Oswald, JFK assassination, and Soviets sending KGB fake defectors to the U.S copyrighted as of 5 April 2007:
The following is information is largely from the book, The Secret History of the CIA, by Joseph J. Trento, 2001. It was not written to disclose new information about Oswald and the assassination of JFK, but rather to tell about the screw-ups of the CIA and FBI. Mr. Trento researched his book by interviewing several of the former top leaders of the CIA, many former CIA supervisors and case officers, and reading their personal papers and records.
In early 1949, the German police arrested two young Germans named Baladini and Stirner. The German police, under the U.S. Army supervision, killed Baladine during interrogation, allegedly beaten to death. The Army used a White Russian, CIA recruited spy, Igor Orlov to cover this up. (p. 62-63).
In 1949, James Angleton kept secret his relationship with Israeli intelligence (Mossad) (from the leaders of the new CIA or the Executive Branch) because of State Department fears that public cooperation with the Israelis would complicate Arab and British relations. According to a former CIA officer who served as chief of station in Tel Aviv, no one at the State Department or CIA was anxious to have an open relationship with Israel. Israel was a country made possible by the Soviet Union introducing a UN Resolution, 181, which allowed the partitioning of Palestine. Moscow ordered Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to supply Israel arms and training her pilots. (p.80)
According to author Anthony Summers, who studied documents from both the State Department and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, in the 18 months prior to January 1960, no fewer than nine U.S. enlisted men defected ( to the Soviet Union), five of them U.S. Army men from West Germany, two Navy men, and at least three civilians. All these defectors had backgrounds in the military or in sensitive defense work. It is known that, like Oswald, at least four of these returned to the U.S. after a few years. (Crossfire, p. 116)
The Soviets lacked detailed altitude information on the U-2 flights that would allow them to accurately control their anti-aircraft missiles at great altitudes. Oswald, who served as a radar operator at Atsugi Japan, a base for the U-2 flights, had that information. (Crossfire, p. 115)
A former CIA finance officer, James Wilcott, testified to the House Select Committee on Assassination that colleagues told him that Oswald was a secret operative (contract agent) for the spy agency in Japan. The Committee decided not to believe Wilcott's hearsay information. (Crossfire, p. 104)
In 1959, the U.S. was having real difficulty in acquiring information out of the Soviet Union. One activity used to acquire information was an Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) program which involved three dozen, maybe 40 young men who were made to appear disenchanted, poor, American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what Communism was all about. They were sent into the Soviet Union or into Eastern Europe as fake defectors (dispatched U.S. spies). The intention were that the Soviets would pick them up and "double" them, or recruit them into the KGB. These fake defectors (double agents) were trained at various naval installations both in the U.S. and abroad, but the operation was being run out of NAG's Head, North Carolina. (Crossfire, p. 117)
A statement of William Robert (Tosh) Plumlee who worked as a contract pilot for the CIA: I first meet Lee Harvey Oswald at a secret base called Illusionary Warfare Training at Nagshead, North Carolina in 1959 prior to him going to language school and going to Russia.
When I later learned that Oswald had been arrested as the lone assassin, I remembered having met him on a number of previous occasions which were connected with intelligence training matters, first at Illusionary Warfare Training in Nagshead, North Carolina, then in Honolulu at a radar installation and at Oahu's Wheeler Air Force Base, then in Dallas at an Oak Cliff safe house on North Beckley Street run by Alpha 66's Hernandez group, who had worked out of Miami prior to the assassination.
http://www.jfkmurde
On August 17, 1959, Oswald applied for a dependency discharge from the U.S. Marines on the grounds that his mother needed his support. Within two weeks, Oswald's request was approved and he released from service on Sept. 11, 1959. On September 4th, Oswald applied for a passport, wherein he plainly stated that he might travel to various countries, including Russia and Cuba. After a brief stopover in Texas with his mother, Oswald took a freighter to Le Havre, France on Sept. 20, 1959 and arrived in Moscow on October 16, 1959 (Crossfire, p. 111 and 118) On October 31, 1959, Oswald went to the U.S embassy in Moscow attempting to revoke his U.S. citizenship. His act displayed a sophisticated knowledge of the legal subtleties concerning the revocation of one's citizenship. Oswald journey to Moscow was also a most unorthodox manner via Helsinki, Finland where he got a visa to go to Russia from the Soviet embassy. (p. 118 -119).
In the summer of 1959 Khrushchev visited the United States. Pres. Eisenhower had scheduled a full-fledged summit in Paris for mid-May 1960 which it was hoped would produce a limited nuclear-test-
Some students of history such as David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace in The People's Almanac noted: It is possible that certain U.S. military leaders deployed (U-2 CIA pilot Francis) Powers purposely to sabotage the peace talks which Eisenhower himself acutely desired."
Comment: I put this to you. Could this be one of the reasons for Eisenhower's military, industrial, complex speech?
Former CIA officer, James Angleton, believed Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 armed with details of U-2 radar images, flight trajectories, capabilities, and runway distances that the U-2 required - all the information the Soviets needed to aim their not-so-accurate, SAM missiles if they were ever going to shoot down the U-2. It turned out that the Soviets sent Oswald to Minsk, where they gave him a luxurious apartment by Soviet standards, pay equaling that of a top military officer and perks available only to members of the KGB or the Soviet elite. This after KGB defectors alleged Oswald was so unstable, so "strange" that the Soviets had decided to not recruit him to spy on the U.S. Years later, Angleton became convinced that this very special treatment, was Oswald's reward for compromising the U-2. (p. 221)
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Fake defectors sent to the U.S.:
In June 1959, Nikolai F. Artamanov, a Lieutenant Commander in the Soviet Navy and his Polish girlfriend defected to the U.S./CIA. The reason he gave for defecting was that he was disgusted with the direction the Soviet leadership was taking under Khrushchev. It was only years later that the CIA learned that Artamanov was a fake defector (double-agent) sent by the Brezhnev, Andropov, and Furtseva cabal because they were fearful that Premier Khrushchev's lurching policies could start nuclear war. Artamanov's father-in-law was Admiral Gorshkov and he sent Artamanov to send a message to the U.S (that the Soviet Navy did not want nuclear war). Artamanov dazzled the U.S. with information about the Soviet Navy. (P.230-231)
In the December 20, 1975, Artamanov went home to the Soviet Union. The Russians put out a false story that he had died when he was kidnapped by the KGB due to an overdose of cholorform. The Israeli Mossad learned of this Soviet operation to repatriate Artamanov and made a deal not to expose this to the U.S. is the Soviets agreed to release several key Jewish dissidents they held. (p. 423)
GRU (Soviet military intelligence)
This Soviet conservative element or cabal was made up of people like Yekaterina Furtseva, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and others in top Soviet military officials who were extremely frightened, by Khrushchev's addiction to freewheeling nuclear poker. They had learned from the head of Soviet rocket forces that Khrushchev had placed nuclear armed ICBMs in Cuba. This cabal was desperate to notify the U.S. before it discovered the missiles on its own. They did not succeed in that - because the CIA had already learned about the missiles from another CIA spy or spies (probably inside Cuba), recruited by Bill Harvey, who was in charge of Operation Mongoose. Some time around September 5, 1962, in addition telling the CIA about the ICBMs in Cuban ICBMs, Penkovsky allowed the CIA to pinpoint the flight path of its U-2 planes. That is, the U.S. U-2 plans did not have to flying back and for across the whole of Cuba in search for these missiles, but just once. (p. 236-248).
Note: In May 1963, Penkovsky was given a public trail, he confessed (probably due to torture). His death by firing squad indicated that he was not a KGB double agent because the KGB would not have killed him, but rather he was spy for the ultra-conservative cabal who gave up his life in the hope of preventing nuclear war.
Penkovsky was in his early forties and came from one of the most distinguished families in the Soviet Union. His uncle was a lieutenant general and nepotism had is rewards even in the People's State. Penkovsky's father-in-law was a Red Army general. The idea that Penkovsky a devote Marxist was offering himself to the West with precisely the intelligence the CIA and British foreign intelligence service, MI6, was struggling to obtain. These facts should have alerted the CIA that Penkovsky had it too good as a member of the Soviet elite. He was no volunteer, but rather what he was a messenger (a double agent / agent of influence) from the most conservative elements of the Soviet power structure -elements of the Soviet Power structure that wanted Khrushchev , the liberal reformer, removed from power.
Penkovsky message (real mission) was that Kennedy could not trust Khrushchev's sanity. That is, the Soviet's were willing to give up their most important military secrets to prove Penkovsky was a real defector . On July 15, 1961, Penkovsky warned his CIA debriefers that Khrushchev was bound and determined to win his battle with the West by rattling nuclear weapons. Khrushchev considered Kennedy a weak man who would back down.(p. 240)
During the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev order Semichastny, head of the KGB to send Aleksandr Fomin, the KGB chief of station in Washington DC, to contact ABC News reporter, John Scali. They met in a restaurant and Fomin expressed an interest in setting up a back channel for negotiations about the Cuban missile crisis. Khrushchev turned to Fomin in letting Kennedy know that Khrushchev's hand was not the only hand at the Soviet tiller. (running Soviet foreign and military policy). (p. 250)
In June 1962, a KGB Major Yuri Nosenko, 34, approached the CIA tenant in Geneva (presumably at the U.S. embassy) and said he wanted to work for the U.S., but he could not defect as long as his wife and children were in Moscow. He was working for the KGB as watching the Soviet delegation to the Geneva talks on nuclear weapons. Nosenko presented the CIA valuable information in exchange for a small payment. He revealed that he had served in the Far East and in June 1958 had been appointed deputy chief of branch of the KGB that specialized in recruitment of tourist in Tokyo and other cities.
Nosenko also reveal that a CIA dead-drop in Moscow had been compromise. A dead-drop is a secret hiding place used to leave messages, etc. from CIA spies are living and working inside the USSR. This information about the dead-drop was proven to be true. Some time later, in spite of Nosenko's warning, a CIA officer was caught by five KGB men after he reached into the dead-drop to pick up film cassettes from a very important and valuable, CIA spy, GRU Col. Penkovsky. As a result of the CIA's going ahead and using this dead-drop after Nosenko's warning, Penkovsky was sentenced to death by firing squad. (pages 241-243, and 247).
A Soviet correspondent, Belitsky, who was recruited to spy for the CIA cut off contact with the CIA after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yuri Nosenko proved to the CIA that he had knowledge of Belitsky operation and that Belitsky was really a KGB agent. (p.287) This was just one of many double agents that the KGB was dispatching to defect to the CIA.
JFK assassinated on November 21, 1963.
On January 20, 1964, during a CIA meeting with Nosenko, he said he wanted to defect. His said his reason was because he had been summoned back to Moscow and he was afraid the Soviets may have learned of his relationship to U.S. intelligence. That is, defect now, even thought he previously stated he would only defect with his wife and children. Nosenko also reminded his CIA case officers that he had been in charge of recruiting Americans in Moscow and added that he had detailed knowledge of the KGB's relationship to Lee Harvey Oswald during the time Oswald live in the Soviet Union. (p. 278)
Nosenko said he did not recruit Oswald. He said Oswald was so unstable, so "strange" that the Soviets had decided to pass on recruiting him.
Nosenko said based on two mental examinations made of Oswald - the KGB found the would-be defector not very bright and even "mentally unstable." (Crossfire, 130-131)
He said that the decision not to recruit Oswald was made not by the KGB, but by Yekaterina Furtseva. (p. 278)
Part of Nosenko's story was corroborated by one of the FBI's deepest secrets -their own Soviet KGB defector code named Fedora (CIA`s code name SCOTCH) . If Nosenko was lying, then Fedora, too, become suspect. (Crossfire, 130-131) Fedora was a KGB officer working at the United Nations Secretariat who contacted the FBI and offered
to betray the Soviet Union by supplying secret information.
James Angleton convinced Richard Helms and others in the CIA hierarchy that Nosenko should be incarcerated (treated as a dispatched agent) until his reliability could be determined. Howard Osborne Chief of Security for the CIA in an attempt to resolve the issue, put Nosenko thru hostile interrogation (torture) by experts from the Office of Security. At Camp Peary, the CIA's training base for new agents outside Williamsburg, Virginia. For George Kisevalter and others in the CIA's Soviet Division, the treatment of Nosenko was shameful. "What he (Angleton) had done to Nosenko," said Kisevalter, "is a crime beyond anything that we, as Americans, would stand for...to torture a person for nothing." (p. 278 and 285-286)
He was kept in solitary confinement for 1,277 days (3.5 years) under intense physical and psychological torture He was put on a diet of weak tea, macaroni, and porridge, given nothing to read, a light was left burning in his unheated cell 24 hours a day, and his guards were forbidden to speak to him or even smile. His isolation was so complete that he eventually began to hallucinate, according to CIA testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Toward the end of this ordeal, Nosenko was given at least two polygraphs. He failed both. (Crossfire, 130-131)
Prior to the Kennedy assassination was the darkest stain ever on the record of the FBI. They had failed to notify the Secret Service of Oswald's strange activities. They had ignored the dangers implicit in the letters Marina Oswald had sent to a KGB official. In July 2, 1962, the FBI intercepted a letter from Marina Oswald to Vitaly A Gerasimov at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC. In the letter, Marina requested permission to return to the Soviet Union. The FBI found it significant that Marina had chosen Gerasimov to write to as he was a top KGB case officer, in addition to a consular officer.
(p. 283, 257-258)
During the 1950s and 1960s, a illegal (CIA) program*, code name HT/LINGUAL , to intercept letters from the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites and keep records on the people who received such letters. The CIA intercepted a letter to Marina Oswald from a KGB official who had served in Europe. Angleton's subordinates notified the FBI of this letter to Marina. (p. 258)
*Note: Only the FBI is authorized to intercept and conduct a search of mail (covertly open and read) of letters sent to the U.S. and from the U.S. and then only on issuance of a warrant based on probable cause. The mail-opening program was run from Angleton's office, but he had nothing to do with it. In December 1974, William Colby leaked the CIA's mail opening campaign to the New York Times and forcing Angleton out of the CIA into retirement, putting the blame for the secret program on Angleton. p. 410)
After JFK's assassination the FBI was under enormous pressure to solve this crime. Looking for a way to clear the FBI of gross negligence, Hoover took raw, unverified and untested intelligence given by Nosenko and leaked it to members of the Warren Commission and to President Johnson. Hoover with the backing of former CIA director Allen Dulles (a member of the Warren Commission) told President Johnson and Chief Justice Warren that the Soviets had not recruited Oswald. (p. 284)
Angleton was furious with Hoover for leaking the raw and unproven information from Nosenko. Among senior government official, only James Angleton continued to express the belief that JFK was not killed by a lone gunman. In a memo to Hoover and the Commission, Angleton wrote, "Such inflammatory and untested information had an unfortunate impact on the Warren Commission members." (p. 284) At the CIA's request, the Warren Commission obligingly made no reference to Nosenko because of their doubts about him. (Crossfire, 130-131)
Nosenko had told the CIA that their agency had been penetrated by a Soviet mole, KGB-code name SASHA. That is all he told the CIA about SASHA. This was very important information and was confirmed by two other KGB defectors. These defectors were Major Anatoly Golitsyn who alleged he was assigned to the 1st Chief Directorate (foreign Intelligence) of the KGB and KGB Major(or Colonel) Igor Kozlov who alleged he was assigned to KGB counterintelligence
who wasn't uncover as a KGB mole by the CIA until 1978. He has spied on the U.S. since 1945. (p. 475)
As of 1989, Nosenko continued to be an advisor on Soviet intelligence to the CIA and FBI at a salary of more than $35,000 a year. He as been given a new identity as well as more than $150,000 as payment for his torture. (Crossfire, 130-131)
Comment: I think Nosenko was as real defector, but Angleton and others in the CIA thought he was another fake defector to also send the message to the U.S. that Oswald was not recruited by the KGB.
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Yekaterina Furtseva was the most powerful woman in the Soviet Union and Khrushchev's lover. In 1961, she disagreed with Khrushchev's attempts to curb excessive lifestyles of the Soviet elite and he began to lose his supporters in the Central Committee and the Politburo. Furtseva concluded that he was a dreamer, an impractical man. (pgs. 254-257)
Furtseva was Khrushchev's Minister of Culture, a member of the Presidium and had gained power over the KGB. Furtseva began secretly to join forces with Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov and others in top Soviet military officials against Khrushchev.
(p. 230-231)
The successful defusing of the Cuban Missile Crisis (June 1962) had a profound effect on both Pres. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. The two men had been to the brink of nuclear war together and were determined never to come that close to the brink again. "A partnership, a thawing was taking place," as William Corson (a high ranking CIA official) put it. Negotiation began for a treaty to terminate the testing of nuclear weapons both sides had been testing with increasing regularity. A secret agreement was made to remove obsolete Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba.
Khrushchev had concluded that the Cold War was bankrupting the Soviet Union, and his country could not survive without an end to the arms race. He began demanding more and more internal Soviet reforms.
The CIA Directorate of Intelligence (intelligence analysis department) had been making it clear to higher-ups since the 1970s that the Soviet Union was rotten from the insdie out and would ultimately collapse under its own weight. Any data not conforming to the Reagan party line was left out of the National Security Estimates. ( p. 467)
Note: Reagan got raise the national debt by three trillion dollars due his administrations unnecessary spending on defense.
Kennedy and he had also agreed to deal with Berlin and with issues of East Germany. The opposition this stirred up within the KGB and Soviet hierarchy/elite escalated beyond anything Khrushchev foresaw. Furtseva and hardliners thought these reforms threatened the very existence of the Soviet state.
The conspirators understood that what gave Khrushchev his stature as a world figure was the unique relationship he had developed with John Kennedy. By resolving the Missile Crisis, Kennedy had made Khrushchev into a statesman. The head of the KGB, Semichastny later wrote Brezhnev, "realized that if Khrushchev lost his relationship with Kennedy, he would lose his support for remaining in power." Brezhnev was busy accusing Khrushchev of losing his nuclear nerve as a result coming so close to nuclear war. (pgs. 254-257)
In spite of Pres. Kennedy's post-Missile Crisis promise not to remove Castro, Operation Mongoose, continued. Because so many attempts on Castro's life were bungled by the CIA and the Cuban emigre community was so infiltrated with Communist agents, the KGB was completely aware of the CIA's assassination program, code name ZR/RIFLE and KUBARK, run by the CIA's Task Force W. (p. 260).
The CIA had information warning that Brezhev had control of the KGB and not Khrushchev and that Brezhnev was dealing directly with the KGB director's deputy, Alexsandr I. Perepelitsyn. Perepelitsyn was the KGB leader in-charge of using of assassinations. He had suggested to the Politburo a series of KGB assassinations, which Khrushchev had stopped. (p. 260-261)
Anatoly Golitsyn who defected to the CIA in December 1961, stated that the KGB had been active in assassination operations. He said that because the Eisenhower Administration efforts against Castro, Nixon was targeted for assassination. The CIA and FBI were busily withholding information from each other and from other government agencies. This information from Golitsyn was withheld from the Secret Service. (p. 256-266)
The idea for the assassination of JFK was to make certain it was done by the Cuban Intelligence service, the DGI, not the KGB. It did not bother the Brezhnev conspirators as long as the KGB itself did no more than aid the DGI by supplying willing resources like Lee Harvey Oswald (as a patsy). (pgs. 262-263).
Pres. Lyndon Johnson's Oval Office (tape) recordings indicate that he was convinced the Soviet Union was behind the Kennedy assassination, and Angleton, who personally briefed Johnson, confirmed that the President remained convinced of that until his death...because Castro was seeking revenge. Richard Helms officially informed Johnson of the CIA's Operation Mongoose and operation to kill Castro in 1964, and Johnson ordered Helms to shut it down. It took two more years to finally to put a stop to CIA assassination plots. (p. 268)
Yekaterina Furtseva had carefully planned for her son-in-law, KGB Colonel (or Major) Igor Kozlov, to defect to the CIA. (p. 423) She was now using a family member to convince the United States that the Soviets had nothing to do with JFK's murder. (p.409)
Operation Mongoose
After the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba, Attorney General Robert Kennedy was given responsibility for overseeing Cuban affairs. Soon a much more secret CIA operation, codename, Operation Mongoose got started. By mid-1962, this operation involved nearly 600 CIA case officers and as many as 3,000 contract agents, many of whom were Cuban refugees. [6b]
CIA special case officer, Bill Harvey was in charge of Operation Mongoose. Harvey had 60 (contract) agents in place in Cuba. (p.213)
CIA's Miami station (code name JM/WAVE ) under the leadership of CIA station chief, Theodore Shackley, included near nightly raids on Cuba -- landing saboteurs, dropping propaganda leaflets, occasional military-style raids, and attempts to kill Castro by the CIA using the US mafia. The CIA connections to the US mafia dated all the way back to Lucky Luciano and World War II. The Cuban missile crisis happened on October 22, 1962. [6b]
The most violent Cuban exile group was Alpha 66. The CIA's Western Hemisphere Division's Director of Operations, David Atlee Phillips, undercover-named, Maurice Bishop, and helped guide the plans to assassinate Castro. [8b] Phillips appears to have worked for Deputy Director Richard M. Bissell Jr. [9b]
(Crossfire The Plot That Killed Kennedy, by Jim Marrs. /6b.- pages 142-144. / 9b.- page 138)
In May of 1960, CIA Officer E. Howard Hunt was involved in the creation of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the umbrella anti-Castro organization and a Cuban government in exile. Also involved with Hunt were Bernard L. Baker, and Frank Sturgis, all of later Watergate fame. [7] Many of the CIA officers were involved in the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
Source: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography Chapter -XII- Chairman George in Watergate --- by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin http://www.tarpley.
Fidel Castro knew about the CIA plans to assassinate him, because he had recruited Santos Trafficante to spy for him. Castro did this by promising Trafficante control of gambling in Cuba once the revolution succeeded. Trafficante placed Castro (DGI) agents among the refugees fleeing Cuba after the revolution. Some of the most fervent anti-communist emigre organizations were controlled by Castro's DGI. The CIA did not realize that among its recruits for its anti-Castro Bay of Pigs, army and Operation Mongoose, were some of Castro's most loyal supporters.
(pgs. 199-200).
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John and Robert Kennedy had devised and were executing a secret plan to overthrow Fidel Castro on December 1, 1963. "The Plan for a Coup in Cuba" (as it was titled in a memo for the Joint Chiefs of Staff) would include a "palace coup" to eliminate Castro, allowing a new Cuban "Provisional Government" to step into the power vacuum, and would be supported by a "full-scale invasion" of Cuba by the US military, if necessary , War plan code named AM/WORLD.
Three powerful Mafia dons—Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Johnny Rosselli—learned of the plan and realized that the government would go to any lengths to avoid revealing the secret war plan AM/WORLD (and Operation Mongoose) to the public. [5]
Robert Kennedy told several close associates that Carlos Marcello was behind JFK's death, but he couldn't reveal what he knew to the public or to the Warren Commission without AM/WORLD being uncovered. RFK and other key government officials worried that exposure of the plan could trigger another nuclear confrontation with the Soviets, just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. [5]
Early in 1962, Robert Kennedy was trying to prosecute a top mafia boss, Sam Giancana, when he found the CIA interceding on Giancana's behalf. Pursing the matter, Kennedy was finally told about the earlier deals between the CIA and mafia to kill Castro.[6]
Comment: I wonder how much of the OSS and CIA collaboration with the mafia in turning a blind eye (collaboration) with international drug traffickers for covert direct actions against alleged communist political parties in Italy, the Nationalist Chinese in Burma, South Vietnam, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and other third world countries?
(See The Strength of the Wolf, The Secret History of America's War on Drugs by Douglas Valentine, 2004)
Chuck Giancana wrote a biography of his brother titled, Double Cross. He writes that was killed by both the CIA and the Outfit (aka mafia) because, Bobby and Jack went against the Outfit after being helped greatly to get Jack elected. Jack Ruby was more than just a bar owner in Dallas. He says the CIA and the mafia are one and the same.
Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli had several things in common, in addition to confessing their roles in JFK's assassination in later years. The three were close associates who met at least once or twice a year, sometimes at a secluded location free from FBI surveillance. All three were under intense and unrelenting pressure from Attorney General Bobby Kennedy by 1963, pressure that had begun in 1957. All three were in business with Jimmy Hoffa, who was also under constant prosecution from Bobby Kennedy. But unlike Hoffa—a high profile, very public figure—these three godfathers shunned the limelight and were unknown to the general public in 1963. All three had dealings with mobster Jack Ruby and had associates close to Lee Harvey Oswald. All three had links to the French Connection heroin ring (and the mafia had been aided by the CIA and Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) going back to World War II) . All three had worked for the CIA, in attempts to assassinate Castro. And despite the Kennedys' best efforts, all three had operatives who had managed to penetrate the AM/WORLD plan without the Kennedy's knowledge.
Why these three Mafia bosses were willing to risk killing the President in 1963 can be explained only by looking at their operations before they came under assault by the Kennedy's. That was the era they wanted to return to, a time when J. Edgar Hoover publicly denied that the Mafia even existed.
Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Johnny Rosselli were each powerful in their own right by the 1950s. But the more they worked together, the more powerful they became. Their combined actions are rarely discussed outside of obscure government reports, old newspaper articles, and a few books, some long out of print. The House Select Committee on Assassinations volumes had some good information on Marcello, less on Trafficante, and strangely little on Johnny Rosselli, so it never gave a clear sense of how the mob bosses worked together. The action they took together in 1963 to assassinate JFK was not the first time they had worked together or the first time they had assassinated public officials. Likewise, AM/WORLD wasn't the first CIA operation the three mob bosses had infiltrated—that was something they had done several times in the years before they killed JFK.
Marcello received special treatment not only from the national Mafia, but also from local, state, and even federal officials. According to a recent history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) (predecessor to the DEA). The history of the FBN goes on to say that Bobby "Kennedy wanted to nail Trafficante and Marcello, but the FBN had only four agents in its Miami and New Orleans offices, and the FBI—though it had the manpower—chose not to place wiretaps on them. These two were the only Mafiosi to receive such privileged treatment from J. Edgar Hoover."
The FBN history quotes Clarence Giarusso, a veteran New Orleans narcotic agent and later its chief of police, to explain Marcello's freedom from prosecution: "We don't care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no interest in who brings the dope in. That's the job of federal agents." However, even some federal agencies weren't interested in Marcello's heroin trafficking. In 1959, FBN agent Tony Zirilli "was set up because he had gotten close to" making a case on "Carlos Marcello through Marcello's girlfriend."
Long before Bobby Kennedy became US Attorney General, he knew about "Marcello's representative in Dallas, Joe Civello," according to a recent history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). While chief counsel for the Senate "Rackets" Committee in the late 1950s, Bobby "suspected that Marcello, through Trafficante in Florida . . . played a dominant role in international drug trafficking. As Bobby was certainly aware, the FBN office in New Orleans believed that Marcello received narcotics from Trafficante in Florida on Teamsters trucks and that" Marcello had a front company that "smuggled drugs from Mexico `without interference from customs.'"
Frank Ragano, the lawyer for Jimmy Hoffa and Santo Trafficante, wrote that "Santo mentioned obliquely that Marcello's power extended to Texas, where he had placed an under-boss, Joe Civello, to run rackets out of Dallas. FBI agents were informed that Jack "Ruby was a frequent visitor and associate of Civello, after Ruby moved to Dallas." Ruby was linked by several witnesses to narcotics traffic, and "federal agents" found "telephone communications" between Civello and "a major trafficker in narcotics" from New York.
The action they took together in 1963 to assassinate JFK was not the first time they had worked together or the first time they had assassinated public officials. Likewise, AM/WORLD wasn't the first CIA operation the three mob bosses had infiltrated—that was something they had done several times in the years before they killed JFK.
Shortly before JFK's assassination, a Marcello associate used a vending-machine executive to pay Jack Ruby several thousand dollars, according to JFK press secretary (and former Senate crime investigator) Pierre Salinger.
Marcello's political savvy and largess extended to national politics, important to someone whose territory covered many states and who was subject to deportation by federal authorities. His influence in Washington sprang from several sources. Marcello employed a well-connected Washington, D.C. lobbyist whose clients included the Somoza family. Lyndon Johnson, then one of the most powerful members of the Senate, received support from Marcello during the 1950s, in the same way that powerful mobsters supplied money to powerful politicians in many parts of the country.
Marcello's biography, John Davis writes that "Marcello's payoff man in Texas in the fifties . . . had been a principal financial backer of Lyndon Johnson's political campaigns in Texas from the late forties on, to the extent that it could be said that illegal profits from Marcello's slot machines in Dallas and Houston . . . were crucial to the success of Johnson's senatorial campaigns." Davis says that "Johnson, because of his dependence on" this money, "had helped kill in committee all antiracketeering legislative proposals that could have affected . Marcello's activities in Texas."
In 1956, when construction on Rosselli and Marcello's Tropicana was started, Las Vegas needed glitzier casinos and more big-name entertainment to compete with the exotic tropical locale of Havana. Havana casinos at the time were also generally classier, while Havana itself offered more in terms of vice. In addition, Las Vegas can be cold in the winter and sweltering in the summer, in contrast to the year-round ocean breezes of coastal Havana.
After JFK's death, John Davis, writes that Marcello had "enough on Johnson so that the new President would not wish an investigation to turn up evidence of Carlos [Marcello's] complicity."
In Rosselli's case, his associates brought him surprisingly close not just to John and Bobby Kennedy, but also to Senator Barry Goldwater. Rosselli had two close friends of Senator Goldwater assassinated in the late 1950s.
Rosselli's influence in Hollywood continued into the early 1960s, where he and his associates tried to prevent a film from being made of Bobby Kennedy's best-selling Mafia exposé The Enemy Within. []
1. Crossfire, The Plot That Killed Kennedy, by Jim Marrs., p. 303-304.
2. Crossfire, p. 114
3. Crossfire, p. 140-141
4. Crossfire, p. 304
5. Double Cross by Chuck Giancana
6. Crossfire, p. 142.
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Richard Helms, the CIA Deputy Director for Plans (translated: covert operations) appointed CIA officer, Bill Harvey, to be in charge of Operation Mongoose. In April 1962, Harvey met with J. Edgar Hoover and asked him to help him keep track of Castro's DGI agents in the United States. Hoover warned Harvey that the DGI was infiltrating the CIA-backed Cuban nationalist movement at an alarming rate. (p. 213)
JFK assassinated on November 21, 1963.
On Nov. 22, 1963, the New Zealand press released news about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As reported independently by Colonel Fletcher Prouty USAF (Retired), whoever set Kennedy up, accidentally launched a full international newswire biography on obscure "killer" Lee Harvey Oswald, without first taking the trouble to check his world clock. It was still "yesterday" in New Zealand on the other side of the International Date Line when the biography was wired from New York, enabling the Christchurch Star newspaper was able to print a story about Oswald as the prime suspect in its morning edition, several hours before he was first accused of the crime by Dallas police.
Source: http://www.vialls.
The CIA was no more open with its information after November 22. James Angleton said that within a few days of the Kennedy assassination and the killing of Lee Oswald, the CIA had information linking Castro to the killings, but that it deliberately withheld it from the FBI on national security grounds. One key CIA document, finally released to the House Select Committee on Assassination in 1977, detailed the getaway plans of a suspected assassin. The FBI, it turns out, had information on unusual DGI activities in New Orleans, Dallas, and Mexico that it never checked. Both agencies withheld their information from the Warren Commission.
Angleton's theory on who killed Kennedy, was that Castro sent three DGI agents Policarpo and Casas, plus a third man whom Angleton would not name, separately worked their way to Dallas, where they met up and carried out the assassination.
Eyewitnesses told the House Select Committee on Assassination that they saw a man who looked like Oswald leave the Texas School Book Depository and get into a white Rambler station wagon. These witnesses said the driver appeared to be Cuban between 25 and 35 years old - a description that fits either Policarpo or Miguel Casas. After the assassination, the U.S. Border Patrol closed the roads to the Mexican border, but nothing was done to stop small airplane traffic. At 11:10 pm on Nov. 23nd, a man (later identified as Casas) went directly from a twin-engine plane that had just arrived from the U.S. onto a Air Cuban flight without going through Mexican customs. Also the Mexican City airport was teeming with Cuban and Soviet diplomatic officials (possibly KGB under diplomatic cover). (p 266).
CIA assets in Cuba also reported that Casas was suddenly flush with money.
After the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy decided to take full control of all intelligence operations. Robert Kennedy ran the CIA and Operation Mongoose through the White House Special Group. Instead of attacking Cuba, they decided to build an alternative to the spread force of Communism in Latin America. They wanted to compete with Communism by offering an American model as an alternative. Robert Kennedy convinced his brother that the only way to prevent Communism from being exported from Cuba to the rest of Latin America was to develop an aggressive partnership among American business, the Catholic church, and the CIA. President Kennedy order the CIA to begin operations with the Jesuits in Latin America, especially in Chile. He allocated U.S. relief funds to the Jesuits.
The Kennedys also created the Business Group for Latin America as a CIA front established to funnel private funds to secret operations that Robert Kennedy thought important. Enno Hobbling, a former CIA officer, was its executive director. The Group's job was to provide a cover organization to which corporations could contribute money to pay for bribes and other political activities in Latin America.
In the thousand days of Kennedy's presidency, the U.S. conducted a record number of covert actions and assassination attempts. (p. 204-208)
The KGB double agent who made a fake defection to the U.S., Igor Kozlov gave the CIA the identity of the Soviets most valuable moles inside the CIA, Igor Orlov. Orlov had been falsely working for the CIA since World War II and compromising CIA operations and stealing U.S. secrets. Giving up this KGB mole was done to convince the CIA that Kozlov was a real defector. Angleton's contacts with Israeli intelligence told him that Kozlov had married the daughter of Yekaterina Furtseva in 1964, providing Angleton with pictures of the happy family. This told Angleton that it was highly possible that Kozlov had access to information about Oswald.
After Kozlov cut off contact with the CIA,
. Kozlov was sent by the KGB to agree to work for the CIA and to send a message to the CIA and FBI that Oswald had never been recruited by the KGB and therefore, had nothing to do with JFK's assassination.
Here are some of the information noted in the book, The Secret History of the CIA, a cover-up by the FBI and CIA after JFK was assassinated.
June 26, 1962 (before the Cuban Missile crisis, two Dallas-based FBI agents interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald about his life in the Soviet Union. Oswald was uncooperative. He denied being approached by Soviet Intelligence while in Russia and he refused to take a polygraph. He defiantly walked out of the interview. (p.257)
On August 16, 1962, two FBI agents followed Lee Harvey Oswald to a parking lot in Dallas. They tried to interview him, but he was even more hostile and uncooperative than he was in June.
In the fall of 1962, about the same time that the Cuban Missile crisis was ending, George De Mohrenschildt a wealth Dallas businessman began to take an active interest in Lee and Marina Oswald. James Angleton maintains that De Mohrenschildt worked for the KGB and that he was the Oswalds' control officer (KGB case officer).
FBI files indicate that in 1941, De Mohrenschildt was arrested for making a sketch of a naval facility in Port Arkanas, Texas. By the end of World War II, the FBI had concluded he was an NKVD agent. (p. 258)
De Mohrenschildt developed a reputation as a top petroleum engineer. The FBI and CIA both believed his engineering success resulted from Communist connections. He worked for the CIA by voluntarily being debriefed by them after each of his trips to Soviet receptions and his work in Yugoslavia.
J. Walter Moore of the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division met with De Mohrenschildt. De Mohrenschildt had a relationship with the CIA dating back to the OSS. (Crossfire, the plot to kill Kennedy, by Jim Marrs, page 200)
In April 1961, De Mohrenschildt ended up in Guatemala, just a few miles from the training base the CIA had used to prepare for the Bay of Pigs invasion. By October 1962, De Mohrenschildt was back in Dallas and had befriended the Oswalds. In April 9163, De Mohrenschildt suddenly left Dallas for good. James Angleton believes that this was when the KGB handed Oswald off to Castro's intelligence service (the DGI).
An investigator from the House Select Committee on Assassination had attempted to contact De Mohrenschildt on March 29, 1977. Three hours later, De Mohrenschildt was dead from a shotgun blast to the head. His death was ruled a suicide. (Crossfire, p. 200)
Comment: It is assumed a KGB or DGI wet team (assassination team) may have killed De Mohrenschildt because he knew too much. The Soviets had a history of sacrificing their own KGB spies for the success of their spying operations.
A week later, Oswald took a bus to New Orleans. There is evidence that he orchestrated a street fight there purposely to establish an arrest record. Within a few months, Oswald established himself as a Castro sympathizer. He began telling associates he considered Castro's revolution more true to Marxism than the Soviet system.
At the same time, he also became deeply involved with the anti-Castro movement in New Orleans and with a number of Cuban emigres connected to the mafia boss of New Orleans, Carlos Marcello. Marcello had been included with Santos Trafficante and Sam Giancana in the CIA's contract to kill Castro.
Oswald was openly associated with rabid right-wingers involved in Operation Mongoose, including pilot David Ferrie, who had done contract work for the CIA, flying emigres to CIA training camps. Oswald spent time at a New Orleans bar which was a hangout of the most extreme anti-Castro Cuban emigres/refugees. His meetings with right-wing Cubans continued through the fall of 1963. (p.259)
James Angleton believes Oswald's effort to be seen with anti-Castro Cubans "indicated to me that he was trying to provoke them into a confrontation.
In 1963, the CIA was photographing everyone going into and out of the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City. The CIA later conceded that the man photographed while visiting the Soviet and Cuban embassies was not Oswald, but refused to say who it was. (p.260)
In October 1963, a Mexican citizen, Silvia Duran, who work at the Cuban embassy stated an American who identified himself as Lee Oswald had contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. (Crossfire, p.193)
Not shown to the Warren Commission was a cable sent by the director of the CIA to the CIA station in Mexico City urging the secret arrest of Silvia Duran on the day after the assassination. The order was to keep Duran's arrest absolutely secret and that no information from her is published or leaked. Duran was making statements that a man calling himself Oswald, came to the Cuban Embassy.
Another declassified CIA cable tasked Duran be rearrested and to make sure the Mexican authorities took full responsibility for the re-arrest. This probably was due because after her first arrest, she began to speak about the person claiming to be Oswald. (Crossfire, p.194)
In January 22, 1964, the CIA leaked to the Warren Commission members that Oswald had contact with a KGB officer, Valery Kostikov, while in the Soviet embassy. The CIA said Kostikov's responsibilities included "assassinations and sabotage." This possible link between Oswald and a KGB assassination plot so frightened Commission members that they were content to take the CIA's word for Oswald's Mexico visits to embassies. (Crossfire, p.193)
The Top Secret codename for the Bay of Pigs operation, was Operation Zapata. Zapata Petroleum or Zapata Offshore was a Midland, TX oil company headed by George Bush Sr. There is a lot of evidence that Zapata Petrolleum was a CIA front company used to support the Bay of Pigs invasion. S Joseph McBride, wrote two articles in The Nation and disclosed that George Bush Sr. had been involved with the CIA before JFK has been assassinated. He examined an FBI memo dated Nov. 29, 1963 from Hoover to the State Department, subject: Assassination of President John F. Kennedy November 22,1963.
This memo stated that Oswald was in police custody and available for interrogation about his affiliation with agencies of the US government. It in the memo was noted/stated that FBI SA W. T. Forsyth and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency briefed "Mr. George Bush of the CIA". McBride states, "A source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the Agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine operations. (p. 331) [1] Plausible Denial by Mark Lane.
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General Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, believed that the Bay of Pigs invasion would fail (based on his military assessment of the invasion force and the Cuban defense forces), but withheld his judgment from President Kennedy. (Source: Body of Secrets, p. 82)
An April 29, 2000 Washington Post article, Soviets Knew Date of Cuba Attack, reported that the CIA had information indicating that the Soviet Union knew the invasion was going to take place and did not inform Kennedy. Radio Moscow actually broadcast an English-language newscast on April 13, 1961 predicting the invasion "in a plot hatched by the CIA" using paid "criminals" within a week. The invasion took place four days later. According to British minister David Ormsby-Gore, British intelligence estimates, which had been made available to the CIA, showed that the Cuban people were predominantly behind Castro and that there was no likelihood of mass defections or insurrections following the invasion.
(http://laura-
The CIA knew in advance that the date of the invasion had been leaked to the Russians, who had in turn relayed that information to Castro. In spite of this information, the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, ordered the Bay of Pigs Operation forward. The CIA's intention was for Kennedy to send in jets to bomb Cuba and for the Marines to join the (US trained and equipped Cuban "freedom fighters") brigade already on land. If this had happened the survivors would have been placed in a Cuban prison, which would have created an uproar by the American public and forced Kennedy to order a full-scale invasion. High-ranking officials within the CIA spread the myth that Kennedy was responsible for the failure of the invasion. Many Cubans continue to hold this belief when, in truth, the betrayal lies with Allen Dulles and the CIA.
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