Robert Crowley: 1963: JFK Assassination: A Confession of the CIA’s Complicity

[Editor’s Note: This section on “1963: JFK Assassination” comes from a lengthy piece published by Institute for the study of Globalization and Cover Politics (16 August 2014) by Joel v.d. Reijden as a revision of an earlier version by Gregory Douglas/Walter Storch. His account of the assassination of JFK amounts to a confession of the complicity of the agency. The conspiracy appears to have begun in Los Angeles when LBJ forced himself on the ticket with JFK. He admits that Lee Harvey Oswald was the patsy and had not fired a shot. My personal interactions with Gregory Douglas are documented at assassinationresearch.com, where he claimed that the KGB had reconstructed the crime with a three-shot scenario, which is simply absurd. They, like the CIA, knew better.

Among the recent releases under The JFK Records Act is a Soviet intercept properly fingering Lyndon B. Johnson as responsible for the assassination of his predecessor, which is on the mark. The prefatory comments by Joel v.d. Reijden appear to have been intended to distract attention from the agency and back onto Lee Oswald, when we know he was standing in the doorway of the TSBD at the time. Reijden’s prefatory comments give the attempt to spin away from the authenticity of what Crowley was reporting, where his notes are disinformation. Thus he adds these remarks, intended to mislead, by diminishing Crowley and his significance, denying the initial discovery of the Mauser and sketching the case against Oswald, which are significant indications of his role here:

          Crowley has spread A LOT of disinformation on Kennedy it appears:

The ZIPPER file is bogus. It mentions many of the right players, but Crowley appears to have been too junior in 1963 to have played the central role he claims to have had. He has done this on other occasions: putting the blame on himself/taking credit for operations his superiors ran.

Gregory Douglas’ Kennedy book ‘Regicide’ from 2002 contains little of the following insights, except for the disinformation. And what it contains, is certainly not spelled out in such a clear manner as here allegedly by Crowley.

The whole Kennedy-Bolshakov connection that Crowley sometimes brings up seems to be blown way out of proportion to rationalize the killing of JFK.

The Mauser appears to be disinformation by the Dallas police in charge of assassination scene.

Oswald most definitely was not just a patsy and most likely it was not a coincidence he ended up working for D.H. Byrd’s TSBD a month before the assassination. Throughout the years the CIA appears to have moved him around non-stop. Also: Oswald was the only one not seen immediately before and during the shooting, the only one to run, etc. He was still undercover/in role after his arrest when demanding a communist lawyer. Oswald had a lot to do with the assassination, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was a second shooter. [Editor’s note: But there were six or more shooters, who fired from eight to ten shots (possibly more), with at least four (and possibly five) hits to the target:

Richard Sprague, Computers and Automation (May 1970), expanded

 

1963: JFK assassination

“All the stories about mysterious tramps, men with umbrellas, men in the sewer, fake epileptics throwing convenient fits and so on are just smoke and mirrors. All the mob bosses, Cuban exiles, rich Texas oilmen, Richard Nixon and anyone else suggested either couldn’t or wouldn’t have tried to shoot Kennedy. You see, we had Hoover and the Johnson people in our camp. With these, we could shut off any inconvenient revelations at any time. And we have iron influence, let’s call it, with the major media so no worry there. We have various retrospective television programs, usually somewhere around November 22 each year that rehash all the idiot stories and I watch them with great humor. Beats ‘I Love Lucy’ for real humor. … We’re responsible for a lot of that. … [Editor’s note: They were “smoke and mirrors” as distractions from the execution of the assassination by the CIA in complicity with the Secret Service, the Joint Chiefs, LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover.]

“Angleton was a first class counter intelligence man and very dedicated. And he discovers that the most important intelligence reports, the President’s daily briefings from the CIA, are ending up in Moscow. Within a week of them being given to the President. A week. And this was not a one-time incident but had been going on for some time. We then tried to find out how this was happening. … Anyway, they found out that Bobby was talking to the Commie [Bolshakov] on the phone from his home so we, and Hoover, tapped his phone. Hoover didn’t know we were doing it too, but that’s Washington politics for you. And we heard, for sure, that Bobby was sending thermofax copies of this report to him. I mean, there was no question. And, we learned too that Kennedy was keeping in direct contact with Khrushchev by Bobby and the Russian. I mean they were subverting the entire diplomatic system and God alone knows what Kennedy was talking about. … And that is where the decision was made to simply get rid of Kennedy. He was too independent, he had sacked Dulles and Bissell over the Cuban thing and threatened to [Mike] Mansfield to break the Agency up. And here he was giving our worst enemy top secret inside information. I mean, it really wasn’t open to discussion. You can see this all, can’t you? … Kennedy was committing the treason, not us. It was he and his vile brother who were passing our most sensitive and secret documents to our enemies. What were we to do? Confront him? We’d all be fired, or worse. What choice was there? Tell me that. …

“We were certainly determined to stop him from breaking the CIA up as he was seriously planning, and the Army was determined to have its profitable [Vietnam] war and then there were the business people and the Mafia in the wings. … But the unforgivable sin as far as Kennedy was concerned was his going around us and establishing a personal contact with Nikita Khrushchev. Not done. All Presidents had to use us [always forgets to mention the State Department, which would be diplomacy above his head] as firewalls or contacts. Presidents had to rely on us for their information and what would come of it if they dealt directly with some hostile head of state? This would erode our power and essentially relegate the CIA to being mere messengers. The power? As keepers of the flame, others had to bow to our power but if we lost that power, all of us would be back on the chicken farm. That was the final straw, believe me. …

“After Kennedy was dead, our agency would reveal to all the world that the Russians had plotted this and then Johnson would order a surprise nuclear attack on them. …

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVCv3Yha4xw

That was a sort of afterthought [nuking Russia]. Angleton hated the Russians and he did know that the Kennedy people were in touch with the KGB and Khrushchev people, so he went from there. [note: later at the American Security Council, loaded with people who thought a first-strike nuclear war with Russia was winnable] You might say that Jim was the sparkplug on that engine, right along. …

“The Kennedy family were living in a dream world their father had convinced them was real. Power can come from money, Gregory, but power has to include working with others who also have power. Dictators cannot function with powerful barons too close. Either kill them or replace them with ciphers. No other choice. So in a sense, Kennedy was going from bad to worse and plots were being hatched all over the place during the last year of his reign. …

“Oh yes, … the mob [was] out to get Kennedy, because of his brother’s attacks on them, ordered by Joe, the ex-bootlegger. Listen, we had the cooperation of the leadership of the FBI, who would have the lead in the investigation, but the mob would not, and if that ever got out, Hoover would have to clean their respective clocks for them. No, in spite of their hatred of him, they would never have done such a thing. …

“[The anti-Castro Cubans were] emotional enough and after they felt Kennedy had deserted them during the Bay of Pigs disaster. They had plenty of motive, but no opportunity and emotional as they are, they would boast and Hoover’s men would have nailed them. …

“I know people in the Chicago mob and as much as they detested Kennedy, and they did get him elected by voting every cemetery early and often, they are far too smart to even try to kill a sitting president. … Meyer Lansky was a very smart man and the same I said about the Chicago mob would hold true for him and his boys: they wished Kennedy dead, but let someone else do it. … [And] Castro is not a stupid man and even though it leaked out, on purpose of course, that we were trying to kill him, Castro did not have the connections to reverse the attacks on him. Like the mob and others, he was not sad to see Kennedy killed, but had nothing to do with any real plotting. … [Editor’s note: Representatives of JFK and of Fidel were meeting in Paris to discuss the normalization of relations when the assassination took place. Castro and Khrushchev were both profoundly saddened by this stunning turn of events, one of many differences that he would have made had he lived.]

Noel Twyman, BLOODY TREASON (1997), analyzed the perfect conspiracy

“And I can recall that when Hoover learned of our house cleaning project, he jumped on board with the caveat that we also get rid of Bobby. John hated Bobby… Yes, Colonel John Edgar. Franklin made him a Colonel but Hoover was pissed off that he wasn’t made a general at least so he never used the title, but it was there. Anyway, we had no problem with Hoover because Bobby was telling his staff that Hoover was a fairy and John Edgar didn’t like that and when Bobby dug into Hoover’s past and discovered relatives as black as the ace of spades, he got livid with rage.

“Killing a sitting President is never easy and one has to move with great care in such matters. Too much talking at the wrong time and in the wrong place can wreck even the most ambitious plans. We knew what had to be done and the opening gambits were to secure the agreement of other power brokers. We got [vice president] Johnson on board through the good offices of Abe Fortis, who would have sold the rotting corpse of his dead mother to the dog food people if they paid him enough. LBJ was a pill in the box in that he had some knowledge and lusted for the Oval Office. And again, Bobby was an irritant by calling him ‘Uncle Cornpone’ all over the Beltway. Johnson was used to power and did not like being ignored and marginalized so he smiled and kept quiet.

“We certainly had Hoover and some of the top people in the Pentagon, the full support of the mob and a few other necessary organizations. The Mafia could get their gambling halls back again [with] a dead Bobby who was having his fun persecuting the very people who put his brother in the Oval Office. … We all need friends, Gregory, and the AGs deliberately harassing the Mafia in Chicago was very, very unwise. I point out that Jack Ruby was one of their enforcers there. Dare I say more? …

“Oswald had nothing to do with the business. [Editor’s note: Lee had been recruited by ONI as a recruit in San Diego, conducted a pseudo-defection to the Soviet Union at the bequest of the CIA, and was working as an informant for the FBI at the time. He was standing in the doorway of the TSBD at the time the motorcade passed by. He did not fire a shot.] Nothing at all. He was an asset of ONI and he worked for both of us at Atsugi. That’s our U-2 base in Japan. He spoke Russian, after a fashion, and was instructed to act like a Marxist to rope in some Jap spies there. A clever young man but a bit of a trouble maker. No, Oswald had nothing to do with it. I said we had used him once and we had a dossier on him. He was perfect for the role of patsy. Married the niece of a top MVD officer, an avowed Marxist and so on. And, joy of joys, he worked at the book building. We had the presidential cavalcade rerouted to go right past it to be certain. And we had a resource in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico who swore Oswald was in there trying to flee to Cuba. It does pay to have people in the right place, Gregory. Never know when you might need them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OtjNDjKstM

“The Mauser belonged to the wrong people so the other piece was substituted. [Editor’s note: Crowley once again has it right and a note by Reijden–that this was disinformation and that the gun at the TSBD appears to have been a Carcano from the start–is meant to reinforce the official account. ]

We made sure that could be traced to him. And we got the wife to admit seeing the wop gun. Of course in her condition, she would identify a crossbow or a polar bear. …

Poor idiot. Jesus, what a wife! First class bitch. Thought Lee was a millionaire and when she came here, she would strike it rich. Turned out she lived in a slum and she had to put up with a loudmouth husband and then got stuck with a kid. No wonder she did what we told her. … Later, they got Oswald’s bitch of a wife, being deposed, and two phony Russian translators who would claim that she had seen the very rifle in Russia. Of course that was a .22 target rifle and the one we planted was the cheap wop piece with a cheaper scope so that one went out.

“Oswald knew a little too much, just a little, but enough. And he could prove he never shot Kennedy. So he had to go before he started to talk. Oswald knew some of our people and he worked directly for ONI, so there were dangers there. … Oswald had nothing to do with the business but was involved in other things for us. If he came to trial, very ugly things could have come out and we couldn’t control a courtroom scene. Better to insure it never went that far.

“Ruby was from the Chicago mob and I had connections with them through my father. [They] got him to do a job on Oswald. … Ruby had cancer and knew he was probably going to die soon enough so he was put up to silencing Oswald. Oswald was not involved and if it ever went to trial, it would all come out. The Navy didn’t want it to come out that they hired him and the FBI didn’t want it out that he had worked for them, so everyone was happy when Ruby did his deed in the basement. Of course later, he found out they might execute him instead of letting him die comfortably in a Dallas hospital, so he got alarmed and was trying to get out of it. … The locals were going to try him and he was starting to sweat the electric chair so he threatened to talk. … I don’t know why, Gregory. He knew all about keeping quiet, but he was … very emotional – not stable. … Certainly [we killed him]. Ruby died of rampant cancer. As you are aware, Gregory, we can give people fatal heart attacks and cancer is only a little more difficult and problematical. A medical examination, an injection with cells and so on. Ask a good oncologist. It is possible to do this. It takes more time but what did Ruby have? There was no immediate danger of him blabbing so we pacified him with stories of last minute rescues and let him die. [Editor’s note: Judyth Vary Baker recounts her recruitment to work on the development of a rapid-acting cancer in New Orleans with David Ferrie and Lee Oswald under the supervision of Dr. Mary Sherman in her book, Me and Lee (2011).]

“Jerry [Gerald] Ford was no threat. A wonderfully cooperative man, Jerry was. During the Warren Commission, he called up old Hoover every night with the latest confidential dirt. No, Jerry was no problem. And the peanut farmer was too self-righteous to bother with and harmless. …

“No, I did not hate Kennedy. Kennedy came from a family that was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. His father was a rum-runner and a whore monger and vicious as hell. Jack wasn’t so bad but he couldn’t keep it in his pants and used drugs in the White House. And enough of him for the time being.” 

Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus on the Duluth Campus of the University of Minnesota. His most recent summation of the assassination was presented on The Brian Ruhe Show, “JFK: Who was responsible and why”, integrating the new proofs advanced by Larry Rivera that Lee was indeed standing in the doorway of the TSBD and not only could not have been “the lone gunman” but cannot have fired a shot.