A CIA Chief's Chilling Dying Words and the JFK Assassination
“The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted,” a dying James Angleton said.
One of the reasons I for years rejected the theory of a conspiracy to kill JFK was that it’s too hard to keep small secrets, let alone an enormous one.
“Somebody would have talked by now,” I once told a relative who had read a lot of books on the JFK assassination. “A deathbed confession. Something.”
What I didn’t realize at the time was that there had been confessions and near confession from people inside the US government. The most famous of these was E. Howard Hunt (1918-2007), a legendary CIA spook and one of the the “three tramps” who was photographed near the Texas School Book Depository on the day of the Kennedy assassination.
Shortly before his death, a dying Hunt spilled the beans in a 2007 interview published by Rolling Stone, alleging that the CIA and mafia killed Kennedy in a plot that included Lydon Johnson and CIA officer Bill Harvey (dubbed “America’s James Bond”).
I vaguely remember reading about Hunt’s deathbed confession, which offered details not included in his memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond.
I’ll explore Hunt’s allegations in the future, but first I wanted to explore a confession I had never heard before.
James Jesus Angleton (1917 – 1987) was chief of counterintelligence for the CIA and the righthand man of longtime CIA director Allen Dulles. Though Angleton guarded Dulles’s secrets for years, as the Catholic inched near his meeting with death he began to unburden himself of the secrets he’d harbored for years, confessing to unspecified evils. The most chilling part of Angleton’s confession is the culture he described at the CIA.
“The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted,” Angleton said, per Joseph Trento’s The Secret History of the CIA. “Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was desire for absolute power. I did things in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.”
What precisely the “things” are that Angleton was referring to is unclear, but author David Talbot points out in the CIA history The Devil’s Chessboard that among the strange items they found Angleton’s safe after his death were “files relating to both Kennedy assassinations and stomach-turning photos taken of Robert Kennedy’s autopsy, which were promptly burned.”
Were these items “mementoes,” as some have alleged? Perhaps. We don’t know. But we do know that certain men in the CIA hated Kennedy, who famously described his desire to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”
Whether some of these men led an effort to dispense with the president in the name of “the greater good” remains a mystery. (And the CIA refuses to release all documents related to his assassination.) But a dying Jim Angleton gave us a clue as to the types of men who rise in the US intelligence apparatus.
“If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell,” Angleton said. “I guess I will see them there soon.”
LOL People crack me up with that nonsense, “Someone would have talked.” As if nobody ever did. Plenty of people talked. The problem is most people ignore that talk and label it conspiracy theories. Then they turn around and say, “Nobody could keep such a secret, someone would have talked,” like that somehow proves there was no conspiracy. smh.
“The moon landings weren't faked. Someone would have talked.” Yeah. Lots of people talked, nobody listened. I spent months examining NASA archive photos, and I can say with 1000% certainty every mission was faked. I've seen the evidence, and so can anyone else because it's in the archives. Just like evidence of a conspiracy is in the Zapruder, Darnell, Nix films & Moorman photo. Cuban exile hitmen that were members of the CIA murder squads, Operation 40 & Alpha 66, can be seen all throughout Dallas. Two specifically with rifles in the pergola behind Zapruder. They got away by pretending to be Secret Service men after throwing their rifles in the trunk of a car. Probably Zapruders, since he was actually parked behind the pergola.
The CIA was involved in every aspect of the assassination. Zapruder himself was a member of 2 propriety CIA organizations and good friends with George deMohrenschildt (Oswald bestie) and his wife Jeanne LeGon, Zapruders business partner in the dress making business. That's not a coincidence. Neither was selling the film to Time Life's publisher/ CIA agent, CD Jackson. Nor taking the film to the CIA's top secret editing facility located at Kodak headquarters in New York, Hawkeye Works.
The most damning evidence was military intelligence man Stuart Reed. "Oh he was just on vacation." Uh huh. Just happened to be on vacation taking photos of everything & everywhere Oswald was or was supposed to be. Like he knew exactly where to go and be. Then drops off the photos for devolpment with a note for the FBI to pick them up and immediately leaves the country. LOL
Nobody has ever asked what the Irgun terrorist & future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was doing in Dallas that day for all of 3 hours. Or why a Mossad agent & the top Dimona scientist both revealed that Ben Gurian was the one who gave the order to kill Kennedy to James Angleton, or why Harold Byrd was supplying Israel with uranium.
The CIA once investigated allegations of its own drug trafficking, and guess what. They found no wrong doing. Gee, maybe all criminals should be allowed to investigate their own crimes. I wonder how many would find wrong doing?
I always used to believe the 'not that many people could keep a secret' nonsense until someone at my old job told me about the development of the Lockheed SR-71 spy plane. At it's height, the project apparently involved over 300 contractors and none of them said a word about the top-secret project during the entire time of its development, most likely because most of them didn't actually know what project they were working on. So if over 300 people could keep that secret, I'm pretty sure less people were involved in the Kennedy assasination and yes, they could have kept it secret if the Lockheed contractors did