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Kennedy, conspiracy in Hamburg
BY GABRIEL MOLINA
ONE
of the collateral objectives of the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy was that of liquidating
the Cuban Revolution.
But
this aim was not achieved and that is the secret
reason that 45 years afterwards, the conspiracy
continues. The latest machination has rebounded from
Germany: “Hamburg, Jan 3 (DPA).—A TV documentary
from the German public TV ARD has charged the Cuban
Secret Service with the assassination of the U.S.
president, John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
Wilfried Huismann, the documentary’s director, is
the current instrument to affirm, according to the
German agency: “It was Castro’s revenge for the CIA
attempt to assassinate him with a poisoned pen.”
It
is not an accusation to be underestimated. The
shocking assassination had such an impact on the
world that even today, when it is evoked, somebody
will remember where they were at the time.
For
my part, on November 22, 1963, I was in the
picturesque La Percherie restaurant in the port of
Algiers, anticipating the house’s excellent snails
with Helen Klein, the U.S. press chief of President
Ahmed Ben Bella. We suddenly received the terrible
news.
“President Kennedy has been assassinated!” Now they
are going to blame Cuba,” I immediately said to her.
“Don’t exaggerate,” she answered.
We
quickly went to the Prensa Latina agency on 26, Rue
Claude Debussy, where I was working as a
correspondent, for more information. There I learned
how the radio stations were repeating that the Cuban
government was responsible for the assassination.
Surprised, Helen asked me how I had guessed it.
“I’m
not a fortune teller,” I explained, “But for the
United States Cuba is the cause of all evil. A
little bit of it because of hysteria and another
little but because they are looking for a pretext to
try and crush us.”
THE
VERSION CAME FROM THE CIA
However, a few hours later, the accusation vanished
into the air with the same speed that it had
entered. At that point everything was shrouded in
mystery.
Fifteen years later, in Washington, the same charge
was floating in the air for the umpteenth time. The
Special Committee investigating the assassinations
of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin
Luther King, was handling many theories on the
assassination of the president of the United States.
Once again the attempt to raise suspicions as to the
Cuban government’s involvement was being floated in
the media.
A
Washington journalist with close links to the FBI,
revealed to me in confidence that the version
originally came from the CIA, which distributed a
note stating that Oswald had committed the murder on
behalf of the Cuban government. He added that the
FBI forced the media to withdraw the accusation.
When
I asked the veteran journalist why the FBI had taken
the trouble to de-authorize the CIA, he explained
that they considered the initiative an
irresponsibility that could have unleashed
incalculable consequences, such as a third world
war.
The
first significant investigation into the
assassination was undertaken by the Warren
Commission, which considered that theory and
discounted it by stating that there was no such
conspiracy.
However, starting in 1967, the Drew Pearson and Jack
Anderson column once again raised identical
accusations. The media lifted the tone by pointing
to Cuba every time new evidence involving the
establishment arose that Oswald did not act alone.
It should be noted that during his career Anderson
had at least been very close to the CIA. There was
so much evidence that in 1976, Congress decided to
createthe abovementioned Special Committee, headed
by African-American Congressman Louis F. Stokes.
After nearly two years of arduous investigations the
Stokes Committee arrived at interesting conclusions.
Among its findings Appendix C, Paragraph 2 states
that on the basis of the available evidence the
Cuban government was not involved in the
assassination of President Kennedy.
After enquiries in the United States and in Cuba as
to the motives for the assassination, President
Kennedy’s intention to normalize relations with Cuba
emerged, in addition to other no less significant
reasons within internal politics.
IMMORAL COLLUSION WITH THE MAFIA
The
Special Committee reached the conclusion that Carlo
Marcello, the capo of New Orleans and part of Texas;
Santo Trafficante of Florida; and James Hoffa,
president of the truck drivers’ trade union, had the
motives, means and opportunity to assassinate
President Kennedy.
Trafficante was a vital target in the Kennedy
administration’s battle against organized crime. His
name was among the 10 principal subjects to
investigate and combat.
When
Robert Kennedy found out about the CIA’s immoral
collusion with the Mafia, he prohibited the
officials involved from having recourse to such
associations without informing him. But they
continued doing so under the direction of Richard
Helms.
The
Committee report stated that Trafficante’s position
in organized crime and drug trafficking and his role
as the principal mafia link with criminal figures
within the exile Cuban community, all furnished him
with the capacity of organizing a conspiracy to
assassinate President Kennedy, as he did previously
in the case of Fidel Castro.
The
Committee established that there was a possible
connection between Trafficante and Jack Ruby,
particularly in Havana in 1959, when Ruby was in
fact acting as a courier in the interests of the
Cosa Nostra for transferring funds from the Cuban
capital to Miami. Cuba supplied the evidence of
that.
However, the Committee was unable to find any direct
evidence as to Trafficante’s or Marcello’s
involvement in the assassination of the president.
New Orleans, the imperial capital of the latter, had
turned into a significant scenario of the terrorist
conspiracies. Characters of the ilk of Orlando
Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, the Guillermo brothers
and Ignacio Novo Sampoll, Eladio del Valle, Jorge
Mas Canosa, Hermino Díaz and others used to go
there. Oswald developed his deceiving pro-Cuban
activities in the same building in which they met.
The
Special Committee also confirmed the theory that
these terrorists of Cuban origin conspired as
individuals for the commission of the crime. The
same men who plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro did
so to assassinate Kennedy. Shortly before being
killed, John Roselli told columnist Jack Anderson
that Cubans in Trafficante’s gang had taken part in
the assassination.
The
report concedes that the anti-Castroites were
frustrated, embittered and angry and that their
resentments were focused on Kennedy who, just before
his death, had directed William Atwood to discuss
the possibility of normalizing relations with Cuban
representatives. The Cuban delegate to those talks
was Carlos Lechuga, at that time UN ambassador.
McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s security adviser, stated
that the president wanted a report on the progress
of the talks for when he returned from Dallas. Even
after the death of his brother, Robert Kennedy also
tried to suppress the anti-Cuba measures, but the
new president, Lyndon Johnson, prevented it.
The
Stokes Committee confirmed that Oswald’s contacts in
the United States were counterrevolutionaries of
Cuban origin and opted to openly look into these
aspects, which had not been investigated by the CIA,
closely involved with the Cuban-Americans. It
decided to rigorously examine the groups that, apart
from the motivation, had the capacity and the
resources to be mixed up in the assassination.
There were many terrorist organizations in the
period between the triumph of the Cuban Revolution
and the assassination of Kennedy. But it was
determined that there could have been a connection
between Oswald and two of them: Alpha 66 and the
Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE).
The
Stokes Committee heard the testimony of Marita
Lorenz, a beautiful spy recruited by Frank Sturgis,
who recounted a meeting that she attended in Miami
at the house of Orlando Bosch in which Pedro Luis
Díaz Lanz and Oswald planned a visit to Dallas. She
added that on November 15 she traveled to that city
in a two-car caravan with Bosch, Sturgis, Díaz Lanz,
Oswald, Gerry Hemmings and the Novo Sampoll
brothers. There were various guns in the hotel rooms
in which they stayed and they had a visit from Jack
Ruby, subsequently Oswald’s executioner. More
recently Lorenz stated that there Howard Hunt
(Eduardo to the Cubans) handed money over to Sturgis
on November 21 for an operation in an unstated
locale and returned to Miami two or three hours
after the assassination.
PHILLIPS, HANDLED THE DIRTY WORK
Antonio Veciano, the founder of Alpha 66, told the
Committee that in the context of his activities
against the Cuban government, he met on many
occasions with a CIA official who gave his name as
Bishop. And that in August 1963, in Dallas, Texas,
the latter made contact with him in an office
building, accompanied by a person whom he identified
after the death of Kennedy as Lee Harvey Oswald.
Later Veciana confided to writer Gaeton Fonzi that
Bishop’s real name was David Atlee Phillips who
worked for the CIA in Havana under the cover of a
businessman living in Apartment 502, 106, Humboldt
Street.
From
1960, Atlee Phillips-Bishop was the Miami chief of
propaganda for the ‘61 invasion of Cuba, together
with Howard H. Hunt, the principal organizer of
Watergate. In 1954, both of them succeeded in
bringing down the Arbenz government in Guatemala.
Cuban Security confirmed the identity of this CIA
official, who organized the Cuban-American terrorist
groups who, as late as 2003 were pressuring the Bush
government to secure the release of Posada Carriles
and his accomplices.
One
of the members of the JURE group, Silvia Odio,
testified in 1964 before the Warren Commission that
a man whom she identified via the media as the
Oswald who killed Kennedy, visited her apartment in
Dallas in September 1963 with two other men of
Latino appearance. She added that the two Spanish
speakers told her that they were members of JURE.
One
of them gave his name as Leopoldo and had a Cuban
accent. The other, Angelo, seemed to be Mexican. The
third introduced himself as León Oswald and was, for
her, Lee Harvey Oswald. Cuban Security identified
Oswald’s companions as the Novo brothers,
responsible for a long list of assassinations and
other acts of terrorism.
Silvia gave the same testimony to the FBI and added
that two days later, Leopoldo called her again and
told that, according to León, they should have
killed Kennedy after the failure of the Bay of Pigs
invasion. Two months later Kennedy was assassinated.
The
conclusions of the report were that Silvia’s
statement is still credible and all the more so
given that she insistently maintained the same
arguments 15 years later.
That
same day Nicholas Katzenbach, former justice
secretary under the Johnson administration gave
evidence and made allusion to internal fights and
poor relations between the FBI and the CIA during
the period of the investigation.
RICHARD HELMS ADMITTED THAT THE CIA ASSASSINATIONS
WERE POLITCAL ACTIONS
The
following day, September 22, Richard Helms, the
former CIA director, provoked indignation among
certain congress members and shock among the
majority by appearing for seven hours before the
Special Committee to respond to inquiries into the
effectiveness of the CIA investigation after the
assassination and if he had supplied the relevant
information he possessed to others. At the time of
Kennedy’s assassination Helms was head of the CIA
clandestine service and President Johnson appointed
him deputy director of the CIA one year later. And
director in 1966.
Congressman Christopher J. Dodd asked whether the
Warren Commission was informed of the attempts on
the life of Fidel Castro and revealed his anger at
the contacts between organized crime and the agency.
Helms replied that he had only informed the Warren
Commission on the matters he was asked to.
At
the insistence of congress members, he stated that
activities against the Cuban Revolution included
attempts to sabotage electricity plants and sugar
refineries, burn cane fields and multiple types of
terrorist actions. He added that this was a
political action that could not solely be blamed on
the agency, as the president, the Pentagon, the
Justice Department, the Defense Department, State
Department and the National Security Council were
fully aware of the plans and had approved them.
A
tall man with graying receding hair and cultivated
manners, with his well-cut dark suit, Helms
confronted his interrogators with great aplomb and
traces of good humor. His distinguished aspect did
not make it easy to envisage the man who gave orders
to assassinate from his office desk. Coldly, with
asepsis, he spoke of criminal attempts in complicity
with mafia killers.
OSWALD’S CONTACTS WITH THE CIA DATE BACK TO 1960
Another of the documents on which he was
interrogated referred to the CIA’s first contacts
with Oswald; even though he informed the Warren
Commission that there were none, they dated back to
1960. One of the CIA memos presented stated that
Allan Dulles, despite being a member of the
Commission, lectured his subordinates on how to
conceal the CIA’s relations with Oswald.
Helms responded to these questions evasively.
Three days previously, Thomas J. Kelly and James J.
Rowley, inspector and chief, respectively, of the
Secret Service responsible for the president’s
protection, caused shock by stating that despite the
CIA and the FBI possessing information on Oswald,
the Secret Service was not informed of it.
“Otherwise we would have known what we were doing on
the day of the death of President Kennedy,” stated
Kelley and Rowley to the members of the Select
Committee.
These and other findings made the Committee reach
the conclusion that there was a lack of cooperation
and coordination among the distinct government
agencies; that the secret service was deficient in
protecting the president and in analyzing the
information that it possessed. Moreover, it lacked
the personnel for his adequate protection.
In
Paragraph 5 it is affirmed that neither the Secret
Service (of the presidency), nor the FBI nor the CIA
were involved. But it criticized them for not having
adequately analyzed, investigated, utilized or
inter-exchanged information that they possessed on
the threats surrounding Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.
The
report recommended that the Justice Department
should continue the investigation, because they had
found evidence of a conspiracy in which elements of
the Italian-American mafia had participated and
Cuban-American Mafiosi groups. It was not stated
that these had historically been handled by the CIA,
but it was insinuated. It confirmed that it was not
possible to reach definitive conclusions as the CIA
had refused to decode certain information. At the
same time the CIA was criticized for not having
rigorously investigated these groups of Cuban origin
resident in Miami.
The
decision to ask the Justice Department to
investigate further also took into account the fact
that the filmed and acoustic evidence analyzed
demonstrated the possibility of a second individual
on the floor from which Oswald supposedly fired and
that there was probably more than one sniper.
The
report also emphasized that neither did the FBI
investigate the possibility of a conspiracy after
the assassination and that the CIA was deficient,
both before and after the killing.
Moreover, the Dallas police, like the entire
population of Texas subjected at that time to an
anti-Kennedy barrage of propaganda, likewise
demonstrated themselves to be incapable of
protecting him. The anti-Kennedy atmosphere there
reached such an extreme that in the morning of that
fateful November 22, 1963 pamphlets were distributed
against the president.
The
most aggressive was published in a Dallas daily as a
full-page paid advertisement and bore a photo of
Kennedy and the following provocative text: “Sought
for treason: This man is sought for acts of treason
against the United States.
Even after the assassination there was serious
neglect over the transfer of Oswald. The photograph
of his two guards looking the other way while Ruby
approaches with impunity to shoot the accused is an
eloquent one. Thus the most appropriate person in
terms of revealing the motives and complexities of
the case was silenced. Nevertheless, the officers on
duty that day were not dismissed but subsequently
promoted.
It
wasn’t only Veciana who mentioned CIA intentions to
implicate the Cuban government into the case. It was
suspicious for the entire world that for a long time
before the attempt the CIA had tried to identify
Oswald with the island and even put pressure on a
Mexican employee at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico to
corroborate that version. The valiant woman
resisted.
The
accusations against Cuba remained alive until the
Stokes Committee ruled them out in 1978 after making
investigations in Mexico and Havana, where they met
with President Fidel Castro. Mr. Azcue, the Cuban
consul in Mexico who refused Oswald a visa a few
weeks before the assassination, in spite of his
agitated insistence, testified before the sessions.
Who knows what prompted that visit.
This
session made us wonder exactly what President
Kennedy wanted to say when he confided to his
collaborator Clark Gifford shortly after the Bay of
Pigs invasion: Something very bad is going on within
the CIA and I want to know what it is. I want to
shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter
them to the four winds.
In
its final report the Stokes Committee noted that the
CIA refused to declassify certain important
documents. When Frank Carlucci, deputy director of
the CIA in 1978 and President Reagan’s national
security advisor in 1987, was interrogated in one of
the hearings, he stated that they came from highly
sensitive sources and had to be protected.
One
of the most important and worrying pieces of
evidence found by the Stokes Committee was the tape
recording found in the Dallas police station in
which four shots can be heard and not three as the
Warren Commission established. This finding was
strengthened by the statement of the wife of
Governor Connally that a second shot was fired at
him and not the one that wounded the president in
the throat.
GUILTY MASTERMINDS AND MATERIAL ASSASSINS
General Fabian Escalante, one of those investigating
the case on the Cuban side, has stated that based on
information from the State Security files, certain
testimonies and an analysis of the facts and
antecedents, Havana has reached conclusions as to
the identity of the guilty parties that are similar
to those of other investigators: the CIA, the Mafia
and Cuban counterrevolutionaries planned and
executed the assassination.
He
added that having studied the descriptions of
witnesses to the crime, especially those expounded
by former Judge Garrison, it is presumed that the
sharpshooters of Cuban origin Eladio del Valle and
Hermino Díaz were those ordered to fire,
subsequently escaping in a Nash Rambler truck. And
that the attempt was organized by two groups, one
under the control of Jack Ruby and the other by
Frank Sturgis, later chief of the Watergate
plumbers.
The
mafia participants, Escalante continued, were Santos
Trafficante, Sam Giancana, John Roselli and, to a
lesser degree, Carlos Marcelo and Jimmy Hoffa.
Among the CIA plotters he also mentioned David Atlee
Phillips and Richard Helms, supervisor of anti-Cuban
operations; General Cabell, former deputy chief of
the CIA; Gerry Hemmings and other high-ranking
officials.
The
scandal, picked up by the press worldwide, led to
the committee instructing the CIA executive to
declassify the majority of the documents, which
succeeded in hushing the protests. But doing so
would have been to incriminate itself.
Unable to continue its investigations, on fulfilling
the Congress mandate in December 1978, the Committee
made the noteworthy suggestion that the Justice
Department should continue the investigative line to
resolve the mystery.
It
is for that reason that Jimmy Carter could not be
allowed to win a second mandate. That had to be
prevented by provocations such as the assault on the
embassies that resulted in the Mariel exodus from
Cuba. For that reason, 27 years after the
investigation and 42 years after the assassination,
the administrations of Reagan, Bush, Clinton and
Bush Jr., which should have picked up the glove,
have not lifted a finger to assume that task.
The
most important documentation on the Dallas shooting
has been retained as top secret in a vault in the
archives of the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon, and
will not be classified until 2013.
In
the years after the assassination more than 22
people involved in the case have died in more or
less mysterious form, among them the main
protagonists: Oswald and Ruby.
The
list has been growing since 1963. At that rate, it
is unlikely that anyone will be alive to testify.
And what is worse, none of those guilty will be
alive. Today the shady secret is transparent to
everyone apart from those to whom it should be.
Because the principal protagonists have acquired a
terrible ascendancy over the U.S. government.
German Wilfried Huismann is no more than another
pawn in this chess game. For that reason he is
maliciously ignoring these sources. That conspiracy
in Hamburg seeks to distract media attention from
Luis Posada Carriles in order to release him.
Because if Carriles should fulfill his threat to
spill everything that he knows, Nixon’s Watergate
will appear like a scratch on the surface of the
perversity that is being concealed.
Berlin discounts Cuban responsibility
•
HELMUT Schaefer, the German deputy foreign minister,
has refuted the thesis of the Appointment with
Death documentary, in which German director
Wilfried Huismann accuses Cuba of the assassination
of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Schaefer stated that the thesis of the film “lacks
all political logic” and that it is “totally
improbable” that the Cuban secret service and
President Fidel Castro organized the attempt on the
life of the U.S. leader. (Taken from La Jornada) |
