The Lies of Thomas Graves
A hateful troll spews bile on a scholarly, civilized site
A subscriber to JFK Facts has injected himself into comment threads, purveying theories as fact while insulting all who disagree with him as “tinfoil hat” conspiracy theorists. He goes by Thomas Graves. At first I thought it was a made-up profile, designed to harass honest, curious readers. I couldn’t believe anyone would post like that under their real name. But I’ve since found reference to a 75-year-old Thomas Graves from La Jolla, California, who posted on Education Forum in 2016. It thus appears that these belligerent, shrill, repetitive, depressingly dishonest comments are the work of a real person.
Conditional Conspiracist
Thomas Graves disseminates a theory as fact. That theory is that Lee Harvey Oswald, accused murderer of President John F. Kennedy, was a Soviet KGB-programmed assassin who killed JFK to further the interests of the Soviet state, and he did so alone.
While the KGB didn’t necessarily direct Oswald to murder JFK on that very day, Graves is happy to entertain that conspiracy theory — and only that conspiracy theory — in case anybody is interested. Anyone who lends more credence to any other theory is a “pinko” in a “tinfoil hat,” undermining the integrity of the United States and its vaunted institutions.
Here he attacks me for my most recent JFK Facts article:
In my humble opinion, it’s conspiracy theorists like you who have, along with Putin’s professional trolls, wittingly or unwittingly made our body politic apathetic, discouraged, confused and angry, and have thereby enabled what happened in America three days ago — the re-“electing” of a Fascist by the name of Donald John Trump as our “president.”
Hint: A sharpshooting, self-described Marxist, former Marine U-2 radar operator who had been sent to Moscow in 1959 by a KGB* “mole” in the CIA killed JFK by firing three shots at him over 10.2 seconds in the echo chamber known as Dealey Plaza, and he did it with or without the encouragement or logistical help of the aforementioned Soviet intelligence service.
*Today’s SVR and FSB
At least Graves admits his opinion is “humble,” and it certainly merits an expression of humility. Because if you accept Graves’ theory as fact, his stance as principled patriot crumbles. By upholding a hollow simulacrum of the democratic republic, he embodies Samuel Johnson’s old maxim: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Thomas Graves is a scoundrel.
Hostile Misfit
Graves should be attacking the Warren Report, not JFK Facts. His theory that Oswald was a Soviet assassin, motivated by militant Marxism to strike at the heart of the American republic, diverges markedly from the Warren Commission’s conclusion, which reads:
Many factors were undoubtedly involved in Oswald’s motivation for the assassination, and the Commission does not believe that it can ascribe to him any one motive or group of motives. (Warren Report, p. 423)
To the Warren Commission, Oswald’s precise motive was obscure. To hostile misfit Thomas Graves, Oswald’s motive was crystal clear: he acted on behalf of the Soviet KGB.
So why attack JFK Facts? Closely affiliated with the non-profit Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF), suing the government for release of the still-withheld assassination-related files, JFK Facts’ main agenda is transparency. We question the official history based on facts. With concrete evidence, we’d gladly accept Graves’s theory as fact. Since we don’t have any such evidence, we don’t, and we certainly don’t harass people who doubt it.
Where can we agree with him? Maybe, at least, we agree that the assassination resulted from a colossal failure by U.S. intelligence agencies — CIA, FBI, and others charged with guarding the institutions of state — whether the murder resulted from a conspiracy or not. If Graves is right, the Soviets blew a gaping hole in our state institutions and got away with it. We now live in the aftermath of a mortally destructive Soviet act of war.
Should we seek to verify that one way or the other? If we did, we might have to make some changes, perhaps abolishing and replacing the CIA and FBI for their failure and subsequent concealment of the truth. If we can’t take punitive action against our spy agencies for all their screw-ups, what about this screw-up? How about a major overhaul?
Thomas Graves says no. President Kennedy’s assassination wasn’t a qualitatively unique intelligence failure. One-third of the federal power was “gutted,” but it was just another run-of-the-mill screw-up. That’s why no one got fired. Even if the CIA or other agencies are withholding details of their fiasco, and the consequent Soviet seizure of a big chunk of U.S. sovereignty, those of us who seek to uncover the truth are Putin’s trolls.
And he calls himself a patriot.
The Chimera of Patriotism
In my article, I suggest that the CIA’s close relationship with the Mafia in the late 1950s and early 1960s may have created the means and opportunity for a prolific foreign hit man to become a shooter in Dealey Plaza. The U.S. extended this homicidal Cuban exile political asylum shortly after the CIA debriefed him, weeks before the assassination.
The CIA thus played a role in this hoodlum’s legal resettlement in America, despite his track record of killings and complicity in assassination plots abroad. Should we overlook this intelligence failure out of patriotism and respect for America’s institutions?
Thomas Graves says yes. If you don’t “trust” the CIA and FBI, you’re “traitorous.” Real patriots shut up, for the good of the country, even if it means allowing the rot at the heart of the Republic to spread. The 61-year-old unhealed wound should go on festering.
Because apparently, if word gets out that the CIA and FBI failed to thwart a Soviet-sponsored hit on a U.S. president, America’s reputation is toast. If we don’t acquiesce to the unending cover-up of the USSR’s role in our 35th president’s death, we admit to failure before the entire world. Vladimir Putin, dictator of today’s Russia, will then rule us.
If it seems like Thomas Graves’ reasoning is shady, it gets worse.
Homeboy Fearmongerer
Despite claiming to be an expert on Russia, by his own admission Thomas Graves has never set foot in puppet-master Putin’s terrifyingly world-dominating empire, never mind the USSR before its dissolution over 30 years ago. I’ve been to Russia many times, know the language, and even visited the Soviet Union in 1988, during the period of “glasnost” and “perestroika.” I don’t defer to homeboy Thomas Graves about Russia.
Russia is a great civilization in cultural terms, even if the Russian government isn’t our friend. But Russia is brutal. It may punch above its weight, but its infrastructure and tertiary industrial base are primitive relative to any Western country. It was ever thus.
No continuous road connects the Russian far east to the capital. Drive a few hundred kilometers outside Russia’s biggest city, and you hit the dirt. The pavement ends. A Belarusian journalist confided to me 23 years ago in Minsk that Russia was an “empire of outhouses,” indoor plumbing still a luxury across most of its underdeveloped expanse.
These are facts, not theories, but they don’t faze Thomas Graves. For him, the Kremlin’s power to hypnotize all of us is so great, so all-enveloping, that resistance is practically futile. All we can do, Graves suggests, is prop up the façade of U.S. independence from Moscow, out of some warped sense of… “patriotism.” The alternative is admitting we’re all really slaves of the Soviet KGB. Better to indulge national fakery than live in reality.
Neocon Hack
Neoconservative founding father Norman Podhoretz insisted “glasnost” and “perestroika” were only a ruse to dupe the West until he finally visited Russia for the first time in 1989. Then he admitted that, yes, the reforms in the dilapidated, failed Soviet state were real.
Podhoretz had taken his lead from former CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, who never visited the Soviet bloc at all but insisted the Sino-Soviet split was just a hoax.
Interestingly, J. Edgar Hoover, Angleton’s ally in political thuggery who fudged the JFK murder inquiry, never even set foot outside America. How exactly do these homeboys become experts in the evils of other countries without ever seeing them first-hand?
Neocon homeboy hack Thomas Graves also says he’s studied the assassination for 40 years, yet he hasn’t published a single book about it, despite his long online screeds.
Instead, he just repeats “KGB” in his puerile potshots, with an asterisked note — *today’s SVR and FSB — as if nothing about world security has changed since the Cold War. Post-Soviet reforms, splitting the KGB into foreign (SVR) and domestic (FSB) intelligence agencies, were just another trick, and the Soviet-era KGB is still the most dangerous enemy at our gates by far. Be afraid. A KGB agent might be under your bed right now.
If only we’d listened to Angleton and Podhoretz.
Love it Chad!! So glad someone finally called him out publicly. Kudos
Hot air artists like Thomas Graves and youtube commentator AaronZ are merely CIA trolls, repeatedly lying and trying to promote confusion. As long as people are looking somewhere other than at the CIA as being responsible for the JFK assassination, they are accomplishing their goal. They killed JFK to be able to do Vietnam, and then they loused that one up also. So, confusion and distraction are priority #1.