Continued.....
The conclusions of the report were that Silvia’s statement is still credible and all the more so given that she insistently maintained the same arguments 15 years later.
That same day Nicholas Katzenbach, former justice secretary under the Johnson administration gave evidence and made allusion to internal fights and poor relations between the FBI and the CIA during the period of the investigation.
RICHARD HELMS ADMITTED THAT THE CIA ASSASSINATIONS WERE POLITCAL ACTIONS
The following day, September 22, Richard Helms, the former CIA director, provoked indignation among certain congress members and shock among the majority by appearing for seven hours before the Select Committee to respond to inquiries into the effectiveness of the CIA investigation after the assassination and if he had supplied the relevant information he possessed to others. At the time of Kennedy’s assassination Helms was head of the CIA clandestine service and President Johnson appointed him deputy director of the CIA one year later. And director in 1966.
Congressman Christopher J. Dodd asked whether the Warren Commission was informed of the attempts on the life of Fidel Castro and revealed his anger at the contacts between organized crime and the agency.
Helms replied that he had only informed the Warren Commission on the matters he was asked to.
At the insistence of congress members, he stated that activities against the Cuban Revolution included attempts to sabotage electricity plants and sugar refineries, burn cane fields and multiple types of terrorist actions. He added that this was a political action that could not solely be blamed on the agency, as the president, the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the Defense Department, State Department and the National Security Council were fully aware of the plans and had approved them.
A tall man with graying receding hair and cultivated manners, with his well-cut dark suit, Helms confronted his interrogators with great aplomb and traces of good humor. His distinguished aspect did not make it easy to envisage the man who gave orders to assassinate from his office desk. Coldly, with asepsis, he spoke of criminal attempts in complicity with mafia killers.
OSWALD’S CONTACTS WITH THE CIA DATE BACK TO 1960
Another of the documents on which he was interrogated referred to the CIA’s first contacts with Oswald; even though he informed the Warren Commission that there were none, they dated back to 1960. One of the CIA memos presented stated that Allan Dulles, despite being a member of the Commission, lectured his subordinates on how to conceal the CIA’s relations with Oswald.
Helms responded to these questions evasively.
Three days previously, Thomas J. Kelly and James J. Rowley, inspector and chief, respectively, of the Secret Service responsible for the president’s protection, shocked the whole of America by stating that despite the CIA and the FBI possessing information on Oswald, the Secret Service was not informed of it.
"Otherwise we would have known what we were doing on the day of the death of President Kennedy," stated Kelley and Rowley to the members of the Select Committee.
These and other findings made the Committee reach the conclusion that there was a lack of cooperation and coordination among the distinct government agencies; that the secret service was deficient in protecting the president and in analyzing the information that it possessed. Moreover, it lacked the personnel for his adequate protection.
In Paragraph 5 it is affirmed that neither the Secret Service (of the presidency), nor the FBI nor the CIA were involved. But it criticized them for not having adequately analyzed, investigated, utilized or inter-exchanged information that they possessed on the threats surrounding Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.
The report recommended that the Justice Department should continue the investigation, because they had found evidence of a conspiracy in which elements of the Italian-American mafia had participated and Cuban-American Mafiosi groups. It was not stated that these had historically been handled by the CIA, but it was insinuated. It confirmed that it was not possible to reach definitive conclusions as the CIA had refused to decode certain information. At the same time the CIA was criticized for not having rigorously investigated these groups of Cuban origin resident in Miami.
The decision to ask the Justice Department to investigate further also took into account the fact that the filmed and acoustic evidence analyzed demonstrated the possibility of a second individual on the floor from which Oswald supposedly fired and that there was probably more than one sniper.
The report also emphasized that neither did the FBI investigate the possibility of a conspiracy after the assassination and that the CIA was deficient, both before and after the killing.
Moreover, the Dallas police, like the entire population of Texas subjected at that time to an anti-Kennedy barrage of propaganda, likewise demonstrated themselves to be incapable of protecting him. The anti-Kennedy atmosphere there reached such an extreme that in the morning of that fateful November 22, 1963 pamphlets were distributed against the president.
The most aggressive was published in a Dallas daily as a full-page paid advertisement and bore a photo of Kennedy and the following provocative text: "Sought for treason: This man is sought for acts of treason against the United States.
Even after the assassination there was serious neglect over the transfer of Oswald. The photograph of his two guards looking the other way while Ruby approaches with impunity to shoot the accused is an eloquent one. Thus the most appropriate person in terms of revealing the motives and complexities of the case was silenced. Nevertheless, the officers on duty that day were not dismissed but subsequently promoted.
It wasn’t only Veciano who mentioned CIA intentions to implicate the Cuban government into the case. It was suspicious for all the world that for a long time before the attempt the CIA had tried to identify Oswald with the island and even put pressure on a Mexican employee at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico to corroborate that version.
The accusations against Cuba remained alive until the Stokes Committee ruled them out in 1978 after making investigations in Mexico and Havana, where they met with President Fidel Castro. Mr. Azcue, the Cuban consul in Mexico who refused Oswald a visa a few weeks before the assassination, in spite of his agitated insistence, testified before the sessions.
This session made us wonder exactly what President Kennedy wanted to say when he confided to his collaborator Clark Gifford shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion: Something very bad is going on within the CIA and I want to know what it is. I want to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds.
In its final report the Stokes Committee noted that the CIA refused to declassify certain important documents. When Frank Carlucci, deputy director of the CIA in 1978 and President Reagan’s national security advisor in 1987, was interrogated in one of the hearings, he stated that they came from highly sensitive sources and had to be protected.
One of the most important and worrying pieces of evidence found by the Stokes Committee was the tape recording found in the Dallas police station in which four shots can be heard and not three as the Warren Commission established. This finding was strengthened by the statement of the wife of Governor Connally that a second shot was fired at him and not the one that wounded the president in the throat.
GUILTY MASTERMINDS AND MATERIAL ASSASSINS
General Fabian Escalante, one of those investigating the case on the Cuban side, has stated that based on information from the State Security files, certain testimonies and an analysis of the facts and antecedents, Havana has reached conclusions as to the identity of the guilty parties that are similar to those of other investigators: the CIA, the Mafia and Cuban counterrevolutionaries planned and executed the assassination. He added that having studied the descriptions of witnesses to the crime, especially those expounded by former Judge Garrison, it is presumed that the sharpshooters of Cuban origin Eladio del Valle and Hermino Díaz were those ordered to fire, subsequently escaping in a Nash Rambler truck. And that the attempt was organized by two groups, one under the control of Jack Ruby and the other by Frank Sturgis, later chief of the Watergate plumbers.
The mafia participants, Escalante continued, were Santos Trafficante, Sam Giancana, John Roselli and, to a lesser degree, Carlos Marcelo and Jimmy Hoffa.
Among the CIA plotters he also mentioned David Atlee Phillips and Richard Helms, supervisor of anti-Cuban operations; General Cabell, former deputy chief of the CIA; Gerry Hemmings and other high-ranking officials.
The scandal, picked up by the press worldwide, led to the committee instructing the CIA executive to declassify the majority of the documents, which succeeded in hushing the protests. But doing so would have been to incriminate itself.
Unable to continue its investigations, on fulfilling the Congress mandate in December 1978, the Committee made the noteworthy suggestion that the Justice Department should continue the investigative line to resolve the mystery.
It is for that reason that Carter could not be allowed to win a second mandate. That had to be prevented by provocations such as the assault on the embassies that resulted in the Mariel exodus from Cuba. For that reason, 27 years after the investigation and 42 years after the assassination, the administrations of Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush Jr., which should have picked up the glove, have not lifted a finger to assume that task.
The most important documentation on the Dallas shooting has been retained as secret in a vault in the archives of the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon, and Hill not be classified until 2013.
In the years after the assassination more than 22 people involved in the case have died in more or less mysterious form, among them the main protagonists: Oswald and Ruby.
The list has been growing since 1963. At that rate, it is unlikely that anyone will be alive to testify. And what is worse, none of those guilty will be alive. Today the shady secret is transparent to everyone apart from those to whom it should be. Because the principal protagonists have acquired a terrible ascendancy over the U.S. government. German Wildried Husimann is no more than another pawn in this chess game. For that reason he is maliciously ignoring these sources. That conspiracy in Hamburg seeks to distract media attention from Luis Posada Carriles in order to release him. Because if Carriles should fulfill his threat to spill everything that he knows, Nixon’s Watergate will appear like a scratch on the surface of the perversity that is being concealed.
See also: Who Loaded The Gun That Killed Kennedy?
.:Story originally published by:.
Granma International Havana / Cuba | Gabriel Molina - Dec 06.06
