Gabriel  Molina Franchossi

THIS year marks the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Robert Kennedy (June 5, 1968) and the 50th of the crime against his brother John Kennedy in Dallas (November 22, 1963). The connection between these crimes, their revelations and global repercussions comprise the most important conspiracy of the 20th century and have ever greater relevance as the years pass by.

A recent book on the subject, John F. Kennedy and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass, states that the assassination of the President was a conspiracy for his having made peace. (1) In real terms he should have said, for having tried to make peace. Oliver Stone, director of the impressive film JFK, based on the book of the same name by district attorney Jim Garrison, describes it as the best account he has read about this tragedy and its significance.

 Douglass admits that he did not begin to see any connection between this crime and peace until 30 years after the event. He commented that, in overlooking the great changes in Kennedy’s life and the forces behind his death, he contributed to the national climate of deniability, the collective deniability of the obvious removal of Oswald by Ruby and his transparent silencing. The success of this cover up was an indispensable foundation for the successive deaths of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy by forces operating within the government and amongst Americans themselves. (2)

To a great extent, the first to denounce this conspiracy was Fidel Castro. On the very day of the crime, as soon as he heard about it, he said to Jean Daniel that Kennedy – who was awaiting Fidel’s reaction to his messages sent using the French journalist as an intermediary – could have been the only leader "to understand that there could be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, including in the Americas." Five days later, on November 27, speaking at the University of Havana, Fidel explained how events were unmasking the entire maneuver hatched against peace. The changes in Kennedy’s way of thinking had converted him into a major threat to the industrial-military complex.

Douglass refers in his book to the legal proceedings initiated by the King family, affirming that they described, "A sophisticated government plot that involved the FBI, the CIA, the Memphis Police, Mafia intermediaries, and an Army Special Forces sniper team. The little publicized verdict of the jury was that there was a conspiracy which included agencies of the U.S. government. The author thus understood the parallels in the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who "were four proponents of change who were murdered by shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats under the cover of "plausible deniability." (3)

Given its nature, the most relevant investigation is that of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). At the end of its mandate on January 1, 1979, the HSCA announced its conclusion that the President and Martin Luther King were probably assassinated as the result of a plot and that the investigation must be continued by the Justice Department. Louis Stokes, Committee president, announced this, and Walter Fountroy, president of the subcommittee on the death of Martin Luther King, stated that not only the Justice Department but also the FBI should continue the investigation. For his part, Richardson Preyer, president of the subcommittee on the Kennedy assassination, stated that the government must concentrate on the possibility that certain members of organized crime and Cuban enemies of Fidel Castro – unexpectedly in Dallas on November 22 – were also involved in the assassination, individually, rather than as a whole. In the same context, the Committee referred to a number of government agencies, such as the CIA, finding some of its members suspects, rather than the institution as a whole. The HSCA did not lay a finger on directors of these agencies, but new evidence has emerged questioning that view.

One of the most important pieces of evidence refers to George Joannides, the officer appointed by Richard Helms to represent the CIA at the Committee investigation, and who, in 1963, supervised Oswald’s contacts with Carlos Bringuier and Sergio Arcacha Smith. Both of these were members of a group of Cubans based in New Orleans and were present in Dallas on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. The CIA did not disclose to the HSCA how Joannides helped to conceal the fact that the agency utilized and financed this group and its contacts with Oswald. This evidence, linked to his presence in the area where Robert Kennedy was assassinated, also makes him a suspect.

Robert Blakey, head of the HSCA investigators, was furious when he discovered through some documents declassified in 1998, after Joannides’ death in 1990, that he was the officer on the case and regularly contributed funds to the group. Blakey had placed all his confidence in Joannides’ supposed collaboration with the Committee, while in fact he was disinforming it.

The investigation focused on the months which Oswald spent in New Orleans, distributing leaflets allegedly published by Fair Play with Cuba. Oswald gave as its address 544 Camp Street, in the Newman building. The New Orleans attorney Jim Garrison discovered some time later packages of these leaflets in the Guy Banister Associates, Inc. Investigators office at this address.

Banister and David Ferrie, alternatively linked to the FBI and CIA, met there with Oswald and Cubans linked to the agency, HSCA suspects in the John F. Kennedy assassination. Years later, Ferrie served a prison term as one of the "plumbers" in the operation ordered by Nixon in the Watergate building, also related to the assassination.

The Select Committee also established in 1979 that the audio and filmed evidence, as well as certain testimonies, gave rise to the doubt that there was one single shooter in the assassination, given other wounds produced by another weapons fired from in front of the motor convoy, which presupposes a plot justifying a continuation of the investigation. But Benjamin R. Civiletti, Assistant Attorney General, immediately announced that the Justice Department would not reopen either case. That same year Ronald Reagan was elected President and also eluded the HSCA mandate to continue the investigations. Thus, everything remained the same from the point of view of justice, or rather, the lack of it. Fifty years later, although the John F. Kennedy Records Act of 1992 ordered the declassification of files related to the assassination, the CIA continues to refuse this on the grounds of national security.

The conspiracy theory has been left in limbo, as if the assassination of a president of this nation were not a tremendous problem of security, not just for the United States, but for the world as a whole. John F. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, immediately reversed the moves to avoid war which Kennedy began in the final months of his life; the order to begin to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam was left without effect – in fact the U.S. army presence was intensified with pretexts such as that of the Gulf of Tonkin. Any relationship with the explosion of the USS Maine destroyer in Havana Bay in the 19th century, with Iraq in the 20th century and with Syria in the 21st, is ‘mere coincidence.’