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When Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992 agencies throughout the Federal Government transferred assassination-related records to the National Archives which established the JFK Assassination Records Collection. The Collection consists of approximately 5 million pages of records. Approximately 88% of the records in the Collection are open in full. An addition 11% are released in part with sensitive portions removed. Approximately 1% of documents identified as assassination-related remain withheld in full. All documents withheld either in part or in full were authorized for withholding by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), an independent temporary agency that was in existence from 1994 to 1998.
According to the Act, all records previously withheld either in part or in full should be released on October 26, 2017, unless authorized for further withholding by the President of the United States. The 2017 date derives directly from the law that states:
Each assassination record shall be publicly disclosed in full, and available in the Collection no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of the enactment of this Act, unless the President certifies, as required by this Act, that –
(i) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement or conduct of foreign relations; and
(ii) the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.
The Act was signed by President Bush on October 26, 1992, thus the final release date is October 26, 2017.*
There is an estimated 3100 classified documents that are still held sequestered. CIA was investigating Lee Harvey Oswald and his movement from Moscow to Mexico City. Sources and methods are inside those 3100 documents and some are still used today.
President Trump approved the release but not ‘all’ the documents subject to more information.
The final 1964 report/investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy, known as the Warren Report is found here. This was the genesis of citizens not believing government and with good reason. Theories abound that included Lyndon Johnson planning the murder, to the Mafia being ordered to do so and finally to Trump while on the campaign trail accusing Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael.
What did George de Mohrenschildt know? He has bee pinned as Oswald’s handler. de Mohrenschildt provided testimony and later more information surfaced. There are countless other names rarely discussed that allege knowledge of the assassination. Additional names include Antonio Veciana, Valery Kostikov and John McCone.
There is a former CIA agent known as George Joannides. He was the CIA psychological warfare station chief in charge of Cuba based in Miami where his office was located on the south campus of the University of Miami. At one point up to 400 CIA operatives worked out of this office in Operation Mongoose. What George Joannides knew and what he wanted admitted into evidence became a lawsuit.
For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance.
The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963. In 1978, the agency made Mr. Joannides the liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations — but never told the committee of his earlier role.
That concealment has fueled suspicion that Mr. Joannides’s real assignment was to limit what the House committee could learn about C.I.A. activities. The agency’s deception was first reported in 2001 by Jefferson Morley, who has doggedly pursued the files ever since, represented by James H. Lesar, a Washington lawyer specializing in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. More here.
Eighty-eight percent of the Archives’ 5 million pages of JFK material are already public. Another 11 percent are partly public, with sensitive portions removed. Just 1 percent of the records remain fully secret.
Documents that show what the government knows about that 1963 trip have been kept secret for more than 50 years. Now, these records are among the remaining sealed documents about the JFK assassination set for release in coming months.
Unless President Donald Trump intervenes to stop them, the National Archives will make available tens of thousands of pages of previously unseen records on or before Oct. 26. That’s 25 years to the day President George H.W. Bush signed the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which created a five-member board that reviewed and released millions of pages of records before it disbanded in 1998.
The controversy over the Warren Commission “kind of sent us down a path of losing trust in government,” Tunheim said. “The release of information could have moderated that, and they wouldn’t do it.”
Through the mid-1990s, the panel led by Tunheim exercised its extraordinary powers to collect and examine the vast quantities of records held by the FBI, CIA, State Department and many other agencies and private sources. It turned over about 5 million pages to the National Archives. About 11 percent remain partly secret. About 1 percent — or 3,600 files — have been completely withheld, after agencies argued they still could affect national security. More here.
In summary, Trump clarified his approval:
Trump administration officials told Politico Friday that some information would remain classified, since it contains important information on recent intelligence and law enforcement operations. A National Security Council official confirmed to The Washington Post that federal agencies are asking the president not to release an unknown number of files. The official did not specify which agencies had made the requests.
Twenty-one U.S. diplomatic personnel assigned to Cuba have been severely affected by some health condition with the cause still unknown officially. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson has issued travel warnings to Cuba for civilians and has ordered a large number of government personnel to leave the island. Cuba is allegedly cooperating in the investigation and for more than a year, there have been no clues or resolutions. The FBI additionally sent an expert team to Havana to investigate all associated locations including the housing where these attacks have occurred. The housing for diplomatic personnel is provided by Cuba and as with all laws and standards, the host country must provide safe conditions and be approved by the U.S. State Department.
So, what are the likely explanations for U.S. personnel and Canadian personnel suffering from hearing loss, brain damage and even speech complications?
Well as submitted by former CIA official John Sipher, who has served in some hostile nations does offer some explanation(s) as to what those nations have history done to U.S. facilities.
During my time overseas, I have had personal experience with several of these “attacks.” In the 1980s and 1990s, the Soviet and then Russian intelligence services deployed doses of nitrophenyl pentaden (NPPD) against American diplomats whom they suspected of managing espionage operations against Russian interests. This so-called “spy dust” was an invisible electromagnetic powder with a customized chemical identifier. It was smeared onto door handles, furniture and cars of suspected American spy handlers. It was a tagging agent used by Russian security elements to covertly monitor their own community by revealing unreported (and potentially espionage related) contacts between Russian and American officials. It was somewhat ingenious. After deploying the invisible material on a suspected U.S. intelligence officer, Russian counter-intelligence would snoop after-hours through the offices of Russian government employees looking for traces of the material. Discovery of the powder in the office of someone who had not reported contact with the American provided significant proof of suspicious activity.
What was not ingenious, however, were the threats to human health. There were concerns at the time that the material was carcinogenic and could be harmful to American diplomats. Following studies, the United States determined there was no specific evidence of a threat to the U.S. diplomatic community since it was only used against a handful of people. As someone who was “dusted,” that explanation didn’t really make me feel much better. However, the substance was at least a step up from earlier Russian tracking devices like radioactive nails hammered into the tires of U.S. diplomatic vehicles, allowing Russian surveillance vehicles to hang back unseen and follow along by using special equipment to track targets’ tire residue.
The Russian security services were also known to flood the U.S. embassy in Moscow with electromagnetic radiation. They would beam concentrated microwaves and electronic pulses at the Embassy in an attempt to eavesdrop on U.S. typewriters and conversations. In the 1970s, a U.S. Ambassador contracted and died of a blood disease that many assumed to be a result of the attacks. The State Department detected high levels of radiation in the embassy staff, and provided hazard pay to personnel who worked in Moscow. A variety of electronic attacks continued over the years to include mobile Russian vans that acted as a giant x-ray that could be directed at diplomats all over town. In a similar fashion, high frequency devices can be used to pulse other devices, perhaps turning on or off collection devices in homes or offices.
Similarly, the Russian security services undertook a massive effort to bug the new embassy building in Moscow with all sorts of technical gear, some of which could potentially affect the health of Americans. Indeed, the new embassy construction was even abandoned in 1985 due to the sheer volume and sophistication of electronic eavesdropping equipment that was found throughout the walls, concrete floors and underground. A second attempt to improve the security of the building also faltered when the United States found an equally aggressive and sophisticated attack, which included building listening devices directly into the steel beams holding the building upright. Even the sidewalks and streets throughout the neighborhood were embedded with electronic collection gear which was designed to turn the embassy building into a giant antenna. The United States lost hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix the problems, and eventually tore off the top several floors of the Embassy and rebuilt it with specially imported materials put together by American-only labor – an effort the U.S. called the “Top Hat” solution. The decades-long process displayed the remarkable expertise of the Russians in the use of technical sensors and surveillance gear. Russian technology was consistently underestimated by the U.S. and often our best scientists had difficulty understanding what the Russians were up to. Full article here.
photo courtesy CBS
Could Mr. Sipher be missing something or omitting something? Yes.
There is something called vibroacoustic syndrome—the effect of infrasonic output not on your hearing but on the various fluid-filled parts of your body, which can affect hearing and loss of balance.
The low frequency of infrasonic sound and its corresponding long wavelength makes it much more capable of bending around or penetrating your body, creating an oscillating pressure system. Depending on the frequency, different parts of your body will resonate, which can have very unusual non-auditory effects. For example, one of the ones that occur at relatively safe sound levels (< 100 dB) occurs at 19Hz. If you sit in front of a very good-quality subwoofer and play a 19Hz sound (or have access to a sound programmer and get an audible sound to modulate at 19Hz), try taking off your glasses or removing your contacts. Your eyes will twitch. If you turn up the volume so you start approaching 110 dB, you may even start seeing colored lights at the periphery of your vision or ghostly gray regions in the center. This is because 19Hz is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. The low-frequency pulsations start distorting the eyeball’s shape and pushing on the retina, activating the rods and cones by pressure rather than light.* This non-auditory effect may be the basis of some supernatural folklore. In 1998, Tony Lawrence and Vic Tandy wrote a paper for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (not my usual fare) called “Ghosts in the Machine,” in which they describe how they got to the root of stories of a “haunted” laboratory. People in the lab had described seeing “ghostly” gray shapes that disappeared when they turned to face them. Upon examining the area, it turned out that a fan was resonating the room at 18.98Hz, almost exactly the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. When the fan was turned off, so did all stories of ghostly apparitions. More here.
A recent edition of U.S. News and World Report highlighted several of these “wonder weapons” (acoustics, microwaves, lasers) and noted that scientists are “searching the electromagnetic and sonic spectrums for wavelengths that can affect human behavior.” 3A recent Russian military article offered a slightly different slant to the problem, declaring that “humanity stands on the brink of a psychotropic war” with the mind and body as the focus. That article discussed Russian and international attempts to control the psycho-physical condition of man and his decision making processes by the use of VHF-generators, “noiseless cassettes,” and other technologies.
An entirely new arsenal of weapons, based on devices designed to introduce subliminal messages or to alter the body’s psychological and data processing capabilities, might be used to incapacitate individuals. These weapons aim to control or alter the psyche, or to attack the various sensory and data-processing systems of the human organism. In both cases, the goal is to confuse or destroy the signals that normally keep the body in equilibrium.
This article examines energy-based weapons, psychotropic weapons, and other developments designed to alter the ability of the human body to process stimuli. One consequence of this assessment is that the way we commonly use the term “information warfare” falls short when the individual soldier, not his equipment, becomes the target of attack.
A 2014 study in the journal Royal Society Open Science found that low-frequency sounds below the audible range could disrupt little whistles made by the ear, called spontaneous optoacoustic emissions, in response to noise. (How that mapped to symptoms, however, wasn’t clear.)
In this instance, one possibility is that the infrasound stimulated the part of the ear not dedicated to hearing — the vestibular system that controls balance, Liberman said. In that instance, the symptoms wouldn’t appear immediately.
“You could imagine them being very slow onset and very persistent,” Liberman said. “It might take days before you even notice any funny sensations.”
Sonic weapons
While the idea of a silent sonic weapon sounds like something out of James Bond, Inspector Gadget or the reject pile of DARPA, the idea of using sound as a weapon has a long history.
For instance, studies show that animals exposed to high-intensity, focused ultrasound can experience lung and brain damage. And a cruise line circling the pirate-infested waters off the Somali coast has taken to using a military-grade “sonic weapon” to deter would-be hijackers, the BBC reported. This long-range device, also known as a sound cannon, can cause permanent hearing loss at distances of up to 984 feet (300 meters), according to the BBC. Other companies have developed a magnetic acoustic device, commonly referred to as a sound laser , that deploys incredibly painful, focused beams of sound to deter people from an area, NPR reported. The Israeli army has also used a device known as “The Scream,” which damages the inner ear, causing nausea and dizziness, Wired reported. More here from FNC.
There is more going on than is being reported. Further, I would be asking all allied nations to Cuba that have access to Cuba what they know and I would be challenging all SIGINT communications on the island…surely there is chatter about this very event. Since there are some Canadian personnel involved, has Canada made any inquiries and launched investigations? Crickets…
Primer: One of the easiest things to do is to scam and fraud the Federal government without consequence as noted by this report by the DHS Office of Inspector General when it comes to being illegal with multiple identities and claim any and or all benefits from entitlement programs and still not be deported.
The swelling population of illegal immigrants and their kids is costing American taxpayers $135 billion a year, the highest ever, driven by free medical care, education and a huge law enforcement bill, according to the the most authoritative report on the issue yet.
And despite claims from pro-illegal immigration advocates that the aliens pay significant off-setting taxes back to federal, state and local treasuries, the Federation for American Immigration Reform report tallied just $19 billion, making the final hit to taxpayers about $116 billion.
State and local governments are getting ravaged by the costs, at over $88 billion. The federal government, by comparison, is getting off easy at $45 billion in costs for illegals.
President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and conservatives in Congress are moving aggressively to deal with illegals, especially those with long criminal records. But their effort is being fought by courts and some 300 so-called “sanctuary communities” that refuse to work with federal law enforcement.
The added burden on taxpayers and the unfairness to those who have applied to come into the United States through legal channels is also driving the administration’s immigration crackdown.
The added burden on taxpayers and the unfairness to those who have applied to come into the United States through legal channels is also driving the administration’s immigration crackdown.
The report, titled “The Fiscal Burden Of Illegal Immigration on U.S. Taxpayers,” is the most comprehensive cost tally from FAIR. It said that the costs have jumped about $3 billion in four years and will continue to surge unless illegal immigration is stopped. It was provided in advance exclusively to Secrets.
“Clearly, the cost of doing nothing to stop illegal immigration is far too high,” said FAIR Executive Director Dan Stein. “President Trump has laid out a comprehensive strategy to regain control of illegal immigration and bring down these costs,” said Stein. “Building the wall, enhancing interior enforcement and mandating national E-Verify will go a long way in bringing these ridiculously high costs under control,” he added.
Over 68 often shocking pages, FAIR documents the average $8,075 in state, local and federal spending for each of the of 12.5 million illegal immigrants and their 4.2 million citizen children.
Broadly, the costs include $29 billion in medical care, $23 billion for law enforcement, $9 billion in welfare, $46 billion for education.
Just consider the cost of teaching an illegal alien child who doesn’t speak English. FAIR estimates an average cost of over $12,000 a year, and that can reach $25,000 in New York. Add to that welfare, health care, school lunches, and the per student price soars.
In state costs alone, California leads the list at $23 billion per year, followed by Texas at $11 billion, and New York at $7.4 billion.
And it also documents the taxes paid and how they don’t come close to offsetting the costs. What’s more, FAIR noted that 35 percent of the illegal population operate in an underground economy hidden from tax collectors. And worse, employers hire illegals and either pay them cheaply or under the table.
“The United States recoups only about 14 percent of the amount expended annually on illegal aliens. If the same jobs held by illegal aliens were filled by legal workers, at the prevailing market wage, it may safely be presumed that federal, state and local governments would receive higher tax payments,” said FAIR.
Key findings pulled from the report:
The staggering total costs of illegal immigrants and their children outweigh the taxes paid to federal and state governments by a ratio of roughly 7 to 1, with costs at nearly $135 billion compared to tax revenues at nearly $19 billion.
The nearly $135 billion paid out by federal and state and local taxpayers to cover the cost of the presence of 12.5 million illegal aliens and their 4.2 million citizen children amounts to approximately $8,075 per illegal alien and citizen child prior to taxes paid, or $6,940 per person after taxes are paid.
On the federal level, medical ($17.14 billion) is by far the highest cost, with law enforcement coming second ($13.15 billion) and general government services ($8 billion) third.
At the state and local level, education ($44.4 billion) was by far the largest expense, followed by general public services ($18.5 billion) and medical ($12.1 billion).
The top three states based on total cost to state taxpayers for illegal immigrants and their children: California ($23 billion); Texas ($10.9 billion), and New York ($7.5 billion).
Gotta wonder if Jane Fonda had her own entire file cabinet. Hollywood did have many names included on the blacklist. A pamphlet titled ‘red channels’ included the names. For how this blacklist worked due to the FBI and HUAC, go here.
Ralph David Abernathy, Donald Sutherland, Women’s Liberation, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War – Among Those on NSA’s Watch List
Gregory Peck Joanne Woodward
NSA Biographic Files Included 73,000 U.S. Citizens, Including Journalists Art Buchwald and Tom Wicker and Actors Joanne Woodward and Gregory Peck
Washington, D.C., September 25, 2017 – The National Security Agency’s (NSA) own official history conflated two different constitutionally “questionable practices” involving surveillance of U.S. citizens, according to recent NSA declassifications published today by the National Security Archive, an independent research organization based at The George Washington University. During the mid-1970s, the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee investigated a number of such “practices” by NSA, including the so-called Watch List program, which monitored the international communications of anti-Vietnam war activists and other alleged “subversives.” The “Watch List” was one of the questionable activities; the other was the NSA’s creation of a voluminous filing system on prominent U.S. citizens whose names appeared in Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) collected by the Agency. That filing system, abandoned in the early 1970s and destroyed in 1973, stayed secret for years.[1]
The files on well-known Americans were a product of the Agency’s sweeping efforts to track the communications of Cold War adversaries and to identify the individuals mentioned in them. Ultimately the filing system, and corresponding indexes, surpassed 1,000,000 names, including 73,000 U.S. citizens mentioned in SIGINT collected by the Agency. Among them were politicians, corporate leaders, trade unionists, Hollywood personalities, and journalists, ranging from Church Committee member Senator Walter Mondale (D-MN) and actor Joanne Woodward to IBM CEO Thomas Watson and United Auto Workers President Leonard Woodcock.
The recent NSA release has more information on the Watch List, such as the identities of a number of targeted individuals and organizations: Canadian actor and antiwar activist Donald Sutherland, civil rights leader Ralph David Abernathy, journalist Seymour Hersh, antiwar activist David Dellinger, the Venceremos Brigade, and an entire social movement, Women’s Liberation.
Four years ago, the National Security Archive published a newly declassified National Security Agency history that included details about the Agency’s Watch List. As it turned out, the Agency’s history mistakenly folded in the NSA’s filing system on U.S. citizens into the Watch List, which focused on social reformers, revolutionaries, anti-war activists, and their organizations. Thus, the history incorrectly stated that Senator Howard Baker and journalists Art Buchwald and Tom Wicker, among others, were on the Watch List. Declassified documents confirm, however, that the NSA included those individuals and 73,000 others as part of the Agency’s name files of U.S. citizens. New documents that the NSA released to the Archive through a mandatory declassification review appeal provide an important corrective to the Agency’s official history by demonstrating that the Watch List and the biographical files were what the Church Committee – the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) – saw as two different “questionable practices” with respect to the Agency’s treatment of U.S. citizens.
To identify people mentioned in intercepted messages and other SIGINT products, the NSA (and its predecessors) created special indexes and sets of biographical files. The index to the biographical files was the “Rhyming Dictionary” used by NSA analysts as they decrypted and reported on SIGINT. Eventually including over a million names, the “Rhyming Dictionary” was organized in forward and reverse alphabetical order to make it easier for intelligence analysts to access the names of individuals and to retrieve biographical files as needed. When the Agency began to collect the names of U.S. personalities during the 1960s, it included them in the “Rhyming Dictionary” and created corresponding files that ended up filling 8-10 filing cabinets with over 73,000 entries.
According to the newly declassified documents, among the subjects of biographical files were prominent U.S. individuals. Besides Joanne Woodward, Thomas Watson, and Walter Mondale, the files included Washington Post humorist Art Buchwald, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur Burns, actor Gregory Peck, Congressman Otis Pike (D-NY), New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, civil rights leader Whitney Young, and members of the Senate Select Committee including Howard Baker, Jr., and Frank Church. The Church Committee regarded the creation of files on American citizens by a U.S. intelligence agency as an improper activity, but their specific existence was not disclosed at the time, even though the procedures that generated such files were discussed during hearings.
The NSA’s Watch List, the other dubious activity, had been created in the early 1960s to keep track of U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba. During the following years Watch List targets broadened. After President Kennedy’s assassination, it included possible threats to the president.[2] On 20 October 1967, the Watch List began including anti-Vietnam War and civil rights activists, after U.S. Army intelligence informed the Agency “that Army ACSI, assistant chief of staff for intelligence [General William P. Yarborough], had been designated executive agent by DOD for civil disturbance matters and requested any available information on foreign influence over, or control of, civil disturbances in the U.S.” That comported with the thinking of President Lyndon Johnson who privately claimed that covert financial support from “international Communism” was behind the anti-Vietnam War movement, which was then preparing for a major demonstration in Washington (21 October 1967).[3] To determine whether there were such connections, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began providing hundreds of names for the Agency’s Watch List. During the Nixon administration, the list expanded further to include narcotics traffickers and terrorist organizations.
According to testimony by NSA Director General Lew Allen, in October 1975, U.S. government agencies nominated the names of individuals and organizations that appeared on the Watch List. Thus, to cover the Defense Intelligence Agency’s “requirements on possible foreign control of, or influence on, U.S. antiwar activity,” DIA nominated the names of 20 U.S. persons who traveled to North Vietnam. The FBI “submitted watch lists covering their requirements on foreign ties and support to certain U.S. persons and groups,” with the lists including “names of ‘so-called’ extremist persons and groups … active in civil disturbances, and terrorists.” The FBI lists included about 1,000 individuals. The Secret Service nominated about 180 U.S. individuals and groups that “were potentially a threat to Secret Service protectees.” During 1967-1973, Allen testified, all of the lists combined had a “cumulative total of about 450 U.S. names on the narcotics list, and about 1,200 U.S. names on all other lists.”
Senator Church and his colleagues did not object to Watch Lists of narcotics traffickers or to genuine threats to the president, but they wondered about the “lack of adequate legal basis for some of this activity and what that leads to.” Allen agreed that there was a problem and spoke of “domestic intercepts which cannot be conducted under the President’s constitutional authority for foreign intelligence,” which meant that “we are not authorized by law or constitutional authority and they are clearly prohibited.” As General Allen explained, there were “interpretations which deal with the right to privacy [from] unreasonable search and seizure of the fourth amendment.” It was “self-doubt” (referred to in Document 10) that led the NSA to stop accepting Watch Lists with the names of U.S. citizens in the summer of 1973. When Attorney General Elliot Richardson raised questions about the propriety of FBI and Secret Service requests for information from NSA Allen officially closed down the program.
One of the most sensational revelations of the Church Committee was Operation SHAMROCK by which the major telecommunications companies RCA, Western Union, and International Telephone and Telegraph reluctantly shared their telegram traffic with the NSA and its predecessors from 1945 to the early 1970s. Near the program’s end, NSA analysts were reviewing 150,000 telegrams a month. Information from the telegrams provided grist for the Watch List, which, in the words of Frank Church, “resulted in the invasion of privacy of American citizens whose private and personal telegrams were intercepted.” Church also saw a betrayal of trust by companies whose “paying customers who had a right to expect that the messages would be handled confidentially.” In November 1975 those and other considerations led Church and the committee majority to unilaterally declassify facts about the SHAMROCK program over the objections of President Ford. According to former Committee staffer L. Brit Snider, “This was the “only occasion … where a Congressional committee voted to override a presidential objection and publish information the President contended was classified.”[4]
A mandatory declassification review request by the National Security Archive to the National Security Agency produced the documents in today’s posting. The subject of the request was the sources cited in an endnote to the NSA history. The documents in the Agency’s initial release were excised and more information on the watch list and the Rhyming Encyclopedia was released under appeal. Pending declassification requests to the FBI and other agencies may produce more information on the history of the Watch List.
BostonGlobe: The United States remains an easy mark for drug dealers, terrorists and others who prize anonymity when registering aircraft or getting licensed to fly. So much for the lessons of 9/11.
As he sought to unspool the story behind the tragedy, Asnaldo Del Valle Gonzalez would come face to face with what he calls “the monster,” the web of secrecy that surrounds thousands of planes like the one that devastated his family, making it nearly impossible to identify a plane’s real owners and hold them accountable.
A Spotlight Team investigation has found that lax oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration, over decades, has made it easy for drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and even people with links to terrorism to register private planes and conceal their identities. With the US stamp of approval — signified by a number on the tail fin that always begins with the letter “N” — owners often find more freedom from scrutiny and anonymity while traveling. This has allowed criminals and foreign government officials to mask illicit activities or keep wealth hidden from their home countries.
The registered owner of the crashed twin-engine Piper, a company called Aircraft Guaranty, is part of a nearly invisible private industry that sometimes operates from computer terminals inside FAA offices in Oklahoma, busily registering planes on behalf of foreign nationals — and working in a system that allows them to hide their names from the public. More than 1,000 planes are registered in Aircraft Guaranty’s name at an address in a Texas town of 2,500 that doesn’t have an airport. But it’s enough to give clients both anonymity and coveted US registration for their planes.
Gonzalez never did figure out who really owned the plane that crashed into his home — even when the name of the client Aircraft Guaranty had on file, Luis Nuñez, was revealed during court proceedings. A court official who visited the listed Miami address for Nuñez found cobwebs on the doorknob and a package addressed to someone else. A private detective working for Gonzalez’s attorneys spent a year searching for additional clues and for Nuñez, before concluding that he was nothing more than a “phantom person.” The Globe also was unable to locate Nuñez.
More than 16 years after aircraft were used as weapons in the worst terrorist attack in US history, the FAA still operates more like a file clerk than a reliable tool for law enforcement, enabling secrecy in the skies here and abroad. The price to register a plane is still just $5 — the same as in 1964, even though the agency has the power to raise it — generating little revenue that could be used to expand oversight. And the FAA does so little vetting of the ownership and use of planes listed in its aircraft registry that two of the airliners hijacked and destroyed on 9/11 were still listed as “active” four years after. And that’s prompt compared to this: The FAA didn’t cancel the registration for one TWA cargo plane until 2016, 57 years after it crashed in Chicago, killing the crew and eight people on the ground.
Today, thousands of planes are registered using practices that can allow for anonymity of ownership. A Spotlight review shows that one out of every six aircraft is registered through trusts, Delaware corporations, or using post office box addresses, techniques commonly used to make it hard to discern the true owner. The number is likely even higher because the FAA acknowledged that it does not verify the validity of documents filed for the registry’s more than 300,000 planes.
There are 314,529 aircaft with N-numbers in the FAA’s registry.
54,232 of those aircraft are registered using known secrecy tactics.
7,610 are registered to companies known for providing trust services to non-U.S. citizens.
Critics, including federal investigators who’ve scrutinized the aircraft registry, say it is little more than “a big file cabinet” in which precious little information has been verified, leaving the door open for people with bad intentions to hide behind a US registration.
FAA officials essentially agree. They stress that they have a “robust oversight system” that includes a team of special agents to investigate fraudulent plane ownership, but say they don’t have the resources to determine whether information on US plane registration forms is accurate.
“The FAA is constantly working to strengthen the integrity of Registry information,” according to an FAA statement to the Spotlight Team that came after months of correspondence about the registry’s shortcomings. “The agency is developing a plan to significantly upgrade and modernize the aircraft registration process.”
But that’s no guarantee reforms will come swiftly, if at all. The FAA has a reputation for making change at a snail’s pace even when problems are clearly identified: The agency, for example, still doesn’t put a photo of the pilot on airman’s licenses 13 years after Congress called for it.
“It is like walking through thick glue. They just don’t move very quickly at the FAA, and it’s a chronic problem,” said former North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan, who served as chairman for the Senate aviation panel in 2009 and 2010. “I would have thought after 2001 that we would have made more progress by now with respect to verifying the ownership of aircraft.”
Today, the public often only discovers the gaps in US oversight when something goes wrong or criminal investigators get involved:
The Venezuelan air force shot down a US-registered, drug-loaded plane near Aruba in 2015, leaving a trail of bodies and cocaine floating in the bright blue sea. Records showed the aircraft was registered to a Delaware shell company and managed by Conrad Kulatz, a Fort Lauderdale attorney in his late 70s.
Federal agents investigating US-registered planes that bore the hallmarks of drug smuggling in 2013 found that three had been illegally registered here in the name of a Mexican national. He fooled the FAA simply by listing a Texas strip mall near the Mexican border as his address and claiming to be a US citizen.
Early this year, US officials labeled Venezuela’s vice president, Tareck El Aissami, a foreign narcotics kingpin, freezing access to his US assets, including a luxury jet. The Treasury Department charged that the jet, registered at the FAA in the name of a shell company, was actually controlled by El Aissami, who, in addition to drug trafficking, also has been accused of aiding Islamic extremists. But, at the FAA, the jet’s registration remains valid in the name of 200G PSA Holdings.
In 2015, federal authorities broke up a scheme to deliver US airplanes registered through trusts to an Iranian airline that US officials say helps to transport troops and materiel to the brutal regime of Bashar Assad in Syria. Though the sale was stopped, the names of the people who planned to sell the airliners to Mahan Air were not revealed publicly.
With so little oversight, there may be more dangerous people in control of American-registered planes whose names have not come to light. The 9/11 conspirators considered using private crop-dusting planes to launch terror attacks before deciding to hijack commercial planes instead. Three months before the World Trade Center attack, terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was trying to acquire crop dusters in Oklahoma. There is no reason to think his efforts would have been blocked or even noticed by the FAA’s Aircraft Registry just a few miles away in Oklahoma City.
Responding to the Globe’s findings, US Representative Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat who has long promoted corporate transparency, said the public urgently needs to know whether there are other potential terrorists among the thousands of unknown individuals who control US-registered planes.
“The FAA has basically abdicated their responsibilities,” said Lynch, who in July filed a bill requiring that the real owners of US-registered planes be publicly disclosed. “We have all these aircraft being operated by who knows who and for what purpose. . . . It’s not the exception, it is the rule, and I think it is important to hold the FAA accountable.”
Family pictures, fitness schedules, sticky notes, and birthday balloons decorate the computer terminals inside the FAA Civil Aviation Registry’s public documents room in Oklahoma City.
This is where members of the public can look up information on US-registered planes, but the terminals at the back are rarely used, according to the man at the desk, and when a Globe reporter tried one, it was slow and balky. Most of the other terminals — many of them seemingly better machines equipped with double monitors — are used by the same people day after day, and they’ve dotted their workstations with personal items.
They work for aircraft title companies, law firms, and companies that create trusts — the way for foreign nationals to register their planes here legally and without attracting public attention. Companies actually lease terminals in the document room, allowing Aircraft Guaranty to boast to potential clients that it has an office inside the FAA’s Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center.
For anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, the agents will create a legal trust to “own” private aircraft on behalf of their actual owners, whose names are typically not disclosed to the public. The registration form itself is even easier to complete — less work than registering a car in most states. Once the paperwork is done, agents can turn it in at the cashier’s window in the corner of the document room, paying a $5 registration fee whether the plane is a $20,000 Piper Tomahawk or a $20 million Learjet.
Then, the FAA is supposed to review the registrations for completeness, but a 2013 outside review found that the FAA is not very thorough. The Department of Transportation inspector general audit estimated that records for more than half the aircraft registered to non-US citizens through trusts were incomplete.
In part because US plane registration is so cheap, easy, and often anonymous, it is extremely popular for people registering internationally. Two-thirds of business jet owners worldwide register their planes in the United States, according to a 2014 estimate on the website Corporate Jet Investor. Another bonus: US-registered planes are believed to attract less attention when traveling internationally.
Defenders of these “noncitizen trusts” say they’re an important tool for businesses, especially companies that include foreign nationals among their owners or executives. US corporations conducting global business might have key officers who do not meet the FAA’s citizenship requirements. Additionally, noncitizens who plan to relocate planes from the United States sometimes set up trusts so that the plane has a legal owner while in transit.
Under US law, foreigners can’t legally register a plane here unless they have a US citizen or US-based legal entity to serve as their representative in dealing with the FAA. It is a longstanding safeguard that, in practice, safeguards nothing.
Champions of the trust system also point out that the FAA has tightened up the rules in recent years, requiring the trustees to disclose agreements with their clients to the FAA at the time of application for registration. The trusts don’t have to keep the names of their clients in the FAA’s permanent record, but they are supposed to make the information available to investigators when asked.
The FAA checks for the completeness of the paperwork, and trusts are often reviewed by the agency’s legal counsel’s office. However, the agency does not verify that the trust information is accurate, nor are they required to under the law. When the Department of Transportation inspector general tried to get the names of the real owners directly from trust companies in 2013, investigators said some trustees either refused to provide the information or took months instead of the two days allowed by the FAA to turn over the names.
The FAA, similarly, puts few restrictions on who can hang out their shingle as a trust company set up to register aircraft. As a result, the industry is a hodgepodge of banks, businesses, and individuals, including several lacking recognizable websites or phone numbers. At least three operate offshore in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom — even though the whole point of such trusts is that they are supposed to provide a US contact for the FAA.
A Georgia-based trust company called Plane Fun Inc. exemplifies the elusiveness of several of the trust agents contacted by the Spotlight Team. Plane Fun lists a modest, split-level home in Snellville, Ga., as its headquarters, with more than 200 planes registered to the address.
But the home is owned by Kathleen Schumacher, who told the Globe she is not involved with the business. “I handle nothing on it; my son does,” Schumacher said. Despite repeated attempts, the Globe was unable to reach Schumacher’s son, Kenneth, who she said is the operator of Plane Fun.
Aircraft Guaranty, with offices in Texas and Oklahoma, is much bigger and more visible than Plane Fun. The nearly 30-year-old business describes itself as “one of the most well respected and trusted Trustee Service providers in the aviation industry.” But, like the manager of Plane Fun, Aircraft Guaranty owner Debbie Mercer-Erwin didn’t want to talk about her work.
Only after numerous attempts to interview Mercer-Erwin, including a visit to the single-family home in Oklahoma City where she has an office, did the Globe receive a statement from the company’s attorney.
Aircraft Guaranty “fully complies with all US laws and FAA and other regulations in providing this specific service to its customers,” wrote attorney Wallace C. Magathan III of Miami. He noted that the firm voluntarily follows federal “know your customer” rules, which require company officials to collect “personally identifiable information” from clients that may include name, date of birth, address, and identification number.
Magathan added that Aircraft Guaranty “is not in the business of thoroughly investigating its customers’ private business affairs.” He declined to answer the Globe’s questions about individual clients.
But detailed information about some of Aircraft Guaranty’s more unsavory past clients has come to light. One of them, Fausto Veliz Urbina, was sentenced to 78 months in federal prison for cocaine trafficking before being deported to Mexico in 2010. According to federal court records in Florida, he registered a plane through Aircraft Guaranty on behalf of a Mexican shell company, Consorcio Melun SA de CV, in 2012, something investigators discovered while looking at a fleet of planes suspected of involvement in drug trafficking.
A former Guatemalan vice president, Roxana Baldetti, has been indicted in the United States on federal drug charges and is currently jailed in her homeland. According to media reports, she regularly jetted around in a Raytheon 400A that FAA records show was registered by Aircraft Guaranty on behalf of a Panamanian company, Best Advisors Group Inc. Baldetti resigned and was arrested on fraud charges in 2015 amid media reports of her many luxury purchases, including multimillion-dollar homes.
And there’s Luis Nuñez, the “phantom person” whose plane — registered through Aircraft Guaranty — crashed into Asnaldo Gonzalez’s house. Gonzalez’s inability to find the real owner prevented his family’s attorneys from suing for damages to rebuild his family’s life.
Analysts say there’s a good reason that trust companies like Aircraft Guaranty are attractive to shady characters: Anonymity is good for business.
“Criminals find that US planes allow them to fly under the radar far more easily than if using some dodgy Russian aircraft,” said Kathi Lynn Austin, an expert in arms trafficking and executive director of the Conflict Awareness Project. “The simple act of flying out of US airspace — where regulatory standards are perceived to be high — conveys a level of legitimacy on its aircraft and its operator. The American flag also makes it easier for corrupt officials to wittingly turn a blind eye.”
In 2009, a jet registered on behalf of a foreign owner through Wells Fargo crashed in a remote area of the Bahamas, triggering scrutiny of the FAA’s noncitizen trust policy. FAA officials briefly shut down the option for foreigners to register through noncitizen trusts, amid concern that some plane owners were making side agreements that made ownership hard to trace, especially in an emergency.
“There was a frustration that everybody had,” Joe Standell, counsel to the FAA’s Aeronautical Center at the time, recently told the Globe. “You let them register airplanes as an owner trust. But look what that does; nobody is accountable.”
Trust companies such as Aircraft Guaranty teamed up with businesses to ensure the survival of noncitizen trusts, arguing they are crucial to companies with multinational executives who want to own American-registered aircraft. In all, a dozen associations along with 70 companies and law firms combined forces to deluge the FAA with comments.
“If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” advised Conrad Kulatz, the Florida attorney linked to the drug-laden plane shot down off Aruba in 2015, in a 2012 e-mail to the FAA. “I have never had a problem arising from trustee registration of aircraft in over 30 years practicing law in South Florida.”
The FAA eventually backed off, allowing foreign plane owners to use noncitizen trusts as long as they met some new conditions: share the trust agreements with the FAA and agree to provide ownership information within 48 hours when requested.
A bright orange fireball erupted on the screen of Jeroen Lucas’s video camera while he filmed a commercial for his media firm in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2015. His frame captured the Aruba skyline twinkling at dawn as a flaming streak twisted and turned over the Caribbean Sea.
Minutes before the flash appeared, a business jet had failed to respond to air traffic controllers, and soon the Venezuelan Air Force marked the private jet in its crosshairs. A shot transformed the white and green Challenger 600 into a Roman candle spiraling through thick gray clouds. The plane crashed in the water, killing three people. More than a ton of cocaine floated on the waves.
The aircraft was obtained by two Colombian drug kingpins, Dicson Penagos-Casanova and Juan Gabriel Rios Sierra, who worked as key members of an international drug trafficking ring that supported multiple cartels bringing cocaine to the United States, federal prosecutors said in the indictment.
But the aircraft’s tail number, N214FW, told a different story, tracing the ownership of the plane to a company incorporated in Delaware, a state that often requires minimal public disclosure about the owners of a business. FAA records showed that the cocaine-packed plane was owned by Dinama Aircorp Inc., formed in Delaware less than two weeks before it purchased the airplane in 2013. According to FAA records, the president and sole officer of the firm was Kulatz, the Fort Lauderdale attorney who, a few years earlier, sent an e-mail to the FAA opposing efforts to make plane ownership more transparent.
There are nearly 200 other planes registered to the same address as Dinama Aircorp in Delaware, including a jet that was seized in 2014 by the Dominican Republic, according to a Globe analysis. Kulatz and another attorney are listed as the key officers of the firm that registered the seized plane.
Kulatz did not respond to repeated calls and correspondence from the Globe. At one point, a receptionist at his office said Kulatz had retired. In July, the Florida bar association listed him as ineligible to practice law because he did not meet the continuing legal education requirement.
Penagos-Casanova and Rios Serra are like many drug traffickers who actively seek American planes because they believe they can more easily “fly under the radar,” according to Benjamin Barron, an assistant US attorney in the Central District of California, who prosecuted the pair. To ensure success, they paid aircraft owners a fee of about 30 to 35 percent of the cocaine shipment and bribed Venezuelan military and government officials, according to federal court records. Kulatz has not been accused of wrongdoing in connection with the case.
“They hope they will attract less suspicion particularly by using expensive jets that are US-registered and might appear to be something that a corporation might use,” Barron said. “It’s all a way of avoiding detection and getting the cocaine safely from point A to point B.”
But Delaware makes hiding especially easy for corporations of all kinds, setting some of the nation’s most lenient rules. For as little as $90, people can create a Delaware-based company to “own” anything they don’t want to be associated with by name. Delaware goes further in protecting privacy than most states, not requiring a list of officers for some types of firms.
Transparency International, a global anticorruption organization, calls Delaware a haven for transnational crime and “a place where extreme corporate secrecy enables corrupt people, shady companies, drug traffickers, embezzlers, and fraudsters to cover their tracks when shifting dirty money from one place to another.”
More than one-third of all US aircraft — 122,336 — are registered to corporations. Of those, nearly 11,000 are registered to firms in Delaware.
A review of FAA records by the Globe found that about 3,500 aircraft are registered to more than 2,000 companies located at a single Wilmington address that is home to a business incorporator.
It is impossible to know how many planes are registered to non-US citizens through trusts because the FAA does not keep track. The Globe identified several businesses that provide the service. Together they have more than 7,500 aircraft registered across the country.
Law enforcement officials say these easy-to-create shell companies can be significant roadblocks in trying to convict criminals. A Los Angeles DEA agent who investigates narcotics-related aircraft said the dummy ownership makes it harder for him to draw a direct connection between drug dealers and their product.
“If I can’t demonstrate the individual who owned the aircraft or whose name was on the registration paperwork received money to knowingly and intentionally purchase this vessel in a drug transaction, then almost always there is no prosecution,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
Penagos-Casanova and Rios Serra acquired a second drug-loaded plane that crashed in the Caribbean Sea due to engine failure in May 2015, according to court papers. In all, authorities recovered more than $70 million worth of cocaine from the two planes.
Both men pleaded guilty in US District Court in Los Angeles to “conspiracy to possess cocaine on board a United States-registered aircraft with intent to distribute.” They are awaiting sentencing.
Colombian kingpins are not the only suspicious users of aircraft registered to corporations set up by Kulatz, the Florida attorney. He and his wife are listed as officers of Delaware-based Secure Aircorp Inc., which owns the Gulfstream American 2 jet that was seized in 2014 by the Dominican Republic, according to FAA records.
N522HS was seized as part of an investigation by the Dominican Republic’s Justice Ministry Anti-Corruption Department into possible money laundering and embezzlement by one of the country’s senators, Felix Bautista. According to Dominican media reports, authorities said Bautista attempted to evade prosecution and the forfeiture of his aircraft by changing the plane’s tail number about two months before he was indicted. While businesses and individuals may request specific tail numbers to act as vanity plates, criminals utilize the tactic to evade detection, much like switching a license plate on a car.
FAA officials in a statement said such number changes are routine: “The Registry does not generally deny requests for a number change,” in part because they can still track planes by their serial numbers.
Likewise, FAA officials appeared to have no idea that plane N214FW had been shot down off Aruba or that it was controlled by alleged international drug lords. About 15 months after the plane crashed, the agency sent a notice to Dinama Aircorp reminding the company to renew registration for N214FW. Over several months, the agency sent multiple letters to the same address and all came back to Oklahoma City marked “Return to sender.”
30 years of frustration
Ronald Reagan was president when Congress took the FAA to task for not doing enough to keep criminals from secretly acquiring US-registered planes as well as pilot’s licenses.
At the 1988 hearing held by the House Committee on Public Works and Transportation, members wanted to know why the FAA so rarely revoked aircraft and airmen certifications for individuals knowingly violating controlled substance laws in the Aviation Drug-Trafficking Control Act of 1984. Over a four-year period, the FAA revoked the certifications of only three aircraft and six airmen.
Law enforcement officials explained that criminals were able to hide behind a veil of anonymity created through fictitious owners, fake addresses, post office boxes, illegible signatures on documents, repeated changes in ownership, and the switching of tail numbers. These administrative issues — found on paper and documents — created hurdles for law enforcement officers attempting to fight the US war on drugs.
“Aircraft identification and registered owner identification is an elusive veil, behind which the smuggler finds refuge,” testified Carol Knapik, then a detective with Florida’s Broward County sheriff’s office. “All to his advantage that there is no true piece of identification required for the registration of an aircraft.”
Congress directed the agency to make information in the aircraft registry more reliable, prompting common-sense reforms at the FAA such as using computer software to validate addresses and requiring that signatures be legible.
But after 9/11, the continuing weakness of FAA oversight — and the urgent need for reliable information — became increasingly obvious. An internal agency audit of the aircraft registry in 2010 found unreported address changes and sales that left the ownership of about one-third of the more than 300,000 aircraft on the registry in question. In response, the FAA required reregistration of all aircraft with mandated renewal.
Three years later, the inspector general at the Department of Transportation identified a concerning pattern among trusts set up on behalf of foreigners: 5,600 of the aircraft records maintained by the FAA were incomplete, often lacking key information on owner identities. And, in a follow-up letter, the investigators identified several trust-owned aircraft that should have set off alarms:
An FAA inspector was unable to obtain information about who was flying a US trust-registered Boeing 737 in the United Arab Emirates. The plane was suspected of not following US regulations and possibly being used for illegal activity.
Hours before the United Nations Security Council met in 2011 to approve a no-fly zone over Libya, a US plane registered to a trust approached the Tripoli International Airport without a landing permit.
And one aircraft was registered in a trust arrangement on behalf of a Lebanese politician who was “backed by a well known US government-designated terrorist organization.”
It wasn’t until March 2017, after months of questions from the Globe, that FAA officials sat down with the inspector general to address its seven major concerns. After the meeting, the inspector general said the FAA had addressed three of them, tackling issues of data integrity and security.
‘A crown jewel target’
Today, US air security is a study in contrasts. Since the attacks of 9/11, the government has made enormous changes to security procedures in commercial air travel, creating a whole new agency to screen passengers before they board. Since hijackers seized and weaponized four commercial airliners that September morning in 2001, the public has gotten used to a host of small indignities, from removing shoes to whole-body scans and dogs sniffing their carry-ons, all in the name of safety on planes.
But there have been far fewer security improvements for planes used in general aviation that, collectively, represent three-quarters of all US air traffic.
Partly, that may reflect some security analysts’ view that private planes can do far less damage as tools of terror than airliners.
But private planes have been used in attacks such as Joseph Stack’s 2010 suicide crash into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas, which killed an IRS agent and injured 13 others. Stack had posted a suicide note about the “greed” of the IRS on the same day he burned down his own house and deliberately flew his Piper Dakota into the four-story office building.
The 9/11 conspirators had bigger ambitions for small planes. Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the masterminds who had looked into buying crop-dusters in Norman, Okla., and possessed “a computer disk containing information related to the aerial application of pesticides” when he was arrested, according to his 2001 indictment. The indictment said that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta made similar inquiries in Florida in 2000 and 2001.
In June, all these years later, the head of US Homeland Security called commercial aviation “a crown jewel target” for terrorists.
“The threat has not diminished. In fact, I am concerned that we are seeing renewed interest on the part of terrorist groups to go after the aviation sector,” said John Kelly, then-Department of Homeland Security secretary and now President Trump’s chief of staff, during remarks on enhanced aviation security for commercial flights in June.
Scars that won’t heal
For Asnaldo Gonzalez, the failed oversight of US-registered planes had a devastating effect. The federal lawsuit filed on his behalf by Podhurst Orseck, a Miami-based firm, against the plane’s owner was dropped partly because the true owner couldn’t be found to hold accountable. To this day, nine years later, Gonzalez still cannot afford to rebuild his shattered home.
“Absolutely everyone is in total and absolute silence,” said Alfredo Jose D’Ascoli Centeno, an attorney for the Gonzalez family in Caracas.
Before the crash, Gonzalez’s own multistory dwelling was the largest home on the block. It served as an imposing reminder of an accomplished dream — a house built to fit his entire extended family.
Now the cement walls peel with black and gray scars. The bedrooms, once filled with the laughter of his grandchildren, resemble oversized emptied ashtrays. An old couch, two plastic chairs, and wall decorations of homes shifted sideways are among the only family items left behind in the uninhabitable house.
“What I’m looking for is for everyone involved in this tragedy to be held responsible,” said Gonzalez, who continues to pursue the case in Venezuela. “My family and I are fighting without any type of economic resources, and we will fight to the end. “
As Gonzalez recounts his nightmare, voices of children echo from the elementary school across the street as they change classes and play at recess. His wife, Carmen, folds her hands inside of her lap and presses her lips together. The story makes her breathe in hard.
Gonzalez’s grandson, Joecruz, who was rescued from his burning crib and is now 9, paces in the background as he listens to the familiar story that always ends with the same terrifying climax: The explosion. The terror. The deaths.
Joecruz wears his baseball cap low, covering his dark hair and a burn scar that stretches across his forehead. Below his deep brown eyes on both of his cheeks are two more scars, constant reminders he’s unable to erase.
photo courtesy CBS
Gregory Peck 
Joanne Woodward