“Not In Your Lifetime” –
THE BEST BOOK ON THE ASSASSINATION
OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY
– By William Kelly
Of all the many books to be published or reissued on
this 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, the
best, most objective, thorough, and definitive account is Anthony Summers’ Not in Your Lifetime.
The murder of the president on a Dallas street in
broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses was a watershed event that is
still effecting us today in many and varied ways. The failure to protect and properly
investigate the murder has permitted subsequent political assassinations to
occur and allows murder to be another tool in the box of political operatives
today. The continued withholding of
government assassination records on grounds of national security also makes the
president’s death a meaningful political issue now, and until the last record
is finally released, which may or may not occur in our lifetime.
The unresolved nature of the case of the murdered
president makes it possible for a discredited whitewashed cover-story suffice
to keep the legal system from acting, and fuels a speculative conspiracy theory
industry that has produced news and magazine articles, books, documentary TV
shows and major motion pictures, none of which has sufficiently answered James
Douglas’ question, “Who killed JFK and Why It Matters,” the second most
important book on the assassination.
While Douglas is a spiritual conspiracy theorists, Summers
tries to cut through all of that and using logic and reason in piecing together
what we really know about the assassination and tries to relate the story in a
meaningful and appealing way that should easily resonate with other journalists
as well as serious academic scholars, students and the general public.
That Summers’ book is the best of the lot is not
only my opinion but also that of Jefferson Morley (JFKFacts.org), and others
who have looked deeply into this matter, but in the spirit of full disclosure,
I must admit that I know Tony Summers. I worked with Summers as a researcher on
various aspects of the case, and consider him an studious independent
journalist who I admire and would like to emulate. I am also proud of the fact that
he mentions me and my blog JFKcountercoup in his acknowledgements, and he
credits my blog in the footnotes as the source of a number of important items.
For the past few decades, or since the beginning of
the internet, it was not academically acceptable to reference web sites and
blogs as the source of any authoritative fact or report, especially since such
web sites didn’t last long. But that is no longer the case, as the internet is
now the primary source for most serious researchers, and there are many
permanent and reliable web sites, a few being the primary source for JFK
assassination records, including the NARA JFK Collection, MaryFerrell and
Baylor University Poague Library.
The internet however was not in existence when I
first heard of Tony Summers in 1980 when I read a review of his book Conspiracy and bought the first edition
hardbound in a New York City bookstore. While I was with some Irish friends who
ran a bar and played music, I ignored the chaos around me as I sat in the
corner and was enthralled at what I read – the first real, honest and accurate
account of the assassination by a reporter using journalistic tools and
principles. Hallelujah!
Rather than parrot the official version of events or
promote some wild conspiracy theory, Summers was actually trying to figure out what
really happened, and attempting to make some sense of it all.
It is curious, and a condemnation of the modern
media, that this hadn’t been done before, or since, but he got my attention,
and so I was a bit surprised a decade later, to get a call from Summers asking
me to come immediately to Washington D.C. to assist him in reviewing a new
batch of recently released CIA records related to the assassination. Actually I
just made photo copies of documents that he had read and tagged with a sticky,
but we talked as we went through piles of documents that would take years to sort
and read through and cull what was important from what was immaterial.
Somers was especially interested in a few people I
knew something about, including Jim Braden, a gambler and confidence man who
got caught up in the Dealey Plaza dragnet, Carl Mather, a close friend of J.D.
Tippit, the Dallas police officer killed in the wake of the assassination, and
John Martino, who was from Atlantic City, my backyard.
Martino was one of the subjects of the newly
released documents and Summers located his son and widow in Florida and went
down and interviewed them at the same time I met and questioned Martino’s
brother and sister in Atlantic City. Some of the information gleaned from
Martino’s family was incorporated into an article Summers wrote for Vanity Fair
magazine as well as a second edition of his book, which he updated and renamed Not In Your Lifetime.
The name change came about because the original
title – Conspiracy, stemmed from the
conclusion of the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) Final Report,
while Summers thought that, after all was said and done, the official version
of events had been convincingly demolished, but conspiracy had not yet been
proven, legally or to a reasonable satisfaction.
The new title Not
In Your Lifetime was taken from the response of Supreme Court Chief Justice
Earl Warren to the question of when all of the government’s records on the
assassination would be released to the public.
While Conspiracy
was based primarily on Summers’ personal interviews with many of the subjects
and suspects, which was paired with a special BBC TV documentary, Not In Your Lifetime included many of
the suppressed records Warren referred to that were ordered released by
Congress under the JFK Act of 1992, and this new 2013 50th
anniversary edition has been substantially re-written and updated with the
latest, state-of-the-art research.
Summers: “With the passing of a half century, much
remains unclear about what happened in Dealey Plaza. Few murders in history had
such a massive audience or were caught in the act by the camera, yet for
millions the case remains unsolved. No assassination has been analyzed and
documented so laboriously by public officials and private citizens. Yet the
public has remained understandably skeptical. Skeptical when after one official
probe proclaimed the assassination the work of a lone gunman, another declared
it the result of a conspiracy – ‘probably.’ Skeptical after a welter of media
coverage and books, when much of the media work has proven inaccurate or
biased, and when supposedly authoritative books have been unmasked as inept, or
naïve, or cynical propaganda…Above all, perhaps, the public attitude to the
Kennedy assassination has been tempered by all the scandals, all the exposes
that over the years have eroded belief in government. Far from starting with
the premise that the authorities tell the truth, a depressingly large number of
people now accept as a given that the government constantly lies. If it does
not actively lie, many are persuaded, it conceals the truth….”
With the release of this substantially re-written
book Summers sent out a note to friends and associates detailing some of the
items that were eliminated from the new edition and why, raising some eyebrows
with the complete dropping of the Lee Harvey Oswald in Clinton, Louisiana
story, Summers being persuaded by Pat Lambert that the entire Clinton incident
was questionable. Also gone with the convoluted saga of Jim Braden, one of my
pet subjects. Added was the suspicion that Oswald probably did kill Dallas
police officer J.D. Tippit after all, Summers crediting Lone Nut impression-ado
Dale Myers for showing that the ballistic evidence against Oswald in the murder
of Tippit is quite convincing.
As for the Clinton incidents, if all eight of the
witnesses were lying when they testified under oath before the New Orleans
Grand Jury that Oswald was in Clinton in a black Cadillac with David Ferrie and
Clay Shaw, that Oswald tried to register to vote and applied for a job at the
hospital there, if they all lied then that proves a conspiracy, at least among
those who perjured themselves.
While Summers has dropped the Clinton stories from
this edition, he leaves in the fact that a nearby Louisiana telephone operator
came forward after the assassination to report that she put in a person-to-person
long distance call from a women in Louisiana to Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas
School Book Depository two days before the assassination. Who was this
anonymous Louisiana associate of the accused assassin? And is it the same person
who changed Oswald’s mailing address in New Orleans weeks after he had left the
city?
Summers still has a hard time putting Oswald on the
Sixth Floor of the Texas School Book Depository at the time of the shooting, and
implies that based on the available evidence, he could have been framed for the
assassination. But the Tippit murder remains the “Rosetta Stone” of the case.
Apparently convinced by Dale Myers (With Malice) that Oswald may have killed
Tippit, Summers still left in the new edition the eyewitness account of two men
being seen leaving the dead Tippit on the street, one running away and the
other escaping in an old Plymouth. Also in the new edition is the fact that
just after the Tippit murder a man identified as Oswald was seen nearby acting
suspiciously while driving a 1956 Plymouth that was registered to Carl Mather, a
close friend of the murdered police officer.
While Dale Myers discounts these incidents entirely,
they are important clues to the Tippit murder that reflect directly back to the
assassination at Dealey Plaza.
Carl Mather’s alibi, it turns out, is that he was at
work at Collins Radio, the company that provided cover for the CIA Cuban raider
ship The Rex, and also made and serviced the radios for Air Force One. Mather
himself worked on the radios in the Vice President’s plane. Oswald’s friend
George deMohrenschildt introduced Oswald to a Collins’ executive and tried to
get him a job there.
But when researchers requested the file on Collins
Radio at the JFK Records Collection at the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA), it contained a single piece of paper that read: “Removed
for Reasons of National Security.”
There it is - the “not
in your lifetime,” response to requests for government assassination records,
which begs the question that Summers asks: “What sort of national security
concerns prevent us seeing all there is to see about the Kennedy assassination,
a supposed random act by a lone nut, all these years later?” It is, he says, “a
question to ponder as you read this book.”
“ Everyone will know who I am now,” Lee Oswald
remarked while still alive and under interrogation, but as Summers puts it,
“Fifty years on…Oswald remains ill defined, a figure in the fog of incomplete
investigation and the absence of real official will to discover the full
truth.”
Rather than withhold them, it is now in the interest
of our national security to release the records. Now is time for the government
to release the remaining sealed assassination records, not in 2017, or never,
but now, in our lifetime, so everyone who cares can know the truth as to what
happened at Dealey Plaza fifty years ago.
BONUS - PLUS
Tony Summers - Planned Address to COPA - Coalition On Political Assassinations Conference Dallas, Texas
NOVEMBER
24, 2013
See: Tony and Robbyns Blog.
Dallas
talk for COPA….November 22, ’13…..from Anthony Summers
(did not go ahead, because of technical problems).
Greetings
from Ireland. You in Dallas have experienced an extraordinary couple of days,
again. I thank John Judge for his invitation.
Let me
say now that I am well aware that this group embraces people with widely
divergent views – many no doubt far, far from my own. My intention tonight, as
you wind up the program of the day, is to offer some new information but no
great sensation. Merely, on this fiftieth milestone day to assess where the
case sits in 2013 – as I see it after my own reporting. What I say may seem
conservative. And if it does, then that may not be such a bad idea.
Fifty
years…To many in the wider public, by now, our subject is too far in the past
to matter – or an entertainment.
It
wasn’t, of course and never should have become that.
One
could start worse than with the words of Jacqueline Kennedy, as she recalled
the moment of the assassination – just a week after it occurred, in an
interview for Life magazine. What she said was suppressed for years,
deemed too raw to be published. You may know what she said, but I read it now
because – even now – it takes us back with a jolt:
Mrs.
Kennedy said: “You know, when he was shot, he had such a wonderful expression
on his face … [Then] he looked puzzled … he had his hand out. I could see a
piece of his skull coming off. It was flesh-coloured, not white. He was holding
out his hand – and I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from
his head…”
As
the presidential limousine gathered speed, Mrs. Kennedy believed she
cried: “I love you, Jack…I kept saying, ‘Jack, Jack, Jack’ … All the ride to
the hospital, I kept bending over him saying, ‘Jack, Jack, can you hear me? I
love you, Jack.’ I kept holding the top of his head down, trying to keep the…”
She could not finish the sentence.
What
happened on November 22, 1963 was brutally brief. The findings of the two
official enquiries have been reiterated ad nauseam. The Warren Commission’s
version – the one the mainstream media has always favored (without really
paying attention to the second investigation or thinking out of the box) had
the murder committed by former Marine Oswald, a recently returned defector to
the then Soviet Union, a leftwinger who had lately seemed to be an activist on
behalf of Castro’s Cuba.
Oswald
had got off three shots, as the Commission had it, in between about 5 seconds
and rather less than eight seconds (depending on which shots hit and which may
have missed). He had then run for it, and soon after killed Officer Tippit. The
Commission had it that Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald two days later, had “no
significant link” to the Mafia.
In 1979,
the House Committee on Assassinations would show conclusively that,
to the contrary, Ruby in fact had links to organized crime from his youth until
just before the assassination. The Committee would also find links between
Oswald’s family and organized crime.
The way
the Committee saw it, on its reading of all the evidence, physical, acoustics,
and the human testimony was – just as had the Commission – that Oswald was an
assassin. It also thought, however, that another – unknown – gunman – had
probably fired at the President on November 22 – from in front.
There
had thus – that unfortunate word “probably” – probably been a conspiracy.
The
Committee suspected the Mob, but could pin nothing on Mafia leaders. And,
though you had to look harder for that than you did for the suspicions about
organised crime, the murkier parts of the anti-Castro movement.
The bulk
of the U.S. media, however, virtually ignored the congressional finding of
probable conspiracy. There was no clamor for action. Barely a soul noticed when
the Justice Department failed to follow through as the Committee had
recommended. Although the Committee’s former Chief Counsel Robert Blakey has
said – quite seriously – that he believed that back then around 1980 – a tough
investigation could have brought conspirators to trial.
With one
official probe saying Oswald did it alone and another pointing to conspiracy,
it is not a bit surprising that the American public’s skepticism has never gone
away. Some 60 % of those Americans polled in a study this year believe there
was a conspiracy.
On the
other hand, it would be fatuous to think now – has been for decades – that
anyone official is going to do anything about it. To think otherwise is to
yodel in the wilderness.
And yet.
The U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, has just said publicly that he has
“serious doubts” Oswald acted alone.
The New
Yorker two days ran a lengthy piece by John Cassidy. He wrote: “There’s a
substantive reason why the doubters survive: the official version of events
begs questions; in some aspects, it beggars belief….Questioning the official
version of history is a sign of democratic vigor.”
Yes, it is.
My book on the case was first published three decades ago as Conspiracy, a
title deriving – at my publisher’s insistence, and over my strenuous objections
– from the House Committee’s conclusion .… I thought I’d be labeled a
“conspiracy theorist”, a fate worse than “reputation death” for a journalist
who takes his work seriously. Mysteriously, however, I got away with it, and
most of the mainstream press – even the ever-nose-in-the-air New York Times,
for god sake, welcomed the book.
A couple
of editions later, when I updated the book, a new publisher agreed to the title
it now carries – Not in Your Lifetime. I took this new title from the answer
Chief Justice Warren gave in 1964 when asked if all the investigation’s
information would be made public. He replied: “Yes, there will come a time. But
it might not be in your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially,
but there may be some things that involve security. This would be preserved but
not made public.”
Warren
was thinking, he said, of stays by the alleged assassin in the Soviet Union and
Mexico, and there may indeed have been national security ramifications at that
time.
Since
then, of course, and against the wishes of some federal agencies, millions of
pages of documents have been released – thanks to the JFK Records Act. Not
that, fifty years on, we yet have it all. Some Army Intelligence and Secret
Service records have been destroyed. There are questions as to the whereabouts
of some Naval Intelligence material. The Central Intelligence Agency – the CIA
– is withholding 1,171 documents as “national security classified.” “I think.”
former Assassinations Committee chief counsel Blakey has said, “the Agency is
playing the Archives.”
If
anything has kept me going this year, when I’ve produced a new, updated edition
of my book, it’s the challenge presented by those continued withholdings. I’ve
dropped a lot of material that seems to me surplus to requirements, or is never
going to go anywhere, brought what I’ve sustained up to date, and considered
what we have left.
I think
the one thing anyone seriously focused on this case knows is that – after all
this time and effort by so many people – all we know is that much remains
unknown.
A
primary reason I’ve kept working on the case, when I should perhaps have known
better, is what I learned at the outset about the press coverage of the case.
It was shamefully delinquent at the time and has stayed delinquent. If you’re
kind enough to read the new edition of my book, which I believe may be
available at the door, take a look at how very rarely, in some hundred pages of
Notes at the end, I quote from major media sources. I quote them hardly at all
because … few reporters did any real work.
I have
as little patience with the bogus experts who have wasted time and distracted
attention from the real issues – or the Hollywood distortions. Really early on,
when I was working as a young journalist at the BBC in London, I had the
unpleasant experience of seeing Mark Lane, heady no doubt with the hoohhah
about his book Rush to Judgement, cause an unjustifable public force and
flounce out of a television studio. It was grandstanding, made no point,
achieved nothing – cxcept to make doubt look disreputable.
Oliver
Stone, with his immensely successful movie JFK, used distorted information to
lead a whole generation to think the assassination was somehow connected to the
Vietnam War and “the military-industrial complex.” He said the assassination
was “sacred history” to which one had to be faithful, or words to that effect,
while maintaining that he had artistic license to make the film as he wished.
You can’t have it both ways – though Stone and I have since become friends.
The
further glorification Stone gave to former District Attorney Jim Garrison, moreover,
troubled me. Garrison made a circus out of a crucial evidence scene, New
Orleans, and I think set serious research back years and years. When I finally
met him, in the late 1970s, he behaved as though we were in the middle of a
very bad spy movie – and asked me to meet him in a sauna bath. To the extent
that a reporter comes to a conclusion about an interviewee on the basis – to a
degree – of instinct – I thought him quite seriously unstable.
There
are the time - wasters and gossip merchants – I’m thinking of the
“a-Secret-Service-agent-did-it” notion. Or: “It was LBJ”. And of course the
complete nutcases. Some of the more extreme theories reposing in the Loonies
file in our office, include:
* A
letter on the grand notepaper of the “Institute of Moral and Political Law,”
advising that “the JFK mystery is solved!” The assassin, you see, was George
Bush Sr.!
* A
missive enclosing photos “proving” that there had been a small dog in the
limousine with the President on the day he died. The pooch was somehow involved
in the murder plot!
* An
initially sane-sounding letter that closes with an offer to prove that JFK was
not killed, merely “removed from office.” Crouched down on the floor, he
escaped the bullets….
Back in the real world, what of the actual evidence in the case? You don’t have
to be a lunatic or a “conspiracy theorist” to harbor multiple questions about
the evidence the Warren Commission handed down as certainties. Millions now
know, largely thanks to people like you, how badly the autopsy and the
ballistics evidence was handled. One would hope, I think, that a homeless
person’s autopsy would be handled better than was John Kennedy’s.
A lot of
people – I watch it on the Internet – still give serious time and debate time
to the studying the wounds, the trajectories, the bullet fragments – and all
that. I admire some of those who work in that area, but I long since distanced
myself. Nothing is ever going to be proved one way or the other about the
physical side of the evidence. It’s vaguely satisfying to those who oppose the
Warren account, I suppose, that the Livermore National Laboratory, no less, in
2007, cast new doubt on the Single Bullet Theory. But I think we should accept
that the physical evidence area is now what the lawyers call a non liquet –
something that can never be resolved for certain. Better, now, to look
elsewhere.
Fingerprint
evidence can of course be crucial, and Oswald’s prints were found on book
cartons near the window from which he allegedly fired. Yet that proved nothing.
As an employee, the alleged assassin had been legitimately working in that very
area.
What,
though, of the palm-print found on one of the boxes, one never identified?
Whose was that? We don’t know, not least because – in a ludicrous oversight –
not all those who worked in the building were fingerprinted. Why not? Because,
after Oswald had been arrested, the building superintendent asked that the
fingerprinting process be halted. Incredibly, law enforcement officials
obliged.
There
is, as you know, much more. The possibility, for example, that Oswald was not
on the infamous Sixth Floor at the time shots were fired. He claimed he had
been in a downstairs lunchroom at the time, and there were witnesses who
appeared to support his story.
One of
them, whom I believe I interviewed for the first time, Caroline Arnold, the
secretary to a senior executive in the building. She told me she saw Oswald in
the lunchroom at 12.15 p.m. or perhaps as late as 12.25 p.m. I found her
credible and have had no cause to change my mind. Had the motorcade been on
time – in fact it ran five minutes late and went by at 12.30 – the President
would have passed the building at 12:25.
Would a
would-be assassin who planned to kill the President have been sitting around
downstairs as late as 12:15, or anything after that?
There is
something else that’s toweringly important. The cliché is that murderers should
have “motive, means and opportunity.” Well, Oswald had the opportunity and he
had the means – a rifle. But, motive? The Commission never figured out a
satisfactory motive for Oswald. The overall testimony was that he rather liked
the President, and there is not a jot of even half reliable evidence that he
loathed him – let alone wished to do away with him.
Could
Oswald have been, as he claimed, a “patsy” – set up to take the blame? His
behavior that day sure leaves it highly likely he was guilty of something, but
it is not at all evidence that means that he killed the President.
Any
serious look at the case involves disentangling the threads that run through
Oswald’s activity in the months and years before the assassination:
* The
clandestine operations of U.S. intelligence.
* And
the Cuba factor.
In a
talk like this, I can only sketch in the outlines of the intelligence angle.
Consider, though, Oswald’s three-year defection to the Soviet Union and his
return the year before the assassination. This was a former U.S. Marine who had
had access – at the height of the Cold War – to information on the operations
of the U-2 spy plane. On defecting, he had said openly that he had undertaken
to give the Soviets what he knew. This was a self-declared would-be traitor.
Would you not think that, on returning to the United States, Oswald would have
been – at a minimum – severely interrogated?
The
official line, however, has been that Oswald was allowed to return home and
melt back into life as a law-abiding citizen. It doesn’t wash, and snippets of
evidence indicate otherwise. There’s that CIA document, long withheld in its
full version, that shows officials discussed “the laying on of interviews” on
his return. A senior member of the Soviet Russia Division wrote that his
department “had an OI [that’s Operational Intelligence] in Oswald.”
Here,
briefly, a speculation – and I try in my book to speculate very little. Were
this leftwing defector-cum-traitor – think, somewhat, a sort of junior league
Edward Snowden – interrogated on his return, he may have been given options.
“You’re a traitor,” subject to a lengthy stay in jail.” Or, perhaps, “You’re a
traitor, and you could go to jail. Or you could perhaps be useful to us.
Maintain your leftwing stance, and we may get you to do things for us.”
Back to
the facts. Oswald did return to civilian life, did go back to his focus on
socialist activity – and especially on Communist Cuba. Remember the date he
returned. This was shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The armed standoff
– and the propaganda war – between the United States and the Soviet Union and
Castro’s Cuba was at its most tense.
Oswald
joined the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, went to New Orleans – the
city of his birth – and ostensibly went about setting up a local branch of Fair
Play for Cuba there. I say “ostensibly” because there are indications that it
was all a charade. He reported a clash in the street with some anti-Castro
Cuban exiles a week before it actually occurred. Stuff like that just won’t go
away. When it did occur, and Oswald was arrested for disturbing the peace, two
police officers got the impression there was some sort of “set up,” that Oswald
was “being used.”
Used,
used by whom? The files show that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was being
targeted, bugged and infiltrated, by the FBI. The anti-Castro group with which
Oswald “clashed,” moreover – the DRE – was being run by the CIA as part of the
secret war against Cuba, a war that involved both armed raids on Cuba by armed
exile fighters and complex propaganda operations.
We know
the anti-Castro group that had the supposed clash with Oswald reported back to
a CIA case officer. I obtained an interview with a former paid tool of the FBI,
Joseph Burton – the Bureau described him as a “valuable and reliable source” –
whose job back then was to pose as a Marxist and infiltrate radical groups. He
said Oswald had been “connected with the FBI”…that FBI agents had spoken of
“owning” Oswald.”
The FBI
and the CIA, often historically at loggerheads, were cooperating to an unusual
extent at this time. In September, 1963, a CIA officer and a senior FBI
official met to discuss new plans for action against the pro-Castro Fair Play
for Cuba Committee. The CIA “advised that it was “giving some consideration to
countering the activities of [the Committee] in foreign countries”…..and giving
thought to planting deceptive information which might embarrass the Committee.”
The day
after that memo was written, Oswald applied for a Tourist Card for a visit to
Mexico. A new passport had been issued to him within twenty-four hours – even
though his application stated he might wish to return to the Soviet Union.
Funny that, you may think – given Oswald‘s background as a defector and
traitor.
Oswald
did go to Mexico City, and his six-day visit remains one of the most mysterious
– yet telltale – episodes of the entire story. It makes for a fresh chapter in
the new edition of my book – though here we must zip past it in a couple of
minutes. Oswald’s ostensible purpose in Mexico, of course, was to go to the
Cuban and Soviet embassies – armed with his credentials as a pro-Castro
activist – to try to get a visa for travel to Cuba. He failed. The Cubans – I
went to Mexico and Cuba and talked to relevant witnesses – suspected he might
well be a CIA agent provocateur.
The
signs are that the CIA did indeed hope to use Oswald, wittingly or unwittingly,
as a cog in its covert anti-Castro operations. I say perhaps unwittingly, for
there are indications that an Agency impostor used Oswald’s identity in Mexico
City. The House Assassinations Committee took the possibility seriously – and
separate information, nothing to do with Oswald, establishes that the use of
impostors by the CIA was a common ploy. “A standard operation was to
impersonate Americans in telephone contact with the Soviet Embassy,” said
Jeremy Gunn, the former Executive Director of the Assassinations Records Review
Board.
More important – and this is more stuff that just won’t go away – is the tangle
of information that arose from the CIA’s photographic and audio surveillance of
the Communist embassies. Both the Cuban and Soviet embassies were covered by
cameras monitoring comings and goings. CIA microphones were planted inside the
Cuban embassy, especially, and telephone calls were all bugged.
Two of
the calls Oswald supposedly made to the Soviet Embassy appear not to have been
made by the real Oswald. Could one not establish whether that is so by
comparing the voice on the tape with the known voice of the authentic Oswald? A
good specimen was available, a recent broadcast he had done in connection with
his pro-Castro activity in New Orleans.
Well no,
said the CIA. It claimed the Mexico surveillance tapes had been “routinely”
wiped weeks before the assassination – because, it claimed, Oswald had
supposedly, been of no interest at the time.
Except, we now know from the draft memoir left behind by the then CIA station
chief in Mexico City, Winston Scott, that – in his words – Oswald “had been a
person of great interest to us” during his visit. “We kept a special watch” on
him.
Except, too, that we now know the tapes were not routinely wiped before the
assassination. Senior Warren Commission counsel William Coleman and his fellow
Commission attorney David Slawson, and – in his retirement – the CIA station
chief’s deputy, all told me that they listened to Oswald’s tape-recorded voice
in April 1964 months after the assassination. What became of the recording –
and indeed of the photographs that must have been snapped of Oswald on one of a
total of five visits to the Communist embassies?
The CIA
has offered no satisfactory answer. We do know, though, that – when Station
Chief Scott died some years afterwards – CIA Counterintelligence’s James
Angelton flew down to Mexico within hours, searched through the deceased man’s
belongings, seized Scott’s draft memoir and what has been described as a stack
of reel-to-reel tapes labelled “Oswald,” and ordered that they be flown to
headquarters in Washington. Though some of the memoir has since been returned
to the station chief’s next of kin, it appears that the other material was
disposed of under a CIA “destruction order.”
There is
still , meanwhile, the extraordinary episode that has been called the “Rosetta
Stone” of the case, which probably occurred when the authentic Oswald was on
his way from Mexico to Dallas, where he was to spend the few remaining weeks
before the assassination. I refer to the testimony of the Odio sisters, Cuban
exiles Silvia and Annie. I know, I know, this is a hoary old angle. But it is
as central to the case as ever it was. The sisters were visited by a trio of
men who said they were anti-Castro militants. Two of them, Hispanics,
introduced their companion, an American who – the sisters would insist after
the assassination looked just like Oswald – as “Oswald,” “Leon Oswald.”
Later,
in what seemed to be a very deliberate way, the leader of the group would say
Oswald was an “ex-Marine…an expert marksman…” who said “we should have shot
Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs…should have done something like that.”
This
posed a problem for the Warren Commission probe into the assassination – one
that never was resolved. Commission attorneys took the view that the Odio women
were excellent, credible witnesses and that their account seemed truthful. (I
obtained what I believe were the first independent interviews with them – and I
share that view.) Silvia and Annie’s account, of course, suggests that there
was an attempt to set Oswald up – just weeks before the assassination – as a
would-be presidential assassin.
Today,
there is more. In the attempts to establish who the two Hispanics who had
accompanied this “Oswald” had been, investigators took statements from a man
who initially led them down a false trail – offering what Congress’ Committee
called a “fabrication.” That man, a fellow named Loran Hall, alias Pascillo,
had served in the U.S. Army, reportedly trained in counter-intelligence, was
indeed involved with the anti-Castro campaign in the New Orleans area, and –
earlier – had worked for Mafia boss Santo Trafficante.
Trafficante
was one of the two Mafia bosses who has been linked repeatedly to the
assassination of the President.
Which
brings us to the issue of motive and – if Oswald didn’t kill the President, or
at any rate didn’t do it on his own – Whodunnit?
Who
might have had a motive to kill Kennedy? Though Oswald had lived for quite a
long period in Russia, and though available information makes it clear that
Soviet intelligence took a real interest in him while he was there, no serious
observer considers the Soviets desired the President’s death or had any part in
the assassination.
The
theory that Castro’s Cuba was behind the tragedy has received serious attention
over the years – not least, recently, in the context of the possibility that
Castro learned of CIA efforts to kill him – and struck first. The so-called
supporting evidence for such a theory, however, is flimsy. Militating against
it is the fact that – had Washington discovered Cuba had a hand in the
assassination – U.S. retaliation could have been expected to be devastating,
would have swept the Castro revolution away once and for all.
Of the
plausible suspects, that leaves the anti-Castro exiles, Mafia bosses – and, I
don’t reject the possibility, elements within the CIA. There is no inherent
conflict in lumping those three groups together. All three were committed to
the fight against Castro – the Mafia because the Revolution had robbed them of
a gambling and hotel goldmine, the anti-Castro people and their CIA backers for
obvious reasons. Many anti-Castro fighters loathed Kennedy with a passion
because of the way they considered he had betrayed their cause at the Bay of
Pigs invasion in 1961, by the way he resolved the Missile Crisis and by his
subsequent clampdown on their activity. Mafia bosses, notably Trafficante and
New Orleans’ Carlos Marcello, hated the President – and had even allegedly
threatened to kill him – because the Kennedy administration was conducting an
unprecedented onslaught on organized crime. If the anti-Castro groups and
the Mob bosses plotted to kill Kennedy, seeing to it that the crime was blamed
on a pro-Castro activist would have seemed a masterstroke.
After
all this – and we’ve only scratched the surface – the endgame.
Have there been plausible admissions?
I call
the final chapter of my book “Hints and Deceptions.” On this 50th anniversary,
you may have heard discussion of admissions Mafia bosses Trafficante and Carlos
Marcello supposedly made in old age. I’ve looked hard at those stories, and the
alleged confession stories turn out to be really questionable.
I set
much more store by other apparent admissions, some of them gleaned from my own
interviewing. One has been around for a long time. Trafficante associate John
Martino should be high on any suspect list. His connection with the Mafia boss
aside, he had worked in a casino in Cuba before the revolution, had done time
in a Castro jail, worked on both the military and propaganda campaign to topple
Castro afterward – and was amongst those who spun tales after the assassination
about Oswald’s alleged links to the Cuban regime.
Martino’s
wife Florence told me her husband spoke of an imminent assassination attempt on
the morning of November 22, hours before it took place. According to her and
the couple’s son Edward, the news from Dallas – when it came – seemed “more
like confirmation.” Much later, when he was dying of heart disease, Martino
told an associate – whom I also interviewed – that he had been “part of” the
assassination.
Martino
said: “The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn’t know who he
was working for….Oswald made a mistake….They had Ruby kill him.”
And he
referred to a second gunman who had been involved, a “Cuban” who had been “the
other trigger.”
In 2007,
in the company of former Assassinations Committee chief counsel Professor
Blakey, I visited Miami to speak with a Cuban no one had heard of before. The
man, who was in his eighties, had made contact saying there was something he
wanted to get off his chest before he died. What he had to say is, in Blakey’s
view, “a breakthrough of historical importance.” I’ve put it on the record in
the new edition of my book.
While in
a Castro prison in the mid-1960s – on a minor charge involving illegal currency
offenses – the man said – he learned that an anti-Castro fighter he had known
well since their student days, had spoken of his “participacion” –
participation – in the assassination of the President.
The
fighter’s name was Herminio Diaz. He had worked in one of Mafia boss
Trafficante’s casinos, and is listed in CIA files. It is a matter of record
that he had had in the past shot dead a former Cuban chief of police, had tried
to kill the President of Costa Rica, and had plotted to kill the Cuban dictator
Fulgencio Batista. He was a crack marksman, a known assassin – and he was in
the United States in 1963.
After
fifty years, this may be the first plausible identification of an unknown
gunman who perhaps fired at President Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
In the
fog of remaining knowns and unknowns, now and then, are the elements that could
perhaps tell us whether and how Oswald – the very public pro-Castro Marxist – may
have been set up to take the blame. Just visible in the thick of the evidence
are the outlines of what may have happened.
In New
Orleans, there was the anti-Castro group that had clashed with “pro-Castro”
Oswald in that charade of a confrontation. That group was funded and supervised
by the CIA – a fact that the CIA failed to reveal to the Warren Commission.
In Mexico City was senior CIA officer David Phillips – he had previously been
the CIA’s man in Havana – running anti-Castro propaganda (with oversight over
the operations in New Orleans) and in charge of the surveillance operations
against the Cuban and Soviet embassies during Oswald’s visit. Phillips may have
been one and the same as “Maurice Bishop”, an intelligence officer who – after
the assassination – sought to fabricate information linking Oswald to the
Castro Cubans.
There’s
new information on the Phillips/ “Bishop” issue. This year, while I was
preparing my book, former Clandestine Services officer Glenn Carle told us he
asked Phillips whether he had been “Bishop”. “Phillips’ reaction,” Carle said,
was to acknowledge that he was the man in question…but he did not explicitly
confirm to me that he had done what he was accused of doing: meeting with
Oswald. He avoided discussing this point.”
How to interpret it all?
Did
Oswald shoot the President off his own bat, without any known motive, as the
official account claimed?
Did U.S. intelligence officers use Oswald as a minor
cog in a covert anti-Castro propaganda scheme – one that had nothing whatsoever
to do with the assassination – then, to avoid exposure, rush to cover up after
November 22nd – with the effect of making themselves appear to have something
far more serious to conceal? Did the anti-Castro people kill Kennedy without
the knowledge of their CIA handlers, seeking to make the pro-Castro Oswald take
the fall?
After
all the work and all the years, I do not pretend to know the answer.
What is
clear, though, is that elements of the truth have been kept secret, are being
kept secret still – not least by the CIA. It has emerged that George Joannides,
the officer brought in from retirement to liaise with Congress’ Assassinations
Committee, to decide what Agency documents investigators could and could not
see, was none other – though the CIA concealed this from the Committee – than
the very CIA officer who, in 1963, had been case officer to the DRE, the
anti-Castro group that had the purported clash with Oswald in New Orleans!
This was a gross deception. One that former chief counsel Blakey has called
“criminal…a wilful obstruction of justice…I no longer believe anything the
Agency told us.” Professor Anna Nelson, who served on the Assassination Records
Review Board, has suggested there be a congressional probe of “the CIA’s
alleged corruption of its inquiry into the Kennedy assassination.”
Don’t
hold your breath.
A drunk,
cynical stage character, in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh, says, “To
hell with the truth…As the history of the world proves, the truth has no
bearing on anything.”
In fact,
of course, history is very, very relevant – and getting to the truth about the
assassination of President Kennedy has mattered greatly.
That
said, it is very late now, probably too late, to be able to take the case much
further. I leave the last word – ironically enough – to a former Warren
Commission counsel – he later became a judge – Burt Griffin. He felt
“betrayed,” he told, because the CIA – and the FBI – deliberately misled
us….Consider the possible reality that under the American system of civil
liberties and the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, it is
virtually impossible to prosecute or uncover a well-conceived and well-executed
conspiracy.”
There is
a further moral to draw from that quote. I first cited it in the original
edition of my book, in 1980.
We have moved forward a snail’s pace or two since
then. Not much, but history matters!
Thank
you all for listening, and the very best from Ireland.
