Expert Report Part 2: JFK's Assassination and Why It Matters

This John Fitzgerald Kennedy Report is presented by the TRC (www.americantruthnow.org), which was formed in 2019 by members of the Kennedy and King families, Daniel Ellsberg, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, David Crosby, Reverend James Lawson Jr., Oliver Stone, Adam Walinsky, James Galbraith, David Talbot, and other public figures. It states:

The TRC is dedicated to helping America confront the truth of the assassinations, all of which changed the course of American and world history and adversely affect us to this day. The subsequent cover-ups and failures to disclose critical case files have added to the public’s distrust of both the government and the media, a situation that has helped create the dysfunction in our current political environment.

Written by respected journalists and researchers, this report (available in its entirety in JFK: The Real Story)  relies on documented evidence to refute the official government story of these assassinations. As with other Truth and Reconciliation movements, our goal is not to punish the perpetrators but to set the historical record straight and thereby help bring about a new era of understanding for current and future generations.

The Justice Integrity Project, which has been active in supporting the committee’s work, republished the first part of the report here (JFK’s Assassination Part 1),to advance public understanding of evidence that has been ignored or under-reported by the mainstream media.

Today’s second and final part (with photo selection and captions by our project, not the TRC) answers the key questions about the tragic event in Dallas in 1963: “Who Killed JFK? Why Does It Matter Now?”

– Andrew Kreig, Justice Integrity Project editor

In 1963, hate mongers prepared for President Kennedy’s assassination by distributing the handbill above in Dallas on the day he was murdered, Nov. 22, 1963.

Who Killed JFK?

Soon after President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, President Johnson, above center, appointed the Warren Commission (arrayed around him as they delivered their report in 1964) ostensibly to get to the bottom of who killed Kennedy and why. But the Commission appeared more interested in putting the public’s mind at ease than in finding the truth. Over time, researchers who analyzed the report were stunned by the inaccuracies, important evidence that was ignored, and testimony that was changed.

Named for its chairperson, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, left, the panel could just as easily been called the Dulles Commission after its most active member, former CIA director and Kennedy enemy, Allen Dulles. Kennedy and Dulles, right, had intractable differences, and Kennedy had actually fired him after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

The Warren Report, issued in September 1964, asserted that President Kennedy had been shot by an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone assassin who fired three bullets from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. But that claim was patently false for many reasons. At that point, Kennedy’s limousine was already more than 150 feet past the building—and still moving away. Also, there were several oak trees and a large road sign in the line of fire.

Any lone assassin in that position would certainly have taken the much easier shot as the limousine approached to within 50 feet on Houston Street.

More than 40 witnesses stated that shots were fired from the grassy knoll in front of the President’s motorcade (shown at left on the photo below), but all of them were either ignored or  pressured to change their testimony by the FBI or Warren Commission attorneys. Such was also the case with eyewitnesses Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, close friends and associates of Kennedy, who had been riding in the limousine behind the President’s.

To protect the lone-assassin narrative, the overriding requirement of which was that only three bullets had been fired, all from behind the President, Warren Commission attorney Arlen Spector made a bizarre claim. He posited that one of these bullets, later dismissively called the “the magic bullet,” somehow passed through Kennedy’s body and zigzagged up and down, and left and right, and ultimately struck Texas Governor John Connally, who was sitting in the front seat. Spector claimed said that the shot caused seven wounds. One problem was that this alleged “magic bullet” was later found on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital in pristine condition. Even Connally insisted until his death that he was struck by a different bullet than any of those that hit JFK. Also, the Warren Commission ignored physical evidence of additional bullet holes observed in the limousine and on the adjacent roadside.

The Commission’s conclusion was an absurd ballistic fairytale that was visually shattered by the famous Zapruder film, which clearly shows the President being shot from his front right. Shots were also fired from behind. But as Kennedy’s right temple explodes, he is violently thrown back and to his left, indicating he was killed by the shot from the front, not a shot from behind at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD, shown at left center in the adjoining photo). This clear video evidence alone is ample proof of a conspiracy.

Apparently, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy also believed this. Shown (at left) climbing onto the trunk of the car to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull, she later told friends she believed that her husband had been ambushed by multiple conspirators.

In presentations before Congressional committees, renowned forensic coroner, Dr. Cyril Wecht, right, further demolished the Warren Report’s insistence that it was three bullets from the TSBD behind the President that killed him.

There was also confirmation of the conspiracy from two of the Parkland Hospital emergency room surgeons, Dr. Charles Crenshaw and Dr. Robert McLelland, shown below at right lecturing on the issue. Silenced for years by official pressure, these doctors eventually revealed that they had seen with their own eyes that President Kennedy had been shot from the front as well as the rear. Over the years, numerous other Parkland and Bethesda doctors have come forth and told of having seen multiple frontal wounds.

Particularly telling is the fact that no Oswald fingerprints were found on the alleged assassin’s rifle; nor was there any gunpowder residue on his cheek when Oswald was tested by Dallas police. And there is strong exculpatory evidence that Oswald had nothing to do with the killing of Officer J.D. Tippit—he was shot nearby 45 minutes after the assassination—for which Oswald was also charged.

Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?

The Warren Commission described the 24-year-old Oswald, left, as a “lone nut assassin.” But there’s more than enough reason to believe that he had been engaged by the U.S. intelligence community. As stated by Senator Richard Schweiker, who investigated the Kennedy assassination in the 1970s while serving on the Church Committee, Lee Harvey Oswald had the “fingerprints of intelligence” all over him.

Oswald served in the Marines as a radar technology specialist at the Naval Air Station Atsugi in Japan, which housed the CIA’s super-secret U-2 spy planes.

He carried a high-level security clearance (a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission) and was trained in the Russian language. When he left the Marines, he apparently became one of several fake defectors to the Soviet Union on behalf of U.S. Intelligence. After denouncing the United States, publicly rejecting his American citizenship while retaining it privately, Oswald worked at a Soviet factory in Minsk and married a Russian woman. The two of them returned to the U.S. courtesy of a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow. Oswald and his wife, Marina (shown departing the the Soviet Union), were met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by Spas T. Raikin, an anti-Communist with extensive intelligence connections, who, according to the Warren Report, had been recommended by the State Department.

If Lee Harvey Oswald had truly defected to the Soviet Union on his own at the height of the Cold War, it defies reason that he would ever have been allowed back into the United States with such ease and government support and later been hired (as shown below) by several companies led by fervent anti-communists. James W. Douglass, in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters—considered by many to be the most important book on the subject—asks the key question: Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the very government he allegedly betrayed?

And Oswald’s smooth reentry into America is not the only puzzling part of this story.

Oswald moved to Fort Worth, Texas where, at the request of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, a vehement anti-communist White Russian, who was also a CIA asset. Within days, de Mohrenschildt, left, secured employment for Oswald at a photography and graphics company that worked on top-secret maps for the military related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba and elsewhere. Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt and introduced to many other anti-Communist White Russians. One day in 1977, just hours before he was to meet with House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator, Gaeton Fonzi, de Mohrenschildt allegedly took his own life. He had recently confessed that he had contacted Oswald on behalf of the CIA.

In April 1963, Oswald moved to New Orleans and got a job at the Reily Coffee Company, which was owned by two brothers, William and Eustis Reily, who had known CIA affiliations. The company, conveniently situated in close proximity to FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Naval Intelligence offices, was also just around the corner from the office of Guy Banister, the former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago bureau reporting to FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover. Banister, right, was working in New Orleans as a covert action coordinator for various U.S. intelligence services, supplying weapons, money, and training to anti-Castro paramilitaries at secret facilities near the city. Oswald also went to work with Banister and the CIA paramilitaries.

From this time until the assassination, Oswald engaged in all sorts of contradictory activities— one day portraying himself as pro-Castro, the next day as anti—with many of these theatrical performances directed from Banister’s office.

Oswald, in a short sleeve shirt and tie at front center, is shown handing out leaflets promoting the pro-Castro “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” (as shown on the yellow flyer at right) outside the International Trade Mart in New Orleans on Aug. 16, 1963. (Archival annotated photo by NBC affiliate WSDU-TV.)

It was as if Oswald, then 23, on the orders of his intelligence handlers, were being set up as a future “assassin” or “patsy,” while at the same time enacting multiple conflicting roles to confound anyone intent on deciphering the reasons behind his actions.

Author James Douglass argues persuasively that Oswald “seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI as a provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960 to 1964, recounted in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that, “It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency (CIA).”

A wealth of evidence depicts a young Oswald being moved around the globe by the CIA like a chess pawn, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated (as shown at right) in the Dallas police headquarters by Jack Ruby, who himself had known intelligence and Mafia ties. Moreover, it has come to light that Ruby and Oswald had known each other and worked together for several years. Author John Armstrong reported more than 30 people claiming to have seen Lee Harvey Oswald and Jacky Ruby together.

Other Intelligence Handlers and Collaborators

When de Mohrenschildt exited the picture, Ruth and Michael Paine—a couple introduced to Oswald by the CIA asset—entered the scene right on cue. Ruth Paine, left, conveniently arranged employment for Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository, where he began work on October 16, 1963.

The Paines became critically important witnesses against Oswald during the Warren Commission investigation. Allen Dulles questioned them, studiously avoiding any revealing questions, including ones that might indicate his own close personal connections to the Paine family. For instance, Michael Paine’s mother, Ruth Paine Forbes Young, was a dear friend of Dulles’ long-time mistress, Mary Bancroft, who worked with Dulles as a spy in Switzerland during World War II. Bancroft and Dulles had even been guests at Ruth Paine Forbes Young’s private island off Cape Cod.

Thirty years after the assassination, a declassified document indicated that Ruth Paine’s sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Their father traveled throughout Latin America on a contract with the Agency for International Development (whose CIA front activities are well-documented) and filed reports that went to the CIA. Ruth’s husband Michael’s stepfather, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell helicopter, a military workhorse during the Vietnam War, and Michael held a high-security job working with his stepfather at the military contractor.

Even D. Harold Byrd, the owner of the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald worked for the month before the assassination, had strong ties to the anti-communist community in Dallas. Byrd, a right-wing oilman, defense contractor and founder of the national Civil Air Patrol (in which Oswald had served as a teenager in New Orleans, as shown in the photo at right), was a “Kennedy-hater,” according to author Russ Baker.

At left is a copy of a full-page, anti-Kennedy ad published in the Dallas Morning News on the morning of the assassination. The ad was signed by Bernard Weissman, a Dallas right-winger who was later reported by Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Thayer Waldo to have met for two hours on Nov. 14 with Jack Ruby at Ruby’s Carousel Club along with Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit.

It is now apparent to anyone paying close attention that a very intricate and deadly game was being played at high levels in the shadows. It’s common knowledge that Oswald was blamed for the Nov. 22 murders of President Kennedy and Officer Tippit.

But if one follows the trail of that day’s events, it becomes obvious that government forces were at work, and Oswald was likely nothing more than the “patsy” he claimed to be while in police custody.

Who Had the Power to Withdraw the President’s Security and Cover Up the Crime?

To answer the essential question is to finger the conspirators and to expose, in the words of first-generation researcher Vincent Salandria (a lawyer who publicly questioned the Warren Report soon after it came out in 1964), “the false mystery concealing state crimes.” Reflecting on the coverup, he asked, “What would an honest government do?”

One thing is certain: neither Oswald, the Mafia, nor anti-Castro Cubans would have had the power to interfere with Presidential security. But we do know several entities that did.

First, Dallas Sheriff Bill Decker ordered all his deputies “to take no part whatsoever in the security of that motorcade.” Likewise, Police Chief Jesse Curry withheld Dallas police protection from Dealey Plaza. Both lawmen were responding to orders they received from the Secret Service, which puzzlingly withdrew most of the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s limousine, where they usually ride (as they did the day before, in Houston). At the last minute, they even removed agents from the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire.

The Secret Service freely admitted there were no agents on the ground in Dealey Plaza to protect Kennedy. We know from extensive witness testimony that before, during, and after the assassination, there were people in Dealey Plaza impersonating Secret Service agents. One of them physically barred a policeman and curious onlookers from advancing toward the spot where they suspected some of the shots originated, the raised embankment that came to be known as the Grassy Knoll.

Also, in a blatant violation of security protocol, the Secret Service had approved the fateful, dogleg turn from Main Stre onto Elm Street, where the President’s driver, Secret Service agent William Greer, proceeded at a snail’s pace and nearly came to a full stop before the final shot to the head. Greer’s actions stood in stark contrast to his Secret Service training, in which agents are instructed to drive off at maximum speed if shot-like sounds are heard. Instead, he hit the brakes and turned around, as if to ascertain that Kennedy had been mortally wounded, before speeding away. This sequence of events was proffered by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, not by some conspiracy theorist.

Many factors point overwhelmingly to powerful forces within the government and not to rogue actors: the evidence and witness accounts that were manipulated, inquiries that were stopped, press coverage that was distorted, legitimate researchers who were defamed, and the many witnesses who met violent deaths. And who could have squelched the testimony of the multiple doctors and medical personnel who insisted that the president had been shot from the front in addition to from behind—facts that directly contradict the official story? Such a systematic cover-up could hardly have been orchestrated by lone individuals with no institutional support.

For nearly six decades, engaged citizens, independent historians and journalists, and Congressional investigators have amassed a detailed case for conspiracy in the murder of John F. Kennedy—a foul crime that tragically altered the course of American history. The only Americans still in resolute denial of the facts are those in power.

Epilogue By James W. Douglass

Kennedy Family, with parents Joseph and Rose Kennedy, center, Hyannisport, MA

James Douglass, author of JFK and Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters, has written:

“John F. Kennedy, the son of a millionaire ambassador, was born, raised, and educated to rule the system. When he was elected President, Kennedy’s heritage of power corresponded to his position as head of the greatest national security state in history. In spite of all odds, he became a peacemaker and, thus, a traitor to the system….

“Why did John Kennedy choose life in the midst of death and by continuing to choose life thus condemn himself to death? I have puzzled over that question while studying the various biographies of Kennedy. In reading his story, one is struck by his devotion to his children. There is no mistaking the depth of love he had for Caroline and John, and the overwhelming pain he and Jacqueline experienced at the death of their son Patrick.

“Robert Kennedy (left) in his book Thirteen Days has described how his brother saw the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of the future of his children and all children. The heroic peacemaking of his final months, with his acceptance of its likely cost in his own death, was, I suspect, partly a result of the universal life he saw in and through them. I think he believed profoundly the words that he gave in his American University address as his foundation for rejecting the Cold War: ‘Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.’”

President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy pose along with their children, John Jr., left, and Caroline with the Washington Monument in the background (Kennedy Library Photo). 

What Can You Do?

We encourage you to contact your Senators, members of Congress, and President Biden to demand the release of all documents and testimony from the assassinations of President Kennedy as well as those being held in national, state and local government institutions relating to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy.

Please visit the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s website (www.americantruthnow.org) and sign our petition to reopen these cases and create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The new report assembles considerable evidence that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was a “patsy,” as he claimed to be before Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald on live national television at the Dallas police headquarters two days after JFK’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

The Justice Integrity Project’s coverage of these cases and their continuing impact on American democracy will resume with excepts from the committee’s reports, beginning with those from the report on JFK’s death.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

  Related Resources

Change.org. Petition Seeking Sirhan’s Parole.

The Truth & Reconciliation Committee (TRC). The JFK primer is presented by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, whose founding signers include members of the Kennedy and King families, forensics expert Dr. Cyril Wecht, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, civil rights leader Reverend James Lawson, Jr., activist actors and directors, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, Alec Baldwin, Oliver Stone and many others. (www.americantruthnow.org).

We call for major public inquests into the four major assassinations of the 1960s that together had a disastrous impact on the course of American history: the murders of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

These public tribunals, shining a light on this dark chapter of our history, will be modeled on the Truth and Reconciliation process in post-apartheid South Africa. The inquests — which will hear testimony from living witnesses, legal experts, investigative journalists, historians and family members of the victims — are intended to show the need for Congress or the Justice Department to reopen investigations into all four assassinations.

Related News Coverage

Nov. 29

Justice Integrity Project, Expert Report: JFK’s Assassination and Why It Matters (Part 1), Andrew Kreig, Nov. 29, 2021. Editor’s Introduction: This is an excerpt that begins “JFK: The Real Story,” a major new research report by the Truth & Reconciliation Committee, which was founded in 2019 to investigate the 1960s assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (JFK), Black civil rights leader Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., (MLK) and the president’s brother, New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Nov. 28

Justice Integrity Project, New Reports By Expert Research Group Document Conspiracies To Slay JFK, RFK, Andrew Kreig, Nov. 28, 2021. Two major new research reports assemble evidence that challenges longstanding official accounts endorsed by major news organizations that President John F. Kennedy (JFK) and his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), were fatally shot in separate assassinations by lone gunmen, acting alone.

The separate reports announced late this month show that JFK’s 1963 death in Dallas and RFK’s 1968 death in Los Angeles were each the product of conspiracies to thwart the democratic process of elections and accountability via the criminal justice system and have resulted in long-time cover ups that continue to thwart justice and other aspects of civic life.

The reports were prepared by the non-partisan Truth & Reconciliation Committee (T&R), which was founded in January 2020. The reports are available in full on the committee’s website.

Nov. 25

Justice Integrity Project, JFK Murder Documents, Deadlines, Disclosures, Disputes, Andrew Kreig, Nov. 7, 2021, updated Nov. 25. The Biden Administration’s recent delay in releasing the final trove of classified documents pertaining to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy tees up three annual research conferences this month during the anniversary of JFK’s slaying in downtown Dallas.

The conferences and postponed document releases build on millions of pages of previously declassified documents and many hundreds of books through the decades fanning widespread public doubts about official accounts. Those official accounts, most notably the 1964 Warren Commission report, assigned guilt for the president’s death solely to ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald. Flaws in the report largely ignored by government, academic and mainstream media foster lingering fears that watchdog institutions fail to probe and prevent civic tragedies and cover-ups, including in current times.

Today’s column surveys this fall’s major developments. These include the records release delay, the three conferences and Oliver Stone’s sequel, JFK Revisited, to his blockbuster film JFK three decades ago. The new documentary launched in the United States on Showtime on Nov. 22, the anniversary of JFK’s death.

This editor served as publisher for a recent book in the field, Oswald: Russian Episode, a memoir by Oswald’s friend Prof. Ernst Titovets, M.D., Ph.D. (with the cover at right showing Oswald at center smiling with other friends), worked closely with leaders in records release advocacy and also spoke at two of the three November conferences.