American Pravda: the JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?
A
strong dam may hold back an immense quantity of water, but once it
breaks the resulting flood may sweep aside everything in its path. I
had spent nearly my entire life never doubting that a lone gunman named
Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy nor that a different
lone gunman took the life of his younger brother Robert a few years
later. Once I came to accept
that these were merely fairy tales widely disbelieved by many of the
same political elites who publicly maintained them, I began considering
other aspects of this important history, the most obvious being who was
behind the conspiracy and what were their motives.
On
these questions, the passage of a half-century and the deaths, natural
or otherwise, of nearly all the contemporary witnesses drastically
reduces any hope of coming to a firm conclusion. At best, we can
evaluate possibilities and plausibilities rather than high likelihoods
let alone near certainties. And given the total absence of any hard
evidence, our exploration of the origins of the assassination must
necessarily rely upon cautious speculation.
From
such a considerable distance in time, a bird’s-eye view may be a
reasonable starting point, allowing us to focus on the few elements of
the apparent conspiracy that seem reasonably well established. The most
basic of these is the background of the individuals who appear to have
been associated with the assassination, and the recent books by David
Talbot and James W. Douglass effectively summarize much of the evidence
accumulated over the decades by an army of diligent assassination
researchers. Most of the apparent conspirators seem to have had strong
ties to organized crime, the CIA, or various anti-Castro activist
groups, with considerable overlap across these categories. Oswald
himself certainly fit this same profile although he was very likely the
mere “patsy” that he claimed to be, as did Jack Ruby, the man who
quickly silenced him and whose ties to the criminal underworld were long
and extensive.
An
unusual chain of events provided some of the strongest evidence of CIA
involvement. Victor Marchetti, a career CIA officer, had risen to
become Special Assistant to the Deputy Director, a position of some
importance, before resigning in 1969 over policy differences. Although
he fought a long battle with government censors over his book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, he retained close ties with many former agency colleagues.
During
the 1970s, the revelations of the Senate Church Committee and the House
Select Committee on Assassinations had subjected the CIA to a great
deal of negative public scrutiny, and there were growing suspicions of
possible CIA links to JFK’s assassination. In 1978 longtime CIA
Counter-intelligence chief James Angleton and a colleague provided
Marchetti with an explosive leak, stating that the agency might be
planning to admit a connection to the assassination, which had involved
three shooters, but place the blame upon E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA
officer who had become notorious during Watergate, and scapegoat him as a
rogue agent, along with a few other equally tarnished colleagues.
Marchetti published the resulting story in The Spotlight, a
weekly national tabloid newspaper operated by Liberty Lobby, a rightwing
populist organization based in DC. Although almost totally shunned by
the mainstream media, The Spotlight was then at the peak of its influence, having almost 400,000 subscribers, as large a readership as the combined total of The New Republic, The Nation, and National Review.
Marchetti’s
article suggested that Hunt had actually been in Dallas during the
assassination, resulting in a libel lawsuit with potential damages large
enough to bankrupt the publication. Longtime JFK assassination
researcher Mark Lane became aware of the situation and volunteered his
services to Liberty Lobby, hoping to use the legal proceedings,
including the discovery process and subpoena power, as a means of
securing additional evidence on the assassination, and after various
court rulings and appeals, the case finally came to trial in 1985.
As Lane recounted in his 1991 bestseller, Plausible Denial,
his strategy generally proved quite successful, not only allowing him
to win the jury verdict against Hunt, but also eliciting sworn testimony
from a former CIA operative of her personal involvement in the
conspiracy along with the names of several other participants, though
she claimed that her role had been strictly peripheral. And although
Hunt continued for decades to totally deny any connection with the
assassination, near the end of his life he made a series of video-taped
interviews in which he admitted that he had indeed been involved in the
JFK assassination and named several of the other conspirators, while
also maintaining that his own role had been merely peripheral. Hunt’s
explosive death-bed confession was recounted in a major 2007 Rolling Stone article and also heavily analyzed in Talbot’s books, especially his second one, but otherwise largely ignored by the media.
Many
of these same apparent conspirators, drawn from the same loose alliance
of groups, had previously been involved in the various U.S.
government-backed attempts to assassinate Castro or overthrow his
Communist government, and they had developed a bitter hostility towards
President Kennedy for what they considered his betrayal during the Bay
of Pigs fiasco and afterward. Therefore, there is a natural tendency to
regard such animosity as the central factor behind the assassination, a
perspective generally followed by Talbot, Douglass, and numerous other
writers. They conclude that Kennedy died at the hands of harder-line
anti-Communists, outraged over his perceived weakness regarding Cuba,
Russia, and Vietnam, sentiments that were certainly widespread within
right-wing political circles at the height of the Cold War.
While
this framework for the assassination is certainly possible, it is far
from certain. One may easily imagine that most of the lower-level
participants in the Dallas events were driven by such considerations but
that the central figures who organized the plot and set matters into
motion had different motives. So long as all the conspirators were
agreed on Kennedy’s elimination, there was no need for an absolute
uniformity of motive. Indeed, men who had long been involved in
organized crime or clandestine intelligence operations were surely
experienced in operational secrecy, and many of them may not have
expected to know the identities, let alone the precise motives, of the
men at the very top of the remarkable operation they were undertaking.
We
must also sharply distinguish between the involvement of particular
individuals and the involvement of an organization as an organization.
For example, CIA Director John McCone was a Kennedy loyalist who had
been appointed to clean house a couple of years before the
assassination, and he surely was innocent of his patron’s death. On the
other hand, the very considerable evidence that numerous individual CIA
intelligence officers and operatives participated in the action has
naturally raised suspicions that some among their highest-ranking
superiors were involved as well, perhaps even as the principal
organizers of the conspiracy.
These
reasonable speculations may have been magnified by elements of personal
bias. Many of the prominent authors who have investigated the JFK
assassination in recent years have been staunch liberals, and may have
allowed their ideology to cloud their judgment. They often seek to
locate the organizers of Kennedy’s elimination among those rightwing
figures whom they most dislike, even when the case is far from entirely
plausible.
But
consider the supposed motives of hard-line anti-Communists near the top
of the national security hierarchy who supposedly may have organized
Kennedy’s elimination because he backed away from a full military
solution in the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis incidents. Were
they really so absolutely sure that a President Johnson would be such an
enormous improvement as to risk their lives and public standing to
organize a full conspiracy to assassinate an American president?
A
new presidential election was less than a year away, and Kennedy’s
shifting stance on Civil Rights seemed likely to cost him nearly all the
Southern states that had provided his margin of electoral victory in
1960. A series of public declarations or embarrassing leaks might have
helped remove him from office by traditional political means, possibly
replacing him with a Cold War hard-liner such as Barry Goldwater or some
other Republican. Would the militarists or business tycoons often
implicated by liberal JFK researchers have really been so desperate as
to not wait those extra few months and see what happened?
Based on extremely circumstantial evidence, Talbot’s 2015 book The Devil’s Chessboard, something of a sequel to Brothers,
suggests that former longtime CIA Director Allan Dulles may have been
the likely mastermind, with his motive being a mixture of his extreme
Cold Warrior views and his personal anger at his 1961 dismissal from his
position.
While
his involvement is certainly possible, obvious questions arise. Dulles
was a seventy-year-old retiree, with a very long and distinguished
career of public service and a brother who had served as Eisenhower’s
secretary of state. He had just published The Craft of Intelligence,
which was receiving very favorable treatment in the establishment
media, and he was embarked on a major book tour. Would he really have
risked everything—including his family’s reputation in the history
books—to organize the murder of America’s duly-elected president, an
unprecedented act utterly different in nature than trying to unseat a
Guatemalan leader on behalf of supposed American national interests?
Surely, using his extensive media and intelligence contacts to leak
embarrassing disclosures about JFK’s notorious sexual escapades during
the forthcoming presidential campaign would have been be a much safer
means of attempting to achieve an equivalent result. And the same is
true for J. Edgar Hoover and many of the other powerful Washington
figures who hated Kennedy for similar reasons.
On
the other hand, it is very easy to imagine that such individuals had
some awareness of the emerging plot or may even have facilitated it or
participated to a limited extent. And once it succeeded, and their
personal enemy had been replaced, they surely would have been extremely
willing to assist in the cover-up and protect the reputation of the new
regime, a role that Dulles may have played as the most influential
member of the Warren Commission. But such activities are different than
acting as the central organizer of a presidential assassination.
Just
as with the hard-line national security establishment, many organized
crime leaders had grown outraged over the actions of the Kennedy
Administration. During the late 1950s, Robert Kennedy had intensely
targeted the mob for prosecution as chief counsel to the Senate Labor
Rackets Committee. But during the 1960 election, family patriarch
Joseph Kennedy used his own longstanding mafia connections to enlist
their support for his older son’s presidential campaign, and by all
accounts the votes stolen by the corrupt mob-dominated political
machines in Chicago and elsewhere helped put JFK in the White House,
along with Robert Kennedy as his Attorney General. Frank Sinatra, an
enthusiastic Kennedy supporter, had also helped facilitate this
arrangement by using his influence with skeptical mob leaders.
However,
instead of repaying such crucial election support with political
favors, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, perhaps ignorant of any
bargain, soon unleashed an all-out war against organized crime, far more
serious than anything previously mounted at the federal level, and the
crime bosses regarded this as a back-stabbing betrayal by the new
administration. Once Joseph Kennedy was felled by an incapacitating
stroke in late 1961, they also lost any hope that he would use his
influence to enforce the deals he had struck the previous year. FBI
wiretaps reveal that mafia leader Sam Giancana decided to have Sinatra
killed for his role in this failed bargain, only sparing the singer’s
life when he considered how much he personally loved the voice of one of
the most famous Italian-Americans of the 20th century.
These
organized crime leaders and some of their close associates such as
Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa certainly developed a bitter hatred toward the
Kennedys, and this has naturally led some authors to point to the mafia
as the likely organizers of the assassination, but I find this quite
unlikely. For many decades, American crime bosses had had a complex and
varied relationship with political figures, who might sometimes be
their allies and at other times their persecutors, and surely there must
have been many betrayals over the years. However, I am not aware of a
single case in which any even moderately prominent political figure on
the national stage was ever targeted for assassination, and it seems
quite unlikely that the sole exception would be a popular president,
whom they would have likely regarded as being completely out of their
league. On the other hand, if individuals who ranked high in Kennedy’s
own DC political sphere set in motion a plot to eliminate him, they
might have found it easy to enlist the enthusiastic cooperation of
various mafia leaders.
Furthermore,
the strong evidence that many CIA operatives were involved in the
conspiracy very much suggests that they were recruited and organized by
some figure high in their own hierarchy of the intelligence or political
worlds rather than the less likely possibility that they were brought
in solely by leaders of the parallel domain of organized crime. And
while crime bosses might possibly have organized the assassination
itself, they surely had no means of orchestrating the subsequent
cover-up by the Warren Commission, nor would there have been any
willingness by America’s political leadership to protect mafia leaders
from investigation and proper punishment for such a heinous act.
If a
husband or wife is found murdered, with no obvious suspect or motive at
hand, the normal response of the police is to carefully investigate the
surviving spouse, and quite often this suspicion proves correct.
Similarly, if you read in your newspapers that in some obscure Third
World country two bitterly hostile leaders, both having unpronounceable
names, had been sharing supreme political power until one was suddenly
struck down in a mysterious assassination by unknown conspirators, your
thoughts would certainly move in an obvious direction. Most Americans
in the early 1960s did not perceive their own country’s politics in such
a light, but perhaps they were mistaken. As a total newcomer to the
enormous, hidden world of JFK conspiracy analysis, I was immediately
surprised by the mere sliver of suspicion directed towards Vice
President Lyndon B. Johnson, the slain leader’s immediate successor and
the most obvious beneficiary.
The
two Talbot books and the one by Douglass, totaling some 1500 pages,
devote merely a few paragraphs to any suspicions of Johnson’s
involvement. Talbot’s first book reports that immediately after the
assassination, the vice president had expressed a frantic concern to his
personal aides that a military coup might be in progress or a world war
breaking out, and suggests that these few casual words demonstrate his
obvious innocence, although a more cynical observer might wonder if
those remarks had been uttered for exactly that reason. Talbot’s second
book actually quotes an apparent low-level conspirator as claiming that
Johnson had personally signed off on the plot and admits that Hunt
believed the same thing, but treats such unsubstantiated accusations
with considerable skepticism, before adding a single sentence
acknowledging that Johnson may indeed have been a passive supporter or
even an accomplice. Douglass and Peter Dale Scott, author of the
influential 1993 book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, apparently seem never to have even entertained the possibility.
Ideological
considerations are probably an important reason for such remarkable
reticence. Although liberals had grown to revile LBJ by the late 1960s
for his escalation of the unpopular Vietnam War, over the decades those
sentiments have faded, while warm memories of his passage of the
landmark Civil Rights legislation and his creation of the Great Society
programs have elevated his stature in that ideological camp.
Furthermore, such legislation had long been blockaded in Congress and
only became law because of the 1964 Democratic Congressional landslide
following JFK’s martyrdom, and it might be difficult for liberals to
admit that their fondest dreams were only realized by an act of
political parricide.
Kennedy
and Johnson may have been intensively hostile personal rivals, but
there seem to have been few deep ideological differences between the two
men, and most of the leading figures in JFK’s government continued to
serve under his successor, surely another source of enormous
embarrassment to any ardent liberals who came to suspect that the former
had been murdered by a conspiracy involving the latter. Talbot,
Douglass, and many other left-leaning advocates for an assassination
conspiracy prefer to point the finger of blame towards far more
congenial villains such as hard-line, anti-Communist Cold Warriors and
right-wing elements, notably including top CIA officials, such as former
director Allan Dulles.
An
additional factor helping to explain the extreme unwillingness of
Talbot, Douglass, and others to consider Johnson as an obvious suspect
may be the realities of the book publishing industry. By the 2000s, JFK
assassination conspiracies had long become passé and were treated with
disdain in mainstream circles. Talbot’s strong reputation, his 150
original interviews, and the quality of his manuscript broke that
barrier, and attracted The Free Press as his very respectable publisher, while later drawing a strongly positive review by a leading academic scholar in the New York Times Sunday Book Review and an hour long television segment broadcast on C-Span Booknotes.
But if he had devoted any space to voicing suspicions that our 35th
president had been murdered by our 36th, surely the weight of that extra
element of “outrageous conspiracy theory” would have ensured that his
book sank without a trace.
However, if we cast off these distorting ideological blinders and the practical considerations of American publishing, the prima facie case for Johnson’s involvement seems quite compelling.
Consider
a very simple point. If a president is struck down by an unknown group
of conspirators, his successor would normally have had the strongest
possible incentive to track them down lest he might become their next
victim. Yet Johnson did nothing, appointing the Warren Commission that
covered up the entire matter, laying the blame upon an erratic “lone
gunman” conveniently dead. This would seem remarkably odd behavior for
an innocent LBJ. This conclusion does not demand that Johnson was the
mastermind, nor even an active participant, but it raises a very strong
suspicion that he at least had had some awareness of the plot, and
enjoyed a good personal relationship with some of the principals.
A
similar conclusion is supported by a converse analysis. If the plot
succeeded and Johnson became president, the conspirators must surely
have felt reasonably confident that they would be protected rather than
tracked down and punished as traitors by the new president. Even a
fully successful assassination would entail enormous risks unless the
organizers believed that Johnson would do exactly what he did, and the
only means of ensuring this would be to sound him out about the plan, at
least in some vague manner, and obtain his passive acquiesce.
Based
on these considerations, it seems extremely difficult to believe that
any JFK assassination conspiracy took place entirely without Johnson’s
foreknowledge, or that he was not a central figure in the subsequent
cover-up.
But
the specific details of Johnson’s career and his political situation in
late 1963 greatly strengthen these entirely generic arguments. A very
useful corrective to the “See No Evil” approach to Johnson from liberal
JFK writers is Roger Stone’s The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ,
published in 2013. Stone, a longtime Republican political operative
who got his start under Richard Nixon, presents a powerful case that
Johnson was the sort of individual who might easily have lent his hand
to political murder, and also that he had strong reasons to do so.
Among
other things, Stone gathers together an enormous wealth of persuasive
information regarding Johnson’s decades of extremely corrupt and
criminal practices in Texas, including fairly plausible claims that
these may have included several murders. In one bizarre 1961 incident
that strangely foreshadows the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman”
finding, a federal government inspector investigating a major Texas
corruption scheme involving a close LBJ ally was found dead, shot five
times in the chest and abdomen by a rifle, but the death was officially
ruled a “suicide” by the local authorities, and that conclusion was
reported with a straight face in the pages of the Washington Post.
Certainly
one remarkable aspect of Johnson’s career is that he was born
dirt-poor, held low-paying government jobs throughout his entire life,
yet took the oath of office as the wealthiest president in modern American history,
having accumulated a personal fortune of over $100 million in
present-day dollars, with the financial payoffs from his corporate
benefactors having been laundered through his wife’s business. This odd
anomaly is so little remembered these days that a prominent political
journalist expressed total disbelief when I mentioned it to him a decade
ago.
Stone
also effectively sketches out the very difficult political situation
Johnson faced in late 1963. He had originally entered the 1960
presidential race as one of the most powerful Democrats in the country
and the obvious front-runner for his party’s nomination, certainly
compared to the much younger Kennedy, whom he greatly outranked in
political stature and also somewhat despised. His defeat, involving a
great deal of underhanded dealings on both sides, came as a huge
personal blow. The means by which he somehow managed to get himself
placed on the ticket are not entirely clear, but both Stone and Seymour
Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot strongly suggest that
personal blackmail was a greater factor than geographical
ticket-balancing. In any event, Kennedy’s paper-thin 1960 victory would
have been far more difficult without Texas narrowly falling into the
Democratic column, and election fraud there by Johnson’s powerful
political machine seems almost certainly to have been an important
factor.
Under
such circumstances, Johnson naturally expected to play a major role in
the new administration, and he even issued grandiose demands for a huge
political portfolio, but instead he found himself immediately sidelined
and treated with complete disdain, soon becoming a forlorn figure with
no authority or influence. As time went by, the Kennedys made plans to
get rid of him, and just a few days before the assassination, they were
already discussing whom to place on the reelection ticket in his stead.
Much of Johnson’s long record of extreme corruption both in Texas and
in DC was coming to light following the fall of Bobby Baker, his key
political henchman, and with strong Kennedy encouragement, Life Magazine
was preparing a huge expose of his sordid and often criminal history,
laying the basis for his prosecution and perhaps a lengthy prison
sentence. By mid-November 1963, Johnson seemed a desperate political
figure at the absolute end of his rope, but a week later he was the
president of the United States, and all those swirling scandals were
suddenly forgotten. Stone even claims that the huge block of magazine
space reserved for the Johnson expose was instead filled by the JFK
assassination story.
Aside
from effectively documenting Johnson’s sordid personal history and the
looming destruction he faced at the hands of the Kennedys in late 1963,
Stone also adds numerous fascinating pieces of personal testimony, which
may or may not be reliable. According to him, as his mentor Nixon was
watching the scene at the Dallas police station where Jack Ruby shot
Oswald, Nixon immediately turned as white as a ghost, explaining that he
had personally known the gunman under his birth-name of Rubenstein.
While working on a House Committee in 1947, Nixon had been advised by a
close ally and prominent mob-lawyer to hire Ruby as an investigator,
being told that “he was one of Lyndon Johnson’s boys.” Stone also
claims that Nixon once emphasized that although he had long sought the
presidency, unlike Johnson “I wasn’t willing to kill for it.” He
further reports that Vietnam Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and numerous
other prominent political figures in DC were absolutely convinced of
Johnson’s direct involvement in the assassination.
Stone
has spent more than a half-century as a ruthless political operative, a
position that provided him with unique personal access to individuals
who participated in the great events of the past, but one that also
carries the less than totally candid reputation of that profession, and
individuals must carefully weigh these conflicting factors against each
other. Personally, I tend to credit most of the eyewitness stories he
provides. But even readers who remain entirely skeptical should find
useful the large collection of secondary source references to the sordid
details of LBJ’s history that the book provides.
Finally, a seemingly unrelated historical incident had originally raised my own suspicions of Johnson’s involvement.
Just prior to the outbreak of the Six Day War in 1967, Johnson had dispatched the U.S.S. Liberty,
our most advanced intelligence-gathering ship, to remain offshore in
international waters and closely monitor the military situation. There
have been published claims that he had granted Israel a green-light for
its preemptive attack, but fearful of risking a nuclear confrontation
with the Soviet patrons of Syria and Egypt, had strictly circumscribed
the limits of the military operation, sending the Liberty to keep an eye on developments and perhaps also to “show Israel who was boss.”
Whether
or not this reconstruction is correct, the Israelis soon launched an
all-out attack on the nearly defenseless ship despite the large American
flag it was flying, deploying attack jets and torpedo boats to sink the
vessel during an assault that lasted several hours, while
machine-gunning the lifeboats to ensure that there would be no
survivors. The first stage of the attack had targeted the main
communications antenna, and its destruction together with heavy Israeli
jamming prevented any communications with other U.S. naval forces in the
region.
Despite
these very difficult conditions, a member of the crew heroically
managed to jerry-rig a replacement antenna during the attack, and by
trying numerous different frequencies was able to evade the jamming and
contact the U.S. Sixth Fleet, informing them of the desperate situation.
Yet although carrier jets were twice dispatched to rescue the Liberty
and drive off the attackers, each time they were recalled, apparently
upon direct orders from the highest authorities of the U.S. government.
Once the Israelis learned that word of the situation had reached other
U.S. forces, they soon discontinued their attack, and the
heavily-damaged Liberty eventually limped into port, with over
200 dead and wounded sailors and NSA signal operators, representing the
greatest loss of American servicemen in any naval incident since World
War II.
Although
numerous medals were issued to the survivors, word of the incident was
totally suppressed by a complete blanket of secrecy, and in an
unprecedented step, even a Congressional Medal of Honor was awarded only
in a private ceremony. The survivors were also harshly threatened with
immediate court martial if they discussed what had transpired with the
press or anyone else. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the attack
had been intentional, a naval court of inquiry presided over by Admiral
John S. McCain, Jr., father of the current senator, whitewashed the
incident as a tragic accident, and a complete media blackout suppressed
the facts. The true story only began to come out years later, when
James M. Ennes, Jr., a Liberty survivor, risked severe legal consequences and published Assault on the Liberty in 1979 .
As
it happened, NSA intercepts of Israeli communications between the
attacking jets and Tel Aviv, translated from the Hebrew, fully confirmed
that the attack had been entirely deliberate, and since many of the
dead and wounded were NSA employees, the suppression of these facts
greatly rankled their colleagues. My old friend Bill Odom, the
three-star general who ran the NSA for Ronald Reagan, later shrewdly
circumvented the restrictions of his political masters by making those
incriminating intercepts part of the standard curriculum of the Sigint
training program required for all intelligence officers.
In
2007 an unusual set of circumstances finally broke the thirty year
blackout in the mainstream media. Real estate investor Sam Zell, a
Jewish billionaire extremely devoted to Israel, had orchestrated a leveraged-buyout of the Tribune Company, parent of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune,
investing merely a sliver of his own money, with the bulk of the
financing coming from the pension funds of the company he was acquiring.
Widely heralded as “the grave dancer” for his shrewd financial
investments, Zell publicly boasted that the deal gave him nearly all of
the upside potential of the company, while he bore relatively little of
the risk. Such an approach proved wise since the complex deal quickly
collapsed into bankruptcy, and although Zell emerged almost unscathed,
the editors and journalists lost decades of their accumulated pension
dollars, while massive layoffs soon devastated the newsrooms of what had
been two of the country’s largest and most prestigious newspapers.
Perhaps coincidentally, just as this business turmoil hit in late 2007,
the Tribune ran a massive 5,500 word story on the Liberty
attack, representing the first and only time such a comprehensive
account of the true facts has ever appeared in the mainstream media.
By
all accounts, Johnson was an individual of towering personal ego, and
when I read the article, I was struck by the extent of his astonishing
subservience to the Jewish state. The influence of campaign donations
and favorable media coverage seemed completely insufficient to explain
his reaction to an incident that had cost the lives of so many American
servicemen. I began to wonder if Israel might have played an
extraordinarily powerful political trump-card, thereby showing LBJ “who
was really boss,” and once I discovered the reality of the JFK
assassination conspiracy a year or two later, I suspected I knew what
that trump-card might have been. Over the years, I had become quite
friendly with the late Alexander Cockburn, and the next time we had
lunch I outlined my ideas. Although he had always casually dismissed
JFK conspiracy theories as total nonsense, he found my hypothesis quite
intriguing.
Regardless of such speculation, the strange circumstances of the Liberty
incident certainly demonstrated the exceptionally close relationship
between President Johnson and the government of Israel, as well as the
willingness of the mainstream media to spend decades hiding events of
the most remarkable nature if they might tread on particular toes.
These
important considerations should be kept in mind as we begin exploring
the most explosive yet under-reported theory of the JFK assassination.
Almost twenty-five years ago the late Michael Collins Piper published Final Judgment
presenting a very large body of circumstantial evidence that Israel and
its Mossad secret intelligence service, together with their American
collaborators, probably played a central role in the conspiracy.
For
decades following the 1963 assassination, virtually no suspicions had
ever been directed towards Israel, and as a consequence none of the
hundreds or thousands of assassination conspiracy books that appeared
during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had hinted at any role for the
Mossad, though nearly every other possible culprit, ranging from the
Vatican to the Illuminati, came under scrutiny. Kennedy had received
over 80% of the Jewish vote in his 1960 election, American Jews featured
very prominently in his White House, and he was greatly lionized by
Jewish media figures, celebrities, and intellectuals ranging from New
York City to Hollywood to the Ivy League. Moreover, individuals with a
Jewish background such as Mark Lane and Edward Epstein had been among
the leading early proponents of an assassination conspiracy, with their
controversial theories championed by influential Jewish cultural
celebrities such as Mort Sahl and Norman Mailer. Given that the Kennedy
Administration was widely perceived as pro-Israel, there seemed no
possible motive for any Mossad involvement, and bizarre, totally
unsubstantiated accusations of such a monumental nature directed against
the Jewish state were hardly likely to gain much traction in an
overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry.
However,
in the early 1990s highly-regarded journalists and researchers began
exposing the circumstances surrounding the development of Israel’s
nuclear weapons arsenal. Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy
described the extreme efforts of the Kennedy Administration to force
Israel to allow international inspections of its allegedly non-military
nuclear reactor at Dimona, and thereby prevent its use in producing
nuclear weapons. Dangerous Liaisons: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn appeared in the same year, and covered similar ground.
Although
entirely hidden from public awareness at the time, the early 1960s
political conflict between the American and Israeli governments over
nuclear weapons development had represented a top foreign policy
priority of the Kennedy Administration, which had made nuclear
non-proliferation one of its central international initiatives. It is
notable that John McCone, Kennedy’s choice as CIA Director, had
previously served on the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower,
being the individual who leaked the fact that Israel was building a
nuclear reactor to produce plutonium.
The
pressure and financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel by the
Kennedy Administration eventually became so severe that they led to the
resignation of Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in June
1963. But all these efforts were almost entirely halted or reversed
once Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of that same year.
Piper notes that Stephen Green’s 1984 book Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel
had previously documented that U.S. Middle East Policy completely
reversed itself following Kennedy’s assassination, but this important
finding had attracted little attention at the time.
Skeptics
of a plausible institutional basis for a JFK assassination conspiracy
have often noted the extreme continuity in both foreign and domestic
policies between the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, arguing that
this casts severe doubt on any such possible motive. Although this
analysis seems largely correct, America’s behavior towards Israel and
its nuclear weapons program stands as a very notable exception to this
pattern.
An
additional major area of concern for Israeli officials may have involved
the efforts of the Kennedy Administration to sharply restrict the
activities of pro-Israel political lobbies. During his 1960
presidential campaign, Kennedy had met in New York City with a group of
wealthy Israel advocates, led by financier Abraham Feinberg, and they
had offered enormous financial support in exchange for a controlling
influence in Middle Eastern policy. Kennedy managed to fob them off
with vague assurances, but he considered the incident so troubling that
the next morning he sought out journalist Charles Bartlett, one of his
closest friends, and expressed his outrage that American foreign policy
might fall under the control of partisans of a foreign power, promising
that if he became president, he would rectify that situation. And
indeed, once he had installed his brother Robert as Attorney General,
the latter initiated a major legal effort to force pro-Israel groups to
register themselves as foreign agents, which would have drastically
reduced their power and influence. But after JFK’s death, this project
was quickly abandoned, and as part of the settlement, the leading
pro-Israel lobby merely agreed to reconstitute itself as AIPAC.
Final Judgment
went through a number of a reprintings following its original 1994
appearance, and by the sixth edition released in 2004, had grown to over
650 pages, including numerous long appendices and over 1100 footnotes,
the overwhelming majority of these referencing fully mainstream sources.
The body of the text was merely serviceable in organization and
polish, reflecting the total boycott by all publishers, mainstream or
alternative, but I found the contents themselves remarkable and
generally quite compelling. Despite the most extreme blackout by all
media outlets, the book sold more than 40,000 copies over the years,
making it something of an underground bestseller, and surely bringing it
to the attention of everyone in the JFK assassination research
community, though apparently almost none of them were willing to mention
its existence. I suspect these other writers realized that even any
mere acknowledgement of the existence of the book, if only to ridicule
or dismiss it, might prove fatal to their media and publishing career.
Piper himself died in 2015, aged 54, suffering from the health problems
and heavy-drinking often associated with grim poverty, and other
journalists may have been reluctant to risk that same dismal fate.
As
an example of this strange situation, the bibliography of Talbot’s 2005
book contains almost 140 entries, some rather obscure, but has no space
for Final Judgment, nor does his very comprehensive index
include any entry for “Jews” or “Israel.” Indeed, at one point he very
delicately characterizes Sen. Robert Kennedy’s entirely Jewish senior
staff by stating “There was not a Catholic among them.” His 2015 sequel
is equally circumspect, and although the index does contain numerous
entries pertaining to Jews, all these references are in regards to World
War II and the Nazis, including his discussion of the alleged Nazi ties
of Allen Dulles, his principal bête noire. Stone’s book,
while fearlessly convicting President Lyndon Johnson of the JFK
assassination, also strangely excludes “Jews” and “Israel” from the long
index and Final Judgment from the bibliography, and Douglass’s book follows this same pattern.
Furthermore,
the extreme concerns that the Piper Hypothesis seems to have provoked
among JFK assassination researchers may explain a strange anomaly.
Although Mark Lane was himself of Jewish origins and left-wing roots,
after his victory for Liberty Lobby in the Hunt libel trial, he spent
many years associated with that organization in a legal capacity, and
apparently became quite friendly with Piper, one of its leading writers.
According to Piper, Lane told him that Final Judgment made “a
solid case” for a major Mossad role in the assassination, and he viewed
the theory as fully complementary to his own focus on CIA involvement.
I suspect that concerns about these associations may explain why Lane
was almost completely airbrushed out of the Douglass and 2007 Talbot
books, and discussed in the second Talbot book only when his work was
absolutely essential to Talbot’s own analysis. By contrast, New York Times
staff writers are hardly likely to be as versed in the lesser-known
aspects of the JFK assassination research community, and being ignorant
of this hidden controversy, they gave Lane the long and glowing obituary that his career fully warranted.
When
weighing the possible suspects for a given crime, considering their
past pattern of behavior is often a helpful approach. As discussed
above, I can think of no historical example in which organized crime
initiated a serious assassination attempt against any American political
figure even moderately prominent on the national stage. And despite a
few suspicions here and there, the same applies to the CIA.
By
contrast, the Israeli Mossad and the Zionist groups that preceded the
establishment of the Jewish state seem to have had a very long track
record of assassinations, including those of high-ranking political
figures who might normally be regarded as inviolate. Lord Moyne, the
British Minister of State for the Middle East, was assassinated in 1944
and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator sent to help resolve
the first Arab-Israel war, suffered the same fate in September 1948.
Not even an American president was entirely free of such risks, and
Piper notes that the memoirs of Harry Truman’s daughter Margaret reveal
that Zionist militants had tried to assassinate her father using a
letter laced with toxic chemicals in 1947 when they believed he was
dragging his heels in supporting Israel, although that failed attempt
was never made public. The Zionist faction responsible for all of these
incidents was led by Yitzhak Shamir, who later became a leader of
Mossad and director of its assassination program during the 1960s,
before eventually becoming Prime Minister of Israel in 1986.
If
the claims in the 1990s tell-all bestsellers of Mossad defector Victor
Ostrovsky can be credited, Israel even considered the assassination of
President George H.W. Bush in 1992 for his threats to cut off financial
aid to Israel during a conflict over West Bank settlement policies, and I
have been informed that the Bush Administration took those reports
seriously at the time. And although I have not yet read it, the recent,
widely-praised book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations
by journalist Ronen Bergman suggests that no other country in the world
may have so regularly employed assassination as a standard tool of
state policy.
There
are other notable elements that tend to support the Piper Hypothesis.
Once we accept the existence of a JFK assassination conspiracy, the one
individual who is virtually certain to have been a participant was Jack
Ruby, and his organized crime ties were almost entirely to the huge but
rarely-mentioned Jewish wing of that enterprise, presided over by Meyer
Lansky, an extremely fervent supporter of Israel. Ruby himself had
particularly strong connections with Lansky lieutenant Mickey Cohen, who
dominated the Los Angeles underworld and had been personally involved
in gun-running to Israel prior to the 1948 war. Indeed, according to Dallas rabbi Hillel Silverman, Ruby had privately explained his killing of Oswald by saying “I did it for the Jewish people.”
An intriguing aspect to Oliver Stone’s landmark JFK
film should also be mentioned. Arnon Milchan, the wealthy Hollywood
producer who backed the project, was not only an Israeli citizen, but
had also reportedly played a central role in the enormous espionage project
to divert American technology and materials to Israel’s nuclear weapons
project, the exact undertaking that the Kennedy Administration had made
such efforts to block. Milchan has even sometimes been described as “the Israeli James Bond.” And although the film ran a full three hours in length, JFK
scrupulously avoided presenting any of the details that Piper later
regarded as initial clues to an Israeli dimension, instead seeming to
finger America’s fanatic home-grown anti-Communist movement and the Cold
War leadership of the military-industrial complex as the guilty
parties.
Summarizing
over 300,000 words of Piper’s history and analysis in just a few
paragraphs is obviously an impossible undertaking, but the above
discussion provides a reasonable taste of the enormous mass of
circumstantial evidence mustered in favor of the Piper Hypothesis.
In
many respects, JFK Assassination Studies has become its own academic
discipline, and my credentials are quite limited. I have read perhaps a
dozen books in the subject, and have also tried to approach the issues
with the clean slate and fresh eyes of an outsider, but any serious
expert would surely have digested scores or even hundreds of the volumes
in the field. While the overall analysis of Final Judgment
struck me as quite persuasive, a good fraction of the names and
references were unfamiliar, and I simply do not have the background to
assess their credibility, nor whether the description of the material
presented is accurate.
Under
normal circumstances, I would turn to the reviews or critiques produced
by other authors, and comparing them against Piper’s claims, then
decide which argument seemed the stronger. But although Final Judgment
was published a quarter-century ago, the near-absolute blanket of
silence surrounding the Piper Hypothesis, especially from the more
influential and credible researchers, renders this impossible.
However,
Piper’s inability to secure any regular publisher and the widespread
efforts to smother his theory out of existence, have had an ironic
consequence. Since the book went out of print years ago, I had a
relatively easy time securing the rights to include it in my collection
of controversial HTML Books, and I have now done so, thereby allowing
everyone on the Internet to conveniently read the entire text and decide
for themselves, while easily checking the multitude of references or
searching for particular words or phrases.
The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy
This
edition actually incorporates several much shorter works, originally
published separately. One of these, consisting of an extended Q&A,
describes the genesis of the idea and answers numerous questions
surrounding it, and for some readers might represent a better starting
point.
Questions, Answers & Reflections About the Crime of the Century
There
are also numerous extended Piper interviews or presentations easily
available on YouTube, and when I watched two or three of them a couple
of years ago, I thought he effectively summarized many of his main
arguments, but I cannot remember which ones they were.
The
Kennedy assassination surely ranks as one of the most dramatic and
heavily reported events of the twentieth century, yet the overwhelming
evidence that our president died at the hands of a conspiracy rather
than an eccentric “lone gunman” was almost entirely suppressed by our
mainstream media during the decades that followed, with endless ridicule
and opprobrium heaped on many of the stubborn truth-tellers. Indeed,
the very term “conspiracy theory” soon became a standard slur aimed
against all those who sharply questioned establishmentarian narratives,
and there is strong evidence that such pejorative use was deliberately promoted
by government agencies concerned that so much of the American citizenry
was growing skeptical of the implausible cover story presented by the
Warren Commission. But despite all these efforts, the period may mark
the inflection point at which public trust in our national media began
its precipitous decline. Once an individual concludes that the media
lied about something as monumental as the JFK assassination, he
naturally begins to wonder what other lies may be out there.
Although
I now consider the case for an assassination conspiracy overwhelming, I
think that the passage of so many decades has removed any real hope of
reaching a firm conclusion about the identities of the main organizers
or their motives. Those who disagree with this negative assessment are
free to continue sifting the enormous mountain of complex historical
evidence and debating their conclusions with others having similar
interests.
However,
among the cast of major suspects, I think that the most likely
participant by far was Lyndon Johnson, based on any reasonable
assessment of means, motive, and opportunity, as well as the enormous
role he obviously must have played in facilitating the subsequent Warren
Commission cover-up. Yet although such an obvious suspect must surely
have been immediately apparent to any observer, Johnson seems to have
received only a rather thin slice of the attention that books regularly
directed to other, far less plausible suspects. So the clear dishonesty
of the mainstream media in avoiding any recognition of a conspiracy
seems matched by a second layer of dishonesty in the alternative media,
which has done its best to avoid recognizing the most likely
perpetrator.
And the third layer of media dishonesty is the the most extreme of all. A quarter century ago, Final Judgment
provided an enormous mass of circumstantial evidence suggesting a
major, even dominant, role for the Israeli Mossad in organizing the
elimination of both our 35rd president and also his younger brother, a
scenario that seems second in likelihood only to that of Johnson’s
involvement. Yet Piper’s hundreds of thousands of words of analysis
have seemingly vanished into the ether, with very few of the major
conspiracy researchers even willing to admit their awareness of a
shocking book that sold over 40,000 copies, almost entirely by
underground word-of-mouth.
So
although committed partisans can continue endless, largely fruitless
debates over “Who Killed JFK,” I think that the one firm conclusion we
can draw from the remarkable history of this pivotal event of the
twentieth century is that all of us have lived for many decades within
the synthetic reality of “Our American Pravda.”
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