Did the CBC solve the JFK assassination?

Fred Litwin is the author of I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak which is available on Amazon, Kindle, Kobo and iTunes. For further information, please visit conspiracyfreak.com A CBC memo from 1983 attached a “strange message” from a Ouija board session that communicated with President John Kennedy. Associate Producer Maxine Sidran sent Producer Brian McKenna the transcript from a 1976 session where they asked Kennedy “who killed you?” The answer to her question was Karsland. When asked to repeat the answer, Kennedy again responded “Karsland.” When asked “Who is Karsland?” Kennedy answered, “Secret Service.” The memo claimed that “the people who used to take part in these sessions often had better than average results.” Kennedy also told the participants that the truth would soon come out via an informant and that he had been killed because of “secret plans to take over the country.” The text of the session was attached with “no editing” because that is what you do if you are a “good researcher.” The best news of all? Kennedy was asked, “How are you feeling?” and the answer was “a [sic] peace.” Welcome to the world of TheFifth Estate, the CBC’s premier investigative documentary series. In the fall of 1983, they were busy working on an upcoming episode, “Who Killed JFK?” Unfortunately, even though Kennedy told the Ouija board participants that “soon everybody will know” the truth via an informant, it wasn’t in time to make it into the documentary. Who Killed JFK? would be Producer Brian McKenna’s fourth documentary on the JFK assassination. It would be the most-watched Fifth Estate episode ever, with more than two million viewers. He went on to produce two more and also write articles on the assassination for the Montreal Gazette, opinion pieces for Rabble.ca, and book reviews on Amazon. Brian McKenna isn’t just any CBC producer. In 2007, he received the Pierre Berton Award for “distinguished achievement in popularizing Canadian History.” At that point, McKenna had been with the CBC for 37 years and had won Geminis for the Pierre Trudeau’s memoirs and for the controversial series, The Valour and the Horror. That three-part series, about the bombing of German cities in World War II, aired in 1992 and was attacked by veterans’ groups for presenting a biased negative portrayal of Canadian military actions. The CBC ombudsman found that the documentary was “flawed and fails to measure up to CBC’s demanding policies and standards.” McKenna’s next big achievement was the Pioneer Award from JFK Lancer, a Texas-based organization predicated on the belief that the U.S. government has conspired to hide the truth from the world regarding the JFK assassination. McKenna was honoured in 2010 for his “lifetime of searching for the truth” about who killed JFK. In his acceptance speech, McKenna laid out the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. It was a “sophisticated coup plotted by the U.S. military and CIA with support from Hoover’s FBI and Kennedy’s bodyguards, the Secret Service.” In addition, “the Mafia were co-conspirators as well as the world’s richest man, the right-wing billionaire H.L. Hunt.” And Vice-President Lyndon Johnson “supported the coup which made him President.” A large conspiracy was necessary because McKenna had to give significant meaning to JFK’s death. He was killed because he “tried to change the world” and “over and over he chose not to go to war, over Laos, over Berlin, and twice over Cuba.” Kennedy was “going to be pulling out of Vietnam” beginning “with a 1963 order to start withdrawing troops.” McKenna claims, “This was the last straw for his generals and the CIA. They accused him of treason.” All of this was just nonsense. Kennedy only wanted to remove troops because of supposed progress in training the South Vietnamese Army. He never contemplated pulling out of Vietnam. Kennedy was a Cold Warrior, period. None of these facts mattered to McKenna. He was a man on a mission and that mission was to find proof of the massive conspiracy. And it didn’t take him long. The CBC press release for McKenna’s first documentary, Dallas and After, which aired in November, 1977, heralded “New evidence showing that Lee Harvey Oswald may have been the victim of a faked photograph which was an important piece of evidence in the John. F. Kennedy assassination.” The backyard photos of Lee Harvey Oswald have long been a staple of conspiracy theorists ever since he told Dallas police that his head was “pasted” onto somebody else’s body—despite the fact that his wife Marina admitted taking the pictures. Now McKenna had Canadian military officials confirming that conspiracy buffs had been right all along. It also raised the question—if these incriminating photos were faked, wouldn’t that mean that Oswald was framed?

It was all too good to be true. The press release for TheFifth Estate documentary said they consulted “phototechnologists at the Department of National Defense in Ottawa. They told us that this photo and another shot at the same time bear the earmarks of having been faked. They noted that the shadows fall in conflicting directions. The shadow of his nose falls in one direction and that of his body in another.” The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was already in the middle of their investigation when the Dallas and After aired, contacted Major J.M. Pickard of the Canadian Forces, a Commanding Officer of the Canadian Forces Photographic Unit. Pickard wrote the Committee a letter (see below) stating that he performed “No scientific analysis of the transparencies” that he was given and that they were “very poor copies.” He did “perfunctory measurements” and then offered an opinion. He said his “total involvement with the CBC was less than one hour.”

The HSCA photographic panel ultimately concluded there was no forgery and that the photos were legitimate. Over the years, the Fifth Estate would get all the basic facts of the assassination wrong. They claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald was a poor shot; that no single gunman could fire three shots in 5.6 seconds; and that the fatal head shot came from the grassy knoll in the right-front of Kennedy. None of these claims were true, then or now. In November, 2017, McKenna and TheFifth Estate were back with a new documentary, The JFK Files: The Murder of a President. This time, the focus was on newly-released documents which included tidbits about CIA schemes to kill Fidel Castro and the FBI’s dim view of Martin Luther King but nothing particularly revelatory about the Kennedy assassination. Some documents were withheld by the Trump administration in the name of national security. That was enough to inspire McKenna to recycle some hoary old myths about the “truth” and the “cover-up.” But, once again McKenna had some big news—a document dated two days after the assassination in which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is quoted as saying: “The thing I am concerned about is having something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” This was presented as new evidence confirming the belief held by “many” that “Lee Harvey Oswald was the U.S. government’s patsy in JFK’s death.” But the document was not “new” at all. It was written by Walter Jenkins, an aide to President Lyndon Johnson, and it was published 38 years ago by the HSCA. All it confirms is Hoover’s concern that “the public needed to be settled down” as FBI inspector James Malley, in charge of the investigation in Dallas, explained to the House Committee. There was much concern about public reaction in the wake of the murder. Gossip about an international conspiracy was rampant because Oswald was a communist who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. Hoover and Lyndon Johnson wanted to stop the rumours from escalating into a full-blown Cold War panic. And while TheFifth Estate was upset that President Trump was withholding some documents, they don’t mind keeping their documents secret. I filed several Access to Information requests about McKenna’s various documentaries, and the CBC either claimed an exemption to the Act or said they could find no files. In one filing, I just asked for a list of documentaries on the JFK assassination produced by Brian McKenna for TheFifth Estate, and the CBC replied that “no records were found to respond to your request.” All of the cases are under appeal. I did manage to find a transcript of the 1977 documentary from the Harold Weisberg Archive on the web. McKenna had corresponded with Weisberg and had sent him a transcript. So, a researcher in the United States can get a transcript but a Canadian can’t? The 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder is coming up in November, 2023. Set your clocks. My bet is that Brian McKenna and TheFifth Estate will be back with yet more “responsible sensationalism.”