The rendezvous was arranged for a weeknight last fall at a Turkish restaurant near CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. The proprietor would be expecting him.
When author Gerald Posner said he was there to meet George and his wife, as he had been instructed to do, the proprietor led Posner and his wife, Trisha, to a private table in the back room.
George was the code name for Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the U.S. in 1964 and now lives under another name in an undisclosed part of the country. Posner was researching a book about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Nosenko had agreed to speak for the first time exclusively about the Soviet intelligence agency’s surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union from late 1959 until June 1962. Nosenko had suggested that he and Posner bring their wives, Posner said, because the sight of two couples dining together would serve as cover for their interview.
“Yuri supervised the Oswald file in Moscow and was familiar with the KGB files on Oswald’s time in Minsk, which I had seen,” Posner said. “I knew he could be extremely helpful in reconstructing that period of Oswald’s life.”
A chapter in Posner’s new book, “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK,” is devoted to Nosenko and his assessments of Oswald.
As the title suggests, Posner finds Oswald to be Kennedy’s assassin, acting alone, just as the Warren Commission said. Further, he was not a CIA agent, not a KGB agent, not an innocent patsy but a sociopath and loser who had grandiose notions of making a mark in history.
Posner is as surprised at the book’s conclusion as the conspiracy buffs are riled.
“I’m getting some very personal, vindictive calls from the conspiracy people. If it’s any consolation, I never set out to do a book that would say here is the final answer, here is who did it,” Posner said during a visit to Chicago.
Posner’s intention was to write a primer of sorts about the assassination after examining the welter of conspiracy theories to see what was credible and what wasn’t.
Poking in the garbage
“When you read all the conspiracy books, it’s apparent they can’t all be right because they flatly contradict each other,” he said. “I knew there was garbage on the record. I didn’t know how much.”
After he debunked as many inaccuracies and false leads as he could, he assumed there would be some issues that would require further investigation, perhaps questions about acoustics or ballistics or possible Mafia involvement.
Yet toward the end of his research, Posner notified Bob Loomis, his editor at Random House, that he had taken an unexpected turn.
“I was convinced the Warren Commission had gotten it right. The evidence was overwhelming,” he said.
Posner also was aware, of course, that a large majority of the populace thinks the Warren Commission had gotten it wrong, maybe on purpose.
He got a feel for such skepticism when Loomis, vice president and executive editor of Random House, took his own poll at the next meeting of the publishing house’s top editors, who periodically gather to report on works in progress.
“Bob told them about what I’d found and asked how many believed the Warren Commission was right,” Posner said. “Remember, these are some of the brightest, best-informed, best-educated people in New York City, and no one raised a hand except Bob Loomis.”
Posner was not dismayed. “When people cite polls showing 70 or 80 or even 90 percent of the public as believing the assassination was the result of a conspiracy, I say I’m surprised it’s not 100 percent when you consider that people have essentially heard only one side for three decades.”
`JFK’ an `abomination’
A 1978 congressional investigation estimated that 2,000 books, including those that are self-published, had been written on the subject. All but a handful present a variety of sometimes-elaborate scenarios about plotters, motives, killers and cover-ups, and as a rule, the conspiracy books make bestseller lists, while the others don’t.
“Then there are the TV documentaries, which are invariably pro-conspiracy,” Posner said. “A recent one was a five-hour British film for Arts & Entertainment called `The Men Who Killed Kennedy.’ “
And most influential of all, he said, is Oliver Stone’s $50 million movie, “JFK,” released in late 1991.
“Half of our country’s present population weren’t born (as of) November 1963. Stone’s movie is a historical abomination that’s filled with demonstrable falsehoods, but to young people, it’s a documentary.
“Even if they read articles criticizing it, they say, `Well, Stone may have exaggerated, but there’s got to be something there.’ Believe it or not, there’s not.”
What’s especially galling, Posner said, is that Stone based his movie on the investigation of former New Orleans District Atty. Jim Garrison, including his prosecution of businessman Clay Shaw as an alleged conspirator.
“Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw was disgraceful, criminal and has been thoroughly discredited. There was coercion of witnesses and changing of testimony,” Posner said. “The jury took only 45 minutes to find Shaw not guilty, and one of the jurors said it would have been 20 minutes but that several jurors had to go to the bathroom.”
Stone has said “JFK” was a “counter-myth” to the “myth” of the Warren Commission.
The no-longer magic bullet
Among the doctrines of conspiracy literature bolstered by “JFK,” Posner noted, is that the so-called magic bullet found on Texas Gov. John Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital was almost pristine, couldn’t have struck Kennedy and Connally, as the Warren Commission said it did, without zigzagging in midair, and was probably planted.
“If ballistics tests didn’t prove conclusively the bullet struck Kennedy and Connally, which they do, use your common sense,” Posner said. “At the time the bullet was found, the conspirators wouldn’t know if the bullets fired at Connally and Kennedy were still lodged in their bodies or had been recovered.
“If they wanted to shield the conspiracy, there can only be three shots. More than that, and the single assassin doesn’t have time to shoot. So why risk exposing the conspiracy by planting a fourth bullet that wouldn’t match ballistically with remnants of the other rounds?”
And what about Jack Ruby, the Chicago native who moved to Dallas to run strip clubs? Did he just happen by the Dallas jail on Nov. 24 and shoot Oswald on the spur of the moment?
“Ruby’s murder of Oswald does more to undermine this case in terms of getting the truth out than anything else,” Posner said. “First, it prevents the trial of Oswald, where the evidence would have convicted him. It also gives us a second assassin, with ties to organized crime. It’s hard for people to believe this was a coincidence, so you’re off and running with a conspiracy.”
Posner’s account of Ruby’s life and his actions during the assassination week demolishes any notion he was a conspirator.
According to the trade journal Publishers Weekly, six books by major publishers will appear this fall to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the assassination, with “Case Closed” standing alone in its anti-conspiracy stance.
Posner has been heartened by promising sales and positive reviews. “Many readers are put off by conspiracy books that select only material that’s favorable to their position, whether it checks out or not. I think these people are buying the book.”
Thumbs up from the critics
Three weeks after its release, it is eighth on The New York Times national best-seller list and seventh on the Tribune’s list of Chicago’s best sellers.
U.S. News & World Report, which ran excerpts from “Case Closed,” writes: “Posner achieves the unprecedented. He sweeps away decades of polemical smoke, layer by layer, and builds an unshakable case against JFK’s killer . . . Lee Harvey Oswald.” It quotes Stephen Ambrose, biographer of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon: “The chapter on the (magic) bullet is a tour de force, absolutely brilliant, absolutely convincing.”
New York Times book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt writes that “Posner effectively refutes hundreds of claims that have added up to conspiracy theories.”
In a Tribune review, author Jeffrey Toobin writes that “Case Closed” is “utterly convincing in its thesis, which seems, in light of all that has transpired over the past 30 years, almost revolutionary.”
Posner, 39, didn’t set out to be a writer, instead complying with the wishes of his father, a union official in San Francisco. “My father dealt with a lot of lawyers. He said, `Son, these fellows charge fees you can’t believe.’ “
So Posner attended law school at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was an honor student, then joined a prestigious Wall Street law firm, leaving two years later to form his own firm.
In 1981 he represented Jewish victims of Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi war criminal who escaped from Germany after World War II and died in hiding in South America.
“It was a pro bono case, and I sued the Mengele family and the German government,” Posner said. “Nothing came of the suit, but I accumulated 25,000 documents about Mengele, so I thought I’d write a book.”
“Mengele: The Complete Story,” which he co-wrote with John Ware, was published in 1986, prompting Posner to leave the law and write full time.
“Case Closed” is his fifth book. “A weakness of mine is that I tend to underestimate the difficulty of each project I undertake. This was true with this book, but as I kept going I kept finding answers to things I didn’t think I could get answers to.”
The real cover-ups
Posner agrees with critics of the Warren Commission who say its investigation was flawed.
“There was a cover-up by the FBI and the CIA, but they weren’t attempting to conceal their involvement in the murder of the president but rather their own inefficiency and bungling,” Posner said. “I go into detail in exposing these cover-ups, but they can’t be interpreted as evidence of conspiracy.”
The Warren Commission’s work also was tarnished by a dubious finding of the 1978 investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Posner said.
“The committee’s acoustics experts tested a Dictabelt recording of radio traffic on Dallas police channels and said they were 95 percent certain there had been a fourth shot, therefore a second shooter and a conspiracy.”
A retest by the National Academy of Sciences discredited the committee’s experts, concluding that the recording was made a minute after the shooting, Posner said.
Half of “Case Closed” is a meticulous examination of Oswald’s entire life, culminating in an almost day-by-day chronicle of his movements in the last two months before the assassination. “Many conspiracy books almost ignore Oswald. But he’s the key, and it’s amazing how much is known about him,” Posner said. “It’s certainly enough to disprove all the theories that he was a spy or a patsy.
“My technique was to go to original sources. Too many books quote secondary sources, some of which are passing on misinformation, which means the garbage is disseminated again and again, becoming fact.
“Here’s an example. `JFK’ opens with Rose Cheramie, a prostitute, warning her doctors that the Kennedy assassination is going to take place in Dallas and naming Ruby as involved. I found her doctor, who said she was psychotic and didn’t mention the assassination until the day after it happened or Ruby until the day after he killed Oswald.”
Posner paused. “I can go on.”
