Russia, fake news and the CIA: Oliver Stone’s obsession with the JFK assassination
Whilst Oliver Stone has produced a number of celebrated movies, he has also made a career out of dividing people. This primarily comes by way of his tendency to dance with conspiracy theories, best evidenced in his 1991 film, JFK. The Kevin Costner-starring political thriller examines the investigation into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy by district attorney Jim Garrison.
A controversial film advancing Garrison’s theory that shooter Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone, elements of the contemporary ‘Deep State’ conspiracy theory feature throughout. Demonstrating its connections to Garrison’s personal beliefs, the screenplay for the film was adapted by Stone and Zachary Sklar from the attorney’s 1988 book On the Trail of the Assassins and Jim Marrs’ 1989 effort Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy.
Notably, in 2021, Stone returned to the subject of the JFK assassination with the documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. In the film, the director explains that he is attempting to “piece together what really happened that day and discover the reasons why”. Another divisive offering, it caused some commentators to delve into what influenced Stone’s beliefs about the assassination.
Whilst a host of explanations abounded, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tim Weiner and author of the 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, offered his account of why Oliver Stone bought into Garrison’s assertion to Rolling Stone in November 2021. His interpretation has holes, but it makes for a compelling read. Weiner ultimately pins Stone’s beliefs down to one main factor: misinformation spun by Moscow. Weiner states that in JFK Revisited, when building his case, Stone claims that controversial CIA head Alan Dulles and his agency backed a failed coup aiming to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle. However, Weiner dismisses this as nothing more than a fabrication from Moscow.
Just as the CIA did during the Cold War, Weiner maintains that the KGB – the Soviet equivalent of the American agency – paid reporters and editors worldwide to advance the Kremlin’s geopolitical agenda. He claims that in the late 1950s, they created a directorate to undermine America’s social fabric – ‘Department D’, named after the word ‘dezinformatsiya’. For a contemporary context, Weiner dubs the project the “world’s first industrial factory of fake news”.
Then, only a few days after the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, a KGB-written tale about the supposed CIA plot to kill de Gaulle appeared in the Italian daily newspaper Paese Sera. This is significant as the publication was backed by the Italian Communist Party. The story was then regurgitated in Moscow by the Soviet Party media organ, Pravda, gaining traction in France before finally breaking globally. This was a quintessential Russian disinformation operation, according to Weiner.
Weiner then claims that six years later, Paese Sera planted the seed that would grow into Oliver Stone’s JFK. He points out that this anecdote was first told in 2001 by historian Max Holland in the now-defunct journal, The Wilson Quarterly. On March 1st, 1967, the district attorney for New Orleans, Jim Garrison, arrested Clay Shaw. He was the director of the city’s International Trade Mart and a gay man whose sexuality would eventually be used against him. Garrison charged Shaw with a central role in the supposed conspiracy that killed Kennedy.
After, Garrison reportedly told the press that the assassination of Kennedy was “a homosexual thrill-killing”. Only three days later, Paese Sera named Shaw as a conduit for CIA-funded espionage and other forms of political subterfuge in Rome. According to Weiner, this story was also “crafted” by the KGB before being picked up by the global press. It was first published in America by The National Guardian on March 18th.
From Weiner’s perspective, Garrison seized this opportunity. He then fed the tale to a newspaper reporter in New Orleans, and it quickly became sensational breaking news. Shaw was then reported as a CIA operative, which Weiner claims he wasn’t. Instead, he was once on a part-time contract helping the agency with commerce. Escalating the situation drastically, Garrison argued that the CIA had even plotted to kill Kennedy and then covered it up. According to Weiner, Garrison said the CIA was “infinitely more powerful than the Gestapo”.
On February 6th, 1969, Garrison put Clay Shaw on trial, with his witnesses described as a “parade of perjurers from the seamier quarters of New Orleans”. This is where the matter starts to get a little more opaque. Allegedly, Garrison presented no evidence that tied the CIA to the case but asked the jurors to strike a blow against what he described as the conspiracy’s “murder of the truth”. Shaw was acquitted within 54 minutes. Following this, Weiner examined the “two lasting effects” that Garrison’s claims had on America. The first had an immediate change. He somewhat speculatively claimed that the number of Americans who believed there was a conspiracy to murder Kennedy “skyrocketed”, something that many still believe. As for the other effect, it “took 20 years”.
Coming back to Garrison, he spent the next decade writing the book, On The Trail Of The Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy. In the text, he names the “co-conspirators” in the plot as the CBI, FBI, Dallas PD, the Warren Commission, Secret Service, US Army, anti-Castro Cuban exiles and even the Navy pathologists who performed the autopsy on Kennedy.
Numerous publishers rejected the book before William Schaap and Ellen Ray of Sheridan Square Press eventually picked it up in 1988. It was noted that the couple had previously worked with CIA defector Phillip Agee in publishing Covert Action Information Bulletin – a magazine dedicated to exposing the CIA. Agee apparently had a hand from Russian intelligence per “KGB records” in his efforts, but according to Weiner, there is no evidence to link Schaap or Ray, both of whom are now dead, to Moscow.
On The Trail Of The Assassins became a hit. This is where it gets really fascinating and where Oliver Stone reappears. Weiner included a quote from Schaap, who allegedly once recalled, “at a film festival in Havana, we ran into Oliver Stone. And Ellen said to him, ‘Have I got a property for you!’ Because we knew he was an assassination freak, we gave him an advance copy of the book…. Of course, Oliver Stone won’t admit to any of this!”
As concluded by Weiner, JFK and its spiritual sequel are embellished versions of Jim Garrison’s “delusions”. Stone’s 1991 movie also convinced more of the public that there was an extensive conspiracy behind JFK’s assassination. Ultimately though, as everything to do with the incident is so oblique and blurred by subjective readings, all, including Weiner’s account, is up for debate. After all, Oliver Stone does say in JFK Revisited: “conspiracy theories are now conspiracy facts”.
