IN 1969, MAN landed on the moon. In 1977, Elvis died. In 2001, the United States was attacked by terrorists; the 9-11 assaults did not, in any way, shape, or form, involve the CIA. In contrast to these facts, there are conspiracy theorists who mistakenly believe that the moon landing was faked, that Elvis lives, and that 9-11 was an inside job. At the same time, there are those who lump together all conspiracy theories and brand them as false. But in fact, as serious students of history know, major conspiracies have indeed occurred in our nation’s past. In the cases of the John and Robert Kennedy assassinations, numerous hidden facts related to these murders, uncovered over the years and pieced together here, overwhelmingly debunk the official “lone-gun” scenarios.
Most Americans today realize that the CIA is saving their lives every day; the Agency’s intelligence-gathering networks, drone attacks, and other clandestine actions are critical to the war on terrorism. It wasn’t always this way. This book, CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys: How and Why US Agents Conspired to Assassinate JFK and RFK, is the story of the CIA’s darkest days—the 1960s.
Journalists typically answer five key questions when writing their reports: who, what, when, where, and why. In this book, we will also examine in depth the question of “how.” How were the Kennedy brothers’ assassinations planned, executed, and covered up? The evidence shows conclusively that both plots were based on a cunning variation of an appalling CIA operation known originally as MKULTRA with a crucial twist incorporated: the program utilized an unwitting fall guy in conjunction with hidden sharpshooters (not to be confused with a “Manchurian Candidate”). It is this finding that forms the framework for understanding the true story of the assassinations of the Kennedys.
You may be familiar with the mantra, “if conspiracy theories were true, someone would have talked by now and everyone would know the truth. You can’t keep a secret that long in this town.” Washington, DC, may not be known for keeping secrets. But at the same time, we must remember that assassins also kill witnesses or are themselves eliminated by their backers; dead men tell no tales. Secondly, some secrets are bigger than others and take more time to surface. You’ll recall that it was not until 2005 when we read the revelation that “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame was a quiet, unassuming, high-level bureaucrat named W. Mark Felt, the assistant director of the FBI. Mr. Felt had remained anonymous to the public at large for more than thirty-two years!
Another legend in the nation’s capital depicts Watergate as the greatest political scandal in modern US history. Yet the break-in and its related sundry political crimes pale in comparison to the ’60s assassinations. If one takes the time to dig beyond the falsehoods of crazed lone gunmen and magic bullets, it becomes evident that the facts surrounding the murders of President John F. Kennedy and his brother New York senator Robert F. Kennedy reveal a much greater scandal, one that begs to be explored in depth.
The goal of this book is to show, through forensic science and other resources, the identity of the primary individuals ultimately responsible for these horrific assassinations. A thorough examination and analysis of those who had ample motive, means, and opportunity concludes that only one small group stands alone: the CIA’s Richard Helms and James Angleton and their rogue band of conspirators and mob allies. Their story is told in the chapters ahead.
This revisionist view of history will startle some historians, particularly those who recall the murder of Bobby Kennedy.
New York senator Robert Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments after giving a rousing victory speech, having just won the California Democratic presidential primary. Minutes after midnight on June 5, 1968, as he walked behind the speaking platform and through a crowded kitchen pantry, he was shot in the back of the head and in the upper back at point-blank range. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian immigrant, was apprehended, gun in hand.
While Sirhan had indeed been firing, top forensic scientists concur that the evidence shows he could not have been the killer. There are three key reasons for this: bullets later test fired from his gun could not be conclusively matched to the victim’s bullets. Kennedy was shot in the back, yet Sirhan was positioned in front of him. The fatal shots were fired from an inch away based on the powder burn evidence, yet Sirhan’s gun was several feet away. In addition, the alleged murder weapon held eight bullets, yet evidence of at least ten bullets was found. Witnesses have testified they saw two other gunmen standing next to Kennedy as he fell. Sirhan has no memory of the murder, even while under hypnosis. He also claims to have no memory of writing his forty-eight-page so-called diary, evidence the state produced to show premeditation. The psychiatrist who last examined Sirhan reported that he was not deranged in any way.
On April 23, 1969, Sirhan was sentenced to death in the gas chamber for assassinating Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. The sentence was reduced to life imprisonment in 1972 after California abolished the death penalty. At this writing, Sirhan is still imprisoned in a California jail. Since 1992, he had been at Corcoran State Prison, an hour north of Bakersfield. In November 2009, he was moved to Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California,1 some eighty miles east of Big Sur and two hundred miles northwest of Pasadena.
Robert Kennedy, forty-two, would most likely have been the next president of the United States. When he was shot, he was in the final stages of an electrifying presidential campaign. An anti-Vietnam War candidate, Senator Kennedy was projected to win the Democratic nomination over his main rival, also a peace candidate, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy. With a victory at the convention in Chicago, Kennedy’s chances were excellent to have gone on and defeated Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon in the general election in November 1968. An examination of the facts, based on the best evidence, indicates that the elimination of Robert Kennedy from the race was a well-planned, cunning plot.
Four and a half years earlier, in November 1963, President John F. Kennedy had signed an order to begin the process of gradually withdrawing US troops from Vietnam. Several days later on November 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade through the streets of Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy was assassinated. The Vietnam withdrawal order was immediately rescinded by the newly sworn-in President Johnson.
On the day President Kennedy was killed, CIA director John McCone drove over to Robert Kennedy’s house in McLean, Virginia. According to author Richard Mahoney in his book, Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Kennedy aide Walter Sheridan has revealed that when McCone arrived they went outside to the lawn, where Bobby asked him if the CIA had killed his brother. Shortly after, Bobby called a Washington location at which the CIA maintained a unit of anti-Castro Cuban operatives. These CIA handlers, an element within the Agency over which Richard Helms had overall authority, had been carrying out raids on Cuba and attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro. The unit was enraged over the Kennedy administration’s decision to end hostilities toward Castro. Bobby spoke with a writer there, Haynes Johnson, who was chronicling the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Speaking of his brother’s assassination, Bobby told him, “One of your guys did it,” meaning the Cubans’ CIA handlers.2
Bobby publicly went along with the Warren Commission investigation of the assassination, but did so to avoid media controversy while quietly planning his own route to the White House, a vantage point from which he could then try to bring both his enemies and the enemies of peace and democracy to justice.
President Kennedy was killed at age forty-six as he was about to run for a second term in 1964, which he surely would have won. His plans to make peace with the Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba, eloquently expressed in his June 1963 speech at American University, were anathema to many in the establishment, particularly at the top of the CIA. Kennedy’s actions sealed his fate.
The alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a twenty-four-year-old ex-Marine living in Dallas, who was married with two infant children in 1963. He was arrested within hours of the assassination at a movie theater following the murder of a police officer and was charged with killing the president. Oswald was accused of firing a bolt-action rifle from a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building in Dealey Plaza in Dallas. As the car carrying the president, his wife Jacqueline, and Gov. John Connally and his wife passed by on Elm Street, shots rang out, hitting Kennedy in the head and back and also wounding Governor Connally. Fifty-one eyewitnesses later stated the shots came from the grassy knoll in front of the president, not only from the Book Depository building behind the motorcade. No one witnessed the alleged assassin in the window. Oswald was in fact observed minutes before and after the shooting sitting in the Book Depository lunchroom. Later investigations have shown that eyewitness reports, film evidence, Parkland Hospital doctors’ testimony, and forensic evidence on the angle and direction of the bullets all indicate that the JFK assassination was carried out by three gunmen who fired four shots.
Oswald was gunned down two days after the assassination while being taken through the basement of the Dallas Police Station en route to the county courthouse. In the full glare of network TV cameras, local mobster Jack Ruby silenced the government’s prime suspect, thus eliminating the need for a trial.
As a Marine, Oswald had studied the Russian language and become fluent. He was assigned to a key US spy base in Japan. After nearly three years in the service, he was discharged, traveled to the Soviet Union, and married there. His ease of entry and exit, his access to financial resources, and other indicators have shown that his “defection” involved covert intelligence operations ongoing during this era. Oswald’s closest associates were all CIA assets: George de Mohrenschildt a well-financed Dallas immigrant who assisted Oswald upon his return to the Dallas area from the Soviet Union; Captain Alexi Davison of Atlanta, a US embassy doctor whom he met with repeatedly in the USSR; and David Ferrie, a pilot who worked for CIA sponsored anti-Castro Cuban exile groups. When Oswald started his sole-member Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter, his office was in the same building as David Ferrie’s. But despite these intelligence connections, Lee Harvey Oswald had another side of himself that definitely was not in sync with the CIA’s upper echelon: his admiration for President John F. Kennedy, according to Oswald’s friends in Dallas.
Conventional wisdom holds that the alleged assassins, Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald, were “nobodies” who wanted to be “somebodies.” This classic line, used by many in the media and in government circles, implies that conspiracy theorists are people who refuse to accept that a man so “small” (i.e., Sirhan, Oswald) could kill a man so “big” (RFK, JFK). Those who think that revisionists think this way cannot accept the fact that a small cabal of intelligent—yet demented—men within their own government could be so ruthless and inhuman that they would embrace such diabolical plots.
Instead, these conventional “official line” writers believe that each assassination was carried out by a lone gunman. “Organized evil,” or the concept of a conspiracy, is just too much for some to contemplate. At the same time, there are other writers who believe that there is such a thing as organized evil in society, such as the Mafia. But they refuse to accept the fact that rogue members of the CIA, the “good guys,” could have acted with such malevolence. Indeed, for many historians, the assassinations are enigmas wrapped in emotions (to paraphrase Winston Churchill).
And then there are those conspiracy critics, many in positions of power in the media, in publishing, and in academia, who adamantly believe that advocating conspiracy theories is criminal because it will undermine the public’s belief in government. On the contrary, as students of history can affirm, seeking the truth in public records promotes openness, and, in turn, strengthens our government.
And, of course, there are those in these same camps who know the truth—that CIA rogues and mobsters killed JFK and RFK—but publicly they deny such convictions, saying to themselves, “We don’t want our enemies to know that sometimes we are as bad as they are.”
Other powerful nationally known writers have stated that discussing conspiracies increases paranoia in the country. The New York Times’ Anthony Lewis wrote simplistically in 1975 that the search for a conspiracy “obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason.”3
The most common misconception of establishment pundits is the idea that the assassinations were carried out by an individual seeking fame, that is, “by a crazy person who wanted to make a name for himself.” If this were so, then why is it that one of the alleged assassins protested the charges against him, and the other insisted he could not recall what had happened? Lee Harvey Oswald admonished his brother Robert, “Don’t believe the so-called evidence against me.”4 And Sirhan B. Sirhan has spent the majority of his life behind bars while his attorneys have sought to have their client exonerated as a programmed pawn.
These two 1960s assassinations at issue involved similar methods, hidden gunmen, and innocent fall guys. The motive in each case was the continuation of the war against Communism in Vietnam and Cuba and the suppression of civil rights protest marches at home by eliminating key leaders who stood in the way. Only Richard Helms and James Angleton, the CIA’s chiefs of counterintelligence, possessed the means of planning and executing this type of operation without drawing suspicion, albeit in part by relying on their closest officers: David Atlee Phillips, the head of CIA Latin American Affairs; E. Howard Hunt, sabotage expert; and other confidants. Helms and Angleton had two overriding motives: accumulating power and self-preservation. But there were other motives. They maintained a zealous desire to vanquish Communism in all its forms both abroad and at home. This was the Red Scare generation; several years younger than “Red-baiting” Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, they and their contemporaries produced the Black List as they hunted alleged Communists in the military, in government, and in Hollywood. It was the McCarthyism of the 1950s that culminated in the assassinations of the 1960s. JFK and RFK chose to travel a different path. They confronted the rabid anti-Communism of their day. On issues of war and peace and civil rights, they listened to a different drummer, and because of this, they were cut down in their prime.
The CIA’s Richard Helms also was motivated by factors within his psychological makeup. Through intelligence and charm, he maintained the illusion of normality. If we look beneath the surface (as we shall see when we examine his personality in detail ahead), we find an apparent pathological liar, one who acted like a man without a conscience who would do whatever he needed to survive and to get ahead. In fact, he exhibited the classic signs of a serious mental disorder—not insanity, but that of a closet sociopath.
Critics of conspiracy theories like to postulate that people in general cannot accept the irrational. Yet, the assassinations were not irrational by any means. Again, it is very difficult for shallow people to live with the hard, cold fact that individuals within their own government conspired to assassinate their leaders.
No one likes to believe that he or she has been lied to, or worse, that one has believed the lies. There are those whose egos cannot accept the fact that they were duped while others, less astute than they, were not fooled. Consequently, many of these “official line” believers naively look away. They would rather believe the popular delusion that these assassinations were utterly senseless and tragic and have no explanation than to have to face the brutal facts. Others say to themselves, If I were wrong about the assassination conspiracy, was I also wrong about other important aspects of my life? They resolve this anxiety by dismissing opposing points of view out of hand. The “lone nut” theories were promulgated to cover up the true accounts of two incredible losses. Upon closer inspection, history has had to be rewritten.
This work involves the use of the mosaic theory of intelligence gathering in which pieces of information are combined with other pieces to produce a composite. By connecting the dots, information that has been hidden from the general public for decades can emerge with force, clarity, and meaning.
Some key connections and conclusions herein have never before been published. They represent new knowledge stemming from an analysis of the available forensic evidence and an assessment of the work of several intrepid historians whose books are cited throughout. By following up their persistent investigative efforts and carefully fitting together the many pieces of the puzzle, we have arrived at a better understanding of modern American history.
Richard Helms and James Angleton took with them to the grave many of the secrets of the ’60s assassinations. Helms died of bone cancer at home in Washington, DC, on October 22, 2002. He was eighty-nine. Angleton died of lung cancer, also in Washington, DC, on May 11, 1987, at age sixty-nine. Since then, enough evidence and related historical facts have been uncovered over the years to enable us to decipher both Helms’s and Angleton’s roles in relation to these murders during their thirty years of covert activities.