This Is Where Oliver Stone Got His Loony JFK Conspiracies From
The
origin story for the CIA-killed-Kennedy myth is twistier than a magic bullet
By
Oliver Stone once
made brilliant movies like Platoon, which won Oscars for best
picture and best director. These days, he’s a tinfoil-hatted fabricator. His
new documentary — JFK Revisited:
Through the Looking Glass, premiering on Showtime on, you guessed it, Nov.
22 — is rooted in a big lie. It comes 30 years after the premiere of JFK, a film
unrivaled in the annals of American cinematic propaganda. Both are based on the
undying delusion that President Kennedy was murdered by the Deep State: The
Central Intelligence Agency, backed by the military-industrial complex.
Do you
believe that the CIA killed
JFK? Millions of Americans suspect so. Let me ask you, then: Why do
they believe it?
The tale
can be traced to a Russian disinformation operation. It came from the
same arsenal of political warfare that convinced half the
world that the U.S. Army created AIDS. The one that monkey-wrenched the 2016
election for Donald Trump. The one now flooding the internet with deadly lies
about the coronavirus and vaccines. The goals of these campaigns were one and
the same: to divide Americans, to pour salt in our self-inflicted wounds, and
ultimately to convince you that there is no truth. That crackpot fantasies are
cold hard realities. That “conspiracy theories are
now conspiracy facts,” as Stone proclaims in JFK Revisited.
Disinformation
works best when it contains a kernel of truth. And, in truth, the Kennedy
assassination is the black hole of American history. It has sucked better minds
than Stone’s down into darkness. It has taught generations of Americans to be
highly skeptical of the Official Government Version of events. It made the grasy
knoll our town commons.
But what
you believe about it boils down to this: Either Lee Harvey Oswald, trained by
the United States Marines as a sharpshooter before he defected to the Soviet
Union, got off a million-to-one shot in Dallas. He acted alone. Or he was an
instrument of a conspiracy so immense that it staggers the mind.
As the
new documentary opens, Stone paces down Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where President
Kennedy was killed, the same place where QAnon crazies gathered recently to
await the miraculous resurrection of JFK Jr. and the divine reinauguration of
Trump. The director promises his audience that he is about to solve the murder
mystery, to “piece together what really happened that day and discover the
reasons why.”
Brace
yourself: he doesn’t.
The dark
beast of JFK Revisited is Allen Dulles, a founding father of the CIA
and its director from February 1953 to November 1961. I know a fair amount
about Dulles; my history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, lays a multitude of sins at his
feet. Dulles often grievously misled Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. He
oversaw CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala which ushered in dictatorships. His top
officers tried to kill Fidel Castro, enlisting the Mafia. He blithely convinced
JFK to carry out the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April
1961, which was his downfall as Director of Central Intelligence.
Stone
pegs Dulles as a presiding genius of the plot against the president. To begin
building this case, he tells us that Dulles and the CIA backed a failed
military coup aimed at assassinating President Charles de Gaulle of France.
That’s another lie spun by Moscow.
Like the
cold-war CIA, the KGB paid editors and reporters around the world to print
stories that could advance the Kremlin’s international agendas. In the late
1950’s, it created a directorate to undermine America. Department D — D as
in dezinformatsiya — aimed to bend and shape public opinion, and
above all to defame the United States. The Department of Disinformation was the
world’s first industrial factory of fake news.
A
KGB-scripted story about the CIA’s plot to kill De Gaulle first appeared in a
daily newspaper, Paese Sera, published in Rome and backed by the Italian
Communist Party, a few days after the Bay of Pigs. It was republished in Moscow
by the Soviet party organ, Pravda; then in France, and finally across the
globe. That was, and is, the M.O. of Russian disinformation operations: start a
fire, fan the flames, and blow the smoke around the world.
Six
years later, Paese Sera planted the seed that flowered into JFK. And
therein lies a tale. (One first told in 2001 by the historian Max Holland
in The Wilson Quarterly, a now-defunct political science journal.)
On March
1, 1967, the New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, arrested Clay Shaw,
the director of the city’s International Trade Mart and a somewhat-closeted gay
man, and charged him with a central role in a conspiracy to assassinate
Kennedy. The D.A. told reporters that what happened in Dallas had been “a
homosexual thrill-killing.” Three days later, Paese Sera named Shaw
as a conduit for CIA funds for espionage and dirty tricks in Rome. The story,
crafted by the KGB, ricocheted around the world, landing in New York on the
front page of a New Left weekly, the National Guardian, on March 18.
Garrison
seized upon it. He fed the falsehood to a friendly newspaper reporter in New
Orleans and it landed on page one. He told the world that Shaw was a longtime
CIA operative. (He wasn’t, though he had been a casual part-time contact on
questions of commerce, one among some 150,000 Americans who volunteered information
to the cold-war CIA.) The prosecutor then doubled down. He proclaimed that the
CIA had plotted to kill Kennedy and then covered up the conspiracy, that Oswald
had been under its control, that the agency was “infinitely more powerful than
the Gestapo,” and that it had masterminded a coup d’etat in America
in the name of anticommunism.
On Feb.
6, 1969, Garrison put Clay Shaw on trial. His witnesses were a parade of
perjurers from the seamier quarters of New Orleans. He presented no evidence
tying the CIA to his case. But in his summation, he asked the jurors to strike
a righteous blow against the Deep State’s “murder of the truth.” They took 54
minutes to acquit.
Garrison’s
tragicomedy had two lasting effects on the United States. The first was immediate:
After he announced his charges, the number of Americans who believed that
there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy skyrocketed. A majority still
believe it. The second took 20 years.
Garrison
spent a decade turning his case into a book called On The Trail Of The Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the
Murder of President Kennedy. The co-conspirators in this opus included
the CIA, the FBI, the
Dallas police department, the Warren Commission, the Secret Service,
anti-Castro Cubans, the United States Army, and the Navy pathologists who
autopsied JFK. Fifteen publishers rejected it until it was picked up by William
Schaap and Ellen Ray at Sheridan Square Press in 1988. (The couple had worked
with Phillip Agee, a CIA defector, publishing Covert Action Information
Bulletin, a magazine devoted to exposing the Agency’s operations and officers.
Agee received a strong assist from Russian intelligence, according to KGB
records. No evidence whatsoever links Schaap and Ray, now both deceased, to the
Russians.)
On The
Trail Of The Assassins would prove to be a hit with the public. Shortly
before its publication, as Schaap later recounted, “at a film festival in
Havana, we ran into Oliver Stone. And Ellen said to him, ‘Have I got a property
for you!’ Because we knew he was an assassination freak, we gave him an advance
copy of the book…. Of course, Oliver Stone won’t admit to any of this!”
JFK and
its new sequel are, with artistic embellishments, cinematic transcriptions of
Jim Garrison’s delusions. The original movie convinced millions more Americans
that the version of history wrought by Stone and Garrison was true. National
surveys taken after JFK was released showed that three-quarters of
those polled believed the CIA had murdered the President. And that, along with
the end of the cold war, provoked Congress to begin declassifying millions of
records relating to the assassination — a task that remains incomplete nearly
three decades later. Both Trump and President Biden have delayed disclosures
required under law, though a new set of documents is set to be unwrapped before
Christmas.
I’ve
spent half my life reporting, writing, and reading about the CIA and American
intelligence. I remember the Kennedy assassination; I’ve studied the evidence.
And I can’t tell you that there wasn’t a conspiracy. Maybe it was the
Russians. Could have been the Cubans. Might have been the Mafia. Maybe there’s
a mind-blowing bombshell in the still-classified archives of the government.
But I seriously doubt it.
I can
tell you for a fact that our democracy is suffocating under an avalanche of
disinformation. Trump won the 2020 election! Covid vaccines are seeded with
microchips! Democrats are blood-sucking pedophile communists! 9/11 was an
inside job! Our body politic is being poisoned
by lies. They stalk the land like brain-eating zombies. And we can’t seem
to kill them.
We have
a moral obligation to call bullshit when we see it. Especially when public
figures promote lies for profit. Stone’s JFK films are fantasies.
Conspiracy theories are not facts. They’re a kind of collective psychosis. And
they’re driving our country down the road to hell.
In This
Article: CIA, conspiracy theories, FBI, JFK, Oliver
Stone
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