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Complicity of the CIA

I’d like to look at the area of specific evidence of CIA involvement. People often speculate that “the CIA did it” but fail to really provide any evidence; and without evidence, it’s just a vague assertion.

Here’s what we now know. The CIA-Mafia plots to kill Fidel Castro were somehow related to JFK’s murder. The CIA conducted a cover-up after the assassination, hiding a now obvious role in the relationship between alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and U.S. intelligence, particularly in regard to his false defection to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But those points are broad and pretty general. So what do we know specifically?

The large CIA station in South Florida known as JM/WAVE appears to have played a major role in the organization phase of the conspiracy. Specifically, William “Wild Bill” Harvey and David Morales from JM/WAVE, and CIA officer Cord Meyer were named in the deathbed confession of CIA Officer E. Howard Hunt as having directly participated in the JFK assassination.⁵⁵⁵ Anti-Castro exile groups apparently involved in the assassination, such as the “Alpha 66” group, were also affiliated with JM/WAVE, as were mobsters Johnny Roselli and John Martino.⁵⁵⁶

The fact that Johnny Roselli was even brought into Dallas to abort the assassination, with the special team from military intelligence, is another strong indication that the plot to kill Kennedy was hatched out of those anti-Castro black ops based in Florida.⁵⁵⁷

CIA Officer David Phillips handed us another such clue. As Phillips put it in an unpublished manuscript found after his death that mirrored the roles of both Oswald and Phillips in the weeks leading up to the assassination:

I was one of the two case officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald. After working to establish his Marxist bona fides, we gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba . . . I don’t know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro.⁵⁵⁸

The CIA was also obviously involved in the visits of an Oswald “double” to Mexico City. As has been observed by investigators who’ve delved into the matter, the purpose of that double was apparently to link Oswald to KGB assassin Valeriy Kostikov, thereby building an intelligence “legend” whereby JFK’s assassination could be blamed on the Soviets and Cubans.⁵⁵⁹

[At] 9:20 a.m. on the morning of November 23, CIA Director John McCone briefed the new President. In [historian Michael] Beschloss’ words: ‘The CIA had information on foreign connections to the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, which suggested to LBJ that Kennedy may have been murdered by an international conspiracy.’ It would be wrong however to think that the CIA cover-up was limited to defusing this Phase-One impression of an international conspiracy. The CIA, by covering up the falsity of the alleged Oswald phone call to the Soviet Embassy, actually helped strengthen a spurious supposed link between Oswald and an alleged Soviet assassination expert, Valeriy Kostikov.⁵⁶⁰

That reported visit by Oswald to Kostikov was false, but nevertheless was information that made it all the way from the CIA to the President of the United States, where it was considered vitally important and formed the basis of the national security cover-up:

It is not certain whether the conspiracy [CIA Director John]

McCone referred to on November 23 involved Cuba or the Soviet Union. Beschloss’s account implies that McCone’s “information” concerned Oswald’s alleged visit in September 1963 to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City:

‘A CIA memo written that day reported that Oswald had visited Mexico City in September and talked to a Soviet vice consul whom the CIA knew as a KGB expert in assassination and sabotage. The memo warned that if Oswald had indeed been part of a foreign conspiracy, he might be killed before he could reveal it to U.S. authorities.’

Johnson appears to have had this information in mind when, a few minutes after the McCone interview, he asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover if the FBI ‘knew any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy.’⁵⁶¹

To sum up: That false intelligence legend of Oswald as a communist— with links to the KGB’s assassination apparatus as well as to Castro via the Fair Play for Cuba Committee—were a ploy to justify a U.S. retaliatory air strike against Cuba.

As Peter Dale Scott noted:

We know from other sources that Bobby Kennedy, on the afternoon of November 22, was fearful of a Cuban involvement in the assassination. Jack Anderson, the recipient of much secret CIA information, suggests that this concern may have been planted in Bobby’s head by CIA Director McCone.

‘When CIA chief John McCone learned of the assassination, he rushed to Robert Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia, and stayed with him for three hours. No one else was admitted. Even Bobby’s priest was turned away. McCone told me he gave the attorney general a routine briefing on CIA business and swore that Castro’s name never came up. . . . Sources would later tell me that McCone anguished with Bobby over the terrible possibility that the assassination plots sanctioned by the president’s own brother may have backfired. Then the following day, McCone briefed President Lyndon Johnson and his National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.

Afterward McCone told subordinates—who later filled me in—what happened at that meeting. The grim McCone shared with Johnson and Bundy a dispatch from the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, strongly suggesting that Castro was behind the assassination.’⁵⁶²

Cuba was continually “promoted” by U.S. intelligence, as the probable perpetrators of the murder of President Kennedy.

Three days later the [Mexican] Ambassador, Thomas Mann, the CIA Station Chief, Winston Scott, and the FBI Legal Attaché, Clark Anderson, enthusiastically promoted wild allegations that Oswald’s act had been plotted and paid for inside the Cuban Embassy.⁵⁶³

Key CIA officials spread stories immediately after the assassination that Cuba’s Fidel Castro was behind the President’s murder.⁵⁶⁴ So, as Colonel Fletcher Prouty also observed, a whole false legend about “the President’s assassin” was quickly being force-fed to everyone by the CIA. There were people in the Agency who wanted it to quickly be assumed that the Communists were responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy.

And in addition to “controlling the spin” on those events, persons with CIA connections were also reportedly directly involved in the assassination. District Attorney Garrison’s office had no doubts about that:

His investigation led Garrison to believe that, regardless of whoever actually fired the shots in Dealey Plaza, the assassination was the result of a plot hatched in New Orleans by persons with CIA connections. Furthermore, Garrison concluded, following the assassination the CIA engaged in a cover-up to protect itself and the assassins. . . . Garrison thought that ‘the assassins were CIA employees who were angered at President Kennedy’s posture on Cuba following the Bay of Pigs disaster, and that the CIA was frustrating his investigation, although the agency knew the whereabouts of the assassins.’⁵⁶⁵

Jim Garrison made it very clear that his investigation concluded that Kennedy was killed by men who had worked with the CIA from its anti-Castro operations:

The thesis Garrison has set forth is that a group of New Orleans-based, anti-Castroites, supported and/or encouraged by the CIA in their anti-Castro activities, in the late summer or early fall of 1963 conspired to assassinate John F. Kennedy. This group, according to Garrison, included [Clay] Shaw, [David] Ferrie, [Lee Harvey] Oswald . . . and others, including Cuban exiles and American anti-Castroites. . . . Their plan was executed in Dallas on November 22, 1963. At least part of their motivation . . . was their reaction to Kennedy’s decisions at the Bay of Pigs and the changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba following the missiles crisis of 1962.⁵⁶⁶

So to clarify, the CIA as an agency does not appear to have acted overtly in the assassination itself, but several “rogue” or “renegade” CIA agents, acting on their “off-the-books” mission, do appear to have been involved.

PLAYBOY: How could your probe damage the prestige of the CIA and cause them to take countermeasures against you?

GARRISON: For the simple reason that a number of the men who killed the President were former employees of the CIA involved in its anti-Castro underground activities in and around New Orleans.⁵⁶⁷

⁵⁵⁵ Hunt, Bond of Secrecy.

⁵⁵⁶ Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked.

⁵⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁵⁸ Morley & Scott, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA.

⁵⁵⁹ Scott, “The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico”.

⁵⁶⁰ Scott, “The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico,” citing Michael Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (Simon & Schuster: 1997): history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm

⁵⁶¹ Scott, “The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico,” citing Beschloss, Taking Charge and National Archives.

⁵⁶² Scott, “The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico,” citing Jack Anderson, with Daryl Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (Tom Doherty Associates: 1999), 115–16.

⁵⁶³ Ibid.

⁵⁶⁴ Jack Anderson, “JFK plot: Did mobster’s death cover up secret,” September 8, 1976: news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2002&dat=19760908&id=3PYuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=QtsFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4912,1845880

⁵⁶⁵ Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., Professor of Law, “Destiny Betrayed: The CIA, Oswald, and the JFK Assassination,” December 7, 2005, Flagpole Magazine, 8, citing Fred Powledge, “Is Garrison Faking?,” June 17, 1967, The New Republic, 13–18: law.uga.edu/dwilkes_more/jfk_22destiny.html

⁵⁶⁶ Wilkes, Jr., “Destiny Betrayed,” citing Richard H. Popkin, “Garrison’s Case,” September 14, 1967: nybooks.com/articles/archives/1967/sep/14/garrisons-case/?pagination=false

⁵⁶⁷ “Jim Garrison’s Playboy Interview,” Playboy Magazine, October 1967, Vol. 14 No. 10: jfklancer.com/Garrison2.html