Murder Tales: The JFK Conspiracies

by H. N. Lloyd

  FBI agent James Hosty was another individual brushed over in the FBI report, his dealings with Oswald were barely mentioned. Hosty’s actions after the assassination have also brought him under suspicion by the conspiracy buffs in the half century since. I mentioned the letters that Oswald wrote to Hosty as they are historical fact, but nowhere in the FBI report where they actually mentioned, and Hosty did not declare having received any communications off of Oswald to the Warren Commission. When Hosty was finally caught out and questioned about the communications he had received from Oswald, and why they weren’t in Oswald’s file, Hosty stated that he had burnt the letters on his superior’s orders. Important evidence in the assassination of a President, and a senior FBI official had ordered it burnt! So now we only have Hosty’s word for what was in those letters, and surely his word must be looked at in a dubious light given his suspicious actions in burning this critical evidence. After the FBI Report and the Warren Commission, Hosty was given an official reprimand for his sloppy conduct, and for the next thirty years had a rather un-startling career with the FBI.

  One of the stranger elements of the case; that both the FBI and later the Warren Commission glossed over; was the peculiar route Oswald took from the scene of the assassination to the Texas Theatre. There were of course plenty of witnesses who informed the FBI; and who later testified; that they had seen Oswald on his way from the Texas School Book Depository, but this in no way explains the peculiarity of his route. Firstly; if Oswald had just murdered the President of the United States, then surely he should have been eager to get the hell out of dodge as quickly as he could. Now if Oswald had wanted to escape then he was in the perfect place, he passed right by the Greyhound Bus Depot; where he could have caught a coach to anywhere in the country. So the question has to be asked; why didn’t Oswald just get on a bus and leave town, instead of faffing around, drawing attention to himself and ultimately getting himself caught and killed? Was it because, as some have claimed, Oswald had been ordered to go to the Texas Theatre to meet a contact? Possibly a CIA handler; or other such dubious individual? Researcher Jim Marrs and other assassination buffs certainly seem to think it’s a possibility.

  One of the biggest criticisms laid upon the FBI report is its dealing with Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City in the September of 1963. The witness, CIA agent William Gaudet, raises several questions. Gaudet claimed he knew Oswald from Oswald’s ‘Fair Play For Cuba antics’ handing out leaflets outside a local Trade Mart. Every single one of Oswald’s ‘Fair Play For Cuba’ leaflets had been stamped with an address, 544 Camp Street, New Orleans. Gaudet didn’t feel that it was worth mentioning that at the time of his Oswald sighting; he also worked out of an office in 544 Camp Street. Let’s turn our attention to the Embassy tapes, first of all, immediately upon hearing them, the FBI agents asked to assess their content believed that the CIA had made a mistake, they did not believe that it was Oswald speaking on the tapes at all. They felt so strongly about this point; a memo was sent to The Whitehouse informing President Johnson that the FBI believed some terrible mistake had occurred. Despite this the CIA was insistent that it was Oswald, and so the FBI took them at their word, since that day officialdom has obstinately insisted that it was Oswald’s voice picked up on the wiretap. What was interesting is that in the tapes Oswald mentioned that he had previously being dealing with an official called Valeriy Kostikov. Kostikov had been working out of the Mexico embassy at the time, and he was well known to the CIA as an operative of Department 13, a codename for a cabal of saboteurs and assassins. When others came to try and verify the voice for themselves, they found their permission blocked, and given the rather feeble excuse that the contentious tapes had been wiped. Of course there was nothing sinister in the CIA destroying some contested evidence in the assassination of a President, no; they claimed that they routinely wiped surveillance tapes after a set period of time. We then come to the supporting evidence of the Oswald tapes, the photographs the CIA surveillance team took of ‘Oswald’ coming in and out of the embassy. When the FBI received the photographs they were dumbfounded and not a little confused, you see the photographs were quite clearly not of Oswald at all, the man bore some slight resemblance, but it quite clearly wasn’t the alleged Presidential assassin. Of course the CIA wasn’t deliberately trying to mislead the FBI, no, it had been a genuine mistake, they’d accidently sent photographs of a similar man who’d been at the embassy on the same day. When the FBI requested the correct photographs, the CIA apologised and said that they had lost them. These disingenuous acts on behalf of the CIA; have left the conspiracy buffs and researchers questioning if Oswald ever visited Mexico at all in the September of 1963, or was it just some elaborate plot using a rubbish look alike to try and make Oswald’s connection to left-wing ideological thought appear that little bit stronger?

  In 2010 TV host and conspiracy buff Jessie Ventura; tracked down Marina Oswald, now Marina Porter, she was sixty-eight and still living in Dallas with her second husband. She refused to speak to Ventura on camera; as she feared not for her own life, but for the lives of her children. She stated categorically that she had never worked for the KGB or any other Russian intelligence agency, or indeed any American intelligence agencies, but she did feel after soul searching over the decades that Lee Harvey Oswald was an intelligence officer working for; and being manipulated by; the CIA. After Oswald’s death she believes the same agencies that murdered the President, manipulated her so that she believed wholeheartedly and publically supported the framing of her murdered husband; and the cover-up of the conspiracy to murder the President. The FBI’s report into the events was the first part of her conversion into believing in her former husband’s guilt. Of course she could offer no proof of her beliefs; it was simply her gut feeling after a lifetime of reflection. There was one point she was keen to clear up unequivocally, she confirmed that she had indeed taken the famous photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald stood in the back yard of their home; proudly holding the rifle used to kill Kennedy, the Smith and Wesson used to kill Officer Tippit, and the left wing newspapers. Once again her gut instinct was that someone had ordered Oswald to have those photographs taken, and he had unquestioningly obeyed that order, unaware that the photograph would one day be used by the FBI to besmirch his name.

  The Warren Commission

  The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy; became more popularly known as the Warren Commission, named after its chairman Chief Justice Earl Warren. Established by President Lyndon B. Johnson, he wanted a report that would finally bring the curtain down on the long shadow his predecessor cast over him. Seven of Capitol Hills most respected players sat on the Commission to view the evidence and rubber stamp what was already assumed to be the official conclusion; that Oswald acted alone. Now this is one of the major criticisms levelled at the Warren Commission and its ultimate report, the Commission did exactly what every investigator or student of historical crime learns not to do on their first day, the Commission had its theory from the beginning, set out to prove it, looked for evidence that backed up their beliefs, and discarded or pooh-poohed any inconvenient evidence that did not fit in with their hypothesis. Their hypothesis was simple; Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nutter, acting by himself, who was then killed by the emotionally unstable Jack Ruby, murdering Oswald out of the misguided but noble sentiments of wanting to save Jackie Kennedy from the turmoil of the ensuing trial.

  The Chief Justice, Earl Warren, was a well known liberal; and proponent of civil rights reform. Many in the south had called for him to be sacked and placed on trial for his ‘communist’ sympathies. He initially refused the position as chairman of the Commission; as he felt that it was a conflict of interest for a supreme-court judge to engage in ‘extra-judicial interests’. President Lyndon B. Johnson; feared that if he could not get a Presidential Committee up and running, then he would have to deal with two official but opposing investigations into the assassination, one a Texa
s State Investigation, and a second investigation run by the Senate. These conceivably could have come to two different conclusions; which would have placed the entire matter in utter confusion, and fuelled talk of conspiracy. Johnson needed one Commission, coming to one final and definitive answer. So Johnson summoned Warren to the Oval Office; where he ordered Warren to take the chair of the Commission. He explained to Warren the delicate situation, the possibility of two opposing Commissions, and the consequences of the wrong conclusion being reached. If people kept saying Khrushchev killed Kennedy, and the Americans were pushed to act against Khrushchev by popular public demand, then Khrushchev had the means to killed thirty-nine million people in one hour with the Soviets nuclear arsenal. Warren realised the heavy burden being placed upon him, and accepted the chairmanship. Giving Warren this little pep-talk, Johnson also did something rather naughty, something rather damaging to the legitimacy of the Warren Commission. Johnson made sure Warren knew the possible consequences of coming to an undesirable conclusion, even if it was the inconvenient truth. Of course Lee Harvey Oswald’s past didn’t help the Commission’s task of making him look like a lone assassin. The fear was that if the American people discovered that Oswald was a Cuban or Russian agent, then it might create great public pressure to take reprisals against the country responsible for handling Oswald. Gary Cornell, who later re-examined President Kennedy’s murder as part of the House Select Committee on Assassination, concluded that the members of the Warren Commission felt it was more important to ‘quash’ rumours that Oswald was part of a conspiracy, the uncovering of which could create tensions between America and Russia, and possibly lead to a nuclear war, than to find the real truth behind the assassination. From its very inception then, the Warren Commission was complicit with The Whitehouse in making sure the ‘truth’ would be a whitewash.

  The committee consisted of Earl Warren; Chief Justice of the United States, Richard Russell; the senator for Georgia, John Sherman Cooper; the senator for Kentucky, Hale Boggs; the House Majority Leader, Gerald Ford; House Minority Leader and himself the future President of the United States, Allan Welsh Dulles; former Director of the CIA, and John J. McCloy; the President of the World Bank. It has been suggested that several of these people should not have had a place on the Commission; seeing as they or the organisations they represented stood to gain from the President’s death, and therefore have been incriminated or accused of being involved in the Presidents murder. Letting them sit on the Commission therefore was akin to letting viable suspects sit on the jury of a normal murder trial. Take for example Allan Welsh Dulles, the CIA are accused by several people of being a major player in the Presidents murder, for reasons which we will discuss later. Dulles had been the Director of the CIA when Kennedy inherited the disastrous Bay of Pigs endeavour. At the end of the failed invasion of Cuba; Kennedy personally blamed Dulles; and had him sacked. So imagine being unceremoniously dumped from one of the most powerful positions in the world, after doggedly doing the job thanklessly for years. The person who sacked you is then murdered; everyone knows you hated the victim with a passion, so are you seriously telling me that this really is the right person to be chosen to investigate the victim’s murder? John J. McCloy’s involvement is also said to be suspect by some. He represented the powerful forces of international banking, and there are those who believe that such forces conspired to murder President Kennedy; because of his attempts to take away power from the powerful Federal Bank. Richard Russell has had the finger of suspicion pointed at him, as he was the chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, the legislative overseer of all American Military shenanigans. It was well known that the military was upset with Kennedy over his plans to pull out of Vietnam, and for not fully supporting operations such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The military are said to have been involved in any number of conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of President Kennedy, therefore having the military’s man on Capitol Hill sit on the committee investigating the Presidents death, has sat uneasily with some critics. The fact that Lyndon B. Johnson was also tape recorded cryptically telling Russell, ‘you’re my man on that Commission’, has raised some very suspicious eyebrows as to what Lyndon B. Johnson’s real influence was over the allegedly independent committee. President Johnson, of course, being another individual who benefited from President Kennedy’s death, and who at one time or another has been accused of being more involved in the assassination than he ever let on.

  Initially the Commission was simply going to rubber stamp the FBI’s final report on the assassination, they were not going hear witnesses, they were not going view evidence, they were simply going to read the FBI’s report and put their names to it. Then the Commission hit its first big snag, on Monday the 9th of December 1963, just seventeen days after the murder, the FBI submitted its dubious findings, and to the Commissions horror it was five volumes long. Just like the Warren Commission had been expecting, the FBI had arrived at the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nutter acting to his own warped agenda. As the members of the Commission read the long and dull report it slowly dawned on them that not only had it been hastily written, but that it was riddled with factual errors and inconsistencies. The Commission openly criticised it for not dealing with the actual crime, simply wallowing in the details of Oswald’s dubious past; and affiliations with communism. John J. McCloy went on record in the Commissions minutes as stating that the FBI report left him feeling more confused as to the details of the assassination than when he began reading it. Hale Boggs said the FBI report left him with a million unanswered questions. Earl Warren poured scorn on the report; calling it ‘totally inconclusive’. In short the FBI’s official report was seen as wholly unworthy of the Commission rubber stamping it. J. Edgar Hoover was furious at the Commission’s reaction, he felt that the Warren Commission was trying to place blame for the assassination onto the FBI, that the Commission was deliberately looking for the conspiracy which would make the FBI look incompetent in its failure to uncover it. There were even those who rumoured that the FBI might have been in on a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, well, after all J. Edgar Hoover was another person who was known to have fervently hated President Kennedy. President Kennedy had tried to force Hoover to retire on several occasions, and there were even rumours that Hoover had been blackmailing the President with details of his numerous affairs. Then, just a few short weeks after the President’s murder, a rumour that the FBI had been involved in the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy reached the Commissions ears. This had its genesis on Wednesday the 22nd of January 1964, when the Commission received a telephone call from the Texan Attorney General, Waggoner Carr. Carr informed the Commission of the stunning revelation that Lee Harvey Oswald had been an FBI informant. The Commission hastily convened a meeting where they discussed the allegation. They quickly realised that, if what Carr was telling them was true, then they would never again be able to quash a belief in a government conspiracy against the President. Allen Welsh Dulles demanded that all records of the meeting be destroyed, lest the rumours become publicly known, but Earl Warren refused, he was determined that there be a degree of transparency about all the Commission’s proceedings. Nevertheless the Commission did begin to act in secret; they held secret talks with Waggoner Carr about the rumours circulating in Dallas regarding Oswald. After the meeting the Commission met in an executive session. During this meeting Hale Boggs went on record in the minutes as saying, ‘We have to do everything on earth to establish the facts, one way or the other...without doing that every one of us is doing a very grave disservice’. Allen Welsh Dulles, not surprisingly given his CIA roots, was a little more pragmatic in his approach to the whole shady situation. He explained to the Commission members that they would never get the truth. The FBI was like the CIA; they would rather commit perjury than reveal details of their secret operations, and admit that Oswald had been an undercover employee. They discussed the possibility of setting up a further independent committee, with the
singular purview of investigating the allegation that Oswald had been on the payroll of the FBI. After discussing the idea in some depth, the Commission decided against any further investigation of the FBI. Even the powerful members of the Warren Commission were scared of J. Edgar Hoover and the power he held. It was said that if you were less than whiter than white, then J. Edgar Hoover would know your dirty little secrets. If you displeased him, then he would use your secrets to destroy you. Of course on Capitol Hill no one was whiter than white, and so it made J. Edgar Hoover one of the most feared and powerful men in America. On top of this consideration, the Commission was entirely dependent on the FBI to carry out any investigative duties. It would mean they would have to ask the FBI to investigate itself, something the Commission didn’t trust the FBI to do openly or honestly. So the Commission quietly dropped any ideas of investigating allegations of FBI duplicity. Yet this whole sorry debacle did show the Commission one thing, they could not simply just rubber stamp the FBI’s report, they had to carry out a longer and more detailed investigation of their own. Paradoxically; this episode also showed that the Commission lacked the authority, credibility and power to carry out such an exhaustive and truly honest investigation to its full capability. The Commission was already mortally compromised before it had even begun.