Final_Judgment

595 Questions & Answers [499]
What follows are questions addressed to Michael Collins
Piper, author of Final Judgment, and his responses to those
questions. The questions focus on both a wide variety of
matters discussed or subjects otherwise not mentioned—in the
pages of Final Judgment. The questions appear in boldface
text. Piper's responses are in regular text.
How did you first come up with the theory that the Israeli
intelligence service, the Mossad, had a hand in the assassination of
President Kennedy? That's a highly controversial allegation
considering all of the other theories that have been presented. How did
you come about researching and writing this book?
That's not a simple question to answer for the reason that the process of
developing the idea for the book was something that I suppose, ranged from
the very beginning of the time that I began reading about the JFK
assassination as a grade school student in the late 1960's. I've touched on
various aspects of the answer to this question in the pages of Final
Judgment, but since so many people have still asked this question, I will
elaborate further and perhaps provide some new insights to readers.
As anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the subject is well aware,
there have been literally thousands of books written on the subject. I've
probably read about 100 of them at the most. I do have an extensive
personal library on the subject (and on many other matters as well, in
particular, I might note, U.S. Middle East policy) and I've read many of the
JFK books many, many times over the years and, in the process, absorbed
the primary details.
I do recall that at some point while I was in college and was discussing
the JFK assassination with my mother (who was very well read on the
subject herself) and she said: "Why don't you write a book on it?" I
responded: "Well, that would basically be a waste of time. There's very
little new information to write about. The books have already essentially
been written." (Little did I know what I would later discover!)
At any rate, it was essentially, however, around the time of 1992 that
my interest in the assassination was beginning to develop more extensively,
largely because of the fact that The Spotlight, the newspaper by which I had
been employed for a decade, had been involved in the E. Howard Hunt libel
trial. In 1991 Mark Lane's book, Plausible Denial, had been released and
that was the book that outlined the circumstances of the Hunt libel case
involving The Spotlight and this was also the time that Oliver Stone's film,
JFK, was in the process of being made and released. Consequently there
was a newly revived and reinvigorated interest in the JFK assassination.
As I read Mark Lane's book, which focuses on the CIA's role in the
assassination of President Kennedy, it became clear to me that one of the