Was The Zapruder Film Altered - Redux?

We have uncovered credible documentation confirming that the Zapruder film was altered, thus forcing a revision of sorts to our original conclusion that it had not been modified.

 

Our opinion was a bit more nuanced. We argued that if the film had been altered, it was not in a semantically meaningful way – meaning that the film clearly demonstrated a head shot from the front – a scenario which the assassins would be loathe to add to the movie if they were claiming a shot from the rear by a lone nut. But this is not to say that significant information was not suppressed.

 

We can now accept without caveat that the Zapruder movie was altered and done so by the Central Intelligence Agency attempting to maintain the fantasy of a 3 round murder for the Warren Commission which was yet to be announced.

 

More specifically, the CIA and Secret Service collaborated in developing 2 sets of film – one which was developed in Dallas the afternoon or evening of 11/22/1963, and a separate film which was developed at Kodak’s CIA Hawkeyeworks in Rochester, NY, the home of Kodak’s corporate headquarters.

 

Doug Horne, Chief Analyst for Military Record for the ARRB from 1996-1999, produced the smoking gun proving beyond doubt that the Zapruder film was altered. Based upon a series of interviews with the film processors at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center during the ARRB era as well as in 2009 and 2011, Horne acquired the evidence supporting the charge that the CIA altered the film.

 

Horne discovered that two teams processed film for briefing boards during the weekend following the CIA’s murder of Kennedy. Dino Brugioni, Chief Information Officer of NPIC, led a team Saturday night to create a set, using the camera-original movie, for the Secret Service and John McCone, CIA director. Brugioni described his work product and noted emphatically that it did not match what Horne’s photos showed.

 

When Brugioni’s team was finished with the film, the Secret Service took it to Hawkeyeworks early Sunday morning to be altered as it was the only facility in the Eastern United States with the capacity to do the type of modifications required by the CIA.

 

Unbeknownst to Brugioni, another team led by Homer McMahon, chief of the NPIC Color Lab, also created briefing boards the following night using the newly altered film. McMahon identified his work product from the photos Horne showed him.

 

Members of both teams were threatened by the Secret Service to not talk to anyone, including supervisors, about their work if they were questioned.

 

During the interviews, each man described a different sequence of events seen on the film. Indeed, Brugioni was shocked when Horne showed him the official National Archive version of the Zapruder film. He noted that the explosions around Kennedy’s head were much more pronounced and vivid, expressing disbelief at the forged film. Brugioni had viewed the original film several times during the night of 11/23/1963 in preparation for creating the photographic prints used on the briefing boards.

 

The solution to the problem lies in the chain of custody, a subject which Horne addresses in detail. The film shot by Zapruder was sent to the Dallas Kodak lab for development, at which time 3 copies were made. One copy went to the Secret Service in Dallas, and another to the Secret Service in Washington, DC. The third copy stayed with Zapruder and the original briefly went to Life magazine – or to be more precise to Chicago.

 

The Secret Service intercepted the film in Chicago in order to get it to Brugioni in Washington where briefing boards were made from the camera-original film. Once he was finished with the film, it was sent to the Hawkeyeworks facility in Rochester to be sanitized after which it was flown back to NPIC to create the second set of briefing boards.

 

So why was the movie altered? The CIA did so in order to reduce the movie action to support a 3 shot scenario as the original film showed 6-8 shots hitting the president from 360 degrees in the Dealey Plaza kill zone.

The alterations also concealed the halting of the presidential limousine by the Secret Service in order to allow the CIA's assassins to have a perfect shot at the president. This means that we must retract our support for Sherry Fiester's time dilation theory which denied that the vehicle stopped.

 

The implications of this operation are staggering. It shows that Arthur Lundahl, Navy Captain Pierre Sands, and CIA Director John McCone were murderers or accessories after the fact, all of whom were heavily engaged in the cover-up of the crime of century. Lundahl was the director of the NPIC and Sands was one of his lieutenants, both of whom knew of the activities occurring in their own facility. McCone of course was the gatekeeper who coordinated a vast array of criminal activity by the photographic teams as well as many others.

 

Regarding the Zapruder - Life nexus, our opinion is that Zapruder was being paid off for his work in filming the CIA's operation in Dealey Plaza. The Life negotiations were a cover designed to deceive the public about the nature of the film. The actual photos which Life published were from a set of black and white "dirty duplicates" which were created at Hawkeyeworks.

Indeed, Horne reports that Life publisher C D Jackson had a long working relationship with the CIA and was one of the agency's favorite newsfakers. We also note that Zapruder was part of the same Dallas White Russian element which so enthusiastically supported the CIA's murder operations. As such we believe that he filmed the event for the CIA. In any event he was at the very least paid a hefty amount of hush money through the Life cover operation.

Yet here is the most important fact about the Zapruder film which nearly every commentator has overlooked. The CIA could have easily destroyed the Zapruder film. It could have commandeered the movie as it did with so many other evidences belonging to other people. The agency could have conveniently lost it, yet it did not!

Everything associated with the Zapruder incident, from filming to distribution, was completely scripted by the CIA. Zapruder was no innocent bystander. The contract which Life magazine offered him had absolutely no purpose than to create the illusion of a bystander with an accidental historical treasure in his hands.

The CIA designed the Zapruder film - or rather its forgery - to be widely distributed and available, not only for the Warren Commission to justify its preconceived bails of lies, but to deceive Americans on a grand scale and to rub the murder in their faces.

No other conclusion is permissable - the CIA did not destroy the film to stamp out damning evidence. We repeat that it could have easily done so right from the very beginning but refused to do so in order to propagate a monstrous lie and to force Americans to come face to face with the raw evil of its true plutocratic rulers.

 

So yes, we erred in our original conclusion about the virginity of the Zapruder film, but we were correct that even the altered film showed a frontal shot. The witness of Dino Brugioni, who saw the original film, confirms in spades that our conclusion of a frontal headshot was right on target. Vengeance  is mine, thus saith the Lord.

Reference
The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Analysis and Implications, Douglas Horne, Jim Fetzer, Veterans Today, May 29, 2012

Copyright 2013 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

Was the Zapruder Film Altered?

The famous Zapruder film which captured the horror of an American president being murdered by a cabal of Wall Street plutocrats has been the subject of much controversy regarding its integrity. Regardless of the final resolution of that debate, it doesn’t really matter.

Abraham Zapruder (1905 – 1970) was allegedly the innocent bystander who just happened to have an 8mm Bell & Howell portable movie camera with him on the day that President John Kennedy was murdered in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. His ultimate film noir recorded for history the very moments when the assassins’ bullets ended the life of the president.

We do not believe that Zapruder was an innocent bystander. In fact we believe that he was hired – either directly or indirectly – to film the murder for the sick benefit of his pay masters. Zapruder owned a women’s clothing manufacturing firm which operated in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza. He was an extreme right wing ideologue who ran in the same circles as George DeMohrenschildt, another Russian émigré who shepherded Oswald to his job in the Texas School Book Depository.

This community of White Russians were strongly hostile to Kennedy because they viewed him as soft on communism.

Henry Luce’s Life magazine purchased the film in order to sequester it and to extract photos from it supporting the Lone Nut theory of the assassination.  When the film surfaced a few years later, its content shocked the world.

Prior to the film’s sequestration, a few people who saw the film were advised to keep their mouths shut when they protested that the film did not support the official Warren Commission Report. Luce, who was a hostile critic of the President and warned him of dire consequences due to his handling of the steel crisis, was undoubtedly happy to serve as custodian for the film.

The problem with the film is that it clearly shows fire from the front of the president’s limousine and therefore demolishes the Lone Nut and Single Bullet Theories.

The film’s long residency in the vault of Life magazine provides the background for the conspiracy theories – and we do not use the term pejoratively – that the film was altered. However, it is the film’s jerky quality which provides the real motivation for the theory. So when you marry the two facts together, it is easy to see how someone would consider a conspiracy to alter the film.

For our part, we believe that the video was slightly altered to show that the limousine did not come to a full stop. Many eye witnesses have testified that the driver completely stopped the car or brought it to a virtual stop. The reason for this, as we explained elsewhere, is so that the assassins could have the ideal frame for guaranteeing Kennedy's murder.

The alterations provided the Secret Service a plausible defense against charges that it participated in the murder of the president - something which it most certainly did.

But why did the murderers want a film of their wicked deeds? Beyond the macabre satisfaction of seeing the man they hated murdered, they needed a record of the event in order to know how to lie about the facts, to identify potentially troublesome witnesses, and to have a lessons learned record to plan future murders. Indeed, the FBI and Army Delta Force which murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. also filmed his assassination.

For these reasons, we believe that the Zapruder film is largely intact. Even with the minor modification we allow, it is largely irrelevant whether the film has been altered because it clearly shows that the president was murdered from the grassy knoll or another spot from the front of the president’s limousine.

Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.