RFK assassination program on BBC2, Nov. 20

John Simkin · July 20, 2007

I have contacted the BBC about David Talbot and Jeff Morley's article.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/...y_kennedy_1.htm

Although this undermine's Shane's programme, it has drawn attention to the activities of George Joannides and David Morales. I have also suggested that they allow David and Jeff to make a follow-up film. I will also contact the Guardian about the possibility of providing space for David and Jeff's article as they originally published the following:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1952393,00.html

Shane O'Sullivan · July 21, 2007

I welcome this new evidence and am sure researchers will make up their own minds about the photographs but it's a shame David and Jeff did not share everything they found. I interviewed the senior CIA official who supplied the Joannides photos and he still believes that the man at the Ambassador is 'not incompatible with Joannides'. For the record, Bradley Ayers has seen the new Morales photos and also stands by his identification of Morales at the Ambassador. I will respond to this new evidence fully in my film.

But I have to say I find the tone of this article absurdly pompous, pitching Morley and Talbot against the mighty BBC. This was one independent filmmaker on limited resources following the evidence and intriguing the BBC enough to give me twelve minutes of airtime to give an honest assessment of available evidence and ask for clarification from the CIA. It has stimulated great debate and helped generate a lot of new information on these guys.

David and Jeff loftily complain of editorial standards and 'titillating charges' when the fact is my story left them just as intrigued and titillated as the BBC and they put their reputations on the line to get the New Yorker to fund further investigation. I remember David telling me they felt like Woodward and Bernstein, ready to hit the road to crack open the Kennedy assassinations. They sought my cooperation and I supported them by sharing everything I had. Not a word about this in their article, of course.

Before my Newsnight story aired, I asked Morley to show the Ambassador photograph to Joannides' daughter. Her response was a frosty 'no comment', which Morley said he found 'telling'. He then slagged off my story publicly the day after broadcast - presumably to appease the Joannides family - before later admitting he spoke too soon and answering the call of the New Yorker.

I find a number of startling omissions in this article. Huge weight is given to the death of a 'Gordon Campbell' who is clearly not the man Bradley Ayers knew at JM/WAVE. Morley omits several new positive IDs of Joannides, then cites a negative ID by Timothy Kalaris without telling us that Timothy's father George was the successor to Angleton as the Head of Counterintelligence. It does make you wonder.

Many inaccuracies, too. David Rabern was not a CIA operations officer and never identified Morales by name. All in all, there's interesting new information here, but it's weirdly skewed. David and Jeff are great reporters but this is not the whole story, or even the whole of their story. My film will be released in the US and UK before the end of the year and will address these issues in more detail.

Robert Charles-Dunne · July 21, 2007

I find a number of startling omissions in this article. Huge weight is given to the death of a 'Gordon Campbell' who is clearly not the man Bradley Ayers knew at JM/WAVE. Morley omits several new positive IDs of Joannides, then cites a negative ID by Timothy Kalaris without telling us that Timothy's father George was the successor to Angleton as the Head of Counterintelligence. It does make you wonder.

The alleged date of Gordon Campbell's death is what most intrigues me. As I've posted elsewhere previously, though it failed to generate any comments, professional assassination nay-sayer Mel Ayton was first out of the gate in trying to impugn Shane's story. In so doing, he sought out old CIA hands to refute the identifications presented in Shane's piece, including one from Grayston Lynch, who said of Gordon Campbell, in Ayton's words: "the man in the LAPD film footage is not Campbell and that he “…knew Gordon Campbell.”

Let's assume that Lynch did know Gordon Campbell, as he presumably must have done. How, then, do we reconcile Lynch's failure to tell Ayton that Campbell had died in '62, and thus couldn't possibly have been at the Ambassador Hotel in '68?

Did this key salient fact simply slip Lynch's mind?

Or did he not know Campbell had died in '62?

Or, did he know it and yet, for reasons about which we can only speculate, refuse to disclose this to Ayton?

Or did Campbell not die in '62, which would be suggested by Brad Ayers' contrary assertions, and Lynch's failure to mention this to Ayton?

The fact that there are/were two such men named Gordon Campbell only serves to muddy the issue even further.

As I've also pointed out elsewhere, one could more easily dismiss Shane's assertions as fantasy speculations were it not for the demonstrable presence of [ex-?] CIA personnel among the LAPD squad responsible for "solving" RFK's assassination, their heavy-handed intimidation of witnesses, and the subsequent disappearance of critical evidence illustrating the likelihood of a second shooter in the kitchen pantry area. Given how these two CIA men seem to have been deliberately inserted into the crime-solving process, and the fashion in which they steered the so-called investigation, it is almost as though they were parachuted into those positions for the express purpose of nullifying the chances for a genuine and comprehensive investigation. And yet, what aim would any of that have served, unless these CIA alumni were inserted for the express purpose of ensuring that CIA's own complicity in the crime remained undetected?

Initially, I was predisposed to dismiss Shane's piece, if only because I found it astonishingly counter-intuitive that three key CIA personnel would be at the crime scene. It would have been a highly risky gambit, should their presence have been detected. However, even if we allow that not all three men tentatively identified were CIA, the presence of any one of them at the crime scene is sufficient to raise fresh questions about what he was doing there, and how that led to the subsequent insertion of CIA/LAPD personnel to preclude investigation of that fact.

It seems to me that, thanks to Shane and his hard work, we have a clearer knowledge of the two bookends to the event - CIA at the crime scene before the crime occurred and then afterward in charge of the crime's so-called investigation - but what we currently lack is what happened between those bookends.

Edited July 21, 2007 by Robert Charles-Dunne

Michael Hogan · July 21, 2007

It seems to me that, thanks to Shane and his hard work, we have a clearer knowledge of the two bookends to the event - CIA at the crime scene before the crime occurred and then afterward in charge of the crime's so-called investigation - but what we currently lack is what happened between those bookends.

In his customary fashion Robert's analysis of the larger picture often enables us to look at the smaller pieces of evidence with a more proper perspective.

As other members have noted time and time again, RCD's posts are always a most welcome addition to the debate.

John Simkin · July 21, 2007

As other members have noted time and time again, RCD's posts are always a most welcome addition to the debate.

I agree. I would love RCD to post everyday. I would also like him to write a book on the assassination of JFK. I would definitely be the first in line to buy it. In fact, I would buy anything he wrote. RCD is not only the most logical writer that we have, he is the best stylist.

Wayne Smith · July 23, 2007

My only comment is that I remain convinced that the man in the photos is Dave Morales. I knew him well and saw him often over a period of years. And given everything else I know and knew about Morales, I’d have had no reason to doubt that he’d have been there. The other two I didn’t know at all.

William Kelly · July 23, 2007

My only comment is that I remain convinced that the man in the photos is Dave Morales. I knew him well and saw him often over a period of years. And given everything else I know and knew about Morales, I'd have had no reason to doubt that he'd have been there. The other two I didn't know at all.

Hello Wayne,

Many thanks for your input. While others on this forum may not know you, I met you at an early COPA conference, when you told me about working at the US Embassy in Havana, and acting in an amateur theater group with David Atlee Phillips.

I also appreciate your extensive efforts to arrange the two major meetings between researchers and the Cubans.

Since then I came across a listing of US officials stationed at the US Embassy in Havana, your name included, as well as that of David Morales.

Your assistance in fine tuning the extent of what is known about Morales and his activities will certainly help fill in some missing pieces of the puzzle.

I hope you stick around, and answer some additonal questions that members of the forum may have, especially about Morales and the situation in Havana that existed at that time.

Bill Kelly

David Talbot · August 6, 2007

This is what Don Bohning just said to me in a series of emails:
(1) Actually, your friends Hinckle and Turner identify Campbell as assistant station chief in their book Deadly Secrets. I should have known better than to rely on them.

(2) I might note also that Talbot identified Richard Bissell as head of the CIA operation that overthrew Arbenz when Bissell himself says in his memoirs that wasn't so. And your website also says Morales was in Bolivia when Guevara was killed in 1965 when it was really 1967 and when Larry Sternfield, the CIA station chief there at the time, says he wasn't even in Bolivia when Guevara was killed. Given the other errors in Talbot's book, I am not sure that he and Morley are correct about Campbell either.

(3) Just went back and looked at the Fish is Red, the earlier version of Deadly Secrets, by Hinckle and Turner, and Campbell is identified in there as the deputy station chief. And given the number of errors of fact in Talbot's book, I am not convinced that he and Morley are right about Campbell either.

Besides, Mel Ayton knocked down the JFK assassination story long before Talbot and Morley did. In fact, Morley called me before he and Talbot came to Miami and asked how to get in touch with Manny Chavez, well after Ayton's article on him already had appeared.. I put he and Tlbot in contact with Cavez.

I had given Chavez and Gayston Lynch's phone number to Ayton weeks before Talbot and Morley. Ayton had sent enhanced pictures of Morales to Chavez and to Lynch. Chavez didn't know Campbell but Lynch did and he said the pictures of neither Morales nor Campbell.

It is true that the Talbot and Morley piece took the thing a bit further but the story had been descredited well before the one they wrote, which was somewhat anti-climatic coming weeks later when the story already had been discredited by Ayton.

A couple more emails from Don Bohning:
(4) Having just looked through the two books by Bradley Ayers, the Zenith Secret and the War that Never Was, it would seem that Talbot and Morley have gotten mixed up on Gordon Campbell. Ayers, according to his books, did not join JMWAVE until 1963 and on page 39 of the Zenith Secret he identifies Campbell as the deputy chief of station. Morley and Talbot say Campbell died in 1962.

Who do you believe? Looks to me like another Talbot error. I would believe Ayers before I would believe Talbot. I think they identified the wrong Gordon Campbell.

(5) Talbot and Morley also say in a footnote that David Rabern was indentified as a CIA operations officer. No one around here ever heard of David Rabern and, according to Ayers, he was a private investigator in Arizona.

In his review of my book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, Don Bohning asserts that I take a “starry-eyed” view of the Kennedys. But Bohning comes to this conclusion because he has chosen to view this historical chapter through his own prism – that of his CIA sources. In the interests of full disclosure, Bohning – or Washington Decoded editor Max Holland – had a duty to reveal that Bohning was named in declassified CIA documents as one of the Miami journalists whom the CIA regarded as an agency asset in the 1960s. But neither Bohning, nor Holland in his editor’s note, disclosed this pertinent information.

A CIA memo dated June 5, 1968 states that Bohning was known within the agency as AMCARBON 3 -- AMCARBON was the cryptonym that the CIA used to identify friendly reporters and editors who covered Cuba. (AMCARBON 1 was Bohning’s colleague at the Miami Herald, Latin America editor Al Burt.) According to the agency memo, which dealt with New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, Bohning passed along information about the Garrison probe to the CIA.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...mp;relPageId=2)

A follow-up agency memo, dated June 14, revealed that “Bohning was granted a Provisional Security Approval on 21 August 1967 and a Covert Security Approval on 14 November 1967 for use as a confidential informant.”

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...amp;relPageId=1

A declassified CIA memo dated April 9, 1964 explained that the CIA’s covert media campaign in Miami aimed “to work out a relationship with [south Florida] news media which would insure that they did not turn the publicity spotlight on those [CIA] activities in South Florida which might come to their attention...and give [the CIA’s Miami station] an outlet into the press which could be used for surfacing certain select propaganda items.”

While researching my book, I contacted Bohning to ask him about his reported ties to the CIA. Was he indeed AMCARBON 3? “I still do not know but… it is possible,” Bohning replied in one of a series of amicable e-mails and phone calls we exchanged. “There were several people in the Herald newsroom during the 1960s who had contact with the CIA station chief in Miami.”

Bohning took pains to explain that he was not a paid functionary of the CIA, insisting he was simply a dutiful reporter working every source he could as he went about his job. And, as I wrote back to him, I’m fully aware that agency officials – looking to score bureaucratic points with their superiors – could sometimes make empty boasts that they had certain journalists in their pocket. I also told him that I understood that many journalists, particularly in those Cold War days, thought it was permissible to swap information with intelligence sources. But in evaluating a journalist’s credibility, it is important for readers to know of these cozy government relationships. The fact that Bohning was given a CIA code as an agency asset and was identified as an agency informant is a relevant piece of information that the readers of Washington Decoded have a right to know.

Even more relevant is that, over the years, Bohning’s journalism has consistently reflected his intelligence sources’ points of view, with little or no critical perspective. Bohning’s book, The Castro Obsession, is essentially the CIA’s one-dimensional view of that historical drama, pure and simple, down to the agency’s self-serving claim that it was the Kennedys’ fanaticism that drove the spy outfit to take extreme measures against the Castro regime. Bohning’s decision to invoke former CIA director and convicted xxxx Richard Helms’ conversation with Henry Kissinger, another master of deceit, as proof that Robert Kennedy was behind the Castro plots speaks for itself.

In Bohning’s eagerness to shine the best possible light on the CIA, he goes as far as to attempt to exonerate David Morales – a notorious CIA agent whose hard-drinking and violent ways alienated him not only from many of his colleagues but from his own family, as I discovered in my research. Among my “thin” sources on Morales were not only those who worked and lived with him, but his attorney, who told more than one reporter that Morales implicated himself in the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers.

In discussing my “tendentious” view of the CIA’s dissembling on the Bay of Pigs operation, Bohning seeks to exculpate disgraced covert operations chief Richard Bissell, the architect of the fiasco. Bohning writes that he doubts Bissell lied to JFK about the doomed plan’s chances for success. And yet this is precisely the way that the Miami Herald, Bohning’s own newspaper, covered the story when the CIA’s internal history of the Bay of Pigs was finally released in August 2005. “Bissell owed it to JFK to tell him” the truth about the Bay of Pigs plan, the newspaper quoted a historian who had studied the CIA documents. But “there is no evidence that he did.” Bohning too was quoted in the Herald article, and his view of Bissell was decidedly less trusting than it is in his review of my book. “Bissell seems to have had a habit of not telling people things they needed to know,” Bohning told the Herald.

Bohning’s pro-CIA bias also compels him to brush aside former Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi’ strong suspicions of a CIA involvement in the assassination. It is true that the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which found evidence of a conspiracy in its 1979 report, did not include the CIA in its list of suspects. But Bohning stops conveniently short of what has happened in ensuing years. After Washington Post journalist Jefferson Morley revealed that the CIA’s liaison with the committee, a veteran agent named George Joannides, had withheld information about his own connection to Lee Harvey Oswald from the committee and undermined its investigation in other ways, a furious G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel of the committee, retracted his earlier statement that the agency had fully cooperated with the Congressional investigation. Instead, said Blakey, the CIA was guilty of obstruction of justice. Blakey told me, as I reported in my book, that he now believes that Mafia-linked “rogue” intelligence agents might have been involved in the assassination. In short, these developments have bolstered Fonzi’s earlier suspicions.

Bohning criticizes me for accepting the credibility of a source named Angelo Murgado, a Bay of Pigs veteran aligned with the Cuban exile leader Manuel Artime – and as Bohing concedes, a minor figure in my book. But Bohning provides no evidence that Murgado’s story about investigating suspicious activity in the Cuban exile world for Bobby Kennedy is false. The exile community is known for its flamboyant internal disputes. Bohning solicits comments about Murgado from his own corners of this world and chooses to accept their validity. But many of the sources in the anti-Castro movement that Bohning has cultivated over the years have their own dubious pasts and shady agendas. I was forthright with my readers about Murgado’s drawbacks as a source, including his criminal record, which Bohning presents as if he’s revealing it for the first time. I tried to put Murgado’s statements in their proper context and allow readers to make their own conclusion. But Bohning is rarely as transparent about his sources and their motivations in his Cuba reporting.

Bohning is equally selective in rejecting Howard Hunt’s late-hour confessions about Dallas. Until the final years of his life, Hunt – a CIA veteran of the anti-Castro wars and the notorious ringleader of the Watergate burglary team – took a view of the Kennedy assassination that was espoused within agency circles in his day, i.e., that JFK was the victim of a Havana and Moscow-connected plot. This Communist plot theory of the assassination was rejected by the Warren Commission (whose work Bohning continues to find persuasive), as well as investigators for the Church Committee and the House Assassinations Committee, as well as most reputable researchers. But Hunt’s unfounded charges about a Communist conspiracy never landed him in hot water with critics like Bohning. It was only when Hunt broke ranks to implicate members of the CIA – and himself – in the crime that Bohning felt compelled to heatedly question his credibility.

Unlike his earlier charges, Hunt’s allegations of a CIA connection to Dallas were based on what he claimed was first-hand, eyewitness evidence. Hunt told his son, St. John, that he was invited to a meeting at a CIA safe house in Miami where the plot to kill Kennedy was discussed, and he implicated himself in the plot as a “benchwarmer.” It is true that during his career, Hunt did indeed act as a CIA disinformation specialist, and he might have had inexplicably devious reasons for fingering former colleagues like Morales, as well as himself, in the crime. And his son, St. John, did indeed once lead a roguish, drug-fueled life, as he has freely told the press and as I reported in my book. But I have seen the confessional notes written in the senior Hunt’s own hand, and have heard his guarded confessions on tape – as have other journalists. The authenticity of this material is undisputed. So, despite his colorful past, St. John’s character is not the central issue here. It’s the material that his father himself left behind as his last will and testament. Bohning has no reason to dismiss Howard Hunt’s sensational allegations out of hand – other than his blind faith in CIA sources who still stick to the party line on Dallas. While Hunt’s confessions are clearly not the definitive word on the subject, they are at least worthy of further investigation on the part of serious, independent journalists and researchers.

But when it comes to the subject of the CIA’s secret war on Cuba – an operation that Robert Kennedy, among other knowledgeable insiders, believed was the source of the assassination plot against his brother – Don Bohning is an obviously partisan chronicler. Again and again Bohning has chosen to present the CIA in the most flattering light and its critics in the most negative. I accept Bohning’s insistence that he was not a CIA stooge. But he should stop acting like one.

David Talbot · August 6, 2007