is often used by the CIA and
its allies. As John Newman noted in Oswald and the CIA, the
Agency tried to discredit its own asset June Cobb in the wake of
the Kennedy assassination. It did the same to Sylvia Duran, Cuban
embassy worker in Mexico City who talked to Oswald or an
impersonator in 1963. In Probe (Vol. 4 No. 4, p. 9) we have seen
how journalist (and CIA-applicant) Hugh Aynesworth and the New
York Herald Tribune tried to smear Mark Lane with compromising
photographs. If one goes to New Orleans, one will still meet
those who say that Jim Garrison indicted Clay Shaw because he was
himself gay and jealous of Shaw's position in the homosexual
underworld. And we all know how the FBI tried to drive King to
suicide by blackmailing him with clandestinely made "sex tapes."
The Church Committee
What precipitated these posthumous and personal attacks on the
Kennedys? Something happened in the seventies that necessitated
the "second assassination" from the right - i.e. the use of
scandal to stamp out Kennedy's reputation and legacy. That
something was the Church Committee. Belated revelations about the
CIA's role in Watergate, and later of the CIA's illegal domestic
operations created a critical firestorm demanding a full-scale
investigation of the CIA. The fallout from Watergate had produced
large Democratic majorities in both houses of congress via the
1974