Lansdale looks like he was part of wider regime change operation quarterbacked by Lyndon B. Johnson
[Founded in the late 1970s by CIA whistleblower Philip Agee, Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB) was way ahead of its time in pointing to a conspiracy in the JFK assassination, which now has become widely recognized. This article is part of a series of articles in CovertAction Magazine on the JFK assassination that continues in the tradition of CAIB. See other articles here, here and here.—Editors]
Major General Edward Lansdale was a legendary CIA operative who played a key role in U.S. Cold War operations in Southeast Asia during the 1950s and 1960s.
A prototype for the Alden Pyle character in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, Lansdale was known for adopting gruesome tactics as a counterinsurgency expert, including hanging the dead bodies of captured guerrillas on hooks for intimidation.[1]
A photograph taken at 2:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, shows a man walking away from Dealey Plaza in Dallas after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated who looked exactly like Lansdale.[2]
Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty and General Victor Krulak, who both worked closely with Lansdale in Vietnam, identified the man in the photo as Lansdale.
Lansdale’s second wife, Patrocinio Yapcinco (aka Pat Kelly), also identified the man in the photo as Lansdale.
Kelly was a Filipino journalist who met Lansdale in 1945 when he was stationed in the Philippines and became his mistress and later his wife.[3] It was through her that Lansdale claimed he came to understand the Philippines.
Robert Morrow is a JFK assassination researcher who interviewed Daniel Sheehan, a public interest attorney who has investigated CIA crimes for decades, at the JFK assassination Lancer conference in Dallas on November 23, 2024.
Sheehan told Morrow that, in the late 1980s (roughly around 1988 after Lansdale had passed), he went to the Rhode Island home of Richard “Dick” Billings, chief staff writer for the 1976-78 House Select Committee on Assassinations and a former staff writer for Life magazine, who told him that he had interviewed Pat Kelly and that she told him [meaning Billings] that she was certain that the man in the photo leaving Dealey Plaza was her husband.
Pat Kelly said that she knew for sure it was Lansdale based on his height, the look of the back of his head, and because of the ring on his finger—their wedding ring [Lansdale’s hand is exposed in the photo and a blow up of the photo reveals the ring on his finger which Kelly identified as her wedding ring].
Kelly’s testimony provides evidence that Lansdale was in the area where Kennedy was killed at the approximate time, leading to the obvious inference that he may have in turn—if that was indeed him—had something to do with the plotting.
Historian John M. Newman, a U.S. army intelligence veteran, said that he found a note in Lansdale’s papers at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University with the name of the hotel [Hotel Texas] that JFK was staying at in Fort Worth, Texas, 36 miles away from Dealey Plaza, the night before Kennedy was killed.
Newman also found letter correspondence from fall 1963 between Lansdale and General “Hanging” Sam Williams, head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Vietnam from 1955 until 1960, in which Lansdale specified that he had retired from the U.S. Air Force (his CIA cover) and planned to drive down to Denton, Texas, just outside of Dallas where Williams lived.[4]
Newman told Robert Morrow in November 2017 at the JFK Lancer conference that, after he and fellow JFK researcher David Lifton visited the Hoover Institution, a librarian there with whom he had become friendly telephoned him and told him that, after he had left, some men in dark suits affiliated with the federal government came and went through Lansdale’s papers and classified as “secret” many of the documents that Newman mere days before had been looking at.
Careerist Motive
Lansdale’s motive in helping to coordinate the JFK assassination may not have been what people like Oliver Stone would lead you to believe.
Stone, in his film JFK, following on the heels of researchers such as Jim DiEugenio, presented the hypothesis that JFK was assassinated in a CIA-coordinated conspiracy because he was intending to remove U.S. troops from Vietnam and to de-escalate the Cold War.
However, JFK was a cold warrior enamored of counter-insurgency and the spy trade who would have only withdrawn U.S. troops from Vietnam if the South Vietnamese could defeat the National Liberation Front (NLF) guerrilla movement on their own, which was implausible.[5]
Lansdale’s motive for helping to kill Kennedy would have been one of personal revenge for losing his job and influence in the Kennedy Administration.
Lansdale was enraged over the death of his friend Ngo Dinh Diem who died in a coup endorsed by JFK. Lansdale, who wanted Diem to become the “George Washington” of Vietnam, had nurtured and advised Diem from the beginning of his rule in the mid 1950s.
Lansdale was so angry over the Diem coup and death that his friend Lucien Conein had to tearfully apologize to him for helping to overthrow Diem (see Max Boot’s book on Lansdale).[6]
Lansdale had previously personally told JFK that he would never participate in a coup against Diem.
Lansdale had been sent to Vietnam in 1954 by then CIA Director Allen Dulles, who had been his mentor and later headed the Warren Commission, to transform Diem into the reincarnation of Ramon Magsaysay, the Filipino leader Lansdale had advised who was heralded for allegedly saving the Philippines from a communist takeover.
Much like he did with Diem, Lansdale wrote Magsaysay’s speeches and helped finance and train counter-insurgent forces operating under his direction to stamp out the left-wing Hukbalahap.
Lansdale was generally a man who thought he should have a proprietary interest over U.S. policy making in Vietnam.
Lansdale’s anger at the Kennedys was accentuated by his having been forced to retire just before President Kennedy was killed.
A mere 11 days after LBJ became president, Lansdale had a job in the “Food for Peace” program in the Old Executive Office Building, which is part of the White House complex, and he was subsequently appointed by LBJ to serve as a senior official at the U.S. embassy in Vietnam and top counter-insurgency guru in Vietnam.[7]
Historian Robert Morrow believes that these latter appointments were a payoff for Lansdale’s involvement in the JFK assassination.[8]
Morrow points out that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and other national security officials hated Lansdale because he was considered to be a loose cannon because of his unorthodox methods.
McNamara, Rusk and Bundy were behind Lansdale’s dismissal when JFK was president. They stayed on to work in the Johnson administration but were unable to keep Lansdale out of the new administration. This is because Johnson personally interceded to rehire Lansdale because of the special favor that he had done for him—eliminating JFK.
LBJ As Quarterback
Strong evidence indicates that LBJ was indeed the key mastermind of the JFK assassination.
Johnson was going to be dropped from the Democratic Party ticket in the 1964 election because of his connection to an assortment of financial scandals and political murders in Texas, which Robert F. Kennedy was leaking to the media on the eve of the JFK assassination.
The Kennedys’ goal was not simply to drop Johnson but to engineer his complete personal and political destruction. According to Robert Morrow, “the Kennedys in November 1963 were about to drop a hydrogen bomb of humiliation and embarrassment on the head of Lyndon Johnson, a man who could not take even the slightest criticism. LBJ was a cornered animal, and he struck back with lethal effectiveness in Dallas on 11/22/63.”
The Kennedys had always hated Johnson but were blackmailed into selecting him for vice president in 1960 by Johnson and Sam Rayburn (D-TX), who threatened to release a file they had compiled with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the Kennedys’ sexual bacchanalia.
During his time in the Senate, Johnson was part of an elite group of senators (Leverett Salsonstall, Richard Russell and Harry Byrd) who covertly oversaw the CIA.
A number of his key supporters in Texas also had ties to the agency. They included a) George and Herman Brown, co-founders of Brown & Root construction company, b) David H. Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository, founder of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), and owner of E-Systems, which manufactured spy equipment and bought Air America, a CIA airline; and c) Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell who was a CIA asset since 1956. Post JFK assassination, Cabell, a Democrat, defeated Republican Bruce Alger and then became a reliable LBJ ally in Congress.[9]
Reward for Dallas
Barr McClellan, a top oil and gas lawyer who worked for the Austin, Texas, law firm of Clark, Thomas & Winters which represented Lyndon Johnson, writes in his book, Blood, Money, & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K., that senior partner Ed Clark, who had also represented Brown & Root, engineered the assassination.
McClellan said that Don Thomas, LBJ’s closest friend and a senior partner at the firm along with another partner, John Coates, told him that “[Ed] Clark handled all of that in Dallas.”[10]
A captain in the army during World War II born to a prominent Texas pioneer family, Clark was a virulent racist characterized by Reader’s Digest as the “secret political boss of Texas.” Clark’s obituary in the Austin American-Statesman in 1992 referred to him as “one of the most influential Texans of his time.”[11]
According to McClellan, as a reward for plotting Kennedy’s assassination, he got lucrative oil leases and was appointed by Johnson as U.S. Ambassador to Australia where he served from 1965 to 1968.[12]
McClellan said that Clark would put an oil lease on his desk at the law firm and ask him to take care of the paperwork, telling him that the lease was a “reward for Dallas,” i.e., orchestrating the JFK assassination.[13]
Dick Billings and the Media Cover-up
The son of John Billings, the first managing editor of Life magazine, Dick Billings has an interesting history that sheds light on the media’s role in suppressing the truth about the JFK assassination.
According to Spartacus Educational, a website devoted to exposing the truth about the JFK assassination, Billings joined a group of CIA agents in June 1963 on a secret trip to Cuba to meet with some potential Soviet defectors who could provide secrets on the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
In November 1963, Billings was a member of the Life magazine team in Dallas that purchased the Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and afterwards negotiated with Marina Oswald the exclusive rights to her story, which never appeared in print.[14]
Billings continued to take an interest in the JFK assassination and, in January 1967, met with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison who had been tipped off by Hale Boggs (D-LA), a member of the Warren Commission, that the Warren Commission was a fraud.
Garrison subsequently began pursuing the prosecution of CIA agent Clay Shaw for his role in the JFK assassination plot, hoping to use this case as a springboard to go after the masterminds.
While Billings initially got the green light from Life to work with Garrison and pursue investigation into the JFK assassination, in September Billings told Garrison that Life was no longer willing to work with him.
Soon thereafter, Life adopted a smear campaign against Garrison, suggesting that he had ties with an unnamed New Orleans mobster. Billings at the time also lost his job with Life.
In 1976, Billings was hired by G. Robert Blakey to serve as chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations and went on to write a book with Blakey, The Plot to Kill the President (1981), pointing to a larger conspiracy in the JFK assassination.
Alec Baldwin Told NBC Policy Is to Support the Warren Commission Report
In 2018, Robert Morrow interviewed San Francisco-based attorney Bill Simpich, who told him and lawyer Larry Schnapf that he met Alec Baldwin at a benefit dinner a year earlier and that Baldwin told him that he asked to go on NBC to give his assessment of the JFK assassination.
Baldwin, however, said that he was blocked from doing so because he did not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.
Baldwin told Simpich he was told by NBC executives that it was NBC’s policy to support the Warren Commission Report, which is known to be false in so many ways.[15]
In the 1960s, the noted public intellectual Dwight Macdonald described the Warren Report as “a work of fantasy and literary imagination” and an “American anti-Iliad” that “bore no resemblance to a murder investigation.”[16]
This assessment was shared by members of the commission itself, like Hale Boggs, who tipped off Jim Garrison about its underlying political agenda and lack of professionalism.[17]
In 1997, The New York Times reported that recently declassified documents revealed that Gerald Ford, a member of the Warren Commission who became U.S. president, was instrumental in having the Warren Commission’s description of the bullet wound in Kennedy’s back changed to say the wound was not in his back but was at “the base of the back of his neck”—which would better fit the scenario of Oswald as the lone assassin.[18]
Failing to interview key witnesses like Secret Service Agent Paul Landis, who found a bullet in Kennedy’s limousine, the Warren Commission spent days questioning unimportant witnesses over unimportant details, amassing thousands of pages of irrelevant documents to give it a fake professional veneer. [19]
So why is NBC today censoring anybody questioning the validity of the Warren Commission and what does this say about the corruption of the mainstream U.S. media that broad sectors of the public no longer trust?
See Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). ↑
For more discussion of this photograph, see Robin Ramsey, “JFK, Chauncey Holt and the Three Tramps Redux,” Lobster Magazine, Summer, 2016. ↑
Lansdale’s first wife was Helen Lansdale (nee Batcheller), whom he abandoned; she died in 1972. They had two sons, Edward and Peter. Kelly was born in the Philippines in 1915 and died in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2006. Lansdale himself died on February 23, 1987 at the age of 79. ↑
Robert Morrow, Interview with John M. Newman, November 22, 2024, JFK research conference, Dallas, Texas. ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Liberal Savior as Conservative: John F. Kennedy’s Foreign Policy,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, 12, 2 (Summer 2024). Jim Hougan reported in Spooks: The Haunting of America; The Private Use of Secret Agents (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1978), 12, that the Kennedy’s “had an affection for spooks” and “used White House discretionary funds to establish an archipelago of private intelligence agencies designed to further their political ends.”↑
Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (New York: Liveright, 2018). ↑
Boot, The Road Not Taken, 435. ↑
Author interview with Robert Morrow, June 22, 2023; Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (New York: Liveright, 2018), 435. Lansdale would have coordinated Kennedy’s shooters from the grassy knoll and Texas School Book Depository. These would have included Cubans, anti-Castro elements who hated Kennedy and had run black operations out of the CIA’s JM-Wave station on the campus of the University of Miami. When Lyndon Johnson sent Lansdale to Vietnam in 1965 it was reported in front page newspaper articles across the country. The latter heralded the dispatch of Vietnam guru Lansdale. ↑
Byrd kept a replica of the 6th floor sniper’s nest in the Texas School Book Depository as a trophy in his magnificent home in North Dallas. Byrd’s CIA ties are discussed here; Cabell’s here; and George and Herman Brown’s here. ↑
Barr McClellan, Blood, Money, & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K. (New York: Skyhorse Press, 2011), 9. John Bullion was told by his father, Waddy Bullion, LBJ’s investment adviser: “No one was closer personally than Don to LBJ, except of course Lady Bird. No one.” ↑
Famed Watergate prosecutor and LBJ lawyer Leon Jaworski in 1977 told his grandson future journalist Robert Draper that Ed Clark was a “very, very powerful man.” ↑
McClellan, Blood, Money, & Power; “Edward A. Clark,” AustinAmerican-Statesman, September 17, 1992, B11. ↑
McClellan, Blood, Money, & Power. See also Billie Sol Estes, Billie Sol Estes: A Texas Legend (Granbury, TX: BS Productions, 2005), 146, 147. ↑
Marina was Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife. ↑
Also in 2013 Abraham Bolden was within minutes of going on MSNBC on the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination and he was canceled from making an appearance because Bolden believed in a conspiracy in the JFK assassination. Phil Singer, a close friend of Abraham Bolden, told this to Robert Morrow. On January 23, 2025, top NBC reporter Tom Llamas interviewed Gerald Posner, a proponent of the Oswald lone assassin theory, and presented him in a fawning interview as the “best guest I think in the country” and top “expert” on the JFK assassination, plugging Posner’s 1993 book Case Closed. Llamas is now slated to become the anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” after current anchor Lester Holt retires in summer, 2025. ↑
Dwight Macdonald, quoted in Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007), 1. ↑
Mellen, A Farewell to Justice. Senator John Sherman Cooper (R-KY) came to the belief, while he was a member of the Warren Commission, that “Lyndon Baines Johnson was involved in the planning and execution of Kennedy’s death.” Cooper told his aide Morris Wolff (an aide to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he was assigned as a legislative aide to Cooper to lead the effort to pass the Civil Rights Act) that “the forensics clearly show there were at least two separate shooters, and they were standing in different places, one from the grassy knoll and one high in the office building.” Johnson, the new president, wanted to “cover everything up and move on” while he wanted to “delay and get all the facts.” The Warren Commission “want[ed] to bury the truth under a pile of stones.” Morris Wolff, with Karen Weber, Lucky Conversations: Visits With the Most Prominent People of the 20th Century (Columbus, OH: The Educational Publisher, 2021), 112. ↑
Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014). Johnson specifically put Ford on the Warren Commission because of Ford’s close connections to and expertise with the CIA. The words LBJ used were he wanted Ford, “who knows CIA over in your shop.” Later, in 1970, Newsweek magazine declared Gerald Ford to be “the CIA’s best friend in Congress.” ↑
See Philip Shenon, A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (New York: Henry Holt, 2013), 13. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
