The Kennedy Assassination: Somebody Knew In Advance

Philip Agee, 72, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative, has died in Cuba. Agee exposed the crimes committed by the government unit in his classic diary published during the 1970s., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Havana. May 17, 2012

The Kennedy assassination: somebody knew in advance

Gabriel Molina

GEORGE H. W. Bush and Richard Nixon were in Dallas on the day of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, one year after the October Missile Crisis. However, they deny or fail to remember this fact.

Brian Latell, a senior CIA agent, recently published the book Castro’s Secrets, prompting an insidious Miami Herald article by Glenn Garvin headlined "The Kennedy Assassination: Did Castro know in advance?". The article was reproduced in Life and Le Monde magazines.

Neither Latell nor Garvin asked where Nixon and Bush Senior were on November 22, 1963. Others have done so and the two politicians answered that they didn’t remember. But Paul Kangas and other researchers have disclosed evidence that both were in Dallas, Texas, and that they knew about the assassination.

Part of the evidence is a November 23, 1963 memo from FBI director Edgar Hoover, revealing that George Bush Sr., as a CIA officer, reported on Cuban exiles’ reaction to Kennedy’s death. Bush alleged that this was another agent of the same name, but left the impression that the FBI knew what he was saying. Fletcher Prouty, a former CIA link official, stated that Bush – by then a high-ranking officer with the agency although he also denied that fact – was responsible for organizing the Bay of Pigs invasion, involving the recruitment of Cubans later suspected by the U.S. Congressional Committee investigating the assassination of being linked to John F. Kennedy’s death.

Carl Freund, from the Dallas Morning News, interviewed Nixon on the day of the assassination, who stated during the interview that Kennedy intended to drop Lyndon Johnson as his running mate in 1964 and attacked the President for the civil rights demonstrations taking place throughout the U.S., commenting that Kennedy had offered more than he could give. The newspaper added that Nixon was attending a meeting of the Pepsi Cola Company in the city and was staying at the Baker hotel. The day before the assassination, The Dallas Times Herald published a photo of Nixon taken in Dallas with Donald Kendall, president of Pepsi Cola. Kangas refutes the argument that Nixon had already left the city, given that airport documents show that he left after the assassination. (1)

In 1991, CIA agent Chauncey Holt told Newsweek magazine that Kendall was considered by the agency as its eyes and ears in the Caribbean. The CIA is key to the close relationship between the businessman and the politician. Pepsi had a factory and a plantation in Cuba which were nationalized by the revolutionary government.

Researcher Carl Oglesby places Nixon and Vice President Johnson during the evening of November 21 at a Dallas party, which he considers the final coordination meeting for the assassination. Kennedy’s increasing confrontations with Johnson during 1963 were known in government circles and by the President’s close friends. They were sure that his corrupt connections were going to be exposed and that Johnson would not be the candidate in 1964. There was also talk of his prosecution.

The book Le dernier temoin (The Last Witness) includes the confessions of Billie Sol Estes, a financial millionaire who was sentenced in court after being investigated by Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General, and was closely linked to the Texan politician. Estes said that Johnson forced him to keep quiet about the dirty business he was doing for both of them.

"According to Madeleine Brown, a close friend of Johnson’s, on November 21, the Vice President accompanied her to a private soirée at the home of Clint Murchinson, a Dallas oil millionaire, where the Vice President made an enigmatic remark: "After tomorrow, those SOB’s will never embarrass me again." (2)

In his book, The Yankee and the Cowboy War, Oglesby reveals the presence at the party, in addition to Johnson and Nixon, of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover; Allen Dulles, former CIA director; oil tycoon Haroldson L. Hunt; John Connally, former governor of Texas; General Charles Cabell and his brother Earl, all of them John F. Kennedy haters.

On February 1, 1962, the president had replaced Cabell as deputy director of the CIA. On April 19, 1961, Cabell had tried to force Kennedy to authorize the use of fighter planes from an aircraft carrier stationed close to Cuba, an action that he stated could change the course of the Bay of Pigs in a matter of minutes. Pentagon chiefs, headed by Lemnitzer and Walker and those of the CIA, especially Dulles and Cabell virtually rebelled and continued trying to provoke direct military intervention in Cuba. For these reasons, the decision of General Cabell’s brother who, as mayor of Dallas, diverted the presidential convoy as it was traveling along Mayor Street toward the center of Dealey Plaza heading for Stemmons Highway, as planned, was highly suspicious. "On Mayor Street, continuing along the open boulevard, shots could not have reached him… at the last minute the President’s route was changed to make it pass where the warehouse is." (3) The change made by Cabell’s brother involved a 120-degree turn down Houston Street, which meant reducing the convoy’s speed to 15mph and heading for Elm Street, the location of the warehouse and a grassy hillock. This dramatic turn facilitated the work of Kennedy’s assassins lying in wait there.

Latell and Garvin must have formulated the question as to why the route was changed, particularly to George H. W. Bush, one of the few surviving suspects. The untiring labor of researchers has resulted in new discoveries implicating Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy’s replacement and the man with the most to gain, in the assassination plot

After the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, Nixon was elected President and continued with his dirty tricks. On Nixon’s orders, a group of CIA agents and officers, disguised as plumbers, entered the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate office complex. It was initially thought that the objective was to seek out information damaging to George McGovern, the presidential candidate, but the matter was far more serious. On June 23, 1972, President Nixon tried to have the CIA block the investigation, in charge of FBI officers like Mark Felt, who recently turned out to be "Deep Throat," the secret informant of The Washington Post, which contributed to clarifying the facts.

In the early days of the scandal, Nixon‘s aide John Ehrlichman summoned to the White House Patrick Gray, the FBI director who replaced Edgar Hoover. He told him that six files written by Howard Hunt, a CIA officer involved in the Watergate break-in, and which were in the FBI’s possession, were political dynamite and should never see the light of day. Gray took the files to his house and burned them. John Dean, the President’s advisor, did the same with Hunt’s diary. However, tapes of conversations in the White House revealed Nixon’s anxiety over the detention of Hunt and the other operatives involved. He was trying to conceal the fact that the operation would expose his connection with Kennedy’s assassination and agreed that Hunt should be given one million dollars in hush money.

Fearing the possible consequences of the scandal, Nixon leaned on his chief of personnel, H.R. Haldeman, to put pressure on his CIA buddies George Bush, Richard Helms and Vernon Walters, explaining, "The problem is that it will blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing." (4) Nixon added that they had protected Helms many times and that Bush would do anything for the cause. (5)

The agitated response of Helms, who yelled that he had nothing to do with the Bay of Pigs, shocked Haldeman. The President’s right hand man acted as ordered, but the scandal had grown too large given the revelations of the White House tapes and he was obliged to tell Nixon that he could do nothing more.

In his subsequent book The Ends of Power, Haldeman confessed that Nixon always masked any reference to the Kennedy assassination by mentioning the Bay of Pigs. The tapes are full of these references. One of the "plumbers," Frank Sturgis, confessed five years later that the powerful motive for the Watergate break-in which so much concerned Nixon was "the photos of our role in the Kennedy assassination."(6) E. Howard Hunt, who led the Watergate break-in; James W. McCord Jr.; and Cubans Virgilio R. González, Bernard L. Barker and Eugenio Martínez – all of them CIA officers or agents – were also involved in some way in the Bay of Pigs invasion. And all of them, apart from McCord, were investigated in relation to the assassination.

In his memoirs, American Spy, Hunt stated that William Harvey, placed by the CIA at the head of Task Force W to direct conspiracies to assassinate Fidel, could have played a principal role in organizing the Kennedy assassination together with David Morales, a well-known CIA assassin,. In 2004, Hunt offered other revelations in a video to his son St. John, who had asked him to make the recording when his father was nearing death from cancer. Hunt said that Sturgis has invited him to a secret CIA meeting at which Morales was present, to discuss a big event, which he later found out was the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. Hunt cryptically admitted that he took part, but as a spare player, given that he had reservations.

Commenting on Latell’s book, El Nuevo Herald tried to exonerate the CIA, organized crime and other spurious interests from any part in the 1961 invasion, the 1962 Missile Crisis, and the assassination of Kennedy, events which were clearly linked.

Latell’s principal thesis is that of the lone gunman: Lee Harvey Oswald, linked to Cuba. This was precisely the initial evidence of an official conspiracy. The plot merits a different analysis.

(1) The Realist No.117, Summer 1991, P.7.
(2) William Reymond. JFK, Le dernier temoin. Editions Flammarion. Paris. 2003. Pp 259
(3) Jim Garrison. JFK, Tras la pista de los asesinos, Ediciones B S.A. Barcelona1992, P. 145
(4) Stanley I. Kutler (ed.) Abuse of Power, Simon and Schuster, New York. 1997), Pp. 67-69
(5) San Francisco Chronicle, May 7, 1977.
(6) Ibid.