J.F.K files: Lee Harvey Oswald not only s.h.o.o.t.e.r, Pentagon Papers lawyer says

The Assassination That Never Ended

More than six decades after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the release of hundreds of thousands of documents once again ignited hopes that the truth might finally emerge.

Yet for Daniel Sheehan, a constitutional and civil rights attorney with over fifty years of experience investigating intelligence abuses, these files were never going to deliver a neat conclusion.

According to Sheehan, the expectation that a single “smoking gun” document would surface misunderstands how power actually operates within the American national security system.

Sheehan’s perspective is shaped not by speculation, but by direct involvement in some of the most explosive political investigations of the twentieth century.

His professional journey into the Kennedy assassination began in the early 1970s, when he worked as a trial lawyer in the firm of famed defense attorney F.

Lee Bailey during the Watergate era. What initially appeared to be a routine legal assignment quickly transformed into something far more disturbing.

As Sheehan examined the backgrounds of individuals arrested during the Watergate break-in, he recognized several figures not as political operatives, but as gunmen connected to Santos Trafficante, one of the most powerful Mafia bosses in the United States.

This recognition raised immediate red flags. Why, Sheehan wondered, were organized crime enforcers operating alongside a CIA wiretapping specialist inside the Watergate complex?

His investigation led him down a path that connected intelligence agencies, organized crime, and covert assassination programs dating back to 1960.

According to Sheehan, these programs were originally commissioned to eliminate Fidel Castro, using Mafia intermediaries and deniable assets.

What began as a foreign covert operation, he claims, never truly shut down. Sheehan asserts that the same assassination apparatus assembled to kill Castro remained intact for years, operating in the shadows.

When President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy later dismantled anti-Castro paramilitary bases across the southeastern United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis, those involved viewed the move as a betrayal.

The closure of these operations not only angered Cuban exiles and criminal partners but also threatened entrenched interests within the intelligence community.

At the center of Sheehan’s allegations is former CIA Director Allen Dulles. Though officially dismissed after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Dulles, Sheehan argues, continued to exert enormous influence behind the scenes.

Kennedy’s growing independence—particularly his secret correspondence with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev—alarmed figures who believed nuclear superiority was essential to American dominance.

According to Sheehan, Kennedy’s willingness to discuss dismantling nuclear arsenals crossed a line that could not be tolerated.

Lee Harvey Oswald, in this narrative, was not the lone assassin portrayed by official history.

Sheehan claims Oswald was a low-level intelligence asset, manipulated into firing a single shot as part of a larger false-flag operation designed to implicate Cuba or the Soviet Union.

When the real assassination unfolded around him, Oswald allegedly realized too late that he had been set up as the perfect scapegoat.

The reason, Sheehan argues, that definitive proof has never emerged is simple: the architects of the plot understood the importance of erasing their own tracks.

Documents were destroyed, witnesses were silenced, and those subpoenaed by later investigations often met violent ends.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations, he notes, lost key witnesses within days of issuing subpoenas, creating a climate of fear even among federal investigators.

For Sheehan, the newly released JFK files are not meaningless—but they must be read with sophistication.

Rather than explicit confessions, he looks for corroborating details: dates, names, surveillance records, and financial connections that align with testimony already gathered decades ago.

In his view, the absence of a written order for assassination is not evidence of innocence, but proof of professionalism.

Beyond the Kennedy case itself, Sheehan frames the assassination as a warning. If a sitting president could be removed for threatening the priorities of the national security establishment, then the concept of democratic control becomes fragile.

This, he says, is the true significance of what many now call the “deep state”—not a vague bureaucracy, but a network rooted in intelligence operations, covert finance, and unaccountable power.

Sheehan believes the American public already senses this reality. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans doubt the lone-gunman narrative.

Yet public suspicion alone is not enough. Without sustained citizen pressure, he argues, no elected official will risk confronting forces capable of ending political careers—or worse.

In his most provocative claim, Sheehan links Kennedy’s assassination indirectly to the UFO secrecy debate.

Kennedy’s push for a joint U.S.–Soviet space program, combined with his request for briefings on unidentified aerial phenomena, allegedly heightened fears that deeply guarded secrets might be shared outside approved channels.

To Sheehan, this was not the cause of Kennedy’s death, but another indicator of how far the president had moved beyond the control of entrenched interests.

Ultimately, Sheehan insists that the truth is not unreachable—only resisted. Some witnesses, he says, are still alive.

Some pilots, trainers, and operatives remain silent, not because they lack information, but because the consequences of speaking remain severe.

The failure to act, therefore, is not one of evidence, but of political courage. As long as the forces that orchestrated secrecy remain intact, Sheehan warns, no president can truly govern freely.

The Kennedy assassination, in this view, is not merely a historical mystery—it is an unresolved power struggle that continues to shape American democracy today.