JFK Assassination

THE 40th anniversary of one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century was marked on November 22, 2003 – with the mystery, frustratingly, no closer to being solved. Despite the welter of conspiracy theories that have attached themselves to the assassination in Dallas, Texas, of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, only one fact is now known for certain – that his death was indeed the result of a conspiracy. Pending some startling new revelation surrounding the events of that tragic day in Dallas, or the release of more US intelligence agencies’ records, we can only speculate as to who was behind the conspiracy. Theories range from the highly plausible to the utterly bizarre.

This eBook examines the main theories from both these genres. It also examines the circumstances that prove the president’s assassination was a conspiracy – the work of more than one hand. Crucial to proving this is the evidence from a piece of film only 26 seconds in duration – the legendary footage shot by Abraham Zapruder and which has only recently been digitally enhanced.

It was because of dissatisfaction with the abilities of the Dallas police department to carry out a proper investigation into the events surrounding the death of his predecessor and the subsequent execution of prime suspect Lee Harvey Oswald by nightclub owner and Mafia odd-job man, Jack Ruby, that President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the setting up of the Warren Commission.

The commission duly reported that the assassination of the president had simply been the work of the deluded former US Marine and Communist sympathiser Lee Harvey Oswald. But in reaching this simplistic conclusion the commission had ignored the testimony of a huge range of witnesses – witnesses not only to the shooting but also to crucial events both before and after the shooting. It would appear the commission chose to ignore testimony that did not fit its already preconceived version of the record of events. The fatally flawed Warren Commission official report begged as many questions as it answered.

Independent investigators had pointed to numerous inconsistencies in this official version of events. It was their dogged persistence that eventually led to another investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The three-year investigation concluded in 1979 that there probably had been a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. No conclusion was reached, however, on who may have been behind the conspiracy. Thirteen years later, in 1992, the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Act was passed by Congress – ironically because of public pressure following the release of the Oliver Stone movie, JFK, itself a veritable hotchpotch of conspiracy theories. Despite the subsequent release to researchers of hundreds of pages of documentation relating to the assassination, thousands more – mainly in the form of both CIA and FBI records – remain hidden. It is unclear if these remain secret to cover up complicity, incompetence, or a combination of both.

If there was a conspiracy, who was responsible? Who would have been able to plan, fund and – literally – execute such a complex operation? We can only speculate – but speculate to a reasonable degree of probability. Was it the Mafia? The American intelligence community? The Soviets? Disgruntled US right-wingers? Cubans in the pay of Castro? Cubans who were both anti-Kennedy and anti-Castro? A combination of some, or all, of these groups? We will examine their possible role in our section ‘In The Frame’, after we examine what is known about the events in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963 and the evidence from the Zapruder film and other sources that the Warren Commission chose