Kennedy’s files and the theories galore
WASHINGTON: Who was behind President John F Kennedy’s assassination, which stunned the world on November 22, 1963? Thousands of files newly released from the investigation shows there was no shortage of theories at the time, and the FBI and CIA doggedly chased all of them-while finding themselves the target of suspicion as well. The files show all arms of the US government following up each rumor and suspicion, taking them to a rightwing militia’s shooting camp, probing both Nazis and communists, and tracking down New Orleans nightclub strippers named “Candy Cane” and “Kitty DeVille.”
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR-the predecessor of modern-day Russia-was the first suspect. Documents showed shooter Lee Harvey Oswald’s contact with “a member of the Soviet KGB Assassination Department” at the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September and October 1963 drew much of the attention, immediately after Kennedy was killed.
A US intelligence report issued days after the assassination shows the White House learned quickly that Moscow believed Oswald to be a “neurotic maniac” serving a right-wing conspiracy trying to poison US-Soviet relations. That did not assuage all suspicions, however, even as Moscow continued to press that view. An intelligence report said that in Cairo on May 24, 1964, Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev made the case to celebrated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, who was influential across Washington and whose wife had family connections to the CIA.
Khrushchev told Pearson he could not believe the simple story that both Oswald and Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who fatally shot him, had acted alone. “He did not believe that the American security services were this inept,” according to a CIA report of the discussion. Pearson “got the impression that Chairman Khrushchev had some dark thoughts about the American right-wing being behind this conspiracy” and rejected all arguments to the contrary.
Johnson’s bizarre theory
The CIA itself was suspect. According to a memorandum written in 1975, rumors that gunman Oswald worked for the spy agency erupted within days of the assassination. Indeed, CIA documents have shown the agency was aware of Oswald. By November 27, 1963, the agency felt the necessity to conduct its own internal probe. In the memorandum, counterintelligence chief Paul Hartman says he combed the CIA’s records, its branch offices and outposts, station chiefs and covert operations, and came up with nothing, as he reported to the agency directors a week later. “The results showed that Lee Harvey Oswald had never had any connection whatsoever with the agency,” the memo read. But the memorandum also showed that suspicions had not died by the mid-70s. It notes CBS television was preparing a story on the CIAOswald connection. Richard Helms, deputy director and then director of the CIA from 1962 to 1973, was broadsided by constant conspiracy talk.
In a previously classified 1975 deposition to the Rockefeller Commission, which investigated the CIA’s assassinations of foreign leaders, Helms said that even Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy as president, was given to bizarre theories. —AFP