JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

 by Edward Curtin
GlobalResearch.ca
 http://www.globalresearch.ca


Despite a treasure-trove  of new information having emerged over the last forty-six years,  there are many people who still think who killed President John  Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. There are  others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation  proffered by the Warren Commission. Both groups agree, however,  that whatever the truth, it has no contemporary relevance but is  old-hat, history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing  better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred  almost a half-century ago, so let’s move on.
  
Nothing could  be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in his extraordinary  book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters  (Orbis Books, 2008). It is clearly one of the best books ever written  on the Kennedy assassination and deserves a vast readership. It  is bound to roil the waters of complacency that have submerged the  truth of this key event in modern American history.
  
It’s not  often that the intersection of history and contemporary events pose  such a startling and chilling lesson as does the contemplation of  the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed with the situations  faced by President Obama today. So far, at least, Obama’s behavior  has mirrored Johnson’s, not Kennedy’s, as he has escalated  the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can’t but help think  that the thought of JFK’s fate might not be far from his mind  as he contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.
  
Douglass presents  a very compelling argument that Kennedy was killed by “unspeakable” (the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s term) forces within the  U.S. national security state because of his conversion from a cold  warrior into a man of peace. He argues, using a wealth of newly  uncovered information, that JFK had become a major threat to the  burgeoning military-industrial complex and had to be eliminated  through a conspiracy planned by the CIA – “the CIA’s  fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to  it” – not by a crazed individual, the Mafia, or disgruntled  anti-Castro Cubans, though some of these may have been used in the  execution of the plot. 
  
Why and by whom? These are the key questions. If it can be shown that  Kennedy did, in fact, turn emphatically away from war as a solution  to political conflict; did, in fact, as he was being urged by his  military and intelligence advisers to up the ante and use violence,  rejected such advice and turned toward peaceful solutions, then, a  motive for his elimination is established. If, furthermore, it can  be clearly shown that Oswald was a dupe in a deadly game and that  forces within the military/intelligence apparatus were involved with  him from start to finish, then the crime is solved, not by fingering  an individual who may have given the order for the murder or pulled  the trigger, but by showing that the coordination of the assassination  had to involve U.S. intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA. Douglass  does both, providing highly detailed and intricately linked evidence  based on his own research and a vast array of the best scholarship.    

We are then  faced with the contemporary relevance, and since we know that every  president since JFK has refused to confront the growth of the national  security state and its call for violence, one can logically assume  a message was sent and heeded. In this regard, it is not incidental  that former twenty-seven-year CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, in a  recent interview, warned of the “two CIAs,” one the analytic  arm providing straight scoop to presidents, the other the covert  action arm which operates according to its own rules. “Let  me leave you with this thought,” he told his interviewer, “and  that is that I think Panetta (current CIA Director), and to a degree Obama, are afraid – I never thought I’d hear myself saying  this – I think they are afraid of the CIA.” He then recommended  Douglass’ book, “It’s very well-researched and his  conclusion is very alarming.” 
  
Let’s  look at the history marshaled by Douglass to support his thesis.
  
First, Kennedy,  who took office in January 1961 as somewhat of a Cold Warrior, was  quickly set up by the CIA to take the blame for the Bay of Pigs  invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The CIA and generals wanted to oust  Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles  to invade Cuba. Kennedy refused to go along and the invasion was  roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed  Kennedy. But it was all a sham.
  
Though Douglass  doesn’t mention it, and few Americans know it, classified documents  uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the  Soviets had learned of the date of the invasion more than a week  in advance, had informed Castro, but – and here is a startling  fact that should make people’s hair stand on end – never told  the President. The CIA knew the invasion was doomed before the fact  but went ahead with it anyway. Why? So they could and did afterwards  blame JFK for the failure. 
  
This treachery  set the stage for events to come. For his part, sensing but not  knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director  Allen Dulles (as in a bad joke, later to be named to the Warren  Commission) and his assistant General Charles Cabell (whose brother  Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the mayor of Dallas  on the day Kennedy was killed) and said he wanted “to splinter  the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”  Not the sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within  a government whose power was growing exponentially.
  
The stage was  now set for events to follow as JFK, in opposition to nearly all  his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in U.S. foreign  policy. 
  
In 1961, despite  the Joint Chief’s demand to put troops into Laos, Kennedy bluntly  insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative  at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand? I want a negotiated  settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”
  
Also in 1961,  he refused to concede to the insistence of his top generals to give  them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia.  Walking out of a meeting with top military advisors, Kennedy threw  his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.”
  
He refused  to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban  missile crisis in 1962. Afterwards he told his friend John Kenneth  Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention of doing  so.”
  
Then in June  1963 he gave an incredible speech at American University in which  he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end  of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world  by American weapons of war,” and movement toward “general  and complete disarmament.”
  
A few months  later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev.
  
In October  1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for  the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from Vietnam by the  end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of 1965.
  
All this he  did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Khrushchev via  the KGB, Norman Cousins, and Pope John XXIII, and with Castro  through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist  Jean Daniel. In an interview with Daniel on October 24, 1963 Kennedy  said, “I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the  Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially  yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some  extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of  sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to pay for  those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement  with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.”  Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to the CIA  and top generals.
       
These clear  refusals to go to war and his decision to engage in private, back-channel  communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as an enemy  of the national security state. They were on a collision course.  As Douglass and others have pointed out, every move Kennedy made  was anti-war. This, Douglass argues, was because JFK, a war hero,  had been deeply affected by the horror of war and was severely shaken  by how close the world had come to destruction during the Cuban  missile crisis. Throughout his life he had been touched by death  and had come to appreciate the fragility of life. Once in the Presidency,  Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from  Cold Warrior to peace maker. He came to see the generals who advised  him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war.  And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put  him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the  CIA. On numerous occasions he spoke of the possibility of a military  coup d’état against him. On the night before his trip to Dallas,  he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot  me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry  about it.” And we know that nobody did try to stop it because  they had planned it.
  
But who killed  him?
  
Douglass presents  a formidable amount of evidence, some old and some new, against  the CIA and covert action agencies within the national security  state, and does so in such a logical and persuasive way that any  fair-minded reader cannot help but be taken aback; stunned, really.  And he links this evidence directly to JFK’s actions on behalf  of peace. 
  
He knows, however,  that to truly convince he must break a “conspiracy of silence  that would envelop our government, our media, our academic institutions,  and virtually our entire society from November 22, 1963, to the  present.” This “unspeakable,” this hypnotic “collective  denial of the obvious,” is sustained by a mass-media whose  repeated message is that the truth about such significant events  is beyond our grasp, that we will have to drink the waters of uncertainty  forever. As for those who don’t, they are relegated to the  status of conspiracy nuts.
  
Fear and uncertainty  block a true appraisal of the assassination – that plus the thought  that it no longer matters.
  
It matters.  For we know that no president since JFK has dared to buck the military-intelligence-industrial  complex. We know a Pax Americana has spread its tentacles across  the globe with U.S. military in over 130 countries on 750-plus bases.  We know that the amount of blood and money spent on wars and war  preparations has risen astronomically.
  
There is a  great deal we know and even more that we don’t want to know,  or at the very least, investigate.
  
If Lee Harvey  Oswald was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and  the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a  lone-nut” assassin. Douglass marshals a wealth of evidence  to show how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe  like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was  eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters. 
 
As he begins  to trace Oswald’s path, Douglass asks this question: “Why  was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government  he betrayed?” 
 
After serving  as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s U-2 spy plane operating base  in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret but a fact  suppressed by the Warren Commission), Oswald left the Marines and  defected to the Soviet Union. After denouncing the U.S., working  at a Soviet factory in Minsk, and taking a Russian wife – during  which time Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane is shot down over the  Soviet Union – he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American  Embassy in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey  by a man, Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-communist with extensive  intelligence connections, recommended by the State Department. 
 
He passed through  immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to Fort Worth,  Texas where, at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts  Service chief, he was met and befriended by George de Mohrenschildt,  an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De Mohrenschildt  got him a job four days later at a graphic arts company that worked  on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions  over Cuba. 
 
Oswald was  then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt who,  in 1977, on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the  CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assasinations’  Gaeton Fonzi, allegedly committed suicide. 

Oswald then  moved to New Orleans in April 1963 where he got a job at the Reilly  Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reilly. The Reilly  Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI, CIA, Secret  Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence offices and a stone’s  throw from the office of Guy Bannister, a former FBI agent, who  worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services,  supplying and training anti-Castro paramilitaries meant to ensnare  Kennedy. Oswald then went to work with Bannister and the CIA paramilitaries.      

During this  time up until the assassination Oswald was on the FBI payroll, receiving  $200 per month. This startling fact was covered up by the Warren  Commission even though it was stated by the Commission’s own  general counsel J. Lee Rankin at a closed-door meeting on January  27, 1964. The meeting had been declared “top secret” and  its content only uncovered ten years later after a lengthy legal  battle by researcher Harold Weisberg. Douglass claims Oswald “seems  to have been working with both the CIA and FBI,” as a provocateur  for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott,  who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960 to 1964, in a 1978  interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “It was common  knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”
  
When Oswald  moved to New Orleans in April 1963, de Mohrenschildt exited the  picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a $285,000  contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator “Papa  Doc” Duvalier, which he never did, but for which he was paid.  Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue. Douglass  illuminatingly traces in their intelligence connections. Ruth later  was the Warren Commission’s chief witness. She had been introduced  to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September 1963 Ruth Paine drove  from her sister’s house in Virginia to New Orleans to pick  up Marina Oswald and bring her to her house in Dallas to live with  her. Thirty years after the assassination a document was declassified  showing Paine’s sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father  traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for International  Development (notorious for CIA front activities) contract and filed  reports that went to the CIA. Her husband Michael’s step-father,  Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell helicopter and Michael’s  job there gave him a security clearance. Her mother was related  to the Forbes family of Boston and her lifelong friend, Mary Bancroft,  worked as a WW II spy with Allen Dulles and was his mistress. Afterwards,  Dulles questioned the Paines in front of the Warren Commission,  studiously avoiding any revealing questions. Back in Dallas, Ruth  Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas Book Depository  where he began work on October 16, 1963. 
  
From late September  until November 22, various Oswalds are later reported to have simultaneously  been seen from Dallas to Mexico City. Two Oswalds were arrested  in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken out the front door and  an impostor out the back. As Douglas says, “There were more  Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the Warren  Report could use or even explain.” Even J. Edgar Hoover knew  that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ concerning Oswald’s  alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He later called  this CIA ploy, “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico…their  (CIA’s) double-dealing,” something that he couldn’t  forget. It was apparent that a very intricate and deadly game was  being played out at high levels in the shadows.
  
We know Oswald  was blamed for the President’s murder. But if one fairly follows  the trail of the crime it becomes blatantly obvious that government  forces were at work. Douglass adds layer upon layer of evidence  to show how this had to be so. Oswald, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans  could not have withdrawn most of the security that day. Sheriff  Bill Decker withdrew all police protection. The Secret Service withdrew  the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car  where they had been the day before in Houston; took agents off the  back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire.  They approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November  18) where the car came almost to a halt, a clear security violation.  The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded this, not  some conspiracy nut. 
  
Who could have  squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical personnel  who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck  and head, testimony contradicting the official story? Who could  have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American  Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail  by JFK, who warned that he feared the president was going to be  assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times and his evidence  on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on November 2 –  a story little known but extraordinary in its implications –  is riveting.) The list of all the people who turned up dead, the  evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted,  and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up – clearly point to forces  within the government, not rogue actors without institutional support.
  
The evidence  for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence  apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth  and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would not be  deeply moved and affected by his book.
  
He says it  best: “The extent to which our national security state was  systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John  F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system,  we absorb and think in a system. We lack the independence needed  to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points  toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which  we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate  cover-up.”
  
Speaking to  his friends Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell about those who planned  the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK said, “They couldn’t  believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try  to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”
  
Let’s  hope for another president like that, but one that meets a different  end.