If you were ever skeptical of John F. Kennedy’s
assassination being an inside job, this is the story that could change your mind.
Welcome to what many believe to be the most convincing of all JFK conspiracy theories.
Before we talk about the evidence, and there’s tons of it that may surprise even our most
skeptical viewers, we need to talk a little bit about the motive. Why would the CIA, perhaps
with various other officials of the American government, want to take out their own President.
After all, if found guilty, it’s a crime that would disgrace America forever more.
The risk involved was monumental, so there had to be a very, very big reason to go through
with such a risky and treasonous plan. So, we’ll start our story in Cuba, Varadero
Beach to be exact, about two hours from the capital of Havana. The French journalist Jean
Daniel is having lunch in the living room of the summer residence of the Cuban leader,
Fidel Castro, a man the CIA went to almost ridiculous lengths to try and assassinate. At about 1.30 pm, Cuban time, the phone rang.
The news from the other end was that someone had tried to assassinate John F. Kennedy.
Castro and Daniel had already talked quite a lot about Kennedy before they received that
news. The Cuban leader pointed out that he was reassured by how JFK and the Soviet Union
leader Nikita Khrushchev had been getting along so well, and that they were possibly
working to effectively end the Cold War. At one point, Castro told Daniel, “I know
that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with. I have gotten this impression
from all my conversations with Khrushchev.” Castro told him that he was looking forward
to working with Kennedy once the President secured a second term. This was a man the
CIA despised. So, when news outlets confirmed that Kennedy
was dead, Castro, according to Daniel, was very solemn. Castro turned to him and said,
“Everything is changed. Everything is going to change.”
It certainly did. There were to be no peace talks with the Soviet Union, that’s for
sure. The Cold War would rage on for many more years.
On March 13, 1962, the United States Army general, Lyman Lemnitzer, who was the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented a plan to the Secretary of Defense, a man JFK
trusted, Robert McNamara. Like many of the people working in the highest
echelons of American military and intelligence, Lemnitzer wanted to invade Cuba. Nonetheless,
to do that, the US would need a good reason, so, Lemnitzer introduced Operation Northwoods
to McNamara. This plan pretty much sums up the kind of people that surrounded Kennedy.
Operation Northwoods was what’s called a false flag operation, a fabricated event,
in which a fake hostile action requires an offensive response. Lemnitzer wanted to attack
the US military bases and blame it on the Cubans. Among the bullets and bombs, US intelligence
propagandists would spread rumors on the radio about this vicious attack on innocent Americans.
They would hire friendly Cubans to walk around close to the attacks in Cuban military uniforms.
They’d then pretend to capture those men. There would be fires set, aircrafts burned,
installations bombed, ships attacked, and later even funerals for the mock victims.
Lemnitzer said they would publish casualty lists in all the biggest newspapers, along
with sad stories, to get enough popular support to start an invasion of Cuba.
In Part 4 of the proposal, he wrote, “We could develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign
in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even Washington.” He said there would
be “wounding” of innocent people to be “widely publicized.” They wanted to “explode”
a few plastic bombs “in carefully chosen spots.” US citizens would be outraged, and,
of course, they’d say yes, go and kill those commie terrorist bastardos. As crazy as this
sounds, it was par for the course. Such subversion was not unusual during the Cold War.
Lemnitzer said all the Joint Chiefs were on board with the plan and the CIA was firing
on all cylinders to make it happen. They believed the evil Communists had to be stopped at any
cost, which is partly why the CIA committed or encouraged human rights abuses all over
the world during the Cold War. This was the political environment JFK entered
when he was elected President. To appreciate the JFK assassination conspiracy theory, you
have to understand what lengths certain people in the US military and intelligence would
go to. Kennedy dismissed Operation Northwoods, telling Lemnitzer and other key advisors that
he could not foresee anything in the near future that would “justify and make desirable
the use of American forces for overt military action” in Cuba. This is all well-documented,
as is everything we will tell you today. JFK was isolated in his own government, according
to the conspiracy theory. He’d already lost support among many of his advisors after the
1961 Bay of Bigs incident when the CIA secretly sent 1,400 Cuban exiles they’d trained into
Cuba. Kennedy was a much younger president, one with different ideas about how to carry
out politics. This plan had been drawn up during the Eisenhower administration before
him, and even though JFK would go on to dismiss similar plans during his term, at the end
of the day, he was expected to do what he was told.
This all started when Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. The CIA now wanted to throw Castro out, just
as they’d covertly done already with success to leaders in Iran and Guatemala, with plenty
of assassinations on the way. To get the job done, Cuban exiles were trained by the US
at guerilla training camps in Guatemala. American involvement was supposed to be kept secret,
which didn’t happen. The whole thing was a total disaster. Castro’s
troops won and then captured many of the exiles. Kennedy later told friends that the Bay of
Pigs was “a trap”. The older men around him had thought he’d be drawn into sending
troops in. He told his friends Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell, “They were sure I’d
give in to them.” He added, “They couldn’t believe a new President like me wouldn’t
panic.” He said, “They had me figured out all wrong.”
JFK did not trust many of the older guys who advised him, and especially the CIA director
Allen Dulles. Dulles admitted in memoirs found after his death that the plan was always to
get Kennedy to send in the troops rather than “permit the enterprise to fail.” Instead,
JFK handed Cuba $53 million worth of baby foods and medicine in exchange for the prisoners
Castro had taken. It was a total embarrassment, and while JFK gave the green light on assassination
plans for Castro, he still had to keep pushing back the hawks around him that kept telling
him to invading Cuba. Then there was Vietnam. The US had been active
in Vietnam for years. In 1954, Vice President Richard Nixon said, “If the French withdrew,
the United States might have to take the risk now by putting our own boys in.” The CIA
later helped French forces through its Saigon Military Mission (SMM), directing paramilitary
campaigns against the Communists and assisting with propaganda. The US even considered using
tactical nukes on Vietnam to help the embattled French under Operation Vulture.
Much later, in May 1961, JFK agreed to send 500 Special Forces troops and military advisors
to help the pro-Western government of South Vietnam. A year later, close to 11,000 American
military advisors were working in South Vietnam, and, of course, Kennedy approved that. The
Americans did not want the Communists overrunning South East Asia. So, under JFK, US presence
did indeed increase, but Kennedy would soon start thinking differently about Vietnam.
He was under a lot of pressure to send actual combat troops into Vietnam. As the Pentagon
Papers later showed, he was willing to send in advisors and let the CIA do what it needed
to do, but he was against sending in “units capable of independent combat.”
The Pentagon Papers, by the way, were thousands of pages of top-secret Department of Defense
actions up until 1968 in Indochina. They were released in 1971 and showed the American public
a very different side to military America, which would include secret campaigns in Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia, and result in many, many thousands of dead civilians. The CIA was out
of control, which likely wouldn’t have happened had JFK not been taken out. That’s what
the conspiracy theorists think. Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst and
activist behind the Pentagon Papers, had always been unsure about where Kennedy had stood
on Vietnam. It didn’t seem to make sense to him, sending in more men yet remaining
reluctant to send in the combat troops. So, he asked JFK’s brother, Robert Kennedy (RFK),
when he got the chance in 1967. RFK, soon to be assassinated (1968), too, told him that
his brother had rejected “the urgent advice of every one of his top military and civilian
officials,” which was to send in the troops. Years later, Ellsberg recorded this conversation
and said this is what RFK had said when he was asked why his brother wouldn’t send
in those combat troops. RFK said, “Because we already were there in 1951! We saw what
was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother was determined, determined to never
let that happen to us.” JFK knew what would happen partly because
of Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who he’d sent on a fact-finding mission
to South Vietnam in 1962. Mansfield returned and told JFK that getting into a war in Vietnam
would be a mistake. JFK later signed national security action memorandum 217, which forbade
“high-ranking military and civilian personnel” from going into South Vietnam without State
Department clearance. This rattled the Pentagon. JFK told Mansfield he was thinking about a
full withdrawal from Vietnam, but he would wait. His actual words were, “But I can’t
do it until 1965 after I’m reelected.” If he tried before, he’d be criticized by
the conservatives and might lose some of the vote.
JFK told his friend and consultant, a man we mentioned earlier,
Kenneth O'Donnell, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular Presidents in history.
I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser, but I don’t care.”
McNamara later surprised the military hierarchy in a meeting in Honolulu when he told them
“1,000 US military personal” were to be “withdrawn from South Vietnam by the end
of the calendar year 63.” McNamara told them to draw up concrete plans. It seems the
military had other ideas. After JFK’s death, those combat troops were
sent en masse. This happened when US officials and, subsequently, the media, said there’d
been an unprovoked attack on American vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin.
But the facts about this attack were, at best, manipulated, and, at worst, totally contrived.
They served as a pretext to go to war with Vietnam. The “Tonkin Gulf Resolution”
written by Congress gave the President virtually unlimited power to do whatever he wanted in
Southeast Asia, a power that was very much exercised by both Lyndon B. Johnson and later,
Richard Nixon. Almost 200 documents that the National Security
Agency (NSA) declassified in 2005 and 2006 show us that Congress was misled. We won’t
go into all the details today, but what was said and what happened were two very different
things, and at the time the misinformation was enough to make war with Vietnam look justifiable.
But JFK’s Vietnam withdrawal plan wasn’t everything. In July 1993, a Canadian newspaper
through a freedom of information request had 21 secret letters that were written between
JFK and Khrushchev declassified. They talked about mountains and lakes and other beautiful
things, and they also talked about atomic weapons and the destruction of the world.
In one letter, Khrushchev compared their situation to the mythological Noah’s Ark, saying they
might see each other as clean and unclean, but in the bigger scheme of things, they were
on the same Ark together and wanted the same thing. They did not want to blow the whole
world up. JFK replied, saying he liked that analogy, adding, “Whatever our differences,
our collaboration to keep the peace is as urgent, if not more urgent, than our collaboration
to win the last world war.” They might have been on friendly terms in
those letters, but that didn’t stop the Cuban Missile Crisis. After the Americans
deployed missiles in Italy and Turkey the Soviets deployed ballistic missiles in Cuba.
This was fighting talk. In fact, what happened next is generally thought to be the closest
the world ever came to a nuclear war, despite both countries knowing that many, many millions
of innocent people would die. In the middle of the crisis, JFK was under
pressure to launch an attack, which he knew would mean a full scale nuclear war. RFK,
who was then the US attorney general, told the Russian Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin,
“We are under severe stress. In fact, we are under pressure from our military to use
force against Cuba.” He then said please pass this message to Khrushchev through “unofficial
channels.” He said even though the President is against any action against Cuba, “an
irreversible chain of events could occur against his will.”...Against his will…This is
important to understand. JFK knew when people such as General Curtis
LeMay said to hit them now and be done with it, they were deadly serious. In that particular
instance, JFK replied sarcastically, “And what do you think the reprisal would be?”
JFK later told his friend and Special Assistant, Dave Powers, “Can you imagine LeMay saying
something like that? These brass hats have one advantage in their favor. If we listen
to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they
were wrong.” JFK and Khrushchev came to an agreement. Khrushchev
withdrew those missiles from Cuba. The US did the same in Europe, but that was done
in secret, so Mr. Khrushchev lost the vote of confidence in Russia. He was seen as a
weak man for trying to save the world from obliteration. JFK later told the historian Arthur Meier
Schlesinger Jr., “The military are mad. They wanted me to do this.” They were also
mad at him, not just mad in general. They got even madder when he made his commencement
address at the American University in Washington on June 10, 1963. He started the speech by
telling the students in attendance he wanted to focus on one topic: Peace. His words have
gone down in US history. To understand why he was taken out, you need to hear some of
this speech. Like Eisenhower before him, JFK understood the danger of what had become what
Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.”
“What kind of peace do we seek?” JFK asked. “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world
by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.
I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living,
the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for
their children.” Music to the ears of many Americans but not what the military-industrial
complex wanted to hear. He talked about wasting billions of dollars
on nuclear weapons that could destroy the world. He said peace would not be easy, but
the US and its enemies should work toward “mutual tolerance,” and he added that
“disarmament” was favorable to war. He even had the nerve to say, “Let us reexamine
our attitude toward the Soviet Union.” A war with this enemy, he said, would destroy
“All we have built, all we have worked for.” He said he hoped, “Our military forces are
committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary
irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.” He said the words “peace” and “disarmament.
The word peace for the Pentagon is like garlic for a vampire.
Did JFK really mean it, though? Was he serious about disarmament and ending the Cold War?
Documents on this matter and his actions say yes, he was serious, according to the conspiracy
theorists. With all of these talks of peace and disarmament, JFK had basically put a target
on his head. Then on July 25, 1963, JFK delivered a 26-minute televised address on the nuclear
test-ban agreement. He and Khrushchev had agreed not to test new nuclear weapons. Kennedy told Americans in their living rooms
that since the nuclear weapons had been created, “all mankind has been struggling to escape
from the darkening prospect of mass destruction on earth.” This was not disarmament, but
he did say, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
On October 11 that year, he signed the initial order to withdraw 1,000 troops from Vietnam.
That target on his head got much bigger. In Action Memorandum 263, he said that the “major
part of the U.S. military task” In Vietnam “can be completed by the end of 1965.”
This memorandum later came out in the Pentagon Papers.
Even so, when JFK signed that order, the CIA was doing things in Vietnam that he had no
control over. The reporter and editor for the Washington Daily News, Richard Starnes,
wrote that the CIA had penetrated every branch of the American government in Saigon. They
ran the show. There was what Kennedy wanted in South East Asia, and there was what the
CIA wanted. They were out of control and always had been, which is why Kennedy said he would
“splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”
He said this about an agency that hired mafia assassins to take out politicians and had
an assassination manual that talked about throwing people from buildings to make their
deaths look like an accident. The manual explained in some cases, a CIA assassination must be
made to look like it was committed by “a fanatic of some sort.” It added, “Politics,
religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives…Although it is intended that he
[the assassin] die in the act.” You’ll hear more about this kind of fanatic
assassin later, but first, let’s finish this first part of the show, our motive explanation,
with national security memorandum 239, which was titled “U.S. Disarmament Proposals”
and was signed by John F. Kennedy. It said:
“I have in no way changed my views of the desirability of a test ban treaty or the value
of our proposals on general and complete disarmament. Further, the events of the last two years
have increased my concern for the consequences of an un-checked continuation of the arms
race between ourselves and the Soviet Bloc.” He wanted to again talk about “general and
complete disarmament” of nuclear weapons, and he said he would be the one to lead the
talks to make this happen. He was, effectively, talking about ending the arms race and possibly
the Cold War. He meant what he had told those students about peace and stopping humanity’s
slow crawl to total annihilation. Ending the Cold War, say the conspiracy theorists, was
about as much as JFK’s official foes could take.
The target on his head was shining like the North Star on a clear night. Kennedy now only
had a few months of his life left to live. Now you have a motive, but as yet, no evidence.
On October 31, 1957, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald arrived at the American Embassy in
Moscow and met the Consul, Richard Snyder. Oswald, who two months before had been discharged
from the US Marine Corps, told Snyder he wanted to renounce his US citizenship. He then handed
Snyder a letter that explained, “My allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
In an era of rabid anti-communism in the US, this was incredibly risky, especially if Oswald
ever returned to the US. The Soviet officials who were present were
led to believe that Oswald “might know something of special interest.” Oswald said he “would
make known to them all the information concerning the Marine Corps and his specialty therein.”
All this is documented. But what did he know? Wasn’t he just a regular
soldier, as people were later told? It’s often said that Oswald was a kind of
a nobody in the military, but his job as a radar operator at Atsugi air force base in
Japan was not a nobody’s job. This this was a crucial base of operations for the CIA
as it acted as its headquarters in that part of the world. With one more base in the region,
this was where the CIA’s very secretive U2 spy planes took off from.
This program was run by CIA officer Richard Bissel, who worked closely with CIA director Allen
Dulles, both of whom were tasked with using these planes for spying missions over the
Soviet Union. Rather than a nobody, Oswald had “crypto”
clearance at the radar control room where he worked, meaning the most top-secret of
top-secret clearance. Oswald often listened to the radio communications of the U2. He
certainly would have known many things the Soviet Union would have wanted to know.
Marine Corps Lieutenant John E. Donovan was later Oswald’s officer at another base where
Oswald had the same access to ultra-top secret information, but what’s incredibly strange
is that when the Warren Commission later interviewed Donovan about Oswald’s involvement in JFK’s
death, they asked not one thing about Oswald’s U2 work and his access to top-secret information.
You’d think that would have been important, say the conspiracy theorists.
When Donovan was asked about that years later by a writer, he told the writer that he actually
asked the Warren Commission investigators, “Don’t you want to know anything about
the U2.” They replied, “We asked you exactly what we wanted to know from you, and we asked
you everything we wanted for now, and that’s all.”
Donovan then asked another guy from the program if they had asked him about Oswald’s U2
work, and he confirmed that he wasn’t asked about it either. Weird. It’s also weird
that six months after Oswald defected, the first U2 plane was shot down by the Soviets.
It was as if they had insider information. But guess what, when a year later, Oswald
returned to the US after some factory work in Minsk, the Americans, who had been made
aware of Oswald’s possible connection to the U2 attack, allowed him to walk right back
into the country without a problem. They gave him a passport and even a loan just
24 hours after he applied for the passport. This was insane considering that Oswald had
worked on classified spying technology and defected to the enemy shortly after, many
would see this as treason, something fishy was going on. People who later wrote about
this said every single obstacle was removed for Oswald on his return to the US. The Warren
Commission never uttered a word about Oswald’s Crypto clearance and his U2 work, but why?
Something else the Warren Commission didn’t talk about was the fact that Oswald worked
near the CIA site in Japan where MKUltra mind control experiments were conducted on captives
and its own soldiers. A CIA memo declassified just recently titled “Truth Drugs in Interrogation”
tells us that the CIA dosed agents who performed “dangerous overseas missions.”
Maybe the Warren Commission didn’t know about the mind control stuff, but that would
be surprising since the Commission used CIA and FBI personnel for the investigations.
Yes, some say the CIA was tasked with investigating a crime it had committed.
Former CIA agent Victor Marchetti, who wrote a book saying many things the CIA did not
want to be published, said back then, the CIA ran an operation from the Office of Naval
Intelligence in which young men were to appear like they were angry at the US and disenchanted
with its capitalist ways. They were then sent to the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe as spies.
About 40 men were in the program. Each of them was trained at Nag’s Head, North Carolina.
They learned how to act and what to say, with the Americans knowing the KGB would pick these
men up at some point. The Americans hoped the KGB would try and turn them into spies,
making them valuable double agents. Is that what Oswald was doing when he went
to the Soviet Union? Very possibly say the conspiracy theorists.
Oswald’s former roommate in the US, James Botelho, said Oswald’s whole pro-communist
thing was a total lie, a pretense. He told writers that Oswald was actually “anti-Communist.”
He added, “I was sure that Oswald was on an intelligence operation in Russia.” He
said when Oswald returned and was welcomed back with open arms, not even being questioned
by US police or intelligence, he knew that Oswald was definitely working for intelligence.
Moreover, considering Oswald defected to the USSR and told the guys at the embassy on record
that he had information to give the Soviets, how come he could move around without constantly
being surveilled? How did he manage to kill JFK with that kind of history, with the CIA
knowing he was working where JFK would one day pass through? The conspiracy theorists
say this makes about as much sense as the movie Inception…Well, they didn’t say
that exactly, but you get the point. It’s believed a man named George de Mohrenschildt
was Oswald’s CIA handler. In 1977, he gave an interview saying that this was true. He
explained that a CIA agent named J Walton Moore put him in touch with Oswald. Mohrenschildt
said, “I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore hadn’t sanctioned
it.” The New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, depicted in the movie JFK by Kevin
Costner, called Mohrenschildt a CIA “babysitter.” Garrison said some of Mohrenschildt’s family
told him Oswald had been made a scapegoat for JFK’s assassination.
Mohrenschildt’s wife and daughter said on record that he was the one who got Oswald
a job in Dallas at a graphics art company. This firm, Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, was, according
to the Warren Commission, just a regular “commercial advertising” outfit, and left out the fact
the company made highly classified maps for the U.S. Army, possibly maps of Cuba and the
Soviet Union, which Oswald could have helped with.
Three hours after Mohrenschildt opened his mouth about his relationship with Oswald,
he was found dead in a house in Florida. This happened just minutes after Gaeton Fonzi,
an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, had come knocking at his
door and left a card. The writer James Douglass, whose investigations we’ve used a lot today
for this show, believes Mohrenschildt was just a “pawn in the game.”
Garrison understood only too well that people who talked tended to suddenly die, which is
why he hid one female witness we’ll discuss later. We’ll also show you a bunch of very
mysterious deaths. The man running the CIA’s counter-intelligence
programs from 1954 to 1967 was James Jesus Angleton.
This Yale graduate was a fervent anti-communist and was the head of the CIA’s assassination
program, which he ran with army colonel Boris Pash. The latter is more famous for investigating
Robert Oppenheimer for alleged spying activities for the Soviets regarding the atomic bomb.
Pash also led the ALSOS mission when the Americans tried to grab Nazi scientists who’d worked
on the atomic bomb and chemical weapons. After that, he took charge of the CIA’s so-called
Wet Affairs, which were assassination and kidnapping programs.
When the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) looked
into such men, they found that Angleton’s Special Investigations Group had a file on
Lee Harvey Oswald. It was called a 201 file. The CIA had this on Oswald for three years
before JFK was killed. The Warren Commission had not found this, and if it had, things
might have turned out very differently. 201 files were for CIA operatives that needed
to be watched closely as they’d become suspicious. But what’s also interesting here is that
documents were unearthed that showed the CIA had been creating phony 201 files for the
ZR/RIFLE project, which was related to the assassinations of political leaders. The reason
that some of these files were forged was so the CIA could one day use that person as a
scapegoat. They could say, look, we already knew this agent was up to no good, and then
place all of the blame on him. The HSCA interviewed a woman named Anne Egerter.
She’d worked for Angleton and had seen Oswald’s 201 file. It was her testimony that showed
us that Oswald was actually a CIA asset, but one who was under investigation by the CIA
or, perhaps, being set up to become a scapegoat. We should say that she was indirect with her
answers when interviewed, but researchers now say her testimony “implies strongly
that either Oswald was indeed a member of the CIA or was being used in an operation
involving members of the CIA.” The former CIA finance officer Jim Wilcott
also backed up the fact that Oswald was a CIA asset. Wilcott became a whistleblower
who said he left the CIA when he realized the work they were doing had nothing even
remotely to do with “humanism.” His wife, who was also CIA, left, too. They both testified
that by leaving, they’d be able to “sleep better at night.” Jim testified that another
reason was that while working at the Tokyo station, other loose-lipped CIA agents told
him the CIA killed JFK. Jim testified, “I thought these guys were
nuts, but then a man I knew and had worked with before showed up to take a disbursement
and told me Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA employee. I didn’t believe him until he told me the
cryptonym under which Oswald had drawn funds.” Jim then realized that he himself had advanced
funds to this same cryptonym, which in his eyes, made him partly involved in his beloved
president’s assassination. In 1978, after Jim had left what he saw as
a disgraceful agency, he told the San Francisco Chronicle, “It was common knowledge in the
Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.” It was also widely known that he’d
been employed to become a double agent, spying on Russia.
Jim explained, “Oswald was recruited from the military for the express purpose of becoming
a double agent assigned to the USSR ... More than once, I was told something like ‘so-and-so
was working on the Oswald project back in the late ’50s.” He added, “One of the
reasons given for the necessity to do away with Oswald was the difficulty they had with
him when he returned. Apparently, he knew the Russians were on to him from the start,
and this made him very angry.” After this kind of talk, both Walcotts had
their lives made very difficult, which, as you’ll soon see, happened to many people.
They were followed everywhere they went. They struggled to find work. Their car tires were
slashed. They regularly received threatening phone calls.
Now we should talk about Richard Case Nagell, a CIA double agent who was arrested on September
20, 1963, after walking into the State National Bank in El Paso, Texas, and firing two shots
into the ceiling. He said he’d purposefully got himself arrested because “I would rather
be arrested than commit murder and treason.” Nagell had worked for Field Operations Intelligence,
which was tasked with covering up the “true nature of CIA objectives.” As a double agent,
he also worked for the KGB, and one of his tasks was surveilling Lee Harvey Oswald. Nagell
admitted all of this later at a time when fewer people believed Oswald had acted alone
in killing JFK or even acted at all. Nagell also said the KGB knew about the JFK
assassination plot before it happened. He said, “If anyone wanted to stop the assassination,
it was the KGB.” JFK was a much better leader for the Soviets than anyone who might replace
him. The KGB told Nagell to either kill Oswald or to at least try and convince him that he
was being set up to become a patsy. He told him that when he met Oswald in New Orleans.
Nagell also sent FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover a registered letter, saying he’d been ordered
to kill Oswald and that there was a plan to assassinate JFK. Nagell believed that he would
somehow be implicated in this assassination, so he got himself arrested. Jim Garrison interviewed
him and later said he was “the most important witness there is.”
Nagell said after talking to Garrison, he survived three attempts on his life and then
agreed to stay quiet for a nice pension. But what about his letter to Hoover? He said he
wrote it in a way “to persuade the reader that its sender was familiar with CIA procedure,
that it was not a crank letter.” He used the alias “Joseph Kramer,” the pseudonym
of a Soviet agent known to the US. Surely that would mean the FBI knew what was
going to happen to JFK. The FBI has always denied it received such a letter. Since there
is no letter, Nagell has been painted as a loon.
But then, in 1995, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) got in touch with Nagell,
saying they would take him seriously as long as he told them everything and handed over
every document he had that could show he was telling the truth. They mailed him a letter
saying that on November 1, 1995, which was the day he was found dead in his bathroom
in his house in LA. It was said to be a heart attack, in spite of him being in good health
and having no heart issues. We should add that under MKUltra, the CIA worked on methods
to cause people to have heart attacks. His son, Richard, was left the key to a storage
lockup in Tucson, Arizona, where his dad had told him he kept all his documents in a purple
trunk, consisting of everything about his time in the CIA. When Richard arrived, he
found all of his father’s things, minus the purple trunk. It was gone. It was also
strange that the day Richard went to Arizona, his house was broken into and ransacked. Weird…
We should also mention Thomas Arthur Vallee, the man believed to have been the CIA’s
first patsy who was to be blamed for the assassination of JFK on November 2 in Chicago rather than
November 22 in Dallas. This was only made public knowledge four decades after JFK was
assassinated. Information about Vallee, the fact he looked like Oswald and had a background
similar to Oswald’s, was never made available to federal agents in Dallas at the time of
JFK’s visit. The assassination in Chicago failed, but Vallee
was still arrested. The file on Vallee said he was a far-right wing lunatic, obsessed
with guns, a loner, and paranoid. This fits perfectly with what the CIA liked to call
lone actors when they needed to blame a crime on someone.
The Secret Service had learned about the Chicago assassination plot, so raced to Vallee’s
house, where they found an M-1 rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition. They told the Chicago
police to watch this man 24 hours a day. A day later, policemen Daniel Groth and Peter
Schurla pulled over Vallee’s car and found a hunting knife in the back. In the trunk
were 300 rounds of ammunition. When investigators later interviewed Vallee,
he told them he’d worked in Japan on the secret U2 program. They found his car’s
license plate had been frozen. Journalists were told the plate information was classified.
As for those two detectives, they went on to have astounding careers in police intelligence.
The academic Daniel Stern investigated Groth’s police career and said he’d never had anything
close to a normal career. He went missing for long periods. He and other researchers
said Groth actually worked for counterintelligence. Had they been part of a plot to make Vallee
a patsy, placed there just in case the assassination was successful?
Vallee’s sister, Mary, believes her brother was set up as a potential assassin. She said
Thomas was never the lone nut he’d been portrayed as, although he did have a history
of some mental health issues. That’s why he was honorably discharged from the Marines
in September 1956. What’s more, Vallee later told the journalist
Edwin Black that he’d worked for the CIA at a training camp in Long Island, training
Cuban exiles in the art of assassination. Just like Oswald, he’d somehow managed to
find a job right where the Chicago assassination attempt would happen, where JFK’s motorcade
would pass. It was as if his life was the double of Oswald’s. Later investigations
showed Vallee also had access to a window at his new workplace that had the perfect
view of the motorcade that was to pass through Chicago.
Secret Service heard that two snipers with high-powered rifles were believed to be waiting
for the President to pass through. The Secret Service, now knowing about the threat, arrested
three men as possible snipers, and another two men were being held. These men were in
custody just as the Chicago cops arrested Vallee. The possible snipers arrested that
day also didn’t become known to the public for decades.
Abraham Bolden, the first black person ever to guard the president, was there in Chicago.
He later said he couldn’t understand why some of JFK’s security was so lax. He said
some of the men were drunk half the time. Bolden started drawing lines between what
happened in Chicago and what happened in Dallas. On May 17, 1964, he tried to call the Warren
Commission about this but didn’t get through. On May 18, he was arrested and accused of
trying to sell Secret Service files. He was disgraced, even though there was hardly
any proof. At his home in Chicago, as he sat in prison, his garage was burned down. A shot
was once fired through a window, scaring his wife and kids. When he spoke with Jim Garrison,
he was subsequently put in solitary confinement. In 1995, when AARB got on the case, the Secret
Service destroyed all records of the Chicago plot after AARB investigators asked for access
to them. So, this theory goes that Oswald was framed.
But to frame him, he needed to be seen doing a lot of sketchy things prior to the investigation,
more than just going to Russia or seeming like he was pro-Cuba. This is where his double
comes in. Prior to the assassination, there were many
sightings of a man who looked like Oswald. He was seen at a firing range on a few occasions.
The theory says that the CIA was trying to make this man look guilty by sending a body
double to the local firing range. One of the witnesses in the Warren Commission,
Malcolm Price, said someone who looked like Oswald asked for help with his scope at a
Dallas firing range. The witness Garland Slack said he was at another firing range, and this
Oswald character drew attention to himself by “burning up his ammunition” on Slack’s
own target. Slack said when he complained, the man gave him “a look” he would “never
forget.” The problem was, when the Warren Commission
was told about these events, Oswald was supposed to be in Mexico City visiting the Russian
and Cuban embassies. There were too many Oswalds. The conspiracy theorists say they weren’t
just setting up Oswald but indicting the whole of the Soviet Union in a Cold War they needed
the American public to support. Four days before JFK was shot and killed,
the Soviet Embassy in Washington received a letter written by Oswald, or, at least,
signed by Oswald. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI read the letter before it even got there.
In the letter, Oswald admitted to a meeting with Valery Kostikov, the KGB’s undercover
assassination specialist. So, the man who apparently killed JFK, four days prior to
killing him, sent a letter talking about hanging out with a Soviet assassin. This was a perfect
setup. But how do we know Oswald wrote the letter,
ask the conspiracy theorists. The Russian ambassador wrote, “This letter
was clearly a provocation. It gives the impression we had close ties to Oswald.” He said the
US must have been aware of the letter. He added that whoever wrote it was no doubt behind
the assassination. When Lydon Johnson became President after
JFK, he actually decided not to scapegoat the Soviet Union, but he didn’t question
the fact that Oswald was guilty. The Warren Commission would later make out
that Oswald’s plan was to escape by plane to Cuba after he knocked off the President.
This obviously didn’t happen since Oswald was arrested and later shot dead by someone
we’ll discuss later, Jack Ruby – maybe not a man who was who you think he was.
Oswald didn’t fly away, but it had to look like he had planned to do that. The patsy
needed a fake getaway. On November 20, 1963, a car drove into Red
Bird Airfield just outside Dallas. It parked close to the American Aviation Company, a
private airline. One man stayed in the car, and a woman and a guy entered the office.
They said they wanted a Cessna 310 for November 22 and wanted to fly to the Yucatan in Mexico,
not far from Cuba. Wayne January, who was the owner, became suspicious
when they asked lots of strange questions, such as how far the plane would go, at what
speed, and where else they could fly besides Mexico. These were amateur-sounding questions,
the type a kid or a criminal would ask. January also said he’d looked in the car at the
guy that didn’t come in, and not surprisingly, he said it was Lee Harvey Oswald. He said
that after the assassination, of course. Red Bird Airfield was just 5 miles from where
Oswald lived. In 1991, through a freedom of information
request, a British man named Matthew Smith got hold of the FBI’s report on the Red
Bird Airfield incident. Smith then flew to the US to find Wayne January and told him
what the FBI had said about the incident. January was shocked. The FBI had written that
the incident occurred in July, not November, two days before the assassination. It also
said January had been unsure about it being Oswald in the car when he had told them it
was him for sure. His exact words were, I gave them “a nine
out of ten” chance. The reason for the lies, say the conspiracy theorists, is that in January’s
testimony, he’d said he thought those two people were thinking about hijacking a plane
to Cuba. After President Johnson decided not to implicate Cuba or the Soviet Union in JFK’s
death, they now didn’t need this Red Bird Airfield incident. It had to be played down.
Just half a day after the Red Bird Airfield incident, a police lieutenant in Louisiana
named Francis Fruge was called to a hospital in Eunice, Louisiana. There, he met women
who was in withdrawal from opiates. Her name was Rose Charmaine. She said she’d been
driving with two men, who later threw her out of the Silver Slipper bar they were drinking
at, and she got run over. Fruge took her to another hospital where she
could have her withdrawal in more comfort and on the two-hour journey, Charmaine told
him the two guys she’d been driving with had told her they were going to kill the President
when he arrived in Dallas. She said they were either Cubans or Italians. He didn’t, of
course, think much of it since she was in a bit of a state by that time.
But when two days later, JFK was shot, Fruge called the hospital and told them not to let
Charmaine out of there. He couldn’t believe it. Had she really known? After JFK was killed,
they contacted the FBI about what she had told them, and they were told they already
had their man. They didn’t want to know about Charmaine’s story.
In a strange twist of fate, it also came to light that Charmaine had once worked for the
nightclub owner, Jack Ruby. She also told Fruge that through Ruby, she had met Lee Harvey
Oswald. She explained that Ruby and Oswald were actually quite close.
She never got to testify about this in the subsequent JFK investigations. On September
4, 1965, she was found dead in the middle of a road in Big Sandy, Texas. The driver
of the car that hit her said that he had swerved to miss some suitcases piled in the road,
only when he swerved, he went over a body. It’s never been explained why a woman at
three in the morning was lying in the road next to a pile of suitcases. Dr. Charles Crenshaw,
who later wrote a book about JFK’s assassination, said her autopsy showed the kind of head wound
that is usually associated with a gunshot wound. She might not even have been hit by
that car. Jim Garrison wanted to exhume her body, but the state of Texas refused his request.
When Mac Manual, the owner of the Sliver Slipper, was later interviewed, he identified the two
men she was with as Sergio Smith and Emilio Santana, two Cuban exiles. Santana told Jim
Garrison that he had worked for the CIA in 1962 when he first got to Miami. He was involved
in moving weapons on the sea for guerilla fighters in Cuba. The CIA admitted to using
him but said they terminated his contract in 1963. Charmaine’s story might sound unbelievable,
but it’s just a little bit strange she talked about knowing JFK was going to be killed at
a time she was seen with Cuban CIA operatives. The conspiracy theorists say this is just
one coincidence of hundreds of strange coincidences. As for the other man, Smith, he’d once been
arrested in Venezuela on charges of plotting to kill President Ernesto Betancourt, the
so-called “Father of Venezuelan Democracy.” Records show Smith was released from prison,
and the US embassy came to his aid. He went straight to New Orleans, where he worked with
a Cuban exile group, and it was there he befriended the detective/intelligence agent Guy Bannister,
who also knew Oswald. Small world, eh…say the conspiracy theorists. Bannister and Smith
had offices in the same building, the Balter Building. The witness David Lewis, who worked
for Bannister, later testified that Oswald and Smith knew each other.
Ok, let’s move on a little bit. 23-year-old Julia Ann Mercer said on the day
JFK was murdered, she saw a green truck parked close to Dealey Plaza, where the President
would be killed in one and a half hours. A man exited the truck and pulled out what she
described as a rifle case. The man then walked over to an area that would later become known
as the grassy knoll. She said three cops were standing nearby, and not one of them did anything
about this man walking around with a rifle case.
She then pulled up next to the truck and looked at the driver. She got a clear look at him
but only recognized him two days later when she saw his face on TV. She was absolutely
sure the guy driving the truck was Jack Ruby. She said that well before anyone ever asked
her questions about a conspiracy. After seeing the guy with the rifle, she’d
been overheard telling her friends about it at a restaurant. Police officers later stopped
her and told her she’d been heard chatting about seeing a man with a rifle, and what’s
more, the president had just been shot. She was then questioned for four hours at a Dallas
police station. When Jim Garrison interviewed her later, he
showed her and her husband the statements she had made to the cops. She looked at them
and said she had never said anything like that. Her actual words to Garrison were, “They
have all been altered. They have me saying just the opposite of what I really told them.”
She said she’d been given photos to look at by the cops of who might have been driving
the green truck. She picked up one of them and said it was him for sure. She turned it
over, and on it was written, Jack Ruby. “They definitely showed me Jack Ruby, and I definitely
picked him out as looking like the driver,” she told Garrison.
Just imagine if this had gotten out just before Ruby killed Oswald. It would have been massive,
but the cops wrote that Mercer had been unable to identify the truck driver. She told Garrison
that she told her family the day she saw Ruby on TV that this was the guy she’d seen driving
the truck. She then notified the FBI that not only had
she seen Ruby in the photo but that she had seen him again on TV, but this wasn’t in
any FBI report. The only thing the official report said was that, indeed, one of the photos
she’d been shown was of Ruby, but they said she hadn’t picked him out.
Garrison told her the FBI report said she said the words “Air Conditioning” were
written on the truck, but she told Garrison she’d told the FBI that the truck had no
writing on it. “I clearly said there was no printing on the truck,” she told Garrison.
But that didn’t stop the agents from spending two days looking for the Air Conditioning
truck. She also told Garrison, “Neither of the signatures on these two pages of this
affidavit are mine, although they are close imitations.”
On the day of the assassination, Sheriff Bill Decker and Police Chief Jesse Curry were both
nervous. They knew the President would be exposed. Both of them had been told by the
Secret Service to lighten security that day. Decker had told his men they were to “take
no part in the security of the Presidential motorcade.” The House Select Committee on
Assassinations later said both these men were just following orders from the Secret Service,
orders that proved to be fatal to the President. The Secret Service said that JFK was the one
who didn’t want officers all around him, but subsequent interviews refute this. Air
Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who’d protected President Eisenhower before, said all the
windows of buildings in the vicinity should really have been locked down with tape with
the order, “Do Not Open.” But that never happened. There was a vacuum of security for
JFK. Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig said just after
the President was shot, he saw a man running down the hill toward another man driving a
light green Rambler station wagon. He tried to stop them, but he couldn’t get across
the street, and the car took off. Craig then ran toward the Texas School Book Depository
to tell the Secret Service. There he met a man who said he was Secret Service, who Craig
said, didn’t seem very interested in what he had to say.
Craig later went to the Police Station and talked to Captain Will Fritz of the homicide
division. By this time, Fritz said they had a man in connection with the killing. Craig
asked to look at him, to see if he was the same man he’d seen running toward that light
green Rambler. It was the same man! But how could that be? Oswald said, “That station
wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine. Don't try to drag her into this.” Mrs. Paine, who Oswald
and his wife had stayed with, owned a station wagon, but it was a BelAir Chevrolet. This
would all be refuted anyway when the Warren Commission would say Oswald walked out of
the building and got on a bus. The witness, Helen Forrest, also said she
saw the running man enter a green Rambler. James Pennington corroborated what she saw,
while some witnesses said they saw a man in a hat and a tan or brown sports coat. Caroline
Walther said she saw a man in the School Book Depository leaning out of a window holding
a rifle. Marvin Robinson and Roy Cooper both saw a man running down the hill toward the
green Rambler. The Warren Commission rejected all these reports of a green Rambler. They
couldn’t use them because when Oswald was seen getting into the Rambler, Officer Marion
Baker and Roy Truly said they’d seen Oswald on the second floor of the Texas Book Depository.
What about JFK’s injuries? His wife, Jacqueline, said.
“I was trying to hold his hair on. But from the front, there was nothing. But from the
back, you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on and his skull on.”
The Warren Commission wiped these words from their investigation, saying they were in “poor
taste.” What these words might also have done is help prove that her husband was shot
from the front. We won’t get into the magic bullet theory too much because it would make
our story even longer, but just keep in mind that this very crucial fact was striked from
the official report. On the day of the shooting, William Allen
Harper was taking photos near the grassy knoll. He actually found a large piece of skull fragment,
which he then took to his uncle, Dr. Jack Harper. Jack passed it on to Dr. Cairns, the
chief pathologist at the hospital where they worked. Both Cairns and another pathologist
looked at the fragment and said it was a piece of a skull belonging to the occiput, the lower
back of a human skull. Nine years later, a student at UCLA realized
that the X-rays of JFK’s skull couldn’t have been the real thing if these pathologists
had been right. The X-rays showed a different part of his skull was missing. The X-rays
fit the official story, which said there was only one gunman, but the skull those guys
had looked at suggested there must have been more than one perpetrator, meaning JFK was
also hit from the front. Dr. David Mantik, a radiation oncologist, later investigated
the X-rays and determined they were not authentic. They’d been forged, he said.
As for Oswald, he told cops that when the President was shot, he was having lunch on
the first floor. He then went up a floor to buy a Coke from the vending machine. A key
witness, whose testimony was ignored by the Warren Commission, saw Oswald there at 12.15.
Her name was Carolyn Arnold. She said she knew Oswald well because he was always stopping
by her desk and asking for change for the vending machine.
She said she knew the time when she saw Oswald as it was lunchtime. She went into the canteen
for some water and saw Oswald sitting there with his Coke. She said, “He was alone as
usual and appeared to be having lunch.” This was apparently 15 minutes before he must
have raced up three flights of stairs, set his sights on the President, shot him, and
escaped. JFK was also supposed to pass there at 12.25, so the killer was apparently sitting
back and acting relaxed ten minutes before getting ready for the shooting in a different
part of the building… About 1.5 minutes after the shooting, Dallas
patrolman M. L. Baker flew into that second-floor canteen, where he saw a calm Oswald. Baker
then asked the superintendent, “Do you know this man?” The superintendent said yes.
Oswald then finished trying to get a Coke from the machine. One minute later, a clerical
supervisor, Mrs. R. A. Reid, also saw Oswald on the second floor. He had a can of Cola
in his hands. They all testified that when they’d seen
Oswald, he was not out of breath and looked totally calm, and yet the Warren Commission
was trying to say he’d pulled off the crime of the century and moved about as fast as
Casper the ghost. 15 years later, Arnold found out that the FBI had changed her statement
from seeing Oswald on the second floor to seeing him in the hallway off the first floor.
“This doesn’t make any sense to me,” she told a journalist. Her testimony of Oswald
calmly eating lunch just didn’t fit with the narrative.
There are many more witness statements as to what happened at the Book Depository and
in the street, and many of them are contradictory or not very reliable. This has been discussed
time and again, and yet no one can say with certainty what happened, so we will move on
to focus on broader aspects of the case. As you know, the Warren Commission said Oswald
then killed Officer J. D. Tippit and later fled into a movie theater. This is only one
story, though. There’s another take on this tale, say the conspiracy theorists.
The Warren Commission says Tippit pulled over Oswald at 1.15. They exchanged words. Tippit
walked around the car, and Oswald shot him. Oswald hit him with four bullets, after which
he took off on foot, reloading his gun on the way. The report says 12 people saw the
shooter, and at least five made Oswald out in photographs at the station.
Calvin Brewer, manager of a shoe store, also saw Oswald. He said he saw Oswald acting weird,
and then he went into a movie theater. Julia Postal, who was in the ticket booth, saw the
man sneak in, so she called the cops. The time was 1.45 pm.
Even so, Warren “Butch” Burrows, who ran a concession stand in the theater, claims
to have seen Oswald at 1.05. He didn’t see Oswald enter the theater but saw him inside.
Butch said he was 100% sure of that. He also said Oswald bought popcorn from him at 1.15,
exactly when Tippet was shot. Again, it was as if there were two Oswalds.
18-year-old Jack Davis also saw Oswald at this earlier time. Davis said he was weirded
out because there was loads of space in the auditorium, but this guy sat really close
to him as if he was trying to be seen. The man then got up and went to sit somewhere
else. He proceeded to get up again and went to the lobby. Davis said Oswald returned about
twenty minutes later, although Butch said the Oswald he saw instead went to sit by a
pregnant woman. Butch then said after Oswald was arrested
in the theater after being wrestled to the ground, he was astounded. He said he saw another
Oswald, like a twin brother. One Oswald was carted out of the front of the cinema, and
Butch said he saw the other Oswald taken out the back. Bernard Haire, who owned a hobby
shop, saw the commotion out in the street at the front and then went into the back of
his store where there was an alley behind. Regarding what he saw at the back, he later
said, “Police brought a young man out…They put him in a car and drove off.”
That was fine at the time for Haire, but years later, he learned that Oswald was taken out
the front, which he said he knew was wrong ‘cos he’d been there and seen he was taken
out the back. Both Haire and Butch’s stories seem to suggest there were two Oswalds, as
does the story of police officer L. D. Stringfellow, who said in a police report that Oswald was
arrested on the balcony at the theater auditorium, but he wasn’t; he was arrested in the main
bottom part. So, who did Stringfellow see being arrested?
And who was the Oswald that the motor mechanic T. F. White saw around 2 pm, who was wandering
around a free man? The other Oswald, by now, was in a police station. White saw a car that
seemed suspicious, a red Falcon. He took the license plate: PP 4537. A man in a white shirt
got into it, who White realized later that night when he saw the man on TV was Lee Harvey
Oswald. But how had he seen him at 2 pm when he was apparently in custody at that time?
White’s wife said, say nothing; keep your mouth shut.
Years later, a journalist got that license plate number. When he checked it out, it belonged
to Carl Amos Mather, who worked for Collins Radio, a contractor for the CIA. The FBI then
talked to Carl Mather’s wife, who said Carl was very close with the deceased Mr. Tippit.
It was she and Carl who broke the news to Tippit’s wife after he was shot. 15 years
later, Carl said he’d testify to the House Select Committee, but only if he was granted
immunity from prosecution. There were too many coincidences, say the
conspiracy theorists, too many connections, but the best one follows.
The official timeline is further complicated by the story of Robert G. Vinson, who worked
in the US Air Force for the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). He saw the second
Oswald, too. He was on the same getaway plane as Oswald.
Let us explain. Vinson wanted to get to Colorado Springs,
which was home, so he went to Andrews Air Force base and, as was customary in the air
force, asked if he could hitch a ride on one of the plane. No planes were leaving, so he
wrote his name and serial number on a sheet so he was on the list to go next. He then
went for breakfast, but halfway through it, he heard his name called on a loudspeaker.
He was told a C-54 cargo plane was leaving for Denver. Great, he thought. The plane had
no markings on it, and when he got inside, it was empty. He saw two men in overalls working
on the plane, but strangely, they also had no markings on their clothes. Vinson was also
surprised that no one asked him to sign the manifest, which happened every time he hitched
a ride. When he was high in the sky, he heard a voice on the intercom say, “The president
has been shot.” The plane suddenly banked left and headed
south. Soon in the distance, he was very surprised to see the skyline of Dallas. Two men in Dallas
got on the plane, a taller man and a shorter man. He thought nothing of it until sometime
later when he saw Oswald on TV and knew he was the shorter guy. Both these guys got off
the plane when the plane landed again. Vinson later said, “I couldn’t understand why
they were in such a rush.” Vinson later found out the plane had landed
in New Mexico. He eventually got home and, sometime later, told his wife that Oswald
had somehow been on his plane. His wife said he was nuts. He kept quiet about it for 30
years, and in all those years, despite immaculate service, he never got a promotion. Let’s
remember that he’d put his name and serial down at that air force base. If that man really
was Oswald, someone must have known Vinson had shared a plane with him.
In 1964, Vinson was called in for what he was told was a special project. He soon discovered
it was with the CIA. They put him through a series of psychological tests and then asked
him to work for them. He refused as he still had ambitions in the air force. It seemed,
in the end, he had no choice. His bosses later told him that he was going to work with the
CIA at Area 51 on the Blackbird SR 71 spy plane. The conspiracy theorists believe that the
CIA wanted Vinson close, working on top secret projects, and so unable to talk about his
job. Vinson later said that he wasn’t dumb. He knew this work meant he was being asked
to keep quiet about his plane ride. He later said he knew the CIA would never let him out
of their sights. The CIA, he thought, could have killed him, but instead, they hired him.
But in 1992, when Congress passed the JFK Records Act, and Vinson was already retired,
he contacted Dan Glickman, a Democratic representative for Wichita, Kansas. Vinson now knew under
the new act, he was able to talk. Vinson’s story made the news, and later it became a
book. Investigations showed that the C-54 could have landed about five minutes from
where White had seen Oswald in the red Falcon. So, this is how the second Oswald got away,
according to the theory. After JFK was killed, the first man to inspect
the body was resident surgeon Dr. Charles Crenshaw, who was then working at the Parkland
Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Jackie Kennedy was beside herself, he later said. She’d
just recently tried to put her husband’s brains back into his head.
Crenshaw and other doctors noted a “small opening in the midline of” JFK’s throat,
about the size of the tip of a finger. They’d all seen this many times in the ER. It was
a bullet wound, an entry wound. There was absolutely no doubt about this, they said.
They put a tube in Kennedy’s throat as he wasn’t breathing well, a process known as
a tracheotomy. Crenshaw then looked at the “empty cavity” in the president’s head,
later saying that “there was no doubt in my mind that the bullet had entered his head
through the front.” Still, on the day, the Secret Service took
the body. This was not in line with US protocol. Coroner Earl Rose tried to stop them, telling
them the chain of evidence meant JFK could not leave the hospital. The agents pushed
him aside. They really wanted that body. As you know, the following autopsy at Bethesda
Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, revealed something very different from what those doctors
had seen. The conspiracy theorists say the CIA’s Allen
Dulles made sure these doctors soon changed their minds and agreed it was possible that
an entry wound could suddenly become an exit wound. There was one lone gunman, said Dulles,
and you better well make sure you tell a story that fits that. Doctor Malcolm Perry changed
his statement, telling a friend that “men in suits” had visited him. Secret Service
agent Elmer Moore later admitted that he’d been told to pressure Perry. Moore said, “I
did everything as I was told. We all did as we were told.”
Crenshaw said in 1992, “We believed the medical truth would be asking for trouble…I
was as afraid of the men in suits as I was the men who assassinated Kennedy,” adding
that anyone who would kill a President wouldn’t think twice about killing a doctor. He wrote
a book titled, “JFK: Conspiracy of Silence.” He was subsequently smeared. It was reported
how much money he’d made from the book. The Journal of the American Medical Association
said in a paper that he might not have been in the trauma room that day. Doctors and nurses
at least came forward and said he had and that what he’d said was the truth. It didn’t
matter. Once he was smeared, there was always a shadow of doubt hanging over him, say the
conspiracy theorists. Even the doctors that did the official autopsy
were under pressure. They were told not to examine the throat. Navy Medical Corpsman
Paul O’Connor was there. He said they were told to leave the throat because the wound
was just a tracheotomy wound, not a gunshot wound. “It got very tense,” he said in
an interview later, adding, “We were all military. We could all be controlled.”
Lieutenant William Bruce Pitzer, who was head of the Navy’s audio-visual department, got
something worse than a good old smearing, according to this theory. He worked on a 16mm
film of the Bethesda autopsy. He saw everything. First-class Corpsman Dennis David saw Pitzer
work on the film. They both knew what they saw, that JFK had without doubt been hit from
the front. David later said in an interview, “I can assure you it was definitely an entry
wound.” He said it was “inconceivable” that it could be anything else.
David assumed that Pitzer had taken this film. He realized later that what he’d seen would
contradict the evidence that a lone gunman shot JFK. Pitzer had in his hands the most
important footage in America. On October 29, 1966, Pitzer’s body was found
on the floor of the National Naval Medical Center where he worked. The FBI said he was
found in a pool of blood with a bullet wound to the head. A 38-caliber pistol was lying
nearby. His family said straight away that what the FBI said had happened could not have
happened. Pitzer was neither depressed or suicidal.
We know from his wife and friends that he was thinking about retiring from the military
and taking a new job. David said, “They were afraid that he would take the pictures
that he and I had seen, these 35mm slides and 16 mm film, that he would have taken them
with him.” Pitzer was thinking about moving on to a major studio, so David said they’d
be afraid Pitzer would have given them this evidence to work with.
Both the slides and the film have never been seen again. This allegedly incontrovertible
evidence disappeared when Pitzer died. Naval intelligence went to see his wife, Joyce,
after he died and told her not to talk with anyone. She kept quiet for 25 years. Even
at 80, she said she was afraid if she spoke, they’d stop her pension.
She’d actually been told something incredible, something darker than the dark side of the
moon. A retired army special forces lieutenant named
Daniel Marvin had visited her. She said he told her in 1965 the CIA had approached him
with an assignment. The job was to assassinate her husband. She always knew someone had killed
him, but Marvin said he hadn’t been the man to do it. He’d refused to take out anyone
on American soil, but he was still telling her someone in the CIA had killed her husband.
Marvin had been a green beret and later trained as an assassin at a secret training camp in
Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was called the Special Warfare School. During that training,
he and others were told that a perfect assassination of a government leader would consist of using
snipers and setting up a crazed loon who could easily fit the description the public would
believe. In fact, in 1966, the CIA asked Marvin to assassinate Cambodian Crown Prince Norodum
Sihanouk and to make it look like the work of the Viet Cong. The operation was later
aborted, but Marvin said his entire military career consisted of such black operations.
He told Mrs. Pitzer that Colonel Clarence W. Pattern summoned him to the office one
day and told him he was to meet a “company man.” This company man asked him if he’d
be willing to execute a man who was a national security risk. Marvin assumed this would be
in Southeast Asia, where he’d worked before, so when he was told the target was Willian
Pitzer and he was in the US, he refused to do it. He said he would only do it if Pitzer
were abroad. Marvin later said in an interview, “It was
common knowledge in mafia and CIA circles that green berets were tapped by the Company
to terminate selected targets in foreign countries, whereas the mafia provided the CIA’s pool
of assassins for hits in the US.” Marvin was also in contact with Captain David
Vanek. He said in interviews later that Vanek, who he’d trained with regarding assassinations,
might have killed Pitzer. In 1993, Marvin went looking for Vanek, hoping he would admit
what they had done in the 60s. He said when he contacted the Veterans Services Directorate,
he was told Vanek did not exist. There was no record of him. That’s when Marvin thought,
hmm, they took him out, too. But AARB found Vanek in 1996. By then, he
was a colonel in the US Army Reserve Medical Corps. Vanek admitted to training at the Special
Warfare School but said he didn’t know Marvin. He also said he couldn’t recall a meeting
with a Company man and didn’t know William Pitzer. An investigation showed that Vanek
had worked for a CIA cover organization in Thailand from 1965 to 1967.
As for Jack Ruby, while in prison, a doctor diagnosed him as psychotic. He’d lost the
plot apparently, even though according to documents discussed in Tom O’Neill’s book
CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, Ruby was perfectly
healthy and in fine mental shape when he was visited just days before that diagnosis and
each time before that. How come he suddenly started suffering from psychosis? The New
York Times wrote on March 10, 1964, “MIND EXPERT SAYS RUBY WAS INSANE.” Anything he
said now would be the words of a madman, which the conspiracy theorists said came in handy
for some people. The man who diagnosed Ruby as psychotic was
Louis Jolyon West, a doctor who became notorious in time for dosing people with large amounts
of lysergic acid diethylamide in his top-secret work in the MKULTRA interrogation, hypnosis,
and mind control program. One of the most outspoken people about JFK
conspiracies and apparently how ridiculous they were, was the prosecutor and author Vincent
Bugliosi. This same man threatened to sue Tom O’Neill when during the 25 years O’Neill
researched his book on Manson, he discovered Bugliosi’s famous book, Helter Skelter,
was full of provable lies and completely missed the CIA’s many connections to the Manson
murders. It’s just another coincidence that Bugliosi became a kind of spokesperson for
the CIA and the US government in detailing how the conspiracy theories were not true.
According to James Beaird, who often played poker with Ruby back in the day, Ruby stored
and shipped guns to rebels in Cuba for the CIA. The journalist Dorothy Kilgallen was
working on a story about Ruby’s CIA connections when she died mysteriously.
She’d just had an interview with Ruby when she was found dead in her Manhattan townhouse,
apparently from alcohol and sleeping pills. Next to her body was a glass with dust on
it, as if someone had crushed some pills. In the CIA’s assassination manual from 1952,
in the “techniques” section, part three describes how a forced overdose is “effective”
and “not easy to detect.” Kilgallen had worked for 18 months on the JFK story, conducting
numerous interviews. She said the Warren Commission report was “laughable.” She said she would
shake up America with her story, and then she died, and according to the book, “The
Reporter Who Knew Too Much,” her death had CIA written all over it.
Jim Garrison always said Ruby was working for the CIA, not as an agent, but as a mafia
asset, as many mafia gangsters back then worked for the CIA, in return for favors. Ruby knew
if he killed Oswald, he would be next, say the conspiracy theorists. That’s the way
it went. At 3 am, the Sunday before he did it, he called
police officer Billy Grammer. Grammer later confirmed the speaker was Ruby. Ruby told
Grammer, “If you move Oswald the way you are planning, we are going to kill him.”
Grammer later said that Ruby was trying to foil his own assassination job so he wouldn’t
end up having to do it and so die himself. The Dallas Country Sheriff’s Office received
calls at 2.15 am and 2.30 am from a man saying Oswald was about to be killed. Even so, Ruby
defied reason when he was able to get into the police station and walk right up to Oswald.
This shouldn’t have been possible, especially after those two phone calls.
You’ve heard a lot today, and there’s more to this story, but what you’ve heard
is the general outline of a conspiracy theory that has convinced many people to question
the official narrative. The question is, are you now one of those people?
Now you need to watch “Inside the CIA's Terrifying 'Sleep Room'.” Or, have a look
at “How They Caught Charles Manson.”
