Dick Russell’s research established a connection between H. L. Hunt and George de Mohrenschildt; the same de Mohrenschildt who also watched Lee Harvey Oswald.641 Russell also established a connection between Hunt and Jack Ruby:
More alarming was the Warren Commission’s finding that on the day before the assassination, Jack Ruby had driven a young woman over to the Hunt offices for a job interview. After Ruby shot Oswald, Dallas police found two scripts from H. L. Hunt’s Life Line radio program among his possessions. The FBI also reported that the telephone number of another son, Lamar, appeared ‘in a book which was the property of Jack Ruby.’ Questioned about this on December 17, 1963, Lamar replied ‘that he could not think of any reason why his name would appear in Jack Ruby’s personal property and that he had no contact whatsoever with Ruby to the best of his knowledge.’642
Maybe he couldn’t think of any reason why Jack Ruby had his number, but I’m sure starting to see some.
Hunt seemed to have a lot of contacts in organized crime:
The day before the assassination, Eugene Hale Brading, a Mafia man with a long arrest record, visited Hunt’s office building in Dallas. Brading was arrested in Dealey Plaza on the day of the shooting when he was found to have taken an elevator to the ground floor of the Dal-Tex Building shortly after the shots were fired. Brading was released, however, because he gave the police an alias. While in Dallas, Brading stayed at the Cabana Hotel.643
The Cabana Motor Hotel in Dallas was also where Johnny Roselli and Chuck Nicoletti were supposed to be on the day of the assassination, as well as being where Brading (also known as Jim Braden) stayed, and where James Files was staying as well. Files said he had also seen Gary Marlowe there, the man who actually shot Officer Tippit, and that Lee Harvey Oswald had stopped at Files’ room at the Cabana while he was staying there, too.644 Mobster Chauncey Holt was supposed to take mobsters Leo Moceri and Chuck Nicoletti to the Cabana.645 Another mobbed-up millionaire with connections to H. L. Hunt, named Morgan Brown, was also—you guessed it—staying right there at the Cabana.646 There were, in fact, so many pre-assassination goings-on there that one researcher did a study specifically on the Cabana Motor Hotel!647 Jack Ruby was there at the Cabana also; now that was quite a popular place!
Jack Ruby visited that hotel, and Hunt’s office building, on November 21. Moreover, according to Hunt’s former chief aide, John Curington, Marina Oswald met with Hunt two days before the shooting.
On November 23, Hunt asked his chief aide to see what kind of security the police had for Oswald. The aide reported that Oswald had very little protection and that security was very lax at police headquarters where Oswald was being kept. Hunt flew to Washington D.C., shortly after receiving this report. Oswald was killed on November 24.648
The above facts were confirmed in direct interviews with John Wesley Curington, who was chief aide to H. L. Hunt.649 So Hunt obviously knew Jack Ruby and may have been involved in setting up the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald—as well as John F. Kennedy.
638 Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover.
639 Joachim Joesten, How Kennedy Was Killed (Dawnay, Tandem: 1968): spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKhuntHL.htm
640 Ibid.
641 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 173.
642 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 375.
643 Michael T. Griffith, “Suspects in the JFK Assassination,” December 19, 2002: michaelgriffith1.tripod.com/suspects.htm
644 Dankbaar, Files on JFK.
645 William Kelly, “November 21, 1963—The Cabana Motor Hotel, Dallas, Texas,” October 27, 1998: mcadams.posc.mu.edu/weberman/11-18-07.html
646 Ibid.
647 Ibid.
648 Griffith, “Suspects in the JFK Assassination.”
649 Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 376–377.
62
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.
63
The True Facts Concerning the Conspiracy and Cover-Up Have Still Not Been Revealed to the American Public
Eighty percent of the American people still refuse to believe the Warren Commission’s conclusion that President Kennedy was murdered by one “lone nut” gunman.675
Because—to put it bluntly—were not stupid!
I’ve made this point before as I’ve gone around the country speaking and teaching, and it bears repeating:
During my first year as governor, I caused a pretty big stir when I told an interviewer from Playboy that I did not believe the official conclusion on
Oswald. I think I may have been the highest-ranking official who ever said that, at least publicly. I started by simply applying common sense. If Oswald was who they told us he was—a Marine private who gets out of the Marine Corps and decides to defect to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, then comes back home with a Russian wife and does minimum-wage jobs—why would any records need to be locked away in the National Archives because of “national security” for seventy-five years? As a Navy SEAL, I had to have Top-Secret clearance. That was higher than Oswald’s, and I know a few secrets, but not enough to endanger national security.676
But in Oswald’s case, thousands of documents are still being withheld.
My point is this: It’s now fifty years after the assassination and the story is still suppressed! WHY?
Here’s a recent example of what I’m talking about:
On January 11, 2013, Robert Kennedy Jr. told Charlie Rose in front of a large Dallas audience that his father, Robert F. Kennedy (brother to JFK), privately believed the Warren Commission was ‘a shoddy piece of craftsmanship,’ and that ‘the evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman.’
Kennedy said his father had ‘asked Justice Department investigators to informally look into allegations that the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had received aid from the Mafia, the CIA or other organizations. He said the staff members found phone lists linking Jack Ruby, Oswald’s assassin, to organized crime figures with ties to the CIA, convincing the elder Kennedy that there was something to the allegations.’677
Now get a load of this:
The Rose interview was taped but not broadcast by the media, which evidently does not ‘go there.’678
The presentation was apparently taped at a public “town hall” presentation in Dallas, but was not actually aired on television.679 In fact, a transcript of the presentation was apparently never made available either.680
And don’t think for a second that you’ll actually be seeing everything the government has been hiding all these years, because they’re still keeping crucial documents sealed!
They Killed Our President Page 31
