Scott McCabe smccabe@washingtonexaminer.com
09/29/11
http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/2011/09/ex-official-accused-massive-national-archives-theft
A former head of the National Archives department that kept the Zapruder film of President Kennedy's assassination has been charged with stealing sound recordings from the agency over the past 10 years.
Leslie Charles Waffen, 66, who worked for the National Archives and Records Administration for 40 years, was charged with theft of U.S. property. Court documents said officials recovered 955 sound recording items from his Rockville home in October 2010.
A plea hearing has been set for Tuesday before federal Judge Peter J. Messitte in Greenbelt. Waffen faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
No attorney was listed for Waffen in court documents.
Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said Waffen was the head of the motion picture, sound and video unit at the archives' facility in College Park.
The items recovered from Waffen's home were not known to have gone missing, Archives Inspector General Paul Brachfeld said, but their historic content would be apparent.
"I think the American public ... a lot of it will be things they read about in their history books," Brachfeld told the Associated Press.
In 2004, Waffen was quoted in the New York Times about his department's efforts to preserve recordings from an open microphone on a police motorcycle during Kennedy's motorcade into Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the only known audio recording of the president's assassination.
Waffen's department also had custody of the Zapruder film, the famous 8 mm color home movie of the assassination.
In October, special agents from Brachfeld's office served a search warrant at Waffen's home in the 500 block of Saddle Ridge Lane in Rockville.
Archives investigators located boxes of materials and "identified [the items] right away as theirs" in a basement room and, after securing the contents, removed the boxes from the house and loaded them onto the truck.
The raid occurred after a two-year government report cited "significant weaknesses" in the agency's security and a year after another report found that several important historical documents, including the original patent for the Wright Brothers' flying machine, had gone missing.
Showing posts with label Zapruder Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zapruder Film. Show all posts
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Whaddup, Steamshovel?
Whaddup, Steamshovel?
by Kenn Thomas
SteamshovelPress.com
Good news! The new Steamshovel-related book, Conspiracy Files, is now available in Australia. The publishers plan US and UK editions some time in the near future, but anxious readers who want to check it out right way, go to www.murdochbooks.com.au/conspiracy.htm and have it shipped.
The book has a slick, color, nice interior graphics, hardback design.
It presents a gamut of historical conspiracy information useful to the novice and at the same time a wealth of arcane detail that will satisfy even veteran conspiracy watchers that they came away learning something new. Kinda like an issue of Steamshovel.
That leads to the bad news. As many readers have noticed, the Steamshovel has stalled for some time now. It has no advertising revenue streams and the subscription money it brings in has been barely enough over the years to get its motor to turn over.
For many months it has survived only on the well wishes of its considerable and devoted audience. Alas, with the last round of postal and printer increases, even that no longer makes it possible to continue to produce the hard copy magazine for the present time.
This conclusion fell upon Steamshovel with one issue left under production, and this in turn led to a survival strategy. Steamshovel Press #23 is now available electronically, as a PDF file. For subscribers, this means that they need only supply their e-mail address to have it sent. Newbies can receive it for $10, payable the standard way (via money order or check payable to "Kenn Thomas" at POB 210553, St. Louis, MO 63121), or via Steamshovel's new PayPal account.
It may be possible to salvage Steamshovel from the junk yard of conspiracy zines past if this new electronic form of the magazine sells well, with the goal of bringing back the hard copy. Steamshovel can produce a new hard copy for as little as a thousand dollars, and in this era of niche marketing that's not such a large amount.
In addition, however, finally moving all the way into electronic publishing may push the operation into new realms. If this works, Steamshovel has plans to make available a wide range of materials from its archives through electronic format, including PDFs of many classic Steamshovel books; other arcane an underground literature; and DVDs of things taken from the airwaves and public events that shed new light on the parapolitical environs.
The first of this new product line: the lecture I gave at Conspiracy Con in San Jose earlier this year. This hour-long DVD costs $10, post paid. Its title: "Parapolitics On the Planet Earth", and in it I explore the changing meaning of the JFK assassination in the popular culture, replete with video of the Zapruder film; Abraham Zapruder himself just in from the "shoot"; and the film's first TV airing-all of it leading to a discussion of the most currently relevant assassinations, centering on Alexander Litvinenko. Plus I cover the history of pop culture's falling out with the covert world, from the 1970s defections of the likes of John Stockwell and Phillip Agee to the Valerie Plame affair, connected as they are to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. So it's a nice little trot over current affairs seen through the JFK prism.
None of that is a hard sell, just "what it is" in the parlance. Steamshovelpress.com remains the magazine presence on the web, and I still pop around on various conspiracy discussion lists with various insights and footnotes placing current and historical events into the perspective of the conspiracy minded reading public. Gasp, a Steamshovel blog may yet appear. The pathway back to actually producing the magazine, however, will be this electronic one, and I hope readers are willing to follow along with it.
by Kenn Thomas
SteamshovelPress.com
Good news! The new Steamshovel-related book, Conspiracy Files, is now available in Australia. The publishers plan US and UK editions some time in the near future, but anxious readers who want to check it out right way, go to www.murdochbooks.com.au/conspiracy.htm and have it shipped.
The book has a slick, color, nice interior graphics, hardback design.
It presents a gamut of historical conspiracy information useful to the novice and at the same time a wealth of arcane detail that will satisfy even veteran conspiracy watchers that they came away learning something new. Kinda like an issue of Steamshovel.
That leads to the bad news. As many readers have noticed, the Steamshovel has stalled for some time now. It has no advertising revenue streams and the subscription money it brings in has been barely enough over the years to get its motor to turn over.
For many months it has survived only on the well wishes of its considerable and devoted audience. Alas, with the last round of postal and printer increases, even that no longer makes it possible to continue to produce the hard copy magazine for the present time.
This conclusion fell upon Steamshovel with one issue left under production, and this in turn led to a survival strategy. Steamshovel Press #23 is now available electronically, as a PDF file. For subscribers, this means that they need only supply their e-mail address to have it sent. Newbies can receive it for $10, payable the standard way (via money order or check payable to "Kenn Thomas" at POB 210553, St. Louis, MO 63121), or via Steamshovel's new PayPal account.
It may be possible to salvage Steamshovel from the junk yard of conspiracy zines past if this new electronic form of the magazine sells well, with the goal of bringing back the hard copy. Steamshovel can produce a new hard copy for as little as a thousand dollars, and in this era of niche marketing that's not such a large amount.
In addition, however, finally moving all the way into electronic publishing may push the operation into new realms. If this works, Steamshovel has plans to make available a wide range of materials from its archives through electronic format, including PDFs of many classic Steamshovel books; other arcane an underground literature; and DVDs of things taken from the airwaves and public events that shed new light on the parapolitical environs.
The first of this new product line: the lecture I gave at Conspiracy Con in San Jose earlier this year. This hour-long DVD costs $10, post paid. Its title: "Parapolitics On the Planet Earth", and in it I explore the changing meaning of the JFK assassination in the popular culture, replete with video of the Zapruder film; Abraham Zapruder himself just in from the "shoot"; and the film's first TV airing-all of it leading to a discussion of the most currently relevant assassinations, centering on Alexander Litvinenko. Plus I cover the history of pop culture's falling out with the covert world, from the 1970s defections of the likes of John Stockwell and Phillip Agee to the Valerie Plame affair, connected as they are to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. So it's a nice little trot over current affairs seen through the JFK prism.
None of that is a hard sell, just "what it is" in the parlance. Steamshovelpress.com remains the magazine presence on the web, and I still pop around on various conspiracy discussion lists with various insights and footnotes placing current and historical events into the perspective of the conspiracy minded reading public. Gasp, a Steamshovel blog may yet appear. The pathway back to actually producing the magazine, however, will be this electronic one, and I hope readers are willing to follow along with it.
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