Dealey Plaza’s Tell-Tale Heart

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It is approximately 12:30 p.m. on the 22nd of November 1963, in Dallas, Texas. A bespoke convertible Lincoln Continental limousine enters Dealey Plaza, before taking its fateful left turn onto Elm Street. Sitting in the back seat are the 35th President of the United States and his wife. In the next few moments, John Fitzgerald Kennedy would enter the kill box of triangulated fire and be struck at least twice by assassins bullets, including a devastating head shot. Perpendicular to the President’s motorcade, roughly 65 feet away, on a raised platform to the left of the Grassy Knoll, stands Abraham Zapruder, an innocent civilian recording the moment on his video camera. Zapruder not only captured in horrifying detail the moment when a President was murdered, but the very moment when American democracy was utterly subverted. A coup d'etat carried out by rogue elements of America’s own intelligence services was complete.

Ever since that day, the ghost of JFK has haunted the American psyche. With tantalising new evidence recently emerging—covered by the fearless Tucker Carlson on Fox News—it is increasingly apparent that the JFK killing was indeed orchestrated by rogue elements within the Central Intelligence Agency. I have been fascinated by the murder ever since I was very young and have read multiple books on the subject, and consumed as many documentaries as are available on the topic. Allow me to expound, though this is partly conjecture, as to what I think really happened. I do not claim to be infallibly correct, it is merely my personal theory; take it or leave it.

Firstly, I would like to focus not on how it was achieved, but on the question of why it was carried out. Why did John Kennedy have to die that day in Dallas? Just like Donald Sutherland said in Oliver Stone’s film—easily the best scene in that movie—those questions are just scenery for the public: 

“Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia; it keeps them guessing like some kind of parlor game, prevents them from asking the most important question: why? Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited? Who has the power to cover it up?”

The answer is, he had simply gathered too many enemies. From organised crime, to corporate interests, to the intelligence services. By 1963, ranged against him, his administration and his brother Bobby, he had generated a vast array of interests that would be better off if JFK was in his grave.

More than any other, it was Kennedy's anti-imperialist policies in Latin America that garnered them enemies. Where the Caribbean and Latin American world up to and including the Eisenhower administration had always been a free-for-all for US organised crime and corporate interests, John Kennedy had instituted a body called ‘The Alliance for Progress’, which sought fairer trade and an active reduction in exploitation. This angered the Mafia, specifically men such as Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante, whose revenues were slashed. Furthermore, with Castro apparently being allowed to continue his particular and idiosyncratic brand of Cuban nationalism, those revenues were not going to be restored any time soon. Combined with Bobby Kennedy’s ruthless investigations and persecutions of the Mafia back home, many in the underworld were monumentally angered. The Rockefeller family also had huge interests in that part of the world—Nelson and David did not take kindly to previously subservient governments suddenly being encouraged to stand up for themselves. The powerful Texan oil interests of the Suite 8F Group, personified by the likes of Clint Murchison Sr, H. L. Hunt, and David Harold Byrd were also out of pocket. Moreover, Bobby was unleashed to close tax loopholes domestically, which would cost these men billions. Finally the military industrial and intelligence complexes felt betrayed and hamstrung by JFK’s perceived weakness on the Cuba question, most famously when he refused to authorise air strikes or send in the Marines after a badly botched attempt to covertly invade Cuba in 1961. Men such as Curtis LeMay, Lyman Lemnitzer, Mac Bundy, Bill Bundy, Dean Rusk, Charles Cabell, Earle Cabell, Dick Helms, Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Jim Angleton, David Atlee Philips, Cord Meyer, Bill Harvey, and the big enchilada himself, Allen Dulles.

The Central Intelligence Agency had been Allen Dulles’s exclusive mechanism for covert skullduggery and even policy making since the Truman administration. Dulles referred to himself as the “Secretary of State for unfriendly governments,” which meant an almost entirely unsupervised carte blanche to intervene anywhere in the world to covertly fight The Cold War. There were practically no limits to his mandate, including, of course, political assassinations. Eisenhower had been forced to review the CIA’s practices multiple times, but had lacked the political capital to actually remove Dulles or significantly curtail his influence in Washington; or he simply did not wish to. By the time he left office though, Eisenhower was under no illusions that a shadow government existed within the government, and he said so.

Kennedy had always planned to remove Dulles as Director of the CIA, and after the Bay of Pigs incident, made no secret of his plans to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Kennedy is known to have told James ‘Scotty’ Reston, “I’ve probably made a mistake in keeping Dulles on. I’ve never worked with him, and therefore I can’t estimate his meaning when he tells me things. Dulles is a legendary figure, and it’s hard to operate with legendary figures. It’s a hell of a way to learn things, but I have learned one thing from this business [the Bay of Pigs], that is, that we will have to deal with the CIA.” In 1962, JFK finally did just that and replaced Allen Dulles at the top of the Central Intelligence Agency with his own pick, John McCone.

Angering many of the deep state’s most illustrious luminaries, as well as much of his own party and ultra powerful organisations like the Council on Foreign Relations—men such as John McCloy and Lyndon Johnson and C. Douglas Dillon—was JFK’s more general world view. He was a staunch anti-imperialist, distrusting and loathing Western Imperialism just as much as the Communist quest for world domination. This view was the very antithesis of how the deep state and old-guard cold warriors and corporate interests viewed the world. In 1951, for example, Kennedy set the tone of his political career when he publicly spoke about the French troubles in Vietnam. He said, “To pour money, materiel, and men into the jungle of Indochina would be dangerous, futile and self destructive ... I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy that is everywhere and at the same time nowhere. An enemy of the people which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.” Such a view might be tolerated while JFK remained a congressman or even a senator, but it would have been beyond the pale if he were in the White House.

On Algeria, another example of French imperial dreams coming crashing back to reality, Kennedy said:

“The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor Capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile, it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. A great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, Imperialism. And today that means Soviet Imperialism, and whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western Imperialism. Thus the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenges of Imperialism. What we do to further man's desire to be free. On this test, more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western Imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandisement of armaments, no new pacts, or doctrines, or high level conferences, can prevent further setbacks to our course and our security.”

It is these views that, more than anything else, in my opinion, meant that John F. Kennedy had to die that day in Dealey Plaza. In the minds of men like Curtis LeMay and Douglas Dillon and Allen Dulles, Kennedy was not merely weak, he was an active threat to national security and possibly even a full-blown traitor. That is why. That is why Kennedy had to die.

Next, to the conspiracy itself: there seems very little doubt there was, indeed, a conspiracy. The 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations even came to that conclusion. Despite this, some do still hold some doubt, from insisting Oswald was a lone gunman, to theories about an accidentally discharged M16 from a Secret Service agent following behind the President’s Limo, to the driver himself spinning round and firing point blank. Suffice to say, a mountain of literature and evidence does point towards more than one shooter, contrary to the Warren Commission’s findings. If we are to accept that a conspiracy was afoot, here is how I personally suspect it may have played out.

At an absolute minimum, the three key conspirators would have been Allen Dulles, Lyndon Johnson, and Douglas Dillion. Dulles to organise and coordinate all the details of the actual shooting, Dillion to arrange the Secret Service’s manifest short-comings that day, and Johnson to green-light it all, as well as orchestrate the subsequent whitewash of the Warren Commission.

Focussing on the role of Allen Dulles, it seems to me that no other man had the means, motives, connections, and inclination to pull off such a brazen murder. Though he had been removed from his post as Director of the CIA in 1961 by JFK, he remained its rogue chief. His replacement, John McCone, was a bureaucrat and rank outsider. The key men in ‘The Company’ who were experienced with assassinating heads-of-state were still loyal to the deposed Allen Dulles: men such as Dick Helms, Richard Bissell, and Jim Angleton.

I suspect that OSS and CIA legend Allen Dulles gave the green light to someone like Helms or Angleton to order someone like Harvey or Atlee Phillips to assemble a kill team—perhaps utilising professional Corsian assassins or men such as David Morales or Frank Sturgis—and then to arrange with his close friends, Doug Dillion and the Cabell brothers, to fix the Secret Service and the motorcade route to fit in with his plans. Finally, Dulles used his incredible network of influencers and unparalleled ability to manipulate the Washington circles of power to maneuver himself—who really should have been in the witness dock—onto the Warren Commission. Yes, Allen Dulles served on the Warren Commission, and is widely known to have been the most pivotal and powerful voice during its proceedings. This could only really have been certain had LBJ been in on the conspiracy from an early stage. Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, arguably had the most to gain from the death of his predecessor.

In the midst of, and despite all this horror and human generated evil, there is still a glimmer of something wonderful: the tenacious and completely unbreakable pursuit of the real truth by decent human beings. In the face of the most daunting and pitiless and ruthless monsters the seemingly insurmountable US power structure can throw at them, despite their endless gaslighting and ridicule, the good and honest people of this world have never let it go. Through the decades, despite the apparently diminishing chances of success, the devotees of truth and reason have never given up their quest to discover what really happened that day in Dallas. The perseverance and tenacity they have displayed is a genuinely beautiful thing. It is a hopeful thing. They have refused to accept the lie they were fed. They have refused to forget their murdered commander-in-chief. John F. Kennedy’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart’ keeps ticking away, all these years later; it will not allow the demons in the intelligence services to enjoy a clean break with their crime. It haunts them in perpetuity, and rightly so. The ghost of JFK won’t be laid to rest until the unvarnished truth is finally allowed to be told. I fervently hope that day isn’t too far off.