JFK Conspiracy Theorists Who Earn Their Reputation as Crackpots

[Benjamin Cole]

For decades, the President John F. Kennedy assassination research community has been unfairly dismissed, if not ridiculed, as agenda-driven “conspiracy nuts.”

But now, the assassination researchers, busy since the Nov. 22, 1963 shooting, have decided to earn their reputation.

Prominent conspiracy activists have hit upon a new and possibly more-remunerative answer to the aging question of “Who shot John?”

Answer: Mossad! And the Israelis perpetrated the atrocity by working through a senior CIA apparatchik named James Jesus Angleton. But first, some background.

Since the slaying of JFK more than six decades ago, questions have lingered regarding the probability that a lone gunman, armed with a single-shot per bolt-action rifle—the alleged assailant Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO)—could have fired so quickly and accurately to perpetrate the foul deed.

Conspiracy theorists have posited many true authors of Kennedy’s demise, from disenchanted assets within the CIA, to the Mafia, to succeeding US President Lyndon Johnson, to globalist-capitalists, to the Soviet KGB, or Cuba’s G2 intelligence service. And others, even less plausible.

In truth, all such explanations flounder in the transition from shadowy theory to facts in the harsh sunlight. The only suspect known beyond reasonable, or even casual, doubt to have been in Dealey Plaza, the site of shooting on November 22, was Oswald. 

And LHO was shot dead two days later, by a mobbed-up nightclub operator named Jack Ruby.

Not knowing Oswald’s confederates, if he had any, has left all theories “live,” and none disproven. Yet no concrete explanation—the who, what, and how kind of explanation—has ever been authored.

In a nutshell, we have narratives of JFK assassination suspects, and their motives…and then leaps to accusations of the actual act, with the persuasiveness of a pole-vaulter crossing the Grand Canyon. 

In every telling, between the suspect-de-jour and the actual JFK assassination are several missing links in a short chain.

Rising prominently in recent years into this dimming kaleidoscope of JFK assassination allegation has been Mossad, most recently and appallingly touted by one of the dons of assassination theorist community, book author Jefferson Morley. 

Appearing on a podcast of popular talk-show host Tucker Carlson (formerly of Fox News), Morley dog-whistled that Israel benefited from the JFK assassination, as the charismatic president had opposed Tel Aviv’s plans to build a nuclear bomb.

But President Johnson gave the thumb’s up!

Mossad is “juxtaposed” the the Kennedy assassination—and worse, Tel Aviv to this day is acting to suffocate JFK assassination-related documents releases, averred Morley.

Israel will tell President Donald Trump, “Oh no, you can’t do that,” on certain JFK Records releases, said Morley. This will help hide Mossad’s role in the Kennedy assassination, presumably.

Others in the conspiracy community have piled on, claiming that President Johnson tilted to Israel in his foreign policy after he assumed office, another factor that motivated Mossad.

Some have even posited had Kennedy lived, he would have successfully reversed “the Nakba,” and thus brought permanent peace to the Middle East. (Israel has plenty of real historians, so I won’t bother to rebut this counterfactual tale.)

The anti-Semitic crackpots, such as those camping at Ron Unz’ website, have seized on Morley’s commentary, the  way a fidgeting alcoholic grabs for a drink.

Angleton

But, back to Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief. To be sure, Angleton was friendly with Mossad—and, of course, with intelligence agencies of all other Western liberal democracies, and very friendly with the Vatican, then an anti-communist bulwark in Latin America, South Vietnam and Eastern Europe.

Nevertheless, the vitriol-soaked anti-Zionist The Grayzone in mid-August reported that “Angleton’s CIA counterintelligence staff ordered Lee Harvey Oswald’s removal from federal (FBI) watchlists six weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, despite Oswald’s classification as as a high security risk.”

In fact, there is no evidence that Angleton ever ordered any such thing, but more importantly he could not have—the FBI controlled the watchlist in question, and FBI agents do not take orders from CIA officers. Indeed, if Angleton had ever even tried to prevail upon FBI agents, the reality of bureaucratic turf wars would have resulted in the agents forwarding the out-of-lane request up the ladder to their superiors, including then-FBI Chief J Edgar Hoover. 

But The Grayzone wants readers to believe that Israel’s minion Angleton ordered Oswald’s name off of watchlists just before the Kennedy visited Dallas, to enable the assassin to operate freely in Dallas. Morley has repeated this ugly canard from The Grayzone.

Agendas

The Kennedy assassination has long been a platform upon which partisans of every stripe mount their ethnic, political and ideological agendas and biases. 

In general, the left-wingers have long sought to blame the US national security state, in league with capitalist-globalist cabals, for the murder—this version having been re-vivified of late by the MAGA-Moscow crowd, with an additional spin of Mossad collusion, most prominently touted by Tehran-friendly (and financed?) social influencers. 

Right-wingers counter with narratives of KBG or Castro oversight, or devotion to the original “Lone Nut” definition of Oswald.

All told, the assassination theorists, like the event itself, are of a certain generation, aging and receding into the past.

Not content to exit the stage gracefully like more-sensible senior actors, evidently some assassination buffs want to disappear…by sinking into the mire.

Jeff Morley is disappearing from view.

[Tom Graves]

James JESUS Angleton.

Dear Benjamin,

It's good to see that you're keeping the JFKA tinfoil-hat CT CIA-hating tradition alive.

-- Tom

[Michael T. Griffith]

Morley is a difficult case. He is no crackpot. But, he has been spreading Hamas and Iranian anti-Israeli propaganda about Israel's retaliatory incursion into Gaza in response to Hamas's brutal October 7 massacre. He has also posited Israeli involvement in JFK's death.

However, I have not detected any anti-Semitism from Morley. I think he is one of those folks who is not anti-Semitic but who is overly critical of Israel.

I am disgusted by his bashing of Israel and his minimizing of Hamas's brutality, and I utterly reject as absurd his belief that Israel played a role in the JFK's death, but as long as he does not veer into anti-Semitism, I will not repudiate him as a source. I won't quote him, but I will cite his research when it is accurate.

[Benjamin Cole]

MTG--

Thanks for your collegial comment.

Morley has been dog-whistling Mossad, re-hashing demented versions of the USS Liberty debacle, and who knows what for months and months. Soon I expect Morley to discover that Mossad is a suspect in the 9.11 WTC bombing (like that certain crackpot over at EF-JFKA).

Mark Groubert recently said something about Morley being beneath contempt.

As I said in my post, the JFKA becomes a platform for people with agenda and ideologies. On the far left today, there is a perverted obsession with Israel. Putin can murder 1.5 million in Ukraine...but Israel, Israel, Israel!

Maybe Morley is not an anti-Semitic crackpot. He just happens to dog-whistle Israel, when one could make the same case about the Vatican, or KGB, or French OAS, or any number of organizations or groups or ethnicities.

BTW, while I disagree with your narrative of the JFKA (I think the conspiracy was very small), I never detected any agendas at work in your research and postings. I enjoy and appreciate your work. We are just on different pages sometimes...but so what?

PS Who knows where paying Substack subscribers come from? Who is a Tehran stooge and who is not?

[Lance Payette]

One person's crackpot is another person's "fellow researcher." I would not call Morley, DiEuegnio, Simpich, Newman, et al., crackpots per se. They are ideologues for whom the JFKA is just a tool for to further a political/ideological agenda. Their theories about the JFKA may be far-fetched, but that is essentially irrelevant to the narrative they weave. Historical truth about the JFKA is really not their primary objective.

I wouldn't call Pat Speer or Larry Hancock or Tink Thompson (and others) crackpots or ideologues. I think they are sincerely interested in the historical truth of the JFKA. Their perspective on the evidence may be different from mine, but they do serious work that is certainly worth considering.

Some proponents of theories I might call crackpot-esque have nevertheless made valuable contributions. Bart Kamp's Prayer Man site is a goldmine. The John Armstrong Collection at Baylor University is a goldmine.

Then we have the genuine crackpots, right here on this forum, over at the Ed Forum, and in every weirdness community with which I've ever been associated. They are identifiable by the absurd stuff they believe and promote. They are almost always intolerant, dismissive cranks. Everyone should see what I see! There is no other possible answer! If you don't see it, you're either stupid or a disinformation agent! They are the ones so far into the lunatic fringe that I might actually suspect them of being disinformation plants in furtherance of an agenda to embarrass the entire CT community.

Cranks and ideologues, alas, predominate at almost all internet forums, certainly all that deal with controversial subject matter. It's the nature of the beast. Supposed "Christian only" forums are bloodbaths that make JFKA forums look positively civilized. Someone who isn't a crank or ideologue can survive only if he sees the humor and finds mental exercise in the jousting. The downfall of the Ed Forum has been the appointment of cranks as moderators and a predominance of one-dimensional ideologues as participants. If they still visit, which the statistics suggest they don't, James Gordon and Kathy Becket must be aghast; their evenhandedness, which I personally experienced, was unlike anything one will find there today. (When I was an absolute newbie and a longtime, prominent CTer kept questioning whether I was really a lawyer, James immediately banned him - boom, gone.)

There is a strong strain of anti-Semitism throughout weirdness communities. The Jews as scapegoats fit into almost any species of weirdness you can think of. Years ago, one of the current moderators at the Ed Forum launched into a blatantly anti-Semitic narrative of 9/11. It was the Jews, the Jews, the Jews. I called him on it and even CTers who were no fans of mine joined in the outcry. I have had to laugh in more recent years at his efforts to tone it down and try to appear more reasonable, but as Kirk Galloway said back then: "You've shown us who you are."

[Michael T. Griffith]

MTG--

Thanks for your collegial comment.

Morley has been dog-whistling Mossad, re-hashing demented versions of the USS Liberty debacle, and who knows what for months and months. Soon I expect Morley to discover that Mossad is a suspect in the 9.11 WTC bombing (like that certain crackpot over at EF-JFKA).

Mark Groubert recently said something about Morley being beneath contempt.

As I said in my post, the JFKA becomes a platform for people with agenda and ideologies. On the far left today, there is a perverted obsession with Israel. Putin can murder 1.5 million in Ukraine...but Israel, Israel, Israel!

Maybe Morley is not an anti-Semitic crackpot. He just happens to dog-whistle Israel, when one could make the same case about the Vatican, or KGB, or French OAS, or any number of organizations or groups or ethnicities.

I agree completely.

Fletcher Prouty, on the other hand, was definitely an anti-Semitic crackpot. I would not be shocked to learn one day that he was a plant, a disinformation agent whose job was to discredit the case for conspiracy. John Newman warned Oliver Stone about Prouty, but Oliver wouldn't listen. Prouty's tales were just too juicy to pass up, I guess.

BTW, while I disagree with your narrative of the JFKA (I think the conspiracy was very small), I never detected any agendas at work in your research and postings. I enjoy and appreciate your work. We are just on different pages sometimes...but so what?

Thanks. I enjoy your research as well. Your article "The Death of the Tumbling Magic-Bullet Theory" contains a lot of useful information, and your article on the Walker shooting is a must-read for anyone who is interested in the subject. Your measured, cerebral approach is commendable.

As you may know, I used to be a lone-gunman theorist. I accepted what I was taught in school. I didn't have any doubts about Oswald's guilt and the WC's scenario until the early 1990s.

When you say you think the plot was very small, how small do you mean? Like just a handful of people, three or four or five?

Do you perhaps believe that those officials who carried out the cover-up knew nothing about any plot to kill JFK but felt they had to push the lone-gunman story to avoid nuclear war and to maintain the public's confidence in their government and country?

[Tom Graves]

Do you perhaps believe that those [small number of] officials who carried out the cover-up knew nothing about any plot to kill JFK but felt they had to push the lone-gunman story to avoid nuclear war and to maintain the public's confidence in their government and country?

You mean the fear of Nuclear Armageddon that the KGB instilled in LBJ and others by having Kremlin-loyal triple agent Ivan Obyedkov "volunteer" to Oswald or "Oswald" the Department 13-radioactive name "Kostikov" over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA phoneline on 10/1/63, which name had been made Department 13-"radioactive" a year earlier by a Kremlin-loyal triple agent at the FBI's NYC field office by the name of KGB Major Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA)?

[Michael T. Griffith]

You mean the fear of Nuclear Armageddon that the KGB instilled in LBJ and others by having Kremlin-loyal triple agent Ivan Obyedkov "volunteer" to Oswald or "Oswald" the Department 13-radioactive name "Kostikov" over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA phoneline on 10/1/63, which name had been made Department 13-"radioactive" a year earlier by a Kremlin-loyal triple agent at the FBI's NYC field office by the name of KGB Major Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA)?

Okay, who are you and what have you done with the real Tom Graves? The real Tom Graves would address me as "Comrade Griffith" and would not fail to accuse me of doing Vladimir Putin's bidding and of spreading KGB disinformation.

But, yes, I was referring to the professed fear of a nuclear Armageddon with the Soviet Union. Thanks to records released in 1993, we know that LBJ pressured Richard Russell and Earl Warren into serving on the WC by telling them that if the government didn't squash rumors that the Soviets and/or the Cubans were behind the JFK assassination, this could push the U.S. into a war that could “kill 40 million Americans in an hour.”

I believe that this argument was made to several senior military officers to persuade them to ensure that the autopsy findings supported the lone-gunman scenario. I also believe that one or two of those senior officers repeated this argument to Humes and Boswell when they ordered them to make sure the autopsy report supported the single-shooter story.

I'm not sure if this argument was made to Finck. I think Finck figured out very quickly which conclusions would be acceptable and which ones would not, but we know that Finck caused a lot of problems during the autopsy. He was excluded from the first brain examination. He was furious over the disappearance of his autopsy notes.

Finck was willing to tell most of the lies he knew he was expected to tell, but not all of them. At the Clay Shaw trial, he admitted that during the autopsy he was ordered not to dissect the neck wound. When the HSCA FPP tried to pressure him into changing the location of the rear head entry wound, he not only refused but questioned the authenticity of the autopsy photo of the back of the head. He admitted to the ARRB that at the time of the autopsy he knew he was supposed to measure the wound locations in relation to fixed reference points but did not do so when it came to the back wound.