I am not a JFK assassination researcher, per se. I have spent a number of years researching the old controversy regarding allegations of U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War. I found something close to a smoking gun on the latter, namely declassified CIA communications intelligence reports from 1952 that quoted decrypted intercepts from Communist forces responding to bioweapons attack. Even so, my research continues as many aspects of the BW campaign, which was a highly secret compartmentalized program, have yet to be worked out.
It was while pursuing this research that I came across the connections between Dr. Winfred Overholser, the retired chief of St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a federally run mental health facility, and the Warren Commission. Overholser was supposed to help the WC construct the biographies of Oswald and Ruby for the Commission. McCloy had also opined that Overholser could help them plumb the mysteries surrounding the JFK autopsy and the FBI's own narrative of events. When Overholser died in Oct. 1964, his successor at St. Elizabeth's, Dr. Dale C. Cameron, took over as psychiatric consultant to the WC. There was also a brief mention in WC records of Overholser communicating with Dr. Bryant Wedge. Wedge had strong CIA connections, and likely was at least a contract agent for the Agency.
The intelligence links were numerous among all three doctors. Overholser had been in charge of the WW2-era "Truth Serum" study by the OSS, done under the auspices of the Manhattan Project. His institution, St. Elizabeth's, had a special arrangement with the CIA to take in CIA psychiatric cases, and also possibly political cases falsely labelled as psychiatric. Both Overholser and Cameron had to be privy to, if not heavily implicated in such arrangements. None of this, of course, was ever broached inside the Warren Commission, though Allen Dulles at the very least, must have known of these connections.
As for Wedge, he had admitted working for the CIA on constructing psychological profiles of foreign leaders. But it turns out he was had a relevant position at the Army's Valley Forge Hospital in late 1953 when the CIA planned a Project Artichoke experiment on returning POWs from Korea at the facility. The latter is a subject I had already covered elsewhere, so I knew a great deal about it. In fact, I was pleased to learn of Wedge's presence, as I had not known the identity of any of the doctors up to that point. Wedge, it turned out, was at the time the assistant chief of psychiatric services at Valley Forge, and very likely was at the very least aware of CIA's activities there. (CIA had already used Valley Forge previously for unspecified reasons.)
There is no smoking gun in this research. But the involvement of CIA-linked doctors in consulting for the WC is an aspect of the JFK assassination controversy that has not, to my knowledge, been addressed. It corroborates CIA interest in and probable meddling with the investigation from the outset, an important fact that should be publicly known and further investigated.
Interested members of this forum should check out my article, which has all the details on the above, including numerous links to the relevant documentation. The URL for my article, which is not paywalled, is
https://kayej.substack.com/p/cia-connected-dc-hospital-chief-advised
