Q: WHO KILLED JOHN LENNON? A: THE CIA
(or perhaps some other elements of the U.S. permanent government)
Don’t believe it? Have a look at the evidence:

· Lennon’s murder was never investigated by any legal authority. Despite his lawyers’ urging him to plead insanity, Mark David Chapman refused and pled guilty to murder.
No trial, no investigation.

· The only person to seriously investigate Chapman was British writer Fenton Bresler, who reported his findings in Who Killed John Lennon? (1989, St Martin’s Press, now out of print). Bresler died in 2003.

· Chapman abhorred violence, according to family and friends interviewed by Bresler. He was not a fan of Lennon or the Beatles.

· While a teenager in Decatur, Georgia, Chapman did a lot of LSD, then found Jesus, and devoted his life to working with the YMCA, which, according to Philip Agee (CIA Diary, 1975), was prime recruiting grounds for CIA stations in Latin America. Chapman’s YMCA employment records are missing.

· In June 1975, Chapman volunteered to work in the YMCA office in Beirut, Lebanon, as the civil war erupted.

· Returning to the U.S., Chapman was sent to work with newly-resettled Vietnamese refugees (and CIA assets) in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, run by World Vision, an evangelical organization accused of CIA collaboration in Honduras and El Salvador.

· No one who knew Chapman in Hawaii, in the period before he killed Lennon, considered him psychotic, including mental health clinicians who were treating him for depression at a public clinic.

· Chapman would have been the ideal “programmed assassin”. Did the CIA have this capacity? If not, it was not for want of trying, as shown by former State Department officer John Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: the CIA and Mind Control (Norton, 1979).

THE CIA KILLED LENNON? COME ON! WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN THE MOTIVE?

In his book, Bresler only asserts that it was Lennon's likely re-entry into political life in general -- he was about to win U.S. citizenship -- that motivated his assassination by some agency of our government. But after a decade of Central America solidarity work I am absolutely convinced that Lennon was a victim of the U.S. government's counter-revolutionary war in Central America. Remember: Lennon died six days after four U.S. churchwomen were raped and murdered by the U.S.-supported Salvadoran military (nuns Maura Clarke, Ita ford, and Dorothy Kazel, and lay worker Jean Donovan). The mass murder by the military and their allied death squads in El Salvador was just at its exponential upstroke, and the contra war in Nicaragua was just being launched. Reagan had just won the election, not yet taken office, and his "transition team" was at the helm. There can be no doubt that a major item (probably the major item) on their agenda was their war in Central America, and thus there had to be some consideration paid to the management of the domestic opposition, which was already active and getting stronger: after all, they must have foreseen that they were about to massacre several hundred thousand people in our own "backyard" and there would be a predictable resistance (and as is now public knowledge, the Reagan Administration was to infiltrate and subvert CISPES and other solidarity organizations). Lennon would have been seen as the individual with the greatest power - and perhaps, greatest inclination - to galvanize the popular movement (imagine - more to the point, imagine these creeps imagining -what the demonstrations might have looked like had Citizen Lennon helped to popularize the cause). It doesn't even matter whether or not Lennon had any intention of getting involved at the time of his murder; it was only necessary that the Forces of Darkness felt it was possible Lennon might take up the cause. Why not? If they did it right, Chapman himself would never realize he was being manipulated, so what did they have to lose?

So it’s my contention that the bad guys got away with it, free and clear, and I’d like to see that corrected, if nowhere else then in the popular imagination. Even if there’s not going to be justice, at least it might be possible to put the notion that some agency of our government was responsible for John Lennon’s death on a comparable footing to that of the JFK matter…

Interested? Anyone out there know Oliver Stone – or Sean Lennon?


posted by alan, the initiator of this blog