Conspiracies: The Facts * the Theories * the Evidence (22 page)

Political Conspiracies: Arguments For

Political scandal is nearly always shown in retrospect to have masked
wider misdemeanours involving many more people than are exposed
in the immediate revelations, which are quickly contained at the
time – At least some of the Moon landings evidence can be shown to
be unreliable in certain areas, whatever real y happened, with one
or two NASA photographs being provable fakes – Mounting a lunar
hoax might not need to involve as many people as is sometimes
claimed – The evidence of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
was widely known to be false even at the time of the al ied invasion,
and documents and footage revealed by WikiLeaks unequivocal y
demonstrate that the truth of Western actions in the Middle East is
habitual y kept from the public – Democratic principles are almost
certainly compromised by the hidden cronyism that has become

endemic in the Western political system, and governments of recent
times have been clearly exposed as being far too influenced by
media lobbying – Deaths of important witnesses seem to occur with
alarming regularity.

ConClusion

The political world is the interface between the quiet forces with the real power – whether legitimate corporate and financial

players or conspiratorial manipulators – and the everyday

business of running a civilization. Yet too often is it revealed to have fallen into corruption and falsification even at a surface

level. As the ‘scandals’ that emerge into full public attention seem 131

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to occur so frequently, what faith can anyone real y have in the

complex machinations and dubious dealings that must be going

on far beneath? Imagining that something as historic as the lunar programme could have been at least partial y misrepresented

becomes less of a stretch when the overall picture of endemic

deception, abuses of power and rule by proxy is considered.

The sheer audacity of the weapons of mass destruction scare

that was used to justify action in Iraq, and the all-too-common

manipulation of media conduits to spread propaganda, show that

there is little that authorities won’t consider doing when their

agendas demand it.

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CONSPIRACIES

When public figures die in mysterious or controversial circum stances,
it is inevitable that conspiracy theories will arise. Sometimes these
mask simple grief and denial, a lack of acceptance that someone
important is gone. But a number of assassination al egations require
a little more consideration. In a world where ruthless minds appear to
treat people as chess pieces to be played with or removed as necessary
through false-flag attacks, there seems to be little reason to think
they would hesitate to take out individuals as well. But achieving
this without raising suspicion is not so easy, requiring, perhaps, the
need to dress up murders as accidents or suicides. Two famous cases
stand out in this regard, but even accepted assassination scenarios
are rarely as straightforward as they appear.

i) John f kenneDy

An Iconic Murder

It is widely described as ‘the mother of all conspiracy theories’; there can scarcely be a person on the planet who remains unaware

of the controversies over the iconic death of US President

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John F Kennedy at Dealey Plaza, Dal as, on 22 November 1963.

The horror of the moment is imprinted on the collective memory

(largely through the vital 8mm cine film taken by Abraham

Zapruder), with Kennedy’s head exploding and his pink-suited

wife Jackie scrambling across the boot of the limousine.

Thus everyone accepts that JFK was the victim of bullets fired

by someone; it’s just that no one can quite agree on who fired them and why. For all the years of speculation, almost nothing has ever been universal y settled about what exactly happened. As such,

raking through every detail yet again is unlikely to pay dividends here, but a few points stand out as important for the purposes of these pages.

Analysis of the Shooting

There is little doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-US Marine and one-time defector to the Soviet Union, was responsible for one

of the shots which took out Kennedy, fired from an overlooking

window of the Texas School Book Depository as the President’s

motorcade passed by.1 Some witnesses say several shots were

heard (six possible impulses are said to have been recorded on a

controversial police ‘Dictabelt’ recording), but at least two other bullets are general y agreed to have been fired on the day. The

question is, by whom? The official Warren Commission, which

infamously dismissed any wider conspiracy beyond Oswald,

concluded that he fired all the shots, and that one bullet missed while another sliced through both Kennedy and Governor John

Connal y (who survived), before a third inflicted the fatal wound to the President’s brain.

Contrary to the commission’s conclusions, however, the much-

discussed evidence of shots also being heard from the fence

at the top of the now-legendary ‘grassy knol ’ (a raised area to

the side of Dealey Plaza) is not insubstantial. It is interesting to 134

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note that when
Science and Justice
journal, a publication of the British Forensic Science Society, analysed audio recordings of

the assassination, they concluded a ‘96% certainty’ that shots had been fired from there, although critics maintain that the sounds

were merely acoustic rebounds. The official version, on the other hand, insists that Oswald, incensed by Kennedy’s treatment of

Cuba, among other grievances, acted alone. The problem lies

in the numerous anomalies which present themselves in this

scenario: from claims that one man couldn’t possibly have fired

three shots so quickly or precisely, to doubts over even which

gun was used; many people remain doubtful. The first policemen

on the scene unambiguously described Oswald’s weapon as

being a 7.65 Mauser, but by the time the Warren Commission

reported, this had become a 6.5 Italian Mannlicher Carcano,

seemingly to match a rifle he was known to have owned before

the assassination. This has led to theories, aside from the grassy knoll candidates, that yet another gunman, using a different rifle, may have been in the same building as Oswald, but that evidence

for this was suppressed to leave Oswald with the sole blame.

As immortalized in Oliver Stone’s in itself not entirely accurate but still salient 1991 film
JFK
, great doubts also hover over the

‘magic bullet’, the first shot to hit the President. Even the usual y conspiracy-deflating Wikipedia
witheringly points out that this somehow managed to ‘traverse fifteen layers of clothing, seven

layers of skin, and approximately fifteen inches of tissue, struck a necktie knot, removed four inches of rib, and shattered a radius bone’. More incredibly stil , the same bullet then somehow passed on into Governor Connal y, to cause further injury to his chest

and wrist before lodging in his thigh. Although it was the third

projectile which did the fatal damage to Kennedy’s skul , the

arguments over the second one are important, because if this

bullet did
not
behave in the manner described, then it follows that other shots must have been fired from different directions within the same split seconds. Those who refuse to countenance this

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cling to the magic bullet theory, but to most conspiracy theorists this smacks of a convenience with which to support the official

‘lone gunman’ verdict – a term which has now passed into popular

culture as flagging up an establishment-approved orthodoxy

being enforced in the face of considerable contrary evidence.

But if the theorists are right – and in the case of JFK, this means most of the world’s population, according to pol s – then one might assume that the additional gunmen must have been seen, if not

identified, somewhere in the vicinity on the day. As it happens, there are indeed many reports of suspicious-looking figures hovering

in unusual places at the time of the shooting. Although some of

this might be retrospective paranoia (the passing of a presidential motorcade, with much advance promotion, would have brought

out all sorts of curious onlookers), we have already seen that Frank Sturgis claimed that the purpose of the Watergate break-in was to steal incriminating photographs of US agents secretly stationed

around Dealey Plaza (
see
p. 91), while reports of three mysterious

‘tramps’ (albeit clean-shaven and unconvincing ones) keeping an

eye on things have also added to the conjecture.

Potential Perpetrators

Although he himself denied his presence (a stance supported by

some later inquiries), one of the ‘tramps’ was widely reckoned to have been one E Howard Hunt, a CIA station chief whose name

has been linked many times to JFK’s shooting. Whether he was

in Dal as that day or not, he was certainly the man who went on

to arrange the failed Watergate burglary (for which he served 33

months in prison before being pardoned by President Gerald

Ford, along with Nixon himself). Shortly before Hunt’s death

in 2007, his son claims that his father privately told him he
had
been part of a plot to assassinate Kennedy. This raises inevitable fears that Kennedy’s death was orchestrated perhaps not by

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Cuban exiles, Fidel Castro, the Mafia, the Soviets, a consortium

of bankers or discontented Israelis, all of whom (and more) have

been put forward as possible sponsors, but by forces much closer

to home, with the theorists’ stalwart Lyndon B Johnson often

implicated as the prime suspect. In this view, the killing of JFK

was essential y a
coup d’état
.

Sifting all the numerous choices, it is certainly the case that

Kennedy’s approach (and colourful lifestyle) had alienated many

of those used to a more traditional presidential demeanour, and

the efforts of him and his brother Robert F Kennedy to curtail

the powers of both legal (if only just) institutions such as the

Federal Reserve (
see
p. 231) and illegal ones such as the Mafia had undoubtedly ruffled some usual y untouchable feathers. Cuban

exiles, meanwhile, angry at the fumbled attempt to retake their

country from Castro’s revolutionaries in the 1961 Bay of Pigs

incident, had made loud and public threats against Kennedy.

The revolutionaries themselves would doubtless have also been

happy to put an end to his term of office. At the other end of the spectrum, more elaborate claims point to Kennedy’s desire to

declassify UFO evidence as being yet another reason for various

black-ops cabals to require his removal (
see
chapter 7). There was plainly no shortage of factions which stood to benefit from

JFK’s death. But the most likely sources seem to point to hands

within US intelligence services as having been the tools behind

the assassination’s arrangement, whoever the paymasters were.

The inherent problem with Kennedy conspiracy theories is that

there are now so many of them, some logical and interconnected,

others more contradictory and extravagant, that it has become

almost impossible as the decades have passed to extricate ful y the key threads which might hint at the most probable truth. Maybe

all of the accused played a role somewhere in the background,

whether they knew they were working for the same ends or

not. But identifying the truth is unlikely to get any easier until confidential documents are final y released from the archives.

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Removal of Evidence and Witnesses?

Some claim that important pieces of JFK assassination evidence

were tampered with from the start. The crucial Zapruder

film, which, whilst not being the only footage taken of the

moments around the shooting, is certainly the clearest, is not

in itself entirely reliable. There have been several assertions that important frames have been removed from the publicly available

versions, or that critical minutiae may in places have actual y

have been scratched from the original emulsion. The late and

influential conspiracy theorist William Cooper claimed that

some of this occurred to conceal detail showing that the driver

of the limousine, William Greer, had himself fired one of the

deadly bullets by quickly turning around with a gun from the

front seat while the other shots were incoming. This is not widely agreed with, but it adds yet another layer of potential intrigue.

Other visual evidence, such as autopsy photographs purporting

to show the damage to the president’s skul , has also been called into question, with loud contentions that the released images do