The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Virginia. “We reconstructed the whole thing,” said Hathcock, “the angle, the range, the moving target, the time limit, the obstacles, everything. I don’t know how many times we tried it, but we couldn’t duplicate what the Warren Commission said Oswald did. Now if I can’t do it, how in the world could a guy who was a non-qual on the rifle range and later only qualified ‘marksman’ do it?”

Disregarding the truly lunatic theories that John F. Kennedy was murdered by Martin Bormann (who, like Elvis Presley, never dies) or time-travelling aliens, the finger of suspicion points at four main potential culprits: The Communists

Early JFK conspiracy theories centred on the USSR and its stooges. Kennedy had, of course, gone toe-to-toe with the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Plot and Counterplot Edward J. Epstein suggested that Dallas was payback time by a smarting Moscow. Oswald, who had once defected to the USSR but returned to the US, was according to this hypothesis a KGB agent. A variant is that the Communist leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro, organized the assassination. As LBJ neatly put it: “Kennedy was trying to kill Castro. Castro got him first.” The strongest evidence in support of the Castro theory is that Oswald contacted the Cuban embassy in Mexico City in September 1963; but whether this was on his own initiative or at the instigation of the Cuban Intelligence Service, G-2, is unknown.

Against the Communist and/or Castro hypothesis is that both Cuba and the USSR were in rapprochement with Kennedy at the time of his assassination. During its investigation, HSCA visited Cuba and interviewed Castro about Cuban complicity in Kennedy’s assassination. He replied:

That [the Cuban Government might have been involved in Kennedy’s death] was insane. From the ideological point of view it was insane. And from the political point of view, it was a tremendous insanity. I am going to tell you here that nobody, nobody ever had the idea of such things. What would it do? We just tried to defend our folks here, within our territory. Anyone who subscribed to that idea would have been judged insane… absolutely sick. Never, in 20 years of revolution, I never heard anyone suggest nor even speculate about a measure of that sort, because who could think of the idea of organizing the death of the President of the United States? That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country, which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years, in every possible sense. Since the United States is much more powerful than we are, what could we gain from a war with the United States? The United States would lose nothing. The destruction would have been here.

Obviously Castro might have been lying to HSCA, but his point is good: why give the US a 22-carat pretext to invade Cuba by assassinating its leader?

Castro/the USSR assassinated JFK: ALERT LEVEL 3

LBJ

In 2003 Barr McClellan published Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK, which argued that Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson, together with an accomplice, Edward Clark, planned and covered up the assassination in Dallas. LBJ certainly had a motive: aside from the intrinsic attraction of succeeding to the most important job in the world, Johnson was the subject of four major criminal investigations involving government contract violations, misappropriation of funds, money-laundering and bribery at the time of Kennedy’s murder. All these investigations were terminated upon LBJ’s assumption of the Presidency. Worse, LBJ knew Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, a convicted murderer who was the sometime boyfriend of LBJ’s sister Josefa; in 1998 JFK assassination researcher Walt Brown announced that he had identified a fingerprint in the “sniper’s nest” in the Book Depository as belonging to Wallace. Former CIA officer and Watergate agent E. Howard Hunt also implicated LBJ in a deathbed confession, along with CIA agents Bill Harvey, Cord Meyer, Bill Harvey and David Sanchez Morales; in Hunt’s confession the shooter was named Lucien Sarti and shot Kennedy from the grassy knoll. Hunt, according to his own account, was one of the “three hoboes” seen on the grassy knoll on the afternoon of 22 November 1963.

LBJ apparently had no shortage of willing helpers. Mark North’s Act of Treason (1991) posits that LBJ was helped by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who was known to loathe JFK and his brother Bobby, the Attorney General.

LBJ conspired to kill his predecessor: ALERT LEVEL 6

CIA and Anti-Castro Cuban Exile Conspiracy

Something very bad is going on within the CIA and I want to know what it is. I want to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds.

President John F. Kennedy

Kennedy despised the CIA for bungling the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, and afterwards accepted the resignation of the CIA chief Allen Dulles. The Agency reciprocated Kennedy’s feeling because, aside from his stinging criticism, he was intending to withdraw from Vietnam and seek detente with the Communists. According to Crime and Cover-Up (1977) by Peter Dale Scott, Kennedy’s initiatives would have caused the scaling down of the CIA empire, as well as the curbing of its lucrative narcotics-trafficking business. The Military-Industrial Complex financed the hit, since it had a vested interest in continuing the war in ’Nam, from which it was making billions. Assassination was the CIA’s stock-in-trade. It had participated in the successful murders of two (at least) heads of state, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Why not murder its own head of state? It had the expertise, after all.

HSCA reviewed these theories and concluded that, although Oswald assassinated Kennedy in a conspiracy with others, the conspiracy did not include any US Intelligence agencies. HSCA did believe, however, that anti- Castro Cuban exiles might have participated in Kennedy’s murder. These exiles had worked closely with CIA operatives in covert operations against Castro’s Cuba.

The CIA assassinated JFK: ALERT LEVEL 2.5

Anti-Castro Cuban exiles assassinated JFK: ALERT LEVEL 7

The Mob

The HSCA investigation also identified the Mafia as possible conspirators in the plot to assassinate Kennedy. The Mob, so the theory runs, murdered JFK in retaliation for the heat put upon them by Attorney General Robert Kennedy (who had increased by 12 times the number of prosecutions under President Eisenhower). What HSCA was too discreet to mention was that the Kennedys had long been in bed with the Mob (literally in the case of JFK, who had an affair with Sam Giancana’s girlfriend Judith Campbell Exner) and had used Mafia money in the campaign to secure the White House. The Mob didn’t like the campaign against them, and even less did it like the Kennedys’ hypocrisy. Mafia bosses Carlos Marcello, Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr top the list of HSCA gangster suspects. For good measure, HSCA also found ties, admittedly tenuous, between Oswald, Jack Ruby and the Marcello mob of New Orleans. Ruby, a sometime foot soldier for Capone in Chicago, was tasked with “offing” Oswald before he could squeal. An argument against Mafia culpability is that the JFK assassination did not bear the hallmark of Mafia hits, which tend to be up close and personal; if the Mob did kill Kennedy then it must have hired a trained military marksman, possibly someone in or on the dissident fringes of the CIA, with whom the Mob had co-operated in attempted assassinations of Castro.

An added twist to the Mob theory is given by Mark North in Act of Treason, in which he claims that Marcello tipped off J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI in 1962 that the assassination was being planned. Hoover, who despised Kennedy’s civil rights agenda, intentionally sat on the information and let JFK