The Future of Freedom Foundation
July 12, 2025
In light of the recent revelations regarding the decades-long secrecy, deception, and lies of the CIA regarding its relationship with the anti-Castro group the DRE both before and after the JFK assassination, I believe it would be helpful to recap the essential aspects of the national-security state's plot to assassinate President Kennedy and then cover it up.
I fully realize that there are still many Americans who do not wish to confront this ugly aspect of our nation's history, preferring to settle for the old lone-nut theory of the assassination or the "I guess we'll never really know what happened" theory. I contend that if we are ever going to get this nation back on the right track, it is essential for Americans to confront the dark side of the national-security state governmental structure that was foisted upon our nation in the 1940s and that continues to inflict massive damage on our liberty and well-being today. In fact, that's why the JFK assassination is still so relevant today - because the entity that orchestrated and then covered up its role in that state-sponsored murder remains with us to this very day in a very big, destructive way.
When the U.S. government was converted into a national-security state in the 1940s, the conversion fundamentally altered America's governmental structure. Unlike the limited-government republic that the Constitution brought into existence and that had been America's governmental structure for more than a century, the national-security state immediately acquired omnipotent powers - powers that clearly violated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Among these powers was assassination, which is essentially legalized murder - that is, the taking of life by federal officials without due process of law, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. No one cared about the constitutional violation because what mattered was keeping people "safe" from the supposed international communist conspiracy to take over the world, including the United States. Since the Reds wielded the power of assassination (and other omnipotent dark-side powers), it was necessary, it was believed, that the U.S. government wield the same dark-side powers in order to win the Cold War against the Reds.
Almost from the very beginning, the CIA focused on perfecting its power of assassination. (See an early version of its eery assassination manual here.) But it did more than that. It also focused on ways to hide its role in state-sponsored assassinations. For example, "suiciding" someone by throwing him out of a high-storied building was considered one of the best ways to kill two birds with one stone - the murder and covering up that it was the CIA that carried it out.
Once it was decided that Kennedy needed to be removed from office, on grounds of "national security" (see FFF's book JFK's War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne), the objective was not only to succeed in killing JFK but also to cover up the fact that the national-security establishment had carried out the assassination.
But this was going to be the assassination of a president of the United States. Everyone knows that when someone kills any federal official, government officials are going to pull out all stops to investigate everyone who could have possibly been involved in the murder. Such an investigation would be doubly fierce given that the victim would be the president.
Thus, the CIA knew that such a fierce, no-holds-barred investigation would almost certainly lead to the national-security establishment - i.e, the military and the CIA. Therefore, the only way to avoid that possibility would be to figure out a way to get that investigation stopped before it even got started. And therein lies the sheer dark-side genius of the national-security plot to kill Kennedy.
The plot entailed having shooters from both the front and the back of Kennedy. Firing from the back would be a "communist." Firing from the front would be his confederates, who would presumably be fellow communist agents.
There was a big problem, however. How could the CIA make certain that a real died-in-the-wool communist would be situated in Kennedy's rear and firing from that direction? That would be an impossible task. So, the CIA did the next-best thing: It selected a U.S. intelligence operative - Oswald, who was a former U.S. Marine - to unwittingly serve as the "patsy" - that is, a U.S. intelligence operative who would be being positioned to take the fall as a "lone nut." The real shooter would be located in the same building or an adjacent building.
That's where the CIA-controlled DRE comes into play. Oswald had been directed to move from Dallas, where he was associating with right-wing people with ties to U.S. intelligence, to New Orleans, where he immediately began making a big public hullabaloo about being a "communist." The CIA-controlled DRE was helping him do that, especially with a big public altercation, followed by a recorded radio debate that advertised Oswald's communist bona fides.
Intelligence operative Oswald was then directed to Mexico City, where he made another big public hullabaloo by contacting the Soviet and Cuban embassies.
Thus, Oswald had now been "sheep-dipped" with a big public persona of being a "communist" but not just any communist. Oswald was now a "communist" with connections to Russia and Cuba, which would obviously implicate those two communist regimes in the upcoming assassination.
Here's the $64,000 question: If one is going to frame someone as a "lone nut" who is purportedly firing from the rear, why in the world would one have shooters also firing from the front? Dumb, right? No, actually ingenious because that's the way they could ensure that the investigation would be shut down immediately. That's where their dark-side ingenuity comes into play.
Establishing that Russia and Cuba had assassinated Kennedy as part of the worldwide communist conspiracy would mean World War III because the U.S. would have to retaliate. Matters would quickly escalate to all-out nuclear war. Thus, the only way to avoid World War III and all-out nuclear war would be to quickly shut down the investigation and just settle on Oswald (who was now dead and silenced) as a lone-nut assassin.
But what if someone were to say, "But we can't let the Reds get away with initiating a war against us by assassinating our president"? New President Lyndon Johnson would have had a very persuasive response ready to go: "The Kennedy boys started this assassination game by trying to assassinate Castro. They got burned with it. I'll be damned if I'm going to destroy the world to save their reputation. Shut this investigation down now."
So, the investigation was shut down immediately. When Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade charged that Oswald had assassinated Kennedy as part of an international communist conspiracy, Johnson telephoned him and told him to eliminate that charge at once, citing the risk of World War III. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach issued a memo on the Monday following the Friday assassination stating that it was imperative that the American people be convinced that this was nothing more than just a lone-nut assassination.
Meanwhile, Johnson was cojoling mainstream public officials - that is, officials who would never dream of accusing the military and the CIA of killing the president -into joining his official commission to "investigate" the crime. In the process of doing that, he pulled the World War III card - -telling them that he needed them to serve on his commission in order to avoid the prospect of World War III.
At that point, under the terms of the plot, it was necessary to hide evidence of shots having been fired from the front, so as to convince the American people that this was just a "lone nut" assassination, not a communist conspiracy. That's what forcibly getting Kennedy's body out of Dallas without an autopsy (in violation of state law) and into the hands of the military at Bethesda National Naval Medical Center was all about. A fraudulent autopsy wrapped in military secrecy conducted by military officials would be used to convince people that there was no forensic evidence of shots having been fired from the front.
Thus, after landing at Andrews Air Force Base, the military sneaked Kennedy's body into the Bethesda morgue about 1 1/2 hours before the official start of the autopsy. During that period of time, the Navy pathologists conducted pre-autopsy surgery to make it look like the only shots had come from the rear - that is, no international communist conspiracy.
This darkly ingenious plot succeeded for many years, especially given the tight veil of "classified" secrecy that was imposed on the autopsy participants. Ultimately, however, as ever-increasing amounts of evidence of the fraudulent autopsy continued surfacing over the years and decades, the evidence of autopsy fraud finally reached a critical mass in the 1990s during the term of the Assassination Records Review Board. That "beyond a reasonable doubt" circumstantial evidence of autopsy fraud ended up sealing the fate of the plotters, given that there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. See my book The Kennedy Autopsy and Douglas Horne's five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.
And now we have the long-secret files of CIA official George Joannides, which establish that the CIA has been lying the entire time about its role with the DRE in New Orleans. It turns out that it was the CIA, operating through its front organization the DRE, that was helping Oswald create his public persona of being a "communist," one who had supposedly killed the president. It was CIA operative Joannides who was running the DRE operation. It was also CIA operative Joannides who had served as an obstructor of justice during the investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations during the 1970s. The files also established that the CIA had awarded CIA operative Joannides a medal for his faithful service.
Finally, it's worth noting that even if the cover-up had failed, no one would have been convicted and punished of assassinating Kennedy anyway. That's because under U.S. national-security law, Pentagon and CIA official officials who carry out state-sponsored assassinations based on grounds of "national security" are immune from criminal prosecution. As soon as Texas officials brought criminal charges against military and CIA officials, the Justice Department lawyers would have had the case removed to federal district court, where they would have shown that the assassination was carried out to protect America from a president whose policies ostensibly constituted a grave threat to "national security." Since under our system of government, it is the national-security branch that has the final say in what constitutes a threat to "national security," the judge would have had no choice but to dismiss the charges.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.