Tony Cuesta, Eladio del Valle and Herminio Diaz Garcia
Tony Cuesta was a founding member of Alpha 66, a highly combative paramilitary exile group that hated Castro with a vengeance. Cuesta was taken prisoner after a failed covert operation into Cuba in 1966.
When his team was captured, Cuesta pulled the pin on a grenade in a final attempt to take out his Cuban enemies and was blinded and lost a hand. Cuesta then spent many years in a Cuban prison, and his political positions softened somewhat as he grew older.
Years later, Cuesta actually admitted his participation in the JFK assassination—personally—to Fabian Escalante, head of Cuban Counterintelligence. Cuesta also reportedly provided Escalante with a voluntarily written declaration to that effect, which also stated that Cuesta had direct knowledge that two other Cuban exiles—Eladio del Valle and Herminio Diaz Garcia—also were involved in plotting the assassination of President Kennedy.607
Diaz Garcia was a hired killer who had been a bodyguard for Santo Trafficante and also worked for Tony Varona.608 He died in combat during a raid into Cuba in 1966.
Eladio del Valle was a brutal exile leader who was brutally murdered himself in Florida. He was known to have links to Florida Godfather Santo Trafficante, himself a key suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy.609 In addition to being named as a conspirator in the JFK assassination by Tony Cuesta, a friend of del Valle’s also claimed that del Valle was murdered because of his involvement in the assassination.610
The murder of del Valle was just as he was being sought for testimony by the investigation of District Attorney Jim Garrison. In fact, del Valle was killed the exact same day that another crucial witness, David Ferrie, was found dead under circumstances that Garrison also found suspicious.611
Tony Varona and Rolando Masferrer, Alpha 66
Tony Varona was a loyal supporter of former Cuban President Carlos Prìo Socarrás (the leader overthrown by a military coup just before the Cuban Revolution” see; spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKprio.htm). He worked at efforts to reinstate Prìo Socarrás, which included assassination attempts on Fidel Castro.
Varona worked closely with Prìo Socarrás and another extremely popular exile leader, Manuel Artime. But he also worked closely with mobsters Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante in the CIA-Mafia attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.612
Tony Varona was the key connection for Roselli to hardcore Cuban killers like Herminio Diaz Garcia.613
Colonel C. William Bishop, senior Military member of an elite assassinations unit, told author Dick Russell that, from direct personal knowledge, he could name Varona and Masferrer as conspirators in the JFK assassination:
By 1963, the Cuban element—see, Kennedy had gone to Miami, to the Orange Bowl down there, and made this statement that the brigade’s flag would fly over Cuba and all this crap. That was a stopgap. The exiles for a time believed him. Then shortly after that, a presidential executive order came out that no military-style incursions into Cuba based from the United States would be tolerated. The end result was complete distrust and dislike for Kennedy and his administration by the Cuban exiles. You take Tony Varona and Rolando Masferrer to name but two—and there were many, many more—when serious talk began to happen about the possibility of assassinating Kennedy.614
Rolando Masferrer was a killer with his own private army who was closely associated with mobster Santo Trafficante’s organization and was brought into CIA-Mafia anti-Castro operations by Johnny Roselli and John Martino.615
As Colonel Bishop of the CIA’s Executive Action assassination program put it, in addition to Masferrer being a “key bagman” for the militant Alpha 66 group:
He also had different ties with Jimmy Hoffa. As far back as 1962, I think. But Rolando, from time to time when it came to large sums of money, had sticky fingers. I think that’s why he was killed, eventually. Either that, or the Kennedy assassination. Because he knew about it.616
Masferrer was killed when his car was blown to bits by a very professional car bomb in 1975.
Antonio Veciana
Veciana was the exile leader who founded the extremist anti-Castro group, Alpha 66. He was involved in attempts to kill Castro and testified that the CIA secretly funded some of their military and intelligence operations against Cuba in secret because the Kennedy Administration was in strong opposition to such raids and black ops.617
Veciana’s testimony was also enlightening because he said that he was certain he saw Lee Harvey Oswald with his CIA handler, known to Veciana only by his operational name of Maurice Bishop. Congressional investigators suspected that Maurice Bishop was actually David Phillips, but were never able to prove it completely.618
Manuel Artime
Artime was another popular Cuban exile leader. But in addition to working with the CIA to help try and regain Cuba from Communist control, he was playing both sides of the fence by also working with the Mafia.619
Like many close to the CIA-Mafia plots, Artime died just as he was being sought to testify before a Congressional committee in 1975. He died from rapid-onset cancer but it should be noted that a strain of rapid-onset cancer was being developed in the nexus of anti-Cuban operations to be used as a potential bioweapon against Fidel Castro.620
It’s beyond the realm of coincidence to look at how many witnesses with information about the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro died sudden deaths just as they were about to be pressed by investigators concerning what they knew. That list includes Artime, Rolando Masferrer, David Ferrie, Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, Chuck Nicoletti, George de Mohrenschildt, Carlos Prìo Socarrás, and Eladio del Valle. Others with inside information about those intelligence operations and their apparent link to the JFK assassination were killed before investigators had even figured out who they were: Herminio Diaz Garcia, Manuel Rodriguez Quesada, and Gilbert Rodriguez Hernandez.621
Carlos Prío Socarrás
Prìo Socarrás was President of Cuba from 1948 to 1952. Even though he was “elected” as opposed to being a dictator, his presidency was considered one of the most corrupt eras in Cuban history, with many links to organized crime and political corruption.622
He was involved in the CIA’s Bay of Pigs operation that tried to overthrow Castro and was also linked to two other persons of “keen interest” to the Congressional committee investigating the assassination: mobsters Jack Ruby and Frank Sturgis.623
It was also believed that Prìo Socarrás had relevant information about the JFK assassination, and he was being sought as a witness by Congress. But before he could testify, he died from gunshots outside the garage of his Miami home on April 5, 1977. It was ruled another suicide, but some investigators say that he was murdered to keep him from testifying.624
605 Belzer & Wayne, Hit List, 165–169, citing Robert D. Morrow, First Hand Knowledge (S.P.I. Books: 1992) and Craig Roberts & John Armstrong, JFK: The Dead Witnesses (Consolidated Press: 1994), 98.
606 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 309.
607 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much:
608 John Simkin, “Herminio Diaz Garcia: Biography,” Spartacus Educational, retrieved 25 May 2013: spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKgarciaH.htm
609 Anthony Summers, Not in Your Lifetime (Marlowe & Co.: 1998), 319, 491.
610 Reference Center for Marxist Studies, “Eladio del Valle: Biography,” retrieved 25 May 2013: marxistlibrary.org/eladio-del-valle-biography/
611 Belzer & Wayne, Hit List, 167–179.
612 John Simkin, “Tony Varona: Biography,” Spartacus Educational, spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKvarona.htm
613 Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked.
614 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much,
615 Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice:
616 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 333.
617 John Simkin, “Antonio Veciana: Biography,” Spartacus Educational, retrieved 26 May 2013: spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKveciana.htm
618 Fonzi, The Last Investigation
619 Waldron & Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice:
620 Haslam, Dr. Mary’s Monkey; Baker, Me & Lee.
621 Belzer & Wayne, Hit List, 165–183, 301.
622 Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, 136.
623 John Simkin, “Carlos Prio: Biography,” Spartacus Educational, retrieved 26 May 2013: spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKprio.htm
624 Ibid, citing David Miller, “Did the CIA Kill Carlos Prio.”
60
Complicity of Lyndon Johnson
Conclusions of Soviet KGB
I discovered an amazing document while I was writing this book. Get a load of this:
By September 16, 1965, the Soviet KGB had concluded that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the JFK assassination.625
Stop for a minute and imagine the gravity of that! I already told you about how slick the Russian KGB were. They had figured out—in 1963—that Oswald was part of a plot to kill President Kennedy. And since Kennedy as President was their best option at that time, they acted on that intelligence to try and “eliminate” the Oswald threat and save President Kennedy, even if that meant having Oswald killed.626
Their conclusions, therefore, are very important. In a sense, it seems they knew what was going on better than our U.S. intelligence agencies did!
So I found this document from U.S. intelligence which wasn’t even released until the 1990s; it was buried in millions of documents—literally millions of pages that researchers studied for years. And buried in all those documents was one that contained a real gem; a true game-changer. At first, it was apparently just passed over as “foreign intelligence” matters. But JFK researcher Robert Morrow has been attempting to bring the deeper meaning of that intelligence into the light of day where it belongs. This is a verbatim excerpt from the FBI memo:
Our source added that in the instructions from Moscow, it was indicated that ‘now’ the KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.627
The above intelligence was in a high-level FBI internal memorandum—entitled “REACTION OF SOVIET AND COMMUNIST PARTY OFFICIALS TO THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY”—and also states the following:
On September 16, 1965, this same source reported that the KGB Residency in New York City received instructions approximately September 16, 1965, from KGB headquarters in Moscow to develop all possible information concerning President Lyndon B. Johnson’s character, background, personal friends, family, and from which quarters he derives his support in his position as President of the United States.628
Another statement in that FBI document revealed the broader conclusions of Soviet leadership:
According to our source, officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup.’ They seemed convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but that it rose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part. They felt those elements interested in utilizing the assassination and playing on anticommunist sentiments in the United States would then utilize this act to stop negotiations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba and thereafter spread the war.629
Like I said, the Russians were some pretty slick customers and drew some very cogent conclusions. There’s a lot of other circumstantial evidence that Johnson was involved in the conspiracy.
Madeleine Brown
I covered Ms. Brown’s testimony earlier—you can find it in the section on “Other Witnesses.” But she stated very clearly for the historical record that her lover of many years and father of her child, Lyndon Johnson, told her on the night before the assassination in no uncertain terms that ‘After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again—that’s no threat—that’s a promise.’630
Billie Sol Estes
The testimony of Billie Sol Estes detailed that his former business partner, Lyndon Johnson, was directly responsible for the murder of several individuals and that one of those was the murder of John F. Kennedy.
To convey an idea of the extent of pervasive corruption wreaked by Lyndon Johnson’s political organization in Texas, one need look no further than the trial of his henchman, Mac Wallace. Described as Johnson’s hit man, Wallace was found guilty of First Degree Murder with eleven jurors recommending the death penalty and the twelfth juror recommending life imprisonment.
But in an incredibly obvious example of a corrupt system known at the time as “Texas Justice,” the judge over-ruled the jury, technically sentencing Wallace to five years imprisonment, which was “suspended” by the judge, and Wallace was immediately freed.631
Douglas Caddy, Esq., a Texas attorney formally representing Billie Sol Estes, contacted the United States Attorney’s Office on August 9, 1984, informing them of the following:
My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of May 29, 1984. Mr. Estes was a member of a four-member group, headed by Lyndon Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960s. The other two, besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses:
I. Murders
1. The killing of Henry Marshall
2. The killing of George Krutilek
3. The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary
4. The killing of Harold Orr
5. The killing of Coleman Wade
6. The killing of Josefa Johnson
7. The killing of John Kinser
8. The killing of President J. F. Kennedy632
The statement sent to the U.S. Department of Justice included the following: “Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who executed the murders.”633
Mac Wallace
A fingerprint identified at the so-called sniper’s nest in Dealey Plaza was positively identified by a certified expert in that field who determined clear fourteen-point identification, far exceeding the legal requirement of proof for a match.634
That fingerprint belonged to the notorious Mac Wallace, a convicted killer who, for many years, took care of the “dirty work” for Lyndon Johnson.635
CIA Officer E. Howard Hunt
Veteran operative Howard Hunt, in deathbed testimony, implicated Johnson as being at the operational top of the conspiracy to kill JFK. His “Chain of Command” diagram had “LBJ” as head honcho of the black op.636
Reduced Secret Service Protection
As I covered in the Evidence section, compared to other trips of President’s Kennedy’s, the Secret Service protection in Dallas was visibly reduced and a lot of those security reductions appeared to emanate from contacts of LBJ, like his aide Cliff Carter and Shift Leader of the White House Secret Service Detail, Emory Roberts.637
625 Robert Morrow, “The LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK,” November 28, 2012: lyndonjohnsonmurderedjfk.blogspot.com/2012/11/lbj-cia-assassination-of-jfk-112912.html also see: Anna K. Nelson, American University, “JFK Assassination Review Board Releases Top Secret Documents,” 1998: indiana.edu/~oah/nl/98feb/jfk.html
626 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 282–283, 464.
627 Anna K. Nelson, American University, “JFK Assassination Review Board Releases Top ecret Documents,” 1998:indiana.edu/~oah/nl/98feb/jfk.html
628 Ibid.
629 Ibid.
630 Brown, Texas in the Morning, 166, emphasis in original.
631 Belzer & Wayne, Dead Wrong, 22.
632 Douglas Caddy, Esq., “Letter to Mr. Stephen S. Trott, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice,” August 9, 1984: home.earthlink.net/~sixthfloor/estes.htm
633 Ibid.
634 Alan Kent, “Mac Wallace fingerprint?” The Education Forum, retrieved 28 May 2013: educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=4
966
635 Ibid.
636 Hunt, Bond of Secrecy.
637 Palamara, Survivor’s Guilt.
61
Complicity of H.L. Hunt and “Texas Oil”
Lyndon Johnson’s benefactors apparently played a role in the assassination, too. “Texas Oil,” as it was called, was a major supporter of Lyndon Johnson throughout his political career and it gave him a lot of clout. Men like H. L. Hunt (the richest man in the world at the time), Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison, and D. H. (“Dry Hole”) Byrd had all made huge fortunes in the oil business and were busy buying influence with their profits. Byrd owned the building that Oswald supposedly killed Kennedy from. Murchison “owned a piece” of J. Edgar Hoover and used such friends for his political devices. Washington’s infamous raconteur, Bobby Baker, put it like this:
Clint Murchison owned a piece of Hoover. Rich people always try to put their money with the sheriff, because they’re looking for protection. Hoover was the personification of law and order and officially against gangsters and everything, so it was a plus for a rich man to be identified with him. That’s why men like Murchison made it their business to let everyone know Hoover was their friend. You can do a lot of illegal things if the head lawman is your buddy.638
Hunt was a rabid anti-Communist who despised the Kennedy Administration in general and John and Robert in particular. He was also quite possibly the person to whom Lee Harvey Oswald wrote the letter I showed you earlier in this book, asking for his “advice on how to proceed” before it was too late.
District Attorney Jim Garrison reportedly made a statement on September 21, 1967, that “the assassination of President Kennedy had been ordered and paid for by a handful of oil-rich psychotic millionaires.”639
It so happens that H. L. Hunt is also a longtime friend, admirer and financial ‘angel’ of the most prominent Texas politician of our time, Lyndon B. Johnson, the man who was destined to become President of the United States automatically the moment Kennedy died. Perhaps this is the reason why Garrison preferred not to be too specific.640
They Killed Our President Page 30
