On the Trail of the Assassins Response by NWC

Introduction (to On The Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison)

THIS IS NOT just another of the many books analyzing
the dry evidence in the assassination of President
Kennedy. It is, instead, a chronicle of the experiences
of one man who tried to get to the truth about the
murder and prosecute those responsible for it. I write
not as a critic but as a participant, a prosecutor and an
investigator.

At the time of the assassination on November 22, 1963, I was district attorney of New Orleans. Because
the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had resided
in New Orleans the summer before the assassination,
I was immediately drawn into the case. More than
three years later, in March 1967, my investigation
culminated in the arrest of Clay Shaw, director of the
International Trade Mart and fixture of New Orleans
high society, on charges of conspiracy to murder John
Kennedy.

In the months leading to Shaw’s trial in 1969 I
publicly suggested that members of the United States
government’s intelligence community, including
Shaw, were responsible for the assassination and had
carried it out in order to stop President Kennedy’s
efforts to break with Cold War foreign policy.

While the jury accepted my argument that there had been
a conspiracy, it was not then aware of Shaw’s role as
a clandestine C. I. A. operative. Unconvinced of his
motivation, the jury acquitted him of the charges.
History has a way of changing verdicts.*_ Twenty-
five years ago most Americans readily accepted the
government’s contention that the assassination was
a random act of violence.

A lonely young man, his mind steeped in Marxist ideology, apparently
frustrated at his inability to do anything well, had
crouched at a warehouse window and-in six seconds
outraged, Americans wanted an answer. And we
got one. The Dallas police closed the case almost
immediately, convicting Lee Harvey Oswald without
trial. The F.B. I. agreed, virtually closing the case
in a matter of weeks. And the Warren Commission,
appointed shortly after the assassination, added its
offcial stamp of approval less than ten months later.
But time has undone the omcial explanation
that most Americans at first believed.

There were too many contradictions, too many witnesses, too
many photographs and motion pictures taken at the
scene, too many skeptics. As time passed, previously
unheeded witnesses were located, investigative reports of the assassination were found to be
false, and other evidence was found to have been
altered or destroyed. Even the concealment of
assassination evidence for 75 years by the federal
government could not prevent independent critics
and researchers from uncovering gaping holes in the
Warren Commission report. By 1967, two-thirds of
the public did not accept the conclusion that Lee
Oswald was the lone assassin.

In the 1970s the new Freedom of Information Act
opened more doors. Material that federal agencies
had stored away in their files—believing it would
remain secret forever-became available to the public.

Since that time able critics have done considerable
research. Many books have raised incisive questions
about the official story and disclosed new and
troubling evidence. Yet much of this information
remains unknown to the majority of Americans.

For example:

• Five day s before the assassination the New Orleans
F.B.I. offce received a telexed warning that an
attempt would be made to assassinate the President
in Dallas at the end of the week. The Bureau did
not pass on the warning to the Secret Service or
other authorities. Shortly after the assassination,
the telex message was removed from the file drawer
of the New Orleans offce of the Bureau.

The great majority of witnesses at Dealey Plaza
in Dallas heard repeated rifle fire coming from the
grassy knoll in front of Kennedy. In the chase that
followed, the Dallas police apprehended three men
and marched them away under shotgun arrest.
However, the numerous news photographs of their
arrest were never published and no record remains
of their mug shots, their fingerprints, or their
names.

• On the day of his arrest, Lee Oswald was given a
nitrate test, the results of which showed that he had
not fired a rifle in the previous 24 hours. This fact
was kept secret by both the federal government and
the Dallas police for ten months.

• The assassination taken by eyewitness Abraham
Zapruder was concealed from the public and kept
locked in a vault by Lift magazine. This moving
picture showed Kennedy being slammed violently
backwards-dear evidence of his being struck by a
rifle shot from the front.

• Approximately an hour before the arrival of
Kennedy’s motorcade, Jack Ruby, the man who later
murdered Lee Oswald, was observed alongside the
grassy knoll, unloading a man carrying a rifle in
a case. The statement of Julia Ann Mercer, the
witness to that event, was altered by the F.B.I. to
make it appear that she had been unable to identify
Ruby as the man. This fraudulent alteration has
never been explained or even denied by the federal
government.

• After the President’s body was subjected to a
military autopsy, his brain disappeared. The brain,
which is still missing after 25 years, had been
immersed in formalin to harden it and might
have shown from what directions the head shots
came. Photographs and x-rays of the autopsy, which
might also have resolved the issue, were never
examined by the Warren Commission.

• The pathologist in charge of Kennedy’s autopsy at
Bethesda Naval Hospital burned in the fireplace of
his home the first draft of the autopsy report.
Such revelations, while not widely disseminated,
did eventually force the House Select Committee
on Assassinations to conduct another investigation
from 1976 to 1979. Its offcial conclusion, citing
acoustical evidence, was that there probably had
been a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy—and
that more than one man had been shooting at him.
However, the investigation was limited and made no
further attempt to determine the forces behind the
assassination.

• This book accepts the responsibility that the House
Committee bypassed. Based on my experiences as
a district attorney who actively investigated the
assassination and on my continuing research since
then, I offer in the final chapter an informed
which is still missing after 25 years, had been
immersed in formalin to harden it and might
have shown from what directions the head shots
came. Photographs and x-rays of the autopsy, which
might also have resolved the issue, were never
examined by the Warren Commission.

•This book accepts the responsibility that the House
Committee bypassed. Based on my experiences as
a district attorney who actively investigated the
assassination and on my continuing research since
then, I offer in the final chapter an informed
historical speculation about what happened—who
killed John Kennedy and why. I do not claim, however,
to have all the answers about the assassination. No
individual could. To uncover the whole truth would
require an open-ended, honest federal investigation
—the kind that has not taken place to date.

•t the outset, I must underscore the fact that the
details of the assassination—who pulled a trigger,
from what building, what kind of gun, and so
forth—are no longer my primary concerns. The
assassination was an enormously important event.
But even more important, in my view, is what
happened after—ratification by the government and
the media of an offcial story that is an absurd fairy
tale.

•Immediately after the assassination, the federal
government and the major media adopted the
posture of two giant ostriches, each unyielding to
reason, each with its head firmly lodged in the sand.
Having ratified the lone assassin theory, they refused
to acknowledge any facts that might discredit it and
attacked anyone who offered a different explanation.

It was not difficult to figure out what their dilemma
was. For the government and the major media to have
acknowledged what virtually everyone knew (that
Kennedy had been fired at by a number of guns)
would have put an end to the sacred pretense that the
President’s assassination was a chance occurrence.

To have acknowledged a conspiracy would have led
inevitably to the question of why it had occurred.
There then would have followed recognition that
there had been powerful opposition in the
government to President Kennedy’s efforts to end the
Cold War. His desire to withdraw from Vietnam, for
example, would have been revealed.

Correspondingly, the role of those who dragged us into nine years of
war in Vietnam also would have become clearer.
When I tried to bring some of these profoundly
disturbing connections to light, the United States
government and the major media came down hard
on me. Both before and after the trial of Clay Shaw,
I was denounced by government offcials and the
mass media for suggesting that members of our own
intelligence agencies might have conspired to kill the
President. I was vilified in the press as a publicity-
seeking politician, a charlatan, and a communist.

The federal government brought false charges of
corruption against me while I was in the midst of a
re-election campaign for district attorney. Although
I was found innocent in court, I narrowly lost
the election. Thus the government succeeded in its
attempt to remove me from offce.

to communicate my view of all that happened.
Nearly twenty years later that has changed. We
have been through the Vietnam War, Watergate,
and the Iran/contra affair. We have learned much
about our intelligence agencies and what they have
done in our name. Assassination by our C.I.A. is no
longer inconceivable; it is established historical fact.
The existence of off-the-shelf covert government
operations is acknowledged in congressional hearing
rooms and on national television. In this more open
atmosphere it is time—for history’s sake and for the
sake of the future—for me to tell the full story of my
investigation and allow a new generation to consider
it.

As a result of my investigation of the Kennedy
assassination and my experiences afterwards, my
life and consciousness were changed forever. This
book is really about that process of change—of
growing disillusionment, anger, and knowledge. My
experience as a prominent player in the historical
events prevents it from being typical. But our entire
country shared, to varying degrees, my change of
consciousness.

A quarter century later, it is possible
to see that the assassination and cover-up by the
government and the media were watershed events
for this country. They represented the loss of
innocence for post-war Americans, the beginning of
the current era of discontent and distrust in our
government and our most fundamental institutions.
I hope this book will help the younger generation
to understand better the political, social, and
historical consequences of the assassination and the
subsequent cover-up.

Today, we still live with those consequences a continuing and ominous Cold War,
a deceptive secret government, a docile press, a
pervasive cynicism, and corruption. To bring an end
to this era in which the lies of our elected government
and the covert operations of our secret government
threaten the very survival of our society, we must
begin to see the Cold War and our national security in
a new light.

Our relationship with the Soviet Union
and other communist nations must be reconsidered
and put into a realistic perspective that looks forward
to a new century rather than backward to the 1950s.
In his short three years as President, John Kennedy
had already begun to change our attitudes and
fundamental assumptions about the Cold War. His
adoption of a more enlightened, less polarized view of
the earth and its inhabitants, I believe, may have led
John Kennedy to his death.

However, it also showed us a way to avoid global
catastrophe. In re-examining his tragic assassination
25 years after it occurred, we should not forget
his enduring legacy, articulated so eloquently at
American University in June 1963: if we cannot
end now our differences, at least we can help make
the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis,
our most basic common link is that we all inhabit
this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all
cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Clarence Darrow lost the Scopes trial, but who remembers that
now?

New William Cooper

…

Jim Garrison Writes

Today, we still live with those consequences a continuing and ominous Cold War,
a deceptive secret government, a docile press, a
pervasive cynicism, and corruption. To bring an end
to this era in which the lies of our elected government
and the covert operations of our secret government
threaten the very survival of our society, we must
begin to see the Cold War and our national security in
a new light.

…

Edward Paul Donegan and Jen Moore believe this about something older than the Cold War though something the Cold War flowed out of and even WWII flowed out of.

The USA had a relationship with Leverage Forces the Jedah British Secret Service that could assassinate a few leaders and journalists here and there switching out top level leadership as needed to get a “second opinion” from national sovereigns if they did not like the first one.

These ties go very far back in history and JFK was a threat to that as RFK was.

THe Cold War was a fear of the Hot War that ended WWII and that fear favored leverage cover operators over open combat.

…

On the Trail of the Assassins (excerots from The Sponsors Chapter)

Whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be the truth. –
The Sign of Four;
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A coup d’etat has been described as “a sudden
action by which an individual or group, usually
employing limited violence, captures positions of
governmental authority without conforming to the
formal requirements for changing offceholders, as
prescribed by the laws or constitution.” A successful
coup requires a number of elements: extensive
planning and preparation by the sponsors (those
responsible for the coup); the collaboration of
the Praetorian Guard*_ (officials whose job is to
protect the government, including the President); a
diversionary cover-up afterwards; the ratification of
the assassination by the new government inheriting
power; and the dissemination of disinformation
by major elements of the news media. If this
concurrence of events has a familiar sound, it is
because this is exactly what happened when John
Kennedy was murdered.

I do not know precisely when the planning and
preparation for the coup began. In a sense, it may
have been as early as late 1960 when the C.I.A.
prepared a dossier analysis on the President-elect.
Such a psychological profile surely would not have
contemplated assassination of the President, but its
purpose was to help the C.I.A., or some elements
within it, further its goal of manipulating foreign
policy. It probably was not until later, when Kennedy
had veered toward detente and conventional means
of controlling policy had failed, that assassination
became an option in the minds of some of the C.I.A.’s
Cold War establishment.

…

The sponsors of the assassination also arranged
numerous scenes where Lee Oswald was
impersonated in hopes of laying a trail of
incriminating evidence at his feet. (See Chapter
5.) The most significant of these impersonations
occurred in Mexico City in October 1963, when
Oswald reportedly contacted the Soviet Embassy
and the Cuban consulate, ostensibly to arrange
a trip to the Soviet Union. The reason this
particular impersonation stands out is that all
the “documentation” for it was provided by the
C.I.A. This evidence—which included C.I.A. memos,
photographs of a man who obviously was not
Oswald, and tapes of phone calls to the Soviet
Embassy that were not of Oswald’s voice—was
insultingly flimsy. To me, this meant that while
some elements within the C.I.A. participated in
the Oswald impersonation charades and thus were
doing the necessary preparatory work of setting up
the scapegoat for the assassination, other elements
within the Agency remained uninformed about the
plot, or indeed might have been trying to discover the
truth.

Oswald appears to have been extensively
manipulated by the C.I.A. for a long period prior to
the assassination and may well have believed that he
was working for the government. Oswald was also
an F.B.I. confidential informant, a job that provided
additional control over him and may have given him
a reason to believe he was actually penetrating the
plot to assassinate the President. His association with
the F.B.I. raises a question.

To what extent did the F.B.I. and the Secret Service cooperate in the pre-
assassination planning? It appears to me that neither
agency took any discernible positive action prior
to the assassination—although there clearly was
distinct inactivity when activity was called for.
This brings us to the second necessary element for
a successful coup: the cooperation of the Praetorian
Guard. A coup d’etat needs the support neither of a
large number of government offcials nor of a broad
base of the population. The managers of the coup
may well represent the views of only a tiny minority
of the populace, but if they have key elements of the
Praetorian Guard on their side, the majority becomes
irrelevant.

In the United States, the modern counterparts
to the Praetorian Guard are the secret police of
the intelligence community, beginning with the
smallish, close-at-hand Secret Service and extending
on through the F.B.I., the intelligence divisions of
various federal departments, the Defense Intelligence
Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Without
key elements of this modern-day Praetorian Guard, a
coup d’etat in the United States would be impossible.
With them, however, a coup can be unstoppable.
The Praetorian Guard is vital to a successful coup
because it has the capability of allowing the defensive
protection of the leader to vanish at a crucial
moment. The removal of the Emperor Caligula in
seconds, leaving as the new emperor the stuttering
Claudius, was almost casual following the quiet
withdrawal of the protection of the guard. And
almost equally casual was the removal of President
Kennedy in less than six seconds, leaving Lyndon
Johnson as the new President.

…

NWC Response

My Edward Paul Donegan response is 1)that all of what Garrison who was closest to the facts as prosecutor alleged has since been proven true from the deathbed confessions of HOlt, Hunt, and others adn 2) Garrison starts out with a well selected quote that explains why I and other witnesses have been in danger since

On the Trail Chapter 20 The Secret Sponsors

This is the way of all successful coups d’etat. In the
early 17th century, Sir John Harington, the English
poet, described it in a few lines:

Treason doth never prosper: What’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

MUCH HAS HAPPENED since Clay Shaw’s trial and my
trial. Leading public figures like Lyndon Johnson,
Earl Warren, Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell, and Earle
Cabell have all died. And important characters in
my New Orleans investigation like the virulent
anticommunist Guy Banister and his private
detective associate Jack Martin have gone unnoticed
to their graves.

Others have died in undeniably mysterious
circumstances. Lee Oswald’s Dallas friend and baby
sitter George de Mohrenschildt was found shot to
death, a shotgun nearby, hours after arranging to be
interviewed by an investigator from the House Select
Committee on Assassinations. The coroner’s verdict
was suicide.

David Ferrie, as described in Chapter 11, was
discovered dead in his New Orleans apartment with
two unsigned suicide notes by his side. The coroner
decided that death was due to natural causes.
Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig left Dallas and moved to
New Orleans as the result of an attempt on his life.
He grew homesick for Dallas, however, and moved
back. His car was blown up while he was in it, but
he survived. Then he was found shot to death at his
home. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

Jack Ruby, having been treated at the Dallas Sheriffs
offce for a cold, was sent to the hospital when it got
worse. Shortly thereafter it was announced that he
had cancer, and shortly after that it was announced
that he had died from the cancer.

Lee Harvey Oswald, of course, was shot by Ruby
in front of a television audience of millions and a
virtual wall of Dallas police offcers. Though there
is no mystery about the precise cause of death,
Ruby’s stated reason for killing Oswald—to save Mrs.
Kennedy the burden of having to attend Oswald’s
trial—remains as questionable as ever, particularly in
view of Ruby’s ties to organized crime on the one
hand, and to the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. on the other.

The beginning of the formal ratification process
came when Congress allowed President Johnson, the
heir to power, to appoint the Warren Commission,
including ex-C.I.A. Director Dulles, to investigate
the murder. The Commission’s report, carrying the
prestige and credibility of its highly respected chair,
put the offcial government stamp of approval on the
lone assassin fairy tale. For the government, reluctant
to face the pre-assassination involvement of the
C.I.A. and the participation of its other intelligence
agencies in the cover-up, such a ratification must
have seemed the easy way out. For many years
afterwards, federal offcials did their best to prop up
this crumbling edifice as critics tore it apart, leaving
almost no one still believing in the lone assassin
scenario.

With the murder plainly unsolved, a succession
of Presidents and attorneys general, each with
the resources of the F.B.I. and the entire federal
government at their command, made no effort to get
to the truth.

On the contrary, when I attempted a real
investigation of the assassination, federal officials
sought to suppress the truth. I received no
cooperation when I sought to subpoena key
witnesses like Allen Dulles. I found crucial federal
records destroyed, altered, classified as secret, or
sealed by the federal government for 75 years.
I found myself denounced by the President, the
attorney general, and the Chief Justice. I found my
investigation infiltrated and subverted by federal
agents. And ultimately I found myself on trial in a
trumped-up federal case. That is what happens to you
when you do not go along with the new government’s
ratification of the coup.

The government’s cover-up and ratification of
the assassination have been aided by a flood
of disinformation appearing in the major media.
Dissemination of disinformation is the last element
necessary for a successful coup d’etat, and it also
happens to be one of the specialties of the C.I.A.
For many years the Agency secretly had on its
payroll journalists ostensibly working for the major
media but in fact disseminating propaganda for
consumption by the American people. It has also
subsidized the publication of more than 1,000 books.

ohn Stockwell retrieved from Spartacus Educational and copied or modified to here

John Stockwell, the son of an engineer was born in the Belgian Congo (Zaire) in 1937. His father, an engineer from Texas, was involved in building a hydroelectric plant for a local mission hospital. His mother managed the only women’s academy in Central Africa.

Stockwell was educated at the Presbyterian school in Lubondai before attending the University of Texas. In an autobiographical article Stockwell claimed that while at university he “never had a conversation with a liberal, much less a radical critic of the system”.

After graduating he joined the U.S. Marine Corps. As a result of his ability to speak the languages of the area (Tshiluba and Swahili), Stockwell was sent to the Congo to deal with the rebellion being led by Patrice Lumumba.

Stockwell spent three years in the marines before working in the ranching and land-clearing business in Texas. This was followed by work in the sales and market analysis branch of the Gates Rubber Company in Denver. Stockwell was inspired by a speech made by John F. Kennedy (“ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”) to join the Central Intelligence Agency.

Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia

In 1964 Stockwell voted for Barry Goldwater. As he later explained: “everyone in Texas knew that Lyndon Johnson was corrupt to the core, with mob ties, with murders sometimes associated with his political campaigns”.

Stockwell’s first CIA assignment was in West Africa. His main task was to monitor communist activity in the region. He was later promoted to the position of chief of the CIA base in the Katanga province. Stockwell reported back to Washington that he did not believe that the CIA presence in the Congo was not justified as it was not advancing “US national security interests”.

Stockwell spent six years in Africa before serving in Vietnam. As officer in charge of Tay Ninh Province, he organized covert operations against the National Liberation Front. This resulted in him winning the CIA Medal of Merit. He remained in the country until joining the US flight from Vietnam in April, 1975.

Stockwell now served on a subcommittee of the National Security Council and was appointed as chief of the CIA’s Angola Task Force. Unhappy with the way the CIA was targeting the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and resigned from the organization in December, 1976.

Three months later Stockwell published an open letter to CIA Director Stansfield Turner in the Washington Post. He claimed that 98% of CIA operations in the field were “fabrications but were papered over and promoted by aware case officers because of the numbers game”. This resulted in Turner initiating a “house-cleaning of the clandestine services”.

Stockwell has written two books on the CIA: In Search of Enemies (1978) and The Praetorian Guard: The US Role in the New World Order (1991). He has also made several lecture tours where he has spoken on CIA covert operations.

By John Simkin (john@spartacus-educational.com) © September 1997 (updated January 2020).

▲ Main Article ▲ Primary and Secondary Sources (1) John Stockwell, open letter to Stansfield Turner (10th April, 1977)

We have not met and will not have the opportunity of working together, as you are coming into the Central Intelligence Agency when I am leaving. Although I am disassociating myself from the Agency, I have read with considerable interest about your appointment and listened to some of your comments.

You have clearly committed yourself to defending the Agency from its detractors and to improving its image, and this has stirred a wave of hope among many of its career officers. However, others are disappointed that you have given no indication of intention, or even awareness of the need, for the ‘internal housecleaning that is so conspicuously overdue the Agency.

You invited Agency officers to write you their suggestions or grievances, and you promised personally to read all such letters. While I no longer have a career interest, having already submitted my resignation, numerous friends in the DDO (Deputy Directorate for Operations) have encouraged me to write to you, hoping that it might lead to measures which would upgrade the clandestine services from its present mediocre standards to the elite organization it was once reputed to be.

While I sympathize with their complaints, I have agreed to write this letter more to document the circumstances and conditions which led to my own disillusionment with CIA.

First, let me introduce myself. I was until yesterday a successful GS 14 with 12 years in the Agency, having served seven full tours of duty including Chief of Base, Lubumbashi; Chief of Station, Bujumbura; Officer in Charge of Tay Ninh Province in Vietnam; and Chief, Angola Task Force. My file documents what I was told occasionally, that I could realistically aspire to top managerial positions in the Agency.

I grew up in Zaire, a few miles from the Kapanga Methodist Mission Station, which was recently `liberated’ by Katangese invaders, and I speak fluent English and Tshiluba, `High’ French and smatterings of Swahili and other dialects.

My disillusionment was progressive throughout four periods of my career. First, during three successive assignments in Africa from 1966 through 1977 I increasingly questioned the value and justification of the reporting and operations we worked so hard to generate.

In one post, Abidjan, there was no Eastern bloc or Communist presence, no subversion, limited United States interests and a stable government. The three of us competed with State Department officers to report on President Houphouet-Boigny’s health and local politics.

I attempted, to rationalize that my responsibility was to contribute, and not to evaluate the importance of my contribution which should be done by supergrades in Washington. However, this was increasingly difficult as I looked up through a chain of command which included, step-by-step: (a) the Branch Chief, who had never served in Africa and was conspicuously ignorant of Black Africa,; (b) the Chief of Operations, who was a senior officer although he had never served an operational overseas tour and was correspondingly naive about field operations; and (c) the Division Chief, who was a political dilettante who had never served an operational tour in Africa… Their leadership continuously reflected their inexperience and ignorance.

Standards of operations were low in the field, considerable energy was devoted to the accumulation of perquisites and living a luxurious life at the taxpayer’s expense. When I made Chief of Station, a supergrade took me out for drinks and, after welcoming me to the exclusive inner club of `chiefs’, proceeded to brief me on how to supplement my income by an additional $3,000 to $4,000 per year, tax-free, by manipulating my representational and operational funds. This was quite within the regulations. For example, the COS Kinshasa last year legally collected over $9,000 from CIA for the operation of his household…

The organization currently belongs to the old, to the burned out. Young officers, and there are some very good ones, must wait until generations retire before they can move up. Mediocre performances are guaranteed by a promotion system wherein time in grade and being a`good ole boy’ are top criteria, i.e., there are no exceptional promotions and the outstanding individual gets his promotions at the same time as the ‘onlygood’ and even some of the ‘not-really-so-good’ officers, and he must wait behind a line of tired old men for the truly challenging field assignments.

These young officers are generally supervised by unpromotable middle-grade officers, who for many years have been unable to go overseas and participate personally in operational activity. These conditions are obviously discouraging to dynamic young people, demoralizingly so, and several have told me they are also seeking opportunities outside the Agency.

With each new Director they hope there will be a housecleaning and reform, but each Director comes and goes, seven in my time, preoccupied with broader matters of state, uttering meaningless and inaccurate platitudes about conditions and standards inside the DDO. The only exception was James Schlesinger, who initiated a housecleaning but was transferred to the Department of Defence before it had much effect.

You, sir, have been so bold as to state your intention to abrogate American constitutional rights, those of freedom of speech, in order to defend and protect the American intelligence establishment. This strikes me as presumptuous of you, especially before you have even had a good look inside the CIA to see if it is worth sacrificing constitutional rights for.

If you get the criminal penalties you are seeking for the disclosure of classified information, or even the civil penalties which President Carter and Vice-President Mondale have said they favour, then Americans who work for the CIA could not, when they find themselves embroiled in criminal and immoral activity which is commonplace in the Agency, expose that activity without risking jail or poverty as punishment for speaking out. Cynical men, such as those who gravitate to the top of the CIA, could then by classifying a document or two protect and cover up illegal actions with relative impunity.

I predict that the American people will never surrender to you the right of any individual to stand in public and say whatever is in his heart and mind. That right is our last line of defence against the tyrannies and invasions of privacy which events of recent years have demonstrated are more than paranoiac fantasies. I am enthusiastic about the nation’s prospects under the new administration, and I am certain President Carter will reconsider his position on this issue.

And you, sir, may well decide to address yourself to the more appropriate task of setting the Agency straight from the inside out.

John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard: The US Role in the New World Order (1991)

The President was perfunctorily warned of the threats against him, but the usual vigilant efforts to protect him were not taken. The Secret Service, FBI, and local police certainly can protect presidents. They do it continuously not only inside the United States but in foreign capitals around the world. Numerous, almost routine, techniques are involved, like bringing extra security forces to blanket problem areas, moving in caravans of cars at a brisk 45 miles an hour, and using, whenever possible, unannounced routes that do not include sharp, slow turns.

When President Kennedy and his wife visited Dallas on November 22, 1963, nearly all of the protections were lifted. Available Texas Guard units were not called into the city and available Dallas policemen were temporarily released from duty. The result? A team of CIA, Cuban exile, and Mafia-related renegades organized a simple military ambush in Dallas and successfully gunned him down. The ambush and its coverup were brazen and astonishingly open. In fact several plots, in Chicago, Miami, and Houston, to kill Kennedy had misfired or been thwarted. The plot that succeeded in Dealey Plaza was so open that various people were reported prior to the event to have said that Kennedy would be killed with a rifle and a patsy would be blamed for the crime. Individuals like Joseph Milteer, the “umbrella man,” and a CIA pilot Robert Plumlee went to Dealey Plaza on the 22nd of November to watch.

Obviously, most CIA personnel were not involved and did not know of the plot since sensitive operations are compartmentalized in order to protect their security. Moreover, the great majority of the coat-and-tie people inside CIA headquarters would never have put up with a hit on the President. A great deal of the success of the CIA is due to its ability to attract patriotic, good soldiers who believe in the general rightness of what they do, and then insulate them through compartmentalization from the heavier activities.

The OPMONGOOSE renegades, however, included assassins, terrorists, and people who had been involved in the drug traffic from Cuba into the United States. The team set up a military-style ambush in Dealey Plaza, with shooters on the tops of buildings and the famous grassy knoll. The route of the President’s convoy included a 120-degree turn which slowed the car to a near stop. There was cooperation of elements of the Secret Service, of the Dallas Police, and of other law enforcement agencies.

When the shooting began, the Secret Service driver put on – the brakes (home movies of the scene show the brake lights on). Anyone who has been through that kind of training – and I have been through their “bang and burn” courses – is drilled to react. When the bullets start flying in such a situation, you mash down on the gas and you get the hell out of the area; you do not slow down and look around as the seasoned Secret Service driver in fact did. In ten seconds of rifle fire, only one of the Secret Service agents in the trail car moved to the President’s aid. The one agent who did move was Jackie Kennedy’s personal guard, in Dallas at her request, not part of the team that was there to protect the President.

Kennedy was shot at very close range from firing stations, probably four of them, where the assassins fired eight to ten shots. He was hit in the back, throat, and twice in the head, two bullets each from the front and from the back. Texas Governor John Connally was hit twice. Two bullets were fired into the concrete, one on each side of the convoy. After the shooting stopped, the convoy raced away. The FBI and other branches of the government immediately launched the coverup. The new President, Lyndon Johnson, ordered the limousine in which Kennedy was killed be flown to Chicago and destroyed. The announced goal of President Johnson was to “reassure” the nation by proving that the killing was the work of lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. It was variously suggested that an investigation that turned up Soviet involvement might lead to nuclear war; it might embarrass the Kennedy widow; it might lead to domestic unrest. In fact; it might have led to a sizeable number of very important people and organizations being implicated in a presidential assassination. That might very well have exercised the population sufficiently to provoke a serious investigation of CIA, FBI, and Mafia activities in the country, and to demand some changes.

The evidence was extensively tampered with. The President’s body was altered; the photographs of the autopsy were altered; and over 100 witnesses were killed or died mysterious and violent deaths. To this day, despite the House Committee’s 1979 conclusion that there was a conspiracy, there has been no formal, official investigation. Neither have all the documents been released.

Even among the majority that acknowledge that there was abroad conspiracy, many find it difficult to believe that the CIA itself could have been involved. Perhaps, they reluctantly concede, “renegades” might have had something to do with it.

In fact, there is strong evidence that both the FBI and the CIA high commands had prior knowledge of and direct involvement in the conspiracy. After the Dallas Police had arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, but before they could have positively identified him (he had false identification papers in his wallet) much less interrogate him and reasonably confirm his (alleged) guilt, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover telephoned Bobby Kennedy in Washington to tell him that the assassin had been caught. Hoover gave Kennedy biographic information that he could only have had prior to the assassination. Clearly he was waiting with information about Lee Harvey Oswald, to blame him for the killing.

Similarly, CIA operatives far from Dallas were waiting with biographic information about Oswald to feed to the media. Some time after the Warren Committee hearings, journalist Seth Kantor found himself broadly suspected of being somehow a secret agent because, researchers found, the Warren Commission had classified part of his testimony. Puzzled, he checked and found that the Commission had in fact classified telephone calls he made during the afternoon of the killing. In addition to checking his own notes, he succeeded in forcing the Warren Commission to return his testimony to him, and identified the calls. One was to the managing editor of the Scripps-Howard news service bureau in Washington. Mid-afternoon, again long before the police could have interrogated Oswald, made a positive identification, concluded what had happened, and eliminated the possibility of accomplices in a conspiracy to kill the President, the editor told Kantor that Oswald had been identified as the assassin and instructed him to call Hal Hendricks, a journalist who gave Kantor detailed biographic information about Oswald. Years later, in the CIA-engineered coup in Chile, Hendricks was positively identified as a CIA operative working under journalistic cover. Moreover, the Warren Commission’s move to classify the phone calls is proof positive that it knew there was an intelligence connection with Hendricks and strongly suggests that it was willfully covering up the assassination conspiracy.

vIn sum, the FBI Director and CIA media operatives were waiting, primed, before the assassination to launch the coverup and pin the blame on the pre-selected patsy, Oswald.

In September, 1997, Spartacus Educational founder and managing director John Simkin became the first educational publisher in Britain to establish a website that was willing to provide teachers and students with free educational materials.

From the William Binney Chapater of The Great Treason

Chapter 13 (hmm) by Jim Garrison in his book On The Trail

All of this overlaps with the Japan CIA operation and the CIA at Las Vegas and Covington locations Chauncey Holt speaks of AND CD Douglas in LIfe magazine framing Garrison.

The Assault

ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren
announced from Tokyo, Japan, that I had presented
“absolutely nothing” publicly to contradict the
findings of the Warren Commission report on
President Kennedy’s assassination. Warren, speaking
at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, said that
he had not heard “one fact” to refute the Commission findings that Lee Oswald was the lone killer.

This was strange behavior for the Chief Justice of
the United States. Clay Shaw’s trial had not begun.
The first juror had yet to be selected. Yet here the
highest judge in our land already was testifying as the
first witness in the case. He was not testifying under
oath, which gave him a unique freedom from the laws
of perjury which witnesses following him would not
have. And he plainly was loading the dice in Shaw’s
favor. No witness was going to be eager, in front of all
the world, to make the Chief Justice appear to be a liar,
or at least mistaken.

Some long-cherished illusions of mine about the
great free press in our country underwent a painful
reappraisal during this period. The restraint and
respect for justice one might expect from the press
to insure a fair trial not only to the individual
charged but to the state itself did not exist. Nor did
the diversity of opinion that I always thought was
fundamental to the American press. As far as I could
tell, the reports and editorials in Newsweek, Time,
the New York Times, the New York Post, the Saturday
Evening Post and on and on were indistinguishable.
All shared the basic view that I was a power-mad,
irresponsible showman who was producing a slimy
circus with the objective of getting elected to higher
office, oblivious of any consequences.

The attacks did not end with Phelan. Without any
warning, Dick Billings, the friendly editor from Life
magazine, suddenly flew in from New York. He
seemed amiable enough, but he appeared to have lost
a great deal of weight. He had deep circles under his
eyes. His Ivy League clothes hung loosely on his thin
frame. He informed me that Life would no longer
be able to support me and work with me in the
investigation. The magazine, he said, had come to the
conclusion that I was not the vigorous opponent of
organized crime that it had first thought I was.
“What on earth are you talking about?” I asked. He
then mentioned a name, asking me if I knew of the
man. I shook my head and answered that I had never
heard of him. The editor held out his hands. “There
you are,” he said. “You should have had a dossier on
him by now.”

I pulled over a phone directory and located the
name he had mentioned in the small town of
Covington, a listing which indicated that he lived
immediately north of the lake. “Is this who you
mean?” I asked.

“That’s the man,” he said. “He’s one of the top
racketeers down here.”

“And you’re the starting quarterback for the Green
Bay Packers,” I responded. If that fellow had been
engaged in any extended criminality in and around
New Orleans, I would have known his name well. As it
turned out, I could find no one in the offce who ever
had heard his name. Nor did the name ever come up
again.

I studied my visitor. It was obvious that he was
an unhappy man executing a bad assignment which
he had been ordered to carry out. I was angry, but
not at him. He was considerably more sensitive and
intelligent than most of the media representatives
I had encountered. Soon he would be assigned to
stories about the birth of quintuplets in Bangor,
Maine, or a scientific breakthrough in increasing the
fertility of rabbits.

Apparently, the Life magazine gambit had been
planned for some time, if not from the very outset.
Within a few weeks my name appeared in the second
of two Life articles about organized crime. It gave
particular attention to me as a free-wheeling visitor
at Las Vegas casinos from time to time. The writer of
the article had some problems working me into the
scenario because, as it happens, I do not gamble at all.
It is not that I am too virtuous. I simply observed a
long time ago that the house always wins.

However, that detail did not inhibit the editors of
Life. I was described as having a special Las Vegas
connection who was a “lieutenant” of a New Orleans
“mobster.” I reportedly was “granted a $5,000 credit
in the cashier’s cage.” The implication was that I used
this credit to sign chits during my alleged forays at
the gambling tables.

It was true that I filled out a form once when I had
to cash a check at the Sands Hotel. This apparently
is where I acquired such credit, if indeed I had that
much. It was also true that I took trips to Las Vegas
about twice a year, but they were entirely for the
purpose of getting out into the dry western climate,
which I happen to love, and catching up with some
sunshine. That was all that was needed for me to
become Life’s version of The Man Who Broke the Bank
at Monte Carlo.

Around the time of the Life article about my
fictional gaming proclivities at Las Vegas, Time
magazine—a sister publication of Life’s and a part
of the Luce empire—ran a series of articles on our investigation. It was pictured as an indefensible
sham, and I as a demented buffoon, hungry for
headlines.

In Newsweek’s May 15, 1967, issue under the
eading “The JFK ‘Conspiracy’,’t Hugh Aynesworth
wrote:

…

Jim Garrison is right. There has been a conspiracy in New
Orleans—but it is a plot of Garrison’s own making. It is a
scheme to concoct a fantastic “solution” to the death of John
F. Kennedy, and to make it stick; in this case, the district
attorney and his staff have been indirect parties to the death
of one man and have humiliated, harassed and financially
gutted several others.

Indeed, Garrison’s tactics have been even more questionable
than his case. I have evidence that one of the strapping
D.A.’s investigators offered an unwilling “witness” $ 3,000 and
a job with an airline—if only he would “fill in the facts”
of the alleged meeting to plot the death of the President. I
also know that when the D.A.’s offce learned that this entire
bribery attempt had been tape-recorded, two of Garrison’s
men returned to the “witness” and, he says, threatened him
with physical harm.

Aynesworth, who seemed a gentle and fair enough
man when he interviewed me for several hours in my
home, never did get around to revealing whose life
our offce had shortened. As for the $3,000 bribe, by
the time I came across Aynesworth’s revelation, the
witness our offce had supposedly offered it to, Alvin
Babeouf, had admitted to us that it never happened.
Aynesworth, of course, never explained what he did
with the “evidence” allegedly in his possession. And
the so-called bribery tape recording had not, in fact,
ever existed.

If this article was a typical Aynesworth product,
one could hardly help but wonder how a newsman with so rampant an imagination continued to find a
market for his stories. Yet, in fairness to Aynesworth,
I must say that this “news” story was all too
typical of what my offce staff found itself reading
in newspaper and magazine articles by writers from
distant cities who had not the remotest awareness of
what my offce had been attempting to accomplish.

A Lie Too Big To Fail retrieved from A Lie Too Big To Fail Mission Possible of the CIA and copied or modified to here

Lisa Pease

THE MORNING OF JUNE 5, 1968, CIA OFFICER
JOSEPH BURKHOLDER Smith heard on his car radio
that Robert Kennedy had been shot. He was on his
way to teach a class to a group of Army offcers who
were going to Vietnam as part of a joint CIA-Defense
Department unit. When Smith arrived, an Army
colonel who led the unit Smith was about to teach
shocked Smith with the following exhortation:

…

“Congratulations,” said the colonel, “now it won’t
be us. You guys are great. Only, for Christ’s sake,
having your agent use that small-caliber weapon
is taking an awful chance. He’s not dead yet.”ZZi

…

Why did the Army Colonel immediately assume,
without any evidence, that the CIA had killed Senator
Robert Kennedy? Because he had seen the system
from the inside, perhaps more than had Smith, who
assured his class, also without evidence, that the CIA
hadn t killed Kennedy.

After the CIA’s operations were exposed in the wake
of the Church and Pike Committees, Smith wrote he
was shocked to find out how much he didn’t know
about his employer, despite his many years working
for the Agency.Z-Z2 But Smith continued to defend the
Agency against all comers, even when an investigator
for the House Select Committee on Assassinations
came knocking on his door. As Upton Sinclair once
said, “It’s impossible to make a man understand
something when his salary depends on him not
understanding it.”

Regardless of whether Smith was shocked or
posturing, the Army colonel had a clearer view of
how the CIA operated, and the ways in which the CIA’s
world vision clashed with that of the Kennedys, than
most reporters do today.

Some people really can’t believe that CIA people
would ever do such a thing. Aren’t they the ultimate
patriots, putting their lives on the line to defend
us? It’s important to understand that, like the Army
colonel, there were a number of people in the military
and intelligence establishments who felt the Kennedy
brothers were Communist sympathizers or worse, so
killing them was, in their minds, an act of patriotism,
not treason. That the Kennedys weren’t Communists
or sympathizers was a difference of fact, not opinion,
but when people only listen to lies that support
their beliefs, instead of the facts that challenge them,
terrible things can happen.

The politics of the Kennedy brothers have been
deliberately muddied for that reason: If you believe
the Kennedy brothers were of the same mind as the
CIA of the time, you’ll find it impossible to believe
that operatives of the CIA killed both brothers. But if
you understand that there was an epic power struggle
going on between the Kennedys and the CIA at the
time of President Kennedy’s death, and that Robert
Kennedy’s policies would have not only mirrored but
exceeded those of his brother’s on the left of the
political spectrum, the picture of why both Kennedys
were killed becomes much clearer.

The CIA and the establishment that supported
it had no qualms advocating and executing covert
action to overthrow governments whose economic
policies did not provide the U.S. an advantage over
all other nations in areas with key resources. In the
present era, we can see clearly now how disastrous
those policies were in Latin America, in the Middle
East, and everywhere else the CIA has meddled. Iran
may never have become a fundamentalist state had
the CIA not overthrown the democratically elected
Mohammad Mossadegh.

No one epitomized the establishment more than
the brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles. These
two had both worked for the powerful Wall Street
law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, protecting
the corporate interests of clients that included
the powerful Rockefeller clan. Together, they ran
America’s overt and covert foreign policy for
eight years. And under them, a tragic number of
democratically elected leaders would be overthrown.

In 1951, two men were elected president that
would become targets of the nascent CIA: Jacobo
Arbenz in Guatemala and Mohammed Mossadegh
in Iran. Both men wanted to stop the exploitation of their people by foreign interests, predominantly
British and American business interests. Both took
steps to nationalize their most valuable resources—
oil in Iran and farmland in Guatemala, and both were
then labeled “Communists” and overthrown by the
CIA in the mid-1950s.

Not all the CIA’s coup attempts were successful.
The CIA tried and failed to overthrow President
Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958. A plot to kill Castro
designed to coincide with the Bay of Pigs failed.

Schlesinger quoted an unnamed “CIA man” who
described how in 1957 CIA tried to force the
State Department’s hand in Indonesia by feeding
them increasingly disturbing intelligence reports on
the Indonesian leader Sukarno. “When they read
enough alarming reports, we planned to spring the
suggestion that we should support the colonels.”

When the Indonesian Ambassador expressed
opposition to any plot to overthrow Sukarno, Allen
Dulles, the head ofthe CIA, pressured his brother John
Foster Dulles, then head of the State Department, to
replace the Ambassador. And while Allen Dulles had
“personally promised” to keep the new Ambassador
apprised of CIA activity, he did not.

In 1958, the CIA launched an utterly unsuccessful
attack on Indonesia that resulted in CIA pilot Allen
Pope being captured. This incident was as poorly
planned and executed as the Bay of Pigs operation
would be three years later. The OCB once again
admonished President Eisenhower to rein in the CIA.
The OCB expressed similar sentiments again in 1959
and 1960. In January 1961, just before John Kennedy
was inaugurated, the board wrote:

We have been unable to conclude that, on balance,
all of the covert action programs undertaken by
CIA up to this time have been worth the risk or
the great expenditure of manpower, money and
other resources involved. In addition, we believe
the CIA’s concentration on political, psychological
and related covert action activities have tended
to detract substantially from the execution of
its primary intelligence-gathering mission. We
suggest, accordingly, that there should be a total
reassessment of our covert action policies.

…

Data in [my Lisa Pease] previous book with Jim DiEugenio, The
Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and
Malcolm X for some of the strong evidence of the CIA’s
role in the plot. Here I will attempt only the barest
summary of some evidence in that regard.

CIA finance officer James Wilcott told the HSCA and
later, anyone who would listen, including his friends,
who told Jim Douglass, that Oswald had been a paid
agent of the CIA. While Wilcott had never paid him
personally, he was told by others that Lee Harvey
Oswald had been paid under a CIA project code.

Wilcott told the HSCA that he learned from others in
the CIA in the days following the assassination that
members of the CIA had killed Kennedy.

Originally, said Wilcott, the news of Kennedy’s
assassination was met with joy in the CIA. The CIA
was filled with extreme right-wing hardliners who
were thrilled the liberal president had been killed.
But when Oswald’s history surfaced, the joy faded as
employees realized their CIA had killed the president.
According to Wilcott:

…

Not long before going off duty, talk about Oswald’s
connection with CIA was making the rounds.
While this kind of talk was a jolt to me, I
didn’t really take it seriously then. Very heavy
talk continued up to about the middle of January.
Based solely on what I heard at the Tokyo
Station, I became convinced that the following
scenario is true: CIA people killed Kennedy. Either
it was an outright project of Headquarters with
the approval of McCone or it was done outside,
perhaps under the direction of Dulles and Bissell.
It was done in retaliation for Kennedy’s reneging
on a secret agreement with Dulles to support the
invasion of Cuba.

…

There was no secret agreement between President
Kennedy and Dulles to support an invasion of Cuba,
but it would have been fully in keeping with Allen
Dulles’ character to make up such a story to blame the
victim. More disturbing was Wilcott’s assertion of the
motive behind the killing of Kennedy:

…

The branch chiefs and deputy chiefs, project
intelligence officers and operational specialists
viewed Kennedy as a threat to the clandestine
services. The loss of special privileges,
allowances, status and early retirement that
come with the CIA cloak-and-dagger job were
becoming a possibility, even a probability.
The prestigious portions of the bureaucratic
dominions, ambitiously sought, might be no
more. Adjustment to a less glamorous job in a
common profession could be the result.

…

Ed Donegan reminds you the CIA at that time was the Overthrow Operational Forward Base

This was for Asia, Tokyo, Soviet Union, and Gautamala and Indonesia, and Indonesia overthrow plans in the Caribbean was in dispute and I say tied to plans for a very young Obama Jr. and Prouth and Donegan were invovled in it.

The Great Treason, Pillory, Ted Gunderson Bio X, Written By The Right Hand, Majic 12 and the Secret Government https://newwilliamcooperpatrioticsovereignpress.com/on-the-trail-of-the-assassins-response-by-nwc/

New William Cooper Patriotic Sovereign Press

Books series on The Deep State and the CIA Special Relationship With Great Britain