The Decadent Worker

SORRY, WRONG LEON

“There was no Castro involvement in the Kennedy killing to the best of my knowledge. If so, it was very indirect. That is, those who wished to curry favor with Castro might have got in it for this reason. This would be the Mafia. They want to get the gambling going again in Cuba. The Mafia gambling joints are in top shape and ready to go. They have caretakers and were undamaged during the ‘revolution.’” — Co-man Ra (9/15/76 letter to KWT)

My respect for Co-man Ra’s expertise on the JFK murder is related to his ability to furnish logical explanations for evidence which otherwise makes little sense. Take, for example, the Second Oswald cases. As one of the people suspected by Warren Report critics of impersonating Lee Oswald just prior to the assassination, I’ve thought more about this subject than many.

These impersonations were exceptionally crude or inept — therefore seeming hardly the work of professionals who could, on the other hand, insure that even the U.S. Government and media would cover up their crime. How would anyone smart enough to get Earl Warren to furnish them an alibi, so to speak, be stupid enough to try to incriminate Oswald before the fact with: individuals using his name who drove cars when Oswald could not drive; impersonators who were older and heavier than Oswald and, most puzzling, why did one of the two impersonators who actually looked something like Lee Oswald insist upon calling himself, instead, Leon Oswald?

Co-man Ra said the crude Oswald impersonations were the work of people within the conspiracy who wanted the truth to come out. For that to happen, the complacent and trusting American public had to be sensitized to the reality of conspiracies. In order to accomplish that, the framing of Oswald was botched by means of overproduction and deliberate ineptitude.

Within a few years of accepting this explanation, I came to realize that fake names are seldom selected among intelligence professionals randomly — especially when they are trying to expose operations in which they are involved. So the next question was: Who was Leon? Probably one of the higher-ups in the conspiracy.

Having by the early eighties gone through a number of convoluted experiences regarding JFK murder studies at the hands of nominal Marxists, among others, the notion of Communist involvement no longer seemed the manifest absurdity it once had. My reading of Murrow’s Betrayal and the Hugh McDonald books, Appointment in Dallas and LBJ and the JFK Conspiracy, lent weight to such a hypothesis. Among serious scholars of JFK’s death, these volumes are not reputable. In substance they are deemed bogus confessions. Among conspirators themselves the first is rumored to be the work of the Illuminati while the other two are said to represent David Rockefeller’s version. What I found convincing about them, notwithstanding, was how much they resembled in content my own assassination-connected experiences. There was present a ring of truth, a certain atmosphere I recognized, not to be found in the more abstract works. If they were disinformation jobs, it was still the disinformation of those who knew what they were talking about. Betrayal says JFK was killed to keep him from learning that Soviet missiles had never actually been removed from Cuba. Appointment and LBJ say the assassination was instigated by the KGM, more or less further implying the CIA found out about it beforehand and either assisted or did not oppose.

As for the Leon mystery, nowhere in my assassinationology readings was it solved. Leon Trotsky? “Oswald Armed for Murder” is shown holding two copies of The Militant, a Trot newspaper. Note as well that the shadow under his nose fails to jibe with the shadow of his body on the ground. When confronted by the police with this photo, Oswald said it was obviously his head pasted on somebody else’s body. So it is possible somebody was trying to imply that Oswald was working for Trotskyists, or they were trying to smear the Trots who, in any case, were high on J. Edgar Hoover’s shitlist.

Then, circa 1981, I read a book called The U-2 Affair with a footnote that seemed to settle the Leon question. As I was to write in the October 1984 issue of The New Libertarian: “At the time of the events in Dallas, the Russian ambassador to Cuba was Sergei N. Kudryavtaev — arrested in Canada many years earlier for participating in the spy ring that stole the secret of the atom bomb from the U.S. at which time he operated under the code name, ‘Leon.’”

This opinion I also previously expressed over the air on KPFA in Berkeley on Doug Wellman’s “SubGenius Hour Radio Show (More Than an Hour, Less Than a Show).”

Any suspicion that I might have fallen in with the assassinations to begin with because I was the fair-haired destiny’s tot of Nazi eugenic plots, was as yet, far from my mind. And while this Leon theory seemed to contradict Co-man Ra’s opinion, it certainly coincided with what Brother-in-law said to me about the desirability of the war against an Asian race instead of against Caucasian Cuban Castillians.

Now although Sam Konkin, who publishes The New Libertarian, is rather too much the anarcho-capitalist for my Bakuninistic tastes, we are friends — and he has never made any secret of his connections with the Institute for Historical Review, with many of whose personnel and ex-personnel Sam is on good and close terms.

One of the reasons I dislike Konkin’s (and Ayn Rand’s) Austrian Economics is that they are so Austrian — part and parcel with them, almost inevitably, come the Holocaust Revisionist Historians who, if they are not practitioners of Hitler’s Big Lie Technique, sincerely believe Hitler was framed for a Holocaust that never was.

Enter Leon Number Three via the Klaus Barbie trial: one of Barbie’s closest post-war associated, also a friend of Otto (Werewolf) Skorzeny, was Belgian nationalist Nazi, Leon Degrelle. Says Charles Higham in American Swastika (p. 291f): “Leon Degrelle is still at it. He appears on the pages of The Journal for Historical Review, published in Torrance, California,” by the above-mentioned Institute. I blush to say, “which states among other things that the Holocaust was an invention of the Jews.” — Kerry Wendell Thornley

LANGUAGE IS THEFT/ Law and Order: A contradiction in terms.

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