Background
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated as he traveled in an open car in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963; Texas Governor John Connally was also injured. Within two hours, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder of a Dallas policeman, not for the assassination of President Kennedy. Two days later, while in police custody, Oswald was killed byJack Ruby. In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that there was no persuasive evidence that Oswald was in a conspiracy to assassinate the President, and stated their belief that he acted alone. Almost immediately, critics began to question the official government conclusions and wrote books attacking the Commission and its findings. Among them was Mark Lane — a lawyer who briefly represented Oswald's mother and who authored the critical book Rush to Judgment.
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald assassinated Kennedy. However, the HSCA also concluded that Kennedy was assassinated "probably as a result of a conspiracy." The HSCA also stated: "The Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President."
Other official investigations of the assassination include the Ramsey Clark Panel and the Rockefeller Commission, both of which supported the Warren Commission's conclusions, and the Jim Garrison investigation, which tried unsuccessfully to convict Clay Shaw of participation in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy.
According to a 2003 ABC poll, "seven in 10 Americans think the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the result of a plot, not the act of a lone killer — and a bare majority thinks that plot included a second shooter in Dealey Plaza."[2]
Further Information
The single-bullet theory and evidence related to Oswald's rifle are of key importance to the belief that Oswald was a lone assassin.
Witnesses important to the conclusions of the Warren Commission and the other official investigations of the assassination include: Governor John Connally, Nellie Connally, Howard Brennan, Abraham Zapruder, Emmett Hudson and Marilyn Sitzman.
Conspiracy theories
More than one gunman
The Warren Commission findings and the single bullet theory are implausible according to some researchers. Oswald's rifle, through testing by the FBI, could only be fired three times within the five to eight seconds of the assassination. The Warren Commission, through eyewitnesses, determined that only three bullets were fired as well: one of the three bullets missed the vehicle entirely; one hit Kennedy and passed through Governor John Connally, and the final shot was fatal to the President. The weight of the bullet fragments taken from Connally and those remaining in his body supposedly totaled more than could have been missing from the bullet found on Connally's stretcher, known as the "pristine bullet". However, witness testimony seems to indicate that only tiny fragments, of less total mass than was missing from the bullet, were left in Connally. In addition, the trajectory of the bullet, which hit Kennedy above the right shoulder blade and passed through his neck (according to the autopsy), supposedly would have had to change course to pass through Connally's chest and wrist. Hence, the conclusion by some historians is that more than three shots were fired and that more than one gunman had to be involved.
Witnesses
Nellie Connally was sitting in the presidential car next to her husband, Governor John Connally. In her book From Love Field: Our Final Hours, Connally was adamant that her husband was hit by a bullet that was separate from the two that hit Kennedy.
Roy Kellerman, a U.S. Secret Service Agent, testified that, "Now, in the seconds that I talked just now, a flurry of shells come into the car." Kellerman said that he saw a 5-inch diameter hole in the back right-hand side of the President’s head.
Lee Bowers was operating a railroad interlocking tower, overlooking the parking lot just north of the grassy knoll and west of the Texas School Book Depository. He reported that he saw two men behind the picket fence at the top of the grassy knoll at the time of the shootings and he also claimed to see a puff of smoke from that direction.
Thirty-five witnesses who were present at the shooting thought that shots were fired from in front of the President — from the area of the Grassy Knoll or Triple Underpass — while 56 eyewitnesses thought the shots came from the Depository, or at least in that direction, behind the President, and 5 witnesses thought that the shots came from two directions.
Clint Hill, the Secret Service Agent who was sheltering the President with his body on the way to the hospital, described "The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car." Later, to a National Geographic documentary film crew, he described the large defect in the skull as "gaping hole above his right ear, about the size of my palm."
Robert McClelland, a physician in the emergency room who observed the head wound, testified that the back right part of the head was blown out with posteriorcerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue was missing. The size of the back head wound, according to his description, indicated it was an exit wound, and that a second shooter from the front delivered the fatal head shot.
Rose Cherami (sometimes spelled "Cheramie") was depicted in Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK as a "witness." Rose Cherami was a 41-year-old drug addict and prostitute who was picked up on Highway 190 near Eunice, Louisiana, on November 20, 1963 -- two days before the Kennedy assassination -- by Lt. Francis Frugé of the Louisiana State Police. Cherami allegedly told Frugé that John F. Kennedy would shortly be killed. During her confinement, and prior to the time JFK was shot in Dallas, Cherami supposedly spoke of the impending assassination. After Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, Cherami reportedly claimed that she had worked for Ruby as a stripper, that she knew both Ruby and Oswald, and that the two men were "bed partners" who "had been shacking up for years." According to Lt. Frugé, Cherami declined to repeat her story to the FBI. She was killed when struck by a car on September 4, 1965, apparently while hitchhiking, near Gladewater, Texas. Among conspiracy theorists, the story has been considered quite credible since 1979, when an account by investigator Patricia Orr was published by the House Select Committee reviewing the JFK assassination (HSCA). This account was based primarily on the HSCA depositions of Francis Frugé and Victor Weiss, a doctor at the Jackson hospital.
Analysis
Former U.S. Marine snipers Craig Roberts and Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, who was the senior instructor for the U.S. Marine Corps Sniper Instructor School at Quantico, Virginia, both said it could not be done as described by the FBI investigators. “Let me tell you what we did at Quantico,” Hathcock said. “We reconstructed the whole thing: the angle, the range, the moving target, the time limit, the obstacles, everything. I don’t know how many times we tried it, but we couldn’t duplicate what the Warren Commission said Oswald did. Now if I can’t do it, how in the world could a guy who was a non-qual on the rifle range and later only qualified 'marksman' do it?”
Kennedy's death certificate located the bullet at the third thoracic vertebra — which is too low to have exited his throat. Moreover, the bullet was traveling downward, since the shooter was by a sixth floor window. The autopsy cover sheet had a diagram of a body showing this same low placement at the third thoracic vertebra. The hole in back of Kennedy's shirt and jacket are also claimed to support a wound too low to be consistent with the Single Bullet Theory.
Conspiracy theorists claim that Oswald could not have fired his rifle at a rate better than one bullet per 2.3 seconds. The Warren Commission demonstrated that Oswald could in fact have theoretically fired as often as one bullet per 1.4 seconds because his rifle was equipped with iron sights which allowed him to manage the rifle efficiently, despite the fact that the rifle had a crookedly mounted scope.
More than one Oswald
Claims that Oswald was impersonated by a political decoy appeared very early in the assassination controversy. Professor Richard H. Popkin's 1966 work The Second Oswald set out a case for an impersonation of the alleged assassin. Much of this was based on eyewitness testimony, but Popkin did have a "star witness" in the person of FBI director J Edgar Hoover, who wrote a memo predating the assassination in which he warned that an impostor could be using Oswald's personal details.
More recently, the work of John Armstrong has purportedly identified the "two Oswalds" as part of an intelligence operation which originally had no connection to the assassination. However, expert analysis by the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that both "Oswalds" had identical handwriting.[20][21]Furthermore, the House Select Committee on Assassinations had forensic anthropologists examine photos of Oswald (included in the set were photos that purportedly showed two different "Oswalds"), and all were consistent with a single individual.
Finally, it should be noted that in October 1981 Oswald's body was exhumed at the behest of British writer Michael Eddowes, with a view towards proving a thesis developed in a 1975 book, Khrushchev Killed Kennedy (re-published in 1976, in Britain as November 22: How They Killed Kennedy and in America a year later as The Oswald File). The examination positively identified Oswald's corpse through dental records, and also detected a mastoid scar from a childhood operation. Contrary to reports, the skull of Oswald had been autopsied and this was confirmed at the exhumation.
The three tramps
Nearly a dozen people were taken into custody in and around Dealey Plaza in the minutes following the assassination. In most of these instances, no records were kept of the identities of those detained. The most famous of those taken into custody have come to be known as the “tramps,” three men discovered in a boxcar in the rail yard west of the grassy knoll. Speculation regarding the identities of the three and their possible involvement in the assassination became widespread in the ensuing years. Photographs of the three at their time of arrest fueled this speculation, as the three “tramps” appeared to be well-dressed and clean-shaven, seemingly unlikely for hobos riding the rails. Some researchers also thought it suspicious that the Dallas police had quickly released the tramps from custody apparently without investigating whether they might have witnessed anything significant related to the assassination, and by the fact that Dallas police claimed to have lost the records of their arrests as well as their mugshots and fingerprints.
In 1989, the Dallas police department released a large collection of files that contained the arrest records of the "three tramps," whose names were Harold Doyle of Red Jacket, West Virginia; John F. Gredney, with no listed home address; and Gus W. Abrams, also with no listed home address. The brief report described the men as "all passing through [Dallas]. They have no jobs, etc." and were known to be rail-riders in the area. The previous evening they had slept in a homeless shelter where they were able to get showered and shaved, explaining their clean appearance on the day of the assassination. The three were released on the morning of November 26.
When asked in a 1992 interview, Doyle said that he had deliberately avoided revealing himself to the public limelight, saying, "I am a plain guy, a simple country boy, and that's the way I want to stay. I wouldn't be a celebrity for $10 million." Gredney independently confirmed Doyle's sentiment. Abrams had since died (in Ohio in 1987), but his sister also corroborated the events of that day and noted that Abrams "was always on the go, hopping trains and drinking wine." The three were evidently not involved in the assassination in any way.
A list of the better known "identifications" of the three tramps alleged by conspiracy theorists includes:
Charles Harrelson, the father of actor Woody Harrelson, has been alleged to be the tallest of the three tramps in the photographs. Harrelson at various times before his death boasted about his role as one of the tramps, however, in a 1988 interview, he denied being in Dallas on the day of the assassination.
E. Howard Hunt, the CIA station chief who was instrumental in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and who later worked as one of President Richard Nixon's White House Plumbers, was alleged by some to be the oldest of the tramps. At the time of his death, Hunt's son released taped and written confessions of supposed government complicity in the assassination.
Frank Sturgis is thought by some to be the tall tramp in the photographs. Like Hunt, Sturgis was involved both in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Watergate burglary. In 1959, Sturgis became involved with Marita Lorenz, who later identified Sturgis as a gunman in the assassination. Hunt's confessions before his death similarly implicates Sturgis.
Chauncey Holt, also alleged by some to be the oldest of the tramps, claims to have been a double agent for the CIA and the Mafia, and has claimed that his assignment in Dallas was to provide fake Secret Service credentials to people in the vicinity. Witness reports state that there were one or more unidentified men in the area claiming to be Secret Service agents.
Even before the Dallas police records were discovered and made public, the House Select Committee on Assassinations had forensic anthropologists study the photographic evidence. They were able to rule out E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Dan Carswell, Fred Lee Chapman, and other popular suspects in 1978. The Rockefeller Commission concluded that neither Hunt nor Frank Sturgis was in Dallas on the day of the assassination.
Despite these positive identifications of the tramps and the lack of any connection between them and the assassination, some researchers have maintained their identifications of the three as persons other than Doyle, Gedney and Abrams and have continued to theorize that they may have been connected to the crime.
CIA and anti-Castro Cuban exile conspiracy
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was frequently mentioned in theories during the 1960s and 1970s, and it was rumoured then that the CIA was involved in plots to assassinate foreign leaders. Kennedy said to his collaborator Clark Clifford (shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion) that, "Something very bad is going on within the CIA and I want to know what it is. I want to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds."
Allen Dulles was the head of the CIA during the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba by a small army of Cuban nationals in April 1961. The assassination policy of the CIA had been created under Allen Dulles. Robert Kennedy had been working as Attorney General and was running the intelligence agency through the White House Special Group. The embarrassment of the U.S. government and the CIA due to the failed invasion turned the Kennedy brothers against Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles resulting in the firing of both Bissell and Dulles. To make matters worse Allen Dulles decided to volunteer to help investigate President Kennedy’s murder. According to William Corson, Allen Dulles “lobbied hard for the job” as he was not in the prestigious group appointed by Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson finally appointed him. Congress began investigating the intelligence agencies by way of the Church Committee. In the weeks following the assassination, major changes were made in the CIA.
CIA assassinations
In 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee published fourteen reports on the formation of U.S. intelligence agencies, their operations, and the alleged abuses of law and of power that they had committed. Among the matters the Church Committee investigated was the involvement by U.S. intelligence agencies to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Fidel Castro.
The CIA provided $42,000 in immediate support money to the plotters on the morning of the assassination of President Diem of Vietnam, which was carried out byLucien Conein, although Robert S. McNamara and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., (who was a participant as a White House historian) both stated that President Kennedy went pale when he heard the news about the coup and was shocked that Diem had been murdered.
Kennedy and the CIA had a strained relationship following the Bay of Pigs disaster, with Kennedy remarking that he wanted "to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."However, that animosity was evidently short-lived, as CIA deputy director for intelligence John L. Hegerson would later write that "the [CIA's] relationship with Kennedy was not only a distinct improvement over the more formal relationship with Eisenhower, but would only rarely be matched in future administrations." While the CIA's budget has always been classified, ranking CIA official William Colby made it clear when he wrote, "the fact of the matter is that the CIA could not have had a better friend in a President than John F. Kennedy. He understood the Agency and used it effectively, exploiting its intellectual abilities to help him analyze a complex world, and its paramilitary and covert political talents to react to it in a low key way."
The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that although Oswald assassinated Kennedy, a conspiracy was probable but that the conspiracy did not implicate any U.S. Intelligence agencies. This conclusion was based almost entirely on the analysis of a police dictabelt which supposedly recorded the sound of a fourth bullet being fired in Dealey Plaza. The HSCA also said that President Kennedy did not receive adequate protection in Dallas, and the Secret Service possessed information that was not properly analyzed, investigated or used by the Secret Service in connection with the President's trip to Dallas; in addition, Secret Service agents in the motorcade were inadequately prepared to protect the President from a sniper. This lack of protection may have occurred because Kennedy himself had specifically asked that the Secret Service make itself discreet during the Dallas visit, undermining claims that the Secret Service "let it happen." It is important to note that were U.S. intelligence agencies to be implicated in the murder of a sitting president, that murder would effectively constitute acoup d'état.
A documentary alleging George H. W. Bush supervised CIA involvement was created by Alex Jones.
Cuban exiles
Richard Helms, director of the CIA's Office of Special Operations, had reason to be hostile to Kennedy since when first elected, Kennedy supported invading Cuba and then only later changed his mind about how to approach the matter. After the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba sponsored by the CIA, Kennedy changed his mind about an invasion, earning the hatred of the Cuban exile community. Thus, Helms was immediately put under pressure from President Kennedy and his brother Robert (the Attorney General) to increase American efforts to get rid of the Castro regime. Operation Mongoose had nearly 4,000 operators involved in attacks on Cuban economic targets.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations believed evidence existed implicating certain violent Cuban exiles may have participated in Kennedy's murder. These exiles worked closely with CIA operatives in violent activities against Castro's Cuba. In 1979, the committee reported this:
President Kennedy's popularity among the Cuban exiles had plunged deeply by 1963. Their bitterness is illustrated in a tape recording of a meeting of anti-Castro Cubans and right-wing Americans in the Dallas suburb of Farmer's Branch on October 1, 1963.
Holding a copy of the September 26 edition of The Dallas Morning News, featuring a front-page account of the President's planned trip to Texas in November, the Cuban exile vented his hostility:
"CASTELLANOS. ...we're waiting for Kennedy the 22d, [the day Kennedy was murdered] buddy. We're going to see him in one way or the other. We're going to give him the works when he gets in Dallas. Mr. good ol' Kennedy. I wouldn't even call him President Kennedy. He stinks."
Author Joan Didion explored the Miami anti-Castro Cuban theory in her 1987 non-fiction book "Miami."
Deathbed confession
In 2007, Wiley published an autobiography of former CIA and Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt , who implicated Lyndon B. Johnson in the assassination. Hunt stated that Johnson may have orchestrated the killing with the help of CIA agents who had been angered by Kennedy's actions in the past, which included an affair that Kennedy had with a wife of one of the agents. A 2007 article published in Rolling Stone magazine about the death of E. Howard Hunt reveals his deathbed confessions to his son which names Johnson, CIA agents Cord Meyer, Bill Harvey and David Sánchez Morales, as well as a "French" gunman named Lucien Sarti, who purportedly shot at Kennedy from the grassy knoll:
E. Howard scribbled the initials "LBJ," standing for Kennedy's ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under "LBJ," connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that's never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer's name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer's name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales' name, with a line, the framed words "French Gunman Grassy Knoll." So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that's the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories.
It is unlikely that Cord Meyer would have sought revenge against Kennedy for the affair because Cord and his wife Mary had divorced in 1958, while Mary's and Kennedy's affair began in 1962. The Rolling Stone article states that the case of her murder had never been solved, based on the fact that Ray Crump, the man accused of her murder, was found not guilty. Though Crump was found not guilty, he was found near the scene with blood on his hands, torn jeans, and an unzipped pants fly. The jacket found near the scene was identified by Crump's wife as belonging to him. There is no record connecting either Harvey or Morales to the assassination. A gunman put two bullets into her two days before her 44th birthday. Her diary and letters related with her affair with JFK were kept by James Angleton, chief of the CIA’s counter-intelligence group, for safekeeping with the intention, according to him, to be returned to her children. This letter was never burned as Angleton initially stated.
Since 1974 it had been speculated that Hunt and CIA agent Frank Sturgis were among the "Three Tramps" who were photographed in Dealey Plaza, and held by the Dallas Police, shortly after the assassination. This theory has fared badly, first as the result of the work of forensic anthropologists working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations who ruled out Hunt and Sturgis in an analysis of the photographic evidence, and then as the result of the release of Dallas Municipal Archives documents that subsequently identify the tramps as Harold Doyle, John F. Gedney, and Gus W. Abrams.
Alternatively, other researchers propose to identify Hunt as a figure crossing Dealey Plaza in a raincoat and fedora immediately after the assassination.
Organized crime and the CIA conspiracy
Another possible culprit was the Mafia, in retaliation for the increasing pressure put upon them by Robert Kennedy (who had increased by 12 times the number of prosecutions under President Dwight Eisenhower). Documents never seen by the Warren Commission have revealed that the Mafia was working very closely with the CIA on several assassination attempts of Fidel Castro. Frank Sinatra has been accused of being a "go-between" for the Mafia and the Kennedys. In addition, allegedly the Mafia had funneled thousands of dollars to the Kennedy presidential campaign through back channels, supposedly in exchange for influence in the White House; in one instance, the money was supposedly used to pay off county sheriffs in the state of West Virginia so that the published slate of local candidates included Kennedy for the West Virginia primary, despite the fact that the White House does not have direct and immediate authority over sheriffs in West Virginia. It is also theorized that the Chicago mob helped fix the election returns in the city so that Kennedy would win Illinois' electoral votes, partly as a favor to JFK's father, Joseph Kennedy, and that they later felt betrayed by the pressure put upon the Mob by the Kennedy Administration.
Judith Campbell Exner, as described in her book My Story in 1977, was having an affair with Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana and was used to send money back and forth between the mob and the campaign.
Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa, and mobsters Carlos Marcello, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, Charles Nicoletti and Santo Trafficante Jr. (all of whom say Hoffa worked with the CIA on the Castro assassination plots) top the list of House Select Committee on Assassinations Mafia suspects.
Carlos Marcello allegedly threatened to assassinate the President to short-circuit his younger brother Bobby, who was serving as attorney general and leading the administration's anti-Mafia crusade.
In a documentary titled, "The Murder of JFK: Confession of an Assassin" (1996) (ASIN 6304138458) James Files claims that he assassinated Kennedy and that Johnny Roselli and Charles Nicoletti were also present at the assassination on the orders of Sam Giancana. He is currently serving a 30-year jail sentence for the attempted murder of a policeman.
Lyndon Johnson conspiracy
In 2003, researcher Barr McClellan published the book, Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K.. McClellan claims that Lyndon Johnson, motivated by the fear of being dropped from the Kennedy ticket in 1964 and the need to cover up various scandals, masterminded Kennedy's assassination with the help of his friend attorney Edward Clark. The book suggests that a smudged partial fingerprint from the sniper's nest likely belonged to Johnson's associate Malcolm "Mac" Wallace, and that Mac Wallace was therefore the assassin. The book further claims that the killing of Kennedy was paid for by oil magnates including Clint Murchison and H. L. Hunt. McClellan's book subsequently became the subject of an episode of Nigel Turner's ongoing documentary television series, The Men Who Killed Kennedy. The episode, entitled "The Guilty Men", drew widespread condemnation from both the Johnson family and President Johnson's former aides following its airing on The History Channel, which subsequently agreed not to air the episode in the future.
Madeleine D. Brown, a former mistress of Johnson, has also implicated him in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Brown alleged in 1997 that Johnson along with H. L. Hunt had begun planning Kennedy's demise as early as 1960. Brown claimed that by its fruition in 1963 the conspiracy involved dozens of persons including the leadership of FBI and the Mafia as well as well-known politicians and journalists.
Soviet Bloc conspiracy
The perception of a conspiracy was widespread, even in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. A source considered reliable by the FBI related that Colonel Boris Ivanov, Chief of the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB), who resided in New York City at the time of the assassination, stated that it was his personal feeling that the assassination of President Kennedy had been planned by an organized group rather than being the act of one individual assassin.
Much later, the highest-ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa described his conversation with Nicolae Ceauşescu who told him about "ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill": "László Rajk and Imre Nagy of Hungary; Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu and Gheorghiu-Dej in Romania; Rudolf Slánský, the head of Czechoslovakia, and Jan Masaryk, that country’s chief diplomat; the shah of Iran; Palmiro Togliatti of Italy; American President John F. Kennedy; and Mao Zedong." Pacepa provided some additional details, such as a plot to kill Mao Zedong with the help of Lin Biao organized by KGB and noted that "among the leaders of Moscow’s satellite intelligence services there was unanimous agreement that the KGB had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy."
New information regarding the murder of John F. Kennedy confidante Mary Pinchot Meyer has led to a reinterpretation of a statement by retired senior CIA official Cord Meyer shortly before his death in 2001. Meyer's statement seems to suggest that CIA learned many years ago, possibly from a defector, that the KGB organized the assassination of Kennedy, most likely as revenge for the humiliation of the Cuban missile crisis.
Documents in the Mitrokhin Archive revealed that the Soviet Union actively promoted conspiracy theories about the assassination as part of a disinformation campaign to undermine public trust in the US government.
Cuban conspiracy
This theory is succinctly expressed in the following reported remark of Lyndon Johnson: "Kennedy was trying to kill Castro. Castro got him first", and in purported incidents.
On September 7, 1963, Castro entered the Brazilian embassy in Havana and granted an unusual interview to an American reporter. Castro stated that the leaders of the U.S. government would not be safe if they continued their efforts to kill Cuban leaders. Castro's remarks were widely reported in the American press.
In some variations this theory is compounded with the Organized Crime theory; they both had reasons to hate JFK, and Castro is supposed to have paid the Mafia off by allowing them to use Cuban ports to smuggle drugs into the United States.
Another theory of the involvement of a Cuban secret service was recently published by an investigation of German journalists Wilfried Huismann and Heribert Blondiau. In their documentary "Rendezvous with Death" (Rendezvous mit dem Tod) for public German television station ARD, they present various sources formerly within the FBI, KGB and Cuban service G-2, which state the following:
Oswald entered the Cuban embassy in Mexico City in September 1963 with the stated desire to emigrate to Cuba and work for Fidel Castro, whom he admired greatly (the last part of his pseudonym, Hidell, probably came from "Fidel." However it is not quite clear whether this was really Oswald's initiative or a Cuban idea. Following this, the Cuban intelligence Service G-2 keeps contact. Fidel Castro, enraged about the multiple assassination plots against him supported by the American CIA and the President's brother Robert F. Kennedy, had already sent out multiple warnings to the U.S. government to stop these plots. Frustrated by their futility, the Cuban leadership decides to support Oswald by sending him money through a high-ranking G-2 official acting as courier. Oswald then returns to the U.S. and carries out the assassination successfully. He is allegedly left to believe there is an escape plan for him prepared by Cuba, although there is not.
The FBI investigation following the assassination then traces back Oswald's contact to the Cuban embassy in Mexico and, supported by Mexican authorities, finds out about Oswald's contacts to G-2, and reports this back. The presidential bureau of Lyndon Johnson however, does not want this information to become public out of the following political considerations:
- A feared right-wing and anti-Castro uprising in the U.S. which would mean probable defeat to the Democrats in the next election;
- Fear of a possible and probable nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Bloc following a retaliatory invasion of Cuba by U.S. forces.
Thus, the U.S. government orders the stop of the Mexican investigation and keeps the findings to themselves. Following this theory, tragically, unknowingly and unwillingly, Robert Kennedy is in a way responsible for his brother's death, through his efforts to support an assassination of Fidel Castro. He was said to have found out about this and be devastated.
Doubts as to the credibility of this theory were expressed by the German magazine "Focus". However, they were rejected by ARD and the authors of the documentary.
Roscoe White
Ricky White (the son of Roscoe White, who was a Dallas policeman) claims that his father’s diary reveals that he was part of a three-man assassination team in Kennedy’s murder. The diary stated that there were six shots fired — two by his father. Roscoe White was behind the wooden fence on top of the grassy knoll and had the code-name Mandarin. His first shot hit the President in the throat. His second shot hit the President in the head. Of the other two assassins, one was located in the Dallas County Records Building and used the code name Saul. The third assassin was located in the Texas School Book Depository Building and used the code-name Lebanon. The diary also said that Mauser rifles were used in the assassination. Ricky White remembers his father giving him two rifles after the assassination in Dallas. One was an Argentinian rifle and the other was a 7.65 Mauser.
Ricky White claims that the diary showed that Oswald knew of the assassination plot but did not fire any shots. Oswald was told to bring his rifle to work onNovember 22, 1963, and to build a sniper's nest with boxes by the sixth floor window. All three of the assassins had an assistant whose job was to disassemble the rifles and take them away.
The diary also states that Roscoe White and Oswald had plans to escape together after the assassination and go to Red Bird Airport in south Dallas. Their driver was J.D. Tippit, who did not know anything concerning the plot. While driving the two in south Dallas, Tippit heard radio reports of the assassination and suspected that his two passengers were involved. Oswald became agitated and jumped out of the car. White got out of the car and shot Tippit with a pistol when Tippit told him he would have to take White downtown for questioning. Ricky White says that the diary (which he claims is no longer in his possession) states: "I killed an officer at Tenth and Patton."
Israeli conspiracy
This theory alleges that the Israeli government was displeased with Kennedy for his pressure against their pursuit of a top-secret nuclear program at the Negev Nuclear Research Center (commonly called "Dimona") and/or the Israelis were angry over Kennedy's sympathies with Arabs. Gangster Meyer Lansky and Lyndon B. Johnson often play pivotal roles in this conspiracy theory as organizing and preparing the hit, thus bleeding into and possibly catalyzing many of the other conspiracies as well.
In July 2004 Israel’s nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu claimed in the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper that the state of Israel was complicit in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Vanunu, a former technician at the Dimona plant who was jailed for 18 years for revealing its inner workings to Britain’s Sunday Times in 1986, made the statement after his 2004 release. He claimed there were “near-certain indications” Kennedy was assassinated in response to “pressure he exerted on Israel’s then head of government, David Ben-Gurion, to shed light on Dimona’s nuclear reactor.”
Portuguese conspiracy
Mostly marginalized, this theory implies that Salazar played a major part in the assassination, following the support of Kennedy himself at endorsing the Angolan pretensions during the Portuguese Colonial War.
Federal Reserve conspiracy
Jim Marrs in his book Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy has alleged that the assassination of Kennedy occurred from fallout over the issuance of Executive Order 11110.
This executive order enabled the Treasury to print silver certificates, bypassing the Federal Reserve System. Executive Order 11110 was not officially repealed until the Ronald Reagan Administration. Official explanations claim that the executive order was simply an attempt to drain the silver reserves.
Decoy hearse and wound alteration
David S. Lifton and others have theorized that the coffin removed from Air Force One and placed in a waiting ambulance at Andrews Air Force Base on the evening of November 22, 1963 was empty. The president's body was taken off the jet out of the television camera's view. This portion of Lifton's theory comes from a House Select Committee on Assassinations report of an interview of Lt. Richard A. Lipsey on January 18, 1978 by committee staff members Donald Andrew Purdy Jr. and T. Mark Flanagan Jr. in which Lipsey said in that his capacity as aide to General Wehle, he had met President Kennedy's body at Andrews Air Force Base. The report stated that Lipsey "placed [the casket] in a hearse to be transported to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Lipsey mentioned that he and Whele then flew by helicopter to Bethesda and took the President's body into the back of Bethesda. A decoy hearse had been driven to the front." A decoy hearse carrying an empty casket.
Laboratory Technologist Paul Kelly O'Connor was one of the major witnesses supporting David Lifton's theory that somewhere between Parkland and Bethesda the President's body was made to appear as if it had been shot only from the rear. O'Connor says that President Kennedy's body arrived at Bethesda in a body bag, which differed from the sheet it was wrapped in at Parkland Hospital. He stated the brain had already been removed by the time it got to Bethesda, and that there was only "half of a handful" of brain matter left inside the skull.
According to Nigel Turner, director of the 1988 British television documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy. "There were mysterious men in civilian clothes at the autopsy. They seemed to command a lot of respect and look over my shoulder or over Dr. J. Thornton Boswell's shoulder, then they'd go back and have a conference in the corner. Then one of them would say 'Stop what you're doing and go on to another procedure.' We jumped back and forth, back and forth. There was no smooth flow of procedure at all."
As done with all cargo on airplanes for safety, the coffin and lid were held by steel wrapping cables to prevent shifting during takeoff and landing and in case of air disturbances in flight. The casket was also under ample armed guard at all times, a fact that Lifton neglects to mention. In addition, the plane was watched by thousands of people that bathed the far side of the plane in lights and provided a very public stage for any body snatchers. However, the Dallas casket, slightly damaged in transit, was switched before Kennedy's internment at Arlington National Cemetery. The original casket was dumped into the Atlantic Ocean in 1966.
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