Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (48 page)

Everything was fine, as long as the nation concluded Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone-gun nutcase assassin had acted alone.

“Under the direction of Allen Dulles, the CIA interpreted ‘plausible deniability,’ as a green light to assassinate local leaders, overthrow governments, and lie to cover up any trace of accountability—all for the sake of promoting U.S. interests and maintaining our nuclear-backed dominance over the Soviets and other nations.”

—James W. Douglass,
JFK and the Unspeakable
, 2008
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“A cover-up is like a magic trick. Once you understand how it was accomplished, you can never be fooled by it again.”

—Lisa Pease, co-editor of
The Assassinations,
2012
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J
FK, LIKE HIS FATHER BEFORE HIM
and his brother Robert after him, had an uncanny ability to cause almost irrational anger and hatred in very powerful men that should never have been enemies in the first place. The Kennedy family lived an outrageous lifestyle of social privilege despite the lack of a storied pedigree. Family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy made a fortune in a series of fast and fortunate deals that years later would be outlawed. But instead of being arrested for stock fraud, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Joseph Kennedy to be the first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Perhaps
a crook made the best cop, but when Joseph Kennedy became incapacitated, the patriarch’s ability to keep his sons out of trouble came to an end. Even Johnny Roselli, the mobster who introduced Joseph Kennedy to Hollywood and assisted John and Robert Kennedy in their attempt to eliminate Castro, ultimately turned on the brothers.

John F. Kennedy made two fatal mistakes: first, he allowed his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, to take on a decades-old grudge match with the predominately Italian and Jewish eastern mob through the offices of his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; second, he threatened to break the CIA up into a thousand little pieces. Declaring war on organized crime and on the CIA at the same time had disastrous repercussions, especially because JFK failed to achieve his objectives in each.

Had Robert F. Kennedy broken the back of organized crime in the United States, imprisoned mobsters would have had a much harder time planning revenge. Had JFK closed down the CIA and fired all its employees, embittered intelligence operatives would have had a much more difficult time undertaking an assassination plot. Organized crime felt betrayed, believing JFK owed his 1960 presidential victory to fraudulent votes delivered in Chicago in part by the Giancana organization. The CIA felt the Bay of Pigs invasion would have succeeded if only JFK had resolved to commit the US military to save the Cuban exiles being slaughtered on the beach.

The unfortunate truth is that by leaving in place dangerous mobsters who felt betrayed and an ever-treacherous CIA that felt endangered, JFK left relatively undamaged the two enemies most capable of developing and funding an operational plan to bring about his demise. Having worked together since the Guatemala coup d’état in the 1950s, organized crime and the CIA needed no outside assistance to pull off a presidential assassination for which neither would be blamed. With the patina of Kennedy charm running thin for men such as Allen Dulles, a key member of a family that had helped world leaders achieve prominence since before Hitler, scores were about to be evened.

As we saw in
chapter 7
LBJ, Richard Nixon, Allen Dulles, and the military industrial complex each had their motives for killing JFK. While not capable of playing operational roles in the JFK assassination, each of these JFK enemies—LBJ, Richard Nixon, Allen Dulles, and the military industrial complex—could provide the financial support for a CIA/mob plan. Each had access to Texas oil millionaires and other financiers on the political right willing to provide the funds needed to carry out such an operation. LBJ, Richard Nixon, and the military industrial complex wanted to send troops to Vietnam.

The day JFK removed Allen Dulles from directing the CIA was the day JFK signed his death warrant. Even removed from the CIA, Dulles was more than capable of organizing the coup d’état from behind the scenes, the place where Dulles was truly most comfortable. It should come as no surprise that LBJ appointed Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission. This completed the circle, positioning Dulles so he could make sure the Warren Commission assigned all the blame for JFK’s assassination to Lee Harvey Oswald, the operative chosen by the CIA to play the role of patsy.

Allen Dulles had a deep motive to see JFK killed that stemmed not simply from revenge, but more importantly from ideology. Truly, Allen Dulles came to hate everything JFK represented, as did Richard Nixon. Dulles and Nixon were Cold War warriors who embraced the idea the United States needed to maintain a large, well-funded, clandestine intelligence agency capable of covert operations abroad to ensure our freedom at home. They agreed that this agency, formed as the CIA at the end of World War II, needed the authority to plan invasions of foreign countries, launch
coups d’etat
, and even assassinate foreign leaders as needed to contain the spread of Communism. Because the missions were covert, the CIA had to lie to the American public that funded it.

In the Eisenhower years, the CIA had a green light. By appointing John Foster Dulles as secretary of state and Allen Dulles as CIA director, Dwight D. Eisenhower had turned over the key components of US foreign policy to a team of brothers with a sordid history. The Dulles brothers were presented to the nation as loyal and patriotic Americans, with a compliant press never probing the key role the Dulles family played in assisting Hitler to come to
power. Instead of being prosecuted as war criminals after the war, the Dulles family continued to make sure Nazi intelligence assets were employed by the United States and Western Europe. In this clandestine history of the United States, the Bush family also rose to prominence.

Thus, at the roots of the JFK assassination were key players whose life experiences and attitudes toward US national security where shaped before World War II. Psychologist E. Martin Schotz interpreted Isaac Don Levine’s 1959 book,
Mind of an Assassin
, which analyzed the motivates of Communist Ramon Mercader for assassinating Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Schotz suggested that in Levine’s book, Kennedy could be substituted for Trotsky and Dulles could be substituted for Mercader. Doing so, Schotz came up with the following brilliant formulation: “The key to Dulles, who typifies the modern political assassin, is to be found in the special character of the organization in which he has enlisted for life. The American power is an amalgam of a temporal state and a political religion. It is in the nature of a military order in which the government authorities and the anti-communist party priesthood are one supreme source of faith and strength. Dulles became an assassin both as a servant of that government and as a missionary of its anti-Communist faith, and is beyond redemption.”
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As we shall see next, prior to World War II, the grandfathers of President George H. W. Bush and the Dulles brothers were among a small group of Americans working hard to finance Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.

In 1931, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. was formed as a Wall Street investment firm by merging three predecessor investment banking firms: Brown Brothers & Co., Harriman Brothers & Co., and W. A. Harriman & Co.

The history of Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker, the grandfathers of George H. W. Bush, traces back to these investment banking firms founded in the 1920s, and specifically to the Harriman family. W. Averell Harriman, the son of the investment firm founder, was a Republican politician and diplomat who followed Thomas E. Dewey as the
48th governor of New York, serving from 1955 through 1958. In 1920, George Herbert Walker became president of W. A. Harriman & Co. In 1924, Prescott Bush succeeded George Herbert Walker as president of W. A. Harriman & Co. This was convenient because George Herbert Walker was Prescott Bush’s father-in-law when on August 6, 1921, Prescott Bush married George Herbert Walker’s daughter, Dorothy Walker. The second son of Prescott and Dorothy Bush, born in 1924, was named George H. W. Bush, the future 41st President of the United States. In 1931, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. was formed from three-predecessor Wall Street investment banking firms: Brown Brothers & Co., Harriman Brothers & Co., and W. A. Harriman & Co. The point is that President George H. W. Bush and his son, President George W. Bush, date back to a prominent Wall Street investment firm where the patriarch grandfathers of the family worked together.

Born in 1888, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, after graduating from Princeton University in 1908 and getting his law degree at George Washington Law School, joined the prominent New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, where he specialized in international law. Born in 1893, the younger brother, Allen Dulles, also graduated from Princeton University. Allen Dulles, however, spent five years in the US diplomatic corps before earning a law degree from George Washington Law School in 1926. Allen then joined Sullivan & Cromwell where his older brother was already a partner.

Political commentator and former Republican Party strategist Kevin Phillips, in his 2004 book,
American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
, wrote that among the most prominent Wall Street principles turning their attention to Germany in the 1930s were Averell Harriman, George Herbert Walker, and the Dulles Brothers.
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“In 1941, the
New York Herald Tribune
had featured a front-page story headlined ‘Hitler’s Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank,’ reporting that steel baron Fritz Thyssen had channeled the money into the Union Banking Corporation, possibly to be held for ‘Nazi bigwigs,’” Phillips noted. “UBC was the bank, nominally owned by a Dutch intermediary that Brown Brothers Harriman ran for the German Thyssen steel family. Prescott Bush was a director.”
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Since the 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman was one of the two most notable active investors in a rapidly
re-arming Germany that came under Nazi control when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Union Bank closed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war by Nazi Germany on the United States. Going back to the 1930s, one of Sullivan & Cromwell’s most notorious Nazi connections was the legal work the firm did for the German chemical firm I. G. Farben, the manufacturer during World War II of the Zyklon-B gas the Nazis used to kill Jews in the concentration camps. John Foster Dulles, the chief legal contact at Sullivan & Cromwell for I. G. Farben signed “Heil Hitler” on the correspondence he wrote to the German chemical firm before World War II.

Political commentator Kevin Phillips drew the conclusion that the men who managed most of the high-level financial and corporate relations between the United States and Nazi Germany in the pre-war period from 1933 to 1941 developed “an unusual kind of information and expertise that made them important to the war effort in general and the U.S. intelligence community in particular.” After World War II, with the Soviet Union rapidly becoming the major Cold War enemy of the United States and Western Germany transforming into a major US ally, “the new American national security state formed a new establishment in which Prescott Bush and many of his friends were prominent and honored members.”
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Included in this group were the Dulles brothers.

In 1945, at the end of World War II, attorney Allen Dulles, then serving as chief of the OSS Berlin office under OSS founder and director General William Donovan, rescued out of a prison camp Nazi intelligence director Reinhard Gehlen. Under Hitler, Gehlen had been responsible for Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front, including the Soviet Union. Gehlen fit perfectly into the plan Dulles had developed to decline prosecuting Nazi intelligence assets so they could be employed by the United States. Dulles wanted Gehlen and the Nazis to advise the newly forming CIA and to be re-employed as the backbone around which an anti-Soviet, anti-Communist intelligence network headquartered in what emerged as Western Germany could be formed to work undercover throughout Eastern Europe.

“By the summer of 1945, Dulles had finished his negotiations with Gehlen,” wrote assassination researcher James DiEugenio in his 2012 book,
Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case
. DiEugenio reported that by September 1945, Gehlen and six of his aides were flown to Washington by Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith. As a result of high-level discussions in Washington, Gehlen’s Nazi intelligence organization was transferred under his control to work in Eastern Europe until Germany was reorganized.

In 1949 Gehlen signed a contract to work for the CIA for five million dollars a year. In 1950 High Commissioner of Germany John McCloy appointed Gehlen as advisor to the German chancellor on intelligence. Ultimately Gehlen became intelligence chief of the Federal Republic of Germany, better known simply as West Germany.
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This was quite a reward for a Nazi responsible for torturing, starving, and murdering some four million Soviet prisoners of war. “From the ruins of defeat, the virtual head of Hitler’s intelligence became the chief of one of the largest intelligence agencies in the postwar era,” DiEugenio wrote. “A man who should have been imprisoned and prosecuted for war crimes became a wealthy and respected official of the new Germany.”
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Note that Allen Dulles followed Gen. Walter Bedell Smith as CIA Director. Note also that Allen Dulles and John McCloy both ended up being appointed to the Warren Commission.