The WAR between JFK and CIA

[Jim Hargrove]

Was this a "warning" to JFK that the CIA was plotting his overthrow, or was this a preemptive leak to help frame the CIA in advance in case the impending military-style ambush went awry?

I think there was a patsy-chain, Jim. There were a lot of guys on it. I think the reason Jack Lawrence went back to the car dealer and puked his brains out in the bathroom soon after the assassination was because he realized he'd been set up.

I think the reason LBJ had a breakdown in the AF1 bathroom (according to Gen McHugh) was because he realized he was set up to take the fall -- "They're going to get us all!" McHugh quotes the Texan as bawling out.

And that's why the CIA lost its shit over Garrison.

They knew they were set up, heads might have to roll, starting with that great career back-up patsy Howard Hunt.

Maybe you're just being too clever. Why isn't it more likely that this was exactly as it appeared to be? That Administration officials were alarmed that a powerful, secretive organization had gone rogue, and these officials were so alarmed they were starting to go public. No one hated Kennedy like the anit-Castro Cubans and, I suspect, the CIA people handling them. Hatred cuts through a lot of what otherwise might be finessed.

This is good stuff, no doubt. What I can't buy is the notion that Morales was at the top of the plot.

I can see Morales as operating primarily not as a CIA operative per se, but as an operative for a pan-organizational team of elite-backed drug smugglers.

Morales was someone's tool. He was expendable after all, right?

Don't forget Bill Harvey. He was pretty far up the food chain.

To me, though, it always goes back to Oswald. Whoever was setting up Oswald in Dallas in the fall of '63 knew pretty much how the hit would take place. And I think that guy was the American born with the name Lee Harvey Oswald. Listen to the speech of the guy killed by Jack Ruby. New Orleans accents can get a little weird, but does that sound to you like the voice of a man born and raised in the American south and southwest?

The clearest, simplest explanation for all of this is that the Oswald Project was simply a CIA spy program from beginning to end, using the idea of look-alikes that Allen Dulles wrote so fondly about, and that some or all of the Oswald handlers turned it into an important part of the assassination in the late summer and fall of '63. In the end, DNA evidence will prove or disprove this, but it may take time to make it happen without the wrong fingers in the test tubes.

We'll probably just have to agree to disagree, again.