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:
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Another of the BBC:
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LINCOLN WAS WRONG: THE EASE OF FOOLING MOST OF THE PEOPLE MOST OF THE TIME
23.11.2007 19:34
JOHN CHUCKMAN
This year marks the forty-fourth anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination. What is most remarkable about this is the stunningly simple fact that, despite innumerable books and several official investigations, we still do not know what happened in 1963.
Not understanding what happened is no mere curiosity of history. It tells us something profound about the nature of government in America today, all of it running against the received notion of a free and open society.
I might not say that were the assassination a simple, straightforward matter that had occurred with few witnesses, but it was an event with many witnesses, many of whom were ignored by the Warren Commission with some of the most credible discounted. And it was anything but simple, although the conclusions of the Warren Commission are just that, simple.
At least some of the key parties involved – Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby, and David Ferrie, for example – are subjects of voluminous government records about their bizarre or criminal activities, and forty-four years later, parts of these essential records remain secret.
I might not say that about the free and open society also, were there not a long history of government secrecy around the event, and at times deliberate misrepresentation. Yes, there was finally in the 1990s a big opening of files held secret for decades, but these files – at least the parts not blacked-out – tell us little of importance that is new. Indeed, to the thoughtful inquirer they only raise the issue of why most of them were ever considered worthy of being labeled secret in the first place.
Most importantly, though, a good many files still have not been released, a critical point not treated carefully by many writers on the subject. Certain CIA and FBI files on Oswald are key examples.
You must ask yourself, why, if the assassination is just a simple murder by one misfit, has there been so much secrecy? Indeed, why, if it was a simple murder, was the President’s murder not investigated in Dallas, the scene of the crime, instead of from Washington? All the evidence and most witnesses were located in Dallas. Federal agents at the hospital actually drew their guns against local police and officials to seize the President’s body for shipment to Washington, instead of allowing the perfectly normal procedure of the local jurisdiction autopsying the body. Why? Why was the autopsy conducted by the military with military doctors who were rank amateurs at shooting investigations?
There is no such thing as a free and open society where great matters of empire are concerned, and this is something no less true of the United States than any past imperial power. The people are never consulted on imperial matters, whether war, assassination, or overthrowing other governments, and they are, sadly, frequently deliberately misinformed about them, their own resources being used against them, just the latest examples being around the invasion of Iraq.
Although elements of the CIA truly hated Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover would have spat upon his grave given an unobserved opportunity, I do not subscribe, for many reasons, to the idea that an arm of the American government killed Kennedy. It is highly probable that individuals in some government agencies did understand what had happened and worked to blur and confuse the investigation afterwards. I also consider it possible that, owing to these intense hatreds, glimmers of intelligence in advance of the assassination were deliberately ignored or buried. This seems most likely in Hoover’s case.
Motives for hiding any knowledge of events are unknown, but almost certainly they have to do with hiding genuinely embarrassing or compromising information concerning secret operations and relationships. Embarrassment is more often than not, certainly more often than genuine national security, the reason for imposing secrecy in the American government.
Assassinations at this level in a large advanced society are always the result of conspiracies and complex plans, the plans providing for the certainty of success and the safe distancing of conspirators.
There are, I believe, three plausible candidates for organizing the assassination, all quite powerful groups, all selected for their extreme motives, resources, and opportunity.
The first candidate is a branch of the American mafia, a number of whose members had been deeply hurt by the Attorney General’s aggressive organized crime-fighting activities. After all, Kennedy had received handsome secret contributions in cash from the organization when he ran for office. He had also had at least the seeming cooperation of some senior mafia leaders in his efforts to assassinate Castro, and here he was letting his brother conduct a ruthless campaign against the interests of some families. A mafia family leader and the leader of the Teamsters Union at the time, a known mafia associate, are on record as having made threats against Kennedy. Some members of the Congressional investigations came to favor this candidate although they failed to prove it.
The second candidate is one of the many Cuban refugee groups armed, trained, and paid by the CIA in hopes of invading Cuba again, hurting its economy through terrorist activities, and assassinating any of its leaders. Few Americans today appreciate the extent of these government-subsidized terrorist camps then, operations that make Osama’s camp in the mountains look insignificant.
Kennedy was loathed by the most violent of these groups in his last days because he agreed not to invade Cuba as part of his settlement with the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba. After that pledge, Kennedy had the FBI raiding the operations of some of these previously catered-to groups as a show of good will towards the Soviets. It is in connection with these very raids that Oswald had some not-well-understood but certain connection with the FBI. These refugee groups were ruthless, angry men who didn’t hesitate to kill or cripple those in their way. They had even conducted a number of terrorist attacks in Miami.
The third candidate is Israel, whose secret efforts at developing nuclear weapons were underway at the time and had become known to Kennedy. He made it unpleasantly clear in private communications that he would not allow Israel to go nuclear, something not widely known in America. But the people running Israel considered it essential that the country become a nuclear power, and we have all seen over many decades how Israel has not hesitated to assassinate or attack where it regards its interests are involved.
Just a few years after Kennedy’s assassination, during the Six Day War, Israeli planes made a two-hour attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, a spy ship operating in the Eastern Mediterranean, killing many of its crew. Israel’s motives have never been explained adequately or investigated openly, but likely had to do either with suppressing information of atrocities in the Sinai – the Liberty being an intelligence-gathering ship – or with trying to trick the United States into entering its war against Egypt. In either case, we see ruthlessness compatible with eliminating a hostile, powerful leader.
I don’t claim to know the truth because the truth would require new evidence. And the candidates are not all mutually exclusive. One might well expect the mafia or Mossad to manipulate and use people like the violent Cuban refugees.
Each of these groups had great motives, more than adequate means, and ample opportunity. By comparison, Oswald stands out as a ridiculous figure with no motive, virtually no means, but a seeming opportunity arranged for him by others at the Texas Book Depository. He was, almost certainly, the patsy he said he was in police custody shortly before his death, having been duped by forces he didn’t understand into certain activities that would mark him before the assassination. We have ample evidence of Oswald’s lack of serious interest in things military, his having been pretty much a flop at being a Marine, and of his temperamental inclination in other directions. While he had a temper (who doesn’t?), he was not a violent man, indeed Russian observers who recalled his years in Russia said he was temperamentally incapable of murder.
If you want to understand why the Warren Commission Report is so wrong, just spend some time yourself reading it with a critical eye. You can find an old copy at a used bookstore for a dollar or two. Parts of it are laughable, much of it is fragmentary, and all of it is a prosecutor’s brief. There is no voice for the defense. Our Western traditions of law require the clash of defense and prosecution before a jury can arrive at guilt. There is no other way, although so much of the public is today conditioned by mystery books and television shows where a detective wraps everything up neatly by the end of the book or show.
Perhaps even more importantly, as few younger readers will know, the Warren Commission did no investigation. Its investigative arm was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. He personally kept tight control of these investigations day by day. Hoover’s FBI committed many blunders and genuine crimes over the years of his being director, from trying to send Einstein, a Jewish refugee from Nazism, back to Germany (he hated Einstein’s free thinking) to carrying out an elaborate plan to discredit Martin Luther King with secretly recorded tapes in the hope he would commit suicide. These great men, and many other notable figures, Hoover privately regarded as dangerous communists.
Hoover more or less blackmailed many members of Congress and several presidents with his secret files obtained by spying on their private lives. After his death these files were whisked away never to be seen again. As I said, Hoover hated the Kennedy brothers, surely giving him a total lack of impartiality as an investigator. Hoover, too, spent many days at resorts and racetracks over his career paid for by mafia figures he should have been investigating. Communism, even though it never had any large presence in the United States, was always Hoover’s obsession, and Oswald had the (false) reputation of being a communist. It was not a promising arrangement for the Warren Commission from the beginning, and the poor results show.
With a few special exceptions of genuine investigative journalism and analysis, there are two general categories of books about the Kennedy assassination, both biased in their information. There are the various “theory” books which do not accept the Warren Commission and attempt to promote some particular theory of the crime based on (necessarily) incomplete evidence. Examples of these include a book on Hoover himself as suspect, one on the Secret Service having an accident with automatic weapons, and a number on various CIA figures such as Howard Hunt.
Some of these “theory” books suggest almost paranoid fantasies and have given Kennedy assassination books a bad name in general, making easy targets for those wishing to support the Warren Commission. But we must not conflate honest skepticism and lack of belief in the Warren Commission with the theories of people who promote specific concepts of how things were done. This is a trick, conflating honest doubt with unsubstantiated or far-out theories, used over and over again by those promoting our second category of Kennedy assassination books.
The second category includes books that work towards showing the Warren Commission was right, at least in its major conclusions, attempting to restate old material in new words, neglecting to tell readers clearly that they have no new evidence of any great significance with which to work their glib magic. There is an equally long series of these with some of the notable ones along the way being Edward Epstein, Gerald Posner, and, very recently, Vincent Buglosi.
In general, if you go back to examine press reviews at the time of the release of each of these books, you will find a large consensus buzz in the mainstream press about how we finally have the case resolved. That very statement has been made time and time again. This was almost embarrassingly true of Gerald Posner’s book some years ago, a book that added nothing of consequence to our understanding of the crime but used aggressive new language to restate old stuff. It is now being said of Vincent Bugliosi.
People impressed by big fat books will be impressed by Vincent Bugliosi’s recent book on the Kennedy assassination, Reclaiming History, but in a sense its very size is a judgment against it. It is no great feat for an experienced court prosecutor to churn out a voluminous document. They do it all the time in their court briefs, taking pages of legalese to say what should take paragraphs of good, clear English.
It is fitting in more than one way that Bugliosi is a prosecutor, for his book is a prosecutor's brief, just a fatter one than the ones produced by Bugliosi's predecessors.
But size here serves another purpose, what I would call intimidation. How could you possibly argue with this massive pile (1,600 pages) of evidence and argument? The truth is that it is not hard at all to argue with it.
Bugliosi follows his predecessors who used pretty much the same evidence to reach the same conclusions which any independent-minded student of the assassination understands is impossible, that is, that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. Bugliosi had no new evidence of any significance with which to work. He simply looks at the same old stuff ad nauseam, coming up here and there with prosecution tricks to make old stuff seem fresh or different.
But a key fact of the assassination is that the existing evidence is not adequate to convict anyone, and certainly not Oswald. There is, of course, other evidence in existence which has never been released. The CIA and the FBI have files they have never opened.
We know this from many bits of evidence, including references in documents we do have and from situations about which we can positively conclude evidence must exist by the nature of things. A good example of the last is the CIA surveillance photos and recordings of Oswald, or someone pretending to be Oswald, in Mexico City. An obviously incorrect photo was released and the claim was made recordings were erased.
Oswald's connections with the FBI have never been satisfactorily examined. There are many circumstances suggesting his being a paid informant for the FBI, especially during his time in New Orleans. A letter Oswald wrote to a Dallas agent just before the assassination was deliberately and recklessly destroyed by order of the office's senior agent immediately after the assassination with no reasonable explanation.
Oswald had no motive for killing Kennedy, having expressed admiration for the President. Bugliosi cannot get around this fact, only pursuing the typical path of all his forerunners in attacking Oswald's character. There has been another series of books over the years, pretending to be biographies of Oswald but only serving to attack his character, giving assassination writers material to cite. These include works by writers who clearly had CIA connections: notably Priscilla Johnson, someone all students of the assassination knows was conveniently in Moscow when Oswald was there, and the late Norman Mailer, a man who could not have written his own big, fat book on the CIA without agency cooperation.
Oswald's being promptly assassinated himself by Jack Ruby, a man associated with the murky world of anti-Castro violence, someone whose past included gun-running to Cuba and enforcer-violence in the Chicago mafia, is a gigantic fact that sticks in the throat of any author. It has never been explained satisfactorily and is not by Bugliosi.
One trouble with all such books is that we have every two decades a new generation of people, most of whom do not know enough about the case to begin to argue with such an exposition. One cannot help but believe that those who prompt the periodic publication of these books have just this fact in mind. Posner is old, stale, and forgotten. This generation gets Bugliosi.
We must always remember Bertrand Russell's profound, unanswered question after he had reviewed an advanced copy of the Warren Report: "If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?" Russell's question goes to the heart of the matter, as you would expect from one of the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th century. It has never been answered, and certainly not by Bugliosi.
It must be at least somewhat embarrassing for Bugliosi that Italian authorities recently, near the release of his book, conducted a series of tests with Oswald's ridiculous choice of weapons, a 1940 Mannlicher-Carcano, one of the last rifles in the world a determined assassin would choose. Italian Army sharpshooters could not come close to Oswald's supposed feat of loading the crude bolt-action rifle and firing it three times, let alone hitting anything while doing so.
Moreover, in other tests conducted by the Italian Army using animal parts, it was shown impossible for a bullet to emerge from Kennedy virtually intact as the Warren Commission claimed "the magic bullet" did. One thinks of the lost opportunity in 1993 to discover something new when permission was refused by the widow of the dead John Connally to extract known bullet fragments from his wrist, fragments supposedly from “the magic bullet.” The evidence was buried, literally.
Of course, when we limit ourselves to three times loading and shooting for the rifle, we are already playing the Warren Commission's own game. There were in fact at least four shots as a closely-analyzed recording clearly showed. Recent analysis at Texas A&M University showed that the ballistics evidence used to rule out a second gunman later had been misinterpreted.
The Kennedy assassination and its inadequate investigation and secrecy mark an important turning point in modern American history. Elections are still held, and more groups of people can vote today than over most of the country’s not particularly democratic history, but government in the dark world of international affairs behaves often as though there were no electorate to which it is responsible. This seems a paradox, but if you think about it, you will see its truth.
You don’t have to be an obsessive, conspiracy-minded person to be concerned about the state of affairs in America. Have Americans been told the truth about the CIA’s great failures leading up to 9/11? Have they been told about the abuse of the CIA leading up to the Iraqi invasion, including what really happened in the Plame affair? Have Americans been told the truth about 9/11 itself, including the virtual certainty that the fourth flight over Pennsylvania was shot down by the military? Have Americans been told the simple truth about the invasion of Iraq? Have all the lies that were told, including rubbish about terror and weapons of mass destruction, been corrected? Have they learned how many Iraqis their government has killed and crippled?
No, not at all, not any more than they have been told who killed Kennedy and why.
So how is this great democracy different in the dark business of international affairs compared to the autocrats with whom it so often allies itself? Not at all.
freelance sniper