The Danger of Using Motive as Evidence of Conspiracy
Excerpt from "The Gun that Didn’t Smoke," in my book, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas
Author’s note (Feb. 2023): Too many students of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy have a bad habit of naming conspirators based on the presence or absence of motive. It keeps those who could otherwise help resolve the crime entangled in a counterproductive pseudo-debate. In this excerpt, I gave an example of naming a suspected conspirator without relying on motive, Senator Thomas Dodd; followed by examples of the motive-based quagmires of CIA officer John Stockwell, and CIA-friendly journalist Evan Thomas. I also showed that when discussing non-motive evidence, deception and bias became clear in talk-show host Tom Snyder’s interview of Senator Arlen Specter. I present this excerpt now as a warning: In the coming deep-state-controlled disclosure of false conspiracy evidence, beware of explanations that rely on the presence or absence of motive. (Endnote reference numbers herein include numbers from the original essay.)
In 1963, as head of the Senate’s Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee, Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut was experimenting with ordering arms from mail order houses in an attempt to gather information allowing Congress to stem unregulated traffic. Senator Dodd instituted the program on behalf of Colt and other small firearms producers in Connecticut who complained of foreign imports.
Oswald might have participated in this program. Dodd, a former FBI agent and long-time J. Edgar Hoover loyalist,1-161 was also a leading member of the Cuba Lobby (which grew out of the right-wing, red-hunting, China Lobby) through which he was in touch with some of the same Cuban-exile mercenaries as Oswald. He was also investigating the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in which Oswald may have been an infiltrator. Returning to the treatise of criminologist Charles O’Hara, we can see how Oswald, working in a legitimate undercover capacity for Dodd, could have easily been manipulated into simultaneous conspiracies involving a Mannlicher-Carcano:
“In the investigation of subversive activities and systematic thefts undercover operations are almost indispensable.
“Undercover work is most successfully used when there is knowledge that certain persons are engaged in criminal activity, but proof which may be used as evidence is lacking...The effective undercover agent is, perhaps, the only means of obtaining detailed information concerning a subversive group or organization.”2–162
Two of the gun mail-order houses Dodd’s subcommittee was investigating were the ones from which Oswald allegedly ordered his Smith and Wesson .38 revolver (Seaport Traders of Los Angeles) and his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle (Klein's of Chicago). Oswald ordered his pistol two days before Dodd’s subcommittee began hearings on the matter on January 29, 1963. The subcommittee’s sample statistics later showed a purchase in Texas made from Seaport Traders. One of the groups being investigated for firearm purchases was one whose members Oswald had in his address book, the American Nazi Party. One of the investigators looking into interstate firearms sales at this time was Manuel Pena, the Los Angeles police lieutenant who was later one of the pivotal officers investigating Robert Kennedy's assassination. It was Pena who traced Oswald’s telescopic sight to a California gun shop.3–163 And one of the primary culprits, robbing domestic manufacturers of profits, was the Mannlicher-Carcano.4–164
After the assassination, Dodd, using CIA sources, helped the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee publish a story that Oswald had been trained at a KGB assassination school in Minsk. At the time, Dodd was on the payroll of the American Security Council, “the leading public group campaigning to use U.S. military force to oust Castro from Cuba, and to escalate the war in Vietnam.”5–165
Along with those connections, Dodd’s long tenure in the U.S. Government brought him into direct contact with, or within one degree of separation from, a statistically significant number of suspected conspirators and suspicious groups linked to the JFK assassination: the FPCC’s Richard Gibson; Guy Banister, who, like Dodd, had been a member of the FBI’s elite team pursuing John Dillinger; Ed Butler and his Information Council of the Americas; certain members of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal; certain organized crime figures and labor racketeers; the United Fruit Company; the State Department’s Office of Security; the Castillo Armas junta of Guatemala; Allen Dulles and associates, including Nazi assassination plotter Hans Bernd Gisevius and Ruth Forbes Paine’s close friend Mary Bancroft; Richard Helms; the Rockefeller family and associates; the Lyndon Baines Johnson family and associates; Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans and associates, eventually including George DeMohrenschildt; the Citizens’ Committee for a Free Cuba, including Clare Boothe Luce and other secret warriors against Cuba; Cord Meyer and his United World Federalists, including again, Ruth Forbes Paine; Nazi War Criminals like Alfreds Berzins; William F. Buckley, Jr. and associates, including E. Howard Hunt; expert Clay Shaw-defense witness J. Appel, Jr.; and Dodd’s own son, Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut.
On the day Kennedy was assassinated, Dodd considered the tragedy a personal victory, bragging about his friendship with the “new” administration, grieving only over “the damage he [Kennedy] did to us in three years.” But, as with Edgar Tatro’s evidence of who forced Roger Craig to lie about “the Mauser,” we still await George Michael Evica’s proof that, “Beyond speculation...I have learned that according to two unimpeachable sources, Senator Thomas Dodd indeed caused at least one Mannlicher Carcano to be ordered in the name of Lee Harvey Oswald (or in the name of ‘Alek Hidell’) sometime in 1963.”6–166
Conspiracy investigation is never about motive, because, by definition, conspiracies involve multiple motives. Conspiracy investigation is primarily about connections. The significance of Dodd’s linkage to the conspiracy lies not in the closeness of his contact to any one of these entities, but in the closeness of his contact to all of them, and the fact that the only two significant common denominators of all of these entities is the CIA and the JFK assassination conspiracy and coverup.
Conspiracy investigation is never about motive, because, by definition, conspiracies involve multiple motives. Conspiracy investigation is primarily about connections.
As O’Hara wrote, “Motive or that which induces the criminal to act must be distinguished from intent. The motive may be the desire to obtain revenge or personal gain; the intent is the accomplishment of the act. Motive need not be shown in order to obtain a conviction, but intent must always be proved where it is an element of the offense.”7–167
The problem with relying on motive to identify conspirators is illustrated by the vacillating opinions of John Stockwell. In a chapter on the assassination in his 1991 book, The Praetorian Guard, Stockwell wrote: “In fact, there is strong evidence that both the FBI and the CIA high commands had prior knowledge of and direct involvement in the conspiracy.” He cited excellent examples of that evidence, apart from motive. Two years later, for a new “Afterword” to that book, he wrote: “However, I consider the chapter on the Kennedy assassination to be substantially in error....You see, in 1963 the CIA and John Kennedy could not have been much closer....Of all the popular suspects, only the Mafia and perhaps Lyndon Johnson emerge with truly persuasive motives and opportunity to plot Kennedy[’s] murder.”8–168 As a consequence of relying on motive, Stockwell’s opinions became riddled with qualifying phrases and uncertainty.
Stockwell’s vacillation seems tame, however, compared to the extremes of Evan Thomas. Addressing the subject of secrecy and oversight in a free society, during a panel discussion on the future of the CIA, Evan Thomas, “the first author or historian ever permitted to read the CIA’s own secret histories,” said that “eighty percent of American people believe a conspiracy killed JFK and fifty percent of the people believe the CIA was behind it.” He said, “The CIA has done a lot of bad things but they did not kill JFK.” He added, “I think they’re nuts not to just completely open up those files.” He said, “there will be problems with the files regarding Cuban CIA agents but the CIA will be cleared of any conspiracy to kill JFK.”
The panel’s moderator, ABC News Diplomatic Correspondent David Ensor, did not respond to Thomas. Neither did the other five panelists. No one at the panel discussion had mentioned the subject of JFK’s assassination before Thomas, and no one addressed it after him, not even panelist Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, who had helped Thomas write a Newsweek cover story about the CIA and the JFK assassination in 1993. With a half hour left in the discussion, Thomas was the only panelist not to speak again, and the only one not asked to speak again. Silence was the least foolhardy course considering what Thomas had just said and what he has written on the subject. His Newsweek article concluded that “In the end, the story of the American government and the assassination of John F. Kennedy is a tale of human error and parochialism, not conspiracy.”
Yet in his article and in his later book about the CIA, Thomas used the motives of avenging the Bay of Pigs and preserving world peace to conclude that “Slightly more plausible conspiracy theories [than those blaming Khrushchev and Castro] involve renegades and rogue agents,” and that “Somewhat more plausible suspects are renegade Cuban exiles, conceivably abetted by rogue CIA agents.” That is followed in his article with, “But there is no solid evidence leading to the Agency or the Cubans. There are, however, more intriguing hints of mob involvement,” wrote Thomas, because “The motive was to get Bobby Kennedy off the mob’s back....But, in addition to a lack of any hard evidence, there are two big problems with fingering them as the culprits.”
Incredibly, Thomas’ two big problems are that mobsters would be more motivated by prudence and self-preservation than by anger toward an enemy; and that they would have no motive to use an “unreliable, unlikely professional hit man” like the “paranoid loser” Oswald. Thomas cites only Gerald Posner as proof that the motiveless Oswald was the hitman, however. And he ignores the fact that “paranoid loser” perfectly describes a patsy, one who is duped or victimized — a sucker. And he ignores the fact that patsies are essential to con-jobs perpetrated by mobsters and other swindlers.
Like the Warren Commission, Thomas thus admits to plausible evidence of conspiracy, exchanging the Warren Report’s unproven qualification, “no credible evidence,” for his own unproven value judgements, “no solid evidence” and “no hard evidence.” In his article, Thomas wisely states that “It is impossible to prove a negative — that someone did not plot to kill Kennedy.” (Thomas’ emphasis) Yet in his book, as in the panel discussion, he attempts the impossible: “The many conspiracy theories notwithstanding, there is no evidence that the CIA itself somehow became sucked into a plot to kill JFK.” In other words, according to Thomas’ flip-flopping, there was no conspiracy, and if we discount the CIA agents, including Cuban exiles and mobsters, who plausibly conspired to kill JFK, there is no proof that the CIA was part of the plot. This from the man who called it “an absurd leap to think the CIA would kill Kennedy.”9–169
Applying Peter Dale Scott’s methodology of analyzing consistently negative information, a pattern of disinformation can be seen in a preference for motive-based arguments on the part of biased media pundits and investigators. Because of its irrelevance, motive can be used either to support or to ridicule any particular conspiratorial relationship. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in the wake of Oliver Stone's film, JFK, former Warren Commission staff attorney Richard M. Mosk did both. He cited only the motive of going after "a fast buck" to support his theory that the publishing and entertainment industries were conspiring to “distort history for profit.” Then, just before mounting a weak defense of the Commission, Mosk attempted to defend his own innocence in its coverup with the “logic and common sense” that he had no motive: “For example, why would I, a young private-sector lawyer who had just completed active military service and whose father was close to President Kennedy, participate in a cover-up?”10–170
A pattern of disinformation can be seen in a preference for motive-based arguments on the part of biased media pundits and investigators. Because of its irrelevance, motive can be used either to support or to ridicule any particular conspiratorial relationship.
When motive is not the focus, bias becomes obvious. Bias to the extent of bigotry revealed itself in both interviewer and interviewee when talk-show host Tom Snyder interviewed presidential candidate Arlen Specter. When “Charlie in New York City” called and asked the former Warren Commission counsel if his views had changed over the years regarding his single bullet theory, Specter failed to make any sense despite embarrassing effort. Snyder, declaring that he “truly” believed the theory, supplied his own embarrassment by attempting damage control through the next night’s broadcast. He finally said, “...I’m not going to try and change your mind. Don’t try and change mine.”11–171
But at least Snyder figured out that the only way to be a true believer is to avoid being confused by the facts. John Stockwell’s confusion only worsened. Following his epiphany about CIA innocence in JFK’s death, Stockwell conducted rifle-firing tests to “debunk or verify” the ballistics claims of alleged, confessed, grassy-knoll assassin James Files.12–172 By giving Files’ confession a moment’s thought, Stockwell compounded his motive-based flip-flop. Files claims he was a military-trained, albeit mob-connected, CIA assassin who, although he hated JFK, was just following orders from a CIA-employed mobster in a U.S. government-supported operation. Moreover, the “Files video” has been shown to be a blend of truths and untruths characteristic of classic disinformation.13–173
When hard evidence finally becomes public connecting a multipurpose Mannlicher-Carcano and the Dodds (father and son) to the JFK assassination conspiracy, the first line of defense will most likely be based on an absence of a motive.
ENDNOTES:
161. Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: Penguin, 1991) p. 407; cited in Scott 249.
162. O’Hara 197, 199.
163. 22H 528.
164. Evica 252-53. Scott 249, 250, 307, 370.
165. Scott 215, 216.
166. George Michael Evica, “And We Are All Still Mortal: Thomas Dodd and Lee Harvey Oswald,” Assassination Chronicles, Mar. 1996, pp. 20-24. Lisa Pease, “Thomas J. Dodd & Son: Corruption of Blood?,” Probe, Jul.-Aug. 1996, pp. 18-23. Anthony Summers, Conspiracy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980) pp. 290-98, 384, 444, 489. Richard Bartholomew, “Possible Discovery of an Automobile Used In the JFK Conspiracy,” Fair Play online magazine. [https://web.archive.org/web/20130104011007/http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/17th_Issue/fp.html] (and self-published manuscript, 1993, pp. 8, 31, 35-48, 50, 51, 56, 57, 59, 62, 63, 66, 68, 78, 87-89, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 115, 113, 120, 124, 135, 152); hereafter cited as “Possible Discovery” with page number(s). William E. Kelly, Lines of Inquiry and The Divine Scheme (unpublished manuscript).
167. O’Hara 19.
168. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard (Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1991) p. 125. John R. Stockwell, “Afterword,” (written on his personal letterhead and inserted into later editions by his distributor, Prevailing Winds Research) Aug. 24, 1993.
169. Richard Bartholomew’s contemporaneous notes from CIA Symposium: “Spying Under Siege: The Future of Covert Action,” National Press Club Ball Room, Washington D.C., Mar. 25, 1997 (broadcast live by C-SPAN2; sponsored by the Discovery Channel and held in conjunction with the CIA’s 50th Anniversary and the world premiere of the mini-series, “CIA: America’s Secret Warriors,” Mar. 31-Apr. 2, 1997). Evan Thomas, “The Real Cover-up,” Newsweek, Nov. 22, 1993, pp. 68, 92, 94, 95; and The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 308, 331, liner notes. R 374 (“no credible evidence”).
170. Richard M. Mosk, “The Plot to Assassinate the Warren Commission,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 30, 1991; reprinted in Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause Books, 1992) pp. 333-34; hereafter cited as Stone and Sklar 333-34.
171. Richard Bartholomew, “True Believers: Tom Snyder talks to Arlen Specter,” The Fourth Decade, Jul. 1995, pp. 29-32. [republished in Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 002, Jun./Jul./Aug. 2019, pp. 8-12, and here at bartholoviews.substack.com]
172. Richard Bartholomew’s contemporaneous notes of phone call from John Stockwell, Feb. 7, 1995, 10:48 a.m.-11:42 a.m. CST.
173. Martin Shackelford, “‘Confession of an Assassin’ James E. Files, Joliet State Penitentiary, March 22, 1994: Notes on the Videotape (1996, Bob Vernon, UTL Productions/MPI Video)” JFK-Share Internet discussion group, Sept. 20, 1996 00:53:33 EDT. “Another Lone Nut? Confession of an assassin: The murder of JFK,” Assassination Chronicles, Vol. 2, Issue 2, Summer 1996, p. 48.