NEW YORK POST – August 24, 2019
The Original Phase One - Cuban Castro Commie Cover-Story Continues -
Gilberto Policarpo Lopez
The
Cuban expat who may have helped Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate JFK
August
24, 2019
Gilberto
Policarpo Lopez
National
Archive and CIA
Just as
Lee Harvey Oswald was aiming his rifle at JFK above Dealey Plaza in Dallas,
another suspected assassin lurked nearby.
The
Cuban expat, Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, was handsome with angular features, a
pale complexion and a preference for white V-necks and classic Foster Grant
shades.
Though
he and Oswald appeared nothing alike, they had a lot in common.
Both
sought favor from the Castro regime. Both recently had applied for Cuban visas
and were denied. Both had fought with their wives and were living alone.
And on
Nov. 22, 1963, Lopez was in Texas, though where exactly nobody knows.
What is
known is that, on the same day Oswald fired his infamous three shots, killing
Kennedy, the 23-year-old homesick drifter crossed from Texas into Mexico then
quickly disappeared to Cuba afterward. That fact, coupled with Lopez also
having been in Tampa four days earlier, at the same time as JFK, implicates him
in the plot, many believe.
“The
obvious significance was that Lopez might be fleeing,” writes James H. Johnston
in his new book “Murder,
Inc.: The CIA Under John F. Kennedy” (Potomac Books), out now, pointing to
“his strange travel from Tampa to Texas to Mexico to Havana.”
Born in
Cuba, Lopez left in 1960 to avoid being drafted into the military and
eventually became a US citizen. But by 1963, he was desperate to return to his
homeland.
PHOTO Lee
Harvey Oswald ZUMAPRESS.com
In the
week leading up to Kennedy’s death, Lopez shadowed the president, jetting to
Tampa on Nov. 18 for the first leg of the presidential tour. There, he waited
for an important call from Cuba, giving him the “go-ahead order” to leave the
US and go back to the island nation, a source in Tampa told investigators.
But the
call never came, and Lopez departed that night or the next day for Texas. Just
days later JFK flew to the Lone Star State and eventually met his death in an
open-air motorcade.
No one
knows what Lopez did in Texas, but at midnight on the same day JFK was killed,
he showed up at the Mexican border in Nuevo Laredo then made his way to Mexico
City, presumably by bus. (Just one month earlier, on Oct. 8, Oswald had also
traveled to the Mexican capital, where he visited the Cuban consulate and
Soviet embassy in a bid to get a visa.)
Mexican
border agents viewed Lopez as “suspicious” and snapped the only known photo of
him — wearing sunglasses at night.
PHOTO: President
John F. Kennedy, and first Lady Jaqueline Kennedy moments before Kennedy was
assassinated.REUTERS
The CIA
station chief in Mexico City “and Mexican authorities were aware of the recent
allegation that Lopez had been involved in the assassination, and the
allegation was unresolved,” Johnston writes.
At this
point, the CIA flagged Lopez as a possible suspect in the assassination plot,
writes Johnston, a lawyer on a 1970s Senate committee investigating links
between CIA hits and Kennedy’s death.
In
Mexico City, where Lopez apparently obtained a “Cuban courtesy” visa, he must
have finally got the call he’d been hoping for. On Nov. 27, he hopped on a
Cubana Airlines flight to Havana. The flight had waited for hours for Lopez to
arrive, then hastily took off after he climbed aboard, though the Mexicans had
tried to stall the plane and failed, according to intelligence reports. Lopez
was the only passenger.
The CIA
assigned the cryptonym it used for the assassination probe, “GPFLOOR” to Lopez,
but nothing much else was done, Johnston writes.
After
Lopez vanished, the CIA sent its files on him to the FBI, though the bureau
didn’t follow up and failed to mention his name to the Warren Commission, which
concluded Oswald acted alone. A Senate committee later looked into the
allegations but couldn’t prove a thing.
“If the
commission had known about Gilberto Lopez’s waiting for a phone call from Cuba
about his visa, it might have asked for records of all phone calls
from Cuba since Oswald too was waiting to hear about his visa,” Johnston
writes. “Not seeking this information is an inexplicable lapse.”
Authorities
never pursued Lopez, despite a common belief that Castro almost certainly knew
Kennedy wanted him dead, so he acted first, possibly using Lopez’s help.
Lyndon
Johnson believed that Kennedy had run a “damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean,”
giving the Cuban strongman reason to retaliate, according to an Atlantic
article by his former speechwriter six months after LBJ died. The CIA had
allegedly recruited Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli as well as Rolando Cubela, a
Castro rival from Cuba, to kill the dictator.
And yet,
even today, many questions go unanswered.
“The
confusion that abounded from the top to the bottom of the US government still
doesn’t explain why significant leads were never pursued,” Johnston concludes.
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