Well, that’s as good a way as any to start.
All over the Internet, and for years previous to its genesis, conspiracy theories have been used to explain complex issues which many times are more simply explained as random events, disjointed sets of circumstances, and just plain serendipity. Many times, these conspiracy theories take on a malevolent character: things are the way they are because of the Jews, Blacks, atheists, Christians, and so on. Things would sure be a lot better if it wasn’t for some of those “Others!”
Yet today we hear more and more of such ideas. Why? Many psychologists claim that it is because of the stress and the overall complexity of modern life. People harken back to a simpler time—a time when life was slower, things seemed more stable, and there were more “absolutes” in people’s lives. It has gotten to so bad that many analysts are starting to propose the idea that conspiracies, in actuality, are very few and far between. The website on which this essay is published takes a more open view with respect to conspiracies—particularly in regard to political conspiracies.
I
As a relatively new contributor to Kennedysandking.com, let me tell you first who I am—or maybe who I am not. I am not a ballistics expert. I am not a doctor/medical expert. I am not an expert researcher who visits the National Archives in Washington D.C. or any other major repository of documents—secret or otherwise. I am simply a guy who has an intense interest in politics, history, philosophy, and various and sundry aspects of the sciences and the humanities.
With that out of the way, what about this conspiracy business? More and more people nowadays seem to ascribe to one or another of various and sundry conspiracy theories—from the serious minded to the thoroughly ridiculous. As an educated layman, I get the following type responses to questions I raise concerning the “official versions” of many of the scenarios discussed on this website from the so-called experts, educators, and “mainstream media types.”
You say that the Kennedys and King were murdered as part of a conspiracy? That’s ridiculous—how could something that complex be covered up for so many years without someone at the very pinnacle of the conspiracies coming clean or telling all? Or: do you realize how many people it would take to cover up such a conspiracy or group of conspiracies: tens of thousands or maybe even millions?
In this essay, I plan to explain why I believe that, in fact, on some occasions—and, in particular, in the cases of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, that the scenarios presented on this website are substantially correct and why such arguments about the large number of people necessarily involved or no one involved coming clean are not valid.
It Would Take Too Many People to Carry Out a Political Assassination in the USA without Someone Spilling the Beans
Is the above statement really true? Has a conspiracy been carried out and largely covered up for decades without anyone “spilling the beans?” I contend that despite the propaganda to the contrary, it indeed has happened in the past in the USA.
Let us take a look at the radiation and drugging experiments carried out in the United States between 1943 and 1973 coordinated by the US government and private industry. A good source for this is the book entitled The Plutonium Files: America’s secret medical experiments in the Cold War by author Eileen Welsome. In that book, Welsome investigates the case of 18 people deliberately exposed to plutonium by the US government and elements of the private medical establishment. These experiments were carried on at such institutions as prisons, schools for the developmentally disabled, and even maternity clinics.
One example of such an institution was the Fernald School in Massachusetts. Founded in 1848 and originally called “The Fernald School For The Feeble Minded,” this school not only was involved in a eugenics program (a topic to be discussed later in this essay), but it also was the site of an ugly, dark, secret experiment involving elementary school children. Without their knowledge or the knowledge of their parents, they were fed radiation laced food and milk to determine the absorption rate of iron and calcium. The entities involved were Harvard University and MIT along with The Quaker Oates Company. Quaker Oats was going to use the data collected by these experiments in advertising its cereal. For a more detailed example of this experiment see this page from Massachusetts Creepy.
Another example from Welsome’s book was the experiment on pregnant women at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee in the 1940’s. Again, these women were not told exactly what they were being fed. In fact, the researchers told them that they were part of a clinic that was meant for poor undernourished women and that the health drink they were being fed was to benefit their developing fetuses. Actually, these health drinks contained radioactive iron oxide contents 30 times those of normal environmental exposure. This was another example of researchers trying to test the absorption rates of iron. Initially, the researchers thought that these health drinks did not contain any harmful amount of radioactive iron, but follow-up studies showed that at least three children died from this exposure. (For additional information about this experiment see this AP News article).
In other sections of her book, Welsome discusses experiments performed by the military on soldiers involving radiation exposure. There are numerous examples therein. In addition, The Atomic Heritage Foundation website has numerous examples—some where the soldiers knew about the exposure and some where they did not. (Click here for details)
In addition, while researching this subject separate from Welsome’s book, I found numerous YouTube videos concerning the issue. A general search using such terms as: “radiation experiments”, “US military and radiation experiments”, and “human radiation experiments” will display numerous such videos.
Finally, for a brief period of perhaps two or three weeks in the summer of 1994, this information hit the mainstream media. The ABC TV network program Nightline did one program concerning the issue. On this program, a research scientist who had been directly involved in the experiments was confronted with a declassified document that he had written stating, “The contents of this research must be kept highly classified because to the general public, such experiments would sound too Buchenwald-ish.” His clumsy reply was something like, “Well I don’t know what everyone is so upset about this for, we obtained valuable research information and after all not too many people died.”
Because of the moderate coverage by the media, a House of Representatives committee investigated these experiments for a few months and issued a report months later. They actually established a telephone hotline called “The Radiation Research Health Line” which people could call and report any suspicious type experiences and/or related health issues and the experts assigned to this project would investigate to see whether the caller was unknowingly involved in the experiments. (Click here for details) This “Health Line” was not publicized very often and with the sea change in congress—wherein, for the first time in 40 years, the Republicans took both houses of congress in the midterm 1994 elections, the line was discontinued early in 1995.
II
While these experiments eventually saw the light of day in the mainstream media, it took a full fifty years for even this somewhat limited exposure to occur. In the final report, the congressional committee determined that at least thirty-five thousand civilians and tens of thousands of military personnel were involved in these experiments. Some of the material is still classified and there is evidence that much more has been destroyed. While we do know substantially more about such experiments, we do not know the exact number of people involved at the governmental and private sector level. But with even the limited exposure, common sense tells us that a huge number, perhaps thousands of researchers and government officials over a half century, had to be involved!
So, what does such an example do to the argument that something as horrific as a political assassination would take too many people and would be too easily exposed? I dare say it diminishes greatly if not vitiates such an argument. Remember, the people keeping the secrets concerning these medical experiments were not covert intelligent operators and were most certainly not trained in psychological warfare and black operations. One might pose the question: how much more likely would it be for a large conspiracy to be covered up by people who were trained in such operations?
Let us move to another conspiracy of sorts. One might say that this was actually a conspiracy that was hiding in plain sight. This is the field of eugenics. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly sterilized in the United States in the period roughly from 1920 to 1970. This really wasn’t a conspiracy in the same sense as the radiation experiments discussed above. But nowadays, if you ask people about this phenomenon, many of them will think you are an extreme conspiracy theorist. It’s a topic that was not discussed openly in public during its heyday. But it is something that people in the medical field knew of and largely approved of during that roughly half century.
Basically, eugenics grew out of a convergence of early scientific knowledge about genetics and the long-held belief in white supremacy. In the early days of genetics, some scientists believed that it would be simply possible to breed a superior race of human beings by eliminating the “defectives” within the gene pool. This error in early genetics—which was later debunked by the increased research of the twentieth and twenty-first century in combination with the preconceived notions about Northern/Western European genetic superiority—was the basis for this program.
A good source that gave extensive accounts of this program is the CBS TV film from 1982 entitled: Marian Rose White. This movie was based on the true-life story of a California woman named Marian Rose White who was committed to a school for the “feeble-minded” in 1934 and, though she had no real mental defect, was sterilized against her will. The Institution in Sonoma County, California, was part of a group of United States hospitals and schools for “the feeble-minded” that sterilized over three hundred thousand people in the middle decades of the twentieth century. (For another good source about this school, see this article from the Press Democrat Newspaper online)
This institution, along with several other institutions in such places as Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, were actually used as models by the eugenics and master race proponents of Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. At the Nuremberg trials, one of the defenses offered to the defendants was that such practices as eugenics and forced sterilization were already being done in the USA when the Nazis came to power.
Another good source about the eugenics program in the USA is the book entitled: Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck by Adam Cohen. In this book, Cohen traces the development of the eugenics movement in the late nineteenth century and catalogs the court decisions that allowed for the practice of forced sterilization to become accepted by the medical establishment of the time.
By examining the case of Carrie Buck—a Virginia resident—Cohen describes the arguments pro and con which were presented at the time, as well as the slow but steady approval by state and federal courts of this tragic attempt to create a more perfect race through sterilization. Cohen points out the kind of stereotypes that were used to promote eugenics practices. Not only did some of the scientists promote the idea of sterilizing mental defectives, but also promoted the ideas that the population of the “lesser ethnicities” such as darker skinned races: Blacks, Italians, Hispanics, and so on, should be subjected to such eugenics practices. There you have the total fusion of white supremacy and genetics.
Again, this eugenics movement wasn’t a conspiracy in the classic sense of the word. But it was largely not discussed in public, was carried on for the better part of fifty years, and is seldom discussed today by people in general. If you go to a local social group and bring up the topic, many people won’t believe it or will accuse you of being an extremist of some sort.
My point is that this grotesque activity went on for decades, was more or less approved of, and is almost never brought up to students in classrooms below the college level. In addition, there seems to be a current attempt to remove all such discussions of past wrongs carried out in the name of discredited beliefs of the past. However, it did happen and can be included in a discussion of large numbers of people being involved in reprehensible acts that are shoved under the rug so to speak and are largely ignored in the context of promoting American Exceptionalism.
III
Now let’s move to another conspiracy of sorts: the big tobacco cover-up. If you are a smoker, you are obviously aware of the warning appearing on the packs of cigarettes stating the known health risks of using this product. Of course, this wasn’t always so. The first major federal governmental involvement in the hazards of smoking appeared in 1964 with the surgeon general’s report listing the possible risks and diseases associated with smoking. But for decades, cigarette company executive, after cigarette company executive, testified before state and federal committees defending the effects of their products and labeling the critics as alarmists, radicals, and extremists. When the first lawsuits were brought in the 1990’s, various media outlets including ABC’s Nightline and CBS’ Sixty Minutes showed little snippets of cigarette company executives answering such questions as: “Do you believe cigarettes are addictive.” And receiving replies such as: “No, I don’t believe cigarettes are addictive.”
Yet freedom of information requests by people in the medical and legal communities were eventually able to obtain individual reports as far back as the early 1950’s wherein company executives were warned about the extreme addictive nature of cigarettes and their long-term health effects. Even worse, when it came to the types of additives used in production, one cigarette company scientist even used the phrase “a cigarette is a nicotine delivery system; the more nicotine included in the cigarette the more addictive the product and the higher the sales.” So, the companies “punched up” cigarettes, giving them more nicotine and thus more of an addictive character.
When criticism of cigarettes as a major health hazard began exploding in the press in the 1960’s, cigarette companies began propagandizing to the effect that there were actually healthy cigarettes. One company even used in their TV commercials the phrase: “This is the cigarette doctors recommend.” Finally, after decades of lawsuits, exposés and governmental investigations, cigarette companies were forced in 2006 to admit all. The conspiracy was blown wide-open and the companies were forced to publicize their deception and pay substantial amounts of money to make amends. (One good source among many for information about this issue is the website “Truth Initiative” )
Doesn’t this prove that such a large conspiracy will eventually be disclosed? You might jump to that conclusion. But in this case, it took almost seven decades. With the tremendous amount of information available to health professionals and governmental officials, it still took that long. Again, the businesspeople who covered up this conspiracy were not black operators, psychological warriors, or assassins trained as career intelligence agents. Yet, they still succeeded for a very long time. I contend that career intelligence operatives with almost limitless resources could act in concert and keep such a conspiracy secret for even longer.
Did It Really Take Thousands of People to Carry Out the Assassinations of the Sixties?
My answer to the above question is a resounding no. Let me explain what I mean.
To analyze the assassinations of the 1960’s, and in particular the JFK assassination, you must make a clear distinction about the actual assassination itself and the cover-up that followed. I do believe that the assassination of JFK resulted in a massive cover-up involving hundreds, if not more people and numerous public and private entities. I could go into great detail as to why I believe this, but this website does a more than ample job of it. Here are just a few highlights for those too busy or time constrained to do massive research on this and other sites.
Let us use some examples from one of the earliest critical books about the Warren Commission, but one that has sources directly inside that body. As Edward Epstein notes in his book Inquest, some members “conceived of the Commission’s purpose in terms of the national interest.” Allen Dulles noted that the atmosphere of rumors and suspicions was obstructing the workings of government, especially in foreign policy. Consequently, Dulles figured that one of the main tasks of that body was to “dispel rumors.” John McCloy declared that it was very important to “show the world that America is not a banana republic, where a government can be changed by a conspiracy.” Congressman Jerry Ford stated that “dispelling damaging rumors was a major concern of the Commission.” (Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles, p. 54)
But perhaps the most devastating indictment of the credibility of the Warren Commission was not really known until the Assassination Records Review Board went to work in 1994. At that time, the Board declassified the memorandum written by Church Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi upon his first interview with Sylvia Odio, which occurred on January 16, 1976. During that interview, she related her post Warren Commission testimony meeting with attorney Wesley Liebeler:
He (Liebeler) kept threatening me with a lie detector test, even though he knew I was under tremendous stress at the time. But one thing he said, and this has always bothered me, he said to this other gentleman, I don’t remember his name, he said, “Well, you know if we do find out that this is a conspiracy, you know that we have orders from Chief Justice Warren to cover this thing up.”
Fonzi was, quite naturally, surprised. He asked Odio, “Liebeler said that?” She replied with, “Yes sir, I could swear on that.” (Probe, Vol. 3 No. 6)
With this kind of bias, the facts of the case were malleable. Gerald Ford knew that placing the JFK back wound where the autopsy face sheet located it would make for a dubious trajectory for the Single Bullet Theory’s exit through the president’s neck. So, in the draft of the Warren Report, with the stroke of a pen, he moved it up to the neck area. Does that sound like someone interested in getting to the bottom of the truth about the assassination? (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, pp. 174–75) It was also revealed that Ford, when US president, gave the game away to French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing. When the Frenchman asked him about his work on the Commission, Ford replied that Kennedy’s assassination was not the work of one man, “It was something set up. We were sure it was set up. But we were not able to discover by whom.” (JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, by James DiEugenio, p. 176)
The idea that an alleged communist like Oswald might have killed JFK for Castro, was promoted from the very night of the assassination by the CIA associated Cuban exile group, the DRE. (ibid, p. 234) Yet sitting member and dominant figure on the Warren Commission, Allen Dulles—who was part of direct and prolonged attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro—sat silent and revealed nothing about CIA subterfuge with the Cuban exiles. It was more than a decade later that accurate information began to emerge about such plots before the Senate’s Church Committee.
IV
Now let’s briefly examine the mainstream media’s early reporting on the JFK assassination. To understand the cover-up and/or unwillingness to challenge the emerging story, it is necessary to examine what we learned very early on—the afternoon of the assassination and within a few days after.
At the first news conference held after JFK was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, emergency room doctor Malcolm Perry described the throat wound as an entrance wound. (Ibid, p. 121) A few hours after that, JFK’s personal physician Admiral Burkley described the head shot as: “a simple matter of a gunshot through the brain.” Malcolm Kilduff, the press spokesman, pointed to his right temple while eliciting this statement. (Ibid, p. 17) And NBC newsman Chet Huntley repeated this at about 1:40 PM on network television. For a few weeks after, the mainstream media did not contradict this. But as the story about Oswald being the only shooter took hold, and the idea that only three shots from behind the car were fired, the mainstream media began trying to fit the proverbial square peg into the round hole. Some prominent media sources began explaining the early reports of Perry and Burkley mentioned above by explaining that the reason for this apparent anomaly was that the president turned almost totally around to wave at some supporters in the crowd—thus exposing his front to the shooter from behind. (See Paul Mandel in Life magazine of December 6, 1963)
There’s a major problem with this scenario. The Zapruder film, which Life magazine actually had at the time, shows nothing of the sort. JFK was not at all facing backwards when the shots hit him. Not even close. While the film itself was not shown to the general public until 1975, media sources had to know about this. Yet as mentioned above, some mainstream media sources proceeded with this “JFK was facing backward” scenario anyway.
In the issue of October 2, 1964, Life magazine published photos from the Zapruder film. That issue was largely dedicated to the newly published Warren Report. to As Jerry Policoff and Robert Hennelly later explained, the magazine went through three different incarnations, in order to conceal the president’s head moving rapidly rearward. This technical overhaul necessitated quite expensive alterations, like breaking and resetting printing plates twice. Both photos and captions were changed so as to camouflage indications of a frontal shot. (See the Village Voice, March 15, 1992) Years later, when the film was shown to the public, it was obvious what Life had done.
I could go on and on about the cover-up by the Warren Commission and about early naivete/cover-ups within the mainstream media. But it would be better served for visitors to this site to do a bit of investigation of the site itself. But why early on was so much of the MSM promoting this incorrect and deceptive scenario of a lone assassin shooting three times from behind? I think the subject can be explained by examining the phone calls between the new president Lyndon Johnson and prospective members of the Warren Commission.
Phone calls recorded on dictabelts collected by the Johnson library and released over the years show that both Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and Senator Richard Russell were reluctant to serve on the commission for a variety of reasons—both personal and professional. LBJ was able to convince them to serve by making subtle references to Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to Mexico City and national security issues, like the threat of atomic war. This seemed to scare/prompt both Russell and Warren to participate. (See DiEugenio, p. 92)
A thorough examination of these unsubtle references to Oswald in Mexico City reveal that early on, the CIA and FBI promoted the idea that Oswald had been in contact with Valery Kostikov—a supposed master of black operations and assassinations in the western hemisphere for the KGB. And that the revelation of which might lead to complications that would provoke a nuclear war between the US and USSR. In fact, there was ample proof of the effectiveness of this motif on view in 1964. At that time, Mark Lane was part of a debate in Beverly Hills with three other lawyers. The event was recorded, with thousands in attendance. Noted liberal lawyer A. L. Wirin stated:
I say thank God for Earl Warren. He saved us from a pogrom. He saved our nation. God bless him for what he has done in establishing Oswald was the lone assassin. (Lane, Plausible Denial, p. 52)
When Lane asked the famous liberal attorney if he would still say that if Oswald was innocent, Wirin replied affirmatively.
As the above example shows, this clever plan by the plotters was able to scare the then “liberal establishment” in Washington and the mainstream media to promote the cover-up. Once the cover-up was promoted by the MSM—even with subsequent revelations contradicting the official scenario—a certain inertia set in. Imagine the fall out if sacred media icons such as the Washington Post, New York Times and mainstream TV networks had to admit that they were snookered into believing a clever lie; that they totally blew their investigation of the greatest political crime in US history—the conspiratorial assassination of the president. It would have destroyed their credibility for decades, if not permanently.
V
What about the actual assassination itself? While it is possible that it did involve a large number of people, I contend that it isn’t necessary to have had a large number of people. Based on what I have read on this site, as well as a large number of books associated with the JFK assassination, a relatively small number of people could have carried out the assassination itself.
It is well established at this point that JFK had made a number of political enemies in high places within both military and the CIA. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, JFK fired three sacred cows in the CIA: Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and Charles Cabell. He privately blamed the CIA for misleading him and, in fact, perhaps sabotaging him early on with respect to the Bay of Pigs. He angrily swore to “smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” (Lane, p. 93)
His unwillingness to invade Cuba during and after the Bay of Pigs affair, his reluctance to increase involvement in Vietnam, and his subsequent attempt to achieve a détente with the USSR and Cuba angered members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, such as Air Force General Curtis LeMay, Joint Chiefs Chair Lyman Lemnitzer, and also veteran black operator Colonel Ed Lansdale. After the successful resolution of the Missile Crisis, White House tapes reveal that while the president was in the room during a meeting with the Joint Chiefs, one general can be heard saying words to the affect that this is: “another Munich.” (DiEugenio, p. 184)
With such enemies as Lemnitzer, LeMay, and Lansdale in the military, and the remaining allies of the dismissed Dulles, Cabell, and Bissell, such as William Harvey, James Angleton, David Phillips, and Richard Helms, this cadre of JFK haters would have provided a nucleus of those in high places with significant experience in covert operations and assassination planning to have attempted and succeeded in orchestrating the murder of JFK.
Now as for the “meat and potatoes” of the assassination as it was carried out on November 22, 1963, in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, just how many people would it have taken? We are talking about what military intelligence and the CIA would generally call technicians. This term refers to those who actually follow orders, position themselves, and do the shooting and clean-up afterwards.
The late Jim Garrison—the DA in New Orleans who was the only man in history to actually bring a trial against anyone for the assassination of President Kennedy—thought that it wouldn’t have taken any more than 10 or 15 people on the ground at Dealey Plaza. His basic scenario was: three shooters with an assistant on a radio in communication with either each other (two ways radios) or with someone on the ground along the motorcade route to coordinate the affair; and a few more people—perhaps as few as five to do a clean-up. By clean-up, I mean to collect obvious evidence such as extra bullets or bullet fragments, people with photographs that might give a bird’s eye view of things better left unknown to any investigators and so on. (Garrison lightly sketched in such a scenario in his Playboy interview of October, 1967)
In fact, there were numerous reports of people representing themselves as Secret Service agents demanding films and photographs after the assassination, as well as agents arresting and interrogating people afterward. These individuals have never been identified or accounted for despite numerous inquiries and investigations. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 110; Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 423, p. 189)
What about involvement of the Dallas Police and Dallas County Sheriff personnel? There could have been some involvement, but for the most part, the officers on the ground were probably following orders as to just how much security to provide and how to proceed in the aftermath of the assassination. Perhaps this was influenced from Washington. On one of the dictabelt recordings there is a talk between Johnson assistant Cliff Carter and Dallas authorities. Carter can be heard saying words to the effect that: You have your man, don’t you? We need this thing to be tied up before too many rumors spread about a possible communist conspiracy. (DiEugenio, p. 92) There is obviously tremendous pressure being applied from Washington in what, by any estimation is a serious crisis and it would be understandable that Dallas may have been a victim of this pressure. While it is likely that Dallas officials like Mayor Earl Cabell could have provided some logistical support for the conspirators by altering the motorcade route, we simply don’t know enough about the exact planning of the itinerary of the Dallas trip to state definitively whether or not Mayor Cabell was a willing conspirator or perhaps a dupe of the conspirators.
Some people in Dallas and the Secret Service made statements that, for example: JFK wanted motorcycle riders to ride behind the presidential car rather than alongside of it—thus giving the shooters a clearer shot at the president. On YouTube, there is even a film of a Secret Service agent ordered to reluctantly jump off the back of the limousine, raising his hands in puzzlement. There are also disputes about the bubble top, both the secret service and the Dallas authorities were supposedly told that JFK wanted the bubble top removed. As expert Vince Palamara has shown, we know that that was untrue.
Could the Secret Service have been involved directly in the conspiracy? This is indeed a plausible scenario. But just how many people would it take? I believe it could have been a limited number—perhaps just the chief of the Secret Service in Washington, James Rowley, or maybe even the local on ground head of the Secret Service who was traveling with the presidential party in Dallas, Roy Kellerman. One of such people might have told the rest of the agents something like: ‘JFK wants the bubble top removed;” or “JFK wants the Dallas police to stand down or show less of a presence.” Remember, these agents are very much like a military contingent. This is not a democratic organization. They just follow orders.
VI
The same could be said of the autopsy doctors. Were all of them actively involved in the conspiracy itself? I doubt it. These doctors were military doctors under orders. They may have been simply told that the nation’s national security is at stake and again they may have just followed orders. In fact, one of the doctors present at the autopsy, Dr. Pierre Finck did testify at the trial of Clay Shaw that a general was directing the autopsy. When he was queried about this to the effect of the nature of this direction, he continued and he added:
Oh yes, three were admirals, and when you are a lieutenant Colonel in the Army you just follow orders, and at the end of the autopsy we were specifically told as I recall it, it was by Admiral Kenney, the Surgeon General of the Navy…we were specifically told not to discuss the case. (Transcript, 2/24/69)
Thanks to writer Rob Couteau, there is further evidence of the doctors involved in the cover up. For afterwards, they called Perry and asked him to change his story that very night or they would find a way to discipline him. (See article “The Ordeal of Malcolm Perry”, by James DiEugenio)
Same thing with the FBI. Only in the discredited and baseless piece of fiction, Nomenclature of as Assassination Cabal, are they given direct responsibility for the assassination. As John Newman has shown, J Edgar Hoover was mystified by the evidence he was getting from Mexico City. And he later called it a false story. (Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 635) Keep in mind that Hoover was approaching seventy years of age and later reports are that he was becoming less and less competent near the end of his life. He may even have been an innocent dupe of the Oswald in Mexico City scenario and acted to participate in the cover-up as a defender of national security and the World War III scenario.
We can go through a check list of commonly named suspects.: David Rockefeller and the business community, Organized Crime, Lyndon Johnson, Cuban exiles. The JFK administration had many, many enemies who they were rubbing the wrong way. We can then argue one way or the other on each. The exiles hated JFK for his perceived backing out of the Bay of Pigs and his second refusal to invade Cuba during the Missile Crisis. There were rumors that LBJ might be gone in a second administration. We also know that Wall Street was not happy with what President Kennedy did during the Steel Crisis. Everyone and their mother knows that Bobby Kennedy was hounding the Mafia, especially the likes of Sam Giancana and Carolos Marcello, since the fifties. We could also argue that there was a cross pollination of the plot between certain elements of these vectors of power. In fact, some authors, like the late Bill Turner, did argue a triangular plot: the CIA, Mafia, Cuban exiles. But the point I wish to make is that although a relatively small hit team could have pulled off the murder, as I have shown, larger conspiracies are not at all uncommon.
For those of you not familiar with William Shakespeare, the great British playwright wrote a series of works generally referred to by scholars as “The Histories.” These plays are Shakespeare’s dramatizations of significant historical events from his own era back to the classical (Greek/Roman) era. One of these plays was titled Julius Caesar. This is the story of the assassination of Julius Caesar and is based loosely on ancient writings about Caesar. Caesar was assassinated in the Roman senate by his enemies. This, in turn, provoked a long, complex civil war after which Caesar’s stepson, Octavian, eventually won out; defeating both the original plotters, and his own allies: Lepidus and Mark Antony.
Author Donald Gibson has helped point out an intriguing parallel in the two cases. In the lead up to Caesar’s assassination, according to the play, Caesar had been repeatedly warned by a soothsayer “Beware of the Ides of March.” This is the day in 44 BCE on which Caesar was eventually assassinated. Now the title of an article in Fortune magazine uses such a reference. While it doesn’t actually say: “Beware of the Ides of April,” its reference is a bit perplexing. Why not just title it: “Kennedy Wrong on Steel” or perhaps “Kennedy Jawboning a Threat to Free Enterprise.” People who were interviewed in the article were not just steel executives but also prominent Wall Street bankers and businesspeople. They all expressed outrage at Kennedy’s “jawboning” and worried that he was rapidly leading the US toward a dictatorship. (For an extensive article on the issue, visit this page on Ratical.org entitled: “Fortune’s Warning to President Kennedy: Beware of The Ides of April”)
What this shows is that there was a real disdain at the top of the Power Elite against Kennedy. These kinds of people had connections throughout other sectors of our society. And that was the key point. This scenario is probably the more likely scenario rather than a massive business plot. Elements of the national security structure including the CIA and military intelligence knew of the general dislike of JFK by the business community and knew that if they pulled something off, they would receive little if no opposition from the economic power structure. And that men like Hoover and LBJ would fall in line and help in the cover up.
Now, let me again further my point about large conspiracies This time in the blatantly political arena. We all recall the Watergate scandal. Over sixty people were tried and later convicted. What about the Iran/Contra affair? In this one, two presidents were clearly involved: Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. And it was the latter who pardoned other higher ups in the trail of perfidy. And as many writers have noted—including two who have passed on, Gary Webb and Robert Parry—the cocaine part of that affair was never officially uncovered. But they proved that it undeniably existed. (See Webb’s book, Dark Alliance. Also click here over how the CIA watched over Webb’s downfall)
Let me add one more example of a large conspiracy. One that was not even really well-hidden. Everyone should be watching the congressional January 6th hearings. Or at least view them on You Tube. Clearly, much evidence was kept from the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, because today we can now see how wide and deep the plotting was to stop Joseph Biden from winning an electoral college victory. It went on for months. And it employed at least two dozen people both inside and outside the White House. It was also multi-leveled. It involved lawyers visiting state legislators, phone calls and visits to state voting officials, the gathering of thousands of Trump zealots in Washington, the stowing away of weapons nearby etc. The end game of this planned insurrection was that a total of nine people died, and over 140 were injured. Even today, key people have refused to testify, like Mark Meadows and Steve Bannon. Why?
VII
The evidence is rather convincing: large conspiracies have existed throughout time. Different aspects of our society have existed within them. The latest example being street provocateur Ali Alexander and very likely, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. In the JFK case, all that was needed was someone or, maybe two, who had access to some of these sectors. A commonly named example would be Allen Dulles. He and his close friend James Angleton could have then focused on certain areas for the plot: Tampa, Chicago, Dallas. And they could have picked susceptible fall guys like Gilberto Lopez, Thomas Arthur Vallee, and the perfect one, Lee Oswald. If the great amount of circumstantial evidence which exists does point to major involvement of Oswald in US intelligence, then this is the missing piece of the puzzle which, when manipulated properly, would have given the conspirators their major tool to carry out and, in particular, cover-up the assassination. They scared the ‘liberal establishment’ into going along with the cover-up to avoid nuclear war.
Let me add one more common complaint: Well, wouldn’t someone have talked? Maybe, but maybe not. But my point should really be that there has been a whole book written about this subject: Larry Hancock’s Someone Would Have Talked. In that book Hancock details the stories of two men who did say something about the plot to kill JFK: Richard Case Nagell and John Martino. Dick Russell has written a long book on the former called The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Here is the point: large conspiracies do exist and, yes, people have talked in the JFK case. I could also add that David Phillips told his brother he was in Dallas on the day of the assassination. (Russell, p. 272)
Conclusion
In his book entitled The Secret Team, former Pentagon/CIA liaison Fletcher Prouty mentions just that: a secret team that could be used to carry out multiple deep cover operations such as assassinations, psych wars, and other black op/disinformation operations. He concludes, in this and other writings, that the JFK assassination, and other events in the USA, could have been a simple application of the covert operations used by American intelligence to destabilize foreign governments being brought in and utilized within the borders of the US itself. Remember, during the same time period of the assassinations, the FBI was running dozens of covert intelligence programs to destabilize such activist groups as anti-war, civil rights, black militants, and women’s rights organizations. The CIA, with Operation Chaos, also carried out a similar group of intelligence operations in the US. These are the signature methods used by US intelligence operatives in foreign countries: eliminate or neutralize the leadership and use covert operations to divide and destabilize political parties that supported the assassinated/neutralized leaders.
In closing, it was not necessary for hundreds or even thousands of people to have been directly involved in planning and implementing the assassinations of major center-left US politicians and activists in the 1960’s. It is also possible that only a few dozen people may have actually taken part directly in the assassinations themselves. With the fear of the communist menace dominating the culture and media of that time period in general, and the fear of a world ending in nuclear incineration in particular, both the powerful and the weak were likely lulled into a sense of security/normality by the official explanations of those tragic events. Thereafter, a huge amount of government officials and media managers—down to Paul Mandel and A. L. Wirin—took part in the cover up.
While many people nowadays believe that JFK was probably killed by a conspiracy, the other assassinations receive less exposure. Many people have little or no opinion about those events. People want to believe that their country is more or less right-minded and that its basic foundations are not corrupt and that, while there may be some significant problems we all face, the truth will eventually win out and things will progress as they should. That is why many people cannot get their heads around the idea of either a large secret government within the US national security structure or that such an element of the power structure could pull of a series of assassinations and manipulations in an ongoing manner and whose effects exist in major ways to this very day. I hope that this essay can serve to educate and inform the public as to just how realistic and plausible these scenarios are.
Finally, and most importantly, the events of the 1960’s marked a watershed in history by which all events which followed were greatly affected. Unless we finally get to the bottom of these events, including the major assassinations of that era, we can never truly understand how we got to where we are today.
