Free American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us by Jesse Ventura, Dick Russell Page A

hearing Mark Lane that year, I was at the height of my wrestling career during the 1978 congressional hearings into the assassination and didn’t really start delving into any of this until wrestling changed in the mid-1980s. All of a sudden, I was no longer driving to towns, but flying. Sitting on airplanes all the time becomes extremely boring, so I started reading. Besides Mark Lane’s Plausible Denial , I remember Jim Marrs’s Crossfire and then a whole bunch of other books. When I’d see anything about the Kennedy assassination in the bookstores, I’d buy it.
    So as I got older and started looking back at the Sixties, where every assassin was supposedly a “lone nut,” I began thinking how could that be? These nuts who never told anybody anything or planned with anyone else, but just felt the need to go out and commit murders of prominent individuals—John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The odds of that, I figured, simply defied all logic.
    It made me wonder who’s really running the show. Especially when you look at things they now admit never happened, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that drew us into the Vietnam War. These things, as portrayed by our government and media, seem to be smaller segments of a bigger picture. It almost seems like a game of chess sometimes, where you don’t understand the significance of one move until maybe a decade or two later and start to see the results of how things turned out differently.
    You can bet that during my four years as the independent governor of Minnesota (1999 to 2003), I was shielded from plenty of information, because they figured this guy will come and go. At the same time, I had some personal experiences that would tend to make a sane public servant start looking over his shoulder. (As William Burroughs once said, “Paranoia is having all the facts.”)
    The first inkling that certain people inside the federal government were out to keep an eye on me came not long after I took office. Sometime early in 1999, I was “asked” to attend a meeting in the basement of the Capitol building, at a time when the State Legislature was not in session. I was informed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was conducting a training exercise that they hoped I’d be willing to participate in. Well, by this time I knew that the CIA’s original mission statement from 1947 meant they were only supposed to operate outside the U.S. The FBI was the outfit with domestic jurisdiction. But, being an ex-Navy SEAL and a patriotic citizen, I basically felt I should cooperate. Besides, I was curious as to what this was really all about.
    Down there in the bowels of the building, some “fledgling” CIA operatives sat waiting for me in a conference room. There were 23 in all; I counted heads. They ranged in age from right out of college to what looked like retired people, both men and women, a very diverse group. Your average middle-class neighborhood types—except all of them were with the CIA, which was kind of chilling when you think about it. I was placed in the middle of a big circle of chairs, and they all sat there staring at me, with notebooks on their laps.
    Well, before they could start asking me questions, I said I had a few for them. First of all, what were they doing here , in the FBI’s territory? Nobody seemed to want to say. Then I started going around the room, asking for their names and their job descriptions. Maybe three or four answered, but the others dummied up. Either they’d describe what they did without identifying who they were, or neither. Considering that I’m an elected governor, I thought this was not only rude, but rather brash. So I told the group, “Well, being that you’re not being too cooperative with me, it’s going to be difficult for me to cooperate with you .”
    They asked their questions anyway, and it was interesting. They all