COUNTDOWN
TO DARKNESS – THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY
VOLUME
II – John M. Newman
Major
Working Hypotheses. The following working hypotheses pertain to the entire
series of volumes in the present work. Hypotheses Three and Four was presented
in the 2008 edition of my previous work, Oswald and the CIA. We will build upon
them as the volumes of this series unfold.
-
Hypothesis One: At some point in
1962, regardless of how much earlier someone might have wanted President
Kennedy to be assassinated, the contours of the plot that eventually emerged
began to fall into place: an American Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald would
assassinate JFK and APPEAR to have done so for Fidel Castro with the assistance
of the KGB.
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Hypothesis Two: The plot was also designed to make it APPEAR
that the Kennedy brothers’ plan to overthrow Castro had been successfully
turned around by Fidel, resulting in the assassination.
-
Hypothesis Three: Lee Harvey Oswald was sent by his agent
handler to New Orleans in the summer of 1963 to build upon his pro-Castro Cuban
legend that he had begun to establish in Dallas at the beginning of that year.
-
Hypothesis Four: Oswald’s CIA files
were manipulated by CIA counter-intelligence in the weeks before the
assassination to support the design mentioned in Hypothesis One and Two.
In this connection, Oswald (or an imposter) traveled to Mexico City
(28 September-3 October 1963) and met with a Soviet diplomat, Valery Kostikov, who
was known to U.S. intelligence to be the head of KGB assassinations (Department
13) for the Western Hemisphere.
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Hypothesis Five: An essential
element of the plot was a psychological operation to raise the specter of WWIII
and the death of forty million Americans. 7.
[Note: 7. See the discussion in David
Talbot’s Brothers – The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Free
Press, 2007, p. 252-253). Talbot discusses the threat of nuclear war, and also
Castro’s remark, “You watch and see, I know them, they will try put the blame on
us for this thing.”].
This threat of a nuclear holocaust was then used by
President Johnson to terrify Chief Justice Earl Warren and some of the other
men who served on the Warren Commission to such an extent that they believed
there was no alternative to writing a report stating Lee Oswald alone had
assassinated the president.
-
Hypothesis Six (New): The deaths of
Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic –
without regard to who actually pulled the triggers – were ultimately the result
of President Eisenhower’s top secret plan according to which their elimination was
an indispensable requirement for the success of his covert plan to overthrow
Castro.
-
Hypothesis Seven (New): President
Kennedy’s April 1961 decisions against direct U.S. military intervention in
Cuba and Laos spawned the deep hatred in many circles that gathered momentum
during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and later became a critical part of the
motivation for his assassination in 1963.
Further Assumptions
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Neither Fidel Castro nor the Soviet
Union was involved in the assassination of JFK.
-
For the plot that was used in the
JFK assassination to work, Castro had to be alive after the president’s death.
Rolando Cubela would have to be denied the means to easily kill Castro until
after – several months at a minimum – the assassination in Dallas took place.
-
Many of the post-assassination lies
and cover-ups were carried out by people who had nothing to do with the
pre-existing plot to assassinate the president. Many of these people mistakenly
thought that what they were doing was in the best interest of the country.
-
We would be mistaken to assume that
just because there is no written evidence for an event that it never took
place.
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(New): DCI Allen Dulles was aware,
well before Congo’s independence, of Belgium’s plans for the recession of
Katanga Province.
-
(New): The claims, by top advisors
to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, that an exile invasion would trigger an
uprising of the Cuban population against Castro were known to be false by those
who made them.
-
(New): The CIA attempt to cobble
together a functional government-n-exile from the exiled Cuban leaders was
doomed to fail right from the start.
-
(New): Given the level and timing of
Soviet Bloc military aid to the Castro regime, there was not enough time to
adequately prepare, train, and equip a Cuban exile military force capable of
toppling the regime.
-
(New): DCI Allen Dulles and the
Joint Chiefs of Staff knew that the CIA-planned invasion of Cuba would fail,
and deliberately withheld this judgement from the president. Furthermore, they
assumed that, once the exile forces were being slaughtered on the beachhead at
the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy would reverse his policy of refusing to intervene with
U.S. military forces.
-
(New): Allen Dulles hoped that DDP
Dick Bissel would be fired for the failed landing in Cuba, and that Dulles
would get to remain as DCI instead of being replaced by Bissell as JFK had
originally planned.
The
Implications of the False Defector Scenario
Once
you say you are willing to seriously consider that Oswald was sent as a false
defector to the Soviet Union to surface a Soviet mole or moles in the CIA
and/or MI-6, you have walked into the proverbial wilderness of mirrors. For
several reasons, it is best not to aver that this scenario was, in fact, so;
rather, it is better to treat it as a hypotheses best described in terms of the
probabilities of its many possible scenarios. When considering intelligence
operations, “beyond a reasonable doubt” or “by a preponderance of the evidence”
are standards of proof that are undercut by plausible deniability.
And like it
or not, in this case your choices have important consequences. Whatever
permutation you choose, from the many scenarios available, fundamentally
affects the way you understand Oswald’s behavior in Japan, and just about all
of the major events in his life after his defection to the USSR and re-defection
to the U.S.
To
begin with, you must accept as probable, the possibility that neither side (CIA
or KGB) in this counterintelligence chess match would have officially
acknowledged that Oswald was a false defector. To have done so against the
backdrop of the Kennedy assassination would have revealed an embarrassing
serious interest in him when both intelligence services were desperate to
establish as much distance as possible from the alleged assassin. And if Oswald
was not a false defector, both sides would still say the same thing. So the
denials get you exactly nowhere. But understanding both sides would deny it if
it had been true is important.
Oswald’s
status as the alleged killer of JFK made him radioactive to both intelligence services.
Oswald’s late 1963 Soviet KGB contacts in Mexico caused the KGB – after the assassination
– to send a false defector, Yuri Nosenko, to claim that they had nothing to do
with the “abnormal” Oswald. In the end, the CIA would be happy to let that
fairytale go unchallenged, as it assisted their analogous claim – that the CIA
had nothing to do with Oswald’s sojourn in the USSR.
In
this scenario of moles and false defectors on both sides, you must also accept
as probable, the possibility that even when one side discovered a mole in its
midst while working for the other side, the mole had to be left in place –
perhaps for several years even as more damage occurred – in order to prevent
the other side from figuring out how the mole was uncovered. Before arresting
the mole, it was necessary to create and sell a secondary and believable story
about how the case was solved to divert the opponent’s attention to the true
source of the discovery.
With
so many layers of deception, you must admit that, at the end of the day, you do
not have the “true” story or all of the story; rather, what you have is a
complicated best-case scenario. In the hypothesis under consideration here, the
basic scenario is already complex: using Oswald to surface a highly placed
Soviet mole in the West who had betrayed the U.S. U-2 program and also very
likely the CIA mole in the GRU, Pyotr Popov. But this scenario was made
exceeding MORE complex by a subsequent KGB defector....Nosenko gave the CIA a
COMPLETELY FALSE account of that (Oswald’s) file. The KGB, Nosenko said, had no
interest at all in Oswald, had not interviewed him, watched him or bugged his
apartment in Minsk. Similarly, the CIA’s official position has been that they
never had contact with or interest in Oswald. Both sides were telling false
tales…..
His
(Nosenko’s) claim of complete familiarity with the Oswald’s Soviet sojourn was
the bait that assured he would be allowed to defect to the U.S. What happened
afterward was one of the hardest fought and destructive battles in the history
of the Agency…
The
Soviet denial of interest in Oswald collapsed with the demise of the USSR. We
have not suffered a political collapse of similar proportions in America, but
instead have witnessed a further entrenchment of a national security state….
Little
by little, as the small pieces of information were reevaluated in the light of
yet more small pieces, new life was breathed into the false defector
hypothesis. That story is important all by itself, aside from the JFK case,
because it leads so deeply into the spy-counterspy wars of the past and that
may still be taking place.
If
Oswald was a witting tool of an Angleton operation at the beginning of the
story, it increases the probability that he might have been witting or
manipulated into an operation at the end of the story.
A
CIA propaganda associate of David Phillips, William Kent, intimated as much to
his daughter at a family Thanksgiving gathering: “Oswald was a useful idiot.”
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