When, after Secret Service Chief Rowley made a request for information concerning Lee Harvey Oswald's relationship to the CIA, and the files came to McCone's desk, showing that Oswald had been trained by the CIA through the Office of Naval Intelligence; McCone did what every businessman--but few intelligence officers--would do in that situation: he wrote a memo to Rowley, giving a very broad overview of what the Oswald file said.
McCone did this for three reasons: first, it showed that he was one of the "good guys;" a patriot who wanted what was best for his country; second, it provided cover for him against James Jesus Angleton, who would have gladly thrown McCone under the bus if the CIA had in any way been implicated in President Kennedy's murder; third, this is what you did to CYA against a powerful subordinate who was also a potential rival in the business world.
I believe original document for this particular copy of the memo came from either McCone's or Rowley's private personal files. Because of the record number "CO-2-34,030," which appears to be a National Archives record number for a number of other Secret Service documents, I believe it probably came from Rowley's personal file. (See the Memorandum signed for by Johanna Smith of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), dated March 10, 1978, in Part One of this article.) I also believe that the personal file was probably hand-delivered by Rowley himself to the National Archives, and a time limit was placed on their release, which explains the "Confidential" secrecy stamp placed on the document. The document was then microfilmed at the National Archives, and forgotten.
I believe that years later, some clerk happened to come across this document in the National Archives, and made a print from the microfilm of the McCone-Rowley Memorandum, using a machine similar to the Kodak 870, which uses rolls of photo-sensitive paper, rather than plain 8-1/2"x11" plain white copy paper. I am certain of this because as a former microfilm retriever for the Colorado State Division of Motor Vehicles, I have noted that the vertical compression (third line second paragraph) and stretching (fifth line, second paragraph) of some of the lines of text in the document which is common with this type of machine. This, together with the slightly darker shading around the edges, tells that this document is from a microfilm retrieved using a machine with photo-sensitive paper. Barring examination of the original copy of the document in question, and knowing how difficult it would be to forge this document (microfilm, National Archives inter-agency memorandum stamp from the time period, and valid National Archives/Secret Service record number, e.g., CO-2-34,030) I believe that this is a real document, not a fake, recovered by a patriot working in the National Archives.
So Why do I bring this up yet again?
In part it is a reminder to myself, and to anyone who reads this little missive, to maintain what the Buddhists call "a beginner's mind:" a mind that is open to the possibility of the world being vastly different from how we think it is, a world which does not have simple black and white answers.
It is also a reminder to us all to not make value judgments when weighing evidence, other than true or false, especially when dealing with something as important as and with as much intentional disinformation as President Kennedy's assassination. One cannot call any piece of evidence as being "too good to be true," and consign it to the dustbin of history on that basis alone. For the Isolationists in Washington in early 1917, the Zimmerman Telegram was "too good to be true." And yet, it was true, and the Kaiser discovered he had roused a sleeping colossus, to his eternal regret.
Puppet Masters and Pawns
"The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions."
Claude Lévi-Strauss , French anthropologist. The Raw and the Cooked, "Overture," section 1 (1964).
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