In 1969, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison brought a criminal prosecution against a man named Clay Shaw. In the trial, Garrison rejected the lone-nut theory of the assassination of President Kennedy. He alleged instead that Kennedy was assassinated in a highly sophisticated regime-change operation spearheaded by the U.S. national-security establishment. Garrison alleged that Shaw had played a role in that operation.
Although Shaw was quickly acquitted, Garrison’s prosecution later inspired Oliver Stone to come out with his movie JFK, whose theme was the same as Garrison’s — that Kennedy was assassinated by his enemies within the national-security establishment.
At the end of Stone’s movie was a blurb that informed people that official records relating to the assassination would continue to be kept secret until the year 2029. The inference was clear: The secrecy was designed to advance a cover-up of the national-security state’s regime-change operation against Kennedy.
That blurb produced such an outcry among the American people that Congress was effectively forced to enact the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that all federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the CIA, release their long-secret assassination-related records to the public. To enforce the law, Congress called into existence the Assassination Records Review Board, which operated from 1994 to 1998.
The ARRB’s enforcement of the JFK Records Act is how we learned that the national-security establishment had conducted a fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body on the very evening of the assassination. The nature of that fraudulent autopsy was detailed in my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.
That fraudulent autopsy is how we know that the national-security establishment orchestrated and carried out one of its patented regime-change operations against Kennedy. As I have repeatedly emphasized over the years, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. Once one concludes that the Kennedy autopsy was fraudulent, there is but one reasonable conclusion that he can reach: The national-security establishment, which conducted the fraudulent autopsy, orchestrated and carried out the assassination.
Thus, if it hadn’t been for Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw in 1969, it is a virtual certainty that we still wouldn’t know today that what occurred on November 22, 1963, in Dallas was a national-security state regime-change operation. That’s because Garrison’s prosecution led to Oliver Stone’s movie, which, in turn, led to the JFK Records Act and the ARRB, which led to the evidence that established a fraudulent autopsy.
Ever since the Garrison’s prosecution, however, defenders of the lone-nut theory of the Kennedy assassination have portrayed Clay Shaw as an innocent victim of an abusive criminal prosecution. As it turns out however, Shaw wasn’t as sweet and innocent as the lone-nut theorists have long claimed. He actually was a perjurer and a liar.
At his trial, Shaw testified in his own behalf and denied that he had played any role in the Kennedy assassination. During his testimony, which, of course, was under oath, the following transpired:
Q: Mr. Shaw, have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?
A: No, I have not.
After he was acquitted, Shaw was interviewed by Penthouse magazine. In the interview, he stated, “I have never had any connection with the CIA.”
On November 1, 2021, the National Archives released a CIA document that had been kept secret since February 1992. That date was several months before the JFK Records Act was signed into law in October 1992. It was clearly an assassination-related record that should have been disclosed during the term of the ARRB in the 1990s. Instead, it was kept secret under a loophole in the law that entitled the CIA and other federal agencies to continue keeping certain records secret for another 25 years, on grounds that their disclosure would reveal “sources” or “methods” or endanger “national security.”
If you read the document, you will see that there is no possibility that it falls within any of those categories. The CIA simply lied to the ARRB to ensure that the document would continue to remain secret for 25 more years. Then, when that 25-year deadline came due in 2017, the CIA again lied, this time to President Trump, to get even more time for continued secrecy of the document. Trump gave the CIA another five years of secrecy. When that deadline came due in 2021, the CIA persuaded President Biden to grant another extension of time for secrecy, this time to December 2022. For some unknown reason — perhaps even a screw-up — the National Archives released the document in November of 2021.
The document is a memo sent by J. Kenneth McDonald, the Chief of the CIA History Staff, to the Director of the CIA, with copies being sent to other CIA personnel. It pertains to how the CIA should handle the CIA’s records from the reinvestigation of the Kennedy assassination by the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s.
In his memo, McDonald states the following: “These records do reveal, however, that Clay Shaw was a highly paid CIA contract source until 1965.”
Thus, by the CIA’s own admission, it turns out that Clay Shaw wasn’t the sweet, innocent man that lone-nut theorists in the Kennedy assassination have long portrayed him to be. At the very least, he was a perjurer and a liar, which, of course, taints his entire testimony at his trial.
Do you see why the CIA is loathe to disclose the 14,000 records that it continues to keep secret from the American people that related to the Kennedy assassination and why it continues to demand continued secrecy of such records?
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