JFK Conspiracy Fact #36: A Byrd, Some Planes, And…Bill Buckley And George Bush?

From the snarled web of suspicious connections of those involved in the Kennedy assassination have emerged some titillating facts about some very public people…people whom, it turns out, have unsavory intelligence ties. William F. Buckley was one of those people. Bill worked under E. Howard Hunt, covert CIA asset and Watergate mastermind, in the 1950s before using his family's wealth to start up the National Review and a neo-fascist organization called Young Americans for Freedom. Much of the Buckley family's wealth was derived from their oil company, Pantipec Oil. The president of Pantipec Oil was Warren Smith. Two men who worked for Smith at Pantipec were CIA contract agents, George deMohrenschildt and Jack Crichton. DeMohrenschildt, identified as Lee Harvey Oswald's best friend in Dallas by the Warren Commission, was a rabid anti-communist/oil geologist who mentored Oswald in Dallas's right Russian community. Crichton sat on the board of Dorchester Gas with a man named D.H. Byrd. Both Byrd and Crichton were unabashed Kennedy haters. Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository, close friend of Texas oil millionnaires and LBJ, and founder of the Civil Air Patrol, made a fortune off the Vietnam War after JFK's assassination. LBJ started up the Vietnam War for real, and Byrd's Ling-Temco-Vought got a fat defense contract for building fighter jets.

Of all the sinister characters in this web, perhaps the most suspicious is Jack Crichton. Crichton worked for the OSS, the CIA's forerunner, in the 1940s. In the 1950s he started up his own spy unit, the 488th military intelligence detachment, in Dallas. When the CIA first started planning the Bay of Pigs operation in 1960, it came to Crichton and Poppy Bush to spearhead funding for the operation. Crichton and Bush had been partners and close friends for years. In his book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, And The Hidden History of The Last Fifty Years, author Russ Baker writes, "In his memoirs former Cuban intelligence official Fabian Escalante asserted that...an important group of Texas businessmen...headed by George H.W. Bush and Jack Crichton...[was contacted] to arrange outside funding for the operation." When the Bay of Pigs invasion failed, the CIA and its supporters were furious with Kennedy.

Furthermore, on November 22, 1963, Crichton sent one of his operatives from the 488th military intelligence unit to "interpret" Marina Oswald's statements for the Dallas Police. Baker writes,"...[the] translations...were far from literal translations of her Russian words and had the effect of implicating her husband [Lee Harvey Oswald] in Kennedy's death."