American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  I found it interesting that, they same day that the Bilderberg expert, Daniel Estulin, was to meet with me in New York, our filming schedule got thrown off. I had to wait an extra day because he happened to be on the no-fly list. It took 24 hours for him to be cleared and come talk to me. I was trying to figure out why they would deem this guy a terrorist. I mean, he’s a writer. Who would have the power to put him on that list? What are the qualifications? Like Shakespeare once put it, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave.”

  It makes me want to run to the Baja for six months and get away from it all. But by the time I’m ready to go, I’ll probably be on the no-fly list, too! I’ll keep you posted.

  WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

  We need real heroes for our young people to emulate, individuals who weren’t afraid to take a stand for the sake of our country. The story of Major General Smedley Butler needs to be as widely known as those of Washington and Lincoln. If this means making us think about the fact that wealthy people can sometimes be out for evil purposes, so be it. I’d rank Professor Quigley as a hero, too, for his willingness to expose the secret machinations of the rich and powerful. Again, let’s revise our history textbooks!

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION: BIGGEST COVER-UP OF MY LIFETIME

  THE INCIDENT: The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, riding in his limousine in Dallas, on November 22, 1963.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine and Communist sympathizer, shot the president twice from behind, firing a rifle from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. He was captured later that day in a theater, and killed two days later by Jack Ruby.

  MY TAKE: The cover-up of what really happened to JFK starts with the Warren Commission’s “lone assassin” conclusion, and continues to this day with the help of the big media. A second gunman assassinated the president from the grassy knoll, while Oswald was set up as the fall guy. The perpetrators behind Oswald are tied into the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Mob, along with right-wing extremists who tried to make it look like Cuba was behind it. Oswald himself was part of an intelligence operation that involved a look-alike “double.”

  “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.”

  —Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address as president, 1961

  There are two official government reports on the assassination of President Kennedy, and they directly contradict each other. The first was, of course, the Warren Commission Report, which concluded that a disgruntled Marine-turned-Communist named Lee Harvey Oswald took out JFK on his own, using an old Italian-made rifle and connecting with two out of three shots in 6.3 seconds from a sixth-floor window. The second was a report fifteen years later by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concluding that JFK was “probably” eliminated as part of a conspiracy.

  Somehow, that one keeps slipping through the cracks. Maybe it’s because the Justice Department never investigated it and came to a real conclusion. As it is, every time a new book comes out that supports the Warren Commission, the big media reviewers tell us this puts all the rumors to rest for good. I’m talking about Gerald Posner’s Case Closed (1993) and then Vincent Bugliosi’s 1,600-page tome, Reclaiming History (2007). Vince is a good friend of mine, and a prosecutor for whom I have great respect, but in this case it’s beyond me how he can buy into the lone-nut scenario. Other new books like Brothers, Legacy of Secrecy, and JFK and the Unspeakable barely merit a mention; anything raising the specter of a plot gets quickly relegated to the stack of books-to-be-ignored.

  So let’s start with a serious look at the overwhelming physical evidence that Oswald couldn’t have been acting alone. First of all, what about the so-called “magic bullet” that moved all around and caused seven separate wounds in President Kennedy and Governor Connally? When this bullet just happened to turn up on a stretcher at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, there weren’t any bloodstains on it. Although the bullet appeared to be undamaged, the one that hit Connally left behind some permanent lead in his wrist. According to Dr. Cyril Wecht, former President of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists, these two facts simply don’t add up. Without the “magic bullet,” the idea that Oswald killed the president falls apart.1 (Of course, if you challenge the status quo like Dr. Wecht eventually they’ll come after you, as the Justice Department did. For sending personal faxes and giving students permission to study autopsies, Dr. Wecht found himself facing numerous criminal charges. He was forced to resign as a county coroner in Pittsburgh and spent $8 million on legal fees before the Justice Department dropped most all its charges against him in 2008.2

  A total of eighteen witnesses at Parkland Memorial Hospital that day—most of them doctors—all described a bullet wound that blew away where the back of JFK’s head should have been. But somehow, the autopsy photos that got entered into evidence don’t show that wound. Of course, Dr. James Humes, the navy physician who led the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, admitted later that he burned both his autopsy notes and the first draft of his report.3 Somehow, the president’s brain disappeared, too.

  What gets me is that John Kennedy’s body was illegally removed from the city of Dallas, where by law the autopsy should have taken place. Texas law in 1963 required that the autopsy of anyone murdered in the state had to take place within its borders. The only exception was a murder that happened in a place owned, possessed, or controlled by the federal government—which wasn’t the case here. In fact, the Dallas County medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, tried to enforce the law when the Secret Service was removing the president’s body from Parkland late that afternoon for immediate return to Washington. Dr. Rose was overruled by the Dallas district attorney, Henry Wade. So did the feds simply come in and say, this is what’s going to happen? Why don’t they have to abide by the same laws as the rest of us? This set a terrible precedent that happened again after September 11, but I’ll get into that later.

  As for the famous Zapruder film: anybody can see that JFK’s head is thrust violently backward when the fatal shot strikes him. Despite all the claims to the contrary, this supports someone firing from the front, most likely the grassy knoll. A number of experts say that the film was definitely altered—and we’ve recently learned that it went to a CIA lab run by Kodak in Rochester, New York, the weekend of the assassination!4 When Life magazine published stills from the Zapruder film not long after the assassination, they were printed out of order. Kinda makes you wonder about the media again, doesn’t it?

  Did you know that not a single fingerprint was found on Oswald’s alleged murder weapon? When the FBI did a nitrate test on Oswald, it came up positive for his hands but negative for his face. Which means that he maybe fired a pistol, but not a rifle, that day. After Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, the Dallas Police did come up with a palm print on the Mannlicher-Carcano—but this was after the FBI’s top fingerprint analyst had dusted the whole rifle and said he found nothing of importance.5

  During my first year as governor, I caused a pretty big stir when I told an interviewer from Playboy that I did not believe the official conclusion on Oswald. I think I may have been the highest-ranking official who ever said that, at least publicly. I started by simply applying common sense. If Oswald was who they told us he was—a Marine private who gets out of the Marine Corps and decides to defect to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, then comes back home with a Russian wife and does minimum-wage jobs—why would any records need to be locked away in the National Archives because of “national security” for 75 years? As a Navy SEAL, I had to have top secret clearance. That was higher than Oswald’s, and I know a few secrets, but not enough to endanger national security. Y
et in Oswald’s case, hundreds of documents were withheld.

  When I was traveling around the country to promote my first book, the publisher said I could go to either Houston or Dallas. I said, “Give me Dallas.” With my apologies to readers who may already have read this story in my previous book, as well as the one about my meeting with Fidel Castro, I feel like these are too important to leave out of what I’ve learned about JFK’s killing. First a cop gave me the tour of the police headquarters basement where Jack Ruby shot Oswald. The eerie part was, there was the elevator we all saw on TV—and down on the floor, almost on the exact spot where Oswald lay dying, the tile has oil on it that still looks like blood.

  From there I went to Dealey Plaza and took my time walking the picket fence on the grassy knoll, where a second gunman most likely was firing from. That was eerie, too. Then I went to what’s now the JFK Museum inside the Texas School Book Depository, where the curator, Gary Mack, met my party. The actual supposed sniper’s nest on the sixth floor is sealed off. But you can go to the next window, which would seem to be an easier shot, because you’re eight feet closer to where the president’s motorcade passed and at basically the same angle. I didn’t see how three shots could possibly have cleared the branches of an oak tree and lined up on the presidential motorcade.

  After my book signing was over, we headed out to Dallas’s Love Field airport. At the time, I was smoking cigars, so they found me a restricted area outside where I could light up. I remember it was a beautiful day, and we were all laughing and making small talk. As it came time for me to put out my cigar and board the plane, the police officer who’d been our guide all day took me off to the side.

  He said, “Be very careful, Governor. You are a high-profile person who might say things that certain people don’t want brought to light.”

  That made my head spin a little. If there was nothing to hide about the assassination, how could my making comments about it forty years later affect anybody? In hindsight, I wish I’d canceled the flight and gone to the policeman’s home that night. I wanted to ask him, “Why are you warning me about this? What do you base it on, or won’t you tell me?” But I had the strong impression he didn’t want me to know.

  Then, my last year in office, in 2002, I had an even more powerful experience when I got the opportunity to meet Fidel Castro. A few of America’s sanctions against Cuba dealing with food and agricultural products had finally been lifted, so Minnesota was able to put together a trade mission for humanitarian purposes. President Bush was very opposed to my going along, but I decided it was my right as an American citizen. We now know that Robert Kennedy, on December 12, 1963—less than a month after his brother’s assassination—had sent a memo to Dean Rusk asking the secretary of state to get rid of the restrictions on American travel to Cuba, because this was inconsistent with our belief in freedom. It took almost a half-century more for his daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, to push the Obama Administration to go forward on this—which it seems is finally going to happen. I guess I was a few years ahead of my time.

  I’d grown up in fear of Fidel Castro. I was young when his revolution took place in 1959, but I remember the propaganda. I vaguely recall hearing about the Bay of Pigs invasion, because it dominated the news when I came home from school. As a kid, the name fascinated me. Why would they name a place after pigs? As an adult, when I started reading books trying to figure out what really happened to President Kennedy, Castro and Cuba of course loomed large: Oswald and his Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his attempt to get a visa to Cuba on a trip to Mexico. So Cuba had fascinated me for years, though I never dreamed I’d have a chance to actually go there, much less to spend an hour with Castro himself.

  The last day of our visit, around noon, Castro was waiting for me in a room at the trade fair. I’ve never known a handshake like Castro’s. He comes up to me, winds up, pulls back his hand all the way to his shoulder, and thrusts it out with great excitement. We sat down in two chairs right across from each other. He had his interpreter along, and some of his security people.

  The first words out of his mouth were, “You are a man of great courage.”

  I was puzzled by this and said, “Well, Mr. President, how can you say that? You don’t know me.”

  He looked back at me and said, “Because you defied your president to come here.” I guess he has pretty good “intel.”

  And I looked right back at him and said, “Well, Mr. President, you’ll find that I defy most everything.”

  Castro laughed. Who knows, maybe he felt this was something we had in common.

  The whole conversation, on my part, was in English and interpreted to him by a lady in Spanish. But I don’t think he really needs her. Because now and then, I’d say something that was funny and he’d laugh before the interpretation happened. As good as Castro is at masking the fact, I think he understands English very well. Let’s put it this way: I’m sure he does English far, far better than I do Spanish.

  We covered a lot of ground in our conversation. Just as I have great pride in Minnesota, he has the same for Cuba. He was extremely proud of the fact that they have the highest literacy rate of any Latin-American country in the hemisphere. He’s also proud that they have the best medical care. I found him very engaging. He’s a master of hyperbole. I told him that I felt the U.S. boycott was wrong. It did nothing positive for either of our countries, and it was time for America to get over it. His questions of me were mainly about my political future. He was interested in the fact that I was an independent and didn’t belong to either of the two major parties. A kind of rogue element being the governor of a state.

  Time passes very quickly when it’s only an hour and you’re sitting with Fidel Castro. He’s so perceptive. At one point I glanced at my watch and immediately Castro said, “I’m sorry, do you have to be somewhere?” I said, “No, sir. But I’m only here a short time with you, and there are some personal questions I wanted to ask you before our hour is up. So I was just checking my watch to see how much more time I had. So—can I ask you one?”

  His answer was, “Ask me anything you’d like.”

  I told him about how I was only twelve years old when John F. Kennedy was killed. And how later, as an adult, I started studying the murder. I told him that I came to not believe the Warren Commission, or what my country has portrayed as what happened. I said, “Naturally, in studying this, there are a few scenarios where you come up very strongly as being a part of it, that Oswald was somehow linked to you. You were around back then, and much older than I was, and more involved—I would like to know your perception of what happened to John F. Kennedy.”

  For the next twenty minutes, I couldn’t stop him from talking. First of all, he said it was an “inside job,” meaning that the assassination was orchestrated from within the United States. He very intently stared at me and said—which also told me that he was aware of my military background—“You know as well as I do, Oswald couldn’t make the shots.” Then he went on to explain the reason he knew that. During the Cuban Revolution, he was the main guy who taught and carried out sniper work. Knowing all he did about this, he knew Oswald couldn’t have accomplished the job with the antiquated Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that he used.

  Then Fidel described why it was an inside job. First of all, he said, he was very close to the Soviet Union at that time. “The Soviets didn’t do it,” he stated emphatically. In fact, the Kremlin leaders had told him about Kennedy: “You can talk to this man.” Apparently the Russians were pleased that Kennedy had enough of an open mind to at least consider their side’s position, on Cuba and other matters. Besides, neither country wanted another nuclear confrontation like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  Secondly, Castro said, “I didn’t do it.” Again his gaze was penetrating. He went on, “I’m not suicidal crazy. Why would I destroy my Cuba, the country I love so much. If I would have ordered Kennedy killed, and the United States found out, we wouldn’t exist anymore. They would have unleashed eve
rything they had on us, and basically blown us off the face of the earth. Why would I take that risk?”

  It made sense to me. Not only that, but look who was waiting in the wings—Lyndon Baines Johnson. I didn’t see his becoming president as a positive for Fidel Castro.

  He also recalled for me how, at the moment Kennedy was killed, he was meeting in Havana with a French journalist named Jean Daniel, whom Kennedy had personally sent to see him. Castro felt very strongly that Kennedy was considering a change in policy towards Cuba. I could tell that he felt Cuba was worse off without Kennedy alive.

  He said again, “It was completely an inside job. It was done by people within the United States of America.”

  I wanted to ask for specifics—it felt like he knew some—but our time was up.

  That last night, I turned to my Cuban bodyguards and asked them to take me out for a night on the town. They took me to the infamous Club Havana. It’s a beautiful nightclub, maybe the biggest one in Cuba, with a Vegas-type entertainment show where they bring out Latino comedians, a variety of different musical acts, and have beautiful Cuban girls who dance in their feathered native costumes.

  The night wore on. Castro apparently has informants everywhere. One of them came up and whispered something to my bodyguard, who then told me. It seems that some CIA operatives were tailing me. I thought to myself—is that for my benefit, or for theirs? Am I in some type of danger that they need to be following me around? I don’t think so. I doubt that Fidel Castro would want an American governor coming to harm on his island, when I’m there on a mission of good will. So I ruled out that somehow the CIA were hanging around to protect me, especially considering I had my own armed bodyguards plus the three assigned by Fidel.