CIA veteran Rolf Mowatt-Larseen proposed a “thought experiment” to the November 2019 JFK conference in Dallas. He reverse-engineered the lone gunman scenario, posing a question both novel and incisive.
“How can you get away with a really elaborate but very simple plan of deception, to end up in a place where the president is dead and it is blamed on someone else, other than the people who perpetrated it?” he asked. “Not easy.”
“Why am I doing this?” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen asked the audience at the Coalition Against Political Assassinations’ conference in Dallas. “As a CIA officer it’s a little controversial. What is my goal? My goal is to have an answer [about who killed JFK] for myself and my children.” That may sound overly ingenuous to some, but most people in the room, myself included, had the same agenda.
Mowatt-Larssen was nine years old when he heard the news from Dallas.
(This article, titled “Under CIA Eyes,” first appeared in Counterpunch, Vol. 25 published in January 2020.).
“I was struck by the intimacy and the smallness of the whole surroundings,” said retired CIA officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen after his first visit to Dealey Plaza in November 2019.
Dealey Plaza, a grassy Art Deco entry point to downtown Dallas, is where President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on November 22, 1963. Hundreds of thousands of people still come from around the world to see the spot where the popular liberal president was ambushed. Many of them have the same reaction to the crime scene: the intimacy, the smallness.
When History Hit, a British history channel, asked me for an interview about the 58th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, I hastened to agree, especially when they said they’d throw in a hundred dollars for my trouble. “A hundred quid is always welcome,” I said to my new-found Cousins. Stateside news outlets are rarely so fair to free-lance talent. …
The CIA now has until December 15, 2021 to produce the last of its JFK assassination files. As I told the Washington Post, I suspect this second delay in the legally-mandated release of the files is a “ruse.” I hope the CIA proves me wrong. In any case, we will learn more about the Agency’s intentions in six weeks.
Meanwhile, although BIden’s JFK records embargo is an important development, what we have learned in recent years is just as important as what we might learn. Case in point: this new video from Vince Palamara, the JFK research community’s leading expert on the Secret Service. The video illuminates one aspect of the JFK story that the CIA is still hiding 58 years after the fact.
The killing of Lee Harvey Oswald is another key to Rolf Mowatt-Larssen’s JFK analysis. He argues that one of the conspirators had to have had access to the Mafia bosses who could induce Jack Ruby to eliminate the accused assassin as a witness.
Fifty-two years ago this week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s last resort for all criminal cases, reversed Ruby’s murder conviction and death sentence and ordered a new trial because of the trial judge’s egregious legal errors. Because Ruby died before he could be retried, in the eyes of the law, he will always be an innocent man.
Jackie Kennedy’s bloodstained pink Chanel suit tells more acutely than any other image the story of what happened in Dallas on Friday, Nov. 22. But the notes she prepared for her personal assistant, Providencia Paredes, read as stage directions for a weekend of political theater and a catalog of the wardrobe that made her the most fashionable first lady of the 20th century, referenced by her successors to this day.
Since the publication of David Talbot’s groundbreaking book, Brothers, the story of Robert Kennedy’s suspicions about his brother’s murder have come to light.
Orville Nix was a bystander with a movie camera in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. He gave his film of JFK’s assassination to the FBI. The Bureau later gave him back a second-generation copy of the film. The original is still missing. …