Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: CUBA

  • David Kaiser, The Road to Dallas

    The Road to Dallas is a methodically bad book. And as you read it you pick up on the method in its badness. And then at the end you comprehend the reason for it all.

    Author David Kaiser begins the tome with a canard. In his introduction he says that this book is the first by a historian who has researched the “available archives”. (p. 7) If what he means by this are the releases of the Assassination Records Review Board, then he must think that fellow historians John Newman, Michael Kurtz, and Gerald McKnight are non-entities. They all wrote books based either largely, or in part, on the releases of the ARRB. And their works were all published before this book was. Kaiser then writes this sentence: “Partly because of the evidentiary excesses or deficiencies of so many other authors, I have written this book not only to show what happened but to make clear how we know it.” (Ibid) As we shall see, Kaiser’s own excesses and deficiencies as a historian prevented him from doing any such thing. And the last thing this book does is bring us any closer to what really happened in Dallas.

    There are other revealing passages that raised my antennae in this introduction. For instance, he states that the famous incident at Sylvia Odio’s apartment was a key to the assassination. He then names the three men who visited her. This “identification” is quite strained and dubious but the certainty with which it is made gave me even more pause about what he was up to. (I will explain that later. But my pause was well taken.) He also states that unbeknownst to the authors of the Inspector General’s Report on the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro, Carlos Marcello was actually involved in them. He says he has new evidence on this. We will discuss his “new evidence” about these plots later. (p. 3) On the same page as he writes the above, he then states with certainty that the CIA had nothing to do with the assassination. And, of course, the Garrison inquiry gets labeled a “farce” (p.6)

    But that’s not all Kaiser is certain about. He knows who actually was responsible for the crime: the Mafia Dons, Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, and Carlos Marcello, had JFK killed. And as with all these Mob did it tomes, the reason was to stop RFK’s war on the Mafia. Oswald was their instrument to kill Kennedy, and he did it for money. (As will be revealed, the way Kaiser cinches the financial argument is nothing if not bizarre.) How does he know Oswald killed Kennedy? Well the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) convincingly demonstrated that fact. (p.7) And he concludes this introduction by calling FBI agent Jim Hosty a dogged investigator who never quite caught up to Oswald. He then praises the FBI, the HSCA, and the CIA operatives who believed America deserved the truth. (I don’t know how he left out Mom and apple pie.)

    There is one part of this introduction that raised my antennae to telephone line height. In describing and praising the work of the ARRB, he writes that the Board was “led by historian Anna K. Nelson”. (p. 6) It was not. As anyone who followed it knew, Judge John Tunheim led the Board. (Known as Jack to his friends, which evidently, Kaiser is not.) As I read that I thought, “How could a guy who considers himself a serious historian make such a mistake? Maybe there’s more to it.” When I finished the volume I found out there was. And this ends up being the most interesting part of a boring, specious, and stultifying book.

    II

    Kaiser divides the book into three main sections. The first part is entitled “Criminals, Cubans, Kennedys, and the CIA.” This is all about the Castro revolution and the American reaction to it from Eisenhower through Kennedy. It is a story that has been told scores of times in the literature. And once you understand what Kaiser is up to here-which does not take very long-it becomes insufferably dull and predictable.

    Kaiser’s agenda here is the same as Gus Russo’s or Max Holland’s. In fact, if someone gave this chapter to me in typed form with no name on it, I would have guessed that one of those two guys wrote it. He begins with the Kefauver Committee and RFK getting involved with the crusade against organized crime. He then extends it to the Mafia’s holdings in Cuba and their ties to alternating Presidents Fulgencio Batista and Carlos Prio. Then comes Castro’s revolution, which alters all that, kicks them off the island, and that leads to the Mob’s desire to get back into Cuba.

    The story is banal. First, it is almost a half-century-old. Second, people like John Davis, Dan Moldea, Robert Blakey, Dick Billings, David Scheim, Lamar Waldron, Thom Hartmann, and Frank Ragano have all been down the road before. Kaiser has no problem using most of these authors. But what he does is make it just all more extreme. For instance, did you know that Eva Grant, Ruby’s sister, was part of the Capone Gang? (p. 15) How about Marguerite Oswald? She had mob ties too. (p. 17) This last bit of info he gets from the notoriously unreliable Hoover acolyte Aaron Kohn. Kohn has been exposed as a compromised source too many times to enumerate here. But just let me add this: ace archives researcher Peter Vea told me that he found documents in the ARRB collection that reveal that it was Kohn who was the impetus for the frame up of Jim Garrison on those phony kickback and tax charges. But if you consider the Garrison inquiry a “farce” then you don’t mind using someone who frames an innocent man as a source. (Which, as we shall see, Kaiser has no problem doing.)

    Interestingly, Kaiser introduces the testimony of John Martino in Chapter Two. Now, as I noted with Larry Hancock’s book, Martino allegedly stated that Oswald was a patsy who would be framed by the anti-Castro Cubans. So this was fitting enough for Hancock’s book, which postulates a CIA/Mafia plot. But its not fitting here. Kaiser postulates no such thing. As I noted, he has Oswald killing Kennedy. And the main plotters are the mobsters named above. So precisely how does the Martino story fit into his scenario? This is something he never explains or confronts. Further, he does not explain how Martino’s story expanded toward the end of his life. In 1975 Martino told a reporter for Newsday that he had met Oswald in the weeks leading up to the assassination. It was in Key Biscayne, where there is no evidence Oswald was at the time.

    What is Kaiser’s new evidence that Marcello and, perhaps Hoffa, were in on the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro? Well, like Lamar Waldron, it appears to come mainly from Dan Moldea’s dubious book, The Hoffa Wars. In my long review of Ultimate Sacrifice I discussed how dangerous it was to use Moldea’s book. Evidently, Kaiser did not read it, or if he did, he didn’t care. He even trots out that thoroughly discredited serial liar Ed Partin more than once. (Beginning on page 39) He notes that Partin had trouble passing his first polygraph test for Walter Sheridan. But, he adds, he passed his second one. (pgs. 132-133) What he does not reveal is that the second test was proved to be rigged by a panel of polygraph technicians. And the two men who administered it were later indicted for fraud. (The prurient reader can check my review of Ultimate Sacrifice, Section 2, paragraph 4, for more details on Moldea, Partin, and this test.)

    Like Waldron, Kaiser also tries to critique the Inspector General report on the CIA/Mafia plots. Again, he trots out Moldea for this. In his book on Hoffa, Moldea quoted a brief magazine snippet about a mobster named Bufalino. There was a mention that he claimed to be part of the plots. On this diaphanous piece of evidence, Kaiser now says that the Inspector General Report was faulty. What else does he use in this attempt? Are you ready? The testimony of CIA officers like Sam Halpern. Yet Halpern was already discredited as unreliable by David Talbot in his book Brothers. (See Talbot, p. 123) Talbot showed that Halpern actually used a dead man to, of all things, tie RFK to the Mob.

    Kaiser wants to do this because he wants to insert the Kennedys, especially RFK, into the plots to kill Castro. So he actually presents a thug like Halpern as “most forthcoming”. (p. 100) But yet, if he was so forthcoming, why didn’t Halpern spill his guts about RFK’s involvement in 1967 to the original writers of the IG Report? He had a perfect opportunity since he is listed as an interview subject for their work. Kaiser does not tell the reader about this. So he doesn’t have to explain it. He therefore can present Halpern as “forthcoming”.

    What Kaiser does with the testimony of Senator George Smathers on this issue is even worse. He begins his paragraph on the matter by saying that Kennedy was probably informed in advance of the plots against both Castro and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. (Trujillo was killed in late May of 1961.) This statement follows: “In early 1961 the President asked Florida Senator George Smathers … for his opinion of the reaction in Latin America if Castro were assassinated. When Smathers … strongly disapproved of the idea, Kennedy said he agreed with him. ( Kaiser, p. 78) He sources this to the Church Committee book entitled Alleged Assassination Plots. What he leaves out is that Smathers was a CIA asset who was involved with the funding for Eladio Del Valle, David Ferrie’s friend who was murdered in Miami the same day Ferrie died–with Jim Garrison about to indict Ferrie as a conspirator in the Kennedy assassination. Kaiser also leaves out the fact that when the subject was brought up in his presence, Kennedy got so furious he smashed a dinner plate and told Smathers he did not want to hear of such things again. (Alleged Assassination Plots, p. 124) Now, why would Kennedy bring up a subject that he was so opposed to that he would get violent about it? Because, as Kaiser implies, he didn’t bring it up. The CIA asset Smathers was pushing it on him. By leaving out Kennedy smashing the plate, Kaiser can 1.) Suggest it was the other way around, and 2.) Ignore how violently JFK was opposed to such things.

    Kaiser also leaves out other interesting Smathers testimony, some of it relating to Trujillo. In 1971, Smathers said that Kennedy seemed “horrified” at the idea of political assassination. Smathers related that JFK had told him “the CIA frequently did things he didn’t know about, and he was unhappy about it.” The president characterized the CIA as “almost autonomous”. In that regard, he told Smathers that he believed the CIA had arranged to have Diem and Trujillo killed. Smathers said, “He was pretty well shocked about that.” Kennedy concluded that he wanted “to get control of what the CIA was doing.” (The Assassinations, p. 329) Now, if Kennedy had been informed of the Trujillo assassination in advance, why would he be shocked about it? And why would he then be unhappy and trying to get control of the Agency?

    The capper in Kaiser’s almost mad attempt in this regard is his characterization of the famous Hoover memorandum of May of 1962. This occurred after both Hoover and RFK had discovered the CIA/Mafia plots by accident and both of them had investigations done on the matter. They met and Hoover wrote a memo on the meeting. The memo says that Hoover expressed shock at the CIA/Mafia association in view of the bad character of Robert Maheu and the “horrible judgment in using a man of Giancana’s background for such a project. The Attorney General shared the same views.” (The CIA had used its asset Maheu to approach mobster Sam Giancana about killing Castro for them.) What Kaiser does with this memo is slightly astonishing. (p. 106) He actually tries to argue that the mentioning of the bad character and background of Maheu and Giancana means that RFK objected to only the people used, not the actual plotting! Is Kaiser saying here what I think he is? Is he trying to say that if the CIA used an ethnic group RFK favored, like say Native Americans, Bobby Kennedy would have been overjoyed by the discovery of the murder plots? That is what I think he is saying. So according to Kaiser’s implication, RFK should have said: “Can we get any such work for Cesar Chavez’s Chicano friends in East LA? Can we bump off anyone out there?”

    Further, Kaiser leaves out the record of the original CIA briefer to RFK. In describing RFK’s reaction to this news, the man wrote: “If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.” (The Assassinations, p. 327) So here there is no record of him being upset about just the use of Maheu or Giancana. He is upset in general. (Recall, the memo Kaiser wants to use was written by Hoover.) This is why the IG Report states about this briefing, that it was restricted to the first phase of the Castro plots only. And these had ended a year before. It then adds: “Phase Two was already underway at the time of the briefing, but Kennedy was not told of it.” (Ibid) In other words, as Kennedy was being briefed and made aware of the first plots, the CIA had already extended them into another phase– without telling him at this briefing. And Kaiser leaves this out!

    Did I say Gus Russo or Max Holland could have written this section? Too mild. In his distortion, editing and ignoring of evidence, it actually approaches the work of the demonic Seymour Hersh in his infamous The Dark Side of Camelot.

    III

    The second section of the book is about Lee Harvey Oswald. To say that the portrait he draws is a curious one really does not do it justice. What appears to have happened is that Kaiser understands that the “lonely sociopath” portrait of Oswald is difficult to make fly today. So he keeps the latter part, and tries to amend the former part. He admits it is odd that an alleged communist like Oswald would have ties to conservatives like George DeMohrenschildt in Dallas and Guy Banister in New Orleans. So he says that the best way to explain this paradox is that Oswald was some kind of undercover agent. But he then goes into a limited hangout mode. Oswald was not really working for the Central Intelligence Agency as an agent provocateur. Kaiser writes that ” … it is far more likely that he embarked upon his career as a provocateur under unofficial supervision.” (p. 172, emphasis added) In other words, he doesn’t want him to be a real government agent.

    He tries to make this more palatable by curtailing his portrait of Oswald. He begins his chronicle of the man with his return from Russia. Which conveniently leaves a lot out. For example, his enlistment in the Marines where he listened to Russian records and subscribed to communist newspapers. His language training at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. His technical training as a radar operator, which would give his defection to Russia some value to the KGB. His stationing at Atsugi air base in Japan, a huge CIA center and home of the U-2. His application for a hardship discharge although his mother was not actually enduring a hardship and he only stayed with her a few days when he got out of the service. His application and payment to Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland, a college so obscure that neither the FBI in Paris or the Swiss federal police knew about it. His flight into Russia from Helsinki, when there were no commercial flights scheduled. His quite suspicious denouncement in Moscow of the United States. The fact that the KGB did not buy into this “defection” and shipped him 400 miles away to Minsk, where he was spied on and surveilled by Russian agents.

    By beginning where he does with Oswald, Kaiser can leave all the above out. He appears to do this so he can deny that Oswald was in any way a CIA operative. Which he does this way: “Oswald’s activities fall squarely into a larger pattern of FBI and private right-wing attempts to discredit communist fronts … ” (p. 191) And this is what I mean about the book being methodically bad. If Oswald was primarily working for the FBI, why would Hoover have to launch a five-month investigation for Albert Schweitzer College? You mean he didn’t know where his own operative had been headed? As I discussed in my review of A Certain Arrogance, the main American backer of that college was a primary stockholder in Southern Air Transport, a CIA shell company. But if you don’t tell your reader any of this then you don’t have to explain the dichotomies and non-sequitirs. And I should add here that the private company that Kaiser says Oswald may have worked for was the Information Council of the Americas, (INCA) Yet this would only explain Oswald’s activities in the summer of 1963, and secondly, INCA’s Truth Tapes were recycled into Latin America by Ted Shackley and the CIA.

    Another problem for Kaiser in this regard is David Ferrie, Clay Shaw and Guy Banister. These three men are all clearly associated with the CIA. He solves the Shaw problem by minimizing the Clinton-Jackson incident, spending about 2 _ pages on it. He then tries to present it as an FBI COINTELPRO operation. As Bill Davy has noted, this interpretation has some serious problems to it. First, the FBI operations against these types of groups were not formally begun until 1967. (Let Justice Be Done, p. 107) Second, the whole episode ends not in Clinton with the voter registration drive, but in Jackson, with Oswald applying for a job at a mental hospital. But if you skimp the incident, you can ignore these important factual points. As for Ferrie and Banister, Kaiser takes another page from Ultimate Sacrifice (a book which he condemns) by presenting them as being employees of Carlos Marcello. He actually says that “Ferrie took a vacation at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, but nothing is really known about what he was doing.” (p. 199) Evidently, Kaiser didn’t read Davy’s book. Ferrie was training Cubans for the Bay of Pigs at the Belle Chasse Naval Station just south of New Orleans. Equipment for the camp was coming in through the State Department and CIA through Ferrie’s good friend Sergio Arcacha Smith. There were about three hundred Cubans trained there over a six-week period. One group was trained as a strike force assault battalion before being sent to Guatemala for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation. They were trained in things like demolition, guerilla warfare, and underwater diving. The memo containing this information concludes that “the training was entirely Agency controlled and the training was conducted by Agency personnel.” (Davy, p. 30-31) The memo was signed by David Phillips. He should know since he was one of the managers of that debacle. So much for Ferrie not being a CIA agent and being in the exclusive employ of Marcello’s lawyer, Wray Gill. As for no one knowing where Ferrie was the day of the Bay of Pigs operation, evidently Kaiser never visited New Orleans or Baton Rouge. If he would have read the papers there he would have learned that Smith’s wife told the reporters that Ferrie had been at their house the day of the operation. (Baton Rouge State-Times, 2/27/67) And after the invasion failed, the two friends watched films of the failed operation. (Davy, p. 28) Did Marcello get those films for them? Finally, by his own admission, Ferrie was also employed by the CIA during Operation MONGOOSE. (Ibid) Again, Kaiser methodically ignores all this important and documented information. And much more.

    Kaiser devotes a chapter to the famous Odio incident. It’s as specious as everything else he does. First off, he tries to state that it actually was Oswald at Sylvia Odio’s apartment door. But as everyone who has studied the incident knows, this creates a problem because then one must ask: Who is the guy on his way to Mexico City at right around the same time? Kaiser tries to dodge this dilemma by saying that the incident may have occurred not in late September, but in October. (p. 246) This is strange. In the 1993 PBS Frontline documentary about Oswald, one of the very few good portions of that special was that they featured Odio and other corroborating witnesses to her story. They pinpointed the date as the last week in September, the 25th or 26th. But since Kaiser wants to dodge the question of an imposter, he leaves himself this ridiculous October date as an out.

    He then writes another weird sentence. In prefacing this incident, he describes it as, “The event that definitely ties Oswald to anti-Castro Cubans and indicates that he had been recruited to travel to Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro … ” Oswald had been involved with anti-Castro Cubans throughout his whole stay in New Orleans. Too many to be named here. Jim Garrison had reams of files on most of them. The last part of that sentence is also troublesome. Kaiser repeatedly portrays Oswald’s trip to Mexico as a way to get to Cuba. Its like he wants the reader to forget that Oswald, or an imposter, visited the Russian Embassy there also. And the idea was to get a transit visa to Cuba and then go to Russia. Finally, as most good commentators on the Odio incident state, the impression left on Odio was the “loco” Oswald’s hatred of Kennedy for betraying the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. This is the act which one of the three men, Leopoldo, told her that Oswald felt JFK should be killed for. (Accessories After the Fact, by Sylvia Meagher, p. 379)

    Finally, and most strange of all, Kaiser concludes that it was Loran Hall and Lawrence Howard with Oswald at Odio’s apartment. He bases this on an alleged conversation Hall had with the FBI in which he said he had been in Dallas in September with Howard and a man named William Seymour. And he uses, of all people, the late Gerry Hemming to bolster this. (pgs 258-259) He can do this because he completely ignores the fact that Hemming led author Joan Mellen to two other people as Oswald’s two cohorts. For Mellen, Hemming produced Angelo Murgado and Bernardo DeTorres as Leopoldo and Angelo.

    Hemming had been part of the International Anti-Communist Brigade with Hall. As Gaeton Fonzi notes in his extraordinary The Last Investigation, the members of this group were famous for giving out disinformation about the JFK case. (Fonzi, p. 114) As Fonzi further notes, Howard later denied being in Dallas. And when Silvia Odio was shown the photos of Hall and Howard, she did not recognize them. Hall later said he fabricated the story. Even later, he told the HSCA he never told the FBI he had been at Odio’s apartment. (Ibid, p. 115) Or as Meagher sums it all up: “Subsequent interviews with Loran Hall, Lawrence Howard, Sylvia Odio and Annie Odio resulted in the collapse of the assumption that Hall, Howard and Seymour were the men who had visited Mrs. Odio …” (Meagher, p. 387)

    So why does Kaiser insist on Hall being there? He needs Hall to link the plot to Florida mobster Santo Trafficante. (Kaiser, p. 260) This is revealed on the last page of his chapter on Odio. Not easily deterred, Kaiser is determined to fit that round peg into that square hole.

    IV

    The last section of the book is called “Converging Paths.” It is probably the worst of the three sections, which is saying something. The first two chapters of this section detail Kennedy’s Cuban policy after MONGOOSE was terminated. Kaiser opines that there was no dramatic difference between MONGOOSE and what came afterwards. Which is easy for him to do since he never mentions Kennedy’s refusal to back Operation Northwoods, the Pentagon’s secret plan to create a provocation to invade the island. And like Lamar Waldron he gives short shrift to the back channel set up by Kennedy to establish détente with Castro. He actually says it was going nowhere. (p. 306) Which completely contradicts Bill Attwood, a major participant in the negotiations. As Jim Douglass noted in JFK and the Unspeakable, Attwood wrote he had no doubt that it would have led to a normalization of relations between the two countries.

    He mentions Richard Helms’ testimony about the discovery of an arms cache in Venezuela in November of 1963. (pgs. 298-99) I discussed this incident in my review of Ultimate Sacrifice. Revealingly, Kaiser leaves out three important aspects to the story. First, Helms went to Bobby Kennedy to announce this important discovery of Castro subverting other countries in South America. Bobby was nonplussed. Helms then went to JFK with this alarming news of Castro exporting revolution. Kennedy told him it was no big deal and gave him a picture of himself. Later, CIA analyst Joseph Smith deduced that the CIA had planted the shipment to create a crisis for the US to invade Cuba.

    This incident, and the back channel, if explained fully, completely contradicts his statement about Kennedy’s attitude toward Castro. Kaiser writes that Kennedy never accepted the existence of Castro’s regime in Cuba and wanted to remove it, even if it meant American intervention. (p. 306) Needless to add, if Kennedy had wanted to remove Castro, he would have sent in the Navy during the Bay of Pigs, or the Marines during the Missile Crisis. Those were perfect opportunities for American intervention and nearly everyone around him would have backed him. In fact, they were encouraging him to do so. He did not. Kaiser never explains why he didn’t.

    The last three chapters, 15-17, are actually kind of pathetic. In the numerous impersonations of Oswald–for instance at the rifle range with Sterling Wood–all the critics have been wrong for all these years. It was really Oswald. And this helps explain his excellent marksmanship in Dealey Plaza. (p. 342) It was actually Oswald who left a rifle at the gunsmith shop with Dial Ryder. (pgs 349-350) And hold on to your hats. The famous Al Bogard story of an Oswald impersonator at the Lincoln-Mercury car dealership? Well, that was really Oswald. And the money he mentioned he would be coming into, well that was his reward for killing Kennedy. (pgs 350-351) I’m not kidding.

    Needless to say, according to Kaiser, Oswald killed Kennedy. How does he know this? The HSCA’s scientific tests prove it. He actually uses the Vincent Guinn analysis of the neutron activation test in this regard. And he uses the likes of Ken Rahn and Larry Sturdivan to back Guinn. This test has been thoroughly discredited at length and in depth by two superlative academic studies. (See “Death of the NAA Verdict” on this site’s front page.) He also uses the HSCA trajectory test done by Thomas Canning to show that Oswald could have fired the shot that went through both President Kennedy and Governor Connally. He never tells the reader that, strangely, Canning didn’t reveal the angle of that bullet in degrees during the entire fifty pages of his HSCA testimony. (The Assassinations, p. 79) Or that Canning moved up the back wound placement from where the medical panel had placed it in order to make that trajectory work. (Ibid) Or that at the time the HSCA placed the first hit of Kennedy, Zapruder frame 189, Oswald would have been firing through the branches of an oak tree. (Ibid. p. 84) And perhaps most devastating to Kaiser, he never quotes the letter Canning wrote to Blakey. It ends with this: “On balance, the entire effort would be justified solely by the strong indication of conspiracy at the Plaza.” Thus Kaiser’s own expert disproves not just this section, but his entire book.

    V

    Why would Kaiser lend himself to such a farcical exercise? As I said earlier, the mentioning of Anna Kasten Nelson’s name as the chair of the Board set off some alarm bells with me. The bells were ringing by the end of the book. In his Acknowledgements section he gives the game away. On page 494 appear two sentences which encapsulate The Road to Dallas. He writes first that Oliver Stone’s film JFK, “did more than anything else to promote the most irresponsible conspiracy theories about the case … ” He then follows that with this, “Professor Anna K. Nelson of American University, a board member, has also been an enthusiastic supporter of this project.”

    The two institutions of American society which were most rocked by Stone’s film were the media and academia. For good reason. The film was a slap in the face to them both. They were the key supporters of the phony Warren Commission story. First, the media accepted it without any analysis. Then, academia let that verdict go unchallenged through the years by posing no serious questions to it in history books or in academic journals. When Stone’s film was released almost three decades after the fact, it made them look like silly stiffs.

    Next to the late Kermit Hall, Nelson was probably the most outspoken member of the Board in this regard. Two of the four lists that President Clinton chose from to construct the Board were the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association. So Clinton chose from establishment historians. And Nelson clearly had it in for Stone. In a piece she wrote for Chronicle of Higher Education, she attacked his portrait of President Nixon in his film Nixon. In an interview she did for Penthouse (January of 1997) she basically took the line of writers like George Lardner and Walter Pincus: There really was nothing new or revealing in the declassified files. She said “The sense you get in reading all of these documents is that the CIA and FBI were primarily concerned with covering up other kinds of operations.” She went on to say that J. Edgar Hoover damaged the Warren Commission’s credibility by protecting some CIA and FBI secret operations. She concluded that the reason over two million pages of documents were not revealed was, “It was part of the Cold War culture.” (Probe Vol. 4 No. 2)

    In another interview she gave to the LA Times (8/20/97), Nelson took a shot at Jim Garrison. Noting a release of what appeared to be a diary of Clay Shaw’s, Nelson said that it was “one more step that totally discredits Garrison’s trial and, incidentally totally discredits Stone’s movie.” She apparently forgot that it was Shaw’s trial and not Garrison’s. (Probe Vol. 5 No. 2) But she then added that although she believes the Warren Commission, she now believes it acted in haste. Although she thinks Oswald killed JFK, “there is likely more to the story.” (Ibid) After I wrote the article from which these quotes were pulled I concluded that what these comments proved “is that no one ever got ahead in the academic world by advocating conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination.”

    Kaiser seems to understand that. And he fulfilled Nelson’s wishes. He fills in the “more to the story” but he keeps Oswald as the lone assassin. Along the way, he trashes Stone and Garrison. In fact, if you analyze the book’s message it is essentially the inverse of Stone’s film. Kaiser is saying that 1.) Oswald killed Kennedy 2.) Any cover-up that ensued was probably because of Oswald’s nebulous ties to either INCA or the FBI, and 3.) The Kennedys weren’t that great anyway. But as I have proven above, he broke almost every rule of historical scholarship to achieve that agenda.

  • Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked

    I have spoken to Larry Hancock on several occasions. I like him and some of the Lancer Group people he is associated with, like Debra Conway. But Hancock’s book Someone Would Have Talked is a decidedly mixed bag.

    From the title, it tries to circumvent the notion that Warren Commission defenders always trot out. Namely: If there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, why has no one talked about such an enterprise before or since? The book enumerates several people who did do just that. But its real aim is to outline the actual conspiracy as he sees it. And he tries to tilt that conspiracy in a certain way. It’s the way he tilts it that I have some major problems with.

    The first chapter focuses on John Martino. Martino was involved with a Mafia-owned hotel in Cuba prior to Castro’s revolution. He was then arrested and jailed by the revolutionaries. Once he was released in 1962 he began to speak out against Castro, joined up with some para-military types like Felipe Vidal Santiago and Gerry Hemming, and was also a speaker on the John Birch Society circuit. He died in 1975. But before he passed away he spoke about what he had heard of the plot to kill Kennedy to a couple of friends and to his wife. One of the friends, Fred Claasen, went to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. According to Hancock, the HSCA did only a perfunctory investigation of the claims. Later on, in Vanity Fair, (December of 1994) Anthony Summers fleshed out the story more fully. Hancock, on page 16, puts the Martino findings in synoptic form:

    1. Cuban exiles manipulated Oswald in advance of the plot and two of them were snipers in Dealey Plaza.
    2. Oswald was a U. S. government undercover operative who was approached by anti-Castro exiles representing themselves as pro-Castro.
    3. Oswald was supposed to meet an exile contact at the Texas Theater. Oswald thought he would help him escape the country, but the actual plan was to shoot him. Tippit’s killing aborted this. Therefore the planners had to have Ruby murder Oswald.
    4. The motorcade route was known in advance, and the attack was planned thoroughly in advance.

    It is interesting to note here that shortly after this, in Chapters 3 and 4, Hancock begins to summarize the story of Richard Case Nagell, another person who had knowledge of the assassination. I think to any knowledgeable and objective observer comparing the two stories, Nagell’s is more compelling. For by 1975, when the Martino story first surfaced, all of the enumerated points above were realized as distinct possibilities or contingencies by most serious researchers. The one exception being the anti-Castro exiles presenting themselves to Oswald as pro-Castro. But this would be the most speculative part also, since the only people who could actually verify it would be Oswald and the Cubans who approached him. And since I have noted elsewhere, most of the Cubans in this milieu are notoriously unreliable, that would leave Oswald.

    I said that by 1975 Martino’s information was pretty well known to serious investigators. But really, as Hancock relates it, it was known earlier than that. For by the end of 1968, all of the points — except as noted — were working axioms of the New Orleans investigation by DA Jim Garrison. To use just one investigator’s testimony, researcher Gary Schoener has said that Garrison was “obsessed” with the Cuban exile group Alpha 66. At one time, he thought they were the main sponsoring group manipulating Oswald, and that they had pulled off the actual assassination.

    One avenue by which Garrison was led to believe this was through Nagell. And one thing I liked about the book was that it summarized a lot of Nagell’s testimony in more complete, concise and digestible terms than previously presented (see pgs. 39-58). In the first edition of Dick Russell’s book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Nagell’s story wandered and got lost in a 900-page mountain consisting of much extraneous and tangential elements. Although Hancock leaves out some rather important details — which I will mention later — he does a nice job in distilling and relating its basic outlines. Between the two, because of who he was, his first person testimony, and some evidence he had, I believe Nagell’s story easily has more evidentiary value.

    Consider: Nagell actually tried to inform the authorities in advance. When they did not respond, he got himself arrested. He was then railroaded — along with Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden — because of his attempt to talk. He then wrote letters describing his knowledge to friends while incarcerated (see Probe Vol. 3 No. 1). He then revealed to Garrison assistant William Martin his specific knowledge of two of the Cuban exiles who were manipulating Oswald. One he named as Sergio Arcacha Smith. The other who he only hinted at had a last name beginning with “Q”. This could be Carlos Quiroga, or Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero. Since Smith and Quiroga were known associates in New Orleans, I lean toward Quiroga. Nagell actually revealed that he had recorded their incriminating talks with Oswald on tape. Since he — as well as Garrison — did not know that Martin was a double agent, it is not surprising that the FBI later broke into his belongings and absconded with the tape, among other things. (Strangely, or as we shall see later, perhaps not, Hancock leaves this intriguing episode out of his book.)

    Now since Garrison was the first law enforcement authority Nagell confided in directly, and the first person to take him seriously, the DA was clearly interested in the Cuban exile aspect. Especially since Nagell’s information was being reinforced to him from multiple angles. For instance, David Ferrie’s close friend Raymond Broshears was also quite specific with Garrison as to the importance of Sergio Arcacha Smith. And when Garrison tried to get Smith extradited from Texas, the local authorities, under the influence of Bill Alexander and Hugh Aynesworth, refused to cooperate. (It is puzzling to me that Hancock, who is so interested in the Cuban groups, seems to try to minimize the importance of Smith.)

    One thing Hancock makes clear is how Nagell originally got involved in the JFK case. Like many foreign intelligence operatives, one of Nagell’s ports of call was Mexico City. As certified by his friend Arthur Greenstein and an FBI memorandum, Nagell was there in the fall of 1962. And at this time, he began acting as a triple agent: “He represented himself to a Soviet contact as a pro-Soviet double agent, while secretly retaining his loyalty to the United States.” (p. 54) It was in this pose that he became known to the KGB. When they approached Nagell they asked him to monitor a Soviet defector and his wife. The second mission they had was to infiltrate a group of Cuban exiles. The Russians had discovered a group of them in Mexico City making threats against President Kennedy for his actions at the Bay of Pigs. The Russians had garnered that part of the scheme was to blame the plot on the Cubans and Russians. This is something that, in the wake of the Missile Crisis, the Russians were desperate to avoid. From here, Hancock summarizes the stories of both Vaughn Snipes and Garret Trapnell, people Nagell suspected as being considered as pro-Castro patsies by the Cuban group (pgs 56-58). And it was this trail that eventually led Nagell to New Orleans and Oswald.

    II

    It is probably a back-handed complement to Hancock to praise him for his neat and precise synopsis on the man who Garrison called the most important witness in the JFK case. For, as noted above, he seems much more preoccupied with Martino. And with that preoccupation, the middle section of the book uses Martino’s more general information to explore what Hancock calls “persons of interest”. But right before this the author makes a most curious statement. He writes, “Knowing that Martino was part of a conspiracy and was in communication with individuals in Texas on November 22… ” (p. 61) Having read the book closely and written over 14 pages of notes on it, I fail to see how Hancock justifies this statement. As summarized above, the information Martino had could have been communicated to him through several of his Cuban exile friends. None of it connotes Martino being part of the plot. And Hancock advances no affirmative evidence to prove that point. (I should also add that the last part of the quoted phrase is ambiguous. It could mean that, after the fact, he was in contact with people who say they were in Dallas that day.)

    It is statements like this that I think seriously mar the book. It is nothing if not an ambitious book. For instance, right after the above statement concerning Martino, Hancock tries to pinpoint the exact moment in time where Oswald began being manipulated by Cuban agents. He says it is while he was in New Orleans on 8/28/63. He marks this by a letter Oswald wrote to the FPCC about a planned move. He then adds that Dallas was not actually in the assassination plan at this time. He says that at the end of August, the hit was planned for Washington in September. This is based on nothing more than a letter Oswald wrote on September 1st mentioning a possible move to Baltimore which, of course, never occurred.

    Now — and this is important — there are all kinds of things Oswald did in New Orleans that, retrospectively, could be seen as part of his frame-up. Too many to be listed here. And there are others, besides the Cuban exiles, who were involved with his manipulation e.g. Ed Butler, Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw in New Orleans. (Not to mention George DeMohrenschildt and the Paines in Dallas.) For instance, there is the absolutely remarkable journey Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald took to the towns of Clinton and Jackson which occurred about a week before this letter was written. Also, the House Select Committee on Assassinations discovered that Banister either was thinking of, or actually did send, a dead rat to the White House that summer. These things seem to me to be at least as interesting as this letter for marking purposes. But again, the author does not note them. I mention them here just to indicate how difficult it is to make an extraordinary claim like he does, actually trying to pinpoint when Oswald began being manipulated. I really don’t think this is possible. But, as we shall see, it is par for the course in this book.

    From here Hancock begins to explore those “persons of interest” he mentioned earlier. Some of the people he chooses are interesting, some of them are not. A prime example of the latter is Victor Hernandez who he spends two meandering pages on (pgs 64-65). Some others, like Robert McKeown, seem to me to be more relevant. There is also a section entitled “Oswald in the School Book Depository” (p. 69). And in this section and the pages that follow, Hancock deals with the evidence that exculpates Oswald. He does a good job with the gunshot residue testing. He writes that there was nothing to connect either Oswald’s cheek to the rifle or his hands to the pistol. And that upon hearing word of this, the FBI ordered agents not to make those facts available to anyone in order to “protect the Bureau.” (p. 73) Further in this regard, he uses the work of Harold Weisberg to show that on seven occasions the FBI had fired the rifle with the result being the depositing of heavy powder on the subject’s cheeks. (Ibid)

    Hancock caps this section nicely. After proffering up all this probative evidence, he then quotes Cortland Cunningham’s testimony to the Warren Commission. This testimony states in part, “No sir; I personally wouldn’t expect to find any residues on a person’s cheek after firing a rifle … so by its very nature, I would not expect to find residue on the right cheek of a shooter.” (Ibid)

    Another interesting part of the book is how it deals with the experiences of the late Dallas detective Buddy Walthers. This is based on a rare manuscript about the man by author Eric Tagg. Walthers was part of at least three major evidentiary finds in Dallas. Through his wife, he discovered the meetings at the house on Harlendale Avenue by Alpha 66 in the fall of 1963. Second, he was with FBI agent Robert Barrett when he picked up what appears to be a bullet slug in the grass at Dealey Plaza. And third, something I was unaware of until the work of John Armstrong and is also in this book, Walthers was at the house of Ruth and Michael Paine when the Dallas Police searched it on Friday afternoon. Walthers told Tagg that they “found six or seven metal filing cabinets full of letters, maps, records and index cards with names of pro-Castro sympathizers.” (Hancock places this statement in his footnotes on p. 552.) This is absolutely startling of course since, combined with the work of Carol Hewett, Steve Jones, and Barbara La Monica, it essentially cinches the case that the Paines were domestic surveillance agents in the Cold War against communism. (Hancock notes how the Warren Commission and Wesley Liebeler forced Walthers to backtrack on this point and then made it disappear in the “Speculation and Rumors” part of the report.)

    III

    Since Hancock is dealing in the Cuban exile milieu, he spends a lot of time on the infamous characters of Dave Morales and John Roselli. And this is where I need to mention a couple of volumes the author uses, books which I find unreliable.

    One of them is Ultimate Sacrifice, which I have reviewed at length previously. I won’t go through the myriad problems I have with that book. But as a result of that, I was surprised that Hancock seemed to actually take it seriously. Even its most questionable thesis, about a so-called second invasion of Cuba assembled by the Pentagon and CIA (see p. 200). Unfortunately, Hancock leaves out the fact that Director of Plans Richard Helms didn’t seem to know about that invasion. And neither did Pentagon Chief Bob McNamara or National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy.

    The other book relied upon here is All American Mafioso: The Johnny Roselli Story. This is by Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker. This book, like Ultimate Sacrifice, makes extravagant claims about Roselli that I find rather strained and poorly sourced, e.g. his alleged involvement in the death of Castillo-Armas in Guatemala. One of the sources for the Roselli book is Jimmy Fratianno, a noted Mafia informant. If one walks around Los Angeles (where I live) often enough, one will eventually meet someone who knew a friend of Fratianno’s. And that person will tell you a tale Fratianno had not revealed in public before about Roselli’s involvement in President Kennedy’s assassination. I know this for a fact since it just happened to me about eight months ago. Unlike Rappleye and Becker I will not be writing about it. As Michael Beschloss has stated, there is no library with the declassified papers of Sam Giancana. Or in this case, John Roselli. So, in large part, one must rely on the word of people like Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno. And if you wish to aggrandize and sensationalize Roselli, then you will use a character like him. I would place the Becker/Rappleye effort somewhere on a par with John Davis’ tome on Carlos Marcello. So it was not surprising to me that the authors of the gaseous Ultimate Sacrifice were eager to use both of these works. It did surprise me that Hancock used the Roselli book as much as he did. In fact, about half his chapter on Roselli is sourced to it. He even mentions an alleged meeting between Roselli and Ruby in the fall of 1963. Yet he then adds that this is based on FBI reports that no one can produce.

    I had a similar problem with the following chapter on David Phillips. And it started right on the first page (159). Hancock writes, “Phillips was without a doubt a CIA general.” If we consider that word in its normal sense, with normal examples e.g. Eisenhower, Schwarzkopf etc. then I don’t understand it. At the time frame of the JFK assassination, Phillips was an operations officer. A man in the field supervising things getting done and done right. Not a guy behind the lines planning and approving the overall campaign. In his fine book A Death in Washington Don Freed quotes CIA Director Bill Colby (p. 81) as calling Phillips a great operations officer. So if we go by Colby’s rather authoritative account, Phillips was really a Lt. Colonel at the time — parallel to someone like Oliver North in the Iran/Contra scandal. Hancock then goes further. He applies this same spurious hierarchical title — “general” — to Dave Morales. Yet Morales was Chief of Staff to Ted Shackley at JM/WAVE during this period. I would not even apply the word “general” to Shackley at the time, let alone Morales. Or if I did, it would at most be Brigadier General, not a starred one. It was their superiors at Langley, e.g. James Angleton, who were the generals. People like Phillips and Morales were implementers. (Hancock devotes an entire chapter to Morales. Which is part and parcel of the hubbub that has attended the research community since Gaeton Fonzi introduced him in The Last Investigation. As I noted in my review of the documentary RFK Must Die this has reached the point of actually — and unsuccessfully — implicating him in the murder of Robert Kennedy.)

    Hancock uses Philips’ own autobiography The Night Watch for much of the background material on the man. He then uses one of his timelines to take us up to the famous Bishop/Phillips masquerade episode with Antonio Veciana. But surprisingly, he leaves out some of the most intriguing points about Phillips in Mexico City. Especially his work on the fraudulent tapes sent to Washington to implicate Oswald in the JFK case. For instance, Hancock does not even mention the role of Anne Goodpasture, Phillips’ assistant in Mexico City. There is some extraordinary material on her in the HSCA’s Lopez Report. Neither does he mention the utterly fascinating evidence that John Armstrong advances in his book Harvey and Lee. Namely that Phillips sent the dubiously transcribed Mexico City tapes of Oswald by pouch to himself at Langley under an assumed name. Why would he do such a thing? Well, maybe so that no officers but he and Goodpasture would have the tapes from their origin in Mexico City to their arrival at CIA HQ. This mini-conspiracy was blown in two ways. First, when FBI officials heard the tapes as part of their Kennedy murder investigation and concurred that they were not of Oswald. Second, when HSCA first counsel Richard Sprague showed the official transcripts of the tapes to the original Mexico City transcriber. The transcriber replied that what was on those transcripts was not what he recalled translating. It seems odd to me that these very important points would be left out of any contemporary discussion of Phillips. Even more so since Hancock goes into the Mexico City episode less than a hundred pages later (pgs 275-282)

    IV

    The above leads to a structural criticism of this book, namely its uneven organization. There is almost as much jumping around here as in Joan Mellen’s A Farewell to Justice. But unlike with that book, the fault is not in the editing down of a longer work. It seems here to be part of the ambitious, gestalt-like approach. Hancock the theorist is handling many different threads, and assigning them equal weight. It’s a wide grasp, and Hancock the writer isn’t up to the task. The job of Hancock the writer was to at least try and mold all these separate strands into a clean, clear narrative frame that would keep the reader’s attention and drive him forward to a convincing conclusion. To put it mildly, the book did not succeed on that level. It’s a difficult read. It does not really have a chronological organization, or even a thematic one. Which is why Hancock probably uses all those cumbersome and unhelpful timelines. The thematic approach he attempts is also weak. The chapter titles are supposed to suggest a general framework of what to find. Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not. For instance, he introduces the aforementioned Robert McKeown in Chapter 2. But then his story is not filled in until almost 200 pages later (pgs 189-191) Same with Jack Ruby. Details about him are filled in throughout the book. But they seem to me to be incomplete in themselves, and not completing an intellectual or narrative arc. This organizational problem is multiplied by other technical errors in the book’s production. For example the proper rubric to give the introduction to a book is “Foreword,” not “Forward”. In the index, even though he is mentioned prominently, you will not find the name of Robert McKeown. Conversely, my name is mentioned in the index, but it does not appear on the pages listed.

    The above production flaws accentuate the tilt in the book that I noted earlier. Although it’s a bit difficult to discern, the conspiracy I see Hancock postulating here is a kind of rogue, loosely knit, willy-nilly operation. A set of Cubans is at the bottom committing the crime (he points toward Felipe Vidal Santiago). The supervisor of this plot is Roselli, who Hancock terms the “strategist”. Since Roselli has connections to the CIA, the implication is this is where Phillips and Morales come in. To top the machinations as depicted by Hancock — and in a rather original stroke — he brings in Roselli’s friend and super Washington lobbyist Fred Black. He says Black is the guy who saw President Johnson right after he took office and had some blackmail material on him and this is why LBJ went along with the cover-up.

    Where does this information appear to come from? Newly declassified ARRB files perhaps? Nope. It’s from another rather questionable book that the author uses. This is Wheeling and Dealing, by the infamous Bobby Baker. Now again, to go into all the problems with using a book like this and with someone like Baker would take a separate essay in itself. Suffice it to say, Baker had such a low reputation and was involved with so many unsavory characters and activities that RFK pressed then Vice-President Johnson to get rid of him before the 1964 election. The Attorney General was worried some of these activities would explode into the press and endanger the campaign. Liking the protection his position with Johnson gave him, Baker resisted. He then fought back. One of the ways he fought back was by planting rumors about President Kennedy and a woman named Ellen Rometsch. The resultant hubbub, with daggers and accusations flying about, is the kind of thing that authors like Seymour Hersh and Burton Hersh make hay of in their trashy books. (I didn’t think it was possible, but Burton Hersh’s book Bobby and J. Edgar is even more awful than The Dark Side of Camelot. It is such an atrocity, I couldn’t even finish it.) Suffice it to say, Baker was forced out in October of 1963. Researcher Peter Vea has seen the original FBI reports commissioned by Hoover about Rometsch and he says there is nothing of substance in them about her and JFK. I am a bit surprised that Hancock would try and pin the JFK cover-up on information furnished by the likes of Baker and Black.

    This is all the more surprising since the author includes material from John Newman’s latest discoveries about Oswald, James Angleton, the CIA and Mexico City. To me this new ARRB released evidence provides a much more demonstrable and credible thesis as to just how and why Johnson decided to actively involve himself in the cover-up.

    To make his Black/Baker theorem tenable on the page, Hancock leaves out or severely curtails some rather important and compelling evidence. In 1996, Probe published a milestone article by Professor Donald Gibson entitled “The Creation of the Warren Commission” (Vol. 3 No. 4 p. 8). It was, and still is, the definitive account of how the Warren Commission came into being. And it was used and sourced by Gerald McKnight in the best study of the Warren Commission we have to date, Breach of Trust, published in 2005. According to this evidence declassified by the ARRB, there were three men involved in pushing the concept of the Warren Commission onto the Johnson White House. They were Eugene Rostow, Dean Acheson, and Joseph Alsop. (There is a fourth person who Rostow alluded to but didn’t name in his call to Bill Moyers on 11/24. Ibid p. 27) This trio sprung into action right after Oswald was shot by Ruby. And they began to instantly lobby Moyers, Walter Jenkins, Nick Katzenbach, and President Johnson to create what eventually became the Warren Commission. To say that Hancock gives short shrift to Gibson’s seminal account is a huge understatement. He radically truncates the absolutely crucial and stunning phone call between LBJ and Alsop of 11/25. One has to read this transcript to understand just how important it is and just how intent and forceful Alsop is in getting Johnson to do what he wants him to. (The Assassinations pgs. 10-15.) By almost eviscerating it, Hancock leaves the impression that it is actually Johnson who was pushing for the creation of a blue ribbon national committee and not Alsop! (Hancock pgs 327-328) I don’t see how any objective person can read the longer excerpts and come to that conclusion. So when Hancock states (p. 322) categorically that “President Johnson was the driving force in determining and controlling exactly how the murder of President Kennedy was investigated,” I am utterly baffled at how and why he can write this. The sterling work of both Gibson and McKnight show that this is a wild and irresponsible exaggeration.

    V

    But this puzzling aspect of the work relates to other dubious but just as categorical statements that abound in it. On page 298, Hancock writes that the Oswald as Lone Nut story was created after the fact as a damage control device and was not part of the plot. If that is true then why did Shaw and Ferrie try to get Oswald a position at a mental hospital in Jackson, Louisiana in the summer of 1963? When Garrison studied this incident he concluded its goal was to get Oswald into such a hospital under any circumstances. And then announce after the assassination that he had been there as a patient. Presto! You have the officially deranged sociopath the Warren Commission tries to portray. Also, on and dovetailing with this, multi-millionaire Jock Whitney did a curious thing on 11/22/63. He went to work as a copy editor at the New York Herald Tribune — a paper that he owned. One of the things he did was to approve an editorial that suggested that very Lone Nut scenario. (Probe Vol. 7 No. 1 p. 20) Right after making this unwarranted assumption, Hancock writes about how the plotters actually meant to portray the patsy: “The plotters were presenting Oswald as a paid Castro agent associating with Castro operatives.” (Ibid) Two questions I have about this “presentation.” First, who was paying him and how much? In other words, what happened to the money? Second, who were these pro-Castro operatives? I fail to see them in any study of Oswald. This seems to me to be, outside the fantasy world of Gus Russo, a vacuous and unsupportable concept.

    On another occasion the omniscient Hancock states that the conspirators lacked “a Dallas intelligence network.” (p. 379) Well, if your self-appointed plotters are people like Santiago and Roselli, this might be accurate. But if you unblinker your eyes, people like George DeMohrenschildt, CIA chief J. Walton Moore, Ruth and Michael Paine, and the rather large White Russian community — who, among other things, counseled Marina Oswald on her New Orleans Grand Jury testimony — these suspicious characters might serve just fine as an intelligence network.

    Finally, in a rather revealing statement, Hancock writes that if the cover-up had been pre-planned, “there should not have been the glaring problems we now see in regard to the autopsy.” (p. 299) Again, this is a real puzzler. The medical part of this case held quite strongly until the time of the HSCA. In other words for 15 years. When a strong critical movement arose against the Warren Commission in 1967, Warren Commission lawyer David Slawson — then in the Justice Department — started the move toward an official review of the autopsy. From the beginning, his intent — which he actually wrote about — was to stop the critical community in its tracks with an authoritative medical document supporting the Warren Commission verdict. Slawson’s efforts ended up in the formation of the so-called Fischer Panel, an illustrious panel of forensic pathologists selected by Ramsey Clark. They issued their report in 1968 and it predictably certified that only one assassin was involved and all shots came from the rear. This report was then used to batter both the Warren Commission critics and DA Jim Garrison, who was pursuing his case against Clay Shaw at the time. How did it achieve this aim? Because of its Washington based sanction of secrecy. Only the result was announced. The material and methodology used to attain it was kept hidden. It was not until the HSCA report, and the second generation of books on the case which followed it, that this area of evidence began to be seriously addressed. And this was in the late 70’s and early 1980’s. And it was not until the nineties, with the Assassination Records Review Board releases, that so much was finally declassified that the medical aspect began to be sharply skewered from multiple angles. In other words, what went on at Bethesda — a deliberately incomplete and deceptive autopsy conducted under military control — was not fully revealed until three decades later. Which is quite enough time to keep the cover-up intact. From a conspiratorial standpoint, the only other solution to this problem — disguising the true nature of the shots and the assassin — would have been to actually have a sniper on the sixth floor and to have him perform what the Commission actually said he did. But this could not have been done since we know today that the feat is not possible. So what did happen, the federally sanctioned cover-up, was an operational necessity which did the trick.

    These kinds of blanket yet porous statements occur quite often throughout this book. (There are many others I could have listed but, for reason of rhetorical overkill, I did not.) So although there are some interesting and worthwhile aspects to this book, overall I found it really disappointing. It is spotty, pretentious, unconvincing in its overall thesis, and uses questionable sources and witnesses to advance parts of its presentation, while leaving out more credible evidence that works against that particular presentation. It pains me to write like this, since I like Mr. Hancock and think he and his organization have done some good work. But I have to.

    Also read the update to this review.

  • Castro blasts CIA over spy papers

    From BBC NEWS, July 1, 2007

    Cuban President Fidel Castro has said recent CIA admissions of illicit Cold War activities disguise the fact the US is using such “brutal” tactics today.

    Last week the CIA published documents called the “Family Jewels,” revealing spy plots and assassination attempts.

    The documents included plans to use Mafia help to kill Fidel Castro.

    Mr Castro, still recovering after surgery last year, said in the official media the US was trying to pretend the tactics belonged to another era.

    “Everything described in the documents is still being done, only in a more brutal manner around the entire planet, including an increasing number of illegal actions in the very United States,” President Castro wrote.

    In an editorial called the Killing Machine, he wrote: “Sunday is a good day to read what appears to be science fiction.”

    Lee Harvey Oswald

    One of the key revelations of the documents was that the CIA tried to persuade mobster Johnny Roselli in 1960 to plot the assassination of the Cuban leader.

    The plan was for poisoned pills to be put in Mr Castro’s food, but it was shelved after the US-sponsored invasion of the Bay of Pigs failed a year later.

    Mr Castro has long accused the US, including President George W Bush, of plotting to kill him.

    In his editorial, Mr Castro also refers to the assassination of John F Kennedy, saying the US president was the victim of the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

    Mr Castro says Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone in killing the president.

    “You lose the target after every shot even if it is not moving and have to find it again in fractions of a second,” Mr Castro, himself an expert marksman, says.

    Mr Castro underwent intestinal surgery in July last year but in recent weeks his writings have been appearing more frequently.

    The abuses and illicit activities listed in the CIA report date from the 1950s to the 1970s.

    On Friday Cuba’s parliament passed a resolution stating that: “What the CIA recognises is not old history. It is present-day reality and the facts show it.”

  • E. Howard Hunt Dies

    E. Howard Hunt Dies

    Everette Howard Hunt, a cold warrior whose Intelligence career spanned three decades, died in Miami on January 23 at the age of 88.

    E. Howard Hunt was a co-founder of the Office of Strategic Services during World War Two. A strident anti-communist, he proudly took credit for orchestrating a 1954 coup against Guatemala’s elected leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz, and the 1967 killing of Fidel Castro ally Ernesto “Che” Guevara. He also organized the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion

    hunt 01

    But Hunt’s most notorious act was as one of the masterminds of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate building in Washington, DC. “I will always be called a Watergate burglar, even though I was never in the damn place,” Hunt said in 1997. “But it happened. Now I have to make the best of it.”

    Hunt, a devoted servant of President Richard Nixon, relied on a circle of militant Cuban contacts from the Bay of Pigs invasion to carry out the break-in. The Cuban burglars rifled campaign files and financial records in search of evidence to back Hunt’s suspicion that Castro had given money to Nixon’s rival, Democratic nominee George McGovern.

    “I had always assumed, working for the CIA for so many years, that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land,” Hunt told People magazine in 1974. “I viewed this like any other mission. It just happened to take place inside this country.”

    Hunt spent 33 months in federal prison for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, pleading guilty to evade what could have been a 35-year sentence if convicted at trial. Two dozen other men also served time for the bungled break-in. Nixon was forced to abandon his second term on Aug. 9, 1974, becoming the only U.S. president to resign.

    After his release from prison, he devoted much of his time to writing spy novels, which he had begun producing in the 1940s. He wrote more than 80 books. A memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, is due out next month.

    In an interview for Slate magazine in October 2004, Hunt said he had been doubtful of the Bay of Pigs’ prospects for deposing Castro because of State Department interference in the CIA operation and the Kennedy administration’s insistence on keeping it low-key.

    Hunt also was involved in organizing an event that foreshadowed Watergate: the burglary of the the office of the Beverly Hills psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971.

    Many believe Hunt played a role in the Kennedy assassination. In 1978 Spotlight magazine, a publication of the right-wing Liberty Lobby, published an article by former CIA employee Victor Marchetti that linked Hunt to the assassination. Hunt sued for libel and won a settlement of $650,000. That verdict was vacated in 1985. Hunt never received any of the money and declared bankruptcy in 1997.

    Some have put forth the theory that Hunt was one of three so-called tramps arrested near Dealey Plaza shortly after the assassination. Hunt always denied it. “I was in Washington, D.C., on November 22, 1963,” he wrote in a 1975 letter to Time magazine, while he was incarcerated at Eglin Air Force Base’s prison camp. “It is a physical law that an object can occupy only one space at one time.”

    Hunt underwent gall bladder surgery in the late 1990s and had a leg amputated after arteriosclerosis developed, spending his last years in a motorized wheelchair. He lived in a modest home in the Miami area with his second wife, Laura Martin Hunt. His first wife, the former Dorothy Wetzel Day Goutiere, died in a plane crash in 1972.

    Besides his wife, Hunt was survived by six children.

  • Gunrunner Ruby and the CIA

    From the July-August, 1995 issue (Vol. 2 No. 5) of Probe

    It’s not as if they didn’t know. Assistant counsels to the Warren Commission Burt Griffin and Leon Hubert wrote, in a memo to the Warren Commission members dated March 20, 1964, that “the most promising links between Jack Ruby and the assassination of President Kennedy are established through underworld figures and anti-Castro Cubans, and extreme right-wing Americans.” 1 Two months later, Griffin and Hubert wrote another memo to the Commission, significantly titled “Adequacy of the Ruby Investigation” in which they warned, “We believe that a reasonable possibility exists that Ruby has maintained a close interest in Cuban affairs to the extent necessary to participate in gun sales or smuggling.”

    “They’re going to find out about Cuba. They’re going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything.”

    Ruby had talked about it himself while in jail, reportedly telling a friend, “They’re going to find out about Cuba. They’re going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything.” 2 Tales of Ruby running guns to Cuba abounded in the FBI reports taken in the first weeks after the assassination, yet neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee pursued those leads very far. Griffin and Hubert expressed concern over this, saying that “neither Oswald’s Cuban interests in Dallas nor Ruby’s Cuban activities have been adequately explored.” 3

    If They Dared

    Hubert and Griffin expressed in their memo of May 14 to Rankin that “we believe that the possibility exists, based on evidence already available, that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald. The existence of such dealings can only be surmised since the present investigation has not focused on that area.” 4 They expressed concern that “Ruby had time to engage in susbtantial activities in addition to the management of his Clubs” and that “Ruby has always been a person who looked for money-making ‘sidelines’.” They even suggested that since the Fort Worth manufacturer of the famous “Twist Board” Ruby was demonstrating the night after the assassination had no known sales, and was manufactured by an oil field equipment company, that “[t]he possibility remains that the ‘twist board’ was a front for some other illegal enterprise.” But what Griffin and Hubert kept coming back to is that there was “much evidence” that Ruby “was interested in Cuban matters, citing his relationship to Louis McWillie; his attempted sale of jeeps to Castro, his reported attendance of meetings “in connection with the sale of arms to Cubans and the smuggling out of refugees”; and Ruby’s quick correction of Wade’s remark that Oswald was a member of the Free Cuba Committee, a group populated with such notables as Clare Booth Luce, Admiral Arleigh Burke, and Hal Hendrix. “Bits of evidence link Ruby to others who may have been interested in Cuban affairs.”

    What was their recommendation, based on such tantalizing evidence? “We suggest that these matters cannot be left ‘hanging in the air.’ They must either be explored further or a firm decision must be made not to do so supported by stated reasons for the decision.” History has given us the commission’s decision on this, but a clue to the motivation shows up in this same memo, in regards to Seth Kantor, who claimed to have seen Ruby at Parkland hospital around the time of Kennedy’s death. “We must decide who is telling the truth, for there would be considerable significance if it would be concluded that Ruby is lying.” [emphasis added] The concern was not what the truth was, but what the truth might mean if it was uncomfortably discovered.

    Ruby was lying, and the implications are enormous.

    Cuban Excursions

    Ruby had told the Warren Commission he had only been to Cuba once, on vacation, for a week to ten days. Not true. According to Cuban travel records, Jack Ruby entered Cuba from New Orleans on August 8, 1959; left Cuba September 11, 1959; re-entered Cuba from Miami on September 12, 1959; and returned from Cuba to New Orleans on September 13, 1959. 5 But bank records 6, Dallas police records 7, and FBI records 8 showed Ruby in Dallas August 10, 21, 31, and September 4, days which fall right in the middle of his supposedly continuous stay in Cuba. Somehow, Ruby was getting in and out of Cuba without the Cuban authorities detecting and recording such. Why was Ruby making multiple excursions to Cuba during this time? What were the nature of these visits and why did he choose to hide them?

    The reticence of investigative bodies to investigate these matters make sense when one realizes that Jack Ruby was not going to Cuba on pleasure trips. The Warren Report tells of an incident in early 1959 where Ruby made “preliminary inquiries, as a middleman, concerning the possible sale to Cuba of some surplus jeeps located in Shreveport, La., and asked about the possible release of prisoners from a Cuban prison.” 9 Ruby’s sister indicated the jeeps might have been military surplus from W.W.II. 10 Both the story of the jeeps and the story of the prisoners tie Ruby to some interesting Cuban activities.

    A Whole Lot of Jeeps

    Texas gunrunner Robert McKeown said Ruby “had a whole lot of jeeps he wanted to get to Castro.” Ruby wanted McKeown to write a personal letter of introduction to Castro for Ruby so he could talk to Castro about releasing some unnamed friends detained in Havana. 11

    At that time, Santo Trafficante was being held at the Trescornia detention center in Cuba. Was Ruby instrumental in winning Trafficante’s release at that time? John Wilson Hudson (a.k.a. John Wilson), an English journalist supposedly detained with Trafficante in the camp, indicated that Ruby came to see Trafficante in Trescornia. 12 After Ruby shot Oswald, according to CIA cables, Wilson contacted the American Embassy and reported that “an American gangster called Santo…was visited by an American gangster type named Ruby.” 13 If Ruby was trying to sell jeeps to Castro, as McKeown said, was this an arms-for-hostages type deal? Get Castro the jeeps and get Trafficante out of jail? Recent events remind us this certainly wouldn’t have been the only such effort in history. Trafficante was released from the detention center in August, 1959, 14 possibly just after Ruby’s appearance there.

    Questioning Trafficante

    Trafficante is a person often portrayed as one of Ruby’s mob contacts. But Trafficante was one of the “gangsters” who participated in the CIA’s Castro assassination attempts, according to the CIA Inspector General’s report. Key to understanding the seriousness of defining Trafficante’s relationship with Ruby are the questions originally put to him before Blakey took over the HSCA, by then-chief counsel Richard Sprague. 15 To all of the following, Trafficante’s response was, “I respectfully refuse to answer that question pursuant to my constitutional rights under the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments.” This is the legal outlet allowed when a truthful answer will be self-incriminating, and Trafficante used it throughout.

    The first question out of Sprague’s mouth is probably indicative of why he was eventually ousted – he had a habit of getting right to the point:

    “Mr. Trafficante, have you at any time been an employee, a contract employee, or in any manner been in the service of the Central Intelligence Agency, or any other agency of the Federal Government of the United States?”

    The rest of the questions followed in a similar vein:

    “Mr. Trafficante, did you know John Rosselli?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, did you know Sam Giancana?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, do you know Robert Maheu?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, prior to November 22, 1963, did you have information that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, prior to November 22, 1963, did you advise other people of the assassination of President Kennedy?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, prior to November 22, 1963, did you know Jack Ruby?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, have you ever met with representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency to discuss the assassination of various world leaders, including Fidel Castro?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, is any agency of the U.S. Government giving you any immunity with regard to any plans to assassinate any world leaders?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, did you ever discuss with any individual plans to assassinate President Kennedy prior to his assassination?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, while you were in prison in Cuba, were you visited by Jack Ruby?”

    When the questions were opened to the others present, more questions followed in the same vein. Note: no one was asking questions about Trafficante’s mob involvement. They were interested in his ties to the government:

    “Mr. Trafficante, as a result of your appearance here today, have you been threatened by anyone, any group or agency? Has your life been threatened in any way?”
    “Mr. Trafficante, have you been contacted by any agency in the executive branch, say the CIA or FBI, in connection with your possible testimony before or after you received formal subpena to appear before this committee?”

    Trafficante’s involvement with the CIA and Ruby bear further scrutiny. The Review Board should be asked to release all CIA and FBI files on Santo Trafficante.

    The story of Jack Ruby getting Trafficante out of a Cuban jail was not the only such allegation. There is another allegation from a different source that Ruby was involved in some guns for hostages deal.

    Nancy Perrin Rich told the Warren Commission a fascinating story about a group running Enfield rifles to Castro in order to run refugees out of Cuba to Florida. The guns were to be run through Mexico. Ruby was evidently the bagman for this group, since his appearance on at least one occasion made the cries about lack of money disappear when he walked in. 16

    Nancy Perrin Rich’s story is perhaps the most widely retold of Ruby’s gunrunning episodes. But there are a number of other odd stories that bear dissemination, some with more substantiation than others. There are the new Elrod revelations that put Ruby in the middle of yet another gunrunning scenario. 17 And there is a story from Islamorada, Florida that leads to interesting places.

    Jack and James

    Mrs. Mary Thompson met a man named “Jack” accompanied by a women, not his wife, named “Isabel” at the home of Mary Lou and James Woodard in Islamorada, Florida. 18 At the time, Mary Thompson was accompanied by her daughter Dolores and Dolores’s husband. Jack was said to be from Chicago originally. Mrs. Thompson placed the date of this encounter around the end of May of 1958. Interestingly enough, she said Jack’s first real name was Leon but went by Jack. Jack Ruby’s middle name was Leon.

    Mary Lou Woodard said Jack had a trunk full of guns he was going to supply to Cubans. Mary Thompson stated she’d been told there were supplies of guns hidden in the marshes that were being collected by the Indians in the area to be sold to the Cubans, as this was around the time of the Cuban revolution. Mary Thompson’s daughter Dolores also saw and described this same Jack, as did Mrs. W. R. Simons.

    Dolores recalled that her husband’s friend James Woodard, while drunk one night, declared he would run guns to Cuba with Jack. Woodard had two or three guns of his own but said Jack had a lot more. When shown a photo of Jack Ruby she said it resembled the man she remembered, although she didn’t remember his last name as being “Ruby.”

    A check of the Knoxville FBI files showed that James Woodard was considered “armed and dangerous”, packed a weapon, and had a violent temper when drinking. Interviewed by the FBI in September of 1963, Woodard “in somewhat rambling and incoherent manner” talked of his participation in an invasion of Cuba prior to the Castro regime, that he had again participated in the Bay of Pigs and had furnished ammunition and dynamite to both Castro and the Cuban exile forces. On October 8, 1963, Woodard was questioned again, this time concerning dynamite found at his residence in South Dade County, Florida, as the dynamite had been stolen from a construction company. He claimed the dynamite was being used by Cuban exile forces fighting the Castro regime.

    After the assassination, James Woodard’s sister said James had been in Texas a lot, and that she had asked James if he ever knew Ruby. He said no, but then promptly disappeared and hadn’t been seen since November 25, 1963. If he truly had been running guns with Ruby to the CIA-sponsored Cuban exile forces, one can surely imagine a hefty motive for his sudden disappearance after Ruby appeared on the public scene by shooting Oswald. Woodard is another person whose records the Review Board should look into to shed light on Ruby’s contacts with Cubans and gunrunning.

    Perhaps Ruby was concerned enough to hide his activities not so much because he was running guns, but because of who he was running them for, and with.

    By far the most interesting account of Ruby’s gunrunning is found in an FBI report taken a week after the assassination. Informant “T-2” (Blaney Mack Johnson) revealed that in the early 1950s a man he knew then as “Rubenstein” arranged illegal flights of weapons to the Castro organization in Cuba. He added that Rubenstein “left Miami and purchased a substantial share in a Havana gaming house in which one ColLIS PRIO (phonetic) was principal owner.” 19 One recognizes the name Carlos Prio Soccaras, especially when T-2 linked “ColLIS” to Batista. In the early 50s Prio was a supporter of the Batista regime under which he had grown exceedingly wealthy, but in the mid to late 50s Prio worked hand in hand with Castro, aided by the CIA, to overthrow the increasingly difficult Batista.

    In a letter to Lee Rankin of the Warren Commission, Hoover had this to say of the ongoing (since 1952) investigation of Dr. Carlos Prio Socarras, a.k.a. Carlos Prio: “The neutrality and registration act investigation related primarily to the activities of Carlos Prio Socarras, who, with a number of others including McKeown, was involved in a conspiracy to ship arms, munitions, and other war materials to Fidel Castro to assist him in his efforts to overthrow the Batista regime in this investigation.” 20 In the attachment, the FBI had McKeown knowing Castro and Carlos Prio Socarras personally. As referenced earlier, McKeown was the one who revealed Ruby’s possible jeep deal and Ruby’s attempt to get friends released from Cuban detention. McKeown also said that Ruby came to him offering a large sum of money in return for a personal letter of introduction to Castro. 21

    Mysterious Mr. Browder

    But T-2’s account revealed possibly a contact of Ruby’s even more interesting than Prio. T-2 stated that the man he recognized as Ruby but knew formerly as Rubenstein was smuggling arms to Cuba with one Donald Edward Browder. T-2 went on to name three people who he said could corroborate his story: Joe Marrs of Marrs Aircraft whom Ruby contracted to make flights to Cuba; former Chief of Police in Hialeah, Florida Leslie Lewis, who would know of Ruby’s gunrunning and smuggling operations; and Clifton T. Bowes, Jr., formerly captain of National Airlines, Miami, for further corroboration.

    Joe Marrs worked for Eastern Airlines. He claimed he never flew for hire or transported goods. He knew Browder, but claimed he avoided Browder as he saw him as a shady promoter who was all talk about air transport plans but no money (an amusing revelation from a man who just a few words earlier had said he didn’t fly for hire.) 22

    Les Lewis, the former Chief of Police, denied knowing Jack Ruby and claimed to have “no knowledge whatsoever of persons flying weapons to Cuba.” A Hialeah Police Chief having no knowledge of persons flying weapons to Cuba in the fifties is a bit hard to believe. And of course, Lewis completely denied ever knowing a Donald Edward Browder. 23

    Clifton T. Bowes was sure he never knew a Jack Rubenstein and said he first heard of Ruby watching him on television. He did not know a Donald Edward Browder but did claim to know Blaney Mack Johnson, saying he understood Johnson was ill and had been hospitalized, was “highly imaginative” 24, the usual FBI line for an unwelcome witness.

    When the FBI collected these denials, they returned to Johnson. Johnson stuck tightly by his story and insisted all the information he had provided had been true and accurate. He also said he understood why Lewis, Marrs and Bowes would have lied to conceal their knowledge of and/or involvement in Ruby’s activities. And of course, Johnson replied he had never been hospitalized.

    Enter Eddie Browder. Eddie Browder testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 70s. 25 He was a former Lockheed test pilot who was serving a 25-year prison sentence for “security violations.” He told the committee he worked for the CIA. One time he had leased a B-25 bomber under the name of a non-existent company and flown it to Haiti a year after the Kennedy assassination. He cashed a check signed by George DeMohrenschildt’s Haitian business associate Clemard Charles, in the amount of $24,000. What’s interesting is that the HSCA used Browder’s testimony in the DeMohrenschildt section, not the Jack Ruby section. Is there a tie there linking DeMohrenschildt to Jack Ruby? Only three small “innocuous” reports of the more than 1000 pages the FBI has on Browder were released to the Warren Commission. 26 It’s time the remaining documents on Browder, including the full text of his executive session testimony before the HSCA, were released. Any Browder who used the Don Eduardo alias 27, worked with DeMohrenschildt, and ran guns with Ruby to Cuba is worthy of further study.

    (Continued in the following issue of Probe.)

    Notes

    1. George Michael Evica, And We Are All Mortal (University of Hartford, 1978), p. 161.
    2. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, Ltd, 1993), p. 179.
    3. Memorandum to J. Lee Rankin from Leon D. Hubert and Burt W. Griffin, May 14, 1964, p. 3.
    4. Memorandum to J. Lee Rankin from Leon D. Hubert and Burt W. Griffin, May 14, 1964, p. 4.
    5. HSCA, Vol. 5, pp. 197-198.
    6. HSCA, Vol. 5, p. 204. On page 205 Stokes said that Ruby was admitted to his box on August 20th, but the copy of the FBI report on the bank records on the previous page show both a typewritten date of August 21 and a handwritten note with the same date.
    7. Anthony Summers, Conspiracy (Paragon House paperback edition, 1989), p. 439.
    8. HSCA, Vol. 5, p. 221.
    9. Report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), p. 345.
    10. WC Vol. 26, p. 661, CE 3069.
    11. Summers, p. 437.
    12. Summers, p. 441.
    13. Summers, p. 440; HSCA Vol. 5, p. 365.
    14. HSCA, Vol. 5, p. 325.
    15. HSCA, Hearings March 16, 1977, pp.37-41.
    16. WC Vol. 14, pp. 349-350.
    17. For a lengthy treatment of Elrod, see the article by Ray and Mary La Fontaine, The Washington Post, 8/7/94, “The Fourth Tramp”.
    18. WC Vol. 26, p. 642-649.
    19. WC Vol. 26, p. 634, CE 3063.
    20. WC Vol. 26, p. 650, CE 3066.
    21. Summers, p. 437.
    22. WC Vol. 26, p. 639.
    23. WC Vol. 26, p. 639.
    24. WC Vol. 26, p. 640.
    25. Jim Marrs, Crossfire (Carrol & Graf, 1989), p. 284.
    26. Marrs, p. 392.
    27. Don Eduardo was a well known alias of E. Howard Hunt. But James McCord also used the name Don Eduardo. Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (Random House, 1984), p. 80. Blaney Mack Johnson said Don Edward Browder was sometimes called “Don Eduardo.” WC Vol. 26, p. 642.

  • Gus, Will You Please Make Up Your Mind?

    Gus Russo has been at work on the JFK case for the past 15 years. To those around him, he has jumped around in his conclusions quite frequently and violently. So much so, that it is hard to measure what he really believes about this case and why or why not. This is particularly puzzling because since 1998 there have been approximately 2 million pages of new files that have been released by the Assassination Records Review Board. Many of these new documents have been very important in resolving disputes that have existed for a long time. For example, Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn’s investigation of the medical evidence — that is, the interviews he conducted with some very important people at President Kennedy’s autopsy in Bethesda, Maryland — are extraordinarily illuminating to anyone seriously investigating a homicide. Yet, if one examines Russo’s book there is not a mention of them in the entire text. This is important for what it tells us about the book and Russo, but also because it tells us why Russo arrived at where he did on his long and digressive and interesting journey.

    In the late 1980’s Russo was friendly with Boston area researcher Edgar Tatro. (This relationship would be sustained up until the issuance of JFK: The Book of the Film. Russo worked on this book with Oliver Stone’s chief researcher, Jane Rusconi. He promised Tatro he would be credited prominently in the book since he called him many times for information. Tatro was not mentioned as often as he should have been and this began their split.) As anyone who knows him will attest, Tatro is a prime proponent of the school that Lyndon Johnson was behind the John Kennedy assassination. At this time, Russo befriended Tatro and asked if he would be willing to take a sabbatical from his educator’s position to serve as the consultant to a documentary film he was proposing to several financial backers. According to Tatro, Russo actually got as far as presenting the idea to these backers, but for some reason the proposal fell through. So, one could assume that since Russo was pushing this idea he probably believed it. But wait.

    In the early 1990’s the word got out that Oliver Stone was producing a big-budget film based on Jim Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins. Now anyone who knew Garrison, or his publisher, Sheridan Square Press, would know that the book had to propose that the Central Intelligence Agency —especially the so-called Old Boys Network within it — was the main perpetrator behind the Kennedy assassination. At this time, Russo was investigating the shadowy European trade company PERMINDEX, of which Clay Shaw was a member. He was also extolling the fact that he had outfoxed a clerk at the National Archives and had listened to a previously classified tape of the so-called Fenton Report. This referred to a suspect in the Garrison investigation who had been tracked down by House Select Committee investigators Cliff Fenton, Bob Buras, and L. J. Delsa and had discussed his role in an apparent meeting, and other actions, at which the murder of JFK had been discussed. As mentioned above, Stone later hired Russo to help Rusconi produce the book which contained much of the backup material for the screenplay. So many deduced from all this that Russo believed the CIA was the prime force behind the killing of Kennedy. But wait.

    At a conference in Dallas in 1992, Russo discussed the story of Delk Simpson, a military officer who had been mentioned by writer Robert Morrow and had been pursued reportedly by attorney Bernard Fensterwald. He actually made a presentation with former military intelligence analyst John Newman. Newman’s book JFK and Vietnam mainly blamed the military for the intelligence deception that Kennedy had seen through when he decided that the U.S. would have to withdraw from Vietnam. So now people assumed that Russo had shifted gears and thought the assassination was led by the military with perhaps a hand from the CIA. But wait.

    A year later, at a conference in Chicago, Russo now ridiculed the idea that Oswald could have been an intelligence operative. This basically knocked out the idea of a military-intelligence type of conspiracy. He now said that the research community should be following leads that pertained to the Mafia and the Cuban exile community. Sort of what people like Robert Blakey — Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations — may have proposed today. Yet, at the same time, someone read him his blurb for Robert Morrow’s final book on the case, First Hand Knowledge. Russo essentially said that he stood by the positive blurb. The problem here was that Morrow’s book included a conspiracy of the Mafia, the Cubans and the CIA, which was led on the ground by Clay Shaw. So perhaps now Russo was advocating a kind of “grand conspiracy” theory crossing through two or three different structures. But wait.

    In the same year, Russo was one of the two reporters on the PBS Frontline special, “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?” This show was erratic and unfocused yet by the end it clearly went along with the verdict of the Warren Commission, i.e. that Oswald did it alone. Was Russo now throwing all his years of hunting for an antidote to the Warren Commission away? Was he now embracing the thoroughly discredited Warren Commission? It appeared that way. But wait.

    In 1998 Russo penned his book which was supposedly based on the declassified files of the ARRB. Now he twisted the Warren Commission thesis a bit. He now seemed to be saying that Oswald was not really a demented sociopath, which is what the Warren Commission leans on. He now seemed to be saying that he was manipulated by agents of Fidel Castro into believing that Kennedy felt that Castro’s regime had to be removed. The pro-Castro Oswald could not stomach that thought and he did what he did in Dealey Plaza.

    If you have been counting, depending on what you make of Russo’s performance at the Chicago Conference, that is either six or seven camps that Russo has been in. Yet he discounts each step of his Pilgrim’s Progress. He forgets his previous beliefs as quickly as a good cornerback forgets the 70 yard touchdown completed over his head. This is OK for football, but it is not OK for investigative journalism which tries to build an edifice that recognizes and tries to reconcile into an understandable paradigm all the evidence about a complex and important event. There is no sign of this in Russo’s work. Or else he would not have ignored the vital medical evidence mentioned above. What makes it even worse is that Russo does not even mention his previous beliefs today. For instance, it is difficult to find anywhere where he mentions that he worked on the Stone book with Rusconi. The only way one can find out about the LBJ phase is through Tatro. No one can recall him mentioning it at any talk he gave at a national researcher’s conference in the nineties.

    The natural question is: Did he believe any of these himself? Or when he found he could not find a foolproof theory did he then decide that it was easier and more lucrative to side with the Establishment and the Warren Commission, knowing that people like Peter Jennings and David Westin would never divulge his past conspiracy delvings, or maybe not even ask about them?

    Unfortunately for Jennings and Westin, some people knew Russo way back when he was a musician, before Jennings and Westin started flying him around the country first class for their “exhaustive” and “irrefutable” investigation.

  • David Atlee Phillips, Clay Shaw and Freeport Sulphur

    Lisa Pease Reports on Freeport Sulphur:

    Whitney, the Ambassador, and Batista’s Tax Break for Freeport Sulphur

    Freeport Sulphur’s Powerful Board of Directors

    JFK, Indonesia, CIA & Freeport Sulphur

    Maurice Bishop and “The Spook” Hal Hendrix

    “If the CIA has taken over one large corporation, then how many others, perhaps smaller and less likely to be noticed, might it already have taken over? At this moment just how many American corporations are being used at home and abroad to carry out the CIA’s nefarious schemes?”

    – Writer and editor Kirkpatrick Sale, referring to the Hughes Corporation, in a presentation for the Conference on the CIA and World Peace held at Yale University on April 5, 1975, published in Uncloaking the CIA, Howard Frazier, ed. (NY: The Free Press, 1978)

    During my recent interview of MR. JAMES J. PLAINE of Houston, Texas, MR. PLAINE informed me that he had been contacted by a MR. WHITE of Freeport Sulphur in regards to a possible assassination plan for Fidel Castro.

    – New Orleans District Attorney (NODA) Memo from Andrew Sciambra to Jim Garrison, dated 10/9/68

    		  
      A memo in the GUY BANISTER file indicates that there is information which reports that DICK WHITE, a high official of Freeport Sulphur, and CLAY SHAW were flown to Cuba probably taking off from the Harvey Canal area in a Freeport Sulphur plane piloted by DAVE FERRIE. The purpose of this trip was to set up import of Cuba’s nickel ore to a Canadian front corporation which would in turn ship to the Braithwaite nickel plant. The plant was built by the U.S. Government at a cost of about one million dollars. – New Orleans District Attorney (NODA) Memo from Sciambra to Garrison, dated 10/9/68
    One man whose name we first thought to be WHITE apparently is WIGHT, Vice President of Freeport Sulphur who reputedly made the flight. Currently an effort is being made to locate WIGHT, who lives in New York. Despite the fact that the original source of this information was JULES RICCO KIMBLE, a man with a record, this lead keeps growing stronger. From the very outset it had been reported that the flight had something to do with the import of nickle following the loss of the original import supply from Cuba. Recent information developed on WIGHT in a separate memo indicated that he is now on the Board of Directors of the Freeport Nickel Company, a subsidiary of Freeport Sulphur. – NODA Clay Shaw Lead File note, no date  
      [Ken] Elliot then changed the subject and stated that he has a lot of information that he could give to the D.A. but that unless he was assured that he would not be publicly brought into the investigation or be served, he would not come forward. He stated as an example that SHAW and two other persons either purchased or attempted to purchase a nickel ore plant in Braithwaite, Louisiana, after the company was closed because of broken trade relations with Cuba. At this time DAVID FERRIE flew SHAW and his two partners to Canada in an attempt to receive the ore from Cuba but through Canada. – NODA Memo from Sal Scalia to Garrison, 6/27/67
    Cogswell says the Bishop sketch resembles the former president of a Moa Bay subsidiary, Freeport Sulphur of New Orleans. Cogswell doesn’t remember the name of that officer, but says he knew he had very powerful connections and came from Texas. – HSCA Outside Contact Report dated 7/6/78, Gaeton Fonzi’s interview of James J. Cogswell III.  
      Mr. Phillips stated that he “probably” did have some contacts with someone or some persons associated with the Moa Bay Mining Company, but he did not recall any specific names. He also “must have” had some contact with Freeport Sulphur people. “I was fairly socially active at the time and the name of the company is familiar to me.” – HSCA notes from an HSCA interview with David Atlee Phillips, dated 8/24/78.

     

    The quotes at left [above] should raise some serious eyebrows. Could an American-based multinational corporation such as Freeport Sulphur, now Freeport McMoRan, have been involved, however peripherally, in anti-Castro activities in the sixties? Could Freeport have provided cover to employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, employees such as David Atlee Phillips? Could we have imagined there would be a company connecting both Phillips and Clay Shaw, the man Jim Garrison charged with being part of the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy?

    The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late ’70s pursued this strange lead. It seemed more than mere coincidence that both Clay Shaw’s name and that of Phillips’ purported alias, Maurice Bishop, would show up in conjunction with a little publicized company known then as Freeport Sulphur. Interestingly, in the last few months, Freeport has been making headlines in the Los Angeles Times, Texas Observer, The Progressive and the Austin Chronicle due to allegations of human rights abuses and environmental degradation.

    The HSCA suppressed the files surrounding the investigation of David Phillips’s alleged connection to Freeport Sulphur’s Cuban subsidiary, the Moa Bay Mining Company. The document quoted at left, referencing David Phillips and Freeport Sulphur, has been quietly circulating through the research community, although it had been technically unreleased. The secrecy surrounding David Atlee Phillips and every document, interview, tape and reference to him must end. He is a key suspect, having been fingered by several as the Maurice Bishop that Antonio Veciana saw talking to Oswald in Texas. As the reader will see, the connections here are too compelling to go unexplored. The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) must make every effort to secure the remaining pieces of the investigation of the Freeport Sulphur-David Phillips connection, as well as all documents and testimony relating to the identity and role of Maurice Bishop/David Atlee Phillips in the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination.

    Bill Davy, in his well-documented monograph Through the Looking Glass: The Mysterious World of Clay Shaw, put forth the first public information on Freeport Sulphur’s peripheral relation to a key figure in the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. Here, we flesh out the information surrounding this company, as it hosts a startling set of heavy hitters whose policies crossed swords with those of President John F. Kennedy in significant ways.

    Probe is not going to state that Freeport Sulphur was in any way involved in the planning or execution of the Kennedy assassination. But this is a company that connects the CIA, the Rockefellers, Clay Shaw and David Phillips. The company had serious clashes with Castro over an expensive project, and with the Kennedy administration over matters of great monetary significance to Freeport. Allegations of a Canadian connection with New Orleans, and Cuban nickel mining and processing operations fit neatly into Shaw’s reported activities. And this is a company which had at least one director reportedly talking about killing Castro.

    Because this is such an important story, and there is so much to it, this article has been broken into two parts, the second of which will be in the next issue of Probe. There is no quick way to tell this story, as the history and players all need backgrounds to put the nature of the implications in the fullest possible context. So we go back to the beginning.

    Freeport Sulphur’s Early Years with John Hay Whitney

    Freeport Sulphur was born in Texas in 1912. The company later moved the headquarters office to New York. Originally, the principal business was mining sulphur. By 1962, Freeport Sulphur was the nation’s oldest and largest producer of sulphur. In 1962, the fertilizer industry used 40% of the sulphur produced in the world. Other business segments that use sulphur in the production process are chemical, papermaking, pigment, pharmaceutical, mining, oil-refining and fiber manufacturing industries. For most of this period, Freeport was headed by John Hay Whitney.

    In 1927, Payne Whitney, one of America’s richest multimillionaires, died, leaving his only son and future Freeport president an estate valued at over $179 million. At the young age of 22, John Hay Whitney became one of the country’s richest men. Nonetheless, “Jock,” as the press later called him, took a job at Lee Higginson and Co. on a salary of $65 a month. There, he made a fateful friendship with another onetime Lee Higginson employee named Langbourne Williams. Langbourne’s father had originally founded Freeport Texas, then lost control of the business. Langbourne enlisted Jock’s boss at Lee Higginson-J. T. Claiborne-to help in a proxy fight for control of Freeport. Claiborne urged the young Jock to join their efforts. Jock did-to the tune of a half a million dollars. By 1930, the Claiborne-Williams-Whitney team had won control of Freeport.

    Without Jock Whitney’s influence-and of course, money-the future of Freeport may have been gravely different. The Whitney family fortune was legendary not just for its size, but for the power that the Whitneys wielded with it. Republican Whitney money, for example, founded The New Republic. Carroll Quigley, in Tragedy and Hope, has written:

    The best example of this alliance of Wall Street and Left-wing publication was The New Republic, a magazine founded by Willard Straight, using Payne Whitney money. . . . The original purpose for establishing the paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide it quietly in an Anglophile direction. . . . The first editor of The New Republic, the well-known “liberal” Herbert Croly, was aware of the situation. . . Croly’s biography of Straight, published in 1914, makes perfectly clear that Straight was in no sense a liberal or a progressive, but was, indeed, a typical international banker and that The New Republic was simply a medium for advancing certain designs of such international bankers, notably to blunt the isolationism and anti-British sentiments so prevalent among many American progressives, while providing them with a vehicle for expression of their progressive view in literature, art, music, social reform, and even domestic politics. . . . The chief achievement of The New Republic, however, in 1914-1918 and again in 1938-1948, was for interventionism in Europe and support of Great Britain.

    Put another way, the Whitney family was accustomed to covert uses of corporate institutions, and especially the media.

    The Whitneys had also been powerful within the government. Whitney’s grandfather, for example, had served under President Grover Cleveland as Secretary of the Navy. Jock Whitney himself followed the path of his predecessors, joining with Nelson Rockefeller in 1942 to take charge of American WWII propaganda in Latin America through the Rockefeller-controlled Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA). Due to the confluence of interests and the similarity in substance, at one time, there was talk of merging the Rockefeller-Whitney CIAA operation with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). Nelson Rockefeller, however, did not wish to relinquish his fiefdom, and the merger never happened. (The history of Nelson Rockefeller’s Latin American operations are well detailed in the book Thy Will Be Done, by Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett.)

    Whitney himself had significant ties to the OSS and the CIA. During World War II, Whitney had been temporarily detailed to “Wild Bill” Donovan of the OSS. During this time, he was captured by the Nazis, but escaped in a daring jump from a moving train.

    Whitney was second cousin to the famous CIA officer Tracy Barnes, known in the agency as Allen Dulles’s “Golden Boy.” Barnes eventually headed the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division long before it was legal for the CIA to operate domestically. Whitney and Barnes became friends while both were attending the Army Air Corps’ intelligence school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

    Another lifelong Whitney friend and business associate was William H. Jackson, who briefly served as second in command at the newly formed CIA as Deputy Director under Walter Bedell Smith.

    Perhaps it was these associations, or perhaps it was his relationship with the CIA-involved Nelson Rockefeller which persuaded Whitney to collaborate with the Agency on several occasions. For example, the Whitney Trust was financed in part with money from the Granary Fund. The Granary Fund was a CIA conduit.

    Another of Whitney’s many companies, the Delaware corporation Kern House Enterprises, housed the CIA front company Forum World Features, a foreign news service used to disperse CIA propaganda around the world. Forum writer Russell Warner stated that Forum World Features was “the principal CIA media effort in the world.” As for Kern Enterprises, in The Cult of Intelligence, by John Marks and Victor Marchetti, chapter five begins with a comment about Delaware corporations.

    “Oh, you mean the Delaware corporations,” said Robert Amory, Jr., a former Deputy Director of the CIA. “Well, if the agency wants to do something in Angola, it needs the Delaware corporations.”

    By “Delaware corporations” Amory was referring to what are more commonly known in the agency as “proprietary corporations” or, simply, “proprietaries.” These are ostensibly private institutions and businesses which are in fact financed and controlled by the CIA. From behind their commercial and sometimes non-profit covers, the agency is able to carry out a multitude of clandestine activities-usually covert-action operations. Many of the firms are legally incorporated in Delaware because of that state’s lenient regulation of corporations, but the CIA has not hesitated to use other states when it found them convenient.

    The present incarnation of Freeport Sulphur, Freeport McMoRan, is incorporated in Delaware.

    In keeping with the Whitneys’ long-standing British proclivities, Forum World Features was run with the “knowledge and full cooperation of British Intelligence.” Whitney’s friendliness with the British ultimately led to his appointment as Ambassador to Great Britain in 1957. At that time Whitney also controlled, as publisher and later as Editor-in-Chief, the New York Herald Tribune. Whitney worked media deals with Katherine Graham of the Washington Post, and Graham held a 45% share of the New York Herald Tribune’s stock, with an option for 5% more upon Whitney’s death.

    John Hay Whitney and Freeport Sulphur

    Whitney’s solid Eastern Establishment credentials, as well as his cooperation with the CIA, make his long tenure at Freeport Sulphur-both as Director and eventually Chairman of the company-rather interesting. It was Whitney who pushed for diversification of Freeport Sulphur into other concerns. The first diversification move Whitney put through was the purchase of the Cuban-American Manganese Corporation and its manganese reserves in Cuba. Manganese oxide production there ran from 1932-1946, at which point the reserves had been exhausted by the war effort. In late 1943, Freeport opened its Nicaro Nickel Company subsidiary in Nicaro, Cuba. Through its Cuban-American Nickel Company subsidiary, Freeport also developed another subsidiary: Moa Bay Mining Company.

    By the early ’60s, Freeport had divisions and subsidiaries that were diverse and profitable. Freeport Oil Company, a division of Freeport Sulphur, racked up $1,122,000 in 1961, over and above its $772,000 earnings the year before. Freeport International, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Freeport Sulphur, set out to explore and develop new industrial ventures overseas in Europe, Australia, India and elsewhere. With one other company, Freeport Sulphur shared equally in a 95 per cent share in the National Potash Company, whose earnings in 1961 were triple that of the previous year.

    A company with the diverse assets of Freeport Sulphur, with the ability to provide cover to agents worldwide, would naturally be of intense interest to the CIA. Not surprisingly, there have been allegations of CIA involvement with the Moa Bay Mining Company, Freeport’s Cuban nickel mining subsidiary.

    Nickel Mining in Cuba, Processing in New Orleans

    According to Cuban lawyer Mario Lazo, whose firm represented Freeport Sulphur in Cuba, the Nicaro project was conceived just two months after Pearl Harbor. The strange Cuban nickel-cobalt ore required a special extraction process. Freeport had developed a new chemical process-and Washington approved the financing-to aid the development of nickel (used in the manufacturing of steel) for the war effort. The Nicaro nickel plant cost American taxpayers $100,000,000. At one point, the plant produced nearly 10% of all the nickel in the free world.

    New Orleans became home to a special plant Freeport set up just outside the city to process the nickel-cobalt ore. When the Moa Bay Mining project was conceived, Freeport Nickel, a wholly owned Freeport Sulphur subsidiary, put up $19,000,000 of $119,000,000 to develop the Cuban nickel ore. The rest of the money came from a group of American steel companies and major automobile makers. (Freeport’s pattern of putting in a small portion of total cost is a recurrent one.) $44,000,000 of the original funds went into Louisiana for the development of the New Orleans nickel processing facility at Port Nickel.

    Batista, Castro and the Moa Bay Mining Company

    In 1957, two things happened that allowed Freeport to develop nickel not just through the government-owned Nicaro nickel plant, but for itself. The first was a break on taxes, won through negotiations with Batista, for the proposed Moa Bay Mining Company. The second was a government contract in 1957 in which the U.S. Government committed itself to buying up to $248,000,000 worth of nickel. Both of these would lead to public criticism of Freeport in the years to come. The tax break led to charges that the U.S. Ambassador to Cuba and Langbourne Williams of Freeport Sulphur made a special deal with Batista. (See the box on page 19.) The contract would eventually lead Freeport into a Senate investigation and a confrontation with President Kennedy over the issue of stockpiling.

    Phillips, Veciana, Moa Bay Mining Company and Cuba

    During the Church committee hearings, Senator Richard Schweiker’s independent investigator Gaeton Fonzi stumbled onto a vital lead in the Kennedy assassination. An anti-Castro Cuban exile leader named Antonio Veciana was bitter about what he felt had been a government setup leading to his recent imprisonment, and he wanted to talk. Fonzi asked him about his activities, and without any prompting from Fonzi, Veciana volunteered the fact that his CIA handler, known to him only as “Maurice Bishop,” had been with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas not long before the assassination of Kennedy. Veciana gave a description of Bishop to a police artist, who drew a sketch. One notable characteristic Veciana mentioned were the dark patches on the skin under the eyes. When Senator Schweiker first saw the picture, he thought it strongly resembled the CIA’s former Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division-one of the highest positions in the Agency-and the head of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO): David Atlee Phillips.

    In an HSCA interview of David Phillips, an unnoted committee member wrote-in a document circulated throughout the research community-the following:

    When asked about his relationsip [sic] with Julio Lobo, he became a bit upset and said he thought he had covered that adequately in his deposition. He says as far as he can recall he met Lobo only one time, perhaps it was even in Madrid and not Havana, he doesn’t recall, and he had no substantial dealings with him.

    Julio Lobo was a Cuban banker and sugar king who later lived in Spain. He was also Veciana’s employer at the time Veciana first met Bishop. He gave funding to the DRE, set up by a man named Ross Crozier for the CIA as part of the operations against Cuba. Crozier says he did not, however, set up the New Orleans branch and that that was run by Carlos Bringuier. Crozier, referred to as “Cross” by the HSCA, was one of the people who identified David Atlee Phillips as Maurice Bishop. With this established, Phillip’s next recorded comment immediately after being asked about Lobo is significant:

    He [Phillips] wanted to know if Veciana’s story about Bishop is still being considered and if any decision about his being Bishop had be [sic] conclusively arrived at. He said he doesn’t like living under the fear and tension of possibly being called before the television cameras and having Veciana suddenly stand up and point his finger at him and say that he is Bishop and that he saw him with Oswald.

    Why would Phillips be so worried if there was no chance he was Bishop?

    Veciana, in his earliest interviews, spoke of receiving his intelligence training in an office building in which a mining company’s name was displayed and which also housed a branch of the Berlitz School of Languages. Could that mining company have been Nicaro Nickel, or Moa Bay Mining Company? And in one of those curious coincidences that infest the Kennedy assassination, Steve Dorrill, a writer for the British magazine Lobster, noted that in Madrid, a recent director of the Berlitz School of Languages was CIA officer Alberto Cesar Augusto Rodriguez, who was also the man responsible for the photographic surveillance of the Cuban Embassy at the time of the “Oswald” visit there. Recall that the CIA sent the Warren Commission pictures of a man who could never be mistaken for Oswald as evidence that Oswald had been to the Cuban embassy.

    Probe recently interviewed a former CIA pilot who knew Veciana from the Miami area and reported that Veciana was a guy whose word among the exile community was “as good as gold.” Fonzi felt that Veciana-by that time well out of prison and eager to get back into anti-Castro action-might lie out of loyalty to his greatest benefactor, “Maurice Bishop.” Veciana gave indications that Phillips was Bishop, but refused to identify him as such. (For yet another identification of David Atlee Phillips as Maurice Bishop, see Maurice Bishop and “The Spook” Hal Hendrix.)

    Perhaps because of the following account, David Atlee Phillips was questioned by the HSCA about his possible relationship with both Freeport Sulphur and Moa Bay Mining Company. While working for the HSCA, Fonzi interviewed James Cogswell III, in his home in Palm Beach, Florida. Cogswell presented Fonzi with various leads he felt were important to the case, one of which was the following:

    Cogswell says the Bishop sketch resembles the former president of a Moa Bay subsidiary, Freeport Sulphur of New Orleans. Cogswell doesn’t remember name of that officer, but says he knew he had very powerful connections and came from Texas.

    When Phillips, who came from Texas, was asked about Freeport, the HSCA staffer noted this response:

    Mr. Phillips stated that he “probably” did have some contacts with someone or some persons associated with the Moa Bay Mining Company, but he did not recall any specific names. He also “must have” had some contact with Freeport Sulphur people. “I was fairly socially active at the time and the name of the company is familiar to me.”

    Note that Phillips did not deny an association, but left it to the investigators to find more. Steve Dorrill reported in the Lobster article mentioned previously that one of the pilots of the Moa Bay Mining Company was Pedro Diaz Lanz, a hotshot pilot who defected from the head of Castro’s air force and subsequently befriended both Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt, both of whom have also been closely associated with David Phillips. Another employee of the Moa Bay Mining Company, Jorge Alfredo Tarafa, listed Freeport Nickel Company, Moa Bay Cuba as his place of employment from 9/21/59 to 4/8/60 on his job resume. Tarafa was identified as a delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Front (FRD) in New Orleans, headed by Sergio Arcacha Smith. The FRD was the group that E. Howard Hunt set up with exiled Cuban leader Tony Varona to sponsor anti-Castro activities.

    Arcacha, Banister, and “Mr. Phillips”

    Probe has turned up a long lost transcript of a deposition of a person whose name would be instantly recognized by anyone who has studied the Kennedy assassination. It is our hope to reveal the source of this deposition to the ARRB if and when they come to the West Coast.

    In this deposition, we find the following startling information. Picking up where the witness was telling how Sergio Arcacha Smith, one of Garrison’s original suspects in the Kennedy assassination planning, had invited the witness to a meeting in Guy Banister’s office:

    Q: Did you go alone to that meeting?

    A: As I recall, I did, yes.

    Q: Who was there?

    A: Mr. Banister, Mr. Arcacha Smith, and Mr. Phillips.

    Q: Do you know his first name [meaning Phillips]?

    A: No.

    Q: Had you seen him before?

    A: No.

    Q: Was he a Latin?

    A: No.

    Q: What was his interest in the meeting?

    A: He seemed to be running the show.

    Q: Telling Banister and Arcacha Smith what to do?

    A: His presence was commanding. It wasn’t in an orderly military situation, you know. It was just they seemed to introduce Mr. Phillips.

    Q: How old a man was he?

    A: I would say he was around 51, 52 [Note: the speaker is young.]

    Q: American?

    A: American.

    Q: Was he identified as to his background?

    A: No.

    Q: Were hints dropped as to his background?

    A: Just that he was from Washington, that’s all.

    Q: Did you assume from that he was with the CIA?

    A: I didn’t assume anything, I never assume anything. . . .I think someone mentioned something about this conversation isn’t taking place.

    The project that Banister and Arcacha and Mr. Phillips were working on, according to the witness, was to be a televised anti-Castro propaganda program, something that would have been in the direct purview of David Phillips as chief of propaganda for Cuban operations at that time.

    The Seizing of the Moa Bay Mining Company by Castro

    Unfortunately for Freeport’s board (see Board members on page 24), the Moa Bay Mining company was short-lived in Cuba. With $75,000,000 invested in that operation, one can see how vital the special tax exemption leftover from Batista’s reign was to Freeport’s Moa Bay operation. And since the deal was negotiated under Batista’s regime, one can also see how this must have stuck like a craw in the throat of Castro’s revolutionaries as they took control of Cuba in 1959. The Castro government wanted to end the special tax exemption. Freeport wanted to keep it. By March of 1960, Freeport Nickel (parent of Moa Bay Mining, subsidiary of Freeport Sulphur) threatened the Cuban government with an ultimatum: If their special tax status was revoked, the Moa Bay and Nicaro nickel facilities would be shut down.

    Freeport knew that Cuba needed the jobs and even partial income that Freeport’s nickel operations provided. Freeport must have thought it could bluff this one through, largely due to the particular quality of the Moa Bay ore. The ore was an unusual combination of cobalt and nickel, elements which needed to be separated through a highly complex chemical process, handled at that time by Freeport’s New Orleans processing plant. Industry observers were quoted as saying the best thing Cuba could do was to negotiate a compromise, because Cuba could not afford to build the kind of plant Freeport owned. Even the instructions for the process were not kept in Cuba.

    Deliberations with the new Cuban government fell apart in August of 1960. According to an “unimpeachable source” in the New York Times, the Cuban government felt negotiations should be suspended because of the tense situation between Cuba and the United States. Cuba performed what they characterized as an “intervention,” a temporary measure of stepping in and taking control of the mining facility, rather than outright nationalization. This was reported as Cuba trying to leave the door slightly open for some sort of negotiated settlement. But Freeport considered the takeover a battle cry and wanted to invoke international law to protect its rights to the plant.

    Cuba ended up retaining the plant, and the United States ending up attempting to invade Cuba under the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation. One of the planners of the Bay of Pigs, as well as an advocate for assassinating Castro, was Admiral Arleigh Burke. Burke later become a director of Freeport Sulphur.

    “Mr. White” of Freeport Sulphur

    During New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation of Clay Shaw, evidence developed that connected Shaw to Freeport Sulphur. James Plaine of Houston, Texas, told Andrew Sciambra, one of Garrison’s assistants, that a Mr. “White” of Freeport Sulphur had contacted him regarding a possible assassination plan for Fidel Castro. Plaine also said that he distinctly remembered either Shaw or David Ferrie talking about some nickel mines which were located at the tip of Cuba. Corroboration for an association between Shaw, Ferrie and “White” came from a witness whose CIA file has only been seen by the CIA and HSCA: Jules Ricco Kimble. Kimble told Garrison’s office that “White” had flown with Shaw in a plane believed to be piloted by David Ferrie to Cuba regarding a nickel deal. Another source, a former New Orleans newscaster, told Garrison’s team that Shaw and two other persons were attempting to purchase, or had already purchased, an ore processing plant in Braithwaite, Louisiana in the aftermath of the U.S. Government’s decision to break off trade relations with Cuba. He said that Ferrie had flown Shaw and two partners to Canada to attempt to arrange for the import of Cuban ore through Canada, as Canada was continuing its trade with Cuba.

    The New York Times of March 8, 1960, confirms that the Freeport Louisiana special ore processing plant was to be shut down:

    Freeport Nickel Company, known in Cuba as the Moa Bay Mining Company, confirmed yesterday that it was closing down operations at its $75,000,000 nickel-cobalt mining and concentrating facilities at Moa Bay in Cuba’s Oriente province.The company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Freeport Sulphur Company, said a recently passed Cuban mining law together with “other Cuban developments” had made it impossible to obtain the funds necessary to continue operations.Robert C. Hills, president of Freeport Nickel, said the company had invested $44,000,000 in related refining facilities in Louisiana. These facilities also will be made idle, as a result of the Cuban situation, he indicated.

    In this light, the most significant Garrison memo is one which says that Freeport Sulphur, Shaw and “White” were together going to buy the Braithwaite plant (built with U.S. government money) to process ore that would be purchased through a Canadian front company, and then shipped back to the Louisiana plant for processing.

    Finding Mr. Wight

    Garrison finally found the key to “Mr. White,” and wrote it up for the Clay Shaw lead file under the heading “Shaw’s Flight to Canada (or Cuba) with Ferrie:

    One man whose name we first thought to be WHITE apparently is WIGHT, Vice President of Freeport Sulphur who reputedly made the flight. An effort is being made to locate WIGHT, who now lives in New York, by a contact of Mark Lane’s. Despite the fact that the original source of this information was JULES RICCO KIMBLE, a man with a record, this lead keeps growing stronger. From the very outset it had been reported that the flight had something to do with the import of nickel following the loss of the original import supply from Cuba. Recent information developed on WIGHT in a separate memo, indicates that he is now on the Board of Directors of Freeport Nickel Company, a subsidiary of Freeport Sulphur.

    Charles A. Wight was Chairman of the Executive Committee and a Director of Freeport Sulphur, according to his Who’s Who in America entry from 1954-1955. Yale educated, he had previously been a Vice President for Bankers Trust Company, first in the London office from 1931-1935, then in the New York headquarters office 1936-1948 (see the Whitney, the Ambassador, and Batista’s Tax Break for Freeport Sulphur for a curious Bankers Trust link to the Bay of Pigs operation.) The 1963 Moody’s guide lists Wight as Vice Chairman under Langbourne Williams. Wight was a key person at Freeport Sulphur. He was still with the company when the HSCA looked into it, in 1977.

    It would be hard to imagine that Freeport, under the circumstances, did not work any deals with members of the CIA in an attempt to find a way around its-in the words of its president-“Cuban situation.” One should recall here that John McCone, former CIA director and at the time a board member of ITT, told a Senate committee quite frankly that yes, he had discussed getting rid of Allende in Chile, when ITT’s properties were at risk due to nationalization efforts. Corporate leaders voicing concerns and urging “executive action” against leaders in other countries is neither new nor, unfortunately, particular shocking. Witness the recent report (Washington Post 1/30/96) where members of the CFR were complaining openly about provisions prohibiting actions supportive of coup attempts against foreign leaders and calling for the lifting of existing restrictions on the CIA.

    Given the evidence that Freeport’s Wight may have been pursuing a Castro assassination plot, we cannot overlook this item from Peter Wyden’s book Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story. According to the CIA’s own Inspector General report, Johnny Rosselli was one of the CIA’s mobsters involved in Castro assassination plots. According to Wyden, at one of his earliest meetings after having taken on the task of getting rid of Castro, Rosselli told his Cuban contacts that he represented Wall Street financiers who had “nickel interests and properties around in Cuba.” Was Rosselli ever paid by or through Freeport Sulphur or any of its subsidiaries? Or had he just been given the reference as a cover? Had he pulled nickel interests out of a hat? Only more file releases on Rosselli can hope to answer those questions.

    In Thy Will Be Done, there is another startling implication of a Freeport/anti-Castro/CIA collaboration:  Castro was targeted for assassination as early as December 11, 1959, by Nelson’s old friend from the CIA days, J. C. King, now the CIA’s Chief of Clandestine Services in the Western Hemisphere. Even before Castro had forced Fulgencio Batista to flee Havana, King and Adolf Berle had met to ponder the fate of Freeport Sulphur Company’s mining project at Nicaro, in Oriente province. Now the Nicaro deposits and sugar plantations were facing nationalization. It was clear to King that a “far left” government existed in Cuba. “If permitted to stand,” he wrote CIA Director Allen Dulles, it would encourage similar actions against American companies elsewhere in Latin America. One of King’s “recommended actions” was explicit:

    “Thorough consideration [should] be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro. None of those close to Fidel, such as his brother Raul or his companion Che Guevara, have the same mesmeric appeal to the masses. Many informed people believe that the disappearance of Fidel would greatly accelerate the fall of the present Government.”

    Which brings us to a crucial point. Freeport Sulphur is a company Wall Street considers a “Rockefeller” company. There are numerous Rockefeller ties to the board of directors (see Freeport Sulphur’s Powerful Board of Directors). There is a significant tie that led to the stockpiling investigation. And Adolph Berle and J. C. King, as well as John Hay Whitney, were all very closely tied to Nelson Rockefeller himself. So the revelation that J. C. King and Adolph Berle were conversing about the fate of a Rockefeller-controlled company is significant, credible, and highlights the ties between these players and the CIA, where J. C. King-and in later years David Atlee Phillips-presided as Chiefs of the Western Hemisphere Division. In a strange twist of fate, Rockefeller’s good friend King was the authenticating officer on a cable giving authority to kill Castro’s brother Raul. Interestingly, Whitney’s cousin and friend Tracy Barnes sent the cable rescinding the original order a couple of hours later.

    Freeport versus Kennedy:  The Stockpiling Investigation

    Already reeling from its losses over Castro’s appropriation of the Moa Bay plant, Freeport found itself under attack from a new quarter: a Senate investigation into stockpiling surpluses, requested by President Kennedy himself.

    In 1962, President Kennedy asked Congress to look into the war-emergency stockpiling program, stating it was “a potential source of excessive and unconscionable profits.” He said he was “astonished” to discover that the program had accumulated $7.7 billion worth of stockpiled material, exceeding projected needs by $3.4 billion. Kennedy also pledged full executive cooperation with the investigation, mentioning specifically $103 million in surplus nickel.

    The Senate pursued an investigation into stockpiling surpluses. Special attention was paid to three companies in which the Rockefeller brothers had substantial holdings: Hannah Mining, International Nickel, and Freeport Sulphur. A December 18, 1962 headline in the New York Times read “U.S. Was Pushed into Buying Nickel, Senators Are Told.” The article opened with this:

    A federal official told Senate stockpile investigators today that the U.S. Government got a bad deal in a 1957 nickel purchase contract with a potential $248,000,000 obligation.

    John Croston, a division director in the General Services Administration, testified that he had strongly opposed the contract with the Freeport Sulphur Company.

    But, he said, officials in the agency “knew that the contract was in the bag from the beginning.” Pressure for it, he said, came from the Office of Defense Mobilization, then headed by Arthur S. Flemming.

    Dr. Arthur S. Flemming was regularly a part of the National Security Council under Eisenhower. Right after Ike’s election, in November of 1952, Dr. Flemming served with Ike’s brother Milton on the three-member President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organization, headed by Nelson Rockefeller. Perhaps it was his friendship with Nelson that caused some to accuse Dr. Flemming of some arm-twisting on Freeport’s behalf. The New York Times (12/19/62), reported:

    The subcommittee was told yesterday by officials of several Government agencies that they opposed the contract because they felt the need for nickel was exaggerated.

    These officials said, however, that Dr. Arthur S. Flemming, then head of the Office of Defense Mobilization, was determined that the contract be signed.

    One witness said Mr. Flemming had indicated that competition against the International Nickel Company, the giant in the field, should be encouraged.

    But what Flemming apparently didn’t know, or hadn’t shared if he did, was that both Freeport and International Nickel Company (INCO) shared some of the very same investors: the Rockefellers.

    Croston said he had opposed the contract with Freeport from the beginning, stating “there was no real shortage of nickel at any time” and that cobalt “was running out of our ears.” Freeport’s earlier 1954 contract with the government caused the U.S. to spend $6,250,000 to help build that special Louisiana nickel-cobalt ore processing plant so necessary to the Cuban mining operations. Another contract obligated the government to buy up to 15,000,000 pounds of nickel at a premium price, as well as 15,000,000 pounds of cobalt.

    The committee’s head, Senator Stuart Symington, reported that it was John Whitney who exerted his influence from Freeport’s end to get the government contract for the nickel.

    Freeport’s Chairman, Langbourne Williams, defended the contract, claiming the contract had saved the Treasury money, and had not been entered into for the purposes of stockpiling, but rather to increase nickel production capacity. He contended that the government ended up not having to purchase any nickel under the contract because Freeport had been able to sell to other buyers the nickel and cobalt produced at Moa Bay before Castro took it over.

    But the controversy flowed over into 1963, and Press Secretary Pierre Salinger stated that the Kennedy administration planned to make stockpiling an issue in the 1964 campaign. As we know, JFK didn’t live long enough to fulfill that promise.

    Original Probe article

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  • Whitney, the Ambassador, and Batista’s Tax Break for Freeport Sulphur

    Lisa Pease Reports on Freeport Sulphur:

    David Atlee Phillips, Clay Shaw and Freeport Sulphur

    Freeport Sulphur’s Powerful Board of Directors

    JFK, Indonesia, CIA & Freeport Sulphur

    Maurice Bishop and “The Spook” Hal Hendrix

    In the September 12, 1960 issue of The New Republic, Professor Samuel Shapiro wrote an article about Cuba, Castro, and American business involvement. Shapiro wrote that the former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Earl E. T. Smith, owing his apppointment largely to the support of John Hay Whitney (by that time former Chairman of Freeport but still a large stockholder), negotiated a substantial tax reduction for the Moa Bay Mining Company with Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. Smith wrote a belligerent letter back, published in the October 3, 1960 issue, stating:

    This is a clear and grave charge that I employed my official position and influence as US Ambassador to Cuba for the private profit of the Moa Bay Mining Company.  This is utterly untrue.

    Smith then went on to cite a State Department release from 1959 that had stated that:

    neither the State Department nor the American Embassy ever intervened during the negotiations of the new industry concessions granted by the Cuban Government to Moa Bay Mining Company in August 1957. Negotiations were completed in July 1957, before Ambassador Smith’s arrival in Cuba, and the subsequent decree granting the concessions was published in August, 1957.

    One of Freeport’s vice presidents, John C. Carrington, added:

    This tax treatment . . . came under a principle of law predating Batista and honored by Castro. . . . Ambassador Smith had nothing whatever to do with the matter and in fact did not even come to Cuba until July 1957.

    In his rebuttal also published in the October 3, 1960 issue, Shapiro responded:

    Sirs:

    Neither the Batista Government nor Moa Bay officials ever made public the details of the special tax treatment granted the company. In view of the extremely cordial relations that existed between Ambassadors Gardner and Smith and the dictatorship, documented at great length in such books as Jules Dubois’ Fidel Castro, it is most difficult to believe that the subject was never brought up. As Mr. Carrington himself indicates, the tax reduction was held up for over a year, and though approved “in substance” in July, 1957, the month of Ambassador Smith’s arrival in Havana, did not actually go into effect until some time later; furthermore, the tax cut could have been withdrawn at any time. The specific charge that Ambassador Smith used his influence on behalf of Moa Bay was made in a special number of Bohemia, something of a Cuban equivalent of Life, in January, 1959. Ambassador Smith resigned on January 10 after seeing an advance copy but before the issue went on sale. The statement Ambassador Smith and Mr. Carrington quote was thus made after Ambassador Smith’s departure from Cuba.

    In my article I did not intend to single out the Freeport Sulphur Company as particularly reprehensible in its dealings with the dictatorship. Every businessman in Cuba had to get along by the use of influence and bribes. If Moa Bay really got its tax reduction without political or diplomatic pressure, and without the distribution of money in the right places (and Carrington does not say that it did), this was an example of generosity almost without parallel in the history of Cuba.

    In his response to Shapiro’s parenthetical comment, published a month later, Carrington wrote:

    I now state, for Mr. Shapiro’s future reference, that Moa Bay obtained its new industry tax exemption without the distribution of money, and I repeat that it did so without political or diplomatic pressure. . . In sum, there is no ground for Mr. Shapiro’s accusation-by-innuendo against our company. . . and I request that a proper retraction be made.

    Shapiro had the last word in his final response to Carrinton:

    I am happy to accept Mr. Carrington’s assurance, but as both he and Ambassador Smith have denied that the Ambassador used political or diplomatic pressure to secure the grant of new-industry tax status to the Moa Bay operation, it may be pertinent to quote the notice that appeared in The New York Times on August 17, 1957:

    “Work on a project for mining and refining nickel and cobalt at Moa Bay in Oriente Province will start immediately, the Presidential Palace said today. The announcement was made following talks by Earl E. T. Smith, United States Ambassador, L.M. Williams, President of Freeport Sulphur Company and other officials of the enterprise with President Fulgencio Batista.

    “About $75,000,000 will be invested in the Moa Bay project, officials said. The way was cleared for the start of construction when President Batista granted the project a classification as a new industry with tax exemption. Production is scheduled to begin within two years.”  [. . . ]

    I believe it should be said that Mr. Smith showed poor judgement in interceding with the dictator on behalf of an American company seeking a tax concession. But then, Mr. Smith was a political appointee with no previous diplomatic experience. He had contributed $3,800 to the Republican campaign chest in 1956. . . .

    In 1956, John Hay Whitney, Freeport’s then Chairman and significant investor as well as Ambassador Smith’s promoter, was Chairman of the United Republican Finance Committee.