Tag: CIA

The Assassination of Robert Kennedy

From the YouTube Channel introduction:

Robert Kennedy’s killing seemed an open and shut case, yet in spite of 77 witnesses, it remains shrouded in mystery. Many witnesses at the time complained of pressure by the LAPD to change their testimony.

For the first time, we expose how evidence was changed: how an FBI officer saw bullets being removed from the scene of the assassination and how LAPD officers who didn’t toe the line found themselves suspended on ridiculous charges or taken off the case.

This hard-hitting documentary is prodced in the gripping style of “The Day The Dream Died”, the documentary which catapulted Chris Plumley to international prominence and formed the backbone of Oliver Stone’s acclaimed film “JFK”.

May 9, 2018

Edmund Gullion, JFK, and the Shaping of a Foreign Policy in Vietnam

In the 1951 photograph above, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny is leading a contingent through the streets of Saigon at a time when France was engaged in a losing cause during the First Indochina War. In the back of the pack, a young congressman from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, is observing the conditions on the ground in a war effort that was at the time receiving substantial American aid. Kennedy’s younger brother Robert accompanied him on the trip. RFK later ran on an anti-war platform at the height of the Vietnam War, shortly before his assassination in 1968. This study explores the impact of the 1951 trip to Vietnam on John F. Kennedy, his association with the diplomat Edmund Gullion, and the evolving vision of JFK for American foreign policy in Vietnam, which was articulated in a major address given in 1954.

Edmund Gullion (1913-98) enjoyed a distinguished career as a diplomat followed by a second life in academia as Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he trained a generation of foreign officers. As a Southeast Asian specialist, he held senior positions at the American Embassy in Saigon from 1949-52 during the First Indochina War. At a time when the Truman administration was ramping up aid for France in an effort to salvage its colonial outpost in Southeast Asia, Gullion was an advocate of Vietnamese independence. Later, at a critical juncture in America’s involvement in Vietnam in 1963, Gullion asked a colleague, “Do you really think there is such a thing as a military solution for Vietnam?”1

Gullion was also a confidant of the young Congressman and World War II hero John F. Kennedy, who visited Saigon in 1951. Congressman Kennedy was there to observe up close the conditions of a foreign colonial war in progress, in preparation for his run for the Senate the next year against Henry Cabot Lodge. Later, he used Gullion as a sounding-board as he was shaping his own views on America’s role in Southeast Asia and the Third World. During his presidency, JFK appointed Gullion as ambassador to the Congo.2 Gullion’s oral interviews and the words of JFK himself help to shed light on the congressman’s formation as a statesman in the period before he acceded to the presidency. The year 1954 is an especially important crossroads in the history of Vietnam and a turning point for JFK in articulating a foreign policy for Southeast Asia.

Young John F. Kennedy was an inveterate traveler. When he was a Harvard student, he took time out to travel to Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East in 1939, witnessing first-hand the ominous signs of the coming war. During the war itself, he survived an attack on his PT boat in the Solomon Islands, heroically rescuing a badly burned crew member and guiding his men to safety until they were rescued. At the close of the war in 1945, he worked as a journalist, attending the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco and the Potsdam Conference. As a congressman from Massachusetts, Kennedy embarked on a seven-week, 25,000-mile trip in 1951. Accompanied by his brother Robert and his sister Patricia, Kennedy visited Israel, Pakistan, Iran, India, Singapore, Thailand, French Indochina (Vietnam), Korea, and Japan. Upon his return home, he conveyed to the press that his goal for the trip was to learn “how those peoples regarded us and our policies, and what you and I might do in our respective capacities to further the cause of peace.”3

At the time, he described in a radio interview what he believed should be the primary goal of combatting communism in the Third World, which was “not the export of arms or the show of armed might but the export of ideas, of techniques, and the rebirth of our traditional sympathy for and understanding of the desires of men to be free.”4 When Kennedy met with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, he asked Nehru for his view on the current war in French Indochina. Nehru replied that the military and financial assistance provided to the French by the United States was a “bottomless hole” because the war was an example of doomed colonialism.5 Upon arriving in Vietnam, the Kennedy entourage observed Charles de Gaulle and the top brass of the French military as the war was in progress. But, more significantly, the young Congressman was to have a fateful meeting with an American consular officer named Edmund Gullion.

II

While the French were optimistic about retaining their colonial empire with American support, Gullion had recognized in 1951 that they would not prevail. Kennedy had known Gullion since 1947 when they had conferred about a speech the congressman was to give on foreign policy. Now, they met privately on the top of the Hotel Majestic in Saigon. Earlier in the day, Kennedy had been told by the French commander, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, that with 250,000 troops, it would be impossible for the French to lose.6 But as JFK listened to the twilight mortar shells exploding in the distance from the artillery of the Viet Minh, Gullion informed him that

In twenty years there will be no more colonies. We’re going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing, we will lose, too, for the same reason. There’s no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The homefront is lost. The same thing would happen to us.7

Congressman Kennedy would never forget the prophetic words of Gullion. A decade later, in the now famous debates in the White House in November of 1961, he recalled them to his cabinet members. As John Newman and James Blight have described, these men were pressing him as commander-in-chief to augment military advisors in Vietnam with American combat troops, a request that JFK adamantly rejected.8

When Kennedy returned from his 1951 trip, it was clear that he was deeply affected by the words of Gullion. Robert Kennedy later recalled that the experience had been “very very major” [sic] in shaping his older brother’s vision for American foreign policy in the countries he had visited.9 In describing this period in Kennedy’s life, historian Herbert S. Parmet writes that,

… at a time of containment as the sine qua non of meeting the spread of the ‘international Communist conspiracy,’ Jack Kennedy was evolving into a spokesman for a more sophisticated view. He was beginning to call attention to the soft spot of the Western cause, to the frustration of a region that had long contended with colonial domination.10

In March of 1952, Kennedy spoke to an audience in Everett, Massachusetts, voicing his opposition to sending American troops to assist the French in Indochina. In April, he addressed a Knights of Columbus chapter in nearby Lynn, stating that “we should not commit our ground troops to fight in French Indochina.”11 In an editorial in The Traveler,the Congressman received praise for taking a stand against the status quo: “Mr. Kennedy is doing a service in prodding our conscience.”12 It was clear in 1952 that Kennedy was as outspoken of American aid to the French as he was against the French colonial war itself.

Gullion returned to Washington in 1953, at which time he renewed his association with Kennedy, who had recently been elected to the Senate. They had many conversations and bonded in their minority opinion about the policy of pouring aid into the French war effort in Indochina. The State Department even suspected Gullion of contributing to Kennedy’s speeches on foreign policy. But Gullion recalls an independently minded Kennedy, who not only did not require Guillon’s assistance as a speechwriter, but was shaping a vision entirely on his own. In reflecting on his meetings with Kennedy in an oral history interview in 1964, Gullion modestly recalled that from the very first speech in which Kennedy had sought Gullion’s aid in 1947, the young politician was thinking for himself:

Actually, it was a very realistic and an advanced kind of perspective that he had, and it was his own. My own contributions to it were factual, and I volunteered some opinions and some sentences, but I was somewhat surprised and, I suppose, my own very youthful egoisms somewhat checked when I saw the finished product and realized how much of this was Kennedy and how little of it was mine. It was quite an interesting product.13

Gullion also recalled that after his 1951 trip, Kennedy’s “stance on Indochina certainly went against the prevailing opinion …. Now when he came back he prepared an address in the Senate which was one of his most important.”14 In his work on this major address, Kennedy conferred with Gullion, and, once again, his views were “entirely his own,” according to Gullion.15

JFK’s speech in the Senate came at a turning point in the modern history of Vietnam in the year 1954. After a brutal, fifty-seven day standoff in northwestern Vietnam, Dien Bien Phu fell to the forces of Ho Chi Minh on May 7. With aid from the Chinese and Russians, the Viet Minh commander Võ Nguyen Giáp had amassed troops and, most importantly, heavy artillery that negated the formidable French airpower. The collapse and surrender of the French that followed were the result of Giáp’s brilliant tactical campaign at Dien Bien Phu. In July, French Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France put his signature to the Geneva Accords that effectively marked the end of French control of Indochina. The Geneva agreement stipulated that in the nation’s transition to independence, there would be a temporary partition of the country pending a national election to be held in the summer of 1956.

But the United States never signed the Geneva agreements, and almost immediately, the CIA aggressively began to transform Vietnam with the same zeal that had just effected regime changes in Iran and Guatemala. Now, to counter Ho Chi Minh in the north, the search was on for a United States backed leader in the south, whose rise to power would be facilitated by the CIA specialist in black operations, Edward Lansdale. In early 1954 and prior to the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, Ngo Dinh Diem was made prime minister of Vietnam by France’s longstanding puppet ruler Bao Dai. Within the next two years, Diem would take control of South Vietnam through the sophisticated psychological warfare and propaganda campaigns of Lansdale.16 With Diem in place, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was able to boast that, “We have a clean base there now, without a taint of colonialism. Dien Bien Phu was a blessing in disguise.”17 The elections that were to unify Vietnam never occurred in 1956, because the United States knew that Ho Chi Minh would be elected in a landslide. Instead, the partition between North and South Vietnam was no longer “temporary,” the North Vietnamese were identified as the “communists,” and, propped up by American economic and military support, the “free” nation of South Vietnam under Diem came into existence.18

III

As the turbulent events of 1954 were unfolding in Vietnam, and a month before Dien Bien Phu collapsed, John F. Kennedy rose to deliver an address in the Senate on April 6, 1954. The structure of the speech was a detailed, year-by-year recapitulation of the massive American support given to the struggling French mercenary army through administrations of both a Democrat (Truman) and a Republican (Eisenhower). Kennedy had done his homework for the speech. This included sending a list of forty-seven detailed questions to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles about the purpose of American involvement in Vietnam.19 But Kennedy was not aware that the United States national security network had already recognized the futility of American intervention in Vietnam by 1954. In 1971, the release of the secret Pentagon Papers revealed that in 1954,

… unless the Vietnamese themselves show an inclination to make individual and collective sacrifices required to resist Communism, which they have not done to date, no amount of external pressure and resistance can long delay complete Communist victory in Vietnam.20

With that knowledge, the Eisenhower administration continued its unalloyed engagement in Vietnam.

On the floor of the Senate, Kennedy prefaced his chronological survey by demanding the government’s accountability to the American people for adventurism and potential war in Vietnam:

If the American people are, for the fourth time in this century, to travel the long and tortuous road of war—particularly a war which we now realize would threaten the survival of civilization—then I believe we have a right—a right which we should have hitherto exercised—to inquire in detail into the nature of the struggle in which we may become engaged, and the alternative to such struggle. Without such clarification the general support and success of our policy is endangered.21

Kennedy was most likely expressing to Eisenhower his personal outrage when he had learned that secret discussions had occurred about deploying atomic warfare in Vietnam to support the fading French prospects of victory. In his speech, Kennedy’s concerns for disclosure were being raised prior to the outcome of the battle of Dien Bien Phu and months before the American subversion of the Geneva Accords that resulted in the artificial division of Vietnam against the will of the Vietnamese people. As he was speaking in the Senate, there was as yet no design for a portion of Vietnam to become an American client state led by a puppet ruler like Diem. It was precisely such a scenario that Kennedy feared.

Kennedy then went on to warn of the dangers of an American military commitment to Vietnam in the wake of the French struggle he had observed in 1951, based on his first-hand experience and the perspectives he had gleaned from Edmund Gullion:

But to pour money, materiel, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive. I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, “an enemy of the people” which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.22

In hindsight, the prophetic nature of Kennedy’s 1954 address underscores a set of lessons that would eventually be learned the hard way by the policymakers after the horrific number of American and Vietnamese casualties during the war that unfolded between 1965-75. Kennedy closed his address by issuing a warning about the potential consequences of military adventurism in Vietnam, including a nod to Thomas Jefferson’s prudence and caution, prior to leaping into the unknown with a military entanglement abroad:

The time to study, to doubt, to review, and revise is now, for upon our decisions now may well rest the peace and security of the world, and, indeed, the very continued existence of mankind. And if we cannot entrust this decision to the people, then, as Thomas Jefferson once said: “If we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education.”23

This coda to Kennedy’s speech could have been a road map to the future to avoid what became the tragedy of the Vietnam War.

IV

JFK’s tour-de-force Senate address of 1954 was not political grandstanding. Rather, it was a carefully formulated examination of the question of American intervention in Vietnam at a pivotal moment for both nations. Prior to the Senate speech, Kennedy had spoken to the Cathedral Club in Brooklyn, New York, stressing that the French could not withstand the united forces of Ho Chi Minh, who “has influence penetrating all groups of society because of his years of battle against French colonialism.”24 As he would say again in late 1961 to his advisors, the situation was far different from the recent Korean conflict, wherein an independent government in the south was threatened by the invading communists from the north. Even before the Geneva Accords had mandated free elections to unify Vietnam and before Eisenhower began to use the expression “domino theory,” Kennedy had identified the unique circumstances of Vietnam’s long struggle for independence, as distinct from a nation that America could potentially “lose” to communism.

After the Senate speech, Kennedy followed up with a television appearance, indicating that the French could not possibly retain Indochina and that again, as he would say seven years later, “American intervention with combat troops would not succeed.”25 In another 1954 speech in Los Angeles, Kennedy asserted that the American people “have been deceived for political reasons on the life and death matters of war and peace.”26 He reiterated this theme before the Whig-Cliosophic Society of Princeton University and the Executives Club in Chicago, stressing above all the importance of recognizing independent movements for nationhood in the Third World and distinguishing them from the global expansion of communism. In response to Vice President Richard Nixon’s call to send American ground troops into Vietnam, Kennedy responded that if we were to do that, “We are about to enter the jungle to do battle with the tiger.”27 By the end of 1954, an imaginary line would be drawn across Vietnam as a result of the Geneva Accords. But a very different line was being drawn in the sand by John F. Kennedy: one that proscribed American military intervention. The 1954 Senate speech, which was addressed to President Eisenhower, was a prescient warning about repeating the mistakes of the French. Ultimately, it was advice that was ignored after the death of President Kennedy by his successors, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

In Adlai Stevenson’s bid to unseat Eisenhower as president, Kennedy delivered speeches in support of Stevenson in the run-up to the 1956 presidential election. But when he discussed foreign policy, Kennedy refused to engage in partisan politics. In describing American interference in the developing nations of Africa and Southeast Asia, Kennedy observed that

… the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today. And it is by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has nothing to do with anti-communism.28

After such speeches, the Stevenson election team asked Kennedy to refrain from making further foreign policy remarks in the course of the campaign. Senator Kennedy was unsuccessful in his quest for the nomination of Vice President on the Stevenson ticket. Which was probably a blessing in disguise.

During the late 1950s, the focus of Southeast Asian foreign policy of the Eisenhower administration was on preventing the nation of Laos from becoming the first fallen domino. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy stressed that we would never succeed in Laos against “guerrilla forces or in peripheral wars … We have been driving ourselves into a corner where the choice is all or nothing.”29 As a senator, Kennedy had recognized that “public thinking is still being bullied by slogans which are either false in context or irrelevant to the new phase of competitive coexistence in which we live.”30 By the time he was elected President in 1960, Kennedy had the wisdom to see beyond the Cold War slogans of “the domino theory,” “godless communism,” and “Soviet master plan.” In his first year in office as President, Kennedy traveled to Vienna for a summit with Khrushchev. While en route, he was warmly received in Paris by President Charles de Gaulle. After Kennedy presented de Gaulle with a gift of an original letter written from George Washington to the Marquis de Lafayette, de Gaulle proffered advice to Kennedy on Vietnam, telling him that intervention in Southeast Asia would be “a bottomless military and political quagmire.”31

This counsel reflected the lessons learned by de Gaulle himself from Dien Bien Phu and Algeria. But John F. Kennedy hardly needed this advice from de Gaulle, as his thinking about the emerging nations of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia had been formed after a decade of close study and hands-on experience during his travels. His 1954 address in the Senate could be a blueprint even today for correcting the misguided American attempts at “nation building” abroad.32 From the time he traveled to Vietnam until his death, Kennedy had the clarity of thinking to understand that the struggle in Vietnam was the story of nationalism, not a Cold War intrigue. And the thinking that informed his vision was guided at the outset by the words he had heard in 1951 from Edmund Gullion.

Afterword

The history of the Vietnam War is invariably delineated by historians as a continuum of escalating involvement from the administrations of Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon in the form of an incremental progression.33 This essay challenges that notion as apparent in the vision of John F. Kennedy, one that vehemently opposed conventional warfare in Vietnam. According to JFK’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, Vietnam was

… not central to the foreign policy of the Kennedy presidency. Berlin was, Cuba, the Soviet Union, but not Vietnam. Vietnam was a low-level insurrection at that point.34

While there were sixteen thousand military advisors in Vietnam at the time of his assassination on November 22, 1963, Kennedy had resisted the pressure to send in combat forces. According to Sorensen, Kennedy listened to his hawkish advisors, “but he never did what they wanted.”35 Similarly, Võ Hong Nam, the son of the North Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp, informed researcher Mani Kang, in an interview in 2011, that “President Kennedy was finally changing his foreign policy in regards to Vietnam in 1963” and “he was withdrawing.”36

The military historian John M. Newman observes that “at 12:30 P.M., on Friday, November 22, the rifle shots rang out in Dealey Plaza that took the president’s life. His Vietnam policy died with him.”37 Lyndon Johnson’s decision to use the Gulf of Tonkin affair as the pretext to send combat troops into Vietnam, escalate the war, prop up a string of South Vietnamese dictators in a client state, and, finally admit failure, when choosing not to run for reelection as President in 1968, has tended to erase the memory of JFK’s goal of withdrawing all military advisors no later than 1965.

Speaking before a large gathering at the LBJ Library on May 1, 1995, Robert McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defense and, later, one of the principal policymakers of the Vietnam War under LBJ, recalled the strategic meetings of the National Security Council (NSC) on October 2 and October 5, 1963, wherein, against the will of the majority of the NSC committee members, President Kennedy had made the determination for complete withdrawal of United States military advisors from Vietnam by December 31, 1965. Historian James DiEugenio has effectively summarized the psychology that JFK was using against a powerful national security network that opposed his plan for withdrawal from Vietnam:

Kennedy had based his withdrawal plan on taking advantage of the differences between what the real battlefield conditions were and what the Pentagon said they were. Knowing that the American-backed South Vietnam effort there was failing, the Pentagon was disguising this with a whitewash of how bad things really were. Therefore, Kennedy was going to hoist the generals on their own petard: If things were going so well, then we were not needed anymore.38

In Kennedy’s plan, the initial phase-out of one thousand advisors would be accomplished by the end of 1963. A public announcement would be made to set these decisions “in concrete.”39 McNamara’s recall of the NSC meeting was corroborated when, in the late 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) released tape recordings of key meetings during the Kennedy presidency, including those of the National Security Council sessions of October 2 and October 5, 1963, wherein all of McNamara’s points were confirmed. McNamara’s voice appears on the tape, stating, “We need to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it.”40 Shortly after the NSC meetings, JFK approved the Top Secret National Security Action Memo 263. Declassified in the early 1990s, the document identifies the first phase of the withdrawal of one thousand U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963. The combination of contemporary eyewitness testimony, oral history, recollections of statesmen, tape recordings of meetings, documentary evidence, and, above all, President Kennedy in his own words, points to his capacity as commander-in-chief to steer the United States away from what became the tragedy of the Vietnam War following his assassination.

Notes

1 Wolfgang Saxon, “Edmund Asbury Gullion, 85, Wide-Ranging Career Envoy,” obituary, The New York Times, March 31, 1998. (https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/31/world/edmund-asbury-gullion-85-wide-ranging-career-envoy.html)

2 At a critical stage in the crisis of the Diem regime in Vietnam in the summer of 1963, JFK wanted to appoint Gullion as ambassador in Saigon. But Secretary of State Dean Rusk opposed the nomination of Gullion in favor of an opposition party member, the Republican Henry Cabot Lodge. In an effort to show bipartisan unity, JFK went along with Rusk. But the appointment of Lodge was a grave mistake that eventually JFK would regret. Robert Kennedy had also preferred the selection of Gullion, warning his brother that Lodge would create “a lot of difficulties in six months.” RFK’s words were prophetic, especially at the time of the CIA-backed assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem that occurred six months later and unbeknownst to the President. James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 151.

3 Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy—1917-1963 (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2003), 165.

4 Dallek, 167.

5 Dallek, 168.

6 Douglass, 93.

7 Douglass, 93.

8 Kennedy’s advisors included Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy and his brother William, and Eugene Rostow and his brother Walt. These were the men identified by journalist David Halberstam as “the best and the brightest” of the intellectuals in JFK’s administration. After the president’s assassination, these civilian policy makers would be complicit with Lyndon Johnson as the chief architects of the disastrous war in Vietnam.

9 Herbert S. Parmet, Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: The Dial Press, 1980), 228.

10 Parmet, 228.

11 Parmet, 228.

12 Parmet, 228.

13 Oral History with Edmund A. Gullion, July 17, 1964.

14 Oral History with Edmund A. Gullion, July 17, 1964.

15 Oral History with Edmund A. Gullion, July 17, 1964.

16 The clandestine operation of Lansdale has been documented with great thoroughness by Talbot and Douglass, as per bibliography.

17 Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 139. Quoted in James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed—JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, second edition (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 24.

18 The 1958 bestselling novel The Ugly American, written by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer, exposed the smooth tactics of counterintelligence, propaganda, and force exerted by American operatives to win “hearts and minds” in a fictitious Southeast Asian nation. The thinly veiled portrait of Lansdale was apparent in the wily character of Colonel Edwin Hillendale, whose psychological ploys sought to convert the nation to the American way. Senator John F. Kennedy loved the novel and purchased one hundred copies for distribution to the entire United States Senate. He also paid for a large advertisement of the book in The New York Times.

19 Mahoney, 15.

20 The Complete Pentagon Papers, The New York Timesonline, 1945-67 (http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/205509-pentagon-papers-part-iv-a-4.html)

21 John F. Kennedy, Senate Address on Indochina, April 6, 1954 (https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/United-States-Senate-Indochina_19540406.aspx)

22 John F. Kennedy, Senate Address on Indochina, April 6, 1954. Shortly after the period in which Edmund Gullion was stationed in Vietnam, Charlton Ogburn became an intelligence officer in Southeast Asia, writing memos to the State Department and warning of the dangers of military involvement in Vietnam. His voice was completely ignored by the overconfident civilian leaders in Washington. Ogburn believed that the reach of the authorities was “totalitarian” in nature, a reality that was grasped by Plato, who may have been the first to identify the amorphous power of the “State” in the example of ancient Athens. For Ogburn, Vietnam was a “laboratory” for understanding how dogma is wielded by authority figures. He later recalled that “we lost over fifty thousand lives in Vietnam because the authorities could not be budged. Their appraisal of themselves was based on their being right …. They had to be right.”  The passage of time would prove Ogburn to be correct in his assessment of Vietnam. Writing in 1989, Andrew Jon Rotter in The Path to Vietnam—Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989) refers to Ogburn’s dispatches to State Department officials as “startling and prophetic” in his early critique of the false assumptions guiding U.S. policy. Ogburn concluded one of his memos to Dean Rusk with a statement that spoke for the rights of Third World nations caught up in the Cold War. Referring to the people of Southeast Asia, Ogburn wrote, “Darn it, they are the ones who are threatened with a fate worse than death—not we.” Around the same time, John F. Kennedy was making virtually the same argument in his Senate speech of April 4, 1954.

23 John F. Kennedy, Senate Address on Indochina, April 6, 1954.

24 Parmet, 281.

25 Parmet, 286.

26 Parmet, 285.

27 Parmet, 285.

28 Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council Luncheon at the Biltmore Hotel on September 21, 1956. (https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Los-Angeles-CA-World-Affairs-Council_19560921.aspx)

29 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days—John F. Kennedy in the White House (New York: Fawcett, 1965), 310-11.

30 Quoted in James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed—JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, second edition (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), 25.

31 Dallek, 397. Prior to acceding to the presidency, Kennedy paid a visit to General Douglas MacArthur who, like de Gaulle, advised him to “never get involved in a land war in Asia.” (https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/08/politics/caroline-kennedy-axe-files)

32 As observed by biographer David Talbot, “Kennedy’s thinking about the historical imperative of Third World liberation was remarkably advanced. Even today, no nationally prominent leader in the United States would dare question the imperialistic policies that have led our country into one military nightmare after another. Kennedy understood that Washington’s militant opposition to the world’s revolutionary forces would only reap ‘a bitter harvest.’” Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard—Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York: Harper Collins, 2015), 362.

33 In the popular Steven Spielberg film The Post, the screenwriters lump together on multiple occasions the American Presidents from Eisenhower to Nixon, suggesting that each President was on board with military intervention in Vietnam, as the American commitment grew exponentially from one administration to the next. But the historical record suggests that this was not the case during Kennedy’s thousand-day presidency.

34 David Talbot, Brothers—The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Free Press, 2007), 215.

35 Talbot, Brothers, 215.

36 Mani Kang, “General Giap Knew,” Kennedys and King, August 30, 2013. (https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/general-giap-knew)

37 John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam—Deception, Intrigue, and The Struggle for Power (self-published, 2016), 458.

38 James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland—Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination in the New Hollywood (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), 188.

39 James K. Galbraith, “Exit Strategy: In 1963, JFK Ordered a Complete Withdrawal From Vietnam,” Boston Review (September 1, 2003).

40 Galbraith.

Works Cited Bibliography

The Personal Papers of Edmund A. Gullion. The John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts (https://archive2.jfklibrary.org/EAGPP/EAGPP-FA.xml )

Historic Speeches of John F. Kennedy. The John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts (https://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/Historic-Speeches.aspx )

The Complete Pentagon Papers, The New York Timesonline, 1945-67 (http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/205509-pentagon-papers-part-iv-a-4.html )

Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy—1917-1963. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2003.

DiEugenio, James. Destiny Betrayed—JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, Second Edition. New York, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012.

DiEugenio, James. Reclaiming Parkland—Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination in the New Hollywood. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016.

Douglass, James W. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008.

Galbraith, James K. “Exit Strategy: In 1963, JFK Ordered a Complete Withdrawal From Vietnam,” Boston Review, September 1, 2003.

Mahoney, Richard. JFK: Ordeal in Africa. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Newman, John M. JFK and Vietnam—Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power, second edition. Self-published, 2016.

Parmet, Herbert S. Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy. New York: The Dial Press, 1980.

Rotter, Andrew Jon. The Path to Vietnam—Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Saxon, Wolfgang. “Edmund Asbury Gullion, 85, Wide-Ranging Career Envoy. “ Obituary, The New York Times, March 31, 1998.

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. A Thousand Days—John F. Kennedy in the White House. New York: Fawcett, 1965.

Talbot, David. Brothers—The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. New York: Free Press, 2007.

Talbot, David. The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. New York: Harper Perennial, 2016.

May 8, 2018

The Tippit Case in the New Millennium

Original black and white photographic negative taken
by Dallas Times Herald and United Press International
photographer Darryl Heikes.

Up until the earthquake caused by Oliver Stone’s film JFK, there was an accepted paradigm in the critical community regarding the murder of Dallas Police patrolman J. D. Tippit. Two good examples of what that case looked like under critical scrutiny could be accessed in Henry Hurt’s book Reasonable Doubt, and Jim Garrison’s memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins. The former was published in 1985, and the latter in 1988. Garrison asked some cogent questions about the ballistics evidence in the case, which, in turn, cast aspersions on the honesty and efficacy of the handling of the evidence.

As Garrison wrote, the Warren Commission version of the Tippit shooting said that Oswald alone killed Tippit at about 1: 15 PM. After President Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald departed work at the Texas School Book Depository and took a taxi to his boarding house. The official story then has Oswald walking to the crime scene at 10^th and Patton from his rooming house at 1026 North Beckley in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, a distance of around 9/10 of a mile. In itself, as both Hurt and Garrison noted, this created a problem. It began with Oswald’s landlady testifying that she had seen him standing on the corner across the street from the rooming house waiting for a bus after he went into his room at about 1:00 PM. When asked what time she saw him there—waiting for a bus that would take him in the wrong direction from 10^th and Patton—she replied it was about 1:04. (Garrison, p. 194; Hurt p. 144) The idea that someone could traverse the nearly one mile distance from the rooming house to the crime scene in something like 11 minutes is hard to swallow. I know two researchers—both of them much taller than Oswald—who tried to negotiate that distance and actually walked the route. Neither of them came close to equaling what the Commission said Oswald did. And neither of them walked normally; they both power-walked the distance. As Henry Hurt added, no one saw Oswald running that distance, or walking for that matter. Recall, this is about a half hour after President Kennedy’s assassination. If Oswald had been running, wouldn’t someone have noticed him? (Hurt, p. 145)

But, as both Garrison and Hurt showed, the idea that Tippit was shot at the 1:15 PM time is not supported by the weight of the evidence. For instance, Mrs. Donald Higgins was later interviewed by Barry Ernest for his book, The Girl on the Stairs. She told Barry that the time of the shooting was 1:06. And she lived only a couple of doors down from the crime scene. (See the e-book version, p. 58.) Roger Craig said that, when the news of the shooting came over the radio, he looked at his watch, which said 1:06. (Garrison, p. 194) Even Helen Markham, who became hysterical after the shooting, said Tippit was shot at the latest about about 1:07 PM. (Hurt, p. 144) As Hurt notes, T. F. Bowley came on the scene after the shooting, with Tippit’s body lying in the street. He had to stop his car, and then walked over to the abandoned Tippit car, and he then picked up the radio. He said that the time on his watch after he arrived at the scene and stopped his car was 1:10. It is important to hold in mind that the Warren Commission did not interview either Mrs. Higgins or Mr. Bowley. (Garrison, p. 196) In fact, the Warren Report actually says that another witness, Domingo Benavides, made the call to the police that Bowley actually made. (WR, p. 166) The late Larry Ray Harris was probably the foremost authority on the Tippit case at the time of his death in a car accident in 1996. When I spoke to him at an earlier seminar in Dallas, he told me that the most likely time of the shooting was probably 1:08 PM.

This, of course, is a key evidentiary point. Because if it is hard to believe that Oswald was at the scene at 1:15, it is not possible to think he could be there at 1:08 PM—that is, unless someone drove him there, and no evidence of that has surfaced in over fifty years. Consider this fact: Just 9 years earlier Roger Bannister became the first man to run the mile in less than four minutes. The idea that Oswald could do something similar—in street clothes, on cement sidewalks—and that no one would recall him doing so, that would be absurd. I doubt if even Dan Rather could have swallowed it. This may be the reason that Bowley and Higgins were not interviewed.

But the riddle of the time of death is even more complex. Because the legal death certificate document pronounced Tippit dead at 1:15. This was done by Dr. Richard Liquori at Methodist Hospital.

Tippit death certificate
(note the time of decease 1:15 pm typed over
what appears originally to be 1:09)

If one allows for the time for the ambulance to get to the scene of the crime and return, this would appear to back up Mrs. Higgins’ claim that the shooting occurred at 1:06 PM.

What made the situation worse was this: the witness who was closest to the actual shooting scene could not identify Oswald as the shooter. This was Domingo Benavides. (Hurt, p. 145) This is compounded by the fact that the Dallas Police never even took Benavides to a lineup in order to identify Oswald. (WR, p. 166)

Warren Reynolds was also an eyewitness. He also could not identify Oswald as the killer. He worked about a block away from the scene. When he heard the shots, he ran out on a patio and peered in that direction. He said he saw a gunman running towards him stuffing a handgun under his belt. He began to follow him, but after a block, he lost him when he ducked into a building. Reynolds gave interviews to the press and his name was in the news for about two months. Yet no official investigator talked to him in this time period. Finally, in late January, the FBI interviewed Reynolds. He said he could not feel free to offer a positive identification of the man as Oswald. Two days later, Reynolds was shot through the head. He miraculously survived. Evidently, the down time did his memory some good. He now was ready to identify the fleeing man as Oswald. (Hurt, pp. 147-48)

With these kinds of witnesses, the Commission felt they had to rely upon Helen Markham for probative value. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 256) At this point in time, I do not think it is necessary to pile on this poor woman. But what I would like to accentuate here is the following fact: the Warren Commission understood what a liability she was to their case, before they published. They used her anyway. At a public debate in Los Angeles in 1964, Commission lawyer Joe Ball characterized her testimony as full of errors and called her an “utter screwball”. (Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 87). Neither Ball nor fellow lawyer Wesley Liebeler wanted to use her in the first place. Liebeler labeled her testimony with the ultimate insult. He called it “worthless”. (Edward Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles, pp. 142-43) The men doing the heavy lifting in the trenches were clearly overruled from above.

Why did the Warren Commission overrule their own working lawyers and decide to make Markham the chief witness in the Tippit case? One problem was that a witness they billed as being a direct eyewitness to the crime was not. This was taxi driver William Scoggins who had his view of the shooting obstructed by hedges. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 455) When Scoggins was shown a few pictures of Oswald, he narrowed it down to two. He then picked the wrong one. (WC 3, p. 335) Another problem was that his identification took place during the infamous Dallas Police lineups. Scoggins was at the same lineup as another cab driver, William Whaley. Whaley said about this proceeding: “You could have picked Oswald out without identifying him, by just listening to him because he was bawling out the policemen, telling them it wasn’t right to put him in line with these teenagers.” Whaley continued by saying Oswald told the police they were trying to railroad him and he wanted his lawyer. Whaley concluded, “Anybody who wasn’t sure could have picked out the right one just for that.” But further, when asked their names and occupations, the others in the lineup—who were policemen—gave fictitious answers. Oswald said his true name and that he worked at the Texas School Book Depository. (Meagher, p. 257)

Another witness who said he saw Oswald fleeing the scene was Ted Callaway. The problem with his testimony is that Benavides worked for him at a car lot. Callaway asked Benavides if he saw the man escaping. Benavides said he did. Before he took off looking for him, Callaway asked his employee: Which way did he go? As Meagher asks, is not Callaway’s testimony therefore paradoxical? Why did he have to ask his employee where the guy went if he already saw him? (Meagher, p. 258) In addition to that, before Callaway viewed the lineup, he was given some input by Leavelle. He was told that the police wanted to wrap up the Tippit case real tight since they thought the man who killed Tippit also killed Kennedy. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 474) As Hurt points out, time after time, witnesses to a man fleeing the scene were not questioned until late January. And at that late date they were only shown one photograph: Oswald’s. (Hurt, p. 147) This was two months after the media had begun its daily pounding of the public consciousness with the idea that Oswald was Kennedy’s killer. (As we shall see, the FBI went even further in this case in its violations of investigative protocol.)

II

The ballistics evidence in the Tippit case is also a morass. First of all, there is the enigmatic message sent out over the police radio by the ubiquitous Sgt. Jerry Hill. A message Hill actually tried to deny before the Warren Commission but which he admitted to decades later. Further, Hill once told a writer that the shells were arrayed within a hand towel of each other. Such was not the case, since they were recovered yards apart from each other. (See Bill Simpich, “Jerry Hill’s Lies: The Heart of the J. D. Tippit Shooting,” 3/12/16)

Hill reported that one of the shells at the scene indicated “that the suspect is armed with an automatic .38 rather than a pistol.” This was shortly after another Dallas cop described the man escaping the scene—who did not match Oswald’s description—as being armed with an automatic. (Garrison, p. 198) Michael Griffith wrote in a review of Dale Myer’s book about the Tippit case that, in 1986, Hill admitted he had picked up one of the casings for examination This is important because the shells are marked with ‘.38 AUTO’ at the base. And Hill said he specifically looked on the bottom.

As Garrison went on to explain, an automatic is clip loaded from its handle and its spring action ejects cartridge cases from the spent round. A revolver keeps the cartridge shells in the chamber as the turret rotates to the next round. As several authors have shown, including Garrison, it is hard to believe that experienced policemen could mistake an automatic handgun and ammo for a revolver. (For a telling visual presentation of this key point, see Robert Groden’s book Absolute Proof, p. 298) Especially since the Dallas police used .38 Special ammo and the shells were marked at the bottom. (see again Simpich, “Jerry Hill’s Lies”) This is an important point to recall as we progress through the ballistics evidence, and later, the issue of possession of the weapon.

Of the bullets taken from Tippit’s body, three are Winchester Western manufactured and copper-coated. The last is a lead bullet made by Remington-Peters. As Garrison noted, this seemed to suggest that two men might have fired at Tippit. (Garrison, p. 199) But further, the shells did not match the bullets. Two of the shells were made by Remington and two by Winchester. (Garrison, p. 201) This has led some to think that perhaps there was a shot that missed and a shell that was not recovered. The House Select Committee on Assassination suggested this but labeled it as speculation. (McBride, p. 256)

But the automatic/revolver dispute and the mismatching of the manufacturers and the ammo is only the beginning of the problems with the ballistics evidence. On the day of the shooting, the police made out an inventory of the evidence found at the scene. There was no mention of cartridge cases of any kind. (Garrison, p. 200) Moreover, it is also standard police procedure to send the bullets and shells to the FBI lab the day of the crime to have them identified and matched to the weapon. In the Tippit case, the authorities sent only one bullet to the Bureau. The police said this was the only projectile recovered from the victim’s body. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 244) The FBI could not match this bullet to the weapon allegedly taken from Oswald later at the Texas Theater. And further, that bullet was described by the FBI as “so badly mutilated that there is not sufficient individual microscopic characteristics present for identification purposes.” (WC 24, p. 263)

There was a complicating factor to this issue. As Henry Hurt explained in Reasonable Doubt, and John Armstrong amplified on in Harvey and Lee, the Smith and Wesson .38 revolver in evidence had been altered by its purchaser George Rose and Company, located in Los Angeles. The company sent 500 of these guns to its gunsmith in Van Nuys, California. Among the modifications made were the re-chambering of the cylinder so the weapon could accommodate a .38 Special cartridge. This altered chamber made for a slight slippage upon firing and thus did not allow the usual markings to be placed on the bullet. (Armstrong, p. 482; Hurt, p. 143)

When they could not get a match on the first bullet, in March of 1964, the Commission sent FBI technician Cortlandt Cunningham to Dallas to find the other bullets. The police said they had misfiled them. But they turned up in the dead files, a point that the Commission tried to paper over. (McBride, p. 254) Predictably, four months later, the same thing happened: the bullets did not match. (Garrison, p. 199)

Thus, the emphasis was now on the shells. It was not until six days after the police sent the first bullet to the FBI that they finally marked the evidence inventory sheet with four shells. These the FBI were able to match to the weapon. The delay in getting the shells on the inventory list and the failure to send all the ammunition exhibits promptly to the FBI has led some to suspect that the police fiddled with the evidence—to the extent that it suggests that the original weapon perhaps really was an automatic. This is not at all a critic’s meandering speculation. Warren Commissioner Hale Boggs himself expressed similar reservations about the delay. Boggs asked Commission counsel Melvin Eisenberg, “What proof do you have though that these are the bullets?” (McBride, p. 258)

But even that is not the end to the problems with the Tippit ballistics. Benavides had found two cartridge cases at the scene. He handed them to Officer J. M . Poe. Hill told Poe to mark the shells with his initials. His marks were not evident when the policeman inspected the exhibits for the Commission. (Hurt, pp. 153-54) Further, when the witnesses who found the other two shells were asked by the FBI to identify them as the ones they originally recovered, they could not. (WC 24, p. 414)

One would think it could not get any worse. But, in the JFK case, it usually does. When McBride interviewed Detective Jim Leavelle in 1992, the crusty old cop tried to put the whole issue of police identification to rest by throwing a giant curveball at it. He now said that neither Poe, nor the man Poe gave the shells to, Sgt. Barnes, ever marked the cartridge cases at all. (McBride, p. 256) Consider the ramifications of this charge. First, Poe is now a liar. But by labeling him as such, it attempts to rid the Dallas Police of the substitution of evidence accusation. What it really does, however, as McBride notes—as if it had not been done already—is it makes the whole “chain of custody on the shells highly suspect.” (McBride, p. 256)

III

As noted above, Jim Garrison came to suspect that there were probably two assailants. His judgment relied on the mismatching ballistics and the testimony of witnesses not in the Warren Commission.

Acquilla Clemmons worked as a caretaker for an elderly woman on the next block. She ran down the street after she heard the shots. She saw two men, one with a gun. The gunman was “kinda chunky, he was kinda heavy, he wasn’t a very big man. He was a kinda short guy.” (McBride, p. 492) The gunman’s accomplice, who was tall and thin, then waved at the shooter and told him to “go on.” The two men left the scene heading in different directions. Two days after the shooting, a man Clemmons thought was from the DPD visited her and told her she should not talk about what she saw. If she did, she might get hurt. So when a reporter visited her with a camera, she refused the interview. After giving a long and filmed interview to Mark Lane in 1966, Clemmons apparently disappeared. (McBride, p. 492) It seems clear from looking at who was brought before the Commission and who was not that, as Jim Garrison pointed out, the Warren Commission had an agenda as to who they would and would not hear. (Garrison, p. 197) In fact, after Garrison was interviewed for Playboy, an anonymous writer mailed in a letter that was printed in the January 1968 issue. He said that, like Clemmons, he had seen two men shoot Tippit and they both ran off in different directions. Neither man was Oswald. (p. 11)

As if the witness censorship and the oddities with the ballistics evidence were not suspect enough, let us now turn to the radio transcripts. As most of us know, there were three versions of the radio messages that were eventually delivered to the Warren Commission. Sylvia Meagher pointed out that the first transcript the police turned over did not include what was perhaps the most important instruction given to Tippit that day. That was the order for him to move into central Oak Cliff at 12:45 PM. (Meagher, p. 260) This was about 15 minutes after President Kennedy was killed. But as has been noted by others, this order created some serious evidentiary problems. First, there were three DPD witnesses the Commission had already heard from on the issue of Tippit’s location. They were at a loss to explain why Tippit was in Oak Cliff, about four miles out of his area. None of them proffered this order at 12:45 as the reason for it. (Meagher, p. 261) Second, just prior to this message, the dispatcher had said, “Attention all squads, report to downtown area Code 3 to Elm and Houston with caution.” (WCE 705, p. 397) Which, of course, makes perfect sense. (The police tried to disguise this order in the first transcript, but the FBI actually listened to the tapes and this was their accurate transcription. Police Chief Jesse Curry confirmed this in a letter to the Warren Commission, see WCD 1259, p. 3)

In fact, one can reverse the question for effect: Why at this time would the police detail anyone to any location except Dealey Plaza? Further, why would the dispatcher take the time to give out such a superfluous order in the immediate wake of the tumult that followed the biggest crime ever committed in the history of the city? Yet the Commission accepted this since it was one way to explain the fact that Tippit was out of his assigned territory at the time he was shot. (Hurt, p. 161) And, one might add, what on earth was so important about central Oak Cliff? No one had radioed in any disturbance in the area.

But that does not end the controversy. On the transcripts, there is no acknowledgement of this order, even though it was given to two men, Tippit and R. C. Nelson. (WCE 1974, p. 26) What’s more, the police already had a man in Oak Cliff. His name was William Mentzel. (McBride, p. 427) In other words, at a time when cars were being directed from the outermost areas to Elm and Houston for Kennedy’s assassination, not one, but two cars are being directed to Oak Cliff—when there is already a patrol car there. And, in fact, the dispatcher does not try and contact Mentzel to check on his location before he sends in two other cars.

But that is not the capper about this order. The capper, at least for me, is that Nelson did not head to Oak Cliff. He went to Dealey Plaza. As Henry Hurt noted, there was nothing said about this apparent discrepancy by the Commission; indeed, neither the Warren Commission, nor the House Select Committee on Assassinations, called Nelson as a witness. (Hurt, p. 162)

At 12: 54, Tippit stated he was at Lancaster and 8^th. The dispatcher replied with—considering what had happened and what was about to happen—one of the strangest police radio instructions imaginable. Murray Jackson told Tippit to, “Be at large for any emergency that comes in.” (Meagher, p. 263) As we will see, what makes this exchange even more notable is that Tippit might not have been at Lancaster and 8^th.

We now come to the message at 1:08. Between 12:45 and that time there were four messages involving Tippit. Three went from the dispatcher to the patrolman and one allegedly came in from Tippit; this was at 1:08. In one version of the messages, Tippit called the dispatcher twice and got no answer. In the FBI version, Tippit’s call number at that time, 78, is missing: the message is assigned to No. 488. The FBI notes the sound is garbled and No. 488 is not identified by his name, and there is no other message that is assigned to whoever this person is. Tippit researcher Bill Drenas, who wrote an interesting essay, “Car #10 Where are You?”, did a thorough examination of the tape and transcripts. He concluded that the voice is not Tippit’s either. But he disagrees with who the real caller is. He says it is call number 388. Which would be from the Criminal Investigative Division.

From this perspective, Mrs. Higgins’ time for the shooting, 1:06, may be correct. If that is so, then the other salient point she told Barry Ernest is also relevant. Higgins said that after the shots rang out, she went out to her porch. She saw a man fleeing the scene. It was not Oswald. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 125)

IV

The above is the author’s attempt to present a précis of what the evidence in the Tippit case consisted of in the early nineties. For after the tsunami caused by Stone’s JFK, the calculus of the Tippit case was altered.

The first tremor occurred in 1995 when Dallas FBI agent James Hosty published his book on the Kennedy case entitled Assignment Oswald. In that book he revealed a stunning piece of information, one that had been concealed for 32 years. Hosty wrote that his FBI colleague Bob Barrett had told him something unusual occurred at the scene of the Tippit murder. Barrett told him that one of the policemen, Captain Westbrook, asked him if he had ever heard of a Lee Harvey Oswald. When Barrett said he had not, he then asked him: How about an Alek Hidell? Again, Barrett replied he had not. As Barrett was answering the questions, Westbrook was leafing through a wallet found at the scene.

This extraordinary development was raised from the realm of memory into that of fact when a film from TV station WFAA was later uncovered. That film shows three policemen handling the wallet at the scene of the Tippit murder.

WFAA footage of police handling wallet

These images were captured at 01:24 and 02:50 of this ABC news feature from 2013.

This reinforcement drove diehard defenders of the official story into overdrive in a mad attempt to camouflage the damage it did. For the question now became: Who carries three wallets? The Warren Report has Oswald’s wallet being taken from him in the police car after he was apprehended at the Texas Theater. The report also says Oswald left a wallet at the home of Ruth and Michael Paine, where his wife Marina was staying, that morning. (DiEugenio, p. 126) The late Vincent Bugliosi tried to squirm out of the dilemma by saying the wallet was most likely Tippit’s. This explanation is effectively neutered since three Dallas police officers were sent to Methodist Hospital to recover Tippit’s effects at 2:00 PM. They delivered them to the station at 3:25. Among the artifacts was Tippit’s wallet. (DiEugenio, p. 126) But, even further, at a JFK Lancer seminar several years ago, intrepid researcher Martha Moyer told this author that she had talked to another officer at the scene, patrolman Leonard Jez. He told her not to let anyone bamboozle her: it was Oswald’s wallet.

The implication of the wallet at the crime scene would be that someone dropped it there in order to implicate Oswald. Beyond that, since the official story had Oswald ordering a handgun and rifle in the name of Alex Hidell, it would demonstrate he ordered the weapons and then used them to kill both policeman Tippit and President Kennedy. But from that hypothesis extends another problem. According to researchers John Armstrong and Bill Simpich, no one ever saw the wallet on the ground. The best estimates are that the film of the wallet being shown to others was taken at about 1:30-1:40 PM. With the ambulance arriving and departing, with patrol cars there, with so many bystanders on hand by that time, how could so many people have missed the wallet on the pavement? And in point of fact, some of the witnesses actually said there was no wallet on the ground. (See Bill Simpich, “Who Found Oswald’s Wallet,” 4/21/14)

Therefore, under examination, this new evidence seems to indicate the possibility that someone brought the billfold to the scene. That idea now focused attention on three people who had been more or less ignored prior to the discovery of the WFAA film. Those three are Westbrook, reserve officer Kenneth Croy and witness Doris Holan.

409 10^th Street, where Doris Holan
resided at the time of the shooting

Holan was never called by the Warren Commission. Nor is there any evidence she was ever interviewed by either the Dallas Police or the FBI. Like many important witnesses in the JFK assassination, she was discovered by private citizens many years after the fact. Local Dallas researchers Bill Pulte and Michael Brownlow were the first to talk to her. Which is weird since she lived only one door down from the crime scene, at 409 10^th Street, on the second floor. This placed her in a perfect position to see what she was about to disclose. The most remarkable information to come to the fore in the two interviews she granted was this: As she looked out her window upon hearing the shots, she saw a second police car at the scene. It was in the driveway between 404 and 410 East Tenth. This was adjacent to the spot on the street where Tippit’s car stopped. Knowingly or unknowingly, Tippit had blocked the driveway, which led to an alley at mid-block. She said a man got out of the car, looked at Tippit’s body and then went back down the driveway. He was alongside the car, which was retreating back toward the alley. She also saw a man fleeing the scene in a different direction. (McBride, pp. 494-95)

Brownlow had previously found a second witness to the police car. This was Sam Guinyard, a porter at a used car lot at 501 East Jefferson. And as McBride further notes in his book-length study of the Tippit case, Virginia Davis had said that when she heard the shots and ran out, the police were already there. Years before he talked to Holan, another witness who wished to remain anonymous related to Pulte that he had been told there was a man in the driveway who approached Tippit. (see Harrison Livingstone, The Radical Right and the Murder of President Kennedy, p. 348)

Diagram courtesy of David Josephs

To my knowledge, the Holan testimony made its first appearance in book form in the 2006 Livingstone reference just cited. This was late but fortunate, since Holan had passed on in the year 2000. Holan’s revelation opened up a new vista for the Tippit case. Now writers began to focus on Westbrook and Croy, since Croy was the first known person to handle the wallet and Westbrook was the last. Of course, the Warren Commission did no inquiry into the existence of the Oswald wallet at 10^th and Patton, even though there was a film available. And, as mentioned, they were oblivious to Holan. But, in retrospect, there were still some notable things to be garnered from the Commission testimony of both William Westbrook and Kenneth Croy.

V

The first is that neither man was a detective or a patrolman. Yet both were at the scene of the Tippit murder quite quickly. In fact, Croy was reportedly the first man there. Westbrook was the chief of the personnel department. (WC 7, p. 110) That is, he handled background inquiries for applications and investigated complaints. He did not even wear a uniform. On the day of the assassination, Westbrook sent his men to the Texas School Book Depository. After the office was empty and he was the only one there, Westbrook told the Commission he got antsy, so—and he fittingly prefaced the following with “believe it or not”—he decided to walk to the Depository alone. He also added that, even though he had a radio, he would stop occasionally to get an update on a transistor radio from groups of people standing on the sidewalk. The distance between the police station and the depository is about one mile. If one adds in the stopping to listen to civilians with radios, one could say that Westbrook’s unaccounted time here could amount to as much as 20 minutes or more.

Capt. William Ralph Westbrook

Westbrook testified that while he was at the depository, he heard someone say an officer had been shot in Oak Cliff. He felt —and again this may also be hard to swallow—that since he was in personnel he should investigate the homicide. (WC 7, p. 111) Although Westbrook mentioned Barrett in his Commission testimony, he never noted the wallet he questioned the FBI agent about. Strangely, Barrett did not appear before the Commission.

While at the scene of the Tippit murder, Westbrook said the word about a suspect at the Texas Theater came over the radio. So Westbrook got a ride to the theater with another officer and Barrett. Almost immediately upon arrival there someone tipped him off as to where the suspect was sitting. Westbrook witnessed his arrest and directed he be escorted out of the theater and to the station. (WC 7, p. 113) Westbrook said that after this he went back to his desk at personnel.

In other words, it was all in a personnel officer’s workday. Thanks to being bored at his personnel desk, Westbrook became one of the few officers who showed up at the depository, the Tippit murder scene and the Texas Theater. But this does not actually do his busy day justice. As former British detective Ian Griggs has noted, Westbrook is also credited with finding the Tippit killer’s jacket and going to a nearby library to investigate a false alarm about the assailant being there. (Ian Griggs, No Case to Answer, p. 131-32) As Griggs points out, although he is credited with finding the jacket, Westbrook actually denied he did so. He said some other policeman gave it to him—but he cannot recall his name. Further, he did not place the discovery of the jacket on the report he gave to the Commission. Attorney Joseph Ball had to ask him, “Did you ever find something?” (WC Vol. 7, p. 115) Westbrook immediately said he did not find it; some other officer did.

Kenneth Croy

That declaration of not knowing who gave an officer an important piece of evidence applies to Croy also. But before getting to that point, we should, as we did with Westbrook, review Croy’s Warren Commission testimony. And we should keep in mind that, as with Westbrook, the Commission never challenged Croy, nor tried to corroborate what he said.

First of all, Croy was not a regular officer. He was a reserve officer. He drove patrol car duty perhaps once a month. (WC 12, p. 195) On the day of the assassination, Croy said he was just off of Main street when he heard President Kennedy was shot.

Croy was just a few blocks from Dealey Plaza at this time. He then said that he drove to the nearby courthouse to see if the police might need some help. (WC 12, p. 200) Considering the circumstances, it is hard to believe that Croy had to ask this question, or that the police would say no if he did. But Croy said he could not recall whom he asked, and Commission counsel Burt Griffin did not probe the answer to Croy’s question on November 22, 1963. Croy added that, amid all the tumult going on a few blocks away, he decided to go home. He then said that he heard a call about an officer being shot.

As the reader can see, there really is no way so far to corroborate Croy’s whereabouts from the time of the assassination to the time of him arriving at the scene of the Tippit shooting. And Croy insisted he was the first policeman there. (WC 12, p. 201) From his description, once he was there, he talked to Helen Markham. But as Griffin questioned him about his discussion with Markham, a surprising admission came into the record. Croy claimed he did not file a report on his activities that day. Once Griffin elicited this piece of information, he just passed it by, making no comment or inquiry about it. Which is remarkable considering Croy’s insistence he was the first officer at the scene.

Croy stated he was at 10^th and Patton for approximately 30 minutes, perhaps a bit more. (WC 12, p. 202) When Griffin asked him what he did after he left, Croy answered that he went to get something to eat. He also said he stayed home the rest of the day. Again, Griffin let this pass. There was no question as to why Croy did not go to the station to pen a written report or give an oral report. When Griffin asked Croy if there were any officers at the scene that he knew, Croy replied in a curious way: “There were several officers there that I knew. I don’t know their names.” (WC 12, p. 203) He went on to say that he only knew them by sight. In other words, we are led to believe that even if Croy had written a report he would not have been able to relate it to any other officer.

As Croy left 10^th and Patton, he said he drove near the Texas Theater and saw squad cars around the building. He decided not to stop since he felt the situation was well in hand. After first telling Griffin he was going to get something to eat and go home, he then said that he actually met his estranged wife at Austin’s Barbecue. (WC 12, p. 205) And this is where Croy’s story gets even more retroactively bizarre. He now added that right after Kennedy’s assassination, the cops he did talk to told him he was not needed. The wife from who he was separated happened to drive up next to him and he asked her if she wanted to get something to eat. Consider this fact: Croy was in uniform. He was just off Dealey Plaza; sirens, and scores of policemen are pouring into the area; searches are being organized of the depository building and the area behind the picket fence.

Approximate location of Croy when he and his estranged wife arranged to meet for lunch after the assassination. If this really happened, it would make for a good SNL skit.

Croy now added something even more puzzling. He said that before going to the diner, he intended to go to his parents’ house to change his clothes. Presumably, this was when he heard about the Tippit shooting. Due to his job duties, he was late for the dinner with his estranged wife. He colorfully adds that she was angry. Apparently sharing a hamburger was more important than the murder of a police officer. (This writer is not aware if Griffin ever called her to confirm this tale.)

Croy is important because when the story about the wallet finally did break, he was the policeman who was credited with first handling it. His story was that he was handed the wallet by a civilian. Of course, Croy never asked the name of this witness. (See again Simpich, “Who Found Oswald’s Wallet”)

Considering his modus operandi that day, it was as if Croy were operating in a fog. To show how thick the fog was, Croy once told one researcher that he did not examine the contents of the wallet. He then told another researcher that there were seven different ID’s in it and none were Oswald’s. (See part 2 of Hasan Gokay Yusuf’s review of Myers’ book)

With a hapless performance such as his, whether that fog was designed or accidental is a natural question to pose.

VI

With the new evidence arrayed as it is above, the question most objective observers would ask is: What would have happened if you had a real investigation in the Tippit case instead of the somnolent Warren Commission? To show the difference that would have made, consider a speech that former HSCA Deputy Counsel Robert Tanenbaum made in Chicago in 1993. Tanenbaum was an experienced prosecutor who rose to Chief of Homicide in New York City. He never lost a murder case. After listening to a highly sophisticated and complex debate over the medical evidence, Tanenbaum stepped to the podium and said words to the effect: I like to get down to basics. My opening question for an investigation would be: Why did Tippit stop Oswald?

Which is an interesting query. As most people know, the official story attributes a description of the alleged assassin to Dealey Plaza witness Howard Brennan. The Commission said that by his looking upward from about a hundred feet away, and through a window six stories up that he managed to convey a description of the man he saw down to his height and weight. Add in the fact the window was only partly open and as Tanenbaum said, it was not a floor to ceiling window. So how could that description be accurate? The professional prosecutor also added that if one goes with the Commission’s sniper’s nest scenario, then how could Brennan see anything but a partial view of the subject? Further, not only did Brennan not identify Oswald in the police lineup that evening; there is a serious question whether Brennan was even at the lineup. (Griggs, pp. 90-96)

Moreover, it is simply not possible to verify a chain of communication from Brennan’s alleged description of a man who was 5’ 10” and 165 pounds to the Dallas Police. The official story has Brennan giving his description to Inspector Herbert Sawyer. But Sawyer would not confirm Brennan was the man. (WC 6, pp. 322-25) Also, Brennan did not identify Sawyer. (WC 3, p. 145) Nevertheless, in the face of this, writers like Gerald Posner still insist that the description came from Brennan to Sawyer. (Posner, Case Closed, p. 248) Yet when one looks at the footnote Posner refers to, one can read that Sawyer testified that he based his broadcast description from evidence that did not make it clear whether the sniper had been on the fourth or fifth floor, or even in the building. (WC 6, p. 322) So how could this be Brennan?

The FBI spent many weeks trying to find out who the source for the description was. They gave up and J. Edgar Hoover decided to label the source as an unidentified citizen. (FBI memo of 11/12/64 from Richard Rogge.) The HSCA chose not to rely on Brennan in any way. (Summers, p. 79) But what makes the description even more odd is that it also included the information that the suspect was armed with a rifle: namely, either “a 30-30 or some type of Winchester.” (WC 6, p. 321) So why would Tippit stop someone clearly armed without calling for a back-up first? But, of course, we know that whoever shot Tippit did not likely have a rifle. So, again, why did Tippit stop the person?

This lacuna in the official story has driven the other side into overdrive. As with the tall tale of the wallet being Tippit’s, they offer a palliative explanation: that Oswald changed directions on 10^th Street, and because that action looked suspicious, Tippit thus stopped the man who killed him. But as Michael Griffith has ably pointed out, to do this one must rely on witnesses who altered their testimony, plus testimony offered 14 years after the fact by a witness who saw something that no one else saw. As Griffith noted, none of the police or Secret Service initial reports found any witnesses who said this occurred. They all said the assailant was walking west, toward the patrol car, not away from it. (Michael Griffith, “Did Oswald Shoot Tippit?”)

This puzzling hole in the evidence allows for the alternative that Tippit did not pull the man over because of the radio message. If in fact Doris Holan was correct, Tippit stopped his car almost right in front of the driveway where the second police car was situated. That would leave open the suggestion that Tippit was being lured, not just out of his proper area, but onto some kind of disguised trapdoor.

At this point in our analysis, it would be appropriate to chronicle the rather strange itinerary that Tippit’s life took during its last hour. Before I begin to trace this schedule, I wish to stress that the reader will find none of the following information in the Warren Report. This tells us all we need to know about the Commission’s completeness and honesty. The source I will use for this information is Joseph McBride’s Into the Nightmare; that book is, in my view, the best compendium of information on the Tippit case today.

Between the hours of approximately noon and 12:35, Tippit was most likely on a shoplifting call and then home for lunch. (McBride, pp. 506-17) At approximately 12:40, he was seen in his car by five witnesses at a GLOCO filling station. Interviewed by author William Turner, the witnesses said Tippit appeared to be watching the Houston viaduct, which crosses over from Dealey Plaza. That viaduct connects to the Kennedy crime scene within ninety seconds. (McBride, p. 441) We should recall that, at about this time, the order came on the radio: “Move into Central Oak Cliff area.” Yet, according to five credible witnesses, that was not really what Tippit was doing.

Another piece of the millennium’s new evidence now enters the equation. Just a few moments after this, Tippit pulled over a car driven by insurance agent James Andrews. Andrews told a Dallas researcher that Tippit drove in front of him and cut him off on the 300 block of West Tenth. Tippit jumped out of his car, walked forward and inspected the space between the front and back seat. Perplexed, Andrews looked at the officer’s nameplate. Without saying anything, Tippit got back in his car and drove away. Andrews commented that Tippit “seemed to be very upset and agitated and acted wild” (McBride, p. 448)

Tippit was next reported at the Top Ten Records store at 338 West Jefferson Boulevard. Two witnesses, Dub Stark and Louis Cortinas, saw him there. Cortinas said that Tippit was in a hurry and asked people to move aside. Tippit, whom he knew fairly well, then commandeered the phone, called someone, and apparently did not get an answer. He then hung up and walked off, looking worried or upset about something. (McBride, p. 451) At around this time, 1:00 PM, the dispatcher called Tippit and got no answer.

As McBride comments, it seems logical to assume that—unless this was the first time he ever saw the viaduct—Tippit was waiting for someone to cross over by car or bus. He then actually did stop a car, apparently to look for someone hiding in the back. Frustrated at both places, he then tried to make a phone call in order to get further directions. Finally, he proceeded to his death at 10^th and Patton, driving his car very slowly, as if he were looking for someone. (WC 3, pp. 307, 324) In this new light, it is possible to see his death more fully and accurately than either Henry Hurt or Jim Garrison did.

VII

One of the most interesting parts of McBride’s book is the fact that he interviewed someone no one else did. That would be Edgar Lee Tippit, father of the patrolman. Through that long interview, McBride attained some new background information on Tippit and his family. This and other research the author performed revealed a much fuller picture of Tippit than allowed by the Commission. As Sylvia Meagher once said, the portrait drawn in the Warren Report reduces Tippit to little more than a cipher. (Meagher, p. 253) There was almost no background investigation done for the report. As Meagher pointed out, it did not even appear that they talked to his widow.

William D. Mentzel

Edgar Lee did talk to Marie Tippit. He told McBride, “They called J.D. and another policeman and said he [Oswald] was headed in that direction. The other policeman told Marie.” (McBride, p. 426) But he added something more. Marie also told him, “The other boy stopped—he would have got there but he had a little accident, a wreck. They both started but J. D. made it. He’d been expecting something. The police notified them Oswald was headed that way.” (McBride, p. 427) Marie said this information was given to her by the other officer. McBride concluded that the officer who spoke to Marie was William D. Mentzel. As noted above, Mentzel was in the area already and he told the HSCA that he responded to an accident at a bit after 1:00. As we have seen, there is at least one instance where Tippit did use a phone, and as McBride notes, Mentzel also reported that he contacted the station by phone, not by his police radio.

In an interview McBride did with Gary Revel, he stated further that Wade told him that “Somebody reported to me that the police already knew who Oswald was, and they were looking for him.”

For someone to have put together the wallet Croy initially produced at the scene, the contents of which Westbrook described to Barrett, implies that some special part of the DPD had been alerted to who the patsy was earlier than the rest of the police force. After all, when Jerry Hill announced on the radio at 1:52 that Oswald had been apprehended at the theater, it was only in relation to the Tippit case, not the JFK case. (Griggs, p. 138) Because the information about the wallet did not become known until the mid-nineties, in their examinations of the Tippit case, neither Garrison nor Hurt mentioned Westbrook or Croy. (Although, to his credit, Garrison did write that it seemed probable to him that part of the Dallas police colluded in the crime before it happened: see Garrison, p. 203)

But both Garrison and Hurt did mention the name of officer Jerry Hill. Like Westbrook, Hill holds the distinction of being one of the very few cops who maintains he was at the three main scenes: the Depository, 10^th and Patton, and the apprehension of Oswald at the Texas Theater. In addition, he was in the unmarked car that escorted Oswald to the station. If the reader recalls, Hill was the policeman who first reported from the Tippit scene that the shells fired there were from an automatic. When Henry Hurt confronted him with this discrepancy, along with the fact that, even though Hill instructed Poe to mark the shells with his initials, those markings had disappeared, Hill responded with one of the most farcical comments available in the literature. Hill said that he could not imagine any kind of evidence manipulation because the Dallas Police Department was so clean it scared him. (Hurt, p. 155)

Hill at the TSBD

Surely the reader must know that statement is so contrary to the facts that it actually lends suspicion to Hill. As this author wrote in his examination of Vincent Bugliosi’s elephantine book Reclaiming History, the contrary is true:

No other county in America—and almost no state, for that matter—has freed more innocent people from prison in recent years than Dallas [Tarrant] County where Wade was DA from 1951 through 1986. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 196)

Henry Wade, of course, was the DA who supervised the Kennedy and Tippit cases. What makes this even more deplorable is that none of this would have ever been exposed except for the power shift that took place in 2006. That year, the city elected its first African American DA in over a half century. Craig Watkins was not from the good-ole-boys network. He never worked for Wade or met him. In fact, he said of the previous regime, “There was a cowboy kind of mentality and the reality is that kind of approach is archaic, racist, elitist and arrogant.” He began a review of prior convictions. Literally dozens of innocent people were set free. In three cases, the charge was murder. As Watkins said, many of Wade’s cases “were riddled with shoddy investigations, evidence was ignored, and defense lawyers were kept in the dark.” In other words, the combination of Wade and lead detective Will Fritz made for a thoroughly corrupt local law enforcement system—in pure numbers, the worst in America at that time.

Take the following example. More than one witness said that that Tippit’s killer leaned into the police car, touching it with his hands. So the police had the car dusted for prints. The DPD said the prints were not legible. But it turned out that the HSCA discovered there were actually two sets of prints taken, and the second one was legible. Dale Myers took the prints to a reputable analyst. After comparing them to Oswald’s, he said they did not match. This was about par for the course for the DPD in defending the rights of the accused. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 126)

And Jerry Hill knew about it; in fact, he was part of it in 1963. As stated above, Hill was a member of the police team that apprehended Oswald at the Texas Theater. In 1967, he was hired by CBS as a consultant for their four-part series on the Warren Commission. As part of his duties on that show, he did a long interview with correspondent Eddie Barker. In that interview, he said the police did a “fast frisk” on Oswald at the theater and found nothing in his pockets at the time. This poses a serious problem for both Hill and the police, because they later claimed that Oswald had five live bullets in his pockets at the station. Since Oswald was handcuffed at the theater, where did they come from? (See my “Why CBS Covered up the JFK Assassination, Part 2”)

In October of 1963, Hill went on what he called a “special assignment”. He was detailed over to the personnel division to work under Westbrook. (WC 7, p. 44) There was never any question by Commission lawyer David Belin about why this happened at that time, a notable omission in light of the fact that Westbrook already had six people working for him. (Griggs, p. 15)

According to the Warren Commission, it was Hill who had possession of the handgun taken from Oswald upon the arrival of the suspect at the police station. But as Gokay Hasan Yusuf has pointed out in his essay, “Gerald Hill and the Framing of Lee Harvey Oswald”, there is some confusion about who actually took a handgun from Oswald at the theater and when it was transferred to Hill. When Hill arrived at the station, he placed the gun in Westbrook’s office while he wrote a report. This was so odd that Westbrook himself admitted to the Commission that the gun should not have been there. (WC 7, p. 118) Concerning this point, Hill testified that he had tried to turn over the gun to Lt. T. L. Baker, but for some reason Baker did not accept it at that time. (WC 7, p. 51) It would have been nice if the Commission had asked Baker about the matter and why he did not accept the weapon, but when Baker did testify, he was only asked eight questions, none about this episode. (WC 4, p. 248)

One last point about this .38 Smith and Wesson. According to the Warren Report, that weapon was ordered by Oswald and was delivered not by the post office but by a private company called Railway Express Agency (REA). This was a forerunner of FedEx. They required certain legal restrictions on firearms delivery, specifically on small firearms, like pistols and revolvers. For instance, one had to show an ID, and an affidavit of good character. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 128) This was to be done at the REA office in Dallas. So the procedure should have been that REA would send a card to Oswald’s post office box first. Then Oswald would pick it up and walk over to REA office. He would then show his ID and affidavit, pay for the revolver, get a receipt and the transaction would be recorded by REA.

To make a long story short, there is no proof that any of this happened. In other words, there is no paper trail that leads from the card being picked up by Oswald to the transaction being processed by REA. In fact, there is not even any proof that the FBI ever went to the REA office. The Warren Report glides over this without referring to it, leaving yet another of its innumerable lacunae. The Commission does not even ask: Why would Oswald order the weapon under an alias, namely Hidell, knowing the summons card by REA had to go to a post office box in his real name? But the bottom line is that there is no proof Oswald ever picked up the gun. So how do we know he had it?

VIII

According to Hill, while he was making out his report, Captain Westbrook told him he should change the report to say that Oswald was the suspect in not just the Tippit case, but also the murder of President Kennedy. (WC 7, p. 60) There is no trace in the transcript that the Commission lawyer batted an eyelash at that jarring disclosure, let alone asked Hill to detail the reason Westbrook told him to do that. And again, in going through Westbrook’s testimony, this author could find no cross-check on that exchange, that is, no inquiry as to whether Westbrook actually told Hill to do this, and if he did, what the reason was behind it. Hill was part of the circle of policemen who stated that Oswald somehow tried to fire a handgun at the theater. This was proven false by Cortlandt Cunningham of the FBI for the Commission. (WC 7, p. 61; McBride, p. 202) It would have been an important part of the case to have the names and interrogations of the 24 spectators in the theater at this time. But after giving the order to collect that information, Westbrook said he did not know what happened to the list. (WC 7, p. 118; Griggs, p. 137)

That afternoon, at approximately 5 PM, Hill did an interview on the radio that went national. It is important to note that Hill was an experienced print and TV journalist who, as Bill Simpich discovered, had worked the Dallas police beat out of an office at the station. (WC 7, p. 44) During this interview with Sacramento’s KCRA host Bob Whitten, Hill did about everything he could to incriminate Oswald in the public mind. This was before Oswald had been arraigned on either charge, before the FBI had linked him to the weapons, and before the Bureau had tested for fingerprints, or ballistics. Hill accused Oswald of being a violent person who may have shot another policeman previously—an accusation that he seems to have manufactured out of thin air. Hill also said that Oswald would not even admit he pulled the trigger on the gun in the theater. Which, as Cunningham showed, he did not. He then said that Oswald had admitted during interrogation he was an active communist. Hill talked about Oswald’s time in Russia, how he had defected and returned with a Russian bride. How Hill attained this (mostly false) information is unclear, as is his motive for conveying it on the air. But his story was that he got some of it from Westbrook. (WCD 1210; “Gerald Hill and the Framing of Lee Harvey Oswald”)

As most people familiar with the JFK case understand, there is usually a punch line in these kinds of mysterious and unexplained matters. In this one it is the following: Within a year of the publication of the Warren Report, Westbrook resigned the force. He then became an advisor to the security forces in Saigon. That assignment was handled through the Agency for International Development. Those who follow the JFK case know that AID often worked under the auspices of the CIA. (Gokay Hasan Yusuf, “A few Words on former DPD Captain, William Ralph Westbrook”, 9/13/14)

In light of these latter revelations, the murder of J. D. Tippit takes on a new evidentiary significance. There had been hints of what it all really meant before. As Deputy DA Bill Alexander once said to Henry Hurt: he knew that the man who killed Tippit had killed Kennedy. (Hurt, p. 157)

As Evan Marshall, a former 20-year homicide investigator, told the late Harrison Livingstone:

The Tippit shooting has always been to me a Red Herring of the first order. As someone who spent 20 years as a big city cop, I can assure you that nothing affects a cop like the murder of a brother officer. Perhaps the hope was that the officers who responded to the theater would kill him there. (Livingstone, The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, p. 339)

Detective Jim Leavelle stares
as Ruby shoots Oswald

When Joe McBride was researching his book on the Tippit murder, Marshall’s comments were both amplified and certified by another lawman, Detective Jim Leavelle of the Dallas police. In commenting on the differences between the murder of President Kennedy and Tippit, he described the first as such:

As the old saying goes back then, “It wasn’t no different than a south Dallas nigger killin’.” When you get right down to it—because it was just another murder inside the city limits of Dallas that we would handle. It was just another murder to me. And I’ve handled hundreds of ‘em. So it wasn’t no big deal. (McBride, p. 240)

Leavelle differentiated that case from Tippit’s with the following: “What some people don’t realize is that when a police officer gets killed, that takes precedence over the shooting of the president, because that’s close to home.” (McBride, p. 241)

As I have tried to show here, this seems to be what happened. Of course, I cannot prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Not even close to that standard. However, as Tanenbaum said in the speech referred to above, it is not the duty of private citizens to do the work that should have been done by the FBI, the Warren Commission and the HSCA. But I have little doubt that if someone like HSCA chief counsel Dick Sprague had been running the Warren Commission, and he had this information, he would have honed in on Westbrook, Croy and Hill like a laser. He would have moved heaven and earth to find out the source for the assassin’s description which, in all likelihood, did not come from Howard Brennan. He would have been at the scene with Doris Holan, walking her through what she saw. He then would have looked for corroboration. And those witnesses would have been provided protection. He personally would have gone to both the post office and REA to try to figure out how the heck Oswald got that handgun.

That, and much more, would have all been part of what a real investigation of the Tippit case would have been like. None of that is in the same universe with what really happened. And as a result, the people who really arranged for and killed Tippit succeeded tactically in a spectacular way. For within about 30 minutes after the ambulance carted Tippit’s body away, more than a half-dozen police cars descended on the Texas Theater in response to a reported infraction—the infraction being that some unknown person had gone into the theater without paying. That was enough to lower the noose around Oswald’s neck. Once apprehended and handcuffed, Westbrook ordered the arresting officers to get Oswald in the car and take him to the station. (Griggs, p. 138) At 1:52, under Radio Call Sign 550-2, Jerry Hill made the announcement that they had their man in the murder of officer Tippit. As we have seen, Westbrook—the man who would soon be working with the CIA—then told Hill to add President Kennedy as the other victim.

April 28, 2018

The CIA and Mafia’s “Cuban American Mechanism” and the JFK Assassination

KUsomething:

“Jesus, you don’t look so good!”

WOsomething:

“Look who’s talking, I’ve never seen you so baggy-eyed.”

KUsomething:

“I don’t handle the heat very well. I wonder how the Old Man is doing. Apparently, it’s a lot hotter a few floors down.”

WOsomething:

“Tell me, have you seen AMHINT-24 around?”

KUsomething:

“You mean the one who bumped into GPFLOOR in the courthouse after his rumble on…”

WOsomething:

“No that was AMSERF-1.”

KUsomething:

“Then was it the guy who got all those articles written about him with the help of AMHINT-5? … I thought he was AMDENIM-1.”

WOsomething:

“AMHINT-24 was in on the brouhaha on … uh, Canoe Street; he also helped Don Santo Junior recruit AMLASH with the help of their friend AMWHIP-1. It gets a little confusing because many were part of AMSPELL… Then when you throw in the 30 or so AMOTs living here… Maybe AMSHALE-1 will help clear things up when he joins us.”

KUsomething:

“I don’t think we will be seeing him here, he seems to have gotten most of his shit together… I doubt he would even speak to me anyway, after getting shot at and all…”

WOsomething:

“Well, I can think of only a few others who might be soon joining us. Hopefully, they won’t blame us like the others do.”

KUsomething:

“Man it’s hot!”

Introduction

In 2013, just before the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s assassination, this author completed a study on how North American history books describe the JFK assassination and how their authors justify their writings. The most distributed books overwhelmingly portrayed the crime as one perpetrated by a lone nut, and their key sources are the Warren Commission along with a few authors who re-enforce this notion.

After corresponding with the historians, it became clear that almost all were unfamiliar, if not completely unaware, of critical information that came out in the half-century that followed. Many of the post-Warren Commission sources cannot simply be fluffed off as conspiracy theorist machinations. These include five subsequent government investigations; one civil trial; a number of mock trials; three foreign governments’ analysis of the assassination; and some groundbreaking work by a number of dedicated, independent researchers.

In a subsequent article, it was demonstrated that most government investigations that followed (and therefore should have trumped) the Warren Commission, as well as the only civil trial about the case, proved that a conspiracy took place and that the Warren Commission hardly even investigated this possibility.

When one considers the written conclusions from many of the reports, jury decisions and comments from investigation insiders, which contradict the Warren Commission report, it is clear that many of these historians were in breach of their own code of conduct by woefully disrespecting the official record. Furthermore, they showed no effort in following the proper historical research methodology that can be summarized as follows:

Identification of the research problem (including formulation of the hypothesis/questions);
Systematic collection and evaluation of data;
Synthesis of information;
Interpreting and drawing conclusions.

By stopping all research beyond the obsolete Warren Commission report and limiting themselves to a few discredited authors, historians never made it to step two in their work. In fact, the impeaching of the Warren Commission by both the Church Committee and the HSCA should have stimulated investigators, journalists and historians to start anew with one of the hypotheses being that there was a probable conspiracy.

Over and above underscoring historians’ ignorance of the work of their own institutions, this author sought to contribute to the data collection step in the research by analyzing previous plots to assassinate JFK and bringing out patterns that should have been impossible to ignore and that clearly pointed the finger at persons of interest in the case. In a fourth article, Oswald’s touch-points with some sixty-four plausible or definite intelligence-connected characters (since updated to seventy-five) underscored the Warren Commission’s hopelessly inaccurate and simplistic description of him as a lone malcontent.

Another source of valuable information that historians are oblivious to comes from what foreign governments knew about the conspiracy. Cuba in particular was very motivated to monitor many of the persons of interest in the Kennedy assassination; for them their survival was at stake!

Gaeton Fonzi, as an investigator for both the Church Committee and the HSCA, was perhaps the first to sink his teeth into the confusing world of Cuban exiles who were involved in plots to remove Castro. This allowed him to better connect the dots with CIA and Mafia forces that were influencing them. In doing so, researchers who were effective in disproving Warren Commission conclusions would now be better prepared to identify the plotters. Malcolm Blunt, John Newman, Bill Simpich and others began deciphering CIA cryptonym codes related to a hornet’s nest of secrets and covert operations that Allen Dulles kept hidden from his Warren Commission colleagues. In doing so, he deprived them of crucial information that could well have brought the spotlights right back on him.

On the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, we can now find a database of CIA cryptonyms and pseudonyms carefully designed to designate people, organizations, operations and countries. For example, cryptonyms that begin with the letters AE relate to Soviet Union sources, in particular defectors and agents, and those that start with LI refer to operations, organizations, and individuals related to Mexico City. The category, which has by far the most cryptonyms, is the one that starts with the letters AM, which were used for protecting the identity of operations, organizations, and individuals relating to Cuba. As we will see, an impressive number of crypto-coded jargon revolves around the world of Oswald and the Big Event.

In this article, we will: first, assess what some foreign intelligence services concluded about the assassination; second, explore how seemingly different factions came together to form one of America’s most ruthless team of covert operators, assassins, saboteurs and terrorists that wreaked havoc abroad and on American soil for decades; third, describe the make-up and some of the covert actions of what the Cubans called The CIA and Mafia’s “Cuban American Mechanism”; and finally, see how this obscure, misunderstood entity came to play a role on November 22, 1963.

France, Russia and Cuba nix the Warren Commission report

It is important to preface this section by recognizing that the quality of foreign government data is sometimes difficult to evaluate. Some would argue, perhaps rightly, that it does not always come with primary source information, that the data is old and that there could be hidden biases. On the other hand, we will see that foreign intelligence also had different sources that would logically have been well connected and positioned to observe the goings-on in and around the persons of interest, including Oswald himself; that they may in fact have had fewer biases than those controlling U.S. investigations; and that their research is much more recent than the sources lone-nut backers rely upon. As a matter of fact, Cuban analysis takes into account key ARRB declassified documentary trails that Warren Commission backers’ hero Gerald Posner could not do when he wrote Case Closed just before the ARRB vaults of classified documents were opening. In an open-ended investigation, not looking into what these sources can reveal is simply derelict.

It was not only foreigners who suspected foul play the minute Ruby terminated Oswald; dark thoughts were omnipresent in the U.S. The very first media reactions clearly indicated that Oswald was bumped off in order to seal his lips.

In an article written for the Washington Post, and published one month after the assassination, former president Harry Truman, who had established the CIA in 1947, opined that the CIA was basically out of control:

For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment… This quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue– and subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

He said the CIA’s “operational duties … should be terminated.” Allen Dulles, then sitting on the Warren Commission, tried unsuccessfully to get Truman to retract the story. Some have speculated that the timing of the writing of this article was linked to the assassination.

Shortly after the media congratulations greeted the Warren Commission Report release, valiant independent researchers such as Vincent Salandria, Penn Jones, Sylvia Meagher and Mark Lane played key roles in debunking it. Some foreign governments were also forming their own opinions about what really took place.

Neither Jackie Kennedy nor Bobby Kennedy believed the Warren Commission, nor did they trust U.S. intelligence to find the underlying cause of what really happened. According to the late William Turner and Jim Garrison investigator Steve Jaffe, they received information from French intelligence, which had monitored Cuban exiles and right-wing targets in the U.S. (perhaps because they felt some of the attempts on De Gaulle’s life stemmed from the U.S.). They reported that the president had been killed by a large rightwing domestic conspiracy.

As for the Russian reaction to the JFK assassination, the most recent ARRB releases leave no doubt about where they stood on the matter. In 2017, a CIA note describing Nikita Khrushchev’s feelings about the assassination was declassified. It revealed a May 1964 conversation between the Soviet leader and reporter Drew Pearson, where the head of state said he did not believe American security was so “inept” that Kennedy was killed without a conspiracy. Khrushchev believed the Dallas Police Department to be an “accessory” to the assassination. The CIA source “got the impression that Chairman Khrushchev had some dark thoughts about the American Right Wing being behind this conspiracy.” When Pearson said that Oswald and Ruby both were, “mad” and “acted on his own … Khrushchev said flatly that he did not believe this.”

The research community also gained access to a J. Edgar Hoover memo sent to Marvin Watson, Special Assistant to the President on December 2, 1966, which described what Russian intelligence believed about the murder:

The Memo also adds this explosive point made after two years of Russian intelligence efforts that had been intended for internal use only:

We can safely guess that this only hardened Khrushchev’s opinions.

When interviewed by NBC’s Megyn Kelly in 2017, Vladimir Putin stated, “There is a theory that Kennedy’s assassination was arranged by the United States intelligence services,” Putin told Kelly. “So if this theory is correct, and that can’t be ruled out, then what could be easier in this day and age than using all the technical means at the disposal of the intelligence services and using those means to organize some attacks, and then pointing the finger at Russia?”

Though one can question his motives, there is no doubt that the ex-lieutenant colonel in the KGB had easy access to the intelligence on which he could base such a tantalizing statement.

The most vocal foreign leader about the assassination was Fidel Castro.

The Cuban leader was perhaps the first person to remark publicly that something was awry in the JFK case. He learned of the assassination on the day it happened while engaging in diplomatic discussions with one of JFK’s secret envoys, a French journalist named Jean Daniel. Immediately upon getting the news, Castro remarked to his visitor: “This is an end to your mission of peace. Everything is changed.” Later Castro commented: “Now they will have to find the assassin quickly, but very quickly, otherwise, you watch and see, I know them, they will try to put the blame on us for this thing.” A day later, after frantically following all the cables about the subject, the early ones linking Oswald to pro-Communist and Cuban interests, he felt it confirmed a plot to blame him so as to give the U.S. the excuse it needed to invade his country.

Cuba was plunged into crisis-mode, the overthrow of the Island was already a clear and present danger and it would be under assault for decades. Its security and intelligence forces went into even higher gear. Among them, some Cuban exiles in the U.S. who had access to privileged information on plots to remove Castro, which intersected with the one to remove Kennedy— perceived to be the biggest roadblock into regaining an empire to be plundered once again by ruthless opportunists.

The hit team: Was it a mosaic of diverse groups and organizations, or a well-tuned, synchronized network?

One of the biggest problems researchers have in convincing skeptical audiences that there was, in fact, a large-scale conspiracy behind the coup d’état is that the involvement of so many different factions would have been too complex to pull off. In fact, here is what two historians remarked in their correspondence with me when I challenged their writings:

Was it Cubans, the CIA, the Mafia, Lyndon Johnson, the Federal Reserve . . . many of the villains contradict each other?

I’m always reminded of the headline in the comedy newspaper, The Onion, which read something like: JFK ASSASSINATED BY CIA, FBI, KGB, MAFIA, LBJ, OSWALD, RUBY, IRS, DEA, DEPT OF ED, DEPT. OF COMMERCE AND MORE! That about sums up the feeling from professional historians about those proposing we rethink the JFK assassination.

Of course, it would have helped to ask who the persons and groups of interest were. Something the Cubans did. Out of all the foreign governments that looked into the assassination, Cuban intelligence efforts were the most persistent and the best connected. Their findings were eventually revealed. Thanks to some of their writings and exchanges with serious assassination researchers, we can better understand how interrelated some of the suspects were before, during and after the assassination. Their stories begin in the early part of the twentieth century.

**Cuba pre-revolution: Enrique Cirules, The Mafia in Havana, a Caribbean Mob story, 2010**

	Enrique Cirules (1938 – 18 December 2016) was a Cuban writer. His books include Conversation with the last American (1973), The Other War (1980), The Saga of La Gloria City (1983) Bluefields (1986), Ernest Hemingway in the Romano Archipelago (1999) The Secret life of Meyer Lansky in Havana (2006) and Santa Clara Santa (2006).
Enrique Cirules

His The Mafia in Havana won the Literary Critic’s Award in 1994, and its 2010 edition is the basis for most of this section.

This book goes significantly farther than what its title suggests, as it chronicles how a network of imperialist-exploiters from 1930 to the revolution in 1959 plundered the Island. It sheds light on how the foursome of the Mafia, U.S. intelligence, Captains of U.S. industry and the Cuban elite ran a rigged system with an invisible government pulling the strings using Cuban figureheads for the benefit of so few.

The Mafia actually began running alcohol in Cuba in the early 1920s; however, the creation of a large criminal empire began in 1933 when Lucky Luciano tasked Meyer Lansky, the top Mafia financier, to begin a relationship with Fulgencio Batista who by then controlled Cuba’s Armed Forces. Batista used this position to influence Cuban presidents until he was elected president in 1940 and would go on to become a long-lasting American puppet dictator who made off with some 300 million dollars by the time he was forced to leave as Castro and his band of rebels were closing in on Havana.

Cuba was an ideal location for the Mafia: only ninety miles off U.S. shores, virgin territory, with neither laws nor taxes to worry about, and Cuban leaders in their pockets. For a long time the Mafia operations were organized under Lansky who was the number one chieftain in Cuba, drug tsar Santo Trafficante Sr., Amadeo Barletta, and Amletto Batisti who actually established a bank to finance his Mafia interests. By the 1940s, the Mafia was careful to select Cuban nationals to participate in their operations. One wealthy Cuban who did well under this regime was Julio Lobo (AMEMBER-1) who was an important player in the sugar and banking industries. He also connects well with some of the Cubans of interest in the JFK assassination.

By the end of World War II, the Mafia controlled casinos, prostitution, and the drug trade. Cuba was a stopping point for heroin destined to the U.S. and a key market for cocaine. They also began taking over banks they used to finance shady deals, get their hands on Cuban subsidies and launder Cuban and U.S. based rackets. At around the same time they took over important parts of the media. Trafficante even began training undercover agents within Cuban political groups. Barletta at one point was the sole representative of General Motors in Cuba. He also owned media outlets and many businesses.

By far the most powerful of the foursome was Lansky, who is said to have been aware of everything that went on in Cuba. He intimidated all the leaders, including Batista. Lansky always kept a low profile, but he was well known by all the power brokers and key operators who governed the country. He was suspected of having maneuvered to block his ex-boss Luciano from gaining entry on the Island after his expulsion from the U.S. His high rank in the pecking order could be seen by his refusal to allow credit to the Vice-President of the republic in one of the casinos, his snubbing of the Minister of the Interior who sought to exchange greetings with him and by even pressuring Batista himself into protecting Mafia-friendly policies. An invisible government was now in charge of Cuba where profits of the Mafia empire were greater than the rest of the Cuban economy.

By 1956, other U.S. mobsters, including Sam Giancana and Carlos Marcello, wanted in, which led to a bloody mob battle in the U.S. coined the Havana Wars.

U.S. industry leaders took their share of the spoils as the Rockefellers used their banks to quickly take over large segments of the economy in the early 1930s. By the 1950s, Rockefeller interests owned much of the sugar, livestock and mining industries.

Where one could find American imperialism thriving, not far away was Sullivan & Cromwell, the leading international lawyer/lobbyists of the era who joined their clients on Cuban soil and opened doors for others like the Schroeder Bank. Through the Dulles brothers, who were partners in the firm, the symbiosis with U.S. intelligence and government was ensured as John Foster Dulles later became Secretary of State and Allen Dulles would go on to head the CIA.

The free reign in Cuba could not have worked without the efforts of U.S. intelligence, who became the gatekeepers of the Island as early as 1902 when they infiltrated the Cuban military. By the 1930s, they were using Mafiosi, journalists, lawyers, businessmen, politicians all over the Island. During the war years, Franklin Roosevelt became alarmed by the trend towards Marxism and was particularly worried about Cuba. The key diplomat he designated to ensure that Batista would squash any rebellion was no other than Meyer Lansky, because of his excellent relations with the dictator.

Fearing a revolt, the U.S. took steps to fake a demonstration of democracy to give the Cuban people the impression that they had a voice. They convinced Batista to call an election in 1944 that the U.S. rigged to place another puppet, Doctor Ramon Martin (AMCOG-3), in power. The new leader could not take two steps without a Batista henchman breathing down his neck. During this era, Carlos Prío would have a stint as prime minister while Tony Varona was second in command—both of whom would go on to become key leaders of Cuban exiles in Miami. The invisible government later created a crisis around these political leaders so that Batista could come back in 1952 and save the day—so many smoke screens all marketed to the populace as a showcase of democracy by the Mafia and CIA-run media.

By 1955, when a rebellion threat was growing again, Lyman Kirkpatrick, inspector general of the CIA, was making repeated trips to Cuba to help Batista, who had been scouted by the U.S. in the early 1940s. Cirules produced a letter from Allen Dulles to Batista where he reminds him of their recent meeting and the decision to have the new head of the Bureau of Repression of Communist Activities, General Tamayo, come to Washington to receive special training.

In 1958, Castro took over and the Imperialist-Finance-Intelligence-Mafia network was forced out with many of their Cuban protégées. But not without a futile last stand from Tony Varona, who haplessly tried to lead the police forces.

As we will see, many of the persons of interest in the JFK assassination did not just join forces sometime around 1962 to develop a plot to remove JFK. They were part of a well-connected network of very cunning people in existence for many years, if not decades, who desperately shared the same goal to regain their former power and wealth, who were very secretive, who planned the removal of Castro and who came to see JFK as an obstacle and a traitor. For some of them, their obsessions and their violence persisted for decades.

Journalists and historians never asked themselves who these people whose names kept popping up from deep event to deep event were. If they had looked into their backgrounds, they would have discovered a ruthless cast of characters, who were linked to the Mafia and/or intelligence and/or U.S. imperialist forces and/or the Cuban elite. This network, which scattered away from Cuba in 1958, would quickly coalesce again in Miami and spread to New Orleans, Dallas and other American cities. What followed was an onslaught of assassination attempts against Castro, acts of terrorism that would span 40 years and a regime change in the U.S. on November 22, 1963, during lunchtime in full public view on a sunny day.

American style state-sponsored terrorism

The network of many of the persons of interest in the JFK assassination had its origins some thirty years before the revolution, and while many faces changed over time, the gangs lived on for decades with a moral compass that was pointed towards hell.

Before discussing this partnership and Dealey Plaza, it is worth underscoring the forty years of fury unleashed on Cuba, and its friends, in the form of covert action according to the perpetrators, terrorist acts according to the victims. We will let the reader decide. The following is a partial list:

In March 1960, the Belgian steamship La Courbe loaded with grenades was blown up in Havana, killing 101 and injuring over 200;
In 1961, a volunteer teacher and a peasant were captured and tortured to death;
Also in 1961, explosives in cigarette packages were used to blow up a store;
In 1962, the Romero farming family were murdered by counter-revolutionaries;
In 1964, a Spanish supply ship was attacked;
In 1965, led by Orlando Bosch, terrorists bombed sugar cane crops;
In 1970, two fishing vessels were hijacked and their crews of 12 kidnapped;
In 1981, dengue fever broke out in Cuba killing 151 people, including 101 children; terrorist Eduardo Arocena admitted to the crime in a federal court in New York;
In 1994, terrorists from Miami entered Cuba and murdered a Cuban citizen;
In 1997, explosives were detonated in the Copacabana, killing an Italian tourist;
In 2003, the Cuban vessel Cabo Corriente was hijacked.

The targets were not only confined to Cuban territory:

During the years that followed the revolution, British, Soviet and Spanish ships carrying merchandise to and from Cuba were attacked;
In 1972, Cuban exiles blew up a floor where there was a Cuban trade mission in Montreal killing one person;
In 1974, Orlando Bosch admitted sending letter bombs to Cuban embassies in Lima, Madrid and Ottawa;
The terrorists were particularly active in 1976: explosions were set off in the Cuban embassy in Madrid and the offices of a Cuban aviation company; two Cuban diplomats were kidnapped, tortured and assassinated; two other Cuban diplomats were murdered in Lisbon; a bomb exploded in a suitcase just before being put on a Cuban airline in Jamaica; terrorists downed a Cuban airliner that had departed from Barbados, killing all 73 aboard.

Even U.S. soil was fair game for the terrorist cells:

In 1975, a Cuban moderate living in Miami was shot and killed;
Cuban diplomats were killed in New Jersey and New York City in 1979 and 1980;
In 1979, a TWA plane was targeted, but the bomb went off in a suitcase before departure.

Overall, Cuba counted 3500 who died and 2000 who were injured because of these acts of aggression to go along with billions of dollars in damage.

The terrorists, who had become full-fledged Americans, were well known to authorities but acted with impunity:

Orlando Bosch (AMDITTO-23) told the Miami press that “if we had the resources, Cuba would burn from one end to the other.”
There was not much remorse if we base ourselves on what Guillermo Novo Sampol had to say after a Cuban airline exploded in midflight, killing 73 passengers: “When Cuba pilots, diplomats or members of their family die—this always makes me happy.”
Convicted terrorist Luis Posada Carilles (AMCLEVE-15) confirmed in a New York Times interview that they had received training in the use of explosives by the CIA.

Fabian Escalante’s investigation

Fabian Escalante joined the Department of State Security in 1959. Escalante was head of a counter-intelligence unit and also part of a team investigating a CIA operation called Sentinels of Liberty, an attempt to recruit Cubans willing to work against Castro. At the request of the U.S., he presented the HSCA with a report on Cuban findings about the JFK assassination that was never published by the committee because of some of the information it contained. He is recognized as a leading authority on the CIA in Cuba and Latin America.

Fabian Escalante

Some of his critics state that he seems to base most of his analysis on the work of American researchers and that he is biased. In his defense, it is important to note that very few American investigators have gone through as much committee-based research as Escalante. While it is true that some of his sources like Tosh Plumlee and Chuck Giancana are not convincing for many, he himself tempers his observations by often emphasizing that more research should be done to follow-up on leads ignored by U.S. media and intelligence. His exchanges with people like Dick Russell and Gaeton Fonzi helped push the analysis forward. As we will see, some of his insights certainly go an awful lot farther than what we can see on CNN. In the following sections, we will look at Escalante’s work, which will be at times bolstered by findings from other sources that dovetail with his analysis.

Cuban intelligence, though lacking in structure during the days that followed the revolution, had privileged access to informants in the U.S. and Cuba who at times penetrated exile groups in the U.S. and their antennas on the Island. They also captured combatants who revealed secrets they kept about the assassination. Furthermore, they were able to obtain information from their Russian counterparts. Finally, they kept abreast of all U.S. research in the subject to a degree far superior to what historians or mainstream media ever did. By 1965, a Cuban spy, Juan Felaifel Canahan, had infiltrated CIA special missions groups in Miami and won Cuban exile leader Manuel Artime’s confidence. Artime was involved in the plot to assassinate Castro code-named AMLASH, which brought together the CIA, Mafia, and Cuban exiles in the master plan. It was only after 1975, after the publication of a Church Committee report, that they suspected that this partnership was behind the assassination of JFK.

In 1993, during his retirement, after launching a security studies center, he again put together all the pieces of the puzzle he could put his hands on. His research would be enriched by ARRB releases. Even Escalante admits that he does not have full access to all the Cuban files, but what he does know is worth listening to.

In 1995 Wayne Smith, chief of the Centre for International Policy in Washington, arranged a meeting on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in Nassau, Bahamas. Others in attendance were: Gaeton Fonzi, Dick Russell, Noel Twyman, Anthony Summers, Peter Dale Scott, John M. Newman, Jeremy Gunn, John Judge, Andy Kolis, Peter Kornbluh, Mary and Ray LaFontaine, Jim Lesar, Russ Swickard, Ed Sherry, and Gordon Winslow. In 2006, his book analyzing the assassination, JFK: The Cuba Files, was published. While some of Cuba’s sources are deemed contestable by some reputable researchers, it is clear that they had access to sources that not even the FBI could have tapped. Their findings may not be perfect but they certainly are more fact-based and up to date than anything a historian will find in the Warren Commission report.

The network factions

In JFK: The Cuba Files, Escalante describes how the departure of Cuban exiles, CIA operators and Mafiosi from the Island, where they had originally joined forces, gave birth to what he called the CIA and Mafia’s “Cuban American Mechanism”. Its members were based mostly in Miami and were trained to do a lot of the dirty work to get their empire back in a manner that was plausibly deniable by their supervisors.

Most researchers are aware of the influence the business elite had on U.S. foreign policy. It is now fully accepted that regime change in the 1950s in the Middle East was for the benefit of U.S. and British oil magnates, and the removal of Arbenz in Guatemala was asked for by United Fruit and made good on by Dulles and a cadre of CIA officers who mastered the art of delivering a coup. Many of these specialists were involved in covert actions against Cuba and some became persons of interest in the JFK assassination.

Escalante demonstrates the importance of the corporate elite in dictating U.S. policy by quoting a statement made by Roy Robottom, Assistant Undersecretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs: “… In June 1959 we had taken the decision that it was not possible to achieve our objectives with Castro in power … In July and August, we had been drawing up a program to replace Castro. However, certain companies in the United States informed us during that period that they were achieving some progress in negotiations, a factor that led to a delay …” By the end of 1959, J.C. King, head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, recommended the assassination of Castro. In March 1960, Eisenhower approved the overthrow under a project codenamed Pluto.

The Mechanism assumed a life of its own after the failed Bay of Pigs in 1962, and held JFK responsible for the debacle.

Structuring the Cuban exiles

The author describes how “venal officials, torturers, and killers from the Batista Regime fled Cuba and sought refuge in the United States” to escape justice in Cuba, and began forming groups with an eye to re-taking the Island. In this chaos, the Mafia, the CIA, and the U.S. State Department would quickly aid them. This is what also gave birth to the Miami Cuban Mafia. Some of the prominent leaders were of course Batista puppets, including Carlos Prío Socarrás, who was President of Cuba from 1948-52, and Tony Varona, who was Vice President under Prío, also a Mafia associate. They led the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FRD) (AMCIGAR), an umbrella group for hundreds of smaller groups. The FRD was eventually replaced by the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) (AMBUD) which was conceived by the CIA as a government in waiting.

The command structure of the Cuban exiles was focused at first on the Bay of Pigs invasion. After this fiasco, in 1961, the management of the Cuban exiles centered on acts of sabotage and terrorism under the Operation Mongoose program led by Edward Lansdale and William Harvey. Harvey was later exiled to Rome after almost messing up the delicate Missile Crisis negotiations when he intensified covert actions against Cuba.

In the early 1960s, JMWAVE in Miami became the largest CIA station with over 400 agents overseeing some 4000 Cuban exile assets, Mafia partnerships and soldiers of fortune. The Cuban exile counter-revolutionary organizations were so numerous (over 400) and weirdly connected that Richard Helms of the CIA had to send Bobby Kennedy a handbook to explain the situation. Some groups were more political in nature, others military. Many had antennas in Cuba.

The handbook describes the unstable structure as follows:

Counter-revolutionary organizations are in fact sponsored by Cuban intelligence services for the purpose of infiltrating “unities” creating provocations, collecting bona fide resistance members into their racks and taking executive action against them. It is possible that the alleged “uprising” on August 1962, which resulted in the well-nigh final declination of the resistance ranks, was the result of just such G-2 activities.Guerrilla and sabotage activities have been further reduced by lack of external support and scarcity of qualified leadership. Exile leaders continue to hold meetings, to organize to expound plans of liberation, and to criticize the United States “do nothing policy.”But it is the exceptional refugee leader who has the selflessness to relinquish status of leadership of his organization or himself by integrating into a single strong unified and effective body. “Unidades” and “Juntas” are continually being created to compete with one another for membership and U. S. financial support. They print impressive lists of member movements, which in many instances are only “pocket” or paper groups. Individuals appear to leadership roles in several or more movements simultaneously, indicating either a system of interlocking directorates or pure opportunism.

In order to place in perspective the hundreds of counter-revolutionary groups treated herein, it is necessary to understand the highly publicized CRCConsejo Revolucionario Cubano—Cuban Revolutionary Council). The CRC is not included in the body of this handbook because it is not actually a counter-revolutionary group, but rather a superstructure, which sits atop all the groups willing to follow its direction and guidance in exchange for their portions of U. S. support for which the CRC is the principal channel.

The CRC was originally known as the FRD (Frente Revolucionary Democratica) and was not officially called CRC or Consejo until the fall of 1961.The Consejo has always been beset with factionalism and internal dissension. It and its leader Dr. Jose Miro Cardona have been continually criticized by Cuban exile leaders for a “do nothing” policy. The CRC does not participate in activities within Cuba but acts as a coordinating body for member organizations. It has delegations in each Latin American country as well as in France and Spain. Besides the main office located in Miami, it has offices in Washington, New York, and New Orleans. CRC gives financial support to member groups for salaries, administrative expenses and possible underground activities in Cuba.

The following is a list of the groups (the handbook gives additional information on each group-membership numbers in U.S. and Cuba, key members, year of foundation etc.):

Part I: Leading Organizations [7 groups]

Movimiento Revolucionario 30 de Noviembre – 30 Nov, MRTN, M-30-11 — 30 November Revolutionary Movement
Movimiento de Recuperacion Revolucionario – MRR — Movement for Revolutionary Recovery
Unidad Revolucionaria – U. R., Unidad — Revolutionary Unity
Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil D.R.E. — Students Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) (
Rescate Democratico Revolucionario RDR — Revolutionary Democratic Rescue
Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo — Revolutionary Movement of the People
Movimiento Democrata Cristiano MDC — Christian Democrat Movement

Part II describes those organizations currently judged to be above average in importance. [52 groups]. See appendix 1 (note: in this author’s opinion Alpha 66 in this group became very important).

Part III describes those judged to be of little apparent value, paper organizations, or small disgruntled factions.

The CIA ensured funding to the tune of $3 million a year according to CIA operative E. Howard Hunt. U.S. militia forces recruited some of the other Cuban exiles. Two CIA stations were key in the destabilization efforts: one in Mexico City, where David Phillips played a key role; the other in Madrid, headed by James Noel. Both spies were very active in Cuba before the revolution.

Captain Bradley Ayers trained commandos. Training grounds could be found in Florida and near New Orleans, where Guy Banister, David Phillips, and David Ferrie were seen in the company of Cuban exiles and soldiers of fortune. According to Escalante, the Mafia, represented by John Roselli, exercised control as an executive and got involved as a supplier of weaponry. The Mafia could even count on CIA watercraft to bring in narcotics and arms. Finally, as Escalante continues, organizations created by private citizens interested in freeing “Cuba” popped up in various cities seeking additional and illegal funds for the huge cost of the operation and lobbying effort. Escalante cites as examples: in his native Texas, George H. W. Bush as one of those “outstanding Americans”, along with Admiral Arleigh Burke and his Committee for a Free Cuba; and in New Orleans, there was the Friends of Democratic Cuba.

A repressive police and intelligence apparatus, called Operation 40, was formed to cleanse captured territories of communists and other adversaries. Mercenaries like Gerry Patrick Hemming, through his group called Interpen, and Frank Sturgis and his International Anticommunist Brigade, offered their services for waging the secret war. Private citizens and corporations joined the Mafia by getting involved in financing operations and launching NGOs such as the Friends of Democratic Cuba in New Orleans, located at 544 Camp Street. Here, Lee Harvey Oswald would eventually set up his Fair Play for Cuba Committee office and hob-nob with Cuban exiles he was supposedly at odds with.

Operation Tilt, undertaken in 1963, and sponsored by Clare Boothe Luce (Life Magazine) and William Pawley (QDDALE), who were two close friends of Allen Dulles, is a clear example of how big business, Mafia, Cuban exiles and intelligence teamed up on an anti-Castro mission that went against JFK policy. Described by Gaeton Fonzi, among others, the scheme can only be seen as reckless and quasi-treasonous. In the winter of 1962, Eddie Bayo (Eduardo Perez) claimed that two officers in the Red Army based in Cuba wanted to defect to the United States. Bayo added that these men wanted to pass on details about atomic warheads and missiles that were still in Cuba despite the agreement that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bayo’s story was eventually taken up by several members of the anti-Castro community, including Nathaniel Weyl, William Pawley, Gerry P. Hemming, John Martino, Felipe Vidal Santiago and Frank Sturgis. Pawley became convinced that it was vitally important to help get these Soviet officers out of Cuba. William Pawley contacted Ted Shackley at JMWAVE. Shackley decided to help Pawley organize what became known as Operation Tilt or the Bayo-Pawley Mission. He also assigned Rip Robertson, a fellow member of the CIA in Miami, to help with the operation. David Sanchez Morales, another CIA agent, also became involved in this attempt to bring out these two Soviet officers.

On June 8, 1963, a small group, including William Pawley, Eddie Bayo, Rip Robertson, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, John Martino. Richard Billings and Terry Spencer, a journalist and photographer working for Life Magazine, boarded a CIA flying boat. After landing off Baracoa, Bayo and his men got into a 22-foot craft and headed for the Cuban shore. The plan was to pick them up with the Soviet officers two days later. However, Bayo and his men were never seen again. It was rumored that he had been captured and executed. However, his death was never reported in the Cuban press.

William Pawley’s background is particularly revealing. Gaeton Fonzi points out in his book, The Last Investigation: “Pawley had also owned major sugar interests in Cuba, as well as Havana’s bus, trolley and gas systems and he was close to both pre-Castro Cuban rulers, President Carlos Prío and General Fulgencio Batista.” (Pawley was one of the dispossessed American investors in Cuba who early on tried to convince Eisenhower that Castro was a Communist and urged him to arm the exiles in Miami.)

Lee Harvey Oswald and the subterfuge according to Escalante

Like most Americans, the Cubans found Oswald’s murder by a nightclub owner in the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters simply too convenient. His immediate portrayal as communist and pro-Castro made them strongly suspect that this was all a ruse to attack Cuba.

Within days of the assassination, Castro stated the following: “ … It just so happened that in such an unthinkable thing as the assassination a guilty party should immediately appear; what a coincidence, he (Oswald) had gone to Russia, and what a coincidence, he was associated with FPCC! That is what they began to say … It just so happens that these incidents are taking place precisely at a time when Kennedy was under heavy attack by those who felt his Cuba policy was weak …”

When Escalante analyzed all they could find on Oswald (post-assassination cryptonym: GPFLOOR), he was led to the following hypothesis:

Oswald was an agent of the U.S. intelligence service, infiltrated into the Soviet Union to fulfill a mission.
On his return, he continued to work for U.S. security services.
Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963 and formed links with Cuban organizations and exiles.
In New Orleans, Oswald received instructions to convert himself into a sympathizer with the Cuban Revolution.
Between July and September 1963, Oswald created evidence that he was part of a Cuba-related conspiracy.
In the fall of 1963, Oswald met with a CIA officer and an agent of Cuban origin in Dallas, Texas, to plan a covert operation related to Cuba.
In September 1963, Oswald met with the Dallas Alpha 66 group and tried to compromise Cuban exile Silvia Odio.
Oswald attempted to travel to Cuba from Mexico.
Oswald was to receive compromising correspondence from Havana linking him to the Cuban intelligence service.
The mass media, directed by the CIA and Mafia’s “Cuban American Mechanism,” was primed to unleash a far-reaching campaign to demonstrate to the U.S. public that Cuba and Fidel Castro were responsible for the assassination.

Through his investigation, he found evidence of the parallel nature of plans of aggression against Cuba and the assassination of Kennedy. The Cubans simply found that there were too many anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Oswald’s realm, suggesting a role in a sheep dipping operation. They show that his history as a provocateur in his pre-Russia infiltration days was similar to his actions in New Orleans, and that James Wilcott, a former CIA officer in Japan, testified to the HSCA that “ … Oswald was recruited from the military division with the evident objective of turning him into a double agent against the Soviet Union …” Escalante also received material on Oswald in 1977 from their KGB representative in Cuba, Major General Piotr Voronin. Then, in 1989, while in the Soviet Union, he met up with Pavel Iatskov, colonel of the first Directorate of the KGB, who had been in Mexico City during Oswald’s visit.

Iatskov stated the following: “At the end of the 1970s, when the investigation into the Kennedy assassination was reopened, I was in Moscow, and at one point … one of the high-ranking officers from my directorate … commented that Oswald had been a U.S. intelligence agent and that his defection to the Soviet Union was intended as an active step to disrupt the growing climate of détente …” They speculated that Oswald was there to lend a blow to Eisenhower’s peace endeavors by giving away U-2 military secrets, which dovetailed into the downing of Gary Powers a few short weeks before a crucial Eisenhower/ Khrushchev summit.

It was through some of their intelligence sources in the U.S. that the Cubans found out about the formation of the Friends of Democratic Cuba and its location in the famous Camp Street address. They identified Sergio Arcacha Smith, Carlos Bringuier and Frank Bartes as exiles who were often there and who were visited by Orlando Bosch, Tony Cuesta, Antonio Veciana, Luis Posada Carilles, Eladio del Valle, Manual Salvat, and others. This same source recognized Oswald as someone who was in a safe house in Miami in mid-1963. Escalante believes that Oswald did in fact visit Mexico City with the intention to try to get into Cuba, to push the incrimination of Castro even further.

Letters from Cuba to Oswald—proof of pre-knowledge of the assassination

In JFK: the Cuba Files, a thorough analysis of five bizarre letters that were written before the assassination in order to position Oswald as a Castro asset is presented. It is difficult to sidestep them the way the FBI did. The FBI argued that they were all typed from the same typewriter, yet supposedly sent by different people. Which indicated to them that it was a hoax, perhaps perpetrated by Cubans wanting to encourage a U.S. invasion.

However, the content of the letters and timeline prove something far more sinister according to Cuban intelligence. The following is how John Simkin summarizes the evidence:

The G-2 had a letter, signed by Jorge that had been sent from Havana to Lee Harvey Oswald on 14th November, 1963. It had been found when a fire broke out on 23rd November in a sorting office. “After the fire, an employee who was checking the mail in order to offer, where possible, apologies to the addressees of destroyed mail, and to forward the rest, found an envelope addressed to Lee Harvey Oswald.” It is franked on the day Oswald was arrested and the writer refers to Oswald’s travels to Mexico, Houston and Florida …, which would have been impossible to know about at that time!

It incriminates Oswald in the following passage: “I am informing you that the matter you talked to me about the last time that I was in Mexico would be a perfect plan and would weaken the politics of that braggart Kennedy, although much discretion is needed because you know that there are counter-revolutionaries over there who are working for the CIA.”

Escalante informed the HSCA about this letter. When he did this, he discovered that they had four similar letters that had been sent to Oswald. Four of the letters were post-marked “Havana”. It could not be determined where the fifth letter was posted. Four of the letters were signed: Jorge, Pedro Charles, Miguel Galvan Lopez and Mario del Rosario Molina. Two of the letters (Charles & Jorge) are dated before the assassination (10th and 14th November). A third, by Lopez, is dated 27th November, 1963. The other two are undated.

Cuba is linked to the assassination in all the letters. In two of them an alleged Cuban agent is clearly implicated in having planned the crime. However, the content of the letters, written before the assassination, suggested that the authors were either “a person linked to Oswald or involved in the conspiracy to execute the crime.”

This included knowledge about Oswald’s links to Dallas, Houston, Miami and Mexico City. The text of the Jorge letter “shows a weak grasp of the Spanish language on the part of its author. It would thus seem to have been written in English and then translated.

Escalante adds: “It is proven that Oswald was not maintaining correspondence, or any other kind of relations, with anyone in Cuba. Furthermore, those letters arrived at their destination at a precise moment and with a conveniently incriminating message, including that sent to his postal address in Dallas, Texas …. The existence of the letters in 1963 was not publicized or duly investigated, and the FBI argued before the Warren Commission to reject them.”

Escalante argues: “The letters were fabricated before the assassination occurred and by somebody who was aware of the development of the plot, who could ensure that they arrived at the opportune moment and who had a clandestine base in Cuba from which to undertake the action. Considering the history of the last 40 years, we suppose that only the CIA had such capabilities in Cuba.”

Jack Ruby’s links to Trafficante

Escalante is of the opinion that Jack Ruby and Trafficante were acquainted and that Ruby did in fact visit Trafficante when the latter was detained in Cuba in 1959. Here is his rationale:

Ruby’s close friend Louis McWillie ran Trafficante’s Tropicana Casino;
Ruby’s visits to Cuba after accepting invitations from McWillie, coincide with the detention of Trafficante and other Mafiosi;
McWillie told the HSCA that he made various visits to the Tiscornia detention center during Ruby’s visits;
After Ruby’s stays in Miami, he met with Meter Panitz (partner in the Miami gambling syndicate) in Miami. McWillie spoke with Panitz shortly before the visits. Trafficante was a leading gangster in Florida. Ruby kept this hidden from the Warren Commission;
Ruby’s entries and exits logistics dispel any idea that he went to Cuba for vacation purposes;
Ex-gun-runner and Castro friend Robert McKeown told the HSCA that Ruby approached him to try and get Castro to meet him in the hope of getting the release of three prisoners. McKeown also had contacts with Prío before and after the revolution and had met Frank Sturgis;
John Wilson Hudson, a British journalist, was also detained in Tiscornia at the same time as Trafficante (confirmed by Trafficante). Wilson gave information to the U.S. embassy in London recalling an American gangster-type called Ruby had visited Cuba in 1959 and had frequently met an American gangster called Santo. Prison guard Jose Verdecia confirmed the visits of Trafficante by McWillie and Ruby when shown a photo. He also confirmed the presence of a British journalist.

Operation 40

“We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”

~ President Johnson

In 1973, after the death of Lyndon Johnson, The Atlantic published an article by a former Johnson speechwriter named Leo Janos. In “The Last Days of the President,” LBJ not only made this stunning statement but also expressed a highly qualified opinion that a conspiracy was behind the murder of JFK: “I never believed that [Lee Harvey] Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger.” Johnson thought such a conspiracy had formed in retaliation for U.S. plots to assassinate Fidel Castro; he had found after taking office that the government “had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.” It is very likely that Johnson garnered this information from reading the CIA Inspector General Report on the plots to kill Castro.

There is compelling evidence that it is through Operation 40 that some of the assassins that Johnson may have been referring to received their training and guidance. The existence of this brutal organization of hit men was confirmed to the Cuban G-2 by one of the exiles they had captured: “The first news that we have of Operation 40 is a statement made by a mercenary of the Bay of Pigs who was the chief of military intelligence of the invading brigade and whose name was Jose Raul de Varona Gonzalez,” says Escalante in an interview with Jean-Guy Allard:

In his statement this man said the following: in the month of March, 1961, around the seventh, Mr. Vicente Leon arrived at the base in Guatemala at the head of some 53 men saying that he had been sent by the office of Mr. Joaquin Sanjenis (AMOT-2), Chief of Civilian Intelligence, with a mission he said was called Operation 40. It was a special group that didn’t have anything to do with the brigade and which would go in the rearguard occupying towns and cities. His prime mission was to take over the files of intelligence agencies, public buildings, banks, industries, and capture the heads and leaders in all of the cities and interrogate them. Interrogate them in his own way.

The individuals who comprised Operation 40 had been selected by Sanjenis in Miami and taken to a nearby farm “where they took some courses and were subjected to a lie detector.” Joaquin Sanjenis was Chief of Police in the time of President Carlos Prío. Recalls Escalante: “I don’t know if he was Chief of the Palace Secret Service but he was very close to Carlos Prío. And, in 1973 he dies under very strange circumstances. He disappears. In Miami, people learn to their surprise—without any prior illness and without any homicidal act—that Sanjenis, who wasn’t that old in ‘73, had died unexpectedly. There was no wake. He was buried in a hurry.”

Another Escalante source concerning Operation 40 was one of its members and a Watergate burglar: “And after he got out of prison, Eugenio Martinez came to Cuba. Martinez, alias ‘Musculito,’ was penalized for the Watergate scandal and is in prison for a time. And after he gets out of prison—it’s the Carter period, the period of dialogue, in ‘78, there is a different international climate—Eugenio Martinez asks for a contract and one fine day he appears on a boat here … and of course he didn’t make any big statements, he didn’t say much that we didn’t know but he talked about those things, about this Operation 40 group, about what they had done at the Democratic Party headquarters …”

In the Cuba Files, Escalante underscores a reference to Operation 40 by Lyman Fitzpatrick, CIA Inspector General, in his report on the Bay of Pigs: “…the counter-intelligence and security service which, under close project control, developed into an efficient and valuable unit in support of the FRD, Miami base, and the project program. By mid-March 1961, this security organization comprised 86 employees of whom 37 were trainee case officers, the service having graduated four classes from its own training classes, whose instructor was (censored) police officer. (Probably Joaquin Sanjenis)”

A memo by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. refers to this organization and its dark mission:

Schlesinger’s Memo June 9, 1961
MEMORANDUM FOR MR. RICHARD GOODWIN

Sam Halper, who has been the Times correspondent in Habana and more recently in Miami, came to see me last week. He has excellent contacts among the Cuban exiles. One of Miro’s comments this morning reminded me that I have been meaning to pass on the following story as told me by Halper. Halper says that CIA set up something called Operation 40 under the direction of a man named (as he recalled) Captain Luis Sanjenis, who was also chief of intelligence. (Could this be the man to whom Miro referred this morning?) It was called Operation 40 because originally only 40 men were involved: later the group was enlarged to 70. The ostensible purpose of Operation 40 was to administer liberated territories in Cuba. But the CIA agent in charge, a man known as Felix, trained the members of the group in methods of third degree interrogation, torture and general terrorism. The liberal Cuban exiles believe that the real purpose of Operation 40 was to “kill Communists” and, after eliminating hard-core Fidelistas, to go on to eliminate first the followers of Ray, then the followers of Varona and finally to set up a right-wing dictatorship, presumably under Artime. Varona fired Sanjenis as chief of intelligence after the landings and appointed a man named Despaign in his place. Sanjenis removed 40 files and set up his own office; the exiles believe that he continues to have CIA support. As for the intelligence operation, the CIA is alleged to have said that, if Varona fired Sanjenis, let Varona pay the bills. Subsequently Sanjenis’s hoods beat up Despaign’s chief aide; and Despaign himself was arrested on a charge of trespassing brought by Sanjenis. The exiles believe that all these things had CIA approval. Halper says that Lt Col Vireia Castro (1820 SW 6th Street, Miami; FR 4 3684) can supply further details. Halper also quotes Bender as having said at one point when someone talked about the Cuban revolution against Castro: “The Cuban Revolution? The Cuban Revolution is something I carry around in my check book. Nice fellows.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Frank Sturgis, one of its members and a Watergate burglar, allegedly told author Mike Canfield: “this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents … We were concentrating strictly in Cuba at that particular time.”

In November 1977, CIA asset and ex-Sturgis girlfriend, Marita Lorenz gave an interview to the New York Daily News in which she claimed that a group called Operation 40, that included Orlando Bosch and Frank Sturgis, were involved in a conspiracy to kill both John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro. “She said that they were members of Operation 40, a secret guerrilla group originally formed by the CIA in 1960 in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion … Ms. Lorenz described Operation 40 as an ‘assassination squad’ consisting of about 30 anti-Castro Cubans and their American advisors. She claimed the group conspired to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro and President Kennedy, whom it blamed for the Bay of Pigs fiasco … She said Oswald … visited an Operation 40 training camp in the Florida Everglades. The idea of Oswald, or a double, being in Florida is not far-fetched. The 1993 PBS Frontline documentary “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” had a photo of Oswald in Florida, which they conspicuously did not reveal on the program.

In Nexus, Larry Hancock not only provides another confirmation of this outfit’s existence but describes part of its structure and its role: Time correspondent Mark Halperin stated that Operation 40 members “had been trained in interrogation, torture, and general terrorism. It was believed they would execute designated Castro regime members and Communists. The more liberal and leftist exile leaders feared that they might be targeted following a successful coup.”

Hancock also asserts that “documents reveal that David Morales, acting as Counter-intelligence officer for JMARC, had selected and arranged for extensive and special training of 39 Cuban exiles, designated as AMOTs …. Sanjenis was the individual who recruited Frank Sturgis … They would identify and contain rabid Castroites, Cuban Communists …” A final confirmation of Operation 40 comes from Grayston Lynch (a CIA officer involved in the Bay of Pigs): “The ship Lake Charles had transported the men of Operation 40 to the Cuban landing area. The men had been trained in Florida, apart from the regular Brigade members, and were to act as a military government after the overthrow of Castro.”

Other than Morales, Sanjenis, Sturgis, and Felix (probably Felix Rodriguez), it is difficult to pin down names of actual members with certainty. This author has not found any documentary traces. But there is no doubt that it existed and that it was a Top Secret project that was rolled over into the Bay of Pigs so that President Kennedy would not know about it. It was so secret that, according to Dan Hardway’s report for the HSCA, Richard Helms commissioned the study on Operation 40 to be done by his trusted aide Sam Halpern. Hardway wrote that only one person outside the Agency, reporter Andrew St. George, ever saw that report. Exactly who was in Operation 40 is a moot point; what is important to retain is that the most militant and violent Cuban exiles were recruited and trained by the CIA to perform covert operations against Cuba, Castro, and anyone who would get in their way no matter what country they were in and no matter who they were.

**The Mechanism’s Team Roster: The Big Leagues**

Out of the thousands of Cuban exiles living in the U.S., only a select few could be counted on to be part of the covert activities that would be used to remove Castro, and that became useful for the removal of Kennedy. These received special training in techniques used for combat, sabotage, assassinations and psychological warfare. The training would be provided by people such as Morales, Phillips and perhaps some soldiers of fortune.

When analyzing these figures, it is easy to see how many were, or could easily have been, linked to one another before and after the revolution and during the November 22, 1963, period. It is only by understanding the universes of the factions that worked together on that dark day that we can explain how Oswald and Kennedy’s lives came to their tragic ends.

The first 18 persons profiled were considered the most suspicious by the Cuban researchers. Because the Cuban data precedes 2006, we will enrich some of the pedigrees with more current information.

Table 1

Other persons of interest come from JFK: The Cuba Files and various other sources:

Table 2

Aftermath of the assassination

“Operation 40 is the grandmother and great-grandmother of all of the operations that are formed later.”

~ Fabian Escalante

The assassination of JFK was a landmark moment in American history. The country would go on to be rocked by a series of scandals that would see public confidence in politicians and media go into a tailspin. LBJ gave us Vietnam and Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy and John Lennon saw their freedom of speech rights contested, with extreme prejudice. Watergate, Iran/Contra, George Bush Junior’s weapons of mass destruction, and the Wall Street meltdown would follow. Now even U.S. grounds are the target of foreign rebels who have mastered the art of using terrorism tactics similar to those that were used against Cuba.

The role some of the members of the Mechanism played in future deep events adds credence to what is alleged about them regarding the removal of JFK. Their murderous accomplishments have their roots in the Dulles brothers’ worldviews. Allen Dulles’ protégé E. Howard Hunt became one of Nixon’s plumbers. In 1972, after Arthur Bremer attempted to assassinate presidential candidate George Wallace, Nixon aide Charles Colson asked Hunt to plant evidence in Bremer’s apartment that would frame George McGovern, the Democratic opponent. Hunt claims to have refused. Hunt, with his ex-CIA crony James McCord, and Cuban exiles Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, together with Frank Sturgis, would all be arrested, and then let off rather easily for their roles in Watergate. Hunt would even demand and collect a ransom from the White House for his silence. In 1985, Hunt would lose the Liberty Lobby trial that, in large part, verified the infamous CIA memorandum from Jim Angleton to Richard Helms stating that they needed to create an alibi for Hunt being in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Recruited by David Morales in 1967, Felix Rodriguez succeeded in his mission to hunt down and terminate Che Guevara in Bolivia. Rodriguez kept Guevara’s Rolex watch as a trophy. He also played a starring role in the Iran/Contra scandal. In the 1980s, Rodriguez was the bagman in the CIA’s deal with the Medellin cartel and often met with Oliver North. He was also a guest of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush at the White House.

In 1989, Loran Hall and his whole family were arrested for drug dealing.

As discussed earlier, Novo Sampol, Carilles (who also had links to Iran Contra), and Orlando Bosch continued in their roles in American-based terrorist activities for decades. Arrested in Panama, Luis Posada Carriles and Guillermo Novo were pardoned and released by Panama, in August, 2004. The Bush administration denied putting pressure on for the release. The Bush administration cannot deny providing safe haven to Bosch after an arrest in Costa Rica, which saw the U.S. decline an offer by the authorities to extradite Bosch to the United States.

Veciana continued for a while to participate in attempts to assassinate Castro. He eventually outed David Atlee Phillips. For his candor, he was possibly framed and thrown in jail on narcotics trafficking charges. He was also shot at. The Mafia may not have regained their Cuban empire, but they no longer had the Kennedys breathing down their necks. American imperialists and captains of industry set their sights on the exploitation Vietnam, Indonesia, the Middle East, Africa and cashed in on conflicts.

Risky Business

Being a member of the Mechanism also came with its share of professional risks—namely, short life expectancies. When the Warren Commission whitewash was taking place, there were few worries. When the more serious Garrison, Church and HSCA investigations were in full swing, the word cutoff took on a whole new meaning. Intelligence did not seem to bother too much about being linked to rowdy exiles and Mafiosi when it came to removing a communist; the removal of JFK … well, that must have been a different matter. There were many deaths that occurred before 1978 which were timely and varied from suspicious to murderous:

William Pawley died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, in January 1977.

Del Valle was murdered in 1967 when Garrison was tracking him down, shortly after David Ferrie’s suspicious death.

Sanjenis simply vanished in 1973.

Artime, Prío, Masferrer, Giancana, Hoffa, Roselli and Charles Nicoletti were all murdered between 1975 and 1977.

Martino, Harvey and Morales all died of heart attacks.

Out of some 45 network members discussed in this article, 18 did not survive the end of the HSCA investigation, 8 were clearly murdered and 7 of other deaths were both timely and suspicious.

Trafficante’s links

The unholy marriage of the CIA and the Mafia with the objective of removing Castro was initiated by Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell. They had Sheffield Edwards go through Robert Maheu (a CIA cut-out asset), to organize a partnership with mobsters Giancana and Trafficante using Johnny Roselli as the liaison. The CIA gave itself plausible deniability and the Mafia could hope to regain its Cuban empire and a have the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card in their back pockets.

William Harvey, author of executive action M.O. ZR/RIFLE, eventually oversaw the relationship between himself and Roselli, which involved assassination expert David Morales as Harvey’s special assistant.

Trafficante, who spoke Spanish, was the ideal mobster to organize a Castro hit because of his long established links on the Island. He was also seen as the CIA’s translator for the Cuban exiles. Through Tony Varona and Carlos Tepedino (AMWHIP-1), they tried to get Rolando Cubela (AMLASH) to murder Castro. Trafficante and his friends have very close ties to the Kennedy assassination, to the point where Robert Blakey (head of the HSCA) became convinced the mob was behind it. Blakey now seems to be open to the idea that the network was a lot larger.

Trafficante’s links to persons of interest

Victor Hernandez connects to Trafficante through his participation in the attempts to recruit Cubela, a potential hitman who had access to Castro. He wound up joining Carlos Bringuier in a Canal Street scuffle with Oswald that the arresting officer felt was for show. This was a key sheep-dipping moment of the eventual patsy. Loran Hall met Trafficante when the two were in jail in Cuba. He ran into him a couple of times in 1963. When the Warren Commission wanted the Sylvia Odio story to go away, Hall helped in the pointless tale that he in fact was one of the people who had met her.

Rolando Masferrer had links with Alpha 66, Trafficante and Hoffa. According to William Bishop, Hoffa gave Masferrer $50,000 to kill JFK. Frank Sturgis connects with so many of the people of interest in the JFK assassination that it would require a book to cover it all. He likely received Mafia financing for his anti-Castro operations. He is alleged to have links with Trafficante. So does Bernard Barker, who some think may have been impersonating a Secret Service agent behind the grassy knoll.

Fabian Escalante received intelligence (in part from prisoner Tony Cuesta) that Herminio Diaz and Eladio del Valle were part of the hit team and were in Dallas shortly before the assassination. Robert Blakey had the Diaz story corroborated by another Cuban exile. Diaz was Trafficante’s bodyguard and a hitman. Del Valle worked for Trafficante in the U.S. and was an associate of his in Cuba. It is important to note that Diaz’ background fits well with what is alleged, however some doubt the hearsay used to accuse him.

John Martino showed pre-knowledge of the assassination and admitted a support role as a courier. He also helped in propaganda efforts to link Castro with Oswald. He worked in one of Trafficante’s Cuban casinos.

As we have seen in an earlier section, Jack Ruby’s links to Trafficante are many. He is known to have spoken often with underworld personalities very closely linked to Trafficante, Marcello and the Chicago mob during the days leading up to the assassination. These include McWillie, James Henry Dolan and Dallas’ number two mobster Joe Campisi. We all know what he did two days after the coup. His seeming nonchalance in implicating others may have led to his demise while in jail.

The following excerpts from the HSCA report should leave no doubt in the historians’ minds about the significance of just who Ruby’s friends were, what he was up to, and just how badly the Warren Commission misled the American people by describing him as another unstable loner:

… He [Ruby] had a significant number of associations and direct and indirect contacts with underworld figures, a number of whom were connected to the most powerful La Cosa Nostra leaders.

… Ruby had been personally acquainted with two professional killers for the organized crime syndicate in Chicago, David Yaras and Lenny Patrick. The committee established that Ruby, Yaras and Patrick were in fact acquainted during Ruby’s years in Chicago.

… The committee also deemed it likely that Ruby at least met various organized crime figures in Cuba, possibly including some who had been detained by the Cuban government.

… The committee developed circumstantial evidence that makes a meeting between Ruby and Trafficante a distinct possibility …

… The committee concluded that Ruby was also probably in telephonic contact with Mafia executioner Lenny Patrick sometime during the summer of 1963.

… The Assassinations Committee established that Jack Ruby was a friend and business associate of Joseph Civello, Carlos Marcello’s deputy in Dallas.

… Joe Campisi was Ruby’s first visitor after his imprisonment for murdering the President’s alleged assassin. (Incredibly, the Dallas Police did not record the ten-minute conversation between Oswald’s murderer and a man known to be a close associate of Carlos Marcello’s deputy inDallas.)

… The committee had little choice but to regard the Ruby-Campisi relationship and the Campisi-Marcello relationship as yet another set of associations strengthening the committee’s growing suspicion of the Marcello crime family’s involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy or execute the President’s alleged assassin or both.

…As for Jack Ruby’s connections with the Marcello organization in New Orleans, the committee was to confirm certain connections the FBI had been aware of at the time of the assassination but had never forcefully brought to the attention of the Warren Commission.

Jack Ruby’s connections to the mob and his actions before, during and after the assassination were obviously a chokepoint for HSCA investigators. If we analyze Trafficante’s points of contact with very suspicious figures, one can easily argue that we have another.

All these relationships should be enough to suggest that Trafficante played a role in the hit, at the very least in the recruitment of Ruby to eliminate Oswald. Over and above being tightly connected with key leaders of the Cuban exile community, he has at least nine (seven definite) links with people who became actors in the Kennedy assassination and/or Oswald’s universe (five definite and four plausible). Any serious investigator cannot file this away as coincidental or innocuous.

David Phillips’ links to Oswald

For a historian, pushing data collection further in this area and synthesizing the data would lead them to a new hypothesis: They would concur with Blakey that the mob was involved in the assassination.

This would lead to a completely new area of investigation (that Blakey sadly dismissed) regarding who was complicit with the mob, which would invariably lead to data collection around CIA mob contacts such as William Harvey and David Morales who link up with our next subject. David Phillips’ overlap with the world of Oswald left some investigators from the Church and HSCA Committees with the feeling that they were within striking distance of identifying him as one of the plotters. That is when George Joannides and George Bush came in and saved the day.

For exhibit 2, we can lazily accept that the entwinement of Phillips’ world with Oswald’s was mere happenstance, or conclude logically that it was by design:

Phillips’ links to Oswald

If Oswald was in fact a lone malcontent who somehow drifted by chance into the Texas School Book Depository, how can one even begin to explain so many ties with a CIA officer who just happened to be in charge of the Cuba desk in Mexico City, running the CIA’s anti-Fair Play for Cuba Committee campaign, and one of the agency’s premier propaganda experts? The perfect person to sheep-dip Oswald and to apply ZR/RIFLE strategies of blaming a coup on an opponent, ties into over 20 different events that were used to frame Oswald, blame Castro or hide the truth. He also connects well with up to six other patsy candidates who, like Oswald, all had links with the FPCC and made strange travels to Mexico City. It is no wonder the HSCA and Church Committee investigators found him to be suspicious and lying constantly, even while under oath.

He made no fewer than four quasi-confessions, and his close colleague E. Howard Hunt confirmed his involvement in the crime.

David Phillips’ name does not appear anywhere in the Warren Commission report. Nor in the 26 accompanying volumes. Which is especially startling in light of the fact that he was running the Agency’s anti-FPCC crusade.

Conclusion

JFK’s assassination has been partially solved. The arguments that can satisfy the skeptics are not yet fully streamlined and the willingness of the fourth estate and historians to finally shed light on this historical hot potato is still weak.

Blue-collar and violent crimes perpetuated by individuals get the lion’s share of the publicity and serve to divert attention away from what is really holding America back. Behind the Wall Street meltdown, there were scores of white-collar criminals who almost caused a full-fledged depression. How many went to jail? Who were they? It is pure naiveté to believe that such crimes will get the attention of politicians, yet the limited studies on the matter indicate that they cost society over ten times more than blue-collar crime.

State-crimes are almost never solved, let alone investigated. Politicians, media and the power elite fear being dragged into the chaos that would be caused by a collapse of public trust and avoid these issues like the plague. However, every now and then, a Church Committee does come along and exposes dirty secrets that, instead of hurting the country, will help straighten the course. The catalyst often comes from the youth who were behind the downfall of Big Tobacco and are now taking on the NRA.

This article helps dispel the notion that the Cuban exiles, Mafia and CIA partnership was too complicated to have taken place. There is still explaining to do on how the Secret Service and Dallas Police Department were brought in to play their roles, but researchers like Vince Palamara have already revealed a lot in these areas. At least four of the people Oswald crossed paths with in the last months of his life had cryptonyms (Rodriguez, Hernandez, Bartes and Veciana). If the alleged sightings of him with other Cuban exiles are to be believed and other cryptonyms were to be decoded, that number would more than triple. Still other crypto-coded figures, who may not have met him, played a role in framing him. Still others are persons of interest in the assassination itself. By really exploring Oswald’s universe, we can get a glimpse of who some of the first line players and their bosses were. It is world of spooks, Mafiosi, Cuban exiles and shady businessmen who were part of, or hovered around, the “Cuban-American Mechanism”.

If we were to push this exercise even further and explore the universes of Phillips, Morales and Harvey, we would fall into the world of Allen Dulles, a world brilliantly looked into by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard and also by Fletcher Prouty. Understanding Dulles’ CIA and Sullivan & Cromwell’s links to the power brokers of his era would probably go a long way in explaining how the plot was called.

It is this author’s opinion that today’s power elite are not far away from having the conditions needed to let this skeleton out of the closet. Their cutoff is time: most of the criminals have already passed away. Another cutoff may be Allen Dulles himself: he is long dead and he was not a formal part of the CIA when the crime took place. But as Talbot showed, the trails to him are still quite palpable.

He may end up being the one who takes the most heat. And deservedly so.

Appendix: Cuban exile groups judged to be of average importance in CIA handbook

Asociacion de Amigos Aureliano AAA — Association of Friends of Aureliano

Asociacion de Amigos de Aureliano – Independiente AAA-I — Association of Friends of Aureliano – Independent

Accion Cubana AC — Cuban Action

Asociacion Catolica Universitaria ACU – Catholic University Group

Agrupacion de Infanteria de Combat AIC — Combat Infantry Group

Alianza para la Libertad de Cuba ALC — Alliance for the Liberty of Cuba

Agrupacion Montecristi (AM) — Montecristi Group

Buro Internacional de la Legion Anticomunista BILA — International Bureau Anti-Communist Legion

Batallon de Brigada BB — Brigade Battalion

Bloque de Organizaciones Anti-Comunista BOAC — Bloc of Anti-Communist Organizations

Comite Anti-Comunista de Ayuda a la Liberacion Cubana CACALC — Anti-Communist Committee to Aid Cuban Liberation

Comite Coordinador de Organizaciones Democraticas Cubanas en Puerto Rico CCODC — Coordinating Committee of Democratic Organizations for Cuban in Puerto Rico

Cruzada Femenina Cubana CFC — Cuban Women’s Crusade

Confederacion Profesionales Universitarios Cubanos en el Exilio — Confederation of Cuban University Professional in Exile

Confederacion de Trabajadores de Cuba en Exilio CTCE — Confederation of Cuban Workers in Exile

Directorio Magisterial Revolucionario DMR — Revolutionary Teachers Directorate

Ejercito Invasor Cubano EIC — Cuban Invading Army

Ejercito Libertador de Cuba ELC — Liberating Army of Cuba

Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN) — National Liberation Army

Frente Anticomunista Cristiano FAC — Christian Anti-communist Front

Fuerzas Armadas de Cuba En El Exilio (FACE) — Armed Forces of Cuba in Exile

Fuerza Anticomunista de Liberacion (in US) FAL — Anti-Communist Liberation Force

Fuerzas Armadas y Civiles Anticomunistas FAYCA — Armed Forces and Civilian Anti-Communists

Federacion Estudiantil Universitaria FEU — University Students’ Federation

Frente de Liberacion Nacional FLN — National Liberation Front

Frente Nacional Democratica Triple A (FNDTA) — National Democratic Front (Triple A)

Frente Organizado Anticomunista Cubano FOAC — Organized Anti-Communist Cuban Front

Frente Obrero Revolucionario Democratico Cubano FORDC – Labor Revolutionary Democratic Front of Cuba

Frente Revolucionaria Anti-Comunista FRAC — Anti-Communist Revolutionary Front

Frente Unido de Liberacion Nacional FULN — United Front of National Liberation

Gobierno Interno de Liberacion Anticomunista GILA — Internal Government of Anti-Communist Liberation

Ingenieros de Combate Commando 100 — (Commando 100 Combat Engineers)

Juventud Anticomunista Revolucionaria JAR — Revolutionary Anti-Communist Youth

Junta Nacional Revolucionaria JNR — National Revolutionary Unity

Junta Revolucionaria Cubana JURE — Cuban Revolutionary Unity

Movimiento de Accion Revolucionaria MAR — Revolutionary Action Movement

Movimiento Democratica Liberacion MDL — Democratic Movement for Liberation

Movimiento Democratico Martiano MDM — Marti Democratic Movement (also Frente Democratico Martiano)

Movimiento Masonico Clandestino MMC — Masonic Clandestine Movement

Movimiento Revolucionario Accion Cubana MRAC — Cuban Action Revolutionary Movement

Movimiento Recuperacion Revolucionaria Cubano — Cuban Revolutionary Recovery Movement

Organizacion Autentico OA – Authentic Organization

Operacion ALFA 66 — Operation ALPHA 66

Organizacion del Ejercito Secreto Anticomunista OESA — Organization of the Anti-Communist Secret Army

Pro-Gobierno Constitucional de Cuba en Exilio PGCC — Pro-Constitutional Government of Cuba

Partido Revolucionario Cubana (Autentico) PRC — Cuban Revolutionary Party (Autentico)

Resistencia Agramonte RA — Agramonte Resistance

Segundo Frente Nacional de Escambray SFNE — Second National Front of the Escambray

Unidad Cubana de Accion Libertadora UCAL — Cuban Union of Liberating Action

Unidad de Liberacion Nacional (de Cuba) ULN — National Liberation Unity

Union Nacional Democratica “Movimiento 20 de Mayo” UND — Democratic National Union “May 20”

Union Nacional de Instituciones Revolucionarias UNI — National Union of Revolutionary Institutions

The author wishes to express his thanks to Kennedys And King and to Chris La May for their proofreading and assistance with graphics.

Addendum

The following FBI teletype shows how the cooperation between the Mafia and the anti-Castro Cubans continued right up to the month of the assassination, despite JFK’s orders to cease and desist. The FBI informant states that Trafficante offered to pay for the arms and ammo purchased from the mob by the Cubans through him, provided they could demonstrate it would be used in efforts against Castro. [The editors]

April 12, 2018

Desperate Measures in the Congo

I

“The Dark Continent”

In his sweeping and revolutionary Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the 19^th-century Prussian philosopher G. W. F. Hegel detailed a vision of history unfolding through the bold and decisive actions of what he deemed “world historical” personalities. Having seen Napoleon and his ornate retinue of generals parade through his hometown of Jena as a young man, Hegel was impressed by the singular power of individuals to shape history, and eventually developed this notion into his rarefied theory of how unseen forces find their expression in the actions of powerful leaders who themselves—unwittingly or actively—force the grand wheel of history to turn through its great dialectical arc.

So compelling was this vision to late 19^th-century Europeans, who stood at the apex of technological achievement in contrast to the developing world, that even today few realize Hegel’s version of human history is but one narrative in a vast tapestry of explanations as to how societies have organized themselves throughout the centuries. We also forget, at our peril, the pernicious implications of Hegel’s theory concerning non-Europeans, especially the retrograde, even worthless qualities he ascribes to those inhabiting the African continent. As he noted in his series of lectures presented at the University of Berlin from 1822-30, “Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists; for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing—an object of no value.” He concludes, after a lengthy digression on cannibalism, polygamy and the perpetual brutality among tribal sub-Saharan African groups, by claiming, “From these various traits it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been.” (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 98)

This patriarchal view held by many 19^th-century European intellectuals was the cornerstone for the many justifications used to perpetuate the brutal colonization of the African continent. The colorful flags of Denmark, Germany, France, Belgium, Portugal, England and Spain all shimmered in the hot African breeze at some point, continuously reaffirming from the colonizers’ perspective Hegel’s enduring vision of the infantile and helpless African peoples and their European “civilizers.” In this sense, the abject horror many historians have detailed at length in the Belgian Congo was not an aberration, but was more a crystalline and total distillation of the tenets of European racial subjugation as practiced elsewhere.

In 1885 King Leopold II effectively declared the entire Congo basin his personal property, akin more to a medieval kingdom than a traditional colonial region like British India, for example, where to some extant the British were compelled to integrate aspects of local culture and politics into their own system. In the Belgian Congo, as Adam Hochschild and others have detailed, unrestrained brutality was normalized to such an extent that one might have forgotten that slavery had been universally abolished decades earlier. Established in 1885 at the Conference of Berlin, the “Free State of Congo” was ostensibly created to enrich the lives of its inhabitants, incapable, as Hegel noted, of managing their own affairs. And yet almost immediately this benevolent charter was reversed, with Leopold II using his mercenary Force Publique to maim, torture, and essentially re-enslave the native Africans of the Free State of Congo. Estimates vary, particularly due to the burning of records by the colonizers, but a conservative figure is that in his twenty-five year reign, nearly ten million Congolese were killed as a result of his policies, representing fifty percent of the 1880 population. During his reign of terror, Leopold and his provincial overseers extracted ivory, rubber, and other rare goods for export to Europe, personally enriching the king to the tune of 220 million francs ($1.1. billion today) by the estimates of the Belgian scholar Jules Marchal. (Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 276) Incentivized through a tiered system of profit-maximization, the king’s men were rewarded with bonuses and promotions for resources gathered. Reluctant or underperforming Congolese were subjected to pitiless horrors, including having their limbs hacked off or enduring a hundred lashes of the whip, most of which proved fatal. The Force Publique also kidnapped villagers’ wives, who were frequently beaten and raped, holding them as ransom to induce workers to secure their release through reaching their rubber quotas. Herded like cattle into slave labor camps and paid just enough to purchase subsistence rations from their overlords, they remained powerless to resist Leopold’s private army, cordoned off in their remote Congo basin by armed outposts, attack dogs and a complacent international community at a time when information was the stuff of rogue travelers’ tales and stories told by escaped prisoners, rather than mass media headlines. In the United States, it was the lone voice of an African American military officer, Colonel George Washington Williams, who, having visited the Free State of Congo just years after its creation, felt compelled to openly criticize the regime in the international forums, declaring the Belgian king guilty of crimes against humanity:

All the crimes perpetrated in the Congo have been done in your name, and you must answer at the bar of Public Sentiment for the misgovernment of a people, whose lives and fortunes were entrusted to you by the august Conference of Berlin, 1884—1885. I now appeal to the Powers which committed this infant State to your Majesty’s charge, and to the great States which gave it international being; and whose majestic law you have scorned and trampled upon, to call and create an International Commission to investigate the charges herein preferred in the name of Humanity, Commerce, Constitutional Government and Christian Civilization. (Washington, “Open Letter to King Leopold of the Congo”, 1890)

Tales of his terrible and sinister exploits were the stuff of legend, and it was Leopold’s Free State of Congo that inspired author Joseph Conrad to write his famous novella Heart of Darkness, in which a distant and jaded Marlowe tells his shipmates his terrifying story of going up-river into the seething heart of colonial Central Africa. Yet from this tragic past, as the twentieth century dawned and Hegel’s dialectic of history moved the peoples of the world forward in the wake of the Second World War, the powerful and latent forces of human emancipation which had been awaiting their chance to check colonial oppression found their expression in a charismatic Congolese intellectual who intimately understood the powers arrayed against an autonomous Congo.

II

A New Hope

The President observed that in the last twelve months, the world has developed a kind of ferment greater than he could remember in recent times. The Communists are trying to take control of this, and have succeeded to the extent that … in many cases [people] are now saying that the Communists are thinking of the common man while the United States is dedicated to supporting outmoded regimes. (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958—1960, XIV, Document 157.)

The Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) had been founded and led by Patrice Lumumba. Its aim was to seek the Congo’s independence from Belgium. In December of 1959, the MNC won a majority of local elections and participated at a conference in Brussels in late January of 1960. That conference set June 30, 1960 as the date for an independent Congo after national elections for new leadership were held in May. The MNC won the May elections. Lumumba was to be Congo’s first prime minister and Joseph Kasavubu the first president.

In an impassioned and catalyzing speech to a crowd of thousands of newly liberated Congolese men and women, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s newly elected thirty-five year old prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, captivated his constituents by recounting the significance of what had just been achieved:

We are deeply proud of our struggle, because it was just and noble and indispensable in putting an end to the humiliating bondage forced upon us. That was our lot for the eighty years of colonial rule and our wounds are too fresh and much too painful to be forgotten. We have experienced forced labour in exchange for pay that did not allow us to satisfy our hunger, to clothe ourselves, to have decent lodgings or to bring up our children as dearly loved ones.

Morning, noon and night we were subjected to jeers, insults and blows because we were “Negroes”. Who will ever forget that the black was addressed as “tu,” not because he was a friend, but because the polite “vous” was reserved for the white man? We have seen our lands seized in the name of ostensibly just laws, which gave recognition only to the right of might. We have not forgotten that the law was never the same for the white and the black, that it was lenient to the ones, and cruel and inhuman to the others.

We have experienced the atrocious sufferings, being persecuted for political convictions and religious beliefs, and exiled from our native land: our lot was worse than death itself. We have not forgotten that in the cities the mansions were for the whites and the tumbledown huts for the blacks; that a black was not admitted to the cinemas, restaurants and shops set aside for “Europeans”; that a black travelled in the holds, under the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.

Who will ever forget the shootings which killed so many of our brothers, or the cells into which were mercilessly thrown those who no longer wished to submit to the regime of injustice, oppression and exploitation used by the colonialists as a tool of their domination?

All that, my brothers, brought us untold suffering. But we, who were elected by the votes of your representatives, representatives of the people, to guide our native land, we, who have suffered in body and soul from the colonial oppression, we tell you that henceforth all that is finished with. The Republic of the Congo has been proclaimed and our beloved country’s future is now in the hands of its own people.

Freed from human bondage by a reluctant King Baudouin of Belgium in June of 1960, the Democratic Republic of Congo stood poised to capture the imagination of still-colonized and recently decolonized regions throughout the African continent. With Kasavubu as president and Lumumba as prime minister, along with a freely appointed parliamentary body, the Congolese provinces were taking the first decisive steps towards freedom. In the post-Free State of Congo period, stretching from its dissolution in 1908 to the 1960 creation of the Democratic Republic of Congo, although the abject horrors of Leopold II’s slave-labor program had largely subsided, the people of the Congo were still living under the thumb of their European overlords. In this interregnum period, education for black Africans was provided by white Catholic missionaries who proselytized their vision of what good Christians were to endure in the face of hardship. No African living in the Congo during this fifty-year period could vote, and apartheid was the default social framework in which blacks and whites co-existed. For the Congolese, these times were “free” only symbolically.

But as many have pointed out, most recently John Newman in Countdown to Darkness, Belgium had schemed in advance to make sure that the free state of Congo would have an unsuccessful launch. The mechanism would be fouled to the degree that Belgium would have to retake the country in order to save it from a descent into chaos. As Newman points out, it was not just Belgium, but the USA that was unprepared to accept the success of a newly independent African country, especially one as large and as mineral-rich as Congo. Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence, had smeared Lumumba’s character at a May 5, 1960 National Security Council (NSC) meeting. Dulles also suggested that there was “Some possibility that a movement might develop in the rich Katanga area for separation from the Congo.” (Newman, p. 152, all references are to the Kindle version) In other words, the foreign economic mining interests in Congo had planned the Katanga secession before independence day. And Dulles knew about it.

On the day of Congo’s independence, there was another NSC meeting. This time Dulles was accompanied by Deputy Director Charles Cabell. Cabell now stated that Lumumba’s government would be communist-oriented and that Lumumba had already “solicited communist funds to help him obtain his present political position.” (Newman, p. 155) In other words, the CIA was doing its best to poison Lumumba’s character at the higher levels of governance in Washington.

Within weeks of Lumumba’s pivotal June 30, 1960 speech, tensions within the Congolese state’s numerous and disparate factions and its multiracial army began to spill over into the general population. In sectors of the Congolese army, many black soldiers sought the removal of white officers, who they viewed as a cruel reminder of the colonial past, and demanded increased pay, commensurate with a professional army defending a newly unified and free nation. Katanga Province soon seceded from the Democratic Republic of Congo, only weeks after its creation, with its leader, Moise Tshombe, painting a picture of Prime Minister Lumumba as a radical. The mineral-rich region in the southeastern reaches of the Congo contained vast stores of precious metals, from copper to gold to the uranium used to build the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan at the end of WWII. Diamonds were also in large supply in Katanga, making it a truly invaluable region in the eyes of the colonizers. Indeed, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, along with Belgian military and intelligence support, began to get its hands dirty in Central African developments. Having sent cash, supplies, and the tacit support of intervention should their anti-Lumumba puppets fail to secure their tenuous hold during the crisis, the Western powers were instrumental in assuring the Democratic Republic of Congo would be stillborn. To tilt the scales even more against Lumumba, all of the country’s gold reserves had been transferred to Brussels prior to freedom day. And Brussels would not allow their transfer to Leopoldville. (Newman, p. 156)

III

Hope Dims

On July 9, 1960 Belgium began to airlift paratroopers into Congo. With the Belgian troops already there, this now amounted to almost four thousand men. The next day, the provisional president of Katanga, Moise Tshombe, requested Belgian troops to restore order. To counter this, Lumumba and Kasavubu requested to meet with Tshombe, but the rebel leader of Katanga refused to let their plane land there. (Newman, p. 157) The Congolese troops now began to open fire on the Belgians and other Europeans. The Belgians returned the fire and shot scores of Congolese. (Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 36) Lumumba now asked for American help in stopping the insurgency and the attempt by Belgium to reinstate control. Eisenhower turned the request down. (Mahoney, p. 37) On July 13, 1960 Belgian troops occupied the airport at Leopoldville, and shortly after this, Lumumba severed relations with Brussels. One day later, Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations, shepherded through a resolution to send UN troops to the area. Hammarskjold also called on Belgium to remove its forces from the theater. This was the first time the UN had taken on such a mission. Hammarskjold was trying to make good on his intent to make the United Nations a forum where newly liberated countries could let their voices be heard against the established powers of the world.

But Hammarskjold had the deck stacked against him. The largest mining operation in Congo was Union Minière, a joint Belgian/British enterprise. When the struggle broke out, the Belgians now began to pay business taxes not to Congo, but to Tshombe and Katanga. The Russians had also expressed their disappointment in what Belgium and the United States had and had not done. Dulles used this proclamation to turn the conflict into a Cold War struggle. (Newman, pp. 158-59) Lumumba and Kasavubu did not make things easier for him; they sent Hammarskjold a written ultimatum that demanded the Belgians be removed by July 19^th. Furthermore, if this did not occur, they would then turn to the USSR in order to accomplish the task. (See Foreign Relations of the United States, hereafter FRUS, Vol. 14, Document 32) As both Richard Mahoney and John Newman have noted, this demand sent the NSC into overdrive. It sealed the CIA’s objective of turning a nationalist independence movement into a Cold War crucible, and on July 19^th, the American ambassador to Belgium sent the following cable to Allen Dulles:

Lumumba has now maneuvered himself into position of opposition to the West, resistance to United Nations and increasing dependence on Soviet Union … Only prudent therefore, to plan on basis that Lumumba government threatens our vital interests in Congo and Africa generally. A principal objective of our political and diplomatic action must therefore be to destroy Lumumba government as now constituted, but at same time we must find or develop another horse to back which would be acceptable in rest of Africa and defensible against Soviet political attack. (FRUS, Vol. 14, Document 136)

The problem with this cable as sent by diplomat William Burden—a Vanderbilt fortune heir who had bought his way into the State Department—was that almost every statement in it was false. As Mahoney has shown, Lumumba was actually still trying to communicate with the USA at this time. Similarly, he was not resistant to Hammarskjold; he just wanted the UN Chief to perform with alacrity. And he was not dependent on the USSR. But further, his request to Moscow for supplies would have been prevented if the United States had acceded to his earlier cable to Washington. Finally, Lumumba did not constitute any danger to American interests in Congo or Africa. In fact, Burden confabulated the first part of the cable in order to jump to the second part, namely that the USA should now be prepared to take terminal actions against both Lumumba and Congo and should begin to search for a new leader there.

As Senator John Kennedy once noted, it was this kind of State Department performance—backing the imperial powers while discounting the hopes of the native people—that was ultimately self-defeating, as France had seen at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. There, as Senator Kennedy had said, we had wrongly allied ourselves with “the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of empire.” (Mahoney, p. 15) This is a major reason why, in 1958, Kennedy purchased one hundred copies of that prophetic novel about Vietnam, The Ugly American, and passed it out to each of his Senate colleagues. But, unfortunately for Lumumba and the Congo, Kennedy was not yet president.

The Burden communiqué seemed to inspire Dulles to scale even further heights in smearing Lumumba as not just a communist, but in league with Egypt, the USSR and the communist party in Belgium. (FRUS, Vol. 14, Document 140). The allegation of Lumumba´s allegiance to Egypt was natural, since the CIA considered Gamel Abdel Nasser too leftist and, according to author William Blum, had contemplated overthrowing him in 1957. Nasser was also a pan-Arabist, and therefore it was claimed that the union of Nasser and Lumumba could unleash a Red Horde across Africa and the Middle East. This was all propaganda. As Jonathan Kwitny later wrote in his seminal essay on Lumumba, there was never any credible evidence that Lumumba was a communist, or that he had any interest in proselytizing that dogma either in Congo or across Africa. (Kwitny, Endless Enemies, p. 72) But Dulles was not going to let the minor matter of evidence get in his way. At this same NSC meeting of July 21^st, he now said that with Lumumba “we were faced with a person who was a Castro or worse.” (FRUS, Vol. 14, Document 140) Since President Eisenhower had already approved a plan to overthrow Castro, and Dulles was privy to CIA plots to assassinate him, the CIA Director was now playing his ace in the hole. With that card, Dulles was now clearly in opposition to Hammarskjold.

In the latter part of July, Lumumba—further contradicting the Burden memo—decided to visit America. He arrived in New York to speak with Hammarskjold, and then went to Washington DC. Eisenhower avoided meeting him there by staying out of town in Newport, Connecticut. Lumumba told Secretary of State Christian Herter that Tshombe did not represent the people of Katanga and that Belgium has essentially stolen Congo’s gold assets and left the country with no treasury. (Newman, p. 218) He therefore requested a loan. Herter dodged all these requests by saying that these would all be considered by Hammarskjold and the USA would have input into these decisions—all the while Dulles, as previously noted, was working at odds with the United Nations.

Lumumba now expressed disagreement with Hammarskjold over the terms of UN intervention. He demanded that the UN expel all non-African troops and enter Katanga to stop its secession. (Newman, p. 221) If not, then he would turn to the USSR to do so. The Russian aid began arriving just after mid-August. This included military advisors and supplies, by both ship and plane. With this, all hope for Lumumba and Congo’s independence went down the drain. There was now open talk in cables about Congo experiencing a classic communist takeover, and how the United States must “take action to avoid another Cuba”, and how “the commie design now seems suddenly clear.” (Mahoney, p. 40; Newman p. 222)

All of this culminated in the August 18^th NSC meeting. This meeting consisted of advisors like Maurice Stans and Douglas Dillon turning Lumumba into some kind of Red Menace. And this kind of talk eventually got the best of President Eisenhower. As Newman informs us, the turnaround time for NSC steno notes was usually a day. At the most it would extend to 3-4 days. In this case, the transcription took one week. In 1975, fifteen years after the meeting, the transcriber Robert Johnson decided to explain why the draft memo of that meeting took so long. Johnson testified that during the meeting Eisenhower gave an order for the assassination of Lumumba. (Newman, p. 224) After checking with a superior, Johnson decided not to include the order in the transcript. This issue was then followed up on a week later at another meeting. But as Newman has discovered, the Church Committee interview notes of a participant who conveyed Eisenhower’s interest in following up his assassination request with covert action have now disappeared. Luckily, however, Newman copied the notes back in 1994 before they were removed, so we know that after one week to think about it, Eisenhower had not changed his mind on the issue. (Newman, p. 232)

The day after the August 25^th meeting, Allen Dulles composed what can only be called an assassination cable. It reads as follows:

In high quarters here it is the clear-cut conclusion that if Lumumba continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the UN and for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently, we conclude that his removal must be urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action.

On the second page of the cable, Dulles authorizes the station chief in Leopoldville to spend up to $100,000 to carry out the operation without consulting headquarters about the specifics. On the same day Dulles sent the cable, Director of Plans Dick Bissell talked to the head of the CIA’s Africa Division. He told Bronson Tweedy to start thinking about “reviewing possibilities, assets, and discussing them with headquarters in detail.” (Newman, pp. 236-240)

On September 5^th, 1960, only months after Lumumba’s grand speech, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kasavubu, dismissed him on Radio Brazzaville, officially of his own volition, but in actuality, with the urging of his CIA and Belgian intelligence handlers. (Stephen Weismann, “Opening the Secret Files on Lumumba’s Murder,” Washington Post 07/21/2002)

Kasavubu had been a reluctant supporter of Lumumba, and Western strategists were quick to play on his hesitations regarding Congolese independence. For months leading up to this announcement, UN Undersecretary in Charge of General Assembly, Andrew Cordier, later president of Columbia University, had been coaching the Congolese president, and carefully monitoring developments as he prodded him to fire Lumumba. (Carole Collins, “The Cold War Comes to Africa: Cordier and the 1960s Congo Crisis,” Journal of International Affairs, 6/22/1993) After this bold radio dismissal, Cordier ordered U.N. troops into the region, with orders to ostensibly shut down the airport and radio stations in Brazzaville. As Collins notes, however, there was a backhanded motive to this move:

These actions primarily hurt Lumumba because only Kasavubu enjoyed access to radio facilities in the neighboring state of Brazzaville. Similarly, Kasavubu’s allies were allowed to use the ostensibly closed airport to travel into the Congolese interior to mobilize support for the president while Lumumba’s supporters were grounded. Near the end of his three-week stay in early September, Cordier authorized the United Nations to offer food and pay to the Congolese Army. This action allowed Mobutu—a one-time Lumumba aide who had been appointed chief-of-staff of the army by Kasavubu just days earlier—to win credit for paying the soldiers their past-due salaries, and to pave the way for his coup attempt a few days later. The combination of U.N. and U.S. support was pivotal for Mobutu’s subsequent seizure of power.

Colonel Joseph Mobutu, another key figure in the tripartite struggle for indigenous Congolese independence, was, like Kasavubu, not altogether enthusiastic about Lumumba’s historic and sweeping proclamations of independence. Now the titular head of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s armed forces, after a recent promotion by Kasavubu, Mobutu was essentially an opportunist from all extant evidence. Carefully monitoring local political developments and the slow but steady marshaling of Western armed forces in the sweltering jungle basin, he hedged his risk and quietly stood poised to make his bold power play. As Brian Urquhart recalls from his station at Leopoldville on the night of Kasavubu’s announcement,

Mobutu appeared once again at our headquarters, this time in uniform. He said he was tired and nervous and needed a quiet place to relax. Our office was already jammed with jittery suppliants, so I put him in my bedroom. At his request, I lent him a radio, adding half a bottle of whiskey to cheer him up. Some time later, I looked in on our uninvited guest. He seemed to be enjoying the whiskey all right, as Radio Leopoldville continued to play the cha cha cha. But then the music stopped, and a voice was heard to say that he was suspending the president, the prime minister and the parliament and taking over the country.

‘C’est moi!’ Mobutu exclaimed, triumphantly pointing to the radio. ‘C’est moi!’

I don’t know when I have been more irritated. I told Mobutu that if he wanted to make a coup d’état, the place for him was in the streets with his followers, not listening to the radio under false pretenses in someone else’s bedroom. We then threw him out.” (Brian Urquhart, “Mobutu and Tshombe: Two Congolese Rogues,” UN News Character Sketches)

By the end of September, 1960, Mobutu and his remaining loyal soldiers and officers from the former Belgian Congo Army became the western Congo basin’s de facto functioning political body. This had been done in agreement with the Leopoldville CIA station chief, Larry Devlin. Devlin had also authorized Mobutu to eliminate Lumumba and had guaranteed him a large sum in French francs to do so. (Newman, p. 268) To the east, Lumumba’s deputy, Antoine Gizenga, assumed a provisional role as the leader of the short-lived Stanleyville government. To the south, Tshombe still held onto the Katanga and South Kasai provinces. Patrice Lumumba himself remained under house arrest, having been detained on September 16^thby U.N. peacekeeping troops, ostensibly for his own safety.

But the CIA had still not given up. In September, the Agency had three agents in Congo and their shared mission was to assassinate Lumumba. These were contract assassins QJ/WIN, WIROGUE, and the CIA headquarters chemist Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb was to prepare a toxic agent and deliver it to Congo. From there, Devlin was to recruit a Lumumba aide to insert it in the prime minister’s toothpaste. If that failed, Devlin was also trying to recruit an assassin to break into the safe haven the UN had provided for Lumumba and simply shoot him. These were in addition to Devlin’s agreement with Mobutu. Therefore, by the end of September, the CIA had five different methods on hand to kill Lumumba. But at the end of the month, Tweedy cabled Devlin that they must choose a plot that would conceal America’s role. (Newman, p. 268)

IV

“Mad Mike”

To detail the full sweep of the Congo Crisis and its myriad twists and betrayals is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice to say, after Tshombe’s secession of Katanga province and Mobutu’s and Kasavubu’s betrayals of Lumumba, the prime minister was surrounded by hostile forces, and desperately sought outside help. Among these were the United States, which categorically rejected his pleas, and the Soviet Union, which agreed, at least ideologically, with his fight for freedom. But they were initially reluctant to commit armed forces for fear of escalating the regional conflict into a larger strategic battle with the West.

President Tshombe, who still held onto Katanga in January 1961, had the most to lose and the likeliest chance of receiving outside help, given his region’s enormous natural resources. One of his initial strategies involved creating a group of 700 to 800 foreign mercenaries, both for personal protection and as a stopgap unit to quell any potential attacks from neighboring provinces on Katanga. Belgians, Rhodesians, South Africans, and French nationals answered the call; for a decent wage, they could partake in a quixotic adventure in the Congo, led by their much-loved and no-nonsense Thomas Michael “Mad Mike” Hoare, a retired WWII captain who promoted himself to major upon answering Tshombe’s call.

Having served in the Second World War as an infantryman with the Royal Army’s London Rifles, Hoare was a veteran of the North African and Italian theaters of combat. After a brief stint in the peacetime army, he relocated to warmer climates, finally settling down in Durban, South Africa in the 1950s. Moonlighting as a safari guide and a used car salesman, he was looking for something new when he heard from a close friend that Tshombe was looking for mercenaries. Hoare flew to Katanga, and quickly placed an ad in a local newspaper. Within weeks he had mustered a few dozen able-bodied men. Among their colorful ranks were an ex-Wehrmacht soldier who flaunted his iron cross medal on deployments, former British and Australian soldiers from WWII, local Katangese soldiers trying to protect their homesteads and families, members of the former Belgian occupation and security forces, and a few former South African police officers. Hoare was quick to note that his men were seriously lacking in actual battlefield experience, with many faking feats of valor and claiming decorations and accomplishments that, when investigated, more often than not proved fictional. Through a punishing physical training regimen and a cursory demonstration of fundamental battlefield tactics and command protocols, “Mad Mike” whipped his infamous “4 Commando” (later 5 Commando) into basic shape by the early months of 1961, with his headquarters situated in the provincial capital of Elizabethville. He and a former Royal Army officer, Alistair Wicks, each led a company of sixty men, with Hoare in nominal command of the two units. (Mike Hoare, The Road to Katanga: A Congo Mercenary’s Personal Memoir)

Initially tasked with securing Elizabethville against raiding parties of the local Baluba tribe, Hoare’s account is half Arthur Conan Doyle novel, half military memoir, but always gripping:

The column had bogged down in the heart of enemy territory. The track had collapsed after days of torrential rains and more than twenty trucks had sunk into the mud up to their axles. We were surrounded by an unseen army of Baluba warriors, a tough and merciless foe. That day we had lost one of my men from a wound inflicted by a poisoned arrow. He had lasted less than sixty minutes and was one of my first casualties. Morale among my Katangese drivers was at rock bottom. My unit, 4 Commando, which was escorting the column, was on edge, several of the men down with malaria, the remainder near exhaustion from lack of sleep. (Hoare, 4)

Initially tasked with supporting transport columns carrying food and supplies to the beleaguered Belgian security forces fighting in Katanga, Hoare’s 4 Commando eventually earned the trust of the Elizabethville government enough to serve as a small but effective personal army for Tshombe, who funded the adventure through the previously mentioned Union Minière, an enormously rich mining conglomerate based in Katanga. With access to nearly unlimited ammunition, modern Belgian assault rifles and belt-fed machine guns, and a motley assortment of military jeeps and half-ton trucks, Hoare’s group of foreign legionnaires was a truly frightening sight for an indigenous uprising armed with 19^th-century shotguns, bows and arrows, and a mystical courage imbued in them by local witch doctors. For many of the Baluba, who were 4 Commando’s principal opponents in the early days of his deployment, a ritual dance, along with the ceremonial drinking of beer and smoking of marijuana, combined with the soothing rhythmic words of their shamans, steeled them against the commandos. Hoare noted that, while the notion that Western bullets passed through the Baluba was obviously absurd, their belief in this was fueled only in part by wishful thinking and mysticism; in previous uprisings before the declaration of Congolese independence, Belgian security forces would often fire blanks into crowds of Balubas who were marshaling to rebel.

A man of average height and wiry build, with slicked-back blonde hair and sharp features, Thomas Michael Hoare was the spitting image of the great white hunter, which, as mentioned before, he once was. With his decorative beret, rolled up sleeves, and ubiquitous radio receiver in hand, he seemed archaic even in the mid 1960s. And yet this old-fashioned, Rule Britannia mentality was probably what saved him and his men’s lives in the depths of the jungle. Under no illusions regarding the challenges arrayed against him—especially the health risks presented by sustained deployments in the jungle without modern medical facilities—he was equally curious, in that colonial way, about the innate differences between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. While still under the same spell as Hegel, Kipling, Spencer, and other proponents of racial hierarchical thinking, to his credit, “Mad Mike” was more open to the African experience, if solely for practical considerations. Like an integrated unit in Vietnam, or a professional football team whose members must put their differences aside, if only temporarily, 4 Commando ultimately served, like the pirate ships of the 16^th Century, as a strange meeting place for people of all walks of life. Hoare exercised executive control over the expedition, and in the case of a man who murdered a young Congolese boy after numerous other infractions, was not averse to summary execution. Another soldier under his command, who had raped and killed a local Katangese woman, was lined up in front of the trucks on the side of a house; Hoare knew the man was a semi-professional soccer player back in Europe, and saw fit to pull out his pistol and personally shoot off both of the man’s big toes.

To these ends, throughout the early months following Katanga’s secession, Hoare’s motley crew slogged through the rugged Katanga backwoods, driving through monsoon downpours and blistering heat, setting up camp at night in some of the world’s most desolate regions, firing bright green illuminating flares at the sounds of potential raiding parties gathering in the jungle, but more often than not, firing blindly at imagined armies where only wildlife and rustling bush existed. Their first real encounter with the enemy, ironically, was an armed standoff in the village of Nyunga with U.N. peacekeeping troops. Having been placed there at the behest of the Feb. 21, 1961 U.N. Security Council decision to prevent a full-blown Congolese civil war, a detachment of Malayan soldiers with a platoon of armored cars ordered Hoare and his men to stand down. In the night, while the two forces stealthily checked their weapons and sandbagged their positions across the town square, Hoare’s radioman received a report from Albertville HQ that the U.N was very likely going to arrest 4 Commando and intern them in Leopoldville; all Belgian and foreign mercenaries, under the U.N. Security Council’s resolution, were considered hostile combatants. After a brief meeting with the Malayan colonel in charge of the U.N. detachment, Hoare had to think on his feet. He told the officer he would briefly consult with his men and try to forgo the inevitable and likely suicidal shootout with a heavily armed professional army. After walking across the town square and debriefing his men in his makeshift headquarters, seven of which wanted to surrender, he ordered a breakout. Those wishing to avoid capture would cut a mad dash across town as the others approached the checkpoint to surrender. They would scatter and rush through the jungle to a prearranged rendezvous point a few miles away and take it from there. Hoare checked his compass, grabbed his rifle, blew his whistle and they were off.

V

Plausible Deniability

As long as Lumumba stayed in his UN-guarded safe haven he was relatively secure from any attempt by Mobutu to arrest him, for the simple reason that Hammarskjold’s representative would not allow the warrant to be served. Lumumba had survived several futile attempts by the CIA’s Executive Action program to eliminate him. For example, QJWIN and WIROGUE had been recruited through the CIA’s Staff D, which came under the control of William Harvey in 1960. Director of Plans Dick Bissell had himself offered the job of case officer on the operation to at least two agents and they both turned it down. But the second one, Justin O’Donnell, did agree to run an operation to politically neutralize Lumumba. The opportunity came when, under intense lobbying by America and England, the UN decided to seat Kasavubu’s delegation. This occurred just when Lumumba’s following was gaining strength in Congo. So Lumumba decided to arrange his escape to Stanleyville, his political base on the evening of November 27, 1960. (Mahoney, p. 55)

Devlin now conferred with Mobutu to plot the paths that Lumumba would have to take in order to make it to Stanleyville. The CIA helped Mobutu set up checkpoints along river crossings and to block certain roads. (Mahoney, p. 56) On November 30^th, QJ/WIN offered to go to Stanleyville to kill Lumumba himself. But within 24 hours of that offer, Lumumba was captured in the rebel province of Kasai. (Newman, p. 295) Fearing that killing him on their own soil would provoke a full-blown uprising, his captors decided to send him to his certain torture and death at the hands of the rulers of Katanga province. He was moved from a temporary holding barracks in Thysville to Elizabethville, the capital of Katanga, where his previous colonizers, the Belgians, were waiting with their close friend and president, Moise Tshombe. Having contemplated killing him through a tube of poisoned toothpaste only months earlier, the CIA was relieved at news of his capture and subsequent murder, which they helped orchestrate. Indeed, Sydney Gottlieb, the American witch doctor who pioneered many of the Central Intelligence Agency’s lethal potions and covert execution methods for ZR/RIFLE (the codename of the central assassination arm of the CIA), had only weeks earlier flown in from Europe to personally deliver the goods. (NY Times 12/11/2008)

After a kangaroo court and short military trial which accused him of inciting a revolt, Lumumba, along with his two escaped aides who had all been beaten and sadistically abused throughout the night, was lined up against a tree and shot by a Belgian firing squad. President Tshombe personally oversaw the execution. After killing his two supporters, the Belgians and their Katangese paramilitary officers dumped them in shallow graves, later deciding to disinter them, dissolve their bodies in sulphuric acid, and grind their bones into a fine powder to forever erase them from history. When the sulphuric acid ran out, what was left of the corpses was set afire. (Newman, p. 296) This happened three days before John Kennedy’s inauguration. The news of his death was kept from Kennedy for almost one month. Whether this was by accident or by design, it is a fact that once Kennedy was in office his policy drastically altered Eisenhower’s. And it would have favored Lumumba.

The murder of Patrice Lumumba made it much easier for a continuation of neocolonial policies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In one fell swoop it laid waste to the nascent progressive hopes of a people essentially freed from over a hundred years of brutal colonial slavery, and paved the way for the rise of figures like Joseph Mobutu, who would later rule the Congo until 1996, becoming a billionaire and a brutal despot. Mobutu was a great friend of Washington, a tremendous ally to the CIA, and the bane of African nationalists seeking the practical, achievable vision of figures like Lumumba, who could have stood as a beacon of hope for a Pan-African unity of purpose against their white European overlords in this time of turmoil and decolonization. With the murder only months later of U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold—and Susan Williams’ book proves it was a murder—the last best measures for preventing a downward spiral of the DRC were lost. When his airplane, engulfed in flames, crashed into the jungle outside Ndola airport as he was attempting to land and begin ceasefire talks, one of the few honest statesman from the European power structure who was truly concerned about the fate of the Congo was lost. As Richard Mahoney notes in his fine book, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, Kennedy made a strong effort to try to keep Congo independent after Hammarskjold’s death. (See further Dodd and Dulles vs Kennedy in Africa) For as Greg Poulgrain revealed in The Incubus of Intervention, Kennedy and Hammarskjold had made a secret alliance to do all they could to keep Congo and Indonesia free from imperialism. Kennedy did his best to maintain that pledge after Hammarskjold was assassinated. (See Hammarskjold and Kennedy vs The Power Elite)

Epilogue: Why Congo Matters Today

As Jonathan Kwitny noted in Endless Enemies, after his death Lumumba became a hero in Africa. One could find his name affixed to avenues, schools, squares and parks. As Kwitny wrote: “Lumumba is a hero to Africans not because he promoted socialism, which he didn’t, but because he resisted foreign intervention. He stood up to outsiders, if only by getting himself killed.” (Kwitny, p. 72)

But there is also a larger, more epochal aspect to what happened to Lumumba and Congo. This has to do with being a historical marker for Africa as it came out of the second Age of Colonialism. Again, Kwitny eloquently summarizes it:

The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest and the most unnecessary blight on the record of this new era is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in postcolonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country and were all instigated by the United States of America. It’s a sad situation when people are left to learn their ‘democracy’ from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (Kwitny, p. 75)

One cannot understand why the so-called “Third World” remains just that if one does not confront the very harsh realities of episodes from mid-century U.S. foreign policy like the CIA’s attempts to kill Patrice Lumumba. Though mainstream media outlets eventually admit to our sad and tragic “mistakes” made in the distant past and point to “startling revelations” about this and that player and agency involved, they fail to admit the obvious: The United States, for its entire post-WWII history, up to the publication of this article, has almost entirely suppressed, held-back, or outright destroyed freedom-seeking, nationalistic movements on a global scale. It does this through a variety of means, be they the actual targeted assassination of a movement’s leader, the depreciation of a nation’s currency, the overthrow of a regime through a proxy army or CIA-backed coup, or a traditional military invasion.

This is a painful but necessary fact for its citizens to internalize, seeing as it runs counter to almost everything we are told about America in school, on the radio, or in the news. It is acceptable to critique the power structure insofar as that critique points to a technical glitch, a rogue personality, or a tactical error, as in the mainstream media´s common admission now that the Iraq War was a “mistake.” There are no mistakes at that level. The mistake was intended to be a mistake. Destabilization of a region, like the Middle East, or in our case, central Africa, is extremely helpful to people who seek to benefit from chaos. It was enormously profitable for mining interests in the Congo that the region fell into a perpetual civil war or under a brutal dictatorship. It was equally lucrative for hundreds of thousands of Indonesians to be slaughtered by Suharto’s death squads, seeing as parts of his nation contained hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of gold veins. It was a strategic victory for nations like Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others on the Project for a New American Century’s list to be decimated since this opened the way for greater geopolitical leverage against other superpowers like Russia and China, while subtly flooding the southern reaches of Europe with refugees, and spawning groups like ISIS and ISIL. What a more honest assessment of U.S. foreign policy would note is that the United States, as Martin Luther King famously noted, still remains the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and yet the average citizen within its borders is blissfully unaware of this fact; and is equally unaware that it was a statement like that which likely got King killed by the very government he sought to change. Like Lumumba, figures like Dr. King, President Kennedy, and Dag Hammarskjold paid the ultimate price for seeking to effect change in the developing world and at home in America’s impoverished communities. And it is this sinister, plausibly deniable ugliness of the United States that is largely to blame.

Editor’s note: the following feature appeared in 2016, and speaks directly to the theme of the Congo’s (and Africa’s) continuing relevance today.

How the World Runs on Looting the Congo

Addendum (05.01.2018)

A new document courtesy of David Josephs.

This document indicates just how involved Kennedy was in the colossal Congo crisis. He is actually leading the UN effort, not the other way around. After the murder of Hammarskjold, he appears to have taken over the Secretary General’s initiative there as the United Nations commitment was slackening.

Or, click here: RIF 176-10036-10001

April 2, 2018
Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton
Was there ever a person who was so hidden from public view in 1963, yet ended up being such a key character in the JFK case than James Angleton? Offhand, the only other character in the saga I can think of to rival him is David Phillips. Which puts Angleton in some rather select company. But what makes the Angelton instance even odder is that, unlike with Phillips, there have been at least three other books based upon Angleton’s career. To my knowledge there has been no biography of Phillips yet published.

The veil around Jim Angleton began to be dropped in December of 1974. At this time, CIA Director William Colby had decided that Angleton had to go. Since Angleton had been handed carte blanche powers first by CIA Director Allen Dulles, and then by Richard Helms, he was not willing to leave quietly. So Colby had to force him out. He first gave a speech about certain CIA abuses before the Council on Foreign Relations. He then directly leaked details about Angleton’s role in Operation MH Chaos to New York Times reporter Sy Hersh. MH Chaos was a massive program that spied on the political left in the United States for a number of years. Combined with the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, they composed a lethal one two punch to dissident groups on issues like civil rights and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations.

Colby’s leaks to Hersh did the trick and Angleton was forced to resign at the end of 1974. That timing coincided with what some have called the “Season of Inquiry”. This refers to the series of investigations of the CIA, the FBI and the JFK assassination that took place after the exposures of the Watergate scandal. Specifically, these were the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The author of the book under discussion, Jefferson Morley, goes through these to show how Angleton became a star attraction for some public inquiries. Angleton did not handle these proceedings very well, with consequences for his own reputation. As we will see, in the wake of his exposure he made one enigmatic comment that would haunt the literature on the JFK case forever.

It was these appearances that likely led to the beginning of the literature on the legendary chief of counter-intelligence. Wilderness of Mirrors was a dual biography of both Angleton and William Harvey by newspaper reporter David Martin, published in 1980. Considering the problems with classification, it was a candid and acute portrait for that time period.

Several years later, two books on Angleton were published in rapid succession. In 1991, Tom Mangold published Cold Warrior. Mangold’s book was a milestone in the field and remains a valuable contribution not just on Angleton but on CIA studies to this day. Somehow, Mangold got several Agency insiders to cooperate with him in a devastating expose of the damage Angleton had wreaked on the Agency and its allies. This was done through his almost pathological allegiance to a man named Anatoliy Golitsyn. Golitsyn was a Russian KGB operative who had been working as a vice counsel in the Helsinki embassy when he decided to defect at Christmas, 1961. He warned that any other defectors who followed would be sent by the KGB to discredit him. He prophesied about the presence of a high-level mole in the American government. He then demanded audiences with the FBI, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president of the United States and intelligence chiefs of foreign countries; most of which he got.

In two ways, Golitsyn’s overall concept played into the nightmare fears of Western intelligence: first, as to the existence of high-level double agents in their midst; and secondly, regarding Western leaders who were already compromised, e.g., Prime Minister Harold Wilson of the Untied Kingdom. Due to the largesse of Angleton and British MI6, Golitsyn became a millionaire. As for the accuracy of his knowledge of Soviet affairs, he said the Sino-Soviet split was a mirage, that the coming of Gorbachev was really a deception strategy to isolate the USA, and that the whole Perestroika revolution was also a KGB phantasm. He forecast the last two in his books, New Lies for Old (1984) and The Perestroika Deception (1995). Needless to add, in order to buy Golitsyn one had to accept that the rise of Gorbachev, the collapse of the USSR, and Boris Yeltsin’s use of American economic advisors to administer Milton Friedman economic “shock doctrine” to decimate the Russian economy back to conditions worse than the Great Depression—all of this was somehow a colossal KGB Potemkin Village designed to deceive the West. The question being: Into believing what? That somehow the USSR had not really collapsed? This is how ultimately bereft Golitsyn was, and this was how craven our intelligence chiefs were. They did not just believe him, they made him into a wealthy retiree. Mangold’s book revealed almost all of this. It was shocking to behold.

A year after Mangold, David Wise published his book Molehunt. The Wise book was kind of a reverse imprint of Mangold. Wise did scores of interviews with the victims of what the folie à deux of Golitsyn/Angleton had done. That is, the careers that were ruined, the reputations that were sullied, the promotions that never came. It got so bad that Congress had to pass a bill to compensate certain victims for the damage done to their careers. In 2008, author Michael Holzman wrote another biography. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA and the Craft of Intelligence was a rather sympathetic look at the man and his career. And it attempted to rehabilitate both Angleton and Golitsyn, while trying to contravene William Colby’s dictum about Angleton that, to his knowledge, he had never caught a spy.

II

Holzman’s book was published about a decade after the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) had officially closed its doors, which makes it surprising how little information the author used concerning Angleton, the JFK case and Lee Harvey Oswald. After all, John Newman had published his milestone book on that subject, Oswald and the CIA, in 1995. He reissued that volume the same year that Holzman published his. Because he had been an intelligence analyst, Newman understood how to read and then blend together documents into a mural that made previously uncertain events understandable. He did this with the help of the releases of the ARRB.

There were two areas of Newman’s work that one would think any biographer of Angleton would find of the utmost interest. The first would be how the information on Oswald was entered into CIA files after his defection. The second would be the extraordinary work that was made possible about Oswald in Mexico City after the release of the HSCA’s legendary Lopez Report. Taking up where Holzman dropped the baton, the strength of Jefferson Morley’s book is that it does have a featured focus on this aspect: the Oswald file at CIA and its relation to Angleton. And this is the most valuable part of the book.

As Morley notes, James Angleton had suzerainty over the Oswald file at CIA for four years. (p. 86. All references are to the Kindle version) Contrary to what the late David Belin said on national television, the contents of that file were never fully revealed to the Warren Commission. And they were obfuscated for the HSCA. The file itself was personally handled by Birch O’Neal, one of the most trusted and most mysterious of the two hundred men and women who worked for Angleton in Counter Intelligence. From day one, O’Neal began to lie about what was in the Oswald file. He told the Bureau that there was nothing there that did not originate with the FBI and State Department. As Morley has noted on his website and in this book, that is simply not true. But further, the ARRB files on O’Neal have been released in heavily redacted form, and three are completely redacted.

As Morley further explains, the rule inside the Agency was that if three reports came in, a 201 file should be opened on the subject. Yet this rule was not followed with the Oswald file. This exception to protocol allowed the file to be limited in access when it was opened in December of 1959. (Morley, p. 88) It was only when Otto Otepka of the State Department sent the CIA a request on the recent wave of American defectors to the Soviet Union that a 201 file was opened on Oswald.

If the Warren Commission would actually have had full access to the file, the obvious question would have been: If Otepka had not sent the request, would a 201 file have been opened at all? Otepka’s request was about information on whether the defectors were real or ersatz. When Director of Plans Richard Bissell received it, he sent it to Angleton’s office. These circumstances strongly suggest that there was a false defector program being run by CIA, and that Angleton had a role in it.

To his credit, Morley also uses some information that was first introduced in the Lopez Report. This was the fact that there were two differing cables sent out of Angleton’s office once CIA got word of Oswald meeting with a man named Valeri Kostikov in Mexico City. One was sent to the Navy, State, and FBI. It had information about Oswald but a wrong physical description of him. The other cable was sent to Mexico City and had a correct description, but it did not include the most recent information that the CIA had on Oswald concerning his activities in New Orleans—for example, that he had been arrested, detained, tried and fined for his pro Castro activities there. (pp. 136-37) This clearly would have been important in evaluating whether or not he posed a potential threat. In other words, if Oswald had been meeting with a Russian diplomat in a nearby third country, and prior to that he had been protesting on the streets of a southern city in favor of Fidel Castro, and was trying to get an in-transit visa through Cuba to Russia, that would seem to be significant information one should pass to the FBI.

But this cable did not provide the correct description of the man. When the CIA sent up its request, it contained a picture of a man who was not Oswald. He has come to be known as the Mystery Man, although the Lopez Report identifies him as a Russian KGB agent under diplomatic cover. Consequently, that cable described Lee Oswald as a 35 year old with an athletic build and six feet tall. What makes this even more puzzling is that the CIA had accurate info on Oswald as being 24 and 5’ 9”. The other cable was sent to Mexico City and although it was allowed to be disseminated to the FBI there, it did not include the information on Oswald’s return to the USA or his New Orleans hijinks. The Warren Commission only saw one of these two cables and the HSCA only mentioned them in redacted form. (See “Two Misleading CIA Cables about Lee Harvey Oswald”)

As mentioned by the author, neither Jane Roman nor Bill Hood of the CIA could explain this paradox. (p. 137) As Morley offers: if what Oswald was doing in New Orleans—setting up an FPCC chapter with him as the only member, raising his profile via street theater— was part of an operation, then Mexico City station chief Winston Scott would not need to know about that. (p. 137)

One week before Kennedy’s murder, on November 15^th, Angleton’s office received a full report from Warren DeBrueys of the New Orleans FBI office about Oswald’s activities there. As Morley writes, “If Angleton scanned the first page, he learned that Oswald had gone back to Texas after contacting the Cubans and Soviets in Mexico City. Angleton knew Oswald was in Dallas.” (p. 140) In other words, all the information that an intelligence officer needed in order to place Oswald on the Secret Service Security Index was available to Jim Angleton at that time. He did nothing with it.

III

But it is actually worse than that. As Morley notes,

Angleton always sought to give the impression that he knew very little about Oswald before November 22, 1963. … His staff had monitored Oswald’s movements for four years. As the former Marine moved from Moscow to Minsk to Fort Worth to New Orleans to Mexico City to Dallas, the Special Investigations Group received reports on him everywhere he went. (p. 140)

As Newman originally noted, Oswald’s files from Moscow and Minsk should not have gone into the Special Investigation Group (SIG). They should have gone into a file at the Soviet Russia division. (Newman, p. 27) The cumulative effect of Morley’s book is that it makes the case that the idea that Oswald was some kind of sociopath who no one knew anything about in Washington is simply not tenable today. The CIA has hidden its monitoring of Oswald for decades. And it took the JFK Act and its forcible declassification process to reveal its extent.

Morley quickly moves to some interesting developments that took place within just hours of the assassination. Oswald’s street theater antics in New Orleans now got played up in the media. Ed Butler turned over a tape of Oswald defending the FPCC on a local radio station. The CIA-backed Cuban exile organization, the DRE, were calling reporters to inform them of Oswald’s FPCC activities in the Crescent City. They even published a broadsheet saying Oswald and Castro were the presumed killers of Kennedy. (Morley, p. 145) Of course, Butler and the DRE’s intelligence connections were not exposed at this time, nor did the Warren Commission explore them. To accompany this there is a mysterious message that Richard Helms’ assistant Tom Karamessines wrote to Winston Scott in Mexico City. He told the station chief not to take any action that “could prejudice Cuban responsibility.” (Morley, p. 146)

Morley has an interesting observation about Kostikov and AM/LASH. Hoover asked Angleton in May of 1963 if Kostikov was part of Department 13, responsible for terrorist activities and murders in the Western Hemisphere. The reply was negative. (Morley, p. 149) Yet this would change six months later. (Newman, p. 419) It would change again, when Angleton testified to the Church Committee. There he said he was not sure. But Morley further reveals that Rolando Cubela, a prospective assassin tasked by the CIA to kill Castro, was also in touch with Kostikov. This was done through Des Fitzgerald who was in charge of Cuban operations in 1963. Fitzgerald probably thought that Cubela may have told Kostikov about the CIA using him. Kostikov then told the Cubans, and Castro may have decided to strike first, using Oswald as a pawn. This may be why Fitzgerald wept when Jack Ruby shot Oswald on television. He reportedly said, “Now, we’ll never know.” (Morley, p. 150)

The first liaison between the CIA and the Warren Commission was a man named John Whitten. But he was rather quickly moved out by Richard Helms and replaced with Angleton. The CIA now adapted a stance of waiting out the Commission. (p. 155) Here, Morley passed up a fine way to exemplify this fact. When Commission lawyer Burt Griffin testified before the HSCA, he revealed that he had sent a request to CIA to send him all the files they had on Jack Ruby and several related persons, like Barney Baker. Two months later, in May of 1964, they still had no reply. So they sent a reminder. They finally got their negative reply in mid-September, when the Commission volumes were in galley proofs. (HSCA Volume XI, p. 286) You can’t wait out a committee any better (or worse) than that can you?

Continuing with the JFK case, Morley makes a brief mention of the formation of the CIA’s Garrison Group. (p. 192) And he also adds that one of Angleton’s assistants, Raymond Rocca, was a key member. Rocca proclaimed at its first meeting that it appeared that Jim Garrison would be able to convict his indicted suspect Clay Shaw. I wish Morley had made more of this body, because as is evidenced from the declassified files of the ARRB, the CIA itself began to take offensive measures against Garrison at around this time. The convening of this intra-agency group was ordered by Richard Helms. Helms wanted the group to consider the possible implications of the Garrison case before, during, and after the trial of Clay Shaw. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 270) Which they did. For instance, Angleton ran name traces on the possible jurors in the Shaw trial. (p. 293)

As Morley noted in his previous book, Our Man in Mexico, when Winston Scott passed away in 1971, Angleton immediately hightailed it to Mexico City to confront the widow of the CIA station chief. (Morley, p. 213) By using some not so subtle threats about Scott’s death benefits, he essentially emptied the contents of Scott’s safe, which amounted to 3 large cartons and 4 suitcases full of materials. This included a manuscript Scott was laboring on at the time of his death. By all indications, this cache included at least one tape of Oswald in Mexico City.

The last time Angleton’s proximity to the JFK case came up was near the end of his career. Senator Howard Baker had been on Sam Ervin’s committee investigating Watergate. His minority counsel, Fred Thompson, had uncovered a lot of material about the CIA’s hidden role in that scandal. (See Thompson’s book, At That Point in Time.) This, along with the exposure of MH Chaos in the New York Times, provided much of the impetus for first the Rockefeller Commission, then the Senate Church Committee, and the Pike Committee in the House of Representatives.

Morley leaves an important point out when he introduces this crucial historical episode, about which there are still documents being withheld from the public. As Daniel Schorr noted, at a closed press briefing in Washington, President Ford was asked why he had stacked the Rockefeller Commission with such conservative stalwarts—e.g., General Lyman Lemnitzer and Governor Ronald Reagan—and appointed Warren Commission lawyer David Belin as chief counsel. Ford replied that there might be some dangerous discoveries ahead. Someone asked him, “Like what?” Ford blurted out, “Like assassinations!” There was no discussion of what assassinations were referred to. However, since the NY Times article was about domestic CIA spying, and both Ford and Belin served on the Warren Commission, Schorr assumed it was about domestic assassinations. But when Schorr went to Bill Colby at CIA, the director did a beautiful bit of ballet on the issue, one that has never been properly appreciated. He told Schorr that Ford must have been talking about foreign plots. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 194)

This was a masterful stroke by Colby. It was now the CIA plots against Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Achmed Sukarno, and first and foremost Fidel Castro, which took center stage. Because many felt the Rockefeller Commission would be a fig leaf, it was superseded by Senator Frank Church’s and Congressman Otis Pike’s now near-legendary efforts. (For anyone interested in reading up on this fascinating subject, this reviewer recommends Schorr’s Clearing the Air. Schorr ended up being fired by CBS due to the influence of then CIA Director George H. W. Bush.)

As Morley notes, Angleton made some rather startling comments both in the witness chair and to reporters outside. Some of them follow:
- “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of government.”
- “When I look at the map today and the weakness of this country, that is what shocks me.”
- “Certain individual rights have to be sacrificed for the national security.” (All quotations from p. 254)
And, as alluded to above, there was the granddaddy of all Angleton quotes. In reply to a query about the JFK case, Angleton said, “A mansion has many rooms, I was not privy to who struck John.” (p. 249) That particular quote has sent many writers scurrying to understand what on earth Angleton meant by it. Perhaps the best effort in that regard was by Lisa Pease in her two-part essay on the spy chief. Her work benefits from the use of an episode that, for whatever reason, Morley ignored. This was the legal dispute between a periodical called The Spotlight and Howard Hunt, which was chronicled in Mark Lane’s book Plausible Denial. As Pease notes, Angleton did all he could to dodge questions about this incriminating episode. It originated over an article in Spotlight about a memo to Richard Helms. Angleton’s memo stated that they had to create an alibi for Howard Hunt being in Dallas on the day of the assassination. (Lane, p. 145)

Hunt denied that any such thing happened. And he won a lawsuit against Spotlight. But on appeal, that decision was reversed. In his book, Lane shows that, in fact, the CIA had tried to help Hunt in constructing his alibi. And contrary to skeptics, it turned out that Angleton himself had actually shown the memo to journalist Joe Trento. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 195) What is remarkable about this is that the Trento meeting happened in 1978, while the HSCA was ongoing. And Angleton had called Trento to specifically show him the document. As Lisa Pease wrote, the HSCA—through researcher Betsy Wolf—was closing in on Angleton’s association with Oswald through CI/SIG. In her opinion, this memo was meant to send a warning shot across the bow of his cohorts: If I go down, you are coming with me.

IV

To his credit, Morley spends quite a few pages on Angleton’s governance of the Israeli desk at CIA. There is little doubt that Angleton was a staunch Zionist who was not at all objective about the Arab-Israeli dispute. (Morley, p. 74) For instance, Angleton did not disseminate the information on the suspected construction of the Israeli atomic reactor at Dimona for U2 over-flights. (p. 92) Angleton leaned even further toward Israel because he suspected a growing alliance between Cairo and Moscow. Morley concluded this section with a good summary of how the Israelis betrayed America by stealing highly enriched uranium for their first bombs from a nuclear plant they purchased as a front near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (See “How Israel Stole the Bomb”)

My complaint about this section is that Morley does not sketch in how Angleton’s near rabid devotion to Israel was in opposition to President Kennedy’s policy in the Middle East. There were two specific aspects he could have highlighted in this regard. First, once he became president, JFK did all he could to forge an alliance with Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt in order to reach out to the moderate Arab states. (Philip Muelhenbeck, Betting on the Africans, pp. 125-27) And he was doing this simply because he felt that what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower had done previously—asking Nasser to join the Baghdad Pact, and cutting off funds for the Aswan Dam—had helped usher Nasser into a relationship with Moscow. An extreme cold warrior like Angleton would not appreciate this kind of diplomatic strophe. The other point that is missing here is that, as Roger Mattson noted in his book Stealing the Atom Bomb, Kennedy was adamant about there being no atomic weapons in the Middle East. (Mattson, pp. 38-40, 256) This was an integral part of his overall policy there in which he tried to be fair and objective to both sides. It would thus appear that Angleton and Kennedy held differing views on this issue. And after Kennedy’s murder, Angleton’s views won out first under President Johnson and then further with Nixon.

That point branches off into President Kennedy’s foreign policy toward Cuba and the USSR at the time of his death. Morley does some work on Angleton’s influence on Cuba policy as late as May of 1963. But he does not sketch in Kennedy’s policy shift toward Castro that came after the Missile Crisis; nor his attempt at a rapprochement with Khrushchev at that time. Today, all of this seems important in light of the attempts by certain suspect characters—some he has mentioned—to blame the assassination on either Cuba or Russia.

Also relevant in this regard is the production of the Edward Epstein authored book Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, which Morley deals with rather lightly. That book had one of the largest advances for any book ever in the JFK field. Today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, it would be well over a million, closer to two million. According to more than one source, including Carl Oglesby and Jerry Policoff, Angleton was a chief consultant on that project. Released during the proceedings of the HSCA, Epstein ignored all the evidence that showed Oswald was some kind of American intelligence operative. Instead, the book did all it could to insinuate that Oswald was really some kind of Russian agent, perhaps controlled by George DeMohrenschildt, and that Oswald did what he did for either the KGB or Cuban G-2. As Jim Marrs later discovered, Epstein employed a team of researchers. They were instructed to only look at any possible communist associations they could find. As Lisa Pease later discovered, in Epstein’s first edition of his previous book on the JFK case, Inquest, he acknowledged a Mr. R. Rocca, Who she suspected to be Ray Rocca, one of Angleton’s important assistants specializing on the JFK case.

To me, this area would seem at least as interesting and important as Mary Meyer, which Morley spends about ten pages on. To put it mildly, after doing a lot of research on this issue, I disagree with just about every tenet of his discussion of the matter. And I was more than a bit surprised when Morley even brought in the Tim Leary aspect of this mythology. As I showed, Leary manufactured his relationship with Meyer after the fact in order to sell his book Flashbacks. And if one reads the current scholarship on Kennedy’s foreign policy by authors like Phil Muehlenbeck and Robert Rakove, the idea that Kennedy needed Meyer to advise him on this is risible. (See my review of Mary’s Mosaic for the details)

Also disturbing in this respect is his use of Mimi Alford and her ludicrous, “Better red than dead” quote she attributed to JFK during the Missile Crisis. Greg Parker did a very nice exposé of Alford and the man who first surfaced her, Robert Dallek, back in 2012 that unfortunately is not online today. It showed just how dubious she was. But suffice it to say, anyone who reads, for example, The Armageddon Letters—the direct communications between the three leaders—can see how fast and hard Kennedy drew the line. (See the letter on pp. 72-73) The missiles, the bombers and submarines were all leaving and they would be checked as they left. In fact, as Parker pointed out, Kennedy had criticized the “better Red than dead school” less than a year before the crisis during a speech at the University of Washington. But he also criticized those who refuse to negotiate. Kennedy was not going to let the atomic armada stay in Cuba for one simple reason: he suspected that the Russians had done this to barter an exchange for West Berlin. Kennedy resisted that because he saw it as unraveling the Atlantic Alliance. Anyone who has read, for example, The Kennedy Tapes, will understand that. (See, for example, p. 518, where Kennedy himself makes the association.) What Kennedy conceded ultimately was very little, if anything. He made a pledge not to invade Cuba, which he was not going to do anyway; and he silently pulled missiles out of Turkey, which he thought were gone already. They were supposed to have been replaced by Polaris missiles, which they later were. So in his actions here, unlike with the Mimi Alford mythology, Kennedy simply lived up to his 1961 speech. Either Morley has little interest in Kennedy’s foreign policy or he has little knowledge of it.

The strength of the book lies in the tracing of the Oswald files through the CIA under Angleton’s dominion. No book on Angleton has done this before. And that is certainly a commendable achievement. Hopefully, this will become a staple of future Angleton scholarship, which I think the book is designed to do.
March 29, 2018
44 out of 102 districts in upcoming primaries have Democratic candidates with military-intelligence backgrounds

March 18, 2018
Michael Paine dies at 89

March 16, 2018
David Giglio interviews Lisa Pease on James Angleton and the JFK Assassination

March 1, 2018
Update on Richard Case Nagell: The New Files

by Dick Russell, at WhoWhatWhy

February 14, 2018

Tag: CIA

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Afterword

Notes

Works Cited Bibliography

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VII

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Introduction

France, Russia and Cuba nix the Warren Commission report

The hit team: Was it a mosaic of diverse groups and organizations, or a well-tuned, synchronized network?

Cuba pre-revolution: Enrique Cirules, The Mafia in Havana, a Caribbean Mob story, 2010

American style state-sponsored terrorism

Fabian Escalante’s investigation

The network factions

Structuring the Cuban exiles

Lee Harvey Oswald and the subterfuge according to Escalante

Letters from Cuba to Oswald—proof of pre-knowledge of the assassination

Jack Ruby’s links to Trafficante

Operation 40

The Mechanism’s Team Roster: The Big Leagues

Aftermath of the assassination

Risky Business

Trafficante’s links

David Phillips’ links to Oswald

Conclusion

Appendix: Cuban exile groups judged to be of average importance in CIA handbook

The author wishes to express his thanks to Kennedys And King and to Chris La May for their proofreading and assistance with graphics.

Addendum

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“The Dark Continent”

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A New Hope

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Hope Dims

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“Mad Mike”

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Plausible Deniability

Epilogue: Why Congo Matters Today

Addendum (05.01.2018)

Or, click here: RIF 176-10036-10001

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**Cuba pre-revolution: Enrique Cirules, The Mafia in Havana, a Caribbean Mob story, 2010**

**The Mechanism’s Team Roster: The Big Leagues**