BOOK SAYS JFK WAS HIT BY AGENT'S FRIENDLY FIRE

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From: cwalters@ducvax.auburn.edu

Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk

Subject: The Article - long

Message-ID: <1992Feb23.211845.1908@ducvax.auburn.edu>

Date: 24 Feb 92 02:18:45 GMT

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Okay - some of you asked for this article, so here 'tis!

BOOK SAYS JFK WAS HIT BY AGENT'S FRIENDLY FIRE

By Stepehn Hunted of The Baltimore Sun

Copied from The Huntsville (Ala.) Times, 2/23/92

Reprinted without permission, so don't tell nobody

   TOWSON, Md. - It's a tale of two rifles.

   It's a tale of three bullets.

   It's a tale of a dead president, a still-grieving nation and a

thousand unanswered questions.

   But most of all it's a tale of a Towson, Md., man's obsession with

finding the truth.

   It's Howard Donahue's tale, contained in a soon-to-be published book

titled "Mortal Error: The Shot that Killed JFK," by Bonar Menninger,

which chronicles Donahue's long odyssey through the thickets of

ballistic evidence, governmental obstructionism and what he views as

media indifference.

   The book embraces Donahue's conclusion that although Lee Harvey Oswald

shot at and hit President Kennedy with a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle,

the fatal bullet that destroyed the president's skull came from another

source.

   Kennedy, Howard Donahue believes, was killed by friendly fire.

   And in the book, he names the friend who fired, a Secret Service agent

who was in the follow car in the Dallas motorcade and rose heroically to

return fire on the assassin but instead accidentally triggered a round in

the wrong direction.

   Donahue's contentionhas invited immediate scorn, and puts him at at

odds with other groups'theories about the assassination.

   "The theory is, like all the others, just wrong," says David W. Belin,

the former Warren Commission counsel who is the commissions most vocal

defender. "If you look at the record as a whole, it's clear that Lee

Harvey Oswald shot the president, just as we concluded."

   And Bob Snow, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said, "If I used the

word 'ridiculous,' that would be the mildest thing I could say. I haven't

seen the book, but I know the general thesis."

   He would not give out any information on the agent in question, citing

employee confidentiality.

   Meanwhile, in Dallas, Larry Howard, direcor of the JFK Assassination

Center and a firearms consultant on the film "JFK," called the idea

"absolutely ridiculous." He claims the president was hit by at least

three riflemen and that the killing shot came from the grassy knoll.

   But Donahue, 69, can only smile: At least people are paying him some

attention, when for years he has toiled in obscurity.

   A former World War II bomber pilot with 35 missions under his belt and

19 combat decorations on his lapel, he graduated from the University of

Maryland in 1949 and for many years was a pharmaceutical salesman before

pursuing his true avocation, firearms. A dedicated hunter and firearms

tinkerer, he operated a Towson gun shop for 12 years. In 1981, he closed

the shop and has since earned his living as a firearms examiner,

investigating gun accidents and testifying in court.

   He has been pursuing his investigation since 1967, when he took part

in tests with a Carcano rifle at a Maryland ballistics laboratory. In

that testing, filmed by CBS, he fired three times and hit three head-

shots on a moving target in less than the 5.6 seconds that most experts

say was the time Oswald had to fire. But knowing how hard the shots were

to make, Donahue doubted that Oswald, a mediocre shot, could have pulled

it off.

   An early version of his theory was pusblished in 1977 in The Baltimore

Sun Magazine to minor lacal acclaim but it garnered no national interest.

He has been routinely dismissed by, among others, the House Select

Assassination Committee of 1978, "60 Minutes" and the Kennedy

assassination conspiracy community.

   The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald, acting alone, shot and

killed Kennedy. He missed with one shot, hit both Kennedy and Texas Gov.

John Connally with a second, then fired the third shot which exploded the

president's skull. Fragments of bullets recovered in the limousine can

all be traced to his rifle.

   Donahue is not a conspiracy theorist; in fact, he embraces many of the

sommission's conclusions. But he believes that the subtle ballistic

evidence shows that the head-shot bullet came from another direction.

   DONAHUE'S SCENARIO

   Here is what happened that day, according to Donahue:

   Oswald fired only twice at Kennedy. His first bullet struck pavement,

and sprayed the limousine with fragments, one of which struck Kennedy in

the head. The second, the so-called "magic bullet," penetrated the

president's neck (probably a mortal wound) and Connally, as the Warren

Commission said. In fact, Donahue is one of the few people who has

studied the assassination who endorses the "magic bullet" theory.

   At that point, a Secret Service agent in the follow-up Cadillac stood

up with an AR-15 assault rifle, the weapon later made famous as the M-16.

As he turned towards the Texas Book Depository he slipped backward and

the rifle fired, striking the president on a left-to-right axis high in

the head, fragmenting inside his brain, and blowing out the right side

of his skull, Donahue says. The moment was captured in all its terrible

gore on frame 313 of the Zapruder film.

   That rifle's presence was acknowledged in some Warren Commission

testimony though it eluded Donahue's notice for years, even though he

had concluded early on that the bullet angles in the skull meant that

the fatal shot had to have come from some other source.

   "It has the pattern of the classic gun accident," says Donahue. "As

freakish as the odds may seem, many gun accidents involve fantastic odds:

A man just happens to be in the way when a shotgun goes off. A tenth of a

second later he'd be alive or a tenth of a second earlier."

   Attempts by Donahue, Menninger and the chairman of the board of the

book's publisher, St. Martin's, to approach the agent in question have

been rebuffed with silence or threats of lawsuits.

   Asked about the possiblility of a lawsuit by the agent, Donahue

replied: "We went over this with our lawyers and their concensus is that

he won't sue, because we did everything we could to reach him. We never

arrived at our conclusion through malice. It was a deduction on our part.

We don't accuse him of being an assassin. He was caught in an unfortunate

web of fate through no fault of his own."

   Donahue maintains that there are two tests that could prove or

disprove his thesis.

   First, the AR-15 bullet jacket is 90 percent copper, 9 percent zinc,

and one percent impurities. The Carcano bullet jacket contains only

copper. Thus, if tests found zinc in any of the bullet fragments, it

would mean that the shots did not come from a Carcano rifle.

   Second, the dimensions of the copper jackets on the two bullets are

profoundly different. The jacket on an AR-15 bullet is 1-21,000 of an

inch thick; the Carcano's is 1-32,000 of an inch thick. Under microscopic

examination, the differences would be readily visible.

   "I hate the word 'cover-up,'" he says. "It sounds so sinister. But

the government was between a rock and a hard place. They did not want to

admit that Kennedy was shot in the head by their own man. They tried to

cover it up with the Warren Commission.

   "And the Warren Commission was so inept that it led to much more

widespread distrust of the government and its investigating agencies.

Nobody really profited from it. The Warren Commission simply covered the

evidence with a haystack."

Well, that's it! Whatcha think? Just sitting here, I've come up with two

questions:

1) What are the chances of a bullet hitting the pavement next to a moving

car, fragmenting, and ricocheting into a moving car and hitting JFK in

the head, like Donahue suggests? Wouldn't the angle be wrong for that to

happen? And asphalt is actually highly elastic. Wouldn't the bullet

either imbed in the street, or lose enough velocity to slow down too

much?

2) For Kennedy to get hit in the left side of the head and go left-to-

right by a gunman from the following car, he would have to be looking

over his left shoulder. But, then again, if he was facing forward,

wasn't the left side of his head pointing towards the grassy knoll?

I'm not sure of the direction of the entry points in his head, but I

thought they all came from behind. Does anyone know anything different?

Also,I remember an interview with John Connally where he essentially said

he didn't buy the "magic bullet" stuff either.

Well, it's late. Hope y'all like it!

Christian Walters

cwalters@ducvax.auburn.edu