In Defense of “Tosh” Plumlee: How His Critics (unintentionally) Help to Vindicate Him —And His Story of “That Day”

Or, How “Some People DID Talk but Others Chose Not to Hear”

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NOTE: The multiple images of documents below may be adjusted to increase the type size for easier reading, by holding the cursor over the image, then “right-click” and select “open image in new window.” Then go to the new window and “left-click” over image. Increase type size by pressing keys “Ctrl” and “+” sign (or decrease with the “-” )

Pondering the Motives of Tosh Plumlee’s Critics

For the last five-plus decades, William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee has patiently and plaintively retold the story of how he co-piloted a DC-3 (C-47) airplane on November 21, 1963—originating in Florida, stopping in New Orleans where some passengers left and others came aboard, then flying on to Houston, from where he, as co-pilot along with the pilot and several passengers—then flew to Dallas on the morning of November, 22, 1963. The original destination was Redbird airport in Oak Cliff, the southwest side of Dallas, but, due to inclement weather, the plane was redirected to Garland, on the northeast side of Dallas. Among the passengers on the airplane who got off in Garland was CIA-affiliated / Mafia-connected Johnny Roselli. After a short delay, it proceeded on to Redbird, from where he and “Sergio,” a fellow member of a CIA Abort Team, then went to Dealey Plaza by car.

A more complete statement written by Plumlee is appended as page 2 and a video of Tosh describing the scene at Dealey Plaza that day will be presented below. Moreover, and just as importantly, the photos published here on page 4, are essential components which prove the general veracity of Plumlee’s story. For the “doubters” who wish to continue the debate about whether he has now been vindicated, or not, a good place to start the rebuttal might be to please explain how he managed, in a 30ish year reunion in Florida, to personally take a unique photo of Narzario Sargen, the military planning director of Alpha-66 never published anywhere else, then having himself included in another photo of Sargen and Pablo Duran Jr., and still another one of himself with Alpha-66 founder Antonio Venciana at that same event. Is it even possible that anyone without those ties could convince these men to even meet with him — much less pose together for photos — if his bona-fides were fabricated?

For some reason, there are certain people who do not believe Plumlee’s claims, despite much documentation in the form of official records and correspondence which the government has released, though most of his actual testimony has remained classified. In some cases, perhaps, the critic may not have studied the complexities related to the “tradecraft” of the spy business, some of which will be elucidated in the narrative to follow.

Admittedly, there is much confusion sewn into many of Plumlee’s records — planted “disinformation” — all done for one of two purposes:

(1) For their immediate use as “Plausible Deniability” as we will see examples of next, or

(2) As a means for the CIA, with help from the FBI (and J. Edgar Hoover personally, as it will become clear) to plant false canards into the official records about the pilots — including Plumlee, but others as well, to be used as necessary for their own possible future needs — to “disassociate” the agencies from anyone whom they feared may possess too much confidential information gained from their participation in covert operations.

The CIA/FBI’s Gaslighting of Potential “Whistleblowers”

The most-asked question Tosh gets is: “If all of the things you say are true, really are, then how did you avoid being suicided (or, “killed”, “eliminated”, “deep-sixed”, “wasted,” etc.). His answer always was and still is: “Because there is no need for that because I’ve been ‘character-assassinated’ already.”

As we will next review, steps were taken long ago to effectively destroy his good name, and there are, evidently, people on secret payrolls to continue making that charge. Much of that happened in the immediate aftermath of his 1950s covert operations, which will explored below. His FBI and other related agencies’ files were cunningly “adjusted” to portray him as an out-of-control check forger, and/or non-sufficient funds [NSF] check-writer, auto thief, airplane crasher and plotter of fantastic other schemes like pretending to be dead.

There is of course, nothing in the government’s public files that outlines the “methods and procedures” for the conduct of their “wet jobs,” “black bag jobs,” “character-assassination assignments” or numerous other illegal and unconstitutional activities, including proofs of the two agencies’ joint ventures in the assassinations of American leaders in the 1960s that should be obvious to all at this point; enough details of the FBI’s COINTELPRO have been exposed to prove those assertions (see many such examples within the previous blogs on this website, or within my published books).

Various ex-FBI agents have courageously come forward to admit their involvement in such activities, including M. Wesley Swearingen, Donald G. Wilson and Frederick Whitehurst, for examples cited within my books, or the well-known books of numerous other authors—such as Athan Theoharis’s The FBI & American Democracy: A Brief Criminal History—all of whom have exposed much of the worst corruption within both agencies.

Though Tosh Plumlee experienced many attempts to silence him—from having fabricated lies put into his official files, simple demands to be silent, escalating over time to summarily-ordered “detentions” (though never charged with actual evidence or given a trial), physical threats on himself and/or his family, being beaten up then having his house burned down (both incidents on the same day) —he would never stay silent for long.[1]

While he spoke out numerous times during the last six decades — as he was ignored by the major media, put off by congress, literally beaten up by goons in black suits, his house burned to the ground, and slandered all-the-while by some in the “community” — for a little salt in his wounds, the “deniers” claimed he did it all for fame and glory.

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In their two books (cited below) about this subject, authors Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner exposed some of the deceptive tactics adopted by the CIA and FBI—along with cooperating local, state and federal officials—in their efforts to mount a secret war from Florida and ensure that the secrets would become permanent. From the use of many “front companies” used to hide the real names of their operatives, to the suspension of inconvenient laws, required the cooperation of authorities at each level. Even at privately-owned businesses such as the First National Bank of Miami, employees “winked at transparently false information on loan applications,” and the University of Miami “was unstinting in its cooperation,” providing cover for their personnel under the guise of their doing “undersea and classified weapons research with the university.” [2]

The subterfuge that the authors described extended into every area of operations, including false information being implanted into legal documents such as incorporation papers, income tax records with bogus sources of income, violation of FAA regulations with “spurious flight plans and the taping over of registration numbers,” transportation of hazardous materials and explosives on Florida highways against state laws, acquisition of illegal automatic weapons in violation of state and federal laws. Furthermore, Hinckle and Turner wrote:

“Every time a boat left for Cuba the Neutrality Act was broken; every time it returned Customs and Immigration laws were skirted . . . The CIA quietly arranged for a suspension of the enforcement. Police and sheriffs’ departments from Miami to Key West quickly released agency people stopped for anything from trespassing to drunk driving. Customs, immigration, treasury, and FBI agents all looked the other way. Boat crews, for example, were given a password of the day for use if challenged by the Coast Guard . . . Robert Plumlee, a pilot for the Dodge Corporation front [as Plumlee explained to the authors, “It had the legitimate name of the auto maker, but the name was a dodge], told the authors how he evaded detection by U.S. radar picket planes with the aid of CIA contacts in the military. When a mission to Cuba was scheduled, his Dodge handler would come by with a packet containing instructions, air charts, and the coordinates of the remote airfield in Cuba that was his destination. Plumlee, whose radio code name was Zapata, would hop over to Marathon Key or Loxahatchee and wait to take off at exactly the time his instructions stated. His course would take him through a temporary gap in the radar screen created when the giant Lockheed Constellation picket planes made U-turns at the ends of their runs. “Obviously Dodge was being fed the times by the military,” Plumlee said.

Those broad deceptions extended into the less-noticed, more personally related, intrusions employed by the CIA’s and FBI’s joint operations to “gaslight” people whose credibility — and their intimate knowledge of those highly illegal operations — were such that any future disclosures of “state secrets” by them would mean that they had to be discredited in advance. These preemptive acts, completed contemporaneously in “real time,” would stick to the personnel (thus the FBI’s) files permanently, thus resulting for many of them, having their “loose lips” being sealed indefinitely. Many of these files, long tucked away in boxes at NARA, were later shared with Mary Farrell, and eventually became fodder for the detractors to use to vilify Tosh Plumlee.

One single example of the FBI’s brazen corruption of the 1950s-60s-70s that most cognitively-aware people will immediately understand, of many other lesser-knowns, was the decade-long “neutralization” (1957-through 4/3/68, before he was completely eliminated the following day) of Martin Luther King Jr. During that same period, while numerous other similar illegal acts were occurring across the U.S. under its COINTELPRO abuse, what they did to Dr. King stands as the single most thoroughly documented exemplar of the heinous abuse of power practiced by some of the most corrupt and evil men of that age: J. Edgar Hoover was only one of the several and his record needs no further examination as to this point.

The same kind of advance-preemptive steps to discredit certain of the people involved in the operations related to the Cuban pre- and post-revolution period, was targeted to those, like Tosh Plumlee and Bradley Ayers, who were known to “speak their minds” a bit too freely for the people managing these covert operations. Unfortunately for the managers, their attempts to load disinformation into the official records were often inconsistent with other records. Many of these kinds of errors were culled from the files, evidently in some cases by Mary Ferrell herself, or one of her assigns. Plumlee described this in a recent telephone conversation with me:

“The FBI documents [which detail this point] can be found at the Mary Ferrell website. They show how, through J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI tampered with that information and changed it up. [In one example of this] there was money that I was supposed to give to Johnny Rosselli, which came from John Martino, who was a gambler in Havana. It was in a bus station locker in West Palm Beach and the FBI document stated that when they opened the locker the only thing they found was an old pair of binoculars and there was no $13,000 [the sum varied: in different documents it was either $8,000 or $15,000]. That was one of the FBI documents” (See Exhibit A-1 and 2 on Page 5 “FBI Documents”)

“So one document says there was no money found in the locker, but another document says that I was allowed to accompany the two CIA agents to the bus locker and the money was turned over to the CIA agents. But what actually happened was that I was very concerned because that was mob money, given to me by John Martino and the mob would have cut my throat if it did not get to Roselli. I told the local police, who had arrested me on a vagrancy charge, that I had put that money into a bus locker in West Palm Beach and I gave them the locker number, I had the key in my pocket. They went down to the bus station and said the key didn’t fit, so they got the janitor to open up the locker and said they only found the old binoculars, but it was out of the wrong locker, as we later determined. Later, I was allowed to accompany two CIA agents to the locker, they opened it up and they took the money out of that locker, and I learned later that it was given back to Johnny Roselli. I also learned later that Roselli had been in a hell of a lot of trouble with the mob because they thought that he had ripped them off for $15,000.”

[That document, dated 8/31/1963 refers to the money as “$15,000.” Also, it should be noted that another discrepancy existed between the two documents: the first one states that the money came from John Martino, the second from an unnamed employee at L.B. Smith Aviation]. (See Exhibit B on Page 5, “FBI documents)

Some of the earliest unclassified documents, dating from the mid-late 1950s, were either originally prepared to twist the circumstances (as below) or later “doctored” by someone to discredit Plumlee’s subsequent testimony. That “charge” is nothing unique about Plumlee’s case, as most seasoned researchers will understand.

As we will see next, J. Edgar Hoover put himself personally into the function of watching the men conducting these operations like a hawk looking at an overloaded chicken coop. And Tosh Plumlee was, metaphorically, one of the biggest chickens in the flock — though in real life, he was more like a peregrine falcon.

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The originally-classified documents to be reviewed shortly illustrate a number of important points. In both cases, these somewhat routine operational communications were addressed to Hoover himself, not to any of the assistant directors or any other official or regular employee (which, one would expect, would have handled it as a “routine” process, were it a more ordinary crime). It clearly means that these matters were managed closely by him, personally.

It was all because they were dealing with, and corresponding about, covert operations involving gun smuggling into Cuba, for the purpose of arming Fidel Castro: a highly illegal operation. This issue is still an astounding secret for most people. Within Humberto Fontova’s book The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro, (and a later summary news article HERE) the reason many CIA officials favored Castro and went to great lengths to support him was revealed: Led by the mainstream media into believing Castro represented a democratic alternative to Dictator Batista, many CIA officials balked at following Eisenhower’s lead, and defiantly supported Fidel Castro.

Tosh believes that the reason Fidel Castro subsequently decided to affiliate with the Soviet Union (now Russia) was because the United States refused his request for 26 tractors to help jump-start the agricultural sector. The Soviets granted him that request and “the rest is history.”

Author Fontova noted these specific examples of CIA and State Department official’s support for Castro, circa 1957-1960:

• “A friendly and persuasive CIA representative who had an opportunity of talking to Fidel Castro for an hour (when the Soviet satrap visited Washington D.C. in April 1959) emerged in a state of ecstasy about Castro’s receptivity, responsiveness and understanding” (Steven Bonsal U.S. ambassador to Cuba 1959-61).
• “Me and my staff were all Fidelistas” (Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s Caribbean Desk chief (1957-60);
• “Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State was pro-Castro, except [Republican] ambassador Earl Smith” (Robert Weicha, a CIA operative in Santiago Cuba);
• “Don’t worry. We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra Mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto “Che” Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever” (Jim Noel, Havana CIA station chief, 1958).
• “Without U.S. help Fidel Castro would never have gotten into power. The State Department played a large part in bringing Castro to power. The press, the Chief of the CIA Section are also responsible; we are responsible for bringing Castro in power. I do not care how you want to word it” (Earl Smith, Ambassador to Cuba, 1957-59).

LIFE magazine (thus the FBI) inadvertently documented 20-year-old pilot Tosh Plumlee’s arrival deep into the interior of Cuba in its issue dated July 21, 1958.

On one of his gun-running flights to Cuba, just before his scheduled landing, he lost one of the engines of the D-18 Twin Beach aircraft (see photo of it on page 4) and he had to put the plane down in a swamp to avoid crashing. One of the rebels, “Sergio” and Raul Castro’s “political advisor” Vilma Espin (code name “Deborah” who later became Raul’s wife) came to Tosh’s aid, rescuing him from the swamp and provided him netting to keep mosquitos away. Vilma began calling him “Zapata” (the name of the swamp) and his case officer heard it and decided it would make a great code name for Tosh.

Tosh credits Sergio for saving his life, twice, in that era. They became friends after that, going on other missions together including the trip to Dallas and Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Tosh had promised Sergio and his family that he would never reveal his last name, and still stands by his word. The LIFE magazine article includes a photo of his friend Sergio on the third page (scrolling down) and, on the first page is a photo of “Deborah” (Vilma) holding one of the sniper rifles Tosh had smuggled in that had been stolen from a National Guard Armory. (See Page 6 for the complete LIFE article).

Despite this extraordinary proof (including the ironic statement about their inability to conclude that it was Plumlee in the photo) of his having been closely monitored by the FBI and CIA, et. al. there are many people still alleging that Tosh has made up all of this background. It is these bona fide FBI records that expose the trolls who evidently live lavish lives with great expense account benefits, all paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

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The Gaslighting of Tosh Begins: 1959

Obviously, that mind-boggling level of CIA malfeasance—smuggling guns into Cuba for the 26th July Castro rebels which were stolen from the National Guard in various cities, all of it contrary to President Eisenhower’s policies—had something to do with the “cloak and dagger” handling required to surveil the men who were involved. That required the FBI’s assistance in keeping files on all of their movements and activities—selectively augmented with assorted disinformation—which facilitated extended controls into the future, should they ever decide to talk too much.

Which is why most of the people involved never talked. It took a man whose courage was greater than his fears of retribution to step forward.

Among a number of related FBI memoranda, the two copied below illustrate how the FBI handled the “resolution” of an incident involving Tosh Plumlee, the Columbus, Ohio Police Department and the U.S. Customs Service (as it was called before 2003): On the left a February, 1959 memo the Cincinnati Senior Agent in Charge (SAC) sent to “DIRECTOR, FBI” supposedly about Plumlee’s arrest in Columbus, Ohio for a forged check, though the real story was noted below that lede: about his airplane in that city, loaded with guns and ammunition. Four months after that, another FBI memo, this from the Detroit SAC on the same matter, but by this point no further mention is made of the supposed “forged check.” Instead of that being the stated reason for his prior arrest, now it has become merely about Columbus “being so far inland it would be impossible to prove attempts to ship arms to Cuba.”

The case started out when an agent for U.S. Customs detained Plumlee after finding out his airplane was loaded with guns and ammunition. He was preparing to fly to Cuba on a CIA mission, from Columbus, Ohio in January, 1959. Plumlee stated that a man named “Sutor” had been involved in sending that cargo and the FBI had him under surveillance and had picked him up: “The plane that I was on was loaded by people who were tied to Sutor. The FBI wanted to know what I knew about Sutor, so they had approached me (but many in the ‘research community’ have stated that I went to them, which is untrue). The documents say that they went out of their way to find me . . . and I went out of my way to dodge them.”

Whatever steps the CIA usually took to avoid those confrontations had apparently not worked, but, as we will examine further below, sometimes these acts might have been intentional, for the purposes of doctoring files and/or to insert a bit of disinformation into the record for possible future use. Regardless of that, due to the need to avoid publicity about the illegality of the operation, Plumlee said: “U.S. Customs was instructed to turn the pilots over to local authorities — apparently, in order to have them create documents to justify the detention.”

Plumlee continued: “The FBI falsely reported that I was arrested while attempting to pass a forged check at Morehouse Fashions. There was no mention by the FBI about U.S. Customs detaining me or there being guns on board the aircraft. The whole operation involving multiple shipments by the CIA during 1957-59, of guns and ammunition to Castro [it is noteworthy to point out this was going on under the Eisenhower-Nixon administration] were covered up and the pilots that were intercepted by U.S. Customs, carrying guns onboard their aircraft bound for Cuba, were charged with other false crimes like hot check writing, or stolen cars, no mention of guns”

[No mention of guns in the police files, but in the various FBI memoranda there were such references because that was the real reason for the detentions in the first place; clearly the bogus charges were merely to provide reason for having detained and/or arrested them. At a later date, all of those charges were quietly dropped].

Plumlee added: “Most of those guns found by Customs were stolen from U.S. National Guard Armories. The CIA directed the false information to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and other federal agencies, like ATF, as pretexts to cover up their own illegal acts.” (These incidents led to that becoming a chronic problem, as evidenced by the 2009 “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation wherein the Department of “Justice,” and its subsidiary ATF bureau, magnanimously gave stolen guns to Mexican warlords [see HERE] and the same general programs persist to this day [see HERE]),

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Plumlee’s Early 1960s CIA Flying Adventures Constantly Tracked by FBI

Some of the partially censored FBI documents indicate that, in April, 1963, Plumlee flew Roselli to the Thunderbird Inn in Las Vegas, then to Santa Barbara, California. That trip was for the purpose of Roselli meeting with Chauncy Holt. Subsequently, on his last leg, without Roselli on board, he then ran into an unforeseen storm that caused him to have to land the plane on a highway to avoid crashing it; when he then took off again with the help of police in blocking traffic, due to extended rerouting, he ran low on fuel and then had to find a place to land: he did so on a roadway in an Indian reservation, requiring him to abandon it there and later notified the company he had rented it from, the Thompson Flying Service in Salt Lake City, and they later recovered it. A state policeman loaned him his personal car to continue his way back to an airport. Tosh had presumed the matter was closed.

Yet the FBI had been made aware of the incident and they issued a report that said the airplane had crashed and the pilot’s location was unknown. That report would lead to a judge accusing Plumlee of playing “dead,” as will be noted below. In that plane was an aeronautical map with Plumlee’s fingerprint as well as another fingerprint that belonged to “Colonel John Rawlston” of Miami, Florida (i.e. Johnny Roselli).

For more “stories of intrigue” regarding Plumlee’s exploits during the late 1950s-early 1960s, including how he flew ABC reporter Lisa Howard into and out of Cuba and one of the occasions when he met Fidel Castro, who gave him a fatigue hat, see the addendum towards the bottom of Page 2.

Plumlee then (late April, 1963) returned to regular duty at his base in Miami / West Palm Beach — Loxahatchee. and, unaware of the FBI’s interest, continued flying other assignments, including flying Roselli on occasion to such destinations as Bimini. However, after his Dallas mission, he was extradited to Denver in late November, 1963 then held without charges in a Denver jail to April, 1964; evidently the real reason was due to his venture into Dealey Plaza and how he would not conform to the government’s cover-up agenda or capitulate to their pressure to stop talking. It was there that he met with FBI agents for his interview, in April, 1964, telling them what he saw that day — obviously a story they did not like to hear. Soon after that, he was brought up on phony “check bouncing” charges based upon the standard FBI lies explained above, but prosecuted only for a $25 alleged case, not the one for over $5,000, which was summarily dismissed, as the newspaper article below indicates.

The judge who heard his case had clearly been put on a mission, which appeared to be putting Tosh “on ice” for an “indeterminate” period, which turned out to be nine months, away from anyone with whom he might commiserate again about what he saw in Dealey Plaza on November, 22, 1963.

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Plumlee recently stated that the article is wrong in this respect: “I did not plead guilty. My attorney told me to plead no contest and they would have to produce the alleged checks. The prosecutor said they had two checks, one for over $5k and one for $25. They could not produce either one. They dropped the $5k check and used the $25 to prosecute me. But since it was under $50 it should have been a misdemeanor charge, not a felony. However, today there  are no felony charges recorded on me anywhere, including the alleged arrest in Columbus Ohio. And no checks anywhere were ever produced in a court of law, including in Palm Beach, another inadvertent “error”? . . . How do you spell “Set-Up”?

Judge Finesilver, essentially finding Plumlee uniquely guilty of not being “grown up,” sentenced him to an indefinite term in the Colorado Reformatory, beginning in April, 1964. He was finally released in January, 1965. This despite his already lengthy aircraft maintenance, flying and military / intelligence experience, as well as considerable unique experience with high-level Mafiosi. It should be apparent to most people, from this cursory review of the essential facts, what that “reform school” sentence was all about: A rather brutal warning to him to keep his mouth shut.

For most reasonable, prudent and objective people, it should be quite understandable that the legal problems Plumlee experienced in 1964—shortly after witnessing JFK’s head being partially blown away, then, within 3 days of that turning age 26, (at which point he was already a 10-year military veteran)—might have been related to the extreme trauma he experienced that day. In an unpublished manuscript, he has written about how he cried uncontrollably on the flight out of Dallas, and was repeatedly called out by the pilot because, as the co-pilot, he had a responsibility to get his emotions under control and leave those memories behind. Moreover, what is now known as “PTSD” was then considered merely a temporary shock that was untreatable and was expected to eventually go away — which, as many people can attest, is not necessarily true.

All of that, combined with his young age and a sense of rebellion about the horrors he personally witnessed—as well as an inner-rage caused by how he felt about the obvious cover-up that was then unfolding—might have had something to do with his “acting out”.

In some cases, materials that would vindicate his testimony have been culled, while other materials intended to cast doubt on his statements, or contradict his testimony—apparently fabricated by the CIA and/or FBI for the purpose of discrediting him—have been curated by these agencies (including specifically at the Mary Ferrell website). [3] There are only 175 records that “match” a Plumlee search on the website (as of this date), but many of his more undoctored records were apparently co-mingled with those of John Martino. (Curiously, the same thing was done with many of Chauncy Holt’s records, both of whom have been similarly treated by the JFK research “community”). A recent search with Martino’s name totaled 202,986 reports and documents, which suggests that even more names were “misfiled” there. (See Page 5, Exhibit C for one sample “misfiled” document)

In his quest to bring truth to the American public, Plumlee’s claims were originally made to congressional investigators for the “Church Committee” in the 1970s, and subsequently repeated under oath to Senate subcommittees in the 1980s-90s, run by Senators Gary Hart and John Kerry and their respective staffs, all to no avail as summarized below.

Plumlee posted this summary of his military and intelligence experience on the Education Forum on January 12, 2006:

• I enlisted and was assigned to military specialized operations at Fort Bliss, Texas in April of 1954.(RA18389060; Recon Training Command, RTC-D8)
• I was associated with various Military Intelligence units of the Fourth Army based at Fort Bliss, Texas, and also the Fourth Army Reserve, located at Dallas Love Field, Dallas Texas. This service period was in the early to mid fifties and into the early sixties.
• Approximately 1962 through 1963, I was assigned to Task Force W Section- C-7 tab B and D known as the Cuban Project which operated at the time from the JM/WAVE station attached to Miami, Florida’s ‘Cuba Desk’ of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
• I operated as a contract “Undercover pilot” and also, at times, I was assigned to specialized Cuban operations of the CIA’s “Covert Action Group” (CAG) I was engaged in many secret operations through out the early sixties.
• Some years later, after brief retirement, known by some [on] the forum as ‘The Farm’. I reactivated myself and became attached as an undercover operative and contract pilot for the federal government during President Reagan’s “Drug War”. (1979-86)
• I was attached to a secret team known as ‘America-Mexico Special Operations Group’ (“AMSOG”), HQ’ed Panama Southern Command. I was also a pilot and associated with the Contra Resupply Network.
• I have testified four times in closed door session, to various Senate and congressional investigative committees (Director FBI 1964; J Hoover; Senator Church, 1976-75; closed-door testimony, classified TS [Top Secret]; to Congressmen Tom Downing’s investigators, before the HSCA was formed; (1975) to Senator John Kerry’s Committee of 1988-91 [the] Senate Foreign Relations Committee twice, August 2, 1991 & May 7-15, 1992 also classified “TS Committee Sensitive” and the “Tri-State Drug Task Force”, (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico) chaired by Arizona Governor, Bruce Babbit.
• The cover operation contact cut out was the Phoenix Organized Crime Div. Phoenix AZ,1975-86. I worked with Senator Gary Hart and his security adviser Bill Holden, on previous intelligence matters with the NSC and the drug war with Colombia and Costa Rica. I worked UC operations with KiKi Camarena and his pilot, before they were murdered and I was a Military/DEA contract pilot, attached to Panama and Colombia, Costa Rica Investigative Task Force on Narcotics.
• I have a secret classified file as defined within the National Security statutes under the name of William Robert (Tosh) Plumlee aka William H “Buck” Pearson code named “Zapata”, Miami Cuba Desk, 1960-63 MI/CIA OMC-TFW7; Section C (locate Tab B & D) classified information; portions declassified Aug 1998. Associated with Operation 40 connected to the NSC and the “White House Situations Rooms briefings. I was a contract operative for the CIA, associated with Tracy Barns, Wild Bill Harvey, Frank Bender, John Martino and many others. All my previous testimony concerning government investigations has been under oath.

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Why Would “Truth Seeking” Researchers Reject Plumlee’s First-Hand Vivid Memories as They Accept the CIA’s Long-Discredited Lies?

A recent informal review of the various forums suggests that the majority of people following his story do believe the essence of his many essays, his responses to questions raised and what is known about his still-classified congressional testimony. However there are a number of researchers and published authors who have their doubts, mostly it seems, due either to their being uninformed or biased, for reasons only known to them, for which there seems to be a lack of coherence to the explanations proffered. The reasons stated are generally ambiguous or nonsubstantive, such as banal statements about how his stories lacked “consistency.” But that is countered by such giants in the “JFK Research Community” as Jim Marrs, who categorically stated—as we shall see shortly—that they were very “consistent,” considering the breadth of the time span covered.

On April 30, 2021, at a webinar conference sponsored by Project JFK / CSI Dallas, a long-time JFK assassination researcher, Bill Simpich, posed a question to Sara Peterson and Katanna Zachry, authors of Voices from the Shadows and The Lone Star Speaks. (A transcript of the pertinent part of his question, and an audio recording of the full 8 minute dialog, is presented on page 3 below). Excerpts of his premise — to provide context for everything that follows, begin here:

Simpich:  “Here’s my question, because I love a lot of the figures, but there’s one that I do not love in this case . . .and I’m ready for all the arrows, is Tosh Plumlee.  And the reason I say that, and you probably know that Tosh has at least been questioned as a reliable source, I just wanted to share that he was not only one of the most important, you know, alleged witnesses, in this case but he was also in the Dark Alliance case, the Gary Webb story about the cocaine . . . uh, Tosh, well, this is how I knew about Tosh, because I worked on that case back in the day, that’s how I met Peter Dale Scott. Now, here’s an article out of the Huff Post from a few years ago – just let me read a few lines: 

[Quoting from article] “Two years before the Iran-Contra bubbled up in the Reagan White House, pilot Tosh Plumlee revealed to Senator Gary Hart that the planes would routinely transport cocaine to the United States after dropping off arms to the Nicaraguan rebels; and then he spoke in media interviews, he wrote letters to Senator Gary Hart, he sought out Gary Hart in 1983.  Gary Hart told the Huff Post in 2014 he remembered getting this letter, you know, decades later, you know, after the fact, and found his allegations worthy of follow-up. Plumlee flew weapons into Latin America for decades, for the CIA.  When the Contra revolution took off in the 1980s he continued to transport arms south for the spy agency and bring cocaine back with the blessing of the U.S. government.”

“I have to say, I think that he’s got one of the most active imaginations I’ve ever seen.” . . . . . (Emphasis, through voice inflection, in original audio).

Mr. Simpich then began a lengthy monologue about how he had previously believed that Robert Barrett, an FBI agent in Dallas involved in the “investigation” (so-called) was credible but later decided he had not been seeking actual truths, enumerating some of the reasons for that.

Then, with nary a word of why he believed Plumlee was also not credible, Simpich managed to place him under the same umbrella as Barrett, through something akin to what magicians call “sleight of hand” techniques. Apparently, his intent of using his critique of Barrett as a proxy to discredit everything Plumlee has said, was the basis to assert that Plumlee’s statements are so fantastically absurd that there was no need to stipulate a single example of why he should be considered unreliable, other than his assessment of Tosh having an “active imagination,” indeed, “the greatest one” he’d ever seen.

This colloquy, unfortunately, is representative of how Plumlee’s critics have generally attacked him for decades: Lacking substantive, factual and provable citations, they repeatedly use ambiguous innuendo, “guilt by association” tactics or misconstrued comparisons to other people or events as allusions to the character defects that cannot otherwise be firmly attached to him.

But Simpich’s more subtle allusion to the implausibility of Plumlee’s account, due to a lack of veracity on Gary Webb’s part, is very troubling on many levels and must be closely examined in the context of the slowly evolving truth of yet another CIA subterfuge.

In this case, Mr. Simpich has used comparisons to both Robert Barrett and a controversial investigative reporter, the late Gary Webb, as an indirect means to attack Tosh Plumlee. But, as I will demonstrate in the narrative to follow, the negative connotation he implicitly made regarding Gary Webb’s reputation was merely an ephemeral CIA concoction that was used to defray public sentiment when their need to destroy Webb suddenly thrust their skullduggery into the public mindset, and it worked, at least for a decade, starting in 1996.

Beginning in 2006, and strengthened mightily in 2014, the “Zeitgeist” about Gary Webb has slowly flipped: He is no longer the falsely scorned, reckless journalist that Simpich’s allusion was intended to portray. That point will become the primary focus of this treatise throughout the remaining narrative.

As we unpack the reasons why Plumlee’s veracity about the CIA’s guns- and drug-running culture is above reproach, we will also review some reasons why Tosh Plumlee should be considered a rare and valued witness to the Crime of the 20th Century, one whose reminisces should be believed by anyone searching for actual truths about JFK’s assassination. Because Plumlee’s story is a unique and honest perspective from someone who was there: He really was that “Someone Would Have [and Did], Talked.”

In the last section below, we will attempt to answer the lingering question of “why” his critics seem so determined to denigrate Plumlee personally and undermine his account of what happened in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

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A Summary of the 1980s-1990s CIA-Connected Guns and Drug Trafficing — And Tosh Plumlee’s Dilemma on Seeing it First-Hand

Senator Gary Hart (D-CO) summarized his, and his staff’s, extensive interviews with “Tosh” Plumlee in the following letter sent to Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Communications in preparation for a 1991 reinvestigation of the same charges he had originally made eight years previous:

An article titled “Senator Who Investigated JFK Assassination: ‘American Journalism Never Followed Up On That Story’” originally published in the November 10, 2013 Huffington Post (see here) quoted Sen. Hart’s comments about his interest in the real story of the JFK assassination [which undoubtedly had much to do with the end of his political career]. That article included further reference to Plumlee’s original belief that the trip to Dallas had been portrayed as an “abort mission,” though he later came to believe that some of the passengers deplaning at the stop in Garland were there to participate in the plot:

“Hart also heard from William Robert Plumlee — a former CIA contract pilot who gave classified testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then chaired by John Kerry, in the ‘90s — about how he believed Kennedy was really killed. Plumlee told Hart that he’d flown a plane to Texas days before the president’s assassination and had later come to believe that several people on board were connected to the murder. A report by TV producer Robert Vernon claimed that Plumlee testified that the flight — with Roselli on board — was an attempt to thwart the Kennedy assassination.

Clearly, Senator Hart, in conveying the introductory letter of Plumlee to Senator Kerry, and his subsequent reference to him in the Huffington Post, was implicitly commending him as a man who should be taken seriously.

One must ask themselves two questions: (1) Would Senator Hart have gone out on a limb like this for anyone whom he did not consider absolutely credible; and, (2) Would Mr. Plumlee go to all the trouble he did, repeatedly, for over 50 years and counting, were it not for his earnest desire to seek truths, correct wrongs and report illegal activity?

The answers to both of these questions, for objective researchers with no axe to grind, attest to Tosh Plumlee’s credibility.

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Other Unfolding Early-1980s Related Events

Within the above letter, Sen. Hart noted that Plumlee first contacted his Denver office in March, 1983 about “illegal arms and narcotic shipments [that] were not being appropriately acted upon by U.S. intelligence and law enforcements agencies,” that had been on-going since 1978. A photo of Plumlee meeting with Nicaraguan Contra members in 1984, as referenced by Senator Hart, is included with miscellaneous photographs furnished by Tosh on page 4 below.

Unfortunately, all of that came to naught, as the CIA maneuvered behind the scenes to mitigate further damage to its reputation through the same tactics used previously to keep state secrets secret. Just as the House Select Committee on Assassinations [HSCA] had been subverted from its original mission through the CIA’s and FBI’s manipulations of Congress in 1976-77, their attempts to investigate Plumlee’s charges throughout the 1980s would also be derailed. [4]

Among his other attempts to get the public’s awareness focused on this issue, Plumlee was interviewed by Morley Safer and 60 Minutes about how the U.S. Forest Service allowed the CIA to use their C-130 fire fighting aircraft for drug smuggling (See HERE for a video of that show)

During the 1980s under a Top Secret order by President Reagan, the CIA—despite a specific act of Congress to not fund the “Contras,” a Nicaraguan rebel force attempting to oust the Marxist Sandinista regime—was conducting operations through CIA-front companies Corporate Air Services and Southern Air Transport to deliver to them supplies of small arms and ammunition. In 1983, Plumlee, who, with other pilots, informed Hart of secret plans then underway to build a military airport at Santa Elena, Costa Rica to facilitate these trans-shipments so that Congress could investigate—information which both the CIA and FBI were suppressing—therefore Congress was kept “in the dark.” It was from that secret airport that a CIA aircraft would be shot down three years later. See HERE for a more detailed recap of this point.

The shoot-down of a CIA airplane over Nicaragua on October 5, 1986, which killed two of the crew members (the pilots, Tosh’s friends Bill Cooper and Buzz Sawyer), led to the capture of the only survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, and further exposure of the operations that had previously been kept secret, except for the reports of Robert Parry and Brian Barger, to be noted next. Hasenfus’ business card, found in his wallet by his captors, led straight to the White House. And that started the unraveling of what was the single greatest scandal of the Reagan-Bush administration: “The Iran-Contra Affair” which exposed still another aspect of how the secret funding of CIA’s operations extended to arms sales in Iran.[5]

In December 1985, the late journalist Robert Parry (who subsequently left the Associated Press and founded Consortium News) and Brian Barger first broke the story of a Contra-drug connection in their piece “Reports Link Nicaraguan Rebels to Cocaine Trafficking.” Among other things, Parry and Barger revealed that the CIA had provided an “assassination manual” to train the Contras on the various methods to employ that esoteric art. Mr. Parry also broke news of the involvement of Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, a deputy director of the National Security Council, in a covert operation to support the Contras with proceeds from clandestine arms sales to Iran. The weapons had been illegally sold to Iran to speed the release of American hostages in Lebanon.

Finally in 1986 the Senate began a formal investigation of the CIA’s alleged involvements in Central American drug trafficing, through the creation of a special senate subcommittee, chaired by then-senator John Kerry.

Senator Kerry’s Subcommittee’s Report was Ignored by the Media (Perhaps as He, and Other Interested Parties, Intended?)

In 1989 the Senate released a 1,166-page report on covert U.S. operations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. In summary, the report found “considerable evidence” that the Contras were linked to running drugs and guns — and that the U.S. government knew about it . . . It is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking … and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.”[6]

Though the Senate report affirmed the involvement of CIA personnel, it proved to be a feckless attempt due the media’s apparent resistance to say negative things about their benefactor. The book Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott and Johnathan Marshall summarized that point thusly:[7]

“Several reporters did outstanding investigative work, but their findings were either ignored or scantily treated by major media organs like the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Iran-Contra investigating committees ducked the issue and included in their final report a mendacious memo purporting to refute the essence of the Contra-drug allegations. Only in April 1989, after intense political wrangling and crippling delays, did the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations (the Kerry subcommittee) finally produce its own report documenting the Contra-drug connection–long after both the public and the media had lost interest in the Iran-Contra affair. With its report unread and its implications ignored, the Kerry subcommittee’s efforts went largely for nought.

“[Former chief counsel for Kerry’s subcommittee Jack] Blum’s own investigation uncovered proof of CIA involvement with Central American drug traffickers ranging from Contra commanders to Panama’s Noriega. Indeed the long and sordid history of CIA involvement with the Sicilian Mafia, the French Corsican underworld, the heroin producers of Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, the marijuana- and cocaine-trafficking Cuban exiles of Miami, and the opium smuggling mu-jaheddin of Afghanistan simply reinforces the lesson of the Contra period: far from considering drug networks their enemy, U.S. intelligence organizations have made them an essential ally in the covert expansion of American influence abroad.”[Ibid].

Moreover, the same authors noted the existence of CIA/Contra/drug-smuggling operations throughout the world, though not Plumlee’s (or any other specific pilot’s) involvement. Scott and Marshall wrote, “In Afghanistan, as in Indochina, and as we shall see, in Central America, the White House and CIA chose to look the other way while their allies sold vast quantities of drugs to the U.S. market . . . [and, quoting an unnamed Reagan administration official], ‘We’re not going to let a little thing like drugs get in the way of the political situation . . . the Afghanistan story has repeated itself in Central America. This pattern is deeply embedded in the CIA’s history and structure. For the CIA to target international drug networks, it would have to dismantle prime sources of intelligence, political leverage, and indirect financing for its Third World operations’.” [Ibid]

Interestingly, Peter Dale Scott was referenced by Simpich, who said that he had met Scott during his “work” on the Gary Webb case, yet in his comments during the April 30th conference, his sarcasm about Plumlee and the CIA-drug trafficing matter, as the audio recording (page 3) indicates, he seemed to disbelieve any connections by the CIA to drug imports or smuggling, not just about how Plumlee had been involved with it. Again, that belief might have had merit in the wake of the vicious MSM attacks (to be explored further, below), from 1996-2006, but it has since been demonstrated to be a CIA-produced fabrication.

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More Notoriety – 1990s Related Events

A number of books and news articles were published about related major stories, including the mysterious 1986 murder of the infamous drug-smuggler-turned-DEA-informant Barry Seal and his high-level connections to Col. Oliver North and George H. W. Bush. While it, and they collectively, relate to this story, we will merely give the point a cursory note, despite the fact that it does add substance to the overall background of the unfolding story. The primary difference was that while Seal’s activities may have been similar in some respects, there was no direct link into what he was doing in Mena, Arkansas and what was going on in certain military airbases. Especially what too many people knew about the high frequency of mysterious night-time flights into the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County, California.

By 1989-1990, the brewing controversy in Los Angeles concerning the “drug epidemic” infesting the area had begun exploding. It had all started with Col. North’s operations in Central America and had “grown like topsy,” with a lot of help from local drug dealers like the infamous “Freeway Ricky” in Los Angeles. Though Plumlee’s name is not mentioned in Gary Webb’s articles and book (to be examined in detail, below) Tosh was working directly with Gary, feeding him much of the information that he would publish. Plumlee stated it succinctly: “We worked together covertly.  Gary Webb, Gene Wheaton, Neil Matthews, and I worked together on this investigation for over a month, and before Gary released his findings, in Dark Alliance. I met with Gary in 1990 before the April 1990, “I Ran Drugs for Uncle Sam” article by Neil Matthews [SEE HERE] was released and published by the San Diego Reader. The excerpt below from that article provides additional context about Tosh Plumlee’s long-term perseverance (beginning in 1983) in attempting to get congress’s attention to the ongoing criminal activities being conducted by officials beginning at the top with National Security Advisor John Poindexter and Lt. Colonel Oliver North, through numerous others following their orders:

“[Plumlee] met with [Senator Gary] Hart staffer Bill Holden, giving him a copy of a map of Central America marked with notes, aircraft IDs, staging areas, weapons drops, and contra crossover points from Honduras into Nicaragua [those maps were reproduced within the cited article]. At the time, most of this information was a secret being withheld from Congress. The map, on which Plumlee continued to make notations for four years, until he quit flying to Central America in 1987, was a form of security for him. He figured that since a copy of it was in Hart’s hands, the map would protect him if he were ever shot down in Central America and the government tried to discredit him and deny his activities. Several of the names Plumlee wrote on the map would be revealed years later to be principal players in the Iran-contra scandal (Robert Owen, Felix Rodriguez, Richard Secord, [and National Security Advisor in Reagan’s administration John] Poindexter). But at the time Plumlee jotted them down, these notes and names were his private picture of a dirty secret.”

Plumlee stated, “Gary Webb was a friend we had been meeting and talking with even before the Gary Hart letter was released to Senator Kerry. Gary knew about Col James Sabow and that Sabow was going to spill the beans on the whole El Toro operation.”

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Marine Colonel James E. Sabow, a straight-as-an-arrow stereotypical Marine, had become very concerned with what everyone had begun suspecting was going on with those late-night flights. He knew all about the covert flights into El Toro rumored to involve drug running activities—as his superior officers at the airbase must have feared—that would eventually result in a federal drug investigation of the base, Operation Emerald Clipper.

Sabow was murdered on the El Toro base, although his death was ruled a “suicide.” It was done to prevent him from blowing-the-whistle on cocaine trafficking into El Toro. No one in his family accepted that finding, especially his brother David, a neurologist from South Dakota who led a private investigation when the military leaders refused to pursue it. According to the referenced articles (see endnote): “[Forensic experts] reported on the colonel’s homicide and DOD cover-up in the UK Journal of Forensic Research in late 2017 and early 2018. Their articles were peer-reviewed by other forensic experts and passed the litmus test for publication. They are not the imaginations of unqualified individuals, but that of court-recognized experts in forensic science.”[8] A CBS news report on this subject, done on the Connie Chung televised news show, by TV reporter Bernie Goldberg, who interviewed Plumlee, can be seen HERE.

Moreover, those articles state this factoid about the underlying criminal conduct that had become infested in operations at El Toro:

“CIA proprietary C-130s flew guns to Costa Rica and El Salvador, returning with their cargo bays full of the white powder. These aircraft crossed the Mexican border with transponder codes issued by the government. Besides El Toro, March AFB and Homestead AFB were involved . . . Gene Wheaton, former Army criminal investigator [associate of Plumlee, noted three paragraphs above], reported to the U.S. Attorney for Arizona over 50 aircraft from the Davis-Montham AFB in Tucson transferred to CIA proprietary companies. These aircraft were used in smuggling and cocaine trafficking. Wheaton had the serial and tail numbers, the type of aircraft, the names of the companies and military officials involved in the transfers.  Wheaton offered to brief the U.S. Attorney on the evidence collected. His offer was ignored. 

Col. Sabow was just one of many uncountable victims whose early deaths could be directly attributed to out-of-control military zealots like Col. North, whose myopia led the U.S. military-industrial “complex” war machine to go to enormously inflated, illegal and intrusive operations in distant lands that had no pertinence to US “national security” — all directly aimed at putting the U.S. into the untenable position of being the “Policeman of the World.”

[Q: Did we not learn anything from the horrid Vietnam lesson visited upon the world by LBJ?].

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And yet, there are some who still criticize Tosh Plumlee for his dedicated efforts to bring a halt to the madness, instead of those who created the leviathan that he has been fighting for over six decades, as though they are completely unaware—and now content to remain ignorant of—what was going on in real time by the early 1990s. Some even have the cojones to assert that Plumlee’s motive for doing this is really about his own publicity, a true absurdity when one considers it in the context of his treatment over five-plus decades.

Given the mountain of evidence cited above, all of which Plumlee has referenced again and again in his quest to “come clean,” the arrogantly banal contempt and derision from the “research community” constantly manifested through their denials of all of it is incomprehensible.

Meanwhile, “as Rome burns,” Tosh continues his fight in a video documentary series now under development — see HERE for a video trailer on the death of Colonel James Sabow.

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Gary Webb’s Blockbuster Investigation of CIA Corruption — And the Mockingbird Media’s Wrath

In August, 1996, Gary Webb, an investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a three-part series titled “Dark Alliance” which rattled a lot of cages in Washington and led to still another Congressional investigation, and ultimately a CIA Inspector General’s report, which would corroborate some of Webb’s findings.

It was the small-time San Jose Mercury News’ scoop that shocked the biggest newspapers in the country, undoubtedly in part through jealousy and embarrassment, to go into attack mode: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post all went after Gary Webb to destroy his credibility and trash his story. Their rebuttals were primarily focused on their own inferences and extrapolations of points he had not directly made—e.g., that the CIA intentionally created the crack epidemic in the urban ghettos of major cities—as the L.A. Times would finally acknowledge ten years later, to be noted below.

There should have been ample evidence available—had those pillars of “journalism” done a scintilla of research, including the articles and congressional investigations, for example, as much as six years before Webb’s story—that supported many of his charges. That would have included the well-publicized (including live TV coverage) Senate hearings of the Iran-Contra investigators in 1987 and Lt. Col. Oliver North’s handwritten notebooks; Senator Kerry’s 1989 subcommittee report noted above, and North’s 1989 conviction of three related felony counts (accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and ordering the destruction of documents—later vacated on appeal due to a technicality. Similarly, John Poindexter was found guilty of several counts in 1990 which were dismissed in 1991.

All of it was affirmation of Poindexter / North’s (et. al.) early involvement in creating the conditions which resulted from the operation they were guiding (in league with his military superiors up to and including President Reagan). That corruption became a major political scandal which he managed to quell through theatrics brought about by the televised coverage of him, arrogantly appearing in uniform and speaking condescendingly to the politicians who attempted, rather weakly, to skewer him.

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The assault by the CIA-infected major national newspapers literally brought their target to his knees. After losing his job, then any hope of a journalism career while fighting valiantly to recover from the damages wrought by the three major organs of the Mainstream Media, Gary Webb finally lost his marriage, family, car, motorcycle and home. Refusing to accept the only option left to him —to move in with his mother in a small apartment—he also lost all hope of ever recovering. Eight years after his blockbuster article, on December 10, 2004, he lost his life by two shots to his head, reportedly by his own hand.

For ten years, that Zeitgeist endured—that “Gary Webb’s recklessness had done great damage to journalism standards”—despite the fact that it was brought about by the three key purveyors of government propaganda as designed in the early 1950s through the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. The vicious assault they made, using twisted and fabricated misinterpretations of what he actually wrote, was secretly being managed and recorded by the CIA contemporaneously, though that documentation and analysis was then withheld for over 18 years.

Fast-forwarding to 2014, a blockbuster story that had its secret origins in 1996 (and will be reviewed further in the timeline below) was published about how, beginning in the months and years after Gary Webb’s 1996 series, the CIA had started gleefully collecting everything that was published by their Mockingbird retainers about how Webb was being systematically destroyed, all the way up to and including his 2004 suicide. That event must have produced great prizes for the corrupted “journalists” who accomplished their objectives.

2006: A Decade Later (Two Years After His Suicide)

The Media Lies About Gary Webb Are Finally Exposed

In 2006, an award-winning journalist named Nick Schou wrote Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, a work that should be considered the first effort of complete vindication of Webb’s tragic story.

In a concurrent article which Schou also wrote for The Los Angeles Times, he excoriated not only his own paper, but The Washington Post and The New York Times as well, for their previous handling of Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series:[9]

“Most of the nation’s elite newspapers at first ignored the story. A public uproar, especially among urban African Americans, forced them to respond. What followed was one of the most bizarre, unseemly and ultimately tragic scandals in the annals of American journalism, one in which top news organizations closed ranks to debunk claims Webb never made, ridicule assertions that turned out to be true and ignore corroborating evidence when it came to light. The whole shameful cycle was repeated when Webb committed suicide in December 2004 . . . “All three major U.S. dailies, The Times included, debunked a claim that Webb actually never made — that the CIA deliberately unleashed the crack epidemic on black America. The controversy over this non-assertion obscured Webb’s substantive points about the CIA knowingly doing business south of the border with Nicaraguans involved in the drug trade up north. (Emphasis added by author).

“The Washington Post titled one of its stories “Conspiracy Theories Can Often Ring True; History Feeds Blacks’ Mistrust.” The New York Times chipped in with a scathing critique of Webb’s entire career, suggesting that he was a reckless reporter prone to getting his facts wrong . . . “That article included virtually none of the good things Gary did,” said Webb’s former Cleveland Plain Dealer colleague, Walt Bogdanich, now a New York Times editor. “It didn’t include the success he achieved or the wrongs he righted – and they were considerable. It wasn’t fair, and it made him out to be a freak.”

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2014: Another Eight Years On: More Exoneration For Webb / More Condemnation for Mainstream (Mockingbird-Trained) Media

Eighteen years after the publication of Gary Webb’s series “Dark Alliance”, declassified CIA documents revealed how “The Company” essentially relied on its well-trained Mockingbird crews to do their job, as described in a September, 25, 2014 report by Ryan Devereaux writing for The Intercept.

During the entire decade after the appearance of Webb’s article in 1996, the CIA kept managing the after-action tasks, analyzing the product of their efforts and adding materials to their files — essentially monitoring the complete persecution and destruction of a Pulitzer-prize award-winning, genuine journalist.

The six-page report titled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story” explained how the CIA used its “ground base of already productive relations with journalists” (a.k.a. “CIA stooges”) to quiet the impact of Webb’s reporting.[10]

The point is particularly stunning in the way they were fully aware of the tragically-false assault, as if they took pride in the knowledge that all of their work to plant their news-minions in positions for use in precisely this kind of situation had paid off, “Big-time,” in 2004 with Webb’s suicide.

Ten years after that successful operation, in 2014 they finally released those files, as described in an article in the on-line publication Intercept:

“Culled from the agency’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, the materials include a previously unreleased six-page article titled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story.” Looking back on the weeks immediately following the publication of “Dark Alliance,” the document offers a unique window into the CIA’s internal reaction to what it called “a genuine public relations crisis” while revealing just how little the agency ultimately had to do to swiftly extinguish the public outcry. Thanks in part to what author Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer at the time of publication, describes as “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists,” the CIA’s Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter.

Despite such damning assessments, the subcommittee report received scant attention from the country’s major newspapers. Seven years later, [Gary] Webb would be the one to pick up the story. His articles distinguished themselves from the AP’s reporting in part by connecting an issue that seemed distant to many U.S. readers — drug trafficking in Central America — to a deeply-felt domestic story, the impact of crack cocaine in California’s urban, African American communities.[11]

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In another essay, dated November 2, 2014, the Consortium News weighed in again with a thoroughly documented treatise titled, “Gary Webb and Media Manipulation” which summed up the quantum ironies of the Washington Post’s vendetta thusly:

“Webb’s revelations, of course, flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that President Ronald Reagan was a stern enemy of drugs and a fierce threat to drug traffickers. On Oct. 27, 1986, Reagan budgeted $1.7 billion for the drug war and federalized Rockefeller law-style mandatory-minimum sentences. The message was: “Just say no.” It also turned out that the CIA’s “productive relations with journalists” proved so strong that it didn’t even seem to matter when official government investigations confirmed key facts about the Contra-cocaine scandal.

“Commenting on Kerry’s investigation and the major U.S. media’s response, journalism professor Jeff Cohen wrote: “Contra drug dealing was tolerated in the U.S. frenzy to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftwing Sandinista government. Kerry’s work was ignored or attacked in big media — Newsweek labeled him a ‘randy conspiracy buff.’” With Kerry and his investigation dismissed as irrelevant by the big newspapers, the scandal remained largely suppressed for the next seven years until Webb revived it in 1996. (Emphasis added by author).

“Webb (1955-2004) was an investigative journalist whose awards included a Pulitzer in 1990, as part of a team at the San Jose Mercury News, and at least four other major prizes for his solo work. Webb tried to reveal the impact that some of the cocaine that came through the Nicaraguan Contra pipeline had on American cities, saying:

“What is ironic about the recent patronizing anti-Webb commentary by the Washington Post’s Jeff Leen claiming that “an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof” is that the Post was a prime salesman for the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. And just what “proof” did the Post require for the “extraordinary claim” about Iraq hiding stockpiles of WMD, the chief selling point to the American people? Apparently nothing more than “jingoism,” the beating of war drums and empty assurances from the Bush administration’s neocons.”[12] (Emphasis added by author).

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Unlike the main U.S. organs of the MSM, the Tico Times (an English-printed newspaper published in Costa Rica favored by the many American ex-pats who live there) did a masterful and courageous job of following up on the story. A more proper and essential “correction of the corrupted record,” article titled “The un-doing of Gary Webb” on October 29, 2014, using Tosh Plumlee as a primary source, corroborating a CIA IG report (strengthening a sometimes unreliable source).[13]

“The drug flights to military bases were something that was the subject of gossip and speculation during the 1980s. But now Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, a pilot who says he worked for the company SETCO – identified in a 1998 CIA Inspector General’s report prompted by Webb’s reporting as a drug trafficking company and the principle company that transported arms and supplies to the Contras – has come forward to confirm that he and other SETCO pilots flew about 40 tons of cocaine into both El Toro and Homestead, among other U.S. military air bases.

“In addition, former DEA agent Celestino Castillo confirmed that Contra drug flights left El Salvador’s Ilopango Airbase and were flown to Homestead Airbase in Florida, information he got from a source in the Ilopango control tower.

“Plumlee said he was able to fly into U.S. military airbases because he had codes to transponders that enabled him to land without interference from the military, which were given to him by SETCO along with his flight plans”.

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Tosh Plumlee’s Attempts at Dialog with JFK Assassination Researchers

In 2014, when Tosh briefly attempted to rejoin the (so-called) “JFK Assassination Research Community” in the annual JFK Conference organized by Judyth Baker in Arlington Texas, his intent was to discuss his plans to write two books on his personal experiences in the military and intelligence apparatus of the United States.

He began by telling the audience that, as a kid, many considered him a “JD” — a common 1950’s acronym for “juvenile delinquent.” His early independent streak led him to drop out of high school, which he would eventually make up for through equivalency courses in the service, allowing him to receive the special training he needed for his career goals, including aircraft maintenance and flight school, which gave him the skills necessary to fly numerous types of military and commercial aircraft.

He told the audience how he had lied about his age to join the army at age 14, well before he was eligible; when that was discovered four months later, he was honorably discharged, but he reenlisted at age 16 and was soon assigned into a classified position in specialized operations. He has provided the records to prove all of these assertions, and more, though his detractors do not seem to accept such proofs.

Clearly, the Army realized that he was a very intelligent, aggressive risk-taker who considered himself as fearless, and his supervisors no doubt expected to find many roles to fit such a person. His lengthy, documented record has been impressive and should have removed all doubt about his honesty and truthfulness. Yet, there are some who choose to ignore those documents and challenge his statements as though they have signed onto a secret mission to discredit him with nothing other than banal “analysis” and misinformed assertions.

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What the late Jim Marrs said about Tosh Plumlee:

NOTE: To adjust the type size in the following image “right-click” over the image and select “open image in new window”, go to the window and increase type size by holding “Ctrl” and “+” sign (or decrease with the “-” window)

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Proof that Some Critics Don’t Understand Basic Laws of Physics — Nor the Essential Components and Steps of Deductive Reasoning and Critical Thinking Processes

Tosh Plumlee stated that (referencing the original format of the Frank Cancellare photo shown below), he and his friend Sergio took a position under the fourth (and “forked”) big tree from the triple underpass (i.e. the first one from the left side), in the shadows under the tree.

Cancellare, a photographer for UPI, was riding in camera car #2, seven cars behind the Presidential limousine, which was still on Main Street when the first shot was fired. That car had slowed to a crawl, like the other cars before his, some of which were then making the 120 degree left turn onto Elm Street; he did not jump out of the car until, according to another photographer sharing the car, Henry D. Burroughs, “We came up to the scene of the shooting and people were running all over the place. Cancellare got out there and there was a policeman running, as I recall, up the hill and “Cancy” followed him, and we just took off.”[14]

This account indicates that at least 2-3, minutes—most likely 3-5 or more given the slowness of the traffic and the time it took to get to the spot on the knoll from which he made the photo-shot—had elapsed after JFK’s limo had left the scene, and before Cancellare could have possibly snapped the shutter of his camera. That was plenty enough time for Tosh and Sergio to have already left the scene as Tosh describes it in the video below.

Over the years, several researchers have declared that if Tosh and Sergio were where Tosh has always stated they were, then they would have been in the photo. That fallacy presumes that Cancellare had been standing there, or somehow immediately got into position there, seconds after JFK’s limo passed by, but as Richard Trask documented it, as summarized above (see endnote #14), it wasn’t as simple as others make it seem.

Jefferson Morley repeated that same elemental error in his typically glib fashion, while admonishing “Ken,” a reader of his blog September 5, 2016 [HERE] about “due diligence” and how even a “cub reporter” should get things right, stating with aplomb: “[Tosh Plumlee] says he was on the South Knoll during the shooting. Maybe you can point him out to me [in] the photographs of that area. I can’t see him . . . Tosh Plumlee has credibility problems of his own: an obvious hunger for the spotlihgty” [sic]. For the record, Tosh’s “credibility problems” exist only in the minds of obtuse critics, rationalizing their preconceptions, uninterested in finding real truths.

(Also see Endnote #16 for how Gary Mack asked that question of Tosh and somehow it got placed in the “litany of lies” they claimed disprove Tosh’s statements, when in fact it merely discredits Gary Mack — and anyone else who failed to complete this simple analytical exercise).

Plumlee has stated that he believes that the figure highlighted in the cropped photograph below might be one of the shooters (he and Sergio had already begun moving out immediately after the limousine had left the area; therefore would have already left the scene several moments before this photo was taken, as he described in the video clip that is presented after the photo):

The key portion of what he saw that day is contained in this paragraph, which he first made in 1964 and repeated it on various forums, and still sticks by it 57 years on: [15]

“On the morning of November 22, 1963, about 4:30-5 a.m., our weather briefing was not favorable for a VFR flight into Dallas’s Red Bird airport. We selected Garland as an alternate in case the weather had not improved by the time we arrived near Dallas air space…. I only began to learn the full scope of the operation from my pilot Rojas and a field operative friend of mine named Sergio…. Although my specific assigned function was only as a pilot, upon arriving at Redbird Airport, Sergio asked me if I wanted to come along and see the President. I could also act as a spotter for him and his team, which, he said, were assigned to the south side of the plaza. I was told other members of the team would be patrolling the north side and the overpass. I understood we would be looking for a type of triangulation ambush. I gladly accepted Sergio’s offer. It seemed like an adventure I didn’t want to miss. We were driven from Red Bird Airport to a place not far from the Oak Cliff Country Club, then driven to Dealey Plaza, where we (Sergio and I) checked various areas and attempted to spot potential members of an attack team from the position on the South Knoll.

“While on the south knoll, Sergio and I were attempting to evaluate the most logical places where shooters might be located, but everything was confused, the timing was off, team members were late getting into position. They were not where they were supposed to be and the limited radio contacts that we had with them were not working, or spotty at best. It was soon after our arrival that the motorcade arrived. When the shots rang out, I had the impression of 4 or 5 shots, with one being fired from behind and to my left on the South Knoll, near the underpass and south parking lot. While leaving via the south side of the underpass near the train tracks, Sergio and I smelled gunpowder.”

The key point about his testimony—from that which was given to the FBI in April, 1964, throughout the rest of that decade, and what he gave in closed sessions to the Church Committee and the House Select Committee [HSCA] about the JFK assassination in the 1970s, then about CIA activities in Central America to Senate committees in the 1980s-90s—and that which he has been attempting to give to the august, self-anointed researchers populating the “JFK Research Community” throughout those decades and into the new millennium, is that it has been remarkably consistent.

Given the intensity of scrutiny he has received, especially from the FBI and CIA, but from the “critics-at-large” as well, for this alone he should be entitled to an award of some sort.

Because, compared to the “official” record as promulgated by the Warren Commission, which has been categorically debunked at every level, and in practically every conceivable way, Tosh Plumlee’s testimony has literally withstood the “test of time.”

To be dismissive of Robert “Tosh” Plumlee by invoking official records which are known to be widely falsified for the very purpose of preemptively discrediting him is simply an egregious attack on that most rare resource — an honest man, willing to step forward with unvarnished truths. He has been begging the “JFK research Community” to accept his testimony, the very kind of factual data that is essential to unravel all the myths of the 1960 treacheries and treasons. He is now 83 years old, and the clock is ticking.

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One last “proof” of the CIA’s facilitation of drug trafficing may be pertinent for anyone still doubting those ties. Peter Dale Scott, one of the most widely respected researchers and authors in the “Community,” is probably, hands down, the most often cited authority for all matters related to the 1960s assassinations as well as everything else pertaining to one of the several terms which he coined, “The Deep State.” The excerpts below come from his 2000 essay titled “OVERVIEW: THE CIA, THE DRUG TRAFFIC, AND OSWALD IN MEXICO,” (see HERE):

• “Parahistory [i.e., actual truths, with the lies and myths deleted] can be partly recovered by the disclosure of previously repressed records. Deep political history must attempt to reconstruct what happened in areas where there are few if any records at all. (Emphasis added).
• “. . . the CIA and FBI conspired to suppress a major clue to the existence of a pre-assassination conspiracy [his point about one is extended here to mean being representative of merely one example of the many].
• “It is important to understand that this suppression was entirely consistent with intelligence priorities of the period.
• “The power of these covert agencies to control US politics through the manipulation of truth is only one more reason for us to refer to them as kryptocracies, agencies of government which (in contrast to conventional bureaucracies) operate secretly and are not accountable for their actions and procedures. 
• “. . .the different kryptocracies or intelligence agencies, and even different branches within these agencies, were in conflict with each other . . .”
• ” . . .the power of kryptocracies to influence history became even greater when, as we shall see, they acted in concert with forces allied to the powerful international drug traffic. Most people are unaware of the size of this unrecorded drug economy. In 1981 U.S. Government analysts estimated that the annual sales volume of illicit drugs exceeded half a trillion dollars. The total of legitimate, recorded international trade, in all commodities, was in the order of one trillion dollars, or twice the estimate for drugs. While estimates of the unrecorded drug traffic remain questionable, it is obvious that this traffic is large enough to be a major factor in both the economic and political considerations of government,  even while it does not form part of recorded economic statistics.
• “I propose the word kryptonomy, to name this unrecorded, illicit, but nonetheless important shadow economy. It is no accident that kryptocracies and the kryptonomy work in concert. The kryptonomy is so large, and so powerful, that governments have no choice but to plan to manage it, even before attempting to suppress it.
• “Perhaps the most conspicuous example is the massive paramilitary army organized and equipped by the CIA in Laos in the 1960s, for which drugs were the chief source of support. This alliance between the CIA and drug-financed forces has since been repeated in Afghanistan (1979), Central America (1982-87), and most recently Kosovo (1998).”

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Possible answers to the question, “WHY would purported “Truth Tellers” be so anxious to discredit Tosh Plumlee?

Mr. Plumlee’s efforts to inform researchers of his experiences have illustrated the divide within that group more clearly than any other person or issue, especially any other actual witness to JFK’s murder. A sizeable group (at least more than half, though this is admittedly a “guesstimate”) have welcomed his testimony; the rest, not so much. Indeed some, as Mr. Simpich illustrated, have declared Mr. Plumlee’s testimony to be too incredible for their appetites.

The reasons why, as we have noted above, are as hazy and unsubstantiated as they would have you believe his testimony was, and is. It would seem, to a completely objective, rational and prudent observer (if anyone on the planet could possibly qualify for that, given the extant “diversity of opinion”), the most common reason for his critics’ skepticism might relate to the fact that many in that community reject his insistence that there was such a thing as an “abort team” within the CIA—an impossible oxymoron they say—since they assert that if “the powers that be” wanted to stop the assassination, that could have been done with a telephone call to President Kennedy.

Yet, that simple retort presumes that there would be no implications for the agency, and everyone involved in the plot, of such a call, regardless of whether it was the act of its officials or merely staff people acting as rogues — thus the need for such a special team.

It also completely ignores the fact of the CIA’s “plausible deniability” tenet and the related use of a “need to know” criterion to “compartmentalize” everyone involved. That would explain why the pilots, dispatchers, the ground crew and anyone else without that need—would not have been informed that the flight was about a mission to murder the President. For them, including co-pilot Plumlee, it would make perfect sense that they would have been told it was an “abort mission.” Tosh Plumlee was never “read in” to the actual purpose of the mission, he was merely invited at the last minute by his friend Sergio to accompany him to Dealey Plaza, to assist him in being a “spotter” attempting to locate the shooters. And when he returned to his base, he was severely punished for his actions, as previously noted about how he spent the entire year of 1964 under detention.

Thus, whoever would even raise that question, and use that argument against this man whose “mission” was merely supposed to be about flying that “team” into and out of Dallas has failed this elementary analytical exercise.

There is no possible realistic explanation for this “disconnect” short of a full release of all remaining files, so the short answer to the conundrum is that this “abort mission, or not” point is not only impertinent, it pales in comparison to everything else Plumlee’s insights reveal, therefore it must remain in limbo for now, as it always should have been.

Debates on the various JFK assassination forums have raged for decades on such esoteric points as, “why would the CIA have sent an abort team there at the 11th hour anyway?” Since there is no real answer to such rhetorical questions, the possible answers are as infinite as they are meaningless. But, if one studies the threads by the great majority of critics on these websites—arguably the entirety—all of their arguments on these issues fit neatly into those categories.

Moreover, such long-time researchers as Larry Hancock have repeatedly stated that Plumlee’s statements have changed over the years, though he, and the others, rarely, if ever [none I’ve seen at least after numerous searches through hundreds of posts on too many threads to count], not one stipulates in detail what those changes have been, and where they have even attempted it in generalized form, they fail when subjected to intensive analysis, just as so much of it within this essay has been demonstrated.

Like everyone else, Tosh Plumlee may have been guilty of inadvertent, erroneous statements about issues that go beyond what he knew personally—e.g. whether the CIA-affiliated operatives were “rogues” or operating under orders coming through the chain-of-authority—but who’s to say which is more correct, absent a full release of the still-secret files?

For a complete copy of a formal statement he previously published in the 1970s-80s, and again in 1991, then republished again in 2004, see Page 2.

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Conclusions

The sum total and essence of all of the above matters boils down to the question of why Tosh Plumlee is considered “unreliable” by some long-time researchers and as “highly reliable and of critical importance” to others. Perhaps it comes down to what and who they believe was behind the assassination of JFK and what this key witness has stated does not conform with their long-held preconceptions.

Plumlee’s insights open up a prism into how a major military and intelligence operation to take out a president (regardless of the distracting “abort” issue) unveil enough significant parts of it to provide elements of context, structure and coherence to enable better understanding of the whole, thus the strongest answers to the “why.”

At this late stage in the study of this rather unique witness, it should be clear by now that the specious arguments for him being “unreliable” have not been convincing. That is due to the obvious duplicitousness that has accompanied his treatment over nearly six-decades by all levels of government (notably beginning even in his earliest years, still a teenager and into his early 20s, with the highest levels of the FBI and CIA, and eventually with Congress and various judicial authorities) and finally with the “at-large critics” as noted throughout this treatise.

The notion of Plumlee being considered “unreliable” is, interestingly, consonant with the “official” government position—and the likes of the committed “lone-nutters” such as the late John McAdams, Hugh Aynesworth, Dave Perry,[16] et. al.—and is therefore a particularly troubling indicator of one possible reason for that result. With all previous attempts to discredit Plumlee—and despite the mountain of negative internet posts—that case was always merely illusory and perfunctory at best, and now it should stand completely debunked, for all the reasons delineated above.

Because, as this latest example illustrates, the same deceptive methods previously used—the general duplicitousness; the modified FBI and CIA records, similar to numerous others in all of the 1960’s assassination files; the lavishly-framed innuendo and use of “guilt by association” and logical non-sequiturs; the false-premise comparisons to other persons supposedly of ill repute; and, especially, giving higher “credibility indexes” to the CIA and FBI or their assigns than to the person being attacked—cannot withstand intensive and objective scrutiny.

The use of all of these tricks inevitably backfires, though they certainly serve their purpose: To distract and delay the process of finding real truths. Anyone who blindly follows those who espouse such baseless, mythical blather runs the risk of accepting all the other lies that have been planted by the many planters put there by the same agencies who assisted in various ways to execute, and then cover up, the “Crime of the 20th Century.”

The fact that Tosh Plumlee alone—among the dozens, or hundreds, of others having first-hand knowledge of the long series of unfolding illegal events—came forward to repeatedly, and formally, request official government inquiries regarding clearly illegal, and in the larger context, treasonous activities, should have earned him accolades and awards, not the heavy-handed reprisals and inane repudiations that he has endured.

William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee should be considered a veritable “hero” by anyone who actually seeks justice for John F. Kennedy.

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End Notes:

[1] Schou, Nick, Men in Suits, O.C. Weekly, October 5, 2006: https://www.ocweekly.com/men-in-suits-6369822/

[2] Hinckle, Warren, and William W. Turner, The Fish is Red, New York: Harper and Row, 1981, pp. 117-118 (Reissued and expanded in 1993 as Deadly Secrets: The CIA-MAFIA War Against Castro and the Assassination of JFK .

[3] As has been repeatedly proven in numerous other cases related to the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations, and the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, within my four books.

[4] For a detailed summary of how the highest-level officials of the CIA and FBI in 1979 sabotaged the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) forcing the replacement of the original chief counsel, the tenacious Richard A. Sprague, with the more doctrinaire and malleable Robert Blakey, see Chapter 11 “HSCA Congressional Investigation” of my book Who Really Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? (pp. 269-343).

[5] Balestrieri, Steve, “OCTOBER 5, 1986, CIA RESUPPLY PLANE SHOT DOWN OVER NICARAGUA” Sofrep News: https://sofrep.com/news/hasenfus-cia-nicaragua-sandinistas-contras/

[6] See report here: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB113/north06.pdf

[7] Scott, Peter Dale and Johnathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America

[8] Schou, Nick,

• “Who Killed James Sabow?” OCWeekly, February 17, 2000 https://www.ocweekly.com/who-killed-col-james-sabow-6393655/
• “Marine Colonel James Sabow’s Murder,” Arrowair 1285 News website: https://www.arrowair1285.com/marine-colonel-james-sabows-murder

[9] Schou, Nick, “The Truth in Dark Alliance,” The Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2006 (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-aug-18-oe-schou18-story.html)

[10] See the CIA report here: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001372115.pdf

[11] From the secret CIA report completed in the aftermath of Gary Webb’s 1996 series “Deadly Alliance”, but withheld from the public for over eighteen years — See here: (https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-media-destruction-gary-webb/

[12] Bandler, Beverly, “Gary Webb and Media Manipulation” Consortium News, November 2, 2014, https://consortiumnews.com/2014/11/02/gary-webb-and-media-manipulation/

[13] McPhaul, John, “The un-doing of Gary Webb,” The Tico Times, October 29, 2014 https://ticotimes.net/2014/10/29/the-undoing-of-gary-webb-and-todays-news-organizations

[14] Trask, Richard B., Pictures of the Pain, Danvers, MA: Yeoman Press, 1994, pp. 37; 392-400

[15] See: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/5562-tosh-plumlee/

[16] One of the many inane assertions of Perry and McAdams, within which they ignore the many FBI files available, is that he hasn’t proven his bona-fides. Those files, along with reams of correspondence (e.g. the Gary Hart memorandum reproduced within this essay, merely one of many), newspaper reports and other materials herein referenced, not to mention the fact that he has been repeatedly vetted by various U.S. House and Senate committees at which he has supplied sworn statements yet, to this day, has never been found to have lied or embellished any of it.

A particularly pernicious “essay” about Plumlee found on the McAdams’ website, written by Kyle Whelton, is replete with whole lies, half truths and non-sequiturs galore: Within his screed, he references what the late Gary Mack—a famously deceptive former “semi-conspiracist” who was evidently paid off to become the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas—once asked Plumlee to point himself out in the Cancellare photo. Whelton wrote, “He was unable to because there is no one there.” (Emphasis added). No, he was unable to do so because, (1) at that distance it was improbable, that anyone could be seen standing in the shade of the tree he had been standing under, even if he were still there, but (2) as demonstrated above, Plumlee and Sergio had already left the scene by the time “Cancy” was able to get into the position to take that shot. Also representative of the “hooey” repeated by McAdams, Aynesworth, Dave Perry, and other “lone nutter” delustionalists, is the contrived conundrum reproduced below:

“. . . there is no record of Plumlee ever being in employed by the CIA in any way shape or form other than his personal statements. It is not uncommon that someone will work for the CIA or be contracted by them and there is no existing documentation of their employment, especially during cover operations. The problem for Plumlee is that there is no one who can corroborate his story. The website jfkmurdersolved.com has a cache of files on Plumlee’s “CIA Involvement.” However all of these files are either accounts of Plumlee bothering various Federal officials with his claims, or descriptions of operations Plumlee claims to have been involved in without any mention of him.

There is, in other words, zero corroboration in the documents of any of his claims.

Here, Mr. Whelton posits another absurd “whopper:” that Plumlee has never proved he worked for the CIA, even while acknowledging the fact that it “is not uncommon that someone will work for the CIA or be contracted by them and there is no existing documentation of their employment . . .”

Seriously . . .”zero corroboration”?? Perhaps people visiting those websites are exceptionally naive, or are gullible / vulnerable to such banal drivel, that they accept such absurdity. Proof enough has been made within this essay, if one chooses to find it. Even the videos and audio tapes, reflecting many decades after-the-fact, his intimate personal knowledge of the details of numerous operations, proving his honesty and the great breadth of his knowledge over the many facets of his wide span of military and intelligence experiences. Such essays as those on McAdam’s, Perry’s or similar others take the concept of “creative writing” to new and lower levels.

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Go to Page 2 for:

A. Notes Posted on the Education Forum by Tosh Plumlee in November, 2014

B. Addendum to Robert Tosh Plumlee’s “stories of intrigue” regarding his exploits during the late 1950s-early 1960s

C. CBS PLUMLEE VIDEOS and RELATED NEWS ARTICLE

Page 3 — Audio Recording and Transcript:  Bill Simpich questions Sara Peterson and Katanna Zachry about Tosh Plumlee’s credibility

Page 4 — Plumlee’s Photo Collection (For Those Who Still Doubt His “Bona-fides”

Page 5 — FBI Documents (Exhibits Cited)

Page 6 — Magazine Article