JFK's Assassin - Patsy or Jackel COP

JFK’s Assassin - Patsy or Jackel?

The Costa Garves movie “Z,” David Atlee Philllp’s book “The Carlos Contract” and Fredrick Forthsite’s “Day of the Jackal” all give good examples of how a proper counter-intelligence investigation is conducted against political assassins who utilize covert operational techniques to conduct their work.

In each case one man is made responsible for the job and he recruits a small crew of dedicated assistants, each with their own specialty, to assist hm, and in each case the investigation is penetrated by the assassin himself.

The film “Z” takes place in Greece where a prosecutor manages to identify and arrest assassins, despite their high political connections and influence, while Forthsite’s novel “Day of the Jackal” and subsequent movie concerns the real life efforts to kill the French president, who escaped six assassination attempts, and the inspector who leads the effort to capture the lone wolf jackal, who like the real Carlos the Jackal, escaped the law by living with girl friends he would pick up at discos.

David Atlee Phillps’ novel “The Carlos Contract” concerns the assignment to kill Carlos the terrorist, also known as the Jackal, who has since been captured and is now in jail.

In each case it is the way in which one man was given the task and proceeds to conduct a proper counter-intelligence investigation – one that has never been fully conducted in the case of the murdered president – JFK.

Unlike a criminal investigation, the purpose of which is to develop suspects and evidence in criminal cases, counter-intelligence CI – investigations don’t proceed to court, but are intended to provide security, identify suspects and new information and determine the truth.

Sometimes crimes are even committed in conducting CI investigations  -  such as breaking and entering – a black bag job they call it in their parlance, which is what Watergate was all about, and tapping phone and offices but also includes finding out everything you can about targeted suspects, including a review of all open source records and going through their garbage. That’s one thing that David Phillips has his characters do in their quest to get Carlos, and something that A. J. Weberman did to his Village neighbor Bob Dylan. Weberman also wrote the radically significant book “Coup d’etat” with Michael Canfield.

While there have been a number of private CI investigations of the assassination – all of which concluded there was a conspiracy behind what happened at Dealey Plaza, all of the government CI investigations, including one by the US Marine Corps, have produced no documentary trace of their conclusions.

Once a year a group of law enforcement professionals get together in Philadelphia to consider a case one of them is working on – sometimes historic, sometimes current, each case has its own solution.

When we formed COPA – the Coalition on Political Assassinations in Washington DC in the early 1990s, one of the benefits of such an organization was to have a networking group of assassination researchers who have extensively explored the American political assassinations of the 1960s that can be immediately be put to work investigating any new political assassination as it happens.

In the course of developing suspects on the ground in Dallas Lee Harvey Oswald (LHO) certainly stands out as Suspect Number One – and whether or not he was the patsy or committed the deed alone or in concert with others – Lee Harvey Oswald fits the COP criminal profile. 

When the Secret Service hired a team of psychologists to examine the suspects in all of the cases of all presidential assassinations and attempted assassinations, they put Oswald in the Lone-nut category and failed to correctly profile him, or even categorize the correct profile at all.

Being from New Jersey where we have developed criminal profiling into a fine art, I thought I would correct the situation by using Oswald as the proto-type for what I have called the Covert Operational Profile – COP.

Those who fit the COP profile standout and are easily identifiable by their use of standard intelligence techniques and covert procedures that betray them – but they don’t tell you who the COP is working for, just that he is one and fits that particular profile.

COPs must be trained in these techniques and procedures, and are connected to a private or government intelligence agency or network through a case officer cut-out who operates and controls the COP, whether he be an asset, agent or operative.

COPs are usually trained by the U.S. military, and maintain their relationship with their department through the Reserves or a case officer they report to.

COPs live frugally, use Post Office boxes, keep an apartment apart from their families, are bi-lingual, have lived and worked abroad and are specially trained in communications, codes and ciphers.

Whether Oswald was a Lone Wolf and killed the president without any assistance or he was a Patsy in a bigger scheme, whatever happened at Dealey Plaza must be viewed as a Covert Operation and investigated as such.

For a Covert Operation to be uncovered and properly identified it must be countered by a Counter-Intelligence Operation – one similar to those portrayed in Phillips’ book “Carlos Contract” and the films “Z” and “Day of the Jackal.”

In each case the CI investigation was headed by a single man – but as we have seen with what happened to the HSCA, one man who tries to conduct a serious investigation can be squashed by the powers of government.

A private CI investigation however, can be conducted today and quickly accelerated with the use of the networking tools now available.

In his novel, one of the first things David Atlee Phillips has his chief investigator on the Get Carlos squad do is to file a Freedom of Information Act – FOIA request for the CIA file on Carlos, which is quickly and efficiently process by the agency because they can give it a fast track when they want to.

Now with the JFK Act we have the government documents and files on the assassination that allows us to do that aspect of the CI investigation.

To begin with any investigation must focus on Suspect Number One – Lee Harvey Oswald – and whether a Patsy or the only shooter he is a significant but not the most significant character in the Dealey Plaza drama.

If Oswald was the only shooter at Dealey Plaza then he wasn’t the inept loser who couldn’t hold a job but he was in fact – the greatest assassin in history and should be studied and considered as such.

If the president was murdered by a deranged lone nut or a motley conspiracy of CIA and Mafia types, then it wasn’t a coup and those who killed the president didn’t take over the government or power, but they just facilitated LBJ’s almost accidental assassination..

But if the assassination at Dealey Plaza was a covert intelligence operation and thus a conspiracy and coup then the people who killed JFK had to take over the government – and the suspects are limited and can be traced through the files.

The intelligence network that conducted the Dealey Plaza operation can and should be identified and exposed and though justice may never be served, the truth will out.