In summary, would you like to hear how President Richard Nixon summarized the Warren Commission? This is straight from his White House tapes:
It was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated.449
That should make you angry, because the Powers That Be were obviously well aware—and still are—of all the crap that they have been force-feeding to us all these years.
439 Jim Moore, Conspiracy of One (Summit Publishing Group: 1997), 173.
440 Mike Feinsilber, “Gerald Ford forced to admit the Warren Report fictionalized,” July 2, 1997, Associated Press: whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/JFK/ford.html
441 Ibid.
442 Ibid.
443 Walt Brown, Ph.D., The Guns of Texas Are Upon You (Last Hurrah Press: 2005), 200.
444 Ibid, 205 (cited from 3H 362).
445 Ibid, 205.
446 Ibid, 195.
447 Ibid, 210–211, emphasis in original.
448 Michael T. Griffith, “The Warren Commission’s Failed Investigation,” February 19, 2002: michaelgriffith1.tripod.com/failed.htm
449 Kevin Anderson, “Revelations and gaps on Nixon tapes,” March 1, 2002, BBC News: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1848157.stm
47
The CIA Also Participated in the Cover-Up
Like a true government agency, after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Central Intelligence Agency immediately went hard to work: covering their own rear ends!
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency engaged in a cover-up of highly relevant information when the Warren Commission was investigating President John Kennedy’s assassination. . . . President Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy became party to the effort which consisted of withholding key facts from the Warren Commission.450
Among that highly relevant information that the CIA closely guarded and/or destroyed, was evidence related to Lee Harvey Oswald and his actions on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies. It’s pretty easy to see why they did that, even though it’s clearly obstruction of justice. Anything linking the President’s assassin to the Agency would have been extremely embarrassing.
The CIA lied about Oswald not being debriefed after he returned from his “defection” to the Soviet Union. Researchers uncovered evidence in 1993 that Oswald had been debriefed by the Agency.
Upon Oswald’s return to the U.S. in 1962, he was, in fact, ‘debriefed’ by a CIA officer named Aldrin [‘Andy’] Anderson. The debriefing report was read by CIA officer Donald Deneselya, who confirmed this in an interview for this book on May 25, 2007, as well as in the 1993 PBS Frontline program, “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?”451
Their diversionary tactics were employed right from the start too:
Soon after the assassination, Johnson was led to believe by the CIA that Kennedy might have been the victim of a Soviet conspricay.452
Here’s another example of their “obfuscations” of the truth, from Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott:
More importantly, the CIA and FBI conspired to suppress a major clue to the existence of a pre-assassination conspiracy. This was that an unknown person had falsely presented himself as Lee Oswald in a phone call to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. The FBI initially reported that the person making the recorded call ‘was not Lee Harvey Oswald.’ Later the FBI and CIA conspired, swiftly and clumsily, to conceal both the falsity of the impersonation and the fact that FBI agents had exposed the falsehood by listening to the tape.453
That might sound confusing but its ramifications are huge. And, as Scott points out, the way that the Agency covered their intelligence uses of Oswald at the top secret CIA base in Atsugi, Japan, then as a “false defector” to the Soviet Union, and then in Mexico City probably explains what it was that they were actually covering up:
It is important to understand that this suppression was entirely consistent with intelligence priorities of the period. This important clue had been planted in the midst of one of the most sensitive CIA operations in the 1960s: its largest intercept operation against the telephones of an important Soviet base. One can assume that this clue was planted by conspirators who knew that the CIA response would be to suppress the truth. As a result the CIA protected its sources and methods [in accordance with the responsibilities enumerated in its enabling statute]. The result was obstruction of justice in a crime of the highest political significance.454
And even after Oswald was eliminated, the CIA was still hard at work on damage control:
Richard Helms, who was then in charge of clandestine operations for the CIA, sent a memo to the FBI on February 18, 1964. Helms was interested in a scar that Oswald was supposed to have had on his left wrist, after he allegedly attempted suicide in Moscow in 1959. Helms requested any FBI information, ‘including the undertakers, copies of any reports, such as autopsy or other, which may contain information pertinent to this point. . . . The best evidence of a scar or scars on the left wrist would of course be direct examination by a competent authority and we recommend that this be done and that a photograph of the inner and outer surfaces of the left wrist be made if there has been no other evidence acceptable to the [Warren] Commission that he did in fact attempt suicide by cutting his wrist.’455
As I showed you earlier in this book, the CIA also played a role in “helping” the other side in the Jim Garrison investigation and in altering the Zapruder film of the assassination. They also worked with Time-Life to control that film and thereby manage the early information about the assassination:
For many years, [chief of Time-Life media empire, Henry] Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA was C. D. Jackson, a Time, Inc., vice president who was publisher of Life Magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964. . . . He also ‘approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time-Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce’s wife, Claire Booth.’ [Herself a member of the Committee to Free Cuba, immediately after the assassination Mrs. Luce disseminated information implicating Oswald that she’d received from a group of CIA-backed Cuban exiles whom she supported.]456
So the CIA and those acting on its behalf were very busy pointing fingers at Cuba and the Soviets and away from Oswald’s links to intelligence.
These facts started to seep out eventually; you can only hide a skunk for so long before it starts to stink. Eventually even former staff attorneys of the Warren Commission started calling the CIA liars. Here’s how former Warren Commission counsel Burt Griffin put it:
I feel betrayed. I feel that the CIA lied to us, that we had an agency of government here which we were depending upon, and that we expected to be truthful with us, and to cooperate with us. And they didn’t do it.457
Part of the Agency’s concern was what Senator Frank Church figured out later anyway; that the CIA was using Mafia killers to try and assassinate Fidel Castro. They wouldn’t reveal that earlier; it was a fact, but as Counsel Griffin noted, a fact that they withheld:
The CIA concealed from us the fact that they were involved in efforts to assassinate Castro which could have been of extreme importance to us. Especially the fact that they were involved in working with the Mafia at that time.458
Congressman Don Edwards, who was a Chairman of House committee hearings in 1975—and was himself a former FBI agent—reached some pretty dramatic conclusions about it all:
There’s not much question that both the FBI and the CIA are somewhere behind this cover-up. I hate to think what it is they are covering up—or who they are covering for.459
And as investigative author Anthony Summers summarized it at the end of his book on the Kennedy assassination:
There is no longer any denying it. Above and beyond the information published in the main body of this book, documents now available confirm that the CIA and the FBI have long covered up what they knew about Oswald before the assassination.460
Even the CIA needed help for such a massive campaign of deception, which leads us to Operation
Mockingbird and how the government really pulled off the outrage that President Nixon called the “greatest hoax ever perpetuated.”461 It was easy, as they had control of most of mainstream media!
450 Tad Szulc, “FBI-CIA Cover-Up Alleged,” May 28, 1976, The Evening Bulletin: jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/S%20Disk/Szulc%20Tad%20New%20Republic%20The%20JFK/Item%2004.pdf
451 Janney, Marys Mosaic, 430.
452 Talbot, “The mother of all cover-ups.”
453 Peter Dale Scott, “Deep Politics III, Overview: The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico,” December, 2000: history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm
454 Ibid.
455 Ventura & Russell, American Conspiracies, 37.
456 Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, 35.
457 Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 376.
458 Ibid.
459 Ibid.
460 Ibid.
461 Anderson, “Revelations and gaps on Nixon tapes.”
48
Mainstream Media Reinforced the False Conclusions of the Warren Commission
It’s a reality all-too-apparent—at least to those authors who have genuinely attempted to bring new evidence to public attention. Most of the mainstream media turns a blind eye to such new revelations while consistently welcoming, highlighting, and applauding quite publicly, the works which support the official government version of the assassination.
And I’m not talking about twenty or thirty years ago either. I’m talking about now, today. Because—believe it or not—even today, The New York Times refuses to even review my books (and many others who write about conspiracy). Which I find rather ironic because most of my books hit The New York Times bestseller list anyway!
But they won’t touch it, unless it’s in some critical format, usually mocking my work as “yet another conspiracy monger.” Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves why, in the year 2013, my bestselling books still are not even considered “reviewable” by the powers-that-run The New York Times? I find that very curious, don’t you? Well, there’s a lot of history behind decisions like that (by them), and it’s a history intimately entwined with the Central Intelligence Agency.
I’ll start at the beginning: Operation Mockingbird.
Starting in the early days of the Cold War [late 40s], the CIA began a secret project called Operation Mockingbird, with the intent of buying influence behind the scenes at major media outlets and putting reporters on the CIA payroll, which has proven to be a stunning ongoing success. The CIA effort to recruit American news organizations and journalists to become spies and disseminators of propaganda was headed up by Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of the Washington Post).462
Pulitzer-winning journalist Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame detailed that wide-scale intrusion of the intelligence community into the media in 1977. Bernstein’s work, CIA and the Media, is one of the most important articles ever written, and you can read it online at: tmh.floonet.net/articles/cia_press.html
In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.
Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.
Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation, and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.463
Of course, they don’t admit it; in fact, they hide it.
The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception. . . . Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA included the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald, and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune. By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS, and Time Inc.464
This intermingling of the U.S. intelligence community with media has also been well-documented by the U.S. Congress. The following is an excerpt of the 1976 Final Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities:
The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.
The Committee is concerned that the use of American journalists and media organizations for clandestine operations is a threat to the integrity of the press.465
That was in 1976! Can you imagine how sophisticated that process is now?
The perceived need for subversion of the media originated as a by-product of Cold War thinking. As a high-level CIA official explained it to Carl Bernstein:
One journalist is worth twenty agents. He has access, the ability to ask questions without arousing suspicion.466
The mainstream media certainly “played ball” with the government and their official version of the JFK assassination. As I wrote in American Conspiracies, this baloney began right away because, if you look back at the original press coverage, the first reports indicated shots from the front!
The very first dispatch out of Dallas on November 22, 1963, came from the Associated Press: ‘The shots apparently came from a grassy knoll in the area.’ That was the news in most of the early reports, though it was soon replaced with the Texas School Book Depository.467
From the get-go, Oswald was damned as guilty by the media. The headline in The New York Times: “Career of Suspect Has Been Bizarre.” In the New York Herald-Tribune: “Left Wing Lunacy, Not Right is Suspect.” In Time magazine: “Evidence Against Oswald Described as Conclusive.”468
Then, Dan Rather either lied his eyes out or should have been declared legally blind. You decide:
Dan Rather, who was a local newsman in Dallas at the time, was the first journalist to see the twenty-second-long ‘home movie’ taken by dressmaker Abraham Zapruder. Rather then told a national TV audience that the fatal shot drove the president’s head ‘violently forward,’ when the footage showed just the opposite! Later on, in his book The Camera Never Blinks, Rather defended his ‘mistake’ saying it was because his watching the film had been so rushed.
But nobody could question this at the time, because Time-Life snapped up the Zapruder film for
$150,000—a small fortune back then—and battled for years to keep it out of the public domain. The Life magazine publisher, C. D. Jackson, was ‘so upset by the head-wound sequence,’ according to Richard Stolley, who was then the magazine’s L.A. bureau chief, ‘that he proposed the company obtain all rights to the film and withhold it from public viewing at least until emotions calmed.’469
And then, to reverse the thinking on any of those authentic reports that had slipped out about shots coming from the front, Life magazine came to the rescue:
Life published a story headlined “End of Nagging Rumors: The Critical Six Seconds” [December 6, 1963], that claimed to show precisely how Oswald had succeeded in hitting his target. Supposedly based on the Zapruder film, the magazine said that the president had been turning to wave to someone in the crowd when one of Oswald’s bullets hit him in the throat. But guess what? That sequence is nowhere to be seen in the film.
Life magazine devoted most of its October 2, 1964 issue . . . one of the articles was illustrated with eight frames from the Zapruder film. But Frame 323 turned out to contradict the Warren Report’s conclusion about the shots all coming from the rear. So the issue was recalled, the plates broken and re-set [this was all pre-computer], and Frame 313 showing the president’s head exploding became the replacement. A second “error” forced still another such change. When a Warren Commission critic, Vincent Salandria, asked Life editor Ed Kearns about this two years later, Kearns wrote back: “I am at a loss to explain the discrepancies between the three versions of Life which you cite. I’ve heard of breaking a plate to correct an error. I’ve never heard of doing it twice for a single issue, much less a single story. Nobody here seems to remember who worked on the early Kennedy story . . .470
Make no mistake about what they were doing—they were controlling the information to jam the lone gunman theory right down our throats:
Three months before the Warren Report appeared in September 1964, the New York Times ran a page one exclusive: “Panel to Reject Theories of Plot in Kennedy Death.” They then printed the whole report as a forty-eight-page supplement and collaborated with Bantam Books and the Book-of-the-Month Club to publish both hardcover and paperback editions. “The commission analyzed every issue in exhaustive, almost archaeological detail,” according to reporter Anthony Lewis.
They Killed Our President Page 23
