NSA Kennedy Assassination Records
The NSA Records Related to the
Assassination of President Kennedy
By William E. Kelly, Jr.
The letters “NSA” were at one time a
national security secret, and for many years the CIA- the Central Intelligence
Agency took most of the heat when it came to any intelligence or espionage
caper that caught the public’s attention, but the NSA was always there quietly
sitting in the background soaking it all in like a fly on the wall.
When Congress, under the JFK Act of
1992, ordered the Assassinations Records Review Board to identify and release
all of the government records related to the assassination of the President,
when they got to the NSA, they had already been bamboozled by the Secret
Service, who destroyed records after the enactment of the law, and the ONI, who
like the NSA, just said they didn’t have any records that had anything at all
to do with the assassination. Nothing, zilch. Not believable, the ARRB
designated ONI a separate entity from the Navy and with the cooperation of ONI
officers, found a number of assassination related records, including one on
military defectors and obtained the testimony of former ONI investigators who
created records that they now say no longer exist.
Also like the ONI’s now non-existent
records that military officers had seen and read, there are published
references to NSA records related to the assassination that the NSA failed to
turn over to the ARRB, or the Warren Commission for that matter.
RALPH
MEYERS
For starters there’s Ralph Meyers,
who has never been questioned despite the fact that his uncle Lawrence Meyers
was a close personal friend of Jack Ruby, and Ralph’s father Ed Meyers met Ruby
on the night before the assassination. Ed Meyers was a carbonated beverage
distributer in New York city who was in Dallas after visiting his son Ralph in
Mexico City, where Ralph was working as a journalist. Prior to working as a
journalist in Mexico City Ralph Meyers had served in the Army Security Agency
(ASA), stationed at a remote listening post in Turkey from where U2 flights
were also launched. After his active duty service in the military Ralph worked
as a bus driver for the Chicago Transit Authority, where Cuban exile Homer
Echaverra also worked at the time.
When Lawrence Meyers testified
before the Warren Commission, there was little interest in his nephew, who
worked for the Army Security Agency – the military side of the National
Security Agency – (NSA), and after being “sheep dipped” as a Chicago bus
driver, was a journalist in Mexico City when Oswald visited there, and may have
been in Dallas at the time of the assassination.
An appendix to the book “The CIA and
the Cult of Intelligence” includes the minutes to a meeting of academic
associates of the intelligence community who were given a briefing on the new
nature of the intelligence business. The document was discovered by rebellious
students at Columbia University when they took over the administration
building. According to the minutes to this meeting, the CIA briefer said the
new nature of intelligence was generally divided it into three distinct areas –
human intelligence – the old school of spies, and the new and still developing
areas of satellite -aerial-photo intelligence and electronic intelligence –
ELINT.
The NSA is responsible for the ELINT
– electronic intel – but it is legally limited to spying overseas on foreigners
and is not permitted to function domestically or violate the inalliable rights
of Americans abroad.
In regards to the Kennedy
assassination, the first question one would ask an Electronic – eavesdropping
agency would be if they happened to have a tape of the Air Force One radio
transmissions that the White House Communications Agency seems to have lost?
Since they were not legally permitted to operate domestically however, they would be hard pressed to admit that they had it, but they should have been able to obtain it from the Cubans or Soviets, or even friends like the Canadians, British, Australians or Israelis.
Since they were not legally permitted to operate domestically however, they would be hard pressed to admit that they had it, but they should have been able to obtain it from the Cubans or Soviets, or even friends like the Canadians, British, Australians or Israelis.
Most of the information we have on
the NSA related to the assassination of President Kennedy concerns defectors –
Oswald, Martin and Mitchell, Brian Latell’s Cuban Florentino Aspillaga and
Mitrokin.
Oswald himself was a former USMC
defector to the Soviet Union, who returned to the USA with a Russian wife, and
tried to get a visa to Cuba from the Cuban and Soviet Embassies in Mexico City.
Around the same time the American intelligence establishment was rocked by the
joint defection of Martin and Mitchell – two former US Navy ELINT specialists
who left the Navy to work for the NSA. Martin and Mitchell defected together,
going from Mexico City to Cuba and then by ship to the Soviet Union, the same
way Oswald wanted to go two months before the assassination. Was he trying to
use the same route and try to penetrate the network that recruited Martin and
Mitchell and whisked them away behind the Iron Curtain?
One supposedly high level defector
from Castro’s Cuba, when debriefed through CIA interpreters like Brian Latell,
said that Castro himself ordered their listening posts to tune in to Texas to
try to pick up any Air Force One radio communications. While Latell illogically
asserts that this is proof that Castro knew JFK would be killed there and
Castro was thus responsible for the murder, it really only indicates that
Castro knew JFK would be in Texas.
But the Soviets and Cubans did
operate a very high tech electronic ELINT listening post at Lourdes, on the north
shore of Cuba, which was specifically designed to pick up strategic radio
communications in the United States such as that from Air Force One.
While it is clear that it is a
stretch to believe that the CIA’s Cuban defector provides Cuban foreknowledge
of the assassination, it is possible the Cubans-Soviet ELINT station picked up
and recorded the radio communications from Air Force One, just as the defector
said he had been ordered to do. If the Cubans picked up and recorded
the Air Force One radio communications, then the NSA, whose job it is to
monitor the Cubans radio communications, would or should have the recording,
and have it legitimately from the Cuban sources.
Besides being a possible source for
a complete unedited version of the Air Force One radio transmissions, the NSA
must have records on a number of published incidents that refer directly to the
assassination of President Kennedy, including that of Robert Lipka, an NSA
clerk who was belatedly identified as a KGB source by another defector, V.
Mitrokin.
As a self-professed keeper of the KGB files, Mitrokin defected to the British as the Soviet Union collapsed, and in order to confirm his bonifides as a legitimate KGB archivist, gave up Robert Lipka, who Mitrokin said was an NSA clerk who provided the KGB with secret documents for years. Lipka had left the NSA and was living in a suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania town when he was approached by an undercover FBI agent who approached him in a bar and offered to revive his service to the Russians. When Lipka took the bait he was arrested and Mitrokin’s bonifiedes confirmed.
As a self-professed keeper of the KGB files, Mitrokin defected to the British as the Soviet Union collapsed, and in order to confirm his bonifides as a legitimate KGB archivist, gave up Robert Lipka, who Mitrokin said was an NSA clerk who provided the KGB with secret documents for years. Lipka had left the NSA and was living in a suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania town when he was approached by an undercover FBI agent who approached him in a bar and offered to revive his service to the Russians. When Lipka took the bait he was arrested and Mitrokin’s bonifiedes confirmed.
When Lipka appeared at a court
hearing however, he told the Judge that while working as a file clerk at NSA he
read a document that identified the real assassin of President Kennedy. With
that, the Judge ended the hearing but while he was being led out of the court
room, a reporter asked Lipka the name of the real assassin of President
Kennedy.
“Louis Angel Castillo” Lipka
answered as he was being led away.
It just so happened, despite
warnings from Peter Dale Scott not to get sucked into the Louis Angel Castillo
vortex, I requested the Church Committee report on Castillo that was kept at
the President Gerald Ford library in Michigan but it was withheld for reasons
of national security. After the passage of the JFK Act of 1992 it was released,
and indicated that Castillo was arrested in an assassination plot in the Philippines
and while being violently interrogated, admitted a role in the Kennedy
assassination.
Castillo had some Cuban connections
as well, but was also clearly mentally unbalanced and appeared to have multiple
personalities, some of them intentionally programmed. Back in the United States
Castillo was for a time imprisoned in Bordentown, New Jersey, an institution
that received CIA MKULTRA contracts, and after violating parole he was and
maybe still wanted on a NJ warrant. But the report on Castillo prepared for the
Church Committee and withheld from the public until the passage of the JFK Act,
indicate that the FBI was hot on Castillo’s trail and located him at his
mother’s house in Chicago. When they got there however, she said that he had
been taken away by some men a few days previous, and she didn’t expect to ever
see him again.
That’s where the Louis Angel
Castillo trail goes cold, but that’s not the point. The point is the National
Security Agency – NSA had documents about Castillo and the assassination of
President Kennedy that Lipka, the KGB agent had read, and those NSA Kennedy
assassination documents were not turned over to the ARRB and NARA and included
in the JFK Collection as the law dictates.
SCRIPPS-HOWARD-NEWS-SERVICE-REPORT
Also among the records the NSA is
known to have regarding the assassination of President Kennedy and not released
to the NARA are the documents concerning the “leak” of a 1980 NSA document that
originated in Venezeula but concerned a Cuban radio report that said Fidel
Castro was plotting the assassination of President Reagan just as he had killed
President Kennedy.
Of course the NSA doesn’t permit
“leaks” and if it was a legitimate leak by a government whistleblower it would
have been thoroughly investigated and the culprit identified, but there are no
records that reflect that is what happened, so we can only assume that the
so-called “leak” was an official “leak” and a black propaganda operation. It
may have been associated with the attempted assassination of President Reagan a
few months later by John Hinckley, who purchased his pistol from a Dallas pawn
shop a few blocks from Dealey Plaza.
Even though this Scripps Howard News
Service (SHNS) report was distributed by the wire services and widely published,
the NSA didn’t include it among the records they had that was turned over to
the NARA to be included in the JFK Assassination collection, as they should
have.
So there are a number of records
among the NSA that are related to the assassination of President Kennedy that
should have been included in the JFK Act releases but weren’t – including the
NSA and ASA files on Ralph Meyers, and the records of defectors Latell’s Cuban,
Martin and Mitchell, V. Mitrokin, Latell’s Cuban, Lipka and Louis Angel Castillo,
as well as the 1980 SHNS report.
NSA
THE NSA Records Related to the
Assassination
1) Possible
source of AF1 radio transmission tapes
2) Lourdes,
Cuba – listening post – Leedel –source? – Canada, Israel, ?
3) Regan
pre-op psyh war news article – SHNS – 1980 –
4) Mitrokin
and Lipka – NAS clerk –
5) Louis
Angel Castillo
6) Mitchell
and Martin –
Hello, Bill...A slight correction to your section on the Meyers family. Ralph Meyers is the son of Lawrence Victor Meyers - not Ed's son. Ed "Eddie" Meyers is Lawrence's brother - and thus, Ralph's uncle. I just did a genealogical workup on the family. Lawrence V. Meyers is buried in Dallas. Funny that he came back to Dallas to live the last couple of decades of his life. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/125870241
ReplyDeleteHis legal name may have been Victor Lawrence Meyers, i've found it both ways on Ancestry family trees but could never find a birth certificate to know which was his legal birth name. Early on in the '20 & '30 Censuses he went by "Victor" - later he started using Lawrence or Larry for his first name and Victor/V. as a middle name. Whatever his birth name was, "Lawrence V. Meyers" is on his grave marker. Keep up the good work! :)