PLAUSIBLE DENIAL

The author of Rush to Judgment, the first book to attack the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of JFK, takes on the CIA's possible role in the murder, by way of Florida jury trial. It was Mark Lane who found a CIA conspiracy behind the Jonestown massacre (he was there) in 1979's The Strongest Poison and FBI complicity in 1977's Code Name ``Zorro'': The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. This time out he offers his most damning version yet of CIA wrongdoing. Lane assembles his evidence with a trial lawyer's cool skill and builds to a riveting climax: an eyewitness account of CIA spy E. Howard Hunt paying off a CIA- backed Cuban assassination team in Dallas the night before the murder and clearly setting up Jack Ruby—before the assassination- -to kill Oswald, the patsy, who never fired a shot. Lane's evidence is drawn from a trial he conducted in Florida in 1978 while defending a small political magazine, Spotlight, which had lost a $650,000 defamation suit brought against it by Hunt. The magazine claimed that Hunt was in Dallas at the time of the assassination while Hunt claimed he was in Washington, D.C. When the appellate court vacated the decision and called for a second trial, Spotlight's owner called in Lane to defend him. Lane saw a case he might well lose, but also his first opportunity ever to cross- examine top figures in Lane's assassination scenario. And indeed he deposes CIA directors Richard Helms and Stansfield Turner, G. Gordon Liddy, Hunt himself—and strikes gold in CIA agent Marita Lorenz, who accompanied two cars full of guns and assassins from Miami to Dallas and, under oath, names all of them, then tells of a follow-up talk with the proud top assassin who pulled off ``the really big one...we killed the president....'' Well-reasoned at every point, Lane's convincing report sounds like the last word on the assassination—but for an alternate scenario, see Mark North's Act of Treason (below).