Whatever else might be said
about the assassination of President Kennedy, one thing is for sure: The
cover-up of this particular U.S. regime-change operation was one of the most
ingenious and cunning plots ever designed. This shouldn’t surprise anyone,
given that practically from its inception in 1947 the CIA was specializing in
the arts of assassination, regime change, and cover-up.
As far back as 1953, the
CIA published an assassination manual that the CIA succeeded in keeping secret
from the American people for more than 40 years. It came to light in 1997 as a
result of a Freedom of Information request. That was around the time that the
Assassination Records Review Board, which was overseeing the mandatory release
of JFK-related assassination records of the CIA and other federal agencies that
had been kept secret from the American people since 1963.
Today, Americans can read the CIA’s assassination manual online.
Titled “Study of Assassination,” the manual spells out various
ways to assassinate people. Here is what the manual states in part regarding
the use of firearms:
Firearms
are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively…. Public figures or
guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a
firing point can be established prior to an official occasion. The propaganda
value of this system may be very high.
The manual also makes it
clear that the CIA was studying ways to assassinate people without being detected.
Note the following excerpt:
For
secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the
most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little
excitement and is only casually investigated.
It would be safe to assume
that the CIA continued developing and expanding on the assassination principles
enunciated in that early assassination manual. That’s what we would expect from
an agency whose specialties included assassination. We can also assume that the
CIA continued to refine the ways to avoid detection when assassinating someone.
The CIA published that
secret assassination manual as part of its preparations for a U.S.
regime-change operation in Guatemala, one that was designed to violently remove
the nation’s democratically elected socialist president, Jacobo Arbenz, from
office and replace him with an unelected, right-wing, pro-U.S. military
general.
As part of the Guatemala
regime-change operation, the CIA prepared a list of Guatemalan officials to be
assassinated. While the CIA has never revealed the names of the people it
targeted for assassination, there is little doubt that Arbenz, the president,
was at the top of the list.
There is something
important to note: Neither Arbenz nor any other Guatemalan official had ever
attacked the United States or even threatened to do so.
So, why were they targeted
for assassination? Because Arbenz had reached out to the Russians and Cubans in
a spirit of peace and friendship, just as John Kennedy would do ten years
later. That’s why the CIA targeted Guatemala for regime change and why it
targeted Arbenz and other Guatemalan officials for assassination.
Although Arbenz was able to
escape the country, the CIA’s regime-change operation was a total success, with
Arbenz being replaced by the pro-U.S. Gen. Carlos Castillo Armas, who proceeded
to instigate a reign of terror across Guatemala.
The Guatemalan operation
was brilliant and ingenious. The CIA officials were secretly honored for
protecting “national security” by removing President Arbenz from office and
replacing him with a pro-U.S. military general. Tracy Barnes, one of the CIA
officials responsible for the operation, was awarded the Distinguished
Intelligence Medal, the CIA’s second-highest medal.
The CIA’s cover-up in the
JFK assassination was even more brilliant and ingenious.
The doctors at Parkland
Hospital stated that President Kennedy had a big exit-sized wound in the back
of his head, which implied a shot having been fired from the front. At a press
conference immediately after the president died, two treating physicians stated
that the other wound — the one in the front of Kennedy’s neck — was an entry
wound, which implied that Kennedy had been hit by another shot fired from the
front.
This necessarily meant that
Kennedy had been shot from the front, not the rear, where accused assassin Lee
Harvey Oswald was situated.
Keep in mind something
important: After he was arrested, Oswald claimed his innocence. But he also
went a step further. He said that he was being framed for the crime.
The obvious question
arises: Why frame an innocent man who is situated in the rear by killing the
president with shots fired from the front? Wouldn’t it be more logical to
either have the shots fired from the rear, where Oswald was, or, alternatively,
place Oswald in the front, where the shots were fired?
That’s where the
brilliance, ingenuity, and cunningness of the cover-up come into play.
If Oswald is in the rear
and since shots are fired from the front, that could mean only one thing: that
Oswald had confederates firing from the front.
Who would those
confederates be? There could be only one answer: communists. Soviet and Cuban
communists, to be more specific.
How would we know this?
That’s where Oswald’s trip to Mexico City right before the assassination comes
into play.
Oswald traveled to Mexico
City where he purportedly visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies and where he
supposedly met with a premier assassin for the Soviet Union.
Keep in mind that this was
the height of the Cold War between the United States and that the Cuban Missile
Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, had taken place
the previous year.
So, President Kennedy has
been assassinated. Oswald is immediately arrested. He has confederates firing
from the front, who almost certainly are Soviet and Cuban communists,
especially since Oswald has supposedly just recently visited the Soviet and
Cuban embassies in Mexico City.
What does all that mean? An
assassination of the president by the Soviet Union and Cuba is obviously an act
of war. That means nuclear war is about to break out because there is no way
that the United States is going to sit idly by when the Reds have just assassinated
America’s president.
Except for one thing: The
communist part and the nuclear-war part were concocted. That was all part of
the plan. That was the ingenious way that the CIA was able to get the
investigation into the assassination squelched just as soon as Oswald was
murdered.
In the early days of the
Warren Commission, commission chairman Earl Warren called a top-secret meeting
of the commission. Its purpose was to discuss information that Warren had
received that Oswald was actually a U.S. intelligence agent or an informant for
the FBI or both.
How did Warren resolve this
troubling issue? He simply asked the heads of the CIA and FBI whether it was
true. They said no. That was the end of the matter.
The issue was so sensitive
that Warren ordered the members of the commission to never reveal the meeting
to the American people. He ordered all notes and other written references to be
destroyed. He also ordered the court reporter to destroy her notes of the
meeting. Unbeknownst to him, the court reporter inadvertently kept a recording
of the meeting that ultimately came to light.
This troubling issue arose again yesterday, November 2, in
the Washington Post in
an article entitled “Tantalizing Mystery of JFK Assassination Files Solved – 23 Years
Ago.” In the article, author Ian Shapira points out that among the
long-secret CIA records that were recently released was a deposition of former
CIA Director Richard Helms taken in 1975 before the President’s Commission on
CIA Activities, which stated as follows:
BELIN:
Well, now, the final area of my interrogation relates to charges that the CIA
was in some way conspiratorially involved with the assassination of President
Kennedy. During the time of the Warren Commission, you were Deputy Director of
Plans, is that correct?
HELMS:
I believe so.
BELIN:
Is there any information involved with the assassination of President Kennedy
which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or an
age[nt.…
That’s where the transcript
ends according to few secret records of the CIA that were recently released by
the National Archives.
Shapira points out, “Several news organizations, including The Washington Post, seized on the truncated file as an
example of the government’s continued secrecy about the assassination.” Shapira
points out that Helms’ full deposition has been in the public arena since 1994.
(The year 1994 was during the tenure of the Assassination
Records Review Board, the agency charged with securing the mandated release of
JFK assassination records from the CIA and other federal agencies. The ARRB had
been formed after Americans had learned of the official secrecy after watching
Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, which
posited that the JFK assassination was a U.S. regime-change operation, no
different in principle from the one the CIA had carried out in Guatemala nine
years before.)
Shapira then proceeds to
provide the answer that Helms gave, which, as he points out, has been public:
HELMS:
Mr. Belin, this question, and I think you may recall this, was raised at the
time and the Agency was never able to find any evidence whatsoever, and we
really searched that it had any contact with Lee Harvey Oswald. As far as the
FBI was concerned, my recollection is not all that precise. I believe that Mr.
Hoover testified that he had not been an agent of theirs either. He was
certainly not an agent of the CIA. He was certainly never used by the CIA.
Whether any CIA officer ever talked to him any place or not I don’t know
but I certainly felt quite comfortable — I believe Mr. [John] McCone [a
previous CIA director] was asked to testify before the Commission on this
point. I believe he was asked to testify. It was a hot item anyway at the time.
And my recollection is that I informed Mr. McCone that we could find no
evidence that Oswald had any connection with the CIA.
Shapira ends his article by
suggesting that commentators should do more complete research, maybe even use
Google, before they jump to conclusions.
But Shapira would be wise
to follow his own advice because he himself is guilty of what he accuses others
of. That’s because he failed to conclude his article with one great big
important point about former CIA Director Richard Helms.
What is that great big
important point that Shapira, who, according to his tagline on his article,
“enjoys writing about people who have served in the military and intelligence
communities,” left out of his article?
Perjury. He left out that
former CIA Director Richard Helms was a perjurer. A liar. A CIA official who
would tell falsehoods, even under oath, whenever he felt that “national
security” required it.
Shapira failed to note that
Helms was convicted in a federal district court of lying to Congress under oath
about another CIA regime-change operation ten years after the Kennedy
assassination in Chile.
Interesting enough, in the
Chile regime-change operation, the CIA and the Pentagon were telling their
counterparts in the Chilean national-security establishment that they had a
moral duty to violate their nation’s constitution and violently remove their
nation’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, from office. The
reason? Allende was reaching out to the Russians and Cubans in a spirit of
peace and friendship, just as Arbenz had done and just as Kennedy had done.
Thus, given that Helms was
an admitted perjurer and convicted liar, what value does his denial that Oswald
was an intelligence agent have? It has no value at all. And Shapira, who
“enjoys writing about people who have served in the military and intelligence
communities,” had an ethical duty to point out Helms’ proclivity for lying in
his article.
The circumstantial evidence
overwhelmingly establishes that Oswald was working for U.S. intelligence. How
often have you ever heard of a U.S. Marine communist? If Oswald was a genuine
communist, why would he have joined the Marines in the 1950s, given that the
Marines hated communists and had just helped kill millions of them in the
Korean War? Why would a genuine communist want to join an organization in which
he could be ordered, on a moment’s notice, to return to Korea or be sent to
Vietnam, Laos, China, the Soviet Union, or Europe to kill communists? Don’t
forget: this is the height of the Cold War!
After Oswald supposedly
tried to “defect” to the Soviet Union and promised to give the Russians all the
secrets he learned about in the military, why would U.S. officials agree to let
him back in the country, and with a communist wife? Why wouldn’t they indict
him or at least haul him before a federal grand jury to testify as to what
secrets he gave the Russians? Why wouldn’t they harass, abuse, humiliate,
persecute, or prosecute him, like they did to Martin Luther King, Dalton
Trumbo, John Walker Lindh, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and other people
they have deemed to be communists or traitors? How is it possible that Oswald
could learn fluent Russian while serving in the U.S. military without having
U.S. military tutors teaching him? How is it possible that a veteran who
embarrasses the U.S. Marine Corps by openly proselytizing for communism in New
Orleans is able to saunter across the Cold War stage of history, not long after
the McCarthy hearings, without nary a care in the world?
The answer: Helms lied.
There is no reasonable doubt that Oswald was a U.S. intelligence agent, one who
was ordered to travel to Mexico City to set the framework for his frame-up.
But things obviously went
dreadfully wrong in Mexico City, which is why the CIA had to shut down that
part of the post-assassination investigation. Not surprisingly, the CIA’s
Mexico City operations regarding Oswald are among the 98 percent of the records
that Trump and the CIA have chosen to continue keeping secret from the American
people, on grounds of “national security” of course.
Thus, when Oswald was claiming that he was being framed, there
could be only one entity that he could have been thinking about: the CIA, the
agency whose officials, as former Washington
Post investigative reporter Jefferson Morley has documented,
were secretly monitoring his activities in the weeks leading up to the
assassination, no doubt to ensure that Oswald had not figured out what was
about to happen to him.
We can assume that any
frame-up by the CIA is going to be good. The operation is going to be carefully
planned and executed.
But no plan is perfect.
Things are inevitably going to go wrong. The pieces aren’t going to fit
together perfectly. The Mexico City operation is a good example of that. That’s
why the CIA has to continue keeping those records secret.
But here’s another example,
a small but important one: Recall that Oswald supposedly hid the rifle before
he headed down the steps from the fourth floor of the school book depository.
Ask yourself: If someone has just assassinated the president of the United
States, is he really going to take the time to hide the rifle? What good would
that do? Wouldn’t officials conduct a thorough search of the area? Wouldn’t an
assassin instead simply leave the rifle there and get out of there as soon as
he could?
Then why the hidden rifle?
Because it’s consistent with a frame-up. The framers had to hide the rifle in
advance in a place where no one would see it during the morning of the
assassination, which took place after noon.
No matter how good a
frame-up was, the CIA knew that it could be detected with an aggressive
investigation. That’s where ingenuity and cunning come into play. They had to
figure out a way to shut down the investigation so that the frame-up would
remain intact.
That’s why they had shots
fired from the front and placed Oswald in the rear. The idea was that since an
investigation would lead to Oswald’s supposed communist confederates in the
front, which in turn would lead to nuclear war, the investigation had to be
shut down immediately, especially since it was the CIA itself that had started
the assassination game by repeatedly attempting, in partnership with the Mafia,
to assassinate Castro.
It was one of the most brilliant and cunning ruses in history.
They get the body out of Parkland by force, in violation of Texas law, and put
it in the hands of the military in Maryland, which conducts a secret fraudulent
and bogus autopsy. (See my book The Kennedy Autopsy.) Lyndon Johnson telephones Dallas
District Attorney Henry Wade on the night of the assassination and orders him
to shut down any investigation of a conspiracy because it might lead to nuclear
war. As soon as Oswald is assassinated, the FBI orders Wade to turn over all
his investigative files to the FBI. At the same time, Deputy Attorney General
Nicholas Katzenbach and FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover both write secret memos and
reports saying any further investigation must stop immediately. Lyndon Johnson
gets Earl Warren and Sen. Richard Russel to join the Warren Commission by
telling them that the assassination could lead to World War III. Johnson
appoints former CIA Director Allan Dulles, who Kennedy had fired as a result of
the CIA’s regime-change operation at the Bay of Pigs, to the Warren Commission,
thereby guaranteeing that there will be no investigation of the CIA.
Then keep all the records
secret for decades, when many people won’t care anymore who killed President
Kennedy. And employ Operation Mockingbird-like journalistic assets in the
private sector to flood the market with alternative “conspiracy theories” to
confound and confuse the public. And smear anyone who questions the official
narrative as a “communist sympathizer” or a “conspiracy theorist.”
The CIA’s cunning cover-up
in the JFK assassination worked brilliantly. Thanks to President Trump and the
CIA’s decision to continue keeping 98 percent of the CIA’s decades-long secret
records secret from the American people, the CIA’s cunning cover-up of the JFK
assassination continues to work brilliantly today.