JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  This is the evidence we have of the significance of the Kennedy assassination. But it is only one example. Other major events, such as the development and escalation of the Vietnam War, have been manipulated in a similar manner. In bringing this work to a close I shall provide, briefly, a look at a few of the other events during the Cold War that have taken place because the power elite planned things that way.

  As a result, I am aware I may be attacked in the same fashion as Oliver Stone even before his movie JFK appeared in the theaters. The attack consists of words like conspiracy and paranoia similar to the verbal accusations during the Inquisition. To attack someone as conspiracy prone because he does not believe the cover story that one lone gunman killed the President is ridiculous. By now it has become clear that there was a plan to murder Kennedy in order to escalate the Vietnam war and decimate most of the less-developed countries through a form of banker-managed, predatory economic warfare. Conspiracy is far from the operative word. This is planning at its best or worst, depending on your point of view. Furthermore, paranoia cannot properly be used to define someone who studies economics and history and reveals certain facts. As a matter of proper definition, such findings are the result of the opposite of “paranoia.” Having said this, let’s take a look at a few recent examples of how the game plan of the High Cabal, Winston Churchill’s phrase for the power elite, operates.

  Ever since the murder of the President we have been told by the highest authorities that JFK was killed by one man, who fired three shots from a mail-order Italian-made rifle. Quite naturally most Americans have wanted, at first, to believe the word of their government, especially when it involved such an important matter.

  Many of the most earnest of these researchers who do not believe that one man killed the President with three shots from a rifle have mistakenly spent almost three decades researching and studying the cover story and not the facts. More than six hundred books have been written on this subject. In them you can find a myriad of obscure trivia dug up by these tireless researchers. But to no avail. That is not the path to the answer to the main question, “Why was Kennedy killed?” No one will ever know who killed the President. In that business, the “mechanics” are faceless and have chameleon identities that are skillfully shielded by the system.

  It is easy for anyone to learn that President Kennedy was murdered in a burst of gunfire, as reported by able and on-the-spot newsmen, that hit him at least twice, struck Governor Connally at least once and more likely two times, and that a fragment created by a stray shot hit a man named Tague who was standing on the curb of a street about a block away from where Kennedy was shot. Those are more than the “three shots” on which the Warren Commission builds its case. “More than three shots” is all the evidence needed to prove that the accounts of the crime given by the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Warren Commission are wrong.

  What does it take to convince able, intelligent people that the contrived cover story published by our government is nothing more than that? If nothing else a recent episode from the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association should alert the public to the seriousness of the cause underlying the decision to assassinate JFK almost thirty years ago.

  This powerful, wealthy association, one of the most influential in the country, has required its spokesmen to proclaim, once again, that a bullet entered the back of the neck of the President and exited through his throat and then traveled on to seriously injure Governor Connally. “How utterly absurd,” we might say; and of course it is. But that is not the point. Here is this prestigious organization being forced by a higher power, under some form of duress, to play a distasteful role before the American public by repeating a story that is untenable.

  Consider the implausibility of just one of their “facts.” Their spokesmen have said, using contrived diagrams, that one bullet entered Kennedy’s neck from the back and exited the throat. On the other hand, anyone can look at the suit coat and the shirt that were worn by Kennedy at the time he was shot and see clearly that the bullet that entered his body from the back made a hole in the coat and a matching one in the shirt at a point well below the neck. Such a bullet would have had to have changed course immediately, inside Kennedy’s body, to have advanced upward and emerge from his throat. Moreover, this bullet was allegedly fired on a downward trajectory form six floors above the President’s car. Physically impossible!

  The contrived story of this entire AMA presentation went beyond medical facts. Because some authors have written that a “general” was in Bethesda Naval Hospital autopsy room at the time and that the general gave orders to the autopsy doctors, it has been made to appear that the doctors had been ordered not to perform an adequate examination. Naturally the doctors concerned have rejected such a suggestion. The doctors stated in their AMA story that there were no generals in the autopsy room, there were just the “President’s military aides.” This was another fabrication, and an unnecessary one. One of the President’s military aides was Godfrey McHugh. I have been acquainted with McHugh since the fifties, and I know that in 1963 Godfrey McHugh was an air force general. The President’s military aides were at Bethesda, as the AMA spokesmen say. He was a presidential military aide, and he was a general. He was there. He was also a friend of Jackie Kennedy and had known her since before she met Kennedy. McHugh was present at Bethesda doing his duty. The AMA spokesmen erred in stating, among other things, “there were no generals in the room.”

  The reason I mention these things now is to underscore that the course of events in our time is planned carefully by agents of the power elite. This American Medical Association episode in the spring of 1992 is a classic example proving that the power behind the Kennedy assassination plot lives on.

  Chronologically I have brought this review of the historical record through the years from 1943 to 1971 with some discussion of the Pentagon Papers and their unusual role in the revision of the history of past events. It is clear to anyone close to the scene, and to those who have studied them with care that this massive set of documents, “37 studies and 15 collections of documents in 43 volumes” accompanied by their very contrived editorial comments on that period of history is not the true and complete story. Can anyone imagine that a review of that period of history “from World War II to the present [1969]” could have been written without more than a few relevant words about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? In fact, you will recall, on the very date that Kennedy died the Pentagon Papers completely ignored his death, saying quite simply that Ambassador Lodge had flown to Washington to speak with the President. This was followed by the statement that on the next day, Ambassador Lodge met with the President. Not a word was said of the fact that President Kennedy had died on November 22 and that the man Lodge met with on the twenty-third was Johnson. Is that true and reliable history?

  Let’s tie the assassination of Kennedy and the role of the power elite to some other notable events.

  It was the spring of a memorable year, 1972. On February 7, President Nixon’s secretary of commerce, Maurice Stans, opened a remarkable “White House Conference on the Industrial World Ahead, a Look at Business in 1990.” This three-day meeting of fifteen hundred of this country’s leading businessmen, scholars, and the like concluded with a memorable and prophetic statement by Roy L. Ash, president of Litton Industries, and incidentally one of the original “Whiz Kids” from Harvard with Bob McNamara:

  . . . state capitalism may well be a form for world business in the world ahead; that the western countries are trending toward a more unified and controlled economy, having a greater effect on all business; and the communist nation are moving more and more toward a free market system. The question posed [during the conference] on which a number of divergent opinions arose, was whether “East and West would meet some place toward the middle about 1990.”

  That was an astounding forecast before such an eminent group considering that it was made in 1972 and that it was actually “
about 1990” when the Soviet Union did weaken and the Cold War came to an end, in much the way he had visualized. These ideas have had a major impact on all of us. The predictions of this conference proved to be another long step on the way to a New World Order.

  Such ideas are not limited to a few leaders or to a few countries. During a speech made in 1991, Giovanni Agnelli, chief executive officer of the Italian Fiat Company, recalled: “In 1946 Winston Churchill spoke in Zurich of the need to build a United States of Europe.” That was another long-range forecast that is being proved quite accurate. Then Agnelli updated that comment with another statement that confirms the fact that the power of ideas, of course he means the ideas of the power elite, is greater than guns: “The fall of the Soviet Union is one of the very few instances in history in which a world power has been defeated on the battlefield of ideas.”

  Agnelli calls this the “battlefield of ideas.” Others may find evidence of “conspiracy,” while still others see things as they are and speak of “planning.” And if there is planning, and we have plenty of evidence there is, there must be “planners.” In that sense, this becomes an accurate definition of the existence and activity of the power elite. These events are not the result of a throw of the dice. They are planned.

  Turning back to the White House Conference in 1972, before February had ended Secretary Stans had resigned to become chairman of the Committee to Reelect the President. That was the spring of the year 1972, the year when the “dirty tricks” business went public, with the birth of CREEP and the days of “Watergate.”

  In that same year, under President Nixon, an unusual and most effective international business organization was formed by the business interests of the Dartmouth Conference, whose meetings were regularly scheduled by the Rockefellers. It was called US-TEC, for the United States-USSR Trade and Economic Council. Backed by the Nixon administration and the international banker David Rockefeller, the Council that listed most of the Fortune 500 corporate leaders among its membership, along with hundreds of their counterparts in the Soviet Union, opened offices in New York and in Moscow for regular activities. Meetings of the membership were scheduled every six months alternately in each location. Usually these meetings were augmented by major trade fair exhibitions from each country. This organization publishes a fine magazine that is not classified. But you can not get a copy of it unless you are a member.

  US-TEC has done much to make Roy Ash’s forecast at the “Look at Business in 1990” conference come true. Business, in 1972, took aim at the Evil Empire, as President Reagan called the Soviet Union a decade later.

  Not much has been published openly about either of these organizations, the United States membership and the Soviet membership, as they have worked busily to create the New World Order. Their work has included the promotion of the military-industrial complex and of the massive international agricultural combines in their voracious search for new business in new fields. In this connection, the CIA is one of the primary activists and promoters for these combines, especially since its more recent emphasis upon the business of economic intelligence.

  Not all wars are fought with guns. Economic warfare can be just as powerful and just as deadly.

  In March 1973, the White House arranged for a meeting of representatives of the largest petroleum-consuming organizations in the country. These companies included the airlines, railroads, trucking firms, utilities, and government agencies such as the Government Services Agency and the Department of Defense. This meeting took place in the Washington offices of the National Defense Transportation Association (NDTA). I attended that meeting as a railroad representative.

  At that time, as I recall, gasoline was selling at the service station pumps for under forty cents per gallon, and the railroads were buying fuel on long-term contracts for about eleven cents per gallon.

  The White House spokesman informed this group that a recent study had warned that petroleum use was far ahead of new discovery and that reserves of the world’s oil supply might be depleted in the not too distant future, perhaps even before the year 2000. He stated that the meeting had been called to alert all major consumers that before the end of the year it would be all but impossible to make a long-term contract for petroleum and that prices would be up by a factor of two or three. I was sitting between representatives of the airlines and the General Services Administration. You could have heard a pin drop. By the end of the year those predictions concerning price had proved to have been conservative.

  At the same time the Federal Power Commission had begun a natural gas survey because “the shortage of natural gas had been a source of surprise, shock, and disbelief to many of those affected, but not to serious students of long-term United States resource development.”

  Then, as if right on schedule, an Arab-Israeli war broke out in late 1973. Before long it was announced that the Arabs had instituted an oil embargo and that available supplies of automobile gasoline would drop around the world. Soon thereafter we were all parked in long lines leading to the gas pumps waiting for the little gasoline available and at any price.

  In early 1974 the prestigious Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. invited several hundred mid-level officials from all parts of the government, from congressional offices, and from local offices of major corporations to a new federal staff energy seminar. These were more or less monthly meetings where these invitees could listen to world leaders in the field of energy, particularly petroleum.

  Again, I was invited as a railroad representative and was pleasantly surprised at the high caliber of the subjects and the speakers, such as Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger, and by the fact that these sessions continued for about four years. It is clear that an objective of those meetings was to have all of us marching to the same drum. We all began to believe that the fast-rising price of petroleum was fully justified, that a “world price” was inevitable and that the “last barrel” would be drawn from some well not too long after the year 2000.

  As we now know, much of this “energy crisis” was a massive production designed and orchestrated to raise the price of petroleum from its long-time base of approximately $1.70 per barrel to a high, at times, of $40.00. Except for the international drug trade, no other production in the fields of economic warfare had ever made so much money . . . and continues to do so.

  It takes little imagination to discover that this is another product of the High Cabal elite and that while the energy and drug projects are operating most profitably the international food business cannot be far behind. As conventional battlefield warfare diminishes in value to the world planners, economic warfare is moving boldly to the front of the stage.

  William J. Casey had served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, former under secretary of state, and later the director of central intelligence under President Reagan. On December 11, 1979, during a “Law, Intelligence and National Security Workshop” sponsored by the American Bar Association, Casey said:

  I think that we are being swamped and we have an ample supply of economic information. What we are deficient in is sufficient analysis, understanding of the long-term implications where the economic facts that scream out at us from the financial pages every day are carrying us and the problems that they are creating for us in the future, and what we can do about them. It’s a shocking thing to me that we have close to a complete absence of any real machinery or any place in the United States government to systematically look at the economic opportunities and threats in long-term perspective, or any fixed responsibility for recommending or acting on the use of economic leverage, either offensively or defensively for strategic security purposes.

  Does that sound like big guns and real warfare to you? A little more than one year after that speech Bill Casey became the director of central intelligence, and economic intelligence became the biggest game in town for the CIA and the National Security Agency. The meanings behind these events reveal t
hemselves to us once we see our way through the maze of the Warren Commission Report and the continuing obfuscation of the facts concerning John F Kennedy’s death.

  This CIA connection in the business of making war, and more recently of making big-business bigger, has introduced another pattern of events that this country has experienced, though not as frequently as some other nations. To oversimplify, this may be seen as the agency’s ability to “rekindle the fire” whenever some new occurrence is needed to raise the level of concern throughout the nation, particularly whenever another big military budget has been prepared for a vote.

  By the end of direct United States participation in the warfare in Indochina, it had become clear to the long-range war planners in the government that further attempts to support an ever-increasing military budget for the type of conventional warfare practiced in Korea and Vietnam would no longer be possible. With the advent of the Reagan administration and its pro-business leaning toward a strong and ever-increasing Defense Department budget, something had to be done to raise the level of public anxiety and anger toward the only superpower available, the Soviet Union. This created a problem and a demand for a solution.

  Clear evidence indicates that the old Hegelian doctrine that nations require conflict still prevails. But you may be sure that the scenario of the conflict itself must change. Here we need to look at an important example of the Reagan era that is being used repeatedly to demonstrate how the power elite and their warmakers utilize all manner of plots to achieve their ambitious goal of establishing the highest level of costly military preparedness under all kinds of political conditions. This method of international gamesmanship is called “Terrorism.”