The Assassination of President Kennedy – Part 10

Researcher and author Harold Weisberg argued that the first thing one must do to determine who was behind the Kennedy assassination is to ask two questions:

“Who benefited from it, and which of those who benefited were in a position to frame Lee Harvey Oswald?”1

According to Weisberg, this ruled out the Mafia as well as right-wing and left-wing extremist groups.

Instead, he concluded that those who had both the means and the motive were the forces that feared and opposed Kennedy’s foreign-policy initiatives concerning Vietnam and the Soviet Union:

“There was a very powerful, well-connected coalition that opposed the winding down of the Vietnam venture and feared that Kennedy would act to free us from what they viewed as a potentially lucrative war.”2

This group included several individuals, particularly people who made enormous profits from America’s involvement in the war and from the vast quantities of materials, equipment, and other goods expended in Vietnam.

Before examining more closely who these individuals may have been, we should first take a closer look at whom this power elite may have delegated the task of planning the assassination to.

Some of those who worked for the HSCA believed that, although it was possible that Mafia gunmen may have been used to carry out the assassination of Kennedy, an operation of this kind could only have been orchestrated by someone within the U.S. intelligence community and with special knowledge of Oswald’s background.

The leading candidate, they reasoned, would therefore be a high-ranking CIA officer who had previously coordinated plots in which the Mafia and the CIA had worked together.

Some researchers believe that person may have been William Harvey, who, after his involvement in terror operations against Cuba during the Missile Crisis, had been harshly reprimanded by Bobby Kennedy and transferred to Italy.

Harvey was demonstrably responsible for the CIA’s Executive Action program and contingency plans for foreign assassinations for a period of time.

According to Eric Hamburg, a former staff assistant in the U.S. Congress who was involved in implementing the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, Harvey was also associated with the assassin Lucien Sarti and the Corsicans who, according to some sources, were armed at Dealey Plaza.3

Furthermore, as head of the Task Force, he held a leading position in sabotage operations directed against Castro.4

Harvey also had personal connections with gangsters such as Trafficante and Roselli, whom the CIA had demonstrably used in its earlier attempts to assassinate Castro.

The HSCA staff discussed the matter with former CIA employees, including a former senior officer who had worked in Mexico City.

“The feeling among some of the CIA people we spoke to was that Harvey was heavily involved with organized-crime figures,” one committee member later said. “He may have been the key to making the assassination happen.”5

In an interview with French journalist Fabrizio Calvi in 1998, Mark Wyatt, a former deputy chief of the CIA station in Rome, revealed that Harvey had traveled to Dallas in November 1963.

Harvey’s explanation for the trip was that he was going there “to see what happens.”6

To Wyatt, this sounded strange:

“I could never understand what Harvey was doing in Dallas in 1963.”7

In his autobiography, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt claimed that some individuals within the CIA believed that Harvey had recruited several Corsicans, including Lucien Sarti, to shoot Kennedy, and that it was Sarti, disguised as a police officer, who had been the gunman behind the fence on the grassy knoll.8

Hunt, who admitted that he did not believe Oswald could have accomplished what was attributed to him, considered it likely that multiple shooters had participated.

He also stated that, in addition to Harvey, both Cord Meyer and David Atlee Phillips had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill Kennedy.

Bill Harvey’s CIA colleague John Whitten was asked by HSCA investigators why he thought Harvey had instructed his wife to destroy all of his papers after his death.

Whitten replied cryptically:

“He was too young to have murdered McKinley and Lincoln. It could have been anything.”9

Professor John Newman, a former officer in the U.S. Army, argues that the key figure in the Kennedy assassination was probably James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA counterintelligence:

“Regardless of who Oswald’s handlers were, we must now seriously consider the possibility that Angleton was their boss. No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the devilishly cunning mind to manage this sophisticated conspiracy.”10

Newman argued that the conspirators’ reach extended so deeply into the intelligence community that they could employ someone who knew its inner secrets and methods so thoroughly that he was also capable of designing a foolproof mechanism for carrying out the plot against Kennedy.

One of those involved in the CIA’s early efforts to establish an assassination unit was Charles Siragusa, who had worked with Angleton in the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS, in 1944–45 and later obtained a position in the FBI’s narcotics division.

Siragusa was subsequently assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, from where he cooperated with the CIA.

In a conversation with Edward Kennedy in 1977, Siragusa stated that in the early 1960s he had been approached by a CIA officer named Vincent Thill, who wanted assistance recruiting underworld figures for executions. They were willing to pay up to one million dollars for a completed operation.

Siragusa explained that, in addition to Thill and several other CIA officers, he was also in contact with Angleton at the time.11

As head of counterintelligence, Angleton was, of course, a master at obscuring the facts.

Even former CIA Director William Colby wrote in his memoirs that Angleton’s explanations were “impossible to follow.”12

Loch Johnson, special assistant to the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, interviewed Angleton on several occasions in connection with the Church Committee’s investigation of the CIA in 1975.

“Angleton’s answer to a question lacked all the characteristics of a linear narrative,” Johnson recalled.

Or, as Mark Twain might have put it:

“Listening to Angleton for half an hour could make you dizzy. Listening to him for a full hour could make you drunk.”13

It was not without reason that Angleton—who was deeply upset by Congress’s probing into CIA affairs—often compared the central mission of counterintelligence to “building a wilderness of mirrors in which the opponent would become confused and lost forever.”14

Johnson later compared questioning Angleton to trying to discover a new planet with a telescope designed for viewing Earth:

“Angleton could begin an important story and then let it drift away like a passing comet, disappearing into a black hole of ambiguity.”15

Author Larry Hancock believes that David Sanchez Morales may have been the mastermind behind the assassination.

According to Morales’s close friend Ruben Carbajal, Morales was recruited into Army Intelligence as early as 1947, even though he was officially assigned to the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.

During this period, Morales became acquainted with two future CIA figures, William Harvey and Ted Shackley.

In 1951, Morales was hired by the CIA while retaining his cover as an Army officer.

The following year, he joined the Directorate for Plans, which conducted covert anti-communist operations around the world.

He returned to the United States in 1953 and assumed a cover position as an employee of the State Department.

Before long, he was participating in the CIA’s “black operations,” a policy that later became known as Executive Action and involved removing foreign leaders who did not follow the U.S. line.

Morales also took part in the overthrow of Guatemalan leader Jacobo Arbenz, was stationed in Caracas, and became known as the CIA’s most effective assassin in Latin America.

In 1958, Morales moved to Cuba and helped support the dictator Batista.

According to author Michael Calder, who wrote JFK vs. CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency’s Assassination of the President, the mastermind behind the assassination was probably the CIA’s Deputy Director (and later Director), Richard Helms.

A claim that, according to Professor Joan Mellen, was supported by the mercenary Gary Patrick Hemming, who reportedly stated in an interview that “Helms is behind the entire operation to kill JFK.”16

Hemming later denied having identified Helms.

However, Mellen, who had interviewed Hemming and quoted his remarks in her book A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, And the Case That Should Have Changed History, stated that she had the interview recorded on tape.

Hemming’s claim is also supported by Colonel and former CIA agent William Bishop, who, in an interview with author Gary Shaw, asserted that Helms had ordered the assassination.17

Bishop had been involved in covert operations that later became associated with what was known as Executive Action.

In 1961, Bishop was one of those responsible for the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, the leader of the Dominican Republic.

Bishop, who was also involved in Operation 40, gave an interview to author Dick Russell in which he confirmed what Robert Tannenbaum of the HSCA had said about seeing Oswald in a film with mercenaries in Louisiana:

“I checked into Oswald’s background. I had never met him, but I had seen him in a training film in New Orleans the previous summer. He just happened to be part of the group out at the Pontchartrain camp,” Bishop explained.

“I thought even then (after the assassination) that Oswald was a patsy. There’s not a chance in hell he could have fired three shots in that amount of time with that degree of accuracy using that weapon.”18

Bishop also claimed that Jimmy Hoffa had given the Cuban exile Roland Masferrer $50,000 to have Kennedy killed.

Masferrer was a former newspaper publisher in Cuba who had supported the former dictator Batista and later fled to Florida, where he established a guerrilla organization called the 30th of November Movement after Castro came to power.

Bishop, who believed that people one disliked should be voted out rather than shot, stated that:

“We had a coup d’état on November 22, 1963.”19

Former CIA agent Bradley Ayers claimed in a letter to AARB chairman John R. Tunheim in 1994 that nine individuals from JM/WAVE had extensive knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Kennedy’s assassination.

According to Ayers, these nine were: Theodore Shackley, Grayston Lynch, Felix Rodriguez, David Morales, Rip Robertson, Thomas Clines, Gordon Campbell, Edward Roderick, and Tony Sforza.

Before Helms became CIA Director, the position was held by John McCone.

It seems far-fetched that an operation of this kind would have been run through a newly appointed CIA Director such as McCone rather than through an old, hardline veteran like Helms.

That is not to say that Helms was necessarily the person who gave the green light from within the CIA, although that possibility cannot be ruled out either.

For example, in an interview, former CIA agent Carl McNabb claimed that Helms even had a private assassin who went by the designation “Zap Man.”20

More than one researcher of the Kennedy assassination is convinced that Allen Dulles either participated in, or at least knew about, the planning of the assassination. Others believe that Dulles was actually the mastermind behind it.

Journalist and author David Talbot, for example, refers to Dulles as “the chairman of the board of assassination.”

Talbot argues that there was a consensus within the CIA regarding Kennedy:

“For the good of the country, he had to be removed. And Dulles was the only one with the power, the connections, and the will to make something that large happen.”21

Jerome Corsi, a political science professor and author of Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination, also considers Dulles to have been one of the principal figures behind the assassination.

In an interview with Newsmax that same year, Corsi stated:

“One of the major forces behind the assassination was Allen Dulles… when Jack Kennedy was killed, the CIA got what it wanted—a president who would follow the CIA’s script.”22

The fact that Dulles had been dismissed from the CIA by Kennedy in 1961 did not mean that he severed his ties to the Agency.

Dulles continued to meet with CIA officials at his home on Q Street in Georgetown.

Among the visitors were James Angleton, E. Howard Hunt, and Bill Harvey—three additional figures who have all been suspected of involvement in the Kennedy assassination.

Michael Delavante, The Assassination of President Kennedy – Part 10

Also read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8 and part 9

Sources:

1. Spotligt, April 16, 1979-3, another View of Kennedy by Martin Price, http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/M%20Disk/Marchetti%20Victor%20CIA/Item%2010.pdf
2. Spotligt, April 16, 1979-3, another View of Kennedy by Martin Price

http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/M%20Disk/Marchetti%20Victor%20CIA/Item%2010.pdf

3. E. Howard Hunt and the JFK Plotters. By Eric Hamburg. cryptome.org, (sid. 2-3) https://cryptome.org/2012/07/jfk-hunt.pdf
4. Michael L. Kurtz, Crime of the Century The Kennedy Assassination from a Historian’s Perspective, University of Tennesse Press,(sidan xilv)

5. Anthony Summers, ”Conspiracy”, McGraw-Hill, 1989. (sidan 529)

6. David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, “Harper , 2015, (sidan 465)

7. David Talbot, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, “Harper , 2015, (sidan 465)

8. E. Howard Hunt, Greg Aunapu,”American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond”, John Wiley & Sons, 2007. (sidan 134)
9. Geral McKnight,  “Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation And Why”, University Press of Kansas, 2005, (sidan 348 “Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation And Why”,University Press of Kansas, 2005, (sidan 348)
10. Allan J. Weberman, Michael Canfield,”Coup D’Etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy”, Quick American Archives, 1992, (sidan 11)
11. Allan J. Weberman, Michael Canfield,”Coup D’Etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy”,Quick American Archives, (1992) (sid. 40-41)
12.  Moles, Defectors, and Deceptions: James Angleton and His Influence on US Counterintelligence, A Wilson Center and Georgetown University Center for Security Studies, Joint Conference, 29 March, 2012, (sidan 60)
13. Moles, Defectors, and Deceptions: James Angleton and His Influence on US Counterintelligence, A Wilson Center and Georgetown University Center for Security Studies, Joint Conference, 29 March, 2012, (sidan 60)
14.  Loch K. Johnson, “A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation”, University Press of Kentucky, 1985,  (sidan  83) Se även: Michael Howard Holzman, “James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence”, University of Massachusetts Press , 2008, (sidan 302)
15. Loch K. Johnson, “A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation”, University Press of Kentucky, 1985, (sidan  83) Se även: Michael Howard Holzman, “James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence”, University of Massachusetts Press , 2008, (sidan 302)
16. Joan Mellen, A Farewell To Justice: Jim Garrison, Jfk’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History,Potomac Books, Inc,  2005. (sidan 156)
17. Joan Mellen, A Farewell To Justice : Jim Garrison, Jfk’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History,Potomac Books, Inc,  2005. (sidan 156)
18. William C. Bishop https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbishopW.htm
19. William C. Bishop https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbishopW.htm
20. Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico Written by James DiEugenio, kennedysandking.com, 01 September 2008
21. David Talbot , “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,” Harper, 2015 , (sidan 548)
22. Jerome Corsi: LBJ Knew About and Supported JFK’s Assassination By Courtney Coren and Kathleen Walter,newsmax.com. 19 Sep 2013.