20

MUCH HAS HAPPENED since Clay Shaw’s trial and my trial. Leading public figures like Lyndon Johnson, Earl Warren, Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell, and Earle Cabell have all died. And important characters in my New Orleans investigation like the virulent anticommunist Guy Banister and his private detective associate Jack Martin have gone unnoticed to their graves.

Others have died in undeniably mysterious circumstances. Lee Oswald’s Dallas friend and baby sitter George de Mohrenschildt was found shot to death, a shotgun nearby, hours after arranging to be interviewed by an investigator from the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

David Ferrie, as described in Chapter 11, was discovered dead in his New Orleans apartment with two unsigned suicide notes by his side. The coroner decided that death was due to natural causes.

Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig left Dallas and moved to New Orleans as the result of an attempt on his life. He grew homesick for Dallas, however, and moved back. His car was blown up while he was in it, but he survived. Then he was found shot to death at his home. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

Jack Ruby, having been treated at the Dallas Sheriff’s Office for a cold, was sent to the hospital when it got worse. Shortly thereafter it was announced that he had cancer, and shortly after that it was announced that he had died from the cancer.

Lee Harvey Oswald, of course, was shot by Ruby in front of a television audience of millions and a virtual wall of Dallas police officers. Though there is no mystery about the precise cause of death, Ruby’s stated reason for killing Oswald—to save Mrs. Kennedy the burden of having to attend Oswald’s trial—remains as questionable as ever, particularly in view of Ruby’s ties to organized crime on the one hand, and to the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. on the other.

Clay Shaw died on August 14, 1974, and the circumstances were also odd. One day, a neighbor of Shaw’s saw some men carrying a body on a stretcher in the front door of Shaw’s carriage house. The entire body, including the head, was covered with a sheet. The neighbor, finding this unusual, called the coroner’s office, which promptly sent its investigators to Shaw’s residence. By the time they arrived, the place was empty. After a day of inquiry, the Orleans Parish coroner’s investigators learned that Shaw had just been buried in Kentwood, in Tangipahoa Parish where he was born.

A death certificate signed by Dr. Hugh Betson attested that Shaw’s death was due to natural causes—lung cancer. The New Orleans coroner, Dr. Frank Minyard, concerned about the circumstances and the speed of the burial, decided to obtain a court order for the exhumation of Shaw’s body in Kentwood so that he could assure himself that Shaw had not died as a result of foul play. But before he could get the order, word of what he had in mind reached the media. Immediately, the newspapers published heated editorials protesting the callous desecration of Shaw’s remains, proclaiming his right to be left in peace, and hinting that this was an attempt to revive my past charges of Shaw’s involvement in President Kennedy’s assassination. The coroner reconsidered, there was no exhumation, and Shaw’s body has been left in repose.

I have no idea what happened to some of those who figured prominently in this saga: Kerry Thornley, Oswald’s look-alike acquaintance from his Marine days; former F.B.I. Agent James Hosty; Oswald’s friend Ruth Paine; and our witness Vernon Bundy.

Some have prospered. Richard McGarrah Helms, the C.I.A.’s deputy director for plans (covert operations) when the assassination occurred, was promoted to Agency director in 1966. In 1973, he retired to become ambassador to Iran, until 1977, when he became a private business consultant. Johnny Carson has turned into a late-night TV icon. N.B.C., C.B.S., Newsweek, Time, Life, and The New York Times have all gone on just as before.

So have some important witnesses. For example, Perry Russo operates a property rental business of his own in New Orleans and drives a taxicab on the side. Julia Ann Mercer, married to a successful businessman, is a housewife in the Midwest. And Pershing Gervais is a bail bondsman in Baton Rouge.

With one exception, the members of the special group in the New Orleans D.A.’s office who carried out the J.F.K. investigation are still involved with the law in one way or another. Andrew Sciambra is now a magistrate in the Criminal District Court in New Orleans. Lou Ivon is a member of the state legislature. Al Oser became a judge of the Criminal District Court until his retirement and is now a senior partner in a New Orleans law firm. Jim Alcock also became a Criminal District Court judge in New Orleans and now practices law in Houma, Louisiana. Charles Ward sits as a judge on Louisiana’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal. D’Alton Williams practices real estate law in New Orleans. And Numa Bertel is chief of the Indigent Defender Service at the Criminal District Court. Frank Klein returned to our office, and later moved on to become the chief assistant district attorney in Placquemine Parish, south of New Orleans, but, I am sad to say, died of cancer in 1986.

As for myself, following my defeat for a fourth term as district attorney and my acquittal in the government’s phony tax evasion case against me, I spent four years in private law practice, wrote a novel, and then was elected to my present office as a judge on the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal.

However, my interest in the assassination of President Kennedy and its implications never ended. The assassination critics have continued to turn up new information—which has continued to be disregarded by the United States government. To me, among the most significant revelations were the belated discovery that an additional bullet had been found in President Kennedy’s body at the autopsy scene, the disappearance of President Kennedy’s brain, and of course the confirmation by both Victor Marchetti and Richard Helms that Clay Shaw had been an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. (See Chapter 18.)

In 1978 and 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted its hearings, and while well on its apparent course of attempting to breathe new life into the moribund Warren Commission report, stumbled reluctantly to the conclusion that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”[80] Before disbanding, it called upon the Justice Department to consider reopening the investigation and delivered a secret report detailing the fresh leads its work had developed. The result of that request was nearly a decade of silence.[81]

More than anything, what has changed in the years since President Kennedy’s assassination is our national consciousness. We have been through so much. There were, for example, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. There were the assassination attempts on presidential candidate George Wallace and on Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. We have lived through nine horrifying years of the Vietnam War, the trauma of Watergate, the revelations during the 1970s about the C.I.A., and more recently, the Iran/Contra affair. This extraordinary succession of events has ended our innocence.

Looking back today with new information and new insights, it is possible to put together an informed historical speculation of what happened to President Kennedy and why. I believe that what happened at Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963, was a coup d’etat. I believe that it was instigated and planned long in advance by fanatical anticommunists in the United States intelligence community; that it was carried out, most likely without official approval, by individuals in the C.I.A.’s covert operations apparatus and other extra-governmental collaborators, and covered up by like-minded individuals in the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the Dallas police department, and the military; and that its purpose was to stop Kennedy from seeking detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba and ending the Cold War.

A coup d’etat has been described as “a sudden action by which an individual or group, usually employing limited violence, captures positions of governmental authority without conforming to the formal requirements for changing officeholders, as prescribed by the laws or constitution.” A successful coup requires a number of elements: extensive planning and preparation by the sponsors (those responsible for the coup); the collaboration of the Praetorian Guard[82] (officials whose job is to protect the government, including the President); a diversionary cover-up afterwards; the ratification of the assassination by the new government inheriting power; and the dissemination of disinformation by major elements of the news media. If this concurrence of events has a familiar sound, it is because this is exactly what happened when John Kennedy was murdered.

I do not know precisely when the planning and preparation for the coup began. In a sense, it may have been as early as late 1960 when the C.I.A. prepared a dossier analysis on the President-elect. Such a psychological profile surely would not have contemplated assassination of the President, but its purpose was to help the C.I.A., or some elements within it, further its goal of manipulating foreign policy. It probably was not until later, when Kennedy had veered toward detente and conventional means of controlling policy had failed, that assassination became an option in the minds of some of the C.I.A.’s Cold War establishment.

Just who did the plotting is not clear either. But certainly Guy Banister was involved in questionable assassination-related activities very early. Representatives of his organization, Friends of Democratic Cuba, were the first ones to impersonate Lee Oswald when they tried to buy 10 pickup trucks for the Bay of Pigs invasion from the Bolton Ford dealership in New Orleans in January 1961. (See Chapter 4.) By the summer of 1963 Banister was deeply involved in anti-Castro activity, ranging from training guerrillas north of Lake Pontchartrain to collecting ammunition for raids on Cuba. That Banister was working with the C.I.A. at this time is no longer open to serious dispute.

Another one of Banister’s tasks that summer of 1963 was the sheepdipping of Lee Oswald to make him appear to be a dedicated communist. Although no one has ever succeeded in locating a genuine New Orleans chapter of Fair Play for Cuba, Banister had Oswald out on the streets handing out leaflets in its name. He provided Oswald with a room up on the third floor of the Newman Building and met with him from time to time in his own office. This sheepdipping, courtesy of Banister, succeeded exactly as planned. Following the assassination, Oswald was immediately branded a communist, with his leafleting activity in New Orleans cited as the prime evidence.

The sponsors of the assassination also arranged numerous scenes where Lee Oswald was impersonated in hopes of laying a trail of incriminating evidence at his feet. (See Chapter 5.) The most significant of these impersonations occurred in Mexico City in October 1963, when Oswald reportedly contacted the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban consulate, ostensibly to arrange a trip to the Soviet Union. The reason this particular impersonation stands out is that all the “documentation” for it was provided by the C.I.A. This evidence—which included C.I.A. memos, photographs of a man who obviously was not Oswald, and tapes of phone calls to the Soviet Embassy that were not of Oswald’s voice—was insultingly flimsy. To me, this meant that while some elements within the C.I.A. participated in the Oswald impersonation charades and thus were doing the necessary preparatory work of setting up the scapegoat for the assassination, other elements within the Agency remained uninformed about the plot, or indeed might have been trying to discover the truth.

Oswald appears to have been extensively manipulated by the C.I.A. for a long period prior to the assassination and may well have believed that he was working for the government. Oswald was also an F.B.I. confidential informant, a job that provided additional control over him and may have given him a reason to believe he was actually penetrating the plot to assassinate the President. His association with the F.B.I. raises a question. To what extent did the F.B.I. and the Secret Service cooperate in the pre-assassination planning? It appears to me that neither agency took any discernible positive action prior to the assassination—although there clearly was distinct inactivity when activity was called for.

This brings us to the second necessary element for a successful coup: the cooperation of the Praetorian Guard. A coup d’etat needs the support neither of a large number of government officials nor of a broad base of the population. The managers of the coup may well represent the views of only a tiny minority of the populace, but if they have key elements of the Praetorian Guard on their side, the majority becomes irrelevant.

In the United States, the modern counterparts to the Praetorian Guard are the secret police of the intelligence community, beginning with the smallish, close-at-hand Secret Service and extending on through the F.B.I., the intelligence divisions of various federal departments, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Without key elements of this modern-day Praetorian Guard, a coup d’etat in the United States would be impossible. With them, however, a coup can be unstoppable.

The Praetorian Guard is vital to a successful coup because it has the capability of allowing the defensive protection of the leader to vanish at a crucial moment. The removal of the Emperor Caligula in seconds, leaving as the new emperor the stuttering Claudius, was almost casual following the quiet withdrawal of the protection of the guard. And almost equally casual was the removal of President Kennedy in less than six seconds, leaving Lyndon Johnson as the new President.

A telexed warning of an attempt to assassinate the President in Dallas on November 22 or 23 had apparently been sent to every F.B.I. special agent in charge across the country and had been quietly ignored. (See Chapter 17.) The protective bubble for the President’s limousine had been left off by the Secret Service. The windows and roofs of buildings along the parade route had not been secured. (See Chapter 2.) And the parade route had been changed at the last minute so that the motorcade would have to make a sharp turn, thus slowing it to less than ten miles per hour. (See Chapter 7.) All of this added up, essentially, to the withdrawal of the President’s protection by the modern-day Praetorian Guard, leaving him vulnerable to the rifle fire coming at him from the grassy knoll in front of him and from at least two locations in buildings behind him.

Precisely how many shots were fired, from precisely where, and by whom are questions that remain unanswered. But one thing I am quite sure of is that Lee Harvey Oswald did not fire at anyone on November 22, 1963. His negative nitrate test, his abysmal marksmanship record in the Marines, his generally unaggressive personality, the poor quality of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he allegedly bought through the mail and used, and the lack of any evidence of his involvement in the Tippit murder all confirm that he killed no one, that he was merely, as he claimed, “a patsy.”

The President’s blood hardly had cooled before the well-organized cover-up began. The hijacking of his body in an ambulance to Air Force One, over the vociferous objection of Texas officials at Parkland Hospital, allowed the body’s quick removal before the required local autopsy could reveal that he had been hit from both front and back. Lyndon Johnson was promptly sworn in as the new President to head off the alarming possibility of a national security emergency. Then the plane made its getaway from Love Field and headed for the military autopsy waiting at the U.S. Naval hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. There the Hippocratic Oath and any serious search for truth would suddenly be swept aside in the face of the first rule of the military—to obey orders without question. (See Chapter 18.)

Once Air Force One took off and Kennedy’s body was airborne, it finally could be announced officially that the President had been shot only from behind. It could be announced that a lone assassin, a disoriented young Marxist drifter with no motive and no supporters, had done it all and that the Dallas police already had him under arrest in the office of Captain Will Fritz, the chief of homicide. The feared emergency was over. The United States government was in good hands.

The coup d’etat had accomplished its objective with clock-work precision. The life had been ripped from the chief executive of the United States government, and major changes in American foreign policy would be arriving not in months or weeks but in the next several days.

Meanwhile, the cover-up was progressing. The Secret Service sent Governor John Connally’s clothing, along with all the evidence it contained, to be laundered and then proceeded to scrub down the presidential limousine, again washing away crucial traces of blood, bone, and bullets. (See Chapter 17.) Later its agents would “investigate” Lee Oswald’s office in Guy Banister’s operation and fail to find anything remotely suspicious. (See Chapter 3.)

The F.B.I. hushed up the fact that it had been informed of a plot to kill the President five days before the actual assassination and began bullying witnesses like Fenella Farrington (see Chapter 5) and trying to silence others like Richard Randolph Carr (see Chapter 18). It went so far as to alter the statements of witness Julia Ann Mercer, who identified Jack Ruby as the man she had seen dropping off a rifleman on the grassy knoll an hour before the assassination. (See Chapter 17.)

The Dallas homicide unit managed to lose two rifles found in the Texas School Book Depository, one of them a highly accurate 7.65 Mauser (see Chapter 7); it never bothered to check out Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig’s report that he had seen a Nash Rambler station wagon carrying four men, including Oswald, leave from in front of the Depository and even denied hearing of such a thing (see Chapter 16); it concealed for ten months Oswald’s negative nitrate test (see Chapter 7); it concealed, altered, and fabricated crucial ballistics evidence in the Tippit murder (see Chapter 15); and most important, it allowed Jack Ruby to kill Oswald in the basement of police headquarters surrounded by dozens of officers. Ruby had at least helped set up the assassination and because of this may have been put in a position by the assassination’s engineers where he had no alternative but to eliminate Oswald. Ruby’s act of violence, silencing the one man who might have identified the assassination’s sponsors, was the capstone of the cover-up.

With the cover-up such a stunning success, the stage was now set for the ratification of the assassination. The surviving elements of the new government—from Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and Earl Warren on down—were quick to see the advantages of supporting the scenario that no coup d’etat had occurred and that our democracy was safely intact, that a lone malcontent had murdered the President in a meaningless, random act of violence. And they were quick to understand the message of those who had engineered the assassination—that there was a forceful consensus that wanted the Cold War resumed at its pre-Kennedy intensity. There is no evidence that Johnson, Hoover, Warren, or Allen Dulles had any prior knowledge of or involvement in the assassination, but I would not hesitate to classify all of these men as accessories after the fact.

As soon as the non-participating elements in the intelligence community saw that a coup d’etat had occurred, they moved quickly to support the official story. Motivated in some instances by self-preservation and in others by a belief that Kennedy had brought the assassination on himself by compromising too often with the Soviets, the remainder of the government—from high elected officials to heads of departments and agencies—lined up to add their solemn voices to the growing chorus chanting the great lie.

This is the way of all successful coups d’etat. In the early 17th century, Sir John Harington, the English poet, described it in a few lines:

The beginning of the formal ratification process came when Congress allowed President Johnson, the heir to power, to appoint the Warren Commission, including ex-C.I.A. Director Dulles, to investigate the murder. The Commission’s report, carrying the prestige and credibility of its highly respected chair, put the official government stamp of approval on the lone assassin fairy tale. For the government, reluctant to face the pre-assassination involvement of the C.I.A. and the participation of its other intelligence agencies in the cover-up, such a ratification must have seemed the easy way out. For many years afterwards, federal officials did their best to prop up this crumbling edifice as critics tore it apart, leaving almost no one still believing in the lone assassin scenario.

With the murder plainly unsolved, a succession of Presidents and attorneys general, each with the resources of the F.B.I. and the entire federal government at their command, made no effort to get to the truth.

On the contrary, when I attempted a real investigation of the assassination, federal officials sought to suppress the truth. I received no cooperation when I sought to subpoena key witnesses like Allen Dulles. I found crucial federal records destroyed, altered, classified as secret, or sealed by the federal government for 75 years. I found myself denounced by the President, the attorney general, and the Chief Justice. I found my investigation infiltrated and subverted by federal agents. And ultimately I found myself on trial in a trumped-up federal case. That is what happens to you when you do not go along with the new government’s ratification of the coup.

The government’s cover-up and ratification of the assassination have been aided by a flood of disinformation appearing in the major media. Dissemination of disinformation is the last element necessary for a successful coup d’etat, and it also happens to be one of the specialties of the C.I.A. For many years the Agency secretly had on its payroll journalists ostensibly working for the major media but in fact disseminating propaganda for consumption by the American people. It has also subsidized the publication of more than 1,000 books. As Richard Barnet, the co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies, put it:

For 25 years the American people have been bombarded by propaganda pointing insistently to a variety of irrelevant “false sponsors” as the supposed instigators of the Kennedy assassination. (False sponsor is a term used in covert intelligence actions which describes the individual or organization to be publicly blamed after the action, thus diverting attention away from the intelligence community.) Americans have been so thoroughly brainwashed by such disinformation, paid for by their own taxes, that many of them today are only able to sigh mournfully to one another that they “probably never will know the truth.”

Meanwhile, an unending stream of news service releases, newspaper articles, television “documentaries,” magazine features, and books repetitively reinforce this bewilderment and continue to point the public’s attention in the wrong direction. The incredible accumulation of false sponsors laid upon the American people includes Lee Harvey Oswald, the K.G.B., Howard Hughes, Texas oil barons, organized crime, and Fidel Castro.

The original false sponsor was the scapegoat himself, Lee Harvey Oswald. Nominated for the role by the intelligence community, he was formally endorsed by the Warren Commission and others at the highest levels of the United States government. However, over time it became increasingly apparent that the lone assassin fairy tale had fallen apart, and most of its supporters simply fell silent.

Consequently, I was surprised to find recently that Time magazine, long an ardent supporter of the lone assassin explanation, continues to be loyal to the original false sponsor, Lee Oswald. One must acknowledge a certain magnificence in the total dedication here, the sustained lack of thought through 25 years. In its August 1, 1988, review of the novel Libra by Don DeLillo, which although fictional is an interesting and provocative treatment of both Kennedy’s assassination and his alleged assassin, Time finds fault with the book’s argument that “the plot to kill the President was even wider and more sinister than previously imagined.” There is a simpler possibility, the magazine authoritatively concludes: “A frustrated, angry man looked out a window, watched the President ride by, and shot him dead.”

When I read that brief, neat disposition of one of history’s most complicated and significant events, I realized that there is not much one can say to a publication which obviously has all the answers.

One of the most intriguing false sponsors is Fidel Castro. Frequently over the years—particularly when I was making speeches at universities—I would encounter people who enthusiastically agreed with me that it was not possible for Oswald to have killed Kennedy unaided. However, they then would add that they believed that Fidel Castro had engineered the assassination. I would answer by examining the logic of this proposition.

First I would point out that at a critical time during the C.I.A.’s attempted invasion of Cuba in 1961, the acting chief of the Agency beseeched the President to provide jet fighter plane support from nearby U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. Kennedy refused, and the invasion failed catastrophically. Next I would explain that during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Kennedy refused to bomb or invade Cuba, as a number of his military and intelligence advisers urged him to do. Finally, I would remind the audience that one of the factors helping to resolve the missile crisis was Kennedy’s personal assurance to the Soviet Union that the U.S. would make no further attempts to invade Cuba, a decision which deeply disturbed the operational elements of the C.I.A., which had been training anti-Castro Cubans at guerrilla camps in Florida and Louisiana for precisely that objective. At this point it usually was sufficient for me to ask but one question: “Do you truly believe that Fidel Castro would have liked to see Kennedy removed as President, that he would have preferred to have Lyndon Johnson in power?”

One could pose many more questions to those who advocate the idea of Castro as an engineer of Kennedy’s murder. Could Cuban communists really have established the necessary operational base and penetration of key police elements in Dallas, one of the most conservative cities in the United States? Would these communists have received the extensive cooperation from Dallas officials, the F.B.I., and the C.I.A. that the actual assassins evidently received? And are we really to believe that Fidel Castro had Lee Oswald hand out his inflammatory leaflets in New Orleans and later ordered the same fellow to go to Dallas and kill President Kennedy? Are we to suppose that Castro would have had only one man working for him? Fortunately, perhaps because of the very insanity of such a proposition, the false sponsorship of Castro has faded.

I was aware, of course, of the brief vogue of the “Southwest oil billionaires” as backers of the assassination. However, this was never in vogue with me, not even briefly, because it simply did not fit my initial—and unchanging—belief that the critical connections were to the intelligence community. True, George de Mohrenschildt was in the oil business and was a member of the Petroleum Club in Dallas. But in my talks with de Mohrenschildt it became clear to me that he was used—not by the Southwest oil billionaires but by the intelligence community. His duties were limited to escort supervision of Oswald, at the conclusion of which he was dispatched to his “government-oriented” business in Haiti while the final arrangements were made establishing Oswald as the scapegoat for the assassination. (See Chapter 4.)

The visit of “Jim Braden” (Eugene Hale Brading) to the offices of the Hunt family, of Texas petroleum fame, a few days before the assassination appears to have been a one-shot deception gambit. (See Chapter 16.) The same kind of one-time visit to the Hunt offices was made, also just before the assassination, by Jack Ruby—who was no more in the oil business than “Braden” was. The intention of these decoy moves was to fuel speculation that the Texas oil business might have sponsored the assassination.

Such brief decoy visits reminded me of the “mis-direction” move with which every major professional football team commences a number of its running plays. Upon receiving the ball, the runner takes a half step to his left and, while the opposing defense is off and running in the wrong direction, then heads off to his right at full speed. The professional football players, however, are only amateurs when it comes to mis-direction. The real pros work in the operations directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Of course, the primary and most lasting false sponsor has been organized crime, the Mafia, the mob. Many of the books ostensibly criticizing the government’s official explanation of the assassination seem designed simply to leave readers with the firm conviction that the mob murdered John Kennedy. As with any powerful myth, there are some elements of truth to it. The C.I.A. has worked with the Mafia over the years, and there is certainly evidence that many mob figures hated President Kennedy—and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And mob-related individuals do figure in the scenario.

For some elements of organized crime, pre-Castro Cuba had been rich pickings with its wide-open gambling for American tourists. Later, in furtherance of its private war against Castro, the C.I.A. made arrangements with some of these mobsters—most notably Santos Trafficante and John Rosselli—to help it accomplish the assassination of Fidel Castro. Other mob-oriented individuals, like Jack Ruby, were still adept at collecting arms and ammunition for anti-Castro adventures. It was hardly surprising then, after President Kennedy’s murder, that the Agency continued to use its helpful new friend, the mob, for the fragrance its very name provided as a false sponsor. The unarguable criminality of its varied enterprises added greatly to the continued confusion being manufactured by the Agency’s disinformation machinery and caused many eyes to turn away from the Company as a possible sponsor. For these mobsters, in turn, the Agency had become a new and generous godfather.

The Agency used its new friends not only for murder and gunrunning, but for other purposes as well. Imagine my surprise, for example, upon thumbing through a volume of the House Select Committee on Assassinations when I read a report provided by the C.I.A. It stated that “Jim Garrison, while still district attorney of New Orleans, had participated in a secret meeting in a Las Vegas hotel with John Rosselli.” Of course, this was absolutely false, but I considered it no small honor to have the disinformation machinery of the government’s main clandestine operation smear me with its most powerful potion—association with the mob.[83]

Far more significant than this minor slander has been the Agency’s success in persuading many otherwise thoughtful Americans to believe that organized crime itself somehow accomplished the sophisticated social engineering that resulted in the elimination of President Kennedy. I suggest that we examine this contention with a little old-fashioned reasoning.

It will be recalled that the original route scheduled for the motorcade did not go right past the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald had been working since October when Ruth Paine obtained a job interview for him there. (See Chapter 5.) In fact, as late as the morning of the assassination the motorcade route was still diagramed on the front page of the Dallas Morning News as continuing on Main Street to the center of Dealey Plaza. (See Chapter 7.) Is it really believable that the mob could have changed the route of the motorcade on the morning of the assassination?

Never mind the succession of books which purportedly reveal organized crime as the engineer of Kennedy’s murder. (See Afterword.) If it can simply be shown how the mob changed the route of the motorcade on the morning of the assassination—just that one single, simple, item—I could accept at least the possibility that the mob killed President Kennedy. Without that explanation, I must be suspicious of the people who say they believe the Mafia carried out the assassination.

It appears to me that someone with considerable force and influence wanted to have Lee Oswald close to the motorcade. Whoever this was decided, in effect, “If we can’t put Lee Oswald along the parade route, then we’ll put the parade route next to Oswald.” Who could more likely accomplish that change—the capos who work for Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno, or clandestine operations elements of the intelligence community? The employees of Tony (Big Tuna) Accardo, or elements of the Praetorian Guard which, having the duty to protect the President, also have the power to decide where, when, and how he travels?

Placing Lee Oswald somewhere along the parade route would have been of value only to whoever had sheepdipped him to appear to be a communist and supporter of Fidel Castro. Was it organized crime that sheepdipped Oswald, or was it Guy Banister, veteran of the O.N.I., the F.B.I., and the C.I.A.? Was Oswald working out of some Mafia restaurant, or was he working out of Guy Banister’s offices along with David Ferrie, a small army of anti-Castro Cuban guerrillas, and a host of intelligence community operatives?

Could organized crime have insured that the version of the front page of the Dallas Morning News offered to the Warren Commission as evidence no longer showed the originally scheduled route of the motorcade? (See Chapter 7.) Could the mob have obtained Governor Connally’s clothes, sending them out to be drycleaned after the arrival of the President’s limousine at Parkland Hospital, thus removing all evidentiary marks? Could the Mafia have whisked Kennedy’s body past the Texas authorities, who wanted it kept for the local autopsy as Texas law required, and got it aboard Air Force One? Could the Mafia have placed in charge of the President’s autopsy an Army general who was not a physician? Could the Mafia, in the course of the autopsy, have ordered the pathologists not to probe the neck wound lest a bullet from the front be found lodged in the spine? Could the Mafia, afterwards, have ordered the chief pathologist, Commander Humes, to burn his original autopsy notes? Could the Mafia have arranged for President Kennedy’s brain to disappear from the National Archives?

Upon close examination, then, the false sponsors all fall of their own weight. What remains as the only likely sponsor with both the motive and the capability of murdering the President is the covert action arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Invisible as it is dangerous, the covert operations apparatus of the C.I.A. has become far and away the most powerful element in the intelligence community. It is the closest to the top levels of the government and, at least since the 1950s, has assumed a steadily increasing role in the determination of foreign policy.

As distinguished from intelligence collection, covert operations include the development and distribution of propaganda (the euphemism is disinformation), the raising of secret armies, the staging of coups d’etat, and even murder—everywhere and anywhere, internationally and domestically, but always hidden. Such concealed operations represent more than two-thirds of the C.I.A.’s total activity, as a result of which the covert operations directorate constitutes, as former C.I.A. officer Philip Agee once put it, “a secret political police ... the Gestapo and S.S. of our time.”

It is improbable that an elaborate plan to assassinate the President received official approval from John McCone, the C.I.A. director in 1963, or Richard Helms, deputy director for plans (covert operations). But it may well have been conceived at lower echelons of the Agency and been carried out in collaboration with extra-governmental individuals or organizations[84] precisely to avoid leaving any paper trail to top C.I.A. officials, who may have conveniently looked the other way. We have recently seen such a quasi-governmental creature, composed of a mixture of government officials and private citizens, in the Iran/Contra affair which Congress investigated in 1987. That particular mixture of official power and civilian assistance, also seen in the Watergate affair, was described by one of the high-ranking officers participating in it as the “Enterprise.”

I believe that the Iran/Contra enterprise may well be the historical descendant of a considerably more powerful enterprise that killed President Kennedy. Both were brainchildren of the C.I.A. covert action directorate; both utilized a combination of Agency veterans and mysterious civilians to carry out their sinister, illegal operations; both were steeped in far rightwing ideology; and both were totally unaccountable. The continuity here is frightening indeed. To me, it appears that the dream of the late C.I.A. director William Casey of an ongoing “off-the-shelf” operation to handle extremely delicate and controversial covert actions as an untraceable instrument of the Agency has been a living reality for a quarter century, going back at least to the assassination of President Kennedy.

Unlike the false sponsors, the C.I.A. clearly had the capability to accomplish the assassination. In 1975 a Senate committee headed by Frank Church found that the Agency had planned a number of assassination operations, using everything from poison to machine guns and sometimes mob hit men. The committee was not mandated to inquire into domestic assassinations, but it did find that the Agency had repeatedly conspired to remove foreign leaders who were implementing policies it did not like.

In 1953, with Allen Dulles directing the operation by radio out of Geneva, Switzerland, the Agency launched a well-organized coup against the government of Iran. As a result, Premier Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown, the imperial throne was restored, and the Shah was reinstalled on it.

In 1954 in Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, although not a communist, was governing with distinctly liberal policies. When some military leaders began a plot against the democratically elected leader, the Agency moved in to support them with armed fighter planes. Arbenz ended up fleeing the country.

In 1960, Patrice Lumumba, a strong national leader and the first premier of the Congo (Zaire today), became an Agency target. Like Mossadegh of Iran and Arbenz of Guatemala, Lumumba was not a communist. Nevertheless, C.I.A. Director Dulles authorized the expenditure of up to $100,000 to “remove” Lumumba. Shortly thereafter, the Agency’s deputy director for plans, Richard Bissell, asked C.I.A. scientist Joseph Scheider to make preparations to assassinate an unnamed African leader.” Scheider made a list of toxic biological materials which would cause fatal diseases indigenous to Africa. In his testimony before the Church Committee, Scheider admitted delivering a lethal bouquet to the Agency’s station chief in the Congo and instructing him that he was to assassinate Lumumba.

However, the poison never had to be used. In January 1961, Lumumba—now temporarily out of office and a political prisoner—was placed on a plane allegedly bound for Bakwanga in Katanga Province. In mid-flight it was redirected to Elizabethville in the same province, an area where the inhabitants were known to be hostile to Lumumba. Some weeks afterwards it was reported that Patrice Lumumba had escaped but then had been murdered by hostile villagers. The C.I.A.’s direct involvement in the murder of Lumumba is unclear, but in 1978 former C.I.A. Africa specialist John Stockwell said a high Agency official had described to him how he drove around with Lumumba’s body in his car, “trying to decide what to do with it.”

The Church Committee found that, in addition to plotting the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the C.I.A. on a number of occasions plotted the murder of Fidel Castro, using such novel devices as poisoned diving suits and toxic cigars. Furthermore, the committee found that the Agency had actively encouraged the assassinations of other foreign leaders, including Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in 1961, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam in 1963, and General René Schneider of Chile in 1970. The committee’s sobering conclusion was that the C.I.A. repeatedly had planned or helped plan the assassination of a number of national leaders.[85]

This was confirmed by former Agency officials. According to one of them, William Harvey, the C.I.A.’s program of removing foreign leaders included the “capability to perform assassination.” Richard Bissell, former deputy director for plans, also acknowledged that assassination was included in the “wide spectrum of actions” available to eliminate chiefs of state who were a problem. It seems fair to state, then, that the C.I.A., from long experience, had the necessary capability to assassinate President Kennedy.

Equally important, it had the motivation. Contrary to what most Americans assume, the C.I.A. was not created solely to gather intelligence.[86] From its beginnings in 1947 the primary reason for its existence, as exemplified by the dominant role of its operations directorate, was the defeat of what it perceived as a monolithic communism. The hard-line Cold War obsession of the C.I.A. during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations—that the Soviet Union was committed to the destruction of the United States and the conquest of the entire world—was shared by its brother agency, the F.B.I., under J. Edgar Hoover and by many others in the government.

President Kennedy had campaigned and taken office on a note which suggested that his administration would continue the policy of no compromise with the Soviets. However, it gradually became clear that his philosophy did not truly lend itself to the long-established hard line. From his refusal to let General Cabell have the requested jet fighter support for the Agency’s faltering Bay of Pigs invasion, to his rejection of the recommendations to bomb and invade Cuba during the missile crisis, to his insistence over the initial opposition of his military advisers that the U.S. sign the nuclear test ban treaty in Moscow, to his decisions in 1963 to withdraw from Vietnam and consider restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba, Kennedy was following a different drum beat.[87]

To the hard-line, war-oriented elements of the American power structure, for whom the C.I.A. operations directorate had been created and for whom it functioned, this was nothing less than “selling out to the communists.”

In retrospect, the reason for the assassination is hardly a mystery. It is now abundantly clear from the course that U.S. foreign policy took immediately following November 22, 1963, why the C.I.A.’s covert operations element wanted John Kennedy out of the Oval Office and Lyndon Johnson in it.

The new President elevated by rifle fire to control of our foreign policy had been one of the most enthusiastic American cold warriors— although as vice-president he had become of necessity a closet cold warrior. Lyndon Johnson has been described by the writer Fred Cook, a highly regarded observer of the Washington scene, as “a man with limited knowledge of foreign affairs” who by experience and temperament was “oriented to think in military terms.”

Johnson had originally risen to power on the crest of the fulminating anti-communist crusade which marked American politics after World War II. Shortly after the end of that war, he declaimed that atomic power had become “ours to use, either to Christianize the world or pulverize it”—a Christian benediction if ever there was one. Johnson’s demonstrated enthusiasm for American military intervention abroad, which earned him the sobriquet “the senator from the Pentagon,” contrasted starkly with President Kennedy’s intention of total withdrawal from Vietnam.

It was no surprise, then, that following President Kennedy’s death and Lyndon Johnson’s swearing in as President, some dramatic changes in American foreign and military policy took place. Kennedy’s order to have the first thousand Americans returned home from Vietnam by December was promptly rescinded.

Of even greater consequence, on the Sunday afternoon following the assassination, after solemnly making an appearance at the eulogy for Kennedy at the Capitol Rotunda, Johnson met with Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, in the Executive Office Building. He informed Lodge that he was not going to lose Vietnam, that he was not going to see Southeast Asia go the way of China, that “Saigon can count on us.”

In August of 1964 the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred—or, at least, so the American public was told. The entire affair carried the musky fragrance of the intelligence community. “While on routine patrol in international waters,” it was announced from Washington, “the U.S. destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack.” An invisible enemy vessel, it seemed, had fired an invisible torpedo which fortunately missed the Maddox cruising off the coast of North Vietnam. Shortly afterwards a similar incident took place involving another U.S. naval vessel. Once again the enemy, deceptive as ever, left no evidence of the attack.

Johnson soundly denounced this “open aggression.” He appeared on national television to inform the American citizenry that “renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.” Congressional leaders of both parties, he said, had assured him of passage of a resolution making it clear “that our government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in Southeast Asia.”

The Gulf of Tonkin resolution, passed on August 7, 1964, with only two Senators dissenting, gave Johnson the power to take whatever military action he felt necessary in Southeast Asia. This declaration of war against North Vietnam, however unofficial, had been accomplished just over a year after John Kennedy’s American University speech in which he had eloquently expressed his hope for peace.

Promptly following the congressional resolution, American planes began their first bombardment of North Vietnam. The U.S. Pacific Command was ordered to prepare for combat. In 1965, more than 200,000 American troops poured into South Vietnam. In 1966 and 1967, upwards of 300,000 more followed. By the time the U.S. signed the Paris Agreement in January 1973, more than 55,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese were dead.

Thus was President Kennedy’s foreign policy reversed “without conforming to the formal requirements for changing office holders, as prescribed by the laws or constitution”—the very definition of a coup d’etat. This was the major consequence of the assassination of John Kennedy, and the real reason for it.

Is all this plausible? It might not have seemed so 25 years ago. However, now that we know some of the true history of the C.I.A. and its covert operations, the answer is a distinct yes. Assassination is precisely what the Agency knows how to do and what it has done all over the world for policy ends.

With the passage of time, we can see the enduring results of President Kennedy’s assassination. The nation is still recovering from its tragic nine-year adventure in Vietnam. The C.I.A. continues to run our foreign policy without any real control by either Congress or the President—only now the Agency stands far back in the shadows, appearing to distance itself from the enterprise at hand, using private citizens and intermediaries to guarantee its insulation. The Justice Department, knowing all that we know now, still refuses to conduct an honest investigation into the most important political assassination of our time. Twenty-five years after President Kennedy’s murder, it may be too late.

However, it is not too late for us to learn the lessons of history, to understand where we are now and who runs this country. If my book can help illuminate this for a younger generation who never knew John Kennedy, then it will have served its purpose.