The two words “conspiracy theory” are often seen together. However, conspiracy is not a theory, it’s a crime. A felony. Apparently so rampant that our legal system had to criminalize it as it is an integral part of any criminal enterprise.
Listening to the Rollye James Show (XM-158) the other night a caller made an excellent point about about conspiracy–that there is often more than one going on at the same time. He said several of his relatives had been involved in the Bay of Pigs operation and he described the outward and then behind the scenes workings around the event. It’s multi-layered. That is why it makes it hard to sort out why things happen as they do in major events like assassinations or terror attacks and why so many theories are spawned to try and explain them.
This in turn, reminded me of my web programming days and when we using nested style sheets. These were pages of code for often repeated things such as headers, footers, or graphics of the same style. It made coding easier and more organized for a web developer, particularly when a lot of pages were involved in a large corporate web site. However, for an event like an assassination, these multiple layers of plots can sometimes be operated by different players, or sometimes not. But they do qualify as being nested. A nested conspiracy makes nothing easy and in fact, often complicates the event. No wonder we still argue over how many shots were or were not fired in Dealey Plaza in November of 1963.
A nested conspiracy is an example of multiple operations in action. Since there are multiple theories on the assassination, many seem plausible; from LBJ being involved to the CIA or the Texas Oilmen. Everybody has something to hide and classify under the grounds of National Security. (Or should that be National Insecurity?) At any rate, these operations may be in tandem with each other or separate functions from various factions. Like it is widely suspected that the CIA in staging the coup in Chile had President Salvador Allende assassinated and made to look like a suicide. But William Buckley, a former CIA Beirut station chief who would one day be kidnapped, tortured, and killed by Hezbollah told a journalist that it wasn’t the Agency that did it. Somebody else killed Allende but they never found out who.
The Nested Conspiracy of Watergate
Another example of a nested conspiracy is Watergate. Much has been written about the greatest political scandal of 20th century, the seemingly obscure break-in of Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel that ultimately led to the downfall and the first ever, resignation of a sitting President, Richard Nixon. The official story on this scandal from the mainstream media was that Nixon was a big liar and a crook. The Washington Post concentrated on him to the exclusion of all else that was in orbit around the affair. But time reveals a lot of secrets.
But only one author Jim Hougan in his book, Secret Agenda, has written about the other side of the conspiracy–that which involves the CIA. At the time all the energy for the scandal revolves around Nixon and his aides and there was largely little focus on the five arrested burglars being active CIA agents (and all former active in the Bay of Pigs operation). Hougan suggests that the CIA’s involvement was not a take down of Nixon but more of a fishing expedition for blackmail material through the call girl ring operating out of the Watergate hotel. It was the CIA that offered technical help, the agents, safe houses for meetings, disguises, even the graphics that G. Gordon Liddy used for his famous Gemstone presentation to AG John Mitchell. Whatever the case, they did a great job at shielding themselves from being portrayed as participants in the affair–which according to Hougan they were.
Conversely, authors Lee Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup head off in a different direction pinning most of the scandal on White House lawyer John Dean. The authors point out conclusively that Dean’s future wife’s name (Mo Biner) was found on a list of women that were part of the call girl ring operating out of the Watergate hotel. Dean then seeks to quash any information on this and is responsible for running his own clandestine intelligence operation behind Nixon’s back and then when it all blew up orchestrated the cover-up which Nixon took on and ran with. It is apparent that Dean was instrumental in setting Nixon up with his perjured testimony in front of Congress and in the many trials to follow. To be fair, Nixon had a proclivity towards intrigue to begin with which led him down his disastrous path. However, Colodny and Gettlin portray John Dean as the biggest liar in the whole affair, which may come as a shock to some people who lived through the Watergate scandal at the time.
So Watergate ends up with four forces at work here: The CIA on one hand digging for dirt and making sure their real aim is not revealed; the Washington Post and Woodard-Bernstein focused on Nixon to exclusion of all else; John Dean’s machinations behind the scenes as a one-man wrecking ball; and finally, Nixon and his aides doing cover-up for their crimes they so easily drifted into.
And maybe this is how it’s understood. But who can say for sure?
JFK and The Nested Conspiracy
How many nested conspiracies converge at Dealey Plaza? Author Philip F. Nelson in LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination, provides a reasonable scenario for Lyndon Johnson setting up a conspiracy to have John Kennedy killed as outlandish as it might seem to our American sensibilities–our sense of American Exceptionalism–that we don’t do this sort of thing because of our special place in the world. In many ways it’s a hard thing to confront. It’s like reading about the Franklin child sex ring scandal. We know there is corruption in high places but it’s shocking to get a glimpse of how cold the evil really is. It sends chills down to the bone. Nevertheless, Johnson did all he could have done to set up a kill-zone for Kennedy. He was the architect behind the trip in the first place, a trip Kennedy didn’t want to take. His aides made sure the Secret Service were given detailed instructions on what JFK desired for his security whether it was true or not (it wasn’t). Kennedy never talks to the Secret Service because he is trusting them to protect him; conversely, the Secret Service never asks Kennedy what he wants as they are assuming Johnson and his aids are telling the truth. Afterwards the blaming starts from the Johnson camp to distance themselves from the disaster and deflect any inquiry. And it worked. The Warren Commission nor any investigative body that follows ever does a complete investigation into the security failures of the Secret Service. If they did, many of the roads would mostly likely lead to LBJ.
However, with the LBJ scenario seems to require a lot of helpers on the side. The CIA, always comes up as a culprit via guilt through association with numerous illegal and deadly clandestine affairs. Since one of their guys, Lee Oswald was mixed up in the affair it behoves them to play Cover One. (Not to mention that too much investigation would reveal too much about their operations.) We know there was a false defector program to the Soviet Union of which Oswald was most likely involved in. CIA documents feature an agent interviewing a former marine that re-defects back. Who seems very familiar to Oswald. The CIA opens a SIG 201 file on him in 1960, a file that is only opened on agents. Then you have the whole business of Oswald actions in New Orleans and later in Mexico City which bely a man conducting field theater, i.e., operations. The CIA has a lot to cover for here.
Cover Two is played by J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. Hoover has to lie about what they knew about Oswald since the Bureau took notice of his defection in 1959 (memos on the defection were sent to all branches of the military and all major government agencies) and Hoover had been amassing weekly reports on Oswald from 1960 onwards. Plus, Hoover established the lone gunman theory within twenty-four hours of Oswald’s arrest which served to head off any inquiry into a conspiracy, along with Johnson’s aides pressuring every Texas law official into going along with the scheme. Then later, LBJ forms the Warren Commission to further head off any independent investigations that were brewing in Texas and in the Congress. Ultimately, Hoover leans on the Warren Commission enough along with LBJ (and the weak sister, Earl Warren) to direct it towards the true goal–lone gunman with no plot.
There were many other investigations to follow, each one never satisfying the public’s distrust of the official story. Each one ends up adding more levels of secrecy, with a never ending load of classified (concealed) evidence.
The Media Layer
And the mainstream press is there to add the final layer. Journalist Mike Golden has an excellent article, Assassination By Omission: Another Look At Serial Plagiarist Gerald Posner, where he describes how he ran head-on into it in 1998 when he scored the last interview with Dr. Martin Luther King’s alleged assassin, James Earl Ray in April of that year. He was preparing an article for Vibe magazine, a publication with a mainly black readership when the Editor-in-Chief Danyel Smith pulled the plug on the project without explanation. In fact, nobody in the media wanted anything to do with this. It was radioactive.
In Golden’s words:
“Every other mainstream publication I approached refused to even listen to the tape, much less read the transcript of the interview, for fear, I suppose, of possibly having to reveal information that could get them into deep trouble. With who and for what, I can’t tell you. After all this time, I still can’t put names behind who was calling the shots or what they were afraid of hearing come out of Ray’s mouth. But whoever they were, they were pretty high up the old totem pole, and they know more than you or I...”
Isn’t this a conspiracy going on here? Anyway, this is not unusual. John Barbour, creator of the popular Real People television show once had a popular radio program in the Los Angeles market. Just as he was getting ready to have Jim Garrison on for an live interview, his program was quickly pulled off-air. No explanation. He was finished in that radio market. Later he was doing a show, Speak Up America. He got in contact with Jim Garrison again and arranged for a three-hour taped interview. When it was broadcast it was edited to make Garrison look like a kook, with Garrison saying there were 32 shooters in Dealey Plaza when the unedited version he states there were three teams of two shooters per unit. A classic case of libel. The same thing was done to assassination witness Orville Nix (See my article, How CBS Screwed Orville Nix, HERE). John Barbour was appalled and complained to the producer. After that he was let go of Real People and the show went downhill from there.
Shades of Chuck Harder’s velvet hammer.
The Nested Conspiracy Forever
The Kennedy assassination is probably not the first nested conspiracy ever to be put into action but certainly is a good example of a modern one. All the ones that follow copy it to some degree. Just look at the controversy of the 9-11 attack. It’s the 21st Century version of the Kennedy assassination complete with bloodshed, never ending controversy, destruction of evidence, a resulting war, tons of new evidence to classify, a shoddy investigation with a shoddy report, and two camps of independent investigators slinging mud at each other.
In regards to the investigators, many can be highly educated, degreed people that make perfect sense in their arguments but then certain details don’t fit. Such as Dr. Steven Jones and his thermite research. When Dr. Judy Wood asked Jones where is thermite ever used to demolish a building he does not reply to her. Answer? It never is according to Dr. Wood (who is a proponent of an exotic technology being used instead of conventional explosives). Yet Dr. Jones’ research has a large following and his work has been peer reviewed. And the 9-11 research community is rife with this sort of goings on as are other research groups such as those in the Kennedy assassination crowd. There is disinformation going on here but from whom?
There are so many operations in effect there to even begin to write about it would probably cover many volumes. You start out with the Arab terrorists hijacking commercial airliners. Coinciding with the hijacking is a Pentagon simulation of a hijacking of said commercial airliners. Then you have Mossad agents filming the towers being attacked and falling down (their interrogation and film classified). Meanwhile, you have the destruction of large amounts of financial records that were stored in the buildings. The FBI is another player stating there were no black boxes found at Ground Zero, that is later contradicted by two firemen who say they found the recorders.
With so many players involved with so many controversial events, be they individuals and or government or corporate agencies, all serve to lead people astray. How can one sort any of this out with so many players involved? It’s extremely difficult if not impossible. Because it’s all nested. Everybody can write their books and post on their web pages in the hunt for an angle. And nobody is going to get close. Because it’s all nested.
Sources
Nelson, Philip, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination; Hougan, Jim, Secret Agenda; Colodny, Lee and Gettlin, Robert, Silent Coup; Prouty, Fletcher, The Secret Team, McKnight, Gerald, Breach of Trust
John Barbour, Coast to Coast AM radio interview, 5/31/09.
Mike Golden
http://exiledonline.com/assassination-by-omission-another-look-at-serial-plagiarist-gerald-posner/
Dr. Judy Wood
http://www.drjudywood.com/
Rollye James Show
http://www.rollye.net/
