Few events in American political history are more mysterious and controversial than the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Dr. John M. Newman is a rare breed of historian who has meticulously examined and reexamined historical evidence concerning the complexity of the power hierarchy in the United States, numerous international and domestic events of the Cold War, and covert spy wars that led to the tragedy on November 22, 1963. Below is an abridged version of the hour-and-a-half-long interview with Dr. Newman conducted by The New American senior editor Veronika Kyrylenko on October 25. The full interview is available at TheNewAmerican.com as a video with the accompanying transcript. 

The New American: Your extensive, three-decade-long investigation into the JFK case has established you as a globally renowned expert in this field…. What was so controversial about your book [JFK and Vietnam] that it got suppressed? 

Dr. John Newman: Because I had absolute proof that President Kennedy had ordered the withdrawal from Vietnam. And that would change history if he did not die. And then, when he died, we went into Vietnam. If he had not been assassinated, there would have been no Vietnam War. And the Vietnam War cost East and West all the trade and the routes to get all the equipment and weapons over there for that war. It consumed resources and time. It was a huge war for a long time. 

Avoidable war: The Vietnam War held profound implications for the Cold War’s delicate balance of power, diverting valuable time and resources and altering critical trade routes. Had JFK been allowed to continue his presidency, this conflict may never have come to pass. (AP Images)

And by the time it was over, the United States, which was supreme in terms of its foreign currency reserves and all kinds of things, was just about on par with Japan and Germany, which had been the enemies in World War II. That’s how bad it was.… Kennedy wasn’t supposed to get elected. They thought [Richard] Nixon was going to get elected. He changed history because they [the U.S. military establishment] would have gone to war instantly. And so, for four years — actually, no, even for three years — Kennedy did all kinds of things for poor people, Social Security, and all these ... things. But he was too scared to bring in new people to the CIA and the Pentagon. He didn’t do it. He was afraid to do that. 

TNA: Let’s talk about the historical context of the early 1960s in America, which was marked with serious challenges and threats on the one hand and with achievements and optimism for the future on the other. What are the key facts that are important to know about the domestic and international climate during the Kennedy presidency? 

Dr. Newman: The Americans thought that the Russians were going to take the entire continent and go all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. That wasn’t true. Stalin had too much on his plate. But it was the Cold War, with what Churchill called the Iron Curtain. 

So, it wasn’t like we weren’t fighting each other. We weren’t using bombs and bullets because they were nuclear. That’s the problem. So, nobody really wants to blow up the whole planet except for the [Joint Chiefs of Staff]. They didn’t realize what Oppenheimer and Einstein knew, which is that if they had gotten what they asked for, there wouldn’t be an Earth left today. 

That’s how crazy these generals were. So, it was a really scary decade afterwards, because in 1956, a war started. The Cold War turned into a hot war. And it involved three countries: Israel, Great Britain, and France, wanting to go in and conquer in Egypt and take Gaza and the Suez Canal. 

Eisenhower refused to participate in it. That was the beginning of a really hot war. And the thing that started it made it even worse because Eisenhower wanted to find out whether the Soviets were going to participate or not. 

And he had a new toy, the U-2. It’s a spy plane that flies at 80,000 feet. Now, Khrushchev had a mole in the United States, in the CIA, a high-level mole — so high that he had the technical details of the U-2. 

But along the way, it’s important to note that we had another guy whose name was Pyotr Popov. He defected to us in 1952. He was a GRU officer of the Soviet military intelligence. 

The KGB [was] going to arrest him. There were just so many reasons why he wasn’t going to survive. But he decided to go home. And he did. And he got executed. But the last thing he told his case officer, [CIA Research Council Chair] Keith Walter, was, “Oh, by the way, there is a KGB mole high echelon in the CIA that has [leaked] details of the U-2,” in April 1958, before he went back to Moscow. 

But the fact that he told Keith Walter, that is where [Lee Harvey] Oswald comes in, because what he has done is just now inform the CIA about this high-echelon mole with the U-2 specifications. 

Popov told Keith Walter [about the mole], and Walter told his boss in the Soviet Russia division, [James Jesus] Angleton, who’s head of counterintelligence. Angleton goes and asks [the CIA’s Office of Security head] Bruce Solie, “Who is the mole?” Angleton does not know he [Solie] is the mole and he [Angleton] always tells everything he knows to Solie. 

[Because Solie was the KGB mole], everything goes to Moscow ... all the way up to the fall of the Soviet Union, the entire gamut of Western spy services was an extension of the KGB. 

I’m the one who discovered who he was in this book Uncovering Popov’s Mole, which is why it’s causing lots of aches and pains everywhere, because it changes everything that we thought we knew about the upper echelons of the CIA. It turns out that the function of a mole hunt in the CIA is done in the Office of Security, not the counterintelligence staff, where Angleton was. 

What Solie did before Oswald showed up was to get all of the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics inside the CIA and say, “Every government document about the Oswald trip to the Soviet Union and defection goes to my desk alone.” 

So, nobody knew except for Bruce Solie. Everything that was being said and talked about in the CIA, about Oswald’s trip. It really didn’t matter how much Oswald knew about the U-2 as he did [as he worked on the U-2 in Japan], which is why he was chosen. 

They [the CIA] called him a useful idiot. He liked to play spy and he would play on one side or the other side. He didn’t care. It was a big deal for him, and he didn’t realize over the years that he was digging his own grave. 

So, Oswald went [to the USSR], and it worked. And so, eventually, he was recruited [by the KGB]. Oswald stays there for a while and he’s interrogated by a lot of people in Minsk, in the KGB higher school of counterintelligence. 

That is how Oswald was sent and why. That has nothing to do with Oswald, who was murdered after he allegedly murdered JFK. That’s a whole other story, [that happened] years later. But you have to understand who Oswald was and why he was sent there. 

[But we need to talk about the sequences that led to the JFK assassination]. 

[The key elements are] Armageddon and the military coup with the CIA’s support. So, there were some rogue elements inside of the CIA. 

TNA: What are these elements? And what was their agenda? 

Dr. Newman: Well, first of all, you’ve got people in the security office who are not Solie who are doing their own thing. You’ve got people who were working with [CIA Director] Allen Dulles and his proteges or a few of those people in different places in the CIA.  

Allen Dulles was a very powerful man and his brother [John Foster Dulles] was head of the State Department. And during World War II they were working with Wall Street firms to provide Hitler with 80 percent or 60 percent of all of his iron while American soldiers were being killed on the battlefield. That’s who ends up in power. Dulles is the guy who allows Angleton to be his counterintelligence chief under one condition. He told Angleton, “You can’t investigate me.”  

[And so there are] five sequences that explain generally, from a 20,000-foot-high altitude, low resolution, the way that the Kennedy assassination was arranged and how it was done.  

And it’s just nothing to do with Dealey Plaza [in Dallas, Texas], per se. 

Okay, first sequence. April 1961, the Bay of Pigs. It was not a stand-alone operation. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also wanted to go into Laos. This was two countries, not one. And the Bay of Pigs failure caused [President] Kennedy not to go into Laos because they were happening at the same time. [Kennedy] showed a bunch of these memos that he got from the Joint Chiefs, [saying] “Thank God for the Bay of Pigs because we would be in Laos right now.” They [the military] wanted him to use nuclear [weapons.] They wanted to use nuclear weapons in the South. And so, this was the first time they wanted to start Armageddon. And that’s what it would be because we didn’t have enough ground forces to win a campaign in Cuba or in Laos. 

So why are the Joint Chiefs asking Kennedy to go into both of those places when it’s impossible to win? That’s a very difficult question, but it’s a very easy answer because they’re going to use nuclear weapons. They didn’t need ground forces.  

TNA: Were they not afraid of retaliation? 

Dr. Newman: They knew something about the balance of nuclear power. They knew when it would actually be the best time. And that was the fall of 1963. Guess who dies in the fall of 1963? Okay. So anyway, the first time they tried to get Armageddon started under Kennedy was Laos and the Bay of Pigs. 

The second sequence is the same year, the second half of the year, July through December. And in July, there’s a crazy SIOP [Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear warfare] brief for President Kennedy by a small part of the National Security Council called the NATO Evaluation Subcommittee. They briefed him for the next year, which at that time would have been ’62, but they didn’t brief the South for ’62. [The] briefing [was about] how the Soviet Union and the United States fared against each other in a nuclear war. And it just so happens that by the time Kennedy comes in, Khrushchev had been bluffing the whole time about his ICBMs. He didn’t have any. Basically, in between the election and his actual inauguration, Kennedy finds out, oh, my gosh, we’ve got all these weapons. They don’t have any. So, what they told Kennedy during that briefing was, “Look, we think we have a good chance to do this in the fall of 1963. It will be the moment at which we have the mostest and they have the leastest.” And when you compare them, nuclear balance of power, and that’s [when] we do an all-out, complete spasmodic surprise attack on the communist countries. 

And Kennedy gets up, looks at them, shakes his head and says, “And we call ourselves the human race.” And walks out. He’s not going for it. 

“And we call ourselves the human race?” On four occasions during his presidency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff made attempts to entice Kennedy into waging nuclear warfare against communist countries. Each time, he firmly put a halt to their plans. (The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

TNA: They didn’t like it, did they? 

Dr. Newman: Oh, no. They didn’t like that. But they didn’t like him after the Bay of Pigs because he wouldn’t go in. You know, they promised him that he wouldn’t have to go in with combat troops because he said he wouldn’t. He wasn’t going to do it no matter what happened. 

They said, fine, no problem. They were sure he would change his mind once those Cuban exiles were getting butchered on the beachhead. Kennedy said, no, this is on you guys. But publicly, he took the blame for it, but they hated each other. That’s the beginning of the motive for getting rid of this guy because he would not play ball with [the Pentagon]. They don’t have any respect for him at all. 

Moving down through the sequences. So, July and December. The other part of that second sequence is the Berlin crisis, which starts that summer and comes to a head in December. 

And here’s the Joint Chiefs and they got a new special SIOP, all waiting for him to start. So, you’ve got Checkpoint Charlie, you’ve got the tanks, you’ve got Soviet tanks and American tanks pointing at each other with their guns, with the engines running. They’re ready to fire and start World War III. 

And Kennedy had it all figured out. He had something better. He was going to show the world how much [weaponry] we had. And he did that a couple of days before that standoff at Checkpoint Charlie, and it was huge, [he] released to the world to show how many nuclear weapons we had, all the ICBMs and all of our aircraft carriers and all these things. 

And a lot of them had multiple independently targetable warheads. And the poor Russians didn’t have anything. And Khrushchev was embarrassed, so were the military over there, because this was a big shock. Everybody thought that the Soviets were in the lead. So, Kennedy turned the tables on them, and it stopped the second time they asked for Armageddon. 

The third sequence comes in the first half of the next year. In 1962 there were two operations, called Mongoose and Northwoods. It involves the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And what they wanted to do was to say, “Okay. You didn’t want to do it in Cuba because they were a little country, and they hadn’t done anything. How about if we do a pretext, what we’re going to do is shoot down a couple of planes or a plane going over the Gulf down there and any Cubans in dinghies that are trying to escape, we will kill them. And then we’ll shoot some people in Miami and do the same thing in Washington, D.C., and blame it all on Fidel Castro so that the American people will be willing to go to war. In fact, they will demand it. So, if we give you a pretext, how about that?” And he looks at [General Lyman] Lemnitzer, and tells him to take a hike, and that’s the end of that. So that is the third time that they put Armageddon on the table, Operation Northwoods, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

So, the fourth sequence happens in the summer of 1963. Now what starts it all is a completely crazy thing. The Buddhists are burning themselves in the streets [in Vietnam], dousing themselves with gasoline and lighting themselves up.… It appears to me that Kennedy suspected he wasn’t going to live. 

He had not been doing things that he wanted to do for a very long time, like civil rights. Martin Luther King was one of the reasons why he got elected in the first place. At this point, he thinks if he doesn’t say what he really believes, nobody will ever know. So, he accelerates his secret plan to withdraw from Vietnam. We were supposed to be starting in ’64 and then get everybody out after ’65, after the new election. Now he realizes time is running out. And if he did think that he was right, he only had three months to live. And so, he accelerates the withdrawal plan to a thousand out, right now, in 1963. He kept it secret for a little while, but not long. By October 3, he put it in the National Security Action memorandum, and it was made public. 

That really drove the Joint Chiefs crazy mad because that was now out in the newspapers. Kennedy also gave a commencement speech to American University. Nobody saw the text and didn’t know what he was going to say. And he got up there and he made a special appeal to Khrushchev and the Soviet Union for detente. Right now. He even offered to let the Soviet Union participate in the American space race. You know how the general felt about that one. Not very good. He does this thing that just goes all over the world, this detente, and Khrushchev doesn’t go for it. So, Kennedy’s rebuffed. 

But the third thing he does is he admits that he’s done nothing on civil rights and he’s apologizing for that. 

And that’s the end. Now, withdrawal from Vietnam comes out. He has six weeks left in his life and during that time is the fifth sequence, and here’s what happens. That crazy plan we call, that crazy SIOP in 1961, that said the fall of ’63 is the right time, is still in play. Because it is fall of ’63. And we do have this big advantage. That’s number one. 

Number two is Lee Harvey Oswald [who worked for the CIA] and his Castro activities in the United States. Once he comes back from the Soviet Union, he starts wearing a placard, Viva Fidel, and walking around Dallas, and then he goes to New Orleans. And all summer long he’s baiting the anti-Castro guys after having offered them money. And so, they’re getting into fights. And he gets all over the news down there. And FBI director J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t know what’s going on, but he smells a rat, and he doesn’t like it. So, he starts sending big memos all the way to the top of the CIA. They don’t go everywhere. They only go to a few special places. So, what actually happens inside the CIA? What’s very important for the motorcade that Kennedy is going to be on a few weeks later, is that nobody knows that Oswald is even back [from the USSR]. You couldn’t look at anything about Oswald. You couldn’t put anything in the file unless you got permission from the espionage division of the FBI. Now, at this time, when Oswald goes to Mexico City to try and go back to the Soviet Union again, second time through Cuba, somebody turns off the red lights in the FBI now. So, when it comes to the Secret Service, looking if there are any threats to the people on this motorcade, the FBI is not flashing the red lights.… And so, you have all this suppression of knowledge so that the cover up will work. This is where the CIA is able to do this because the CIA is helping people in this, to suppress the story about what Oswald had been doing ever since he got back from the Soviet Union. 

TNA: So, Kennedy was surrounded by a very complicated net of conspiracy within his intelligence and military establishments? 

Dr. Newman: Not just one conspiracy, five of them. 

TNA: But you said he suspected. He was at such odds with this, what we now call the Deep State, that he decided to [go public with his plans]. 

Dr. Newman: Well, it’s really obvious that he was scared in the beginning. When he came in, he should have done what everybody else does, put his own people in the Pentagon and the CIA. He didn’t do that. He let them stay. And when it came time to fire them all after the Bay of Pigs, he didn’t do that except … one at a time. So, he didn’t want anybody to know he was cleaning the house because he didn’t want to upset the Joint Chiefs. And everything he did was like that. And when Lemnitzer had to leave, Kennedy pins a medal on him. And we have a picture of that. Lemnitzer is looking at him, giving him the worst scary stare. And Kennedy is … scared of him, and for a good reason. They did kill him in the end. 

The final thing is that during those six weeks, General Maxwell Taylor, who had started off supposedly as a friend, started doing things that were bad, like on Vietnam. 

And Kennedy said, okay, well, you’re fired from that. But he let him stay on because he’d already worked his way into the family, into the Kennedy family. 

But by the time we get to the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of ’62, he becomes the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That’s the job he really wanted, and he got it. And so now we fast forward to the last six weeks and guess what he does? What he does is to gut Kennedy’s withdrawal plan secretly behind [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara’s back. 

So, Kennedy and McNamara have no idea that’s been gutted. Not only that; it’s been replaced with a plan … which is American full intervention in Vietnam in those six weeks. That’s what’s going on. 

TNA: The Warren Commission tasked with investigating the Kennedy assassination concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, who himself got killed the day after he assassinated Kennedy, had acted alone and that there was no conspiracy, either domestic or international, involved. 

Dr. Newman: You have to understand why that happened and how that happened. That’s very simple. They told Earl Warren, who is the chief justice…. You see, this is crazy. Because now, President [Lyndon] Johnson decides he wants to have an investigation. Warren turned him down. What changed his mind was a little story about Mexico City. 

The CIA helped put the coverup together, which had to be put together beforehand. You can’t kill the president and then decide how to cover it up. 

The documents were taken out, and they were hidden so that the people that had to make plans and communicate, especially like with the motorcade and other things like that, didn’t know what was going on. 

So [the people who were behind the assassination] had two stories. One was for the public, and that was that Oswald was alone. That’s not what they said at the secret level to all those organizations, the FBI, CIA. They were told that Lee Harvey Oswald did kill Kennedy, but he did it with the KGB and Castro. 

TNA: But was it true? 

Dr. Newman: No, it wasn’t. But you know who was very scared? Moscow, because they had used Oswald. They had recruited him, and they were afraid the next thing they were going to see was nuclear bombs. And that’s the first thing that Castro said when he saw the news, but that didn’t happen. 

Earl Warren was told that if he didn’t go along with the façade for the public, that because Oswald was working with Castro and the KGB, 40 million Americans were going to die. 

The top-secret story was that Castro and the KGB did it, and they used Oswald. So, this was a World War III thing. This was an Armageddon thing that they were hoping did start after Kennedy’s death. Kennedy got killed, Khrushchev was purged. And it was a very, very volatile time. And the only reason that the fourth time they tried to get Armageddon…. Guess who stopped it? LBJ! His ego was big enough. When he was waiting for the election results, he was overheard by Stanley Karnow, who wrote big books on Vietnam. He was in the hallway [outside of] the Oval Office. And there was LBJ saying to his Joint Chiefs, “Just get me elected and you can have your f-in war.” 

Under pressure: Earl Warren, the head of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, was told that if he didn’t go along with the story of a lone gunman, 40 million Americans would die in a nuclear holocaust. (AP Images)

TNA: And so they did. 

Dr. Newman: It wasn’t until his inauguration that he gave the go-ahead to go into Vietnam, which he started in April. But by then, the Soviet Union had too many ICBMs. And so, it was over, that imbalance that had been there all those times. The chiefs tried not once, not twice, but four times to start Armageddon. And in the end, LBJ is the one who stops it. 

He didn’t know much about it. They wouldn’t tell him anything because he was drunk all the time and he would leak everything.… Anyway, that’s the large story here. And it is all of the things we could have talked about. 

TNA: What are your thoughts regarding the possibility of the complete truth about the Kennedy assassination being revealed? Do you believe that Americans will ultimately learn who was responsible for this event? 

Dr. Newman: Well, they tried to stop me from doing JFK and Vietnam when I wrote volume four, all this stuff on YouTube, Facebook, all the social media things I said and everything everybody else said about my book was taken down instantly. And then the other thing that happened, and this is all in the space of 24 hours, Kindle, Amazon, refused to publish my book, and the excuse they used was because I was publishing Bruce Solie’s travel records. And they said, “Well, those travel records are a little bit hard to read.” 

TNA: But the official investigation? JFK’s nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., whom you worked with and whom you know personally, is pledging an official investigation into his uncle’s death. Do you think he, if he is ever elected, will be allowed to learn the truth about what happened on November 22, 1963? 

Dr. Newman: [He’d have] the power to do that because he would be the apex of the political hierarchy. Well, I can tell you that Democrats, like all of them, have failed to do this. They’re scared. 

There are people much bigger than the CIA. And they’re behind who gets elected and who doesn’t get elected. 

TNA: In this regard, does it even matter if we have elections anymore? 

Dr. Newman: Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it? Because when our Republic was founded, it was founded upon the principle of an informed citizenry. Now, if we can’t find out what the president did the last four years, how do we know what to vote for?