Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case
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DESTINY
BETRAYED
DESTINY
BETRAYED
Second Edition
JFK, CUBA, AND THE GARRISON CASE
James DiEugenio
With a preface by Lisa Pease and
a foreword by William Davy
Copyright © 1992, 2012 by James DiEugenio
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-62087-056-3
Printed in the United States of America
To my mother, Flo (1924–1991)
With sorrow and regret that you weren’t
here to see this book published.
Rest in peace, forever.
Contents
Preface
Foreword
Acknowledgments
1. The Legacy
2. The Education of John F. Kennedy
3. Bay of Pigs: Kennedy vs. Dulles
4. Kennedy De-escalates in Cuba
5. New Orleans
6. Witches’ Brew
7. On Instructions from His Government
8. Oswald Returns: Strange Bedfellows
9. Jim Garrison in 1966
10. Garrison Reopens the Kennedy Case
11. Inferno
12. “Shaw Will Never Be Punished”
13. Anticlimax: The Shaw Trial
14. Garrison Must Be Destroyed
15. Blakey Buries the Case
16. Mexico City and Langley
17. Washington and Saigon
18. Denouement
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Not all conspiracies are theories. As grown-ups, we need to learn to decouple those terms, which have been irresponsibly glued together since 1963.
I grew up with conspiracies. I watched Congress investigate Watergate and Iran Contra. I saw high-level government officials repeatedly tell us Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” only to learn that that information was false. I was a juror on a conspiracy trial. Conspiracies happen.
So why do some conspiracies get investigated while others get covered up? This volume will help you answer that question.
I first encountered Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba and the Garrison Case in an independent bookstore, on a shelf labeled simply—and appropriately— “Intelligence.” Within the first few pages, I knew I had discovered something special. I had read a handful of books on the assassination of President Kennedy by that point, but this was the first book I read that put the events squarely in their historical context. I experienced a “light bulb” moment, seeing the convergence of factors that led to Kennedy’s death.
The book also explained why the erudite Jim Garrison I met in Garrison’s own wonderful book, On the Trail of the Assassins, did not match the image of him that the press was presenting. The picture of a crazed district attorney hell-bent on prosecuting an innocent man never rang true to me. Here was a district attorney who, in my opinion, had done the right and honorable thing, something that had not been done to that point: treated the assassination like the prosecutable crime it was. He called in witnesses. He arrested Clay Shaw, a prominent citizen, on charges of conspiracy to kill the President because of strong evidence. He took his case to trial. And yet, Shaw was found not guilty. What happened?
In this volume, James DiEugenio connects the dots to explain why Garrison’s case fell apart, who undermined it, and how those players connect to the circle of people who had been manipulating Oswald long before the Kennedy assassination took place.
If you want to understand how a lie can be perpetrated for almost fifty years, read this book. DiEugenio deconstructs, through declassified government records, personal interviews, and careful analysis, how high-ranking members of the CIA—through their allies on the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, with the help of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI’s and CIA’s assets in the mainstream media—derailed not just Garrison’s investigation but every serious attempt to investigate John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Greatly expanded and rewritten from the original edition, this book shows us how our past has been deliberately rewritten to hide the important truth of who killed President Kennedy and why.
This is not “conspiracy theory.” This is the factual history of how the investigations into the assassination of President Kennedy were deliberately and provably subverted. DiEugenio exposes the mechanisms that enabled the conspiracy and cover-up to take place.
But this book is not just about our past. If we don’t learn not only what happened, but how the cover-up was effected, then not only did they get away with it, but the same operational template can be run again.
If you never punish a criminal, will the criminal voluntarily stop committing future crimes? Of course not. The same is true when the criminal is a government official. It’s long past time we started demanding that people be held accountable for high-level crimes and cover-ups. Accountability matters.
And why are we, the people, so gullible? It has often been said that people prefer to believe a conspiracy killed Kennedy because such a consequential act demands a consequential reason. But consider the reverse. Why would anyone in their right mind prefer to believe that members of their own government had Kennedy killed and then covered it up? Who would choose to believe that? Isn’t that why the lies persist? We want to believe our government would never do such a thing, even when the facts scream otherwise.
But the truth doesn’t have to be scary. A cover-up is like a magic trick. Once you understand how it was accomplished, you can never be fooled by it again. That’s why this book is so important. It dissects the magic trick. You may feel you’re losing your innocence, but you’ll only be losing your naïveté.
Jim Garrison stepped up, did the right thing, and was pilloried for it. It will take many more people with the courage to do what Garrison did, to risk ridicule and defamation, in order to rescue our future. But with each new recruit, the truth becomes more obvious and less of a struggle to defend. That’s where you come in.
It is too late to hold some of these people accountable in their lifetimes. But it’s not too late to hold them accountable in the eyes of history. “Who controls the past controls the future,” wrote George Orwell in his prescient book 1984. By restoring to us the real history of these events, this book offers us the power to choose a different future. Let’s accept the gift and do something useful with it.
—Lisa Pease, coeditor of The Assassinations
Foreword
Like millions of others in 1992, I too was caught up in the buzz created by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK. Primarily based on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s 1988 book about his investigation into th
e assassination of President Kennedy, On The Trail of the Assassins, Stone’s film generated controversy, legislation and a lot of ink.
Unlike a lot of the movie going public though, I had already studied the JFK assassination and the Garrison case for more than ten years and so had a little easier time separating the wheat from the chaff—and there was a lot to digest. In the wake of the film, a spate of books, magazines, newspaper columns, and TV specials flooded the market.
One day at the newsstand, I picked up a copy of Cineaste magazine that was devoted to the topic of JFK, the film (Vol. XIX No.1, 1992). That issue featured many interesting articles by the likes of Christopher Sharrett, George Michael Evica, and—Garrison’s editor and Stone’s—co-writer, Zachary Sklar. But what caught my eye was an ad on page 22 announcing the release of a new book on the Garrison investigation called, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case. I have to admit, I greeted it with skepticism. Other than Paris Flammonde’s book, The Kennedy Conspiracy, and Garrison’s own volumes, little of note had been written about Garrison, and one had to be wary of the mountain of disinformation and shabby scholarship surrounding the case. I was somewhat relieved to find out that the book was being brought out by Garrison’s publisher, Sheridan Square Press, and had been endorsed by both Stone and Sklar. Yet I still had a nagging feeling as I had never heard of the author—James DiEugenio. Somewhat reluctantly I mailed my check off.
I needn’t have worried. I remember that the book arrived as I was house sitting for my parents and had plenty of reading time on my hands. I devoured the book from cover to cover and then read it again. I was impressed by the way the author deftly placed the assassination and the subsequent investigation into their appropriate historical context—something sorely lacking in the field to this day. The writing flowed logically and the depth of the information in the endnotes section alone could have been another book in itself. The bibliography is still a valuable resource to this day. But the meat of the book is what ultimately matters and there DiEugenio didn’t disappoint. Jim took the Garrison case to new heights with diligent interviewing, new areas of research and plain old-fashioned shoe leather—having driven his battered Toyota from coast to coast.
At the 1993 Midwest Symposium in Chicago, I got to listen to Jim speak and meet him—albeit briefly. Two important events occurred in the immediate aftermath of that conference. Jim and some of his West Coast colleagues went on to form Citizens for the Truth about the Kennedy Assassinations (CTKA) and its in-house magazine Probe. The second event was that I got to meet Peter Vea. Peter was a volunteer worker at the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) in Washington, D.C., who specialized in the Garrison probe. The AARC was started by attorney Bud Fensterwald who had been close to Garrison in his lifetime and was now being run by preeminent FOIA attorney, James Lesar. The AARC was a huge repository of the former New Orleans DA’s files as well as Paris Flammonde’s working papers, numerous unpublished manuscripts, and more. As a D.C. suburb resident, I was a regular “customer” of theirs and was down there every Saturday and a lot of weeknights as well. Peter took note of my interest in all things Garrison, and we became fast friends and colleagues.
Around this time as a result of hearings in the House and the Senate, legislation was passed to induce government agencies to release all Kennedy assassination-related documents—a classification left purposefully vague to compel agencies to release anything close to a Kennedy-era document. (To say compliance has fallen short of expectations would be an understatement as agencies are still withholding millions of pages of material.) A declassification review board was established (ARRB) to oversee the process. But before the members could be approved by Congress, many agencies did a massive data dump, and the National Archives was now home to millions of pages of material that had been held on to for decades by the CIA, FBI, DOD, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Church Committee, et al.
Researchers now had an avalanche of materials to pore through, and Peter and I took on that task, with our primary focus being New Orleans. During subsequent conversations with Peter, I found out that he had gotten to know Jim DiEugenio at the Chicago conference and had maintained contact with him since. In fact, he was going to join Jim on the southern leg of Jim’s latest coast-to-coast summer research odyssey. When Jim and Peter returned to the Washington area, they rang me up and we met at an Italian restaurant in Chantilly, Virginia. After lunch, we convened at my house where I shared my now burgeoning file collection with Jim. As Jim and I got to know each other better, we found we had other areas of mutual interest as well (cinema for example). We too became fast friends and stayed in contact.
In the spring of 1994, Jim and a CTKA colleague, Dennis Effle, returned to Washington for a series of CTKA related meetings, and I put them up at my house. During that time, we started laying the groundwork for a two-week research blitz tour planned for that summer in New Orleans. That trip yielded numerous interviews with many key witnesses and cemented a relationship with Jim Garrison’s sons that allowed us unprecedented access to boxes of the late DA’s public and private papers. A follow-up trip in 1995 by Peter and me augmented an already colossal archive. By that time I had started writing for Jim’s publication, Probe, and had amassed so much new material that I wrote a monograph titled Through the Looking Glass. It was published in a comb-bound edition and was printed and distributed exclusively by Jim and CTKA. I later expanded that work into book length and published it as Let Justice Be Done in 1999. As Destiny Betrayed had been my inspiration, I had only one person in mind to write my foreword and Jim graciously wrote that wonderful opening essay.
While the years saw the cessation of the print edition of Probe, CTKA’s online site picked up the slack, far surpassing any comparable web sites put out by the so-called “new media.” Jim’s (and others’) contributions to the site are always insightful, informative and entertaining, whether it is keeping the public abreast of new work in the research community or reviewing a worthy new book in the field. At the same time, CTKA pulls no punches in taking the piss out of authors of shabbily written and lazily thought out volumes (e.g., those by Waldron, North, et al., but it is Jim’s ten-part demolition of Bugliosi’s bloated, pompous Reclaiming History that is the site’s magnum opus). Not to be overlooked, Probe’s earlier articles proved to be so popular that an anthology, edited by Jim and Lisa Pease, titled The Assassinations was released by Feral House in 2003.
So, we now come full circle to the rerelease of Destiny Betrayed. Rest assured this is not some crass attempt to cash in by reprinting old material and just slapping on a new preface. This is a reboot—a total rewrite from start to finish. Because of the timing, Jim did not have the benefit of having all of the new file releases at his disposal when the first edition was published—Jim more than makes up for it here. His chapters on the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam alone produce more insight and correct more historical wrongs than whole volumes on the subjects. At the same time he pumps new life into the chapters on Garrison and New Orleans. The chapter dealing with the National Security State’s interference with Clay Shaw’s perjury trial is as compelling as it is frightening. The writing is masterful throughout, the pacing is brisk and the information invaluable—just what you would expect from an author at the top of his game (but sadly what you too often don’t get).
Destiny Betrayed belongs in that pantheon of books that have changed history and will stand the test of time. I’m just thankful to Jim that I was along for the ride.
—William Davy
Acknowledgments
For the rewritten and expanded version of this book, I should thank Len Osanic who got me in touch with Tony Lyons and Skyhorse Publishing. They made the decision that the book was worth republishing, and they let me almost completely rewrite it to reflect the current state of research in the field.
The new information this book contains is largely reliant on the work of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). That body oper
ated from 1994–98. That agency created a unique declassification process that reversed the prior Freedom of Information Act law. Now the restricting body, whether it be the CIA or FBI, had to show why the document should not be released. Therefore, much new information, about two million pages worth, concerning the murder of President Kennedy has now been declassified. Once that process began, two friends of mine, Peter Vea and William Davy, began searching through these documents at the National Archives. They forwarded much of the most interesting material to me. We then organized two trips to New Orleans in 1993 and 1994. There, we did many interviews, established contact with several helpful people, and searched more archival repositories.
From 1993–2000, I was part of a journal called Probe Magazine. This periodical covered the major assassinations of the sixties and the new developments in those cases. Illustrious researcher Lisa Pease and I edited this journal from 1995 onward. We published many articles based on these documents. And it is from those writings that much of this new material, especially on the Garrison case, originates. We had many, many authors—too many to list here—contribute distinguished articles to that journal. This book could not exist in the form it does without that major and enduring contribution to the literature in the field.
CHAPTER ONE
The Legacy
“The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history … We and we alone were in a position to break up the plan.”
—Dean Acheson
The events that exploded in Dallas on November 22, 1963, had their genesis in Washington on a February day in 1947. In a distant but very real sense, it was John Kennedy’s resistance to the policy begun on that day that killed him.1
On February 17, 1947, H.M. Sichell, assistant to Lord Inverchapel, the British ambassador to Washington, sent a message to Dean Acheson.2 The ambassador wanted to talk to Secretary of State George Marshall, but, since Marshall was out of town, the diplomats spoke instead to Acting Secretary of State Acheson. They told him the British were experiencing difficulty “administering” Turkey and Greece. For one thing, Britain was unable to quell Greek leftwing partisans in their civil war against rightwing monarchists. Indeed, the formidable strength of domestic leftists and economic havoc in both countries put the British in an unprecedented position. Still reeling from the economic effects of the war and already in need of a large loan from the United States, Britain was in no position to maintain its military involvement or extend aid to either country. The two diplomats impressed on Acheson their fears that a communist, neutralist, or even nationalist victory in the area would change the power structure in the Middle East, India, North Africa, and Italy. Their implication was obvious. England was stepping down as a “superpower,” and America must fill the vacuum.