JFKCountercoup2: CIA Chief told RFK About Two Shooters
Why did Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy believe that his brother President John F. Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy, as his son recently said?
Did RFK have any evidence for his belief, asked readers of thewidespread coverage of RFK Jr.’s comments?
It turns out RFK had it on good authority that two people were involved.
RFK’s conviction was based on conversations with the Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, who had been briefed by analysts at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) after they reviewed a home movie of JFK being struck by gunfire.
This little-known story comes from two credible sources: Dino Brugioni, retired chief of the CIA’s photographic analysis offices, and historian Arthur Schlesinger.
The film, of course, came from the camera of dressmaker Abraham Zapruder as he watched the presidential motorcade in Dallas in which President Kennedy was struck by gunfire on November 22, 1963. Zapruder had the film developed and gave a copy to the Secret Service. That night one copy of Zapruder’s film was hand-delivered to the Grand Prarie Naval Air Station in southwest Dallas. A jet pilot flew the film to Washington D.C. where it was viewed by FBI and Secret Service officials.
At around 10 p.m. on the night of November 23, two Secret Service agents delivered a copy of Zapruder’s film to the new state-of-the-art National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) at the Navy Yard in Washington D.C., where Brugioni was working as duty officer. In an extended interview, Brugioni told Doug Horne, a former chief of military records for the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, what happened next:
Brugioni’s team analyzed the film and made still enlargements of select individual frames that were mounted on briefing boards. They worked on the film throughout the night. On early Sunday morning, November 24, Art Lundahl, the director of the NPIC, took the briefing boards to CIA headquarters in Langley. Lundahl was Brugioni’s mentor who had won the confidence of the White House with the CIA’s rapid analysis of aerial surveillance photos of Soviet missile installations in Cuba in October 1962.
According to Brugioni, Lundahl went to the office of CIA Director John McCone, taking along briefing notes Brugioni had prepared for him. Lundal briefed McCone on the CIA’s analysis of the blown-up frames of the Zapruder film. He returned to NPIC later Sunday morning, November 24, and thanked everyone for their efforts the previous night, telling them that the briefing of McCone had gone well.
What Lundahl told McCone in the briefing is unknown but Lundahl’s sources are not. He relied on the NPIC analysis of the original Zapruder film and the reports of the Secret Service agents who witnessed the assassination.
