RFK- Double Crossed at Dealey Plaza 1

RFK - Double Crossed at Dealey Plaza

By William Kelly

Lee Harvey Oswald was framed as the Patsy, Fidel Castro was set up as the Fall Guy, and RFK was double crossed and checkmated - so those who planned the Dealey Plaza operation would not be pursued and the truth about the assassination would be kept secret for over fifty years.

In May 1961, after the Bay of Pigs, RFK learned about the early CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro involving mobsters Sam Giancana, Santo Traficante and John Rosselli from a J. Edgar Hoover authored memo, and a year later, in May 1962 RFK learned more details of these plots from the CIA.

Despite his objections to the earlier plots, RFK followed Operation Mongoose anti-Castro activities closely and took over chairmanship of the Special Group (Augmented) that evaluated and approved counter-insurgency operations against Cuba.

As one RFK biography put it, “Bobby Kennedy was the spark plug of the operation. With passionate pursuit of an objective typical of his character, he kept after the SGA, demanding action. He telephoned, sent memos, held meetings at which he pounded his desk and told them to get off their asses. He was clearly dissatisfied with the progress of Operation Mongoose. Spurred on by Bobby, the Army adopted measures that were even more absurd than the plots of the CIA.”  (p. 227, Bobby Kennedy - The Making of a Folk Hero, Lester and Irene David, Dodd, Mead, 1986)

“Was there knowledge of, or authorization for the assassination of Fidel Castro on the part of any senior official in the Kennedy Administration? Nothing was ever put into writing, no memos, directives, or orders issued….The Church Committee concluded there was insufficient evidence that any President, Eisenhower, Kennedy or Johnson or any of their close advisors, or the SGA had authorized the murder of Castro. What about Bobby? His role is murky.”

While the second round of Castro assassination plots were “disapproved” by “higher authority,” as the documentary record puts it, the SGA - Special Group (Augmented), led by RFK, and “higher authority” did approve specific violent autonomous commando raids to destroy economic targets in Cuba, with the idea of putting pressure on Castro while at the same time engaged in back channel negotiations with Castro at the UN dedicated to resume official diplomatic relations.

Although there was a publicized, public prohibition on raids against Cuba from US mainland, the CIA conducted a few approved raids every month from JM WAVE bases in Florida, primarily attacks on economic targets, but also including arms drop offs, and inserting sniper trained commandos on assassination missions, along with the necessary high powered rifles with scopes used by trained snipers.

The CIA-US Army Ranger snipers, approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were trained at Point

Mary, a then remote area near Key Largo, while those assigned to attack economic targets were trained at bases in the Everglades.

According to William Harvey’s official biographer, fellow CIA officer Stockton, RFK visited the JMWAVE's Florida operational bases, and US Army Ranger Captain Bradley Ayers recalls meeting RFK at a meeting of JMWAVE officers at a CIA safe house on a golf course, as well at a remote Everglades operations base where RFK arrived by helicopter and personally met commandos about to go on Cuban infiltration missions.

Harris Wofford, a former Pennsylvania Senator and Kennedy administrator said that, "RFK made field trips to Mongoose bases in Florida, and if a sabotage raid was scheduled, he insisted on knowing such details as what side arms the exiles would be carrying."

In late September 1963 the CIA’s Desmond Fitzgerald briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff on their study of the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler and adapting it to Cuba and Castro, identifying and encouraging disenchanted military officers to engineer a coup. 

This CIA-Pentagon plan not only incorporated the use of dissatisfied military officers, as with the attempted murder of Hitler, they were going to blame the assassination on the opposition ie. Soviet communists, as well as control the media in reporting on the assassination.

The CIA also devised the Pathfinder plan to shoot Castro with a high powered rifle while he rode in an open Jeep near the DuPont estate resort, where Castro was known to frequent.

According to four NPIC officers stationed at JM WAVE, the CIA’s Pathfinder records were kept separate from regular CIA JMWAVE files in the NPIC - National Photo Interpretation Center section, and after the assassination, these records, on orders from RFK, were sent to the Smithsonian Instiute rather than to the NARA, as they should have been.

But it wasn’t Castro who was killed, it was JFK, and RFK immediately suspected the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans as being responsible, before submitting to the deranged lone nut cover story that LBJ and others publicly accepted but privately held serious doubts about.

Some have intimidated that RFK personally met Oswald in Florida, though there’s no indication Oswald was ever in Florida, but it is possible RFK was intentionally introduced to the anti-Castro commandos who were involved in the plans to kill Castro and possibly used in the Dealey Plaza operation.

Immediately after the assassination RFK suspected the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans, confronting both CIA director John McCone and Bay of Pigs survivor Ruiz Williams with his suspicions before slipping into a deep morass of guilt. Some say RFK somehow felt responsible for his brother’s murder despite the evidence that implicated Oswald, a former US Marine Corps defector to the Soviet Union, pro-Castro leftist and Fair Play for Cuba Committee member who visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City shortly before the assassination.

Neither Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles nor RFK mentioned the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro to the Warren Commission, substantially undermining their conclusion of a deranged lone nut being responsible, but the facts eventually came out.

In 1966 attempts were made to deport Johnny Roselli as an illegal alien when he told attorney Edward Morgan that, "The last of the sniper teams dispatched by Robert Kennedy in 1963 to assassinate Fidel Castro were captured in Havana. Under torture they broke and confessed to being sponsored by the CIA and the US government…The result was that Castro infiltrated teams of snipers into the US to kill Kennedy."

Indeed, on Halloween, October 31, 1963 - the ultimate spook David Atlee Phillips birthday, the CIA raider ship Rex deposited a team of anti-Castro Cuban commandos on a Cuban beach where they were immediately captured and paraded before Cuban TV, along with their high powered rifles with scopes, that Rolando Martinez, one of the Cuban boat skippers and later Watergate burglar said, "Were not for shooting rabbits." 

Were these some of the commandos RFK met at the remote Everglades training base earlier that summer? 

On March 3, 1967 Jack Anderson wrote about RFK’s involvement in the plots to kill Castro in the nationally syndicated column Washington Merry Go-Round, saying, "President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb, an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot [against Castro] which then possibly backfired against his late brother."

Anderson said the attorney general “may have approved an assassination plot” against Castro and speculated that Castro might have retaliated by engineering John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963.

In response President Lyndon Johnson ordered the CIA to prepare a full report on the Anderson story that resulted in a 140-page secret report by CIA Inspector General J. S. Earman.

Anderson later wrote that when RFK was questioned whether he “may have approved an assassination plot, which then possibly backfired against his brother, former aides of the late Robert Kennedy confided that he was furious over our column. It was published at a time of strained relations between Kennedy and then-President Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy though(t) Johnson had leaked the story to us. The aides recall, significantly, Kennedy acknowledge to them that our story was correct about the assassination plot. But he denied that he had approved the plot; he told them, on the contrary that he had stopped it.”

Shortly after Robert Kennedy had been mortally wounded on June 5, 1968, Johnson doodled on a memo wondering if Castro had decided that his revenge would not be complete until both Kennedy brothers were dead, scratching out a few disjointed words: "Costra [sic] Nostra ... Ed Morgan ... send in to get Castro ... planning."

Max Holland (in a 31 March 2007 Washington Decoded blog post) wrote about “Why RFK Shunned the Investigation into his Brother's Assassination,” reporting that, “12 years after the assassination of JFK, (on January 4, 1975) there was an Oval Office meeting - President Ford, national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger and Richard Helms, who reportedly said, if the Family Jewels were released, - ‘Blood will flow. For instance, RFK personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.’” 

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