JFK visited Italy and supported the alliance between the Socialist Party and the ruling Christian Democrats. The CIA worked behind the scenes to undermine that alliance, by funding opposition groups and, later, launching false-flag bombings to blame on leftists. JFK and foreign leaders sensed that a shadow government in the U.S. was out of his control.
One of the CIA officials who worked in Italy was Bill Harvey, who had earlier caused a scandal by disobeying JFK and sending armed groups to Cuba in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of Harvey's deputies was F. Mark Wyatt, who had suspicions that Harvey had prior knowledge of the JFK assassination. When news of the assassination first broke, Harvey said something to suggest he expected it. Wyatt later told a journalist that Harvey had been in Dallas in November 1963. House Assassination Committee investigator Dan Hardway was in charge of investigating possible CIA involvement. He suspected that Harvey was involved, since he had connections both to the mafia and to the Cuban exile community. Hardway requested Harvey's files from the CIA, but the CIA refused to turn them over. David Talbot (the author of the book) also tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain CIA files on Harvey.
It's these sorts of provocative bits of evidence that caused Charles de Gaulle to wonder why the Americans refused to pull the threads of evidence to see what emerged. De Gaulle believed the JFK assassination was an inside job.
Kennedy alienated Texas oilmen by working to close tax loopholes such as the oil depletion allowance. Kennedy was so unpopular in Texas, that when he convened a planning meeting for the 1964 re-election campaign, he didn't invite his vice-president, LBJ. Kennedy's civil rights policies also alienated southerners.
Talbot summarizes some of the conspiracy theories explaining CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination, the "crime of the century." Howard Hunt (of Watergate infamy) confessed some of the story to his son. Alleged co-conspirators include William Harvey, Cord Meyer, David Sa'nchez Morales, David Atlee Phillips, Frank Sturgis, and possibly LBJ. Many of the co-conspirators were involved with the CIA. Several of them were in Dallas before the assassination. Sharpshooters from the Corsican mafia like did the hit. House committees investigated some of the "threads" but were unable to find definitive answers. At some point the CIA seemed willing to throw Hunt and Harvey under the bus and blame it all on them.
This Politico article from 2021, What Biden is keeping secret in the JFK files, reviews the history of efforts to get federal agencies to release all their records about the JDK assassination.
Lee Harvey Oswald had a troubled childhood -- his father died young and his mother was unable to care for him, so he ended up in group homes and then in the military. He got into trouble in the military and was court-martialed. Then he "defected" to the Soviet Union, where he worked for two years and married a Soviet woman who was raised by an uncle who worked for the KGB. Oswald announced his defection at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Yet when he decided to return to the U.S., the government made it easy for him to return and the State Department even gave him a $35 loan. No federal agents met him at the airport. Republican Senator Richard Schweiker, who served on the Church Commission investigating the CIA, said of Oswald, "Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence."
One of Oswald's close friends was George de Mohrenschildt, whose family fled Tsarist Russia and was ardently anti-Soviet. Talbot presents (convincing) evidence that de Mohrenschildt was "minding" Oswald for the CIA. Later in life he wrote that he couldn't say that he wasn't a CIA agent but nor could he say he was. (Talbot thinks de Mohrenschildt was an "asset" but not an agent.) De Mohrenschildtd had as friends and associates many people in the Texas oil business, which was ardently anti-Kennedy, with connections to conservatives such as the Bush dynasty, William F. Buckley's father, LBJ, Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles, and D.H. Byrd (the owner of the Dallas School Book Repository (from which Oswald allegedly fired a shot at JFK). "The international oil business and the U.S. intelligence establishment were overlapping worlds, and de Mohrenschildt soon found himself with a foot in each one. He testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald was maniacally jealous of Kennedy -- thus providing a motive for the assassination -- but also that Oswald deeply "admired" Kennedy. The Warren Commission didn't investigate the CIA connections.
By the next year, de Mohrenschildt was telling Jackie Kennedy's mother, Janet Auchincloss, that she should use her money to find out who really killed JFK. But Auchincloss, who was a Nixon supporter and was friends with Alan Dulles, continued to say that Oswald alone was responsible. De Mohrenschildt felt he was being used by the CIA, according to Talbot. Later in his life, de Mohrenschildt wrote a memoir I am a Patsy, in which he retracted his earlier testimony to the Warren Commission. Oswald, he insisted was not jealous of the Kennedy's wealth. In fact, Oswald had little interest in wealth and high society.
Near the end of his life, de Mohrenschildt was writing his memoirs and becoming more insistent that justice had not been served by the Warren Commission. He felt that he was being monitored by the CIA and plead with his old friend George Bush, Sr -- then head of the CIA -- to protect him. De Mohrenschildt was scheduled to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassination -- "whose investigations were showing a keener interest in the truth than the Warren panel had." Before he was able to testify, he was found dead. The death was ruled a suicide, but there was rampant speculation that he in fact been murdered. Bill O'Reilly, then a Dallas TV reporter, reported on the assassination in his book Killing Kennedy.
Interestingly, there was a "flurry of other sudden exits during that season of renewed congressional inquiry into the Kennedy case." Some died from heart attacks or suicide. Mafia-CIA go-between Johnny Rosselli was "garroted, chopped up, and stuffed into an oil drum."
It's difficult to summarize some of the circumstantial evidence about Oswald's connections to the CIA: friends and relatives who were CIA assets or who were being monitored by the CIA. Oswald appearing in strange places and even meeting with known CIA people. One such friend helped Oswald get the job at the Dallas School Book Repository. Oswald was involved in both pro-Castro and anti-Castro political groups, both monitored or infiltrated by the CIA. Oswald was spotted in the company of David Atlee Phillips, according to the testimony of Antonio Veciana, a leading Cuban exile leader. Phillips was Veciana's CIA supervisor. Veciana testified in 2014 at a conference of JFK assassination researchers, "I was trained by the CIA, as was Oswald. Oswald and Fidel Castro were ideal scapegoats for the murder of the president -- It really was a coup d'etat." Talbot writes, "In the final weeks of his life, Oswald was the subject of particularly intense CIA coverage. Some of this evidence is presented in John Newman's book Oswald and the CIA; Newman is a University of Maryland history professor and a former military intelligence officer.
For days following the Kennedy assassination, Dulles spent time at the Farm, the CIA alternative headquarters. Though he had no formal role in the CIA, he had continued to be influential and to meet with CIA employees.
Kennedy earned the ire of bankers and industrialists such as David and Nelson Rockefeller by trying to tax the rich and by supporting democracy movements in the Latin America. He said "There's a revolution going on down there, and I want to be on the right side of it."
Talbot reviews some of the evidence about the assassination itself: that doctors examining the president said that there must have been multiple shooters; that bullets entered from the front; that as many as 21 police officers said they heard gunshots from the "grassy knoll" in front of Kennedy, not from the Dallas School Book Repository where Oswald worked; that ballistics evidence from the scene of the crime showed that the bullets that killed Kennedy didn't match the fun that Oswald supposedly used; that the alleged murder weapon, a $19.95 Italian military surplus rifle, was too old and faulty to have been used in such a high precision operation; and the driver who drove Oswald to the building said he hadn't been carrying a package big enough to hold a rifle.
Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald, was connected to the Mafia. "The list [of names in Ruby's phone records] was almost a duplicate of the people I called before the Rackets Commission." RFK knew that the CIA used the Mafia to do some of its dirty work.
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