The Third Bullet - Страница 72

In September 1964, after employing hundreds and working eighteen-hour days, the Warren Commission released its report. You might think I’d gobble it up, but I didn’t. I read the news coverage in the Times and the Post and realized that no matter how diligent the eight hundred investigators had been, they still hadn’t a clue what happened. I left it at that and continued my total immersion in Agency affairs.

I can’t say I was surprised, but at the same time, I was annoyed when the first of the anti-commission books came out in ’65, Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. My annoyance had more to do with the temerity of Lane: how easy it is to sit back and carp and bitch at the efforts of people who work so hard under a mission mandate to find out the truth and allay national fears; how easy to make a fortune out of nitpicking. It seemed likely that the report contained errors, as anything run by the government on so large a scale and compiled at such breakneck speed is bound to. What was called for was a second edition with a few corrections, not the initiation of a culture that would swell grotesquely and display its leftist tendencies and true agenda, which was to protect the left from any involvement in spite of the fact that Alek was created solely in the hothouse culture of screwball Commie crackpotism, and to sow general distrust of a government bent on winning its war in Asia, damn the cost in treasure and lives.

I watched from Washington and even abroad as the conspiracy theories metastasized into a huge tumor on the body politic, all of the conspiracies shamefully absurd and manufactured out of nothing more than occasional coincidence or good-faith errors in the rush, all of them driven by animus and the profit motive. I detested them: lefty scavengers picking at the bones to make political points and dough. Did I read them? No, but I read the reviews assiduously to see if anyone came close. I did see the Dal-Tex Building mentioned here and there, usually as a shooting site in either the four-rifle theory or the seven-rifle theory. I noted that the police did apprehend a fellow there, though they let him go the next day. Still, it was clear that we’d pulled it off, as all the theories and speculations remained comically off the mark. They seemed to think it was a “big” conspiracy, because only a huge governmental agency would have the wherewithal to make such an event happen, which included secretly influencing the Secret Service and the White House and poor Alek in a concerto of such exquisite timing and psychological acuity that it resembled a Swiss watch set to music by Mozart.

I suppose I should temper my contempt with a little understanding. After all, I knew things that no investigator did. For example, it was possible that the down-range sonic boom caused by Lon’s shot, obeying some unpredictable acoustical logic, rebounded weirdly in the echo chamber that was Dealey Plaza and caused a pressure spike or a reverberation or even a report-like sound, which would strike many ears as coming from the grassy knoll. Perhaps it was that confusion that spawned the thousand-odd theories.

As well, I knew that the extreme velocity of the bullet Lon fired could have easily unleashed a fragment that would travel another three hundred feet and draw blood from James Tague, situated at the triple overpass. Mr. Tague’s facial wound has long baffled and tantalized theorists because the Mannlicher-Carcano, grievously underpowered and slow-moving, wouldn’t have had the oomph to reach out and touch a person so far away. The detonation of Lon’s bullet, moving at close to three thousand feet per second, could have easily accomplished such a trick.

Anyhow, we succeeded exactly because we weren’t a government operation, despite my connections. It was my op, and the team was bound in blood and loyalty, working without pay, risking all for a belief system. It was the kind of highly professional, small-scale enterprise that is the only hope of success, that needed no documentation, no vetting committees, no senior supervisors, no cliques with their concomitant resenters and traitors, no office politics, no budget, nothing. It could be betrayed only from the inside; no detective could unravel it because there wasn’t one clever enough to read the signs in the dust, which were too subtle. We were too smart for them, for at least fifty years. The next few days? We’ll see.

Anyhow, back from my first tour in Vietnam as a kind of hero, with a few empty weeks to fill before a tour in Moscow, I decided it was time to read the damned report and see what they had learned. By that time, my own internal turmoil had settled and I felt I’d be able to confront the findings in a more or less rational manner. My conclusions were mainly that the operation had succeeded brilliantly, particularly Lon’s solution of the ballistics issue. If you recall, our problem was to shoot a man with a bullet that would leave no trace of itself except in tiny metallic residue that could be traced only to a specific bullet identified by category and lot but not to any particular rifle. (I suppose if Lon’s rifle were located, traces of the same metal might be found within its barrel. But Lon-though we never discussed this, I’m sure it’s so-would have destroyed the rifle so that no such discovery was possible.)

That is exactly what Lon managed: the head-shot bullet exploded dynamically when it hit the skull, leaving no fragment large enough to be tracked to Alek’s rifle and therefore no fragment that could be ID’d as not from Alek’s rifle. The investigators did locate two fragments in the limousine large enough to examine under the electron microscope, but clearly, they were not from the head shot. They were both pristine, without any contamination by blood or brain tissue, as the FBI expert explained in detail during his testimony. He also testified that, although fragments are generally hard to relate to a particular rifle, these two, one twenty-one grains, the other forty-four grains, did bear marks that related them to Alek’s rifle. The only explanation for their presence is that they were fragments from Alek’s first missed shot.

As I see it, he fired wretchedly, coming off a mistake that I will describe shortly, and the bullet (other testimony buttresses this argument) hit the curb immediately behind or adjacent to the limousine. Since the angle of refraction is always less than the angle of reflection, when the bullet tore itself to pieces against the hard stone, its “cloud” of fragments was projected in a conelike shape that almost perfectly intercepted the vehicle a few feet away, all of this in micro-time. Some think that one fragment hit the president in the scalp, stinging him. Maybe so, maybe not, but one hit the windshield from the inside, cracking it, and that fragment bounced downward and to the left, where it was found the next day by FBI searchers. Another fragment also landed there, but no one can identify the trajectory, other than to say that the energies released by explosions are madly random.

We know the two frags found in the car couldn’t have come from Lon’s rifle, because of the rifling marks already mentioned, but also because of the geometry of the head shot. It is not particularly enjoyable to focus on such a morbid topic, but in the interest of truth, I shall go onward. The detonation took place in the upper right-hand quadrant of the president’s skull, above his ear (suggesting, among other things, the left-to-right axis of Lon’s shot, given our position to the left of the sniper’s-nest corner; LHO’s theoretical shot would have created a necessarily right-to-left axis, which would have exploded out of JFK’s left-hand quadrant, maybe above his left eye). The salient point is that, given the physics of the “explosion,” all those fragments would have spewed at high energy from the right-hand upper quadrant of the skull along that axis, carrying metallic debris and brain tissue to the right, out of the car; there’s no way the widely documented head shot, as witnessed eventually by the whole world, would have deposited fragments radically twenty full feet to the left, and downward, no less, to the carpet near the pedals, where those two pieces were found.

My one criticism of the report is that its investigators quickly came to believe in the single-gunman theory. Lane was right about one thing: it was a rush to judgment. Though they worked hard and honorably, that precept framed their findings, shaping them, perhaps only at the unknowable subconscious level. Had they remained open to theories outside their own invented box, they might have seen indications, subtle but persistent, in Alek’s behavior that suggested strongly there were other players on the field.

Therefore, I shall walk you through Alek’s last hour or so of freedom. There were developments that baffled the commission’s investigators and continue to baffle the amateur assassinationologists, so let me lay out, for the sake of history, exactly what I think happened between 12:30 p.m., when Alek fired the first bullet, and 2:17 p.m., when he was nabbed in the Texas Theatre.

I doubt he was nervous. He was too exuberant, too happy, too coursing with energy. I can see him, crouched and hiding behind the fortress of boxes he’d arranged on the sixth floor of the Book Depository, his eyes beady, his face tight with the characteristic smugness that so exiled him from his fellow man, presidential assassin or no, thinking not What if I miss? but Hurry up, hurry up! He must have been hungry for his destiny, for his entry into history. He wasn’t giving escape or survival a thought, but concentrating entirely on getting the job done to the best of his meager abilities. Consider his mind at the moment: he was about to strike a blow not merely at the United States, which he claimed to loathe, but at all those who’d seen him as he was-a fringe man clearly unable to hold a job, much less have a career, a life of normalcy and contribution-and insisted on reporting the bad news: You are nobody. You are not equipped to compete. Your destiny is nothingness. So this was his moment: to all of them, he was saying I exist! in thunder. But do not abjure the political for the psychological: he was a true believer, so true that he could and would kill for his principles. That puts him at the very end of the spectrum of political behavior, though it does not push him off it. In some fashion that he probably could not articulate, he thought he was birthing a new socialist world, and his idealism loaned him the self-esteem nothing else had provided for him. Then there was greed, the treasure at the end of the rainbow. That was the idealized image of himself as hero of Havana, in the ’53 Cadillac convertible with Dr. Castro on the Malacon, waving to the throng. That was a risk worth dying for. He must have been, all taken into account, one of the world’s happiest men in the split second before he pulled the trigger.