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A CIA Plot Against Castro was Apparently “Hijacked” and Used Against JFK, which Explains the Perceived Need for a National Security Cover-Up

Historian Peter Dale Scott emphasized the importance of “the disturbing claim by John Roselli, the CIA’s principal mafia contact, that a CIA hit team had been ‘turned’ and used to kill the President.”⁶⁵⁰

The very same theme—a “hijacked” anti-Castro intelligence operation—was also later alluded to by the CIA Director, WHO (Western Hemisphere Operations), David Phillips:

I was one of the two case officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald . . . 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.⁶⁵¹

Author David Talbot observed the same demons at work, noting that “the assassination was probably the work of a conspiracy involving elements of the CIA, Mafia and anti-Kennedy Cuban exiles—a cabal that was working to terminate Castro’s reign (by any means necessary) and turned its guns instead against Kennedy. This is precisely what Robert Kennedy himself immediately suspected on the afternoon of November 22, 1963 . . .”⁶⁵²

A “black operation” being hijacked by renegade members of our own intelligence community amounted, as writer Debra Conway put it, to a scenario in which the conspirators were “using the Castro plots for ‘window dressing’ for the true plot to assassinate President Kennedy. . . . These plots resulted in what I call a ‘checkmate’ situation for Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who we now know played a major role in rendering inaccessible much evidence in the case of his brother’s murder. The deep remorse shown by RFK and his actions afterwards are only explainable when we allow that he believed—or was led to believe—he was somehow responsible for his brother’s death through his continued encouragement—however innocent—of the Cuban exiles and their actions against Castro.”⁶⁵³

The operation that killed the President apparently utilized direct components of the secret plans to assassinate Castro, which had to be kept secret.

Bobby Kennedy immediately called the CIA Director:

One of the first things Robert Kennedy did after learning of his brother’s death was to immediately call the Director of the CIA and scream into the phone:

Did the CIA kill my brother?⁶⁵⁴

Bobby said that ‘at the time’ of JFK’s death, he ‘asked (CIA Director John) McCone . . . if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t.’ This statement is important, because Bobby said he asked McCone ‘at the time’ JFK died, meaning something about JFK’s murder made him quickly suspect that the CIA might have been involved.⁶⁵⁵

Second, how could Bobby ask McCone ‘in a way that he couldn’t lie to me’ unless there was some particular operation both men knew about? Clearly, Bobby was asking McCone if a plan meant for Castro had been used on his brother instead.⁶⁵⁶

Asking (CIA Director) McCone if the CIA was involved in such a way that ‘he could not lie’ suggested Kennedy thought the CIA operatives were acting at a deniable distance.⁶⁵⁷

RFK apparently recognized a relationship between anti-Castro intelligence operations and the murder of the President:

Robert Kennedy seemed to have immediately realized that the plot to kill President Kennedy was somehow a component of the CIA’s anti-Castro operations.

He called up his contact with the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida and blurted the following into the phone:

One of your guys did it.⁶⁵⁸

That statement above was to his “anti-Castro” group in Florida and was verified and witnessed by both Harry Ruiz Williams and Haynes Johnson.⁶⁵⁹ “Robert Kennedy was utterly in control of his emotions when he came on the line and sounded almost studiedly brisk as he said, ‘One of your guys did it.’”⁶⁶⁰ Historians interpret that remark as meaning that Robert Kennedy “clearly was referring to embittered Cubans deployed by elements in the CIA.”⁶⁶¹

At 9:20 a.m. on November 23, 1963—the morning after the assassination— CIA Director John McCone briefed the new President Lyndon Johnson:

The CIA had information of foreign connections to the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, which suggested to LBJ that Kennedy may have been murdered by an international conspiracy.⁶⁶²

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.⁶⁶³

The name of the Russian KGB agent who supposedly met with “Oswald” in Mexico City was Valeriy Kostikov. FBI Director Clarence Kelley:

The importance of Kostikov cannot be overstated. As FBI agent Jim Hosty wrote later:

‘Kostikov was the officer-in-charge for Western Hemisphere terrorist activities—including and especially assassination. In military ranking he would have been a one-star general. As the Russians would say, he was their Line V man—the most dangerous KGB terrorist assigned to this hemisphere!’⁶⁶⁴

So there was evidence of a communist conspiracy, even though a communist conspiracy had not actually transpired, because that evidence indicating a communist conspiracy had been deliberately planted in CIA channels prior to the assassination. This is a conclusion reached after extensive and highly professional examination of the inconsistencies in the evidence of Oswald in Mexico City and the CIA cable traffic.⁶⁶⁵

Two men who were intricately involved in the CIA-Mafia assassination plots against Castro—Johnny Roselli and John Martino—played a key role in the quick dissemination of information falsely linking Oswald to Communist Cuba:

For both men told the FBI that the assassination of John F. Kennedy had been Castro’s retaliation for Kennedy’s CIA-Mafia plots against himself, even to the point of Castro’s having ‘turned’ an assassination team and sent it back to Dallas.⁶⁶⁶

We now know that Lyndon Johnson himself, despite his public lip service to the Warren Report’s verdict of a lone assassin, believed in fact that the killing was the work of a ‘conspiracy,’ a ‘retaliation’ for ‘a CIA-backed assassination team . . . picked up in Havana.’⁶⁶⁷

It’s, of course, impossible to really know if President Johnson actually believed those intelligence reports about a plot, or if he may have been “crying wolf,” so to speak, to cover his own involvement. In any case, he certainly acted, behind-the-scenes, as though it were a matter of the utmost national security.

A top aide to President Johnson wrote that the Johnson Administration was aware that “a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson speculated that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt . . .”⁶⁶⁸

So issues of “national security” immediately played a major role in the post-assassination cover-up. As news columnist Jack Anderson wrote:

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. . . . 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.⁶⁶⁹

Imagine the shock waves in the corridors of power when it became known that the accused assassin of the President of the United States was associated with U.S. intelligence—and was using the “legend” created for him by U.S. intelligence. That makes it highly plausible that, as John Newman so aptly put it: “. . . when Oswald turned up with a rifle on the president’s motorcade route, the CIA found itself living in an unthinkable nightmare of its own making.”⁶⁷⁰

A few key officials—like Bobby Kennedy, Richard Helms, and others—would also believe that Oswald had done it [at least initially], but not for the reasons most others did. They would think that a US asset like Oswald had ‘turned,’ for some reason. Yet that reason couldn’t be publicly revealed—or even fully investigated . . .⁶⁷¹

In a memo kept classified for ten years, the Warren Commission lawyers wrote that ‘the motive of’ the ‘anti-Castroites’ using Oswald ‘would, of course, be expectation that after the President was killed,” that ‘Oswald would be caught or at least his identity ascertained. Law enforcement authorities and the public would then blame the assassination on the Castro government, and the call for its forcible overthrow would be irresistible.’⁶⁷²

So it looks like CIA contract agent Robert Morrow—himself a veteran of many anti-Castro operations—nailed it exactly right when he said the following:

The assassination of President Kennedy was, to put it simply, an anti-Castro ‘provocation,’ an act designed to be blamed on Castro to justify a punitive American invasion of the island. Such action would most clearly benefit the Mafia chieftains who had lost their gambling holdings in Havana because of Castro, and CIA agents who had lost their credibility with the Cuban exile freedom fighters from the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion.⁶⁷³

And, as Peter Dale Scott concluded from all the false linkages to Oswald, “one can see the abundance of reasons behind the consensus, apparently generated by Hoover, for establishing that Oswald was just a nut who acted alone.”⁶⁷⁴

⁶⁵⁰ Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK.

⁶⁵¹ David Atlee Phillips, The AMLASH Legacy (unpublished manuscript), cited in Morley & Scott, Our Man in Mexico.

⁶⁵² David Talbot, “Case Closed? A new book about the JFK assassination claims to finally solve the mystery,” December 1, 2005, Salon.com: salon.com/2005/12/01/review_161/

⁶⁵³ Debra Conway, “US-Cuba Relations: Castro Assassination Plots,” November 2007: jfklancer.com/cuba/castroplots.html

⁶⁵⁴ Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice.

⁶⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁵⁶ Richard D. Mahoney, The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (Skyhorse Publishing: 2011), 178.

⁶⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁵⁸ Mahoney, The Kennedy Brothers, 178.

⁶⁵⁹ Talbot, Brothers; David Talbot, May 26, 2007, “David Talbot: The Kennedy Family and the Assassination of JFK,” The Education Forum: educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=10049

⁶⁶⁰ Mahoney, The Kennedy Brothers, 178.

⁶⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶⁶² Michael R. Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963—1964 (Simon & Schuster: 1997).

⁶⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁶⁴ Newman, Ph.D., Oswald and the CIA, emphasis in original.

⁶⁶⁵ Newman, Ph.D., Oswald and the CIA and John Newman, Ph.D. “Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City,” 2003: pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/conspiracy/newman.html

⁶⁶⁶ Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK.

⁶⁶⁷ Ibid.

⁶⁶⁸ Leo Janos, “The Last Days of the President: LBJ in Retirement,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1973; Volume 232, No. 1; 35–41: theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/73jul/janos.htm

⁶⁶⁹ Jack Anderson & Daryl Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (Forge: 1999) 115.

⁶⁷⁰ John Newman, Ph.D., Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK (Skyhorse Publishing: 2008).

⁶⁷¹ Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice.

⁶⁷² Ibid.

⁶⁷³ Robert D. Morrow, First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the CIA-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy (S.P.I. Books: 1992).

⁶⁷⁴ Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK.