Tag: CIA

  • America’s Last President, by Monika Wiesak

    America’s Last President, by Monika Wiesak


    The complete title of this new book is America’ Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy. Monika Wiesak begins her book by saying about John F. Kennedy that, after some study, “I realized that the public image of him as a careless, thoughtless, self -involved playboy obscured the depth of what he was trying to achieve and intensity of opposition he faced.” (p. iii) She then quotes Bob Dylan’s lyrics on the subject: “They killed him once, and they killed him twice.” She adds that it was not enough that Kennedy be murdered, his ideas had to perish with him.

    In an unprecedented manner, she then traces Kennedy’s anti-imperialist concepts all the way back to 1939, in an unlikely place: Palestine. Even at this early date, young Kennedy writes that the press was not giving the public the whole story. He wrote that it seemed to him that, even at this time, the Zionists wanted to take over Jerusalem, make it the capital of their new country, and to also colonize Trans-Jordan. Kennedy even described what would today be termed as false flag operations: where bombs were being set off in the Jewish quarter, by the Jews, and the British would be called in to fix the damage. (p. 6)

    In 1951, Kennedy visited Asia and the Middle East. He wrote that he felt it was wrong for America to support England’s oil interests in Iran, and her military interest in Suez. He also commented on the plight of the 700,000 Palestinians who were now refugees after the Nakba, and how this would not align itself with the promises of the Voice of America. (p. 8). About Indochina, he wrote that we must not sacrifice nationalism for anti-communism, since he thought the latter cause would fail.

    From here, Wiesak goes to Kennedy’s famous Algeria speech of 1957. She correctly comments on it as: “…to this day, it remains one of the most potent speeches opposing imperialism ever given by a U.S. senator.” (p. 11). She then acutely adds, not only was Kennedy an anti-colonialist, he was keenly aware of the substitute for colonialism, which was imperialism:

    Suspicion is aroused that when colonialism is ousted anywhere and the inevitable vacuum results, dollar control is prepared to move in, so that freedom would amount to little more than a change of masters. (p. 14)

    Some of the other ideas that Senator Kennedy advocated were: no nuclear proliferation, anti-censorship and loyalty oaths, and the government should intervene in the economy actively for the public good. This opening is astutely done since she adds that these concepts would carry over into his presidency. Therefore, “The following chapters detail what happened to a world leader whose priority was the people.” (p. 21)

    II

    The book proper opens with chapters on the CIA and then the Congo. Wiesak focuses on the Bay of Pigs and the deceptions hoisted by the Agency to get Kennedy to go along with that fey excursion. She also points out his deep regrets afterward about allowing himself to be gulled: “How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead.” (p. 28) Kennedy literally cried alone with his wife. In fact, she uses the book posthumously published by Caroline Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, as a major and revealing source. Which is something that this reviewer thinks is rather original. I have never seen that book used as extensively, or as pointedly, as Wiesak does here. Kennedy’s widow provided some insightful perceptions into her husband’s thinking. Wiesak deserves credit for mining these hidden and concealed jewels.

    In a separate chapter, she writes that presidential candidate Kennedy had sent Averill Harriman to Congo. He reported back to the senator that Patrice Lumumba, newly elected president of Congo, was a nationalist and not a communist and JFK should favor him. (p. 35). In return, Lumumba sent Kennedy a telegram on the day he was elected requesting that he oppose the secession of the state of Katanga and hoping he would cooperate with the United Nations.

    As we know, Lumumba did not live to see his request fulfilled. CIA station chief Larry Devlin recommended drastic steps to eliminate Lumumba before Kennedy took office. After all, Ted Kennedy had visited Africa and urged Lumumba be released from house arrest. (p. 37)

    After the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, was done away with in September of 1961, Kennedy essentially took control of UN policy in Congo. JFK ended up approving the UN military mission, code named Operation Grand Slam, which stopped the secession of Katanga in late 1962. In short order, after JFK’s assassination, Kennedy’s non-imperialist policy there was reversed by President Johnson. Instead of a democratically elected, constitutional republic, Josef Mobutu and Moise Tshombe ended up being despotic co-rulers. Mobutu lasted for about three decades. After he left, about 5.4 million Congolese perished between 1998-2007, partly as a result of two civil wars in the nineties.. (p. 42) Congo should have been a wealthy and independent republic, an example for the rest of sub -Sahara Africa. It ended up as a poverty racked failed state.

    Her chapter on Congo leads up to an overview of Kennedy’s entire Africa policy in Chapter 4. In 34 months, Kennedy greeted 28 heads of state from that continent. This contrasts with President Eisenhower, who met with less than a third as many in eight years. Kennedy’s point man on Africa, G. Mennen Williams, visited every country there except the Union of South Africa; because they would not grant him a visa. (p. 47) Kennedy’s aid package was also different: he sent a larger sum, and less of it was for the military. It is interesting to note, as she does, that Kennedy was criticized for spending too much time and effort on this Third World continent, both by fellow Democrats Dean Acheson and Henry Jackson, as well as the National Review and New York Times.(p. 54). But as Jackie Kennedy said, after she wrote a note to Kwame Nkrumah of Africa, “Jack made you feel how important it was to be polite…how awfully everyone had always treated the Africans, how Eisenhower had kept an African leader waiting for 45 minutes.” (p. 47)

    This policy was seriously altered by Lyndon Johnson. By 1969, Africa was getting 29% of the aid it received in 1962. (p. 56) When Kennedy was assassinated, Tommy Mboya of Kenya said the emotional impact was like a death in the family. The leaders of Africa repaid Kennedy by refusing to grant refueling rights to the Soviets during the Missile Crisis.

    In Latin America Kennedy created the Alliance for Progress, which broke with tradition. Since it was going to lend money at very low, or sometimes, zero interest rates. So there would not be a constant debt expansion problem. Which could only be cured by purchasing American products. Big business did not like the program. They deemed it one step away from socialism. (p. 61) But Kennedy liked the approach, and he visited Latin America three times, and had another visit scheduled in 1964. His wife had gone with him on two of these journeys south. A Wiesak quote from the First Lady crystallizes the Alliance for Progress, and what JFK was about:

    In Venezuela I went to an orphanage, and there was a picture in the paper, all the children were kissing me goodbye, and the headline was…we love Mrs. Kennedy, look, she permits herself to be kissed by these children. And that just hurt Jack so much….And he said you just don’t know the inferiority complex they have that the United States has given them. Jack believed all those things he was saying about our revolution is like yours; at last they had someone they could trust who felt about them. (pp. 63-64)

    Another example of how Kennedy felt about the Alliance for Progress, from Teodoro Moscoso:

    When he went around and saw the farmers, poor undernourished people who never in their life had ever had anything to their name except the clothing on their back, and assisted in handing them over the title to a piece of property, to a piece of land with a fence around it and with a house on it, he got a fantastic lift out of this. (p. 64)

    Jackie Kennedy also wrote that her husband would never have recognized the military juntas in Dominican Republic in 1963 and Brazil in 1964. (p. 64). Juan Bosch, the displaced democratic leader in the Dominican Republic later said of Kennedy’s murder: “The fatal bullet did much harm to you, but greater harm to us.” (p. 66)

    III

    One of the finest aspects of America’s Last President, is Wiesak’s discussion of Kennedy’s economic program. She starts off by noting that celebrated financial journalist/author Seymour Harris wrote that, Kennedy knew more about economics than any president he covered. Since he wrote columns on the subject from 1943, and published over 30 books dating from 1930, that takes in a lot of territory.

    Wiesak notes that, when Kennedy took office, the unemployment rate was 7.7 %. By 1964, it was under 5%. Under Kennedy, the Gross National Product increased by 20%, Industrial Production went up by 22 % and Personal Income increased by 15%. (p. 68) Kennedy greatly wished to stimulate growth and increase productivity. He thought this would contribute to a greater share of wealth for all, but would allow for more to be given to those suffering who were the neediest.

    JFK tried to stimulate economic production by granting a tax credit for new plant and equipment; and also providing for a general tax cut. Kennedy’s tax cut would give the largest percentage of relief to the poorest third of the population and to small business. (p. 71) Kennedy also wanted to keep interest rates low and to increase defense contracts for small business. Things like the Area Redevelopment Act, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and Manpower Development and Training Act, these all poured money into distressed areas that needed it the most. In this regard, Kennedy made much more surplus food available to the poor. In fact, in just two months, he doubled the number of recipients. (p. 75). What else did he do to ease the problems of the poor and not well off?

    1. Extended span of unemployment benefits
    2. Increased the minimum wage
    3. Increased by almost 30% the amount of Social Security benefits
    4. Pushed for a Medicare bill
    5. Sanctioned the VISTA program in poverty stricken areas

    At his last Cabinet meeting, Kennedy uttered the word poverty seven times. The amazing thing about Kennedy’s robust economic program is this: during his administration inflation averaged just 1.7 %.

    Who would be against such a successful program? Well, the denizens of Wall Street of course. Fortune magazine described Kennedy’s policies as a “master government plan.” (p. 80). One of the reasons why people like the owner of that magazine, Henry Luce, bitterly attacked Kennedy was this: he wanted to close off foreign tax havens and loopholes, “which permit and encourage industry to invest overseas.” He even advocated for a withholding tax on dividend payments, since he thought this would be more fair to wage earners and small business. (p. 82-83). Unlike what we had under the likes of Reagan, Bush and Bill Clinton, Kennedy knew where the money was located and wanted to entertain ways to make tax collection more graduated i.e. by eliminating provisions that would allow special tax preferences for wealthy individuals transferring property as gifts. . (p. 83)

    In her examination of Kennedy’s economic program she does not ignore the goals of Kennedy against the Federal Reserve. Which he tried to neutralize through the appointment of James Saxon as Comptroller of Currency. (Click here for more detail.)

    She also examines the now legendary Steel Crisis, where the magnates of Big Business decided to launch a frontal assault on Kennedy’s policies. One of the strategies Kennedy used to defeat his opponents was to begin giving large defense contracts to smaller steel companies, who were not part of the cartel. (p. 90) Kennedy did not think that rigging prices was the way the free market worked. Even after the price fixing case was broken, Bobby Kennedy launched a law suit which made the culprit companies pay maximum fines in 1965 for price fixing from 1955-61. (p. 91). Kennedy made more than one pithy comment on the crisis after it was over. Consider how he characterized the conflict:

    …a small group of men turning against the government and the economy because the government would not surrender to them. That is the real issue. (pp. 94-95)

    Later he added the following:

    If to stop them saying we are anti-business, we are supposed to cease enforcing the antitrust laws, then I suppose the cause is lost. (p. 96)

    Wiesak closes off this section with what is probably the best precis of Kennedy’s environmental program I have seen. Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, requested that the White House help publicize Rachel Carson’s upcoming book, Silent Spring. The book had been excerpted in The New Yorker in June of 1962. Kennedy then announced he would be investigating pesticides. Kennedy did not back down when the chemical companies started attacking the book. (pp. 98-99)

    As the writer specifies, this is related to Kennedy’s prior address on what he called Consumer Rights. He made this speech on March 15, 1962. Kennedy advocated for more truth in packaging laws, among other consumer rights. Today March 15th is celebrated as World Consumer Rights Day. This was all in keeping with what Kennedy saw as his primary duty, which was protecting the interests of the public. (p. 113)

    IV

    Wiesak, of course, addresses Kennedy’s epochal confrontations with the Pentagon and CIA over Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia.

    About the first, before taking action, Kennedy asked to speak to the American ambassador to Laos, Winthrop Brown. After this talk, where Kennedy said he wanted to hear his observations, not the State Department’s, Brown later said, “I mean, I just thought I’d been in the presence of a great man.” (p. 129)

    The Pentagon wanted to send in troops to stop the Pathet Lao. Specifically, about 140,000 of them. As Max Taylor later wrote, it was President Kennedy who resisted sending in troops. (p. 131) Kennedy insisted on a neutralist solution in 1962.

    In Vietnam, Kennedy sent John Kenneth Galbraith to give him a dissenting opinion from his advisors, who again, wanted to insert combat troops. Kennedy knew Galbraith would give him a radically different opinion, which he did. Kennedy then passed on that opinion to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and this was the beginning of the president’s withdrawal of all advisors, which would be begun in late 1963 and be completed in 1965. (p. 133)

    Kennedy was determined to enact this plan without Pentagon interference. So he forbade any higher ups in the military to visit Saigon without being cleared by the State Department. That paved the way for NSAM 263 which began the withdrawal program with one thousand advisors to be taken out by the end of 1963. Again, LBJ did a reversal and it was not long before the OPLAN 34A program was underway. These patrols, really provocations—featuring attack speedboats accompanied by communications destroyers–paved the way for the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Which was then used as a casus belli for the USA to declare war on Hanoi. With Americans fighting the brunt of the war.

    Sukarno of Indonesia liked some of the speeches Kennedy had made in the 1960 election against Richard Nixon. Sukarno had convened the first non-aligned meeting of Third World countries in Indonesia about five years previous. For this and other reasons, covert operations chief Dick Bissell and the CIA did not care for Sukarno. Bissell once said that “Lumumba and Sukarno were two of the worst people in public life I’ve ever heard of…I believed they were dangerous to the United States.” (p. 141). This is how he justified planning to eliminate such “mad dogs”.

    Contrary to the CIA and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Kennedy approved of the non-aligned movement. (p. 140) And when Sukarno met with JFK in Washington in 1961, he told the president that 90% of the communist party in Indonesia, the PKI, were really nationalists. The two leaders discussed this issue of non-alignment and neutrality in the Cold War. This is something that both JFK and Dag Hammarskjold agreed upon, specifically in relation to both Congo and Indonesia. (p. 142) Wiesak now reviews the important natural resource information about West New Guinea, today called Papua. How, unknown to either Sukarno or Kennedy, that region was even richer than Katanga in precious metals and oil. In a dispute with the Dutch, who likely did know, Kennedy worked to transfer that land over to Sukarno in 1962. This is something the CIA actually had declared off limits, since they felt it would aggrandize Sukarno’s stature. (p. 144). As Wiesak notes, through the work of Greg Poulgrain, we also know that CIA Director Allen Dulles very likely did know about the enormous amount of resources in Papua.

    Kennedy had planned on visiting Jakarta in 1964. He also planned on a large foreign aid package to be sent to Sukarno at the end of 1963. Both of these were eliminated by LBJ. The relations between the two countries now became much more strained and difficult. And it culminated in eventual overthrow of Sukarno, which began in late 1965. No one knows for sure how many were slaughtered in 1965 and continued into 1966; estimates range from a half million to a million killed. As Wiesak observes, there is plentiful evidence to indicate the CIA was involved in this bloody affair. (p. 148) As scholar Bradley Simpson told Oliver Stone in his interview for JFK: Destiny Betrayed, in all probability, this would not have happened if Kennedy had lived.

    V

    From here, the writer discusses two instances where Kennedy worked with Khrushchev in order to stop what could have ended up in serious conflicts, perhaps escalating into atomic warfare. The two episodes are, of course, Berlin in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. In the former, she notes how both Berlin commander Lucius Clay and General Bruce Clarke of US Army Europe, were trying to provoke a showdown over the Berlin Wall. (p. 150) The Kennedy brothers negotiated a way out of the stand off which included removing tanks at the Brandenburg gate. Kennedy told William Walton: “I am almost a peace-at-any-price president.”

    This was further illustrated in October of 1962 during the Missile Crisis. Wiesak notes that Kennedy felt the Russians had installed the medium and long range missiles behind his back over the issue of Berlin. (pp. 153-54) That is, they would demand the giving up of West Berlin over negotiations for removal of the missiles from Cuba. Which is something that Kennedy would not deal over since he thought this would be the beginning of the rolling up of the Atlantic alliance. She also notes that Kennedy was taken aback when Russian foreign minister Andrei Gromyko lied to him about offensive weapons in Cuba.

    At the beginning of the crisis, there were two alternatives presented to Kennedy: 1.) A surgical strike against the missile silos, and 2.) An even larger air strike followed by an invasion. But against the majority, Kennedy decided on a blockade. Kennedy stole a quip form Lincoln, saying that his one vote outnumbered all those in opposition. (p. 161) To JFK it was the alternative that had the least amount of casualties attached, and it also minimized the prospect of war, since it allowed for negotiation.

    Wiesak dutifully comments on Kennedy’s discussion of the issue with the Joint Chiefs. He first said to advisor Ted Sorenson, “They all want war.” He then commented “…if we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong.” (p. 159). His brother Bobby Kennedy, of course sided with the president and managed to convince Doug Dillon of Treasury to accept the blockade.

    From here, the boundary lines for a negotiated solution were constructed. UN representative Adlai Stevenson suggested using the American missiles in Turkey as a bargaining chip. To which Bobby Kennedy said, this must only come at the end of negotiations. (pp. 162-63). At first, the Russians wanted a pledge that the USA would not invade Cuba. They later added they would also like the Turkish missiles removed. (Which Kennedy thought were already gone.) Under these parameters, Bobby Kennedy met with Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. RFK told him that the Turkish missiles would be removed six months later. He also added this: the Joint Chiefs are spoiling for a fight. According to Dobrynin Bobby said, “If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.” (p. 165). Make no mistake, Kennedy was losing support among his advisors, especially when Lyndon Johnson chimed in and said the USA was giving up way too much in the negotiations. (The Kennedy Tapes, by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, p. 587). The visit to Dobrynin, with RFK’s warning, probably turned things. The next day, Nikita Khrushchev announced he was going to begin removal of the missiles. But as Wiesak writes, Kennedy was so determined to get a deal that, if Khrushchev had not sent the telex, the president was going to negotiate through U Thant at the United Nations–and this would have included the Jupiter missiles in Turkey. When it was all over, JFK told John Kenneth Galbraith that, in relation to bombing the missile silos, “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.” (p. 161)

    Which was fortunate for us all. Because at a much later seminar on the subject, held in Havana in 1992, some important information was revealed. First that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the medium and long range missiles were already installed at the time of the blockade. Therefore, the maneuver had little if any strategic impact. Secondly, that there were short range tactical nuclear missiles on the island and the Soviet commanders had permission to use them if the Americans invaded. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was on hand for this event. When he learned of this information he was so stunned he tore off his headphones and then waved his arms in disbelief. ( p. 167; see also The Armageddon Letters, by James Blight and Janet Lang, p. 279)

    This directly relates to Wiesak’s section on nuclear disarmament. As author Roger Mattson wrote in his book Stealing the Bomb, no president since has been so single-minded and determined about cutting the number of atomic weapons and limiting proliferation than JFK was. Kennedy actually started a new agency for that purpose, the U. S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 1961, he said before the UN: “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” (Wiesak, p. 173)

    Kennedy then outlined a six step process to begin a world-wide disarmament program. Marcus Raskin, who worked on nuclear studies for Kennedy, recommended a 30% cut in arms and JFK liked that idea. (p. 178) Kennedy envisioned a general and complete disarmament that would take place in stages, with no atmospheric testing. This was the background to the famous Peace Speech at American University in June of 1963. That speech was more admired in Russia and Cuba than in the USA. But it did kick start the Partial Test Ban Treaty of September, 1963. Castro liked this move so much that he said he was willing to declare Barry Goldwater his friend if it would help elect Kennedy. And JFK started planning for a visit to Moscow in his second term. (pp. 185-86)

    VI

    As rich as the book is, I think its crowning jewel is Wiesak’s discussion of Kennedy’s approach to Arab-Israeli relations. In synoptic form, it is the best I have seen anywhere. Since no president since has come close to duplicating Kennedy’s policy in vision and fairness, it is important to describe it. And to also show how it was dismantled by his successors. To a point where it became unrecognizable.

    One of the mainstays of Kennedy’s policy was UN Resolution 194, sometimes called the Johnson Plan. Middle East specialist Joseph Johnson had devised a plan which would settle the refugees of the Nakba. They would have the option of returning to where they lived, staying where they were at, or going elsewhere– and the UN, meaning largely the USA, would cover the costs.

    To put it mildly, Israel’s President David Ben Gurion did not like the plan. To be blunt about it, he said, “Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man.” (Wiesak, p.189) In order to keep the Johnson Plan alive, when the Russians sent equipment to Egypt in 1962, Kennedy had to agree to sell defensive missiles to Israel. Something he was uncomfortable doing. (p. 191). In fact Johnson quit his position in the fall of 1962.

    In the face of much resistance, Kennedy continued to push the plan in bilateral talks. In fact, as Wiesak notes, Kennedy supported the plan through November of 1963. Something the Arabs appreciated, but which Israeli leaders, like Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol, were disturbed by. (p. 193)

    The second mainstay of Kennedy’s Middle East policy was his insistence on keeping up a relationship with the man he saw as the potential leader of a Pan Arab movement, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. This was done through a series of letters, of which no one knows the exact number exchanged. Kennedy thoroughly understood Nasser’s impressive stature in the Arab world through episodes like the Lavon Affair and the Suez Crisis. In fact, JFK spent much time and effort in the writing of his correspondence, at times redrafting it 5-6 times. Another hallmark of Kennedy’s was he really studied the history of the Middle East. Diplomats would visit with him and emerge saying, “He knows more about our problems than I do.” (p. 197) In fact, by 1963, some senators were criticizing Kennedy for being pro-Nasser. (p. 201) Coupled with this was the Kennedy brothers opposition to the American Zionist Council, RFK wanted them to register as a foreign lobby. (p. 205) As Wiesak notes, this was the beginning of the formation of AIPAC.

    The third rail of Kennedy’s policy in the Middle East was his opposition to the acquisition of atomic weapons by any nation. In March of 1963, Kennedy even drafted a National Security Action Memorandum on the subject. (pp. 210-11) Kennedy was so determined to halt any such program that in April of 1963, when he happened to run into Shimon Peres, Israel’s deputy of defense at the White House, he conducted an impromptu interrogation of him on the subject. After which Kennedy commented to Charles Bartlett, “Sons of bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability.”

    This led to a showdown between Kennedy and David Ben Gurion. Kennedy insisted on biannual inspections of what he suspected was a nuclear weapons reactor at Dimona. Ben Gurion denied this and instead insisted on a bilateral security agreement. To Kennedy, this would have put his relationship with Nasser on the line. It was simply a non-starter. In June of 1963, after Kennedy sent him two letters saying aid to Israel would be placed in limbo if there were no inspections, Ben Gurion stepped down. After which CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton visited him at least once in Israel. (p. 217)

    Needless to say, LBJ completely reversed Kennedy’s very careful policy. He ended up cutting aid to Egypt and boosting aid to Israel—supplying them with tanks and aircraft. In other words, offensive weapons. In fact, the sum of military aid Johnson gave to Israel in 1966 surpassed the cumulative sum given to the state since its establishment in 1948! (p. 204) Needless to say, this caused a breakage in US/Egypt relations. The imbalance was epitomized with the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. George Ball of the State Department cogently commented on this episode. He said that by allowing Israel to cover up what really happened there, LBJ was telling the Israelis that nothing they did would cause America to refuse their bidding. (p. 204)

    Monika Wiesak has written a remarkable and valuable book. It is the kind of volume you can send to friends and relatives for the holidays. It is the best book in its category in fourteen years, since Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable.

  • Creating the Oswald Legend: Appendix

    Creating the Oswald Legend: Appendix


    Appendix

    The Grand Chess Board: actors and players


    CIA Officers

    Allen Dulles

    Director of the CIA

    Dulles was held responsible by JFK for the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion and was fired afterwards. Dulles never forgot or forgave JFK for the humiliation suffered. Kennedy decided to return West Irian to Indonesia from Dutch colonial rule. What Kennedy did not know, but Allen Dulles did, was that West Irian was a region extremely rich in minerals, even richer than Katanga. In the 1920s and 1930s, Allen Dulles was a lawyer at the giant corporate law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. He represented the Rockefellers there and he knew that Indonesia had huge mineral and oil potential. One of the oilfields in Sumatra exploited by Caltex was the size of similar oilfields in Saudi Arabia. In 1936, a joint Dutch and American expedition—including explorer/geologist Jean Jacques Dozy—was organized by Allen Dulles through Sullivan and Cromwell. That expedition discovered two enormous mineral deposits in West Irian. The American firms that financed the expedition were two divisions of Standard Oil. One of the two colossal deposits was called the Ertsberg and the other the Grasberg. Both were extravagantly rich in gold, silver, and copper. Just the gold content was much larger than the wealthiest gold mine in the world, then located in South Africa. Allen Dulles was close to the DeMohrenschildt family and transferred George DeMohrenschildt to West Irian to work on Standard Oil’s drilling, since the region had one of the largest oil deposits in Indonesia. Dulles lied to Kennedy on several occasions regarding the Sino-Soviet split. He told him it was not real, but a Cold war ploy to fool America. It was real and Dulles was using Indonesia as a wedge to further the split between China and the Soviet Union. From 1958, his first attempt to overthrow Sukarno, Dulles was planning on regime change. That would have allowed his clients to control the oil, gold, copper, and silver reserves of Indonesia rather than go to the citizenry of Indonesia, as Kennedy and Sukarno had planned. The policy of wedge against China and the Soviet Union would have been disrupted. Dulles had used religious organizations like the Unitarians to create humanitarian front organizations in order to conceal OSS and later CIA covert operations to destabilize Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia.

    James Jesus Angleton

    (Chief of CIA Counterintelligence)

    Angleton’s obsession and mission was to catch a Soviet mole that allegedly had infiltrated the Agency. His secretive mole hunt unit, the Special Investigations Group (SIG), held a 201 file on Oswald prior to the assassination. John Newman thought that Oswald was an off-the-books agent for Angleton. In 1960, he used Oswald in a mole hunt to find out who had betrayed the U-2 secrets that led to its shoot down. Angleton did not find any mole, but he used the mole hunt as an alibi to cover his role in the U-2 incident, which resulted in the Paris Peace Summit cancellation. Similarly, he used the Oswald legend and an imposter to catch a mole had betrayed the CIA operations against Cuba in Mexico, even contacting the head of KGB assassinations before he himself tried to get to Cuba. Angleton had the excuse to manipulate information and to lower Oswald’s profile in a way that it would not raise suspicion until after November 22. Angleton, who John Neman believes was privy to the conspiracy to assassinate the President, had to design a fool-proof plot. The idea was to make it appear that the Cubans and Soviets manipulated Oswald in Mexico City in such a way to use him in the assassination of Kennedy. Angleton knew that the exposure of this plot would plant a WWIII virus in Oswald’s files that would halt any real investigation, in order to prevent a possible nuclear war. To achieve that, Oswald’s profile had to be lowered for the six weeks before the assassination. Angleton had to come up with a cover story, so no one would ever question his role in the plot. Again, Angleton would fail to catch a mole, but he had used the mole hunt to cover his true role that resulted in the murder of a U.S. President.

    David Atlee Phillips

    (CIA Covert Action/SAS Counterintelligence)

    David Phillips was the Chief of Cuban Operations and Covert Actions in Mexico CIA station and also worked for the SAS/CI. He and James McCord first targeted the FPCC back in 1961. He dangled an American student, Court Wood, into the FPCC by pretending to be pro-Castro interesting in starting a new FPCC chapter, something that Oswald tried to emulate two years later both in New Orleans and Mexico. Prime suspect for handling Oswald and the Mexico City incident involving Oswald’s visits to the Cuban and Soviet Consulates. Lied far too many times about the events that took place to the HSCA investigators. On October 1, 1963, a diplomatic pouch was sent to CIA HQ addressed to a Michael Choaden. This was an alias for Phillips, that way he controlled all the materials in both Mexico and Washington. His assets like Alvarado tried to implicate Oswald in the assassination as a Cuban agent. In New Orleans he met with Banister, Ed Butler, and Sergio Arcacha Smith.

    E. Howard Hunt

    (Propaganda expert and an Officer of CIA’s Domestic Operations Division in 1962 under Tracey Barnes)

    Bagley revealed to Malcolm Blunt that E. Howard Hunt was in the Soviet Division in 1962. There was no sign he ever worked in Soviet Russia Division. Blunt discovered that as part of a mole hunt, Bruce Solie of the Office of Security/Security Research Staff handed over Security and Personnel files to the FBI on various suspected moles. One of these was CIA staffer Peter Karlow. Those files contained information that Hunt was attending parties with the Karlows. Blunt is of the opinion that Hunt was spying on his own colleagues and that this would explain his sudden appearance in the Soviet Division. He also suspects that Hunt could only have been there under the instructions of Angleton, although Angleton always denied any relationship with Hunt. Later, Angleton revealed to author J. Trento that Hunt was in Dallas on the day of the assassination and that Hunt “had possibly been sent there by a high-level mole inside the CIA.” Trento believed that Angleton was trying to hide his own connections to Hunt and that it was him that had sent Hunt to Dallas. Hunt was the founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) that was so prominent in Oswald’s contacts in New Orleans. In 1968, Hunt employed Cubans from the Trafficante drug trafficking network to eliminate French smugglers and the old French Connection by redirecting the heroin trade from Marseille to Southeast Asia and Mexico to supply the US.

    William K. Harvey

    (CIA Chief of Foreign Intelligence Division D)

    Head of the CIA’s executive action ZR/RIFLE assassination program. On his notes wrote that “Corsicans recommended Sicilians lead to Mafia.”

    He also had security clearance for “Project Rock” a codename for the U-2 plane. According to a CIA document, they re-evaluated Harvey’s file in respect for approval to get security clearance to “Project Rock.” Mark Wyatt, Harvey’s Deputy in Rome, revealed that Harvey was in Dallas in November 1963. According to Wyatt, he had bumped into Harvey on a plane to Dallas sometime before the assassination. When he asked Harvey what was doing in Dallas, he replied vaguely, “I am here to see what’s happening. To be fair to Harvey, he was not in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Wyatt said that they were both attending a Gladio meeting in Sardinia, Italy, when they heard about the assassination. Later that afternoon, Wyatt found Harvey collapsed in his bed after drinking martinis. Malcolm Blunt revealed that in August 1963, Harvey wanted to meet with Clare Boothe Luce, some months prior to the assassination.

    Tennet H. Bagley

    (CIA Chief of Soviet Russia/Counter Intelligence)

    Told researcher Malcolm Blunt that Oswald was a witting false defector. Bagley had nothing to say about Kostikov’s role as KGB assassination officer. Yet on November 23, 1963, submitted a memo describing Kostikov as “an identified KGB officer…in an operation which is evidently sponsored by the KGB’s 13th department responsible of assassinations.” It is worth mentioning that Bagley was transferred in 1963 from the Bern station in Switzerland to Langley and promoted as Chief of SR/CI, just in time for the suppression of Kostikov’s KGB role.

    William Larson

    (CIA Chief of the Information Management Staff)

    Revealed to HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf that the Office of Security did not open 201 files and that a 201 file should be opened whenever a subject accumulates at least five documents. Oswald’s file had 12 items and yet a 201 file was not open. Larson also revealed that the Office of Security worked closely with Angleton’s Counter Intelligence staff.

    Richard M. Bissel

    (CIA Deputy Director of Plans)

    Involved in the development of U-2 & A-12 spy planes, CORONA satellites, CIA Liaison with Air Force and Defence industry. Brought Helliwell back from the Far East to organize a similar network of drug trafficking and bank laundering to finance the war against Castro. One of the architects of the Bay of Pigs invasion

    Robert Gambino

    (CIA Office of Security Chief)

    Revealed to HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf that the CIA Mail Logistics responsible for incoming documents bypassed the General Filing System and sent all the Oswald information to the CIA Office of Security instead of the Soviet Russia division

    Raymond Rocca

    (Angleton’s Deputy in CIA Counter Intelligence)

    Cabled Luis Echeverria on November 23rd concerning the relationship between Oswald and Sylvia Duran who took over the Mexico investigation from the FBI and the WC, before Helms had assigned Angleton his liaison duties with the Commission. the day after the assassination, a CIA agent escorted Elena Garro de Paz to the Vermont Hotel. In other words, within 24 hours, Angleton and Rocca are controlling Duran, a prime witness to Oswald not being in Mexico City, and Elena Garro, a witness who would eventually say that Oswald was having an affair with Duran.

    Ann Egerter

    (Counter Intelligence/Special Investigations Group Officer)

    Worked under Birch O’Neil and his Deputy Scotty Miller. She opened a 201 file on Oswald in 1960 after a State Department request about US defectors to the USSR. She wrote Oswald’s middle name Henry, not Harvey, and the slot that is labeled Source Document is filled in with the acronym CI/SIG, which is not a document. Finally, in the notes below Dottie Lynch is still waiting for the file. She works in the SR division where the file should have been placed originally.

    Edward G. Lansdale

    (Air Force Major General and CIA affiliated, member of the American Security Council)

    Malcolm Blunt believes that although Lansdale was a military man, he was working mainly for the CIA.  Blunt mentioned that Lansdale resigned or retired temporarily from the army in October 1963. A short time later he returned to the army and he was promoted. The man who was pushing for his promotion was none other than Allen Dulles himself. Not only that but Lansdale headed the first mission in Saigon in 1954 and this mission was a CIA creation. John Newman found out that after his retirement, Lansdale visited his friend Sam Williams in Denton, Texas, which was near Dallas around the time of the assassination. He was Nelson Rockefeller’s clandestine associate in Southeast Asian propaganda activities. Lansdale was an adviser to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund/Special Studies Project and was appointed head of new counterinsurgency office at the Pentagon after the Bay of Pigs. William K. Harvey disliked Lansdale, thought of him as a security risk and could not work with him. If any of the two was part of the assassination planning certainly did not involve the other.

    Paul Helliwell

    Helliwell was a member of the OSS and later of the CIA in the Far East; he was one of the most prominent members of the China Lobby. He was the originator of the CIA’s off-the-books accounting system and nicknamed Mister Black Bag. His mission was to assist Chang Kai-Shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) army in Burma to invade China. This army managed and controlled the opium traffic in the region. Helliwell created two front companies to help KMT to carry out its war and the drug trade. One was Sea Supply in Bangkok and the other was CAT Inc., later Air America in Taiwan. Helliwell had organized a drug trafficking network supported by banks to launder CIA’s drug profits in the Far East. Helliwell’s main objective was to cement the CIA’s relationship with organized crime. Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante were both planning to invest in the Far East by bringing heroin back to the States. Helliwell established banks in Florida and became the owner of the Bank of Perrine in Key West, “a two-time laundromat for the Lansky mob and the CIA”, and its sister Bank of Cutler Ridge. Lansky would deposit money into the Bank of Perrine, reaching the US from the Bank of World Commerce in the Bahamas. Lansky also used the small Miami National Bank, where Helliwell was a legal counsel, to launder money from abroad and from his Las Vegas casinos. Peter Scott claimed that Helliwell worked with E. Howard Hunt, Mitch WerBell and Lucien Conein on developing relationships with drug dealing Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and became CIA paymaster for JM/WAVE to finance Chief of Station Ted Shackley’s operations against Cuba.

    Anne Goodpasture

    Anne Goodpasture was a CIA officer from Staff D posted to the Mexico CIA station. She tried to disguise her role in retrieving photos each day. But Lopez and Hardway found out the man she named in this function only did the legwork for Goodpasture. They finally discovered that Goodpasture was responsible for photographic and electronic surveillance. The translating team said that they did not review all photographs from the Soviet Embassy, only what Goodpasture would allow them to see, and all such photographs were under her control. They also revealed that, although Goodpasture was an assistant to station chief Win Scott, she was a closer assistant to David Phillips. She provided the photographs of the mystery man in Mexico. When Goodpasture was questioned about it, she replied that it was the only photograph of a non-Latin person taken on October 1, 1963. But Lopez and Hardway discovered that the photo was taken on October 2, 1963. Dan Hardway described her as ‘’a lying, conniving bitch. And if there was any justice in this world, she would be in jail.’’

    David Sanchez Morales

    Morales was also known as ‘’El Indio’’ was the chief of operations at the CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami, operations involving training paramilitary teams to infiltrate and invade Cuba. His haunting words to his friend ‘’we took care of that S.O.B.’’ have convinced may researchers that Morales was involved in the assassination. Bill Simpich believes that had used his Cuban intelligence forces, called AMOTs, to impersonate Oswald and Duran. It is unlikely that Morales would have been able to manipulate the Oswald files and foresee all the subsequent events that led to the assassination. . It is more likely that Morales would have also taken orders from Angleton and not the other way around.

    Dorothe Matlack

    Assistant Chief of Staff of Intelligence (ACSI)

    The CIA and Army Intelligence worked together to form the Caribbean Action Center (CAC) for collecting intelligence from Cuban refugees. One of the major participants in this group was Dorothe Matlack, Assistant Chief of Staff of Intelligence (ACSI) for Army Intelligence and Liaison to the CIA. Matlack had joined the Interagency Defector Committee (IDC) in 1953. This involved State, DIA, Army, Navy, Air Force, FBI, and CIA. She also cooperated with Tony Czajkowski of the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division and CIA Defector Coordinator George Aurell and worked with the CIA in analyzing reports made by notorious defectors such as Anatoly Golitsyn. On May 7, 1963, Matlack and Czajkowski met with George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne.

    CIA Operations (may include Cuban Exiles and the Mafia)

    CIA DOD and Air Proprietaries

    The DOD would recruit anti-Castro Cuban exiles with the purpose of breaking into foreign embassies and United Nations missions that were suspected of being friendly and sympathetic to Castro’s regime. Another important aspect of the DOD was his affiliation with the CIA proprietary organizations. The most infamous and most important CIA proprietary company was the Pacific Corporation Holdings, located in Washington D.C., that was incorporated in Dover, Delaware, a State with a friendly tax law that allowed companies formed in Delaware but not operating there to not pay state corporate tax.

    Pacific Corporation was the parent company of the CIA air proprietaries, Civil Air Transport Co., Ltd., CAT Inc., later renamed Air America Inc.; Air Asia Co., Ltd.; the Pacific Engineering Company; and the Thai Pacific Services Co., Ltd. Air America took over all the operations in South East Asia, while Air Asia operated from Taiwan.

    Another air proprietary linked to Pacific Corporation was Southern Air Transport (SAT), incorporated in Miami and operated in both the Far East and Latin America. Most importantly, the air proprietaries like CAT/Air America not only provided their services to facilitate the opium trade in the Golden Triangle, which included Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, but also were involved in the replacement of elected governments in Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Air America did not only operate for the CIA, but they were doing contract work for large oil companies in the Southeast Asia

    Trafficante, Lansky, Anti-Castro Cubans and drug trafficking

    Santo Trafficante’s main areas of influence were Florida and the Caribbean, operating casinos in Cuba. After 1959, large numbers of anti-Castro Cubans moved to Florida and Trafficante used them to take control over Florida’s bolita lottery, a Cuban numbers game. This worked as a cover, since these Cubans became Trafficante’s new group of heroin couriers and distributors, who were unknown to American law enforcement agencies. They used drug smuggling to finance their operations—trafficking cocaine from Latin America and later heroin from Marseille. Manuel Artime, E. Howard Hunt’s protégé and head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) in Miami, was involved in drug trafficking to finance his war. The DOD under Barnes and Hunt would protect the Cuban drug network and Angleton was aware of it. Another CRC member of New Orleans, Sergio Arcacha Smith, who was associated with Hunt, Phillips, and Banister, was involved in contraband operations from Florida to Texas, specializing in drugs, guns, and prostitution.

    In 1968, Trafficante visited Hong Kong and Southeast Asia to examine the possibilities of importing heroin from those regions to the US via Mexico and Latin America

    DOD & Angleton’s CI operations

    Orchestrated the Mexico charade and a mole hunt when Oswald defected in the USSR.

    Angleton’s Counter Intelligence was obliged to ask the FBI to assist tracking Soviet illegals, moles, and spies entering the US. But with the creation of the new division, he could conduct his operations with the DOD without having to inform Hoover about it. Malcom Blunt believes that “DOD would have been ripe for exploitation purposes. And of keen interest to Angleton for positive counterintelligence usage. DOD was somewhere other agency elements could drop personnel into and thus be a vehicle for disguised operations: such as Howard Hunt’s PCS/DOD in 1962 when he turned up in the Soviet Russia Division.

    CIA Counter Intelligence & Police Training

    The CIA’s Counter Intelligence Staff was responsible for the Police Group (CI/PG). This CI/PG would be in constant liaison with the OPS of USAID and its training facility, the International Police Academy (IPA) in Washington. The CI/PG would exchange daily information with USAID on training programs with IPA and tours for foreign police/security representatives sponsored by the CIA’s Area Divisions. James Angleton wrote a memo explaining how USAID cooperated with CIA in law enforcement training and operations. CIA’s 1947 chapter forbade any “Police or Subpoena power” and only the FBI had the right to legitimately train the domestic Police forces. Phillip Melanson acquired documents showing that the CIA provided training to Metropolitan Police. This ranged from seminars, briefings, workshops in bugging, clandestine action, disguise techniques, lock picking, equipment loaning, and explosives detection.  One of the documents revealed that CIA agents posed as cops and had received police badges and ID cards as early as 1960 to pursue “foreign intelligence targets”, as the CIA claimed. The CIA would also contact “friendly” police departments to ask for discreet handling of CIA personnel when in trouble and also to check on CIA employees and other people. Some of the police departments having received training and equipment were New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Miami, San Diego, and Minnesota. Dallas was not in those documents, but the name of some police departments was blanked out and Melanson believed that one of them was Dallas. He reasoned that Dallas would have not refused the CIA’s generous offer of training., especially when Mayor Earle Cabell was a CIA asset and his brother was a CIA Deputy Director and the force was full of right wingers and anti-Communists, who were always eager to unmask subversives and spies.

    New Orleans

    Guy Bannister

    Banister’s office was located in the Balter building in New Orleans. In the same building were located the offices of a Cuban exile organization, the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), and Sergio Arcacha Smith was the New Orleans representative. When Banister moved to 544 Camp Street, Arcacha Smith rented an office for CRC in the same building. It was CIA officer E. Howard Hunt who had helped create this organization. Gordon Novel has said that he met Arcacha Smith in 1961 at Banister’s office upon Ed Butler’s recommendation and, at that meeting, was a person who fit the description of David Phillips. When Oswald moved to New Orleans, it is possible that his job there was related to industrial security in search for subversives. He was employed by the Reily Coffee Company, but he also worked covertly for Guy Banister. William Monaghan, an ex-FBI agent, was the company’s Vice President and specialized in industrial security. Alfred Claude, the man who hired Oswald, left Reily and went to work in Chrysler’s aerospace division, which was based in NASA’s New Orleans facilities. Emmett Barbee, Oswald’s supervisor, and two other Reily employees, Dante Marachini and John Branyon, went on also to work for NASA, more likely in the industrial security division. Oswald was frequenting a New Orleans’s garage and had revealed to its owner, Adrian Alba, that he was going to work for NASA. Bill Nitschke, a Banister associate, confessed that Banister had given an offer to NASA to get a contract for industrial security in NASA’s New Orleans facilities.

    That Banister’s investigating agency was doing industrial security work can be indicated by the testimony of former Banister associate, Joseph Oster. He told L.J. Delsa, an HSCA investigator, that Banister was using two sources to seek out subversives and Communists, FIDELAFAX and the American Security Council.

    David Ferrie

    When Oswald was in New Orleans, he was in contact with Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw.  When Oswald was fifteen, he met David Ferrie in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), where Ferrie was a Captain. In 1961, Ferrie and an exiled Cuban, Sergio Arcacha Smith, were part of the CIA’s training and preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion.  Jim Garrison was the first official to present witnesses that had seen Oswald in the company of David Ferrie and Clay Shaw in the areas of Clinton and Jackson, ninety miles north of New Orleans, Oswald and his two companions went to the neighboring village of Clinton to register. It happened to be the day when a drive to register black voters—organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—was on. When the Cadillac appeared, most voters thought it might be the FBI, so they noticed the car and its occupants. Several witnesses, from simple voters, to the Registrar, and the local Sheriff, testified that they identified the three people as Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw. The Sheriff even approached the car and asked the tall grey haired driver for his license. It turned out to be Clay Shaw of the International Trade Mart of New Orleans. Why did Shaw and Ferrie take Oswald to Jackson to seek a job at the hospital and register as a voter?

    Clay Shaw

    Garrison was contacted by a witness who revealed to him that a Mr. “White” of Freeport Sulphur company had contacted him to discuss a possible Castro assassination plan. The same witness had heard Clay Shaw or David Ferrie talking about some nickel mines in Cuba. Another witness, Jules Ricco Kimble, told Garrison’s office that a Mr. “White” along with Shaw and David Ferrie had flown in a plane to Cuba to make a deal regarding some nickel mines. It could be a coincidence, but Johnny Roselli testified that he “represented himself to the Cuban contacts as an agent of some business interests of Wall Street that had nickel interests and properties around in Cuba and I was getting financial assistance from them.” This, of course, was when Roselli was associated with the CIA and trying to arrange the murder of Fidel Castro. It would have been interesting if Roselli had named those nickel interests in Cuba, but it may be more than an assumption that he was talking about the same nickel mines involving Freeport Sulphur. regarding Clay Shaw’s contacts with the Domestic Contact Service (DCS). One of these documents stated Clay Shaw had been granted covert security approval for project QK/ENCHANT. Newly discovered documents revealed that the CIA was examining the prospect of using Banister’s agency as a cover company for project QK/ENCHANT. Based on ARRB investigation, QK/ENCHANT was a cryptonym for “permission to approach” and utilization for cleared contact purposes. These probably indicated the use of individuals and companies as contact cover for CIA proprietary organizations. Author Bill Davy showed the above document to former CIA officer Victor Marchetti and, after examining it, he said to Davy, “That’s interesting…he was doing something there.” He added that Shaw would not need a covert security clearance for DCS.

    Ed Butler

    Ed Butler, the founder of INCA, the Information Council of the Americas. Oswald’s appearance on Bill Stuckey’s New Orleans radio show “Carte Blanche”. There, he talked about his political views and debated with Ed Butler and Carlos Bringuier. The result of this interview was a record production by Dr. Alton Ochsner’s INCA, an album with the title, “Oswald: Self-Portrait in Red.” On the front cover was a drawing of Oswald’s face and on the back of the album was the headline “I am a Marxist” with the date of August 21, 1963, at the bottom were photographs of Congressman Hale Boggs, psy war specialist and Ochsner employee Ed Butler, and Dr. Alton Ochsner himself. Ed Butler did not only have connections to the previously discussed American Security Council, but he was also in contact with General Edward Lansdale and CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell. After Kennedy’s assassination, Jim Garrison learned about Oswald’s activities in New Orleans and his contacts with Butler and INCA. Butler got so scared that he packed all the INCA files and parts of Banister’s files and moved to Los Angeles, where he found employment with Patrick J. Frawley, a prominent member of the American Security Council

    Alton Ochsner

    (Esteemed Surgeon Doctor in New Orleans)

    Malcolm Blunt revealed that Ochsner was a cleared CIA source since May of 1955 and the CIA had sources inside Ochsner’s large New Orleans clinic. He had the reputation of an extreme right-winger: anti-welfare, anti-Medicare, and racist. He was the President of the International House (IH) and he was also a member of the International Trade Mart (ITM), where he worked with Clay Shaw, who was once a Managing Director of the International House. He was a member of the exclusive New Orleans Boston Club and he had been invited to the secretive west coast Bohemian Club. During his time at Tulane University, he managed to attract financial support from the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. Ochsner’s INCA organization was getting financial support from Standard Oil, the Reily Foundation, Mississippi Shipping Company, the Hibernia bank, and ITM.

    Various Persons of Interest

    Priscilla Johnson

    She interviewed Oswald in his hotel in Moscow while he was waiting to be relocated. Next day she had a dinner with McVickar. He wrote a memo where he stated that Priscilla had told him that Oswald would be trained in electronics but Priscilla later denied that she did. When Josef Stalin died, his daughter Svetlana defected to the States and stayed with Priscilla’s father, Stewart Johnson. Priscilla helped Svetlana write her memoirs. Following JFK’s assassination, Priscilla was privileged enough to spend time with Marina Oswald in the summer and fall of 1964. As an important witness to testify for the Warren Commission, Marina was not allowed to come in contact with anyone, living under Secret Service protection. How Priscilla managed to stay with her when nobody else could approach her is a question that has not been answered. Priscilla had one more privilege: to write Marina’s biography. Senator Richard Russell, a member of the Warren Commission, was not convinced that Oswald was guilty or that he had travelled to Mexico, but an unexpected incident helped change his mind. Marina testified that she found a ticket to Mexico inside a magazine while writing her biography with Priscilla. In other words, after numerous searches, the FBI and the Dallas Police could not find it, but Priscilla and Marina did. In 1977 Priscilla published her book titled Marina and Lee. Marina revealed that she did not contribute much to the book; it was Priscilla who had to discover most of the facts and put them in order. Priscilla never stopped trying to convince the public that Oswald was guilty. She appeared before the HSCA, along with her attorney and a written affidavit. The Committee found this odd, since she was not being accused of anything so the affidavit and the lawyer were not necessary.

    Yekaterina Furtseva

    Yekaterina Furtseva was an interesting character that some believe was the most powerful woman in the Soviet Union and Khrushchev’s lover. She even had authority over KGB’s head, Vladimir Y. Semichastny, threatening to replace him with his deputy whenever he displeased her. She loved everything American and she was primarily concerned about her family’s well being. In 1993, it was revealed that Oswald had a champion in the Politburo, and it was none other than Furtseva. In The Man who Knew too Much Russell reported that “Furtseva urged that the young ex-Marine be allowed to stay on … and sought to keep KGB chief Semichastny from recruiting Oswald.” Later Semichastny concluded that Furtseva was running her own shop.

    Johnny Roselli

    John Martino’s claimed that the “Anti-Castro Cubans put Oswald together.” Larry Hancock in his recent e-book “Tipping Point” presents a case where CIA Cuban exile teams in JM/WAVE were trained to kill Castro, but later shifted their focus to Kennedy after they learned that JFK was secretly negotiating to restore relations with Castro. To them, this constituted the ultimate betrayal. It is likely that such information would have been passed down from William Harvey to Johnny Roselli. Therefore, in this scenario, those most likely involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy were Roselli, Harvey, David Morales, Rip Robertson, Felipe Vidal Santiago, Roy Hargraves, John Martino, CIA paramilitary officer Carl Jenkins, and Cubans like Chi Chi Quintero, Felix Rodriquez, Carlos Hernandez, Nestor Izquierdo, and Segundo Borgas.

    Pawley-Bayo mission (CIA crypt Operation TILT). This was a sea voyage into Cuba. It was allegedly designed to exfiltrate Soviet scientists who wanted to defect and testify before Senator James Eastland’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. That testimony was to state that the Russians still had missiles present in Cuba.

    Apart from millionaire William Pawley and Cuban exile Eddie Bayo, others that took part in the operation were John Martino, Eugenio Martinez, and CIA agent Rip Robertson. Pawley had asked CIA Deputy Director Pat Carter and Ted Shackley of JM/WAVE to help him with the mission. Pawley would have used his private yacht, while David Morales supervised the mission. Operation TILT failed, since the exile Cubans disappeared on their way to Cuba and were never heard from again.

    Peter Dale Scott has written that the real purpose of the mission was to assassinate Castro. Jack Anderson reported the Johnny Roselli story that the assassination team was captured in Cuba and Castro “turned them” and sent them to Dallas to assassinate Kennedy instead. At one point, Bayo had asked for help from a wealthy Kennedy supporter, Theodore Racoosin, who later reported that someone from within the White House—possibly Robert Kennedy—had authorized him to organize meetings with Cuban exiles and learn details of CIA Cuban operations. Scott believes that this operation was used to blackmail the Attorney General, so he would not investigate his brother’s assassination.

    John Martino

    John Martino was an exiled Cuban who worked in a Havana Casino owned by Santo Trafficante Jr. back in 1956. He was imprisoned in Cuba between 1959 and 1962. When he returned to the States, he became involved in the anti-Castro cause. He took part in the notorious Operation Tilt, he had both Mob and CIA connections. Later in life, he admitted to his business partner Fred Claasen that the anti-Castro Cubans put Oswald together and tried to frame him as a Castro assassin in a plot to murder President Kennedy. Those Cubans posed as Castro agents and it is more likely that Oswald played along to reveal their agenda as part of his mission to smoke out subversives and pro-Cubans. The plan was to fly him out of the country and kill him en route, possibly on his way to Cuba, in such a way that would prove Castro and Cuba were pulling Oswald’s strings. John Martino’s claimed that the “Anti-Castro Cubans put Oswald together.” On November 26, the CIA and Mafia-affiliated Frank Sturgis said to the Sun-Sentinel newspaper that Oswald had connections to the Cuban Government and that he had made a call to the Cuban Intelligence. The same day John Martino, another CIA and Santo Trafficante Jr. ally, stated in an interview that he had contacted Cuban G-2 in Mexico City and had distributed FPCC leaflets in Miami. Martino also revealed that Castro killed Kennedy to retaliate for a plot devised by Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to replace Castro with Huber Matos, who was in a Cuban jail.

    Dallas

    Max Clark

    Max Clark was a retired Air Force Colonel and he used to work at General Dynamics as industrial security officer. Clark had also received covert security clearance from the CIA for “Project Rock” while working for General Dynamics. A CIA document had linked “Project Rock” to Project Oarfish, a code for the manufacturing of the U-2 airplane. Max Clark was working closely with I.B. Hale, a former FBI agent and later head of General Dynamics industrial security. It was Virginia, wife of I.B. Hale, that had helped Oswald to get a job at Leslie Whiting on July 1962. George DeMohrenschildt was encouraged by Max Clark and J. Walton Moore of the CIA to befriend Oswald and become his mentor. It was George DeMohrenschildt who helped Oswald get a new job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall (JCS) after he quit his job at Leslie Welding. JCS was doing contract work for the U.S. Army Map Service and that work was related to U-2 flights over Cuba. Oswald got the job four days before President Kennedy was shown pictures of missiles in Cuban taken by the U-2.

    Dallas Police officers

    Reserve officer Kenneth Croy was near Main Street and asked a policeman outside the Courthouse if he was needed assistance with the investigation of the President’s murder. Croy claimed that the policeman replied that he was not needed; so he decided to go home. He heard on the radio that an unidentified officer was shot at 10th and Patton. He went there and  ”discovered” a wallet allegedly given to him by a civilian. Strangely enough, he never filed a report and never asked the name of the witness he talked to or the name of the person that gave him the wallet.

    Captain Westbrook, the Chief of the Police Personnel Department, was at the TSBD when he heard on the radio that a police officer had been shot in the Oak Cliff area. He decided to go there to investigate a murder; which was odd since he was a personnel officer and not a homicide detective. FBI agent Hosty said that his colleague, FBI Agent Bob Barrett, who was present at Tippit’s murder scene, told him that Captain Westbrook asked him: “Have you ever heard of a guy named Lee Harvey Oswald?” Barrett said no. Westbrook then asked him, “How about Alek Hidell?” Then Barrett said that he saw Westbrook holding and searching a wallet, which was supposed to be Oswald’s wallet. This wallet would link Oswald to Hidell and to the weapons that killed both Tippit and Kennedy. However, the Warren Commission gave a different version concerning the wallet: that it was found on Oswald after he was arrested at the Texas Theater. Westbrook’s “personnel” work was not over, since he heard on the radio that a suspect was seen entering the Texas Theater looking suspicious, without paying a ticket. So the personnel officer went there and witnessed the arrest of Oswald. He then gave the order to drive the suspect to the police station. So, the Chief of Personnel had managed to be present at the three major crime scenes: Dealey Plaza, 10th and Patton, and the Texas Theater. It was a remarkable work of sleuthing for a Personnel Officer.

    Sergeant Gerald Hill was the man who first reported on a radio call at 13:40 that the shells found at the Tippit crime scene were fired from a 38 automatic, not a 38 special. Later when testifying for the Warren Commission, he denied under oath that he made such a call; but twenty years later he admitted to Dale Myers that he made the call after all. When Hill returned from the Texas Theater, he sat down to write a report regarding Oswald’s arrest. Captain Westbrook informed him that Oswald was not just the suspect in Tippit’s murder, but also for President Kennedy’s assassination.

    Senator Thomas Dodd

    Senator Thomas Dodd was one of the major forces who opposed Kennedy’s Congo policy. He initiated hearings in the senate on the “loss” of Congo to Communism. Senator Thomas Dodd, another member of the powerful American Security Council. Dodd was the Chairman of the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee trying to legislate the use of interstate mail orders for weapons. Dodd’s subcommittee started its hearings two days after Hidell ordered the Smith & Wesson gun and the Manlicher–Carcano was also one of the weapons investigated. Senator Dodd was also member of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee—headed by the racist, right-wing Senator James Eastland of Mississippi—which was investigating the FPCC. Dodd called the FPCC “the chief public relations instrument of the Castro network in the United States” and believed that both the Socialist party and the Communist Party had infiltrated the committee. It might have been possible that Oswald, as a member of a private investigating firm, was contacted by Dodd’s committee to infiltrate these three organizations. The son of one of Senator Dodd’s friends, who had been hired as an investigator to do work for the subcommittee, was involved in a strange incident in Mexico, causing a disturbance in a strip club. He was arrested by Mexican police for having a gun and posing as a police officer. The same man was arrested for carrying three weapons and ammunition in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, on a weekend that President Kennedy was there. After the assassination Dodd promoted the false information that Oswald had been trained at a KGB assassination school in Minsk.

    Michael and Ruth Paine

    Michael Paine was related to the Forbes and Cabot families. Michael’s mother, Ruth Forbes, was a very good friend of Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles former lover Michael’s stepfather was Arthur Young, a famous inventor and one of the creators of Bell Helicopter. That connection helped his step-son Michael Paine get a high tech/high security clearance to work at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth. Ruth Paine’s father, William Avery Hyde, and his wife Carol were prominent members of the Ohio Unitarians. An employee of theTexas Employment Commission wanted to inform Oswald that they had found him a job at Trans Texas Airport. Ruth Paine answered that he was not home and so they called back the next day to hear that Oswald had taken a job elsewhere. Ruth never informed Oswald about this job, even though it paid about $100 more per month than the TSBD one. The backyard photographs of Oswald posing with a rifle were found by the police at the Paines’ home. But a week later, another piece of evidence turned up out of the blue— on November 30. It was a note found inside a book incriminating Oswald in the attempted murder of General Walker, which is bizarre since Oswald, for seven months, had never been considered a suspect in that case. Ruth Paine also provided other evidence: a betting guide and a English-Spanish dictionary that allegedly proved that Oswald had visited Mexico. Ruth was also responsible for discovering the well-known “Kostin letter“ allegedly written by Oswald saying that he met Comrade Kostin (meaning Kostikov) in Mexico City. some of these items were discovered after the Dallas Police searched the Paine home and garage—twice! A good example would be the Imperial Reflex camera which was allegedly used to take the backyard photographs. That camera was not on the original Dallas Police inventory list. It was found by Ruth two weeks after the assassination. 

    Criminal Intelligence Section (CIS)

    This unit was also involved in Presidential protection by helping to identify and neutralize potential dangerous local threats. The CIS had compiled a list of twelve TSBD employees who were unaccounted for but the CIS list had put on top the name of Harvey Lee Oswald. Melanson believed that a common CIA practice was to keep two files on certain individuals, an overt file and a covert file that usually had the first two names transposed. It was L. D. Stringfellow, a CIS officer who provided the 112th MIG the incriminating information that Oswald had defected to Cuba in 1959 and was a card-carrying member of Communist Party. CIS was not only aware of Jack Ruby’s gun running activities, but withheld this information. They also investigated Ruby’s shooting of Oswald and found nothing sinister. In 1963, it was one of the three sections of Police’s Special Services Bureau, along with Vice and narcotics, and their offices were not located at the City Hall, but at the Dallas Fair Grounds, where Jack Crichton’s underground Emergency Command and Communications bunker was located. In the force were officers George Lumpkin, Jack Revill, Stringfellow, and W. P. Gunnaway. Colonel Jack Crichton, was the head of the 488th Army Reserve Intelligence unit in Dallas. According to Russ Baker, Crichton revealed “in a little-noticed oral history in 2001, there were about hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.”  Crichton was the man who, through Lumpkin, arranged for his friend Ilya Mamantov to translate Marina’s testimony and, as we have shown earlier, to falsely connect Oswald to a dark and scopeless rifle. Researcher Bill Kelly believes that Crichton’s 488th Army Reserve Intelligence unit was connected to ACSI-Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, U.S. Army Reserves and that Captain Lumpkin and Army Reserve Colonel Whitmeyer were ACSI officers.

    Eastern Establishment

    Percival Brundage

    Brundage was a major Unitarian Church officer from 1942-1954 when the Unitarian Church was cooperating with, first, the OSS, and later the CIA. He was also president of the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) from 1952-1955 and president of the American Friends of Albert Schweitzer College from 1953-1958, the College in Switzerland were Oswald was supposed to visit and study. Most importantly, Brundage became the most prominent member of the Bureau of Budget (BOB) during the Eisenhower presidency. Brundage was responsible as the head of BOB for drafting the congressional legislation for the creation of NASA. Through his BOB activities he was involved with the U-2, the satellite programs, the Pentagon and the CIA. Brundage and one of his associates, E. Perkins McGuire, were asked to hold the majority of a new airline stock “in name only.” They both agreed to act on behalf of the CIA. The airline was none other than Southern Air Transport, which was used in paramilitary missions in the Congo, the Caribbean and Indochina.

    Frederick Osborn Jr.

    Frederick Henry Osborn Sr. was a trustee of Princeton University and a member of the Rockefeller Institute and the Carnegie Corporation. Osborn was a Director of the Population Association of America, the American Eugenics Society, and of the Association for Research in Human Heredity. He was also an associate of Dean Acheson. John D. Rockefeller III appointed Osborn the Population Council’s first Director Osborn, along with Wickliffe Preston Draper, founded the Pioneer Fund; the purpose was to advance pro-eugenic research and propaganda. In 1937, Osborn stated that the Nazi’s racial sterilization program was “the most important social program which has ever been tried.” His son Frederick Osborn Jr. and his wife Nancy who provided character references for Ruth and Michael Paine, when the FBI was investigating them for their close relationship to Marina and Lee Oswald.

    Henry Luce

    Owner of the Time, Life, Fortune empire. Henry Luce was the man who invented the term “American Century,” which involved global American dominance projected by American businesses leading a worldwide economy. Anti-Communist and member of the American Security Council.

    C. D. Jackson

    He was an expert in wartime propaganda, public relations, advertising, publishing, psychological warfare, black ops, and he was an opinion maker. During the Eisenhower Presidency, he was the Special Assistant to the President for International Affairs and he had been an editor-in-Chief of Henry Luce’s TimeLife, and Fortune magazines. He bought the Zapruder film for Time Inc. When Jackson viewed the film he withhold it from public viewing. On 29 November 1963, Life published a special issue on the assassination that included only thirty-one selected frames, which did not allow the readers to understand the sequence and direction of the shots, especially the fatal head shot. Marina Oswald was isolated at the Inn of the Six Flags by the Secret Service. James Herbert Martin was the manager and later became Marina’s agent, also arranged for Marina to pen a book. That was arranged from C. D. Jackson and Life’s Edward K. Thompson, through their Dallas representative Isaac Don Levine. It was Allen Dulles who had urged C. D. Jackson to have Marina’s story written by Levine, but that book never materialized. C. D. Jackson was indirectly connected to the Pawley-Bayo mission (CIA crypt Operation TILT).

    Joe Alsop

    Joseph Alsop of the New York Herald Tribune called LBJ and suggested to him the need for a presidential commission, but the President argued that it would ruin the Texas and FBI investigations. Alsop tried to convince Johnson otherwise and offered the information that Dean Acheson, the former Secretary of State, was also in favor. Alsop was indirectly admitting that he was acting in collusion with Acheson. Alsop inflated a minor incident in Laos involving north Vietnamese invaders. Alsop arrived in Laos in time to report about a “massive new attack in Laos” by “at least three and perhaps five new battalions of enemy troops from North Vietnam.” Later he wrote of “aggression, as naked, as flagrant as a Soviet-East German attack on West Germany.”

    Dean Acheson

    He was an American Statesman and lawyer. On December 4, 1963, Dean Acheson praised LBJ for appointing the Warren Commission and LBJ replied that “we did the best we could and I think we’ve got Hoover pretty well in line.” It was McCloy, Lovett, and Acheson that later advised LBJ on Vietnam and recommended escalation of the war.

    Eugene Rostow

    Dean of the Yale Law School, called Bill Moyers at the White House on November 24, 1963, to suggest the possibility of a Presidential Commission which would include distinguished citizens. It should be noted that Rostow told Moyers there was someone else in the room when he called, but he did not say who it was. Rostow told Moyers that he had already spoken to Katzenbach about three times, but he was speaking directly to Moyers because Katzenbach “sounded too groggy so I thought I’d pass this thought along to you.” Katzenbach wrote his memo as a result of his conversations with Rostow.

    Rockefeller Business Interests World Wide

    The Rockefeller brothers made huge profits from the Vietnam war since they had ownership and shares in big defense contractors like Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Boeing, and General Motors. That last company gained more than $1.3 billion in military contracts in 1968. But these were short-term profits for the Rockefellers. The real deal was in reconstructing the infrastructure after the war had ended and financing would be needed to achieve that. Under this mistaken assumption, in 1965, Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank opened a branch in Saigon—a huge fortress with no windows but thick glass blocks and stone walls that could withstand mortar attacks. A major force behind the Vietnam War was the Rockefeller’s Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group (SEADAG). That membership included Rockefeller Brothers Inc., Chase Manhattan Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Standard Oil of Indiana. SEADAG’s Samuel P. Huntington believed that cheap labor created by forced relocation would help Saigon win the conflict. Anthropologist Jules Henry explained that the war would create cheap labor that would be able to compete with the lower productive costs of Chinese and Japanese industry and that “the destruction of the Vietnamese countryside is the first, and necessary, step to the industrialization of Vietnam and nationalization of its agriculture. US corporations had a big stake in Belgium’s monopoly of copper and uranium in Katanga province of Kongo through Tanganyika Concessions Limited: a company in which the Rockefellers were shareholders. The Rockefellers and the Guggenheims held stocks in the Belgian diamond mining operation in Kasai province, Northwest of Katanga. Their investment was $20 million, while their Belgians partners had invested only $2 millions. Kennedy’s Treasury Secretary Douglas C. Dillon also had a stake in Congo. He was an investor in Laurence Rockefeller’s textile mill and also in Laurence’s automobile import company in Congo. Two Rockefeller companies were also doing oil business in Indonesia: Stanvac (jointly held by Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socony-Mobil, Socony being Standard Oil of New York); and Caltex, (jointly held by Standard Oil of California and Texaco.) Freeport Sulphur, a Rockefeller controlled company, would be hugely rewarded by the West Irian mineral mines. Freeport Sulphur subcontracted Bechtel to handle the engineering aspects of the mining. Freeport was later renamed Freeport McMoran. It became one of the two largest mining corporations in the world. The eventual wealth mined from the two deposits topped 100 billion dollars. David Rockefeller opposed JFK’s economic and Foreign policies.

    LBJ and friends

    LBJ reversed JFK’s foreign policy in Vietnam/Southeast Asia and around the Globe. LBJ’s friends from Texas were to be hugely compensated from the war that the new president was promoting. The Texas located company manufacturing Bell helicopters—where Michael Paine worked—would profit immensely from their use in Vietnam. General Dynamics plane production—located in Fort Worth—would gain huge contracts during that war. Another of LBJ’s friends who profited from the Vietnam War was David Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository. In early November, 1963, Byrd and his investment partner James Ling bought $2 million worth of stock in Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), a defense company they owned. It may have been a coincidence, but the fact is that the navy awarded LTV the first major contract in February 1964 to construct the A7 Corsair fighter plane for operations in Vietnam. Peter Dale Scott calculated that this sum of money was worth $26 Million by 1967. LBJ was a close friend to the Brown Brothers, who owned a construction company named Brown and Root. In 1962, a consortium of private American construction corporations made up of Raymond International and Morrison-Knudsen (RMK) were building Vietnam’s infrastructure. But the construction was limited. The original contract was for $15 million. But in the beginning of 1965, the sum had reached $150 million. RMK could not keep up with the demands of construction. They added to their team two large American companies, Brown and Root and J.A. Jones, to form the largest ever consortium, RMK-BRJ. This consortium took the largest share of all Vietnam construction work, around 90 percent of the total. The US Navy granted RMK-BRJ a cost-plus-fixed-fee to quickly prepare Vietnam for a major U.S. military presence.

    Go to Part 1

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    Go to Part 3

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    Go to Part 5

    Go to Part 6

    Go to Conclusion

  • Creating the Oswald Legend: Conclusion

    Creating the Oswald Legend: Conclusion


    In 1959, the US intelligence services, and notably the CIA, were trying to infiltrate revolutionary movements like Castro’s government and sympathetic organizations for purposes of infiltration and discreditation. Lee Harvey Oswald had all the earmarks of being prepared with that purpose in mind. In all likelihood, Oswald was a creature of American intelligence who was sent to the USSR to help him build what is called in espionage parlance, a ‘Legend’. He was a defector with Marxist ideology who may or may not have betrayed technical information about the U2 spy plane to the Russians.

    The plan was to return to the United States and use this Legend to infiltrate and smoke out subversives: Communists and Castro supporters, not only in public and private life, but also in defense contractor industrial plants. His primary target would have been the newly organized Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was active in both New York and the Los Angeles area. In the LA area, the first people who established the organization attended Robert Fritchman’s First Unitarian Church. Coincidentally or not, one of his Marine buddies, Kerry Thornley, was also attending that Church. It is most likely then that Thornley, Fritchman, or both provided Oswald with information about the Albert Schweitzer College (ASC), a quite obscure higher learning institute in Switzerland and encouraged him to enroll and study there. For when Oswald made out his passport application to Europe, this was one of the destinations he listed. After being contacted by the Director of the college, his mother thought he might be attending classes there when he left the United States after being discharged from the Marines.

    The ASC was created by the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) and was supported by the Unitarian American Friends of Albert Schweitzer College. Percival Brundage, an important figure of the Eastern establishment, was one of the Directors of the Unitarian American Friends of Albert Schweitzer College. Brundage was also the Director of the Bureau of Budget (BOB) during the Eisenhower presidency and along with another Unitarian, James Killian, they were involved in the U-2 and CORONA satellite projects, the latter which was intended to replace the U-2 plane.

    Brundage held major stocks in Southern Air Transport, which Paul Helliwell, a CIA man in the Far East, had established. Helliwell was responsible for arranging and managing the drug trafficking in the Golden Triangle to finance CIA operations.

    As Senator Richard Schweiker stated, Oswald had the fingerprints of intelligence all over him. If there was one person whose fingertips were more dominant than anyone else, that person was James Jesus Angleton. He and his ultra-secretive CI/SIG unit were keeping tabs on the young Marine since his defection to the Soviet Union and maybe earlier. Thanks to Malcolm Blunt, we learned for the first time of the magnificent work of HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf. Her work was nowhere to be found in the HSCA report or in any typed memorandum. Malcolm could only manage to get her handwritten notes when they were declassified in 1998. Her notes helped solve a riddle that had plagued the critical community since 1995 and the release of John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA.

    When Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, he made plain his intent to dangle the U-2 spy plane secrets to the Soviets. Yet his defection and this dangerous offer did not cause the opening of a CIA 201 file. That did not occur until 13 months after. Years later, when Richard Helms was asked about this delay, he found it inexplicable. He replied, ‘’I am amazed.’’

    Betsy Wolf was most probably doubly amazed when she discovered this odd discrepancy. She set out to find a solution to his mystery. In an HSCA interview of a CIA officer named William Larson, he revealed that if there were more than five documents on someone at the CIA, a 201 file should be opened. Betsy was intrigued by this, because after Oswald’s defection, there were more than five documents concerning him. And yet a 201 file was not opened.

    But there was another paradox about Oswald’s files at CIA. Larson revealed that the documents about Oswald should have gone to the Soviet Russia Division (SR), but instead they went to the Office of Security (OS). Malcolm Blunt found out that the OS was cooperating with Angleton’s CI/SIG, or mole hunters unit. Betsy Wolf found out that there a dissemination of files form upon request from CIA offices. In Oswald’s case, someone from OS deliberately directed his files to the Office of Security instead of the General Filing System.

    Betsy Wolf’s notes included a new information about a never-before-seen interview of Robert Gambino, then Chief of the CIA’s Office of Security. Wolf interviewed her in the latter half of 1978, as the HSCA was closing down. Gambino told her that it was CIA Mail Logistics, a component of the Office of Central Reference (OCR), that was responsible for disseminating all incoming documents. Mail Logistics should have sent all Oswald documents to the SR division through the General Filing System. That was bypassed. Instead, they were sent to the OS. This was important information, because it revealed that someone had rigged the system at the time of, or even before, Oswald’s defection.

    It is possible that this was done for the purpose of a mole hunt, after former KGB officer Pyotr Popov was placed under surveillance. Popov was a double agent who had informed the CIA that information about the U-2 project had been compromised. It is possible that Angleton, who monitored Oswald more closely than anyone else, decided to use him in an to start a mole hunt to find out the alleged Soviet spy who had possibly betrayed the U-2 secrets that led to the alleged 1960 shootdown of the Gary Powers flown U-2 over the USSR., although some observers, like the late Fletcher Prouty, did not think this was how Powers was downed.

    Angleton would initiate this mole hunt as a cover to conceal the true purpose of the U-2 incident, which was probably the cancellation of the Paris Peace Summit between Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev. The CIA and the Military Industrial Complex were willing to sacrifice the U-2, since its utility was coming to an end, ready to be replaced by a newer airplane and satellites. A scapegoat was needed, and the Soviet mole—who was never found—was just that. The CIA had the excuse to officially search for him, without success.

    Three years later, Angleton would initiate a similar mole hunt in Mexico City after Oswald’s, or an impersonator’s, visit to the Cuban and Soviet Embassies, in order to reveal a Soviet mole who had helped the Cubans impersonate Oswald and expose an official CIA operation to embarrass the FPCC in countries where it had support. The victim this time was the receptionist at the Cuban embassy, Sylvia Duran.

    The Mexico City operation was used to conceal Kennedy’s assassination by forcing a major cover up that would ensure that the identity of the perpetrators would never be known. John Newman named Angleton as the CIA officer who was most likely the architect of the Mexico City plot and orchestrated the drama that evolved down there.

    What Betsy Wolf revealed was that Ray Rocca, Angleton’s most trusted associate, had cabled Luis Echeverria on November 23, 1963, to inform him about Oswald’s and Sylvia Duran’s relationship. What is striking about this is that it occurred long before Helms assigned Angleton to take over the Mexico City investigation from John Whitten, thus before Angleton became liaison to the Warren Commission. The day after the assassination, the CIA took Elena Garro de Paz under their protection. In other words, the CIA had both the accuser, Elena, and the accused collaborator Duran, under their control within 24 hours of Kennedy’s assassination. It is important to note that Philip Shenon used Elena’s story about Duran being a communist aide to Oswald quite liberally in his Commission supporting book A Cruel and Shocking Act.

    Besides Betsy Wolf’s revelations, the Angleton fingertips could have been laid upon Dallas, if one considers the strange behavior of certain Policemen like Gerald Hill and Captain Westbrook. A declassified CIA file revealed that the CIA Police Group had been transferred from the NE Division to Angleton’s CI staff. It was the Counter Intelligence Police Group (CI/GP) that was running the CIA’s police programs.

    After Angleton was fired by William Colby, he made the following bizarre remark to reporter Seymour Hersh: “A mansion has many rooms and there were many things going on…I am not privy to who struck John.” This comment was cryptic and it is difficult to interpret it with precision. Did Angleton mean that he was out of the loop and someone else within the CIA was responsible for the assassination, someone even higher up than him? Or, in a similar fashion to the mole hunt, was he trying to deflect all responsibility from himself and blame it on the ever-elusive mole? Do we have any indications that Angleton has ever admitted that his famous mole hunt was just an excuse and a cover?

    In part 5, we documented that Angleton revealed to Joseph Trento that E. Howard Hunt was in Dallas on the day of the assassination and possibly sent there by a high-level mole inside the CIA. Trento believed that Angleton was trying to hide his own connections to Hunt and that it was him that had sent Hunt to Dallas. If we consider Trento’s explanation, then we have an indication that Angleton was using the mole hunt as a cover whenever it was suitable to cover his sinister operations.

    Hunt himself vehemently denied that he ever was in Dallas that day, but Mark Lane proved in the Liberty Lobby trial that Hunt was contradicting himself. Hunt had testified to the Rockefeller Commission back in 1974 that on 11/22/1963 he was with his wife and children in Washington D.C. Lane asked him if he recalled his testimony at the first Liberty Lobby trial, where he had admitted that his children were upset when allegations came out that he was in Dallas that day and he had to reassure his children that he was not in Dallas that day and had nothing to do with the assassination.[1] Then Lane asked him a question that Hunt could not adequately answer:

    Mr. Hunt, why did you have to convince your children that you were not in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, if in fact, as you say, a fourteen-year-old daughter, a thirteen-year-old daughter, and a ten-year-old son were with you in the Washington D.C. area on November 22, 1963 and were with you at least for the next forty eight hours, as you all stayed glued to the TV set?’[2]

    Did Oswald visit Mexico City in the fall of 1963? Angleton may have designed the Mexico City plot, but it was David Phillips and Anne Goodpasture in Mexico who were controlling the information that made it possible to succeed. Years later, Phillips admitted that Oswald likely never visited Mexico City:

    I am not in a position today to talk to you about the inner workings of the CIA station in Mexico City…but I will tell you this, that when the record comes out, we will find that there was never a photograph taken of Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City. We will find out that Lee Harvey Oswald never visited, let me put it, that is a categorical statement…there is no evidence to show that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Soviet Embassy.[3]

    Continuing with Mark Lane’s encounter with Phillips: he said that if the CIA gave deliberately false information about the incident, Mexico City would ask for the abolishment of the Agency and made a very enigmatic statement that “if some CIA guy that I never saw did something that I never heard of, I don’t want to have to come back here.”[4] Was Phillips trying to say that he was innocent and that someone else within the CIA was to blame for the crime? Or as a former actor, was he was trying to confuse his audience and appear innocent?

    Part of Oswald’s mission was to join the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which he was the only member in New Orleans. Through people like Guy Banister, Clay Shaw, and David Ferrie, he got into contact with Cuban exiles. In Dallas, the allegedly Marxist Oswald was in contact with peculiar characters like the the White Russians, most prominently George DeMohrenschildt and George Bouhe, and also with Michael and Ruth Paine.

    Oswald was probably employed indirectly by the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division, through some proprietary firm, most likely involved in industrial security. As Paul Bleau has shown, William Stuckey was in contact with the FBI in 1962 trying to find out if there was any member of the FPCC in New Orleans. It was Stuckey who arranged the New Orleans radio interview during which Oswald had a slip of the tongue that almost gave away his secret that in Russia he was under the protection of the US Government.

    When he was captured in Dallas, he again dropped a hint as to what he was. Roger Craig told Captain Fritz that he saw Oswald entering a station wagon after the assassination. Oswald replied “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine. Don’t try to drag her into this.” Then in a very disgusted and disappointed tone, he added “Everybody will know who I am now.” The Warren Commission transposed the ‘now’ and wrote in its report “NOW everybody will know who I am.”[5]

    Oswald was likely not an official CIA agent, but he was made to believe so and he was probably the creation of a joint project by primarily the CIA, along with the FBI and the military, exemplified by a mentality mostly marked by the American Security Council. However, this author does not want to give the wrong impression that the American Security Council killed President Kennedy. Oswald just happened to be a protagonist in a drama, a theatrical play where some actors were known to him, but most of them—along with the director, the script writers, and the producers—were operating in the shadows. Oswald had no knowledge of how the story would end. He would soon realize that this theater was larger than he could imagine, that the stage was the Globe, like Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard (see Appendix).

    After Oswald’s funeral, his mother Marguerite, stated to a television camera:

    Lee Harvey Oswald, my son, even after his death, has done more for his country than any other living human being.

    To sum up Oswald’s tragic life and fate, one has to remember Jim Garrison’s words during an on camera interview for the TV mini-series “The Men Who Killed Kennedy” (Part 4; “The Patsy”):

    Lee Oswald was totally, unequivocally, completely innocent of the assassination of President Kennedy and the fact that history, or in the re-writing of history, disinformation has made a villain out of this young man who wanted nothing more than to be a fine Marine, is in some ways the greatest injustice of all.

    By all accounts, Oswald was innocent, never fired a shot, and he was not on the sixth floor of the TSBD at the crucial time. The latest research reveals that Oswald might have been outside on the steps watching the Presidential Parade.[6]

    If Oswald was innocent, then who committed this heinous crime? Ideally, when trying to solve a murder case, the first step would be to examine the crime scene, evidence and question the witnesses. Sadly, for the JFK assassination it would be an exercise in futility to even try to contemplate such a feat. It would be a Herculean task, since the crime scene has been tampered with, evidence has been destroyed, witnesses’ testimonies were withheld or altered and a massive cover up of Gargantuan proportions ensured that it would be impossible for future investigators to piece it together. It was not only the Dallas Police that did not do its job properly, but also the FBI, the medical doctors at Bethesda, and all the investigative bodies, from the Warren Commission to the HSCA, never really tried hard to uncover the truth.

    Faced with this improbable mountain to climb, what is left for today’s researchers is to focus on Fletcher Prouty’s phrase “Cui Bono?’’ and the classic triptych of the Means, Motive and Opportunity. In part 6, we examined Oswald’s elite connections and how JFK’s foreign policy was drastically reversed by LBJ when he ascended into power. We also discussed how enormous profits were made from the Vietnam War and this foreign policy reversal in general. However, this author would like to stress that this is circumstantial evidence and one cannot conclude beyond reasonable doubt who were those that instigated the assassination. Their identities will likely forever remain obscured from the eye of history.

    The same could be said for the actual assassins. We’ll probably never find out their names. Lucky for us, a wealth of official documents and tireless research by those who investigated the assassination left us some clues as to who were the facilitators who carried out the instigators wishes.

    Some researchers would blame the Mafia, the Cubans, the CIA, or the Military. This author believes that this is a false argument, that neither the CIA per se or the Military per se murdered the President. Most likely members of both participated outside their agencies, carrying out the wishes of a powerful elite, who believed in the American Century and its Manifest Destiny of financial conquest and economic possession, a refined neo-colonialism. This American Century was built on the solid foundations of the US dollar and the American war machine in order to expand around the Globe. As Henry Luce commented about the American Century in 1941, ‘’Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space, but Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny.’’ Allen Dulles, the CIA’s Director, had always been in the service of the Power Elite and championed their interests whenever it was needed.

    John Kennedy was a part of that elite, but after a while he was perceived as a virus, an internal fault that had to be eliminated and his murder was seen as an erasure of a fault line in the system. This could not be exemplified better than by the chilling and arrogant words that Allen Dulles uttered to Willie Morris, young editor of Harper’s magazine, ‘’That little Kennedy…he thought he was a god.’’[7] Those opposing his policies were a ruthless elite partly composed of Malthusian ideology championing Eugenics, the survival of the fittest, and social engineering.

    Regarding Kennedy’s assassination and the critical community, a great deal of time has been spent on finding who the marksmen were: their location, the shot trajectories, etc. This has led to some weird, silly theories: e.g. James Files, John Roselli, Charles Nicoletti.

    The late great astronomer, Carl Sagan warned us about the dangers of not using our critical mind:

    Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along.[8]

    In the case of the JFK assassination, we have been up for grabs for the last 58 years, but it is time to practice these tough habits of thought to stop all those charlatans who have been throwing ashes so shamelessly into our eyes to obscure the truth.

    The weight of history will be against us in our effort to reveal the true circumstances of President Kennedy’s assassination, since there was so much obstruction of justice, destroyed evidence, disinformation, and an ongoing cover up, but we must persist in our quest for the truth.

    In an X-Files episode, a retired Navy Commander tells Agent Scully:

    We bury our dead alive, don’t we?…We hear them every day, they talk to us, they haunt us, they beg us for meaning. Conscience is just the voices of the dead trying to save us from our own damnation.

    Later, Scully tells Mulder about what a man said to her “that the dead speak to us from beyond the grave, that that’s what conscience is…I think the dead are speaking to us Mulder, demanding justice. Maybe that man was right. Maybe we bury the dead alive.”[9]

    Similarly, we have buried not only John Kennedy alive, but also his brother Robert and Martin Luther King. They have become our conscience, demanding justice and trying to save us from our damnation before it is too late. We only have to listen to our conscience.

    Go to Part 1

    Go to Part 2

    Go to Part 3

    Go to Part 4

    Go to Part 5

    Go to Part 6

    Go to Appendix

    References


    [1] Lane Mark, Plausible Denial, Plexus Publishing Ltd, 1992, p. 274.

    [2] Ibid, pp. 282–283.

    [3] Ibid, p. 82.

    [4] Ibid, p. 83.

    [5] “Roger Dean Craig,” Spartacus Educational

    [6] Prayer Man

    [7] Talbot David, The Devil’s Chessboard, HarperCollins 2015, p. 1.

    [8] Sagan Carl, The Demon Haunted World, Headline Book Publishing, 1997, p. 42.

    [9] X-Files, episode 3×15, Apocrypha.

  • Veciana, Phillips, and Oswald: A Plot Triangle?

    Veciana, Phillips, and Oswald: A Plot Triangle?


    Shortly before the JFK assassination, Hilda Veciana was walking as usual from her nearby home to her workplace, namely the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. At some 200 feet from the entrance, she bumped into a big wad of bills on the sidewalk. Two men immediately approached and one of them told her in Spanish with a Mexican accent something like, “Hey, lady, this money is yours. Pick it up!”

    She got scared, stepped up toward the embassy, and even cried for help. After she entered the diplomatic compound and talked about the incident, some of her co-workers got out and headed to the scene, but neither the money nor any people were there anymore.

    Making Sense

    General Fabian Escalante revealed this incident to JFK historians gathered with Cuban officials in Nassau, Bahamas, from December 7–9, 1995. He judged it as an obvious provocation. Hilda Veciana was working at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City because her husband, Guillermo Ruiz, had been appointed as Commercial Attaché in August 1963. If she would have grabbed the money, the CIA would have her photographed to compromise her husband by showing him the photos and threatening with publishing them if he did not collaborate.

    The Cuban diplomatic compound was under heavy photo surveillance by the CIA program LIONION. From a window in a third-floor apartment across the street, CIA employee Hugo Cesar Rodriguez was taking pictures of the visitors to the Embassy, while a pulse camera covered the Consulate from another window.

    Connecting the Dots

    Hilda Veciana was cousin of the fierce anti-Castro militant Antonio Veciana, leader of the paramilitary group Alpha 66 and fellow traveler of the CIA handled by David Atlee Phillips. Both shared an unrelenting animus against JFK.

    In the spring of 1963, JFK ordered a crackdown on anti-Castro belligerent groups and Alpha 66 was targeted. It was attacking Russian ships to torpedo the Kennedy-Khrushchev understanding on their peaceful solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the AARC Conference on “The Warren Report and the JFK Assassination” (Bethesda, MD, 2014), Veciana openly admitted: “In the early 1960’s, I believed John F. Kennedy was a traitor to the Cuban exiles and to this country.”

    The Bay of Pigs fiasco was a thorn in Phillips’ flesh. Instead of admitting it was the CIA’s fault, Phillips put the blame on the pinko at the White House. In Nassau, Escalante also revealed that Phillips had told Cuban dangle Nicolas Sirgado a curious anecdote among a few drinks in Mexico by 1972: after Kennedy’s death, he visited his grave and urinated on it. Phillips also said JFK was a communist.

    Before the HSCA, Veciana triangulated his relationship with Phillips by adding Oswald. At the so-called Southland Building meeting (Dallas, TX) in late August or early September 1963, Veciana arrived a bit early and saw Phillips chatting with a man who quickly left. On November 22, 1963, Veciana recognized this man on TV as the breaking news person.

    Veciana affirmed Phillips contacted him after the assassination with the proposal to pay his cousin-in-law a large sum of money, if Guillermo Ruiz would say he and his wife had met with Oswald in Mexico City, meaning the Cuban Intelligence Services (CuIS) had precise instructions for Oswald to kill JFK. Veciana agreed to make contact, but was unable to do it.

    Just after a HSCA panel visited Havana in 1978, Castro smelled a rat in the AMLASH plot: it might have been linked to the JFK assassination.[1] A task force overseen by Escalante—already head of the Cuban State Security apparatus—went over a bunch of files ranging from known terrorists to exiles, all under a cloud of suspicion. When the CuIS analysts read Veciana’s passage in the HSCA Report (1979), they instantly formulated a hypothesis strongly favored by the Hilda Veciana incident: her cousin was tampering with the timing of the facts.

    The propaganda campaign trying to tie Oswald to Castro has lowered down after the failed wave of scams, hoaxes, and jokes during the first two weeks after the assassination by the deed and disgrace of Nicaraguan secret agent Gilberto Alvarado, Cuban exile Salvador Diaz-Verson, Mexican credit inspector Oscar Gutierrez, and other fakers.

    Phillips knew, through Veciana himself, that his cousin and her husband were working at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, but bribing Guillermo Ruiz to take a path, unsuccessfully trodden by many others, did not seem to be proper tradecraft. Veciana admitted that Phillips was very jumpy about having asked him to bribe his cousin-in-law and shortly thereafter told him to forget about it. By contrast, Phillips’ proposal to Veciana fits in perfectly before the assassination with plotting a testimony after the fact or just a quick and convenient visa service.

    Muddying the Waters

    At the AARC Conference, Veciana made a truly astonishing revelation:

    [Phillips] confirmed to me in a conversation that Oswald had traveled to Mexico on [his] orders. [Phillips] tricked Oswald into taking that trip to secure a visa from the Cuban Consulate though [he] knew the authorities there would never grant Oswald such a visa. The reason for this trip was to create a trail that would link Oswald to Fidel Castro and help focus the blame of the planned assassination of President Kennedy on Castro.

    Veciana did not provide a straight answer to the key question posed by Jim DiEugenio on the spot: When did Phillips tell him that? Furthermore, Veciana omitted this conversation in his memoirs (Trained to Kill, Skyhorse Publishing, 2017) and left us all in the lurch. We don’t know whether Phillips actually told him such a crucial detail about Oswald or it was an inference drawn by Veciana from conversations with Phillips.

    In his garbled answer to DiEugenio, Veciana stated Phillips had asked him about the possibility of getting a visa on the same day at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City. Veciana responded zero chance. This conversation occurred shortly after Castro made his well-known and often distorted statement to Associated Press reporter Daniel Harker at the Brazilian Embassy on September 7, 1963.[2] The exhortation to bribe Guillermo Ruiz would have taken place immediately after the assassination.

    In his memoirs, Veciana did not report the conversation around September 7 and placed the second one in Miami a few weeks after the assassination, but neither in the book nor at the conference does he clarify when Phillips made the assertion that Oswald was traveling to Mexico under his orders. Last, but not least, Veciana has never told why Phillips summoned him to Dallas in September of 1963 and what the Southland Building meeting was about.

    Occam’s Razor

    For CuIS, this meeting revolved around Phillips planning with Veciana and Oswald the trip to Mexico City and the fix of a same-day Cuban visa. But Veciana couldn’t approach Guillermo Ruiz, so Phillips tried to blackmail him through his wife. This push also failed, but Phillips sent Oswald to Mexico City with a false promise. It may explain why Oswald became so upset when he was denied an instant visa.

    Phillips would have never planned a meeting in the same place with two assets from unrelated operations. On the contrary, the meeting in Dallas wouldn’t be a significant tradecraft mistake if Phillips was handling Oswald and Veciana in the same or related operations. Veciana tampering with the timing of conversations with Phillips about Guillermo Ruiz and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in regard to the Dallas meeting agenda fit in well with this scenario.

    As Dan Hardway has pointed out, Phillips could have used Oswald as a dangle without him being witting about an upcoming JFK assassination. His impersonation by phone in Mexico City reinforces such hypothesis. However, Veciana seemed to be aware of the ultimate goal.


    [1] The CIA recruited Cuban Army Major Rolando Cubela and precisely on November 22, 1963, his handler gave him in Paris an ingenious poison pen to kill Castro, but Cubela didn’t take it. By February 29, 1965, Cubela was in Madrid with Cuban exile leader Manuel Artime [AMBIDDY-1] to plan the assassination of Castro with Cubela’s own rifle. It would be followed by the landing of Artime’s commandos from Central America to establish a beachhead and to create a government supported by the Organization of American States. Castro agent Juan Felaifel was infiltrated into Artime’s inner circle and spoiled the plot. Cubela and his co-conspirators ended up in jail by February 1966.

    [2] “United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” (The Miami Herald, September 9, 1963, page 1A).

  • Into the Storm, by John Newman

    Into the Storm, by John Newman


    John Newman has finished his third volume on the JFK case. This entry is called Into the Storm. As readers of this site will know, I have already reviewed the first two volumes in the unprecedented series. (Click here for the first review and click here for the second)

    In foreign policy, the third volume focuses on the year 1962, up until the Missile Crisis. These events include the initiation of Operation Mongoose in Florida, the submission of the Northwoods provocation plans to Kennedy, the removal of Lyman Lemnitzer as Joint Chiefs chairman, and the assumption of that position by General Maxwell Taylor. These are all important developments. And one can argue that they may have had an impact of what happened to Kennedy in Dallas, but surprisingly the major part of the writing about them comes near the end of the book. And the weight of that description and analysis is outdone by the subjects the author deals with previously. For me, it made for an uneven and, in some ways, puzzling result.

    Prior to getting to those rather salient points, the author deals with four major topics at length. These are the activist group CORE and their Freedom Ride demonstrations in the south; the KGB/CIA spy wars over men like Pyotr Popov, Oleg Penkovsky, and Yuri Nosenko; the intelligence career of Cuban exile Antonio Veciana; and, finally, the false accusations of Agency officer Sam Halpern implicating the Kennedys in the CIA/Mafia plots against Fidel Castro.

    I

    Newman includes two chapters on the outburst of the race issue under the Kennedy administration. These amount to about 55 pages of text in a 400 page book. The vast majority of those pages deal with two topics: Martin Luther King’s arrest in Atlanta during the 1960 election and the Freedom Rides and the accompanying violence they incurred in 1961. This material has been dealt with many times in the past by several different authors. Newman maintains that they are integral to any story about Kennedy’s demise, since JFK would not have been president if not for the Kennedy brothers’ role in releasing Martin Luther King from a Georgia prison before the election. (p. 15)

    This may or may not be true. There have been several interpretations about how Kennedy won his narrow popular victory in 1960, which was wider in the Electoral College. This includes Robert Caro’s explanation of Lyndon’s Jonson’s campaigning in the south. But even if one were to grant the author his premise, I don’t see how that necessitates including them in a book that is subtitled “The Assassination of President Kennedy.” If, at the end of his series, Newman convincingly shows us how this racial strife somehow impacted Kennedy’s murder, I will be glad to make amends and thank him for his insight.

    In Chapter 2, the author brings up what I think is a more relevant subject, which he does not deal with at the length he does his four main fields of interest. This is the undeclared war of the Wall Street Journal—and all that powerful publication represented—against the introduction of Kennedy’s policy plans, both foreign and domestic. As Newman notes, that newspaper viciously attacked Kennedy right out of the gate, on both his domestic spending plans and level of foreign aid. (p. 39) One reason for this is because Kennedy’s policies posed a juxtaposition with President Eisenhower’s. But secondly, Kennedy had always been concerned about levels of joblessness and the length of unemployment benefits to those who could not find work. He was worried about the cumulative impact of structural unemployment on the economy.

    The author briefly deals with the rather controversial appointment of Douglas Dillon as Secretary of Treasury. (p. 43) Many liberals wondered about this, since Dillon had been a mainstay of Eisenhower and worked at three different positions in his administration. Newman then comments on Kennedy’s counterbalancing of the conservative Dillon with the liberal Keynesian Walter Heller at the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). There can be little doubt that Heller’s ideas worked. The performance of the American economy was remarkable under JFK: in three years Kennedy doubled economic growth and increased GNP by 20 per cent. (See for example, John F. Kennedy: The Promise Revisited, by Paul Harper and Joann Krieg, pp. 169–224; Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, pp. 118–217)

    The author also counteracts the accepted CW that Kennedy was unsuccessful at getting his proposals through congress. By late 1961, Kennedy had gotten 35 of his 55 bills passed. (p. 47) He declares that Kennedy had clearly sided with Heller and the CEA and his goals were to keep interest rates and mortgage rates low. (pp. 50–51). None of this success calmed down the attacks by the Wall Street Journal, especially when, recalling Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy began to implement economic programs as a way of dealing with social problems. This meant things like placement services to find jobs for those seeking work and extending unemployment benefits from 26 to 39 weeks.

    In summing up Kennedy’s economic achievement, Newman writes that prices remained stable in a way they had not under Eisenhower, while wholesale industrial prices actually declined. Both happened under a rapidly expanding economy. (p. 59) My one complaint about this section of the book is that there was no mention of the rather important figure of James Saxon, Kennedy’s Comptroller of the Currency. It seems clear to me that Kennedy was relying on both Saxon and Heller to effectively counter the innate conservatism of both the Federal Reserve and Dillon. In my online discussions with British researcher Malcolm Blunt, he seemed to agree with me. (Click here for details)

    II

    One of Newman’s preoccupations, both in this book and in his public appearances, has been his disagreement with the late Cuban exile Antonio Veciana. To anyone who knows anything about the JFK case, I should not have to remind them that Veciana was first interviewed by Church Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi. At that time, Gaeton was working under the Church Committee’s Senator Richard Schweiker. Fonzi was then transferred over to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) by attorney Robert Tanenbaum. Senator Schweiker showed Tanenbaum some of what Fonzi had accomplished under his stewardship and the New York prosecutor was favorably impressed. (Fonzi, p. 431) Gaeton decided to stay on the HSCA even after both Tanenbaum and the first Chief Counsel, Richard Sprague, had left.

    There, partnered with another Tanenbaum hire—New York detective Al Gonzalez—the two pursued various leads out of Miami, Dallas, and New Orleans. These are vividly captured in Fonzi’s fine book on the case, The Last Investigation. In that volume, Gaeton described his first meeting with Veciana and then his following relationship with the man all the way through the closing of the HSCA. Fonzi details the difference in his belief in Veciana and the committee’s disagreement with that belief. This includes Veciana being shot at—four times—after the appearance of the HSCA Final Report. (Fonzi, pp. 392–93)

    In that book, Fonzi meets up with Veciana as he is being released from prison on what the Cuban believed was a trumped-up drug charge. (Fonzi, pp. 123–24) Veciana had a degree in accounting from the University of Havana. He was good at what he did and ended up working closely with Julio Lobo. Lobo was a millionaire known as the Cuban Sugar King prior to the Castro revolution. Since Veciana became one of the most militant of the exile leaders and was associated with Alpha 66, Fonzi asked him who he was tied in with as part of the American government. This turned out to be a man named Maurice Bishop. At one of their meetings, he said that he had seen Lee Oswald with Bishop in Dallas around the beginning of September, 1963. (Fonzi, pp. 125–26). This became the famous Southland Building meeting, where Veciana had arrived a bit early and had seen Bishop chatting with Oswald. When Veciana approached, Bishop disposed of Oswald rather quickly. Fonzi had a police artist sketch a picture of Bishop along the lines of the description that Veciana had given. Veciana and Fonzi spent hours working on the sketch with the illustrator. When this was later shown to Schweiker, he said it looked to him like CIA officer David Phillips. (Fonzi, p. 158) Later, when Gaeton showed the sketch to a brother of David Phillips, he exclaimed “Why, that is amazing! That certainly does look like David!” His office secretary said the same. Then his daughter, David Phillips’ niece, said “What that’s Uncle David!”(Fonzi, p. 315)

    Gaeton then decided to search for sources who had been in the Agency who could confirm that Phillips had used the alias of Bishop on occasion. He ended up finding three such sources. (Fonzi, pp. 308, 364) Former CIA Director John McCone told the HSCA that he did recall a Maurice Bishop who worked for the Agency. (Fonzi, p. 434. The CIA later made McCone walk back the statement.)

    It should be noted: throughout The Last Investigation, Veciana never flatly states that Bishop is Phillips. In fact, there are instances where he denied it. (Fonzi, p. 251) This included a face to face meeting between the two. (Which, as Fonzi notes, Phillips lied about. See p. 276) At the end of the book, Veciana admits that, if it was Phillips, he could not admit it without Phillips’ approving it. (Fonzi, p. 396)

    Gaeton’s widow, Marie Fonzi, wrote to Veciana after her husband’s death in 2012. She was preparing a new version of The Last Investigation. Marie asked permission from Antonio to quote him about Gaeton’s honesty and dedication in pursuit of truth. He agreed to do so. At this time, Veciana was working as an accountant for his son’s marine supply store in Miami.

    The next year, 2013, Marie asked Antonio to identify Bishop. She did not mention Phillips in that request. Veciana’s son typed the letter to her finally saying that Phillips was Bishop. His son asked Veciana if he was sure about what he was doing. Antonio said it was time. Marie alerted journalist Jerry Policoff to this fact and he wrote an online piece, which was picked up by other JFK sites; but got little if any MSM exposure. The following year, Veciana showed up at the 2014 AARC seminar and discussed what he wrote in public. (Email exchange with Marie Fonzi, 9/16/2021)

    There is more I could write about Fonzi’s work on Veciana. For instance about the personal profile he assembled about Bishop (pp. 155–56) and Bishop’s ultimate pay off to Veciana as witnessed by his wife. (p. 150) But I would just suggest that if you have not read The Last Investigation, you should.

    III

    Before beginning any discussion of Newman’s disagreement about the Veciana/Bishop relationship, I think it is important to state what is not in his argument. John never talked to Marie Fonzi or visited her home to look through what she still had left of her husband’s files. Even though Veciana died last year, he had time to talk to Antonio through his daughter who is a professional journalist. As most readers know, this reviewer has shown that Clay Shaw repeatedly lied on the witness stand at his trial. He also lied in public about his relationship with the CIA. This reviewer also believes that Shaw was part of the plot to set up Oswald in the murder of President Kennedy and this is why he called attorney Dean Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald. But in spite of that, I interviewed three of Shaw’s four lawyers. I could not talk to Ed Wegmann, since he had passed on prior to starting the research on my first book.

    There are two main areas that Newman finds fault with in Veciana’s statements to Fonzi and others. The first is that, in his initial utterances, Antonio said that he first met up with Bishop in Cuba in 1960. As the author notes, Veciana later changed this to 1959. The first person to find a problem with this was Fabian Escalante. (Newman, p. 67) At the time of Kennedy’s murder, Escalante was part of Castro’s counterintelligence force. He eventually rose to helm Cuban state security forces. Probably no one on the island knew as much about anti-Castro CIA operations and Phillips as Escalante did. According to his information, Phillips had left Cuba in February of 1960. To his knowledge, he did not come back. (Newman, pp. 67–71)

    Newman’s other main point of contention is that, contrary to what Veciana told Fonzi, he was not primarily associated with the CIA. After leaving Cuba in October, 1961 Veciana was associated with the MRP. In late 1961, he was approved for CIA use in other operations, but did not like working for the Agency. The reason being that he wanted little or no restrictions placed on him. (Newman, p. 293)

    In Puerto Rico, Veciana helped create a group called Alpha 66. And he gained sponsorship from Army intelligence in November of 1962. (Newman, p. 299) The author concludes that, from his timeline, Veciana was working for the Army while he was participating in Alpha 66 activities. And he concludes that when Veciana told the Church Committee that the man behind Alpha 66 strategy was Maurice Bishop, he was being deceitful. (Newman, p. 313)

    John has done some good work with this and I think some of it is valuable. And he probably is not done yet. But let me point out what I see as a bit problematic. The author brings out his information about Veciana, Alpha 66, and Army Intel as if it had been buried underground. Yet it was written about as far back as ten years ago.

    In 2011, Larry Hancock penned a brief but valuable book called Nexus. In Chapter 11 of that work, he writes about how the success of Alpha 66 had drawn the interest of the Army in October of 1962. The CIA and G-2 then shared what information they had collected on the group’s projects. Cyrus Vance of the Army drafted a proposal for very select missions, but Vance’s proposal is marked “Not Used.” Everyone knows that after the Missile Crisis, the actions against Cuba were greatly slowed down and decreased. And, at Kennedy’s insistence, the little that was left was mostly moved off shore. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 70)

    The Missile Crisis concluded as a great success for Kennedy, but the Cuban exiles looked at it differently. The rumor in Miami was that somehow the Russians were lying and Castro was cheating. There were still missiles in Cuba and two defecting Russian officers were there willing to talk. As Hancock mentions both in Nexus and Someone Would Have Talked, the main source for this appears to have been Eddie Bayo of Alpha 66. (Respectively, p. 86, p. 337) If that group was only a G-2 operation at that time, 1963, then why did the reaction to this Alpha 66 rumor turn into a purely CIA project? I am referring of course to Operation Tilt, sometimes called the Bayo/Pawley mission. William Pawley was a zealous sponsor of the excursion into Cuba and presented it to CIA. Dick Billings of Life magazine was involved in this mission on Pawley’s yacht since Life was giving publicity to both the DRE and Alpha 66.

    Newman admits that there was a female contact who worked for Veciana, who communicated messages to him from Phillips. (Newman, p. 83) Delores Cao had been Veciana’s secretary and she recalled messages from a man who used the name Bishop. According to Hancock, in 1963, there was another woman who was used for messaging later. Veciana recalled her name as Prewett. This has to be be Virginia Prewett, who Phillips worked with in propaganda operations. (Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, p. 177) John also admits that some CIA agents stayed on the island after the revolution. And Veciana named one of them who appeared to be an associate of Phillips, but he rules out the possibility that Phillips would have ever returned, because he had no diplomatic immunity since he was not under state department cover.

    IV

     One of the major themes that the author spends many pages on is the controversy surrounding the espionage battles between the KGB and CIA in the fifties and early sixties. This includes figures like Pyotr Popov, Oleg Penkovsky, George Blake, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and Yuri Nosenko, among others. In my discussions with John and in one of the talks I have seen him give, his assessment is going to be contra authors Tom Mangold and David Wise. What he appears to be saying is that there really was a high level mole inside the CIA, Golitsyn was somehow a credible source, and that Nosenko was a false defector.

    In 1992, British journalist Tom Mangold published a long biography of James Angleton and his reign over the CIA’s counterintelligence staff for two decades. That reign ended in 1974, when he was forced to resign by CIA Director Bill Colby, who had replaced Richard Helms. Mangold’s book was really the first full scale biography of Angleton. For too many reasons to mention here, it did not present an attractive portrait. In his review of CIA literature, in house historian Cleveland Cram praised the book as being honest and accurate. (October, 1993, Center for the Study of Intelligence, “Of Moles and Molehunters”)

    Much of Mangold’s valuable work focused on how Allen Dulles and Dick Helms had allowed Angleton to establish what was essentially his own fiefdom within the CIA, including his personal filing system which was not integrated with the Agency’s system. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that those two men allowed the very rightwing Angleton to more or less run roughshod, with little or no oversight. Another major theme of the book was Angleton’s firm belief in virtually anything that Golitsyn told him. Complimentary to that belief were the monetary rewards that Angleton bestowed on the man—no matter how wrong his predictions turned out to be. And many of them were.

    Within a year after Mangold’s book was released, much respected journalist David Wise—who had developed a reputation for dealing with intelligence matters—published his own book dealing with Angleton. This was called Molehunt. Wise traced all the organizational and personal damage to careers that Angleton had wrought in his search for what he thought was the mole in the CIA. This unhinged search was largely based on Golitsyn and the fact that he said the mole’s last name began with a K. To make a long story short, this resulted in the wreckage of CIA officer Peter Karlow’s career; along with Paul Garbler’s and Richard Kovich’s. And by agreeing with Golitsyn’s prophecy—that anyone who followed him would be ersatz—later defectors were either discounted or looked on with suspicion. This went on even beyond Angleton, with a man named Adolf Tolkachev, who later turned out to be a very valuable informant on Russian defense technology. His offer was turned down three times. President Carter later signed a bill called the Mole Relief Act in order to recognize and compensate Angleton’s victims. (Click here for more details)

    Nosenko had first tried to defect in 1962, but he wanted to act as an agent in place, so he stayed in the USSR. But after the assassination, he did defect at Geneva in January of 1964. His message was that while he was in Russia, and as part of the KGB, he was responsible for the Oswald file. The KGB had no interest in the Marine defector and little knowledge of his military background. They were still not interested even after Oswald married a Russian girl. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, pp. 316–17)

    Today, Newman is convinced that Nosenko was a false defector, to the point that he once told me that Bruce Solie, the CIA officer who helped rescue Nosenko from three years of torture and imprisonment, might have been the mole. What seems odd about all this to this reviewer is that the author also writes that the KGB had nothing to do with President Kennedy’s murder. (Newman, p. 339) Which means to me that, at worst, the Russians were trying to convince the USA that they had nothing to do with turning Oswald while he was in the USSR, or ultimately Kennedy’s murder.

    A lot of what the author writes in this section of the book is based on the works of Tennent “Pete” Bagley. An important part of what Newman writes about the longtime CIA officer concerns his relationship with esteemed British researcher Malcolm Blunt. This reviewer has material of value to add to their exchange over Oswald’s file that is not in the book under review.

    The Brit Malcolm became friendly with Bagley while the former agent was living in Brussels. By 2012, Malcolm had done some work on the declassified HSCA files of Betsy Wolf. One of her assignments was to investigate the Oswald file at CIA. Betsy was a thorough and conscientious researcher. One of the oddities about Oswald’s file that puzzled her was the fact that no 201 file had been opened on the man after he had defected in 1959. Betsy began to inquire with other CIA officers and to look up certain division charters. She found out that in not opening that file, the Agency was violating its own internal rules.

    The other problem she pondered was that Oswald’s files did not go where they should have gone, which was the Soviet Russia (SR) division. Instead, they went to the Office of Security (OS). The more people she talked to, the weirder this situation got. She came to suspect that somehow, someone had rigged the system so that no 201 file would be opened on Oswald. As she dug deeper, she realized such was the case. For OS did not open 201 files. This is why certain outside agencies were sending multiple copies of files on Oswald to CIA, but they were not getting distributed. After months of research work on this, Betsy interviewed the man who was the then present Chief of Security, Robert Gambino. He told her that the office of Mail Logistics is alerted in advance of where certain files should be headed in the system. She concluded that this is what had happened: someone had instructed that office in advance to misdirect Oswald’s files. (Click here for details, plus a diagram of how Oswald files were routed)

    Malcolm drew for Bagley the diagram of how Oswald’s incoming files were routed in 1959. That is, not going to where they should have been going, namely the SR division, where Pete had worked, but instead being diverted to OS where no 201 file would be opened. After looking at the diagram, Bagley asked Malcolm if Oswald was a witting or unwitting defector. Malcolm did not want to reply, but Bagley pushed him on the question telling him he had to know the answer. Malcolm said, “Okay, unwitting.” Bagley instantly countered with, “Oh no, he had to be witting!” (Newman, p. 339) What makes this even more interesting is that Bagley thought Oswald had killed Kennedy. So you had, for the first time, a veteran CIA counter intelligence officer—who thought Oswald had killed Kennedy—saying that the man was a witting false defector.

    V

    I would like to close this discussion on a high point, actually two of them.

    Newman’s analysis of how the CIA switched back their plots to kill Castro onto the Kennedy White House is very well done. In fact, it is unmatched in the literature. As the author explicates it, this deception started with Director of Plans Dick Bissell; it was then continued, expanded, and elongated by William Harvey’s assistant Sam Halpern. The author proves that both men knowingly lied about the subject. It is important, because this whole mythology became a way to confuse what had happened in the JFK case. The myth that arose from it was that Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got him. When, in fact, neither clause was true. And neither was the corollary: JFK dug the hole for his own death.

    Bissell was the first person who created the chimera that somehow “the White House” urged him to create an executive action capability. (Newman, p. 182) In fact, Bissell first told this story to William Harvey in 1961. But under examination by the Church Committee, Bissell said six times that he could not recall who the person at the White House was who first asked him to do this. Someone in the administration calls you about such a subject and you cannot recall who it was?

    But on its face, this was not credible. Because the CIA’s Staff D—which included this function—had already been created by then. Plus the CIA/Mafia plots were already in motion. The former began in October of 1960, the latter in August of 1960. And, in fact, it was Bissell’s idea to reach out to the Mafia. (Newman, p. 187) After doing depositions with Bissell, Harvey, and McGeorge Bundy, the Church Committee concluded that Kennedy had filed no such request with CIA and none had been discussed with him. (Newman, p. 191) In fact, the Church Committee was forced to ask Bissell: If the White House tasked you with that, why didn’t you reply that such actions were already proceeding?

    The reason that Bissell wanted to use this fabrication of White House approval was to egg on the Mafia plots in order to salvage the Bay of Pigs operation. This is most likely because he understood from the two designers of that operation—Jake Esterline and Jack Hawkins—that it would not succeed due to the revisions that had been made in their plans. In fact, they wanted to resign, since they sensed a debacle was upcoming. Bissell understood if that happened, he would be left holding the bag, since he was the main supervising officer. (Newman, pp. 191–92).

    Halpern took this fabrication and made it his own, with two alterations. First, he switched the pushing of the plots from JFK to RFK and he used a CIA man he knew, Charles Ford, as RFK’s “accessory.” What was quite revealing about the Church Committee inquiry was that Dick Helms did not seem to know much at all about Halpern’s RFK/Ford schemes. And what he did know was through Halpern. (Newman, pp. 237–39)

    The giveaway about Halpern was his frequent assertion that RFK deliberately left no paper behind about his dealings with Ford. This turned out to be utterly false. And as the author points out, for Seymour Hersh to have accepted this from Halpern for his 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, tells you all you need to know about Hersh’s piece of rubbish.

    In fact, Charles Ford testified twice before the Church Committee. For whatever reason, we only have his second deposition. But it is clear from the references he makes to the lost first interview that he never did what Halpern said he was doing. That is acting as a liaison for RFK to the Mob for the purpose of killing Castro. Considering Bobby Kennedy’s war on the Mafia, this was preposterous on its face. But as the author points out, we have documents from both sides today—RFK’s and Ford’s—as to what Ford was doing for Bobby. The idea was that he was supposed to check out some American representatives of anti-Castro groups in Cuba and also explore ways to retrieve the prisoners from the failed Bay of Pigs project. (Newman, pp. 260—67). These prove that Halpern was passing gas on two levels.

    But the capper about this is that Halpern knew about it, since he signed off on one of Ford’s memos. In fact, Ford was working with Halpern and Harvey in 1961. And since Ford worked under those two men in 1961, within their domain at CIA, he could not have been working under Bobby Kennedy. The Church Committee examined Ford’s testimony afterwards and found it to be accurate. (Newman, p. 276)

    Perhaps the sickest statement that Halpern made to Hersh was this: “Bobby Kennedy’s primary purpose is dealing with Charles Ford was to do what Bill Harvey was not doing—finding someone to assassinate Fidel Castro.” As Hersh could have found out through declassified documents available at that time, this was an ugly lie. Harvey had found someone he was working with to kill Castro. That was John Roselli. And the CIA had lied to Bobby Kennedy about the existence of this plot. (Newman, p. 279)

    Does it get any worse than that?

    VI

    The book closes with what is a testament to its title. The author notes that Dwight Eisenhower and his National Security Advisor Gordon Gray had thought of using a false flag operation at Guantanamo Bay in the waning days of Ike’s administration. That is, they would employ Cuban exiles to simulate an attack on the base and that would suffice as an excuse to invade Cuba. In fact, Eisenhower had told Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer that he had little problem with that scenario, as long as they could manufacture something “that would be generally acceptable.” (p. 372)

    As the author then writes, it is clear that Lemnitzer recalled Eisenhower’s approval of this concept, since both he and Edward Lansdale, who was running Operation Mongoose, were going to try and push it on President Kennedy. As Newman, and many others have written, once Mongoose—the secret war against Cuba—was up and running in February of 1962, the three men supervising it were not well-suited for each other. That would be Lansdale, William Harvey, and Bobby Kennedy. RFK was there at his brother’s request. Since after the Bay of Pigs, the president did not trust the so-called experts anymore. Lansdale did not like this. He actually asked CIA Director John McCone for complete control over Mongoose. A request that was promptly denied. On top of this, Lansdale and Harvey despised each other and Harvey hated RFK. (Newman, pp. 376–77)

    Lansdale was quite imaginative—and deadly—in his plans to shake up things on the island. He thought up outlandish schemes like Task 33. This was a plan to use biological warfare against Cuban sugar workers, but this was only part of an even more wild menu: to create a pretext to attack Cuba. Lansdale now brought back the idea of staging a fake Cuban attack at Guantanamo to provoke an American invasion. There were two other scenarios that Lansdale thought up for this purpose.

    As the reader can see, what Lansdale had in mind actually preceded what the Joint Chiefs were going to propose to President Kennedy, which was the infamous Operation Northwoods. The problem was that President Kennedy not only did not want to provoke American direct intervention, he did not even want to hear about it. (Newman, p. 385) But yet, on March 13, 1962 the Joint Chiefs proposed Northwoods to the White House. This was a series of play acted events designed to manufacture chaos in Cuba in order to provoke an attack by American forces. One was a staging of a “Remember the Maine” scenario: blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay and blaming it on Castro. Another was to create a communist Cuban terrorism wave on cities like Miami. Kennedy rejected these proposals.

    Newman closes the book with Kennedy’s searing disagreements with Lemnitzer over both Cuba and Vietnam. About the latter, Lemnitzer said that Kennedy’s policy would lead to “communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland.” In regard to Cuba, Lemnitzer would not let up on the idea of American intervention. This led to his eventual rebuke by Kennedy in mid-March of 1962. (Newman, pp. 391–94) If there was any doubt that Lemnitzer was leaving—and there was not much—this settled it.

    Kennedy did kick him out of the White House, but he sent him to NATO, which, of course, was secretly guiding the Strategy of Tension under Operation Gladio. In other words, the terrorist plan Lemnitzer had been turned down on with Cuba, he was now going to be part of in Europe.