The Men with the Guns
G.F. Newman (Sphere, London 1984)
I’ve got a lot of time for G.F. Newman. He’s written some of the best, sharpest, things about contemporary Britain: the Law and Order series and the Terry Sneed novels are the obvious places to start. But this – perhaps because of the shift to an American location and American characters – isn’t so good.
The ‘men with the guns’ are the gunmen who shot Kennedy, and the book’s plot concerns a hunt for them a decade or more later. It’s a good idea but it doesn’t quite come off, neither as a thriller, nor as a roman a clef about the Kennedy assassination. But there is material of interest here for the student of conspiracy theories. For this, to my knowledge, is the first book which has included within it the basic thesis from The Gemstone File, an American samizdat which has been floating around the world since 1976.
The Gemstone File is interesting to me because it got me started in all this muck when it appeared in the late lamented International Times in 1977. Being the pedantic academic that I am, I responded to its appearance by saying ‘hey, far out’, but then going through a couple of libraries trying to check out some of its more startling claims.
(For those unfamiliar with the Gemstone File, its central thesis is that a ‘Mr Big’ has been in control of things for most of the post-war era – one Aristotle Onassis – and he knocked off Kennedy, organised the Vietnam war, kidnapped and murdered H. Hughes etc etc.)
The thesis is, of course, almost entirely baloney, the paranoid megalomaniac fantasies of its author, someone called Bruce Roberts. But it is spiced with enough ‘solid’ bits and pieces to make it interesting. But then it isn’t clear if I should believe ‘the thesis’ at all. For there are several versions of the damned thing floating around – at least four that I know of.
There’s the ‘original’ 1976 version, a much photocopied version with the imprint of the ‘Jessie James Press, New York’ on it. As far as I know this version came via the Californian conspiracy buff, Mae Brussel. The author, Roberts, gave Brussel his entire oeuvre – about 400 pages of hand-written ravings. Brussel then handed them over to someone else to make sense of – and so the world received the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File, a precis of the more intelligible sections.
At this point things get complicated. Another version – the original, slightly expanded – appeared in Larry Flynt’s magazine Hustler in 1978. A third version appeared in 1980, entitled Beyond The Gemstone Files. It claimed to have being ‘written’ by one Peter Renzo, who claimed to be an ex-CIA agent. (A story and excerpts from this appeared in the Boston Globe April 19 1980). Renzo was, of course, a bullshitter, and, as the excerpts show, all he was peddling was Roberts’s original with one or two things added.
Of more interest was the fact that the publisher of Renzo’s little scam was Fighting Tigers Inc. I don’t know who this is, but it bears a striking resemblance to the ‘China Lobby’ – linked organisation of the Chennaults.
Finally a fourth version appeared, a compilation of three other versions, put together by the American researcher, Ace Hayes Jnr.
RR