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.