16 Mind-Blowing Facts About Who Really Killed JFK
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
22 November 13
overnment documents declassified after the passage of the JFK Records Act in 1992 prove that the official narrative is bullshit. There is overwhelming evidence implicating the CIA and other United States intelligence agencies, as well as top military officials and corporate entities, in a complex plot to stage a coup against a president who rebelled against their wishes.
Many of the facts revealed in this article were gleaned from the book "JFK and the Unspeakable," by Jim Douglass, which has recently been endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I use Douglass's book as a main source, as all of his facts are documented in over 100 pages of endnotes, citing declassified government documents contained in the National Archives building in Maryland, which are available to the public.
1. Eisenhower warned us of the "military-industrial complex" just before Kennedy took office
In January of 1961, the five-star general who commanded the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, who served as commander-in-chief during the Korean War, and who became the first Supreme Commander of NATO, spoke ominously in his final address to the nation of a sinister group of entities he called the "
military-industrial complex." President Eisenhower urged Americans to stay alert and aware before this shadowy, intimately-tied group of government and corporate entities seized too much power.
"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.... We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted." –
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
Eisenhower's successor would go toe-to-toe with the beast Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address on a near-daily basis. The military-industrial complex had already laid out plans for the World War II veteran and newly-elected president to pre-emptively start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. John F. Kennedy's insistence on peace would be his downfall.
2. JFK went toe to toe with military contractor United States Steel
"My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now." –
John F. Kennedy, April 1962
One of the leading companies in the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of was United States Steel, a major contractor with the US military that controlled 25% of the entire steel market. Steelworkers staged a 4-month strike in 1959 during Eisenhower's second term, and Kennedy hoped to avoid a similar flareup during his tenure amidst fears of inflation affecting steel prices.
JFK
brokered a deal between United Steel Workers (USW) and the steel industry, by which workers would get a slight wage increase while a price hike on steel would be avoided for the time being. Kennedy praised the industry for the compromise, calling it "industrial statesmanship of the highest order." But the words quoted above were spoken to his aides in private, after United States Steel CEO Roger Blough
double-crossed Kennedy and informed him in the Oval Office, after the deal was done, that his company would actually be raising steel prices by 3.5 percent to $6 a ton, with other steel companies following suit.
But after Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, informed United States Steel that a new submarine construction contract would be given to a smaller steel company that hadn't agreed to the price hike, other industries that had raised prices in response to U.S. Steel's maneuver
quickly withdrew their price hikes, leaving the military-industrial complex smarting from the Kennedy administration's pointed blow.
3. The military-industrial complex regularly pressured JFK to start all-out nuclear war
"And we call ourselves the human race." – John F. Kennedy to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, after walking out of a top-secret Pentagon briefing
The specter of nuclear war constantly loomed over the Kennedy administration. While JFK famously de-escalated the threat of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, what was not yet known was that Fidel Castro had allowed Russian missiles on Cuban land only as a deterrent against a US attack. However, Kennedy's Joint Chiefs of Staff thought the opposite, that if the United States didn't strike first, the nation would be obliterated. Plans for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union were already in place by the time Kennedy took office.
"Even though it sounds crazy to us, the CIA truly believed Kennedy was deliberately obstructing a war that had to happen," Jim Douglass told me in a phone interview. "The Soviets were seen as absolute evil, and we were the supposed 'good guys.'"
On
page 237, Jim Douglass describes a top-secret "Doomsday Briefing" between Kennedy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where plans were laid out for a
pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union in 1963. Kennedy repeatedly pressed his top generals for an assessment of the effectiveness of such an attack, and the potential loss of life in the United States. Finally, Kennedy walked out in disgust, making the remark quoted above to his secretary of state.
At the height of cold war tensions, top military brass were deeply troubled by the prospect of a commander-in-chief who actively sought peace with an entity widely viewed as the ultimate enemy of the United States.
4. JFK secretly brokered a nuclear disarmament treaty with Khrushchev
President Kennedy and Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev
secretly wrote letters to one another throughout JFK's presidency, and both eventually began to doubt their circle of advisers and appointees about the evil of the other and gradually worked toward peace. Twenty-one letters of correspondence were released by the State Department in July of 1993 after a Freedom of Information Act request was filed by a Canadian newspaper.
Kennedy had first met with Khrushchev in Vienna, and was stunned at his hard-headedness and nonchalance about the prospect of nuclear war. But Khrushchev's first letter to Kennedy, which a KGB agent covertly handed to Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, behind the back of the Kremlin, spoke warmly of his retreat near the Black Sea and lamented conditions that could lead to the annihilation of millions. Referring to their earlier meeting in Vienna, Khrushchev said:
"The whole world hopefully expected that our meeting and a frank exchange of views would have a soothing effect, would turn relations between our countries into the correct channel and promote adoption of decisions which would give the peoples confidence that at least peace on earth will at last be secured. To my regret – and I believe, to yours – this did not happen." –
Nikita Khrushchev, September 29, 1961
From October 16 to 28, 1962, Kennedy willfully ignored his military and intelligence advisers and decided to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis without instigating nuclear war. The reason Khrushchev installed the missiles in the first place was due to his understanding that the Bay of Pigs invasion was merely the United States' first of many forays into Cuban affairs, as he wrote in
his memoir.
Robert F. Kennedy, in his memoir "
Thirteen Days," wrote of the tense situation his brother faced as the situation seemed to deteriorate toward nuclear war and human annihilation. At one point, two Soviet submarines were charging toward the US naval blockade, which was set up in Cuban waters to stop further shipments of warheads from the USSR. The submarines were targeted for destruction by depth charges, which would likely set off a chain of events leading to war. RFK wrote about his grey-faced brother clenching his fist and holding it over his mouth before Khrushchev ordered the subs to not challenge the blockade at the last minute.
According to
White House tapes declassified in the late nineties, General Curtis LeMay of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admonished his commander-in-chief during the crisis for setting up the blockade instead of launching a pre-emptive strike. LeMay compared the blockade to the notorious appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938, saying Kennedy's decision would make him look weak to the Soviets and to the American public.
LeMay: "You're in a pretty bad fix." Kennedy (laughing): "You're in with me, personally."
However, the crisis was resolved peacefully, largely thanks to the rapport JFK and Khrushchev established with the secret letters they sent each other through intermediaries. In October of 1963, Khrushchev signed a historic nuclear test ban treaty, which, in a
letter to the president, he said would "clear the road to general and complete disarmament, and, consequently, to the delivering of peoples from the threat of war."
Khrushchev also wrote about the potential for projects the two leaders could work on, like the "conclusion of a non-aggression pact between countries of NATO and member states of the Warsaw Pact, creation of nuclear-free zones in various regions of the world, barring the further spread of the nuclear weapon, banning of launching into orbit objects bearing nuclear weapons, measures for the prevention of a surprise attack, among other steps."
However, when Soviet foreign minister Valerian Zorin handed this letter to US ambassador Foy Kohler, a cold warrior recommended by the Foreign Service whom Kennedy appointed only when his brother could offer no alternatives, Kohler
commented to the State Department that the letter contained nothing of value. The State Department wrote a boilerplate two-paragraph response that remained forever in limbo, and Kennedy died a month later, never seeing the correspondence from the Soviet leader that could have ended the cold war.
5. JFK openly sided with Castro in the Cuban Revolution
"If you see him again, tell him that I'm willing to declare Goldwater my friend if that will guarantee Kennedy's re-election!" – Fidel Castro to
Jean Daniel, November 19, 1963
On October 24, 1963, French journalist
Jean Daniel met with JFK in an interview arranged by Newsweek. Daniel would later interview Fidel Castro, just three days before Kennedy's assassination. US-Cuba relations had been volatile since the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Castro had recently removed Fulgencio Batista, a right-wing dictator allied with the US, from office, and instead allied with the Soviet Union in the height of the cold war. The Bay of Pigs invasion was the CIA's failed ploy to push Kennedy into a corner and force him to go to war with Cuba, and by default, the Soviet Union.
President Eisenhower had already
allocated $13 million to the CIA during his final year in office to authorize the training of Brigade 2506, a paramilitary group charged with overthrowing the Castro regime. Three days after Bridgade 2506 traveled from Guatemala to invade Cuba, Castro forced their surrender, prompting Kennedy to make the decision to mount a larger invasion or suffer a humiliating defeat. After the incident, Kennedy
famously said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."
Jean Daniel's eye-opening interview with President Kennedy, roughly 2 years after the Bay of Pigs and a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, revealed that Kennedy in fact sympathized with Fidel Castro, the socialist leader that Americans were conditioned to hate. This is in spite of the fact that Kennedy ran against Nixon in the election on a platform of stiffness toward the Cuban regime.
"I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime.... I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries." –
John F. Kennedy, October 24, 1963
Just as he did with Nikita Khrushchev, JFK used intermediaries to correspond with Castro and set up a meeting between the two leaders, subverting his own State Department. Kennedy instructed Adlai Stevenson's assistant, William Atwood, to
start communicating with Cuba's UN ambassador, Carlos Lechuga. Castro was doing the same, having been urged by Khrushchev to communicate with Kennedy in an attempt to make peace. Atwood was making progress on setting up talks between the two leaders through Castro's assistant, Rene Vallejo.
On November 19, 1963, Fidel Castro appeared suddenly at Jean Daniel's hotel in Havana, prompting a
six-hour conversation from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., wanting to hear all about his conversation with Kennedy. The Cuban leader told Daniel that he believed Kennedy could be the one US president to forge world peace.
"He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater president than Lincoln," Castro said.
On the afternoon of November 22, Jean Daniel was interviewing Castro at his home about the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Castro got a call about President Kennedy having been shot in Dallas. Upon hearing the news, Castro repeated the phrase, "
Es una mala noticia (this is bad news)," three times. Upon hearing confirmation of Kennedy's death, Castro told Daniel, "Everything is changed. Everything is going to change." Lyndon Baynes Johnson put on hold any and all dialogue between Washington and Havana, despite Castro's numerous attempts to reach out and make peace.
6. JFK was secretly working to end the US occupation of Vietnam
"This war in Vietnam – it's never off my mind, it haunts me day and night… The first thing I do when I'm re-elected, I'm going to get the Americans out of Vietnam." – John F. Kennedyto next-door neighbor Larry Newman in Hyannis Port, October 20, 1963
Before delving into Vietnam, it's important to acknowledge that Kennedy has received lots of deserved criticism over his decision to deploy
Agent Orange, a toxic chemical weapon developed by Monsanto, Dow Chemical and others, in Vietnam in 1962. Agent Orange was responsible for the contamination of crops and thousands of
Vietnamese deaths, and will continue to cause
serious health defects for generations of Vietnamese yet to be born. Agent Orange also
contributed to the deaths of US soldiers who developed serious health conditions upon their return home.
But to fully understand the transition Kennedy underwent from fierce cold warrior to staunch advocate for world peace, Jim Douglass's "JFK and the Unspeakable" is a must-read. Douglass cites letters written by
Thomas Merton, a monk living in Kentucky who offered harsh critiques of Kennedy's foreign policy and in-depth analysis of his complete transition from a war hawk to a peacemaker. Along with juggling the world-shaking Cuban Missile Crisis and constant tensions with the Soviet Union, Kennedy also had to deal with the prospect of either continuing to prop up the brutal and corrupt Diem regime, or allowing a coup that would oust Diem and give the Soviets an extra piece in the global chess game between the US and USSR.
In late April of 1961, General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the Allies in the Pacific,
told Kennedy: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined." When the Joint Chiefs of Staff pressured Kennedy to up the troop presence in Vietnam and even deploy nuclear weapons, he cited the words of General MacArthur in defending his position.
In November of 1963, Kennedy told General David Shoup, commander of the Marines and the only member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he trusted, that the first thing he'd do following the election would be to
pull all troops out of Vietnam. Shoup advised his commander-in-chief, "Unless we were prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expanded beyond control." Kennedy issued National Security Action Memo (NSAM) 263 just before his death, which secretly
authorized the withdrawal of 1,000 US troops from Vietnam. As history shows, NSAM 263 would never be obeyed, and the Vietnam War would escalate into an unwinnable quagmire under the LBJ administration.
7. JFK refused a 9/11-esque plot to stage terrorist attacks on US soil to be blamed on Cuba
"We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters.... The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to 'evacuate' remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." –
Operation Northwoods, March 13, 1962
In the Spring of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a sinister, top-secret plot to create the political will to invade Cuba, called Operation Northwoods. This plan was so secretive that it couldn't be seen by even "commanders of unified or specified commands," "US officers assigned to NATO activities," or even "the Chairman, US delegation, United Nations Military Staff Committee." Upon seeing the documents, Kennedy told Joints Chiefs of Staff Chairman
Lyman Lemnitzer there was no way Operation Northwoods would happen under his watch, and a few months later, subsequently denied a renewal of his chairmanship. These excerpts of the document are probably what made Kennedy say no, more than anything else:
"A series of well-coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces."
"We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated)."
"7. Hijacking attempts of civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba."
Operation Northwoods goes on to explain a detailed plan involving a CIA plane to be painted at Eglin Air Force Base to duplicate a registered civilian aircraft that would be converted to a drone. Then, "any grouping of people with a common interest" would charter a nonscheduled flight to a South American country with a flight plan that crosses Cuba.
The passengers would all be given "carefully prepared aliases" before boarding, and once their plane passed a "rendezvous point" south of Florida, the drone aircraft would proceed to be detonated by radio control over Cuban airspace after "transmitting on the international frequency a 'MAY DAY' message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft." Meanwhile, the jet with the passengers would fly at minimum altitude back to Eglin so the military would "return the aircraft to its original status."
Every last detail was thought out for this false flag attack, including the addition of a "pre-briefed pilot" who would fly "tail-end-Charlie," or right in between the passenger plane and the drone craft. Upon crossing into Cuban airspace, the pilot would put out a distress signal that he was under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft, say he's going down, and fly back to Eglin, whereupon a new tail number would be given to his craft. The pilot would then "resume his proper identity and return to his normal place of business." Meanwhile, other surface craft would litter the waters surrounding Cuba with F-101 parts, where search ships would be sent out to find a parachute and other aircraft parts. The document states, "The pilots returning to Homestead would have a true story as far as they knew."
Despite Kennedy's steadfast refusal of their nefarious plan, the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed to keep planning "pretext operations" without Lemnitzer, who would become the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO after Kennedy's assassination.
8. Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset
Three years before the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was being investigated by the CIA's Special Investigations Group (SIG), a branch of the agency's Counter-Intelligence (CI) division, headed by James Angleton between 1954 and 1974. This was confirmed in the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)
questioning of Ann Egerter, a member of Angleton's staff who opened
the CIA file on Lee Harvey Oswald (a "201 file" in US intel lingo) in December of 1960.
The kicker is that the CI/SIG division is only tasked with investigating current CIA agents who are potential security risks. Egerter said her office was known within the CIA as "the office that spied on spies." She further elaborated on SIG as the entity that undertook "investigations of agency employees where there was an indication of espionage."
Because CIA agents are forbidden to disclose the identity of any other agents, Oswald's true occupation could only be discerned through indirect questions directed at Egerter. One HSCA interviewer asked her what the purpose of the CI/SIG was within the agency. Through this line of questioning, it can be discerned that Lee Harvey Oswald was seen in 1960 as a security risk, making him easy to burn, for example, as a patsy in the Kennedy assassination.
Interviewer: "Please correct me if I'm wrong … it seems that the purpose of CI/SIG was very limited and that limited purpose was to investigate agency employees who for some reason were under suspicion."
Egerter: "That is correct."
Interviewer: "When a 201 file is opened, does that mean that whoever opens the file has either an intelligence interest in the individual, or, if not an intelligence interest, he thinks that the individual may present a counterintelligence risk?"
Egerter: "Well, in general, I would say that would be correct."
Interviewer: "Would there be any other reason for opening up a file?"
Egerter: "No, I can't think of one."
9. Oswald was on the FBI's payroll
In 1963, William Walter was a clerk in the FBI's New Orleans office. He told the HSCA that Lee Oswald indeed had
"an informant's status with our office." Orest Pena, another FBI informant, said he saw Oswald with FBI agent Warren deBrueys on 'numerous occasions,' even stating that deBrueys physically threatened him about not revealing what he saw before Pena appeared before the Warren Commission. Oswald's friend Adrian Alba, who managed a New Orleans garage that held FBI and Secret Service cars, recalled watching Oswald approach an FBI car outside the garage and receive a white envelope that was handed to him through a cracked window before concealing it under his shirt. Alba later said Oswald "met the car again a couple of days later and talked briefly with the driver," whom Alba knew as an
"FBI agent visiting New Orleans from Washington."
While in New Orleans, Oswald was working for the Reily Coffee Company, which was owned by William B. Reily, a financial supporter of the CIA-sponsored Cuban Revolutionary Council. A CIA memo dated January 31, 1964, that has since been declassified states "
[Reily's] firm was of interest as of April 1949." CIA contractor Gerry Patrick Hemming also confirmed Reily's coordination with the CIA in a 1968 interview with the New Orleans District Attorney's Office, which "confirmed that William Reily had worked for the CIA for years." Reily's company was located close to the New Orleans offices of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).
Oswald also worked in the office of a detective and former FBI agent named
Guy Banister, whose office was directly across the street from the ONI and Secret Service offices.
According to Daniel Campbell, an ex-Marine who spied on radical New Orleans students and gave small arms training to Cuban exiles, "Banister was a bagman for the CIA and was running guns to Alpha 66 in Miami." As you'll read later,
Alpha 66 was a CIA-funded group of Cuban vigilantes plotting to overthrow Castro.
Oswald's intelligence connections may explain why he was able to summon an FBI agent so easily following his August arrest for an altercation that broke out when he was passing out pro-Castro leaflets. Oswald had written to the New York headquarters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee about starting a New Orleans branch, and FPCC national director V.T. Lee
wrote back, urging him not to cause "unnecessary incidents which frighten away prospective supporters." Oswald did the exact opposite.
On August 5, Oswald visited Carlos Bringuier at his clothing store about wanting to train Cubans to fight Castro. Bringuier was leader of the
Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), which was later described in a 1967 CIA memorandum as "conceived, created and funded by the CIA." When
E. Howard Hunt testified to the HSCA, he named David Atlee Phillips as the person in charge of the group. Though Bringuier testified to the Warren Commission that he was wary about Oswald's visit, the two CIA-connected men nevertheless staged an act of elaborate street theater that ended in a fight and subsequent arrest of the two men and three of Bringuier's friends.
While he was in jail, Oswald asked to speak to the FBI, whereupon Special Agent John Quigley met with him for an hour and a half. When Quigley testified about this incident to the Warren Commission, he said Oswald simply explained to him why he was passing out the Castro leaflets. But Harold Weisberg's book "Whitewash IV" included
top-secret remarks from chief Warren Commission council J. Lee Rankin, which were declassified after an extensive legal battle. Rankin's statement revealed the actual reason for Oswald's meeting with Quigley. According to the session transcript, Rankin stated Oswald was "employed by the FBI at $200 a month from September of 1962 up to the time of the assassination."
