Article 6453 of alt.conspiracy:
From: pfranklin@igc.org (Paul Franklin)
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Subject: Re: Definitive JKF article
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Date: 27 Dec 91 03:14:00 GMT
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Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!pfranklin    Dec 26 19:14:00 1991


                       Heritage of Stone



Reprinted  with  permission from "High Times" magazine, September
1991, with help from Mark  Zepezauer  at  the  Santa  Cruz  Comic
News.  

by  Steven Hager Although John F. Kennedy was neither a saint nor
a great intellectual, he was the youngest president ever elected,
which may explain why he was so well attuned to the changing mood
of America in the '60s. Americans had grown  weary  of  Cold  War
hysteria.  They  wanted to relax and have fun.  Like the majority
of people across the planet, they wanted peace.  

The President's primary obstacle in this  quest  was  a  massive,
power-hungry   bureaucracy  that  had  emerged  after  WWII  ~  a
Frankenstein  monster  created  by  anti-Communist  paranoia  and
inflated defense  budgets.   By 1960, the Pentagon was easily the
world's largest corporation, with assets of over $60 billion.  No
one understood this  monster  better  than  President  Dwight  D.
Eisenhower.  On  January 17, 1961, in his farewell address to the
nation, Eisenhower spoke to the country, and  to  his  successor,
John Kennedy.  

 "The  conjunction  of  an  immense  military establishment and a
large arms industry is new  in  the  American  experience,"  said
Eisenhower. "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial
complex."  

At  the  beginning  of  his administration, Kennedy seems to have
followed the advice of his military  and  intelligence  officers.
What else could such an inexperienced President have done?  Signs
of a serious rift, however, first appeared after the Bay of Pigs,
a  CIA-  planned  and  executed  invasion of Cuba that took place
three months after Kennedy took office.    The  invasion  was  so
transparent   that   Kennedy  refused  massive  air  support  and
immediately afterward fired CIA  Director  Allen  Dulles,  Deputy
Director  General  Charles Cabell and Deputy Director of Planning
Richard Bissell.  

Kennedy's next major crisis occurred on October 16, 1962, when he
was shown aerial photos of  missile  bases  in  Cuba.  The  Joint
Chiefs of  Staff  pressed  for  an  immediate  attack.   Instead,
Attorney General Robert Kennedy was  sent  to  meet  with  Soviet
Ambassador  Anatoly  Dobrynin.  In  his  memoirs,  Premier Nikita
Krushchev quotes the younger Kennedy as saying: "The President is
in a grave situation...  We are under pressure from our  military
to  use  force  against  Cuba...  If the situation continues much
longer, the President is not sure  that  the  military  will  not
overthrow him and seize power."  

Military  hopes  for  an invasion of Cuba evaporated as Krushchev
and Kennedy worked out a nonviolent solution to the crisis.    In
return, Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba. Angered over the Bay
of  Pigs  fiasco,  the  CIA refused to bend to Kennedy's will and
continued their destabilization campaign  against  Castro,  which
included  sabotage  raids  conducted by a secret army, as well as
plots against Castro's life, which were undertaken with the  help
of such well-known Mafia figures as Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana,
and  Santos  Trafficante.  A  bitter  internal struggle developed
around Kennedy's attempts to disband the CIA's paramilitary bases
in Florida and Louisiana.  

On August 5, 1963, the US, Great Britain  and  the  Soviet  Union
signed a   limited   nuclear-test-ban   treaty.    Engineered  by
President Kennedy and long in  negotiations,  the  treaty  was  a
severe  blow to the Cold Warriors in the Pentagon and the CIA. On
September 20, 1963, Kennedy spoke hopefully of peace  to  the  UN
General Assembly.  "Today we may have reached a pause in the Cold
War," he  said.    "If both sides can now gain new confidence and
experience in concrete collaborations of peace, then surely, this
first small step can be the start of a long, fruitful journey."  

"Years later, paging through  its  formerly  classified  records,
talking  to  the National Security Council staff, it is difficult
to avoid the impression  that  the  President  was  learning  the
responsibility  of power," writes John Prados, in his recent book
Keepers of  the  Keys,  an  analysis  of  the  National  Security
Council.   "Here was a smoother, calmer Kennedy, secretly working
for  rapprochement  with  Fidel  Castro  and  a  withdrawal  from
Vietnam."  

Although  Kennedy's  Vietnam  policy  has not received widespread
publicity, he turned resolutely against the war in June of  1963,
when he ordered Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor to announce from
the White House steps that all American forces would be withdrawn
by  1965.  At  the  time,  15,500 US "advisors" were stationed in
South  Vietnam,  and  total  casualties   suffered   remained   a
relatively low 100.  

On  November  14, Kennedy signed an order to begin the withdrawal
by removing 1,000 troops.  In private, Kennedy let  it  be  known
the  military  was  not going to railroad him into continuing the
war.  Many of  the  hard-line  anti-Communists  ~  including  FBI
Director J.   Edgar  Hoover  ~  would  have  to be purged.  Bobby
Kennedy would be put in charge of dismantling the CIA.  President
Kennedy  told Senator Mike Mansfield of his plans to tear the CIA
"into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind."   But  these
plans  had to wait for Kennedy's reelection in 1964. And in order
to win that election, he had to secure the South.  Which  is  why
Kennedy went to Texas later that month.  

Could  John  Kennedy  have stopped the war in Vietnam, as was his
obvious intention?  America will never  know.    His  command  to
begin  the  Vietnam  withdrawal  was  his  last  formal executive
order.  Just after noon on November  22,  President  Kennedy  was
murdered  while  driving through downtown Dallas, in full view of
dozens of ardent supporters, and while surrounded by  police  and
personal bodyguards.    Twenty-eight  years  later,  grave doubts
still linger about who pulled the  trigger(s),  who  ordered  the
assassination, and why our government has done so little to bring
justice forth.  

In  1963,  no American wanted to believe that President Kennedy's
death was a coup d'etat, planned by  the  military  establishment
and  executed  by  the  CIA. Today, such a claim can no longer be
dismissed.  Why has the national media done such an  abysmal  job
of presenting  the facts to the American people?  Hopefully, some
light will be shed  by  Oliver  Stone's  upcoming  film,  JFK,  a
$30-million  epic  starring  Kevin Costner, scheduled for release
December 20. As his focal point for the story, Stone  has  chosen
former  New  Orleans  District  Attorney  Jim  Garrison, the only
prosecutor to attempt to bring this case  to  court,  and  a  man
subjected  to  one  of  the  most  effective smear campaigns ever
orchestrated by the US government.  It is a frightening story  of
murder, corruption  and  cover-up.  Even today, 24 years after he
brought the  case  to  court,  a  powerful  media  disinformation
campaign against Garrison continues.  

Born  November  20,  1921,  in Knoxville, Iowa, Earling Carothers
Garrison ~ known as "Jim" to friends and family ~ was  raised  in
New  Orleans.  At age 19, one year before Pearl Harbor, he joined
the army.  In 1942, he was sent to Europe, where  he  volunteered
to fly  spotter  planes over the front lines.  Following the war,
he attended law school at Tulare, joined the FBI, and served as a
special agent in Seattle and Tacoma. After growing bored with his
agency assignments, he returned to New Orleans to  practice  law.
He served as an assistant district attorney from 1954 to 1958.  

In  1961,  Garrison  decided  to  run  for district attorney on a
platform openly hostile to then-New Orleans Mayor Victor  Schiro.
To  the  surprise  of  many,  he  was  elected  without any major
political backing.  He was 43 years old  and  had  been  district
attorney for less than two years when Kennedy was killed.  "I was
an  old-  fashioned  patriot,"  he  writes in On the Trail of the
Assassins, (Sheridan Square Press, NY), "a product of my  family,
my military  experience, and my years in the legal profession.  I
could not imagine then that the government would ever deceive the
citizens of this country."  

A few hours  after  the  assassination,  Lee  Harvey  Oswald  was
arrested.  Two days later, while in Dallas police custody, Oswald
was  murdered by nightclub-owner Jack Ruby. Garrison learned that
Oswald was from New Orleans,  and  arranged  a  Sunday  afternoon
meeting with  his  staff.    With  such an important case, it was
their responsibility to investigate Oswald's local connections.  

Within days, they learned that Oswald had been recently  seen  in
the  company  of  one  David Ferrie, a fervent anti-Communist and
freelance pilot linked to the Bay of  Pigs  invasion.    Evidence
placed Ferrie  in Texas on the day of the assassination.  Also on
that  day,  a  friend  of  Ferrie's  named  Guy   Bannister   had
pistol-whipped Jack  Martin  during an argument.  Martin confided
to friends that Bannister and Ferrie were somehow involved in the
assassination.  Garrison had Ferrie picked  up  for  questioning,
and  turned  him  over to the local FBI, who immediately released
him.  Within a few months, the  Warren  Commission  released  its
report  stating  that  Oswald  was  a  "lone  nut"  murdered by a
misguided patriot who wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy  the  ordeal
of testifying.    Like  most  Americans,  Garrison  accepted this
conclusion.  

Three years later, in the  fall  of  '66,  Garrison  was  happily
married  with  three  children  and  content with his job, when a
chance conversation with Senator Russell long changed  his  views
on the Warren Commission forever.  

"Those  fellows  on  the Warren Commission were dead wrong," said
Long. "There's no way in the world that one man could  have  shot
up Jack Kennedy that way."  

Intrigued,  Garrison  went  back  to  his  office and ordered the
complete 26-volume  report.    "The  mass  of   information   was
disorganized  and  confused," writes Garrison. "Worst of all, the
conclusions in the report seemed to be based  on  an  appallingly
selective  reading  of  the evidence, ignoring credible testimony
from literally dozens of witnesses."  

Garrison was equally disturbed  by  the  background  of  the  men
chosen by President Johnson to serve on the commission.  Why, for
instance,  was  Allen  Dulles,  a  man  fired  by Kennedy, on the
panel?  A master spy  during  WWII,  Dulles  had  supervised  the
penetration of the Abwehr (Hitler's military intelligence agency)
and the subsequent incorporation of many of its undercover agents
into  the  CIA.  He  was  powerful,  well-connected  and had been
Director of the CIA for eight years.  Certainly, he was no friend
to John Kennedy.  Serving with Dulles were Representative  Gerald
Ford,  a  man  described by Newsweek as "the CIA's best friend in
Congress," John McCloy, former assistant  secretary  of  war  and
Commissioner  for  Occupied Germany, and Senator Richard Russell,
chairman  of  the  powerful  Senate  Armed  Services   Committee.
Russell's  home  state  of Georgia was filled with military bases
and government contracts.  The  balance  of  the  commission  was
clearly  in  the  hands  of  the military and the CIA. The entire
"investigation" was supervised by J.  Edgar  Hoover,  who  openly
detested the Kennedy brothers.  

Another interesting link turned up; The mayor of Dallas was Earle
Cabell,  brother  of  the  General Charles Cabell JFK had earlier
fired from the CIA. Earle Cabell was in  a  position  to  control
many important details involved in the case, including the Dallas
police force.  

Based  on  these  general suspicions, Garrison launched a highly-
secret investigation around Lee Harvey Oswald's  links  to  David
Ferrie  and Guy Bannister. Unfortunately, Bannister had died nine
months after the assassination.  An alcoholic  and  rabid  right-
winger,  Bannister had been a star agent for the FBI and a former
Naval Intelligence operative.  He was a member of the John  Birch
Society,  the  Minutemen,  and  publisher of a racist newsletter.
His office at 544 Camp street was a well-known meeting place  for
anti- Castro Cubans.  

Ferrie's background was even more bizarre.  A former senior pilot
for Eastern Airlines, Ferrie had been the head of the New Orleans
Civil  Air  Patrol,  an  organization  Oswald  had  joined  as  a
teenager.  Ferrie suffered from alopecia, an  ailment  that  left
him hairless.    He  wore  bright  red wigs and painted eyebrows.
Ferrie had  founded  his  own  religion,  and  kept  hundreds  of
experimental rats  in  his house.  He reportedly had flown dozens
of solo missions for the CIA in Cuba and Latin America,  and  had
links  to  Carlos  Marcello,  head  of the Mob in Louisiana. Like
Bannister, he was  extremely  right  wing.    "I  want  to  train
killers,"  Ferrie  had written to the commander of the US 1st Air
Force. "There is nothing I would enjoy better  than  blowing  the
hell   out   of   every   damn   Russian,   Communist,   Red   or
what-have-you."  

On the day of the assassination,  Dean  Andrews,  a  New  Orleans
attorney,  had  been  asked to fly to Dallas to represent Oswald.
When asked by the Warren Commission who had  hired  him,  Andrews
had  replied  Clay Bertrand. Bertrand, Garrison discovered, was a
pseudonym used by Clay Shaw, director of the International  Trade
Mart. Shaw, a darling of New Orleans high society, was also well-
connected in  international high-finance circles.  He was also an
associate of Bannister and Ferrie.  Like  many  others  connected
with  the  assassination,  Shaw  was  a  former Army Intelligence
operative.   The  case  against  Shaw  was  circumstantial,   but
Garrison  did have an eyewitness willing to testify that Shaw had
met with Lee Harvey Oswald just prior to the assassination.  

Just as Garrison was marshalling his case,  some  strange  events
took place.    On  February 17, 1967, the New Orleans States-Item
published a story on Garrison's secret probe, indicating that  he
had  already  spent over $8,000 of taxpayer's money investigating
the Kennedy assassination.  Soon thereafter, Garrison received an
unusually strong letter of support from a Denver oil  businessman
named  John Miller, hinting that Miller wanted to offer financial
support to  the  investigation.    When  Miller  arrived  in  New
Orleans, he met with Garrison and one of his assistants.  "You're
too  big  for  this  job,"  said Miller. "I suggest you accept an
appointment to the bench in federal district court, and move into
a job worthy of your talents."  

"And what would I have to do  to  get  this  judgeship?"    asked
Garrison.   "Stop  your  investigation,"  replied  Miller calmly.
Garrison asked Miller to leave his office.  "Well,  they  offered
you the carrot and you turned it down," said his assistant.  "You
know what's coming next, don't you?"  

Suddenly,  reporters  from  all over the country descended on New
Orleans, including the Washington Post's George Lardner,  Jr.  At
midnight on February 22, 1967, Lardner claims to have conducted a
four-hour  interview  with  Ferrie. The following morning, Ferrie
was found dead.  Two unsigned,  typewritten  suicide  notes  were
found.   The  letter  made  reference  to  a  "messianic district
attorney."  

Three days later the coroner announced that Ferrie  had  died  of
natural  causes  and placed the time of death well before the end
of Lardner's supposed marathon interview.   Lardner's  complicity
in  the  affair  would  never  be called into question, while his
highly- influential  articles  in  the  Washington  Post  branded
Garrison's  investigation a "fraud." It was just the beginning of
a long series of disruptive attacks in the media, and  the  first
in  a  long  series  of bodies connected with the case that would
mysteriously turn up dead.  

With Ferrie gone, Garrison had only one suspect left.  He  rushed
his case to court, arresting Clay Shaw. 

Ellen  Ray,  a  documentary  filmmaker from New York, came to New
Orleans to film the story.  "People were getting killed left  and
right," she  recalls.  "Garrison would subpoena a witness and two
days later the witness would be  killed  by  a  parked  car.    I
thought Garrison  was a great American patriot.  But things got a
little too heavy when I started getting strange phone calls  from
men with Cuban accents."  After several death threats, Ray became
so  terrified  that instead of making a documentary on the trial,
she fled the country.  

Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a close friend of President Lyndon
Johnson, announced from Washington that  the  federal  government
had already  investigated and exonerated Clay Shaw.  "Needless to
say," writes Garrison, "this did not exactly make  me  look  like
District Attorney of the Year."  

Meanwhile, all sorts of backpedalling was going on at the Justice
Department. If Shaw had been investigated, why wasn't his name in
the Warren  Commission  Report?   "The attorney general has since
determined that this was erroneous," said a spokesman for  Clark.
"Nothing arose indicating a need to investigate Mr. Shaw."  

Realizing he was in a political minefield, Garrison presented his
case as  cautiously  as possible.  A grand jury was convened that
included Jay C. Albarado.  "On  March  14,  three  criminal-court
judges   heard  Garrison's  case  in  a  preliminary  hearing  to
determine if there was enough evidence against Shaw to  hold  him
for  trial,"  Albarado  wrote  recently  in  a  letter to the New
Orleans Times- Picayune. "What did they conclude?  That there was
sufficient evidence.  Garrison then presented his evidence  to  a
12-member grand  jury.  We ruled there was sufficient evidence to
bring Shaw to trial.  Were we duped by Garrison?  I think not."  

Thanks to  all  the  unwanted  publicity,  Garrison's  staff  had
swollen with  volunteers  eager  to  work  on the case.  The 6'6"
Garrison, now dubbed the "Jolly Green Giant," had already  become
a  hero  to  the  many  citizens  and researchers who had serious
doubts about the Warren Commission. Unfortunately, a few of these
eager volunteers were  later  exposed  as  government  informers.
Shortly  before  the  case went to trial, one of the infiltrators
Xeroxed all of Garrison's files and turned them  over  to  Shaw's
defense team.  

On  September  4,  1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that
Garrison's case was worthless.  The New York Times  characterized
the investigation  as  a "morbid frolic."  Newsweek reported that
the conspiracy was "a plot  of  Garrison's  own  making."    Life
magazine  published  the  first  of many reports linking Garrison
with the Mafia. (Richard Billings, an editor at  Life,  had  been
one  of  the first journalists to gain access to Garrison's inner
circle, under the guise of "wanting to help" the  investigation.)
Walter  Sheridan,  a  former Naval Intelligence operative and NBC
investigator, appeared in New Orleans with a film  crew.    Their
purpose?   An  expose~ titled The Case of Jim Garrison, which was
broadcast in June '67.  "It required only a few  minutes  to  see
that  NBC  had  classified the case as criminal and had appointed
itself as the prosecutor," writes Garrison.  

Puzzled by the intensity of NBC's attack, Garrison  went  to  the
library and  did  some  research  on the company.  He learned the
network was a subsidiary of  RCA,  a  bulwark  of  the  military-
industrial  complex whose defense contracts had increased by more
than a billion dollars from 1960 to 1967. Its  chairman,  retired
General  David  Sarnoff,  was  a well-known proponent of the Cold
War.  

"Some long-cherished illusions about the great free press in  our
country  underwent  a  painful  reappraisal  during this period,"
writes Garrison.  

Clay Shaw was brought to trial on January 29, 1969. It took  less
than one month for Garrison to present his case.  

Demonstrating the  cover-up  was  the  easy  part.   Although the
overwhelming majority of eyewitnesses in  Dealy  Plaza  testified
that  the  fatal  shot  came  not  from  the  Texas  School  Book
Depository ~ where Oswald  worked  ~  but  from  a  grassy  knoll
overlooking  the  plaza, the FBI had encouraged many witnesses to
alter their testimony to fit the ~lone nut' theory.   Those  that
didn't were  simply  ignored  by  the  commission.  The ballistic
evidence was flawed and obviously tampered with.  Even though the
FBI had received several warnings of the assassination, they  had
ignored them.    Security  for  the  President was strangely lax.
Although Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby, had ties to the CIA and  the
Mafia, this evidence had been suppressed.  Ruby was never allowed
to testify before the commission, and when interviewed in a Texas
jail  by  Chief  Justice Warren and Gerald Ford, he told them: "I
would like to request that I go to Washington... I want  to  tell
the truth,  and I can't tell it here...  Gentlemen, my life is in
danger."  Ruby never made it to Washington. He remained  in  jail
and  died  mysteriously  before  Garrison  could  call  him  as a
witness.  

Even  more  disturbing  was  the  treatment  given  the  deceased
President's corpse.  Under Texas law, an autopsy should have been
performed  by a civilian pathologist in Dallas. Instead, the body
was removed at gunpoint by the Secret  Service  and  flown  to  a
naval  hospital  in  Maryland,  where  an  incomplete autopsy was
performed  under  the  supervision  of   unnamed   admirals   and
generals.   The  notes  from  this "autopsy" were quickly burned.
Bullet holes were never tracked, the brain was not dissected, and
organs were not removed.  The  autopsy  was  a  botched,  tainted
affair, performed  under  military  supervision.    (The  medical
aspects of the case were so weird,  they  would  later  form  the
basis for a best-selling book on the assassination, Best Evidence
by David Lifton [Macmillan, New York].) 

The  most  important  and  lasting  piece of evidence unveiled by
Garrison was an 8mm film of the assassination  taken  by  Abraham
Zapruder, a film that only three members of the Warren Commission
had  seen, probably because it cast a long shadow of doubt across
their conclusions.  A good analysis of the film can be  found  in
Cover-Up by J. Gary Shaw with Larry Harris (PO Box 722, Cleburne,
TX 76031): 

Had  the  Zapruder  film  of  the JFK assassination been shown on
national  television  Friday  evening,  November  22,  1963,  the
Oswald/lone  assassin fabrication would have been unacceptable to
a majority of Americans... The car proceeds down Elm and  briefly
disappears behind  a  sign.    When  it emerges the President has
obviously been shot...  Governor Connally turns completely to the
right, looking into the back seat; he begins to  turn  back  when
his body  stiffens  on  impact  of  a bullet.  Very shortly after
Connally is hit, the President's head explodes  in  a  shower  of
blood  and  brain  matter  ~ he is driven violently backward at a
speed estimated at 80-100 feet per second.  

Although Time, Inc. could have made a small fortune  distributing
this  film around the world, they instead secured the rights from
Zapruder for $225,000, then held a few private screenings  before
locking the  film  in  a vault.  It was shown to one newsman, Dan
Rather, who then described it on  national  television.    Rather
asserted  that  Kennedy's  head  went  "forward with considerable
force" after the fatal head shot (a  statement  that  would  have
supported  a  hit  from  behind, from the direction of the School
Book Depository).  Several months later, Rather was  promoted  to
White  House  Correspondent  by  CBS.  As  if  to  buttress  this
fabrication, the FBI  reversed  the  order  of  the  frames  when
printing  them  in the Warren Report. When researchers later drew
this reversal to  the  FBI's  attention,  Hoover  attributed  the
switch to a "printing error."  

Although  Garrison  proved  his  conspiracy,  the  jury  was  not
convinced of Clay Shaw's role in it.  He was released after  only
two hours of deliberation.  

The  end  of the Clay Shaw trial was just the beginning of a long
nightmare for Garrison. On June 30,  1971,  he  was  arrested  by
federal agents  on corruption charges.  Two years later, the case
came to trial at the height of  Garrison's  reelection  campaign.
Although  he  won  the case, he lost the election by 2,000 votes.
However, the Jolly Green Giant remains widely  respected  in  his
home  state,  and has recently been elected to his second term on
the second highest court in Louisiana.  

In 1967, the  machinations  of  the  CIA  were  unknown  to  most
Americans.  Today,  thankfully,  many  brave  men have left their
comfortable careers in the agency and  spoken  out  against  CIA-
sponsored terror  around  the  world.    One  of  these is Victor
Marchetti, who was executive assistant to Director Richard Helms,
and then coauthored The CIA and the  Cult  of  Intelligence  with
John  D.  Marks.  In  1975 Marchetti confirmed that Clay Shaw and
David Ferrie had been CIA operatives, and  that  the  agency  had
secretly worked for Shaw's defense.  

Over  the years, many high-ranking officials have come forward to
support Garrison's  theory.    "The  big  story  in  the  Kennedy
assassination  is the cover-up," says retired Colonel L. Fletcher
Prouty, Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff
until 1964. Prouty was on assignment in New Zealand on the day of
the assassination.    After  carrying  a  New  Zealand  newspaper
article  back  to  Washington,  he  checked  the time of Oswald's
arrest against the hour the paper  had  been  printed  and,  with
great  horror,  realized  Oswald's  biography had gone out on the
international newswire before Oswald had  been  arrested  by  the
Dallas police.     Prouty  has  since  become  one  of  the  most
persuasive and persistent critics of the Warren  Commission.  His
book,  The  Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the
United States and the World, is a frightening  portrayal  of  the
hidden rulers of America.  

On March 6, 1975, the Zapruder film made its national- television
debut   on   ABC's   Goodnight  America.  As  a  result  of  this
long-delayed national screening, enough public pressure  was  put
on Congress   to   reopen   the   case.      Unfortunately,  this
investigation  became  as  carefully-manipulated  as  the  Warren
Commission,  eventually  falling  under  the control of G. Robert
Blakey, a man with close ties to the CIA. As could  be  expected,
Blakey  led  the  investigation away from the CIA and towards the
Mob. Blakey's conclusion was that President Kennedy was killed as
the result of a conspiracy, and  that  organized  crime  had  the
means, method  and  motive.    "The  Garrison investigation was a
fraud," said Blakey.  Richard Billings, the former  Life  editor,
was a prominent member of Blakey's staff.  

Recently,  however,  a  number  of  highly-detailed  books on the
assassination have appeared, most  of  which  support  Garrison's
thesis rather than Blakey's. The best of these include Conspiracy
by  Anthony  Summers  (Paragon House, New York), Crossfire by Jim
Marrs (Carroll & Graf, Inc., New York) and High Treason by Robert
Groden and Harrison Livingstone (Berkeley, New York).  

"Could the Mafia have  whisked  Kennedy's  body  past  the  Texas
authorities and  got  it aboard Air Force One?"  writes Garrison.
"Could the Mafia have placed in charge of the President's autopsy
an army general who was not a physician?  Could  the  Mafia  have
arranged  for  President  Kennedy's  brain  to disappear from the
National Archives?"  

Today, we know that the CIA frequently hired Mafia  assassins  to
carry out contracts.  Undoubtedly some of these men were involved
in the  assassination  and  the  cover-up.    Shortly  before his
disappearance, Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa said, "Jim Garrison's  a
smart man.    Anyone  who  thinks he's a kook is a kook himself."
Was Hoffa silenced because he knew too much about the plot?  Just
before   their   scheduled   appearances   before    the    House
investigation,  Johnny  Roselli  and  Sam  Giancana were brutally
murdered in gangland fashion.  Was this a message  to  other  Mob
figures who had fragmentary information on the case?  

In  July 1988, The Nation published an FBI memorandum from Hoover
dated  November  29,  1963.  Obtained  through  the  Freedom   of
Information  Act, the memo implicated "George Bush of the CIA" in
the Kennedy assassination  cover-up.    Although  President  Bush
denies any contact with the CIA prior to his being named director
in  1976, it is reasonable to assume that Zapata, the oil company
Bush founded in 1960, was a CIA front.  

Former President Richard Nixon is also implicated in  the  cover-
up.   Nixon  was  in Dallas the day before the assassination, and
his greatest fear during the early days of Watergate was that the
"Bay of Pigs thing"  would  be  uncovered.    According  to  H.R.
Haldeman  in  The  Ends  of Power, "Bay of Pigs" was Nixon's code
phrase for the Kennedy assassination.  

As liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon  during  the  Bay  of
Pigs,  Fletcher Prouty was put in charge of ordering supplies for
the invasion.  "The CIA had code-named  the  invasion  ~Zapata,'"
recalls  Prouty. "Two boats landed on the shores of Cuba. One was
named Houston, the other Barbara. They were Navy ships  that  had
been repainted  with  new  names.    I have no idea where the new
names came from."  

At the time Bush was living  in  Houston.  His  oil  company  was
called Zapata, and his wife's name was Barbara.  

If  Garrison's  investigation was not a fraud, it's reasonable to
assume that  high-placed  individuals  in  the  conspiracy  would
either  be  dead or would have obtained considerable power in the
last 28 years.  According to an article in the March 4  issue  of
U.S.  News  and  World Report, Nixon and Bush have remained close
associates.  "Nixon is in contact with Bush or his  senior  staff
every  month," writes Kenneth Walsh. "Nixon also speaks regularly
on the phone with [National Security Adviser] Brent  Scowcroft...
and Chief of Staff John Sununu."  

Earlier this year Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin published Silent
Coup,  a  well-documented  analysis of the real forces behind the
Watergate scandal.  According to the authors, Nixon fell prey  to
a  military  coup  after refusing to work with the Pentagon. They
claim the famous Deep Throat  was,  in  fact,  General  Alexander
Haig.  

In  the  meantime,  a  well-orchestrated  disinformation campaign
against Oliver  Stone's  movie  has  predictably  appeared,  long
before Stone could even begin editing his film.  Longtime Kennedy
researchers  were  not surprised to find the charge led by George
Lardner, Jr., of the Washington Post, the last man to  see  David
Ferrie alive.  

"Oliver  Stone  is  chasing fiction," wrote Lardner in the May 19
edition of the Post.  "Garrison's  investigation  was  a  fraud."
Later  in  the  article,  he adds: "There was no abrupt change in
Vietnam policy after JFK's death."  

"That is one of the most preposterous things  I've  ever  heard,"
says  Zachary Sklar, editor of On The Trail of the Assassins, and
coscreenwriter with Stone on JFK. "Kennedy was trying to get  out
of  Vietnam,  and  Johnson  led  us  into  a  war in which 58,000
Americans died.  Lardner's article is a travesty."  

"I wouldn't give Lardner the time of day,"  adds  Gary  Shaw.  "I
think he's bought and paid for."  

Mark  Lane,  author  of  Rush to Judgment, one of the first books
critical of the Warren Commission, agrees.  "The CIA is  bringing
out  the spooks who pose as journalists," says Lane. "The amazing
thing about the Lardner piece is he's reviewing the  film  months
before it's even completed."  

Time  magazine  also  slammed  the  film long before its release.
"Garrison is considered somewhere  near  the  far-out  fringe  of
conspiracy  theories,"  writes  Richard Zoglin, a film critic who
admits to knowing "very little" about the  assassination.    (For
the 25th anniversary of the assassination back in '88, Time ran a
cover story  titled  "Who  Was  the  Real Target?"  Inside was an
excerpt from The Great Expectations of John Connally,  a  curious
book  that  argued  that Oswald really meant to kill Connally and
only hit JFK by mistake.  Someday this book may be  viewed  as  a
textbook example of CIA-sponsored disinformation.) 

Time,  Inc.,  it will be remembered, is the same company that hid
the Zapruder film for five years.    When  High  Times  requested
slides  from  the  film  to  accompany  this article, the current
copyright holder sent them a three-page contract  to  sign.    It
included a  prohibition  against  "any  reference...    that  the
Zapruder film was ever owned by Time, Inc...."  

High Times decided not to run the photos rather than assist Time,
Inc. in their continuing cover-up of the real facts  behind  John
F. Kennedy's assassination.  

In  the  next  few  months, the American people will be bombarded
with information about the Kennedy assassination.    Most  of  it
will  be  critical  of  Stone  and  Garrison.  It's  important to
understand that  much  of  this  criticism  will  be  written  by
intelligence assets working for the CIA. Although the Cold War is
supposed  to  be over, the CIA budget is at an all-time high; $30
billion of taxpayer's money buys a lot of propaganda.  

How extensive is the CIA's infiltration of the national media?  I
called former agent Ralph McGeehee, author of Deadly Deceits, who
has  compiled  a  database  on  everything  published  about  the
agency.   "In  1977,  Carl  Bernstein wrote an article in Rolling
Stone that named over 400 journalists  uncovered  by  the  Church
Committee  who  were  working  for  the  CIA,"  says McGeehee. If
anything, their numbers  have  only  increased  in  the  last  12
years.  

When will  the  subversion  of  the national media end?  When the
American people demand it.  Unfortunately,  the  public  has  not
flexed  any  muscle  in  this country since they ended the war in
Vietnam. If you want to help bring justice in this case,  there's
plenty  you  can  do:  1)  Assist  the Assassinations Archives in
Washington in their quest to  obtain  the  documentation  on  the
Kennedy case  that  remains  sealed  to  the  public.    For more
information call Jim LeSar at (202)  393-1917.  2)  Subscribe  to
Covert  Action  Information  Bulletin,  a  national newsletter on
covert CIA activities.  For more information call (202) 331-9763.
If you want more  detailed  information  on  the  CIA,  McGehee's
database  can be purchased for $99. For more information call him
at (707) 437-8487. 3) Write  your  representatives  in  Congress.
Tell  them  you  want  a  law passed prohibiting journalists from
working for the CIA. Although such a bill has been proposed  many
times, it never makes its way out of committee.  

Finally, stop accepting everything you hear on TV and read in the
newspapers.   Buy  books  on  the  assassination and cover-up and
educate yourself.  Only in this way can we keep hope  alive  that
one  day  America  will be the sweet land of liberty her founders
intended.  



