THE THIRD DECADE
DALLAS MOSIAC: The Cops, the Cubans and the Company
By Philip H. Melanson
BK Notes: Many thanks to Jerry Rose for publishing this: showDoc.html
The Third Decade, Volume 1, Issue 3, available at http://www.maryferrell.org journals
The Dallas Alpha-66
There was a glaring lapse in the advance protective
work done for President Kennedy. Alpha-66, an anti-Castro group, was in Dallas
and the Secret Service didn’t know it, even though the Service had previously
foiled one Cuban-exile plot in which a small plane was going to ram Air Force
One (the Service had gotten word of the plot and secretly helicoptered the
President to Miami.) 1.
While the question of why the FBI did not report
Oswald to the Secret Service would receive great attention after the
assassination, the question of why the CIA did not report Alpha-66 or its
“violently anti-Kennedy” leader to the Secret Service has never been asked. CIA
was conspicuously silent about Dallas Alpha-66 head Manuel Rodriquez, both
before and after the assassination.
Local police had the major responsibility for
discovering local threats to a visiting President, but Federal agencies also
had an important role. 2
There were no precise guidelines as to the types of
individuals that the FBI or CIA should report to the Secret Service as
constituting potential threats, but the violently anti-Kennedy leader of the
commando group noted for its conflict with the President clearly should have
been reported.
That the CIA had no knowledge of Rodriguez or his
group is not logical. Alpha-66 was in many ways a creature of the Company, and
CIA case officers were with the exiles at their Dallas meetings. 3
Alpha-66 and its leader came to the belated
attention of the Secret Service (after the assassination). The CIA responded to
a Secret Service inquiry by stating that it had no data on Rodriguez. 4.
After the assassination, an FBI informant in Dallas
reported that Rodriguez was “known to be violently anti-President Kennedy.” 5
The Bureau interviewed Rodriguez twice in 1964. 6.
On both occasions he claimed that he was an admirer
of the President, both as a person and as a politician. Nor could he remember
ever hearing any derogatory comments about Kennedy uttered at Alpha-66
meetings, though he had “heard rumors” that many Cubans were critical of
Kennedy’s policies. But a Warren Commission memorandum which accidently slipped
out in 1976 while it was still classified describes Rodriguez as “apparently a
survivor of the Bay of Pigs episode,” a debacle that many anti-Castro Cubans
blamed on Kennedy personally.
Dallas police and FBI documents reveal that
Rodriguez’ singular characteristics were not limited to his being the only
member of Alpha-66 who admired Kennedy. Evidently, he also bore a strong
resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald.
On 8:00 A.M. the day after the assassination, the
Dallas County Sheriff’s office passed along a hot report to the Secret Service:
“Oswald” had been meeting with a Cuban political group before the
assassination, “possibly the Freedom for Cuba Party (sic) of which Oswald was a
member.” 7.
The address at which “Oswald” was seen had nothing to
do with the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). It was the Dallas
headquarters of Alpha-66.
The man mistaken for Oswald at the Alpha-66 meetings
was very likely Manuel Rodriguez. After the assassination the FBI received a
report that “Oswald” had been in Oklahoma on November 17th. 8
Upon investigation, the Bureau discovered that the
Oklahoma witness had been Rodriguez. Oswald was 5’9 ½”, 150 lbs. with brown
hair. Rodriguez was 5’9”, weighed 145 lbs. and had brown hair.
The Dallas Sheriff’s office had reported that the
Cuban group --- which was really Alpha-66, not FPCC --- had been meeting in a
house in Dallas and stopped their meetings either a few days or a few days
after the assassination. The address reported was “3128 Harlendale Street.” The
FBI report of an interview with Manuel Rodriguez said Alpha-66 met at “3126
Hollandale Street.”
In 1975 the Rockefeller Commission, which was investigating
possible CIA involvement in the JFK case, asked the CIA about Alpha-66 in
Dallas, based on a query by assassionologist Paul Hoch, who brought Rodriguez
and Alpha-66 to the Commission’s attention. The CIA’s response to the
Rockefeller panel was not released until 1980, among 600 pages of documents liberated
by the filing of a lawsuit. The agency’s response was that their files revealed:
…..no record of any CIA contact with any anti-Castro
group in Dallas. No Cuban organization is listed in the Dallas telephone
directory. Dallas city map and 1963 criss-cross directory reveal no street
named Harlendale. 10
Beyond the ludicrous notion that the way to find
Alpha-66 is to check the phone book ---- presumably in the yellow pages under
commandos ---- there is (and was in 1963) a Harlendale Street in Dallas.
There was no “3128 Harlendale” as described by the
Sheriff’s office, but there was a 3126. The Sheriff’s office got the right
street, slightly wrong number. Rodriguez spoke with a heavy accent, so it is
probable that the FBI agent interviewing him garbled Harlendale to Hollandale.
Rodriguez told the FBI the identity of the man who hosted the Alpha-66
meetings. 11
The 1964 Dallas telephone directory lists this man
as living at “3126 Harlendale Street.” Despite the CIA’s attempts to make the
street disappear, the Alpha-66 meeting house was real.
The
Best Little Gun Shop in Texas
The web of CIA-anti-Castro mysteries in Dallas
extends far beyond the house on Harlendale Street. Around the time of the assassination,
an agent of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau (ATFB) of the Treasury
Department was working undercover in Dallas, gathering evidence against a local
gun shop owner for violating the National Firearms Act. 12.
The undercover ATFB agent learned that Manual
Rodriguez and another Cuban had contacted the gun shop owner about the purchase
of machine guns, bazookas and other “heavy equipment.” The gun shop owner
confided that Rodriguez had made purchases from him and that Alpha-66 had a large
cache of arms somewhere in Dallas.
The undercover agent was interviewed by the Secret
Service on December 16, 1964 (in order for the Service to learn more about
Rodriguez). In the Secret Service interview, the ATFB agent stated that he had “recently”
worked undercover gathering evidence, thus indicating that the cache of arms
referred to was probably in existence on November 22 when the President was
shot.
But there is more to this gun shop than simply
helping to establish that the commandos of Alpha-66 were well-armed at the time
of the assassination. It seems that an exhaustive search by Federal authorities
revealed that this was one of only two gun shops in Dallas where bullets for a
Mannlicher-Carcano rifle could be obtained. 13
The gun shop owner told the FBI that he had sold ten
boxes of Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition in 1963, but it is not known to whom.
The ammunition that would fit “Oswald’s” gun was
uncommon in the United States in 1963. The shells found in the Depository were
quickly traced to the manufacturer: the Western Cartridge Company of East
Alton, Illinois.
“Oswald’s ammunition was from a batch of four million rounds manufactured by Western Cartridge in 1954. An FBI document reveals that shortly after the assassination an FBI agent made an interesting allegation about the manufacturer --- one which the Bureau would proceed to bury. The Depository shells were allegedly manufactured under government contract (DA-23-196-ORD-27) for the United States Marine Corps. But FBI agent R. H. Jevons claimed that this type of ammunition “does not fit and cannot be fired in any of the USMC weapons.” Jevons’ memo concludes: “This gives rise to the obvious speculation that it is a contract for ammunition laced by the CIA with Western under a USMC cover for concealment purposes.” 14
“Oswald’s ammunition was from a batch of four million rounds manufactured by Western Cartridge in 1954. An FBI document reveals that shortly after the assassination an FBI agent made an interesting allegation about the manufacturer --- one which the Bureau would proceed to bury. The Depository shells were allegedly manufactured under government contract (DA-23-196-ORD-27) for the United States Marine Corps. But FBI agent R. H. Jevons claimed that this type of ammunition “does not fit and cannot be fired in any of the USMC weapons.” Jevons’ memo concludes: “This gives rise to the obvious speculation that it is a contract for ammunition laced by the CIA with Western under a USMC cover for concealment purposes.” 14
Jevons startling “speculation” has never been
confirmed or disproven.
In 1976 investigative journalist Dick Russell made
an interesting finding. 15
Russell interviewed ATFB agent Frank Ellsworth, the
man who had worked undercover in investigating the gun shop and its dealings
with Rodriguez and Alpha-66. Ellsworth broke his silence and told Russell an
amazing story. It seems that immediately after the assassination, Ellsworth was
summoned to Dallas Police headquarters where, as the local federal firearms
man, he was brought in to interrogate Oswald concerning the alleged assassination
weapon. Ellsworth was shocked when he entered the interrogation room and
confronted Lee Harvey Oswald, for he thought that Oswald was the man whom he
had been investigating in the months before the assassination.
“Oswald was sitting in a chair about ten feet from
the door,” Ellsworth recalled, “And all I could see was headlines that I’d just
turned loose the man who killed the President.” Ellsworth later discovered that
he was wrong, much to his relief. It was not Oswald that he had been
investigating prior to the assassination, but another man in Dallas who was
Oswald’s “twin.” That man turned out to be the gun shop owner.
Ellsworth revealed that the twin had been
interrogated by federal authorities after the assassination and was found to
have been “nowhere near downtown Dallas” at the time of the shooting. Ellsworth
claimed that a number of federal, state and local officials were aware of the
look-a-like situation “….we talked about it. We laid it to rest and satisfied
ourselves that it was merely coincidence.”
Russell found the gun shop owner in Dallas in 1976
and claimed that “if you looked closely, you could see the resemblance.” In
1981 Russell told the author: “He was heavier when I saw him, but back then
(1963) he was probably a dead ringer for Oswald.”
The
Company and the Cops
The key to how a well-planned, intelligence-based conspiracy
could manipulate events in Dallas is provided by the probably linkage between a
unit of the Dallas Police Department and the CIA
Though its 1947 charter forbade any “police or
subpoena power” and although the FBI had the legitimate police-training
mission, CIA secretly engaged in an extensive, illegal program of police
training.
Documents obtained by the author via the Freedom of
Information Act in 1981 show that, in the 1960’s, CIA provided a wide range of
services to metropolitan police departments: seminars; briefings; workshops in
bugging, clandestine action, disguise techniques and lockpicking.” 16
There were also loans of equipment and technical
advice on how to detect explosives.
In some instances CIA agents posed as cops. This was
a real advantage to an Agency which was forbidden by law, and by the political
clout of the FBI, from conducting domestic spying or domestic covert operations.
One document obtained by the author under FOIA reveals that the Agency received
police badges and ID cards as early as 1960, when it obtained nine badges from unnamed
police departments. CIA claims that the badges were used so that agents could pursue
“foreign intelligence targets.” CIA agents also flashed police identity cards
(date and city unknown) while conducting break-and-enter.
Another important payoff of its police ties was that
the CIA could deal directly with its police friends in matters involving Agency
employees. A 1975 memo entitled “Relationships With Police” makes it clear that
if CIA “staff, victim or alleged perpetrator of a crime --- the CIA would
contact friendly police to get their help in “resolving certain personal
problems of employees.” CIA looked to its police friends for help in checking
up on its employees and, in all likelihood, on non-employees as well.
The author compiled a list of forty-four state,
local and county organizations described in the documents as receiving one or
another form of training or equipment. The list includes city police
departments: New York; San Francisco; Los Angeles: Chicago; Boston;
Philadelphia; Miami; Baltimore; Washington D.C.; Long Beach; San Diego;
Richmond, Va.; Bloomington, Minnesota. As we might expect, de-classified
documents make no reference to the city of Dallas.
In response to an FOIA request by the author, CIA
claimed that it could find no records pertaining to Dallas, but this hardly
means that Dallas was a stranger to CIA-police interaction. It is unlikely that
the Dallas Police Department would abjure the Agency’s generous offers of
training and technical assistance. The city’s right-wing, stridently
anti-communist political culture surely made it receptive to the idea that
police could use an extra edge in keeping track of subversives and fending off
foreign spies.
In 1963 Earl Cabell was Mayor of Dallas. It is improbable
that Dallas was ignorant of the opportunities presented by the CIA’s
domestic-police-training program. The mayor’s brother, Major General Charles
Cabell, was a former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Major
General Cabell was one of Allen Dulles’ most trusted deputies and left the Agency
along with Dulles after the Bay of Pigs Disaster. 17
In the 360 pages of released police-training
documents, entire pages and series of pages are blanked out. Why is some city
(or cities) more sensitive than New York or San Francisco or Washington D.C. ---
identities which were not deleted? One explanation is that the city in question
is Dallas.
One CIA document which surfaced in another context,
and which was provided by the Center for National Security Studies in
Washington D.C., establishes that intimate linkage between the CIA and the
Dallas police existed as of 1967. 18.
The document describes a project aimed at infiltrating
and monitoring peace groups and black-power groups in Dallas. CIA cover
informant R1 tells headquarters about a Dallas police project to discredit
groups by publicizing alleged narcotics involvement of group leaders. It is
unlikely that such covert-data links began only in 1967; it is likely that they
existed in 1963 as well.
In city after city, CIA contacts with police were
exercised through the police intelligence squad or unit or section. This becomes
especially important when we see the pivotal role played by the Criminal
Intelligence Section (CIS) of the Dallas Police Department. The claim here is
not that the Dallas Police CIS was a knowing participant in the conspiracy, but
that it could have been a vehicle for conspirators using established channels
of covert information in order to manipulate events.
The Dallas Police CIS played a prominent role in
Presidential protection. For many years this was obscured by the Warren
Commission and the government’s desire to keep Secret Service methods and
procedures as secret as possible, in order not to jeopardize Presidential
protection. Commission lawyers signed an agreement with the Treasury Department
(in which the Secret Service is located) to restrict public access to all
matter related to protection. 19
The Secret Service was, in 1963, very dependent upon
local police. The primary role of police, in addition to helping out with
Presidential protection during a visit, was in “identifying” and “neutralizing”
potentially dangerous individuals in the local area, before the President
arrived. Warren Commission documents show that operational responsibility for
investigating indigenous groups and individuals who might present a threat to
President Kennedy fell to the Dallas Police CIS. 20
CIS investigated no fewer than fourteen groups
ranging from the Black Muslims to the KKK. Group members were placed under surveillance
“to determine associations and movements.” Investigations extended beyond
members to persons in any way affiliated with target groups. In its attempts to
identify all of the “extremists” and “subversives” who might harm the
President, CIS came up with a list of over four hundred names.
As its name might imply, the Criminal Intelligence
Section had a clandestine capability. As a police memo describes: “This section
had previously (before beginning work on protection for the President’s visit)
been successful in infiltrating a number of these organizations; therefore, the
activities, personalities, and future plans of these groups were known.”
Yet the CIS reported neither Oswald nor Alpha-66 to
the Secret Service. Was it monumental incompetence, or did certain CIA sources
somehow vouch for, or account for, both the Russian defector and the
anti-Castro commandos?
It did not require any investigative genius to comprehend
that the presence of Alpha-66 would spell potential trouble for President
Kennedy. The President had publicly criticized the group’s raids on Cuba,
carried out in violation of his ban, to which the leader of Alpha-66 replied, “We
are going to attack again and again.” 21
The Dallas Alpha-66 had as many as twenty members.
But the Criminal Intelligence Section, which had such groups as the ACLU, the
Oak Cliff White Citizens Council and the Young People’s Socialist League under surveillance,
either missed the gun-toting gurrillas of Alpha-66 or just couldn’t conceive of
them as dangerous to the President.
Neither of these possibilities is as logical as the
explanation that CIA vouched for Alpha-66. Remember that even the Dallas County
Sheriff’s office, a non-spooky outfit with little intelligence-gathering
capacity, received a tip from an informant that a Cuban group --- which turned
out to be Alpha-66 --- was meeting in a house in Dallas before the assassination.
There was at least one warning of potential danger.
It came only a month before the assassination at a meeting of the local John
Birch society on the outskirts of Dallas. The local John Birch Society was one
of the groups already under surveillance by the CIS, which (according to police
documents) monitored meetings of its target groups. The Birch Society would
normally rank high on any list of potentially troublesome groups for a
President whom the Birchers viewed as too soft on communism and too hard on
civil rights. The October Birch Society meeting was attended by three rabidly anti-Castro
Cuban exiles. One of them made a speech that should have vastly increased CIS
attention to any anti-Castro groups located in Dallas. He reviled Kennedy:
“Get him (Kennedy) out! Get him out! The quicker,
the sooner the better….He stinks….We are waiting for Kennedy the 22nd,
buddy. We are going to see him one way or the other. We’re going to give him
the works when he gets to Dallas.”
Then, after stating his support for the election of
Barry Goldwater as President, he asserted, “We have to get rid of one
(President) first. We have to wait and see what Mr. Goldwater is going to do
afterward.” The speaker, it turns out, had been a pilot for the CIA’s exile
army during the Bay of Pigs invasion. 23
The Pursuit
of Lee Harvey Oswald
CIS’s apparent laxity in advance protective work is
all the more suspicious given its inexplicable efficiently in targeting Oswald
as the suspect.
The official version of how Oswald came to be the
police’s one-and-only suspect tells us that the Book Depository manger
discovered that Oswald had left the building. Police Chief Curry told the
Warren Commission that there was a roll call. Police claimed that “every other
employee” was located, except Oswald. 24
In fact there was no roll call. The police list of
Depository employees had no fewer than twelve names unaccounted for. Among
these was a black man named Charles Givens who had a criminal record with the
Dallas police. 25
An APB went out for Givens: “He has a police record
and he left (the Depository).” Yet, at the very top of the list of Depository
employees was the name of the man who would be the only suspect --- Oswald. 26
The list was compiled by the CIS (see the back cover
illustration, this issue).
But the name listed was Harvey Lee Oswald. Oswald
himself never used the name Harvey Lee in any of his varied aliases or numerous
signatures, or in referring to himself. Nor did the FBI --- which had a file on
Oswald because he was a Russian defector --- have him listed that way. We do
know that at least one agency had him listed that way. In a 1960 response to a
White Hose request for information about defectors, the CIA sent the name
Harvey Lee Oswald. 27.
The rest of the names on the list were correct.
There is a common intelligence practice of keeping
two files on certain individuals --- overt and covert. The covert file has the
first two names transposed. In one of the instances in which an Oswald imposter
appeared, he used the name Harvey Oswald. 28
As mysterious as why CIS put Oswald atop their list
(and as “Harvey Lee”) is where they managed to get the address which appeared
beside his name. “605 Elsbeth” was the location where Oswald had lied in late
1962 and early 1963, but this address was unknown to Oswald’s employers at the
Book Depository. Depository records reflected Oswald’s Irving address. 29
Since the police did not have Oswald in custody and
did not yet have access to his personal effects, the question arises as to how
they got this address, since the Dallas police claimed not to have a file on
Oswald prior to the assassination.
That someone may have been feeding the CIS data on
Oswald is further reflected in cables sent out by CIS just after the
assassination. One cable, not declassified until 1973, went from CIS to the 4th
Army Command in Texas, then to the U.S. Strike Command at McDill Air Base in
Florida. 30
The cable was incendiary and false. It stated that “information
obtained from Oswald reveals that he had defected to Cuba in 1959 and is a
card-carrying member of the Communist Party.”
Oswald never joined the American Communist Party,
which the FBI knew because they were monitoring him as a potentially subversive
defector. He defected to Russia, not Cuba. The FBI knew better. Nor did Oswald
give such false information to police, according to police interrogators. 31
Where did it come from? Probably from the same
source as his name and address: the cable promised more data on “Harvey Lee
Oswald.”
The conspirators may have been hoping that this
provocative data would cause the jittery ready-alert system to launch a quick
strike on Cuba. The Florida Strike Force was a rapid-deployment force set up in
1961 for just such action. If this sounds grandiose, remember that the conspirators
had just successfully assassinated the President. Strangely, the false cable
was not carbon-copied to Washington until days later, contrary to standard
procedure. 32.
In Washington, Oswald’s records would show the cable
to be false, and the correct data could have been quickly communicated throughout
the ready-alert system.
Assassinologist Peter Dale Scott has discovered
another piece of disinformation that preceded the cable just described. 33
At 5:15 P.M. on the day of the assassination, CIS
phoned Army Intelligence to say that Oswald had confessed. Oswald’s professions
of innocence were continuous and unambiguous.
CIS On the Spot
In 1963 the Dallas CIS was one of the three “sections”
within the Police Department’s Special Services Bureau. Each section --- Vice,
Narcotics, Intelligence --- had about twenty men and was headed by a
Lieutenant. 34
The three units worked closely with one another,
sometimes exchanging personnel.
CIS was small in size but its role in
assassination-related events was critical. Anyone seeking to shape events in
Dallas would not necessarily have to have access to the top of the police
hierarchy or to broad segments of the Department. To have contact with, or influence
upon, CIS would be sufficient. Discrete contacts between CIS and federal
agencies were surely no problem: the spooky little unit was physically removed
from the rest of the DPD and was headquartered in a building on the state fairgrounds.
35
CIS officers were on the scene in Dealey Plaza and
interviewed witnesses to the assassination immediately after the shooting,
including Depository employees. 36
Later, CIS was responsible for interviewing key
witnesses during the Dallas Police Department’s own investigation of the assassination.
Charles Givens, the black Depository employee who changed his testimony months
after the assassination to become the only witnesses to place Oswald on the
sixth floor before the shooting, had been handled on a narcotics charge by CIS’s
sister division, Narcotics. Givens’ case was known to Criminal Intelligence,
which told the FBI three months after the assassination that Givens was a man
who would change his story for money. 37
This was before Givens changed his story.
CIS personnel had the task of investigating key
facts concerning Ruby’s murder of Oswald, even more so than the Homicide
Division. Ruby had been an informant to the Bureau’s Vice section. 38
Before the assassination, CIS had information on
Ruby in its files, allegedly in connection with his gambling activities in
Dallas. 39
CIS was given the task of investigating Ruby’s
linkages with the Dallas police. Ruby’s close relationship with police is now
well-documented. 40
He was arrested twice for carrying concealed
weapons, three times for liquor-license violations, once for assault, once for
a traffic violation. His only penalty was for the latter offense. In return for
such treatment, Ruby provided cops with free drinks at his club, bottles of
liquor and, on special occasions, even the girls who worked for him. CIS’s
investigation concluded that Ruby’s relationship with police was nothing more
than casual familiarity. 41
CIS officers interviewed Ruby at the Dallas County
jail. 42
The CIS checked into how Ruby got past police
security to kill Oswald. It interviewed Western Union office personnel, did a
time-and-motion study of Ruby’s walk from that office to police headquarters,
and conducted half of all of the interviews with Dallas police officers regarding
Oswald’s murder. 43
Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry’s ultimate findings
about Oswald’s murder were, on all major points, based on Criminal Intelligence’s
evidence and findings.
But CIS’s investigation was a spotty one.[Conservative Republican] Congressman Robert Edger of Pennsylvania, a member of the House Assassinations Committee, pointed out a major failing of the investigation. It seems that only one of the possible ways in which Ruby might have entered the police basement was investigated – the Main Street ramp --- which is where the Warren Commission said that Ruby had entered. 44
But CIS’s investigation was a spotty one.[Conservative Republican] Congressman Robert Edger of Pennsylvania, a member of the House Assassinations Committee, pointed out a major failing of the investigation. It seems that only one of the possible ways in which Ruby might have entered the police basement was investigated – the Main Street ramp --- which is where the Warren Commission said that Ruby had entered. 44
The investigation also failed to interview a Dallas
police officer who was an important eyewitness concerning how Ruby might have
entered. 45
Given CIS’s pivotal role, it would surely be interesting
to discover what federal-level contacts the unit had, both before and after the
assassination.
Footnotes
Please support this research if you can:
No comments:
Post a Comment