Did the Soviets/Castro organize the assassination?

[Tim Gratz]

Robert Charles-Dunne wrote:

"Arguendo, let's suppose Castro plotted against Kennedy. Would he have selected a fallguy whose own personal history tracked straight back to Moscow and Cuba?"

Therefore you must believe LHO was a sincere leftist, Castro-lover, I take it?

What if, as many suspect, LHO was an agent of U.S. intelligence? Then it would make perfet sense to make LHO the patsy, guaranteeing a cover-up.

[Ron Ecker]

Despite what Dawn says, I believe LBJ thought Castro did it.  Maybe he suspended the anti-Castro activities because he did not want to be on Fidel's hit list!

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I suspect that LBJ suspended the anti-Castro activities because they had proven to be a stupid waste of time. And LBJ had no intention of starting off his own presidency with his own Bay of Pigs, "covertly" supporting another exile invasion of Cuba with no guarantee of success. If leaving Castro alone meant again betraying the anti-Castro Cubans, so be it. He had Vietnam to worry about, an issue that probably played a significant role in his predecessor's death. LBJ knew we'd be going to war there after the 1964 election and he was going to need support (along with some convenient provocation, hence the Gulf of Tonkin resolution). Another Cuba fiasco was the last thing he needed.

Ron

[Tim Gratz]

Robert Charles-Dunne wrote:

The fact that any number of people subscribe to any given theory doesn't give it weight or validity. Many more people than you cite above, who were far more involved in the investigations of the day, believed that Oswald acted alone. Does that make it true?

These people were unaware of our country's efforts to kill Castro. The CIA chose not to tell the Warren Commission. Richard Helms said "We were never asked." At least one WC staff counsel said that had the WC known about the Castro polts it would have proceeded much differently.

And, as I am sure you know, much other evidence was withheld from the WC, some pointing to Cuban involvement.

WC did not know that Ruby helped negotiate Trafficante's release from Cuban jail in 1959.

WC did not know Trafficante was acting as paymaster for Castro intelligence agents in U.S.

CIA never told WC about Cubela, so obviously WC did not know about Cubela's links to Trafficante and to Valery Kostikov.

The cover-up may have prevented a nuclear exchange in 1964. But now it is time to get to the truth!

[Tim Gratz]

Ron Ecker wrote:

I suspect that LBJ suspended the anti-Castro activities because they had proven to be a stupid waste of time. And LBJ had no intention of starting off his own presidency with his own Bay of Pigs, "covertly" supporting another exile invasion of Cuba with no guarantee of success. If leaving Castro alone meant again betraying the anti-Castro Cubans, so be it. He had Vietnam to worry about, an issue that probably played a significant role in his predecessor's death. LBJ knew we'd be going to war there after the 1964 election and he was going to need support (along with some convenient provocation, hence the Gulf of Tonkin resolution). Another Cuba fiasco was the last thing he needed.

Ron, absolutely right! So Castro's gambit worked! He got the Kennedy brothers off his back!

(And we got the War in Vietnam!)

Edited January 13, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Ron Ecker]

Tim,

Considering all the evidence, and applying Occam's Razor, JFK was assassinated by powers within the U.S. government, powers in a position to cover up their own deed. Those powers (as institutions, and whatever individuals are left who were involved) are still covering up, and as institutions probably always will.

Ron

[Tim Gratz]

Ron, I agree that if the cover-up was accomplished by the conspirators, then, quite obviously, neither Castro nor Leonid Brezhnev did it.

But it is not necessarily true that the cover-up was accomplished by the conspirators. Certainly not all of the cover-up was.

For instance, RFK participated in the cover-up and I think we would all agree he did not do it.

So if some of the cover-up was by non-conspirators, it cannot be concluded that any of the cover-up was by a conspirator.

Therefore, the cover-up does not disprove that Castro did it.

I hope to demonstrate that the weight of the evidence indicates Castro did it.

What evidence, if any, supports a theory that, for instance, the CIA or any of its rogue elephants did it? From all I can tell, it boils down to: (a) arguably some CIA members had a motive; ( in drunken braggadocia, one CIA agent boasted about how "we took care of that (blankety-blank) Kennedy; and © some of the photographs of Dealey Plaza show men who look like they may be recognizable CIA agents.

What other hard evidence exists that anyone in the CIA did it?

Edited January 13, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Ron Ecker]

Tim,

In considering all the usual suspects, one has to look at means, motive, and opportunity, and who had the power to cover up. Many people, such as Castro, the Mafia, and the Russians had means, motive, and opportunity, but not the power to cover up the deed. Who does that leave? I would put the CIA, FBI, military, and LBJ at the top of the list, in no particular order but probably as a conspiratorial group.

Offhand I would say there is no hard evidence against any of them, just plenty of circumstantial evidence against all of them.

Ron

[Dawn Meredith]

Tim,

That's why I don't buy the idea that it's a mistake to think that those who planned the assassination are also those who covered it up. I think that those who planned the assassination are exactly those who covered it up. No one would commit such a crime without a plan in place to cover their tracks instead of  depending on someone else to hopefully do it for whatever reasons. That would be like invading Iraq with no exit strategy, which we all know would be stupid. Who would do it?

Ron

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Ron:

From my own perspective, I think it's important to draw a distinction between those who authored and executed the plan, and those who helped cover it up, because they're not necessarily the same people.

Allow me to hypothesize a scenario. You are John McCone. You arrive at work on 11/23/63, and are briefed by underlings. They claim that a few of your personnel may have been involved in the prior day's events. Despite the fact that you had no prior knowledge of those plans, you now must do all in your power to obscure the truth. To admit the truth is to invite the dismembering of your Agency, which you rightly view as a vital part of the nation's defense against an implacable Communist enemy. Disclosing the truth will not bring back the dead President, but will irreparably harm your Agency. Hence, you collude with others to ensure that your Agency isn't subjected to greater scrutiny than is necessary. This doesn't make you responsible for the President's murder, but does make you an accessory after the fact. Yet, what other viable choice is open to you?

Of course, it's a simplistic scenario, made only to illustrate a point. Aside from strict need-to-know compartmentalization being SOP at the Agency, I strongly suspect that McCone was completely out of the loop on any number of things, the result of what the Agency calls "selective briefing." Because DCIs were regularly questioned by Congressional intel committees, they were often shielded from the truth by their own underlings, to preclude sudden bursts of honesty while they were being grilled on the Hill.

[Moreover, McCone was Kennedy's nominee for DCI, after all, and by most accounts such a boy scout that when the anti-Castro plots came to his attention, he fretted he would be excommunicated from the Catholic church should those plots be made public. If McCone didn't even know about the attempts to whack Castro while they were current, as he insisted, whom within the Agency - presuming that anyone within the Agency had foreknowledge - would have made him privvy to plans to kill the US President?]

As for the coverup, I can see ample cause for virtually all agencies to collude in scuttling the truth, without it necessarily implicating them in the crime itself.

In a perfect world, FBI should have admitted that Oswald was well known to them [as the subsequent release of previously classified documents makes clear], but chose instead to claim no prior knowledge of him or his movements. To admit otherwise would only have raised questions about why the Bureau didn't monitor this man more closely. Given their role as Warren Commission "investigators" [conflict of interest, anyone?], one clearly sees why certain facts were filtered out of the data provided to the Commission. [A conspiracy only compounded its culpability.]

Ditto for the Secret Service, already in the frying pan for its multiple failures in Dealey Plaza. Whether or not Oswald fit their criteria for inclusion in the Protective Registry, the presumption of his sole guilt after the fact only made it more obvious that he should have been included, irrespective of SS criteria for doing so. [A conspiracy only compounded its culpability.]

Ditto for the CIA, the most obstructionist of all the agencies, and the one with the most incendiary data about Oswald: the Mexico City charade. Oswald meeting with the putative head of KGB's assassination department before Kennedy's murder might qualify as the kind of information one passes on to FBI, SS, et al. Oops.

Ditto for the DPD, which - with Oswald's death while in custody - had to to pin the blame on Oswald as a sole assassin, by itself and/or in collaboration with others. The alternative was to admit it had arrested the wrong man, and allowed him to be murdered while in its custody. [A conspiracy only compounded its culpability.]

Ditto for military intelligence of all branches of the service. I've always puzzled over how much Colonel Robert Jones seemed to immediately know about LHO - per Jones' HSCA testimony - yet nobody within the military volunteered that data to the Commission while it was sitting. By the time of Jones' admissions to the HSCA, Oswald's own military intelligence files had been "routinely" destroyed, as though he were any other run-of-the-mill leatherneck, thus depriving us the means to verify Jones' contentions.

None of the foregoing precludes individuals at each agency from being a part of the crime, of course. But collusion in the coverup doesn't necessarily demonstrate the colluders were [fore-]knowing participants in the crime.

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______________________________

The Castro speech I have scanned to this forum is primarily the first page and then 4-5 more pages, as it is a very long speech (as we know Castro does that). I first found this speech in the work of Paris Flommonde who did the very first book on the Garrison inverstigation. In fact he so titled it (to best of memory going back to 74)"An UNcommissioned report into the invertigation of Jim Garrison).

Castro's remarks are extremely illustrative of how very insightful he was so quickly after the assassination. I took these pages today from the longer version of the speech from Dr Marty Schotz' book, "History Will Not Absolve Us". I do hope the words can be enlarged enough to be legible as I was only able to scan, but not enlarge the print.

Hoperfully his words will put to rest once and for all the innane notion that "Castro did it". (Or as I have always called it "cover story no 2). LBJ KNEW BETTER, he knew tape was running when he was making those comments. LBJ knew damn well Castro did NOT kill JFK.

Dawn

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If someone has Marty Schotz book History Will Not Absolve Us, would you please post the portions of Castro's speech that I scanned to John yesterday, they were not good quality he said, sometning to so with not right scanning equipment. I think it is very important that readers on this thread read these words. I began with the start of the speech on p, 53, then pages 76-79. If someone else could post this I would greatly appreciate it.

Dawn.

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

Robert Charles-Dunne wrote:

"Arguendo, let's suppose Castro plotted against Kennedy. Would he have selected a fallguy whose own personal history tracked straight back to Moscow and Cuba?"

Therefore you must believe LHO was a sincere leftist, Castro-lover, I take it?

Obviously not, as was made clear in the very next lines of my post [which I've made bold, below], which you chose to delete, rather than acknowledge:  "Would he have instructed that fallguy to make ostentatious - but entirely superficial - attempts to found a FPCC chapter in NOLA? Would he have instructed the fallguy to make repeated visits to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City - knowing full well that this facility was under photographic and telephonic surveillance by CIA - for no purpose other than to create the illusion Cuba was behind his subsequent murder of the President? Seems rather self-defeating, doesn't it?"

What if, as many suspect, LHO was an agent of U.S. intelligence?  Then it would make perfet sense to make LHO the patsy, guaranteeing a cover-up.

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OK, let's assume LHO was US intelligence asset, as I do suspect. Yes, it would guarantee a coverup. And your Castro scenario becomes entirely superfluous, in the absense of any evidence that it existed. Unless, that is. you can provide any documentation that US intelligence operative Oswald advised his case officer of Cuban intelligence approaches to him.

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

Robert Charles-Dunne wrote:

The fact that any number of people subscribe to any given theory doesn't give it weight or validity. Many more people than you cite above, who were far more involved in the investigations of the day, believed that Oswald acted alone. Does that make it true?

These people were unaware of our country's efforts to kill Castro.  The CIA chose not to tell the Warren Commission.  Richard Helms said "We were never asked." At least one WC staff counsel said that had the WC known about the Castro polts it would have proceeded much differently.

"Unaware?"  You might have noticed that one of the Commissioners was a chap named Dulles.  You know, the bloke on whose watch as DCI those self-same "efforts to kill Castro" were first hatched.  You might also have noticed that neither Dulles nor any of his former colleagues rushed to volunteer this information for the Commission's consideration.  Any guesses why?

And, as I am sure you know, much other evidence was withheld from the WC, some pointing to Cuban involvement.

Citation please.  What "evidence pointing to Cuban involvement" was withheld?  Does it pass the sniff test?  The laugh test? 

WC did not know that Ruby helped negotiate Trafficante's release from Cuban jail in 1959.

And we still don't.  McWillie allowed that Ruby may have accompanied him during one of McWillie's visits to Trafficante in prison.  That's still a long way from making him a "negotiator" on Trafficante's behalf.  Moreover, there may have been an entirely different person Ruby wished to visit there, as is suggested by McWillie's own HSCA testimony. 

WC did not know Trafficante was acting as paymaster for Castro intelligence agents in U.S.

And we still don't, in the absense of you posting any actual evidence.  Citation please.

CIA never told WC about Cubela, so obviously WC did not know about Cubela's links to Trafficante and to Valery Kostikov.

Obviously, if Cubela was still operational [as the 1967 CIA Inspector General's Report makes clear] while the Commission was sitting, this would not be disclosed.  But it wasn't Trafficante or Kostikov who recruited Cubela to kill Kennedy [unless you finally post some evidence for this pet supposition]; it was the CIA who recruited Cubela to kill Castro, for which we have CIA's own admission.

The cover-up may have prevented a nuclear exchange in 1964.  But now it is time to get to the truth! 

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I doubt we'll get any closer to the truth by posting pet theories that don't synch with known facts. On the contrary, we must parse the facts - not delete or ignore them - in order to arrive at the truth.

[John Simkin]

First,  I have to say that most of us who have seriously wrestled with the conspiracy make use of the type of source material which is being discussed here - in this particular case Veciana's remarks about Phillips and Veciana's cousin in the MC embassy has some real potential value.

The problem of course is that you always have to try to assess the remarks against the source.  And a couple of things you can almost always count on is that any exile deepley involved in war against Castro will try to do to things in respect to the subject of JFK.  The first is to cast suspicion on Castro for JFK's murder,  that is so consistent as to be almost universal and its pretty easy to understand why.  The second is to disclaim that they really had nothing against JFK and he was OK - that's not quite as universal but its frequently said by individuals who are on record saying the exact opposite when not talking to an interviewer.

I've seen more than one interview including approaches to the FBI by exiles with stories about Castro agents in DP,  in at least one other case I recall the person mentioned seeing a spy in a photo in Life magazine.  When it was really investigated it just turned to vagueness.  Reminds me of Roselli telling his media friends he could name the Castro agents involved in the hit on JFK and the only individual he eventually was forced to cite was found be found was a long term inmate in a mental hospital.

Tim is going to be able to find many sources pointing to Castro.  Problem is that they will either be cases of generic exile hatred of Castro or they will be cases of planted stories with just that intent.  Some as part of the conspiracy and some as part of the cover-up.

....OK,  so that's my estimate of the data... Larry

[Thomas H. Purvis]

First,  I have to say that most of us who have seriously wrestled with the conspiracy make use of the type of source material which is being discussed here - in this particular case Veciana's remarks about Phillips and Veciana's cousin in the MC embassy has some real potential value.

The problem of course is that you always have to try to assess the remarks against the source.  And a couple of things you can almost always count on is that any exile deepley involved in war against Castro will try to do to things in respect to the subject of JFK.  The first is to cast suspicion on Castro for JFK's murder,  that is so consistent as to be almost universal and its pretty easy to understand why.   The second is to disclaim that they really had nothing against JFK and he was OK - that's not quite as universal but its frequently said by individuals who are on record saying the exact opposite when not talking to an interviewer.

I've seen more than one interview including approaches to the FBI by exiles with stories about Castro agents in DP,  in at least one other case I recall the person mentioned seeing a spy in a photo in Life magazine.  When it was really investigated it just turned to vagueness.  Reminds me of Roselli telling his media friends he could name the Castro agents involved in the hit on JFK and the only individual he eventually was forced to cite was found be found was a long term inmate in a mental hospital.

Tim is going to be able to find many sources pointing to Castro.  Problem is that they will either be cases of generic exile hatred of Castro or they will be cases of planted stories with just that intent.   Some as part of the conspiracy and some as part of the cover-up.

....OK,  so that's my estimate of the data... Larry

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LHO was nowhere near the experienced actor that was John Wilkes Booth, and therefore highly "overplayed" his role.

1. Attempt to point finger at Castro through Fair Play for Cuba.

2. Attempt to point finger at Castro through visit to Embassy in Mexico.

3. Attempt to point finger at Castro through purchase of guns from McKeon,

known arms provided to Castro.

4. Superficial contact with a variety of liberal elements.

As an old experienced squirrel hunter, I am reminded of how an experienced squirrel will run on the ground jumping onto one tree, only to jump off and run to other trees doing and repeating the same actions.

Many a good squirrel dog has been mislead by these planned antics, and is frequently found to be "barking up the wrong tree".

When placed into proper perspective, most of the actions of LHO demonstrate a planned actions, with some specific intent.

The FPCC altercation event on the streets of New Orleans is a prime example of how this act of the play was written.

Tom

[John Simkin]

In July, 1967, a British journalist, Comer Clark, interviewed Fidel Castro. During the conversation Castro told Clark that Oswald visited the Cuban consulate in Mexico City in September, 1963. The first time he told Cuban officials he wanted to work for them (Cuba). However, he was unwilling to discuss what he meant by this. The second time he said he wanted to “free Cuba from American imperialism”. Then he said “somebody ought to shoot that President Kennedy… maybe I’ll try to do it.”

When he heard this information Castro thought there was two possible explanations for Oswald’s behaviour: (1) Oswald was mentally unstable and was not to be taken seriously: (2) Oswald was part of some right-wing conspiracy that was looking for an opportunity to persuade the US army to invade Cuba. Castro came to the conclusion that he was mentally unstable. After the assassination of JFK he realised he was part of a right-wing conspiracy.

Castro’s story is actually supported by none other than J. Edgar Hoover. On 17th June, 1964, Hoover sent by special courier, a top-secret letter to Lee J. Rankin of the Warren Commission. The letter said “through a confidential source which has furnished reliable information in the past, we have been advised of some statements made by Fidel Castro, Cuban Prime Minister, concerning the assassination of President Kennedy.”

This letter was classified and even when it was released in 1976 what Castro said was deleted. The full details of this letter was not published until the appearance of Daniel Schorr’s book, Clearing the Air (1977). Schorr discovered that the letter basically repeated what Castro had told Comer Clark in 1967. However, it went into more detail about what he believed was a right-wing conspiracy to provoke an invasion of Cuba.

[John Dolva]

I wonder if that may go some way to explaining the backyard photos for me. I find them puzzling, pointless even. I still don't get fully their significance. They have such a theatrical nature about them. (please note this is not a statement on their authenticity, but rather a comment on a possible explanation that may fit a picture of Oswald as an (or part of a group) of agent/s provocateur/s should they be found to be genuine.)

Agent provocateur (quoted in entirity from wikipedia)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur

"NOUN: a·gent pro·vo·ca·teur (-zhä prô-vôkä-tr) (plural: agents provocateurs) :

A person employed to associate with suspected individuals or groups with the purpose of inciting them to commit acts that will make them liable to punishment."

"An agent provocateur is a person assigned to provoke unrest, violence, debate, or argument by or within a group while acting as a member of the group but covertly representing the interests of another. In general, agents provocateurs seek to secretly disrupt a group's activities from within the group.

An agent provocateur is often a police officer whose duty is to make sure suspected individual(s) carry out a crime to guarantee their punishment; or who suggests the commission of a crime to another, in hopes they will go along with the suggestion, so they may be convicted of the crime the provocateur suggested. The phrase comes from the French language, where it means, roughly, "inciting agent".

The activities of agents provocateurs are typically called sting operations. Agents provocateurs are typically used to investigate consensual or "victimless" crimes; since each participant in such a crime is a willing participant, only a police spy posing as a fellow participant in criminal activity is likely to be able to uncover such a crime.

Agents provocateurs are also used against political opponents. Here, it has been documented that provocateurs deliberately carry out or seek to incite counter-productive and/or ineffective acts, in order to foster public disdain for the group and provide a pretext for aggression; and to worsen the punishments its members are liable for. Within the United States the COINTELPRO program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had FBI agents posing as political radicals in order to disrupt the activities of political groups the U.S. government found unacceptably radical, such as the Black Panthers. However, since there is some evidence that the Black Panther organization was itself established as a provocation, aimed at disrupting and discrediting the integrationist program and coalition politics strategy of the Civil Rights Movement, this example drawn from FBI archives may be deliberately deceptive. The activities of agents provocateurs against dissidents in Imperial Russia was one of the grievances that led to the Russian Revolution.

The activities of agents provocateurs pose a number of ethical and legal issues. Within common law jurisdictions, the law of entrapment seeks to discern whether the provocateur's target intended to commit the crime he participated in with the provocateur, or whether the suggestion to commit the crime began with the provocateur. It is also debatable whether the institutionalized deception that the use of agents provocateurs implies is in fact more harmful to the social order than the various consensual offenses typically investigated by provocateurs."

Edited July 24, 2005 by John Dolva

[John Simkin]

I have also just read Michael R. Beschloss’s “Kennedy v. Khrushchev: The Crisis Years: 1960-1963”. Beschloss is considered to be the most well-informed historians today writing about JFK’s foreign policy. In the final section of the book Beschloss considers the possibility of JFK being killed as a result of a conspiracy. Understandably he dismisses the idea that JFK was killed by the KGB or Castro. Beschloss points out that JFK’s death was a terrible political blow to both Khrushchev and Castro.

Beschloss argues that if it was a communist plot it would have originated in China. After all, the Chinese government, like right-wingers in America, were very concerned about the successful negotiations that were taking place between the United States and the Soviet Union. Beschloss points out that the only places where school children applauded when told of the JFK assassination, was in China and Dallas. He quotes Henry Brandon of the Sunday Times who visited the Soviet Union a month after the assassination and was surprised to find the mourning was “almost more intense in Moscow than in Washington”. Time and time again he was asked, “do you think Johnson organized the assassination?”

Beschloss clams that documents released since the fall of communism conforms that senior figures in the Soviet Union believed that JFK had been “murdered by the CIA, which could not forgive him for the Bay of Pigs and the Soviet détente”. These sources also show that the Soviets considered LBJ to be “reactionary” and “inflexible” and a more doctrinaire Cold War warrior than JFK. It of course made no sense for them to kill JFK.