The 2nd bullet is called the "head shot". This is the bullet that , almost instantaneously, killed Kennedy; both official and unofficial versions concur on this point. The government contends, however, that the bullet entered from the back of the head and came out the front. One of the problems with the government theory is that their version of where the bullet struck keeps moving about the skull. Statements by doctors, generals and politicians over the years have placed this bullet as far down as the hairline at the back of the neck, and as far up as the crown of the head; photographs , also, have appeared and disappeared at different times to substantiate these claims.
The 3rd shot, in both official and unofficial versions, was a misfire that wounded James Tague.
Motives (ii) and (iii) sit quite well together in the government accounts. Attempts are rarely made to reconcile them.( In fact it came out several times during the conference, that the stark contradictions in these "motives" indicate a high degree of in-fighting at the level of the intelligence agencies and associated right-wing groups: should Oswald be painted as a KGB agent, thereby risking a call for war with the Soviet Union; or sold to the public as a lone nut to draw attention away from the true architects of the assassination, his employers in the CIA, DIA etc.? )
Jack Ruby, the government contends, was also a victim of "creeping schizophrenia". Ruby is pictured as an irate taxpayer who went bonkers from the knowledge that somebody murdered his president, then got himself a gun and killed the bastard.
This , with minor variations, ( such as the wanderings of the head, throat and back wounds to accomodate the critics ), is the official version of the Warren Commision. It is the same one that was maintained, with important reservations, by the House Select Committee of Assassinations's report of 1979, and it is the view promulgated this very week, 30 years later, by NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Time, Life, Newsweek, the major dailies and every other mainstream media medium.
The consensus opinion maintains that at least 5 bullets were fired that afternoon in Dealey Plaza . (Robert Groden in his two hour presentation analyzed the Zapruder film, frame-by-frame, to show the evidence that 7 bullets had been fired. ) I refer once again to the Theresa Seay for the 'minimal ' picture:
The atmosphere of the macabre peaked in intensity on Saturday afternoon, as we gazed at this utterly hideous frame in the Zapruder film, which shows the blood, brains and skull flaps bursting from Kennedy's head and covering the field of vision. Using a laser pointer Bob Groden moved our attention from place to place :"You see - this shows that - and over here we see that....." .
Most of the medical personell at Parkland Hospital who saw the body when it was brought in have testified that this bullet exited from the back of the head, leaving a small wound that is clearly visible even in the autopsy photographs. They do not base their opinions on these photographs however, which have clearly been tampered with it every imaginable way.
The picture of his relations to the KGB is still extremely murky. His "defection" to Russia in 1959 was almost certainly a espionage gambit orchestrated by American intelligence agencies. What is still very unclear are the reasons why the Russians allowed him to stay. His request for asylum in the U.S.S.R. was granted at the highest level, by Mikoyan and Khrushchev . Some evidence was presented to suggest that his mission involved sensitive negociations between the Russian and the American agencies, so that he functioned as a middleman. There was even some speculation that he may have told the Russians enough to shoot down and capture Gary Powers in the U-2 incident of May, 1961.
The argument for this goes as follows: Both the CIA and the KGB had a stake in keeping the Cold War alive. They were thus natural allies in schemes designed to sabotage detente or any form of rapprochement between Kennedy and Khrushchev. The U-2 incident was serious enough to rupture any negociations, however cautious, that may have been going on at the time. It is known that Oswald was stationed for a while at the U-2 base in Atsugi, Japan and that he was privy to classified information. Gary Powers himself accused Oswald of betraying him.
If Lee Harvey Oswald was so intimately connected with espionage, and if these same agencies are being fingered today as its architects , it is almost impossible to believe that Oswald was completely clean with respect to the planning and preparations for the Kennedy assassination. The Garrison model, which makes Oswald out to be a 'patsy', 'sheep-dipped' by the CIA as a scapegoat , was not endorsed by everyone. The disturbing truth is, that Oswald was so sinister in his own right, that one has no difficulty at all in seeing him as a candidate for one of the assassins. One must turn to the large amount of circumstantial evidence available to conclude that he did not actually pull the trigger.
As to the motives for the assassination, the consensus opinion of the Research Community, as expressed at this conference, is:
It is unfortunate that at the same time that JFK was attacking the CIA and RFK was attacking the Mafia, these two groups were forging alliances and combining resources to work together in areas that were of mutual interest to them: gun-running, drug smuggling, overthrowing Castro, controlling South America. The first collaborations of the CIA and the MOB appear to have been in connection with the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954.
There was also a consensus in the Research Community over at least 3 people believed to be the persons most directly involved in setting up and carrying out the assassination:
This, as I have said, was the consensus opinion. Other suggested factors were : the role of LBJ ; persons in or around Washington with fascist convictions or connections, such as the right-wing fanatic lawyer Robert Morris ; J. Edgar Hoover, certainly implicated in the destruction of important evidence; the vindictive Allen Dulles, smarting from the humiliation of being cashiered by JFK after the Bay of Pigs ; certain generals angry with JFK for one reason or another and threatened to kill him; other mobsters such as Hoffa, Trafficante, Giancana; an OAS mercenary from Algeria named de Soutre ; and a certain Baron George de Mohrenschildt, a very mysterious figure with links to the CIA and the KGB, who was probably involved in setting Oswald up for the fall guy.