Prof. Jeffrey Sachs and the JFK Assassination • 46m

Audio File:

Although the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was surely one of the most famous events of the twentieth century, its sixtieth anniversary passed a few months ago with relatively little attention, probably overshadowed by the looming defeat of Ukraine in its war with Russia and also the enormous civilian casualties following the sudden outbreak of the Israel/Gaza conflict. But many individuals of an older generation probably remembered that tragic date, and I think that one of them may have been Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.

Born in 1954, Sachs had just turned nine years old a couple of weeks before the events in Dallas threw our entire nation into mourning. In recent months he has frequently emphasized his great admiration for our slain leader, whose speeches and public statements seemed to offer hope for world peace, a possibility soon tragically lost.

I suspect that much like myself, over the decades Sachs had always dismissed and ignored the conspiratorial theories of the JFK assassination that were so popular during the 1960s and 1970s then gradually faded away during the more optimistic 1980s. But my eventual discovery of various other major historical anomalies finally led me to begin exploring the facts of the JFK assassination a dozen years ago. Perhaps a very similar process over the last couple of years has now led Sachs’ thinking to move in the same direction, propelled by his shock at discovering official cover-ups on entirely different issues.

As I wrote in late 2022:

Until just a few months ago, I doubt there were many American academics more solidly situated in the topmost ranks of our elite mainstream establishment than Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.
In 1983 he gained Harvard University tenure at the remarkably young age of 28, then spent the next 19 years as a professor at that august academic institution; by the early 1990s the New York Times was already hailing him as the world’s most important figure in his field. Lured to Columbia University in 2002, he has spent the last couple of decades teaching there and also directing a couple of its research organizations, most recently the Center for Sustainable Development. TIME Magazine has twice ranked him among the world’s 100 most influential individuals, and for nearly twenty years he served as Special Advisor to several Secretary-Generals of the United Nations, while publishing many hundreds of articles and op-eds on a wide variety of subjects in our most influential media outlets.
It would be difficult to construct a more illustrious and establishmentarian curriculum vitae for an international academic figure, so in 2020 he was a natural choice to serve as chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, established to investigate all aspects of the deadly worldwide pandemic.
Yet as he has subsequently explained in his interviews, over the course of the last couple of years he became increasingly suspicious that the true origins of the viral disease were being concealed. More than eighteen million people have died worldwide including over a million Americans, and rather than acquiescing in what he came to believe was an ongoing official cover-up, he broke with the establishment and made the courageous decision to bring the true facts to widespread public attention.
Although he has retained the subdued manner and careful phraseology of a mild academic, in recent months the incendiary content of his published articles and his public statements have exploded across the global landscape, reaching many millions who might otherwise never have questioned what they were so uniformly being told by all our mainstream media organs. His critics defending that orthodoxy must surely believe that he has gone dangerously rogue, and given the enormous weight of his past credibility, I suspect that the phrase “rogue elephant” has sometimes entered their thoughts.

From the earliest days of the Covid epidemic, an official narrative was promoted that the virus was natural and editors of the leading scientific journals closed their pages to any submissions that suggested otherwise. With no reputable academic papers challenging their perspective, the natural origins advocates were able to cite this silence as proof that their position represented the overwhelming scientific consensus, thereby intimidating most mainstream journalists into toeing that same line. A massive propaganda-bubble had been inflated and maintained by such administrative means.
However, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof. Sachs had publication privileges in the prestigious PNAS journal, so in May he and a co-author published an important article documenting the highly suspicious characteristics of the Covid virus and calling for further investigation. This constituted a breakthrough, becoming the first and only paper published in a major journal that presented the very strong evidence of Covid bioengineering.
Given his role as chairman of the Covid Commission, Sachs’ paper should have been treated as a bombshell, reaching the headlines of all our leading newspapers. But instead, it was almost totally ignored, as was the author’s public statements on the subject. However, the following month, Sachs attended a small Spanish thinktank gathering, whose proceedings were soon made available on Youtube. Russia’s RT eventually ran a brief item highlighting Sachs’ presentation, and a short clip of his remarks soon went super-viral, retweeted out almost 11,000 times and accumulating over a million views.

Having publicly broken ranks with the political establishment over Covid, he soon began doing the same on other important issues. During July and August he published a couple of opinion columns condemning our reckless policies towards Russia and China, with the former having already provoked a bloody and dangerous war in Ukraine and the latter periodically threatening to do the same over Taiwan.
Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster
Jeffrey Sachs • Consortium News • July 1, 2022 • 1,300 Words
The West’s Dangerously Simple-Minded Narrative About Russia and China
Jeffrey Sachs • Common Dreams • August 23, 2022 • 1,000 Words

A few months later, a series of massive underwater explosions severely damaged the $30 billion Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines. This constituted the greatest act of industrial terrorism in the history of the world, with potentially crippling long-term impact upon the energy supplies of Germany and other European countries. Although there was enormous circumstantial evidence implicating America in those attacks, and renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later revealed the exact details of the sabotage operation, the entire Western media and political establishment stubbornly pretended to see nothing, instead absurdly accusing Russia of having destroyed its own energy pipelines.

But Sachs refused to support this cover-up and he instead played an important role in breaking the media blockade:

Then a few days later, Bloomberg TV invited Sachs to share his concerns over the Ukraine war. His hosts were flabbergasted when he flatly declared that America had probably destroyed the Russian pipelines, even mentioning that top journalists had privately told him the same thing, although none of those vital facts could ever appear in their own newspapers.
As a consequence of Sachs’ candor, the interview was cut short—with Sachs “yanked off air” in the words of the hostile New York Post—but the entire segment was watched at least a couple of hundred thousand times on Youtube and the short clip of Sachs’ Nord Stream remarks soon went super-viral on Twitter, viewed more than 4 million times in one Tweet and another million times across a couple of others.

It has been extremely rare for a public figure of such high establishmentarian credentials to directly challenge such important narratives, and Sachs’ remarkable candor soon made him a very popular guest on numerous podcasts and channels.

Jeffrey Sachs as Righteous Rogue Elephant
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 10, 2022 • 3,500 Words

A couple of years earlier he had also discovered that many of his long held assumptions about the Middle East conflict had been mistaken, as I discussed late last year.

Different scholars have different fields of expertise, and Sachs is an international economist, whose regions of focus have been the former Soviet Bloc countries, Latin America, and China, but apparently without much emphasis upon the Middle East. However, during the long Covid lock-downs, he expanded his knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by reading a recently published book by Prof. Rashid Khalidi, one of his Columbia University colleagues, then joined the author for a very interesting hour-long discussion available on Youtube.
By purest chance, I stumbled across that video several months ago, not long before the region suddenly erupted in unexpected violence, and found it an excellent presentation of the important historical facts, many of them previously unknown to me, while Sachs similarly emphasized that he was forced to “unlearn” much of the history that he had casually absorbed over the years.

Perhaps partly as a consequence, he has been extremely forthright in denouncing the ongoing slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s helpless civilian population, and the remarkable unwillingness of the Biden Administration to force Israel to end its military rampage. As he recently put it, on these matters Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sometimes seems to act as if he were our actual president instead of the confused individual sitting in the Oval Office.

Preoccupied with our own affairs, most of us live our lives within the safe cocoon of our media-generated framework of reality and rarely question the historical narratives that we have absorbed from our earliest youth. But once we discover that the government and its media allies have been promoting utter falsehoods on matters of great importance and shamelessly maintaining those falsehoods despite enormous evidence to the contrary, we naturally begin to question more and more additional issues. The longstanding controversy surrounding JFK’s assassination may become one of these.

Over the last year, Sachs has become a regular weekly interview guest on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s video podcast, and one of his leading concerns has been our country’s disastrously aggressive foreign policy following the end of the Cold War. He has frequently complained that America no longer does diplomacy, but merely overthrows governments around the world that refuse to follow its dictates, noting that academic scholars have compiled lists containing many dozens of such successful or attempted CIA coups. Our government’s 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s neutralist and democratically-elected government was one of the most important of these since it ultimately led to the outbreak of the war with Russia in 2022, a conflict that has cost many hundreds of thousands of lives and now threatens to draw in NATO forces, taking us to the brink of World War III.

Very sharp criticism of the CIA has become a staple of Napolitano’s daily guests, several of whom are themselves former members of that organization. Ray McGovern spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, rising to become head of its Soviet analysis group and serving for years as the president’s morning intelligence briefer, obviously positions of considerable responsibility. But he has been especially scathing towards the operational side of the CIA, which he believes has metastasized into a private army, routinely involved in coups and assassinations and accountable only to the president and sometimes only to itself.

These are widely acknowledged facts, and it requires only a slight logical step to connect them to the events of 1963. All our mainstream history books emphasize that President Kennedy had become intensely critical of the CIA’s activities in the wake of the disastrous failure of its Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, removing several of its top leaders and allegedly vowing to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind.” Under such circumstances, it hardly seems implausible that intelligence operatives who were regularly involved in killings and regime-change operations might have decided to employ those same skills domestically if they believed that their own vital interests were severely threatened. For well over half a century, there has been very widespread speculation that CIA members were directly involved in the JFK assassination.

Although this logical step may seem a very small one, prominent and respectable public figures have been extremely reluctant to take it, and our mainstream media has for decades completely stigmatized or ignored any such “conspiracy theories.” As a consequence of that total lack of reputable supporters, I had always casually dismissed the possibility.

But much as he had done in the case of Covid’s origins and the Nord Stream pipeline attacks, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has now taken that bold step, possibly blowing a hole in a sixty-year cover-up. In his Thursday interview, already viewed nearly 140,000 times, he mentioned that there seemed to be very strong evidence that elements of the CIA had been involved in the JFK assassination, which he suggested might have been “the most decisive event in modern American history.” He even speculated that in the aftermath of that presidential killing, most or all of Kennedy’s successors in the Oval Office may have become little more than “factotums of the system,” lacking the power to fully implement independent policies.

These brief remarks would hardly have provoked surprise within conspiratorial circles or among those who have spent years or decades investigating the JFK assassination. But I think Sachs has become the highest-ranking mainstream figure to ever publicly voice such ideas and this may prompt others to follow his lead.

Over the last year or two, the questions surrounding the assassination of JFK had already returned to public discussion. Although the circumstances were quite different, an earlier break in the dam had occurred in late 2022, as I noted in an article at that time:

Tucker Carlson hosts the most popular cable news show and last Thursday he aired an explosive segment in which he declared that that 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy had been the work of a conspiracy, with our own CIA heavily involved.

Carlson’s regular nightly audience is over 3 million, and more than a million have already watched the Youtube video, so these bombshell accusations regarding the events in Dallas have probably now reached more ordinary Americans than anything else on the topic in the three decades since Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning film JFK was playing in the theaters.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nephew of the slain President and son of his murdered brother praised Carlson’s show as “the most courageous newscast in 60 years,” and his remarks have been Retweeted more than 22,000 times.

In recent decades, such conspiratorial beliefs on the JFK assassination have been largely confined to the Left, with Stone himself being a prime example. But Carlson is one of America’s most influential conservatives, so he may have successfully implanted these ideas among a portion of our citizenry previously unexposed to them. He also noted that widespread use of the insulting phrase “conspiracy theory” only began in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, with the CIA itself successfully marginalizing its critics by promoting that accusation in the compliant media.

Although Carlson hardly had Sachs’ academic reputation or international credibility, his discussion of the issue and Kennedy’s strong praise may have led Sachs and many others to begin questioning the official story. Every crack in the wall may lead to the next one.

Most individuals are very reluctant to acknowledge that they have been entirely mistaken about such an important matter for nearly their entire lives, or at least that was true in my own case. As I explained a few years ago:

Having read a couple of books that completely upended my settled beliefs about a central event of twentieth century history, I simply didn’t know what to think. Over the years, my own writings had put me on friendly terms with a well-connected individual whom I considered a member of the elite establishment, and whose intelligence and judgment had always seemed extremely solid. So I decided to very gingerly raise the subject with him, and see whether he had ever doubted the “lone gunman” orthodoxy. To my total astonishment, he explained that as far back as the early 1990s, he’d become absolutely convinced in the reality of a “JFK conspiracy” and over the years had quietly devoured a huge number of the books in that field, but had never breathed a word in public lest his credibility be ruined and his political effectiveness destroyed.
A second friend, a veteran journalist known for his remarkably courageous stands on certain controversial topics, provided almost exactly the same response to my inquiry. For decades, he’d been nearly 100% sure that JFK had died in a conspiracy, but once again had never written a word on the topic for fear that his influence would immediately collapse.

Few other revelations in recent years have so totally overturned my understanding of the framework of reality. Even a year or two later, I still found it very difficult to wrap my head around the concept, as I described in another note to that same well-connected friend of mine:

BTW, I hate to keep harping on it, but every time I consider the implications of the JFK matter I’m just more and more astonished.
The president of the US. The heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America. His brother the top law enforcement officer in the country. Ben Bradlee, one of his closest friends, the fearless crusading editor of one of the nation’s most influential media outlets. As America’s first Catholic president, the sacred icon of many millions of Irish, Italian, and Hispanic families. Greatly beloved by top Hollywood people and many leading intellectuals.
His assassination ranks as one of the most shocking and dramatic events of the 20th century, inspiring hundreds of books and tens of thousands of news stories and articles, examining every conceivable detail. The argument from MSM silence always seemed absolutely conclusive to me.
From childhood, it’s always been obvious to me that the MSM is completely dishonest about certain things and over the last dozen years I’ve become extremely suspicious about a whole range of other issues. But if you’d asked me a couple of years ago whether JFK was killed by a conspiracy, I would have said “well, anything’s possible, but I’m 99% sure there’s absolutely no substantial evidence pointing in that direction since the MSM would surely have headlined it a million times over.”

I have no idea where Sachs currently stands in his exploration of the issues that he briefly raised last week, and perhaps he has already investigated the subject in much greater depth than his words suggested. But if not, I think I can provide some useful guideposts both to him and to any others who have now decided to seriously explore the JFK assassination for the first time. I am a rank amateur myself, who not so many years ago was exactly in that same situation, so my own suggestions might be much more helpful than those of someone who had spent decades studying the complex details of the topic.

If a newcomer decided to read only a single book on the JFK assassination conspiracy, my first recommendation would be Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, published in 2007 by David Talbot, the founder of Salon and a well-regarded if liberal-leaning journalist. I discussed some of his important material in my 2018 article:

The Talbot book especially impressed me, being based on over 150 personal interviews and released by The Free Press, a highly reputable publisher. Although he applied a considerable hagiographic gloss to the Kennedys, his narrative was compellingly written, with numerous gripping scenes. But while such packaging surely helped to explain some of the favorable treatment from reviewers and how he had managed to produce a national bestseller in a seemingly long-depleted field, for me the packaging was much less important than the product itself.
To the extent that notions of a JFK conspiracy had ever crossed my mind, I’d considered the argument from silence absolutely conclusive. Surely if there had been the slightest doubt of the “lone gunman” conclusion endorsed by the Warren Commission, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy would have launched a full investigation to avenge his slain brother.
But as Talbot so effectively demonstrates, the reality of the political situation was entirely different. Robert Kennedy may have begun that fatal morning widely regarded as the second most powerful man in the country, but the moment his brother was dead and his bitter personal enemy Lyndon Johnson sworn in as the new president, his governmental authority almost immediately ebbed away. Longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been his hostile subordinate, probably scheduled for removal in JFK’s second term, immediately became contemptuous and unresponsive to his requests. Having lost all his control over the levers of power, Robert Kennedy lacked any ability to conduct a serious investigation.
According to numerous personal interviews, he had almost immediately concluded that his brother had been struck down at the hands of an organized group, very likely including elements from within the U.S. government itself, but he could do nothing about the situation. As he regularly confided to close associates, his hope at the age of 38 was to reach the White House himself at some future date, and with the government in his hands then uncover his brother’s killers and bring them to justice. But until that day, he could do nothing, and any unsubstantiated accusations he made would be totally disastrous both for national unity and for his own personal credibility. So for years, he was forced to nod his head and publicly acquiesce to the official story of his brother’s inexplicable assassination at the hands of a lone nut, a fairy tale publicly endorsed by nearly the entire political establishment, and this situation deeply gnawed at him. Moreover, his own apparent acceptance of that story was often interpreted by others, not least in the media, as his wholehearted endorsement.
Although discovering Robert Kennedy’s true beliefs was a crucial revelation in the Talbot book, there were many others. At most three shots had allegedly come from Oswald’s rifle, but Roy Kellerman, the Secret Service agent in the passenger seat of JFK’s limousine, was sure there had been more than that, and to the end of his life always believed there had been additional shooters. Gov. Connolly, seated in front of JFK and severely wounded in the attack, had exactly the same opinion. CIA Director John McCone was equally convinced that there had been multiple gunmen. Across the pages of Talbot’s book, I learned that dozens of prominent, well-connected individuals privately expressed extreme skepticism towards the official “lone gunman theory” of the Warren Commission, although such doubts were very rarely made in public or on the record.
For a variety of complex reasons, the leading national media organs—the commanding heights of “Our American Pravda”—almost immediately endorsed the “lone gunman theory” and with some exceptions generally maintained that stance throughout the next half-century. With few prominent critics willing to publicly dispute that idea and a strong media tendency to ignore or minimize those exceptions, casual observers such as myself had generally received a severely distorted view of the situation.
If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother’s assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy’s pro-Israel public positions, although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America.
All this was well known to me. However, I had not known that powder burns later proved that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy’s head from a distance of three inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him. Furthermore, eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired although Sirhan’s revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Naguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir that there was likely a second gunman. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security guard with his gun drawn standing immediately behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys. The police investigators seemed uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial. With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country entirely. JFK’s widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them.

Taken as a whole, I found Talbot’s narrative quite convincing, at least with respect to demonstrating the existence of a substantial conspiracy behind the fatal event.

Others certainly had the same reaction, with the influential pages of The New York Times Sunday Book Review carrying the strongly favorable reaction of presidential historian Alan Brinkley. As the Allan Nevins Professor of History and Provost of Columbia University, Brinkley is as mainstream and respectable an academic scholar as might be imagined and he characterized Talbot as

the latest of many intelligent critics who have set out to demolish the tottering credibility of the Warren Commission and draw attention to evidence of a broad and terrible conspiracy that lay behind the assassination of John Kennedy — and perhaps the murder of Robert Kennedy as well.

For those less interested in reading an entire book, I think my pair of 2018 articles serves as a useful introduction to the subject, presenting the overview of a newcomer while suggesting more than a dozen books that would provide far more detailed analysis of the issue and its particular elements.

I also believe that it’s quite important to divide all discussions of the JFK assassination into two separate categories. The first involves efforts to determine whether the official story is correct or instead that the assassination had been the result of the conspiracy. And if that latter conclusion is established, we must then seek to determine the likely identities of those conspirators. Most books and articles fall primarily into one category or the other, but obviously establishing the existence of a conspiracy is that first and most important step that must be taken, and with few exceptions our mainstream journalists and academics have stubbornly refused to publicly admit that reality.

American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part I – What Happened?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 18, 2018 • 4,800 Words
American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words

If my articles might provide a brief introduction to the topic and the Talbot book a good and solid serious beginning, I’d also like to recommend a book at the opposite end of the spectrum, far more complex and especially important to those focused on the possible role of the CIA. The author exhaustively analyzed a large collection of declassified but heavily redacted CIA documents, not only confirming that involvement and working out a central element of the plot but even identifying the key CIA conspirator.

As I wrote in late 2022:

By purest chance, Carlson’s show had aired just a few days after I had finished reading an important book on the JFK assassination that someone had brought to my attention last year. Originally published almost thirty years ago, this work provided some crucial insights into how the political cover-up of the conspiracy had been arranged, a cover-up that has now endured for nearly six decades. The most powerful man in the world had been killed at the very height of America’s postwar success and prosperity, yet nearly all of America’s political elites were successfully enlisted to suppress the truth of what had happened.
John Newman had spent twenty years in Military Intelligence and afterward became a professor of history at the University of Maryland. Since then, he had applied the technical skills that he had honed in his many years of government service to analyzing the bureaucratic minutia of declassified government files and using this material to produce a series of books on the hidden side of American government policies during the 1960s, including our growing involvement in Vietnam and especially the complex circumstances of the JFK assassination. Oswald and the CIA originally appeared in 1993, but the 2008 edition included a new epilogue, summarizing some of his most important findings.
The book is a lengthy one, running over 650 pages with notes and appendices, and his exhaustively detailed analysis of the released intelligence files and their interpretation can be eye-glazingly dull at points, but his broader conclusions are not difficult to state. The profusion of internal CIA documents regarding Oswald and his movements seems completely inconsistent with any institutional plot at the Agency to kill Kennedy, but might fit very well with the hypothesis of a “rogue faction” at the CIA having played a central role in the affair.
Newman argued that Oswald was exactly the “patsy” that he claimed to be, but more importantly he drew a very sharp distinction between the small group of plotters who had actually organized the JFK assassination itself and the much larger group who carried out the subsequent cover-up, with the motives of many of those latter individuals being entirely different. As he persuasively explained in his epilogue, the conspirators had created a false intelligence trail suggesting that Oswald might have been a Soviet agent, and then used that misinformation to force our fearful government leadership into become their unwitting accomplices after the fact, compelling them to suppress all evidence of any conspiracy in Dallas.

Newman’s crucial conclusions are worth quoting at length:

It is now clear that most of the U.S. leaders and officials who participated in the national security cover-up had nothing to do with the plot that was hatched before the president’s murder. Many of them—including leading legislators and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren—were motivated by the perceived threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Inside the executive branch of government, many others were motivated by the desire to protect their jobs and their institutions. Their collective actions, however, were not the result of an accident; rather, they were the forced checkmate in the endgame of an ingenious plan.
The plan was designed to force official Washington to bury a radioactive story in Oswald’s files in order for America to survive. The plan worked. No matter how sloppy the performance of the shooters in Dallas was, no matter how bungled the autopsy and the handling of the evidence was, all would be trumped by the threat of WWIII and 40 million dead Americans. From the beginning, the plot was based upon the assumption that, when presented with this horrific possibility, everyone would fall into line. This assumption was correct.
…There was a darker purpose for Oswald’s visit to Mexico City. He was sent there to seek visas from the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy…the objective was simply incidental contact between Oswald and the man who issued Soviet visas in Mexico City: Valery Kostikov. The value of this contact derived from what only a handful of counterintelligence officers in Washington knew: Kostikov was an important operative of the KGB assassinations in the Americas…The handler’s purpose in having both Oswald’s and Kostikov’s names mentioned was to place evidence into the CIA’s records that, on 22 November, would link KGB assassinations to the murder of President Kennedy. The activities of this impersonator are what made it possible for President Johnson to tell Senator Russell on 29 November that those investigating the case were “testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this.” Johnson insisted that this must be prevented “from kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.”

I went on to say:

So under Newman’s convincing reconstruction, most of the powerful American officials who played such a pivotal role in concealing the conspiracy may have been acting under the best of intentions, seeking to protect our country from the risk of a devastating retaliatory war with the Soviets. And obviously these concerns would have been deliberately fanned by those among them who had been involved in the plot and created the false trail of evidence connecting Oswald with KGB assassination efforts.
The author therefore argued that creating that false trail had constituted an absolutely crucial element of the assassination plot, and by a very careful examination of the intelligence files, he concluded that longtime CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton had been the likely culprit, thus identifying him as one of the key conspirators. This conclusion meshes perfectly with the entirely different arguments advanced by the late Michael Collins Piper in Final Judgment, his 1994 landmark work, which had also argued that Angleton was a central figure in the assassination.

Although Sachs’ statements last week certainly reflected his true beliefs regarding the likely role of the CIA in the JFK assassination, I think his willingness to publicly express them was mostly due to his deep concerns over our country’s extremely reckless international behavior and the huge danger it posed to global peace. For the past two years, America and its NATO allies have been fighting a proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia on Russia’s own border. Such a project would have been considered unthinkable madness during the height of the old Cold War, but that policy has now become an almost universal bipartisan consensus among the West’s political and media elites.

As Sachs has correctly emphasized, the relentlessly aggressive Neocons gained control over the American foreign policy establishment more than thirty years ago, and despite their record of repeated disasters, they have successfully retained that unbroken control since then. Indeed, the very term “Neocon” is no longer meaningful since it now includes nearly the entire Washington, DC policy establishment.

The CIA has certainly been a nefarious organization over the decades, but I think its role in these disasters has been a relatively minor and instrumental one. Although the CIA surely helped foment the 2014 coup in Ukraine, it did so under the direction of Victoria Nuland and its other political masters. In previous administrations, CIA analysts were coerced into providing the false intelligence used to justify our calamitous invasion of Iraq while NATO airstrikes were required to destroy the military forces of Libya and allow the overthrow of its government. The Neocon political establishment constitutes the primary danger to our country and the world rather than the CIA, which these days functions as merely one of many Neocon appendages.

I would argue that a central asset of the Neocons has been their dominant control over the media. Our world is ruled by the media, which functions as a force of mind-control, shaping the thoughts and beliefs of those individuals who deploy powerful physical weapons or possess vast financial resources. Breaking that media stranglehold would probably have far greater impact than drastically curbing the power of the CIA, even if that latter goal could actually be accomplished.

But suppose enough Americans in the mainstream and among our educated political classes came to believe that President John F. Kennedy had actually died at the hands of a conspiracy involving important figures of his own government and that our media had concealed those facts from the American people for more than sixty years. Under such circumstances, the power of today’s mainstream media might suffer a very serious blow, greatly increasing the opening for other sources of information less under tight Neocon control.

And that might be the most important consequence of the courageous recent statements of Prof. Jeffrey Sachs regarding that infamous event of 1963.

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