Granma on the JFK Assassination: Luis Posada

[John Simkin]

Ron Ecker provided a link to this article in Granma on another thread but I think it deserves to be published in full.

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2006/enero/vie...3kennedy-i.html

Kennedy, conspiracy in Hamburg

BY GABRIEL MOLINA

ONE of the collateral objectives of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was that of liquidating the Cuban Revolution. But this aim was not achieved and that is the underlying reason that 45 years afterwards, the conspiracy continues. The latest machination has rebounded from Germany: "Hamburg, Jan 3 (DPA).—A TV documentary from the German public TV ARD has charged the Cuban Secret Service with the assassination of the U.S. president, John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

Wilfried Huismann, the documentary’s director, is the current instrument to affirm, according to the German agency: "It was Castro’s revenge for the CIA attempt to assassinate him with a poisoned pen."

It is not an accusation to be underestimated. The shocking assassination had such an impact on the world that even today, when it is evoked, somebody will remember where they were at the time.

For my part, on November 22, 1963, I was in the picturesque La Percherie restaurant in the port of Algiers, anticipating the house’s excellent snails with Helen Klein, the U.S. press chief of President Ahmed Ben Bella. We suddenly received the terrible news.

"President Kennedy has been assassinated!" Now they are going to blame Cuba," I immediately said to her.

"Don’t exaggerate," she answered.

We quickly went to the Prensa Latina agency on 26, Rue Claude Debussy, where I was working as a correspondent, for more information. There I learned how the radio stations were repeating that the Cuban government was responsible for the assassination. Surprised, Helen asked me how I had guessed it.

"I’m not a fortune teller," I explained, "But for the United States Cuba is the cause of all evil. A little bit of it because of hysteria and another little but because they are looking for a pretext to try and crush us."

However, a few hours later, the accusation vanished into the air with the same speed that it had entered. At that point everything was shrouded in mystery.

Fifteen years later, in Washington, the same charge was floating in the air for the umpteenth time. The Special Committee investigating the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King, was handling many theories on the assassination of the president of the United States. Once again the attempt to raise suspicions as to the Cuban government’s involvement was being floated in the media.

A Washington journalist with close links to the FBI, revealed to me in confidence that the version originally came from the CIA, which distributed a note stating that Oswald had committed the murder on behalf of the Cuban government. He added that the FBI forced the media to withdraw the accusation.

When I asked the veteran journalist why the FBI had taken the trouble to de-authorize the CIA, he explained that they considered the initiative an irresponsibility that could have unleashed incalculable consequences, such as a third world war.

The first significant investigation into the assassination was undertaken by the Warren Commission, which considered that theory and discounted it by stating that there was no such conspiracy.

However, starting in 1967, the Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson column once again raised identical accusations. The media lifted the tone by pointing to Cuba every time new evidence involving the establishment arose that Oswald did not act alone. It should be noted that during his career Anderson had at least been very close to the CIA. There was so much evidence that Congress decided to create its own Special Committee, headed by African-American Congressman Louis F. Stokes, to investigate the assassinations of John F. and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. After more than one year of arduous investigations the Stokes Committee arrived at interesting conclusions.

Among its findings Appendix C, Paragraph 2 states that on the basis of the available evidence the Cuban government was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

After enquiries in the United States and in Cuba as to the motives for the assassination, President Kennedy’s intention to normalize relations with Cuba emerged, in addition to other no less significant reasons within internal politics.

IMMORAL CIA-MAFIA COLLUSION

The Special Committee reached the conclusion that Carlo Marcello, the capo of New Orleans and part of Texas; Santo Trafficante of Florida; and James Hoffa, president of the truck drivers’ trade union, had the motives, means and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy.

Trafficante was a vital target in the Kennedy administration’s battle against organized crime. His name was among the 10 principal subjects to investigate and combat.

When Robert Kennedy found out about the CIA’s immoral collusion with the Mafia, he prohibited the officials involved from having recourse to such associations without informing him. But they continued doing so under the direction of Richard Helms.

The Committee report stated that Trafficante’s position in organized crime and drug trafficking and his role as the principal mafia link with criminal figures within the exile Cuban community, all furnished him with the capacity of organizing a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, as he did previously in the case of Fidel Castro.

The Committee established that there was a possible connection between Trafficante and Jack Ruby, particularly in Havana in 1959, when Ruby was in fact acting as a courier in the interests of the Cosa Nostra for transferring funds from the Cuban capital to Miami. Cuba supplied the evidence of that.

However, the Committee was unable to find any direct evidence as to Trafficante’s or Marcello’s involvement in the assassination of the president. New Orleans, the imperial capital of the latter, had turned into a significant scenario of the terrorist conspiracies. Characters of the ilk of Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, the Guillermo brothers and Ignacio Novo Sampoll, Eladio del Valle, Jorge Mas Canosa, Hermino Díaz and others used to go there.

The Special Committee also confirmed the theory that these terrorists of Cuban origin conspired as individuals for the commission of the crime. The same men who plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro did so to assassinate Kennedy. Shortly before being killed, John Roselli told columnist Jack Anderson that Cubans in Trafficante’s gang had taken part in the assassination.

The report concedes that the anti-Castroites were frustrated, embittered and angry and that their resentments were focused on Kennedy who, just before his death, had directed William Atwood to discuss the possibility of normalizing relations with Cuban representatives. The Cuban delegate to those talks was Carlos Lechuga, at that time UN ambassador. McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s security adviser, stated that the president wanted a report on the progress of the talks for when he returned from Dallas. Even after the death of his brother, Robert Kennedy also tried to suppress the anti-Cuba measures, but the new president, Lyndon Johnson, prevented it.

The Stokes Committee confirmed that Oswald’s contacts in the United States were counterrevolutionaries of Cuban origin and opted to openly look into these aspects, which had not been investigated by the CIA, closely involved with the Cuban-Americans. It decided to rigorously examine the groups that, apart from the motivation, had the capacity and the resources to be mixed up in the assassination.

There were many terrorist organizations in the period between the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and the assassination of Kennedy. But it was determined that there could have been a connection between Oswald and two of them: Alpha 66 and the Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE).

The Stokes Committee heard the testimony of Marita Lorenz, a beautiful spy recruited by Frank Sturgis, who recounted a meeting that she attended in Miami at the house of Orlando Bosch in which Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz and Oswald planned a visit to Dallas. She added that on November 15 she traveled to that city in a two-car caravan with Bosch, Sturgis, Díaz Lanz, Oswald, Gerry Hemmings and the Novo Sampoll brothers. There were various guns in the hotel rooms in which they stayed and they had a visit from Jack Ruby, subsequently Oswald’s executioner. More recently Lorenz stated that there Howard Hunt (Eduardo to the Cubans) handed money over to Sturgis on November 21 for an operation in an unstated locale and returned to Miami two or three hours after the assassination.

PHILLIPS, HANDLED THE DIRTY WORK

Antonio Veciano, the founder of Alpha 66, told the Committee that in the context of his activities against the Cuban government, he met on many occasions with a CIA official who gave his name as Bishop. And that in August 1963, in Dallas, Texas, the latter made contact with him in an office building, accompanied by a person whom he identified after the death of Kennedy as Lee Harvey Oswald.

Later Veciana confided to writer Gaeton Fonzi that Bishop’s real name was David Atlee Phillips who worked for the CIA in Havana under the cover of a businessman living in Apartment 502, 106, Humboldt Street.

From 1960, Atlee Phillips-Bishop was the Miami chief of propaganda for the ‘61 invasion of Cuba, together with Howard H. Hunt, the principal organizer of Watergate. In 1954, both of them succeeded in bringing down the Arbenz government in Guatemala. Cuban Security confirmed the identity of this CIA official, who organized the Cuban-American terrorist groups who, as late as 2003 were pressuring the Bush government to secure the release of Posada Carriles and his accomplices.

One of the members of the JURE group, Silvia Odio, testified in 1964 before the Warren Commission that a man whom she identified via the media as the Oswald who killed Kennedy, visited her apartment in Dallas in September 1963 with two other men of Latino appearance. She added that the two Spanish speakers told her that they were members of JURE.

One of them gave his name as Leopoldo and had a Cuban accent. The other, Angelo, seemed to be Mexican. The third introduced himself as León Oswald and was, for her, Lee Harvey Oswald. Cuban Security identified the other two as the Novo brothers, responsible for a long list of assassinations and other acts of terrorism.

Silvia gave the same testimony to the FBI and added that two days later, Leopoldo called her again and told that, according to León, they should have killed Kennedy after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Two months later Kennedy was assassinated.

The conclusions of the report were that Silvia’s statement is still credible and all the more so given that she insistently maintained the same arguments 15 years later.

That same day Nicholas Katzenbach, former justice secretary under the Johnson administration gave evidence and made allusion to internal fights and poor relations between the FBI and the CIA during the period of the investigation.

RICHARD HELMS ADMITTED THAT THE CIA ASSASSINATIONS WERE POLITCAL ACTIONS

The following day, September 22, Richard Helms, the former CIA director, provoked indignation among certain congress members and shock among the majority by appearing for seven hours before the Select Committee to respond to inquiries into the effectiveness of the CIA investigation after the assassination and if he had supplied the relevant information he possessed to others. At the time of Kennedy’s assassination Helms was head of the CIA clandestine service and President Johnson appointed him deputy director of the CIA one year later. And director in 1966.

Congressman Christopher J. Dodd asked whether the Warren Commission was informed of the attempts on the life of Fidel Castro and revealed his anger at the contacts between organized crime and the agency.

Helms replied that he had only informed the Warren Commission on the matters he was asked to.

At the insistence of congress members, he stated that activities against the Cuban Revolution included attempts to sabotage electricity plants and sugar refineries, burn cane fields and multiple types of terrorist actions. He added that this was a political action that could not solely be blamed on the agency, as the president, the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the Defense Department, State Department and the National Security Council were fully aware of the plans and had approved them.

A tall man with graying receding hair and cultivated manners, with his well-cut dark suit, Helms confronted his interrogators with great aplomb and traces of good humor. His distinguished aspect did not make it easy to envisage the man who gave orders to assassinate from his office desk. Coldly, with asepsis, he spoke of criminal attempts in complicity with mafia killers.

OSWALD’S CONTACTS WITH THE CIA DATE BACK TO 1960

Another of the documents on which he was interrogated referred to the CIA’s first contacts with Oswald; even though he informed the Warren Commission that there were none, they dated back to 1960. One of the CIA memos presented stated that Allan Dulles, despite being a member of the Commission, lectured his subordinates on how to conceal the CIA’s relations with Oswald.

Helms responded to these questions evasively.

Three days previously, Thomas J. Kelly and James J. Rowley, inspector and chief, respectively, of the Secret Service responsible for the president’s protection, shocked the whole of America by stating that despite the CIA and the FBI possessing information on Oswald, the Secret Service was not informed of it.

"Otherwise we would have known what we were doing on the day of the death of President Kennedy," stated Kelley and Rowley to the members of the Select Committee.

These and other findings made the Committee reach the conclusion that there was a lack of cooperation and coordination among the distinct government agencies; that the secret service was deficient in protecting the president and in analyzing the information that it possessed. Moreover, it lacked the personnel for his adequate protection.

In Paragraph 5 it is affirmed that neither the Secret Service (of the presidency), nor the FBI nor the CIA were involved. But it criticized them for not having adequately analyzed, investigated, utilized or inter-exchanged information that they possessed on the threats surrounding Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.

The report recommended that the Justice Department should continue the investigation, because they had found evidence of a conspiracy in which elements of the Italian-American mafia had participated and Cuban-American Mafiosi groups. It was not stated that these had historically been handled by the CIA, but it was insinuated. It confirmed that it was not possible to reach definitive conclusions as the CIA had refused to decode certain information. At the same time the CIA was criticized for not having rigorously investigated these groups of Cuban origin resident in Miami.

The decision to ask the Justice Department to investigate further also took into account the fact that the filmed and acoustic evidence analyzed demonstrated the possibility of a second individual on the floor from which Oswald supposedly fired and that there was probably more than one sniper.

The report also emphasized that neither did the FBI investigate the possibility of a conspiracy after the assassination and that the CIA was deficient, both before and after the killing.

Moreover, the Dallas police, like the entire population of Texas subjected at that time to an anti-Kennedy barrage of propaganda, likewise demonstrated themselves to be incapable of protecting him. The anti-Kennedy atmosphere there reached such an extreme that in the morning of that fateful November 22, 1963 pamphlets were distributed against the president.

The most aggressive was published in a Dallas daily as a full-page paid advertisement and bore a photo of Kennedy and the following provocative text: "Sought for treason: This man is sought for acts of treason against the United States.

Even after the assassination there was serious neglect over the transfer of Oswald. The photograph of his two guards looking the other way while Ruby approaches with impunity to shoot the accused is an eloquent one. Thus the most appropriate person in terms of revealing the motives and complexities of the case was silenced. Nevertheless, the officers on duty that day were not dismissed but subsequently promoted.

It wasn’t only Veciano who mentioned CIA intentions to implicate the Cuban government into the case. It was suspicious for all the world that for a long time before the attempt the CIA had tried to identify Oswald with the island and even put pressure on a Mexican employee at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico to corroborate that version.

The accusations against Cuba remained alive until the Stokes Committee ruled them out in 1978 after making investigations in Mexico and Havana, where they met with President Fidel Castro. Mr. Azcue, the Cuban consul in Mexico who refused Oswald a visa a few weeks before the assassination, in spite of his agitated insistence, testified before the sessions.

This session made us wonder exactly what President Kennedy wanted to say when he confided to his collaborator Clark Gifford shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion: Something very bad is going on within the CIA and I want to know what it is. I want to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds.

In its final report the Stokes Committee noted that the CIA refused to declassify certain important documents. When Frank Carlucci, deputy director of the CIA in 1978 and President Reagan’s national security advisor in 1987, was interrogated in one of the hearings, he stated that they came from highly sensitive sources and had to be protected.

One of the most important and worrying pieces of evidence found by the Stokes Committee was the tape recording found in the Dallas police station in which four shots can be heard and not three as the Warren Commission established. This finding was strengthened by the statement of the wife of Governor Connally that a second shot was fired at him and not the one that wounded the president in the throat.

GUILTY MASTERMINDS AND MATERIAL ASSASSINS

General Fabian Escalante, one of those investigating the case on the Cuban side, has stated that based on information from the State Security files, certain testimonies and an analysis of the facts and antecedents, Havana has reached conclusions as to the identity of the guilty parties that are similar to those of other investigators: the CIA, the Mafia and Cuban counterrevolutionaries planned and executed the assassination. He added that having studied the descriptions of witnesses to the crime, especially those expounded by former Judge Garrison, it is presumed that the sharpshooters of Cuban origin Eladio del Valle and Hermino Díaz were those ordered to fire, subsequently escaping in a Nash Rambler truck. And that the attempt was organized by two groups, one under the control of Jack Ruby and the other by Frank Sturgis, later chief of the Watergate plumbers.

The mafia participants, Escalante continued, were Santos Trafficante, Sam Giancana, John Roselli and, to a lesser degree, Carlos Marcelo and Jimmy Hoffa.

Among the CIA plotters he also mentioned David Atlee Phillips and Richard Helms, supervisor of anti-Cuban operations; General Cabell, former deputy chief of the CIA; Gerry Hemmings and other high-ranking officials.

The scandal, picked up by the press worldwide, led to the committee instructing the CIA executive to declassify the majority of the documents, which succeeded in hushing the protests. But doing so would have been to incriminate itself.

Unable to continue its investigations, on fulfilling the Congress mandate in December 1978, the Committee made the noteworthy suggestion that the Justice Department should continue the investigative line to resolve the mystery.

It is for that reason that Carter could not be allowed to win a second mandate. That had to be prevented by provocations such as the assault on the embassies that resulted in the Mariel exodus from Cuba. For that reason, 27 years after the investigation and 42 years after the assassination, the administrations of Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush Jr., which should have picked up the glove, have not lifted a finger to assume that task.

The most important documentation on the Dallas shooting has been retained as secret in a vault in the archives of the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon, and Hill not be classified until 2013.

In the years after the assassination more than 22 people involved in the case have died in more or less mysterious form, among them the main protagonists: Oswald and Ruby.

The list has been growing since 1963. At that rate, it is unlikely that anyone will be alive to testify. And what is worse, none of those guilty will be alive. Today the shady secret is transparent to everyone apart from those to whom it should be. Because the principal protagonists have acquired a terrible ascendancy over the U.S. government. German Wildried Husimann is no more than another pawn in this chess game. For that reason he is maliciously ignoring these sources. That conspiracy in Hamburg seeks to distract media attention from Luis Posada Carriles in order to release him. Because if Carriles should fulfill his threat to spill everything that he knows, Nixon’s Watergate will appear like a scratch on the surface of the perversity that is being concealed.

[Tim Carroll]

Later Veciana confided to writer Gaeton Fonzi that Bishop’s real name was David Atlee Phillips who worked for the CIA in Havana under the cover of a businessman living in Apartment 502, 106, Humboldt Street.

I have never heard before that Phillips lived on Humboldt Street, and from the inference I take it that he had some association with the Humboldt Apartments massacre. I would ask Tosh if he knows anything about this.

One of the members of the JURE group, Silvia Odio, testified in 1964 before the Warren Commission that a man whom she identified via the media as the Oswald who killed Kennedy, visited her apartment in Dallas in September 1963 with two other men of Latino appearance. She added that the two Spanish speakers told her that they were members of JURE. One of them gave his name as Leopoldo and had a Cuban accent. The other, Angelo, seemed to be Mexican. The third introduced himself as León Oswald and was, for her, Lee Harvey Oswald. Cuban Security identified the other two as the Novo brothers, responsible for a long list of assassinations and other acts of terrorism.

This is the first I've heard that Silvia Odio's two Latin visitors were ever identified as the Novo brothers.

The most important documentation on the Dallas shooting has been retained as secret in a vault in the archives of the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon, and Hill not be classified until 2013.

I assume the article was meant to say that the documentation will not be unclassified until 2013. That's sooner than my expectation.

T.C.

[John Simkin]

This Granma article should also interest members:

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2006/enero/vie...4familia-i.html

Havana. January 13, 2006

The Bush family, the Cuban mafia and the Kennedy assassination

BY REINALDO TALADRID and LAZARO BAREDO

IN 1959, a young officer and businessman from Texas received directions to cooperate in funding the nascent anti-Castro groups that the CIA decided to create, but it wasn’t until 1960 that he was assigned a more specific and overt mission: to guarantee the security of the process of recruiting Cubans to form an invasion brigade, a key aspect within the grand CIA operation to destroy the Cuban Revolution.

The CIA Texan quickly took a liking to the Cuban assigned to him for his new mission. The system of work, although intense, was simple. Féliz Rodríguez Mendigutía, "El Gato," would propose a candidate to him, who would then be checked out, both in the Agency and among the Miami groups, and finally, the Texan would give the go-ahead.

In that period, Félix Rodríguez already knew quite a few Cubans, like Jorge Mas Canosa (subsequently the leader of various counterrevolutionary organizations and then president of the Cuban-American National Foundation) and had confirmed his loyalty to "the cause" and to the Americans. For that reason he was among the first to be proposed. He passed through the process satisfactorily, and in a meeting in the city of Miami, which the Texan liked to make as formal as possible, Jorge Mas Canosa officially became an agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Jorge Mas didn’t know how to thank Félix for what he had done for him. From that moment he was constantly grateful to him and, at the same time, obedient to his every petition.

But Jorge Mas was far from imagining the significance of this recruitment on the rest of his life. The significance rested on the fact that that Texan officer who undertook his recruitment process, approved it and then notified him at that meeting, was none other than George Herbert Walker Bush, the same man who, later, between 1989 and 1992, was the 41st president of the United States.

Various sources coincide on the foregoing. Paul Kangas, a Californian private investigator, published an article containing part of his investigations in The Realist in 1990, in which he affirms that a newly discovered FBI document places Bush as working with the now famous CIA agent Félix Rodríguez on the recruitment of ultra-right wing exiled Cubans for the invasion of Cuba.

For his part, in his "Report on a Censored Project," Dr. Carl Jensen of Sonoma State College states: "… there is a record in the files of Rodríguez and others involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, which expounds the role of Bush: the truth is that Bush was a senior CIA official before working with Félix Rodríguez on the invasion of Cuba."

But Kangas is more precise in his quoted article, when he states:

"Traveling from Houston to Miami on a weekly basis, Bush, with Félix Rodríguez, spent 1960 and 1961 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion."

Other publications that have referred to the theme are The Nation magazine, whose August 13, 1988 edition reveals the finding 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;" or the Common Cause magazine that, on March 4, 1990, affirmed: "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."

Without knowing it, Jorge Mas had become part of something far more complex than the planned mercenary invasion. The recent recruited CIA agent became one of the participants in what was originally known as Operation 40.

Operation 40 was the first plan of covert operations generated by the CIA to destroy the Cuban Revolution and was drawn up in 1959 on the orders of the administration of President Ike Eisenhower.

In his book Cuba, la Guerra secreta de la CIA (Cuba, the CIA’s Secret War), Divisional General (ret) Fabián Escalante Font, former head of the Cuban Counterintelligence Services, explained what occurred in the early 1960.

"A few days later (end of 1959), Allen Dulles, chief of the CIA, presented to the King (Colonel, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA) memorandum to the National Security Council, which approved the suggestion of forming a working group within the agency which, in the short term, would provide ‘alternative solutions to the Cuban problem.’"

The group, Escalante Font relates, was composed of Tracy Barnes as head, and officials Howard Hunt, Frank Bender, Jack Engler and David Atlee Phillips, among others. Those present had one common characteristic: all of them had participated in the fall of the Jacobo Arbenz government in Guatemala.

General Escalante recounts in his book that, during the first meeting, Barnes spoke at length on the objectives to be achieved. He explained that Vice President Richard Nixon was the Cuban "case officer" and had met with an important group of businessmen headed by George Bush and Jack Crichton, both Texas oil magnates, to collect the necessary funding for the operation.

In a 1986 edition of the Freedom Magazine U.S. journalist L.F. Proury explains that Richard Nixon had long and close links with the Bush family dating back to 1946 when Nixon, responding to a petition by Preston Bush (George’s father) presented himself as a candidate for the U.S. Congress, financed by the old Bush.

The group constituted within the CIA, states Escalante in his book, set up various teams in charge of organizing clandestine operations, psychological warfare actions and exerting economic and diplomatic pressure, which would put paid to the island government. This was compounded by the preparation of an elite group of Cuban agents who, after specialized training, would infiltrate Cuba and deal a mortal rearguard blow to the Revolution, which included the assassination of its principal leaders.

Jorge Mas Canosa gave his recruiters a very positive impression and was immediately assigned to a special mission. "Now things are going to take off," he said enthusiastically.

In the Exito magazine, Mabel Dieppa narrates:

"He was sent to a U.S. Marines training camp close to the Mississippi River, where he was trained to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion."

But Jorge Mas, as stated, had been attached to a very special group, still within the preparations for the mercenary invasion. The group was composed of 160 men of total confidence and was headed by the traitor and likewise CIA agent Higinio Díaz Ane (Nino). In the abovementioned book, General Escalante explains: "These men were given the mission to attack the town of Baracoa, in the easternmost part of the island, in order to distract the revolutionary forces when the brigade landed at the Bay of Pigs." Once they had taken Baracoa, they were to head for the Guantánamo Naval Base and, simulating Cuban troops, organize a provocation by attacking the installation, thus facilitating a U.S. military response with a formal reason for intervening in the conflict created by the mercenary invasion. That plan was the secret mechanism that the CIA and the Pentagon had up their sleeve, and nobody, not even President Kennedy, knew of it.

On the day of the invasion, the 160 "elite" agency men left in a boat for their destination but, on reaching Baracoa, fear at the movement of Cuban troops in the area won out over the sterling training they had received, and they confined themselves to continue navigating south of the island until they reached the westernmost extreme. From there, they headed for Puerto Rico, arriving there the same day. In Miami, as a joke, this action was christened "Skirting round Cuba."

After the Bay of Pigs defeat in April 1961 the CIA recouped its men. It reiterated its confidence in them and assigned them new missions, maintaining the objectives that gave rise to Operation 40.

In the weekly Política, the author Natacha Herrera explained:

"Along with another 207 agents, Mas went to Fort Benning, Georgia for basic U.S. army training and was selected to take a special intelligence, clandestine communication and propaganda course."

In his extensive work published for the Esquire magazine in January 1993, Gaeton Fonzi affirms that in Fort Benning, Mas Canosa’s friends with whom he was most closely linked in complex covert operations were Félix Rodríguez and Luis Posada Carriles," the latter of whom became notorious for the sabotage of a Cubana Airline passenger plane in full flight over Barbados in 1976.

"After Fort Benning," says the U.S. investigator, "there was some CIA connection in every move or action in Jorge Mas’ career."

Precisely because of the outstanding results obtained in Fort Benning, the Agency later assigned Mas Canosa to another delicate mission. On this occasion, he would have to move to an "ultra-secret" base located a little south of Fort Benning, to join what was known as the "New Orleans group." That group, which took its name from the location of the base on the outskirts of the southern U.S. city, was mainly composed of veterans from the Bay of Pigs and Fort Benning, although some agents of confidence like Antonio Veciana, recently arrived from the island and reportedly very close to Jorge Mas in that period, were incorporated. Their preparation was sui generis. The group took a course on the use of means and methods of combat of the Cuban army.

The content of the mission was disclosed by General Escalante in his book: "Once again, the plot consisted of a self-provocation against the Yankee base (of Guantánamo), via the infiltration of a commando of 150 men who trained in an ultra-secret CIA base on the outskirts of the southern U.S. city of New Orleans."

The mission was cancelled due to the occurrences that gave rise to the Missile Crisis in October 1962, which convinced the organizers of the inevitability of a direct military intervention by the U.S. army without the need of any pretext."

After this new failure, Mas Canosa was full of rage and impotence and acknowledged to the U.S. writer Pat Jordan in an interview that, "the two men he most hated were Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy."

In the United States, the media has once again picked up on the relationship of the émigré Cubans who worked for the CIA with the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

During a long conversation with the investigator Gaeton Fonzi in Havana, we discovered a story that, given its content, it is worth reproducing. Fonzi is not just any common or garden investigator. He had devoted much of his life to working for various congressional committees, including those responsible for investigations into the covert activities of the CIA and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A few years ago, and after much effort, Fonzi managed to get a private interview with Antonio Veciana, the same old buddy of Jorge Mas in the "New Orleans group," where the two of them became close friends while fulfilling CIA missions. Veciana had been interrogated by the Grand Jury charged with investigating the assassination of President Kennedy, and years later, had had some drug-related problems; but he vehemently affirmed to Fonzi that these difficulties were nothing more than a "trap" set up by somebody.

"I have a lot of information, but I am keeping that to myself because it is my life insurance," Veciana told Fonzi."

Antonio Veciana Blanch was a public accountant who worked for the Cuban sugar magnate Julio Lobo. He rapidly opposed the Cuban Revolution and, in 1960 was recruited by the CIA in Havana. He received his initial training in an English Language Academy supervised by the U.S. embassy in the Cuban capital. In October 1961, after the failure of a plot he devised to assassination Prime Minister Fidel Castro with a bazooka during an event at the former Presidential Palace, Veciana fled Cuba.

In the interview that he gave to Fonzi he related that, once in Miami, he was looked after by a CIA official who used the pseudonym of Maurice Bishop. Among other tasks, this "Bishop" ordered Veciana to promote the creation of the ALPHA 66 organization.

"Bishop" had frequent contact with Veciana from 1962-1963 in the city of Dallas. Veciana recalled that, at one of those meetings in a public building, he saw Lee Harvey Oswald.

Fonzi noted that various acts of disinformation were organized as part of the operation that cost the life of President Kennedy: one in Dallas, another in Miami and a third in Mexico City. The objective of the disinformation was to manufacture the image of a "revolutionary" Oswald, a "defender of the Cuban Revolution."

Hence the ex-marine was filmed in acts of solidarity with Cuba, demonstrating in a very aggressive manner. But the most daring act of disinformation was effected in Mexico City. There, Lee Harvey Oswald turned up at the Cuban embassy to ask for an entry visa to the island. All of that was filmed from a surveillance post that the CIA had opposite the Cuban embassy, so that it would be documented.

The strange thing is, as Veciana told Fonzi, in one of his contacts with "Bishop" in early 1963, the latter said that he knew that he (Veciana) had a cousin in Cuban Intelligence, who was located at the Cuban embassy in Mexico. "Bishop" stated that if it suited his cousin to work for them in a very specific action, he would pay him whatever he wanted. Veciana commented to Fonzi that he had never spoken of this cousin to "Bishop" and also, at that time, "Bishop" was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and even went directly from the Mexican capital to some contacts in Dallas.

In fact Veciana was the cousin of the wife of the then Cuban consul in Mexico City, Guillermo Ruiz, and in the days following the assassination of Kennedy, that woman was the victim of a recruitment attempt in the same city, with the clear proposition that, once in the United States, she would testify as to Oswald’s "complicity" with the Cuban secret services.

Questioned by Fonzi as to the existence of renewed contacts with "Bishop" after the Dallas homicide, Veciana answered that there had been, particularly in 1971, when he received an order to leave for Bolivia and work in the U.S. embassy in that country, where he would appear as an official for the Agency for International Development (USAID) and should wait for a visit from a known person. Fonzi checked the USAID archives in Washington and found an application form to enter the USAID in the name of Antonio Veciana, handwritten in letters distinct from those of Veciana and unsigned.

The "known person" who contacted him in Bolivia was "Bishop," at that time located in the U.S. embassy in Chile. "Bishop" immediately incorporated him into a team plotting an attempt on the life of President Fidel Castro, who was to visit the South American country.

Fonzi told us that he interviewed Antonio Veciana again, but this time accompanied by a specialist with the aim of composing a photofit of "Maurice Bishop" so as to determine his real identity.

Veciana gave a detailed description and the photofit was made. Fonzi spent weeks trying to identify the character, and one Sunday, suddenly received a call at home from a Republican senator for Pennsylvania for whom he was working at the time, and whom he had consulted on the identity of the man in the drawing.

The senator assured him that the he was absolutely sure that the man using the pseudonym of Maurice Bishop was none other than David Atlee Phillips. He was a veteran CIA officer who was in Havana on a working visit in 1958 as a specialist in psychological warfare, participated in the creation of Operation 40 and later, as part of the same, organized the Radio Swann transmitter. With time, Phillips would become head of the Western Hemisphere Division of the Agency.

However, at the end of 1993, in the documentary ¿Caso cerrado? (Case Closed?), the former chief of Cuban Security , Divisional General (ret) Fabián Escalante, revealed a secret report from one of his agents, which spoke of a meeting between Antonio Veciana and David Phillips in a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the early 70s.

"Veciana told me," said the Cuban agent, "that he was a CIA agent and it was the CIA that assassinated Kennedy and that senior CIA officials including David Phillips, the official attending to him, were behind it all. Veciana never wanted to give me any details of that affirmation, but recently, I have been able to confirm it, because once when I was in a hotel with Veciana, I heard a conversation that he had with his officer, David Phillips, in which Veciana swore that he would never talk about what happened in Dallas in 1963."

General Escalante guarantees that the source has direct access to Veciana, and was in his total confidence:

"I believe," Escalante affirmed, "that that is very important information because I have to say that, in 1973, when Antonio Veciana was liquidated by the CIA; in other words, when the CIA took him off their books, he received a compensation payment of $300,000."

But there is more. According to Cuban State Security investigations disclosed by General Escalante in the abovementioned documentary, various witnesses quoted by the Warren Commission described two Cubans, one of them black, leaving the Daley Plaza Book Deposit in Dallas, a few minutes after the assassination was effected. In parallel, through secret information and public testimony (the statement by Marita Lorenz, ex-CIA agent to a congressional committee), Cuban Security knew that two days before the assassination various Cubans were in Dallas with weapons and telescopic sights, including Eladio del Valle and Herminio Díaz, two paid killers and expert sharpshooters linked to the Mafia and Batista politics. The physical characteristics of Del Valle and Herminio Díaz matched the descriptions that various witnesses gave to the Warren Commission of the two Cubans seen leaving the building seconds after the president had been assassinated.

The really curious fact is the final fate of both of them: Eladio del Valle was brutally murdered in Miami when Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney initiated his investigation into the Kennedy assassination; Del Valle was chopped into pieces with a machete. Even more interesting was the end of Herminio Díaz, who died near the Havana coast in 1965, when he collided with a patrol boat while trying to infiltrate the island with the mission of assassinating Osvaldo Dortícos and submachine gunning the Riviera Hotel

In order to fulfill the mission on which he was sent, Díaz had to infiltrate the island right in the capital via Monte Barreto in Miramar (where a number of hotels are currently going up) at a time when, because of an incident at the Guantánamo naval base, the Cuban army was on combat alert, and aerial and coastal vigilance was been reinforced to the maximum. In the eyes of experts, and the Cuban Security, the operation was a veritable suicide mission.

The financial organizer and planner of such "a strange mission" was none other than Jorge Mas Canosa.

But the history of the CIA’s links with its Cuban agents and the Kennedy assassination has not only been explored by Fonzi. Many other authors and investigators, and even the film studios that gave origin to the U.S. movies Executive Action and JFK, have covered the subject.

In an article published in The Realist magazine, the investigator Paul Kangas affirms:

"Among other members of the CIA recruited by George Bush for the (Bay of Pigs) invasion) were Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Bernard Baker and Rafael Quintero… On the day that JFK was assassinated, Hunt and some of the subsequent Watergate team were photographed in Dallas, as well as a group of Cubans, one of them with an opened umbrella as a signal, alongside the president’s limousine, right where Kennedy was shot… Hunt and Sturgis fired on JFK from a grassy knoll. They were photographed and seen by 15 witnesses."

On May 7, 1990, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Frank Sturgis acknowledged:

"…the reason why we robbed in Watergate was because (Richard) Nixon was interested in stopping the news leaks related to the photos of our role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

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 to nation."

Up to here are certain details of one of the existing theories on the above-mentioned event but, will the whole truth come out some day? Will Antonio Veciana, former member of the "New Orleans group," decide to reveal his "life insurance" or Rafael Quintero, to tell what he knows and thus, "rock the nation?"

[John Simkin]

Havana. January 13, 2006

The Bush family, the Cuban mafia and the Kennedy assassination

BY REINALDO TALADRID and LAZARO BAREDO

IN 1959, a young officer and businessman from Texas received directions to cooperate in funding the nascent anti-Castro groups that the CIA decided to create, but it wasn’t until 1960 that he was assigned a more specific and overt mission: to guarantee the security of the process of recruiting Cubans to form an invasion brigade, a key aspect within the grand CIA operation to destroy the Cuban Revolution.

The CIA Texan quickly took a liking to the Cuban assigned to him for his new mission. The system of work, although intense, was simple. Féliz Rodríguez Mendigutía, "El Gato," would propose a candidate to him, who would then be checked out, both in the Agency and among the Miami groups, and finally, the Texan would give the go-ahead.

In that period, Félix Rodríguez already knew quite a few Cubans, like Jorge Mas Canosa (subsequently the leader of various counterrevolutionary organizations and then president of the Cuban-American National Foundation) and had confirmed his loyalty to "the cause" and to the Americans. For that reason he was among the first to be proposed. He passed through the process satisfactorily, and in a meeting in the city of Miami, which the Texan liked to make as formal as possible, Jorge Mas Canosa officially became an agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Jorge Mas didn’t know how to thank Félix for what he had done for him. From that moment he was constantly grateful to him and, at the same time, obedient to his every petition.

But Jorge Mas was far from imagining the significance of this recruitment on the rest of his life. The significance rested on the fact that that Texan officer who undertook his recruitment process, approved it and then notified him at that meeting, was none other than George Herbert Walker Bush, the same man who, later, between 1989 and 1992, was the 41st president of the United States.

Various sources coincide on the foregoing. Paul Kangas, a Californian private investigator, published an article containing part of his investigations in The Realist in 1990, in which he affirms that a newly discovered FBI document places Bush as working with the now famous CIA agent Félix Rodríguez on the recruitment of ultra-right wing exiled Cubans for the invasion of Cuba.

For his part, in his "Report on a Censored Project," Dr. Carl Jensen of Sonoma State College states: "… there is a record in the files of Rodríguez and others involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, which expounds the role of Bush: the truth is that Bush was a senior CIA official before working with Félix Rodríguez on the invasion of Cuba."

But Kangas is more precise in his quoted article, when he states:

"Traveling from Houston to Miami on a weekly basis, Bush, with Félix Rodríguez, spent 1960 and 1961 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion."

It is possible that this investigative reporter real name is Steve Kangas rather than Paul Kangas. Steve Kangas was working on a book about CIA covert activities when on 8th February, 1999, he was found dead in the bathroom of the offices of Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: "Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?"

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKkangas.htm

[William Turner]

The Granma article on George senior's services for the Bay of Pigs and subsequent operations is fascinating. Is that why one of the invasion ships was named the Barbara J? And why did George de Mohrenschilt's telephone register contain the name and address for Poppy Bush and his oil company Zapata?

In 1974 Frank Sturgis told me that Hunt said they were burglarizing DNC to prove that Castro had sent $200,000 to the Democrats. Frank obviously is referring to the photos of the "three tramps" in Dealey Plaza. I spent two days riding around with him and can attest that he isn't in the pictures.

[Allan Lowe]

1) Veciana NEVER confirmed to Fonzi that Bishop was Phillips - he actually skirted around the issue -

2) There is no evidence cited actually tying Bush sr. to the the Bay of Pigs invasion - what real documentation do they have?

[Thomas Graves]

In 1974 Frank Sturgis told me that Hunt said they were burglarizing DNC to prove that Castro had sent $200,000 to the Democrats. Frank obviously is referring to the photos of the "three tramps" in Dealey Plaza.

_____________________________________

Sorry, I don't see the connection between the two above sentences. Am I missing something?

_____________________________________

Edited January 21, 2006 by Thomas Graves

[Thomas Graves]

Ron Ecker provided a link to this article in Granma on another thread but I think it deserves to be published in full.

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2006/enero/vie...3kennedy-i.html

Kennedy, conspiracy in Hamburg

BY GABRIEL MOLINA [...]

GUILTY MASTERMINDS AND MATERIAL ASSASSINS [...]

...it is presumed that the sharpshooters of Cuban origin Eladio del Valle and Hermino Díaz were those ordered to fire, subsequently escaping in a Nash Rambler truck. [...]

__________________________________________

Make that a [Nash] Rambler STATIONWAGON.

FWIW, Thomas

__________________________________________

[Tim Gratz]

Great post by Tim Carroll. I bet not many members are aware of the Humboldt Street Massacre.

Tim is also right about the "identification" of the Novo brothers as Odio's visitors.

The article also asserts that Gerry Hemming was one of the conspirators.

As Pat rightly noted, all the article proves is that it is not only the US government that lies to its people!

[James Richards]

Tim is also right about the "identification" of the Novo brothers as Odio's visitors. (Tim Gratz)

It is probably worth noting that Ignacio Novo Sampol was one of the Cubans who crashed a U.N. Opening on September 27, 1963. They were all thrown out by security.

The image below shows Ignacio on the far right being unceremoniously tossed from the building.

FWIW, I have exited many a Surfers Paradise pub in this fashion.

James

Edited January 22, 2006 by James Richards

[Tim Gratz]

James, do they fit the descriptions of Odio's visitors? It does not appear so to me.

[James Richards]

James, do they fit the descriptions of Odio's visitors? It does not appear so to me.

I don't believe they do, Tim.

It is also hard to believe that Sylvia Odio would not have known of the Novo brothers. They were high profile at the time and if they did visit her, I'm sure she would have recognized them.

James

[Tim Gratz]

And James is it not also true that Odio was also shown many photographs of Cubans both pro- and anti-Castro and failed to identify any of the photos?

Query whether those photos would have likely included the Novo brothres?

Or deTorres?

Or Murgado?

What do you think?

[James Richards]

And James is it not also true that Odio was also shown many photographs of Cubans both pro- and anti-Castro and failed to identify any of the photos?

Query whether those photos would have likely included the Novo brothres?

Or deTorres?

Or Murgado?

What do you think?

Tim,

Even if the photos shown to Odio didn't include the Novo brothers, I still think she would have known who they were given the press they were receiving at the time.

As to Murgado and De Torres, I just don't know if their photos were displayed. I take it Sylvia Odio is not receptive to researchers these days?

James

[Tim Gratz]

That is my understanding, James, but it would certainly be helpful if she would confirm (or deny) that her visitors were deTorres and Murgado.

It would also be helpful if there was any record of the photos she was given to review.

Edited January 22, 2006 by Tim Gratz