Three Plausible Conspiracy Theories

But we will never know thanks to Jack Ruby

It is historically certain that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that hit and killed President Kennedy. There may or may not have been other shooters at Dealey Plaza that day. There may or may not have been a broader conspiracy lurking behind Oswald. But it is historically certain that he fired the shots that hit and killed the President.

So let’s look at Oswald’s movements after he shot the President to see what we can learn. To anyone trained in espionage, these movements reveal that Oswald was trying to escape and had a plan to do so which almost worked.

The key question is to what or to whom Oswald was trying to escape? Where was he going the moment before he was stopped by Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit? Was Oswald just going out to the highway to hitchhike down to the Mexican border? Maybe.

But the fact that he only had $8 on him when arrested, having left $170 and his gold wedding ring that morning for his wife, might suggest that Oswald expected to meet somebody. Who?

Outline of Presentation

First, I will decode for you the movements of Oswald from when he shot the President at 12:30 till he was apprehended at 1:50.

Second, I will analyze the initial investigation undertaken by the Dallas Police. This initial investigation was flawless thanks to the Chief of the Homicide and Robbery Bureau, Captain Will Fritz. On the first day, Fritz proved that Oswald had indeed killed the President. On the second day, Fritz shifted the focus of his investigation to whether anyone else was involved along with Oswald.

Unfortunately, Jack Ruby killed Oswald on the morning of the third day. Thanks to Ruby, we WILL NEVER KNOW whether there was a conspiracy lurking behind Oswald, no matter how sincerely Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi might argue otherwise.

So, finally, I will discuss three PLAUSIBLE conspiracy theories: the mob, Cuba, and my own CIA.

Lee Harvey Oswald was incredibly calm after assassinating the most powerful man on Earth.

After firing three shots from the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository, Oswald quickly moved to northwest corner and hid his rifle underneath some boxes. The purpose of this was to aid his escape by delaying police pursuit.

He then went down to the second floor and bought a soda. There, he was momentarily detained by a Dallas policeman, but he reacted calmly and was vouched for by a fellow employee. So he was quickly released.

He slipped out of the Book Depository and caught a bus to his rooming house in Oak Cliff. The bus got caught in the traffic jam at Dealey Plaza, but he didn’t panic. He got off the bus, worked his way around the traffic jam, and caught a cab at roughly 12:48.

At about this time, the Dallas Police issued an All Points Bulletin based on an eyewitness report for “a slender white male, about 30, 5’10”, 160 lbs who shot at the President.” The eyewitness report was accurate, Oswald was a slender white male, 24, 5’9”, 150lbs.

Oswald had the cab drive past his rooming house and got out a block and a half away. The purpose of this was two-fold. First, the cab driver would not see where he was going.  Second, on the drive by the rooming house and on the walk back to it, Oswald could check for any police activity. We spies call this a “Surveillance Detection Maneuver.”

Seeing no police activity, Oswald ducked into the rooming house at 1:00 PM just long enough to grab his pistol and alter his appearance by changing clothes. At this same moment, President Kennedy was officially declared dead.

At 1:12 PM, Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit saw a suspicious man who fit the APB description walking east along a back street in Oak Cliff. Tippit pulled his patrol car alongside the man, talked to him briefly out the passenger window, then got out of the car to continue the conversation.

At that moment, the suspicious man pulled out a 38 snub nose revolver and shot Tippit three times in the chest. He started to walk away, thought better of it, and returned to fire a fourth shot into Tippit’s temple. There were a number of eyewitnesses to the event.

The killer of Officer Tippit had been walking east along a back street but he knew that police would soon be swarming the area. So he shifted to what we spies call “Escape and Evasion” mode.

He reversed course and tried to lose himself in the crowds walking along Jefferson Avenue. He quickly ducked to the right to change his appearance again by disposing of his jacket. Then, the killer made use of an old escape and evasion trick used by the Soviet KGB, he slipped into a theater to kill time as the police swirled around looking for him.

But the theater trick didn’t work that day. Courageous eyewitnesses had followed the killer, saw him slip into the theater, and alerted the police. After a short scuffle, the police apprehended Tippit’s killer inside the theater at 1:50 PM.

He refused to give his name but in his wallet the police found a library card without a photo in the name of Lee Oswald. The police also found this…

A draft card with Oswald’s photo on it but in the name of Alek James Hidell. When asked whether his name was Oswald or Hidell, the man in custody smarted off, “You figure it out.” The police did figure out a short time later that the man’s name was Lee Oswald and the Hidell draft card was a well-done forgery.

To everyone involved with the subsequent interrogation, Oswald appeared cool and calm, smart and disciplined. He even appeared a bit self-satisfied. He knew to give lots of details about things that did not matter, be vague on things that did matter, and simply deny facts that conflicted with his story. For a high school dropout, he showed considerable skill in counter-interrogation techniques. It was as though he had been trained by some espionage service.

Oswald was up against this man, Captain Will Fritz.

In 1963, Fritz had been a Dallas cop for 41 years and the Chief of the Homicide and Robbery Bureau for 29 years. He was a living legend.

Fritz was always a “perfect gentleman.” He never used inappropriate language with either friends or suspects. His interrogation style was low key. He aimed for confessions and his record of getting confessions was the best in Texas. Oswald was showing no interest in confessing, however, so Fritz had to build his case on the following evidence.

Oswald denied that he killed Officer Tippit but there were several eyewitnesses to the cold-blooded murder and they had no problem identifying Oswald as the killer in line-ups. He had the murder weapon on his person when he was arrested. That murder weapon was purchased by mail-order by A.J. Hidell and delivered to the Post Office Box registered to Lee Oswald. The forged ID in his possession at the time of his arrest proved that A.J. Hidell was an alias used by Oswald.

Oswald denied that he had ever owned any rifle, but on the afternoon of the assassination, his wife admitted he owned a sniper rifle. She offered to show police the rifle stored in the garage but, to her surprise, it was gone. The police found the infamous photo of Oswald holding the rifle with an inscription in Oswald’s handwriting on the back. Later, his wife admitted taking the photo, herself, seven months before, prior to Oswald’s assassination attempt on the anti-Castro Edwin Walker. 

Oswald denied he had killed the President but the sniper rifle he denied owning was found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository, along with three expended cartridges. The rifle had been wiped clean of fingerprints but Oswald’s fingerprints were found all over the sniper’s nest. As with the pistol that killed Tippit, the sniper rifle had been purchased by mail order by A.J. Hidell and shipped to the PO Box registered to Lee Oswald.

Thus, by the end of the first day, Fritz could prove that Oswald had killed the President. On the second day, Fritz turned his attention to whether there was anybody else involved in the assassination. Unfortunately, Jack Ruby murdered Oswald on the morning of the third day.

Ruby was a strip club owner and small-time hood who had ingratiated himself with the Dallas Police. After the President’s assassination, Ruby stalked Oswald. Late that Friday night, Ruby, with a pistol in his pocket, got within a few feet of Oswald but did not try to shoot him.

Some time on Saturday and for some reason, Ruby decided he would kill Oswald if he got another chance. Saturday night, Ruby was almost certainly the man who anonymously called the Dallas Police and the FBI to warn that, “we will kill the man who killed the President.”

Sure enough, just before 11:20 the next morning, Ruby walked down this ramp into what was supposed to be a heavily guarded garage at Police Headquarters just as Oswald was being transferred to another jail.

At 11:21, Ruby again found himself just a few feet away from Oswald but this time he pulled out his pistol and shot the punk. As a kid, I saw it live on national TV.

Ruby was detained before he could get off a second shot. Oswald was in agony on the garage floor. Detective Jim Leavelle – the man in the tan suit – had the presence to kneel next to Oswald and ask, “Son, you’re hurt real bad. Is there anything you want to say?”

Oswald just grimaced and silently shook his head. He died 48 hours after the President, leaving no death bed confession.

Three Conspiracy Theories which are Factually Plausible

Thanks to Jack Ruby, we WILL NEVER KNOW whether there was a conspiracy lurking behind Oswald in the assassination of President Kennedy. What we can and should do is follow the facts, eliminate wild conspiracy theories, and focus on the plausible conspiracy theories.

In that, I can be of assistance to you because I am a professional conspirator – or at least I used to be during the three decades I worked at CIA. With respect to the Kennedy Assassination, I can offer you three guideposts that should prove helpful.

First, any conspiracy that requires hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of people in the know WILL NOT WORK … it will leak and be exposed. A corollary of this general rule is that if you think that 60 years later, CIA is still sitting on the Kennedy Assassination Rosetta Stone, maybe think again. It would have leaked out decades ago.

Second, where was Oswald going when he was stopped by Officer Tippit?  Was he heading to the highway to hitchhike down to the Mexican border? Or was he going to meet somebody?

Third, the fact that he left $170 and his gold wedding ring for his wife and had only $8 on his person might indicate that Oswald expected to meet somebody.

These are the lines of interrogation that Will Fritz would have pursued had Jack Ruby given him the chance. As it is, we can only speculate in a rational fashion.

I will give you three plausible scenarios that have been put forward by others:

-          a mobster, Carlos Marcello

-          a Cuban, Fidel Castro

-          a CIA officer, Cord Meyer.

They all had motive to kill John Kennedy and the skill to get away with it. Whether they used that skill to act on their motive is anybody’s guess.

Carlos Marcello

The Marcello theory is promoted most prominently by Robert Blakely who was the Chief Counsel of the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassination, a serious fellow.

In the early 1960’s, Marcello had been the Godfather of the New Orleans mob for over a decade with his reach extending into Texas. He was untouchable until John Kennedy became President and Bobby Kennedy, Attorney General. The Kennedy Brothers used every legal trick available to the US Government to destroy Marcello. And Marcello vowed revenge.

Joe Campisi was Marcello’s man in Dallas. Campisi along with a money-man named Ralph Paul were Jack Ruby’s closest associates.  An educated guess is that Ruby laundered money for the Marcello organization.

Ruby, Paul, and Campisi had dinner together the night before the assassination at Campisi’s restaurant, the Egyptian Lounge. For some unknown reason, Campisi visited Ruby in jail a few days after Oswald’s murder. AND Oswald was heading in the direction of Ruby’s apartment – which was just 4 blocks away – when Officer Tippit stopped him.

So, the theory goes that Marcello or one of his underlings duped Oswald into killing Kennedy. Campisi or Ruby was supposed to eliminate Oswald the day of the assassination. After Oswald was arrested, Ruby took the job in exchange for some pay-off.

The strong point of this theory is that Ruby did eliminate Oswald. The weak point is how did Marcello dupe the devotedly pro-Castro Lee Harvey Oswald into doing his dirty work?

The answer is a false flag operation – recruiting someone supposedly for one sponsor, when the real sponsor is somebody completely different. In this case, you dupe Oswald into thinking that he is killing Kennedy for Castro when he is really killing Kennedy for Marcello.

False flag operations are very, very hard to carry out – but they are doable. I, myself, did one with great success, one that flopped, and I abandoned a number of others as simply too complicated. (I was never trying to kill anybody.)

Fidel Castro

The Castro theory is supported most prominently by Edward Jay Epstein, another serious fellow who just passed away on 9 January 2024. Epstein got a lot of his information from James Jesus Angleton, the longtime head of Counterintelligence at the CIA.

Castro wanted to kill Kennedy because Castro knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kennedy was planning to kill him. The CIA was supposedly working with Rolando Cubela to assassinate Castro. But Cubela was a double agent who warned Castro about everything the CIA wanted him to do.

Castro had no need to convince Oswald to kill Kennedy because in late September 1963 at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, Oswald volunteered to kill Kennedy in exchange for political asylum in Cuba.

Given what he knew from CIA’s meetings with Cubela, Castro would not have said no to Oswald’s offer.

Nor would he have given an unequivocal yes. The Cubans didn’t know whether they could trust Oswald – he might have been a double agent like Cubela. In any case, it was unlikely that Oswald could succeed in killing supposedly the best protected man in the world.

The Cubans would have given Oswald an ambiguous answer but they would have wanted to stay in touch with him. To this end, they would have set up a secret communication channel with him.

That secret communication channel may have been this man - seen in a picture that was attached to a CIA/Mexico City cable to CIA/Headquarters right after the assassination – Giliberto Lopez Policarpo.

Lopez was a Cuban exile with an American wife living in Tampa. He was active with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee as was Oswald. On 19 November, Lopez got a telephone call in Tampa summoning him home to Cuba. He departed on 20 November, transited Texas 21-22 November, and crossed the border into Mexico in the early hours of 23 November just hours after the assassination.

He holed up in the Cuban Embassy from 23 thru 26 November and then was the only passenger on an Air Cubana flight to Havana on 27 November. He never saw his American wife again.

So, the theory is that Oswald was on his way to meet Lopez with the expectation that Lopez would help him escape first to Mexico and then to Cuba. Actually, Lopez would probably have killed Oswald.

Cord Meyer

Peter Janney in his book Mary’s Mosaic thinks that Cord Meyer had a leading role in the assassination but on behalf of the CIA organization. Janney thinks the CIA organization wanted Kennedy dead because he “had turned away from the Cold War toward the pursuit of world peace.”

I seriously doubt that. The CIA is a bureaucracy that reports directly to the President of the United States. The CIA is loyal to every President no matter who the President is. The idea that such an organization could be involved in the assassination of any President is – I believe – fantasy. But if CIA as an organization had been involved, it would have leaked and been exposed long ago, and the organization disbanded.

That is NOT to say that a rogue CIA officer could not have mounted the assassination and gotten away with it. One possibility might have been Cord Meyer.

Meyer and Kennedy were wealthy contemporaries. As young men, Meyer’s political prospects were much brighter than Kennedy’s. And Meyer, an austere Episcopalian, disdained Kennedy as nothing more than a playboy.

By their 40’s, their situation had changed dramatically. Kennedy was President of the United States. Meyer was divorced from a beautiful woman and living in a rooming house near Georgetown University despite being a very senior official at CIA.

What really galled Meyer was that Kennedy as President had embarked on a scandalous affair with that same beautiful woman, Cord’s ex-wife Mary. This deeply offended Cord’s sense of propriety.

This photo of Mary was taken on the Presidential yacht Sequoia during JFK’s birthday party in May 1963. A few months before, JFK’s affair with her had become very public knowledge, much to Cord’s chagrin.

Phil Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. During a January 1963 speech to a gathering of American newspaper publishers, Graham went off-script and talked on and on about the scandalous sex affair Kennedy was having with Mary Meyer, the ex-wife of a senior CIA official. Every newspaper publisher in America was cut in on Cord’s embarrassing secret but not one of them published a word about it.

THIS is what drives people to murder – SEX – not some policy dispute over the Cold War and world peace!

Cord was a war hero who had lost an eye to a Japanese grenade during the Battle of Guam. If, repeat, if he was involved in the assassination, then it would have been another false flag operation. In this case, you dupe Oswald into thinking that he is killing Kennedy for Castro when he is really killing Kennedy for Cord Meyer. Again, false flag operations are very hard to execute but certainly doable.

Also, some believe Cord made an oblique death bed confession.

Ten months after President Kennedy’s assassination, Mary Meyer was murdered as she took her daily walk on C&O Canal Towpath that runs along the Potomac River below Georgetown University.

She had one bullet fired from the back into her heart and one bullet fired at close range into her temple. There were no signs of struggle or sexual assault.

In the business, two bullets to the head are called a “hit.” One bullet to the head and one bullet to the heart are called a “message.” Police never found the gun. The case remains unsolved to this day.

The usual suspect – the estranged husband – Cord was conveniently away on a secret CIA mission. Nobody knows where.

In 1982, Cord wrote that he, “was satisfied by the conclusions of the police investigation that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated assault.”

However, dying of lymphoma in 2001, Cord hissed that Mary was killed by “The same sons-of-bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.”  

Maybe Cord killed them both and got away with it. Nobody knows.

Summary

It’s been 60 years since the assassination. In 1964, the Warren Commission asserted that Oswald acted alone. In 1992, Gerald Posner in his book Case Closed asserted that Oswald acted alone. In 2007, Vincent Bugliosi in his opus Reclaiming History asserted that Oswald acted alone.

But the American people don’t buy it – and with some reason. Because Jack Ruby never gave Will Fritz the chance to find out where Oswald was going with only $8 in his pocket.

We can and should follow the facts to eliminate wild conspiracy theories and focus on plausible conspiracy theories.

But, we must accept that we will never know for certain what happened in the biggest crime of the 20th Century. 

(Note: Next month I will publish via a separate Substack a historical novel entitled “The Oswald Enigma.” It tells Oswald’s story from September 1957, when he arrived as a 17 year old Marine radar operator at a TOP-SECRET U-2 spy plane base in Japan, though his 1959-1962 defection to the Soviet Union, to his assassination of President Kennedy and his own murder in November 1963. The novel represents my best guess of what really happened. It is a fun read.)