Short History of the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (JFK)

I have now completed alot of reading and per the request of a student of mine, I wanted to post a very short story of the plot to kill JFK. Read my previous post about "CIA Motivation for the Kennedy Assassination," to find out why they wanted to do it. It is clear that the plot was a covert operation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It may not have been official, but may have been ordered by the unemployed former Godfather of the CIA, Allen Dulles. That he was involved seems clear and it is probable that under him the men who planned and coordinated the plot were at least Clay Shaw, David Atlee Phillips and maybe some others.[1]

The basics of the plot were to ambush Kennedy while he was touring a southern city in a motorcade. The south was the bedrock of anti-communism and many prominent men in the south openly hated Kennedy; several shady characters predicted his death. The Kennedy team cancelled a motorcade in Miami before the Texas trip because of these security concerns and the plotters may indeed have tried to kill him in Miami earlier if the opportunity had presented itself. After the motorcade in Dallas was planned, for reasons not entirely clear the Secret Service changed the route of the caravan so that it would pass right by Lee Harvey Oswald's place of work at the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dealey Plaza of downtown Dallas. The roads in the plaza were perfect for an ambush because the sharp curves provided many places for snipers to set up easy shots. It was against security protocol to route a presidential motorcade on roads that would cause it to slow down this much and therefore it seems clear that people within the Secret Service were part of the plot.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a intelligence agent who worked for the CIA as well as Navy Intelligence. Oswald had a long-time deep cover pretending to be a communist, but he was actually an anti-communist CIA agent. He was one of about 40 men that Navy Intelligence instructed to do this in the 1950s. He knew many of the CIA in the south wanted to kill Kennedy and knew of the plot, but he did not know that they set him up to be the fall guy and to be framed as the lone crazed communist killer of the president. He was perfect for it because he worked in downtown Dallas and he had done much work to present himself as a communist in the past. The CIA went even further to show him as a communist and sent fake Oswalds to public places using his name and loudly proclaiming communist views.

The killing shots came after the president's car slowed down to make a dog-leg turn in front of the Depository building. The shots came at him from behind a fence past the Depository building atop a grassy knoll. Dozens of witnesses heard the shots come from the fence and many people including police rushed toward it after the shooting with smoke drifting across the knoll from the discharge of the rifle(s) behind. When they got there the plotters had fake Secret Service agents there to present credentials and distract the searchers from themselves. One person took a picture of a shooter dressed as a policeman aiming a gun behind the fence at the time of the shooting. Another witness saw a man rush a rifle to another man dressed as a railroad worker who quickly dismantled the gun and put it in a railroad tool bag and then they both moved rapidly away. (There was a railroad yard behind the fence). The first shot hit Kennedy in the throat and then one hit him in the head blowing his brains out from front to back. There were other shooters hidden around the area. People saw two men through the windows of the sixth floor of the book depository and a couple of witnesses saw one with a gun. Other suspicious people were seen on top of other buildings. People heard 3 to 6 shots and initially there was evidence of all these, but later it was covered up so that the official story only includes three shots all supposedly from the Texas School Book Depository that was behind the president where Oswald worked.

Right after the shooting, plotters planted a gun, a sniper's nest, and spent bullet casings on the sixth floor of the book depository and plotters directed police to the area by reporting that they had seen the assassin up there, but then the "witnesses" disappeared. Lee Harvey Oswald's name was put forth by these plotters as a prime suspect very early and the Dallas police converged on the sixth floor and put out a notice to arrest him very quickly. Some in the Dallas police department may have been part of the plot. Oswald was arrested a few hours later in a movie theatre. Oswald was seen calmly drinking a coke on the second floor of the book depository by a police officer and his boss less than 2 minutes after the shooting . Then he went and took in a movie; clearly not the behavior of a man who had just killed the president.

The vast majority of the people who were there heard and saw evidence that the shooting did not only come from the building where Oswald was working, but they heard shots from the fence by the grassy knoll and saw smoke there. Very quickly though the official story became that Oswald had done it and the plotters altered evidence to make it look as though this was true. Oswald himself denied it, but quickly figured out that his CIA masters had set him up to be the fall guy and stated that "he was a patsy." It was becoming clear that Oswald was going to talk and so CIA agent and mafioso Jack Ruby killed him two days later even while he was being escorted in the basement of the police station by 30 policemen. This has puzzled people and made them suspicious ever since. In the years that Ruby spent in jail after this, he admitted that there was a plot, but never provided much evidence of it. He was CIA and was part of the plot; he was present in Dealey Plaza the day of the shooting. It is unknown why Ruby sacrificed himself to keep the plot quiet; we can only speculate. He said he did it because he loved Kennedy, but he was a known anti-communist and Kennedy hater.

In David Lifton's book Best Evidence, he proves that the plotters shot JFK from the front as well as behind and that Kennedy's body was surgically altered under the control of the Secret Service and/or FBI to make it look like he had been shot only from behind.[2] This fact would seem to indicate to some that the highest levels of the U.S. government would have had to be involved, but it does not prove it nor does Lifton make this claim.

President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the FBI to make a complete investigation and appointed the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren to head up a special commission to investigate the slaying. Many anti-communist enemies of Kennedy were appointed to the commission including Allen Dulles and the commission did a large investigation and published a 26 book report that concluded Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy all by himself. The vast amount of evidence that showed this to be impossible was ignored and surpressed and this has caused many people to conclude that the commission purposely covered up the plot from Earl Warren on down. This is not entirely true of every person on the commission, but the most important evidence of the murder (Kennedy's body and the bullets that killed him) were altered so that it appeared that the only weapon that hit him was the one planted on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. This caused even some objective members of the commission to ignore other contrary evidence like the many witnesses that heard shots and saw smoke come from the grassy knoll.

There is speculation as to how high the plot went in American government. Vice President Johnson stood the most to gain from the assassination. He is clearly guilty of destroying evidence and concealing the plot. Johnson ordered the presidential limousine to be completely cleaned and refurbished in the first three days after the assassination completely destroying evidence including bullet marks in the car. He sent his aid to retrieve and clean the suit of another man who was wounded in Kennedy's car, Texas governor John Connally, making this item useless as evidence. But worst of all, he issued "Executive Order 11652, which locked an immense amount of assassination evidence and documents in the National Archives away from the American public until the year 2039."[3] Johnson's career involved at least two cases where people were murdered who were investigating his corrupt dealings in politics, so it is not hard to speculate that he could have known and approved of the plot; it would have been consistent with his political career.[4]

I will now name some more people involved in the plot and what their functions were. CIA agent and pilot David Ferrie was to provide transportation for the assassins.[5] One of the many men that the plotters had stationed all around Dealey plaza for a multitude of duties to assist the plot was CIA agent Gordon Novel who may have been part of a signal team stationed right on the street.[6] The shooters were almost assuredly selected from the top secret CIA Assassination squad codenamed ZR/RIFLE. CIA Officer William Harvey was the head of the group and so he is probably part of the plot. There is evidence to show that one of the gunmen was long-time French intelligence and ZR/RIFLE team member Michel Roux, codenamed QJ/WIN. Author Steve J. Rivele has written a book called The Murderers of John F. Kennedy, 1988, detailing a "French Connection" of the plotters and naming mafiosos Sauver Pironti, Lucien Sarti, and one Bocognoni as gunmen.[7] This may be my next read. It is well known that the CIA used mafia men for many missions and especially assassanations. Convicted hitman and mafia connected Charles V. Harrelson admitted that he assisted with the shooting and there is evidence to back up his claim.[8] There is abundant evidence naming many more involved in the plot, but they can not all be listed here in a brief history.

The case was tried by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison from 1967 to 1969; he attempted to convict CIA agent Clay Shaw of Conspiracy to murder President Kennedy, but failed because the public was firmly convinced that the Warren Report was the truth and Shaw had many allies that helped him keep his cover. Also dozens of key witnesses have been murdered or died mysteriously since the plot, including David Ferrie; if Garrison had just some of them he could have won. In 1977 the tireless work of the assassination researchers succeeded in reopening the case in a U.S. House of Representatives investigation called the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Unfortunately, the details of the actual conspiracy are so fantastic that the members of the committee simply did not follow through on the abundant evidence that could have proved it and could have began to bring people to justice. The House investigation did do some very detailed sound tape analysis of the police radio recordings from Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination and proved that there were multiple shooters and that it could not have been just Lee Harvey Oswald. Therefore the House Committee concluded that there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but said that there was not enough evidence to prove the details of it - this last part was clearly a cop out. Until this day the facts have not been well publicized and much of the public still believes the false official story of the Warren Report.

All of what I have written is thoroughly documented by numerous assassination researchers who use court room reliable evidence. I have gone light on the footnotes to expedite this to the blog. I will supply any documentation you need if you just ask me; I am big on documentation. If any of you think I missed some important details that should be in a BRIEF history, please post them in the comments. Also please post any disagreements or corrections, especially if you can post direct evidence of high government participation in the plot such as by President Johnson or the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

[1] James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case (New York: Sheridan Press, 1992), pages 220-222, 237-238 .
[2]David Lifton, Best Evidence, Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York, 1980), passim.
[3] Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989), page 297.
[4] Ibid, pages 291-295.
[5] DiEugenio, pages 144-145, 27.
[6] Ibid, 135-138
[7] Marrs, pages 202-209.
[8] Ibid, pages 85, 333-337.