Annotated Excerpts from Murder, Inc. – The CIA Under President Kennedy (Potomac Books – University of Nebraska Books, 2019)
(BK NOTES: I read this book twice, the second time marking excerpts that I thought important, and have reproduced here. It represents a very small portion of the entire book, and is for research purposes only, and I recommend that anyone interested in this subject to purchase the book as it is an important one, though it is not fully truthful. Some of the facts left out I am sure Johnston didn't know, like Michael Paine's mother and Arthur Young. But some he certainly did - like the fact that Carlos Bringuier was a member of the DRE, and Rolando Cubela, a major player in Johnston's story, was an original founder of the anti-Batista, anti-Castro group that Oswald finagled with in New Orleans, an important part of the story. Most of what Johnston says is important, but he leaves out the best parts. In any case, I will be adding my annotations to this text over the next few days, in bold, so stay tuned. - BK )
Introduction
Late in life, former president Lyndon Johnson told a reporter (Walter Cronkite) that he didn’t believe the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John Kennedy. Johnson felt that Cuban president Fidel Castro was behind it. After all, Johnson continued, Kennedy was running “a damn Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean,” giving Castro reason to retaliate. 1
[ BK: LBJ didn't say Kennedy was running a damn Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean, he said "we" were. Johnston tries to pin the blame for the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro on the Kennedys, when they began in the Eisenhower administration, as he admits, and continued in the Kennedy administration despite the "diss-approval of higher authority" as the Pathfinder Plan was.]
A later Senate investigation reported on the CIA’s assassination operations but was skimpy with details. However, since then the secret files on the CIA’s Cuban operations have been made public, allowing this more complete and troubling story about the operations and their effect on the Warren Commission investigation of Kennedy’s death.
Kennedy’s animosity towards Castro is well known. He ordered an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and moved to the brink of World War III in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Hidden by secrecy, however, is the fact that the assassination operations were a continuing part of the CIA’s bag of tricks and played a role in both events.
When the CIA entered the assassination business, it turned to organized crime to do the dirty work of killing Castro. This began in the last months of the Eisenhower administration…..
The CIA’s relationship with the mob became even more problematic after FBI director J. Edgar Hoover discovered Kennedy was having an affair with another of Giancana’s girlfriends (Judy Campbell).
[BK: Yes, and as I pointed out in my review of this book, Judy Campbell's Vegas apartment was broken into under the watchful eyes of an FBI stakeout squad by the Hale twins, whose father was a former high level FBI official and security officer. Oswald knew the Hale twins as Abington Heights high school mates when he dropped out to enlist in the marines, and their mother Virginia Hale helped Oswald get jobs at Leslie Welding and Jaggers-Chiles-Stoval when he returned from USSR. All relevant info.]
The underworld operations ended with the missile crisis in October 1962….
(But not with John Roselli, who went on to work with his CIA case officer William Harvey and was known as Colonel Rawlston at JMWAVE training bases where he supported one of the commando teams infiltrated into Cuba to kill Castro. After Harvey was relieved after the Cuban Missile Crisis he remained Roseli's case officer when replaced as head of the Cuban task force by Desmond FitzGerald)
By the next April, the CIA had a new head of Cuban
operations, Desmond FitzGerald. He proposed a coup in Cuba. Orchestrating a
coup was a conventional way to bring about regime change, FitzGerald argued.
Given a green light by the President, The CIA recruited Castro’s friend Rolando Cubela, who felt
Castro had to be "eliminated” at the start of the coup. He wanted the CIA to give
him assassination weapons.
Having a direct hand in murder gave the agency pause, but after
off-the-record meetings with Attorney
General Robert Kennedy and the president on November 19, 1963, the CIA made the
decision to give Cubela the weapons. It was working out the details with him at
the very moment the president was murdered three days later.
[BK: Yea, it was "off the record" meeting all right, as there are no records in the public domain that indicate JFK or RFK approved assassinating Castro or anyone.]
The obvious question at the time should have been whether Castro had retaliated.
[BK: No, the obvious question should be whether the Castro assassination mechanism set up at JMWAVE, the Murder, Inc. LBJ was talking about, was redirected to JFK at Dallas after he refused to approve it being used against Castro.]
In September 1963 he had said that U.S. leaders would not be safe if the CIA plotting against him continued, and it had. The CIA also knew that Oswald met with Cuban intelligence officers in Mexico soon afterward…..
[BK: Wait a minute, how and when and where does the CIA know Oswald met with Cuban intelligence s officers in Mexico? All of the events Russo, Latell, Baer, Shenon have used to "prove" this have been shown to be false.]
When questioned in a later congressional investigation, a CIA officer blandly said, “I don’t believe the thought [of retaliation] ever occurred to me at the time.”
The denial is ludicrous of course. But why hide the Cubela operation? If Kennedy knew of and approved it, then the CIA may have thought itself a kind of Praetorian Guard, protecting his memory and legacy from word of the dirty business becoming public.
If he did not approve, though, then the CIA was protecting only itself. The public would probably have demanded the CIA be abolished at the mere hint its operation backfired and resulted in the death of the president regardless of whether Castro was responsible…..
I was introduced to the subject as a lawyer for the 1975-76 Senate Intelligence Committee investigations of the CIA assassination plots and of links between those and Kennedy’ death and questioned some of the witnesses quoted in this book. Committee chairman Senator Frank Church (D-1D), for whom the committee was named, coined the phrase “rogue elephant” to ask if presidents had approved assassination efforts or if the CIA had charged off on its own. The committee chose rogue elephant but did not seem particularly alarmed at the implication that, if this were true, the CIA was dangerously out of control.
No one could challenge he conclusion because the underlying documents and testimony were classified. However, in 1992 Congress passed a law to make pubic the secret files on Kennedy’s assassination. As a result a huge trove of material not only on the assassination but also on Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Cuban policies was turned over to the National Archives. This included a great deal of material that had not been made available to the Senate investigation. This book is sourced from formerly classified national security documents and testimony. It includes not only the high level deliberations on the operations but also the spy craft of assassination.
Chapter 1 – CASTRO, OSWALD AND KENNEDY
[BK Notes: While most of this is just basic background on the three individuals involved in this story, it’s mostly rehash and more like a Wiki version of their backgrounds, but a few items are worth noting.]
….In August 1956 Marguerite moved again to Fort Worth, and Oswald went with her. He reentered high school but only for a few weeks.
[BK: No mention here that two of his school mates were the Hale twins, sons of I.F. Hale, a high level FBI agent close to Hoover who became head of security for General Dynamics. The Hale twins, whose father was a College standout, reportedly laughed Oswald off the football field when he tried out for the team. While Oswald was in USSR, the Hale twins were observed by an FBI stakeout team breaking into the Vegas apartment of Judy Campbell, whose affairs with John Roselli, Sam Giancana and JFK became legendary. But the FBI did nothing.]
Paradoxically, he wrote the Socialists Workers Party in New York, [BK: Where he had just returned from] announcing that he was a Marxist and asking for more information on its youth league, and a few weeks later, when he turned seventeen, he enlisted in the Marine Corps…..
[BK: No mention here of the fact that the SWP was founded by Michael Paine’s father Lyman Paine or that in the backyard photos he is seen not only with the weapons said to have been used on November 22, but two publications, The Worker, publication of the Soviet controlled Communist Party in the USA, and the Worker, the SWP publication, two organizations that did not get along well together.]
Chapter 2 – THE BAY OF PIGS
….When Bissell first conceived the idea for overthrowing Castro in early 1960, the plan was simpler and more straightforward than what eventually happened. The idea was to recruit about twenty Cubans to be trainers. They would in turn bring in perhaps sixty more and train them as the core of a paramilitary force that would build a true underground in Cuba. As late as the summer of 1960, the CIA naively believed there was so much dissatisfaction with Castro that this small underground movement could overthrow him. By November however, CIA calculations increased the needed core to several hundred, and it continued to grow to more than one thousand in the planning. 14. [Testimony of Richard Bissell]
….Invasion wasn’t the only method the CIA had for bringing about regime change in Cuba. In the late summer of 1960, before Kennedy was elected, Richard Bissell was thinking about what he euphemistically called “the capability to eliminate Castro.” 17
He asked Sheffield Edwards, who was director of the Office of Security at CIA, to see what he could do. Edwards was an unusual choice since his job was to protect the CIA from penetration by foreign intelligence services. He did not normally engage in covert operations. Edwards gave the assignment to his chief of operational support, James O’Connell. According to O’Connell, Edwards said that CI director Allen Dulles approved the idea. O’Connell was a former FBI agent and he turned for help to Robert Maheu, who was also a former FBI agent and who, after leaving the bureau, did consulting work for the CIA. 18
O’Connell and Maheu felt that the gambling syndicate, which operated in both the United States and Cuba, could do what was needed. In their minds the syndicate had men who were “tough enough,” apparently meaning they weren’t bothered by murder. Maheu offered to get in tough with the underworld figure Johnny Roselli as a way into the syndicate. Maheu broached the subject with Roselli at the Brown Derby Restaurant in Beverly Hills. Roselli was hesitant; he wanted to meet the CIA officer personally. So Maheu arranged a get-together with O’Connell at the Plaza Hotel in New York around the time of Castro’s visit to the United Nations in September 1960. 19
A few weeks later, Roselli brought into the operation Momo Salvaatore Giancana from the Chicago underworld, and Giancana in turn brought in Santos Trafficante, head of the Cosa Nostra in Cuba. Trafficante was still travelling to Cuba, trying to get Castro to reopen the casinos that he had closed after the revolution. 20
Traficante had the added talent that he, unlike the others, spoke Spanish…..
On January 25, 1961, only five days after Kennedy was sworn in as president, Bissell tapped William Harvey to create an “executive action” capability within the CIA. Executive action is a euphemism for political assassination. The idea was for the CIA to develop a stable of trained assassins. The project was later given the code name ZRRIFLE. CIA code names typically had a designator, such as ZR, followed by a descriptive term, such as “rifle,” to serve a mnemonic devices…..
At about this time, Senator George Smathers of Florida talked with President Kennedy on the White House lawn. According to Smathers the president mentioned Castro’s assassination because Kennedy “had apparently discussed this and other possibilities with respect to Cuba” with someone. Kennedy was certain it could be accomplished. Smathers told Kennedy he disapproved of the idea. In his testimony to the Church Committee, Smathers recalled the president saying that he completely disapproved. However, in an earlier oral history attached to Smather’s testimony, the senator’s recollection was different; that Kennedy did not, in fact indicate his own views. 31
Any such disapproval by the president failed to reach CIA, however.
[BK: Such disapproval did reach the CIA at JMWAVE as the CIA's NPIC techs - 8 of them, said they saw the Pathfinder plans - that were kept in their section of the station instead of the Operational Files, where they belonged, and that plan to shoot Castro with high powered rifles as he rode by in an open jeep were clearly marked "disapproved by higher authority." https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=104139&relPageId=14 ]
In fact precisely the opposite happened. Harvey testified that Bissell told him the idea for developing the executive action capability had come from the White House in late January 1961, shortly after Kennedy took office. 32
Within a month Johnny Rosell was at the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami with Gottlieb’s poison pills and a briefcase with $10,000 in cash for Castro’s assassination. Maheu was there too. He reportedly told one of Roselli’s friend: “Johnny’s going to handle everything, this is Johnny’s contract.” 33
Ultimately, Roselli said, the pills got to Cuba, but the agent didn’t carry out the plan because he never received a “go-signal.” The CIA inspector general’s report, however, concluded that the operation failed because the agent lost his access to Castro. 34
President Kennedy had a different kind of problem with signals. He was boxing himself in with words. At a press conference on April 12, he said the U.S. military would not intervene in Cuba “under any conditions,” and no Americans would become in military operations against Cuba. 35
The CIA was on the verge of sending Brigade 2506 to invade Cuba, and Kennedy had publicaly ruled out giving any support from the navy or air force in the event of difficulties….
In any event, since assassination had not worked, the CIA gave the green light to the invasion. The original plan was for the brigade to land in a populated region around the city of Trinidad near the Escambray Mountains, from which it could wage guerilla warfare.
But since the president thought this location was noisy, a remote site that was less favorable militarily had been chosen. 37
[BK: From what I have read from the CIA's official history of the Bay of Pigs - Lansdale and his Phllipine sidekick Napoleon V. - were the ones behind the original plan and relieved of their duties, though JFK was never informed of the change in plans or the change in trainers.]
……The president and other top officials were meeting personally with those involved in the CIA-supported assassination operation with organized crime. 48
[BK: You can say this all you want but it doesn't make it true. When and where did he meet personally with them? JFK met personally with Harvey in the Oval Office when he asked to meet America's James Bond - but there's no evidence he knew of the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro.]
This would not be an isolated occurrence….
Robert Kennedy’s oversight of Cuban operations was achieved organizationally by creation of the Special Group (Augmented) of the National Security Council to deal with the Cuban situation. The parenthetical “Augmented” meant that the attorney general and retired general Maxwell Taylor, a special presidential advisor, were members.
The president called Taylor out of retirement to look into the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion…..
[BK – And later named him Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, much to the chagrin of the other Chiefs of Staff, who were used to naming a rotating chairman from among themselves.]
....During the Church Committee investigation of the CIA, Senator Frank Church famously asked if the CIA was a "rogue elephant" in plotting the assassination of foreign leaders. The senator was suggesting that the agency was not responsive to the president. This question prompted a resentful CIA officer to explode and tell the author that he had watched Ethel Kennedy pull up to CIA headquarters on a motor scooter. A suited John McCone climbed on behind her, and they puttered off for lunch at Hickory Hill, Robert and Ethel's house in Langley, Virginia, that was a few blocks away. To the [UNNAMED] CIA officer, this illustrated the cozy relationship between the CIA and the Kennedys during McCone's tenure. 59
....Thus six months after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy had reorganized the bureaucratic structure for dealing with Cuba and put a new man in charge. John McCone was a CIA director, but the attorney general was really in charge on Cuban matters, exerting his influence officially as a member of the Special Group (Augmented) and unofficially through his friendship with McCone. The personnel changes, however, didn't help....
MONGOOSE
...Robert Kennedy's talking to case officers meant he knew not only the general thrust of Cuban policy but also the details of specific CIA operations against Castro. CIA historian Robarge concludes that McCone could have learned about CIA assassination plots from Robert Kennedy, suggesting the attorney general knew more about what was going on at the CIA with respect to Cuba than the director did. 3.
[BK: CIA historian Robarge wrote a still heavily redacted biography of McCone, so RFK's knowledge of the CIA assassination plots must be in the redacted sections because its not in whats been published.]
....On October 6 (1961) the Special Group was told that a covert-operations plan for Cuba was in the works and that it would be complimented with a contingency plan for what to do if Castro were removed. The CIA's Board of National Estimates - a group charged with analyzing intelligence for long-range planning purposes - was also preparing a study, "The Situation and Prospects in Cuba." 6
....Thus with the situation in Cuba unacceptable and seemingly intractable, the president recommended to his brother Robert that Lansdale be put in charge of Cuban policy. John Kennedy was grasping at straws. Whatever Lansdale's strengths and expertise were, his success had come in dealing with Communist insurgents in Asia, not with an established and entrenched Communist regime in Latin America.
....The next day Lansdale attended a meeting of the Special Group where, according to Richard Reeves's biography of the president, the attorney general yelled at the committee, including Defense Secretary McNamara, Alexis Johnson of the State Department, and Bissell of the CIA: "Get off your ass about Cuba! The Cuban problem carries top priority in the U.S. Government. No time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared." Robert Kennedy's notes of the meeting record that "Ed Lansdale (The Ugly American)" was theree. The notes continue: "McNamara said e would make the latter available for me - I assigned him to make a survey of the situation in Cuba - the problems and our assets. My idea is to stur things up on island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by the Cubans themselves....Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate." 10.
Lansdale had no experience in such things, and Robert Kennedy overlooked the fact that the Kennedys might have a great deal to lose by taking on Castro.....
....On November 9, at Robert Kennedy's suggestion, the president met with reporter Tad Szulc, who covered Cuba for the New York Times and who knew Castro. In the course of the meeting, the president asked, "What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?" Szulc said it was morally wrong and added it wouldn't change things in Cuba. The latter assessment was the same as the Board of National Estimates. The president responded to Szulc: "I agree with you completely." 13
Kennedy's approach to Szulc was similar to the one he had used with Senator Smathers earlier in the year when he floated the idea of Castro's assassination and said it came from unnamed advisors.
A week after the president's meeting with Szulc, Bill Harvey, who was developing the executive action capability called ZR/RIFLE for the CIA, was asked to take over contact with the organized crime figures Sheffield Edwards had used in his plots to poison Castro earlier in the year, Maheu, Giancana, and Roselli....
Harvey remembered that he also had discussions in the fall of 1961 about using his ZRRIFLE assets, that is, trained assassins, to kill Castro. 14
[BK: And even after being reassigned to Rome by CIA, Harvey continued to meet and socialize with Roselli, including in the summer of 1963 when they met in Florida and Harvey chalked up the hotel bill and meals to the ZRRIFLE account.]
The president may have told Szulz that he wasn’t going to assassinate Castro, but the CIA was continuing to plan for exactly that….
…Lansdale adopted the moniker “Operation Mongoose” for the effort against Castro. A mongoose is a ferret-like animal that kills snakes. ….
The CIA designated Bill Harvey as its point man for Mongoose and gave him an organization called Task Force W. 16
This was in addition to his ZRRIFLE responsibilities and his handling of the underworld plots. He had perphaps 225 people on staff at CIA headquarters. 17
Harvey had another 400 CIA employees at the agency’s station in Florida, code-named JMWAVE, and as many as 2,000 Cuban agents and a budget of $50 million a year. 18
Robert Kennedy was still not happy with the scale of the effort. In January 1962 he again told Harvey’s boss, Richard Bissell, to “get off his ass” on Cuba, saying again that Castro was the administration’s “top priority,” adding, “No time, money, effort – or manpower is to be spared….”
…..In Fort Wort Oswald found a job and rented an apartment. He and Marina made friends in the small Russian community in the city. In early October Oswald moved to nearby Dallas and got a job with the Jaggers-Chiles-Stoval Company, which did graphic arts. Oswald did printing work, making advertising copy ready for printing. It was a relatively low-skilled job. …
[BK: But it also had a contract with the Army Map Service, putting arrows and captions on U2 photos and charts, as his co-worker Dennis Ofstein said Oswald recognized the names of some of the Russian cities. When JFK was briefed on the Soviet missiles in Cuba with blown up posters, that Stevenson also used at the UN, those posters were put on display at the National Airport in DC on an anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was with John Judge when we looked at them closely, and in the bottom right hand corner, where an artist signs his work - they clearly read: Jaggers-Chiles-Stoval.]
MISSILE CRISIS - Chapter 4
……On October 1, 1962, President Kennedy elevated General Maxwell Taylor from presidential advisor on Cuba to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing Lyman Lemnitzer. 11
The president was slowly bending the entire national security apparatus in the direction of ousting Castro….
….On October 14 a U-2 flying over Cuba came back with photographs that showed MRBMS and IRBS were being installed there……
….Within hours the Cuban Missile Crisis, as it would be called, pushed Mongoose into the background….
…John Kennedy was, for a change, the one at the meeting with the cool head. When air force general Curtis LeMay was asked what the Russians would do if the United States bombed the missiles in Cuba, he said they would do nothing. Frustrated by being given only military options, the president later quipped that if the sites were bombed, thus starting World War III, there might not be anyone around to tell the generals they were wrong. 15
…..The CIA’s Bill Harvey was also a casualty but not fatally. His fault lay in his handling of agents sent into Cuba…..These agents sent into Cuba were supposedly saboteurs, but they were possibly assassination agents. As explained later mobster Johnny Roselli was sending assassins to Cuba at this time and would claim they were captured and talked. According to Roselli this led Castro to make a decision to retaliate….
….CIA historian Robarge details several confrontations. One occurred early in 1962 at the JMWAVE station in Florida, where Harvey stopped the attorney general from walking out of the room with a classified cable. A second was when Kennedy learned a team that was supposed to be infiltrated into Cuba was still in training. Kennedy sarcastically said he would train them at his house in Virginia, Hickory Hill. Harvey replied with equal sarcasm by asking Kennedy if he was going to teach them babysitting. 32
The last straw, according to Robarge, came at a Special Group (Augmented) meeting on October 26, 1962, two days before Khrushcev agreed to pull the ballistic missiles from Cuba. The meeting was to discuss Mongoose sabotage operations, which, surprisingly, continued during the missile crisis. Indeed, at the October 16 meeting referred to earlier, Helms had presented a list of eight sabotage operations that the CIA would undertake “as soon as possible,” and Robert Kennedy had approved. 33
But in addition to these, Harvey sent a six-man team into Cuba on the night of October 19 to sabotage the Matahambre copper mine. This operation was not listed among those Kennedy had approved three days earlier. Four men made it out, but two did not.
[BK: So Harvey was sending unapproved commandos into Cuba.]
Harvey was then grilled about this operation at the October 26 meeting, but he didn’t know if it had succeeded or failed or what happened to the two agents. McCone asked if Harvey had canceled, as McCone had suggested, the insertion of three additional teams into Cuba. Harvey said the teams had been dispatched and couldn’t be recalled. Lansdale criticized Harvey and the CIA for planning to sent ten teams of five men each into Cuba by submarine to collect information that might be needed by the military for an invasion because this was diverting resources from Mongoose. ….
….These weren’t the only teams being sent to Cuba though. Mobster Johnny Roselli had gone to Florida to send another assassination team to Cuba just before the missile crisis and returned during the crisis to see if his underworld connections had intelligence about the missiles. 36
[BK: So both Harvey and Roselli were sending into Cuba commandos on unapproved missions.]
….That Harvey had an assassination team in Cuba during the missile crisis gains further support from his testimony to the Church Committee about the circumstances in which assassination was justifiable: “I can conceive of it being perfectly within the province of an intelligence service….to eliminate a threat to security of this country by any means whatever whether it’s a nuclear strike or a rifle bullet if I may be blunt….There was good reason to believe in the summer and fall of 1962 that we were faced with exactly that kind of threat.”
THE BRIGADE
....The White House wanted to integrate the government's overt programs to help Cuban refugees, including the returned members of Brigade 2506, with covert operations aimed at overthrowing Castro. 36
On the plus side, the new structure facilitated the recruitment of returnees and refugees for covert operations. But on the minus side, it added new layers of bureaucracy between the president and operations. For example, the Defense Department named Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance as its representative to the ICCCA, and e named his special assistant Joseph Califano as is representative. Califano in turn designated James Patchell to be his assistant. 37
[BK: Many of the department of defense documents open to the public under the JFK Act can be found in the Califano collection at the Mary Ferrell database. And I believe Califano is still alive.]
This development not only made action more cumbersome; it also widened the number of people who knew what was going on with respect to covert actions against Cuba.
....Completely outside the government structure, the attorney general was maintaining his own personal ties with Brigade 2506 leaders, especially commander Manuel Artime, deputy commander Erneido Oliva, Roberto San Roman, Pepe San Roman, and Enrique Ruiz-Williams. 46
He had the CIA pay for a house in Maryland for Manuel Artime and a house for Pepe San Roman in Virginia not far from Kennedy's Hickory Hill.....
.....President Kennedy seemed inspired by the Cubans and began thinking there might be a rebellion in Cuba. On February 28 he met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to a Defense Department memorandum of the meeting, the president wanted to know ow long it would take to put American troops in Cuba in the event of an uprising. The generals said that existing plans assumed there would be a period of tension prior to the insertion of troops. They could deploy an armed force within eighteen days of notification. Kennedy said he wanted to be able to put troops in Cuba "at a much earlier date tan 18 days...."
......in March 1963, FitzGerald dismissed as "unrealistic" the possibility of a popular revolt in Cuba.....
FitzGerald thought the best option was for the United States to employ a "pincers strategy of economic strangulation to weaken and undermine the regime" and combine this with a military coup. If McCone agreed, then FitzGerald would proceed to identify and recruit dissidents in the Cuban military and other high-level officials in the Castro government that could lead the coup.....
.....Another threat to shipping came from naval attacks by Cuban exile groups. On March 18, one such group, Alpha 66, attacked a Soviet ship and Soviet installations in Cuba. For the president this was completely unacceptable....
Kennedy's prohibition against exile raids on Cuba did not apply to raids sponsored by the intelligence agencies, but it was difficult to distinguish which groups had government support and which did not. For example, although the CIA was the principle agency aimed at Cuba, army intelligence was also involved. It had 120 Cuban agents, more than half of whom were on the island. 58
[BK: Yes, as John Newman has demonstrated, Alpha 66 leader Antonio Veciana was not run by CIA, but by Army Intelligence - ACSI - Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence - of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.]
They were gathering the kind of intelligence that the army would need in the event of an invasion. In military parlance tis is called "order of battle" information, which is designed to identify opposition military units and their leaders.
Alpha 66 was another example of how the line between government-sponsored and private groups could be blurred. As late as February 1963, army intelligence officers in Puerto Rico and Miami had been in contact with Alpha 66 because Lansdale had been interested in the group. The army had not made operational use of Alpha 66 since February.....
The president's policy on these raids became clear by the end of March when the State and Justice Departments issued a joint statement saying that every effort will be made to prevent such raids being "launched, manned, or equipped from United States territory." 60
The wording contained a huge loophole though. Exile groups could continue to fund raids on Cuba provided the boats did not depart from U.S. soil, and the CIA could do whatever it wanted....
....the topic of sabotage came up. Kennedy had not given up on the idea. McCone pointed out the political dangers of the United States saying, on the one hand, that it was cracking down on sabotage by exile groups, and on the other, letting the CIA engage in it. Kennedy thought perhaps the sabotage should come from within Cuba. McCone did not respond.....
6. FIDEL AND HIDELL
Lee Harvey Oswald was still working at the Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall graphic arts company in Dallas on New Years Day 1963. He undoubtedly used the company's equipment to prepare the photo-print samples he had sent to the Socialist Workers Party and the Gus Hall Committee a few months earlier....
In March 1963 Oswald received two packages he had ordered. One was for a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver; the other was a rifle. He used the alias A. J. Hidell in ordering the pistol and A. Hidell for the rifle....
...Even before the weapons arrived, according to Marina, Oswald began planning to shoot retired general Edwin Walker, an outspoken anti-Communist living in the Dallas area. Oswald photographed Walker's house, the alley behind it, and a nearby railroad track. He recorded his plans in a notebook and checked the schedules for buses that would take him to Walker's home.
.....Jaggers-Chiles-Stoval fired him on April 6.....
...the evening of April 10, Oswald went to Walker's house and fired at him with the rifle but the rifle missed. Oswald hid the rifle nearby and rode a bus home. He retrieved the rifle later. It was the same rifle that killed the president. Within two weeks of the shooting, Oswald left his wife and daughter and went by bus to New Orleans, saying he had a better chance of finding work there. He probably also wanted to get out of Dallas in case the police were looking for him.....
....Marina told the Warren Commission that Oswald wasn't serious about going back to the Soviet Union himself: "His basic desire was to get to Cuba by any means,...."
....John Kennedy didn't want to travel to Cuba; he wanted to invade it. When the Special Group met on April 25, McGeorge Bundy told the attendees that he had received a report placing a high priority on "low level coverage of Cuba." The latter term was a reference to photoreconnaissance by low-flying jet aircraft.....
....(McCone) recommended that the United States aim for a military coup. FitzGerald took over to explain that several high-level Cuban officials were unhappy with Castro. The task was to organize them and assure them of U.S. support. As an apparent sop to the Kennedys, FitzGerald carved out a role for raids by select Cuban exile groups. The attorney general was constantly urging this type of action,......
.....This long-range plan apparently didn't satisfy the attorney general. According to historian Michael Beschloss, he complained to the Standing Group that the United States had to do something against Castro even if it couldn't bring him down. 9
Of course FitzGerald's plan would do exactly that.
The military began to lean FitzGerald's way. On May 10, 1963, Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, forwarded to Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance "a comprehensive study of the courses of action" in the event of a spontaneous revolt in Cuba. The study offered four options in this event: ignore; discourage; encourage; and support....
Even better, the report implied, would be a revolt that the United States initiated by encouraging disaffected leaders in the Cuban government. If that happened and these leaders asked for help, then the United States could apply its full military power to assure the revolt's success.....The report doesn't say, but one repercussion of American soldiers killing Russian soldiers might be World War III.
Thus analyzing the situation apparently independently, both the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had concluded that a U.S. initiated coup was the best way to get rid of Castro....
....At a lower level, a subcommittee of the ICCCA had been working since February on the problem of countering Communist subversion in other Latin American countries.....The Defense Department representative on this committee and its chairman was marine major general Victor H. Krulak.
In World War II navy lieutenant Jack Kennedy's PT boat helped evacuate Krulak's forces from an island in the Pacific Ocean after marine's troop carried out a successful operation against the Japanese. Krulak was awarded the Navy Cross with V for Valor and Bronze Star for leading the marines in the operation. He promised Lieutenant Kennedy a bottle of whiskey for his help. Krulak didn't have a chance to deliver it until he was a general and Kennedy was president. 13
[BK: And it was Krulak's deputy Colonel Walter Higgins who wrote the memo on Desmond FitzGerld's briefing of the Joint Chiefs on CIA covert ops against Cuba on September 25, 1963, a document that I consider the most important record released under the JFK Act for a number of reasons. https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-significance-of-higgins-memo.html ]
In the last week of Kennedy's presidency, the big picture of a coup and this relatively minor countersubversion program would come to fore.....
....In early June a new alternative emerged when the Special Group agreed that establishing a channel of communications with Castro would be useful. 17
....Pressured by the Kennedys to develop a sabotage program, FitzGerald proved deft at staying in their favor not only by restarting the sabotage program but also by saying that, despite his earlier opposition, sabotage actually had a role to play for his plan for a coup. FitzGerald outlined his idea for a comprehensive and integrated approach in a paper to the Standing Group dated June 8,...Two records of the meeting are public. One was prepared by FitzGerald for McCone's private files at CIA. The other was prepared by Parrott for distribution to the members of the Special Group......
....Parrott's memo reported that Harriman was the one who said that once started, these operations should not be subject to stop-and-go orders....."A question was asked as to whether the Cubans would retaliate in kind. The answer was that they would certainly have this capability but that they have not retaliated to date, in spite of the number of publicized raids." 23
This was the first time that the possibility of Cuban retaliation appears in notes of discussions at the National Security Council level, but it would not be the last.....
7 - OSWALD IN NEW ORLEANS
.....Then, soon after getting back from his talk in Alabama, Oswald moved in two opposite directions.....There was no ostensible purpose to what Oswald was doing....
[BK: The ostensible purpose of what he was doing was to infiltrate the DRE there, and then establish his pro-Castro bonafides by getting into a fight with them, get arrested, go to court, and debate them on the radio with two CIA trained psychological warriors.]
....What FitzGerald did over the next few days is a mystery because the records seemingly have been lost. While the government is not supposed to lose records, it has in this case. On August 13, FitzGerald wrote a memo titled "U.S. Courses of Action in the Event of a Military Revolt in Cuba" to Califano at the Pentagon. Although the National Archives has a record that such a document once existed and was declassified, it doesn't have any copies and is unable to explain what happened to it. The Defense Department doesn't have it either because it gave all its copies to the National Archives. 23
[BK: They aren't the only missing records. The list is long and still growing.]
Be that as it may, the title suggests that FitzGerald was alerting the Defense Department to begin preparations to react to a military coup in Cuba. If so, this would be further evidence that Kennedy was preparing to support any coup with U.S. military forces despite his no-invasion pledge.
[BK: Further evidence that Kennedy was preparing to support a coup with military forces when he promised everyone he would not use US military force in Cuba? Further evidence of FitzGerald writing records that the Defense Department and NARA make disapear.]
On August 15 FitzGerald went to the White House to meet with the president, Bundy and others. This was neither a Standing Group or Special Group meeting....The meeting was taped by the White House recording system and is at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. However, the library's listing states: "Eighteen minutes are deleted as secret."......
[BK: Yea, another eighteen minute gap in the record.]
8 - ASSASSINS AND SPIES
.....Scott Breckenridge, a former deputy inspector general of the CIA, writes about the Church Committee investigation in The CIA and the U.S. Intelligence System and says that the committee staff debated whether assassination could ever be justified. According to Breckenridge, "one aspect of the issue....was whether any of them would have condoned the assassination of Adolf Hitler. The question was that of balancing one man's life against the estimated 40 million who died."
Breckenridge believes the senators, except for Barry Goldwater of Arizona, ducked the question.....
Lee Harvey Oswald was interested in the very same question and had an answer. When his wife, Marina, appeared before the Warren Commission, she was asked why Oswald shot at General Walker. She said: "He [Oswald] said that this [Walker] was a very bad man, that he was a fascist, that he was the leader of a fascist organization, and wen I said that even though all of that might be true, just the same he had no right to take his life. He [Oswald] said if someone had killed Hitler in time it would have saved many lives. I told him that this is no method to prove your ideas, by means of a rifle." 4
[BK: Yes, The policy makers in Washington and little Lee Harvey Oswald were thinking the same thing. And Oswald got the seed planted in his mind that Walker should be killed as Hitler should have been from a conversation he had with Volkmar Schmidt at a party set up for the purpose of introducing the Oswalds to the Paines in February 1963. And the CIA was thinking the same thing, as Desmond FitzGerald told the Joint Chiefs of Staff - they were studying in detail the July 20, 1944 German military plot to kill Hitler in order to adopt it to Castro, a study they also managed to lose. http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/volkmar-schmidt-interview.html ]
The common view of assassination has been shaped by novels and movies. In the 1960s movies based on the James Bond in Ian Fleming novels were popular....The assassins in these movies were always clever and highly trained in order to better challenge the skills of hero James Bond.
According to author Philip Shenon in his book A Cruel and Shocking Act about the Warren Commission, staff lawyer David Slawson said that he was briefed by the CIA on the KGB's history of assassinations and concluded that Kennedy's murder would have been completely out of character for the KGB. "They gave us background material on how Russian spies killed people....and none of them fitted the pattern of Lee Harvey Oswald," Slawson said.
What the CIA told Slawson differs from a briefing the author received when he was on the Church Committee. In response to the author's assertion tat Oswald was hardly the kind of man the KGB would use for an assassination, the (UNNAMED) briefer disagreed and said he was "precisely" the kind of man the Soviets used in World War II.
......In Castro's Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Brian Latell, a former CIA officer and later professor in Cuban American studies, write of a retired CIA expert on Cuba saying that the Cubans had "the best intelligence service in the world." This is, says Latell, a view shared by many in American intelligence. 20 .....
9 - AMLASH
The heart of Desmond FitzGerald's plan was to recruit selected Cuban military leaders and convince them to work together to throw Castro out in a coup.....The military leaders in Cuba would not initiate action because Castro was running a police state, and nothing would happen unless the CIA organized this effort. This was the reason FitzGerald had asked the army for biographical information on Cuban military leaders.
It was also the reason that the CIA decided that one of the men on the army's list, a prominent Cuban its agency had first met the previous year, Rolando Cubela, might be useful. He was given the code name AMLASH. 1
The "AM" designation was for Cuban operations. The meaning of "LASH" is self-evident.... .
.....Cubela was six years younger than Fidel Castro. He too had opposed Batista from the beginning. In 1956 Cubela assassinated a Batista intelligence officer and fled to the United States. He returned to Cuba to join Castro's fight. Cubela was careful to keep his followers separate from Castro's because he didn't want to take orders from Castro's cohort, the Argentinean Che Guevara.
When Castro fled Cuba on January 1, 1959, it was Cubela's men who took over the presidential palace, which, for a time, they refused to turn over to Che as a way of asserting their independence. Cubela went on to get a medical degree from Havana University, were e also served as president of a government-sponsored student group. His disagreements with Che, and later Fidel Castro, continued, and he had a falling out with the regime.
[BK: Whey doesn't Johnston mention the fact that the anti-Batista/anti-Castro organization Cubela founded at the University of Havana was the Revolutionary Student Directorate - DRE? Would it be because that was the organization Oswald got tangled with in New Orleans whose CIA case officer was George Joanedes, the CIA officer sent to work with the House Select Committee on Assassinations and whose file the CIA refused to give up to Jeff Morely after a decades long FOIA civil suit?]
Cubela first came to the CIA's attention in 1961, when he traveled to Mexico. There, at the CIA's instigation, Carlos Tepedino, a friend of Cubela and an exile who was a jeweler in Florida and New York, approached him to sound him out about Castro. Cubela expressed displeasure with the Cuban leader. The CIA gave Tepedino the code name AMWHIP.....
......On June 19, 1963, the same day that FitzGerald outlined his plan for a coup to the president.....the CIA was trying to reestablish contact with Cubela. 9
By August FitzGerald realized that the Cuban fit perfectly into the new coup plan. Nestor Sanchez was FitsGerald's special assistant responsible for organizing the Cuban military officers for the coup. He had previously worked under Seymour Bolton on "the psychological political action part" of Bill Harvey's Task Force W. He was a natural to be Cubela's case officer....
Once Tepedino established that Cubela was still interested in talking with the CIA, Sanchez flew to Brazil to meet with him on September 7...
....On September 7, the night of Sanchez's meeting with Cubela in Brazil, Fidel Castro attended a reception at the Brazilian embassy in Havana and agreed to a lengthy interview with Associated Press reporter Danial Harker. The story ran on the AP wire service, and newspapers used whatever parts they wanted....
[BK: Since Castro went to the Brazilian embassy reception the night that Cubela met with his CIA case officer in Brazil, and complained about CIA attempts to kill him as well as the CIA sponsored commando raids, CIA counter-intelligence officers correctly suspected Cubela was a double-agent, and warned FitzGerald not to deal with him, but instead FitzGerld met with Cubela personally. While Johnston does mention this at the end of the book, it should be a part of the story.]
.....The Chicago Tribune....under the headline "Castro warns U.S. Not to Aid His Foes" - "Premier Fidel Castro said tonight that "United States leaders" would be in danger if they helped in any attempt to do away with the leaders of Cuba." Denouncing what he called recent U.S. promoted raids on Cuba territory, Castro said: "We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should be mindful that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe." 18
......(Cubela) thought, and FitzGerald was probably beginning to agree, that assassinating Castro needed to be the first step in the coup. Yet the operation was leaking, and Castro seemed to know not only the general thrust of the plan, but also the most important details.
[BK: Yea, Castro knew the details of the plan, he got from Cubela.]
10 - MEXICO CITY
Marina Oswald's friend from Dallas, Ruth Paine, arrived in New Orleans on September 20 for a visit, during which it was supposedly decided that Marina would go back to Texas with her.....The women and the Oswald's daughter (and the rifle) left New Orleans three days later. This was the Warren Report's version.
The true situation was more complicated......
[BK: Yea, you ain't kidding its more complicated. As Gerald Ford mentions in his book Portrait of the Assassin, Ruth Paine wrote a letter to Marina in New Orleans inviting her to live with her in Texas until the baby was born. If she agreed, Marina was to write to her in care of C/O Arthur Young, Paoli, Pa.. When I read that I wondered who Arthur Young was. I later learned he was the eccentric inventor of the Bell Helicopter and third husband of Michael Paine's mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young. And Ruth Paine didn't just show up in New Orleans, she went on a summer road trip in her Chevy station wagon to visit her father in Ohio, sister who worked for the CIA in Washington, and Michael's mom at the Forbes family island off Massachusetts and Art Young's farm outside of Philadelphia. Michael's mom was also an active World Federalist - founded by Cord Meyer, Jr., and a close personal friend and traveling companion of Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles' OSS assistant and paramour and author of Autobiography of a Spy. I have met Michael's mom and interviewed Art Young.]
.....The Warren Report chose not to mention that Oswald probably met with Cuban intelligence....
[BK: Yes, because it "probably" didn't happen.]
.....Through AMSPORT Sanchez had learned that Cubela really wanted to meet wit a senior government official in Washington. He preferred Robert Kennedy as Cubela understood he was responsible for Cuban affairs....
Sanchez ended by assuring headquarters that he would do everything possible to discourage a high-level meeting.
FitzGerald called Robert Kennedy after he received this message. The message was received at CIA headquarters around 1:30 in the afternoon and would have been given to FitzGerald immediately. 28
Robert Kennedy's telephone logs show he took a call from FitzGerald within the hour. 29
Kennedy received 477 callas in the period from September 1 to November 21, 1963, but this is the only one from FitzGerald. Though circumstantial it is strong evidence that FitzGerald called to ask if Kennedy would meet with Cubela if necessary. This would not be the last time that a cable about Cubela's plans led to hasty contact between the CIA and the attorney general.
On October 13 Sanchez met wit Cubela and Tepedino. Cubela said he wanted to defect, but if the CIA wanted him to go back to Cuba and organize a coup, then a meeting with Robert Kennedy was necessary. 30
.....Thus the CIA found itself in a decision crisis connected to Cuba. In some ways similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis just a year before. Did it want Cubela to lead a coup, which both he and others thought involved the assassination of Castro? If so what about Cubela's wanting to see Robert Kennedy? What were the risks of doing that? Or would Cubela be satisfied by the CIA providing something less?
11 HUBRIS
.....FitzGerald decided he would meet with Cubela himself..... Not everyone at the CIA supported FitzGerald's decision.....Ted Shackley, station chief of the CIA's Florida operation, JMWAVE,.....and FitsGerald's security chief, Harold Swenson, also opposed it......
......If Oswald's actions appeared contradictory, going to a right-wing meeting one night and a left wing meeting a few nights later, so were the Kennedys'. While they were insisting on increased sabotage in Cuba, a coup, and apparently Castro's assassination, they also gave indications that they were prepared to reach an accommodation with him. Foreign policy mavens would say the Kennedys were taking a "two-track" approach, covert action on the one hand and diplomacy on the other, and waiting to see which was the more promising...
The diplomatic track was being developed by the deputy ambassador to the United Nations, William Attwood, a former journalist who had once worked as a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson.....
Little wonder that Harold Swenson got into a shouting match with FitzGerald over the idea that he was even thinking of meeting with a possible dangle and a prospective assassin in Paris and bringing him to Washington to meet Robert Kennedy. There would be no plausible denial. If Swenson was right, FitzGerald might be walking the U.S. government into a trap.
12 - CARPE DIEM
Cuba wasn't the only country commanding the attention of the national security establishment. Vietnam was too......
In the end according to the memorandum for the record, the president decided to tell the coup plotters in Vietnam not to go ahead unless they thought they could succeed. A message to this effect was sent to Lodge.3
.The CIA also has a memorandum for the record of the meeting with Cubela in Paris. Strangely, it is dated several weeks after the meeting. FitzGerald was introduced under the false name "James Clark" and said to be an "emissary from the policy level of the U.S. government." Thus on October 29, the United States was moving forward with plans for a coups in both Vietnam and Cuba. FitzGerald told Cubela a variation of what was told the generals in Vietnam. "The United States is prepared to render all necessary assistance to any anti-communist Cuban group which succeeds in neutralizing the present Cuban leadership and assumes sufficient control to invite the United States to render the assistance it is prepared to give."
....Parsing Sancez's circumlocution, a principal reason the CIA was dealing with Cubela was because it thought he could kill Castro if need be. Cubela was not the CIA's candidate to be the next ruler of Cuba......
....In Washington the Special Group convened on Tuesday, November 5, for a special meeting on Cuba. The first two items for discussion were a failed sabotage operation in Cuba and two future operations.
[BK: Yes, the failed sabotage operation was probably the one in which the commandos were captured, paraded on Cuban TV, and identified as having been deposited in Cuba from the CIA ship The Rex, which the New York Times ran a photo of on their front page on November 1, and identified as being owned by Somoza of Nicaragua and leased to the Collins Radio Co. of Richardson, Texas. Also unmentioned is the fact that Collins made and serviced the radios aboard Air Force One, all Executive aircraft, and SAC bombers, and employed JD Tippit's good friend Carl Mather, who worked on the radios in LBJ's plane, and owned a car seen at the murder site of his good friend Tippit, being driven by the accused assassin. See: https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-collins-radio-connections-to.html ]
13 - THE PLOT ACCELERATES
..... FitzGerald then turned to the heart of the effort, the coup. Working with Defense Departments biographical information on the Cuban military, the CIA had identified 150 key military personnel, of which 45 were of interest, meaning that they might be amenable to recruitment. Yet the CIA was in direct contact with only three.....
[BK: In his September 25 briefing of the Joint Chiefs FitzGerald admits to only identifying ten disenchanted Cuban military officers. While that may have been a problem identifying such Cuban officers, it wasn't a problem in the US, as the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff (except Taylor) were passionately hateful of the President.]
Thus on November 12, 1963, ten days before the president's trip to Dallas, the CIA briefed John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and General Maxwell Taylor on its plot for a coup in Cuba.....But FitzGerald and the CIA officials at the meeting knew that Cubela alone might be enough. 3
The meeting then turned to a different matter almost as an afterthought. FitzGerald's memorandum for the record states that Bundy raised the subject of an arms cache recently discovered in Venezuela that seemed to come from Cuba.......
The Venezuelan arms cache is important because,....Richard Helms was back in the White House a week later for a hastily arranged meeting that was allegedly for the purpose of showing the president a weapon from the arms cache.....
[BK; The Venezuelan Arms cache was the last item JFK dealt with before leaving for Texas and has since been shown, as Johnston himself admits, to be a Northwoods Type operation made to appear to be Cuban but actually put together by the CIA and the US military.]
14 THE LAST WEEKEND
......Kennedy would have a busy schedule on Monday. He would travel to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, where he would tour the headquarters of the U.S. Strike Command on the base. The Strike Command was designed to be a quick reaction force the president could deploy at a moment's notice to any place in the world - such as Havana in the event of a coup......
[BK Ah, yes, MacDill AFB - home of the Strike Command, that Dallas PD and Texas National Guardsman Stringfellow wrote to in the immediate aftermath of the assassination informing them that the assassin was a pro-Castro Cuban, part of a well entrenched and distinct black propaganda and disinformation campaign to blame the assassination on Castro, that this book is a part of. https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-psy-op-that-failed-crack-in-dealey.html ]
15 A BARRIER ONCE REMOVED
.....In Washington this Monday, the Joint Chiefs of Staff met to talk about the order the President had given....a week earlier to catch Castro red-handed shipping arms to Latin American countries.....
16 - JOHN KENNEDY AND THE ROGUE ELEPHANT
On Tuesday, November 19, the CIA finally, and suddenly decided to give Cubela the assassination weapons he had long been requesting. The CIA's Richard Helms met with both Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy this day. The question is whether Helms made the decision on his own or obtained the president's authorization. That is, was the CIA a rogue elephant in making such an important decision only three days before the president himself was assassinated, or did Kennedy order this to be done?
....On the same November 19, (Jean Daniel) was summoned for a session with Castro at ten o'clock in the evening. The two men talked until four o'clock the next morning.....He said the CIA was trying to foment a coup to overthrow him (which of course is an accurate description of what FitzGerald was trying to do with Cubela). But by the end of the six hour meeting Castro held out an olive branch, saying that Kennedy might change and the two leaders might reach accommodation......
17 WASINGTON, PARIS, DALLAs
At CIA headquarters the next morning , November 20, Nestor Sanchez and Sam Halpern, FitsGerald's executive officer, called on Edward Gunn of the Technical Services Division. They had talked to him on a previous occasion about Cubela's supposed desire for a poison dart device.....
....In Dallas, Texas, Lee Harvey Oswald was leading his lonely life.... But a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, Hugh Aynesworth, discovered something different.....He asked.....what Oswald did when he came home from work. Mr. Johnson said, "Oswald would retire early and listen to his small radio."
.......Surprisingly, the radio, a Russian-made portable, wasn't mentioned in the Warren Report...
Thus after work at the book depository on Wednesday, November 20, Oswald probably retreated to his room and listened to the radio.....
[BK: Implying but not saying that Oswald was receiving his instructions from Havana via radio, since there's nothing else to go on.]
18 - NOVEMBER 22, 1963 DALLAS
.....Thus at the end of that day in Dallas, the president was dead as was officer Tippit. Oswald was in police custody, charged with murdering Tippit. And Jack Ruby, who some said was distraught but who seemed calm to others, was hanging out with a gun in his pocket at police headquarter where Oswald was being held, pretending at times to be a reporter, and had tried to get in the room where Oswald was being questioned.
19 - NOVEMBER 22, 1963 IN OTHER CITIES
In Washington DC, ....Robert Kennedy's thoughts turned to legalities and his brother's legacy. He called McGeorge Bundy to ask who owned John Kennedy's personal papers. After checking with the State Department, Bundy told him that the Kennedy family did, so the attorney general ordered the combinations changed on all the safes in the White House with Kennedy papers in them. 3
The audio tapes of the president's Oval Office meetings were similarly secured that afternoon by John Kennedy's personal secretary and later given to Robert Kennedy.
The attorney general also began trying to learn who was responsible for his brother's murder.....Kennedy called ...Enrique Ruiz-Williams... and told the Cuban.. "One of your guys did it." .....
[BK: So RFK's first thought was the ANTI-CASTRO CUBANS were behind the murder of his brother, not Castro]
Desmond FitzGerald and his aides Sam Halpern and Bruce Cheever....were in Georgetown having lunch together at City Tavern. 8
Upon hearing that the president had been assassinated and Oswald arrested, Halpern remarked, "I sure hope that guy isn't involved in Cuba some way." 9
[BK: From what I remember - it was FitzGerald who wondered out loud whether "their" Cubans were invovled.]
20 THE DAY AFTER
....Upon returning to Washington that night, Lyndon Johnson went to his office in the Executive Office Building and met with his personal staff, including Bill Moyers, Walter Jenkins, and Jack Valenti, to discuss the future of his presidency. They then adjourned to Johnson's house in northwest Washington to continue the discussion over drinks. 3
[BK: A lot more happened - according to Reclaiming History, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter and David Atlee Phillip media asset Joseph Goulden - and current overseer of his papers - tried to get Assistant Dallas DA William Alexander to charge Oswald with furthering a communist conspiracy. When LBJ learned of this while at his EOB office, he had Moyers call the Texas Attorney General, who tracked down the Dallas DA at a restaurant and had him go back to his office and make sure that Oswald was NOT charged with conspiracy. Leaving the EOB around 7 pm, LBJ didn't arrive at his Elms home until 9 pm. Where did he go and who did he see in those missing two hours. See: http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/06/tipping-point.html / https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-tipping-point-revived.html ]
The next morning, the day after the assassination, CIA director McCone met with the new president Lyndon Johnson alone in Bundy's office. Johnson asked McCone to stay on as CIA director, and McCone agreed. McCone asked Johnson if he was familiar with the President's Checklist, the daily intelligence report the CIA gave the president. Johnson said, no, so it was agreed that for the next several days, McCone would personally brief President Johnson in the morning......
......The CIA may also have been worried about an interrogation of Duran because it knew she had had an affair with Carlos Lechuga, the Cuban ambassador to the UN with whom William Attwood was trying to arrange a dialog with Kennedy and Castro. 13
In the meantime Nestor Sanchez was flying back to Washington from his meeting with Cubela in Paris. Sanchez arrived at 6:10 p.m. on November 23. He went to the office either that evening or the next morning. 14
He was debriefed on one of those days by FitzGerald......
...FitzGerald and Sanchez did not discuss a possible link between the Cuban operations and the Kennedy assassination - although the first thought to pop into the head of FitzGerald's executive officer, Sam Halpern, when he learned of the assassination while lunching with FitzGerald, was that he hoped the assassin didn't have ties to Cuba, and Sanchez said he assumed he was recalled so suddenly because of the assassination. 15
If Cubela was right in saying that his November 22 meeting with Sanchez in Paris was interrupted by a phone call from FitzGerld telling them of the assassination, then there was even more reason for FitzGerald to discuss this with Sanchez upon his return....
[BK: But they don't do it.]
21 - AN INVESTIGATION HOBBLED FROM THE START
....On November 24 CIA headquarters asked the Mexico City station to provide the names of all known contacts of the Russians with whom Oswald met at the Soviet embassy. In addition to Kostikov, it asked for Ivan Gavrilovich Alferiev's contacts. The Mexico City station answered by saying that Alferiev and a cultural attache in the Cuban embassy had arranged a press conference for Rolando Cubela two years earlier. 21
In other words a name trace on Oswald linked him to Alferiev and Alferiev was linked to Cubela. Producing leads like this is the very purpose of a name trace. It proves nothing in and of itself; it is just an investigative tool.
[BK: Yes, I like name traces and this Ivan Gavrilovich Alferiv is a new name to me, possibly connecting Oswald and Cubela.]
It could have significantly affected the assassination investigation though. If only two days after the assassination, investigators had known that at the moment of the assassination, the CIA was meeting with Cubela, who wanted to assassinate Castro, attention might have been paid to the chronological connection of the AMLASH plot to Kennedy's assassination.
But the investigators didn't get the information. Sam Halpern, FitzGerald's executive officer, testified that the CIA's 201 files contained only biographical information on individuals. They did not include "operational contacts." Even if an investigator in the CIA did a name trace on Cubela and read his 201-file, he would not learn that the CIA was using Cubela to trigger a coup in Cuba. To get that information, the investigator would be referred to the responsible case officer. 22
....For this reason the top document in Sanchez's file on Cubela at the time is significant because it was written by hand in red and read, "Not to leave this office per Sanchez," and dated December 1963. 23
When asked about the note by the Church Committee, Sanchez testified that he probably directed his secretary to put the notation in the file because FitzGerald had ordered Sanchez "to minimize the knowledgeability of this particular operation because of its sensitivity." No one could see Cubela's file except FitzGerald, Helms, and McCone without Sanchez's approval. 24
FitzGerald had already told Sanchez to keep written records about the operation to a minimum.....
But the AMLASH operation kept cropping up in the assassination investigation.....
.....Little wonder that others in the CIA, such as FitzGerald's counterintelligence chief Swenson, worried about the security of the entire AMLASH operation. This is another instance of the CIA taking affirmative action to prevent assassination investigators from learning about the AMLASH operation.
......On November 25 McGeorge Bundy's aide, Gordon Chase, sent him a memorandum asking whether the overture to Castro through William Attwood should be renewed. 32
Later on the same day, Chase forwarded a chronology that Attwood had prepared and sent to the White House....
Nothing in these documents suggests that Chase, an assistant to the national security advisor, was aware of the fact that Carlos Lechuga, with whom Attwood was dealing, had had an affair with Silvia Duran, who was of intense interest in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination because of the assistance she had given Oswald at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. The agency knew though.
Indeed, the CIA was growing increasingly alarmed about Cuban involvement as it analyzed the facts that were pouring in....
In sum within days of the assassination, Hoover was satisfied that the investigation was complete and that the remaining task was to convince the public that Oswald was the assassin. If he had his way there would be no Warren Commission....
In most instances compartmentation made it easy so suppress information about the (AMLASH) operation. Those running the AMLASH operation simply had to stay silent. However, on occasion it required affirmative action on their part to prevent assassination investigators from learning that at the moment Kennedy was shot, a CIA case officer was having a last meeting with Cubela before the latter returned to Cuba to do "the big job."
22 - THE INVESTIGATION SPUTTERS ON
.....FitsGerald's SAS division was proceeding as if nothing had changed. On December 2 it ordered the JMWAVE station in Florida to begin preparing to get Cubela the weapons and secret writing materials he had been promised at the November 22 meeting in Paris. It also relayed to the Florida station the names of the men Cubela thought would assist him in the first stage of a coup against Castro and those who would lend support once Castro was "removed." 9
......Fidel Castro for his part was again putting out peace feelers . On December 2 William Attwood reported to Gordon Chase on the National Security Council that the Cuban delegate to the UN, Lechuga, had received a letter from Castro authorizing Lechuga to proceed with discussions with Attwood.....
23 REGIME CHANGE
.....The showdown between John Kennedy's Cuban policy and Lyndon Johnson's came on December 19, 1963, when the CIA explained its program to the new president....
...FitzGerald summarized the situation in Cuba and what the CIA had been doing. When FitzGerald got around to explaining the coup plan, the president was both dismissive and highly critical....Johnson rejected the CIA and Defense Department proposals for large-scale sabotage operations and air strikes.....
....As the year came to a close, the lose ends of Kennedy's Cuban policy were being wrapped up. Sanchez cabled JMWAVE to go ahead with delivery of arms for Cubela. However, the contents had changed. No longer would he be given rifles with telescopic sights, explosives and grenades. Instead, the cache would have two Belgian FAL rifles, the kind that Castro had carried and were common in Cuba, and two submachine guns. 32
.....As for the Venezuelan arms cache, army team investigated....the team said that "many of the items found were in fact US origin."
....The report makes no mention of Belgian-made weapons. Helms may have taken a Belgian-made FAL rifle to show the attorney general and the president on November 19......
....A month after Kennedy's death, U.S. policy toward Cuba had changed completely. CIA attempts to assassinate Castro and stage a coup were no longer in the cards......Lee Harvey Oswald had done for Castro what Cubela had proposed to do for Kennedy: bring about a regime change in his native land.
[BK: Yes, the regime change was in the USA, not Cuba, but Oswald didn't bring it about, the Murder, Inc. did.]
24 THE WARREN REPORT
...On February 28 at McCone's request, FitzGerald took the unusual step of meeting alone with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The attorney general's role in Cuban policy had seemed to stop with his brother's death,.....According to FitGerald's memorandum, he handed Kennedy a document he called the "Spectrum Paper" with respect to Cuba and an annex titled "Scenario for Action."
The "Spectrum Paper" is an astonishing document.....
25 THE NEVER ENDING INVESTIGATIONS
....The Church Committee, for its part, conducted a broad investigation into CIA plots against foreign leaders, including but not limited to Castro. Senators Gary Hart of Colorado and Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania were on the subcommittee that looked specifically at the Kennedy assassination and for evidence that Castro had retaliated. The committee as a whole issued a report on the CIA assassination plots and concluded that there was no evidence any president had approved them. 37
....Two of the men involved in the underworld plots against Castro, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, were murdered at the time of the Church Committee revelations...Roselli believed Castro had retaliated for the assassination plots against him, not for the "Bay of Pigs." ..........
26 JOHN KENNEDY AND THE CIA
.....In late 1963 Castro seemed to know that CIA was plotting to kill him and seemed to be trying to decide if John Kennedy approved. Cubella may have been in league with Castro, and so was a double agent, or he may have been unwitting.....
....When Cubela asked for proof that John Kennedy approved what the CIA was doing, FitzGerald obliged. He flew to Paris and met with Cubela as the personal representative of the president's brother....FitzGerald certainly wasn't a rogue elephant at this stage of the operation; he had authority from Robert Kennedy.....
Castro may have turned the tables on John Kennedy. He had caught the president red-handed authorizing assassination. It was easy to prove that FitzGerald was CIA and had met with Cubela and that Kennedy had called Castro a barrier to be removed in a public speech. And there was that nasty device the CIA was going to give Cubela on Friday. John Kennedy would have trouble plausibly denying that he was trying to kill the Cuban leader.
27 LYNDON JOHNSON AND THE CIA
.....Several lessons emerge from all this. One is a simple history lesson. Things happen differently from the way history has recorded them.
Another is that democracy and secret intelligence agencies are strange bedfellows indeed....
.....Last is the danger of letting the spy game compromise fundamental moral principles. The United States could not fully investigate the assassination of John Kennedy for fear the trail would come back to the CIA's Murder, Inc.
[BK: Yes, it comes back to the CIA's Murder, Inc., not Oswald, and not Cuban retaliation, but the mechanism set up by the CIA to kill Castro was redirected to JFK at Dealey Plaza. That's what happened, and that's the reason for the continued secrecy and the continuing "active measure" disinformation campaign to blame the assassination plots against Castro on the Kennedys and the assassination on Castro.]
END OFJAMDES JOHNSTON'S TEXT
MORE BK COMMENTS TO COME
Whether you ere a cabinet secretary....a national security advisor.....a senior CIA officer....or a young case officer....you felt the change, a sea of change, in U.S. policy toward Cuba that came within weeks of John Kennedy's death. The major beneficiary was Fidel Castro.....
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MORE TO COME
