Tag: CUBA
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Exposing the FPCC, Part 2
see Part 1
“Follow the money” is one of the things that the FBI and Warren Commission did not do in trying to understand how such a destitute person like Oswald could run an FPCC chapter, raise a family, and save money for Marina (at least $1600 in today’s money).[1] He was so poor that the White Russians paid for his YMCA fees.
The FPCC added the following to this drifter’s cost of living: FPCC membership fees, renting of a space, hiring leafleteers, paying a fine for disturbing the peace, the purchase of rubber-stamping equipment, personal displacements, printing of up to five different pieces of literature, correspondence with the FPCC, and use of a Post Office Box…with not one single member to help absorb the costs.
The following exchange between Oswald’s lawyer and Wesley Liebeler of the Warren Commission suggests something more plausible than Oswald giving away time and money for a passé organization rather than focusing on his growing family—he was paid $25 a day (Note that Oswald’s job at the Texas Schoolbook Depository paid $1.50 per hour):

Oswald’s slip was showing
Admitting his remuneration to Dean Andrews and stamping 544 Camp Street on his handouts were not Oswald’s only mistakes that would ultimately blow his cover.
Shortly after launching the FPCC Chapter in New Orleans, Lee sent out two honorary membership cards to Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis, two senior members of the American Communist Party, even though after his return from Russia he wrote the following in his diary:
The Communist Party of the United States has betrayed itself! It has turned itself into the traditional lever of a foreign power to overthrow the government of the United States; not in the name of freedom or high ideals, but in servile conformity to the wishes of the Soviet Union and in anticipation of Soviet Russia’s complete domination of the American continent.
In a letter dated August 1, 1963, postmarked August 4, Oswald wrote to Vincent T. Lee, head of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York,
In regards to my efforts to start a branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans…I rented an office as planned and was promptly closed 3 days later for some obsure [sic] reasons by the renters, they said something about remodeling, ect. [sic] I’m sure you understand after that I worked out of a post office box and by useing [sic] street demonstrations and some circular work have substained [sic] a great deal of interest but no new members. Through the efforts of some cuban-exial [sic] ‘gusanos’ a street demonstration was attacked and we were oficialy [sic] cautioned by the police.
The problem with this letter was that the incident Oswald seems to be referring to occurred on August 9th, more than a week after he first wrote about it. Was Oswald describing a scenario for the upcoming theatrics on Canal Street over which he would be arrested and arraigned in court?
When Oswald debated anti-Castro Cuban exile Carlos Bringuer, he was asked how he lived in Russia: “Did you have a government subsidy?” Oswald answered; “Well, I worked in Russia and, I was under the protection of the United States, Uh I was under the Uh that is to say, I was not under the protection of the United States Government. But, I was always considered a United States citizen.”
It was not just Oswald who blew his own cover. Antonio Veciana, who was David Phillips’s go-to guy in the Cuban exile community for some thirteen years, told Gaeton Fonzi—and later the whole JFK research community—that he had seen Phillips talk to Oswald in Dallas in September 1963.
Oswald’s participation in the training of anti-Cubans was caught on film according to Robert Tanenbaum, Chief Counsel of the HSCA, during his interview with Jim DiEugenio:
JD: Was it really as you described in the book, with all the people in that film? Bishop was in the film?
BT: Oh, yeah. Absolutely! They’re all in the film. They’re all there. But, the fact of the matter is the Committee began to balk at a series of events. The most significant one was when [David Atlee] Phillips came up before the Committee and then had to be recalled because it was clear that he hadn’t told the truth. That had to do with the phony commentary he made about Oswald going to Mexico City on or about October 1st, 1963. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 5)
John Newman shows how Dallas FBI claims that they lost track of Oswald, while he was setting up the FPCC in New Orleans all the way up to August 5, lack credibility, especially given his multiple FBI scrutinized correspondences—all occurring before June 6—with the Post Office, the Communist Party, the Soviet Embassy in Washington, and the FPCC, where his New Orleans address was easy to find.[2]
Another astute observation by Newman is that before August 5th, Oswald’s FPCC recruitment activities were done quietly, almost undercover. They were likely done that way in order to help Banister and the CRC with their background investigations. As of August 5, when he meets Bringuier up until September 25 when he meets Silvia Odio, Oswald repeatedly acts overtly with anti-Castro Cubans while, at the same time, seeking media attention for his FPCC activities.[3]
On September 16, 1963, the CIA informed the FBI that it was considering action to counter the activities of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in foreign countries. In New Orleans, on September 17, 1963, Oswald applied for, and received, a Mexican travel visa.[4]
Another indicator of Oswald’s informant role is what the FBI did not do: Infiltrate the New Orleans FPCC. The FBI did this with FPCC chapters throughout the country, often with multiple informants. And as we saw with Bill Stuckey, New Orleans was well prepared for an FPCC presence in their city. It would have been very easy to have informants answer Oswald’s leafleting by signing up to spy on him—as they did in Tampa, NY, Detroit, Chicago, L.A., Indiana, and elsewhere. But, for whatever reason, they chose not to.
There seems to be a logical deduction from all this. Oswald was informing on both pro- and anti-Castro operations in New Orleans. But he was also creating a portfolio similar to other FPCC participants in the past to be able to eventually travel to Cuba by way of the Mexico City-Cubana Airlines route.
Are we to believe that Oswald just stumbled into these right-wing fanatics, Cuban exiles, and old acquaintances who shared a hatred for Castro?
The FPCC template of informants and/or potential patsies
In this author’s article, The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK eight subjects were profiled who shared similar traits to Oswald as represented in the ensuing chart:

As we can see:
- Eight of the nine subjects profiled are connected to cities visited by Kennedy during the six months that preceded his assassination.
- Each of these cities was a territory exploited criminally by Mafiosi of interest in the assassination.
- At least three moved to the cities and got employment in strategically located buildings along the motorcade route shortly before the planned presidential visit.
- Seven were ex-military.
- Eight of them exhibited behavior that can very plausibly be linked to intelligence gathering or Cuban exile interaction.
- Seven were directly linked to the FPCC. Seven of them had visited Mexico City
- Six attempted to visit Cuba, three of them successfully.
- Seven had links to Cuban/Latino exiles.
- Six were described as having psychological problems.
- Seven exhibited anti-Kennedy behavior.
- None were probed seriously by the Warren Commission.
Intelligence services, notably the Secret Service, kept crucial information about these subjects, as well as the prior plots, totally secret from the Warren Commission.
By reading the Failed Plots article, the reader will discover how many of the above characters were being potentially framed through linkage to prior plots attempts and their links to the FPCC and how some used their FPCC allegiance to spy on the organization or as a ruse to enter Cuba.
Another ruse that became clearer with time was that the associations of many of the potential patsies/informants would have had the impact of tearing down the FPCC once and for all, while placing the blame on Castro and providing Psy-Ops propagandists with a storyline tainting the FPCC operations outside the U.S. borders, as well as organizations like the SWP, the U.S. Communist Party, CORE, and others seen as threats to U.S. security.
Framing the FPCC – a coordinated effort by the usual suspects[5]
In the Failed Plots article, we show how the FPCC-tainted Oswald, not only put the final nail in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, he was used to frame Castro as well. A tactic straight out of the CIA’s ZR/Rifle executive action playbook written up by assassination guru William Harvey. Here were some of the P.R. tactics that were described:
- Cuban exiles: Immediately after the assassination, Carlos Bringuier and John Martino, as well as Frank Sturgis—also a Watergate burglar—pushed the Castro was behind it story.
- Castro frame-up stories were very quickly leaked to Hal Hendrix, a JM/WAVE friend, and other CIA media assets.
- Antonio Veciana, leader of the Cuban exile group Alpha 66, confirmed that David Phillips—whom he had seen talking to Oswald shortly before the assassination—had asked him to bribe a cousin of his in Mexico City to say that Oswald was being paid by Castro agents to assassinate JFK.
- HSCA investigator Dan Hardway confirmed that almost all of the Mexico City stories that incriminated Oswald and framed Castro were created by assets of Phillips.
On the night of JFK’s assassination and Oswald’s arrest, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade erroneously stated during a press conference that Oswald was a member of the Free Cuba Committee. Out of all the many onlookers present, it was nightclub owner and future patsy killer Jack Ruby who corrected the D.A.
Let us now add a few more frame-up artists and their propaganda contributions:
Ed Butler (INCA) and Bill Stuckey
Butler’s role in the post-assassination tale got quite interesting. For as Time magazine noted in its 11/29/63 issue, “Even before Lee Oswald was formally charged with the murder, CBS put on the air an Oswald interview taped by a New Orleans station last August.” That night, according to New Orleans Magazine, Butler and the INCA staff churned out news releases about Oswald in order to offset the “rightist” and “John Bircher” charges flying about. Then, Senator Thomas Dodd, who ran the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, was called up by Butler.
The Kennedy-hating Dodd invited his acquaintance Ed Butler to testify before his Senate Subcommittee. Apparently completing Butler’s public relations tour, the tape of the WDSU interview was forwarded by the CIA to Ted Shackley at the Miami station and used in the CIA’s broadcasts into Latin America, furthering the legend about Oswald the communist killing President Kennedy. Declassified files reveal that the label on the box with the tape says, “From DRE to Howard.” Howard signifies either Howard Hunt or George Joannides, whose codename was “Howard.” This means that Bringuier’s group (DRE) probably gave a copy to Howard Hunt who forwarded it to the CIA’s Shackley. The Agency in spite of later denials was still funding the DRE at the time of the assassination.[6]
Ruth Paine (2 deliveries)
Ruth was not only the Warren Commission’s busiest witness in making the case for the lone nut scenario, she was a prolific provider of timely evidence against Oswald coming straight out of her garage. One of her go-to guys was Irving Police Captain Frank Barger (FBI informant T-4). Barger also had informants who revealed to him a phone conversation between Michael and Ruth Paine on November 23, 1963, confirming their perceptions of a conspiracy when one said[7]:

From Ruth Paine’s home came important evidence linking Oswald to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee:

And then you have these strange FBI notes that are at NARA:

Page 1 
Page 2 These have, to my knowledge, never been fully analyzed, so I can only give a personal impression: Ruth seems to have asked Barger to send a Russian cookbook and toys to Marina. In the same breath, there are notes identifying two, if not three, FPCC members in Dallas including two Dalmans who, on Harlandale Street, are a stone’s throw away from an anti-Castro Cuban exile meeting place on that street where Oswald was said to have entered.
We have long suspected that the Paines kept files on Communist sympathizers. Was this some of the fruit of their labor? Did Oswald help supply the names through his short-term Dallas activities?
Al Lewis Los Angeles FPCC
Oswald was not the only FPCC member who was slandered. According to Dick Russell,
Al Lewis, executive director of the Los Angeles FPCC in 1963 and now a retired psychiatrist, remembered: ‘The FBI called me after Kennedy was assassinated, and apparently wanted to involve me in it some way. They tried to pin a relationship with Oswald on me, because apparently, I’d been in Mexico at the same time he was, on my way to Cuba. Well, that was the first I heard about it. And I never heard of Oswald and the New Orleans Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the movement. That whole thing to me was a setup of some kind by the intelligence services.[8]
Johnny Rossen Chicago and National FPCC
Johnny Rossen, who had been the head of the Chicago chapter and later became a National Chairman, was also the victim of wild rumors. An FBI report dated November 28, 1963, summarizes a slander campaign by an informant stating that he was a sex degenerate who slept with a Puerto Rican mistress named Carmen Osiokowski, who knew Oswald, who had sent money to him periodically and who hated Kennedy. His source was the mistress. When she was questioned, she denied everything. Upon re-questioning this informant’s story completely fell apart.
Tony Perez, an informant in Chicago, qualified as a reliable source by the Chicago FBI. He was an anti-Castro Cuban and had provided dirt on Rossen.[9] In a November 30, 1963, TELETYPE from SAC Chicago to Director and SAC Dallas, the FBI is given the following information: That Johnny Rossen had held a number of late-night meetings in his Chicago Theater with FPCC subjects during the days leading up to the assassination. Some two years earlier, Perez a representative of the Chicago Council for a Democratic Cuba, had debated Rossen at Northwestern University in opposition of his FPCC activities.
Like Oswald, Rossen was able to taint major organizations as he had always been an active pro-communist agitator having been the secretary of the U.S. Communist Party in St. Louis, where he ran for mayor for the party. Later, he would show Russian films in his Chicago Theater. He was active in the American Peace Crusade and Civil Rights Congress. He also used a number of aliases.
Robert Beaty Fennell San Francisco FPCC
On December 21, 1963, another Oswald-like character was arrested by the Secret Service in San Francisco for having on him notes containing threats to assassinate LBJ. Not much is known about Robert Beaty Fennell, but this article[10] reveals that he was said to be a member of the San Francisco FPCC, that he had mental problems, was involved in agitations and that he had received an honorable discharge from the Air Force five years earlier.
Richard Taber National FPCC
The framing of Oswald and even the FPCC as a group, were not the only lofty objectives of the anti-Castro forces. They planted the ridiculous story[11] that the inaugural head of the FPCC, while in refuge in Cuba, had actually met a Lieutenant Lee Harvey Oswald in 1961 when he himself had “accompanied Castro during the Bay of Pigs Invasion.”

Given that Oswald was in Minsk at this time, along with Taber’s vehement denials,[12] we can chalk this one up as another red herring designed to stimulate the invasion of Cuba.
Bringuier’s last gasp
Even when it became clear that the U.S. was steering clear of any scenario implying a conspiracy and stratagems to attack Cuba, there was an ultimate Hail Mary thrown by a Cuban Freedom Fighter (most likely Carlos Bringuier) in the form of an open letter to the President in October 1964 which stated:

Vincent T. Lee and Harrold Wilson National and Tampa FPCC
Vincent Theodore Lee, actually Army veteran Vincent Tappin, was elected Head of the Tampa Chapter in June 1961. On the Board was treasurer Harrold Wilson, who eventually replaced Lee when Lee took over from Richard Gibson as the national Chapter Chairman in 1962.
Oswald’s actions in New Orleans parroted Lee’s. Lee was heavily involved in leafleting, media coverage, and direct confrontations with anti-Castro Cubans featuring a near riot in November of 1961 in Marti Park, where Sergio Arcacha Smith led CRC forces against the FPCC. Lee appeared on WBAI radio.
On December 26, 1962, Vincent T. Lee flew from New York City to Mexico City. From there, on December 28, he flew to Havana via Cubana Airlines where he stayed for nearly one month. Oswald corresponded multiple times with Lee, reporting his FPCC agent provocateur coups. V. T. Lee, while providing him with advice, is the one who connected Oswald with Wilson so as to be better coached for his N.O. mission.
Other than this, not that much is known about Lee, because as a witness during the Eastland Senate hearings, other than defending the FPCC and confirming his military record, he mostly took the Fifth Amendment. The Warren Commission did very little to go into his background during their typical probe light questioning.[13] Lee also lied his head off by claiming he did not know Oswald. The HSCA never got him in as a witness despite obvious interest.
The following articles are fascinating because they also associate the FPCC with high-profile murderous activity in the U.S., taint Black Liberation Front activists and suggest that Lee and Wilson are informants.










Here is the lead-in to the article on the Statue of Liberty bombing plot:
On 16 February 1965 three Americans and one Canadian were arrested in connection with a plot to destroy three of the United States’ most treasured monuments: the statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell, and Washington Monument. The Americans—Robert Steele Collier, Walter Augustus Bowe, and Khaleel Sultran Sayyed—were part of a small extremist organization known as the Black Liberation Front (BLF). The Canadian, a white woman named Michelle Duclos, was a member of a Quebec separatist party.
In the article, the reader will discover how some of the perpetrators visited Cuba, met Che Guevara who provided “technical information,” and became involved in yet another major incident that would have favored the blaming of Cuba while tarnishing a “subversive” group.[14] (Click here to read)
Gilberto Policarpo Lopez
Another extremely important detail in the first article is that the Tribune claims to have a source that places V. T. Lee in Tampa on November 17, 1963, with Gilberto Policarpo Lopez. The FBI would easily know this based on the important number of informants at every FPCC meeting.
The HSCA described parts of what it called the Lopez allegation:[15]
Lopez would have obtained a tourist card in Tampa on November 20, 1963, entered Mexico at Nuevo Laredo on November 23 and flew from Mexico City to Havana on November 27. Further, Lopez was alleged to have attended a meeting of the Tampa Chapter of the FPCC on November 17…CIA files on Lopez reflect that in early December 1963 they received a classified message requesting urgent traces on Lopez…Later the CIA headquarters received another classified message stating that a source stated that “Lopes” had been involved in the Kennedy assassination…had entered Mexico by foot from Laredo on November 13…proceeded by bus to Mexico City where he entered the Cuban embassy…and left for Cuba as the only passenger on flight 465 for Cuba. A CIA file on Lopez was classified as a counterintelligence case…
An FBI investigation on Lopez through an interview with his cousin and wife as well as document research revealed that…He was pro-Castro and he had once gotten involved in a fistfight over his Castro sympathies.
The FBI had previously documented that Lopez has actually been in contact with the FPCC and had attended a meeting in Tampa on November 20, 1963. In a March 1964 report, it recounted that at a November 17 meeting…Lopez said he had not been granted permission to return to Cuba, but was awaiting a phone call about his return to his homeland…A Tampa FPCC member was quoted as saying she called a friend in Cuba on December 8, 1963, and was told that he arrived safely. She also said that they (the FPCC) had given Lopez $190 for his return. The FBI confirmed the Mexico trip (Lopez’ wife confirmed that in a letter he sent her from Cuba in November 1963, he had received financial assistance for his trip to Cuba from an organization in Tampa) …information sent to the Warren Commission by the FBI on the Tampa chapter of the FPCC did not contain information on Lopez’ activities…nor apparently on Lopez himself. The Committee concurred with the Senate Select Committee that this omission was egregious, since the circumstances surrounding Lopez’ travel seemed “suspicious.” Moreover, in March 1964 when the WC’s investigation was in its most active stage, there were reports circulating that Lopez had been involved in the assassination…Lopez’ association with the FPCC, however, coupled with the fact that the dates of his travel to Mexico via Texas coincide with the assassination, plus the reports that Lopez’ activities were “suspicious” all amount to troublesome circumstances that the committee was unable to resolve with confidence.
One can add this from DeBenedictis’ well-sourced thesis:[16]
A Cuban national by the name of Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, attended the viewing of “Ted Lee in Cuba,” at Mary Quist’s home on November 17. Lopez was staying at the Quist residence, while waiting for a phone call with the “go ahead order” for him to leave the United States and go to Cuba. The day after the film showing, President Kennedy visited Tampa.
One file showed that there were several teletypes and airtels regarding Lopez and Oswald and the possibility that they may have had contact. The airtel message told of Lopez’s travel to Mexico and later to Cuba. The airtel also told of post-assassination correspondence between FBI offices in Dallas, San Antonio, and Tampa. All intended to identify Lopez. Another part of this file, which was released later than other Tampa FPCC FBI files, told that the San Antonio FBI office was the source of the information in the post-assassination period regarding Lopez crossing the border at Laredo. From the 1964 Warren Commission to the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations, the change in time was more of a change in broadening of information rather than in a lessening of secrecy. Neither investigation showed a desire for opening assassination files until well into the Twenty-First Century. Since the FPCC was the subject of dossier compilation since its inception, there was much in the way of information. But in its post-assassination classification period, the secrecy surrounding the FPCC had more to do with the Kennedy assassination, and lack of cooperation from intelligence agencies, than from consideration of sensitive material due to the ongoing Cold War.
Combining the article information and FBI intelligence, what we have is the FPCC National Chapter’s V.T. Lee possibly meeting, at Tampa FPCC’s Mary Quist’s home on November 17, with FPCC tainted assassination suspect Lopez, who, considering his Texas and Mexico travels, likely would also have been linked to Oswald had the pro-Castro conspiracy scenario not been deep-sixed. This also would have torn down the FPCC worldwide, if not the U.S. Communist Party, and could easily have stimulated the invasion of Cuba, given the direct link between Lee and Castro.
There is a difference between a series of ads and an ad campaign. Ad campaigns have a coordinated rhythm, where there is a huge bang at the launch, followed by reminder advertising in a timely manner. They also have a central theme (called a USP) such as Castro was behind all of this. This P.R. push certainly has all the earmarks of being coordinated by propaganda specialists. Which brings us to the next two sections.
George Joannides
Towards the beginning of the HSCA investigation, much headway was being made in investigating CIA files. Things took a turn for the worse when George Bush senior, CIA Director since 1976, decided to clamp down on the scrutiny. A year later, George Joannides was brought in as a liaison between the CIA and HSCA investigators. The HSCA was lied to when they were told that Joannides was not involved in the areas of interest the HSCA was exploring. Quite the contrary.
George had been the person in charge of overseeing anti-Castro operations in New Orleans. He was now obstructing the HSCA. Joannides had joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951 and later became chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami. In this role he worked closely with the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE), a militant right-wing, anti-Communist, anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy group. This was the group that Oswald was in direct contact and conflict with in New Orleans in August 1963.[17]
Jefferson Morley is credited for much of what we know about Joannides and the fight for the release of files about him. He adroitly underscored the following about him: “Among his primary responsibilities were guiding, monitoring and financing the Revolutionary Cuban Student Directorate or DRE, one of the largest and most effective anti-Castro groups in the United States. CIA records show, and the group’s former leaders confirm, that Joannides provided them with up $18-25,000 per month, while insisting they submit to CIA discipline. Joannides, in his job evaluation of July 31, 1963, was credited with having established control over the group.” Morley also revealed Joannides travels from JM/WAVE to New Orleans in 1963.
David Phillips
In a previous article,[18] I have penned for Kennedys And King, I wrote a section on how this legendary disinformation artist for the CIA was a person of interest in the scenario plans around Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. By reading it, you will discover how his background, role with Amsanta, motives, track record, omnipresence around Oswald, lies to the HSCA, his being outed by colleague E. Howard Hunt and asset Antonio Veciana all point to something sinister. Readers are encouraged to follow the above hyperlink to review the case against Phillips.
The remarkable thing about Phillips and this story is that he was associated with both of these groups we have examined. In other words, he was at least partly involved with both sides of this pseudo-conflict and street theater. As we have seen, in Oswald and the CIA, John Newman showed that Phillips had a role in the CIA’s campaign to infiltrate and destabilize the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.[19]
During his questioning by the HSCA, Howard Hunt was asked about his knowledge of the DRE. He replied that, “Dave Phillips ran that for us.” (Deposition of 11/3/78, p. 77) Phillips was in on the beginnings of the DRE. William Kent, a psy war officer out of JM/WAVE, signed-off on Joannides’ reports in 1963. Kent was very familiar with what the DRE was doing at this time. Later on, to private family members, he was asked about Oswald. He said that Lee Oswald was a useful idiot. When asked about the Kennedy assassination itself, he said, “Its better you don’t know.”[20] Any objective person would have to say that, based on this information, New Orleans was quite important to the Kennedy assassination. HSCA investigator Hardway also revealed in 2013 at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Conference that he and Ed Lopez had prepared a bill of indictment for perjury against Phillips specifically keyed around what he had said about Oswald’s alleged activities in Mexico City.
James Phillips was the brother of David. He was a writer, a CIA pilot, and a member of the Flying Tigers. A former Marine, he later wrote for Leatherneck magazine. He was the father of Shawn Phillips.
Shawn Phillips
His recounting (email to Gary Buell) of his uncle David’s last conversation with his father represents one of a number of quasi confessions made by the high-level intelligence officer:
The “Confession,” you refer to was not in so many words as such. I cannot remember the time frames involved, but this was what was told to me by my father, James Atlee Phillips, who is deceased. He said that David had called him with reference to his (David’s), invitation to a dinner, by a man who was purportedly writing a book on the CIA. At this dinner, was also present a man who was identified only as the “Driver.” David told Jim that he knew the man was there to identify him as Raul Salcedo, whose name you should be familiar with, if your research is accurate in this matter. David then told Jim that he had written a letter to the various media, as a “Preemptive Strike,” against any and all allegations about his involvement in the JFK assassination. Jim knew that David was the head of the “Retired Intelligence Officers of the CIA,” or some such organization, and that he was extremely critical of JFK, and his policies. Jim knew at that point that David was in some way, seriously involved in this matter and he and David argued rather vehemently, resulting in a silent hiatus between them that lasted almost six years according to Jim. Finally, as David was dying of irreversible lung cancer, he called Jim and there was apparently no reconciliation between them, as Jim asked David pointedly, “Were you in Dallas on that day?” David said, “Yes,” and Jim hung the phone up.
If you add just how intertwined Phillips was with Oswald during the months in and around the assassination, there is simply too much to dismiss all of this as mere happenstance. Where there is still some debate is to what level, if any, Phillips was involved in the planning of the assassination. Where there is very little debate is in his involvement in the messaging and frame-up efforts.
Summary
Given Oswald’s adventure in Russia and the state the FPCC was in when Oswald opened a chapter in New Orleans—perhaps the most hostile city for such an endeavor—and at a time when the FPCC was in a downward spiral, the most plausible premise would be that it was also an intelligence operation. When he joined, the FPCC was infested with informants, the FBI and CIA were countering it through their respective COINTELPRO and Amsanta programs, and New Orleans intelligence was fully prepared for the arrival of the FPCC. In fact, Stuckey was on the prowl for the FPCC two years in advance.
Oswald’s choices in terms of timing, location, networking, recruitment activities, as well as the budget constraints he overcame, along with the lack of infiltration of his chapter, these all point to his being an informant on pro-Castro and anti-Castro goings-on in New Orleans.
The campaign to position Oswald as Castro-linked was clearly coordinated and performed by intelligence assets. Two persons of extreme interest linked to the operatives and the strategies used were Joannides and Phillips. By 1963, the FPCC appears to have been no more than a tool for intelligence gathering, creating a portfolio to enter Cuba and lying in wait to be a perfect platform on which to hoist a patsy, and through him, implicate Castro.
If it is confirmed that both V.T. Lee and Harrold Wilson were Intel related, we have yet two more cut-out operatives who add themselves to the above cast of characters (e.g. Dave Ferrie, Ruth Paine, Frank Bartes, and Clay Shaw) who helped build the Oswald myth.
The plot succeeded in removing JFK, but failed to stimulate an invasion of Cuba. It helped launch a new era of suspicion of government and media that has been exacerbated by other political murders, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran Contra, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the list goes on! No wonder the U.S. cannot get its people vaccinated! No one can put their trust in faith, it has deserted the country.
Conclusion
Oswald’s adventure in Russia has been analyzed by many. Most serious researchers concur that it was an Intel mission and was part of a false defector program. Oswald’s dance with the FPCC is lesser understood, but perhaps even more important, as it brought him right into the realm of the plot.
There has never been an all-defining write-up of the FPCC within the context of the assassination. This is somewhat normal, because as DeBenedictis noted, FPCC files have been kept under wraps. There should be hidden files on most of the potential patsies, informants, chapter leaders and a lot more… detailed ones. I have tried to make a start with this essay.
If we understand who gave Oswald his orders, as well as those for the other ex-marine informants and potential patsies, we will understand the propaganda side of the assassination.
Gaeton Fonzi opened incredible windows into the world of JM/WAVE, which led to an area of research taken up by authorities in this field including Larry Hancock, Bill Simpich, John Newman, and others who have figured out hierarchies, operational activities, and timelines through which these specialists focused on a number of assassination professionals who are leading suspects in the November 22nd ambush. Having recently read Tipping Point by Larry Hancock, we can see that much progress has been made in nailing down the players, the ambush preparations, and logistics around the hit.
Jim Garrison paved the way for understanding the very important roles those who gravitated around Oswald in 1963 played in setting up the whole Castro did it scenario. The work done by contemporary researchers Joan Mellen, Jim DiEugenio, William Davy, and conclusions by the HSCA have all vindicated the New Orleans DA and shed light on many of the operatives working outside of Miami.
Understanding organizations like the FPCC, the DRE, ALPHA-66, Operation 40, and persons like Joannides, Phillips, the Rodriguez family, and Sergio Arcacha Smith will help us merge the bodies of research Fonzi and Garrison began and gain a better comprehension of organizational structure and interrelations between the murder and propaganda divisions.
While conducting the research for this document, I have seen some compelling arguments that many subversive organizations, including the FPCC, were intelligence vehicles from the outset. While I have not yet reached that conclusion, I am all ears.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Malcolm Blunt, Alan Dale, Bart Kamp, and Jim DiEugenio for their support in providing me with many of the files they have uncovered and archived. I also want to underscore the incredible efforts of the researchers, investigators and authors mentioned in this article plus other sources, who have paved the way to where we are now at…A case that, if I may say so, has been largely solved.
see Part 3
[1] Paul Bleau, “Marina’s Sponsor and Oswald’s Fifth Wallet,” Kennedys And King.
[2] John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, Chapter 16.
[3] John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, Chapter 17.
[4] Dan Hardway, “Declaration,” Case 1:03-cv-02545-RJL Document 156-1, Civil Action No. 03-02545 (RJL).
[5] Paul Bleau, “The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK,” Kennedys And King.
[6] James DiEugenio, “Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare,” Kennedys And King.
[7] William A. Branigan, “Memorandum for Mr. Sullivan Re: Lee Harvey Oswald,” 105-82555, January 17, 1964.
[8] Dick Russell, The Man who Knew Too Much, pp. 685–686.
[9] Herbert Stallings, FBI report, 29/11/1963, File 62-6115.
[10] Associated Press, “Threat to Kill LBJ is Charged,” December 21, 1963.
[11] INFORMATION FBI HQ RECORD NUMBER 124-10008-10043 FILE NUMBER AGENCY 105-82555-194.
[12] FBI report 2/12/64, File NY 105 38431.
[13] Warren Commission, testimony of Vincent T. Lee.
[14] The Journal of Counterterrorism, “The Monumental Plot,” Volume 16 -No. 04 2010.
[15] House Select Committee on Assassinations Final Report.
[16] Frank S. DeBenedictis, “Cold War comes to Ybor City: Tampa Bay’s chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee,” Florida Atlantic University, December 2002.
[17] James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, 2nd edition, pp. 159–61.
[18] Paul Bleau, “Oswald’s Intelligence Connections: How Richard Schweiker clashes with Fake History,” Kennedys And King.
[19] John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 240–242.
[20] Dan Hardway, “An Operation Sketch,” 2014.
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Exposing the FPCC, Part 1
Introduction
In January 2019, a petition began circulating where, among other startling affirmations, the 2500 signatories, including prominent JFK assassination experts, agreed that, “As the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979, President John F. Kennedy was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy. In the four decades since this congressional finding, a massive amount of evidence compiled by journalists, historians and independent researchers confirms this conclusion. This growing body of evidence strongly indicates that the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy was organized at high levels of the U.S. power structure, and was implemented by top elements of the U.S. national security apparatus using, among others, figures in the criminal underworld to help carry out the crime and cover-up.”
The destruction of classified documents pertaining to the JFK assassination and the refusal to release others 58 years after the assassination only strengthens the perceptions of the conspiracy researchers.
One of the premises that is key to this scenario is that when ex-marine Oswald entered the Soviet Union in 1959 and spent two and a half years there, he did so as a false defector within a program called REDSKIN.1
Given the above, shouldn’t the most plausible premise for Oswald launching the Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter in New Orleans, perhaps the most hostile city for such an endeavor at a time when the FPCC was in a downward spiral, be that it was also an intelligence operation?
Oswald’s strange dance with the FPCC in the months leading up to the assassination is not scrutinized enough––as this quest put Oswald right in the realm of those who would later accuse him of being Kennedy’s killer.
What do we really know about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee? It lacks scrutiny even though, like his adventure in Russia, the evidence of intelligence is everywhere. However, context and insight about the FPCC is lacking, even though it should have been turned inside out by the WC and the HSCA. But it was not, thanks largely to Allen Dulles, George Joannides and other spies who knew what to hide and were perfectly placed to obstruct real investigations.
Research into the FPCC will help lay the groundwork for what should have been a leading hypothesis that should have guided the investigations: that is, that Lee Harvey Oswald was again following orders when he penetrated the FPCC, thereby turning him into an ideal patsy for the assassination of the President.
The FPCC: A Brief History
In 1993, author Van Gosse wrote Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of the New Left. It gives one of the more complete accounts of this odd association.
The FPCC was founded in the spring of 1960 by Robert Taber and Richard Gibson––CBS newsmen who covered Castro’s ascent to power––as well as Alan Sagner, a New Jersey contractor. Its original mission was to correct distortions about the Cuba revolution. It was first supported by writers, philosophers, artists and intellectuals such as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Jean-Paul Sartre. It also touched a chord with university students. Some estimates place its African American membership at one third of its roster. In April 1960, Taber and Gibson ran a full-page ad in the New York Times.
Around Christmas time 1960, it organized a huge tour to Cuba, which led to a travel ban to the country by early 1961. According to Gosse, its high point was after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. There was no official membership headcount, but organizers claimed the FPCC had between 5 and 7 thousand members and 27 adult chapters, almost all in the Northeast, a few on the West Coast and only one in the Southeast in Tampa.
When it became clear that the U.S. would not tolerate the revolution, it began dissipating. After a short-lived peace demonstration binge during the missile crisis in 1962, its spiral downwards was accelerated and the FPCC died not long after one of its members allegedly killed JFK.
The FPCC was characterized as “Castro’s Network in the U.S.A.” by the HUAC. Membership within this anti-U.S. organization was described during hearings as an effective door opener to enter Cuba via the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City and Cubana Airlines. Though the HUAC had been seriously rattled by the McCarthy-era witch hunts, Castro was breathing some new life into this outfit for political showcasing of American patriotism. The FBI may even have bribed an FPCC insider to testify that a launch ad placed by the FPCC was financed by Cuba.
The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (also known as the Eastland Committee) questioned Dr. Charles Santos-Buch, a young Cuban physician, who was a self-described FPCC organizer. On January 6, 1961, Santos-Buch told chief prosecutor Julian Sourwine that he and Taber had received the needed money from “eight different people.” The documents reveal that Santos-Buch changed his story on January 9 at a subsequent executive session, and that he was also given a promise that the CIA would help get a number of family members out of Cuba. He changed his story, at least in part because of his desire to extricate his family from Cuba. On January 10, Santos-Buch publicly testified that he and Robert Taber obtained $3,500 from the Cuban government through the son of Cuba’s Foreign Minister Raul Roa. This money, along with $1,100 in funds from FPCC supporters, paid for the full-page FPCC ad in the April 6, 1960, edition of the New York Times. A week later, Jane Roman from James Angleton’s counterintelligence office in the CIA reported that security concerns made it too dangerous for the CIA to keep its promise to Santos-Buch.
According to one of its national leaders, Barry Sheppard, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) was very involved with the FPCC: “We came to be part of the leadership of the FPCC partly as the result of a crisis in the organization. The original FPCC leadership was somewhat timid, and shied away from forthright defense of the revolution as it radicalized. In response, Cuban members of the 26th of July Movement living in the U.S. aligned with the SWP and some other militants, and took over the leadership of the Committee.”
Sheppard’s memoir shows that the SWP was much larger than the FPCC. He describes protest mobilization during the Missile Crisis in 19622 this way:
We stood up to it. The PC discussed and approved the thrust of a statement to appear in the next issue of The Militant. It ran under the headline, “Stop the Crime Against Cuba!” We alerted SWP branches and YSA (Young Socialists of America) chapters that night to mobilize to support the broadest possible actions against the threat. In New York, there were two major demonstrations. One was called by Women Strike for Peace and other peace groups. We joined some 20,000 protesters at the United Nations on this demonstration. Then the Fair Play for Cuba Committee held its own action, more specifically pro-Cuba in tone, of over 1,000 people, also near the UN.
The following points concerning the July 1963 SWP convention cast even more suspicion around the timing and motives of the already suspiciously late openings of FPCC chapters in the deep south by Santiago Garriga in Miami and Oswald in New Orleans and the continued involvement with the FPCC by other odd subjects:
At the convention, a meeting of pro-Cuba activists discussed the situation in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Cubans living in the United States who supported the 26th of July Movement had helped us build the FPCC. Now most of them had returned to Cuba. In most areas, the FPCC had dwindled down to supporters of the SWP and YSA. Since we did not want the FPCC to become a sectarian front group, the meeting decided to stop trying to build it. The FPCC then existed for a while as a paper organization, until the assassination of President John Kennedy dealt it a mortal blow.3
FBI reports confirm that FPCC National Chapter meetings plummeted from 25 meetings a year to 3 in its last year of existence.
Red Scares, the HUAC and McCarthyism
The first Red Scare in the U.S. took place in 1919-20 because of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the fear of this movement spreading to the United States as well as the influx of immigrants that did include a small number of anarchists. In one case, a bomber blew himself up by accident in an attempt to assassinate John Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. Because of this, the General Intelligence Division (the forerunner of the FBI) was formed and J. Edgar Hoover was chosen to lead it.
In 1938, The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) was formed to investigate individuals, groups and organizations considered subversive or disloyal with a special focus on communist-leaning credos.
The second Red Scare is considered to have begun shortly after World War II in 1947, when President Truman signed an order to screen government employees, and lasted 10 years. Through the propaganda and grandstanding of politicians, working in symbiosis with the press and the FBI, panic and hysteria was omnipresent. The HUAC went into overdrive, with Senator Joe McCarthy as its poster boy and with the Communist-hating Hoover eager to oblige.
By 1956, after overstepping and ruining hundreds of lives, McCarthy was taken down by lawyer Joseph Nye Welchin his heroic “Have you no decency” retort during the Army-McCarthy hearings.
This, however, did not stop the anti-communist fervor of the FBI and CIA. They just became even sneakier with no regard for the rule of law.
COINTELPRO and AMSANTA
The Church report,4 in its section “USING COVERT ACTION TO DISRUPT AND DISCREDIT DOMESTIC GROUPS,” describes the illegal activities of the FBI that were put in motion between 1956 and 1971 under the acronym COINTELPRO [Counter Intelligence Program], which claimed to have as a motive the protection of National Security.
The FBI acted as a vigilante by not just breaking the laws but by taking the law into its own hands against both violent and nonviolent targets. Some of the targets were law-abiding citizens who were advocating change, but were labelled as domestic threats unilaterally by the FBI, e.g., Martin Luther King. Others were violent groups such as the Black Panthers and the Klan, where due process was ignored. Once the FBI started down this dangerous path, they not only targeted the kid with the bomb but also the kid with the bumper sticker!
Organizational targets fell under five umbrella groups: The Communist Party; The SWP; White Hate groups; Black Hate groups; and the New Left. This opened the floodgates to investigate any group that had a potential for violence, including nonviolent groups such as The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was labelled as a Black Hate Group, as well as sponsors, civil-right leaders, students, protesters; and the list goes on …
The FBI used five main methods during COINTELPRO: infiltration; psychological warfare; harassment via the legal system; illegal force; undermining of public opinion.5
These actions stepped up in the wake of the Communist takeover in Cuba. Church Committee members exposed the dimensions of the mail opening program, and discovered that the CIA and FBI had placed the names of 1.5 million Americans in the category of “potentially subversive.” Together, both agencies opened about 380,000 letters.6
Larry Hancock, in Someone Would Have Talked, describes the FBI program called AMSANTA:
The program was initiated by the FBI as part of its effort targeting the FPCC as a subversive group and involved the CIA in briefing, debriefing and possibly monitoring travel of assets through Mexico City to and from Cuba. The program began in late 1962, had one major success in 1963 and appears to have been abruptly terminated in fall 63.
According to John Newman (Oswald and the CIA)7, the CIA, led by David Phillips and James McCord (of Watergate fame), began monitoring the FPCC in 1961. In December 1962, the CIA joined with the FBI in the AMSANTA project. A September 1963 memo divulged an FBI/CIA plan to use FPCC fake materials to embarrass Cuba.
There are strong indicators that the CIA efforts to penetrate and use the FPCC were local and illegal––such as spying on U.S. citizen/members of the FPCC. As a David Phillips asset stated, it was “At the request of Mr. David Phillips” that, “I spent the evening of January 6 with Court Wood, a student who has recently returned from a three-week stay in Cuba under the sponsorship of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”8
The opening of a Miami FPCC chapter in 1963 by Santiago Garriga is more evidence of illegal domestic espionage on or through the FPCC by the CIA. According to Bill Simpich, author of State Secret, Garriga’s resumé was perfect for patsy recruiter/runners––interaction with Cuban associates in Mexico City; seemingly pro-Castro behavior; and his crowning achievement: like Oswald in 1963, he opened an FPCC chapter in a market deemed very hostile for such an enterprise.
Garriga is the potential fall guy who is the most clearly linked with intelligence. Like Oswald, he could be portrayed as a double agent by those who packaged him. What makes Garriga so unique are, as Simpich writes, his pseudonym and close links with William Harvey’s (CIA Cuban Affairs) team. To cover this intriguing lead, it is best to cite a few excerpts from State Secret:
During October 1963 Garriga worked with other pro-Castro Cubans to set up a new chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in Miami … Although it appears that Garriga’s ultimate loyalty was with the Castro government, it’s likely that Garriga’s FPCC activity was designed by Anita Potocki (Harvey’s chief aide at the wiretap division known as Staff D) to set up a flytrap for people like Oswald. Maybe even Garriga himself was considered as a possible fall guy.
However, in the days before 11/22/63, the FBI ran an operation that investigated the Cuban espionage net that included Garriga and shared the take with the CIA. The CIA referred to this investigation as ZRKNICK. Bill Harvey had worked with ZRKNICK in the past … The memos that identify Garriga were written by Anita Potocki.
Was there something sinister in this effort to set up FPCC Miami? It certainly looks ominous, given that AMKNOB-1 is the main organizer and that Anita Potocki is one of his handlers. The FPCC leadership recognized that it was dangerous to set up such a chapter in Miami due to the possibility of reprisals by Cuban exiles. For just these reasons, the FPCC leadership had discouraged Oswald from publicly opening an FPCC chapter in the Southern port town of New Orleans.
The fingerprints of AMSANTA and COINTELPRO were also all over Oswald.
Targeting the FPCC
By the time Oswald opened his Crescent City chapter of the FPCC, it was under the intense scrutiny which had started in 1960, the year of the national launch. An FBI report9 in response to NSAM 43 and 45 to the attorney general, dated April 24, 1961, outlines steps taken by then to counter pro-Castro organizations. It was already a full-court blitz.
In this document, the FBI makes it clear that the Castro movement is a serious threat to the U.S. The FPCC is underlined as a key target pursuant to Executive Order 10450. The overall coverage of pro-Castro activities in the U.S. is described as having begun in November 1955 when Castro came to the U.S. looking for financial support for the rebel cause, and the 26th of July Movement started up in the U.S. When Castro took power in January 1959, the FBI had files on this organization as well as lists of members it shared with other intelligence agencies and sharply expanded its surveillance operations. Spying on Cuban diplomatic institutions, questioning defectors and the infiltration of pro- and anti-Castro groups with informants, are listed as key Intel tactics.
By the time the report was written10, the FBI numbers the pending matters at 1000 and information sources at over 300. The FBI had by then identified 140 Castro supporters in the U.S. who constituted a threat to security. “We are maintaining close coverage of the various Cuban establishments as well as pro-Castro groups and their leaders,” which was shared generously with other intelligence groups. The FPCC is described as the most important such group, and received support from Cuba as well as the SWP and CP, according to the report.
The FBI claimed that Cuban agents were receiving assistance from their surveillance targets and that Cubana Airlines was an important tool for their activities. The FBI was keeping close tabs on pro-Cuba propaganda. Covert informants were given a T symbol,11 preceded by a location identifier such as NY for New York, followed by a number. Also identified were the locations they could report on and the subject matter. Some informants were government employees, post-office workers, intelligence assets on assignment (June Cobb was assigned to spy on Richard Gibson and slander Oswald in Mexico City)12 and freelancers (as we will see later Ruth Paine quite possibly was a provider of FPCC intelligence), etc., who could oversee documentary movement around targets. Others infiltrated FPCC chapters and were present during meetings. These would report on who was present, who said what, and the materials shown and exchanged. License plates of parked cars of meeting attendees were recorded. In some cases, chapter officers were key sources: Thomas Vicente (National), Harry Dean (Detroit), Harrold Wilson (Tampa), John Glenn (Indiana) were all definite or likely snitches for the FBI.
In April 1963, aided by Thomas Vicente, the FBI broke into FPCC NY offices for a black bag operation. FBI files indicate that NY alone had over 25 covert informers who were being used along with other sources. Tampa had at least 11 informants carrying the TP-T code.
The CIA also was all over the FPCC. Two days after the FPCC ad in the NY Times, William K. Harvey, head of the CIA’s Cuban affairs, told FBI counterintelligence chief Sam Papich: “For your information, this Agency has derogatory information on all individuals listed in the attached advertisement.” Other files confirm that Jane Roman and James Angleton were also monitoring the FPCC.
Recipients of intel included the Secret Service, the CIA, Customs Bureau, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Post Office Department, the Aviation Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the U.S. Information Agency, the Treasury Department, the U.S. Information Agency, the Bureau of Foreign Commerce. The report also stresses the importance of coordinated efforts with other intel agencies as well as local FBI offices.
After the failed Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, we can assume that when Oswald, already notorious for his Russian adventure, opened an FPCC chapter in, of all places, New Orleans by the middle of 1963, he was a known quantity.
Frank S. DeBenedictis on the Tampa FPCC
In 2002, Frank S. DeBenedictis submitted a thesis13 about the Cold War coming to Ybor City, and the Tampa FPCC, for his Master of Arts at Florida Atlantic University. DeBenedictis adroitly points out that the reason FPCC files have been very difficult to access is that after the assassination of JFK, these files were categorized as classified JFK assassination files instead of Cold War files.
The following represents some of the key information/passages from his thesis. It is based largely on government and intelligence investigations of the FPCC, declassified JFK assassination documents, Van Gosse’s research, newspaper articles as well as FPCC propaganda and correspondence. Almost all of the FPCC chapters were situated in the North of the U.S. or along the West Coast. The reason Tampa was unique in hosting an important FPCC chapter was because it had a large Cuban exile population who were anti-fascist and had fled the brutal Marchado and Batista regimes. In 1955, Castro raised money there for his rebellion and had satellite followers to his 26th of July Movement. Ybor City (part of Tampa) was known for its Latino culture and its cigar industry.
By 1961, Eisenhower cut all ties with Castro, and the 26th of July Movement ceased activity in the U.S. It was being replaced by the FPCC. As Frank writes, “It was somewhat different from the older pro-Castro groups, since it came about after Castro was already in power. When Cuba formed ties with the Soviet bloc, the FPCC and its defense of Castro increasingly became part of the Cold War. By late 1961 the very active Tampa chapter had established its own newsletter, and drew attention from both Castro supporters outside Florida, and anti-Castro Cuban exiles and a variety of government operatives.”
The influx of anti-Castro Cuban exiles (including Batista followers as well as other Cubans who were disappointed by Castro’s political and economic systems as well as his strong-arm tactics) took refuge in large numbers in Florida and were ready to counter the FPCC on all fronts––with the support of intelligence forces. Violence among Cubans ensued: riots, intimidation, vandalism directed at FPCC sympathizers were the order of the day. Hosting chapters in the deep south became perilous, with strong anti-Castro sentiment coming from Latinos, business, government, intelligence and Americans from all walks of life.
“An organization formed in rebellion at this time, against the Castro regime. It called itself the Cuban Front. The group was made up of Cuban exiles and residents, which at this early date of disaffection with Castro, was composed primarily of Batista supporters. Since Cuba and the United States had by early 1961 experienced two years of deteriorating diplomatic relations, the Cuban Front’s strategy was to raise the specter of communism coming to Cuba.” One violent confrontation called the Marti Park Incident featured CRC leader Sergio Arcacha Smith, who entered Oswald’s universe in 1963.
The Bay of Pigs invasion commenced on April 17, 1961, and FPCC chapters organized protests against the U.S. action. Five days before the invasion, Tampa chapter leader V.T. Lee wrote a letter to the Tampa Tribune deriding both the Tampa daily and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which was investigating the organization. His letter lambasted Senators Thomas Dodd and James 0. Eastland, whose strident anti-communism began accusations that the FPCC was run by a foreign government.
On April 22, 1961, when FPCC-led public protests against the Bay of Pigs operation became prevalent on a daily basis, the Kennedy administration’s National Security Council passed National Security Action Memo [NSAM] 45. This memo ordered the Attorney General and the Director of Central Intelligence to “examine the possibility of stepping up coverage of Castro activities in the United States.” On April 27, 1961, J. Edgar Hoover issued a general order for FBI agents to report on pro-Castro agitation. Hoover noted that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee’s actions showed the capacity of a national group organization to mobilize its efforts.
Florida Congressman William C. Cramer testified on April 3, 1963. A primary subject was, in the words of the Senate Committee, “the flow of subversives through the open door of subversion, the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, by way of Cubana Airlines.’’
For the Tampa FPCC, in large part this meant that the Florida Legislative Investigative Committee [aka––Florida Johns Committee] became involved in investigating the activities of the pro-Castro group. Its investigation of the pro-Castro 26th of July Movement and Fair Play for Cuba Committee began in 1959 and continued into 1964.
Local police intelligence unit “red squads” and state investigative committees filled the anti-Communist void in the post-McCarthy era. Florida’s Johns Committee had a counterpart in Louisiana, which was the Louisiana Un-American Activities Committee [LUAC].
The following passage by DeBenedictis explains the degree of FBI infiltration of an FPCC chapter, and the stunningly high number of informants per FPCC meeting attendee ratio.
A January 30, 1964, FBI report told of meetings the pro-Castro group had at the Tampa residence of Christine and Manuel Amor. Information about this meeting came from October 13, 1963, reports by FBI Special Agents Charles C. Capehart and Fredrick A. Slight. This data was gathered by taking down automobile license plate numbers registered to individuals in attendance. Eight cars were at the Amor residence. An FBI informant inside reported that a meeting cancellation notice had been sent to members, but several still showed up. Slide presentations and a tape recording of V.T. Lee’s Cuba trip were planned on this October date. Background reports provided data on FPCC members past affiliations with the Communist and Proletarian Parties. Jose Alvarez, who in June 1962 was elected the organization’s financial secretary, was identified by TP T-7 as a Communist Party member in Tampa in 1943. Other members, at late 1963 FPCC meetings, were listed as protestors and supporters of radical causes. Among these causes were opposition to the McCarran Act, and support of Cuba’s right to have Soviet missile stations. In addition, these members had links to the Communist Party in northern cities. FPCC informants were given the cryptonyms TP T-1 through TP T-11. Among them was TP T-2, who was identified as M. Miller, Superintendent of Mails at Ybor City’s post office. The FBI’s mail surveillance program complemented the CIA’s HT/LINGUAL mail opening program. FBI agents relied extensively on informants in the Tampa FPCC.
The key with Tampa is that it served as a model for Oswald’s agitation activities as well as FPCC countering strategies for many of the people Oswald would network with in New Orleans.
The FPCC in New Orleans
At least three city police intelligence units kept files and conducted surveillance on the Tampa FPCC. These included Miami, Tampa, and New Orleans. In addition, the police units also cooperated with each other and with the U.S. Senate Committee investigating the organization.14
Perhaps the most interesting of the police intelligence correspondence is the one between the Tampa Police Intelligence Unit and its New Orleans counterpart. The NOPD Intelligence Unit collected data about the FPCC from March to September 1961 from newspaper articles. In 1962 this changed when the NOPIU initiated a chain of correspondence with the TPIU. Sgt. J.S. de Ia Llana, supervisor of the TPIU, replying to a December 1962 information request on the Tampa Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter, informed P. J. Trosclair (NOPIU): “The Tampa Chapter (of the FPCC) is very active in Tampa, these members hold secret meetings and distribute various types of literature. Also, movies are shown. Enclosed are some of the circulars which are distributed. This unit maintains a current file on the local chapter and its members.” The Tampa PD Intelligence Unit enclosed several circulars for its NOPD counterpart, and promised them its full cooperation.15
Early in 1963, the Tampa PD would write to New Orleans, giving them information about a Dr. James Dombrowski, a left-wing activist in New Orleans, claiming that he was an active FPCC member. The NOPD investigation of the FPCC collected a copy of Tampa Fair Play; a list of 202 travelers to Cuba, which can also be found in FBI files, and Florida Johns Committee files. Also included are the pre-Kennedy assassination arrest records and post-assassination warnings on Lee Harvey Oswald. For the NOPD, their late-1962-initiated correspondence to Tampa was odd since New Orleans had no known FPCC chapter in late 1962 and early 1963. Also unusual was the NOPD inquiry to Tampa about FPCC activity in New Orleans!
Oswald and the FPCC in Dallas
According to an FBI report, there is evidence that Oswald agitated for the FPCC in Dallas before moving to New Orleans. Dallas confidential informant T-2 advised that Lee H. Oswald of Dallas, Texas, was in contact with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. According to T-2, Oswald had a placard around his neck reading, “Hands off Cuba Viva Fidel.”
The following day (April 19), Oswald wrote to the FPCC in New York and said:
I do not like to ask for something for nothing but I am unemployed. Since I am unemployed, I stood yesterday for the first time in my life. with a placard around my neck. passing out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets, etc. I only had 15 or so. In 40 minutes they were all gone. I was cursed as well as praised by some. My homemake [sic] placard said: ‘Hands OFF CUBA! V IVA Fidel’ I now ask for 40 or (50) more of the fine, basic pamplets-14. Sincerely, Lee H. Oswald16
The following lead merits investigation. One of the Cuban exiles who was cursing during the so-called skirmish involving Oswald and Carlos Bringuier was Celso Hernandez, who may have met Oswald before. According to Bill Simpich’s research, the CIA examined Celso Hernandez as a Castro penetration agent. There is an intriguing report of FPCC member Oswald being arrested with Celso Hernandez in New Orleans in late 1962. The ID of Hernandez was made years later and is admittedly shaky. The ID of Oswald is more substantive, as he identified himself to the police as an FPCC member––but he was living in the Dallas area. The story is that the two men were picked up at the lakefront in Celso’s work truck, owned by an electronics firm that was Celso’s employer.17
FBI agency file number 97-2229-7 even states that Oswald was the FPCC organizer and chairman in TEXAS!

(Note: also explosive in this document is the statement that Oswald was being polygraphed on November 22––sounds like another offshoot, sigh!)
Oswald’s first attempt at interacting with the FPCC may have been as early as late summer 1962, when the head of the FPCC at the time, Richard Gibson, responded to a request for information from a Lee Bowmont from Fort Worth, Texas. Gibson felt he may have been in a group of three Trotskyites he had met shortly after.18
And then we have the following mind-boggling correspondence(s) courtesy of Malcolm Blunt:

This envelope, with the FPCC return address, as it stands is difficult to analyze because of the unclear postmark and its content has not been revealed as far as I know (which would once again represent obstruction of justice if this were the case). However, we do know Oswald lived at the above address from about July to October of 1962. This confirms that Oswald/FPCC relations began clearly before 1963. The following May 5, 1961 letter is food for thought:

It was not only Oswald who was interested in the FPCC before he went to New Orleans; others from the Big Easy were gathering information. Guy Banister was also a member of the Scotch Rite19 which figures on the letterhead. What on earth is this organization doing corresponding with the FPCC in 1961?

Oswald and FPCC Worst Practices
Location, Location, Location!
As we have seen by chronicling the demise of the FPCC, Oswald’s sense of timing was horrendous when he launched the New Orleans chapter in the summer of 1963. His choice for a location was even worse.
The two most dangerous places to open chapters in the U.S. at the time were probably Miami and New Orleans. Dallas would not have been far behind. New Orleans perhaps stood out as the worst because of its dependence on North-South trade. Its proximity to Cuba caused many sleepless nights during the October 1962 missile crisis. V.T. Lee had urged Oswald to avoid New Orleans.
When the HSCA published its completed Final Report in 1979, it showed two areas related to the FPCC that the Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately. One overlooked area was the identity of occupants at the address Oswald used for his FPCC literature distribution. The address 544 Camp Street appeared on materials that Oswald was handing out. This address was the New Orleans Newman Building. The Warren Report stated that, at an earlier date, the building was occupied by an anti-Castro group, but the name was not revealed in the final report. Later it was found to be the Cuban Revolutionary Council. Another resident of the Newman Building was the private detective agency of Guy Banister. He also was not mentioned in the Warren Report. Banister was the retired FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago FBI field office. After his FBI retirement in the mid-1950s, he moved to New Orleans and helped set up that city’s police intelligence unit. Guy Banister, a staunch anti-communist, continued his anti-subversion work well after his official ties with the FBI were severed. The HSCA determined in their investigation that in 1961 Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith of the CRC were working together in the anti-Castro cause.20
The 544 Camp Street address, which Oswald foolishly stamped on some of his handouts, was also surrounded by intelligence organizations, including the ONI, CIA, Secret Service and the FBI.
The HSCA did take a closer look at the Camp Street enigma. Here were some of the findings:
(467) During the course of that investigation, however, the Secret Service received information that an office in the Newman Building had been rented to the Cuban Revolutionary Council from October 1961 through February 1962.
(466) The investigation of a possible connection between Oswald and the 544 Camp Street address was closed. The Warren Commission findings concurred with the Secret Service report that no additional evidence had been found to indicate Oswald ever maintained an office at the 544 Camp Street address.
(469) The committee investigated the possibility of a connection between Oswald and 544 Camp Street and developed evidence pointing to a different result.
(482) The overall investigation of the 544 Camp Street issue at the time of the assassination was not thorough. It is not surprising, then, that significant links were never discovered during the original investigation. Banister was involved in anti-Communist activities after his separation from the FBI and testified before various investigating bodies about the dangers of communism. Early in 1961, Banister helped draw up a charter for the Friends of Democratic Cuba, an organization set up as the fundraising arm of Sergio Arcacha Smith’s branch of the Cuban Revolutionary Council.
(489) The long-standing relationship of Ferrie and Banister is significant since Ferrie became a suspect soon after it occurred.
(491) Witnesses interviewed by the committee indicate Banister was aware of Oswald and his Fair Play for Cuba Committee before the assassination. Banister’s brother, Ross Banister, who is employed by the Louisiana State Police, told the committee that his brother had mentioned seeing Oswald hand out Fair Play for Cuba literature on one occasion.
(492) Ivan F. “Bill” Nitschke, a friend and business associate and former FBI agent, corroborates that Banister was cognizant of Oswald’s leaflet distributing.
(494) Delphine Roberts, Banister’s long-time friend and secretary, stated to the committee that Banister had become extremely angry with James Arthus and Sam Newman over Oswald’s use of the 544 Camp Street address on his handbills.
(495) The committee questioned Sam Newman regarding Roberts’ allegation. Newman could not recall ever seeing Oswald or renting space, to him … Newman theorized that if Oswald was using the 544 Camp Street address and had any link to the building, it would have been through a connection to the Cubans.
Roberts claimed Banister had an extensive file on Communists and fellow travelers, including one on Lee Harvey Oswald, which was kept out of the original files because Banister “never got around to assigning a number to it.”
(514) Significant to the argument that Oswald and Ferrie were associated in 1963 is evidence of prior association in 1955 when Ferrie was captain of a Civil Air Patrol squadron and Oswald a young cadet. This pupil-teacher relationship could have greatly facilitated their reacquaintance and Ferrie’s noted ability to influence others could have been used with Oswald.
(515) D. Ferrie’s experience with the underground activities of the Cuban exile movement and as a private investigator for Carlos Marcello and Guy Banister might have made him a good candidate to participate in a conspiracy plot. He may not have known what was to be the outcome of his actions, but once the assassination had been successfully completed and his own name cleared, Ferrie would have had no reason to reveal his knowledge of the plot.
On page 145 of its final report, the HSCA states that “it was inclined to believe that Oswald was in Clinton, August – early September 1963, and that he was in the company of David Ferrie, if not Clay Shaw. The Committee was puzzled by Oswald’s apparent association with David Ferrie, a person whose anti-Castro sentiments were so distant from those of Oswald, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee campaigner.”
Research since this very accusatory report has only re-enforced this conclusion. We now know for certain that Clay Shaw was a well-paid CIA asset, something that he vehemently denied during the Garrison inquiry. He was also using the alias Clay Bertrand and that he was seen in the company of Oswald in Clinton.
Birds of a Feather
If Oswald’s sense of timing and choice of location for opening an FPCC chapter were awful, his networking strategies were catastrophic … if you believe he was serious about promoting Fair Play for Cuba.
Jim Garrison had already pointed out how Oswald’s hobnobbing with White Russians in Dallas was diametrically opposed to his supposed pro-Marxist credo. His universe of contacts in New Orleans was even worse––unless he was involved in something else, like infiltrating pro- and anti-Castro groups to help the FBI in their oversight objectives. Let us highlight a few (for a more in-depth coverage of Oswald’s contacts read this author’s article Oswald’s Intelligence Connections: How Richard Schweiker clashes with Fake History):
David Ferrie

David Ferrie Oswald’s first intel connection is one of the most important for confirming Schweiker’s assertion. David Ferrie plays an important role in Oswald’s fate during two phases of Oswald’s short life. In 1955, both Ferrie and Oswald were members of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol where Ferrie taught, among other things, aviation. Ferrie later became a contract CIA agent flying bombing missions over Cuba. During the summer of 1963, Ferrie and Oswald linked up once again at 544 Camp Street. During this period, Ferrie was frequently seen in the building and elsewhere, in the company of Banister, CIA agent Clay Shaw, the CIA-connected Sergio Arcacha Smith, Oswald and others of this ilk who became key suspects in the Garrison investigation.
Kerry Thornley

Kerry Thornley When Oswald was stationed back to California in 1959, Thornley wrote a book about him before the assassination called The Idle Warriors, and then another in 1965. In the summer of 1963, Thornley popped backed into the picture in New Orleans where several witnesses saw him with Oswald either in public or at Oswald’s apartment. There is evidence that Thornley picked up Fair Play for Cuba flyers for Oswald. An FBI memo states that Thornley and Oswald went to Mexico together. And despite preliminary denials, he eventually admitted links to David Ferrie, Guy Banister, Carlos Bringuier and Ed Butler.
Victor Thomas Vicente
When Lee Oswald wrote his first letter to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee HQ in New York in April 1963, he asked for “forty to fifty” free copies of a 40-page pamphlet. The author of the pamphlets, Corliss Lamont, turned out to be holding a receipt for 45 of these pamphlets from the CIA Acquisitions Division. These pamphlets were mailed to Oswald by FPCC National Chapter worker Victor Thomas Vicente. Vicente was a key informant for both the CIA and the FBI’s New York office.
John Martino

John Martino Martino showed pre-knowledge of the assassination and also admitted observing Oswald during the summer of 1963. Martino certainly did have CIA connections in 1963, primarily to David Morales and Rip Robertson.
William Monaghan and Dante Marichini
During the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, Oswald gained employment at the Reilly Coffee Company, an organization of interest because of its links to Caribbean anti-communist politics. The Reilly brothers backed Ed Butler’s INCA (the CIA-linked Information Council of the Americas, which factors heavily in Oswald’s later Marxist PR activities) and the CRC (Cuban Revolutionary Council).

Reilly Coffee Co William Monaghan was the V.P. of Finance there who ended up firing Oswald. He was also an ex-FBI agent. He was listed as a charter member of INCA in a 1962 bulletin. Other employees there of interest to researchers included four of Oswald’s co-workers who joined NASA during the summer of 1963. Dante Marichini, who was a friend of David Ferrie’s and the neighbor of Clay Shaw, was one of these.
Guy Banister

Guy Banister What emerges from all we know about 544 Camp Street is that Oswald was assisting Banister, a known communist hunter, in identifying Castro-sympathizers and that Banister was deeply involved in activities supplying weapons to anti-Castro groups like Alpha 66––a key organization of interest in the assassination.
Clay Shaw

Clay Shaw Thanks to Jim Garrison, we were introduced to a key person of interest in Clay Shaw. The HSCA investigation concluded that New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison and his office ”had established an association of an undetermined nature between Ferrie, a suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, and Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald.”
In Destiny Betrayed, Jim DiEugenio underscores other Shaw links with the CRC and with Banister, CIA-cleared doctor Alton Ochsner, and Ed Butler, who are all connected to the Information Council of the Americas, which appears to have played a role in the sheep-dipping of Oswald (see Ed Butler). He also shows that Shaw was cleared for a project called QK/ENCHANT during the Garrison investigation. Howard Hunt also belonged to this project, which was part of the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division, according to CIA insider Victor Marchetti.
William Gaudet

William Gaudet Gaudet had worked for the CIA before he crossed paths with Oswald. He most likely continued freelancing for it. He worked virtually rent-free out of Clay Shaw’s International Trade Mart. It seems plausible that Gaudet played a part in monitoring Oswald, perhaps for the benefit of Shaw.
Dean Andrews

Dean Andrews Lawyer Dean Andrews was called by Shaw, under the pseudonym Clay Bertrand, and given instructions to represent Oswald, as told by Garrison in his famous interview with Playboy.
Sergio Arcacha Smith

Sergio Arcacha Smith The CIA selected him to be a key leader of Cuban exiles as a representative of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. That group was created by Howard Hunt as an umbrella organization of many Cuban exile groups such as Alpha 66 and the DRE. The FDC was allegedly organized for his benefit, and it borrowed Oswald’s name when he was in Russia. It is in this role that he associated closely with Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Doctor Alton Ochsner. Gordon Novel claims that David Phillips participated in at least one meeting where Smith and Banister were in attendance.
At the time of the working relationship between Banister and CRC leader Sergio Arcacha Smith, the CRC became involved in Tampa’s Marti Park demonstrations against the FPCC. (Frank S. DeBenedictis thesis).
Carlos Bringuier, Carlos Quiroga, Celso Hernandez and Frank Bartes

Carlos Bringuier Bringuier was part of the DRE, a militant right-wing, anti-Communist, anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy group. Bringuier, based in New Orleans, was placed in charge of DRE publicity and propaganda. According to Bringuier, the following summarizes his strange encounters with Oswald:
On August 9, 1963, Oswald, while leafleting FPCC flyers on Canal Street, drew the ire of Bringuier and his Cuban associates Celso Hernandez and Miguel Cruz. Bringuier did the swinging while Oswald tried to block his blows. Oswald was then interviewed on a Bill Stuckey show along with Bringuier where his Marxist and FPCC credentials were discussed for all to hear.
According to E. Howard Hunt, the DRE was started by David Phillips, who is the CIA career employee with the most links with Oswald. The DRE was eventually overseen in 1963 by George Joannides, who helped sabotage the HSCA investigation.

Arcacha Smith, Manuel Gil,
& Carlos QuirogaA Jim Garrison polygraphed interrogation of Quiroga, plus other research, proved that Quiroga knew Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith, had met Oswald more than once, and had supplied Oswald with Fair Play for Cuba literature on the orders of Carlos Bringuier. One of the Cuban exiles arrested during the so-called skirmish was Celso Hernandez, who may have met Oswald before. According to Bill Simpich’s research, the CIA examined Celso Hernandez as a Castro penetration agent.
While Oswald and Bringuier were in court after their altercation, a sympathizer and friend of Bringuier’s, Frank Bartes, showed up to offer moral support. This Cuban exile went on to conduct anti-Castro press relations. Bartes followed Smith as the CRC leader in New Orleans based in the Newman building with Banister. In 1993, the ARRB released files confirming that Bartes was an informant for the FBI agent who just happened to be monitoring Oswald: Warren DeBrueys.
Jesse Core
Core was Clay Shaw’s right-hand man who was present during the incident on Canal Street and Oswald’s leafleting in front of the Trade Mart. He contacted Shaw’s friends at WDSU TV. He also is the one who warned his team about Oswald’s blunder of placing Banister’s address on some of the literature he was handing out. Jesse Core’s reports about Oswald made their way to intelligence outfits.
John Quigley and Warren DeBrueys

Warren DeBrueys After the altercation with Bringuier, while under arrest, Oswald made a bizarre request. He asked to see an FBI agent. The FBI sent agent John Quigley, who spent somewhere between 90 minutes and three hours with Oswald. It’s safe to say that they were not discussing Bringuier simply being mean to the alleged communist. Quigley stated that Martello told him that Oswald wanted to pass on information about the FPCC to him. Joan Mellen’s research finds that Oswald actually asked specifically for Warren DeBrueys. DeBrueys, who ran Bartes as an informant, would further nail down the real reason Oswald started an FPCC chapter in a hostile place like New Orleans. William Walter, an employee at the New Orleans FBI office, claimed to have seen an FBI informant file on Oswald with DeBrueys’ name on it.
Arnesto Rodriguez and family
Before his approach to Bringuier, Oswald had contacted the head of a local language school, Arnesto Rodriguez Jr., expressing an interest in learning Spanish. One of Arnesto’s closest associates in New Orleans was Carlos Bringuier, and both men acted as sources for the FBI (Arnesto aka Ernesto was assigned FBI source number 1213 S).
The father of the Rodriguez family, Arnesto Napoleon Rodriguez Gonzales, had his own intelligence connections, having worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II; he had also served as an on-island source for the CIA before leaving Cuba. In terms of Lee Oswald’s being known to JFK conspirators, the most important point is that Arnesto’s father and Arnesto Jr. were both in routine touch with a relative in Miami, a CIA officer deep within JM/WAVE intelligence operations. That individual (son to Arnesto Sr; brother to Arnesto Jr.) was Emilio Americo Rodriguez Casanova (crypt AMIRE-1). Emilio was a close friend to both David Morales and Tony Sforza as well as a number of other SAS and JM/WAVE officers. He had also worked with, and appears to have been in contact with, David Phillips in 1963.21
Orestes Peña, Joseph Oster, David Smith, and Wendell Roache

Orestes Peña Curiously, the evidence that Oswald collaborated with Customs is stronger than with almost any other agency. Cuban exile Orestes Peña testified that he saw Oswald chatting on a regular basis with FBI Cuban specialist Warren DeBrueys, David Smith at Customs, and Wendell Roache at INS. Peña told the Church Committee that Oswald was employed by Customs. Informant Joseph Oster went farther, saying that Oswald’s handler was David Smith at Customs. Church Committee staff members knew that David Smith “was involved in CIA operations.” Orestes Peña’s handler Warren DeBrueys admitted he knew David Smith.
Ed Butler and Bill Stuckey

Butler & Bringuier The Canal Street incident led to Oswald being part of a debate on WDSU reporter Bill Stuckey’s weekly radio program called Latin Listening Post. Later, Butler and Carlos Bringuier were also invited to debate Oswald about his Marxist views on a show called Conversation Carte Blanche.
To fully comprehend the significance of Oswald’s media exposure during his debate with Carlos Bringuier on WSDU, it is critical to have some insights on Ed Butler and INCA as well as Bill Stuckey and WSDU. These were dissected by Jim DiEugenio22:
INCA was, in essence, a propaganda mill that had as its targets Central and South America, and the Caribbean. It would create broadcasts, called Truth Tapes, which would be recycled through those areas and, domestically, stage rallies and fund raisers to both energize its base and collect funds to redouble its efforts. By this time, as Carpenter and others point out, Butler was now in communication with people like Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA, and Ed Lansdale, the legendary psy-ops master within the Agency who was shifting his focus from Vietnam to Cuba. These contacts helped him get access to Cuban refugees whom he featured on these tapes. Declassified documents reveal the Agency helped distribute the tapes to about 50 stations in South America by 1963. There is some evidence that the CIA furnished Butler with films of Cuban exile training camps and that he was in contact with E. Howard Hunt––under one of his aliases––who supervised these exiles in New Orleans. Some of the local elite who joined or helped INCA would later figure in the Oswald story e.g. Eustis Reilly of Reilly Coffee Company, where Oswald worked; Edgar Stern who owned the local NBC station WDSU where Oswald was to appear; and Alberto Fowler, a friend of Shaw’s; plus future Warren Commissioner Hale Boggs who helped INCA get tax-exempt status. Butler also began to befriend ground-level operators in the CIA’s anti-Castro effort like David Ferrie, Oswald’s friend in New Orleans; Sergio Arcacha Smith, one of Hunt’s prime agents in New Orleans; and Gordon Novel, who worked with Banister, Smith and apparently, David Phillips, on an aborted telethon for the exiles.
Two other acquaintances of Butler were Bill Stuckey, a broadcast and print reporter, and Carlos Bringuier, a CIA operative in the Cuban exile community and leader of the DRE, one of its most important groups in New Orleans.
Stuckey claimed that his show helped destroy the FPCC in New Orleans. It is during this show that Oswald let slip that he was under the protection of the government while in Russia.
So, as we can see, the arrival of Oswald in New Orleans, his behavior and his network were very closely linked to the demise of the FPCC and his own tragic fall, as well as a ploy to blame Castro.
His short stint in the Big Easy was not only a godsend for right-wing fanatics; it was planned and welcomed. FBI files discovered by Malcolm Blunt, as well as Stuckey’s testimony to the Warren Commission, confirm that the radio host was making inquiries about whether or not the FPCC was present in New Orleans as early as 1961. In other words, Stuckey was not just a free-lance journalist.


INCA WDSU
“Conversation Carte Blanche”Both Butler and Stuckey were briefed in advance about Oswald’s defection to Russia: Stuckey by the FBI, Butler by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Therefore, they were able to ambush Oswald and expose him as a Soviet defector, which compromised his debate position as one who desired “fair play” for Cuba. The records of this show were used immediately after the assassination (through Butler and Bringuier) to paint Oswald as the lone-nut Marxist. In fact, Butler was flown up to Washington within 24 hours to talk to the leaders of the HUAC.
According to author Ed Haslam, Butler also became the secret custodian of Banister’s files years after his death.23
see Part 2
Notes
1 AEBALCONY_0005.pdf (cia.gov).
2 Barry Sheppard, The Party, p. 83.
3 Sheppard, The Party, p. 103.
4 Church Report, p. 211, Section: “Using Covert Action to Disrupt and Discredit Domestic Groups.”
5 Brian Glick, War at Home.
6 See n. 13 below.
7 Newman, Oswald and the CIA, location 1329, Kindle.
8 Newman, location 3122.
9 FBI report (CR-109-12 210-2990).
10 FBI report (CR-109-12 210-2990).
11 FBI document James Kennedy Report 11/29/1963.
12 FBI file 124-10324-10098.
13 Frank S. DeBenedictis, Cold War comes to Ybor City: Tampa Bay’s chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (Ph.D. diss., Florida Atlantic University, 2002).
14 DeBenedictis, Cold War comes to Ybor City.
15 DeBenedictis, Cold War comes to Ybor City.
16 John Armstrong, Harvey & Lee, p. 542.
17 https://www.opednews.com/populum/page.php?f=THE-JFK-CASE–THE-TWELVE-by-Bill-Simpich-120825-173.html.
18 CIA file, NBR 89970 Dec 18, 1963.
19 William Guy Banister (1901-1964) – Find A Grave Memorial.
20 DeBenedictis, Cold War comes to Ybor City.
21 Hancock, Tipping Point, part 4, “Oswald in Play.”
22 James DiEugenio, “Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare“ (2004).
23 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, pp. 161-165.
-

Jonathan Chait meets Michael Kazin
Almost any notice in the media about John F. Kennedy will supply an excuse for someone in the MSM to write a derogatory article about him. As we have seen, Michael Kazin used the occasion of a recent book about Kennedy to do a hit piece on him in The New York Review of Books. (Click here for details) Recently, a panel of scholars for C-SPAN did a poll ranking past presidents, including Donald Trump. Journalist Jonathan Chait didn’t like it. Why? Because Kennedy ended up in eighth place. Chait thinks this was unwarranted. Therefore, New York Magazine let him do a Kazin: that is a hit job on the slain president. (June 30, 2021)
What is immediately noticeable about these rants is this: None of the writers knows very much about Kennedy or his presidency. But they pretend they do. For instance, Chait writes that Kennedy made some promises on civil rights in his presidential campaign, but abandoned them when he saw this would offend southern conservatives. The thinking being that it would stop the passage of his other domestic programs.
As I have explained before, this is a liberal orthodoxy that has a serious problem with it. It isn’t true. This author spent months studying the issue for a four-part series about the Kennedys and civil rights. (Click here for that series)
Kennedy did not abandon civil rights at all. He was advised by his specialist on the issue, Harris Wofford, that it would be very difficult to pass an omnibus civil rights bill in his first year and probably even in his second year. After all, there had been nine different attempts to pass such a bill since 1917 and they all failed. (Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, p. 39) Wofford therefore advised Kennedy to issue executive orders and also to rely on the court system, through the Attorney General, to further the cause. The hope being that this would create a furor over the issue that would tilt the balance in the House and Senate. That would then make it possible to pass such a bill.
That is what Kennedy did; and that is what happened. Anyone can read about this in more than one book (e.g. Wofford’s Of Kennedys and Kings, or Irving Bernstein’s Promises Kept). (Bernstein, pp. 40–41, 48–50)
To list all the things that Kennedy did for civil rights in just his first year illustrates the utter fallacy of what Chait is trying to sell. Right out of the chute, JFK and his brother intervened in the New Orleans school segregation court case, something that President Eisenhower had avoided. (Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 122) Eisenhower’s failure to act allowed the state legislature to pass laws attempting to curtail and avoid the court’s decision to implement Brown v Board. When Bobby Kennedy got the news about this scheming he replied, “We’ll have to do whatever is necessary.” (Bass, p. 131)
The Kennedy administration did something that the Eisenhower administration would never have dreamed of doing. The Attorney General filed charges against the state Secretary of Education, Shelby Jackson. The idea was to stop the governor’s attempt to cut off funding for integrated schools. (Bass, p. 135) When a trial date was set, Jackson backed off and said he would not interfere. This episode began in February of 1961, a month after Kennedy’s inauguration.
A similar case occurred in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Due to scheming by the governor and legislature, Prince Edward County had no schools to attend. Again, Eisenhower said he could not do anything about it. Shockingly, he even said states were not required to maintain a school system and, therefore, the president was “powerless to take any action.” (Brian Lee, Ph. D. thesis, A Matter of National Concern, p. 50)
Again, the Kennedys reversed Eisenhower’s course. The president now began to remake the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals governing Virginia and nearby states. (Lee, p. 6) But the Kennedys also began doing two things that were, again, unprecedented. First, they joined the NAACP lawsuit as a plaintiff, not a friend of the court. Secondly, realizing the court reworking would take time, they appointed family friend William Vanden Heuvel to raise a large amount of money. The idea was to build, from scratch, a free school system to educate the African American students, so they would not fall further behind. (Lee, pp. 145–50)
Did Chait miss all of this? Well, no surprise, since he also missed those two executive orders that Kennedy signed for affirmative action. The first was written in his first year, which again, no president had ever done before. (Bernstein, p. 56) Finally, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy made it a point to speak at the University of Georgia Law School. He spent half the address talking about civil rights. He said he would enforce the Brown v. Board decision. As historian Carl Brauer wrote, this was the first time anyone could recall an Attorney General speaking out on the issue in the South. (Carl Brauer, John F Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction, p. 95)
That was in May of 1961. Again, we are to assume that Chait missed all of this, which is weird, since it was all unprecedented in the field. But that was just the beginning of a crescendo that led to the submission of Kennedy’s omnibus civil rights bill in February of 1963. (For the rest of the story, click here)
Chait leads off his article by saying that Kennedy was elected due to his youth and his campaigning about the missile gap. He leaves out the fact that there was only a four-year difference in age between himself and his opponent Richard Nixon. Considering his second point, in Kennedy’s acceptance speech in Los Angles at the Democratic convention, there was no mention of a missile gap. He talked about things like separation of church and state, racial discrimination, the plight of the poor, and said this was no time to try and uphold a status quo that was not working. (Click here for the address) At a famous speech in September, which he gave before the Liberal Party in New York, again one will find no mention of a missile gap. But one will find the following: Kennedy tried to define what he thought the word liberal meant in a political sense, as opposed to how the Republicans defined it:
But if by a Liberal, they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties—someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if this is what they mean by a Liberal, then I’m proud to say that I’m a Liberal.
Kennedy went on to say that he also believed “…in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities.” He continued by saying that when government “has a job to do, I believe it should do it.” This was then exemplified by his above actions in his first year on the civil rights issue, which, as I showed, were starkly different than Eisenhower’s. (For the whole speech click here)
One of the nuttiest things that Chait writes is that Kennedy was a man out of his time period, because he thought there were no great problems to solve, no great dragons to slay, and no great compromises to be made. That Chait could borrow that comment from one of the worst biographers of Kennedy, the late Richard Reeves, tells you just what his game is, because Kennedy says just the opposite in both of these speeches. A constant refrain is his haranguing the GOP for not facing up to the problems as he perceives them: of the urban poor, of dispossessed farmers, of creating an imaginative foreign policy. And he clearly implies that a party of Coolidge, Hoover, and Taft simply could not really do anything about these dilemmas. He contrasted that with people like FDR, who chose to act in a time of crisis. And he compared the 1960 election to that of 1932. In other words, the Democrats could do something and would use government to solve problems.
Chait tries to define Kennedy’s foreign policy by using the Bay of Pigs as an example. He then says, in regards to the Missile Crisis, that the president bungled his way into a nuclear showdown over Cuba. I hate to confront Mr. Chait with the facts, but I must. It was the Russians who placed a first strike capability in Cuba. This featured all three arms of the nuclear triad: long and medium range missiles, bombers, and submarines. In addition, they had 45,000 troops on the island and had also given Fidel Castro tactical atomic weapons. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 66) These would have annihilated any large invading force. This was all done in secret, knowing that Kennedy had insisted there be no offensive weapons in Cuba. And when, due to U2 photography, Kennedy inquired about them, the Soviet foreign minister lied to him about their presence. (Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes, p. 169) When it came time to confront the situation, Kennedy chose the least provocative action: no invasion, no air strikes, but a blockade. Choosing that option gave each side time to resolve the crisis peacefully. Anyone can read the transcripts of these taped conversations. Clearly, Kennedy was keeping the hawks at bay almost throughout. For a good example, read the record of his meeting with the Joint Chiefs, especially note their derisive comments about the president after he leaves the room. (May and Zelikow, pp. 173–88)
As we can see, Chait’s article, like Kazin’s, is not factually based. His real point is to try and reverse the concept that somehow there was a step down in class and achievement from Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson. For instance, he writes that two programs that Kennedy was trying to get passed, but could not, were federal aid to education and health care for the elderly. As Irving Bernstein has written, Kennedy did get federal aid to education through the senate in October of 1963. (Bernstein, p. 241) Kennedy failed to get a Medicare bill through in 1962, but what Chait leaves out is that Kennedy was bringing it back for consideration through powerful congressman Wilbur Mills in 1963. And on the morning of November 22, 1963, Kennedy’s congressional liaison, Larry O’Brien wrote that “with Mill’s objections met, the passage of Medicare was assured.” (Bernstein, p. 258) In other words, Kennedy had set the table for Johnson on these two bills.
This meme is continued when Chait lists the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the War on Poverty as Johnson’s achievements, giving no credit to Kennedy or anyone else. As I have mentioned several times, the idea that Johnson got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed is a myth supported by establishment figures like Robert Caro. Clay Risen, who wrote a book about the passage of the act, has shown why it is a myth. (Click here for details)
President Johnson told Martin Luther King that he could not get the Voting Rights Act passed on his own. The only way he could so was if King did something to give him the torque to implement it. King did so by staging the Selma demonstration, which he was already arranging before Johnson told him this. (Louis Menand, “The Color of Law”, The New Yorker, 7/1/2013)
The War on Poverty began after Kennedy read Dwight MacDonald’s review of Michael Harrington’s The Other America. (Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, pp. 242–43) In June of 1963, JFK was already thinking past the Civil Rights Act he had submitted to congress. So he called in his chief economic advisor, Walter Heller, and they began to formulate a plan to counteract pockets of poverty. After Kennedy was assassinated, Heller told Johnson about this plan he and Kennedy had formulated. In other words, the War on Poverty was not Johnson’s concept. It was Kennedy’s. In his jihad to inflate LBJ and downgrade Kennedy, this is how anti-historical Chait becomes.
If one can comprehend it, Chait even tries to elevate LBJ at Kennedy’s expense over what became Johnson’s disaster in Indochina. With all we know about Vietnam today, I would have thought no one would even think of doing this. But one should never underestimate the stubbornness and perversity of the MSM. Chait begins by saying that it is an unproven assumption that Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam. That worn out standby is not sustainable today. With all the information that the Assassination Records Review Board declassified, combined with the work of writers like Gordon Goldstein, Howard Jones, David Kaiser, Jim Douglass, James Blight, and the revised version of John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam, there is little or no question about the issue: Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam. We have a veritable cornucopia of evidence to prove it. And he was going to enact that withdrawal around the 1964 election. (Click here for details)
Johnson was aware of this plan and within 48 hours of the assassination he started to reverse it. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 310; also see Chapter 23 of the 2017 version of Newman’s JFK and Vietnam.) Contrary to Kennedy, Johnson’s concept was to work his escalation plan around the 1964 election. In other words, as he was saying things like he wished no wider war and he did not want to send American boys to die in a war that Asian boys should be fighting, he was arranging to do just that. This has been proven by too many scholars to belabor the point here. But to name just three: Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster, Fredrik Logevall’s Choosing War, and Edwin Moise’s Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War.
Chait now writes that Kennedy’s policies laid the groundwork for Johnson’s escalation; due to the calculation that no Democrat could lose a territory to communist expansion. I threw my arms up at this one. If Kennedy was withdrawing at the time of his death and Johnson stopped that withdrawal, planned on going to war in Indochina, effectively declared war on Vietnam, and then invaded the country with hundreds of thousands of combat troops—how did Kennedy lay the groundwork for that? In November of 1961, with NSAM 111, Kennedy drew the line: he refused to send combat troops to Indochina. He never crossed that line. There was not one more combat troop in Vietnam on the day he was killed than on the day he entered office. Johnson not only sent half a million combat troops there, he also initiated one of the largest American air wars ever devised, Rolling Thunder, to try to bomb North Vietnam into submission. Does any credible person think that Kennedy would have countenanced these things, let alone allowed them to happen?
This relates to Chait’s other point about the fear of “losing Vietnam.” Kennedy simply did not think that Vietnam was worth going to war over. Just like he did not want to commit combat troops to Laos, even though Eisenhower had advised him he might need to do so. (Newman, p. 9) Kennedy was a more sophisticated thinker about the Cold War than Johnson was. For him, Berlin was a flash point, since he was not going to let the Atlantic Alliance be challenged, but Vietnam was simply not worth the price. And this indicates how uninformed Chait is about JFK. Kennedy understood just how hopeless an imperial conflict would be in Vietnam. He comprehended this due to his relationship with diplomat Edmund Gullion in Saigon way back in the early fifties, where he saw firsthand the doomed French effort to recolonize the area. (Click here for details) He also understood the problem from his Ambassador to India, John K. Galbraith who wrote him a memo to counter the hawks who wanted him to intercede in 1961. (Click here for more)
Compare that to LBJ. Johnson actually said that, if he left Vietnam, he would be doing what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich with Hitler and Mussolini. He then compared losing Vietnam to losing China and that the former would be even worse than the latter. He concluded that reverie with the following:
Losing the Great Society was a terrible thought, but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America’s losing a war to the Communists. Nothing could possibly be worse than that. (Blight, p. 211)
Can anyone conceive of Kennedy saying such things? There is no evidence for it. In fact, as I noted in my review of John Newman’s revised version of JFK and Vietnam, Kennedy told many people that Vietnam was a hopeless struggle, which America could not win. Therefore, he was getting out. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 183) What is so incredible about Chait’s abomination is that, at the end, he concludes that Kennedy’s rating in the poll is due to a lack of analysis. We have just seen what analysis does to Chait.
Make no mistake, Chait’s handiwork is not an accident. As Jeff Morley wrote in his recent e book about his lawsuit against the CIA, no one ever got ahead in the journalistic world trying to expose new facts about Kennedy’s assassination. Well, since 2013, the same figure applies to Kennedy’s presidency, especially in light of the fact that we now know what happened in Indochina as a result of his death. And since that switch in policy came so fast, perhaps—just perhaps—the two events were related. And if such was the case, how could the MSM have missed it with such completeness?
As noted at the start, I recently wrote about Michael Kazin’s similar hatchet job about Kennedy’s presidency, disguised as a review of Fredrik Logevall’s book JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century. Well, if one looks back to 2013, Kazin did the same in the pages of The New Republic. At that time, he was allegedly reviewing Thurston Clarke’s book JFK’s Last Hundred Days. (July 15, 2013) As was the case of Kazin with Logevall, it was a review that was not a review. It was a way to downgrade Kennedy and wonder out loud: Geez, why does anyone pay any attention to this guy at all? The title of the article was: “On the Fiftieth Anniversary of JFK’s Assassination Don’t Bother with the Tributes.”
As I have written before, the MSM drive to conceal who Kennedy really was has become as systematic and assiduous as the attempt to cover up the circumstances of his assassination. As noted above in regards to Vietnam, it’s pretty obvious as to why.
Mr. Chait meet Mr. Kazin. Future employment for both is secured.
Action suggested:
Contact at twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathanchait
The editor of New York Magazine is David Haskell, david.haskell@gmail.com
See also Brian E. Lee’s Ph.D. thesis from 2015 on the Kennedy administration efforts to restore public education to Prince Edward County, VA.
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Morley v. CIA
Jefferson Morley’s e-book Morley v. CIA is a brief tome, but if one is attuned to the scenario and the political times, it’s a work that is powerful in its overtones. On the surface, it tells the story of a journalist at the Washington Post who got interested in the JFK case. He decided to pursue a certain angle about Oswald’s activities in New Orleans with a certain Cuban exile group. He then filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The end result of that application had two long term results that were both negative for Morley and for the cause of open government and disclosure. They are really the heart of this story. But before we get to them, let us lay in some background.
Morley was one of the very few MSM reporters who showed a real interest in the John Kennedy assassination. From his outpost at the Washington Post, he became acquainted with John Newman. He and Newman cooperated on what was one of the most fascinating and important discoveries in the early days of the Assassination Records Review Board. This was the interview those men did with CIA official Jane Roman in the fall of 1994. Morley had discovered that Roman had handled cables and communications about Oswald in the weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. Yet she had signed a communication to Mexico City saying that the latest information CIA had on Oswald was a State Department report from May of 1962. This was a key discovery in trying to comprehend what was going on in Mexico City, which the Warren Commission never came close to understanding. (For a fuller version of that incident click here)
Morley actually got the Post to publish a few stories on the JFK case which were not cheerleading boilerplate for the Commission or slams against the critical community. This was a significant achievement. He has talked about the rather difficult process he had to go through to get the stories published. At times, it was almost a Catch 22 situation. His editors would ask him what theory he was trying to push. He would reply that he was not pushing any theory. They would then ask: “Well why do you want to run the story then?” Consider: Morley was a veteran reporter who had been with The New Republic and The Nation for a number of years prior to the Post. The fact he had to run this gauntlet shows how radioactive this issue was thirty years after Kennedy’s assassination.
As he began to go through some of the declassified CIA documents, the reporter noted that, contrary to what the Agency had maintained for decades, they had a keen and continuing interest in Oswald. (Morley, p. 9). He was particularly struck by the fact that the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil—the DRE—had participated in a broadcast debate with Oswald. Afterwards, they had called for an inquiry into his group: the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This was three months before the assassination. He was surprised when he discovered that not only did the CIA have a file on the DRE, they had three boxes of materials on that group. After going through the material, he concluded that the DRE was in reality a CIA front. (Morley, p. 10) They were getting a princely sum of $51,000/month to operate both domestically and abroad—the equivalent of nearly a half million today. (Morley, p. 11)
He then went about tracking down some of the surviving DRE members. They all referred to a man named “Howard” as their contact with the CIA in 1963. In the boxes, there were lengthy monthly reports out of the Miami station on the DRE, yet these did not appear to exist in 1963. (Morley, p. 10) In 1998, the Review Board released a document which stated the case officer for the DRE in 1963 was not Howard Hunt, but George Joannides. (p. 14) The plot thickened when Morley learned that, in 1978, while he was recovering from a heart operation, Joannides was recruited by Scott Breckinridge. Breckinridge was the chief liaison for the CIA with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Unfortunately, when Morley unearthed all of this, he also found out that Joannides had passed on in March of 1991. The Post obituary had described him as a Defense Department attorney. (Morley, p. 15)
Once he had this information in hand, the reporter contacted Robert Blakey, the Chief Counsel for the HSCA during its last two years of operation. He asked him if he knew what Joannides was doing in 1963. Blakey said he was not doing anything. He had a deal with the Agency that no one operative in 1963 would be working with the committee. In other words, the Chief Counsel had been snookered. (Morley, p. 15)
Morley thought, quite naturally, that this all added up to an interesting story that the Post should run. Bob Woodward agreed. But the investigative reporting chief ended up vetoing the story. The author’s summary of this episode is notable:
They just didn’t want to deal with a JFK assassination story, which amounted to prudent careerism manifested by a difference in news judgment. Nobody had ever gotten ahead in Washington by challenging the CIA’s account of JFK’s assassination…The truth was, I had a good story that didn’t serve the newsroom’s collective agenda. (Morley, p. 18)
It then got worse. The Post, in the person of managing editor Steve Coll, denied his suggestion to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get more documents on Joannides. Therefore, Morley had to publish the story with the Miami New Times, an alternative weekly.
Though he switched over to the online version of the Post, he did not lose interest in Joannides. Morley ended up joining forces with the very experienced Washington FOIA attorney Jim Lesar. Lesar agreed to take the case, because the precedent in the field was that if the CIA lost, the Agency would have to pay his fees. (Morley, p. 19)
Prior to working with Breckinridge, since he spoke fluent Greek and French, Joannides had worked as an undercover agent at the Athens station. The author makes clear that Joannides was an operations man, not a desk jockey. (Morley, p. 21) But in 1962, he was sent to the Miami station. At around this time, Deputy Director Richard Helms decided to redo the Agency contract with the DRE. Whoever became their case officer would have full access to Helms. (p. 22) In some documents the CIA gave up, Morley discovered that Joannides took out a second home in New Orleans in 1964, while the Commission was holding hearings there. This may have been important, because Helms never disclosed that the DRE had a CIA code name, AMPSELL, to the Warren Commission. This was the case even though Helms was the key officer controlling CIA relations with that body.
Lesar filed for the missing monthly reports and the reasons why Joannides was chosen as the HSCA liaison. (p. 26) Dan Hardway became co-counsel. Hardway had worked for the HSCA and had direct contact with Joannides. Recall, when Fletcher Prouty first went to the HSCA for a pre-interview, he saw Joannides there. He immediately realized what had happened. So, he chose to cooperate in only a perfunctory manner.
In interviews this reviewer did with Hardway, and based on a speech Hardway’s partner Eddie Lopez gave in Chicago in 1993, Prouty was absolutely correct. Up until Joannides coming in, Danny and Ed worked out of the CIA offices in Langley. It was a relatively cooperative and informal arrangement. And the two made good progress on their studies of the CIA and Oswald, and the Oswald in Mexico City mystery. This changed under Joannides. As Lopez said in Chicago, now they were shifted out of Langley to offices at the HSCA headquarters. A huge safe was moved into the office. Ed and Dan had to file formal written requests that were now courier-delivered to a secretary. They then had to sign in and out and also for each batch of documents. They also had to hand in their notes. But further, according to Hardway, they now did not get completely unredacted documents or all the documents under request. This violated the agreement that the HSCA had made with CIA. In other words, Joannides acted as a hatchet man.
Judge Richard Leon oversaw Morley’s case at the district level. To put it mildly, he did not look upon it with sympathetic eyes. And here, in addition to the struggle at the Post, comes a second sub theme to the book. That is, how the GOP has stacked the judiciary through The Federalist Society. Leon was appointed to the court by George W. Bush and, according to the late Robert Parry, that may have been an appreciative familial gesture. (Click here for details)
Leon consistently ruled against Morley and Lesar, but, on appeal, Lesar got about 300 pages of newly declassified material. It should be revealed here that, in his interview with Oliver Stone for the director’s upcoming JFK documentary, ARRB chair John Tunheim stated that he was also deceived by the CIA about Joannides. The Agency told the Board that all they had on the former operator was his personnel file. That turned out to be, at the very least, an exaggeration. Tunheim felt that he also had been snookered. For example, Joannides told Blakey that the CIA cut off contact with the DRE in April of 1963. Not accurate. The CIA funding of the DRE went on all the way until late 1966. (Morley, p. 41)
After the 300 pages—which declassified an award that included his domestic actions, which Morley thinks may have been his work with the DRE—Leon attempted to end the case. This was with about 100 documents still outstanding. (Morley, pp. 43–45). This time, the appeals court—with Brett Kavanaugh on it—agreed with Leon.
This led to the second part of the suit, which was an attempt to have the CIA compensate Lesar for the work he had done on the filings, hearings, and other parts of the case. Here, Brett Kavanaugh proved crucial. Prior to the Morley case, there had been a four-part test over the issue of compensation. (Morley, p. 47) If the plaintiff prevailed, those four parts came into play. Clearly, Morley had prevailed, since he got hundreds of pages out which had been secret. These benefited the public, since he wrote many articles about it. Further, the JFK case was and is an issue of substantial interest.
In the end, Kavanaugh reversed his initial vote on the fees. In 2013, he agreed with Lesar. In 2018, he did not. The main issue that changed was that he was now on the verge of attaining his life’s ambition as a member of the Federalist Society. (Morley, p. 55) As the author writes, Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court was sealed with a “decision that can only be described as arbitrary, self-serving, and detrimental to the spirt of the Freedom of Information Act.” (Ibid)
And that statement is not hyperbole and it is not sour grapes either. The author includes Kavanaugh’s decision along with Karen Henderson’s in his appendix to the book. Henderson dissented and her opinion pretty much takes apart Kavanaugh’s in every way. And make no mistake, this is an important issue, for the simple reason that it is difficult for a private individual to take on the FBI or CIA on his own. And the people who file these cases are usually not those of extreme wealth (e.g. the late Harold Weisberg). This is what keeps the scales a bit more even and what helps secure an open government. But once one gets a judge like Leon, who defers to the judgment of the CIA, and one like Kavanaugh, who saw his future beckoning, past precedents were forgotten. Henderson’s dissent is very much worth reading.
Morley has written an unusual book. I don’t recall one like it dealing with the JFK case. It seems to me more than just a profile of a FOIA lawsuit. It tells us about problems with not just the JFK case, but through that with the press and our court system. Both of which weighed in on the side of secrecy.
Joannides must be smiling.
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Creating the Oswald Legend – Part 3
I. Was Oswald a Government Agent?
In part 3, we will try to answer the most important question regarding Oswald. Was he a secret agent of some U.S. intelligence service and, if so, who was controlling him? We will examine his actions in Dallas and New Orleans and, finally, his alleged trip to Mexico before the tragic events of 11/22/1963. We will show that what happened in Mexico has many similarities with his USSR defection and the U2 incident.
The Warren Commission had examined the possibility that Oswald was some kind of a “government agent”. J. Lee Rankin, the Commission’s general counsel, during the January 27th, 1964 meeting, was trying to convince the other members that they should counter the “dirty rumor” that Oswald was a “government agent”. Three days earlier, the chair of the Commission, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Rankin had met secretly with members of the Texas Court of Inquiry to discuss whether or not Oswald was a CIA informant. Henry Wade, the Dallas District Attorney, informed them that somehow he learned that Oswald’s CIA identity number was 110669 and that it was consistent with the CIA’s filing system. Rankin later found out from Oswald’s CIA 201 personality file that Oswald’s CIA number on the file was 289248. Rankin never shared the above information with other members of the Commission and instead told them that there was a rumor out there, saying that Oswald was an FBI informant with identity number S-172 and S-179, which were bogus.[1]
It was Waggoner Carr, the Texas Attorney General, who had provided the information to Rankin that Oswald had an FBI badge with number 179 and he was being paid $200 a month.[2] If that was true, then there should have been records at FBI HQ and probably in Dallas and in New Orleans. He would not have a badge, but a number that would be consistent with the Dallas field office abbreviation (DL), a four-digit number and the letter S at the end to denote security (e.g. DL1268S).[3]
As it was concluded in part 2 of this series, Oswald’s Pro-Soviet, Pro-Communist bona fides would have allowed him to infiltrate communist subversive and pro-Castro organizations targeted by both the CIA and FBI. It is doubtful that Oswald would have been directly employed by the CIA or the FBI, but he was most likely employed by a private investigating agency that had connections to both or one of these two agencies, most likely the CIA.
Peter Scott believed that this particular investigating agency’s field was that of industrial security.[4] To answer if that was the case, we should examine the life of another Marine who, like Oswald, showed sympathy towards revolutionaries, communists, and subversives. His name was Robert C. Ronstadt and in 1946 he started selling subscriptions to the Communist Daily People’s World and in 1947 joined the Communist party. However, he later testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he was only pretending to be a Communist. In reality, he was working in the Los Angeles firm Allied Records and he was tasked to smoke out employees with Communist sympathies and affiliations. It was also revealed that his true employer was not Allied Records but the private investigative firm owned by P. McCarthy and Joseph Dunn that was responsible for providing industrial security to Allied Records. Ronstadt was not an FBI agent, but his employers, McCarthy and Dunn, were reporting their work to the FBI. Later, Ronstadt left the security company and became a paid informant to the FBI.[5]
During the Cold War, all defense contractors and oil companies were obliged by law to conduct industrial security investigation to make sure that no leftists and subversives were hired by them. It was Lee Pennington Jr., an FBI agent, who joined the private organization the American Legion and started collecting and storing information on subversives in a massive library. The infamous James McCord of the CIA contacted Pennington, when he was looking to expose subversives.[6] Later, Pennington became a CIA consultant and transferred his library files from the American Legion to the newly created American Security Council (ASC ), which was a joint FBI-CIA-military industrial complex organization. Among its benefactors were both right wing anti-communists and Wall Street Eastern Establishment members. Some of them were Bernard Baruch, Nelson Rockefeller, Eugene W. Rostow, Henry and Clare Luce, Senator Thomas Dodd, Averell Harriman, General Lyman Lemnitzer, General Edward Lansdale, General John Singlaub, Patrick Frawley, Ray Cline, and James Jesus Angleton.
Angleton created the Security and Intelligence Fund (SIF) after his forced retirement. John M. Fischer, one of the ASC’s presidents, was a founding director of SIF. Two other members of the Council, Elbridge Durbrow and General Robert Richardson III, were also SIF’s President and secretary/treasurer respectively. Large defense contractors like U.S. Steel, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Motorola, and McDonnell-Douglas were consulting its industrial security database to check potential personnel who could pose threats to their security.[7] Other notable members of the ASC were Admiral Felix B. Stump, Air America’s board Chairman, Henry O’Melveny Duque, Nixon’s former law partner, and vice presidents from Atlantic-Richfield, Standard Oil of California, General Dynamics, and the National Security of Industrial Association.[8]
Do we have any evidence that Oswald was doing industrial security to expose subversives?
When Oswald returned to Dallas from the USSR, he contacted Peter Gregory who was a petroleum engineer in Fort Worth. In August 1962, Gregory invited Oswald to dinner, where he met George Bouhe, leader of the White Russian community. We can recall from part 2 that Oswald was probably receiving leaflet materials from a White Russian organization and not the Cuban Consulate, as it was first believed. Bouhe introduced Oswald to other members of the White Russian community, among them Max Clark and his wife Katya, born as Princess Sherbatov of the Russian Royal family.[9] Max Clark was a retired Air Force Colonel and he used to work at General Dynamics as industrial security officer. Clark had also received covert security clearance from the CIA for “Project Rock” while working for General Dynamics. A CIA document had linked “Project Rock” to Project Oarfish, a code for the manufacturing of the U-2 airplane.[10] Clark later denied that he was working for the CIA, but he probably had some connection to them through that project. Surprisingly, another infamous character, William Harvey of CIA’s staff D, also had security clearance for “Project Rock”. According to a CIA document, they re-evaluated Harvey’s file in respect for approval to get security clearance to the above mentioned project.[11]
Max Clark was working closely with I.B. Hale, a former FBI agent and later head of General Dynamics industrial security. It was Virginia, wife of I.B. Hale, that had helped Oswald to get a job at Leslie Whiting on July 1962.[12]
George DeMohrenschildt was encouraged by Max Clark and J. Walton Moore of the CIA to befriend Oswald and become his mentor.[13] It was George DeMohrenschildt who helped Oswald get a new job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall (JCS) after he quit his job at Leslie Welding. JCS was doing contract work for the U.S. Army Map Service and that work was related to U-2 flights over Cuba. Oswald got the job four days before President Kennedy was shown pictures of missiles in Cuban taken by the U-2.[14]
When Oswald moved to New Orleans, it is possible that his job there was related to industrial security in search for subversives. He was employed by the Reily Coffee Company, but he also worked covertly for Guy Banister. William Monaghan, an ex-FBI agent, was the company’s Vice President and specialized in industrial security. Alfred Claude, the man who hired Oswald, left Reily and went to work in Chrysler’s aerospace division, which was based in NASA’s New Orleans facilities. Emmett Barbee, Oswald’s supervisor, and two other Reily employees, Dante Marachini and John Branyon, went on also to work for NASA[15], more likely in the industrial security division. Oswald was frequenting a New Orleans’s garage and had revealed to its owner, Adrian Alba, that he was going to work for NASA. Bill Nitschke, a Banister associate, confessed that Banister had given an offer to NASA to get a contract for industrial security in NASA’s New Orleans facilities.
That Banister’s investigating agency was doing industrial security work can be indicated by the testimony of former Banister associate, Joseph Oster. He told L.J. Delsa, an HSCA investigator, that Banister was using two sources to seek out subversives and Communists, FIDELAFAX and the American Security Council.
One of the people who Oswald met in New Orleans was Ed Butler, the founder of INCA, the Information Council of the Americas. After Kennedy’s assassination, Jim Garrison learned about Oswald’s activities in New Orleans and his contacts with Butler and INCA. Butler got so scared that he packed all the INCA files and parts of Banister’s files and moved to Los Angeles, where he found employment with Patrick J. Frawley, a prominent member of the American Security Council.[16]
It will not then be a surprise to learn that, in the fall of 1962, Oswald subscribed to the Daily Worker newspaper of the American Communist Party USA, applied for membership in the Socialists Workers Party, and subscribed to that party’s newspaper The Militant.[17] Both parties were a hive of leftists, subversives, and Communists.
One could conclude that Oswald was not on the direct payroll of the CIA or the FBI, but possibly through Max Clark he was employed by an unknown industrial security private agency with the purpose of reporting on subversives that were of interest to CIA, the FBI, and defence contractors.
Had this agency been created and controlled by the CIA or the FBI? For Ed Butler was in contact with people like Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA, and CIA officer Ed Lansdale, a member of the ASC.[18]
When Oswald was in New Orleans, he was in contact with Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw. When Oswald was fifteen, he met David Ferrie in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), where Ferrie was a Captain. In 1961, Ferrie and an exiled Cuban, Sergio Arcacha Smith, were part of the CIA’s training and preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion.[19] During the same period, Banister’s office was located in the Balter building in New Orleans. In the same building were located the offices of a Cuban exile organization, the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), and Sergio Arcacha Smith was the New Orleans representative.[20] When Banister moved to 544 Camp Street, Arcacha Smith rented an office for CRC in the same building. It was CIA officer E. Howard Hunt who had helped create this organization.[21] Gordon Novel has said that he met Arcacha Smith in 1961 at Banister’s office upon Ed Butler’s recommendation and, at that meeting, was a person who fit the description of David Phillips.[22]
In Part 2, we concluded that high-level CIA officer James Angleton had utilized Oswald for a Counter Intelligence operation. John Newman thought that Oswald was an off-the-books agent for Angleton. When Oswald returned from Russia, Angleton probably would not have used him as an official CIA agent, but he may have used his connection with the American Security Council and “hired” Oswald from the back door through an industrial security private firm. Angleton was very close to William Sullivan, the head of FBI’s Counterintelligence Division 5, and they had cooperated in the past against the KGB in search of a mole. Most of Sullivan’s men were in continuous cooperation with Angleton’s Counter Intelligence and his secret CI/SIG mole hunting unit. Don Moore of the FBI’s Soviet Counterintelligence interviewed Soviet defector Anatliy Golitsyn and he was the FBI’s representative to the joint CIA/FBI mole hunt task force that included Sullivan and Sam Papich. Papich was the FBI’s liaison to Angleton’s Counterintelligence staff and, as we shall see later on, he was part of a joint CIA/FBI effort to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in foreign countries where it had support.[23]
Angleton and Sullivan also conspired to rehearse questions and answers for the Warren Commission. It can be logically concluded that Oswald’s mission against subversives was a joint CIA/FBI project orchestrated by Angleton.
II. Oswald as Agent Provocateur
Lee Harvey Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963 and visited his Uncle and Aunt, Dutz and Lillian Murret, where he stayed for a while until he could a find a job and settle down on his own. As it was shown earlier, Oswald got a job at Reily Coffee Company and then secured his own apartment.
In part 2, we reported that Oswald was a frequent visitor to the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles where the people that later founded the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) were members. We have also concluded that Oswald’s Soviet bona fides were a part of his preparation to later infiltrate this particular organization. In New Orleans, he did so. On May 26, 1963, Oswald wrote to the central offices of the FPCC asking them to accept him as a formal member and informed them that he would open a small office to use as branch of the organization. He asked if the organization could provide him with a charter, leaflets, paperwork, and a photograph of Fidel Castro.[24]
On May 29, 1963, the director of FPCC, Vincent Lee, informed Oswald that he was accepted as an official member of the organization. But he tried to discourage him from opening a chapter in an area which he knew would attract few members, since they would have to work hard just to put together a rudimentary apparatus. He also warned about a branch office provoking violent reaction of the city’s well known right-wing extremists, so he advised renting a postal box. [25]
Oswald did rent a P.O. Box in his own name with number 30061, New Orleans, Louisiana. He added his wife’s name, Marina Oswald, and someone by the name of A. J. Hidell to also be able to receive mail. He then made an order to print 1000 leaflets and 500 applications using the name Lee Osborne. [26] On the leaflets, he had his name printed with A. J. Hidell as the chapter President. He then informed the Worker and Militant of his new P.O. Box.[27]
In May and June of 1963, Oswald was distributing FPCC leaflets in at least three New Orleans locations: Tulane University, Canal Street, and the port. Two university students had in their possession FPCC leaflets with “Hands off Cuba” and the name A. J. Hidell instead of Lee Harvey Oswald. A military intelligence officer reported to the FBI that he had found one such a leaflet at Tulane with the name A. J. Hidell, P.O. Box 30016. Oswald also distributed leaflets outside the aircraft carrier Wasp.[28] Although the correct P.O. Box address was 30061, for some peculiar reason on the above occasion, it was written 30016.
On June 24, 1963, Oswald applied for a passport to travel to England, France, Germany, Holland, the Soviet Union, and Poland. He received it the next day with the warning that he was not allowed to travel to Cuba. On July 19, 1963, the Reily Company fired Oswald on the grounds that he was not working efficiently and he was absent from his post quite often. On July 27, 1963, his cousin Eugene Murret asked him to talk about his life in the Soviet Union at the Jesuit College in Mobile, Alabama, where he was a student.[29]
During his speech, he said the Communist Party USA had betrayed itself. It had become a sidekick of the USSR against the American government, so the Soviet Union could become the absolute ruler of the American continent. This is strange since Oswald first joined the Communist party USA and now was accusing it of betrayal. It is also odd that he accused the Soviet Union while some days ago, he had applied to travel there. On August 1, 1963, Oswald wrote a letter to Vincent Lee informing him that he had opened the P.O. Box and distributed leaflets on the streets. Then he wrote something bizarre, but prophetic, saying to Vincent that some exiled Cubans attacked one of his demonstrations, the police intervened, and because of that he lost any support and was left alone.[30] We don’t know if Oswald possessed clairvoyant powers, but something similar happened four days later. On August 5, 1963, he visited the clothes shop of Carlos Bringuier, an Anti-Castro exiled Cuban and member of the Revolutionary Student Directorate (DRE), to offer him his skills that he had acquired as U.S. Marine. He appeared to be anti-Castro, but on the 9th of August his true face was revealed when Bringuier and two of his associates witnessed Oswald distributing FPCC “Hands off Cuba” leaflets while seeking support for Castro. This double-faced behavior of Oswald made Bringuier extremely angry and he accused Oswald of being “a traitor and Communist”. Oswald didn’t seem to be very shaken and replied “OK Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me”. The police intervened, like Oswald had foreseen, and arrested them all.[31]
Oswald was locked in jail and he could have been immediately released if he had paid the $25 bail, but he chose not to and stayed in for the weekend. During that time, he was visited and questioned by Police officer Francis Martello and FBI agent John Quigley. What he said to both of them and how this impacted him on 11/22/1963 will be explained later on.
The focus for the time being will be on the aftermath of his arrest and his subsequent radio interview about the Canal Street event. On the 12th, Oswald testified before the court that he was guilty of disturbing the peace and was sentenced to ten days. However, he paid the bail of $10 and was set free. The Cubans were not sentenced and were released.[32] Oswald continued his leafleting and Bringuier asked the help of Ed Butler of INCA to expose Oswald’s true colors.
First, Oswald gave an interview to William K. Stuckey’s WDSU-radio program “Latin Listening Post” and talked about his FPCC organization, but he refused to reveal the names of its members. Oswald was questioned if he was a Communist and if Castro’s regime was a Soviet front in the western hemisphere. Oswald did not deny being a Communist, but he said that he was not member of the Communist Party. Stuckey asked Oswald if the FPCC activities promote Communism, which he denied saying that the organization is only concerned with Cuban matters. When asked if he had visited Latin America, he answered that he had been only to Mexico. It should be noted that Oswald never offered the information that he had lived in the Soviet Union. He said the American government and their anti-Cuba policies had forced Castro to seek help from the Soviet Union. Finally, he accused the CIA of mishandling Cuba and called the CIA defunct and Allen Dulles defunct, which might be something an anti-Castro exile would say who thought the Agency did not do a proper job in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs.[33]
At the end of the interview, Stuckey asked Oswald if he could come again for a more detailed interview and he agreed. On August 21, 1963, Oswald appeared on Stuckey’s show “Conversation Carte Blanche” to debate Carlos Bringuier and Ed Butler of INCA.[34] Stuckey began the interview by asking Oswald if he had lived in the Soviet Union, a tip provided to him by Bringuier. Oswald was surprised by the question and replied that he had. Bringuier intervened and asked him if he represented the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or Fair Play for Russia Committee. Oswald replied that this was a provocative question that didn’t need answering.
Stuckey then dropped the bomb and asked Oswald if he’d renounced his American citizenship and had become a Soviet citizen. Oswald replied that this had nothing to do with the topic of Cuban-American relations. But Stuckey insisted that it did, since Oswald had been proclaiming that Cuba is not a Russian puppet and now it was revealed that he had past relationship to Russia and maybe he was a Communist. Oswald did not answer if he was a Communist, but admitted that he was a Marxist.
Stuckey wondered how he supported himself his three years in Russia and asked if he was given any government subsidy there. Stressed, Oswald almost revealed his true purposes when he said that:
…I worked in Russia. I was under the protection, I was not under the protection of the American government, but I was at all times considered an American citizen. I did not lose my American citizenship…I am back in the United States. A person who renounces his citizenship becomes legally disqualified for returning to the United States.
In the first interview, he denied that Cuba was under Russia’s control and insisted the FPCC’s concern was only Cuban independence and opposing intervention in Cuban affairs. In his second interview, he was exposed as a Marxist and possible Communist working for the Soviets and taking his orders from them, perhaps as a Soviet spy himself. Oswald, wittingly or unwittingly, had connected the FPCC to the Soviet Union and had hurt the organization’s reputation and credibility. After this debate, Oswald’s career as member of FPCC and Castro’s supporter had lost its purpose, value, and meaning.
With his help, his interlocutors made the FPCC look like a Russian Trojan horse in America and a dangerous Communist spying niche. It is more likely that Oswald was acting as such as part of CIA’s anti-FPCC campaign which, as John Newman found out, had been orchestrated by James McCord and David Atlee Philips since 1961.[35] The CIA and FBI suspected that the FPCC back then was trying to infiltrate students that were travelling to Cuba. So Phillips decided to dangle an American student, Court Wood, into the FPCC by pretending to be pro-Castro interesting in starting a new FPCC chapter, something that Oswald tried to emulate two years later.[36] Although the CIA was not allowed to run domestic operations, the FBI knew they did and turned a blind eye to them as FBI agent in New Orleans Warren DeBrueys told author Jim DiEugenio.[37] It would be very plausible that this CIA anti-FPCC campaign had been passed to CIA’s Domestic Operations Division (DOD), formed in 1962.
Researcher Peter Vea discovered a list of documents in the National Archives regarding Clay Shaw’s contacts with the Domestic Contact Service (DCS). One of these documents stated Clay Shaw had been granted covert security approval for project QK/ENCHANT.[38] Newly discovered documents revealed that the CIA was examining the prospect of using Banister’s agency as a cover company for project QK/ENCHANT. Based on ARRB investigation, QK/ENCHANT was a cryptonym for “permission to approach” and utilization for cleared contact purposes. These probably indicated the use of individuals and companies as contact cover for CIA proprietary organizations.[39]
Author Bill Davy showed the above document to former CIA officer Victor Marchetti and, after examining it, he said to Davy, “That’s interesting…he was doing something there.” He added that Shaw would not need a covert security clearance for DCS. Marchetti then said he was likely doing something for Clandestine Services. When Dave asked which one, Marchetti replied:
The DOD (Domestic Operations Division). It was one of the most secret divisions within Clandestine Services. This was Tracey Barnes’s old outfit. They were getting into things…uh exactly what I don’t know. But they were getting into risky areas. And this is where E. Howard Hunt was working for at the time.”[40]
The DOD offices were not located at Langley, but on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington. When Richard Helms was asked about the DOD behind closed doors in 1968, he described the DCS which was not a part of the Directorate of Plans.[41] Donald Freed wrote in his book Death in Washington that the DOD was involved in illegal domestic cover companies and operations against the FPCC.[42]
III. Setting Up the Patsy
In this section, we shall look into the events and incidents showing that Oswald was set up to take the fall for Kennedy’s murder. There were many such efforts, but we will concentrate on the most important, since it will be impossible to report in every detail the life of Oswald in this article.
A. Senator Dodd, Hidell and the Mannlicher – Carcano
The Warren Commission had a hard time proving that Oswald owned a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, the weapon that allegedly was used to kill Kennedy. What is certain, though, is that Oswald was interested in how to purchase weapons by mail. When he was working at the Reily Company, Oswald was spending his time visiting Adrian Alba’s garage and engaging him in conversations about mail order weapons. Oswald would also study some magazines about guns in Alba’s office. He had asked Alba, “How many weapons had I ever ordered, and how long did it take to get them, and where had I ordered the guns from.”[43]
The Dallas Police said they found an order page from the June 1963 American Rifleman magazine about a Manlicher–Carcano.[44] Oswald, however, had already ordered a Manlicher–Carcano from Klein Sporting Goods on March 12th, 1963, using a coupon from the February issue of the same magazine under the name A. Hidell. He also ordered a Smith & Wesson .38 gun from Seaport Traders of Los Angeles on January 27th, 1963, under the name A. J. Hidell. This was the same gun that Oswald allegedly used to kill Officer Tippit.[45] Was it a coincidence that these two weapons companies were under investigation by the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agency (ATF)?
Besides ATF, there was another ongoing investigation about these two companies, conducted by Senator Thomas Dodd, another member of the powerful American Security Council. Dodd was the Chairman of the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee trying to legislate the use of interstate mail orders for weapons.[46] Dodd’s subcommittee started its hearings two days after Hidell ordered the Smith & Wesson gun and the Manlicher–Carcano was also one of the weapons investigated.[47]
Senator Dodd was also member of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee—headed by the racist, right-wing Senator James Eastland of Mississippi—which was investigating the FPCC. Dodd called the FPCC “the chief public relations instrument of the Castro network in the United States” and believed that both the Socialist party and the Communist Party had infiltrated the committee. It might have been possible that Oswald, as a member of a private investigating firm, was contacted by Dodd’s committee to infiltrate these three organizations.[48]
The son of one of Senator Dodd’s friends, who had been hired as an investigator to do work for the subcommittee, was involved in a strange incident in Mexico, causing a disturbance in a strip club. He was arrested by Mexican police for having a gun and posing as a police officer. The same man was arrested for carrying three weapons and ammunition in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, on a weekend that President Kennedy was there.[49]
As others have pointed out, it would have been stupid for Oswald to order a rifle via interstate mail intending to kill JFK, since it would leave a trail that would ensnare him. It would have been easier to buy a rifle from a gun shop in Dallas anonymously. When Oswald was arrested in New Orleans, he was interviewed by Lieutenant Francis Martello of the New Orleans Police Intelligence Division and New Orleans FBI Agent John Lester Quigley. He showed two FPCC cards, one signed by Vincent T. Lee and the other by A. J. Hidell, his alleged New Orleans FPCC officer. As a result, this information was related by Martello to the 112th Army Military Intelligence Group (MIG) at Fort Sam Houston and by Quigley to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Algiers, Louisiana.[50]
After the assassination, Colonel Robert E. Jones of the 112th MIG informed the FBI that Oswald was carrying a fraudulent Hidell selective service card; therefore this information linked Oswald to Hidell and the weapon used to shoot the President.[51] This would trace back to the FPCC and, perhaps, Castro as a leading force behind the assassination. One has to wonder why Oswald would order a weapon using an alias and then carry with him an identity card that would link him to the weapon on the day of the assassination.
B. The Clinton-Jackson Incident
Jim Garrison was the first official to present witnesses that had seen Oswald in the company of David Ferrie and Clay Shaw in the areas of Clinton and Jackson, ninety miles north of New Orleans.
One day, during the late summer of 1963, Ed McGehee the owner of a barbershop in Jackson was visited by a stranger who he later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald asked if he could find a job as an electrician in the area. McGehee told him to ask in the East Louisiana State hospital and informed him that it was a mental hospital, something that Oswald did not know and surprised him. He advised him to contact state representative Reeves Morgan.[52]
Oswald visited Morgan, but he told him that he could not help him since he could not put him ahead of his own constituents. He advised him to register to vote and that might net him extra points in his search of work. Van Morgan, playing in the front yard, noted the black Cadillac parked outside the house; with a man with a shock of white hair in the driver’s seat.[53]
The next day, Oswald and his two companions went to the neighboring village of Clinton to register. It happened to be the day when a drive to register black voters—organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—was on. When the Cadillac appeared, most voters thought it might be the FBI, so they noticed the car and its occupants. Several witnesses, from simple voters, to the Registrar, and the local Sheriff, testified that they identified the three people as Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw. The Sheriff even approached the car and asked the tall grey haired driver for his license. It turned out to be Clay Shaw of the International Trade Mart of New Orleans. Oswald and another man were the only two white voters trying to register that day.[54] When Registrar Henry Palmer asked him for ID, Oswald showed him some Marine separation papers and offered two references, both doctors, Malcom Pierson and Frank Silva. Oswald said that he was living in the state hospital together with the above mentioned doctors. Then Palmer asked him why he wanted to register and Oswald replied that he was advised this would help him secure a job at the hospital. Palmer replied that this was not so, since he knew many people out of Mississippi that were working in Jackson. Hearing that, Oswald left the office, returned to the car and the trio departed.[55]
Oswald then resurfaced at the East hospital trying to get a job, but he was making a spectacle of himself. Talking loudly and being obnoxious, he asked the hospital employees what it would take to take Castro down, since he was a Marine and he was involved in getting rid of Castro. Frank Silva, a Cuban doctor that Oswald had used as a reference, heard the conversation and took an immediate dislike to Oswald.[56]
Maxine Kemp, the hospital secretary, remembered Oswald filling an application and a year later, after the assassination, looked for the file and found it. When Garrison investigators went there looking to find it, the file had disappeared.[57]
Why did Shaw and Ferrie take Oswald to Jackson to seek a job at the hospital and register as a voter? If we could consider Oswald’s actions against leftists and subversives, it would make sense to try to register with the black voters so to link CORE through himself to FPCC, Castro, and the Soviet Union, something that would comprise the CORE movement for racial equality. However, the most important aspect of this trip was his visit to a mental hospital acting as a troubled young man talking nonsense and behaving erratically. Garrison believed that if Oswald had secured a job at the hospital it would have been easy for someone to alter his file from employee to a mental patient, something that would fit with his later portrayal as the lone nut assassin.
C. The Odio Incident
Sylvia Odio was the daughter of the Cuban truck magnate Amador Odio, who was imprisoned back in Cuba along with his wife for actions against the Castro regime. She was living in a Dallas apartment with her two children and her sister Annie, who was helping Sylvia move to another apartment. In late September, Sylvia was visited by two men who presented themselves as Cuban exiles and an American. The exiles were introduced to Sylvia by their war names: Leopoldo and Angelo. They said they were members of JURE, Manolo Ray’s liberal exile organization of which Amador Odio was a founding member.[58] They had come from New Orleans and asked Sylvia to write them letters in proper English to be used to attract financial support for JURE. Sylvia declined since she did not know or trust these strangers and they then left. But the next day one of the Cubans, Leopoldo, called her and told her that the American accompanying them was named:
Leon…he was an ex-Marine, an expert marksman…he could do anything, like getting underground in Cuba, like killing Castro. He says we Cubans don’t have any guts; we should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. He says we should a thing like that.[59]
Sylvia never heard from them again and wrote her father about these strange visitors. After the assassination of President Kennedy, Sylvia and her sister Annie recognized Lee Harvey Oswald as “Leon,” the American that came to her house. Sylvia was certain that they visited her apartment on Thursday, the 26th of September or the next day. This created a huge problem for the Commission: Oswald was supposed to be on a bus to Mexico on the 26th of September. This incident is very similar to Oswald’s bragging to Doctor Silva about getting rid of Kennedy and showing radical, unpredictable, and bizarre behavior.
JURE was considered by the CIA as a leftist organization that had infiltrated the JMWAVE station. At one point, CIA Officer Henry Hecksher had ordered Manuel Artime, E. Howard Hunt’s protégé, to fire on JURE vessels.[60] Hunt despised Ray and referred to his philosophy as Castroism without Castro. It is plausible that this incident could have been an effort to connect JURE to Oswald and, subsequently, to Castro and the assassination of Kennedy.
D. Castro’s Gun Dealer
Either just before or right after visiting Sylvia Odio, two men visited Robert McKeown, a former gun dealer at his house in Bay Cliff near Houston. One of them introduced himself as Lee Oswald and his companion, a Cuban, as Hernandez. They explained that they wanted to buy a large number of guns to start a revolution in El Salvador. McKeown was skeptical and refused to sell them anything, since he was on probation for smuggling guns to Castro in Cuba on behalf of Prio Socarres. When he refused, Oswald tried to convince him to at least sell them four Savage automatic rifles with telescopic sights for $10,000. McKeown again refused and said to Oswald that he could buy these for a few hundred dollars from any Sears Roebuck store in Texas.[61] He thought that the whole deal was fishy and maybe someone wanted to get him in trouble if the guns were really for Castro; especially when he recognized Hernandez as a man he knew in Cuba years ago as a Castro supporter.[62]
If McKeown had fallen for the trap and one of the rifles was proven to be used in the JFK assassination, then the gun could have been traced back to him and eventually to Castro and Cuba as the instigators of the crime.
The most important event that took place to incriminate Oswald was the infamous Mexico City incident. Due to its complexity, it will be examined separately, in more detail than the above four.
IV. Mexico Histrionics
Oswald’s trip through Mexico and what occurred there is the most convoluted and enigmatic event regarding the assassination, one that could lead to the core of a momentous plot. Analysing it in all its aspects is not within the scope of this essay. One should read John Newman’s book Oswald and the CIA or the Lopez Report, to name just two sources, for a detailed and deep analysis. A summary of the incident will be presented here to note if any parallels can be drawn between the episode and the U-2 shoot down in the Soviet Union.
Oswald visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City on a Friday, September 27, 1963, around 11 a.m. and asked Sylvia Duran—the consulate’s secretary—to grant him an in-transit visa to Cuba on his way to the Soviet Union. To make his case, he showed her his work papers from Russia, his marriage certificate, and his membership cards in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and in the FPCC. Duran found his behaviour odd, since he was a member of CPUSA, which was illegal in Mexico; and he had not gotten a visa from CPUSA which had a special agreement with Cuba’s Communist Party to get instant visas for its members. Duran asked him to get some passport photographs, Oswald left, and then returned with photographs, but Duran advised him that she could not issue him an in-transit visa to Cuba unless he first had obtained a visa to the Soviet Union.[63] So Oswald went to the Soviet Embassy. The Soviets refused him a visa, telling him that that he had to fill in an application form that would be sent to Washington and it could take months for a reply. Oswald returned to the Cuban Consulate and told Duran a bold lie, that the Soviets had issued him a visa. Duran, incredulous, called the Soviet Embassy to find out if they had. KGB operative under diplomatic cover Valery Kasimov told her that the reply from Washington could take months. As John Newman concluded, those who handled Oswald had advised him to lie because they wanted to force Duran to call Kostikov and the conversation would be recorded by CIA’s LI/ENVOY telephone tap secret operation in Mexico City. But neither of the two mentioned Oswald by name and instead referred to him as the American.[64]
Duran would not issue Oswald a transit visa and told him to leave. Oswald got angry and displayed erratic and aggressive behaviour, making a bad impression on the Cubans. He had to be escorted out of the Consulate.
The next day, Saturday 28, 1963, he returned to the Soviet Embassy, which was closed on weekends. But he managed to meet with Kostikov for a final desperate attempt to get a visa. According to the Russians, he had a revolver, which he said he needed to protect himself from the FBI. They denied his request and asked him to fill in an application for Washington’s Soviet Consulate. Oswald never filled in the form and gave up, leaving the premises.[65] He never again visited either the Cuban Consulate or the Soviet Embassy.
What happened next is the beginning of the most enigmatic tangled web that surrounded Oswald: a man and a woman impersonating Duran and Oswald, called the Soviet Embassy asking for the visa application that Oswald had not filled in. The name of Oswald is not mentioned. Also, the man spoke poor Russian but good Spanish which was the opposite of Oswald’s case. The imposter told the Russian that he went back to the Cuban consulate to ask for his address in Mexico since they had it.[66] Newman believes that the impersonators wanted it recorded that Oswald had some special relationship with the Cubans. Duran later denied that she made the call as did the Soviets, so it is likely that the Russian recorded answering was also an impersonator.
Because Oswald’s name was not mentioned, another call occurred on Tuesday, October 1, 1963. The imposter called the Soviet embassy and asked if there were any news on a cable to Washington. Those impersonating Oswald did not know the details of his visits to the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy nor that he had declined to fill in the visa application. If they had known, they would have never asked such a pointless question. Again, the caller spoke poor Russian, which would later pose a problem to them. The imposter asked what was the name of the Soviet official he spoke to and the Russian replied “Kostikov.” Why was it so important to link Oswald to Kostikov? Because Kostikov, according to CIA was, part of KGB’s department 13, responsible for assassinations.
Newman concluded that the impersonators wanted the names of both Oswald and Kostikov to be mentioned so it would be recorded by LI/ENVOY, planting a virus into the CIA’s records that would be activated on November 22, 1963. That virus would link KGB assassinations and the Soviet Union to the murder of President Kennedy. President Johnson would use the impersonation charade to convince Senator Russell and Chief Justice Warren into preventing a conflict “kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.”[67] The WWIII virus made sure that the Warren Commission would never investigate what really happened in Mexico.
It is undeniable that someone impersonated Oswald on these phone calls. But did they impersonate the historical Lee Harvey Oswald or another imposter? There are indications that the real Oswald never travelled to Mexico and there are testimonies by Duran, Cuban Consul Azcue, and a Cuban student that confirm he was not the real Oswald they saw in Mexico.
Duran testified under interrogation that Oswald was blonde, short, dressed inelegantly, and his face turned red when angry.[68] When the CIA gave Duran’s testimony to the Warren Commission, they eliminated the above description. When Duran testified to the HSCA, she offered the following description: “as approximately five feet six, with sparse blonde hair, weighing about 125 pounds.”[69] Consul Azcue gave a similar description “a white male, between 5’6″ and 5’7″, over 30 years of age, very thin long face, with straight eye brows and a cold look in his eyes.”[70] A Cuban student, Oscar Contreras said that he met an American named Lee Harvey Oswald and he was blonde and short.[71] If these testimonies are true, the impersonator who made the calls had impersonated an already impersonated Oswald: which perplexes things even further.
Two CIA assets working undercover inside the Cuban consulate told Lopez that the man they saw was not the man accused of assassinating the President.[72] This issue could have been resolved if photographs of Oswald going in and coming out of the embassies existed. The CIA has never been able to present any such photographs and thanks to the Lopez report we know why. Anne Goodpasture was a CIA officer from Staff D posted to the Mexico CIA station. She tried to disguise her role in retrieving photos each day. But Lopez and Hardway found out the man she named in this function only did the legwork for Goodpasture. They finally discovered that Goodpasture was responsible for photographic and electronic surveillance. The translating team said that they did not review all photographs from the Soviet Embassy, only what Goodpasture would allow them to see, and all such photographs were under her control. They also revealed that, although Goodpasture was an assistant to station chief Win Scott, she was a closer assistant to David Phillips, the Chief of Cuban Operations and Covert Action. During that same period, Phillips was also working for the SAS/CI.[73] Phillips was questioned by HSCA Chief Counsel Dick Sprague if he had any photographs of Oswald in Mexico. He replied that the camera was not working those days.[74] Hardway wrote a memo to HSCA Chairman Louis Stokes saying that about ten feet of film was taken from the camera that covered the Cuban Consulate on the 27th and 28th of September. These were developed and sent to CIA HQ, then lost and never seen again.[75]
The CIA always maintained that the tapes had been erased and there were not any originals for Lopez and Hardway to compare with the existing transcripts. There was a missing conversation of September 30, 1963, that the translator, Mrs. Tarasoff, had transcribed. She remembered that it was a very lengthy call and Oswald had spoken in English and had requested financial aid from the Soviets. She had marked it as urgent and according to her recollection Phillips had also heard it.[76]
On October 1, 1963, a diplomatic pouch was sent to CIA HQ addressed to a Michael Choaden. This was an alias for Phillips. Phillips had access to all information from Mexico to Washington and vice versa. He had the original tapes that Goodpasture had given him, plus the copies and transcripts at CIA HQ. Simply put: Phillips would have been able to alter the tapes or phony up the transcripts.[77]
On October 8, 1963, the Mexico station sent a cable to CIA HQ to report an American citizen’s contact with Kostikov. This contact had been known for a week. Phillips tried to explain the delay to Lopez by saying the translators were too slow. But Lopez found out they had finished the translation after 24 hours. Phillips insisted that he was certain about this, since he signed the cable because it concerned Cuban matters. That was another lie, because he had left Mexico the 1st of October and the cable did not say anything about Cuban matters.[78]
The cable had two separate sections. The first reported that an American male, Lee Oswald, who spoke broken Russian, talked with Soviet consul Kostikov. The second section informed that they had photos of someone entering and leaving the Soviet Embassy that was age 35, athletic build, 6 feet, receding hairline and balding top. The cable did not state that this “mystery man” photographed was the same as Lee Oswald, who was only recorded on the phone.[79]
It should have been obvious that the mystery man was not Oswald. When Goodpasture was questioned about it, she replied that it was the only photograph of a non-Latin person taken on October 1, 1963. But Lopez and Hardway discovered that the photo was taken on October 2, 1963.[80] All of these falsehoods made Hardway and Lopez suspicious of Goodpasture and Phillips.
V. A Sinister Mole Hunt Deja Vu
The Mexico desk at CIA HQ received the Kostikov cable and John Whitten—alias John Scelso—then retrieved Oswald’s 201 file. He found out that it had been dormant for the previous eighteen months. This file had been kept by its custodian Ann Egerter of Angleton’s super secretive CI/SIG. What Whitten could not possibly have known was that the FBI report of Oswald’s debriefing in 1962 was missing. He also could not have known that the FBI reports concerning Oswald’s activities with Cubans and the FPCC in Dallas and New Orleans were not included in his 201 file. Around September 23, 1963, just before Oswald went to Mexico, all this crucial information had been bifurcated to file 100-300-011, entitled “Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”[81] There were no indications that the Cuban affairs office (SAS) read that file, but its Counterintelligence staff SAS/CI did.[82] More importantly, Whitten had no information about Kostikov and did not know that he was suspected of being a KGB officer responsible for assassinations.
On October 10, 1963, CIA HQ sent a cable to State, FBI, and Navy connecting the mystery man to Oswald and informed them that Lee Oswald contacted the Soviet Embassy and spoke to consul Kostikov. It described Oswald as 35 years old, athletic build, six feet tall with receding hairline. It also reported that this Oswald might be identical to a Lee Henry Oswald that had defected to the Soviet Union and implied that he was still there with his family.[83]
The same day, they sent another cable to the Mexico City station that included a different description of Oswald as five 5’ 10”, 165 pounds, light brown wavy hair and blue eyes.[84] This cable also identified Oswald with a Lee Henry Oswald that had defected to the Soviet Union and still living there according to latest HQ info dated may 1962; no word about his return to the States and his escapades in Dallas and New Orleans.[85] Most of the Counterintelligence officers in CI/SIG knew that the information included on these cables was not true, but rather deceptive.
Jane Roman, one the counterintelligence officers who signed both of the cables was interviewed by John Newman and Jefferson Morley in 1994. Roman admitted to them that:
I am signing off on something I know isn’t true…The only interpretation I could put on this would be that this SAS group would have held all the information on Oswald under their tight control…
She added “Well, to me, its indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on a need-to-know basis.”[86]
On September 16, 1963, a day before Oswald obtained his tourist visa to Mexico, the CIA sent a memo to FBI for a joint operation to embarrass the FPCC in countries where it had support by planting deceptive information. It would have been a counterintelligence operation inspired by CI/OPS and carried out by SAS/CI.[87] As we have seen in the previous section, Oswald was probably under the control of the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division (DOD), but now that he was to be moved outside of U.S. soil, the SAS and David Phillips would have taken the reigns. Could this have been his mission in Mexico to discredit the FPCC, as he had in New Orleans?
The CIA, and most likely Phillips, had already run an impersonation operation against an American named Eldon Hensen in Mexico. Hensen wanted to help provide useful information to the Cubans and requested a meeting. The CIA station in Mexico City had an agent pretend to be Cuban and meet Hensen. As a result, Hensen walked into a trap.[88]
However, most clandestine operations have at least two purposes and an operation might be hidden inside another. It is possible that the SAS could have used Oswald or his legend in an operation designed to kill Castro, although no such evidence exists. Bill Simpich, in his book State Secret, made the case that the disinformation and false data presented in the two cables were designed as a mole hunt to find out who had betrayed a CIA operation in Mexico by impersonating Oswald. I would agree with him up to a point, that there was a mole hunt but it was not benign, as he seems to think, but a sinister one. The name Lee Henry Oswald, the wrong descriptions of Oswald, Marina’s surname pronounced Pusakova instead of Prusakova were marked cards used in a mole hunt.
This mole hunt had eerie similarities to the one we described in Part 2, which Angleton used as a cover for the U-2 shoot down. Simpich also believes that it was CIA officer from JM/WAVE, David Sanchez Morales, that had used his Cuban intelligence forces, called AMOTs, to impersonate Oswald and Duran. Morales was clever and knowledgeable of counterintelligence operations, but he was not in any way a CIA general. Would Morales be able to bifurcate information into two separate Oswald files? It was this bifurcation that kept his Cuban activities secret and lowered his profile so he would not be included on the Secret Service security index. These two files emerged after November 22, 1963, to complete Oswald’s profile and reveal that an ex defector to the USSR had been involved upon his return to the States in pro-Castro activities and had been in contact with a Soviet KGB assassinations officer in Mexico City. Further, could Morales have foreseen that the FBI would remove the flash warning from Oswald’s file on October 9th, the day before the CIA issued the two faulty memos? That warning had been intact since 1959. This also allowed Oswald’s threat profile to be lowered. One last point, as we shall see, the probability remains that Oswald was not in Mexico City. Could Morales have known that the double operation was planned with a man who was not going to be there? Who was a legend? And would Morales know what specific legend it was? Was Morales really that far up the food chain?
By excluding Oswald’s Cuban escapades from the two cables, only the Soviet Counterintelligence staff would be responsible for drafting and signing them, while the SAS was kept in the dark. Tennent Bagley, the Chief of Soviet Russia/CI, had nothing to say about Kostikov’s role as KGB assassination officer. Yet on November 23, 1963, submitted a memo describing Kostikov as “an identified KGB officer…in an operation which is evidently sponsored by the KGB’s 13th department responsible of assassinations.”[89] It is worth mentioning that Bagley was transferred in 1963 from the Bern station in Switzerland to Langley and promoted as Chief of SR/CI, just in time for the suppression of Kostikov’s KGB role. Could Morales have been able to transfer Bagley, an Angleton ally, back to CIA HQ and place him in the right place to ensure that everything would go as he planned and loose ends would be unexposed? Could Morales have anticipated with precision each of Angleton’s moves, all the way to the point that the FBI would remove Oswald from the security index, ensuring he would not be picked up and removed from the motorcade route in advance?
Putting it all together, we can try to synthesize the puzzle of what happened in Mexico City. Angleton, who John Neman believes was privy to the conspiracy to assassinate the President, had to design a foolproof plot. The idea was to make it appear that the Cubans and Soviets manipulated Oswald in Mexico City in such a way to use him in the assassination of Kennedy. Angleton knew that the exposure of this plot would plant a WWIII virus in Oswald’s files that would halt any real investigation in order to prevent a possible nuclear war. To achieve that, Oswald’s profile had to be lowered for the six weeks before the assassination. Angleton had to come up with a cover story so no one would ever question his role in the plot. As Newman revealed, he was the only person with access to all the Oswald files and information and he managed to manipulate and restrict his FPCC activities in Dallas and New Orleans. He knew the allegedly explosive information about Kostikov’s involvement in wet affairs and he was in a position to instigate a SAS counterintelligence operation against the FPCC in Mexico.
Would Oswald have been asked to go to Mexico if only his legend was to be used? Or was he too important for the assassination plot’s success to place him in suspicious and dangerous situations in the Cuban and Soviet embassies, especially with someone as lethal as Kostikov in direct proximity? More importantly, if anyone had taken a photo of him and somehow his legend was exposed, it would have been extremely difficult to lower his profile. He would have been marked a potential threat and would have not have been allowed on the motorcade route. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that a short, blonde man was sent to Mexico to impersonate the real Oswald as part of an SAS counterintelligence operation.
But we don’t really know how the impersonation was justified for this legitimate CIA operation. The plan was for Oswald to fail to get a transit visa to Cuba, thereby provoking Duran to call Kostikov and plant the WWIII virus. Even if Duran had mentioned Oswald by name to Kostikov, I believe that the telephone call impersonations on 9/28 and 10/1 would have still occurred. This necessitated the bifurcation and also the removal of the flash warning.
Angleton used the impersonations as an excuse to start a mole hunt in a similar way he did back in 1960 when a mole had betrayed the U-2 secrets that led to its shoot down. Angleton did not find any mole. But he used the mole hunt as an alibi to cover his role in the U-2 incident, which resulted in the Paris Peace Summit cancellation.
The mole had returned to action and now he had betrayed the CIA operations against Cuba in Mexico, even contacting the head of KGB assassinations before he himself tried to get to Cuba. Angleton had the excuse to manipulate information and to lower Oswald’s profile in a way that it would not raise suspicion until after November 22. Again Angleton would fail to catch a mole, but he had used the mole hunt to cover his true role that resulted in the murder of a U.S. President.
Below a table would present the parallels between the two mole hunts, in the Soviet Union and in Mexico.
Oswald in Soviet Union
Oswald in Mexico
Oswald defected to USSR
Oswald claimed to return to USSR via Cuba
Visited Embassy on a Saturday so he could not defect
Visited Soviet Embassy in person and phone calls to the embassy on Saturday when closed
Never returned to sign defection papers
Never returned to complete visa application
Impersonated to look like he was replaced by a Soviet Illegal
Impersonated to look like a Cuban or Latin person had replaced him
Angleton believed that the U2 was compromised possibly by a Soviet mole inside CIA
SAS operation to embarrass FPCC
A possible SAS operation to assassinate Castro and the CIA surveillance operations were all compromised possibly by a Soviet mole inside CIAPurpose to cancel Paris peace summit
Purpose to show that the Cubans and the Soviets controlled Oswald in a plot to kill Kennedy to revenge CIA’s plan to kill Castro
Oswald legend was used as part of staged mole hunt to find out the Soviet mole that betrayed the U2 secrets
Oswald legend was used as part of staged mole hunt to find the Soviet mole that betrayed the SAS operation
Mole hunt was used as a cover to hide Angleton’s true purpose
Mole hunt was used as a cover to hide Angleton’s true purpose
FACT: A mole was never uncovered but the Peace Summit was cancelled
FACT: A mole was never uncovered and JFK was killed instead
Angleton was the man pulling the strings from the CIA HQ and David Phillips and Anne Goodpasture were his foot soldiers covertly pulling strings down in Mexico City. It is more likely that Morales would have also taken orders from Angleton and not the other way around. This author remains incredulous to the theory that Morales was such a diabolical puppet master that he could organize such an evil plot from Miami, forcing CIA’s Counterintelligence and Angleton’s CI/SIG to unwittingly dance to his music resulting in the President’s assassination. And then get away with it.
Go to Part 1
Go to Part 2
Go to Part 4
Go to Part 5
Go to Part 6
Go to Conclusion
Go to Appendix
NOTES
[1] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 332.
[2] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 129.
[3] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 131.
[4] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, pp. 243-244.
[5] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 244.
[6] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, pp. 244-245.
[7] The American Security Council.
[8] Scott, Peter Dale, The War Conspiracy, Mary Ferrell Foundation Press 2008, p. 235.
[9] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.152.
[10] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 15, p. 39.
[11] CIA RIF#104-10106-10582, 17/9/1959.
[12] Simpich Bill, The Twelve who built the Oswald legend, part 6.
[13] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.153.
[14] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.154.
[15] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.157.
[16] Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare
[17] Summers Antony, Not in your Lifetime, Open Road Integrated Media, 2013, p. 187.
[18] Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare
[19] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.86.
[20] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.105.
[21] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.395.
[22] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.105.
[23] Scott, Peter Dale, Dallas ‘63, Open Road Media, 2015, kindle version.
[24] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 18, p. 3.
[25] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 18, p. 4.
[26] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 30.
[27] NARA, JFK Files, RIF 124-10011-10133.
[28] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 310-311.
[29] SAC Mobile, November 30, 1963, FBI 105-82555-383 1st NR.
[30] Warren Commission Report, Vol. XX, pp. 524-525.
[31] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 315.
[32] Kaiser David, The Road to Dallas, Belknap Press 2008, p. 219.
[33] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 19, pp. 60-74.
[34] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 321.
[35] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 236.
[36] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 165.
[37] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.158.
[38] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.385.
[39] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 427.
[40] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.385.
[41] Marchetti-Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Coronet Books, 1974, p. 257.
[42] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 427.
[43] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 248.
[44] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 248.
[45] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 249.
[46] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 249.
[47] Evica, George Michael, And We Are All Mortal, Hartford University, 1978, p. 253.
[48] Evica, George Michael, And We Are All Mortal, Hartford University, 1978, p. 253.
[49] Evica, George Michael, A Rifle Symposium, The Assassination Chronicles 1976.
[50] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 258.
[51] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, pp. 259-260.
[52] DiEugenio James, Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, p.157.
[53] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.89.
[54] DiEugenio James, Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, p.158.
[55] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.92.
[56] Mellen Joan, Farewell to Justice, Potomac Books, 2005, pp. 220-221.
[57] DiEugenio James, The Assassinations, Feral House, 2003, p. 208.
[58] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 20.
[59] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 21.
[60] Hancock Larry, Nexus, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 20011, p. 156.
[61] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, pp. 26-27.
[62] Russell Dick, The Man Who Knew too Much, Carroll & Graf, p. 280.
[63] Lopez Report, p. 192.
[64] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 616.
[65] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 616-617.
[66] Hancock Larry, Nexus, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 20011, p. 145.
[67] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 616-617.
[68] Lopez Report, p. 186.
[69] Lopez Report, p. 194.
[70] Lopez Report, p. 205.
[71] Fonzi Gaeton, The Last Investigation, Marry Ferrell Press, 1993, 2008, pp. 289-290.
[72] Fonzi Gaeton, The Last Investigation, Marry Ferrell Press, 1993, 2008, pp. 293-294.
[73] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.
[74] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.
[75] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.
[76] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.
[77] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.
[78] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.
[79] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 398.
[80] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.
[81] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 619.
[82] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 394.
[83] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 398-399.
[84] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 399.
[85] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 400-401.
[86] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 623.
[87] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 623.
[88] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 362.
[89] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics II, Mary Ferrell Foundation Press 2003, pp. 31-32.
-

Destitute Cuban Studies Institute on the JFK Assassination
The Executive Director of the so-called Cuban Studies Institute (CSI), Pedro Roig, presents himself as an attorney and historian in posting “Castro’s Complicity in Kennedy’s Assassination.” The piece leaves much to be desired of Roig’s expertise in both legal and historic studies. It exposes the CSI as a sanctuary of shameless and mindless anti-Castro propaganda. Let’s review Roig’s endeavor to persuade without regard for truth.
Oswald Contact with Cuban Security Agents
- “It is now evident that Oswald made contact with Cuban intelligence officers while stationed at El Toro Marine Air Base in Santa Ana, California.”
No, it’s not. The FBI interviewed 26 U.S. Marines acquainted with Oswald at El Toro. None of them connected Oswald to the budding Castro’s foreign intelligence. Roig cherry-picked Nelson Delgado and disguises his presumptions as quantum of proof.
- “Under oath, Delgado stated that ‘Oswald told him he was receiving mail from Cubans and had developed contact with Cuban government officials in Los Angeles. Delgado recalled that Oswald met with an unknown visitor … and they spent about one and a half, two hours talking.’”
Let’s summarize what Wesley J. Liebeler, assistant counsel of the Warren Commission, got from Delgado under oath, upon which Roig dares to even suggest that a Cuban handler came to a U.S. military base at night to talk with his agent Oswald.
Liebeler: You never asked Oswald who this fellow was that he talked to?
Delgado: No, no.
Q: Did you connect this visit that Oswald had at that time with the Cuban Consulate?
A: Personally, I did, because I thought it funny for him to be receiving a caller at such a late date time … After he started to get in contact with these Cuban people, he started getting little pamphlets and newspapers.
Q: Did you have any reason to believe that these things came to Oswald from the Cuban Consulate?
A: Well, I took it for granted that they did after I seen the envelope…
Q: What was on this envelope that made you think that?
A: Something like a Mexican eagle, with a big, impressive seal, you know. They had different colors on it, red and white … But I can’t recall the seal. I just knew it was in Latin, United, something like that.
Q: You don’t know for sure whether it was from the Cuban Consulate?
A: No. But he had told me prior, just before I found that envelope in his wall locker, that he was receiving mail from them.
Q: Did he tell you what his correspondence with the Cuban Consulate was about?
A: No, he didn’t.
As earwitness, Delgado didn’t know who visited Oswald one night at El Toro; as eyewitness, he described an impressive seal that could be anything but Cuban stuff. Roig has simply recycled the failed 1975 CIA trick of giving Delgado evidential weight to dispel the growing cloud of suspicion over the CIA itself and to point the finger at Castro. Thus, Roig has only proven that the CSI comes to the JFK research community with the spurious arguments of a previous generation.
In Oswald and the CIA (Carroll & Graf, 1995, 627 pages / Skyhorse, 2008, 696 pages), retired Major John M. Newman, who spent 20 years in U.S. Army Intelligence and became executive assistant of the National Security Agency (NSA), killed the two Delgado birds flown by the CIA with one stone. The ex-Marine Gerry Patrick Hemming told his 1960 CIA debriefers that he had met Oswald at the Cuban Consulate in Los Angeles and then confronted him about it outside the gate at El Toro the night before flying to Washington. In an interview by Dick Russell, Hemming destroyed the wild presumption of a 1959 link between Oswald and the budding Castro’s intelligence services:
I ran into Oswald in Los Angeles in 1959, when he showed up at the Cuban Consulate. The coordinator of the 26th of July Movement [Castro’s political group] called me aside and said a Marine officer had showed up, intimating that he was prepared to desert and go to Cuba to become a revolutionary. I met with the Marine … I thought he was a “penetrator” [and] I told the 26th of July leadership to get rid of him. (Argosy, Vol. 383, No. 3, April 1976)
In contrast to Oswald, Hemming did manage to join Castro’s army; in line with Oswald, he also exemplifies the adventurous spirit among many Americans in the early days of the triumphant Cuban revolution. Oswald was released by the U.S. Marine Corps at El Toro on September 11, 1959. On September 3-4, 1959, U.S. Ambassador Phillip Bonsal still expressed “the general sympathy with objectives of Cuban revolution and similarity with many of our own aims and aspirations.” (Foreign Relations of The U.S., 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba, Document 359)
Roig hides this Zeitgeist to portray Oswald as a fully dedicated soldier for Castro: “[Delgado] testified that Oswald kept on asking him ‘how he could help Castro’”. Roig stops here, but the beat goes on with Delgado explaining: “We were on friendly terms with Cuba, you know, so this wasn’t no subversive or malintent”. Delgado clearly revealed the adventurous spirit:
[W]e had a head start, you see. We were getting honorable discharges, while Morgan [Delgado meant Major William Morgan, who also had been infatuated with the Cuban revolution and ended up executed by firing squad under charge of rebellion against Castro] got a dishonorable discharge from the Army and he went to Castro and fought with Castro. So, we could go over there and become officers and lead an expedition to some of these other islands and free them too … [W]e would do away with Trujillo [The dictator of Dominican Republic, the Caribbean nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti].
However, Roig keeps on building a body of evidence about a Castroite Oswald, in a way that resembles the fate of the Cuban character “Chacumbele,” who killed himself. After acknowledging that “defectors like Oswald [were] under close surveillance” by the KGB, Roig broaches a “suspicious coincidence.” In Minsk (Belarus), Oswald was directed to enroll in a Foreign Language School “adjacent to the KGB Academy, attended by Cuban security personnel.”
The coincidence is not suspicious, but absolutely irrelevant. There is not a shred of evidence in reference to Cuban security personnel and Oswald in his KGB file, which includes daily reports of intensive surveillance, even through a peephole into his bedroom. In addressing this lack of evidence, Roig has concocted an undrinkable cocktail: Marina Oswald “testified that Oswald bragged that he had gotten close to some of the Cubans [and] remembered the Cubans with pleasant memories.”
Marina clearly stated that Oswald knew “a Cuban family” and she had heard about 300 Cubans in Minsk, “but I never knew even a single one.” In fact, Oswald knew a man named Alfred (last name unknown) from Cuba and a picture of them together is provided by [Warren] Commission Exhibit 2612. Newman demonstrated Alfred does not provide scope for suspicions. He was a student at the University of Minsk and his parents visited him. Oswald knew him through Anita Zieger, who was courted by Alfred. She and her family—of Argentinian origin—were friends of the Oswalds in Minsk.
Oswald’s Alleged Visits to the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City
Roig continues his deceptive handling of the facts by masking Oswald as “a militant advocate of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” He also labels the FPCC “as a Communist front that supported the Castro’s Marxist-Leninist revolution.” Ironically, this remark closes his new avenue of deception for good.
In the Spring 1963, Oswald formed a one-man New Orleans chapter of FPCC. Although its leadership warned him about “unnecessary incidents,” Oswald walked into a lair of the anti-Castro Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) to offer help. On August 9, he was handing out pro-Castro leaflets in downtown New Orleans. A brawl with DRE militants eventually ensued, but it was staged. Oswald had described the incident in a letter to FPCC postmarked five days before. Less than two weeks thereafter, Oswald and the local DRE head, Carlos Bringuier, met again on a debate at WDSU radio.
Bringuier exposed Oswald as a re-defector from the Soviet Union. Oswald turned the tables by boasting about his stay there as “excellent qualification to repudiate charges that the FPCC is Communist controlled.” He stressed: “It is inconsistent with my ideals to support Communism … We do not feel that we are supporting international Communism in supporting Fidel.”
Within a week, Oswald wrote to the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), in order to leave a paper trail of the very linkages he had denied on the air: “I am the secretary of the local brach (sic) of the FPCC, a position which, frankly, I have used to foster communist ideals.” A prime soldier for Fidel Castro does not stab him in the back.
Roig circumvents the most burning question about Oswald in Mexico City by quoting from the unpublished autobiography of Winston Scott [CIA Chief of Station]: “Every piece of information concerning Oswald was reported immediately … These reports were made on all his contacts, with both the Cuban Consulate and the Soviets … Persons watching these embassies photographed Oswald as he entered and left; and clocked the time he spent on each visit.”
The core factual issue is that the CIA has never produced either a photo of Oswald nor a tape with his voice on it from Mexico City. Win Scott himself overlooked Oswald in his September 1963 report on the CIA telephone tapping program LIENVOY, although an American in phone contact with both Cuban and Soviet embassies was ipso facto of operational interest. In his attempt to escape from the facts, Roig falls into a preposterous dual story:
In March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson … requested from his close associate (sic) Marty Underwood to meet with Scott in Mexico City. The timing was excellent … In the meeting with Underwood, Scott stated that early in the morning of November 22, 1963, a small Cuban airplane landed at the Mexico City Airport. The passenger transferred to another plane, that immediately took off for Dallas, Texas. Later that evening, the same plane returned from Dallas and the individual transferred to the Cuban aircraft the flew back to Havana. After many months of investigation, the CIA was confident that the individual was Fabian Escalante.
Just the timing reveals Roig’s ignorance. Underwood’s only trip to Mexico City occurred in 1966. During his brief meeting with Scott, according to Underwood’s own notes, there was not the slightest reference to November 22, 1963. As a White House advance man, Underwood sought help from Scott for Johnson’s upcoming visit to Mexico. (ARRB Final Report, p. 136) And Escalante—as counterintelligence officer in the Section Q of Castro’s G-2—was so busy in 1963 watching anti-Castro fighters inside Cuba or in exile that he couldn’t have timed a wet operation, id est, involving spilling blood.
It is incredible that Roig would fall for the deceased Underwood. Because, as noted above, Underwood was exposed for telling fairy tales back in 1998 when the Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board was published. Not only was his canard about Scott then revealed, but he had also been telling tall tales to Gus Russo and Sy Hersh for the deceitful Judith Exner. And those two willingly gobbled them up. (Ibid)
State Department: “Do Not Implicate Cuba”
From the bamboozler Underwood, Roig jumps to Thomas Mann, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, who “has the answer” about what happened to the CIA files on Oswald in Mexico City. Mann “was personally ordered by the State Department, a few days after Oswald murdered President Kennedy, to shut down any investigation that would implicate Cuba’s involvement.” Roig added that a top CIA official, Tom Karamessinger (sic), memoed Scott: “Arrest of Sylvia Duran is extremely serious matter which could prejudice (us) … Request you ensure that her arrest is kept absolutely secret, that no information from her is published or leaked.”
Roig is muddying the waters as if the report Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City (1978), written by HSCA staffers Dan Hardway and Edwin Lopez, hasn’t gone through rounds of declassification since 1993. It became clear that the CIA knew Oswald had been impersonated by phone on September 28 and October 1. Duran was also impersonated on September 28.
That Saturday, a caller to the Soviet Consulate identified herself as Duran and announced that “an American that was just at the Soviet Embassy … is going to talk with you.” The CIA transcriber, Boris Tarasoff, commented that the American “speaks terrible, hardly recognizable Russian.” On October 1, a caller to the Soviet Consulate identified himself as Lee Oswald. Tarasoff noted he was “the same person who had called a day or so ago and spoken in broken Russian.” Duran was arrested and harshly interrogated by the Mexican Police on November 23 and November 28. The info taken from her included that she neither met Oswald nor made any call to the Soviet Consulate on September 28.
Duran emphasized “she had no fear [of] extradition to the United States to face Oswald.” On the contrary, the CIA was afraid [that] “any Americans [might] confront Silvia DURAN or […] be in contact with her” [DIR 85318, 11-27-63, in [Duran’s] Information – NARA Record Number: 104-10102-10145, p. 14]. That’s why neither the eyewitness Duran nor the earwitness Tarasoff were ever questioned about the call by the Warren Commission. The CIA itself, not the State Department, shut down any further investigation on a Cuban connection after its Mexico City station not only produced both a tape and a photo that weren’t Oswald’s, but also spread stories—all of them debunked—of Communist conspiracies:
- Mexican writer Elena Garro de Paz transformed Duran from the Mexican employee, who handled Oswald’s visa request at the Cuban Consulate, into the intelligence officer of Castro, who met Oswald again at a twist party in order to put him up to killing Kennedy.
- Nicaraguan secret agent Gilberto Alvarado watched Oswald taking $6500 in the Cuban Embassy to kill Kennedy, while Mexican credit examiner Pedro Gutierrez saw Oswald taking money outside the Cuban Embassy.
- Cuban Embassy employee Luisa Calderon expressed foreknowledge of JFK’s assassination…
Fidel Castro vs. John F. Kennedy
Roig comes to his overarching issue with an “unavoidable” clash between Castro and JFK. As veteran of the Brigade 2506, he is as misguided in his analysis now as he was as a member of the force that failed twice in making a diversionary landing near Guantanamo in mid-April 1961. Roig rarefies JFK’s oath—in the December 29, 1962, ceremony at the Orange Bowl stadium (Miami) with the participants in the Bay of Pigs invasion just released from Castro’s prison—that the flag of the Assault Brigade 2506 was to “fly again in a free Havana.”
For Roig, it was the spark that ignited Castro to engage in “a personal fight to the end” against Kennedy but that’s an utter cognitive distortion of history. On Christmas Eve 1962, the American lawyer Jim Donovan boarded the last flight with the Bay of Pigs prisoners airlifted to Miami as result of his negotiation with Castro. Just before departure, Castro’s aide Dr. Rene Vallejo broached the subject of re-establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Let’s suppose Castro was, indeed, trying to lure Kennedy. Even so, killing the sitting U.S. President offered nothing else to gain than having Johnson in the White House with no hope of more favorable U.S. policies toward Cuba. The Soviet bloc’s diplomats in Havana were aware of it. On March 31, 1963, Hungarian Ambassador János Beck set out in a secret report to Budapest that Castro was convinced “Kennedy is the best” option among the possible candidates for the U.S. presidency in 1964 (“Talks between Cuba and the USA, March 31, 1963,” in Selected Hungarian Documents on Cuba, 1960-1963,” Cold War History Research Center [Budapest]).
The anti-Castro fighter Roig is not aware yet of who his greatest enemy was. Castro knew that killing JFK wouldn´t solve anything and entailed risking everything. His personal fight was system-centered. Accordingly, he proceeded to infiltrate both the CIA and the Cuban exile community. Thus, Castro managed to win in the dirty USA-Cuba war.
Rolando Cubela Secade (sic): The Double Agent Chosen to Kill Fidel Castro
Nonetheless, Roig obsessively resorted to the neither logically nor circumstantially justified hypothesis brought by Senator Robert Morgan (D / N.C.) of the Church Committee: “JFK was assassinated by Fidel Castro or someone under his influence in retaliation for our efforts to assassinate him [and] this fellow [Cubela] was nothing but a double agent.”
This fellow [AMLASH-1 for the CIA] was involved in two assassination plots against Castro. His key co-conspirators were the CIA officer Desmond FitzGerald [Chief of the anti-Castro Task Force known as Special Affair Staff (SAS)] and the CIA golden boy Manuel Artime [Chief of the anti-Castro paramilitary group Revolutionary Recovery Movement (MRR)]. Cubela does not fit at all into the facts as double agent loyal to Castro.
- For unveiling the Artime-Cubela plot, Castro burned his intelligence officer Juan Felaifel, who had infiltrated the CIA in 1963. Another officer, Erasmo Terrero, was gathering evidence against Cubela in Paris. On March 11, 1966 Cubela was sentenced to 25 years.
- For unveiling the FitzGerald-Cubela plot, Castro had to wait for a July 16, 1976, report by his State Security Department (DSE) stating that the “counterrevolutionary inmate” Cubela was the CIA agent AMLASH-1 who surfaced at the Church Committee. Before that, Castro lacked intel on this 1963 CIA plot.
At the XI World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana, Castro set up an agitprop court to prosecute the crimes committed by Yankee imperialism. On August 2, 1978, Cubela confessed to both CIA assassination plots against Castro and spelled an inconvenient truth for Roig: “It is absurd to think that a double agent would have spent 12 years in jail.” Cubela also testified before an HSCA panel in Havana. Castro rewarded him by granting the parole legally prescribed after serving half the sentence.
The Cuban Exile Clandestine Operations
As a fugitive from history, Roig runs so fast that he misses the two-track policy of the Kennedy administration towards Cuba after the debacle of Operation Mongoose. Roig just follows the track of (sometimes) autonomous operations by select Cuban exile groups, backed, in any event, by the CIA, and forgets the parallel track of accommodation with Castro. In fact, due to the ARRB, we now know just how feeble this activity was. For the incoming president Lyndon Johnson, CIA officer Desmond Fitzgerald wrote a report on what these operations consisted of at the time. He wrote that in the entire second half of 1963, there had been a total of five raids against Cuba. There were only fifty men involved in three cadres. In this letter, Fitzgerald admitted it was completely unrealistic to think that such a meager force would result in any real change in Cuba. He stated that they had now become counter productive, since they could not be taken seriously. And he advised they be discontinued. (Letter from Fitzgerald to McGeorge Bundy, 3/6/64)
Ignoring this factual aspect, Roig can please himself with a pharisaic righteousness: Kennedy remained “true to his commitment to get rid of Fidel Castro,” thus ignoring Kennedy’s crackdown on other anti-Castro belligerent exiles groups. How the administration was going to overthrow Castro with fifty men is the author’s secret. Perhaps Roig was modeling his essay on the Peter Sellers comedy The Mouse that Roared?
“Listen to Communications from Texas”
After such an intermezzo, Roig next stages an act against intellectual integrity. The protagonist is the late Cuban defector Florentino Aspillaga, who back in 1963 was working for Castro at a listening post in Jaimanitas [a small beach town near Castro’s main residence, dubbed as Point Zero, seven miles west of Havana]. The script reads thus:
On Friday morning, November 22, 1963, Aspillaga received precise orders: “The leadership wants you to stop all your CIA work, (repeat), All your CIA work” and listen to communications from Texas. Around 1:30 (Havana Time), “I began hearing broadcast on amateur radio bands about the shooting of President Kennedy in Dallas.”
Roig drops the question: “Did Fidel Castro know Kennedy would be killed?” instead of asking: “Who would believe such a tale?” Castro would have never resorted to electronic intelligence to learn something that would have been instantly available through mass media. In 1963, info about anything occurring in Dallas during the JFK visit meant broadcast reports interrupting soap operas on the three national TV networks, and radio stations giving breaking news.
Aspillaga was in fact a self-defeating storyteller. Radio amateurs must have just been chatting about what the commercial media had already reported. In late 1963, a unique witness gave conclusive evidence contradicting Aspillaga’s claim. French journalist Jean Daniel wrote a first-hand account (“When Castro Heard the News,” The New Republic, December 7, 1963). As Kennedy’s emissary, he was talking with Castro in Varadero Beach the very day of the assassination. After a phone call by Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós, Castro got all the news “from the NBC network in Miami.” Daniel also recounted Castro was utterly shocked and turned to him saying—about the plans for rapprochement—that everything was going to change.
Aspillaga told Dr. Brian Latell in 2007 that the CIA had learned the Jaimanitas’ story during his debriefing in 1987. However, it is not to be found among the documents—either declassified or withheld—from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on the JFK assassination. The CIA would not have objected to furnishing a carefully redacted Aspillaga debriefing to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).
The Paris Meting (sic): Assurance of American support
In this intermezzo, Roig again addresses Operation AMLASH to reinforce the discredited notion of Cubela as fake conspirator. The Castroite General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) did not control but rather watched Cubela with a certain inefficiency. Before the Church Committee, the CIA moved to transfigure him into a double agent, even a provocateur, to hide its own shortcoming in recruiting a heavy-drinking, loquacious, third-rate Castro official who couldn’t provide any valuable service.
The DGI manipulated Oswald’s Violent Outburst at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City?
Roig stages this act with an outright lie:
Oswald requested at the Cuban Consulate in the City of Mexico a transit visa to Russia via Cuba and was denied. Oswald turned violent and began screaming “I am going to kill Kennedy.”
As FBI super-spy Jakob “Jack Childs” informed J. Edgar Hoover, Castro himself recounted:
I was told this by my people in the Embassy exactly how he (Oswald) stalked in and walked in and ran out. That in itself was a suspicious movement, because nobody comes to an Embassy for a visa (they go to a Consulate) [W]hen Oswald was refused his visa at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, he acted like a madman and started yelling and shouting on his way out, “I’m going to kill this bastard. I’m going to kill Kennedy” [Castro]was speaking on the basis of facts given to him by his embassy personnel, who dealt with Oswald, and apparently had made a full, detailed report to Castro after President Kennedy was assassinated.
The Consulate was in a separate building from the Embassy. The Cuban diplomatic compound in Mexico City was located at Francisco Marquez Street (Colonia Condesa) with two main entrances: one to the Embassy, on the corner of Tacubaya Alley, and the other to the Consulate, on the corner of Zamora Street. Both the outgoing (Eusebio Azcue) and incoming (Alfredo Mirabal) consuls testified before HSCA that they did not hear Oswald threatening Kennedy’s life. Neither did the Mexican employee Sylvia Duran, who was consistent about it in both her interrogation by Mexican Police and her interview by the HSCA, nor did two other witnesses who had come downstairs from the Commercial Office.
Roig’s opera seria continues as a vaudeville with a substandard duet: DGI defector Vladimir Rodriguez [dispatched by his own CIA debriefer, Harold Swenson, as lacking “any significant information” on Oswald] and Oscar Marino [an alleged former Cuban intelligence officer imported from the bestiary described by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton in Brothers in Arms (Bloomsbury USA, 2008)]. Roig closes the act by foisting two “outrageous lies [on Castro as] part of a premeditated deniability perfidy[:] that he knew nothing of Oswald’s existence before the Dallas assassination and that he was never informed of Oswald’s threatening remarks against Kennedy in the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City”. The latter is refuted by Childs’ report; the former is still wanting for any evidence.
Fidel Castro Got Kennedy First
Before the curtain falls, Roig concocts a Castroite Oswald with a Castro prone to react to the CIA plots against him in the spaghetti western manner summed up by Lyndon Johnson: “Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got to him first.” Such a fact-free approach thrives only on claques of people who cannot think logically or will not think logically, because they have a fanatical and counterproductive anti-Castro agenda.
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Review of Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (Henry Holt and Co., 2019)
I
In his latest book on the Central Intelligence Agency’s history of dirty tricks, longtime historian Stephen Kinzer attempts to paint a picture of the vast and shadowy tapestry that was the American intelligence apparatus at mid-century, using one of its most infamous henchmen, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Technical Services Division of the CIA, as its focal point. While the title would suggest that Kinzer has unearthed new biographical information about this sinister character, I found little that was not already available in other surveys of the field. Knowing the quotidian details of Sid’s family life, his habits, and his strange charm really did not advance a story, which was essentially a rehash of known facts repackaged as a biography of what Kinzer deems the CIA’s “Poisoner in Chief.” While there is some survey value in this book regarding the technical perspective of how the CIA dreamt up its machinations of torture, mind-control, psychological warfare, and exotic poisons, its real strength is in Kinzer’s narrative flair. I read it in a single, very uncomfortable sitting. And for that, I feel it does play a valuable role in the historiography of this unsettling topic, one of which most Americans are barely aware, or at best, would rather forget, despite its present-day relevance.
Kinzer begins his book with a stark postwar vignette:
White flags hung from many windows as shell-shocked Germans measured the depth of their defeat. Hitler was dead. Unconditional surrender had sealed the collapse of the Third Reich. Munich, like many German cities, lay in ruins. With the guns finally silent, people began venturing out. On a wall near Odeonsplatz, someone painted: “CONCENTRATION CAMPS DACHAU—BUCHENWALD—I AM ASHAMED TO BE GERMAN.” (p.13)
The Allies were faced with some of their most trying decisions after the Soviet Union’s capture of Berlin and the subsequent surrender of all Nazi forces in Europe. Many Allied officials knew that ideologies as entrenched, compelling, and destructive as fascism died hard. Just because their nation was in ruins, leaderless, and at the mercy of rampaging Red Army troops on one end and embittered, battle-weary Americans on the other, this did not necessarily mean the German people would go quietly into the night and embrace ideas like peaceful co-existence with their European brethren, or even American-style “democracy.” Some, like Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, wanted Germany reduced to an agricultural backwater with no future prospect of industrial production, military rearmament, or political clout in a world they had only years earlier sought to conquer and rule. Others had different ideas.
As the OSS would soon discover, clandestine warfare and the implied threat of biological warfare had played a major role in both the Japanese and German governments’ early chess moves. As new to the game, that spy agency was only beginning to understand these matters. While Roosevelt begrudgingly fulfilled Winston Churchill’s 1944 request for half a million bomblets filled with anthrax, by the time the batch was coming off the production lines of a converted factory in Indiana, the Nazis had surrendered.
In the ensuing discoveries made in the wake of German capitulation, however, word soon spread that Nazi doctors like Kurt Blome had weaponized dozens of biological agents, diseases, and plagues. Further, that he had been in friendly competition with the sadistic Japanese scientist and biological researcher Shiro Ishii, whose Unit 731 committed human atrocities on captured Allied and Chinese soldiers and civilians that would have made Caligula wince. Much like in their technical advances in rocketry, jet propulsion, tanks, artillery, and submarines, the Nazis were apparently leaps and bounds ahead of the United States in this dark field too. OSS officers on the ground were curious and would soon make a choice that would color and shape the moral landscape of the newly formed CIA in the years to come. As Kinzer notes:
Nazi doctors had accumulated a unique store of knowledge. They had learned how long it takes for human beings to die after exposure to various germs and chemicals, and which toxins kill most efficiently. Just as intriguing, they had fed mescaline and other psychoactive drugs to concentration camp inmates in experiments aimed at finding ways to control minds or shatter the human psyche. Much of their data was unique, because it could come only from experiments in which human beings were made to suffer or die. That made Blome a valuable target—but a target for what? Justice cried out for his punishment. From a U.S. Army base in Maryland, however, came an audaciously contrary idea: instead of hanging Blome, let’s hire him. (p.14)
The author then continues:
For a core of Americans who served in the military and in intelligence agencies during World War II, the war never really ended. All that changed was the enemy. The role once played by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was assumed by the Soviet Union and, after 1949, “Red China.” In the new narrative, monolithic Communism, directed from the Kremlin, was a demonic force that mortally threatened the United States and all humanity. With the stakes so existentially high, no sacrifice in the fight against Communism—of money, morality, or human life—could be considered excessive. (p.25)
The psychic shock of totalitarian ideologies, unleashed in those roughly five and a half brutal years of WWII, was an enduring one for the case officers and assets that now made up the fledgling CIA. And with President Truman’s signing of the National Security Act in 1947, clandestine operations were essentially ratified in legal writ, with the stamp of the highest offices of government, a decision Truman would famously lament in his retirement. As Kinzer shows, the nebulous and ill-defined limits circumscribing this new shadow warfare were quickly pushed to their logical end by those who seemed to believe nothing was too extreme when the fate of the “free world,” as they understood it, was concerned. Given an unprecedented opportunity to play James Bond, an almost unlimited budget to fund new and exciting ways to overthrow governments, assassinate leaders, poison food supplies, and expose innocent people to mind-shattering substances in their search for mind control, they took the ball and ran with it. Things fell into place. Truman left office in 1953 and President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, were all too willing to use the CIA to achieve political ends. With John’s brother, Allen Dulles, now appointed as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, the circle was complete: foreign policy would be a spy’s game, with very real conventional wars interspersed for flavor, but essentially, a secret and enduring war in the shadows. And to play the game, they needed the tools.
Kinzer’s ability as a storyteller is pronounced in these early chapters. The book at this point reads like a John Le Carré novel, as much as it does a well-researched, thoroughly footnoted monograph of the early Cold War. Familiar names are given a face, a voice, a temper: Wild Bill Donovan, Bill Harvey, Ira Baldwin, and of course, a young Jewish man from the Bronx named Sid with a club foot and a stammer who was studying biology back in the States.
II
Lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, or “acid” on the street, plays a central role in Kinzer’s book, with many chapters devoted to the CIA’s explorations into its potential to manipulate human beings for political and social engineering ends. Wilson Greene, an officer of the United States Chemical Corps, discovered scattered reports and rumors of a Swiss doctor named Albert Hoffmann, who Kinzer believes is the first person ever to have had an acid trip. Though Hoffmann, who worked for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, had taken this journey in 1943, it would not reach Washington until 1949. Kinzer describes the thesis of Greene’s paper to government officials, entitled: “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War:”
Their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely destroyed, by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue. The symptoms which are considered to be of value in strategic and tactical operations include the following: fits or seizures, dizziness, fear, panic, hysteria, hallucinations, migraine, delirium, extreme depression, notions of hopelessness, lack of initiative to do even simple things, suicidal mania. Greene proposed that America’s military scientists be given a new mission. At the outer edge of imagination, he suggested, beyond artillery and tanks, beyond chemicals, beyond germs, beyond even nuclear bombs, might lie an unimagined cosmos of new weaponry: psychoactive drugs. Greene believed they could usher in a new era of humane warfare. (p.29)
This, along with reports of recently-returning soldiers from the Korean War who seemed to sympathize more with the enemy they were sent to kill than their American brethren, led some policy planners in Washington to suspect that the Reds were up to more than conventional propaganda. That, as Kinzer notes, none were actually “brainwashed” as Washington suspected, but simply critical of what they viewed as a hypocritical, unjust, capitalistic and segregated mid-century America, didn’t matter in the binary option set of hard line anti-communists like CIA officers Dulles, James Angleton, Richard Helms, and their colleagues. These were the same people who essentially green-lit what would eventually turn into the MK-ULTRA program, whose directive was to probe the limits of the human psyche, with the express aim to eventually discover how a fully functional person could be “depatterned” and remade, as it were, in the image of his or her handler for any number of field-deployable roles.
While that program is exhaustively detailed elsewhere, Kinzer does add some colorful vignettes to the story that seem like they jumped from the pages of a Thomas Pynchon novel rather than the historical record: secretly dosing colleagues at dinner parties, most famously Frank Olson, who of course “jumped or fell” from a 13-story Manhattan hotel room after having an acid-induced nervous breakdown and frantically seeking an exit from the intelligence field, paying crooked cops in cash to sit behind two-way mirrors in rented San Francisco brothels to watch prostitutes try to illicit sensitive information from acid-dosed patrons, injecting an elephant at an Oklahoma zoo with a lethal dose of LSD, releasing “benign” but actually toxic bacterial aerosols off the coast of California (Operation Seaspray) to test their dispersal pattern on an unaware American population getting their Sunday morning newspapers. The list goes on and only gets more absurd as it does.
What Kinzer accomplishes in Poisoner in Chief is to show just how unscientific so much of what we call MK-ULTRA and its hundred-plus “sub-projects” really were. With little oversight, and an actual legal license to kill, torture, abduct, and abscond, the early case officers and assets tasked to the CIA’s biological and mind-control initiatives were dangerously out of control, yet in some sense, legally justified, given the vague language and imperatives of the National Security Act which legitimized their activities. As George White, the crooked cop mentioned earlier, said years later in a grateful letter to his mentor and boss, Sidney Gottlieb, “… it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” (p.155)
Indeed. Where else but in the CIA?
III
Poisoner in Chief proceeds predictably enough through the sixties and seventies, with the major uses of Gottlieb’s Technical Services Division of the CIA highlighted against the backdrop of a given foreign policy episode. Crafting ever sillier ways to kill Fidel Castro—boots laced with thallium to make his mighty beard fall out, exploding ornate seashells to catch his eye on one of his frequent scuba dives, and botulin-laced cigars that only needed to be held between the lips for seconds to kill—Gottlieb and his junior staff of kids from local technical colleges and workshops were never out of ideas. Poisoned tubes of toothpaste for the first democratically elected leader of the Congo? No problem. “Joe from Paris” (Gottlieb’s code-name in the Congo operation) will arrive in Leopoldville shortly. So will QJ/WIN, the backup shooter. Standby.
This is an exciting part of the book and provided a rare glimpse into the devil’s workshop that was TSS (Technical Services Staff). But, at the same time, it contains some critical oversights that must be addressed. Namely viewing President Kennedy as a younger, fresh-faced continuation of Eisenhower, and someone who laid the groundwork for Johnson, rather than as someone opposed to either of his executive bookends. A president who was rather unique in his conciliatory vision of peaceful coexistence; a president who, unbelievable as it may sound today, had genuine empathy for the developing nations of the world. This is not a debatable point in 2019, despite the MSM’s dogged, fifty-five-year smear campaign against a most promising U.S. leader, as any reader at Kennedys and King should know by now.
Yet there is a real political vacuum in this section of the book. In his tracing of the Gottlieb attempts to poison Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, there is no mentioning of how these plots were hurried in late 1960 after John F. Kennedy won the election. Yet, there are authors who have come to this conclusion after reading the cable traffic. (John Morton Blum, Years of Discord, pp. 175-76) Almost everyone agrees today that Kennedy clearly favored Lumumba in his struggle to free Congo from European imperialism. And it appears that the CIA knew that.
As most authors also realize today, the CIA plots with the Mafia to assassination Fidel Castro did not have presidential sanction. This was the conclusion expressed by the Church Committee in 1975 and is fortified by the release by the Assassination Records Review Board of the CIA Inspector General Report on that subject. Yet, in the face of all this, plus the declassified files of the Assassination Records Review Board, former New York Times reporter Kinzer claims,
Plotting against Castro did not end when Eisenhower left office at the beginning of 1961. His successor, John F. Kennedy, turned out to be equally determined to “eliminate” Castro. The spectacular collapse of the CIA’s 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs intensified his determination. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his brother, relentlessly pressured the CIA to crush Castro and repeatedly demanded explanations of why it had not been accomplished. Samuel Halpern, who served at the top level of the covert action directorate during this period, asserted that “the Kennedys were on our back constantly … they were just absolutely obsessed with getting rid of Castro.” Richard Helms felt the pressure directly. “There was a flat-out effort ordered by the White House, the President, Bobby Kennedy—who was after all his man, his right-hand man in these matters—to unseat the Castro government, to do everything possible to get rid of it by whatever device could be found,” Helms later testified. “The Bay of Pigs was a part of this effort, and after the Bay of Pigs failed, there was even a greater push to try to get rid of this Communist influence 90 miles from United States shores … The principal driving force was the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. There isn’t any question about this.” (p.122)
First, to take the testimony of a practiced liar like Richard Helms regarding his sworn enemies, the Kennedy brothers, at face value, is almost comical. Richard Helms ordered Sidney Gottlieb to shred every accessible document pertaining to MK-ULTRA before congressional investigations discovered his illegal program’s dirty paper trail. Helms famously walked into the Oval office with a rifle, plopped it on JFK’s desk, and said the CIA had just discovered (through acid-based swaths), a Soviet serial number on the stock, and that the gun was from Cuba, strengthening, so he thought, his case that Kennedy should immediately invade the island before the Russians had time to reinforce Castro. Kennedy asked to see more proof, since Helms said the magic acid test only worked for a few seconds and then destroyed the numbers it allegedly revealed. Kennedy then waved him out of the office to finish opening his daily mail. Not exactly hell-bent, as Kinzer would have us believe.
Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell planned the Bay of Pigs to fail, stacking the initial invasion waves with the lowest quality, most poorly trained groups of the Cuban exiles slated for the assault. They did this anticipating that Kennedy would cave once reports got back to him that they could not get off the beach and capture strategic inland objectives without naval and air support (and, in all likelihood, the landing of U.S. Marines). Kennedy later understood this and complained about it. But the lie was fortified when Allen Dulles and E. Howard Hunt commissioned a ghost-written article in Fortune that created the narrative Kinzer and others have fraudulently promulgated: JFK got cold feet and “called off” the air support, leaving those poor Cuban exiles stranded on the beach. Kennedy inherited the operation from Eisenhower, reluctantly green-lit it only because the CIA was lying to him at every step, and when he realized its quixotic goals were impossible without escalation and the commitment of non-clandestine U.S. forces, sat anxiously in his briefing room as it fell apart. He then quietly fired Dulles, Bissell, and Cabell.
Similarly, to say that Robert Kennedy was hell bent on killing Castro is to fail to acknowledge the declassification of the CIA’s Inspector General report on the CIA/Mafia plots. That long report states that Robert Kennedy had to be briefed about the plots by the CIA after the FBI accidentally discovered them. Obviously, if the Kennedys had been in on them, there would have been no briefing necessary. But making it worse, the CIA told Robert Kennedy that they would now put a halt to them, since RFK was very upset by the briefing. This was a lie. The plots continued along without his knowledge, pairing mobster John Roselli and CIA officer Bill Harvey. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp 327-28) The obvious question that Kinzer does not ask is: Why would the CIA have to lie to RFK, if he was in agreement with the plots? Kinzer also overlooks the apparent understanding of Castro’s own feelings towards the matter. He ignores the fact that it was largely Robert Kennedy, through Soviet back channels during the Cuban Missile Crisis, who averted what looked almost certainly to be a nuclear Armageddon. That incident provided a perfect opportunity to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. Afterwards, Castro suggested a détente with Washington and JFK obliged him. It’s easy to see why the CIA hated both of the brothers. And while this misreading of history is only a few paragraphs of an otherwise fairly well researched and engaging book, it provides a disappointing and misleading aspect that readers unfamiliar with the true history of the Kennedys’ views about the developing world. If anyone disagrees, it would be good for them to fact-check for themselves. Reading the IG report would be a good place to start. (Click here for that link)
Overall, while largely a repackaging of long-known facts, the book is an interesting introduction for those unacquainted with the dark side of the CIA at mid-century and into the latter years of the Cold War. Gottlieb remains a mysterious, infrequently quoted figure in the book, with a few interspersed interviews with his children and friends. Perhaps most interesting is Kinzer’s chapters on Gottlieb’s attempted retirement and disappearance from the TSS, floating around abroad, in a leper colony in India and other exotic hideouts. His very face and name would have remained unknown to the general public and, likely, the research community had it not been for late 70s probes like the Church Committee. Kinzer does a fine job here and this probably represents the only unique aspect of the book, focusing as it does on their attempts to see how deep the CIA’s rabbit hole was when they stumbled upon the last surviving documents detailing projects like MK-ULTRA and MKNAOMI.
