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March 14, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:31
Edition 620 - Dr Grover Proctor - Oswald's Call
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well I'll tell you something, in the midst of the horror and turmoil this world is going through at the moment, it was actually here in London today a really beautiful day.
For most of it the sun was shining bright and rather warm too.
The sky was blue and I took the bike out into the park and just had a little ride round, ate a sandwich, drank a bottle of water, looked at the grass and the trees and the deer and thought to myself, how beautiful is this?
And I tried as far as I could to put out of my mind the thoughts of everything else that is happening at the moment.
And I know from my email inbox that a lot of you are affected by these things for reasons that I can completely understand.
On my radio show on Sunday last, as I record these words, I had a very famous psychologist on, Professor Sir Kerry Cooper, who I've known for years.
And we talked about ways that people could cope with all of the things that are going on at the moment.
And we came out with, or rather he came out with, the idea that you can only control the things that you can control in your own sphere.
And beyond that, you maybe have to turn off the news and disconnect from it.
Because you cannot control the things that are happening in the main.
It's a runaway train if it is a runaway train.
And, you know, we're not in the driving seat.
And I've tried to take some of that on board, although I'm a news guy and I have to follow the news.
You know, I've tried to turn it off from time to time.
And just before I recorded this, I turned off the news and just sat in the near silence and really benefited from that.
So maybe we all need to do those things from time to time because we have to realize that there are things in this world that we have no control over.
And the outcome of those things will be the same whatever we do.
So I've got to practice what I preach, really.
It's better to stop worrying about it as far as you possibly can.
And I know that that is easier said than done.
But I do understand and thank you very much for the emails.
And I greatly sympathize with you.
Look, here in my little world for the last two years, most of the things that I lived my life by have gone out the window.
I don't even think that I'm the same person that I was two years ago, and I'm scared for the future.
That's myself.
But I try and put it behind me as far as I can in day-to-day life because you have to.
It's the only thing that you can do.
So maybe you can take some comfort in the fact that if you're going through it at the moment, please know that so am I. But please spare a thought for those people who are victims at the moment of a war in another part of Europe from where I speak at the moment.
Now, what we're going to hear on this edition of The Unexplained is a conversation with a man called Dr. Grover B. Proctor Jr.
Fascinating conversation about an aspect of the JFK assassination that I had no idea about, and I don't think you'll have heard this story either.
Lee Harvey Oswald, the man they say was the lone gunman, which I've never really believed and many, many people don't believe either, placed a call or tried to make a call from his cell 12 hours before he himself was shot dead by Jack Ruby.
Who that call was to and why that call might have been placed is something that Grover Proctor Jr. has researched intensively for more than 40 years.
It is an astonishing story.
I don't think you'll have heard this story.
We certainly need to hear it now.
So that's from my radio show, Grover Proctor, and the story of the phone call that Lee Harvey Oswald placed from his prison cell 12 hours before he died.
Just a couple of bits of housekeeping to do, though, before we get to that.
Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work on the show.
Ongoing.
Thank you, Adam.
I know you're busy.
So thank you for keeping it cranking on.
Richard asked me to say hello to his dog.
That's a first.
Okay, as long as you don't ask me to bark, because I don't think I'd be very good at that.
No.
Maybe do a Scooby-Doo.
The dog is Star.
Star, the dog.
Thank you very much for listening to my show.
Apparently, Star does listen to my show.
Ben got in touch and asked me to do a shout-out for Simone in North London.
Ben and Simone, nice to hear from you.
And Ben wanted me to say Simone's name.
So, Simone.
George, neaklso, thank you very much for your nice email, George, and for what you did, too.
Okay, let's get to the guest on this edition from my radio show, Grover Proctor Jr.
This is the conversation as it was broadcast pretty much without the commercials and stuff and actually slightly longer than you'll have heard on the radio about Lee Oswald and that weird phone call.
I was, as I do all the time really, when I'm not actually recording things and researching things, I'm checking out stuff that I think might have potential.
And I found by total chance a week ago a video of a man making a presentation in front of an audience somewhere, I don't know where.
But he spoke about this subject absolutely clearly without hesitation or deviation for about an hour and a half.
And the subject was one that we've covered before, but a totally, completely different and often overlooked aspect of it.
I'm talking about the JFK assassination and the involvement of Lee Harvey Oswald, or Lee Oswald, if you want to leave out his middle name.
Now, Lee Oswald has much been speculated about over the years.
People have talked about his background.
He himself said before he was shot dead by Jack Ruby, said that he was a Patsy.
You know, he was just somebody who was put there for something far bigger than just him shooting out of the Texas Depository bookstore, rather book depository window, on that day in November 1963.
There was much more to this than meets the eye.
And we've all looked into this, I'm sure, through our lives many times.
And most of us, I think, have come to the conclusion that it wasn't his work alone.
How could it be?
You know, there are still some people Left who think that it was his work alone, but I think those people perhaps are diminishing in number.
Person we're about to speak with then is the man who was doing that presentation, Dr. Grover B. Proctor Jr., historian, former university dean, widely acknowledged as an expert on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
He's published numerous articles, lectured extensively, frequently been consulted by print and broadcast media like this one.
While most of his work comprises analysis and interpretation of the assassination research phenomenon, he broke new ground in the investigation around about 40 years ago with his work on Lee Harvey Oswald's alleged telephone call from the Dallas jail to a former military counterintelligence agent in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Did you know this?
That the night before he was assassinated, and now he can't tell us anymore, Lee Oswald tried to place a phone call to a number or numbers that he had.
And the story that hangs around that is absolutely astonishing.
Online from North Carolina now is Grover Proctor.
And I'm going to say, Grover, thank you very much for doing this.
Thank you for making time for me.
Well, Howard, it's great to be here.
I appreciate your continuing interest in the JFK assassination story.
And I have to say, congratulations.
I've heard so many people give intros like this, but you got all the facts right.
And so thank you very much for that.
We try our best.
But look, we've covered the JFK case so many times on this show.
In fact, we did it recently because there was an updated book about it.
It's something they'll be writing books about, I think, in 100 years from now, 150 years, forever, probably.
And I thought that I knew most aspects of the story.
This aspect of Lee Oswald trying to place a call to somebody and somebody with a strange pedigree, it turns out, I wasn't aware of this.
It seems to have been swept away, forgotten, buried in the mists of time.
Why do you think that is?
Well, I mean, it is a very small portion.
And even if this story had not kind of died away that weekend and no one knew about it, or only one or two people knew about it for another five years before it became more well known, even if that had not been the case, people would have looked at it and said, oh, well, nothing really happened here.
You know, go home, nothing to see here.
But coming the way that it did and kind of emerging from being buried as it did between 1968 and 1978 and then the publication of the House Assassination Committee report in 1980, it gives it kind of an aura.
And so I picked up on it.
It also didn't hurt that Raleigh, North Carolina, where this is located, this story has its central place, is where I was born and raised.
So that pricked my interest right there.
But Oswald was a very interesting character and the person that he was attempting to call as interesting, but for an entirely different way.
We'll have many times to comment on that as the interview goes on.
But right now for Lee Oswald, what I have found from him in my almost 50 years of research total on this subject is contrary to the story that people tend to want you to believe, he was an intelligent young man.
He was a well-read young man.
And everything that I have seen tends to indicate that he was not in any way or fashion the lone nut that he was described.
His life, if you look at all the details and especially the summer before of the assassination that he spent in New Orleans, there is no lone nutness here where he's just wandering around and trying to get into trouble or make his name known.
He is following a very deliberate pattern, it seems, to the point that when the United States Senate decided in the 1970s to research all of Americans' intelligence agencies to see if they had stayed in line with their charters or if they had stepped out of line, they were looking at foreign assassinations, all those sort of things.
They asked Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania to head up a little small subcommittee to see if in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, if the CIA had helped the investigation, if they had hindered it, what might be the case?
Well, Schweiker took that mandate and ran with it and looked before the assassination to see if the CIA or any other intelligence agency might have been involved in the lead up to it.
Can't go into all the details now.
Looking at Schweiker's reports is a very good thing.
But he came out with one quote that is, I put at the bannerhead of everything that I write, and I say it at the beginning of all my lectures.
This is his quote after he had finished his investigation of Lee Oswald.
He said, we don't know what happened, but we do know Oswald had intelligence connections.
Everywhere you look with him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence.
He was living a life that makes me say to people when I speak to them the following.
He lived a life that looked like, followed the pattern of someone who either A, was working for some sort of American intelligence, CIA, military, whoever, and I don't think that's the likelier of the likelihoods,
or B, someone was making him think that he was and having him do things, running him in a way that one would run an agent of American intelligence.
His life looks exactly that way.
And as I said, especially the time in New Orleans.
And so I think that that is not well known.
And one of the things about this telephone call that makes it more than just a, oh, isn't that an interesting little oddity story, is that it is one More of those links of the fingerprints of intelligence, and we'll find out more as the interview goes on.
Indeed, we will.
Just to finish off on Lee Oswald himself, and I'm deliberately calling him Lee Oswald because, as you point out in your presentation, we don't call everybody by their middle names.
And history has recorded him the way that he was recorded when he was taken in by the police.
The cops recorded him as Lee Harvey Oswald, but he was known as Lee Oswald.
So we will be referring to him, unlike most of the rest of the media down these years, as Lee Oswald.
Now, there was another aspect of him that everybody, of course, over the decades has latched upon.
This man married a Russian woman and went to live in Russia for a while.
He effectively, but not effectively, he defected.
Yes, he did.
And there's no getting around that.
That actually happened.
And so here's this young American Marine who leaves the Marine Corps early and under mysterious circumstances and not particularly happy circumstances, according to his Marine record, decides that he is going to publicly announce that he is a Marxist, that he wants to go and defect to the Soviet Union.
He wants to give them all of the military secrets that he learned about American spy planes that he learned from working in our base in Japan.
And so he does.
And he lives there.
He becomes disaffected with that as well.
Again, this is the story that people are hearing.
And he decides he marries there.
He marries the niece of a KGB colonel, which is a very interesting kind of thing, given what we know about Putin and everything today.
And then decides, well, it's time to go home.
And so he goes to the American embassy or consulate in Moscow.
Same one that he went to to begin with, threw his passport down on the table and says, I defect.
He goes back and he says, well, maybe not so much.
And so I'd like to go home again.
And by the way, here's my Russian wife.
Well, what happened was, of course, exactly the consulate officer did exactly what you would expect someone to do, and that is to take that traitor who had announced his intention to betray the country, arrest them, lock them up, put them in a lengthy trial, and declare them guilty of treason.
No, as opposed to that, the American government gave him money to get home, gave him back his passport with no restrictions, and got him back to the Southeastern America where his home and his mother and where his background was.
And that doesn't make sense, and that has not made sense to a lot of people.
Well, it doesn't.
I mean, most ordinary people, well, I say ordinary people, what ordinary people would do the things that he did?
But most people in that situation would find themselves finding it enormously difficult to get admitted back to the United States.
And if they were admitted back to the United States, they may well find themselves facing charges or under constant scrutiny unless they were required for something else.
Exactly.
And as we head to the break, I'll very quickly say that when I was beginning my investigation of the Raleigh call, I was told by a former retired CIA officer that what Oswald was doing in Russia was using the knowledge that he learned at a school for intelligence operatives that the naval intelligence set up in Nagshead,
North Carolina, at that time to try to get disaffected young American men, unmarried, so they're not connected, to agree to supposedly defect to the Soviet Union in the hopes that they would be picked up as agents over there and the United States could send false information.
And he said that's exactly what Oswald did.
He was there.
I don't have proof of that, but one day you'll discover the proof.
And actually, I have talked to a man who is a former CIA pilot who does say that he did see Oswald there at the NAGSAD training.
So even the defection is something that shows fingerprints of intelligence written all over Lee Oswald.
So he is absolutely steeped in intelligence and finds himself caught up in something that is to make world history.
The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, a unique aspect of the Lee Harvey Oswald story in the assassination of JFK, a phone call that he made from his cell 12 hours before he was shot on his way to the next stage of justice after the terrible events of that day in November 1963.
So let's get back to Dr. Grover Proctor.
Talk some more about this.
Grover, where is the Harvey Oswald kept then?
Where is he staying overnight on that fateful, terrible night?
Well, he had two nights in which he stayed at what they just call, I'm sure it has a much longer and technical name, but they just call it the Dallas Jail.
It's downtown.
It's used as a holding cell for any level of miscreants that happen to be apprehended.
And depending on the level and depending on where their court dates and so forth will be, then they are transferred from there to other holding places, other jails, other prisons.
And so, and it's kind of interesting that the Dallas jail that he was being held in is less than a block away from the Texas Schoolbook Depository building from which they say he fired the shots.
So he was there Friday night, of course, and then on the day Saturday, he was subjected to more interrogations by the Dallas police, the FBI, to a certain extent, more specifically the Secret Service.
And of course, one of the things that we regret and have great suspicions about is that no one took any notes and no one recorded any of his interrogations at that time.
So we really don't know what he said to these people other Than the occasional anecdotal remembrance that somebody wants to tell you about.
So he was there, and on that Saturday, which would have been the 23rd of November, he, during the day, during the course of the day, indicated that he wanted to make two telephone calls.
They were not to be done at the same time or immediately consecutive.
But earlier in the day, he wanted to contact a man by the name of ABT, ABT, who was an attorney in the state of New York, I believe, if I remember correctly, who was actually famous for defending the American Communist Party in various legal issues.
And so he asked a phone call to be made to that person.
We don't have any records per se of what was made, whether the call was actually made, whether they were just not able to get through.
But we do know for a fact that he never got a chance to talk to that lawyer.
And therefore, he had absolutely no legal expertise to help him during the time that he was incarcerated there.
Then later that evening, and we're talking certainly after dark, probably in the eight or nine o'clock range, he let it be known that he wanted to make yet another call.
The Dallas police were saying, you can call anybody you want.
You just let us know.
We have a record of that.
And so he decides he wants to make this call.
And so at that time, the entire building telephone system went through a central switchboard.
And there were ladies hired to take the incoming calls, route them to the correct place or office in the jail itself, or to take outcoming call requests from the jail and place it and connect the people that way.
And the supervisor for that office happened to be working on that Saturday evening.
And by her testimony, two men came to her, people she knew, her supervisor and others, came to her and said that the prisoner, and of course everybody knew that meant Oswald, was going to be wanting to make a phone call.
And so he said, two men will be sent down here to listen into the conversation.
And if you will, give them whatever they need and help them out.
So she agreed.
I won't say she was an elderly person, but let's just say she was in the upper portion of her middle age, but she was known as a rather nervous lady.
And this situation made her very, very nervous by her own testimony.
And so the lady that was joining her for the evening shift that started at 11 o'clock came in early that night because she was relieving someone else who wanted to get off early.
So she's there at about 10.15 and the two ladies are there.
And all of a sudden, they get the call in that Oswald is going to make the call in just a few minutes.
The two men will be right there.
They come in.
These ladies who've worked at the Dallas Jail for a long, long time and know just about everybody there did not recognize these two men.
They were dressed in suits.
There was a listening room or a conference room just off the switchboard office.
So they put them in there, told them how to listen in, went back out, and sure enough, the light from the jail lights up on the switchboard and the first lady takes the call.
Actually, they both plug in to their respective places at the same time.
But the first lady, the supervisor asks for number, please.
And so she is taking care of that situation.
The other lady, who is kind of the more famous one here, Mrs. Alvida Trion, is also listening in, but she has decided since this is my supervisor and this is important, I'll let her handle it.
But she listened in and she took a little piece of paper and was writing notes down as to what Oswald was telling the supervisor about who he wanted to call.
And he apparently had memorized two telephone numbers and indicated that it could have been either one.
And so the supervisor says, just a moment, I'll try to place the call.
She puts him on what we would call now, she puts him on hold, and then calls into the next room where the two men are, explain what is going on.
She is listening.
Of course, the first, the second lady who's making the notes can't hear this conversation entirely.
And so she's listening to what the men tell her.
She's getting more and more nervous.
She says, okay.
She cuts them off, turns back to Oswald, makes his line active again and said, I'm sorry, neither one of those phone numbers answers.
And basically hung up on him without ever having tried to place the call.
What conclusions may we draw?
Something happened between the time that Oswald told her who he wanted her to call and the time she said, I'm sorry, neither one of them answered.
And the only variable there is what the two men told her.
I've heard some very serious suggestions from people who know these kinds of things and have kept a map, a chronology of who was where throughout that whole weekend.
And the best suggestion that I have heard based on what little evidence we have is that these were two Secret Service men, including perhaps the ranking Secret Service agent for that entire trip, who was there in the jail when Oswald was being held and interrogated.
So Mrs. Trion, as I said, Mrs. Trion, the one who was making the notes, tears off that piece of paper and keeps it as a souvenir.
And thank goodness She did because you know, any record would only have been anecdotal but for that piece of paper.
And in fact, you have a copy of that piece of paper, which I know you digitally cleaned up.
I'm actually holding it now because I printed it out.
And I'm looking here.
It's, I mean, it's quite nice script, it's written in.
It's got the, you know, at the top of it, it says City of Dallas long-distance messages, Raleigh, North Carolina, two numbers here, and then the date, 112363.
And then underneath, it's signed, but it's also initialed by somebody.
What's the initialing?
The DA and the CA.
Is that what you're talking about?
Yes, those are not initials.
Those are codes that they use for record keeping.
And DA is their code for did not answer.
And CA is call canceled.
Right.
So since that is the official message that went to the person trying to place the call, Mrs. Trion wrote those two down to remember that that's what had been told to him.
And the L. Swinney, the signature there, is the supervisor's name.
Since she took the call and handled it, Mrs. Trion didn't sign her own name.
She wrote down her supervisor's name again to keep as a souvenir.
So am I to assume here, am I reading this right, that those two numbers were called, one of them did not answer, and one of them was basically cut off before connection?
She did not attempt to place either call.
Right.
And so nobody called anyone except Oswald calling down from the jail to the switchboard.
So why are they notated in this way then?
Well, they were located because the only piece of paper that Mrs. Trion had is these slips that they keep for long-distance calls because they have to then be sent off to accounting and charged to the right department and so forth.
Since no call was made, no record was needed, she had written this information down on one of the slips, and so that's why she kept it.
And after this played out, what happened to the two Secret Service people?
They got up, thanked them for their help, and left.
That's an astonishing little drama to go through, isn't it?
I mean, you wouldn't do that without a reason.
And that makes one think what that reason might be.
You know, they go through this whole thing of he submits these numbers.
Those numbers are ultimately not connected.
Why would these people be there and interested in that?
Well, in 1978, 79, the House Select Committee on Assassinations was at the height of its work.
And a man who was known, a lawyer, Bernard Fensterwald, who had been an attorney for several committees in Congress and who was known very well by people in Congress, he was also known for his archiving of anything that had to do with the Kennedy assassination, literally from 63 all the way up to 78, 79.
And he knew about this call.
How did he know?
Well, very, very briefly, this Mrs. Trion ultimately played out her career there at the Dallas Jail, retired.
She and her husband moved back to her home, which is in Missouri.
One night at a dinner party, she tells this friend of theirs about the story that happened that night.
Because if you've got a story like that, you're going to dine out on it, you would think.
And so she was telling him because this man was working in prison records at that time.
And she thought that he would be interested.
And he was.
And he was a friend of the Greene County Sheriff's Department's office and particularly of the sheriff.
So he tells him, like the next day, this is the story that I just heard.
Maybe it should be investigated.
I don't think anybody knows about this.
I don't remember seeing it in the Warren Commission report.
So the sheriff goes out, visits with Mrs. Trion, sees the little slip that she has kept after all these years and said, you know, in essence, this is above my pay grade.
This is a federal thing.
If you don't mind, I'm going to call the FBI and see if they're interested.
He reported that he did call the FBI and the FBI seemed to know nothing about it when he called.
They sent two agents down to take Mrs. Trion's story.
They asked if they could borrow the phone slip, take it back, make copies, so forth, and then they would send it back to her.
And ultimately they did.
And so somewhere along the line, somebody prepared a three and a half legal size page affidavit as if from the voice of Mrs. Trion saying, this is what happened.
I saw this.
She did this, and so forth.
That document still exists today, not the original, but copy after copy after copy.
So it's a little difficult to read in a couple of places.
Affidavit is a legal document, though.
Are you saying that that legal document was actually faked?
I'm saying that it never became, it was done in the form of a legal document and maybe intended one day to be, but no one ever showed it to Mrs. Trion.
No one ever asked her to sign it.
It being unsigned is not, therefore, a legal document.
So it makes it sound to me like somebody was trying to stop this.
There was legitimate interest all those years on.
The document was taken in, some kind of statement was taken from her, but nothing else was done about it.
And it looks like that was the intention, that it should only go so far.
But Bernard Fensterwal got a hold of the original carbon of that affidavit.
I have no idea how or why that information has not survived.
But I have held that carbon copy in my hand and have made copies of it.
And so the story is there.
So the House Assassinations Committee set up a little subcommittee to study the Raleigh call.
It wasn't called that then, but this incident.
And so they contacted her and they said, now in your affidavit, you said, and she said, what affidavit?
And He said, Well, this affidavit.
I've never signed anything like that.
I never wrote anything like that.
So they sent her a copy and said, Would you please look at this and see if this reflects the correct story?
And if not, would you note the things that are wrong and would you correct them?
And she did that.
And we have, it's in the archives right now.
And again, I have a photocopy of her handwritten corrections to this.
So now in my work that I have published, it's now based on what she said actually happened and not what the affidavit said.
And it was just a matter of a few procedural things that were wrong in that.
But we now know we have her absolute correct story of what happened.
And so again, without going into this for three hours, she is interviewed, Mrs. Swinney is interviewed, and they call the two numbers that were on there.
Well, first they call the phone company, and the phone company said, well, these numbers were both unlisted at that time.
So I can't tell you who had that by law.
I can't tell you who had those numbers.
Well, that didn't make sense to me.
And what's the odds that two entirely different phone numbers who appear together in something seemingly so random should both be unlisted?
So I had a couple of researchers, I was living in Connecticut at the time, so I had a couple of researchers go down to our public library in Raleigh and pull out the 1963 phone book that would have been current at the time.
And they didn't have any names to go with.
There was, of course, the name John Hurt on there.
Apparently, the first pass, they didn't notice that.
But then on the second pass, they saw both of those numbers belonged to men named John Hurt.
At separate addresses.
At separate, totally separate.
Yeah.
Literally, if you know Raleigh, on other sides, opposite sides of the city.
So that gave the House Assassinations Committee something to go on.
They looked very closely at one of the numbers, and apparently the person that had that was very young at the time.
He was a high school dropout.
He was working in the automobile tire recapping business.
This is the way they described him.
And they saw right away this guy was too young and he had nothing to do with it because the other one they got in contact with and started doing research on turned out to be in World War II an army counterintelligence agent.
Let's pick up the story from then, Grover, I think.
We'll take a break.
We'll come right back.
We'll talk some more about this because this is where it starts to get interesting.
Why would Lee Oswald, in his cell waiting for the next part in the justice procedure overnight, he wanted to make a call to one of two numbers?
These numbers, by a process of using the phone book eventually, these numbers turn out to be for somebody with the same name, John Hurt, but different people at different parts of Raleigh, North Carolina.
One of whom seems to be completely unconnected in any way because he has quite a routine mundane job, but the other one has a much more interesting background.
What on earth was all this about?
Grover Proctor in the U.S. The intriguing case, a story little told of Lee Oswald trying to make a phone call.
Two numbers in his cell on that fateful night in Dallas, Texas.
Security people are there.
They're monitoring.
And then they leave.
The phone calls are not connected.
Years later, a document reveals the numbers that Lee Harvey Oswald or Lee Oswald gave.
Those numbers were for Riley, North Carolina, one for a person with a mundane ordinary job, one for a person who had a Secret Service connection in World War II and may have had other connections.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Back to Grover now.
So, Grover, by using the simple ploy of finding the phone book for the relevant year 1963, even though investigators have been told it wasn't possible to find out who those numbers were for because they were what we call in the UK X directory, they were unlisted.
But in fact, you found by going back to the phone book they were listed.
One of them turns out to be ordinary, one of them turns out to be not.
What happened then?
Well, they contacted this other John Hurt, John David Hurt, as his full name was.
And he is really a rather sad character in this whole thing because he had a very bad life in the sense of health problems and everything.
And none of us knew it at the time they were talking with him, but he was two years away from his death at that point from the many things that he suffered from.
But he also was diagnosed in absentia by certain people who knew of his behaviors as having psychological problems as well.
And that was pretty well known.
He had served with great distinction in World War II and counterintelligence to the point that even though he was an enlisted man when they came in, when he came into the army during the war, after the war, they offered him a commission and asked him to make a career of intelligence work with the army.
He turned them down.
We're not sure why.
He never gave a reason that has stayed with us.
And so that was his life.
He became an alcoholic, as I said, had very serious problems.
The House Assassinations Committee interviewed him.
He said, no, he had no idea of Lee Oswald other than he knew him from the news that weekend.
He said that he was a great lover of, he, John Hurt, was a great lover of John Kennedy.
And he said, as opposed to talking with him, I would have just as soon put a bullet in him, meaning Oswald.
And he denied everything quite convincingly.
And their life was really, he and his wife's life were kind of turned upside down from that point because news of this call started leaking out.
I became aware of it shortly after the House Assassinations Committee published their final report, in which, by the way, they make no mention of the Raleigh call.
But I ended up talking to the chief counsel Bob Blakey and several other people involved with that.
They wrote up a, I think it was a 24, 28 page report on what they found out about the Raleigh call.
It's never been published until Bob Blakey sent it to me.
I transcribed it and it's now sitting on my website for anybody to look at free of charge.
But they came away saying, we don't think that this is false.
We think that the story that Mrs. Trion told is true.
Everything that we have seen verifies what she said.
He, Oswald, wanted to make the call.
He, Oswald, apparently had memorized two phone numbers, both coincidentally to a person named John Hurt.
He even knew the area code.
I was actually a little suspicious of that to begin with because I was thinking, did we even have area codes here in America in 1963?
Turns out.
Looked at that same 63 phone book, and yeah, we had area codes.
So everything rings true.
So what happened?
I'll tell you a little bit more, just a little bit more about John Hurt in a minute.
But remember, I told you about the former CIA officer that I interviewed about the Nagshead School for Defectors.
What he also told me.
The one who said that he'd seen Lee Oswald at that place.
Well, that was someone else.
But he told me that he said, one day you will find evidence that Oswald was there because he fits the profile.
And so he's the same one that said to me, and this was the main takeaway at the time for us doing the research.
The main takeaway was he said he, Lee Oswald, was following standard spycraft.
Somebody had given him the name of a man, a man name, sorry, and his location and said, if you ever get into trouble, don't call us because we don't want this link to be known.
So here's your cutout.
That's the name of a person that is a third uninvolved, indirect person.
Call Jod Hurt, Raleigh, North Carolina, and he will get in touch with us and we'll make it right and don't worry about it.
And so that's what I was told.
And again, Richard Schweiker's fingerprints of intelligence keeps flashing in my mind as I'm hearing this.
I'm hearing a former CIA officer tell me that Oswald is following strict spycraft behaviors.
So let me just go back and see how all of this makes sense because it's extraordinary from what I'm hearing.
Yes, I can understand that spycraft works that way.
You know, I've watched enough Michael Caine films to know that all kinds of things happen and people get given pieces of equipment or numbers or names to memorize.
Yes, but I wonder why he would have two numbers both for the same name, the same person effectively.
How could that have happened?
Was that a mistake?
Was that on purpose?
Why was that?
Here's how I have pieced it together.
Here's the set of steps that I think makes sense.
If I find out later, oh, you got this wrong here and here, okay, fine.
But this, to me, makes sense.
Somebody told him that.
Somebody said the words, call John Hurt, H-U-R-T, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he'll help you.
Oswald took that away and got to thinking about it as the assassination got closer and closer, and he began to put two and two and two together.
And he called directory assistants, or what we used to call information at that point, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and said, I need a phone number for John Hurt in Raleigh, North Carolina.
And he was almost certainly told, we have two John Hurts.
Which one do you want?
I don't know.
Well, give me both.
And they did.
He wrote them down and he obviously memorized them because he was able from the jail cell without, you know, all of his possessions had been taken from him, his wallet and everything.
So it had to have come from his mind.
He was able to recall not just the man's name, not just the city, but the two phone numbers that he had memorized, even down to the area code.
Again, standard spy craft.
And do I think in my heart of hearts that he actually was working for the CIA or some other?
No, I really don't.
No evidence has ever surfaced that indicates that.
Of course, it wouldn't because they are spy organizations.
But I really think that everything points towards someone wanting a way to really cut themselves off from him if he was used as the Patsy that he later said he was.
He would call this man that anyone in the spycraft business who cared to know about it would understand that this John Hurt's life had deteriorated to the point that he was an alcoholic.
He was known to the State Bureau of Investigation at calling the governor's office and making threats and doing all these kinds of things that this poor John Hurt man did in his mental illness and in his alcoholism.
And so if Oswald called this man and it came to be known, well, this would just be one more blind dead end, which I think they expected it would stay right there.
No one expected Mrs. Trion to write down the phone numbers at the same time Oswald was saying them and hold on to that slip.
And so there we have circumstantial and a little bit of physical evidence that points toward the scenario that I just said.
But surely then with further investigation, if it was possible to do that at this kind of remove, you would be able to track the connections of the John who's of interest in Raleigh, North Carolina versus the one who wasn't of interest.
And by tracing back his connections, even if he wasn't physically able to help you, which he wouldn't be in the state that he was in, his connections surely would tell a story, wouldn't they?
Well, certainly his service in the Army in World War II as counterintelligence agent or officer makes this story much sexier, spicier, more interesting.
If he had been a plumber during World War II, I doubt we would be having this conversation, sure.
But I take it, and again, this is my assumption, don't know.
I'm not, I can't look into the minds of these people that were running Oswald, but they wanted someone who had absolutely nothing to say to the authorities if the authorities ever contacted him.
And when his past became known, it would be just another one of those things to pique people's interest and maybe keep their minds and eyes off things that they didn't want them to be looking at.
I mean, they knew that any connection to John David Hurt in Raleigh, North Carolina was going to go nowhere.
But they also knew that one day Grover Proctor and Howard Hughes would be having this conversation, fascinated by this and all the other things laid on the table.
Of course, that's not true with you because you've done all these years of interviews and the research I've done as well.
But nevertheless, you know what I'm saying?
It is false flag 101.
So are you saying, do you think, Grover, that somebody who laid this elaborate trail, and you don't think, and by the sounds of it, I don't think I think that it was the legitimate Secret Service that was involved in this.
It was something else operating with the same modus operandi.
You think that actually they intended, at some remove, like 50, 60, 70 years, intended this to be known at some point, but intended to set a trail so circuitous that it wouldn't be unraveled or partially unraveled until years and years and years later, when it was no use for bringing anybody to justice.
I know this because I've been researching this, as I said, 1980.
And what they have done by picking John Hurt, this particular John Hurt, out of a bag or file or whatever, is that they have erected one more brick wall in the assassination story that idiots like me have stood for the last 40 years kicking the wall, trying to knock it down, and it's not going to knock down.
And that's anybody who wants the truth of what happened that day never to be known loves all those brick walls we're spending our time looking at and trying to knock down.
But maybe they overplayed their hand a little.
Maybe hubris, maybe just didn't think about it.
But by thinking, well, if we use this poor guy that we have in the files here who's having a hard time and has got a bad reputation, maybe since he's been accused in the past of phoning the governor of North Carolina's office and making threats, maybe we can make it spin it so that people will think that he was calling into the Dallas jail to talk to Oswald.
And in fact, early on, that's what some people speculated.
It's pretty clear now that didn't happen.
And the reason it didn't happen is because Lee Oswald thought to get both numbers.
If the call was incoming, there's no reason two numbers would have been on that sheet.
And I don't think they could have counted on that.
But had the document, the one that I'm holding a copy of at the moment, that little slip, had that not been kept, then this story would be a lot harder to tell.
It couldn't be told because Mrs. Sweeney, the supervisor, was certainly not going to tell it.
She didn't even want to talk to the House Assassinations Committee.
Again, a very nervous kind of lady who just thought that people were out to get her and so forth.
The government, she had fear of that.
And she even asked the representative from the committee, do I have to talk about this?
Do I have to tell you this?
So she was trying.
So she wasn't going to tell the story.
Mrs. Treon had ample opportunity to have her 15 minutes worth of fame, but elected not to, told it to this one friend at the dinner party, and things blossomed from there.
I'll tell you another little bit about the story.
You can find this in my manuscript online.
But I've just discovered this in the last about seven years.
But remember the sequence that I told you about?
The dinner party, friend finds out about it, tells the sheriff, sheriff tells the FBI, FBI comes down.
Somehow or another, the affidavit gets there.
All right.
In that time period, about a week to two weeks after the date of that initial dinner party, a major news organization in the United States has a copy of both the unsigned affidavit and the telephone slip.
And when I tell you, certainly when the American listeners hear the name of this news agency, there'll be a lot of laughter.
But somehow or another, the FBI or somebody leaked that information to the National Enquirer.
Really?
Now, the National Enquirer, of course, is kind of like we have a magazine in the UK called Private Eye.
Something like that, yes.
Maybe not quite as salacious, but yes, absolutely.
And it had that reputation.
Actually, the National Inquirer has a little bit better reputation now, certainly than it did in 1968, which is when the dinner party was.
But that information goes to the National Inquirer and not to Woodward and Bernstein.
Well, if you really didn't want it known, but you wanted to feed this guy something, again, to take people's attention away from three bullets, four bullets, bullet from the front, all that sort of thing.
If you want to feed them something that will keep them going around in circles for 40 years like me, you'd feed them something like this.
And you would expect to see something like this in the Inquirer.
And your reaction, your predicted reaction was, well, this is just the garbage that they make up.
Well, in this case, turned out not to be.
I have looked and looked and looked for someplace that Keeps archives of National Inquirers that, you know, microfilm.
Obviously, no research library of any reputation is going to keep that.
And I haven't been able to find that the National Inquirer itself has that available to the public for research, but I would love to go back and find any articles that were written.
I even know the name of the reporter that it was given to.
And his name was Ian Calder.
And Ian Calder, a reporter for the Inquirer in 1968, ultimately became president and CEO of National Enquirer.
But unfortunately, he's not with us at this point, I understand, to be able to talk to you about it.
So anyway, I know all that information.
I just haven't been able to find those articles.
And it would be interesting to see if he had anything that he was given or that he uncovered that made it into one of those stories, if he wrote more than one, that we don't know today.
And so that continues to be one of my little side notes of will I ever be able to find that.
I kind of doubt it, but we'll see.
40 years of research into all of this, a fascinating story to uncover.
You don't sound to me like the kind of man who lets a thing go.
So presumably you're continuing with this, as you've just indicated there are things that you would like to discover, maybe not be able to discover.
Is there anywhere else you can take this?
Well, obviously, as the president's office, and we've now been dealing with three different presidents, trying to get them to release all of those classified documents that we were told by Congress in 1993, I think it was, had to be released now, meaning in our time.
And some of those documents are still not available.
And also the Secret Service.
And let me tell our American listeners here, because I know you have a lot.
When I say Secret Service, you know what I mean, but the British might not.
We over here call the Secret Service that one specific organization that protects the president and also works for the Treasury Department to uncover counterfeiters.
Secret Service, I get the impression from watching James Bond and other things, kind of means the whole security system over in England.
And so we do have a slightly different meaning there.
But as we go forward on this, there's only so many doors that could possibly be open.
And I'll continue to look for them as I can.
I see now that a lot of the researchers that knew nothing about this are finally, they picked up on my stuff and they're putting it in their books and so forth.
And some are treating it just exactly the same way you did.
You were very accurate in your opening here.
And some just sort of make things up and assumptions that are wildly speculative and they have no sources for whatsoever.
So trying to keep those separate in the public's mind is probably one of the biggest tasks that I have now.
What an astonishing story, Grover.
Thank you for telling it.
I hadn't heard it before.
I'm certainly glad I've heard it now.
If people want to read about you, what is your website?
It's groverproctor.us slash jfk.
Sadly, the one person who would have the answers to this is Lee Oswald, and he ain't talking.
What a story.
No, he's not.
Thank you so much.
Grover Proctor, please check him out online.
And there are, I think, a couple of presentations in video on YouTube that he's done.
And the reason that I heard about him was through one of those presentations.
I think it's a really compelling story.
Wonder what you think.
You can always get in touch with me by going to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
And please don't forget my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Thank you very much.
Let's hope we get more spring days like the one that we've had today because it's a real in the middle of everything that's going on at the moment.
It's an absolute real tonic, don't you think?
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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