Thank you all for your patience while waiting on this penultimate chapter of our JFK assassination series. Below is part 5. Did the CIA kill John F. Kennedy?
If you are new, check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. It will bring you up to speed on this incredible American mystery!
This is a difficult story to tell:
One of the reasons for the gap in time between the last part and this one is that this is a complicated, convoluted story. It’s hard to verify certain facts and because so much has been written on the subject, it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. This will be a long article, but stick with it… I’m about to make the case that the CIA might have killed a sitting President of the United States, and the case is pretty strong.
One of the funny parts of being a JFK assassination nerd is that as you head down the “CIA did it” rabbit hole, you come face to face with a lot of crazy people. They don’t always start off crazy, either. They start by making a reasonable point that the military and CIA were not happy with Kennedy’s leadership. Then, an hour later they are telling you about reptilian aliens putting LSD in the water to make the frogs gay. Consequently, it’s a little hard to know what to keep and what to throw away.
I’ve tried to use reliable sources, verified history, a couple of books, The Warren Report, and other declassified documents which are linked here or in previous parts of this series. Much of the information I got is from the book JFK and the Unspeakable, by James W. Douglass. For whatever it’s worth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr says it’s the most accurate book in print on his uncle’s assassination.
That said, let’s secure our tinfoil hats, dig in, and see if the CIA really did kill John F. Kennedy!
Lee Harvey Oswald (a recap)
Part 2 of this series was all about Lee Oswald, the alleged assassin. In it we went over Lee’s beginnings in Japan as a Marine Corps radar tech on a Top Secret radar system used to track U2 flights. We covered how he began to study Russian, and how his records indicate that he had communist sympathies. We also noted how odd it was that a young Marine would be allowed near such a secret program if he was showing obvious signs of disloyalty… and in 1958 learning Russian and saying nice things about the commies would have hardly gone unnoticed.
We discussed his brief defection to the USSR. Oswald, seemingly out of nowhere and with no money, took leave from the Marines and traveled to Russia. We discussed how he had a meeting at the US Embassy in Moscow and supposedly handed over his passport to an American official. We talked about how he hired a tour guide in Moscow and told her that he wished to defect.
Then we noted that the Soviets didn’t trust Oswald in the slightest and looked at him with great suspicion. They were sure the US had sent him there, and Oswald would never be allowed near intelligence in Russia. He was stashed in Minsk and given a monitored apartment and a low level job in a factory.
Oswald got married and had a child while in the USSR. He was there about two and a half years in total. Again, as we noted in Part 2, In May of 1962 Lee Oswald walked back into the US Embassy in Moscow, explained that he didn’t want to be a defector anymore, asked the US government for money in order to move himself and his Soviet wife and daughter back to the US… and he wanted his passport back. This incredible request was seemingly immediately granted and the happy family was headed home to the Red White & Blue all courtesy of Uncle Sam. When he arrived in Dallas, he immediately met up with George de Mohrenshildt, the CIA field agent who set him up with a place to live.
We also detailed Oswald’s activities when he got home including his time in New Orleans and his supposed trip to Mexico. We sourced these facts with The Warren Report and with other government documents that have been declassified since.
Now it’s time to state the obvious:
Lee Harvey Oswald was in the employ of the CIA. He was probably recruited while in the Marines and they had him learn Russian. Our government sent Lee Oswald to the USSR as some sort of spy, also known in intelligence circles as a NOC (non-official cover). This type of foreign agent is also known as an “illegal”. Such activities are well documented as verified techniques used by intelligence organizations around the world, including by the United States. Spies are real. They do exist. Lee Harvey Oswald was one.
It is simply not logical to believe that a Marine, being given leave, and instead making his way to Russia, approaching Russian intelligence and claiming to have classified material to share, would then be welcomed back to the US at taxpayer expense with his family and no criminal charges. Ask Edward Snowden if it works that way.
It is obvious that Oswald was sent to Russia by the US Government. The operation does not seem to have borne much fruit, as the Russians didn’t trust Oswald and simply monitored him and stuck him in Minsk where he couldn’t get in much trouble. After a couple of years the operation was called off, and Oswald was brought home. That story makes sense. The official story does not.
Did the CIA do it, or did Lee act on his own?
When asking a question like “Did the CIA kill an American President?” it’s important to be precise in our language and clear in our definitions. It is not hard to imagine that Lee Oswald, a former (or even then-current) employee of the CIA would have mental problems after his failed mission to the USSR and lash out at his own government by killing the President. If this is the case, then it’s also not hard to believe that the CIA would want to hide the fact that Oswald ever worked for them.
In my opinion, that scenario would not mean that the CIA killed Kennedy. It would mean that a rogue CIA employee killed Kennedy, which is very different. If that were the case, then the “lone nut” theory would largely hold, save for the one caveat that the “lone nut” happened to be a spook.
That said, as we explore this theory further, if we find evidence that Oswald’s actions on November 22, 1963 were part of a larger coordinated event… if we find out that some faction of our Intelligence Community or the agency at large had knowledge of what was to happen, or was complicit in the planning, then our conclusion will be; Yes. The CIA did kill John F. Kennedy.
Evidence: It’s a circumstantial case
As any trial lawyer will tell you, circumstantial evidence is still evidence. The classic example explaining the concept is that if you look out your window before bed on a dry evening, then wake up the next morning to see that the yard, driveway, car, street, and everything else is wet, you can safely assume that it rained during the night. You don’t have direct evidence, because you didn’t actually see it rain and there is no video of it raining, but the only other option would be that someone or some thing had come in the right and spread water over everything… which is obviously not logical. So the fact that everything is wet is circumstantial evidence that it rained.
The fact is that we don’t have any credible witness that has ever gone on record that claims direct knowledge of a CIA conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, but we do have circumstantial evidence, and we will explore some of it in this section. Let’s look at some of the strongest evidence that this wasn’t just one rogue CIA employee.
The fact that Oswald was killed:
As we went over in Part 3 and Part 4 of our series, on November 24, 1963, approximately 48 hours after the President was shot, the closeted homosexual, mob connected, strip club owner, Jacob Rubinstein (aka Jack Ruby) shot and killed Oswald in the garage of a Dallas Police station in clear view of a bunch of press, complete with live TV cameras… while Oswald was handcuffed to Dallas Police Officer Jim Leavelle.
In the 48 hours leading up to Oswald’s murder, he was questioned by the FBI, by local police, and even took some questions from the press. Through all of it, Oswald claimed that he was innocent and famously proclaimed himself “just a patsy”. Shortly thereafter he was killed.
While that is certainly interesting, even shocking, the story doesn’t end there. First of all, as we explored in Part 4, Jack Ruby was connected to mobster Santo Trafficante. Santo Trafficante was connected to the CIA, as was revealed by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in the mid-1970’s with the release of the so called “Family Jewells” documents. In 1959 Trafficante was offered $150,000 ($1,563,000 in today’s dollars) by the CIA to kill Fidel Castro. The operation obviously did not move forward, but the fact remains, Jack Ruby is directly connected to a man to whom the CIA offered a million and a half dollars (in today’s money) to assassinate someone. It would not be a large leap to assume that Trafficante, who has been accused of being involved in Kennedy’s murder directly, was asked by people connected to the CIA to kill Oswald, and that he used Jack Ruby to do it.
So what happened to Ruby?
Jack Ruby was immediately arrested. He went through a couple of lawyers and generally denied being involved in any conspiracy (very Cosa Nostra of him). Ultimately he was represented by famed defense attorney Melvin Belli, who represented Ruby pro-bono. He even got his original conviction overturned on appeal.
Unfortunately we will never know what would have come out in that new trial, because Jack Ruby died on January 3, 1967 of supposed natural causes.
Why do I say ‘supposed’ natural causes? Because Ruby went quite insane after his arrest. When he finally met with the Warren Commission, he claimed that The John Birch Society was trying to kill him and that he needed to be brought back to Washington for his own protection.
Why does that matter? Because the person who ended up being Jack Ruby’s doctor was Dr. Louis Jolson (Jolly) West. Jolly West was one of the doctors involved in MK-Ultra, a CIA program to test mind control drugs on humans.
Okay… Hold on… Stop…
Yes. I am telling you that after he shot Oswald, Ruby was interrogated and continually “treated” for the rest of his life by a CIA doctor who took part in mind control experiments for our government and was also one of the CIA folks that began surreptitiously giving LSD to unsuspecting people to see how they reacted. That is real. It is documented.
Tighten down those tinfoil hats.
Shortly before his retrial was set to begin, Jack Ruby died, riddled with cancer and quite insane.
All that, taken together, is circumstantial evidence for a conspiracy that involved the CIA in a plot to kill Lee Oswald. The only reason for the CIA to kill Oswald is if they were afraid of what he might reveal about the plot to kill Kennedy.
Oswald’s trip to Mexico:
As we went over in Part 2, in late September of 1963, about two months before the assassination, a man claiming to be Lee Harvey Oswald walked into the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. The notes received by The Warren Commission from the Cuban and Russian Embassies were that the man spoke broken Russian. The Cubans sent the man to the Russian Embassy to get approval for a visa. The Russians denied his request. Not to be deterred, “Oswald” spent the next five days going back and forth between the two embassies and making a show of his request. Each time, he made sure to identify himself as Lee Harvey Oswald, an American citizen. (All citations for this are in Part 2 of this series)
There are a couple of problems with this. First and foremost, whoever went to Mexico was not Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald didn’t speak “broken Russian”. He was fluent. He had been studying Russian since he was a teenager in the Marines. He was married to a Russian woman who didn’t speak English. He lived in the Soviet Union for two and a half years. Broken Russian, indeed.
Secondly, the man described in the Warren Report and since by declassified Soviet reports on the meetings did not match Oswald’s physical description. The hair was wrong, the build was wrong, everything was wrong.
Finally, the Russian and Cuban Embassies in Mexico City were under constant surveillance by the CIA at that time. No unknown personnel went in or out of those buildings without their picture being taken and notes on them being made. In some cases people were followed after their visit in order to try and figure out who they were and what they were doing there. No photos of Lee Oswald in Mexico City have ever been found.
I assure you, an American former Marine / defector / undefector / CIA employee wouldn’t have gone unnoticed over 5 days of making a scene at those two embassies. It’s not possible.
The only logical conclusion to draw is that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City, and that person was there with the knowledge of the CIA. The obvious questions are: Who? and Why?
The only answer I can come up with is that the conspirators in the murder of John F. Kennedy were putting together evidence that would show Oswald to be an anti-American nut who was trying to defect again in the months leading up to the assassination. They wanted there to be something to point to that made Oswald look sketchy, so they sent someone down to Mexico with a fake ID and told him to make a scene.
Is that definitive? Not really. However, I do believe it’s clear that Oswald was not in Mexico City in September of 1963. The rest is just a theory. If you have a better idea as to why the CIA would ignore an American going in and out of two communist embassies in a spy hub like Mexico City in 1963 several times over the course of five days, I’m all ears. Maybe Lee just forgot how to speak Russian. Maybe all the cameras from all the surveillance teams watching those embassies were in the shop that week… it happened in Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell . You tell me what makes more sense.
The CIA had a motive
The Deep State exists. I’m sorry if you don’t want to believe that, but it does. Today it is known as “permanent Washington”. It is the horde of bureaucrats who work for various intelligence and military agencies in the Executive Branch of our government. These management teams outlast Congressional majorities and leaders. They outlast Presidents. At times they operate outside of their congressional mandates and outside of Executive control.
This fact is true today just as it was true in Kennedy’s era. Kennedy knew it. Eisenhower before him knew it too, which is why his farewell address famously warned us all, referring to the beast as the “Military Industrial Complex”.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. — President Eisenhower
January, 1961
La Bahia de los Cochinos
Near the end of the Eisenhower Administration the military and CIA hatched a plan for the overthrow of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Ike had given tentative approval for the plan but knew it would take place under the next administration.
Kennedy was briefed on the plan in January of 1961, just after he took office. The basic idea was that Cuban political refugees, here in the United States since the overthrow of Batista on New Years Day in 1959, and trained by our intelligence and military personnel, would sail from Florida to Cuba and land in a harbor known as The Bay of Pigs.
There they would engage any pro-Castro forces they found and march toward Havana linking up with resistance groups along the way, at which point they would take control of the military, topple Castro in a coup, and prevent the Soviet Union from having a stronghold in the Caribbean.
There are books written on the Bay of Pigs and if you want to know more, JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass breaks all this down pretty well. That said, Kennedy was apprehensive about the plan because he wasn’t sure how it could work without direct involvement from the US Military. His firm stance was that he would not allow the US Military to be directly involved because he didn’t want to encourage the Russians to retaliate in Eastern Europe, thus escalating the Cold War.
Kennedy ended up approving the plan with the explicit caveat that no US Military may be involved in the invasion, with the exception of a brief amount of air cover on the beach to allow the Cuban freedom fighters to establish a beachhead. Further the US bombers would have to be painted to remove all American insignia and the pilots would be stripped of identification.
Unbeknownst to Kennedy, his instincts were correct. The plan would never work without US military support, nor was it designed to. The CIA and the military had secretly planned on forcing the President’s hand once the invasion had started.
As the invasion began in April of 1961, it became obvious that invasion was doomed to fail. The Cuban military had been expecting them. The CIA trained Cuban freedom fighters were trapped under heavy fire on the beaches. There are even reports that Fidel Castro, himself, was driving a tank during the battle.
As it became clear that the attack had no hope of succeeding, Kennedy called off the air support, as it risked American pilots in a country they weren’t supposed to be in for a lost cause.
CIA Director Allen Dulles and several of the Joint Chiefs of the military confronted Kennedy and demanded that he authorize the US Marines to reinforce the Cuban freedom fighters and save the operation. President Kennedy and his brother Bobby Kennedy saw this demand for what it was. It was the the plan from the start to force the President’s hand into an armed invasion of Cuba by the US Military.
JFK washed his hands of the whole thing. He refused to allow American troops to reinforce the operation, and it failed spectacularly with many Cuban freedom fighters killed or captured.
Kennedy was furious. He was intentionally undermined by the Deep State and was almost forced into a war with a Soviet satellite state, and had only been President for four months.
As was recounted in Robert Kennedy’s retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 13 Days, neither Dulles nor the Joint Chiefs anticipated the resolve of John Kennedy. Their entire plan hinged on the idea that the new President, in the face of certain defeat, would acquiesce and allow in American troops. He did not. He took responsibility in the press, but behind the scenes he blamed the CIA and the military completely.
Aftermath:
Kennedy fired Allen Dulles and several of his deputy directors. He never trusted the CIA again for the rest of his life. Thanks to leaked classified information from WikiLeaks, we now know that John Kennedy said he would “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds”. For the rest of his life, that is what he would try to do.
Kennedy considered the Bay of Pigs “debacle”, as he called it, to be his defining moment as President and it led him to push for peace between the US and the Soviets. He averted conflict during the Cuban Missile Crisis, also against the advice of military and intelligence leaders. In October of 1963, John Kennedy ordered that all 1,000 advisors in the war torn country of Vietnam be withdrawn. That order would never be followed.
From four months into his Presidency, Kennedy fought against the “Military Industrial Complex”. His stated plan to deal with the USSR was through sustained, incremental, mutual disarmament. There were those in our government who not only saw that as naive, but dangerous… perhaps even suicidal.
Did some of them get together and hatch a plan to change Presidents to someone who could be more easily controlled? There is no direct evidence for that, but there is this:
Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama… They all did exactly what they were told by the CIA. Each of them expanded the CIA’s powers. Not one pushed back. In one taped conversation in the Oval Office, when asked about crossing the intel community, Richard Nixon said he would not go against the CIA because he “knows who shot John”.
That remained true until Donald Trump came along and started floating ideas like getting out of NATO and ending foreign wars. The Deep State didn’t assassinate Donald Trump, but as has been shown in the recently released Durham Report, they took part in shocking abuses against him. They hamstrung his Presidency. If Trump had been a better man, not so easily distracted, discredited, and manipulated, perhaps they simply would have killed him.
Conclusion:
Dear readers, I suggest that I have presented more than enough circumstantial evidence to show that the CIA might very well have kill John F. Kennedy. We don’t know who in the agency ordered the operation or how far up the conspiracy went. We don’t know how many people might have been involved, but I believe we can conclude that the official story of the assassination simply doesn’t hold water. In my beloved Appalachian parlance, that dog don’t hunt.
We have shown that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for the CIA and that the CIA hid that fact. We have shown that they conspired to create a myth about Oswald and his desire to defect to Cuba by faking the trip to Mexico City. We have shown that Kennedy and the CIA despised each other and that the Deep State had worked to undermine his authority, starting with the Bay of Pigs only a few months into his Presidency. We have shown that the Deep State, in 1963 much like today, will destroy a President for their own purposes.
There is still so much we don’t know about the plan. How much did Oswald know? Surely he wasn’t aware that he was being set up as the fall guy. Were there other shooters? Who were they?
We may never know all the answers, but we’ll keep looking! Stay tuned!
For whatever it’s worth, Allen Dulles served on the Warren Commission and helped write the report that concluded there was no conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.
Part 6 is coming soon!
In the final part of our series we will look at the possibility of multiple shooters and bring the totality of the evidence together and I’ll tell you what I think happened on November 22, 1963.
Thanks very much for reading! Question everything, especially me!
God bless all of you,
—Virgil
Post Script:
Remember George de Mohrenshildt? He was the CIA field agent who was apparently Oswald’s only friend in Dallas. Well, on March 16, 1977 he was approached by an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He was passed a business card and asked to schedule a meeting. That afternoon George de Mohrenshildt, the American spy… the man who bounced a young Jackie Bouvier (who became Jackie Kennedy) on his knee… supposedly stuck a shotgun in his own mouth and committed suicide. Huh… I wonder why he did that.
—V
Really enjoying this series.
Got to reread 1 - 4 before I make irrelevant comments.