Part 1 44:11 (10.1MB) | Part 2 44:02 (10.1MB) | Part 3 44:41 (10.2MB) | Part 4 06:44 (1.6MB)
Orig­i­nally broad­cast Novem­ber 1, 1983 (Approx­i­mately 140 minutes)

The first of the “Guns” pro­grams sets forth the polit­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal back­ground of the focal point of the series, Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion. As Kennedy was prepar­ing to take office, ele­ments of the national secu­rity estab­lish­ment were cir­cum­vent­ing pres­i­den­tial and con­sti­tu­tional author­ity. Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of the U-2 inci­dent, this pro­gram presents abuses com­mit­ted by ele­ments of the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity. Allegedly shot down by a Soviet mis­sile, the CIA’s U-2 spy plane piloted by Fran­cis Gary Pow­ers appears to have been delib­er­ately sab­o­taged, in order to force the can­cel­la­tion of a sum­mit con­fer­ence between Soviet Pre­mier Khr­uschev and Pres­i­dent Eisen­hower. (The plane’s down­ing accom­plished just that.) Pow­ers attrib­uted the plane’s down­ing to infor­ma­tion allegedly sup­plied to the Sovi­ets by Lee Har­vey Oswald. Another Cold War inci­dent of the early 1960’s was the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs inva­sion. Right-wing ele­ments have faulted Pres­i­dent Kennedy for fail­ing to pro­vide the inva­sion force with air cover. In this pro­gram, we find indi­ca­tions that the invasion’s air sup­port was delib­er­ately sab­o­taged by ele­ments within the Agency com­mand struc­ture for the inva­sion! One of the peo­ple involved with that sab­o­tage was appar­ently Gen­eral Charles P. Cabell, Deputy Direc­tor of CIA. Cabell also helped arrange the Mob assas­si­na­tion attempts on Cas­tro, believed by many to be con­nected to the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion. The offi­cial ver­sion of Kennedy’s mur­der con­tends that Jack Ruby was a “lone nut” mur­derer, moved to elim­i­nate Oswald by grief over Kennedy’s killing and sym­pa­thy for Jackie. In fact, Ruby was a major Dallas-area orga­nized crime oper­a­tive. In the days lead­ing up to the assas­si­na­tion, Ruby was in close touch with orga­nized crime ele­ments bit­terly opposed to Kennedy. Prior to Kennedy’s killing, Mafia dons San­tos Traf­fi­cante and Car­los Mar­cello fore­shad­owed the killing. Pre­sented as a “lone nut” left­ist moti­vated by his sym­pa­thy for Fidel Cas­tro, Oswald was shep­herded around the New Orleans area by fas­cist ele­ments and fig­ures directly con­nected to the CIA’s anti-Castro forces. The broad­cast ana­lyzes the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity ele­ments around Oswald and presents evi­dence that he was being set up as a patsy. Par­tic­u­lar empha­sis is placed on the infor­ma­tion devel­oped by the unfairly-maligned Jim Gar­ri­son, the heroic D.A. of New Orleans, who inves­ti­gated the assas­si­na­tion and cor­rectly iden­ti­fied many of the par­tic­i­pants. Among the high­lights of the pro­gram is an actual broad­cast inter­view with Oswald in which he states that, while in the Soviet Union, he was “. . . at all times under the pro­tec­tion . . .” of the U.S. government.

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