Dallas FBI Agent James Hosty #3
Updated: Aug 25
My review of Dallas FBI agent James Hosty will require several parts. Let’s start with a brief summary of Hosty’s own testimony on May 5, 1964, before US Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senator John Cooper, Congressman Gerald Ford, CIA Director John McCloy and former CIA Director Allen Dulles.
1. The FBI had no official duties with regard to the JFK motorcade. At noon Hosty was at the corner of Main and Field and watched the parade. Then he went to lunch. While at lunch, the waitress told Hosty about the JFK shooting.
2. Hosty ran back to FBI HQ. His boss (J. Gordon Shanklin) immediately sent Hosty to Parkland Hospital, where JFK was being treated. When Hosty got to Parkland, his boss called him and ordered him to return to FBI HQ right away, to begin searching files of suspects.
3. So, Hosty returned to FBI HQ and began searching files. He saw the FBI case of Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) which had been closed in Dallas since 1962. LHO’s case and Marina Oswald’s case now both belonged to James Hosty – but Hosty had no reason to suspect LHO of violence, he claimed. Hosty had never spoken to either of them until November 1, 1963.
4. On November 1, 1963, Hosty kindly introduced himself to Marina Oswald at Ruth Paine’s house but no more -- because she just had a baby. Yet he did speak briefly with Ruth Paine about LHO.
5. On November 5, 1963, Hosty returned to speak at length with Ruth Paine about LHO because LHO had returned to Dallas in early October 1963, and he had just learned that LHO had been in recent contact with the Soviet Embassies in New York and Mexico City.
6. As Hosty was searching through his FBI HQ files for JFK murder suspects, around 1:15pm, Dallas radios began broadcasting stories about the slaying of Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit.
7. Then, around 2pm, the radio began broadcasting news that LHO was a suspect for the Tippit slaying! Then, only fifteen minutes after that, radios began broadcasting that the Dallas Police were holding LHO on suspicion of killing JFK!
8. Hosty testified that he was “shocked.”
9. Hosty’s boss was also shocked since Hosty currently had the LHO case. At about 3pm he ordered Hosty to hurry to the Dallas Police Station to participate in the interrogation of LHO. He took FBI agent Bookhout with him.
10. At about 3:15pm, Dallas FBI agents Hosty and Bookhout arrived in the office of Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz. LHO was in that office. LHO exploded with anger when he heard the name “Hosty.” LHO had previously received his name, number and license plate number from Marina Oswald, and knew that Hosty had visited her without his attendance! LHO refused to say anything to Hosty, claimed Hosty.
11. At that point, Captain Fritz alone interrogated Oswald, while Bookhout and Hosty just took notes. (Hosty told the WC – twice – that he destroyed those handwritten notes after they were typewritten. He said, "that is the procedure.")
11.1. After those interrogations, James Hosty never met LHO again; that was the first and last time that Hosty had ever met LHO, he said.
12. Now at the end of his WC testimony, the WC asked James Hosty whether the Washington DC Secret Service PRS had ever asked him if the Dallas FBI knew of any dangerous suspects to investigate in Dallas. Yes, replied Hosty, who added that he couldn’t find any.
13. Although Adlai Stevenson had been attacked in Dallas only one month previously, those John Birch Society protesters had been arrested and warned, so they weren’t dangerous.
14. Also, regarding the hostile handbill that had circulated around Dallas declaring, WANTED FOR TREASON: JFK, Hosty did admit to the Secret Service PRS that those handbills were in circulation since the Adlai incident. Yet, he also told the Secret Service that he had no idea who published these handbills – and neither did anybody else in Dallas.
Following are my problems with Hosty's sworn WC testimony:
(i) Like J. Edgar Hoover, Hosty admitted that the LHO case had been closed back in 1962. Hosty had no reason to suspect LHO of violence, he said. Yet Hosty in his book, “Assignment Oswald” (1996) admitted that he applied several times in 1963 to re-open the case on LHO, and was denied multiple times. Just the same – Hosty visited Ruth Paine on November 5, 1963, to ask her many questions about LHO.
(ii) Hosty explained to the WC that, "LHO had been in recent contact with the Soviet Embassies in New York and Mexico City.” So, why didn’t Hosty tell the Secret Service PRS about this when they asked about dangerous people in Dallas?
(iii) After the JFK Assassination; around 1:15pm, Dallas radios announced the JD Tippit slaying. Then, around 2pm, they named LHO as a suspect in that slaying. Then, ~15 minutes later, they named LHO as a suspect in the JFK Assassination. Was Hosty truly “shocked?” But he had wanted to track LHO’s Soviet connections – even apart from the Secret Service, as he admitted.
So, my suspicions are already up. Let me add at this point that I take EVERY TESTIMONY about what happened in Will Fritz’s office that afternoon with a grain of salt. I have long claimed that all reports about interrogations of LHO at the Dallas Police Station were fake. Historians agree that not one word was ever officially recorded at the time. The WC waited for months to get reports from the eye-witnesses.
At the end most witnesses repeated each other nearly word for word. Sounds to me like witness coordination of stories to tell the WC. It seems more likely to me that LHO said NOTHING to anybody there, but only waited for, in his own words, “someone to come forward to give me legal assistance.”
(iv) I am not alone in doubting Hosty’s claim that his handwritten notes of that day were ultimately typewritten, since the FBI had no record of them.
(v) Many are aware that in the 1990's Hosty claimed that he "found" his handwritten notes after all. And what do you know – they confirm exactly what he claimed he had already said! But if so, why did Hosty testify under oath that he had destroyed them, and offer a reason?
(vi) James Hosty told the Secret Service PRS that he couldn’t find any dangerous persons in Dallas. As we saw last week, the highest-ranking FBI and Secret Service witnesses all agreed that this was where everything broke down.
(vii) Hosty told the PRS that the John Birch Society in Dallas that had attacked Adlai Stevenson the previous month weren't really dangerous.
I will linger longer on this, because in Hosty’s 1996 book, Assignment Oswald, Hosty blamed J. Edgar Hoover, Alan Belmont and other high-ranking FBI officers for withholding facts from him. So, he had to research the truth on his own – without telling them – and that’s when he found his own Conspiracy Theory, i.e., that the KGB had hired LHO to kill JFK.
Even though J. Edgar Hoover himself repeatedly denied that!
(viii) Hosty told the PRS that nobody in Dallas knew the publishers of the hostile handbill, WANTED FOR TREASON: JFK. Yet the dozens of Five Amendment pleas by the publisher Robert Alan Surrey -- are doubly suspicions since Hosty was, according to Penn Jones, Jr., his close personal friend.
Thank you,
-Paul
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