Jim Marrs was born in Fort
Worth, Texas, on 5th December 5, 1943. His father, a strict Baptist,
sold structural steel for a company in St.
Louis. Marrs began working as a journalist while at junior high
school. After graduating from University of North Texas in 1966 he
attended Graduate School at Texas Tech in Lubbock.
After graduating from University
of North Texas he joined the United States Army.
On his release in 1968 he joined the Fort
Worth Star-Telegram. He served as police reporter and general
assignments reporter covering stories locally, in Europe and the Middle
East. After a leave of absence to serve with a Fourth Army intelligence
unit during the Vietnam War, he became
military and aerospace writer for the newspaper and an investigative
reporter.
Marrs began to take an
interest in the assassination of John
F. Kennedy. After
interviewing several members of the Dallas Police Department he became
convinced him that the Warren
Commission was
a cover-up. Marrs continued to investigate the case and interviewed
several important witnesses as well as city and county officials.
In 1976 Marrs began teaching
a course about the assassination for the University of Texas at Arlington.
He left the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
in 1980 and worked as a freelance journalist while continuing to investigate
the death of Kennedy. Marrs eventually became convinced that Lee
Harvey Oswald had
been set up by the government and in 1989 he published Crossfire:
The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Published
to critical acclaim and reached the New
York Times Paperback Non-Fiction Best Seller list in mid-February
1992. It also became a basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK
and he served as a chief consultant for both the film's screenplay
and production.
Since 1980, Mr. Marrs has
been a freelance writer, author and public relations consultant. He
also published a rural weekly newspaper along with a monthly tourism
tabloid, a cable television show and several videos.
Beginning in 1992, Mr.
Marrs spent three years researching and completing a non-fiction book
on a top-secret government program involving the psychic phenomenon
known as remote viewing only to have it mysteriously canceled as it
was going to press in the summer of 1995. Within two months, the story
of military-developed remote viewing broke nationally in the Washington
Post after the CIA held a press
conference revealing the program but putting their own spin on psychic
studies. Psi Spies is now available
from JimMarrs.com.
In May, 1997, Marrs' in-depth
investigation of UFOs, Alien Agenda,
was published by HarperCollins. Marrs has been a featured speaker
at a number of national conferences including the Annual International
UFO Congress and the Annual Gulf Breeze UFO Conference. Publisher's
Weekly described Alien Agenda
as "the most entertaining and complete overview of flying saucers
and their crew in years." The paperback edition was released
in mid-1998 and has since become the best-selling UFO book ever in
the United States. Beginning in 2000, he began
teaching a course on UFOs at the University of Texas at Arlington.
In early 2000, HarperCollins
published Rule by Secrecy, which
traced the hidden history that connects modern secret societies to
the Ancient Mysteries. In 2003, his book The
War on Freedom probed the conspiracies of the 9/11 attacks
and their aftermath.
Jim Marrs
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (1990)
Whatever information Kilgallen
learned and from whatever source, many researchers believe it brought
about her strange death. She told attorney Mark Lane: "They've
killed the President, (and) the government is not prepared to tell
us the truth . . . " and that she planned to "break the
case." To other friends she said: "This has to be a conspiracy!
. . . I'm going to break the real story and have the biggest scoop
of the century." And in her last column item regarding the assassination,
published on September 3, 1965, Kilgallen wrote: "This story
isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive - and
there are a lot of them." But on November 8, 1965, there was
one less reporter. That day Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her
home. It was initially reported that she died of a heart attack, but
quickly this was changed to an overdose of alcohol and pills.
(2)
Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (1990)
One witness was Warren
Reynolds, who chased Tippit's killer. He, too, failed to identify
Oswald as Tippit's killer until after he was shot in the head two
months later. After recovering, Reynolds identified Oswald to the
Warren Commission. (A suspect was arrested in the Reynolds shooting,
but released when a former Jack Ruby stripper named Betty Mooney MacDonald
provided an alibi. One week after her word released the suspect, MacDonald
was arrested by Dallas Police and a few hours later was found hanged
in her jail cell. Neither the FBI nor the Warren Commission investigated
this strange incident.)
(3)
Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (1990)
In a remarkable attempt
to resolve the issue, Nosenko underwent "hostile interrogation."
He was kept in solitary confinement for 1,277 days under intense physical
and psychological pressure.
He was put on a diet of
weak tea, macaroni, and porridge, given nothing to read, a light was
left burning in his unheated cell twenty-four hours a day, and his
guards were forbidden to speak with him or even smile. His Isolation
was so complete that Nosenko eventually began to hallucinate, according
to CIA testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
Toward the end of this ordeal, Nosenko was given at least two lie
detector tests by the CIA. He failed both. But Nosenko did not crack.
The believers of Nosenko,
headed by the CIA's Richard Helms and J. Edgar Hoover, took his intransigence
to mean that he was telling the truth but the KGB having no interest
in Oswald.
But doubts remained. So
at the CIA's request, the Warren Commission obligingly made no reference
to Nosenko. Angleton retired from the CIA and later wrote: "The
... exoneration or official decision that Nosenko is/was bona fide
is a travesty. It is an indictment of the CIA and, if the FBI subscribes
to it, of that bureau too. The ramifications for the U.S. intelligence
community, and specifically the CIA, are tragic."
The counterintelligence
faction, led by Angleton, still believes that Nosenko's defection
was contrived by the KGB for two purposes: to allay suspicions that
the Soviets had anything to do with the JFK assassination to cover
for Soviet "moles," or agents deep within US intelligence.
(4)
Robert
Wilonsky, Dallas Observer (6th July, 2000)
Marrs was
asleep in his dorm room when events transpired at 12:30 p.m. November
22, 1963, to wake him from his reverie. Like Jim Garrison in JFK,
Marrs would sleep no more when he heard John Kennedy had been shot
while driving through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, gunned down by the bullets
of an assassin. His initial reaction to the news of the president's
shooting was one of relief, happiness. His roommate woke him to tell
him what had happened, and all Marrs could say was one word: "Good."
By his own
admission, he was then a "typical Texas redneck" who thought
Kennedy was a handsome man determined to hand the country over to
the liberals and blacks. He had no use for the man or his utopian
vision of one nation under Camelot. But like the rest of the country,
he was stuck to the television, watching every second of news coverage.
When Walter Cronkite showed up at 1 p.m. to announce Kennedy's death,
Marrs was watching and, he insists, thinking about how he could get
involved in covering the biggest news story to come out of North Texas
in decades. Even now, he has all the newspaper clippings from November
1963. They would, in time, become his life's roadmap.
|
Texas journalist
Jim Marrs pulls together a wealth of facts and new evidence
to reveal the glaring defects in official versions of what happened
that fateful day in November 1963 when President Kennedy was
shot. Backed up by rare photos and evidence from a dramatic
video-sequence, Crossfire is the startling and comprehensive
account of America's most infamous crime. Disturbing by its
very thoroughness, this book poses and answers new questions
on an event that too many people in high places have been trying
to lay to rest.
(Jim Marrs, Carroll & Graf, ISBN 0 88184 648 1)
|
Jim
Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, Carroll & Graf
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