Daniel Marvin

Daniel Marvin

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 the author of the book, Expendable Elite (2003). He was working on a book about William Pitzer entitled The Smoking Gun: The Conspiracy to Kill LCDR William Bruce Pitzer when he died on 19th January, 2012.

Primary Sources

(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.