16 Mind-Blowing Facts About Who Really Killed JFK
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
22 November 13
President John F. Kennedy is seen riding in motorcade
approximately one minute before he was shot in Dallas, Tx., on Nov. 22, 1963.
In the car riding with Kennedy are Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy, right, Nellie
Connally, left, and her husband, Gov. John Connally of Texas. (photo:
AP)
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.
1. Eisenhower warned us of the
"military-industrial complex" just before Kennedy took office
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.
2. JFK went toe to toe with military contractor United
States Steel
"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.
3. The military-industrial complex regularly pressured
JFK to start all-out nuclear war
"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.
4. JFK secretly brokered a nuclear disarmament treaty
with Khrushchev
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." Kennedy
(laughing): "You're in with me, personally."
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.
5. JFK openly sided with Castro in the Cuban
Revolution
"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 asix-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.
6. JFK was secretly working to end the US occupation
of Vietnam
"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 byThomas 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 topull 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 withdrawalof 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.
7. JFK refused a 9/11-esque plot to stage terrorist
attacks on US soil to be blamed on Cuba
"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."
"We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or
simulated)."
"7. Hijacking attempts of civil air and surface craft should appear to
continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba."
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.
8. Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset
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."
Egerter: "That is correct."
Interviewer: "When a 201 file is opened, does that mean that whoever opens
the file has either an intelligence interest in the individual, or, if not an
intelligence interest, he thinks that the individual may present a
counterintelligence risk?"
Egerter: "Well, in general, I would say that would be correct."
Interviewer: "Would there be any other reason for opening up a file?"
Egerter: "No, I can't think of one."
9. Oswald was on the FBI's payroll
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."
10. CIA assets helped Lee Harvey Oswald get work
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 stilldeposited
$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."
11. Oswald was seen in Dallas with a CIA covert ops
chief two months before the assassination
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.
12. The CIA revealed their hand in killing JFK through
the use of Oswald doubles
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. A
little 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 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.
13. The Warren Commission Report was a cover-up
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?"
Hoover: "No, that's one angle that's very confusing, for this reason – we
have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet
embassy, using Oswald's name. The picture and the tape do not correspond to the
man's voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a
second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there."
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.
14. JFK's assassination was supposed to happen in
Chicago, not Dallas
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.
15. The real shooter in Dallas was on the grassy
knoll, and carried a Secret Service badge
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.
16. CIA employee Sidney Gottlieb made Secret Service
credentials
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 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 1945, 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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