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Preliminary Note: To commemorate the 52nd anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, all three of FFF’s JFK ebooks are being offered for FREE at Amazon.com for today only, November 20.
The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob Hornberger
Kennedy’s War With the National Security Establishment: Why JFK Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.
Regime Change: The JFK Assassination by Jacob Hornberger
Also, The Kennedy Autopsy is now in print form for $9.95. It is also available at Amazon in audio format for $14.95
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Last month, Politico.com published an article by author Philip Shenon that detailed a recent confession by the CIA that it had engaged in deception and cover-up in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. According to a once-secret in-house report prepared by a CIA historian in 2013, the CIA suposedly failed to disclose to the Warren Commission its assassination plots against Cuba’s president Fidel Castro as part of the CIA’s assassination partnership with the Mafia.
The CIA’s historian considered the CIA’s cover-up to be “benign” because the CIA’s motive was supposedly a noble one: that the CIA was supposedly concerned that disclosure of its assassination plots against Castro could lead to retaliatory action against Cuba, which the CIA supposedly was trying to avoid.
According to Shenon’s article, the report was initially marked “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning “it was not to be shared outside the agency or with foreign governments.” Nonetheless, the report “was quietly declassified last fall,” which Shenon says “might suggest a new openness by the CIA in trying to resolve the lingering mysteries about the Kennedy assassination.”
Unfortunately, however, there is another possible explanation for the CIA’s new-found transparency and openness in the JFK assassination — to distract attention away from a higher crime by confessing to a lower crime.
It wouldn’t be the first time that the CIA has done that. Consider the case of Frank Olson. He was a CIA employee who worked in the U.S. national-security state’s top-secret biological warfare labs at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, during the Cold War.
On November 28, 1953, Olson was killed as a result of what appeared to be a suicidal jump from the window of his 13-story hotel room in New York City. For more than 20 years, Olson’s family believed that he had been suffering depression and a nervous breakdown at the time he purportedly decided to kill himself by jumping out of the hotel-room window. The CIA did nothing to cause the Olson family to doubt that belief.
Then, in 1975, the Rockefeller Commission uncovered evidence about the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA drug experiment program on unsuspecting Americans.
The Olson family became suspicious and began investigating. Although the CIA had remained mum about Olson’s death for some 20 years, the agency suddenly found religion, became “open” and “transparent,” and publicly confessed that it had subjected its employee Olson to LSD without telling him in advance. Supposedly besieged by depression caused by the LSD, Olson supposedly decided to end his life.
The CIA now felt horrible about what it had done and apologized profusely to the Olson family, even inviting them to CIA headquarters to receive a personal apology from the director of the CIA. The family accepted a $750,000 out-of-court settlement.
Twenty years later, in 1994, the Olson family once again became suspicious. They exhumed the body and had another autopsy performed. According to Wikipedia, most of the autopsy team, which was headed by James Starrs, professor of law and forensics science at George Washington University National Law Center, concluded that Olson had suffered a blunt force trauma to the head before he left the hotel room window. According to the new autopsy, the evidence was called “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.”
Did I mention that there was a fellow CIA agent in the hotel room with Olson? Perhaps it would be helpful to quote a secret assassination manual of the CIA in the 1950s, entitled “A Study of Assassination”:
It is possible to kill a man with the bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative. However, the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice…. For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated. The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface.
Why did the CIA murder American citizen and CIA agent Frank Olson? The entire sordid story is told in a fascinating book entitled, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli Jr. Having participated in horrific and deadly drug experiments on innocent people, Olson had experienced a crisis of conscience and had begun talking to outsiders about what was going on. That was his “terrible mistake.” As such, he became a threat to “national security,” and had to be dealt with.
When the Olson family brought a lawsuit for wrongful death in 2012, the CIA defended by saying that it was too late — that the Olson family had already settled the case in the 1970s and that it should have brought its new action long before now. The federal judge agreed and dismissed the suit.
The CIA’s strategy was brilliant. By confessing to and expressing remorse for the lesser crime of providing Olson with LSD in the 1970s, which supposedly caused him to commit suicide, the CIA was successful in distracting attention away from the higher crime — the CIA’s murder of its employee who was threatening to blow the whistle on MKULTRA.
Has the CIA suddenly had its own crisis of conscience, one in which it suddenly feels the need to disgorge its long-held secrets regarding the Kennedy assassination?
The circumstantial evidence belies that notion.
For example, right now the National Archives is holding tens of thousands of long-secret pages of CIA records relating to the JFK assassination.
Why are they still secret? After all, the JFK Records Act in the 1990s was supposed to bring about the disclosure of all JFK-assassination-related records to the public.
Well, somehow the act permitted the CIA and other agencies to continue withholding some of their records for another 25 years.
If a malefactor is being forced to disgorge a multitude of records, doesn’t it stand to reason that, given a choice, he would wait as long as possible to disclose the most incriminatory records?
Well, guess what: Those 25 years are up in October 2017, and the National Archives has announced that they are getting the records ready for release.
But there is one big caveat: the law enables the CIA to ask the president to continue the concealment of its JFK records, on grounds of “national security.”
Of course, there is nothing that prevents the CIA from sending a letter to the National Archives right now stating, “We have become born-again advocates of openness and transparency in the JFK assassination. Don’t wait until October 2017. Release the records now. We have nothing to hide.”
Instead, the CIA is keeping its options open, waiting to see who the next president will be.
And what about the CIA’s records on its agent George Joannides? He was the CIA agent who secretly supervised and funded the anti-Castro organization in New Orleans known as the DRE, the organization that began issuing press releases immediately after the assassination advertising Lee Harvey Oswald’s connections to communism, the Soviet Union, and Cuba.
Perhaps this would be a good time to remind people what the CIA and the military were teaching about assassination to Latin American right-wing military and intelligence goons at the School of the Americas during the Cold War: that in a covert state-sponsored assassination, officials should blame it on a communist.
Unfortunately, the suddenly open and transparent CIA still refuses to disclose its records on Joannides. Perhaps I should also mention that John Tunheim, the federal judge who presided over the Assassination Records Review Board, which was charged with enforcing the JFK Records Act during the 1990s, as well as G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations during the 1970s, have accused the CIA of intentionally misleading the ARRB and the House Select Committee with respect to Joannides and his relationship to the DRE.
Why would the CIA suddenly confess to a “benign” cover-up in the JFK assassination? Yes, it’s true: one possibility is that it has suddenly decided to come clean on the JFK assassination. But how likely is that? The more likely explanation is that the CIA was confessing to the lower crime in order to hide the higher crime, just as it did in the Frank Olson case.
As everyone knows, the defenders of the lone-nut theory of the assassination have always loved to hurl the “conspiracy theorist” epithet at those who reject the lone-nut theory. What they are essentially saying when they hurl that epithet is this: that such people have simply come up with a theory that the CIA and the military assassinated Kennedy.
Why would they come up with such a theory? The common answers include that such people simply cannot accept the fact that a little man killed a great man. Or that people translate their dislike for the government into a theory that the government killed one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history.
But the lone-nut theorists are missing an important point, a point that the CIA is well aware of — that assassination researchers, over a period of several decades, have, over time, compiled and synthesized a mountain of powerful and convincing circumstantial evidence indicating that the national-security state assassinated Kennedy in a regime-change operation intended to protect “national security,” an operation that was no different in principle from the CIA’s other regime-change operations, including through assassination, during the Cold War.
Thus, it’s not mere theorizing that assassination researchers have been engaged in. For decades, they have been the compiling, marshaling, and analyzing large amounts of circumstantial evidence, much of which was deliberately kept secret by the U.S. national-security establishment for decades, and much of which was only released in the 1990s — 30 years after the assassination — and over the resistance of the military and the CIA and even the Secret Service, which intentionally destroyed many of its JFK-related records after the JFK Records Act was enacted and in direct violation of the Act. Why would they do that?
Keep in mind that the Warren Commission ordered that much of its evidence be kept secret for 75 years. Ask yourself: If a president had been murdered by a lone nut, would it really be necessary to keep the evidence in the case secret for 75 years? And consider this cryptic response from Earl Warren, the head of the Commission, when asked if the Commission’s evidence would ever be made public: “Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security. This would be preserved but not made public.”
Really? Why is that? Wasn’t it just a lone nut murder?
Then, consider the fact that the House Select Committee, which reinvestigated the assassination in the 1970s owing to widespread skepticism of the Warren Report, itself ordered that much of its evidence be kept secret for 50 years.
Why? What does a lone-nut murder have to do with secrecy and “national security?”
Consider just some of the circumstantial evidence that only came out years after the assassination, much of which is detailed in my two ebooks: The Kennedy Autopsy and Regime Change: The JFK Assassination:
- The Dallas physicians said that Kennedy had a big blow-out wound in the back of his head. That would denote an exit wound, which means that JFK was shot in the head from the front. Oswald was situated in the rear.
Check out this lecture, for example, by Dr. Robert McClelland, who was one of the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital. He states that the president had a big wound in the back of his head, which would denote an exit wound, which would mean that JFK was shot from the front.
Dr. Charles Crenshaw, another treating physician, stated the same thing. For example, see this interview of Crenshaw.
But the official autopsy photographs, which were supposed to be kept secret for 75 years, show the back of JFK’s head to be intact. That is, no big exit hole.
- Immediately after the assassination, two of the Dallas treating physicians, Dr. Malcolm Perry and Dr. Kemp Clark, held a press conference, during which Perry repeatedly stated that Kennedy had been struck in the throat by a shot fired from the front.
- The Secret Service forcibly removed the president’s body from Parkland Hospital in order to prevent an autopsy from being conducted by the Dallas Medical Examiner, and, in the process, threatened to kill anyone who interfered with their forcible removal of the body. They also stated that they were under orders to get the body out of Parkland immediately. Who was the most likely person to have issued those orders?
- The president’s body was taken to President Lyndon Johnson’s plane, which was waiting for it at Dallas Love Field. The body was delivered later that evening to a military facility in Maryland for an autopsy.
- After the House Select Committee Hearings in the 1970s, several Navy enlisted men came forward and disclosed that the president’s body had been secretly brought into the Bethesda Naval Medical Center morgue about 1 ½ hours before the official start of the autopsy.
This was confirmed by an official written report soon after the assassination by a Marine Sergeant named Roger Boyajian, which stated that the president’s body was brought into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. (in addition to being brought into the morgue again at 8 p.m.). That report didn’t become public until the 1990s. Here’s a copy of the Sgt. Boyajian’s official report.
This was further confirmed by a written report by the Washington, D.C., funeral home, Gawler’s Funeral Home, which handled the president’s funeral.
Why was the body secretly introduced into the morgue before the official start of the autopsy? The answer might be found in the official report that was submitted by two FBI agents who witnessed the autopsy, Francis O’Neill and James Siebert: “Following the removal of the wrapping [at 8:15 p.m.], it was ascertained that the President’s clothing had been removed and it was also apparent that a tracheotomy had been performed, as well as surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull.” (Brackets and emphasis added.)
There was no surgery performed on the president’s head in Dallas.
- The official photographer for the autopsy, John Stringer, when asked to identify the official photographs of the autopsy, testified under oath that those were not the photographs he took during the autopsy.
- The personal photographer for President Kennedy, Robert Knudsen, claimed that he was the official photographer for the autopsy. Nonetheless, he was never in the same autopsy room that Stringer was in.
- A Navy enlisted woman named Saundra Spencer, who worked in the Navy’s photograph lab in Washington and who worked closely with the White House, testified before the ARRB that the official photographs in the record were not the ones she developed on the weekend of the assassination. She said that the photographs she developed showed a large-sized wound in the back of Kennedy’s head, just as the Dallas physicians (and many other witnesses) attested. It would be difficult to find a more credible witness than Saundra Spencer.
- There were two separate brain exams, one involving the president’s brain and another belonging to someone else. The final autopsy report and photographs reveal a full-sized brain weighing more than an average person’s brain, which was impossible given that at least 1/3 of JFK’s brain was blown away by the gunshot that hit him in the head.
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg, and, as you can see, all this is not engaging in theorizing. This is what the law calls circumstantial evidence, evidence that the law treats just as validly as direct evidence.
What are we to make of all this circumstantial evidence? Well, one thing is beyond dispute: All those people did not get together and conspire to pin the Kennedy assassination on the U.S. national-security state. They were obviously just telling the truth, each independent of the other.
For decades, the U.S. national-security establishment kept most of this evidence secret from the American people. Over the decades, the evidence began surfacing, owing partly to the House Select Committee investigation in the 1970s and owing largely to the ARRB in the 1990s. The great weight and preponderance of that circumstantial evidence that had been kept secret and then later released points in the direction of assassination and cover-up on the part of the U.S. national-security state.
Why would the CIA suddenly have a crisis of conscience and confess to a “benign” cover-up in the Kennedy assassination? The answer lies in how U.S. officials, from President Lyndon Johnson on down, were able to successfully shut down any serious investigation into a conspiracy, an investigation that could have led directly to them.
As I detailed in my ebook Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, Johnson and the national-security establishment were operating on two tracks after the assassination. On the one hand, they were telling the American people that a lone nut had assassinated the president and that there was nothing left to investigate.
On the other hand, they were telling officials in Washington and Texas that a full-scale investigation could lead to nuclear war and, therefore, that it was necessary to shut it down. For example, Johnson told both Earl Warren and Sen. Richard Russell that their country needed them on the commission and that it was their duty to serve, in order to keep America from being embroiled in a nuclear war that would kill some 40 million Americans.
Ask yourself: How could a lone-nut assassination lead to nuclear war?
It’s because the president actually was shot from the front, just as the Dallas doctors had attested, just as Saundra Spencer attested, and just as many other witnesses have attested.
Now, ask yourself: If you’ve got a purported communist supposedly shooting from the rear and also people shooting from the front, who would be the co-conspirators firing from the front? Wouldn’t the most logical answer be the Soviets and the Cubans, given Oswald’s supposed connections to them? That would inevitably mean war between the United States and Cuba and the Soviet Union. And we all know what war would have meant: All-out nuclear war.
What Johnson was telling Warren and Russell was that it was necessary for the commission to settle for pinning the crime solely on Oswald and leave it at that. An all-out nuclear war would not bring the president back. What’s done was done. America could fight the communists in Vietnam and elsewhere, without all-out nuclear war.
But what if those shooters from the front weren’t Soviet or Cuban? What if the assassination wasn’t a communist plot? What if the national-security state orchestrated the assassination?
Then, the conjuring up of WMDs, mushroom clouds, and all-out nuclear war would succeed in scaring most everyone into totally shutting down an investigation into conspiracy, one that might conceivably end up targeting the national-security establishment.
The question naturally arises: If the communists really did kill Kennedy, why not go to war against them?
That’s where the CIA’s assassination plots (in partnership with the Mafia) against Castro come into play. As I contend in Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, rather than keep such plots secret from the Warren Commission, as the CIA’s recent “confession” asserts, it is a virtual certainty that the Warren Commission was made aware of such plots on a top-secret basis, either by Allen Dulles, the former director of the CIA who Kennedy had fired and who Johnson had appointed to serve on the Warren Commission, or by Johnson, or by the CIA itself.
Think about it: That information would have immediately and permanently shut down the investigation. It would have enabled Johnson to say: “Although the communists have killed our beloved president, we can’t go to nuclear war against them because it was our government, under the Kennedy brothers, that started the assassination war by trying to assassinate Castro first.”
There certainly is precedent for that type of secretive action on the part of the Warren Commission. As I state in Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, when Warren was confronted with evidence that Oswald was an employee or asset of the FBI and the CIA, Warren called a top-secret, emergency meeting of the commission to discuss the problem. Warren ordered that the meeting and the discussions of the meeting be kept secret and that the transcript of the meeting be destroyed. The members of the commission honored his request for secrecy. The only reason we know about the meeting today is that the court reporter for the meeting failed to destroy her tape recording of the meeting.
What was the national-security state’s motive for removing Kennedy from office? The same motive for removing so many other officials from office in foreign countries during the Cold War: “national security.” That details of that motive is fully set forth in FFF’s ebook Kennedy’s War With the National Security Establishment: Why JFK Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.
Why do 30 percent of the American people still believe the lone-nut findings of Warren Report despite the overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence pointing toward a regime-change operation by the U.S. national-security establishment?
The answer lies in the deep fear that some people have of even pondering the notion that the national-security state, the totalitarian-like structure that was grafted onto America’s original governmental system after World War II in order to wage the Cold War orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, just as it orchestrated assassinations and regime-change operations practically since its inception.
Oh sure, such people will usually accept that the CIA and the military have engaged in regime-change operations in other countries and even that they have assassinated countless people, including Americans. But assassinate an American president, John F. Kennedy? Their minds do not permit them to look in that direction. The national security state has become their idol, one that deserves unconditional praise and thanks for “keep us safe” and preserving “national security” — an idol that, in their minds, can do no wrong. To them, it is simply inconceivable that the national-security establishment would protect national security by eliminating an American president whose policies were considered to be a grave threat to national security.
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To commemorate the 52nd anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, today, November 20, all three of FFF’s JFK ebooks are being offered for FREE at Amazon.com:
The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob Hornberger
Kennedy’s War With the National Security Establishment: Why JFK Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.
Regime Change: The JFK Assassination by Jacob Hornberger
Also, The Kennedy Autopsy has just been issued in print form for $9.95. It is also available at Amazon in audio format for $14.95
I also highly recommend the following books:
The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (2015) by David Talbot.
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (2010) by James W. Douglass.
Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the JFK Assassination – Volumes 1-5 (2009) by Douglas P. Horne.
Best Evidence (1980) by David Lifton.
I also highly recommend the 5-part, 6 1/2 hour video presentation that Douglas Horne did for The Future of Freedom Foundation, entitled “Altered History: Exposing Deceit and Deception in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence” which has now received 150,879 views.
