I've just finished reading a quite remarkable book that I thought I'd bring to the attention of members who like to research and better understand the Kennedy murder.
Over the many years of doing so myself, I long ago reached the conclusion that knowing who actually did it makes no difference, and is in fact a red-herring - it was
the why that counted not the
who and the how. This book has helped change my mind again in that the who and the why are once again more firmly interconnected.
I'm amazed this volume, published in 2018, has not created more shock waves. Then again I'm not.
It's written by Major Ralph Ganis, USAF, Ret, a man with clearly an impeccable background both in his role as a veteran of three services - USMC, US Army and USAF - serving in 1st Gulf War, the so called Global War on Terror and the 2nd Gulf War to name a few, but also with strong academic background as a historian as well as a Master of Science in Strategic Intel from the National Defense University, Defence Intelligence Agency. With that kind of a CV you'd likely be highly skeptical and have him down as a skilled disinfo artist.
Well that's not my take after reading the book. He is extremely thorough - extremely! - and the book is nothing but documented connection after connection after connection from circa 1940 up to 1962. His historical background and context is exceptional and his non-partisan truth hunting nothing short of forensic in its detail. No stone is left unturned as he piles up his evidence whilst never imposing undue conclusions or wild speculation. Light, frothy reading this is not! A serious hypothesis with considerable evidence to propose by way of support.
Having said all that, there is one thing you have to take on face value, namely the principle primary source for his deductions; what he calls
The Skorzeny Papers (and also the title of his book), which he acquired at private auction but has yet to release any documentary version thereof.
And here named is our prime suspect number one.
Otto Skorzeny.
From Wikipedia:
And this is the man in question:
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I hardly know where to begin as you simply couldn't make him or his story up (and yes that is a sabre scar across his face which he acquired in his early military career whilst dueling - one of his favorite pastimes!)
He makes James Bond look like an amateur. 6'4", and built like a tank whilst being a commanding, magnetic, utterly fearless, charming, sophisticated, ruthless, extremely intelligent, complex driven man. And it seems no ideological Nazi - he was just the best of the best and he ended up in the Waffen SS as a result before being personally hand picked by Hitler to form a secret commando organization to match the American OSS and the British SOE.
Despite the brilliance of the book this is no character study so its hard to detect what was really at his core - particularly concerning his mercenary life post WWII and what seems convincingly to be his eventual operational design and delivery of the events on the ground in Dealey Plaza that fateful day. But the one thing you grasp is that he was fastidious to the core and as part of that absolute attention to every detail (as well as I suspect a genuine desire to be remembered after his death), he collected and catalogued his life like an historian preparing his Magnum Opus. Though the documentation was at times partially destroyed or lost, he went on collecting through out his final 30 or so years, leaving a vast body of documentation to his equally brilliant and complex wife. Upon her death they simply came to market in a public auction in Spain which the author attended and secured without fuss or undue competition.
As far as I can tell he fathered no children. If so, that is extremely revealing. A psychopath? Possibly - but I somehow doubt it. Simply one of a kind. A brilliant, destructive force of subterfuge and death! Like something out of Norse myth!
It took the author years to translate, archive and decipher the enormous sea of personal, legal and business documents all covered with annotations in Skorzeny's hand writing before beginning the task - with a team of amateur sleuths - of attempting to piece together the extraordinary web of connections, activities and implications.
If you take that story on face value (and I have no reason to disbelieve it - and indeed items of Skorzeny paperwork still
turn up at auction houses to this day) it simply beggars belief.
In very potted simple terms:
1. He was already a primary target for capture by US/British intel as the war ended.
2. They engineered his 'escape' from trial and detention whereupon he immediately went to work for them.
3. He had a huge underground, stay behind network which he brought with him rather like Gellen.
4. He eventually ended up in Spain where he continued to build and develop this network into a world wide business model using dummy corporations and mutlipe cells on a need-to-know basis that became completely entwined with the CIA among other international Intel outlets.
5. That he was everywhere in that his organization and his own person were involved in France, Algeria, Spain, Cuba, Vietnam, Congo, Egypt, etc; you name it, he was all over whatever nefarious activity went on.
6. He was close with Dulles and Angleton, and connected strongly to a who's who of the Kennedy assassination right down to and including de Mohrenschildt and Ruby with a huge network of Dallas based contacts and interests .
7. Having worked for Nasser (despite what Wiki says above, he clearly did), he then ended up contracted to Mossad - which the Israelis admitted to in 2012 - which not only beggars belief (an SS War Criminal working to support the state of Israel) but is a critical link in terms of the undoubted pivotal role Israel played in the removal of Kennedy.
8. The clear evidence in the book that come 1963 he was long entrenched as QJ/WIN, the ultra, ultra secret CIA code name for the head of their outsourced assassination programme.
9. That Jean Souetre, the rogue French officer and known assassin who was secretly flown out of Dallas the day after the assassination (as documented by the FBI) was - and had been for years - Skorzeny's man since the debacle of Algiers and the failed assassination attempts on de Gaulle.
There is way, way more. But this gives you a distasteful flavour of his grim activities.
What the book masterfully succeeds in doing is linking so many elements and pieces of the jigsaw into a clear and purposeful mechanism - the business of regime change and the management of history as a business through organized violence/crime, deception, secrecy, compartmentalization and its integration with massive corporate and deep state interests.
The only part of the book that fails is the authors absurd few paragraphs on the why (because Kennedy's philandering were of such extreme national security consequence he had to go), though he is spot on in highlighting the pivotal Bobby Baker case which rather like Rumsfeld's announcement the day before 9-11 that the Pentagon had 'lost' $2.5 trillion dollars, was actually a sign of a pressing need to undertake an immediate and greater crime by way of a cover up. There is no doubt the Bobby Baker scandal would have destroyed Johnson and possibly even Kennedy - but that's more a reason why Johnson was involved in the Command and Control order to kill JFK - if only to agree not to interfere and then after take on responsibility for the cover up. That aside it's to my mind a game changer of a book.
On a final note it may be worth looking out for a new work by H. P. Albarelli on the assassination - described as the definitive (!) -
Coup in Dallas: The Decisive Investigation into Who Killed JFK due out this November. It seems as if he to agrees that Skorzeny played a pivotal role:
