JFK Conference: Rex Bradford detailed the historic importance of the Church Committee

[Octafish]

15. Church Committee was last time INTEL Services held to public scrutiny

Some of what they found: FBI DESTROYED OSWALD EVIDENCE.

Destruction of the Oswald Note

In 1975, the allegation surfaced that the FBI had destroyed a note delivered to it by Lee Harvey Oswald, just one or two weeks prior to the assassination of President Kennedy. An internal FBI investigation failed to find any records relating to this, but interviews of Dallas Field Office personnel established that an Oswald visit and note dropoff had occurred.

The House Judiciary Committee heard testimony from several relevant witnesses, as did the contemporaneous Church Committee. The results of this were:

• Oswald definitely did visit the Dallas Field Office a week to two weeks prior to the assassination, looking for Agent (James) Hosty, who had recently visited his wife Marina.

• When told that Hosty was not in, Oswald left a note in an envelope which was unsealed.

• The note contained some sort of threat, but accounts varied widely as to whether Oswald threatened to "blow up the FBI" or merely "report this to higher authorities."

• Within hours after Oswald's murder on 24 Nov 1963, Hosty destroyed the note and a memorandum which Special-Agent-in-Charge Gordon Shanklin had ordered written on November 22.

Hosty maintained that Shanklin, head of the Dallas Field Office, had ordered him to destroy the note. Shanklin denied ever having heard of the note until 1975, though Assistant Director William Sullivan did recall the incident. The House Select Committee on Assassinations reviewed the incident and did not find Shanklin's denial credible.

CONTINUED...

http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Destruction_of_the_Oswald_Note

The Nation can use some more Church Committees nowadays.