The CIA’s assassination plots

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Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
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The attempt to assassinate Donald Trump and his heroic response to it are uppermost in our minds. We don’t yet know the details of who was involved in the attempt on his life, though I suspect that the “lone gunman” theory will turn out to be false. But the sad event offers us a chance to reflect on something that we do know, and that may well be relevant to the attempt on the former—and we trust soon to be next—president’s life: The CIA has been involved in numerous assassination plots since its inception.

One of these plots is especially important in current circumstances. The CIA is implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. Jacob Hornberger has done a great deal of research on this topic and here is what he says. “Why would the CIA snuff out the life of President Kennedy? Because Kennedy was determined to snuff out the life of the CIA, which the CIA, not surprisingly, considered would be a grave threat to ‘national security.’ Kennedy also was determined to move America in a direction different from that of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, which they considered would result in a communist takeover of the United States. Worst of all, Kennedy was saying good things about Russia and establishing friendly and normal relations with both Russia and Cuba. In the eyes of the national-security establishment, what Kennedy was doing was not only cowardly incompetence that would result in a communist takeover of the United States, it also consisted of treason. We all know what happens to traitors.

Thus, this was a war to the finish. If Kennedy lives, the CIA is put down, America makes friends with Russia and Cuba, and America’s militarist direction comes to an end. If Kennedy dies, the CIA survives and prospers, the never-ending hostility toward Russia and Cuba continues, and America’s militarist direction proceeds indefinitely. The die was cast, but Kennedy obviously proved to be no match for the overwhelming power of the national-security establishment.” See this.

For the same reasons, the CIA killed President Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy. After Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential race in 1968, Kennedy was the odds-on favorite to become the next president. He blamed the CIA for his brother’s death and was determined to bring the agency to heel. For that reason, the CIA had to kill him. David Talbot, the author of Brothers, a book about President Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, gives a vivid account: “As I write in my book Brothers, Robert Kennedy, who served as his brother’s attorney general and knew more about the dark side of American power than any other official of his day, was the first JFK conspiracy theorist. Journalist Jack Newfield, a close friend of RFK, told me: ‘With that amazing computer brain of his, he put it all together on the afternoon of November 22,’ the day in 1963 that President Kennedy was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy figured out that his brother was killed by CIA plotters, using members of the criminal underworld and Cuban exiles. As I reveal in Brothers, RFK planned to reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder if he had been elected president in 1968.

But, of course, Robert Kennedy himself was fatally shot on the night of June 5, 1968, after winning the California primary. My research led me to conclude that assassination was not carried out by Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of the crime, but by a shooter posing as one of the security guards charged with protecting RFK that night. (Los Angeles County coroner, Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who performed the autopsy on RFK, and key eyewitnesses also concluded Sirhan did not fire the fatal shot.) The armed ‘security force’ surrounding Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was under the control of Robert Maheu, the CIA contractor (and Kennedy hater) charged with recruiting the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro.” See this.

In fact, the list of CIA assassinations is amazingly long. Among the most famous were the repeated attempts to kill Fidel Castro, but there have been many more. The targeted killings proved so embarrassing to the US government that President Gerald Ford issued an Executive Order in 1976 banning them, but this simply made the CIA continue the killings under a new name. The agency has done extensive research into bizarre ways to “take people out.” A story in the British newspaper The Guardian gives a good account of the CIA’s malodorous activities: “The agency was forced to cut back on such killings after a US Senate investigation in the 1970s exposed the scale of its operations.

Following the investigation, then president Gerald Ford signed in 1976 an executive order stating: ‘No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire in, political assassination.’ In spite of this, the US never totally abandoned the strategy, simply changing the terminology from assassination to targeted killings, from aerial bombing of presidents to drone attacks on alleged terrorist leaders. Aerial bomb attempts on leaders included Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 1986, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Earlier well-documented episodes include Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, judged by the US to be too close to close to Russia. In 1960, the CIA sent a scientist to kill him with a lethal virus, though this became unnecessary when he was removed from office in 1960 by other means. Other leaders targeted for assassination in the 1960s included the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, president Sukarno of Indonesia and president Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

In 1973, the CIA helped organise the overthrow of Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, deemed to be too left wing: he died on the day of the coup.

The US has developed much more sophisticated methods than polonium in a tea pot, especially in the fields of electronic and cyber warfare. A leaked document obtained by WikiLeaks and released earlier this year showed the CIA in October 2014 looking at hacking into car control systems. That ability could potentially allow an agent to stage a car crash.

Recent failed North Korean missile attempts – as well as major setbacks in Iran’s nuclear programme – have been blamed on direct or indirect planting of viruses in their computer systems.

It is a long way from the crude, albeit imaginative and eventually doomed, methods employed against Castro. The US admitted to eight assassination attempts on Castro, though the Cuban put the figure much higher, with one estimate in the hundreds. Castro said: ‘If surviving assassinations were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.’” See this.

We don’t have to rely on outside observers to find out about the CIA. Victor Marchetti, a veteran CIA operative, wrote an important book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. He argued that intelligence gathering wasn’t the main function of the CIA. Its main activity was the secret subversion of governments and groups hostile to the “deep state.” Here is a summary of his analysis: “The CIA does not ‘function primarily as a central clearinghouse and producer of national intelligence for the government’. Its basic mission is ‘that of clandestine operations, particularly covert action—the secret intervention in the internal affairs of other nations. Nor was the Director of CIA a dominant—or much interested—figure in the direction and management of the intelligence community which he supposedly headed. Rather, his chief concern, like that of most of his predecessors and the agency’s current Director—was in overseeing the CIA’s clandestine activities.’

There is also the management of entrenched CIA businesses, which include looted and laundered trillions in secret bank accounts and shell companies, and the management of a vast network of CIA political assets throughout Washington and in the corporate world. While there may be CIA operatives and employees, including current and former veterans who do not support the criminal operations of the agency, these rank and file operatives have not dictated CIA policy since its creation. These ‘good guys’ are the minority, and their reform and whistleblowing efforts have largely been in vain and met with deadly force.” See this.

Let’s do everything we can to get rid of the CIA, as the great Dr. Ron Paul has urged us to do.