Permindex

L. Fletcher Prouty, a U.S. military intelligence officer and historian, claimed that the JFK assassination was a coup d’état carried out by the intelligence and military communities to stop the Kennedy from taking control of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs, and that it was orchestrated by his old boss, ASC member General Edward Lansdale (1908 – 1987).[1] Lansdale was a United States Air Force officer who served in the OSS and the CIA. Several novelists, including Graham Greene, based obsessive or pathological characters pushing the American Way on Lansdale.[2] When Allen Dulles sent Lansdale to Vietnam in 1954, he told Eisenhower he was sending one of his “best men.”[3]

During the war, Lansdale had worked in the Philippines with Shickshinny Knight and ASC member and General MacArthur’s right-hand man, General Charles Willoughby. John Bevilaqua, author of JFK – The Final Solution, has argued that Wickliffe Draper, the founder of the Pioneer Fund and his associate, Anastase Vonsiatsky, head of both the OSJ and the Shickshinny Knights of Malta in America, might have been involved with Willoughby, James Jesus Angleton, John Birch Society member Robert J. Morris, racist clergyman Gerald L.K. Smith and CIA officer and ASC founder Ray S. Cline, in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. According to Bevilaqua, the planning, financing and direction for the assassination was in all likelihood headed by Smith, with the complete knowledge of Willis A. Carto of the Liberty Lobby and all financed by Draper.

According to William Torbitt, the pseudonymous author of Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal (1970), Dallas oil tycoons H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison were the principal financiers of Permindex—a trade organization headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and a front organization for the CIA—which orchestrated the JFK assassination.[4] The president of Permindex was Prince Gutierez de Spadafora, a former Mussolini undersecretary, whose son had married the daughter of Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schact, whose niece Ilse von Finckenstein was married to Otto Skorzeny.[5] Clay Shaw, also a close friend of Schacht, was indicted by Jim Garrison, represented the United States on the board of directors of Permindex. In Destiny Betrayed, James DiEugenio writes that financial backing for Permindex came from J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation, founded by Nazi banker Baron Kurt von Schroeder, who had been associated with Heinrich Himmler. According DiEugenio, the bank “had been closely associated with Allen Dulles,” through his law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. Dulles eventually became the bank’s General Counsel.[6]

In 1967, the Italian left-wing newspaper Paese Sera published a story alleging that Shaw was linked to the CIA through his involvement in the Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), a subsidiary of Permindex and a known CIA front. CMC was connected as well to L.M. Bloomfield, and to the Seligman banking family in Basel, who were also allied with Sullivan and Cromwell. Bloomfield, a former major in the OSS with close ties to Mossad, ran Permindex’s North American headquarters in Montreal. Bloomfield also ties had to Edmund Rothschild and to Israel Continental Oil Company. Bloomfield also worked closely with Sam Bronfmann, the billionaire of the Seagrams empire and one of Mossad’s strongest links in North America.[7] Permindex’s holding company was Banque de Credit International (BCI) in Geneva, founded by Tibor Rosenbaum, Financial Director of Mossad.[8] The president of Permindex was former prime minister of Hungary, Ferenc Nagy, a longtime asset of CIA Deputy Director for Plans, Frank Wisner. Nagy’s partner in the leadership of Permindex was Giorgio Mantello, a.k.a. Georges Mandel, who during World War II had traded in Jewish refugees from his position at the consulate of El Salvador in Bern.[9] CIA documents declassified in 2017 revealed that Mandel was an Israeli intelligence Service (IIS) agent.[10]

As discovered by Michele Metta, author of CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK, Gershon Peres, brother of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, was also a CMC member. Shimon was also linked to Alberto Forte, managing Director of the Banque Belgo-Centrade, a subsidiary of SITB, the Swiss-Israel Trade Bank, a front of the Mossad, according to Israeli sources. SITB’s creator was Yehuda Assia, who was also behind the creation of the Negev Nuclear Research Center of Dimona, a role conferred by Shimon Peres. Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli former nuclear technician and peace activist who, citing his opposition to weapons of mass destruction, revealed details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986, and that Israel was complicit in the assassination of John F. Kennedy because of his opposition to the nuclear program at Dimona.[11]

According to Torbitt, the cabal also involved Roy Cohn, John Connally, Gordon Novel, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Jack Ruby, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Lee Harvey Oswald and Ruth and Michael Paine. According to Torbitt, the assassination was orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover’s Division Five, a department within the FBI, which acted in cooperation with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which was acting on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Through their Control Group, they supervised the Defense Industrial Security Command (CISC), which additionally serves NASA, the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Information Agency, the AEC, USIA, and the Pentagon. Division Five was headed by Bloomfield, a long time friend and confidant of Hoover, and involved the White Russian community known as Solidarists, led by Nagy and John DeMenil, Russian exile from Houston, Texas, and a close friend and supporter of Lyndon Johnson; a Cuban exile group called Free Cuba Committee headed by ex- Cuban President Carlos Prio Socarras; a network of American, Caribbean, and Cuban gamblers called the Syndicate headed by Clifford Jones, ex-Lieutenant Governor of Nevada of the Democratic National Committee, and Bobby Baker of Washington, DC who worked closely with a Mafia family headed by Joe Bonnano, and finally the Security Division of NASA, headed by ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun. Shaw,  von Braun and his former commander Walter Dornberger and others began a very close association with Reinhard Gehlen’s BND.[12]

City of Hate

Also working closely with Permindex was a section of the American Council of Christian Churches, a fundamentalist organization by H.L. Hunt. Along with H. Roy Cullen, John Birch Society members H.L. Hunt, Sid W. Richardson and Clint Murchison were the four most influential businessmen during the Texas oil boom, sometimes called the “gusher age,” during the early twentieth century, which some historians define as the beginning of the world’s “Oil Age.” The boom began with the discovery of a large petroleum reserve near Beaumont, Texas, unprecedented in its size, which ushered in an age of rapid regional development and industrialization that has few parallels in American history. Texas quickly became one of the leading oil-producing states, along with Oklahoma and California, and soon the United States overtook the Russian Empire as the top producer of petroleum.[13]

By 1924, the Dallas chapter of the Klan was the largest in the nation, including one out of every three eligible men in Dallas.[14] Dallas County voters placed Klan or Klan-supported candidates in control of the courthouse in 1922 and of City Hall in the following year. The State Fair of Texas officially designated October 23, 1923, as Ku Klux Klan Day. Two successive district attorneys were Klansmen, as were the sheriff, the police commissioner, the police chief, judges, and others. A close friend of H.L. Hunt, Lt. George Butler, the head of the Policeman’s Union in Dallas, was a member of the Klan. He once told Penn Jones Jr., a former Army colonel at Anxio and Texas liberal newspaper operator, that one half of the Dallas police force were Klansmen.[15] Four of the Klan’s Executive Committee of Ten and at least twenty of its Steering Committee of One Hundred were members of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.[16]

Large numbers of Klan members and their families belonged to the Baptist and Methodist churches, reported Nancy McLean.[17] The hub of the conspirators was the First Baptist Church of Dallas, which is considered influential among evangelical Christians in the United States. The church was organized on July 30, 1868, with eleven charter members on the first floor of the Masonic Hall, on Lamar Street near the intersection of Ross Avenue. According to Dr. James Holly, who commissioned the Southern Baptist Convention’s investigation into Freemasonry in 1993, there are between 500,000 and 1.3 million Southern Baptist Freemasons, with 14 percent of SBC pastors and 18 percent of deacons being Masons. The Scottish Rite Journal has claimed the allegiance of numerous well-known members. Every president of the Southern Baptist-run Baylor University since its founding has been a Mason.[18]

In 1944, Reverend W.A. Criswell, a Freemason, was called to replace fellow Mason George Washington Truett as the pastor of the church.[19] Truett had reflected a postmillennial approach to eschatological questions, whereas Criswell drew upon the theology of C.I. Scofield. Criswell was at first critical of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and of federal intervention against segregation. Criswell would spend the remainder of his life at First Baptist, preaching more than four thousand sermons from its pulpit. In his most famous sermon, “The Scarlet Thread,” first preached at the Dallas church in 1961, Criswell repeated the Curse of Ham theory as justification for segregation.[20]

Criswell was elected for two terms as president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1968 to 1970. During Criswell’s tenure membership grew from 7,800 to 26,000, with weekly Sunday School attendance in excess of 5,000. The church expanded to multiple buildings covering five blocks in downtown Dallas, eventually becoming the largest Southern Baptist church in the world. Supporters have described him as one of the twentieth century’s greatest preachers and the patriarch of the “Conservative Resurgence” within the SBC.[21] Beginning in 1960, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) experienced an intense struggle for control of the organization. Its initiators called it the Conservative Resurgence while its opponents labeled it the Fundamentalist Takeover. The movement was primarily aimed at reorienting the denomination away from its purported domination by “liberals,” and towards fundamentalism.[22]

Reverend Billy Graham, fellow Freemason and member of The Family, became a close friend of the Criswell family, and remained a member of the Dallas congregation for 55 years. Graham joined the First Baptist Church in Dallas in 1953. Sid Richardson, who was estimated the wealthiest man in America in the 1950s, was Graham’s most important backer, helping launch his career in Washington. When Richardson passed away, Graham presided over the funeral. Graham said of his longtime patron: “He was willing to go to any end to see that our American way of life was maintained.”[23] Most importantly, it was Richardson who introduced Graham to Eisenhower, thus cementing that relationship. Richardson was also on the board of directors of the Freedoms Foundation, along with backers of the Liberty League.[24]

H.L. Hunt was also a member of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, and was a major financial contributor toward the establishment of the conservative Christian evangelical Criswell College in Dallas, Texas, named after Criswell, its founder. At the time of his death, H.L. Hunt was reputed to have the highest net worth of any individual in the world. His personal life, which featured many children by three wives, was among the chief inspirations for the television series Dallas, whose most famous character J.R. Ewing was largely based on popular perceptions of Hunt. Hunt also funded two right-wing radio shows, which he used to support the anti-communist campaign of Joseph McCarthy. Through McCarthy, Hunt was introduced to Roy Cohn, who ended up working for him.[25] In his later years, General Willoughby published the Foreign Intelligence Digest newspaper, and worked closely with Hunt on the International Committee for the Defence of Christian Culture, an extreme right umbrella organization connected to the John Birch Society and the Minutemen.[26]

Criswell had helped Hunt convert after his second marriage and baptized Hunt and his new family. With considerable backing from H.L. Hunt, Criswell became one of the Southern Baptist Church’s most visible defenders of segregation.[27] Criswell was also a critic of the Kennedy administration, and argued in 1960 that electing a Catholic as president would “spell the death of a free church in a free state.”[28] Inspired by Criswell’s sermon, Hunt ordered 200,000 copies of it to be distributed to Protestant ministers all over American during the Democratic Convention.[29]

Criswell praised John Birch Society positions and railed against “the leftists, the liberals, the pinks, and the welfare statists who are soft on communism and easy towards Russia.”[30] Dallas had attracted a lot of extremist right-wing elements, such that it acquired the reputation of the “City of Hate.” That reputation was helped by the Dallas Morning News, a very right-wing, reactionary newspaper, published by Edward Musgrove Dealey, a rabid anti-communist and supporter of Senator McCarthy. According to retail magnate Stanley Marcus, the News was “opposed to social progress, the United Nations, the Democratic party, federal aid, welfare, and virtually anything except the Dallas Zoo.”[31] Edward Musgrove “Ted” Dealey, president of the Dallas Morning News, famously read a prepared statement that angered Kennedy at the White House, saying, “The general opinion of the grassroots thinking in this country is that you and your administration are weak sisters.”[32]

Dealey sympathized with the John Birch Society ideology, and engaged with General Edwin A. Walker, a member of the steering committee of the Liberty Lobby.[33] H.L. Hunt listed Walker among those Americans whom he admired, which included AFC founder Gen. Robert E. Wood; Shickshinny Knight Lt. General A.C. Wedemeyer, former chief of staff to Chiang Kaishek, once a member of the John Birch Society advisory committee; Robert H. W. Welch Jr., founder of the John Birch Society.[34] Hunt said he is not a member of the John Birch Society but that he believed Welch “knows a great deal about the Communist conspiracy.”[35]

Dallas was a national epicenter for the John Birch Society in early 1961, with an estimated 35 chapters. In 1961, Jim Lehrer a rising reporter for the Dallas Morning News observed that approximately seven hundred members of the group lived in Dallas, making it “one of the most flourishing, enthusiastic John Birch movements in the country.”[36] Walker was a major general in the US Army who had given up his appointment when he was accused of indoctrinating his troops with John Birch Society materials. David Talbot argues in his book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, that Walker’s indoctrination program was endorsed by ASC member General Lemnitzer. However, according to the Deguello Report, the true cause of Walker’s discharge was homosexual relationships with other men in and out of military service.[37]

Walker moved to Dallas and became an ultraconservative icon, though his latent homosexuality likely contributed to his downfall.[38] Walker had deep ties to the Klan. In 1964, he was the main speaker for Americans for the Preservation of the White Race in Brookhaven, Mississippi. A year later, in 1965, Walker turned down an offer from the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America for the position of Grand Dragon of the UKA of Texas.[39] Walker also decided to run for governor of Texas and enjoyed the support of H.L. Hunt. Walker’s later actions in opposition to racial integration at the University of Mississippi led to his arrest on insurrection, seditious conspiracy, and other charges. He was temporarily held in a mental institution on orders from Robert Kennedy, but a grand jury refused to indict him.[40]

Shortly after his resignation from the military, Edwin Walker began forging a friendship with fellow John Birch Society member Billy James Hargis. At the height of his popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, Hargis’ Christian Crusade ministry was broadcast on more than 500 radio stations and 250 television stations. He promoted segregation and conspiracy theories that the government, the media, and pop culture figures were promoting “communism” in the late 1960s. His subordinate, Rev. David Noebel, wrote the short work, Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, which he expanded into Rhythm, Riots and Revolution the following year. In 1963, Walker and Hargis teamed up for a speaking tour called their series Operation Midnight Ride, which according to Walker’s FBI files was sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan in both South Carolina and Arkansas.[41] Hargis and Walker preached against the evils of communism and invited popular right-wing speakers like General Charles Willoughby.

According to the Deguello Report, Walker and Hargis were having a homosexual affair. In 1974, when Hargis was nearly fifty, he was forced to resign as president of American Christian College because of allegations that he had seduced college students. Two of his students, one was female, one was male, claimed that they had had sexual relations with Hargis.[42] Likewise, Walker was arrested in 1976, for public lewdness in a restroom at a Dallas park, and was accused of fondling and propositioning a male undercover police officer.[43]

It was Walker who said of the President, “He is worse than a traitor. Kennedy has essentially exiled Americans to doom.”[44] More chillingly, General Walker’s troops had distributed thousands of handbills along the streets of Dallas, picturing Kennedy on a “wanted” poster with the message: “WANTED FOR TREASON.” On the morning of his assassination, on November 22, 1963, Kennedy read a full-page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News, that said, “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas,” placed by three John Birch Society members and which accused the president of communist sympathies. “How can people say such things,” Kennedy asked his wife. “We’re headed into nut country today.”[45]

Kosher Nostra

Sid Richardson was an original founding member of the ASC, which in the early 1960s was the leading public group advocating the use of military force against Castro. John Fisher, the president of the ASC, formed the Free Cuba Committee in 1963, along with fellow ASC members and retired chief of naval operations Raleigh Burke, and Clare Boothe Luce.[46] The Crusade to Free Cuba Committee had been founded in December 1961 by anti-Castro Cuban exile Sergio Arcacha Smith to raise funds and support for the CIA-backed Cuban Revolutionary Council—formerly known as the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front (FRD)—in New Orleans, a group that David Ferrie was reputedly “extremely active in,” and a group which maintained an office in the same building as Guy Banister.[47] In New Orleans, Delphine Roberts identified Permindex’s Ferenc Nagy from his photograph as someone she had seen at Guy Banister’s office.[48] The FRD’s military wing was called Brigade 2506, which fought in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

In 1959, immediately after Fidel Castro drove the dictator Batista out of Cuba, then Vice-President Richard Nixon established and chaired a Special Committee within the National Security Council for the purpose of carrying out a non-Congressionally authorized operation to mount a covert war against the new socialist government of Cuba, using expatriate right-wing Cubans who had been loyal to Batista. This secret operation was then code-named “Operation 40.” In late 1959, Nixon, with the direct participation and cooperation of CIA Director Allen Dulles, undertook the supervision of the recruiting of expatriate, right-wing Cubans who had fled from Cuba to Miami, Florida. Dulles assigned CIA Agent and former Marine Corps officer Carl Jenkins to supervise the training of these forces in guerilla warfare tactics in Florida and under the CIA-installed regime in Guatemala.[49]

Nixon secretly reached out to one Robert Maheu, the Chief of Staff and de facto Director of billionaire Howard Hughes’s financial empire. In early 1960, Nixon selected Robert Maheu, the Chief of Staff and de facto Director of billionaire Howard Hughes’s financial empire, to attend a secret meeting in Florida with two men representing Santo Trafficante, John Roselli and Sam Giancana.[50] According to their own documents, Giancana was “the chieftain of Cosa Nostra and the successor to Al Capone.”[51] Maheu told Roselli that he has been retained by international businesses suffering “heavy financial losses in Cuba as a result of Castro’s action.”[52]

Trafficante’s Havana casino, hotel and prostitution operation, which was run by Resorts International, had been driven out of Cuba, along with Trafficante’s business associate Batista in 1959. Trafficante was a close associate of Resorts International’s owner, Meyer Lansky, head of the Jewish Mafia, who was responsible for managing the finances of Lucky Luciano’s heroin smuggling empire. Lansky was also a close friend of Tibor Rosenbaum, Permindex fundraiser and Financial Director of Mossad. Rosenbaum and Lansky had used the BCI bank to hide and launder the Lansky’s illicit gains, just as he used BCI to finance Mossad’s overseas intelligence operations.[53] The largely Jewish-American and Italian-American gang known as Murder, Inc. and Jewish mobsters such as Meyer Lansky, Mickey Cohen, Harold “Hooky” Rothman, Dutch Schultz, and Bugsy Siegel developed close ties with and gained significant influence within the Italian-American Mafia, eventually forming a loosely organized, mostly Jewish and Italian criminal syndicate known in the press as the “National Crime Syndicate.” After a quarter century of widespread heroin abuse, the international medical community finally recognized the dangers of unrestricted heroin use, and the League of Nations began to regulate and reduce the legal manufacture of heroin. Due to the subsequent sharp decline in legal pharmaceutical supply of the drug, aggressive criminal syndicates shifted the center of world heroin production to clandestine laboratories in Shanghai and Tientsin, China. Owned and operated by a powerful Chinese secret society, these laboratories started to supply vast quantities of illegal heroin to corrupt Chinese warlords, European criminal syndicates, and American Mafiosi like Lucky Luciano. Almost all of the world’s heroin trade was financed and organized by one of the American Mafia’s twenty-four regional groups, or “families.”

The outbreak of World War II seriously disrupted international drug traffic. However, in The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Alfred W. McCoy noted, “Within several years, in large part thanks to the nature of U.S. foreign policy after World War II, the drug syndicates were back in business, the poppy fields in Southeast Asia started to expand and heroin refineries multiplied both in Marseille and Hong Kong.”[54] In 1946, American military intelligence released Luciano from prison and deported him to Italy, where he teamed up with the Sicilian Mafia to rebuild the heroin trade. In Sicily the OSS initially allied with the Mafia to assist the Allied forces in their 1943 invasion, and later formed an alliance with the Mafia to counter the influence of the Italian Communist Party.[55]

During the 1950s, the Sicilian Mafia began to divest itself of the heroin manufacturing and started relying on Marseille’s Corsican syndicates for their drug supplies. Based out of Marseille, the Corsican Gang operated what is known as the French Connection, where heroin was smuggled from Turkey to France and then to the United States through Canada. The Corsican Gang was protected by the CIA and France’s SDECE after World War II, in exchange for working to prevent French Communists from bringing the Old Port of Marseille under their control.[56] The Corsicans opened up smaller laboratories and began producing for European markets and export to the United States. Thus, Italy gradually declined in importance as a center for illicit drug manufacturing, and Marseille became the heroin capital of Europe.

Luciano also forged an alliance between the Mafia and Meyer Lansky, whose control over the Caribbean and his relationship with the Florida-based Trafficante family were of particular importance, since many of the heroin shipments passed through Cuba or Florida on their way to the US. For almost twenty years the Luciano-Lansky-Trafficante triumvirate remained a major feature of the international heroin traffic. Organized crime thrived in prerevolutionary Cuba, and Havana was probably the most important transit point for Luciano’s European heroin shipments. Luciano’s 1947 visit to Cuba laid the groundwork for Havana’s subsequent role in the international narcotics trade. Cuba was to be made the center of all international narcotic operations. By the early 1950s, Trafficante in turn delegated his Havana concessions to Santo Trafficante, Jr., the most talented of his six sons. It was reportedly his responsibility to receive the bulk shipments of heroin from Europe and then forward them through Florida to New York and other major urban centers, where their distribution was assisted by local Mafia bosses.[57]

Hotel del Charro

Murchison and Richardson were known to have been major national political operatives and had close ties to Eisenhower and his vice president Nixon, as well as J. Edgar Hoover and President Lyndon B. Johnson.[58] Murchison bank-rolled General Douglas MacArthur after he was fired by President Truman.[59] As Summers remarked, “Recognizing Edgar’s influence as a national figure, the oilmen had started cultivating him in the late forties—inviting him to Texas as a houseguest, and taking him on hunting expeditions. Edgar’s relations with them were to go far beyond what was proper for a Director of the FBI.”[60] In 1958 Murchison purchased the publishers, Henry Holt and Company. The first book he published was Hoover’s Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America, was an account of the Communist menace which sold over 250,000 copies in hardcover and over 2,000,000 in paperback. It was on the best-seller lists for thirty-one weeks, three of them as the number one non-fiction choice.

Lansky was also a guest at Hotel del Charro, a resort hotel in La Jolla, California, purchased by Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson in 1951, which had become a “notorious mob hangout,”[61] and whose guest list of celebrities included Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, John Wayne, William Powell, Elizabeth Taylor, Mel Ferrer, and Gregory Peck.  Murchison’s financial empire overlapped closely with that of Lansky, as well as Jimmy Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters. Hoffa had been put in prison by Robert Kennedy, but was later pardoned by Nixon. In 1955 a Senate committee discovered that 20 percent of the Murchison Oil Lease Company was owned by Vito Genovese and his family.[62] Other mob-connected guests of Hotel del Charro included Santos Trafficante, Johnny Rosselli, Sam Giancana and Carlos Marcello.

The hotel was close to the Del Mar racetrack which Murchison and Richardson also later acquired. “McCarthy was virtually on Murchison’s payroll,” the hotel’s manager Allan Witwer reported.[63] McCarthy was finally expelled for indecency. Joan Crawford as well was finally expelled, for flirting too heavily with Richardson.[64] Although McCarthy had arrived with Roy Cohn and David Schine, neither was allowed to stay because the hotel was “restricted.” The only exceptions Murchison permitted were Senator Barry Goldwater and certain members of the Jewish mafia.[65] Hoover, along with his life partner, FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson, racked up an enormous bill that Murchison never required to be paid. Hoover entertained guests in his bungalow that included Howard Hughes.

Like his assistant Roy Cohn, McCarthy as well was a closeted homosexual. In October 1952, the Las Vegas Sun identified McCarthy as a homosexual, naming one of his partners, and claimed that McCarthy was a well-known patron of gay bars in Milwaukee. This was despite the fact that Hoover, Cohn and McCarthy were involved in the Lavender Scare, where homosexuals were said to be security risks and communist sympathizers, which led to the call to remove them from state employment. Cohn and McCarthy attempted to enhance anti-Communist fervor in the country by claiming that Communists overseas had convinced several closeted homosexuals employed by the US federal government to pass on important government secrets in exchange for keeping the identity of their sexuality a secret.

According to Seymore Hersh in Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America, Hoover expressed admiration for Cohn’s aggressive and shady tactics and told Cohn to “call me directly” whenever he had information worth sharing. From that point on, Cohn and Hoover “traded favors, effusive compliments, gifts and elaborate private dinners. It quickly became ‘Roy’ and ‘Edgar.’” Hersh also describes Hoover as Cohn’s soon to be “consigliere.”[66]

Both Hoover and Cohn also maintained a close personal friendship with the fascist and Knight of Malta Cardinal Spellman, the “Grand Protector and Spiritual Advisor” to the SMOM’s American wing, and a close ally of Liberty League plotter Jacob Raskob.[67] During the 1950s and the early 1960s, relations between the US and the Vatican were conducted largely through Spellman, who was hailed as “America’s Pope.” Spellman had worked with Pius XII to help Nazi war criminals escape justice.[68] During his tenure in New York, Spellman’s considerable national influence earned his residence the nickname of “the Powerhouse.” He hosted prominent figures such as Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., Bernard Baruch, David I. Walsh, John William McCormack and numerous other politicians, entertainers and clergymen.

Although Spellman frequently criticized films he perceived to be “immoral” or “indecent,” John Cooney, one of his biographers, cited four interviewees who stated that Spellman was homosexual, and journalist Michelangelo Signorile described Spellman as “one of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church’s history.”[69] Another of Hoover’s biographers, Curt Gentry, also maintained that Hoover’s files contained “numerous allegations that Spellman was a very active homosexual.”[70] Spellman was accused of not only condoning[71] pedophilia in the Catholic church and ordaining known pedophiles including Cardinal Theodore “Uncle Teddy” McCarrick, but also engaging in it himself to such an extent that many New York area priests widely referred to him as “Mary.”[72]

Cohn was also close to Lewis “Lew” Rosenstiel, who was crucial to Samuel Bronfman’s Prohibition-era bootlegging operations. New York state legislative investigations alleged that Rosenstiel “was part of a ‘consortium’ with underworld figures that bought liquor in Canada [from Samuel Bronfman],” whose other members were “Meyer Lansky, the reputed organized crime leader; Joseph Fusco, an associate of late Chicago gangster Al Capone and Joseph Linsey, a Boston man Mr. Kelly [the congressional investigator testifying] identified as a convicted bootlegger.”[73] During a divorce proceeding brought by Rosenstiel’s fourth wife, Susan Kaufman, she alleged that Rosenstiel hosted lavish parties that included “boy prostitutes” that her husband had hired “for the enjoyment” of certain guests, which included important government officials and prominent figures in America’s criminal underworld.[74] Rosenstiel also made sure that the venues were bugged with microphones that recorded the goings-on of his high-profile guests. Those audio recordings, Kaufman alleged, were then kept for the purpose of blackmail.[75]

One of the “blackmail parties” was hosted by Cohn in 1958 at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, suite 233. Kaufman described Cohn’s suite as a “beautiful suite…all done in light blue.” She described being introduced to Hoover, who was in drag, by Cohn, who told her that Hoover’s name was “Mary” in a fit of barely concealed laughter. Kaufman testified that young boys were present and Kaufman claimed that Cohn, Hoover and her ex-husband engaged in sexual activity with these minors.[76] New York attorney John Koltz began to investigate Cohn on behalf of a client. Declassified New York government files and research by a private detective corroborated that Cohn was providing “protection” and that “there were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That’s where Cohn got his power from– blackmail.” As Berton Hersch observed, “Like scorpions investigating coitus, Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover would continue to circle each other with wary fascination for decades.”[77]

Lansky, according to Kaufman, was one of the individuals that Rosenstiel sought to protect, and he was overheard saying that if the government “ever brings pressure against Lansky or any of us, we’ll use this [a specific recording taken at one of the ‘parties’] as blackmail.”[78] Lansky was credited with obtaining compromising photos of J. Edgar Hoover sometime in the 1940s, which showed “Hoover in some kind of gay situation,” according to a former Lansky associate, who also said that Lansky had often claimed, “I fixed that sonofabitch.”[79]  The photos showed Hoover engaged in sexual activity with Tolson.[80] Journalist Ed Reid, author of the Virginia Hill biography The Mistress and the Mafia, wrote that Lansky was attempting to entrap powerful people through sexual blackmail as far back as 1939. Congressional crime consultant Ralph Salerno told Summers in 1993 that Hoover’s willful ignorance of organized crime for most of his career as FBI director “allowed organized crime to grow very strong in economic and political terms, so that it became a much bigger threat to the wellbeing of this country than it would have been if it had been addressed much sooner.”[81] According to journalist and author Burton Hersh, Hoover was also tied to Sherman Kaminsky, who ran a sexual blackmail operation in New York involving young male prostitutes. That operation was busted and investigated in a 1966 extortion probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, though the FBI quickly took over the investigation and photos of Hoover and Kaminsky together soon disappeared from the case file.[82]

Profumo Affair

In 1963, Kennedy was paying especially close attention to the Profumo Affair, which coincided with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The affair was a major scandal in Britain, when it was exposed that John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, who was touted to become Prime Minister, had an extramarital affair with nineteen-year-old model Christine Keeler beginning in 1961. Public interest was heightened by reports that Keeler was at the same time involved with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché, thereby creating a possible national security risk. One of the central figures in the affair was Keeler’s “pimp,” Dr. Stephen Ward (1912 – 1963). Ward first moved to the United States in 1934 to study osteopathy. When the war broke out, Ward volunteered for the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). In March 1944, he was posted to India where he treated was Mahatma Gandhi, who impressed him: “Although much of his policy was opposed to that of my own country. I knew that when I was with him I was in the presence of greatness, and my encounter with him was certainly the most important meeting of my life.”[83]

After the World War II, Ward worked for the Osteopathic Association Clinic in Dorset Square, London, where he treated well-known public figures, the first of whom was the American ambassador and Skull and Bones member, W. Averell Harriman. Soon after, other famous people such as Winston Churchill, Duncan Sandys, Feliks Topolski, Ava Gardner, Mary Martin and Mel Ferrer became his patients. His fame enabled him to set up his own clinic in Cavendish Square, on the fringe of Harley Street. Over the next few years, he gained several other important patients. Other friends included Colin Coote, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, Anthony Blunt, nephew of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Geoffrey Nicholson, the Conservative MP, Peter Rachman, the famous slum landlord and the actor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.. Colin Coote, the editor of the Daily Telegraphm commissioned Ward to produce sketches of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. According to Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, the authors of An Affair of State: “Ward duly went to Israel and a series of his drawings appeared in the newspaper.”[84]

Ward’s osteopathy practice and his art won him considerable social success, and he made many important friends.  Ward befriended the cartoonist and socialite Arthur Ferrier, whose parties Ward attended regularly and where he mixed with, among others, Prince Philip.[85] Ward also befriended William Astor, 3rd Viscount Astor (1907 – 1966), the son of Nancy Astor, whose country house, Cliveden, became the center of the Cliveden Set, another name for the Rhodes Round Table, involved in the policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany. In 1956, Astor gave Ward—who introduced Astor to nightclubs, parties, and girls—the use of a riverside cottage in the grounds of his Astor family estate at Cliveden.[86]

Genealogy of Astor Family

• John Jacob Astor (Robber Baron) + Sarah Cox Todd

  • William Backhouse Astor Sr. + Margaret Rebecca Armstrong

    • William Backhouse Astor Jr. + Caroline Webster "Lina" Schermerhorn

      • John Jacob Astor IV (died on Titanic) + Ava Lowle Willing

        • Alice Bouverie (participant in seances of The Nine at Puharich’s Round Table Foundation)

        • Vincent Astor

      • John Jacob Astor IV + Madeleine Talmage Force

        • John Jacob Astor VI

    • John Jacob Astor III

      • William Waldorf Astor + Mary Dahlgren Paul

        • Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor + Nancy Astor (Cliveden Set, a.k.a. Round Table)

          • William Waldorf Astor II (associated with Stephen Ward, who “pimped” Christine Keeler in Masonically-theme “black magic” parties in Profumo Affair)

          • Jakie Astor + Ana Inez "Chiquita" Carcano y Morra

            • Michael Ramon Langhorne Astor + Daphne Warburg

It was rumored that Ward was involved in occultism, and some have tried to link him to the Golden Dawn or to one of its offshoots in Great Britain.[87] He was known to have been interested in occultism and “black magic.”[88] Exploiting his friendship with several young woman, he became involved in hosting sex parties that were attended by the rich and famous, that seem to have been ritualistic in nature. As Keeler later recalled in her autobiography, The Truth at Last, Ward sought to control his guests by offering to satisfy their perversions at wild sex parties, where two-way mirrors were common. As she explained:

Stephen could always sense people’s sexual tastes—and egg them on, make them go further than they might have otherwise… Stephen new all the Masonic handshakes and he said that at some the of parties the girls would wear leather Masonic aprons. “They would be flicked up and down like a sporran,” he laughed.”

Some of the women Stephen was involved with were heavily into sadistic sex and there were “black magic” parties, which were really just an excuse for group sex sessions. There would be phallic totem poles around which all these women would brown and scrape.[89]

It was at Cliveden, in the summer of 1961, where Ward introduced John Profumo. As Keeler recalled, Roger Hollis and Anthony Blunt were regular visitors to their shared apartment. Blunt was recruited into Soviet intelligence by his friend Guy Burgess, a fellow member of the Cambridge Apostles. In 1940, Blunt was transferred from the Army to MI5 and began working as a spy. Blunt also became friends with another member of the Apostles, Victor Rothschild, who served as an intelligence officer during World War II, and later as a senior executive with Royal Dutch Shell and N M Rothschild & Sons. Rothschild also served as an advisor to the Edward Heath, British Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974, who was eventually accused of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA).[90] It was reported that a man had claimed that at age twelve he was raped by Heath in a Mayfair flat in 1961, after he had run away from home.[91] Ward also kept tabs on Blunt, whose homosexual lover was Peter Montgomery, the brother of Hugh Montgomery, who was the Very Reverend Monsignor Montgomery.[92] According to Keeler: “Their (Ward and Hollis) plan was simple. I was to find out, through pillow talk, from Jack Profumo when nuclear warheads were being moved to Germany.”[93] Profumo and other cabinet ministers were also attending sex parties being held by Mariella Novotny, whose was part of Ward’s bevy of females, including Mandy Rice-Davies and Suzy Chang. Novotny ran sex parties in London. So many senior politicians attended that she began referring to herself as the “government’s Chief Whip.” As well as British politicians such as John Profumo and Ernest Marples, who was Minister of Transport, foreign leaders such as Willy Brandt and Ayub Khan, attended these parties.[94]

In 1960, Novotny travelled to the United States with Chang, and became involved in relationships with leading politicians, including both John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. In early 1961, Novotny had been in New York and, she said later, was procured for the President-elect by his brother-in-law, “Rat Pack” member Peter Lawford.[95] It was Lawford who introduced an evidently drugged Marilyn Monroe when she famously, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” on stage at John F. Kennedy’s early birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden in New York on May 19, 9162, a few months before her death. Monroe’s psychiatrist at the time and self-professed “Svengali” was Ralph Greenson.[96] Greenson had been recommended by her former psychiatrist, Marianne Kris, a close friend of Anna Freud, who also analyzed Monroe in 1957. Marriane was married to Dr. Ernst Kris of the New School for Social Research, the American branch of the Frankfurt School. Ernst Kris was one of several psychiatrists involved in producing the “Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler,” commissioned by Bill Donovan of the OSS, and headed by Carl Jung’s friend, Henry A. Murray, the American psychologist and colleague of Timothy Leary at Harvard University, who from 1959 to 1962 conducted a series of psychologically damaging experiments on undergraduate students, one of whom was Ted Kaczynski, later known as the Unabomber.[97]

Lawford, who had also dated Monroe, had introduced her to President Kennedy. As summarized by Joe Williams in Hollywood Myths, Monroe became romantically involved with both Kennedy and fellow “rat pack” member, Frank Sinatra. Sinatra’s friend, Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, used his connections to help Kennedy win the state of Illinois, and thus the presidency. There is evidence that Sinatra and Lawford continued to pass messages after the election between the Kennedy brothers and the mob. Hoover began eavesdropping on the various parties, including Monroe. Phone records in June and July of 1962 show that Monroe made repeated calls to the White House and to Robert Kennedy’s office.[98]

A number of investigators, including Anthony Summers in his book Goddess, suggest that Robert Kennedy began a relationship with Monroe as well, leading to speculation that he was involved in her murder. As reported by Michael Freedland in All the Way: A Biography of Frank Sinatra, Robert Kennedy was growing increasingly concerned about the rumors circulating about his and his brother’s relationship with Monroe, and asked Sinatra to get her out of the way for them. Sinatra then made a room available for her at the Cal-Neva Inn, a resort and casino straddling the border between Nevada and California on the shores of Lake Tahoe, that Sinatra purchased with several others, including singer Dean Martin and Giancana. According to the staff at the inn Monroe was surrounded by bottles of pills and other drugs. Giancana, who was sharing a room with Phyllis McGuire, But he also spent time there with Monroe, which was caught on camera. Sinatra wanted to destroy the evidence, had his favourite photographer, Billy Woodfield, develop it. Woodfield gave Frank the film, and then watched him burn it the material. “They are pretty sick, aren’t they?” he said, looking at the pictures. Woodfield would later describe the what he saw in shots as Monroe “wallowing and crawling around. Giancana was straddling her and lifting her up… Obviously a lady in serious trouble and blasted out of her mind.” At Sinatra’s request, Pat and Peter Lawford drove Monroe to the airport, and she went home to Los Angeles where she died.[99]

According to Williams, another possibility is that it was either Hoover or Giancana’s henchmen who murdered her to implicate the Kennedys.[100] Williams also proposes a third possibility, that it was Monroe psychiatrist Ralph Greenson who accidentally overdosed her and tried to cover it up. Greenson had been recommended to Monroe by her former psychiatrist, Marianne Kris, a close friend of Anna Freud, who also analyzed Monroe in 1957. It was Lawford who cleaned up Monroe’s apartment after her death to make sure nothing remained to link her with the Kennedys. Eunice Murray, whom Greenson hired as Monroe’s housekeeper, later revealed that Robert Kenndey had not only been in town, but visited Monroe on the day of her death.[101]

It is believed that both Novotny and Chang worked at the Quorum Club in Washington, run by Bobby Baker, a close friend of Lyndon Johnson.[102] In the early 1950s, Baker worked closely with Fred Black, a close friend of Mafia boss, Johnny Roselli. Baker also became involved in helping the Intercontinental Hotels Corporation to establish casinos in the Dominican Republic. Baker arranged for Ed Levinson, an associate of Meyer Lansky and Sam Giancana, to become involved in the deal. Baker was investigated by Robert Kennedy as Attorney General, who discovered Baker had links to Clint Murchison and several Mafia bosses.[103] Evidence also emerged that Lyndon Johnson was also involved in political corruption.[104] In 1961, Baker established the Quorum Club, a private club in the Carroll Arms Hotel on Capitol Hill. “Its membership was comprised of senators, congressmen, lobbyists, Capitol Hill staffers, and other well-connecteds who wanted to enjoy their drinks, meals, poker games, and shared secrets in private accommodations.”[105] Baker also knew about Kennedy’s earlier relationships with Novotny and Chang. Recently released FBI files claim that Ward was involved in supplying these women.[106]

The State Department reported to the FBI that Ward had been a go-between during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, carrying messages between the British and the Russians. In January 1961, Coote invited Ward to have lunch at the Garrick Club with Ivanov, and the two became close friends. According to Anthony Summers, “MI5’s D branch, responsible for counter-espionage, quickly identified Ivanov as a Soviet Intelligence officer using diplomatic cover, a common practice worldwide. According to one source, part of Ivanov’s mission may have been to supervise Soviet penetration of the Portland naval base in Dorset.”[107] The Security Service, Ward claimed, was fully aware of his association with Ivanov, and he made good on his promise to keep them informed. Ward was later used by the British Foreign Office as a backchannel, through Ivanov, to the Soviet Union, and was involved in unofficial diplomacy at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.[108]

Kennedy “had devoured every word written about the Profumo case,” noted his friend and reporter Ben Bradlee. “He ordered all further cables on that subject sent to him immediately.”[109] J. Edgar Hoover suspected, as did others in American intelligence, that Kennedy may also have been one of Keeler’s clients. As the Kennedy brothers struggled with the mounting civil rights crisis, Hoover opened a new file code-named “Bowtie.”[110] The Bowtie files discuss Ward’s American connections such as Averell Harriman and the billionaire Paul Getty. There was mention of the infamous “Man in the Mask” orgy hosted by Novotny in an apartment in Hyde Park Square in December 1961. According to Keeler, at the party that became known as the “Feast of Peacocks,” there was “a lavish dinner in which this man wearing only... a black mask with slits for eyes and laces up the back… and a tiny apron—one like the waitresses wore in 1950s tearooms—asked to be whipped if people were not happy with his services.” There has been much speculation as to his identity. Wearing only socks, Ward told Keeler about the man in the mask and said he had also worn a bowtie and winked and said: “Let’s say it was Ernie Marples. Tell your readers that.” Some have claimed that the man was Anthony Asquith, a film director and son of the former prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith.[111]

After the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Ward told Keeler that he believed John F. Kennedy would be assassinated. He told her and Ivanov: “A man like John Kennedy will not be allowed to stay in such an important position of power in the world, I assure you of that.”[112] A shooting incident between two of Keeler’s other lovers revealed that her affairs could be threatening to national security. After Profumo admitted to improper conduct, the incident discredited the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan in 1963. A trial was instigated after the embarrassment caused to the government. Ward was found guilty of being Keeler’s pimp, but before the verdict was announced, he took an overdose of sleeping pills and died three days later. As Knightley and Kennedy observed, “The end of the trial and Ward’s dramatic suicide swept the Profumo scandal off the British scene. It was as if one moment the newspapers had been full of only that and the next moment there was nothing.”[113]

According to Knightley and Kennedy, after Ward’s death, Lord Astor “went to pieces and within months was confined to a wheelchair.” Astor’s health declined to such an extent that his wife Bronwen decided to ask the well-known Roman Catholic exorcist Dom Robert Petitpierre to exorcise Cliveden. After the new tenant committed suicide by drowning himself in the kitchen sink a few weeks later, Dom Robert returned to exorcise Ward’s cottage. Bronwen recalled, “Dom Robert wouldn't let me near the cottage otherwise I would have been knocked sideways. Even he could hardly walk through the door,” and according to Dom Robert’s, “the evil powers emanating from the cottage were some of the strongest I’ve ever experienced.”[114]

Operation 40

In June 1961, when Robert Kennedy had re-grouped Operation 40 as Operation Mongoose, with the mission of overthrowing Castro’s government, he also decided that Edward Lansdale, Staff Member of the President’s Committee on Military Assistance, should be placed in charge of the operation. Lansdale would hire American Mafia family heads Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano in the U.S. war against Fidel Castro in 1961, much as he would hire the Italian Mafia families to wage an illegal operation against the Italian Communist party.[115]

Douglas Valentine, a journalist and noted chronicler of CIA covert activities, noted in his book The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World that the US government’s cooperation with the Mafia during World War II led to its expansion after the war and set the stage for its future collaboration with American intelligence. Meyer Lansky also had close ties to the CIA and U.S. military intelligence. During World War II, Lansky—along with his associate Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel—worked with Naval intelligence in what was codenamed “Operation Underworld,” an operation whose existence the government denied for over 40 years.[116]

As head of Mongoose, one of Lansdale’s first decisions was to appoint William King Harvey, from the CIA’s Berlin Base, as head of Task Force W. Harvey was known as “America’s James Bond,” a tag given to him by Lansdale.[117] Along with James Angleton, he became one of the foremost operatives in the secret war against the KGB during the Cold War, and was famous for leading an operation in Berlin that built an underground tunnel to the Soviet sector. Harvey’s brief was to organize a broad range of activities that would help to bring down Castro’s government.

In 1962, Harvey was appointed by Richard Bissell with a project to organize “Executive Action” for the assassination of foreign political leaders, under the codename ZR/RIFLE. Bissell was in charge of the Directorate for Plans responsible for what became known as the CIA’s Black Operations. His deputy was Richard Helms. This involved a policy that was later to become known as Executive Action (a plan to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power). This including a coup d’état that overthrew the elected Marxist Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 after he introduced land reforms and nationalized the United Fruit Company. Other political leaders deposed by Executive Action included Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, General Abd al-Karim Kassem of Iraq and Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam.

However, Harvey’s main target was Fidel Castro who had established a socialist government in Cuba in 1959.[118] As Tom Miller wrote in Trading With the Enemy, Castro thought he was Jewish, or at least part Jewish. “Castro” is among the more common Marrano names. Castro mentioned his heritage in private to Ricardo Subirana y Lobo, a chemical engineer and financial backer of the Revolution, to whom he gave a diplomatic post in Israel in 1960. According to historian Maurice Halperin, Castro “apparently was convinced that some of his ancestors were Marranos.”[119]

To get to Castro, Harvey had decided he needed Mafia links, and drew on the connections of CIA agent Robert Maheu, who had links with Mafia bosses like Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, Jr., Johnny Roselli and others.[120] In 1960, Roselli and Giancana had taken part in talks with CIA director Allen Dulles about the possibility of murdering Fidel Castro. It is also believed that Trafficante, a leading figure in the American Mafia, became involved in Mafia plots to kill President John F. Kennedy.[121] After the Mafia’s many bungled attempts to kill Castro, Harvey began to work exclusively with Roselli.[122]

In early 1962 Harvey had brought Ted Shackley into the project as deputy chief of JM/WAVE, which was responsible for Mongoose. Shackley is one of the CIA’s most decorated officers, was assigned to work under Harvey in Berlin in 1953 after he was recruited by the agency. Due to his “light hair and mysterious ways,” Shackley was known to his colleagues as “the Blond Ghost.”[123]

In April, 1962, Shackley was involved in delivering supplies to Roselli as part of the plan to assassinate Castro. Later that year, when he became Station Chief in Miami, he gained control over Operation 40 or what some now called Shackley’s Secret Team. Operation 40 included Shackley’s fellow long-term colleagues at the CIA, agents Thomas Clines, Edwin Wilson, and David Sanchez Morales.[124] Operation 40 also recruited former Batista-regime intelligence officers, mob henchmen, and mercenaries like Frank Sturgis, CIA case officer E. Howard Hunt, and Felix Rodriguez who was later involved in the execution of Che Guevara.[125] Agents of Operation 40 were also commanded by Otto Skorzeny for operations in Guatemala, Brazil and Argentina.[126]

Famed CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, who worked for the OSS during World War II, became the Station Chief of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination in Mexico City in 1950, where he helped lay the framework for Operation PBSUCCESS, the successful covert operation to overthrow Arbenz. While in China, Hunt was commanded Paul Helliwell (1915 – 1976), American lawyer, banker, OSS official, and CIA officer.[127] Helliwell was also counsel for the money-laundering Miami National Bank, controlled by Meyer Lansky.[128] Helliwell formed Castle Bank & Trust in the Bahamas in 1962 to provide a financial channel to support CIA operations against Cuba and Latin America including the Bay of Pigs Invasion, for which he was one of the pay masters.[129] Richard Bissell, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans (DDP), the man overseeing plans for the Bay of Pigs Invasion, assembled a number of other agents who had worked on the Guatemalan coup, and appointed Hunt with forging Cuban exile leaders in the United States into a broadly representative government-in-exile that would form a provisional government to take over Cuba after the invasion.[130] After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Hunt was reassigned as Executive Assistant to Allen Dulles.[131] After President John F. Kennedy fired Dulles in 1961 for the Bay of Pigs failure, Hunt served as the first Chief of Covert Action for the Domestic Operations Division (DODS) from 1962 to 1964.[132]

Operation Zapata

According to Fabian Escalante, a senior officer of the Cuban Department of State Security, in 1960 Richard Nixon recruited George H.W. Bush and Jack Crichton to gather the necessary funds for Operation 40, and according to Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo the man assigned to assist him was Felix Rodriguez.[133] Crichton, a former OSS officer, was an oil and natural gas industrialist from Dallas, who was among the first of his ranks to recognize the importance of petroleum reserves in the Middle East. In 1952, Crichton had joined a syndicate that included petroleum tycoon Everette DeGolyer, the du Ponts and Clint Murchison, to use connections in the government of General Francisco Franco to obtain drilling rights in Spain. In 1956, Crichton started up his own intelligence unit, the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment, which he commanded until 1967, at which time he was awarded the Legion of Merit and cited for “exceptionally outstanding service.”[134]

In the 1950s, Crichton became involved with several oil men who began negotiating with Batista. Key figures involved were the local CIA man in Dallas, J. Walton Moore, and George de Mohrenschildt, who at that time worked for a company called Cuban-Venezuelan Oil Voting Trust Company (CVOVT), that had been established by William Buckley Sr., the father of William F. Buckley, and which had invested more than $30 million looking for oil in Cuba.[135] In the fall of 1963, about two months before JFK’s assassination, Crichton and his friend George H.W. Bush both decided to embark on GOP races for statewide office.[136]

One of his longtime friends, offshore oil engineer George Kitchel, told the FBI that de Mohrenschildt counted among his good friends Clint Murchison, H.L. Hunt and Sid Richardson.[137] De Mohrenschildt was born in the Russian Empire, but emigrated to the United States in 1938. Upon his arrival, British intelligence reportedly told the US government that they suspected he was working for German intelligence. Although de Mohrenschildt denied any Nazi sympathies, his application to join the OSS during World War II was rejected because, according to a memo by former CIA director Richard Helms, he “was alleged to be a Nazi espionage agent.”[138] Nevertheless, de Mohrenschildt’s brother Dimitri, who was also a staunch anti-Communist, did become a member of the OSS, and was one of the founders of the CIA’s Radio Free Europe and Amcomlib (aka Radio Liberty) stations.[139] De Mohrenschildt was also acquainted with the Bouvier family, including young Jacqueline Bouvier, future wife of John F. Kennedy. Jacqueline grew up calling him “Uncle George” and would sit on his knee. [140]

In the early 1940s, de Mohrenschildt worked closely with Baron Konstantine Maydell, who was described as either his uncle or cousin. Along with Merwin K. Hart, one of the key founders of the America First Committee (AFC), the two participated in the promotion of Spain in Arms, pro-Franco film. Hart was a well-known as the founder of an organization called the National Economic Council (NEC). In the 1950s, Hart worked closely with Allen Zoll, who had founded the American Intelligence Agency in 1949. Zoll and Hart received backing from H.L. Hunt, who in the 1950s promoted both men through his radio show Facts Forum. As revealed by Major Ralph P. Ganis, in the Skorzeny Papers: Evidence for the Plot to Kill JFK, Hart and his NEC were a major part of the international commercial network of Otto Skorzeny. Two other associates of Hart who were also members of Skorzeny’s network were Freda Utley, an English scholar who was a former member of the OSS and New York lawyer Clifford Forster, a senior staff council attorney of the American Civil Liberties Union. Forster was also close friends with General Pierre de Bénouville, who had been associated with Action française and later served as the French Resistance contact to Allen Dulles. In 1960, Forster, along with James Burnham, a member of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), founded the American Committee for France and Algeria.[141]

One of Crichton’s company directors was D. Harold Byrd, a wealthy oilman whose family accumulated a large portion of downtown Dallas property in the early 1900s, and who were heavily involved in Dallas politics. Byrd’s cousin was Admiral Byrd who headed Operation Highjump and named Antarctica’s Harold Byrd Mountains after him. Byrd’s other cousin was Harry F. Byrd, who was described by Alden Hatch in The Byrds of Virginia: An American Dynasty as “the leader of conservative opinion in the United States.”[142] Harry Byrd came to lead the “conservative coalition” in the United States Senate, and opposed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, largely blocking most liberal legislation after 1937. Byrd was vehemently opposed to racial desegregation of the public schools, and was leader of “massive resistance,” a campaign of opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education that led to closure of some public schools in Virginia in the 1950s.

Byrd was a personal friend of Lyndon Johnson, was closely associated with John Connally, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson and H.L. Hunt. Byrd was also a member of the right-wing Texas Crusade for Freedom (TCF), whose members included Earle Cabell, Everette DeGolyer, Ted Dealey and de Mohrenschildt. The TCF was spawned from the National Committee for a Free Europe, established by Senator Herbert Lehman, son of a founder of Lehman Brothers. The TCF supported Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, centers of American propaganda riddled with former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. According to Baker, the TCF would become a “who’s who of Texans connected to events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”[143] They included H. Neil Mallon, Paul Raigorodsky, Lewis W. MacNaughton, Everette DeGolyer, Earl Cabell and Ted Deally. Charles Cabell, Allen Dulles’ CIA deputy director, and a key Bay of Pigs figure, was brother of Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, also a good friend of Byrd’s.[144]

Mallon was a close friend and business partner of Prescott Bush. The CIA managed to get hold of banking documents captured from the Nazis regarding Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman, which were far more detailed than the records the Justice Department had obtained during its banking investigation. “The file was damning,” according to Robert T. Crowley, a former aide to Dulles. As a result, the Bush and Harriman families were protected from any potential embarrassment if details of their financial collaboration with Hitler should become public. Prescott, explains Joseph P. Trento, “spent his post-World War II life cooperating with, and taking an active interest in, the most covert CIA intelligence operations.”[145]

Mallon attended Yale University where he and Bush both became members of the Skull and Bones in 1917.  Mallon served as the Chairman of the Board, President and Director of Dresser Industries. In 1928, the Wall Street investment-banking firm of the firm of fellow Bonesman, W.A. Harriman and Company, Inc., converted the firm into a public company by issuing 300,000 shares of stock.[146] Prescott Bush noted in a letter around this time that Mallon was “well known to Allen Dulles, and has tried to be helpful to him in the CIA, especially in the procurement of individuals to serve in that important agency.”[147]

Prescott served on the board of Dresser, and would in turn name of his sons, Neil Mallon Bush, after his mentor. Mallon hired Prescott’s other son, future US President George H.W. Bush, to work for Dresser Industries in West Texas shortly after he graduated from Yale University. Mallon was also an early investor in Zapata Corporation, a CIA front founded by Bush. Bush founded Zapata in 1953, with John Overbey, brothers Hugh and Bill Lietdke and former CIA agent Thomas J. Devine. Bush hired fellow Bonesman Robert H. Gow who eventually became president of Zapata, and persuaded several Bonesmen to invest in the company.[148] Other investors included Prescott Bush’s close friends, Katharine and Philip Graham.[149]

Operation Zapata was the code name for the CIA’s Bay of Pigs Invasion Cuban exile training program. George began doing favors for the CIA after he and his wife Barbara had moved to Houston in 1956. Bush was at first a part of Operation Mongoose, by hiring anti-Castro agents aboard Zapata’s oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean, to provide cover for training facilities and invasion launch points against Cuba in the 1960-61. According to John Sherwood, a top William King Harvey deputy in Washington, “Bush was like hundreds of other businessmen who provided the nuts-and-bolts assistance such operations require. He was no spy. None of these guys were. What they mainly helped us with was to give us a place to park people that was discreet.”[150] Although the CIA maintained connections with large corporations like International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) and Ford, Robert T. Crowley, a former aide to Dulles, explained, “sometimes we would suggest someone go off on their own. Sometimes the Agency needed more control. It was much easier to simply set someone up in business like Bush and let him take orders.”[151]

Paul Raigorodsky, a friend and mentor of de Mohrenschildt, was a former White Russian officer who was one of the directors of Permindex.[152] Some accounts having him serving in the OSS.[153] He also became a friend of J. Edgar Hoover. The second most influential Russian émigré was George Bouhe. In the 1920s, while at high school in Petrograd, Bouhe worked for the American Relief Administration, an intelligence front. Bouhe later moved to New York where he worked for Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. After moving to Dallas, he became bookkeeper for Lewis W. McNaughton, a partner in a highly influential petroleum geology consulting firm DeGoyler and MacNaughton and a board member of Dresser Industries.[154]

Two Oswalds

D. Harold Byrd, was the owner of the Texas School Book Depository building where Lee Harvey Oswald was to have shot Kennedy, and also founded the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), where Oswald was recruited by CIA agent David Ferrie at a two-week summer camp in Louisiana in 1957.[155] Oswald was eighth cousin twice removed to Admiral Byrd, who headed Operation Highjump to Antarctica that Thompson participated in.[156] Oswald was eighth cousin twice removed to Byrd.[157] Oswald had an illustrious pedigree, being descended from European royalty, all the way back to King Edward I of England, and was distantly related to people like George Washington and James Madison. Oswald was a third cousin once removed to President Theodore Roosevelt and fourth cousin to FDR’s wife Eleanor Roosevelt via Joseph Oswald, and fifth cousin five times removed to General Robert E. Lee via John Carter of Christchurch.[158]

Oswald and his mother Marguerite moved from Fort Worth to New York City in 1952, where they lived with Oswald’s half-brother John Pic. The Oswalds were asked to leave after Lee pulled out a pocket knife during an argument and threatened to use it on Pic’s wife. Oswald attended seventh grade in the Bronx, New York, but was allegedly truant, which led to be remanded for psychiatric observation to Youth House, a home for wayward juvenile delinquents and homeless youth.

The Youth House was originally known as the Lavanburg-Corner House, started in 1928 for immigrant Jewish girls. The funding was through the Lavenburg Foundation set up by Jewish businessman Fred Lavanburg.[159] Lavanburg was the brother-in-law of Oscar Straus, the first Jewish United States Cabinet Secretary and the first president of the American Jewish Historical Society. Straus had befriended Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who funded the Alliance Israelite Universelle for the creation of schools.[160] Oscar Straus served as Chairman of the Lavanburg Foundation from its establishment.[161]

Oswald was examined by Chief Psychiatrist, Dr. Renatus Hartogs, clinical psychopathologist who came to the United States from Germany in 1940 and became chief psychiatrist for the Youth House. A New York jury convicted Hartogs, who then maintained a column for Cosmopolitan magazine, of malpractice in 1975 and awarded $350,000 to Julie Roy, an Esquire magazine secretary who accused Hartogs of forcing her to have sexual relations with him “under the guise” of psychiatric treatment.[162] The case was widely reported in newspapers around the U.S. and Canada. The next year, Roy co-authored a book, Betrayal, which was later made into a made-for-TV movie of the same title.[163]

Hartogs, who was interviewed by the Warren Commission, reported that Oswald’s case was so interesting that he and his staff held a seminar on the subject of Oswald. Hartogs described Oswald as immersed in a “vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which [Oswald] tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations.” Hartogs detected a “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies” and recommended continued treatment.[164]

However, as John Armstrong pointed out in “Harvey and Lee: The Case for Two Oswalds,” Assistant FBI Directory John Malone, who was in charge of the New York FBI office, reviewed the court file on Oswald, which stated that Oswald left the Youth House in May 7, 1953, and entered the ninth grade. But Oswald had entered the seventh grade the previous September. One set of records show Oswald to be truant, while another show him to be attending full-time. Additionally, Oswald’s half-brother John Pic identified photographs of Oswald from age two to twelve. But when Pic was shown a photograph of Oswald at 13 at the Bronx Zoo, Pic denied it was Oswald.[165]

Richard Popkin, who was then chairman of the philosophy department at the University of California San Diego, and an expert on millenarianism and Sabbateanism, argued in The Second Oswald (1966) that someone might have been impersonating Oswald in the weeks prior to the assassination. Popkin believed that a man who looked like Oswald and often posed as Oswald was the actual assassin. Poplin’s claims were based on a reading of the Warren Commission report, as well as Edward J. Epstein’s Inquest and Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash.

Jim Garrison argued that between the years 1961 and 1963 Oswald was impersonated by Kerry Thornley, the founder of the Discordian Society. In 1962 Thornley wrote a novel called The Idle Warriors about a disgruntled marine who defects to the Soviet Union. The book was based on Thornley's knowledge of Oswald. The following year Thornley moved to New Orleans where it was claimed he associated with Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Clay Shaw. The FBI were aware of Thornley’s novel and so after the assassination of Kennedy he was asked to testify before the Warren Commission. Garrison later claimed that Thornley and Lee Harvey Oswald were involved together in covert CIA operations. In his book On the Trail of the Assassins (1988) Garrison insists that Thornley was friends with another possible conspirator, Johnny Roselli. According to Garrison, “Thornley sent a lengthy, almost biographical, 50-page affidavit to me describing, among other things, evidence he had encountered in New Orleans of “Nazi activity” in connection with President Kennedy’s murder.”[166] Thornley was apparently told that his father was Admiral Karl Dönitz.[167] Dönitz’s representative in the United States, H. Keith Thompson, was also in touch with Oswald’s mother Marguerite.[168] Thompson assisted her in opposing the Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination, and represented her in negotiations for interviews and the sale of documents. Thompson was himself questioned about the assassination, but asserted Fifth Amendment rights when interviewed.[169] Thompson also auctioned the Oswald letters on behalf of Marguerite.[170]

In 1957, Oswald and Thornley were stationed as a radar technician at Atsugi Air Base in Japan, the CIA’s headquarters in the Far East. Kerry later served at Atsugi in 1959, also as a radar technician, though they were not stationed at the same time. Since the early 1950s, Atsugi served as one of two overseas field stations where the CIA conducted extensive LSD testing.[171] Similarly, in 1961, the US Army started Operation Third Chance to test LSD on their troops stationed at West European military bases, especially in Germany. The trials included psychological and physical torture and focused on interrogation techniques in case of suspicion of espionage, as well as on the behavior of soldiers in battle situations. Similar LSD army experiments were carried out in 1962 under the code name Derby Hat at a number of US bases in Asia and Hawaii.[172] According to E. Howard Hunt’s autobiography, he was stationed at the Atsugi Air Base at the time.

It was at a party on February 22, 1963, being thrown amongst the émigré White Russian community by de Mohrenschildt, that Oswald met Ruth Hyde and Michael Paine. In 1958, Paine began work for Bell Helicopter Company in Fort Worth under Walter Dornberger, another Nazi scientist associated with the Permindex cabal. Dornberger had been the commanding officer of Wernher von Braun while working together for Hitler's rocket program. Like von Braun, Dornberger was among thousands of Nazi scientists brought to the United States through Operation Paperclip. Dornberger was a directing officer in the Bell Aerospace Corporation along with Fred Korth, Lyndon Johnson's protégée from Fort Worth, Texas. Korth was revealed by the Warren Commission to have been sending money orders and instructions to one of the men impersonating Oswald in Dallas over a period of a few weeks immediately prior to the assassination.[173]

Michael was the son of Ruth Forbes Paine and George Lyman Paine Jr., a Trotskyite and friend of James Burnham of the CCF. Burnham was also a friend of E. Howard Hunt. Ruth Forbes Paine, of the Boston Forbes family, was a great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ruth was also a close personal friend of Mary Bancroft, a devoted student of Carl Jung and mistress to Allen Dulles and later to Henry Luce, Skull and Bones member and creator of Life magazine.[174] A friend of Michael Paine was Fred Osborn, whose father Fred Osborn Sr. was a friend and associate of Allen Dulles. In 1950, Dulles and Osborn co-founded an organization called Crusade for Freedom, an early CIA propaganda effort that merged with Radio Free Europe in 1962. Luce was among the original board of directors.[175] Ruth then later married Arthur M. Young, the designer of Bell Helicopter’s first helicopter, was also an influential philosopher who, inspired by the process theory of spiritual evolution of Alfred North Whitehead, proposed theories that combined Darwinism with traditional wisdom, Jungian archetypes, Theosophy, astrology, yoga, mythology and other forms of knowledge. In 1949, while living in New York, Young and Ruth met Mary Benzenberg Mayer and enrolled in her school, the Source Teaching Society. Mayer had trained under Freud and was later associated with Carl Jung and used dreams and the study of earlier religious traditions.[176] In 1952, Young and his wife Ruth organized the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness in Philadelphia, the forerunner of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, founded in Berkeley in 1972, for the scientific investigation of the phenomenon of ESP. In 1953, Young and Ruth attended séances at Andrija Puharich’s Round Table Foundation which summoned The Council of Nine.

According to a declassified CIA document, Ruth Hyde’s sister Sylvia Hyde Hoke was employed by the CIA in Falls Church, Virginia.[177] Ruth’s father William Avery Hyde worked for the USAID, a well-known CIA front. Declassified documents also show that Hyde had contacts with the agency which considered him for use in an operation in Vietnam.[178] Ruth Hyde, who spoke Russian, was a friend of Oswald’s Russian wife Marina, who was living with Ruth at the time of the JFK assassination. At the suggestion of a neighbor, Ruth Paine told Oswald about a job opportunity at the Texas School Book Depository. According to five government investigations, Lee Harvey Oswald stored the rifle he used to assassinate Kennedy in Ruth’s garage, unbeknownst to her and her husband, Michael Paine.[179]

De Mohrenschildt had numerous ties to the CIA and would often make international trips after which he would be debriefed by J. Walton Moore, an agent of the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division in Dallas.[180] On March 29, 1977, de Mohrenschildt gave an interview to author Edward Jay Epstein, during which he claimed that in 1962, Moore had given him the go-ahead to meet Oswald. “I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it,” de Mohrenschildt said. “Too much was at stake.”[181] That afternoon, de Mohrenschildt was found dead from a supposedly self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head in a house where he was staying in Florida. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

New Orleans

According to Anthony Summers, the author of The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Murchison was also a primary source of money for the American Nazi Party, and its leader, Lincoln Rockwell, who considered Hoover “our kind of people.”[182] In 1968, Minutemen founder Robet DePugh warned in a “special bulletin” circulated among the organization that some members “have been tricked into joining a competing organization that is secretly financed by the Central Intelligence Agency.”[183] In 1970, Former FBI agent William Turner reported that DePugh was held in detention in Kansas City for having jumped bail, which he claimed to have done for fear of his life, because a “Nazi clique” wanted him dead, and that there was no point in going to the FBI who were in control of the organization, as he explained.[184] DePugh was referring to a rift between the Minutemen and Rockwell’s American Nazi Party. On the urging of Jim Garrison, William Turner of Ramparts called DePugh who offered that he had evidence that rogue Minutemen had been involved in the Kennedy assassination. DePugh suspected a couple of his members were on the shooting team in Dallas, using ammunition encased in plastic sleeves so it could be fired from a larger caliber weapon without being traced to that weapon.[185]

Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans, as well was interested in having DePugh testify about the death of three men who were members of the Minutemen. Garrison had uncovered the existence of a paramilitary cell in New Orleans headed by a retired Army officer who claimed to be the “national commander of the Minutemen. In Los Angeles and Orange Country, there was a clique who called themselves the “Real Minutemen.” Some of DePugh’s former members went over to the American Nazi Party. When Turner asked DePugh, wasn’t the ANP a “gross burlesque,” DePugh answered “Not at all,” and named a prominent Texas oil millionaire as its chief financier. “It has the best underground in the right wing,” he added.[186]

Turner worked with Garrison and together they concluded that a group of right-wing activists, including Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Carlos Bringuier and Clay Shaw were involved in a conspiracy with the CIA to kill Kennedy. Banister was an employee of the FBI. Originally based in Indianapolis, he later moved to New York City where he was involved in the investigation of the American Communist Party. J. Edgar Hoover was impressed by Banister’s work and, in 1938, he was promoted to run the FBI unit in Butte, Montana. He also served in Oklahoma City, Minneapolis and Chicago. In Chicago, he was the Special Agent in Charge for the FBI. He retired from the FBI in 1954. Banister moved to Louisiana and, in 1955, became Assistant Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, where he was given the task of investigating organized crime and corruption within the police force.

After he had officially left police work, Banister was active as a top US intelligence agent in the South and in Latin America. His office at 531 Lafayette Street, on the ground floor of the Newman Building in New Orleans,  served both as a rallying point for Minutemen, Cuban exiles and various right-wing and intelligence operatives and as an arms distribution center.[187] According to the New Orleans States-Item, Banister “participated in every anti-Communist South and Central American revolution that came along, acting as a key liaison man for the U.S. government-sponsored anti-Communist activities in Latin America.”[188] The paper also stated that Banister is believed to have worked in cooperation with a US military intelligence office there. Around the corner but located in the same building, with a different entrance, was the address 544 Camp Street, which would later be found stamped on Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets distributed by Lee Harvey Oswald. The Newman Building housed militant anti-Castro groups, including the Cuban Revolutionary Council, as well the Free Cuba Committee. Banister’s office was within walking distance of the New Orleans offices of the FBI, CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the Reily Coffee Company, Oswald’s employer and a supporter of anti-Castro Cubans.[189]

n Miami, DePugh’s intelligence and security officer Jerry Milton Brooks, known to fellow-Minutemen as “the rabbi,” recruited among the Cuban exiles, signing up a former Batista cabinet minister who had fled with a fair share of the national treasury, and an Oriente Province large plantation owner whose property had been expropriated. Brooks reported of a front called the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean (ACLC), operating out of New Orleans. A similarly named Anti-Communist Foreign Legion of the Caribbean was based in the Dominican Republic, and funded by the dictators Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and former Cuban Secret Police Chief Orlando Piedra.[190] Brooks credits the ACLC with assisting the CIA in engineering the 1954 overthrow of the leftist Arbenz government in Guatemala.[191]

According to Brooks, Brooks Gatlin, Sr., an attorney on his list of key Minutemen in Louisiana, served as legal counsel to the ACLC. In Brooks’ estimation, he was a “transporter” for the CIA to countries around the world. In fact, Brooks had been a kind of protege of Gatlin. On one occasion. Gatlin told Brooks, “I have pretty good connections. Stick with me—I’ll give you a license to kill.”[192] In 1962, Gatlin transferred $100,000 from the CIA which was used by the OAS failed attempt to assassinate French president General de Gaulle.[193]

In 1963, Banister and anti-Castro activist David Ferrie began working for a lawyer named G. Wray Gill and his client, New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello. On the day that Kennedy was assassinated, Banister and one of his investigators, Jack Martin, got into a dispute and Banister’s office. Banister pulled out a gun and began to strike Martin who yelled: “What are you going to do — kill me like you all did Kennedy?”[194] Martin told authorities and reporters that Ferrie had been involved in the assassination. He claimed that Ferrie knew Oswald from their days in the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol, and that Ferrie might have taught Oswald how to use a sniper rifle.[195] Martin also claimed that Ferrie drove to Texas on the day of Kennedy’s assassination to serve as a getaway pilot for the assassins.[196]

Grassy Knoll

Garrison believed that Permindex founder Clay Shaw was the man named as “Clay Bertrand,” mentioned in the Warren Commission Report, and an alias Shaw used in New Orleans’ homosexual society.[197] During the trial, which took place in 1969, insurance salesman Perry Russo testified that he had attended a party at Ferrie’s apartment, where he said that Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and “Clay Bertrand” (who Russo identified in the courtroom as Shaw) had discussed killing Kennedy.[198] Russo said the plot involved “triangulation of crossfire,” as a diversionary ruse, and the sacrificing of one man as a scapegoat to allow the others to escape. New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews Jr. testified to the Warren Commission that he received a call from “Clay Bertrand,” the day after the assassination of Kennedy, asking him to fly to Dallas to represent Oswald.[199]

The United States House Select Committee on Assassinations stated that the “evidence strongly suggested” that Oswald was responsible for the unsuccessful assassination attempt on General Edwin Walker on April 10, 1963.[200] Oswald told his wife Marina that the reason he shot Walker was because he was a “very bad man” and “the leader of a fascist organization.” Oswald excused his actions to her pointing out that, “if someone had killed Hitler in time it would have saved many lives.”[201]

In 1962, Harry J. Dean an ex-employee of the FBI and the CIA infiltrated the John Birch Society and later reported that leading members of the society, including Walker and Republican Congressman John Rousselot from California hired two gunmen, Eladio del Valle and Loran Hall, to kill President John F. Kennedy. Dean said Rousselot and Walker convinced other members of the John Birch Society that a “dirty communist” label should be attached to John Kennedy and that he should be marked for death to save the United States from “falling into Red hands.” “I know that John Rousselot organized the murder plot and with other right-wingers financed it. General Walker ramrodded and trained the hired guns,” Dean said.[202]

Operation 40 member Eladio del Valle was born in Cuba, was a supporter of Batista and served as a congressman in Havana. He went into exile just before Fidel Castro gained power in January, 1959. Del Valle moved to Florida where he was active in the Free Cuba Committee, an organization formed by Sergio Arcacha Smith. Loran Hall joined the U.S. Army and later became a mercenary who joined the rebels led by Fidel Castro. Del Valle also worked for Trafficante and was a friend with David Ferrie. Loran Hall fell out with Castro and in 1959 he spent several months in prison where he also met Trafficante.[203] On his release, Hall moved to the United States where he met Gerry P. Hemming, who had established the anti-Castro group Interpen (Intercontinental Penetration Force) in 1961. Hall also joined Hemming, Frank Sturgis and David Ferrie in the International Anti-Communist Brigade. According to Victor Marchetti, Hemming was also Lee Harvey Oswald’s case officer at the then-secret Atsugi Air Force base in Japan.[204]

In his book JFK: The Second Plot, Matthew Smith argued that the John Birch Society may have joined forces with the Texas oil millionaires to assassinate Kennedy. Madeleine Brown, who claimed to have been Lyndon B. Johnson’s mistress and the mother of his child, stated in an interview on the television show, A Current Affair that on November 21, 1963, that she was at Murchison’s Dallas home on the evening prior to the assassination of JFK, which was attended by Johnson as well as other famous, wealthy and powerful individuals, including John J. McCloy, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, H.L. Hunt and Sid Richardson. According to Brown, Johnson had a meeting with several of the men after which he told her: “After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That’s no threat. That’s a promise.”[205] Brown’s account was supported by former CIA agent Robert D. Morrow who wrote in the book, First Hand Knowledge: How I participated in the CIA-Murder of President Kennedy, “On the eve of the assassination, Hoover and Nixon attended a meeting together at the Dallas home of oil baron Clint Murchison. Among the subjects discussed at this meeting were the political futures of Hoover and Nixon in the event President Kennedy was assassinated.”[206]

Murchison, along with Richardson and H.L. Hunt, became major supporters of Lyndon B. Johnson in order to maintain the oil depletion allowance, a generous tax credit. However, in January 1963, Kennedy had presented his proposals for tax reform, which included relieving the tax burdens of low-income and elderly citizens. Kennedy also said he wanted to do away with the oil depletion allowance. It has been estimated that the proposed removal of the oil depletion allowance would have resulted in a loss of around $300 million a year to Texas oil tycoons. After the assassination of Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson dropped the government plans to remove the oil depletion allowance.[207]

The Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Times Herald, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram photographed three transients under police escort near the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the assassination of Kennedy. The men later became known as the “three tramps.” According to Vincent Bugliosi, allegations that these men were involved in a conspiracy originated from theorist Richard E. Sprague who compiled the photographs in 1966 and 1967, and subsequently turned them over to Jim Garrison. Later, in 1974, assassination researchers Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield compared photographs of the men to people they believed to be suspects involved in a conspiracy and claimed that two of the men were E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis.[208] L. Fletcher Prouty identified one of the other man as his former boss, Edward Lansdale.[209]

William King Harvey was one of three people involved in a covert program to send false defectors to the Soviet Union, and was undoubtedly aware of Oswald’s defection. In his personal notes for Executive Action, Harvey developed a profile of the ideal assassin: a person with Communist credentials that can be used if the cover is blown.[210] Harvey also hated the Kennedys. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Harvey infuriated Robert Kennedy when he ordered an unauthorized mission to send ten intelligence operatives into Cuba, and was exiled to Italy as Rome Station Chief.

In 1977, Marita Lorenz told Paul Meskil of the New York Daily News that she met Oswald in the fall of 1963 at an Operation 40 safe house in the Little Havana section of Miami. According to Lorenz, she met him again in 1963 before the Kennedy assassination in the house of Orlando Bosch, with Sturgis, Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, and two other Cubans present. She said the men studied Dallas street maps and that she suspected that they were planning on raiding an arsenal. Lorenz stated that she joined the men who were traveling to Dallas in two cars and carrying “rifles and scopes,” but flew back to Miami the day after they arrived.[211]

Researchers Gaeton Fonzi, Larry Hancock, Noel Twyman, and John Simkin believe that Operation 40 member David Morales was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Morales is alleged to have expressed deep anger toward the Kennedys for what he saw as their betrayal during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Morales’ friend, Ruben Carbajal, claimed that Morales said, “Well, we took care of that SOB, didn’t we?”[212] Morales is alleged to have once told friends, “I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard,” presumably referring to the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, California on June 5, 1968.[213]

In 1975, Roselli testified before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence led by Idaho Senator Frank Church about Operation Mongoose. Shortly before Roselli testified, an unknown person shot and killed Giancana in the basement of his Illinois home just days before Giancana was to testify before the committee. Bill Bonanno, the son of Cosa Nostra mafia boss Joseph Bonanno, claimed in his 1999 memoir, Bound by Honor: A Mafioso's Story, that he had discussed the assassination of Kennedy with Roselli and claimed that Roselli fired at Kennedy from a storm drain on Elm Street.[214] In 1976, Roselli was called before the committee to testify about a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Three months after his first round of testimony, when the Committee wanted to recall Roselli, he went missing. Roselli’s decomposing body was found on August 9, 1976, in a fuel drum floating in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami, Florida.[215]

After Roselli’s death, journalists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten published an editorial stating that Roselli had told associates that individuals he had recruited to kill Castro had been turned by the Cuban leader to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.[216] Bill Bonanno, the son of Cosa Nostra mafia boss Joseph Bonanno, claimed in his 1999 memoir, Bound by Honor: A Mafioso’s Story, that he had discussed the assassination of Kennedy with Roselli and implicated him as the primary hitman in a conspiracy instigated by the mob. According to Bonanno, Roselli fired at Kennedy from a storm drain on Elm Street.[217]

E. Howard Hunt was undeniably bitter about what he perceived as President John F. Kennedy’s lack of commitment in overthrowing the communist government of Cuba.[218] After Hunt’s death in 2007, his sons Saint John Hunt and David Hunt revealed that their father had recorded several claims about himself and others being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. In the April 5, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, Saint John Hunt detailed a number of individuals implicated by his father including William King Harvey, as well as Lyndon B. Johnson, Cord Meyer, David Sánchez Morales, David Atlee Phillips, Frank Sturgis, and an assassin he termed “French gunman grassy knoll,” who many presume was Lucien Sarti, a Corsican drug trafficker from Marseilles.[219] In November 1988, Steve J. Rivele’s French-published book The Murderers of John F. Kennedy named Sarti as one of three French gangsters involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Rivele claimed Sarti fired the fatal shot.

On November 3, 1978, Hunt gave a classified deposition for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), where he denied knowledge of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. A few months earlier, two newspaper articles stated that a 1966 CIA memo linking Hunt to the Kennedy assassination had been provided to the HSCA. The first article, by Victor Marchetti, author of the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, appeared in the Liberty Lobby newspaper The Spotlight on August 14, 1978. The second article, by Joseph J. Trento and Jacquie Powers, which appeared in the Sunday edition of The News Journal of Wilmington, Delaware, alleged that the memo was initialed by Richard Helms and James Angleton and showed that they discussed the fact that Hunt had been in Dallas on the day of the assassination and that his presence there had to be kept secret.

Hunt sued Liberty Lobby, but not the News Journal, for libel. Hunt prevailed and was awarded $650,000 damages. In 1983, however, the case was overturned on appeal because of error in jury instructions. In a second trial, held in 1985, Mark Lane successfully defended Liberty Lobby by producing evidence suggesting that Hunt had been in Dallas. He used depositions from David Atlee Phillips, Richard Helms, G. Gordon Liddy, Stansfield Turner, and Marita Lorenz, and a cross-examination of Hunt. On retrial, the jury rendered a verdict for Liberty Lobby. Lane outlined his theory about Hunt's and the CIA’s role in Kennedy’s murder in a 1991 book, Plausible Denial.

In 1976, author Michael Canfield, author of Coup d’etat In America, visited Paul Raigorodsky, a member of the Solidarists associated with Permindex, he retorted, “I told everything I knew to the Warren Commission. What is your interest in all of this?” When Canfield answered, “Oh, I’m just curious, that’s all.”[220] Raigorodsky warned, “But don’t you know that curiosity killed the cat?” Raigorodsky less than two weeks before de Mohrenschildt died, at a time when HSCA investigators were seeking to interview both of them about the assassination.[221]

After de Mohrenschildt’s death in 1977, an address book was retrieved from his briefcase, in which was found the names, among others, of key MK-Ultra agent Gordon Wasson, who himself was associated with at least six people suspected of being involved in the JFK assassination, including C.D. Jackson and Henry Luce. The address book also contained an entry for “Bush, George H. W. (Poppy).” [222] Other entries included William F. Buckley Jr. and William S. Paley of CBS, a key agent of Operation Mockingbird.[223]

D. Harold Byrd told friends, including the president of the Dallas Morning News at the time, that he had removed the window from which Oswald allegedly took his shot, and displayed it in his home, where it became a conversation piece of many social gatherings.[224] One of H.L. Hunt’s closest friends was Lt. George Butler, who was the head of the Policeman’s Union in Dallas and a member of the Klan, and was also acquainted with Jack Ruby, and appeared to have protected him in the famous attempt to bribe the Dallas police by the Chicago mafia. It was Butler who was immediately in charge of Oswald’s transfer at the time Ruby killed him.[225]

[1] Michael Carlson. “L Fletcher Prouty: US officer obsessed by the conspiracy theory of President Kennedy’s assassination.” The Guardian (June 21, 2001).

[2] Sterling & Peggy Seagrave. Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold (Bowstring, 2010).

[3] Ibid.

[4] William Torbitt. NASA, Nazis & JFK: The Torbitt Document & the Kennedy Assassination (Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996) p. 49.

[5] Brussell. “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination.”

[6] James DiEugenio. Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012).

[7] John Hughes-Wilson. JFK: An American Coup: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination (Kings Road Publishing, 2013).

[8] Jim DeBrosse. See No Evil: The JFK Assassination and the U.S. Media (TrineDay, 2018).

[9] Joan Mellon. A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).

[10] Michele Metta. CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK (independently published, 2018).

[11] Michele Metta. CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK (independently published, 2018).

[12] William Torbitt. Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal (1970).

[13] James Stuart Olson. Encyclopedia of the industrial revolution in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 238.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Harrison E. Livingstone. The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy: Stunning Evidence in the Assassination of the President (Victoria: Trafford, 2004), p. 69.

[16] Darwin Payne. “When Dallas Was the Most Racist City in America.” D Magazine (June 2017).

[17] McLean. Behind the Mask of Chivalry, pp. 54.

[18] Joe Maxwell. “News Watch: Baptist Battle over Freemasonry Erupts Anew’.” Christian Research Journal (Fall, 1993).

[19] Michael Glenn Maness. Character Counts: Freemasonry Is a National Treasure and a Source of Our Founders’ Constitutional Original Intent (AuthorHouse, 2010) p. 251.

[20] Alan Bean. “The curse of Ham: Black Baptists question their place in the SBC.” Baptist News (July 10, 2017).

[21] “Texas Baptists prepare to memorialize Criswell.” Baptist Press Website (January 10, 2002). Retrieved 2011-02-15.

[22] Albert Mohler. “The Southern Baptist Reformation—A First-Hand Account.”

[23] Kruse. One Nation Under God, p. 27.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Livingstone. The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, p. 69.

[26] Phillip F. Nelson. LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), p. 180.

[27] Michael Phillips. White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001 (University of Texas Press, 2006), p. 134.

[28] Alan Peppard. “Campaign ‘60.” Dallas Morning News.

[29] David Miller. The JFK Conspiracy (Writers Club Press, 2002), p. 170.

[30] John Savage. “The John Birch Society Is Back.” Politico (July 16, 2017).

[31] Edward H. Miller. Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy (University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 7.

[32] Peter Elkind. “The Legacy of Citizen Robert.” Texas Monthly, (July 1985), p. 161.

[33] Constantine. Virtual Government, p. 11.

[34] “H L. Hunt: Magnate with Mission; One of Richest Men in Nation, Oilman Aids Right Wing.” New York Times (August 17, 1964).

[35] Ibid.

[36] Miller. Nut Country, p. 90.

[37] The Deguello Report.

[38] Ibid., p. 7.

[39] Lee Roy Chapman. “The Strange Love of Dr. Billy James Hargis.” This Land (February 11, 2012).

[40] Anthony Summers. Not in Your Lifetime (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1998), p. 162.

[41] Chapman. “The Strange Love of Dr. Billy James Hargis.”

[42] James Stuart Olson. Historical Dictionary of the 1970s (Greenwood Publishing, 1999), p. 187.

[43] “General Walker Faces Sex Charge: Right-Wing Figure Accused in Dallas of Lewdness,” United Press International, New York Times (July 9, 1976), p. 84.

[44] Adam Gopnik. “The John Birchers’ Tea Party.” The New Yorker (October 11, 2013).

[45] Miller. Nut Country, p. 7.

[46] David E Kaiser. The Road to Dallas (Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 248.

[47] “Cuban Revolutionary Council: A Concise History.” House Select Committee on Assassinations - Appendix to Hearings, Volume 10, 4, p. 58; David Ferrie. House Select Committee on Assassinations - Appendix to Hearings, Volume 10, 12, p. 110.

[48] Joan Mellon. A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).

[49] Affidavit of Daniel P. Sheehan. The Christic Institute (Filed on December 12, 1986).

[50] Ibid.

[51] Simon Tisdall. “CIA conspired with mafia to kill Castro.” The Guardian (June 27, 2007).

[52] Ibid.

[53] John Hughes-Wilson. JFK: An American Coup: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination (Kings Road Publishing, 2013).

[54] Alfred W. McCoy, Cathleen B. Read & Leonard P. Adams II. The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Harper & Row, 1972).

[55] Ibid.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid.

[58] James McEnteer. Deep in the Heart: The Texas Tendency in American Politics (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2004). p. 105.

[59] Livingstone. The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, p. 69.

[60] Anthony Summers. The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), p. 180.

[61] Sally Denton & Roger Morris. The Money and the Power (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002).

[62] Livingstone. The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, p. 69.

[63] Athan G. Theoharis & John Stuart Cox. The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition, (Temple University Press, 1988).

[64] Matt Potter. “Oil and Politics in La Jolla.” San Diego Reader (January 5, 2011).

[65] Curt Gentry. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), p. 432.

[66] Burton Hersh. Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover that Transformed America (Basic Books, 2008).

[67] Martin A. Lee. “Their Will Be Done,” Mother Jones (July/August 1983).

[68] Kevin J. Madigan. “How the Catholic Church Sheltered Nazi War Criminals.” Commentary (December 1m 2001).

[69] Michelangelo Signorile. Cardinal Spellman’s Dark Legacy (New York Press, 2002).

[70] Curt Gentry. J. Edgar Hoover, The Man and the Secrets (NY: W. W. Norton, 1991), notes p. 347.

[71] Lucian K. Truscott IV. “I was groped by a man called “Mary”: The world changes but not the Catholic Church.” Salon (February 9, 2019).

[72] Rod Dreher. “Uncle Teddy, Boy Raper.” The American Conservative (July 19, 2018).

[73] Nicholas Gage. “Ex‐Head of Schenley Industries Is Linked to Crime ‘Consortium’.” New York Times (February 19, 1971). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1971/02/19/archives/exhead-of-schenley-industries-is-linked-to-crime-consortium.html

[74] Nicholas Faith. The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006), p. 66.

[75] Whitney Webb. “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case.” MintPress (July 18, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.mintpressnews.com/shocking-origins-jeffrey-epstein-blackmail-roy-cohn/260621/

[76] Ibid.

[77] Burton Hersh. Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover that Transformed America (Basic Books, 2008), p. 88.

[78] Tom Jicha. “PBS Show Opens Closet Door on Hoover’s Sexuality, Mob Ties.” Sun Sentinel (February 9, 1993).

[79] Anthony Summers. “The secret life of J Edgar Hoover” The Guardian (January 1, 2012).

[80] Ibid.

[81] Ibid.

[82] Hersh. Bobby and J. Edgar.

[83] Phillip Knightley & Caroline Kennedy. An Affair of State: The Profumo Case and the Framing of Stephen Ward (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), p. 16.

[84] Knightley & Kennedy. An Affair of State, p. 69.

[85] Knightley & Kennedy. An Affair of State, p. 22-24.

[86] Ibid., p. 31-32.

[87] Peter Levenda. Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft. Book Two: A Warm Gun (Walterville, Oregon: TrineDay , 2011).

[88] Knightley & Kennedy. An Affair of State, p. 48.

[89] Christine Keeler. Secrets and Lies: The Trials of Christine Keeler (John Blake, 2014).

[90] Robert Booth. “Ted Heath’s accuser ‘gave child abuse inquiry fantastical evidence’.” The Guardian (November 27, 2016).

[91] Steve Anderson. “Edward Heath ‘raped 12-year-old boy at Mayfair flat’.” The Independent (August 4, 2015).

[92] Christine Keeler. Secrets and Lies: The Trials of Christine Keeler (John Blake, 2014).

[93] Ibid.

[94] John Simkin. “Why did the intelligence services murder Dr. Stephen Ward?” Spartacus International (January 8, 2014). Retrieved from https://spartacus-educational.com/spartacus-blogURL15.html

[95] Anthony Summers. The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993).

[96] Donald Spoto. Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (Cooper Square Press, 2001), p. 534.

[97] See David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao. Volume Three, Chapter 18: The Frankfurt School.

[98] Joe Williams. Hollywood Myths: The Shocking Truths Behind Film's Most Incredible Secrets and Scandals (Voyageur Press, 2012), p. 119–120.

[99] Michael Freedland. All the Way: A Biography of Frank Sinatra (London: Orion Books, 1997), p. 299.

[100] Joe Williams. Hollywood Myths: The Shocking Truths Behind Film's Most Incredible Secrets and Scandals (Voyageur Press, 2012), p. 119–120.

[101] “Housekeeper: Monroe died after seeing RFK” UPI (October 6, 1985). Retrieved from https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/10/06/Housekeeper-Monroe-died-after-seeing-RFK/9586497419200/

[102] John Simkin. “Mariella Novotny.” Spartacus Educational. Retrieved from https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKnovotny.htm

[103] John Bartlow Martin. Robert Kennedy: His Own Words (1988) p. 389; cited in John Simkin. “Bobby Baker.” Spartacus Educational. Retrieved from https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbakerB.htm

[104] Richard D. Mahoney. Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy (1999) p. 277; cited in John Simkin. “Bobby Baker.” Spartacus Educational. Retrieved from https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbakerB.htm

[105] Bobby Baker. Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator (1978), p. 79.

[106] John Simkin. “Why did the intelligence services murder Dr. Stephen Ward?” Spartacus International (January 8, 2014). Retrieved from https://spartacus-educational.com/spartacus-blogURL15.html

[107] Anthony Summers. The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993).

[108] Geoffrey Robertson. Stephen Ward Was Innocent OK: The Case for Overturning his Conviction (London: Biteback Publishing, 2013), p. 166; Knightley & Kennedy. An Affair of State, p. 105-112.

[109] Anthony Summers. The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993).

[110] Anthony Summers. The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993).

[111] Tom Mangold. “Revealed: The secret tapes of the orgy-loving playboy driven to suicide by the Profumo scandal…” Daily Mail (May 24, 2013). Retrieved from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2330652/Revealed-The-secret-tapes-orgy-loving-playboy-driven-suicide-Profumo-scandal-.html

[112] Christine Keeler. Secrets and Lies: The Trials of Christine Keeler (John Blake, 2014).

[113] Knightley & Kennedy. An Affair of State, p. 248.

[114] Knightley & Kennedy. An Affair of State, p. 257.

[115] Douglas Valentine. A Review of The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War On Drugs. Retrieved from Carlo Parcelli, http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine/

[116] Eric Dezenhall. “The Devil Himself Explores Mob’s Fight Against Nazis During WWII.” Daily Beast (July 13, 2017). Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-devil-himself-explores-mobs-fight-against-nazis-during-wwii

[117] David C. Martin. “The CIA’s ‘Loaded Gun’” Washington Post (October 10, 1976).

[118] John Simkin. “CIA: Executive Action.” Spartacus Educational (September 1997).

[119] Tom Miller. Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 69.

[120] Martin. “The CIA’s ‘Loaded Gun’”

[121] “Santo Trafficante.” Spartacus Educational.

[122] David C. Martin. “The CIA’s ‘Loaded Gun’” Washington Post (October 10, 1976).

[123] David Stout. “Theodore Shackley, Enigmatic C.I.A. Official, Dies at 75.” The New York Times (December 14, 2002).

[124] Joel Bainerman. Inside the Covert Operations of the CIA & Israel’s Mossad (SP Books, 1994), p. 67.

[125] Fabian Escalante. “Who had the means and motives to kill Kennedy in 1963?” Granma International, (Havana, June 5, 2005); Fabian Escalante. Cuban Officials and JFK Historians, (Nassau, Bahamas, December 7, 1995).

[126] Brussell. “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination.”

[127] E. Howard Hunt. Undercover: memoirs of an American secret agent (Berkley, 1974). pp. 43–44.

[128] Mark Selden & Alvin Y. So. War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 187.

[129] Jim Drinkhall. “CIA Helped Quash Major, Star-Studded Tax Evasion Case.” Washington Post (April 24, 1980). Retrieved from https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GWWkS5swBjcJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/04/24/cia-helped-quash-major-star-studded-tax-evasion-case/a55ddf06-2a3f-4e04-a687-a3dd87c32b82/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

[130] Tad Szulc. Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 78.

[131] HSCA Deposition (November 3, 1978), Part II, p. 6:10–17.

[132] John Prados. Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Ivan R. Dee, 2006), p. xxii]

[133] Fabian Escalante. CIA Covert Operations 1959-1962: The Cuba Project, (2004) pp. 42-43; Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo. “The Bush Family and the Kennedy Assassination.” Centro de Midia Independente (January 16, 2006).

[134] Russ Baker. “Bush and the JFK Hit, Part 10: After Camelot.” Who.What.Why (November 13, 2013).

[135] Roger Stone & Saint John Hunt. The Bush Crime Family: The Inside Story of an American Dynasty (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017); John Simkin. “Jack Alston Crichton.” Spartacus Educational (September 1997).

[136] Baker. “Bush and the JFK Hit, Part 10: After Camelot.”

[137] Russ Baker. Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), p. 84

[138] “Oswald friend labeled CIA informant in memo.” Dallas Times Herald (July 27, 1978). pp. 1, 14

[139] Baker. Family of Secrets, p. 72.

[140] Ibid., p. 128.

[141] Major Ralph P. Ganis. The Skorzeny Papers: Evidence for the Plot to Kill JFK (Hot Books, 2018).

[142] Alden Hatch. The Byrds of Virginia: An American Dynasty, 1670 to the Present (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).

[143] Baker. Family of Secrets, p. 77.

[144] Ibid, p. 111.

[145] Joseph Trento. Prelude to Terror: Edwin P. Wilson and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005) p. 7.

[146] Payne Darwin (2010-06-12). “Dresser Industries.” tshaonline.org. Retrieved from https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dod04

[147] Baker. Family of Secrets, p. 78.

[148] Robbins. Secrets of the Tomb, Kindle Locations 2473-2475.

[149] Trento. Prelude to Terror, p. 16.

[150] Ibid.

[151] Ibid.

[152] Donald Gibson. The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up (Huntington, NY: Nova Science, 2000).

[153] Baker. Family of Secrets, p. 76.

[154] Ibid.

[155] Daniel Hopsicker, “Barry & ‘the Boys’: Goss Made His ‘Bones’ on CIA Hit Team.” Mad Cow Morning New (May 6 2006).

[156] “Famous Kin of Lee Harvey Oswald.” Retrieved from https://famouskin.com/famous-kin-menu.php?name=9730%20lee%20harvey%20oswald&fbclid=IwAR3XR6V__b6wLV4XV-cPura_xBzb-KNqmeWtmwu-NmYyW3tnyA3lxGrkBgs

[157] Ibid.

[158] Ibid.

[159] Bill Bell. “Foundation is Tapped Out.” New York Daily News (February 19, 1996).

[160] “Baron Maurice de Hirsch.” Jewish Virtual Library (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/baron-maurice-de-hirsch

[161] “Lavanburg-Corner House Fund.” Social Networks and Archival Context (n.d.). Retrieved from http://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w68203ww

[162] Roy v. Hartogs, 366 N.Y.S. 2d 297 (1975), motion to dismiss denied, 381 N.Y.Sup.Ct. 2d 587 (1976).

[163] Gary R. Schoener. “Sexual Misconduct By Professionals: Some Historical Perspectives,” TELL Therapy Exploitation Link Line (n.d). Retrieved from https://www.therapyabuse.org/p2-professional-sexual-misconduct_Schoener.htm

[164] Warren Commission Report, pp. 378-383.

[165] John Armstrong. “Harvey and Lee: The Case for Two Oswalds.” The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. edited by James DiEugenio & Lisa Pease (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House), p. 97.

[166] Jim Garrison. On the Trail of the Assassins (1988).

[167] Interview with SteamShovel Press editor Kenn Thomas in a 1991. Cited in Gorightly. The Prankster and the Conspiracy, p. 195.

[168] Bolton. “H. Keith Thompson Jr.”

[169] David McCalden. Revisionist Newsletter, (Manhattan Beach, California, No. 21, June, 1983).

[170] “Marguerite Oswald 1968 typed letter signed” to Thompson, American Exchange.

[171] Martin A. Lee, Robert Ranftel & Jeff Cohen “Did Lee Harvey Oswald Drop Acid?” Rolling Stone Magazine (March 1983).

[172] Dieter Hagenbach & Lucius Werthmüller. Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hoffman and His Discovery of LSD; cited in Dieter Hagenbach, “The Search for a Truth Serum”, Reality Sandwich.

[173] William Torbitt. Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal (1970).

[174] Baker. Family of Secrets, p. 103.

[175] Steve Jones. “New Evidence Regarding Ruth and Michael Paine.” Kennedy Assassination Chronicles (Vol.4, Issue 4, Winter 1998).

[176] “About Arthur M. Young,” Retrieved from http://www.arthuryoung.com/about.html

[177] “SECURITY FILE ON SYLVIA HYDE HOKE.” CIA. Series: JFK; Record Number: 1993.07.24.08:39:37:560310; Agency File Number: 80T01357A.

[178] “MEMO - PAINE, RUTH, NEE: HYDE, AKA: MRS. MICHAEL PAINE.” CIA. Series: JFK; Record number: 104-10300-10140; Agency File Number: 80T01357A.

[179] Federal Bureau of Investigation (1963), the Warren Commission (1964), the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979), and the Dallas Police Department.

[180] George de Mohrenschildt. House Select Committee on Assassinations - Appendix to Hearings, Volume 12, 4, p. 54.

[181] Edward Jay Epstein. The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), p. 559.

[182] Summers. Not in Your Lifetime, p. 181.

[183] Robert H. Colllins. “Minutemen Warned on ‘CIA-Backed Rivals’.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (October 20, 1968).

[184] William W. Turner. “DePugh and the Minutemen: Wonderland of the Mind,” Ramparts (June 1970).

[185] William Turner. Rearview Mirror (2001).

[186] Turner. “DePugh and the Minutemen.”

[187] Joachim Joesten. How Kennedy Was Killed (1968).

[188] New Orleans States-Item (May 5, 1967).

[189] Anthony Summers. Not in Your Lifetime (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1998), pp. 220-221, 226.

[190] Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1993), p. 88.

[191] William W. Turner. “The Minutemen.” Ramparts (January, 1967).

[192] Turner. Rearview Mirror (2001).

[193] Ibid.

[194] Appendix to Hearings before the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, Volume X, 1979 & page 130.

[195] FBI interview of Jack S. Martin (November 25, 1963 & November 27, 1963), Warren Commission Document No. 75, pp. 217-18, 309-11.

[196] David Ferrie. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Appendix to Hearings, Volume 10, 12, pp. 112-13.

[197] James Phelan. Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels, pp. 150-51.

[198] Testimony of Perry Raymond Russo, State of Louisiana vs. Clay L. Shaw (February 10, 1969).

[199] “Testimony of Dean Adams Andrews, Jr.” Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. XI. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. 1964. pp. 325–339.

[200] “Findings of the Select Committee on Assassinations.” HSCA Final Report, p. 61.

[201] Warren Commission Hearings, Volume I, p. 16.

[202] W.R. Morris. The Men Behind the Guns (Angel Lea Books, 1975).

[203] Alan J. Weberman. Coup d’Etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Quick American Archives, 1992), p. 134.

[204] The Spotlight (August 14, 1978)

[205] Hugh Aynesworth. “‘One-man truth squad’ still debunking JFK conspiracy theories.” The Dallas Morning News (November 17, 2012).

[206] Robert D. Morrow. First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the Cia-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy (Spi Books, 1992).

[207] Jim Marrs. Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

[208] Vincent Bugliosi. Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), p. 930.

[209] Sterling & Peggy Seagrave. Gold Warriors.

[210] Matthew White. JFK Murder - A Revisionist’s History (2006).

[211] Paul Meskil. “Ex-Spy Says She Drove To Dallas With Oswald & Kennedy ‘Assassin Squad’.” New York Daily News (September 20, 1977).

[212] Gaeton Fonzi. The Last Investigation, (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993).

[213] “CIA role claim in Kennedy killing.” BBC News (November 21, 2006); Shane O’Sullivan. Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy (New York: Sterling Publishing, 2008).

[214] “Bound by Honor: A Mafioso’s Story.” Publishers Weekly (March 29, 1999); George Anastasia. “Did the Mafia really manage JFK's assassination?” The Baltimore Sun (May 30, 1999).

[215] “Deep Six for Johnny.” Time Magazine (August 23, 1976). pp. 23–25.

[216] Jack Anderson & Les Whitten. “Mob may have been behind Kennedy assassination.” The Free Lance–Star (September 7, 1976). pp. 4–5.

[217] “Bound by Honor: A Mafioso’s Story.” Publishers Weekly (March 29, 1999).

[218] Carol Rosenberg. “Plotter of Bay of Pigs, Watergate conspirator: ‘File and forget’ Castro.” Miami Herald (June 28, 2001).

[219] Erik Hedegaard. “The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt.” Rolling Stone (April 5, 2007).

[220] Baker. Family of Secrets, p. 279.

[221] Ibid., p. 279.

[222] Ibid., p. 278.

[223] Webster Griffin Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (2004).

[224] “Famed ‘Oswald window’” Washington Times (May 2, 2006).

[225] Livingstone. The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, p. 69.

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio