16 Mind-Blowing Facts About Who Really Killed JFK
By Carl Gibson Reader Supported News 22 November 2013
Government documents declassified after the passage of the JFK Records Act in
1992 prove that the official narrative is bullshit. There is overwhelming
evidence implicating the CIA and other United States intelligence agencies, as
well as top military officials and corporate entities, in a complex plot to
stage a coup against a president who rebelled against their wishes.
Many of the facts revealed in this article were gleaned from
the book JFK
and the Unspeakable, by Jim Douglass, which
has recently been endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I use Douglass’s book as a
main source, as all of his facts are documented in over 100 pages of endnotes,
citing declassified government documents contained in the National Archives
building in Maryland, which are available to the public.
In January of 1961, the five-star general who commanded the
defeat of the Nazis in World War II, who served as commander-in-chief during the
Korean War, and who became the first Supreme Commander of NATO, spoke ominously
in his final address to the nation of a sinister group of entities he called the
“military-industrial
complex.” President Eisenhower urged Americans to stay alert and aware
before this shadowy, intimately-tied group of government and corporate entities
seized too much power.
“Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.... We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
Eisenhower’s successor would go toe-to-toe with the beast
Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address on a near-daily basis. The
military-industrial complex had already laid out plans for the World War II
veteran and newly-elected president to pre-emptively start a nuclear war with
the Soviet Union. John F. Kennedy’s insistence on peace would be his downfall.
“My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now.” – John F. Kennedy, April 1962
One of the leading companies in the military-industrial
complex Eisenhower warned of was United States Steel, a major contractor with
the US military that controlled 25% of the entire steel market. Steelworkers
staged a 4-month strike in 1959 during Eisenhower’s second term, and Kennedy
hoped to avoid a similar flareup during his tenure amidst fears of inflation
affecting steel prices.
JFK brokered a
deal between United Steel Workers (USW) and the steel industry, by which
workers would get a slight wage increase while a price hike on steel would be
avoided for the time being. Kennedy praised the industry for the compromise,
calling it “industrial statesmanship of the highest order.” But the words quoted
above were spoken to his aides in private, after United States Steel CEO Roger
Blough double-crossed Kennedy and
informed him in the Oval Office, after the deal was done, that his company would
actually be raising steel prices by 3.5 percent to $6 a ton, with other steel
companies following suit.
But after Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara,
informed United States Steel that a new submarine construction contract would be
given to a smaller steel company that hadn’t agreed to the price hike, other
industries that had raised prices in response to U.S. Steel’s maneuver quickly
withdrew their price hikes, leaving the military-industrial complex smarting
from the Kennedy administration’s pointed blow. [See Also: May 1962
Fortune magazine Editorial, “ Steel: The Ides of April” with background context by Jim
Douglass –editor]
“And we call ourselves the human race.” – John F. Kennedy to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, after walking out of a top-secret Pentagon briefing
The specter of nuclear war constantly loomed over the Kennedy
administration. While JFK famously de-escalated the threat of nuclear war during
the Cuban Missile Crisis, what was not yet known was that Fidel Castro had
allowed Russian missiles on Cuban land only as a deterrent against a US attack.
However, Kennedy’s Joint Chiefs of Staff thought the opposite, that if the
United States didn’t strike first, the nation would be obliterated. Plans for a
nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union were already in place by the time
Kennedy took office.
“Even though it sounds crazy to us, the CIA truly believed
Kennedy was deliberately obstructing a war that had to happen,” Jim Douglass
told me in a phone interview. “The Soviets were seen as absolute evil, and we
were the supposed ‘good guys.’”
On page
237, Jim Douglass describes a top-secret “Doomsday Briefing” between Kennedy
and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where plans were laid out for a pre-emptive
nuclear strike on the Soviet Union in 1963. Kennedy repeatedly pressed his
top generals for an assessment of the effectiveness of such an attack, and the
potential loss of life in the United States. Finally, Kennedy walked out in
disgust, making the remark quoted above to his secretary of state.
At the height of cold war tensions, top military brass were
deeply troubled by the prospect of a commander-in-chief who actively sought
peace with an entity widely viewed as the ultimate enemy of the United States.
President Kennedy and Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev secretly wrote letters to one another
throughout JFK’s presidency, and both eventually began to doubt their circle of
advisers and appointees about the evil of the other and gradually worked toward
peace. Twenty-one letters of correspondence were released by the State
Department in July of 1993 after a Freedom of Information Act request was filed
by a Canadian newspaper.
Kennedy had first met with Khrushchev in Vienna, and was
stunned at his hard-headedness and nonchalance about the prospect of nuclear
war. But Khrushchev’s
first letter to Kennedy, which a KGB agent covertly handed to Kennedy’s
press secretary, Pierre Salinger, behind the back of the Kremlin, spoke warmly
of his retreat near the Black Sea and lamented conditions that could lead to the
annihilation of millions. Referring to their earlier meeting in Vienna,
Khrushchev said:
“The whole world hopefully expected that our meeting and a frank exchange of views would have a soothing effect, would turn relations between our countries into the correct channel and promote adoption of decisions which would give the peoples confidence that at least peace on earth will at last be secured. To my regret – and I believe, to yours – this did not happen.” – Nikita Khrushchev, September 29, 1961
From October 16 to 28, 1962, Kennedy willfully ignored his
military and intelligence advisers and decided to resolve the Cuban Missile
Crisis without instigating nuclear war. The reason Khrushchev installed the
missiles in the first place was due to his understanding that the Bay of Pigs
invasion was merely the United States’ first of many forays into Cuban affairs,
as he wrote in his
memoir.
Robert F. Kennedy, in his memoir Thirteen
Days, wrote of the tense situation his brother faced as the situation
seemed to deteriorate toward nuclear war and human annihilation. At one point,
two Soviet submarines were charging toward the US naval blockade, which was set
up in Cuban waters to stop further shipments of warheads from the USSR. The
submarines were targeted for destruction by depth charges, which would likely
set off a chain of events leading to war. RFK wrote about his grey-faced brother
clenching his fist and holding it over his mouth before Khrushchev ordered the
subs to not challenge the blockade at the last minute.
According to White
House tapes declassified in the late nineties, General Curtis LeMay of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff admonished his commander-in-chief during the crisis for
setting up the blockade instead of launching a pre-emptive strike. LeMay
compared the blockade to the notorious appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938,
saying Kennedy’s decision would make him look weak to the Soviets and to the
American public.
LeMay: “You’re in a pretty bad fix.”
However, the crisis was resolved peacefully, largely thanks
to the rapport JFK and Khrushchev established with the secret letters they sent
each other through intermediaries. In October of 1963, Khrushchev signed a
historic nuclear test ban treaty, which, in a letter
to the president, he said would “clear
the road to general and complete disarmament, and, consequently, to the
delivering of peoples from the threat of war.”
Khrushchev
also wrote about the potential for projects the two leaders could work on,
like the “conclusion of a non-aggression pact between countries of NATO and
member states of the Warsaw Pact, creation of nuclear-free zones in various
regions of the world, barring the further spread of the nuclear weapon, banning
of launching into orbit objects bearing nuclear weapons, measures for the
prevention of a surprise attack, among other steps.”
However, when Soviet foreign minister Valerian Zorin handed
this letter to US ambassador Foy Kohler, a cold warrior recommended by the
Foreign Service whom Kennedy appointed only when his brother could offer no
alternatives, Kohler commented
to the State Department that the letter contained nothing of value. The State
Department wrote a boilerplate two-paragraph response that remained forever in
limbo, and Kennedy died a month later, never seeing the correspondence from the
Soviet leader that could have ended the cold war.
“If you see him again, tell him that I’m willing to declare Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee Kennedy’s re-election!” – Fidel Castro to Jean Daniel, November 19, 1963
On October 24, 1963, French journalist Jean Daniel met
with JFK in an interview arranged by Newsweek. Daniel would later
interview Fidel Castro, just three days before Kennedy’s assassination. US-Cuba
relations had been volatile since the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
Castro had recently removed Fulgencio Batista, a right-wing dictator allied with
the US, from office, and instead allied with the Soviet Union in the height of
the cold war. The Bay of Pigs invasion was the CIA’s failed ploy to push Kennedy
into a corner and force him to go to war with Cuba, and by default, the Soviet
Union.
President Eisenhower had already allocated $13
million to the CIA during his final year in office to authorize the training
of Brigade 2506, a paramilitary group charged with overthrowing the Castro
regime. Three days after Bridgade 2506 traveled from Guatemala to invade Cuba,
Castro forced their surrender, prompting Kennedy to make the decision to mount a
larger invasion or suffer a humiliating defeat. After the incident, Kennedy famously
said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to
the winds.”
Jean Daniel’s eye-opening interview with President Kennedy,
roughly 2 years after the Bay of Pigs and a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis,
revealed that Kennedy in fact sympathized with Fidel Castro, the socialist
leader that Americans were conditioned to hate. This is in spite of the fact
that Kennedy ran against Nixon in the election on a platform of stiffness toward
the Cuban regime.
“I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime.... I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries.” – John F. Kennedy, October 24, 1963
Just as he did with Nikita Khrushchev, JFK used intermediaries to correspond with
Castro and set up a meeting between the two leaders, subverting his own
State Department. Kennedy instructed Adlai Stevenson’s assistant, William
Atwood, to start
communicating with Cuba’s UN ambassador, Carlos Lechuga. Castro was doing
the same, having been urged by Khrushchev to communicate with Kennedy in an
attempt to make peace. Atwood was making progress on setting up talks between
the two leaders through Castro’s assistant, Rene Vallejo.
On November 19, 1963, Fidel Castro appeared suddenly at Jean
Daniel’s hotel in Havana, prompting a six-hour
conversation from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., wanting to hear all about his
conversation with Kennedy. The Cuban leader told Daniel that he believed Kennedy
could be the one US president to forge world peace.
“He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of
history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last
understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists,
even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater president than Lincoln,”
Castro said.
On the afternoon of November 22, Jean Daniel was interviewing
Castro at his home about the Cuban Missile Crisis, when
Castro got a call about President Kennedy having been shot in Dallas. Upon
hearing the news, Castro repeated the phrase, “Es
una mala noticia (this is bad news),” three times. Upon hearing confirmation
of Kennedy’s death, Castro told Daniel, “Everything is changed. Everything is
going to change.” Lyndon Baynes Johnson put on hold any and all dialogue between
Washington and Havana, despite Castro’s numerous attempts to reach out and make
peace.
“This war in Vietnam – it’s never off my mind, it haunts me day and night. . . The first thing I do when I’m re-elected, I’m going to get the Americans out of Vietnam.” – John F. Kennedy to next-door neighbor Larry Newman in Hyannis Port, October 20, 1963
Before delving into Vietnam, it’s important to acknowledge
that Kennedy has received lots of deserved criticism over his decision to deploy
Agent
Orange, a toxic chemical weapon developed by Monsanto, Dow Chemical and
others, in Vietnam in 1962. Agent Orange was responsible for the contamination
of crops and thousands of Vietnamese
deaths, and will continue to cause serious
health defects for generations of Vietnamese yet to be born. Agent Orange
also contributed
to the deaths of US soldiers who developed serious health conditions upon their
return home.
But to fully understand the transition Kennedy underwent from
fierce cold warrior to staunch advocate for world peace, Jim Douglass’s JFK
and the Unspeakable is a must-read. Douglass cites letters written by Thomas Merton, a monk living in
Kentucky who offered harsh critiques of Kennedy’s foreign policy and in-depth
analysis of his complete transition from a war hawk to a peacemaker. Along with
juggling the world-shaking Cuban Missile Crisis and constant tensions with the
Soviet Union, Kennedy also had to deal with the prospect of either continuing to
prop up the brutal and corrupt Diem regime, or allowing a coup that would oust
Diem and give the Soviets an extra piece in the global chess game between the US
and USSR.
In late April of 1961, General Douglas MacArthur, who
commanded the Allies in the Pacific, told
Kennedy: “Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of
Asia should have his head examined.” When the Joint Chiefs of Staff pressured
Kennedy to up the troop presence in Vietnam and even deploy nuclear weapons, he
cited the words of General MacArthur in defending his position.
In November of 1963, Kennedy told General David Shoup,
commander of the Marines and the only member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he
trusted, that the first thing he’d do following the election would be to pull
all troops out of Vietnam. Shoup advised his commander-in-chief, “Unless we
were prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before
the war expanded beyond control.” Kennedy issued National Security Action Memo (NSAM) 263 just before
his death, which secretly authorized the
withdrawal of 1,000 US troops from Vietnam. As history shows, NSAM 263 would
never be obeyed, and the Vietnam War would escalate into an unwinnable quagmire
under the LBJ administration.
“We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the
Cuban waters.... The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered
by US fighters to ‘evacuate’ remaining members of the non-existent crew.
Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national
indignation.” – Operation
Northwoods, March 13, 1962
In the Spring of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off
on a sinister, top-secret plot to create the political will to invade Cuba,
called Operation Northwoods. This plan was
so secretive that it couldn’t be seen by even “commanders of unified or
specified commands,” “US officers assigned to NATO activities,” or even “the
Chairman, US delegation, United Nations Military Staff Committee.” Upon seeing
the documents, Kennedy told Joints Chiefs of Staff Chairman Lyman
Lemnitzer there was no way Operation Northwoods would happen under his
watch, and a few months later, subsequently denied a renewal of his
chairmanship. These excerpts of the document are probably what made Kennedy say
no, more than anything else:
“A series of well-coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.”
Operation Northwoods goes on to explain a detailed plan
involving a CIA plane to be painted at Eglin Air Force Base to duplicate a
registered civilian aircraft that would be converted to a drone. Then, “any
grouping of people with a common interest” would charter a nonscheduled flight
to a South American country with a flight plan that crosses Cuba.
The passengers would all be given “carefully prepared
aliases” before boarding, and once their plane passed a “rendezvous point” south
of Florida, the drone aircraft would proceed to be detonated by radio control
over Cuban airspace after “transmitting on the international frequency a ‘MAY
DAY’ message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft.” Meanwhile, the
jet with the passengers would fly at minimum altitude back to Eglin so the
military would “return the aircraft to its original status.”
Every last detail was thought out for this false flag attack,
including the addition of a “pre-briefed pilot” who would fly
“tail-end-Charlie,” or right in between the passenger plane and the drone craft.
Upon crossing into Cuban airspace, the pilot would put out a distress signal
that he was under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft, say he’s going down, and fly
back to Eglin, whereupon a new tail number would be given to his craft. The
pilot would then “resume his proper identity and return to his normal place of
business.” Meanwhile, other surface craft would litter the waters surrounding
Cuba with F-101 parts, where search ships would be sent out to find a parachute
and other aircraft parts. The document states, “The pilots returning to
Homestead would have a true story as far as they knew.”
Despite Kennedy’s steadfast refusal of their nefarious plan,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed to keep planning “pretext operations” without
Lemnitzer, who would become the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO after Kennedy’s
assassination.
Three years before the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey
Oswald was being investigated by the CIA’s Special Investigations Group (SIG), a
branch of the agency’s Counter-Intelligence (CI) division, headed by James
Angleton between 1954 and 1974. This was confirmed in the House Select Committee
on Assassinations (HSCA) questioning
of Ann Egerter, a member of Angleton’s staff who opened the
CIA file on Lee Harvey Oswald (a “201 file” in US intel lingo) in December
of 1960.
The kicker is that the CI/SIG division is only tasked with
investigating current CIA agents who are potential security risks. Egerter said
her office was known within the CIA as “the office that spied on spies.” She
further elaborated on SIG as the entity that undertook “investigations of agency
employees where there was an indication of espionage.”
Because CIA agents are forbidden to disclose the identity of
any other agents, Oswald’s true occupation could only be discerned through
indirect questions directed at Egerter. One HSCA interviewer asked her what the
purpose of the CI/SIG was within the agency. Through this line of questioning,
it can be discerned that Lee Harvey Oswald was seen in 1960 as a security risk,
making him easy to burn, for example, as a patsy in the Kennedy assassination.
Interviewer: “Please correct me if I’m wrong – it seems that the purpose of CI/SIG was very limited and that limited purpose was to investigate agency employees who for some reason were under suspicion.”
In 1963, William Walter was a clerk in the FBI’s New Orleans
office. He told the HSCA that Lee Oswald indeed had “an
informant’s status with our office.” Orest Pena, another FBI informant, said
he saw Oswald with FBI agent Warren deBrueys on ‘numerous occasions,’ even
stating that deBrueys physically threatened him about not revealing what he saw
before Pena appeared before the Warren Commission. Oswald’s friend Adrian Alba,
who managed a New Orleans garage that held FBI and Secret Service cars, recalled
watching Oswald approach an FBI car outside the garage and receive a white
envelope that was handed to him through a cracked window before concealing it
under his shirt. Alba later said Oswald “met the car again a couple of days
later and talked briefly with the driver,” whom Alba knew as an “FBI
agent visiting New Orleans from Washington.”
While in New Orleans, Oswald was working for the Reily Coffee
Company, which was owned by William B. Reily, a financial supporter of the
CIA-sponsored Cuban Revolutionary Council. A CIA memo dated January 31, 1964,
that has since been declassified states “[Reily’s]
firm was of interest as of April 1949.” CIA contractor Gerry Patrick Hemming
also confirmed Reily’s coordination with the CIA in a 1968 interview with the
New Orleans District Attorney’s Office, which “confirmed that William Reily had
worked for the CIA for years.” Reily’s company was located close to the New
Orleans offices of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Office of Naval
Intelligence (ONI).
Oswald also worked in the office of a detective and former
FBI agent named Guy
Banister, whose office was directly across the street from the ONI and
Secret Service offices. According
to Daniel Campbell, an ex-Marine who spied on radical New Orleans students
and gave small arms training to Cuban exiles, “Banister was a bagman for the CIA
and was running guns to Alpha 66 in Miami.” As you’ll read later, Alpha
66 was a CIA-funded group of Cuban vigilantes plotting to overthrow Castro.
Oswald’s intelligence connections may explain why he was able
to summon an FBI agent so easily following his August arrest for an altercation
that broke out when he was passing out pro-Castro leaflets. Oswald had written
to the New York headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee about starting
a New Orleans branch, and FPCC national director V.T. Lee wrote
back, urging him not to cause “unnecessary incidents which frighten away
prospective supporters.” Oswald did the exact opposite.
On August 5, Oswald visited Carlos Bringuier at his clothing
store about wanting to train Cubans to fight Castro. Bringuier was leader of the
Directorio
Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), which was later described in a 1967 CIA
memorandum as “conceived, created and funded by the CIA.” When E.
Howard Hunt testified to the HSCA, he named David Atlee Phillips as the person in
charge of the group. Though Bringuier testified to the Warren Commission that he
was wary about Oswald’s visit, the two CIA-connected men nevertheless staged an
act of elaborate street theater that ended in a fight and subsequent arrest of
the two men and three of Bringuier’s friends.
While he was in jail, Oswald asked to speak to the FBI,
whereupon Special Agent John Quigley met with him for an hour and a half. When
Quigley testified about this incident to the Warren Commission, he said Oswald
simply explained to him why he was passing out the Castro leaflets. But Harold
Weisberg’s book Whitewash
IV included top-secret
remarks from chief Warren Commission council J. Lee Rankin, which were
declassified after an extensive legal battle. Rankin’s statement revealed the
actual reason for Oswald’s meeting with Quigley. According to the session
transcript, Rankin stated Oswald was “employed by the FBI at $200 a month from
September of 1962 up to the time of the assassination.”
Oswald’s connections to the CIA and FBI would explain why
Oswald was issued a passport from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Minsk, USSR, in
1959 in
just 24 hours. This is highly unusual, considering Oswald, a former member
of the military, had just renounced his American citizenship in the height of
the Cold War to travel to the Soviet Union, where presumably his knowledge of
military radar from his service in the Marines (including his
work on the CIA’s top-secret U-2 project, which you’ll read about later)
would be given to the enemy. Upon Oswald’s return to the US in 1961, he and his
new wife, Marina, were befriended by the vehemently anti-Communist Russian
community in Fort Worth.
While he was in Fort Worth, Oswald became acquainted with a
man named George de
Mohrenschildt, a CIA asset and son of a Czarist Russia official who liked to
be called “The Baron.” In a 1977 interview, de Mohrenschildt admitted that he
was given approval to first contact Oswald in late 1961 by J. Walton Moore, the
CIA’s Domestic Contacts Service Chief in Dallas. Moore primed de Mohrenschildt
to meet his contact, informing
him of “an ex-American Marine who had worked in an electronics factory in
Minsk, and in whom there was ‘interest.’” In the summer of 1962, de Mohenschildt
said he was handed Oswald’s address by an associate of Moore, and, as a quid pro
quo, asked Moore to facilitate a contract through his company with “Papa Doc”
Duvalier in Haiti.
According to de Mohrenschildt’s wife and daughter, In October
of 1962, just 9 days before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Oswald’s new friend and
mentor George de Mohrenschildt convinced Lee and Marina to move to Dallas. “The
Baron” set
up a job for Oswald at a graphic arts company called Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall
(JCS), which had contracts with the US Army Map Service. Even though Oswald had
renounced his citizenship and would normally be seen as a turncoat by military
security apparatus, he nonetheless was working on classified projects involving
top-secret U-2 missions. Oswald’s coworkers at JCS said they were working on
setting type for Cuban place names to be put on maps, and just days later,
Kennedy would be shown photos taken by the CIA’s U-2 spy planes, confirming the
presence of Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba.
“The Baron” also facilitated
the first meeting between the Oswalds and Ruth Paine, a housewife with powerful
connections to the military-industrial complex. George de Mohrenschildt
introduced Paine to Marina Oswald at a party he arranged in February of 1963.
Two weeks later, Marina Oswald would move in with Ruth Paine at her home in
Irving, a suburb of Dallas, while Lee Oswald went to look for work in New
Orleans. Ruth’s husband, Michael, worked as a research engineer for Bell
Helicopter, a defense contractor in Fort Worth. Thirty years after the Kennedy
assassination, it was discovered that Michael Paine’s stepfather, Arthur Young, was actually the
inventor of the Bell Helicopter, connecting him deeply with the
military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about.
Michael Paine’s mother was Ruth Forbes Paine Young, who came
from the aristocratic Forbes family of Boston and was friends with Mary
Bancroft, a World War II-era spy who became CIA director Allen Dulles’s mistress
in Switzerland. When Michael Paine was testifying to the
Warren Commission, Allen Dulles asked him, “Is this Mr. Young your
stepfather?” When Paine confirmed that fact, Dulles remained quiet, allowing
other Commissioners to ask their questions. Dulles knew that any follow-up
questions he asked of Paine might lead to public knowledge of his intimate
family connections with a main benefactor of the president’s accused assassin.
The Paine family’s CIA connections run even deeper. After the
passage of the JFK Records Act in 1992, declassified documents showed Paine’s
older sister, Sylvia
Hyde Hoke, was listed as a CIA employee in the 1961 issue of the city
directory for Falls Church, Virginia. In her
testimony to the Warren Commission, Ruth Paine very modestly described her
father, William Avery Hyde, as an insurance underwriter who “writes the fine
print.” But after the publication of the Warren Report in October of 1964, William Avery Hyde
received a 3-year contract from the State Department’s US Agency for
International Development (USAID) as the regional insurance adviser for all of
Latin America, filing reports from Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Panama. Ohio
governor John Gilligan (father of current Health and Human Services Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius) was administrator of USAID from 1977 to 1979, and described
its role as a proxy agency for the CIA.
“At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. It was pretty well known in the agency who they were and what they were up to . . . The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.” – John Gilligan
The Warren Commission shows that Ruth Paine called the Texas
School Book Depository on October 14, 1963 about possible job openings for Lee
Oswald, after a neighbor suggested the idea. Oswald was interviewed for a
part-time job there on the 15th, and started work on the 16th, where he would be
paid $208.82 a month. However, the commission also reveals that Paine lied
under oath about being contacted by the Texas Employment Commission on
October 15th about a far more lucrative full-time job for Oswald at Trans-Texas
Airways as a cargo handler, where he would be paid
$310 a month. In just a few exchanges with Warren Commission lawyer Albert
Jenner, Paine went from denying any knowledge of the job offer, to vaguely
remembering it, to hearing about the job from Lee Oswald himself.
Just as the Paine family became the prime sponsors of the
Oswalds, the deal de Mohrenschildt asked J. Walton Moore to broker with the
Haitian government came through. “The Baron” left Dallas for Haiti in April of
1963, while briefly stopping in Washington to meet with CIA and US Army
intelligence to enhance his Haitian connections. De Mohrenschildt was awarded a
$285,000 contract to conduct geological surveys for the notoriously corrupt and
brutal Duvalier regime. No survey was done, but de Mohrenschildt still deposited
$200,000 in his Port-au-Prince bank account that year. In his final
interview in 1977, “The Baron” said, “I never would have contacted Oswald in a
million years if Moore had not sanctioned it.” Oddly enough, just three hours
after that interview, George de Mohrenschildt was dead of an apparent
self-inflicted shotgun blast.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover noticed how suspicious this all
looked and warned the Warren Commission against publicizing the connection. On
October 23, 1964, Warren Commission chief counsel J.
Lee Rankin received a sternly-worded letter from Hoover, warning him not to
release the FBI’s “reports and memoranda dealing with Michael and Ruth Paine and
George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt ... Making the contents available to the
public could cause serious repercussions to the commission.”
Antonio
Veciana, leader of the CIA-funded paramilitary group Alpha 66 recalled
seeing a thin, pale man with wavy hair in a downtown Dallas office building
conversing with the CIA contact he knew as “Maurice Bishop.” Bishop was actually
David Atlee Phillips, then the chief of covert operations for the CIA’s Mexico
City branch (and head of the DRE in New Orleans, as mentioned earlier). Veciana
finally opened up about this Oswald sighting in 1975 to Gaeton
Fonzi, an investigator with the HSCA.
According to Veciana, he saw “Bishop” talking to a young man
with a pale complexion in early September of 1963, whom he would later
recognize, after November 22, as Lee Harvey Oswald. When Veciana walked into the
lobby to meet with Bishop, he noticed the two quickly exchanged a few more words
before Oswald left, and Bishop initiated a conversation with Veciana about Alpha
66, not once mentioning the man with whom he had just been speaking. And Veciana
didn’t ask.
Before Veciana was set to testify to the HSCA about the
Oswald sighting, the FBI warned
him three separate times that he would be killed. Veciana was shot in the
head by an unknown would-be assassin and recovered, but the FBI refused to
investigate, instead deferring to an uncooperative Miami police department.
Bear with me, because it’s about to get really confusing. The
pieces to this jigsaw puzzle are enough to fill an airplane hangar. The CIA
wanted it that way. In a nutshell, there were multiple smoke-and-mirror
maneuvers to make Lee Harvey Oswald a scapegoat tied to all the right people, in
order to instigate the war the military-industrial complex wanted all along.
Smoking gun evidence abounds in the following stories that show the CIA’s
fingerprints all over the Kennedy assassination, putting Oswald in several
locations at the same time and blowing their cover.
The Warren Commission alleges Oswald was in Mexico City from
September 27 to October 2 of 1963 at the Soviet and Cuban embassies, both of
which were under constant
CIA surveillance. The CIA had also tapped phones at both embassies.
According to the CIA’s version of the tale, on one call placed to the Soviet
embassy on October 1st translated from Russian into English, a man who called
himself “Oswald” spoke broken Russian and asked to speak with Valery
Vladimirovich Kostikov regarding a telegram to Washington.
Kostikov was the KGB’s chief
assassinations expert in the Western Hemisphere, and was incredibly
prominent in US intelligence circles, just as Osama bin Laden was prominent in
those same circles in the late 1990s. This means that if the “Oswald” who made
the call actually was the president’s accused assassin, this would have deeply
implicated the Soviet Union in the plot to kill Kennedy. However, the caller was
an impostor, since the real Lee Harvey Oswald lived in Minsk for two years and
was fluent in Russian, whereas this caller spoke broken Russian.
The October 9 cable from the CIA’s Mexico City bureau to the
headquarters in Langley not only described the suspicious call to Kostikov, but
also mentioned photos taken of a 6-foot-tall, 35-year-old balding male with an
athletic build entering and
leaving the Soviet embassy on October 1. Langley cabled Mexico City on
October 10, describing the Lee Harvey Oswald who defected to the USSR in 1959 as
a five-foot-ten, 24-year-old man who weighed 165 pounds, with wavy light brown
hair. Whoever it was entering the Soviet embassy that day, it
definitely wasn’t Oswald.
On October 10, the CIA cabled the FBI, the State Department,
and the Navy about the information received from Mexico City the day before. But
the CIA made no mention at all of Oswald’s reference to Kostikov, despite the
prominence of the name. In JFK
and the Unspeakable, Jim Douglass argues that the CIA kept this
highly-sensitive information from other agencies until Oswald, through his
multiple CIA connections in Dallas and elsewhere, could be secured in a location
directly above Dealey Plaza on November 22.
Another story of dueling Oswald appearances is documented in
JFK and the Unspeakable. Ralph
Leon Yates, a refrigeration mechanic for the Texas Butcher Supply Company in
Dallas, picked up a hitchhiker while taking the Beckley Avenue entrance to the
R.L. Thornton Expressway at 10:30 AM, on the morning of Wednesday, November 20,
1963. In one of several statements to the FBI, Yates said the man he picked up
was carrying a brown paper package roughly 4 feet long. When he told the man he
could put the package in the back of his truck, the hitchhiker said the package
contained curtain rods, which he preferred to carry himself in the cab. In
testimonies following the assassination of Kennedy, Yates told the FBI the man
looked almost identical to Lee Harvey Oswald.
While making small talk with the hitchhiker, Yates mentioned
that people in the city were excited about Kennedy’s upcoming visit. According
to the FBI’s citation of Yates’s story, the hitchhiker suddenly became a
fountain of conversation, asking Yates if he thought someone was capable of
assassinating the president. After Yates said he believed it could be done, the
hitchhiker then asked if it could be done from the top of a building or out of a
window, high up. Yates again answered that he thought it was possible if the
shooter had a good rifle with a scope.
The notes from the FBI’s conversation with Yates detailed the
rest of the odd conversation, during which the hitchhiker suddenly pulled out a
picture of a man with a rifle, asking Yates if he thought the president could be
killed with a gun like that one. Yates said he was driving and didn’t look at
the picture, but answered yes. Then the mysterious rider asked Yates if he knew
the president’s route. Yates answered he didn’t, but knew that the route was in
the paper. Then the hitchhiker asked Yates if he thought the route might be
changed at the last minute. Yates told him no, unless there were safety
concerns.
The hitchhiker asked Yates to drop him off on Houston Street,
and Yates took him to the Elm and Houston intersection. Yates told the FBI the
last he saw of the man was as he walked across Elm Street, in the direction of
the Texas School Book Depository. After the odd encounter, Yates told co-worker
Dempsey Jones about the hitchhiker. The FBI interviewed Jones for confirmation,
and Jones told investigators that before the assassination happened, Ralph Yates
definitely described picking up a hitchhiker “who discussed the fact with him
that one could be in a building and shoot the president as he, the president,
passed by.”
Normally, this would add up to an open-shut case fingering
Oswald as the assassin. The highway entrance on Beckley where Yates picked up
the hitchhiker was on the same street as Oswald’s rooming house on 1026 North
Beckley. Yates dropped the hitchhiker off close to the place where Oswald
worked. The hitchhiker fit Oswald’s physical description, and the entire
conversation reeked of an apparent assassination plot. But this apparent Oswald
sighting directly conflicted with the Oswald sighting the Warren Commission
decided to include in their final report.
Buell Wesley Frazier, one of Lee Harvey Oswald’s co-workers
at the Texas School Book Depository, testified to
the Warren Commission that Oswald asked to ride home with him to Irving on
the afternoon of Thursday, November 21, 1963. When Frazier asked Oswald why he
wanted to ride with him on Thursday instead of Friday, when he stayed with his
wife, Marina and their two daughters at Ruth Paine’s house on the weekend,
Oswald said, “I’m going home to get some curtain rods . . . [to] put in an
apartment.”
Frazier and his sister, Linnie Mae Randle, testified that
Oswald left his house with a 2-foot-long brown package the following morning,
and explained that the package contained curtain rods when he was asked about
it. The Warren Commission therefore decided that the package, though far too
small to carry a rifle, even when broken down, was the rifle Oswald allegedly
smuggled into the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the assassination.
The FBI called Ralph Leon Yates back in to re-tell the story
of picking up the hitchhiker on December 10, 1963, and January 3 and January 4,
1964, this time with a polygraph, or lie detector test. Each time, the polygraph
test results came back “inconclusive,” meaning that while Yates’s story wasn’t a
lie, the FBI wasn’t satisfied with the final result. The FBI recommended Yates
immediately go to Woodlawn Hospital (Dallas’s most prominent mental
institution). They didn’t have him committed, but rather made the
recommendation, and Yates drove himself there, accompanied by his wife, Dorothy.
After an episode in which Yates briefly escaped from Woodlawn, he was committed
to Terrell State Hospital east of Dallas, where he lived for 8 years. He then
spent a year and a half at the Veterans Hospital in Waco, and then in Rusk State
Hospital for the last 18 months of his life.
Yates, drifting from institution to institution, never worked
again, and his family was left impoverished. He died of congestive heart failure
at age 35. Yet the whole time, Yates insisted that this minor story of picking
up one unnamed hitchhiker on a Fall day was the reason the president was killed,
and refused to recant it. Ralph Yates’s wife, Dorothy, remembered a very
puzzling statement from the FBI after Yates’ final polygraph test.
“They told me that he was telling the truth [according to the
polygraph], but that basically he had convinced himself that he was telling the
truth. So that’s how it came out. He strongly believed it, so it came out that
way.”
Jim Douglass theorizes in JFK and the Unspeakable that
because Yates’s alleged Oswald sighting happened during a time when the real
Oswald was already at work, proving that the Oswald Yates picked up was a
double, it became necessary for the US government to throw Ralph Yates under the
bus. Yates’s story, which he corroborated to both his wife and his co-worker,
directly conflicted with the official story the government wanted the Warren
Commission to tell. For the tenuous narrative to seem legitimate, Yates had to
be discredited.
Still with me? Here’s where it gets weird.
Air Force Sergeant
Robert Vinson was an accidental witness to an Oswald double’s secret flight
out of Dallas on the day of the shooting. Vinson was upset that despite his
diligent work for NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) at Ent Air Force
Base in Colorado Springs, he hadn’t been rewarded with a promotion, so he took a
spontaneous flight to Washington DC on November 20, 1963, to demand an answer
from his superiors.
On November 21, Sergeant Vinson met with a Colonel Chapman in
the basement of the US Capitol about his promotion. During their meeting, Vinson
remembered Col. Chapman, a liaison officer between Congress and the Pentagon,
taking a call and telling the person on the other line that he “would highly recommend the president
not go to Dallas, Texas, on Friday because there had been something
reported.” After Chapman finished the call, he assured Vinson his promotion
would be considered.
On the morning of November 22, Vinson went to Andrews Air
Force Base with the intent of coming back home to Colorado Springs by nightfall.
He gave an airman at the check-in counter his name and serial number, asking to
be alerted when the next plane bound for the area would be departing, “if
anything should come through that you don’t have a notice on.” Roughly 15
minutes later, Vinson was paged to the hangar, where he boarded a C54 plane that
bore no markings or serial numbers other than a strange brown logo on its tail,
of an egg-shaped earth crisscrossed with grid lines.
After boarding the empty plane, Vinson noticed two men in
olive drab overalls board the plane and close the cockpit door without even
saying a word to Vinson. Sergeant Vinson found it odd that he wasn’t asked to
sign a flight manifest, as he had always done when riding Air Force planes.
[Hours] after the C54 took off, an unemotional voice announced over the plane’s
intercom system, “The president was
shot at 12:29.”
The C54 headed due South, and after another few hours, Vinson
watched the Dallas skyline approach through the window around roughly 3:30
Central. Once the C54 landed in Dallas, the pilot emerged from the cockpit and
opened the passenger door, whereupon two men in off-white construction overalls
quickly boarded, after running there from a Jeep that was already backing away
from the site. Sgt. Vinson recalled one of the men was between 6’ and 6’1”,
looked Cuban, and weighed between 180 and 190 pounds. A shorter Caucasian man
also boarded, whom Vinson estimated was between 5’7” and 5’9” and weighed
between 150 and 160 pounds. The plane took off and headed West without anyone
else on the plane saying a word to Vinson. Sgt. Vinson figured the silence of
the crew was part of the mission the crew was on, and kept quiet during the
flight.
When the plane landed again around sunset, Vinson approached
a guard shack and asked an air policeman where he was. The AP told him he was at
the Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico. Vinson was trying to get downtown so
he could take a bus back home, but the AP informed him the base was locked down
and nobody could get in or out. Vinson thought this was especially strange,
given that his plane had just landed with no interference.
By November 23, Robert Vinson was back home with his wife
Roberta, watching the news on the assassination that evening, after telling her
about his odd flight home. When Lee Harvey Oswald’s face appeared on the news,
Robert said, “That guy looks just like
the little guy who was on the airplane.”
“Are you nuts?” Roberta asked. “It couldn’t be him. He’s in
jail.”
“I swear that’s the little guy who got on the plane,” Vinson
insisted.
“Well, keep quiet about it,” Roberta said.
After Jack Ruby murdered Oswald, Vinson vowed to keep quiet
about what he saw. But he had still given his name and serial number to the
airman at the Andrews Air Force Base check-in counter, and by Spring of 1964,
when Vinson had been promoted to technical sergeant, federal authorities had tracked him
down. Neighbors told the Vinson family that the FBI was interviewing
residents about them, specifically about the Vinsons’ conversation topics in
recent months. Vinson’s commanding officer made him sign a secrecy statement,
and Roberta, for the first time as an Air Force wife, had to fill out a personal
history form and sign an additional secrecy statement.
In November of 1964, Vinson was ordered to go to
Washington and call a number for further instructions upon landing. After
making the call, Vinson was told he would be spending the better part of a week
at CIA headquarters in Langley, where he would soon undergo multiple physical
and psychological tests. At the end of the fifth day, Vinson was interviewed by
a semi-circle of men shrouded in darkness, who offered Vinson a job with the
CIA. When Vinson refused, they offered him lucrative bribes, which he also
declined. Vinson went back home to Colorado Springs, until he was contacted
again three months later.
This time, the Air Force had Vinson report to a telephone
number after landing in Las Vegas. Vinson learned the Air Force had assigned him to the CIA’s top-secret
Blackbird SR 71 spy plane [air base] in the Nellis Mountains some 40 miles
Northwest of Las Vegas. The base was renamed Site 51 after being contaminated by
radiation from nearby nuclear testing sites, and focused on experimental
aircraft resembling saucers. Vinson later learned that similar flying saucer
experiments were being conducted at the Roswell Air Force Base where the C54 had
landed on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. Local lore about aliens was seen
as convenient cover for the CIA’s top-secret projects.
Robert Vinson spent the last year and a half of his Air Force
enlistment as the administrative supervisor for base supply at Site 51. The CIA
supplemented Vinson’s Air Force income with monthly cash payments, which both
Vinson and his wife suspected was the agency buying their silence about what
Sgt. Vinson saw when he boarded the wrong plane on November 22, 1963. When
Vinson asked an Air Force sergeant at Site 51 about the origin of a rust-colored
egg-shaped Earth logo on the tail of a C54 landing at Site 51, the sergeant
said, “CIA.”
Vinson kept quiet for 20 years as he and his wife quietly
lived and worked in Wichita, Kansas. In 1976, Robert Vinson told a lawyer friend
about the secret he had been keeping, who then told Vinson, “Don’t tell a soul.
For your own safety.” Vinson followed his friend’s advice until the passage of
the JFK Records Act in 1992, and subsequently went on Wichita’s KAKE-TV Channel
10 to tell the story to
Larry Hatteberg. His story was so popular with viewers that the interview
was re-broadcasted several more times. Vinson’s story of watching the CIA fly an
Oswald double out of Dallas and the subsequent purchasing of his silence and
complicity has since been chronicled in the book Flight
From Dallas by Wichita civil liberties attorney James Johnston and
journalist Jon Roe.
While there’s not enough space to get into it here, the
testimonies of Dallas mayor Wes Wise,
auto mechanic T.F. White, concession
stand operator Butch Burroughs, and
hobby shop owner Bernard Haire, along
with the stories of Sergeant Robert
Vinson and Ralph Leon Yates, all
prove the sightings of more than one “Oswald” seen in different places at the
same time. This is the biggest indicator of the CIA failing in an attempt to
force a particular narrative around a particular person, inadvertently drawing
more attention to themselves as a result.
Even though the Warren Commission was investigating the
alleged assassin of the president who had extensive knowledge of top-secret
military intelligence programs, pertinent questions were noticeably absent from
the panel.
From September 1957 to
November 1958, Oswald was a radar operator for the Marines at the Atsugi Air
Force Base in Japan. The base was also the CIA’s main base of operations in the
Far East, one of just two bases where top-secret U-2 spy planes took off on
missions over China and the Soviet Union. Oswald had a “crypto” security
clearance, which is higher than top-secret, giving him license to regularly
listen to radio communications from U-2 flights.
Former Marine Corps lieutenant John Donovan told
the Warren Commission that Oswald “had the access to the location of all
bases in the West Coast area, strength of all squadrons, number and type of
aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code
of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for the Air Defense
Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our
radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding units’ radio and radar.”
As Jim Douglass would write in JFK and the
Unspeakable, Donovan was dumbfounded that the Warren Commission omitted all
questions related to Oswald’s work with the top-secret U-2 planes before
defecting to the Soviet Union. After his questioning, Donovan asked a Warren
Commission lawyer, “Don’t you want to know anything about the U-2?” The lawyer
responded, “We asked you exactly what we wanted to know from you and we asked
you everything we wanted and that is all. If there is anything else we want to
ask you, we will.” When Donovan asked another witness to Oswald’s work with the
U-2 if he was asked anything about it, he said, “No, not a thing.”
Given the obvious omission of critical questions about the
alleged assassin of the president and turncoat’s knowledge of top-secret US
military operations and programs, and the CIA’s flubbed attempt to tie that
alleged assassin to Cold War opponents in elaborate smoke-and-mirror games, the
Warren Commission’s ruling that Oswald acted alone has to be taken with a grain
of salt.
According to Michael
Beschloss, editor of the now declassified Johnson Tapes, CIA director John
McCone briefed LBJ at 9:20 AM the day after the assassination. McCone spoke
about “information on foreign connections to the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey
Oswald, which suggested to LBJ that Kennedy may have been murdered by an
international conspiracy.” At 10:01 that same morning, FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover called the newly sworn-in president, where they had this
exchange:
LBJ: “Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September?”
LBJ suspected that the assassination was not carried out by
the USSR and Cuba with the help of Oswald as the CIA suggested. In fact, the
conversation between Hoover and LBJ had the implication that it may have been
facilitated by the CIA itself, given their mishap in Mexico City that led to
dubious Oswald sightings.
LBJ knew, given the evidence of Oswald impostors in Mexico
City, which puzzled even J. Edgar Hoover, the first option was most likely
implausible. The second option meant opening up a whole new can of worms the
nation wasn’t prepared to face, so the only feasible option was for the Warren
Report to obscure the truth, label Oswald a lone wolf assassin, and call it a
day.
Chicago was
originally where Kennedy was to be assassinated. Had the plan succeeded, Thomas
Arthur Vallee would have been the famous alleged assassin whose name would be
remembered forever, rather than Lee Harvey Oswald.
On November 2, 1963, Kennedy was set to appear at the
Army/Air Force football game in Chicago at 11:40 a.m. At the Chicago Secret
Service Bureau, Special Agent in Charge Maurice Martineau informed agents about
reports of assassins on October 30. Martineau was repeating a tip from the FBI,
in which an informant identifying as “Lee” talked about a four-man sniper team
of “rightwing para-military fanatics” with high-powered rifles, who would shoot
at Kennedy as his motorcade was driving from O’Hare down
the Northwest Expressway, around a slow loop off the highway exit of what is now
ironically known as the JFK Expressway.
The tip from “Lee” wasn’t the only one. A landlady at a
Northside boarding house called the FBI after she saw four men check into the
house, each with a scoped rifle, and carrying a map of Kennedy’s motorcade
route. The FBI then called the Secret Service office in Chicago, who searched
for the riflemen. Two of the would-be assassins were found and detained for
several hours for questioning, while the other two got away. The names of the
two would-be presidential assassins are still unknown to this day, as the
Department of the Treasury, which oversees the Secret Service, mysteriously destroyed
all records of the Chicago plot when the Assassinations Records and Review
Board asked for them in 1995, more than three decades after the incident.
In the meantime, the Secret Service had to respond to another
tip about an ex-Marine named Thomas Arthur Vallee, who
had been reportedly talking about shooting the president when he came to
Chicago. Vallee was a paranoid schizophrenic, a disaffiliated member of the
famously right-wing, anti-Communist John Birch society, collected guns, and was
described as a loner. As a Marine in the Korean War, Vallee was injured by a
mortar blast, was subsequently committed to several mental institutions, and
received full disability benefits from the Veterans Administration. Like Oswald
the expat turncoat, Vallee the mentally disabled fit the preferred profile of
the lone wolf presidential assassin.
Vallee’s apartment was raided in his absence, and FBI agents
found an M1 rifle, a carbine rifle, and 2500 rounds of ammunition. The Secret
Service instructed Chicago Police to put 24-hour surveillance on Vallee and “get
him off the street.” Vallee was pulled over and arrested by CPD officers Daniel
Groth and Peter Schurla on the morning of November 2, as his 1962 Ford Falcon
made its way toward the expressway on Kennedy’s motorcade route. The officers
cited a missed turn signal as the result of the arrest. Upon seeing a hunting
knife in the front seat of the Falcon, they charged Vallee with carrying a
concealed weapon, and a search of his trunk yielded 300 rounds of ammunition.
Vallee’s connections to US intelligence soon came out. His
New York license plates read 31-10RF.
NBC Chicago employee Luke Christopher Hester learned of the arrest and asked
Hugh Larkin, his father-in-law, to have a background check done on the plates by
his former colleagues in the NYPD. The plates came back “frozen,” meaning that
only US intelligence agencies could retrieve the classified information
associated with Vallee’s registration.
Officers Groth and Schurla went on to have prominent
intelligence careers. Groth led the December 4, 1969, raid on Black Panther
leaders Fred
Hampton and Mark Clark, who were both assassinated by police. Hampton was
just 21, and Clark was 22. The families of Hampton and Clark, as well as Black
Panthers who survived the raid, would successfully sue Daniel Groth and local,
state, and federal agencies in 1983 for a $1.85 million settlement. While under
Oath, Groth admitted that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI specifically requested the raid
on Hampton. Officer Schurla became a high-level intelligence officer at the
Chicago police headquarters.
Like Oswald, Vallee also worked on the CIA’s top-secret U-2
planes in Japan. Vallee told investigative journalist Edwin Black that his U-2
work was at Camp Otsu, but that he also helped the CIA train Cuban exiles to
kill Fidel Castro at a CIA base in Levittown, Long Island. Oswald did similar
work at a CIA training camp in Lake Pontchartrain, close to New Orleans. Vallee
worked near a third floor window at IPP Litho-Plate, at 625 West Jackson
Boulevard, directly above where the presidential motorcade would pass. Oswald
worked on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, in front of where
the Dallas motorcade would pass. It isn’t hard to see how the CIA blazed a path
for both men to be set up as scapegoats in their elaborate plot to assassinate
JFK.
Ed
Hoffman, a 27 year-old deaf-mute who prided himself on his acute sense of
sight, took a detour from a scheduled visit to the dentist on the morning of
November 22 to catch a glimpse of Kennedy. Hoffman inadvertently witnessed the
shooter on the Grassy Knoll fire the fatal shot from his vantage point on the
bridge just above the freeway on Kennedy’s limousine route, and took note of the
two getaway cars that transported the assassin and his assistant after the act –
one was a white four-door, and the other was a light green Rambler station
wagon.
Hoffman finally told his story, with the help of a sign
language interpreter, to Jim Marrs in 1989 for his book Crossfire.
Hoffman had made many attempts to tell the FBI, going against the urging of his
father and his uncle, who was a Dallas police officer, to keep quiet for his own
safety. One such attempt ended in federal investigators offering Hoffman a bribe
of $500 to keep quiet, which Hoffman refused. Next, agents paid a visit to
Hoffman’s father and interrogated him about his son’s story. Wanting to protect
his son’s life, Frederick Hoffman would only say, “I don’t know if Ed saw what
he saw.” FBI agents then manipulated their report to suggest that Hoffman’s own
father dismissed his son’s story, in an effort to discredit critical evidence.
In Crossfire, Hoffman described watching two men
behind the wooden stockade fence at the top of the grassy knoll. One of them was
a stocky man in a dark blue suit, which Hoffman called “the suit man.” The other
was standing by the railroad switch box, and was taller and thinner, wearing a
railroad worker’s clothes. Hoffman called him “the railroad man.” Hoffman
thought the pair were peculiar, seeing as they were clearly working together but
dressed very differently.
According to Hoffman, the suit man would occasionally walk
over to the railroad man and confer with him for a moment before going back to
his original position. As the presidential limousine approached, Hoffman watched
the suit man talk to the railroad man a final time before walking back to the
fence, bending over, picking up an object, and looking back over the fence. When
Hoffman saw a puff of smoke emerge from where the suit man was standing, he
assumed it was a cigarette. But when the suit man turned, he was holding a
rifle. The suit man ran to the railroad man and threw him the rifle.
The railroad man disassembled the rifle with a twist, put it
in a railroad workers’ bag, and ran north along the railroad tracks while the
suit man strolled casually along the side of the fence. A police officer ran
around the fence, pointing a revolver at the suit man, who held out his empty
hands. The suit man then produced identification from his coat pocket, the
officer lowered his gun, and the suit man blended into the crowd and walked over
to the passenger door of the light green Rambler station wagon. The getaway car
drove out of the parking lot on the North end of the Texas School Book
Depository, and made a right on Houston Street. Hoffman then looked down at the
splayed body of JFK in the back seat of the presidential car as it passed
directly below him, and noticed a gaping wound in the president’s right rear
skull, which he said resembled bloody Jello.
The Dallas police officer Hoffman saw approach the suit man
at the wooden fence after the shooting was Joe
Marshall Smith, who would tell his superiors he immediately smelled
gunpowder near the fence. Smith later told the Warren Commission that the man he
approached had Secret Service credentials that looked real enough to satisfy him
and the deputy sheriff who was with him. Smith would later recall that the man
who produced those credentials wore a sports shirt and sports pants, had dirty
fingernails, and hands like an auto mechanic. In a nutshell, he definitely
didn’t fit the bill of an actual Secret Service agent.
Gordon
Arnold, a 22-year-old soldier in uniform, also witnessed a man behind the
wooden fence with Secret Service credentials, right around the same time Officer
Smith approached the fence, but just before the assassination. Arnold planned to
film the president’s arrival, and was walking toward the railroad bridge to have
an ideal vantage point. When walking behind the wooden fence, he described
seeing a man in a civilian suit wearing a sidearm standing guard, brandishing a
Secret Service badge, and telling him to leave the area. Arnold walked along the
front side of the wooden fence, and paused to shoot his film.
In the book Crossfire, Arnold recalled feeling the
whiz of the bullet pass by his left ear, coming from the wooden fence just a few
feet behind him. Arnold then heard the report of the rifle, and immediately hit
the ground, having just crawled under live machine gun fire as part of the basic
training he had recently completed. Arnold recalled hearing another whiz over
his head, and another crack of a rifle report. He then remembered seeing a man
standing over him, waving a long gun, acting hysterically, and demanding the
film in his camera. When Arnold tossed it over to the gunman, the gunman removed
the film from the camera and threw the camera back to Arnold. And just as
Officer Smith said, Gordon attested that the man with the rifle had noticeably
dirty hands.
Other witnesses described aggressive activity from men near
the wooden fence. Jean
Hill said men who identified themselves as Secret Service agents confiscated
photos she took of the motorcade when she ran behind the fence at the top of the
grassy knoll. Deputy Constable Seymour
Weitzman told the Warren Commission that he gave “one of the Secret Service
men” a piece of the president’s skull that he had found in the street. There is
overwhelming evidence that men with Secret Service badges confiscated all
evidence from nearby witnesses just before and after the shooting.
In 2007, the CIA finally declassified its “Family
Jewels” report as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request that
had been in limbo for 15 years. A damning 1973 memo from Sidney Gottlieb, chief
of the CIA’s Technical Services Division, is buried in the 702-page document. In
the memo, Gottlieb talks about how he “furnished this [Secret] Service” with
“gate passes, security passes, passes for presidential campaign, emblems for
presidential vehicles; a secure ID photo system.” However, Secret Service agent
Abraham Bolden, who was part of the investigation into the Chicago assassination
plot, stated that when Secret Service books were all replaced in January of
1964, it was done by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The Department of the
Treasury has jurisdiction over both the Secret Service and the Bureau of
Engraving and Printing, not the CIA, meaning that Gottlieb’s orders were for an
unknown covert purpose rather than providing standard identification for Secret
Service agents.
Thus, the complex and intricate plot to kill Kennedy was carried out by multiple alphabet
agencies, acting on what they believed were righteous motives to remove an
obstructionist president in the way of a war they felt had to be waged. But the
suggestion that a government agency would covertly kill its own president to
advance a cause isn’t that radical. Our CIA has been behind the assassinations
of world leaders both before and after the Kennedy assassination, from Mohammed
Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, to Salvador
Allende in Chile in 1973. Just as with JFK’s assassination in 1963, our
runaway intelligence agencies have repeatedly shown they won’t let any elected
leader stand in the way of their goals.
On December 22, 1963, exactly one month after the
assassination, former president Harry Truman published a precisely worded op-ed in the
Washington Post about the need to rein in the same agency he created with
the stroke of his pen after World War II. He wrote:
“For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas ... There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.” – Harry S. Truman
Three weeks before his op-ed was published, which was met
with absolute silence from the media, Truman had written more urgently-worded
notes that are still preserved in the Truman Library:
“[The CIA] was intended merely as a center for keeping the
president informed on what was going on in the world at large and the United
States and its dependencies in particular . . . it should not be an agency to
initiate policy or to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention
when it was organized."
The recent NSA
leaks by Edward Snowden, and our government’s brutal response to his attempt
at transparency, give just an inkling of how far our government is willing to go
in lying to the public and suppressing the truth. In the aftermath of Snowden’s
revelations, some have suggested that we repeal the Patriot Act. But real justice for Kennedy and the
countless other victims of the massive intelligence and military apparatus of
the US government can only come about by repealing Truman’s National Security Act of 1947, which
created the CIA and the NSA. And if we don’t push for it using all the
earth-shattering new knowledge that people like Jim
Douglass and Ed
Snowden have armed us with, this same specter will continue to haunt all
future presidencies to come.
Carl Gibson,
26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a
nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of
activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading
up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl
and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary “We’re Not Broke," which premiered at
the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You
can contact him at carl@rsnorg.org, and
follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.
Reader Supported
News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is
freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Saturday, June 7, 2014
To understand 9/11, one must understand JFK and what he stood for...
