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CHAPTER 1

"Professor Popkin & the Robot Assassin: 'Dear President Ford: I Know Who Killed JFK ...'"

The Village Voice, September 1, 1975

SAN DIEGO — There is no longer any doubt in my mind that the world has gone mad, and I with it. The story you are about to read is not fantasy, it is lunacy. And it is absolutely true. How to begin? Perhaps with the telegram.

This telegram was dispatched at approximately 1 AM, Thursday, June 19, to Gerald Ford, White House:

"I have documents indicating that U.S. intelligence agencies had a laboratory producing robot murderers (Manchurian Candidates) and that at least one of them took part in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The programmer of this robot murderer is presently at large. I will provide the information to you at your convenience."

The sender was Richard H. Popkin, author of The Second Oswald and professor of philosophy. A reputable, scholarly gentleman who lectures at Oxford and the Sorbonne, edits the Journal of the History of Philosophy, co-directs the International Archives of the History of Ideas, and once translated Pierre Bayle's seventeenth-century dictionary.

Unfortunately, this will not be the full tale of how the absentminded professor found unopened a five-year-old letter from an Oriental hypnotist, flew off to meet with him, and ultimately barricaded himself in a hotel room with a thousand pages of the hypnotist's explosive research. Popkin is currently at work building his case and will then attempt to negotiate a deal with a variety of interested media — from television networks to major publishing houses — for the greatest sum possible. Therefore, I was permitted to see the documents only on the condition that I would sign a pledge not to reveal their contents.

At this point, I can tell you that I've spent the better part of the past six weeks investigating the veracity of Popkin's evidence. I did this for Popkin himself. He needed someone to verify certain leads in the Midwest, and he paid the expenses of a young Los Angeles investigator and myself to check the leads out. I personally have met the mysterious hypnotist and have done enough legwork to be convinced — with certain reservations — of the story the documents tell. The attorney general's office is not convinced, the Church Committee might yet be.

But all that must wait. This chronicle is necessarily but a footnote to the history of "The Popkin Papers." If sometimes the tone seems disrespectful or even totally disconnected from such incredible subject matter, it can't be helped.

The account that follows is a journal of five days spent in the Richard Popkin household overlooking San Diego bay. Five days of bizarre telegrams, bugged telephones, and strange conversations with Jim Garrison, Dick Gregory, and Bernard Fensterwald. Five remarkable days in which the author of The History of Skepticism first concluded he had found the solution to one of the darkest puzzles of recent times.

* * *

SATURDAY. Stepping out of the San Diego airport, I am confronted by a fervent, bearded young man thrusting a leaflet in my face: "WHO SHOT KENNEDY? by Moses David." It is copyrighted by the Children of God, and a tiny circle in the upper right-hand corner says: "donation suggested." I give the fellow a nickel and hail a cab.

Yesterday morning, the tip-off that "something huge is happening in California" had come from an acquaintance at the Assassination Information Bureau in Cambridge. He didn't know exactly what Professor Popkin had unearthed, but along the grapevine that monitors the assassination business, the rumors had never been so electric.

After about an hour of busy signals, I had managed to reach the professor by phone. "I'm in a slight state of hysteria," he began, and proceeded to tell of two JFK assassination plots in 1963 — the first foiled by a double agent, the second including a killer programmed somewhere in the Midwest. He said he'd give the story only to those "who've been on our side," that the National Tattler had already mentioned six figures and could Village Voice come close to such an offer? If not, I was still welcome to come observe history-in-the-making. They even had a spare bed.

So I had headed West. After all, what was beyond possibility anymore? The CIA had hired mob hit-men to try to bump off Fidel Castro. The army had been "turning on, tuning in, and dropping out" ten years before Timothy Leary. The navy supposedly had run an assassin training school. If Nelson Rockefeller and the Nightly News were willing to reveal this much, what other horrors might be twisting slowly, slowly in the conspiratorial wind of Watergate?

For some time, a growing segment of the country had been turning back the clock to November 22, 1963. Finding out who really killed JFK, RFK, and MLK had become far more than the pastime of a few "lone nuts" asserting the innocence of a few other "lone nuts." Indeed, a considerable chorus had begun wondering if America was run by lone nuts.

Was it merely a bunch of people getting off on their own paranoia? A lot of hucksters and false prophets gleefully boarding another media bandwagon? Partly, maybe. Still, a gut feeling persisted that somewhere in the muck of the last 12 years, a truth did wait to be discovered. And if Richard Popkin had found it....

Thus do I find myself riding past the Pacific Ocean on a cool summer evening, reading a nickel message from the Children of God: "Save yourselves from this untoward generation of vipers who would destroy the Earth!"

The Popkins' ranch-style home sits on a hillside in the plush suburban environs of La Jolla. The Del Charro, where J. Edgar Hoover used to huddle with cronies, is now a vacant lot a few hundred yards down from their picture-window. Dr. Popkin (henceforth to be called "the professor") is sitting with a few guests at a dining room table cluttered with manila folders, disheveled typescript, and a collection of mailgrams.

The first impression he exudes is one of hair. Wildly curling black hair with specks of gray, bushy eyebrows, and gray sideburns. A prominent nose on a long thin face overlaps a bristly mustache. He has a tendency to mumble into his thin beard, causing some to refer fondly to him as "Snuffy Smith." He wears glasses, suspenders, and baggy pants. Fifty-one years of manic energy.

His wife Julie, dark-haired, bespectacled, and pleasant, offers me the last of some steak and informs I'm the fifth visiting journalist of the week. Newsday's Marty Schramm, who in 1973 broke the exclusive about Bebe Rebozo's wheeling-dealings, led the way for lamb chops on Monday evening. Next came Howard Kohn of Rolling Stone, renowned for exposing Detroit police corruption. Then a CBS team of Lee Townsend and Brooke Janis, working on a twohour assassination special for the fall. New Times' Robert Sam Anson was due in a few days. The National Tattler had been visited personally by the professor in Chicago.

Seymour Hersh, he is saying as I sit down, will soon be sorry he hadn't shown more tact on previous associations. In the meantime, tonight's Western Union message is almost ready.

"Do you want to call it in?" the professor asks me. "To have the fun of listening to what happens?"

A fellow who is book review editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy suggests it might be dangerous.

"Anybody can get away with it," the professor replies. "They're in the business of selling telegrams. They'll make $20 out of this one."

I consent to go as far as listening in on another extension. The professor dials, intimating that he's sure the phone is tapped.

"I'd like to send a telegram to President Ford."

"Go ahead, sir."

"I have documents indicating that Fidel Castro tried to foil the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy, but that the FBI prevented him from stopping the assassination. I will present these documents to you at your earliest convenience."

He asks this also be mailgrammed to Henry Kissinger, Frank Church, Howard Baker, George McGovern, John McClellan, Nelson Rockefeller, Mike Mansfield, Edward Levi, Clarence Kelley, Bernard Fensterwald, Fidel Castro, Dick Gregory, Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and David Rosenthal, a former student who keeps a collection.

"Night letter or cable, sir?" asks Western Union.

This done, the professor ushers me quickly into his office, also my temporary bedroom. I'm asked to examine the other journalists' statements of silence and write one of my own. Then, and only then, will I be able to examine the documents. Signing my pledge of allegiance, I am spirited back to the living room for a "crash course."

The utmost caution is required, the professor says recklessly. At this moment somewhere in the Midwest, there is a stakeout on the house of a man who helped program one of the JFK assassination team. And in Los Angeles, at a secret residence, is the ex-CIA man who knows all about the earlier plot in 1963.

Two hours later, nearly staggering into bookcase in which is prominently displayed a volume titled The Historian as Detective, I take a set of the documents to my room. Begin to read about a spy who came in from the cold. A young Latin ready to kill at the utterance of key words. There is a tape transcript from a deep-trance deprogramming session carried out by a hypnotist employed by the intelligence service of U.S. ally. The wildest imaginings of John le Carré, Len Deighton, and Richard Condon — can it be?

Confused, but feeling the thread of a certain diabolic logic, finally I fall asleep. My last conscious thought takes in my sleeping quarters. A wall-to-wall sprawl of papers whose catacombs might conceivably alter the face of recent history. In the living room, the professor is playing pinochle.

* * *

SUNDAY. The clacking of typing keys had come pulsing through my bedroom door at approximately 4:15 AM. At breakfast, sitting with his wife Julie and thirteen-year-old daughter Sue, I am told the professor had felt a sudden need to finish a letter about Napoleon's emancipation of the French Jews in 1806. Julie had curtailed the brainstorm, and he was now sleeping in.

The new theory about Napoleon's Messianic complex was another of his current interests. Julie says it's always been his passion "to uncover material never before seen." It started in Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1952 with some forgotten documents that led him to a whole unsuspected strain of philosophical skepticism beginning with Descartes, the fuel for a book that "didn't make him a popular figure, but a respected one."

The Second Oswald was similarly skeptical and scholarly. It appeared in 1966 as one of the early alternatives to the Warren Commission inspired by reading Bertrand Russell on a midnight train and dedicated "To my mother who has always encouraged my interest in the unknown and unexplained."

(Mother Zelda, I later learned, is a renowned writer of Jewish mystery novels. The professor's father was, incidentally, one of America's pioneer public relations men, having arranged Einstein's tour of the U.S. and managed Alf Landon's New York campaign and promoted Harry Houdini. Today the professor's brother performs similar services for the Red Cross disaster service and writes books about earthquakes.)

The Second Oswald also certified the professor as a big-league assassination buff, and over the years he had become a kind of data bank of the dark side, annually hibernating at universities until about the Ides of March.

Springtime was when something always seemed to build. Two years ago, the professor had learned of a Secret Army Organization of San Diego right-wingers with mislaid plans to terrorize the 1972 Republican Convention (published in Ramparts). Last year, it was a possible government plot on Nixon's life.

This particular spring had seen a succession of disappointments. First he'd put together a story for Universal Press Syndicate identifying Robert Bennett, a former E. Howard Hunt associate, as Woodward and Bernstein's "Deep Throat," but few papers seemed interested. Next he zoomed off to Toronto to check out a man claiming new film evidence about the JFK assassination, but then everybody involved clammed up. So it was back to Washington University in St. Louis and the humidly humdrum life of a Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, until...

"If I hadn't been nagging him about cleaning his study," Julie is saying — it is almost noon, audible stirrings in the bedroom — "none of this would have happened. Dick never sorts his papers. His mind is very orderly, but the flesh is different. Well, finally he agreed to try and suddenly he was in the kitchen shouting 'Look at this letter! It will boggle your mind!'" The elusive letter, from a long-ago admirer of his Oswald book who'd been secreting his own sensational documents in sealed plastic under a washer-dryer in Canada for the last five years, was a scenario from the professor's fondest nightmares. Shakily, he had dialed the old phone number. The chain reaction that followed, he was currently living through. We all were.

Before flying off to make history, the professor had packed up in St. Louis and prepared to move the family back to summer in San Diego, where he chaired the university philosophy department through the 1960s. Then they all headed up to New York for a quick visit to his mother before she left for Israel. There, the night they put Zelda on her plane, a young colleague was called in for the first of numerous special missions.

"In addition to philosophy, this young man is a great bugger," Julie recalls. "My husband has coteries of faithful helpers everywhere. So, on our wedding anniversary, we spent the evening tapping in on Dick's conversation with Dick Gregory. That was also the night of the first telegram." For a time, Popkin had taken to bugging his own phone, taping his conversations for history.

"He's been pretty caught up in telling people he's making history," Sue adds. "The first couple times he sent telegrams, he told the operator she was making history."

About this time, the professor is emerging, wandering into the kitchen in pajamas to the tune of a jangling phone. It's Jim Garrison.

"Your reputation will be vindicated in a few days," the professor is saying. "Unfortunately you can't produce Ferrie or Shaw except in the graveyard. ... I'll be called as a witness, that's for sure. ... I sent another telegram last night. I didn't put you on the list because it costs a dollar for every one, but I'll read it to you ..."

Jim Garrison feels like he's being vindicated at last, he says, hanging up. He ponders momentarily about getting a set of all the telegrams to Frank Church immediately, then remembers: "Washington doesn't work on weekends. That's why Pearl Harbor worked so well."

Within a half hour, we are driving to his office at U.C. San Diego to Xerox documents and dictate letters. Also he has a long-postponed paper to work on about the philosophical basis of racism. Everyone here is working on papers. Julie is doing one on Drugs and Keats. The professor has begun calling me his Boswell.

Evening floats in on the vapors of a spent copying machine. All the visiting media have been given copies of the documents, even though they're forbidden to use them. Tonight, some people called the Dykstras are having a dinner party and Herbert is coming. Herbert Marcuse, philosopher-hero of the New Left and instructor of Angela Davis in the late 1960s, brought from Brandeis to San Diego by none other than the professor.

Waiting for a chili relleno soufflé in a living room on La Jolla's outskirts, as seventy-seven-year-old Herbert Marcuse walks in with his mid-thirties girlfriend Ricki. An aristocratic white-haired gentleman with a paunch and a cane, full of vinegar. He and the professor face each other across the chip-anddip. Marcuse slams a palm down and cries, "What is most important is to get it out!"

The professor talks at dinner about the Secret Service. He became familiar with their ilk during his investigation of the Secret Army Organization. Suddenly he gets up and beckons his hostess and the wife of his book review editor into a bedroom. Picking up the phone, he gets the number of the local Secret Service and dials.

"Hello, I have knowledge of a plot to assassinate President Ford." Brief silence. "Well, is Mr. Perez in? I'll talk to him about it. He's not? Well, I'll call back then."

A wide grin crosses the professor's face as he hangs up. It seems to say: See? I told you so. They could care less. "If Perez heard my name, he'd have to leave the country," he adds. "He knows I connected him with the Secret Army."

Dinner is over and Herbert Marcuse is lying on a heat pad on the couch. His back is bothering him, Ricki is making him comfortable. The professor starts preparing his nightly telegram, one pointing up newfound Warren Commission fallacies. He asks Marcuse if he'd like to receive a copy. However, Marcuse, who is hard of hearing, thinks it's a telegram about assassinating Ford and is concerned about getting involved. Things are getting confusing.

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Excerpted from "On The Trail Of The JFK Assassins"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Dick Russell.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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