Today is the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy

Was It Oswald Alone Or Not?

We have done a number of stories through the years on the Kennedy assassination: whether or not it was a conspiracy, focusing on rumors of CIA and military involvement and reports (now established fact) of a mind-control program called MK-ULTRA.

All these years later, there still (not to be cute about it) is no “smoking gun.”

Yes, there is a mountain of data indicating some kind of a conspiracy.

Perhaps the most well-documented book on this topic was JFK and the Unspeakable, the author of which is a Catholic scholar and theologian named James W. Douglass. It tallied amazing facts we’d never heard before.

“Unspeakable evil” is an expression he took from the famed monk Thomas Merton, who once penned a letter to Kennedy that is woven throughout the book.

But most of this tome focused on the assassination — and conspiracy. Among the marshaled facts: details on how the CIA allegedly planned first to kill Kennedy in Washington D.C., then, when that fell through, in Chicago — with a different assassin but, as in Dallas, from a warehouse window overseeing the motorcade route. (Ninety-six pages of footnotes does this tome have. You can check out a previous article here).

Recently, however — and this spurs our flashback — has come a particular item of news. It ran last week and states: “On April 10, 1963, just seven months before he shot and killed President John F. Kennedy, the inscrutable assassin Lee Harvey Oswald crouched behind a fence in an upscale Dallas neighborhood and aimed his rifle at the window of an ultra-conservative firebrand named Edwin Walker, a former U.S. Army general [our emphasis].

“Oswald fired, but the bullet caromed off the windowsill and missed Walker’s head by an inch.

“The Dallas Police Department’s investigation came up cold and Oswald, already flagged by the FBI, evaded further scrutiny.

“The weapon that Oswald fired at Walker—a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle bought under a false name—was the very same that would take President Kennedy’s life on November 22 of that same year.”

This we had not heard before.

And if true, it seems to argue in favor of a lone fanatic.

Is that now the case? Was Oswald indeed a freelancer looking for trouble — or is this “new” angle a set-up by the CIA to do exactly what it leads one to initially conclude: that Oswald indeed acted alone?

It comes to the fore via the History Channel. Perhaps we simply missed it previously.

But if so, why was it not emphasized for years? Does it not bear stunning implications in the endless disputes about the assassination?

We’ll leave all channels open for now.

As for the Douglass book: it had been lauded by the likes of Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Professor Richard Falk of Princeton University, and Mark Lewis Taylor of Princeton Theological Seminary.

And the answer to questions of a conspiracy, argued Douglass very persuasively, in very detailed fashion, was and is yes: JFK was slain by a cadre of American intelligence and military operatives.

The Catholic writer-theologian focuses on the moves in foreign policy by Kennedy, which many military leaders — as well as the Central Intelligence Agency — not only disagreed with but interpreted as dangerous and highly threatening to their branches of government.

Indeed, Douglass recounts how, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco (whereby C.I.A. operatives were caught red-handed trying to provoke an all-out conflict with Cuba), Kennedy threatened to splinter the C.I.A. “into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. ”

“In his short presidency, Kennedy began to take steps to deal with the C.I.A.,” writes Douglass. “He tried to redefine the C.I.A.’s mandate and to reduce its power in his National Security Actions memoranda 55 and 57, which took military-type operations out of the hands of the C.I.A. President Kennedy then asked the three principal C.I.A. planners for the Bay of Pigs to resign: Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Richard Bissell, Jr., and Deputy Director General Charles Cabell.” (After the assassination, Dulles was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to serve on the Warren Commission.)

JFK also moved quietly to cut the C.I.A. budget in 1962 and again in 1963, aiming at a twenty percent reduction. The “splintering” had begun. And the surreptitious foreign operations of the C.I.A., especially in Viet Nam and Cuba (where it had a special team called Alpha 66), were in great jeopardy.

Incredibly and inexplicably, as Douglass details at length, Oswald once worked at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan, a super-secret base of operations for the C.I.A., with the express purpose, according to former C.I.A. financial officer Jim Wilcott, of “becoming a double agent assignment to the U.S.S.R.”

These are only some of the aspects documented by Douglass.

According to the author, as another example, when Lee Harvey Oswald returned to the U.S. on June 13, 1962, after his supposed “defection” to the Soviet Union, he was met at U.S. Customs not with arrest and prosecution, but by Spas T. Raikin, a representative of the Travelers’ Aid Society. He was granted a passport almost immediately.

Raikin at the time was secretary-general of an anti-Communist organization with extensive intelligence connections — an unlikely source of support for Oswald, who supposedly had been a traitor. Or had he been a C.I.A. plant?

Douglass also reports that there had been an assassination program attached to Cuba and known as “ZR/RIFLE” that used documents to falsely link it with Soviets or Czechs.

In addition, when, in the summer of the same year, the Oswalds settled in Fort Worth, Texas, they were immediately befriended by a man named George de Mohrenschildt, who had traveled around the world as a geologist, consulting for Texas oil companies and doubling as an intelligence “asset.”

Again, see the complete synopsis in our previous article. And here’s another article, on the link between the assassination of brother Bobby and a secret mind-control project operated by the CIA.

Food for prayer and thought this week when JFK’s rise and demise are endlessly and inconclusively recollected.