Kill Zone: A Sniper Looks at Dealey Plaza

I, like the author, have been following the Kennedy Assassination since the day it happened. I was 14 at the time, there was a movie that come out about ten years after in 1973, starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, that was amazingly close to reality, or as real as we can know now. Author Roberts has done some very detailed research, connected the many dots, to a plausible end. Author Roberts is uniquely qualified to comment on this subject, he was a Marine Sniper in Vietnam with combat and war wound experience, he was a Law Enforcement Officer and investigator and a qualified Plane mechanic. His insight into airplanes and their construction allowed him to pick up on a second plane in Dallas that afternoon, that very well may have spirited JFK's body out of Dallas, leaving an empty coffin to be escorted by Jackie Kennedy to Washington. Roberts is able to connect all the various and seemingly unrelated dots, weave a credible step-by-step movement and analysis of the shooting, from where and it's effects and then the subsequent escape of the hit men and their teams. Then Roberts tie's the entire episode up in a neat bow, and explains the WHY'S ! Which is the most important part of the case, the MOTIVE ! A great read, detailed by not dragged down by his precision and a very plausible answer to the question: "Who Killed JFK?"

Craig Roberts offers a unique viewpoint on the Kennedy Assassination. Roberts authored "Police Sniper" and "Precision Rifle." Roberts also knows aviation.But why does the murder of President Kennedy matter today? The man died sixty years ago! The person or persons who killed Kennedy got away with murder. Yes, Lee Oswald was murdered two days after Kennedy, surrounded by Dallas cops (Kennedy was surrounded by Dallas cops, too!)--but Oswald never saw the inside of a Dallas courtroom for that crime. Jack Ruby was convicted for killing Oswald but had been given a new trial and died in prison while awaiting his new trial--"technically, Ruby was innocent until the retrial proved him guilty." Clay Shaw was found "not guilty" of conspiracy to murder the president. Nobody was brought to justice. The movers and shakers behind any possible conspiracy would be in their nineties or past the century mark today--free men. How likely would teenagers have been part of a plot to kill President Kennedy in 1963? Whoever killed Kennedy got away with it. What rewards did the murderer or murderers get?Craig Roberts starts with his trip to Dallas and an afternoon walking in Dealey Plaza in 1987--and discovering that he had been lied to. As an experienced professional sniper, Craig evaluated how he would have done the deed and determined that Oswald didn't. Air Force One is a call sign--not an actual aircraft--just as Marine Corps One is a radio callsign for whatever helicopter contains POTUS. Roberts delves into 18th Century international banking history in his search for the smoking gun. Who had the motive, means and opportunity to kill the president?As an aid to JFK assassination researchers, I'm going to spoil the plot of this book published in 2014--the Federal Reserve Board had a motive. JFK was taking steps to dissolve the Federal Reserve Board, a private corporation in charge of the US money supply. There are many usual suspects mentioned--and "Kill Zone" references them. This is an excellent reference book.I gave this only four stars mainly because there were annoying typos in the text. Petty of me, perhaps.On the other hand, I'm no stranger to the Kennedy assassination. On Friday, 22 November 1963, I walked to my first grade class on the San Antonio, Texas air force base. Everything was routine until my class let out at lunchtime. When I arrived back at my home in base housing, the adults were mean and very, very angry--I had a flashback to the previous year when my family slept in the fallout shelters on Spangdahlem Air Force Base in West Germany during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Two days later I saw a replay of Ruby shooting Oswald. After my father explained that Oswald shot the president, I was so relieved that I hadn't caused all the adults to get angry that I didn't bother following up for a decade. Besides, I was still learning how to read in 1963. Oswald was in boot camp when I was born in the US Navy hospital in San Diego. Later I was in the same Marine Corps training battalion as Oswald--just 18 years later. I finally walked Dealy Plaza myself in May 2022. While my credentials are not as extensive as Roberts' I do know something about setting up ambushes. While stationed in Hawaii, I attended a one-day orientation on the Marine Corps Scout-Sniper attended by Major Land during the late 1970s. That course was for battalion staff and chain of command so that when a sniper team was attached the company and battalion leaders could make best use of it. I also instructed an estimated 2000 students in M16 rifle, M9 pistol, M60 machine gun, M203 grenade launcher and M249 squad automatic weapon marksmanship--most of my students were already trained and experienced with the M16 family. I am an experienced military armorer and have had a few rifle and pistol matches--didn't win any trophies, though. I retired from the Army National Guard in 2010 and today I'm an NRA-certified range safety officer and rifle and pistol instructor. Over the past five decades I have studied irregular warfare and I have a lot of experience in security operations. This background gives me my own bias.One bias is that professional snipers forget that not everybody is a trained and experienced sniper--or a rifle match shooter. Roberts noted that Lee Oswald was no sniper. Except for the rifle (M16 instead of M1) Roberts fired the same KD rifle qualification course in boot camp that Oswald did. As a rifle instructor, two of the many types of riflemen were those who fired faster than they could hit and those who ran out of time on the rifle range before they ran out of cartridges. A clip- or charger-fed military bolt action rifle can be cycled far more rapidly and then reloaded more rapidly than most people will believe. Do an internet search with "carcano six shots in five seconds" and see what you get. It would have been unprovable in 1963 to demonstrate that Oswald was capable of pulling off the assassination as the Warren Commission predicted. Several expert riflemen have gone on record claiming that those experts couldn't do it, so Oswald couldn't. Craig Roberts in 1987 and 2014 had decades of "shoot no faster than you can hit" pounded into his head. Recreation after recreation with EXPERT riflemen failed to fire off three aimed shots in the "established 8.3 second" time frame from first to final shot. Established--how? I've read estimates of 4 to 11 seconds. Time is experienced subjectively. Nobody is on record timing the shots with a stopwatch from first "firecracker" to fatal headshot. True, on the line I've observed riflemen with M16 service rifles on semiautomatic fail to fire within five seconds of their target appearing, and unable to fire two consecutive shots within eight seconds. I have also observed beginners cranking a bolt action rifle and shooting off five shots in under six seconds. I even instructed a WW2 recreator in the British Home Guard method of assault fire with the Enfield service rifle--and I was surprised that he achieved 100% hits on a 50-foot target firing faster than two shots per second with his SMLE. The man was left-handed and had to fire right-handed yet he still pulled it off with less than a half hour of instruction and thirty rounds. I cannot state that Oswald DID fire a Carcano rifle from the sixth-floor southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository and hit Kennedy twice in under 11 seconds, but it is possible for a rifleman to fire a Carcano five times in five seconds. "But he can miss!" It seems that there were at least three misses if Connally was not a designated target. That squares with an inexperienced shooter. Still doesn't prove that Oswald did it--nor that a single rifleman fired off three shots. The Carcano has a six-shot clip that is inserted in the magazine as a unit (Roberts acknowledges this in "Kill Zone") but only one live cartridge (found in the chamber), three spent casings (found and photographed on the floor), the six-shot clip (photographed leaving the Texas School Book Depository hanging partially from the bottom of the magazine), and a Carcano rifle serial C2766 were entered into evidence. No explanation of where the two missing cartridges went. Potentially, five shots could have been launched and that lines up with three recorded misses and two hits on Kennedy. This trivia doesn't prove that Oswald did it--nor does it exonerate Oswald. But when evidence is missing, an investigator has to follow through.The rifle's telescopic sight was reported to be loosely mounted and not zeroed. I wasn't impressed because C2766 was torn down in a futile search for Oswald's fingerprints--until those prints were found. The Warren Commission speculated that Oswald tore down his rifle to fit in a sack that two witnesses reported to be between 17" and 24" and then assembled the rifle in seconds using only an unrecovered dime. Taking down a rifle and removing the scope would have cancelled out the rifle's zero, and if the scope base had been shimmed to zero that rifle, those shims could easily have been lost. Or Oswald might have used the metallic sights on the rifle and ignored his telescopic sight. Still, Oswald had to play the Flash, seen on the first or second floor no more than five minutes before the assassination and then seen again 90 seconds after the last shots were fired. Again, I question the time frame. Billy Ray Williams was seen eating lunch on the sixth floor--the remains of his lunch were found by Dallas police and thought to have been Oswald's lunch--and Williams claims to have left the sixth floor around 12:20 PM. In something like six minutes, Oswald changed clothes (witnesses saw someone dressed in white clothes and Oswald was seen before and after the assassination in dark clothes), dashed silently up four or five floors, collected his rifle from a hiding place and assembled it, silently built his sniper's nest, blasted off three or five shots, crossed a cluttered sixth floor and hid his rifle, changed clothes, dashed past several witnesses using the stairs and purchased a coke from a vending machine, all without breaking a sweat. This recreation of the crime strains credulity--and Oswald wasn't alive to foist that scenario on the Warren Commission. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) didn't question the timeline nor the evidence but did determine that the CIA was conducting assassinations worldwide--including assisting in at least one attempt on French president Charles de Gaulle and having a hand in the assassination of the Diem brothers on 2 November 1963 in South Vietnam. Smoking guns, anybody?The point is that the Warren Commission Report contained errors--if not outright lies. The Garrison Investigation was only one of many by multiple agencies world-wide. There was the HSCA investigation.Craig Roberts' scenario with multiple sniper teams does make more sense from a professional's viewpoint. In the early Sixties most snipers operated solo--with British and American snipers trained to operate in teams of two--a shooter and an observer, with the observer in charge. A decade later, most American snipers operated in teams. Carlos Hathcock related to a solo sniping mission in his "Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills" biography. Professional snipers would use equipment that they had confidence in. High-end assassins like to leave false leads to cover their tracks--a throwaway rifle that has nothing to do with the assassination other than framing someone else. I'd like to see the sabot rifle cartridges of 1963--I'd be okay with paper-patched 6.5mm bullets fired from a .30 caliber rifle but accuracy from this lash-up would suffer. Plastic sabots in 1963? Remington's .30-06 Accelerator came out in 1977 and the box I had exhibited poor 100-yard accuracy probably due to my 1-in-10" rifling twist or poor sabot separation. Using a lash up like that would be more trouble than it's worth. If the HSCA's determination that "Kennedy probably died as the result of a conspiracy" was true, there are easier ways to plant bullets on the crime scene and alter evidence and manipulate witnesses than using a sabot round through a silencer--and underloading the rifle cartridge. Such as "losing" or failing to find two spent cartridge casings next to a large hole in the wall at floor level.

I will just quote from the book itself:""How in the world could anyone look at that {Zapruder} film and say that the fatal head strike had come from the rear? The so-called experts who stated that the rearward jerk of Kennedy's head was due to 'muscle reaction,' 'jet force from an erupting bullet' or some other violation of the laws of physics, had obviously never served in combat, where witnessing high-velocity bullet strikes was commonplace...""Some of the supporters of the Warren Commission...stated that the bullet came from the rear because the eruption of brain matter and blood came out of the front of the president's skull. I saw something else. In a head shot, the exit wound, due to the buildup of hydrostatic pressure, explodes in a conical formation in the down-range direction of the bullet. Yet in the Zapruder film, I could plainly see that the eruption was not a conical shape to the front of the limo, but instead was an explosion that cast fragments both up and down in a vertical plane, and side to side in a horizontal plane. There was only one explanation for this: an exploding or 'frangible' bullet. Such a round explodes on impact--in exactly the manner depicted in the film."A seasoned veteran (sniper) of the Vietnam war stood at the `snipers-nest' and released it was all a lie; nuff said.

This is a terrific take on JFK 's murder but it collapses in the end by trying to say that history's Evil Bankers are "anti-Christian" -- hint, hint...it's all the Rothschilds' fault...hint hint -- Geddit?The world's capitalist overlords' world domination -so interestingly documented by the author in laying out how Kennedy was killed and why -- are largely products of the Anglo-Euro-American banking and finance cabals that are personified in modern times, for example, by the Bush family dynasty. The robber barons of yore and today are, largely, Christians and the descendants of old-line Christian aristocracies. The only religion any of these bastards have - no matter what their names - is Capitalism and the retention and expansion of the wealth they have controlled and inherited over centuries. Three-quarters of this book is great, justifiably-angry reporting so the author should be praised for that.

One of the best books written on the assassination of a great US President. This book explores the background with the forensic detail hitherto not seen in other written material. It is unlikely when the files are opened and released they will contain anything of value and the cover-up will be maintained.

Un libro muy bien documentado, con investigación a fondo, que no únicamente se queda en la planificación, ejecución y encubrimiento del asesinato de JFK, sino que va más allá y se adentra en identificar a los beneficiarios de dicho crimen y, sobre todo, investigar las muy poderosas fuerzas ocultas y su plan para dominar el mundo.

It's an easy read. And it makes sense when one is forced think about our society and it's controlling forces. Everyone should read this book. Especially our students. Who are being spoon fed a lot useless nonsense at our schoolsGood old liberal arts, don't think about anything or reason out anything! Just swallow the crap that is fed to you at great cost to you and your parents! We have become the Zombies of this generation.

This book is a reflection of the apathy we humans have condemned ourselves to. The truth, though hidden, is not hard to discover once we open our eyes and minds. Craig Roberts is one of the few who choose to live with their eyes and minds open and all the better for the rest of us that we still have some lions among men left.Thank you Craig Roberts for being born and being who you are.

Craig Roberts, not a Kennedy fan, only needs to look down on Dealy Plaza from the book depository window to realize he has been lied to. He then heads down a path already well worn by hundreds before him to discover Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed, in Oswalds own words, just a "patsy". What is amazing is that no-one in America in a position of power during the past 53 years has wanted the truth about the Kennedy assasination to come out. Despite the fact the majority of Americans don't believe the findings of the Warren Commission, not one President since Kennedy has had the guts to call for a new enquiry. This just proves the amount of power wielded by the men who ordered the hit on Kennedy, and how much power they continue to wield today, either in person or via their heirs. You would think after 50 years Obama, a fellow Democrat, could have had the decency to get to the truth, but no. Will, Hilary Clinton? Never. Will Trump? Maybe. We can only hope the American people get the chance to elect another honest President at some time in the future.