"Havana had exploited Lee Harvey Oswald" - the Pro-Castro Cubans are the guilty party.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps blindingly obvious, now. Not the Anti-Castro Cubans but the Pro-Castro lot now claim to have used Oswald as their assassin. And were  recommended to choose him by the KGB. No wonder LBJ hastily lashed together the Warren Commission to keep the lid on what could have become a nuclear exchange between Russian and the US had the implications emerged in 1964. In this context the increasing involvement in Vietnam must have seemed like a welcome sideshow to keep the  public occupied in a different part of the world.

It is of course possible that Dealey Plaza that day was littered with assassination groups. It now seems that Oswald just got his shots off faster than most... 

 

Wednesday, 4 January 2006, 23:08 GMT 

 

JFK assassination 'was Cuba plot'

A new documentary exploring the death of John F Kennedy claims his assassin was directed and paid by Cuba.
Rendezvous with Death, based on new evidence from Cuban, Russian and US sources, took three years to research.
One source, ex-Cuban agent Oscar Marino, said Havana had exploited Lee Harvey Oswald, who was arrested but shot dead before he could be tried.

Conspiracy theories on the killing have variously accused Cuba, Russia and the US of acting alone or jointly.
According to Oscar Marino, the Cubans wanted Kennedy dead because he opposed the revolution and allegedly sought to have its leader Fidel Castro killed.

Mr Marino told film director Wilfried Huismann that he knew for certain the assassination was an operation run by the Cuban secret service G2, but he declined to say whether it had been ordered by Mr Castro.

Cuban intelligence made contact with Oswald after being alerted by the Russian KGB in 1962 when he returned to the USA after living in the Soviet Union for three years, Cuban and Russian sources say.

" He [Oswald] was so full of hate, he had the idea. We used him," Mr Marino said.

A possible Cuban connection was investigated by the US immediately after Kennedy's death.
But an FBI officer sent to follow the Oswald's trail during a visit to Mexico was recalled after only three days and the investigation called off.

Laurence Keenan, now 81, said it was "perhaps the worst investigation the FBI was ever involved in".
" I realised that I was used. I felt ashamed. We missed a moment in history," Mr Keenan said.

Oswald, an ex-Marine, was a Communist sympathiser

Veteran US official Alexander Haig told the film-maker that Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B Johnson, believed Cuba was to blame and feared a pronounced swing to the right if the truth were known that would keep the Democrats out of power for a long time.

According to Mr Haig - a US military adviser at the time and later a secretary of state - "he [Johnson] said 'we must simply not allow the American people to believe Fidel Castro could have killed our president'. " He [Johnson] was convinced Castro killed Kennedy and he took it to his grave."

 

Communist sharpshooter

 

John F Kennedy, the 35th US president, was assassinated as his motorcade drove through Dallas in November 1963.
Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine sharpshooter who worked in a book warehouse overlooking the assassination, was arrested but killed shortly afterwards.

He had a Russian wife, called himself a Communist and agitated on behalf of Castro's Cuba.

 

FBI PROBE ABORTED

 

Laurence Keenan, an officer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who was sent to Mexico City immediately after Kennedy's death to investigate a possible Cuban connection, said he was recalled after just three days and the probe was aborted.

" This was perhaps the worst investigation the FBI was ever involved in," Keenan said. "I realized that I was used. I felt ashamed. We missed a moment in history."

Keenan, 81, said he was convinced Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, blocked further investigation because proof of a Cuban link would put him under irresistible pressure to invade the island, a year after the Cuban missile crisis had brought the United States and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

" Most likely there would have been an invasion of Cuba which could have had unknown consequences for the whole world," he told journalists at the screening, saying that was why Johnson preferred to accept Oswald was "a crazed lone Marxist assassin."

Interviewed for the film, Alexander Haig, then a U.S. military adviser and later secretary of state, quoted Johnson as saying "we simply must not allow the American people to believe that Fidel Castro could have killed our president."
" And the reason was that there would be a right-wing uprising in America, which would keep the Democratic party out of power for two generations," Haig said.

He added that Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the assassinated president and attorney general in his administration, had personally ordered eight attempts on the life of Castro, who is still in power to this day.

Cuban and Russian sources interviewed in the film say the KGB alerted the Cubans to Oswald in mid-1962 after he left the Soviet Union, where he had lived for three years, and returned to the United States with his Soviet wife and their daughter.

Cuban intelligence first made contact with Oswald in November 1962, according to the film.

Huismann also unearthed a U.S. intelligence report shown to Johnson which said Cuban secret service chief Fabian Escalante flew via Mexico City to Dallas on the day of Kennedy's assassination, and back again the same day.

Tracked down by the film maker, Escalante denied he had been in Dallas and evaded questions about Cuba's alleged role. "What is truth, what are lies?" he said, smiling.

 

However, other reports say diifferent, naturally.  Castro himself was not behind the assassination.

 

Castro and the Kennedy Assassination 
Decades Before Oliver Stone, Cuba Saw a Conspiracy
by Jon Elliston
Dossier Editor
pscpdocs@aol.com

 

" This is bad news," Fidel Castro said in serious tones. He repeated himself: "This is bad news." The date was November 22, 1963, and Castro had just heard that one of his staunchest enemies had been gunned down in the streets of Dallas, Texas. John F. Kennedy was dead, and the Cuban leader was extremely worried.

Given the bitter state of relations between the United States and Cuba during the Kennedy administration, Castro's mournful reaction may come as a surprise. After all, President Kennedy had authorized the CIA's disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and ordered subsequent sabotage operations against the island. During Kennedy's three years in office, the Defense Department had drafted and practiced threatening plans for a full-scale invasion of Cuba, and the CIA had put multiple hits on Castro's life.

Despite all this, Castro apparently saw nothing but disaster in the news of Kennedy's death. Newly released documents from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) reinforce past indications that the Cuban leader reacted grimly to the assassination of the American president.

The NSA's specialty is "signals intelligence" -- the global interception and collection of telephone and radio conversations. In the days after Kennedy's killing, the NSA turned its powerful electronic ears on the island of Cuba, fishing for clues about what role, if any, Castro and his cronies may have played in the assassination. In August 1997, almost 34 years after JFK's demise, the Assassination Records Review Board, a special committee appointed by Congress to facilitate the release of records on the incident, released 84 NSA documents.

According to the new documents -- the first NSA records on the Kennedy assassination ever released to the public -- Castro was convinced that the forces that conspired against Kennedy were also gunning for Cuba. Some of the NSA intercepts refer to defensive measures immediately ordered by Castro: the very day Kennedy was killed, Cuban military units hit the trenches on Cuba's northern coast, in anticipation of a U.S. invasion.

While his troops prepared to mount a defense of the island, Castro took to the airwaves to warn the Cuban people that dark days were ahead. In a two-hour speech broadcast on Cuban radio and television on November 23, Castro said that JFK's death "may have very negative repercussions with regard to the interests of our country."

Meanwhile, a European intelligence agent cabled home this message from Havana: "Although it was only the third time I had witnessed a speech by Fidel, I got the impression that on this occasion he was frightened, if not terrified." According to the agent, whose message was monitored in secret by the NSA, Castro was concerned that the assassination might "provide the excuse which up to now was lacking to justify internationally an invasion of Cuba."
These concerns were heightened by reports in the U.S. media that Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a pro-Cuba activist who had led his own chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans. From the outset, Castro charged that Oswald was only a distraction, a player in a much larger plot by powerful actors. In his November 23 speech Castro voiced the outlines of a conspiracy theory that would later become popular in the United States. In singling out Oswald, Castro charged, those actually responsible for the assassination "manufactured their criminal" to breed "anti-Cuban hysteria" in the United States.

"It may be the case of an innocent person turned into a scapegoat in a well prepared plan, by people who know how to prepare such plans," Castro said. "It was hardly possible that they would not try to take advantage of circumstances to turn all their hatred, all their propaganda, and their campaign against Cuba. This did not surprise us.... We foresaw that as a result of these events the cycle might begin again, the ambush, the Machiavellian plan against our country."

(In April 1978, Castro told investigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations that it would have been "tremendous insanity" for him to plot the death of President Kennedy, because a Cuban role in the death of America's chief executive would be "the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country, which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years.")

From the beginning Castro, and the state media outlets he essentially directed, criticized the official version of events -- that loner Lee Harvey Oswald had killed Kennedy in a fit of leftist rage -- and further charged that right-wing forces in the United States were to blame. "An event like yesterday's could only benefit those ultrarightist and ultrareactionary sectors, among which President Kennedy could not be counted," he said.

One Cuban publication called the Oswald-Cuba link a "dirty maneuver aimed at making Cuba the perpetrator of the crime." An international radio broadcast from Havana said:

" These events and the hysterical anticommunist campaign unleashed in the country, aimed mainly at implicating Cuba and the Soviet Union, clearly show that President Kennedy's assassination was a political crime involving the ultra-reactionary and bellicose interests of the United States which considered Mr. Kennedy's imperialist policy weak.... Macabre plans of frenzied warmongering and reaction are hiding behind these events."

After Jack Ruby killed Oswald, Kennedy's alleged assassin, the Cuban leader stepped up his charges that right-wing zealots were to blame for the President's death. The plot behind the death of Kennedy, Castro asserted in a November 27 speech, was an indication of "what dangers threaten humanity, what dangers imperil the peoples, what a lack of scruples, how much evil exists, and how much cynicism is embodied in the imperialist society."

Castro's sentiments were shared by one of his closest confidants, Che Guevara, who said on November 25 that the death of Kennedy "could presage more difficulties for the revolution." Guevara called Ruby's killing of Oswald "something straight out of a U.S. gangster film" and referred to "many dark and shadowy forces" at play in Dallas. Because Kennedy was gone, "the peace of the world will now be threatened for years to come," Guevara warned.

A Cuban TV commentator said on November 25 said that by killing Oswald someone was probably "erasing the clues" about the true perpetrators of the assassination. Another remarked on November 27: "All signs indicate that what is involved is a slaying prepared by the most brutal forces of the United States to be used as a spark capable of setting off anticommunist and bellicose hysteria. Comrade Castro's charges and world reaction have caused their initial plans to fail. Caught in a trap, they killed Oswald, silencing him forever.... They feared a live Oswald and they cold-bloodedly eliminated him, using a gangster whom they now try to disguise as a patriot." 

When the new president, Lyndon Johnson, appointed the Warren Commission to look into Kennedy's assassination, the Cuban media continued their charges that a sinister cover-up was underway. A December 4 radio editorial suggested that an investigation of the CIA was in order -- "that is the most overdue investigation anyone could think of -- the investigation of the biggest crime syndicate now in operation." On the same day, another Cuban commentator remarked that CIA director Allen Dulles, who had been appointed to the Warren Commission, was "not precisely the man to have an objective view of the CIA."

Did elements of the U.S. national security state participated in a plot to kill Kennedy? The question will no doubt dog assassination investigators for decades to come, but it was first voiced long ago by a man, Fidel Castro, who had considerable experience as a target of these same elements.

Sources:

Foreign Broadcast Information Service, "Report on Cuban Propaganda -- No. 12: Havana's Response to the Death of President Kennedy and Comment on the New Administration," December 31, 1963.
George Lardner, Jr., "Castro 'Frightened' After JFK Killing," Washington Post, August 20, 1997, p. A9.
Neil A. Lewis, "Documents Indicate Cuban Forces Were Put on Alert After Kennedy Assassination," @times (the New York Times on America Online), August 20, 1997.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Ballantine Books, 1979).(c) Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc. 

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