Conspiracy Theories Part 3

      Parts 1 and 2 of this series on conspiracy theories should not be taken to suggest that I don't think the CIA was/is hiding something related to John Kennedy's assassination. I just don't think it was or is hiding something about its involvement. My book Murder, Inc. says it was hiding its plot to kill Fidel Castro. 

      The first clue that the CIA was hiding something about that plot is the CIA Inspector General's (IG) Report of 1967. Apparently, Lyndon Johnson ordered CIA Director Richard Helms to give him a report after LBJ heard Johnny Roselli's lawyer, Ed Morgan, was claiming Castro killed Kennedy in retaliation for CIA plot(s) against him. But the lengthy IG Report only contains one sentence about Kennedy's assassination, remarking on the "coincidence" that the CIA was meeting with Rolando Cubela about killing Castro at the very moment Kennedy was assassinated. Given that the report was seemingly written in response to Ed Morgan's claims, this is very strange. Even stranger is the fact that, according to the report, Helms ordered the IG to destroy all notes from the investigation and all copies of the report. This is a classic way to cover something up, but we don't know what that was because all the backup material was destroyed. Perhaps most significant, at least to me, is the fact that the report does not mention Richard Helms's meeting with President Kennedy about Cuba on November 19, 1963. That is the same day that Nestor Sanchez's memo, which was made public, says he got authority to give Cubela "sniper rifles." 

      Murder, Inc. details many other instances where documents are missing or investigatory leads were not followed, so I won't detail those here. However, I do want to make it clear that I did not think Nestor Sanchez, the CIA case officer who was meeting with Cubela when Kennedy was killed, was forthcoming in my interview of him in 1976. I remember he seemed uncomfortable during the interview. He seemed trying to guess where my questions were leading. I felt, and still feel, that his answers to my questions about what happened to the poison pen were evasive. You don't offer someone a James Bond-like assassination device and then not remember what happened to it. The interview was twelve years after the fact, but almost everyone would remember such a dramatic meeting. I was sure the IG talked to him in preparing the 1967 Report, and I'm sure he was debriefed immediately afterwards. But there are no documents. 

      I was not a rookie lawyer when I conducted that interview. I had been in Army counterintelligence for two years, six months of which were spent in being trained in how to conduct such investigations. I pressed on the poison pen because it was a tremendously compromising device if it fell into the hands of Cuban intelligence. CIA agents simply are not as casual about such items as Sanchez was in his testimony.

      It may be asked, of course, why would the CIA still be hiding this today.  The first answer is: Because it doesn't know what happened. Nothing incriminating was written down, or if it was, the documents were destroyed in 1963 or 1964.  There would have been documents relating to the manufacture of the supposed poison pen and custodial records about it being given to Sanchez. The CIA was not casual about such things. What if Sanchez had given the pen to Cubela, and the operation had been discovered by the Cubans? The CIA would want records and photographs of the device. It would want a sworn statement from Sanchez if he had, as he hinted in the interview, thrown it away after the meeting.

      The second answer, which I give in the book, is that the United States government did not want the Warren Commission to find a foreign conspiracy. Such a finding might well have set off World War III, with the United States invading Cuba and the Soviet Union coming to its defense. Within 45 minutes of Oswald's murder on November 24, 1963, FBI Director Hoover warned the White House's Walter Jenkins that public disclosure of foreign involvement should be avoided. Hoover knew at the time that the CIA had a plot to assassinate Castro. The same general sentiment was expressed later by a letter Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wrote to Bill Moyers at the White House. JMWAVE chief Ted Shackley testified that he assumed someone (at the CIA) would have investigated the relationship between the Cubela operation and JFK's assassination, but there are no documents from such an investigation. This seems like the kind of secret the CIA would still keep from the public today. 

Conspiracy Theories Part 2

    The second problem with those conspiracy theories that say the CIA was involved is that they never give a plausible reason for this. The CIA isn't a human being. It is a collection of individuals. It doesn't get mad. It doesn't hold grudges. Government agencies do have a bizarre tendency for self-preservation, but John Kennedy was the CIA's best friend in the 1960s. The CIA's director, John McCone, was close personally to Robert and Ethel Kennedy while lower level employees never had it so good. In the 1960s, the CIA under John Kennedy was probably the most admired agency of government. And while it is true that many anti-Castro Cubans were still angry over the Bay of Pigs, as Murder, Inc. shows, the AMLASH operation was one of the ways Kennedy was trying to demonstrate to the Cubans that he was doing something to get rid of Castro. Indeed, Robert Kennedy may have been leaking the plot to his anti-Castro friends for this very reason.

    Moreover in point of fact, I can't think of any occasion where a government agency of any kind or a conspiracy of individuals within an agency ever directed violence against political leaders.  The FBI could play tough with politicians and others with programs like COINTELPRO, but it never resorted to violence. Indeed, one of my assignments for the Church Committee was to fly around interviewing victims of COINTELPRO. When I described to the victims what the FBI had done to them, every one of them found the FBI's action laughable. An elected judge, for example, said the FBI's accusing him of being a Communist in a mailing to voters would have helped him win the election because the voters in his district had communist leanings.

    So in the various conspiracy theories that claim CIA involvement in the assassination, I've never found a plausible explanation of exactly who in the CIA was involved, how they would escape detection in an agency that prided itself on policing its own, why they wanted Kennedy assassinated, or how they avoided the FBI, Warren Commission, and later investigator discovering what they did.

    It would be very hard to go rogue in the CIA during the Cold War since it was very, very vigilant to penetration by the KGB and had a host of controls on employees.  

    The final trouble with most CIA conspiracy theories is that it makes no sense that the CIA would continue to hide such a conspiracy that happened more than sixty years go. That is, if the CIA did have evidence of a conspiracy in 1963, why would it still be resisting the disclosure, as most such theorists claim? The CIA isn't a human being. It doesn't get embarrassed. In 1976, it was relatively open with the Church Committee about its past misdeeds. It generally recognized that the United States is a democracy and that congressional oversight is part and parcel of that although it was perhaps more open with the president that with congress. 

Conspiracy Theories Part 1

     I usually try to avoid throwing cold water on conspiracy theories about the assassination because it probably does no good. But as a staff lawyer in a major, adversarial investigation of the CIA, the Church Committee, I feel I should address those theories that say the CIA was involved. It wasn't. Plus, I figure that this posting will certainly prompt rebuttals. 

     Theories about CIA involvement, such as Jim Garrison's, commonly say that a small group of low-level people in the CIA were involved although some theories claim a cover-up by more senior CIA officials. 

      There is no credible evidence of either such involvement by the CIA despite four outside investigations. First was the Warren Commission. Those who say there was a conspiracy and cover up have to explain why the Warren Commission didn't uncover it. After all, the FBI, not the CIA, did the bulk of the investigation.

      Second was the Rockefeller Commission in 1975. David Belin was its chief counsel and he had been a staff lawyer on the Warren Commission. He in fact was very interested in whether the CIA might have withheld information from the Warren Commission, but he found nothing.

       Third was the Church Committee. As has been documented in books by Loch Johnson and James Risen, the Church Committee staff consisted both of adversarial lawyers and CIA-friendly academics. Even lawyers in an adversarial role, like I was, had plenty of contact and were cordial with senior CIA officers. We talked with them both on the record and in casual conversations. I found James Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence in 1963 and point man for CIA contact with the Warren Commission, quite forthcoming in private. Ted Shackley, who ran JMWAVE, struck me as especially forthcoming among the CIA officers. Then there was Seymour Bolton who had been executive officer for Desmond FitzGerald. He was CIA liaison to the Church Committee. He wasn't forthcoming, but I never felt he lied. I felt the same way about Harold Swenson, who headed counterintelligence against Cuba under Desmond FitzGerald. He wasn't forthcoming , but he seemed to answer questions truthfully. 

       What do I conclude from this? None of these individuals knew of a conspiracy within the CIA, and it was certainly their responsibility to know. Granted, it might be possible to hide things from them, but the CIA had very good controls to prevent employees from going rogue. The short of it is that although the Church Committee's adversarial lawyers and CIA-friendly academics spent a year in close contact with those who had been at the CIA in 1963, the Church Committee never got so much as a whiff of high or low level CIA involvement in John Kennedy's assassination. 

      Fourth and last was the House Assassinations Committee under Congressman Pike and later Congressman Stokes. My sense is that the House committee's staff did not enjoy such close contacts with 1963 CIA personnel as the Church Committee staff did, but regardless the committee did not claim to find CIA involvement.

          

        

      

James Bond vs. Lee Harvey Oswald

 

This comment to the Washington Post article repeats a mistake many people make in thinking about spies, particularly assassins: “Lee Harvey was not the kind of guy I’d want on my conspiracy team.” I made the same mistake in the early stages of the Church Committee investigation. Troubled by the fact Oswald had met a KGB officer in Mexico City who was in Department 13 of the KGB, the section that dealt with assassination and sabotage, I arranged a briefing by a witness who was an expert on the KGB. Skeptical of claims of a conspiracy, I asked the witness the leading question: “Lee Harvey Oswald was hardly the type of person the KGB would pick as an assassin?” To which the witness immediately answered: “He was precisely the kind of man they would choose." Assassinations are usually suicide missions, which sane men won’t undertake. Experience in World War II led the KGB to look for misfits and others that could be manipulated into taking such missions.

This is the difference between the real world of espionage and assassination and the highly romanticized world of James Bond and other fictional spies. True, there are men who sell their killing skills for money, but they are few.  This is the subject of Chapter 8 of Murder, Inc. in which I compare the Soviet’s General Sudoplatov’s advice about what to look for in an assassin, someone with an inferiority complex who thinks assassinating an important figure will make him superior to others, with the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald sought for himself “a role as the ‘great man.’”

This is also the reason I included so much of the spy craft of the AMLASH operation in the book. I wanted to show that the CIA’s approach was not so different. After the case officer had met with Rolando Cubela (AMLASH) in Brazil on September 7, 1963, he cabled headquarters, complaining that Cubela was a “spoiled brat” and a control problem. He had no interest in learning the details of good spy work. Desmond FitzGerald at headquarters cabled back the admonition that Cubela was a “bird in the hand.” Being an armchair critic is different from being a government official charged with carrying out an order. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said to critics about being unprepared for the invasion of Iraq: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Finally, to those who think the underworld was involved in Kennedy’s death, I point to the CIA’s experience with using the underworld to assassinate Fidel Castro. It discovered that the underworld’s hit men could not be used to machine gun Fidel Castro on the streets of Havana because that would be a suicide mission. The underworld might employ goons, but they were rational men who wanted a reasonable chance to escape alive. As a result, the CIA had to supply the underworld with various poisons to put in Castro’s food or drink, giving the assassin time to escape before the victim showed symptoms.

Washington Post Article and Memory

          David Ignatius wrote this article for the Washington Post about the assassination based on Murder, Inc., and things I told him. You need to be a subscriber to the Post to read it though. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/28/jfk-assassination-file-release-cuba-mexico-oswald/

      Many of the comments to the online article ask good questions. And so I want to answer some in a series of entries for this blog. I'll start by answering how I possibly could remember after fifty years seeing a document at the CIA that said the Mexican government had concluded Cuba was involved in President Kennedy's assassination.

      In 1975, Senator Frank Church persuaded the Senate to create a special committee to investigate abuses by the intelligence agencies uncovered in the Watergate investigation, with Church chairing the committee. Senators Schweiker and Hart formed a subcommittee on John Kennedy's assassination, asking among other things whether the agencies, principally the FBI and CIA, had adequately investigated the assassination in support of the Warren Commission. It became clear they had not. FBI Director Hoover had quietly censured a number of agents for failure to aggressively investigate Oswald before the assassination. One agent had secretly destroyed a threatening note Oswald sent the FBI only weeks before the assassination.

       The Church Committee had already discovered that the CIA had been trying to assassinate Fidel Castro since 1960 and that one such operation in the fall of 1963 led to the CIA meeting with a high-level Cuban in Paris at the very moment Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963. It offered him a poison pen with which to kill Castro, promised assassination rifles would be smuggled into Cuba for him, and assured him that John Kennedy personally knew about the operation. The CIA told the Warren Commission none of this. Moreover, the CIA knew that Castro seemed aware of the operation and threatened to kill Kennedy if it continued. The operation had continued.

       However, the political winds from Watergate shifted against the Church Committee in December 1975, and it began wrapping up.  The staff was told to write final reports and not to continue investigating. The staff on the JFK assassination subcommittee was allowed to interview witnesses, but we were also writing our report. The fall 1963 assassination operation was an important part of that since neither the Warren Commission nor the CIA officers working with the commission had known about it. It gave Castro a motive to retaliate or at least to show Kennedy that two could play the assassination game. In addition, we had CIA documents saying that in March 1964 the Mexican government identified a man who allegedly was "involved in the assassination" and who had fled to Cuba. So the possibility that Kennedy's murder was in response to the CIA operation and that the Mexican government had evidence not given to the Warren Commission (the CIA had not shared the March 1964 report with the commission) was very much on my mind.

       In the midst of all this, in late March or early April 1976, the CIA informed me that it had a document I should see. This notice came out of the blue. It was not in response to anything we had asked. We were wrapping up our investigation. The CIA said I would have to drive out to headquarters to see the document. This was the only time in my experience that the CIA would not furnish us copies of documents. So I felt that this document had to be very sensitive. It was my first and only trip to the headquarters.

After checking in, I was directed to a large, working office. There were a number of desks, stacked with papers, but the only person there was a middle-aged man who asked if he could help me. (I met him a few weeks later and learned he was Tom Karramessiness).  I said I didn’t want to bother him; I was just there to review a document and would wait until a secretary got back. He said everyone was at lunch and besides he was the only one cleared to show it to me. He pulled a thin folder out of a safe, had me sign the access slip (David Ignatius's article calls it a "vetting slip"), and then ushered me into a small room. He gave me a pencil and some blank sheets of paper and said he would review my notes before I left. As Ignatius writes, the document said the Mexican government investigated the assassination and concluded Cuba was involved. It went on to describe the source of this information. I will not disclose that. 

     The obvious question I had was what had the CIA done to investigate this. I didn't need to take notes on one or two sentences. This confirmed what we, the Church Committee staff was saying in our draft report. However, the document standing alone didn't prove anything. The source was credible but even if the Mexican government had reached such a conclusion, that didn't mean it was true. I spent only a few minutes in the room. When I walked out, I asked the custodian if he had read the document. He said no, he didn't have the “need to know.” He then pointed to the vetting slip and warned that I was only the sixth person to read it and "If this shows up in the Washington Post, we'll have a pretty good idea who leaked it." Threats like that tend to reinforce one's memory. I also have a clear visual memory of where I was at the moment I heard John Kennedy had been shot and where I was when I heard a commercial airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center. Moreover, I felt like the CIA had volunteered this document for fear it might be criticized later if it did not let the Church Committee know about it.

       I told Senators Schweiker and Hart the gist of the document, but not the source. I was sure the CIA would bring the document to them and not make them drive to Langley. A permanent intelligence committee had been announced, and since Senator Hart was on it, he could pursue the matter if he was interested. If he did, there is no record of it in the released JFK files.

       Of course, by this time the House had created its own committee to investigate the assassination, so later in the year, I met with its staff to discuss the Church Committee's investigation. I did not tell them about this specific document, but I did point out that the intelligence agencies of other countries had probably investigated the Kennedy assassination and the House committee should try to get reports from foreign intelligence services. Nothing suggests the committee made such an attempt.

      But the document, and the other things I had discovered, haunted me, and I continued to follow the Kennedy assassination and research it. In 1989, David Ignatius published my OpEd "Did Cuba Murder JFK" in the Post's Outlook Section. In 1992, I appeared on the Today Show to discuss the assassination, and I testified before a House committee in support of legislation to open the so-called "secret files." After the legislation was passed, I met with staff of the Assassination Records Review Board. I believe this is why the ARRB declared CIA files on its assassination operations should be turned over to the National Archives and made public. I also suggested the ARRB obtain records from foreign governments. As I recall, it did ask the Mexican government, but none were turned over. Russian President Boris Yeltsin gave President Bill Clinton copies of the Soviet Union's files on Oswald and the assassination. But these did not include KGB files. 

      After following the assassination for so many years and with the release of the secret files, I wrote Murder, Inc. By 2022, it was clear that the document I had seen back in 1976 would probably never be released. So, as a private citizen, I asked the Mexican National Archives for its government’s files on the assassination. I eventually received those, and they are discussed in earlier entries in this blog. They are heavily sanitized and redacted. Although there are hints that the Mexican government did pursue leads pointing to Cuba, there is nothing as clear and direct as the document I saw in 1976. I finally decided to go public with what I knew after reading the president's January 2025 Executive Order that all information related to Kennedy's assassination was declassified and should be made public.

YouTube lecture

      To get a short, video version of the book, you may want to watch this video lecture of mine that was recorded at the Asbury Methodist Village in 2024. They kindly gave me a copy to post on YouTube. There was a question and answer period, but it is not included. It is about 45 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm32VzYL-gU

John McCone's Memoranda of Meetings with President Johnson Immediately After Assassination Part 2

      In this second part, I want to comment on the McCone MFRs as a whole. The first thing that stands out is how trivial some of the discussions are. The CIA had provided John Kennedy a daily "checklist." This was like a one-page, daily newspaper of events in the intelligence world. In hindsight, it seems silly, a James Bond token of the Cold War. Why did the president need such details? One answer was that it allowed the CIA to justify all the money spent on it. The checklist made the president aware of the CIA's existence. But the released documensts disclose that on November 23, Lyndon Johnson told McCone he wanted personal briefings. Maybe LBJ didn't like to read, or, more probably, he wanted a chance to take a measure of the man running the CIA.

       In the first meeting on November 23, LBJ focuses on Vietnam and he does this again at the November 25 meeting. Johnson hints at his dislike of the Kennedys in his remark that JFK had "encouraged" the November 1 coup in the country that had resulted in Diem's murder whereas LBJ was "unhappy" about the then-pending coup. His unfavorable view of Robert Kennedy is suggested in the memo of November 25-26 where he says the Department of Justice is pushing for an independent investigation of the JFK assassination, but he, Johnson, exhibited "considerable contempt" for that. No good explanation has ever been advanced as to why LBJ was so opposed to a Warren Commission, this memo say that when he heard that the Washington Post ws going to publish an editorial calling for an independent investigation, LBJ called publisher Katherine Graham and had it "killed."  

       John McCone was close to Robert Kennedy, so it is interesting to read that on December 2 LBJ sounded McCone out on whether Kennedy was going to stay at Justice. In a classic case of giving the highest classification to political rather than national security matters, McCone classified this December 2 memo, which deals with personnel matters, Top Secret EYES ONLY. On the other hand, McCone doesn't put that classification on his December 6 memo even though he uses "unconscionable" and "trickery" to describe his opinion of the Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge.  Nor does he give such a high classifications to his December 13 memo, where he advises LBJ on how to deal with Robert Kennedy.

       But it is with regard to Cuba that the reader sees the greatest difference between LBJ and JFK. While LBJ and McCone use the word "invasion" in their discussions of Cuba, Johnson clearly doesn't see Cuba as important as JFK did. Kennedy was communicating with the CIA on almost a daily basis in the last week of his life whereas it comes up only two or three times in McCone's discussion with Johnson.

       Kennedy pressured the CIA to find hard evidence that Castro was exporting the revolution to Latin America, and on November 19, Helms rushed to the White House with "hard evidence" of a weapons cache in Venezuela. Yet LBJ seems to see it as no more important than a steel mill in Romania. Johnson is interested in Venezuela but mainly because four Americans, including Colonel Channault, were being held hostage by some Communists there. (He was freed without harm).

       Finally, the most striking thing is that although the specious Gilberto Alvarado allegations, that Oswald was seen conspiring with the Cubans, were talked about, McCone never brought to LBJ's attention that the CIA had received far more serious and credible allegations about Gilberto Lopez on December 5. 

John McCone's Memoranda of Meetings with President Johnson Immediately After Assassination Part 1

      To my great surprise, buried in the final, 2025 release of JFK Assassination document is CIA Director John McCone's Memorandum for the Record of his meeting with Lyndon Johnson on November 28, 1963. It is at pages 18-20 of NARA No. 104-10306-10018. There is no cover sheet, as is true with all the 2025 releases. The memo is included along with a number of other of McCone's MFRs of his meetings with the president immediately after the assassination. Only paragraph 2 of the memorandum dealing with Cuba had been made public before now. McCone recorded the President didn't want a repeition of the 1961 fiasco, meaning the Bay of Pigs. That was an invasion of Cuba by CIA-supported Cuban exiles.  Still, "he felt that the Cuban situation was one we could not live with and we had to evolve more agressive policies."

     As I wrote in Murder, Inc., at this time, the CIA was working on the codenamed AMLASH plot to overthrow Castro in a coup led by Rolando Cubela. The CIA was meeting with him in Paris at the very moment John Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Kennedy had ruled out an invasion of Cuba by the U.S. military after he got the Soviets to withdraw their ballastic missiles from the island during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He had let it be known privately that this no-invasion policy was conditioned on Fidel Castro's behaving himself, meaning he would not try to aid Communist revolutions to other Latin American countries. (I don't know if this no-invasion policy was communicated to the Soviets , but it seems likey that Kennedy would have had it communicated because it was face-saving for Nikita Khrushchev who was the one that had backed down to resolve the crisis).

      On November 19, 1963, three days before the assassination, Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms had an urgent meeting first with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and then the President to show them an automatic rifle found in a large cache of weapons found on the coast of Venezuela to be used by Communist rebels there in overthrowing, or at least destabilizing the government. This was the "hard evidence" of Castro's exporting the revolution that Kennedy had asked the CIA to find at previous meetings. 

      While we don't know what the President said to Helms at that November 19 meeting after the hard proof was put before him, we do know from CIA internal memos that this was the same day the CIA case officer managing Cubela was told that the CIA would give him the assassination weapons he had been asking the CIA for since September for the purpose of killing Castro as the first step in the coup.  The CIA called Cubela the day after Helms's meeting with the President to arrange the November 22 meeting with him. The case officer testified that Cubela would assume from the phone call that the CIA was prepared to give him assassination weapons. There is at least some evidence suggesting that Cubela had been told U.S. troops might invade Cuba to prevent his attempted coup from failing.

      Thus, what McCone says in the memo is hard to reconcile with the facts. Did Johnson not know about the Cubela plot? He said he wanted a more agressive policy. It's hard to imagine anything more agressive than a plot for assassination of the leadership in Cuba, a coup, and a possible invasion. Why didn't McCone tell him?

       In any event, as related in my book, in less than a month, Johnson views had changed completely. He backed off from wanting a more agressive approach. Instead, he began ordering the CIA to dismantle all covert operations against Cuba. That was accomplished by June 1964.

There is nothing important left to disclose in the JFK collection at the National Archives

    Matt Chorley of BBC radio broadcast this interview with me on March 7.  Record of program.  Computer-generated transcript.

   I had this interview in Politico on the still-classified JFK files at the National Archives. I cannot imagine there is anything important in these documents. For one thing, the CIA in 2017 wrote that no CIA documents were then withheld in their entirety. This means, the gist of all CIA documents is public. The same CIA letter explains the criteria for any redactions in documents. It hardly seems that anything earthshaking is in those redactions. I point out that if the CIA or any other agency didn't want the public to see a document, it would not have turned it over to the National Archives. 

      

How times have changed

      In 1975, Senator Frank Church led the Senate Intelligence Committee in condemning political assassinations. It would be a crime for an American citizen to do it if Church had his way. President Gerald Ford doused the political fire around it by issuing an executive order telling government employees not to do it, but Church succeeded in establishing the principle that assassination was in the least immoral.

      My how times have changed. The Russian leadership has never been bothered by such niceties. Stalin started the Soviets down that path by having Leon Trotsky assassinated.  During World War II the Soviet Union's KGB formed Department 13 to specialize in assassination and sabotage. The department terrorized the Germans as their armies invaded the Soviet Union. For a time, Department 13 was far more successful than the Red Army in worrying German commanders. Department 13's activities were scaled back but not extinguished during the Cold War, and as evidenced by the recent prisoner exchange with the United States, Russian intelligence still employs assassination agents.

      But the Russians today are not alone.  Israel's government has regularly been resorting to assassination to eliminate its adversaries' leadership. And in complete defiance of President Ford's executive order, Donald Trump not only ordered  Iran's Qasem Soleimani to be killed in a drone strike, Trump publicly bragged about it and took credit for it.

      So where does that leave us? Is assassination a crime; is it murder; is it moral? Or is it now an accepted instrument of a nation's policy? 

      In an earlier post on this blog in August 2020, I pointed out that at the time of Frank Church's investigation, various CIA officers claimed that they had always opposed assassination, not for some goody-two-shoes reason like morality, but rather from what I called the Golden Rule of Assassination. If you do it to them, they'll do it to  you. In the wake of the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the Secret Service went public with the claim that it had reason to believe Iran was trying to assassinate the former president. My August 2020 blog post warned that this might happen. 

      Surprisingly, there has been virtually no discussion of this in the media after the current wave of assassinations and attempts. 

It depends on the narrative

      Press coverage of the claims of former Secret Service agent Paul Landis is an example of how the media, well shoot the public too, forms narratives in its head and fits news items into that narrative.  In this case, the so-called single bullet theory is that narrative, but it could just as easily have been the "grassy knoll theory" on any of a dozen others. The essence of Landis's claim is that he found a bullet, presumably a spent one, in the seat where Kennedy had been shot in the presidential limousine. He then placed it on the stretcher with Kennedy before he was wheeled into the hospital.

      But because the narrative of Murder, Inc. is about the failures of American intelligence agencies, I fit the incident into that.  The CIA was trying to kill Castro, a fact it hid from the Warren Commission.  The FBI was derelict in arresting Oswald even though he had threated to blow up the FBI office in Dallas. The FBI in Dallas covered that up, and Hoover hid the fact he censured multiple FBI agents for failures. 

     And what about the vaunted Secret Service? It is well to remember that the agents in Kennedy's motorcade in Dallas had been up drinking until the wee hours of the morning of November 22, 1963.  They had worked long into the night of November 21 and gone without food. Most went to the Press Club in Fort Worth to get something to eat, but its food service had stopped for the day. They had some drinks there and then wandered down the street to the Cellar.  There are various accounts of what they did.  CBS reporter Bob Schieffer was there.  This is from the Dallas News.  The Warren Commission took testimony and affidavits from the Secret Service about the incident. The Service attempted to gloss over the matter by saying the agents were told they could get something to eat at the Cellar.  It was described as a beatnik coffee house that didn't serve alcohol.  But a Google search will turn up other reports that the waitresses wore only underwear, and Schieffer said liquor was available to "friends." Landis signed an affidavit for the Warren Commission saying he had two "Salty Dicks" whatever those were.

      Landis's current claim raises further questions about the Secret Service's professionalism. The Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department.  In addition to executive protection, it performs law enforcement duties in cases such as counterfeiting. So in theory at least, Landis was a law enforcement officer.  He was an eyewitness to murder; he found a bullet that must have been used in the crime; and, what does he do?  He removes it from the scene and puts it on a stretcher for the doctors to find.  He doesn't secure it.  He doesn't turn it over to the police. He doesn't even tell his superiors. To make matters worse, Landis was standing on the running board of the car behind the presidential limousine and said he only heard two shots, not the three the Warren Commission said were fired.  But if the bullet Landis allegedly found isn't the so-called magic bullet, there must have been four shots.  

      This new revelation fits much better into the narrative of widespread failure across the security agencies of the United States with respect to the assassination and a failure by the Warren Commission to get at some basic facts. I can't find any commission testimony from Landis.  Imagine how different the Warren Report might have been, and how different our mental narrative of the assassination would be, if Landis had been called as a witness in 1964 and testified to finding what could only have been a fourth bullet. Of course, maybe that was not his memory then.

The single bullet theory v. Secret Service agent Paul Landis's new claim

      Paul Landis, a Secret Service agent with the President in Dallas, is making news with the claim that he found a spent bullet in the backseat of Kennedy's car at Parkland Hospital.  He picked up the bullet and left it on Kennedy's stretcher in the hospital thinking it would be found. Speculation immediately started that this disproves the single-bullet theory (that a single bullet entered the back of Kennedy's neck, exited the front of his throat, hit Governor John Connally of Texas, who was on a jump seat in front of Kennedy, in his back, exited his chest, and lodged in his forearm). This bullet was found on Connally's stretcher at the hospital. It was assumed the bullet fell out of Connally's arm when he was taken off the stretcher.

    Precisely how Landis's recollection disproves the single-bullet theory isn't clear.  Landis is 85 years old, and his coming forward with this claim after so many investigations and so many years seems unusual. Besides, no bullet was found on Kennedy's stretcher. But giving Landis the benefit of the doubt, his claim is easily reconcilable with the Warren Report. Beginning on Page 52, of the Report, the commission detailed what happened once the presidential limousine arrived at the hospital.  Kennedy was taken out of the car first. Connally, who was cradled in the arms of his wife, seated in the jump seat in front of Jackie Kennedy, stood up so the Secret Service could remove Kennedy from the car.  Only then did he realize how seriously he himself had been injured. If there were a bullet lodged in his forearm, it might have fallen out in the back seat of the car at this time. Maybe this was the bullet Landis found, and maybe instead of leaving it on Kennedy's stretcher, he put it on Connally's.  Kennedy was immediately taken into surgery.  Unless Landis were among those helping remove Kennedy from the limo, there was no way for him to put it on the stretcher.  The bullet was found on Connally's stretcher after he had been taken off and put on the operating table.

      It is worth noting what the Warren Commission said about what happened when the presidential limo arrived at the hospital.  This is from Exhibit 1026, Volume XVIII, p. 811

The lighter side of redactions

      In 1963, the CIA wanted to bug a safehouse in the Maryland suburbs that it was renting.  Several Cuban exiles were coming to Washington to meet with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and the CIA would put them up in the house. Without apparently being asked by Kennedy, the CIA decided to wire the house and eavesdrop on the exiles' conversations. Perhaps it felt it would curry favor with Kennedy if it could tell him the exiles' plans and reactions to their meetings with him. The wiring would cost a rather considerable amount in 1963, $2,800.  The CIA cleared it with the owner.  He was an audiophile and seemed to like the idea.  But in the 2023 releases, the CIA still redacted the address of the house from the document.   There is obviously no threat to national security in releasing the address -- unless of course the CIA has been using this house for the past 60 years. But one can't help but imagine how pleased the current owner would be if, when guests came over, he could say:  "You know this was a CIA safehouse in 1963. It spent $2,800 wiring it to eavesdrop on some Cuban exiles."  Who knows, maybe a few wires can still be found in the attic. He would have one heck of a story, and it might add $2,800 to the value of his house even without the wires.

     Of course, the redaction is rather silly. I turned to the Internet and within two minutes not only found the address, but also a picture of the house and a biography of the former owner. 

Jim Garrison and the CIA's games with the ARRB and Warren Commission

     I would be just about the last person to give any credit to the claim and prosecution by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison that the CIA was behind President Kennedy's murder.  But he may have had a point about the CIA's presence in New Orleans when Lee Harvey Oswald lived there.

     This comes from the CIA's apparently playing games with the Warren Commission in not telling it that the CIA had a sizable presence in New Orleans.  The CIA played games with the Assassination Records Review Board by redacting information from a document that a lawyer in Washington gave the House Assassinations Committee. The JFK Act did not give the CIA authority to make such a redaction. The fact that a redaction was made suggests the information was true. 

      The redacted information was that CIA had 50 employees in its New Orleans office in what was then called the "Masonic Temple" building, only blocks from where Oswald handed our pro-Cuba leaflets and got into a fight with anti-Castro groups. This doesn't suggest a CIA connection with Oswald, but the CIA was playing games with the Warren Commission.  It may have had more employees in New Orleans than the FBI did and, therefore, had a greater ability to investigate Oswald's fight with the anti-Castro Cubans than the FBI did. In the very least, it was incumbent on the CIA in 1964 to tell the Warren Commission of its capabilities in New Orleans, yet there is absolutely no evidence it did.

      All this comes from a memorandum written by Washington lawyer and assassination buff, Bernard Fensterwald, of a 1975 conversation he had with George Gaudet, who claimed to have worked for the CIA.  Most of the claims seem exaggerated or unfounded.  In fact, it could be said that all of those claims are unfounded, except that some agency, presumably the CIA,  redacted two of them when the document was first released. These two facts, in the third and fourth paragraphs on the second page of the memorandum, were that the CIA had 50 employees in New Orleans and that its offices were in the Masonic Temple building.  We know this because these redactions were removed in the Archives' 2023 release of the same document.

     The Masonic Temple building was at 333 St. Charles Street.  Oswald handed out literature in August 1963 on Canal Street a few blocks away.  He was arrested there after getting into a fight with anti-Castro Cubans.

     The bottom line is that the CIA played games with two government agencies. First, it hid from the Warren Commission the fact that Oswald's confrontation with anti-Castro Cubans happened only a few blocks away from its New Orleans office with 50 employees. Had the commission known, it might have asked if any of the employees witnessed the fight or Oswald's actions. It also might have asked the CIA to investigate. Second, the CIA played games with the ARRB by redacting information from a document that it didn't originate.  Nothing in the JFK Act permitted that.

KGB public assassinations

         Was Yevgeny Prigozhin's very public death an assassination, when a plane carrying him exploded and fell from the sky?  In Murder, Inc., I wrote how the former Russian security service, the KGB, used public assassinations.  I pointed out on page 98 that typically the KGB's Department 13, which specialized in assassination and sabotage, would not want the assassination to be traced back to it.  However, "Sometimes, an intelligence service may want its adversary to know who was responsible in order to send a message.  In the book KGB, John Barron described the assassination of a journalist in Afghanistan during the Soviet war there: 'The assassination was deliberately crude.  Its intent was not only to eliminate an effective Soviet adversary but also to terrorize potential adversaries into silence.  The assassins also left behind discernible Soviet traces.  Witnesses testified that the men arrived in a Soviet jeep.'"