by H. N. Lloyd
Of course this idea of a nebulous and faceless conspiracy, where unnamed shadowy forces plotted against a secretly peace loving President has its critics. It is easy to point to numerous acts of aggression that President Kennedy authorised in the ongoing and endless Cold War, which undermine James Douglass’ central conceit of a President who wanted peace at any cost, but to do so is to misunderstand the framework in which President Kennedy was trapped. It would have been impossible for any President to come out and point blank say that they wanted to end the cold war and have peace, this would have been political suicide, and would have ended the delicate process before it had even begun. President Kennedy was an intelligent man, he knew he had to work stealthily, committing acts of aggression and war which perhaps his conscious might have disagreed with, making pro-war statements and promises he knew in his hearts of hearts were lies, but which ultimately worked as a cover for his derided and hated ideologies of peace. The unspeakable is a complex theory and one there is as much proof to support as to scoff, yet in James Douglass’ tome there is a beautiful truth we should all strive to achieve, that peace isn’t a dirty word or a sinful ideology, and that sometimes we should do what we know is right; even if we are certain it will lead to our own downfall.
The Mirror Man
What if Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t unique? What if he was just one of a collection of similar men who had been selected and placed in key cities around America; waiting for their opportunity to kill President Kennedy? It sounds preposterous, but that’s the tantalising suggestion hinted at by the stories of Thomas Arthur Vallee and Gilberto Policarpo Lopez. It was former Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden, the first black man to be given the honour of protecting the President, who brought this peculiar story to light. In October 1963, Bolden had been dispatched to Chicago, where President Kennedy was soon to visit, here the landlady of a low rent apartment had discovered hidden in a room she had been snooping in, four high powered rifles and a map with the President’s motorcade drawn upon it. The men who rented the room were said to be Cuban nationals, and so the Secret Service sensibly put them under surveillance. Unfortunately one of the Cuban’s heard one of the Secret Service Agents radios squawk as he passed the agents car, the Cubans realised they had been rumbled, and they made a break for it, successfully escaping. As a result of this bungle, Secret Service officers were allegedly ordered to lose all paperwork that pertained to the cock-up, in other words they were to make it look like the threat in Chicago had never existed in the first place.
Meanwhile the Chicago Police Department had got edgy with the Secret Service knocking around town, and so decided independently of the Secret Service, to shake down anyone on their radar who might possibly have a gripe with the President. That’s where Thomas Arthur Vallee came in; he was a man who bore a strikingly similar psychological and social profile to Lee Harvey Oswald. Vallee was a thirty-year old ex-marine; like Oswald, he was a trained marksman; like Oswald, he had been assessed as a having a psychiatric illness; like Oswald, he was a disaffected member of a political organisation; like Oswald, and he’d just got himself a menial job working in a high-rise building that overlooked the route of a Presidential motorcade; just like Oswald. The Chicago Police realised that this man fitted the profile of a potential shooter down to a T, and so they looked for any old excuse they could to have Vallee pulled over; so they could search his vehicle and question him. The police finally found their chance as Vallee committed a minor road traffic violation, they search his car, and low and behold if they didn’t discover a powerful M1 Rifle with a telescopic sight; and 2500 rounds of ammunition.
Then there was the revelation of an assassination plot in Tampa, Florida. Once again President Kennedy had been due to give a talk in Tampa, this time at a Steel Works Union, before the talk there was due to be the obligatory long and meandering motorcade. Luckily this motorcade went off without a hitch. Allegedly the men involved in the prospective assassination attempt had a police mole, who informed them that the police and the FBI were onto the assassination plot, and so called the operation off. It was not until Tuesday the 3rd of December 1963; that the CIA finally received intelligence on the alleged shooter in the Tampa plot, a man who had already fled the country. The CIA suddenly found themselves bold over to discover that not only did the potential shooter surprisingly have links to Lee Harvey Oswald, but he was also startlingly similar in other respects to the Presidential killer. Gilberto Policarpo Lopez was an ex-Cuban national, he was a member of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, just like Oswald, he suffered from a neurological condition, epilepsy, which at the time, many considered to be a mental health condition similar to the psychiatric condition Oswald had been diagnosed with as a young man. Lopez had moved his wife out of Florida in mid-1963, just as Oswald had moved Marina out of New Orleans at the same time. Both men made trips to Mexico City in the autumn of 1963, both crossing the border at Nuevo Laredo. Both men were arrested for having public fist fights over their pro-Castro activities in the Summer of 1963. Both men hated President Kennedy over his treatment of Cuba. On top of this Lopez had taken a job at the Floridan Hotel in Tampa, the tallest building on the route of the Presidential motorcade. Hmm.
Abraham Bolden got wind of the assassination attempt in Tampa, this when put together with the assassination attempts in Chicago, and the actual assassination in Texas, and Bolden smelt conspiracy. When Bolden tried to tell his story to the Warren Commission, he found himself being charged with bribery, and serving six years in prison. This was despite the fact there was no solid evidence against him, and the only person to make an allegation had withdrawn their claim stating that they’d made the whole thing up out of spite. Bolden spent the rest of his life trying to clear his good name, and feeling the terrible suspicion that he had been set-up, because his allegations of conspiracy had gotten too close to the true nub of the matter, and his lingering doubts that the Secret Service were complicit in the President’s murder also. In the end; the Warren Commission did not even mention that the Secret Service had viable intelligence about the assassination plots in Chicago and Tampa in the weeks leading up to the President’s murder in Dallas. Bolden reached the inescapable conclusion that it was a cover-up.
The Vallee and Lopez stories gives rise to the possible conclusion that someone had been positioning men of a certain accusable disposition in places where they could either assassinate the President, or at least take the fall for such a murderous act, but just who would be responsible for this shrewd, conniving and manipulative behaviour? Well according to some it was all part of an elaborate Mafia plan to kill the President. In 1985 Jack Van Laningham became a convicted bank robber, serving eight years at the Texarkana Penitentiary, where he struck up an unlikely friendship with Mafia godfather Carlos Marcello, a friendship born out of the simple fact that they were both the oldest gentlemen in the clink. Laningham was given an offer by the FBI; start to secretly pump Marcello for information, and he would walk free from his jail sentence. Laningham agreed with alacrity, and it was arranged for him to become bunkmates with Marcello. As soon as the men were bunked up all warm and snug; revelation after revelation began to pour in from the cell of the loose lipped Mafia godfather. Now, I’m extremely wary of jail cell confessions from old lags, but many of Marcello and Laningham’s conversations were taped via a secret recording devise; hidden in a radio-set, however the crucial confession; where Marcello startlingly confessed to President Kennedy’s murder, just happened to go down in the prison yard, where there was no audio coverage. Marcello allegedly told Laningham; ‘I had the little bastard killed; he was a thorn in my shoe’. Marcello stated that Oswald had been set up in Dallas to be the shooter. The plan was for the police to see Oswald in the sixth floor window of the depository with the rifle in hand, and for the police to then kill Oswald straight after the assassination, but the police didn’t see Oswald, and he managed to escape. So Jack Ruby, Marcello’s man in Dallas, was picked to finish the botched job; and publically
execute Oswald. Why use Ruby? Well, Marcello had been planning on killing Ruby anyway. He’d just discovered that Jack Ruby has been skimming profits off of the top of the Dallas operations, stealing thousands from him over the years. So Marcello picked Ruby to be the shooter in cold blooded retribution.
It all sounds fantastical, and for years there was no proof that Oswald had any connections to organised crime; then two revelations occurred almost simultaneously which changed this view. Firstly it was discovered that Oswald’s uncle had been an illegal bookmaker for the Carlos Marcello outfit in New Orleans. Then as if to back this revelation up; a photograph surfaced of a young, fifteen year old, Lee Harvey Oswald stood with David Ferrie, a close associate of Carlos Marcello, one of Marcello’s most trusted pilots for his various nefarious activates, such as drugs smuggling, and a man that Marcello used for various acts of spying and snooping in and around New Orleans.
Although a peculiar bunch, the individuals picked to be the patsy in each individual city did at first glance seem to be an inspired choice, one a foaming at the mouth militia, so paranoid he drove around with an arsenal in the back of his car, the other two flaky pro-Cuban sympathisers, guaranteed to make any investigator look for the reds hiding under the bed as those responsible for backing their murderous endeavours on the President. The problem is when you take a closer look these patsy’s aren’t very good at all. Vallee was under such close scrutiny that the police knew all about his cache of weapons, and arrested him before the right wing nut could do any harm with them. If Carlos Lopez had ended up being the unlucky patsy, then surely even the briefest look at his life and medical history would show he couldn’t have been a reliable shooter. He had no military training, having fled Cuba before he had been drafted, and the stress of shooting the President of the United States surely would have brought on one of his regular stress induced seizures. The mafia where not amateurs bumbling around grabbing whoever they could to do jobs for them, they were always careful who they picked to be associated with, even if they were picking a patsy, they would have ensured their man had all the right credentials.
This theory might easily have been forgotten as another crazy jail cell confession, made up by a man who was desperate to get out of jail, and vaguely supported by the words of a (wrongfully) disgraced Secret Service agent. Then, G. Robert Blakey, the man who led the HSCA investigation, gave the theory his support, it was his considered opinion that President Kennedy died at the hands of a conspiracy organised by the mafia. All of a sudden this theory looked a hell of a lot more plausible to the buffs; and the book buying public.
The Not So French Connection
Christian David, a rather disreputable Corsican drug trafficker, linked to the Unione Corse (the French Mafia), was offered the contract to assassinate President Kennedy, whilst David was living in Marseille in the June of 1963. At least that was the story given to investigative journalist Stephen Rivele, when he met David as he lived in exile in South America in 1981. In return for the information he had about the assassination, David wanted America to intervene and stop his extradition to France, where he was facing a lengthy prison sentence for his activities in shifting massive amounts of heroine across international borders, and not to mention murdering French Police Officer Lieutenant Maurice Galiber. According to David, French crime boss Antoine Guerini, had accepted a contract from Carlos Marcelo of the New Orleans Mob; and Tony Gambino of the New York Mob, to murder President Kennedy. The Mob had finally gotten tired of the Kennedy’s constant harassment of their criminal activities and had decided to end their persecutors troublesome whining permanently. So rather than do the hit themselves, and risk making life a hell of a lot more difficult for themselves if the assassin was caught, they did what the Mafia always did, and brought in a killer from out of town. Except for such a large operation the killers were brought in from a little further afield. The Unione Corse were possibly the only foreign killers who were acceptable to the Corsican Mafia, they weren’t black or Asian, which appealed to the Mafia’s vaguely racist little ideologies, they had similar moral values to the Corsican families, they could be relied upon to keep the their mouths shut if they were unlucky enough to be caught, and most importantly they were completely untraceable back to the Corsican Mob.
Christian David ultimately decided to turn the contract down, on the grounds that hitting the incumbent American President on American soil was too dangerous an affair, so Guerini turned to heroine smuggler Lucian Sarti, also known as Silvia Odio. Sarti was known for his wild criminal gambles; and he in turn recruited Roger Bocagnani and Sauveur Pironti to carry out the assassination. The three assassins were flown from Marseilles to Mexico City four weeks before the assassination, where they stayed in a safe-house. Shortly before the assassination they crossed the American boarder at Brownsville, Texas, using fake Italian passports. Once in America they met with their Chicago contacts, and were taken to Dallas. Once again they were put in a safe-house; this was to ensure that they left no traceable records, such as hotel registrations, in their murderous wake. Posing as Italian tourists they then spent a few days getting the lay of the land, taking photographs of Dealey Plaza. On the day of the assassination the three men caught President Kennedy in a crossfire, Sarti firing from the grassy knoll, and his two accomplices firing from behind the President, one from the Dal-Tex Building; and one hidden somewhere at ground level. Four shots were fired; the fist fired from behind President Kennedy, striking him in the back, the second also fired from the rear, this hit Governor Connally, the third, a dum-dum or exploding bullet was fired from the front and burst President Kennedy’s head, and the fourth shot fired from the rear, missed entirely and bounced off the sidewalk giving James Tague a glancing blow to the cheek.
After the assassination the three men packed up their tools and made their way calmly back to their safe-house. Here they stayed for ten more days, until the heat had died down, at which point they made their way to a private airfield, where they were flown by Mob drug runner David Ferrie across the border into Canada, where they changed flights at Montreal; and took another private jet back to Marseilles. Christian David then played his small part in the assassination, from his new home in Buenos Aires. The assassins had been paid in pure heroine, and travelling to see him, David had happily converted the drugs for them into cold hard blood money.
This information was all subsequently confirmed by a Drug Enforcement Agency witness who now lived hidden deep within the witness protection scheme. Michel Nicoli was an ex- Unione Corse drug trafficker who had turned undercover informant. For years Nicoli had been secretly passing on information to the DEA, intelligence which one DEA agent said was ‘dynamite’, he was the ‘best witness’ the DEA had ever had, if Nicoli gave you information ‘you could go to the bank on it’. Nicoli confirmed that he had the inside track on the assassination from a man who had been very close to the plot, and that all the details given to Stephen Rivele were true.
Unfortunately for Rivele, David and Nicoli’s information could be proven to be wildly inaccurate, as both Sarti and Bocagnani could prove that they were safely locked away in prison in November 1963, Sarti in Baumettes Prison in Marseilles and Bocagnani in Fort du Ha in Bordeaux. If the two star witnesses could get such fundamental information wrong as the identity of the alleged killers, then the rest of their story could topple like a house of cards. Several lawsuits followed Rivele’s revelations, and the original documentary the theory was proposed in, ‘The Men Who Killed Kennedy’, was banned from British Television due to its slanderous nature. Rivele was subsequently unable to sell the rights to his book on the assassination to any publisher in America or England, and so far only a French language version of his investigation has materialised.
Mother Russia
America’s biggest enemy at the time of President Kennedy’s administration was of course Soviet Russia. The two nations were set at loggerheads due to ideological differences that could never be resolved. According to some, when Amer
ica and Russia faced off over the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and Russia ‘blinked’; it was seen as a humiliation too far by the KGB, and so they resolved that President Kennedy had to die. You see this was a time when the shadow of Josef Stalin still fell across that proud nation. Any humiliation, no matter how small, was to be dealt with the way Uncle Joe would have dealt with it, mercilessly. So Ivan Serov, head of the KGB, and a man we would class today as a war criminal, responsible for mass genocide committed under Stalin, turned to two of his hard-line Stalinist henchmen, Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Kryuchkov, to plot their bloody revenge. In their infinite cruelty the KGB decided to activate a sleeper agent they had planted for just such an opportunity, and so their steely and determined eyes fell upon Lee Harvey Oswald. You see, if this theory is to be believed, Oswald was not a patsy, but a willing assassin, who had been turned into a KGB agent upon his defection to Russia. Whilst in Russia he had proven his loyalty to his new motherland by giving the KGB enough information to shoot down Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane. It was not therefore a coincidence that Oswald had married a woman whose father and uncle were both KGB operatives, it was again just another level of labyrinthine deceit. Marina Oswald marrying and indeed conjugating with Oswald was a deep cover plot; she was in fact his onsite KGB handler, with him at all times to keep him in line once he had been transplanted back into American culture. Once Oswald had done the dirty deed, instead of spiriting him out of America and flying him back to mother Russia like had been promised, Oswald was sent to what he believed would be a debriefing with one of his handlers. Only the meeting at the Texas Theatre was a set up; and Oswald was arrested. Why was Oswald betrayed? Simple, if President Kennedy’s killer suddenly turned up living the good life in Russia, the finger of suspicion would easily have fallen upon the KGB. So it was arranged for Jack Ruby, who was a Cuban agent, and therefore a friend of Russia, to execute Oswald. Years later when it looked like Ruby himself was about to crack and reveal the whole conspiracy, he was quietly poisoned with a chemical compound that made his death look like a hideously aggressive; but naturally occurring cancer.