Michael Kerr: Jim was the sweetest of people! Jim always kept his home open to us fellow activists when we needed some respite from the outdoor protest. Spent many an evening listening to Jim discussing how the CIA operates. I don’t remember Jim saying much about his personal CIA activities. It might have been because his role as CIA payroll officer for all of Japan was relatively mundane and uninteresting. Both Jim and his wife who was deceased at the time I knew Jim were CIA agents. Jim always suspected that the CIA might have had some involvement in his wife’s cancer!
There was one personal CIA incident that Jim did tell us about on numerous occasions. That was when President John F. Kennedy was supposedly assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Jim was shocked when all those in his office suddenly broke into cheers! Confused Jim sought an explanation. He was told that Oswald was one of them (CIA). In fact, Jim was told that he had been issuing payroll to Oswald all that time. Jim declared that he had never done that, only to be told it that it had been under another name. See articles below.
A while after the protest action had wound down, Jim came down was terminal cancer. At some point my wife and I became Jim’s caregiver. One morning I assisted Jim as best I could before I went to work. Later that day, my wife came to help and discovered that Jim had passed away. I wish I had realized that the end was so near for Jim, as there was no one to comfort him in the end. I also regret that I was unable to get access from relatives to any of Jim’s papers because they might have been politically interesting.
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LEE HARVEY OSWALD, THE CIA, AND LSD: NEW CLUES IN NEWLY DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS
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