After
the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy,
CIA
agent, Gary
Underhill
told
his friend, Charlene
Fitsimmons, that
he was convinced that he had been killed by members of the CIA. He
also said: "Oswald is a patsy. They set him up. It's too much.
The bastards have done something outrageous. They've killed the President!
I've been listening and hearing things. I couldn't believe they'd
get away with it, but they did!"
Underhill
believed there was a connection between Executive
Action,
Fidel
Castro
and
the death of Kennedy: "They tried it in Cuba and they couldn't
get away with it. Right after the Bay of Pigs. But Kennedy wouldn't
let them do it. And now he'd gotten wind of this and he was really
going to blow the whistle on them. And they killed him!"
Executive
Action,
was a CIA
secret plan
to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power.
In his book The
Secret Team (1973) Leroy
Fletcher Prouty claimed
that elements of the CIA were worked on behalf of the interests of
a "high cabal" of industrialists and bankers. He also claimed
that the Executive Action unit
could have been used to kill Kennedy.
Prouty named CIA operative, Edward Lansdale,
as the leader of the operation.
Gaeton
Fonzi
was a
staff investigator for the House
Select Committee on Assassinations. In his book, The
Last Investigation, Fonzi argues that the assassination
was organized by David Atlee Phillips,
head of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division. Phillips,
head of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, denied this but told
the investigator, Kevin Walsh, that Kennedy had been "done in
by a conspiracy, likely including rogue American intelligence people."
In his book, JFK:
The Second Plot (1992), Matthew
Smith claims that Lee
Harvey Oswald was
recruited as a CIA agent while he was serving
in the Marines. Smith
quotes James Wilcott, a former CIA man, who claimed that Oswald had
been "recruited from the military for the express purpose of
becoming a double agent assignment to the USSR." The Soviets
were suspicious of Oswald and he was allowed so little freedom it
was decided by the CIA to bring him home.
On
his arrival back in the United States Oswald
continued to pose as a left-wing activist. Smith argues Oswald was
"taken over and run by renegade CIA agents who were dedicated
to assassinating President Kennedy." Smith claims that J.
D. Tippit and Roscoe
White were
also involved in this plot although he suggests that Oswald was not
aware of what was going on and was being set up as a patsy. Tippit
was supposed to take Oswald to Redbird Airport where he was to be
flown to Cuba in order to implicate Fidel
Castro
in
the assassination.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(N1)
Richard
Bissell,
Reflections of a Cold Warrior (1996)
(The Mafia-connection aspect) did not originate with me - and I had
no desire to become personally involved in its implementation, mainly
because I was not competent to handle relations with the Mafia. It
is true, however, that, when the idea was presented to me, I supported
it, and as Deputy Director for Plans I was responsible for the necessary
decisions.... Sheffield Edwards, the director of the Agency's Office
of Security - and his deputy became the case officers for the Agency's
relations with the Mafia. Edwards was frank with me about his efforts,
and I authorized him to continue... I do not recall any specific contact
with the Mafia, but Doris Mirage, my secretary at the time, does...
I hoped the Mafia would
achieve success. My philosophy during my last two or three years in
the Agency was very definitely that the end justified the means, and
I was not going to be held back. Shortly after I left the CIA, however,
I came to believe that it had been a mistake to involve the Mafia
in an assassination attempt. This is partly a moral judgment, but
I must admit it is also partly a pragmatic judgment.
What did
the CIA employ the Mafia to do?
(N2)
Leroy
Fletcher Prouty, The
Secret Team (1973)
The Secret Team (ST)
being described herein consists of security-cleared individuals in
and out of government who receive secret intelligence data gathered
by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) and who react to
those data, when it seems appropriate to them, with paramilitary plans
and activities, e.g. training and "advising" - a not exactly
impenetrable euphemism for such things as leading into battle and
actual combat - Laotian tribal troops, Tibetan rebel horsemen, or
Jordanian elite Palace Guards.
Membership on the Team,
granted on a "need-to-know" basis, varies with the nature
and location of the problems that come to its attention, and its origins
derive from that sometimes elite band of men who served with the World
War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under the father of them
all, General "Wild Bill" William J. Donovan, and in the
old CIA.
The power of the Team
derives from its vast intragovernmental undercover infrastructure
and its direct relationship with great private industries, mutual
funds and investment houses, universities, and the news media, including
foreign and domestic publishing houses. The Secret Team has very close
affiliations with elements of power in more than three-score foreign
countries and is able when it chooses to topple governments, to create
governments, and to influence governments almost anywhere in the world.
Whether or not the Secret
Team had anything whatsoever to do with the deaths of Rafael Trujillo,
Ngo Dinh Diem, Ngo Dinh Nhu, Dag Hammerskjold, John F. Kennedy, Robert
F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and others may never be revealed,
but what is known is that the power of the Team is enhanced by the
"cult of the gun" and by its sometimes brutal and always
arbitrary anti-Communist flag waving, even when real Communism had
nothing to do with the matter at hand.
At the heart of the Team,
of course, are a handful of top executives of the CIA and of the National
Security Council (NSC), most notably the chief White House adviser
to the President on foreign policy affairs. Around them revolves a
sort of inner ring of Presidential officials, civilians, and military
men from the Pentagon, and career professionals of the intelligence
community. It is often quite difficult to tell exactly who many of
these men really are, because some may wear a uniform and the rank
of general and really be with the CIA and others may be as inconspicuous
as the executive assistant to some Cabinet officer's chief deputy.
What was
the Secret Team? Does Leroy
Fletcher Prouty believe the Secret Team was involved in the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy?
(N3)
Leroy
Fletcher Prouty, An
Introduction to the Assassination Business (1975)
Assassination is big business.
It is the business of the CIA and any other power that can pay for
the "hit" and control the assured getaway. The CIA brags
that its operations in Iran in 1953 led to the pro-Western attitude
of that important country. The CIA also takes credit for what it calls
the "perfect job" in Guatemala. Both successes were achieved
by assassination. What is this assassination business and how does
it work?
In most countries there
is little or no provision for change of political power. Therefore
the strongman stays in power until he dies or until he is removed
by a coup d'etat - which often means by assassination...
The CIA has many gadgets
in its arsenal and has spent years training thousands of people how
to use them. Some of these people, working perhaps for purposes and
interests other than the CIA's, use these items to carry out burglaries,
assassinations, and other unlawful activities - with or without the
blessing of the CIA.
Why did
the CIA become involved in political assassinations?
(N4)
Sylvia
Meagher, Accessories After the
Fact (1967)
Decision after decision,
the State Department removed every obstacle before Oswald... on his
path from Minsk to Dallas. The State Department's extraordinary and
unorthodox decisions and the decisions taken by other U.S. official
agencies in regard to Oswald fall into several general categories:
(1) repeated failure to prepare a 'lookout card' to check Oswald's
movement outside the US; (2) grant and renewal of Oswalds passport
despite cause for negative action; (3) apparent inaction and indifference
to Oswald's possible disclosure of classified military data; and (4)
pressure exerted and exceptional measures taken on behalf of Marina
Oswald's entry into the US.
Why does
Sylvia Meagher believe the CIA was involved in helping Lee Harvey
Oswald?
(N5)
Matthew
Smith, JFK: The Second Plot
(1992)
It is believed that
at this point Oswald made an application for early discharge from
the Marines on the grounds of hardship. Clearly it was an unrealistic
application, without any hope of being seriously considered let alone
granted. The kind of hardship which would warrant discharge in a foreign
country would have been difficult to imagine. It was a curious thing
to have happened, but only one in a number of curious things which
suggested Oswald was being given a 'background'. In this case the
refusal of such an application may have been to indicate that Oswald
most clearly had no special status and was not receiving any special
treatment. It was also, perhaps, to convince 'interested parties'
he was losing any interest he might have had in serving his country,
a man who wanted 'out', and most certainly not what, in reality, he
had now become: a hand-picked and newly recruited agent of the CIA.
Few of the leading researchers
would now doubt that this was the case. In his actions and responses,
Oswald began to display all the hallmarks of working for the CIA,
his special needs being provided for in ways which would not advertise
the fact. His display of distress when shooting off a few rounds,
no doubt at nothing at all, provided a cover for his speedy return
to Japan to participate in preparations for his new work, which included
learning Russian, a difficult language for any Westerner to acquire.
It is worth recalling at this point, that while Oswald was at Keesler
Air Base, he was remembered for his mysterious 100-mile weekend trips
to New Orleans. Time would reveal Oswald to have close links with
New Orleans in respect of his CIA work. It would seem entirely plausible
that, at this early stage in his military career, Lee Harvey Oswald
had been sent on a series of visits to that city to have his aptitudes
and attitudes for espionage carefully examined. It was happening to
a number of young men, selected for the same kind of mission, both
in and out of military service at about the same time. Whatever was
the case the trips to New Orleans were something he strictly did not
talk to his friends about.
Why does
Matthew Smith believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was working with the
CIA?
(N6)
Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, 70
Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
(2001)
David Philips suspected
by the House Select Committee on Assassinations of doubling as the
shadowy "Maurice Bishop" CIA overseer of the Cuban Alpha
66 anti-Castro brigade. The same David Philips in charge of spinning
the Oswald-Mexico City incident in the CIA's favor may have engineered
the "Mexico City scenario" in the first place. Lane, who
has made a legal and literary career out of blaming the CIA for JFK's
death, says he did.
Alpha 66's Cuban leader
Antonio Veciana claimed that at one of his hundred or so meetings
with Bishop, Oswald was there not saying anything, just acting odd.
"I always thought
Bishop was working with Oswald during the assassination," Veciana
told Russell.
Veciana's cousin worked
for Castro's intelligence service and after the assassination Bishop
wanted Veciana to bribe his cousin into saying that he met with Oswald,
in order to fabricate an Oswald-Castro connection.
Investigators never established
for sure that Bishop and Philips were one and the same, but descriptions
of Bishop's appearance and mannerisms mirrored Philips'. Veciana drew
a sketch of his old controller and Senator Richard Schweiker, a member
of the assassination committee, recognized it as Philips. When the
select committee's star investigator Gaeton Fonzi finally brought
Veciana and Philips together, the two started acting weird around
each other. After a short conversation in Spanish, Philips bolted.
Witnesses to the encounter swear that a look of recognition swept
Veciana's visage, but Veciana denied that Philips was his case officer
of more than a decade earlier.
Antonio
Veciana was the leader of the Alpha 66 anti-Castro group. He also
claimed his group was financed by a CIA agent named Maurice Bishop.
How does Veciana implicate the CIA and the anti-Castro activists in
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?
(N7)
G.
Robert Blakey
statement on the Central
Intelligence Agency in 2003.
I am no longer confident
that the Central Intelligence Agency cooperated with the Warren Committee.
My reasons follow:
The committee focused,
among other things, on (1) Oswald, (2) in New Orleans, (3) in the
months before he went to Dallas, and, in particular, (4) his attempt
to infiltrate an anti-Castro group, the Directorio Revolucionario
Estudiantil or DRE.
These were crucial issues
in the Warren Commission's investigation; they were crucial issues
in the committee's investigation. The Agency knew it full well in
1964; the Agency knew it full well in 1976-79. Outrageously, the Agency
did not tell the Warren Commission or our committee that it had financial
and other connections with the DRE, a group that Oswald had direct
dealings with...
I now no longer believe
anything the Agency told the committee any further than I can obtain
substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity.
We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the
CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots,
it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The
Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain
the full truth, which will now never be known.
Significantly, the Warren
Commission's conclusion that the agencies of the government cooperated
with it is, in retrospect, not the truth.
We also now know that the
Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate
the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information
that might adversely affect the Agency.
Many have told me that
the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation
and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story.
I am now in that camp.
What information
did the CIA decide to withhold from the Warren Commission?
(N8)
Letter
signed by a group of authors including G.
Robert Blakey,
Anthony Summers,
John
McAdams,
Gerald Posner, in the
New York Review of Books (18th December, 2003)
As published authors of
divergent views on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
we urge the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense
to observe the spirit and letter of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records
Act by releasing all relevant records on the activities of a career
CIA operations officer named George E. Joannides, who died in 1990.
Joannides's service to
the US government is a matter of public record and is relevant to
the Kennedy assassination story. In November 1963, Joannides served
as the chief of the Psychological Warfare branch in the CIA's Miami
station. In 1978, he served as the CIA's liaison to the House Select
Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
The records concerning
George Joannides meet the legal definition of "assassination-related"
JFK records that must be "immediately" released under the
JFK Records Act. They are assassination-related because of contacts
between accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and a CIA-sponsored Cuban
student group that Joannides guided and monitored in August 1963.
Declassified portions of
Joannides's personnel file confirm his responsibility in August 1963
for reporting on the "propaganda" and "intelligence
collection" activities of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil
(DRE), a prominent organization known in the North American press
as the Cuban Student Directorate.
George Joannides's activities
were assassination-related in at least two ways.
(1) In August 1963, Oswald
attempted to infiltrate the New Orleans delegation of the DRE. The
delegation—dependent on $25,000 a month in CIA funds provided
by Joannides - publicly denounced Oswald as an unscrupulous sympathizer
of Fidel Castro.
(2) After Kennedy was killed
three months later, on November 22, 1963, DRE members spoke to reporters
from The New York Times and other news outlets, detailing Oswald's
pro-Castro activities. Within days of the assassination, the DRE published
allegations that Oswald had acted on Castro's behalf.
The imperative of disclosure
is heightened by the fact that the CIA has, in the past, failed to
disclose George Joannides's activities. In 1978, Joannides was called
out of retirement to serve as the agency's liaison to the House Select
Committee on Assassinations. The agency did not reveal to the Congress
his role in the events of 1963, compromising the committee's investigation.
In 1998, the Agency again
responded inaccurately to public inquiries about Joannides. The Agency's
Historic Review Office informed the JFK Assassination Records Review
Board (ARRB) that it was unable to identify the case officer for the
DRE in 1963. The ARRB staff, on its own, located records confirming
that Joannides had been the case officer.
This is not a record that
inspires public confidence or quells conspiracy-mongering. To overcome
misunderstanding, the CIA and the Defense Department should make a
diligent good-faith effort to identify and release any documents about
George Joannides.
The government should make
these records public in conjunction with the fortieth anniversary
of the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 2003, so as to help restore
public confidence and to demonstrate the agencies' commitment to compliance
with the JFK Assassination Records Act.
Why do
these researchers want the CIA to release information on the career
of George E. Joannides?
(N9)
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.
Why does
Daniel Marvin believe the CIA was involved in the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy?
(N10)
US
Official Poisoner Dies, CounterPunch
(April, 1999)
For many years, most notably in the 1950s and 1960s, Sidney Gottlieb
presided over the CIA's technical services division and supervised
preparation of lethal poisons, experiments in mind control and administration
of LSD and other psychoactive drugs to unwitting subjects. Gottlieb's
passing came at a convenient time for the CIA, just as several new
trials involving victims of its experiments were being brought. Those
who had talked to Gottlieb in the past few years say that the chemist
believed that the Agency was trying to make him the fall guy for the
entire program. Some speculate that Gottlieb may have been ready to
spill the goods on a wide range of CIA programs.
Incredibly, neither the
Times nor the Post obituaries mention Gottlieb's crucial role in the
death of Dr. Frank Olson, who worked for the US Army's biological
weapons center at Fort Detrick. At a CIA sponsored retreat in rural
Maryland on November 18, 1953, Gottlieb gave the unwitting Olson a
glass of Cointreau liberally spiked with LSD. Olson developed psychotic
symptoms soon thereafter and within a few days had plunged to his
death from an upper floor room at the New York Statler-Hilton. Olson
was sharing the room with Gottlieb's number two, a CIA man called
Robert Lashbrook, who had taken the deranged man to see a CIA-sponsored
medic called Harold Abramson who ran an allergy clinic at Mount Sinai,
funded by Gottlieb to research LSD.
By the early 1960s Gottlieb's
techniques and potions were being fully deployed in the field. Well-known
is Gottlieb's journey to the Congo, where his little black bag held
an Agency-developed biotoxin scheduled for Patrice Lumumba's toothbrush.
He also tried to manage Iraq's general Kassim with a handkerchief
doctored with botulinum and there were the endless poisons directed
at Fidel Castro, from the LSD the Agency wanted to spray in his radio
booth to the poisonous fountain pen intended for Castro that was handed
by a CIA man to Rolando Cubela on November 22, 1963.
What work
did Sidney Gottlieb do for the CIA?
(N11)
Michael
Kurtz, Crime of the Century: The Kennedy Assassination From
a Historians Perspective (1982)
Several former
Warren Commission staff members stated that had they known about such
matters as ClA-sponsored assassination plots against Fidel Castro,
they would have looked into the possibility of a conspiracy much more
carefully. The CIA assassination papers also include many censored
documents concerning such topics as Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie,
Cuba, and Russia.
Faced with a "definitive"
five-hundred-page FBI assassination report, pressured to meet its
deadline, and hampered by the lack of complete evidence, the Warren
Commission failed to accomplish its prescribed duty of ascertaining
all the facts about the assassination. The commission operated in
secret and under procedural rules that virtually guaranteed a biased
investigation. Presuming Lee Harvey Oswald guilty, the commission
simply ignored evidence to the contrary.
What subjects
did the CIA withhold information from the Warren Commission? Why might
the CIA have done this?
(N12)
Matthew
Smith wrote about Roscoe
White in his book, JFK:
The Second Plot (1992)
Geneva White, wife
of Roscoe White, a police officer appointed to the Dallas force just
weeks before the assassination, claimed her now-deceased husband left
a diary in which he reveals he was one of the marksmen who shot the
President, and that he also killed Officer Tippit. Roscoe White's
story is that he had been a 'contract man' for the CIA, having killed
ten times for them, his 'hits' including 'targets' in Japan and the
Philippines. The diary, said to have been stolen by the FBI, is claimed
to contain details of the assassination, which was carried out on
the instructions of the CIA. They said Kennedy was a 'national security
risk'. Roscoe White was killed in an industrial accident in 1971 and
Geneva is quoted as saying, 'When Rock lay dying he made a confession
to our minister, the Reverend Jack Shaw. He named all the people he
knew who were involved.' However, this author spoke to the Reverend
Jack Shaw who denies Roscoe mentioned killing the President or Tippit.
'He did confess to taking life in the US and on foreign soil,' he
said, 'but not that of the President or the police officer.' The Minister
went on to say that Roscoe suspected his accident, at a garage at
which he worked after he resigned from the police, had been arranged
by the CIA - 'I saw a man with a brief case....' and Ricky White,
Roscoe's son, is convinced his father had wanted to be finished with
the CIA and they killed him for it. Insurance investigator David Perry
found no evidence of foul play. The accident was apparently caused
by Roscoe taking a welding torch too close to an inflammable liquid.
According
to Geneva White, why did the CIA employ Roscoe White?
(N13)
Robert Artwohl, Conspiracy, Forensic Science, and Common Sense,
Journal of the American Medical Association (March, 1993)
If the Secret Service,
the FBI, the CIA, and other agencies with close access to the President
wanted to dispose of him, they could have availed themselves of a
number of covert means of dispatch. It is difficult to believe a government-led
team of Presidents assassins came up with the following complex plan.
First, take several years setting up Lee Harvey Oswald. Then, get
him a job in the Texas School Book Depository so he could be in position
to kill the President and meticulously plant evidence with which to
frame him. For the central piece of evidence, obtain a cheap mail-order
rifle with an inexpensive sight. (Apparently no one thought to spend
a few more dollars and get a more credible rifle.) Arrange to have
the President fired upon from several different directions using at
least three teams of marksmen. (Why would it take several teams of
marksmen, not one, not two, but, by conspirati count, three to six
volleys of gunfire to hit a slow-moving target at close range with
the fatal head shot?) After the President is hit with multiple bullets
from multiple directions, the military and numerous government agencies,
beginning right at Parkland Hospital, move quickly to conceal multiple
bullet holes from civilian physicians (or coerce them all into silence),
whisk away bullets, alter the President's body, forge roentgenograms
and photographs, and alter every home movie and photograph of the
assassination to conceal the true nature of the injuries and the number
of accomplices involved.
Why does
Robert Artwohl doubt that the CIA was involved in the assassination
of John F. Kennedy?
(N14)
James
H. Fetzer wrote about Robert
Artwohl, Conspiracy, Forensic Science, and Common Sense
in his article, Thinking Critically about JFK's Assassination
(1998)
Absolutely
vintage straw man. Notice, for example, that conspiracy scenarios
do not require involvement by "the military" or "government
agencies", numerous or not, but only by enough people in the
right places at the right times. Depending on who wanted JFK dead
- there are quite a few candidates, from LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover to
Charles Cabell and other associates of the CIA, including anti-Castro
Cubans and the Mob - it may have been more fitting to assassinate
him in public, especially by having a plausible patsy to throw off
public suspicion, than to remove him by covert means, which would
inevitably create questions and motivate inquiries that might have
been inconvenient. Moreover, a public execution sends signals of many
kinds about who really controls power in the USA. Artwohl betrays
a remarkable lack of imagination about the possibilities of conspiracies
of different kinds, where there could have been a number of alternative
assassination scenarios, with other "patsies" waiting in
the wings if the Dealey Plaza scenario had not played itself out.
Moreover, it would have
been essential to have the means to make sure the President was killed.
Triangulated fire provides a standard method of ambush, especially
in the case of a moving target, which can be difficult to hit under
the best of conditions. (Is Artwohl familiar with the problems involved
in hitting relatively small moving targets from 100 yards or so? Here
I think his lack of knowledge betrays him. Having several teams would
be virtually indispensable to guaranteeing the success of the kill.)
Moreover, the problem with the rifle may well have been that easy
access to quality weapons that could be bought on any corner store
in Dallas would not leave a paper trail to implicate Oswald. Not all
the photographic evidence needed to be dealt with - only the most
important. Some photographs were not picked up at the scene of the
crime, which is one of a number of reasons the case has remained alive.
And if Artwohl really wants to understand the behavior of the physicians
at Parkland, for example, he ought to pick up a copy of Charles Crenshaw's
Conspiracy of Silence (1992). This exaggerated caricature of
assassination theories may look impressive on the surface, but resorting
to such arguments betrays the superficiality of his position.
How does
James H. Fetzer counter the arguments put forward by Robert Artwohl?
(N15)
Christopher
Sharrett, Fair
Play Magazine, The
Assassination of John F. Kennedy as Coup D'Etat (May,
1999)
It occurs to me
that two lines of discourse currently affect public understanding
of the John Kennedy assassination. Both narratives obscure the reality
of the assassination as a state crime carried out by the official
enforcement apparatus, a coup d'etat.
One narrative that informs
numerous conspiracy books details a plot to kill Kennedy consisting
of some small, marginal grouping, usually including the Mafia and
anti-Castro Cubans (although at times including pro-Castro Cubans),
occasionally with support of one or two "renegade" CIA agents.
This narrative, which has been in circulation at least since the 1970s,
seems to me to have a particular function in shaping our perception
of the assassination and events surrounding it.
The second narrative, which
is becoming steadily more dominant, acknowledges that there was indeed
an official cover-up of the assassination, but that this cover-up
was "benign," in the interests of the American people, and
spontaneously constructed in order to avoid a confrontation with the
Soviet Union or Cuba, who were suspected by some in state power of
being the real assassins. One recent variation of this narrative argues
that this cover-up was put in place largely to protect the public
from the consequences of the Kennedy brothers' depraved foreign policy.
This narrative also argues that while Oswald was the lone assassin,
Castro perhaps influenced him. But the whole affair comes down to
the ruthless prosecution of the Cold War by the Kennedys, often against
the sober counsel of others within state power.
There is nothing arcane
about the murder of John F. Kennedy. It is no more cabalistic than
the political-economic system we have come to accept. Calling the
assassination a coup d'etat does not necessitate the notion that the
plot was overwhelmingly massive, or that everyone within the state
agreed that Kennedy should be dismissed. On the contrary, there is
rarely uniform consensus within state or private power about any policy
issue. But this does not mean that the crime is any less a function
of ruling authority. We should not view the assassination as a coup
in the traditional sense - obviously there was no imposition of martial
law, no prolonged period of bloodletting (discounting murdered witnesses
and such). Such a blow against the public would have been intolerable
in a major Western democracy after European fascism, and the issue
in any event was not about suppressing a popular movement (here we
can refer to the effect of the Martin Luther King and Black Panther
assassinations on the civil rights movements), but about resolving
a disagreement within the state at a time when financial stakes were
extremely high.
Only if we choose to shed
our denial about the assassination's historical context - and refuse
to immerse ourselves in further endless ruminations about oddball
plotters and Dealey Plaza minutiae - can we come to terms with the
assassination's meaning to our present circumstances, its relationship
to the murderous path of the state as it continues to enforce the
greed of the few.
Does Christopher
Sharrett believe the CIA was involved in a coup d'etat?
(N16)
David
Talbot, Mother
of all Coverups (15th September, 2004)
Thanks to tapes
of White House conversations that have been released to the public
in recent years, we now know that the man who appointed the Warren
Commission -- President Lyndon Johnson -- did not believe its conclusions.
On Sept. 18, 1964, the last day the panel met, commission member Sen.
Richard Russell phoned Johnson, his old political protégé,
to tell him he did not believe the single-bullet theory, the key to
the commission's finding that Oswald acted alone. "I don't either,"
Johnson told him.
Johnson's theories about
what really happened in Dallas shifted over the years. Soon after
the assassination, Johnson was led to believe by the CIA that Kennedy
might have been the victim of a Soviet conspiracy. Later his suspicions
focused on Castro; during his long-running feud with Robert Kennedy,
LBJ leaked a story to Washington columnist Drew Pearson suggesting
the Kennedy brothers themselves were responsible for JFK's death by
triggering a violent reaction from the Cuban leader with their "goddamned
Murder Inc." plots to kill him.
In 1967, according to a
report in the Washington Post, Johnson's suspicious gaze came to rest
on the CIA. The newspaper quoted White House aide Marvin Watson as
saying that Johnson was "now convinced" Kennedy was the
victim of a plot and "that the CIA had something to do with this
plot." Max Holland, who has just published a study of LBJ's views
on Dallas, "The Kennedy Assassination Tapes," intriguingly
concludes that Johnson remained haunted by the murder throughout his
tenure in the White House. "It is virtually an article of faith
among historians that the war in Vietnam was the overwhelming reason
the president left office in 1969, a worn, bitter, and disillusioned
man," writes Holland. "Yet the assassination-related tapes
paint a more nuanced portrait, one in which Johnson's view of the
assassination weighed as heavily on him as did the war."
(16)
David
Talbot, Mother
of all Coverups (15th September, 2004)
Critics of the Warren
Report's lone-assassin conclusion were often stumped by defenders
of the report with the question, "If there was a conspiracy,
why didn't President Kennedy's own brother - the attorney general
of the United States, Robert Kennedy -- do anything about it?"
It's true that, at least until shortly before his assassination in
June 1968, Bobby Kennedy publicly supported the Warren Report. On
March 25, during a presidential campaign rally at San Fernando Valley
State College in California, Kennedy was dramatically confronted by
a woman heckler, who called out, "We want to know who killed
President Kennedy!" Kennedy responded by saying, "I stand
by the Warren Commission Report." But at a later campaign appearance,
days before his assassination, Bobby Kennedy said the opposite, according
to his former press spokesman Frank Mankiewicz. When asked if he would
reopen the investigation into his brother's death, he uttered a simple,
one-word answer: "Yes." Mankiewicz recalls today, "I
remember that I was stunned by the answer. It was either like he was
suddenly blurting out the truth, or it was a way to shut down the
questioning - you know, 'Yes, now let's move on.'"
His public
statements on the Warren Report were obviously freighted with political
and emotional - and perhaps even security -- concerns for Bobby Kennedy.
But we have no doubt what his private opinion of the report was -
as his biographer Evan Thomas wrote, Kennedy "regarded the Warren
Commission as a public relations exercise to reassure the public."
According to a variety of reports, Kennedy suspected a plot as soon
as he heard his brother had been shot in Dallas. And as he made calls
and inquiries in the hours and days after the assassination, he came
to an ominous conclusion: JFK was the victim of a domestic political
conspiracy.
In a remarkable
passage in "One Hell of a Gamble," a widely praised 1997
history of the Cuban missile crisis based on declassified Soviet and
U.S. government documents, historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy
Naftali wrote that on Nov. 29, one week after the assassination, Bobby
Kennedy dispatched a close family friend named William Walton to Moscow
with a remarkable message for Georgi Bolshakov, the KGB agent he had
come to trust during the nerve-wracking back-channel discussions sparked
by the missile crisis. According to the historians, Walton told Bolshakov
that Bobby and Jacqueline Kennedy believed "there was a large
political conspiracy behind Oswald's rifle" and "that Dallas
was the ideal location for such a crime." The Kennedys also sought
to reassure the Soviets that despite Oswald's apparent connections
to the communist world, they believed President Kennedy had been killed
by American enemies. This is a stunning account - with the fallen
president's brother and widow communicating their chilling suspicions
to the preeminent world rival of the U.S. - and it has not received
nearly the public attention it deserves.
Both Khrushchev,
who had been working with JFK to ease tensions between the superpowers,
and his spy chief shared Kennedy's dark view of the assassination.
KGB chairman reacted incredulously to the news that Oswald, a man
whom his agency had closely monitored after he defected to the Soviet
Union, was the culprit: "I thought that this man could not possibly
be the mastermind of the crime." And according to Fursenko and
Naftali, "Intelligence coming to Khrushchev in the weeks following
the assassination seemed to confirm the theory that a right-wing conspiracy
had killed Kennedy." This assessment was shared by the governments
of Cuba, Mexico and France, where President DeGaulle, when briefed
by a reporter on the lone-nut theory reacted with Gallic skepticism,
laughing, "Vous me blaguez! [You're kidding me.] Cowboys and
Indians!"
In the years after his brother's death, Bobby Kennedy
was overwhelmed by grief. But the common perception that he found
it too painful to focus on the assassination is belied by the fact
that Kennedy maintained a searching curiosity about critics of the
Warren Report, using surrogates like Mankiewicz, Walter Sheridan,
Ed Guthman and John Siegenthaler to check out their work and dispatching
his former aides to New Orleans to evaluate Jim Garrison's investigation.
In fact Kennedy himself phoned New Orleans coroner Nicholas Chetta
at his home after the death of key Garrison suspect David Ferrie to
question Chetta about his autopsy report. And while Sheridan -- a
trusted friend of Kennedy's who had worked closely with him on his
Jimmy Hoffa investigation -- famously repudiated Garrison in a 1967
documentary for NBC, RFK apparently still kept ties to the Garrison
camp. According to William Turner, a former FBI agent who worked as
a Garrison investigator during the Kennedy case, in April 1968 he
received a call in the New Orleans prosecutor's office from an RFK
campaign aide named Richard Lubic. "He said, 'Bill, Bobby's going
to go -- he's going to reopen the investigation after he wins.' I
went in immediately and told Jim [Garrison]. He didn't seem surprised."
Bobby was not the only member of President Kennedy's inner circle
who believed there was a conspiracy. Presidential aides Kenny O'Donnell
and Dave Powers, key members of JFK's Irish Mafia, were in a trailing
limousine in the Dallas motorcade. Both of them later told House Speaker
Tip O'Neill that they heard two shots from behind the fence on the
grassy knoll. "That's not what you told the Warren Commission,"
a stunned O'Neill replied, according to his 1989 memoir, "Man
of the House. "You're right," O'Donnell said. "I told
the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn't have happened
that way and that I must have been imagining things." So not
wanting to "stir up more pain and trouble for the family,"
O'Donnell told the commission what the FBI wanted him to.
Speaking of the FBI, its deeply sinister strongman J. Edgar Hoover
might have "lied his eyes out" to the Warren Commission,
as panel member Hale Boggs, the Louisiana congressman, memorably told
an aide, pressuring and maneuvering the commission to reach a lone-assassin
verdict. But again, in private, Hoover told another story. The summer
after the assassination, Hoover was relaxing at the Del Charro resort
in California, which was owned by his friend, right-wing Texas oil
tycoon Clint Murchison. Another Texas oil crony of Hoover's, Billy
Byars Sr. -- the only man Hoover had called on the afternoon of Nov.
22, 1963, besides Robert Kennedy and the head of the Secret Service
-- also was there. At one point, according to Anthony Summers, the
invaluable prober of the dark side of American power, Byars' teenage
son, Billy Jr., got up his nerve to ask Hoover the question, "Do
you think Lee Harvey Oswald did it?" According to Byars, Hoover
"stopped and looked at me for quite a long time. Then he said,
'If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this
country. Our whole political system could be disrupted.'"
Blunt skepticism about the Warren Report was a bipartisan affair,
with leaders on both sides of the aisle airily dismissing its conclusions.
On a White House tape recording, President Nixon is heard telling
aides that the Warren Report "was the greatest hoax that has
ever been perpetuated." One of Nixon's top aides, White House
chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, shared his boss' skepticism.
In his 1978 memoir, "The Ends of Power," Haldeman, who "had
always been intrigued with the conflicting theories of the assassination,"
recalls that when the Nixon team moved into the White House in 1969,
he felt that they finally "would be in a position to get all
the facts." But Nixon, perhaps wary of where all those facts
would lead, rejected Haldeman's suggestion.
According to Haldeman, Nixon did play the assassination card in a
mysterious way against CIA director Richard Helms, long regarded by
Warren Report critics to have some connection to the gunshots in Dallas.
Seeking to pressure the CIA into helping him out of his Watergate
mess, Nixon had Haldeman deliver this cryptic message -- apparently
a threat -- to Helms: "The president asked me to tell you this
entire (Watergate) affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs, and
if it opens up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown." This prompted
an explosive reaction from the spymaster: "Turmoil in the room,
Helms gripping the arms of his chair leaning forward and shouting,
'The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this. I have no concern about
the Bay of Pigs.'" Haldeman speculates that "Bay of Pigs"
must have been Nixon's code for something related to the CIA, Castro
and the Kennedy assassination. But whatever dark card Nixon had played,
it worked. Haldeman reported back to his boss that the CIA director
was now "very happy to be helpful."
Nixon was not willing to publicly reopen the box of assassination
demons. But many of them began flying out when the Church Committee
started investigating CIA abuses in the 1970s, including the unholy
pact between the agency and the Mafia to eliminate Fidel Castro. (The
bombshell headlines produced by the Church Committee would, in fact,
lead to the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations
in 1977.)
Among those in Washington who were particularly curious about the
revelations concerning the CIA and the Kennedy assassination was George
H.W. Bush. As Kitty Kelley observes in her new book about the Bush
family, while serving as the CIA director in the Ford administration,
Bush fired off a series of memos in fall 1976, asking subordinates
various questions about Oswald, Ruby, Helms and other figures tied
to the assassination. "Years later, when [Bush] became president
of the United States, he would deny making any attempt to review the
agency files on the JFK assassination," writes Kelley in "The
Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty." "When he made
this claim, he did not realize that the agency would release 18 documents
(under the Freedom of Information Act) that showed he had indeed,
as CIA director, requested information -- not once, but several times
-- on a wide range of questions surrounding the Kennedy assassination."
One of the most aggressive investigators on the Church Committee
was the young, ambitious Democratic senator from Colorado, Gary Hart,
who along with Republican colleague Richard Schweiker began digging
into the swampy murk of southern Florida in the early 1960s. Here
was the steamy nursery for plots that drew together CIA saboteurs,
Mafia cutthroats, anti-communist Cuban fanatics and the whole array
of patriotic zealots who were determined to overthrow the government
of Cuba -- the Iraq of its day. "The whole atmosphere at that
time was so yeasty," says Hart today. "I don't think anybody,
Helms or anybody, had control of the thing. There were people clandestinely
meeting people, the Mafia connections, the friendships between the
Mafia and CIA agents, and this crazy Cuban exile community. There
were more and more layers, and it was honeycombed with bizarre people.
I don't think anybody knew everything that was going on. And I think
the Kennedys were kind of racing to keep up with it all."
Schweiker's mind was blown by what he and Hart were digging up -- there
is no other way to describe it. He was a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania
and he would be chosen as a vice presidential running mate by Ronald
Reagan in 1976 to bolster his challenge against President Jerry Ford.
But Schweiker's faith in the American government seemed deeply shaken
by his Kennedy probe, which convinced him "the fingerprints of
intelligence" were all over Lee Harvey Oswald.
"Dick made a lot of statements inside the committee that were
a lot more inflammatory than anything I ever said, in terms of his
suspicions about who killed Kennedy," recalls Hart. "He
would say, 'This is outrageous, we've got to reopen this.' He was
a blowtorch."
Hart too concluded Kennedy was likely killed by a conspiracy, involving
some feverish cabal from the swamps of anti-Castro zealotry. And when
he ran for president in 1984, Hart says, whenever he was asked about
the assassination, "My consistent response was, based on my Church
Committee experience, there are sufficient doubts about the case to
justify reopening the files of the CIA, particularly in its relationship
to the Mafia." This was enough to blow other people's minds,
says Hart, including remnants of the Mafia family of Florida godfather
Santo Trafficante, who plays a key role in many JFK conspiracy theories.
"[Journalist] Sy Hersh told me that he interviewed buddies of
Trafficante, including his right-hand man who was still alive when
Hersh wrote his book ('The Dark Side of Camelot'). He didn't put this
in his book, but when my name came up, the guy laughed, he snorted
and said, 'We don't think he's any better than the Kennedys."
Meaning they were keeping an eye on Hart? "At the very least.
This was in the 1980s when I was running for president, saying I would
reopen the (Kennedy) investigation. Anybody can draw their own conclusions."
Hart, of course, never made it to the White House. But another politician
who had been deeply inspired by JFK did -- William Jefferson Clinton.
And like perhaps every other man who moved into the White House following
the Kennedy assassination, he too was curious about finding out the
real story. "Where are the Kennedy files?" the young president
reportedly asked soon after he went to work in the Oval Office.
And what about the other JFK from Massachusetts, who also met President
Kennedy as a young man -- John F. Kerry? If he's elected in November,
will he be tempted to launch an inquiry and try to find out what really
happened to his hero in Dallas? Hart says he doubts it. "You
almost had to go through it like I did with the Church Committee and
get all the context. Otherwise, you have to be very careful about
falling into the conspiracy category. I at least had some credentials
to talk about it. But if Kerry were to bring it up, people would just
say he's wacky, he's obsessive." As Hart observes, there are
other ways to kill a leader these days -- you can assassinate his
character.
And so 40 years after the Warren Report, with the country's political
elite still wracked with suspicions about the Kennedy assassination,
yet immobilized from doing anything about it by fears of being politically
marginalized, and with the media elite continuing to disdain even
the most serious journalistic inquiry, the crime seems frozen in place.
It is now up to historians and scholars and authors to keep the spirit
of inquiry alive.
For decades the only public critics of the Warren Report were a heroic
and indomitable band of citizen-investigators -- including a crusading
New York attorney, a small-town Texas newspaperman, a retired Washington
civil servant, a Berkeley literature professor, a Los Angeles sign
salesman, a Pittsburgh coroner -- all of whom refused to accept the
fraud that was perpetrated on the American people. Undaunted by the
media scorn that was heaped upon them, they devoted their lives to
what powerful government officials and high-paid media mandarins should
have been doing -- solving the most shocking crime against American
democracy in the 20th century. Their names -- Mark Lane, Ray Marcus,
Harold Weisberg, Sylvia Meagher, Vincent Salandria, Mary Ferrell,
Penn Jones Jr., Cyril Wecht, Peter Dale Scott, Jim Lesar and Gaeton
Fonzi, among others -- will find their honored place in American history.
It is these everyday heroes, and their successors, whose best work
will some day come to replace the heavy, counterfeit tomes of the
Warren Report.
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