David Talbot : Walter Sheridan and Jim Garrison

[Chris Cox]

Here, here. For those of us who have tried for years to unravel this ball with facts; a new, improved and tidied history only serves to wind it back up

[William Reymond]

Let's face it : this thread is a sad reminder that we will never be able to close this case. We are not united. Everytime one of us is mowing toward the truth, the rest of OUR community is spending a huge amount of energy to discredit his work. We don't need Bugliosi, McAdams or Posner to do the dirty job, we are doing it by ourselves ! It's just a shame.

I finished to read David's book. I really like it even if I don't share all his views. But, as a member of our community, I really want to thank you. For the first since the 70's, believing in a conspiracy, it's not a shame anymore. I was pleased to see that even Time ( yes, TIME !!!!! ) was offering his a page to make his case. Great job sir .

[William Kelly]

Letter to Time Magazine (unpublished):

Joan,

Thanks for sharing this letter with us. Even though I don't agree with your opinion of David Talbot's book, I think you are on the right track in focusing in on those anti-Castro Cuban operations that RFK did approve. Whether they were assassination plots or something else is a matter of dispute, but regardless, there are specific plots and operations that are directly related to what happend at Dealey Plaza that should be further detailed.

Of specific interest is this Charles Donald "Don" or "Charlie" Ford, of which there is a separate thread. - BK

Joan Mellen: ........Research has revealed his purpose: Bobby remained silent because he had something dark to hide. This underlies why no member of the Kennedy family, and no associates of the President, not the late Arthur Schlesinger, not Theodore Sorensen, not Richard Goodwin, or many others, including the next generation of Kennedys, would even discuss the issue for forty years and more.

A White House Memorandum declassified as one of the CIA's "Family Jewels," and available at George Washington University's National Security Archive, discloses a conversation in which President Gerald Ford was told by his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, how Richard Helms had confirmed for him that "Robert Kennedy managed personally the operation on the assassination of Castro."

Helms revealed only half of the truth. The CIA was engaged in separate plots against Castro, working on its own. Bobby, who had enlisted free-wheeling General Edward Lansdale, fresh from Vietnam, sought with his own recruits to organize a different set of plots designed to do away with Castro. A roaming Attorney General, Bobby had an office at CIA headquarters at Langley, running his Cuban operations, even as CIA officers like Helms, as Helms later revealed, somewhat gleefully, concealed from him their own activities.

In his 1998 oral history for the CIA, available at the National Archives, CIA officer Sam Halpern confirmed that Bobby Kennedy had developed his own plans for the murder of Castro. Halpern recounts his discovery that Bobby sent a CIA operative named Charlie Ford, alias Rocky Fiscalini, to Canada to recruit Mafia assassins for the purpose. Halpern was astonished, given Bobby's much-publicized efforts to battle the Mafia, but he checked out his information, and it was so.

Ramsey Clark confirmed for me that he personally had seen memos Lansdale prepared at Bobby's suggestion elucidating methods by which Castro could be dispatched. Like Halpern, with whom he had little in common politically, Clark was flabergasted. (Lansdale was not discreet about what he was up to either: at a meeting of President Kennedy's "Special Group - Augmented" in August 1962 he talked about the "elimination of leaders").

I discuss in "A Farewell to Justice" another example of Kennedy plots to murder Castro. This one was recounted to me by F. Lee Bailey, who has first hand knowledge of both Kennedy brothers being present in the Oval Office as Office of Naval Intelligence operative Guy Johnson introduced to them a Navy commander the Kennedys then enlisted to recruit a sniper to enter Cuba for the purpose of assassinating Fidel Castro.......

.........

.......

I established that Bobby Kennedy knew about Oswald, that Oswald's anti-Castro activities were known to Bobby months before the assassination of his brother, and that Oswald was even among those anti-Castro activists Bobby's people were attempting to enlist in assassination schemes against Castro. It is this fact that Bobby was trying desperately to conceal; this was why he did not, as Attorney General or as a United States Senator, act to investigate publicly the death of his brother. He had too much to hide, and his presidential ambitions were at stake.

Do you think "any of our people were involved?" Bobby demanded of his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz immediately after the assassination of his brother. Obviously he meant Oswald. Mankiewicz told me he had thought then: "Did you think there might be?"

...........

Another cover-up is not what we need.

From Joan Mellen's website:

I located a document from the CIA's own Secret History, in which the CIA's History Staff is interviewing a CIA officer named Sam Halpern. Halpern reveals his own incredulity that Bobby Kennedy should be working with the Mafia in attempts on the life of Castro at the very same time that he was trying to send other Mafia figures to jail. A CIA operative named Charley Ford, alias Charley Fiscalini, was assigned by Bobby Kennedy to make contact with Mafia types in this country and Canada for the purpose of murdering Castro.

To all this, Charley Ford testified under oath before the Church Committee. That Bobby Kennedy repeatedly attempted to enlist anti-Castro Cubans for these assassination attempts against Castro I learned first-hand from Isidro Borja, of the DRE. “I know Bobby Kennedy was behind it,” he told me indignantly, “because his people approached ME!” Borja told me Bobby's people did succeed in recruiting his good friend Rafael Quintero Ibaria, also known as “Chi Chi.”

From a review of Hersch's Dark Side of Camelot

According to notes obtained by Hersh, Harvey met on Jan. 25 with a C.I.A. scientist to discuss poisons for killing Fidel Castro, among others on the hit list. Hersh has also learned that in 1962, while the assassination efforts involving Mafia hit men were still under way, Bobby Kennedy was assigned his own operational officer in the C.I.A., a man named Charles Ford picked from the staff of Task Force W, then commanded by Bill Harvey. Ford's job was to handle contacts with Mafia chiefs while traveling under the pseudonym of Rocky Fiscalini, a name (along with Ford's own) that appears in Bobby Kennedy's office logs for 1962. But what Ford actually did for Kennedy remains unknown.

To me, it seems that the closer we get to those anti-Castro Cuban operations that RFK and the Special Group Augumented approved in 1963, whether they were assassinaton plots or not, they were the specific operations and operatiaves that were diverted from attacking Castro to killing JFK.

After all the talk about the plans that RFK developed to kill Castro, Castro didn't die, and it was JFK and RFK who were assassinated.

And if as much research was applied to detailing those plot to kill Castro that are directly related to the Dealey Plaza operation (whether LHO was the lone assassin or not), then the JFK assassination details will come unraveled, as they seem to be.

I have a gut feeling that C.D. Ford, as we learn more about him, will lead to where I want to go - the Dealey Plaza ringleaders.

Bill Kelly

[John Simkin]

Let's face it : this thread is a sad reminder that we will never be able to close this case. We are not united. Everytime one of us is mowing toward the truth, the rest of OUR community is spending a huge amount of energy to discredit his work. We don't need Bugliosi, McAdams or Posner to do the dirty job, we are doing it by ourselves ! It's just a shame.

I finished to read David's book. I really like it even if I don't share all his views. But, as a member of our community, I really want to thank you. For the first since the 70's, believing in a conspiracy, it's not a shame anymore. I was pleased to see that even Time ( yes, TIME !!!!! ) was offering his a page to make his case. Great job sir .

I agree, although I suspect this is more about creating interest in a book that was published in 2005.

Are you still involved in researching the JFK assassination? Was there ever an English edition of your book on Billie Sol Estes?

[Don Jeffries]

Joan,

Many people, including lots of well-informed researchers and students of the assassination, believe that the CIA murdered John F. Kennedy and then killed his brother Bobby five years later. Sources emanating directly or indirectly from the CIA who maintain that brother Bobby was indirectly to blame for JFK's assassination are thus, in many eyes, highly dubious. I read "A Farewell To Justice" and respect your views; however, on the matter of RFK, and his alleged culpability in the plots against Castro (and by extension, to those plots "backfiring" into the assassination of JFK), I have to strongly disagree with you. I admit to having a bias here- the Kennedys have always been heroes of mine, and I would find it difficult to believe any of them capable of the kind of chicanery and corruption that so many of our politicians have been guilty of. However, if clear and incontrovertible proof were produced (and I don't mean an old CIA memo or some snippets of conversation between the likes of Kissinger and Ford), then I'm not so smitten with them that I would deny the obvious truth. I just don't accept that Bobby Kennedy was fighting a crusade against the Mafia, and was in lockstep with his brother's plans for rapprochement with Castro, yet at the same time was directing a Mafia team of assassins to kill Castro. What possible sense does that make? But then again, what possible sense does the Lamar Waldron-school of thought make, wherein the JFK assassination was originally intended to spark a coup against Castro? Let's see, Castro and Cuba died as an American political issue with JFK in Dallas. Never again would the CIA or the Mafia try to overthrow him, even though under these theories the main impediment towards his removal (JFK) had been removed himself. What, then, stopped LBJ or even Nixon from acting against Castro? I think the whole "Cuban" connection is a red herring, and the "blame Bobby" stuff is just the most offensive part of it.

[William Reymond]

I agree, although I suspect this is more about creating interest in a book that was published in 2005.

John, it's so obvious that I didn't even mention it.

Are you still involved in researching the JFK assassination? Was there ever an English edition of your book on Billie Sol Estes?

Since JFK, le dernier témoin, I published 3 others books. None on them were related to the JFK assassination ( even if Bush Land was, for obvious reasons, heavy on Texas politics). My publisher was able to sold the translation rights for all of them. The only major countries who didn't buy the rights were UK and USA.

I got this very akward situation where I'm writing about US topics without, apparently, having the slight chance to be published there. My previous book about the secrets of the Coca-Cola Company was a major success In France and so it was published in 18 countries including most of Europe, China and Russia. But not the States. I will not draw any... conspiracy theories here but it's just akward.

As for me still working on the case, I never fully retired ( such thing is impossible. The JFK mysteries have addicting powers, aren't they ? ) but it was not my main concern for the last few years. My next project is not about the JFK assassination BUT it's related to it.

Edited July 15, 2007 by William Reymond

[Joan Mellen]

What is the point of looking back at Bobby Kennedy, and searching for the truth of what he stood for and how he behaved? There is, of course, the obvious value in discovering the truth of history no matter where it leads. But in my mind is also the danger that just as there is a tendency to look at the Kennedys with rose-colored glasses firmly in place, and to look backward with nostalgia to what never was, so today there may be the impulse to look to the Democratic Party for a meaningful alternative to Bush and Cheney. In accepting the facts about the Kennedys, we sharpen our analytic approach to similar false alternatives in the present.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Joan-- I share your belief that the Democrats will do very little if anything to fundementally alter the path of Bush. I think Bush has just continued a path of righward movemnt that began in 1968. (True he has radically accelerated along this path).

I am, however, concerned that cyniscism about the two parties' good cop bad cop act is sometimes used by writers like Chomsky Cockburn, and Hersh in an anacnronistic way. They apply this cynicism to 1960-68, and perhaps assume that the National Security State was as unified and monolithic then as it is today. They assume there was no room for different factions, or even the illusion of different factions.

We might like to convince oursleves we are being gritty realists by aplying today's cynicism to 1963. But isn't this as much an impediment to understanding the Assassinations as the idealization of the Kennedys that these self syled realists seek to correct in the mass media?

The National Security State was sixteen years old in 1963.

[Don Jeffries]

What is the point of looking back at Bobby Kennedy, and searching for the truth of what he stood for and how he behaved? There is, of course, the obvious value in discovering the truth of history no matter where it leads. But in my mind is also the danger that just as there is a tendency to look at the Kennedys with rose-colored glasses firmly in place, and to look backward with nostalgia to what never was, so today there may be the impulse to look to the Democratic Party for a meaningful alternative to Bush and Cheney. In accepting the facts about the Kennedys, we sharpen our analytic approach to similar false alternatives in the present.

What, then, is the point of looking back at anything? What was the point of your book? Of course, truth should always matter, especially to those of us who write books about historical events. I agree with you about looking to the Democrats for any real alternative to Bush (unless Kucinich is able to garner some real media attention). But then again, I think the real issue there is the bogus nature of our antiquated two-party system. We're long overdue for some truly alternative political parties, so that voters actually have some real choices.