The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture

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Thornley was born in East Whittier, California in 1938. He met his lifelong friend Greg Hill—who he shared a writing interest with—in high school. He was an actor in school plays and was a big fan of Mad magazine. (Ibid, p. 27) Thornley joined the Marine Corps Reserves in 1956 and attended boot camp that summer. He returned to high school for his senior year. He went to USC to study journalism but dropped out. (p. 29) He then joined the Marines in the spring of 1959.

In testimony before the New Orleans grand jury, Thornley denied that he had associated with Oswald during Oswald’s time in New Orleans. This was implausible given that they had known each other in the Marines, that Thornley had written a novel about Oswald, and that the two men knew many of the same people and frequented the same places. In fact, Garrison had at least eight witnesses who had seen Thornley and Oswald together during that summer. Two of these witnesses stated that Thornley had told them that Oswald was, in fact, not a communist. Garrison had a witness who said that she, “her husband, and a number of people who live in that neighborhood saw Thornley at the Oswald residence a number of times—in fact they saw him there so much they did not know which was the husband, Oswald or Thornley.” [18] I write “Establishment’s” because the final official word on the assassination remains the HSCA conclusion of a “probable conspiracy.” Given this fact, it is telling that the dominant media still defends the Warren Commission—a body whose work was found inadequate—first by the Church Committee and then by the HSCA Congressional investigation.The idea was not simply to cause chaos — it was hoped that by messing with people’s sense of reality you could create a scepticism of all belief systems (in retrospect this was a very naive goal). Make no mistake, the Warren Commission was on to this. And Albert Jenner understood the connection might have been through Thornley. Comprehending how damaging that would be to their star military witness, they had no intention of finding out if such was the case. But George MIchael Evica, not concerned with such matters, thought this might have been what happened. According to Evica, neither the FBI nor the CIA had produced Oswald’s letter for application to the ASC. ( A Certain Arrogance, p. 15) This caused Evica to ask: did Oswald’s letter really exist? The ASC episode is of interest, because Oswald’s defection will occur in just six months. When he applied for his passport, he listed ASC as one of his destinations. Three months after his attention in ASC was accented, he applied for a hardship discharge for early release from the service. The reason for this early discharge? At her place of work, his mother had a candy box drop on her head. No kidding. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 135) As many have noted, everything about this hardship discharge was suspect, as was everything about ASC, including the institute’s Director Hans Casparis, who never received any degrees from the colleges he said he attended. (Evica, pp,77-78) Plus the fact that ASC closed down within months after Kennedy’s murder. (DiEugenio, p. 134) Garrison also discovered that Oswald had been in New Orleans as an ostensibly pro-Castro activist, but had been working out of the office of Guy Banister—a hard-right, ex-FBI man who ran the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, was a member of the fascist “Minutemen” organization, and had been involved in anti-Castro CIA operations like the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose. Given that Oswald’s New Orleans activities only served to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the obvious inference would be that Oswald was a pawn in some kind of counterintelligence operation. The Zapruder film was so definitive that when it was finally shown on network television in the 1970’s, public support for the Warren Commission fell to all-time lows. [3]

Weishaupt and his colleagues were fed up with the control that religion had over their lives. Instead, they wanted to create a society that was built around reason and logic. It was an idea that was born out of the Enlightenment period. In Europe during the 18th century, people started to turn away from the teachings of the church and moved towards rational thought. One of the most widely held beliefs of the period was that the church and that state should be separated. This idea was particularly popular among the Bavarian illuminati. Even their name, ‘illuminati’, is the plural of ‘illuminatus’– the Latin word for enlightened. Curtis reveals that Garrison wrote a memo entitled “Time and Propinquity” for his staff, in which he tried to explain how they might grapple with this secret government. Meaning and logic are always hidden and so they should instead look for patterns—strange coincidences and links that are apparently meaningless but in actuality evidence of the hidden system of power. Curtis asserts that Garrison’s theory would be a big impact on how many people would come to understand the world: over the Pacific Ocean. Shortly before his death , Thornley reportedly said he'd felt "like a tired All of this is not to say that Garrison was beyond reproach. He should not have been so trusting with the volunteers he allowed to work on the case. He should have indicted Ferrie sooner, lest his main suspect succumb to a deadly brain aneurysm whilst sitting on the couch looking at two typed, unsigned suicide letters. Furthermore, given all the things that have come out about Kerry Thornley, Garrison arguably should have sought to prosecute him rather than Clay Shaw. One reason to argue that Garrison should have gone after Thornley for conspiracy to commit murder comes from Thornley himself. Said Kerry Thornley, “Garrison, you should have gone after me for conspiracy to commit murder.” [30] Admittedly, Thornley was positing a contrived hoax, but even this JFK disinformation is of a piece with his prior roles in Oswald’s framing and in the cover-up after the fact. Less than 24 hours after the assassination, conservative Senator Thomas Dodd had Butler brought to Washington, so the propagandist could offer congressional testimony about Oswald. Thornley, who referred to the assassination as “good news,” was interviewed by the Secret Service 36 hours after the assassination and by the FBI a day later. Just days after the assassination, Thornley abruptly left New Orleans with ten days of rent left on his apartment. He went to Arlington, Virginia and was eventually called to testify to the Warren Commission. Conforming to the new cover story of Oswald as a discontented lone nut, Thornley’s testimony offered lots of psychology analysis that would never have been admissible in court. However, this sort of testimony suited the Warren Commission perfectly well. [23]List of pen names and self-awarded titles provided by Kerry himself on the role of Pope of the Discordian Society in an affidavit to the California School Employees Association (CSEA), on a legal case concerning a member of the society that refused to join the CSEA alleging that the Discordian religion forbade him from doing so: [20] He uses this to connect to, in this same section, the discredited Tim Leary story that he supplied Mary Meyer with LSD and she gave it to President Kennedy. As I have pointed out, this is completely undermined by the fact that Leary never came close to mentioning doing such a thing for nearly 20 years, even though he had written about 20 books in the meantime. Some of them almost daily diaries. But we are to think he forgot to mention that time he met the former wife of a CIA officer, the striking looking Mary Meyer? Please. Lance DeHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), p. 20. The president’s use of this family heirloom, which he used twice while being sworn in as vice president in 2009 and 2013 ( here