There were two darkly brilliant and ingenious aspects of the national-security establishment’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy sixty years ago today — November 22, 1963.
The brilliant part was framing a “communist” or, to be more accurate, a government agent whose job it was to appear as a communist.
Why was that brilliant?
Because this was at the height of the national-security establishment’s Cold War racket, when Americans were deeply indoctrinated to hate everything and everyone who was even tangentially related to communists or communism.
Thus, the plotters knew that once it was established that the person who was being accused of the assassination was a “communist,” no one would dare come to his defense, given that any such person would immediately be smeared as a “communist lover” or a “communist sympathizer.”
That’s why it was so essential to develop Lee Harvey Oswald’s legend as a “communist” in the months leading up to the assassination.
Prior to moving to New Orleans, Oswald was working at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, a photography firm in Dallas that processed film for the U.S. national-security establishment. That’s, of course, consistent with Oswald working undercover for the national-security establishment rather than his being a real communist.
Keep in mind, also, that when Oswald returned to the United States after defecting to the Soviet Union and after declaring that he was going to give up U.S. military secrets to the communists, he was not indicted, subpoenaed, questioned, or tortured. That too is consistent with his being an undercover agent posing as a communist, rather than a real communist.
When Oswald moved to New Orleans a few months before the assassination, he went to work for the Reily Coffee Company, which was owned by an extreme right-winger. What right-winger is going to hire a genuine communist at the height of the Cold War?
During his time in New Orleans, Oswald did his best to smear the Fair Play for Cuba Committee by associating it with the U.S. Communist Party. At the same time, the national-security establishment was targeting the FPCC with destruction as a threat to “national security.”
In New Orleans, Oswald made contact with the DRE, a secret CIA front organization, which helped Oswald to publicize his supposed devotion to communism. Immediately after JFK’s assassination, the DRE sent out a press release advertising Oswald’s bona fides without, of course, letting people know that it was a CIA front organization.
Then Oswald then went to Mexico City, where he loudly made contact with the Soviet and Cuban embassies. And then he returned to Dallas, where there was nary a concern about the presence of a supposed big communist in a city that the president of the United States was visiting. Everything was now set to have a “communist” kill the president and then be quickly killed himself. Thus, framing a communist was the darkly brilliant part of the assassination.
The darkly ingenious part of the assassination was how the plotters achieved a rapid shutdown of the investigation, thereby ensuring that they would not be caught.
How did they achieve that? By having shots fired from the front of the president while the person they were framing was situated in the rear of the president.
Yes, you read that right.
The question naturally arises: If you’re going to frame a guy who is supposedly firing from the rear, wouldn’t you want all the shots coming from the rear?
Answer: Not if you want to get the investigation shut down immediately. To achieve that, you’ve got to have shots fired from both the front and the rear.
Here is the ingenious reasoning behind this part of the assassination: They had Oswald, the presumed communist, firing from the rear. They also had shots fired from the front. That meant that Oswald had confederates who were helping him to kill the president.
Who were those confederates? They had to be Cuban or Soviet communists. Who else? Don’t forget Oswald’s trip to Mexico City shortly before the assassination, where he supposedly visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies.
Thus, America’s beloved president was killed by the international communist conspiracy that was at the core of the national-security establishment’s Cold War racket.
But we all know what that would have meant — World War III. The United States couldn’t just let the assassination of a U.S. president stand, could it? But to respond would have meant bombing Havana or Moscow or both. Thus, America was looking at the very real prospect of all-out nuclear war, people’s greatest fear.
That’s where Operation Mongoose came into play. That was the operation by the Kennedy brothers — John and Robert — to have the CIA engage in state-sponsored terrorism and sabotage inside Cuba for the purpose of effecting regime change in that country.
Thus, the ingenious argument went, in assassinating Kennedy, the communists were simply responding to what the Kennedy brothers had initiated. Since the Kennedy brothers were the first to start this game, there was no good reason for launching a retaliatory strike that would inevitably lead to all-out nuclear war. Better to simply hide the fact that shots were fired from the front from the American people and, therefore, avoid a nuclear holocaust.
At the same time, important insiders within the government were read into what actually happened so that they could bring about an abrupt end to the investigation and settle for pinning the crime solely on Oswald. That’s what Johnson was doing when he advised the members of the Warren Commission that the nation was facing the very real prospect of World War III.
That would also explain why Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover both sent out memos immediately after Oswald’s assassination effectively settling on pinning the crime solely on Oswald and shutting down the investigation.
It would also explain why the Navy pathologists at Bethesda, where the president’s autopsy was being conducted, were charged with hiding the fact that shots were fired from the front.
The shut-down of the investigation became a matter of “national security” — i.e., protecting the nation from all-out nuclear war based on a regime-change war that the Kennedy brothers had started and lost.
Darkly brilliant and darkly ingenious. How could we expect anything less from the world’s master of state-sponsored assassinations — the U.S. national-security establishment?
Also, see my two books: An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story and The Kennedy Autopsy.