Introduction by Kenn Thomas
Foreword by David Hatcher Childress
Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois, USA, 1996, $16.00
Also known as ‘Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal’, the so-called Torbitt Memorandum (‘Document’ here for some reason) has been floating around the JFK research world since the early 1970s.
Torbitt looked quite promising initially: lots of interesting allegations; some old names, some new; and fragments of documentation. But as soon as you begin trying to check it out you find that the allegations are mostly unsubstantiated and uncheckable; and much of the purported documentation is a fraud. That is, if you check the source given it doesn’t actually substantiate the claim made by ‘Torbitt’ for which it is offered as evidence. I’m reasonably certain that ‘Torbitt’ is disinformation, probably produced by the CIA in the wake of the Garrison inquiry. It may even have been a response to the French disinformation production, Farewell America, a couple of years before. For ‘Torbitt’ lays the blame not at the CIA’s door, but jointly on the FBI and something called the Defence Industries Security Command. (On the latter I have never seen any evidence that it ever existed; and if anyone has any, I would like to see it.)
The book opens with two photographs of Area 51, the secret US Air Force base in Nevada which has been the object of much recent conspiracy-mongering. Why Area 51? You may well ask. But start with NASA, then go to Werner Von Braun; then add the claim the Von Braun was the head of the Defence Industries Security Command (if it existed); add that NASA has a base in Nevada at a place called Mercury; and add, finally, that in 1964 a man called Richard Giesbrecht claimed to have overheard David Ferrie discussing the JFK assassination and mentioning something arriving from Nevada. Tenuous doesn’t quite do it justice, does it?
Steamshovel’s Kenn Thomas contributes an amusing and non-committal introduction which, in twelve pages, manages to encompass Timothy Leary, Wilhelm Reich, fake moon landings, Charles Willoughby and a UFO flap over Winnipeg, Canada in 1969 – on the day that Giesbrecht went to tell New Orleans DA Garrison about what he’d overheard in Winnipeg airport. Kenn, you old prankster, you!