We Now Know - Bill Turner
At one of the COPA Conferencces in Dallas, former FBI agent and original JFK assassination investigator Bill Turner said:
"We now know to a fairly good degree of certainty what happened at Dealey Plaza. The motives were piling up - the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the backchannel to Cuba, - the motives were piling up to the point they had to assassinate him. I think its' pretty obvious, with the compilation of the information we have today, that the mechanizm of the crime came out of the alligence between the CIA and the Mafia. They already had an assassination apparatus set up for killing Castro, and they just switched targets and killed Kennedy instead."
So of all the theories about the assassination, the one that holds water is the one that looks closely at the CIA - Mafia plots to kill Castro.
As we have seen and others have detailed, the CIA first began to consort with the Mafia dons - John Rosselli and Sam Giancana during the Eisenhower administration, and with the sanction of CIA director Allen Dulles, himself no stranger to assassination plots.
That began the first part of the CIA - Mafia association, and included a number of plots to poison Castro, none of which came to frutation.
Then the CIA-Mafia plots reaached as second stage, when William Harvey returned to the US from Germany, where he ran the Berlin tunnel operation, and was promoted to head the special Cuban Task Force set up in the basemen of the CIA HQ and called Task Force W.
Giancana was dumped from these plans - as the plottings were replaced by contingincy plans - and Harvey himself replaced Jim O'Donnell as Rosselli's case officer and good friend.
From poinson, the Castro plans moved on to more reliable means of execution, including shooting Castro with a high powered rifle as he rode around in an open jeep, as he often did.
In developing a contingency plan you must review previous, similar plans that have been used and serve as historical models - and two such examples exist - the British MI6 assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Hydrich in Check on June 4, 1942 in Prague, Czech Rep., and the failed August 22, 1962 attack on French President Charles deGaulle by French military disenchanged with plan to free colonial French Algeria.
The attack on Hydrich was orchestrated by Czech agents trained by MI6, and utilized a tight turn in the road that required the motorcade and car he was riding in to slow down when the attack from multiple assailants succedeed, as caan be seen in the popular movie, Anthropoid.
The name Anthropoid comes from the MI6 code name for the operation, as one thing that distinguishes a plot from a planned covert operation is an operation is given a code name that is only know among the perpetuators.
But the backlash against the successful Anthropoid operation was so great in the ruthless Nazis taking of human life against everyone who knew or associated with assailants, thousands of innocent civilians were tortured and killed, that the British MI6 declined the later opportunity to have a sniper kill Hitler as he daily walked through a rose garden.
The French affair is also a significant role model for what happened at Dealey Plaza, though it failed, as there were lessens to be learned.
President Kennedy had urged President deGaulle to free Algeria as a colony, and he was inclined to do so, but the French generals balked at the idea, as they had developed the French Foreign Legion from an army of misfits to one of the most famous fighting forces in the world, and they didn't want to lose their sandbox battlefield.
The Organisation armee secrete or OAS - Secret Army Organization that staged an attack on deGaul's motorcade in Paris on August 22, 1962.
In one of documents released under the JFK Act, a State Department report from the Paris office of Security, refers to a meeting with M. Andre Ducret, the Commissaire divisionnaire de Police concerning the attempted assassination of deGaul. Ducret "disclosed that the ambush had been organized and directed by a person of military experience and this was immediately noticed. The tactics employed were similar to those used by the infantry in attacking convoys...."
Like the attack on Heidrich, this OAS attack on deGaulle was at an intersection where the motorcade of cars and motorcycles had to slow down to almost a complete stop, much like Dealey Plaza.
And sure enough, Jean-Marie Bastien, a French Air Force aeronautical engineer, was apprehended and admitted having organized the attempt. President deGaulle pardoned a few of those convicted for their participation in the attempted assassination - but Bastien was executed in March 1963, a week after the trial. 2,000 policeman were posted along the route used to take him to his execution. Bastein may have been the last person to be executed in France.
The attempt to kill deGaulle was made into a movie, The Day of the Jackel, though the shooting of deGaulle as he gave a speech replaced the "military style attack on a motorcade," that included 187 spent shell casings and 15 bulletl holes in deGaulle's car (a Citroen DS) Two other bullets hit the tires (Michelin), yet the car was able to escape at nearlly full speed.
President deGaulle and the security chief credited the endurance of the car and the tires for saving his life.
The OAS assassination attempts on deGaulle are connected to what happened at Dealey Plaza by the Houma Bunker Raid on Jean deMeniel's Schulumberger munitions bunker at an old Louisiana Navy base that included a number of New Orleans characters who associated with Oswald. Those munitions were taken to Guy Bannister's office and David Ferrie's apartment and were said to be set for use by the anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs or the OAS in France.
While these two historical examples were known and studied by the CIA, just as it studied in detail the July 20, 1944 German military plot to kill Hitler, the one CIA contingency plan to kill Castro that interests me the most was code named PATHFINDER.
PATHFINDER, according to the records of it that have survived, was a CIA contingency plan presented to the National Security Council (NSC) for approval, but was "disapproved by higher authority."
We know that JFK himself, or RFK in his place, reviewed most if not all of the proposed covert operations against Cuba, as JFK was asked to approve a relatively harmless propaganda leaflet drop, a psychological warfare operation, that he "disapproved" after consulting with William Morrow, the head of the US Information Agency. So if he reviewed and disapproved that minor operation, he must have been asked to approve the PATHFINDER plan to kill Castro, and disapproved that one too.
We only know about PATHFINDER because of the reports of National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) technicians who were stationed at JMWAVE told the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) that the CIA kept the PATHFINDER files in their files section of the station rather than where it should have been.
PATHFINDER was a plan to kill Castro with a high power rifle while he rode past in an open jeep near "Xandau," the exquisite DuPont estate that Castro confiscated, and where he was known to frequent.
The JMWAVE NPIC technicians provided the contingency planners with U2 photos of the area and architect drawings of the estate. Nearby was a residence of Rolando Cubella (AMLASH), who was to be provided with a rifle with a scope, but the job required a trained and reliable first class sniper, one trained by the CIA at their JMWAVE sniper training base at Point Mary, near Key Largo, Florida.
The teams that were trained there by a US Army Ranger major (Roderick), who was transferred to the CIA for the job by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were infiltrated into Cuba by the JMWAVE Maritime ships.
Some of the anti-Castro Cuban commandos trained at the CIA's JMWAVE station bases were also supported financially and fanatically by a number of wealthy Americans - William Paley, Clare Booth Luce and John Rosselli.
While Luce's "boys," as she called them were led by a team leader - Julio Fernandez, and trained by US Ranger Capt. Bradley Ayers, Rosselli's team was trained at Point Mary, and included the snipers, whose names should be among the JMWAVE records inspected by the Church and HSCA and released by the JFK Act.
Rosselli later said, and as he reports to Jack Anderson in the Rosselli Chronology file that was recently released by the NARA, that one of his teams was infiltrated into Cuba, but never returned or reported back, and he assumed they were among those captured by Castro forces.
What became of the PATHFINDER file from JMWAVE's NPIC section?
In 1996 two AARC staff talked to Velma Reumann, who worked at the NPIC from 1963-1966. According to their report, "She has a strong, independent recollection of NPC personnel boxing-up all photographic materials related to the assassination on the orders of Robert Kennedy and sending them to the Smithsonian Museum for permanent storage sometime within 6 months or so after the assassination."
"She cannot remember whether the orders from Robert Kennedy were in writing, or oral, but she was quite firmly of the impression in 1996 that the direction had come from Robert Kennedy.
"In order to test the strength of her Smithsonian recollection (she) was asked whtehr she may have been confusing the Smithsonian and the National Archives or some other government body; she replied emplatically that she knew the difference between the National Archives and the Smithsonian, and reiterat that the boxed material (from NPIC) went to the Smithsonian. She said that she was certain of this because she, herself, was required to call an offical at the Smithsonian to discuss the imminent transfer, and recalls that the individual to whom she spoke was surprised by the selection of the Smithsonian as she was."
In any case, we now know, to a fairly good degree of certainty, that the Dealey Plaza Operation was originally devised as a contingency plan to kill Castro, it involved the Cuban military as it was strategically based on the German VALKYRIE plan to kill Hitler, and the tactically the PATHFINDER plan to shoot Castro with a high powered rifle as he rode in an open vehicle, or a similar plan. And as with both VALKYRIE and PATHFINDER included the psychwar disinformation twist to blame the murder on Communists.
As Bill Turner put it, the mechanism was in place to kill Castro, and they just switched targets.
At one of the COPA Conferencces in Dallas, former FBI agent and original JFK assassination investigator Bill Turner said:
"We now know to a fairly good degree of certainty what happened at Dealey Plaza. The motives were piling up - the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the backchannel to Cuba, - the motives were piling up to the point they had to assassinate him. I think its' pretty obvious, with the compilation of the information we have today, that the mechanizm of the crime came out of the alligence between the CIA and the Mafia. They already had an assassination apparatus set up for killing Castro, and they just switched targets and killed Kennedy instead."
So of all the theories about the assassination, the one that holds water is the one that looks closely at the CIA - Mafia plots to kill Castro.
As we have seen and others have detailed, the CIA first began to consort with the Mafia dons - John Rosselli and Sam Giancana during the Eisenhower administration, and with the sanction of CIA director Allen Dulles, himself no stranger to assassination plots.
That began the first part of the CIA - Mafia association, and included a number of plots to poison Castro, none of which came to frutation.
Then the CIA-Mafia plots reaached as second stage, when William Harvey returned to the US from Germany, where he ran the Berlin tunnel operation, and was promoted to head the special Cuban Task Force set up in the basemen of the CIA HQ and called Task Force W.
Giancana was dumped from these plans - as the plottings were replaced by contingincy plans - and Harvey himself replaced Jim O'Donnell as Rosselli's case officer and good friend.
From poinson, the Castro plans moved on to more reliable means of execution, including shooting Castro with a high powered rifle as he rode around in an open jeep, as he often did.
In developing a contingency plan you must review previous, similar plans that have been used and serve as historical models - and two such examples exist - the British MI6 assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Hydrich in Check on June 4, 1942 in Prague, Czech Rep., and the failed August 22, 1962 attack on French President Charles deGaulle by French military disenchanged with plan to free colonial French Algeria.
The attack on Hydrich was orchestrated by Czech agents trained by MI6, and utilized a tight turn in the road that required the motorcade and car he was riding in to slow down when the attack from multiple assailants succedeed, as caan be seen in the popular movie, Anthropoid.
The name Anthropoid comes from the MI6 code name for the operation, as one thing that distinguishes a plot from a planned covert operation is an operation is given a code name that is only know among the perpetuators.
But the backlash against the successful Anthropoid operation was so great in the ruthless Nazis taking of human life against everyone who knew or associated with assailants, thousands of innocent civilians were tortured and killed, that the British MI6 declined the later opportunity to have a sniper kill Hitler as he daily walked through a rose garden.
The French affair is also a significant role model for what happened at Dealey Plaza, though it failed, as there were lessens to be learned.
President Kennedy had urged President deGaulle to free Algeria as a colony, and he was inclined to do so, but the French generals balked at the idea, as they had developed the French Foreign Legion from an army of misfits to one of the most famous fighting forces in the world, and they didn't want to lose their sandbox battlefield.
The Organisation armee secrete or OAS - Secret Army Organization that staged an attack on deGaul's motorcade in Paris on August 22, 1962.
In one of documents released under the JFK Act, a State Department report from the Paris office of Security, refers to a meeting with M. Andre Ducret, the Commissaire divisionnaire de Police concerning the attempted assassination of deGaul. Ducret "disclosed that the ambush had been organized and directed by a person of military experience and this was immediately noticed. The tactics employed were similar to those used by the infantry in attacking convoys...."
Like the attack on Heidrich, this OAS attack on deGaulle was at an intersection where the motorcade of cars and motorcycles had to slow down to almost a complete stop, much like Dealey Plaza.
And sure enough, Jean-Marie Bastien, a French Air Force aeronautical engineer, was apprehended and admitted having organized the attempt. President deGaulle pardoned a few of those convicted for their participation in the attempted assassination - but Bastien was executed in March 1963, a week after the trial. 2,000 policeman were posted along the route used to take him to his execution. Bastein may have been the last person to be executed in France.
The attempt to kill deGaulle was made into a movie, The Day of the Jackel, though the shooting of deGaulle as he gave a speech replaced the "military style attack on a motorcade," that included 187 spent shell casings and 15 bulletl holes in deGaulle's car (a Citroen DS) Two other bullets hit the tires (Michelin), yet the car was able to escape at nearlly full speed.
President deGaulle and the security chief credited the endurance of the car and the tires for saving his life.
The OAS assassination attempts on deGaulle are connected to what happened at Dealey Plaza by the Houma Bunker Raid on Jean deMeniel's Schulumberger munitions bunker at an old Louisiana Navy base that included a number of New Orleans characters who associated with Oswald. Those munitions were taken to Guy Bannister's office and David Ferrie's apartment and were said to be set for use by the anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs or the OAS in France.
While these two historical examples were known and studied by the CIA, just as it studied in detail the July 20, 1944 German military plot to kill Hitler, the one CIA contingency plan to kill Castro that interests me the most was code named PATHFINDER.
PATHFINDER, according to the records of it that have survived, was a CIA contingency plan presented to the National Security Council (NSC) for approval, but was "disapproved by higher authority."
We know that JFK himself, or RFK in his place, reviewed most if not all of the proposed covert operations against Cuba, as JFK was asked to approve a relatively harmless propaganda leaflet drop, a psychological warfare operation, that he "disapproved" after consulting with William Morrow, the head of the US Information Agency. So if he reviewed and disapproved that minor operation, he must have been asked to approve the PATHFINDER plan to kill Castro, and disapproved that one too.
We only know about PATHFINDER because of the reports of National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) technicians who were stationed at JMWAVE told the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) that the CIA kept the PATHFINDER files in their files section of the station rather than where it should have been.
PATHFINDER was a plan to kill Castro with a high power rifle while he rode past in an open jeep near "Xandau," the exquisite DuPont estate that Castro confiscated, and where he was known to frequent.
The JMWAVE NPIC technicians provided the contingency planners with U2 photos of the area and architect drawings of the estate. Nearby was a residence of Rolando Cubella (AMLASH), who was to be provided with a rifle with a scope, but the job required a trained and reliable first class sniper, one trained by the CIA at their JMWAVE sniper training base at Point Mary, near Key Largo, Florida.
The teams that were trained there by a US Army Ranger major (Roderick), who was transferred to the CIA for the job by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were infiltrated into Cuba by the JMWAVE Maritime ships.
Some of the anti-Castro Cuban commandos trained at the CIA's JMWAVE station bases were also supported financially and fanatically by a number of wealthy Americans - William Paley, Clare Booth Luce and John Rosselli.
While Luce's "boys," as she called them were led by a team leader - Julio Fernandez, and trained by US Ranger Capt. Bradley Ayers, Rosselli's team was trained at Point Mary, and included the snipers, whose names should be among the JMWAVE records inspected by the Church and HSCA and released by the JFK Act.
Rosselli later said, and as he reports to Jack Anderson in the Rosselli Chronology file that was recently released by the NARA, that one of his teams was infiltrated into Cuba, but never returned or reported back, and he assumed they were among those captured by Castro forces.
What became of the PATHFINDER file from JMWAVE's NPIC section?
In 1996 two AARC staff talked to Velma Reumann, who worked at the NPIC from 1963-1966. According to their report, "She has a strong, independent recollection of NPC personnel boxing-up all photographic materials related to the assassination on the orders of Robert Kennedy and sending them to the Smithsonian Museum for permanent storage sometime within 6 months or so after the assassination."
"She cannot remember whether the orders from Robert Kennedy were in writing, or oral, but she was quite firmly of the impression in 1996 that the direction had come from Robert Kennedy.
"In order to test the strength of her Smithsonian recollection (she) was asked whtehr she may have been confusing the Smithsonian and the National Archives or some other government body; she replied emplatically that she knew the difference between the National Archives and the Smithsonian, and reiterat that the boxed material (from NPIC) went to the Smithsonian. She said that she was certain of this because she, herself, was required to call an offical at the Smithsonian to discuss the imminent transfer, and recalls that the individual to whom she spoke was surprised by the selection of the Smithsonian as she was."
In any case, we now know, to a fairly good degree of certainty, that the Dealey Plaza Operation was originally devised as a contingency plan to kill Castro, it involved the Cuban military as it was strategically based on the German VALKYRIE plan to kill Hitler, and the tactically the PATHFINDER plan to shoot Castro with a high powered rifle as he rode in an open vehicle, or a similar plan. And as with both VALKYRIE and PATHFINDER included the psychwar disinformation twist to blame the murder on Communists.
As Bill Turner put it, the mechanism was in place to kill Castro, and they just switched targets.
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