by Mark Lane
Locating the Assassins
We begin with the presumption of innocence, which never was in evidence for Lee Harvey Oswald from the day of his arrest until two days later when he was murdered by an FBI confederate in the Dallas courthouse while he was surrounded by police officers who provided the same quality of protection to him as the Secret Service had for President Kennedy earlier. At least now, in retrospect and with less hysteria, perhaps that legal mandate at the heart of our judicial system may be acknowledged and respected. Those words from a defense attorney are neither unprecedented nor unexpected.
We move to the words of a skilled prosecutor, Robert K. Tanenbaum. His conclusion: “Based upon the evidence that we have seen, Oswald, had he lived long enough to be tried, could never have been convicted of the murder of the president. Simply put, the evidence was not there.”
Let us presume, as I do, that Oswald was innocent. Who then was behind the fence and fired the fatal shot from the front? Who placed a weapon and shells on the sixth floor of the book depository building and who fired the shot from the rear that struck Kennedy in the back?
There are then two locations that are crucial to this inquiry and even setting aside legal protections, the laws of nature remain intact, and Oswald could not have performed both actions during the same limited time frame. Then who did?
As we have seen there is undisputed testimony that a Dallas police officer, his weapon drawn, searched for and located a man who had just come from behind the fence that the vast majority of witnesses said was the point of origin for the fatal shot. It appears likely that he was about to arrest the assassin. However, he did not. The man had with him a remarkable document that shielded him from apprehension.
At about the same time two men, strangers to those who worked in the building, were seen hastily leaving the book depository. When asked who they were they displayed the same magic “get out of jail” documents.
All three men in the strategic locations had in their possession authentic credentials of the United States Secret Service White House detail and thus were immune from arrest or even further scrutiny. Later that day the roster of authentic Secret Service agents revealed that there were no agents from that service in the Dealey Plaza area except for those in the motorcade. How had the three men in the most sensitive and suspicious areas of the plaza obtained their credentials? The Warren Commission, relying upon the CIA and the FBI for leads and information, never inquired. We must.
I am indebted to James W. Douglass, a leading author on nonviolence and Catholic theology, for alerting me to the role of the CIA with the Secret Service.134 Of course, the Secret Service had the capability to print credentials in-house. It is a division of the Treasury Department as is the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which is responsible for printing millions of documents annually including all of our paper money. However, it did not print the credentials for its own agents of the Secret Service White House detail.
All related documents including gate passes, security passes, emblems for presidential vehicles, and above all, the authentic credentials for Secret Service agents assigned to the White House detail, were manufactured and distributed by the CIA’s secret Technical Services Division (TSD) under the direction of Gottlieb who followed the orders of Helms. That information became available for the first time in June 2007 when the CIA, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, released the documents, including a memorandum prepared and signed by Gottlieb. The application for the information had been made in 1992. The CIA had stalled for a decade and a half. After the assassination the Secret Service withdrew all credentials issued to its agents and provided them with documents printed by its own service. That reform came too late for John Kennedy.
It is important to recall that the TSD was disinterested in pure research. The objectives of its bizarre experiments were clear and they were universally result-oriented. They did not place electrodes into the brains of prisoners of war and arm them with knives to gain knowledge about the limits of brotherhood but rather to see if they could force their enemies to kill each other. It is in that light that it is appropriate to consider why that unit, one committed to undermining and destroying Kennedy’s policies, and planning the assassinations of other heads of state, wanted to control the Dealey Plaza scene. We must also understand its motive and expectations when it distributed authentic credentials to agents who did not work for the Secret Service. In fact, it appears that they provided credentials to the assassin on the grassy knoll and his confederates in the book depository as part of the plan to assassinate the president.
President Kennedy made several statements in the last months of his life, some public and others private, which illuminate the motives for the assassins. His predecessors, starting with Truman, had wielded the atomic bomb as a weapon to coerce the Soviet Union to yield to demands. Truman dared the Russians to try to match the power of the United States, and his counterpart in the Soviet Union responded that the American president had started the arms race. The Cold War became more intense. Kennedy, who had stated that a representative of a new generation of Americans had been elected and had sent a message to friends and foes alike in his inaugural address, had become less confrontational. On June 10, 1963, he addressed the nation from American University. He called world peace “the most important topic on earth.” He explained the kind of peace he sought:
Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
World leaders were cautiously impressed and hopeful.
In his farewell address, delivered a few days earlier, President Eisenhower had warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He urged that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by that group since “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
I believe no one could better summarize these remarks than Jim Douglass did in his book JFK and the Unspeakable. He wrote, “what Eisenhower in the final hours of his presidency revealed as the greatest threat to our democracy, Kennedy, in the midst of his presidency, chose to resist.”
The negative reaction to Kennedy’s remarks at Langley was exacerbated when CIA officers learned of Kennedy’s plan to end the war in Vietnam and to consider dissolving the CIA and replacing it with the intelligence-gathering unit that Truman had anticipated when he established it. The possibility of Robert Kennedy becoming the director of that group was terrifying. With the files in his hands detailing the criminal conduct of the agency, including murder, torture and numerous assassinations of political leaders, the repercussions could be feared but not known. Those responsible might be indicted, convictions were possible, and if political expediency became a mitigating factor at the least they would live in disgrace and with the knowledge that their futures were not secure.
With each new proposal for rapprochement, there was cautious optimism in Havana and Moscow contrasted by desperate preparations in Langley. In foreign capitals, plans were being made for the next steps toward peace. Fidel Castro was hoping the relations with the United States might change while in Langley, Gottlieb, at the direction of Helms, was creating a poison pill to assassinate the Cuban leader. The pill was manufactured and taken to Cuba, just as Gottlieb himself had earlier smuggled a similar product to the Republic of the Congo to assassinate its head of state.
The messenger sent to Havana was unable to get past Castro’s loyal and committed guards, who had made clear that they would take a bullet to protect their leader and Castro survived. Helms stated that President Kennedy, to whom he was obligated to report, should not be placed in the potentially embarrassing position of know
ing about the intended assassination. Helms sought to rationalize his planned actions when ordering that veil of silence but his penchant for disguising the truth was later fully exposed when he was indicted for committing perjury before a committee of the United States Senate.
Events were moving quickly and in each instance the CIA’s position was being compromised. At the end of September 1963, Kennedy established a method to communicate with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in secret thus excluding his own State Department as well as the CIA. Less than two weeks later he issued a memorandum stating that within the next three months the withdrawal of American troops would begin and that in two years almost all American personnel would be home. On November 18, Kennedy spoke in Miami and said that if Cuba became no longer “a weapon in an effort dictated by foreign powers to subvert the other American republics” then there could be a new relationship between the United States and Cuba. Within forty-eight hours Castro responded saying that he hoped that Kennedy would be reelected and might become the greatest president of the United States by understanding that capitalist and socialists can coexist in peace even in the Americas. On November 21, just before leaving for the trip to Texas after reading the reports of Americans killed and wounded in Vietnam, Kennedy stated that the policy would be changed since, “Vietnam is not worth another American life.”
On November 22 Fidel Castro was meeting with Jean Daniel, the founder and editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, the prominent magazine with the largest circulation of any general information weekly in France. Daniel had met with President Kennedy the month before and was taking to Castro the president’s words of support for the Cuban revolution and his hopes for rapprochement to Premier Castro. Castro warmly accepted Kennedy’s interest in a new relationship. During their luncheon meeting in Varadero Beach, Cuba, Castro and Daniels heard of the assassination. Fidel Castro, no doubt fearing that those who had often tried to kill him were responsible for the death of the American president, said, “Everything is changed. Everything is going to change.”
President Truman’s nightmare had become a reality. The intelligence-gathering unit he had created had become a policy-making force that conducted its independent operations without regard for the position of the president. The CIA was able to circumvent JFK’s less than enthusiastic protectors and Kennedy was executed by an experienced murder incorporated group run by a part of his own government.
Castro’s prediction unfortunately proved to be historically accurate. From a nation espousing a Good Neighbor policy during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, calling for reciprocal exchanges with Latin American countries, to Kennedy’s reaching out to Cuba, the United States has become the fearful but no longer feared Colossus to the North. Our relations with Cuba have deteriorated since November 22. Countries in our hemisphere have elected leader after leader hostile to our administrations. Some have entered into alliances with those who oppose our national interests.
Instead of the peace for all time Kennedy envisioned, we have had never-ending wars since his death. While we devote half of our annual budget to wars, past and present, China has rivaled our economic capabilities and in some instances surpassed us, and this century is still very young. At the time of Kennedy’s assassination there were approximately 18,000 “advisors” in Vietnam, and plans were made to bring them home. After his death 500,000 Americans were sent to Vietnam, and more than 50,000 died there.
And now in many countries American men and women in uniform die each day.
The Central Intelligence Agency has its own air force and brags that it effectively kills more of the enemy than does the United States Air Force.
The leaders of the CIA have never been held accountable for their crimes.
Not even for their part in the assassination of an American president.
The Fourth Branch
At the conclusion of a trial, attorneys for the parties make closing arguments to the jury. Here there has been no trial, just an indictment. The court will instruct the jurors that the remarks of counsel are not evidence. The lawyers often respond by explaining the purpose of the summation.
After a trial, or even a book, the lawyer or author, in this case both the same person, may seek to assemble the many pieces of evidence into a logical, coherent and persuasive mosaic that resembles a completed jigsaw puzzle. As the segments unite and integrate the conundrum is resolved and the role and place of each bit of evidence, testimony, and documents becomes clear. Only when the elements are evaluated in context and taken together with other facts does the case emerge and become decipherable.
Long before we reach that point during a trial, in fact at the very outset of that journey, the court in all federal and state proceedings has already explained to the jurors that the indictment is not proof of anything or, in legalese, that it has no probative value. Its sole purpose is to serve as the vehicle that brings the accusations made by the prosecutors to the triers of fact, the members of the jury.
An indictment in a book can, of course, have no more weight or resolute posture than one in a criminal trial. It brings to your attention and for your consideration numerous issues and questions, allegations and facts.
We start with the understanding that no indictment and no argument is the equal of a verdict by jurors who may have resolved the issues to their satisfaction beyond a reasonable doubt. We act here in the absence of a serious inquiry by the Department of Justice, an agency that has failed to act appropriately. In a democracy that is our right as well as our obligation.
Now let us see together what picture emerges as we examine the evidence, not in the manner of poseurs who consider a television program to be a trial or who serve as assets for intelligence organizations, but as citizens who respect our laws, rules and traditions and do not wish to see them further traduced. This then is the case against the Central Intelligence Agency for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Motive is not an element of a crime. Nevertheless, an understanding of the defendant’s motivation, while proof of nothing, may provide a useful context in which to examine the facts. Cui bono, a Latin adage, is traditionally defined by the lawyer’s standard reference tool, Black’s Law Dictionary, as “For whose good; for whose use or benefit.” Wikipedia accurately adds that it is “used either to suggest a hidden motive or that the party responsible for something may not be who it appears to be.”
On April 29, 1962, President Kennedy invited the Nobel Prize winners of the Western Hemisphere to dinner at the White House. He said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Of course, the president, known for his charm and wit, was being facetious. In founding our exceptional democracy Jefferson acted in concert with the most remarkable men in our history including Adams, Madison and Hamilton as well as Washington and Tom Paine, Paul Revere and James Monroe, as well as Thomas Mifflin and Nathaniel Gorham, each of whom served as president of the Continental Congress. Likely the most brilliant and certainly the most innovative was Benjamin Franklin. Before the American Revolution these men were farmers, scholars, writers, tradesmen, one a silversmith, and many were merchants or real estate investors. Some had impressive educational experience including degrees in medicine or theology, some were lawyers who had been trained at the Inns of Court in London, while others, including Washington and Franklin, were self-taught or gained knowledge through serving as apprentices.
All made a unique contribution to the history of the world, for they created a democracy with checks and balances designed for both the present and the future with the hope of ensuring a fair and lasting experiment.
It was comprised of three separate but equal branches of government. The legislative branch, the United States Congress, was designed to have two houses. No new law could be made unless they both agreed upon its concept and its precise language. It still would not becom
e law unless the executive branch, the president, signed it into law. If he declined to do so there was yet another path the legislature could pursue. They could pass it over the president’s veto if two-thirds of its members voted to do so.
The new law could be challenged by anyone who felt threatened or harmed by its provisions by asking the court system, the third branch of government, the judicial system, led by the Supreme Court of the United States, to declare that it was violative of the principles established in the United States Constitution, our founding document.
Since our founders knew that they did not possess sufficient knowledge to look into the future, they provided a method to amend the sacred Constitution through a difficult path that required the consent of most of the representatives of the states and the nation.
One house of the legislative branch was given the responsibility to initiate funding laws, the other, the power to declare war. No war could be both declared and financed unless both houses agreed. The president, who was by law also the commander in chief of the armed services, was in charge of directing the war, but he alone could neither initiate it nor provide funds for it.
To guarantee the right of the people to make changes, every member of one house of the legislature was required to face election each two years to remain in office. To provide stability, only one-third of the members of the other house faced election every two years with each member serving for six years. The president could be reelected every four years, and while there were no term limits, the first president, who likely could have been a president for life, retired after two terms, and for decades that tradition was honored by his successors and later was enacted into law.
