My conclusion from the reading I've done is that none of the the conspiracy theories have been confirmed. Indeed, author Gus Russo spent many years trying to prove a conspiracy, and he was unable to do so. His book, "Live by the Sword: The Secret War againt Castro and the Death of JFK" established the reasons for the assassination, which lie in Lee Harvey Oswald's determination to make a statement about our Cuban policy.
The question naturally arises, why did our government lie to us all these years? Part of it is LBJ's desire to downplay the cold war aspects of the assassination. For example, when the Dallas DA announced that he was looking into Soviet involvement in the assassination, LBJ called him up and told him to knock it off, saying "What are you trying to do, start World War Three?".
The CIA had good reason to cover up its activities prior to the assassination, in that its incompetence would be exposed if the pubic knew that Oswald had been under suspicion for quite some time. Indeed, the CIA had had Oswald udner constant surveillance during the week he spent in Mexico City prior to the assassination, attenmpting to get permission to move to Cuba. Given that, why wasn't Oswald under continuing surveillance after his return to the U.S.? Also, the CIA feared that a thorough investigation might have revealed the many assassination attempts against Fidel Castro during the Kennedy administration.
The Warren Repoprt was a huge cover-up from the get-go. LBJ's instructions were to disprove all the conspiracy theories and convince the public that Oswald acted alone, and the final report did just that. But what the report didn't tell us was that three of the seven members dissented from the conslusions reached, and issued a dissenting report, written by Senator Richard Russell. Warren promised Russell that the dissent would appear along with the majority's report, but he broke his word and issued the report without the dissent, which wasn't found until years later among Russell's papers at the University of Georgia.
LBJ himself later stated that "I never believed that Oswald acted alone", but his public reaction to the Warren Report was positive, since he didn't want the assassination to be blamed on an international conspiracy. The bottom line is that the Warren Commission was never told about the many CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and so did not look into the possibility that JFK's death was a retaliation for those assassination attempts.
Besides the three dissenters--Senators Richard Russell and John Cooper, and Representative Hale Boggs--two other members, Gerald Ford and Warren himself, later expressed doubts about the Commission's findings. The only two to not express doubts were the two with ties to the CIA--Allen Dulles and John McCloy.
The CIA's involvement in foreign assassination remained secret until 1975, when Congress formed the Church Committee, a select Senate committee, chaired by Idaho Senator Frank church, charged with exploring govenrment abuses in the wake of the Watergate scandals. It should be kept in mind that the CIA's mandate is to collect and analyze foreign intelligence information. The Church Committee found numerous abuses of this mandate, including the following: 1) Operation MKULTRA, which involved the drugging and torture of unwitting US citizens as part of human experimentation on mind control; 2) COINTELPRO, which involved the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil-rights organizations; 3) Family Jewels, a CIA program to covertly assassinate foreign leaders; and 4) Operaton Mockingbird, a program using CIA assets posing as journalists (the Church Committee found 50 journalists who had official, but secret, relationships with the CIA).
For our purposes here I will focus on number three, the foreign assassinations. CIA involvemnt in foreign assassination or coup d'etat attempts include the following: 1) Iran in 1953; 2) Guatemala in 1954; 3) Congo in 1961; 4) Dominican Republic in 1961; 5) South Vietnam in 1963; 6) Cuba, many attempts 1961-1963; and 7) Chile in 1973. All of these attempts have been well-documented, either by the Church Committee or by documents since released by the CIA.
The Kennedy administration's efforts to get rid of Castro were conducted under an operation termed "Operation Mongoose", headed by AG Robert Kennedy. Indeed, RFK was so obssessed with this that at one point he ordered a meeting in his office at 10 AM every morning of the Principal's Committee, consisting of the heads of the relevant agencies--CIA, FBI, Dept. of Defence, and others. Every morning he would ask, "What progress have you made since ysterday in getting rid of Castro?". Given these efforts, it's not surprising that when RFK heard his brother had beens shot, the first thing he did was to storm into the office of the CIA Director to ask him, "Did your people do this?".
Matthew 26:52 tells us of how Jesus rebuked Peter for attempting to stop the Roman soldiers with violence, saying “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword." Sadly, JFK learned this lesson the hard way, and the country is vastly poorer today as a result.
