The DEath of JFK: Nixon Tied it to Bay of Pigs

Sherman Skolnick and some others have assumed that E. Howard Hunt was in a position to reveal a great deal about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nixon was heard to complain a few times that Hunt’s demands for hush money on Watergate was likely to expose "the whole Bay of Pigs thing," H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, wrote that this was a somewhat veiled reference to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. On the famous tapes, Nixon said that the Warren Commission Report “ was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated." But he did not explain why. Some investigators believe the DNC had a reel of film showing Oswald with some C.I.A. operative, but this writer has not been able to find much evidence for this other than a Los Angeles Times story.

Frank Sturgis, told the San Francisco Chronicle (May 7, 1977) that "the reason we burglarized the Watergate was because “Nixon was interested in stopping news leaking related to the photos of our role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.") On January 27, 1964, the Warren Commission interviewed Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr by telephone and he said that Oswald was an F.B.I. informant since September , 1962. Oswald was paid $200 a week and was given the number S-179. Waggoner’s source was Henry Wade, the Dallas DA. Oswald also had the n umber 11069 with the C.I.A.. Robert Kennedy was aware of Oswald’s pre-Nov ember 22 activities and that he was working for the F.B.I.. Kennedy reasoned “If the F.B.I. is controlling him, he’s no problem.” Wade also said tghey had Oswald’s prints on the murder weapon, but a funeral director told Jim Marr that F.B.I. agents later came to his establishment to put Oswald’s fingerprints on it. It is odd that within fifteen minutes of the JFK assassination, the Dallas police put out an alert for a man”about 30, 5’10”, 165 pounds.” There is no evidence of how they got that information. It is exactly the same data found in F.B.I. and C.I.A. files on Oswald.

Richard Nixon may have been in a position to know what happened on November 22, 1963, but that does not mean he was involved. Probably by coincidence, Nixon had just returned to New York from a conservative meeting in Dallas when he learned of the assassination. He had been in Dallas on November 20-22 for meetings with the Pepsi Cola Corporation board. He returned to New York on November 22 and claimed he heard about the shooting in a taxi. It was later established that he learned about it in Dallas. The Dallas papers noted that Nixon taunted Kennedy by saying the nation was unhappy with Kennedy but that Nixon needed no secret service protetection and no plexiglass bubble for his transportation. Kennedy, by some accounts, made the decision not to use the bubble that day. Douglas Dillon swore under oath to the Warren Commission that this was the fact and later restated this in his memoirs. On the other hand, James J. Rowley, head of the Secret Service protective detail, told the commission that no president can dictate to the service on matters of this nature.

Brigadier General Russell Bowen, in Immaculate Deception, analyzed key Nixon tapes in which he referred to “Texans,” “the Texans,” “Cubans,” “the Bay of Pigs,” and’some Texas people.” One of the “brown shoe boys” of the OSS and decades of intelligence work, Bowen saw the references as referring both to recent money laundering and to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When the most relevant of these tapes was released, Nixon advisor Dean Burch said of George H.W. Bush: “He broke out in a**holes and sh*t himself to death…”

The Warren Commission Report documents included a memo in which J. Edgar Hoover said he gave a full briefing on the assassination to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency, and there in a photograph of someone who looks very much like Bush standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963. Comparison of that image with known photographs of the young Bush only strengthen the impression that it he was there that day. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that the F.B.I. had numerous recordings of mafia people threatening to kill JFK. There is no evidence Hoover ever tried to warn the Secret Service. Hoover lived next door to his close friend, Lyndon B. Johnson. That might account for some claims that Johnson had foreknopwledge of the assassination of Kennedy.

Initially, Vice President Richard Nixon oversaw Operation 40, an assassins unit, which was first aimed at Cuba to appease businessmen complaining about lost property. .Nixon got a committee of businessmen under Jack Crichton and George H.W. Bush to fund the operation. These men were also entrusted with enlisting Cubans to invade Cuba. Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Bernard Baker and Rafael Quintero were among those recruited for the invasion. Others were Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, and Antonio Ve C.I.A.na .Felix Rodriguez was serving as an aid to Bush. After the failed Bay of Pigs Operation, these people detested Kennedy. Rodriguez wa Batista's top policeman and went into exile with the president along with Frank Sturgis and Chi Chi Quintero. Rodriguez unofficial ly joined the C.I.A. in 1961 (official ly in 1967) and evntually formed a tight friendship with George H. Walker Bush , who had joined about then and was most likely using Zapata Oil, founded in 1953, as a cover.

Zapata eventually developed many different corporate identities around the world and would have The C.I.A. referred to the Bay of Pigs invasion as” Zapata” while the Army called it “Pluto.” In 1960 and 1961, George Herbert Walker Bush worked with Felix Rodriguez to recruit people for the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was even able to name three of the ships “Barbara,” “Zapata,” and “Houston.” Zapata was the name of his company.