Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK

by Mark Lane

  I began to look into the facts surrounding the assassination and that inquiry resulted in the first book I had ever written, Rush to Judgment. It immediately, to my great astonishment, became a best-selling book. Establishment polls concluded that it had changed the perception of the Warren Report and resulted in America’s developing a credibility gap about unproven governmental assertions.

  I never meant to devote a major part of my life to this one subject. I thought that after writing Rush to Judgment, I would move on to other matters and let this one sort itself out. Now, these many years later, I am still here due to the fact that the defenders of the myth, their reputations in tatters, nevertheless tenaciously hold on to a demonstrably false version of history and enjoy the support of their apologists in the media. The CIA has become increasingly more influential, now even commanding its own air force and making policy, while influencing the media, and its assets have become more servile.

  The Investigators

  After years of the Eisenhower Age, with foreign policy dominated by a reckless and relentless John Foster Dulles rendering a compassionate domestic approach a concept forgotten or repudiated, the lights were burning again at night in the White House, where a young and energetic leader and his family were in residence. In our country, people, many, but not all, young, were asking what they could do for their country. For some the answer was the Peace Corps, for some a new commitment to equal rights for all, and for others various ways to reshape their careers.

  The new administration was not the sudden reappearance of Camelot and its policy was for cautious rather than substantial change, yet it inspired hope for millions who yearned for a better day for their country. For those of us who knew him and had worked with him, his death was also a personal loss. To millions of Americans whom he had inspired, his murder created almost unprecedented apprehension and sorrow. To the world, the assassination of the president of the United States, the most powerful nation on the planet, during the Nuclear Age and a time of incipient proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, promised almost unimaginable threats.

  It was a truly American scene. The president was seated next to his wife in an open limousine riding through a prominent city on a bright sunny day in mid-America as spectators smiled, waved, and applauded. Suddenly sounds of gunfire shattered that moment. Hope died that day along with Kennedy and fear traumatized the conscience of a nation, challenging our concept of national security.

  In that time of national paralysis the federal police acted at once. The rush to judgment began when J. Edgar Hoover, on the same afternoon of the assassination, callously told Robert Kennedy that his brother was dead and that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. To people who maintained their ability to reason, a question emerged. How could the FBI have reached a final conclusion without having first conducted an investigation, especially in view of Oswald’s denials that he had committed any crime? Clearly, a prospective defendant’s assertion of innocence is not proof, in some instances not even evidence, but in the absence of a signed confession, on what basis could anyone almost immediately claim that the case was solved, or that even if Oswald was the lone gunman, that he had not, at some time in the past, conspired with anyone?

  J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a position he considered to be a lifetime sinecure, issued a report as the echo of gunfire from Dealey Plaza had barely faded. He determined, within twenty-four hours and without any serious inquiry, that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Hoover did not lack self-esteem; his agents and special agents in charge were required to officially refer to his office as the SOG, meaning Seat of Government. Hoover saw American presidents as politicians permitted to remain in office just four or eight years, or even less, as they passed through his continuing reign. Unfortunately for him, many others had begun to fear, resent, and ridicule him rather than respect his judgment.

  Frame-ups are best managed from the shadows, for they confront serious obstacles if the crime is witnessed by many during daylight hours, when forensic evidence abounds, and especially if the events are caught on film. In those trying circumstances, the fabrications require unlimited respect for the investigators and unquestioning loyalty to their conclusions from the media. They require, as well, suppression of some evidence, destruction of other evidence, and a blissful ignorance of the most relevant facts and the rules of logic.

  There had been calls for numerous investigations by various committees of both houses of the Congress. Those inquiries would have been well publicized and the facts they uncovered would have been widely available. The congressional committees would have been granted, and likely have used, the power of subpoena.

  The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, appointed a commission of inquiry. Its purpose, it announced, was “to avoid parallel investigations.”1 Johnson appointed a political commission to secretly investigate. The press was banned from the hearings and the transcripts were marked top secret. The formal name of the group was The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. It was popularly called the Warren Commission and was comprised of two Republicans, one a senator and one a member of the House of Representatives, and two Southern Democrats during the era of heated civil rights differences in which Southern Democrats rebelled by often supporting Republican candidates. There was not a single strong Kennedy supporter on the commission.

  In addition, Johnson appointed John McCloy, the former assistant secretary of war, notorious for his refusal to endorse bombing raids on the rail approaches to the Auschwitz concentration camp—raids that would have saved countless Nazi Holocaust victims—and for supporting Hitler at least until 1939 (he shared a box with Hitler in Berlin at the 1936 Olympics). After the war, McCloy refused to endorse compensation for innocent Japanese Americans who had been held in American concentration camps. In short, McCloy was kind to criminals, but took a strong stance against the innocent.

  Johnson also appointed Allen Dulles, the former director of the CIA, who had been fired by John Kennedy for lying to him about the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and for numerous other deceits. Formerly top secret documents, now available, including transcripts of executive meetings, disclose beyond doubt that Dulles ran the Warren Commission. He was, in fact, the only active member of the group.

  Dulles was familiar with assassinations. Under his leadership, the CIA was involved in numerous efforts to remove foreign leaders by covert means, including CIA- led coups. His organization was responsible for deposing democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran in 1953 through Operation Ajax, and President Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954, through Operation PBSUCCESS.

  Dulles also organized attempted assassinations of heads of state who espoused policies different from those supported by the agency. His organization, the CIA, was responsible for the Phoenix Program, the selective assassinations of more than 25,000 civilians in Vietnam, many of whom were village chiefs or other elected officers.

  Dulles relied upon Leon Jaworski to help suppress evidence from Dallas. The commission praised Jaworski for his role and for being “helpful to the accomplishment of the commission’s assignment.”2 Jaworski was later canonized by the media for his role in Watergate. We are indebted to The New York Times for recently publishing a decision of the United States Army review board which demonstrated that twenty-eight black soldiers were falsely convicted of starting a riot that led to a death.3 All were victims of a court martial during 1944, one of the largest army courts-martial of World War II. All twenty-eight were sent to prison and given dishonorable discharges. After twenty-six of the men died, the army concluded that they were innocent and that the unethical and unlawful conduct of one man was responsible for the miscarriage of justice. That man was Lt. Col. Leon Jaworski, who had in his possession important evidence demonstrating the innocence of the soldiers. In violation of relevant ethical standards, Jaworski refused to share that evidence with the defense lawyers, thus leadi
ng to what he knew would be unjust convictions. Jaworski was later chosen to provide all of the relevant evidence from Texas to the Warren Commission.

  The chairman of the group, Earl Warren, was an active politician and prosecutor. He had been appointed, not elected, district attorney of Alameda County, California, when his predecessor resigned. He established a reputation for conducting his office in a high-handed manner and in arguably denying rights to defendants. He was elected governor of the state as a take-no-prisoners prosecutor, whose reputation was similar to that which Thomas Dewey had developed in New York. As governor, Warren played a pivotal role in implementing the plan to establish concentration camps in the United States in which innocent Japanese Americans were imprisoned, while members of Warren’s voting blocks seized their property. In 1948, he ran for vice president of the United States with Dewey. That Republican ticket, although strongly favored to win, was defeated by Harry Truman and Alben Barkley. Later Warren was appointed Chief Justice by President Eisenhower, who later said that the appointment had been a major error. In that position he organized a series of unanimous decisions that barred the racial segregation of public schools and established certain rights for those being held and interrogated by law enforcement officers.

  All of the members of the commission had full-time jobs that occupied them, with the exception of Dulles, who, then unemployed, devoted his time to running the inquiry. Johnson had not put some untrained little fox in charge of the hen house. He had awarded that position to Col. Sanders.

  At an early meeting, for which the minutes were classified top secret (later released as a result of Freedom of Information legal actions brought in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia with the invaluable assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union), Dulles told the members that they need not worry about anyone doubting their false conclusions. Maybe, he suggested, at worst many years will have passed before some professor might study the evidence and by then it would not matter. Albert Einstein was proven by Dulles once again to be right when he said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

  Predictably, the Warren Commission adopted the FBI report and concluded that Oswald had been the lone assassin. The FBI report had been relied upon almost exclusively by an old CIA hand who had been the agency’s director longer than any other person in American history. The commission’s report was an intelligence fabrication.

  Assassination Nomenclature

  For those readers not acquainted with the facts regarding the conclusions of the Warren Commission, I have prepared a glossary to assist in comprehending the tortuous path chosen by the government to fabricate its case:

  The Magic Bullet

  I originated the phrase in an effort to describe the official explanation in 1964; in 1966 it served as a title for Chapter 4 of Rush to Judgment. It refers to the unprecedented mystic and acrobatic propensities of a bullet as imagined by two junior lawyers for the Warren Commission, Arlen Specter and David Belin, two lawyers each in search of a career, who reprised the Roy Cohn and David Schine days with Sen. Joe McCarthy where dedication to the facts was also hardly a virtue. While the bullet took a most fancy flight in their inventive minds, the explanation was not a meaningless flight of fancy; it was absolutely required to save the false conclusions reached by the Warren Commission.

  The bullet’s formal name is CE (Commission Exhibit) 399, but not unlike Earvin Johnson it is better known to millions by its nickname. Here are some relevant facts. The evidence demonstrated that at least four shots had been fired and that one had struck a curb, causing a minor injury to a bystander. All the shots had been fired during a period of not more than 5.6 seconds, as demonstrated by a film of the assassination that served as visual evidence and as the clock for the shooting; the frames ran through the camera at the rate of 18.3 frames per second. The rifle that the commission claimed fired all of the shots was an ancient and inaccurate Mannlicher-Carcano. The weapon, with a hand-operated bolt action, was tested by experts who testified that it required at least 2.3 seconds to reload between shots, and that was without time spent in aiming the weapon.

  The president was seated in the back seat on the passenger side. Seated directly in front of him, on a jump seat, was Governor John B. Connally, Jr. A bullet entered President Kennedy’s throat from the front causing a neat, small entrance wound according to every doctor who had examined him at the Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Another bullet, also fired from the front, was the fatal shot. It threw him backwards and to the left and drove brain and skull matter onto a motorcycle officer to his left and rear.

  Gov. Connally suffered numerous injuries, likely the result of being struck by more than one bullet. His ribs were shattered, his right wrist severely injured and his left thigh was penetrated. The commission was distraught since it began and ended its inquiry with the irrevocable presumption that Oswald was the lone assassin and that he had used the Mannlicher-Carcano. If one bullet had missed, as both the evidence and the Warren Commission revealed, then at least four shots (probably five or more) had been fired in 5.6 seconds. But with a weapon that required 2.3 seconds between shots, four shots could not have been fired. Three intervals, assuming that the weapon was fully loaded before the first shot was fired, would have taken, at an absolute minimum, 6.9 seconds.

  Another problem was that Connally, after studying the film, was able to locate the frame at which he was first struck by a bullet. It took place 1.8 seconds after Kennedy had been hit. The commission concluded that Connally probably never noticed the “glancing blow;” Connally said he had “noticed” the bullet that smashed his ribs and turned splinters into missiles as they exited.

  Specter and Belin were asked to invent some explanation. Neither lacking ambition nor imagination and not bound by rules of logic or adherence to the truth, they created the Magic Bullet Theory.4* Satire permits us to offer this as a summary:

  Oswald was at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository as the president’s limousine slowed to turn onto Elm Street. He was so close that he could have thrown the rifle at the president. Apparently, being a sport, he waited until the car gained speed and was a considerable distance from him. The president’s back was then the only target available. Oswald fired the first shot, which struck the president in the back. The bullet rose upwards and exited through the president’s throat leaving behind a small, neat entrance wound. The bullet hung in midair for 1.8 seconds until it noticed Connally. It regained speed and entered Connally’s back, shattering ribs. Connally did not notice the glancing blow, which almost killed him. The bullet then made a right downward turn and entered Connally’s right wrist. Soon it emerged from that contact and entered Connally’s left thigh. The bullet, almost in pristine shape, having quite mysteriously left behind in Connally’s wrist more metal than it lost (when weighed and examined by the commission’s experts), was discovered at the hospital under the mat of a stretcher that had had no contact with Connally, as if it had been placed there. Therefore, one bullet having accomplished all of the many wounds suffered by Connally and two wounds suffered by Kennedy, it is clear that only three shots were fired.

  Many scholars and others have difficulty in accepting the Magic Bullet Theory.

  Commission Exhibit 399

  How the bullet, which appeared never to have had contact with a single object as dense as bone, was found is a simple story with but one witness who came forward. Darrell C. Tomlinson, who was the senior engineer at Parkland Hospital, testified that he had found the bullet. He said he saw a man whom he could not identify in contact with a stretcher and that when that person pushed the stretcher, a bullet rolled out. He said that it did not come from the stretcher that had been used for Connally. The only witness who testified about the stretcher was Tomlinson. The commission concluded that “the bullet came from the governor’s stretcher,” relying on the only witness to the event who said that it had not.

/>   Experiments were conducted by the government’s expert to determine what a bullet would look like if it shattered a wrist or struck a rib. The expert said that each test bullet did not resemble the magic bullet at all because while 399 was almost pristine, every test bullet was deformed and “severely flattened on the end.”

  Other government experts weighed and examined the bullet and studied Connally’s x-rays. They stated that too many grains of metal remained in Connally’s body to have come from 399. In all respects it was a magic missile worthy of satire—and Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David did their best to ridicule it in a very clever Seinfeld episode.

  The Grassy Knoll

  The vast majority of the eyewitnesses in numerous different locations throughout Dealey Plaza stated that shots had come from behind a wooden fence on the grassy knoll, as did the ear-witnesses, all supported by the forensic evidence, the photographic evidence, the medical evidence, and the physical evidence.

  The phrase “grassy knoll” has become such an integral part of both American history and the English language that it yields many search results in Google. No need to mention JFK, the assassination, Dealey Plaza, or even Dallas—just type “grassy knoll” and Google will respond. Remarkably enough, even the word “knoll” or “grassy” standing alone will get a response relevant to the assassination.

  The only Americans who appeared to have missed the importance of the wooden fence on the grassy knoll were the seven men who comprised the Warren Commission and the fifteen men who served as counsel to the commission, causing one to wonder if, had a few women had been permitted to join the men they might not have been so negligent. The twenty-two men responsible published a report with maps and photographs of Dealey Plaza from which they, through design and duplicity, excluded the fence and the knoll.5