It was Russia, CIA, the FBI: 10 JFK assassination conspiracies that refuse to die

There’s still something horribly compelling about the assassination of John F Kennedy on 22 November 1963. It was the first great televised news story: almost half of all Americans were watching the coverage within two hours of the shooting, and half the population were watching, two days later, when the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself murdered by Jack Ruby.

For me, it’s always been one of the most fascinating moments in modern history – not so much because of the assassination itself, as dramatic as that was, but because of what it came to mean. At the time, many people saw it as a brutal punctuation point, marking the definitive loss of American innocence. And the shooting in Dallas has become a foundational myth of modern American populism, the point at which all conspiracy theories meet.

Conspiracy theories are nothing new: the paranoid style has been part of American life since the dawn of the republic. Indeed, even as Kennedy prepared for his trip to Dallas, cranks were handing out leaflets with a depressingly familiar message. “Wanted for Treason” read the headline below the president’s photograph. “He is turning the sovereignty of the US over to the communist-controlled United Nations …”

So it’s telling that the most popular conspiracy theories – the CIA, the mafia, the military-industrial complex – focus on enemies within, not without. For the conspiracy die-hards, it would be terribly disappointing if it turned out that Fidel Castro or the Kremlin had organised Kennedy’s murder. The whole point is to unlock the sinister secrets of American democracy, and expose what one conspiracy theorist calls “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism on our country”. That conspiracist’s name? Robert F Kennedy, Jr – the nephew of the dead president.

In the absence of a confession or a trial, numerous theories continue to swirl around the internet today. In his 1,632-page book, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F Kennedy, published in 2007, Vincent Bugliosi listed 44 organisations, from the Nazis to dissident French paramilitaries, as well as 214 individuals, from Richard Nixon to J Edgar Hoover to Frank Sinatra’s drummer, who have been accused of involvement.

Some of the more outlandish theories analysed by Bugliosi include: governor John Connally shot himself, as well as the president; Kennedy was impersonated by a police officer and survived to attend a birthday party for Truman Capote a year later; and Kennedy was murdered by a group including Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and George Bush Senior because he had discovered their deal with aliens to build a base on the moon.

As Bugliosi dryly notes: “With at least 82 [alleged] gunmen shooting at Kennedy in Dealey Plaza that day, it’s remarkable that his body was sufficiently intact to make it to the autopsy table.”

Here, however, are the top 10 theories that have gained the most traction over the last 60 years.

Evidence for

Having been wrongfooted by the Russians during the Vienna Summit in June 1961 and again by the construction of the Berlin Wall two months later, Kennedy got his own back during the Cuban Missile Crisis the following October, emerging (at least in the Western media) as the stronger statesman who forced Khrushchev back from the brink of nuclear confrontation. Assassinating Kennedy was, therefore, the Russians’ chance to avenge that humiliation.

What’s more, Lee Harvey Oswald himself identified as a socialist as a teenager, taking this autodidactic flirtation into adulthood by reading Russian dictionaries during his time in the US Marines and travelling to Moscow in October 1959 in an attempt to renounce his American citizenship and settle down in Russia.

Evidence against

More than anything, the Soviet leadership craved stability in the global system. Killing the US president would, therefore, be an irrational gamble of extraordinary magnitude, especially given that the Test Ban Treaty signed in October 1963, a month before Kennedy’s death, was leading to a thawing of Cold War relations.

The facts of Oswald’s sojourn in the USSR also make him a very unlikely Soviet assassin. After a spell in a psychiatric hospital, he was sent to an electronics factory in Minsk, Belarus, where he spent a miserable few years as a lathe operator. In May 1962, having married (and fathered a daughter), he begged the American embassy to allow him to return home. There is absolutely no evidence linking the Soviets with the assassination – or indeed Oswald with the Soviet government. Indeed, die-hard conspiracy theorists tend to shy away from the Russian angle as it doesn’t satisfy their deeply held need to uncover a secret cabal controlling American politics.

Evidence for

In April 1961, only a few months after becoming president, Kennedy launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, a CIA-led attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, the Soviet-backed Cuban president who had himself overthrown the pro-American dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959. Fearing a second, more successful invasion, Castro had asked Khrushchev for more Soviet support to shore up the Cuban Revolution, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

The CIA made hundreds of doomed attempts to assassinate Castro, involving everything from poisonous cigars to exploding seashells. So who is to say that the Cubans didn’t orchestrate a more successful operation on the American leader? This theory is given further credence by Oswald’s passion for Cuba. Having failed to make a life for himself in Russia, he travelled to Mexico City in September 1963 and attempted to get a Cuban visa.

Evidence against

Two good sources – a French journalist accompanying Castro on 22 November 1963 and US National Security Agency intercepts – agree that the Cubans were terrified that they would be framed for Kennedy’s assassination and that his successor would be even more hardline. Despite having a vested interest in blaming Cuba – the House Select Committee on Assassinations even interviewed Castro personally in the 1970s – the Americans never found any evidence linking Castro to Kennedy’s death.

Evidence for

Cuban exiles blamed Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs, a botched operation that doomed them to a very long exile. So what if they got their own back by killing the American president and pointing the finger of suspicion at Castro, thereby killing two birds (and potentially two leaders they despised) with one stone?

Evidence against

Cuban exiles were predominantly middle-class doctors, intellectuals and businessmen – not the most likely group to employ assassins. And why would Oswald, a man who hated Cuban exiles and loved Castro, want to work with them anyway?

Not only was Kennedy still determined to get rid of Castro, his relationship with the Cuban exile community was actually quite positive by the end of his life. Following the Missile Crisis, he attended an event in Miami to welcome freed prisoners who had been detained during the Bay of Pigs. Tens of thousands of enthusiastic people lined the streets. When Kennedy was presented with a flag, he said, “One day, this flag will be returned to a free Havana.” The crowd went wild.

Evidence for

After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy said that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind” – and even if he didn’t actually say this (historians struggle to find the exact quote), perhaps that doesn’t matter if he was widely thought to have said it.

So either Kennedy went or the CIA went, runs the theory. Furthermore, Kennedy’s apparent reluctance to commit troops to Vietnam threatened the CIA’s powerful allies in the military-industrial complex. So they clubbed together and bumped him off. That’s a rough synopsis of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK, anyway. Could Lee Harvey Oswald have been a CIA agent? Why not? After all, the American Embassy in Moscow did give him a loan of $435 in repatriation expenses in 1962.

Evidence against

Far from smashing up the CIA, Kennedy brought in a new person to run it, with whom he had a friendly lunch once a week. And although the CIA has a history of complicity in the assassination of foreign leaders, it doesn’t have a history of murdering American politicians on American soil (at least, officially). Kennedy, a passionate internationalist who had come to power promising to “pay any price, bear any burden, in the defence of liberty”, was an asset, not a threat, to the CIA’s worldview. A Cold War hawk, he radically increased the number of military advisors in Vietnam.

If the CIA and the military-industrial complex had wanted to assassinate Kennedy, would they not have tried something similar with Johnson, who passed sweeping civil rights reforms, with Nixon, who went to Beijing, and with Trump, who relentlessly attacked the CIA and Nato?

Oswald, one of 2,343 destitute US nationals repatriated between 1959 and 1963 thanks to a State Department loan, wasn’t a very convincing CIA assassin. The KGB, the world’s most suspicious people, kept him under constant surveillance during his time in the USSR, concluding that he was an incompetent, inept loner.

Evidence for

J Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, had an awkward relationship with the Kennedys, resenting the influence of the president’s brother, Robert, who was attorney general, and fearing that he would be made to retire by the president when he turned 70 in 1965. (In fact, Hoover ended up serving under two more presidents, finally stepping down in 1972.)

On 24 November 1963, two days after Kennedy’s death, Hoover called one of Johnson’s aides and said that they needed to convince the public that Oswald was the real assassin. Separately, Oswald’s mother had told newspapers back in 1961 that her son was an FBI agent in the Soviet Union.

Evidence against

A more generous explanation of Hoover’s phone call on 24 November is that he was worried about the swirl of rumours and allegations surrounding the murders of Kennedy and Oswald – and wanted to get a grip on the narrative before lurid conspiracy theories competed for the truth. Evidently, he didn’t succeed.

The FBI, a domestic intelligence agency, was aware of Oswald due to his strange behaviour in Russia, but they have no history of employing undercover agents overseas, nor indeed of assassinating American political figures. They also have a deep, institutional rivalry with the CIA.

And how likely is it that the involvement of either the FBI or the CIA – government departments generally staffed with intelligent, public-spirited people – would have been kept quiet for so long? As for Hoover’s retirement plans, he had worked closely with Kennedy for three years, amassing a huge file on the president’s extramarital affairs. Threatening to reveal these details would have been a far more effective way of securing an extension to his directorship than killing Kennedy in broad daylight.

Meanwhile, Oswald’s mother, a self-absorbed woman whose parenting was so haphazard that her son was almost put in care in the 1950s, was hardly the most reliable of witnesses.

Evidence for

On the morning of his death, Kennedy was shown an advertisement in the Dallas Morning News, funded by a right-wing political advocacy group, which sardonically welcomed the president to Dallas and accused him of being a communist.

Evidence against

Kennedy oversaw a growing economy in all three years of his administration, making average tax cuts of around 20 per cent. Squarely in the pragmatic centre of the Democratic Party, his administration included a number of Washington lifers who had also worked for his Republican predecessor Eisenhower. He was not nearly as left wing as, say, Franklin D Roosevelt, whom right-wing businessmen (also) didn’t assassinate. Also, right-wing businessmen had no links to Lee Harvey Oswald, a socialist.

Evidence for

Who benefits – cui bono – from the assassination of Kennedy? His vice president, of course, Lyndon Johnson, who was immediately sworn in as the 36th president. And can it be a coincidence that Kennedy was assassinated in Texas, Johnson’s home state, and that Johnson led the USA deeper into Vietnam?

Evidence against

Yes, it is a coincidence. Why would Johnson, a canny political operator, run the risk of assassinating his boss in broad daylight in his home state when it would have been far easier to bump him off in Washington?

Johnson was visibly distraught in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination. His first act on entering the White House was to write moving letters to Kennedy’s two children. Before the end of the month, he had set up the Warren Commission to investigate their father’s assassination, staffed by many of his own political opponents. Johnson had never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald until 22 November 1963.

Evidence for

President Kennedy’s support for civil rights in the summer of 1963 had angered racists in the American south. TASS, the Soviet news agency, blamed ultra-right-wing fascist and racist circles for the president’s murder.

Evidence against

TASS was not exactly the most reliable news source. The Klan was a crude, shambolic and incompetent organisation under intense investigation by the authorities. It is implausible that they would have masterminded a sophisticated assassination without the Dallas Police Department, the FBI and the Warren Commission unearthing any evidence.

It is also unlikely that they would have worked with Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist.

Evidence for

The mafia loathed Robert Kennedy, who had led a big crackdown on racketeering and corruption, and we know from FBI wiretaps that some mobsters were gleeful about JFK’s death. Some also believe that Joe Kennedy, an ambassador to Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War, bought the 1960 presidential election for his son on behalf of the mafia. When Kennedy failed to deliver, they assassinated him.

The mafia angle that really excites conspiracy theorists, however, is the undisputed fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was assassinated on 24 November in police custody by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner who often bought drinks for people involved in organised crime. Was Ruby employed to silence Oswald so he wouldn’t talk? It was certainly a huge embarrassment for the Dallas police that their prize prisoner was shot in front of seventy officers – and the world’s media – while being transported to a more secure location.

Evidence against

Almost every conspiracy theory involves the mafia, which became powerful during the prohibition era in the 1920s and continued to attract popular interest thanks to the Godfather films released in the 1970s. However, the American mafia were very different from their Sicilian counterparts in that they went out of their way to avoid targeting judges or politicians. Yes, they loathed Robert Kennedy, but would they try to blunt his investigations by targeting his brother? We know from FBI wiretaps of a Philadelphia mafia boss that they feared Kennedy’s successors being even more hardline. Neither is there any evidence of systematic corruption in the 1960 presidential election.

Similarly, it’s difficult to say whether Jack Ruby or Lee Harvey Oswald is the more unlikely mafia assassin. Oswald was so inept that he didn’t even have a getaway car. Ruby, the killer supposedly sent to neutralise a killer, spent the two days in which Oswald was being interrogated wandering around the city in tears and telling everyone how much he loved the Kennedys. Three minutes before he shot Oswald, he was in a queue at a bank, paying one of his strippers. It was only chance that saw him pass the police station at the same moment that Oswald was being transferred.

Although Ruby often bought drinks for mafia members, he also gave drinks (his favourite was a celery tonic) to the Dallas police department. There is no evidence that he was involved in organised crime.

Evidence for

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1939 to a tempestuous mother and a father who had died two months previously, Lee Harvey Oswald was a lonely, sullen and troubled boy. Having moved to the Bronx in New York aged 12, he was sent to a reformatory, where a psychiatrist diagnosed personality pattern disturbance and schizoid features. He joined the Marines aged seventeen in 1956, where his shooting scores were sufficiently high to qualify as a sharpshooter.

Tiring of military life, he left the Marines three years later, spent time in Russia and returned with his wife, whom he regularly beat, and their young daughter to Texas. On 12 March 1963, he bought a mail-order rifle under the false name of AJ Hidell. The following month he used this rifle to try to kill Major General Edwin Walker, a segregationist living in Dallas, scuttling away into the darkness when the bullet missed its mark. In October he got a job in the Texas School Book Depository, a warehouse in downtown Dallas. The president’s route was announced in the newspapers on 19 November.

On Thursday 21 November, the night before Kennedy’s death, Oswald took the unusual step of visiting his wife (they lived separately during the week), leaving his wedding ring behind and collecting a package that he described as curtain rods. The following morning, he took a lift with a neighbour into Dallas, carrying a long package wrapped up in brown paper.

At midday, half an hour before Kennedy’s death, Oswald was seen on the sixth floor by his colleagues, refusing to join them for lunch and asking for the elevator gate to be closed. No one else was on the sixth floor and no one else left the building after the shooting. At 1.06pm, six minutes after Kennedy was proclaimed dead, the Dallas police found a sniper’s nest by a window on the sixth floor. Sixteen minutes later, they found the murder weapon, an infantry rifle.

Meanwhile, Oswald had taken a bus, which got stuck in traffic, and then ordered a taxi, which he never normally did. He got out in the Oak Cliff district of Dallas and was spoken to by a policeman called JD Tippit who had spotted him acting suspiciously. At 1.11pm, at the junction of East 10th Street and South Patton Avenue, an eyewitness saw Oswald shoot Tippit dead. He was arrested just over half an hour later in a theatre, telling the arresting officer, “I hear they burn for murder.” The police found two ID cards in his wallet: one in the name of Lee Harvey Oswald; the other in the name of AJ Hidell.

Under interrogation by captain JW Fritz, Oswald denied two perfectly legal activities: bringing curtain rods to work and buying a mail-order gun under the name of AJ Hidell. By the end of 23 November, the FBI had managed to match the rifle to a mail-order shop in Chicago; the handwriting on the money order to Oswald’s own; and a photograph of Oswald in his backyard with the rifle.

The following day, he was visited by his mother, his wife and his brother, all of whom thought he’d murdered Kennedy. Ten months later, the Warren Commission delivered an 888-page report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that there was no conspiracy.

Evidence against

Lee Harvey Oswald denied killing Kennedy, claiming that he was a “patsy”. When he was shot by Jack Ruby on 24 November, detectives tried desperately to save Oswald’s life. One of them stood over him, asking again and again, “Is there anything you want to say now?”

Oswald took his secrets to the grave. He was declared dead in the same hospital as Kennedy, two days and seven minutes after the president.

Extracted from The Rest is History Returns: An A-Z of Historical Curiosities by Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook with Goalhanger Podcasts (Bloomsbury, £20) out now