Where was Posada when Kennedy was killed?

Robert Kennedy was investigating the CIA and the Cuban- and Italian-American mafias in relation to his brother’s assassination.

• He was convinced, two months before he too was assassinated – when he won the Democratic nomination to the presidency and announced that he was to reopen the case – that attempts to blame Cuba for the murder were part of a conspiracy of these groups, the possible perpetrators, according to evidence that throws new light on the Bush family’s protection of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles


BY GABRIEL MOLINA


RECENTLY revealed suspicions of Robert Kennedy regarding the participation of Cuban- and Italian-American mafias working for the CIA in the assassination of his brother are shedding new light on the protection granted by the Bush family to terrorist Luis Posada Carriles.
The Chicago Tribune newspaper published an article on Sunday, May 13, revealing that Roberto F. Kennedy suspected and began investigating from the first moment — Nov. 22, 1963 — that his brother’s murder was a conspiracy between those groups, given that he knew better than anyone else the motivations behind their actions, having been working with them to overthrow Fidel Castro and strangle the Cuban Revolution after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.


IT HAS HAD TO BE IN SILENCE


The May 13 article is an excerpt of the book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, by David Talbot, published recently by the prominent firm Simon and Schuster.
Robert Kennedy had learned that in Washington, the best thing was to keep a secret when working on something important. That is why he gave misinformation for years, saying publicly that no investigation would bring his brother back. But in reality, his investigation was initiated the very afternoon of the assassination, and it is possible to trace back the time when he frenetically began using the telephone in his home on Hickory Hill to summon all of his top aides there to analyze the crime.
The younger Kennedy, who was Attorney General at the time, concluded that the path to the crime was distant from ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who had already been arrested. That was how he secretly became the first – and most important – assassination conspiracy theorist.
“CIA sources began disseminating their own conspiratorial view of Kennedy's murder within hours of the crime, spotlighting Oswald's defection to the Soviet Union and his public support for Fidel Castro” claimed by “an exile group funded secretly by a CIA program code-named AMSPELL,” Talbot says. This group in New Orleans, which called itself the Cuban Student Directorate, released a recording that it said was of Oswald defending the Cuban president, and claiming that the alleged assassin had ties to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a solidarity organization.
“But Robert Kennedy never believed the assassination was a communist plot. Instead, he looked in the opposite direction, focusing his suspicions on the CIA's secretive anti-Castro operations, a murky underworld he had navigated as his brother's point man on Cuba. Ironically, RFK's suspicions were shared by Castro himself, whom he had sought to overthrow throughout the Kennedy presidency,” Talbot notes.
In these tasks assigned to him by President Kennedy after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Robert learned about the sewer of intrigues comprising the elements who participated in plots to kill the Cuban president. He was particularly impacted by the plans organized by the CIA, along with Cuban gangsters and Italian-American mafia capos John Rossellli, Sam Giancana and Santos Trafficante.
These and other “godfathers” had been pursued by Robert Kennedy in the late 1950s when he was chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee and during his years as attorney general in his brother’s administration. He also knew that all three groups hated the Kennedys and considered them traitors because of the fiascos of the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the Missile Crisis in 1962.


“SUSPECTED MIAMI NETHERWORLD”


“This Miami netherworld of spies, gangsters and Cuban terrorists is where Robert Kennedy immediately cast his suspicions on Nov. 22. In the years since RFK's own assassination [June 5, 1968], an impressive body of evidence has accumulated that suggests why Kennedy felt compelled to look in that direction,” Talbot says, including Congressional testimony, declassified government documents and even “veiled confessions.” The most recent was that uncovered by reputed spy E. Howard Hunt before his death in January, just three months ago. The man who organized the Watergate spies admits in his book American Spy, published posthumously, that the CIA could have been involved in Kennedy’s murder. In handwritten notes and a recording he left behind when he died, he went further, admitting that in 1963, he participated in a CIA meeting where assassination plans were discussed.


THE CHICAGO AND MIAMI MAFIA


The night the president was killed, Robert Kennedy made a phone call to Julius Draznin, an expert on trade union corruption in Chicago, to ask him about any connections in Dallas to the Mafia. He also called his top investigator in the Department of Justice, Walter Sheridan, who was in Nashville waiting for the trial of Robert’s old nemesis, Jimmy Hoffa, the leader of the Teamsters Union.
If Kennedy had any doubts about the Mafia’s participation in the assassination, they were cleared up two days later when Jack Ruby shot Oswald in the basement of the police station where he was being held for the president’s murder.
Sheridan quickly supplied evidence that Ruby had been paid in Chicago by a close associate of Hoffa’s, Allen M. Dorfman, his chief adviser on the Teamsters’ pension funds and stepson of Paul Dorfman, Hoffa’s main liaison with the Chicago mafia.
Days later, Draznin — who had been Kennedy’s man in his old feud with Al Capone — provided more evidence with a complete report on Ruby’s ties to the Mafia. When he took him the list of phone calls that Ruby had made around the time of the assassination, Robert told his assistant, Frank Mankiewicz, that the list was “almost a duplicate of the people I called to testify before the Rackets Committee,” Talbot writes.
With respect to the CIA, Robert knew that its director, John McCone, did not have complete control over the agency. “...Dick Helms was running the agency,” was the comment by the attorney general’s aide, John Seigenthaler.
On the same day, the 22nd, he had a revealing conversation with Enrique Ruiz Williams, a friend and a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion, who he left speechless when he told him “One of your guys did it,” Talbot says.
“The CIA and its anti-Castro client groups were already trying to connect the alleged assassin to the Havana regime. But as Kennedy's blunt remark to Williams makes clear, the attorney general wasn't buying it. Recent evidence suggests that Bobby Kennedy had heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald long before it exploded in news bulletins around the world, and he connected it with the government's underground war on Castro. With Oswald's arrest in Dallas, Kennedy apparently realized that the government's clandestine campaign against Castro had boomeranged at his brother,” Talbot says.
Members of the family and close friends say that on the weekend of the assassination, Robert, sleepless, pondered his brother’s death. “Bobby told family members that that JFK had been killed by a powerful plot that grew out of one of the government's secret anti-Castro operations. There was nothing they could do at that point, Bobby added.” Justice would have to be postponed until they could take the White House.
Over the years, Kennedy offered bland and routine endorsements to the Warren Report and its theory of the lone gunman. But privately, he continued working assiduously to clear up his brother’s killing, preparing to reopen the case if he were to obtain the power to do so.
After he left the Justice Department in 1964 and was elected senator for New York, Kennedy traveled to Mexico, where he looked for information on Oswald’s mysterious trip in September 1963, two months before the assassination. He and Mankiewicz came to the conclusion that it was probably a conspiracy involving the Mafia, Cuban exiles and CIA officials. In March of ’68, during his presidential election campaign, he addressed a raucous rally of students in Northridge, California, who shouted that they wanted to know who had killed the president, and “Open the archives!”
Robert knew that if he made reference to the subject, it would dominate his campaign instead of other campaign issues, like the Vietnam War and racial segregation. But he always addressed the students with “surprising honesty” and “stunned” his press secretary, Mankiewicz, when in response to a question, he replied “...the archives will be open” and “...there is no one who would be more interested...than I...”
Perhaps he was signing his death sentence. Two months later, he too, was shot dead.


CIA ONCE AGAIN


Recently, it was discovered that the group of CIA officials suspected of killing John F. Kennedy were present for more than their duties at the hotel where Robert, the candidate most likely to win the presidency, was killed.
When we recall that the case officer assigned to dirty work against Cuba was for along time George Bush Sr., it is easier to understand how Luis Posada Carriles, also a suspect in President Kennedy’s assassination, could blackmail Bush Jr. It is not just about the drug trafficking-for-arms scandal in Central America, something the self-confessed terrorist and fugitive of justice knows a lot about. It is also a matter of other unmentionable crimes of the CIA-Gate gang.



The original article of David Talbot is in the:

 http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/383811,CST-CONT-kennedy13.articleprint

Another of the BBC:
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/11/who_shot_bobby_kennedy_1.html