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

President George W. Bush, in response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, launched a US military invasion of Afghanistan, followed by an invasion of Iraq. In so utilizing US military force in major foreign entanglements, President George H. W. Bush and his son, President George W. Bush, have followed in the footsteps of LBJ and Richard Nixon.

Truthfully, millions of Americans who were politically aware when JFK was assassinated mark that day as a turning point in the history of this nation. Gone was the idealism that America stood for righteousness. The protests of the Vietnam War and the resistance to the draft radicalized a generation of Americans. Baby Boomers raised in the Eisenhower era came of age during the presidencies of LBJ and Nixon. With Nixon, Watergate, and the subsequent disclosures of the Church Committee, we now see that much that has transpired since World War II needs to be written in a secret history of the United States. At the heart of this secret history are the clandestine activities undertaken by the CIA, creating
what White House counsel John Dean characterized in the darkest days of Watergate as “a cancer on the presidency.”

Truthfully, Robert Kennedy understood this. In a recently released classified evaluation of the Taylor Committee Investigation of the Bay of Pigs established by JFK under the direction of Gen. Maxwell Taylor, CIA historian Jack B. Pfeiffer was particularly critical of CIA Director Allen Dulles. Pfeiffer noted in blunt language after Dulles appeared before the Taylor Committee, that he was “headed for the elephants’ burial ground,” thanks to Robert Kennedy’s denigration of him and the CIA, and due in no small part to the “abysmal performance” of Dulles as a witness. “With the conclusion of the Taylor investigation, there was a period of mistrust of both the CIA and the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] by the new President; and [JFK] turned to his inner circle for guidance which previously would have been sought from the Agency or the Department of Defense,” Pfeiffer wrote. “General Taylor performed in such acceptable fashion that he was recalled to active duty and into the elite inner circle to become President Kennedy’s military adviser and subsequent Chairman of the JCS.”
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Before concluding, we need to add one more footnote to the story of the 1954 CIA-engineered coup d’état in Guatemala. After Hitler’s rise to power, Allen Dulles, as a partner in the New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, remained a director of the New York branch of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, becoming ultimately Schroeder’s general counsel. The Schroeder investment banking houses in London and New York remained tied with the Schroeder family in Germany, including Baron Kurt von Schroeder, who was known as Heinrich Himmler’s special agent.
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The J. Henry Schroeder Banking Corporation and the Schroeder Trust functioned in the 1950s and 1960s to be depositories for CIA money, long after the New York branch had formally been reabsorbed by the London-based J. Henry Schroeder and Company, Limited.
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With Dulles as head of the CIA, this secret depository became a fifty-million-dollar contingency fund held by Schroeder and personally controlled by Dulles.
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In 1936 the Dulles brothers, then both lawyers at Sullivan and Cromwell, intervened in a power play on behalf of their Boston-based client, United Fruit Company, and their operations in Guatemala. The Dulles brothers concocted a scheme where the Schroeder Banking Corporation, with brother Allen Dulles acting as general counsel and a member
of the board, financed United Fruit to take control of the International Railways of Central America, or IRCA, the owner of most of the existing railroad tracks in the region that United Fruit relied upon in order to ship Guatemalan bananas to market in the United States. The president of the Schroeder bank remained a member of the IRCA board through 1954. IRCA also owned outright Guatemala’s only harbor on the Atlantic, Puerto Barrios, from where United Fruit freighters, known as the “Great White Fleet,” engaged in the banana trade.
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In 1954, with Allen Dulles at the head of the CIA, the CIA-engineered coup d’état masterminded by E. Howard Hunt could easily be interpreted as Allen Dulles protecting the business interests of one of his law firm clients.

But the story does not end there. In 1956 the J. Henry Schroeder Banking Corporation financed the opening in Switzerland of a company known as Permindex, standing for the more formal name of the trade group, the Permanent Industrial Exposition.
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Permindex was closely allied with an Italian trade group,
Centro-Mondiale Commercial
, or World Trade Center, an Italian subsidiary of the World Trade Corporation and reputedly a CIA front. New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison entered Permindex into his JFK assassination investigation when he established that Clay Shaw, also known as Clay Bertrand, was a member of the boards of both Permindex and
Centro-Mondiale Commercial
. Clay Shaw was head of the International Trade Mart in New Orleans; coincidentally, the speech JFK never gave was at a luncheon scheduled to be held at the Dallas Trade Mart.

Allegations published in an Italian newspaper in Rome,
Paese Sera
, on April 23, 1961, charged that Permindex was used by the CIA to shuffle funds covertly to fund assassinations, including funneling money to the French OAS to pay Corsican assassins like Michel Mertz to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle. All this may seem farfetched, except that, as we say in
chapter 7
, an authentic declassified CIA document verifies that Mertz had been in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and that he was apprehended and deported by US authorities. The document indicated French intelligence wanted to know the whereabouts of Mertz because Mertz was a professional assassin with ties to the OAS. The French were worried about the security of de Gualle. The CIA, by the way, has dismissed all the speculation about Permindex as Soviet disinformation propaganda.
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Assassination researcher James DiEugenio, after studying documents released over the past few years by the Assassinations Records Review Board, or AARB, has concluded that Clay Shaw, too, was a CIA asset. DiEugenio argued one of Kennedy’s largest splits with the Eastern Establishment was that he was a proponent of Third Word nationalism. This, Eugenio contrasted to Clay Shaw, arguing that Shaw’s two agencies, the International Trade Mart and its sister organization, International House, were early advocates of globalism. International House was founded by the Rockefeller Foundation and spread worldwide. Both David and William Rockefeller III served as trustees of International House, and David served as chairman of the executive committee. John McCloy, formally president of the World Bank, was chairman of the board of International House in the 1950s and 1960s. Once again, recall that John McCloy, along with Allen Dulles, served on the Warren Commission. Although examining Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw is beyond the scope of this book, suffice it to note DiEugenio believed Clay Shaw was very close to cracking the JFK assassination case wide open.

The point here is that the “deep politics” background of the JFK assassination cannot be explained fully by a book whose scope, like this one, is limited to answering the question: Who really killed JFK? When the answer turns out to be “all of the above,” as it is here, the inquiry turns from an identification of the players to an investigation of the political context in which these players worked together. In other words, it is not enough to conclude the operational plot to assassinate JFK involved the CIA working in concert with organized crime. So, too, it is important but not sufficient to note LBJ, Richard Nixon, and the military industrial complex all had motives for seeing a coup d’état carried out in the United States.

What is important is that all these actors shared a common belief in clandestine government operations. In the postwar world, the Dulles brothers exemplified the intermixture of law, investment banking, foreign policy, and covert intelligence operations. The shared principle was that foreign policy covert operations conducted by intelligence agencies under the principle of “plausible deniability” were justified, as long as the result was to create a “New World Order,” even if creating that new world order meant lying to the American people, now for a half century, and probably longer. The innovation represented by the JFK assassination was to
apply the covert operations model, initially designed as a foreign policy tool, into a tool that could be applied equally in domestic politics, causing a coup d’état in the United States rather than simply overthrowing an inconvenient foreign government.

JFK probably would have survived into a second term in office had only he agreed to go along. All it would have taken would have been to green light the US military to send in the air force and possibly the marines to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, with the operation justified in the cause of saving the brave Cuban exile “freedom fighters” who were trying to recover their country and restore freedom to Cuba.

Or, what would have been wrong with JFK just deciding to send in a few thousand US troops to Vietnam in the fall of 1963? Instead of giving a speech in Dallas on November 22, 1963, focused on the US military assistance program, JFK could have planned to explain to the world how his decision to commit US troops to Vietnam was fulfilling the promise he made in his First Inaugural Address to defend freedom around the globe because no price for freedom was too great to pay.

The CIA shared a belief with LBJ, Richard Nixon, and the military industrial complex that even if US military action failed in Cuba or in Vietnam, as it had in Korea, the military intervention would be good for business and the US economy. Besides, in Korea the conflict ended with a partition of the country, a solution the CIA and the military would have accepted in Vietnam, and possibly even Cuba (provided the U.S.A. got Havana). Again, the point is that the New World Order view was comfortable employing the US military to preserve US business interests, as had been done when overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala. George H. W. Bush did not blink when waging war with Iraq, fully realizing US oil interests in Kuwait were being preserved. Under the ideologies of nationalism and self-determination JFK used to analyze Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, it was clear he felt US military involvement was required in none of these conflicts. JFK cared about US business interests, but not necessarily to the point of going to war.

What George H. W. Bush made clear with his “New World Order”
speech to Congress on September 11, 1990, was that the use of US military to protect US business interests was especially justified when backed by an international coalition. Today, US policy makers increasingly look to international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, when formulating US policies. While JFK respected international organizations, he did not spend much time worrying about going first to the United Nations before deciding whether or not to commit US troops to Laos or Vietnam. Somehow, ironically, the internationalization of US policy has proceeded apace, despite the obvious conclusion that by 1974, it was clear JFK was right about Vietnam, while nearly every calculation made by LBJ, Richard Nixon, and the military industrial complex turned out to be wrong.

In the final analysis, JFK was killed because he saw US military action in shades of gray, where the Dulles brothers saw only black and white. Still, despite this, JFK might yet have lived into a second term, but once he called out organized crime and the CIA, threatening to destroy both, he needed to succeed. LBJ and Richard Nixon, the two politicians who stood the most to gain from a JFK assassination, may have resented JFK, but they could do nothing about that resentment without the operational capabilities offered by equally resentful CIA leaders and organized crime bosses.

The one who appreciated this the most may have been Robert Kennedy. Before he was finished, Robert Kennedy fired every member of the Dulles family he could find working in the federal government. When Robert Kennedy found out that Allen Dulles’s sister Eleanor worked for Dean Rusk at the State Department, he insisted Rusk had to fire her too because “he didn’t want any more of the Dulles family around.”
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In Robert Kennedy’s answer to the question “Who really killed JFK?” a prime suspect appears to have been Allen Dulles.

At the top level, E. Howard Hunt, Richard Nixon, and George H. W. Bush are also suspect, if only because all three equivocated when asked where they were when they first heard JFK had been shot. Not providing a forthright answer to this question is a sign of a guilty conscious at a minimum, topped with a desire to hide the truth. What did they have to hide? E. Howard Hunt, lacking a cover story for explaining why he might have been in Dallas on November 22, 1963, denied until the end of his life that he was there. In Dallas, Richard Nixon had the opportunity to
confer and possibly meet privately with one or more of the co-conspirators, as well as to meet with those wealthy individuals who had helped finance his political career. George H. W. Bush appears to have been in Dallas in some sort of coordination with the CIA.

The evidence suggests the shooters were selected from a combination of Cuban exiles and mob hit men. Top suspects for having participated as shooters would include Frank Sturgis, Roscoe White, and Sergio Arcaha Smith. Most likely, E. Howard Hunt, who played a direct role in both the Guatemala coup d’état in the 1950s and in the Bay of Pigs invasion, both under Eisenhower and Kennedy, was involved in planning the operation. Corsican assassin Michel Mertz was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, most likely with a mission to oversee and manage the shooters. When it came to coordinating mob involvement in the JFK assassination, Johnny Roselli was in charge.

After fifty years of US government misinformation and deliberate stonewalling, researchers are just at the edge of discovering the truth about how and why JFK was assassinated in one of the greatest crimes in US history—a coup d’état in which rogue groups, including the highest intelligence services in the land, conspired to remove JFK from the presidency and to place LBJ in the White House. The consequences of this conspiracy are immeasurable, if only because a group of traitors successfully flouted the constitution and got away with it.