Was there a conspiracy behind the Kennedy Assassination?

p Introduction

When assessing whether the murder of President Kennedy was a conspiracy , two broad considerations must be analyzed . Firstly , who other than Lee Harvey Oswald had both the motive and the means to assassinate the President ? Secondly , if one asserts that Oswald was not the assassin , or was not the lone assassin , how does the physical evidence square with that assertion ? In other words , if it was a conspiracy , who did it and how did they do it

For our purposes , a conspiracy entails actors and actions that were not

accounted for in the official versions of the shooting , such as the Warren Commission Report . We are not looking for inconsistencies with the minute details of Oswald 's personal life we are looking for something much more profound , something that will prove conspiracy Essentially , what is needed is another gun or another shooter

Motives and Enemies

We will first approach the issue of motive . Who had motive to kill the President in Dallas ? Part of the shock of that day was that so few Americans could conceive that anyone would be so motivated , but the passage of time and the release of classified information have made it clear that President Kennedy had many enemies , foreign and domestic

First we will look at one of the most popular suspects of conspiracy theorists , the CIA . The CIA causes suspicion in general among the American people simply because it is a secretive organization without regular oversight . Evidence has emerged , however , that President Kennedy may have had special reason to fear the agency

President Kennedy initiated Operation Mongoose , a CIA action to undermine and eventually overthrow Fidel Castro . The CIA recruited many anti-Castro Cubans , some of them assassins , to train for this task . Carl Oglesby , Who Killed JFK (Berkely : Odinian Press , 1992 , 76-7 . After the Bay of Pigs fiasco , Kennedy was not going to try such aggressive action against Cuba again . We should not underestimate how betrayed the Cuban exiles must have felt by this decision . In this theory , Kennedy 's refusal to overthrow Castro may have cost him his life . Interestingly this theory could coexist with Oswald being the gunman the CIA may have hired him

The mafia also had reason to gun for the president . Despite acts of generosity towards President Kennedy 's campaign in 1960 , some mobsters felt persecuted by the President as well as by his brother Bobby , who the President had appointed Attorney General . Bobby was using his office to go after some of the very gangsters that had helped get his brother elected . Again , this scenario could still allow for Oswald as the shooter the mob may have hired him . Ibid , 77

Another obvious suspect would be the Soviet Union , the implacable ideological foe of the United States . It may have orchestrated a decapitation strike against its rival . We know that Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife lived in Russia . This alone makes it clear that there is a Russian connection , however ambiguous . The Soviet Union , with its...