Daniel Marvin was born
in Detroit on 10th October 1933. He joined
the US Army in June, 1952. Marvin was commissioned
as a Second Lieutenant and in 1963 he volunteered for Counterinsurgency
and Guerrilla Warfare training. The following year became a student
at the Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As a
member of the Special Operations Forces, he claims he was involved
in assassinating enemies of the United States.
In 1964 he was part of a contingency mission to blow the hydroelectric
plant at the Aswan High Dam in Egypt,
under construction at the time by the Soviet
Union.
Marvin commanded a Green
Beret Team A-424 in South Vietnam (December
1965 - August 1966) and he was
head of a 12 man Special Forces team that was ordered to attack the
Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia.
In June 1966, the CIA asked Marvin to assassinate Cambodian Crown
Prince Norodum Sihanouk, using his Hoa Hao Irregular fighters in an
operation designed to make it appear to have been carried out by the
National Liberation Front. This mission was
accepted but later aborted when President Lyndon
B. Johnson "failed
to honor the quid pro quo wherein Marvin demanded that Johnson deny
the enemy their safe havens inside Cambodia and announce that fact
publicly in the United States".
Marvin’s next foreign
tour was with the 46th Special Forces in Lop Buri, Thailand where
he commanded the Special Forces Logistical Operations Center which
provided unconventional logistical support to all covert operations
in that area of the world. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in May,
1973 and started
a furniture refurbishing shop in Trumansburg.
In May 1995, Marvin claimed
to have been solicited by an agent of the Central
Intelligence Agency to
"terminate" William
Pitzer. An interview
with Marvin later appeared in the sixth episode of the television
series The Men Who Killed Kennedy
(November, 1995).
Daniel Marvin is also the
author of the book, Expendable
Elite (2003). He is currently at work on The
Smoking Gun: The Conspiracy to Kill LCDR William Bruce Pitzer.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Expendable
Elite
(1)
Daniel Marvin, Assassination
of JFK Forum (10th May, 2004)
Was commissioned
as a Second Lieutenant and went on to retire as a Lieutenant Colonel.
A fully qualified Special Forces Officer (Green Beret), Master Parachutist
and Combat Infantryman, he was experienced in covert operations: A
veteran of eight combat campaigns in the Korean and Vietnam Wars,
he was thrice decorated for heroism. More significantly he accepted
the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour on 29 January 1984 and
since that day he has fearlessly crusaded for truth and justice with
the goal of fighting evil that dwells in certain agencies or personnel
in our government.
Marvin was schooled in
unconventional warfare and learned the fundamentals of guerrilla warfare,
special demolitions, underwater demolitions, assassination and terrorism
techniques, civic action and psychological warfare operations from
veteran Green Beret, CIA and US Navy SEAL Team instructors. In 1964
he volunteered to organize and command a covert operations team of
eight Green Beret volunteers; the first Green Berets to be prepared
to employ the man-portable atomic demolition device (SADM) with an
explosive force equivalent to ten tons of TNT. Their contingency mission
was to blow the hydroelectric plant at the ASWAN High Dam in Egypt,
under construction at the time by the USSR . That same year he and
Green Beret Master Sergeant Joseph Hill were involved in a bizarre
series of interactions with the leadership of the Boston Mafia, giving
them personal insight into the unique alliance that existed between
the CIA, the Mob and the U.S. Army’s Special Forces when their
unique talents were needed to conduct extremely critical covert operations,
including assassinations and sabotage.
(2)
Allan
Eaglesham, Pitzer:
An Update (April 1999)
Tests by the FBI determined that the revolver must have been held
at a distance of more than 3 ft when discharged, otherwise Pitzer
would have had powder burns around the fatal wound in his right temple.
This raises the question as to whether a 142-grain non-Special slug
fired from a distance of say, 4 ft, passing through skull bone twice,
would have sufficient kinetic energy to indent a blackboard.
(3)
William
F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King
(2003)
After Orders to
Kill was published, I received a call from Colonel Dan Marvin,
a former Green Beret, who said that when he was at Fort Bragg, he
was approached and asked to carry out an assassination of an American
citizen (William Pitzer) with sensitive materials in the United States.
He refused, saying that he had never signed on for that work inside
the US. Marvin said he was a sniper and had no hesitation in plying
his trade on foreign soil, but he drew the line when asked to kill
Americans in the US. He knows another professional was approached
and that the target died of an unexplained not long after.
(4)
Daniel
Marvin, Smoking
Gun - The Pitzer File (2002)
Explosive in its
many revelations, it is tentatively titled, Smoking Gun - The Conspiracy
to Kill LCDR William Bruce Pitzer. Kent Heiner and I will co-author
this work. I have found Kent to be a man of integrity anxious to portray
the truth in such a way as to elicit a crusade-like fervor among his
readers. He is unafraid, once personally satisfied it is fact, to
point the finger of suspicion at those persons or entities that are
guilty of wrongdoing or its cover up. There is no substitute for truth
and justice and it is that fact that dictates what is written and
referenced in the factual accounts filling this book of truth, telling
the reader of murder, intrigue, intimidation and subterfuge. Those
are the hard and fast elements that surround the October 1966 termination
of a US Naval Officer. They also relate to the probable destruction
of irreplaceable evidence that could, if available, contribute immeasurably
to an eruption of truth by virtual reality to encompass, capture and
judge those persons and forces that engineered, perpetrated and covered
up the assassination of a President who was getting in the way of
a blossoming hierarchy of an evil-permeated government.
It is my personal judgment,
shared by members of the deceased’s family and a Navy associate
in whom he had confided, that his having sole possession of irrefutable
photographic evidence of the actual autopsy of JFK, evidence that
would prove it to have been multiple bullet wounds that caused JFK’s
death, thereby destroying the myth of a lone gunman our government
had perpetuated, is what gained him a place on our government’s
“hit list.”
Not wanting to take away
from Heiner’s book, but wanting to provide the expectant reader
an inkling of why the book Smoking Gun should be on his or her “must
read” list, I offer the following questions that attack government
denial of a conspiracy and their mythical insistence on the suicide
theory:
(1) Why else, during the
first week of August in 1965, would I have been asked by an agent
of the Central Intelligence Agency to kill William Bruce Pitzer, telling
me that he was a “traitor” about to sell State’s secrets
to the enemy?
(2) Why, if he were going
to use a pistol he allegedly had in his possession to commit suicide,
would he write and place a note in his office that read, “Remind
me to return gun to Sec Off (security office)?”
(3) Is it proper to conjecture
that whoever killed Pitzer waited patiently until the 29th day of
October in 1966 when Pitzer, close to retirement, would retrieve the
highly sensitive evidence from its hiding place (perhaps in the false
ceiling of his office?), murder Pitzer and retrieve (perhaps destroy?)
that incriminating and indeed irreplaceable photographic evidence?
(4) Why was the weapon
that killed Pitzer assumed to have been in his possession when there
was no proof that he had, in fact, ever signed for the weapon on that
day? The FBI investigation states that “an undated notation that
a .38 caliber revolver, serial number 311546 had been checked out
for Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer. The signature under
this notation was illegible,” (emphasis mine). I don’t know
about others who read this who had experience in the military - but
during my 21 years in Uncle Sam’s Army I never knew nor heard
of a weapon, particularly a sidearm, being taken from an arms room
(or security office) without the individual himself signing for that
weapon on a specific dated entry.
(5) Why are there two death
certificates for one death?
(6) Why did the FBI investigation
tell of one being prepared by Deputy Medical Examiner John G. Ball
of the State of Maryland, who, according to the FBI report, told the
Navy’s Investigative Service that he (John G. Ball) had “observed
muzzle marks around the wound and powder burns” when Pitzer’s
autopsy findings showed no powder burns or muzzle marks?
(7) Why was the US Navy’s
Death Certificate on Pitzer dated 1 Feb 67 when he was killed on 29
Oct 66?
(8) Why, when the 143 page
documentation (including undated cover letter of three pages) of the
FBI investigation into the death of William Bruce Pitzer provided
by the FBI and received by me on 2 August 1997, included multiple
examples of US Navy requests made to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
for examination of certain items forwarded by the US Navy to the FBI,
specifically “A .38 caliber Smith & Wesson (S&W) revolver,
military issue, serial #311546 found near body” as noted in the
Naval Investigative Service Office Washington’s 1 November 1966
letter to J. Edgar Hoover (File # 20- BE/DEA/js Ser: 1956, is it a
fact that the complete report contains no reference to the finding
of or the lack of fingerprints or the lack thereof on this pistol?
The answer to the aforementioned question is extremely important inasmuch
as the investigative report tells of Pitzer committing suicide by
a right-handed self-inflicted handgun wound in the head and yet Pitzer’s
associate whom he had shared the fact and the essence of his secret
possession of the autopsy photos, Dennis D. David, told me unequivocally,
when I first spoke with him, that his friend William Bruce Pitzer
was indeed left handed.
(9) Why was the widow Pitzer
refused a copy of her husband’s autopsy for 25 years after his
death?
(10) Why did “Several
of the Captains and one of the Admirals” when they learned of
Livingstone’s book High Treason 2 the widow Pitzer related
to me on 31 Jan 96) tell her to “Stay out of it?”
(11) Why did the Widow
Pitzer seriously wonder, as she suggested to me on 5 Jan 95, “if
more were said about this (her husband’s death) if (her) compensation
might be stopped?”
(12) Last, but not the
least question to this date: Why has there not been a reinvestigation
into the death of William Bruce Pitzer when so much evidence relevant
to and supporting an assassination has been made public by this author
and others, including a courageous, now retired, career Navy man,
Dennis D. David. Dennis told me during a visit to Ithaca, New York,
where I lived at the time (and he has gone public with what he recalled)
that he had “personally seen the film, pictures and slides”
of the JFK autopsy with “Bill” Pitzer in “Bill’s”
office in the Audio Visual Department of the Navy’s Medical School
at Bethesda, Maryland in 1963.
(5)
Daniel
Marvin, The
Unconventional Warrior (2002)
I was behind my desk
at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, when we received word that President
Kennedy had been shot. Yuma was where we busied ourselves testing
parachutes and airdrop equipment of US and foreign origin. The news
of his assassination hit us, as it did the entire nation, like a shock-wave
and got me thinking about the Army’s Special Forces, remembering
what they had meant to JFK.
The very next day I volunteered
for Counterinsurgency and Guerrilla Warfare training. By mid-January
of 1964 I was a student at the Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg,
North Carolina and on my way to earning the right to wear the Green
Beret. I recalled how the Commander-in-Chief had described that special
headgear as “the symbol of excellence, the mark of distinction,
the badge of courage” and I wanted, more than anything, to be
a part of that elite group of unconventional warriors he had admired.
The training was accomplished
by highly motivated instructors, all of whom, with exception of the
few CIA “advisors,” had seen at least one year of combat
as a Green Beret. CIA personnel were involved in instruction related
to terrorism and assassination techniques, to the extent of going
into detail on how the JFK “hit” was perpetrated, including
film footage and photographs taken in Dealey Plaza that fateful day.
This Top Secret instruction was given on “Smoke Bomb Hill”
in an old cantonment area at Fort Bragg. One classroom-type wooden
building with raised stage, surrounded by barbed-wire topped fences
and patrolled by MPs or guard dogs, was the training facility used
for such highly classified subjects.
I shared a “gut feeling”
with a few others in my class that our CIA instructors had first-hand
knowledge of what happened in Dallas. A sobering thought, particularly
so in view of my motives for joining Special Forces. During a coffee
break one day, an instructor casually remarked on the “success
of the conspiracy in Dallas,” tending to confirm my suspicions
that the President’s murder was conceived, executed and covered
up by high-level echelons within our government. I attempted to rationalize
this by believing there had to have been compelling reasons, with
no malicious intent as such on the part of loyal Americans who deemed
it necessary, at significant risk to themselves, to wrest the White
House from one considered ill-equipped to lead our nation in those
troubled times.
What I subsequently gleaned
led me to believe that evil factions in certain agencies within our
government had engineered and executed the conspiracy that left President
Kennedy dead.
(6)
Daniel
Marvin, The
Unconventional Warrior (2002)
It was early in August,
1965 that I was asked by the CIA to kill US Navy Lieutenant Commander
William Bruce Pitzer. Shortly after lunch I was summoned to our headquarters
where Colonel C. W. Patten told me that a ‘Company man’
was waiting in the nearby pine trees to meet with me. Though Colonel
Patten was my commanding officer, he had no idea what it was about,
familiar only with the fact our visitor was looking for a ‘volunteer.’
“Its the way the ‘game’
is played,” I thought to myself, all the while feeling the beginnings
of an adrenaline surge, that shot of extra strength and endurance
needed to get me through impossible situations. My mind conjured up
wild thoughts about the yet unknown: what sort of intrigue might be
in store for the ‘volunteer’ he was seeking? Only too soon
I would learn what I thought at the time to be too much. I now thank
God for what I learned in that moment of truth from a CIA Operative
searching for a volunteer that would open a door to unlock part of
the mystery surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the
untimely demise of those who would open the can of worms that surrounded
the conspiracy cover-up.
Perhaps a hundred yards
into the wooded area behind Group headquarters a slender man of about
5’10” waited. Dressed casually in short sleeves, light slacks
and sunglasses appropriate for the August heat, he flashed his ID,
shook my hand and spoke to me in a low and steady voice, asking if
I would terminate a man who was preparing to give States secrets to
the enemy - a would-be traitor? Not only was I an overzealous patriot
at the time, I was trained in assassination techniques and told that
I could be asked to volunteer for such a mission outside the United
States. Performing that type of mission ‘outside the US’
was a crucial factor in our ‘understanding.’ Along with
the others undergoing the same type of training, I was led to believe
that the ‘resources’ of the Mafia were to be drawn on by
the CIA via an ‘arrangement’ with them for the fulfillment
of Stateside contracts. I was unaware of any rift that had developed
between family Dons and the CIA hierarchy. I assumed the ‘hit’
would be overseas as I was on special orders to report to the 5th
Special Forces in South Vietnam some four months hence. Without hesitation
I said “sure,” thinking that once I was in Vietnam I could
easily be flown via CIA owned Southern Air Transport to wherever my
‘target’ happened to be at that time. Once I had accomplished
my mission I would return to 5th Group as arranged by the agent in
charge, who would be the only one knowing where I’d been or what
I’d done.
It was then told to me
that it was Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer whom they wanted
“taken care of” before his retirement at Bethesda Naval
Hospital. I refused because it was to be done in the United States.
As I left, the agent went on to meet at least one other Green Beret
officer that afternoon, perhaps finding a volunteer to do his bidding:
LCDR William Bruce Pitzer was found shot dead in his office on 29
October 1966, victim of an assassination conspiracy, shot down in
cold blood before he could show the world what he knew about the JFK
assassination.
(7)
Daniel
Marvin, The Fourth
Decade (November, 1999)
It was when I first learned that one such target of our Central lntelligence
Agency, a Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer (who the CIA represented
to me to be a "traitor") was in fact an honorable Naval
officer caught up in the web of deceit that used subterfuge and intimidation
to cover-up the facts of the John F. Kennedy assassination, that I
decided to do what I could to help surface the truth about Pitzer
and the crucial role he played in the overall scheme of things. Conversations
with Pitzer’s widow, his two sons, and a nephew who held him
up as a hero and mentor, convinced me that Pitzer had valuable evidence
and that he had suffered the consequences of his refusal to be a part
of the cover up conspiracy.
