The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination: The Definitive Account of the Most Controversial Crime of the Twentieth Century
400
The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination: The Definitive Account of the Most Controversial Crime of the Twentieth Century
400eBook
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Overview
For the first time, this concise and compelling history seeks to answer the questions that have haunted Americans for decades: Why and how was JFK murdered?
The Hidden History of JFK’s Assassination draws on exclusive interviews with more than two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy, in addition to former FBI, Secret Service, military intelligence, and Congressional personnel, who provided critical first–hand information. The book also uses government files—including the detailed FBI confession of notorious Mafia godfather Carlos Marcello—to simply and clearly reveal who killed JFK. Using information never published before, the book uses Marcello’s own words to his closest associates to describe the plot. His confession is also backed up by a wealth of independent documentation.
This book builds on the work of the last Congressional committee to investigate JFK’s murder, which concluded that JFK “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy,” and that godfathers “[Santo] Trafficante [and Carlos] Marcello had the motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy.” However, it also draws on exclusive files and information not available to Congress, that have only emerged in recent years, to fully explain for the first time how Marcello and Trafficante committed—and got away with—the crime of the 20th century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619022614 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2013 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 282,995 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Evidence of Conspiracy
DRAMATIC NEW EVIDENCE in The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination, much of it from government sources and associates of John and Robert Kennedy, proves clearly and simply for the first time that President John F. Kennedy was killed by a small, tightly held conspiracy directed by two Mafia godfathers. Using critical facts never reported before, this book documents exactly who was involved, why, and how they got away with it.
It builds on the findings of Robert Kennedy and his own secret investigations, as well as those of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The House Committee concluded in 1979 that JFK "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy" and that two Mafia godfathers who were close associates — Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante* — "had the motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy."
Using exclusive interviews and newly declassified files not available to that Committee, this book provides detailed proof of that conspiracy. In addition to Marcello and Trafficante, others involved included their associates Mafia don Johnny Rosselli and mobster John Martino. Few realize that all four men made credible confessions to JFK's murder, with Marcello providing by far the most detailed account, according to FBI files and sources that for the first time are fully detailed in this book.
All four mobsters had also been assets of the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1960s, working on the Agency's plots to kill Fidel Castro — plots that began in September 1960 at the direction of then Vice President Richard Nixon, before JFK was elected President. Those CIA–Mafia plots against Castro continued into 1963 without the knowledge of President Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, or even JFK's CIA director, John McCone.
Marcello and Trafficante used two active-duty CIA men in their assassination plan: CIA agent Bernard Barker and CIA officer David Morales. A Congressional investigator for the House Committee discovered that Morales — in 1963 a close friend of Johnny Rosselli — had confessed involvement in JFK's murder to two close associates. Barker admitted under oath that he had watched JFK's shooting as it happened, even though JFK's motorcade through Dealey Plaza was not broadcast live, even in Dallas. Barker was also identified as being behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll at the time of JFK's shooting by two credible eyewitnesses who encountered him, one of them a Dallas Deputy Sheriff.
Important new material from FBI files and personnel allows this book to detail for the first time Carlos Marcello's own account of how he planned JFK's murder and used trusted associates to carry it out. This new information finally connects all the dots, tying Marcello to the shooters, to Lee Oswald, and to Jack Ruby. What had formerly been a mass of compelling evidence — with a few key parts missing and some connections murky — now becomes a clear, coherent, and concise story of JFK's murder.
For almost fifty years, polls have consistently shown that a majority of the American public believes JFK was killed as the result of a conspiracy. Distinguished tenured historians — among them CBS News consultant Dr. Douglas Brinkley, Dr. David Kaiser of the Naval War College, Dr. Gerald McKnight, Dr. David Wrone, and Dr. Michael Kurtz — have publicly expressed their belief that the historical evidence for a conspiracy in JFK's murder is conclusive. Yet much of the US news media still reports on this topic as if only one official government committee, the Warren Commission, ever looked into JFK's murder, and there has been only one "official" verdict: that a single assassin — depicted at the time and ever since as a "lone nut" — killed JFK. For the "lone nut" thesis to work, a bullet found in almost pristine condition had to have caused two wounds to JFK while also shattering Texas governor John Connally's rib and wrist bones. The following chapter debunks this "single bullet theory," long derided by its critics as the "magic bullet theory," and shows how anyone can easily demonstrate the physical impossibility of the single bullet theory for him- or herself.
In reality, over the course of three decades, a half dozen government committees — including the House Select Committee and most recently, in the 1990s, the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, appointed by President Clinton — investigated JFK's murder. Among the 4.5 million pages of government records the Review Board released during the 1990s was the uncensored FBI file with Carlos Marcello's clear, direct confession to JFK's murder, which I first uncovered at the National Archives in 2006. Several years earlier, I had helped high-level Review Board staff identify crucial JFK records that had not been released.
The news media rarely report that Robert F. Kennedy himself, along with numerous government officials who were associates of RFK and JFK, voiced the belief that President Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy. Robert Kennedy told aide Richard Goodwin that he thought "that mob guy in New Orleans" — Marcello — was behind his brother's death, as Goodwin confirmed to me. RFK learned about Marcello's role because he directed several trusted aides to conduct small, secret investigations into his brother's murder for him. RFK's investigators included the head of the Justice Department's "Get Hoffa Squad," Walter Sheridan, and his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz. Both concluded that a conspiracy had killed JFK.
Other well-documented believers in an assassination conspiracy included President Lyndon Johnson, CIA Director John McCone, JFK's personal physician Admiral George Burkley (the only doctor with JFK's body at both Parkland Hospital and his autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital), JFK's press secretary Pierre Salinger, and JFK aides Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Harris Wofford. Also expressing belief in a conspiracy were LBJ aides Joseph A. Califano Jr. and Alexander Haig, plus numerous Justice Department Mafia prosecutors for RFK, including Ronald Goldfarb and Robert Blakey — the last also authored the RICO Act, used in prosecuting organized crime, and directed the House Select Committee's investigation. According to Vanity Fair, even Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry "believed two gunmen were involved," while Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that CIA Director John McCone told Robert Kennedy he "thought there were two people involved in the shooting."
JFK's two closest aides, Dave Powers and Kenneth O'Donnell, actually witnessed two shots from the grassy knoll, from their perfect vantage point in the limousine directly behind JFK's. (One of the Secret Service agents in their limo testified that he also thought that JFK's fatal head shot came from the grassy knoll.) Powers and O'Donnell both confirmed the grassy knoll shots to House Speaker Tip O'Neill, as O'Neill described in his 1987 autobiography, Man of the House. Later, in an exclusive interview with my research collaborator Thom Hartmann, Powers detailed how he was pressured to change his Warren Commission testimony "for the good of the country." As I first discovered (with the help of the National Archives), Powers's perjured affidavit was taken by Commission counsel Arlen Specter, the leading proponent of the single bullet theory, an important detail the Warren Commission omitted when it published Powers's affidavit.
It's important to stress that much of my information came not only from exclusive interviews with more than two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy but also from former FBI, Secret Service, military intelligence, and Congressional personnel, including those critical of how their agencies handled the investigation. All of those sources provided crucial firsthand information. While some of their disclosures have been detailed in my previous books dealing with the Kennedys — Ultimate Sacrifice (2005; updated 2006), Legacy of Secrecy (2008; expanded 2009), and several chapters in Watergate: The Hidden History (2011) — many important new revelations are detailed in this book for the first time.
It has taken almost fifty years for the full story of JFK's assassination to emerge, for reasons of national security that are detailed later, compounded by the reluctance of agencies such as the FBI and CIA to reveal their own intelligence failures and unauthorized operations.
Government agencies and officials withheld many hundreds of thousands of pages of relevant files and information on covert operations from the Warren Commission, but neither the public nor most journalists knew that when the Warren Report was issued in September 1964. The sheer volume of information publicly available today that was hidden from the Warren Commission is staggering: the CIA's plots with dangerous mob bosses to kill Fidel Castro, the attempt to kill JFK in Tampa four days before Dallas and in Chicago before that, Jack Ruby's work for the Mafia, Oswald's many links to Carlos Marcello, and much more. Instead, the American news media embraced and helped to disseminate the Report since it had been approved by a distinguished panel headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Many people don't realize that in addition to the best-selling one- volume Warren Report, the Commission also issued twenty-six volumes of supporting material. By 1966 authors and journalists were pointing out that the evidence contained in those twenty-six volumes didn't support the Warren Report's own conclusions. A flurry of critical books began to appear, starting with former Congressional investigator Harold Weisberg's Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report, followed by The Unanswered Questions about President Kennedy's Assassination by veteran reporter Sylvan Fox, who soon joined the New York Times. Next came Edward Jay Epstein's Inquest, which even former JFK aides found compelling. Best-selling books followed: Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment and Harvard professor Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas, as well as Sylvia Meagher's Accessories after the Fact. All of those authors used the Warren Commission's own information, along with fresh interviews and overlooked news accounts, to undermine the Warren Report's "lone nut/single bullet" conclusion.
Those efforts helped to spark major investigations by the New York Times and major weekly magazines such as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post. However, declassified files now show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helms immediately began a significant public relations counteroffensive, issuing detailed instructions on how to smear critics of the Warren Report. For example, in a January 4, 1967, CIA memo in which the Agency gives fifty-three pages of specific instructions on how to counter the growing tide of books and articles questioning the "lone nut" conclusion, a domestic operation far outside the bounds of the Agency's charter. In many ways, those PR counteroffensives by the FBI and CIA would last for decades, and some writers make the case that they continue even today.
Also hindering the 1966 and early 1967 investigations by mainstream news organizations was the JFK murder probe begun in late 1966 by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (portrayed by Kevin Costner in the film JFK). Though Garrison first focused on Carlos Marcello's pilot and investigator in 1963 — David Ferrie — Marcello's name never publicly surfaced in Garrison's probe. FBI files show that Garrison came close to publicly naming Marcello twice but never did.
After Ferrie's sudden death early in Garrison's investigation, the District Attorney took his inquiry far from the Mafia, and it soon became a media circus. None of the hundreds of articles in the mainstream press about it mentioned Ferrie's work for Marcello in 1963 or raised the possibility of Mafia involvement in the assassination.
By mid-1967 the mainstream media had ended serious investigations of JFK's assassination and had become highly critical of Garrison. Mainstream journalists didn't resume writing about the assassination until late 1974 and early 1975, in the aftermath of Watergate investigations, when the first widespread reports emerged about CIA–Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro in the early 1960s emerged. Those revelations spawned new investigations such as the Rockefeller Commission and the Senate Church Committee, which eventually added a JFK assassination subcommittee that included Senator Gary Hart. In the summer of 1975, the mob stymied those investigations by murdering two key figures in the CIA–Mafia plots — Rosselli's former boss Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa — before they could testify. The investigations were also hindered by the massive amount of relevant information withheld by the FBI and CIA. When Johnny Rosselli, who was central to the CIA–Mafia plots, was gruesomely murdered the following year, the resulting media firestorm led to the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The House Committee also found itself thwarted by a spate of sudden deaths of mob-connected potential witnesses — some murders, some suicides, some (such as Martino and Morales) by natural causes — and the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence withheld even more relevant information. In the case of both the House Select Committee and the Church Committee, the CIA assigned as its Committee liaison an Agency veteran of the 1963 anti-Castro plotting who actually should have been called as a witness.
Still, due to books such as Dan Moldea's The Hoffa Wars and the House Select Committee's investigation, the press finally linked Marcello and Trafficante to JFK's assassination. Surprisingly, only in the late 1970s did Jack Ruby first become widely identified in the press as a mobster, even though some journalists had known of his mob ties for years. After the House Committee ended with its 1979 conclusion of conspiracy, more books and lengthy mainstream articles with evidence of conspiracy followed, including works by former Senate and House investigator Gaeton Fonzi and former FBI agent William Turner, who had been the first agent to publicly confront J. Edgar Hoover. Both men gave me important, early assistance when I began researching JFK's murder in the late 1980s.
In 1985 the FBI finally obtained Carlos Marcello's confession to JFK's assassination, including details of how it was carried out and the godfather's meetings with Oswald and Ruby. Yet none of that information was released to the public at the time or during the intense media coverage of the twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK's murder in November 1988 — and in fact it wouldn't reach the public for years. Nonetheless, mainstream documentaries and articles casting suspicion on Marcello and the Mafia appeared at the time.
Oliver Stone left the Mafia — including the extensive work that David Ferrie (memorably played in the film by Joe Pesci) performed for Carlos Marcello in 1963 — almost completely out of his 1991 film JFK. Still, it was superior filmmaking, using many documented facts, except for some of the remarks by District Attorney Jim Garrison (an associate of Marcello's brother Joe) and all of the remarks by the fictional character "Mr. X."*
However, the popularity and cultural impact of Stone's film did lead directly to passage of the 1992 JFK Records Act, designed to release all of the JFK assassination records. It took three years for the first releases to begin, and in the meantime, Gerald Posner's 1993 Case Closed was part of a well-orchestrated media campaign to push back against the views of JFK and the conspiracy books by Mark Lane and others that had become best sellers in its wake. Posner was criticized for presenting essentially a one-sided case against Oswald in championing the Warren Report's "lone nut/single bullet" theory. (It would take seventeen years for Posner to issue a 2010 news release admitting "... I've always believed that had Mark Lane represented Oswald, he would have won an acquittal.") Similar criticisms were leveled fourteen years later against Vincent Bugliosi's massive Reclaiming History, which — far from being an objective account — grew out of Bugliosi's work as Oswald's prosecutor in a televised mock trial.
Even today, some authors continue to ignore the Mafia's confessed role in JFK's murder, the findings of the House Select Committee, and the new file releases. That's true for Bill O'Reilly's Killing Kennedy, which basically accepts the Warren Report's conclusion, and for Brian Latell's 2012 Castro's Secrets. Latell, who admits his work for the CIA's Cold War against Cuba goes back to the 1960s, also implies that Fidel Castro's government was somehow linked to JFK's assassination, something CIA personnel have been unsuccessfully claiming for decades.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Lamar Waldron.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PREFACE,
1: Evidence of Conspiracy,
2: "Single Bullet Theory" Demolished and a New Look at Oswald,
3: A Mafia Godfather Confesses,
4: Carlos Marcello's Rise to Power,
5: Marcello, Cuba, and Jack Ruby,
6: CIA vs. Castro, and The Kennedys vs. Carlos Marcello,
7: Marcello and Trafficante: planning JFK's Murder,
8: Marcello Meets with Ruby and Oswald,
9: Marcello and Trafficante Infiltrate JFK's Secret Cuba Plan,
10: Plans To Assassinate Fidel Castro and President Kennedy,
11: Oswald in New Orleans, Dallas, and Mexico City,
12: Carlos Marcello and the Hit Men for JFK's Murder,
13: Targeting JFK in Chicago and Tampa in November 1963,
14: JFK Is Assassinated in Dallas,
15: Officer Tippet Is Killed and Problems Arise for Marcello,
16: Another Mafia Murder in Dallas,
17: Secret Investigations and Getting Away With Murder,
18: Mafia Murders, Confessions, and a Million Files Still Secret,
SELECTED GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS,
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
INDEX,
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