Dead Kennedys Epilogue

Personally, the greatest stumbling block to me concluding a conspiracy existed to kill president John F. Kennedy was the Kennedy family's public acceptance of the Warren Commission Report. Why would Robert Kennedy, his dead brother's closest advisor and then head of the family, accept the obviously flawed "single bullet" theory and its sine qua non of a lone assassin if it was not accurate? At the time of JFK's death Bobby was Attorney General and still in charge of the massive and top secret AMWORLD operation. The starting deadline for the operation was only ten days away. The near nuclear exchange of the Cuban missile Crisis was only a year behind him. Khrushchev had promised Soviet intervention if the United States attacked Cuba. If the plan for a coup in Cuba backed by American military forces were exposed, a nuclear war with the Soviet Union over Cuba was a very real possibility. Part of the planning for AMWORLD included contingencies such as retaliatory attacks by Cuba against US officials and interests. Any investigation of his brother's death was therefore fraught with national security considerations that had to be protected from public disclosure.

Robert Kennedy apparently believed from the day of JFK's death that the anti-Castro Cubans involved in AMWORLD might also be involved in the assassination. A logical conclusion given that some of them were being trained to assassinate the Cuban head of state. It might have been possible that a Cuban double agent had infiltrated the covert coup operation. Or perhaps a embittered survivor of the Bay of Pigs disaster had sought revenge for the alleged betrayal of their cause by the President. Hours after JFK's death Robert told journalist Haynes Johnson who was working on a book about Manuel Artime, Bay of Pigs veteran and exile leader of a private army training in Nicaragua for the coup, "one of your guys did it". He even asked his friend CIA Director McCone if the agency had killed his brother. McCone told him the agency had not. The Director also said he thought two people were involved in the shooting. Later, after Mafia bag man Jack Ruby eliminated Oswald in front of his astonished Dallas police buddies and television, Kennedy came to believe that the Mafia was involved with his brother's death. He was emotionally crushed by the thought that his relentless prosecutions may have been responsible for motivating his brother's killers. He was aware that his government's collaboration with organized crime gave it the means and the opportunity to strike back. Harris Wofford, a close associate of Robert and later a Senator, wrote that, "There was nothing Robert Kennedy could do or say about it. There was no way of getting to the bottom of the assassination without uncovering the very stories he hoped would be hidden forever...[he] took no steps to inform the Commission of the Cuban and Mafia connections that would have provided the main clues to any conspiracy." Such clues would have led to the exposure of AMWORLD.

Certainly FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover did not tell what he knew. No friend of the Kennedys, he publicly proclaimed the 'lone nut' was JFK's murderer and insured that the single bullet theory became the official story. Less than a week after the assassination an FBI agent tied Ruby to a gun smuggling ring that involved former Cuban president, Carlos Prio. Prio had been a corrupt official with ties to the Mafia. He became a Miami businessman and anti-Castro activist. Prio was outed by the Kennedys from AMWORLD, but he attempt to get into it anyway. He clearly knew about the operation, as CIA informants reported. The FBI report about Ruby's connection to Prio became a Warren Commission document (#3036) but it was buried there in 26 volumes of paper.

Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms was tasked with conducting an internal agency review of its files on Lee Harvey Oswald. Helms withheld information on Oswald from his chosen investigator John Witten. Oswald was the subject of a pre-assassination counterintelligence file (201) within the super secret Special Investigations Group (SIG) which apparently detailed Oswald's political activities. Witten initially concluded that Oswald had acted alone, but after reading the FBI's Oswald report at the invitation of a Kennedy aide, Nicholas Katzenbach, he decided that his initial conclusions were "completely irrelevant". Helms removed Witten from the Oswald review and it was taken over by the chief of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. An insomniac, paranoid personality and hardline anti-communist, it was Angleton's business to know where all the skeletons were buried. He is reputed to have had a photo of J. Edgar Hoover engaged in sex with his male lover. The classified 201 file, if it still exists, may show that Oswald was being controlled by CIA agents like David Atlee Phillips
aka Maurice Bishop.

Any theory--be it evolution or how President Kennedy was murdered--is only as valid as its probative power. The national security cover up of the mob conspiracy to eliminate the President explains many of the assassination's curious factual incongruities:

• Attorney General Kennedy decided to transport his brother's body back to Bethesda Naval Hospital for an autopsy over the strenuous objections of Texas law officers who insisted that Texas law required an autopsy at Parkland. Secret Service agents nearly had a violent confrontation with Texas officials over possession of the corpse.
• The autopsy was closely monitored by the Attorney General from the 17th floor suite of the secure military hospital via telephone to Admiral Burkley, the President's physician. Witnesses to the autopsy have stated that Burkley controlled the examination. O'Connor: Burkley said, "I am in charge."; Jenkins: "I think he [ hospital Commander Humes] was being directed.";Custer:" He[Admiral Burkley] seemed like he was controlling everything."
• The initial observations of the Parkland physicians are at glaring odds with the report of the military autopsy especially regarding the nature and extent of the massive head wound. Dr. Clark, the only neurosurgeon to see the wound, described it as "tangential" at the Parkland press conference. When this statement is correlated with his other statements about he wound, a consistent description emerges: a shot tangentially hitting the right side of the President's head blowing out the right rear octant. Dr. McClelland's observations coincide with Clark's description, "I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been blasted...you could actually look down into the skull cavity and see that probably a third or so of the brain tissue...had been blasted out" The Parkland Hospital reports consistently describe a right, front side impact that exploded through the back of the skull, driving bone fragments and brain tissue backward. Such an explosive force could have easily obscured a front entry wound.
• There was an apparent change of medical opinion from the conclusion of the military autopsy in the early morning of November 23, 1963 to the submission of the final report supporting two hits from the rear. Jenkins: "I came out of the autopsy totally expecting them (Hume, Boswell & Finck) to say that there were two shooters." Hospital Commander Hume burned his autopsy notes and the first draft of the report. Boswell's notes and statements support a bullet entering the occiput and driving forward to the mid temple region depositing a bullet fragment behind the right eye visible in the autopsy X-rays and another fragment moving down through the mid brain fracturing the skull floor (CE397).
• None of the Cuban exile leaders--Artime, Ray, Menoyo, Varona, William--who were part of the AMWORLD coup plan were interviewed by the Warren Commission despite Oswald's very public confrontation and debate with Carlos Bringuier of the DRE (Directorio Revolutionario Estudiantil) the summer before the assassination. This group was run by CIA agent David Atlee Phillips and subsequently, George Joannides. By July, 1963 the organization was CIA funded at the level of $18-25,000 per month. Its probably not coincidence that Joannides was brought out of retirement to serve as CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976. The Committee was not informed of his control of DRE in 1963.
• Ruby's background of organized crime contacts was not completely investigated by the Warren Commission. Ruby, aka Rubenstein, had ties to the mob going back to at least 1937 when he was an organizer for the Chicago Scrap Iron & Junk Handlers Union, Local 20467. The union was eventually placed in trusteeship and its President Paul Dorfman suspended by the AFL-CIO. Ruby was involved in gun running to Cuba in 1959 and played a small role in Jimmy Hoffa's deal to sell C-97 aircraft and guns to Castro using stolen Canadian bonds to finance the transaction. This transaction in turn served as cover for CIA sponsored assassination plots against Castro. Ruby pleaded with Chief Justice Earl Warren in Dallas to be brought to Washington for protection and questioning. Ruby told the Judge, "I am making a statement now that I may not live the next hour when I walk out of this room." He had good reason to be scared. His contacts with made guys like Joe Civello, Marcello capo in Dallas, might have allowed investigators to unravel the tangled web of deceit surrounding the lone gunman cover story if they been directed to do so.

What the theory of a mob hit and national security cover up doesn't not explain is whether or not any agents of the United States government had prior knowledge that President Kennedy was the target of a plot to kill him.

Most prominent researchers rule out institutional culpability. But as one researcher publicly noted there is no evidence ruling out the possibility that some government agents--'bad apples'-- had prior knowledge of the Mafia's plan to kill the President in Dallas. Indeed given their official assignments, political views, clandestine experience, and close collaboration with organized crime to hit Castro it is probable that they did have prior knowledge of the Mafia's intentions. That they did nothing to alert the Secret Service to the danger facing Kennedy in Chicago, Tampa and finally Dallas makes them a part of the assassination conspiracy even if they were keeping the secrets of AMWORLD or similar operations. There is no "smoking file" available, only informed speculation.

At the top of my bad apple list are the officers: David Sanchez Morales, then deputy chief of JMWAVE responsible for operations against Cuba, who had a close personal relationship with mob boss and plotter Johnny Roselli. He had a reputation of being a hard drinker who talked to much. Morales was himself an assassin with a long history of black operations going back to the successful CIA assassination of President Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. His identity was keep secret from the Warren Commission and the next four government commissions to investigate aspects of the assassination. Morales died of heart attack before he was scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). David Atlee Phillips stated he was Oswald's case officer. He was a friend of Marcelo employee and government informant Guy Bannister. He even had a friend in common with Jack Ruby. More importantly, he ran DRE and Alpha 66 for the Company giving him wide knowledge of anti-Castro group activity, and in 1963 he was in charge of the CIA's Cuba operations in Mexico City. He also worked on AMWORLD as part of the Special Affairs Staff (SAS) within the Company. Oswald was linked to Eloy Menoyo's exile group through Phillips, aka Maurice Bishop. Before he died, he told a former HSCA staff member that "JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including rogue American intelligence people." Its my opinion he was one of the "rogues". James Jesus Angleton,the master counterespionage agent, had connections to the anti-communist Mafia that probably dated to his OSS service in Italy and Operation Gladio. Angleton's ultra secret Special Investigations Group had a file on Oswald's political activity prior to Dallas. His group could have picked up indications that the mob intended to use Oswald as a patsy. He was assigned by Richard Helms to cut off the Company's in house investigation of Oswald. Helms, a career officer risen in the ranks and passed over for the Director's job by JFK, demonstrated his overriding loyalty to the Company when he failed to inform Robert Kennedy about the "executive action" program code named ZR/RIFLE and the Rolando Cubela plot to kill Castro (AMLASH). Helms could have been informed by either Morales or Angleton about the Mafia menace. He finally attained the Director's chair during the Nixon administration. In 1977 Helms was convicted of misleading Congress about Nixon's plan for a coup in Chile. There are others who could be named as having prior knowledge. We will have to wait until 2017 when the CIA's files on the Kennedy assassination are supposed to be declassified to find out who they may be.

Post Script: One mystery that can be solved now is the identity of the paid collaborator that was to replace Fidel Castro. If you think it was Che Guevara you are wrong. Castro himself thought it was the revolutionary hero. Perhaps this is one reason Che went to Bolivia to fight for the rebels there. Castro did not find out until 1990 that it was Juan Almeida, Commander of the Cuban Army (8th photo). He is currently the number two man in Cuba behind Raul Castro according to the CIA. This web article is dedicated to El Presidente, Fidel Castro. Viva Fidel!