Kennedys and King Test host626

Tag: FIDEL CASTRO

  • Robert Scheer can’t help himself

    Back in 1997, Seymour Hersh released his horrendous hatchet job of a book on John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot. In discussing the book back then, I wrote that it was best perceived as the follow-up reaction to Oliver Stone’s film about the Kennedy murder case, JFK. The first part of the Establishment’s reaction to Stone’s film had been Gerald Posner’s 1993 book Case Closed. That error-riddled propaganda manifesto was meant to confuse the public as to how President Kennedy was killed. Maybe Oswald did it after all? Hersh’s book was the right cross to Posner’s left hook. It was meant to deflate the image of Kennedy as presented by Stone. He really was not all he was cracked up to be. So, go back to sleep Mr. John Q. Public, nothing was lost with Kennedy’s death anyway.

    But there was a problem with Hersh’s pile of rubbish. Namely, it was so bad that even much of the MSM would not approve it. The book got many more negative reviews than it did positive ones, e.g. Newsweek. Some commentators even wrote that Hersh had stooped so low that the volume would be better titled “The Dark Side of Seymour Hersh”.

    Up until that time, Hersh had been praised by much of the Left as being some kind of journalistic paragon. He had made his name as one of the men who had publicized the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. And he had written an expose about Henry Kissinger called The Price of Power. Because of this inflated record, some on the Left decided that Hersh needed to be protected from the pummeling he was taking over his Kennedy book. Bob Scheer was one of those who came to his aid.

    Scheer, who had previously worked at Ramparts, was now working for the Los Angeles Times. The column he wrote back in 1997 for his former employer has now been recycled and reprinted at his web site “truthdig”. (click here)

    In that column he writes that the CIA had recruited Chicago Mafia chief Sam Giancana to help eliminate Fidel Castro. That is true and is contained in his source, the 1967 CIA Inspector General Report on the plots. Scheer then writes that Attorney General Robert Kennedy knew all about this attempt with Giancana since he was briefed on it in May of 1962 by the Agency.

    To read something like that makes me think of the famous response by attorney Joseph Welch to the demagogue Senator Joe McCarthy in 1954, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” It is true that Kennedy was briefed in May of 1962. But Scheer jerks it out of context so jarringly that the whole affair is denied its true meaning.

    The truth is that the CIA had to brief Kennedy about the first phase of the plots. Not because he was in on them, but for the precise reason he was not. What had happened to cause this reluctant briefing is all in the IG Report. In the first phase of the CIA-Mafia plots, CIA asset Robert Maheu had recruited mobsters Giancana, Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante. That recruitment had begun in August of 1960, before John Kennedy’s inauguration, under Eisenhower. (IG Report, p. 16) The idea was that the CIA wished to know if the Mafia still had any associates on the island that could get close enough to Castro to slip him some form of poisonous toxins. These would be supplied in more than one possible form, as dreamed up by the CIA’s technical division. (ibid, p. 23) Giancana actually opposed the use of firearms since it would be hard to find someone to volunteer for such an assignment since the escape would be difficult. (ibid) These plots, which featured things like poison pills and exploding cigars, all failed.

    In the IG Report, these were termed the first phase of the Gambling Syndicate plots. They seem to have been closed down around April or May of 1961. This was after the failure at the Bay of Pigs. In their report, the authors make an inventory about who was knowledgeable about this phase of the plots. The Kennedys are not on that list. (ibid, p. 35) So why did RFK have to be briefed about it?

    Because in late 1961, or early 1962, Giancana called in a favor from Maheu. The windy city mobster was having an affair with singer Phyllis McGuire. But he suspected that she was two-timing him with comedian Dan Rowan. So he requested Maheu arrange to wiretap her room. Maheu was reluctant, but Giancana reminded him that he owed him one for the outreach on the Castro plots. (ibid, p. 57) Maheu then complied. But the local police in Las Vegas discovered the attempt in process. The actual wiretapper then called Maheu in the presence of the authorities. And this information was now relayed to the FBI. (ibid, p. 59) In late March of 1962, his former employers at the FBI called Maheu for clarification as to why they should not prosecute the perpetrator. Maheu referred the Bureau to the CIA.

    Since the FBI worked under the Justice Department, a lawyer from Justice, Herbert Miller, got in contact with the Agency. So now, the Attorney General had to be formally briefed on the whole affair, one of the reasons being that Giancana was one of the mobsters that Robert Kennedy was pursuing by all legal means at his disposal.

    In early May of 1962, RFK was briefed on how Maheu got involved with the wiretapping, and why Giancana felt he could call on him. (IG Report, pp. 62-63) The obvious question Scheer avoids is this: Why would RFK have to be briefed on the matter if he had known about it in advance?

    But that’s not the worst part of what Scheer leaves out. RFK made it clear to both the CIA and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that he was very upset that the Agency would deal with these kinds of people at all. And that this now endangered the case he had against Giancana. He made it clear that he wanted to hear no more about the CIA reaching out to the Mafia. In fact, as the Church Committee noted, one of the CIA briefers said: ”If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.” (Probe, Volume 4, No. 6, p. 7) According to John Siegenthaler, as noted in Ronald Goldfarb’s book Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes, RFK called CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms into his office and reamed him over this.

    But none of this mattered. For, as the report makes clear, CIA officer William Harvey was already working on Phase 2 of the plots with John Roselli. And Kennedy’s briefers did not tell him about it. (IG Report, p. 64) In fact, Harvey and CIA Officer Sheffield Edwards agreed to falsify the internal record by saying CIA Director John McCone—Kennedy’s appointee—had authorized Phase 2, when he had not. (op. cit., Probe) Why and how Scheer could discard all of this is kind of puzzling. But there is still more Scheer leaves out.

    When the Harvey-Roselli plots also came to naught, the CIA then recruited a Cuban national named Rolando Cubela to continue the plots. They gave him the code name AM/LASH. This phase of the Castro murder attempts went on from 1963-65; in other words, well into the Johnson administration. When Cubela asked for proof of high-level authorization inside the government, Richard Helms advised against telling Robert Kennedy about it. (ibid, pp. 88-89) But he decided to send CIA Officer Desmond Fitzgerald to see Cubela under a false name and say he was representing Kennedy. To make this plain: At every major step of the CIA plots to kill Castro, the Agency decided not just to keep RFK in the dark about them; but to lie to him, and then misrepresent him.

    In 1967, when the IG Report was commissioned, the reason was that newspaper columnist Drew Pearson had gotten wind of the plots and was publishing a much-mangled version of them. It was clear he did not have all the information that the CIA did. And the IG Report speculates that either Maheu or Roselli was leaking. (ibid, p. 122) Near the end of that report, in summarizing the Pearson stories, the authors of the IG Report declare that it is simply not true that Robert Kennedy may have approved of the plots. (p. 130) To make it even more obvious: the authors then postulate, in a limited hangout mode, if it were possible for the Agency to say it was “merely an instrument of policy?” Their own reply, in black and white, is: “Not in this case” (p. 131) In the report, that question is underlined and is typed all the way across the page, in spite of margins. How the heck Scheer could have missed it is simply stunning.

    Scheer also relies on a State Department meeting that General Ed Lansdale had convened about Operation Mongoose. The report makes clear that Robert Kennedy was not at the meeting. (IG Report, p. 112) There was some kind of general talk about eliminating Castro, which John McCone quickly neutered, later telling the authors of the IG Report that those terms were used in the context of overthrowing Castro’s government, not assassinating him. Afterwards, Lansdale inquired to Harvey about it. But Harvey did not want to disclose anything about his association with Roselli at the time. (ibid, pp. 114-15) But further, the records of Mongoose have been largely declassified today, and there is no mention of any such assassination plots in them, just as there is no mention of such plots in any of the Bay of Pigs declassifications. Scheer also left out the fact that every administration official the Church Committee interviewed said that JFK never knew about any such ongoing plots. (Alleged Assassination Plots, pp. 154-161) This included National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. If that isn’t enough, then how about Helms and Harvey also saying it? (ibid, pp. 148-52, 153-54)

    Could it get any worse for Scheer? Yes. As noted, this incredibly shallow and slanted column first appeared in the LA Times back in 1997. Probe Magazine replied to it back then. The LA Times printed that reply in its correspondence section. Did Scheer miss a correction to his own column? Or did he just ignore it?

    The occasion for Scheer recycling his worthless column is the visit by President Obama to Cuba. Needless to say, Scheer leaves out the diplomatic back channel to Castro that President Kennedy had set up in 1963 after the resolution of the Missile Crisis. As Jim Douglass so thoroughly described in JFK and The Unspeakable, that back channel—conducted through proxies like journalists Lisa Howard, Jean Daniel and diplomat William Attwood—likely would have resulted in diplomatic relations being restored between Cuba and the USA.

    In fact, Castro was jubilant about that possibility after Daniel’s visit in November of 1963. He then got the news of Kennedy’s assassination. He said first, “This is bad news … this is bad news … this is bad news.” He then turned to Daniel and said that everything was going to change now. Which it did. For over fifty years.

    Barack Obama is doing what John Kennedy would have done in a second term—had he not been assassinated. And the authority for that is Fidel Castro. In fact, Castro was so sold on this cooperation that he told Jean Daniel that, if need be, he would endorse Barry Goldwater in 1964 to guarantee Kennedy’s re-election. (Jim Douglass, JFK and The Unspeakable, pp. 84-90)

    Someone go tell Bob Scheer about all this—before he plants another custard pie on his face again.

    Addendum: Jim DiEugenio’s letter to the LA Times from November 11, 1997

    Letters to the Editor
    Los Angeles Times
    Times Mirror Square
    Los Angeles, CA 90053

    Dear Editors:

    In his column of November 11, 1997, Robert Scheer wrote that there is no question that Sy Hersh was correct in writing that John Kennedy ordered Castro’s assassination. Scheer cites as support the CIA’s 1967 Inspector General report on the Castro Assassination Plots.

    Unfortunately for Mr. Scheer, he is not the only person in LA with a copy of the CIA’s Inspector General report on the Castro Assassination Plots. The report states the opposite of what Mssrs. Scheer and Hersh proclaim. I have attached copies of the pages from which the following quotes are taken so there can be no doubt as to their authenticity. In the report, we find the following explicit, unequivocal statement:

    Former Attorney General Robert Kennedy was fully briefed by Houston and Edwards on 7 May 1962. A memorandum confirming the oral briefing was forwarded to Kennedy on 14 May 1962. The memorandum does not use the word “assassinate,” but there is little room for misinterpretation of what was meant. Presumably the original of that memorandum is still in the files of the Justice Department. It should be noted that the briefing of Kennedy was restricted to Phase One of the operation, which had ended a year earlier. Phase Two was already under way at the time of the briefing, but Kennedy was not told of it. [CIA IG Report, p. 130, emphasis added.]

    Phase One and Two refer to separate prongs of the assassination attempts against Castro. In other words, Robert Kennedy was told only after such plots, which had been ongoing during President John Kennedy’s tenure, had ended. Why would he need to be briefed on these plots after they had ended if he was aware of them while they were taking place? Note too that RFK was not told that new efforts were underway to kill Castro. Two pages after this admission, we find the next interesting and quite explicit question asked and answered by the CIA itself:

    Can CIA state or imply that it was merely an instrument of policy?

    Not in this case.

    [CIA IG Report, p. 132]

    The CIA has admitted flatly, for the record, in their own report, that they had no authorization for these plots; that they were not following any expressed policy. I hope you can express this correction in your paper.

    Sincerely,

    James DiEugenio
    Chairman, Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination
    Author of Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba and the Garrison Case (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1992)

  • John Newman, Where Angels Tread Lightly, Volume 1

    John Newman, Where Angels Tread Lightly, Volume 1

    I

    In this reviewer’s opinion, Professor John Newman has written two of the most important books on the JFK case in the last 25 years.  The first was published in 1992. Since Newman was a professor of Asian history, he had done a lot of work on America’s struggle in Indochina.  He had come to the conclusion that the mainstream media’s belief that President Johnson had continued President Kennedy’s policies in Indochina was false. So he decided to prove, in a scholarly way, that the MSM was wrong on this point.

    Newman’s work was finally published in 1992.  Entitled JFK and Vietnam, it was the first book length study to vitiate the establishment view that there was continuity between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on the conduct of the Vietnam War. Newman’s book was the first systematic and categorical rejection of the Kennedy/Johnson continuity concept. In 460 pages of sober, careful, and documented text, Newman essentially rewrote the history of 1961-63 as far as American involvement in Vietnam went. He showed, among other things, that  Lyndon Johnson was in the pocket of the Pentagon on this issue as far back as 1961. Unauthorized by Kennedy, but influenced by the military, he had offered the leader of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, the introduction of American troops into the theater.  (See p. 72)

    In addition to that, Newman also proved that while Kennedy was trying to disguise his withdrawal plan around the rosy and unrealistic reports of Diem winning the battle on the ground, LBJ knew the truth.  From his military aide Howard Burris, Johnson was getting the actual intelligence reports, which showed the contrary: Diem was actually losing the war.  (See pp. 225-27)

    By the end of the book, Newman had exposed one of the great historical lies of the second half of the 20th century:  namely, that American involvement in Vietnam was an inevitable tragedy.  A myth that had been sustained, not just by the MSM, but also by self-proclaimed historians like David Halberstam and Stanley Karnow. Others have further mined the field Newman pioneered, and today we have good books by people like Gordon Goldstein and James Blight—Lessons in Disaster, and Virtual JFK—that have furthered Newman’s milestone thesis.

    Newman had worked as a consultant on Oliver Stone’s film JFK.  He was also commissioned by PBS to do some work on the Lee Oswald files, then just beginning to be declassified at the National Archives. This was in regard to the PBS 1993 anniversary program about Oswald. Stone’s film had created such a national outcry that congress created the JFK Act of 1993 to begin declassifying tens of thousands of records that had been, either wholly or partly, classified.  That experience caused Newman to write his second book, Oswald and the CIA. Which was another milestone in the field. This time it was in the study of Lee Harvey Oswald’s relations to the intelligence community: from his defection to Russia to his return to Dallas from Mexico in 1963.  Originally published in 1995, it was reissued in 2008.  In his Afterword to the later edition, Newman squarely pointed his finger at James Angleton, the CIA’s longtime chief of counter-intelligence, as the ultimate control agent for Lee Harvey Oswald.  In my opinion, the MSM deliberately ignored the revolutionary findings in this important book. (For my review of the reissue, click here).

    There is a difference between the two books.  Not just in subject matter.  The first book was artfully organized and written.  Therefore, although it was dealing with highly complex persons and issues, and it was dense with new information, it was quite readable.  Newman had an editor on that book.  As I wrote in my review, Oswald and the CIA is not as easy to read—perhaps because it was written in a much shorter time, maybe because it lacked a strong editor.

    A few years after the publication of this book, Newman retired from the field of JFK studies.  He resigned from his position as an instructor at the University of Maryland, and migrated to James Madison University in Virginia.  He also became a yoga instructor. He then wrote a book about the historic parallels of that subject with mysticism and Christian theology.  This was called Quest for the Kingdom.

    Three years later, in 2014, Newman decided to re-enter the JFK field.   Before he had left, he was planning a comprehensive study of the Kennedy administration’s relations with Castro.  That book was tentatively entitled Kennedy and Cuba, and was to be issued in tandem with a re-release of JFK and Vietnam. Once John left the field, that endeavor was, in part, abandoned.  I say in part, because in speaking to the author, he is now updating his first book in a plan to have it reissued.  But secondly, it seems that the author kept many of his research files from his Cuba project, because they seem to form the backbone for his planned multi-book series entitled Where Angels Tread Lightly.  We will discuss part one of that series here.  But before beginning, it is important to note that because this is a multi-volume series, that is, a work in progress, any ultimate evaluation will have to be delayed until the last volume is published.  So the reader should see this review as something of a descriptive marker, a buoy in a channel on the way to land.

    II

    In the preface, the author reveals that the title comes from a phrase in a letter that one Catherine Taafe wrote to Bobby Kennedy in late April of 1961.  She figures in the book.  For she had been a CIA asset involved in Agency dealings inside of Cuba. She was writing the Attorney General about the humiliation he and his brother had just experienced over the Bay of Pigs debacle.  In the following Prologue, Newman says this book will be about something he calls “dark operations”.  Later on, he will describe this specifically as the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro being a pretense for the boomerang theory:  that is, the idea that these attempts formed the pretense for the murder of President Kennedy. And specifically the CIA’s plotting around Oswald, i. e., building a pro-Castro legend around him, while also manipulating his files concerning the Mexico City episode; this was all done while inbreeding the threat of nuclear war from his alleged visits to the Cuban and Russian embassies there. These were all elements of the plot.

    Newman also writes that it is necessary to break into the CIA’s codes, that is, its pseudonyms and cryptonyms, in order to unmask these “dark operations”.  For as he says:

    Without unmasking the CIA’s pseudonyms, cryptonyms, and multiple identities, it will not be possible to find out … who was behind the assassination in Dealey Plaza, and how they got away with it.

    As the author sees it, this is the key to unraveling the murder of President Kennedy.  And at the end of the first volume, he assembles a long appendix, which features his deciphering of the multiple names, identities and cryptos used by say, Howard Hunt—along with several others.

    Newman begins Chapter 1 with what he considers the bungling of the Eisenhower administration in the handling of a dual problem: the weakening of the regime of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and the growth of overt civil disturbances against him. He notes that, even in the middle of 1958, the CIA was still funneling money to Castro’s forces.  Castro was using men like Frank Sturgis to get weapons from a supplier in Miami.   Sturgis was caught smuggling arms twice but released with the help of the CIA.  He then was a captain in Castro’s army.

    Castro grew bolder throughout 1958. He abducted personnel from Guantanamo Bay and seized the Nicaro Nickel Plant, a huge subdivision of powerful Freeport Sulphur.  The CIA now stopped arms shipments to Batista, since they perceived him as being ousted soon. But they also begin to investigate if Castro was part of the international Comintern.  The CIA and businessman William Pawley dreamed up a couple of last minute Hail Mary schemes to stop Castro from gaining power, but they both failed.  In December of 1958, CIA Director Allen Dulles told the president that the indications were that Castro was a communist.  But it was too late to stop his march to Havana. (Dulles would not inform Eisenhower until late March of 1959 that Castro was running a communist dictatorship.)

    Chapter 2 begins with Castro’s takeover and the evacuation of thousands of Americans out of Cuba.  Santo Trafficante was arrested, but he made a deal with Raul Castro. Castro declared martial law. Eisenhower now relieved the American ambassador, Earl Smth.

    Castro was careful in the beginning to disguise who he really was.  He distanced himself from the existing Cuban communist party.  But some remnants of the anti-Batista movement suspected Castro was at least a commie sympathizer.  Some of these men, like Pancho Varona, Rolando Cubela, and Carlos Tepedino actually were informers for the Agency on Batista.  Once they began to realize who Castro was, and suspecting he would install a leftist dictatorship, those men now become the opposition to Castro.  They will soon meet with two CIA officers. This was the beginning of the DRE, or the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil.

    III

    FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, was shocked by the rise to power of Castro in Cuba. In his files, Newman found evidence that Richard Nixon’s lifelong friend, Bebe Rebozo, fronted as a funnel for Mob money and investment in business ventures between Ambassador Earl Smith and Batista. Nixon was also getting a cut of this graft.  The author has three sources for this. (Newman does not note it, but this makes three fonts of dirty money Nixon was getting prior to becoming president: from the Shah of Iran, from Romanian industrialist Nicolae Malaxa, and now Batista.  JFK researchers like to point out how corrupt LBJ was. He had nothing on Nixon.)

    Parts of the CIA, and a larger part of the State Department, were willing to wait on Castro. But another part of the Agency developed other informants on him. This included Sturgis—a relationship that was actually approved by CIA HQ—and military commander Camilo Cienfuegos.

    When Sturgis had a falling out with Raul Castro, he was instructed to visit the American embassy in Havana.  From there he was told to meet two CIA officers in Miami.  It is there that he began his relationship with Bernard Barker. Barker and Sturgis were assigned to William Kent of the psy-war branch. Sturgis now began work with James Noel, chief of the CIA office in Havana, along with psy-war expert David Phillips. Phillips was undercover as one “James Stewart”, working for an advertising agency. (As the author notes, whenever one hears that the CIA had no formal relationship with Sturgis, we can now show this is a  deception.)

    Castro, at first, closed the casinos, and their gambling operations.   But there were so many foreigners still on the island that he decided to reopen them temporarily.  Castro asked Sturgis to work as his liaison to the casinos.  It is here that Sturgis got to  know Juan Orta, Castro’s secretary.  Santo Trafficante will later recruit Orta to take part in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro.  But Sturgis had already volunteered to plant a bomb in the second floor conference room at an Air Force Base he regularly visited.

    The author now introduces another female protagonist. She is June Cobb.  Readers of Oswald and the CIA will recall that Newman spent a good deal of time with Cobb there, since she was a CIA infiltrator—one among many—inside the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  It seems that Cobb began her intelligence career as a double-dealing drug peddler.  That is, she was dealing drugs in Cuba, but also working as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.  This began as far back as 1957, when she actually informed on her boyfriend.

    In 1959, when Castro first visited America, Cobb landed a job as a translator for Fidel.  She actually translated his famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech.  Castro liked her work and invited her back to Cuba. He put her in charge of English publications.

    Frank Sturgis was also hard at work as an informant.  In March of 1959, he went to Washington to inform the FBI about Castro.  He did this at the behest of Pedro and Marcos Diaz Lanz, two commanders in Castro’s military.  Sturgis told the Bureau that all three were alarmed about the growing communist influence in Cuba. They worried that Cuba could now become a communist forward base in the Caribbean, e.g., against Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua.  Both men were backed by the USA. In fact, Cuba did make very small incursions into both countries, along with Panama, in 1959.  When this happened, certain soldiers of fortune now joined up in the battle against Fidel; e.g., pilot Leslie Bradley, trainer Gerry Hemming, and the man the FBI would wrongly accuse of being at Sylvia Odio’s door, Loran Hall.  After joining the Cuban army, Hemming later engaged in training Nicaraguans.  Hall did also.  While in Cuba, Hall got to know Mafia Don Santo Trafficante.

    n June of 1959, Raul Castro began to purge the military of all suspected informers and double agents.  This included later CIA assets like Sergio Sanjenis.  He especially concentrated on the higher ranks. Lanz took over Radio Havana on June 29, 1959 and criticized Castro’s leftward drift in a lengthy speech. Castro was outraged. He ordered Diaz Lanz under house arrest, and gave Juan Almeida his job as commander of the Air Force.  Sanjenis and Pedro Diaz Lanz defected with the help of the CIA in June of 1959.  Diaz Lanz became a prized asset of the CIA.  He testified in public before Senator Thomas  Dodd’s Internal Security committee.  He would later take part in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

    The Diaz Lanz defection really hit home with Fidel. He now turned even more to the left.

    IV

    The first drastic piece of legislation moving Cuba toward a communist state was the Agrarian Reform Program.  At first, this bill did not allow for compensation when Cuba confiscated property for future redistribution.  As a result, the minister of agriculture, Sori Martin, resigned.

    Castro’s program set up a body of local cooperatives that he labeled INRA (the National Institute for Agrarian Reform). Now, only Cubans could buy land on the island.  INRA was a very powerful agency that shaped land distribution and all infrastructure projects in Cuba.  Manuel Artime ran Zone 22.

    It was the creation of INRA that now drove American business interests to lay siege to the White House, especially in light of the lack of promises by Castro to pay compensation for land. (Castro did tell the new ambassador Philip Bonsal that he would pay later, but not right now.)  In the summer of 1959, these business interests wanted Eisenhower to start a formal program of counter-revolution.  And now, people like Bernard Barker joined up with Manuel Artime (before his defection) to aid Mario Lazo.  Lazo was a high level Cuban attorney under Batista.  He served as corporate counsel for Freeport Sulphur on the island.  Taafe used her contacts to steal inside documents from INRA.

    In the fall of 1959, Castro came out of the closet. After keeping the communist party at arm’s length, he now appointed the leader of the party as Minister of Labor.   He then began to appoint members of the party to all levels of his government.  Thereafter, he announced that Cuba would be a fully communist country in three years.  The CIA heard about this meeting announcement through Artime.

    Through the Havana CIA station, David Phillips and Dave Morales now worked on the defection of Marcos Diaz Lanz.  This decision went all the way up to Chief of the Western Hemisphere, J. C. King.  Phillips and Morales were assisted on this by Bernard Barker.

    The author now addresses a weird episode.   Both the Dominican Republic and Cuba had plans to invade each other almost at the same time in the summer of 1959.  Because he was informed of the Trujillo action in advance, Castro struck first by about four days. But he was not informed of the CIA backing of Trujillo’s invasion of Cuba.  The American Ambassador to Cuba, Philip Bonsal, did not back the Dominican Republic invasion, since he thought it had little chance of success, and would therefore strengthen Castro.  Through informants and agents, Allen Dulles pushed for the Cuban invasion of the Dominican Republic, but said little to the NSC about the Dominican Republic invasion of Cuba. Both attacks were failures.  But Trujillo’s was much worse since Castro rounded up about a thousand POW’s.  After this there were even more defections to the USA, since Castro now started a purge of the military of all suspected American allies.

    After this victory, in September of 1959, Castro announced that Freeport Sulphur’s 75 million dollar plant at Moa Bay would come under property review. Since the regime needed money, Raul Castro actually wanted Fidel to directly expropriate the property. In reaction, business leaders now called for an emergency meeting with both the State Department and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.  As a result, David Phillips became a PR advisor for the business interests still on the island. But he reported back that these interests wanted more than PR, they wanted action.

    Short of an American invasion, it was probably too late. For, in October of 1959, Castro wearied of all the defections by people like Sturgis, Sanjenis, and Diaz Lanz. The last one was Manuel Artime, a project that, again, Phillips and Morales worked on. Fidel now made his brother Raul minister of defense.  Bonsal wired Washington that, in and of itself, this was a disturbing development, since Raul was considered even more leftist than Fidel. Further, Fidel Castro cracked down on all suspects who he thought were about to defect:  for example, jailing former Commander Huber Matos.   A week later, Artime began the MRR, an anti-Castro exile group, with Sergio Sanjenis.

    Also in October, the State Department announced a new policy paper in regards to Cuba.  It was titled “Current Basic United States Policy Towards Cuba”.  Part of the objective entailed the removal of Fidel Castro from power by no later than the end of 1960. President Eisenhower adopted this paper in November, along with CIA Director Allen Dulles.  In January of 1960, it extended to the Pentagon.

    At the White House, Vice-President Richard Nixon demanded an action plan.  From the outside, William Pawley—former diplomat and now businessman—wanted another invasion of Cuba through the Dominican Republic. But Allen Dulles vetoed that move.  In December of 1959 Dulles, Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Helms, and Western Hemisphere Chief J. C. King now began to devise a covert action plan against Cuba. When it was completed, Dulles presented it to the National Security Council.

    After Phillips worked on the exfiltration of Artime, he began work on getting Rolando Cubela out of Cuba. Cubela was another government employee who became disenchanted with Castro’s leftward drift.  But the CIA decided that Phillips was becoming overexposed.  So they recalled him back home.  Two cohorts of Phillips handled the Cubela operation: the Cuban friend of Cubela, Carlos Tepedino, and CIA official Tony Sforza.  In talks with Cubela, the CIA learned that government official Manolo Ray was also disenchanted with Castro. But, as time went on, Cubela decided to stay on the island to fight Castro.  Sforza then focused on Juanita Castro, sister of Fidel, as a possible exfiltration target.

    Newman notes that in the middle of all these fateful and furious debates about Cuba, the Russians had stayed hidden in the shadows. This minimized the specter of a Cuban/Russian alliance.  But in late 1959, through Air Force General Curtis LeMay and former Air Force Secretary, and now Senator, Stuart Symington, there began to be talk about a Missile Gap—in favor of the Soviets.  Since Symington was planning on running for the White House the next year, this is probably what motivated him to take part in this nonsense.  As it did Lyndon Johnson, who said the Russians would have a 3-1 advantage in three years.  The facts were that the USA was already two generations ahead of the Soviets in ICBM technology.  The USSR was still testing its first delivery systems while Eisenhower was debating whether to bypass the Atlas rocket for the Minuteman and the Polaris.  This gap in America’s favor would, of course, set the stage for the Missile Crisis.

    This book is exceedingly rich in detail.  Much more than I can begin to convey in a relatively concise review.  What the author is doing has three layers.  First, he is giving us a history of the Castro revolution.  At the same time he is showing how the USA reacted to that epochal turnover, stage by stage in its evolution. Third, he is tracing certain people and movements who will return to the stage in 1963, after Kennedy changes policy, and begins a détente attempt with Cuba.  Other authors have tried this before, but never on this scale or with this intricacy.

  • Shenon and the CIA’s Benign Cover-Up

    After failing to use a crap detector in order to provide a reasonable answer to a key question like “What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico?” (Politico Magazine, March 18, 2015), Philip Shenon has returned this fall. But again without such a tool in hand. So he asserts again that the Warren Commission was not really fraudulent or wrong, but rather did not have all the facts on time.

    His newest piece “Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover Up” (Politico Magazine, October 6, 2015) emphasizes that CIA Director John McCone “was long suspected of withholding information from the Warren Commission. Now the CIA says he did.”

    Shenon is trying to take advantage of a declassified chapter of the still classified biography of McCone written by CIA historian David Robarge in 2005. It was internally released as a report two years ago (“Death of a President: DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” in Studies in Intelligence 57, No. 3, September 2013). After being redacted for its public release on September 29, 2014, it´s now available at the National Security Archive.

    Robarge didn´t question the Warren Commission findings, especially that Oswald was the lone gunman. Shenon adds that it’s “a view shared by ballistics experts who have studied the evidence.” In making that preposterous statement about the evidence in the case, Shenon ignored the quanta of proof to the contrary. Which was furnished by, among others, Martin Hay in his essay Ballistics and Baloney. Shenon also snubbed the fact that the WC reported a wrong Mannlicher Carcano carbine as the murder weapon, (Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 477), a wrong CE 399 as the Magic Bullet (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 227), and a wrong CE 543 shell (Kurtz, Crime of the Century, p. 51). And finally, as Dr. David Mantik has revealed, the current autopsy report, that is by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, wants us to think that the bullet which killed Kennedy – that is the one which struck him in the head – also has magical properties. Why? Because it struck Kennedy in the rear of the skull, then split into three parts. Miraculously, the middle part stuck in the rear of Kennedy’s skull without penetrating it. But the head and tail of this same bullet proceeded through his brain, went out the side of his head, and fell onto the front of the limousine. (See DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pp. 133-35) Nowhere in any of Shenon’s growing archive of literature on the JFK case, does he ever confront any of these disturbing, but true, facts. He just assumes that the ballistics evidence supports his thesis. It does not.

    Shenon focused on Robarge´s suggestion that “the decision of McCone and Agency leaders in 1964 not to disclose information about CIA’s anti-Castro schemes might have done more to undermine the credibility of the commission than anything else that happened while it was conducting its investigation.” In other words, Shenon is again ginning up the old news about the CIA not telling the Warren Commission about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Which has been around since the Church Committee report in 1975. In other words, for 40 years. Thusly, the former New York Times reporter persists in reopening a line of inquiry already proven fruitless: that the Kennedy brothers and the CIA compelled Fidel Castro to take a preemptive lethal action against a sitting U.S. President. As if the Cuban leader wasn´t aware that killing JFK wouldn´t solve anything, but entailed risking everything. And at the same time that President Kennedy was engaging in back-channel diplomatic moves to establish détente with Cuba, something that Lyndon Johnson, with help from the CIA, dropped after Kennedy’s death – much to Castro’s chagrin. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 394)

    For Robarge and Shenon, the cover-up by McCone and others – Deputy Director Richard Helms, Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, former Director Allen Dulles – may have been benign under the bureaucratic impulse towards CIA self-preservation. But it was a cover-up nonetheless, since it withheld information that might have prompted an aggressive investigation about Oswald’s ties to Castro. In reality (something absent in Shenon’s writings), the CIA’s cover-up was aimed at avoiding a deep investigation of Oswald’s ties to itself and to anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

    The key is not that the CIA revealed nothing about the assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, but that it revealed very little about its close tabs on Oswald: the CIA knew what he was doing and was evaluating him. As John Newman, and others, have noted, three CIA teams were watching Oswald all the way down from Moscow (1960) to Dallas (1963): the Counterintelligence Special Investigation Group (CI-SIG), Counterintelligence Operations (CI-OPS), and the Counter-Espionage unit of the Soviet Russia Division (CE-SR/6).

    Oswald’s longtime friend and Civil Air Patrol colleague, David Ferrie, was also a CIA trainer for the covert operations against Castro codenamed Pluto (Bay of Pigs) and Mongoose. He blatantly lied about not knowing Oswald and having no association to any Cuban exile group since 1961.

    The CIA generated an index card for Oswald in the FPCC file (100-300-011) on October 25, 1963. In early summer he was leafletting the obsolete 1961 edition of The Crimes against Cuba, of which the CIA had ordered 45 copies. He was running his own one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in New Orleans, while the CIA and the FBI were running a joint operation against that very same committee. Oswald was really working out of Guy Banister’s office and even put his address [544 Camp Street] on some FPCC flyers. A point that Banister was quite upset about. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 111)

    Banister was not only close to Ferrie, but also to anti-Castro belligerent groups. When Gordon Novel was invited by Cuban exile Sergio Arcacha to a meeting in Banister’s office for a telethon supporting the anti-Castro cause, a certain Mr. Phillips was there, and his description aligns with CIA officer David Phillips. (ibid, p. 162) According to Cuban anti-Castro veteran Antonio Veciana, Phillips was his CIA handler, known to him as “Maurice Bishop”, and met Oswald at the Southland Building in Dallas in late summer of 1963.

    Just after the assassination, Phillips vouched for a “reliable” informant who told a story about Oswald being paid in advance by a “negro with red hair in the Cuban Embassy” to kill Kennedy. In 2013, Shenon followed Phillips´ steps by including, toward the very end of his book A Cruel and Shocking Act, the long-ago discredited remake of that baleful story by Mexican writer Elena Garro: that Sylvia Duran, a Mexican employee at the Cuba Consulate, was a Castro agent who cranked Oswald up to kill Kennedy in a twist party at her brother-in-law’s house, where not only the notorious red-haired negro, but Garro herself were in attendance.

    Although Robarge also reported that the CIA might somehow have been in communication with Oswald before 1963, and had secretly monitored him since his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 (through the illegal mail-opening program HTLINGUAL), Shenon overlooks this part. He wants to bolster the “Castro-did-it” propaganda campaign, apparently planted by the CIA even before the JFK assassination. Today it is clearly being orchestrated to manage public opinion in the face of the release – as required by law – of the remaining JFK records in October 2017.

    Overlooking all the sound investigation after the declassification process unleashed by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), Shenon cherry-picked through Robarge´s piece in order to find “misconceptions [like] the still-popular conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the assassination,” as if it weren´t a fact that the CIA has never produced either an Oswald photo or a tape of his voice in Mexico City.

    By posing again a question highly appreciated by the CIA, “Had the [JFK] administration’s obsession with Cuba inadvertently inspired a politicized sociopath to murder John Kennedy?”, Shenon has no choice other than to distort the facts by asserting that “Robert Kennedy’s friends and family acknowledged years later that he never stopped fearing that Castro was behind his brother’s death.”

    In Brothers (2007), David Talbot has demonstrated that RFK´s suspicions settled instead on a domestic conspiracy. Neither his friends nor his relatives suggested that RFK feared that Castro was behind the assassination. On the contrary, he immediately asked DCI John McCone if the CIA was involved in the killing. His other leading suspects were the Cuban exiles and the mob. And his son RFK Jr. said the same years later in a Dallas interview with Charlie Rose (during the lead-up to the 50th anniversary: see The MSM and RFK Jr.)

    Shenon of course, also adds that: 1) RFK was in on the CIA-Mafia plots, and that 2) RFK was instrumental in getting Allen Dulles appointed to the Warren Commission. The first assertion was denied by the CIA in its own Inspector General Report on the plots way back in the sixties (1967). Somehow, Shenon missed both that and the Church Committee report on the subject, which also denied that the Kennedys were in on the plots. (See The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 327)

    As for RFK using his influence with President Johnson to get Allen Dulles on the Commission, well, what can one say? Except the following: Everyone and his mother knows that LBJ and Bobby Kennedy hated each other’s guts from an early date. And it only got worse, not better, after JFK was killed. In light of that, the idea that Johnson would ask for Kennedy’s advice to man the Warren Commission is ridiculous. But further, as Leonard Mosley wrote many years ago in his book on the Dulles family, Bobby Kennedy was the prime mover in getting his brother to fire Allen Dulles in 1961. Not satisfied with that, he then asked Dean Rusk if any other member of the Dulles family was still in their employ. Rusk said yes, there was Allen’s sister, Eleanor. Kennedy demanded she also be fired since he did not want any of the Dulles family around anymore. So why would he then request that Dulles be brought back after he helped get him and his sister fired – let alone to investigate the murder of his beloved brother? (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 395)

    Martin Hay has also chimed in on this issue in his review of Howard Willens’ book, History Will Prove us Right. There is no record of any communication by Johnson with Bobby between when the Commission idea is accepted by him and his call to Dulles. LBJ suggested a series of names to J. Edgar Hoover. When he got to Dulles, he did not say a word about Dulles being suggested by Bobby Kennedy. When he got Dulles on the phone, he told the former CIA director he wanted him to join the Warren Commission “for me”.

    But as Hay writes, even more convincing is LBJ’s phone call to his mentor Senator Richard Russell. Russell asked Johnson if he was going to let Bobby nominate someone. Johnson replied with a firm and direct “No.” (see Willens review)

    In a note to Jeff Morley at the web site JFK Facts, Shenon tried to defend his contention by pointing to a memo written by longtime Johnson assistant Walter Jenkins. This document was allegedly written on November 29, 1963, the day that Johnson called Dulles to appoint him to the Commission. Why do I say “allegedly”? Because as Dan Hardway notes, what Shenon does not mention is this: a handwritten notation at the bottom of this memo says, “Orig. not sent to files”. And further, it bears a stamp saying that it was received in the central files in April of 1965! Moreover, as Hardway also points out, there was a three-way call between Dulles, Johnson and Kennedy in June of 1964. This was during a racial crisis in Mississippi. Both Johnson and Kennedy had more than one opportunity to affirm that RFK had suggested Dulles for the Commission. Neither of them did. (See JFK Facts entry of October 24, 2015)

    Shenon´s approach to a benign cover-up by the CIA for diverting the WC away from Castro actually seeks to turn the public away from the largely declassified Lopez Report, the monumental 300 page investigation by the HSCA of Oswald’s alleged visit to Mexico City on the eve of Kennedy’s assassination. By doing so, he deflects the genuine line of inquiry about what appears to be the intricate CIA deception prepared in advance of the JFK assassination. In any case, Shenon and other mouthpieces for the “Castro did it” diversion – or in the light version of “Castro knew it” by Dr. Brian Latell – put the CIA in a very delicate position.

    If Oswald, a former Marine re-defector from the Soviet Union, was a true believer in Marx, with the zeal to engage in a variety of pro-Castro activities in New Orleans, then it’s a colossal CIA blunder that he would be allowed to travel to Mexico City and visit both the Cuban and the Soviet embassies – which were under heavy surveillance by the Agency; and that, afterward, the CIA would lose track of him, even after the former Russian defector allegedly met with a Soviet representative in their embassy. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 354-55) And lose track of him to such a degree that no one from the FBI, the police, or Secret Service even talked to him upon his return to Dallas, despite it being just seven weeks before President Kennedy was slated to visit the city. And incredibly, the re-defector would now actually end up on Kennedy’s parade route, thereby walking through any FBI or Secret Service security scheme in broad daylight. What does the silence on the CIA-Mafia plots have to do with any of that? What makes this drivel even worse is that reportedly, Politico dropped an excerpt from David Talbot’s important new book on Allen Dulles in order to run more of Shenon’s fabricated bombast.

    Shenon even avoids addressing the most recent declassification move by the CIA at a public symposium. This was called Delivering Intelligence to the First Customer at the LBJ Library. Among the 2,500 President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) from the Kennedy and Johnson administration released on that occasion, the one from November 25, 1963 reveals that the CIA told Johnson the same blatant lie in which Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway caught CIA Inspector General John H. Waller: “It was not until 22 November 1963 (…) that the [CIA] Station [in Mexico City] learned that [the] Oswald call to the Soviet Embassy on 1 October 1963 was in connection with his request for visa [and] also visited the Cuban Embassy.” In fact, six senior CIA officers reporting to Helms and Angleton knew all about “leftist Lee” six weeks before JFK was killed.

    Shenon is simply performing another high-wire balancing act: dealing openly with CIA misdemeanors in order to hide more serious wrongdoing, and therefore supporting an unsupportable thesis; namely, that the WC was right about Oswald as the lone gunman.

    See also Jim DiEugenio’s review of Shenon’s book A Cruel and Shocking Act.

  • Philip Shenon’s Crap Detector

    Shortly after Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize (1954), Time Magazine writer Bob Manning visited him in Cuba to do a cover story interview. A decade later, Manning joined The Atlantic Monthly. He revisited his notes and published “Hemingway in Cuba” in the August 1965 issue of that periodical. One remembrance from that piece was Hemingway’s notion of fiction writing as “to produce inventions that are true.” Hemingway elaborated: “Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector (…) If you’re going to write, you have to find out what’s bad for you.”

    Philip Shenon, a veteran investigative journalist who spent most of his career at The New York Times, uses this machine for nonfiction writing on the JFK assassination. But in reverse, as a way of bringing forward the detected crap as good arguments for supporting his nonsensical hypothesis. Which is, “Oswald did it, Castro helped.”

    After Shenon’s crap detector worked flat out in A Cruel and Shocking Act (Henry Holt and Co., 2013), it is now doing overtime in the new paperback edition of the book by Picador (2015). From its afterword Shenon has just drawn an essay, “What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico?” (Politico Magazine, March 18, 2015). Here Shenon does his, by now, usual high wire balancing act about how the Warren Commission was not really fraudulent or wrong, it just did not have all the facts it should. And therefore “historians, journalists and JFK buffs…would be wise to look to Mexico City.” What balderdash.

    Why? Because Shenon deliberately ignores all the sound and provocative investigations that have been conducted about Mexico City since the creation of the declassification process by the Assassination Records Review Board. These inquiries would include, among others, the integral and seminal “Lopez Report” done for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, John Newman’s work in Oswald and the CIA, John Armstrong in his book Harvey and Lee, Jim DiEugenio in the second edition of Destiny Betrayed and Bill Simpich in State Secret. All of these authors; along with the most recent investigator, David Josephs–get the back of Shenon’s hand. As if nothing they produced has any relevance at all to the mystery of what Lee Harvey Oswald was doing in Mexico City; or if he even went there. Because, as both Josephs and Armstrong conclude, he did not; at least not the way the Warren Commission and FBI say he did.

    Which brings up another dubious point about Shenon’s piece. In it, he writes that the FBI never adequately investigated Oswald’s voyage to Mexico City. This is simply not true. With ample evidence, both John Armstrong and David Josephs demonstrate that the FBI did investigate this aspect of Oswald’s life as well as they could. The problem was that the evidence trail they found was so full of holes, and so patently falsified by both the CIA and the Mexican authorities that it was almost made to fall apart upon any rigorous review. To use just one example: to this day, no one knows how Oswald even got out of New Orleans to Houston on the first leg of his journey. Or when he actually left the Crescent City. Its not that the FBI did not investigate this aspect. They did. But they could not find any ticket made out to Oswald from New Orleans to Houston or New Orleans to Laredo, which is where the official story has Oswald headed after Houston. The FBI did an extensive check on the two bus lines that could have gotten Oswald out of New Orleans after he closed his post office box and cashed his unemployment check. They could not come up with anything to substantiate Oswald’s travel to Houston. (See Commission Document 1553, based upon Bureau investigation by agent Stephen Callender.)

    Or how about this one by our New York Times veteran. He writes that the CIA had Oswald under surveillance in Mexico City. If that is the case then why, when the FBI got the audiotapes of Oswald in Mexico, the tapes did not match Oswald’s voice? (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 357) And why has the Agency never been able to produce a photo of Oswald entering the Cuban or Soviet embassies there? Why did they send a photo of a person who was clearly not Oswald to the Warren Commission? And why did the Commission then print it in its volumes? (ibid, p. 354) Shenon tries to cover up this lacuna by saying that there is evidence some people saw a photo, and maybe station chief Win Scott saw a photo of Oswald in Mexico City at the time. For instance, if Mexico City station chief Win Scott saw a photo of Oswald why did he then not show it to David Slawson and Bill Coleman of the Warren Commission, when they visited him? They were there for that express purpose: to inquire about Oswald’s activities in Mexico City. (ibid, p. 360)

    Shenon fails to point up the reason we know about all these problems in the evidentiary record about Oswald and Mexico City. We know about them because of the work of Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. While preparing their 300-page report about Oswald in Mexico City, they found the work of Slawson and Coleman to be completely inadequate. They then got access to the CIA cable traffic record to and from Mexico City for the period of September,1963 to November 22nd. This is something the Warren Commission never even thought of doing. Their report is largely based upon that traffic; along with the records of the raw data as produced by the CIA’s electronic and photographic surveillance of the two embassies. This latter record, is again, something that Slawson and Coleman never even approached as evidence while they were there. This is why, in the Warren Report and in the Slawson-Coleman report, one comes away very puzzled over two further lacunae. Neither source record mentions either David Phillips or Anne Goodpasture. Both of these people had cleared access to the surveillance raw data out of the embassies. And there is evidence that both of them helped falsify the record of Oswald allegedly being there. (ibid, pgs. 354-55) If Slawson and Coleman had done their jobs correctly this information and falsification could have been caught back in 1964. Shenon does not mention these facts.

    Nor does Shenon measure Slawson’s hoary canard about how any plot could not have been a far flung or complex one since Oswald did not get his job at the Texas School Book Depository until October, and the motorcade route was not announced until November. Shenon ignored the facts that the first announcement about Kennedy’s trip to Texas was made April 23, 1963. It was made by Lyndon Johnson in Dallas and reported in the Herald Tribune the next day. This was echoed with a specific note to Kennedy from a local Dallas resident already working on the visit. Again, Dallas is mentioned in the note dated June 12, 1963. There is also a story in the same paper in September which also states Kennedy will be coming to Dallas. Further, people organizing the visit that fall knew it would have to be late in November due to scheduling problems. In other words, maybe be Commission was in the dark about this, and the public. But not people in the White House, advance man Jerry Bruno, or the business and political elite in the Dallas-Fort Worth areas. (See the online essay “Why JFK Went to Texas” by Joe Backes) Further, Shenon fails to mention that the failed Chicago plot to kill JFK mirrored, in its design and mechanics, the successful Dallas one. If that is not complex planning in advance, I don’t know what is. (See Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pgs. 202-18) Could Castro have really done all of this maneuvering in two cities?

    Instead our intrepid NY Times veteran peoples his mission of twisting conspiracy “facts” against Castro with the following “experts:”

    – Thomas Mann, U.S. Ambassador in Mexico; who “suspected” and “was under the impression…”

    – Winston Scott, CIA Chief of Station in Mexico City, who also “suspected…”

    – David Slawson, WC investigator, who “believes” and has another “suspicion…”

    – Clarence Kelley, FBI Director, who “came to believe”

    – William Sullivan, FBI Assistant Director, who “admitted huge gaps” in the record

    – David Belin, WC staff lawyer, who “came to believe…”

    – Charles William Thomas, U.S. diplomat, who “was told by a friend…”

    – And finally, “people who suggest that Oswald had many more contacts with people in Mexico City who might have wanted to see JFK dead…”

    Let’s summarize. None of the Shenon’s sources brought a single quantum of proof for turning plausible his Castro hypothesis. Their suspicions, impressions, beliefs, admissions, second-hand tales, and suggestions are linked to long-ago debunked stories. For sticking with them along the substantiation of his hypothesis, Shenon must concoct, among others, these facts:

    “Oswald had visited Mexico City (…) apparently to obtain a visa that would allow the self-proclaimed Marxist to defect to Cuba.”

    Knowing that appearances deceive, Shenon fabricates this one to get around the fact; proven by both CIA transcripts of taped phone calls and eyewitnesses at the Cuban Consulate; that “Oswald” asked the Cubans for an in-transit visa with the declared intention of going to the Soviet Union. For defecting to Cuba, he would have only needed to say it at the spot. Shenon simply hides that Marxist Lee in Mexico City perfectly blends with Castroite Harvey in New Orleans due to a CIA-FBI joint operation to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). As Jim DiEugenio discusses in Destiny Betrayed Oswald was not connected with Castro, but with the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban exiles. (See especially pgs. 101-66)

    “Oswald’s six-day trip to Mexico was never adequately investigated by the CIA… and the State Department.”

    Shenon is correct here. But not in his nonsense that the plot to kill Kennedy was hatched in Mexico by Castro agents, and the U.S. agencies covered it up to avoid World War III. The cover up by the CIA started before the assassination, as John Newman has so thoroughly established since Oswald and the CIA. When CIA officers like James Angleton began to bifurcate the Oswald file in advance of the trip to Mexico. (See Newman, p. 393)

    “And in fact, lots of evidence has accumulated over the years to suggest [it] would be wise to look to Mexico City.”

    Shenon is writing as if the HSCA’s Mexico City Report, also known as the Lopez Report (1978) wouldn’t have been almost fully declassified in 2003. It provides lots of collusion going on with the CIA in regard to Oswald in Mexico City, from phony cables to senior officers blatantly lying on facts as they were happening before the JFK assassination. It’s almost as if Shenon does not want the reader to know about this bombshell report.

    “Much evidence about Oswald’s Mexico trip; including CIA tape recordings of wiretaps of Oswald’s phone calls in Mexico; never reached the [Warren] Commission.”

    That’s half-true. These tapes not only never reached the WC, but also have been never produced by the CIA, even though their transcripts were found. Since the CIA remained silent before the assassination about calls indicating that Oswald had been impersonated, no tapes at all is a conspiracy fact; as Gaeton Fonzi crystal clearly explained in The Last Investigation (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993; that turns Shenon’s hypothesis into excrement. (See Fonzi, p. 294)

    “If Oswald openly boasted about his plans to kill JFK among people in Mexico, it would undermine the official story that he was a lone wolf whose plans to kill the president could never have been detected by the CIA or FBI.”

    FBI super spy Jack Childs reported on his mission (SOLO-15) to Cuba in March 1964 that Castro himself had told him: “When 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’.” Shenon recycles this discredited report and magnifies such an outburst; at the Embassy, not at the Consulate; as an assassination plan. Even though the HSCA already put the issue to rest in its Final Report (1979): “Nothing in the evidence indicated that the threat should have been taken seriously, if it had occurred, since Oswald had behaved in an argumentative and obnoxious fashion.” (italics added) And, in fact, as both John Newman and Arnaldo M. Fernandez have shown, it likely did not happen. (See section six of the following review for details, http://www.ctka.net/reviews/shenon.html)

    Shenon’s “Oswald did it, Castro helped” must match with the notorious fact that a former Marine, re-defector from the Soviet Union, who had openly engaged into pro Castro activism in New Orleans, according to Shenon, this man was spotted by the CIA in Mexico City on September 27, 1963, as soon as he visited the Cuban and the Soviet diplomatic compounds. Since the CIA and the FBI missed him as a security risk in Dallas by the time of JFK visit, Castro could have helped the killing only in a conspiracy of silence with the CIA. Thus, Shenon’s crap detector didn’t find out what’s good for him.

    “State Department and CIA records declassified in recent years show that the agencies rebuffed Thomas in his requests for a new investigation.”

    That’s another half-truth. Thomas’ request was rebuffed on the grounds that the subjacent story; told by his friend, Mexican writer Elena Garro; was mere crap, like all the other allegations of red conspiracies in Mexico City made by Gilberto Alvarado, Pedro Gutierrez, Salvador Diaz-Verson, Vladimir Rodriguez Lahera, Antulio Ortiz Ramirez, Marty Underwood… etc. Shenon interweaves some of these, and other inventions that are not true, in order to arrive beforehand at a fact-free analysis on the Castro connection. As Hemingway told Manning, “no good book has ever been written that [way].” Accordingly, Shenon’s latest essay on the JFK assassination is another cruel and shocking act against his readership. But before leaving it at that, let us add one other pertinent and disturbing fact about Shenon and his latest diversion from the truth.

    Why did he write such a book? In his original 2013 edition, Shenon wrote that his inspiration for writing the volume was a call he got from a junior counsel to the Commission. Once he agreed to the project, this unnamed counsel then got him in contact with the other surviving staffers. According to researcher Pat Speer, the mysterious caller was none other than Arlen Specter, Mr. Single Bullet Theory himself. Since Specter died in 2012, and Shenon’s book was first published in 2013, it turns out that; via Shenon–the Philadelphia lawyer was continuing the JFK cover up from his grave.

    with Jim DiEugenio

  • JFK Nephew Claims CIA Worked to Prevent Normalization with Cuba

    At: teleSUR

  • Frank Mankiewicz: Secret intermediary to Cuba

    National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 494

    Edited by Peter Kornbluh and Justin Anstett, At:  The National Security Archive

  • Philip Shenon, A Cruel and Shocking Act

    Philip Shenon’s book A Cruel and Shocking Act begins with a deception. It then gets worse.

    On the frontispiece, before the actual text begins, Shenon quotes from Marina Oswald’s Warren Commission testimony. In that particular quote, Marina was asked if Lee Oswald had visited Mexico City. She replied that yes, Oswald had told her that he had been at the Cuban and Russian embassies.

    In itself, this is an accurate quote. But what Shenon does not tell the reader here, and in fact what he does not say until nearly 200 pages later, is this: that during her first Secret Service interview she denied Oswald had ever told her he was in Mexico. She did this more than once, and she was categorical about it. She even denied it when she was not asked about it. Just because she had seen the story about Oswald in Mexico City on television. (Secret Service Report by Charles Kunkel “Activities of the Oswald Family November 24 through November 30, 1963”)

    When Shenon does admit she initially denied it, he does not mention a major event that occurred after the initial denial and almost simultaneously with her February appearance before the Warren Commission. A week after her initial appearance before the Commission-where she now changed her story about Mexico City and several other matters-Marina signed a contract with a film company called Tex-Italia Films. The grand total of funds transferred to her was $132, 500. Which today would amount to about a half million dollars. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 977) What makes this transaction so intriguing is that when the company partners were investigated, it was discovered that they used false names. Further, the company’s business offices were asked to leave the lot they were located on for failure to pay their rent. Finally, there was no film made by Tex-Italia about Marina or her dead husband. (ibid)

    Now, to most people, these events and the subsequent reversals of testimony would seem relevant to the story Shenon is telling. After all, if the reader was informed of this information, one conclusion he or she could come to is that Tex-Italia was a front company, and its main purpose was to get Marina Oswald to testify to a tale that was more in line with the official story about Kennedy’s assassination. After all, Mexico City was quite important to the Commission. As we shall see, it is even more important to Shenon. If there is a serious question about Oswald being there, then the Oswald story begins to wobble about in a direction the Commission, and Shenon, do not want it to go. Therefore, in addition to beginning his book with this misleading testimony, in addition to not informing the reader about the timing of the financial transaction, when one scans the index of Shenon’s long book, the reader will not find an entry for Tex-Italia Films.

    Let us move to another section of the book to see how Shenon again censors information to present at best, an incomplete picture, at worst a deceptive one. On page 45, Shenon is describing a phone call between President Lyndon Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the Saturday morning after Friday’s assassination. But before he does that, he prefaces what he is about to present by saying that Hoover “was never as well informed as he pretended to be; he did not always bother to learn all the facts…” (Shenon, p. 46)

    Why does the author do this in advance? Probably because Hoover told Johnson that the evidence against Oswald at this time was not very strong and “The case as it stands now isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction.” (ibid) Shenon does not like this statement. So he now states that the evidence against Oswald on Saturday was “overwhelming”. He then writes that witnesses could identify him at the scene of the Tippit murder and with a rifle in the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. That Oswald purchased the rifle the police found on the sixth floor. And that he also purchased a pistol used in the murder of Tippit, and his wallet had a card in the name of A. Hidell used in the mail order purchases of the weapons.

    Again, by not informing the reader of the true state of this evidence today, Shenon cuts off an alternative to his characterization of Hoover’s discussion. Namely that Hoover was correct about the state of the evidence. For example, the rifle the police found and attributed to Oswald is not the rifle the FBI said Oswald ordered. The rifle the Commission is going to say was ordered was a 36″ Mannlicher-Carcano carbine. The rifle found by the Dallas Police was a 40″ short rifle. Klein’s, the sporting good store in Chicago where Oswald was supposed to have ordered the rifle from, did not put scopes on the 40″ model. Yet this one had a scope on it. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, pgs. 56-63) The night before, Hoover’s agents were at Klein’s for hours on end. They ended up confiscating the microfilm about these orders. Isn’t it possible that Hoover then knew about some problems in the evidentiary record? Shenon does not have to disclose that since he never tells the reader about any of these contradictions about this transaction.

    Shenon is equally nebulous about the transaction for the pistol he says was used in the murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. That handgun was supposed to have been delivered to Oswald by a private company called REA (Railway Express Agency). This was a forerunner to companies like Federal Express and UPS. REA should have sent a card to Oswald’s post office box to tell him the handgun had arrived. Oswald then would have had to present an ID and a certificate of good character to have a firearm given to him via a mail transaction. And REA had to have kept these records in compliance with state and federal laws.

    There is no evidence that any postcard was ever sent to Oswald’s box by REA. (DiEugenio, ibid, p. 104) Neither is there any paper work in evidence about Oswald presenting the ID or the certificate of good character. In fact, there is not even any signature of a receipt for the transaction in the Warren Commission volumes. In other words there is no evidence that this transaction ever took place as the Commission said it did. Or that REA submitted payment to the company who allegedly supplied the pistol. But more to our point here: There is no proof, or even evidence in the Commission volumes that the FBI ever even visited REA in Dallas to check on this transaction. (ibid)

    Now if Shenon thinks that the FBI did not visit REA about this matter then he was never qualified to write this book. The much more logical conclusion is that they did visit REA. But they could not find any of the back up materials to certify this as Oswald’s transaction. If that is the case, then Hoover did know what he was talking about during the call with President Johnson.

    Many authors have discussed the speciousness of the eyewitness testimony in both the Kennedy murder and the Tippit murder. The two most important witnesses in that regard, respectively Howard Brennan and Helen Markham, were so poor that several Commission lawyers did not want to include them in the Warren Report. They felt that their inclusion would create serious problems for the document. Which, as we will see, they did. (Edward Jay Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles, p. 144) There was a real battle in the Commission over these witnesses. This is a point that Shenon very much underplays. But which tends to bolster the Hoover statement about the case against Oswald being weak.

    Let us now deal with the point about the wallet identification of Oswald as Hidell, which certified him as the purchaser of the weapons under an alias. As many people know, the Dallas Police said that they took Oswald’s wallet from him on the way to the police station, after his arrest at the Texas Theater. It was not until many years later that a crucial discrepancy in this record was discovered. And it ends up it was co-discovered by an FBI agent, Bob Barrett. For there is a film of Barrett handling the wallet at the scene of the Tippit murder. One that is not Tippit’s. Barrett later said it had the Oswald/Hidell identification inside of it. Yet, the Warren Report states that Oswald’s wallet was taken from him on the way to the police station after he was arrested at the Texas Theater. But further, there was a third wallet in evidence, one that the police said Oswald left at the home of Ruth and Michael Paine that morning.

    Question for Mr. Shenon: Do you know anyone who carries three wallets? If you do, please tell us about it. In fact, why did you not even mention this “three wallets” problem in the nearly 600 pages of your book? What most objective observers believe today is that the Dallas Police suppressed the evidence of the Oswald wallet at the Tippit scene to avoid the inescapable suggestion that it had been planted after the fact. Because they knew no one would buy the fact of Oswald having three wallets. If that is the case, then again, Hoover’s comments about the state of the evidence were correct.

    II

    Just how bad is Shenon on the physical evidence in the case? He can write that the alleged rifle and handgun used in the murders came from the same gunshop! (p. 46) Yet, by just browsing through the Warren Report one can see that the rifle came from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago, Illinois. The handgun came from Seaport Traders in Los Angeles, California. The odd thing about this is that although the Commission says they were ordered months apart, they both were shipped on the same day. This is an intriguing fact, which Shenon does not note. (See Warren Report, pgs. 121, 174) What makes it more intriguing is that, as with the missing paperwork at REA, the corresponding paperwork is also missing at the post office to certify receipt of the rifle. (ibid, DiEugenio, pgs. 61-62) In fact, as with REA, there is no evidence of any person at the post office saying that they handed the rifle package to Oswald. Which is hard to believe. Because when transferring firearms from out of state shippers, postal regulations stated that one had to present an ID card to certify that you were the person who rented that post office box. As Shenon states, the rifle was allegedly ordered in Hidell’s name. Since Oswald rented the box office in his own name, the rifle package should have been sent back unopened. (ibid) But if Oswald did show he was really Hidell, would not someone at the post office have recalled that fact? Especially by, say, November 23, 1963? No one did. And that interesting piece of evidence is not noted by Mr. Shenon.

    In order to explain how someone could create all these embarrassing lacunae in this day and age, let us drop in some background about how this book originated. Shenon worked for the New York Times for over two decades. He specialized in reporting on the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the State Department. In other words he dealt in national security issues. In 2008 he published a book about the 9/11 investigation and report called The Commission. Many researchers on that case felt the book was a damage control operation about that inquiry. Therefore, quite naturally, a surviving member of the Warren Commission – Shenon will not reveal who it is – called him and asked him to do a reprise about the Warren Commission. Incredibly, Shenon agreed to do it.

    Why is this so objectionable? Because Shenon admits that it was initiated by a junior counsel who then allowed him access to the other surviving counsels. That would mean that Shenon was in contact with, among others, Howard Willens, David Slawson, Richard Mosk, Sam Stern, Burt Griffin, Melvin Eisenberg, the late Arlen Specter, William T. Coleman, and the late Norman Redlich. Now, these men had been harshly criticized for decades on end. The criticism of them turned vitriolic when Oliver Stone’s film JFK appeared in 1991. One of the main criticisms about they dying mainstream media, especially the NY Times, is that in return for access and information, reporters tend to give the reader a one-sided version of the facts. Mainly because their sources have an agenda which usually amounts to something called “covering your ass”. No quasi-legal body in history ever had more of a reason for CYA than the Warren Commission. Yet, Shenon agreed to this arrangement. Not only did he agree to it, but as we will see, he accepted everything his sources told him-with gusto and relish. Because of that unprofessional closeness to his sources and subject, the book becomes so biased as to be, at best, almost useless. At worst it is a propaganda tract for the Commission survivors. It becomes that because, as we will see, Shenon values his sources over the declassified evidence of the Assassination Records Review Board. This might be good and profitable for him. It is not good for the reader, or for the writing of good history.

    A good example of the compromising that Shenon has to do to accommodate his sources appears on page 168 of his book. Because he has chosen to side with these men, Shenon has to bow before the absurd premises of Single Bullet Theory. In fact, Shenon writes that “Later scientific analysis backed the commission’s theory.” Apparently, no one told Shenon that if “scientific analysis” did back it then he would not have to refer to it as a theory. But even worse, he deliberately presents his diagram from an angle both from the front and slightly above the limousine. This does much to eliminate the vertical and horizontal problems with the trajectory of CE 399, the Magic Bullet. For instance, by framing his drawing in that way, Shenon does not reveal the entry point on Kennedy’s back. In fact, in the wording that accompanies the drawing, the author says the bullet enters “Kennedy’s body from behind” at a “slightly downward angle”. Shenon cannot bring himself to say that the bullet hit Kennedy in the back from sixty feet up. Which would make it very hard to believe that it could then deflect upward to exit his throat, especially since, as he notes, it did not hit any bony body structures.But further, by disguising this unknown angle, Shenon now arranges everything from Kennedy’s throat outward in a straight line. Even though the magic bullet smashed two bones in Connally!

    In further obeisance to his sources Shenon ignores two key pieces of physical evidence to revive something that never happened. First, when author Josiah Thompson questioned both of John Connally’s doctors, Robert Shaw and Charles Gregory, he asked them if they thought the bullet that went through Kennedy also went through Connally. They said no, because there were no fibers from clothes in the bullet path of Connally’s back wound. (ibid, DiEugenio, p. 110) Secondly, when the ARRB interviewed several medical witnesses who participated in the autopsy at Bethesda, they testified that the malleable probes inserted into Kennedy’s back were all too low to exit the throat. And further, the slope of the angle was much too steep to connect the two points. (ibid, pgs. 116-17) This is the kind of trouble one invites when one enters a complex case from years of experience at the New York Times.

    But Shenon features another specious schematic on page 245 of the book. He calls this one “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Escape”. It traces Oswald from his exit from the Texas School Book Depository after the murder of Kennedy, to his arrest at the Texas Theater. Shenon first says that Oswald boarded a bus. He was walking the wrong way to board the bus, and the bus would have dropped him off seven blocks from his house. He could have caught a bus nearby which carried him across the street from his house. (WR, p. 160) Shenon then says that Oswald got off the bus and hailed a taxi cab. What he doesn’t say is that Oswald walked back toward the scene of the crime and then offered to give up the cab to an elderly lady. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 83) Mr. Shenon, do these acts sound like a man trying to “escape”?

    Shenon’s map then has Oswald arriving at his rooming house on Beckley Street at 1:00. But it does not say that he then left at 1:04. Shenon now shows us just how in bed he is with his Commission sources. He says that Tippit was shot at 1:15 PM. As writers on the Tippit case have demonstrated, most recently Joseph McBride and John Armstrong, there is simply no credible evidence that places the murder of Tippit that late.

    For instance, T. F. Bowley places the shooting at 1:10. And Bowley looked at his watch. (Meagher, p. 254) Since Shenon does not note Bowley, he cannot tell the reader that the Commission never interviewed Bowley. (ibid) As McBride notes, Helen Markham caught her bus regularly for work walking from the intersection of 10th and Patton, the scene of the murder, toward Jefferson. She would start her walk at about 1:04. The FBI timed the walk at about 2 and a half minutes. Which would place the shooting at about 1:07. (McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 245) The problem for Shenon is that the distance from the rooming house to the scene of the Tippit shooting is nearly one mile. How on earth could Oswald, in street clothes, traverse that distance in six minutes or less? But further, no one saw him traveling in that direction. (Meagher, p. 255) Shenon then has Oswald entering the Texas Theater at 1:40 PM. The reader should then ask: Why did it then take Oswald almost twice as long to travel a distance that was almost the same length?

    These two drawings in A Cruel and Shocking Act tell us all we need to know about the book. As well as does the excision of the following witness testimony. One will not find the name of Roger Craig in Shenon’s index. Probably because Craig’s affidavit, and the corroborating one of Marvin Robinson, vitiate the Commission’s version of “Oswald’s Escape”. Right after the shooting of Kennedy, Craig described a man running down the incline opposite the Depository and jumping into a Rambler auto pulling out of Dealey Plaza on Elm Street. Robinson said the same. When officer Craig got to City Hall, he recognized the man he saw jumping into the Rambler as Oswald. (Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, pgs 242-43)

    But, for obvious reasons, even though he had a corroborating witness, the Commission decided they had to disregard Craig. So does Shenon.

    III

    In other places where Shenon tries to deal with the evidence, he shows himself to be so amateurish that he himself undermines his own case. For instance, he writes that the head shot, “blew away much of the right hemisphere of his brain, an image captured in awful photographs.” (Shenon, p. 22) What the heck is Shenon talking about here? There is no such image in autopsy photos at the National Archives. And, in fact, this shows just how unfamiliar the author is with the actual declassified records of the ARRB. For the images of Kennedy’s brain show a nearly intact brain. And for Shenon to write that much of the right side is gone reveals him to be, inadvertently, in the camp of the conspiracy theorists he is frequently assailing. For many of the critics of the medical evidence believe, based on the medical witnesses, that much of the brain had to be dissipated. (DiEugenio, ibid, p. 137) The problem is that-in spite of what Shenon says – no picture depicts such a damaged brain. Nor does the drawing made by Ida Dox for the HSCA.

    It seems that Shenon wants to have something new to hang his hat on. So he begins the book with three facets of the evidence he thinks will do the trick. The problem is they do no such thing, since they have all been thoroughly discussed for decades.

    The first “new event” Shenon depicts is the fact that Dr. James Humes did not just burn his notes of the autopsy, he incinerated his first draft. This was made obvious about 15 years ago, when ARRB Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn examined Humes. But Shenon wants to be able to hang onto the story that Humes did this so that the autopsy would not drop into the hands of illicit ghoulish souvenir hunters who would then display the bloodied documents. (Shenon, p. 23) As Gary Aguilar has pointed out, the problem with maintaining that fairy tale is that Gunn found out that Humes burned it at his house, which is where the draft in question had been penned. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 165) When Gunn pressed him on this, Humes tried a different excuse instead of the bloodied souvenir stuff pretext: “it might have been errors in the spelling, or I don’t know what was the matter with it…” (ibid) Its revealing of Shenon that he sticks with the now exposed cover story, and by doing so he tries to cover up for Humes; and also to vilify those “ghouls” who would actually like to see that lost draft.

    The author does another thing of note in his brief discussion of the autopsy. He maintains another specious story, namely that Humes never called Dallas from Bethesda until the next day, Saturday. But to name one important witness, radiologist John Ebersole told the HSCA that this call took place on Friday night. (ibid, p. 168-69) But further, that afternoon, in a televised press conference, Dr. Malcolm Perry, who cut the tracheotomy over the throat wound, said three times that this wound was an entrance wound. Dr. George Burkley, who was at Parkland Hospital when Kennedy died, was also in the autopsy room that night. He would have had to have known about the entrance wound in the throat. Finally, nurse Audrey Bell told the ARRB that Perry told her he had been getting calls from Washington during that Friday night. (DiEugenio, pgs. 143-44) What many people believe happened is that this myth about the next day call was created in order to give time to alter the entrance wound in the throat into an exit wound. And sure enough, Secret Service agent Elmer Moore was shortly after stationed in Dallas and was talking Perry out of his first day story. (Ibid)

    It’s hard to believe in 2013, but Elmer Moore’s name is mentioned just once by Shenon. Why is it hard to believe? Because after Moore accomplished his mission at Parkland in preparation for Arlen Specter’s questioning of the emergency room staff, he then became the bodyguard/valet for Earl Warren on the Warren Commission. (ibid, p. 144) In his one mention of his name, Shenon muddies this transition by Moore. He implies that Moore accompanied Warren to Dallas for Jack Ruby’s polygraph test solely for protection purposes. This is not accurate. As writers like Pat Speer and Aguilar have shown, after working over Perry, Moore became almost a personal assistant to Warren throughout much of the Commission proceedings. And this was done at Warren’s request. As Speer notes, Warren wanted Moore to help “the Commission for an indefinite period to assist in its work.” (ibid, p. 144) It is not possible to give an accurate and candid presentation about the Warren Commission without fully describing what Moore did in the alteration of testimony, plus the fact that Warren requested his assistance afterwards.

    The second piece of old evidence that Shenon reports as being long hidden is the destruction of a photograph of Oswald by Marina and Oswald’s mother Marguerite. To use just one example, this incident was thoroughly described by writers like the late Jack White and Greg Parker many years ago. It is also described at length by Vincent Bugliosi in his colossal book, Reclaiming History. Like Bugliosi, who Shenon greatly admires, the author wants us to think that somehow this is another of the infamous “backyard photographs” which the Commission, and Life Magazine, used to incriminate Oswald. But like Bugliosi, Shenon does not quote Marina’s testimony before the HSCA about this point. (Shenon, p. 25) Her memory of this was very hazy and unreliable. But further, Marguerite described this particular photo as being different than the others. She said, in this one, Oswald was holding the rifle above his head with both hands. Further, that this one was addressed to his daughter June. June was two years old at the time. These points are rather indecipherable. Especially in light of the fact that Marina originally said she took just one backyard photo. (ibid, DiEugenio, p. 86) Which is probably why the Commission, when they had the opportunity, did not press far at all in this field.

    The last piece of “hidden” evidence that Shenon uses is also mildewed. It’s the note Oswald left for James Hosty at FBI headquarters before the assassination. (Shenon, p. 25) But again, in this case, its not like the Commission did not know about this incident. During the questioning of Ruth Paine, the subject surfaced since it was mentioned in a letter Oswald allegedly wrote to the Russian Embassy in Washington and Ruth had copied. (McKnight, p. 260) It was also mentioned in her March 1964 testimony. If there was no follow up on this, it appears its because that is the way the Commission wanted it. But further, unlike what Shenon tries to convey, Hosty was asked about the surveillance of Oswald by the FBI prior to Kennedy’s arrival in Dallas. And the questioner was one of Shenon’s presumed sources, Sam Stern. (ibid, p. 261)

    I believe the point of this section of the book is to show that somehow, certain evidence was not revealed to the Commission. But as the reader can see, this is not really accurate. The only piece of evidence that one can really make that argument for is the first draft of the autopsy report burned by Humes. But in terms of relevancy to any Commission work or conclusions, this has no real retroactive impact. To anyone familiar with the evidence and the Commissions’ work, it is this medical evidence that the Commission made almost no inquiry into. As other authors have shown, the Warren Commission was so uninterested in this key issue that they accepted falsified drawings as illustrations for the head and neck wound to President Kennedy. (DiEugenio, pgs. 120-22) These were Commission Exhibits 385 and 388. They are illustrations made by 22 year old, first year medical artist Harold Rydberg. These two drawings – which show a flat direction to the neck wound, and an upward direction to the head wound – were meant to demonstrate, not what was seen in the autopsy room, but what the Commission had already decided upon as their conclusions. But further, the drawing of the back wound places the wound in the neck, when the declassified autopsy photos show it to be in Kennedy’s back. And the drawing of the head wound puts Kennedy’s head in a position it is not in at Zapruder film frame 313, the instant of the head shot.

    Incredibly, Shenon does not mention the Rydberg drawings or their misrepresentations. Which, considering what he did with his drawing of the Single Bullet Theory and “Oswald’s Escape”, perhaps is not so incredible. Its par for the course. But the point about these three above issues-the burnt autopsy report, the missing Oswald photo, the Hosty note – making any difference for the Commission, for reasons stated above, this is simply not convincing.

    Before leaving the subject of the medical evidence, we should note one more point. Throughout the book, Shenon tries to say that somehow, Bobby Kennedy influenced the Commission, and he therefore limited its use of the autopsy materials. As noted by many other authors, this is simply not the case. The autopsy photos were in the hands of the Secret Service at this time. Which is why Secret Service agent Elmer Moore showed one of them to Arlen Specter. (DiEugenio, p. 145) Whatever limitations were placed on the Commission in its use of these materials, they had little or nothing to do with Robert Kennedy. Because the deed of gift for these materials to the Kennedy family would not be signed until 1965, the year after the Commission expired. Somehow, in writing a book about the Warren Commission, Shennon couldn’t find the space to include a sentence with that bit of information in it.

    IV

    Shenon does uncover some interesting information about the work habits of the Commission. For instance, he says that Coleman worked about one day a week. (p. 109) Also that Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin split his workweek between the Commission and his practice. But presumable he did some work for the Commission while in his office. Another interesting point is the paucity of criminal lawyers that Howard Willens picked to man the staff. The clear majority of lawyers were business or corporate lawyers. Which makes very little sense in a criminal procedure, where experience counts a lot. One of the Commission lawyers who did have such experience, Burt Griffin, admitted this was a problem. (Shenon, p. 125) Many of Willens’ recruits were recent Ivy League graduates on their way up the corporate law ladder.

    But what Shenon reveals later is even more startling in this regard. And that is this: some of the lawyers that administrator Howard Willens brought in had no real legal experience at all! The problem was, too many people were leaving. Obviously, what happened-which Shenon does not want to make explicit – is that the private practice billing paid much more than what these men were getting on the Warren Commission. And since, whatever Shenon says, none of these men were great fans of Kennedy, very few of them were going to spend ten months of their lives working on this case while they were losing money. Of the junior counsels, David Belin left in May. Leon Hubert quit right after that. Specter left in June. Only David Slawson, Burt Griffin and Wesley Liebeler were there regularly after that (p. 404) Almost all the senior counsels had left by June also. The case of Leon Hubert quitting is interesting. (Shenon, p. 284) Its so interesting that Shenon papers it over. He says that Hubert essentially quit, but he is not explicit as to why.

    Hubert quit because he was a senior counsel who actually wanted to do a real investigation. He wanted to find out who Jack Ruby really was and where his associations were. In fact, he and Griffin wrote two interesting memos in this regard. Both of which, because of his agenda, Shenon does not print. The first was written in March of 1964. It reads in part, “The most promising links between Jack Ruby and the assassination of President Kennedy are established through underworld figures and anti-Castro Cubans and extreme rightwing Americans.” This, of course, turned out to be quite insightful considering the time it was written, plus the fact that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach were all trying to shut down and limit the inquiry. (A fact which Shenon greatly underplays.) Two months later, the two wrote another prophetic memo. This one said, “We believe that a reasonable possibility exists that Ruby has maintained a close interest in Cuban affairs to the extent necessary to participate in gun sales and smuggling…” This turned out to be accurate, as authors like Henry Hurt and John Armstrong later discovered. Two examples of Ruby doing so were with Thomas Davis and Eddie Browder. Shenon fails to point this out, since the former leads to the CIA and the latter to the Mafia.

    But in that same memo, the two then topped themselves. They wrote that, “Neither Oswald’s Cuban interests in Dallas nor Ruby’s Cuban activities have been adequately explored…” That sentence is pregnant with intrigue in two ways. First, it clearly implies that Oswald and Ruby may have known each other through this anti-Castro underground network, one that began in Florida and spread to Texas after the fall of Batista. But second, it says that after six months, they have gotten little cooperation in exploring that venue.

    If the reader turns to the Volume XI of the HSCA, one will get a much more frank and honest discussion of Hubert’s departure than Shenon gives. There, Burt Griffin was asked about Hubert’s leaving. After replying with the standards about his job and family, Griffin got to the point. He said that Hubert became disenchanted and demoralized because he was not getting the kind of support he wanted, especially from Rankin. (HSCA, Vol. XI, p. 268) Griffin went on to say that he and Hubert got the feeling that Rankin, Willens and Norman Redlich, the mid-level administrators, did not have much interest in what he and Hubert were doing. (ibid, p. 271) In this fascinating interview, Griffin revealed that he himself had no contact with either field agents or FBI HQ agents in Washington. Even though that is where the Commission office was. Everything he requested went by memo to the office of the Chief Counsel. (ibid, p. 276) The problem was that in requests to the CIA for info on Jack Ruby and his associations, the CIA did not respond for months. (ibid, p. 283) In fact, it took 16 days for the initial request by Hubert and Griffin to get past Willens and to the CIA. But that is not the worst part. The worst part is this: the reply from the CIA came on September 15th! Which was about two weeks before the report was printed. Griffin could not explain either delay: the 16-day one or the six-month one. But clearly, this is what he was referring to in discussing why Hubert left. In his interview Griffin says that between the time pressures to finish and the internal resistance, they were very limited in what they could do. (ibid, pgs 295-96) In fact, in this HSCA interview, Griffin was confronted with the second memo, the one that mentioned the possible crossover of anti-Castro elements which could be a connecting point between Oswald and Ruby. When asked if the Warren Commission investigation ever focused on that nexus, Griffin replied simply, “No.”

    None of this crucial information is in Shenon’s book. Just as the reporter describes none of Ruby’s ties to organized crime figures or the Dallas Police. (Shenon, p. 197) In fact, Shenon is slavish that he actually repeats the infamous “Sheba defense” for Ruby. That is, Ruby would not have left his dog in the car if he was going to kill Oswald. To clinch the cover up about Ruby, Shenon uses none of the HSCA review of Ruby’s polygraph in his book. Which is astonishing at the same time that it is predictable. Shenon describes Arlen Specter as being in the room for the polygraph, along with FBI technician Bell Herndon. (Shenon, p. 421) He then describes one Ruby lawyer being there. He then says that there was a long list of questions, and Ruby’s answers were disjointed, therefore it took many hours to complete. The next day, Shenon relates to us, Herndon told Specter that Ruby passed the test “with flying colors and clearly was not involved in the assassination.” (ibid) And that is that as far as the author is concerned.

    To say that this is not the whole story is being much too kind to Mr. Shenon. First of all, unlike what Shenon implies, there were a total of eight people in the room for Ruby’s polygraph, and ten during the pretest. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 244) One of them was Bill Alexander, the assistant DA trying the case against Ruby. Contrary to what Shenon writes, Alexander, who interrupted and then actually held off the record conversations with Ruby, caused many of the delays. The HSCA panel concluded that because of the many people present and their interference, Herndon lost control of the proceedings. Something that a polygraph operator should never do. (ibid) Because all the interference and distraction can lead to false readings.

    But that is just the beginning of the problems the HSCA expert panel had about this test. Altogether, the panel listed over ten violations of proper protocol by Bell Herndon. One of which was the actual number and selection of questions. Like almost everything else in this valuable report, Shenon ignores this point. Which strikes at the very heart of Herndon’s “passed with flying colors” comment. There are three types of questions one should ask during a polygraph: control questions, relevant questions, and irrelevant questions. Standard polygraph practice states that there should be perhaps three relevant questions in an exam i.e. questions which touch on actual material matters dealing with the subject’s participation in a crime. The most relevant questions one of the panelists had ever heard of in 30 years of practice was seventeen. Bell’s test for Ruby contained an unheard of 55 relevant questions. The panel said that this violation “showed total disregard of basic polygraph principles.” (ibid) Because, as the panel wrote, “. . . the more a person is tested the less he tends to react when lying. That is…liars become so test-tired they no longer produce significant physiological reactions when lying.” In other words, with that many relevant questions, one could lie and get away with it. This is why the panel said, Bell should have demanded a second test with a second battery of questions in order to crosscheck the first test. He did not.

    There was also a problem with the control questions. These are questions that the operator asks to which he feels the subject will lie. He does this to get a readable reaction against which he can measure the answers to the relevant questions. (ibid, p. 245) The panel criticized Bell’s selection of questions in this regard also, one of which was, “Have you ever been arrested?” This was common knowledge and Ruby affirmed it so how could this be a control question? He was also asked, “Are you married?” as a control question. The panel thought this was much better suited to being an irrelevant question, one asked in order to register a normal response. In other words with this mishmash of questions, it would be difficult to chart definite landmarks in Ruby’s replies.

    But this test, which Shenon accepts at face value, is even worse than that. For Bell also did something that is simply unexplainable in any benign manner. He started the Galvanic Skin Response detector at only 25% capacity. He then lowered it from there. The panel noted this is the opposite of what proper procedure was. (ibid) This is one of the three prime indicators of deception on the test. And it is especially useful in regard to rising emotions in some subjects. The panel thought this reading was almost a complete waste. But they did note that in the first series of questions, when Ruby was relatively fresh, the answer which gave the largest GSR reaction was Ruby’s reply to the question, “Did you assist Oswald in the assassination?” (ibid, p. 245) Ruby replied in the negative. The GSR, even set that low, would indicate he was lying. Somehow, we are to believe that, in five years of research, Shenon did not read this report. The other alternative is worse. He did read it and did not think it was important. Whatever the answer, Shenon’s work on Ruby is even worse than the Warren Commission’s. Which means it’s abysmal.

    V

    Towards the end, Howard Willens was bringing in lawyers to man the Commission who had had nothing to do with the actual inquiry. In fact, if you can comprehend it, Willens hired a student who had not even graduated from law school yet. Murray Laulicht was 24 years old and just taken his last law school exam – in trusts and estates. Laulicht pleaded with Willens to wait until he got his degree. He did on June 4th. That night he went to Washington and started work solving the assassination of President Kennedy. (Shenon, p. 404) This is how seriously Willens took this case. He hired someone who, not only had no experience in practicing law, but had never even worked in a law office before. Shenon does not make one indication of disapproval of Willens’ choice. Even when Rankin assigns Laulicht to complete the biography of Ruby. Quite naturally, Laulicht tells Shenon he had absolutely no problem with the Commission’s version of Ruby shooting Oswald.

    The problem with that, is-again – the HSCA did. To the point that they concluded the Commission was wrong. Ruby did not just walk down the ramp, past the police sentry Roy Vaughn. They concluded that Ruby had help coming in a back door off an alley. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 204) So again, the HSCA overturned another important element dealing with the Warren Commission case against Ruby. Yet, Shenon’s readers, don’t know about it.

    But now the book gets even worse. And I don’t even think Shenon realizes how bad he is getting here. He doesn’t understand that, in his slavish support of the Commission, his book is now attaining entry into the realm of high camp. He actually allows Laulicht, this law student with no experience in doing criminal inquiry, to say that, in his hot headedness and desire to avenge Kennedy’s death, Ruby was acting as a Holocaust survivor would if he saw a Nazi. (Shenon, p. 405) This is so absurd, I have no comment on it. Except to say that, by this point, I was beginning to develop serious problems about both Shenon’s credibility and his gullibility.

    As bad as Shenon is on Ruby, he may be even worse on Oswald. Again, the author tells us that a new Willens recruit came in late in the day. This time to help on the biography of Oswald. Unlike Laulicht, Lloyd Weinreb actually graduated from law school and clerked a year on the Supreme Court. Evidently, that was enough for Willens to think that, he too could help solve the murder of President Kennedy. When Weinreb arrived he was surprised at all the vacant desks in the office. (ibid,p. 405) Most everyone had fled. Apparently, Willens had no problem giving perhaps the most important job on the Commission to this 24-year-old law clerk who had just transferred over to the Justice Department. Albert Jenner had given up trying to complete the biography of Oswald. But Willens was determined it be done, even if it was done by someone who just walked in the door. As Weinreb hints, with so many desertions, with so much work incomplete, it was Willens who was now riding herd to get the report finished. And if he had to hire people who did not know what they were doing, that was fine with him. Even if it meant a team of amateurs was at work solving the most complex and important American murder in the second half of the 20th century.

    But further, it didn’t matter to Willens that these amateurs did not have anywhere near a complete database to work from. For, as Weinreb reveals, when he started going through the FBI and CIA files on Oswald, he noted much material was missing. Shenon and Weinreb try to say this was because staffers took some of it home with them. And they didn’t return it? Highly improbable. With what we saw happening between the CIA and Willens – 16 days to send a memo to Langley, six months to reply – it is much more likely that Willens was satisfied to get any files at all, even if they were incomplete. And he knew that unlike former senior counsel Leon Hubert, someone as green as Weinreb was not going to raise a stink. This is why the biography written of Oswald in the Warren Commission is unsatisfactory today. There are many things the CIA and the FBI had which are not referred to in that report. And that later, writers like John Newman and John Armstrong discovered and included.

    Then there is Richard Mosk. Mosk reviewed the testimony about Oswald’s marksmanship. He was told by both the FBI and the military that the shots were not all that difficult since the motorcade was moving slowly and the rifle had a telescopic sight. Shenon writes this with no comment attached. I have one. If this was so easy, why did no professional marksman for the Commission duplicate what Oswald did? That is, get two of three direct hits in the head and shoulder area within six seconds on their first try. (See for example, Meagher, pgs. 108-09) In fact, as author George O’toole noted, the rifle experts could not even try the experiment with Oswald’s rifle since the firing pin was defective and the telescopic sight was misaligned. Shenon is so eager to validate the procedures of the Commission that he does not even question the obvious: If the scope was used, it would have taken longer for Oswald to fire the three shots for the simple reason that he would have had to wait for the scope to stop vibrating after each explosion in the chamber. And as I have stated elsewhere, in a deposition for the HSCA, the gunsmith at Klein’s sporting goods said that particular rifle was not equipped with a scope by Klein’s. So, how did it get one? Shenon never notes the problem. Therefore, the reader can’t ask the question.

    One of the most startling things about this book is that Shenon appears determined to outdo the Warren Commission’s case against Oswald. Therefore, the author sidesteps the issue of Oswald not having a defense team before the Commission. Even though Earl Warren was one of the most vociferous voices on the bench in pushing the concept that defendants should be furnished with lawyers no matter what their financial situation. Apparently, the fact that Oswald was dead now mitigated Warren’s beliefs in fairness before the law. What really eroded Warren’s ideas about equal justice in this case was the fear of God put in him by President Johnson. As everyone knows today, when LBJ recruited a reluctant Warren to run the Commission, he told him that if he did not take the job, the danger existed that thermonuclear war would incinerate forty million people in an hour. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkand, p. 253) At the first meeting of the staff, Warren reiterated this warning to those present. (Shenon, p. 127) Young attorney Melvin Eisenberg wrote a memo about this meeting. In quoting from it Shenon, like Vincent Bugliosi, leaves out the key part of the memo. After telling the staff about Johnson giving him that nuclear warning, Eisenberg’s memo reads, “The President convinced him that this was an occasion on which actual conditions had to override general principles.”(emphasis added) He then went on to say that they would still seek out the truth. Now, any objective person would have to admit that the italicized clause is the crucial part-perhaps the crucial part – of the memo. By leaving it out, Shenon can later negate what Wesley Liebeler told Sylvia Odio. Liebeler actually told her about Warren’s instruction to them to cover up any evidence of conspiracy. Shenon spins this as being an “outrageous statement”. It is no such thing. It’s a direct echo of that Warren told the staff. (Shenon, p. 417)

    As for outdoing the Commission in regards to Oswald, apparently, Shenon actually buys Marina Oswald’s story about Oswald wanting to kill Nixon. (Shenon, p. 394) Clearly, this was a story planted on Marina, perhaps by her business manager James Martin or by journalistic provocateur Hugh Aynseworth. (See CE 1357; James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 250) She never brought this story up until after her first appearance, Nixon was not in Dallas at the time she said the event occurred, and there was no announcement he was going to be. Finally, as more than one writer has pointed out, the episode could not have ended as Marina describes it with her locking Lee in the bathroom, since the bathroom door locked from the inside. But Shenon treats this whole fantastic episode with kid gloves.

    Shenon also uses the now discredited story about the Depository workers on the fifth floor who heard bullet casings drop on the floor above them. (Shenon, p. 246) Way back in 1977, this story was brought into doubt with an article by Patricia Lambert in Penn Jones’ The Continuing Inquiry. Maybe Shenon didn’t know about that journal. But he can surely surf the Internet. If he did he would have found it there.

    In his embarrassing march In Praise of Folly, Shenon also uses Marrion Baker’s story about encountering Oswald on the second floor lunchroom. (Shenon, p. 247) Today, this story has also come under close scrutiny. First, by this author in his book Reclaiming Parkland. (See pages, 192-96) But also by researchers Greg Parker and Sean Murphy. Murphy has made the most thorough and detailed examination of this story yet. And he has shown that it collapses along multiple fracture lines. In a very long thread at Spartacus Educational, Murphy makes a compelling argument that Oswald was not on the second floor after the assassination. Completely independent of the Altgens photo and the Lovelady/Oswald debate, Murphy makes a fascinating case that Oswald was outside on the top step of the Depository, where he appears to be drinking a Coke.

    But let us give Shenon the benefit of the doubt. Let us assume that he was unaware of the work of both Murphy and Parker. If he had read the Warren Commission volumes he would have understood the following: in his first day affidavit, Baker never mentioned any such second floor incident with Oswald or anyone else. What makes that affidavit so compelling is this: when Baker made it out that afternoon, Oswald was sitting right across from him in the witness room! That room was so small that Baker had to almost fall over Oswald to leave. We are to believe that Baker made out his affidavit with the guy he allegedly just threatened with a gun by sticking it into this stomach. Yet, he never recognized Oswald and Oswald never recognized him. Not even to the point that Baker leaned over to ask him what his name was. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 194) Shenon may not be aware that Baker changed his story. But Allen Dulles and David Belin certainly were aware of it. Because they took his questioning off the record no less than five times. (ibid) A fact that, along with many others, Shenon somehow missed.

    Shenon quite naturally goes all the way in with the incredibly controversial eyewitness Howard Brennan. Brennan is the Dealey Plaza witness who the Commission relied upon for their identification of Oswald in the sixth floor window.(Shenon, pgs. 248-49) Shenon picks up Brennan from about 46 years of discreditation, dusts him off, and presents him to the reader like he is brand new and there is no problem with him. In reality, very few witnesses presented as many problems for the Commission as Brennan did. There was even a vocal contingent on the Commission itself who actually did not want to use him because they foresaw the numerous problems he would eventually create. (Epstein, pgs. 143-44) Among these were his questionable eyesight, his description as to height and weight of a man who had to have been kneeling down, the question of how his description got to the authorities, and the fact that Brennan had failed to identify Oswald at a subsequent lineup. Shenon has a novel excuse for the last. Quoting David Belin, he says well, Kitty Genovese died that month with over 30 witnesses hearing her scream, so, via Belin, this is how we are supposed to excuse Brennan’s failure since he feared a communist conspiracy. (I’m not kidding, you can read that on p. 249 of Shenon’s book.)

    Although Shenon has no problem conveying that piece of silliness, what he does not say is that, today, due to the fine work of British police inspector Ian Griggs, there is a real question as to whether or not Brennan was ever at any lineup. In his book, No Case to Answer, Griggs performed what is probably the most complete and thorough inquiry into the Dallas Police lineups in the literature. (Griggs, pgs. 77-106) He details each and every lineup, the people who were there, and when each one took place. None of the police records include Brennan’s name. (ibid, pgs. 85-90) None of the Warren Commission records on the subject include his name. (ibid, p. 93) Griggs then tracked down the listed witnesses who were supposed to be at each lineup. No one recalled Brennan being there. (ibid, p. 94) Captain Will Fritz was at each lineup and described them for the Commission. In his testimony he volunteered nothing about Brennan being at any of them. (ibid, p. 93)

    When asked how many people were in each lineup, Brennan said seven, more or less one in each. (WC Vol. 3, p. 147) As Griggs notes, there were only six spots in the lineup platform, and there appear to have never been any more than four people in any lineup. (See CD 1083, and Griggs, pgs. 85-90) When asked if all the other men in the lineup were caucasians, or if there were any blacks in the lineups, Brennan replied with a startling answer. He said he did not remember. (WC, op. cit.) The reader should recall, this was Texas in 1963 when all public facilities are still segregated.

    Because of all these problems, and more, Griggs concludes one of two things happened. Either Brennan was so unreliable that the police dared not show him a lineup. Or, Brennan performed so poorly at a lineup that the record of it was expunged. Whatever the case, for Shenon to trot out Brennan without chronicling any of the above indicates one of two things. Either the man is an incompetent researcher, or if he did know this he is not being honest with the reader.

    Which is similar to what Shenon does with the work of the late Arlen Specter. Clearly, Shenon spent a lot of time with Specter before he died. Apparently, he never once asked anything like the challenging questions Gaeton Fonzi did, which reduced the Philadelphia lawyer to a stuttering state of confusion back in 1966. To show just how slanted his approach is, consider the following. Shenon admires Specter for wanting to be in on the questioning of Jackie Kennedy, and criticizes Earl Warren for not having Specter there. But yet, Shenon then gives Specter a pass on not having him present FBI agents Jim Sibert and Frank O’Neill or Dr. George Burkley before the Commission. Since all three men were in the autopsy room that night, and Burkley was the one doctor who was both inside the Parkland emergency room and at Bethesda, most objective observers would have to say that the latter three witnesses would have more forensic value to the case than Mrs. Kennedy. Especially in light of the fact that the Commission ignored the value of both her testimony and Secret Service agent Clint Hill’s. Namely that she was stretching out on the back of the limousine to capture a piece of skull that had ejected from President Kennedy’s head. And Clint Hill said he saw a hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull as he ran up to the limousine. Therefore, if the skull debris went backwards, and the hole was in the rear of Kennedy’s skull, Kennedy was likely hit from the front. The veteran reporter somehow misses that clear implication. (Shenon, p. 259)

    It is interesting to observe how Shenon introduces the autopsy. He says the autopsy report was “full of gaps”. This is how he describes what many forensic experts, even Dr. Michael Baden of the HSCA, call probably the worst autopsy in recorded history. In his rush to provide another pass to the Commission, he then writes, “The doctors did not have time to trace the path of the bullets through the president’s body.” (emphasis added)

    This is nonsense of two counts. First, according to the official story there was only one bullet that went through Kennedy’s body. The other went through his skull. Second, anyone who has read the testimony of Dr. Pierre Finck at the Clay Shaw trial knows why the doctors did not dissect the back wound: Because they were told not to by the military brass in the room. (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 116) He then says that Sibert and O’Neill were wrong when they said that back wound did not penetrate through the body. (Shenon, p. 260) He doesn’t acknowledge that with the refusal of the military to allow the back wound to be tracked, there is plenty of evidence today that says the agents were correct about the non-transiting back wound. Including the fact that Kennedy’s personal physician, Burkley, certified the back wound as too low to exit the throat. (DiEugenio, p. 121) Further, Shenon provides no reason at all as to why the president’s brain was not sectioned. And Shenon somehow missed the Commission record which states that Specter lied to Rankin by saying that Sibert made no contemporaneous noted of the autopsy. (ibid)

    But Shenon is not done carrying water for Specter. Later on he says that when Specter did his reconstruction of the Single Bullet Theory he wound up with a clear image of the trajectory going through Kennedy’s neck before entering Connally. (Shenon, p. 352) First of all, the bullet did not go through Kennedy’s neck. This is a misrepresentation that Shenon makes throughout the book. And he does it with a rigor that cannot be accidental. The bullet entered his back. And since Specter saw at least one autopsy photo of this, he had to know that. Which is why his so-called reconstruction was a mess. And the reconstruction photo printed in the New York Times, showing a chalk mark in an FBI agent’s back, where Specter marked it, gives the lie to Shenon’s “clear image”. Pat Speer has done a fine analysis of Specter’s faulty reconstruction, showing Specter’s increasing desperation to make it work somehow. Unfortunately for the Commission counsel, he could not. But you would never know that from reading Shenon’s book.

    VI

    But as bad as Shenon is in the handling of the physical evidence, he is even worse in his discussions of both Oswald in New Orleans and Mexico City. Clearly, when Jim Garrison’s investigation was disclosed to the public in 1967, the Commission was left with egg on its face. How could the 1964 inquiry have missed so much evidence of Oswald being involved with anti-Castro Cubans and CIA agents? Wouldn’t that be very suspicious behavior which should have raised some serious questions about who Oswald was, and what he was doing in the summer and fall of 1963? Was it withheld from the Commission by the FBI, or the CIA? As it turns out, both John Newman and Anthony Summers found out the FBI did withhold information about Banister and 544 Camp Street from the Commission. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p.102)

    The way Shenon finesses this point is consistent with his overall design. He goes the 1964 time capsule route of freezing everything at that time. He never mentions Guy Banister. And if you do that, then you don’t have to delve into the whole issue of how Oswald ended up with Banister’s address on at least one of his pro-Castro flyers that summer in New Orleans. Which, of course, would lead to this question: Why would a seemingly pro-Castro advocate like Oswald stamp a rightwing CIA agent’s address on his literature? As we shall see, Shenon did not want to go in that direction. It would have ruined the whole insidious plan of his book.

    So Shenon goes the New York Times route. He smears Garrison by calling his prosecution a blatant miscarriage of justice. He then mentions very select witnesses like Carlos Bringuier, Dean Andrews and Evaristo Rodriguez. He treats that trio in a very deliberate and limited way. For instance, he says that the FBI could not find the mysterious caller, Clay Bertrand, who wanted Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald. (Shenon, p. 412) Shenon is, once again, avoiding the declassified record created by the ARRB. For when a Justice Department source revealed in 1967 that Bertrand and Clay Shaw were the same person, FBI officer Cartha DeLoach wrote to fellow officer Clyde Tolson that Shaw’s name had surfaced in December of 1963 as part of the original FBI inquiry into the Kennedy case. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 388) Later on, it turned out that the FBI did have several sources who revealed to them that Shaw was Bertrand. And Jim Garrison had several more. Further, Andrews admitted to Harold Weisberg that Shaw was Bertrand. (ibid, pgs. 387-88) In typical MSM spin mode, Shenon uses Andrews’ altered description of Bertrand to demean his value as a witness. He can do this since he does not reveal that Andrews’ office was rifled and his life was threatened. (ibid)

    Oswald in New Orleans is a good place to bring up Shenon’s portrait of Allen Dulles. Shenon tries to portray the fired spymaster as a doddering old blunderbuss throughout. Thereby ignoring the key fact that no Commissioner was as active in the proceedings as much as Dulles was. (Reclaiming Parkland, p. 274) Although Shenon tries to hold Bobby Kennedy responsible for the Commission not knowing about the CIA plots to kill Castro, isn’t the much more logical culprit Allen Dulles? The plots began under his watch, and continued under his supervision for over two years. Dulles attended each executive session meeting of the Commission, and more full and partial hearings than anyone else. He had more than ample opportunity to inform the fellow Commissioners about the plots. He chose not to.

    In his discussion of Oswald and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Shenon quotes Dulles as saying that no one would hire someone as shiftless as Oswald as an undercover agent. (p. 145) He then quotes him as saying, “What was the ostensible mission? Was it to penetrate the Fair Play for Cuba Committee?” Shenon can’t bring himself to answer Dulles with, yes, that is what many people researching the JFK case now believe. If not, then why would Oswald stamp his FPCC literature with the address of 544 Camp Street, which was Guy Banister’s office? And why would the FBI block information about this from going to the Commission? Why would so many witnesses see Oswald inside Banister’s offices? Why, according to some of them, would Banister give Oswald his own room to work out of? Why would Banister exclaim about Oswald using his address on his FPCC flyers, “How is it going to look for him to have the same address as me?” (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pgs. 111-13) And then, is it just a coincidence that both the FBI and CIA had counter-intelligence programs in operation against the FPCC at the time Oswald was creating such a ruckus in New Orleans? And is it just another coincidence that one of the men running the CIA program in this regard was David Phillips, who was then seen with Oswald before he allegedly went to Mexico? And is it just a coincidence that on September 16th, the day Oswald stood in line at the New Orleans Mexican consulate with CIA agent William Gaudet, the CIA sent the FBI a cable saying that they were going to plant “deceptive information which might embarrass” the FPCC in a foreign country. (ibid, p. 356)

    Shenon’s readers cannot ask if this is all just a coincidence. For the simple reason that he gives them almost none of this information. Therefore, he can leave the Dulles’ supposition hanging out there as the mental meanderings of a tired old man.

    But there is another reason that the author does all this. Shenon is about to end his book with a very much planned for coup de grace. And in doing so, he is about to unleash another Shenonism. That is, he will present something that is old as new, and convey it to the reader as something important which the Commission should have known about.

    Because of his sources, Shenon is intent on keeping Oswald as the sole killer of Kennedy. But he wants to solve a problem the Commission had trouble with. Namely, supplying Oswald with a credible motive. Shenon’s solution is one of the biggest CIA backstops in the history of this case. Shenon says that Castro was behind Oswald. In fact, as HSCA investigators Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez discovered, many of the false stories that surfaced in the days after the assassination linking Oswald to Castro originated with assets of none other than David Phillips. Who was very likely the overall supervisor for Oswald’s activities in New Orleans with the FPCC. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 362) But by not exposing what Oswald was really up to in New Orleans, he greases the rails for what he is about to do in Mexico City.

    And what he does there is pure sorcery. It is evident from his rather sparse footnotes that the he has read the HSCA’s Mexico City Report, commonly known as the Lopez Report. What is amazing is: 1.) How little he uses it, and 2.) How he bypasses its meaning. Anyone who reads the Lopez Report cannot escape the clear suggestion that Oswald did not go to Mexico City. And if that is so, then someone impersonated him at the Cuban and Russian embassies. Because the Lopez Report does not deal with Oswald’s alleged bus trip to Mexico City or his return to Texas, the longest and most detailed study of those two bus voyages is in John Armstrong’s Harvey and Lee. (See pages 614-706) This author wrote a shorter treatment of the subject in which he agreed with Armstrong’s thesis. (Follow the link and scroll down.) As we shall see, Shenon cannot agree with this imposter concept. And he dares not list the following evidence which indicates that is the case:

    • The voice on the tapes sent from the CIA’s Mexico City station to the FBI turned out not to be Oswald’s.
    • In over 50 years the CIA has not been able to produce a photo showing Oswald going either into or out of one of the two embassies. Even though they had extensive multi-camera coverage of each building and Oswald visited both embassies a total of five times.
    • Numerous witnesses who saw “Oswald” said he was a short man with blonde hair.
    • In 1978, photos showing this man were released by the Cuban government. They matched the short, blonde witness testimony stated above.
    • The man the CIA says went to the embassies spoke broken Russian and fluent Spanish. This is the opposite of what we know about Oswald. He spoke fluent Russian and poor Spanish.
    • Before she signed her deal with the phony Tex-Italia films, Marina Oswald insisted that Oswald had never mentioned going to Mexico City to her before she left New Orleans.
    • The FBI canvassed every photo shop within a five-mile radius of the Cuban and Russian embassies. None of them recalled Oswald coming in to get a photo, which is what had to have occurred.

    The list could go on and on, e.g. Oswald’s name is not on the bus manifest going down and the FBI could never find the attendant who sold him a ticket. The point is this: Shenon does not deal with any of the above matters. Why? Because of his upcoming Shenonism. Which we will now elucidate.

    Based on an FBI report of an informant codenamed SOLO, Shenon is going to write that Oswald walked into the Cuban consulate and said that he was going to kill Kennedy. Now, when Shenon appeared on Face the Nation with his old friend Bob Schieffer, Schieffer was shocked about this “new” document and Shenon said, well it had been sitting there in the National Archives all this time. That implication is simply false. I saw this document 19 years ago in San Francisco at Dr. Gary Aguilar’s house. John Newman and myself were visiting Gary and I was looking through some documents the former intelligence analyst had in his briefcase. When I picked this one up and showed it to John he said quite simply and directly, “That’s a forgery.”

    And upon analysis, that is pretty much an inescapable conclusion. The document consists of a letter by an informant to Gus Hall, head of the communist party in America. Much of the material in the report is accurate, since SOLO was an informant within the CPUSA. But as Newman told me in a phone conversation, one of the problems with the document is this: He would not include that kind of information in a letter to Hall. (Interview with Newman, 11/29/13) He was much too experienced and much too aware of proper channels to do that. Secondly, on the surface this story is specious. We are to think that because Oswald was having difficulty getting his in-transit visa to Russia via Cuba that he would now explode in front of the workers there and say, “I’m going to kill Kennedy!” When, in fact, it was his own fault that he was having problems getting the visa since he was not prepared with the correct documentation. For instance, he didn’t even have the proper passport photo.

    Related to this, as Arnaldo M. Fernandez wrote in his CTKA review of Castro’s Secrets, how could Oswald or an imposter say such a thing without either the incoming or outgoing consul hearing it i.e. Eusebio Azcue or Alfredo Mirabal? Because both men testified to the HSCA they heard no such thing. Neither did the person who dealt with Oswald the most, receptionist Silvia Duran.

    Further, if one looks at the table of Oswald’s alleged activities in Mexico City in Oswald and the CIA, one will see that Oswald or his impersonator called the Russian Embassy before visiting the Cuban embassy. (Newman, p. 356) He then visited the Cuban Embassy in person. Why on earth would he say something like this knowing that he needed clearance from both embassies to get his in-transit visa to Russia? Once he had the difficulties at the Cuban embassy, they would just call the Russians and tell them, “Hey, this guy said he’s going to kill Kennedy.” (ibid, interview with Newman.)

    As Newman also stated, Castro did not make any mention of this in either speech he made concerning the JFK assassination afterwards. That is the nationally televised radio/TV appearance of November 23rd, or his speech at the University of Havana on November 27th. And since no one heard Oswald say this in the embassy, Castro would have had to manufacture the quote. Why would he do such a thing?

    Newman also said that the informant would not manufacture it either. His thesis is that someone in the FBI manufactured the quote and then stuck it in the report. He compared it to a man stealing someone else’s check and forging the signature. Newman also said that this is not the last of these documents that the ARRB found pinning the crime on Castro. The rest are classified Top Secret and may be declassified in 2017. The purpose of keeping them classified is so they could not be exposed, yet their contents could be divulged to select people in the higher circles. Who could then parcel them out to journalists who were predisposed to run with them.

    The other way that Shenon propagates his Castro did it story is through a woman named Elena Garro de Paz. Elena was distantly related to Silvia Duran, and, for political reasons-Duran was a leftist, Elena a conservative – they did not like each other. Elena told a story about seeing Oswald at a “twist party” with Duran. Her story at times also included a red-haired Cuban, which recalled one of the Phillips’ originated stories about Oswald via his asset Gilberto Alvarado. A story that fell apart under scrutiny. Elena was a fairly popular conservative writer in Mexico at the time. Many considered her eccentric and, as Shenon admits, CIA station chief Winston Scott thought she was “nuts”. Duran never denied the “twist party” or the possibility that Elena was there. But she always denied that the man she met as Oswald was there.

    When I asked Eddie Lopez about the Elena allegations back in 1994, he said that he probably spent too much time tracking them down. When I recently talked to Dan Hardway about them, he went further in his remarks: he wished at that time he had the document saying the CIA was about to try and discredit the FPCC in a foreign country. (E-mail communication with Hardway, 11/19/13) Meaning he felt it was part of a deliberate disinformation campaign. The fact that CIA FPCC informant June Cobb, appears to be the first to disseminate the allegations would appear to support that view.

    Whatever one thinks of Elena Garro de Paz and her stories, what Shenon does with them is diabolical. By coupling this questionable witness with the specious SOLO report, he postulates a conspiracy by Cuba to kill Kennedy through Oswald. And he tops it off by using Elena to implicate Silvia Duran in the plot! The way Shenon does this is clever, and in keeping with his method of keeping the reader in the dark. The reader will note, I previously wrote that Duran always denied “that the man she met as Oswald” was at the twist party. The reason I stated it that way was because Duran always denied that Oswald was the man who she talked to in the embassy. She has always been one of the strongest witnesses bolstering the concept of an imposter in Mexico City: the short, blonde Oswald. As noted above, Shenon does not tell the reader about any of this, even though it echoes throughout the Lopez Report. So when he confronts Duran late in the book and she tells him she was not attracted to the short guy, Shenon interjects that Oswald was 5′ 9″ inches tall. Therefore implying that Duran was not being honest. (Shenon, p. 552) He can get away with this because he does not tell the reader that Duran never saw the Oswald he is describing. He does the same with witness Oscar Contreras. He says that in 2013, Contreras said that he saw Oswald talking to people from the Cuban embassy at a banquet. It is bad enough that this story just came out decades later. But what makes it worse is that when interviewed by other writers like Tony Summers, Contreras also said the man who identified himself as Oswald to him was a short blonde guy. (Summers, Conspiracy, p. 352)

    So what Shenon does here is turn the Lopez Report on its head. Instead of the intricate delineation of a CIA deception in advance of the assassination to implicate Oswald by use of an imposter, Shenon tells us Duran was part of a Cuban plot to recruit the real Oswald. But further, Shenon does not tell the reader that when Duran was arrested the day after the assassination, her description of a short blonde Oswald was edited out of transcripts given to the Warren Commission. (Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 646) In fact, Phillips actually prepared the list of questions for the Mexican security forces (DFS) to ask Duran. And they were clearly implicative of ensnaring her in a phony Castro plot against Kennedy. (ibid, p. 647) Years later, Duran told Ed Lopez that she had been tortured in order to get her to admit that she, Oswald and the Cuban government were part of a plot to murder President Kennedy. In fact, they actually tried to stuff words to that effect into her mouth under painful duress.(ibid, pgs. 676-67) According to a Flash Cable sent to CIA headquarters, the idea for her second arrest was to try and get her to corroborate the Gilberto Alvarado story about Oswald being paid in advance by a “negro with red hair in the Cuban embassy” to kill Kennedy. Alvarado was also told to say that he saw Duran hugging Oswald in the embassy. Elements of Alvarado’s story will later get mixed in with Elena Garro’s. In fact, like Elena’s story, Phillips’ questions tried to establish a relationship between Duran and Oswald outside the embassy compound. (ibid, p. 675) As the reader can see, Shenon is continuing in Phillips’ footsteps. Except he covers his trail by cutting out the information that will reveal those steps.

    Towards the very end, Shenon does something even worse than that. He tries to aggrandize the Garro de Paz twist party with Oswald into something like the Murchison ranch party in Dallas the night before JFK’s assassination. (Shenon, p. 556)According to Shenon, the whole purpose of the occasion was to put Oswald up to killing Kennedy! Recall, according to Duran and Contreras, its not even Oswald at the party. With Elena Garro there! This I what I mean about the book scaling the walls of high camp.

    This review could go on and on. For perhaps twice as many pages. That is how many dubious facts and comments it contains. As Victor Marchetti told me, the joke about David Phillips and the CIA was that he never really retired. As he told me, “Dave was retired, but not really retired.” This was when Phillips met Marchetti to try and get him to join his CIA alumni association of former officers. Well, from this horrendous book, the joke is that it looks like Shenon never really retired from the New York Times. He is still hard at work on their national security agenda. Recall what Judy Miller did in the run up to the Iraq War? Shenon just did the same for the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. He put out a cover story; one that is patently false.

    The cruel and shocking act the Warren Commission performed is that it helped frame an innocent man for killing President Kennedy. The surviving members of that infamous panel have been trying to wash themselves clean of what they did for over 40 years. Shenon was their latest volunteer. If one wants to read the real story behind what happened inside the Warren Commission, please read Inquest or Breach of Trust. One will find more truth in one chapter of either book than you will find in all of A Cruel and Shocking Act.

    Read the analysis by Arnaldo M. Fernandez for more on Shenon’s use of this improbable “threat” by Oswald.

  • Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets

    The End of an Obsession: A Review of “Castro’s Secrets”

    After almost half a century of conspiracy theories on the JFK assassination, a former CIA analyst and current research associate at the Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (ICCAS) at the University of Miami has accidentally given the conclusive evidence that Castro had nothing to do with Oswald or Kennedy’s death. In his latest book, Castro’s Secrets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Dr. Brian Latell insisted on unveiling a conspiracy of silence: Castro would have known in advance Oswald was going to kill Kennedy and chose to remain silent about it. Far from making even a circumstantial case against Castro, Dr. Latell actually paved the way for critical thinking which erases any cloud of suspicion.

    The Comer Clark Allegation

    Castro’s foreknowledge is an old story that was first broken by late British journalist Comer Clark. This was a story entitled “Fidel Castro Says He Knew of Oswald Threat to Kill JFK” (National Enquirer, London, October 15, 1967, pages 4-5). On July 9, 1967, Clark flew to Havana and tried to carry out an interview with Castro, but it was flatly denied. (note)

    Nevertheless, Clark wrote that an impromptu interview had taken place anyway. It took place on a sidewalk at a pizzeria in front of a cheering crowd. The claim was that Castro told Clark,

    “Yes,I heard of Lee Harvey Oswald’s plan to kill President Kennedy. It’s possible I could have saved him. I might have been able to, but I didn’t. I never believed the plan would be put into effect.”

    Castro went on and explained that Oswald visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City twice. The second time he said something like: Someone ought to shoot that President Kennedy. Then Castro said,

    “And this was exactly how it was reported to me; ‘Maybe I’ll try to do it.”

    This was less than two months before the American President was assassinated. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) contacted Fidel about this accusation. On April 3, 1978, he replied that since he never went to public restaurants, the man must have invented the story.

    Congressman Christopher Dodd (D/Connecticut) stressed that it was ridiculous that the head of a country would give a print interview in a pizzeria. (HCSA Report, Volume III, pages 207-09). Dodd could have further added that he would never do so in a crowd and certainly not about such a sensitive matter.

    Anthony Summers further undermined the Clark tale. He discovered that Clark, who was now deceased, had a reputation for selling sensational and sometimes spurious stories. When Summers talked to Clark’s widow, she said that he never mentioned such an interview to her. Beyond that, Nina Gadd, Clark’s secretary, said that it was she who originated the story, even though she had never even been to Cuba. Gadd supposedly did this based not upon Clark, but what she heard from a Latin American foreign minister. (Summers, Conspiracy, p. 364)

    Nevertheless, the Final Report of HSCA (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979, page 122) said that the substance of Clark’s interview with Castro had been independently reported to the U.S. Government by a highly confidential and reliable source: Oswald had indeed vowed in the presence of Cuban consulate officials to assassinate the President. But further investigation led the HSCA to believe that Oswald did not voice such a threat to Cuban officials, and however reliable the confidential source may be, it would be in error in this instance.

    The Jack Childs report

    Although Chief Counsel Robert Blakey would not reveal who the source was, it turned out to be Jakob “Jack” Childs, codenamed NY 694-S by the FBI. Jack had engaged with his brother Morris in the Operation SOLO (1958-77). Their mission was to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), in order to gather intelligence about its relations with the USSR and other communist regimes. On May 20, 1964, Jack Childs flew from Moscow to a beach in Cuba on the SOLO Mission 15. He allegedly spent ten days there and was able to talk with Castro about the JFK assassination.

    Childs reported to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that Castro received the information about Oswald’s appearance at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico in an oral report from “his diplomats” in the Embassy. (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 428) According to Childs, Castro was told about this immediately:

    ˜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). [Castro] stated that when 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.” (FBI Records: The Vault – SOLO, http://vault.fbi.gov/solo. See part 63, pgs. 58-59).

    The old sleuth Hoover summed up to Warren Commission General Counsel, James Lee Rankin, on June 17, 1964: The information furnished by our source at this time as having come from Castro is consistent with and substantially the same as that which appears in Castro’s speech of November 27, 1963. No further action is contemplated by this Bureau. (Warren Commission Document 1359).

    The Latell Report

    In the June 2012 edition of the electronic newsletter, The Latell Report, published by the ICCAS-UM , Dr. Latell summed up: Childs learned that Castro received the information about Oswald’s appearances at the Cuban embassy, because he was told about it immediately. Fidel spoke to Childs on the basis of facts given to him by his embassy personnel, who dealt with Oswald, and apparently made a full, detailed report. By trimming the phrase “after President Kennedy was assassinated” from the Childs report, Dr. Latell turned this alibi into a smoking gun against Castro, who had denied any foreknowledge of Oswald in both his speech at the University of Havana on November 27, 1963, and his Radio/TV appearance on November 23, 1963.

    Dr. Latell boasts about catching Castro in a lie, but only by keeping hidden the actual time ”after President Kennedy was assassinated” in which Castro knew about Oswald. Childs also tapers the story by furnishing the exact location of the Oswald outburst: the Cuban embassy, not the consulate, located in a separate building. The Lopez Report [a.k.a. “Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City”, 1978] actually states that the CIA photographed the visitors to the Cuban diplomatic compound from two different windows in a third floor apartment at 149 Francisco Marquez Street (see pages 12 ff.) because the entrance to the embassy was on the corner of Tacubaya Alley and the entrance to the consulate, on the corner of Zamora Street.

    Moreover Childs came to the foregone conclusion that Castro had nothing to with the assassination. After discussing his statements with Beatrice Johnson, the CPUSA representative in Cuba, Childs and Johnson decided never to talk again about the issue because it was dynamite. Hoover took it seriously, but Dr. Latell does not. He dared to manipulate time and location for making his point, and no wonder the issue exploded in his hands.

    The HSCA’s Sound Judgment

    Unaware of the actual circumstances, the least the HSCA could do was discard that Oswald voiced threat to Cuban officials. Why? Because both the outgoing and incoming Cuban consuls in Mexico City, Eusebio Azcue and Alfredo Mirabal, testified (HCSA Report, Volume III, pages 127-58 and 173-78, respectively) that they did not recall hearing Oswald threatening Kennedy’s life while dealing with him about an in-transit Cuban visa to go to the Soviet Union. Neither did the Mexican employee Silvia Duran (JFK Exhibit F-440A), who attended Oswald three times on the same day, September 27, 1963, regarding his visa application (JFK Exhibit F-408).

    Based only on newspapers, Castro knew that the HSCA—especially the authors of the Mexico City report, Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway—had extensive information about phone conversations in Mexico City. Azcue and Mirabal were forced to truthfully testify to avoid being potentially caught in a lie at a public hearing in the United States. And one will search in vain for any such threats in the transcripts declassified today in the Lopez Report.

    As Newman writes, the problem with the Childs Report as issued to Hoover is that there is no specificity in it: Who were the diplomats who heard this threat? On what day was it made? How was it communicated from Mexico City to Havana? And how could the CIA not have known about it with all their audio surveillance installed? (Newman, p. 428) But beyond that, in a private interview Newman gave to Jim DiEugenio in San Francisco, the former intelligence analyst showed him the actual Childs report as given to Hoover. Newman told DiEugenio that, because he had seen hundreds of such informant reports, he could tell by the formatting that it was a forgery.

    The First Defector

    For disputing HSCA logic discounting Childs, Dr. Latell resorts to defectors from the Castro General Directorate of Intelligence (acronym DGI in Spanish). The first one, Vladimir Rodriguez-Lahera, would have told the CIA that Castro lied when he publicly denied any knowledge of Oswald. The legend says Vladimir defected to Canada around April 24, 1964, and the CIA codenamed him AMMUG-1.

    His debriefing (RIF 104-10400-10118) included that “the only possible fabrication known by this source was the specific denial by Fidel Castro on a television program [November 23, 1963], of any Cuban knowledge of Oswald.” For turning the possible fabrication into evidence, Dr. Latell swallows AMMUG-1, saying that the most routine matters at the Cuban diplomatic compound in Mexico City were reported directly to Castro. This author begs to disagree. Neither Castro nor any other Chief of Government has time for being informed about visa applications or nasty applicants.

    By May 8, 1964, the CIA realized AMMUG-1 didn’t know what he was talking about. He ended up admitting: “I have no personal knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald or his activities.” His CIA handler wrote: “The source does not claim to have any significant information concerning the assassination of President Kennedy or about the activities of Oswald.” Even so, Dr. Latell keeps on agonizing about an AMMUG-1 report that Oswald was in contact with DGI officers before, during and after his visits to the Cuban consulate.

    AMMUG-1 did not give the slightest conjecture about after. In regards to ‘during’ the Mexico City trip, he stated that senior intelligence officer Manuel Vega mentioned that Oswald had gone to the Cuban consulate two or three times in connection with a visa. AMMUG-1 didn’t recall anything else about Oswald contacting DGI officers, but added: he felt sure that he would have done so because Vega had said that Oswald had returned several times and [it was] the usual procedure [for] expediting the granting of visas to DGI agents: if the visa applicant does not utter indicative phrases, the DGI officers tell the applicant to return in a few days. This house of cards falls down not only because Oswald came three times on the same day to the Cuban embassy. (See Warren Report, p. 734-35, below) But AMMUG-1 felt sure there was a contact during under the premise that Oswald was a DGI agent. This implies a contact before, but at this point AMMUG-1 became entirely pointless.

     

    CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENGLARGE

    AMMUG-1 page 1
    AMMUG-1 page 3
    WR page 734
     
    AMMUG-2 page 1
    AMMUG-3 page 3
    WR page 735

     

    He said that he thought that Luisa Calderon might have had contact with Oswald because he learned about 17 March 1964, that she had been involved with an American in Mexico. (The DGI had intercepted a letter to her by an American who signed his name as Ower, phonetic, or something similar. He said she had been followed and seen in the company of an American. He did not know if this could have been Oswald.)

    The problem with this is that the Calderon story today is a non-sequitir. If one is not familiar with it, it goes like this: Luisa was a Cuban Embassy employee who was heard on a tapped phone line saying words that were translated as, “I knew almost before Kennedy.” As Rex Bradford pointed out, in the 70’s this became a teaser for, “Did she have foreknowledge of the assassination?” The HSCA could not interview Luisa. But with AMMUG-1 saying to the CIA in 1964 that Oswald may have met with Calderon in 1963 during visits prior to the September-October journey, Luisa’s story now grew even heavier with suspicion.

    As Bradford notes, this call was intercepted at 5:30 PM. So the question becomes: “Were there any other calls previous to this where Luisa could have heard of the assassination?” It turns out there were two such calls. In the first one, captured at 1: 30, she expressed surprise on hearing the news of Kennedy’s death, and she said she did not believe it and asked who did it. As Bradford notes on his Luisa Calderon page at Mary Ferrell Foundation, it is odd that the CIA apparently did not show this other transcript to the HSCA to settle the matter once and for all.

    Neither Calderon nor Mirabal led to Dr. Latell’s suggestion that the DGI was acquainted with Oswald and had started a file on him when he was a Marine stationed (December 22, 1958 – September 11, 1959) in California. The specific account on Oswald attempting to get in with Castroite consular officials in Los Angeles in early 1959 suggests quite the contrary. Former marine (1954-58), Castroite pilot (1959-60) and anti-Castro soldier of fortune (1960-62) Gerald Patrick Hemming stated that he thought Oswald might have been on the Naval Intelligence payroll. “You know, a penetrator. I told the [Castroite] leadership to get rid of him. (Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Hired to Kill Oswald and Prevent the Assassination of JFK, Carroll & Graf, 1992, page 178).

    The Most Valuable Defector

    The last straw in Dr. Latell’s unveiling of a conspiracy of silence is a classic non sequitur fallacy slipped by Major Florentino Aspillaga, a Castro intelligence officer until the year 1985 who defected from Czechoslovakia to Austria in June, 1987. Being hardly 16 years old, Aspillaga already had the standing assignment of electronically detecting CIA agents and infiltration teams. On November 22, 1963, he got an unprecedented order around 9:00 or 9:30 am EST: “Listen to any small detail from Texas.” At 1:40 pm EST, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite broke the news in Dallas, Texas: three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade. Aspillaga drew the conclusion: Castro knew Kennedy would be killed.

    Whatever the reason Castro would have had to give the order, the most unlikely is some foreknowledge about Oswald’s intention to shoot Kennedy, because it would imply that Castro must have been sure about Oswald’s whereabouts on November 22, 1963. The well-known, and quite eventful journey of Oswald makes such foreknowledge by Castro highly improbable. Shortly before Oswald left New Orleans for Mexico City, his wife Marina Oswald (nee Prusakova) had moved to Irving, about 17 miles from Dallas, for the birth of their second child. She stayed at her friend Ruth Paine’s home. Oswald came back from Mexico City on October 2, 1963, when nobody, including God and the CIA, knew whether he would still be in Dallas or elsewhere by the time of the “still in the talking stage” JFK visit. Oswald arrived in Dallas on October 3, 1963, and checked in at the YMCA. The day before, the FBI Field Office in New Orleans was tasking Dallas, Fort Worth, and even Malvern (Arkansas) for ascertaining Oswald’s whereabouts.

    After failing to get hired at Padgett Printing in Dallas, Oswald hitchhiked to Ruth Paine’s house in Irving. He returned to Dallas on October 7, 1963, but couldn’t get a job again and went again to Irving on October 12. He came back to Dallas on October 14. As Ruth Paine mentioned that he was having trouble finding work, her neighbor Linnie Mae Randle hinted about an opening at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD), where her brother Buell Frazier was employed. Paine called Oswald and he began to work at the TSBD on October 16, 1963.

    Apart from the strange order to use intelligence resources for knowing details that will be surely available by listening to the commercial radio, Aspillaga’s credibility is as weak as his reasoning. He told Dr. Latell that he had previously given the information about that order only to the CIA in 1987. Then it must be fully explained why the CIA didn’t come forward with Aspillaga to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which gathered records from 1994 to 1998 after the fireworks made by Oliver Stone with his film JFK (1991). It also makes everyone wonder why Aspillaga abstained from revealing the issue to the media. In June 1988, for instance, he referred to Castro 69 times during a radio interview with Tomas Regalado in Miami, but not even once to Kennedy.

    Dr. Latell wrote in his book he owes a special debt of gratitude to Aspillaga. But both have put themselves in a delicate spot with an anecdote delivered a la carte 25 years later for connecting Castro to Oswald. Dr. Latell abjures social science by messing around with DGI defectors, despite his own foreknowledge about the methodological circumstance that their tales couldn’t be compared with Castro’s archives. The blame is not on Castro for shielding them from outsiders, but on Dr. Latell, since he used the creative imagination of Cuban defectors for writing a non-fiction book instead of a novel about the JFK assassination.

    Note: typically meant wiretaps. (back)

    Note: HSCA Interview of Fidel Castro (back)

    Note: Link to MFF file. (back)

  • HSCA Interview with Fidel Castro

    INVESTIGATION OF THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1978 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS, Washington, D. C.

    KENNEDY SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS
    Name: Fidel CASTRO RuzDate: April 3, 1978 Time: 6: 30 p.m.
    Address: Havana, CubaPlace: Presidential offices
    Interview: Present were President Fidel CASTRO and his interpreter, Senorita Juanita Vera, Captain Felipe Villa, Senor Ricardo Escartin, Zenen Buergo, and Alfredo Ramirez (representing the Government of Cuba). Also present representing the Government of the United States were Congressmen Louis STOKES, Richardson Preyer, Christopher Dodd and staff personnel of HSCA: G. Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel, Gary Cornwell, Deputy Chief Counsel and Edwin Lopez, Researcher/Translator.

    Interview of Fidel Castro Excerpt A

    STOKES: Mr. President, did it come to your attention shortly after the assassination that Lee Harvey oswald, who was the accused assassin, had had contact with your Embassy in Mexico City?

    CASTRO: Yes. In fact, it was after Kennedy’s death that he caught my attention. Because here nobody receives news about anyone filing applications for a visa. These things are always solved through the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. So it never is taken to the government. You know, it is not necessary. This is normal routine work. None of us has anything to do with visas. Some officials knew about it when somebody in particular filed an application there. But tens – or maybe hundreds of thousands of people file applications. But when Kennedy was assassinated and Oswald’s actions were published in the newspapers, the officials who had handled visa applicaitons realized that this Oswald could be the same Oswald who had gone to the Consulate in order to apply for a visa. That is why we had news about it, you know? After Kennedy’s death we learned that a man by the name of Oswald had gone to the consulate and filled out an application for a visa – that he had been told that we did not normally give an intransit visa until the country of destination granted one. And, then we were told that a person had gotten very upset and had protested in an irate manner because he could not receive a visa. This was the news I had, more or less. the rest you know.

    STOKES: We were wondering your…

    CASTRO: There is something I would like to add in that connection. You see, it was always very mcuh suspicious to methat a person who later appeared to be involved in Kennedy’s death would have requested a visa rom cuba. Because, I said to myself – what would have happened had by any chance that man come to cuby – visited Cuba – gone back to the States and then appeared involved in Kennedy’s death? That would have really been a provocation – a gigantic provocation. Well, that man did not come to Cuba simply because that was the norm we rejected visa applications…like that. In those days the mechanism was very rigid because, of course, we had suspicions of anyone who tried to come to Cuba. People in charge of granting visas asked themselves: Why does (this applicant) want to come to Cuba? What kind of counter-revolutionary activity could he carry out in cuba? Maybe the people thought that the person was a CIA or FBI agent, you know, so it was very difficult for a north American, just from his own wishes, to come to Cuba – because systematically we denied the visas. So, I think that there could always be an exception, but in those times it was very, very difficult to have anyone from the United States come into Cuba because there was a tremendous suspicion and because in general permits to (travel to cuba) were denied. Now, if it was a transit visa going toward another country – let’s say had the Soviet Union granted the visa, you may be sure that our Consul would have granted the transit visa because the person would not be coming to Cuba only, but would be going to another country. The person would have to come (here) and if the Soviets would have granted the visa, then that would have accredited the person..like, you know, the person would have been given a transit visa because I feel that if the Soviets had granted the visa, then he would have come here. (In that era) it was not so crazy (that he tried) to come to Cuba because if he had obtained the visa from another country, it would have been for certain that our Consul would have granted him the visa to stop here. Now, can you imagine if that person had been to Cuba in October and then in November the President of the United states would have been killed? That is why it has always been something a very obscure thing – something suspicious because I interpreted it as a deliberate attempt to link Cuba with Kennedy’s death. That is one of the things that seemed to me very strange…

    STOKES: Let me ask you this question, Mr. President. One of the persons that we have talked with since we have been here in Havana has been your former Consul, Mr. Azcue, who was produced at our request by your officials here. He told us that with reference to the man who appeared at your Embassy and who filled out an application for an intransit visa, that the photograph which appears on the visa application is the photograph of the man who died in the United States as Lee Harvey Oswald, but, that this man was not the individual who had appeared at your Embassy in Mexico City. And, my question would be in two parts: One, have you had an opportunity to talk with Mr. Azcue? And secondly, from all the information available to you, would this be your opinion alsothat the man who appeared at the Embassy was an imposter?

    CASTRO: Actually, I don’t have an opinion about that. I wouldn’t be able to say whether I’ve met Azcue once. I don’t remember now. I have no recollection at present of having met Azcue. Because I had been given the information about all that, I myself did not know whether he was in Mexico or here. It is very likely that I have seen him some time; however, I don’t recall having met Azcue those days. Secondly, about the idea of an imposter, I have no special theory on that. As far as I have understood, Azcue has an idea on that. I’ve heard those comments before comments about the possibility of a difference, that he noticed the difference between the person who appeared requesting the visa and the person known as Oswald. But, I don’t have a theory on that. It is likely that there could be two different people. But, now I am thinking if the person had obtained the visa, would he have visited Cuba? That is a hypothesis. What did he want the visa for? From my point of view, the individual could have come to Cuba and compromised us. He would have us compromised. It seems to me that to apply for the visa had the purpose of having the individual come to Cuba. Now, we would have to enter into many conjectures to reach a conclusion on that. Because where did he get the passports? Where did he find the passports that he was taking there? Where was Oswald’s passport? What became of Oswald’s passports? Those papers should be somewhere. I don’t know what could have been the sense of sending another man, but I wouldn’t dare deny that posibility. Actually, we would have to know what would have been the purpose. Why would another person have been sent? I don’t know whether you would have a theory about that. Personally, I don’t have a theory.

    Villa: About the possibility of an imposter, in public sources we have read that the possibility exists that there could be a double that carried out some actions that the real Oswald did not on some occasions in 1963.

    CASTRO: There is something that I can guarantee. The Cuban government believes that Azue is a serious and honest man; and that he has never said something differently from what he said the first time. He has more or less kept his story as far as I know. I mean, he is a person you can trust. He is a trustful man. That is all I can say about Azcue. But, I amy say that if many people have elaborated theories, I am not among them.

    EXCERPT B

    Comer Clark’s Allegation

    Cornwell: One passage reads as follows: An interview in July 1967 with a British journalist, Comer Clark…do you have the translation of it there?

    Villa: Yes.

    CASTRO: Let me see it. I have it here.
    Pause: (Approximately one minute while President CASTRO reads it.)

    CASTRO: This is absurd. I didn’t say that.

    Cornwell: Did the interview ever occur?

    CASTRO: It has been invented from the beginning until the end. I didn’t say that. How could I say that? It’s a lie from head to toe. If this man would have done something like that, it would have been our moral duty to inform the United States. You understand? Because if a man comes here, mentions that he wants to kill Kennedy, we are (being provoked), do you realize that? It would have been similar to a mad person. If somebody comes to us and said that, it would have been similar to a mad person. If somebody comes to us and said that, it would have been our moral responsibility to inform the United States. How could we accept a man from Mexico to Cuba who tells us that he is going to kill President Kennedy? If somebody is trying create provocation or a trap, and uhwe would have denounced him. Sure, a person coming here or even in one of our embassies saying thatand that never happenedin no part, as far as I know.

    Escartin: That refers to the interview you spoke about in the beginning.

    CASTRO: But how could they interview me in pizzeria? I never to to public restaurants and that man invented that. That was invented rom the upper to the bottom. I do not remember that. And, it is a surprise for me to se because I couldn’t have said that. You have to see who wrote it. And, what is the job of that journalist? What is engaged in? And, what prestige has this journalist? Not the one that wrote that book, but the origin of that version. You should have to find who he is and why he wrote it, and with whom he is relatedand which sense they have to attribute those words which are absolutely invented. I think it is possible that you would be able to find out who that journalist was. Do you have some news about about that journalist in that newspaper?

    Villa: He was in Cuba and tried to carry out an interview with you.

    CASTRO: Let me tell you. of every one hundred interviews that are requested of me I only grant one because if I were to give all the interviews that I am requested to, you can be sure that I would not be able to have anything but twenty-four hours of my life to have interviews. I would not have enough time to do anything else. Barbara Walters waited three years for an interviewjust almost three years. And even that of Moyers. I didn’t want to have that Moyers interview. He started talking and the truth is that he was very insistent form the time he came down from the airplane and in spite of the fact that there was no commitment from me regarding the interview. I granted one. There are a lot of interview. I granted one. there are a lot of interview requests and it is very difficult, but I would never have given a journalist an interview in a pizzeria.

    Dodd: I don’t even give interviews in a pizzeria. (back)

    Villa: Another element commander. That interview was published in a sensationalist or yellow press from the United States. It is a non-serious newspaper.

    CASTRO: Especially at that time, a lot of barbaric things were publisheda lot of lies.

    EXCERPT C

    Use of Assassinations As a Political Weapon

    CASTRO: ……………….It was really something inconceivable – could have the idea of killing the President? First, because that would have been a tremendous insanity. The Cuban Revolutionaries and the people who have made this Revolution have proven to be intrepid and to make decisions in the right moment. But, we have not proven to be insane people. The leaders of the Revolution do not do crazy things and have always been extremely concerned to prevent any factor that could become a kind of an argument or a pretext for carrying out agression against our country. We are a very small country. We have the United States 90 miles from our shore which is a very large, powerful country economically, technically, militarily. So, for many years we lived concerned that an invasion could take palce..I mean, indirect and at the end a direct aggression. We were very close to that. Yet look at the conclusions we draw. If the elections of 1960 had not been won by Kennedy, but Nixon instead, during the Bay of Pigs, the United States would have invaded Cuba. We mean that in the midst of the fight that Kennedy followed the line that had been already traced.

    There is no doubt that we appreciate very highly the fact that Kennedy resisted every kind of pressure not to have the Marines land in our country. Because, there were many people who wanted the Marines to land here. Nixon himself was in favor of that. Had Nixon been President during the Bay of Pigs invasion, a landing by the military army of the United States would have taken place. We are absolutely convinced of that. However, Kennedy resisted all the pressures and he did not do that. What would that have meant for us? The destruction of the country? Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of deaths? Because, undoubtedly the people would fight. The people I am absolutely sure about. An invasion of Cuba by the United States would have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe millions of lives. We were aware of that. We have an American military base in our territory, by force. And, it is not assumed that anyone is going to have a military base on someone else’s territory, if it is not on the basis of an agreement. However, the United States has military bases in many places of the world, but here, it is by force. From that base, many provocations have been carried out against Cuba. There were people wounded..there were people killed. What did we do?

    We brought our guards away from the lines, from the fence. We never shot at them. Why? Because we made every possible effort so that an incident of that kind would not become a pretext to be attacked. So, we have followed the policy. We had an American boat just three miles away from us for years, a warship full of electronic communications equipment and never a hostile action was carried against that warship. So, there are many events that have proven how careful Cuba has always been to prevent the perpetration of an invasion. We could have died heroically – no doubt about it. Now, that would have been a victory for our people. They’re willing to be sacrificed and to die. Yet, it would have been just another page in history..nothing else. So, we have always been very much aware to not give The United States the pretext..the possibility..for (an invasion.) What was the cause of the missile crisis? The need we had to seek protection in case of an (invasion) from the United States. We agreed on the installation of the (stategic) missiles, because undoubtedly that diminished the danger of direct aggression. That became a danger of another kind, a kind of a global danger we became, but we were trying to protect our country at all times. Who here could have operated and planned something so delicate as the death of the united States President. That was insane. From the ideological point of view it was insane. And from the political point of view, it was a tremendous insanity. I am going to tell you here that nobody, nobody ever had the idea of such things. What would it do? We just tried to defend our folks here, within our territory. Anyone who subscribed to that idea would have been judged insane..absolutely sick. Never, in twenty years of revolution, I never heard anyone suggest nor even speculate about a measure of that sort, because who could think of the idea of organizing the death of the President of the United States. That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years, in every possible sense. Since the United States is much more powerful than we are, what could we gain from a war with the United States? The United States would lose nothing. The destruction would have been here. The United States had U-2 air surveillancing for almost fifteen years. The planes flew over our territory every day. The women said that they called not go over their terrace naked for the U-2 would have taken a picture of them. That thing we could not allow to happen, you know, because it was demoralizing. So, there were, you know, those flights just fery close to the soil. Those kind of flights was really demoralizing for our people. It was impossible to let them continue to do that, so we had to shoot at them. On the following day after the missile crisis, we had the need to shoot at those planes, because to have allowed that would have created a demoralization among our people. And, I say that if we allowed that, you wouldn’t have been able even to play baseball here. Because those planes came just twenty meters from here, so it was really demoralizing. See, the U-2 came very high, you know, and I tell you, Cuba has been characterized by following a firm policy, a policy of principles. Our position was known after the missile crisis. We were not in a position to make any concessions. That is a known position, but Cuba, the leaders of the Cuban Revolution, have never made that kind of insanity, and that I may assure you. And the biggest kind of insanity that could have gone through anyone’s mind here would have been that of thinking of killing the President of the United States. Nobody would have thought of that. In spite of all the things, in spite of all the attempts, in spite of all the irritation that brought about an attitude of firmness, a willingness to fight, that was translated by our people into a spirit of heroism, but it never became a source of insanity. I’ll give you practical reasons. Apart from our ideology, I want to tell you that the death of the leader does not change the system. It has never done that. And, the best example we have is Batista. Batista murdered thousands of our comrades. If there was anyone in which that kind of revenge was justified, it was Batista. However, our movement did very difficult things, but it never had the idea of physically eliminating Batista. Other revolutionary groups did, but never our movement. We had a war for twenty-five months against Batista’s army and spent seven years under Batista’s dictatorship with thousands dying. But, it never came to our minds..we could have done it, very well, but we never thought about that, because it was different from our feelings. That is our position. That is why we are interested. That is why I was asking you whether you are really hopeful to give serious conclusions on this. On your part, if there is something we could give you, we would, without any kind of precondition. The information we have offered you is not conditioned to anything. In spite of the fact that the problem is thorny, that doesn’t stop this Committee here from giving the impression that we are being judged here, that we are being tried.

    EXCERPT D

    Statements Made By Fidel CASTRO At the Brazilian Embassy on September 7, 1963

    CASTRO: ……………….Then a journalist asked me…and the purpose I had…I don’t remember literally what I said, but I remember my intention in saying what I said and it was to warn the government that we know about the (attempted) plots against our lives. I mean, in one way or the other to let the United States government know that we knew about the existence of those plots. So, I said something like those plots start to set a very bad precedent, a very serious one that that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions…but I did not mean to threaten by that. I did not mean even that..not in the least..but rather, like a warning that we knew; that we had news about it; and that to set those precedents of plotting the assassination of leaders of other countries would be a very bad precedent..something very negative. And, if at present, the same would happen under the same circumstances, I would have no doubt in saying the same as I said (then) because I didn’t mean a threat that. I didn’t say it as a threat. I did not mean by that that we were going to take measures – similar measures – like a retaliation for that. We never meant that because we knew that there were plots. For three years we had known that there were plots against us. So, the conversation came about very casually, you know, but I would say that all these plots or attempts were part of the everyday life.

    I do remember about being in the Brazilian Embassy at that time..that I did make a statement in that sense…in the sense that I was informed of the plots and that that was a very bad precedent to form the various principles in relation to..

    KENNEDY SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS
    Name: Fidel CASTRO Ruz
    Date: April 3, 1978 Time: 6: 30 p.m.
    Address: Havana, CubaPlace: Presidential offices
    Interview: Present were President Fidel CASTRO and his interpreter, Senorita Juanita Vera, Captain Felipe Villa, Senor Ricardo Escartin, Zenen Buergo, and Alfredo Ramirez (representing the Government of Cuba). Also present representing the Government of the United States were Congressmen Louis STOKES, Richardson Preyer, Christopher Dodd and staff personnel of HSCA: G. Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel, Gary Cornwell, Deputy Chief Counsel and Edwin Lopez, Researcher/Translator.
    The meeting opened and President CASTRO stated:

    CASTRO: Do you have the supposed statements that I have made? I have tried to remember. There is an individual who says that he interviewed me in a restaurant. That is very strange. I tried to recall him, you know. I tried to recall (the proposed) interview and on one occasion (he) said that it was in a (pizzeria). I just reached a conclusion not only because of the circumstances in which he says the interview was made, but also because of the content of the interview…or the alleged interview. I am absolutely certain that that interview never took place. Now, I will have to check that about the (alleged interview at the Brazilian Embassy) because that is true. I mean it’s true that I went to the Brazilian Embassy. I’ve been trying to remember, and I recall the following: It is not that I found out that an attempt was being plotted. Villa, when did the interview occur?

    Villa: On September the seventh, 1963. You spoke about the topic with Bill Moyers.

    CASTRO: Then I had know for a long time. It was not recent because the attempt against our lives started to be planned here a long time before that. I could say that from 1959 that was known to us. We were constantly arresting people trained by the CIA and being provided equipment by the CIA that would come to the country with explosives, with the telescopic target rifles, even bazookas every kind of weapon. Here they organized, since very early, plots at Grantanamo base. So, that was very well known to us. Then a journalist asked me..and the purpose I had…I don’t remember literally what I said, but I remember my intention in saying what I said and it was to warn the government that we know about the (attempted) plots against our lives. I mean, in one way or t he other to let the United States government know that we knew about the existence of those plots. So, I said something like those lots start to set a very bad precedent, a very serious onethat that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions…but I did not mean to threaten by that. I did not mean even that..not in the least..but rather, like warning that we knew; that we had news about it; and that to set those precedents of plotting the assassination of leaders of other countries would be a very bad precedent..something very negative. And, if at present, the same would happen under the same circumstances, I would have no doubt in saying the same as I said (then) because I didn’t mean a threat by that. I didn’t say it as a threat. I did not mean by that that we were going to take measures – similar measures – like a retaliation for that. We never meant that because we knew that there were plots. For three years we had known that there were plots against us. So, the conversation came about very casually, you know; but I would say that all these plots or attempts were part of the everyday like.

    I do remember about being in the Brazilian Embassy at that time…that I did make a statement in that sense…in the sense that I was informed of the plots and that that was a very bad precedent to form the various principles in relation to…I remember (another nefarious precedent) was that of the hijacking of planes. The first planes hijacked in this area were Cuban planes, and the hijacking of the planes was encouraged by the United Stated government. Even an amount of money was offered as a reward to the people that hijacked a Cuban plane. And later what happened? well, it was all the way around terrorist elements and insane elements and every kind of people. (Once) the precedent was established, these people started to hijack planes. And that is what I may tell you is part of that experience. And I repeat again that if a similar situation would come about, I could say just the same words I could say just just same. Now, I cannot guarantee because I don’t have the exact recollection. I don’t have the exact copy of what I said literally. And, of course, one always has to be careful with the versions even on a given statement. But that he had interviewed me in the restaurant, and writing the things he wrote? There was a deliberate purpose of creating confusion, of planting confusion and trying to have Cuba involved in these events.

    STOKES: Mr. President, as a result of the statements or the conversation you had with this gentleman at that time, did you ever hear from President Kennedy?

    CASTRO: I am trying to recall the date. I can tell you that in the period in which Kennedy’s assassination took place Kennedy was changing his policy toward Cuba. I mean by that he was not adopting measures, not in fact. The whole style and aggressive measures against Cuba existed for many years. First of all, the Bay of Pigs; then the missile crisis; then the pirate attacks those attacks which were organized in central America and Miami, at a time at which they sent the mother boats to attack the refineries, the warehouses, boats, merchant ships, port installations and even the (innocent) population was also attacked in those days by these people. It has been known later – more or less – for how long these actions lasted. Now at that time, Kennedy was starting to question all these things. One of the facts, one of the events, was that an American official from the United Nations called my house. I don’t speak English, so he spoke to one of my comrades who was with me there. After that, I’ve been able to go with more accuracy through those things. And, I think it was Atwood. I think it was Atwood because later he was appointed Ambassador to Guinea, and that was very significant because it was the first time such a thing happened – – the first time such a gesture came about. And, you could see undisputably that a new trend was coming (into) existence in the sense of established contacts. So, it was a sort of a change (in) policy. I don’t recollect exactly what month it was. Have you been able to reconstruct the time at which Atwood (phoned me) at my house?

    Escartin: We have been able to reconstruct that date around (inaudible).

    CASTRO: Well, that was after the missile crisis, I think. That was after the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis. I was of the opinion that the only man who could change that policy was Kennedy himself, because it seemed to me that at that time it was not a time of the Bay of Pigs. At that time he had more experience. And, he had much more authority. Maybe after the missile crisis, he had much more influence. I was convinced that Kennedy was the man with enough talent and enough courage to question and change that policy. And, people started to (feel) about it. And I felt that a positive act was that famous speech he made at the American University. It was a speech about the need for peace, the need for prevention of war, the destructions that Hitler’s invasion on the Soviet Union had caused. (He expressed this) in terms that he had not used for a long time that had not been used in the American theory for a long time. I have read all over that speech again. I cannot say that that’s a perfect (speech), I feel that it had some gaps, but if you bear in mind what he said, at the moment he said it, in the midst of the cold war, there is no doubt that those statements were of a tremendous value. Now, in addition to that, the unfortunate circumstance happened that in the days previous to Kennedy’s death a french journalist visited our country Jean Daniels. Then he told me..he said that he was interested in having a discussion about a special topic with me. I remember that I took him with me to Veradero. Then, in the morning it was the morning on the way to Verado and also at the beach he was explaining to me his purpose. We were taking about all this. And, I would say that he was bringing a kind of message from Kennedy. In substance, as far as I remember now, he himself has spoken about this on several occasions. But, the most important thing was he told me that Kennedy had explained to him the great danger that existed during the missile crisis, and that Kennedy asked himself whether I (also) was aware of the whole danger that was announced at the time of the missile crisis. But, he was (somewhat) traumatized with all the remembrances of those days. When Kennedy found out that this journalist was coming to Cuba – he had a long talk with this journalist. (He asked the journalist to talk with me, and then return to Washington with a response). We were just talking in those terms. He had to finish explaining to me everything he had talked about with Kennedy and I had to give him an answer about all this. But then at lunchtime or after lunch I don’t remember quite well the first news started to arrive by radio that an attempt against Kennedy had taken place and that he had been seriously wounded precisely at the moment that we were having that talk and that came to be another symptom, that Kennedy was questioning the policy that had been followed so far. Maybe he was elaborating some formula in order to have that policy changed. (From our) point of view, Mr. Kennedy was the only man that at that point had the authority and enough courage in order to bring about the change in that policy. That was my opinion at that time.

    STOKES: Do you remember the name of the journalist?

    CASTRO: Jean Daniel, a french journalist very well known enjoys prestige. He (had) met with Kennedy for some time, and he was well impressed with Kennedy and he was precisely letting us know (about) the whole interview with Kennedy, and the things that he had talked about with Kennedy regarding Cuba. It was assumed that I had to tell him something so that he would go back and convey it to Kennedy. But, before we had just finished with our conversation, the news arrived of the attempt against Kennedy’s life. Actually, we were very much concerned and immediately we suspected that an effort could be made in order to try to link us…to link that death attempt with the Cuban problems. Because immediately, you know, it seemed to (us that) also within that atmosphere of a cold war, some people could try to have us linked with Kennedy’s death to the point that we were very concerned and we thought about the measures that we could take in the face of a danger of that sort.

    STOKES: Mr. President, I think perhaps in that respect that it might be good for you to tell us what your reaction and that of the Cuban people was to the assassination of President Kennedy.

    CASTRO: I have no objection in telling you my reaction. It was a natural and logical reaction. Actually, I felt sad about it. I received that news with bitterness. Reasons? First, I think an event of that nature always produces that reaction even when it is a political adversary. It’s kind of a repulsion, a rejection. In the second place, I think I have said before that Kennedy was an adversary that we had sort of become used to. I mean that political, a strong political struggle existed. But, he was a known adversary. He was somebody we knew. We had (undergone) the Bay of Pigs, we had had the missile crisis so many things had happened. And, at least he was an adversary we knew about. And all of a sudden, you have the impression that something is missing…that something is missing. (Thirdly,) on the basis of very deep political feelings, I think the first thing I learned from Marxism was the idea that situations, societies and social processes do not depend on men, but rather that there is a system; and the system cannot be changed by changing the men even on the basis of an old controversy. For the very past century among revolutinaries, between these who thought that the Czar should be eliminated or that the emperor had to be eliminated because they were the chiefs. That was the theory of dictatorships. Marxists always have been opposed to the idea of killing or having a person killed. That was a very much debated topic among the Marxist (elements). That is one of the first things the Marxists learned; and that it doesn’t make sense to kill the political leaders…to such an extent that in our own experience here (in Cuba) it never came to our minds the idea that Batista’s regime could be eliminated by eliminating the person. We attacked a regiment with 120 men…over 120 men…one of the strongest regiments of the country…in order to take hold of the weapons and to start a struggle against Batista. And, it never came to our minds the idea of killing Batista. If we had wanted to eliminate Batista, we would have been able to. Later 82 men came back to the country from Mexico in a boat that was barely 60 feet long. We traveled 1500 kilometers. We started a war in Sierra Maestra and it never came to our minds the idea of eliminating Batista physically. (Some) people thought that killing Batista would change the system.

    And finally, maybe one of the things that I regretted the most was that I was convinced that Kennedy was starting to change, himself. And, I was going by the (impression) that I was here talking to that man who was bringing a message from him. Actually, I was sad. I was very badly depressed. The impression I got was very bad. I was very sad about it. He was an adversary; a man with his personal characteristics..being intelligent..you may always have the adversaries, but you have an assessment of them as a person, as an intellectual, as political leaders. To a certain extent we were honored in having such a rival. He was not mediocre. He was an outstanding man. And, that was my reaction.

    STOKES: Mr. President, did it come to your attention shortly after that assassination that Lee Harvey Oswald, who was the accused assassin, had had contact with your Embassy in Mexico City?

    CASTRO: Yes. In fact, it was after Kennedy’s death that he caught my attention. Because here nobody receives news about anyone filing applications for a visa. These things are always solved through the Office of The Minister of Fieign Affairs. So it never is taken to the government. You know, it is not necessary. This is normal routine work. None of us has anything to do with visas. Some officials knew about it when somebody in particular filed an application there. But tens – or maybe hundreds of thousands of people file applications. But when Kennedy was assassinated and Oswald’s actions were published in the newspapers, the officials who had handled visa applications realized that this Oswald could be the same Oswald who had gone to the Consulate in order to apply for a visa. That is why we had news about it, you know? After Kennedy’s death we learned that a man by the name of Oswald had gone to the Consulate and filled out an application for the visa – that he had been told that we did not normally give an intransit visa until the country of destination granted one. And, then we were told that a person had gotten very upset and had protested in an irate manner because he could not receive a visa. This was the news I had, more or less. The rest you know.

    STOKES: We were wondering your…

    CASTRO: There is something I would like to add in that connection. You see, it was always very much suspicious to me that a person who later appeared to be involved in Kennedy’s death would have requested a visa from Cuba. Because, I said to myself – what would have happened had by any chance that man come to Cuba – visited Cuba – gone back to the States and then appeared involved in Kennedy’s death? That would have really been a provocation – a gigantic provocation. Well, that man did not come to Cuba simply because that was the norm we rejected visa applications … like that. In those days the mechanism was very rigid because, of course, we had suspicions of anyone who tried to come to Cuba. People in charge of granting visas asked themselves: Why does (this applicant) want to come to Cuba? What kind of counter-revolutionary activity could he carry out in Cuba? Maybe the people thought that the person was a CIA or FBI agent, you know, so it was very difficult for a North American, just from his own wishes, to come to Cuba because systematically we denied the visas. So, I think that there could always be an exception, but in those times it was very, very difficult to have anyone from the United States come into Cuba because there was a tremendous suspicion and because in general permits to (travel to Cuba) were denied. No, if it was a transit visa going toward another country – let’s say had the Soviet Union granted the visa, you may be sure that our consul would have granted the transit visa because the person would not be coming to Cuba only, but would be going to another country. The person would have to come (here) and if the Soviets would have granted the visa, then that would have accredited the person..like, you know, the person would have been given a transit visa because I feel that if the Soviets had granted the visa, then he would have come here. (In that era) it was not so crazy (that he tried) to come to Cuba because if he had obtained the visa from another country, it would have been for certain that our Consul would have granted him the visa to stop here. Now, can you imagine if that person had been to Cuba in October and then in November the President of the United States would have been killed? That is why it has always been something a very obscure thing something suspicious because I interpreted it as a deliberate attempt to link Cuba with Kennedy’s death. That is one of the things that seemed to me very strange. (The facts of the events) seemed very strange also. As it was published, Oswald would have shot several times at a car that was moving with a telescopic (rifle). (I remember) when he trained in Mexico in order to come to Cuba to make revolution we had several guns like that and it could be that we learned almost everything that could be learned about telescopic pistols, even the differences between different pistols; a normal pistol with a trigger, an automatic pistol and a telescopic (rifle). It is much more practical if you use a normal sight…when you try to focus a moving target and you (do it) more accurately..with that kind than with a telescopic sight. A telescopic sight view gun should be used against a fixed target not a moving one It is very difficult. And, I tell you it seemed very strange that he used that weapon and that those shots could have been made with that kind of weapon. Because, when you shoot the first charge you have to take the weapon away from your face to (focus) it again, to try to find the object again..the target..and you lose time it is quite difficult. I don’t know whether later things were technical proof – technical tests were made to see whether – just a normal shooter at that distance and at that speed of the car could have (accurately made such shots). That was something else that was very suspicious to me. But, as far as we are concerned, what was most strange was Oswald’s attempt to visit Cuba.

    STOKES: Realizing, Mr. President, the enormity of the appearance of Oswald at your Embassy and realizing the significance that it had relative to the assassination itself, was it important enough that you summon individuals who would have knowledge about his appearance to talk with you or to submit written reports relative to this matter?

    CASTRO: I think what happened was the following: Nobody knew that. The comrades who had news of that, after the events took place, they reported it, I think, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. So, the only thing we did was when the Warren Commission was created and it requested information bout this, it was agreed to send all the information we had at that time…I recall that we were consulted with something about the visa application and we were willing to offer all the information they wanted. Now it was assumed that they were conducting the investigation. If they had wanted some additional action on our part (material from us), they should have (requested) it. But, they did not request any other (information) since…as far as I have understood…here we spoke with the people (our people) who had been in Mexico and our people went into the details of what really happened. And, that was very well clarified. Beyond this, there was not much more that we could do. You can imagine there was not much that we could contribute. As far as I have understood, the Mexican lady who used to work at the Consulate was later the object of many pressures even some kind of persecution.

    Villa: She was arrested by the Mexican police with the purpose of finding out what he had said at the Consulate.

    CASTRO: All that they said it was assumed that they wanted her to say that also while at the Embassy he had made reference to killing Kennedy. So the Mexican police had the purpose of having the Mexican declare that.

    Villa: Exactly.

    CASTRO: And, who were the people interested in that? Who could be the people interested in that?
    Villa: To us that is very clear.

    CASTRO: But, that is something worth to be taken into account. Why would that lady become the object of that oppression? What do you know about this lady now?

    Villa: She lives in Mexico at present. She used to work in the Consulate and she was sympathetic of the Cuban revolution.

    CASTRO: She, of course, has a very high meritand that after that, knowing how these things are, a person that did not enjoy the diplomatic immunity could have been coerced. She could have been blackmailed and she could have been submitted by fear, you know, in order to have her make a statement that would be against Cuba harmful to Cuba. So, it was a tremendous merit that this Mexican lady did behave the way she did because you know how the people are in some countries of the world. They take a helpless woman without any kind of protection and then she can be forced to say anything. One question I would like to raise with you because we are speaking about that topic about which we are very pleased to give you all the opinions and all the cooperation that you might request that is in our hands. Now, do you think you are going to be able to bring out something really clear on the whole work you’re doing? Do you think you are going to be able to reach a clear conclusion?

    STOKES: Mr. President, that is the precise reason why we are here in your country. One of the things we said to your top officials Friday morning at our first session was that we came to your country without any preconceived ideas or notions or conclusions of any type. We have tried to pursue the entire investigation in a fair and objective manner, searching only for the truth. The assassination of President Kennedy was a traumatic experience for the American people. And in addition to the trauma which was incurred by them, we found that a Gallup Poll in January of 1977 revealed that 81% of the American people believe that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald participated in the assassination of President Kennedy. Only 19% believe that he was a lone assassin. Consequently, the mandate given this Committee by the House of Representatives was for us to investigate all of the facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. Precisely, it is our job to ascertain who killed the President. Did such a person have help either before or after that assassination? And then to ascertain in that respect whether there was or was not a conspiracy to kill the President. Additionally, we are charged with the responsibility to ascertain the performance with the responsibility to ascertain the performance of our own agencies in the United States; that is, the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, all of the American agencies that participated in some way in the investigation conducted by the Warren Commission. And then lastly, our mandate is to make recommendations to the United Stated congress based upon our findings as a result of the total investigation. So we have approached the investigation in that way hoping that we will be able to ascertain the truth of these facts and then be able to put to bed the theories, the rumors, the speculation that presently exists around the assassination of President Kennedy.

    CASTRO: Have you had a broad access to all the pollible sources of information?

    STOKES: Yes, we have. If you have reference to our own agencies and our own files, the answer is yes, we have.

    CASTRO: Are you optimistic about the fact that you’ll be able to reach a sound conclusion on this problem? Are you optimistic about it?

    STOKES: We are optimistic that even though the job is an awesome responsibility for the eleven men and one woman who are members of this committee, along with the staff of 115 people, all of whom we feel are dedicated to this task, our final report will be one that will be a highly professional and competent job.

    CASTRO: Any other question that you would like to raise I would be pleased to answer.

    STOKES: Could we for a moment, Mr. President, go back to the moment you learned about Lee Harvey Oswald having been at your Embassy in Mexico City? Do you recall a speech that you made on the 23rd of November?

    CASTRO: This is on the twenty…the speech on the 23rd. Did we have the data at that time that Oswald had been at the Embassy?

    Villa: No. No.

    CASTRO: So very likely we did not have it. I think I learned about that some days later and not immediately.
    Villa: You mentioned that in the speech on November the 27th.

    STOKES: 27th – all right. Then my question would be firstly in two parts. One, if he remembered the speech he made on November 27th, and then secondly….

    CASTRO: But, you should not confuse the man with the system.

    STOKES: Yes, right, right. That’s what you told us earlier, right.

    CASTRO;That would be a negative fact for the interest of humanity. These ideas I’ve always had about this.

    STOKES: And with reference to the second part of my question regarding the matters which occurred at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City which you referred to in the November 27th speech. Do you recall from whom you learned what had transpired at your Embassy?

    CASTRO: I cannot recall. It should have been through foreign Relations or maybe the Minister of the Interior. Somebody reported to me. We were just reported to about the facts that a gentleman had appeared at the Embassy requesting a visa by the same name as the man accused of having assassinated Kennedy. I don’t remember how it was told to the American authorities. I remember the Warren commission requested through the Swiss Interest Section all the information we had about it. And, immediately, we put at their disposal all the materials we had. Because of course, we were interested more than anyone else in those events being clarified. We were more interested than anyone. At the first moment we were somewhat, you know, uncertain about what was behind this whether there were some people that wanted to use that in order to promote an aggression against Cuba. We had many reasons to suspect that because tremendous things had happened in that sense. We thought that maybe some very reactionary element could have wanted to eliminate Kennedy and just on the way try to eliminate Cuba, you know. That’s why we were observing the whole development of events. But, some days later it started to be clearly seen that it was not a campaign orchstrated against Cuba. But, I’m not – I have no doubt in the least that if they had had the least evidence to link Cuba, that would have been done. A tremendous campaign would have been made and a very dangerous situation would have been created for us. But, now you have to bear in mind, at least to the extent that we know, that the Warren Commission did not make any charge against Cuba, nor did it conduct any effort in that sense. We were under the impression though, that they were working objectively or that if they were able to discover something, they would handle it. They would expose it. But, we thought that the danger that we were concerned about in the very first moments were then no longer so bad. The fact that somebody went to the Embassy was what brought about the suspicion that somebody had tried to link Cuba. The other theory is that this individual decided himself just because of his initiative to visit Cuba – with what purpose? That nobody knows. You would have to have good doses of naivete to think that he was the one who planned the trip to Cuba that he planned the trip to the Soviet Union himself. Actually, all of that is very strange, you know, very rare that he tried to go to the Soviet Union; that he tried to go through Cuba no other place, but through Cuba; because to go to the Soviet Union you don’t have to go to Cuba necessarily. And to this we could add the further event that this individual who could have been able to clarify all because who could have shed more light on this than he himself – Oswald – 24 or 48 hours later. How many hours after the event?

    Villa: 28 hours.

    CASTRO: He was killed 28 hours after the event. And the only explanation given by the assassin was a sentimental reason. As far as I recall from what I read at that time he said that he had seen Kennedy’s widow crying and seen the whole drama. He decided to take revenge with his own hand. And later on it was known that he was not a kind of a sentimental man; I mean to say he’s a psychotic character and in the very face of the policemen – killed the supposed author of Kennedy’s death. Because, who could have verified that better? Why was this man killed? I do know that you have more information than I do much more information than I may have on Jack Ruby’s personality..and, if Jack Ruby for a kind of strictly sentimental reason would have gone there to the very police station and in the face of the policemen killed the supposed author of Kennedy’s death. All this seemed to us very strange. And that is why we have such importance to the effort he made in the Cuban Embassy. It was a kind of an attempt by somebody to have Cuba involved in the whole affair, in the whole issue. Another reasonable fact which I think deserves attention, a fact that deserves attention – and that is something that was known after wards when the Senate Committee conducted their investigations was that practically the same day that Kennedy was killed, a CIA agent was going to have an interview. I do not know whether he had planned that interview with an important agent (Cubela) in order to assassinate me. I felt that a poison was going to be given to that person who was supposed to kill me. So, that is another element which is very suspicious. The same day Kennedy is killed, well about those same days, I get an attempt, a very urgent attempt by an individual with a plan to assassinate me. The Senate (Intelligence Committee) did not give his name, but we know who he was. And, there is no doubt that if one person had the possibility to carry out that attempt, it was that person. Because, he was a man who came from the revolutionary ranks and he had very much good relations with us. So, I would say that among the very many attempts, plans, plots, collaboratins of the CIA, this was one that had many possibilities of success because that individual had access to us. And that visit practically coincided that’s a very suspicious coincidence with the Kennedy assassination – very..We did not learn this until the Senate Committee investigation was conducted. Now, in connection with this Embassy, what were you interested in in connection with the Embassy and the visit?

    STOKES: Let me ask you this question, Mr. President. One of the persons that we have talked with since we have been here in Havana has been your former Consul, Mr. Azcue, who was produced at our request by your officials here. He told us that with reference to the man who appeared at your Embassy and who filled out an application for an intransit visa, that the photograph which appears on the visa application is the photograph of the man who died in the United States as Lee Harvey Oswald, but, that this man was not the individual who had appeared at your Embassy in Mexico City. And, my question would be in two parts; One, have you had an opportunity to talk with Mr. Azcue? And secondly, from all the information available to you, would this be your opinion also that the man who appeared at the Embassy was an imposter?

    CASTRO: Actually, I don’t have an opinion about that. I wouldn’t be able to say whether I’ve met Azcue once. I don’t remember now. I have no recollection at present of having met Azcue. Because I had been given the information about all that, I myself did not know whether he was in Mexico or here. It is very likely that I have seen him some time; however, I don’t recall having met Azcue those days. Secondly, about the idea of an imposter, I have no special theory on that. As far as I have understood, Azcue has an idea on that. I’ve heard those comments before comments about the possibility of a difference, that he noticed the difference between the person who appeared requesting the visa and the person known as Oswald. But, I don’t have a theory on that. It is likely that there could be two different people. But, now I am thinking if the person had obtained the visa, would he have visited Cuba? That is a hypothesis. What did he want the visa for? from my point of view, the individual could have come to Cuba and compromised us. He would have us compromised. It seems to me that to apply for the visa had the purpose of having the individual come to Cuba. Now, we would have to enter into many conjectures to reach a conclusion on that. Because where did he get the passports? Where did he find the passports that he was taking there? Where was Oswald’s passport? what became of Oswald’s passports? Those papers should be somewhere. I don’t know what could have been the sense of sending another man, but I wouldn’t dare deny that possibility. Actually, we would have to know what would have been the purpose. Why would another person have been sent? I don’t know whether you would have a theory about that. Personally, I don’t have a theory.

    Villa: About the possibility of an imposter, in public sources we have read that the possibility exists that there could be a double that carried out some actions that the real Oswald did not on some occasions in 1963.

    CASTRO: There is something that I can guarantee. The Cuban government believes that Azcue is a serious and honest man; and that he has never said something differently from what he said the first time. He has more or less kept his story as far as I know. I mean, he is a person you can trust. He is a trustful man. That is all I can say about Azcue. But, I may say that if many people have elaborated theories, I am not among them. I have not operated on a theory like that. I just see many strange things that are not logical. It started with the very attempt of the person to come to Cuba; the calibre of weapon used, the absolutely abnormal way in which those people behaved. I mean there have always been many strange things that made me (suspicious) about other people. I tell you, I read the book. I read that book “The Death of the President” written by Manchester. Manchester had the theory that this man acted alone and he argues a lot. He makes a kind of psychoanalytical (study) of Oswald and he defends the (lone assassin theroy). Many people have a different theory. So, I have not been able to elaborate I wouldn’t dare elaborate a theory for with me, everything would be speculation. On our account and because of our interest, some time ago we started gathering elements in order to have a better founded idea, you know. And, that is why our people started to gather materials and information. A group of comrades has been working in this direction. But, I am very much aware that we don’t have access to (sources: of information which are fundamental. We have no access to the CIA archives or the FBI archives. We don’t have access to the Warren Commission’s files. How could we do something really well founded? When the Cuban government saw the senate Committee Report, it was something real and it was that that individual who was the man to be given the weapon to kill me in Paris. This man never spoke about that. He was tried and was sentenced on account of the attempts, the plots against our lives. Those plans (had been continuous) and he sent weapons to Cuba until he was discovered. He confessed and told us the truth, but he never spoke about that interview in which he was going to be given the weapon to kill me and that was published by the Senate Committee. He never made reference to that. That person is alive because I had to request some leniency. I mean, because his crime was very serious. It was a tremendous betrayal. It was treason, and at that time to participate in such an action was very severely sanctioned. And, following a tradition with individuals that had participated in the revolution, whenever it has been possible to prevent drastic measures, we have done so. This gentleman had been a revolutionary leader. He had been a good revolutionary fighter, and the public opinion was very irritated about it. His crime was really very serious. I wrote a letter to the Cuban Tribunal morally condemning him (but asking for leniency). I did it for the public opinion…That is Cubela’s case. We learned that later when the Senate committee report appeared. But, all these elements made us think about the advisability or organizing some investigation on our account. We had hoped that being in contact with your Committee could give us some elements of judgment for our own information. But, as far a I know, you don’t contribute many elements of judgment because as I have been told you cannot make use of most of the information you possess. I have been told that one of our hopes was to receive some information. We are giving as much information as we have and we are receiving nothing.

    STOKES: One thing I would like to say and I think you ought to know is that many Americans are ashamed of the CIA and the degrading attempts that they’ve made on your life. And, that’s something that disturbs many, many decent Americans and I think you ought to know that. Mr. President, with your permission I’d like to defer to my other colleagues, if they have any questions, if that is agreeable to you.

    CASTRO: Yes, please.

    STOKES: Mr. Preyer?

    Preyer: Mr. President, you mentioned that you believe that you could transfer power of chains of government without killing the head of the government. That is the tradition of our country also. I speak personally and not forour government, but I join Chairman STOKES in saying that when I read about AMLASH, Cubela and the church Committee reports I was shocked and outraged. I am confident that is the overwhelming reaction of the American people. I am convinced that the President did not know about that; the head of the CIA, John McCone, did not know of that; or our other high officials; and that this was an aberration of small group and that it would have shocked our high officials just as it shocks me if they had known of it. The fact that the Church Report on AMLASH came from the Agency from the government itself rather than being leaked through a newspaper story or something of that sort.

    Interpreter: Excuse me, I didn’t get that last part. I am sorry.

    Preyer: Well, the fact that the information on AMLASH and Cubela was revealed by our government agencies themselves and was now brought out against their will through a leak or newspaper story, I think, indicates the strong feeling in our government that this kind of thing must never happen again. And, we have set up now a House Intelligence Committee and a Senate Intelligence Committee, both new, to insure that it does not.
    On the question of our not giving information, but receiving it, let me say we have a common interest in arriving at a final answer, a clear answer, to the question of the assassination of President Kennedy. We are seeking your help in that and your officials have indicated to us they are willing to continue working to help on that. Our Committee goes out of existence at the end of this year. When we file our final report, there will be a great deal of information in it.

    CASTRO: Is it going to be public?

    Preyer: It will be public which will be of interest to you. Until that time, because of our different jurisdictional problems, there is some evidence which does not belong to us which we cannot release. But in the final analysis, the full report will make available much information of interest to you and may answer many of the rumors. In the meantime, one reason we press so hard for information is that this is the last opportunity that will probably be made in our country to reach a final answer. The last chance where an official body of Congress an official governmental body will make a judgment on this question. That is why we hope that any information that bears on this subject that may come up in the next few months and any effort that could be made, even strenuous effort, would be justified because this opportunity may not come again. And I hope very much that we will be able to give clear answers to the questions. Your help will assist very much.

    CASTRO: I think you are right in what you are saying. When I spoke about the hope of obtaining some information, it was not but a hope. It is absolutely our curiosity, you know. But, it is absolutely evident that we have the duty of handling over all the information we may gather. We are very much interested in having Kennedy’s assassination clarified because in one way or the other attempts have been made to try to have Cuba involved in it. We have our conscience clear. There is nothing so important as having your conscience clean absolutely clean. That’s why it is not a matter of conscience, but rather a matter of political, historical interest to have all these problems clarified. It is also true that the fact that the United States has conducted an investigation on the (attempts on our people) and the fact that (it) has been made public is a very correct thing to do very right. Of course, I (hear) that in that publication many names were not disclosed on reasons of safety. When we conduct an investigation, in general, we publish everything because..anyway..but I would have liked for the Senate report to have been more complets. It should have not protected so many people in the interest of the national security because that, you know, diminishes its moral value. It diminishes the moral value of the publication. However, I coincide with you that the fact that the investigation had been conducted and that all those materials were released is something highly positive. Now, you see, I was recalling Bill Moyers’ report. Bill Moyers made a very important report of all these attempts all these logs on terrorist groups. Now, then, there is one point in which an intimation is made that Kennedy’s death could have been a result of all these attempts against our lives. It is to say to a certain extent Moyers’ report which has many positive things can leave the doubt that Cuba could have had some participation in that because there is a Representative of Congress speaking I thing I spoke later, and at the end a senator spoke that said that he had no doubts about that topic. So, we are very much..we are highly interested in that party being satisfied. Because, even when the Senate Intelligence Report was released, in some people the idea could have become stronger that Kennedy’s death could have been our revenge for all that had been planned against us. If Cuba had something to do with Kennedy’s death, it would have been indirectly because many people were trained in hanling weapons and many things that were not normal were done, and under the shade of these irregularities, terrorism (arises and) develops, so (that) all these acts become the (norm). It was precisely in that sense that I said that it was a nefarious precedent. Can you imagine that in the (entire) world I was one of the naive people who thought that these things could not happen. Not in the Middle Ages, but now in this era in which the whole apparatus of the government can remain very quiet and promote the killing of leaders of other countries? What is to happen to the world in the nuclear era if that becomes a practice? Now we are lucky that all those plans were a failure. We have not had to (regret the) death of any comrade leader of the revolution. Our attitude is not given that of hatred or resentment. On very rare occasions do we talk to visitors about these problems. That belongs in the past. It happened a long time ago and still the prints existstill the poor things exist. You have to see he terrorist attack against a Cuban plane in flight a plane that exploded. Before that plane fell down, all the people got burned alive. Seventy-four people died. Who perpetrated that crime but people who ere trained by the CIA? We suspect that some CIA agent had to do with that terrorist act. It’s very strange, because that happened after Angola. The United States had adopted a very violent attitude towards us and Nixon made forceful statements against us. One of the individuals who was recently arrested in Miami because he was involved in the preparation of terrorist activities was just declared non-guilty in a trial and he defended himself by saying simply that he had been in the White House. He said who he had spoken with and who gave him the weapons, and precisely those facts, those events, took place a week before the attempt before the sabotage on the cuban plane in flight. And, he is just defending himself by saying that in the trial. He is one of the persons that was in the group who perpetrated the sabotage. Now, I am going to tell you something. I think that now Carter is – I don’t know what Party you belong to – and it is not interesting to the part of what I’m going ot say, if I hurt someone’s sensitivity I apologize for that, but I would have not trused Johnson. I may say sincerely, I sincerely believe that Johnson would have followed that line, of the attempts against people’s lives, terrorism, subversion. I have no doubt that Nixon was a man without scruples. I was always under a bad impression. I was convinced of that. But now, I see that this President of the United States would not be capable of resorting to that kind of action. There are two things in this connection: One, I think there is an attitude in the public opinion as to that Watergate affair, and the Senate investigations have contributed to create a sort of consciousness. I also think that the politicians have taken that into account, and I think also that personally Carter is a man of a differently mentality. If I am asked whether I think Carter would be capable of plainning these kinds of actions, I would say no. I would say I don’t think him capable of doing such a thing. I am quite convinced. In that sense, we feel more relaxed. We had to defend ourselves from these actions for many years. You should not think that I like to be surrounded by people. I think you have to be alone. I would like to have a normal life. We have taken many measures in all these years preventing attempts with different kinds of explosives and weapons, attempts with poison, and actually we are not saying all. I will tell you something. I would even say that I underestimated the CIA somewhat because I thought them capable of many things, but when I read the Senate Committee Report, I confess that I had not thought so much. because, all that from bacterias, viruses, poisons, a shell with explosives, I don’t know how many tremendous things. But it was not only that. I want you to know that if we would have been careless, they would have brought a microphone and put it over there in one of the ashtrays and one mike over there in that seat and everything. There were not only subversive activities, but also espionage. There were many activities related to espionage. I remember that around the day in which the sabotage against our plane took place, the CIA asked in a question, to one of their agents here, whether I was going to travel to Africa, whether he could find out what place I was going to visit, what means of transportation I was going to use, I mean, a whole set of investigation which was not political, but rather that could be used for anything else. Now, going back to this topic, one of the things I’ve gone into recently with some people, is why Cuba – it was realy something inconceivable – could have the idea of killing the President?

    First, because that would have been a tremendous insanity. The Cuban Revolutionaries and the people who have made this Revolution have proven to be intrepid and to make decisions in the right moment. But, we have not proven to be insane people. The leaders of the Revolution ot not do crazy things and have always been extremely concerned to prevent any factor that could become a kind of an argument or a pretext for carrying out aggression against our country. We are a very small country. We have the United States 90 miles from our shore which is a very large, powerful country economically, technically, militarily. So, for many years we lived concerned that an invasion could take place. I mean, indirect and at the end a direct aggression. We were very close to that. Yet look at the conclusions we draw. If the elections of 1960 had not been won by Kennedy, but Nixon instead, during the bay of Pigs, the Unites States would have invaded Cuba. We mean that in the midst of the fight that Kennedy followed the lined that had been already traced. There is no doubt that we appreciate very highly the fact that Kennedy resisted every kind of pressure not to have the Marines land in our country. Because, there were many people who wanted the Marines to Land here. Nixon himself was in favor of that. Had Nixon been President during the Bay of Pigs invasion, a landing by the military army of the United States would have taken place. We are absolutely convinced of that.

    However, Kennedy resisted all the pressures and he did not do that. What would that have meant for us? The destruction of the country? Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of deaths? Because, undoubtedly the people would fight. The people I am absolutely sure about. An invasion of Cuba by the United States would have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe millions of lives. We were aware of that. We have an American military base in our territory, by force. And, it is not assumed that anyone is going to have a military base on someone else’s territory, if it is not on the basis of an agreement. However, the United States has military bases in many places of the world, but here, it is by force. From that base, many provocations have been carried out against Cuba. There were people wounded..there were people killed. What did we do? We brought our gruard away from the lines, from the fence. We never shot at them. Why? Because we made every possible effort so that an incident of that kind would not become a pretext to be attacked. So, we have followed the policy. We had an American boat just three miles away from us for years, a warship full of electronic communications equipment and never a hostile action was carried against that warship. So, there are many events that have proven how careful Cuba has always been to prevent the perpetration of an invasion. We could have died heroically – no doubt about it. Now, that would have been a victory for our people. They’re willing to be sacrificed and to die. Yet, it would have been just another page in history..nothing else. So, we have always been very much aware to not give the United States the pretext..the possibility.. for (an invasion.) What was the cause of the missile crisis? The need we had to seek protection in case of an (invasion) from the United States. We agreed on the installation of the (strategic) missiles, because undoubtedly that diminished the danger of direct aggression. That became a danger of another kind, a kind of a global danger we became, but we were trying to protect our country at all times. Who here could have operated and planned something so delicate as the death of the United States President. That was insane. From the ideological point of view it was insane. And from the political point of view, it was a tremendous insanity. I am going to tell you here that nobody, nobody ever had the idea of such things. What would it do? We just tried to defend our folks here, within our territory. Anyone who subscribed to that idea would have been judged insane..absolutely sick. Never, in twenty years of revolution, I never heard anyone suggest nor even speculate about a measure of that sort, because who could think of the idea of organizing the death of the President of the United States. That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years, in every possible sense. Since the United States is much more powerful than we are, what could we gain from a war with the United states? The United States would lose nothing. The destruction would have been here. The United States had U-2 air surveillancing for almost fifteen years. The planes flew over our territory every day. The women said that they could not go over their terrace naked for the U-2 would have taken a picture of them. That thing we could not allow to happen, you know, because it was demoralizing. So, there were, you know, those flights just very close to the soil. Those kind of flights was really demoralizing for our people. It was impossible to let them continue to do that, so we had to shoot at them. On the following day after the missile crisis, we had the need to shoot at those planes, because to have allowed that would have created a demoralization among our people. And, I say that if we allowed that, you wouldn’t have been able even to play baseball here. Because those planes came just twenty meters from here, so it was really demoralizing. See, the U-2 came very high, you know, and I tell you, Cuba has been characterized by following a firm policy, a policy of principles. Our position was known after the missile crisis. We were not in a position to make any concessions. That is a known position, but Cuba, the leaders of the Cuban Revolution, have never made that kind of insanity, and that I may asssure you. And the biggest kind of insanity that could have gone through anyone’s mind here would have been that of thinking of killing the President of the United States. Nobody would have thought of that. In spite of all the things, in spite of all the attempts, in spite of all the irritation that brought about an attitude of firmness, a willingness to fight, that was translated by our people into a spirit of heroism, but it never became a source of insanity. I’ll give you practical reasons. Apart from our ideology, I want to tell you that the death of the leader does not change the system. It has never done that. And, the best example we have is Batista. Batista murdered thousands of our comrades. If there was anyone in which that kind of revenge was justified, it was Batista. However, our movement did very difficult things, but it never that the idea of physically eliminating Batista. Other revolutionary groups did, but never our movement. We had a war for twenty-five months against Batista’s army and spent seven years under Batista’s dictatorship with thousands dying. But, it never came to our minds..we could have done it, very well, but we never thought about that, because it was different from our feelings. That is our position. That is why we are interested. That is why we are interested. That is why I was asking you whether you are really hopeful to give serious conclusions on this. On our part, if there is something we could give you, we would, without any kind of precondition. The information we have offered you is not conditioned to anything. Inspite of the fact that the problem is thorny, that doesn’t stop this Committee here from giving the impression that we are being judged here, that we are being tried.

    STOKES: We certainly don’t want in any way to convey that, in fact, uh,…

    CASTRO: No, no, no. I mean not you. I am not thinking of you. I mean that some people could see it that way; that Cuba has been investigated by the Committee.

    STOKES: Well, Mr. President, one thing we have done in that respect, we even said to your Cuban Interest Section in Washington when we first began that we wanted to come down here and do this part of the investigation very quietly without any fanfare, without any publicity, and this is the overall way we have tried to conduct our whole investigation.. everything is being done quietly in executive session until such time that we compile all he data so that we don’t in any way declaim or degrade anyone. Then, hopefully, at the end we can come out with a report that everyone will respect.

    CASTRO: There is something which is not secret. If I may ask you, is there anything true, or how much could be true about those publications which state that many people who could have had a part in Kennedy’s death have died in accidents and things like that?

    STOKES: This is one of the difficulties of attempting to conduct an investigation thirteen years after the event has occurred. Obviously, there are people who in the normal course of the investigation we would have wanted to talk with, we cannot talk with because they are now deceased. This is one of the difficulties that we face. I yield to Congressman Dodd.

    Dodd: Mr. President, I won’t take much time. I think most of the questions have been asked. I wish we had…

    CASTRO: I have time. Please don’t mind about my time. I made no other commitment today, so I would have time. Nobody is waiting for me.

    Dodd: I wish we had an evening just to talk about the Peace Corps, but we will save that for another time. A tape is played?

    There are a couple of things here. The question you asked of Chairman STOKES – the one regarding the optimism we have over reaching a final conclusion in regard to this effort is one that I think we all ask ourselves almost every day. It is the question that is very important in the minds of many, many people, not only in government, but also of course, the American people are concerned about our efforts. I said today in one of our meetings that I strongly suspected that your grandchildren and my grandchildren will be reading books about the assassination, just as we read them today about the assassination, just as we read them today about the assassination of Lincoln, another historical figure that had been assassinated, and where the suspicion of conspiracy has existed. I think we would be fooling ourselves if we tried to suggest that at the conclusion of our hearings we were going to end once and for all, all of the speculation for all time. I don’t think that is possible.
    But, what we are going to try and do, and I think that what we have done successfully over the past year and a half, is to approach this case with an open mind and not prejudge the case. And, the temptations are great to do that. For every day we almost see a new theory. But, we are determined to proceed through this process listening to all sides and then using that evidence that we are able to collect, to reach as definitely as we can, regarding those points that have been nagging at the consciences and minds of the people all across the earth.

    Two other points: One is that we intend not only to publish our hearings and the conclusion that we reach. We also intend to use every available means of communication in the United States, hopefully television, radio, to conduct open public hearings, not only showing our conclusions, but how we arrived at those conclusion. We suspect that many, many people do not want to read a boring report, but would rather be better informed by radio and television and newspapers. We intend to hide nothing, to release all information without any fear whatsoever as to where that information leads or what our conclusions would be. I think, I know I can speak for myself, and I’m sure I can speak for everyone else on this Committee. I wouldn’t serve on this committee if I didn’t think in the end that I could say to my constituents that I had done an honest and thorough job and that I wasn’t hiding anything from them. And, my last point is, Mr. President, that had some of your government officials not mentioned it today, we would have, but it was very encouraging to hear it come from them, that they would like to continue to keep the lines of communication open between themselves, your government and our Committee. And, as that old Chinese proverb goes – a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And I think this is a good beginning and I want to just say here and now that I have been deeply impressed by your statements. I find your logic compelling and I gurantee you that we will do the very best job we can, including the final report.

    CASTRO: How many legislators do your have on this committee?

    STOKES: There are twelve in all, one lady and eleven men.

    CASTRO: Don’t you all have to be involved in elections at the end of this year now?

    STOKES: Uh huh. Yes, we do.

    CASTRO: And how would you be able, how would you manage to carry out all this work, and take care of the election campagins at the same time? How would you?

    Dodd: He doesn’t have any trouble at all. (About another Congressman.) (Laughter)

    CASTRO: And you work personally in the campaigns, don’t you? I mean, with all this? The twelve, I mean the twelve people on the Committee work together, perticipate in all hearings and all the interviews and all that?

    STOKES: The committee…I have been in Congress ten years, Mr. President, and I serve on several other committees in the House. And, I know in general they are hard working committees. but, I have never seen twelve people who have worked together the way this committee has. We work extremely long hours, we have worked into the night when the occasion necessitated it. We have worked Saturdays and Sundays when it was necessary and remained in Washington to work on Committee matters. We just have twelve people who are dedicated to the fact that this is an opportunity to do something of historic nature and they are dedicated to devoting the time that it requires. In addition to the twelve Members of Congress, we have a staff of 115 people. The staff is headed up by Professor Blakey. You might be interested in knowing that we spent three months searching for a director of the staff. And, we were extremely concerned that we get a person of the highest professional ability, along with integrity that cannot be compromised in any respect, and one who would direct the staff in a way that we would let the chips fall where they may in the final analysis. And to that degree, I am sure…

    CASTRO: Now he as to continue working while you run the reelection campaign.
    (Laughter)

    STOKES: But, when we go home he has to keep on working right here.

    CASTRO: You would have to go to meet your constituents and then..that would be the most important moment of all these efforts, you know? The moments to draw the conclusions…Would it be possible for you to finish up the report when due? Don’t you need more time?

    STOKES: We promised the House of Representatives (laughter) that there would be no further requests for time. I am not worried about time; it is the money part. The House is appropriating about five million dollars over the two-year period forus to complete this investigation…and

    CASTRO;And only 115 people?

    STOKES: Well, Mr. Barber of Maryland who watches the purse strings of the House says it involves a lot of money. We have had to face that kind of opposition on the floor of the House of Representatives.
    Blakey: Mr. President, I have no questions to ask of you, but less we as guests only asked questions and did not respond to any of yours, let me answer at least in part that question you asked.

    You expressed some interest in what we call the mysterious death projects. The literature about the Kennedy assassination is filled with instances of people who have in some way been connected to the assassination and have themselves died under mysterious circumstances. We are looking into those deaths and seeing whether there are sinister explanations for them. Let me comment on one of them: Now, this is not from our investigation, but from my own information, and he may be a man of some interest ot you. Let me put it in context for you. I cannot comment on many of the facts in the investigation. As you put it, much of the information is limited by matters of national security. For example, in our country, it has never been officially acknowledged that AMLASH was Rolando Cubela and nothing that we say here today should be read as an indication on our part that that is true or not true. But to continue..Sam Giancana, who was a Mafia leader in Chicago, who according to the Senate Intelligence Report, directly plotted on your life, was a person who was under investigation by myself in the department of Justice and ironically on November 22nd, 1963, I was with the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, in a meeting of the Organized Crime session and among the subjects taken up at that time was the Attorney General’s personal interest in my work in seeking to prosecute Sam Giancana. I bring this to your attention for two reasons: First, to express to you the feeling of one who has spent a great deal of his life working to see to it that members of the Mafia in the united States consistent with due process receive justice. I know from personal knowledge that Robert Kennedy shared those concerns. He would never have been knowingly involved in using those people to plot an assassination of you. And, while I cannot speak of personal knowledge of the President of the United States, there was not difference between them. I say that to express my sense of shame and outrage that members, according to the Senate intelligence Report, of the CIA were involved in that. Those people who were in charge of our government at that level in my judgment had no knowledge. But to respond more particularly to your question, it is unlikely that Sam Giancana died because he testified before the Senate Intelligence committee. As I indicated to some of the members of your staff, Mr. Giancana was responsible for the death of hundreds of people in Chicago, and the remarkable thing is not that he died then, but that he had not been killed much earlier.

    STOKES: The last gentleman here, Mr. President, is Gary Cornwell. Gary is the deputy Chief Counsel for the Kennedy Subcommittee and he would have direct responsibility in terms of the final work product related to the Kennedy investigation. I separate out the Kennedy assassination because as you know we are investigating also the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Two murder investigations are going at the same time.

    CASTRO: The five million dollars is for both?

    Blakey: You ought to also know, Mr. President, that this is the budget attributable to the Committee itself. In fact, the United States Senate, particularly the people who were responsible for the Church Committee investigation, have been helping this Committee. The Federal Bureau of Investigation ahs a relatively large staff devoted to getting their foles made available to us. We have actually received cooperation form the Central Intelligence Agency. Some members of the staff would say not as fast and as full as we might like, but the final report is not in. The police departments in Dallas and in Memphis have been helping us and if you consider the work that was done in 1963 and 1964, the actual available resources in the United States devoted to these investigations are considerable more than five million dollars.

    CASTRO: May I suggest something? Why don’t you investigate also Oswald’s personality in one sense, whether Oswald was also a member of any intelligence agency in the United States?

    Blakey: That is among the issues that we are looking into.

    CASTRO: I think that is a very important thing. Because, for me, Oswald’s personality – it’s a mystery.. that first he was in the Army, the Navy,[Marines] and later he appears in the Soviet Union. He married a Soviet citizen. He came back to the States. I still get the impression that this individual’s personality is that of a spy. It is the typical way you recruit a spy and send him to another country. This seems to me very important. I think it is very important to go very deeply into his past, to see if at any time it was possible to really know about his personality. That would be very important.

    Blakey: Of all the questions I think we will answer, that I feel with a degree of certainty, we will. I should also add, Mr. President, that if you consider the resources that your staff has also devoted to this organization and the time and effort they have put into it, the five million dollars grows even more.(laughter)

    CASTRO: Sure, they have been working. But as you know, our contribution is very modest because I think that the fundamental things for the investigation could be conducted only in the United States. And, what we can do is very little, very little. But from the first moment we made the decision to make available anyone you wanted to talk with. I think that your task is a hard one. Hard, because your prestige is at stake with the investigation. You face a task of tremendous responsibility and in that sense I think avery hard job has been assigned to you.

    STOKES: We share your feelings on that, Mr. President.

    Blakey: Their job is harder. They are politicians. They must run for reelection. I can always go back and teach.

    CASTRO: Will the report be many volumes?
    (Laughter)
    How big is the Warren Committee Report? When will the Warren Committee Report be published?

    Blakey;The Warren Commission has already been published.

    CASTRO: Warren Commission?

    Blakey: Commission. Yes.

    CASTRO: Warren Commission, what was it?

    Villa: It was twenty-six volumes. We had two copies of the summary, but we have not seen the twenty-six volumes.

    CASTRO: Have you read all that?

    Villa: Yes, we have.

    CASTRO: We have to say that the Warren Commission was objective. They did not try to commit Cuba. You were a Federal Judge. Then, are you the man with the most experience in this kind of business.

    Preyer: Well, in the federal courts we didn’t have to deal with anything as complex as this with so many remors and so many facets to it. Usually, we had a narrow question, so this is really a new experience for me.

    CASTRO: They would give their lives to discover something decisive, you know?
    (Laughter)
    Is there anyone else you would like to meet?

    Villa: Piniero. Piniero worked at the Ministry of Interior at that time. They are interested in speaking to Piniero because he met with Santo Trafficante in the early sixties and gave him 24 hours to leave the country, and also because he met with Ascue.

    CASTRO: We did not even have a Ministry of Interior at that time. He worked as some kind of investigator, but at that time we did not have a Minister of Interior. I think it was for the Army. Some things we have now that w e did not have then. They were created, you know, in the course of the years. The first year everybody did whatever they wanted. There was chaos, you know. The state was not organized, so the people came in and out, absolutely free. There were not the controls that existed later, that were created later, especially in the first year of the revolution. I recall a social problem. All the casinos were closed and thousands of people were unemployed without a solution to the problem. So, we had to take back that measure to gain time to find an economic solution for the people who would remain unemployed when the casinos were closed. So, the state had to cover the salaries of all the people who worked there. And, I want to tell you something else: As you know, recently there was a television conference where efforts were being made in order to have the Cuban government involved in drug traffic, smuggling drugs. That is very curious, you know. I don’t know why that theory is expounded now. It is a very recent invention. It happens that we are the one country in this hemisphere that has cooperated the most with the United States without any purpose, I mean, we have no intention of doing the United States a disfavor. but, anyway, on the basis of Cuba’s belief with regard to drugs, very severe measures were implemented to prevent them. We have become the number one cooperators of the United States in this area. You don’t know how many boats we have captured here that come along Cuban coasts carrying drugs. You don’t know how many planes we have taken here carrying drugs and, of course, over the past twenty years the individuals who have been involved in drug traffic have always been sentenced, always. These were not people that could affect us. They were just going and coming from South America and Central America to the Untied States. And, they just happened to come here by chance. Dozens of people have been searched on account of drug traffic, on account of the international drug traffic laws. We have eliminated drug use in cuba and I myself wonder why it is we have to cooperate with the United States if when the embargo was imposed on our country we could have planted ten thousand acres of marijuana and become the largest supplier of marijuana to the United States in combination with all those people. We did not do that since we were blockaded and knowing that in the United States there is a market for marijuana even though the government in this country has fought the most against drugs. Besides in Cuba we don’t have drug problems, but we had to even uproot the last plants of marijuana planted in the mountains. And actually, look at how we’re being paid back now; they pay us back by trying to link us into the drug traffic. It’s incredible, you know. We can say it like that; this is the government that has fought the most against drug traffic in this hemisphere. No discussion about it. And, we are lucky that we don’t have that problem ourselves because unless the State imported cocaine and marijuana, that problem has almost disappeared.
    (Laughter.)

    Translator left; said she would be around.
    Second translator arrives.

    CASTRO: Well, we have almost finished.

    Escartin: Who was the one who made that impeachment about the drug problem where Reprsetative Wolff participated?
    He was the head of the Committee.

    CASTRO: Why did he do that? Do you know the address, because I am going to write them a note.

    (Laughter. )

    CASTRO: And, I am going to ask a budget for stamps and paper. I’m going to sabotage the next election.

    Escartin?Even though he made some political statements with a certain prestige, he is deceitful. It seems that there are some statements made by him on the basis of an investigation and that this man used them as he wished trying to attain certain political objectives of propaganda because you have explained our stand regarding that. And, there is something strange there: A Cuban Counter-Revolutionary was mentioned who made an operation with Columbia which seems to have serious drug problems…and they tried to link him with us. Afterwards, Hernandez-Cartaya who was a Counter-Revolutionary, particiated in the Bay of Pigs. He made some declaration saying that he was anti-CASTRO and that he had nothing to do with this.

    CASTRO: Just two old friends down there defended me. The President of Columbia defended me also, so I have to thank some two persons who defended me.

    Escartin: It is interesting that Hernandez-Caraya was retained there by the FBI. It seems that somebody is trying to solidify this story…that’s the situation.

    STOKES;Mr. President, before we continue, Gary Cornwell, I think, has a couple of questions to ask you.

    Cornwell: Mr. President, there was a book published by Daniel Schorr called “Clearing the Air”. If you haven’t read the book, I would like to read one passage.

    CASTRO: I haven’t read that. You know about that book?

    Villa: I haven’t.

    Cornwell: One passage reads as follows:

    “An interview in July 1967 with a British journalist, Comer Clark..”, do you have the translation of it there?

    Villa: Yes.

    CASTRO: Let me see it. Yes, I have it here. This is absurd.

    Pause: (approximately one minute while President CASTRO reads it.)

    CASTRO: This is absurd. I didn’t say that.

    Cornwell: Did the interview ever occur?

    CASTRO: It has been invented from the beginning until the end. I didn’t say that. How could I say that? It’s a lie from (head to toe). If this man would have done something like that, it would have been our moral duty to inform the United States. You understand? Because if a man comes here, mentions that he wants to kill Kennedy, we are (being provoked), do you realize that? It would have been similar to a mad person. If somebody comes to us and said that, it would have been our moral responsibility to inform the United States. How could we accept a man from Mexico to Cuba who tells us that he is going to kill President Kennedy? If somebody is trying to create provocation or a trap, and uh…we would have denounced him..sure, a person coming here or even in one of our embassies saying that..and that never happened..in no part, as far as I know.

    Villa: That refers to the interview you spoke about in the beginning.

    CASTRO: But how could they interview me in a pizzeria? I never go to public restaurants and that man invented that. That was invented from the upper to the bottom because you asked me about the Brazilian Embassy and I have no obligation to that and never said it was true. That in the Brazilian Embassy I talked about this problem of the attempt. That was true. I could deny it, but I don’t because it was strictly the truth. I didn’t remember who the journalist was nor…but I have the idea that something like that was discussed and that there was a declaration at the Brasilian Embassy. I can’t assure it because I don’t remember it, but it probably occurred…Later on they tried to present it as a threat and I didn’t do it with that intention. Of course, I didn’t do it with that intention. But, not that other interview. I do not remember that. And, uh, it is a surprise for me to see because I couldn’t have said that. You have to see who wrote it. And, what is the job of that journalist? What is he engaged in? And, what prestige has this journalist? Not the one that wrote that book, but the origin of that version. You should have to find who he is and why we wrote it, and with whom he is related….and which sense they have to attribute those words which are absolutely invented. I think it is possible that you would be able to find out who that journalist was. Do you have some news about that journalist in that newspaper?

    Villa: He was in Cuba and tried to carry out an interview with you.

    CASTRO: Let me tell you. Of every one hundred interviews that are requested of me I only grant one because if I were to give all the inteviews that I am requested to, you can be sure that I would not be able to have anything but twenty-four hours of my life to have interviews. I would not have enough time to do anything else. Barbara Walters waited three years for an interview..just almost three years. And even that of Moyers..I didn’t want to have that Moyer interview. He started talking and the truth is that he was very insistent from the time he came down from the airplane and in spite of the fact that there was no commitment from me regarding the interview. There are a lot of interview requests and it is very difficult, but I would never have given a journalist an interview in a pizzeria.

    Dodd: I don’t even give interviews in a pizzeria.

    Villa: Another element commander…That interview was published in a sensationalist or yellow press from the United States. It is a sensationalist newspaper.

    CASTRO: Especially at that time, a lot of barbaric things were published. They are still being written. Yesterday I was reading an English paper, I don’t remember its name, speaking about Angola, and saying that we in military operations against the blacks killed thousands of women and children and so forth. And, I also mentioned before the declaration of that Representative about the drug traffic. Previous to that incident they tried to implicate us in that. If there is somebody in this world that has accustomed himself to listen to the worst things without losing sleep, it is us. The campaigns that were carried out, directed campaigns that were carried out throughout the world – in western continents and also in the United States – against Cuba and all of us had no precedents. There are a lot of people that are badly informed about Cuba, and we have nothing to hide, nothing. They have spoken about tortures in Cuba, and that was a tradition from the war..during the Revolutionary War. We never put a finger on another person because we created an awareness in our people. We condemned torture and I can assure you that this is a principal that knows not a single exception in our country, because it would have the repulsion of all the world..Why are our policemen so efficient..especially the security policemen who protected all of us? Do you know why? Because, it was precisely a police which did not carry out torture. There are a lot of countries where they apply torture and they never discover anything. They never became policement in themselves. Now our people couldn’t be able to receive any information by means of torture, and they develop intelligence, and the technique of investigation and of prevention. There is a time in which we had more than one hundred counter-revolutionary organizations and all of them were penetrated. We knew more than the counter-revolution armies when a person was arrested because there were some things that he didn’t remember: who he met, which places and so forth. I’m going to tellyou, there was a time in which penetration of our people increased so much that in turn they became the heads of some of those counter-revolutionary organizations. The police wouldn’t be able to develop a technique of investigation and they wouldn’t have investigated anything if they just took one person and tried to destroy him. That tradition will never serve. A true police is one which is developed and that will seek intelligent ways of obtaining information. Batista’s policement tortured and didn’t discover anything. And, for us there is no problem. Security has a lot of advantages because all of the people are militants within the Revolution – country people, children, neighbors, students, peasants and the women. Everybody is organized and, that is why. Through the agents we know everything that is going on. Let me tell you something. One day a parrot was lost. In Havana, we told this to the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution – about trying to find out where this parrot was, and they found the parrot. Some other time, a woman was at the hospital. She had a daughter. Her daughter was robbed from the hospital, so we had to find the girl. Everybody assumed that it was a mental case of somebody. Of course, that was not published in the newspapers. Why not? We did not want any panic. We called up all the CDRs and forty-eight hours later, the girl appeared. One person in one place had a child and they hadn’t seen that she was pregnant. That woman was obsessed about having a child and she went to the hospital dressed up like a nurse and she took the girl. And, after forty-eight hours, they found her. There was something else: Here we never have a political kidnapping. Here we never have a terrorist activity. We find out earlier. There were some counter-revolutionaries. But, there is something. The greatest part of them went ot the United States, especially the wealthy people. The social base of the counter-revolution was transferred to the United States. The United States wanted to take from us the doctors and the professions – they got half of the doctors. Out of six thousand doctors, they got three thousand. But then that forced us to concentrate on a school of medicine. Now we have twelve thousand doctors – almost one thousand are abroad in different countries working. We have thirty-five hundred students at the Cuban Medicine School. By 1985 with the new facilities now in progress we will enroll some seven thousand students every year. We are going to train thirty-three thousand students at the University. Our doctors are distributed throughout the country, and before they were all located in the Captiol. So, if the United States wanted to take our professional personnel, they forced us to develop a new system. Fortunately, they didn’t take only technical people, but also wealthy people, deliquents, pimps…
    (Laughter).

    and exploiters of vices such as drugs, gangsters and all that type of people. They went to the United States. They opened the doors because before the Revolution they had a limit. The United States couldn’t receive more then ten thousand and there were a lot of people who wanted to go there trying to find some jobs or social programs. Then, when the Revolution triumphed, the United States opened its doors. Can they repeat that procedure with some other countries? No, they can’t. What would happen if the United States opened the way for all those Mexicans who want to go to the United States trying to find jobs? What about all the Brazilians, Colombians, Peruvians..? They opened the doors and they took the social ground work of the Counter Revolution. So, they left the houses. Those houses were turned into schools and dwelling houses for humble people. You understand? And all those who left here, they left these houses for humble people..and, in the country, the most humble people stayed. You understand? What resources they need to carry on the Revolution and what social ground work they need for making Counter Revolution, they don’t have. That is why the country is defending itself. And that is why we were able to depend on intelligence, and not torture. Thousands of times, they have sid that in Cuba we torture. It is like that, but people of all nations know how things were and are in Cuba. We never had any persons disappear. It wasn’t a new invention. We would never have that. We never found a dead man in the street. We were forced to legisate tough laws, but nobody was ever sanctioned except through the courts and through previous law. Since we were in the Sierra Maestra, we started making the first law. We said to the people..Well, the assassins and torturers are going to be punished. Nobody will take revenge in their own hands. That was a promise we made to the people. The torturers were punished and also the criminals, who generally are not punished. You can see now that things are going on in Chile and in some other countries. They are doing unbelievable things. Sometimes I have heard some stories about things going on there, and they are unbelievable. That is why we are not in agreement with their thinking. We have been accused of denying a man his human rights; that is to say that things are worse here then in Chile, Brazil and so forth. Who are they going to tell that story in this case? But, in spite of it all, we have survived. And the campaigns did not manage to destroy us.

    REST OF INTERVIEW CONSISTS OF PERSONAL REMARKS

  • Gus Russo Marches On: Or, Rust Never Sleeps

    The current issue of American Heritage (Winter 2009) contains an article that is actually featured on the cover. It is called “Did Castro OK JFK’s Assassination?” It is by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton, and it is meant as a combination summary/excerpt from their new book Brothers in Arms. After having read Russo’s first book on the JFK case Live By the Sword, and then suffered through both the TV specials he worked on – for PBS in 1993, and ABC in 2003 – I admit I didn’t have the stomach to read the whole book. But I felt it necessary to at least comment on the book via the article. I thought that would spare me a lot of unnecessary work and mental anguish. I was right.

    Anybody who understands the game that Russo learned to play can quickly guess what the book is going to be like from the title. The work will generally concentrate on the USA/Cuba policy from about 1959-1963 to the near absence of anything else in the Kennedy presidency. It will then use many questionable sources from both the CIA and Cuba to cast the Kennedy brothers in the worst light. It will also try and take advantage of the reader’s lack of knowledge of the JFK case in order to distort certain subjects and episodes. The overall aim is twofold: 1.) To slightly modify but support the Warren Commission, and 2.) To trash the Kennedy brothers. These two aims are inextricably linked in the Russo/Molton scheme. That’s because the design is the oldest one in the CIA playbook on the JFK case: Blame the assassination on Oswald, the Cuban sympathizer out to avenge the plots against Fidel Castro by killing the US head of state. This, of course, is what David Phillips thought of doing by bribing an Antonio Veciana relative working for Cuban intelligence in 1964. (See Gaeton Fonzi’s The Last Investigation, p. 143). But Phillips tried to work this same deception even earlier, on 11/25/63, right after Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby. At that time he was using another asset of his from Nicaragua, Gilberto Alvarado. On that day, Alvarado walked into the American Embassy in Mexico City. He told the authorities there that in September, he had seen Oswald with two Cubans at the Cuban consulate. They passed money to Oswald while talking about a murder plot. (See Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, pgs 415-419) In the former case, Phillips called off the effort, perhaps because the earlier Alvarado effort had fallen flat. Alvarado first failed a polygraph and then confessed to manufacturing the story. On the subject of Phillips’ propaganda about the JFK case, in part three of my review of Reclaiming History, I note that Ed Lopez and Dan Hardway of the House Select Committee on Assassinations came to an interesting conclusion about all these “Oswald killed JFK for Castro” stories which surfaced in the wake of the JFK murder. Namely, that every story in this regard was linked to a David Phillips asset. The CIA/Phillips ploy had at least three goals. First, to conceal the actual perpetrators of the plot. Second, to take advantage of Oswald’s undercover intelligence status. Third, to attempt to provoke a full invasion of Cuba in retaliation for the murder of the American president. This last is something that the CIA and Pentagon wanted Kennedy to do for three years. Yet he refused.

    Russo reactivated this tall tale in his previous book, and he and Molton try and dress it up and rerun it again here. Predictably, they begin the article by apologizing for the Warren Commission. They write that the Warren Report was “in hindsight, as accurate as possible.” (p. 20) So clearly they are headed for the concept that certain intelligence operations Oswald crossed over had to remain hidden by the US government. Then the authors pull something that seemed to me to be really dishonest. To impress upon the reader the idea that upper echelon leaders understood that the Commission could not tell the whole truth for national security reasons, they relate the famous conversation of September 18, 1964 between President Johnson and Warren Commissioner Richard Russell. In a taped call of that day, they both said that they did not believe the main conclusion of the Warren Report. In fact, Russell said, “I don’t believe it” and LBJ replied with “I don’t either.” (Ibid) The authors try and present this as both men not believing in the element of a conspiracy involving Oswald as the sole assassin. In other words, they understood Oswald was being egged and urged on by shadowy Cuban intelligence (G-2) cohorts. Yet, as Gerald McKnight makes clear in his fine study of the Commission, this is not what the two were discussing. Russell was talking to Johnson about his resistance to the single bullet theory that was being rammed down his throat by Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin. (Breach of Trust, pgs 283-284) So the proper contextual grounding of this phone call cannot be a conspiracy with just Oswald as the lone gunman. What the two men are objecting to, the SBT, is the basis of Oswald as the lone assassin. Without it, there is more than one assassin. By not fully informing the reader of the context, Russo and Molton distort its meaning.

    Russo and Molton follow this up with another distortion in aid of their “Oswald as Castro agent” agenda. They try to say that Johnson and Robert Kennedy controlled the Warren Commission investigation. In their terms, they “directed its focus.” (Russo and Molton p. 20) See, LBJ and RFK suspected the whole Oswald retaliation story and wanted to keep it from the public. This is more malarkey. The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) has now declassified every transcript of the Warren Commission executive sessions. In addition, the working papers of the Commission, as held by Rankin, were also turned over. McKnight based his definitive volume about the Commission largely on these ARRB materials. There is no trace in them of any direct influence by Johnson or RFK. The Warren Commission needed no such help in centering on Oswald alone as the killer. In reading the transcripts of the executive sessions and the testimony in the Commission volumes, it seems clear that the most influential commissioners were Allen Dulles, Gerald Ford, and John McCloy. And these three had their minds made up virtually from the beginning. In fact, in a famous anecdote, Dulles passed out a book at an early meeting that described previous presidential assassinations as the work of disturbed misfits. (McKnight, p. 92) Further, Rankin was a longtime crony of J. Edgar Hoover, and the Commission was overwhelmingly reliant on the FBI for its information. The FBI had closed the case against Oswald in early December. And on December 12, 1963 Hoover told Rankin that a.) Oswald was a skilled marksman, and b.) The bullet on Connally’s stretcher had come from Oswald’s rifle. (McKnight, p. 94) These were both false statements. Today, the former is universally agreed upon as false by everyone except Russo. The latter would be proved false by a later interview of Parkland Hospital employee O. P. Wright, one of the two men who first discovered the bullet. (Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas, pgs. 175-176) And that Hoover lied about this key fact, and that Rankin accepted the lie tells you all you need to know about the report being, in the authors’ words, “as accurate as possible.” It also tells you why both LBJ and RFK were essentially irrelevant to the proceedings of the Commission. Once the FBI verdict was submitted, Hoover was not going to let the Commission stray from its essential findings. And with McCloy, Dulles, and Ford involved, he didn’t meet much resistance. (I will touch on Johnson’s actual influence later.)

    But in spite of all the errors, distortions, and misrepresentations on just the first page of the excerpt, Russo and Molton insist they actually have the truth. And they add that they will now piece together and “tell the real story for the first time.” (Op. cit. p. 20)

    They begin by saying that Kennedy was in the grip of a Cold War paradigm that was especially true for Cuban relations. They say that President Eisenhower and Vice-President Richard Nixon had been plotting a coup in Cuba. Further, that assassination was part of it. Thus the historical backdrop is dubious at the start. It is true that Eisenhower did OK a plan to overthrow the Castro government. But he was urged on in this by CIA Director Allen Dulles. It was Dulles who first proposed the trade embargo on Cuba and urged Eisenhower to try and spread it to all American allies in order to isolate the island. Many commentators, including Harry Truman, have said it was this move which almost guaranteed that Castro would be thrown into the arms of the Russians. Which may have been the crusty old Director’s aim all along. (I have always respected Dulles’ brains as much as I didn’t the uses to which he put them.) In fact, in this whole preliminary Cuban/American discussion, there is no mention of Dulles or the CIA! Which is incredible. Because it is Dulles and the Agency which will continue with the overthrow plot and push it on the new president after Eisenhower leaves office. This resulted in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. And its utter failure caused President Kennedy to fire its main architects, Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Dick Bissell. If you can believe it, in this article, the authors never mention this crucial information.

    Instead, they jump immediately to November of 1961 and Operation Mongoose. And then they distort that also. They say that RFK was closely involved with Mongoose but they leave out the main reason: after they were deceived on the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedys did not trust the CIA anymore. If you leave out the Bay of Pigs debacle, you can shove that crucial fact under the rug. And because this is Gus Russo, the essay tries to state that the Kennedys were part of the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Castro. The problem here is that both the CIA Inspector General Report on the plots to kill Castro, and the records of Mongoose have both been declassified by the ARRB. No reasonable person can state today that those records reveal what Russo says they do. In fact, Russo still uses the notorious liar Sam Halpern to try and insinuate the opposite. Halpern has been exposed many times by, among others, David Talbot and myself as being a fabricator on this issue. Russo and Molton then write that the Missile Crisis was precipitated over Mongoose. Yet in what is probably the best book on the Missile Crisis, The Kennedy Tapes, the authors disagree. In a long and detailed analysis based on declassified Soviet records, they note that Khrushchev first surfaced the idea of shipping nuclear missiles to Cuba in April of 1962. Why? This is one month after the US had completed its installation of Jupiter missiles in Turkey. (Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes, p. 674) That same month, the US resumed nuclear tests in the Pacific. The combination of these two events – both in April of 1962 – coincide with Khrushchev’s first private discussions of the matter with friend and Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan and then with defense minister Rodion Malinovsky. (Ibid p. 675) Further, when Castro was first approached about the installation, he was reluctant to accept it. He felt – correctly – that Cuba was being used to change the global balance of power. (Ibid p. 676) Castro felt that the deployment of the nuclear missiles would itself create an intense crisis. By ignoring all this new, relevant and documented information, the authors can then distort the causes of the Missile Crisis.

    When Russo and Molton go outside of Cuba, they have the same monomaniacal agenda. They actually can write that after Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam were killed, “Fidel became even more certain that he was the next hit on the Kennedys’ list.” (p. 24) This is ridiculous. In the case of Diem, Jim Douglass’ fine book JFK and the Unspeakable shows in exquisite detail that the responsible parties for the murder of Diem were Henry Cabot Lodge and Lucien Conein. (See especially pages 202-209) Not only did Kennedy not know what the two were up to, he was so distraught by what had happened he decided to fire Lodge. As for Trujillo, he had become such a brutal dictator, even his Latin American neighbors urged the US to get rid of him somehow. Yet, there is no evidence that Kennedy ever knew of, let alone approved of a plot. The actual assassination of the man was more or less a spur of the moment outburst. (See William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History pgs. 196-197)

    Around this point in the excerpt, Russo and Molton go into high gear and begin to describe their plot to kill President Kennedy. To say it is flimsy is to give it too much credibility. Predictably, they trot out the mildewed and disputed Daniel Harker AP story from September of 1963. Every writer in this vein – Jean Davison for example – uses this reportage and none of them seem to note that Castro disputes the story as written. (HSCA interview of Castro 4/3/78) And they also fail to note that there are two stories from this Castro encounter at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana. The second one, reported by the UPI and printed in the NY Times of 9/9/63 does not say the same thing as the Harker AP story. The latter quotes Castro as saying “If US leaders are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe. Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves, since they too can be the victims of an attempt which will cause their death.” (p. 25) The UPI fourteen-paragraph story had none of this in it. As the authors note, the Harker story appeared in the New Orleans Times Picayune. The unproven assumption is that Oswald read it and this helped ignite his homicidal tendency to kill Kennedy. So Russo and Molton give us a disputed newspaper story that was assumed to be read by Oswald as key evidence in motivation.

    What is the rest of the plot? Well, essentially it is a rerun of the script Gus Russo wrote for German film director Wilfried Huismann. The film he made out of Russo’s work was called Rendezvous with Death and was shown on German television in January of 2006. This documentary was so full of holes, and used so many dubious witnesses that Russo apparently decided to clean it up the second time around. For instance, it actually relied on the David Phillips inspired and aforementioned Gilberto Alvarado story as its keystone. Even though that fable has been discredited for decades. Yet Huismann and Russo did not tell the audience this. Nor did they tell them about Phillips’ association with Alvarado or how this paralleled other efforts by Phillips. I should also add here that in the original telling, Alvarado said he saw Oswald and the two G-2 agents in Mexico City on September 18th. Yet Oswald was not supposed to be in Mexico at that time.

    Russo and Huismann then built on this phony foundation with people like Pedro Gutierrez. In the Gutierrez instance, Phillips found someone who got the date right. This guy said he saw Oswald in Mexico City on September 30th. But he says he saw a payoff to Oswald right in front of the Cuban Embassy! That G-2 would arrange the murder of JFK right in front of CIA cameras is ludicrous.

    Russo also got his Witness for All Seasons, Martin Underwood, a posthumous gig. Why, I don’t know. Maybe the Germans didn’t know about his poor track record. But it seems whenever Russo needs someone to bolster some unbelievable point of his, he trots this guy out. Underwood was an employee of Mayor Richard Daley who Daley loaned to Kennedy as an advance man for his 1960 campaign. Russo originally tracked him down for Sy Hersh and ABC to bolster one of the many fallacious tales spouted by the late Judith Exner. For the shameless Hersh, Underwood said he saw Exner leaving a train with a bag of money in Chicago when she met Sam Giancana. Well, when Underwood was called to testify before the ARRB about this incident the Hersh/Russo/Exner fabrication collapsed. Underwood “denied that he followed Judith Campbell Exner on a train and that he had no knowledge about her alleged role as a courier. ” (ARRB Final Report, p. 136)

    For the German TV special, Underwood – who later worked for LBJ – passed on a secret report, which he only wanted revealed after his death. The secret report alleged that Winston Scott, CIA Mexico City station chief, told Underwood that one of Castro’s top G-2 agents, Fabian Escalante, was in Dallas on the day of Kennedy’s murder. And the CIA missed that fact. The implication being that the Agency’s miscue caused JFK’s murder.

    One problem with this is that, contrary to the claim above, Underwood told this story while he was alive. And a further problem with it is that he could produce no “report” when the ARRB asked him for it. Russo had given the ARRB notes, but Underwood said he wrote those notes for use in Hersh’s book. That is, they were written in the nineties, not in the sixties when Russo and Huismann say the “Underwood Report” originated. Yet Underwood insisted Scott had told him this. But when he did send the ARRB his notes from Mexico, they only briefly mentioned Scott, and there was no mention at all of the JFK assassination. When the ARRB asked him to testify under oath, Underwood wisely and understandably declined. (ARRB Final Report, p. 135) One last problem with the fabled “Underwood Report”. Scott’s biographer, Jefferson Morley, spent years researching the man’s life. In 2008, he published his book on Scott, entitled Our Man in Mexico. There is no mention of either Underwood or the Escalante story in the volume. Did Scott only tell the Escalante story to Underwood? Why?

    Realizing this was all thin gruel for anyone familiar with the JFK case, Russo and Huismann came up with a new witness. This is a guy named Oscar Marino – which is a pseudonym. Marino said that Oswald volunteered to kill JFK. And Russo and Molton repeat this claim for this article. What is this based upon? Well, when Vincent Bugliosi called Russo, Russo said it was based upon Alvarado’s allegation! (Reclaiming History, End Notes, p. 736) With that, we know what to think of Marino. He has all the credibility of Underwood. But that didn’t matter to Russo and Molton. As I said, they repeat the quote here. (p. 29)

    In American Heritage, Russo and Molton say that Oswald’s shooting at Gen. Walker in April of 1963 was supposed to be an audition for G-2. Further, the authors say that Oswald ordered the rifle used in that shooting, the Mannlicher Carcano. Here is the problem with that. If this is so, then the bullet changed both color and caliber from April to December. Because as Gerald McKnight notes, the original bullet was silver in color and not of the 6.5 caliber used in the Carcano. (Breach of Trust, pgs 48-49) The FBI and Warren Commission altered its color and dimension to incriminate Oswald. Somehow, Russo and Molton leave out that pertinent fact.

    From here, the authors transition to Oswald’s trip to Mexico City. They say that Oswald was declined for a visa to Cuba at the Cuban Embassy because of his erratic behavior. Not accurate. Whoever was at the Cuban Embassy – Oswald or an imposter – was declined because he wanted an in-transit visa to Cuba. The ultimate destination was Russia. Oswald could not get a visa at the Russian Embassy. This is why the Cubans turned him down. They then relate how Oswald went to a local university to get some student leftists to vouch for him in his pursuit of a visa. They say that when Oscar Contreras, the leader of the group, called the Cuban Embassy he was told to forget it since Oswald was unstable. Again, not accurate. Eusebio Azcue told Contreras that he should forget Oswald – or whoever impersonated him – because he was probably an agent provocateur. In other words, he was a CIA operative. This is why Contreras did not help. (Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, p. 290) This undermines their whole thesis. So the authors leave it out.

    The excerpt/summary ends in a crescendo of unintended satire. The authors write that because of the assassination, LBJ ended the secret war against Cuba. But the assassination almost forced a nuclear war against Russia based upon Oswald’s activities in Mexico City. (Russo and Molton, p. 29) What the authors leave out is that Johnson now eliminated the back channel Kennedy had been working on to create dÈtente with Castro. And that move caused the freeze out in relations between the two nations to persevere for 45 years. They also leave out the fact that the fear of atomic war with Russia was largely created by the phony Mexico City tapes the CIA sent to Dallas and Washington the night of the assassination. The ones that contained an imposter’s voice, not Oswald’s. And the whole idea that Oswald was meeting with a KGB agent in Mexico City to plan the murder of Kennedy was a fiction set up before the fact by James Angleton and David Phillips. (See John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, Chapters 18 and 19.) It was this false pretense which threatened atomic war that frightened Johnson. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 231) This fear was used to coax Earl Warren into helming the Warren Commission and conducting it in such a shameful manner. This also undermines their phony thesis.

    That’s pretty important information to keep from the reader. But its par for the course for Russo and Molton. American Heritage should be ashamed of itself for putting such a worthless piece of tripe in its magazine. Let alone on its cover. Shame on you.