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  • John Newman, Countdown to Darkness, Volume 2

    John Newman, Countdown to Darkness, Volume 2

    John Newman has just released the third part of his series on the murder of John F. Kennedy. Titled Into the Storm, we are running an excerpt from it on our site, while linking to another excerpt. This review deals with the second volume, Countdown to Darkness. It is indefinite as to how long this series will be. I originally heard it would be a five-volume set. But now I have heard from other sources it may be six. (I will comment on this length factor later.)

    Countdown to Darkness assesses several subjects. Some of these the author deals with well. Some of his treatments disappoint. The point is the book is wide-ranging in scope, as I imagine the rest of the series will be. It does not just deal with topics relating to the JFK murder. There are subjects dealt with that are more in keeping with a history of Kennedy’s presidency. Therefore, the book is broad based.

    Countdown to Darkness begins with the peculiar arrangement surrounding the dissemination of Oswald’s file at CIA. This valuable information is a combination of Newman’s examination of the file traffic, plus insights gained by the estimable British researcher Malcolm Blunt. Those insights were achieved through Blunt’s discussions with the late CIA officer Tennent Bagley. In this analysis, Newman repeats his previous thesis that although the first Oswald files went to the Office of Security, they should have gone to the Soviet Russia Division. (p. 3; all references to the e-book version) He expands on this by saying this pattern appears to have been prearranged. The mail distribution form was altered in advance to make this happen. (p. 2) One effect of this closed off routing was that there was little chatter about Oswald’s implied threat to surrender radar secrets. When Blunt talked to Bagley, Malcolm told him about this dissemination pattern. Bagley asked Blunt if he thought this was done wittingly. When Malcolm said he was not sure, the CIA officer replied he should be—because it was set up that way in advance. Blunt said that this disclosure was “a significant departure from Bagley’s normal cautious phrasings.” (p. 30)

    II

    From here, the book turns to Cuba and President Dwight Eisenhower’s intent to overthrow Castro. CIA Director Allen Dulles with Vice President Richard Nixon first discussed this idea in 1959. The initial planning on the project was handed to J. C. King and Richard Bissell; the former was Chief of the Western Hemisphere, the latter was Director of Plans. (p. 32) The author traces the familiar story of how the original idea—to integrate a guerilla force onto the island to hook up with the resistance—began to evolve into something larger in January of 1960. This was coupled with the Allen-Dulles-inspired embargo, which extended to include weapons from England. This was meant to force Castro to go to the Eastern Bloc and the USSR for arms. (pp. 36-37) Dulles also wanted to sabotage the sugar crop, but Eisenhower turned that request down.

    Bissell turned over the architecture of the overthrow plan to CIA veteran officer Jake Esterline. (p. 48) Esterline had been a deputy on the 1954 task force in the coup against Arbenz in Guatemala. Like David Talbot before him, the author points out the fact that warnings about the overall design problems, and how the objective differed from Guatemala, were deep-sixed. (p. 55) By March of 1960, Eisenhower started talking about a different approach, a strike force type invasion. The president wanted OAS support for this plan. And here the author introduces something new to the reviewer: his concept of Eisenhower’s Triple Play. That is, in order to achieve such outside support, the White House and CIA would rid Latin America of a thorn in its side, namely, the bloodthirsty dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. (p. 90) This will later expand into an attempt to also get NATO behind the overthrow. Hence, Ike’s Triple Play will include the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Congo.

    One of the contingencies upon which Eisenhower based his overthrow of Castro was the establishment of a government in exile. This consisted of the banding together of several individual groups of Cuban exiles under an umbrella called the Revolutionary Democratic Front, or FRD. (p. 127) This endeavor ended up being quite difficult, for two reasons. First, some prominent exile members, like Tony Varona, did not want to join. Second, a principal officer involved for the CIA, Gerry Droller (real name Frank Bender), had rather poor organizational skills. The author gives us more than one example of this trait. (pp. 129-32)

    As the operation morphed from a guerilla-type incursion into a brigade invasion concept, more managers were grafted onto the project. The author first names Henry Hecksher. (p. 140) Hecksher worked with David Phillips on the Arbenz overthrow, then went to Laos, and then was assigned to Howard Hunt’s favorite exile, Manuel Artime, in 1963-64. (pp. 142-44) Another person named by the author as part of this expansion is Carl Jenkins.(p. 147) Jenkins worked at the Retalhuleu military base in Guatemala. A base was also set up in Nicaragua and some of the Alabama National Guard pilots were enlisted.

    As the brigade concept was escalating, false information was entered into the information flow. Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon said only 40% of the Cuban populace would end up supporting Castro. (p. 170) Which, to put it mildly, turned out to be almost ludicrously wrong. Castro now began to import a flow of Eastern Bloc arms through Czechoslovakia. (p. 171) As this occurred, Eisenhower, through Dulles, began to activate the Trujillo aspect of the Triple Play. This appears to have been set in motion between February and April of 1960. (p. 172)

    When Castro began to seize oil companies like Texaco, Esso and Shell, Vice President Nixon began to urge Eisenhower into action. He recommended “strong positive action” to avoid becoming labeled, “uncle Sucker” throughout the world. (p. 174) National Security Advisor Gordon Gray said much the same thing: “… the U.S. has taken publicly about all it can afford to take from the Castro government ….” (p. 174)

    On July 9, 1960, Nikita Khrushchev threatened the USA with ICBMs over Cuba. Eisenhower replied that America would not be intimidated by these threats. (p. 176) The author mentions that at this time there was an attempt by the Agency to solicit a Cuban pilot to assassinate Raul Castro. Newman scores author Evan Thomas for distorting this as the pilot’s idea, when the impetus was clearly from the CIA. (p. 182) General Robert Cushman, working on the staff of Richard Nixon, urged Howard Hunt to use as much skullduggery as possible to get rid of Castro. (pp. 184-85)

    But as the Inspector General report by Lyman Kirkpatrick later revealed, the attempt to arm and supply the dissidents on the island was not working. In fact, at times, it was counter-productive, since Castro’s forces would recover the supplies and arms. As the threat grew, Russia sent in more arms to the island: tanks, mortars, cannons. With these advantages Castro began to close in on the resistance. And this was another reason the original guerilla plan was modified into a brigade-sized invasion. (p. 185)

    III

    We now come to what this reviewer feels is probably the highlight of the first two books in the series: the author’s work on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. Newman devotes four chapters to this subject. In my opinion the result is one of the best medium-length treatments of the Congo crisis I have read. As noted above, Eisenhower felt that by getting involved in Belgium’s colonial problems, this would encourage NATO allies to stand by him in his attempt to overthrow Castro. After all, the NATO alliance began in 1948 with the Brussels Treaty.

    As early as May 5, 1960 Allen Dulles was aware that Belgium was attempting to set up a breakaway state in the Congo called Katanga. This was two months before the ceremony formalizing the Belgian withdrawal from its African colony. (p. 153) Katanga was the richest region in Congo, and perhaps one of the richest small geographical areas in the world. If the Katanga secession were successful, it would do much to benefit Belgium and its covert ally England, at the same time that it would damage the economy of the new state of Congo.

    Dulles was predisposed to favor Belgium because of his prior career as a corporate lawyer with the global New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. That firm represented many companies that benefited from low wage conditions in the Third World. Therefore Dulles and his deputy Charles Cabell began to smear independence leader Patrice Lumumba at National Security meetings in advance of his assuming power. Combined with the fact that the Belgian departure was not total, this pitted Lumumba against both the former imperialists and the growing malignancy of the USA. (p. 154)

    Lumumba’s stewardship was not just hurt by the Katanga secession, but also by the fact that Belgium had removed Congo’s gold reserves and placed them in Brussels prior to independence being declared. (p. 155) With little cash on hand, Lumumba’s army mutinied and spun out of control. This created the pretext for Belgium to send in paratroopers. The Belgians now began to fire on the Congolese. On July 11th, Katanga declared itself a separate state. By July 13, 1960, two weeks after independence, the Belgians occupied the Leopoldville airport and Lumumba decided to break relations with Brussels. The next day the United Nations, under Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, passed a resolution to send troops to Congo. In the meantime Allen Dulles was working overtime to tell anyone on the National Security Council and in the White House that Lumumba would tie Congo to Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Castro and the Communist Bloc. (pp. 162-63)

    This tactic worked. When Lumumba arrived in Washington to ask for supplies, loans and aid in expelling the Belgians, Eisenhower was not on hand to greet him. Instead, Lumumba talked to Secretary of State Christian Herter and Under Secretary Douglas Dillon. They lied to him by saying they were working through Hammarskjold. (p. 220) This left Lumumba little choice but to ask Russia for supplies. The USSR sent him transport planes and technicians. (p. 222)

    When the Russians sent Lumumba the military aid, it sealed his fate. On August 18, 1960 Leopoldville station chief Larry Devlin sent a cable that was drawn in the most hyperbolic terms imaginable. Devlin told CIA HQ that Congo was now experiencing a classic communist takeover, and there was little time to avoid another Cuba. (p. 223) This was clearly meant as a provocation. It worked. On the day this cable arrived, Eisenhower instructed Dulles to begin termination efforts against Lumumba. This was kept out of the meeting record. It was not revealed until the investigations of the Church Committee. The recording secretary to the meeting, Robert Johnson, told the committee that it was too sensitive to be included in the minutes. (p. 227)

    The plot began the next day. Director of Plans Dick Bissell told Devlin to begin action to replace Lumumba with a pro-Western leader. On August 26, Allen Dulles sent an assassination order to Devlin that authorized a budget of $100,000 to terminate Lumumba, the equivalent of close to a million dollars today. (p. 236) Bissell now called in the head of the Africa Division, Bronson Tweedy, and they began to assemble a list of assets they could employ in order to do the job. (p. 246) One of these was the infamous Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, who began to prepare poisons for use in the assassination. Devlin also got President Joseph Kasavubu to remove Lumumba from his position as prime minister. At this point Hammarskjold sent his own emissary, Rajeshwar Dayal, to Congo to protect Lumumba.

    This was necessary because, in addition to Gottlieb, Devlin now bribed the chief of the army, Josef Mobutu, to also assassinate Lumumba. (p. 265) At around this time, two CIA-hired killers, codenamed QJ WIN and WI ROGUE, both arrived in Leopoldville. Not knowing each other, they both stayed at the same hotel. Gottlieb then arrived in Congo. (p. 268) In September of 1960, with a multiplicity of lethal assets on hand, Tweedy now cabled Devlin to produce an outline of how he planned on terminating Lumumba.

    The use of the two codenamed assassins in Congo marks the beginning of the ZR/Rifle program. This was the CIA’s mechanism for exterminating foreign leaders. It began under Eisenhower in September of 1960. (p. 280) The next month it was taken over by CIA officer William Harvey. ZR/Rifle was sort of like the reverse side of Staff D, which was a burglary program to break into embassies and steal codebooks. Harvey and his assistant Justin O’Donnell recruited safe crackers, burglars and document forgers for that part of the program. (pp. 284-85) When Harvey testified before the Church Committee, he lied about the use of ZR/Rifle in the Lumumba case. He was fully aware of what the two men were doing in Congo. (p. 290)

    Mobutu now tried to arrest Lumumba, but Dayal blocked the attempt. Three things happened in November of 1960 that penned the final chapter. CIA officer Justin O’Donnell arrived in Congo to supervise the endgame. John Kennedy, who the CIA knew sympathized with Lumumba, was elected president. And third, America and England cooperated in seating Kasavubu’s delegation at the United Nations. This last event provoked Lumumba into escaping from Dayal’s house arrest. O’Donnell had decided that the CIA should not actually murder Lumumba. But they would help his enemies do the deed. Therefore, Devlin cooperated with Mobutu to cut off possible escape routes to Lumumba’s base in Stanleyville. He was captured, imprisoned and transferred to Elizabethville in Katanga. (p. 295) Lumumba was executed by firing squad and his body was soaked in sulphuric acid. When the acid ran out, his corpse was incinerated. (p. 296) Thus was the sorry end of the first democratically elected leader of an independent country in sub-Saharan Africa.

    As I said, for me, this section on Lumumba is the highlight of the first two volumes.

    IV

    Another topic that the author spends significant time on is the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. The author traces this idea from Allen Dulles to Dick Bissell. He believes that Eisenhower gave his tacit approval to the plots. He also believes that Bissell dissembled in his testimony on how the plots were hatched, and he mounts several lines of evidence to demonstrate this. (p. 327) Bissell dissembled in order to conceal the fact that it was he who approved of giving the assignment to the Mafia through CIA asset Robert Maheu. By mid-August of 1960, the CIA’s Technical Services Division was at work manufacturing toxins to place in Castro’s cigars.

    Maheu offered gangster Johnny Roselli $150, 000 to kill Castro. (p. 331) Both Allen Dulles and his deputy Charles Cabell were briefed on this overture in late August by Chief of Security Sheffield Edwards, who was part of the Mafia outreach program. Meetings were arranged with Roselli in Beverly Hills and New York City. Maheu and CIA support officer Jim O’Connell masqueraded as American businessmen who wanted to protect their interests by getting rid of Castro. But Maheu eventually told Roselli that O’Connell was CIA. Therefore, the veneer of plausible deniability was lost. (p. 333) Roselli now began to recruit Cubans in Florida for the murder assignment. He also arranged a meeting in Miami for Maheu to be introduced to Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, respectively the Mafia dons for Chicago and Tampa. When this occurred the author writes that, because of the reputations and history of these two men, the plots and the association should have been reassessed and approval cancelled. They were not.

    They should have been. Because the recruitment of Giancana was a huge liability. Not just because of his history of being a hit man; but also because of his inability to keep a secret. Feeling emboldened, since he was now in the arms of the government, he bragged about his role in the plots to at least two people. From there the word spread to others, including singer Phyllis McGuire. Giancana revealed both the mechanism of death—poison pills—and the projected date of the assassination—November of 1960. (p. 334-35) Through his network of informants, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover found out about Giancana’s dangerous chatter. But Hoover did not know that the CIA had put him up to it. The Director told Bissell about it, but Bissell did not inform Hoover about his role as recruiter.

    Maheu now arranged to have McGuire’s room wired for sound in Las Vegas. This was done for two reasons. First, to see if she was talking about the plots; and second, as a favor to Giancana, who suspected she was cheating on him with comedian Dan Rowan. The police discovered this illegal bugging. In addition to the security problem, this all had disturbing repercussions when Attorney General Robert Kennedy began his crusade against organized crime in 1961. (p. 336)

    Along with these assassination plots, on November 3, 1960, National Security Officer Gordon Gray came up with the idea of using Cuban exiles dressed as Castro soldiers to stage an attack on Guantanamo Bay as a pretext for an invasion. (p. 346) As the author suggests, the very fact that the murder plots and this false flag operation were contemplated show that those involved in managing the strike force invasion understood that its chances for success were low. (pp. 345-46) To further that miasma of doubt, at this same meeting, a question was asked about “direct positive action” against Fidel, his brother Raul and Che Guevara.

    There was good reason for both the doubt and the fallback positions, because about two weeks later, CIA circulated a memo admitting that there would not be any significant uprisings on the island due to any incursion, and also that the idea of securing an air strip on the island was also not possible unless the Pentagon was part of the attempt. (p. 348) This memo was not shared with the incoming President Kennedy. The author deigns that it was not shared because the internal uprising myth was used to manipulate Kennedy into going along with the operation. It thus became part and parcel with the new “brigade strike force” concept. (pp. 352-53)

    On January 2, 1961, Castro broke relations with the United States. The favor was returned two days later. These actions caused the training of the exiles in Central America to be expanded, and also for the action against Trujillo to be accelerated. (p. 355) On January 4th, Chief of the CIA paramilitary section wrote a memo to one of the operation’s designers, Jake Esterline. The memo said the invasion would be stuck on the beach unless an uprising took place or there was overt military action by the USA. (p. 355) As the author notes, this is another indication that the people involved at the ground level understood that, left to its own devices, the prospects for the invasion were fey. Hawkins added that Castro’s military forces were growing. They would soon include featured tanks, artillery, heavy mortars and anti-aircraft batteries. Given those facts, Hawkins warned that:

    Castro is making rapid progress in establishing a communist-style police state that will be difficult to unseat by any means short of overt intervention by US military forces. (p. 356, Newman’s italics)

    Since Bissell was a supervisor of both the assassination plots and the invasion, one wonders if he was banking on the murder of Castro to bail out what looked like an upcoming failure on the beach. In fact, as the author notes, at NSC meetings of January 12 and also January 19, the idea of overt intervention was brought up again. What made the time factor even more pressing was that the CIA had information that the shiploads of these munitions would reach Cuba in mid-March and continue with daily arrivals after that. This is why Hawkins urged that the invasion be launched in late February and no later than March 1. (p. 356) This would not happen, since Kennedy rejected the first proposal for the operation, namely the Trinidad landing site.

    V

    Kennedy had two meetings on the subject during his first week in office. At neither did he appear enthusiastic about it. On February 3, 1961 the Joint Chiefs wrote a ten-page report in which they viewed the plan favorably. This was something of a reversal from their previous assessments. But they cautioned that the plan was reliant on indigenous support from the island, meaning defections from Castro. They foresaw that if the force retreated to the mountains it might need overt American intervention. But even with these reservations, the executive summary at the end was positive. (pp. 363-64) Newman comments that one way to explain this reversal is that the Joint Chiefs felt that if the CIA plan failed, they would be called in to save the day and collect the glory.

    Kennedy now chimed in with his reservations about having the operation look too much like a World War II amphibious assault. He asked if it were possible to configure it more like a guerilla operation. (p. 366) This was a harbinger of what was to come from the president, who clearly never liked the operation in the first place. Knowing this, those pushing the plan tried to convince Kennedy that the strike force would ignite a rebellion on the island, even though they knew that such was not the case. (p. 383) Newman writes that this manipulation was done so that JFK would not cancel the operation—the gamble being that he would feel obligated to send in the Pentagon once he saw the invasion faltering. This hidden agenda to the Bay of Pigs episode was pretty well established in 2008 by Jim Douglass in his fine book JFK and the Unspeakable.

    At White House insistence, the location of the plan was moved away from Trinidad, 170 miles southeast of Havana, at the foothills of the Escambray Mountains. (p. 389) The reason for the switch was that Trinidad had a population of about 26,000 people. This decreased the odds of surprise and opened up the possibility of civilian casualties. Trinidad also did not have a proper length airfield for B-26 bombers. For these reasons, the locale was shifted to the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), east of the Zapata Peninsula. The CIA now went to work tailoring a plan for the new location.

    There was a serious problem with these delays. The longer it took to launch the operation, the more time Castro had to import weaponry from the USSR. The arms supplies began arriving in earnest on March 15. After that, one or two ships would unload per day. (p. 392) At this point, both Esterline and Hawkins wanted to leave the project.

    As the author notes, another important alteration was that the air cover and assaults were gradually whittled down in frequency and scope. This was owed to the reluctance of Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk to reveal the hand of American involvement. The first Hawkins-Esterline plan featured well over one hundred sorties in five different waves. (p. 390) When Kennedy asked Bissell how long it would take for the invasion force to work its way off the beachhead, he replied about ten days. In light of what actually happened, this was absurd, since no beachhead was ever established to break out of.

    As late as an April 4 meeting, Kennedy was still trying to argue for an infiltration plan. Inserting groups of 200-250 men and developing a build-up from there. Kennedy was trying to make it appear less as an invasion and more as an internal uprising. The CIA replied that this would only alert Castro, and each group would then be eliminated. (p. 394) The next day Kennedy asked assistant Arthur Schlesinger what he thought of the project. Schlesinger said he opposed it. He felt that Castro was too entrenched to be displaced by a single landing force. And if the landing did not cause uprisings, logic would dictate American intervention. The author notes the late date of this cogent observation: ten days before the launch from Central America. Newman also notes the fact that no one from the Pentagon pointed this out at the meeting; just as there was no real discussion of the air cover plan. Making it all the worse: Kennedy had instructed Bissell to tell the brigade leaders that no American military forces would participate or support the invasion in any way. (p. 393)

    But further, Kennedy drastically cut back on the amount of air sorties he would allow. And this is what had Esterline and Hawkins ready to depart the project. (p. 396) As stated previously, they insisted there had to be five waves of air strikes and over 100 individual sorties. Kennedy and Rusk opposed this aspect. Newman blames the Joint Chiefs for not stepping in and pointing out the difference between the Esterline/Hawkins design and what was happening to it. The author, citing Bissell, now says that what was left was the strikes scheduled the day before, and also the D-Day air strikes. Newman, citing Bissell, says that Kennedy then cancelled the latter the day before they were scheduled. (pp. 399-400) I was surprised to see the author adopt this interpretation of the controversial issue. This is a point of dispute which I will delve into later.

    The invasion was an utter failure and the battle was decided within the first 24 hours. There was no surprise. There were no defections. And in the first 24 hours there was no Allen Dulles. Bissell had encouraged him to keep a speaking engagement in Puerto Rico. Dulles did keep it. Newman makes an interesting observation about this. Dulles kept the engagement to give the appearance that the operation was really Bissell’s. Therefore, after the Navy saved the day, he should be forced to resign while Dulles kept his job. (p. 402)

    What no one thought would happen did happen at midnight on April 18. Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and Navy Chief Arleigh Burke tried to convince the president that he must intervene. (p. 403) Kennedy turned down this last attempt to get him to commit American power into the failed beachhead. Dulles’ plan to overthrow Castro and save his position had failed.

    Burke was relieved of duty in August of 1961. Later in the year, Dulles, Bissell and Cabell were also terminated. Lyman Lemnitzer was moved to NATO command and replaced by General Maxwell Taylor. In a conclusion, the author writes that after doing the research for this book, he has now downgraded his opinion about Eisenhower as a president. (pp. 404-405) After doing my own work on the man, I would have to agree. But I would make this judgment not just on foreign policy but also with civil rights. Eisenhower had some remarkably good circumstances accompanying his presidency; for instance, a growing economy, positive net trade balance in goods and services, a great military advantage over the USSR, and a unified populace behind him. In retrospect, he had a lot of political capital to make some daring decisions with, both abroad and on the domestic scene. For whatever reason, he chose not to. He passed those decisions on to his successor.

    VI

    I might as well begin the negative criticism with the subject of the Bay of Pigs. As the reader can see from my above synopsis, the author advocates for the stance put forth by Allen Dulles and Howard Hunt in their Fortune magazine article, saying that Kennedy cancelled the D-Day air strikes. (September, 1961, “Cuba: The Record Set Straight”) And that somehow this was the fatal blow delivered to the enterprise. (Newman, p. 400)

    I would have thought that by now, this stance would have been discredited. In the penetrating report delivered by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, he poses the hypothetical: Let us assume that Castro’s air corps had been neutralized. That would have left about 1,500 troops on the beach against tens of thousands of Castro’s regular army, reinforced by a hundred thousand or more men in reserve. And the Russians had been delivering shiploads of artillery, mortars and tanks every day for over a month, the very weapons one uses to stop an amphibious invasion on the ground. (Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, pp. 41, 52. This book contains most of the Kirkpatrick Report and its appendixes.) What made this aspect even worse is something Newman barely mentions: the element of surprise. One reason Kennedy moved the operation out of Trinidad is that the area was too populated, which would mitigate against that element. The Zapata peninsula was sparsely populated and the CIA said there was no paramilitary patrol there. This turned out to be false. There was a police force at Playa Giron beach the night of the landing. (Kornbluh, p. 37) They alerted Havana. Castro had his troops, with armor and artillery, on the scene within ten hours. But it’s actually worse than that. Castro had so thoroughly penetrated the operation by his intelligence sources that he knew when the last ship left Guatemala. (Kornbluh, p. 321) Therefore, on high alert, he was literally waiting for the landing. To top if off, the other element that the CIA said would be important to the invasion’s success, mass defections from the populace, was non-existent. In fact, Castro later crowed about how even the small number of people on the scene had backed him against the exiles. (Kornbluh, pp. 321-22) Therefore, with no defections, no surprise, being massively outnumbered, and with mortars, tanks and artillery shelling the force on the beach, as Kirkpatrick wrote: What difference would it have made with or without Castro’s air corps in operation?

    But I would further disagree with the author’s presentation. There is today an ample body of evidence that the so-called D-Day air strikes were not actually cancelled. They were contingent on being launched from an airfield on the island, which is one reason the Zapata Peninsula was chosen. Prior to the invasion, the CIA had agreed to this in their March 15th outline of the plan. In fact, they mention the issue three times in that memo. (Kornbluh, pp. 125-27) Further, both the Kirkpatrick Report and the White House’s Taylor Report mention this stipulation. (Kornbluh, p. 262; Michael Morrisey, “Bay of Pigs Revisited”, The Fourth Decade, Vol. 1 No. 2, p. 20) In the latter, the report states that National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy explicitly told CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell that such would be the case. (p.23)

    This speaks to another issue directly related to the alleged cancellation of the D-Day air strikes. Newman says that both Cabell and Bissell went to the office of Dean Rusk and pleaded their case for the strikes. Rusk was against it and he then got Kennedy on the line and he was also against it. This disagrees with both Dan Bohning’s book, The Castro Obsession, and Peter Kornbluh’s fine volume, Bay of Pigs Declassified. Both of those works say that Rusk offered to get Kennedy on the line, but the offer to talk to JFK in person was turned down. (Bohning, p. 48, Kornbluh p. 306) There is a good reason why Cabell would not want to talk to Kennedy about this subject. It comes from an unexpected source, namely Howard Hunt. In his book on the subject, Give Us this Day, he describes being at CIA headquarters monitoring the operation. He writes that Cabell actually stopped the D-Day strikes from lifting off. Cabell did so because he knew this was not part of the final plan! (Hunt, p. 196)

    Newman’s source for much of this rather controversial material is Dick Bissell’s memoir, Reflections of a Cold Warrior. To put it mildly, between his role in the CIA/Mafia Castro plots and the Bay of Pigs—and his dissembling about both—one would think that any author would look at what Bissell had to say about those topics with an arched eyebrow. Larry Hancock, who is quite familiar with the Bay of Pigs, actually called Bissell an inveterate liar on the subject. For instance, he kept on lying to Esterline and Hawkins about his meetings with Kennedy and about the cutting down of the air strikes. He also told them that if there was too much cut back, he would abort the project. He did not. (e-mail communication with Hancock, 2/23/19)

    If for some reason the author feels all of this information is wrong and Bissell was correct, then he should have at least acknowledged the discrepancy and explained why he felt such was the case.

    But probably worse than this are the two chapters Newman devotes to Judith Exner, Sam Giancana and Kennedy. Before I read this book, I would have thought I would have never seen anything like that topic in a book penned by Newman, for the simple reason that he has almost always been circumspect about the sources he uses for his writing. What caused him to drop his guard on this topic is inexplicable to this reviewer. But whatever the reason, he did.

    And he dropped it all the way down. He buys into just about everything Exner ever authored. To the point that he actually writes that the Church Committee allowed her to get away with lying to them. But that somehow, some way, she did tell the truth to—of all people—Seymour Hersh for his hatchet job on JFK, The Dark Side of Camelot. (p. 203) And I should add, it is not just Hersh. The author’s sources for these two chapters include people like Tony Summers on both Exner and Frank Sinatra, and Chuck Giancana on Sam Giancana. I don’t know how he missed the likes of Randy Taraborrelli and Sally Bedell Smith.

    If one is going to buy Exner’s stories, one has to examine them in order and be complete about the inventory, or relatively so. The first time she ever spoke in public about her affair with JFK was in her book, My Story, published in 1977. That book was co-authored by Ovid Demaris, an experienced crime author who wrote a fawning book about J. Edgar Hoover called The Director. He also co-wrote a book called Jack Ruby, which pretty much takes the stance toward Oswald’s killer that the Warren Commission did. In that work, he also went out of his way to criticize the Warren Commission critics, like Mark Lane. So right from the beginning, one could at least find evidence that Exner was being used as a vehicle.

    My Story was 300 pages long. Demaris was anti-JFK, and he made this clear in his own introduction. If Exner had anything significant to say beyond her Church Committee testimony, she had the opportunity and, in Demaris, the correct author to do it with. She did not. But eleven years later, she did. In a February 29, 1988 cover story for People magazine, Exner was now billed as “the link between JFK and the Mob.”

    What did that title signify? Exner was now telling America that, since she knew both Giancana and Kennedy, they were using her as a messenger service for things like buying elections and also the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. But this was all done with Exner being unaware of what she was doing. Newman writes that Exner likely first talked about this in 1992 with talk show host Larry King. (Newman, p. 203) The author apparently never looked up this 1988 story. This allows him to miss some important aspects of the Exner saga.

    There was another key point in the Exner tales. This came in 1997 with a double-barreled blast from both Liz Smith in Vanity Fair and Hersh in his hatchet job. All one needed to do is compare the installments for an internal analysis to see if they were consistent with each other. One easily finds out they are not. For instance, in 1977 Exner said the idea that she had an abortion was a lie spread about her by the FBI. She denies it in the most extreme terms. She actually said she wanted to kill the agent for slandering her. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 336) But in 1997, she now said she did have an abortion and beyond that, it was JFK who impregnated her. Major revisions like that should raise serious doubts in anyone’s mind about Exner and how she was being used.

    But that’s not all. For People magazine, Exner said she was not cognizant of her role as a message carrier. She never bothered reading any of the messages between Giancana and Kennedy, or opening any of the containers. But as Michael O’Brien later wrote, this was contradicted in 1997 for Smith, to whom she said that Kennedy showed her what was in one of the large envelopes. Supposedly it was $250,000. Somehow, in 1983, she forgot about being shown that much money. (Washington Monthly, December 1999, p. 39)

    There is another whopper in this trail of horse dung. In 1992, when asked by Larry King if Bobby Kennedy had anything to do with this message-carrying service or if she had any kind of relations with him at all, she said no she did not. Either Exner lost track of all the lies she told, or her handlers didn’t give a damn, because in 1997 this was reversed. Now she said that when she was at the White House having lunch with JFK, Bobby would come by and pinch her on the neck and ask if she was comfortable carrying those messages back and forth to Chicago for them. (Washington Monthly, p. 39)

    If Newman had done his homework on this, he would have discovered just how and why the 1983 fantasy version started. Exner knew she could make money off her story. Contrary to what Newman writes, she ended up making hundreds of thousands of dollars selling her tall tales to the anti-Kennedy press. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 330) She was paid $50,000 to sit down with Kitty Kelley for the People story in 1983. (O’Brien, p. 40)

    As biographer George Caprozi later revealed, the two did not get along at all. The problem was that Kelley kept on trying to pump Exner for information about Frank Sinatra. She was preparing one of her biographies about him at the time. Exner did not like this and so the two fought like cats and dogs. Nothing productive came out of the meetings. Since they had to pay both women, the editors decided that they themselves would pen the story. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 334) I should not have to ask Newman, or anyone reading this review, who owns People magazine. The purview of the cover story would come under the aegis of Time-Life. The people who hid the Zapruder film for eleven years; who edited the stills from the film so as not to reveal the head snap; the same people who, on February 21, 1964, placed a dubious photo of Oswald on their cover with the alleged weapons he used to kill Officer Tippit and JFK. In 1983, the time of the story’s publication, the principals were all dead: Sam Giancana, John Roselli and John F. Kennedy. With Exner bought off, the story was libel-proof.

    Finally, to prove that Exner was being used as an anti-Kennedy vehicle, consider the Martin Underwood appendage to the saga. By 1997, Exner had gone hog-wild with her mythology. She now said she was carrying money and messages to Chicago from the White House and she would deliver them to a train station with Giancana waiting for her. This was so silly on its face that Hersh knew he needed a corroborating witness for it. So apparently, with help from Gus Russo, he tried to recruit Martin Underwood to accompany Exner in this film noir scenario. Underwood had worked for Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago and then did some advance work in 1960 for the Kennedy campaign. But the Exner follies now collapsed. Under questioning from the Assassination Records Review Board, Underwood would not go along with the scheme and said he knew nothing about such train travel or Judith Exner. (O’Brien, p. 40; see also “ Who is Gus Russo?”)

    I could go on and on. But I think the above is enough to expose Judy Exner for what she was: a lying cuss. Someone who would sell her soul for money and tinsel to the likes of Hersh, Smith and Time-Life. She did not deserve one sentence in this book, let alone two chapters.

    Let me make one final overall criticism. I have reviewed parts one and two of the series. Countdown to Darkness ends with the debacle at the Bay of Pigs. That took place in April of 1961. Kennedy had been in office for all of three months. I don’t have to tell the reader how long this series could be if the author keeps up this pace. The overall title of the series is The Assassination of President Kennedy. That is not what the series is really about. The book is really about the Kennedy administration. For instance, Volume 3, Into the Storm, features chapters on the association of the Kennedy administration with Martin Luther King. Unless the author is going to say the Klan killed Kennedy, I fail to see how that fits the overall rubric.

    When I was talking about and reviewing Vincent Bugliosi’s elephantine Reclaiming History, I wrote that because something is bigger does not make it better. In my opinion, with an astute and sympathetic editor, these first two volumes could easily have been collapsed into one—with the Exner garbage completely cut. More does not automatically connote quality. Sometimes it’s just more. I had the same complaint about Doug Horne’s five volumes series. Our side does not have to compete with the late Vince Bugliosi to exhibit our knowledge or bona fides. This is a long way of saying that I really hope Newman contains himself, or finds a decent editor who he respects and will listen to. He should stop at five volumes.

    There is a saying among actors: Sometimes, less is more.

    SEE ALSO:

  • Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Robert Kennedy Assassination

    Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Robert Kennedy Assassination

    pease le flemIt’s a rare thing indeed when a book actually delivers everything you could wish for—and then some. I can count on one hand the number of books in recent memory that have achieved this. Incorporating over twenty years of research, personal interviews, deep archival digging, and a comprehensive survey of nearly all the extant literature and articles surrounding Robert Kennedy’s encounter with the unspeakable in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel on the night of Jun 5, 1968, A Lie too Big to Fail will no doubt stand the test of time as the definitive book on the RFK murder. Pease establishes not only the most compelling case against the LAPD’s compromised (non-)investigation of the case to date, but reveals startling new discoveries, including previously unexplored forensic evidence, new witnesses to multiple shooters, and evidence of foul play at the highest levels of the United States political apparatus.

    Digging deep into the court records and transcripts of the also-compromised defense attorney who sold the 24-year old Sirhan Sirhan down the river before he ever had a chance at anything approaching a fair trial, Pease presents a firm case for why his fate—as he sits locked up in a California prison for life—cannot be justified in a democratic society. That Sirhan is still alive and paying for a crime he never committed brings a necessary urgency to her plea that the case be reopened. Because not only did Robert Kennedy’s murder signal the death knell of true progressivism in the United States political arena, but it served as perhaps the most arrogant abuse of power by a hidden hand that, for five decades, hijacked the United States’ foreign and domestic policy. Written with a gripping, driving cadence, the author’s narrative gifts are as pronounced as her investigative acumen. And with this book as her lifetime achievement on a case that still remains relatively obscure in light of the JFK assassination, she will likely establish herself as the preeminent authority on the subject for years to come.

    II

    Officially, minutes after delivering his victory speech in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after midnight, Senator Kennedy—to the cheers of his teeming supporters and staff—excused himself from the podium, proceeded backstage through a small passage leading to large double doors, entered the hotel’s kitchen pantry, shook hands with cooks and a busboy, and was shot to death. The sole perpetrator was held to be Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant who appeared in the confusion of the crowded space in front of the senator and fired a .22 caliber revolver at Kennedy, mortally wounding him and injuring five other people with his eight-shot discharge.

    Kennedy died almost a day later. He had multiple brain surgeries and finally succumbed to the massive damage of the shattered bullet fragments: his heart rate lowered to barely a pulse, then stopped. His funeral ceremony was one of the most highly attended in U.S. history. For people like Tom Hayden, original author of the Port Huron Statement, who sat crying in a church pew upon learning of the death of his hero, the senator’s untimely death was also the death of hope for a generation seeking to take their nation on a course of peace and social justice. With Richard Nixon’s victory all but assured in the confused scrambling of the Democratic Party to promote their second tier candidates, the United States was going to fundamentally change.

    That’s the official version of events we teach our kids in school and repeat ad nauseum in the mainstream media. The problem, of course is that when Thomas Noguchi, the LA County coroner who was tasked with performing Robert Kennedy’s autopsy, was finished, he discovered that the fatal shot, just behind his right ear into the victim’s brain, was fired with the gun barrel at contact range, which could not have been more than three inches. This was demonstrable, as Kennedy’s neck exhibited tell-tale signs of powder burn tattooing, or stippling, which Noguchi took great pains to demonstrate by setting up a test-firing at the LA Police Academy on mock human skulls made of latex and pig ears after the autopsy. Each officer was asked to fire at his respective target from six ranges: barrel-pressed against the target, a quarter inch, half inch, two inches, three, and finally four. Only at three inches, did the stippling dispersal pattern match that on Kennedy’s corpse. Of the nearly seventy witnesses in the pantry that night, none placed Sirhan closer than three feet, and most average a distance of approximately five to six feet. Equally troubling was the fact that the three shots which struck Kennedy were fired from behind and at equally sharp vertical angles, from low to high, which makes it physically impossible for them to have come from Sirhan’s gun, which even before he was attacked and restrained by bystanders, was by all accounts pointed directly at Kennedy in a flat, arm-outstretched fashion. We know Kennedy only perceived a threat from the front by the fact that numerous witnesses recall his hands defensively coming up to cover his face at seeing an approaching Sirhan before he fell to his knees, wounded, and then slumped to the floor where he lay dying in a pool of gathering blood from his fatal head wound.

    The immediate aftermath of the shooting is another one fraught with contradictory claims. Officially, the LAPD concluded—or as we will see, decided actively to conclude, with the urging of two former CIA interrogation experts who took over the investigation within days of the murder—there was no conspiracy. Sirhan was apprehended, everyone saw him shoot, Kennedy went down, case closed. And yet, as Lisa Pease aptly demonstrates, that is not at all what witnesses reported. Almost thirty separate people placed Sirhan in the company of a young lady in a polka dot dress, along with several male accomplices. Many of them saw her in the pantry, seemingly holding Sirhan, and having the same sickly smile on her face as they claim he did before he lurched forward with gun outstretched to make his move. Witness Sandy Serrano places her in the immediate aftermath of the shooting running down the fire escape to the back parking lot with her male companion—both of whom Serrano witnessed entering the hotel via this very fire escape with Sirhan Sirhan earlier in the evening. Serrano said she was exuberantly shouting, “We shot him!” When asked by Sandy who did she kill, the girl responded, “Kennedy! We killed him!”. They were overheard by the Bernsteins, an elderly couple in the parking lot who reported the incident to first-responder Paul Sharaga, of LAPD. When Sharaga put out an APB for these two suspects, he was told moments later by a superior at Ramparts station that, “We don’t want them to get anything started on a big conspiracy.” (Larry Hancock, “Incomplete Justice, Part One: At the Ambassador Hotel,” 5/19/2007) The APB was subsequently pulled, allowing any accomplices ample time to make their escape.

    Lisa Pease details this familiar chain of events and the controversy surrounding the clearly real accomplices, sited by dozens of witnesses throughout the ballroom and surrounding areas that night. With regard to figures like the infamous girl in the polka dot dress, she brings some fascinating new insights to the case: including the likely use of multiple teams and multiple polka dot women who were also part of the plot. Many have wondered: What would have happened had Kennedy exited via a different route? The author is quick to note that he was marked for death that night by the sheer number of likely assassins actually positioned in the Ambassador Hotel that evening. While as many as three shooters could have been in the pantry, the LAPD was immediately told to stand down in their pursuit of leads concerning anyone but Sirhan’s immediate family and friends. Therefore, we will probably never be able to say conclusively who these people were. Lisa Pease provides some excellent considerations though, and that is perhaps one of the most exciting parts of her new findings, along with some of her personal interviews which to my knowledge she is sharing here for the first time in print. That, plus the fact that SUS officers at Ramparts station also burned over 2,400 photos taken at the Ambassador ballroom in a hospital incinerator, removed and later destroyed key ceiling and door panels containing bullet holes because they “didn’t have room to store them,” and both discredited and intimidated major credible eyewitnesses: all this smacks of a systematic cover-up.

    III

    Stylistically, A Lie To Big To Fail achieves a fine balance between the immense complexity of the case—with its thousands of files, its many bizarre suspects and characters, its hypno-programming realities, and other strange but relevant source data—and the inherent drama of the event. We begin with an almost Raymond-Chandler-styled portrait of those fateful California nights spent with folks like director of The Manchurian Candidate John Frankenheimer (talk about situational irony) and other supporters, then progress to the primary victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel. The book is instantly engaging, no matter how familiar readers might be with the case. The accessibility of the book is another commendable feat Pease has pulled off; experts who have studied the case for decades will still find evidence and propositions they had never seen or considered, while a friend I loaned the book to—who had never examined the case—could just as easily engage with the text. That is no small feat. Too often a book in the assassination field presumes a level of familiarity with the subject material that is beyond the scope of most readers, while those that are more accessible often gloss over the depth and complexity of the subplots, and also motives and new information gleaned from recent declassifications. A Lie to Big to Fail does neither, and presents an eminently readable, thoroughly substantiated story that, in many respects, is stranger than fiction.

    Covering the gamut of the LAPD’s Special Unit Senator files, along with newly discovered archival footage from places like the California State Archive and local news agencies, Pease’s book is probably the most comprehensive I have ever read on this case, incorporating not only the limited but extremely useful secondary literature from the 1970s, 80s and recent times, but also combing the entire primary source record of the case as well. The author poured thousands of hours of personal research into the book. And it shows. Sources are meticulously detailed and annotated, in the classical manner with the references at the bottom of the page. This allows anyone with an internet connection to fact check most of her findings; some must be accessed in person in Sacramento and elsewhere.

    The other thing that really stands out in the book is the author’s refusal to argue she’s definitively solved the case. Don’t get me wrong: if anyone has come close to figuring out exactly what happened that night, it’s Lisa Pease. What I mean is that too often plots of this magnitude, which require not only clandestine funding, months of planning, a deeply complex cover-up often stretching decades, and the complicity of many high-level officials and planners, are traced to a single source: the mob, the CIA, the Minutemen, Nixon. What seems to be the case, and I will let readers reach their own conclusions, is that, as Lisa notes, there were aspects of both underworld crime liaisons, private military contractors, and off-the-books involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in the persons of say Hank Hernandez and Manny Peña (USAID/CIA), and of course Robert Maheu (Howard Hughes Corporation/CIA). Thane Cesar has been and still is a prime suspect, given his anti-Kennedy, pro-segregation views and convenient placement as RFK’s escort in the pantry. That he “retired” from Ace Security, a job he’d had for only a few weeks, as he sarcastically stated during his exit interview with the LAPD, is also extremely suspicious. (RFK LAPD Microfilm, Volume 122, Reporters Daily Transcripts, Reinvestigative Files 1974—1978) p. 314). That Nixon was basically handed the presidency does not, of course, implicate him personally; though as the end of the book suggests, there is anecdotal evidence his brother Don was indeed apprised of the events surrounding the assassination and informally debriefed shortly thereafter. In a diary entry that Pease personally procured from John Meier, a Howard Hughes top aide from 1966 to 1970, Meier wrote on June 6, 1968:

    Bob Maheu called to ask about the Don Nixon meeting and suggested 8:30 breakfast at the Desert Inn Country Club (in Las Vegas). I went to the club. Maheu was all smiles, and Don Nixon walks in an all smiles. What followed next had to be seen to be believed. They embraced each other and Don Nixon said, “Well that prick is dead,” and Maheu said, “Well it looks like your brother is in now.” (Pease, p. 493)

    This book also presents perhaps the most balanced look at the controversy surrounding the potential and very likely programming Sirhan underwent before his arrival on the scene. Drawing from both familiar and quite obscure cases, where people were indeed exposed as hypno-programmed assets operating against their will with no working knowledge of how or why they performed various acts and crimes, she gives those in the research community a solid footing on which to stand in what amounts to the hardest part of the case for the MSM to digest. Given the CIA’s millions of dollars of research into its MK-ULTRA and related mind control experiments, along with the accounts provided in Pease’s later chapters, even the most skeptical critics will be hard pressed now to discredit this exotic but very real use of actionable hypnosis.

    IV

    Sirhan remains languishing in prison to this day, narrowly avoiding the gas chamber by a lucky break which saw California abolish the death penalty in 1972. Despite his good behavior, insistence that he has no memory of the events in the pantry, his numerous and sincere interviews with new therapists and hypno-suggestive experts, his fate remains sealed. William Pepper, the attorney and barrister who represented the King family during their 1999 civil trial against Lloyd Jowers, in which a Shelby County jury determined Martin Luther King had been assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, has joined attorney Laurie Dusek in a bid to free Sirhan from a crime we know he could not possibly have committed.

    Senator Kamala Harris, who served as the California Attorney General until 2017, and who was also the DA of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011, insisted since the parole hearing reached her desk in 2012 that Sirhan is still guilty. Following the release of an audio tape found in the California State Archives which captured what acoustics expert Philip Van Praag believes is thirteen distinct shots in the pantry, Harris was confronted by the very real possibility that Sirhan was not a lone gunman. Harris calls Van Praag’s analysis “pure speculation.” (Martinez and Johnson, “Prosecutors, attorneys argue: Was there a second gun in RFK assassination?” CNN, 3/12/2012)

    Similarly, despite the very real fact that hypno-programming has been successfully deployed in military, civilian, and criminal plots, and other special operations dating back to the early 20th century, Harris refuses to accept its possible use on Sirhan in the RFK saga. Upon reading the adamant testimony of Harvard professor of forensic psychiatry and hypnosis, Dr. Daniel Brown—who spent over sixty hours interviewing Sirhan—Harris claimed, “The theory that a person could be hypnotized into planning and committing a murder against his will is a controversial (if not fantastic) one and has not been adopted by most of Brown’s peers, including the American Psychological Association.” She continues, “Thus, even if Sirhan could show that some psychologists believe in mind control or hypno-programming, his showing of actual innocence is nevertheless based on a debatable theory that is not universally accepted in the psychology community.” (CNN, 3/12/2012) Brown, in a signed 2011 affidavit, stated, “I have written four textbooks on hypnosis, and I have hypnotized over 6,000 individuals over a 40-year professional career. Mr. Sirhan is one of the most hypnotizable individuals I have ever met, and the magnitude of his amnesia for actions under hypnosis is extreme.” (Tom Jackman, “The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy: Was Sirhan Sirhan hypnotized to be the fall guy?” Washington Post, 6/4/2018)

    What is actually a debatable theory, in reply to DA Harris’ conclusions, is that three bullets fired at very close range and one at contact range (the fatal head shot behind the right ear), all from behind and at a steep upward angle are supposed to have come from a weapon that was always at least three feet in front of the target. Or that at least thirteen bullets were fired from a gun which could only hold eight, and which likely fired no real bullets, just blanks. These are solidly based facts of the case, yet they are treated as conjectures. If other major legal cases were handled with this much disregard for forensic evidence, lawyers would be disbarred. And if Sirhan had been offered a fair trial—another exceptional chapter of A Lie Too Big to Fail—it is almost certain he would be a free man. But the special logic applied by those seeking to obfuscate the sinister implications of the final major assassination of the 1960s continues to hold fast, at least at the legal level.

    Things are changing though, and it would seem that the concerted efforts of those like Lisa Pease, along with the recent public denial of the official version of events by none other than Robert Kennedy Jr., may be turning the tide towards the real evidence which supports a concerted high-level conspiracy to remove a potential president. It was with a real sigh of relief that I read a recent Washington Post summary of Lisa’s new findings, one that, for a change, actually took her argument seriously and did not attempt to reduce her thesis to fringe theory. In the fifty-one years of relative silence surrounding the case, dotted here and there by books and talks by people like Allard Lowenstein, Ted Charach, Philip Melanson and others, that’s a true testament to the work of informed citizens uncovering the darker chapters of their nation’s history. As journalist Tom Jackman’s article notes, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the slain senator, said he thought Pease was ‘a great researcher.’ Similarly, Kennedy said that his own investigation, which included meeting with Sirhan in prison in December 2017, showed that ‘Sirhan could not and did not fire the gun that shot and killed my father.’” (Jackman, “CIA may have used contractor who inspired ‘Mission Impossible,’ to kill RFK, new book alleges,” Washington Post, 2/9/2019)

    V

    A Lie Too Big To Fail is more than a window into one of the most fascinating and disturbing assassinations of the sixties. It is a work whose implications are relevant to anyone trying to understand how the United States devolved into a shell of a country whose tenets of equality, freedom and justice have gone by the boards, leaving us with a paper-thin facade of a democracy embodied by charlatans who wear red and blue uniforms but who essentially represent the same corporate and military-industrial overlords, or what Colonel Fletcher Prouty once referred to as “The Secret Team:”

    It is a sinister device of opportunity and contrivance. What does exist is the mechanism. What exists is the automatic system, much like a nervous system or an electrical system. More properly, what exists is like a giant electronic data processing machine … which has its own power to grow, to reproduce, and to become more insidiously effective and efficient as it operates. It is a great intra-governmental infrastructure that is fed by inputs from all sources. It is big business, big government, big money, big pressure, and headless—-all operating in self-centered, utterly self-serving security and secrecy. (Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, p. xvii)

    It was Jim Garrison who eerily predicted this in an obscure and brief interview less than a month after the RFK slaying. Art Kevin, host of Los Angeles’ KHJ Radio, asked the New Orleans District Attorney,

    AK: Jim … are you prepared to say that the same elements responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy were responsible for the deaths of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and perhaps even Martin Luther King?

     

    JG: Well, you can remove the perhaps. The answer is “of course,” except that in the case of Senator Kennedy, they apparently interposed a cover organization.

    A bit later:

    JG: But there’s no, I don’t think there’s any question about the fact that the same forces removed everyone. Every one of these men were humanists. They were concerned about the human race. They were not racist in the slightest way, and above all, they were opposed to the evolution of America into an imperialist empire-seeking warfare state. Which it has become, I’m afraid. And now there aren’t too many, now there aren’t too many leaders left to talk out loud against the war in Vietnam. They’re eliminating them, one by one. Always a lone assassin. (“Jim Garrison says RFK was Hip to Murder Plots,” San Francisco Express-Times, 7/3/1968)

    Entrenched in an almost two-decade long foreign policy disaster in the Middle East and Afghanistan, riddled with crippling, insurmountable debt, with young people more despondent and driven to self-medication and violence, the United States of 2019 is unquestionably the dark legacy of those tiny .22 caliber slugs flying through the pantry that fateful July night. As political philosopher Sheldon Wolin described it, the United States in the past half-century has come to resemble an inverted totalitarian government. By that he means, a state run not by a traditional dictator like Stalin, Mao or Mussolini, but one even more ruthlessly efficient at quelling dissent and spreading disinformation through a diffuse and impossible-to-pin-down network of powerful and manipulative factors, from the corporate media to lobbyist groups, to the hollow candidates propped up every four years for the election circus:

    Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed ‘civic demobilization,’ conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses. (Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, p. 239)

    Indeed, many of these issues, which could have been addressed in Dr. King’s Poor People’s March—which RFK conceived and encouraged MLK to undertake—have never been seriously resolved in the last fifty years of American history. The powerful and vigorous aspirations of those like Tom Hayden, which burned briefly and flickered out with RFK’s assassination, have not been rekindled. After Robert Kennedy’s death, there have not been any significant, ideologically divergent political candidates offering real change or practical solutions to basic entrenched issues in the United States. What we got was Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter. It then got worse with the full-blown neoconservative movement’s apotheosis in the persons of Ronald Reagan, followed by George H. W. Bush, and W. In effect, the antithesis of everything which people like Martin Luther King, JFK, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy represented.

    But we must not lose hope, however bleak the future looks. And it is our responsibility not to. As Lisa Pease has so expertly done in her recent book, everything is in our power to expose the lie which still surrounds RFK’s untimely end. As the author concludes in her final passages, “He spent the last years of his life tilting at the windmills of greed and self-interest that ultimately cut him down. But his song lives on in all of us who strive, in whatever ways we can, to reach those unreachable stars.” (Pease, p. 504)

    Some related items:

  • CIA may have used contractor who inspired ‘Mission: Impossible’ to kill RFK, new book alleges

    See also our review.

  • The Canadian Archives, Michele Metta, and the latest on Permindex

    The Canadian Archives, Michele Metta, and the latest on Permindex

    67df04ded316a5b3c8f749febe0cedd2 SA review of

    CMC: The Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station and the Assassination of JFK

    by Michele Metta

    with two Appendices

    In his book, Michele Metta has provided his readers with a glimpse into the world of Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). But along with that, the author gives us an insight into the politics of post-war Italy that is quite encompassing and incisive. It’s very clear that Italy was a hard target of American interests in the Cold War. With the help of some books published in Italy that would not normally be available to an Western audience, Metta takes us further into those attempts to control Italian politics.

    Centro Mondiale Commerciale came to the attention of Jim Garrison’s investigation into John F. Kennedy’s assassination because Clay Shaw, the man he would accuse of participating in a plot to murder Kennedy, was a member of its board of directors. As more than one author had noted, that shadowy corporation had a rather curious background prior to opening in Rome amid much hoopla. They had previously been thrown out of Switzerland due to the controversial nature of some of its members, and also due to the mystery surrounding the company’s financial backing.

    The charge made by Garrison against Shaw is one of the reasons why there is so much discussion on the internet about CMC, located in Rome Italy, and its associated company Permindex, located in Basel, Switzerland. The discussion has also included much unreliable and/or unverified information that is rooted in accusations made by Lyndon Larouche’s Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) and David Copeland, aka William Torbitt, who wrote Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal. This includes stories depicting Permindex as a front company operated by Montreal lawyer, Louis M. Bloomfield, from which Bloomfield supervised assassinations. These stories have been circulating for many decades and for some people these stories about Bloomfield and Permindex are considered as fact.

    When I discovered that an Italian journalist, Michele Metta, had done research on CMC, I was hopeful. Finally, a study of this company that would not build on the falsehoods created by Larouche and Copeland, and instead would provide the reader with a narrative supported by actual evidence. What I found however, was a bit of both. Metta provides evidence that actually proves that Shaw was on the board of directors of CMC, that CMC member Ferenc Nagy was a CIA asset, and that another CMC member, Georges Mandel, aka Giorgio Mantello, was connected to Israeli intelligence. The author further describes connections between CMC and the notorious Italian organization, Propaganda Due (P2), that is linked to the “Strategy of Tension” that was responsible for a wave of bombings and violence in Italy. He also provides connections to persons involved in Kennedy’s assassination. But the book falls short in another aspect of its story. Metta attempts to link CMC to the “Strategy of Tension” and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Although he makes some interesting connections in those regards, he does not really achieve his aim.

    The book however does an excellent job at showing connections. Metta’s research links many members of CMC to Mussolini’s old fascist guard and neo-fascists associated with the “Strategy of Tension.” He does this by providing names of CMC members and then describing their personal histories. He demonstrates that these ardent cold warriors dreaded socialist and communist parties controlling the Italian government, and were prepared to go to great lengths, including violence, to stop them from achieving power. These are the same people who would also oppose Kennedy’s soft-on-communism foreign policy, including his conciliatory attitude towards leftists in the Italian government. These numerous right-wing connections to CMC make it apparent that it could be used as a vehicle for promoting subterfuge in Italian politics and perhaps even play a role in Kennedy’s assassination. But connections alone do not constitute proof. The fact that one person knows another, and that person is somehow connected to CMC is not proof that CMC played a role in the Dallas plot. These numerous right-wing connections, however, create a lot of suspicion about this company’s activities, a suspicion so great that it demands further investigation into its operations. It also shows that Garrison’s interest in the organization was merited and that later attempts to somehow demonstrate that this was all a KGB disinformation ploy are not founded. But more research is needed to provide the actual details of how CMC participated in Kennedy’s assassination. Metta does not provide this important evidence. For example, when he attempts to link the financing of the plot to Valerio Borghese and CMC, he offers only more connections, instead of how money went into CMC’s bank account and then out to the assassination team.

    The author informs us of other events he tries to link to the members of the CMC: for example, interfering with President Jimmy Carter’s re-election bid in 1980 and an assassination attempt on his life. He also tries to tie CMC to the assassination of Italian politician, Aldo Moro, in 1978. But again Metta offers only connections between people as proof that CMC played a role in these events.

    Before examining his book in more detail, we must first examine the question mentioned earlier: why all the interest in CMC/Permindex, and why it has continued to be a topic of interest for Kennedy researchers for such a long time.

    II

    As previously stated, this interest in CMC began with Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw for conspiracy in the death of President Kennedy. In his investigation he found out that Shaw, who had been the manager of the International Trade Mart (ITM) in New Orleans, had also served on the board of directors of CMC. To the casual observer, Shaw’s appointment made sense. CMC, like Permindex and the ITM, were both created to provide a showcase for goods produced by different companies. Given his many years of experience managing the ITM, he appears to have been a good candidate for work with CMC. But Garrison’s suspicions were raised when he discovered that Montreal lawyer, Louis M. Bloomfield, who he believed was a former member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the CIA, was a major stockholder in CMC.1 Garrison also indicated in his book that Le Devoir, a French-language Canadian newspaper, had published an article in 1967 that stated that Bloomfield had done espionage work for the United States government and was a major stockholder in Permindex.2 While I have yet to see credible evidence that Bloomfield was an OSS agent, Garrison was right about his suspicions regarding CMC. Once the public found out about them it was only a matter of time before stories, ever the more wild, began to circulate about both Permindex and Bloomfield. These accusations came to Bloomfield’s attention, and in a letter to I. G. Alk in 1979 he lamented:

    There is an outfit calling itself the North American Labour Party run by some fellow called Larouche, apparently whose propaganda is not treated seriously, but whose propaganda accuses me and other prominent Canadians of all sorts of heinous crimes. (Exhibit 13 )

    These attacks and the perceived damage to his reputation, along with other misinformation about him, were the probable reasons for his wife to ask Library and Archives Canada (LAC) not to release his papers to the public. The archive’s compliance with her wishes resulted in two lawsuits against them. (A discussion of these two lawsuits and a third one brought by me can be found in Appendix 1.)

    Metta continues in this vein. He believes Bloomfield to be a stockholder in the companies and states that he founded Permindex. (p. 7) The evidence from LAC does not support these statements. He is not a direct shareholder nor a founder of Permindex. (A description of his actual role with these two companies can be found in Appendix 2.)

    III

    One of the insights I gained about the anti-Kennedy forces in Metta’s book is found in a pact made between Italian and American Freemasons against Kennedy, which included a member of CMC and the CIA. This is an important assertion, since it is implying that CMC is involved in an anti-Kennedy plot. It also shows a connection between a member of CMC’s board of directors and the CIA. (p. 10) This pact involved Dr. Gigliotti, who was a CIA agent, and was organized by Giuseppe Pièche. (p. 13) Pièche was a member of CMC’s board of directors. (p. 15) The purpose of this pact was to oppose Kennedy’s bid for the 1960 presidential election. In a letter from the Grand Master of the Freemasons, Enzio Milone, to the Christian Democratic Member of Parliament, Elio Rosati, dated September 24, 1960, he told them to:

    … propagate as much as possible the protestant idea—influence Italian immigrants in the USA to vote against Kennedy … (p. 10.)

    But is the pact subversive? To many people, including this reviewer, it looks like typical election politics: encouraging a certain ethnic group to vote a certain way. The fact that it stemmed from a foreign country, Italy, is also not that unusual.

    Giuseppe Pièche, who organized the above-mentioned anti-Kennedy pact, also provides a link between CMC and far-right Italian politics. This connection is important because CMC has always been a suspicious entity, the suspicion being that the company owed its existence to a motive other than profit. And Metta does provide the reader with reasons to be suspicious. Pièche was a general in Mussolini’s army. If this isn’t enough of a fascist credential, Metta goes on to state that he and Mario Scelba “created and directed” the Servizio Antincendio [Fire Service]. He was assisted in the Fire Service by Edgardo Sogno who was connected to P2 and who later told the press that the Fire Service was a NATO organization linked to the Gladio network. (p. 13.4) The author also informs the reader that Pièche and Sogno created and ran an organization called “Pace e Libertà” [Peace and Freedom], which received funding from Allen Dulles. (pp. 14-15) These are credentials that should make any reader be wary. But then Metta makes a strained conclusion. He states that Pièche was a member of the CMC Board of Directors; that Antonio Trabuchi, who was present at the signing of the Freemasons’ pact, was a also a member of the government led by Fernando Tramboni, who wanted to make Italy into a dictatorship (pp. 9, 15); and finally, that Tramboni’s son-in-law, Franco Micucci Cecchi, was also a member of CMC (p. 15).

    From these facts he concludes: “Therefore, there is ample evidence so far to sustain that CMC was behind the pact against JFK.” (p. 15) Yet, he has already told us that the pact against Kennedy was between American and Italian Freemasons. (p. 9) If CMC was the catalyst for the pact, he should have demonstrated how CMC’s board of directors had created and implemented it.

    IV

    Metta then introduces a new statement into his narrative. It is an assertion which is truly sinister, one that implies Freemason participation in Kennedy’s death. At a meeting of the Sacro Collegio del Rito [Sacred Panel of Rites] held on December 5, 1981, which Metta describes as “… the high assembly of top Italian Freemasons,” there were concerns about a document in the possession of Enzo Milone, whose letter described the anti-Kennedy pact of 1960 mentioned above. (p. 16)

    At this meeting, Milone stated: “Everything happening [today] had its matrix in what occurred in 1962.” (p. 18) During this meeting, Franco Nataloni stated that: “If these papers were to get into the hands of the D.C. Tina ANSELMI, this could put all of us in trouble.” (p. 19)

    The Freemasons had a good reason to be concerned about Tina Anselmi. She led an Italian government commission of inquiry that could connect Italian Freemasons to P2 and other subversive activities. (p. 9) Metta then reminds us that the statement regarding what happened in 1962 was after Kennedy was elected and was residing in the White House at the time, so it does not have anything to do with their pact to block his election to the presidency. He goes on to state: “Milone says 1962; when Kennedy is already in the White House, and to stop him means something else; it means things like Dallas.” (p. 18)

    Is he implying that 1962 was the year that the Freemasons began their plot to assassinate Kennedy? It certainly seems like it because he mentions Dallas. But what actually did occur was a lot less sinister. The author also states: “Besides, in 1962 the plot against JFK started involving a key figure of the Italian Intelligence and Freemasonry: Giovanni De Lorenzo, an individual who was closely linked to the CMC …” ( p. 24)

    But the plot was not an assassination plot; it was a five-point plan to oppose left-wing parties in Italy. These are enumerated by Metta (pp. 34-35):

    • Point 1. Program diverse actions for possible emergency situations.
    • Point 2. Intensify finances to the forces which oppose the political swing [to the left].
    • Point 3. Support single leaders in the Christian Democratic Party (DC) and political lobbies willing to rally around the new President of the Republic Antonio Segni (Segni, like Gronchi before him, placed full trust in General De Lorenzo), who did not like the party’s opening to the left.
    • Point 4. Support any action which seeks to weaken the structure of the Socialist Party and favor any kind of internal split.
    • Point 5. Strengthen voices in the media who are able to influence public opinion in the field of economics and politics.

    As can be seen, this was a plan to disrupt the attempt being made by left-wing parties to gain the confidence of Italian voters. As David Talbot mentioned in his book on Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard, Kennedy thought that the ruling party in Italy, the Christian Democrats, should open itself up to the Socialists. This “plot against Kennedy” thus was in opposition to “l’apertura a sinistra”, the opening to the left that Kennedy would propose on a trip to Rome the next year. (Talbot, p. 464)

    V

    Metta does however create some suspicion about CMC’s connections to the Masonic Lodge P2. P2 was, according to the author, linked to the “Strategy of Tension,” which was responsible for much violence in Italy, including the Bologna railway station massacre that killed 85 people and injured over 200 people in 1980. The goal of these attacks was to terrorize the Italian public into accepting an authoritarian government. (p. 21) Led by Licio Gelli and financier Michele Sindona, P2 was declared by the Anselmi Commission to be a criminal organization. P2 was a remarkably dangerous and secret society. Their influence extended beyond Italy, as far away as Argentina. As a result of the Anselmi Commission, it was eventually outlawed.

    Metta believes that the P2 lodge and CMC were so closely linked that: “In fact, we are now about to discover in how many infinite ways the CMC is indistinguishable from the Masonic Lodge P2 …”(p. 21)

    The evidence he cites to connect CMC to P2 is a company called IAHC, which was a subsidiary of CMC. (p. 21) He then tells us that its board of directors meetings were held at the office of Roberto Ascarelli, whom he also links to Licio Gelli, found guilty of the Bologna massacre. (pp. 21-22) Anselmi’s commission stated that P2 also met at Ascarelli’s office. (ibid)

    This is important evidence. It certainly creates a link between P2 and CMC’s subsidiary IAHC, and therefore to CMC itself. Sharing the same offices is similar to the situation Lee Harvey Oswald found himself in, sharing office space with Guy Banister at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. But while this is evidence of possible collaboration between CMC and P2 through its subsidiary, IAHC, it does not prove conclusively that CMC is indistinguishable from P2. Metta is relying on a connection, and while that is important, it does not tell the reader what subversive activities IAHC participated in. Although this is definitely a step forward in describing CMC, more research is needed to show how IAHC participated in P2 operations and how it participated in the Dallas plot.

    VI

    Metta also tries to explain to the reader another aspect of the assassination plot; how it was financed. His attempt to link Valerio Borghese to the Dallas plot gets mired in a large number of connections. It does create suspicion that certainly warrants further research, but does not prove that CMC was somehow connected to Kennedy’s murder.

    Borghese was a naval officer under Mussolini. After the war he was rescued and then mentored by James Angleton. Nicknamed the Black Prince, he became a hardline fascist political figure in postwar Italy. He took part in an attempted coup in 1970. After it failed, he fled to Spain where he lived out the last years of his life.

    Metta introduces the reader to a bank called Credito commerciale e industriale, which is abbreviated to Credicomin. Credicomin was bought by a company called Società finanziara italiana (SFI). On the board of directors of SFI is a man named Antonio Covo, whose brother-in-law is Giovanni Gronchi, who is linked to CMC members, (p. 47). He then tells us that Credicomin came into the hands of Ramfis Trujillo (p. 50), the son of Rafael Trujillo, the former dictator of the Dominican Republic. Borghese then became Credicomin’s president and Trujillo deposited 10 billion lira into Credicomin. This money promptly disappeared. (p. 50) He also adds to the mix the story Gerry Hemming gave to a newspaper in 2005, in which he said that Ramfis Trujillo and Johnny Abbes Garcia, Rafael Trujillo’s former intelligence director who tried to assassinate Fidel Castro, met in Haiti in February 1963 to finance Kennedy’s assassination. (p. 49) He also mentions that the telephone number of Marcella Borghese, a cousin of Valerio Borghese, was found in Clay Shaw’s telephone book. (p. 50)

    Though some have doubts about Hemming, if this is all accurate, it does look sinister. Shaw, the accused Kennedy plotter, knows Borghese’s cousin. Money is disappearing from a bank controlled by Ramfis Trujillo, who Hemming accused of meeting in Haiti to finance the Dallas plot. These are certainly interesting links; but there is a problem. Metta does not tell us how CMC participated in the financing of the assassination. Yes, Shaw was on CMC’s board of directors and Gronchi is connected to CMC, but what exactly did CMC do to facilitate the financing of Kennedy’s murder? These connections between SFI, Credicomin, Borghese, Trujillo and Shaw also do more to implicate Credicomin than CMC in Kennedy’s assassination, because money disappeared from a Credicomin bank account, not from CMC’s bank account.

    VII

    Metta does however produce real evidence that links CMC to the CIA. Here he provides a document from which the following facts emerge: Dr. Ferenc Nagy, President of Permindex, had asked the CIA to place an American businessman on the board of Permindex and also that a CIA agent be placed on the staff of Permindex. Nagy then goes further. He even asks CIA to invest money in Permindex so that it can have input into the management of the company. (p. 87 fn. and p. 88, Exhibit 25) This evidence is very important because it confirms that this company’s purpose was not just to provide an exhibition hall for companies wanting to sell their products, but that there was also an intelligence aspect to it. This evidence is further corroborated by a document provided by Metta that shows that CIA asset Clay Shaw was a member of CMC’s board of directors.6

    Metta establishes another link between CMC and an intelligence agency. Georges Mandel, aka Giorgio Mantello, a member of CMC, was connected to the Israeli Intelligence Service (ILS). Quoting a CIA memorandum, the author states: “ … at Point 5, makes a very detailed but also formidable revelation: witnesses identified Georges Mandel alias Giorgio Mantello, as belonging to the Israeli spy network.” (p. 114) He also informs us that he was employed by the Banque Pour le Commerce Suisse-Amérique Centrale in Geneva that hired ILS agents. (p. 114)

    There are now three persons linked to Permindex and CMC—Nagy, Shaw and Mandel—who have or had intelligence connections. It is getting harder to believe that this company’s only purpose was commercial. But once again it must be said that these intelligence connections alone do not support Metta’s theory that CMC played a role in the Dallas plot. What is needed is evidence that the intelligence assets used CMC as a conduit to carry out the plot.

    VIII

    In his narrative Metta tries to link the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) to Kennedy’s murder and CMC. The challenge here is to see if he offers proof that the OAS, the same organization that was behind assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle, was involved in Kennedy’s murder, and then connect the dots to CMC.

    He does offer some proof about a possible OAS involvement in the Dallas plot. He provides the reader with the contents of a CIA memorandum which states that Jean Souetre was:

    … in Fort Worth the morning on 22 November and in Dallas in the afternoon. (p.128)

    The memorandum also states that Souetre: “… is believed to be identical with a Captain who is a deserter from the French army and an activist in the OAS.”

    He then presents us with more incriminating information. He reminds us that Fernando Tamborini, who was linked to the masonic pact against Kennedy and whose son-in-law, Franco Micucci Cecchi, was a member of CMC, had a “special office” that was, quoting SISMI papers: “… probably, also the headquarters for OAS activities in Italy (at least at the high level).” (p. 131)

    The Souetre presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963 has always been fascinating, for more than one reason. For instance, the OAS had been bitterly opposed to Kennedy since 1957, when he advocated for Algerian independence. Metta does make a connection between the OAS and Tamborini, but this connection is attenuated because the SISMI paper qualifies the identification of Tamborini’s office with “probably”. He then attempts to connect the OAS to CMC using Tamborini’s son-in-law but does not provide evidence to show how Cecchi involved CMC in the Dallas plot. Again, this is new and interesting evidence, but it does not go as far as it should in the details.

    IX

    Connections, connections, connections; this is the core of Metta’s book. He attempts to show that a myriad of connections between the far-right of Italian politics, the CIA, Israeli intelligence and CMC all came together to plot and carry out the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The author even states after describing still more connections between members of CMC and various right-wing personalities: “Yes, for the umpteenth time, everything is connected.” (p. 139)

    But connections are a double-edged sword. Connections can draw the attention of the reader to important relationships between members of the CMC and fascists, and perhaps even to the Dallas plot because the likely suspects were members of the far-right. But connections alone are not enough, because they do not show the crucial details of how Kennedy was murdered: who gave the orders, how the plot was organized, how the snipers were recruited, and what role CMC played in this tragic event.

    Metta does make an interesting connection between the P2 and CMC subsidiary IAHC, but this needs more work because he does not tell the reader what subversive activities it was involved in.

    He also fails to show the reader how CMC was used as a conduit in the Dallas plot. For example, he attempts to link the financing of the assassination to Borghese, Trujillo, Credicomin, Shaw and CMC, but here again we have that double-edged sword. These connections are interesting: missing money, Shaw on the board of directors of CMC and Shaw with Borghese’s cousin’s telephone number. But he does not show how the money went from Credicomin’s bank account to CMC’s bank account and from there to the actual plotters. These connections do raise suspicions, and they should be investigated further. But by themselves they do not prove that CMC acted as financier for the Dallas plot.

    He also provides evidence to establish that there were at least three people, Nagy, Shaw and Mandel, who were connected to intelligence agencies. This is important because it confirms the suspicions of the newspaper Paesa Sera that there was more to CMC than just providing exhibition space for companies to sell their products.

    Metta also includes CMC links to events that occurred after the assassination. He attempts to connect CMC to election meddling by participating in a plot to scandalize President Carter’s brother and to an attempt on Jimmy Carter’s life. He also tries to connect CMC to the murder of Aldo Moro, but CMC’s alleged role in these two events does not inform us about the events of 1963 in Dallas.

    Metta’s book also has a problem with its format: the book does not have an index. This creates a lot of difficulty for the reader because so much of what the author writes about is connections. Attempting to follow the histories of different persons mentioned in his book is difficult without knowing on which pages a person is mentioned. This requires the reader to re-read whole sections of the book to locate information about an individual and this is frustrating. Particularly for a reviewer. Hopefully, this will be improved in a later edition.

    Appendix 1: The Bloomfield Papers Law Suits

    In 1978, Montreal attorney Louis M. Bloomfield donated his personal papers to Library and Archives Canada (LAC). His papers contained a wide variety of items, including a large number of his letters, articles and manuscripts written by him, including photographs. A complete list of what he donated to LAC can be found in the archives finding aid. (Exhibit 3)7 When he donated his papers to LAC he stipulated that all items donated by him were to be released to the public, without any restrictions whatsoever, 20 years after his death. In the intervening years, between the time of his death and the papers’ release date, his wife, Mrs. Justine Cartier, now remarried, would act as literary executrix. Her control of the documents would cease 20 years after his death.

    In 1984, while on a trip to Israel, Bloomfield passed on. In 2004, Maurice Philipps, author of a book about Kennedy’s assassination called De Dallas à Montréal, asked LAC to grant him access to Bloomfield’s papers. According to his will, this should have been done automatically because 20 years had elapsed since his death. The archives consulted with Bloomfield’s widow and asked her about granting Philipps access to her husband’s papers. She told them to deny Philipps access. The archives complied with her wishes, even though her request contravened her husband’s stipulation. Philipps, after being informed that he could not access Bloomfield’s papers, asked the Federal Court of Canada to review the archive’s decision to not allow him to review Bloomfield’s papers. In 2006 the Court ruled in Philipps’ favour and ordered LAC to review their decision.8

    In 2007, after consulting with Mrs. Cartier, the archives made a decision to release some of Bloomfield’s papers, and to hold others back. The papers that were held back were those deemed by LAC to be subject to “solicitor-client privilege” (SCP). This was due to Bloomfield’s status as a lawyer, and they would therefore be released 50 years after the last date in the file in which those papers were contained. The archives created a document that listed all items in the Bloomfield papers and indicated which ones were open for public review and which ones would only be released when the documents were 50 years old. (Exhibit 4) Philipps appealed this decision and asked that all files be released immediately. This time the Court ruled in favour of the archives. Their decision to hold certain files back for 50 years would stand.9

    As a result of his actions, Philipps was finally able to review some of Bloomfield’s papers. He created a website called “I Have Some Secrets for You” in which he provided copies of letters written by Bloomfield in regard to his work with Permindex. Philipps discovered some interesting communications in this first release, specifically between Bloomfield, Permindex and David Rockefeller. Apparently, Ferenc Nagy was trying to solicit funds for Permindex from one of the richest men in America. There was also a CIA connection since Nagy had invited the Agency to use this new company in Rome for any purposes it wished. There is more, as the reader can see by clicking through to his web site.

    I began my own research into Bloomfield’s papers in 2012. The examination began with those files that were already open and then continued with those papers that could only be reviewed after they were 50 years old. This required me to return to LAC as different papers, which had reached 50 years of age, were opened by LAC for review by the public. I accessed them on a number of occasions, and as late as 2017 had been granted access to them. In January 2018, I asked for those papers that were now available for review and was told by the archives that they could not be viewed by the public. The reason given by LAC was that those files were considered to be covered by SCP. In an email from Guy Berthiaume, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, he stated that it was not Mr. Bloomfield’s prerogative to donate his legal papers to the archives because SCP protects communications between a lawyer and his client from being divulged to the public. In response to this decision by LAC to not release his papers to me I submitted an “Application for Judicial Review” to the Federal Court of Canada asking the Court to review the archive’s decision.10 In my case I argued that Bloomfield’s papers were not subject to SCP because they did not meet the legal test for privilege that can be found in Canadian case law. The archive agreed to do a second review of those files they deemed to be subject to SCP. They subsequently released over 2,000 documents to me and held back just 69 documents. The archives also agreed to update the access forms on their website so future researchers would be aware that, except for the 69 documents held back by them, his papers can now be accessed without waiting for them to reach 50 years of age.

    But what would cause the archives, after two previous court cases, to again try to block public access to Bloomfield’s papers? I do not have a definite answer to this question but do have a theory. The most likely cause of this problem was the October 2017 release of Kennedy assassination documents as stipulated by the Assassination Records Review Board in Washington. The release of these documents is rooted in the decision by the United States government, taken in the 1992 President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, to declassify all documents pertaining to Kennedy’s murder in 25 years. Therefore all documents were to be released in 2017. When the time came for the documents to be open to the public, the media was full of stories about the releases. I was still able to access Bloomfield’s documents as late as November 2017, but with all of the media attention given to the JFK documents release, a decision was made to block access to them. The reason for blocking access to them, using the excuse that they were subject to SCP, was most likely caused by all of the media hoopla in America.

    II

    On December 18, 2018, LAC released to me over 2,000 documents previously deemed subject to SCP. These files had been reviewed by the archives and deemed to be not subject to SCP. Only 69 documents from the Bloomfield papers were not released because LAC claims they are subject to SCP. A list of Bloomfield’s correspondence that will not be released is in Exhibit 5.

    A review of the papers that were released did not reveal anything new. The documents found there were the same ones that had previously been considered subject to SCP and held back for 50 years, and these I had reviewed on a number of occasions since 2012. The papers released in 2018 are comprised of letters and cablegrams from Bloomfield to his business associates and other personal contacts. The fact that interesting connections were found but nothing incriminating is not surprising because it appears that Bloomfield was not actually a shareholder in either Permindex or Centro Mondiale Commerciale. His role with these two companies was to protect the interests of certain other shareholders who may have been from the class of the Power Elite. If he had dealings with Director Clay Shaw, or was aware of the company’s intelligence connections, he did not include these documents with the papers he donated to the archives. A review of the correspondence in Exhibit 5 also reveals that important Permindex and Centro Mondiale Commericale figures such as Georges Mantello, Joseph Slifka, Hans Seligman and others, do not appear as recipients on the list of 69 documents that will not be released.

    Appendix 2: Bloomfield’s Role in Permindex and Centro Mondiale Commerciale

    For a long time Bloomfield has been the object of suspicion on many internet forums, and also in some books. Some have insinuated he was the mastermind behind the creation of Permindex, which has allegedly organized a few assassinations. These rumours began during the Jim Garrison investigation. Garrison had been given articles written about Permindex by writers like Ralph Schoenmann and the late Paris Flammonde. But Garrison, for whatever reasons, never brought this information up at the trial of Clay Shaw. After the acquittal of Shaw, a man named David Copeland, using the alias of William Torbitt, wrote a pamphlet called Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal. This pamphlet began to circulate widely in the research community. And it was here, for the first time, that both Bloomfield and Permindex were accused of being part of the JFK assassination. In fact, the very first chapter of the pamphlet focuses on Permindex and names Bloomfield as the top supervisor of the plot. As Jim DiEugenio, in his book Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition notes, there are many, many scholarly problems with this pamphlet, one being that its few references do not check out.

    Years later, in 1981, Lyndon Larouche—in an issue of Executive Intelligence Review written by Jeffery Steinberg and Peter Goldman—published at length about Permindex. Again, Bloomfield was a central focus of that long essay. For the most part, author Michele Metta thankfully does not go that far. He does not accuse Bloomfield of being the leader of an assassination team, but the evidence does indicate that he made some skewed assumptions about Bloomfield’s role with Permindex. He also raises some suspicions about him because he corresponded with the late George H. W. Bush.

    In his book, he states that Bloomfield was the founder of Permindex. But he does not supply a source for the statement. Without evidence from the author to support it, we need to look to the Bloomfield papers for an answer. What does Bloomfield have to say about his relationship to Permindex?

    In a letter from Bloomfield to J. Metzger dated April 8, 1960, he informs him: “…I am not the Treasurer of Permindex but am acting solely in the capacity of lawyer for certain shareholders.” (Exhibit 611 ) Who these shareholders are, he does not tell us, but we now know he is stating that he is not an investor in Permindex.

    In a letter to Enrico Mantello dated January 21, 1960 he writes: “I would have never undertaken this job if I had not been assured of your cooperation.” (Exhibit 712 ) Those are not the words of a founder, they are a statement being made by a representative.

    In a letter to Tibor Rosenbaum dated July 12 1961, Bloomfield discusses ownership positions in a syndicate created to buy the shares of a development called Marina Reale (Exhibit 813 ):

    … so the position today…

    George Mantello 25%
    Enrico Mantello (and Tim Fales) 25%
    Dov Biegun 10%
    Joseph Slifka 15%
    L.M. Bloomfield (in trust for clients) 10%
    Max and Moe Pascal 7 ½%
    Nate Dolin 7 ½%
    Total 100%.

    Again it appears from the evidence that Bloomfield is acting on his client’s behalf and does not have a financial stake in Marina Reale.

    Metta also tries to raise suspicion about Bloomfield’s correspondence with George H. W. Bush, a director of the CIA, who later became both Vice President and President of the United States. His cites as evidence Bloomfield’s connection to Bush, the implication being that since they knew each other, there must be wrong-doing here. He also states that the correspondence between Bloomfield and Bush has been blocked from public access. This is not accurate today. The files are available for public review because LAC only blocked access to those files that they deemed to be subject to SCP. Given that Bloomfield was not Bush’s lawyer, their correspondence is open for review. He also states that the correspondence is “dense”, suggesting that they exchanged many letters. (p.110.) This writer could find only 18 items in Bush’s file and they do not discuss Permindex or CMC, or conspiratorial matters. All of these items can be found in Exhibit 9.14  This does not mean that we can automatically excuse President Bush, or Bloomfield for that matter. It is simply stating that the evidence is not there in these files.

    A question that must also be posed is why Larouche and Copeland would accuse Bloomfield of such major crimes. In Copeland’s case the reason seems to be to simply obfuscate the Kennedy case. At the early date he began to circulate his pamphlet, very little was known about Permindex or the CMC. Thus the field was wide open to attribute all kinds of illicit actions to those bodies. A review of available literature can provide some insights into Larouche’s motivation. His organization and much of his writing tends to accuse the United Kingdom for many international problems. It is not an exaggeration to say that, to the editors of Executive Intelligence Review, Great Britain is the locus of much of the evil in the world. In the 1981 article we mentioned earlier, the authors attempted to connect Bloomfield to the legendary Canadian/British intelligence officer William Stephenson. In 1940, Winston Churchill sent Stephenson to New York as the chief of British Security Coordination. He was also the chief liaison to American intelligence during that conflict. His office was located in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. There is no evidence in Bloomfield’s war file that he worked with Stephenson; his correspondence, however, indicates that he may have known Stephenson in the 1950s. (Exhibit 10)15 Bloomfield felt that there was also a tinge of anti-Semitism in these accusations. For instance, the Anti-Defamation League had written that, “The LaRouche operation has been marked since 1978 by continuous emanations of anti-Semitism. Its publications single out prominent Jews, Jewish families, and Jewish organizations for particular abuse.”16

    Bloomfield was affected by this anti-Semitic campaign because only a year later, in 1979, in a letter to I. G. Alk, he told him what Larouche was saying about him and other prominent Canadians. (Exhibit 1)

    Exhibits

    Exhibit 1 – Bloomfield letter to I. G. Alk

    Exhibit 2 – Nagy asks CIA to make Permindex a CIA front company

    Exhibit 3 – Bloomfield collection finding aid

    Exhibit 4 – Bloomfield collection file release dates

    Exhibit 5 – Bloomfield collection files not released by Library and Archives Canada

    Exhibit 6 – Bloomfield role with Permindex/CMC

    Exhibit 7 – Bloomfield role with Permindex/CMC

    Exhibit 8 – Bloomfield role with Permindex/CMC

    Exhibit 9 – Bloomfield Bush Correspondence

    Exhibit 10 – Bloomfield connection to William Stephenson

    Notes

    1 Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, Warner Books Edition, New York 1991, p. 101.

    2 Garrison, p. 102.

    3 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Container 29 File 16, General Business Correspondence 1979.

    4 Gladio in Italy was part of a larger group of secret armies under the command of NATO that operated in different countries using different names. In Denmark it was called “Absalon”, in Norway it was called “ROC” and in Belgium it was called ‘SDRA8.” They were set up by the CIA and MI-6, and their job was to act as a stay-behind orce that would operate in countries that might be occupied by the Soviets after an invasion of Western Europe. Their objective was to help local resistance movements in occupied territories, evacuating pilots who were shot down and sabotaging enemy supply lines. This network was modeled on the British Special Operations Executive that sent soldiers behind enemy lines during World War II to fight a secret war. Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Frank Cass, London 2005, pp. 1-2.

    5 Metta’s source for this document is CIA. HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, (microfilm—reel 17: Ruiz-Webster), Memorandum: Subject—Trace results on persons connected with Centro Mondiale Commerciale (World Trade Center). NARA Record Number: 104-10181-10114. The document in exhibit 2 was sourced from The Black Vault website.

    6 On p. 8 of Metta’s book is a link to a website that contains documents provided by the author. One of the documents shows that Clay Shaw was on CMC’s board of directors.

    7 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG31-E25.

    8 Philipps v. Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Date: 2006-11-14, File numbers: T-1517-05. A copy of the Court’s decision, including the facts of Philipps’ case and legal issues can be found on the Federal Court’s website.

    9 Philipps v. Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Date: 2008-09-16, File numbers: T-1192-07. A copy of the Court’s

    decision, including the facts of Philipps’ case and legal issues can be found on the Federal Court’s website.

    10 John Kowalski v. Guy Berthiaume, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, File numbers: T-381-18. While documents have been released, the facts of this case and legal issues has not been published on the Court’s website.

    11 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Container 23, File 1, Letter Book 14, 1960.

    12 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Container 23, File 1, Letter Book 14, 1960.

    13 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Container 23, File 3, Letter Book 16 1960-1961.

    14 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Bush, George (Sr.)—Correspondence 1976-1984, Container 16, file 1.

    15 Library and Archives Canada, Louis M. Bloomfield, MG 31-E25, Container 19, File 1, Letter Book 3, 1953-1954.

    16 The LaRouche Political Cult: Packaging Extremism A case study, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, New York, Spring 1986, p.2.

  • The Murder of Hammarskjold

    The Murder of Hammarskjold

    Dag Hammarskj ld 011For a long time this site has tried to point out that the Congo struggle was one of the most important, yet underreported, foreign policy episodes that took place during the Kennedy administration. Sloughed off by the likes of MSM toady David Halberstam, it took writers like Jonathan Kwitny and Richard Mahoney to actually understand the huge stakes that were on the table in that conflict, namely European imperialism vs African nationalism. Kennedy had radically revised America’s Congo policy from Dwight Eisenhower to favor the latter. Not knowing he was dead, JFK was trying to support Congo’s democratically elected leader Patrice Lumumba. JFK was also one of the few Western leaders trying to help UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold stop the Europeans from crushing Congo’s newly won independence.

    In September of 1961, just eight months after Lumumba was murdered, Hammarskjold died in a plane crash. It was officially ruled an accident. But there were doubts from the beginning. For example, Harry Truman told the New York Times, that Hammarskjold was on the verge of getting something done “when they killed him.” It now turns out that Kennedy’s ambassador to Congo, Edmund Gullion, also suspected Hammarskjold’s plane was shot down. And he suspected it the night it happened. This key fact was not revealed for fifty years.

    Below we link to three stories in the press of late that have finally circulated about the true circumstances of what happened to the Secretary General, the man who Kennedy called, “the greatest statesman of the 20th century.”

    It is nice that the MSM is finally catching up to what we wrote about 20 years ago in Probe Magazine.  In particular:

    In the first of these two articles, Jim DiEugenio lays out the overall struggle of Kennedy and Hammarskjold to keep Congo free and united against the imperial forces of Belgium and England. In the second, Lisa Pease examines the murders of Lumumba and Hammarskjold within eight months of each other. Those assassinations left Kennedy standing alone. When he was killed, the imperialists triumphed.

    During the ensuing decade, CTKA continued to focus on this important story, again underscoring the links between Kennedy and Hammarskjold, but now reinforced by the work of historian Greg Poulgrain with regard to their cooperation over Indonesia. See:

    Finally, two decades later, the MSM is acknowledging that work. We don’t like to toot our own horn, but … Honk! Honk!

  • George H.W. Bush, Icon of the WASP Establishment—and of Brutal US Repression in the Third World

    By Greg Grandin, At: The Nation

  • The Crimes of Quillette

    The Crimes of Quillette

    I’ll say this for Fred Litwin: He knows where to go to advance his cause.

    On Steve Paikan’s Ontario TV show The Agenda, Litwin stated that nothing in the declassified files of the ARRB indicated anything about a conspiracy in the JFK case. This is simply and utterly false. As I wrote about Litwin’s essay on Jim Garrison, this statement proves one of two things: 1.) He did not read any of the declassified files, or 2.) He did read them and is deliberately misrepresenting them. In my review I proved that such was the case with several specific examples. This exposure reduces Litwin to the level of Leslie Nielson as Lt. Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun: proclaiming to a gatheringcrowd there was nothing to see as, behind him, bombs explode a fireworks factory. But this is the kind of poseur that Litwin is, except he is not nearly as funny as Nielson.

    In addition to his interview, Litwin has also done an article for an online journal. That online journal is something called Quillette, which I never knew existed until someone pointed out the Litwin article. I would have never found this journal on my own, and I would not have been missing anything.

    Quillette is a libertarian inspired anti-PC, anti-liberal journal founded by one Claire Lehmann. Journalist Bari Weiss grouped Lehmann as a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, along with the likes of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. (See this article for info on Peterson) Shapiro is the snarky right-winger who went on MSNBC to defend gun rights by handing the host, Piers Morgan, a copy of the constitution. Unfortunately Morgan, a Brit, did not reply with, “Ben, do you also believe that African Americans should count as 3/5 of a person for census purposes? Because that is what this document says. Should they, and also women, be allowed to vote? Because under this document they were not.” As Alice Dreger wrote, opinions are not scholarship, and that is what the members of this group generally offer. (“Why I escaped the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’’’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/11/2018) She could have added that snark does not denote intelligence. As with the Shapiro exchange, it’s often just an excuse for being a smartass. Quillette published the so-called “Google memo” by James Damore, in which he accused that company of practicing reverse discrimination which somehow hurt Asians and whites and males. The right loves this kind of thing since it is a way to repudiate the affirmative action policies originated by President Kennedy. Except, by reading some of their articles concerning JFK, I would be willing to wager than no one at Quillette even knows that JFK started that policy. The Intellectual Dark Web is really the cover layer for the rise of the Trumpian alt-right. If the reader understands all that, then everything that follows is as natural as water running over a rock.

    I

    On September 27, 2018, Quillette published an article by Litwin based on his book I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak. That article tried to make the case that somehow the KGB was involved in fostering JFK conspiracy thinking in the USA by planting disinformation stories. Litwin, not the most original researcher, largely based his piece on the work of Max Holland. He labels Holland an historian—which he is not. Two of the three pieces that Holland says are KGB produced disinformation are not disinfo at all. I dealt with them in my critique of Holland’s original article that The Daily Beast was dumb enough to print. As I noted there, the late Mark Lane did not get secret donations from the KGB. And he proved this in his book, The Last Word. (pp. 92-96) As I showed in my critique of Litwin’s essay on Jim Garrison, the last thing in the world that Permindex was was a creation of the KGB. And Shaw’s association with it was something he himself acknowledged. I demonstrated this, not just in my previous essay on Litwin, but also in my lengthy exposure of Holland.

    The third piece of alleged KGB mischief that Litwin brings up is the famous “Dear Mr. Hunt letter”. In book form this was first produced in Henry Hurt’s volume Reasonable Doubt. It is a note dated November 8, 1963, and addressed to a Mr. Hunt. It is written in cursive and reads, “I would like information regarding my position. I am only asking for information. I am asking that we discuss the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else. Thank you.” Oswald’s signature follows. (See HSCA Vol. 4, p. 337) Again, Litwin says this was part of a Russian intelligence operation codenamed Arlington.

    One of the problems with that pronouncement is that the Dallas Morning News ran a story saying they had three handwriting analysts look at the note: Mary Harrison, Allan R. Keon and Mary Duncan. They compared it to samples of Oswald’s writing. All three concluded it was genuine. (NY Times, April 4, 1977) The trio belonged to a professional organization called the Independent Association of Questioned Document Examiners. Harrison said she would be comfortable going into court and presenting her analysis. Litwin gets around this problem by saying that the NY Times wrote of the note’s possible authenticity. As the reader can see, that is not what the Times reported. The HSCA did not make a conclusive judgment about the note because it was a photocopy. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 236) On this point, Ms. Harrison stated that reproductions are often presented in court.

    Most of the Litwin/Holland material was produced by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin. Making the Mitrokhin case look even worse on this matter is the work of researcher Greg Doudna. Doudna did his best to track down the evidence Mitrokhin had purloined from the KGB showing the note was a forgery. In Mitrokhin’s book, The Sword and the Shield, there is a footnote referencing some original papers at a British university. (Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, pp. 228-29) Greg got in contact with the curator at Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, and part of the University of Cambridge. To cut to the chase, there is no evidence for this forgery in the Mitrokin collection. All there exists to back up that footnote is a typed draft of the book. This is the kind of scholarship Litwin offered and Quillette accepted. (E-mail communication with Doudna, 11/28/2018)

    Mitrokhin was a former KGB archivist who became a defector. Apparently, neither Litwin, nor anyone at Quillette, ever read Amy Knight’s coruscating review of his role in the wave of alleged Soviet defectors finding their home with Anglo-American publishers and newspapers owned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. As she points out, when first drafts by these defecting authors were not sensational enough, they were spiced up. And presto! They now included information like, well, how about Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer were giving atomic secrets to the USSR? And Oppenheimer recruited Klaus Fuchs—who actually was a spy—to Los Alamos, the location of the Manhattan Project. Knight, a real scholar in the field of Soviet studies, had some fun with that one. (“The Selling of the KGB”, Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2000) She had more fun with the source for both Holland and Litwin. The idea that an archivist did not have access to a copier for 12 years and therefore had to scribble down notes from documents, instead of copying the documents themselves, this simply strains credulity. But if one sees this new field of exchange as a marketable continuation of the Cold War—with impoverished KGB agents finding a way to make mucho bucks from an American/British Establishment that has a lot invested in the justification of that Cold War—then it makes sense. Somehow, the anti-PC Quillette fails to acknowledge that angle. Which indicates what their political correctness is all about.

    In fact, on the matter of the JFK case, Quillette is Establishment to the hilt—and beyond. On the 55th anniversary of the murder of President Kennedy, they gave Litwin an encore. They ran an echo to his book. One of the editors, Jamie Palmer, penned a piece called “My Misspent years of Conspiracism”. All I can say to Mr. Palmer is that if this was an audition for the big-time MSM, he should be getting a few calls from the Fox network in the near future.

    II

    In Litwin’s book, he says that what originally convinced him there was a conspiracy in the JFK case was ABC TV’s public showing of the Zapruder film in 1975. In Palmer’s Bildungsroman, it was his viewing of the film JFK. But even in describing that experience the reader can see why, as with Litwin, Palmer ended up being a Warren Commission shill. He writes that somehow the Mr. X character in that film turned out not to be credible. That character is based on Fletcher Prouty, and virtually everything he related from his own experience at the meeting in Washington with the Jim Garrison character has turned out to be accurate. That Mr. X/Garrison conversation on a park bench concerning Vietnam has revolutionized our thinking about that entire conflict. It inspired several books that have advanced the film’s thesis even further. Namely, that President Kennedy was not going to escalate the Vietnam quagmire any further, that no combat troops would be sent into theater, and the advisors America had there were going to be recalled. From what I have seen of Quillette, they would not print scholars like David Kaiser or Gordon Goldstein or James Blight. That’s not what they are about. Litwin is.

    Palmer is unintentionally funny when he gets to the turning point of his personal saga. He says that his original beliefs about the case were reversed when he watched the 2003 program on the assassination that was produced by Peter Jennings at ABC and broadcast in England by the BBC. This site carries an entire section consisting of 16 critical articles demonstrating why Jennings’ show was a three-ring circus. From Jennings’ hiring of Gus Russo as his main consultant, to the “computer simulation” of the Magic Bullet, the program was a set up to revivify the corpse of the Warren Report. Our articles expose that agenda in gruesome detail. Somehow, Palmer swallowed it whole. In fact, he calls this program “a masterpiece of methodical argument”.

    Palmer goes on to describe certain parts of that “methodical argument” for an entire section of his long essay. What is incredible about his recitation is that, with one exception, it is all recycled Warren Commission drivel used to convict Oswald in 1964. Are we to believe that in over ten years of his belief that Oswald was innocent Palmer never read any of this material? Not even in books critical of the Commission? For he now says that he sees that Stone was remiss by not including the shooting attempt at General Edwin Walker in his film. Palmer writes, “Oswald had tried to assassinate someone else in April 1963.” The case against Oswald in the Walker shooting has been well examined by, among others, Gerald McKnight in his fine book Breach of Trust. That book is 13 years old, so if Palmer wanted to check up on that incident, he could have.

    First off, the Walker shooting was investigated by the Dallas Police for over seven months and Oswald was never a suspect. Why? For one, the best witness was Kirk Coleman. He ran out of his neighboring house right after hearing the shot. He saw two men escaping, in two separate cars. Further, when he was shown pictures of Oswald by the FBI, he failed to identify him as either man. (McKnight, p. 57) But beyond that, a cursory look at the Warren Report reveals that Oswald did not drive, or own a car. Another witness, Robert Surrey, told the police that two nights before the shooting he had seen two men casing Walker’s house. They left in a Ford. Again, he said that neither man looked like Oswald. (McKnight, p. 58) Tough to go into court when the two eyewitnesses deny the defendant was there.

    But it’s worse than that. The bullet recovered from the scene of the crime, which missed Walker from about 25 feet away, was not the correct ammunition for the alleged Oswald rifle. In newspaper and police accounts it was reported as a 30.06 projectile, not 6.5 mm. Plus, it was steel jacketed, not copper jacketed as was the ammunition used for the Oswald rifle, and therefore was a different hue. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 100) The reason the FBI and the Warren Commission had to pin the Walker shooting on Oswald was because there was next to nothing in his past to connect him to such an outburst of murderous violence as occurred in Dealey Plaza, and later, with the killing of Patrolman Tippit. In the Marines, Oswald accidentally injured himself when a derringer went off as he opened a locker. He then had a dispute with an officer and threw a drink in his face. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 130) What makes that sum total even weaker is that Oswald liked and admired President Kennedy. (Dick Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, p. 206)

    The one exception to his warmed over Warren Commission refuse is contained in Palmer’s final and thunderous J’accuse against Stone. The author concludes his conversion story by praising the ABC-produced Dale Myers computer simulation of the Magic Bullet done for the Jennings program. That simulation was supposed to show the Warren Commission was correct in saying that one bullet went through both John Kennedy and Governor John Connally, making seven wounds, smashing two bones, and emerging from its journey in pretty much unscathed condition, missing only 3 grains of its original mass. There have been several devastating critiques of this simulation. All Palmer had to do was search the web and he would have found them. In our section on this site, we feature three full-scale dismantlings of Myers and his cartoon. The Single Bullet Theory, the sine qua non of the Warren Report, simply did not happen. And when one has to cut as many corners as Myers does in order to create a Rube Goldberg contraption to say it did, then such is the proof of the plot. That Mr. Palmer did not consult any of these critiques says a lot about his personal bias and also his honesty with his readers. He actually writes that he found Myers’ simulation “too convincing to dismiss”.

    Robert Harris showed how easy it was to dismiss. He demonstrated that Myers deliberately misplaced the positions of Kennedy and Connally in the car for ABC. Harris proved this was the case by using actual images from the Zapruder film to demonstrate that Myers had jammed the two victims much closer together than they were, thereby foreshortening the firing trajectory. Myers also changed the position of the two men and altered the image of the car within the same traveling shot. He did this in order to conceal the fact that when placed in their proper perspective, the Magic Bullet comes in way too low to strike Connally in the right rear shoulder. In spite of all this, Palmer concludes this section of his essay by saying that if this same technique would have been used to demonstrate a frontal shot, he would have considered it “decisive and final”. I would like to inform Quillette that by using these techniques, one could simulate a sniper hitting Kennedy and Connally from the top of the Hertz sign in Dealey Plaza. But for Palmer and Quillette, in keeping with Mr. Litwin’s approach, it’s not the accuracy of the presentation that matters, it’s the result. Or to use an old realpolitik adage: the ends justify the means.

    III

    But Palmer has to maintain his whole “personal saga” pretense. So he now shifts gears into the New Orleans aspect of Stone’s film and also to Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins. But, like Litwin, Palmer refuses to acknowledge an important aspect of the overall calculus: the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Litwin simply misrepresents the discoveries of that body. Palmer simply ignores them. As I noted in my review of Litwin, this tactic is convenient for Warren Report shills since so much of what Garrison was talking about back in 1967 has turned out to be accurate. In fact, because Garrison was correct on much of what he said, the FBI and CIA had to cover up the facts, and the CIA had to launch subversive operations against him.

    Part of the subversion was to launch infiltrators into Garrison’s camp. As Garrison describes in his book, one of them was a man he called Bill Boxley, his real name being William Wood. In Stone’s film, he and co-screenwriter Zach Sklar named him Bill Broussard. Palmer actually calls the character, “a composite of various Garrison staffers” and “is allotted the role of the villain in Stone’s film”. Wrong again. From talking with co-screenwriter Zach Sklar, Broussard was based upon Boxley. And if anything, Stone and Sklar underplayed the damage Boxley did to Garrison. This author spent several pages dealing with the havoc the man unleashed, and also the investigative files he stole—some of which were never recovered. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pp. 278-85) If you can believe it, Palmer actually tries to make the guy some kind of hero. What is even more bizarre is that Palmer also relies upon Tom Bethell, the man who was supposed to be in charge of Garrison’s archive. On the eve of the Shaw trial, Bethell turned over the DA’s trial brief to Shaw’s defense. Through research into the Garrison files declassified by the ARRB, Peter Vea discovered that, unlike what Bethell tried to imply years later, he did not admit this to Garrison. Lou Ivon, Garrison’s assistant, conducted an investigation and found out Bethell was the culprit. According to Peter’s work, Bethell broke down and wept upon discovery. Before Garrison could decide what to do with his case, he fled to Dallas. As stated to this author in a conversation he had with the late Mary Ferrell’s estranged son, for whatever reason, Bethell ended up at her doorstep. With touchstones like this, you can do a lot to downgrade Jim Garrison.

    And Palmer cannot let go of Litwin’s false idea that somehow Garrison’s witness Perry Russo was drugged and fed leading questions to get him to identify Shaw as Bertrand. In my review of Litwin I showed this was not the case. It was a trick set up by Shaw’s lawyers with the aid of compromised journalist James Phelan. They rearranged the two sodium pentothal (truth serum) sessions to make it appear that this is what occurred. When read in their true order no such thing happens. Russo introduced the character of Bertrand on his own without being coached. The two best exposures of this charade are by Lisa Pease (Probe Magazine, Vol. 6 No. 5, p. 26), and Joe Biles in his book on Garrison entitled In History’s Shadow (pp. 43-47). Both have been available for over 15 years.

    But Palmer goes beyond Litwin. He says that Perry Russo flunked his polygraph test according to the administrator. The administrator he is referring to is one Ed O’Donnell. O’Donnell was a policeman who Garrison had tried to draw up on charges for police brutality against African American suspects. Both he and Ray Jacob, another technician used by the DA, were intent on unsettling Russo in order to get the wrong indications on the test. (Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 147) When Russo complained to Garrison about these tactics, Garrison called O’Donnell into his office. He asked him if he had a tape of Russo denying that Shaw/Bertrand was at a gathering at Ferrie’s apartment. The policeman said no he did not. Yet he had told Russo he did. Garrison terminated his services upon hearing this. (Clay Shaw trial testimony of 2/26/69) The proof of who O’Donnell really was is that he ended up being an advisor to Shaw’s defense team at the trial. (Mellen, p. 309)

    If you continually and falsely smear the DA’s investigation, and then assume that Oswald shot Kennedy—which we know today did not and could not have happened—then you can characterize Garrison’s inquiry as “inconsequential”. But you would have to add that the Richard Schweiker/Gary Hart investigation for the Church Committee was also meaningless, and the Richard Sprague/Robert Tanenbaum phase of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was also adrift. The problem with saying that is you are now dismissing two fine senators and two excellent prosecutors. Between them, Sprague and Tanenbaum prosecuted about two hundred homicide cases. The combined record was one loss in well over twenty years. Sprague was the lawyer who prosecuted the famous Jock Yablonski murder conspiracy case and convicted corrupt labor leader Tony Boyle. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 326) According to Tanenbaum, when he was privately briefed on the Church Committee inquiry by Schweiker, the senator told him that, in his view, the CIA had killed Kennedy. He then handed him a research file compiled by his chief investigator Gaeton Fonzi. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 5, p. 24) Need I add that this was the same conclusion that Garrison had come to a decade earlier? But Dale Myers and ABC have magically made this information “inconsequential”. And with a stroke of his pen, or keyboard, Palmer has made Schweiker, Hart, Sprague, Tanenbaum and Fonzi all disappear. In fact, from his perspective, they never existed.

    Without that backdrop, and without the relevant discoveries of the ARRB about New Orleans, then you may as well be writing about Jim Garrison from the viewpoint of some MSM hack journalist in 1968. For instance, like Litwin, Palmer wants to discount the fact that we can now prove that the mysterious Clay Bertrand, who called Dean Andrews, was really Clay Shaw. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pp. 385-86) He fails to mention that we know today that it was Shaw and his friend David Ferrie who were escorting Oswald around the villages of Clinton and Jackson 100 miles north of New Orleans in the late summer of 1963. They were trying to register Oswald to vote in a parish far away from where he lived so he could get a job at a mental hospital. (Bill Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 101-17) Shaw lied about all these matters: that he knew Ferrie, or Oswald, that he used the Bertrand alias, and that he was in Clinton-Jackson with those two men that summer. Shaw also knew Guy Banister. (Davy, pp. 93-94) Oswald spent many days of that fateful summer of 1963 in Banister’s office preparing his Fair Play for Cuba Committee flyers and pamphlets, with Banister’s address on the early copies. (Davy, pp. 37-42)

    Somehow, Palmer does not understand that it was these activities in New Orleans that summer that were injected into the media within hours of President Kennedy’s murder and did much to convict Oswald in the public mind as the sociopathic communist who killed the president for ideological reasons. It thus makes sense that Shaw would call his acquaintance Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald—not knowing Oswald was going to be killed within 48 hours of his apprehension. Shaw would know that Andrews could be compromised, or be used as an incompetent lawyer.

    This is where, as they say, the plot thickens, and again, Palmer leaves it out. Through the ARRB, we know today that Oswald was not a sociopathic communist. He was very likely working through Banister as a CIA agent provocateur. The CIA had set up an anti-FPCC campaign under the tutelage of David Phillips, who was one of the men running that operation. (Davy, p. 286) Further, a man fitting the description of Phillips was in Banister’s office in 1961 trying to arrange a citywide telethon for the Cuban exile cause. (Davy, pp. 21-24) Phillips’ was also seen in film made of one of the nearby New Orleans CIA training camps, a film which the HSCA temporarily had in their possession. Along with Oswald and Banister, witnesses also identified him as being in the film. (Davy, pp. 30-31)

    With this background now filled in a bit, Palmer may want to ask himself if it explains the curious provenance of Oswald’s pamphlet, “The Crime Against Cuba” by Corliss Lamont. Oswald stamped it with 544 Camp Street, Banister’s address. Oswald’s version of the pamphlet was printed in 1961. It had gone through at least four more printings by the time Oswald was leafleting with it in 1963. Yet his was from the first edition. The CIA purchased 45 copies of the original edition in 1961. Is this how Oswald got the outdated version, perhaps through Phillips who was running the subversive program against the FPCC? To make it all a bit more curious, Oswald wrote about his altercation with the Cuban exiles, which got him arrested and the pamphlet confiscated, before it happened. (Davy, p. 38)

    As the reader can see, these are the provocative questions that Oswald’s activities in New Orleans pose when they are presented with the full information we have today. Much of it was available at the time of the Jennings special. Mr. Jennings was not going to touch it. We explain why in our special section reviewing that very poor and unethical documentary. In a nutshell, in 1984, ABC Nightly News did a report on the exposure of a CIA front company in Hawaii and the Agency’s involvement in a possible murder plot. It was a fascinating two-part installment. CIA Director William Casey was very upset by that reporting. So he arranged to have some of his friends and colleagues at Capital Cities buy the network. Jennings, the host of the program, got the message. After Casey and Cap Cities bought the network, Jennings, who had originally stood by the story, now said he had no problem with the CIA’s denial of it.

    Palmer closes his essay with a reference to Litwin’s book, saying that somehow the technical panels set up by the HSCA on things like forensic pathology, photographic evidence and the rifle tests sealed the deal against Oswald. By now, one really wonders just what Palmer was doing in those ten years he doubted the Warren Commission. He certainly was not reading the journals on the subject. Because if he had been, he would have known that people like Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. David Mantik and this author completely took apart these very flawed tests made by the HSCA. And, in fact, the chair of the HSCA, Robert Blakey, also took one of them back, the one he relied upon as the lynchpin of his case against Oswald, namely the Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis (CBLT). He has now termed it junk science. (For a full scale, in-depth analysis, see The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 69-85; pp. 250-91) Those 58 pages simply devastate the so-called findings that Litwin, in four pages, trumpets. And one will find evidence in those pages indicating that the HSCA simply and knowingly misrepresented some of their forensic findings.

    IV

    At the end of Palmer’s article, he sourced a previous piece in Quillette from 2017. This was from one Craig Colgan. Colgan fits right in with Quillette’s agenda. He once wrote an article about the National Museum of African American History and Culture and complained that although there was an exhibit for Anita Hill there was none for Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill was the first woman who actually brought the issue of sexual harassment into national consciousness. The fact that she was an African American testifying against the Establishment-backed Thomas made what she did even more courageous. (See this article)

    The title of Colgan’s November 25, 2017 piece was “Are the JFK Conspiracies Slowly Dying?” He begins his article with a reference to Dylan Avery and his film on 9-11 called Loose Change. He then says that since Avery has backed away from some of his more extreme statements, perhaps those who attack the Warren Report should also. Toward the end of the piece, he says he would allow a kind of Robert-Blakey-inspired Oswald-did-it-with-some help concept. And that is what the JFK critical community should be aiming for.

    I don’t know very much about the 9-11 controversy. But I do know that the official investigating committee issued a report without an accompanying set of volumes of evidence. The Warren Commission issued an over-800-page report with 26 volumes of testimony and evidence. The incredible thing about the early critics is this: some of them actually read those volumes. They came to a clear conclusion: the evidence in the volumes did not support the tenets of the report. The late Maggie Field wrote an unpublished book in which she reproduced pages from the report”s conclusions, then juxtaposed to them extracts from the supporting volumes of evidence that directly contradicted them. One could similarly refer to Sylvia Meagher’s classic study Accessories After the Fact. Unlike with 9-11, then, in the case of President Kennedy’s murder, there is nothing to retreat from. In fact, as tens of thousands of declassified pages have later been released, Field’s book has not just been ratified; it has been shown to be too mild, for we know today certain agencies were concealing evidence that would have indicated how parts of the plot and, even moreso, the cover-up, worked. (For example, see section III of this essay and the discoveries about David Phillips and New Orleans.)

    At this point, one must accentuate the fact that even though Quillette is known as a scientific and technically oriented journal, that is what is completely missing from any of its articles on the JFK case. For instance, Colgan mentions a conversation he had with Gary Aguilar about his critique—co-written with Cyril Wecht—of the PBS special Cold Case JFK which aired at the 50th anniversary of the JFK murder. But he does not devote a single sentence to the total demolition of that series that Aguilar and Wecht performed—in a peer review journal on ballistics! And he does not link to the two-part review. Nor does he note that, although Gary offered to pay for both their flight and hotel accommodations, the father and son team who were featured on that program refused to debate him in public.

    Colgan also notes the decline in the public’s belief that there was a plot behind Kennedy’s murder. This is accurate. At the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death, Hart Associates did a poll for Larry Sabato’s book, the Kennedy Half Century. It statedthat 75% of the public did not believe the Commission’s lone gunman verdict. This was down from the over 90% during the time that Stone’s film JFK premiered. (Sabato, p. 416) The reason for this is simple to discern. Due to Stone’s film, for about one year—from 1991-92—there was actually an open discussion in the media about Kennedy’s murder. And there were actually programs and front-page stories in magazines that addressed it in an even-handed way. The Power Elite was quite upset by that hubbub. They did three things to counter it. Random House, through editor Bob Loomis and publisher Harold Evans, decided to recruit Gerald Posner and give his book one of the most massive publicity barrages in recent publishing history. We know this from the lawsuit the late Roger Feinman launched against Random House concerning that book.

    Secondly, they decided that there would be no more open debate on the issue in the media—and there has not been. We know this from written communications between researcher Walt Brown and Loomis as well as from Alec Baldwin’s speech in Houston last year at a dinner during the JFK mock trial. Baldwin said he had approached NBC with a proposal for a documentary program on Kennedy for the 2013 anniversary. It was rejected without a hearing, with words to this effect: We have reconciled ourselves to the official version. Another example would be what happened in Dallas at the fiftieth anniversary. With the world’s media on hand, Mayor Mike Rawlings completely controlled and cordoned off Dealey Plaza so that no critic could be heard by them. (See our report on the subject as well as this one at jfkfacts.org)

    Third, virtually every single program since—and there have been more than a few—has endorsed the Warren Report, specifically the Single Bullet Fantasy and the no-frontal-shot concept. The problem with these productions is that each one has falsified the facts of the case. (See this video or read this essay)

    Judging from their articles, Quillette is really more of a politically oriented journal than a scientific or technical one. At that, they should have understood the politics of the Warren Commission. The policies of the most active member of that body, Allen Dulles, were opposed to those of President Kennedy. But from this review, the reader can see that both Litwin and Quillette were more in sympathy with Dulles than JFK.

  • Jim Garrison vs. Fred Litwin: The Beat Goes On (part 2)

    Jim Garrison vs. Fred Litwin: The Beat Goes On (part 2)

    In the field of JFK assassination studies, those who advocate for the Warren Commission have always had a special and personal problem with Jim Garrison. After all, the New Orleans DA was an elected official who did not just challenge the Warren Commission; he actually put together an alternative theory of Kennedy’s assassination. That theory created intense interest and attracted a public following.

    This created a serious problem for the MSM. The press had embraced the Warren Report, all 800 pages of it. Now came an accomplished District Attorney who was saying that their much-ballyhooed report on the death of President Kennedy was rubbish. By doing that, Garrison was not just upsetting the MSM’s apple cart, but also the FBI, the Secret Service and the White House. After all, they had all cooperated and worked for several months on this much anticipated report. Could they all have been so easily taken in by the Dallas Police? Or was there something else at work? Perhaps a deliberate cover-up? If so, why? What could be behind such an evil act and its elaborate concealment?

    By raising these questions, Garrison was upsetting the establishment. Therefore, he was harshly attacked by all elements of the power structure. Almost no one in the media—except the LA Free Press, Ramparts and Playboy magazines—gave him a fair hearing. Every major newspaper, magazine, and TV network discounted or attacked him—none treated him fairly or even handedly. Elements of the government illegally spied on him, sent infiltrators into his camp, wired his office, tapped his phone, and launched subversive operations against his investigative efforts. (See William Davy, Let Justice be Done, Chapter 12) When Garrison complained about these actions, the MSM ignored him. Today, after the disclosures of the Assassination Records Review Board, they cannot be ignored. For the simple matter that the acts of subversion can now be proven with declassified documents.

    There is another important element to the cacophony enveloping New Orleans that has also been revealed. That is the incessant efforts of Clay Shaw’s attorneys to enlist as much help as possible from Washington DC. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 261-78) What makes this secret solicitation so curious is that, for two solid years, the media portrait of Shaw was that he was as clean as the driven snow. If such were the case, then why were Shaw’s lawyers so desperate for help from the CIA and the FBI? And why did the Agency and Bureau give it to them? Was there something that those two executive intelligence agencies knew that they weren’t telling the public? If so, what was it?

    Through the ARRB, we have now discovered that there was a lot to hide about Clay Shaw. And neither the FBI nor the CIA had planned on letting the public know about it. If not for the ruckus created by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, no one may have ever discovered any of it.

    Now comes one Fred Litwin. Litwin has written two books. They have both publication and thematic similarities. The first was called Conservative Confidential. That book is about his coming out as a gay man and also traveling politically from left to right, eventually emerging as an activist conservative in the gay community in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. What I found interesting about the first book is that, although I had never heard of Litwin, evidently some powerful people had. The book was blurbed by the likes of Conrad Black, and Daniel Pipes. Black is a former international newspaper magnate who was convicted of fraud and obstruction of justice in America and banned from running a company or serving on any boards in Ontario. Pipes is a rightwing veteran of several think tanks who wrote a book labeling almost anyone who believes in political conspiracies as being inherently paranoid. In Chapter 1, Pipes specifically pointed to the African American community. Nice fan base. After making a lot of money in the computer field, Litwin is involved in lecture presentations, music, film festivals and publishing today. (For an example of the people he sponsors, go here)

    Litwin’s second book is called I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak. Like his first, it was published through his own company, Northern Blues. From the title, one does not need much explication as to the similarity in theme. With the JFK case, as with his politics, Litwin has now seen the light. Like St. Paul on the way to Damascus, he had a vision. Except, unlike with Paul, his was not of a vision of a resurrected Christ appearing before him. It was Lee Harvey Oswald firing three shots in six seconds from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository; scoring two of three direct hits to the head and shoulder area of JFK. A feat that, without cheating, no expert has ever been able to duplicate. One of those bullets went through Kennedy’s back, rising upward slightly, even though it was originally traveling downward. Without striking bone, it then went left to right, even though it was fired from right to left. It made a perforating exit from Kennedy’s neck, one that was smaller than its entrance—even though exits are supposed to be larger. It then went through Connally’s body and as it exited his chest it veered right towards his wrist, and then deflected left into his thigh. It emerged from his thigh and was found in the rim of a stretcher, except no one knows whose stretcher it was. (The Impossible One-Day Journey of CE 399; see also Was the CE 399 Magic Bullet Planted?)

    When it was found there was almost no deformation of the bullet, and no blood or tissue on it. After smashing two bones in Connally, it was missing only three grains of its mass. (WC Vol. III pp. 428-30) As Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson have shown, CE 399 was so specious as evidence that the FBI had to lie about its identification. (The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?) As others have said, to believe all this, one must have had some kind of religious experience. Especially if one did not buy into it at first.

    But there is another oddity about Litwin. The present author has been in this field for going on three decades. I have read a rather large amount of material on the subject. This includes research journals from both America and abroad. I do not recall coming across Mr. Litwin’s name in any of them. Apparently, the man kept his beliefs about a JFK plot rather close to his vest.

    I am not going to deal with the entirety of Litwin’s book. Anyone who can propagate that the evidence for more than one gunman in the JFK case has weakened over time does not deserve extended scrutiny. Neither does anyone who is on friendly terms with the likes of Daniel Pipes. But there is a chapter of Litwin’s book available online. It happens to be his chapter on Jim Garrison. Since that is 16 downloadable pages, it should serve as an example of the quality of his work.

    As I have previously said in dealing with the anti-Garrison crowd, if there was one area that the Assassination Records Review Board did a decent job on, it was in declassifying a lot of interesting documents on the New Orleans aspect of the Kennedy case. In two previous review essays on the subject, I have been critical of the fact that none of these documents were anywhere to be seen in the work under discussion. Specifically, this would include the essay by Don Carpenter at Max Holland’s site (Max Holland and Donald Carpenter vs Jim Garrison and the ARRB), and Alecia Long’s essay at 64 Parishes (Jim Garrison: The Beat Goes On).

    Litwin continues to manifest that revealing trait. In the 16 pages, I could find no evidence that he used even one single piece of declassified documentation. When an author does this, it immediately tells the reader much more about him than the writer’s ostensible subject. That is, Mr. Litwin does not give one iota about the declassified record. He is not interested in what the new information is. He does not want to know what the CIA and FBI knew about Clay Shaw back in the sixties, or why it was deemed so taboo that the public had to be kept in the dark about it.

    Which leaves us with two alternative theorems. Either Litwin does not know about this new information; or he does know about it but does not want the reader to be aware of it. Both explanations are pretty unappetizing. But they tell us much about Litwin and his book.

    By the third paragraph, the author exposes the serious fault lines in his work. He writes that Jim Garrison cracked down on vice in the French Quarter by raiding gay bars. How anyone can write something like that is incomprehensible. Once Garrison became famous through the exposure of his JFK inquiry, many people wrote about this 1962 crusade. Almost ten years ago, there was a book written on the subject by author James Savage. What Garrison was cracking down on was a racket called ‘B girl drinking’. The B-girl would sit with a male customer and, as long as he paid for the liquor, she would entice him with hints of sex to be had. (Washington Post, 2/10/63) The girl’s drinks would be very watered down, and as the mark got inebriated, the host would then shortchange him. Afterwards, the poor guy was taken to a cab to get to his hotel; the house got 2/3 of the take, the girl got 1/3.

    I would like to ask Mr. Litwin the obvious question he is seemingly unaware of: If the racket involved a female employee with a male customer, how could these be gay bars?

    What Litwin does next is as bad as the above. He does all he can to denigrate the value of the information that Jack Martin relayed to Garrison’s office within 48 hours after the assassination. For instance, he does not fully explicate why Guy Banister exploded and pistol-whipped his former investigator/employee Mr. Martin. Martin had made some rather incriminating comments, like implicating Banister in the Kennedy assassination. Martin specifically said: “What are you going to do—kill me like you all did Kennedy?” Martin later said that if Banister’s secretary had not intervened, he thought Banister might have killed him. (HSCA Volume 10, p. 130) After the assault, Banister threw some money at his victim. On his way to the hospital, Martin told an acquaintance: “The dirty Nazi bastards did it to him in Texas, and to me here.” (Affidavit of Martin and David Lewis to Jim Garrison 2/30/68)

    Since Martin was describing events on the day of the assassination, who does Litwin think Martin was referring to when he said, “Did it to him in Texas?” In light of the Martin’s previous comment, it was probably President Kennedy.

    What was the specific reason for Banister’s assault? Again, Litwin does not fully reveal that aspect. As Garrison’s staff later discovered, the FBI in New Orleans—namely agent Regis Kennedy—later thought that Martin might have pilfered Banister’s files on Oswald. (Garrison memorandum from Andrew Sciambra, 10/28/68) In fact, a part-time employee at Banister’s office, Mary Brengel, told the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that she felt that both Banister and his secretary Delphine Roberts knew what was going to happen in Texas that day. (HSCA interview of 4/6/78)

    It was Roberts who rescued Martin. Banister then swore her to secrecy and kept her out of the office after the bloody incident with Martin. (Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 294) So when Garrison interviewed her, she was tight-lipped. Later she did reveal things to the HSCA, specifically to investigator Bob Buras. On his second attempt to get her to talk to him, Roberts told Buras that Oswald was at Banister’s office and had a few private meetings with him. He was allowed to use a second floor room to print up his anti-Castro materials. (HSCA interview of 7/6/78) Reporter Scott Malone later found a corroborating witness for this information. Brengel told him that Roberts said Oswald had been at 544 Camp Street, Banister’s office, that summer. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 111) When this author interviewed another Banister employee, Dan Campbell, he also revealed that Oswald had been in Banister’s office that summer. In a separate interview with this writer, so did his brother Allen. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 112)

    In other words, it makes perfect sense for Banister to have had a file on Oswald and for Martin to be interested in it on the day of the assassination. It also follows that, as Roberts told Buras, Banister was upset when he heard that Oswald had handed out flyers in New Orleans with Banister’s office address of 544 Camp Street on them. (HSCA Buras interview.)

    Litwin’s depiction of David Ferrie is about as limited and dubious as his work on Banister. Litwin writes that when the FBI and Secret Service questioned Ferrie, he denied knowing Oswald, or having anything to do with Kennedy’s assassination. Litwin leaves it at that. Which is rather uncurious of him. For as anyone who reads Ferrie’s FBI statement has to acknowledge, Ferrie lied his head off to the Bureau. And it is hard to buy the argument that they did not know he was lying. For instance, Ferrie said he never owned a rifle with a telescopic sight and would not know how to use one. This, from a man who was a trainer for both the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose. (HSCA interview of John Irion, 10/18/78; Davy pp. 28-31; CIA memo of October 1967, “Garrison Investigation: Belle Chasse Training Camp”)

    Ferrie also said that he did not know Oswald and Oswald was not a member of his Civil Air Patrol (CAP) unit in New Orleans. This was another lie that Litwin seems comfortable with. In this case, all the Bureau had to do was question some of the other members of that CAP unit to find out Ferrie was lying. Jerry Paradis, who later became a corporate attorney, told the HSCA that he knew Ferrie and Oswald were members of the same CAP unit because he was also a member and he saw them together at a meeting. (HSCA interview of 12/15/78) Anthony Atzenoffer said the same about Ferrie and Oswald at the CAP meetings. (HSCA interview of 1/2/79) As we all know, in 1993, PBS discovered a photo of Oswald and Ferrie at a CAP cookout and showed it on TV.

    But there is something even more incriminating about Ferrie which indicates that not only was he knowingly lying to the FBI but was also trying to scoop up evidence that would prove his perjury. For in the days immediately following the assassination, Ferrie was looking for that CAP picture of him with Oswald. He called a former CAP member, Roy McCoy, to find out if he had a copy. The FBI had to know Ferrie was doing this. Why? Because McCoy and his wife later called the Bureau and told them about Ferrie’s search for the photo of him with the alleged assassin of President Kennedy. In other words, the FBI was complicit in Ferrie’s cover-up. (New Orleans FBI report of 11/27/63)

    Somehow, Litwin did not think that any of this information about Banister, Ferrie and their ties to Oswald—or the attempts to conceal it—is worth conveying to the reader. Nor does he feel it necessary to note the FBI’s odd reaction to Ferrie’s perjury and attempts at obstruction of justice. This writer would beg to disagree with Mr. Litwin. And again, the fact that he does not reveal it says a lot about his intent as an author.

    Litwin trudges onward with Dean Andrews. Andrews was the New Orleans lawyer who said that a man named Clay Bertrand called him on Saturday, November 23, 1963, and asked him to go to Dallas to defend the alleged assassin of JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald. Again, it takes Litwin about two sentences to descend into travesty. First, he says that Andrews was in hospital and heavily sedated at the time he got this call—which is supposed to cast doubt on the credibility of the claim. Twenty-three years ago, the estimable William Davy checked on this point through the hospital records. Those records indicate that Andrews got the call at least four hours before he was sedated. (Davy, p. 52) Litwin then writes that the call was actually from a man named Eugene Davis. This is also wrong. The name of Eugene Davis did not enter the record until NBC produced its hatchet job on Jim Garrison in the summer of 1967. Davis subsequently denied this under oath. And Andrews was then convicted of perjury. (Davy, p. 302; Jim Garrison’s interview in Playboy,10/67)

    Today there is no doubt who Clay Bertrand was. And through the efforts of British researcher Martin Hay, we now know that Andrews admitted that Bertrand was Clay Shaw. The late Harold Weisberg did some work for Jim Garrison in New Orleans. He developed a friendly relationship with Andrews and talked to him on several occasions. In an unpublished manuscript, Weisberg wrote that Andrews admitted to him that Shaw was Bertrand. But the lawyer told him he was not to say anything about this without his permission. (See the unpublished book Mailer’s Tale, chapter 5, p. 11, at the Weisberg online archives at Hood College)

    Although Andrews’ word would have probative value in this instance, with the work of the Assassination Records Review Board there is simply no question today that Shaw was Bertrand. And, again, the FBI knew this. There are two declassified FBI reports from 1967 in which the Bureau is given information that such was the case. (FBI teletypes of February 24, and March 23, 1967) In a third FBI report of March 2nd 1967, Bureau officer Cartha DeLoach states that they had information about Shaw in relation to the Kennedy case in December of 1963! Somehow, Mr. Litwin did not find that interesting. Many people would disagree. They would also be upset to know that the public had to wait over 30 years to find out that the FBI agreed with Jim Garrison. In light of these revelations Litwin is unintentionally humorous when he writes that the FBI could not find out who Bertrand was. They did know who he was. They did not want to tell anyone because it would support Garrison.

    But Litwin is intent on trying to show that Garrison was somehow deluded by Andrews. So he trots out another discredited tale that is about fifty years old. He says that Andrews made up the name of Manuel Garcia Gonzalez and that Garrison ended up believing him. Again, this tells us more about Litwin than it does Andrews or Garrison. Andrews actually gave Garrison two names: Gonzalez and Ricardo Davis. Both of these were names of real people. (Larry Hancock, Someone Would have Talked, pp. 349-50) And if the reader wants to see just how interesting Gonzalez was, please read this. Dean Andrews was anything but ignorant or dishonest. This is why—as he told Garrison, Mark Lane and Anthony Summers—he was in fear for his life.

    Predictably, Litwin uses an old trick that reporter James Phelan and Shaw’s lawyers originated in the sixties to discredit Perry Russo. Russo told Garrison that he heard Ferrie and Shaw, at a gathering with a Leon Oswald, speak about killing Kennedy. Garrison had Russo undergo both truth serum and hypnosis. By mixing up Russo’s two interviews under sodium pentothal, Phelan made it appear that Dr. Esmond Fatter was leading the witness. But Garrison submitted the two transcripts to the HSCA, and he had them clearly marked and dated in his own files, which this author had access to. When read in their correct order, not backwards, there is no leading of the witness. Russo comes up with the name Bertrand and describes him as the big white-haired guy—which he was—on his own. (See Probe Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, p. 26) Again, this canard was exposed nearly twenty years ago.

    Like Donald Carpenter, Litwin is intent on not revealing the declassified record about Clay Shaw, even though the ARRB did interesting work in that area. It is clear now that, as declassified CIA documents reveal, Shaw was a valuable and well-compensated contract agent from the fifties. Joan Mellen prints the declassified document that proves this in her book about George DeMohrenschildt, Our Man in Haiti, on pp. 54-55. That book was published six years ago. Is there any reason for Litwin not to refer to it? That document also explains why Shaw committed perjury on the stand when asked about this issue. (Davy, p. 185) When you add in Shaw’s covert security clearance for the project QK ENCHANT and his probable clearance for ZR CLIFF, then it is obvious why the CIA considered him a valuable agent. It also helps explain why, as the ARRB discovered, the CIA destroyed Shaw’s 201 file. (ARRB Memo from Manuel E. Legaspi to Jerry Gunn, dated 11/14/1996) The internal lie about Shaw by the CIA—that he was only part of Domestic Contacts like 100,000 other businessmen—shows the lengths they felt they had to go to in order to construct a cover-up about their prized employee. Like the FBI, the last thing the Agency wanted to admit was that Jim Garrison was right about Clay Shaw—which he was.

    Litwin never acknowledges, let alone confronts, any of these documents. He tries to escape from Shaw’s CIA employment by using the excuse that Shaw’s service with the mysterious European entity called Permindex was a tall tale manufactured under Soviet influence and passed on to a leftist newspaper in Italy, the same excuse the likes of Max Holland uses.

    This is more malarkey. The State Department wrote up memos about Permindex at the time the organization was creating a large controversy in Switzerland. Due to the character and suspected criminal backgrounds of members of its board, the controversy got so disturbing it caused the entity to move to Rome. This information was declassified back in 1982 due to a Freedom of Information lawsuit by Bud Fensterwald. They extend from February 1957 to November of 1958 and Shaw is featured in these cables. Bill Davy and others have used these in their books about Garrison’s investigation of Shaw. Again, the FBI was aware of the CIA role in Permindex and how Shaw figured in it. (Davy, p. 100)

    Canadian researcher Maurice Phillips recently discovered even more interesting memos about Permindex in the Louis Bloomfield archive in Montreal. Shaw had been on the board of Permindex, and Bloomfield was a corporate counsel. It turns out that Permindex was likely operating not just as a CIA shell, but at a level above that. Phillips has discovered memoranda which show that Bloomfield was soliciting funds for the endeavor from some of the wealthiest people in the world, for instance, David Rockefeller and Edmond deRothschild. (Letter from Bloomfield to Dr. E. W. Imfeld of 2/10/60) Phillips also discovered a memo revealing that one of the founders of Permindex, Ferenc Nagy, was a CIA asset. Because of that status, he invited the Agency to use this new “business” entity in any capacity they wished. (CIA memo of March 24, 1967, released in 1998)

    Question for Mr. Litwin: did the Soviets manufacture those State Department cables back in the fifties? And somehow insert the Bloomfield correspondence into his personal papers? Once we dispose of this silliness, the obvious question all this leaves, and which Litwin wants to avoid is: What was Shaw doing in the middle of all this?

    The discoveries of Maurice Phillips were quite detrimental to the cover story about Shaw, Bloomfield and Permindex. So much so that, in violation of Bloomfield’s will, his heirs have now tried to stop any more information from being released from his papers. The totality of the declassified record reveals that the cover-up about Shaw was wide, deep, systematic and is ongoing a half century later. This is how fearful the Establishment was about Jim Garrison’s discoveries and where they would lead.

    And that is the fact that Litwin’s article is meant to divert us from. As noted, I could not find one single reference to a primary source record in the entire 16 pages of his essay. Instead of relying on these newly released documents, who does Litwin choose to trust? Well, how about Hugh Aynesworth? If that isn’t bad enough, then how about James Phelan? It’s one thing to use a discredited reporter; it’s another not to tell the reader that he is provably related to the FBI, the CIA, or both. Also that both men denied those relationships prior to the documents being released showing such was the case. Can one say anything worse about a journalist? But that does not seem to bother Litwin at all. (For Phelan, see Probe Magazine, Vol. 6 No.4, pp. 5 and 32, and FBI memo from Wick to DeLoach of April 3, 1967; for Aynesworth see a Western Union teletype of May 13, 1967 which he sent to both the White House and the FBI.)

    By using his discredited sources instead of the declassified record, Litwin is able to conceal the fact that Shaw committed perjury at least four times at his trial:

    1. He lied about his association with the CIA, as amply demonstrated above.
    2. He lied about his use of the alias Clay Bertrand, as is also amply demonstrated above.
    3. He lied about his relationship with David Ferrie. (Affidavits to the DA of 6/27/67, 10/9/68, FBI teletype of 3/5/67, Probe Magazine, Vol. 4 No. 4, p. 8. The last two sources refer to secretaries who saw the two together.)
    4. He lied about not knowing Oswald. (Interview of attorney Samuel Exnicios by Joan Mellen 1/8/02; Davy, pp. 101-17)

    Do innocent people tell this many lies under oath, thereby risking decades in prison? Shaw had to lie, because if he didn’t it would have exposed him to too many questions that he would not have been able to explain away. Like, “Why did you call Andrews and ask him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald?” And, “Why were you and Ferrie escorting Oswald around the Clinton/Jackson area attempting to register him to vote in a place he didn’t live?”

    In the face of all this—quite relevant—perjury, what does Litwin do? Besides avoiding it all, he runs to another risible source: Paul Hoch. Hoch had been misleading the critical community on New Orleans for so long that, when the ARRB opened its doors, he did not want to be exposed as a charlatan. He therefore stood in front of a crowd of about 300 people in Chicago in 1993 and told them to ignore any new releases that came from the Board about Clay Shaw. I wish I was kidding about that, but unfortunately I was there. For that reason, and many others, Hoch simply has no credibility on the issue today. By following Hoch’s advice, Litwin now has custard pie all over his face. Or as they say in the field of information technology, which both men worked in: garbage in, garbage out.

    Not that it matters. If this excerpt is any measure of his book—and from a preview I saw, it is—then Litwin did not write it to educate any members of the public. Neither did he wish to elucidate any of the issues that have now been accented by the releases of the ARRB. And he certainly doesn’t give a damn about the assassination of President Kennedy.

    What he has done is enhance his status with the kinds of people who backed his first book, that is, Conrad Black and Daniel Pipes. He has become a member in good standing of the Culture Warrior crowd. If one looks at his book from that Machiavellian perspective, then like George W. Bush and his disaster in Iraq: Mission Accomplished.

  • The Past American Century

    Mike Swanson has inaugurated a new website, The Past American Century, to host materials on the JFK assassination and other topics.

    Check out this recent video on the Schlesinger memo from June, 1961 about eliminating/restructuring the CIA.

  • Obituary for a Fake Intel Source

    Obituary for a Fake Intel Source

    Florentino Aspillaga in an undisclosed location
    circa 1995 (© RTV Marti)

    The Cuban defector Florentino Aspillaga, TOUCHDOWN in CIA parlance, died from heart disease at age 71 last month. On October 23, Miami-based Radio TV Martí broke the news with the ersatz statement that he was the head of the Cuban Intelligence Services (CuIS) in Czechoslovakia. The former CIA desk analyst Brian Latell had already aggrandized him beyond all modes of reason as being a key witness for proving Fidel Castro’s foreknowledge of the JFK assassination.

    The Jaimanitas Story

    Dr. Latell heard about it straight from the horse’s mouth in 2007 and brought it up in his book Castro’s Secrets (Macmillan, 2012, 2013). Aspillaga also revealed having told the CIA the whole story in 1987 during his after-defection debriefing.

    To believe Aspillaga, on November 22, 1963, the barely 16-year-old Cuban counterintelligence ingénu Aspillaga would have been busy monitoring CIA Headquarters and its station JM/WAVE in Miami from a listening post at Jaimanitas, a small beach town near Castro’s main residence, dubbed as Point Zero, seven miles west of Havana. Around 9:30 am (EST) Aspillaga would have received the order “to stop all CIA work” and to redirect the antennas “toward Texas.” He was told he must report back immediately “if anything important occurs.” A few hours later, he “began hearing broadcasts on amateur radio bands about the shooting of President Kennedy in Dallas.” The teenage radio wave hunter inferred: “Castro knew. They knew Kennedy would be killed.”

    Uncommon Nonsense

    It’s hard to swallow that Castro would have resorted to a radio counterintelligence prodigy or any other means of electronic intelligence (ELINT) to learn something that would have been instantly available through mass media. In 1963, info about anything occurring in Dallas during the JFK visit simply meant broadcast reports interrupting soap operas on the three national TV networks, and radio stations giving breaking news furnished by reporters covering live.

    Aspillaga was in fact a self-defeating storyteller. He told Dr. Latell: “It wasn’t until two or three hours later that I began hearing broadcasts on amateur radio bands about the shooting of President Kennedy.” [emphasis added] Radio amateurs must have just been chatting about what the commercial media had already reported. Moreover, a unique witness had given conclusive evidence against Aspillaga in 1963.

    French journalist Jean Daniel wrote a first-hand account in his article “When Castro Heard the News” (The New Republic, December 7, 1963). As Kennedy’s emissary, Daniel was talking with Castro in Varadero Beach the very day of the assassination. After a phone call by Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós, Castro got all the news “from the NBC network in Miami.” Daniel also recounted Castro was utterly shocked and turned to him saying—about the plans for rapprochement—that everything was going to change. Which contradicts Aspillaga’s story.

    Autopsy of an Outright Lie

    On November 18, 2013, Dr. Latell was the main speaker for a lecture entitled “Castro and the Kennedy Assassination”. It was held at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (ICCAS) at the University of Miami. He felt sure about “Aspillaga’s most sensational revelation” because he had read it in both the English and Spanish versions of Aspillaga’s unpublished memoirs. Apparently, Dr. Latell did not realize that the talking source is the same source writing in English and also the same source writing in Spanish.

    The CIA did not come forward with the Jaimanitas story to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). The Agency Release Panel responded to a FOIA request on June 28, 2013, that “the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence” of JFK-related records in Aspillaga’s debriefing. Even so, the latter is not to be found among the documents—either declassified or withheld—from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). A very strage set of affairs if Latell is correct about Aspillaga.

    Touchdown

    After 25 years and 13 medals in CuIS, Aspillaga had risen to the rank of Major when he took advantage of his first noteworthy assignment abroad in order to defect to the West. In November of 1986, he flew to a third-rate CuIS post in Bratislava (the capital of Slovakia, then part of Czechoslovakia) under the cover of an official from Cubatecnica, a state company in charge of Cuban workers abroad. Then, on June 7, 1987, Aspillaga crossed the border into Austria.

    His case was included in the Historical Dictionary of Sexspionage (Scarecrow Press, 2009) by British historian Rupert Allason, pen name Nigel West, because of an intimate relationship incidental to it. Aspillaga defected along with a teenage girl named Marta. The CIA station chief in Vienna, James Olson, thought this was Aspillaga’s daughter, but she turned out to be his girlfriend.

    Anyway, the walk-in Aspillaga fits better into James Olson’s definition of a “let’s cut a deal kind of guy.” In return for handing over documents stolen from the first-rate CuIS station in Prague and being squeezed by CIA and FBI debriefers, Aspillaga got a deluxe resettlement package in the United States.

    In 2012, Dr. Latell wrote that “the CIA cryptonym assigned to [Aspillaga] remains classified [and] constitutes a private, inside-Langley boast of just how highly the CIA had scored against Cuban intelligence”. Latell was again aggrandizing Aspillaga. In fact, in Olson’s book Fair Play (Potomac Books, 2006) the reader knew Aspillaga was codenamed TOUCHDOWN. But the CIA score was pathetic. Aspillaga furnished the intel that, if not all, then most of the Cuban agents recruited by the CIA from 1960 onward were working for Castro.

    The Sound of Silence

    In July and August 1987, Aspillaga gave interviews to Radio Marti, which were reported by Associated Press, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and others. There was not a single reference to the Jaimanitas story, but a lot about Castro:

    • He had a home in each of Cuba’s provinces, a fleet of yachts, and even a Swiss bank account for his personal whims.
    • He had four children luxuriously living and studying in Moscow, although only his first-born son, Fidelito, was officially acknowledged.
    • He used Panamanian General Manuel Antonio Noriega to send arms to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Colombia, as well as to acquire U.S. high technology items and to traffick in drugs.

    In June 1988, Aspillaga referred to Castro 69 times during a radio interview with Tomas Regalado (WQBA, Miami). But there was not one reference to Kennedy. Aspillaga remained silent about Castro’s foreknowledge of the JFK assassination even when Georgie Anne Geyer interviewed him in Washington, on April 14, 1988, for her book about the untold story of Castro (Guerrilla Prince, Little, Brown and Company, 1991).

    On September 19, 1988, news came from London that Cuban diplomat Carlos Manuel Medina had fired shots at Aspillaga. He said that Aspillaga had tried to strong-arm him into defecting. After the shooting, Medina and the Cuban Ambassador, Oscar Fernandez-Mell, were expelled. However, Aspillaga went again to Regalado and, on October 7, WQBA twice broadcast an interview in which he asserted: “I have never spent a moment anywhere in England.” Aspillaga also boasted for the fun and revelry of gullible Cuban exiles in Miami: “Castro will not fall, we will kick him out.”

    Epitaph

    Apart from Dr. Latell, only former CIA case officer Bob Baer dared to broach Aspillaga’s testimony about “Castro knew it” his hallucinatory TV series “JFK Declassified: Tracking Oswald” (History Channel).