www.plenglish.com-Havana, Jan 9 (Prensa Latina) The assassination of jfk
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Kennedy: the conspiracy goes on
Havana, Jan 9 (Prensa Latina) The assassination of US President John F.
Kennedy originated in a conspiracy, whose one of the collateral
objectives was to annihiliate the Cuban Revolution, political analysts
and researchers have concluded.
Prensa Latina reproduces here the article "Kennedy, conspiracy in
Hamburg" written by Gabriel Molina, Director of Granma International,
on this issue which has been surfaced by a German documentary maker:
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.
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