An Attempt on the life of Jimmy Carter?

Oddly, President Jimmy Carter said while still in office:” We are going to have to go all the way back to the assassination of president Kennedy to get
this country right."

When Jimmy Carter was about to visit Los Angeles in 1979 for a Cinco de Mayo event , police arrested two Hispanics on May 5 near where the president was to appear. They test fired a starter [pistol. They had an additional 70 rounds. It was reported that they were to create a diversion while two professionals dealt with Carter. One of the Hispanics was named Osvaldo Ortiz, 27, and the other was Raymond Lee Harvey, a 35 year Anglo. The Secret Service said he was obviously a derelect.

All information on the incident disappeared. President Carter had requested TV time to outline broad changes in government. . When he heard of the incident, he cancelled the broadcast and retreated to Camp David. He told his advisors, “I have lost control of the government.” Among those he brought to Camp David for advice was Reverend Billy Graham.

Stryker Mcguire of the LA Times broke the story of the two vagrants, but it only ran once, buried in the back pages. He later moved to a job in London. A ffew other papers carried small stories, and Newsweek had a longer piece.

John Simkin believes John J. McCloy and David Rockefelleer may have been behind the attempt on Carter. Of course, both were leaders of Chase Manhattan Bank, which had loaned Iran $500,000,000 nad handled Iranian money. Carter resisted their efforts to get the shah in the United States, thnough Carter did give in when he learned the shah had cancer.

In 2007, Walter W. Blanck, then a prisoner in Wisconsin, unsuccessfully sought representation so he could sue the F.B.I. and two agents. He claimed the two agents gave him mind altering drugs in 1975. He was also working for AFT at the time. Blanck wanted $60,000,000 for psychological damages. He wanted FOI claims filed against all defendants, but the judge ruled the request frivolous.

In 1976, he was subjected to “indoctrination” and had to give one of the agents handwriting and rifle shhoting samples. He claims to have briefly met George H.W. Bush, then director of the C.I.A.

He was given Carter’s 1976 itinerary and told to assassinate him, but Blanck refused. In 1990 he began serving 4 years of a 73 year sentence for kidnapping in Illinois. That was reverse, and he was taken to Wisconsin where he is serving a 67 yerar sentence for kidnapping and false imprisonment.

The Death of John F. Kennedy: How Many Shots?

Some witnesses said they herd more than four shots, and UPI reporter Merridian Smith said in a dispatch 25 minutes after the shooting that ‘some of the Secret Service agents thought the gunfire was from an automatic weapon fired to the right rear of the president’s car, probably from a grassy knoll to which police rushed.” This would mean they heard many more than four shots. This testimony has led one investigator to suggest that the shot came from the trunk. This is unlikely, and it cannot be checked out in any event. Three days later, the Lincoln was completely stripped and rearmored by Hess and Eisenhardt.

Some insist that the assassination of Kennedy marked the accession of a secret cabal that has run our government ever since. If this were true, it would seem that if such a cabal were in control, that Richard Nixon would not have had to rely upon his own plumbers unit to carry out black bag jobs. Nixon’s goals and priorities were, after all, very much in line with what writers have assumed were those of the alleged secret government. Nixon’s plumbers unit was financed through mechanisms created by George H.W. Bush, who Nixon would appoint head of the Republican National Committee.

The names of the people who shot Kennedy and the details on C.I.A. involvement will never be known . The story is an endless rabbit hole strewn with all sorts of red herrings. St. John Hunt, son of E. Howard Hunt has said that it is even possible that there were as many as three simultaneous plots to Kill Kennedy. It is generally assumed that the hit team had at least four members. There is a December 6, 1978 memorandum from the sheriff of Sarasota County, Florida to the F.B.I. in Tampa advising them that Stempeh Ruth told a deputy in 1960 or 1970 that he went to Cuba in 1969 to kill one of the four or five men on the Kennedy hit team. Ruth wass supposed to be a C.I.A. asset, but he got a 60 prison term in 1988 for moving drugs.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy was a huge historical event, and there still is not enough evidence to piece together what actually happened. There is more than enough evidence to suspect that the official story was essentially a fabrication, but it still proves very difficult to sort out all the contradictions and identify and deal with deliberate disinformation. This is probably true with the respect of many other contemporary events. For example, no one can prove for certain why the US invaded Iraq. Historians, due to a methodology inherited from Leopold von Ranke, may find themselves with no choices but to repeat the official or default stories about the assassination and Iraq, perhaps adding that some have questioned these accounts. Its an endless rat hole.

The people who planned Kennedy’s murder could have accomplished this
without so much fanfare. It could have been done in a way to arouse almost no suspicion. Rather it was accomplished in the Dealey Plaza shooting gallery, with all sorts of messy details, and an explanatory theory that would only be accepted by the weak-minded. It was a way of announcing to the citizens of a one-time democracy that other forces were now in control and that ordinary citizens might as well swallow hard and accept it.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy is surrounded with so much contradictory evidence and deliberate misinformation that the true picture of what occurred on November 22 will probably never emerge. Given this situation, many still find that the “lone nut” or default position should be accepted. Yet, It is clear that more than 3 shots were fired, that the autopsy evidence was inaccurate and partly changed or removed, and that a great deal of effort has been exerted to muddy the picture and generate piles of misleading disinformation. Oswald was clearly tied to the intelligence community as was George De Mohrenschildt . The latter must have had a good idea of what happened, but it is not at all certain that he ever told the truth.Democracies depend upon transparency and the free flow of information . We can conclude that the transformation of the US into a banana republic began that day.

The Death of John F. Kennedy: Was It a Communist Plot?

Mrs. Dorothy Gravitis was a Latvian who was teaching Ruth Paine Russian. Mrs. Gravitis distanced herself rom Marina Oswald after Marina said that Lee was in the process of becoming a member of the Communist party. She used a Russian term that meant he was in a phase in which he had to do somethingto prove himself. There is no way of knowing if Marina was just bragging, of Lee was gaming the Soviets, or if it was an accurate statement.

We know that Colonel Philip J. Corso of Army Intelligence was busily spreading the word that Oswald was tied to a communist ring within the C.I.A.. Corso had been involved in a number of black operations and was active in Operation Paperclip, bringing Nazi scientists to the US. Was Corso spreading this rumor on behalf of Army Intelligence or on behalf of the ultra-right Shickschinny Knights of Malta. He as a active member oif this group which was dominated by White Russians. Of course, White Russians pop up time and again in this asdsassination story. These people were tied to the partty of the intelligence community that was to the right of the C.I.A.. They had a more favorable view of the F.B.I. than the C.I.A., which was tied to big oil and its dreams of global power. Their allies were dissident generals who disliked civilian control and independent oil men like H.L. Hunt. Like their hero J.Edgar Hoover, they represented an Americanized form of fascism.

Mahai Pacepa, head of the Rumanian intelligence service, defected to the United States in 1978 and wrote that Oswald was working for the Cubans. His account also suggests tht the communists had something to do with Ruby’s death, three years after the death of Oswald.

There is thin evidence that Luis Angel Castillo could have been a shooter. He was arrested in 1967 in a failed plot to kill the President of the Philippines and told authorities that he had been involved in an assassination in the United States four years before. He told Philippine authorities that he was one of 14 sent to the US by Castro to kill Kennedy. He sometimes went into some sort of hypnotic trance and rambled a great deal. His employer was a John Dolf, who hypnotized him and put him on the second floor of a building with a rifle. But Kennedy wa shot by someone else in the operation. A cable from the US embassy in Manila indicates the State Department considered him unbalanced. Later, he said he worked for the C.I.A. in the Bay of Pigs invasion. . It is not known if he was sent to the US for questioning. He returned to Chicago in 11968 and seems to have disappeared. As a youngster, he did time in a New Jersey reformatory for burgulary. In 1996, Robert Stephen Lipka, a captured Soviet spy who had worked at NSA, said that he saw a document at the NSA identifying one of Kennedy’s assassins and said it was Castillo.

One of the most prominent Russian defector, Yuri Nosenko, insisted that Oswald was a double agent, working for the Soviets. Richard Helms told Congress this was a good possibility.

We have known for some time, that Kennedy had opened back channel negotiations with General Fabian Escalante, head of Cuba’s G-2 intelligence service to normalize relations with Cuba. Then, as now, he was close to Fidel Castro. At the 1995 Nassau conference, the Cuban delegation believed that the US military had a role in Kennedy’s death because they objected to normalization of relations.

The Death of JFK: The HSCA

The HSCA
The House Select Committee on Assassinations half-heartedly looked into the assassination in the seventies. It had few inv estigators, and their travel was severely hemmed in.

For some reason, Congressional supporters of the Pentagon forced the ouster of the first counsel, Richard Sprague. It was also known that the Army was in charge of the Kennedy autopsy and there is a great deal of evidence that it was , at the least, badly botched. He also thought the C.I.A. could be involved and that events in New Orleans were central to the assassination.

A re-examination of physical evidence was a disaster. It turned out that Kennedy’s brain had been lost . A comparison of what the doctors in Texas and others there saw with the official autopsy leads to the conclusion that somethings were changed on photographs and that the head wound was changed so it would appear that the bullet came from the back.

Much information had been lost, including tissue samples, and serious questions have been raised about the x-rays and photographs that have been purported to be those of the dead Kennedy. It also told that one doctor did not dissect the neck because he was ordered not to do so.

The investigation was hampered by many things—bickering over the hiring of staff, much time spent on writing operational procedures and working out delicate relationships with government agencies, and the purge of many staffers to save money at a crucial time.

In the end, the committee decided that more people than Oswald were involved but it failed to put key witnesses to this fact on the stand. It also decided that at least four shots were fired. The holes in the back of Kennedy’s shirt and coat made the single shooter and magic bullet theories untenable. It found strong evidence that the F.B.I. knew in 1963 that information that Lee Harvey Oswald had telephoned and visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City was very doubtful. Yet the committee fudged its conclusion on this and did not pursue the matter. Studying what went on in the committee led many connected to it to wonder if those who led it really wanted to learn what had happened on November 22. An investigation conducted by the Attorney General of Texas, Waggoner Carr, was to show that Oswald was also acting as an F.B.I. informer since 1962.

The committee wasted a great deal of time running down a red herring offered by Clare Booth Luce. The source of her information soon shot himself. She turned out to be an officer of the Retired Intelligence Officers Association. After November 22, Mrs. Marina Oswald broke off ties with her friend Ruth Paine on the advice of the Secret Service. They told her that Mrs. Paine was’sympathizing with the C.I.A..” Her husband Michael Paine worked at Bell Aircraft, a Defense Department contractor. He worked for General Walter Dornberger, an alleged Nazi war criminal who was head of research and development. Mr. Paine took Lee Harvey Oswald to a meeting with General Edwin Walker. Walker had been removed from the Army by Kennedy because he was indoctrinating soldiers with German Bund doctrines.

The possible involvement of Cuban exiles was only traced around the periphery. Rolando Otero told an investigator that he had repeatedly heard that the C.I.A. was involved and that about 30 C.I.A. personnel were in Dallas that day. He was soon shipped off to prison with a forty year sentence. The chief witness against him was Ricardo “the Monley” Morales, a C.I.A. hit man. A Treasury man from Minnesota came into Miami to instruct other witnesses, who had been rounded up and taken to a safe house, in what they should say in court. The committee investigator traced Otero’s two sources, “Carlos” and “Ten-One,” but he was forbidden to look closely into their backgrounds or what they were doing in the mid-1970s.

Fabian Escalante, probably a Cuban government asset, claims that Antonio Cuesta, while being held by the Cubans, confessed to being involved in the assassination. He named three others who were part of the Forty: Eladio Del Valle, Rolando Masferrer and Hermino Diaz Garcia. John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter that he had been involved in the logistics of the assassination, mainly making payments. He thought two Cubans were directly involved, one being Garcia

The other was Virgilio Gonzalez, who was also connected with the Forty. Florence Martino , wife of John, said her husband told her on the morning of November 22 that Kennedy would die that day. Martino also said before his death in 1975 that he had spread false stories about Oswald being the shooter and that he himself was involved as a facilitator, which included delivering money. Martino was close to William Pawley and they involved together in an anti-Castro effort called “Operation Tilt.” Fred Claasen told the House Committee that Oswald thought he was working for the Cubans. He was to meet a contact at the Texas Theater and helped to leave the country, but he made a mistake shooting the policeman. Ruby had to eliminate Oswald.

The Death of JFK: Could LBJ Have Been Involved

In a recent book, Barr McClellan claims that LBJ, one month before his death, told his friend Don Thomas that he had instructed Edward A. Clark to arrange Kennedy’s assassination. It should be noted that Clark was an enemy of McClellan. A Clark operative recruited Lee Harvey Oswald as a shooter and patsy. Clark and Johnson were also responsible for the murder of the Department of Agriculture agent who was investigating Billy Sol Estes. Even if this scenario has value, the C.I.A. would have had knowledge of the plot through Oswald and could have acted to make certain it was successful. The account’s only strength is that a 14 point identification of a print belonging Clark’s shooter, Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, has been found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

A letter on behalf of Billy Sol Estes by his attorney Douglas Caddy seems to confirm parts of the McClellan theory. Billy told Caddy that LBJ admitted to him an involvement in the plot to kill Kennedy. Estes claimed Cliff Carter engineered the assassination. Wallace’s fingerprint was identified in 1998. Estes claimed that Johnson was involved in the Kennedy murder and in conspiring to commit eight others, including that of USDA investigator Henry Marshall, who turned up evidence damaging to Johnson and Estes.

Two women, one LBJ’s main mistress and the other Oswald’s lover have offered some information that confirmed parts of De Mohrenschildt’s story about the involvement of big oil. Madeleine Duncan Brown, LBJ’s mistress, told an interviewer that Lyndon Johnson started planning Kennedy’s death after the Democratic convention of 1960. Brown claimed that the final decision to kill Kennedy was made he night of November 21, at a party hosted by Clint Murchison. Present were Dallas oil men ( including H.L. Hunt), F.B.I. and C.I.A. leaders like J. Mc Cloy and J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, and mob bosses. Also present were Richard Nixon who was in town for a Pepsi Cola meeting, George Brown of Brown and Root, and Jack Ruby, who could arrange entertainment for people.

After LBJ arrived, some of the guests went into a conference room. When Johnson came out he allegedly squeezed hard the hand of his mistress Madeleine Duncan Brown and said that after tomorrow JFK would no longer be a problem, “ After tomorrow those goddamn Kennedys would never embarrass me again - that's no threat - that's a promise.'".” According to Brown, LBJ called her the next morning and repeated these words. However, some writers have demonstrated that Johnson was in Houston the night of November 21 and that Nixon was in Dallas but not at Murchison’s house. Some claim there was not even a party there. She said the event was documented by the society editor of the Dallas Times Herald , but the story cannot be found. While there is evidence that Nixon and Hoover were in Dallas then, there is no evidence that there was a Pepsi Cola board or stockholders meeting. On some occasions, Nixon has said he could not remember where he was when Kennedy died. Possible the only other person in America who has said that is George H.W Bush. She claimed that she often walked with H.L. Hunt, and that he would brag about the Kennedy matter, saying, 'Well, we got him out of office.' That was it."

It is always possible that Mrs. Brown mistakenly placed the party on another day, or that other factors explain the discrepancies in her story. Former C.I.A. contract operative Robert D. Morrow backed her account of the evening of November 21. He said a topic of discussion was the political futures of Hoover and Nixon if JFK were assassinated. Morrow says that David Ferrie came up with the suggestion that Lee Harvey Oswald be used as a patsy. While Oswald was in Minsk, Robert Morrow was a C.I.A. contract agent working for Permindex, a firm partly funded through the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, a CIA backed trade association in Rome that funded Italian politicians. . He was then ordered to go to Paris to pick up for the C.I.A. some papers from an American couple in Minsk and mentioned a Harvey of Minsk. Of course, Marina was not an American.

Morrow thought the C.I.A.’s main reason for going after Kennedy was that JFK was working with Robert McNamara to reign in the agency. Morrow ordered the rifles and transceivers for the assassination team, and Ferrie picked them up. He knew there was planning to kill Kennedy but they thought these weapons were for the assassination of Juan Bosch. At the end of the book, he described how Nixon made a deal with Warrren Commission member Ford to conceal Nixon’s role. Three months before the assassination C.I.A. contract pilot was seen in public with Oswald and Clay Shaw.

The Death of JFK: Was Oswald a Government Agent?

It is likely that Oswald was working for both the F.B.I. and C.I.A. There has been speculation that Lee Harvey Oswald had been trained by the Office of Naval Intelligence to become an agent in the Soviet Union. V ictor Marchetti said the ONI trained as many as 40 young men for this task. The operation was run out of Nag’s Head, North Carolina. Twice on the night of his arrest, Oswald tried to call a man named Hunt in the Nag’s Head vicinity, but the prison authorities did not let the calls go through. Oswald’s Marine medical record said he contracted gonorrhea “in the line of duty” and that it was not his fault. One explanation is that even back then he was working for ONI.

When Oswald was found, he had Sturgis’s telephone number under his real name, Fiorini. Sturgis, of course, was a C.I.A. asset. Oswald probably also knew White as both hung around the Interpen training camp for Cuban exiles maintained by Garry Hemming, a sometime C.I.A. contract agent and soldier of fortune. White shared a Havana jail cell with Hemming in 1960.

James Jesus Angleton ran a top secret false defectors program as a means of getting people into the Soviet Union. As head of Counter-Intelligence, Angleton also ran the super-secret Special Investigations Group in that the C.I.A. said it had no ties to Oswald , which had a 201 file on Oswald before the assassination. SIG dealt with enemy efforts to recruit government employees. There was no reason SIG should have had an interest in Oswald. When he “defected” a file should have been opened because he had knowledge of the U-2 areal surveillance program. No file was opened then. The file was opened a year later. Oswald was not debriefed when he returned from the Soviet Union. When the HSCA committee probed the reasons for having the file, Ray Rocca’s answer could be construed to mean that Oswals may have had some connection to the Directorate of Plans.

Joan Mellen has found an F.B.I. document that indicates that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of that program and that he communicated with the agency through Michael Jelisavcic at American Express. Otto Orepka, who investigated defectors at the State Department, found something odd in Oswald’s paperwork and put it aside in his security safe for further review. As a result of a nighttime burglary, the Oswald file vanished and Otepka was demoted, consigned to tedious paperwork. It is possible that Angleton was just interested in removing evidence about the false defector program. It is also known that the New Orleans C.I.A. office used Oswald as a courier. In 1981, Hunter Leake, former number two man there, told historian Michael Kurtz that he had paid Oswald for courier services and that Oswald came there in April because the agency planned to deploy him in unnamed operations. The agency got him a job at the Reily Coffee Co. and Oswald was worked out of Guy Banister’s office. Leake claimed that after the assassination Richard Helms ordered him to rent a trailer and haul all papers relating to Oswald to Langley, Virginia. We know that Oswald was in constant contact with C.I.A. people and agency assassins up to the time of the assassination.

A March 3, 1964 memo from John McCone to James J. Rowley proves that Oswald had been trained by ONI for service in the Soviet Union Oswald’s Marine Corps G-2 files remain classified as do some F.B.I. materials. It is likely that he was on the C.I.A. payroll while stationed at Atsugi. While there, he frequented the Blue Bird Cafe. It has been speculated that it had some connection to “Bluebird,” a C.I.A. mind control program that prepared assassins. There was a large C.I.A. operation there. Some Russian spies recruited by the Gehlen organization were trained here before they were parachuted into the Soviet Union. Former C.I.A. finance officer James Wilcott told the HSCA that Oswald was a C.I.A. asset while in Japan.

It is also clear that for some reason the C.I.A. suppressed records about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City and that the F.B.I. later learned of about this and went along. At the time, the C.I.A. knew that Oswald was supposed to have met with someone from the KGB there, but did not notify the F.B.I.. It was known for certain that someone impersonating Oswald called the soviet mission in Mexico City and that the photos of Oswald entering the embassy were not reliable. As late as January, 1964 C.I.A. Counterterrorism Chief James Angleton was using this discredited evidence to attempt to sell the Warren Commission on the idea that Oswald worked for the KGB. Yet, Angleton kept a pre-assassination file on Oswald and did not keep it in the counter-intelligence files. Rather he kent it in his super-secret, mole-hunting files, as part of his Special Investigations Group—Staff D. Not only did the C.I.A. track Oswald before the assassination, it lied to othere agencies about him.

. On March 28, 1878, the House Select Committee on Assassinations learned from former C.I.A. accountant that Lee Harvey Oswald was on the C.I.A. payroll. Hunter Leake, number two man in the C.I.A. station in New Orleans, told historian Michael Kurtz, that the station used Oswald as a courier. He told Kurtz that a trailer would have to be used to transport all the paperwork on Oswald’s involvement with the agency . Evidence developed later that Oswald was also an F.B.I. informer.
There is circumstantial evidence to suggest Oswald could have been operating under mind control. Jerry Leonard, a physicist, has argued on The Perfect Assassin: Lee Harvey Oswald, The C.I.A. and Mind Control (Author House, 2004) that Lee Harvey Oswald was under mind control when he played his role in the dreadful drama in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Some of his theory is based on a declassified C.I.A. document dating from a decade before the assassination which describe a mind-controlled defector killing an American official . Then someone kills the defector while the police were holding him. Operation Artichoke was mentioned. Leonard thinks Oswald’s bizarre, maybe bipolar, behavior consistent with that of someone who was unwittingly hypnotized.

ARTICHOKE certainly existed in the 1950s. There were rumors then that Oswald operated under some kind of mind control. Government research in that area had made great progress by 1963 and it would have been possible to program and control an actor at an assassination. The questions and answers in the Warren Commission clearings make this abundantly clear.

Harlan Jensen, a Wisconsin insurance and investment broker, has written Atsugi Assassins about his time in the Marines with Lee Harvey Oswald. He did not know until later that he had been subjected to Mind Control and believes the same was true of Oswald He claimed that Atsuqi was a C.I.A. mind control base and also the location for launching spy planes. He maintains that both he and Oswald were placed under mind control. Insisting he is not a “nut job,” Jensen said he simply wanted to clear Oswald’s name. They first met in a mess hall and later served together in a secret mission in the mountains of Taiwan.
He does not claim an exact memory, saying some memories were somehow remove ed. But he showed the book to others who served and said they support his account.
Once subjected to mind control, Jansen thinks it would have been much easier to do the same to Oswald again. When Oswald said he was a “patsy.” Jensen thinks Oswald sealed his own fate. Controllers would have thought that the man remembered more than he should have.

There is only circumstantial evidence to support the case. Oswald came from an unstable family environment. These are the places that best breed candidates for mind control. He knew agent David Ferrie since he jouned the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol in 1958. Ferrie and Oswald spent time together before November 22, 1963. Ferrie was a skilled hypnotist. At least one C.I.A. agent suspected Ferrie was hypnotizing Oswald. When Oswald was arrested, he had Ferrie’s current library card.
He might have been doing intelligence work for the Marines at age 18 when he was seen several times with a sleek Eurasian woman in the entertainment district of Tokyo. His medical files say he contracted a STD while on some sort of assignment. She was thought to be a prostitute and Russian spy.

Some theorize that Oswald’s stays in the brig were part of mind-control conditioning and that the strange death of his best friend on guard-duty was fortuitous in the sense that it set Oswald up for psychological manipulation. . At least it is an interesting theory-- Even back then, he seemed given to strange behavior, temporary physical break-downs and crying jags. Were these the signs of mental instability—invitations to psychological conditioning—or the results of the drugs he had been given. We can document that in 1962 he as making inquiries about the legality of openly using LSD. Others suggest that Ruby acted under hypnosis. He was seen with hypnotist Ferrie befoe the assassination; and hympnotist Billy Del Mar was performing in the Carousel at the time. Del Mar then disappeared and was not sought by the Warren Commission. Another odd piece of information about Oswald is that, upon his return from Russia, he spent some time in Grenich Village with a notorious right-winger named Stephen H. Landesberg, a native of Mississippi.

In April, 1963, Oswald met Volkmar Schmidt, who studied under Wilhelm Kuetemeyer , a professor of psychosomatic medicine. Schmidt and Oswald discussed shooting General Edwin Walker.

In 1976, the House Select Committee on Assassinations heard a taped comment by Michael Paine, whose wife had taken in the Oswalds, saying that Oswald shot Kennedy but he was not responsible.

Richard Case Nagell later told author Dick Russell that he thought that 'Hairy de Fairy' ( David Ferrie) probably hypnotized Oswald. In 1962, he went to work for the C.I.A. and was active in the Communist Party. In September of that year, Nagell was in Mexico City operating as a triple agent. Later, the KGB asked him to watch Oswald and his wife. He was also told to penetrate the Cuban exile community. He claimed to have recorded two of the Cubans manipulating Oswald, but the F.B.I. later seized what he said was the tape. An F.B.I. memorandum shows he met Oswald both in Texas and Mexico City. Nagell had foreknowledge of the plot, and claimed to have warned both the C.I.A. and F.B.I. When his warnings were ignored, and got himself arrested so he could expose the plot.

The Death of JFK: More on George De Mohrenschildt

Born on April 17, 1911 ( his passports say different things), George DeMohrenschildt came to the United States from Russia in 1938. His father was a baron, czarist governor, a member of the Russian Duma when he was born. . His family feared and hated the Bolsheviks and was helped to escape by the Nazis. British intelligence believed he was a German intelligence asset. Before coming to the US, he acquired a doctorate in commerce from the University of Liege. He entered the US in May, 1938 on the Belgian quota. He may have been a German Abwer agent, and he subsequently penetrated French intelligence.

While an employee of Shumaker Company in New York, he worked for French intelligence and later went to work for Humble Oil. In 1941, the OSS refused to hire him due to his asso C.I.A.tion with Nazi intelligence agents. He would later do intelligence work for the US State Department, going to Yugoslavia in 1957 to search for oil . He did “favors” for the C.I.A. but told Epstein that he was never a paid employee. For example he traveled Latin America for the agency in 1961. His travels took him to Guatemala City at a time when anti-Castro rebels were nearby preparing for the Bay of Pigs. Later Jerry Hemming placed De Mohrenschildt at a 1962 meeting where the assassination of Castro was discussed. He brought piles of $100 bills to pay the assassins. When George flew from Haiti to Washington to testify before the Warren Commission, he was met by Dorothy Matlack of US Army Intelligence. She had long been one of General Lansdale’s top aids. George claimed he was not an intelligence agent but indications are he had been part of that world since his early days with the German Abwehr.

Janet Auchincloss almost married him, and her daughter Jackie grew up calling him “Uncle George.” He was also once engaged to Jackie’s aunt Michelle. In Dallas, he functioned as an oil geologist and knew many important people including George H.W. Bush, whose name was in his address book. He also knew H.L. Hunt and worked for Clint Murchison’ s Three States Oil and Gas Company. Investigator Richard Sprague, who has done an enormous amount of work on the assassination, claimed that the assassination was financed by Carlos Prio Socarras, and Texas oilmen Clint Murchison and Jean DeMenil. Sprague seems right on many details, but the overall story remains an interesting hypothesis.

George H.W. Bush acknowledged knowing De Mohrenschildt since Andover days, as he was the uncle of Bush’s roommate, Edward Gordon Hooker George De Mohrenschildt knew LBJ and sent him a letter on April 17, 1963, and he worked for LBJ backer and oilman John Mecom. Abram Zapruder, another White Russian, also traveled in this circle of Texas oil barons. In 1964, some of De Mohrenschildt’s C.I.A. files were destroyed and James Angleton started monitoring his mail, even though the agency subsidized a periodical published by George’s brother Dimitry , a college professor. The White Russian Solidarists helped the Oswalds settle in and it was connected to US intelligence and most probably to the Gehlen intelligence network. George De Mohrenschildt knew well the Solidarists in Dallas but was careful not to join their organization. Later, he came to fear that these people were scheming to make it appear that he was Oswald’s controller.

In late 1961, J. Walter Moore, who in the C.I.A.’s Domestic Contact Service, asked De Mohrenschildt to befriend Oswald when he returned to Dallas from Minsk. Moore said the agency wanted to learn about his experience in Minsk. George was then a leader of the Dallas White Russian community, and he introduced Oswald to Ruth Paine, another who was tied to the White Russian community due to her travels. Michael Paine, her husband, was an engineer who had been with ONI. He was working for Bell Aircraft and had a security clearance. It is odd that he would have risked his clearance by mixing with a defector—unless he was doing so on orders of the CIS. Mrs. Paine’s sister, Sylvia Hyde Hoke, was a C.I.A. officer operating under Air Force cover. Documents on Mrs. Paine have never been released.

According to whistleblower Bill Tyree’s litigation, Ruth Paine had been a C.I.A. agent from at least 1956, when Colonel Al Carone, C.I.A. paymaster, brought her money on behalf of Bill Casey. In 1963, her contact was De Mohrenschildt , who , in turn, answered to George H.W. Bush. Paine’s mother-in-law Ruth Forbes Paine, was a close friend of Mary Bancroft, a former OSS agent who had been mistress to Henry Luce and Allan Dulles. The Tyree litigation did not focus on the assassination of JFK; it dealt with other C.I.A. operations. When the F.B.I. and Dallas police searched Paine’s house they found file cards on pro-Castro Cubans, suggesting the Paine’s were agents charged with keeping track of pro-Communist elements. It was an anonymous telephone call traced to Bell Helicopter, where Mr. Paine worked, that informed the Dallas police that Marina Oswald lived with Ruth Paine. Mrs. Paine furnished a great deal of information that incriminated Lee Harvey Oswald.

At the time George H.W. Bush was head of Zapata Oil, a firm that may have been partly owned by the C.I.A.. His partner in the venture was retired C.I.A. officer Thomas J. Devine, who resumed affiliation with the agency in 1963. The Bush family had strong business ties to the former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and Jeb ( John Ellis Bush) Bush would name Raoul Cantero, Batista’s grandson, to the Florida Supreme Court. It might be recalled that the Bay of Pigs invasion had been named Operation Zapata.

Marina Oswald gave George an autographed photograph of Lee holding a rifle, with the inscription " For George. Lee Harvey Oswald. Hunter of Fascists, Ha. Ha. ” When he heard that someone tried to kill General Walker, he assumed it had been Oswald and went to their house to see if Oswald had disposed of the rifle. Marina Oswald told the Warren Commission that she heard him rush up the Oswald’s stairs saying: "Lee, how did you miss General Walker?” Oswald was said to have attempted to kill General Edwin Walker, a known rightist. Oswald had with him the addresses of Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazis, and General Walker. On the day of the4 assassination, Walker called a German news source to say that Oswald had tried to kill him. Then ruth Ruth Paine gave Marina Oswald a postdated lettere in which Lee says he tried to kill Walker.

De Mohrenschildt was afraid of becoming implicated. In Haiti, George worked for Clint Murchison and was also a business partner of Mohammed al Fayed and Clamar J. Charles. A man who knew him in Haiti said “I could never figure out what he did” and just assumed he was an intelligence agent. At the time Al Fayed, an Egyptian intelligence officer, ws representing El-Amir Atta and was sleeping with De Mohrenschildt’s S daughter, Aalexandra. He was also De Mohrendschioldt’s business partner, and had ties to Adnan Kheshoggi. El Amir’s son, Mohamed Atta, a lead hihacker in 911, had not even been born yet.

George said Oswald was a patsy. In 1969, gun-runner Lauren Hall told De Mohrenschildt that he was offered $50,000 to participate in the assassination. In the same year, George told a friend he thought H.L. Hunt was behind the assassination and added that he was the link between Hunt and Oswald. Haroldson L. Hunt had run paramilitary operations before, using C.I.A. men. His assistants heard him say he would like to see Kennedy shot and that the country would be better off without JFK.

Before Kennedy’s inauguration, H.L. Hunt’s “Facts Forum” was putting out religious appeals as to why Kennedy should not be permitted to enter the White House. The program had previously attacked Jews and supported Joseph McCarthy. On the eve of the assassination, Hunts various outlets were spewing hateful material about the president. He thought Kennedy was weak on communism and knew Kennedy wanted to tax oil wealth, almost like other forms of wealth. He also viewed democracy as the devil’s work. One of his sons helped pay for a large Dallas newspaper ad attacking Kennedy that prompted the president to say the were entering “nut country.” Some of Hunt’s literature was found in Ruby’s pocket after he shot Oswald.

After the assassination, the F.B.I. briefly provided agents to protect Hunt while he and General Edwin Walker repaired to a Hunt hide-away in Mexico. Hunt was an admirer of LBJ and had strong ties to the Cuban exile community. Hunt had connections with the Chicago mob, and Murchison had a joint business venture with Louisiana mobster Carlos Marcello.Mafia messenger Eugene Hale Brading visited H.L. Hunt’s office on the morning of November 21. He was arrested in Dealey Plaza on November 22 and later released. John Curington, Hunt’s former chief aid, said Ruby also visited Hunt on the 21st.and that Marina Oswald met with Hunt on the 20th. On the 23rd, Hunt instructed Curington to look into the kind of security the police had for Oswald.

In 1975, Exhumation of Lee Harvey Oswald by English lawyer Michael Eddowes appeared. It claimed that a Soviet double for Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. Some investigative writers claim to have established that H.L. Hunt financed the book. Hunt was known for his extreme political views and great wealth, taking in about $30,000,000 a year. He spent large sums on political propaganda, and John F. Kennedy was concerned that men like him were using largely tax sheltered money for political purposes. Kennedy produced a plan to raise more revenue by changing tax treatment accorded the oil and gas industry.

In his last years, De Mohrenschildt became fearful that he was being watched and was in trouble with the C.I.A. and F.B.I.. On September 7, 1976, he sent a handwritten note to his old friend George H.W. Bush, Director of the C.I.A.

I have been acting like a damn fool.....I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people. But to punish an elderly man like myself and my highly nervous and sick wife is really too much. Could you do something to remove this net [of surveillance] around us?

Soon thereafter, in the same month, he taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital for “mental problems” and was given nine electric shock treatments by Dr. Deloach, first cousin to Cartha D. "Deke" DeLoach , an assistant director of the F.B.I.

Later that year, he and long-time friend and Dutch investigative journalist Willem Oltmans went to the campus of Bishop College in Dallas. George told Dutch TV journalist that he was afraid of going to jail because he was responsible for guiding the behavior of Oswald; he’set it up.” De Mohrenschildt wanted to get out of the country and that “the interests” –meaning the F.B.I. and C.I.A. were out to get him. He added that so was the “Jewish mafia” because they considered him pro-Nazi.

George talked in circles with Oltmans in this and other conversations, adding little to his initial admission. He never admitted to doing intelligence work for the F.B.I. or C.I.A. but said he did some work for the State Department in Yugoslavia and Cuba. He also disclosed that he had written an account of what happened on November 22, 1963. He seemed to have a compulsion to tell what he knew, but was also weighing suicide: “Either I talk or I go; they will drive me mad, or I will kill myself.” He often recoiled from telling what he knew because of what his family would then think of him. Oltmans wanted to buy De Mohrenschildt for Dutch National Television and also get the book published.

When De Mohrenschildt finally agreed to accompany his friend to Holland, he added that he knew Jack Ruby and that he had known H.L. Hunt for twenty years and was “very close to him.” He knew that the F.B.I. released a letter Oswald wrote to Hunt and expressed puzzlement that Oswald had addressed H.L. Hunt. However, this November 8, 1963 note was addressed to “Mr. Hunt” and that could have been E. Howard Hunt or someone else. He said the money came from Hunt to him and that he, De Mohrenschildt, then gave directions to Oswald. In 1999, a former KGB agent said it was forged by his old employer.

In Amsterdam, George seemed depressed and troubled, so Oltmans took him to Brussels, where De Mohrenschildt disappeared. He next turned up in Palm Beach at the home of his daughter, Alexandra. When De Mohrenschildt was interviewed by Epstein there they broke for lunch, and DE Mohrenschildt went off and shot himself. (March 29, 1977)

Before going to Amsterdam, De Mohrdenschschildt was commiotted to a mental hospital, where his former wife—herself a former intelligence agent who had worked with Richard Helms, claimed he got worse. She claimed that a mysterious doctor came from out of nowhere, gave George different drugs, and disappeared. On May 11, 1978, she told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that she did not think he committed suicide. Later, De Mohrenschildt’s lawyer sent Epstein the photograph of Oswald holding the rifle, which he established did bear Oswald’s handwriting.

Alexandra had had an affair with Mohammed al Fayed. The C.I.A.’s 41 page report on the affair was signed by James Jesus Angleton and Jane Roman. Roman was the agent who had monitored Oswald for two months before the assassination. Gary Taylor, had been Alexandra’s husband, told the Warren Commission that it was likely that De Mohrenschildt could have been involved in a plot to kill; the president.

Oltman gave testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in executive session, and it was not released until December 2, 1996. It appears that the committee acquired his notes, but they were not released. It is unclear whether De Mohrenschildt’s manuscript was found and acquired.

Death of JFK: Bush and De Mohrenshildt

There is also a well-known picture of a young George H.W. Bush standing to the right of the main entrance of the Texas School Book Depository that gives pause because the resemblance is so strong. Like Nixon, Bush has offered different stories of where he was that day. According to a memorandum written by SAC Grasham W. Kitchel, Bush was in Dallas on November 22 and stayed at the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel. However Kitchel’memorandum was based on a November 21 Bush telephone call to his acquaintance Kitchel. Bush said he was in Tyler and that he heard there was a young man talking about killing President Kennedy. Bush added that he would arrive in Dallas on November 22 and would stay at the Sheraton. Oddly, Bush made the call and then flew via private plane to Dallas where he stayed that night. He gave a talk to some oil drillers the next dday nad then flew to Houston. For some reason he wanted the record to show that he arrived in Dallas on the 22nd and would stay there that night. He the language of the intelligence trade, he was establishing a cover story or “legend.” A Bush aid was with the accused young man at the time of the shooting. Years later, he could not remember where he was on November 22. A November 29, 1963 J. Edgar Hoover memo refers to George Bush as a C.I.A. man.

Bush had ties to George DeMohrenschildt, a fervent anti-Communist and Texas oil man , was one of Oswald’s close friends and possibly a C.I.A. handler. Count George de Mohrenshildt, a murky figure tied to the intelligence world, also had the senior Bush’s phone number on him when he committed suicide in 1978. George DeMohrenschildt was to later admit that a C.I.A. man suggest he befriend Oswald. He helped Oswald find apartments and jobs and sponsored him in Houston Society. DeMohrenschildt shot himself before being called to talk to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

His father was the big man in the Nobel oil fields in Russia and helped form the Trans-Siberia Railroad. The family escaped Soviet Russia, moving to Germany. There they were tied up with the White Russian Solidarists and the Nazis. His cousin was Baron Constantine Maydell was part of the Brown Network that went all over the world spying for the Nazis. George spied for the Nazis in France and was caught spying in Corpus Christi, but wass saved by one of the Rockefellers Later he was spying in Mexico with General Douglas McArthur’s nephew and was booted out of the country. . He was a close friend of Oswald’s after the accused assassin’s return from the USSR. He was heard to praise Heinrich Himmler and was employed in 1956 by Pantepec Oil Company, owned by the William Buckley family. De Mohrenshildt wwas about to testify before Congress about what he knew about the assassination. Jeanne de Mohrenschildt, his wife, said he had been a Nazi spy.

At the time, De Mohrenschildt was on the payroll of Brown and Root. For some reason, he wrote to Vice President Lyndon Johnson on April 17, 1963 and Walter Jenkins, LBJ’s chief aid, answered a day later. Five days later, Colonel Howard Burris, wrote to Jenkins, saying that LBJ should be kept “informed to the maximum to assume the reigns og government in case he is called upon to do so. Then on the 28th Burris and DE Mohrenschildt met in Washington. LBJ and DeMohrenschildt met on May 20. In 1964, the C.I.A. destroyed its files on DeMohrenschildt.

DeMohrenschildt’s son-in-law told the Warren Commission that it was likely he was somehow involved in Kennedy’s death. A November 29, 1963 J. Edgar Hoover memo refers to George Bush as a C.I.A. man. De Mohrenschildt was identified by the F.B.I. in 1942 as having Nazi asso C.I.A.tions, but he probably also worked for France and the US at different times. Hoover thought he was a Nazi spy, and De Mohrendschildt’s cousin movie producer Baron Constantine Maydell was a top Abwehr agent in the US. After the war, the Maydell operation was used to assist East European anti-communist émigrés in the US.

DeMohrenschildt’s son-in-law told the Warren Commission that it was likely he was somehow involved in Kennedy’s death. . A November 29, 1963 J. Edgar Hoover memo refers to George Bush as a C.I.A. man. De Mohrenschildt was identified by the F.B.I. in 1942 as having Nazi asso C.I.A.tions, but he probably also worked for France and the US at different times. Hoover thought he was a Nazi spy, and De Mohrendschildt’s cousin movie producer Baron Constantine Maydell was a top Abwehr agent in the US. After the war, the Maydell operation was used to assist East European anti-communist émigrés in the US.

George De Mohrenschildt was a Dallas socialite and befriended Lee Harvey Oswald. He has been the object of much speculation, and his comments about Oswald and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy have often contradictory. The House Select Committee on Assassinations buried his most remarkabale claims about the assassination.

Jay Epstein was the last writer to see George DeMohrenschildt alive. Epstein, on behalf of Readers’ Digest, had paid him $4000 for a four day interview. At the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, De Mohrenschildt was in Haiti, where he would remain for ten years. He claimed that Division Five of the F.B.I. was behind the assassination, and probably suspected that he would have been tied to shooting had he been in Dallas that day. He testified in 1964 that aside from working for the French in the late 1930s, he had never been an intelligence agent.

The DEath of JFK: Were Elements of the Government Involved

Most people who deny the official assassination story’s validity believe that elements in the United States government were behind Kennedy’s death. Professor James W. Douglass has made the strongest case for the C.I.A. and Pentagon having motives to do away with the president. The C.I.A. expected that the Bay of Pigs Invasion could be used to draw Kennedy into a full scale war with Cuba. Kennedy resisted and vowed “to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Kennedy was also angry that the Joint Chiefs had lied to him in connection with the invasion. The military urged a first strike doctrine upon Kennedy and urged a surprise attack upon the Soviet Union. He angrily rejected the suggestion. In National Security Action Memo 263 he ordered the withdrawl of $1,000 troops from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the “bulk” of US personnel out of that country by the end of 1965.

The military resented Kennedy’s refusal to bomb missile emplacements and General Charles P. Cabel, brother of the mayor of Dallas, called Kennedy a “traitor.” JFK found that the military was refusing to implement his order and that Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was also obstructing it. Kennedy and Nakita Khrushchev were involved in a secret correspondence about ramping down the arms race, and C.I.A. and military knew about this, claiming later he was leaking classified information to the Soviets. In June, 1963 he spoke at American University about the need abolish “the weapons of war” and to end the arms race. Kennedy, known as a cold war hawk, was rapidly reversing his ground. In NASC 239, he instructed his national security advisors to begin preparations for a nuclear test ban treaty and eventual disarmament through a series of US initiatives.

The agency people would probably have been known that the Kennedy administration was beginning to talk to the Cuban government through Ambassador William Attwood, Kennedy’s Harvard roommate, an asset controlled by Henry Cabot Lodge, then ambassador to South Vietnam, and through a US advisor to the UN. Kennedy had decided to normalize relations with Cuba but was continuing sabotage efforts that were coordinated by a subcommittee of the NSC. On the day of Kennedy’s death, Attwood wrote, ““If the C.I.A. did find out what we were doing, this would have trickled down to the lower echelon of activists, and Cuban exiles, and…. I can understand why they would have reacted so violently.”

Elements within the C.I.A. were working with Cuban Army Major Rolando Cubela, who was unhappy with growing Soviet influence, to overthrow Castro. Helms sent Desmond FitzGerald to meet with the major, claiming to be Kennedy’s personal representative. Arthur Schlesinger , Jr, who worked on Latin American affairs in the White House denied that Kennedy knew anything about the Cubela initiative. Schlesinger saw it as a’studied attempt to subvert national policy.” Cubela was employed as an asset, but he refused to take a lie detector test. Some thought he was a “dangle” or double agent. In October, 1963 he asked the C.I.A. for a high powered rifle, but the C.I.A. insisted he use poison to terminate Castro. Cubela was fired in 1965. The agency found he was working secretly with Santo Trafficanti, who was feeding Castro information in hopes of recovering his casinos.

The Army had an anti-Kennedy think tank at the American University called “Camelot,” and another nest of anti-Kennedy people was Operation Mongoose, a C.I.A. unit in Miami dedicated to killing Castro. It had a stable of capable hit men. That team probably began in 1960 when Paul Helliwell was transferred to the Miami station. Through trade in guns and drugs he had financed various opereations, such as the Guatamala coup in 1954, and was now called upon to pick up the bills for anti-Cuban programs. He met Clines and Shackley in Miami, but he was not in charge of the operation itself. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy placed General Edward Lansdale in charge of Operation Mongoose, the effort to kill Castro and disrupt Cuba.

Before the assassination, there were complaints about C.I.A. abuse of power and columnist Arthur Krock wrote in October, 1963 that if there were coup it “would come from the C.I.A. and not the Pentagon.” He referred to the agency as a “malignancy” on the American government.

In the view of the army brass and C.I.A. people, Kennedy had made terrible blunders in planning to bring 1000 troops home from Vietnam by Christmas and by signing National Security Action Memorandum 263, which would reorient US policy from Asia to Europe.

After the Bay of Pigs failure the US agents and Cuban exiles who were involved were angry with President Kennedy and determined to oust Castro from power. Initially with the blessings of the government, they raided Cuba, sent in arms, and even attacked Russian ships. Around July, 1962, Kennedy attempted to shut down these operations while keeping alive his effort to assassinate Castro. That project, Mongoose, was under C.I.A. operative General Edward Lansdale. The C.I.A. was ordered to shut down the raids and arms operations, and some effort was made to do so. The F.B.I. raided a house where arms were stored in Louisiana. But, for the most part, the raids and arms shipments continued. Frank Ragano, lawyer for Santo Trafficante, Jr. and Jimmy Hoffa, has argued that Trafficante and the Mafiosos took C.I.A. money but never did anything to kill Castro. Traffacante told his lawyer that on two occasions. The mobsters did not know how it could be done safely.

The theory is that the people involved in these efforts—including some C.I.A. people-- became a rogue force, now determined to get Kennedy. Kennedy's orders to shut down paramilitary training camps in Florida and Louisiana were ignored. Antonio Veciana, a leading Cuban exile, later testified that his C.I.A. control officer told him to go ahead and attack Soviet shipping. That officer was “Maurice Bishop,” or David Atlee Phillips, then attached to the Mexico City station. David Ferrie of Baton Rouge continued to train 5 man commando teams. In the bayous off Lake Pontchartrain, near Lacombe, La, where the F.B.I. had previously raided an arms depot, there was a anti-Castro guerilla camp.

The camp was near a hunting lodge owned by Marcello, on land owned by Mike Laney, a Meyer Lansky ,.who hd lost a $7,000,000 cassino to -Castro. When he was being invited by Miami Police, Mc Laney, according to Life, named among his close friends, J. Edgar Hoover. When Lee Harvey Oswald was in New Orleans , he had an apartment in a building owned by Mike's brother , William Julius Mc Laney. While there he Associated almost exclusively with mob and intelligence people. One of the first people he contacted was F.B.I. informer Arnesto Rodriguez, whom he asked about getting in touch with the people at the camp. The number two man in the New Orleans C.I.A. field office was Hunter Leake, who told his son Robert that he knew Oswald well in those days.
There existed an 8 mm film of it that showed Oswald, Banister, and Phillips. It also showed many men in fatigues going through exercises. The film was in the Georgetown University archives and disappeared when the House Select Committee on Assassinations used them in the mid-1970s.

Both agents E. Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips used the code name “Bishop,” and there have been numerous accounts of someone named Bishop being seen with members of Alpha 66, a Cuban extremist group. These Cubans and the agents connected to the Bay of Pigs detested John F. Kennedy because he did not fully back the attempt and did not follow up with a full scale invasion. The House Select Committee on Assassinations knew that the leader of Alpha 66, an extremist Cuban-American group, said he saw Bishop with Lee Oswald in Dallas before the assassination. They also believed that JFK had decided to shut down the efforts to assassinate Castro. Perhaps some in the C.I.A. knew that Kennedy ordered McNamara to prepare a plan for withdrawl from Vietnam by late 1965. Documents proving this surfaced in 1997. And of course there was a pile of evidence that Oswald was tied to the intelligence community. The committee never got beyond that, and it had in place institutional arrangements that prevented it from going farther—not that it wanted to. The C.I.A. denied having an agent by that name or having a record of anyone using that alias. Later, a former investigator for the committee built a good case that David Atlee Phillips used that name, and that his close friend E. Howard Hunt also used it. It would appear that the connection between the CIS and Cuban exiles was probably central to the death of John F. Kennedy.

Former House investigator Fonzi also believed the testimony of Silvia Odio, an anti-Castro activist, who told of Oswald visiting her Dallas apartment in September in the company of two other activists. He spoke of why Kennedy should have been shot after the Bay of Pigs. Her sister also testified that one of the men was Oswald. The other two said they were from New Orleans. The Congressional committee concluded that Oswald could not have been in Dallas then, but Odio’s testimony was to become important in 2008. The other testimony linking the Cuban exiles to the death of Kennedy comes from those Associated with John Martino, once a C.I.A. Black ops guy and an of Samuel Traficante.

Martino had been an electronics expert working on Traficante’s gambling machines in Cuba and then became a Castro prisoner before returning to Miami. Martino became connected to former Ambassador William Pawley and worked for Johnny Roselli. He gave speeches for the John Birch Society. He was closely linked to activist William Pawley, who worked closely with Ted Shackley of the C.I.A.. Martino was close to Frank Sturgis and the anti-Castro activists. The morning of the assassination, he told Flo, his wife, that Kennedy would be killed that day in Dallas. He then started to do some painting in his garage and instructed son Edward to inform him if anything important occurred on TV. After Kennedy was shot, he explained to his wife and son that Oswald was a patsy and that he had passed out materials for the Fair Play for Cuba committee. However, he spent the rest of his life telling the public that Castro was responsible for Kennedy’s death. H.L. Hunt and other Texas oilmen financed many of his seaking engagements. Before his death in 1975 , he told Miami Newsday reporter John Cummings that he had been involved in the plot. Cummings thinks that two Cubans were the shooters. Cummings wrote, “"He told me he'd been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things.... He asked me not to write it while he was alive." Martino also told his partner that he and the anti-Castro Cubans were behind Kennedy’s death.


It is theorized that three other men dressed as bums picked up shells in the plaza. Some think the three bums were E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and David Lemar Christ (Daniel L. Carswell). All three were with the C.I.A. and Sturgis and Christ had been in Castro ‘s prisons. On the other hand, Fletcher Prouty thought that one of the men looked like Major General Edward Lansdale. However, a C.I.A. man of that rank would not have been on wet operation. Christ was an audio man who also had expertise in modified weaponry. Hunt’s son, S. John Hunt has written that his father told him on his death bed that he was in Dallas that day.

In August, 1978, Victor Marchetti, a former C.I.A. agent, wrote in the Liberty Lobby’s Spotlight that Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and Gerald “Jerry” Patrick Hemming were involved in the plot to kill Kennedy. Hemming was a soldier of fortune and gun-runner with ties to Santo Trafficante. In 1978 testimony that was sealed until 1993, Hemming said that he distrusted Sturgis and thought he was tied to military intelligence. He also described a 1962 meeting in the home of Louis Rabel, where the assassination of Castro was present and De Mohrdenschildt was present with piles of hundred dollar bills. Hemming said he was home in Miami when Kennedy was killed and he insisted that the Lorenz story was false It was his impression that Sturgis was in Dallas as were some other Miami people. He had met Oswald twice and was surprised by how much Oswald knew about him. At one point, Oswald was trying to infiltrate a team that was to kill Castro. He allegedly met Ruby in 1959.

Marchetti said that Marita Lorens provided information on this. Later two other writers repeated the story. His claims about the three men was based on a C.I.A. memo which the House Special Committee on Assassinations chose not to publish. Her comments were later expandede in litigation initiated by G. Gordon Liddy and are referenced later in this manuscriot. In the ensuing litigation over the article, Mark Lane represented the Liberty Lobby at one time. In 1995, he convinced a jury that the C.I.A. been involved in the assassination. It developed that Marchetti had consulted Alan Weberman, James Angleton, William Corson, Richard Helms, Stansfield Turner, G. Gordon Liddy, Martina Lorenz, and David Atlee Phillips.

Marita Lorenz, told Gaeton Fonzi: “A month or so prior to November 22nd, 1963, I joined Frank Fiorini ( aka. Frank Sturges), Ozzie (Lee Harvey Oswald), others, Cubans in our group and drove in two cars to the home of Orlando Bosch . This… “highly secret meeting” in Bosch’s home was to discuss certain streets in Dallas, Texas… There was talk of a “highly powerful rifle” and discussions of “feet,” “building,” “timings,” “contacts,”‘silence,” etc.” She added that just before the assassination she drove to Dallas with { Orlando} Bosch, Strugis, Pedro Diaz Lanz , another exile leader, and “two Cuban brothers whose names she does not know”. Fonzi argues that in this interview “Marita Lorenz had impressed me as a fairly credible witness.” Her account also appeared in the New York Daily News, November 3, 1977. An extension of her story appeared in sworn testimony in E.Howard Hunt v. Liberty Lobby (1985). She said that Sturgis was paid by “Eduardo”, Hunt, to transport weapons into Dallas. On the second grip, she met Hunt in a motel, and after he left, Jack Ruby visited for a little less than an hour. She did not know what operation was to be planned but knew she was to be a decoy. Alarmed, she flew back to Miama the night before the assassination. Frank Sturgis later told NYPD Detective Jim Rothstein that he was one of the men who shot John F. Kennedy.

Frank Sturgis answered her story by stating he had never met Oswald. Fonzi eventually claimed that the Lorenz story was disinformation intended to send the committee in a direction away from Hunt and the real action. There was no doubt that she had been Castro’s mistress or that she joined the agency in 1959 and later carried out two dangerous missions in Cuba. Her earliest accounts contain elements that suggest a a C.I.A. effort to mislead, but the usual formula for its disinformation is to include a great deal of true information with lies intended to misdirect.

E. Howard Hunt always insisted he was in Washington, D.C. the day Kennedy died. However, the picture of three bums picked up in Dallas that day has fueled speculation that one of them was Hunt. Moreover, James Jesus Angleton told a reporter and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 that Hunt was in Dallas on the day of the assassination.

Another looked like Frank Sturgis, who was never directly employed by the C.I.A.. The picture allegedly showing Sturgis is convincing. Sturgis, who was murdered in 1992, told investigator Henegan that the three hoboes were Sturgis, Hunt, and Charles Harrelson ( father of Woody). Sturgis said that his job that day was to act as a spotter for’sewer assassins,” and added that there was more than one hit team there. Investigator Jim Fetzer also identified Harrelson, but substituted Charles Rogers ( aka Charles Montoya) for Sturgis. Chauncey Holt later confessed to being the tramp who also looked like Hunt. Hunt, on his death bed, told his son he was in Dallas that day.

Harrelson, the tallest of them, was an organized crime figure later sent to prison for killing a San Antonio Judge John Wood with a high powered rifle. Percy Foreman, who represented James Earl Ray, also represented Harrelson. When arrested, Harrelson had the business card of Jack Ruby Russell D. Matthews, who was tied to the Chicago mob and a man who dined with Roby on November 21, 1963.

Anthropologist Gary Mack studied the photographic evidence and said Harrelson was likely the tall tramp. Harrelson once confessed to being involved in the assassination of Kennedy but later retracted his comments, saying they were made under the influence of cocaine., Carlos Marcello’s brother was convicted of hiring Harrelson to shoot Wood. He died March 15, 2007, and the press made no mention of his possible connection with the assassination of JFK. Jo Ann, his widow, thought he looked very much like the tall man in the famous tramp photograph.

Hunt testified to the House that he had never met Frank Sturgis until late 1972—something that seems very unlikely. Sturgis had been very active in the Miami anti-Castro movement and had heard of a C.I.A. named “Eduardo” but he had not met Hunt or “Eduardo” until late Hunt had bragged that he often used disguises, and it is possible that he used some slight disguise then. Likewise David Atlee Phillips, an actor by avocation, admitted to using disguises.

Some thought the third person was Edward Lansdale. This asso C.I.A.tion was probably made because probably design of the assassination looked like Lansdale’s work. General Lansdale was committed to the US effort in Vietnam and had great influence within the C.I.A. because he helped control the gold the Japanese had hidden in the Philippines during World War II . Experts like Mike Sparks and Fletcher Prouty saw the design as classic Lansdale. The great skill in removing conspirators from Dallas and the subsequent cover-up reflect the work of a man of his expertise. The general had many reasons to despise Kennedy, including what he thought were promises of high office in Vietnam.

However, investigator Jim Fetzer makes a good case that the third hit man was Chauncey Holt, a contract C.I.A. killer and a very interesting man. At one time he was Meyer Lansky’s accountant. He was also a counterfeiter and once ran a school for assassins.

The alleged photograph of Hunt shows a resemblance but is a bit fuzzy. St. John Hunt, Howard’s oldest son, also saw the picture: "Around 1975, I was in a phone booth in Maryland somewhere, when I saw a poster on a telephone pole about who killed JFK, and it had a picture of the three tramps. I saw that picture and I fucking -- like a cartoon character, my jaw dropped, my eyes popped out of my head, and smoke came out of my ears. It looks like my dad. There's nobody that has all those same fa C.I.A.l features. People say it's not him. He's said it's not him. But I'm his son, and I've got a gut feeling." He added that he did not remember his father being in D.C. that day. E .Howard Hunt said under oath he was home chopping vegetables with his wife. 1972 In the 1975 trial, attorney Marc Lane pointed out that Hunt had to carefully remind his children that he was home on November 22, 1963. The jury did not believe Hunt. It should be noted that the Warren Commission saw none of the photos of the tramps.

Lois Gibson, a visual identification expert with the Houston Police Department, has made a good case that the three tramps were three entirely different men, whose identities were known. One of them, coincidentally, was also photographed near Oswald when he was passing out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets. This is not a matter that is easily resolved. If Hunt and other C.I.A. operatives were in Dealey Plaza, it is very possible that they were not there as tramps. On the other hand, technical experts from 3M's Comtal Corporation in 1988 concluded there was a strong resemblance between Hunt and the third tramp. Earlier, others had reached a similar conclusion by using photo overlays.

Later one of the alleged Dallas “tramps,” Chauncey Holt, said that he was supposed to contact Echevarria after Kennedy was dead. Holt finally decided to talk because he thought the American people needed to know more about the Kennedy assassination. He claimed that he was taking orders from both Meyer Lansky and his C.I.A. controller Philip Twombly, then located in California. At one point Twomby sent him to New Orleans to meet Oswald. Holt knew there was to be a killing but he had no dead John F. Kennedy was tha target. Twombly told Holt to deliver Secret Service credentials to Homer Echevarria, who one would assume gave them to others. This would explain the reports of people encountering agents on the grassy knoll. Holt admitted to producing ID cards in the names of Lee Harvey Oswald, Leon Oswald, AND Lee Henry Oswald. Holt also brought extra Secret Service credentials. He used Lansky’s Los Angeles Stamp and Stationary Company to produce the credentials and Ids. He also gave guns with silencers and documents to Charles Harrelson and Charles Rogers, and hid with them in a railroad car after the assassination.

Holt rode from Peter Licavoli’s Arizona ranch to Dallas with two hitmen, Charles Nicoletti,James Canty and Leo Moceri. After the assassination, some of the participants hid at an Acapulco safehouse operated by Joseph Ball, A Warren Commission counsel and C.I.A. asset. Harrelson, father of the actor, once said he killed Kennedy and then retracted the statement. He is serving a life sentence for assassinating a federal judge. There is no doubt that Holt was an assassin, a forger, and an employee of both the mopb and the C.I.A.. However, his claims to have been one of the tramps have been rejected by most experts on the assassination. That is, in part, because investigators in 1989 were eventually able to look at the Dallas police records on the three tramps and think they succeeded in checking out all three, who seem to have been ordinary, down-on-their-luck tramps.

If the incident reports are correct, the whole debate on the tramps may be pointless. This is assuming the records can be trusted. One of the hoboes said that Lee Harvey Oswald spoke with them. The fact was he was completely segregated all the time after arrest. There were six to eight men detained. None were fingerprinted or photographed, but Harold Doyle, one of the tramps said he remembered being printed. In 1975, Newsweek published the famous photograph of the three. Speaking of Doyle, it should be noted that none of the later pictures of the man resemble any of the derelects.

Fletcher Prouty has found a photograph of James Hicks, carrying a walkie talkie with a cord dangling down—an antennae. Prouty claims Hicks was a communications man for the people plotting Kennedy’s death. Richard Sprague writes that Hicks coordinated the shooting, actually giving the commands.

A day after Kennedy’s death, Mary Pinchot Myer ( 1920-1964), a painter andthe president’s main mistress, called a friend in New York and said JFK was killed because he was changing too fast and could no longer be controlled. She also called Timothy Leary to say JFK was killed by a high level government conspiracy. By this she meant he was souring on involvement in Vietnam and becoming more distrustful of the C.I.A.. Mary previously told the LSD guru that she had turned on some ranking Washingtonians to drugs. We do not know if she turned Kennedy on to only marijuana or acid as well. A year later she was murdered on October 12, 1964, which incidentally was the birthday of occultist/Satanist Aleister Crowley. Former agent Bob Crow Crowley said she threatened to tell what she knew. She cried out when shot three times by what appeared to be a disturbed young man. Had it been a professional hit, it would have been quite different. She allegedly wrote that she and JFK took LSD before having sex. She was a early peace activist, friend of Timothy Leary ,and her father had helped fund The Masses.

After her death, James Arrington a ranking C.I.A. official and family friend was found in her house looking for her diary. Crowley said Angleton removed “ every bit of the drugs use, all kinds of bad things JFK told her as pillow talk and her inside knowledge of the hit. Not good. “ Later, Arrington purged 150 pages from the autobiography of the late Winston Scott, C.I.A. station chief in Mexico City. Also seized were tape recordings the agency had falsely claimed were of the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald. Crowley maintained that Oswald never went to the Russian Embassy in Mexico City and that station chief E. Howard Hunt dummied up the evidence .

In 2001, Cord Meyer , a C.I.A., man and her former husband, told interviewers that she was killed by” the same sons of bitches …that killed John F. Kennedy." Of course, Hunt, in his last days, tried to implicate Myers. Agent Meyers was known for his leftist leanings and had been appalled when the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. He was the kind of man Hunt would love to have framed. Cord Meyer played a major role in setting up and running Operation Mockingbird, a scheme to control what the press reported. Why would the C.I.A. be interested in Kennedy’s death? He was blamed for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and it was feared that he would splinter the agency. Yet little seemed to have happened after the Bay of Pigs other than Kennedy keeping the agency under somewhat tighter reigns. Some suggest that the C.I.A. disagreed with Kennedy’s intention of extricating the U.S. from the civil war in Vietnam.

In American Spy, Hunt’s memoir, Hunt speculated that LBJ was behind the murder of JFK. Hunt speculated that William K. Harvey of the C.I.A. could have been involved in the assassination. He reasoned that Harvey was a very ambitious man who could use this involvement to his advantage. The memoir was not published while he was alive, and his speculations were superceded by what the dying spy told his son.

In 2007, Howard St. John Hunt told Rolling Stone that his father confessed indirect complicity in the death of John F. Kennedy. E. Howard Hunt also said Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the scheme. . However, we know that Hunt had no use for LBJ. St. John Hunt said his father wrote down that there was a French gunman on the Grassy Knoll. Most experts think this was a reference to Lucien Sarti, a famous assassin from the Corsican mafia.

In 2003, the History Channel aired an interview with Christian David, a French prisoner, who named Sarti as one of three French criminals hired to kill Kennedy. Sarti wore a uniform of some sort on November 22. He was afraid to name the other two. David said the contract to kill Kennedy was originated in Marsailles, and was circulated by Antoine Guerini, head of the Corsi C.I.A.n mob in that city. Guerini was close to Amereican gangster Santo Trafficante, Jr. David declined the contract and three others were hired. They were flown to Mexico City and eventually driven to Dallas and were taken to Montreal after the assassination. David offered an unusual explanation of the assassination, saying there were "three guns, four shots, three hits, one miss." The President was hit twice-- in the back and in the back/neck . Governor Connally was hit by a single bullet that caused five different wounds. Two shots were fired almost simultaneously, explaining why many heard three shots. Two of the assassins were in buildings behind the presidential limousine.

However, the Frenchman may have been the late Jean Pierre Andre rather than Sarti, who can be tied to the Miami scene. C.I.A. records say French assassin Jean Soutre, a member of a violently anti-Kennedy organization, was in Dallas that day. Two days after the assassination, he was picked up and deported.

The elder Hunt, while talking to Howard St. John Hunt, connected Meyer’s name to Morales with a pen. It was known that Morales had bragged, “ We took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” Morales’s attorney has told more than one reporter that Morales bragged about having some sort of connection to the deaths of both Kennedys. A week later E. Howard Hunt gave his son another piece of paper that said: “Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey [ a C.I.A. man tied to Santo Trafficante and Sam Giancante] and Antonio Vecina.[ a member of the exile community] He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Vecina meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons." It went on to state that Hunt’s role was limited to attending a Miami meeting with Sturgis and Morales at which the murder of JFK was discussed. Hunt said he would not get involved in anything with Bill Harvey, “an alcoholic psycho, ” who headed the “Executive Action” or assassinations team.

Later, Hunt wrote an insulting letter to his son, and demanded a return of the JFK memo. St. John returned the original but kept a copy.. There is the possibility that Hunt could have been leading St. John on. He had long treated the club footed son with open contempt. Could it be true that even in death Hunt was covering his own tracks, shielding the people to whom he felt a lasting loyalty, and performing one last service to the C.I.A.?

Madeleine Duncan Brown, LBJ’s mistress , told about Johnson emerging from a conference of Mafios , F.B.I.officials, and Dallas industrialists, and saying, "those SOB's" would never embarrass him again However her comments are not inconsistent with another scenario. It has been well established that J. Edgar Hoover was close to LBJ and that the Director knew about the plot, did not warn the Secret Service, and obliquely let the mob know that Kennedy’s passing would be good for the country. It could be that LBJ just learned about the plot when he spoke to his mistress over twenty years. As for the presence of the mob at the meeting, it is now known that Hoover had many social contacts with mob people and that the C.I.A. worked hand in glove with the mob on numerous occasions. She insisted the confab occurred on November 21, but there are eviden C.I.A.ry matters that suggest she had the wrong date. There is good photographic evidence that LBJ was in the Houston Coloseum that night. While he probably was not present at that meeting, he had reason to want Kennedy out of the way. Bobby Baker, a former Johnson aid, was one of the first to learn that Kennedy would not have LBJ on the ticket in 1964; and if Baker knew, Johnson knew. He probably also knew tht the Kennedys were planning to use the Bobby Baker corruption case against Johnson.

Gaeton Fonzi, who has written on the subject and once did investigative work for Senator Richard Schweiker, when the Pennsylvanian was part of a two person subcommittee of the Church Committee, entrusted with looking into the murder of JFK. Richard Schweiker, was sure that David Atlee Phillips, the Miami Station chief, and David Morales were deeply involved. Shawn Phillips said his father David Atlee Philllips was in Dallas that day. . Morales was head of operations at the Miami station, which was also the headquarters for The Forty, an assassins squad formed in 1959. Edwin Wilson, Barry Seal, William Seymour, Frank Sturgis and Gerry Hemming were early members. It was later expanded to 70 agents. Morales allegedly confessed to a friend in 1973, ““Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” He died before he could testify. Had he lived he would have said nothing as he feared being killed by the agency.

Fonzi went on to be an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1976-1978. In fact he was one of only two investigators who regularly in the field. The Committee was poorly funded and its very existence was precarious because few in Washington really wanted to look carefully into the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It went through three chief counsels, the last of whom told the press that the report established that the mob was behind the death of Kennedy.

In fact the report did not establish this; although, mobster Jack Ruby did enter the story, probably as a hired C.I.A. cut out, by eliminating Lee Harvey Oswald. He may have had other duties. At the time, his lady friend was a stripper named Jada Conconforto, who was scheduled to appear in his night club. Jack proudly distributed pictures of her. On the morning of the assassination she hit a pedestrian at 10:30 AM in her haste to leave the city. She said she had to leave Dallas and get to New Orleans. She was killed in a motorcycle accident when the House Select Committee on Assassinations was active. Her sister claimed Jada was murdered because she knew too much.

Journalist Thayer Waldo of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram told Dorothy Kilgallen that eight days before the assassination there was a meeting of Jack Ruby, Officer Jefferson Davis Tippit, and Bernard Weissman at the Carousel Club. Waldo was too frightened to print the story. Kilgallen learned there was a fourth persom present who was big in the oil industry. Kilgallen had interviewed Jack Ruby for eight minutes but never wrote about it, probably saving it for a book she was writing when she died in 1965. According to Earlene Roberts , Oswald’s landlady, a police car pulled up in front of the house, honked twice, and left. Oswald was inside, so it could have been some sort of signal.

If the mob played a larger role, it was probably because it had a long established relationship with the C.I.A.. When Ruby was grabbed after shooting Oswald, he said that now everyone will know everything, “Cuba, guns, New Orleans, everything.” The reference to New Orleans was to continued gun running and attacks against Cuba after John F. Kennedy attempted to stop it. A rebel force was also being trained in Louisiana against Kennedy's orders. Ruby was a police informant, and a policeman friend attempted to visit him but said was told that this was impossible as Ruby was in C.I.A. custody.”

Journalist Thayer Waldo of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram told Dorothy Kilgallen that eight days before the assassination there was a meeting of Jack Ruby, Officer Jefferson Davis Tippit, and Bernard Weissman at the Carousel Club. Waldo was too frightened to print the story. Kilgallen learned there was a fourth persom present who was big in the oil industry. Kilgallen had interviewed Jack Ruby for eight minutes but never wrote about it, probably saving it for a book she was writing when she died in 1965. According to Earlene Roberts , Oswald’s landlady, a police car pulled up in front of the house, honked twice, and left. Oswald was inside, so it could have been some sort of signal.

Journalist Thayer Waldo of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram told Dorothy Kilgallen that eight days before the assassination there was a meeting of Jack Ruby, Officer Jefferson Davis Tippit, and Bernard Weissman at the Carousel Club. Waldo was too frightened to print the story. Kilgallen learned there was a fourth persom present who was big in the oil industry. Kilgallen had interviewed Jack Ruby for eight minutes but never wrote about it, probably saving it for a book she was writing when she died in 1965. According to Earlene Roberts , Oswald’s landlady, a police car pulled up in front of the house, honked twice, and left. Oswald was inside, so it could have been some sort of signal.