THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS AND THE ASSASSINATION – 60 YEARS ON
By William Kelly billkelly3@gmail.com
Because of Russian dictator Vladamer Putin’s nuclear saber rattling, according to President Biden and former CIA Moscow Station Chief Rolff Larssen, we are closer to nuclear catastrophe now than we have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
Most people today weren’t even alive at the time but those who were remember the anxiety potential nuclear annihilation caused, and as I was only ten years old at the time, I remember it well, and it’s a subject worth revisiting.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April, 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis was second most significant event that put the young president at odds with his military commanders.
There were a number of reports from inside Cuba of missiles being moved around, but those reports were used by the president’s opposition and enemies such as Senator Keating and Clare Booth Luce, who wrote about i the Soviet missiles in Cuba in Life Magazine. JFK wanted more accurate and irrefutable evidence of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, and he got it from Art Lundahl, an important but little known character in a number of aspects of the assassination story.
Lundahl was the head of the US Navy Photo Interpretation Lab, but after his analysis of films of UFOs, the CIA had him moved over to their camp, and he was given rooms above a car dealership in a bad section of Washington D.C., which became known as the National Photo Interpretation Center or NPIC
After U2 planes overflew Cuba, the film was flown to the top secret Hawkeye Works run by Kodak in upstate New York, where it was processed before being sent to the NPIC labs in DC, where Lundal and his staff of technicians determined that there were indeed medium range Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMS) in Cuba.
Some of these photos were then sent to the Army Map Service client in Dallas, Texas, the Jaggers/Chiles/Stoval graphic arts firm, where Lee Harvey Oswald was working at the time. While the head of J/C/S testified that Oswald did not have access to the top secret work they did for the Army Map Service, another employee Dennis Offstein, said that he and Oswald worked on the U2 photos from the USSR, and Oswald mentioned that he was familiar with some of those places because he had lived in Russia. Offstein had also served in the military and attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where a Warren Commission attorney said Oswald was once affiliated, though those records have disappeared.
In addition, on the page of Oswald's notebook where he writes down the name "Chaggers/Chiles/Stoval," he also writes the word "microdot," an espionage technique that takes a photo of a document and reduces it to the size of a period, a photo usually taken with a Minox spy camera made especially for that purpose, a camera that Oswald, Michael Paine and Jack Ruby possessed.
It has also been alleged that it was while working at Jaggers/Chiles/Stoval that Oswald produced the fake Hidel ID card, and he was working there when the rifle and pistol, ordered under the Hidel name, arrived at the Post Office though Hidel was not a name that was approved to receive mail or packages at that Post Office box. No one who worked at the Post Office recalled handing Oswald the rifle and pistol over the counter, and Oswald's daily time sheet shows that on the day they were picked up, though there's no receipt, Oswald worked from before the Post Office opened until after it closed, and one of the clients whose job he worked on was the Sam Bloom Advertising agency, who handled the logistics and promotion of the Dallas motorcade and later for Jack Ruby's trial.
So if Oswald and Offstein worked on the U2 photos of the USSR, they also most likely worked on the U2 photos from Cuba that the J/C/S technicians blew up into poster size and placed arrows and captions on them to portray the missiles.
Lundahl then took these posters prepared at Chaggers/Chiles/Stoval to the White House where he briefed the President, saying that he was as positive as a photo analysist can be that they were medium range Soviet missiles. Lundahl became known as “The Briefer,” and Kennedy sent him and the posters overseas to brief French President Charles deGaulle and former OSS Colonel David Bruce, Kennedy’s ambassador to the Court of St. James in England, to brief them as well and garner support for whatever he decided to do.
UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was then given the U2 photo posters and he presented them to the General Assembly after the Soviet ambassador denied the missiles were there.
When the US military men, led by the Joint Chiefs of Staff learned of the missile in Cuba, they unanimously advised the president to bomb the missiles and Cuba and then invade the island to ensure they eliminated the threat. As accurately portrayed in the White House tapes and transcripts of the day and the film 13 Days, staring Kevin Costner as JFK’s aide, the military, led by Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, were adamant about a military solution, but JFK held out for a negotiated one.
Although only the president has the authority to declare war, a regional military commander on his own, raised the DEFCON level to 2, one step away from war, and when the president learned of this he admonished that commander saying that he sent a message to the Soviets, a message he didn't want sent.
Another significant event that took place behind the scenes during the Cuban Missile Crisis was when William Harvey, head of the CIA's Task Force W Cuban desk, ordered the JMWAVE station to send in a number of commando teams to infiltrate Cuba. When Attorney General RFK learned of this, he immediately had those teams recalled, and fired Harvey, who was reposted to the CIA desk in Rome, Italy, though he maintained his role as case officer for John Rosselli.
Oval Office tapes recorded General LeMay remarking to JFK that “you are in pretty bad fix, Mr. President,” to which JFK responded, “If you haven’t noticed, you are in it with me!”
LeMay also said that a negotiated solution would be “Munich all over again,” referring to the support JFK’s father US Ambassador to England gave Nevell Chamberlain who succumbed to Hitler in Munich allowing the Nazi invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. Chamberlain’s use of the umbrella also sparked the Umbrella Man at Dealey Plaza to protest JFK’s appeasement to communists, the last thing he probably saw before having his brains blown out.
When JFK left the Oval Office he kept the recording tape running that captured LeMay saying, “We’re going to have to do something about those God damned Kennedys,” while JFK said to his brother “And we call ourselves human beings.”
The military were caught with their pants down because they had all of their radars facing north, to detect launches of ballistic missiles, since they knew the Soviets would shoot them over the North Pole. Such missiles, even long range ones could hit Washington D.C., New York, Chicago and San Francisco, but not the southern states, so that’s why the major defense contractors – Bell Helicopter, General Dynamics, Collins Radio, et al., were told to set up their factories in Texas.
Now however, they were threatened by the missiles in Cuba that if launched, could only be detected by one radar, in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, that many people remember as a giant golf ball off the Turnpike. So the military sent a mobile radar unit to Louisiana aimed at Cuba to warn of any missile launches. These two radars operated under the code name Falling Leaves.
During the heat of the crisis, JFK met with his national security advisors, but one morning, before the meeting could begin, Caroline Kennedy approached her father. At the urging of her mother she had memorized one of JFK's favorite poems, Rendezvous With Death, and as recalled by James Douglas in his book, "Why JFK Was Killed and Why it Matters," she recited it to the president and the men who were going to decide the fate of humanity. It's author, Alan Seeger, who met his date with death at the Battle of Somme during World War I, was a nephew of peace activist and folk singer Pete Seeger.
Unfortunately, the title of the poem was hijacked by Gus Russo and a German film maker who produced a certified black propaganda movie that blames the assassination on Fidel Castro, a still active disinformation campaign.
During one such meeting RFK asked Secretary of Defense McNamara what alternatives there were to bombing and invasion, he meekly responded that when they war gamed that scenario, a blockade worked, so JFK ordered a blockade of Cuba so Russian ships taking Soviet missiles could no longer deliver them.
At the same time RFK began a backchannel talk with a Russian journalist he knew who had personal ties to Soviet Premier Khrushchev. They effectively ended the two week long crisis by assuring the Soviets that if they withdrew their missiles the US would never invade Cuba and would remove their ICBMs from Turkey.
When JFK permitted Seven Days in May film director John Frankenheimer to shoot scenes at the White House while he was away, JFK went sailing with his former PT109 shipmate and assistant Secretary of Navy Paul Fay. While sailing Fay asked JFK if he thought a military takeover of the government as portrayed in the movie was possible. JFK responded that yes, it was possible if three requirements were met – one, there was an incident like the Bay of Pigs, two, if there was a similar incident, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and three, if there was a third such incident, it could happen.
And there was, - the back channel negotiations JFK was conducting with Fidel Castro at the United Nations. These talks were made through TV reporter Lisa Howard, JFK’s former Choate Academy roommate William Attwood – who introduced JFK to Mary Pinchot (Meyer), and Cuban ambassador Carlos LeChuga. When LaChuga wasCuban ambassador to Mexico he had an affair with Oswald’s contact at the Cuban embassy Silvia Duran.
Those supposedly secret negotiations, ongoing a the time of the assassination, became known to the Cubans through JFK’s Republican ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, and that was enough to motivate them to kill the President. The anti-Castro Cuban snipers trained by the CIA at JMWAVE bases in Florida, had the mechanism to kill Castro, the motive and the opportunity was presented in a number motorcades in Philadelphia, Chicago, Tampa, Houston, Fort Worth and Dallas.
After the successful settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when things calmed down, JFK and RFK visited Art Lundal at his NPIC office and labs above the car dealership, and JFK arranged for NPIC to move into a vacant building on the grounds of the Navy Yard in Capitol Hill.
That's where the Zapruder Film was taken on two occasions over the weekend of the assassination to make briefing boards. On one occasion it was said the film was brought in from Hawkeye Works, the top secret Kodak lab where U2 and satellite photos were processed. When this fact was related to the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB), the CIA censored it as even the name Hawkeye Works was still classified at the time.
The second occasion the Zapruder film was taken to NPIC was supervised by Dino Brugioni, who wrote two books, one on Photo Fakery and another on NPIC's role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, "Eyeball to Eyeball." Brugioni also wrote the CIA memo relating that eight NPIC technicians participated in an operation called Pathfinder to kill Fidel Castro by shooting him in the head as he rode by in an open jeep on the way to the Dupont estate in Veradero, which he often did.
Brugioni said that the briefing boards he made were used by Lundal to brief CIA director John McCone on the NPIC's analysis of the Zapruder film. Afterwards Lundal thanked the group who made the boards and said the briefing went okay, though there is no official record of it. Shortly thereafter however, Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his journal that when he asked RFK about the assassination, RFK replied that the CIA thought there were two gunman, probably based on Lundal's briefing.
On the 20th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1982 a conference held in Cuba where it was revealed that there were four short range tactical nuclear missiles in Cuba. Had Cuba been bombed and invaded they would most certainly have been used and would have provoked World War III, with the bombs killing hundreds of millions of people.
Around the same time as that anniversary, the NPIC posters that had the arrows and captions on them, that Lundal used to brief the President, were placed on public display at the Washington National Airport.
That November, as John Judge and I were waiting for a plane to take us to Dallas, we looked closely at the posters, and in the bottom corner, where an artist would sign his name to a painting, was the citation: JAGGER/CHILES/STOVAL-Dallas
Links:
https://www.poetryfoundation.
https://jfkcountercoup.
Rendezvous At Dealey Plaza II | JFKCountercoup
https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/12/u2-photos-of-cuba-oct-62.html
https://jfkfacts.org/jan-7-1963-under-u-s-government-eyes-oswald-goes-to-work/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/putin-nuclear-war-threat-intelligence-matters/
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/upshot/when-jfk-secretly-reached-out-to-castro.html
TESTIMONY OF DENNIS HYMAN OFSTEIN
https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/10719-jaggars-chiles-stovall/
Fine summary of events. Thanks Mr. Kelly.
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