It all began when I first laid eyes on a book by Jim Garrison. The name of the book was "On the Trail of the Assassins". Jim Garrison was District Attorney of New Orleans in the 1960's and as such investigated the assassination of our 35th president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. His investigation turned into a media hoopla where Mr. Garrison most of the time found himself cast as the clown who could do nothing right. When I bought the book, I also started on a journey that would take me more than a decade to complete and would lead me abandon pretty much everything I had previously believed in.

Jim Garrison related in a spell-binding way his experiences during the investigation. He was a man of obvious substance. He had participated in WWII as an artillery pilot, flying in combat over the front lines in France and Germany. He came from an old-fashioned patriotic background, one of his grand- fathers could boast of a photograph of himself next to President William Howard Taft, the grand-father being dressed in his red, white and blue Uncle Sam costume. After WWII, Mr. Garrison rose to become a field artillery officer in the National Guard while holding down his regular job as District Attorney of New Orleans, starting in 1961.

Since Lee Harvey Oswald had spent some time in New Orleans during the summer of 1963,it was Garrison's duty as the leading legal officer of the city to investigate his stay there. Information led him quickly to one David Ferrie, who was said to have spent time with Oswald. Ferrie, a flamboyant adventurer and homosexual, was not forthcoming during his questioning by Garrison's men and was handed off to the FBI, which promptly released him while mildly reproaching the D.A. for having brought him in for questioning in the first place. Garrison was perturbed but assumed that the FBI knew what it was doing and dropped the investigation promptly.

Three years later, a chance encounter with the United States senator from Louisiana, Russell Long, caused Garrison to restart his dormant investigation. Long had told him forcefully: "Those fellows on the Warren Commission were dead wrong, there is no way in the world that one man could have shot up Jack Kennedy that way." His own growing awareness of the odd contradictions surrounding the assassination caused him to take a look at the creation of the Warren Commission. Five days after the assassination, Representative Charles Goodell of New York had proposed that a Joint Congressional Committee conduct an investigation, only to have President Johnson preempt this development by forming the Warren Commission and choosing its members himself. Garrison looked up biographical information on its members and found that the Commission was heavily tilted towards the political right, with men whose background were pro-military or pro-intelligence. John J. McCloy had served as High Commissioner in occupied Germany after WWII. Representative Gerald Ford was long known as "the CIA's best friend in Congress". Allen Dulles had been the director of the CIA for nine years, only to be fired by President Kennedy after the debacle of "The Bay of Pigs". Senator Richard Russell chaired the Senate Armed Forces Committee and also was in charge of its Subcommittee on Intelligence.

Reading the Warren Commission files, Garrison was to discover that Oswald had received a grade in a Russian examination at El Toro Marine Base in California just before he defected to the Soviet Union. Stunned, Garrison drew the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, the purported communist, had received intelligence training during his time in the Marines. Odd circumstances piled on top of each other. Oswald had returned from the Soviet Union without any consequences whatever. He even had been helped with travel funds by the State department without any official debriefing, while tourists to the country were regularly debriefed in order to scour any useful information that could help in the Cold War. Ruth and Michael Paine, who helped the Oswald family in Dallas, were a somewhat mysterious couple. Garrison decided to take a look at their income tax reports only to find that they had been classified on grounds of national security.

A large diagram on "The Dallas Morning News" front page of Nov.22, 1963, showing the route of the motorcade, had been blacked out in the exhibit given to the Warren Commission. The rest of the readers of that mornings newspaper could easily see that the route was supposed to continue through the center of Dealy Plaza without making the fateful detour by the Dallas Book Depository. The mayor of Dallas had been one Earl Cabell, the brother of General Charles CaDell, who had been in charge of the CIA's disastrous Bay of Pig's invasion, only to be fired from the CIA by President Kennedy.

In the middle of his investigation Garrison received an offer of financial support from one John Miller, an oil man from Denver. Miller came to see him in New Orleans, at first flattering Garrison only to later offer a bribe to have the investigation stopped. Miller: "I am not just saying you can move on to the federal bench, I'm guaranteeing it." Garrison: "And what would I have to do to get this judgeship"? Miller: "Stop your investigation. The investigation was a magnificent effort. But it is over and done with. Your local newspaper is already on your behind, and that is only the beginning, my boy, only the beginning!" John Miller turned out to be an accurate prophet, shortly Ramsey Clark, the attorney general of the United States would weigh in with efforts aimed at weakening Garrison's case and the Chief Justice of the U.S., Earl Warren would proclaim from Tokyo that Garrison had produced "absolutely nothing" publicly to contradict the findings of the Warren Commission, probably the only time in the history of the U. S. Supreme Court, that an officer of the same had interfered with a criminal case before it had gone to trial.

The elite media weighed in on the side of Garrison's opponents: "all shared the basic view that I was a power-mad, irresponsible showman, who was producing a slimy circus with the objective of getting myself elected to higher office, oblivious of any consequences," he later wrote. Among the well known journalists to defame Garrison were Newsweek's Hugh Aynesworth, Saturday Evening Post's James Phelan, also CBS and especially NBC television networks. Garrison even had a negative experience on Johnny Carson's show, where he found himself debriefed by lawyers before actually going on the show, only to find Carson reading prepared answers to his questions. When Garrison tried to show photos of "the three tramps" from Dealey Plaza, the director had the camera panning the audience instead of showing the photos.

Jim Garrison's book affected me deeply. Here I was, a fairly normal person, who admired the ease and suaveness of politicians at work in Congress. There couldn't be anything amiss in this picture perfect democracy, could it? I had to know more. I bought every book dealing with the Kennedy assassination that came out for years to come. An author by the name of David Litton had meticulously gathered every tidbit of information he could lay his hands on regarding the autopsy, and found to his amazement that no less than two coffins entered Bethesda National Naval Medical Center on the eve of the assassination. The ceremonial bronze coffin from Dallas entered AFTER a cheap tin coffin, which held the remains of the president, the bronze coffin was empty! Furthermore, Lifton found that there was evidence indicating that surgery already had been performed on the president's brain BEFORE the corpse entered the morgue in Bethesda. For this to have happened, President Kennedy must have been surreptitiously removed from his original coffin somewhere en route from Dallas to Washington D.C., then transported to a medical facility, where the operation took place, with enough time left over so that the tin coffin could still enter Bethesda Medical Center before the original ceremonial coffin. Obviously efforts like this demanded large resources---the shadow of a huge conspiracy was slowly taking form in my mind!

Increasingly concerned, I turned to the next author on my list, Mark Lane. This eminent author and lawyer had single-handedly called attention to the discrepancies in the Kennedy affair, had to suffer for it but had persevered and written a book called "Plausible Denial". Lane had taken on the defense of a CIA renegade by the name of Victor Marchetti, who had written an article, which could be interpreted to mean that E. Howard Hunt, also of CIA fame, had been present in Dallas at the time of the assassination. Hunt sued the publication and Lane was brought in for the defense. Lane immediately saw his chance, he could now for the first time depose Hunt et. al. under oath and proceeded to do so. In court Lane managed to trap Hunt with having produced two mutually exclusive alibis for the day of the assassination, and also proved that Hunt in fact had been present in Dallas the day before the assassination!

A woman called Marita Lorenz, former mistress of Fidel Castro and also of CIA fame, testified that she had participated in a car caravan from Florida to Dallas during the day before the assassination. She had been allowed to leave early, only to have another member of the caravan later tell her, that he had helped kill the president that day, all at the behest of the CIA. In a former trial, the publication had lost to Hunt. When that decision was pronounced, major elite media published it on the first page, but when Lane won the retrial and showed Hunt to be an egregious liar, the elite media wouldn't touch the story. The jury foreman, a woman, explained that the jury believed that Lane had shown President Kennedy to have been assassinated by the CIA, only to have her statement cut to pieces by the local TV station. Lane's victory received only a fraction of the media attention that the first trial had received, and it was hard not to draw the conclusion, that the reason was because Lane had won instead of losing.

The next book to be devoured was "The Man who Knew too Much" by Dick Russell, which centered on the case of Richard Case Nagell, a former intelligence agent who claimed that he was ordered by his superiors to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald the months before the assassination. He became aware that an exceedingly large conspiracy was under way to kill the president, but was unable to report back to his superior, who had mysteriously disappeared. Nagell had reason to believe, that Oswald would be involved in the coming attempt. He feared that he himself had been drawn into the drama, in a way that could be bad for his survival prospects. First he sent a letter to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, warning about the coming attempt on the president's life. He received no answer. Then he decided to protect himself by feigning a bank robbery in an El Paso bank, which he proceeded to do. He served some years in prison for the fake bank robbery, but managed to stay out of circulation during the fateful events in Dallas. Later he would reveal some information now and then, until he reportedly cut a deal with the "powers that be", which assured his silence in the years to come.

Russell presented the story of Private Eugene B. Dinkin, who had been trained as a army cryptographic code operator, which in effect made him a small part of the National Security Agency. In early 1962, he had been assigned to the 529th Ordnance Company in France, where he was awarded the requisite security clearances. When Dinkin became upset during his duties, he was given a psychiatric evaluation, and his security clearance was removed. In late October of 1963, Dinkin mailed a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, warning him that an attempt would be made to kill President Kennedy during the latter part of November. In the letter he revealed, that blame would be cast on a Communist, while he claimed that the conspiracy involved elements of the military, especially far right elements of the same. An FBI report of April 3, 1964 acknowledged Dinkin's warning, but made no mention of attempts made to rectify the situation. Hearing via the grape vine that he was about to be locked up as a psychotic, Private Dinkin went AWOL and tried to warn media in Switzerland and Germany without success. He also made an attempt to warn the U.S. Embassy in Bonn but was advised to return to his place of military assignment. Defeated, he returned, and was immediately "hospitalized" at Landstuhl General Hospital in a closed psychiatric ward until Kennedy had been killed, whereupon he was flown to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington D.C. There he was given therapy to help him deal with his unfortunate condition of "schizo-assassination prognostication syndrome," a decease one would normally associate only with the former Soviet Union. He was made to understand, that if his condition did not improve, he would undergo electric shock treatment, whereupon his condition dramatically "improved." He was released from Walter Reed Hospital and the U.S. Army on a medical discharge. During the trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans, Garrison found out that Dinkin's duty had been to decipher telegraphic traffic originating with the French OAS, which was extremely close to factions of the CIA at the time. One surmises, that Dinkin caught his unfortunate decease while dealing with communications between the two venerable organizations.

"First Hand Knowledge", a book by former CIA agent Robert D. Morrow intrigued me. Morrow claimed to have been involved in a contract project for the CIA, when he was drafted to act as liaison to certain anti-Castro Cubans before the "Bay of Pigs" invasion. His involvement deepened to the point that he was present in meetings with CIA honchos Tracy Barnes, Richard Bissell and General Charles Cabell. At such an occasion Morrow was shown a letter addressed to General Cabell, with the intimate sounding salutation: "My Dear Charles". The letter went on to say that the Vice President had learned "strictly by accident" that President Kennedy had ordered Robert McNamara to strip the CIA of its powers and instead establish an alternative intelligence agency which would replace the CIA. Kennedy had met with the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and implied that the CIA was misusing its powers and he wanted severe limitations on the Agency's unvouchered funds. The letter was signed: "LBJ".

At the same occasion he was shown a memo to Attorney General Robert Kennedy with the following contents: "Memorandum to the Attorney General: If possible, try to apprehend all Cuban and American personnel currently engaged in manufacturing bogus Cuban Currency. As you know, in its efforts to overthrow the Castro regime, the CIA has disregarded our direct orders and placed us in a politically embarrassing position. The names of all the parties involved in the conspiracy should be in the Agency's file. Also, you might consider leaking to the Cuban authorities that a massive counterfeiting scheme may be launched against them which could jeopardize the Cuban economy. Signed: Jack"

At another meeting some months later Morrow was told: "LBJ is our inside man in the Kennedy administration. Every morning he walks to his office through the White House. If his friend in the Secret Service has any information, he meets him on his morning walk and supplies him with all the latest dirt to come out of the Oval Office. If the Kennedys knew that Johnson had an inside track on their dealings, particularly inside the White House, they would be on the warpath for revenge."

Shortly after the Warren Commission’s report was delivered to the public, Morrow was told that a former mistress of President Kennedy, Mary Meier, the ex-wife of CIA man Cord Meier, had claimed that she positively knew that agency-affiliated Cubans and the Mafia was behind the murder of the president. Morrow was requested to activate his Cuban friends which he did. Within weeks Mrs. Meier lay dead on a sidewalk close to her home.

Jean Hill, a famous eye-witness in Dealey Plaza, was the girlfriend of a Dallas motor-cycle cop, and as such had access to the goings-on in the Dallas police department. Her boyfriend was assigned to the presidential parade through Dallas, riding next to the limousine. He related that as they met the president at Dallas Love Field that fateful morning, Johnson's Secret Service people came over to the motor cycle cops with some instructions. They were told that the parade route through Dealey Plaza had been changed. Originally the route went straight down Main Street, but now they were instructed to make the jog to the right on Houston Street and then cut to the left on Elm Street. Furthermore the regular parade formation with four motor cycles bracketing the car, one on each fender, was changed. The motor cycles were to stay back of the car and not under any circumstances get ahead of the car's rear wheels. The Vice President's car, which customarily would be right behind Kennedy's car was moved back down the line. Her boyfriend learned that Will Fritz, the Dallas Police Department's chief homicide detective, had been ordered less than three hours after the assassination to drop the investigation immediately, and instead turn it over to the FBI. The order had come straight from the White House.

The motorcade rushed to Dallas's Parkland Hospital after the president had been mortally wounded. Charles A. Crenshaw, M.D. was a young surgeon at the time. He was present during the evaluation of the president's wounds and a few days later during the operation of Lee Harvey Oswald. Thirty years later he was to write about his experiences in his book: "JFK, Conspiracy of Silence". While the team of surgeons worked heroically to save the life of Oswald, Crenshaw took a call in the operations room from President Lyndon B. Johnson: "Dr. Crenshaw, I want a deathbed confession from the accused assassin. There's a man in the operating room, who will take the statement, I will expect full cooperation in this matter".

Crenshaw glanced around to see a large man across the room that he didn't recognize. He had a scrub suit on and a pistol hanging from his rear pocket. Crenshaw went on to reveal that all present surgeons had been concerned about what would happen to them and specifically their careers, if they did come forward with information detrimental to the government's position. Thirty years later Crenshaw was the first and only surgeon to break ranks.

Lyndon Johnson's long time lover, Madeleine Duncan Brown, also wrote down her memories in the 1997 book "Texas in the Morning". She had become Johnson's mistress in 1948 and had carried on an affair with him through the fifties and early sixties. At the same time she hobnobbed with celebrities like H.L. Hunt. Clint Murchison, Sam Rayburn and J.Edgar Hoover. She knew H. L. Hunt very well. Days before the assassination of Kennedy, Hunt showed Ms. Duncan Brown circulars he had ordered, featuring mug shots of Kennedy saying: "Kennedy wanted for Treason". Madeleine warned him that he was going lo get in trouble but was told: "The hell with it. I'm the richest man in the world and I'll do as I damn please." The evening before Kennedy's arrival in Dallas, she attended a social event at Clint Murchison's home in honor of his long time friend J. Edgar Hoover. Present were very powerful men: Richard Nixon, H.L. Hunt, George Brown, John McCloy, R.L. Thornton and others. Lyndon Johnson arrived late and the group went behind closed doors. When Johnson reappeared, red-faced and anxious, he whispered to her: "After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again--that's no threat ---that's a promise." Johnson later told her that an Invisible Government existed, unknown to most Americans: "Congress doesn't know how the Agency spends their billion dollar budgets. The CIA. FBI and the military are all intertwined."

The first time Madeleine Brown met Johnson after the assassination, was at a New Year's Eve ball in Austin. She decided to confront him with her suspicions that he was involved in the murder of Kennedy and was first met with an outburst of denial only to get the straight scoop later: "It was Texas oil and those motherfucking renegade intelligence bastards in Washington ........... hell, that son-of-a-bitch Irish mafia Kennedy came out for suicidal cuts in the oil depletion allowance.....he stopped half a dozen mergers under the anti-trust act. In 1962's sag, the market dropped one hundred and thirty seven billion fucking dollars. Steel fell fifty percent, and he had the impertinence to talk about "roll-back" of prices, or worse, a freeze. This was war, Madeleine, to some rich, fat cats in Texas you and I both know. He campaigned on an increased defense budget, then he made plans to close fifty two military bases in twenty-five states, plus twenty-five overseas bases, and he was getting ready to quit in South East Asia. And for the first time in history, he had sent in one intelligence agency, the FBI, to dismember another agency, the CIA. America simply could not have this ...... And, my God, they couldn't tolerate the Negroes. These boys thought Kennedy was going to lead the Negro revolution instead of fighting it. They got real uncomfortable when they saw 250,000 American Negroes and their supporters march in Washington in the fall of '63".