RFK and
JFK - Set Up as Marks in a Big Con Sting - By Bill Kelly
The first
Tuesday in June 2018 is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of
Robert F. Kennedy, an event that is still being debated as to who was
responsible, much like the murder of his brother President John F. Kennedy.
Actually
there were a string of political assassinations that are related in that if the
murder of Medger Evers was properly investigated and prosecuted, JFK would not
have been killed in the same manner, and JFK’s unresolved homicide led directly
to the murders of MLK, RFK and Malcolm X.
The
assassination of President Kennedy can be shown to have been not only a
conspiracy, because the official version of events that begin and end with a
deranged lone gunman can be demonstrated to be false, but was a more distinct
type of conspiracy – a covert intelligence operation.
While such
operations are designed to be deceptive and shield those responsible, and most
successful covert intelligence operations go unnoticed, they become clearly
visible and embarrassing when they fail, like the Bay of Pigs and Watergate.
The Dealey
Plaza operation was not a plot so much as it was a plan, a very distinct plan
developed and designed to kill Fidel Castro with a high powered rifle as he
rode in an open jeep, a plan that included a psychological warfare cover-story
to blame the murder on communists, a plan that was presented to the National
Security Council’s Cuban Task Force for approval and was “disapproved by higher
authority.”
That plan
to kill Castro was then re-directed to the higher authority at Dealey Plaza,
and included the framing of Oswald for the crime and the blaming of Castro for
the operation that was meant to be seen as a Castro Cuban Communist conspiracy,
what Peter Dale Scott calls the “Phase One” scenario.
On the
night of the assassination however, as Oswald was being charged with “furthering
a communist conspiracy,” the Phase One scenario was replaced with the “Phase
Two” cover story of the assassination being the work of a deranged lone nut
case – Lee Harvey Oswald.
LBJ
himself, holed up with his top aides in his Vice President’s Executive Office
Building suite, made the decision not to accept the Phase One Castro Cuban
Commie cover story because, as he told Texas authorities, acceptance of it
would lead to World War III and 200 million deaths.
LBJ used
the same reasoning to convince Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren to lead the
Warren Commission, whose report would conclude that one man alone was
responsible for what happened at Dealey Plaza. One of the first things Warren
did was to arrange for the military to assign an official Pentagon historian to
work with him and write the narrative of the Warren Report, and they sent Alfred
Goldberg. Warren wanted his report to be readable and Goldberg, who is still
alive today, wrote that narrative, as well as the chapter on responding to
conspiracy allegations.
Now we
need to come up with an alternative narrative, one that explains what really happened
rather than just pin the blame on a deranged loner, or Castro Commies.
But it is
the very failure of the Phase One Castro Cuban Commie cover story, that is
regularly brought back and reissued whenever the Phase Two scenario fades, and reasserts
the fact that the intelligence network responsible for the Dealey Plaza
operation is still functioning and promoting the idea Castro was behind the
murder, as former CIA agents Brien Letell and Robert Baer have done, and Phil
Shennon continues to do.
But it
wasn’t just Oswald who was framed for the crime as the self-professed Patsy,
and Castro, who was to take the blame for the crime he didn’t commit, but JFK
and RFK were also set up like Marks in a Big Con Sting.
As John
Newman has clearly demonstrated, the half-hearted attempts to kill Castro were
half-hearted because Castro had to be alive on November 22, 1963 when he was to
be made responsible for killing the President, as the original plan and cover
story allowed.
It is the
very failure of that aspect of the plan – that gives us insight into those
actually responsible for the crime, as former House Select Committee on
Assassinations (HSCA) investigator Dan Hardway noticed, almost all of the
sources to the false story that Castro directed Oswald and was responsible for
the Dealey Plaza operation are all agents or media assets of former CIA officer
David Atlee Phillips. Now there aren’t a few of these, but dozens of serials,
and each one when tracked back to its origin is clearly part of the same
intelligence network Phillips was associated with at that time.
Just as
the CIA and Cubans trained at JMWAVE were designing contingency plans to kill
Castro – like PATHFINDER for instance, they were frustrated when these plans
were “disapproved by higher authority.”
In his
book “Intelligence Wars,” Thomas Powers, a 30 year veteran of the Council on Foreign
Relations, includes the assassination of President Kennedy as a sensitive
subject, but it is clear from the record that JFK was a victim of the
intelligence wars and not a deranged loner.
Robert F.
Kennedy, the attorney general, was also compromised, blackmailed if you will,
so he could not properly respond to his brother’s murder, by branding him as
being responsible for the CIA plots to kill Castro, establishing a hypothetical
motive for Castro to retaliate.
Powers
says there is a “bushel” of evidence that supports the idea that JFK ordered,
approved and knew about the CIA plots to kill Castro, but when you look at the
evidence closely it is a bushel of bull shit.
Powers
writes: “The assassination of John F. Kennedy was one of the great traumatic
events in American history, and the possibility that he was guilty of intending
what his killer was guilty of doing was more than Kennedy loyalists were
willing to admit.”
Powers
names Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger as one of the Kennedy “loyalists”
unwilling to admit that JFK had ordered the murder of Castro, or at least knew
of the CIA plans to do so, yet Schlesinger was also unaware of JFK’s
backchannel communications with Castro via Lisa Howard, William Attwood and
Carlos Lechuga at the United Nations.
It just so
happens that Attwood, Kennedy’s former prep school roommate, introduced JFK to
Mary Pinchot Meyer, who became JFK’s paramour, and wife of CIA officer Cord
Meyer, a major player in the assassination drama. And it is pretty peculiar
that Lechuga, a former Cuban ambassador to Mexico, had an affair with Sylvia
Duran, the women Oswald dealt with at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City and a
primary source of the Castro Cuban Commie Phase One cover story.
When
Anthony Summers asked Arthur Schlesinger about the back channel communications
between JFK and Castro, that were on-going at the time of JFK’s murder,
Schlesinger said that if the anti-Castro Cubans knew about those back channel
talks it would have been enough motive for them to kill Kennedy. And it appears
that the anti-Castro Cubans were tipped off about the negotiations and were so
motivated to kill JFK.
RFK was
compromised, as Sam Halpern, Thomas Powers, Joe Califano, Desmond FitsGerald
and others have suggested, by his insistence the covert operations against Cuba
be intensified, including the plans to kill Castro. But when RFK was told of
the CIA-Mafia plots, he put an end to them.
RFK was
however, introduced to some of the CIA JMWAVE case officers at a Miami safe
house, and was flown by helicopter into a remote Everglades training base where
he met with some of the anti-Castro Cubans being trained for infiltration
missions into Cuba.
As Powers
writes: “On the day his brother was shot to death in Dallas, Texas, Robert F.
Kennedy asked the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John McCone,
point-blank, if the CIA had been responsible for the murder. It is hard to know
which is more remarkable – that Kennedy wasn’t sure of the answer, or that he
expected to hear the truth either way. McCone of course, said no, and there is
no evidence that Kennedy ever doubted him, but that only narrowed the list of
suspects in his mind….(including) Castro himself, who had been marked for death
by Kennedy’s government, who knew it, and who had warned that two could play at
that game.”
“But
behind those suspicions, never resolved, lay a still darker fear in the mind of
Robert Kennedy: that he himself, if any of the four had been established as the
guilty party, could not have escaped at least some measure of responsibility for
arousing and stroking the anger that resulted in his brother’s assassination.”
“When
Kennedy after much agonizing broke ranks with the administration over Vietnam,
calling the war a ‘horror’ in a Senate speech in March 1967, Johnson was
instantly back at him with a poisonous leak to the Washington Post columnist
Drew Pearson, who flatly accused Kennedy of masterminding an effort to
assassinate Fidel Castro. Had Kennedy’s plan ‘backfired against his late
brother’? Pearson wondered. Was it possible the senator had been ‘plagued by
the terrible thought that he had helped put into motion terrible forces that
indirectly may have brought about his brother’s martyrdom? Some insiders think
so.”
“The
question must have been a painful one,” Powers wrote, “But guilt was only one
of the torments which entered Robert Kennedy’s life with Jack’s assassination.
With it also came a fatalism hard to distinguish from despair and the onset of
a new spiritual sensitivity as tender as a wound that would not heal…”
Powers wrote
a biography of former CIA director Richard Helms, one approved by Helms
himself, and he quotes Helms telling Henry Kissinger that the CIA’s “Family
Jewels” files are “just the tip of the iceberg,” and that “If they come out,
blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation
on the assassination of Castro.”
While
Powers can’t bother with it, he says that Max Holland and Seymour Hersh “are
still on the case,” and they “learned recently the name of the CIA intelligence
officer named to serve as liaison with the attorney general during the year in
which he continually pressed the CIA for results in getting rid of Castro – a career
intelligence officer, now dead, named Charles Ford. According to Ford’s
office-mate Sam Halpern, a CIA officer also assigned to Task Force W in the
agency’s effort to get rid of Castro, Ford traveled hither and yon about the
country on Robert Kennedy’s business, but there public knowledge comes to an
end….Whether still-classified CIA files can fill out the story of Ford’s work
for Bobby remains unknown but it’s likely, just as it is likely no one will be
given free range of the files until many, many additional years have passed, if
then.”
In an
article Powers wrote for the New York Review of Books in February 1999, he asks
us to: “Think of the CIA’s files as the nation’s unconscious. There you may
find the evidence, like the gouges on rock where a glacier has passed, of what
American leaders really thought, really wanted, and really did – important
clues to who we are as a people. Does this eternal battle over access to the
files make sense when few still care what happened at the Bay of Pigs? Does it
matter whether we are permitted to haul up the last piece of paper to the light
of day before letting it rest? There is no right answer, just personal
preference: some would rather know, and some would rather not.”
Well now
we know, as Charles Ford’s HSCA interviews and his notes of what he did at
JMWAVE that year are now public papers among those released by the NARA under
the JFK Act, and reflect the following:
Charles
Ford was born in Atlantic City, NJ and attended Princeton before joining the
Army during WWII and serving as a translator in the Office of Strategic
Services. One OSS report has Ford being sent on a mission to China with another
OSS officer J. Walton Moore, who would become the CIA Domestic Contacts
Division officer in Dallas at the time of the assassination.
After
graduating from Princeton Ford would serve most of his CIA career in the office
of Training, except for that one year at Task Force W in the CIA basement,
working with the Cubans undercover with an alias. When questioned by the HSCA
Ford denied that he ever served as an intermediary between RFK and mobsters in
the plots to kill Castro, as Hersh, Holland, Halpern and Powers have alleged,
but since that doesn’t fit their conspiracy theory you won’t hear it from them.
And now we
have the CIA’s assassination files, and can, in Powers words “haul up that last
piece of paper to the light of day before letting it rest.”
That
record clearly indicates that JFK was not the victim of a deranged lone nut
case or a Castro Cuban Commie conspiracy, but was a victim of what Powers calls
“Intelligence Wars,” and both JFK and RFK were set up as Marks and killed by
the powers that be, truths we will learn before letting them rest.
1 comment:
Why would CIA Charles Ford admit he was involved with certain Mafia in the late 60's and 70's when mob guys who knew were getting hit like Johnny Rossilli and Giancana who knew too much? RFK did not control the CIA involvement in Castro operations or Dallas any more than JFK. I read RFK did not want his brother to go to Dallas and others warned him too. Operation Mongoose was planned and took off in late 61. That was when Phil Ochs bet me that the CIA would kill Castro. JFK never officially cancelled Operation Mongoose and it was an all agency plan to get Castro. When JFK was trying to get some understanding with Castro the day of Dallas it was way too late to conclude what you are suggesting.
Read Felix Rodrigues' book Shadow Warrior. He writes (also a Bush confidant for Bay of Pigs) around the time of Dallas he was on his way to Central America to plan a new attack on Cuba. In 74 when I told Phil Ochs that there was a guy on the tour bus that looked and dressed like him he immediately said it was Felix. The Hoover Bush meeting on that bus was about if Dallas was about something important as on killing JFK. Hoover the next day writes a memo orally given to George Bush of the CIA that the Miami Cubans liked JFK as if no new invasion was planned. Sounds like an evil joke eh?
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