RFK and JFK - Set Up as Marks in a Big Con Sting

RFK and JFK - Set Up as Marks in a Big Con Sting - By Bill Kelly 

The first Tuesday in June 2018 is the 50^th 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.

[Note: I will post the links to some of the records I refer to ASAP, including the OSS report, and Charles Ford's notes. ]