by Lisa Pease
Maps had purportedly been found in connection with the recently arrived cache, but Smith knew those maps had been found months earlier in connection with a wholly separate incident. And the person who “confessed” to being involved in the operation had done so while a prisoner of the security police. As Smith explained:
There are few prisoners of security police in Latin America who refuse to confess. If they don’t confess they usually have died in the process of making up their minds, having thought too long about the matter with their heads under water or something similar.794
President Kennedy didn’t seem persuaded either, because Helms recorded no positive response, no promised action. Instead, Helms wrote that as the president put the gun back into the travel bag from which it had been retrieved, Helms said, “I’m sure glad the Secret Service didn’t catch us bringing this gun in here.” Imagine the implied threat. It was almost as if Helms was warning Kennedy he’d better change his mind. But Kennedy grinned and was evidently so concerned with the Venezuelan arms cache that as Helms looked back, “we could see the President signing mail.”
That afternoon, Helms wrote, “it occurred to me that I did not have one of the customary autographed photographs of President Kennedy.” He called Kenny O’Donnell and arranged to get one. Helms was not a fan of the president. Why did he suddenly want an autographed photo? I got a chill, reading this in Helms’ words, because it was almost like Helms was bragging to insiders who would understand that he was signaling he knew JFK would be killed just three days later. Helms was a collector. He wrote a letter to his son on stationery stolen from Hitler. Perhaps Helms couldn’t resist obtaining a memento he knew would be unobtainable in three days.
Did the CIA kill JFK?
LIKE SMITH’S UNNAMED ARMY COLONEL, ROBERT KENNEDY UNDERSTOOD what the CIA was capable of. When Robert learned of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, he called CIA headquarters to ask a startled officer there if the CIA were involved. But the officer would not have been able to answer that accurately either way. He likely wouldn’t have known the answer, and couldn’t have told the truth if he had. You can’t get a job at CIA if you can’t keep secrets forever. And as we saw with Tom Braden earlier, the CIA is always listening. They bug their own employees. So giving up secrets is too costly to be worth the risk, unless you have the courage of Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning.
Robert also called CIA Director John McCone over to Hickory Hill and asked him the same question. But according to Richard Helms, McCone was never informed by the people beneath him of the CIA’s plots to assassinate Castro. If they hadn’t told him about Castro, why would they tell him if they had killed Kennedy? McCone was a Kennedy appointee. It makes no sense that the CIA would have looped McCone in on a plot to kill the man who had given him his current job.
Even President Harry Truman seemed to have his suspicions. He expressed concern, exactly one month to the day after the assassination of President Kennedy, that the CIA was out of control. On December 22, 1963, newspapers around the country published an opinion piece by President Harry Truman expressing his regret for how far the CIA had moved from its original mandate. President Truman wrote:
I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. …
For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that [sic] it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the president has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda. …
[T]he last thing we needed was for CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people. …
I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the president, and whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere. …
There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.795
There’s no space in this volume to lay out the case for the CIA’s role in President Kennedy’s assassination, but it’s a strong one. Please see The Last Investigation by Gaeton Fonzi, Oswald and the CIA by John Newman, JFK and the Unspeakable by Jim Douglass, Destiny Betrayed by Jim DiEugenio, and my previous book with Jim DiEugenio, The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X for some of the strong evidence of the CIA’s role in the plot. Here I will attempt only the barest summary of some evidence in that regard.
CIA finance officer James Wilcott told the HSCA and later, anyone who would listen, including his friends, who told Jim Douglass, that Oswald had been a paid agent of the CIA. While Wilcott had never paid him personally, he was told by others that Lee Harvey Oswald had been paid under a CIA project code. Wilcott told the HSCA that he learned from others in the CIA in the days following the assassination that members of the CIA had killed Kennedy.
Originally, said Wilcott, the news of Kennedy’s assassination was met with joy in the CIA. The CIA was filled with extreme right-wing hardliners who were thrilled the liberal president had been killed. But when Oswald’s history surfaced, the joy faded as employees realized their CIA had killed the president. According to Wilcott:
Not long before going off duty, talk about Oswald’s connection with CIA was making the rounds. While this kind of talk was a jolt to me, I didn’t really take it seriously then. Very heavy talk continued up to about the middle of January. Based solely on what I heard at the Tokyo Station, I became convinced that the following scenario is true: CIA people killed Kennedy. Either it was an outright project of Headquarters with the approval of McCone or it was done outside, perhaps under the direction of Dulles and Bissell. It was done in retaliation for Kennedy’s reneging on a secret agreement with Dulles to support the invasion of Cuba.796
There was no secret agreement between President Kennedy and Dulles to support an invasion of Cuba, but it would have been fully in keeping with Allen Dulles’ character to make up such a story to blame the victim. More disturbing was Wilcott’s assertion of the motive behind the killing of Kennedy:
The branch chiefs and deputy chiefs, project intelligence officers and operational specialists viewed Kennedy as a threat to the clandestine services. The loss of special privileges, allowances, status and early retirement that come with the CIA cloak-and-dagger job were becoming a possibility, even a probability. The prestigious portions of the bureaucratic dominions, ambitiously sought, might be no more. Adjustment to a less glamorous job in a common profession could be the result.797
Remember how George White expressed how fun it was to “kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage” with impunity? There really were people who’d rather kill the president than give up that lifestyle, especially when it was tinged with a warped patriotism that made them feel killing Kennedy was a necessary act to prevent the spread of liberalism.
As in the RFK case, one of the bullets in the JFK case—the so-called “magic bullet” or Commission Exhibit (CE) 399—does not appear to be the bullet initially submitted. Three of the people in the chain of possession claimed the bullet currently in evidence was not the bullet they had passed along. A fourth claimed to have seen his initials on the bullet, but independent researchers have confirmed his initials are not on the bullet currently in evidence. Why would evidence need to be switched? To cover something up is the obvious answer. To explain a bullet wound that ha
d no bullet in it, for example, an FBI agent actually postulated in the official record that perhaps ice bullets had been used.
Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union is another red flag. His trip was misreported across all media in the days following the assassination of President Kennedy as a “defection” to the Soviet Union. Officially, Oswald was a Marxist-Leninist who defected to the Soviet Union because he believed in the Communist revolution. But after being there a time, he grew disillusioned with the Soviet system and moved back to America. But in fact, Oswald never defected and never renounced his citizenship. Oswald met up with “witting” CIA asset Priscilla Johnson (later, Priscilla McMillan) and other CIA assets during his time there. He offered to give the Soviets something of “special interest,” presumably related to the U-2 program, as he had been a radar operator and knew key information, such as the altitude at which the planes flew. He received an enormous amount of money from the Red Cross while he was there, an unusual act that has never been fully explained. Priscilla later wrote the book Marina and Me about Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina, a book Marina called a pack of lies.
A few months after Oswald landed in the USSR, Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 plane exploded and crashed over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960. Powers managed to parachute out before the plane crashed. That month, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was set to meet with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Paris for a peace summit that could have ended the Cold War. When the plane crashed, the U.S.’ first response was to lie about the mission, claiming the plane was on a weather mission and had strayed off course. But the data in the captured wreckage as well as the admissions of pilot Powers made clear the plane had been used in a spy mission. In his 1970 book Operation Oversight, Powers wondered if Lee Harvey Oswald had anything to do with the downing of his plane to sabotage the upcoming peace summit.
Others have speculated Oswald’s true mission in the USSR was to help the CIA determine if they had a mole in the U-2 program. If the Soviets had no source within the program, then they should have showed interest in Oswald. If they already had a mole in the program, they wouldn’t need to talk to Oswald. But the CIA didn’t consider that their ploy would be so obvious that the Soviets pegged Oswald as a CIA man from the start, so they weren’t interested in him either way. At least, that’s what a high-level Soviet intelligence officer named Yuri Nosenko told the CIA upon his defection. (The best account of the Nosenko story can be found in Thomas Mangold’s Cold Warrior, a biography of James Angleton.) Nosenko’s assertions threatened the “Soviets did it” line Angleton and Dulles had used to persuade President Johnson and the Warren Commission to go along with a cover-up of any evidence of conspiracy. Before one of his sessions on a polygraph machine, Nosenko had been anally stimulated against his will, presumably to raise his blood pressure and stress level in order to make him “fail” the test on the machine. According to Mangold, in that session, Nosenko was asked “many more” questions about Oswald than in previous sessions.
In Mexico City, a month before the assassination, the CIA appeared to pre-frame Oswald for the crime. No credible evidence has ever placed Oswald at either the Soviet Embassy or the Cuban Embassy. Someone who was not the person Jack Ruby shot in Dallas gave his name as Lee Oswald at the Cuban Embassy, according to the Cuban Consul there, Eusebio Azcue. And a conversation that couldn’t have happened because the Soviet Embassy was closed that day was apparently falsified for the record by CIA operatives to place Oswald in the company of a Soviet assassin at the Russian Embassy. The media has uncritically reported on Oswald’s trip to both embassies without realizing they are essentially repeating a CIA “legend,” a false story laid down to protect a CIA operation.
After the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was given a paraffin test to determine if there were nitrate on his hands and cheek, which could indicate that he had fired a gun. Paraffin tests had often produced false positives but never a false negative until the FBI got involved, as I noted in an article for Robert Parry’s Consortium News:
FBI agents tried and failed to fire Oswald’s rifle and not get nitrate on their cheeks, yet Oswald’s cheek tested nitrate-free. So Courtlandt Cunningham of the FBI created a scenario that would allow one to fire the rifle and not get nitrate on one’s cheek: he used two people, one to clean the weapon between shots and hand it back to the other one.
In that manner, Cunningham was able to tell the Warren Commission it was possible to get a “false negative” reading of nitrate. (The Warren Commission failed to explain why a two-man scenario helped prove Oswald was the “lone” assassin.)798
In every test, nitrate was found after firing Oswald’s weapon except for the one where the rifle was cleaned between shots and handed back. Author Gerald McKnight discussed how sensitive the nitrate tests were, and how one could not get a false negative simply by washing one’s hands and face, as the particles would be so deeply embedded in the skin that the paraffin would pull them from the pores. In his book about the Warren Commission called Breach of Trust, McKnight summarized, “Short of spending the afternoon in a Russian steam bath sweating out his pores, the negative results on the paraffin cast of his right cheek argue strongly for his exculpation.”799
When Congress tried to investigate the CIA’s possible role in the JFK assassination in the 1970s, they found the CIA manipulated their investigation to the point where the CIA’s role could not be found or investigated properly. The CIA lied, stalled, hid records, disappeared others once found, and generally treated the investigation with a disdain unbefitting any government agency in a democracy.
Robert Kennedy’s evolution
THE CIA DID NOT FAIL TO RECOGNIZE HOW, IN THE WAKE OF HIS brother’s assassination, Robert Kennedy became somewhat radicalized. He pushed hard to get his brother’s Civil Rights legislation passed in 1964. He became especially vocal about the plight of the poor and minorities. He not only visited West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, he went into the poorest of homes and held diseased babies in his arms. He was emotionally fearless about facing the destitution within the U.S.’ borders and worked to do something about it. In New York, he worked with the business community to create the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the nation’s first public-private partnership to raise money that was used to hire the impoverished in projects to improve the neighborhood in which they lived. He opposed cuts to hospitals for veterans and battled Governor Nelson Rockefeller to secure grants for impoverished communities. The word “revolution” became a frequent addition to his public speeches. He opposed the growing power of the National Rifle Association, and proposed warning labels for cigarette packages at a time when Big Tobacco could make or break political careers.
Kennedy understood that race and class were two sides of the same coin. At a meeting in Harlem, for example, Kennedy said, “It is one thing to assure a man the legal right to eat in a restaurant. It is another thing to assure that he can earn the money to eat there.”800
Abroad, Robert Kennedy was equally outspoken. He went to South Africa to protest apartheid at a time when speaking up for “the Negro,” the term of the time, was a political liability. He told Peruvians to stop whining about American oil interest threats and nationalize their oil if they felt that would serve them better.801 Robert understood that the U.S. could not win a war in Vietnam, and that guerrilla warfare and terrorism were the response to, not the cause of, unbearable circumstances. He did not believe we could simply kill our way to peace, and that the goal of counterinsurgency must be political reform, not body counts. Robert repeated a common theme: “The responsibility of our times is nothing less than revolution,” one that would be “peaceful if we are wise enough; humane if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough.”802 In Chile, after visiting a mine in Concepcion, Robert noted, “If I worked in this mine, I’d be a communist too.”803 Robert Kennedy was the Avenging Angel, bent on protecting the poor and disenfranchised from the exploitation of the rich at every turn.
Dani
el Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, spoke of how Robert Kennedy knew the U.S. could never win a war in Vietnam. Kennedy made clear he didn’t believe we could bomb our way to peace and advocated strongly for winning the hearts and minds through aid programs, not through bombing campaigns.
Ellsberg worked on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968. He was shaving when he heard Robert Kennedy had been killed, and “sat on the edge of his bed and sobbed, tears carving tiny paths through the shaving cream on his cheeks.”804 At a 1993 conference at Harvard, Ellsberg described how he had asked Robert Kennedy, after John Kennedy’s assassination, whether his brother would have pulled out of Vietnam. Jim DiEugenio remembered how Ellsberg said Robert Kennedy responded:
In 1993, at the Harvard Conference, Ellsberg attended and he talked about his conversation with Bobby Kennedy on the subject of the war. He asked RFK what his brother was going to do in regards to Vietnam. Kennedy said he cannot say what he would have done, only what he intended to do. And he intended on withdrawing. Ellsberg replied that was good, and JFK was a smart man. Kennedy raised his voice and pounded the table with his fist: “What do you mean, ‘smart man’? We were there. We saw what happened to the French. We knew what would happen to America. You didn’t have to be smart to see that!”805
Many authors have said Robert Kennedy supported the war in Vietnam more than his brother did. But the comment above and the context from DiEugenio below shows that to be a mistaken impression:
I always wondered where Ellsberg got that story he told in 1993. I was not aware [until later] he worked for RFK in 1968. RFK was with his brother in 1951, when JFK visited Vietnam and met with State Department employee Edmund Gullion, who told him that France had no chance of winning the war. Ho Chi Minh had fired up the Viet Minh to such a point they would rather die than go back under the yoke of colonialism; France could never win a war of attrition, because the home front would not support it. RFK later said that this discussion with Gullion had a deep impact on John Kennedy’s thinking. Apparently, it had an impact on Robert’s as well.806