Two Cheers for Conspiracy Theories

Can you ask questions about the JFK assassination without losing your mind?

For many years, I was uninterested in “conspiracy theories,” and particularly uninterested in those concerning John F. Kennedy. I thought people on the left should redirect people’s attention from hidden hands and false flags to structural power. It seemed to me that alternative explanations of the JFK assassination often involved romanticizing a president who had won the 1960 election by stoking fears of a nonexistent “missile gap.” I had no interest in debates about multiple shooters or bullets or angles: tapping into my own intuitions about physics (or firearms) feels like reviewing a book written in a language I can’t read.

I still believe all of those things. But I have become interested in the JFK assassination, though not obsessed with it (at least by the standards of the field).¹ I believe that something in the official story is not just wrong but has been willfully obscured. This will either strike you as banal or delusional, but I think it’s an idea that should be taken more seriously than it is in respectable circles. Indeed, I make a point of talking about this off-putting subject because I see some value in doing my small part to push back against the respectability barrier which prevents such discussions. The purpose of this post is not to defend any particular theory. Rather, it is an attempt to lay out a minimally controversial case for doubting that Oswald acted alone, for no reason, and with no connections to larger institutional forces.

Before we get into it, a little music. Here are the Byrds performing a song dedicated to Kennedy, with a conspiratorial introduction by the late David Crosby:

What We Know for Sure: The CIA Has Spent Sixty Years Covering Something Up

Earlier this month, New York magazine published an excellent essay by Scott Sayare that distills the strongest and most important evidence we have against the Warren Commission version of events. Someone who can read this article and come away thinking there is nothing to see here is, I think, someone whose faith in the official story could not be shaken by any conceivable evidence.² In a sentence, we now know for absolute certain that “A large number of senior CIA officers at the Agency’s headquarters had evidently been tracking Oswald, and tracking him closely, since well before November 22, 1963.”

This might not appear to mean much: why wouldn’t the spooks track a Marine who defected to the Soviet Union? But we also know for absolute certain that the CIA has consistently lied about its interest in Oswald. Almost immediately after the assassination, they lied to the Warren Commission. In the late 1970s, they lied to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. In 1992, Congress passed a law compelling the release of “all Government records related to the assassination.” But to this day, sixty years after the event and more than thirty years after the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, the CIA still refuses to release a number of documents directly related to its pre-assassination relationship with Oswald.

To repeat, nothing in the preceding paragraph is subject to debate. The CIA's own internal history, which was only declassified (with some redactions) in 2014, acknowledges that the Company, including Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, engaged in a “cover-up,” intentionally misleading the Warren Commission. The CIA historian argues that this cover-up was “benign,” because the deception was (supposedly) limited in scope and noble in its intentions. Specifically, the story here is that McCone’s CIA only lied to cover up their involvement in repeated US attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Bobby Kennedy, who was also involved in the plots against Castro, asked McCone privately: “Did Castro kill the president because the president had tried to kill Castro?” Or “perhaps the administration’s obsession with Cuba inadvertently inspired a politicized sociopath”? If such theories gained a public audience, the CIA feared, the resulting anti-Cuban mood could lead to nuclear war. So they lied in order to save the planet, and they lied only about Castro.

An international Communist conspiracy remains one of the logically possible theories of the Kennedy assassination, as we will discuss further below. For now, note that the CIA’s own history, while admitting to a “benign cover-up,” is demonstrably misleading. Written in 2005, the document does not discuss the most arresting evidence regarding Oswald and the CIA, which had already come out in the 1990s through the research of journalist Jefferson Morley and retired military intelligence officer John Newman.³ The New York magazine piece gives a good rundown:

• The CIA monitored Oswald, sometimes quite closely, between November 1959 until October 1963. Routing slips on declassified documents reveal that information about Oswald reached the highest levels of the CIA.

• Just over a month before the assassination, CIA headquarters was putting out information on Oswald which at least one CIA employee (Jane Roman) knew to be false. In October 1963, CIA employee Jane Roman (“a top aide to James Jesus Angleton, the Agency’s famous counterintelligence chief”) handled and “signed for FBI reports that placed Oswald unequivocally in the U.S.” A few days later, on October 10, Roman also personally signed off on a cable from CIA headquarters to the CIA in Mexico. This cable was also signed by “several notably senior officials, including the No. 2 in the Agency’s covert-operations branch.” The October 10 cable said that they had lost track of Oswald, and that their last information on him was from May 1962.

• In the early 1990s, Jane Roman confirmed that the CIA had intentionally lied about Oswald in October 1963. In a taped interview with Morley and Newman, Roman acknowledged that she must have been “signing off on something that I know isn’t true.” Roman said this was “indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on the need-to-know basis.” The deception reflected an “operational reason,” but Roman said she was not aware of any further details.

• The CIA started lying about Oswald before November 22, 1963. So it cannot be true that the CIA only lied about Oswald in order to preempt discussion of the possible role that Castro played in the Kennedy assassination. The same CIA document (written in 2005 and declassified in 2014) which finally acknowledged a “cover up” is totally silent the Roman evidence. Therefore, we can say with confidence that the 21st century CIA has been engaged in a limited hang-out, simultaneously confirming elements of what had hitherto been maligned as “conspiracy theory” and continuing to willfully obscure other crucial details.

More music: Elvis Costello’s “Dallas version” of his song “Less Than Zero,” altered for the benefit of American audiences by replacing Oswald Mosley with Lee Harvey Oswald:

Cuba: The Known Unknown

As Donald Rumsfeld once said, there are some things that we know we don’t know. The most important known unknown in the JFK case concerns Castro and Cuba. We know for certain that they fit in somewhere, if only because the official CIA history confirms that the CIA’s Warren Commission “cover up” was motivated by a desire to conceal the Agency’s various plots to kill Castro.

A number of powerful and knowledgeable people, including Bobby Kennedy and at least two presidents, flirted with the blowback thesis. In the days after November 22, the CIA’s Miami station began looking “for leads possibly linking Castro Cuba to the murder of Kennedy.” Near the end of his life, Kennedy's vice president Lyndon Johnson told a Time reporter: “I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger.” LBJ thought the conspiracy was related to the fact that “we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean” (LBJ added that he had only learned about the CIA-mafia murder plots after becoming president).

A few years later, in a private conversation preserved on tape, Richard Nixon discussed the Agency’s history of “dirty tricks” with Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, who had been number two at the CIA in 1963. In the midst of a discussion of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Helms said to Nixon: "I do not want any information that comes in from you on these delicate and sensitive subjects to go to anybody outside.” Nixon responded: “The ‘Who shot John?’ angle.” Nixon warned Helms that the question of who “to blame” could “become a very, very vigorous issue.” Nixon said he was on Helms’ side: “I need to know what is necessary to protect, frankly, the intelligence gathering and the Dirty Tricks Department, and I will protect it.” The president pleaded: “I don’t believe that you can say, well…the director of the CIA…is the only one who is to know what happened in certain circumstances.” But Helms gave Nixon no new information about Cuba or the JFK assassination.

I don’t think it’s clear just what Nixon meant by “the ‘who shot John’ angle.’” It seems to me that the most plausible interpretation is that Nixon was asking Helms whether there was any substance to the blowback thesis. But this is not the only conceivable way in which the JFK assassination might connect to Cuba. The other possibility is the opposite: that right-wing, anti-Castro Cuban exiles were somehow involved in the assassination.

To be clear, there is no direct evidence of this (as far as I’m concerned, there is no direct evidence of any specific theory of who, besides Oswald, was responsible for Kennedy’s death). But we know for absolute certain that the Cuban exiles were involved, along with the mafia, in the CIA’s assassination jobs in the Caribbean. We know that Cuban exiles participated in other Agency dirty tricks, most famously the Watergate burglary.

And we know that there were plenty of people in the Cuban exile community who wanted to kill Kennedy, who they blamed for the failure of the Bay of Pigs and for his refusal to invade again. This is clear from a CIA memo from 1977, not fully released to the public until December 2022. The memo provided a firsthand account of the Miami CIA’s “fairly massive” investigation into the possible involvement of anti-Castro exiles in the assassination after 1963. The investigation included asking Agency contacts things like this: “Give me a list of all Cuban exiles or Cubano-Americans you consider to be capable of orchestrating the murder of President Kennedy in order to precipitate an armed conflict between Cuba and the USA.” As Morley notes, the CIA was carrying out this investigation at the same time that “the White House and the FBI were assuring the public that a loner had killed the president for no reason.”

We also know there is some connection between Oswald, the CIA, and the Cuban exile community. More to the point, we know that there is some connection between the CIA’s liasons to the Cuban exile community, on the one hand, and the specific documents that the CIA is still withholding about Oswald. The connection runs through a CIA officer named George Joannides (pictured at the top of this post). The essential points are laid out clearly in the New York article. In the late 1970s, Joannides was the CIA’s liason to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, whose Kennedy investigation had led them to look into a Cuban exile organization called the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE). To save space, I won’t get into the details, but it is uncontroversial that Oswald had multiple personal contacts with the DRE in New Orleans in 1963. The nature and meaning of those contacts remains obscure.

According to Robert Blakey, who was lead counsel for the HSCA, Joannides’ approach to the committee was to “give as little as possible, as slow as possible, and basically wait us out.” Other HSCA figures confirm this view. It turns out that Joannides’ obstruction went deeper than mere stonewalling. Joannides was the CIA case officer in charge of handling the DRE at the time of the Kennedy assassination. He was also in charge of the Miami station’s covert operations. This was not disclosed to the HSCA in the late 1970s, despite the investigators’ specific interest in the CIA-DRE relationship. In the 1990s, the CIA obstructed Morley’s efforts to run down this lead, which he had discovered by looking at the CIA’s “monthly progress reports on the DRE,” which were available in full from 1960 to 1966 “except for a conspicuous 17-month gap around the assassination.” The one memo available from this period referred to a case officer named “Howard,” but in response to a request for declassification the CIA claimed that “the ‘missing’ reports had likely never existed, and that ‘Howard’ was neither a known pseudonym, nor a ‘registered alias,’ nor the true name of any DRE case officer.” But interviews with surviving DRE veterans, who remembered “Howard,” convinced Morley to keep looking, and he found another paper trail which revealed that Howard was Joannides.

This is another clear case of the CIA lying and continuing to dissemble over a period of decades stretching into the present. The CIA told the HSCA in the late 1970s that Joannides “had no connection whatsoever to the matters under investigation; that, in fact, he was merely an Agency lawyer and had not been ‘operational’ in 1963.” The 2005 CIA history (which advances the “benign cover-up” interpretation) does not address the CIA’s documented lies about Joannides (it does not discuss the HSCA at all). As Sayare points out in New York, both the outright lie in 1978 and the lie of omission in 2005 occurred after the Church Committee and the revelation of the US attempts to kill Castro. There is therefore good reason to question the CIA’s current claim that the Agency lied but only in order to conceal its plots against Castro. As Sayare concludes, “If the CIA was using Joannides to prevent the discovery of some damaging secret, it was evidently something else.”

The cover-up, benign or not, continues to this day. Among the JFK files which the CIA still refuses to release, and which may now never see the light of day, are files related to Joannides. The CIA even declined to comment when the journalist Sayare asked them “why Joannides had concealed his role in 1963 from Congress” and “whether the CIA had ‘cooperated fully and faithfully’ with the Warren Commission” and subsequent investigations. It ought not to be controversial to agree with presidential historian Steve Gillon, who says “the documents that have not yet been released are probably very embarrassing to the CIA.” It is indisputable that some of the withheld records concern Joannides, who interacted with the DRE, which in turn interacted with Oswald. And it is indisputable that the CIA was tracking Oswald, and taking pains to cover this up, since before November 22, 1963.

More than this is impossible to say with certainty at the moment, and we may perhaps never learn anything more. But I think it’s odd that there is much less discussion of the Kennedy assassination in mainstream outlets these days than, say, the possible existence of UFOs (a topic the Times, not to mention less august outlets, have covered quite closely). It takes quite a leap of faith to believe that extraterrestrials have visited the earth, and that the US government has covered this up. Conversely, it takes willful blindness not to recognize that the CIA has lied about, and continues to obscure, its relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald in the months and years before November 22, 1963. What Christopher Lasch wrote decades ago remains true: “the most remarkable feature of the controversy surrounding the assassination is not the abundance of conspiracy theories, but the rejection, by the ‘best and brightest,’ of any possibility of a conspiracy.”

The New York magazine piece, which is built mostly on Morley’s discoveries, is one sign that things may be opening up. So is the respectful attention the New York Times gave earlier this year to Paul Landis, a Secret Service agent and eyewitness to the assassination who has now changed his story in a way that (if true) would rule out the possibility that Oswald acted alone. But I think the taboo, however irrational, remains largely in force. Starting this discussion is hardly the most urgent task confronting our darkening and entropic world today. But I think it’s more than an idle hobby.

One last song - Jimmie Dale Gilmore singing “Dallas is a rich man with death wish in his eyes”:

1. The trigger for my reconsiderations may be interesting to a small group of people with shared interests: one of the last essays written by the great Polish economist Michal Kalecki, most famous for his trenchant analysis of full employment politics under capitalism. Kalecki believed that US big business was so involved in the Vietnam War that “it will require quite an upheaval to bring it to an end.” This raised the fundamental question of post-war Marxism: where, besides the working class, could the upheaval possibly come from? Kalecki’s answer surprised me:

The role of such an upheaval might be performed by the reopening of an inquiry into the murder of Kennedy—on the condition, of course, that it would not use the methods of the Warren Commission. Such an inquiry might establish the links between the “predatory” groups of big business and the scheme for the murder of Kennedy and thus compromise the present administration. In the atmosphere of this terrific scandal it might be possible to achieve the acceptance of the U Thant appeal for stopping the bombing of North Vietnam, for an armistice in South Vietnam, and for a start of negotiations with the Vietcong.

There is something wild about this chain of thoughts, which I find both endearing and absurd. Kalecki was clearly wrong about the dependence of business on the continuation Vietnam War. But I admire his creativity in the pursuit of answering a fundamental question. The conclusion of the essay is as memorable as his famous lines about full employment, and remains timely:

It is a sad world indeed where the fate of all mankind depends upon the fight between two competing groups within American big business. This, however, is not quite new: many far-reaching upheavals in human history started from a cleavage at the top of the ruling class.

2. If I’m wrong about this, or if you generally find this post unpersuasive, let me know. I have opened up comments on this post.

3. Morley’s Substack is an important resource on recently declassified documents, and on what is still being held back.