Killing Kennedys: Back and to the Left
In 1963 America, no city was more sympathetic to the shooting death of a hip, young, liberal fornicator than Dallas. Several days before Kennedy’s assassination, General Edwin Walker’s organization printed and distributed 5,000 of these fliers accusing JFK of treason. Poor timing that set the stage for America’s most brutal and shocking political act.
So widespread and universal was the redhot, redneck climate of this politicalyptic Jim Crow hellscape, that in the moments and days after the president’s gruesome murder, police switchboard operators claimed to receive thousands of calls from sobbing housewives. Each convinced their own husbands had gleefully pulled the trigger.
To the rest of America, the whole sneering city was complicit. And rebranding efforts would take years. Well into the 90s, public figures close to the Kennedys refused to cooperate in rehabilitating the city’s trashed image.
Thus it was on the day of JFK’s execution. When the Dallas Morning News published this full page advertisement. An early foray into astroturfing, the newspaper attributed the ad to the American Fact-Finding Committee. A hitherto unknown and unheard-of organization.
John Birch
But everyone in Dallas knew it was just another name for the John Birch Society. And back then, especially in the deep dirty south, everyone who was anyone was a Bircher. Famous members included hollywood action hero John Wayne, titan of industry Fred Koch, oil baron H.L. Hunt, and America’s first, original televangelist: anti-everything/believe-anything baptist Billy James Hargis.
They waged war on civil rights by conflating local, homegrown movements with international communism. Justifying vicious attacks on blacks and hippies by claiming activists were agents of a global conspiracy.
Uniting the worst of the worst from all the ultraconservative, paramilitary, racist, white trash, nationalist groups of the day, it was a who’s who allstar cast of Ku Klux Klan, Citizens’ Councils, and state militias.
John Birch was the basket of deplorables supergroup. A safe space for hicks to get together and reminisce about the good ole days of beating their niggers and wives. They’re still around too, but thoroughly discredited and relegated to fringe status.
No other organization then or since better represents the toxic confluence of corrosive, radical rightwing political, military, and business interests that happily looked the other way when faceless assassins killed Kennedy. To escalate the arms race and Vietnam, stop civil rights, and defend the oil depletion allowance.
Collaborators
But it haunted many of them; redhanded conspirators and accessories alike. Though perhaps not directly involved, many on the killing’s periphery indubitably benefited thereby. Subsequent presidents LBJ and Nixon both later went crazy primarily because of it.
And it’s not farfetched. Tricky Dick’s darkest days in the White House — preserved on Watergate tapes — feature strange, sinister mutterings about picking at scabs that would expose “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.” But by that point in 1972, not much about the Bay of Pigs was any longer a secret.
Operation 40, Alpha 66, and their multifarious connections to the JFK assassination plot however still were. And surviving members of those covert ops hated leaks. While killing Kennedy was a matter of great pride for many of them, most understood the importance of keeping it a secret.
But others openly celebrated. Big oil billionaire and Texas Schoolbook Depository owner D.H. Byrd went on safari. Waited a respectable six weeks after the hit. And then ordered employees to uninstall and relocate Oswald’s alleged sixth floor window sniper’s nest to the dining room of his mansion in an exclusive Dallas suburb.
Where he decorated it with assassination headlines and anti-Kennedy graffiti reveling in the killings of both brothers. Mounted the window up on his wall alongside other hunting trophies. Then laughed about it with drunk, racist, hillbilly friends until the day he died.
And the official story doesn’t even mention this guy.
At least three shooters
November 22, 1963. Half past noon. Concealed marksmen line the hated president up in the crosshairs as his car creeps slowly into their sights. Planners have meticulously designed the motorcade route to accommodate this exact location. Crawling out of a sharp 120-degree turn into a wide open space with Dallas’ smallest crowd and a dozen good sniper’s nests.
It defies logic that the Secret Service approved this outrageous scenario. In an open convertible limousine. Driving a mere five miles per hour. Windows open everywhere. Little prepositioned police presence in Dealey Plaza. No Secret Service agents assigned onsite; only those in the motorcade. The hapless president obliviously approaches a lethal confluence of events.
He’s a sitting duck cut off in the remote heart of deep Texas. The shooters have him right where they want him. Each has only moments. Some longer than others; depending on position. There are at least three. They might know where the others are, but certainly don’t know who the others are.
Planners
These longtime special operators have had compartmentalized contact with one cutout. A World War II-era Joint Chiefs of Staff specops planner each has known independently since OSS operations together 20 years earlier.
Pillars of society like Allen Dulles, Cord Meyer, Ed Lansdale, Howard Hunt, Frank Wisner, William Bishop, Tracy Barnes, Dick Billings, David Phillips, Desmond Fitzgerald, George Joannides, William Pawley, Thomas Clines, and George Bush operationalized antileftist jobs like this in many other countries. Most notably Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, and Brazil.
So it’s nothing new. All in a day’s work.
And it’s naive to think misplaced patriotism might prevent them from redirecting and weaponizing this raging rightwing regime change machine against their own backyard. In many ways, pulling off something like this in a place like Texas will be easier than doing it overseas.
Because it’s full of family friends, war buddies, business connections, and frat brothers they’ve been innocuously and unrelatedly developing into assets for most of their lives. Networking and socializing with them since childhood, many favors and obligations are due.
Bay of Pigs
As the car comes into view, the snipers exhale slowly. Then one by one open fire. Competing to be the first to blow the president’s brains out and win the largest share of the contract. They’ve shot men in the face before. Watched heads explode through rifle scopes.
So it’s no big deal. Just part of the job.
Most importantly, they’re motivated. Not just by money, but revenge. Two years earlier in 1961, JFK refused to commit U.S. air and seapower to support the Bay of Pigs invasion he inherited from his old White House predecessors.
Communists shot their friends to pieces on a desolate beach. Eisenhower, Nixon, and Dulles promised that Kennedy would relent and send in the navy. But the new president stood firm against his generals. And did nothing to further provoke the Cubans or Soviets.
This inaction was a death warrant. And young JFK just piled it on after the failed invasion. In the ensuing fallout, an unidentified aide told the New York Times that the president had said he’d like to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”
Heaping enmity onto scorn, Kennedy fired both CIA Director Dulles and his deputy — Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell’s older brother General Charles Cabell. Coalescing and solidifying the comeuppance so many thought he deserved.
There was an army of idle, paramilitary fascists thinking dark thoughts like these in Miami. And 13 days before Dallas, Miami police surreptitiously record a KKK John Bircher from Georgia named Joseph Milteer describing exactly what would happen according to the official assassination narrative.
“It’s in the workings…From an office building with a high-powered rifle.”
“They’ll pick up somebody within hours, if anything like that would happen. Just to throw people off.”
Both cities are full of these boastful, menacing meatheads. Longing to gun down some fucking commies and civil rights activists. Like hunting or slave dogs poised at the edge of a field — erect and enthusiastic.
Commandos
Hoping to sic something. Eager to kill. Sniffing around for shit and blood. And after the assassination, dozens of these macho Cuba libres brag about their own roles — or their friends’ roles — in proudly pulling the trigger.
American trainers like Gerry Hemmings, Douglas Dewitt Bazata, Tony Poe, Lucien Conein, Rip Robertson, Grayston Lynch, Gerry Droller, or Jake Esterline. And boastful, bloodthirsty anti-Castro Cubans recruited by Ted Shackley and William Harvey for 1961's botched Bay of Pigs. Still smarting from and humiliated by JFK’s betrayal of their counter-revolution.
Like the guy who boasts to this day that he killed Che Guevara and still shows off the watch he claims to have scavenged from his corpse: Felix Rodriguez. A man also on a first name basis with almost every president and CIA director since Kennedy.
Or the man revered by School of the Americas contemporaries as the western hemisphere’s deadliest assassin: David Sanchez Morales. Who was also CIA’s Bay of Pigs recruitment drive deputy during 1960’s Operation J/M Wave in Miami.
10 years later in 1973, Morales loses his cool while drinking with friends. And starts making damning comments like: “I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.”
In 2006, Irish documentarian Shane O’Sullivan identifies him videographically at the scene of Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 LA assassination. Along with a CIA contractor named Gordon Campbell whose death certificate is conveniently dated 1962, and the aforementioned George Joannides. All three of J/M Wave and the Bay of Pigs.
Many professional killers like these were personally invested in righting Bay of Pigs wrongs. And while elite U.S. commandos flown in to Dallas from black sites in Vietnam or Laos might hesitate to pull the trigger once they see their own democratically elected leader in the scope, radicalized, failed, and disgruntled counter-revolutionary Cubans with the same skill set won’t.
They are also all driven by rational, broadly shared hatred of the target. When JFK’s World War II biopic PT-109 plays in Georgia, theaters advertise the film with this magnanimous line: “See the Japs almost get JFK!”
Bay of Pigs planners have promised their army of invasion, counter-revolution, and regime change an eventual payback opportunity for the last two years. And operators have been eagerly anticipating this moment.
One of them has gone so far and low as to wait in the sewer with a high-powered handgun primarily used for competitions and varmint hunting. It’s a compact, low-recoil weapon designed to hit small, fast-moving targets. And the grim commando wielding it is utterly concealed from the crowd.
When he pulls the trigger, there will quite literally be no witnesses.
Killing Kennedys: Collaboration Theory
Part one: Back and to the Left
Part two: Front and from the Right
Part three: Deep State
Part four: Dark Politics
Part five: Secret Team
Part six: Fall Guy
Part seven coming soon: Fourth Reich
Part eight coming eventually: Counting on Disbelief
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