Who Really Killed John F. Kennedy

Over the last decade, a lot of individuals have speculated on conspiracy theories that would make the typical American cringe in disgust. The thought of Americans accusing the homeland of involvement in September 11th, for example, boils the blood of many Americans and especially the super patriots that have spawned as a result of Republican nationalism in the 21st century. It wasn’t long after November 22, 1963 - the 9/11 before 9/11 - that conspiracy theorists started explaining away "what really happened on Dealey Plaza" and they were certain they knew

Here’s the fast clip that everyone has seen at one point or another:

John F Kennedy Assassinated in Dallas, Texas

"Who killed JFK?"

First, here’s a quick and dirty Summary from Wikipedia:

 The assassination of John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, took place on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, USA at 12:30 p.m. CST (18:30 UTC). John F. Kennedy was fatally wounded by gunshots while riding with his wife Jacqueline in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. That, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, was the conclusion of multiple government investigations, including the ten-month investigation of the Warren Commission of 1963-1964 and the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) of 1976-1979. [...] Since the original 1966 Gallup poll, show a majority of the public hold beliefs contrary to these findings. The assassination is still the subject of widespread speculation and has spawned numerous conspiracy theories…

Consider this a fun exercise and nothing more. Many "facts" are contested and many "theories" debunked, so I’m not going to jump into the fray. I see this as a creative think piece about an alternate reality that might have been, one that is logically connected to reality and facts surrounding the JFK assassination.

Almost every American at one point or another either lived the history or learned about the legendary John F. Kennedy and his mysterious assassination. For those of us that weren’t around to witness the event and read the news or listen to pundits, theorists, scholars and lawyers discuss the murder, we only have exposure to the event through historical record. The simplified version of the JFK era that most of us read about in middle school, high school and maybe college was as follows: JFK was a great and beloved American. He was the Presidential “hope” of America a likely champion of the Civil Rights movement; the great American idealist and Democratic hero who would save us from ourselves and likely put an end to the war in Vietnam.

Theories Of Who Killed JFK

JFK Was Killed By The Illuminati and Freemasonry

Many theorie abound as to who killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy.The CIA,the mob,Castro have all been implicated.There is only one orginization with the power,and evil intent to do such a deed,and that,my dear readers is the illuminati.First of all,let me take you back 900 years to the crusades. If you are a student of history you may have came across an organization known as the Knights Templar.The crusading knights started out for a noble cause.To rid the holy land of the scourges of islam.Knights pledged themselves to the service of christ.They took vows of poverty and chastity.All was well for decades until the knights linked up with a muslim sect known as the order of assassins.There the knights took part in all that christianity reguards as evil,including urinating on all christian relics and engaging in homosexual behavior.In time the templars gained great strength and wealth becoming the first international bankers.King Phillip the third of France and The Pope of Rome conspired to arrest all the templars and seize their wealth,which they did.They executed the templar knights,including Jauques Demolay who swore vengence upon the catholic church.As time went on the templars,were taken over by freemasonry and masonry was swallowed by the Illuminati.Now to 1963,As you all know,kennedy was a catholic.Look at the date he was killed.He was killed 11-22-1963.11 and 22 add up to 33.There are 33 degrees in freemasonry.He was killed at noon.In masonic literature 12 noon is when the sun is at its most high.The sun is a Symbol for lucifer.He suffered 3 wounds,to the head,throat,and back.In masonic literature Hiram abiff the bulider of solomons temple,was killed by three ruffians for refusing to reveal the "secrets" of a "master" builder.Abiff was killed by blows to the head,throat and back,(see the book:morals and dogma by albert pike).To add further insult to this nation,they made kennedys wife light the eternal flame at his grave.The eternal flame is the symbol of the illuminati. ???

Where Does The CIA Fit In All Of This?

Accusations of a CIA hit job on our own president were common in conspiracy theory related to the assassination. Certainly, the CIA or Secret Service has unfettered access to resources that could pull off such a mission, but I won’t attempt to convince you that the CIA was involved. I’m the last person you’d find researching on conspiracy theories, my knowledge is or was limited to historical fact. I’ve read Robert Kennedy’s book "Thirteen Days" about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but surely it has no relevance to the assassination that happened on November 22, 1963.  

When you think of JFK and his legacy, you have to ask a simple question. What could possibly motivate anyone — even the CIA — to assassinate what seemed like the next coming of Christ? Of course, within that question lies one obvious answer that I won’t examine "thou shall have no other Gods before me." Religion often gives rise to reasons that are inexplicable to people outside of the religious circle. Then again, I guess anything is possible as humans rarely tend to practice what they preach.   

Religion doesn’t do it for you either? Well, there’s racism as a motive: the possibility that because JFK would help champion desegregation and bring equality to the forefront of American politics, perhaps bigots wanted him taken out. You can look at political motivation, too if that’s ‘too out there for you’: JFK was a liberal like no other, proud, strong and idealistic. He was a visionary who believed in justice as the foundation of our American ideals and more importantly, the "establishment" has no room for people like that. Finally, the military and intelligence angle, a popular one to be sure and in my view the most interesting to examine.

Another Popular Conspiracy Theory: The Limo Driver Did It!!!

Bobby Kennedy was perhaps America’s first conspiracy theorist. Robert Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy conclude that JFK was the victim of a domestic plot, aka. ‘JFK’s assassination was an inside job.’ I know, those words are ringing in your ears the way ‘9/11 was an inside job’ do, but given time, history and technology you are probably much more willing to think about this possibility 45 years after the fact. In fact, Lyndon Johnson suspected the assassination resulted from a struggle for power in Cuba. While Richard Nixon demanded all documents related to the Bay of Pigs invasion when he was President. Think about this possibility for a moment, because it is one that is rarely investigated or given credence to especially because the only people with access to evidence that would link Cuba includes federal agents with clearance at or above the Top Secret level. for some time now has gone viral once again on the Internet, but few people outside if the youtube generation have ever heard of it. Essentially, it exposes a plot cooked up by higher-ups in our government to create false flags, terrorist scenarios and fake other events to make it appear as though Cuba attacked the United States both inside our borders and on foreign lands.  

When I saw this clip, I had to go back to the original ‘fast version’ of the event and pause it frame by frame to see if the "slow motion limo driver clip" was doctored. I don’t see how this theory holds water for one simple reason: Jackie Kennedy was sitting a foot away from the victim.

Cuba???

Over the decades since JFK’s assassination, did anyone stop and wonder what the heck Cuba and power had to do with it? When crazy old man Lyndon Johnson spouted his theories, did you ever wonder how he could possibly come to such wacky conclusions? For those scholars and theorists that did consider our government as ‘motivated’ to kill a sitting President, how was Cuba relevant and what the heck would give anyone the idea that Cuba had a role in all of this? Was it the Cuban Missile Crisis, communism, world domination? What exactly about Cuba would prompt any President, historian or scholar to question the role of Cuba in inciting a plot to assassinate John F Kennedy?

note:

Quick reference from Wikipedia:

The 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful attempted invasion by armed Cuban exiles in southwest Cuba, planned and funded by the United States, in an attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. This action accelerated a rapid deterioration in Cuban-American relations, which was further worsened by the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year.

there’s Operation Norwoods, 

Operation Northwoods, or Northwoods, was a 1962 plan by the U.S. Department of Defense to stage acts of simulated or real terrorism on US soil and against U.S. interests and then put the blame of these acts on Cuba in order to generate U.S. public support for military action against the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. As part of the U.S. government’s Operation Mongoose anti-Castro initiative, the plan, which was not implemented, called for various false flag actions, including simulated or real state-sponsored acts of terrorism on U.S. and Cuban soil. The plan was proposed by senior U.S. Department of Defense leaders, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Louis Lemnitzer.

 Idealism, Hope, and the American Dream

The CIA and possibly other ‘unknown’ federal agencies have done their part to destabilize governments around the world. The CIA is every young boy’s fantasy. It becomes a dream of every teen and the reality of many Ivy League graduates and other brilliant minds and military heroes throughout the U.S. Was idealism, justice, and integrity the key to JFK’s assassination? Was his death ‘necessary’ to keep the lid tight on American State Secrets and if there was a plot by our CIA to assassinate the president, will it ever be revealed or "declassified"? Sounds like something out of Hollywood!

I’m not sure that answers that will close this mystery out will come in my lifetime if ever. For all of the excitement that this event brings in the form of sadness, shock, and disbelief, it seems that the various theories seem more like concoctions of wild creative imaginations, even more so than the outlandish claim that "it was just some crazy guy with no motive" that pulled off one of the greatest assassinations in world history. The only concern I have immediately, is IF our Department of Defense was involved, could it happen again?

 DEAD WITNESSES

 Investigations have been thwarted by the number of material witnesses who died in the first few years after the assassination and in periods of renewed interest in the case during the 1970s.

... many key witnesses ... died at strategically important moments. Here are a few of the more interesting cases:

* Gary Underhill, a CIA agent who claimed the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination, died of a gun shot to the head in May 1964. H is death was ruled a suicide.

* Guy Banister, a former FBl agent and acquaintance of Oswald, died of an apparent heart attack in June 1964. Files containing information on his anti-Castro activities were missing by the time authorities reached his office.

* Mary Meyer, a mistress of JFK's during the White House years and the estranged wife of CIA veteran Cord Meyer, was murdered in October 1964 in a park in Washington, DC. Cord Meyer was a fishing companion of CIA counter-intelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, who seized Meyer's diary after her death.

* C.D. Jackson, senior vice president of Life magazine, died of unknown causes in September 1964. Jackson arranged for Life to buy the Zapruder film soon after the Dealey Plaza shooting and then locked it away. (The film was not widely seen by the public until it was shown on ABC's Goodnight America in 1975.)

* Rose Cheramie, a prostitute and striptease dancer in Ruby's Dallas nightclub, died in a Texas hit-and-run accident in September 1965. Two days before the assassination, she told police in Louisiana she overheard two Latin men plotting to kill the president.

* Dorothy Kilgallen, a prominent columnist and TV personality, was ruled a suicide by drug overdose in November 1965. She had just completed a lengthy interview of Ruby in prison and told friends privately that she was about to "break" the JFK case.

* David Ferrie, a militant anti-Castroite and associate of Oswald and Banister, died of an apparent brain embolism in February 1967. He was just about to be arraigned for conspiracy in the JFK assassination by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, whose investigation convinced him that the CIA was involved.

* Eladio Del Valle, a friend and political comrade of Ferrie's, was shot at close range the day after Ferrie's death. Garrison had been trying to find Del Valle for questioning.

* Hale Boggs, House majority leader and a member of the Warren Commission, was killed in a plane crash in Alaska in 1972. He had begun to express public doubts about the Warren Commission's findings.

* J.A. Milteer, the far-right Miami activist, died when his heater exploded in February 1974. As mentioned above, he predicted an attempt on JFK's life and the capture of a scapegoat shortly before events in Dealey Plaza-and a man looking a lot like him was picked up by the police that November afternoon.

* Clay Shaw, whom Garrison brought to trial as a prime suspect in a JFK conspiracy, died of cancer in August 1974. Unable to prove Shaw's CIA connections, Garrison saw him acquitted in 1969. But just a year after Shaw's death, a high-level CIA defector, Victor Marchetti, confirmed Shaw's ties to the agency.

* Sam Giancana, Mafia boss of Chicago, was shot to death in the basement of his home while in the Federal Witness Protection Program in June 1975. At the time of his murder, Giancana was scheduled to testify to the Senate Intelligence Committee on the ClA's alliance with the Mafia in an attempt to kill Castro.

* John Roselli, a Mafia lieutenant of Giancana's, was dismembered, stuffed into an oil drum and dropped into the ocean off Miami in July 1976. Roselli was the Mafia's contact man for its assassination projects with the CIA and was scheduled for a second appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee when he was killed.

* George de Mohrenschildt, who befriended Oswald in Dallas, was found dead of a gunshot wound, deemed self-inflicted, in March 1977. Two hours before his death, an investigator for the House Assassinations Committee came to interview him about the JFK case, but de Mohrenschildt was not at home. In a manuscript found afterwards, de Mohrenschildt supported Oswald's view of himself as "a patsy."

* Charles Nicoletti, also on the House Committee's witness list, was shot three times in the back of the neck in the parking lot of a suburban Chicago shopping center in March 1977-less than 48 hours after de Mohrenschildt's death. Nicoletti was said to have been a "handler" (that is, supervisor) of Mafia assassins in the ClA-Mafia plots.

* Carlos Prio Socarras, a president of pre-revolutionary Cuba, was found dying of a pistol shot in April 1977, just six days after Nicoletti was gunned down. Prio's death was ruled a suicide. He, too, was on the House Committee's witness list because of his alleged links to Jack Ruby and anti-Castro Cuban militants.

We may never know for sure if these key witnesses were murdered to keep them silent. But there is no doubt these deaths have significantly hindered the official investigations and the public's understanding of what took place at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

Evidence of a cover-up

The evidence that there was a cover-up is just as impressive as the evidence that there was a conspiracy in the first place. Here is a brief run-down, including a couple of points not mentioned above:

* Oswald's description was broadcast over police radio within fifteen minutes of the assassination. No one knows how this description was obtained.

* No interrogation records were kept for those arrested at Dealey Plaza, or for Oswald.

* The pictures of Oswald holding a gun appear to be faked.

* JFK's body was removed from Dallas before an autopsy could be performed there.

* JFK's corpse left Dallas wrapped in a sheet inside an ornamental bronze casket. It arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington in a body bag inside a plain casket.

* The autopsy photographs of JFK's wounds differed radically from the descriptions of the doctors at Parkland Hospital.

* A whole tray of evidence, including what was left of the president's brain, remains missing from the National Archives.

The pristine condition of "the magic bullet" suggests it was planted.

* Numerous films made by witnesses to the event were confiscated.

* Many more witnesses have died than would normally be expected, many in mysterious circumstances.

* Both the FBI and the CIA concealed important evidence from the Warren Commission.

* Critical data unearthed by the Warren Commission in 1964 and the Assassination Committee in 1978 is still classified secret.

Who Was Involved???

If there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, who was involved in it? Since secrecy pervades the case, and since so many witnesses have died, it is impossible to say with certainty, but the following six scenarios describe the most basic possibilities.

The Soviets

Two related theories propose that Nikita Khrushchev, humiliated by the 1962 Missile Crisis, instigated the assassination. One proposes that Oswald was directed to kill JFK by Valery Kostikov, a Mexico City Soviet embassy official and reputed KGB assassin overseer. The second proposes that the KGB captured Oswald during his stay in Russia and then sent an impersonator back to the US to kill the president.

An important advocate of the Kostikov theory was the CIA's chief of counter-intelligence operations, James Jesus Angleton. Either because he wanted to provoke a Soviet-American clash or because he really believed it, Angleton strenuously maintained that the KGB was behind the Kennedy assassination. In fact, the intensity of his conviction led to one of the most bizarre subplots in the entire JFK case and nearly destroyed the CIA from the inside out.

Early in 1964, a KGB officer named Yuri Nosenko, who had been informing to the CIA for more than a year, decided to defect and come to the United States. Nosenko had worked in the KGB bureau that kept the file on Oswald. He stated that he knew for a fact that Oswald was not under the control of the KGB.

But Angleton thought Nosenko was a "mole"-a fake defector whose real mission was to misinform the CIA. Angleton imprisoned Nosenko in a CIA safe house and pressured him in every way short of physical torture to deny what he had said. This situation led to a virtual war within the CIA, and ultimately resulted in Angleton's downfall and Nosenko's vindication.

The Soviets-did-it theory explains why the Warren Commission developed its implausible lone-assassin conclusion. According to Warren's Memous, Johnson had called him to the White House to tell him of "rumors floating around the world" that the Soviets might have been responsible, that if this were known "it might lead us into war," perhaps even a nuclear war, and that as many as 40 million people might die. Warren's Memoirs imply that the real job of the Warren Commission was to quiet any suspicion of Soviet guilt.

But the Soviet theory raises more questions than it answers. Why would the USSR risk nuclear war to promote LBJ, a much more militant Cold Warrior than JFK? Why would the Soviets trust Oswald? And how could Oswald's mother and brothers have been deceived by an Oswald double? (In 1981 Marina and Marguerite, Oswald's mother, were sufficiently persuaded by the theory to exhume Oswald's body. Dental records proved that the body buried in Oswald's grave was, in fact, Oswald's.)

Castro's Cuba

Another theory, popular among right-wingers and anti-Castroites (among them, US ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann, columnist Jack Anderson and Mafia lieutenant John Roselli) accuses Fidel Castro of engineering the assassination. In this scenario, Castro either recruited Oswald as the assassin or turned around a hit squad that had been sent to kill him, sending them back to shoot JFK.

This theory has certain strengths. Like the Soviet theory, it suggests a motivation for the Warren Commission's cover-up-to protect the world from the consequences of learning about a Communist-directed assassination. Castro had a motive: The CIA had sponsored Mafia attempts against his life, and he had warned JFK that these attacks might "boomerang."

But this theory is also implausible. As Castro pointed out in a 1991 interview on NBC, Cuba had been improving its relations with JFK ever since the Missile Crisis and had nothing to gain by putting Johnson in the White House. Further, Cuba would have suffered extreme consequences if such a plot had been discovered.

Finally, if Oswald were the assassin, how was he recruited by Castro? Although Oswald had passed out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans, he did not associate with any other pro-Castro groups and had never visited Cuba.

The Mafia

In its final report of 1979, the House Assassinations Committee theorized that the assassination might have been masterminded by New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. This view was endorsed by the committee's Chief Counsel, G. Robert Blakey, and Richard Billings in their 1981 book, The Plot to Kill the President, which suggests that two Mafia hitmen were involved-Oswald, firing from the book depository and another, still unknown, firing from the grassy knoll.

Marcello certainly had sufficient motive. Despite the Mafia's crucial help getting JFK elected in 1960, Marcello was apprehended and deported only a few months after JFK took office. Upon reentering the US and successfully contesting his deportation, Marcello threatened JFK's life and spoke of getting "a nut" to kill him.

Clearly the Mafia would not have used someone as inexperienced as Oswald as an assassin, so if he was involved, it must simply have been as a patsy. And clearly the Mafia could not have done the job all by itself, since that would not explain the government cover-up. One possibility is that it blackmailed the government, demanding a cover-up in exchange for keeping secret the CIA's hiring of Mafia assassins to kill Castro. But more likely, it was simply hired to do the job.

A five-part TV series, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, which first aired in this country on the A&E cable network in the fall of 1991, provided testimony from two sources which sought to indicate that three hitmen from the Corsican Mafia had been hired to do the job by the US Mafia.

New evidence emerged in 1991 that J. Edgar Hoover knew of a Mafia murder contract on JFK as early as September 1962 but never informed the Secret Service. According to Texas attorney Mark North, Hoover-a bitter foe of many of Kennedy's policies-was worried that Kennedy would enforce his mandatory retirement in 1965. North says that Hoover had earlier attempted to blackmail Kennedy with FBI evidence of his philandering, including JFK's sharing of a girlfriend with Mafia boss Sam Giancana.

The Cowboys

Another theory claims that JFK was assassinated by the Cowboys-wealthy and powerful Southwesterners who share national power in an uneasy balance with the more liberal East Coast political establishment, the Yankees. In this scenario, Oswald was manipulated into the role of patsy and was not an assassin.

The strong point of the Cowboy theory is that, as we have seen, many Texans were murderously angry at JFK by the summer of 1963. He had scaled back the oil depletion tax credit, disciplined General Edwin Walker and was, rumor had it, considering dumping another Texan, Lyndon Johnson, from his 1964 ticket.

There is at least one major weaknesses to this theory-if the Cowboys were planning to murder the president, why would they virtually advertise their intentions in advance?

The Mongoose team

The theory that seems most popular among researchers-Jim Garrison, Mark Lane, Fletcher Prouty, Robert Groden, David Lifton and Jim Marrs among them-is that the assassination was organized "off the reservation" by rogue agents associated with Operation Mongoose.

Mongoose was the code-name for programs JFK set up in the Defense Department, CIA and State Department after the Bay of Pigs to coordinate anti-Castro activities - some of which were aimed at overthrowing him by political and economic means, others at assassinating him outright. To carry out the JFK killing and to cover up their own involvement, Mongoose rogues set up Oswald, a low-level Naval intelligence agent, as a patsy and planted false clues pointing to Cuba, the Soviet Union and the Mafia.

This scenario also provides a clear motive for assassination. Mongoose members-particularly those in Task Force W, a CIA portion of the team - were angry at JFK for his retreat from the Bay of Pigs and what they perceived as his concessions to Communism. As they saw it, LBJ's foreign policy would be a lot better.

This theory also explains how an official investigation could be thwarted and how Oswald, if he were a US intelligence operative in contact with Mongoose members, could have been framed. The difficulties lie not in the theory itself but in the impossibility of evaluating it without obtaining information now classified secret by the US government.

The Nazis

The most extreme theory traces the assassination to a group in the Defense Department that emerged around Werner von Braun and the Nazi rocket scientists the US military imported into the country illegally and against specific orders, and installed at Huntsville, Alabama at the end of WWII-the famous Operation Paperclip.

During the same period, the US government also absorbed a network of Nazi spies headed by Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen. "The Gehlen Org" (as it came to be called) worked within the US government to promote Nazi aims and to protect and resettle Nazis from Europe. In fact, the CIA was built around the Gehlen Org.

This theory postulates an incredible degree of fascist corruption within the US intelligence services. But one person who lends it plausibility is Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman District Attorney Jim Garrison tried for conspiracy in 1968 (and failed to convict). An exit poll of the Shaw jury indicated that Garrison lost his case because he was unable to prove that Shaw was connected to the CIA.

But the year Shaw died ( 1974), a book by a highly placed CIA defector, Victor Marchetti, revealed that the CIA helped Shaw in his legal struggle with Garrison. This may explain why the governors of three states refused to honor Garrison's subpoenas.

Shaw's New Orleans-based International Trade Mart was connected to the shadowy European firm, Permindex, which was kicked out of France in 1962 on suspicion of involvement in the attempted assassination of French president Charles de Gaulle. Permindex's board of directors included von Braun and many well-known European fascists. Some experts say Permindex was a front for the postwar international Nazi underground known as the Odessa.

JFK II Assassination Study (many ties to the Bush Crime Family)

Conspiracy Files - The JFK Assassination

Jean Hill JFK Assassination Eyewitness

Evidence of Revision The Assassinations of Kennedy and Oswald

JFK - Case for Conspiracy I

JFK Conspiracy

Unsolved History: JFK - Beyond the Magic Bullet

JFK

JFK George Bush Sr C.I.A. CIA Link Conspiracy

The Assassination of JFK Jr. (1 of 4)

The Assassination of JFK Jr. (2 of 4)

The Assassination of JFK Jr. (3 of 4)

The Assassination of JFK Jr. (4 of 4)