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William Torbitt is the pseudonymous author of Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal (1970). When the book was published the author claimed he was a lawyer working in the southwestern part of the United States.

Jim Marrs, who interviewed Torbitt when he was working for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram claims that his real name was David Copeland, a lawyer from Waco. Marrs told him that "he got his information from two government agents - one with the Secret Service and the other with the FBI."

During the Second World War Torbitt served in the United States Navy. After completing a law degree from the University of Texas he worked as a prosecuting attorney (1949-51). He admits that his clients includes people involved in committing political murder. He claims he has also represented people involved in the "financial dealings of organized crime in Texas".

In Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal Torbitt claims that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a "fascist cabal... who planned to lay the blame on honest right-wing conservatives, if their first ploy, to lay the blame on Oswald and the Communists, was not bought."

Torbitt argues that a Swiss Corporation named Permindex engineered the assassination. Also involved included Defense Industrial Security Command, organized by J. Edgar Hoover and William Sullivan. Torbitt claims that DISC agents included Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby with Louis M. Bloomfield of Montreal, Canada in charge.

According to the author Permindex was comprised of:

(1) Solidarists, an Eastern European exile organization.

(2) American Council of Christian Churches led by Haroldson L. Hunt.

(3) Free Cuba Committee headed by Carlos Prio Socarras.

(4) The Syndicate headed by Clifford Jones, ex-lieutenant governor of Nevada. This group also included Bobby Baker, George Smathers, Roy Cohn, Fred Black and Lewis McWillie.

(5) Security Division of NASA headed by Wernher von Braun.

According to Torbitt, others involved in the assassination included Lyndon B. Johnson, Walter Jenkins, Fred Korth, John Connally, William Seymour, Robert McKeown, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Lee Harvey Oswald, Ruth Paine, Michael Paine, Gordon Novel, and Clint Murchison.

Torbitt adds that the "anti-Castro Cuban part of the plan was to tie the Castro regime into the murder of Kennedy and thus to have the U. S. military give all service to the overthrow of Castro".

In his book Who Shot JFK? (2002) Robin Ramsay argues that Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal was an attempt by the Central Intelligence Agency to link the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. "Torbitt took Garrison's inquiry into the ClA's links to the assassination and converted them into a story about the FBI's responsibility for the assassination. (This, in my view, tells us that the author/s of Torbitt were working for the CIA, trying to diminish the 'Garrison effect.')"

Torbitt also argues that J. Edgar Hoover and Louis M. Bloomfield planned the execution of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. He names Albert Osborne (John Howard Bowen) as the man who organized these two assassinations.

 

Open Debate on the Kennedy Assassination

Namebase: William Torbitt

Namebase: Albert Osborne

Forum Debate: William Torbitt

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(1) William Torbitt, Nonmenclature of an Assassination Cabal (1970)

The killing of President Kennedy was planned and supervised by Division Five of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a relatively small department within the FBI whose usual duties are espionage and counter-espionage activities.

Actually, Division Five acted dually with the Defense Intelligence Agency which was acting on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Directly under the two-pronged leadership of Division Five and the DIA was the Control Group, their highly secret policy agency - the Defense Industrial Security Command.

The Defense Industrial Security Command has always been kept secret because it acts, in addition to its two official control organizations, on behalf of NASA, the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Information Agency, and the arms, equipment, ammunition, munitions and related miscellaneous supply manufacturing corporations contracting with NASA, the AEC, USIA, and the Pentagon. One can readily observe that DISC is not compatible with an open Democracy and the U.S. Constitution. Consequently, the top secret arms manufacturers' police agency has been kept from the knowledge of even most U.S. officials and Congressmen.

The Defense Industrial Security Command had its beginnings when J. Edgar Hoover in the early 1930's organized the police force of the fledgling Tennessee Valley Authority at the request of David Lillienthal. The police force covered the entire TVA from Knoxville, Tennessee through Huntsville and Florence, Alabama into Kentucky and back through the eastern portion of Tennessee into southern Kentucky. This was one of the first federal agencies with a separate police force. This force grew and Lillienthal took it forward to cover the Atomic Energy Commission, thus tying it into the Army Intelligence Service.

L.M. Bloomfield, a Montreal, CANADA lawyer bearing the reputation as a sex deviate, the direct supervisor of all contractual agents with J. Edgar Hoover's Division Five, was the top co-ordinator for the network planning the execution. A Swiss corporation, Permindex, was used to head five front organizations responsible for furnishing personnel and supervisors to carry out assigned duties...

The Defense Industrial Security Command is the police and espionage agency for the U.S. munitions makers. DISC was organized by J. Edgar Hoover; William Sullivan, his chief assistant, is in direct command. We shall later examine the involvement of a large number of the DISC agents including Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby and others with Permindex's Louis Mortimer Bloomfield of Montreal, Canada in charge.

 

(2) William Torbitt, Nonmenclature of an Assassination Cabal (1970)

From 1960 to 1963, the ruling hierarchy of Lionel Corporation was General John B. Medaris, Roy Cohn and Joe Bonanno (Joe Bananas), a top Mafia man from New York, Las Vegas, Tucson and Montreal, Canada. Lionel Corporation during this period did over ninety percent of their business with the space agency and army ordnance furnishing such items as electronic equipment, rocket parts, chemical warfare agents and flame throwers. Also, during this period, General Medaris, though having retired in 1960, remained on active duty as special advisor to Army Intelligence in the Pentagon. The Lionel Corporation management was in direct contact with Louis Mortimer Bloomfield who, among other things, was a lawyer with offices in Tangiers, Morocco and Paris, France. Bloomfield was also the president of Heineken's Brewers, Ltd., Canada. General Medaris was a director of one of the land speculation companies of Bobby Baker and Senator George Smathers in Florida. Joe Bonanno (Joe Bananas) in his capacity as a Mafia leader, was associated in the Havana and Las Vegas gambling with L.J. McWillie, Clifford Jones and others.

In addition to J. Edgar Hoover's close association with Roy Cohn, he was also a long time friend of General Medaris. Joe Bonanno (Joe Bananas) had been a personal informer for J. Edgar Hoover for over a decade during 1963. Grant Stockdale, ex-United States Ambassador to Ireland and former George Smathers Administrative Assistant and a stock holder and officer in Bobby Baker's vending machine and Florida land transactions, knew and was closely associated with almost all of the top figures in the cabal. Shortly after President Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, Grant Stockdale was pushed, shoved or fell from the fourteenth story of a Miami building and was killed immediately in the fall. As an officer in the Bobby Baker enterprises, Grant Stockdale had particular knowledge of a good part of the workings of the cabal and his death was one of a series made necessary to protect the group from public exposure...

Fred Black of Washington, D.C. was a lobbyist for North American Aircraft and business associate with Bobby Baker and Clifford Jones. Black has confirmed the connection between Jones, McWillie, Baker, Ruby and ex-Cuban President, Prio.

After November 22, l963, Black publicly told many people in Washington, D.C. he had informed J. Edgar Hoover that an income tax conviction against him must be reversed or he would blow the lid off Washington with revelations of the assassination conspirators. Lobbyist Black prevailed upon J. Edgar Hoover to admit error before the Supreme Court where his case was reversed in 1966. Hoover did well to rescue Black from the conviction. Fred Black, while socially drinking with acquaintances in Washington has, on numerous occasions, been reported to have told of J. Edgar Hoover's and Bobby Baker's involvement in the assassination through Las Vegas, Miami and Havana gamblers. He named some of these as the Fox Brothers of Miami, McLaney of Las Vegas, New Orleans, Havana and Bahamas, Cliff Jones of Las Vegas, Carlos Prio Socarras of Havana, Bobby Baker and others. He stated there was also a connection in that some of the gamblers were Russian emigres.

Don Reynolds, Washington, D.C. businessman and associate of Bobby Baker and who had a number of questionable business transactions with Walter Jenkins on behalf of Lyndon Johnson, also gave testimony concerning Bobby Baker's involvement with the principals and he has stated on numerous public occasions that this group was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Black was a stockholder with Baker in the Waikiki Savings & Loan Association in Honolulu. The other members were Clifford Jones and his law partner, Louis Weiner. There was the Farmers and Merchants State Bank in Tulsa where Jones joined Baker and Black in a stock deal and brought in a Miami pal by the name of Benny Sigelbaum, a courier of funds and documents to the Swiss banks for Permindex and the Syndicate.

Of all the enterprises, none could compare with the controversial Serv-U Corp., a Baker-Black controlled vending- machine firm. Ed Levinson, president of the Fremont Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, was also a partner. Grant Stockdale, President of Serv-U and his money is covered later. Formed late in 1961, Serve-U Corporation provided vending machines for the automatic dispensing of food and drink in companies working on government contracts. In the next two years, Serv-U was awarded the lion-share of the vending business at three major aerospace firms - North American Aviation, Northrop Corporation and Thompson Ramo Wooldridge's Space Technology Laboratories. Baker and Black each bought stock in the company for $1 a share, while the others paid approximately $16 a share.

 

(3) Robin Ramsay, Who Shot JFK (2002)

Clay Shaw was a director of the World Trade Centre in New Orleans and was brought into a similar project in Italy involving a company called Permindex (Permanent Industrial Exhibitions), which proposed to create a network of World Trade Centres: propagandising for American business. Around these bare facts was created a story in which all these companies were CIA fronts for covert operations and assassinations. Permindex had been involved in trying to assassinate General de Gaulle and then had killed JFK. This story was planted on a Soviet-sympathising Italian newspaper; was then picked up by a left-wing magazine in New York and a magazine in Canada; and thence made its way to the Garrison investigation. And Garrison believed it without checking it. His 1988 book. On The Trail Of The Assassins, carries a couple of pages on Permindex in which he quotes only the Canadian and Italian versions of the story. Parts of this Permindex story - itself disinformation - were then picked up and used to form the centrepiece of the most famous and most durable piece of disinformation generated by the case, the Nomenclature Of An Assassination Cabal by 'William Torbitt,' better known as the Torbitt Memorandum. 'Torbitt' took Garrison's inquiry into the ClA's links to the assassination and converted them into a story about the FBI's responsibility for the assassination. (This, in my view, tells us that the author/s of Torbitt were working for the CIA, trying to diminish the 'Garrison effect.') At the beginning of the first chapter 'Torbitt' tells us that the assassination was the work of the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency, who jointly ran 'the Control Group.' These two agencies ran another really secret agency, the Defense Industrial Security Command (DISC). Clay Shaw, David Ferrie et al., previously identified as CIA, were in fact DISC. Because it was 'underground' and - because it was full of interesting and authentic-sounding bits and pieces, Torbitt was 'sexy.' However, as soon as I began trying to check the few citations in it, they proved to be useless: either they didn't exist, were impossible to get or, when tracked down, didn't say what Torbitt said they did. But Torbitt lives on. Like all good conspiracy theories, it is immune to refutation.

 

(4) Jim Marrs, Education Forum (2nd November, 2005)

The name of the Waco lawyer who wrote the Torbitt Document was David Copeland and I recall speaking with him when I worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the 1970s. Copeland told me he got his information from two government agents - one with the Secret Service and the other with the FBI. He don't think he ever revealed the identities of these agents. He seemed quite sincere at the time and said he wanted to show the public that "right wingers" did not kill JFK. Personally, I think that he truly believed the Torbitt scenario because he trusted his sources. I think his sources may have been on the level but there's always the possibility they were fed misinformation.

 

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