John Simkin

Thought members would be interested in reading this interview with Gary Cornwell. I will try and persuade him to discuss his book on the Forum. http://thecelebritycafe.com/interviews/200...y_cornwell.html Cornwell, Gary - Author, JFK Conspiracy Theorist By: Dominick A. Miserandino DM) You were on the committee investigating Kennedy's assassination. What in your career led up to being invited to be on this committee? GC) For the preceding seven years I had been with the Organized Crime Section of the U.S. Department of Justice. During the later years of that period, I served as the Strike Force Chief in Kansas City. In that capacity I handled all of the Justice Department's investigations, trials and appeals of cases against the Mafia in a multi-state region surrounding Kansas City. Many of the statutes that we used during those years were written by Bob Blakey, while he served as Senator McClellan's Chief Counsel in the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1969-70. From 1970 to 1977, I frequently visited with Blakey about the legislative history and other legal issues surrounding those statutes. In the summer of 1977, I decided to leave the Justice Department and was passing through Houston on my way to a vacation in Alaska -- I had taken no vacation for the preceding seven years -- and, Blakey, coincidentally, at the same time had been appointed chief counsel for the Select Committee on Assassinations. Blakey tracked me down in Houston and asked me to come to Washington and run the Kennedy investigation for the Committee. Although I initially turned down the job, a few weeks later I agreed, and ultimately I started work as the Deputy Chief Counsel for the Select Committee on Assassinations on Sept. 1, 1977. DM) Why did you initially turn down the job? GC) Primarily because I am really not politically inclined, and I wasn't interested in having to struggle with the political process to be able to conduct an effective investigation. I changed my mind only after Bob Blakey assured me that if I took the job, I would be free to conduct the investigation and would receive all of the support I needed to do it right, and that he would handle the committee and political end. There are, obviously, very few people who could make such a promise and keep it, but Bob is one of them, and in the end, he did. DM) Why was the investigative committee not made as public as the main investigation? GC) There are probably several explanations, but the main reason seems to be that the major news media did not like the most significant finding of the Select Committee, which was that the "blue ribbon" Warren Commission deliberately failed to investigate the issue of conspiracy in 1963-64. That finding was not popular, even though the evidence supporting it was overwhelming, and even though the fact deserved to be recognized and understood by the American public. In fact, the Kennedy case has become folklore and fiction, because the Warren Commission did not solve the case when the opportunity to solve it existed. Rather than reporting this truth, the media have generally opted to criticize the "wild theories" that have been developed over the years to fill the void left by the original investigation, instead of honestly placing the blame where it belongs, on the Warren Commission and the FBI. The Select Committee also found that there was scientific evidence proving to a reasonable probability that there was a conspiracy. That finding was also not very warmly greeted. Even today, 35 years after the fact, significant irrational acceptance of the Warren Commission report remains in the major media. The Posner book of some years ago (Case Closed) received rave reviews from the established media, even though the basic premise of the book is totally unsupportable nonsense. Anyone who tells you the case is closed, and that there was no conspiracy, assumes the obvious burden of identifying the investigation that was competent and thorough enough to negate the possibility of conspiracy. Proving a negative is always difficult. It is one thing to muster the evidence and create a reasonable argument that Oswald was involved. That's relatively simple (in spite of the many disagreements over even that issue). It is quite another thing to disprove the very real possibilities of conspiracy that undeniably require resolution in the Kennedy case in order to say with any confidence that there was no conspiracy. The one thing that can be said about the Kennedy case with absolute certainty is that the Warren Commission's so-called "conspiracy" investigation was a farce: When they told us they had conducted a thorough and complete investigation, that was a blatant lie. And since the only other major investigation that has ever been conducted, that of the Select Committee, certainly did not negate the possibility of conspiracy, the proposition "case closed" remains as completely unsupportable today as it was when originally announced in 1964. In contrast to the widespread acclaim for Case Closed, the major news media have been relatively uninterested in Real Answers. To cite but one example, Texas Monthly did a cover story on the Kennedy case last November. One of the two senior editors who put the piece together read Real Answers, interviewed me for four hours, said he loved the book and that it was one of the best books on the Kennedy case he had ever read, and he wrote it up to be the center piece of the Texas Monthly story. Then, the editor-in-chief of the magazine cut every word about Real Answers from the article. Even the senior editor's threats to quit the magazine in anger over the issue did not prevail. In the end, Real Answers was never mentioned in the article because Real Answers tells the real story about the Warren Commission, and that has never been a popular story with the major news media in our country. DM) Still, it would seem that there is pretty strong opposition to your book. I'd have to imagine that some major news outlets would be dying to publicize it more? GC) I have received quite a bit of media coverage. I have been on over 100 radio and TV talk shows and news programs all across the country, and that was in spite of the fact that my book was competing with the impeachment coverage during November, December and January, when I was promoting it. In addition, Dateline NBC is working on a piece that they still plan to run sometime this year. But what I said is still true: there has always been, and obviously still is, a reluctance in much of the major media to admit that the Warren Commission report was a lie. DM) I've heard stories that there is a conspiracy telling the media what to report on and what not to report on. Do you think that's true? GC) If you mean "conspiracy" in the sense of a criminal agreement to commit illegal acts (its usual meaning), then I would say no. However, I do believe that the media is, unfortunately, often driven more by its own self-interests than by a search for the truth --just as most people, and most businesses unfortunately see the world through the myopic view of their own self-interest. Thus, reporting often is more a reflection of the media's perception of what will sell, of the views of their owners and of their major advertisers, and of the views of the world that the reporters and editors desire to promote. In that sense, the process of "reporting the news" gets distorted by the informal, tacit agreements to promote the "views of the truth" that are of benefit to the news media and those who financially support it. Such informal, tacit agreements between groups of people can also be legitimately described as "conspiracies." In Real Answers, I talk a lot about this phenomenon, because I believe that it is one of the greatest lessons about life that we can learn from studying the Kennedy case. DM) When do you think the public will learn the truth about the Kennedy assassination? GC) The Assassinations Records Review Board has just recently completed its review and declassification of hundreds of thousands of additional federal government records relating to the case. Those records, over time, will undoubtedly shed new light on the case. In addition, further analysis of the Dallas Police Department tape recording, upon which the Select Committee concluded that four shots were fired, may shed new light on the question of what really occurred in Dealey Plaza. But realistically, the ultimate answers are not likely to be uncovered by any amount of additional private investigation. The hundreds of books that have been and continue to be written on the subject do not tell "the truth" primarily because the case is just too big and complicated to be effectively investigated, other than through the resources possessed by the government (subpoena power, search warrants, massive investigative resources and expertise), and after all these years, even an official investigation would face probably insurmountable obstacles. What sells books, understandably, is everyone's desire for ultimate answers, so almost every new book purports to "finally solve the case" -- either some new conspiracy theory, or some new "Oswald did it alone" rationalization. But the honest truth is that we will probably never "solve" the case. The case should have been solved in 1963 and 1964, and because the government decided not to look for the real answers when it had the chance, the opportunity was probably lost forever. That sobering truth is not what most people want to hear -- not the private researchers, not those whose buy books about the Kennedy case, and not the news media. In that sense, it may be hard to say when the public "will learn" the truth, but for those who are willing to listen, "the truth about the Kennedy assassination" is available now. DM) But I didn't think it was known yet who is responsible for the conspiracy. GC) You are right, and that is "the truth" that I am talking about--that is "the truth" that most people simply do not want to hear. "The truth" is that we don t know the scope of the conspiracy; we will in all probability never know the scope of the conspiracy, and the shocking reason is that our government secretly decided not to discover the scope of the conspiracy when it had a chance to do so. What most people (and the media) prefer to hear is not the truth, but simply what makes them feel better. They would rather watch movies like "JFK", pure Hollywood imaginings devoid of any evidentiary support, because they offer a "solution" to the case, and often also because they "confirm" a preconceived view of the world that we have developed quite independent of any study of the Kennedy case. Those who for their own independent reasons want to believe that our government is composed of criminals readily accept Oliver Stone's irresponsible suggestion that the government conspired to kill our President, and really couldn't care less that there has never been any evidence to support that conclusion. Even for those who want to believe the worst about the officials who run our government, however, you would think that the real story (the one based on actual evidence) about what our government did in 1963-64 would be a sufficiently shocking story for Hollywood to tell. The real story, however, falls short of satisfaction because it is, in the end, inconclusive. It may teach us about life, it may be something we can learn from, it may be reality, but it is not satisfying. Only movies like "JFK" and the many new books that come out every year "solving" the case, sell really well. Whether it is some new conspiracy solution or a lie like Case Closed, which "solves the case" with the conclusion that Oswald acted alone, it is the conclusion to it all that makes us feel better.

It would seem that Blair might be brought down by incompetence rather than corruption. The current scandal about the failure to deport foreign criminals is clearly important and does suggest a high level of incompetence. It also highlights Tony Blair’s incompetence. It is clear that until Clarke resigns, there will be daily stories about crimes committed by the released criminals. Blair was a fool not to accept Clarke’s resignation. He now will have the story right up to the local elections on Thursday. He should have asked for John Prescott’s resignation last week as well. (In fact he should have sacked him several months ago when it was disclosed that he had not paid his council tax on his second (or was it his third of fourth) home. Blair was completely wrong to say that it was a “private matter”. Blair must have been aware of Prescott’s long history of using his position to obtain sexual favours. This is another scandal that will badly damage Labour with women voters.

I found this article very thought provoking. It is vitally important that we give students the opportunity to reflect on the information they are receiving. Reflection is easy when reading but extremely difficult when watching multimedia presentations. One way this can happen is to turn the student from consumers to producers. However, with the emphasis on “tests” and “examinations” time becomes a major issue. To remember is not to learn. I fear that what goes on in schools is too much about remembering information for a short-term task (the next test) than about learning long-term skills or concepts.

I believe that ICT is very important. Gone are the days when teachers could say "Technology is important because technology is the future". The future is here and technology is used in almost every situation possible in today's society. I agree. This is especially true in the area of communication. My main concern is with the quality of that communication. Basil Bernstein wrote a book in the early 1960s about the restricted and elaborated code of communication. He argued that communication was greatly influenced by class and that working class had to learn the “elaborated code” to be successful at school. I fear that this is now a problem for the middle as well as the working class. Rebecca, have you seen this article? http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6659

The latest section of James Richards' The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Photographic Archive (Anti-Castro Personnel) has just been uploaded. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/1AAcubans.htm

You can find the rest of the article here: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6681

See the following from Ron Ecker's website: http://www.hobrad.com/acregree.htm Then there's Seymour Weitzman, a county deputy constable, who also looked around behind the Grassy Knoll fence right after the shooting. 14 Researcher Michael Canfield visited Seymour years later--this was after Watergate--in a VA hospital (Seymour was undergoing treatment for schizophrenia), to try to find out who that Secret Service imposter on the Grassy Knoll was. When Canfield showed Seymour a photo of E. Howard Hunt's fellow Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, the schizoid patient said, "That's him." 15 (Wait a minute! Was Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon in Dallas too that day? As a matter of fact, he was--representing Pepsi at a bottlers convention. 16 Ha, ha, ha! I'll bet they used Pepsi bottles for target practice. He left town, though, before the shooting, which was just as well, since Nixon couldn't shoot straight anyway.) 14. Warren Commission, 1964, VII:105-109. 15. Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield, Coup D'etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (San Francisco: Quick American Archives, 1992), pp. 55-57; for Seymour's version of this episode, see HSCA Document 180-10088-10083. 16. Dallas Morning News, November 22, 1963, section 4, page 1. He still works in the Real Estate business in Miami where he keeps an eye on old colleagues from Operation 40.

Jim Yoder, a former work colleague, claimed that Cesar appeared to have no specific job at Lockheed and had “floating” assignments and often worked in off-limits areas which only special personnel had access to. According to Yoder, these areas were under the control of the CIA. Yoder also gave Turner and Christian details about the selling of the gun. Although he did not mention the assassination of Robert Kennedy he did say “something about going to the assistance of an officer and firing his gun.” He added that “there might be a little problem over that.” (96) William Klaber and Philip H. Melanson point out in their book, Shadow Play: The Untold Story of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination that the LAPD “failed to clear up even elementary contradictions in the security guard’s story”. This included “inconsistencies regarding his actions during the shooting”. Nor did they check his gun the night of the murder to see if it had been fired or even what calibre it was.” Even more remarkable was that he was never called as a witness at the trial of Sirhan. (97) An article by Dave Smith in the Los Angeles Times in 1971 explained why Cesar was not put on the stand. Smith quoted an unnamed “official” who stated that the reason why he was not used in court was because of inconsistencies in his story: “He told conflicting accounts and it seemed obvious he had nothing to tell us.” Smith went on to argue that the official thought that “he was trying to inject himself into a sensational case he knew little about.” Of course it is ridiculous to claim that Cesar was trying to “inject himself” into the story. He was at the scene of the crime and given his close proximity to Kennedy he was a vital witness that should have appeared in court. (98) Scott Enyart was another witness who was not called to testify in court. Enyart, a high-school student, was taking photographs of Robert Kennedy as he was walking from the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel to the Colonial Room where the press conference was due to take place. Enyart was standing slightly behind Kennedy when the shooting began and snapped as fast as he could. As Enyart was leaving the pantry, two LAPD officers accosted him at gunpoint and seized his film. Later, he was told by Detective Dudley Varney that the photographs were needed as evidence in the Sirhan trial. The photographs were not presented as evidence but the court ordered that all evidential materials had to be sealed for twenty years. In 1988 Enyart requested that his photographs should be returned. At first the State Archives claimed they could not find them and that they must have been destroyed by mistake. Enyart filed a lawsuit which finally came to trial in 1996. During the trial the Los Angeles city attorney announced that the photos had been found in its Sacramento office and would be brought to the courthouse by the courier retained by the State Archives. The following day it was announced that the courier’s briefcase, that contained the photographs, had been stolen from the car he rented at the airport. The photographs have never been recovered and the jury subsequently awarded Scott Enyart $450,000 in damages. (99) One possible connection between the deaths of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy is that they were all involved in a campaign to bring an end to the Vietnam War. One man who does believe there might be a connection is Edward Kennedy. NBC television correspondent Sander Vanocur, travelled with Edward Kennedy on the aircraft that brought back his Robert’s body to New York. Vanocur reported Kennedy as saying that “faceless men” (Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan) had been charged with the killing of his brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King. Kennedy added: “Always faceless men with no apparent motive. There has to be more to it.” (100) Richard N. Goodwin is another who refuses to believe the lone-gunman theory. Goodwin was John Kennedy’s special counsel. In a review of Edward J. Epstein’s book, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, Goodwin called for the setting up of an “independent group” to look again at the Kennedy assassination. (101) The following day the New York Times commented that “Mr. Goodwin is the first member of the President’s inner circle to suggest publicly than an official re-examination be made of the Warren Report.” (102) In his book, Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, Goodwin explained the significance of the deaths of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. “The sixties… was a time when most Americans felt the future could be bent to their wills. The large public events of the time cut deeply into our personal lives: the civil rights movement, the sit-ins, the beginnings of the women’s movement, the War on Poverty. It was the time of the New Frontier and the Great Society and the dream of Martin Luther King. And then, the experiment barely begun, it collapsed in the voracious terrain of Vietnam. The sixties, so filled with promise, came to an end. Not a failure, but abandoned. Never given a chance.” (103) The Vietnam War continued after the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. In December, 1968, Shackley became Chief of Station in Vietnam and took over Phung Hoang (Operation Phoenix). In his autobiography, Shackley denied he was the “godfather of Phung Hoang”. In fact, Shackley claims he did not approve of this program that involved the killing of non-combatant Vietnamese civilians suspected of collaborating with the National Liberation Front. However, according to Shackley, the Director of the CIA, Richard Helms, insisted that “we are not free agents” and that the CIA rather than the United States Army had to run Operation Phoenix. (104) Other members of Operation 40 in Vietnam at this time included Thomas Clines, David Morales, Carl Jenkins, Rip Robertson and Félix Rodríguez. Two other members of the “Secret Team” in Vietnam with Shackley were John Singlaub and Richard Secord. Shackley claims that Phoenix was set up in November 1966. This was over two years before Shackley arrived in Vietnam. This is true. However, it was Shackley who turned it into an “assassination unit”. Tucker Gouglemann and William Buckley supervised the program. (105) Edith Holleman and Andrew Love claimed that it was Shackley and Clines who played the most important role in Operation Phoenix. The purposely targeted “South Vietnamese town mayors, clerks, teachers, business professionals and educated persons” who they considered were contributing to the “actual or potential civilian infrastructure of the NLF.” (106) Fred Branfman quotes a U.S. State Department document in July, 1969, that said: “The target for 1969 calls for the elimination of 1800 VCI per month.” K. Barton Osborn, a U.S. Phoenix agent, testified to Congress, that in a year and a half of active service, “I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through the interrogation”. He added: “This was the mentality… It became a sterile depersonalized murder program.” He described of how he inserted a “six-inch dowel into the ear canal of one of my detainee’s ears and the tapping through the brain until he died.” (107) The Saigon Ministry of Information admitted that 40,994 were murdered as part of Operation Phoenix. (108) William Colby disagrees, when he testified before Congress he claimed that Phoenix was only responsible for the death of 20,587 persons. (109) Although he admitted to some “illegal killings”, Colby rejected a suggestion by Senator J. William Fulbright that it was “a program for the assassination of civilian leaders”. (110) As Branfman has pointed out: “This number, proportionate to population, would total over a three-year period, were Phoenix in practice in the United States. (111) Notes 1. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 366-371) 2. Warren Hinckle & William Turner, Deadly Secrets, 1992 (page 53) 3. Senate Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 1975 (page 92) 4. Fabian Escalante, CIA Covert Operations 1959-1962: The Cuba Project, 2004 (pages 42 and 43) 5. Common Cause Magazine (4th March, 1990) 6. The Nation magazine (13th August, 1988) 7. Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo, Granma (16th January, 2006) 8. Daniel Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History, 2001 (page 170) 9. Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, 2004 (page 173) 10. Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo, Granma (16th January, 2006). 11. Deposition of Gene Wheaton (1-3, 7-8 March, 1988). Wheaton gave evidence against Chi Chi Quintero during the Iran-Contra investigation. 12. Fabian Escalante, CIA Covert Operations 1959-1962: The Cuba Project, 2004 (pages 42 and 43) 13. Daniel Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News (24th August, 2004) 14. Jean-Guy Allard, Granma (22nd May, 2005) 15. Arthur Schlesinger, memo to Richard Goodwin (9th June, 1961) 16. Jean-Guy Allard, Granma (22nd May, 2005) 17. Fabian Escalante, Centre for International Policy, Nassau, Bahamas (7th December, 1995) 18. Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, 2003 (page 17) 19. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 328) 20. Anthony and Robbyn Summers, The Ghosts of November, Vanity Fair (December, 1994) 21. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 326) 22. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 380-390) 23. Anne Buttimer, Assassination Records Review Board Report (12th July, 1995) 24. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 83-100) 25. Paul Meskil, New York Daily News (3rd November, 1977) 26. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 1993 (pages 101-107) 27. Victor Marchetti, Spotlight (14th August, 1978) 28. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, 1991 (pages 289-310) 29. Anthony Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 2002 (page 371) 30. Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men, 1995 (page 28) 31. Ted Shackley, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA, 2005 (page 103) 32. David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson and the Origins of the Vietnam War, 2000 (page 198) 33. David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA Crusades, 1994 (page 129) 34. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, 1991 (page 19) 35. Christopher Robbins, The Ravens: The Men Who Flew in America’s Secret War in Laos, 1987 (page 125) 36. David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA Crusades, 1994 (page 138) 37. Joel Bainerman, The Crimes of a President, 1992 (page 67) 38. Edith Holleman and Andrew Love, Inside the Shadow Government, 1988 (pages 14-15) 39. Felix I. Rodriguez and John Weisman, Shadow Warrior: The CIA Hero of a Hundred Unknown Battles, 1989 (pages 9-10) 40. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, 1972 (page 278) 41. Edith Holleman and Andrew Love, Inside the Shadow Government, 1988 (page 13) 42. John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, 1986 (page 282) 43. Joel Bainerman, The Crimes of a President, 1992 (page 68) 44. Martin Luther King, speech in New York (4th April, 1967) 45. William F. Pepper, The Children of Vietnam, Ramparts Magazine (January, 1967) 46. Clayborne Carson (editor), Autobiography of Martin Luther King (1998) 47. William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill, 1995 (page 4) 48. William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, 2003 (page 4) 49. William C. Sullivan, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, 1979 (page 147) 50. William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill, 1995 (page 4) 51. Anthony Summers, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1993 (page 352) 52. William C. Sullivan, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, 1979 (pages 135-137) 53. William C. Sullivan, memo ‘King’ (December, 1963) 54. William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill, 1995 (pages 464) 55. Anthony Summers, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1993 (page 355) 56. Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy and the Feud That Defined a Decade, 1997 (page 351) 57. Robert Kennedy, speech in the Senate (2nd March, 1967) 58. Robert Kennedy, interview with Tom Wicker, Face the Nation (26th November, 1967) 59. William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill, 1995 (pages 412-413) 60. Edwin O. Guthman, We Band of Brothers: A Memoir of Robert F. Kennedy, 1971 (page 326) 61. William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, 2003 (page 7) 62. Robert Kennedy, speech, Washington (16th March, 1968) 63. Richard D. Mahoney, Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, 1999 (page 342) 64. Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 1980 (page 921) 65. William Turner, Rearview Mirror, 2001 (page 233) 66. William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill, 1995 (pages 11-16) 67. James W. Douglass, The King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis, included in The Assassinations, 2003 (page 494-95) 68. William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill, 1995 (page 21) 69. Richard D. Mahoney, Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, 1999 (page 357) 70. Martin Luther King, speech at the Mason Temple, Memphis (3rd April, 1964) 71. Anthony Summers, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1993 (page 363) 72. James W. Douglass, The King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis, included in The Assassinations, 2003 (page 495) 73. William F. Pepper, Orders to Kill, 1995 (pages 311-492) 74. William C. Sullivan, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI, 1979 (pages 145) 75. Anthony Summers, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1993 (page 363) 76. Senate Report, Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1972 (page 21) 77. William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, 2003 (page 205-06) 78. Senate Report, Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1972 (page 111) 79. Robert F. Kennedy, speech in Indianapolis (4th April, 1968) 80. Robert F. Kennedy, speech at the Indiana University Medical Center (26th April, 1968) 81. Richard D. Mahoney, Sons & Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, 1999 (page 368) 82. Robert Blair Kaiser, RFK Must Die! A History of the Robert Kennedy Association and Its Aftermath, 1970 (page 469) 83. Jean Stein and George Plimpton, American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy, 1970 (page 334) 84. Lisa Pease, Sirhan Says “I Am Innocent”, included in The Assassinations, 2003 (page 535) 85. Robert F. Kennedy, speech at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles (4th June, 1968) 86. William Turner and Jonn Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup, 1993 (page 162) 87. Dan Moldea, Regardie’s Magazine, June, 1987 88. Dan E. Moldea, The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, 1995 (page 146) 89. Karl Uecker, written statement given to Allard K. Lowenstein in Dusseldorf, Germany (20th February, 1975) 90. William Turner, Rearview Mirror, 2001 (page 244) 91. William Turner and Jonn Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup, 1993 (page 166) 92. Robert Blair Kaiser, RFK Must Die, 1970 (page 25) 93. Lisa Pease, Sirhan Says “I Am Innocent”, included in The Assassinations, 2003 (page 534) 94. William Turner, Rearview Mirror, 2001 (page 244) 95. William Klaber and Philip H. Melanson, Shadow Play: The Untold Story of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, 1997 (page 132) 96. William Turner and Jonn Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup, 1993 (page 166) 97. William Klaber and Philip H. Melanson, Shadow Play: The Untold Story of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination, 1997 (page 132) 98. Dave Smith, Los Angeles Times (16th August, 1971) 99. William Turner, Rearview Mirror, 2001 (page 246) 100. William Turner and Jonn Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup, 1993 (page xxxiii) 101. Richard N. Goodwin, Book Week (23rd July, 1966) 102. New York Times (24th July, 1966) 103. Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties, 1988 (page 543) 104. Ted Shackley, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA, 2005 (pages 233-234) 105. David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA Crusades, 1994 (page 194) 106. Edith Holleman and Andrew Love, Inside the Shadow Government, 1988 (page 13) 107. Fred Branfman, South Vietnam’s Police and Prison System, included in Uncloaking the CIA, edited by Howard Frazier, 1978 (page 113) 108. House Committee on Government Operations, 1971 (page 321) 109. Republic of Vietnam, Ministry of Information, Vietnam 1967-71: Towards Peace and Prosperity, 1971 (page 52) 110. House Committee on Government Operations, 1971 (page 183) 111. Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture, 2006 (page 67) 112. Fred Branfman, South Vietnam’s Police and Prison System, 1978 (page 114)

Assassination, Terrorism and the Arms Trade: The Contracting Out of U.S. Foreign Policy: 1940-2006 Part 4: 1965-70 I have argued in the previous section that as a result of the assassination certain aspects of John F. Kennedy’s policies were brought to a halt. This included plans to end the oil depletion allowance, investigations into government corruption (the TFX, Fred Korth and Bobby Baker scandals), secret negotiations with Fidel Castro, the refusal to start a war in Vietnam and an unwillingness to support anti-democratic military dictators in the America. I have attempted to show that all these decisions benefited the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Complex (MICIC). Although the MICIC had a good motive for killing Kennedy, it is much more difficult to show how this was organized. A considerable amount of evidence has emerged to indicate that anti-Castro Cubans working for the CIA were involved in the assassination. This in itself was linked to CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Gaeton Fonzi has argued convincingly in The Last Investigation that CIA officers, David Atlee Phillips and David Morales were involved in the assassination of Kennedy. Fonzi points out that in 1963 Morales was head of operations at JM/WAVE, the CIA Miami station. (1) JM/WAVE chief was Ted Shackley and his top deputy was Tom Clines. As Warren Hinckle and William Turner were to point out in Deadly Secrets, Operation 40 the “ultra secret… assassins-for-hire” program was based at the JM/WAVE station. (2) An account of the formation of Operation 40 can be found in the Senate Report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. On 11th December, 1959, Colonel J. C. King, chief of CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, sent a confidential memorandum to Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. King argued that in Cuba there existed a "far-left dictatorship, which if allowed to remain will encourage similar actions against U.S. holdings in other Latin American countries." (3) As a result of this memorandum Dulles established Operation 40. It obtained this name because originally there were 40 agents involved in the operation. Later this was expanded to 70 agents. The group was presided over by Richard Nixon. Tracy Barnes became operating officer of what was also called the Cuban Task Force. The first meeting chaired by Barnes took place in his office on 18th January, 1960, and was attended by David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Jack Esterline and Frank Bender. According to Fabian Escalante, a senior officer of the Cuban Department of State Security (G-2), in 1960 Richard Nixon recruited an "important group of businessmen headed by George Bush (Snr.) and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, to gather the necessary funds for the operation". This suggests that Operation 40 agents were involved in freelance work. (4) In 1990 Common Cause magazine argued that: "The CIA put millionaire and agent George Bush in charge of recruiting exiled Cubans for the CIA’s invading army; Bush was working with another Texan oil magnate, Jack Crichton, who helped him in terms of the invasion." (5) This story was linked to the release of "a memorandum in that context addressed to FBI chief J. Edward Hoover and signed November 1963, which reads: Mr. George Bush of the CIA" (6) Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo claim that in 1959 George Bush was asked “to cooperate in funding the nascent anti-Castro groups that the CIA decided to create”. The man “assigned to him for his new mission” was Felix Rodriguez. (7) Daniel Hopsicker also takes the view that Operation 40 involved private funding. In the book, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History, he claims that Nixon’s had established Operation 40 as a result of pressure from American corporations which had suffered at the hands of Fidel Castro. (8) Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin have argued that Bush was very close to members of Operation 40 in the early 1960s. In September, 1963, Bush launched his Senate campaign. At that time, right-wing Republicans were calling on John Kennedy to take a more aggressive approach towards Fidel Castro. For example, in one speech Barry Goldwater said: “I advocate the recognition of a Cuban government in exile and would encourage this government every way to reclaim its country. This means financial and military assistance.” Bush took a more extreme position than Goldwater and called for a “new government-in-exile invasion of Cuba”. As Tarpley and Chaitkin point out, beneficiaries of this policy would have been “Theodore Shackley, who was by now the station chief of CIA Miami Station, Felix Rodriguez, Chi Chi Quintero, and the rest of the boys” from Operation 40. (9) Paul Kangas is another investigator who has claimed that George Bush was involved with members of Operation 40. In an article published in The Realist in 1990, Kangas claims: "Among other members of the CIA recruited by George Bush for (the attacks on Cuba) were Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Bernard Baker and Rafael Quintero.” In an article published in Granma in January, 2006, the journalists Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo argued that “Another of Bush’s recruits for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Rafael Quintero, who was also part of this underworld of organizations and conspiracies against Cuba, stated: If I was to tell what I know about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the greatest scandal that has ever rocked the nation." (10) This information comes from the deposition of Gene Wheaton made during the Iran-Contra investigation. (11) Fabian Escalante names William Pawley as being one of those who was lobbying for the CIA to assassinate Castro. (12) Escalante points out that Pawley had played a similar role in the CIA overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. Interestingly, the CIA assembled virtually the same team that was involved in the removal of Arbenz: Tracey Barnes, Richard Bissell, David Morales, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Rip Robertson and Henry Hecksher. Added to this list were several agents who had been involved in undercover operations in Germany: Ted Shackley, Tom Clines and William Harvey. According to Daniel Hopsicker, Edwin Wilson, Barry Seal, William Seymour, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Hemming were also involved in Operation 40. (13) It has also been pointed out that Operation 40 was not only concerned about trying to overthrow Fidel Castro. Frank Sturgis has claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents." Virtually every one of the field agents of Operation 40 were Cubans. This included Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero, Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch, Roland Masferrer, Eladio del Valle, Guillermo Novo, Carlos Bringuier, Eugenio Martinez, Antonio Cuesta, Hermino Diaz Garcia, Felix Ismael Rodriguez, Antonio Veciana, Juan Manuel Salvat, Ricardo Chavez, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Isidro Borjas, Virgilio Paz, Jose Dionisio Suarez, Felipe Rivero, Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo, Nazario Sargent, Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz, Jose Basulto, and Paulino Sierra. (14) Most of these characters had been associated with the far-right in Cuban politics. Rumours soon became circulating that it was not only Fidel Castro that was being targeted. On 9th June, 1961, Arthur Schlesinger sent a memo to Richard Goodwin: “Sam Halper, who has been the Times correspondent in Havana and more recently in Miami, came to see me last week. He has excellent contracts among the Cuban exiles. One of Miro's comments this morning reminded me that I have been meaning to pass on the following story as told me by Halper. Halper says that CIA set up something called Operation 40 under the direction of a man named (as he recalled) Captain Luis Sanjenis, who was also chief of intelligence. (Could this be the man to whom Miro referred this morning?) It was called Operation 40 because originally only 40 men were involved: later the group was enlarged to 70. The ostensible purpose of Operation 40 was to administer liberated territories in Cuba. But the CIA agent in charge, a man known as Felix, trained the members of the group in methods of third degree interrogation, torture and general terrorism. The liberal Cuban exiles believe that the real purpose of Operation 40 was to "kill Communists" and, after eliminating hard-core Fidelistas, to go on to eliminate first the followers of Ray, then the followers of Varona and finally to set up a right wing dictatorship, presumably under Artime.” (15) In an interview he gave to Jean-Guy Allard in May, 2005, Fabian Escalante pointed out: “Who in 1963 had the resources to assassinate Kennedy? Who had the means and who had the motives to kill the U.S. president? CIA agents from Operation 40 who were rabidly anti-Kennedy. And among them were Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, Antonio Veciana and Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia." (16) This is not the first time that Fabian Escalante has pointed the finger at members of Operation 40. In December, 1995, Wayne Smith, chief of the Centre for International Policy in Washington, arranged a meeting on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in Nassau, Bahamas. Others in attendance were Gaeton Fonzi, Dick Russell, Noel Twyman, Anthony Summers, Peter Dale Scott, Jeremy Gunn, John Judge, Andy Kolis, Peter Kornbluh, Mary and Ray LaFontaine, Jim Lesar, John Newman, Alan Rogers, Russ Swickard, Ed Sherry, and Gordon Winslow. During a session on 7th December, Escalante claimed that during captivity, Antonio Cuesta, confessed that he had been involved in the assassination of Kennedy. He also named Eladio Del Valle, Rolando Masferrer and Hermino Diaz Garcia as being involved in this operation. All four men were members of Operation 40. (17) It has been argued that people like Fabian Escalante, Jean Guy Allard, Reinaldo Taladrid and Lazaro Baredo are under the control of the Cuban government. It is definitely true that much of this information has originally been published in Granma, the newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. Is there any other evidence to suggest that members of Operation 40 were involved in the assassination? I believe that there are several pieces of evidence that help to substantiate Escalante’s theory. Shortly before his death in 1975 John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that he had been guilty of spreading false stories implicating Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of Kennedy. He claimed that two of the gunmen were Cuban exiles. It is believed the two men were Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez. Cummings added: "He told me he'd been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things.... He asked me not to write it while he was alive." (18) Fred Claasen also told the House Select Committee on Assassinations what he knew about his business partner’s involvement in the case. Martino told Classen: “The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn’t know who he was working for – he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theatre. They were to meet Oswald in the theatre, and get him out of the country, then eliminate him. Oswald made a mistake… There was no way we could get to him. They had Ruby kill him.” (19) Florence Martino at first refused to corroborate the story. However, in 1994 she told Anthony Summers that her husband said to her on the morning of 22nd November, 1963: "Flo, they're going to kill him (Kennedy). They're going to kill him when he gets to Texas." (20) Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez were both members of Operation 40. So also was Rip Robertson who according to Anthony Summers “was a familiar face at his (John Martino) home. Summers also points out that Martino was close to William Pawley and both took part in the “Bayo-Pawley Affair”. (21) This anti-Castro mission, also known as Operation Tilt, also involved other members of Operation 40, including Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez. There is another key CIA figure in Operation 40 who has made a confession concerning the assassination of John Kennedy. David Morales was head of operations at JM/WAVE, the CIA Miami station, at the time of the assassination. Gaeton Fonzi carried out a full investigation of Morales while working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Unfortunately, Morales could not testify before the HSCA because he died of a heart attack on 8th May, 1978. Fonzi tracked down Ruben Carbajal, a very close friend of Morales. Carbajal saw Morales the night before he died. He also visited Morales in hospital when he received news of the heart attack. Carbajal is convinced that Morales was killed by the CIA. Morales had told Carbajal the agency would do this if you posed a threat to covert operations. Morales, a heavy drinker, had a reputation for being indiscreet when intoxicated. On 4th August 1973, Morales allowed himself to be photographed by Kevin Scofield of the Arizona Republic at the El Molino restaurant. When the photograph appeared in the newspaper the following day, it identified Morales as Director for Operations Counterinsurgency and Special Activities in Washington. Carbajal put Fonzi in contact with Bob Walton, a business associate of Morales. Walton confirmed Carbajal’s account that Morales feared being killed by the CIA. On one occasion he told him: “I know too much”. Walton also told him about a discussion he had with Morales about John F. Kennedy in the spring of 1973. Walton had done some volunteer work for Kennedy’s Senatorial campaign. When hearing this news, Morales launched an attack on Kennedy, describing him as a wimp who had betrayed the anti-Castro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. He ended up by saying: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” Carbajal, who was also present at this meeting, confirmed Walton’s account of what Morales said. (22) Another important piece of evidence comes from Gene Wheaton. In 1995 Gene Wheaton approached the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) with information on the death of Kennedy. Anne Buttimer, Chief Investigator of the ARRB, recorded that: "Wheaton told me that from 1984 to 1987 he spent a lot of time in the Washington DC area and that starting in 1985 he was "recruited into Ollie North's network" by the CIA officer he has information about. He got to know this man and his wife, a "'super grade high level CIA officer" and kept a bedroom in their Virginia home. His friend was a Marine Corps liaison in New Orleans and was the CIA contact with Carlos Marcello. He had been responsible for "running people into Cuba before the Bay of Pigs." His friend is now 68 or 69 years of age... Over the course of a year or a year and one-half his friend told him about his activities with training Cuban insurgency groups. Wheaton said he also got to know many of the Cubans who had been his friend's soldiers/operatives when the Cubans visited in Virginia from their homes in Miami. His friend and the Cubans confirmed to Wheaton they assassinated JFK. Wheaton's friend said he trained the Cubans who pulled the triggers. Wheaton said the street level Cubans felt JFK was a traitor after the Bay of Pigs and wanted to kill him. People "above the Cubans" wanted JFK killed for other reasons." (23) It was later revealed that Wheaton's friend was Carl E. Jenkins, A senior CIA officer, Jenkins had been appointed in 1960 as Chief of Base for Cuban Project. In 1963 Jenkins provided paramilitary training for Manuel Artime and Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero and other members of the Movement for the Recovery of the Revolution (MRR). In an interview with William Law and Mark Sobel in the summer of 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed that Jenkins and Quintero were both involved in the assassination of Kennedy. It seems that members of Operation 40, originally recruited to remove Fidel Castro, had been redirected to kill Kennedy. That someone had paid this team of assassins to kill the president of the United States as part of a freelance operation. This is not such a far-fetched idea when you consider that in 1959 Richard Nixon was approaching oilmen like George Walker Bush and Jack Crichton to help fund Operation 40. We also have the claim of Frank Sturgis that "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents." According to an account Marita Lorenz gave to Gaeton Fonzi: “A month or so prior to November 22nd, 1963, I joined Frank Fiorini (Frank Sturges), Ozzie (Lee Harvey Oswald), others, Cubans in our group and drove in two cars to the home of Orlando Bosch… This… “highly secret meeting” in Bosch’s home was to discuss certain streets in Dallas, Texas… There was talk of a “highly powerful rifle” and discussions of “feet,” “building,” “timings,” “contacts,” “silence,” etc.” Lorenz went on to claim that she drove to Dallas on the eve of the assassination with Frank Sturges, Orlando Bosch, Pedro Diaz Lanz and “two Cuban brothers whose names she does not know”. Fonzi argues that in this interview “Marita Lorenz had impressed me as a fairly credible witness”. (24) Lorenz eventually took her story to Paul Meskil of the New York Daily News. On 3rd November, 1977, Meskil published an article that implicated Operation 40 in the assassination of John F. Kennedy: "Marita Lorenz told the New York Daily News that her companions on the car trip from Miami to Dallas were Oswald, CIA contact agent Frank Sturgis, Cuban exile leaders Orlando Bosch and Pedro Diaz Lanz, and two Cuban brothers whose names she did not know. She said that they were members of Operation 40, a secret guerrilla group originally formed by the CIA in 1960 in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion... Ms. Lorenz described Operation 40 as an "assassination squad" consisting of about 30 anti-Castro Cubans and their American advisors. She claimed the group conspired to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro and President Kennedy, whom it blamed for the Bay of Pigs fiasco... She said Oswald... visited an Operation 40 training camp in the Florida Everglades. The next time she saw him, Ms. Lorenz said, was... in the Miami home of Orlando Bosch, who is now in a Venezuelan prison on murder charges in connection with the explosion and crash of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 persons last year. Ms. Lorenz claimed that this meeting was attended by Sturgis, Oswald, Bosch and Diaz Lanz, former Chief of the Cuban Air Force. She said the men spread Dallas street maps on a table and studied them... She said they left for Dallas in two cars soon after the meeting. They took turns driving, she said, and the 1,300-mile trip took about two days. She added that they carried weapons - "rifles and scopes" - in the cars... Sturgis reportedly recruited Ms. Lorenz for the CIA in 1959 while she was living with Castro in Havana. She later fled Cuba but returned on two secret missions. The first was to steal papers from Castro's suite in the Havana Hilton; the second mission was to kill him with a poison capsule, but it dissolved while concealed in ajar of cold cream. Informed of her story, Sturgis told the News yesterday: "To the best of my knowledge, I never met Oswald." Statements she made to The News and to a federal agent were reported to Robert Blakey, chief counsel of the Assassinations Committee. He has assigned one of his top investigators to interview her." (25) Gaeton Fonzi argued that the reason Lorenz had gone to the newspapers was that she feared that G. Robert Blakey would not include her testimony in the House Select Committee on Assassinations report. As Fonzi points out: “Of course, what Blakey had decided, now the story had hit the papers, was that he had no choice but to put the Lorenz tale into the record”. Lorenz claimed that as a result of this story appearing, Frank Sturges had taken out a contract on her. When Fonzi, Al Gonzales and Eddie Lopez, went to interview her again, she open the door holding a shotgun. “Oh, it’s you? I thought it was a Cuban Frank had sent to kill me.” Fonzi reports that: “She (Lorenz) looked tired and drawn. She hadn’t slept, and her teenage daughter was out trying to buy a pistol to head off Sturgis before he arrived.” A few days later, Lorenz’s daughter was arrested with a .22 pistol. She said she was “waiting for Sturgis to show up”. During the interview, with Fonzi, Gonzales and Lopez, Lorenz claimed that Gerry Patrick Hemming was also in the party that travelled to Dallas. Fonzi responded that this made sense as “Sturges and Hemming… had been co-founders of an anti-Castro group”. Fonzi eventually comes to the conclusion that Lorenz was not telling the truth. However, his analysis of this event is very interesting: “In retrospect, one result of this whole soap-opera scenario – the factor that still feeds my suspicion of collusion – was a successful diversion, from the Schweiker probe through to the House Assassinations Committee, of our limited investigation resources. And, in the process, it injected a dose of slapstick that would impair any future attempt to conduct a serious investigation into the possible involvement of E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis in the Kennedy assassination.” (26) In August, 1978, Victor Marchetti published an article about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the Liberty Lobby newspaper, Spotlight. In the article Marchetti argued that the House Special Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had obtained a 1966 CIA memo that revealed E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming had been involved in the plot to kill Kennedy. Marchetti's article also included a story that Marita Lorenz had provided information on this plot. (27) The HSCA did not publish this CIA memo linking its agents to the assassination of Kennedy. Hunt now decided to take legal action against the Liberty Lobby and in December, 1981, he was awarded $650,000 in damages. Liberty Lobby appealed to the United States Court of Appeals. It was claimed that Hunt's attorney, Ellis Rubin, had offered a clearly erroneous instruction as to the law of defamation. The three-judge panel agreed and the case was retried. This time Mark Lane defended the Liberty Lobby against Hunt's action. Mark Lane interviewed Marita Lorenz while preparing his case. Lorenz claimed that E. Howard Hunt had paid Frank Sturgis to transport weapons from Miami, Florida, to Dallas, Texas, in November, 1963. When cross-examined by Kevin Dunne during the trial, Lorenz admitted that Gerry Hemming, Guillermo and Ignacio Novo, also took part in the trip to Dallas. (28) So it seems that E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Gerry Hemming, Guillermo Novo and Orlando Bosch were all involved in transport weapons from Miami to Dallas. All these men were members of Operation 40. As a result of obtaining of getting depositions from David Atlee Phillips, Richard Helms, G. Gordon Liddy, Stansfield Turner and Marita Lorenz, plus a skilful cross-examination by Lane of E. Howard Hunt, the jury decided in January, 1995, that Marchetti had not been guilty of libel when he suggested that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated by people working for the CIA. Further support for this Operation 40 theory comes from an unlikely source. David Atlee Phillips died of cancer on 7th July, 1988. He left behind an unpublished manuscript. The novel is about a CIA officer who lived in Mexico City. In the novel the character states: "I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald... We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba... I don't know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president's assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt." (29) The issue is whether Operation 40 remained active after 1963. Is it possible that a network of CIA agents, right-wing businessmen linked to the arms and oil industries and Cuban exiles continued to work together in the interests of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Intelligence Complex? I would suggest that the following people were key members of Operation 40 who need to be looked at very carefully: CIA Officers: Ted Shackley, Tom Clines, Tracy Barnes, David Atlee Phillips, David Morales, Rip Robertson, E. Howard Hunt, Jack Esterline, Carl E. Jenkins, Frank Bender (Gerry Droller), William Harvey, Henry Hecksher, William C. Bishop and Edwin Wilson. Assassins: Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero, Luis Posada, Orlando Bosch, Roland Masferrer, Eladio del Valle, Guillermo Novo, Ricardo Chavez, Eugenio Martinez, Antonio Cuesta, Hermino Diaz Garcia, Felix Rodriguez, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard L. Barker and Frank Sturgis. In January 1966, Desmond FitzGerald, who was now in control of Cuban operations, sent Ted Shackley to be chief of station in Laos. His orders were to create a secret army against the North Vietnamese. (30) As Richard Helms, the Director of the CIA, pointed out to Shackley, that while in Laos his primary concern was to help the United States win the war in Vietnam. (31) Souvanna Phouma had become head of a coalition government in Laos in 1962. This included the appointment of the left-leaning Quinim Pholsema as Foreign Minister. Kennedy supported Phouma as it reflected his desire for all-party coalition governments in the underdeveloped world. On 1st April, 1963, this policy suffered a tremendous blow when Quinim Pholsema was assassinated. As David Kaiser has pointed out: “In light of subsequent revelations about CIA assassination plots, this episode inevitably arouses some suspicion.” (32) This assassination led to a break-up of the coalition government in Laos. The CIA now began funding General Vang Pao and Hmong tribesman in their war with the Pathet Lao. A CIA report explained why the Hmong were willing to fight the communists in Laos: “Primary it is economic and rests on their determination… to protect their homeland and their opium-rich poppy fields from outside incursions.” (33) Vang Pao was in fact a major figure in the opium trade in Southeast Asia. In order to defeat communism in Laos, the CIA was willing to help Vang Pao distribute opium. As Alfred W. McCoy pointed out in The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, the “CIA adopted a complicitous posture toward the traffic, allowing the Hmong commander, General Vang Pao, to use the CIA’s Air America to collect opium from his scattered highland villages.” (34) A few months after becoming chief of station in Laos, Shackley appointed his old friend, Thomas G. Clines, as base chief in Long Tieng, in northern Laos. (35) David Morales was put in charge of Pakse, a black operations base focused on political paramilitary action within Laos. Pakse was used to launch military operations against the Ho Chi Minh Trail. (36) Other former members of Operation 40 who moved to Laos included Carl E. Jenkins, Rafael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez and Edwin Wilson. (37) Shackley’s critics argued that he went much further than co-existing with the drug traffickers in Laos. According to Edith Holleman and Andrew Love: “In addition to his opium trafficking operation, Vang Pao carried out an assassination program, on information and belief under the auspices of Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines. Partially funded by Vang Pao’s opium income, the program eliminated civilian functionaries and supporters of the Pathet Lao, as well as Vang Pao’s rival opium warlords.” Holleman and Love go onto argue that Shackley brought “Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero and Rafael Villaverde, along with Felix Rodriguez, to Laos, to train members of Vang Pao’s Hmong tribe to perform assassinations against Pathet Lao leaders and sympathizers.” (38) This group of assassins were not only at work in Laos. In 1967 David Morales recruited Félix Rodriguez to train and head a team that would attempt to catch Che Guevara in Bolivia. Guevara was attempting to persuade the tin-miners living in poverty to join his revolutionary army. When Guevara was captured, it was Rodriguez who interrogated him before he ordered his execution. (39) In 1967 Shackley and Clines helped Vang Pao to obtain financial backing to form his own airline company, Zieng Khouang Air Transport (ZKAT). This was a combined CIA and USAID (United States Agency for International Development) operation. Two C-47s were acquired from Air America and Continental Air Services. These aircraft were used by Vang Pao to transport opium and heroin between Long Tieng and Vientiane. (40) According to a report published in 1988: “Vang Pao’s officers and agents of Shackley and Clines flew to scattered Hmong villages offering guns, rice and money in exchange for recruits.” (41) By 1968, Vang Pao’s Hmong army had grown to “40,000 soldiers, mostly local defence forces, but about 15,000 grouped in Special Guerrilla Units”. (42) The growth in Vang Pao’s army helped him to dominate the trade in opium in Laos. Joel Bainerman claims that “Shackley, Clines and Richard Secord helped Pao control Laos’ opium trade by sabotaging competitors”. In 1968 “Shackley and Clines arranged a meeting in Saigon between Mafia chief Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Vang Pao to establish a heroin-smuggling operation from Southeast Asia to the United States.” (43) John F. Kennedy was not the only politician to be assassinated because he opposed the Vietnam War. On 3rd April, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. made a speech where he outlined the reasons why he was opposed to the war. It is worth quoting in full: "Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have several reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demoniacal destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years - especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my convictions that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But they asked - and rightly so - what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. What of the National Liberation Front - that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than 25 per cent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them - the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence? Here is the true meaning of value and compassion and non-violence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition." (44) King had decided to take this stand after reading an article on the Vietnam War in Ramparts Magazine. (45) King later wrote: “After reading that article, I said to myself, never again will I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation”. (46) After making his speech on Vietnam, the editor of the Nation, Carey McWilliams and the Socialist Party leader, Norman Thomas, urged King to run as a third-party presidential candidate in 1968. (47) William F. Pepper, the author of the Ramparts article, suggested that King should challenge Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. King rejected this idea but instead joined with Pepper to establish the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP). “From this platform, Dr King planned to move into mainstream politics as a potential candidate on a presidential ticket with Dr Benjamin Spock in order to highlight the anti-poverty, anti-war agenda.” (48) In his autobiography, William C. Sullivan, Deputy Director of the FBI, admitted that this decision created a great deal of concern to the ruling elite. “The Civil Rights Movement which began in the late 1950s gave organization and impetus to the antiwar movement of the late 1960s. The tactics of direct action against authority that proved successful in the earlier struggle were used as a model for the students of the New Left.” (49) Pepper was later to discover that the wiretaps of the conversations that took place about King becoming a third-party candidate “were relayed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and, through him, to Lyndon Johnson.” (50) According to Anthony Summers, Hoover suggested to Lyndon Johnson that the best way of dealing with King and Malcolm X would be to “get those two guys fighting”. He added the problem could be solved “if we could get them to kill one another off.” (51) Hoover told Sullivan when he became head of the Intelligence Division in 1961 that “King was an instrument of the Communist Party” and posed “a serious threat to the security of the country.” Hoover instructed Sullivan to get evidence that “King had a relationship with the Soviet bloc”. Despite an intensive surveillance campaign, Sullivan was unable to find a clear link between King and the Communist Party. When told this by Sullivan, Hoover replied: “I kept saying that Castro was a Communist and you people wouldn’t believe me. Now they are saying that King is not a Communist and you’re just as wrong this time as you were with Castro.” (52) Sullivan continued in his campaign to discredit King. In a memo to Hoover in December, 1963, Sullivan wrote: “When the true facts concerning his (King’s) activities are presented, such should be enough, if handled properly, to take him off his pedestal… When that is done… the Negroes will be left without a national leader of sufficiently compelling personality to steer them in the proper direction.” (53) In June, 1967, Hoover had a meeting with fellow gambler, close friend, and Texas oil billionaire, H. L. Hunt in Chicago. Hunt was very concerned that the activities of King might unseat Lyndon Johnson. This could be an expensive defeat as Johnson doing a good job protecting the oil depletion allowance. According to William Pepper: “Hoover said he thought a final solution was necessary. Only that action would stop King.” (54) It was King’s opposition to the Vietnam War that really upset Hoover. According to Richard N. Goodwin, Hoover told Johnson that “Bobby Kennedy was hiring or paying King off to stir up trouble over the Vietnam War.” (55) It is true that Robert Kennedy, like King, was growing increasingly concerned about the situation in Vietnam. Johnson became convinced that Kennedy was leaking information to the press about his feelings on the war. At a meeting on 6th February, 1967, Johnson told Kennedy: “I’ll destroy you and everyone one of your dove friends. You’ll be dead politically in six months.” (56) The following month Kennedy made a speech where he raised the issue of morality and the Vietnam War: “Although the world’s imperfection may call forth the act of war, righteousness cannot obscure the agony and pain those acts bring to a single child. It is we who live in abundance and send our young men out to die. It is our chemicals that scorch the children and our bombs that level the villages. We are all participants.” (57) In an television interview later that year Kennedy again returned to the morality of the war: “We’re going in there and we’re killing South Vietnamese, we’re killing children, we’re killing women, we’re killing innocent people because we don’t want a war fought on American soil, or because (the Viet Cong are) 12,000 miles away and they might get 11,000 miles away. Do we have the right, here in the United States, to say we’re going to kill tens of thousands, make millions of people, as we have, millions of people refugees, killing women and children, as we have.” (58) Martin Luther King also continued his campaign against the Vietnam War. This upset the Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. In October, 1961, McNamara established the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). This took over the U.S. Army’s Strategic Intelligence Unit. However, following the racial riots at Oxford, Mississippi, the on-scene commander, Major General Creighton V. Abrahams, wrote a report on the performance of army intelligence at Oxford. It included the following: “We in the Army should launch a major intelligence project, without delay, to identify personalities, both black and white, and develop analyses of the various civil rights situations in which they became involved.” Abrahams’ advice was accepted and in 1967 the Military Intelligence Branch (MIB) was formed as part of the U.S. Army Intelligence Command (USAINTC) based at Fort Holabird, Maryland. It was the MIB that now began to take a close look at the activities of Martin Luther King. (59) On 19th February, 1968, Cesar Chavez, the trade union leader, began a hunger strike in protest against the violence being used against his members in California. Robert Kennedy went to the San Joaquin Valley to give Chavez his support and told waiting reporters: “I am here out of respect for one of the heroic figures of our time – Cesar Chavez. I congratulate all of you who are locked with Cesar in the struggle for justice for the farm worker and in the struggle for justice for Spanish-speaking Americans.” (60) Chavez was also a strong opponent of the Vietnam War. Kennedy had begun to link the campaign against the war with the plight of the disadvantaged. Martin Luther King was following a similar path with his involvement in the Poor People’s Campaign. As William Pepper has pointed out: “If the wealthy, powerful interests across the nation would find Dr King’s escalating activity against the war intolerable, his planned mobilization of half a million poor people with the intention of laying siege to Congress could only engender outrage – and fear.” (61) On 16th March, 1968, Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. “I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies.” (62) As Richard D. Mahoney points out in his book, Sons & Brothers: “If there was one reason why Bobby was running, it was to end America’s war in Vietnam…. Politically, however, this looked self-destructive. A substantial majority of Americans supported the president’s policy. The antiwar movement, though a significant new factor in American politics, was not yet a defining factor.” (63) That was true, but that now had the potential to change. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King joining forces against the Vietnam War posed serious problems for Lyndon Johnson. This decision by Robert Kennedy to take on Lyndon Johnson caused Jackie Kennedy great concern. A few days after Kennedy announced his candidacy, Jackie said to Schlesinger at a dinner party in New York: “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” When Arthur Schlesinger replied that he didn’t, she said: “The same thing that happened to Jack.” (64) It is the view of William Turner that Robert Kennedy would probably have ordered a reinvestigation of the events in Dallas if he had been elected president in 1968: “Throughout the primary (in California), Bobby Kennedy was asked by audiences whether he would reopen the investigation of his brother’s death if elected. He hedged, saying he would not reopen the Warren Report, but remained silent on the question of whether he would take action on his own. RFK was a pragmatist, if anything, knowing that he had to control the Justice Department to launch a new probe.” (65) In February, 1968, Memphis clergyman James Lawson, informed Martin Luther King about the sanitation workers’ dispute in the city. Over 90% of the 13,000 sanitation workers in Memphis were black. Men were often sent home by management during working hours and this resulted in them losing pay. Much of the equipment they used was old and in a bad state of repair. The dispute began when two sanitation workers, Echole Cole and Robert Walker, were killed by a malfunctioning “garbage packer” truck. There was no company insurance scheme and the men’s families did not receive any compensation except for a month’s pay and a contribution towards funeral expenses. The local branch of the Association of Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) threatened strike action unless working conditions improved in Memphis. When negotiations failed to achieve an acceptable solution to this problem, the sanitation workers went on strike. A protest march on 23rd February, ended in violence when the local police used mace on the marchers. At this point, Rev. James Lawson, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), became chairman of the strike strategy committee. The Community on the Move for Equality (COME), a coalition of labour and civil rights groups, also gave its support to the sanitation workers. Roy Wilkins of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Bayard Rustin of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), agreed to speak at a strike meeting on 14th March. Martin Luther King also offered to help and it was announced he would speak at a public meeting in Memphis on 18th March. (66) At the meeting King expressed his solidarity with the sanitation workers and called for a general strike to take place in Memphis. This caused create concern amongst the ruling elite. Many people interpreted the idea of a general strike as a tactic that had been employed by revolutionaries in several European countries. The strategy of King seemed to be an attempt to link the campaign against poverty with the civil rights struggle and the protests against the war in Vietnam. In his speeches King argued that the money being spent on the war was making it more difficult for Lyndon Johnson to fulfil the promises he had made about improving America’s welfare system. James Lawson later claimed that King “saw the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike as the beginning of a non-violent revolution that would redistribute income.” He argued his long term plan was to “shut down the nation’s capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty.” He added that the government became especially upset after he began making speeches against the Vietnam War. (67) King’s strategy of linking poverty, civil rights and the Vietnam War seemed to be mirroring the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy. Both men appeared to be seriously threatening the status quo and in that sense were acting as revolutionaries. Recently released FBI files show that during this period J. Edgar Hoover reported to Lyndon Johnson that Kennedy and King were working together in order to undermine his presidency. (68) On 20th March a Gallup poll placed Kennedy ahead of Johnson in the race to get the Democratic Party nomination. Johnson now decided not to stand in the forthcoming election. However, this was not to be announced until the end of the month. Despite his good poll ratings, senior staff members such as Ted Sorensen and Milton Gwirtzman warned Kennedy about his “win in the streets” strategy. They argued that his campaign looked like a “mobile riot” to people watching on TV. As Richard D. Mahoney pointed out: “Many of Kennedy’s advisors… thought his message needed to be broadened beyond Vietnam and the poor and targeted more toward the white middle class.” (69) On 28th March, 1968, King led a march from Clayborn Temple to the Memphis city hall. Although the organizers had ordered the marchers to refrain from any acts of violence, groups of young people ignored the marshals’ instructions and created a great deal of damage to shops on the way to the city hall. A sixteen-year-old boy, Larry Payne, was shot dead by the police who claimed he was a looter. An eyewitness said that Payne had his hands up when shot. King was convinced that the violence on the march had been caused by government provocateurs. According to Coretta Scott King, her husband returned to Memphis on 3rd April to prepare for a truly non-violent march and to prove SCLC could still carry out a pacifist campaign in Washington. That night King made a speech at the Mason Temple. It ended with the following words: "I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane - there were six of us - the pilot said over the public address system, "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked and to be sure that nothing would be wrong on the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we’ve had the plane protected and guarded all night." And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out, or what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers. Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life - longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." (70) After the meeting King and his party were taken to the Lorraine Motel. The following day King was shot and killed as he stood on the balcony of the motel. Two months later, James Earl Ray was arrested in London and extradited to the United States. He pleaded guilty to King’s murder and was sent to jail for ninety-nine years. People close to King were convinced that the government was behind the assassination. Ralph Abernathy, who replaced King as head of the SCLC, claimed that he had been killed “by someone trained or hired by the FBI and acting under the orders from J. Edgar Hoover”. (71) Whereas James Lawson, the leader of the strike in Memphis remarked that: “I have no doubt that the government viewed all this (the Poor People’s Campaign and the anti-Vietnam War speeches) seriously enough to plan his assassination.” (72) William Pepper, who was to spend the next forty years investigating the death of Martin Luther King, discovered evidence that Military Intelligence was involved in the assassination. In his book, Orders to Kill, Pepper names members of the 20th Special Forces Group (SFG) as being part of the conspiracy. (73) Even the Deputy Director of the FBI, William Sullivan, who led the investigation into the assassination, believed that there was a conspiracy to kill King. In his autobiography published after his death, Sullivan wrote: “I was convinced that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King, but I doubt if he acted alone… Someone, I feel sure, taught Ray how to get a false Canadian passport, how to get out of the country, and how to travel to Europe because he would never have managed it alone. And how did Ray pay for the passport and the airline tickets?” Sullivan also admits that it was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and not the FBI who successfully tracked Ray down to London. (74) In a television interview from prison that took place in 1988, Ray claimed the FBI agents threatened to jail his father and one of his brothers if he did not confess to King’s murder. Ray added that he had been framed to cover up an FBI plot to kill King. (75) However, there is evidence that it was another organization that was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King. According to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, military intelligence became very interested in the activities of King after he began making speeches against the Vietnam War. In a report published in 1972, the committee claimed that in the spring of 1968 King’s organization was “infiltrated by the 109th, 111th and 116th Military Intelligence Groups.” (76) In his book, An Act of State, William Pepper points out that the committee was surprised when it discovered that military intelligence appeared to be very interested in where King was “staying in various cities, as well as details concerning housing facilities, offices, bases of operations, churches and private homes.” (77) The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee commented: “Why such information was sought has never been explained.” (78) Kennedy was deeply shocked by the assassination of Martin Luther King. Later that day he spoke in Indianapolis about the killing. He referred to the assassination of John Kennedy. When that happened he was “filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act” but pleaded with the black community not to desire revenge but to “make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.” (79) The assassination of Martin Luther King further radicalized Robert Kennedy. During a speech at the Indiana University Medical Center, one of the students called out: “Where are we going to get the money to pay for all these new programs you’re proposing?” Kennedy replied: “From you. I look around this room and I don’t see many black faces who will become doctors. Part of a civilized society is to let people go to medical school who come from ghettos. I don’t see many people coming here from the slums, or off of Indian reservations. You are the privileged ones here. It’s easy for you to sit back and say it’s the fault of the Federal Government. But it’s our responsibility too. It’s our society too… It’s the poor who carry the major burden of the struggle in Vietnam. You sit here as white medical students, while black people carry the burden of the fighting in Vietnam.” (80) The students reacted by hissing and booing Kennedy. His advisors warned him that if he was perceived as an extremist he would never win the election. It has been claimed that Kennedy was no longer thinking like a politician trying to maximize his vote. Instead he was determined to say what he believed. Kennedy told Jack Newfield that he would probably not win the nomination but “somebody has to speak up for the Negroes and Indians and Mexicans and poor whites.” Despite this pessimism, Kennedy won the Indiana primary with 42% of the vote. In an attempt to prevent Kennedy from being elected, J. Edgar Hoover leaked a report to Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson that when Kennedy was attorney general he had authorized the FBI to wiretap Martin Luther King. (81) Despite this news, Kennedy continued to get the vote of the black community and his campaign went well in California. However, rumours were already spreading that Kennedy would die during the campaign. The FBI had picked up reports of an overheard conversation between Jimmy Hoffa and a fellow prisoner in the Lewisburg penitentiary about a contract to kill Kennedy. (82) One of the more chilling stories appeared in “American Journey”. Jimmy Breslin asked several reporters around a table whether they thought Kennedy had “the stuff to go all the way”. One of the men at the meeting, John J. Lindsay replied: “Yes, of course, he has the stuff to go all the way, but he’s not going to go all the way. The reason is that somebody is going to shoot him. I know it and you know it, just as sure as we’re sitting here. He’s out there waiting for him.” (83) On 4th June, 1968, Harold Weisberg appeared on television in Washington where he discussed the possibility of Robert Kennedy being assassinated. Weisberg recalled a meeting with a Kennedy aide. Weisberg asked why Kennedy had supported the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report. He replied: “it is simple, Bobby wants to live.” Kennedy’s friend added that there were “too many guns between Bobby and the White House”. Weisberg asked who controlled these guns. The friend replied in such a way that Weisberg got the impression that he meant the CIA. (84) Kennedy won the primary in California obtaining 46.3% to McCarthy’s 41.8%. On hearing the result Kennedy went down to the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel to speak to his supporters. He commented on “the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society; the divisions, whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups or on the war in Vietnam”. Kennedy claimed that the United States was “a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country” and that he had the ability to get people to work together to create a better society. (85) Kennedy now began his journey to the Colonial Room where he was to hold a press conference. Someone suggested that Kennedy should take a short cut through the kitchen. Security guard Thane Eugene Cesar took hold of Kennedy’s right elbow to escort him through the room when Sirhan Sirhan opened fire. According to Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, who performed the autopsy, all three bullets striking Kennedy entered from the rear, in a flight path from down to up, right to left. “Moreover, powder burns around the entry wound indicated that the fatal bullet was fired at less than one inch from the head and no more than two or three inches behind the right ear.” (86) An eyewitness, Donald Schulman, went on CBS News to say that Sirhan “stepped out and fired three times; the security guard hit Kennedy three times.” As Dan Moldea pointed out: “The autopsy showed that three bullets had struck Kennedy from the right rear side, travelling at upward angles – shots that Sirhan was never in a position to fire.” (87) Kennedy had been shot at point-blank range from behind. Two shots entered his back and a third shot entered directly behind Kennedy’s right ear. Most of the eyewitness claimed afterwards that Sirhan was never in a position to fire his gun from close-range. It has therefore been argued that there was a second gunman firing at Kennedy. One possibility is that Thane Eugene Cesar was the other gunman. Television producer Richard Lubic, an eyewitness to the shooting, saw Cesar with his “weapon in his hand and was pointing it down in Kennedy’s general direction”. Lubic gave this information to the police after the shooting, but he was never asked about it during his testimony in court. Kennedy’s official bodyguard, former FBI agent Bill Barry, also saw Cesar with his gun in his hand and told him to put it back in his holster. (88) One witness, Karl Uecker, who struggled with Sirhan when he was firing his gun, provided a written statement in 1975 about what he saw: “There was a distance of at least one and one-half feet between the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun and Senator Kennedy’s head. The revolver was directly in front of my nose. After Sirhan’s second shot, I pushed the hand that held the revolver down, and pushed him onto the steam table. There is no way that the shots described in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun. When I told this to the authorities, they told me that I was wrong. But I repeat now what I told them then: Sirhan never got close enough for a point-blank shot.” (89) The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) ignored this evidence and argued that Sirhan Sirhan was a lone gunman. Sirhan’s lead attorney, Grant Cooper, went along with this theory. As he explained to William Turner, “a conspiracy defence would make his client look like a contract killer”. Cooper’s main strategy was to portray his client as a lone-gunman in an attempt to spare Sirhan the death penalty by proving “diminished capacity”. Sirhan was convicted and sentenced before William W. Harper, an independent ballistics expert, proved that the bullets removed from Kennedy and newsman William Weisel, were fired from two different guns. (90) After Harper published his report, Joseph P. Busch, the Los Angeles District Attorney, announced he would look into the matter. Thane Eugene Cesar was interviewed and he admitted he pulled a gun but insisted it was a Rohm .38, not a .22 (the calibre of the bullets found in Kennedy). He also claimed that he got knocked down after the first shot and did not get the opportunity to fire his gun. The LAPD decided to believe Cesar rather than Donald Schulman, Karl Uecker and William W. Harper and the case was closed. Cesar admitted that he did own a .22 H & R pistol. However, he insisted that he had sold the gun before the assassination to a man named Jim Yoder. William Turner and Jonn Christian tracked down Yoder in October, 1972. He still had the receipt for the H & R pistol. It was dated 6th September, 1968. Cesar therefore sold the pistol to Yoder three months after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. (91) Cesar had been employed by Ace Guard Service to protect Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. This was not his full-time job. During the day he worked at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank. (92) According to Lisa Pease, Cesar had formerly worked at the Hughes Aircraft Corporation. (93) Lockheed and Hughes were two key companies in the Military-Industrial-Congressional Intelligence Complex. Cesar was a Cuban American who had registered to vote for George Wallace’s American Independent Party. (94) In an interview he gave to Theodore Charach he expressed extreme hostility to the Kennedy brothers: “He (Robert Kennedy had the same ideas that John (Kennedy) did and I think John sold the country down the road. He gave it to the commies.” Cesar added: “The black man now for the last four to eight years has been cramming this integrated idea down our throats, so you learn to hate him.” (95)

I agree Bruce. I believe that the CIA/FBI have encouraged this view of JFK researchers. For example, see the forced FBI document that suggests that Monroe and JFK were murdered because of information they had about UFOs. I have now moved this thread to the "Political Conspiracies" section.

Evelyn Lincoln wrote a letter to Richard Duncan, a teacher at Northside Middle School in Roanoke, on 7th October, 1994: "As for (sic) the assassination is concerned it is my belief that there was a conspiracy because there were those that disliked him and felt the only way to get rid of him was to assassinate him. These five conspirators, in my opinion, were Lyndon B. Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA, and the Cubans in Florida." Another important point about the reasons for the assassination appears in her book, Kennedy and Johnson (1968) "As Mr. Kennedy sat in the rocker in my office, his head resting on its back he placed his left leg across his right knee. He rocked slightly as he talked. In a slow pensive voice he said to me, 'You know if I am re-elected in sixty-four, I am going to spend more and more time toward making government service an honorable career. I would like to tailor the executive and legislative branches of government so that they can keep up with the tremendous strides and progress being made in other fields.' 'I am going to advocate changing some of the outmoded rules and regulations in the Congress, such as the seniority rule. To do this I will need as a running mate in sixty-four a man who believes as I do.' Mrs. Lincoln went on to write "I was fascinated by this conversation and wrote it down verbatim in my diary. Now I asked, 'Who is your choice as a running-mate?' 'He looked straight ahead, and without hesitating he replied, 'at this time I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.'" Notice the reference to "making government service an honorable career". A few days before he spoke to Lincoln he had sacked LBJ's friend, Fred Korth, as Secretary of the Navy, because of the corrupt TFX deal. His brother, Robert, was at the same time leaking information to John Williams, about the corrupt activities of LBJ. On the day of the assassination Don Reynolds gave details of how Bobby Baker had arranged a $100,000 payoff to LBJ as a result of the TFX contract to a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee. LBJ might not have organized the assassination, but boy did he get lucky. Without the assassination of JFK he would have been impeached by Congress. As LBJ said himself about the TFX contract, "I am going to end up in prison over this."

Mel, the best account can be found in this interview with Scott Enyart. http://www.blackopradio.com/inc_favorite.html For references to where I got my information on Enyart see the early part of this thread. Now what about some references from you. What was the name of the person who said Enyart was lying? If Enyart was lying, why did the LAPD not use the photographs to expose his false story? The LAPD admitted they took the film from Enyart’s camera. They even handed back those photographs that were not of the assassination. Detective Dudley Varney said photographs were needed as evidence in the Sirhan trial. The photographs were not presented as evidence but Enyart was told by Varney that the court had ordered that all evidential materials had to be sealed for twenty years. This was a lie. In 1988 Enyart requested that his photographs should be returned. Why should he do this if they proved that he had lied about taking pictures of the assassination? At first the State Archives claimed they could not find them and that they must have been destroyed by mistake. Enyart filed a lawsuit which finally came to trial in 1996. During the trial the Los Angeles city attorney announced that the photos had been found in its Sacramento office. Once again the LAPD had the opportunity to expose Enyart as a xxxx. However, they did not do this. Instead they were brought to the courthouse by the courier retained by the State Archives. The following day it was announced that the courier’s briefcase, that contained the photographs, had been stolen from the car he rented at the airport. The courier later reported that he had been contacted by the LAPD who wanting to know details about the car he was driving from the airport. He thought this was very suspicious because nothing like this had ever happened before. The photographs have never been recovered and the jury subsequently awarded Scott Enyart $450,000 in damages. However, the LAPD challenged this ruling and he was instead offered an out of court settlement. Part of the deal involves a promise never to talk about the case again. He has refused this offer and is still waiting for his money. Scott Enyart is clearly telling the truth in this matter. I wonder what your motivations are for spreading stories that he is lying.

Mel, the best account can be found in this interview with Scott Enyart. http://www.blackopradio.com/inc_favorite.html For references to where I got my information on Enyart see this thread. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6487 Now what about some references from you. What was the name of the person who said Enyart was lying? If Enyart was lying, why did the LAPD not use the photographs to expose his false story? The LAPD admitted they took the film from Enyart’s camera. They even handed back those photographs that were not of the assassination. Detective Dudley Varney said photographs were needed as evidence in the Sirhan trial. The photographs were not presented as evidence but Enyart was told by Varney that the court had ordered that all evidential materials had to be sealed for twenty years. This was a lie. In 1988 Enyart requested that his photographs should be returned. Why should he do this if they proved that he had lied about taking pictures of the assassination? At first the State Archives claimed they could not find them and that they must have been destroyed by mistake. Enyart filed a lawsuit which finally came to trial in 1996. During the trial the Los Angeles city attorney announced that the photos had been found in its Sacramento office. Once again the LAPD had the opportunity to expose Enyart as a xxxx. However, they did not do this. Instead they were brought to the courthouse by the courier retained by the State Archives. The following day it was announced that the courier’s briefcase, that contained the photographs, had been stolen from the car he rented at the airport. The courier later reported that he had been contacted by the LAPD who wanting to know details about the car he was driving from the airport. He thought this was very suspicious because nothing like this had ever happened before. The photographs have never been recovered and the jury subsequently awarded Scott Enyart $450,000 in damages. However, the LAPD challenged this ruling and he was instead offered an out of court settlement. Part of the deal involves a promise never to talk about the case again. He has refused this offer and is still waiting for his money. Scott Enyart is clearly telling the truth in this matter. I wonder what your motivations are for spreading stories that he is lying.

She also had an affair with LBJ. Her biography contains no information at all on LBJ's corrupt activities. In fact, it is a work of propaganda. I always thought it strange that Goodwin should end up marrying Doris Kearns.

I thought it might be worth starting a thread on Richard N. Goodwin. He was born in Boston on 7th December, 1931. He graduated from Tufts University in 1953. He then went on to study law at Harvard University. Goodwin joined the Massachusetts State bar in 1958. He worked for Felix Frankfurter before being appointed as special counsel to the Legislative Oversight Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1959 John F. Kennedy appointed Goodwin as a member of his speech writing staff. The following year he became Kennedy's assistant special counsel. Goodwin was also a member of Kennedy's Task Force on Latin American Affairs and in 1961, was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, a position he held until 1963. As one of Kennedy's specialists in Latin-American affairs, Goodwin helped develop the Alliance for Progress, an economic development program for Latin America. Goodwin also served as secretary-general of the International Peace Corps. In a review of Edward J. Epstein’s book, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, Goodwin called for the setting up of an “independent group” to look again at the Kennedy assassination. (1) The next day the New York Times commented that “Mr. Goodwin is the first member of the President’s inner circle to suggest publicly than an official re-examination be made of the Warren Report.” (2) In his book, Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, Goodwin explained the significance of the deaths of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. “The sixties… was a time when most Americans felt the future could be bent to their wills. The large public events of the time cut deeply into our personal lives: the civil rights movement, the sit-ins, the beginnings of the women’s movement, the War on Poverty. It was the time of the New Frontier and the Great Society and the dream of Martin Luther King. And then, the experiment barely begun, it collapsed in the voracious terrain of Vietnam. The sixties, so filled with promise, came to an end. Not a failure, but abandoned. Never given a chance.” (3) Notes 1. Richard N. Goodwin, Book Week (23rd July, 1966) 2. New York Times (24th July, 1966) 3. Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties, 1988 (page 543)

Namebase entry for Seth Kantor: http://www.namebase.org/main4/Seth-Kantor.html Davis,J. Mafia Kingfish. 1989 (222, 297-8) Duffy,J. Ricci,V. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. 1992 (259) Fensterwald,B. Coincidence or Conspiracy? 1977 (557-8) Fonzi,G. The Last Investigation. 1993 (325-6) Groden,R. Livingstone,H. High Treason. 1990 (392-3) Kantor,S. The Ruby Cover-up. 1992 (351-84) LaFontaine,R.& M. Oswald Talked. 1996 (215) Liberation Magazine 1977-04 (7) Lobster Magazine (Britain) 1993-#26 (26) Marrs,J. Crossfire. 1990 (206, 328, 366, 414, 536) National Reporter 1987-SP (46-7) Newman,J. Oswald and the CIA. 1995 (10) Scheim,D. Contract on America. 1988 (125-6, 234, 256)

Done.

Thank you for pointing this out. Do you have his email address? It would be good to have him discuss his book on the Forum.

The idea that someone is a communist because their father was a communist (is this a fact or was his grandfather a communist?), is completely bizarre. You will to apply more logic if you are going to contribute anything of any worth to the investigation. By the way, if you think the politics of your parents is really that important, you should do some research into Michael Paine’s father. The thing about the Quakers is that actually follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. That is why they refuse to fight in wars. Like Jesus Christ they are pacifists. All early Christians were pacifists. That is why they were thrown to the lions (they refused to fight for the Roman Army). This changed when the religion was nationalized by the Roman state. After that, “Christians” were told by the Pope that it was okay to fight in wars. Quakers have a long record of supporting the rights of minorities. They were heavily involved in the civil rights movement. Ruth and Michael Paine were both members of the American Civil Liberties Union. You also made some strange comments on the Louis Mortimer Bloomfield thread yesterday. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6622 For obvious reasons. I see no connection between Jews and the assassination of JFK. Some Jews might have been involved in the assassination and the cover-up, James Angleton for example, but it has nothing to do with their religious beliefs. It is true that a fairly high percentage of people in the American Communist Party were Jewish. This is true of the Communist Party in every country. There is a good reason for this: Anti-Semitism. Jews have always being persecuted and they were understandable attracted to a movement that claimed it was in favour of equality and against the persecution of racial minorities. It is also true that a high percentage of white people involved in the civil rights movement in America in the 1950s and 1960s were Jewish. The same is true of the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Unlike some other persecuted people, the Jews have often taken the side of the underdog. It is something that I admire in the Jews. Don't you? I am afraid that you have been reading too much McCarthyite propaganda. It is true that McCarthy, using material provided by J. Edgar Hoover, accused some CIA officials of being sympathetic to communism. This resulted in Cord Meyer being suspended from duty. This was because Meyer’s wife had been a member of the American Labor Party in her youth. Other leading CIA officials had been Roosevelt New Dealers before the war. Of course McCarthy considered liberals to be the same as communists. McCarthy was being used by Hoover who feared that the CIA that had been established in 1947 had taken away some of his power. These claims were part of a power struggle. It was a fight that Hoover lost. It is complete nonsense to portray the CIA as being sympathetic to communism. In fact they were all fanatically opposed to it. Most of them developed these opinions while serving in the OSS during the Second World War.

Seth Kantor deserves his own thread. I have created it here: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=6672

I think Seth Kantor deserves his own thread. He is one of the few journalists who questioned the Warren Commission Report. What few people know is that he also played an important role in exposing the link between LBJ and the TFX scandal. Seth Kantor was born on 9th January, 1926. During the Second World War Kantor served in the United States Marines. After the war he became a journalist and worked for several newspapers including the Fort Worth Press, Denver Rocky Mountain News, Lamar Daily News, the Pueblo Chieftain, and Dallas Times Herald. While working in Dallas he became friendly with Jack Ruby who supplied him with the material for several stories that appeared in his newspaper. Kantor was in the presidential motorcade when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza. He arrived at Parkland Hospital while Kennedy was receiving medical care. Kantor testified before the Warren Commission that while in the hospital he entered into a conversation with Jack Ruby. It has been suggested that Ruby might have been involved in tampering with the evidence. Ruby denied he had been at the hospital and the Warren Commission decided to believe him rather than Kantor. After the Kennedy assassination, Kantor worked for the Scripps-Howard newspaper group in Washington. Later he worked as a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution and the Detroit News. In 1974 Kantor won the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Professional Journalism Society Medallion. In his book Who Was Jack Ruby (1978), Kantor examines the reasons why the Warren Commission seemed to be unwilling to carry out "an in-depth probe of Ruby's past". Kantor also provides information that suggests that Ruby was "allowed" into the Dallas Police Station so that he could kill Lee Harvey Oswald. This was reissued as The Ruby Cover-Up (1992). Seth Kantor died of a heart attack in Washington on 17th August, 1993. At the time he was working on another book on the JFK assassination.

See below:

Inside the Shadow Government was published in 1988. Written by Edith Holleman and Andrew Love, the book is the declaration of Plaintiffs’ Counsel filed by the U.S. District Court, Miami, Florida, on 31st March, 1988. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two U.S. journalists based in Costa Rica, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey. The 29 defendants included several members of Operation 40. This is what the document has to say about Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero. (1) Quintero was a member of the Operation 40 assassination team (page 7) (2) Thomas Clines worked under Ted Shackley as a case officer for Operation 40. Clines directly supervised many of the Cuban exiles including Rafael Quintero, Felix Rodriquez and Raul Villaverde. Edwin Wilson also worked under Clines as part of Operation 40. (3) Shackley brought Quintero, Villaverde and Rodriguez to Laos to train men to perform assassinations. Quintero was a specialist sniper. (4) Between September 1973 and April 1975, Shackley, Clines, Secord and Quintero siphoned off a percentage of the funds derived from the opium profits of Vang Pao. (5) Shackley, Clines and Quintero had strong ties with the Nugan Hand Bank. (6) Clines, Wilson, Shackley, Quintero and Ricardo Chavez (another member of Operation 40) set up American Petroleum Institute Distributors (API). (7) Shackley, Clines and Quintero helped arrange the assassination of anti-Shah activists in Iran. Rafael and Raul Villaverde were used as assassins. (8) In August 1976, the top three managers of the IBEX project – William C. Cottrell, Robert R. Krongard and Donald G. Smith were assassinated. Gene Wheaton believes the men were killed to cover up a scam for skimming profits from the IBEX project. Wheaton also believes that Secord, Clines, Hakim, Shackley and Quintero were involved in these assassinations. (9) Quintero told Wheaton that “if he were ever granted immunity and compelled to testify about past acts, it would be the biggest scandal ever to hit the United States”. (10) Between March and July 1979, Quintero supplied arms and munitions to Anastasio Somoza. (11) William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beruit, worked with Quintero at the Pemex Corporation in the early 1980s. (12) Quintero was providing arms to the Contras from March 1984. (13) In 1986 Quintero asked Felix Rodriguez to obtain a fraudulent end user certificate from an official in El Salvador. (14) In July 1985, Oliver North had a meeting with Secord, Clines and Quintero concerning funds for the FDN. (15) In March 1986 Quintero was in Costa Rica managing an airstrip. (16) Quintero had originally been trained as an assassin by Carl Jenkins. Notes 1. Testimony of Felix Rodriguez, Iran-Contra Hearings, 27 May, 1987 (pages 231-243) 2. Miami Herald, 23rd October, 1986, Washington Post, 24th October, 1986 and John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, 1986 (page 370) 3. Deposition of Gene Wheaton (1-3, 7-8 March, 1988) 4. Interview with Frank Terpil by Jim Hougan conducted in 1983 5. James A. Nathan, Dateline Australia: America’s Foreign Watergate, Foreign Policy, 1982-1983 (page 183) 6. Australia-New South Wales Joint Task Force Report on Drug Trafficking, 1983 (page 736) 7. Edwin Wilson, statement (17-18 December, 1987) 8. Deposition of Gene Wheaton (1-3, 7-8 March, 1988) 9. Deposition of Gene Wheaton (1-3, 7-8 March, 1988) 10. Edwin Wilson, statement (17-18 December, 1987) 11. No documentation supplied. 12. Deposition of Carol Hernandez Prado (5 May, 1987) 13. Testimony of Felix Rodriguez, Iran-Contra Hearings, 27 May, 1987 (pages 231-243) 14. Iran-Contra Congressional Report (page 60) 15. Deposition of Tomas Castillo, Iran-Contra Congressional Report (page 20) 16. Deposition of Gene Wheaton (1-3, 7-8 March, 1988)

April 26, 2006 Dear JFK Assassination Researcher, If you are not already aware, we would like to take a moment to introduce you to the Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF). In honor of Mary Ferrell, the MFF offers a unique opportunity for education and research into the assassination of John F. Kennedy via our website, www.maryferrell.org. The website houses the largest searchable electronic archive of materials on this topic, comprised of over 200,000 pages of government documents, hundreds of books, essays and multimedia. Recent additions to our collection include the entire set of Warren Commission Documents, and we are now processing the CIA Segregated Collection, courtesy of the Assassination Archives and Research Center. One of the goals of the Foundation is to support researchers like you by offering access to an incredible amount of information that in some instances has not existed until now in an electronic format. Our website offers the ability to review both primary and secondary resources using powerful search tools. Most recently we've included the ability to search fields in the Record Identification Forms (RIF) that accompany documents released under the 1992 JFK Records Act. The MFF website currently affords the ability for members to review books and essays and to attach informative comments to documents. We encourage you to be a part of this attempt to provide engaging and detailed information about the Kennedy assassination. We are interested in what you think of our website. Please take a moment to review what we have to offer. Basic membership is free and it is easy to sign up. We hope to continue to engage more authors and experts via such offerings as our audio interview show, entitled Unredacted. We also have begun publishing essays online and would be pleased to review submissions for possible inclusion on the website. If you are interested, please contact us at info@maryferrell.org. We do hope you join us and get involved! It is researchers like you who remind us that history really does matter. Sincerely, Lona Therrien Executive Director Mary Ferrell Foundation http://www.maryferrell.org/

Dawn it has to be remembered that Gerry Hemming took Murgado to Joan Mellen. I asked his son, Amaury Murgado, about this. He replied by email on 5th November, 2005: "As to any of Gerry Hemming's comments, my father and him go way back and my father says he is the real John Wayne. My father confirmed that he saved Gerry's life once. My father will never contradict Gerry, right or wrong. My father has never come forward except when Gerry has asked him to, hence the few limited interviews he has granted. Like it or not that's the way it is. They have been through too much together." Murgado only provided information to Joan Mellen as a favour to Gerry Hemming. I find this highly suspicious. Especially as Hemming appears to have been active as a disinformation agent. Also, my contacts in the anti-Castro Cuban community tell me that Murgado was only a minor figure in these events and never had a relationship with Robert Kennedy.