NSA Kennedy Assassination Records

The NSA Records Related to the Assassination of President Kennedy

By William E. Kelly, Jr.

The letters “NSA” were at one time a national security secret, and for many years the CIA- the Central Intelligence Agency took most of the heat when it came to any intelligence or espionage caper that caught the public’s attention, but the NSA was always there quietly sitting in the background soaking it all in like a fly on the wall.

When Congress, under the JFK Act of 1992, ordered the Assassinations Records Review Board to identify and release all of the government records related to the assassination of the President, when they got to the NSA, they had already been bamboozled by the Secret Service, who destroyed records after the enactment of the law, and the ONI, who like the NSA, just said they didn’t have any records that had anything at all to do with the assassination. Nothing, zilch. Not believable, the ARRB designated ONI a separate entity from the Navy and with the cooperation of ONI officers, found a number of assassination related records, including one on military defectors and obtained the testimony of former ONI investigators who created records that they now say no longer exist.

Also like the ONI’s now non-existent records that military officers had seen and read, there are published references to NSA records related to the assassination that the NSA failed to turn over to the ARRB, or the Warren Commission for that matter.

                                                     RALPH MEYERS

For starters there’s Ralph Meyers, who has never been questioned despite the fact that his uncle Lawrence Meyers was a close personal friend of Jack Ruby, and Ralph’s father Ed Meyers met Ruby on the night before the assassination. Ed Meyers was a carbonated beverage distributer in New York city who was in Dallas after visiting his son Ralph in Mexico City, where Ralph was working as a journalist. Prior to working as a journalist in Mexico City Ralph Meyers had served in the Army Security Agency (ASA), stationed at a remote listening post in Turkey from where U2 flights were also launched. After his active duty service in the military Ralph worked as a bus driver for the Chicago Transit Authority, where Cuban exile Homer Echaverra also worked at the time.

When Lawrence Meyers testified before the Warren Commission, there was little interest in his nephew, who worked for the Army Security Agency – the military side of the National Security Agency – (NSA), and after being “sheep dipped” as a Chicago bus driver, was a journalist in Mexico City when Oswald visited there, and may have been in Dallas at the time of the assassination.

An appendix to the book “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence” includes the minutes to a meeting of academic associates of the intelligence community who were given a briefing on the new nature of the intelligence business. The document was discovered by rebellious students at Columbia University when they took over the administration building. According to the minutes to this meeting, the CIA briefer said the new nature of intelligence was generally divided it into three distinct areas – human intelligence – the old school of spies, and the new and still developing areas of satellite -aerial-photo intelligence and electronic intelligence - ELINT.

The NSA is responsible for the ELINT – electronic intel – but it is legally limited to spying overseas on foreigners and is not permitted to function domestically or violate the inalliable rights of Americans abroad.

In regards to the Kennedy assassination, the first question one would ask an Electronic – eavesdropping agency would be if they happened to have a tape of the Air Force One radio transmissions that the White House Communications Agency seems to have lost?

Since they were not legally permitted to operate domestically however, they would be hard pressed to admit that they had it, but they should have been able to obtain it from the Cubans or Soviets, or even friends like the Canadians, British, Australians or Israelis.

Most of the information we have on the NSA related to the assassination of President Kennedy concerns defectors – Oswald, Martin and Mitchell, Brian Latell’s Cuban Florentino Aspillaga and Mitrokin.

Oswald himself was a former USMC defector to the Soviet Union, who returned to the USA with a Russian wife, and tried to get a visa to Cuba from the Cuban and Soviet Embassies in Mexico City. Around the same time the American intelligence establishment was rocked by the joint defection of Martin and Mitchell - two former US Navy ELINT specialists who left the Navy to work for the NSA. Martin and Mitchell defected together, going from Mexico City to Cuba and then by ship to the Soviet Union, the same way Oswald wanted to go two months before the assassination. Was he trying to use the same route and try to penetrate the network that recruited Martin and Mitchell and whisked them away behind the Iron Curtain?

One supposedly high level defector from Castro’s Cuba, when debriefed through CIA interpreters like Brian Latell, said that Castro himself ordered their listening posts to tune in to Texas to try to pick up any Air Force One radio communications. While Latell illogically asserts that this is proof that Castro knew JFK would be killed there and Castro was thus responsible for the murder, it really only indicates that Castro knew JFK would be in Texas.

But the Soviets and Cubans did operate a very high tech electronic ELINT listening post at Lourdes, on the north shore of Cuba, which was specifically designed to pick up strategic radio communications in the United States such as that from Air Force One.

While it is clear that it is a stretch to believe that the CIA’s Cuban defector provides Cuban foreknowledge of the assassination, it is possible the Cubans-Soviet ELINT station picked up and recorded the radio communications from Air Force One, just as the defector said he had been ordered to do.  If the Cubans picked up and recorded the Air Force One radio communications, then the NSA, whose job it is to monitor the Cubans radio communications, would or should have the recording, and have it legitimately from the Cuban sources.

Besides being a possible source for a complete unedited version of the Air Force One radio transmissions, the NSA must have records on a number of published incidents that refer directly to the assassination of President Kennedy, including that of Robert Lipka, an NSA clerk who was belatedly identified as a KGB source by another defector, V. Mitrokin.

As a self-professed keeper of the KGB files, Mitrokin defected to the British as the Soviet Union collapsed, and in order to confirm his bonifides as a legitimate KGB archivist, gave up Robert Lipka, who Mitrokin said was an NSA clerk who provided the KGB with secret documents for years. Lipka had left the NSA and was living in a suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania town when he was approached by an undercover FBI agent who approached him in a bar and offered to revive his service to the Russians. When Lipka took the bait he was arrested and Mitrokin’s bonifiedes confirmed.

When Lipka appeared at a court hearing however, he told the Judge that while working as a file clerk at NSA he read a document that identified the real assassin of President Kennedy. With that, the Judge ended the hearing but while he was being led out of the court room, a reporter asked Lipka the name of the real assassin of President Kennedy.

“Louis Angel Castillo” Lipka answered as he was being led away.

It just so happened, despite warnings from Peter Dale Scott not to get sucked into the Louis Angel Castillo vortex, I requested the Church Committee report on Castillo that was kept at the President Gerald Ford library in Michigan but it was withheld for reasons of national security. After the passage of the JFK Act of 1992 it was released, and indicated that Castillo was arrested in an assassination plot in the Philippines and while being violently interrogated, admitted a role in the Kennedy assassination.

Castillo had some Cuban connections as well, but was also clearly mentally unbalanced and appeared to have multiple personalities, some of them intentionally programmed. Back in the United States Castillo was for a time imprisoned in Bordentown, New Jersey, an institution that received CIA MKULTRA contracts, and after violating parole he was and maybe still wanted on a NJ warrant. But the report on Castillo prepared for the Church Committee and withheld from the public until the passage of the JFK Act, indicate that the FBI was hot on Castillo’s trail and located him at his mother’s house in Chicago. When they got there however, she said that he had been taken away by some men a few days previous, and she didn’t expect to ever see him again.

That’s where the Louis Angel Castillo trail goes cold, but that’s not the point. The point is the National Security Agency – NSA had documents about Castillo and the assassination of President Kennedy that Lipka, the KGB agent had read, and those NSA Kennedy assassination documents were not turned over to the ARRB and NARA and included in the JFK Collection as the law dictates.

                        SCRIPPS-HOWARD-NEWS-SERVICE-REPORT

Also among the records the NSA is known to have regarding the assassination of President Kennedy and not released to the NARA are the documents concerning the “leak” of a 1980 NSA document that originated in Venezeula but concerned a Cuban radio report that said Fidel Castro was plotting the assassination of President Reagan just as he had killed President Kennedy.

Of course the NSA doesn’t permit “leaks” and if it was a legitimate leak by a government whistleblower it would have been thoroughly investigated and the culprit identified, but there are no records that reflect that is what happened, so we can only assume that the so-called “leak” was an official “leak” and a black propaganda operation. It may have been associated with the attempted assassination of President Reagan a few months later by John Hinckley, who purchased his pistol from a Dallas pawn shop a few blocks from Dealey Plaza.

Even though this Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS) report was distributed by the wire services and widely published, the NSA didn’t include it among the records they had that was turned over to the NARA to be included in the JFK Assassination collection, as they should have.

So there are a number of records among the NSA that are related to the assassination of President Kennedy that should have been included in the JFK Act releases but weren’t – including the NSA and ASA files on Ralph Meyers, and the records of defectors Latell's Cuban, Martin and Mitchell, V. Mitrokin, Latell's Cuban, Lipka and Louis Angel Castillo, as well as the 1980 SHNS report.

NSA

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/11/luis-angel-castillo.html

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/11/castro-plot-to-murder-reagan.html

THE NSA Records Related to the Assassination

1)      Possible source of AF1 radio transmission tapes

2)      Lourdes, Cuba – listening post – Leedel –source? – Canada, Israel, ?

3)      Regan pre-op psyh war news article – SHNS – 1980 –

4)      Mitrokin and Lipka – NAS clerk –

5)      Louis Angel Castillo

6)      Mitchell and Martin -