Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald (23 page)

That being the case, don’t you wish this book was called
Improbable: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald
?

Well, it’s not, so let’s continue to unwind this intriguing thread.

We know there is a Wurlitzer mechanism, but how does the player of the organ coordinate the pipes? Through memos distributed to “media assets” under contract. As luck would have it, we not only have the
Northwoods
memo that tells us by
implication
there is some mechanism of media control, and the Church Report that
in fact
there was in place a mechanism of media control, we also happen to have one of the memos distributed to CIA station chiefs as
direct evidence
of media control, in a memo related to, of all things, the Kennedy assassination!

This memo was inspired by the Jim Garrison investigation of Clay Shaw, an investigation which could have led directly to the CIA had that investigation not been sabotaged, and an investigation which provided the perfect opportunity to produce a “damage control” memo. On April 1, 1967, the CIA produced a memo that we desperately wish was an April Fool’s joke on America, but no luck there.

Eventually declassified in 1998, the memo began as follows:
11

In the case of the Kennedy assassination, one of the nasty rumors that the Central Intelligence Agency had to squash was the legitimacy of any ideas that then-President Johnson was involved in the assassination, and/or that Oswald worked for the CIA, and/or that the CIA was otherwise involved:

The memorandum requested that “friendly elite contacts” (the ones mentioned in the Church report) be informed that the charges of the critics “are without serious foundation”, and that certain conspiracy discussions would “appear to be deliberately generated by communist propagandists” (even though there was absolutely no evidence to support either of these allegations):

The memo suggested employing “propaganda assets” (i.e., journalists and editors with a previous affiliation with the CIA paid to write or publish articles on demand) to launch unsubstantiated counter-framing memos into the media ether:

Notice how just these two memos, the
Northwoods
memo of March 13, 1962, and the CIA memo of April 1967, along with the revelations of the Church Committee, reveal the amazing power of government, which
not only
had the will and the way to launch a military operation with a self-created pretext, but also had the power to bury these plans as “classified” documents somehow involved in “protecting” America’s “national security,” even though in fact they did just the opposite! They also had the power to enlist the media to tout the cover story and bury the back-story as well. So, along with the power to manipulate reality, and the power to
disguise
their
manipulation
of reality, they also had the power to use their “propaganda assets” to discredit anyone who dared to rip off their mask, dipping into the defamation well and pulling out as many phrases as needed.

Now, in the case of
Operation Northwoods
, it could be argued that we should all relax. After all, the plan was presumably vetoed by McNamara and Kennedy. Can we relax? No!

While the
Northwoods
plan was never put into effect, the COINTELPRO operation was. That plan was executed by a different branch of government, the FBI. This massive operation, with roots in the earliest part of the 20th century, became especially prominent in the 60s. Memos taken from FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania in March 1971 were published in the book
The Cointelpro Papers
for all the world to see. And what we see in these memos is
Northwood
-style activity actually carried out.

Take, for example, the well-named “Operation Hoodwink”, which was designed to promote a dispute between the Communist Party and the Mafia (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 42):

The FBI would provoke the dispute between these groups by anonymously forwarding a counterfeit leaflet supposedly attacking Mafia “labor practices” (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 42):

Hoodwink
was used against the Communist Party and the Mafia, two organizations not generally held in high esteem. Because of this, some would erroneously conclude a
Hoodwink
-type operation was justified (as confined to these groups). But history shows that when the Pandora’s box is opened, the virus inside spreads wide. Yes, alas, it wasn’t just the Communist Party and the Mafia hoodwinked. The web of deceit would eventually spread beyond these groups, and other Americans not nearly as deserving would soon find themselves caught in that web. For example, a fake leafleting attack was used, later, to cause disruption in the peace movement against the Vietnam War (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 58):

A similar approach was used to attack a Puerto Rican pro-independence movement, this time to be distributed through FBI propaganda assets at a newspaper (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 70):

The net began to cast wider; eventually the COINTELPRO net was used not just against the Vietnam Antiwar Movement and the Puerto Rican Pro-independence Movement, but even against the winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize for peace, Dr. Martin Luther King! The FBI decided to celebrate Dr. King’s prestigious win in a memo (issued six weeks later) which looked for ways to address the “problem” of removing Dr. King “from the national scene” (
The Cointelpro Papers
, p. 98):