My Conversation With Flemming Rose

Danish free speech advocate talks about new developments in the JFK story

JFK Facts contributor Ryan Carter helped prepare this article and translation.

When Flemming Rose asked me for an interview, I readily agreed.

I recalled his name as the Danish editor and free speech advocate who published a controversial series of cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad in the Copenhagen daily Jyland-Posten and other European newspapers in 2005. The series was intended to vindicate the important principle that a certain religion cannot claim to be sacrosanct in secular media, which I thought was a provocative way of making a sound point. (Most U.S. papers declined to participate.)

Our conversation was long and engaged, and Rose has written a good account of it. I hope a similarly incisive editor of a major news organization will soon publish a series of cartoons about Israeli apartheid. That would update Rose’s point from 2005 for today’s news cycle (and those “free speech” advocates who seem to have forgotten it).

Rose published this article in his publication Frihedsbrevet (The Freedom Newsletter). It is reprinted here in its entirety, with very light editing on the translation. (Translation by Google)

New information in the case of the assassination of John F. Kennedy

By Flemming Rose

These days it is 60 years since the so-called Warren Commission presented its 888-page report on the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The commission, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded that Kennedy had been assassinated by 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald and that he was alone in the crime. The commission also determined that the man who killed Oswald two days later while in police custody also acted alone. His name was Jack Ruby.

On this occasion, I have spoken to one of America's leading investigative journalists, Jefferson Morley, who has covered the case for the past 30 years. Today, everything suggests that neither Oswald nor Ruby acted on their own, and contrary to what was claimed at the time, the two knew each other. And behind it all lies the CIA.

Have fun.

Illustration by Flemming Rose

News on X

Just over a week ago, the American excavation journalist Jefferson Morley noted the following on his X profile:

“I have news. I have now covered the story of the assassination of JFK for three decades. Next week I will publish a revelation that will drive a stake through and thwart the authorities' 60-year-old explanation for the murder.”

Morley added: "I think this is the most important JFK story I've ever done."

Morley was referring to one of the greatest murder mysteries of the 20th Century, the Nov. 22, 1963, shooting death of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas while he and his wife were driving through the city in an open car.

On the same day, American police arrested a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been in the building from which Kennedy was shot. Oswald apparently sympathized with both the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro's Cuba, but he never got to be questioned, as he was killed two days later by a man named Jack Ruby, a nightclub manager with ties to the Mafia, who had met Oswald several times in in connection with activities aimed at the Castro regime in Cuba, although the initial congressional investigation concluded that the two had never met.

Not just any journalist

Jefferson Morley's announcement that he had news on the Kennedy assassination caught my curiosity, since Morley is not just any journalist. He has been covering the case since 1994 and has an in-depth knowledge of the CIA.

He is also the author of acclaimed biographies of three former top CIA officers who helped define American intelligence in the first decades after the establishment of the CIA in 1947. Working on those careers has given Morley deep insight into how the agency's top management thinks and acts.

It concerns Winston Scott (1909–1971), who was the CIA's station chief in Mexico from 1956 to 1971, and thus also when Lee Harvey Oswald visited the country a few weeks before the assassination of Kennedy. Immediately after the second World War, Scott was the CIA's first station chief in London and was later given responsibility for all of Western Europe. During his time in Mexico, Scott recruited as many as three Mexican presidents and served as the United States' local statesman.

Morley's second biography is about James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987), who was the head of American counterintelligence for more than 20 years and, according to Morley, one of the most powerful men in the United States in the second half of the 20th Century, although he was never chosen for anything [by vote].

Angleton began his espionage career in Italy, where he manipulated Italian politics behind the scenes with the aim of preventing a communist takeover, and in Italy, Angleton also realized that it can be valuable for an intelligence service to establish contacts with the mafia in order to be able to draw on its expertise and connections.

It was an experience Angleton benefited from when he returned home to the United States and had to monitor and fight internal enemies. As is well known, the mafia played tricks behind the scenes behind the assassination of Kennedy, but also in the years after, when one important witness after another died under mysterious circumstances or was liquidated.

Red ghosts

Angleton was obsessed with the idea of Soviet moles in the CIA, and his obsession, according to Morley, was ruining the CIA because the spy chief saw ghosts everywhere. It was because he had allowed himself to be ensnared by the British agent Kim Philby, who he had given access to America's deepest secrets, whereupon Philby ended up fleeing to Moscow as the ground began to burn beneath him, after Philby had for years provided KGB with American-British secrets.

Finally, a few years ago Morley published his biography of the former CIA chief Richard Helms (1913–2002), who headed the service from 1966 to 1973, i.e. under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Helms was directly responsible for several CIA-sponsored assassinations of foreign politicians, and he was the only CIA chief ever convicted of lying to Congress under oath.

Morley says of his biographies:

“All three men were involved in different ways in the events of 1963. And I always wondered who cares about my private conspiracy theories. On the other hand, it was interesting to find out what a man like Win Scott thought. He was an insider and was directly involved in the power game, so working on the three biographies gave me a better understanding of the context of the Kennedy assassination and how people inside the CIA understood it and what they knew about Oswald.”

Got to know the CIA in Central America

Morley has a long career as an investigative reporter and editor for the Washington Post, The New Republic and The Nation. On a daily basis, he manages a website entitled JFK Facts, which he has had since 2012, i.e. the year before the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, which is now available on Substack. Morley is also vice president of The Mary Ferrell Foundation, which collects and analyzes historical documents with a critical eye on a series of political assassinations in the 1960s, as well as on Watergate and its aftermath, where there are many episodes of abuse of the intelligence service.

Morley began his journalistic career in the 1980s covering the CIA's role in Cuba and in civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

He elaborates:

“That was my entrance into the CIA, not the assassination of Kennedy. I felt it was in the past, and I had no sources in the CIA, had nothing to add, but in 1992, Congress passed a law following Oliver Stone's film JFK, which required the authorities to release all documents related to the case . It sounded to me like a gold mine of good stories. I already knew quite a bit about the CIA, its history and crimes, but for me it wasn't about unraveling the conspiracy that Stone presented in his film, more about finding a lot of good stories.”

All documents were to be released

The 1992 law required the authorities to make all documents available no later than 25 years later, i.e. in 2017, but both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have agreed to a request from the CIA and FBI to continue to keep a small 4,000 documents behind lock and key, even if it contradicts the adopted law. This has been done with reference to the protection of methods and national security.

Following Morley's announcement of a new exposé on the JFK assassination, I connected with him through a mutual friend and was given the opportunity to see the exposé before it was published last week, whereupon I interviewed Morley about his years of digging into the JFK mystery , which, among many things, resulted in a 16-year legal battle with the CIA over access to files relating to Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. Morley is convinced that the key to solving the Kennedy assassination lies in the CIA's files on Oswald.

Disclosure of a secret CIA report

Morley's latest revelation has two elements: First, he can share the contents of an internal CIA report from the late 1970s that shows the CIA deliberately tried to mislead Congress in its efforts to get to the bottom of the case about the Kennedy assassination. The revelation is based on an anonymous whistleblower from the CIA, who had access to the report and read it, and who, according to other of Morley's sources, both had a security clearance, years of experience in the CIA in finding documents and access to the CIA's secret archives.

What the whistleblower says

“It was a plan on how to keep things hidden from the public and how to prevent the investigative committee set up by Congress from seeing documents that could incriminate parts of the state apparatus. The CIA conducted an investigation to determine whether they had succeeded in misleading the American public about the Kennedy assassination, and they concluded that the lie had worked.”

The investigative committee referred to was set up by Congress in 1976 to reopen the investigation into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, after it had emerged that the CIA had previously been directly involved in assassinations or assassination attempts on foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rene Schneider of Chile and Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam.

After three years of investigation, the congressional committee concluded that there had been more than one shooter behind the assassination of Kennedy and that the president had been caught in the crossfire and killed as part of a conspiracy, but that the perpetrators could not be identified. In other words, the congressional committee denied the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald had to have acted alone and that he was the only shooter.

CIA sabotage

According to Morley, the CIA sabotaged the committee's work in at least two ways. First, in 1978 the CIA sent a liaison officer to the committee to assist with the investigation and answer questions. His name was George Joannides, and the CIA failed to inform the committee that he had served in the CIA's Miami office in 1963, that is, immediately before and after the assassination of Kennedy, and here he had been the lead officer for a Cuban student group that in the in the first hours after Kennedy's assassination, propaganda spread that proclaimed Oswald the perpetrator and linked him to Castro and Cuba. It was a successful operation, because the next day that very angle filled the American media.

Morley notes:

"It was the first conspiracy theory about the assassination of JFK, and it was planned and funded by the CIA."

But when the congressional committee asked Joannides who was responsible for this student group, he said nothing about his own role in the affair.

The CIA also used the same trick in the first commission set up to find the truth, the so-called Warren Commission, which concluded in the autumn of 1964 that Oswald was the murderer and had acted on his own. At that time, the intelligence service had succeeded in getting the CIA's godfather and former director, Allen Dulles, placed on the commission. Dulles had been fired three years earlier by President Kennedy for his role in the so-called Bay of Pigs operation, which was supposed to have overthrown Fidel Castro in an invasion with the help of exiled Cubans, but which ended in total failure.

The CIA took pictures of Oswald

The CIA's second deception of the congressional committee involved Oswald's visit to Mexico in September 1963, where he bypassed both the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic missions, ostensibly to apply for a visa. The committee wanted to know what the CIA knew about it and whether photographs or films existed of Oswald's visits to the embassies of the two socialist countries. The CIA denied it, but it was a lie. The CIA had taken pictures of Oswald as he came and went, and this brings us to the second element of Morley's disclosure, namely that his source in a secret CIA archive outside Washington a few years ago came across a box of film, on which was written "Oswald in Mexico City" or "Oswald in Mexico" accompanied by a date, September 1963, i.e. exactly the material that the said congressional committee inquired about from the CIA back in 1978, but which the CIA denied to be in possession of.

As far as Jefferson Morley's latest news about the assassination of John F. Kennedy: I then asked him about his work on the case, what the status of the investigation is, whether we will ever get the full truth, whether the CIA is a different organization today than it was in Kennedy's time, and about the unsolved murder and [which] parts of the CIA's possible involvement in the murder [are] relevant to the political situation in America today.

From conspiracy to bureaucratic secrets

You wrote on X a few days ago that you think this is the most important JFK story you have done. Why is that?

“This story brings together several parts of my coverage of the case. The story of George Joannides; of CIA chief in Mexico, Win Scott; and Oswald, and my first interview in the JFK case in 1994 with former CIA officer Jane Roman, who, according to released documents, knew about Oswald and his activities before the Kennedy assassination. The new revelation moves the JFK story out of the conspiracy universe, which is often the preferred angle, and into a new framework where we look at it through the covert operations of the bureaucracy. What did the CIA do when dealing with events and people connected to the assassination? In this story, I mean you are brought into the CIA for the first time. This is the first time we have a JFK whistleblower inside the CIA who has access to information that no one outside can access. And we see that the story that the CIA told the Warren Commission in 1964, that they knew almost nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald, was a false story. We can now establish without a doubt that it was a deliberately false story.”

The CIA's deliberate intention to mislead

What does it cover?

“We're getting insight into things in the CIA, we're seeing constant operational activities around Lee Harvey Oswald, and we're seeing that the CIA has not shared everything they know. I find it particularly interesting that the whistleblower's narrative suggests that the CIA is hiding a document that shows a deliberate intent to mislead the Congressional investigation. It is consistent with my own coverage, the story of George Joannides, and how the CIA in the 1970s misled Congressional investigations, so we have yet another case of the CIA as an institution deliberately blocking the release of information about the alleged killer that they [are] in possession of — an alleged murderer who denied his guilt. I think it shows us something important without answering who assassinated Kennedy. It shows a pattern of facts.”

What do you mean?

“It shows us a far more complex reality than the story of a killer who acted alone. I'm often asked by reporters if the CIA wasn't just monitoring Oswald and seriously botched it when he ended up assassinating the president without them intervening, and so it's embarrassing for the CIA and they've been trying to hide their mistake — CYA, Cover Your Ass. In other words, a bureaucratic error that can happen to anyone — negligence. That's one way of looking at it.”

"The alternative is that it is suspicious what is going on, that it is bad and criminal, and I am leaning toward that. I do not believe that the CIA acted negligently in this matter. That presupposes a level of incompetence that is uncharacteristic of the CIA. The CIA is not an incompetent organization. That is why I find this story important. It brings clarity to the JFK story, lifts it from the domain of conspiracy theories to a domain where it's about what the CIA actually did in 1963.”

Kennedy came across his enemies

What is the status of the official version of the assassination of Kennedy?

“There is the Warren Commission of 1964 and the Congressional committee of 1979, which reached different conclusions. The first said that Oswald was the killer and that [he acted] alone. The other concluded that Kennedy was killed in crossfire as part of a conspiracy, but the culprits could not be identified. Both investigations were shaped by the CIA's obstruction of access to crucial information about the CIA and Oswald. Opinion in the U.S. has changed. Today, a majority believes that more than one person was involved in the murder, but there is no consensus.”

Why is uncovering what happened then and who assassinated Kennedy important to the current political situation in the United States? I heard you say that.

“I believe it was Kennedy's enemies in his own government who assassinated him because they felt threatened by his policies. After the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Kennedy was troubled by the idea that he had been on the verge of waging a nuclear war that he did not want, so in 1963 Kennedy's foreign policy course took a new turn. He refused to invade Cuba during the 1962 crisis, and he refused again the following year. He does so contrary to what most of his security advisers suggest. They wanted an invasion. He also withdrew his support for anti-Castro rebels in the spring of 1963. He supported a new civil rights law and in June 1963 gave a sensational speech calling for the peaceful coexistence of different political systems. He thus distanced himself from Pax Americana (the idea of peace in the West governed by the USA, ed.).”

“At that point, Kennedy's enemies realized that he was making fundamental changes. He wanted to pull the United States out of Cold War conflicts in Vietnam and Cuba, and he wanted to enter into nuclear disarmament agreements with the Soviet Union. He wanted to end the Cold War, and he was both an effective politician and popular. When Kennedy was assassinated, no one was held accountable in what you might call the national security faction of the government. I believe that this is one of the reasons why we have pursued such an aggressive foreign policy. Not since Kennedy have we had a president who did not want to impose Pax Americana on the rest of the world.”

The CIA is still powerful

And why is it relevant today?

"Because there are consequences when people get away with this sort of thing without being held accountable. And the faction that supports regime change, covert operations, and the like has never lost their influence in the U.S. government in the 60 years since Kennedy's assassination, and their influence is still enormous. The CIA is an extremely powerful organization, and they also got their way with two presidents as different as Trump and Biden, who complied with the demand not to release the last documents that could shed light on the Kennedy assassination.”

I also read that you link all the conspiracy theories surrounding the recent assassination attempts on Trump to the unsolved Kennedy assassination and all the unanswered questions.

“Yes, the authorities have not presented a credible explanation for the assassination of Kennedy, and the public has found that it has been misled. Take a concept like false flag operation (a situation where an event or action is staged by one group or government to make it look like it was carried out by another group or government, ed.). Nowadays everything is a false flag operation. The Super Bowl is a false flag operation. Hurricane Helene is a false flag operation. Well, where did that idea come from?”

Operation Northwoods

Yes, where does it come from?

"Americans really heard about false flag operations in 1997, when authorities released a trove of documents related to Operation Northwoods, where the public got detailed knowledge for the first time of how the top military leadership planned a false flag operation in 1963 to justify an invasion of Cuba. It was to be done by organizing spectacular attacks on American citizens and targets in the United States and blaming the enemy. Kennedy rejected the plan, but it was recommended by the top military leadership, so we are in the predicament that the authorities have discredited themselves, and therefore an information vacuum can be filled with anything.”

Do you think Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy?

"No. He may well have fired a shot that day, but he was not the intellectual author of the assassination of Kennedy. The president was assassinated by his enemies in the government.”

What do you mean?

"I believe that Oswald was what he said himself: A patsy and a scapegoat."

The Oswald archive is key

You have said on several occasions that the Oswald archive is the key to the story behind the Kennedy assassination, what do you mean by that?

“It concerns the 42 different documents that the authorities had on Oswald when Kennedy was assassinated. There are reports from the State Department and the FBI. There are CIA reports documenting Oswald's movements from his escape to the Soviet Union in 1959 to the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963. The CIA knew who he was, especially a handful of people at the top of the CIA who followed him closely. They knew everything about him. They had, contrary to what later CIA Director Richard Helms claimed to Congress, maximum knowledge of his doings and actions. They knew about his political views, his private life, that he beat his wife, his foreign contacts, they read his letters. They knew that in New Orleans he had been in fights with Cubans financed by the CIA. They knew he had been in contact with a KGB officer in Mexico City. It was CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton who directed it.”

Was Oswald a CIA agent?

In a popular podcast from November 2023, 'Who Killed JFK,’ in which you appear yourself, which attempts to answer who assassinated JFK, it is alleged that Oswald was in fact sent to Moscow by the CIA to fake an escape. What do you think about it?

“It's hard to say when you look at his case file. It is true that the CIA had a look at Oswald before he went to the Soviet Union, so it is possible, and one becomes suspicious when everything is still kept secret.”

“The CIA had a program, Redskin, where they let legal travelers go to the Eastern Bloc. Oswald's entry into the Soviet Union piques one's curiosity. He was 20 years old, had dropped out of high school, but knew exactly where to get a quick visa to Moscow – Helsinki was pretty much the only place that could do it. If Oswald had gone to London, Berlin or Paris, he would not have progressed. And the Finnish authorities have recently released their information about Oswald's entry and exit, and it turns out that the Finnish security service does not know how he got into the country. If you travel by plane, train or ferry, you get a stamp on a piece of paper in your passport, but there is none of that on Oswald.

“Was it a staged escape? Maybe, but I think of it as a spectrum, whether he was helped along the way or not, he was treated exceptionally when he came to the Soviet Union. He was not treated as a security risk by the United States. You don't see anyone in his case asking: Is he red? Which would have been a legitimate question, but the CIA knows that he offered to give the Soviet authorities information about his time at a top-secret American base in Japan. It would have been a goldmine for Moscow and a clear violation of U.S. law, but the CIA is not following through on it. Oswald is not treated as a threat; he is seen as an asset.”

Radio silence among the critics

After the broadcast of the podcast I mentioned, you pointed out that, unlike in the past, there is now surprisingly little controversy about the hypothesis that people from the CIA were involved in the Kennedy assassination, and you called for fact-checking of yourself and the podcast . Has anything happened on that front?

“There is total radio silence. No one has called or written to me. I invited all the old critics to point out where I am wrong. They don't want to get into the debate that I have a point about the CIA and the Kennedy assassination, because they don't want to go down that road. It is absurd, but I can only see the silence as a confirmation of what I have said.”

Is it also a rehabilitation of Oliver Stone's film about the assassination of Kennedy, even though it is fiction? After all, he has been branded a conspiracy theorist.

“I will put it this way: The evidence that has come to light since his film, and that it helped bring to the public, has strengthened the things Oliver Stone is saying about the film. In 1991, when the film was broadcast, and until the release of the entire Oswald archive in 2020, there was little support for the claim that the CIA was interested in Lee Harvey Oswald. Now it is a documented fact. And Oliver Stone knew nothing about Operation Northwoods when he made his film, but it was a classic example of a government conspiracy in an anti-democratic spirit, which the film focuses on.”

The CIA manipulated Oswald

You have said that Oswald was manipulated by the CIA. What do you mean by that?

"Now we are talking about what I think, not what I can document, but to me Operation Northwoods looks like a template for the assassination of Kennedy, that is, the idea of staging a spectacular incident in order to blame Cuba, so that [the U.S.] could wage the war against Cuba that the CIA and the Pentagon wanted, where we had massive military superiority, so they just lacked a legitimate reason to go to war. Then on Nov. 22, 1963, we get this spectacular violent incident in the United States, the president is assassinated, and CIA agents immediately start blaming Cuba, so you can see that as a template.”

“But then things start to go wrong. Oswald is captured alive and he denies having done it. If Oswald had disappeared or been killed, then they would have had their Cuba conspiracy, and the soil would have been fertilized with these CIA operations and the surveillance of Oswald. But he was captured alive, and therefore the CIA was faced with a hell of a problem, if he started talking and all the CIA ops he'd stumbled upon over the years might have come into play.

And that's why Oswald knew he was in mortal danger after the assassination of Kennedy. He went home and got a firearm and maybe killed a cop and hid in a movie theater where he was apprehended, and he is then murdered while in police custody after telling the press that he is a patsy, a naive fool and scapegoat. Oswald's actions after the assassination are consistent with his own claim that he was a patsy. And when you look at all the CIA activity around him, it becomes even more plausible.”

Who fired the fatal shot?

In the podcast “Who Killed JFK?” four perpetrators are mentioned, people from the CIA, the mafia and Cubans with a burning hatred for Fidel Castro. You have said that they should have refrained from making that claim, and then added that it was probably only one of the four who fired shots at Kennedy that day. Who were you thinking of?

“Herminio Diaz Garcia, a Cuban sharpshooter, assassin and member of a militant group that carried out acts of terror to fight Castro's rule. People around him believed that he was the one who had fired the fatal shot at Kennedy in Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Several people who knew him have said so, and he was killed in 1966 during a mission in Cuba where he had directly told the CIA that he wanted to assassinate Castro. Was he actually at Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963? I can't prove that, but of the four mentioned and in light of everything we know about them, Herminio Diaz Garcia is the case where the amount of evidence reaches a level where I would say: Yes, I believe that it could be him.”

The most important case file

There are still some 4,000 documents related to the JFK assassination that have not yet been released. If you could choose, which document would you most like to have access to?

"George Joannides' personal file. He was chief of covert operations at the CIA's Miami station in 1963 and lead officer of a Cuban student group. In Joannides’ file there are a lot of documents from 1963 and 1964 about operations in Miami and New Orleans, where Oswald was living, and the Warren Commission was trying to find out what was going on in New Orleans with the Cuban groups. Next, there will be information about 1978, when Joannides was appointed CIA liaison officer to the congressional committee investigating the Kennedy assassination.

The documents relate to Joannides' intelligence methods and his cover-up in 1963, during which his agents had contact with Oswald and produced propaganda about Oswald. I believe that both the intelligence methods and the cover-up are directly relevant to the Kennedy assassination. I believe it was a covert operation, exploiting Oswald in some way that has never been revealed. And I think these classified documents will show that. And based on the information the CIA had about Oswald, they could manipulate him. However, I don't think those documents will identify a killer, but they will reveal details of the relationship between Oswald and the CIA, and that Oswald was a target, and when you had a lot of intelligence on him, you could manipulate him and get him to to do things. That is basically what covert intelligence operations are all about.”

So the story that Oswald was a communist and supported Castro, and therefore had an interest in assassinating Kennedy?

“Yes, all the information about Oswald as a Castro supporter was generated as a result of his meetings and clashes with the Cuban student group that the CIA funded and managed, so that network goes into action immediately after the assassination of Kennedy and spreads the propaganda that Kennedy was assassinated by a Castro supporter.”

Will we ever get the full truth?

Do you think the public will ever get the full picture of what happened around the Kennedy assassination?

“Yes, I think so. I think with the change of times people change their view of major historical events and it doesn't happen because you find a smoking gun. It is like Thomas Kuhn's theory about the structure of scientific revolutions, where paradigm shifts occur when you go from one way of thinking about the world to another. In those cases, a radical break occurs, and when it does, it has been a long time coming, even if we don't notice it.

In the story of the assassination of JFK, I tend to compare with the long debate about Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Did the third president of the United States have a relationship with this woman who was his property? It was the big sex scandal surrounding the election in 1800, and it has been debated ever since. If you had claimed 50 years ago that Jefferson had had an affair with one of his female slaves, coerced or not, 95 percent of the pundits, The New York Times, Harvard professors, opinion makers, and everyone would those whose judgments were taken seriously have said it was a ridiculous story. One would say that it was anti-American propaganda and gossip, i.e. a conspiracy theory. Today, the situation is exactly the opposite. Today, 95 percent of all experts say that Jefferson had a relationship with his slave.

Paradigm shift

What has happened? In my opinion, three things have happened which have turned the consensus on its head. Firstly, the civil rights revolution in the 1960s. It was well known that Sally Hemings had a relationship with Jefferson. Her family said so, and occasionally it became a story in a newspaper. It was known, but it was constantly dismissed with reference to the fact that it was just black people who should not be taken seriously. That began to change with the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, when historians began to question whether Hemings should be listened to. So there was a change of attitude. That was the first. Next, new evidence began to emerge. People went back to the stories that had been told before, and thirdly, there was a technological breakthrough. In the 1990s DNA testing was done and it showed that descendants of Hemings had the same DNA as Jefferson, and he was the only one in his family who had been close to Hemings during her five pregnancies.

So these paradigm shifts in our understanding are happening as a result of new attitudes, new evidence and new technology. As for the assassination of Kennedy, we already have new positions. People recognize that the CIA could have done something along those lines, and we have new evidence like Operation Northwoods that came to public knowledge in 1997, and finally we have the new technology of the Internet and databases that can organize, retrieve and analyze information.

We have much better capacity now, so I think the same will happen with the JFK assassination debate as with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. At some point it will become clear that the official story is false and that another story is true. I can't say when it will happen, but I think it will happen.”

The original Danish version of this article can be viewed here: frihedsbrevet.dk