The JFK Assassination: 51 Years of Lies, Deceit, and Cover-up

Written by: Alek Hidell

This November 22 marks the 51^st anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination. This time of year has become a treasure trove of Kennedy related TV shows and news articles all asking the same questions. Was Kennedy assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist and disgruntled ex-marine or by a complex conspiracy involving the CIA, the Mafia and high ranking government officials? The government has had several inquiries and conclusions drawn on the Kennedy assassination. The first was the Warren Commission’s Report which found that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated the President alone; a lone assassin. The House Committee on Assassinations in the 70’s, however, found that President Kennedy was most likely assassinated as the result of a conspiracy.  Two official positions have been put forth by the government and still hold to this day.

Kennedy is said to be the most charismatic & charming President who ever lived in the history of the USA and – probably –  the world

The purpose of this article is not to lay out what happened in Dallas on that mournful day in November 1962.  The purpose of this article is to lay out some of what happened after.  I have been a student of the JFK assassination for the better part of three years.  I even publish my articles under the name Alek Hidell, the name allegedly used by Oswald to order the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository. The one thing I have gleamed from studying the Kennedy assassination is that if there was ever a breakdown in the fabric of the matrix, this is it.  I could not begin to summarize the sheer volume of material on the assassination, much of it superfluous but much of it vital to understanding what really happened.  This case has expert witnesses on both sides, and guess what? Both sides appear to have evidence that points to conspiracy and lone gunman theories. There are pieces of evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald that are very incriminating. His signature on the back of one of the infamous backyard photos, which shows Oswald holding the rifle and pistol he ordered by mail, is just one of many.  Experts on both sides have what they deem to be evidence that the photos are either real or fake, depending on who you ask.  This is just one of many examples of how individual pieces of this puzzle are scrutinized and can be used to view the assassination from either point of view.

We will probably never know the specifics of what happened in Dealey Plaza. It truly becomes a waste of time going over what happened at the scene as we have already squeezed it for every last bit of information.  The best hope we have for uncovering the truth is to study the cover up.  Yes, there was a cover up.  When people think of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, they tend to forget that there was a second conspiracy to cover up the true facts of the assassination.  Why would there be a need for a cover up if Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin? That is the ultimate question, isn’t it? Much of the information I will present here is the result of decades of hard work by Doug Horne.  Horne was the senior analyst of Military records for the Assassination Records Review Board from 1995 through 1998.  He summed up his work in a 2009 book entitled “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.” Thankfully Horne summed up his work in a series of videos called Altered History and can be found in my references.  Horne’s work focused on the medical and autopsy evidence as well as the Zapruter film, which Horne concluded were all altered to fit the lone gunman scenario.  Before I get to that I want to cover some background.

The Political Climate

Kennedy was elected president in 1960.  He moved into a political climate that was not friendly to the Kennedys, liberalism or the progressive beliefs he held.  To this day I feel that Kennedy was fifty years ahead of his time in ideology and societal understanding.  Eisenhower left office with a stern warning about the growth of the military industrial complex. This is the era that Kennedy inherited.  A progressive searching for peace in a world on the brink of another war.  Kennedy planned to withdraw the troops from Vietnam as is outlined in National Security Action Memorandum 263.  This memorandum would have effectively ended the Vietnam war before it began.  Kennedy was also hated by the establishment types for his failure to order air strikes at the Bay of Pigs.  The Bay of Pigs was a CIA operation which was meant to overthrow the Cuban government.  When Kennedy realized he was being manipulated by the CIA, he refused to order airstrikes and the invasion failed.  Afterward, JFK said that he would smash the CIA into a thousand pieces. This made Kennedy enemy number one to the intelligence community.  So now, Kennedy has neither the Joint Chiefs and the military on his side or the intelligence community.  Many suspect that Lyndon Johnson had a role in the assassination, and if anyone has studied Johnson, you already know that he had his own personal hit man, Malcolm Wallace.  I’m not saying that he was involved, but it is not outside the scope of his past behavior, as Johnson reportedly had his own sister killed.  Johnson and Kennedy were enemies and always had been.  Some say that Johnson manipulated his way onto the ticket by holding personal indiscretions over JFK’s head.  Once in office, Kennedy sent Johnson around the world as an ambassador of goodwill , so to speak, with little to no influence in government.  This enraged Johnson who didn’t want his career to end in the dead-end job of Vice President.  Kennedy’s only friend in Washington was his brother, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General.

The Patsy

Lee Harvey Oswald is an enigma of a figure.  When one follows his life, nothing seems to make sense or add up. A loner as a child, he would ride the subway system alone for hours in New York.  He gained an interest in Communism and while in the Marines, was called Oswaldovich by his fellow recruits. Angry at the system and America, he dropped out of the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. He returns to America, disappointed by his failures and he assassinated the President. That’s what happened right? Well that is the official story. Oswald is truly a mystery, even to Oswald researchers.  The debate goes on as to whether or not he was an operative of the CIA.  This one piece of information

is probably the biggest question still being asked.  The implications of Oswald having been handled by the intelligence community would be a devastating blow to the official story and the trust that the American people have in their government.  If the assassin of the president worked for the US government, how could we ever trust the government again? The government still has over a million pages of documents on the Kennedy assassination which are classified and unavailable to the public.  While I don’t believe these documents will shed any light on the assassination itself, I have no doubt that they do show a closer relationship between Oswald and the intelligence communities. Why would anyone believe that Oswald was a spy? Lets evaluate his behavior from the time of a child.  His brother attests that Lee loved the television show, I Led Three Lives, a show about a spy.  Lee loved the idea of being a spy.  He decides to join the Civil Air Patrol at age 15, where he meets David Ferrie.  Ferrie was an instructor to Oswald in the CAP and was also a known mafia and CIA pilot.  Ferrie’s involvement in the CIA and mafia are well documented.  It was right around the time he met David Ferrie that he began to take an interest in communism.  Something Ferrie sparked in Oswald? Ferrie was kicked out of the CAP for indoctrinating the young recruits into his ultra right wing philosophies.  Strange? You bet. Lee joins the Marines where he is given a Russian language test. He is then stationed at the CIA air base in  Atsugi Japan.  This was the government’s highest kept secret at the time, the U2 spy plane and the base from which they flew. Oswald, after openly preaching Marxism to fellow Marine’s, in a time when America persecuted communists, ends up at the CIA’s top secret base with a security clearance? Really?  Shortly after being stationed at Atsugi, Oswald gets a discharge from the Marines to take care of his sick mother, who wasn’t sick.  Only a few days after returning home, owning only $200 in his bank account, Oswald buys a $1500 ticket which takes him to England, France and Finland before landing in Russia.  Along the way, Oswald stayed in hotels which are the equivalent of the Ritz Carlton and had tour guides.  How did Oswald afford this? To this day no one knows. Years later, after telling the world he was going to divulge top secret information to the KGB, he is allowed to return to America, never questioned by the CIA, never brought up on treason charges, nothing.  Oswald strolls back into the country like nothing ever happened AND he brought a Russian born wife back with him.  Again, really? Strings were pulled for Oswald by someone.  No one knows who.  Once Oswald returns, he is seen with the likes of David Ferrie, his old CAP teacher, Guy Bannister, a former FBI and CIA man as well as Clay Shaw.  Shaw as you know was the subject of the film JFK by Oliver Stone. The trial of Clay Shaw by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison uncovered many of the intelligence community contacts held by Oswald.  The film also led to the JFK Records Review Board which was responsible for the release of millions of pages of documents. I could go on for days about Oswald and the inconsistencies in his life which point to the intelligence community, but in the interest of time I will save that for another day.  The bottom line is, there is more to Oswald than being the lone gunman disgruntled communist which he has been made out to be.  The deeper I got into studying the JFK assassination, the less relevant Oswald seemed at all.

The Medical Evidence

Immediately following the assassination, JFK was rushed to Parkland Hospital in Dallas.  At Parkland, every doctor, nurse and medical assistant who observed JFK stated on the record that they observed a large exit wound in the Occipital Parietal region in the back of the President’s skull. That is just above the bump on the back of the right side of the skull.  Dr. Charles Crenshaw stated that the hole was large enough for pieces of Kennedy’s cerebellum to fall out.  This is in stark contrast to the wounds described in the Warren Commission Report.  This is also corroborated by the skull fragment found in Dealey Plaza by Billy Harper, known as the Harper Fragment. The Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy was shot with a single bullet from the rear which fragmented upon impact and caused the large skull flap injury we have all come to know.  A shot from the rear does not explain an exit wound clearly observed by the entire medical staff at Parkland. Dr. Malcolm Perry was the attending physician who performed the  tracheotomy on JFK.   Dr. Perry reported his observations of the throat wound as a wound of entry, resulting in an approximately 5mm hole in the President’s throat.  The Warren Report indicated that this was a wound of exit, caused by the bullet that entered the President’s back.  The angle of exit was 11 degrees upward from the entrance of the bullet, which struck at the third thoracic vertebrae. The injuries documented in the Warren Commission Report do not correlate with the injuries observed by the doctors at Parkland Hospital.

After the brief scuffle between the Parkland doctors, Dallas Police and the Secret Service, the President’s body was loaded onto Air Force 1.  The removal of the body was illegal under Texas law.  Proper procedure would have been for local authorities to maintain custody of the body through autopsy, as this was a Dallas homicide, technically nothing more in the eyes of the law.  The body was transported in a bronze ceremonial casket. Once the body of the President was on board, history took a turn which most are unaware of.  This is where nearly 50 years of research and dedication by the JFK assassination research community paid off.  Getting back to the work of Doug Horne; Doug traced the transport of Kennedy’s body from Parkland to Bethesda and the truth he uncovered destroys the official story and everything we think we know about the Kennedy assassination.  The American people watched the President’s bronze ceremonial casket being removed from Air Force 1, what they didn’t know was that the casket was empty.  The President’s body had already been offloaded in a cheap military style shipping casket and driven to Bethesda Naval Hospital in a black Cadillac mortuary ambulance.  This information was elicited during interviews done by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). In 1997, the ARRB interviewed Dennis David and Donald Rebentisch. Both were enlisted Navy men.  Both testified under oath that they removed the President’s casket, a cheap aluminum shipping casket, from a black hearse style ambulance at approximately 1835 hours.  That’s 6:35pm, twenty minutes before the motorcade carrying the bronze casket arrived to Bethesda. This was corroborated by Roger Boyajian, a Marine whose barracks provided physical security for the autopsy.  Boyajian stated that the autopsy itself began at approximately 1845 hours, ten minutes before the motorcade arrived.  Why would there be a need to shuttle the President’s body twenty minutes early and to put on a dog and pony show for the cameras?  The doctors chosen to perform the autopsy were James Humes and Thornton Boswell.  Neither of them had ever performed a gunshot autopsy in their careers.  Neither of them controlled the autopsy.  They were commanded by Military personnel and were active participants in the cover up.  Now, why was the President transported to Bethesda before the motorcade? Sterilization of the crime scene.  In the time before the “official” autopsy started, Kennedy’s wounds were altered to eliminate any evidence of multiple gunmen.  When the doctors from Parkland reviewed the official autopsy photos, none of them had previously observed the injuries they were now shown.  The throat wound, which Dr. Perry described as a wound of entry, and through which he performed the tracheotomy, was now a gaping wound approximately 2-3 inches across.  Above the President’s right eye near the scalp was now a v shaped incision that went the length of the skull.  None of the parkland doctors recall that type of injury and indicated it appeared to be a “crude surgery.”  The gaping head wound in the rear of Kennedy’s skull was now missing from the photographs.  Dr Humes did not even know there was a bullet wound to the throat until after the autopsy was concluded and Dr. Perry informed him by phone.  The autopsy is one of the worst documented autopsies in history. Common autopsy procedures were not followed and areas that should have been investigated were ignored.  After the autopsy, there were four official autopsy reports made.  The first three stated that the wound in the President’s back was shallow and terminated but no bullet was found.  It was not until the three versions made their way through the hands of the military that the report was written a fourth time to indicate that the shallow back wound was actually a through and through that exited the President’s throat.  Besides altered wounds on the President, the majority of the photographs, bullet fragments and of course, the President’s brain have all disappeared.  The alteration of the medical evidence is the single biggest indicator of cover up.

The Zapruter Film

The Zapruter film is the most well known piece of home movie footage in history.  We have all seen it and know it.  What if the Z film you thought you knew was an alteration?  I personally doubted the Z film was altered until I watch Doug Horne’s interview with Dino Brugioni.  Brugioni was the number two guy at the CIA’s NPIC, the photo lab that handled and developed the CIA’s most sensitive photos.  Much of his work was done on the U2 spy plane images over Russia.  Brugioni was presented with a split 8mm copy of the Z film with sprocket holes on only one side.  This is important as the type of film used by Zapruter was a double 8, which has two rows of opposing frames.  In order to develop the film, it has to be slit down the center so a 25 foot 16mm film is now a 50 foot 8 mm film.  There were three copies of the Z film made on November 22, but only the original was a split double 8 roll.  Life Magazine, after making a deal with Zapruter, took custody of the original film and the copies on Saturday November 23, 1963.  According to the official story, the original film was held in the possession of Life Magazine in Chicago through the weekend.  We know now that this story is false.  Brugioni was called in that Saturday night where he observed the original unedited Z film and proceeded to make poster boards for presentation of several frames.  He describes the poster boards as being approximately 21 by 24 inches and hinged together.  These are not the poster boards of the Z film that are currently held by the National Archives.  During the interview, Brugioni stated in regards to the Z film he observed, you could see Kennedy’s limo turn onto Elm St.  This portion of the film which has been removed from the known Z film.  The next discrepancy for Brugioni was the explosive head shot at frame 313.  Brugioni’s description of the explosion was that it lasted much longer than only 1 frame and shot much higher into the air.  When Brugioni looked at the poster boards which are now in the National Archives, he stated that those were not the boards made by him and gave specific details.  What Brugioni didn’t know was that the second set of boards were created the next day, Sunday November 24, by his colleagues at NPIC, Ben Hunter and Homer McMahon.  Brugioni was intentionally kept in the dark as to the work of Hunter and McMahon on the poster boards just as Hunter and McMahon were kept out of the loop as far as Brugioni’s work.  All parties were commanded to not discuss their work, even with their commanding officers.  Who gave this order? The Secret Service, specifically Agent Bill Smith.  At NPIC, the only person who was in on the creation of both sets of poster boards was Brugioni’s boss, Arthur Lundahl, a key figure in the cover up.  One has to ask, how did the Secret Service get the original Z film and how did they get Life Magazine to go along with it? Easy. CD Jackson, the publisher of Life Magazine was a former OSS operative, Assistant to President Eisenhower and a life long CIA man.  He personally took part in Operation Mockingbird, which was the CIA’s operation meant to influence the media. When Life Magazine purchased the Z film, it was actually being purchased by the CIA.   Horne has enlisted the help of numerous Hollywood film producers to analyze the known Z film. While his results have not yet been published, Horne indicated that crude painting had in fact occurred on the frames showing Kennedy’s head after the fatal shot. The painting was meant to cover the rear of the head where the Parkland Hospital doctors observed the massive exit wound.  The Zapruter Film Mystery, listed in the references contains the complete interview with Dino Brugioni.  Horne’s work on both the medical evidence and the alteration of the Zapruter Film have brought new life to the JFK assassination investigation.

Trying to sum up the details of the JFK assassination is no simple task.  Some have dedicated their lives to solving this mystery and we are closer now than ever.  Will we ever know who pulled the trigger? Probably not, but one thing I think I can say assuredly is that Oswald, most likely, did not.  When one analyzes the alteration of the medical evidence and the Z film, how does Oswald fit into that? Like I said earlier, when you dig into the details, Oswald starts to seem irrelevant.  If Oswald shot the President, why the need for cover up? When asking if there was a conspiracy to kill the President, one has to ask why, if everything truly is as reported to the American people, why is there a need for cover up?  To draw the conclusion that there was a conspiracy to cover up the facts of the assassination, one has to conclude that there was a conspiracy to kill the President.  Hopefully, with the help of researchers like Doug Horne, we will continue to fill in the blanks and come to understand what really happened in Dallas on that fateful day in November.

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Sources:

Doug Horne’s Altered History – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrVyOYsx81k

NSAM 263 – http://worldhistoryproject.org/1963/10/11/president-kennedy-issues-nsam-263-ordering-the-withdrawl-of-1-000-military-personnel-from-vietnam-by-the-end-of-1963

Doug Horne Essay – http://assassinationofjfk.net/the-af1-tapes-and-subsequent-events-at-andrews-afb-on-november-22-1963-what-was-supposed-to-happen-vs-what-did-happen/

Humes and Bowell – http://www.jfklancer.com/HumesBos.html

Bullet Wounds – http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/factoid5.htm

The Zapruter Film Mystery – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_QIuu6hsAc

Operation Mockingbird – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird