See note 1.
Introduction
We were as surprised as anybody at the furore over Oliver Stone’s movie. When we published the Dean Andrews material and the analysis of the Clay Shaw U.K. contacts in Lobster 20, in November 1990, we did so in the certain knowledge that hardly anybody was still interested in the JFK case either here or in the USA. Still, here we are, very happy to return to the subject once again. In this section we have both contributed essays and book reviews, some contradictory. (There are three ‘theories’ about the assassination expressed here. As ‘Garrison’ said in that ridiculous closing speech in the movie, ‘It’s up to you’.)
RR
1. Stephen Dorril
- Mark Lane, Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK?, Plexus, 1992.
- Jim Marrs, Crossfire; The Plot that Killed Kennedy, Carroll & Graf, 1992.
- David E. Scheim, The Mafia Killed President Kennedy, Virgin, 1992.
- Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, Sphere, 1992.
The release of the Oliver Stone film has seen a crop of books reissued and repackaged on the assassination of President Kennedy. Summers’ Conspiracy remains the best. It packs in a great deal of information, its assessment of the evidence is very good, and while I do not agree with all of the conclusions, I agree with more of them than any other JFK book. Lane’s book is a mess and will only be of interest to real buffs. However, it contains slivers of information which were new to me, including some interesting material on the spook-backed journalist, Priscilla Johnson, and Oswald’s visits to the American embassy in Moscow; statements made by David Attlee Phillips and background on former CIA officer, William Corson; and a short biography of Howard Hunt, which shows him to be a much more interesting and well-connected CIA officer than previously portrayed. But these are all tidbits. Marrs’ effort, which was apparently extensively dipped into by Stone, should be avoided at all costs. Its passages on British intelligence are so wide of the mark that it made me wary of everything else in the book. Finally, there is Scheim’s re-issue which looks little different to the last edition. The title says it all — The Mafia killed President Kennedy — a bold statement for which there is not a shred of evidence.
The thesis that the Mafia killed Kennedy rests on a number of circumstantial points.
- The Mafia hated JFK and RFK.
True, a motive but not evidence of the murder. - Various Mafia leaders talked about a hit on JFK.
True, but unreliable. The majority of evidence relates to construction of alleged conversations a number of years later. The recent biography of Sam Giancana (Double Cross, Sam and Chuck Giancana, Macdonald, 1992) has to be judged as being totally unreliable with its lack of notes, reconstructed dialogue etc. All the alleged remarks made by Trafficante and others can be construed as direct threats or, more likely, expressions of what they hoped would happen. - Mafia links to Oswald.
These are so removed from Oswald, essentially his uncle in New Orleans, as to be irrelevant. Buffs who take these seriously are clutching at straws, particularly when links to other groups — the CIA, for one — are so much stronger. - Ruby knew Oswald.
We don’t know. The evidence is highly dubious. - Oswald was killed by mobster, Jack Ruby, therefore the Mafia killed Kennedy.
It has a straightforwardness which is highly compelling but it is not logical. - The CIA employed the Mafia in a series of assassination plots against Castro.
True, but at best only circumstantial evidence with regard to the JFK murder.
It is a fact that Ruby was linked to the Mafia but we have no evidence that Ruby killed Oswald on mob orders. I believe it to be true, but it could just as well have been a plot organised by Dallas policemen — for which there is a great deal of evidence — or right-wing oilmen with whom Ruby was indeed in contact. Ruby’s gun-running activities are also an area which might provide productive leads. Even accepting that the Mafia ordered Oswald’s death, it is does not follow that the Mafia were also responsible for the assassination of JFK. If we accept that the CIA/Mafia plots against Castro played a part in the assassination, then you could argue that the CIA killed JFK and then asked Ruby to silence Oswald.
The assassination conspiracy was clearly a failure: the President was murdered but the patsy survived for two days. It seems quite obvious to me that the real intention was for Oswald to be killed in the movie theatre (some of the new information on this epsiode in Summers’ book is important and fascinating). All the constructed biographies of Oswald were in place – – Communist, pro-Cuba, defector to the USSR etc. — but their power and influence on events was diluted by his survival. One can only surmise at what might have happened had Oswald been killed within an hour of the assassination. Some of the messages from intelligence units following the assassination suggest that one motive may have been to push the United States into an attack on Castro’s Cuba.
Before we reach that point, we should draw back. What would have happened if, instead of having a Coke in the rest room, Oswald had wandered outside and watched the motorcade? What if the check-shirted figure of Billy Loveday photographed on the Book Depository steps really had been Oswald? The point is that for the conspiracy to succeed Oswald had to be inside the Book Depository. Was Oswald ordered to remain inside? Did he receive (or make) a telephone call there? I believe that Oswald was having lunch at the moment the President was killed but his behaviour — total disinterest in the President’s visit — was distinctly odd. What was he really doing?
The whole conspiracy collapses if Oswald had not been employed by the Book Depository the short time before the 22 December, if the gun and shells had not been in the building; most importantly, if the route of the motorcade had not been changed, and if Oswald had not been inside the building at 12.30. The conspiracy was not simple, it was extremely complex and well-organised. For these and other reasons, I believe that the conspiracy was beyond the means of the Mafia.
As far as I am aware there is no recorded instance in the United States of the Mafia organising a triangular fire assassination in the open. The Mafia have much easier ways — poison, car bombs; a gun to the chest, fire, and the assassin escapes in the confusion, a la Robert Kennedy. The mob had many chances of getting close to Kennedy but did not use the opportunity. The only group capable of pulling off an assassination of the type which claimed JFK were covert branches of the intelligence agencies or former personnel. The assassination attempts on General De Gaulle are an interesting comparison.
The important point about the events in Dealey Plaza is that everything was done in the open. It was so alarmingly public. It must have been quite obvious to the watchers in the intelligence services that one of their own had done the deed. And, of course, that was the entire intention. The immediate knee-jerk reaction would have been cover-up at all costs.
When did the conspiracy begin? Although the facts of Oswald’s life before the assassination are fascinating and important, we should perhaps concentrate on the activities of the conspirators — whoever you choose — in, say, the two months before the assassination. They may have wanted to get rid of Kennedy for some time but the actual planning would only have been undertaken a few weeks before the event. During those last weeks someone then pulled out Oswald’s file and thought that here was the man they were seeking as the patsy.
There is no straight line in Oswald’s career as a patsy. As a young man he clearly had been of some kind of low-level intelligence interest, then he went to the USSR, probably as some kind of false defector organised by Naval Intelligence. When the KGB failed to take the bait he came back to start a new career as a COINTELPRO agent, flirting with Marxism and pro- Cuban activities. (Incidentally, while a great deal of research has concentrated on his time in New Orleans with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, this has obscured the fact that this link actually began in Dallas, just before his mentor, George de Mohrenschildt, left for Haiti.) This operation also seemed to fail, although it may have been tied to the strange goings-on in Mexico in September 1963 which seemed designed to present Oswald as a potential defector to Cuba.
My own theory on the assassination is as follows. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy brothers had angered the anti-Castro crusaders in the intelligence community by banning covert activity against Cuba from American soil. The solution to this problem was to use one of the islands in the Caribbean as a base for launching a new covert war. The chosen base was Haiti, controlled by the hated Papa Doc. An alliance of the CIA, Military Intelligence, anti-Castro Cubans, possibly Mafia finance, and with Kennedy support, would organise an invasion in late 1963. The fall of Papa Doc fitted in with Kennedy philosophy, would be electorally popular, and would provide the much needed launch pad for the assault on Cuba.
A number of events can be re-interpreted to fit in with this theory. De Mohrenschildt’s trip to the island in April 1963 was part of the general process. The Silvia Odio incident involved mercenaries who were in fact visiting an anti-Castro Cuban in the same block of flats, who was later involved in plots in Haiti. The mercenaries, who later spread Oswald stories, said that they were on their way to a covert operation against Haiti. There was a general build-up in the months before the assassination. And then it all went wrong. In October 1963 Kennedy vetoed the Haiti plan. One can imagine the anger of the people who already thought the President was soft on communism and Castro. It is at this point, I believe, that they decided that the target was closer to home.
2. Robin Ramsay
Although I usually hate drama-docs, the film itself was actually very good. I could have done without the domestic sub-theme and most of the closing speech, and some of the exposition was rather clumsy, but on the whole it was hard to resist. (My favourite section was the marvellous cameo of Guy Bannister by Ed Asner.) In my view it matters not a jot that Stone’s version of the event itself is flawed, that the picture of Garrison is ludicrously romanticised, and so on. The right-wing media got it right: it is psychological warfare, and it makes a pleasant change to hear the screams of protest coming from the Right.
Kennedy’s murder was last used in a psywar project in the struggle to generate a new Cold War in the late seventies, via Edward J. Epstein’s rubbishy Legend. With research funded by the Readers’ Digest, one of Langley’s major psy-war tools of the post-war years, Legend tried to restore the KGB as Oswald’s ultimate paymasters. (2) His links to the CIA, FBI and anti-Castro Cuban movements disappeared. It was childish drivel but quite effective nonetheless. You may not be able to fool all the media all of the time, but you certainly can fool some of the media some of the time, especially the bits that have or have had a covert relationship with the Anglo- American secret states. Legend got tons of favourable publicity from the Anglo-American right media.
It wasn’t just the Stone movie, of course, which transformed the climate: more that JFK was the piece which set the whole mass critical. The thirteen years in office of the Anglo-American Right have been unprecedentedly seedy, a long, overlapping sequence of parapolitical scandals. Stone’s movie has focused the attention. This is not just nostalgic interest in a 30 year-old murder. The fact that Stone’s movie has been a success indicates both that the tide has turned against the Right, and is also part of that movement.
These pivotal events also flush out the right-wing media.(3) Here the Sunday Telegraph — allegiance basically with MI6 — ran a leader on JFK on February 2, titled ‘Reshooting Kennedy’. This rehashed not only the central theme of the 1967 CIA memo on the assassination to its assets (reprinted in this issue), that a member of the plot would have sold his story by now, it also tried to explain the final backwards motion of Kennedy’s head by a shot from behind him by way of ‘neuromuscular reaction to sudden destruction of the brain’s nerve centres’. This preposterous nonsense, I seem to remember, first appeared sometime during the House Committee investigation. In rehashing it the Telegraph has usefully reminded us how far some people are prepared to go to try and maintain the single assassin theory. (4)
Over at the Sunday Times — basic orientation for the past few years Army/MI5 — on 26 January, James Adams, the Times‘ chief spook-contact for those years, now the paper’s U.S. correspondent, was trotted out. Kennedy buffs are no longer a handful of cranks and sixties hold-overs according to Adams, but part of a ‘Billion dollar conspiracy industry that thrives on Kennedy’s death’, to quote the headline of his piece. Adams returns us to the simple world in which Oswald is a ‘Marxist and Soviet sympathiser’ and Jack Ruby a ‘nightclub owner’. All the rest is uncertain, though, concludes Adams, and we conspiracy theorists are to blame: ‘So muddy have the waters become that nobody will ever know the truth of what happened that day in Dallas’.
The central difficulty with the assassination is that the extant information on the conspiracy and its cover-up can be pretty plausibly reworked in many directions. Steve Dorril (above) has offered his current favourite theory. Though I am now reasonably convinced that the Mafia shot Kennedy, I share with many of the buffs a lingering desire to see the American state in there somewhere. My current favourite speculative theory which accommodates the U.S. state involves the so-called apertura a sinistra or opening to the left in Italy.
Nearly ten years ago former BOSS agent Gordon Winter replied to a letter from Steve Dorril about BOSS’s view of the assassination with the answer that BOSS files had attributed it to ‘a General named Walters’. In 1963 Vernon Walters was Military Attaché in Rome. (It may be a coincidence that in Walters’ autobiography there is nothing at all on what he was doing in 1963.) Also in Rome in 1963 as CIA station chief was William Harvey, who, it is widely reported, hated the Kennedys.
To these fragments add contacts between the Mafia in the U.S. and the CIA, the U.S. Mafia’s links with Italy, and you have the ingredients for a satisfying scenario in which Agency/Pentagon concern at the policy in Italy is translated into a Mafia hit in Dallas, with Oswald the designated stooge. All that is missing is evidence. But the lack of evidence was never a serious handicap in this field, was it?
Notes
- The title of this piece was the title of Garrison’s first book on the assassination.
- I analysed Legend in Lobster 2, an essay which will be reprinted in a collection of the best of the early Lobster which is slowly being assembled. On the CIA and the Reader’s Digest see Fred Landis, ‘The CIA and the Reader’s Digest’, in Covert Action Information Bulletin No 29.
- An entertaining rather than comprehensive survey of U.S. press reaction, past and present, is in Extra! March 1992 from FAIR, 130 W 25th St. New York NY10001. $2.50 in the U.S.
4 The all-time best example of this was the New York Times. Faced with the House Committee’s conclusion of ‘probable conspiracy’ in 1979, the NYT simply doubled the number of ‘lone nuts’, suggesting that there must have two madmen in Dallas that day.