Conspiracies Oh Yes!
WASHINGTON, Oct 2 The Central Intelligence Agency is getting a very bad press in dispatches from Vietnam to American newspapers and in articles originating in Washington. Like the Supreme Court when under fire, the CIA cannot defend itself in public retorts to criticisms of its activities as they occur. But, unlike the Supreme Court, the CIA has no open record of its activities on which the public can base a judgment of the validity of the criticisms. Also, the agency is precluded from using the indirect defensive tactic which is constantly employed by all other Government units under critical fire.
This tactic is to give information to the press, under a seal of confidence, that challenges or rebuts the critics. But the CIA cannot father such inspired articles, because to do so would require some disclosure of its activities. And not only does the effectiveness of the agency depend on the secrecy of its operations. Every President since the C. I. A. was created has protected this secrecy from claimants Congress or the public through the press, for examples of the right to share any part of it.
With High Frequency
This Presidential policy has not, however, always restrained other executive units from going confidentially to the press with attacks on CIA operations in their common field of responsibility. And usually it has been possible to deduce these operational details from the nature of the attacks. But the peak of the practice has recently been reached in Vietnam and in Washington. This is revealed almost every day now in dispatches from reporters in close touch with intra-Administration critics of the CIA ñ with excellent reputations for reliability.
One reporter in this category is Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard newspapers. Today, under a Saigon dateline, he related that, "according to a high United States source here, twice the CIA flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Herny Cabot Lodge [and] in one instance frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought from Washington because the agency disagreed with it."
Among the views attributed to United States officials on the scene, including one described as a "very high American official who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy" are the following:
The New York Times, October 3, 1963
"The Intra-Administration War in Vietnam"
by Arthur Krock
August 27 2018
E. Howard Hunt named the following conspirators
Chain Of Command
- Cord Meyer, -- (by implication: Allen Dulles)
- William Harvey (by implication James Angleton)
by implication - Guy Banister?
- David Morales
- French Gunman Grassy Knoll
Also mentioned
David Phillips, Frank Sturgis, Antonio Veciana, , and an assassin he termed "French gunman grassy knoll" who many presume was Lucien Sarti.[3][69]
Eugene Dinkin reported
https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/eugene-dinkin-the-saga-of-an-unsung-hero
conspiracy inc;uded French/Corsican assassin, Jean Souetre, Guy Banister, and William Harvey
My interpretation: William Harvey is in both lists, he was a protege of Angleton. Harvey became head of CIA's anticastro operation cutting out x and directly running traficante
Frank Sturgis Assawsinated of Portuguese PM in 1980
Bill Harvey involved in Italian Gladio which ended up assasinating Italian PM
Guy Banister - "Guy [Banister] participated in every anti-Communist South and Central American revolution that came along, acting as a key liaison man for the U.S. government-sponsored anti-Communist activities in Latin America."[2]
He must
These are some hardcore people
2021 - Add to the E. Howard Hunt file
Later writing[edit]
In 1978, Marchetti published an article about the JFK assassination in the far-right newspaper of the antisemitic[16] Liberty Lobby, The Spotlight. Marchetti, a proponent of the organized crime and the CIA conspiracy theory, claimed that the House Select Committee on Assassinations revealed a CIA memo from 1966 that named E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming in the JFK assassination. Marchetti also claimed that Marita Lorenz offered sworn testimony to confirm this. The HSCA reported that it had not received such a memo and rejected theories that Hunt was involved in a plot to kill Kennedy.[17]
I know who was behind Bobby Kennedy's murder, by his actor friend Robert Vaughn
Last updated at 10:57 AM on 12th January 2009
The CIA's growth was "LIKENED TO A MALIGNANCY" which the very high offical was not sure even the White House could control "ANY LONGER." "If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government, it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon". The Agency "represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone".
Disorderly Government
Whatever else these passages disclose, They most certainly establish that representatives of other excutive branches have expanded their war against the CIA from the inner government councils to the American people via the press. And published simultaneously are details of the agency's operations in Vietnam that can come only from the same critical official sources. This is disorderly government. And the longer the President tolerates it the period already is considerable the greater will grow its potential of hampering the real war against the Vietcong and the impression of a very indecisive Administration in Washington.
The CIA may be guilty as charged. Since it cannot, or at any rate will not, openly defend its record in Vietnam, or defend it by the same confidential press "briefings" employed by its critics, the public is not in a position to judge. Nor is this department, which sought and failed to get even the outlines of the agency's case in rebuttal. But Mr. Kennedy will have to make judgment if the spectacle of war within the Executive branch is to be ended and the effective functioning of the CIA. preserved. And when he makes this judgment, hopefully he also will make it public, as the appraisal of fault on which it is based.
Doubtless recommendations as to what his judgment should be were made to him today by Secretary of Defense McNamara and General Taylor on their return from their fact-finding expedition into the embattled official jungle in Saigon.
When Bobby Kennedy's death was announced that day in June 1968, I cried myself to sleep. It was months before I was able to function normally again.
I had deeply admired Bobby since I was first introduced to him in 1960. Ironically, we met at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where, eight years later, he would be assassinated.
We ran into each other again at the University of Southern California in 1965, when I was concluding work on my PhD in communications and my show, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., was at the height of its popularity.
I was asked if I would host Bobby and his wife Ethel when they visited the campus for a speech.
After that, I stayed many times at Hickory Hill, the family's estate in Virginia, with Bobby, Ethel and their children, all big U.N.C.L.E. fans.
https://popularresistance.org/two-u-s-soldiers-overheard-jfk-assassination-plans/
I stumbled upon this, will check if more was revealed in the 2018 dump
This site looks like it may need some fact checking but i presume it is accurate
Here is a site I am familiar with discussing the archive released April 26 2018 and the next release will not be till 2021 - so this is it for the time being
https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/07/26/analyzing-the-new-jfk-revelations/
The link above I do not repeat - but there is a link between the two articles a right wing french assassin Jean Souetre
From above article about the listening posts
Introducing Eugene V. Dinkin. Two documents were released about this man in November which caught my attention, and one more appeared in the 2018 release.
Frankly, as an academic who wrote two books on JFK, I never heard of him.
Since it took 54 years to lift the veil of censorship on this account, perhaps Eugene should not be ignored any more than he already has.
Private First Class Eugene Dinkin worked in Metz, France. He was a cryptographic code operator for the U.S. Army and in early November, 1963, three weeks before the assassination, he discovered something sobering, a plot to assassinate the President of the United States. He intercepted—or decoded— two messages, and the names he relayed all make a lot of sense today, a French/Corsican assassin, Jean Souetre, Guy Banister, and William Harvey.
That was in 1963, but in 2007, former CIA majordomo, Howard Hunt, made a deathbed confession about the assassination to his son and mentioned two of those suspects. His son, quite unaware of Eugene Dinkin, scrambled to take notes and videotape his father. Hunt’s revelation can been on Youtube today
From below article:
One is the terrorist Jean Souetre. Souetre was active in the Secret Army Organization(OAS), a cabal of dissident French Army officers dedicated to killing and/or overthrowing French President Charles de Gaulle, whom they blamed for “losing Algeria.”
The accused: Tycoon Aristotle Onassis and glamorous friends at a party in Paris in 1974
For years, I had been actively involved in the civil rights movement and Democratic politics, speaking out against American involvement in the Vietnam War and trying to persuade Bobby to stand against Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Indeed, a short time before Bobby announced that he would run for the Democratic nomination in 1968, he even suggested I try for a Senate seat. I was flattered.
'When you're sitting in the Oval Office having stopped the war, we'll talk again,' I said. He smiled and replied: 'We'll see.' I never saw him privately again.
Like the murder of his brother John almost five years earlier, Bobby's shooting was a watershed for America. Most people believe a lone assassin - a Palestinian refugee Sirhan Bashara Sirhan - was responsible for his death.
I shared that assumption until my continued involvement in political debate brought the real questions about Bobby's killing to my attention.
After studying documents, talking to experts and interviewing a crucial witness, I believe there is strong evidence that Bobby's killing was carried out by more than one gunman. And, more shockingly, that the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis paid for the assassination.
This is not to say there is no evidence linking Sirhan to the crime. He was seen by many people at the Ambassador Hotel firing his .22 pistol at Kennedy as the Senator walked through the kitchen on a shortcut between meetings.
Sirhan was arrested, charged and convicted of the crime. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair. But California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and today, 40 years on, Sirhan is still serving a life sentence.
So was Bobby Kennedy's shooting a non-controversial, open-and-shut case with a single, obvious suspect? Here's a summary of the facts.
Firstly, Sirhan was apparently not in the right place to fire the bullets that killed Kennedy. The autopsy shows Kennedy was shot from behind, from below, from the right and with a gun positioned no more than three inches from his head.
Yet all the eyewitnesses said they saw Sirhan between one-and-a-half and five feet in front of Kennedy - a completely different location to the one he would have needed to be in to fire the fatal shots. This information was withheld until after Sirhan's lawyers conceded his guilt.
Using the US Freedom of Information Act, Bernard Fensterwald, a Washington lawyer, obtained an FBI report on the shooting in 1976. It indicated that at least 12 bullets were fired in the hotel kitchen that evening.
Two were recovered from Bobby's body and five from the bodies of wounded bystanders. Two more passed through Kennedy's body, while three were found lodged in ceiling panels.
Meeting of minds: Robert Vaughn, left, with Bobby Kennedy, right, and Norman Topping, president of the University of Southern California, in 1965
Yet the Sirhan theory relies on the notion that his gun, which held a maximum of eight bullets, was the only one fired. It just doesn't add up.
What's more, criminologist William Harper swore in an affidavit that the bullets that killed Kennedy could not have been fired by Sirhan's pistol because the ballistic characteristics did not match.
Finally, there are reasons to believe the Los Angeles police obstructed or neglected aspects of the case.
For example, although an armed security guard stated he was standing behind Kennedy at the time of the shooting - the location from which the fatal shots must have come - and even admitted dropping down and pulling his gun when the shooting began, his weapon was never checked to see if he might have fired any of the bullets that killed Kennedy, whether deliberately or accidentally.
New evidence has recently come to light. Dr Robert Joling, a past president of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists, and sound expert Philip Van Praag concluded that, based on exhaustive analysis of audio tapes from that fateful night, at least 12 shots were fired using at least two guns.
What about the mental state of Sirhan? Is it possible he could have been programmed to take the fall for Bobby's murder?
This may sound implausible, but Dr Herbert Spiegel, a New York psychiatrist who teaches at Columbia University and is considered an expert on hypnosis, supports this theory. He believes Sirhan was probably acting in response to hypnotic directives when he fired at Kennedy.
Sirhan appeared badly disorientated after his arrest, and when he was given a psychiatric examination before his trial, he was found to be susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, even climbing the bars of his cell like a monkey upon command.
In all probability, Dr Spiegel suggests, Sirhan was still in a state of hypnotically induced amnesia.
These questions continue to attract interest from a few intrepid researchers. Was there a second or even a third gunman? If so, who was it? Could the security guard behind Kennedy who admitted pulling his gun have had something to do with the killing? And, assuming that more than one gunman was involved, who was the mastermind behind the plot?
Even those most eager to blame the crime on Sirhan do not pretend he had the intellect, resources or the organisational ability to pull together an assassination conspiracy.
Investigative journalist Peter Evans suggested in his 2004 book Nemesis that Onassis was responsible in part for Kennedy's murder.
According to Evans, Onassis and Bobby first crossed paths in 1953, when Bobby became assistant counsel to Roy Cohn, the chief investigator working for Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade.
Could "FRENCH GUNMEN ON GRASSY KNOLL" - attested said by Howard Hunt have been Jean Souetre?
Allegations of involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy[edit]
After the death of former CIA agent and Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt in 2007, Saint John Hunt and David Hunt revealed that their father had recorded several claims about himself and others being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.[7][8] In the April 5, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, Saint John Hunt detailed a number of individuals implicated by his father including Harvey, as well as Lyndon B. Johnson, Cord Meyer, David Sánchez Morales, David Atlee Phillips, Frank Sturgis, and an assassin he termed "French gunman grassy knoll", who many presume was Lucien Sarti.[8][9] The two sons alleged that their father excised the information from his memoirs, "American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond", to avoid possible perjury charges.[7] Hunt's widow and other children told the Los Angeles Times that the two sons took advantage of Hunt's loss of lucidity by coaching and exploiting him for financial gain. The newspaper said it examined the materials offered by the sons to support the story and found them to be "inconclusive."[7]
An April 2018 release of federal documents related to the assassination included a file concerning one Private First Class Eugene Dinkin, a cryptographic code operator stationed in Metz, France in November 1963. Three weeks before the assassination, he intercepted and decoded two messages concerning an upcoming assassination of the US President. The messages contained three names connected to the assassination conspiracy: William Harvey, Jean Souetre, and Guy Banister.[10] Harvey was then stationed in Rome, Italy. Long-time CIA operative Gerry Patrick Hemming, through his association with Cuban exile groups, was privy to rumors of a super-secret assassination team based in the Florida Keys under ultimate direction from William Harvey. Jean Souetre was a French paramilitary operative with the French security service SDECE, who traveled to Washington DC to meet with James Jesus Angleton, officially for co-ordinating counterintelligence operations, and ended up in Dallas on November 22nd. Banister was a CIA contract operative based in New Orleans, mainly concerned with surveillance but also speculated to be a bag man for covert operations. Dinkin's efforts to relay his information outside of his chain of command led to his arrest and confinement at the Walter Reed Army Hospital through the first half of 1964. He was not consulted by the Warren Commission.
WILLIAM HARVEY, CIA Agent id'd by Hunt as well as US listening station intercept
From Wikipedia on William Harvey which lends credence to the above and likely is tightly moderated:
Riddles remain over the murder of Bobby Kennedy, pictured a moment after he was shot
One of Bobby's assignments was to study what McCarthy called the 'blood trade' between certain American allies and Red China, whose soldiers were fighting US troops in Korea.
Bobby found that more than 300 New York Greek shipping families were trading regularly with China. None of Onassis's vessels was involved, but he was afraid anyone prying into his business would discover he was secretly negotiating with Saudi Arabia to supply tankers to transport oil under the Saudi flag.
Onassis's fears were realised in October 1953 when sealed indictments were handed down to seize any ships owned by Onassis that came into an American port. He blamed Bobby for his predicament.
Despite - or perhaps because of - his resentment of Bobby, Onassis gradually became socially and romantically entangled with the Kennedy family.
He met then-Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie in 1956 when he invited them aboard his yacht, the Christina. Shortly after JFK became President, Onassis began an affair with Lee Bouvier Radziwill, Jackie's sister.
But Onassis wasn't satisfied with Lee - he wanted Jackie herself. He took advantage of the First Lady's vulnerability in August 1963, shortly after the devastating death of her two-day-old son, Patrick. Jackie accepted his invitation to stay on the Christina while she recuperated.
For Bobby, the way Onassis thrust himself into the Kennedys' personal drama heightened the hostility between them. Onassis, of course, went on to marry Jackie in October 1968, five years after JFK's death.
According to Evans, the notion of killing a Kennedy did not take shape in Onassis's mind until early 1968 when he met Mahmoud Hamshari, a follower of Yasser Arafat and a fanatical anti-American and anti-Israeli activist.
Enraged by US support for Israel during the Six Day War in 1967, Hamshari suggested killing 'a high-profile American on American soil' would make the US government 'think twice about backing the Jews'.
When Hamshari had an opportunity to meet Onassis, he used it to shake down the Greek magnate for money to carry out the plot.
Evans provides extensive detail about the dealings between Onassis and Hamshari. He describes the apparent involvement in the conspiracy of Dr William Bryan, an expert in hypnosis based in Los Angeles.
He quotes a defence witness from the trial of Sirhan describing the accused killer as being 'out of control of his consciousness and his own actions [and] subject to bizarre disassociated trances in some of which he programmed himself to be the instrument of assassination'.
And he describes pages from Sirhan's notebook, once in the possession of Christina Onassis, that seem to implicate Onassis not just in Bobby's killing but also in two other business-related murders.
ANALYZING THE NEW JFK REVELATIONS
Review of New CIA and FBI Documents That Change Cold War History
Jackie Kennedy with Onassis after their 1968 wedding. His intrusion into the Kennedys' lives was deeply resented by Bobby
Then there is Hélène Gaillet, one of the players in Evans's story, whom I have interviewed myself. On an autumn afternoon in 2007, I met Helene at her apartment on New York's Upper West Side.
Statuesque and elegant, Hélène had worked as a photographer for The New York Times and New York magazine.
Hélène met Onassis for the first time at the Coach House restaurant in New York in the early Seventies. As the dinner came to a close, he raised the palms of her hands to his lips and said: 'The next time you are in Paris and need a place to stay, call me.'
In 1973, she was due to cover the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in Zaire. But when it was postponed for a month, she found herself in Paris with time on her hands.
Hélène remembered Onassis's invitation and called him. Fifteen minutes later, he invited her to his estate on the Greek island of Skorpios.
Onassis's daughter Christina was there. She was worried about her father's welfare and made Hélène promise not to take any pictures of him. Onassis was dealing with some difficult business issues, Christina said, and she was worried that any unflattering pictures would make him more vulnerable to his enemies.
During her visit to Skorpios, Hélène stayed on Onassis's yacht while he remained at his estate. One day, they went skinny-dipping and he came on to her. Helene reciprocated enthusiastically. It was the first and last time that happened between them.
A few days later, Hélène dined with Onassis at his beach house. They talked about many things, including religion. Hélène had been raised a Catholic and Ari questioned her closely, saying he was fascinated by confession and absolution.
In the course of the conversation, she asked Ari whether he agreed with Hemingway's famous remark about the difference between rich people and the rest of us - 'They have more money'.
With a laugh, Onassis replied: 'The rich get laid more, I know that ... Even that little runt Bobby Kennedy got laid more.'
More disturbingly, Onassis went on to speak freely about Bobby. According to Hélène, Onassis's hatred for him was still vivid and intense.
In the small hours, Onassis walked Helene to the beach from where a launch would take her back to the Christina. They stood together, gazing out to sea, for a long time.
After a while, Hélène realised Onassis was talking to himself, in low, murmuring tones, like someone deep in prayer.
Finally, as she strained to hear what he was saying, he turned to her and, clearly and simply, said: 'You know, Hélène, I put up the money for Bobby Kennedy's murder.'
I spent almost two hours with Hélène at her apartment. I was most impressed with her ability to place herself in the time and emotions of some of the world's most powerful and famous people and her conversations with them.
Not once did I feel that Hélène, now in her 70s, was anything but honest. I'm convinced her story is a faithful rendition of what happened to her.
Does Hélène's story settle forever the question of who killed Bobby Kennedy? Not in a legal sense and perhaps not even in a moral sense. But along with the other evidence, it makes abundantly clear that one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century remains unresolved by the official verdict, even to this day.
• A Fortunate Life, by Robert Vaughn, is published by JR Books priced £18.99. To order your copy for £17.10 inc p&p, call the Review Bookstore on 0845 155 0713.
Find this story at www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1111444/I-know-Bobby-Kennedys-murder-actor-friend-Robert-Vaughn.html
Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd
Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group
It’s important to focus on the CIA — while the other agencies involved in the war on Cuba during JFK’s administration need similar scrutiny. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Tullio Saba / Flickr and CIA / Wikimedia.
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Bill Simpich is a civil rights attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is on the board of directors of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an organization focused on the study of documents related to the 1960s assassinations, Watergate, and Iran-Contra.
In the following essay, he offers a look at some of the gems found in the new JFK document releases and how to speed up the discovery of future finds.
More than 50 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, thousands of government documents related to his death are still under classified lock and key.
By law, all of the remaining secret documents were supposed to have been released last year. President Donald Trump approved the release of approximately 35,000 files in 2017. But he delayed the publication of many other documents in full or in part until 2021 — when the winner of the 2020 presidential election will have another chance to review them for possible declassification.
Researchers have been digging through the released documents in search of a “smoking gun” file which neatly explains to skeptics what really happened that dark day in Dallas. While it’s possible such a document exists, it’s unlikely.
The difficult job of understanding why a president was murdered, and unpacking the Cold War path that America was treading, involves working through the minutiae — the “boring” material — so that the little puzzle pieces can fit together to form a coherent bigger picture.
One year ago this week, the National Archives and Records Administration released the first of what were to be seven batches of newly declassified documents. Some of those documents had actually been released in past decades, albeit with extensive redactions. Others had never been seen before.
Analysis of the newly available documents, including those released in the 1990s — most of which still remain undigitized — are already shedding light on the murky background of President Kennedy’s murder.
Among other things, the findings offer a golden opportunity to unpack more of the hidden history of the Cold War, revise our assumptions about that fraught era, and — finally — get the story right.
There will be no new document releases until 2021. That gives us three years to digest what we already have, and to create some stronger tools for analysis.
But the work of researchers and interested citizens is already paying off.
Intriguing Revelations From the New Documents
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Take the ongoing research on cryptonyms, or crypts — government codewords for people, places, and things that the intelligence community meant to keep hidden.
As someone who has spent a lot of time solving CIA cryptonyms for the Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF) website, one of the premier online digital archives of JFK documents, let me say a brief word on why decoding the cryptonyms is important. When you know the names of the CIA programs, officers, and agents whose names are hidden, a whole new way of seeing the world opens up to you.
Cryptonyms usually begin with a two-letter prefix that identifies the country of origin (e.g., “AM” for Cuba or “LI” for Mexico), and then the remainder of the word reveals the program (e.g., AMCANOE refers to a project to unify exiles, many of whom had traveled by water from Cuba into the US).
It becomes particularly important when you see memos like this, saying that “we cannot give wholesale approval for their release [cryptonyms], but if the crypts have been previously blown or exposed they can be released.”
The JFK case is a jigsaw puzzle the size of a football field. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Jolene Faber / Flickr (CC BY 2.0) and ARCHIVES.GOV.
Many new crypts have been revealed in the new release. Just two of the recent examples:
LIOSAGE — a cryptonym long known to refer to an ally of Mexico City CIA station chief Win Scott — is now exposed as the handle for Carl Migdail, a journalist with the conservative US News & World Report and a contact of CIA propaganda specialist David Phillips. Migdail now joins a group of mainstream Miami journalists who were prized CIA assets: Al Burt (AMCARBON-1), Don Bohning (AMCARBON-3) and key CIA ally and source Hal Hendrix, almost certainly QDELF.
ZRJEWEL was a paramilitary program in 1961 that included Rip Robertson, Grayston Lynch, and Lucien Conein. The confluence of these three men is important. Robertson and Lynch were the two Americans who led the Cuban troops at the Bay of Pigs. They entered this commando program that landed Cuban exiles back into Cuba after the Bay of Pigs was over.
Lucien Conein, part of the same program, assisted the overthrow of the Diem brothers in early November 1963 in South Vietnam — which resulted in their assassination. Robertson was a close friend of David Morales, CIA’s chief of operations at its “forward base for Cuba” in Miami. Morales made provocative statements about his role in killing JFK before several articulate and credible witnesses interviewed by government investigator Gaeton Fonzi.
As for Lynch, he never forgave the Kennedy brothers for what he considered their “betrayal” at the Bay of Pigs.
Among the discoveries that emerge when we piece together clues from decoded cryptonyms: the CIA station in Mexico City falsified a wiretap transcript and gave it to the unwitting US ambassador in an effort to get Mexico to break off diplomatic relations with Cuba. This is doubly important because it suggests that the wiretap of a phone call from Lee Harvey Oswald — the alleged killer of JFK — at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City may also have been falsified. This would cast doubt on Oswald’s purported trip to Mexico in the months before Kennedy’s assassination — a trip often cited as proving that Oswald was in touch with Soviet Russian agents in Mexico. (See below)
Apart from cryptonyms, new information has been obtained about a number of shadowy figures. One is the terrorist Jean Souetre. Souetre was active in the Secret Army Organization(OAS), a cabal of dissident French Army officers dedicated to killing and/or overthrowing French President Charles de Gaulle, whom they blamed for “losing Algeria.” (A similar concern about “losing Vietnam” pervaded American military and intelligence circles in the late 1960s and early 70s.)
For decades, researchers have investigated Souetre’s apparent presence in Dallas, on November 22, 1963, and his expulsion from the US immediately after the JFK assassination. The new FBI and CIA documents reveal more about intelligence efforts to locate Souetre in the US in the months before the assassination. What remains unclear is why he was expelled from the US, rather than arrested.
A particularly amusing or intriguing one (depending on your perspective) is the organization TZFRESH — probably Brazilian intelligence — which was asked by the CIA to photograph the JFK researchers and Cuban counterintelligence officers that met together in August, 1995 in Rio de Janeiro pursuant to an invitation by the Ministry of Culture.
The new releases can be combed to find not only new cryptonyms, but new pseudonyms — fake names used in Agency documents to disguise the identities of important CIA operatives. While we have made great progress in solving the cryptonyms, we still have a long way to go with the pseudonyms. (See many of the resolved pseudonyms at the Assassinations Archives Research Center (AARC) website.)
One problem with the new batch of releases is that the government has re-redacted documents that had already been released! These new (different) redactions make it more difficult for a researcher to deduce what has already been released to the public. On the positive side, all redactions — old or new — do offer a little unintended transparency about what the government is trying to hide.
Oswald in Mexico City — Or Not
.
One of the most curious episodes in the JFK case supposedly occurred two months before Kennedy’s assassination, when Lee Oswald is said to have visited the Soviet and Cuban consulates in Mexico City in an attempt to obtain visas to visit both nations. A November 23, 1963, document recounts the president of Mexico (LITENSOR — Adolfo Lopez Mateos) telling the Mexico City station chief Win Scott that their Mexico/US “joint operation” has found proof that Lee Oswald called the Soviet embassy on September 28, 1963. The newly released document has a redaction in the body of the memo — while an earlier version of the same document has none!
Many of the new documents just fill in a couple blanks to useful documents that we already had.
Paragraph 3, above, states that the wiretap “transcript” of Paragraph 1.b. was given to LITEMPO-2, a high-ranking Mexican official. Review of 1.b, 1.c, and 1.d reveals that this “transcript” and other documents were not authentic. Photo credit: National Archives
The above image illustrates why many researchers wonder if the wiretap transcripts referring to Oswald in Mexico City in 1963 are authentic. After all, why is the president of Mexico telling the CIA’s Win Scott about Oswald’s supposed call to the Soviet embassy on September 28? Shouldn’t the CIA have already known about it?
The Soviets have no record of this call, as their embassy was closed for business that day and the wiretaps depict Soviet calls of a personal nature. The call supposedly originated from Oswald at the Cuban consulate — but the Cubans deny that their consulate was open that day, or that Oswald visited that day. (Oswald may have been impersonated on the telephone on September 28 — see the discussion in the preface to my online book State Secret).
You have to wonder after reviewing a 1962 document showing that Mexico City Chief of Station Win Scott created a fake wiretap transcript and sent it to LITEMPO-2, also known as Gustavo Diaz Ordaz and the president of Mexico from 1964 to 1970.
Not only did Scott create a fake wiretap transcript and other fake documents described in this memo, but he made sure that the US ambassador to Mexico got a look at them, and then bragged that “the ambassador was allowed to believe that all of the above material is authentic.” (Underlined in the original). For good measure, Scott added that “the Ambassador hopes that this material … will be helpful in convincing Mexico that they should break relations with Cuba.”
Documents Need To Be Accessible and Searchable
.
The biggest problem is to digest and analyze the documents that we now have. The MFF (Mary Ferrell Foundation) site has the documents that are the easiest to access — but only 20–30 percent of the JFK files are uploaded to the site, and not all of them are searchable.
Many of the important facts residing in the MFF database are subtle and have to be teased out. When located, these hidden treasures need thoughtful care to integrate and organize. Suppose, for example, you wanted to research the activities of the US ultra-right. Here is what you might find on your line if you went fishing on your own — a convoluted cluster of facts strung together on a long string that ties in eventually with the Kennedy assassination.
But try to follow all this:
Documents released in the 1990s reveal that Marcos Diaz Lanz was AMOT-6 (one of the leading members of a group trained by David Morales to be a new Cuban intelligence service once Castro had been ousted), Marcos Diaz Lanz used the alias Pedro Garcia, was active with the Minutemen under the alias “Pedro Garcia”, and threatened to engage in armed insurrection with the Minutemen when President Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ).
These facts don’t seem that significant until you consider that Pedro Diaz Lanz was the former chief of the Cuban Air Force … and was smuggled out of Cuba by the CIA’s aforementioned chief of operations in Miami, David Morales.
As stated earlier, Morales has been quoted by several in his intimate circle as admitting a role in the Kennedy assassination.
Another document shows that Morales’s frequent partner Tony Sforza was the case officer for Marcos Diaz Lanz/AMOT-6.
Other documents expand the story of KMFORGET — revealed by the New York Times in 1977 as a program where “stories planted by the agency in one country would be clipped and mailed to media in other countries, and ‘such efforts enhanced the likelihood that the stories would be seen by an American correspondent and transmitted home.’” (Also see Jim DiEugenio & Lisa Pease, The Assassinations, p. 301.)
Releases from the 90s show that this “gray propaganda” technique was employed to get around a government ban on using published material by US government agencies created for foreign audiences and aiming them at American audiences. The ban was in place from the 1970s till July 2013. Gray propaganda is seen in situations when “the source may or may not be correctly identified, and the accuracy of information is uncertain.” (Garth S. Jowett & Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, (Sage Publications, 2006))
The National Archives are missing JFK records from military intelligence, NSA, and the Secret Service. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from National Archives / Wikimedia) and Justin Grimes / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
There are dozens of interviews with high intelligence officials within the 70–80 percent of the National Archives documents not yet available on MFF. MFF’s limited budget resources make it impossible to upload these documents at this time without outside assistance.
The Dallas FBI file for the JFK assassination is a crucial source of information for the immediate hours and days after 12:30 PM on 11/22/63.
The “Numbered Files” of the House Select Committee on Assassinations contain dozens of depositions of key CIA and FBI officials and other important discoveries. This is just some of the low-hanging fruit.
If we scan the relevant documents in the National Archives and elsewhere, we will have a far more powerful database. There are other key databases at the Harold Weisberg Archive site, the National Security Archives, MuckRock, WhoWhatWhy’s JFK project, the Assassinations Archives Research Center, the presidential libraries, and elsewhere, but the importance of scanning new documents and increasing the ability to scan cannot be overemphasized.
Some Powerful Ways to Step Up the Pace of Discovery
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It is critical for all researchers and authors to support this effort by setting up websites, coming together in small groups whenever possible, scanning their work, and placing their research and archives online. Many of our best researchers will “age out” in the next 10–20 years — their discoveries should not be lost. Previous discoveries that need to be unearthed can be found at the archives of Penn Jones, John Armstrong, and other researchers, located at the Poage Legislative Library and full-text searchable. Although Poage is not accepting new archives at the present time, there are a myriad of ways to get it done. Holding on to this material for proprietary reasons is a bad idea and holds the work back.
Legal action will probably be required to obtain hundreds of thousands of relevant NSA, Secret Service, and military intelligence files that were never submitted to the Archives as mandated by the JFK Act. Document review shows that the number of these records provided to the National Archives are miniscule when compared to the CIA and FBI submissions. Former intelligence officer John Newman refers to what needs to be done as “Research – Analyze – Review – Repeat … just like the intelligence agencies do it.”
Researcher Bill Kelly suggests that the JFK research community is a citizen-based counterintelligence operation, responding to the work of the intelligence operations.
When we strengthen our analysis of the new and recent JFK revelations, we come together as a vital force ready to take on our nation’s history and the challenges of the modern era.
Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Bill Simpich (JFKFacts.org)and National Archives (Mbell1975 / Wikimedia – CC BY-SA 3.0).
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