navin AITI,FAT Jackson on the path to the amusement park at his Neverland ranch

Michael's World: Dangerous or Just Off the Wall? The fabulously wealthy King of Pop, Michael Jackson is also an androgynous eccentric who surrounds himself with kids. Last week's ugly charge—uncorroborated—of child molestation could affect his image and his business deals. Lifestyle: Page 34

Wired: Living 'On Line' More than 20 million people around the world are living "on line," cross-ing continents and cultures through computer networks. The data stream is awesome: scientific research, polit-ical debate, stock tips—and advice to the lovelorn. Society: Page 42

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So Who Really Shot JFK? A vast new trove of government documents on the assassination excites the conspiracy buffs. Was there a cover-up? Yes—but it wasn't of a plot to kill the president. The CIA and FBI were just trying to hide their own mistakes. National Affairs: Page 14

COVER: Photo by Frederic De LaFosse —Sygmo.

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Newsweek THIS WEEK

National Affairs 14 .111t: There Was a Cover-Up—But Not

of Who Killed Him Terrorism: The Sheik and a 'Seditious Conspiracy' NASA: Lost in Space 20 `Public Lives' by Joe Klein 21 Opinion: The National Health Care Phobia by Gregg Easterbrook 22

International 26 Mostar: Rescuers Are Turned Into Hostages

in a Muslim Town's Long Nightmare by Charles Lane China: Past! Wanna Buy a Missile? 28 Somalia: Catching Warlords Is Harder Than We Thought 29 Lech and Boris: A Couple of Good Ole Boys by Andrew Negorski 31 South Africa: A White American Dies in a Township 32

Lifestyle 34 The Cover: Michael's World

The Risks of Wishing Upon a Star 38 'Between the Lines' by Jonathan Alter 39

Tennis: 'Sweet Pete' Swings by Curry Kirkpatrick 40

Society 42 Computers: The On-Line Search for Therapy.

Stock Tips and Love New Life for the Dead-Letter Office 46 Cold Knowledge and Social Warmth by Howard Rheingold 49

The Arts 50 Profile: Let's Do Naked Lunch

by David Gates Music: Sex and the Single Songwriter 52 Books: South Florida Burlesque 53

A Kinky Creamed-Corn Recipe 53 Hot Thriller From a Cold Climate 54

Televisiort HBO Strikes With the 'Band' 55

Business 56 Wall Street Time to Time the Market?

by Jane Bryant Quinn Travel: Amenity Creep at Struggling Motels 58 Korea: Direct Sales Come Under Fire 60 Woodstock: Making !lay From Memories 61

Departments Newsmakers 33 Periscope 6 Transition 33 Letters 9 'The Last Word' Perspectives 13 by George F. Will 62

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they pored over the murky pic-tures of "the Umbrella Man" of Dealey Plaza, read the top-se-cret CIA report allegedly plac-

ing Lee Harvey Oswald at a raucous twist party in Mexico City just before the shoot-ing and recoiled from the gruesome autopsy close-ups of Oswald's wounds. Serious scholars, journalists. curious tourists and a few flakes had jammed into the East Re-search Room of the National Archives last week to explore a vast new trove of govern-ment documents on the assassination of John l Kennedy. "Fidel was behind it!" exclaimed Stuart Wexler, a twentysorne-

14 NFWSWEEK SKI*TFM Ile II It, 1!1!):t

thing conspiracy freak wandering among the reporters and photographers who had come to record the scene. "I'm talking Ma-fia, exiles, some CIA. maybe some gendrals. They killed President Kennedy!"

Who really shot JFK? Many Americans actually believe the version offered by Oli-ver Stone's movie, "JFK": that acabal of senior military and intelligence officials, backed by Lyndon Johnson, conspired to kill Kennedy before he could withdraw from Vietnam. In 1902 Congress hoped to finally set the record straight by order-ing the federal government. including the CIA. the FBI and the Pentagon, to make public all records on the assassination with-

in 900 days. Last week, on day 301, the National Archives opened up a cache of some moon pages of documents.

They do not, however, tell ail. Many of the documents have been heavily blarked out or replaced by pink slips stamped FIFSTIIICTF.O. According to the Assassina-tion Archives & Research Center. a non-profit organization run by conspiracy buffs, the CIA has withheld some 160,000 documents. The independent panel that is supposed to review withheld documents has yet to he appointed. It will be years before the entire truth comes out. and, in the meantime, the believers in the Friurth Shot and the Man on the Grassy

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A case not closed: The fateful motorcade in Dallas in November 1963. the young president and the assassin (right)

Knoll will continue to spin their theories. In an effort to resolve these mysteries,

NEwswEEK, The Washington Post and CBS News have embarked on a joint proj-ect to examine just how the U.S. govern-ment reacted in the wmk immediately following the shooting. The results of this investigation, which will he pub-lished and boxidcast around the time of

the 30th anniversary of the assassination in November, so far do not support the sinister conclusions of Stone and other conspiracy theorists. There was, to be sure, a cover-up—but probably not of a plot to kill the president. Far more likely is that officials at the CIA and FBI with-held evidence to conceal their own mis-takes and keep hidden the CIA's hare-

brained schemes to assassinate foreign leaders.

The documents revealed last week show the CIA scrambling almost desperately to learn whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist agent. The first reports that November weekend were troubling. Only a few weeks earlier, Oswald had been seen entering the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City, and wiretaps heard him dealing with a consular official who was, in fact, a KGB officer who handled "wet affairs"—assassi-nations. But within a few days agency officials were reason-ably satisfied that Oswald's dealings with the KGB were nothing more than a "grim co-incidence." KGB officials rou-tinely posed as lowly consular officials, and Oswald's conver-sations amounted to nothing more than innocuous requests for a visa. The Soviet Union, U.S. intelligence officials rea-soned, was not about to start

" World War III. Lone gunman The White

House was understandably ea-ger to reassure the public on that score, and Lyndon Johnson moved quickly to set up a commission that would—he hoped—find that Kennedy had been shot by a lone gunman. The CIA and FBI were ordered to cooperate, which they did —but only up to a point.

After the shooting, the FBI did a very professional job of tracking down Oswald's move-ments and the gun he had used to shoot Kennedy. But the FBI's legendary director, J. Ed-gar Hoover, was horrified to discover that his Dallas field office may have bungled an op-portunity to head off the asqas-

sination. In early November Oswald sent a threatening note (the contents remain murky) to the FBI's headquarters in Dal-

Ar las, but the agents there failed to follow up on it. The agent who got the warning, James Hosty, was ordered to get rid of the evidence (he flushed it down the toilet). Hoover later lied to the Warren Commission, saying that the bu-reau had no warning that Oswald was dangerous.

The CIA was also guilty of holding back. Fur three years the agency had been trying

SEPTEMBKR 8,1993 NVWSWEKK 15

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to kill Fidel Castro, even going so far as to hire the Mafia to do the job. This informa-tion was clearly relevant to any investiga-tion of Kennedy's assassination. Suppose Castro had had Kennedy shot in revenge? Indeed, on the day Kennedy was killed a CIA agent was handing a poison pen to a Cuban dissident who claimed he could get to Castro. But the Warren Commission was never told. Why? Former agency officials disingenuously reply that they were never asked. They rationalize that Allen Dulles. the former director of the CIA who had launched the assassination plots, was a member of the Warren Commission.

'Rogue elephant': The CIA in those days did what it pleased with very little over-sight. The agency worked for the president, but presidents wanted "plausible deniabili-ty" The picture of the agency as a "rogue elephant" has given rise to theories that it was the CIA itself that killed Kennedy. The spooks were mad at Kennedy, this theory goes, because he doomed the Bay of Pigs operation by refusing to order air support at the crucial moment —and then blamed the agency for the failure of the invasion. But if there was a nefarious plot, it could hardly have come from the upper levels. Richard Helms, who ran the agency's covert operations in 1963. was a shrewd and cautious bureaucrat who had opposed the Bay of Pigs. It is conceivable, of course, that some lower-level spook took revenge, perhaps in cahoots with right-wing Cubans who felt betrayed by the Bay of Pigs. The documents released last week will raise suspicions still further, because they suggest that the CIA may have myste-riously deep-sixed photos of Oswald taken while he was entering the Sovi-

been bureaucratic: the CIA is tightly com-partmentalized. It is also likely that the official running the operation to over-throw Castro, Desmond FitzGerald, want-ed to keep Angleton. a relentless con-spiracy theorist himself, away from his domain. FitzGerald was personally embar-rassed because a month before the assassi-nation he had gone to meet a Cuban agent in Paris. against warnings from his own advisers that the man might be a double agent for Castro.

More fuel: The CIA was also loath to tell the Warren Commission about its mob ties. This is more fuel for the conspira-cy theorists. Chicago don Sam Giancana thought that he had bought himself a meas-ure of security by helping the CIA with its assassination plots (not to mention lean-ing on corrupt Chicago pols to support jack Kennedy in Illinois in 1960). So he was infuriated when the Kennedys came into office and began cracking down on the mob. Did he order a "hit" on the president in revenge?

Top law-enforcement officials from the Kennedy era say that, at the time, the ques-tion never really came up. There was an investigation into the mob ties of Jack Ruby. the small-time hood who shot Oswald, but the trail led nowhere. It seems hard to believe that the Mafia angle was just over-looked. Bobby Kennedy, for one, is said to have worried that, as attorney general, he caused his brother's death by vigorously prosecuting the mob, But FBI officials say that there was no evidence to back Bobby's fears. According to William Roemer, the FBI agent who burred Gianeana's Chica-go headquarters, the mobsters muttered

et Embassy in Mexico City. Os-wald came and went from the Soviet and Cuban embassies no fewer than five times; it seems unlikely that the hidden CIA cameras stationed outside could have missed him. The photos, the fantasists suggest, would have shown not only Os-wald but a CIA coconspirator.

But this remains far-out con-jecture. More concrete is the evidence that the CIA covered up its plots to kill Castro. Indeed, there was a cover-up within the agency. James Angle-ton, the famously spooky counterintelligence chief who was charged with heading the agency's in-vestigation of the Ken-nedy anassination, was never told of the poison-pen plot against Castro. The reason may have

16 NEWSWEIRK SY.PTEMBRR

'You Wonder How It All Connects' The Kennedy assassination has been the holy grail for a generation of conspiracy theorists. More than 200 books—including an additional 10 to be published this fall—have examined Kennedy's murder and raised questions about the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was his lone assassin. But none of the exotic sce-narios stands up to scrutiny.

LBJ, the CIA and the Pentagon Theory: The CIA felt betrayed by J FK be-cause of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and because of his subse-quent threats to break up the agency. In the film "JFK," writer-di-

LBJ is sworn in

6, 1993

rector Oliver Stone suggests that Lyndon Johnson and Pentagon hawks were in on the conspiracy because President Kennedy was thinking of pull-ing out of Vietnam. Reality check: The CIA was clearly into assassi-nation plots—documents show that it asked the mob to help knock off Fidel Castro—hut there is no evidence of treason. Nor is there any solid evi-dence that JFK planned to pull out of Vietnam.

The Mob Theory: Mob bosses like Sam Giants= felt double-crossed: they helped get Kennedy elected in West Virginia and Chicago. and JFK's brother Robert over at the Justice Depart-ment thanked them by

4111111IMMN$, cracking down on or-Mafia don Giancana ganized crime.

Reality check: Fill wiretaps of Mafia headquarters show no active

Murky pictures, top-secret reports: Hoover and JFK, the National Archives (left)

threats and imprecations against the Ken-nedys, but nothing that sounded anything like an actual plot to kill the president.

In any case, Lee Harvey Oswald made for a very unlikely Mafia trigger man. If Oswald had been hired by the mob to shoot

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Kennedy, why did he first try to kill a retired right-wing general, Edwin Walker, on April 10, 1983, before Dallas? Lee Har-vey Oswald was a pathetic mama's boy who beat his wife and dreamed of living in a socialist paradise. A new book, "Case Closed," by Gerald Posner, viv-

plotting. Also. Oswald is an unlikely mafioso. Sev-en and a half months before the Kennedy assassi-nation, he attempted to kill a retired right-wing general —with the same rifle he would later use in Dallas.

Castro Theory: Since the Unit-ed States was appar-ently determined to kill him —the CIA made at least half a dozen attempts—the Cuban leader decided to shoot back. Reality check: Fidel

Aril I IS

Castro knew that the Cuba's Castro

United States could wipe Cuba off the map.

Cuban Anti-Communists Theory: Survivors of the Cuban brigade that in-vaded the Buy of Pigs wanted revenge for being set up and abandoned. Secret paramilitary group

Alpha 80 joined with rogue CIA agents to shoot Kennedy. Reality check: There /3 no evidence for this claim. The witness alleging the plot was discredited by a congressional investigation.

The Kremlin Theory: The cold war was at its height, Khru-

shchev had been embarrassed by the Cuban mis-

sile crisis and the KGB had an assassination squad that had killed Western officials before. The KGB

recruited Oswald while he was in Russia.

Reality check: The Krem-lin did not want to start World War HI. It also never recruit-ed Oswald. Moreover, former KGB officer Yuri Nosenko told Gerald Posner, author of a compelling new assassina-tion history ("Case Closed") that the emotionally unstable ex-marine was to be "avoided

KGB's Nosenko at all costs."

idly portrays the crazed Oswald and makes a strong argument that he was, in fact, Kennedy's lone assassin. But the case of

the Kennedy assassination will probably never be closed. Last week, as Mike Hines, an ama-teur assassination buff from Minneapolis. sifted through documents in the National Ar-chives, he knew he was not about to find the smoking gun. "You read one thing here, an-other there," he said. "The Warren Commission says this, a movie says something else ... You wonder how it all connects. I'm waiting for someone to stand up and shout. 'Bingo! Here it is!' But that ain't gonna happen." Not even, in all likeli-hood. after the government opens up all its files.

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