Is Jefferson Morley a Conspiracy Theorist?

Unfortunately for Morley (who doesn't like the term), he now meets the textbook definition. Joseph Uscinski, a professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, has written extensively on the subject of conspiracies and is considered an expert. Uscinski writes that "Conspiracy theory is an explanation of past, present, or future events or circumstances that cites, as the primary cause, a conspiracy." These conspiracies "contradict the proclamations of epistemological authorities" (Uscinski, Conspiracy Theories: A Primer, p. 23). In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the Warren Commission, whose sole mandate was determining the facts of the case, is the primary recognized authority. However, other government entities have confirmed all or part of the commission's findings (or contributed to them) including the House Select Committee on Assassinations (see discussion of acoustics issues HERE), the Church Committee, the Clark Panel, the Rockefeller Commission, the FBI, and the Dallas Police.

But has Morley actually asserted a conspiracy?

Indeed he has. In the days when he was more careful with his words, Morley would say that Oswald "probably" killed JFK and implied that he did so unaided. But in his 2020 eBook Morley v. CIA (p. 67), he said that "JFK's enemies" "made Oswald a patsy for their crime." They did this with "covert psychological warfare schemes, like the AMSPELL [DRE] program." Morley has often said that he "has no theory" of the assassination. It is true that he (like nearly all JFK theorists) has offered no specific theory. There is good reason not to promote a specific JFK conspiracy theory. When you do, you end up with something like this. But Morley's numerous writings through the years have provided enough detail to roughly determine what he believes about the assassination.

What other JFK conspiracy theories has Morley supported?

Particularly in recent years, Morley has supported some of the more outlandish conspiracy claims. Here (in no particular order) are conspiracy theories Morley has supported or implied support for taken from his various writings. The links in the Morley quotes lead to refutations of the theories.

I'll start the list with several assertions Morley made regarding Antonio Veciana who claimed to have seen Lee Harvey Oswald with his "CIA handler" Maurice Bishop whom Veciana later identified as David Phillips. I wrote an entire book about Veciana's dubious claims which Morley wholeheartedly embraced upon release of Veciana's book in 2017.

"[Veciana's book] Trained to Kill is not another tinfoil hat Kennedy-conspiracy book...

"In the early 1960s, Antonio Veciana was the CIA's man in Havana."

"[Veciana] wreaked havoc on Fidel Castro's Communist regime, firebombing the capital's largest department store..."

"[Veciana] used his government position to distribute propaganda falsely announcing the government planned to take custody of school-age children.

"[Veciana] saw Maurice Bishop with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in September 1963, two months before JFK was killed.

"Fonzi arranged for an artist to do a drawing of Bishop based on Veciana's description."

"Fonzi then brought Veciana to Washington for a meeting with Phillips. Although he had worked with Veciana for a decade, Phillips coolly pretended not to know him."

"CIA documents show that AMSHALE-1 [Veciana] was a trusted militant in a network run by Phillips in the early 1960s."

"[Veciana's] account about a press conference in Washington in March 1963 to publicize an Alpha-66 attack checks out."

"With [Marie Fonzi] as my witness," [Veciana] writes, "I felt I could finally make public the secret that had been burning inside of me [that David Phillips was really Bishop] for all those years."

Now on to the general conspiracy theories that Morley has endorsed.

"Why would a pro-Castro activist put his headquarters in the same headquarters [allegedly 544 Camp Street in New Orleans] as the leading anti-Castro group in the country? Because he was a provocateur."

"[since the 1990s] We have learned about possible tampering with the photographic record of Kennedy's autopsy."

"[Stone in his film JFK Revisited] examines the story of the so-called “magic bullet, producing new evidence that the Warren Commission’s claim that one bullet caused seven wounds in Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally is factually unsupportable."

"[Stone in his film JFK Revisited] brings forward the long-ignored testimony of three women indicating that Oswald was almost certainly not on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository at the time he supposedly fired at the presidential motorcade."

"[Stone in his film JFK Revisited] highlights the sworn testimony of photo technician Saundra Spencer who testified she developed photographs of Kennedy’s head wound showing that he had been hit by a shot from the front, photos not found in the official record of JFK’s autopsy."

"Ricardo Morales, the Miami man who told his son he met accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in a CIA training camp, was considered a credible source by the Agency and FBI."

"... Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the doctors who tried to save JFK’s life, said ... the president’s head wound was caused by a shot from the front ..."

"...a man identifying himself as Lee Harvey Oswald appeared at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City applying for a visa to travel to Cuba." [Morley implies that it was someone other than Oswald at the consulate. But the evidence is overwhelming that the real Oswald was there].

"I recommend [Greg Wagner's] story 'Window Watchers' to anybody who wants to know more about what happened on November 22." [Wagner says "several [TSBD] witnesses experienced law enforcement officers altering or attempting to alter their statements. In some cases, witnesses were threatened and clearly intimidated into maintaining the government-sanctioned version of events"].

"[Joan Mellen's] portrait of Jim Garrison as a careless crusader is convincing and in the end moving."

In addition to his support of conspiracy theories created by others, Morley has spread his own misinformation unrelated (or loosely related) to the George Joannides-DRE matter. For instance, Morley is fond of saying something like this:

There are a lot of implausible theories about who killed President Kennedy. The notion that one man alone killed the president for no reason is one of them.

But just who claims this? Morley doesn't say because it is a straw man. While it is true that the Warren Commission chose not to "ascribe to [Oswald] any one motive or group of motives," they never said that Oswald "killed the president for no reason." They suspected (but could obviously never prove) Oswald was motivated by:

• His overriding hostility to his environment.
• His inability to establish meaningful relationships with other people.
• His discontentment with the world around him.
• His hatred for American society.
• His desire for a place in history.

These motives have been mentioned and elaborated on by numerous lone assassin advocates. I am unaware of any prominent proponent of the Oswald-did-it mindset who thinks he did it for no reason.

Morley has promoted the idea that the phrase "who shot John" or "who struck John" uttered by Nixon and Angleton is indicative of their guilty knowledge about the JFK murder. Fred Litwin has now debunked this notion.

But possibly the whopper of them all from Morley is found in his eBook Morley v. CIA, "The likelihood that there was a conspiracy, that the killing was not the work of a lone assassin, remains the conclusion best informed by the preponderance of the publicly available evidence." But this proclamation goes against the findings of the Warren Commission, the HSCA, several other government investigations, the FBI, the Dallas police and several meticulously researched best selling books such as Reclaiming History, Case Closed and Marina and Lee. Each of the books mentioned contain a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. Understanding his life is the key to understanding what really happened to JFK.

Was Morley always a conspiracy theorist?

Perhaps not and if so that is the tragedy here. Morley's original public position was that his interest was in having the rest of the records in the JFK Collection released so that everyone could make an informed judgment about the JFK case. It is impossible to know if this was his driving interest in the assassination or if he believed in a conspiracy all along. But one thing is certain. From the mid-nineties to about 2007 or so, Morley's views as publicly expressed were much more tempered. Because of this and his position with the Post, Morley was respected by leaders of the "lone assassin" contingent and given the benefit of the doubt (possibly when he shouldn't have been). It should be noted that it may not be a coincidence that Morley's views on the assassination became more radical after he left the Post in 2007.

In the endnotes for his landmark book Reclaiming History, author Vincent Bugliosi, who had a series of informal debates with Morley via phone calls and letters circa 2005, wrote that Morley was a "fair-minded and responsible writer" and "a fine writer." Bugliosi also wrote that "Morley is not a conspiracy theorist and he is not about to knowingly (although he has done so unknowingly) state something that the evidence does not support."

Another "lone assassin" advocate who respected Morley was the late professor John McAdams of Marquette University. McAdams welcomed Morley's contributions to his (now inactive) alt.assassination.jfk newsgroup and gave him a wide berth. He also published Morley's article "What Jane Roman Said" on his website calling Morley's approach "responsible and sober." Even by 2013 when it became apparent that Morley was less careful with his rhetoric and drifting toward conspiracy theories, McAdams still wrote that "Most everybody applauds [Morley's efforts to get records released]." Additionally, McAdams joined 23 others as a signatory in a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books in 2005. This letter called for the release of "all relevant records on the activities of George Joannides" a cause which Morley has been promoting for years.

In 2008, McAdams wrote in an Internet post to Morley, "I'll certainly see that Marquette's library has a copy [of Morley's book Our Man in Mexico], and put it on my list of books that my students can write a report on."

By 2017, an increasingly frustrated McAdams said this about Morley:

Morley is an interesting, and sad, case. Back in the 1990s he was a pretty moderate conspiracy theorist, who didn't make crazy claims (although he overstated the importance of George Joannides). But as time has gone on, he has drifted further and further into the fever swamps.

How did Morley get involved in JFK research?

Morley's interest in the JFK assassination likely goes back years. But he only began to study the assassination seriously after the publicity generated by Oliver Stone's JFK in the early nineties led to the JFK records Act which mandated the release of relevant documents. Morley reasonably assumed that his readers at the Post would be interested in the JFK story. But the fact that Stone's work was fiction seems to have escaped Morley and like-minded individuals. Stone himself referred to the movie as a "countermyth" to the Warren Report. Indeed, Researcher Dave Reitzes destroyed the notion that the film is historically accurate years ago. Nevertheless, Morley and many others have been inordinately influenced by the Stone's nonsensical portrayal of assassination. Similarly, Morley has written glowingly about Stone's recent "documentary" JFK Revisited . But again, that film (and the longer version called JFK: Destiny Betrayed) has been soundly debunked by JFK assassination expert Fred Litwin both at his blog and in his new book Oliver Stone's Film-Flam: The Demagogue of Dealey Plaza.

Has Morley's written work displayed an anti-CIA bias?

Perhaps it should not be surprising that Morley would be drawn to Stone's films and their anti-CIA propaganda since he is no friend of the agency. In 1985, Morley authored an article titled “Confessions of a Contra” that discussed the concept of a political action group controlled by the CIA to promote a right-wing agenda. Morley has also written a piece called “The Nasty Career of Dick Helms” and has referred to Timothy Weiner's anti-CIA book Legacy of Ashes as "magisterial." Morley's book Our Man in Mexico featured an extensive and unwarranted criticism of David Atlee Phillips, who is one of the favored villains of the conspiracy crowd. Morley's assertions about Phillips have been debunked HERE. Morley's book The Ghost spends much time implying that James Angleton was an assassination mastermind. In a review of the book author Thomas Powers wrote that Morley "forfeits all claim to be taken seriously as a historian." Morley's own politics are unabashedly "progressive." He is the editor of the blog Deep States whose tagline is “Monitoring the World’s Intelligence Agencies.” Morley collected over $9000 on Kickstarter to fund this endeavor.