by Jon E. Lewis
Castro/the USSR assassinated JFK: ALERT LEVEL 3
LBJ
In 2003 Barr McClellan published Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK, which argued that Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson, together with an accomplice, Edward Clark, planned and covered up the assassination in Dallas. LBJ certainly had a motive: aside from the intrinsic attraction of succeeding to the most important job in the world, Johnson was the subject of four major criminal investigations involving government contract violations, misappropriation of funds, money-laundering and bribery at the time of Kennedy’s murder. All these investigations were terminated upon LBJ’s assumption of the Presidency. Worse, LBJ knew Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, a convicted murderer who was the sometime boyfriend of LBJ’s sister Josefa; in 1998 JFK assassination researcher Walt Brown announced that he had identified a fingerprint in the “sniper’s nest” in the Book Depository as belonging to Wallace. Former CIA officer and Watergate agent E. Howard Hunt also implicated LBJ in a deathbed confession, along with CIA agents Bill Harvey, Cord Meyer, Bill Harvey and David Sanchez Morales; in Hunt’s confession the shooter was named Lucien Sarti and shot Kennedy from the grassy knoll. Hunt, according to his own account, was one of the “three hoboes” seen on the grassy knoll on the afternoon of 22 November 1963.
LBJ apparently had no shortage of willing helpers. Mark North’s Act of Treason (1991) posits that LBJ was helped by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who was known to loathe JFK and his brother Bobby, the Attorney General.
LBJ conspired to kill his predecessor: ALERT LEVEL 6
CIA and Anti-Castro Cuban Exile Conspiracy
Something very bad is going on within the CIA and I want to know what it is. I want to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds.
President John F. Kennedy
Kennedy despised the CIA for bungling the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, and afterwards accepted the resignation of the CIA chief Allen Dulles. The Agency reciprocated Kennedy’s feeling because, aside from his stinging criticism, he was intending to withdraw from Vietnam and seek detente with the Communists. According to Crime and Cover-Up (1977) by Peter Dale Scott, Kennedy’s initiatives would have caused the scaling down of the CIA empire, as well as the curbing of its lucrative narcotics-trafficking business. The Military-Industrial Complex financed the hit, since it had a vested interest in continuing the war in ’Nam, from which it was making billions. Assassination was the CIA’s stock-in-trade. It had participated in the successful murders of two (at least) heads of state, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Why not murder its own head of state? It had the expertise, after all.
HSCA reviewed these theories and concluded that, although Oswald assassinated Kennedy in a conspiracy with others, the conspiracy did not include any US Intelligence agencies. HSCA did believe, however, that anti-Castro Cuban exiles might have participated in Kennedy’s murder. These exiles had worked closely with CIA operatives in covert operations against Castro’s Cuba.
The CIA assassinated JFK: ALERT LEVEL 2.5
Anti-Castro Cuban exiles assassinated JFK: ALERT LEVEL 7
The Mob
The HSCA investigation also identified the Mafia as possible conspirators in the plot to assassinate Kennedy. The Mob, so the theory runs, murdered JFK in retaliation for the heat put upon them by Attorney General Robert Kennedy (who had increased by 12 times the number of prosecutions under President Eisenhower). What HSCA was too discreet to mention was that the Kennedys had long been in bed with the Mob (literally in the case of JFK, who had an affair with Sam Giancana’s girlfriend Judith Campbell Exner) and had used Mafia money in the campaign to secure the White House. The Mob didn’t like the campaign against them, and even less did it like the Kennedys’ hypocrisy. Mafia bosses Carlos Marcello, Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr top the list of HSCA gangster suspects. For good measure, HSCA also found ties, admittedly tenuous, between Oswald, Jack Ruby and the Marcello mob of New Orleans. Ruby, a sometime foot soldier for Capone in Chicago, was tasked with “offing” Oswald before he could squeal. An argument against Mafia culpability is that the JFK assassination did not bear the hallmark of Mafia hits, which tend to be up close and personal; if the Mob did kill Kennedy then it must have hired a trained military marksman, possibly someone in or on the dissident fringes of the CIA, with whom the Mob had co-operated in attempted assassinations of Castro.
An added twist to the Mob theory is given by Mark North in Act of Treason, in which he claims that Marcello tipped off J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI in 1962 that the assassination was being planned. Hoover, who despised Kennedy’s civil rights agenda, intentionally sat on the information and let JFK die.
The Mob killed Kennedy: ALERT LEVEL 6
There is no shortage of other possible culprits. The Freemasons (antipathetic to JFK’s Catholicism), Jackie Kennedy (embarrassed and shamed by her husband’s affairs), Richard Nixon (desiring revenge for his defeat in the 1960 presidential election) and the Israelis (in anger at JFK’s use of Nazi scientists in his nuclear programme and his opposition to theirs) have all had their 15 minutes of infamy as the suspected sponsors of the hit. A remarkable number – more than 30 – hoodlums, policemen and government agents have all stepped into the limelight to claim that they pulled the trigger on 22 November 1963, and for a while the diary entry of Dallas policeman Roscoe White, in which he detailed the murder, had many convinced – until it was proven to be a forgery. Around 2,000 books have been published on the JFK assassination and, just when everyone thought it was safe to say JFK was murdered by a conspiracy, there has been a recent tendency to support the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman” theory, headed by Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (1994) and Mark Furhman’s A Simple Act of Murder (2006). Oswald, an ex-Marine, was a good shot, the cavalcade was moving slowly, and a single bullet might have hit both JFK and Governor Connally, meaning that Oswald had to fire only two shots in the timeframe, not three.
The arguments of the “anti-conspirators” fall on stony ground. An ABC News poll in 2003 found that 70 per cent of American respondents “suspect a plot” in the assassination of President Kennedy. Jack Leon Ruby is the weak link in the anti-conspiracy case. Why did Ruby step out of the crowd and gun down Oswald? Because he was so morally or politically outraged by Oswald’s murder of JFK that he had to take revenge? Ruby was a hood of no fixed moral views, so: no. For the fame of it? Possibly, but the HSCA found no evidence that 56-year-old Ruby was psychologically flawed to the degree that he wished to make his mark in history as a shootist. And, when Ruby informed the Warren Commission that he would “come clean”, what was he about to divulge? On balance, it must be assumed that Ruby stepped forward with his gun because he was either paid or pressurized by others to silence Oswald permanently. If someone needed to silence Lee Harvey Oswald, then there was a conspiracy.
The whos and whys of the conspiracy may never be known. In all likelihood, the conspiracy was small-scale, not institutional, and was created in the murky backrooms of the anti-Castro exiles in New Orleans, which maverick CIA agents and the Mob also frequented. This is the thrust of the 1991 Oliver Stone movie JFK – based on Jim Garrison’s investigation – and of the HSCA report.
JFK was killed by a conspiracy, not a “lone gunman”: ALERT LEVEL 7
Further Reading
Mark Fuhrman, A Simple Act of Murder, 2006
Barr McClellan, Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK, 2003
Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy, 1989
Mark North, Act of Treason, 1991
Gerald Posner, Case Closed, 1994
Robin Ramsay, Who Shot JFK?, 2000
Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas–Watergate Connection, 1977
DOCUMENT: EXTRACTS FROM THE REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS OF THE US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
C. The Committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available t
o it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The Committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Soviet Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Cuban Government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.
The Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Central Intelligence Agency were not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
[. . .]
Based on the evidence available to it, the committee could not preclude the possibility that individual members of anti-Castro Cuban groups or the national syndicate of organized crime were involved in the assassination. There was insufficient evidence, however, to support a finding that any individual members were involved. The ramifications of a conspiracy involving such individuals would be significant, although of perhaps less import than would be the case if a group itself – the national syndicate, for example – had been involved.
The committee recognized that a finding that two gunmen fired simultaneously at the President did not, by itself, establish that there was a conspiracy to assassinate the President. It is theoretically possible that the gunmen were acting independently, each totally unaware of the other. It was the committee’s opinion, however, that such a theoretical possibility is extremely remote. The more logical and probable inference to be drawn from two gunmen firing at the same person at the same time and in the same place is that they were acting in concert, that is, as a result of a conspiracy.
The committee found that, to be precise and loyal to the facts it established, it was compelled to find that President Kennedy was probably killed as a result of a conspiracy. The committee’s finding that President Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy was premised on four factors:
1) Since the Warren Commission’s and FBI’s investigation into the possibility of a conspiracy was seriously flawed, their failure to develop evidence of a conspiracy could not be given independent weight.
2) The Warren Commission was, in fact, incorrect in concluding that Oswald and Ruby had no significant associations, and therefore its finding of no conspiracy was not reliable.
3) While it cannot be inferred from the significant associations of Oswald and Ruby that any of the major groups examined by the committee were involved in the assassination, a more limited conspiracy could not be ruled out.
4) There was a high probability that a second gunman fired at the President. At the same time, the committee candidly stated, in expressing its finding of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, that it was “unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.”
The photographic and other scientific evidence available to the committee was insufficient to permit the committee to answer these questions. In addition, the committee’s other investigative efforts did not develop evidence from which Oswald’s conspirator or conspirators could be firmly identified. It is possible, of course, that the extent of the conspiracy was so limited that it involved only Oswald and the second gunman. The committee was not able to reach such a conclusion, for it would have been based on speculation, not evidence. Aspects of the investigation did suggest that the conspiracy may have been relatively limited, but to state with precision exactly how small was not possible. Other aspects of the committee’s investigation did suggest, however, that while the conspiracy may not have involved a major group, it may not have been limited to only two people. [. . .]
If the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy was limited to Oswald and a second gunman, its main societal significance may be in the realization that agencies of the US Government inadequately investigated the possibility of such a conspiracy. In terms of its implications for government and society, an assassination as a consequence of a conspiracy composed solely of Oswald and a small number of persons, possibly only one, and possibly a person akin to Oswald in temperament and ideology, would not have been fundamentally different from an assassination by Oswald alone. [. . .]
3. THE COMMITTEE BELIEVES, ON THE BASIS OF THE EVIDENCE AVAILABLE TO IT, THAT ANTI-CASTRO CUBAN GROUPS, AS GROUPS, WERE NOT INVOLVED IN THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY, BUT THAT THE AVAILABLE EVIDENCE DOES NOT PRECLUDE THE POSSIBILITY THAT INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS MAY HAVE BEEN INVOLVED.
[. . .]
The committee investigated possible involvement in the assassination by a number of anti-Castro Cuban groups and individual activists for two primary reasons:
First, they had the motive, based on what they considered President Kennedy’s betrayal of their cause, the liberation of Cuba from the Castro regime; the means, since they were trained and practiced in violent acts, the result of the guerrilla warfare they were waging against Castro; and the opportunity, whenever the President, as he did from time to time, appeared at public gatherings, as in Dallas on 22 November 1963.
Second, the committee’s investigation revealed that certain associations of Lee Harvey Oswald were or may have been with anti-Castro activists.
The committee, therefore, paid close attention to the activities of anti-Castro Cubans – in Miami, where most of them were concentrated and their organizations were headquartered, and in New Orleans and Dallas, where Oswald, while living in these cities in the months preceding the assassination, reportedly was in contact with anti-Castro activists.
[. . .]
(2) Attitude of anti-Castro Cubans toward Kennedy.–President Kennedy’s popularity among the Cuban exiles had plunged deeply by 1963. Their bitterness is illustrated in a tape recording of a meeting of anti-Castro Cubans and right-wing Americans in the Dallas suburb of Farmer’s Branch on 1 October 1963. In it, a Cuban identified as Nestor Castellanos vehemently criticized the United States and blamed President Kennedy for the US Government’s policy of “non-interference” with respect to the Cuban issue. Holding a copy of the September 26 edition of the Dallas Morning News, featuring a front-page account of the President’s planned trip to Texas in November, Castellanos vented his hostility without restraint:
Castellanos: . . . we’re waiting for Kennedy the 22nd, buddy. We’re going to see him in one way or the other. We’re going to give him the works when he gets in Dallas. Mr good ol’ Kennedy. I wouldn’t even call him President Kennedy. He stinks.
Questioner: Are you insinuating that since this downfall came through the leader there [Castro in Cuba], that this might come to us . . . ?
Castellanos: Yes ma’am, your present leader. He’s the one who is doing everything right now to help the United States to become Communist.
(b) The committee investigation
The committee initiated its investigation by identifying the most violent and frustrated anti-Castro groups and their leaders from among the more than 100 Cuban exile organizations in existence in November 1963. These groups included Alpha 66, the Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE), Commandos L, the Directorio Revolutionary Estudiantil (DRE), the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) which included the Frente Revolucionario Democratico (FRD), the Junta del Gobierno de Cuba en el Exilio (JGCE), the 30th of November, the International Penetration Forces (InterPen), the Revolutionary Recovery Movement (MRR), and the Ejercito Invasor Cubano (EIC). Their election evolved both from the committee’s independent fi
eld investigation and the examination of the files and records maintained by the Federal and local agencies [that were] then monitoring Cuban exile activity. These agencies included local police departments, the FBI, the CIA, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (now the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA), the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Defense.
The groups that received the committee’s attention were “action groups” – those most involved in military actions and propaganda campaigns. Unlike most others, they did not merely talk about anti-Castro operations, they actually carried out infiltrations into Cuba, planned, and sometimes attempted, Castro’s assassination, and shipped arms into Cuba. These were also the groups whose leaders felt most betrayed by US policy toward Cuba and by the President; they were also those whose operations were frustrated by American law enforcement efforts after the missile crisis.
(1) Homer S. Echevarria.–For the most part the committee found that the anti-Castro Cuban leaders were more vociferous than potentially violent in their tirades against the President. Nevertheless, it was unable to conclude with certainty that all of the threats were benign. For example, one that the committee found particularly disturbing – especially so, since it was not thoroughly looked into in the 1963–4 investigation – came to the attention of the Secret Service within days of the President’s death, prompting the Acting Special Agent-in-Charge of the Chicago field office to write an urgent memorandum indicating he had received reliable information of “a group in the Chicago area who [sic] may have a connection with the J.F.K. assassination.” The memorandum was based on a tip from an informant who reported a conversation on 21 November 1963 with a Cuban activist named Homer S. Echevarria. They were discussing an illegal arms sale, and Echevarria was quoted as saying his group now had “plenty of money” and that his backers would proceed “as soon as we take care of Kennedy.”