Batrcop.com>JFK Assassination Page>Conspiracy Theories

 

THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Assembled from the articles in Esquire, Texas Monthly and Houston Chronicle

MAJOR THEORIES:

THE GRAND CONSPIRACY THEORY

Believers

Author Jim Marrs (crossfire)

Since so much information concerning the plot to kill Kennedy has been destroyed, altered, or masked by false leads, it remains impossible to state with authority details of the plan. Even those involved were probably not informed of every aspect of the plot.

However there is enough information available today to begin to construct a likely scenario of what happened:

By the beginning of 1963, serious talk against President Kennedy was circulating within many groups—organized crime, the anti-Castro Cubans, the CIA, business and banking, the oil industry, and even the military.

There were many connections among all these groups and, once word of this pervasive anti-Kennedy feeling reached the ears of certain members of the Southwestern oil and business communities, secret meetings were held where money was raised and tacit approvals given.

From this point on, there would be no further contact between the individuals who initiated the plot and those who carried it out. Consequently, there is little likelihood that the originators of the plot will ever be identified or brought to justice. However, the broad outlines of the plot can be discerned by diligent study of all available assassination information.

Because of his family's great wealth, John F. Kennedy was incorruptible by bribes. He was also the only president since Franklin Roosevelt who was an intellectual. Kennedy had a rich sense of history and a global outlook. He apparently had an idealistic vision of making the world more peaceful and less corrupt. In other words, he really believed he was president and he set out to shake up the status quo of Big Banking, Big Oil, Big Military-Industrial Complex with its powerful Intelligence Community, and Big Organized Crime, which had gained deep inroads into American life since Prohibition.

There were—and most certainly remain—numerous ties among all of these powerful factions. It is now well documented that the mob and the CIA worked hand in glove on many types of operations, including assassination. The various U.S. Military intelligence services are closely interwoven, and in some cases, such as the National Security Agency (NSA) are superior to the FBI and CIA.

Therefore, when Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, began to wage war on organized crime, it quickly became a matter of self-defense to the mob and the banks and industries it controlled.

Officials of the FBI and CIA, likewise, were fearful of the Kennedys, who had come to realize how dangerously out of control these agencies had become. The anti-Castro Cubans felt betrayed by Kennedy because of his last-minute orders halting U.S. military assistance to the Bay of Pigs invaders and were quite willing to support and assassination.

However, no matter how violent these crime-intelligence-industrial cliques might be, they never would have moved against this nation's chief executive without the approval of—or at the very least the neutralization of—the U.S. military.

Already angered by Kennedy's liberal domestic politics, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and his signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, top military brass undoubtedly were incensed in late 1963 when Kennedy let it be known that he planned to withdraw all U.S. military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1965.

With that decision, the military turned against him and, even if they wouldn't openly plot against him, the military leadership would not be sorry if something were to happen to Kennedy.

The stage was set. Gen. Charles Cabell, the CIA deputy director fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, was back in the Pentagon, and his brother, Earle Cabell, was mayor of Dallas.

It was widely rumored that Vice President Lyndon Johnson—long associated with dirty politics, gamblers, and defense officials—was to be dropped from the Democratic ticket in 1964. Texas oilmen, staunch friends of Johnson and the military-industrial complex, were dismayed that Kennedy was talking about doing away with the lucrative oil-depletion allowance.

International bankers were shocked when Kennedy ordered the Treasury Department to print its own money, rather than distributing the traditional Federal Reserve notes, which carry interest charges.

Soldiers, mobsters, and conniving businessmen feared their apple cart was about to be upset by this youthful president.

So the decision was made at the highest level of the American business-banking-politics-military-crime power structure—should anything happen to Kennedy, it would be viewed as a blessing for the nation.

And simply voting him out of office wouldn't suffice. After all, what was to stop someone from carrying on his policies? Two more Kennedys were waiting in the wings for their turn at the presidency. A Kennedy "dynasty" was in place.

Therefore the decision was made to eliminate John F. Kennedy by means of a public execution for the same reason criminals are publicly executed—to serve as a deterrent to anyone considering following in his footsteps.

And the men at the top of this consensus didn't even have to risk getting their hands bloody. . .

. . . Once such a consensus was reached among the nation's top business-crime-military leadership, the assassination conspiracy went into action. Operational orders most probably originated with organized-crime chieftains such as Carlos Marcello and his associates Santos Trafficante and Sam Giacana—who were already involved with the CIA.

But these mob bosses were smart. They realized the consequences if their role in Kennedy's death should ever become known.

Therefore a world-class assassin was recruited from the international crime syndicate—perhaps Michael Victor Mertz, the shadowy Frenchman with both crime and intelligence connections who may have been in Dallas on November 22, 1963, according to a CIA document. Armed with a contract from the world crime syndicate, the premier assassin was given entree to the conspiring groups within U.S. intelligence, the anti-Castro Cubans, right-wing hate groups, and the military.

Slowly, several assassination scenarios utilizing agents already involved in a variety of plots were constructed.

As the true assassination plot began to come together, word must have reached the ears of J. Edgar Hoover, a power unto himself with plenty of cause to hate the Kennedy brothers. Hoover was in contact with his close friend Lyndon Johnson and with Texas oilmen such as H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchinson of Dallas. His agents and this informers were in daily contact with mob figures. This was only one cross point for mobsters, politicians, the FBI and wealthy Texans. There were many others in New York, Washington, Las Vegas, and California.

Aided by ranking individuals within federal agencies and organized crime, agents from both intelligence and the mob were recruited. Many were like Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis in that they had connections to criminal circles as well as to U.S. intelligence and anti-Castro Cubans. It was a military-style operation in that overall knowledge of the plot was kept on a strict need-to-know basis. Many people on the lower end of the conspiracy truthfully could say they didn't know exactly what happened. . .

. . . Acting on orders, Oswald was put into contact with unsuspecting FBI and CIA agents, anti-Castro Cubans, and others to confuse investigators after the crime.

Oswald was a perfect fall guy. His capture or death eliminated a possible Soviet agent and implicated Russia, Cuba, and leftists—drawing attention away from the true right-wing perpetrators. Naming Oswald as the assassin also implicated the FBI and CIA as organizations, thus forcing uninvolved agency officials to help cover up incriminating evidence.

One of Oswald's managers in late 1962 and early 1963 may have been George DeMohrenschildt, himself connected to Texas oilmen and various intelligence agents. While it now seems clear that DeMohrenschildt had no inkling of what was to become of his young friend, it is entirely possible that it was through DeMohrenschildt that the assassination conspirators learned of Lee Harvey Oswald.

It was just at the time of the DeMohrenschildt's departure to Haiti that Oswald left for New Orleans, where he became embroiled with anti-Castro Cubans, ex-FBI agent Guy Banister, his old friend David Ferrie, and others involved in assassination plotting.

On November 22, 1963, there were many people in Dealey Plaza who were not just innocent bystanders.

There were cars roaming the area behind the famous Grassy Knoll with out-of-state license plates and extra radio antennas, men brandishing Secret Service identification when officially there were no agents in the vicinity, and an odd assortment of people pumping umbrellas in the air, waving fists, speaking into walkie-talkies, and even one man firing a rifle who apparently was wearing a uniform similar to that of the Dallas police.

Professional gunmen—the "mechanics"—quietly into position, secure in the knowledge that security was minimal. . .

. . . Three volleys of shots were fired—at least six and as many as nine—most probably using fragmented bullets or "sabot" slugs which would be traced to Oswald's 6.54 mm rifle.

Shots were fired from the Depository building to draw attention there while other gun teams were on the Grassy Knoll and perhaps even at other location, such as the Dallas County Records Building. . .

. . . The slaying of Officer J. D. Tippit may have played some part in this scheme to have Oswald killed, perhaps to eliminate coconspirator Tippit or simply to anger Dallas police and cause itchy trigger fingers. . .

Jack Ruby—the mob's "bag man" in Dallas and the man who apparently handled funds for the local activities of the assassination conspirators—received his orders to kill Oswald from organized-crime leaders eager to protect the secret of their contract, and there were no alternatives for a mob directives.

The key to understanding the Oswald slaying is not that Ruby somehow knew when Oswald was to be transported from the police station, but rather, that the Oswald transfer was delayed until Ruby was in position—thanks to mob influence in the Dallas Police Department, one of the nation's most corrupt at that time.

. . . One shot and Oswald was dead, leaving only his mother to question the official version of the assassination.

While this assassination scenario cannot be undisputably proven at this time, it neverless represents the only theory to date that conforms to all of the known facts. . .

. . . President Kennedy' wounds were altered between Parkland Hospital and his autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, making it appear that all wounds were to the rear of his head and body and forever confusing the medical evidence. Here lies another key to the Kennedy assassination. Who had the power and impunity to have the President's wounds altered and to misdirect the national investigation? These accomplishments could only have come from the very pinnacles of power in the United States. Power such as that wielded by Lyndon Johnson and his friend J. Edgar Hoover, backed by the business-banking-defense communities.

There was never a real cover-up of the assassination, only official pronouncements for the major media and lots of red herrings for devout investigators.

 

 

The CIA Theory

When John F. Kennedy came to office, the Central Intelligence Agency was an entity virtually onto itself. With little supervision from previous administrations, the agency had more or less done what it wanted -- and that included the instigation of coups, the incitement of rebellions, and plots to kill foreign leaders, generally without White House supervision.

When the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion (which the CIA had orchestrated) proved to be a disaster as well as an enormous political liability for Kennedy, he fired the CIA director Allen Dulles and deputy director Charles Cabell and numerous other, threatening to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." Rogue agents, fearful he would do just that, struck first, either by placing CIA sharpshooters at Dealey Plaza or by enlisting former Marine and spy wannabe Lee Harvey Oswald to do the job.

Dulles would be one of the members of the Warren Commission that determined Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in murdering Kennedy and Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit. And Cabell was the brother of Earle Cabell, who was the mayor of Dallas in 1963.

Had the CIA looked for a way to remove the man who was threatening its power? Certainly, it showed no signs of giving in easily. On the very day of the assassination, a CIA operative in Paris was delivering a poison pen to a Cuban traitor who had agreed to hand it to Fidel Castro.

Power-hungry, secretive, riddled with all sorts of sub-groups and eager "spooks," the CIA was just the sort of entity that could have executed and concealed a plot as apparently intricate as the Kennedy assassination. What's more, congressional oversight was just about nil in 1963.

Believers

Authors Mark Lane (Plausible Denial), John Newman (Oswald and the CIA), and Anthony Summers (Conspiracy).

Strange Details

• CIA director Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired in 1961, later served on the Warren Commission.
• CIA deputy director Charles Cabell, whom Kennedy had also fired, was the brother of Earle Cabell, Dallas' mayor in 1963.
• One of Kennedy's mistresses, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was married to a CIA official and was murdered in 1964.
• Richard Nixon -- who oversaw the CIA's original plan to take back Cuba from Castro when he was Eisenhower's vice president -- was in Dallas on the day of the assassination.

Reasons to Believe

• If anybody could have planned and concealed a plot as intricate as the Kennedy assassination, power-hungry CIA agents could; they had already helped oust heads of state in Guatemala and Iran.
• The agency had little congressional oversight in 1963 and was full of furtive cells, subgroups, and enthusiastic spooks who acted with impunity and whose modus operandi was "plausible deniability." Indeed, as Kennedy's motorcade was making its way through Dallas, a CIA operative in Paris was -- unbeknownst to most of his higher-ups -- giving a poison fountain pen to Cuban turncoat Rolando Cubela, who had volunteered to hand it to Fidel Castro.
• While in the Marines in 1957 and 1958, Oswald was stationed at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, the home of the largest CIA station in the Pacific.
• During the Warren Commission's investigation, the CIA withheld untold amounts of information, notably that the agency and the mob had jointly tried to kill Castro.
• And if someone suspected the CIA had two words for its defense -- "plausible denial." And Mark Lane, the Warren Commission critic whose 1966 book Rush to Judgment had been so important to generations of doubters, used this very phrase for a 1991 book that pointed a finger at a CIA role in the assassination.
• The book was the result of documents made available by the Freedom of Information Act and by sworn depositions Lane took from former CIA operatives and officials for a little-publicized libel trial in the U.S. District Court of Miami.
• The 1978 case revolved around Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, who had sued for defamation when a small magazine published a story by a CIA renegade who linked Hunt to the assassination. Lane signed up as a defense counsel, and his investigative efforts about the accuracy of the story led to victory. The forewoman of the jury said that the jury found against Hunt because it believed that the story had been truthful -- that the CIA had killed the president, Hunt had been part of it, and further investigation should be undertaken.

Reasons Not to Believe

• There is no evidence that Oswald was ever a CIA operative; at Atsugi he was a low-level officer who was court-martialed twice and displayed erratic behavior, once shooting himself in the arm.
• Just because the CIA would lie, cheat, steal, overthrow governments, and try to assassinate other countries' leaders does not mean that it would kill its own.

Recent Developments

Speculation about the CIA's involvement has always centered on one of the most intriguing assassination riddles: the identity of the three tramps, a trio of men arrested in the rail yard behind Dealey Plaza immediately after the assassination. Photos showed them being led through the downtown streets by Dallas police officers, yet there was no record of their arrest. Conspiracy theorists have long believed that they looked suspiciously like CIA bogeymen E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis (as well as Charles Harrelson, the assassin of federal judge John Wood and the father of actor Woody Harrelson). According to the three tramps theory, these CIA operatives killed Kennedy; after they were arrested, they were whisked away by unidentified federal agents who destroyed all records of the incident. But in 1992 Dallas researcher Mary La Fontaine searched through Dallas Police Department files and found overlooked arrest records from November 22, 1963. The three tramps were, in fact, three tramps: Harold Doyle, Gus Abrams, and John Forrester Gedney.

 

 

The Mafia Theory

Mix with the mob, and you had better stay friendly.

That's the basic premise behind the theory that the Mafia conspired to kill President Kennedy. Consider this:

Chicago godfather Sam Giancana had helped JFK win the 1960 election through skulduggery. The two men shared a mistress, Judith Campbell Exner, who has said she was a courier between Kennedy and Giancana.

Miami mobster Santos Trafficante had helped the CIA with its plots to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro.

And how did the Kennedy administration respond to these affiliations? Not with loyalty, as the mob expected, the Kennedys launched an all-out campaign against organized crime. Attorney General Robert Kennedy first went after Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa pulling out all the stops to investigate the suspected mobster and then deported New Orleans syndicate boss Carlos Marcello to Guatemala. Pushed around long enough, and angry at the president for going soft on Castro -- who had shut down its lucrative Cuban casinos -- the mob made someone an offer he couldn't refuse. Oswald was either its hit man or its patsy. Upon his arrest, the mob dispatched Jack Ruby to silence him.

Believers

Authors John H. Davis (The Kennedy Contract), Richard Billings (former editorial director for the House Select Committee on Assassination) and David Scheim (Contract on America) and veteran journalist Jack Anderson.

Strange Details

• In 1975 and 1976, during the course of congressional investigations of the mob and the CIA, Sam Giancana was gunned down in his kitchen, Jimmy Hoffa "disappeared," and Las Vegas mobster Johnny Roselli -- who had told Jack Anderson that Ruby was ordered to silence Oswald -- was dismembered, stuffed into an oil drum, and tossed off the coast of Florida.
• Kennedy and Judith Exner, one of Giancana's molls, were introduced in 1960 by Frank Sinatra and carried on an affair for more than two years; Exner says she often carried envelopes from the president to the mobster.

Reasons to Believe

• In 1979 the HSCA concluded that Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante all had the "motive, means, and opportunity" to assassinate Kennedy.
• Richard Billings, former editorial director for the House Select Committee on Assassination, which re-investigated the assassination and issued a report in 1979, says he believes the mob conspired to kill the president. The author of The Plot to Kill the President, he cites circumstantial evidence involving Jack Ruby, the man who murdered suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald two days after the president's death.
• "The pattern of activity from the associations in his (Ruby's) background argue to me overwhelmingly that Ruby didn't just go kill Oswald because he was a patriot or on a whim, or for any reasons other than the reasons he was directed to do it by the people for whom he worked," Billings told the Houston Chronicle in 1988. "And they were the organized crime people, the bosses in Dallas, Texas and Louisiana."
• Billings said Ruby, who operated striptease clubs and dealt in gambling and prostitution, was associated with organized crime figures who had moved into Dallas from Chicago, where Ruby had grown up and run errands for Al Capone. Ruby reported to underworld figures in Dallas who were, in turn, associates of Marcello, the angry mob figure deported through the efforts of Robert Kennedy, Billings said.
• Hoffa had told a federal informant that he would like to kill RFK but that his brother was the more desirable victim because "when you cut down the tree, the branches fall with it."
• Marcello -- according to Las Vegas promoter Edward Becker -- once coolly explained why it was better to target JFK than RFK: "If you cut off a dog's tail, the dog will only keep biting. But if you cut off its head, the dog will die."
• An FBI informant testified before the HSCA that Trafficante told him in 1962 that the president "was going to be hit."
• In 1992 Frank Ragano, a longtime lawyer for Hoffa and Trafficante, told the New York Post that the two mobsters and Marcello had agreed to kill the president. Ragano claimed that Trafficante said on his deathbed: "Carlos f--ed up. We shouldn't have gotten rid of Giovanni [John]. We should have killed Bobby."
• Oswald's uncle and surrogate father, Dutz Murret, was a bookie in the Marcello organization, and his mother, Marguerite, dated members of Marcello's gang.
• When Ruby was a teenager in Chicago, he ran errands for Al Capone. As an adult, he had ties to members of the Giancana, Hoffa, Marcello, and Trafficante families. In 1959 he visited Trafficante in his Cuban jail cell, where Castro had thrown the mobster after the revolution.
• Two days before the assassination, a prostitute and heroin addict named Rose Cheramie told a Louisiana state policeman that she had been en route to Dallas with two men "who were Italians or resembled Italians" and were planning to kill Kennedy. After the assassination, she told Dr. Victor Weiss at East Louisiana State Hospital that "the word in the underworld" had been that Kennedy was going to take a mob bullet. She also said that Oswald and Ruby "had been shacking up for years . . . They were bedmates."

Reasons Not to Believe

• The HSCA was ultimately "unable to establish any direct evidence" of mob complicity.
• Chicago FBI agent William Roemer, who spent hours listening to wiretaps of mobsters after the assassination, said they were "gleeful" but did not talk of a conspiracy.
• There is no proof that Ruby was anything more than a small-timer on the periphery of the Dallas underworld.
• Hoffa, Trafficante, and Marcello were cautious men, yet killing JFK was a rash solution -- one that would only have brought on more heat from RFK. And why would a bunch of seasoned killers rely on a loser like Oswald?
• Melvin Belli, the California attorney who represented Jack Ruby in his murder trial, said he believed Ruby acted only on impulse, not on mob orders, when he killed Oswald. He called his former client "very emotional."
• Cheramie -- who had spent time in mental hospitals and who had a history of providing the FBI with false leads -- was in the throes of heroin withdrawal when she told her story. After the assassination, she said that she had once worked as a dancer for Ruby, whom she knew as Pinky, but there is no evidence that she did. Nor is there reliable evidence that Oswald and Ruby ever knew each other.

Recent Developments

In 1993 Illinois cop killer James Files confessed to Kennedy's murder. Claiming to have been an Army paratrooper in Laos, a trainer of Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the personal driver for Chicago mobster Charles Nicoletti, Files said that he fired from the grassy knoll while Nicoletti shot from the Dal-Tex Building. In 1994 the New York Post ran a story on Files titled "Call This JFK Tale Knoll and Void."

 

 

The LBJ Theory

Brutus. Macbeth. Richard III. Think of their stories, and it is not difficult to understand why some conspiracy theorists might look to Lyndon B. Johnson as a culprit in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

BY 1963 LYNDON JOHNSON HAD GROWN WEARY of the obscurity of his office and was concerned that the scandals surrounding his cronies Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes would ruin his hopes for the presidency. When rumors circulated that JFK was going to drop him from the 1964 ticket, LBJ worked to stage an elaborate coup on home turf, enlisting loyal Texas oilmen who feared losing the oil depletion allowance and warmongers who wanted to step up involvement in Vietnam. One of their foot soldiers was an angry young man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Soviet Government newspaper Izvestia, after condemning The Warren Report as slanderous to Russia, hinted by sly innuendo that President Johnson may have been implicated in the assassination. They cite the soon-to-be published works of Joachim Joesten (seven volumes to be sold by subscription for $200) which argues that Johnson has been covering up. The next day, Trud, the trade-union paper, made the accusations more forcefully.

Californian Barbara Garson has written a satire, based on Macbeth, called Macbird in which L.B.J. and Lady Bird take the parts of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the murder of J.F.K. and Adlai Stevenson (the Egg of Head).

In January of 1964 the Warren Commission learned that Don B. Reynolds, insurance agent and close associate of Bobby Baker, had been heard to say that the F.B.I. knew that Johnson was behind the assassination. When interviewed by the F.B.I., he denied this. But he did recount an incident during the swearing in of Kennedy in which Bobby Baker said words to the effect that the s.o.b. would never live out his term and that he would die a violent death. Reynolds also vaguely suggested that Governor Connally may have called long distance from Washington to Lee Oswald who was staying in a Dallas Y.M.C.A. He had no proof.

A number of letters allegedly written by Jack Ruby and smuggled out of jail were auctioned off by New York autograph dealer Charles Hamilton. Penn Jones, Jr. bought one and published part of it.

"I walked into a trap the moment I walked down the ramp Sunday morning. This was the spot where they could frame the Jew, and that way all of his people will be blamed as being Communists, this is what they were waiting for. They alone had planned the killing, by they I mean Johnson and others.”

“…read the book Texas Looks at Lyndon and you may learn quite a bit about Johnson and how he fooled everyone.”

Believers

Authors David Lifton (The Texas Connection) and Harrison Edward Livingstone (Killing Kennedy).

Strange Details

• John Connally, LBJ's longtime friend and colleague, roomed in college with Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade, whose November 24, 1963, press conference made the definitive case against Oswald.
• Eugene Locke, the deputy ambassador to Vietnam under LBJ, once served as the attorney for Marie Tippit, the wife of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, whom Oswald shot soon after the assassination.

Reasons to Believe

• Two days after the assassination, deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach pushed for the creation of a federal investigatory commission, partly out of concern that the public might suspect Johnson's involvement: Historically, assassinations of heads of state have been carried out by their successors.
• Soon after becoming president, Johnson, a hawk, pressed the House and Senate for passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, initiating a period of increased involvement in Vietnam.
• Johnson sealed certain assassination records until 2039, ordered that Kennedy's limousine be refurbished rather than entered into evidence, and handpicked each member of the Warren Commission, which answered ultimately to him.

Reasons Not to Believe

• LBJ was fiercely ambitious but not depraved; to believe that he would order Kennedy's murder requires an extraordinary leap of logic.
• Despite years of speculation -- beginning, most memorably, with Barbara Garson's popular 1967 play, MacBird!, and amplified in Oliver Stone's JFK -- there is not one shred of evidence to support the idea that LBJ had a hand in the assassination.
• In a letter to J. Lee Rankin, J. Edgar Hoover wrote, “I have not received any information to implicate President Johnson or Governor Connally in the assassination.”

Recent Developments

The newly released LBJ tapes show that Johnson was by no means the puppet of warmongers; he clearly agonized over Vietnam and sought resolution to the conflict. They also reveal a man of more depth, and of greater conscience than had been widely thought, in calls to Jacqueline Kennedy in the days and months after the death of her husband, he seems almost pathetically eager to be kind to her, at one point even suggesting that he might be a "daddy" to her two fatherless children. To say such a thing to a woman after conspiring to murder her husband would have required a depravity that even Johnson's severest critics might not have been willing to grant him.

 

 

The KGB Theory

Those who remember John F. Kennedy are fond of saying that the nation's innocence ended with his assassination. But anyone advancing this theory fails to remember the climate in which the world lived when Kennedy led the free world.

The times were, in a word, scary. Schoolchildren practiced "duck and cover" as a defense against the nuclear attack that everyone feared the Soviets would launch. Public service announcement routinely reminded U.S. television audiences that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had vowed to "bury" them. Americans were urged to build bomb shelters to save themselves in the coming holocaust. And in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's showdown with Khrushchev brought the globe to the brink of nuclear disaster

HUMILIATED BY KENNEDY IN THE CUBAN missile crisis, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev decided to punish him. Scenario 1: Oswald, who lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962, was trained in espionage there and then ordered to make the hit. Scenario 2: Oswald was the patsy in Khrushchev's game, set up by an Oswald double and KGB operatives who fired the fatal shots at Dealey Plaza. Scenario 3: Oswald returned home from the Soviet Union an unwitting assassin, programmed ý la The Manchurian Candidate to carry out the orders of those behind the Iron Curtain.

Believers

CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton and author Michael Eddowes (Khrushchev Killed Kennedy).

Strange Details

• Russian baron and suspected spy George de Mohrenschildt -- who helped introduce Oswald to the Russian ÈmigrÈ community in Dallas and was his closest friend before the assassination -- fatally shot himself in 1977, before he was set to testify before the HSCA.
• The uncle of Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, Oswald's Russian-born wife, was a ranking officer in the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Reasons to Believe

• In January 1960 Oswald was given a rent-free apartment in Minsk, where an espionage training academy was located. Recently declassified files show that up to twenty KGB agents shadowed him and may have manipulated his behavior. ("Maybe they did drop a few tablets in his glass," a high-ranking KGB official told the Russian newspaper Izvestia, "but only to make him let down his guard and be a little more talkative.")
• The Russians, who had never before captured a U2 spy plane, suddenly managed to do so a scant six and a half months after the defection of Oswald, who had worked as a Marine radar operator in Atsugi, Japan, where the U2 was based.
• On a trip to Mexico City on September 27, 1963, Oswald visited the Soviet embassy and spoke to KGB agent Oleg Maximovich Nechiporenko -- who was expelled from Mexico in 1970 for conspiring to overthrow the government -- and Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, an agent in "wet affairs": sabotage and assassination.

Reasons Not to Believe

Secret agents usually keep a lower profile than did Oswald, whose pinko leanings -- such as addressing his fellow Marines as "comrades" in the midst of the cold war or reading Das Kapital in the barracks -- earned him the nickname Oswaldskovich.
• It seems unlikely that the KGB would have recruited someone as unstable as Oswald -- who attempted suicide five days after arriving in Moscow -- for such a covert operation, since a Soviet-backed plot to kill Kennedy would have resulted in certain nuclear retaliation if uncovered.
• In an April 10, 1995, New Yorker article adapted from his book Oswald's Tale, Norman Mailer wrote that the KGB suspected Oswald of being a U.S. agent and kept him under surveillance, watching him and his wife through a peephole in the wall of their Minsk apartment.
• The KGB also noted that Oswald "never seemed to hit anything when he went hunting and that he didn't know how to operate a shortwave radio set." And a fellow worker in a radio factory said he remembers that Oswald "couldn't figure out how to put film in a simple Soviet camera."
• No wonder the KGB did not consider Oswald good spy material. Even so, the intelligence agency was plunged into turmoil when the former defector was arrested in the assassination. The ex-deputy chief of Soviet counterintelligence told Mailer: "Everybody blames me for this! It was as if I knew he would shoot. You could not find one single person from Minsk who would say, 'Yes, Oswald had these intentions to go back to America and cause all this trouble.' "
• At Atsugi, Oswald was a low-level soldier with little exposure to the U2.
• A 1981 exhumation of Oswald's body revealed that it was indeed he who was buried, not his Soviet-trained double, as some conspiracy theorists suspected.
• Marina later recanted her testimony and professed her husband's innocence, saying that she had been threatened with deportation if she did not cooperate.
• Why would Khrushchev want to get rid of Kennedy in favor of Johnson, a more zealous anti-communist with closer ties to the military?

Recent Developments

In 1992 the KGB released dossier #31451: the Oswald file. It contained few revelations other than the KGB's own suspicions that the American defector was a CIA operative. There was, however, one tantalizing detail: After spying on several of Oswald's hunting trips, KGB operatives concluded that he was a poor shot.

 

 

The FBI Theory

In November 1963, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was 68 years old, two birthdays away from forced retirement as the federal law required the 68-year-old to step down on his seventieth birthday. The day of the FBI director's departure would be a day that John F. Kennedy would relish.

The relationship between Kennedy and Hoover had always been an uneasy one. Since World War II, when the FBI began keeping tabs on Kennedy's sex life, the bureau had had information that could have destroyed Kennedy's political career. First attracting Hoover's attention was Kennedy's wartime fling with Inga Fejos, a suspected Nazi agent. Other dalliances were duly noted.

But rather than fading quietly into the background, Hoover orchestrated an early transfer of power to his ally LBJ, who, as president, could -- and did -- exempt him from mandatory retirement, allowing him to lord over the bureau until his death in 1972. Scenario 1: Hoover knew of various plots to kill Kennedy but took no action, failing to inform the Secret Service of threats to the president's life and taking an uncharacteristically hands-off approach to investigating possible conspirators. Scenario 2: Oswald was an FBI informant who killed Kennedy on orders from the bureau. Scenario 3: Oswald warned the FBI of plots to kill Kennedy, only to find himself framed and then silenced by fellow informant Jack Ruby.

In the meantime, Hoover had built an alliance with President Johnson that allowed him to stay in his job until the director's death in 1972. Perhaps the most persistent question that might be asked about Hoover and the JFK assassination is: Why would the FBI director have needed to resort to assassination when he held the upper hand in what could become a most damaging game of blackmail?

Believers

Authors Mark North (Act of Treason) and George O'Toole (The Assassination Tapes).

Strange Details

• Ruby briefly worked as an FBI informant in 1959.
• The FBI's number three man, William Sullivan, who had overseen the "internal security aspects" of the assassination investigation, was fatally shot in 1977 on a hunting expedition before testifying before the HSCA.
• When Oswald was a child, his favorite television show was I Led Three Lives, the story of an FBI counterspy.

Reasons to Believe

• The FBI had been keeping tabs on Oswald since at least 1960 but did not inform the Secret Service that he worked in a building along the motorcade route.
• Despite more evidence of Oswald's Communist activities, the bureau did not decide to reopen his case again until March 1963. When Oswald reportedly went to Mexico City in September 1963 and visited the Soviet Embassy -- an incident that some conspiracy theorists believe involved an Oswald impostor -- the bureau still failed to show concern.
• Ten days before the assassination, Oswald dropped off a handwritten note at the FBI's Dallas field office for James Hosty, a special agent who had been trailing him for several months. Hosty destroyed the note on orders from his superior the day Oswald was shot but never acknowledged its existence until 1975, when he explained that it had merely warned him to "stop harassing" Oswald's wife, Marina. (He had questioned her twice in early November.) Some speculate that the note really contained violent threats; others think it was a warning from Oswald that someone in Dallas was going to kill the president.
• Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr told the Warren Commission he had information that Oswald was an undercover FBI agent, prompting a top-secret emergency meeting of the commission in January 1964.
• Eyewitness accounts of varying reliability placed Oswald in New Orleans fraternizing with, and even receiving envelopes from, FBI agents.
• The sole investigatory body for the Warren Commission was the FBI, which intimidated witnesses, suppressed and destroyed evidence that cast an unflattering light on the bureau, and conducted a shoddy investigation, even declining to take Abraham Zapruder's super-8 footage when he offered it after the assassination.
• According to Hale Boggs, a Warren Commission member: "Hoover lied his eyes out to the commission -- on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it."
• In his 1987 book Secrecy and Power, Richard Gid Powers suggests that Hoover was so embarrassed by the way the bureau bungled the Oswald case that he began a furious campaign to minimize criticism against his agency after the assassination. Although he had initially told President Lyndon B. Johnson that the case against Oswald was weak, Hoover now apparently sought to shift focus away from the bureau by fixing blame on Oswald as the lone assassin, unaided by any conspiracy that could have tied the murder to prior CIA plots or raised the question of why the FBI was unaware of a possible widespread conspiracy.
• Powers' book also points out that Hoover had known of the massive amount of hate mail that Kennedy had received throughout his administration. Did he fear that he would be blamed for keeping a blind eye to the rabid opposition that was building against the president? Whatever his motives, many people in the bureau soon knew Hoover's fury. The director immediately punished everyone connected with the Oswald file. When the Warren Commission reported its findings in 1964, eight agents were punished again. It was the cost of revealing the bureau's deficiencies to the public.

Reasons Not to Believe

• The HSCA could never establish that Oswald had worked as an FBI informant.
• Carr's speculations were partly based on a 1964 Houston Post article whose source, Dallas County assistant district attorney Bill Alexander, later admitted to having concocted the story because he distrusted the feds.
• Why would Hoover -- whose personal files on politicians' indiscretions filled four rooms of FBI headquarters -- have preferred murder to blackmail as a means of furthering his own ambitions?

Recent Developments

In his 1996 memoir, Assignment: Oswald, Hosty said he found notes he took during Oswald's twelve-hour interrogation at Dallas police headquarters -- notes that he told the Warren Commission he had destroyed. Although they shed little new light on Oswald, their sudden appearance raises questions about what else the FBI has withheld over the years.

 

 

The Castro Theory

The Kennedy administration had been a thorn in the side of Cuban leader Fidel Castro since almost the very beginning.

Three months after John F. Kennedy took office, anti-Castro exiles had invaded the Bay of Pigs in a plan sanctioned by the CIA. Kennedy had refused U.S. cover to the exiles at the last moment, but the event had complicated the world political landscape. Then in October 1962 all eyes focused on Cuba during a missile crisis that threatened to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Yet Castro had more personal reasons to hate the Kennedy administration. Agents of the U.S. government had plotted many times to assassinate him, and FBI files declassified in 1993 reveal that Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was convinced that the Kennedy assassination was the result of a conspiracy triggered by the CIA plots.

After one too many bazooka attacks, the dictator said, "Basta!" in the fall of 1963 and struck back. He found a willing assassin in Oswald, a known communist sympathizer.

Believers

Lyndon Johnson (eventually) and anti-Castro activist Carlos Bringuier.

Strange Details

• Oswald admired Castro, often referring to him as Uncle Fidel.
• In the summer of 1963 Oswald was planning to relocate his family to Havana.

Reasons to Believe

• In a September 1963 interview with the Associated Press, Castro called Kennedy a "cretin" and threatened to retaliate against him: "U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders . . . they themselves will not be safe."
• On September 27, 1963, Oswald visited the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, ostensibly to obtain a visa. Eager to ingratiate himself with Cuban bureaucrats, he presented himself as "a friend of the Cuban revolution" and, some speculate, offered his services as an assassin.
• Autulio RamÌrez Ortiz, a hijacker who claimed to have infiltrated Cuban intelligence in the early sixties, testified before the HSCA that he saw a file labeled "Osvaldo-Kennedy" at a Cuban intelligence facility. The file, Ortiz said, contained a photo of Oswald, a KGB recommendation, and this conclusion: "Oswald is an adventurer. Our embassy in Mexico has orders to get in contact with him. Be very careful."
• A 1967 memo from C.D. DeLoach, the FBI's liaison to the Johnson administration, notified top FBI officials that some White House aides privately questioned the official conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. DeLoach wrote: "In this connection, Marvin Watson (LBJ's chief of staff) called me late last night and stated that the president had told him, in an off moment, that he was now convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson stated the president felt that (the) CIA had had something to do with plot."
• The DeLoach memo also revealed that the FBI sent the Johnson administration its files on CIA efforts to recruit organized crime figures for assassination plots against Castro.
• In a 1993 interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, former Johnson press secretary George Christian confirmed that LBJ suspected the Cuban government was behind Kennedy's death. "He frequently made statements that the Cubans must have been involved," Christian was reported as saying. "The whole idea that the Cubans -- meaning Castro -- might have had something to do with it was linked to the CIA's attempts to assassinate Castro. That was the root of Johnson's concern."

Reasons Not to Believe

• Castro had to have known that the U.S. would strike back if his plot were discovered.
• Oswald's visa request at the Cuban consulate was turned down.
• In 1995, more FBI documents were made public, and they paint a picture of a Castro who had his own ideas about the assassination. Among the previously secret papers was a June 17, 1964, report from then-director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover.
• It said that Castro, denying his nation's complicity in the murder, ordered his own tests on a rifle simliar to the one that Lee Harvey Oswald was alleged to have used to fatally wound the president. Castro's conclusion was "that Oswald could not have fired three times in succession and hit the target with the telescopic sight in the available time" and that therefore "it took about three people."
• Hoover also quoted Castro as saying that Oswald had become angry and threatened to kill Kennedy when he was denied a visa by the Cuban Embassy during a visit to Mexico City earlier in 1963. But whether Oswald even visited Mexico City in 1963 has been a bone of contention among conspiracy theorists, some of whom claim that an impostor who called himself Lee Harvey Oswald and made a scene was the man who visited the Cuban embassy.

Recent Developments

According to National Security Agency documents released last year, the usually unflappable Castro was terrified the U.S. would retaliate against Cuba in the first hours after the assassination. The NSA intercepted messages going in and out of Cuba, including one from a foreign agent who saw Castro's televised speech on the evening of November 23: "Fidel, emotional and uneasy, tried . . . to refute the accusations which were then appearing and to twist them so that the assassination would appear as the work of the Ultra Reaction, of the extreme racists of the Pentagon, who are fanatical supporters of war against Cuba and the Soviet Union. Although it was only the third time I had witnessed a speech by Fidel, I got the immediate impression that on this occasion he was frightened, if not terrified."

 

 

The Anti-Castro Theory

A year before John F. Kennedy became president, the CIA had begun to train Cuban exiles for an invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro. President Eisenhower had authorized the operation in March 1960, saying, "Everyone must be prepared to swear that he has not heard of it."

But the plan was a well-known secret. Ten days before Kennedy took office, the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined with the words, "U.S. HELPS TRAIN AN ANTI-CASTRO FORCE AT SECRET GUATEMALAN BASE." Ironically, the newspaper report was the best briefing the president-elect had received on Cuba. In those days Cuban exiles reserved their contempt for Castro, who had taken away their homeland.

Three months later, a force of Cuban exiles was poised to strike. Thirty minutes into their invasion on April 17, 1961, the phone at the president's bedside rang. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Kennedy that the CIA wanted to call in U.S. planes to cover the anti-Castro Cubans who were hitting the beach. The president refused any U.S. help. Kennedy's decision left 1,500 exiles stranded and incurred the wrath of their compatriots, who felt the new president had betrayed them. Their hatred for Kennedy lies at the heart of the theory that Cuban exiles conspired to kill him, either in retaliation for the bungled invasion or to frame Castro, a scenario that, they might have hoped, would have led to a full-fledged U.S. invasion against the Cuban leader.

Enraged exiles orchestrated the president's murder with help from their CIA associates, either in retaliation for the deaths of their brothers-in-arms or to frame Castro for Kennedy's murder, thereby forcing a full-scale U.S. invasion. Oswald, who had tried to infiltrate the anti-Castro movement in New Orleans, was either the exiles' agent or their patsy.

Believers

HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi, authors Bernard Fensterwald (Coincidence or Conspiracy?) and Sylvia Meagher (Accessories After the Fact), and CBS newsman Peter Noyes.

Strange Details

In August 1963 Oswald approached Carlos Bringuier, a New Orleans shopkeeper active in the anti-Castro movement, and asked to join his organization. Four days later Oswald was arrested for disturbing the peace while passing out pro-Castro leaflets -- an elaborate scheme, some say, to deflect attention from his involvement in the anti-Castro conspiracy.

Reasons to Believe

• Cuban exile Sylvia Odio told the HSCA that in late September 1963, three men showed up at her Dallas apartment and convinced her and her sister that they were members of the cause. Two of the men, "Leopoldo" and "Angelo," were Cubans, while the third, "Leon Oswald," was an American, described later as a former Marine, a man who thought Kennedy should be assassinated because of the Bay of Pigs, a good shot, and "kind of nuts." Two months later Odio and her sister were shocked when they recognized the president's assassin: Leon was Lee Harvey Oswald. The HSCA later termed Odio a "credible" witness.
• Cuban exiles viewed the Bay of Pigs as nothing less than unforgivable treachery on Kennedy's part. At the end of 1962 he added fuel to the fire when he shut down Operation Mongoose (a CIA program that was preparing Cuban pilots and soldiers for another invasion) in exchange for Khrushchev's dismantling of Russian missiles on the island. By 1963 the Kennedy administration was cracking down on Cuban exiles, raiding their paramilitary training camps in Louisiana and Florida.
• In her 1967 book Accessories after the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities and the Report, critic Sylvia Meagher speculates that members of the anti-Castro community might have decided to kill two birds with one stone: Assassination would remove the president they hated, and a set-up would eliminate the double-agent who sought to undermine their cause. After all, why would Oswald, a self-proclaimed Marxist who had defected to Russia and was married to the niece of a ranking Soviet official, wish to oppose a Communist leader like Castro?

Reasons Not to Believe

• Oswald was in Mexico City on the day Odio says he visited her.
• Why would virulent anti-communists trust Oswald, a known Red?
• After an extensive search, the FBI identified the "Oswald" character in the Odio story as one William Seymour. Although certainly not an "Oswald look-alike," neither was Seymour grossly different.The FBI's identification was thrown into doubt when the source of the identification, one Loran Eugene Hall, recanted. Yet FBI agent James Hosty believes that Seymour was the man Odio mistook for Oswald. In an interview with Steve Bochan he said:
  Now, I believe that she believes that she saw Oswald. But I'm convinced that the story that we finally came up with about Seymour, is who she saw who looked somewhat like Oswald. Now Loran Hall . . . was the one that said yes, we were up there. Now we can prove that Loran Hall and [Seymour and Howard] were in Dallas at the time. I think they were arrested or stopped or questioned or something. So they were definitely there. . . . . And, after Loran Hall told us this, Seymour and Howard jumped all over him because see, what he in effect had done, he had told us that Seymour had committed a violation of law. It is a violation to threaten to kill the president. And the Secret Service could have arrested him. So they put pressure on him and he changed his story. (Source: Interview with Steve Bochan, 11/21/96)
• In the summer of 1963, Oswald reportedly approached Carlos Bringuier, an activist in the anti-Castro movement in New Orleans, about joining his group. But Bringuier suspected the young man of trying to infiltrate his organization and had a comrade check him out by posing as a pro-Castro sympathizer. Four days after his meeting with Bringuier, Oswald was arrested for disturbing the peace while passing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans.

Recent Developments

In 1994 Florence Martino told writer Anthony Summers that on the morning of November 22, 1963, her husband, John -- an anti-Castro activist -- said, "Flo, they're going to kill him. They're going to kill him when he gets to Texas." Then, she said, John got a bunch of phone calls from Texas. "I don't know who called him, but he was on the phone, on the phone, on the phone . . ." John Martino, who had once worked for Santos Trafficante, had been imprisoned by Castro from 1959 to 1962. (He later wrote a book, I Was Castro's Prisoner.) After his release he threw in with Cuban exiles and later claimed that they had framed Oswald. He died in 1975.

 

 

The Secret Service Theory

SECRET SERVICE AGENTS WERE PAWNS IN A grand scheme to kill the president. Working on orders from higher-ups -- the FBI or the vice president -- they (a) provided lax security in Dallas so that sharpshooters would have a clear shot and/or (b) hijacked the body as part of an elaborate scheme to alter the corpse, scuttle the autopsy, and cover up the whole affair.

Believers

Authors David Lifton (Best Evidence) and Bonar Menninger (Mortal Error).

Strange Details

• Into the wee hours on the morning of the assassination, Secret Service agents drank Everclear at the Cellar, a rowdy beatnik club in Fort Worth whose owner, Pat Kirkwood, was an acquaintance of Jack Ruby's.
• Secret Service agents Winston Lawson and Forrest Sorrells, who chose the motorcade route, rode in a covered sedan in front of the president's convertible.

Reasons to Believe

• Although plans for a presidential motorcade in Miami four days before the assassination were scrapped when a right-wing extremist told a police informant that Kennedy would be shot "from an office building with a high-powered rifle," few precautions were taken in Dallas: Buildings along the motorcade route were not secured, lookouts were not posted, and the presidential limousine's "bubble top" was removed.
• Against regulations, the Secret Service chose a motorcade route that required a 120-degree turn, an angle that forced Kennedy's limousine to slow to a crawl as it passed the book depository building and turned onto Elm Street.
• Rather than having four motorcycles stationed on each side of the president's limo, as Dallas police chief Jesse Curry had suggested, Agent Lawson ordered that only two motorcycles be on each side and that they remain by the rear bumper.
• After the first two shots were fired, Agent William Greer, Kennedy's driver, briefly applied the brake rather than the accelerator, allowing the presidential limousine to come to a near standstill right before the third and fatal shot was fired.
• At Parkland Hospital on the afternoon of the assassination, agents forced their way past Dallas medical examiner Earl Rose with the president's coffin in hand, insisting that the autopsy would be performed not in Dallas, as required by state law, but in Washington, D.C.

Reasons Not to Believe

• Could all of the seventy Secret Service agents assigned to protect the president in Dallas have turned against him -- and kept silent about such a conspiracy for 35 years?
• Since the president's coffin was never left unattended on Air Force One, the corpse could not have been tampered with.

Recent Developments

Interest in the Secret Service's possible connection to the assassination was revived by Menninger's 1992 book, Mortal Error, which claims that Agent George Hickey fired the third and fatal shot while riding in the presidential follow-up car. According to Menninger's thesis, when Hickey reached for his AR-15 upon hearing shots, he slipped off the safety, lost his balance, and accidentally pulled the trigger.

 

 

The Diem Theory

ON NOVEMBER 2, 1963, AFTER SOUTH Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem began negotiations with North Vietnamese communists, he was shot at point-blank range, along with his brother and political adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, during a U.S.-backed coup. Seeking revenge, the wealthy and powerful Diem family -- perhaps led by the widowed Madame Nhu, Saigon's "Dragon Lady" -- settled the score three weeks later in Dallas.

Believers

Lyndon Johnson (initially).

Strange Details

• In 1950, when Diem was forced into exile by Ho Chi Minh, he fled to a Catholic seminary in New York, where he became friendly with then-senator John Kennedy.
• Kennedy had approved the coup but was assured that an attempt would be made to evacuate Diem and Nhu from Saigon; he was appalled to learn that they had been murdered. Eight years later, CIA operative Howard Hunt doctored State Department files so that researchers of the Pentagon Papers might "discover" that Kennedy had arranged Diem's murder.
• Allen Dulles, who created the Saigon Military Mission and staffed it with men who would later help orchestrate the Saigon coup, was a member of the Warren Commission.

Reasons to Believe

The Diem regime showed no mercy to its foes. Immediately after her husband's murder, Madame Nhu told American reporters, "Such a cruel injustice against a faithful ally cannot go unnoticed, and those who indulge in it will have to pay for it."

Reasons Not to Believe

If the South Vietnamese were wily enough to pull this off, why didn't they kill Ho Chi Minh first?

Recent Developments

In 1997 Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot alleged that Kennedy not only knew Diem would be murdered but also personally asked Air Force general Edward Landsdale, a CIA man, to do the job himself.

 

 

The Shadow Goverment Theory

THERE IS A SECRET GOVERNMENT WITHIN OUR government, a cabal that in 1963 ordered the murder of a popular president, set up a patsy, installed its own puppet, and orchestrated an elaborate cover-up that included tampering with the corpse, destroying and suppressing evidence, and killing witnesses. Heading the cabal were some of the world's most powerful men: rich and corrupt industrialists, generals, and right-wing politicians. Down below was an eclectic group of mobsters, spooks, lowlifes, and anti-Castro extremists, many of whom were headquartered at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, including Oswald, former FBI agent Guy Banister, soldier of fortune David Ferrie, and suspected CIA informant Clay Shaw. Together, in the summer of 1963, they plotted Kennedy's demise. score three weeks later in Dallas.

Believers

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, filmmaker Oliver Stone, and former chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Fletcher Prouty.

Strange Details

Theorists enjoy playing an elaborate parlor game of Six Degrees of Assassination. One version goes like this: As a teenager, Oswald had been in the Civil Air Patrol with Ferrie, who had done private investigative work for mobster Carlos Marcello, whose close associate Santos Trafficante had been the main mob boss in prerevolution Cuba, where in 1959 he was imprisoned by Castro, visited by Ruby, and then bailed out by Cuban turncoat Rolando Cubela, who, on November 22, 1963, was being briefed in Paris on killing Castro by an agent of the CIA, whose former director (and future Warren Commission member), Allen Dulles, had been forced out by Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs invasion, as had his deputy, Charles Cabell, whose brother Earle was the mayor of Dallas, which had been papered on November 22 with "Wanted for Treason" leaflets published by Robert Surrey, an aide to Major General Edwin A. Walker, who had been the target of an assassination attempt in April 1963, the chief suspect of which, according to the Warren Commission, was Oswald. Surrey also played bridge with James Hosty, the FBI agent who had been shadowing Oswald, whose wife, Marina, often mocked her husband's lovemaking and told him how attracted she was to Kennedy, who had had an affair with Judith Exner, girlfriend of mafioso Sam Giancana, who had helped steal the 1960 election for Kennedy by stuffing ballot boxes in Chicago, where Ruby had run errands for Al Capone as a teenager and Banister had helped ambush John Dillinger.

Reasons to Believe

Pressed for time, obsessed with secrecy, and embarrassed by their awareness of Oswald's existence, both the FBI and the CIA withheld critical information and did little to investigate possible links between their own organizations and Oswald, between the CIA and Cuban paramilitary organizations, between the Mafia and various assassination players, and between Ruby and the mob, Cubans, and the Dallas police force.

Reasons Not to Believe

• How could such a labyrinthine plan with so many participants never be exposed? How could a bunch of inefficient, bungling bureaucracies work so well and with such determination and unanimity?
• Notwithstanding Kevin Costner's noble portrayal of him in JFK, Garrison -- the chief proponent of this theory -- was a lying, attention-grabbing megalomaniac with McCarthyite tendencies who had been dismissed from the National Guard for mental problems. He tried to prove his theory by taking businessman Clay Shaw to court in 1969 for conspiring to kill the president. The resulting trial was nothing less than a circus. Garrison sought to prove his case with an array of peculiar characters, including a man in a toga identifying himself as Julius Caesar, a heroin addict, and a New York accountant who said he often fingerprinted his daughter to make sure she was not an impostor. The prosecution mischaracterized evidence and bribed, intimidated, and even had witnesses hypnotized. He ultimately said that there were sixteen assassins at Dealey Plaza, including the three tramps and a man who popped out of a sewer. Though he presented plenty of intriguing suspicions, he had few facts, and it took the jury only 45 minutes to find Shaw innocent of all charges. The New York Times later called Garrison's crusade against Shaw "one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence."

Recent Developments

JFK's release forever changed the way Americans view the assassination. Oliver Stone provided the seamless -- albeit wildly inventive and historically inaccurate -- story line that lawyer Garrison had always coveted. If we vaguely believed in a conspiracy before, by late 1991, 73 percent of Americans were sure of it, while 35 percent thought the CIA was directly involved. In response, Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board, whose mandate was to obtain assassination-related files from often-reluctant agencies like the FBI and the CIA, declassify them, and make them available to the public. The upshot was the release of thousands of important items, including the personal papers of Warren Commission members, a presidential aide's amateur film of the motorcade, and notes from Oswald's interrogation at Dallas police headquarters, as well as an archive of more than four million pages of secret records. Nothing earth-shattering was ever discovered (the board was shut down in September), though many documents still remain hidden from view. According to the act that created the board, all relevant documents must be released to the public by 2017 -- except for ones deemed worthy for further postponement by any sitting president.

 

 

THE IVY LEAUGE THEORY

Proponent: Extreme left wingers who see the Bush family as the antithesis of the Kennedy's

Thesis: Prescott Bush was a U.S. senator from Connecticut, a confidential friend and golf partner with National Security Director Gordon Gray, and an important golf partner with Dwight Eisenhower as well. Prescott's old lawyer from the Nazi days, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State, and his brother Allen Dulles, formerly of the Schroder bank, was head of the CIA. ... "In the later years of the Eisenhower presidency, Gordon Gray rejoined the government. As an intimate friend and golfing partner of Prescott Bush, Gray complemented the Bush influence on Ike.

The Bush-Gray family partnership in the 'secret government' continues up through the George Bush presidency. "Gordon Gray had been appointed head of the new Psychological Strategy Board in 1951 under Averell Harriman's rule as assistant to President Truman for national security affairs. From 1958 to 1961 Gordon Gray held the identical post under President Eisenhower. Gray acted as Ike's intermediary, strategist and hand-holder, in the President's relations with the CIA and the U.S. and allied military forces. "Eisenhower did not oppose the CIA's covert action projects; he only wanted to be protected from the consequences of their failure or exposure. Gray's primary task, in the guise of 'oversight' on all U.S. covert action, was to protect and hide the growing mass of CIA and related secret government activities."

It was not only covert "projects" which were developed by the Gray-Bush-Dulles combination; it was also new, hidden "structures" of the United States government. From "The Immaculate Deception" by Russell Bowen: "According to Nixon's biography, his personal and political ties with the Bush family go back to 1946, when Nixon claims he read an ad placed in an L.A. newspaper by the Orange County Republican Party and a wealthy group of businessmen led by Prescott Bush, the father of George Bush. "They wanted a young candidate to run for Congress. Nixon applied and won the job, becoming a mouthpiece for the Bush group, progressing to the U.S. Senate and in 1952 the vice presidency.

"In 1960, Vice President Nixon was scouring the world seeking the presidency. Congressman Gerald Ford was helping raise funds, as was George Bush. "It took Nixon eight more years to reach his goal. And the canny politician always remembered who helped him get there. So again it was payback time for George Bush. Nixon appointed him Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and later ambassador to China. "By 1976, Ford, who succeeded Nixon after Watergate, paid his due bill. He picked out big job for his old crony, Bush: the CIA. But this time Bush would not be an underling. Now he would be head man."

Drawback: As is the case of LBJ the Bushes are fiercely ambitious but not depraved; to believe that they would order Kennedy's murder requires an extraordinary leap of logic. The Bushes as well as Dulles brothers where old-school politicians who had a sense of patriotism and fair-play, maybe they disliked JFK, but that doesn't make them conspirators.

 

 

DALLAS OLIGARCHY THEORY

Proponent: Thomas Buchanan.

According to Buchanan’s theory, “Mr. X,” a right-wing Texas oil millionaire, had to eliminate Kennedy and Khrushchev to gain world domination of the oil market. He decided to assassinate Kennedy in such as way that Khrushchev would be discredited. Oswald was to be framed as the assassin, then executed by Tippit. With Oswald dead, the Soviet Union would be blamed for the assassination. Oswald, however, outdrew Tippit and was captured alive later. The conspirators then induced Ruby to kill Oswald as a means of silencing him for good. Aside from Mr. X, Buchanan names the following “additional conspirators”:

1. The assassin on the bridge. (He hints this was Ruby.)

2. A second assassin in the Depository who was wearing a police uniform.

3. A police officer involved in Oswald’s arrest (who was, next to Mr. X, the key conspirator).

4. Tippit.

5. Oswald.

6. One of the policemen who missed Oswald as he left the building.

Drawback: The entire premise sounds like its the plot to the next Austin Powers move, or at best a Bond flop.

 

GRASSY KNOLL THEORY

Proponents: House Select Committee on Assassination, Maurice Schonfeld, U.P.I., Jack Fox, U.P.I., Burt Reinhardt, U.P.I. In the United Press-International film library, a New York hobbyist found an eight-millimeter color film of the assassination made by Orville Nix. One of the frames of the Nix film particularly interested him because it showed an object behind the wall on the grassy knoll. He then employed a film specialist to blow the frame up, and it became clear that the object was in fact a vehicle. On the roof of the vehicle, he discerned a man aiming what appeared to be a rifle at the President’s car. He immediately took his photograph to Dallas and asked eyewitnesses about it.

U.P.I. editors, apparently impressed with the photograph, sent reporter Jack Fox to Dallas to interview witnesses to the assassination.

Lee E. Bowers, Jr. told him that the photograph was “exactly what I saw.” S. M. Holland, who was standing on the overpass and had one of the best views of any eyewitness, told Fox there were four shots: “…the first came from the book building and hit the President. The second came from the same place and hit Governor John Connally….The third shot came from behind the picket fence to the north of Elm Street. There was a puff of smoke under the trees like someone had thrown out a Chinese firecracker and a report entirely different from the one which was fired from the book building…”

According to Holland, the fourth shot came from the Book Depository. When Holland reached the fence he found a station wagon and a sedan. On the bumper of the station wagon there were two muddy marks “as if someone had stood there to look over the fence.” At least seven other witnesses on the overpass saw smoke rising from the same area, and many other witnesses thought the shots came from behind the picket fence. One Dallas policeman, J. M. Smith, even claimed to have “caught the smell of gunpowder” behind the wooden fence.

 

 

CUBA-FRAMED THEORY

Proponent: Fidel Castro.

About a week after the assassination, Castro suggested that the conspirators intended that Cuba be blamed for the assassination. According to this theory, Oswald may have been one of the riflemen, but his prime role in the conspiracy was to ghost a trail that would lead directly to Cuba. Thus, a few months before the assassination, Oswald set up a phony Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans and Dallas, engaged in “brawls” with anti-Castro Cubans, and identified himself with Castro and Cuba on radio programs. Then he went to Mexico where he tried to obtain a Cuban visa. (Castro notes that Oswald had no reason to go to Cuba. If Oswald wanted to go to Russia, as he claimed, it was shorter and easier to go via Europe.)

After the assassination, the plan called for Oswald to disappear. Evidence planted at the scene would identify Oswald as the assassin, and Oswald’s pre-assassination activities and other planted clues would lead to the conclusion that Oswald had fled to Cuba. This, in turn, might serve as a pretext for an American invasion of Cuba.

Reasons to Believe

1. On September 26, just before Oswald’s trip to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico, Mrs. Sylvia Odio, a Cuban Refugee leader, claims that three men visited her in Dallas. Two were Latins, possibly Cubans, the third was American. The American was called “Leon Oswald.” After the assassination Mrs. Odio as well as her sister definitely identified this man as Lee Harvey Oswald. The three men said that they had just come from New Orleans (the Commission established Oswald left New Orleans about September 25) and were about to take a trip. They wanted backing for some violent anti-Castro activities, but Mrs. Odio suspected that they might in fact be Castro agents. The next day one of the Latins called Mrs. Odio and told her that Oswald was “kind of nuts” and that he had said Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and that “it is so easy to do it.” Thus, Oswald established himself as a potential assassin traveling with two Cubans.

2. Two days before the assassination, three people spoke to Wayne January, manager of Red Bird airport in Dallas, about renting a plane. They told him they wanted to be flown to Yucatán Peninsula on November 22. After the assassination, January told the F.B.I. that one of the three persons was Oswald. January later said that he suspected the threesome might want to hijack his plane and go to Cuba, and thus decided not to rent them the plane.

3. Shortly after the assassination, there were literally dozens of allegations and “tips” that Oswald was closely connected with the Cubans. For example, one Latin American free-lance intelligence agent claimed that he saw Oswald receive $6,500 for the purpose of assassinating Kennedy. (The Commission found these allegations to be false.) However, if Oswald escaped and disappeared, these tips might very well have fed suspicion that Oswald was in Cuba.

 

 

THE NOBLE LIE THEORY

Proponents: Drew Pearson, Henri Nannen (editor of Der Stern), and Jacob Cohen (former instructor at Brandeis summer school and author of Honest Verdict).

Thesis: Drew Pearson quotes Der Stern’s explanation that the original autopsy report was suppressed “on the grounds that President Kennedy was suffering from Addison’s disease” and “his family did not want it known.” Why? Because “politically Kennedy’s illness could become dangerous. Addison’s illness—it sounds sinister.” Thus, according to this theory, the Kennedys withheld the autopsy report and “hid the X-rays, even from the Warren Commission.” And “this would also explain the lack of a date on the Warren Commission autopsy report” which was changed “so that it contained no mention of the President’s illness,” as well as why the autopsy surgeon burned the original autopsy report (“otherwise hundreds of people would have been faced with lying under oath, which would have been deplorable”).

Drawback: The fact that Kennedy had Addison’s desease was in the Warren Report (as well as in Sorenson’s biography of Kennedy), so why delete it from the autopsy report? And the Commission files show that Attorney General Robert Kennedy explicitly gave his approval to the Commission to look at the autopsy photographs and X-rays.

 

 

DOUBLE HEAD-SHOT THEORY

Proponents: Professor Josiah Thompson and Ray Marcus, independently.

Thesis: The “third” shot, which caused Kennedy’s fatal head wound, was actually two nearly simultaneous shots, one coming from the rear and another from the right front.

This theory takes Vincent Salandria’s “Head Movement Theory” and Riddle’s computations one step further. In a forthcoming book, Thompson uses precise scientific studies made of the Zapruder film frames and close analysis of the medical evidence to show that the damage was inflicted by two bullets, not one. Also, he cites ear- and eyewitness reports which back up his claim that the third shot was really a third and fourth.

 

 

TWO OSWALDS THEORY

Proponent: Richard H. Popkin.

Thesis: Professor Popkin (Chairman, Philosophy Department, University of California at San Diego) has advanced a rather ingenious theory to explain certain discrepancies in the Commission’s findings. Certain witnesses claim to have encountered Oswald prior to November 22 in places where he could not possibly have been. To explain these anomalies, Popkin suggests that there were actually “two Oswalds”; the second “Oswald” closely resembled the real Oswald. The real Oswald’s role was to be a decoy—that is, he would lead the police astray by becoming the prime suspect. The escape of the second Oswald, who actually fired the shots from the Depository, was thus facilitated. When Oswald’s trial came up, he would undoubtedly produce a surprise alibi, and the evidence would be so confused by the second Oswald’s pre-assassination maneuvers that the Oswald-on-trial would be acquitted. What went wrong, however—and here the theory becomes a mite complicated—was that the real Oswald met Officer Tippit, who knew the second Oswald, and waved him down. In the ensuing confusion, Oswald panicked and shot Tippit.

This theory differs from the Oswald Impersonator Theory in one important way: here, the real Oswald is guilty.

Drawback: The sightings of this “second Oswald” all occurred before it was even known that Kennedy would be coming to Dallas. Thus it seems unlikely that a carefully deceptive plot cold have been underway.

Retort: Oswald and his double were only one of many pairs of assassins being set up all over the country on a contingency basis, should the opportunity for action arise.

 

 

MINOR THEORIES:

OSWALD IMPERSONATOR THEORY

Proponents: Léo Sauvage, Harold Weisberg, Sylvia Meagher, (See also Popkin’s Two-Oswald Theory).