Kerry Thornley is a weird witness who died insane. His strange story is lately being retold to make it seem that he was never in New Orleans in May, 1963, in contradiction to my stating that on Wed. May 8, Lee introduced him to me. I also got a glimpse of him on Thursday, May 28, as well. Researcher Jim DiEugenio has written a great deal about him in his fine book Destiny Betrayed and in 1999, he and Bill Davey wrote an article that summarizes what was in the book as he exposes researcher Patricia Lambert as a biased defender of the Eatten Commission. SEE: ctka.net/pr599-lambert.html (False Witness: Aptly Titled) So, was Kerry Thornley in New Orleans in May, 1963? He claimed he wasnt. Those who try to remove him from New Orleans at that time like to quote him. So we must ask, can Kerrys word be trusted, or would he lie about this? READ ON! DiEugenio and Davy wrote: ...Thornley was an extreme right-winger who had an almost pathological hatred of Kennedy...[possibly] a reason for him to do the number he did on Oswald for the Commission. Thornley worked briefly for rightwing publisher Kent Courtney in New Orleans and was a friend of New Orleans-based CIA journalist Clint Bolton. According to an article in New Orleans Magazine, Thornley was also once employed by Alton Ochsner’s INCA outfit, the CIA-related radio and audiotape outfit which sponsored Oswald’s famous debate with Cuban exile leader Carlos Bringuier. According to former Guy Banister employee Dan Campbell, Thornley was one of the young fanatics who frequented 544 Camp Street... Thornley tried to deny that he knew Bringuier, yet his girlfriend Jeanne Hack described an encounter between Thornley and a man who fit Bringuier’s description to Bill Turner in January of 1968. And as Thornley notes in his introduction to the 1991 issue of The Idle Warriors, he showed his manuscript to Banister before the assassination back in 1961. This last point brings up one of the most important issues concerning the whole Thornley episode: his early denials and later reversals. Two memos written by Andrew Sciambra in February of 1968 reveal that Thornley denied knowing Banister, Dave Ferrie , Clay Shaw, and Shaw’s friend Time-Life journalist David Chandler. Garrison, however, had evidence that revealed the opposite to be the case. And years later, on the eve of the House Select Committee investigation, Thornley admitted to knowing all of these shady characters. Then, of course, there was the issue of Thornley’s association with Oswald himself in the summer of 1963. Thornley denied before the New Orleans grand jury that he associated with Oswald in New Orleans in 1963. This seemed improbable on its face since, as noted above, both men knew each other previously and both men frequented some of the same places in 1963. But further, consider Thornley’s rather equivocal denial on the witness stand: Q: Did she [Barbara Reid] see you with Oswald? A: I don’t think she did because the next day I started asking people... Q: You don’t think so? A: I don’t know whether it was Oswald, I can’t remember who was sitting there with me.... The above statements earned Thornley a perjury indictment from Garrison. But there was much more. Garrison had no less than eight witnesses who said they had seen Oswald and Thornley together in New Orleans in 1963. ...two of these witnesses, Bernard Goldsmith and Doris Dowell, both said that Thornley told them Oswald was not a communist. This is amazing since, as noted earlier, the Warren Commission featured Thornley as its key witness to Oswald’s alleged commie sympathies. This indicates that Thornley himself 1) knew the truth about Oswald’s intelligence ties and 2) was probably involved in creating a false cover—a legend, in intelligence parlance—for the alleged assassin. On top of these devastating admissions, there is the information from Mrs. Myrtle LaSavia, who lived within a block of Oswald in New Orleans. She stated that she, her husband and a number of people who live in that neighborhood saw Thornley at the Oswald residence a number of times—in fact they saw him there so much they did not know which was the husband, Oswald or Thornley. [JVB: Garrison has lately been accused of having Lees neighbors see an altered photo of Thornley that made him resemble Lee Oswald, also claiming that Harold Weisberg, considered an intrepid researcher, was privy to this deception; they therefore claim that ALL of these witnesses in the matter were duped, which clearly is a stretch]... They quote Harold Weisberg in his book Never Again: When the New Orleans Secret Service investigation led to the Jones Printing Co., the printer of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee handbills, and the Secret Service was on the verge of learning... that it was not Oswald who picked up those handbills, the New Orleans FBI at once contacted FBI HQ. The FBI immediately leaned on the Secret Service HQ and immediately the Secret Service was ordered to desist. For all practical purposes, that ended the Secret Service probe—the moment it was about to explode the myth of the loner who had an associate who picked up a print job for him. (p. 18) What Weisberg does not reveal in this passage is that the guy who picked up the flyers was identified as Kerry Thornley. In an interview with journalist Earl Golz in 1979, Weisberg stated that two employees at the print shop picked out photos of Thornley, not Oswald, when he questioned them about the Hands off Cuba flyers. Weisberg secretly taped one of the interviews with the employees. When Weisberg informed Garrison investigator Lou Ivon of this new development, Bill Boxley—a CIA plant in Garrison’s office—tried to distort what had happened. Weisberg pulled out the tape, quieting Boxley. But later, the tape disappeared. The other 1963 incident that makes Thornley even more fascinating was his trip to Mexico...Thornley was... quite reluctant to speak about it. According to his 11/25/63 FBI statement, Thornley said that he made this trip by himself and emphatically denied that Oswald had accompanied him from New Orleans to California or from California to Mexico. ...In another FBI memo written the same day Thornley was interviewed, the following statement appears: Thornley is presently employed as a waiter in New Orleans and has recently been in Mexico and California with Oswald. Secret Service has been notified. ... even if it were so, the Secret Service probably followed up about as vigorously as it did the Jones Print Shop incident. Thornley’s behavior during the ongoing Garrison probe was strange... As noted above, he told the DA’s representative he never met Shaw, Ferrie, Chandler or Oswald...in New Orleans. He was a bit hazy on Banister saying that he may have met Banister somewhere around Camp Street but he was not sure. His equivocations on Oswald are even more striking. He told Andrew Sciambra the following: He also admits that there are some coincidences which have taken place which make it appear that he and Oswald were in contact with each other but he declares that these are only coincidences and that he has never seen Oswald since the days in the Marine Corps together. In a later interview with Sciambra, Thornley also denied knowing Bringuier and Ed Butler of INCA, even though he applied for a job at the latter. Every one of these denials turned out to be false and Thornley admitted to them later. But on top of this, there is the apparent element of the protection of Thornley when he became a hot item in New Orleans in 1968...according to Mort Sahl, Thornley insisted on meeting Sciambra at ... NASA. Sciambra recalled thinking as he entered the place that if someone like Thornley could command access to such a place then Garrison really didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades. Several of Oswald’s cohorts from Reily Coffee had gone to NASA before the assassination... Garrison camp infiltrator Gordon Novel also went there ... And then there was the problem of locating Thornley. Garrison investigator and former CIA agent Jim Rose ...found Thornley was living in Tampa. ..Thornley had two homes in Florida, one in Tampa and one in Miami. He lived at the Tampa residence which, according to Rose’s notes, was a large white frame house on a one acre lot. In addition, he owned two cars at the time. All this from a man who had only been a waiter and doorman up to that time. After the Garrison investigation, Thornley slipped into obscurity. But he resurfaced in the late seventies around the time of the House Select Committee on Assassinations... as a kind of stoned hippie who had a rather eccentric interest in aliens, Nazis, and the occult. He ...now stated that, I did not realize I was involved in the JFK murder conspiracy until 1975, when the Watergate revelations made it rather obvious. ...[he said] he recognized Howard Hunt as one of the men who recruited him into the plot. In this new mode he even admitted that Oswald had been framed for the crime. Quite an admission from the author of the 1965 book which concluded the opposite. At around this same time, Thornley sent Garrison a long manuscript outlining the Kennedy plot as he saw it...in the form of a long affidavit... To anyone familiar with the true facts of the case and Thornley’s suspicious activities, it is a long and involved and deliberate piece of disinformation. In it, Thornley admits that he had met both Ferrie and Banister by the summer of 1962. But yet, they are not the true conspirators. The real ones are people named Slim, Clint, Brother-in-Law, and one Gary Kirstein i.e. nameless, faceless non-entities. (Later, Thornley named one as Jerry M. Brooks, former rightwing Minuteman turned informant to Bill Turner.) Thornley’s communications with the HSCA were frequent as he tried to rivet their attention on his new and improved JFK plot. When Oliver Stone’s JFK came out, Thornley was paid to make an appearance on the tabloid program A Current Affair (broadcast on 2/25/92). Some of what Thornley said on camera is worth quoting: I wanted to shoot him. I wanted to assassinate him very much. . . . I wanted him dead. I would have shot him myself. I would have stood there with a rifle and pulled the trigger if I would have had the chance. .....Thornley ... also insisted in 1992 that he had not betrayed his friend Oswald, even though he now thought the case was a conspiracy. Thornley was apparently doing his distracting limited hang-out number for bucks this time around. Thornley died ... [in 1998] of a kidney ailment. ...Thornley lied about his relationship with the intelligence network surrounding Oswald. He knew all of these players. He also lied about not knowing Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. The question of course is: Why did he lie? And the answer seems to point to some deeper involvement. This seems to imply that the Weisberg investigation of the flyers at Jones print shop and [a] FBI telex about Oswald accompanying Thornley to California and Mexico have some validity to them. It also suggests that Thornley’s admission about knowing Oswald was not a communist has some weight. That is, Thornley may have known the truth about Oswald all along ... Whatever the truth about Thornley’s possible role in the setting up of a patsy, Lambert’s writing about him—cribbed from Lifton—is too brief, too superficial and ultimately dishonest in what it leaves out. In other words, it is propaganda that deliberately avoids the new evidence. It would also appear that Lifton looked at Thornley with a much too gullible and trusting eye.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 03:02:51 +0000