Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (32 page)

—Lloyd H. Hitchcock, who conducted the tests
(O’Toole, in Scott, Hoch & Stetler; 1976)

See:
The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond: A Guide to Cover-Ups and Investigations,
Professor Peter Dale Scott, Paul Hoch & Russell Stetler (Eds.), 1976

“
Where Was Oswald From 11:50 to 12:35 P.M. on the Day of the Assassination?,” Michael T. Griffith, 1998;
http://www.mtgriffith.com/ web_documents/wherewasoswald.htm

“Hasty Judgment: A Reply to Gerald Posner—Why The JFK Case Is Not Closed,” Michael T. Griffith, 1998;
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/ the_critics/griffith/Hasty_Judgment.html

A GOVERNGOVERNMENTAL COVER-UUP INTENTIONALLY BURIED THE FACTS

Almost as much has been written about how the government covered up the truth about the circumstances of the assassination as has been written about the assassination itself. Suffice to summarize that it’s absolutely accurate to say that The Warren Commission wasn’t formed to find the true facts—it was formed to send the true facts to their official burial ground.

The U.S. Department of Justice even made the mistake of documenting the cover-up for the historical record. In a memo from Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (in Bobby Kennedy’s absence), the Government clearly mandates closing the book on any speculation about a conspiracy, ensuring Oswald was convicted in the court of public opinion and that it was perceived that he had acted as the lone assassin.

THE SMOKING GUN OF THE COVER-UP:

The following is a verbatim copy of the Justice Department memo from the Acting Attorney General of the United States to President Johnson aide Bill Moyers (written shortly after Oswald was murdered), documenting the cover—up in the historical record:

November 25, 1963
MEMORANDUM FOR MR. MOYERS

It is important that all of the facts surrounding President Kennedy’s Assassination be made public in a way which will satisfy people in the United States and abroad that all the facts have been told and that a statement to this effect be made now.

1. The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.

2. Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists. Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat—too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.). The Dallas police have put out statements on the Communist conspiracy theory, and it was they who were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced.

3. The matter has been handled thus far with neither dignity nor conviction. Facts have been mixed with rumour and speculation. We can scarcely let the world see us totally in the image of the Dallas police when our President is murdered.

I think this objective may be satisfied by making public as soon as possible a complete and thorough FBI report on Oswald and the assassination. This may run into the difficulty of pointing to inconsistencies between this report and statements by Dallas police officials. But the reputation of the Bureau is such that it may do the whole job.

The only other step would be the appointment of a Presidential Commission of unimpeachable personnel to review and examine the evidence and announce its conclusions. This has both advantages and disadvantages. I think it can await publication of the FBI report and public reaction to it here and abroad.

I think, however, that a statement that all the facts will be made public property in an orderly and responsible way should be made now. We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort.

Nicholas deB. Katzenbach
Deputy Attorney General

(R) - ITEM IS RESTRICTED

The cover-up was apparently necessitated by the exposure and implication of covert U.S. intelligence anti-Castro operations which were utilizing the Mafia to attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. It is an often overlooked fact that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Robert F. Kennedy was the most powerful person in the United States—more so than even new President Lyndon B. Johnson. In the hours after the murder, it was Robert Kennedy and Kennedy loyalists who controlled the autopsy, the doctors, the body of President Kennedy, and the actions of much of the Secret Service, law enforcement, and emergency personnel. It was also Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department which ultimately controlled the evidence and instituted the cover-up process via the memo from Deputy Attorney General Nick Katzenbach stating that the imperative and overriding directive was that the public must believe that Oswald acted alone. Obviously, Robert Kennedy was not involved in the death plot against his brother. But just as obviously, his hand was forced into covering up the true circumstances surrounding the murder. It was through his office, from those loyal to both he and President Kennedy, and at times at his own direction, that the actual facts concerning the assassination were intentionally (and
necessarily,
from their standpoint) obscured.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency engaged in a cover-up of highly relevant information when the Warren Commission was investigating President John Kennedy’s assassination ... President Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy became party to the effort which consisted of withholding key facts from the Warren Commission.”
²⁶⁵

Investigation and analysis by the CIA’s John Stockwell noted that:

“After the shooting stopped, the convoy raced away. The FBI and other branches of the government immediately launched the coverup. The new President, Lyndon Johnson, ordered the limousine in which Kennedy was killed be flown to Chicago and destroyed. The announced goal of President Johnson was to ‘reassure’ the nation by proving that the killing was the work of lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.”

“ ... CIA operatives far from Dallas were waiting with biographic information about Oswald to feed to the media.”
²⁶⁶

CONCLUSIONS

We do not know with exact certainty how President Kennedy was murdered, but we most certainly
do
know with exact certainty how he was
not
murdered. We know what did
not happen.
We know (and with certainty) that Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone did not do it because the evidence proves conclusively he could not have:

1. Frontal shots preclude the possibility of a single shooter.

2. Oswald was incapable of doing the shooting. The best combat snipers in history tried to match the shots/hits attributed to Oswald and
could not do it.
And Oswald wasn’t even in the same league with them as a shooter. Oswald’s fellow Marines judged him a “rather poor shot.”

3. There were far too many shots fired (more than the shots that the Warren Commission focused upon by completely ignoring the others) to have come from one shooter alone.

4. Oswald was operational in U.S. Military Intelligence.
²⁶⁷
The “Hidell” operational cover name was not being used only by Oswald—it was what is termed a “floating alias” in covert intelligence, and was also being used by other operatives in Military Intelligence.
²⁶⁸

5. A blatant Government cover-up followed, intentionally obfuscating the facts, particularly concerning Oswald’s involvement in the anti- Castro operations of the U.S. intelligence community.

Zack Shelton was a twenty-eight year FBI veteran, twenty-five of those years as a Special Agent. Special Agent Shelton was part of the Organized Crime squad in Kansas City for four and a half years and the Organized Crime squad in Chicago for eight years. He was part of many high-profile investigations, including the FBI team that ran the Mob “skimming” operation out of Las Vegas in the infamous “Strawman Operation” (upon which the film
Casino
was based); the team that solved the truck-dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas; the capture of the armed robbers who held up the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas; and the arrest of a corrupt Texas sheriff for drug smuggling. He’s an expert on criminal investigation who knows where to look and what to look at when he gets there. Put simply, he’s very familiar with the territory.
²⁶⁹

Shelton was hired by Wim Dankbaar, a wealthy Dutch industrialist, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the JFK assassination and attempt to reach fact-based conclusions based upon his investigation. The lengthy investigation by Shelton revealed a long collection of Organized Crime confessions—culled from FBI wiretaps, reliable informants, and cooperating witnesses—which reveal direct Mafia involvement in the assassination of the 35
^th
President of the United States. Therefore, it is not a matter of it being his personal opinion, it is based on the results of a professional who went where the evidence led him. As former Special Agent Shelton puts it:

“I don’t have any theories. All I have are the facts.”
²⁷⁰

The following is former Special Agent Shelton’s summary of the evidence obtained from his lengthy investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy:

Z. Shelton & Associates, Inc
.
THE SHELTON REPORT:

▸
Summary of Facts in the JFK Assassination

Prepared by:

Z. Shelton & Associates, Inc.

Zechariah Shelton

Investigator; twenty-five year FBI Special Agent, retired.

The following are the results of my extensive investigation into the evidence in the JFK assassination.

In summarizing the JFK Assassination, one must look at the facts, not at theories. The following are the irrefutable facts that have surfaced in my investigation. This is a summary of my investigation, spotlighting significant events that led to the assassination, the events of the day and the cover-up, which indicate that there was a conspiracy to kill the president.

April-November 21, 1963