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James E. Files, in a confession due to be released on commercial video this week, says he worked as a driver for Nicoletti and that Nicoletti asked him on the day of the assassination if he would act as a back-up shooter.
The videotaped confession, obtained Sunday by United Press International, has been rejected by the FBI as not credible.
Files is serving a 50-year prison sentence for the murder of a Joliet, Ill., police officer and is incarcerated at Joliet State Prison. The interview was given March 22, 1994, to associates of a private detective who had tracked Files down and won his confidence.
Files, who appeared nervous throughout the questioning, said Nicoletti was the main gunman and that Chicago mob figure Johnny Rosselli also was involved. He said Nicoletti got his orders from mob chieftain Sam "Momo" Giancana but that Giancana likely got his orders from Anthony "Big Tuna" Accardo.
"I have no idea who ordered his assassination....I don't think it was something Giancana would have engineered on his own," Files said.
Files, who said he was a former member of U.S. Special Operations forces in Laos, said he developed a dislike of Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He said he had helped train the commandos and was upset when Kennedy failed to provide air support for the invasion, leading to its failure to oust Fidel Castro.
"I had never liked Kennedy since he backed down," Files said.
Files said he arrived in Dallas a week before the assassination, picked and tested the weapons to be used and cased Dealey Plaza.
On the morning of November 22, 1963, the day Kennedy was murdered, Files said he drove Rosselli, whom he described as the mob's liaison to the CIA, to a restaurant where he met with Jack Ruby and collected an envelope with a map and "Secret Service identification."
Files said he positioned himself at the stockade fence separating the motorcade route from a rail yard and that Nicoletti was in the Dal-Tex building -- one of three buildings police zeroed in on immediately after the shooting. Files said he was not supposed to fire his weapon unless Nicolletti failed to make a head shot.
He said Kennedy was hit in the body but not the head as the limousine approached his position, adding he was under orders not to hit Jacqueline Kennedy.
"I had zeroed in on the left side of the head (to Files's left)," Files said. "If I waited any longer, Jackie would have been in the line of fire....As I fired that round, Mr. Nicolletti fired at the same time. The head went forward and then backward."
He said his bullet would have struck Kennedy just above the right eyebrow and exited through the back of the head.
Files said he was paid $30,000 for the hit several months later.
"To me it was like taking out the garbage," he said.
Nicoletti, Rosselli and Giancana were all slain between 1975 and 1977; Accardo died of natural causes.
Files said another individual was involved in the plot but he refused to name him because the man still is alive.
Files described Oswald as very intelligent and far from the misfit he has been described as.
"I think his part was to plant evidence to confuse everybody....Lee Harvey Oswald never fired a shot," Files said, adding that he doesn't think Oswald was the type of person to kill anyone.
The taped interview with Files, titled "Confessions of an Assassin," is being marketed by MPI Media Group, an Orland Park, Ill., video and film distributor.
Sunday 30 June, 1996
M. Hudson
Box 637
New York, NY
Dear Mike,
Just a few lines in regards to your letter. Thank you for taking the time to write me.
I wish that I could be of some help to you and your group. But at this time I'm not able to say a whole lot as of my obligation to the people that produced the video.
You see, there is to be a second video interviewing other people that are still alive. Such as the pilot, Robert "Tash" Plumlee, that flew the plane in with a team to abort the assassination that morning.
Let me explain, in the video I stated that I would give up no one alive in government or the crime family, as I will put no one in jail. Also, I refused to envolve the C.I.A.
But on Nov. 18th, 1994 in Dallas, TX, Robert Plumlee testified before the Assassination Records Review Board to his part in the assassination. Robert and other parties were granted immunity to testify. A lot of people have been given immunity on this J.F.K. thing, but I am not one of them.
Thanks for the offer of protection and wanting to look out for me. But that is not necessary. I have no [fear] as I died inside a long time ago. Now every morning I wake up is just an added bonus.
After they release their second video, if you wish to write me at that time, then I will try to send you some answers that you may not have. But until then, I will honor their request.
Thank you,
Sincerely,
Jimmy
By the way, once I secure my freedom, I have promised to turn over actual proof, such as documents, papers, etc.
The paper will be tested to prove that it's from that era, plus, the handwriting on some will be checked.
Speakers include Dr. Charles Crenshaw, Dr. John Newman, and Joseph Backes. The keynote speaker is author and co-editor of JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly Walt Brown.
For information, you can contact Dallas '63 Secretary John Rudd via email at johnr@mail.cybase.co.uk, or snailmail at 169 Oakfield Rd., Liverpool, Engladn L4 OUF.
The Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) has scheduled its third annual National Conference this October 18-20 at the Omni-Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. This is the same location the conference was held in 1995. For more information call COPA's Conference Hotline: (202) 310-1858.
COPA has also scheduled meetings in Dallas for November 22-24.
JFK-Lancer will hold its first annual Dallas Conference November 21-23. Presentations are scheduled from Jospeh Riley, Ph.D., Mary Ferrell, author David Lifton, George Michael Evice, and Fourth Decade editor Dr. Jerry Rose. For more information contact Evica via email at evica@uhavax.hartford.edu, or snailmail at 107 N. Beacon St., Hartford CT, 06105. You can also phone (860) 232-9673.
Joe Backes, a regular contributor to Fair Play, is making the tapes available for ten dollars a copy. He is also making available photocopies of ARRB documents for ten cents a page.
Email Joe at JoeBackes@aol.com for more information. (If your Web browser supports forms, click on the highlighted text for a pre-addressed email document.)
The article is called "Declassified," by Roger S. Peterson, and focuses on the work of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). A blurb at the start of the article notes that the Board "has released documents that shed a disturbing light on the 1963 shooting of President John F. Kennedy," and the ensuing text spells some of that out.
At first, the article sounds like so many others written on the case: "Most who remember that afternoon can recall in detail where they were when they heard the news..." But it leaps to the recent past by describing the JFK Records Act of 1992 and the subsequent creation of the ARRB, as well as some of the Board's actual work --- what some released documents might mean.
There is a refreshing characterization of assassination researchers, too --- yes, researchers, not buffs or dilettantes or amateur sleuths: "Researchers have formed the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA), based in Washington, to undertake a peer-review of their work and to share data." And it notes that COPA consists of "physicians, lawyers, engineers, scientists, retired military officers, and historians." Okay, so this describes the governing board and leaves out the jes' plain folks. But why quibble?
There isn't a lot here that students of the case will find new. But it's a mainstream magazine that takes the notion of a conspiracy in JFK's death seriously; you should buy a copy, xerox it, and pass it around to the doubters you know. That's one of the things we intend to do.
He told this to 300 people attending the banquet so I know of no reason he would not be telling the truth.
First, an excerpt from Forgive My Grief, Vol.III, by Penn Jones, Jr., p. 13, "Did Governor Connally Know?", October 16, 1969 [Note: Jones uses the editorial "we" in his first-person critiques...]
Time after time the questions have been asked: "What about Governor Connally? Why did they shoot him? Did he know about the conspiracy?" In the past we have answered by saying we were undecided...
Now we answer differently. Now we believe Connally knew the President was going to be killed, but Connally did not know when, where or how...
Connally was experienced with a rifle, so his strange statement "My God, they are going to kill us all," had long puzzled us. That was truly rapid thinking when at this point the Secret Service men had hardly reacted at all.
Connally did not say: "My God, that man is going to kill someone." Connally did not indicate at the time of his testimony [before the Warren Commission] whether or not he knew --- from the direction of the shots or the rapidity of the shots --- why he had used the plural pronoun. The most terrible possibility is that as the guns were firing, in his moment of truth, Governor Connally was admitting he knew of the entire plot.
The Governor has always insisted that he was not hit by the same bullet that went through the President's back. At the same time, Connally has stated that he is satisfied with the conclusions of the Warren Commission. This is insanity. By persisting that he was hit by a separate shot, Connally destroys the Warren Report completely. How can he then state that he has no quarrel with the Commission's findings?
Governor Connally was an important member of the group which made the decision to hold the luncheon in The Trade Mart. The Trade Mart decision was necessary, and a downtown parade was imperative in order that a strange group in the office of attorney Eugene Locke (candidate for Governor of Texas in 1968) could make the decision for the detour by the School Book Depository Building...
Next, a snippet from Act of Treason, by Mark North. The author argues that Carlos Marcello of the New Orleans mob had Kennedy killed, and that J. Edgar Hoover learned of the plot in 9-62 but did nothing --- just allowed it to happen, for his own political ends.
And who were JFK and LBJ? Though married, Kennedy was apparently an unrepentant philanderer. Johnson was clearly a corrupt man who, through his associations, was directly involved in white-collar crime. Both had at least indirect connections to the Mafia. Johnson, perhaps more like Joseph Kennedy than many would care to think, was doubtlessly motivated in his associations by money and the quest for power. He was not a man of personal integrity.
Kennedy, his fortune previously assured in part by his father's past association with the mob, was a generation removed from this corruption. It is to his credit that he not only perceived the danger that the Mafia represented, but also sought, some would say heroically, to destroy it. In a social context, his fatal flaw was perhaps his inability to distance himself, until it was too late, from women supplied by mobsters. He was, evidently, acutely aware of the corrupt source of some of his fortune, for he consistently gave substantial sums to charity. This concern also expressed itself in his work. His donation of all moneys received as an elected official, as well as the proceeds ($351,000) from the sale of screen rights to his best-selling book, Profiles in Courage, are but two examples.
Also to his credit was the attempt to restructure the bureaucratic power elite in Washington, D.C., into a more moderate, progressive leadership force. Had he not retained Hoover as FBI Director at the outset of his administration, he could well have essentially succeeded by the end of his second term.
The long-term effects of both Hoover's and the Warren Commission's actions are with us today. The primary, and most damaging consequence of this watershed event was, and is, a crisis in government...
Herewith, an excerpt from L. Fletcher Prouty's JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (1992)...What follows is from the book's Epilogue, "Game Plan of the High Cabal." It should be noted that Prouty, a retired Air Force Colonel and a "former top-level `military-CIA' operative," was the model for Oliver Stone's "Deep Throat"-style character "X" in the movie JFK.
The assassiantion of President John F. Kennedy was one of the truly cataclysmic events of this century. The murder of a President was traumatic enough; but the course of events that followed and that have affected the welfare of this country and the world since that time has, in many ways, been tragic.
That assassination has demonstrated that most of the maojr events of world significance are masterfully planned and orchestrated by an elite coterie of enormously powerful people who are not of one nation, one ethnic grouping, or one overridingly important business group. They are a power unto themselves for whom these others work. Neither is this power elite of recent origin. Its roots go deep into the past.
Kennedy's assassination has been used as an example of their methodology. Most thinking people of this country, and of the world believe that he was not killed by a lone gunman. Despite that view, the cover story created and thrust upon us by the spokesmen of this High Cabal has existed for three decades. It has come from the lips of every subsequent President and from the top media representatives and their spokesmen. They are experienced, intelligent people who are aware of the facts. Consider the pressure it must take to require all of them, without exception, to quote the words of that contrived cover story over and over again for nearly three decades.
This is the evidence we have of the significance of the Kennedy assassination. But it is only one example. Other major events, such as the development and escalation of the Vietnam War, have been manipulated in a similar manner. In bringing this work to a close I shall provide, briefly, a look at a few of the other events during the Cold War that have taken place because the power elite planned things that way.
As a result, I am aware I may be attacked in the same fashion as Oliver Stone even before his movie JFK appeared in the theaters. The attack consists of words like conspiracy and paranoia similar to the verbal accusations during the Inquisition. To attack someone as conspiracy prone because he does not believe the cover story that one lone gunman killed the President is ridiculous. By now it has become clear that there was a plan to murder Kennedy in order to escalate the Vietnam war and decimate most of the less-developed countries through a form of banker-managed, predatory economic warfare. Conspiracy is far from the operative word. This is planning at its best or worst, depending on your point of view. Furthermore, paranoia cannot properly be used to define someone who studies economics and history and reveals certain facts. As a matter of proper definition, such findings are the result of the opposite of "paranoia." Having said this, let's take a look at a few recent examples of how the game plan of the High Cabal, Winston Churchill's phrase for the power elite, operates.
Ever since the murder of the President we have been told by the highest authorities that JFK was killed by one man, who fired three shorts from a mail-order Italian-made rifle. Quite naturally most Americans have wanted, at first, to believe the word of their government, especially when it involved such an important matter.
Many of the most earnest of these researchers who do not believe one man killed the President with three shots from a rifle have mistakenly spent almost three decades researching and studying the cover story and not the facts. More than six hundred books have been written on this subject. IN them you can find a myriad of obscure trivia dug up by these tireless researchers. But to no avail. That is not the path to the answer to the main question, "Why was Kennedy killed?" No one will ever know who killed the President. In that business, the "mechanics" are faceless and have chameleon identities that are skillfully shiefded by the system.
It is easy for anyone to learn that President Kennedy was murdered in a burst of gunfire, as reported by able and on-the-spot newsmen, that hit him at least twice, struck Governor Conally at least once and more likely two times, and that a fragment created by a stray shot hit a man named Tague who was standing on the curb of a street about a block away from where Kennedy was shot. Those are more than the "three shots" on which the Warren Commission builds its case. "More than three shots" is all the evidence needed to prove that the accounts of the crime given by the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Warren Commission are wrong.
What does it take to convince able, intelligent people that the contrived cover story published by our government is nothing more than that? If nothing else a recent episode from the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association should alert the public to the seriousness of the cause underlying the decision to assassinate JFK almost thirty years ago.
This powerful, wealthy association, one of the most influential in the country, has required its spokesmen to proclaim, once again, that a bullet entered the back of the neck of the President and exited through his throat and then traveled on to seriously injure Governor Connally. "How utterly absurd," we might say; and of course it is. But that is not the point. Here is this prestigious organization being forced by a higher power, under some form of duress, to play a distasteful role before the American public by repeating a story that is untenable.
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