by H. N. Lloyd
Ironically as the witnesses for the HSCA began to drop like flies, the HSCA itself was looking at the ‘statistically improbable’ number of people who had a connection to the Kennedy assassination, who themselves had died in dubious circumstances. Four of Jack Ruby’s ‘showgirls’, Dealey Plaza witnesses Gary Underhill, Lee Bowers, and several witnesses involved in the ‘Rose Cheramie Affair’; had all died prematurely; and in peculiar circumstances. In the event the Commission concluded that, ‘The available evidence does not establish anything about the nature of these deaths which would indicate that the deaths were in some manner, either direct or peripheral, caused by the assassination of President Kennedy or by any aspect of the subsequent investigation’. This official denouncement of foul play didn’t stop many from continuing to wonder. Eminent Kennedy researcher Jim Marrs; eventually collated a list of 103 people who had died ‘convenient deaths’ before they could give evidence to the various official investigations and hearings into President Kennedy’s assassination.
The most persuasive piece of evidence of conspiracy that the HSCA uncovered was The McLain Tape; this was the dictabelt recording of Dallas Police Radio Channel 1, more specifically, that of Motorcycle Officer H. B. McLain, recorded when he left his microphone in the on position as he escorted the Presidential motorcade. It was believed that when the sound of the rifle fire was caught by the microphone on the motorbike, it recorded it on the dictabelt as an ‘impulse pattern’. The interesting thing was there were quite clearly four impulse patterns recorded on the McLain tape. This suggested that four shots had been fired in Dealey Plaza that terrible day. Bolt, Beranek and Newman Technology, the prestigious acoustic science engineers, were asked by the HSCA to examine the McLain tape. The company agreed to investigate the recording further, and Dr. James E. Barger took charge of their acoustical investigation. Dr. Barger went back to Dealey Plaza, placed microphones all over the area, and using Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he fired shots from the Texas Schoolbook Depository and the grassy knoll. After scientifically analysing the McLain recording, Dr. Barger came to the conclusion that there were indeed four shots recorded on the dictatape, and after comparing the McLain Tape to their own recording made in Dealey Plaza; they came to the conclusion that there was a 50% chance that shot number three came from the grassy knoll. Of course Dr. James E. Barger was putting his reputation on the line; and he didn’t want to look like a fool, so he had his results crosschecked by acoustic analyst’s Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, from Queen’s College. When Weiss and Aschkenasy examined the McLain Tape; they concluded that not only was Dr Barger correct, but by their calculations there was a 95% probability that there had been a fourth shot fired from the grassy knoll. Of course there was some argument over whether the McLain Tape was really what it reported to be. Some argued that it wasn’t even the sound from Officer McLain’s microphone that had been recorded. McLain stated that he rode with the President all the way to Parkland hospital, so the sound sirens should have been more prevalent in the recording, as too should have been the sounds of crowds cheering; and then screaming when the President was shot; McLain even argued that it sounded like the recording of a three wheeled vehicle, not a two. Of course Officers McLain’s protestations fell on deaf ears.
One of the truly delightful things about the murky world of alternative historical research is that events can take the most unexpected turn, so it was with the McLain Tape, when in 1979 with the furore over the HSCA at its height, a pornographic magazine called ‘Gallery’ gave copies of the McLain Tape recording away free with their magazine; on a flexi-disc. Rock drummer Steve Barber just happened to buy a copy of the porno publication (yes even rock-stars have needs) and he ended up listening to the free gift. Barber became a little obsessed with the recording, and listened to it over and over again, using headphones to drown out ambient sound. As he listened he began to make out the words, ‘hold everything secure’; seconds after the impulses left by the rifle fire. Unbeknown to Barber these words had been spoken on the day of the assassination by Sheriff Bill Decker, but crucially he had not spoken them until at least a minute after the President had been shot, therefore with the words coming so quickly after the electronic impulses, researchers surmised the impulses couldn’t be the sound of rifle-fire after all. With Barber’s discovery throwing everything up in the air again, the Justice Department paid the National Academy of Science to test the McLain Tape recording even further. This panel agreed with Barber’s conclusions; and stated that the feedback could not have been created by rifle-fire. Then Dr James E. Barger came back to rebut the criticism of his work, he stated that the National Academy of Science had been working from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the dictabelt recorded sound, and that when listening to the recording one was not necessarily listening to what happened on the day of the assassination in exact real time, therefore it was quite possible to hear Sherriff Decker’s words on the McLain Tape sooner than they were actually spoken on the day. In 1996 Dr. Donald Thomas, an entomologist working in the US Department of Agriculture, carried out his own study on the McLain Tape, for the March issue of the British journal of the Forensic Science Society, Science and Justice. He used a new modern system; to re-synchronise the differing radio channels that had been recorded onto the dictabelt, so that they were now running in the correct chronological order; with no audio overlap from differing channels putting events out of chronological sequence. He concluded that the National Academy of Science was wrong in their analysis, and that there was actually a 96.3% certainty that the impulses heard on the McLain Tape were rifle-fire; representing not three or even four, but five separate gunshots.
In 2004 Dale Myers used his contentious 3D computer model of Dealey Plaza to pooh-pooh the McLain Tape evidence. He gathered six pieces of footage of the assassination, from six onlookers, with six different vantage points of Dealey Plaza. He synchronised this footage with the McLain Tape, and he followed Officer McLain’s progress in the motorcade, from a few moments before; to the moment of the assassination. Myers came to the conclusion that Officer McLain could not have been in the correct position to have recorded the dictatape evidence as given to the HSCA, McLain, Myers argued, was simply too far away from the President when the shots began.
So the debate rages on, others have thrown their pennies worth into the argument, muddying the waters further, the McLain Tape has proven to be one of the most contentious issues in the whole Kennedy assassination affair. For everyone willing to say that it definitely proves the existence of more than one shooter, there are others equally willing to step into the fray with a different analysis which disproves the existence of electronic impulses on the tape. All the while the wider public becomes more and more confused as more and more technical language and peculiar techniques are used to analyse it, twisting the narrative of that fateful day with every new test.
In 1978 the HSRC finally completed its report; it came to the following startling and groundbreaking conclusions:
1. Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President Kennedy. Oswald’s second and third shots hit the President, with the third shot being the fatal bullet.
2. The acoustic evidence pointed to a ‘high probability’ of there being at least two gunmen.
3. President Kennedy did not receive adequate protection from the Secret Service, FBI or CIA. The investigation into the probability of a conspiracy being involved in the assassination was inadequate. The FBI and Warren Commission arrived at their conclusions in good faith; but were ‘presented in a fashion that was too definitive’.
4. Finally; that President Kennedy was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy, which probably involved individuals involved in organised crime and anti-Castro Cuban activities. Crucially; the HSRA did not believe that the conspiracy involved the Soviet Russian or Cuban governments, the FBI, CIA or NSA.
Louis Stokes concluded the committee with the following salient words, ‘Never again should our society respond as it did in the aftermath o
f the death of these two great leaders. We did not give these two men the type of investigation in death which was commensurate with the dignity of their lives’.
Absolutely Corrupt : The Conspiracies
‘Practically all the Cabinet members of President Kennedy's administration, along with Director J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and Chief James Rowley of the Secret Service, whose duty it was to protect the life of the President, testified that to their knowledge there was no sign of any conspiracy. To say now that these people, as well as the Commission, suppressed, neglected to unearth, or overlooked evidence of a conspiracy would be an indictment of the entire government of the United States. It would mean the whole structure was absolutely corrupt from top to bottom, with not one person of high or low rank willing to come forward to expose the villainy’ - Earl Warren
The Mob the CIA and The Fall of Fidel Castro
In 2005, Lamar Waldron and Thomas Hartmann put a new spin on the Mob, the CIA and the Cuban Connections related to the assassination. They came up with a grand unifying theory, which tied together all of the famed disparate elements, in their book, ‘Ultimate Sacrifice’. Over twenty long years of research, Waldron and Hartmann uncovered secret government papers which indicated that factions within the CIA had secretly been working with the Mob; to try and take down Fidel Castro; the Mob having carried out dozens of failed assassination attempts on behalf of Uncle Sam. Why was the Mob doing this seemingly patriotic duty? Well, simply put; the Mob wanted Cuba back. The Mob had secretly been running the island for years before Castro had seized power, the Mob had run the high rolling casino’s in Havana, and had run ridiculously profitable drug smuggling operations from bases on the island, all lovingly ignored by the old corrupt Cuban officials. The good times had ended when Castro came to power; he closed down the casinos, enforced drug laws, shut down the smuggling rings and kicked the Mob off the island.
The Kennedy brother’s persecution of the Mob was seen by the Mobsters as the ultimate insult after all their patriotic work for the CIA. Then in June 1963, Kennedy in collusion with his brother Robert; came up with a secret plan to deal with Castro on their own terms, before the crucial 1964 election campaign. Project AMWORLD was the Kennedy’s own unique plan to stage a coup in Cuba. It was a plan designed by the Kennedy’s to give their administration complete and plausible deniability if it all went wrong like the Bay of Pigs invasion. If it went right, then Kennedy could claim victory in Cuba and propel his administration to a successful landslide re-election. On Sunday the 1st of December 1963, disparate militia groups and soldiers of fortune from around the world would be brought together as a dirty, dangerous and violent invasion force that would storm the beaches of Cuba. Bobby Kennedy was the lynchpin in the whole dastardly plot, this way his brothers Presidential fingerprints wouldn’t be anywhere near the invasion if it went wrong. Bobby met with exiled Cuban militia men who would lead the force, and together they plotted the invasion in minute detail. According to Lamar and Hartmann the CIA decided to ruin the plan for the Kennedy’s, by letting the Mob know that the Kennedy brothers had their own plans afoot to bring down Castro. The Mob in turn infiltrated the plot, having six of their own men recruited into the invasion force.
At the same time as the above plotting and scheming Bobby Kennedy’s crusade against organised crime finally reached the doorstep of the most powerful Mob boss in all America, Carlos ‘The Little Man’ Marcello. Marcello was the boss of bosses in New Orleans, twice Bobby Kennedy had Marcello deported, once Kennedy ordered Marcello to be kidnapped and literally thrown from a plane in the middle of the night, a plane that was flying over Central America. Marcello made his way back home and was back in charge of his criminal empire within a fortnight. Sometime later Bobby Kennedy had Marcello arrested again and deported once again to Guatemala. Again Marcello snuck his way back across the border, and was back in charge of his criminal enterprises before a fortnight was out. Needless to say Marcello was nonplussed by these highly unorthodox actions by the law enforcement agencies, and he turned his notorious rage towards the Kennedy’s. Marcello wanted Bobby Kennedy to stop his persecution of him and his family business. It is alleged that Marcello realised that if he had Bobby Kennedy murdered then things would get even more difficult for him, he’d simply anger the most powerful man in the world, Bobby’s brother, the President of the United States. So Marcello realised that the best way to stop the dog’s tail from wagging; was to cut off the dogs head, and murder the President.
Now Marcello hit upon a glorious realisation, if he murdered Kennedy before Sunday the 1st of December 1963, it would make any open investigation of his murder impossible. If he or his Mob associates were accused of being involved in the assassination they would simply threaten to expose the planned invasion of Cuba, and it could as a result kick start a new era of hostility between America and Cuba’s paymasters, Soviet Russia. The last thing anyone wanted was another situation like the Cuban Missile Crisis; which had brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust just a few short months before. No, Marcello realised that his knowledge of the planned invasion gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, and he would be untouchable. So Marcello arranged for their best hit-men to murder the President, and for some unlucky fool to take the blame. Marcello used the Mob’s connections to the CIA to discover the men who would most likely be on the governments list of suspects if the President were to be murdered. This brought pro-Cuban solidarity agitator Lee Harvey Oswald to the Mob’s nefarious attention.
Marcello meticulously planned the assassination; the plot ending in Dallas, and Waldron and Hartmann claim that this is where Jack Ruby came into the conspiracy. To Waldron and Hartmann; Ruby is more than just a lowly mafia soldier, he was in fact the local mafia man in charge of running the moles in the police department, and organising corruption in local law enforcement, Ruby was the Mafia’s eyes and ears in the Dallas Police Department. Ruby had spent many long years building up connections and sources in the Dallas Police Department, and all these sources were suddenly brought into play, ready to tip Ruby off immediately if the local police got wind of the assassination plot. Importantly, because Ruby had the ability to slip in and out of the Dallas Police Head Quarters with importunity, never being challenged or stopped, he was the man who would execute Oswald before he had the opportunity to open his mouth.
Of course not everyone agrees with this version of events. It has been argued that Operation AMWORLD was simply a contingency plan, and not an active operation that was likely to ever be used. Therefore; the argument goes; the Mob would not have had the power to blackmail the government with the revelation of the top secret invasion plan to the wider world. There is no other supportive documentation to support the existence of Operation AMWORLD, other than the single mention of the operation in only one singular declassified CIA memo. Experts who study such declassified documentation are eager to point out that many such operations and plans, which never came to fruition, are mentioned in such memos regularly. These interdepartmental memorandum where a way for ideas to be circulated, and people would assign arbitrary dates for the potential actions to be completed by in the memos, but the memos were never meant to be taken as final instructions or commands. They were in short the 1960’s equivalent of sending an email to your boss saying, ‘why don’t we do X by Y date, about this particular problem’, sending such an email doesn’t necessarily mean your suggestion will be taken on board by the boss. It is also quite telling that one of Kennedy’s most trusted and closest advisors, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, had absolutely no knowledge of Operation AMWORLD. If it was an active operation then it seems incredible that McNamara would have no knowledge of a plan that would have had consequences for the world political stage, and involved the actual invasion of foreign soil.
The most damning evidence against this particular plot; is that if Kennedy was planning on carrying out an invasion of Cuba; it was well within the Mob’s favour. They would not have wanted to do an
ything that risked the invasion being called off. The Mob were losing millions each day not having access to the island of Cuba. The casinos alone the Mob use to run from Havana made Las Vegas’ returns look like ‘chump money’; as one Mafia expert put it. Therefore it’s crazy to conceive that the Mafia would ensure that any such operation to invade Cuba would be called off, just so they could have some petty revenge on the President and his brother, who at most had only mildly inconvenienced their ongoing operations.
The Price Of Peace
Did President Kennedy have to die because he wanted the cold war to thaw? Was the industrial military complex so threatened by President Kennedy’s finding a ‘deeper, more universal humanity’; that the nameless military minds took the decision to stage of coup d’etat? Those are the startling ideas put forward in Jack Douglass’ seminal work ‘JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died, Why It Matters’ in my humble opinion one of the best; indeed most beautiful; books ever penned on the subject of the assassination.
President Kennedy again and again flew in the face of generally accepted wisdom of how a President should act in the face of his cold war advisors, he had refused to take his generals advice about going to war over the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had refused to step up the Bay of Pigs invasion by offering air support, he was making plans to dissolve the CIA due to its illegal foreign operations, and he was taking steps to end the Vietnam War before it had even begun, the latter being a war the CIA desperately wanted. More than this; President Kennedy had signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty; against the advice of his military advisors; this military treaty banned the testing of nuclear weapons underground, and was seen as a deliberate attempt by President Kennedy to slow down the ever quickening arms race. Perhaps the greatest indiscretion President Kennedy made was his ode to peace known as the American University Speech, the moment many pinpoint as when the industrial military complex realised that President Kennedy had to die. This moving and iconic speech was where President Kennedy laid out the common goal that should be shared by Soviet Russia and America in their quest for a lasting peace, ‘For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal’. Acts of liberal refrain such as this speech deeply upset and annoyed the military, the CIA and the arms manufacturers; who stood to lose billions from a possible end to the ceaseless war that had sprung from the ashes of World War 1 and 2. So together these faceless ‘unspeakable’ forces came together to plot President Kennedy’s murder. As Oliver Stone eloquently put it after reading JFK and the Unspeakable, they weren’t just killing a man; but a vision, a vision of peace.