Testimony of Edgar Tatro


Hearing of 3/24/95 -- Boston, Massachusetts
We'd like to hear now from Mr. Edgar Tatro, who is an assassination researcher who has assisted many authors.

Mr. Tatro, welcome.

MR. TATRO: Thank you for the opportunity. I know that you guys must be tired, and there's only a few minutes left, so I'll try to be as brief as possible, which is tough for a high school English teacher to do, but I'll do the best I can.

To answer a couple of quick questions, John Abt worked with Harold Weisberg years and years ago, and he may have in his extensive files files on Abt.

I can hook you up with a man who is involved with FBI watchdog abuses. They haven't focused on assassination, but they might know people that might know people.

Here at home here, Harold Isaacs was a MIT professor here, and there were FBI documents that linked him to the Aunt Lillian, Dorothy Murret from New Orleans, and perhaps you should contact MIT and see what they have on Harold Isaacs and see what the relationship is to Oswald's aunt.

Let's see here, quickly. Bullets. Bullets. A lot of the things that Mr. Evica has talked about are right on the button. He and I obviously have been working separately but on similar issues, especially the Texas aspects.

He talks about one of the rifles that came through St. Albans, Vermont, and ended up coming through -- he talks about two different rifles with the same serial numbers, and one of them came through St. Albans, Vermont.

The bullets -- I wrote an 8,000-word article on the bullets. The bullets went to Greece, came through Canada, Vermont, and ended up in Texas and might tie into Masen, as well. So, that's it.

Besides, also, the company that made the bullets is the same company that supplied the arms and ammunition for the Iran-Contra affair, which is not good company.

I am interested mainly in Lyndon Johnson. Four major scandals were going on at that time.

There was the TFX scandal with Fred Korth, who had to resign a month before the assassination, close friend of Lyndon Johnson's. There was the Bobby Baker scandal, there was the Billy Sol Estes scandal, and there was Jack Halfen, a mafia man working for Marcello.

All four of those scandals were exploding on the scene in 1963. Once President Kennedy was dead and Lyndon Johnson was president, they all stopped. All documents relating to those four guys and associates of them should be looked into.

George DeMohrenschildt was contacting Lyndon Johnson. He was Oswald's best friend. He was contacting George Bush. There's a whole series of relationships between DeMohrenschildt and all of these power figures, especially the oil man, Clint Murchison.

John Currington and Paul Rothemell are alive. They were H.L. Hunt's oil men. I believe Rothemell recently just had heart bypass surgery, so he may not be in the best of shape.

Okay. I have a record that came through Emory Brown, an excellent researcher who is very little known from the New Jersey area, and the Navy, by accident -- actually, it came through the Air Force.

It's a document that puts Oswald in Gulf Port, Mississippi, and he wasn't there, according to the Navy. I have the actual document, and I have all the Navy denials, and I don't know what it means, but something's amiss.

Oswald's military intelligence files were destroyed. The House Select Committee called it very troublesome, which is the understatement of a lifetime, but cross-reference files were destroyed. I have a letter from the Navy admitting that.

The question is, is there any microfilm of these things that could exist somewhere? It's hard to believe it would just go.

I am in association with a number of Canadian researchers who are pursuing a number of aspects of the case up there. They would be glad to help you, and I can hook you up with them.

I have a letter from the Canadian government admitting they destroyed Oswald files as recently as 1990. So, that's not very good.

When Oswald came back from Russia, he met with a man they call the travel agent, Spas Raikin, but actually he was the president of the anti-Bolsheviks nation, and I've been able to obtain documents showing correspondence between Hoover in 1959 to Raikin.

Raikin says it's all innocent, but there are things blacked out, and even he doesn't know why they are blacked out. So, even he would like to get a hold of those things.

There are at least five witnesses who said there was a hole in that windshield, forget about the dent, that there was a hole in it, and it's never been resolved, and I have been told that there were five to eight windshields available and they could switch windshields. I think someone ought to try to look into the possibility of a windshield switch.

There's a sidewalk scar down there that was stolen by Earl Golz, broken right out of the sidewalk. It's down in a Texas researcher's possession now. It does fit a bullet miss from the other knoll that no one talks about.

I can show you a human-like figure with a rifle-like object; you could fish from that angle. I brought those pictures with me in case anybody really wanted to look at them.

Oswald, it's been alleged, was at the Monterey School in Miami, by one of the Warren Commission members in January of 1964. There are no records. It's called the Defense Language Institute now.

The Defense Language Institute told me that they didn't have any records on Oswald and that they did not keep any correspondence between them and the Warren Commission or them and the House Select Committee. That's hard to believe. Maybe there is some correspondence in existence in the House Select Committee files.

Allen Dulles' mistress, Mary Bancroft, was also a CIA agent. She was the friend of Michael Paine's mother. Michael Paine and Ruth Paine were taking care of Marina Oswald.

Now, where there is smoke, there is not necessarily fire, but any fireman will tell you, most fires, people get killed by smoke inhalation, and I would like to know what the relationship is between Allen Dulles, Ruth Paine, Mary Bancroft, and the Oswalds.

Let's see here. I think I'll skip as many things as possible.

The House Select Committee said that the 201 file had 37 documents that were unavailable at the time. Are they available now?

There were microphones, I'm told, in the autopsy room in Bethesda. Did somebody tape record that autopsy? It would be nice to find out more about that.

And there are a number of other issues here, but I'll beg off because of time constraints. I'll be glad to try to help you guys out in any way I can.

One other thing. Mr. Trask covered most of the film people.

There is Richard Sprague, the researcher, who did all of the collecting of films and photographs in the early years, and there is a man in Canada named Dave Hawkins who makes a living out of this, but he has a great deal of photographic materials, as well as other things that might be of value to you.

One last thing. I almost forgot.

The FBI finger-printed those boxes, the perch where Oswald was supposed to be. There were 28 prints. 24 of them belonged to the two FBI agents who did the printing. Three of them belonged to Oswald, and there is one print that nobody ever identified.

If we had a copy of that print, maybe the public can find out who owned that print, and maybe it's a bad guy.

Thank you very much.

CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: Thank you, Mr. Tatro.

Any questions?

[No response.]

CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: In the interests of time, thank you very much for --

MR. TATRO: Thank you.

CHAIRMAN TUNHEIM: -- sharing with us today.

This brings to a close our public hearing for today in Boston of the Assassination Records Review Board. I want to give you our address and telephone numbers for anyone who wishes to jot them down to share information with us.

As I indicated earlier, the board is very interested in hearing from anyone who wants to direct us toward particular records.

Our address is at 600 E Street, Northwest, in Washington, D.C., and the zip is 20530. Our telephone number is 202-724-0088, and the fax number, the same area code, 202-724-0457.

We thank all of our witnesses this morning for sharing information with us, excellent advice, and we very much appreciate their willingness to be here today.

We thank the members of the public for joining us today, and we look forward to your following our continued work as we try to uncover all of the records of the assassination of President Kennedy.

Thank you very much. Meeting adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 12:58 p.m., the meeting was concluded.]


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