Oliver Stone film shows that JFK was trying to reorient U.S. foreign policy in more peaceful direction prior to his murder and that the Warren Commission was a fraud.

JFK: Destiny Betrayed presents convincing evidence confirming that U.S. intelligence orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Directed by Oliver Stone and written by Jim DiEugenio, the documentary series builds on Stone’s Oscar-winning 1991 film JFK.

It illuminates JFK’s opposition to the imperialist machinations of American oligarchs, who enlisted U.S. intelligence and the Mafia to orchestrate his assassination and then cover it up for decades.

The Shocking Presidential Assassination and Cover-up in a Nutshell

Debuting in May, JFK: Destiny Betrayed is now available on Amazon Prime and Vudu. Stone edited down the four-hour film to just under two hours for film festivals, titling the shorter version, JFK: Through the Looking Glass (previously reviewed in CAM by this writer).^[1]

Destiny Betrayed gives more history regarding John F. Kennedy’s political career leading to his election as president in November 1960. The film also presents a bit more on Robert F. Kennedy in relation to his brother in the White House.

The four-part series begins with shocking and tragic footage of the multiple shots hitting JFK in the throat and head as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.^[2]

Stone then shows Robert Kennedy, Jr., speaking about his father’s reaction: “My father’s first call [after the assassination] was to the CIA desk officer, asking ‘Did your people conduct this horror?!’”

Two aides to the president who had served in World War II drove in the car behind JFK’s car and said there was a crossfire of gunshots at the president.^[3]

Slate founding publisher David Talbot wrote the book Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. He reported talking to Robert F. Kennedy’s aides who all thought the Warren Commission organized by Lyndon Johnson, JFK’s successor, produced a “fairy tale” report.

Two days after President Kennedy’s assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest, Jack Ruby approached Oswald as he was being escorted in front of police and journalists in the police station garage, and fatally shot him.

JFK Evolved into a Civil Rights-Supporting Anti-Imperialist Leaving Vietnam’s Opium

All four chapters of JFK: Destiny Betrayed present little-known aspects of JFK’s evolution toward positive work for the rights of the oppressed at home and abroad.

The first chapters discuss JFK’s opposition to CIA machinations.

JFK and RFK were arguably the most powerful people, outside of the Civil Rights movement itself, to lead the passage of the most comprehensive Civil Rights legislation since the Emancipation Proclamation, with their 1963-crafted Civil Rights Act.^[4]

Chapter 3 presents Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stating his belief in the sincerity of the President and Attorney General as friends and advocates for Civil Rights.^[5]

Regarding JFK’s political evolution, the series started with John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert’s visit to Vietnam in 1951 when he was a U.S. congressman and Robert was his campaign manager. JFK and RFK ended up finding that France’s war to continue colonizing Vietnam was futile and Vietnam deserved independence.

After becoming a senator in 1953, JFK opposed the advice of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to help the French in Vietnam by using nuclear weapons.

JFK also ended up giving a famous speech in the Senate in 1957 entitled “Imperialism: The Enemy of Freedom,” in which he called for supporting anti-colonialism in Africa and Asia.^[6] This brought the wrath of both Democrats and Republicans on him.

Once in the White House, while President Kennedy and his brother waged war on the Cuban Revolution, they ultimately did not back a full-fledged military invasion of Cuba and forced CIA Director Allen Dulles’s resignation over the Bay of Pigs.

Allen and John Foster Dulles were lawyers representing various oligarchs’ interests. JFK further planned to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

While this documentary failed to mention it, President Kennedy also closed down Dulles’s CIA Project MK-Ultra twice, as people under Dulles kept it running behind JFK’s back.

As President Kennedy evolved toward wanting peace with the Soviet Union, Cuba and other leftist countries, he started back-channel correspondences with those countries’ leaders. Top JFK researchers such as James Douglas and Slate’s publisher, Talbot, published on the secret correspondence JFK and Khrushchev had behind their war-hawk generals’ backs.

JFK reportedly said to Norman Cousins that he was 100% committed to disabling all nuclear arms and he was ready to talk to the Soviet Khrushchev about that.

President Kennedy’s final blow against the war-mongering oligarchs came when he decided against sending American ground troops into Vietnam, and ordered an eventual complete pull-out of American involvement there.

RFK and Senate’s Church Committee Unveil CIA and Mafia Work in JFK’s Assassination

The Warren Commission Report concluded that only Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Author David Talbot referenced RFK’s aides saying Bobby Kennedy was determined to start an official inquiry into his brother’s assassination as soon as he entered the White House in 1969. RFK’s California 1968 presidential primary nearly assured that until gunmen assassinated RFK that primary night.^[7]

Regarding the Warren Commission, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., summed up the fact that “commissions in this country anoint orthodoxies.”

Church Committee Senator Richard Schweiker (R-PA) stated that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had confirmed to him in a letter that Lee Harvey Oswald assassin Jack Ruby worked as an FBI informant.^[8]

In April 1964, CIA-contracted Dr. Louis Jolyon West, who had regular correspondence with CIA Project MK-Ultra Director Sidney Gottlieb, interviewed Jack Ruby for 48 hours. Ruby reportedly had a sudden “acute psychotic break” during those interview hours. This barred any testimony from Ruby.^[9]

Chapter 2 of JFK: Destiny Betrayed also linked Jack Ruby to the Mafia working with the CIA on removing President Fidel Castro in Cuba. The Church Committee exposed Johnny Roselli’s function as a liaison between the CIA and Mafia, which RFK Jr. claimed his father had been unaware of.^[10]

The end of Chapter 1 presented several witnesses who confirmed that Lee Harvey Oswald was not on the 6^th floor of the building from where the Warren Report said he fired fatal shots.

More government documents around JFK’s assassination could have aided this conclusion but the FBI and CIA successfully appealed to President Trump to not release the remaining documents.^[11]

The Autopsy Supports Gunmen Shooting in Front of JFK

Chapter 2 of JFK: Destiny Betrayed focuses more on JFK’s autopsy. Numerous doctors’ reports contradict the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots at JFK from behind him, out of the book depository’s 6^th floor window.

For example, at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Dr. Malcolm O. Perry and Dr. Kent Clark examined JFK and stated there was a bullet exit wound in the right rear of the head, as well as an entrance would in the front of the throat.

Nurse Audrey Bell said powerful people forced Dr. Malcolm Perry to change his description the following day. Dr. Donald Miller, a colleague of Dr. Perry, also said Perry told him there was a bullet wound that was undeniably an entrance wound in the front of the throat.^[12]

Assistant White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff’s statement on the day of the assassination included showing a bullet coming right through the right front of the head.

Dr. Charles Crenshaw also saw JFK at Parkland Hospital and saw that JFK was shot in the front of the head.

Dr. Cyril Wecht, who had offered to aid the autopsy at the time, but only could offer advice later upon reviewing the autopsy report, weighed in on the findings. He said the Warren Report would have us believe the absurdity that Oswald’s second gunshot (the so-called “magic bullet”) caused seven wounds in two different people—JFK in the backseat of the car and Texas Governor John Connally in the front seat.^[13]

JFK: Destiny Betrayed also presents oncologist David Mantik, M.D. Ph.D., who reported that the x-rays of JFK’s head showed a fragment trail from the front to the back of his skull, which offered incontrovertible evidence that he was shot from the front.^[14]

Other key physical evidence around the assassination included attorney Mark Lane reporting that the Dallas District Attorney’s office had a paraffin test done on purported assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963. That test showed that Oswald had not fired a rifle.^[15]

More of Intelligence’s Fingerprints on JFK’s Assassination

British magazine editor Frances Stonor Saunders, in her book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, detailed how the wealthiest families started the CIA with their own family members or attorneys at the top of its leadership.^[16]

The CIA’s highest-ranking whistleblower, Assistant Director Victor Marchetti, wrote The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, also documenting how the wealthiest white Anglo-Saxon Protestant families had members at the top of the CIA hierarchy. He was the sole Catholic close to the top tier of the CIA.

The CIA proceeded to do the oligarchical families’ bidding. Many of these families were involved in the opium trade. President Kennedy’s decision to pull out 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1963 went against their interests regarding that trade next to the Golden Triangle for poppy fields in Laos, Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand (this JFK series only mentions the war industry’s lost profits).^[17]

Regarding JFK’s assassination, Church Committee member Schweiker said: “Everywhere you looked… there were fingerprints of intelligence.”^[18]

Otto Otepka, U.S. Deputy Director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Security, tried to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald on his own when Oswald was listed as a Soviet defector. CIA Associate Deputy Director James Angleton refused to respond to Otepka and tried to get him fired.

Oswald had worked for the government on the U-2 plane project, according to a CIA file on Oswald numbered #351164. Before that, Oswald was in the Marine Corps.^[19]

Oswald had further worked with David Ferrie in the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans, while also working with Nazi Party member Guy Bannister there.^[20] Ferrie, in turn, worked with Cuban exiles who consistently plotted with the CIA to overthrow Fidel Castro.

The first Black Secret Service agent, Abraham Bolden, was handpicked by President Kennedy and present at the assassination.^[21] He was visited by his superior, Elmer Moore, just after the assassination and Moore put a gun down in front of him intimidating him into silence.

Bolden tried to talk to the Warren Commission but was railroaded into a phony crime and jailed. Senate Church Committee witness James Gochenaur said he tried to ask Secret Service supervisor Elmer Moore about Agent Bolden. Moore responded, “Who are you working for? That goddamned lying nigger! We finally got him.”^[22]

Assassination Aftermath and Legacy

After President Kennedy’s assassination, Vice President Lyndon Johnson took over and reversed most of JFK’s foreign policies. JFK had stated that he wanted to recognize Indonesian leftist leader Sukarno, signing an $11 million aid bill. Johnson supported his opponent, Suharto, who killed between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians “identified as communists” after a CIA backed coup in 1965.

LBJ also started increasing the U.S. intervention in Vietnam on November 29, 1963, well before the fake “Gulf of Tonkin incident” led to the Johnson administration fully engaging in what would be a losing war with North Vietnam.^[23] American involvement in Vietnam would lead to at least 60,000 American deaths and countless more injuries, as well as a reported two million Vietnamese deaths.^[24]

The Vietnam War provided further cover for the CIA to import opium from the Golden Triangle that wound up addicting U.S. troops and countless other Americans. Within five to ten years of ending the Vietnam War in the mid-1970s, the CIA transferred this kind of operation to Afghanistan, the site of the Golden Crescent for opium-producing poppy fields.^[25]

The CIA’s Project MK-Ultra, continued as MK-Search at least until the Church Committee investigated it in the mid-1970s, used drugs on activists, deleteriously drugging many.^[26]

After JFK’s death, Robert F. Kennedy sent a message to Nikita Khrushchev, stating they knew the Soviets were not involved in his brother’s assassination, and that it was right-wingers.

Cuba’s Fidel Castro said: “This is bad news. Now everything is going to change.” Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser reportedly went into a great state of depression after JFK’s death. Nigeria declared a state of mourning.

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1. https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/12/17/oliver-stones-new-jfk-revisited-disproves-official-story-reveals-u-s-intelligence-involvement-in-assassination/ ↑

2. “Goodnight America” hosted by Geraldo Rivera, with Robert Groden and Dick Gregory, March 6, 1975, the first public showing of the Zapruder footage of President Kennedy’s assassination. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNrgzkjCNCE montycombs 1/30/2010 ↑

3. https://www.usnews.com/debate-club/was-jfks-assassination-a-conspiracy/multiple-shots-prove-jfk-assassination-was-a-conspiracy Michael Vollbach and Ronald Burda, “Multiple Shots from Many Directions Killed JFK,” U.S. News and World Report, November 18, 2013. ↑

4. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/civil-rights-movement ↑

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_4hEfeBIAU MLK reported meeting with JFK five times in 1963, stating JFK was a friend of Civil Rights. ↑

6. Bruce Reidel, “JFK’s Argument Against Imperialism,” Lawfare, June 14, 2022. https://www.lawfareblog.com/jfks-argument-against-imperialism?fbclid=IwAR1vHbiaNRhb4FNrZAe12JLf_mWOezEfDRHQ1LVQ_9Tp79Cq-sZ-JjGmRn8# ↑

7. Here, RFK Jr. discussed how multiple gunmen killed his father and his interviewer describes the incredible multi-ethnic coalition behind RFK. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR6BiqrSYq8 ↑

8. “Senator Richard Schweiker—co-chairman of the Sub-committee on the John F. Kennedy Assassination.” HelmerReenberg October 17, 2013. ↑

9. Tom O’Neill, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2019), pp. 376-81. YouTube interview from Joe Rogan Experience, Interview with Tom O’Neill, “Jack Ruby’s Court Assigned Shrink was an MKUltra Doc,” April 16, 2020. ↑

10. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32423624.pdf ↑

11. Associated Press, “Trump keeps some JFK files secret over CIA, FBI concerns,” Canadian Broadcasting Company, October 26, 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/jfk-assassination-documents-1.4372822 ↑

12. Rick Anderson, “The JFK assassination files lead back to Seattle,” Crosscut, November 19, 2017. https://crosscut.com/2017/11/john-f-kennedy-assassination-files-seattle-trump-release-shooters ↑

13. “Dr. Cyril Wecht on JFK’s Assassination & the Magic Bullet Theory,” CrimeCon 2022, May 1, 2022. ↑

14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUri6DWOAVk ↑

15. http://22november1963.org.uk/oswald-rifle-and-paraffin-tests ↑

16. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2001). Frances Stonor Saunders speech at the National Archives, covered by Book TV on C-SPAN 2, posted on YouTube by Adam Fitzgerald, June 26, 2021. ↑

17. https://news.un.org/en/story/2014/12/485662-opium-poppy-cultivation-golden-triangle-hits-new-high-2014-un-report ↑

18. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/10/16/archives/schweiker-predicts-collapse-of-warren-report-on-kennedy.html ↑

19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2210646 Phillip H. Melanson, Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. Intelligence (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1990). ↑

20. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1968/07/13/garrison ↑

21. https://whowhatwhy.org/justice/black-secret-service-agent-jailed-for-jfk-plot-warning-cleared-the-full-story/ ↑

22. Bolden was convicted in 1964 for soliciting a bribe, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. He was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, ultimately serving 39 months. At age 87, he received a Presidential pardon from Biden on April 26, 2022. ↑

23. https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHP/1961/Month%2004/Day%2024/JFKWHP-1961-04-24-C ↑

24. https://www.britannica.com/question/How-many-people-died-in-the-Vietnam-War ↑

25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MamdDXe5fs Trailer for the film Drugs as Weapons Against Us (Progressive Left Productions, 2019) written, directed and produced by this author, John Potash. Includes Judy Woodruff quoting CIA documents on PBS admitting their heroin trafficking from Vietnam to the U.S. ↑

26. See, for example, the article and quote by former Students for a Democratic Society President Carl Oglesby: “If U.S. Intelligence bodies collaborated in an effort to drug an entire generation of Americans, then the reason they did so was to disorient it, sedate it, and de-politicize it.” This was from his article “The Acid Test and How It Failed,” The National Reporter, Fall 1988. Quoted in Kerry Bolton, Revolution from Above (Menlo Park, CA: Arktose Media, 2021) p. 130. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Revolution_from_Above/FWc3eMiO-4QC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Carl+Oglesby+the+Great+acid+on+acid+and+his+generation&pg=PA130&printsec=frontcover ↑

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