The JFK Assassination: A Strange and Terrible Saga Part III
Welcome to the third installment of my examination of the assassination of JFK. I began the series with Oswald's return to the United States after his alleged defection to the Soviet Union. From there I examined his time in Dallas (the first installment) and New Orleans (the second). Over the course of these two posts I revealed the curious associations LHO kept at either location: White Russians, the offspring of prominent Eastern Establishment families, World Anti-Communist League affiliates, New Age gurus, and bizarre religious orders and secret societies; and of course, the reoccurring appearance of UFOs in the backgrounds of various individuals in this whole affair.
Before wrapping up with Dallas (and Texas as a whole) and New Orleans, there is one curious link between these two destinations that must be examined to fully understand the Kennedy assassination: the drug and arm trafficking that occurred between the two regions. By 1963 this flow of drugs and arms was being driven in part by anti-Castro Cubans who had gone into drug trafficking in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion. One of the first anti-Castro Cuban groups to go down this path was the Cuban Revolutionary Council, a member of whom (Sergio Arcacha Smith) we've already encountered extensively in part two of this series. Here's a bit more about the CRC's entry into drug trafficking:
"Ever ready to try any innovation in unconventional warfare, the CIA in the summer of 1962 enlarged its mercenary army by trading embargoed drugs for anti-Castro Cubans captured during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Some members of the brigade were sent to secret training camps in Florida and Louisiana, to plot murder and mayhem against Castro; others were sent to fight Congolese rebels; and yet others to stamp out Cuban-inspired 'brush fire' revolutions in Latin America. Wherever they landed, especially Mexico, the CIA-trained Cuban Contras turned to drug smuggling to finance their operations, and their syndicate would soon join its Kuomintang, French, Italian, and American counterparts as one of the world's premier drug trafficking operations.
"Manuel Artime is a perfect example of the CIA's lackadaisical attitude towards the drug smuggling activities of anti-Castro Cubans. After his release from prison in December 1962, Artime's case officer, E. Howard Hunt, placed him in a leadership role in the terrorist Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) in Miami. Hunt certainly knew that Artime was using drug money to finance his operations in Miami, as did Hunt's bosses, James Angleton, Richard Helms, and Tracy Barnes. As the CIA's domestic operations chief, Barnes was especially well placed to protect Cuban drug distributors. He was in charge of domestic operations involving anti-Castro Cubans and the Mafia, he controlled sixty-four branch offices across America, and, in conjunction with Angleton's counterintelligence staff, he worked with police forces to provide security for CIA safehouses across America, including any in Dallas, Texas."
(The Strength of the Wolf, Douglas Valentine, pg. 305)
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| Tracy Barnes |
"Like the DRE, Alpha 66 was violently anti-Kennedy in 1963. With the support of Henry Luce and Time-Life, which is said to have spent a quarter million dollars, Alpha 66 made a point of attacking Russian targets in Cuba, in it attempt to shatter the growing convergence of U.S. and Soviet policies in the Caribbean after the nuclear scare of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. When the president appealed separately to Luce and to the exiles to cease their attacks, both rebuffed him. Alpha 66 leader Tony Veciana 'publicly snubbed the president and said that Alpha 66 would continue. If anything, the activities of Alpha 66 were stepped up.'
"Through 1963 there were reports that nuisance raids of Alpha 66, despite Kennedy's disapproval, were being tolerated (against orders) by mid-level ranks of the U.S. Navy. Indeed it seems likely that at the same time Alpha 66 was being used operationally by the U.S. Army. In 1976, the Schweiker-Hart Senate subcommittee revealed that in 1963 the army was using operationally one of the four Cuban exile groups about which the Warren Commission was curious, that the FBI knew this, and that the FBI failed to transmit this information to the Warren Commission. Reports persist that the group was Alpha 66, specifically in Dallas. The House Committee confirmed that army intelligence had 'had an operational interest in Antonio Veciana,' the leader of Alpha 66; and that Veciana had been registered with the Army Information Source Registry from November 1962 until July 1966... In This same period Alpha 66's leaders had been negotiating for the use of aircraft with which to conduct raids, with those involved in the Lake Pontchartrain training camp ... That is to say, with Frank Sturgis alias Fiorini and Gerry Patrick Hemming, the former of whom was one of six men publicly given 'strong warnings' by the Kennedy administration, in the same month of September, to cease their anti-Castro activities."
(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 254-255)
"... 'I was to obtain additional funding, I'll say this and no more, from the [crime] Syndicate out of New Orleans, for Alpha 66. At that point in time, Rolando Masferrer was the key bagman, for lack of a better term, for Alpha 66. Primarily the funding came through the Syndicate, because of Masferrer's connections with those people back in Cuba. He had ties with Santos Trafficante, Jr., and other criminal elements. Organized crime, pure and simple. He also had different ties with Jimmy Hoffa [the Mob-affiliated Teamster union leader]. As far back as 1962, I think.'"
(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pg. 333)
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| Rolando Masferrer |
Members of Alpha 66 were not the only Dallas-based individuals linked to the assassination involved in drug trafficking either. There was also Jack Ruby, the Dallas night club owner who murdered Oswald live on national television two days after the assassination. Many JFK assassination researchers believe that Ruby was one of the chief (if not the chief) figures in Texas for the Syndicate. And, naturally, his prominence within the Syndicate may have been due to his longstanding role in the narcotics trafficking that unfolded between the Tex-Mex border. What's more, Rudy was also an informant for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN, the predecessor organization to the DEA), which put him in an idea position to dictate which heroin shipments made it into the United States and which were seized.
"... Jack Ruby killed Oswald and that, as the HSCA concluded, Ruby had 'direct contact' with associates of Marcello and Trafficante...
"The Ruby family had a long history in the illicit drug trade. Jack's older brother Hyman was convicted in 1939 of buying two ounces of heroin from Jacob Klein... Klein slipped away from FBN agents in New York in October 1954, thanks to George White's intervention on behalf of John Ormento, and he again avoided arrest by FBN agents in Chicago after Jim Attie's informant was murdered in January 1960.
"Klein was luckier than Ruby's next partner, Paul Roland Jones. In October 1947, Hyman betrayed Jones to FBN agents in Chicago. According to White's diary, Hyman had been his informant since July 1946. Jack followed in big brother's footsteps and served White in 1950, when he briefed the Kefauver Committee about organized crime in Chicago – although his attorney, Louis Kutner, agreed to allow him to testify only 'on the condition that the Kefauver Committee stay away from Dallas.' That raises the question of whether Committee investigator George White, who undoubtedly brought Rudy to Kefauver's attention, concurred with this request. If so, why would White want to keep the Committee out of Dallas? Was it to deflect attention from the Pawley-Cooke mission in Taiwan, which was funded by ultra Texas oilman like H. L. Hunt, in which, and which, in 1951, was facilitating the CIA-Kuomintang drug smuggling operation that entered the US by crossing the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas?
"There was certainly enough evidence for the Kefauver Committee to take a long look at the Lone Star State. In 1951, Lait and Mortimer had identified Hunt as a professional gambler who ran a private racing wire, which suggests Mafia ties. They had also claimed that the Mafia had 'taken over the age-old racket of running guns across the border,' under the aegis of Carlos Marcello.
"The FBN office in Dallas knew Jack Ruby. Murray A. Brown, the acting district supervisor on 22 November 1963, described him as 'a sleazy opportunist who was always trying to get the Dallas cops to patronizes club.' But, Brown says, 'Ruby was not in FBN informant.'
"George Gaffney, however, vividly recalls Secret Service chief James Rowley asking him on 25 November 1963 if the FBN had a file on Ruby. It did. 'But there wasn't much in it,' Gaffney recalls. 'Just that he was a source on numerous occasions, on unimportant suspects.'
"Right after Ruby shot Oswald, Mort Benjamin checked the files in the New York office and found one that indicated that Ruby had been in FBN informant since the 1940s. But the next time Benjamin looked for, the New York file had gone missing, and Secret Service chief Rowley never returned the FBN headquarters file to Gaffney – which strongly suggests that someone did not want anyone to know that Ruby had been in FBN informant.
"Not only do the FBN agents from Dallas disagree with the rest of the outfit about Ruby's status as an informant, the stated focus of their operations is at odds with Anslinger's legendary obsession with the Mafia. Murray Brown, an agent in Dallas from 1955 until 1976, insists that the Mafia was not selling heroin there. Long-time Dallas agent Bowman Taylor agrees. 'We weren't after the Mafia,' he says. 'That's gambling more than dope. New Orleans had the Mafia.'
"The small FBN office in New Orleans, which reported to Dallas, had arrested Marcello on a marijuana rap in 1938, and in 1963 it had reasons to believe that he was a major narcotics trafficker. He was cited, for example, in the International List is an associate of Frank Coppola's. Furthermore, as the chief of the New Orleans Narcotics Unit, Clarence Giarusso, said... it was the FBN's job, not his, to investigate Mafia drug smugglers who imported drugs from overseas. But according to agents in New Orleans, they never had the manpower or resources to make a conspiracy case on Marcello, so instead they worked on Black addicts who traveled to New York and returned with heroin, leaving the million-dollar man left unhindered – perhaps to plot the murder of the president?"
(The Strength of the Wolf, Douglas Valentine, pgs. 310-312)
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| Jack Ruby |
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| Marcello |
Before leaving Jack Ruby it bears mentioning another type of trafficking he has long been suspected of playing a role in: sexual slavery. Allegations that the Syndicate was involved in sex slavery first began to emerged during the McClellan Committee (which operated from 1957 to 1960), of which future Attorney General Robert Kennedy was the chief council of. A certain "union" Ruby would have a lot of pre-assignation contact with came up in relation to sexual slavery during the hearings.
"At the time Kennedy dispatched Duffy to deal with Rometsch, Duffy had just finished assisting the McClellan Government Operations Committee investigating a Teamster-dominated union's relationship to mob-organized prostitution, and an alleged 'nation-wide white slavery ring under the syndicate.'
"The union in question was the American Guild of Variety Artists, the subject of so many of Ruby's pre-assassination phone calls. The corrupt, mob-dominated union supplied the legal fiction that the women were 'independent,' rather than the exploited workers in a string of brothels. But in fact, in Blake's words, 'girls were passed from club to club in New York, Miami, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, and Seattle.'
"Not surprisingly, the testimony pointed to Ruby's milieu in a number of ways. For example, the licensee of a strip club in Miami Beach was also an officer of Teamsters Local 320, which had been organized by Ruby's old associate, Dave Yaras, where Santos Trafficante had an office.
"Much of the testimony was directed to the club's practice of ordering women against their will to 'mix' or 'mingle' with the audience; at least one of Ruby strippers had complained to the AGVA that 'Ruby ordered her to "date" some of the customers...' Blakey does not mention this, nor does he mention the reoccurring testimony that Ruby made outside assignments for his women and took half of their earnings. He does, however, report the Ruby's former partner in the Vegas Club, Joe Bonds (alias Joe LoCurto) was convicted in 1954 white slavery.
"Prostitution, as much as gambling, invites the corruption of local politicians and law enforcement. Joe Bonds himself told the FBI that Ruby 'made women available' to Dallas police officers... No one has yet documented the rumors one hears in Dallas that Ruby's relationship to the wealthy oilmen and 'high rollers' of the Del Charro derived from his practice of supplying girls for them, their parties, and their private clubs."
(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 232-233)
Now that the drug and possible sex trafficking angle of the New Orleans-Dallas traffic has been discussed it is time to turn our attention to the arms. As has been indicated, many of the Cuban groups were using drug money (with the encouragement of US officials) to procure arms for continued assaults on Cuba and other "brush fires" in Latin America.
But when it comes to the arms side of the traffic one encounters a group little discussed by many assassination researchers: the Minutemen. The Minutemen presence in New Orleans was briefly addressed in the prior installment but it warrants fleshing out here:
"... As the alleged Louisiana organizer of the right-wing paramilitary Minutemen, moreover, Banister may have had prior knowledge of an arms cache seized by the FBI on July 31, 1963. The arms were seized on the Lake Pontchartrain property of William McLaney, brother of Havana casino operator Mike McLaney. Among those arrested were Sam Benton, Mike McLaney's go-between with the mob-financed Cuban exiles, and Richard Lauchli, co-founder of the Minutemen. The cache was for a nearby Somoza-backed Cuban exile training camp, which according to Warren Hinkle and Bill Turner had been set up a year earlier by Gerry Hemming and Frank Sturgis at the request of the New Orleans branch of the Cuban Revolutionary Council."
(ibid, pgs. 88-89)
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| Guy Banister |
Nor did the involvement of the Minutemen confine itself to New Orleans. At least one member was also assisting Alpha 66 members in Dallas. This was revealed by ATF agent Frank Ellsworth, who broke up the arms deal four days before the assignation of JFK in Dallas.
"' Mr. Ellsworth described in some detail his undercover efforts in procuring the arrest of a local gun shop owner who is an ardent member of the Minutemen. As a result of these undercover activities agent Ellsworth learned that Manuel O. Rodriguez, apparently a Cuban survivor of the Bay of Pigs episode, was attempting to purchase arms in Dallas for Alpha 66. Rodriguez is also a member of the DRE.'
"Alpha 66, one of the most notoriously violent of the anti-Castro Cuban groups, maintained its Dallas headquarters on Hollandale Street, where an early sheriff's report supposedly had Oswald paying a visit. The DRE, or Cuban Student Directorate, was in Oswald's notebook; again, he is said to of attended a meeting where General Walker spoke in the fall of 1963.
"A Secret Service memorandum dated April 24, 1964, is devoted entirely to Manuel Rodriguez, whom the Secret Service at one time had considered a potential danger to the President. On Page 2, it reads: 'On 1-16-54 agent Ellsworth, alcohol and tobacco tax unit, was interviewed relative to any knowledge he might have on the subject. Agent Ellsworth had recently worked in an undercover capacity while gathering evidence against John Thomas Masen ... for violation of National Firearms Act. Agent Ellsworth states that during his association with Masen, Masen had mentioned Rodriguez as being a Cuban who was attempting to buy arms – machine guns, bazookas, and other heavy equipment – from Masen...'"
(On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, Dick Russell, pg. 122)
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| Masen is the one in the center |
"But illegal gun dealing was not the only investigation swirling around Masen. An FBI file dated March 27, 1964, began:
"'Mr. John Thomas Masen, Owner, Masen's Gun Shop... advised he purchased about ten boxes of 6.5 .mm Mannlicher-Carcano, Western Cartridge Company, ammunition from Johnny Brinegar in early1963, and that he sold these 10 boxes to individuals. He stated he was not able to recall the identity of any persons to whom he sold the ammunition...'
"The rifle that Oswald had ordered in March was, of course, a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano. And there was more about Masen in the FBI's records: He spoke Spanish fluently, and 'during the summer of 1963 he made an extensive vacation trip to Mexico, visiting friends in various places.' He was also, according to agent Ellsworth, 'an ardent member of the Minutemen.'"
(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 356-357)
Finally, there's the curious fact that Masen supposedly bore more than a passing resemblance to Oswald.
"Dallas – In mid-November 1963, shortly before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a curious arrest occurred in Dallas. It did not seem to curious at the time – simply a young man, allied with local right-wing Minutemen and charged with a violation of the National Firearms Act. When the fellow managed to raise bond, his release received a routine okay from his arresting federal agent, Frank Ellsworth of Treasury's, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) division.
"But a few days later, when Frank Ellsworth was called to a police interrogation room to question Lee Harvey Oswald about the rifle found in his alleged assassin's nest, the agent was certain that he made one of history's most tragic mistakes.
"'Oswald was sitting in a chair about ten feet from the door,' Ellsworth would remember. 'And all I could see was headlines that I just turned loose the man who killed the President.'
"He hadn't. However, the man Ellsworth had arrested and released was, in his words, 'an absolute dead-ringer for Oswald – identical bill, weight, coloring, facial features, hair. They were like identical twins; they could've passed for each other.'"
(On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, Dick Russell, pg. 119)
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| Masen and other possible Oswald "doubles" |
Clearly, it seems that the Minutemen were active in this underground network that was also engaged in drug trafficking and possibly sexual slavery. At least a few Minutemen seem to have had ties direct ties to the Syndicate via the mysterious figure of Edgar Eugene Bradley, alias Eugene Hall Brading, alias Jim Braden, an associate Harold "Happy" Meltzer, one of the top Syndicate men in Mexico.
"There were two leads linking the 194, Meltzer Mexican connection to the assassination of the President. The first is that Jim Braden, alias Eugene Hall Brading, a convict friend of Meltzer and suspected major courier for Meyer Lansky, was picked up by a Dallas sheriff's deputy near the Texas School Book Depository right after the shooting and then released without fingerprinting. What is particularly intriguing about Braden's background, as explored by former NBC producer Peter Noyes, are his connections to a number of Minutemen and their associates, such as Loran Eugene Hall, Dennis Mower, Albert Tarrants III, Philip Earl Scheib, and Keith Gilbert, suspected in a number of assassination plots, including plots against John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King."
(Deep Politics and the Assassination of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 143)
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| Edgar Eugene Bradley |
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| William Potter Gale (top), Loran Eugene Hall (middle) and Fred Lee Crisman (bottom) |
"For whatever reason, the Warren Commission conspicuously failed to explore Frank Ellsworth's suggestion to its Assistant Counsel Bert Griffin that the Minutemen organization, with links to General Edwin Walker and oil millionaire H. L. Hunt, was 'the right-wing group most likely to have been associated with any effort to assassinate the president.' The Commission even withdrew two Commission Exhibits that had already been placed into evidence: Commission Exhibit 1053, a handbill attacking Khrushchev as 'Wanted for Murder,' and signed 'The Minutemen,' and Commission Exhibit 710, transmitting DPD reports on right-wing extremists in Dallas.
"The 'Wanted for Murder' Minutemen handbill was initially investigated by the Commission for its similarity to the anti-Kennedy 'Wanted for Treason' handbill distributed at the time of the President's visit. The latter was traced by the Commission to General Walker's aide Robert Surrey..., but Surrey was not asked about the companion Minutemen publication, an apparent example of the Minutemen-Walker connection Ellsworth had warned about."
(Deep Politics II, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 114-115)
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| General Walker at a rally for him in Texas |
"More alarming was the Warren Commission's finding that on the day before the assassination, Jack Ruby had driven a young woman over to the Hunt offices for a job interview. After Ruby shot Oswald, Dallas police found two scripts from H. L. Hunt's Life Line radio program among his possessions. The FBI also reported that the telephone number of another son, Lamar, appeared 'in a book which was the property of Jack Ruby.' Questioned about this on December 17, 1963, Lamar replied 'that he could not think of any reason why his name would appear in Jack Ruby's personal property and that he had no contact whatsoever with Ruby to the best of his knowledge.'
(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pg. 375)
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| Lamar Hunt |
Another tie between Ruby and Hunt was a local lawyer named Pete White, who had worked for Ruby a time or two.
"... Pete White... told the FBI that he had got Rudy's charge of pistol-carrying dismissed back in 1954, and that he 'ran into' Ruby on November 20, 1963, two days before the assassination... The FBI duly incorporated this encounter with White in it's chronology of Jack Ruby's movements before the assassination... In the Warren Commission's published chronology ... his encounter with White was omitted... Worse, when Ruby's roommate George Senator was asked about more than fifty names in the Crafard notebook, that of Pete White was for some reason skipped...
"Questions about Pete White might have opened of several possible connections to the underworld past of Jack Ruby, and also to the Minutemen-Cuban exile-General Walker milieu supported by H. L. Hunt and his two sons. In 1962, one of White's two partners was Ivan Irwin, formally of the family law firm identified to the FBI (by Paul R. Jones, the convicted dope trafficker and associate of Ruby) as the conduit for payouts by organized crime to local law enforcement officials... Irwin's son, Ivan Irwin Jr., was a lawyer for the Hunt oil interest, and, more particularly for Nelson Bunker Hunt..., to whose office Ruby drove on November 21, 1963, one day after seeing White."
(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 291-292)
So yes, there are more than a few possible links to the Hunt family and organized crime, for whom Cuban exiles had increasingly become foot soldiers for after the Bay of Pigs. Did the Minutemen perform a similar function for the Hunt crime family? Certainly their involvement in arms trafficking for various Cuban exile groups is a strong indication of such a scenario.
At this point a digression is probably warranted to explain my theory of the structure of the Minutemen organization. Effectively, I believe that there were in fact two Minutemen: One was the "official," overworld organization founded by Robert DePugh while the other was the "real" Minutemen, a clique within the DePugh organization that had infiltrated it. The "real" Minutemen seem to have been led by regional commanders such as General Walker and the LA-based Colonel William Potter Gale, a former military intelligence officer affiliated with the official Minutemen for decades (more information on Gale's takeover of the West Coast Minutemen can be found here). Guy Banister, a former FBI agent and Naval intelligence officer, was likely another regional head.
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| Robert DePugh |
In A Rose By Many Other Names journalist Todd C. Elliot noted that "Gun runners back then (and possibly still today) were often military or ex-military who would steal weapons from military installations, or.... a 'government reservation'" (pgs. 54-55). The Minutemen, like many right wing paramilitary organizations, tended to attract a disproportionate amount of military and law enforcement personnel to their ranks as well as individuals for whom stockpiling firearms was a way of life.
This, combined with the nation wide network the Minutemen possessed, would have made them an idea organization to use for gunrunning (especially as many members would have gleefully engaged in such things out of patriotism). The influx of military officers (many of them with a background in intelligence) into the Minutemen in the early 1960s was likely to establish regional networks for the purposes of arms trafficking. And best of all, when rank-and-file Minutemen (who almost surely had no idea that they were being used) were busted for gunrunning, they could easily be dismissed as kooks and zealots, ensuring that not a lot of attention would be paid to the underground arms traffick. But so much for the Minutemen for now.
Another far right organization in this whole milieu with ties to drug trafficking is the World Anti-Communist League (of which I've written, with a special emphasis on the organization's involvement in drug trafficking, more on here, here, here and here). As noted above and at greater length in the second installment of this series, Guy Banister and Maurice Gatlin (an attorney who worked closely with Banister in New Orleans) were both members of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, an affiliate of the WACL. Gatlin (who was also a member of the steering committee of the WACL) also had some involvement with the mysterious Swiss company known as Permindex. As detailed in part two of this series, Permindex had deep ties to the European far right (including many "former" Nazis and fascists on its board of directors) as well as another reputed Banister associate, Clay Shaw.
"CIA asset Clay Shaw reportedly joined the Permanent Industrial Exhibition in 1957. Known as Permindex, it was a construction company that built trade centers, hotels, and office centers like the Trade Mart he managed in New Orleans. Ten years later, Shaw would attain notoriety as the person New Orleans District Attorney.Jim Garrison charged with conspiring to kill JFK. He was acquitted, and as far as this author is aware, was not involved in drug trafficking. However, his company, Permindex, after moving to Rome in 1961 and reforming itself as the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, was reportedly involved as 'a cover for the transfer of CIA... funds in Italy for illegal political-espionage activities.'
"More to the point, CMC was accused of channeling funds to the drug-smuggling OAS.
In tracing the money used to finance the [July 1961] de Gaulle assassination plots, French Intelligence discovered that about $200,000 in secret funds had been sent to Permindex accounts in the Banque de la Credit Internationale. In 1962, Banister dispatched to Paris a lawyer friend... with a suitcase full of money for the OAS, reportedly around $200,000.
"Banister's money allegedly went to Jean René Marie Souetre – or someone impersonating him. A French Army deserter and the OAS representative in southern Algeria, Souetre reportedly met in the spring of 1963 with E. Howard Hunt in Madrid, ultra general Walker in Dallas, and Guy Banister at 544 Camp Street. In June, he offered the CIA a list of KGB penetrations in the French government. Souetre was also reportedly 'on the Paris in the drug traffic,' and had been followed for years by an undercover narcotics agents in Marseilles.
"In 1977, the CIA released a document, dated 1 April 1964, titled 'Jean Souetre's expulsion from the US.' In this document, the FBI explains that French security officials wanted to know why Souetre was expelled from 'Fort Worth or Dallas' 18 hours after the assassination. Souetre had been in Dallas on the afternoon of the assassination, and had been expelled to 'Mexico or Canada.' The French had some reason to believe that Souetre was plotting to assassinate Charles de Gaulle during his upcoming visit to Mexico, and so naturally they wanted to know about Souetre's movements. But the FBI said it had no information on him and, in yet another case of criminal negligence, it never notified the Warren Commission about Souetre."
(The Strength of the Wolf, Douglas Valetine, pgs. 314-315)
The above-mentioned lawyer who delivered Banister's payoff to the OAS was Gatlin, as noted in part two of this series., The OAS were a far right wing fraction of French intelligence that went rogue after de Gaulle's decision to abandon the Algerian War. More than a few OAS members would go onto join the Paladin Group, an organization founded by former Nazi commando Otto "Scarface" Skorzeny. Skorzeny, in turn, was an asset of the Gehlen Org, a clique of former Nazi intelligence assets that dominated the BND (West Germany's chief intelligence agency) for decades to come and which had close relations with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, the Eastern European branch of the WACL.
Thus, it is safe to say that the drug/arms/sex trafficking that was unfolding between New Orleans and Dallas was controlled by a coalition that consisted of US intelligence assets (especially those linked to CIA and military intelligence), the Syndicate, anti-Castro Cubans, Texas oil money, and various far right groups such as the WACL and the Minutemen. What's more, the figure of Rose Cheramie (hauntingly played by Sally Kirkland during the opening moments of Oliver Stone's JFK) indicates that these forces were directly involved in the assassination of JFK.
"... On 20 November 1963, Rose Cheramie was found on a Louisiana Road, dazed and bruised. She was taken to a private hospital where she told the doctor the JFK was going to be killed during his forthcoming visit to Dallas. Later that day, Cheramie was released in the custody of Louisiana state policeman Francis Fruge, and while Fruge was taking her to the state hospital Cheramie said she'd been traveling from Florida to Dallas with two men who 'were Italian or resembled Italians.' She didn't know their names, but they'd stopped at a lounge for drinks. An argument ensued, Cheramie was evicted and, as she stood outside the lounge, she was struck a glancing blow by a car. She also repeated to Fruge her claim that President Kennedy was going to be killed. But because she was a prostitute and a drug addict, neither Fruge nor the doctor believed her – at least, not until the afternoon of 22 November.
"On 27 November, Fruge interviewed Cheramie again, and she expounded on her story. She said the Italians were taking her to Dallas to obtain $8000, so they could buy eight kilograms of heroin from a seaman. The seaman was to meet them in Houston after disembarking in Galveston. Cheramie gave Fruge the name of the seaman and the ship. As they were on the way to Houston to check out her story, Cheramie told Fruge that she was a stripper at Jack Ruby's nightclub in Dallas, and that she had seen Ruby and Oswald together. She said she was part of a Mafia operation in which call girls were rotated between cities, and that Ruby had sent her to Miami on 18 November.
"When contacted by Fruge, the Customs agents in charge of Galveston verified that the seaman was being investigated for drug smuggling. The Coast Guard likewise confirmed that it was interested in the ship named by Cheramie regarding its role in drug smuggling operations. But the state narcotics bureaus in Texas and Oklahoma found Cheramie's information 'erroneous is in all respects,' and when the HSCA asked Customs to produce the agents she had name, and their reports, Customs officials said that neither the agents nor reports could be found.
"The HSCA let this promising lead drop without attempting to talk to Customs agents like William Hughes, who vividly recalls 'Nutty Nate' Durham as the feckless agent in charge of Galveston in 1963. Nate may have been alive in 1978, but the CIA did not allow Customs to identify him or provide his reports to Congress. The reason for this subterfuge comes as no surprise: some of Nutty Nate's colleagues on the Galveston case were CIA officers operating under Customs cover, as part of the special unit organized in Houston by David Ellis. Members of this unit facilitated the activities of anti-Castro drug smuggling terrorist groups in the US, which is why the FBI also 'decided to pursue the case no further.'"
(ibid, pgs. 312-313)
Not only did Rose Cheramie know the date and city of the Kennedy assassination, but she was reportedly aware of the exact location in Dallas where the assassination was supposed to take place.
"According to seasoned assassination investigator and writer Jim DiEugenio, on November 22, Rose and 'several nurses' at the state hospital watching a television broadcast covering JFK's arrival in Dallas when, moments before his assassination, Rose told the nurses, 'This is when it is going to happen.' DiEugenio interview two of the nurses who confirmed the account."
(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 96)Cheramie also alleged that Ruby had some type of homosexual relationship with Oswald, according to Albarelli. Todd C. Elliott, whose A Rose By Many Other Names was the first biography of Cheramie, was less certain about this claim but he did confirm Cheramie's ties to organized crime.
"Rose was considered a low-ranking member of the Carlos Marcello heroin network – which work in unison with another crime boss, Santos 'Sam' Trafficante, who controlled the Florida market, according to Lamar Waldron, author of Legacy of Secrecy..."
(A Rose By Many Other Names, Todd C. Elliot, pg. 32)
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| Kirkland as Cheramie in JFK |
"Years later, according to an anonymous Eunice source, this would become well known to several members of Jim Garrison's investigative team, who purported that the Silver Slipper in Eunice was owned by none other than Jack Ruby. It was further alleged by Cheramie the Carlos Marcello, organized crime boss of New Orleans, fronted Ruby the money to open the Silver Slipper."
(ibid, pg. 26)
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| a younger Rose during better days |
"After learning that Rose was dead, Fruge visited the Silver Slipper lounge and interviewed owner Mac Manual... Manual told Fruge that Rose came into his lounge on November 20, 1963 with two men who were both 'pimps' known to be engaged in the 'business of hauling prostitutes' from Florida to Louisiana and Texas. During the interview, Fruge showed Manual a stack of photographs and asked if he could identify the two men among them. According to Fruge, Manual selected photos of two Hispanic men, Sergio Arcacha Smith and Emilio Santana...
"Not 'Eyetalians' at all, as Rose had allegedly claimed, they were both Cuban exiles. Manual, who would be shot to death about six years later in Ville Platte, Louisiana, told Fruge that both Santana and Arcacha Smith had stopped a number of times at his establishment and that he knew both men as drug traffickers and white slavers. As it turns out, both men also had extraordinary ties to the CIA, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the assassination..."
(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli, Jr., pg. 119)Indeed. Smith worked out the same office building, 544 Camp Street, as Banister. He also had some type of relationship with Banister employee David Ferrie, as evident by the fact (recounted in part two of this series) that Arcacha Smith sent Cuban thugs around New Orleans to threaten witnesses who had come forward concerning Ferrie's various pedophilic activities in the city. And here he is, engaged in drug trafficking and possibly sexual slavery for the Syndicate (and possibly the Hunts and other Texas oil men who sought girls for their clubs).
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| Arcacha Smith |
With this in mind, an obvious question must know be asked: Who would have had the sway to bring these forces together, carry out the assassination and then perpetuate the cover-up? Based on extensive research, this author believes that there are two logical figures capable of such an endeavor: CIA counterintelligence (CI) chief James Jesus Angleton and former military intelligence officer Major General Charles Willoughby.
Let us begin with Angleton, who was the figure the Matt Damon character in The Good Shepherd was based upon. Angleton, like many of the early OSS (and later CIA men), had ample blueblood pedigree: His father, James Hugh Angleton, was a former military cavalry officer and successful businessman who became head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy in between the World Wars. Angleton grew up around the European aristocracy of Italy (and later Britain) before returned to the United States to attend Yale University. There he famously became a member of the notorious Skull and Bones secret society.
Beyond this, Angleton was also a close friend of the uber-blueblood Allen Dulles. Dulles had been a lawyer for the notorious international law firm Sullivan & Cromwell prior to WWII and joined the OSS shortly after the outbreak of the war. Dulles would become the OSS man in charge of Switzerland, a plush position due to the contacts he forged there with the Nazi regime. Eventually he was appointed to the directorship of the CIA under Eisenhower, a post he held until the disastrous Bay of Pigs debacle which resulted in Kennedy sacking him along with other CIA sacred cows such as General Charles Cabell (whose brother, Earle, was major of Dallas at the time of the Kennedy assassination). Reportedly Dulles was not a fan of Kennedy even before the Bay of Pigs thing and became one of his vocal critics after his firing. But back to Angleton.
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| Dulles |
"... As Angleton himself told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, he set up the CI/SIG in 1954 to investigate the allegations (promoted at the time by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover) that the CIA itself might have been penetrated by the KGB.
"Partly to ensure that the CI/SIG would not be too sympathetic to the rest of the CIA, Angleton entrusted it to an ex-FBI agent, Birch D. O'Neal. O'Neal had been part of a wartime FBI overseas operations (the SIS) that had been bitterly competitive with the CIA's predecessor agency, the OSS. It has been suggested that Hoover so mistrusted the CIA that he arranged for some of his FBI/SIS veterans to resign from the FBI and join the CIA as penetration agents. FBI veterans in the Agency (many of them close to Angleton) included O'Neal, (William Harvey Angleton's predecessor as counterintelligence chief), Mexico City Station Chief Win Scott, and at least one other relevant officer (George Munroe) of the Mexico City CIA station. According to Dick Russell, Munroe was the CIA's leading surveillance man Mexico City, responsible for the electronic bugging of the Soviet and Cuban embassies."
(Deep Politics II, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 5)Through the CI, and especially the CI/SIG, Angleton had the power to paralyze the Agency (and some believe that he did so during in the pursuit of his notorious "mole hunts"). Beyond this, the ZR/RIFLE program that brought together CIA assets and the Syndicate to assassinate Castro was overseen by the above-mentioned William Harvey in collaboration with Angleton. According to Peter Dale Scott in the Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, this project came to involve some of the New Orleans based Cubans involved with the Cuban Revolutionary Council (of which Sergio Arcacha Smith was the chapter head in New Orleans). By all accounts Angleton and Harvey were close friends.
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| William Harvey |
"If Hunt was close to Dulles, he was even closer to his own protégé, David Atlee Phillips. In fact it was probably through Hunt that Philips became 'an active player in a small clique within the CIA hierarchy who were almost autonomous in their operational capabilities,' an OSS brotherhood of whom Allen Dulles, inside the agency are out, was the acknowledged leader.
"The key to Dulles' 'agency-within-the-Agency'... was the power Dulles had conferred on his close friend Jim Angleton. As Counterintelligence Chief Angleton was authorized to spy on the rest of the CIA, and maintain a CIA network of assets in other branches. The close connection between Dulles and Angleton endured well beyond Dulles' departure from the Agency...
"Another move at this time was the temporary duty assignment of David Phillips, the Chief of Cuban Operations and Covert Action at the Mexico City Station, to Washington and Miami, 'from at least late September to October 9, 1963.' In view of allegations about Hunt's Counterintelligence activities at this time... it is relevant that while in Washington Phillips appears to have been attached to the Counterintelligence Staff of the Fitzgerald's Special Activities Staff devoted to anti-Castro operations.
"Then there is the much disputed question of whether... Howard Hunt was assigned to temporary duty in Mexico City for the period August and September 1963, at the time of Oswald's alleged visit there. Both Hunt and the CIA have strongly denied this claim. It is however supported by the sworn testimony of David Phillips in a libel suit that he had seen Hunt in Mexico City at the time Hunt denied being there. In a 1963 House Watergate hearing, Hunt testified how a retired CIA agent 'had during the Cuban operation been my inside man in the embassy when I was outside in Mexico operating as part of the Cuban task force.
"An even more dramatic allegation, also strongly disputed, is that Hunt was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, at the time of the assassination. According to reporter Joseph Trento, a secret CIA memo of 1966 is said to have been initiated by Angleton and Helms, emphasizing the importance of keeping Hunt's presence there a secret, and suggested a cover story to provide Hunt with an alibi. According to author Dick Russell, Trento later told him that Angleton himself was the source of the story, and arranged for a copy of the internal CIA memo to be delivered to him, as well as the House Committee. If this is true, Angleton's role is sinister, and apparently part of the cover-up whether the memo is real (and Hunt was in Dallas), or whether it was disinformation (and Hunt was not).
"Trento told Russell he understood from Angleton that Hunt was in Dallas because 'of a serious counterintelligence problem with the [CIA] Cubans,' some of whom were known to be 'penetrated by Castro's intelligence.' Far-fetched as an explanation to justify Hunt's presence in Dallas, it would make sense of his temporary detachment to Mexico City, where a number of JURE Cubans, suspected by Hunt and Angleton for their left-leaning politics, were preparing to take part in a Bobby Kennedy-backed operation against Castro. It would indeed have been characteristic of Angleton to use a CIA officer like Hunt, not nominally part of the Counterintelligence Staff, to spy on left-leaning CIA-sanctioned operations. And Hunt's animosity against the Cuban Manuel Ray of JURE, conceded by Hunt himself in his memoir Give Us This Day, was well-known throughout the Agency."
(ibid, pg. 41-43)
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| Angleton |
"In November 1963, two events occurred before Oswald died to confirm his status as an intelligence agent and his journey to Russia as part of a false defector program. Otto Otepka is a man whose name does not appear in the index of the Warren Report. Which is another of its grievous shortcomings. In light of what we are about to learn, Otepka should have had his own chapter. Otepka worked in the State Department as a security analyst in the Intelligence and Research Bureau. In late 1960 he sent a memo to Dick Bissell at CIA for information on a number of American defectors to the Soviet Union. Bissell turned this request over to James Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff, but not to the Soviet Russia Division, which had jurisdiction over defectors. Further, as John Newman notes, many of Oswald's documents from this period bear the label CI/OPS which means Counter Intelligence Operations. This would suggest that Angleton had an interest in the defector program. The eighth name on Otepka's list was that of Lee Harvey Oswald. Although Hugh Cummings actually sent the memo, Otepka originated the request. He sent it because neither the CIA nor military intelligence would inform him which defectors were genuine and which were double agents. When the CIA assigned the job to a researcher, they told her to work on some of the names, but not on others. One of the 'others' was Oswald. When the CIA sent back its reply in late November, Oswald's name was marked SECRET. It is very interesting that it is after this request from State that Oswald was finally given a 201 file. Thirteen months after his defection. One has to wonder: if Otepka had never made this request, would CI/SIG ever have opened a 201 file and Oswald? Or would his papers have remained in their private domain?"
(Destiny Betrayed, James DiEugenio, pg. 164)
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| Otto Otepka |
Angleton also played a key role in establishing the post-WWII CIA-sanctioned Syndicate drug trafficking.
"James Angleton alone possessed the coveted Israeli account; and through his relationship with Italian royalty, Rosenbaum, Charlie Siragusa, Hank Manfredi, and Mario Brod, he was certainly aware of Lansky central role as the Mafia's banker in the Caribbean – where Lansky's mob associate from Las Vegas, Moe Dalitz, opened an account at Castle Bank – as well as in Mexico, were Angleton's friend, Winston M. Scott, was station chief, and certainly kept tabs on Lansky's associate, former Mexican president Miguel Aleman. As ever, Angleton, and Lansky were the dark stars of the intelligence and financial aspects of international drug smuggling."
(The Strength of the Wolf, Douglas Valentine, pg. 373)
Finally Angleton, along with Dulles, had been one of the key figures in establishing the post-WWII European fascist underground that would use venues such as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (and later the World Anti-Communist League), the Gehlen Org, the Paladin Group, the notorious P2 lodge and other such organizations and associations as fronts. More information on the role Angleton and Dulles played in crafting this network can be found here and here.
It may well have been through this fascist underground that Dulles and Angleton first established formal ties with Charles Willoughby. William Quinn, another Dulles lackey who served in the CIA and military intelligence and who eventually became deputy director of the DIA, was apparently the one who initiated Angleton into this murky underworld.
"One was Major General William ('Buffalo Bill') Quinn, who had been Dulles's personal courier for information pertaining to the Nazi troop movements and World War II, while a G-2 officer with the Seventh Army. And the first wave of FBI émigrés into Quinn's postwar group included William Harvey, Raymond Leddy, and Winston Scott. All three would go on to play vital roles in U.S. intelligence after the CIA's formation in 1947. Harvey would become chief of the CIA's Berlin base in the mid-1950s and later, through the Cuban Missile Crisis period, the agency's Cuban task force chief; it was he who spearheaded the CIA's recruitment of organized-crime figures into anti-Castro plots. Leddy would set up the CIA's original operational network in South America, then become the State Department's officer in charge of Latin affair; at Allen Dulles's request, he would map out plans for the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954. Scott, the CIA's first station chief in London and then it's inspector general in Washington, would from 1956 to 1969 be the agency's station chief in Mexico City.
"It was William Quinn who set up James Angleton as his man in Italy after World War II. They traveled widely together across Europe and, years later, Quinn would call his old friend 'the finest counterespionage officer the United States has ever produced.' Within Quinn's group the career of Richard Helms was promoted; Helms would become the CIA's covert operations boss and eventually CIA director.
"Quinn had also pushed forward and overseas spy network aimed at the Soviets and run by Hitler's ex-intelligence chief, Reinhard Gehlen. This mushroomed, of course, through the 1950s, becoming a subject of common interest to Allen Dulles and Charles Willoughby. Late in 1956, when it became clear that a German-based Free Europe Committee of disenfranchised Hungarians and other Eastern Europeans was riddled with reactionaries, Eisenhower sent word to Dulles to disestablish it. Assigned the task of closing down U.S. refugee reception centers and terminating subsidies in Berlin were William Harvey and his old FBI sidekick Raymond Leddy. The Gehlen web stayed intact, but, by 1958, as Angleton would comment was seeming regret, many of the émigré units were disbanded, 'causing great disillusionment and bitterness among the members.' At that point those units turned increasingly to private support channels, through the auspices of men such as Charles Willoughby and H. L. Hunt..."
(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 142-143)
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| William "Buffalo Bill" Quinn |
With his extensive ties in the post-WWII fascist underground as well as his underworld connections, Willoughby had both the sway to bring an anti-Communist network together as well as provide it with black market funding. Thus, it was likely under his auspices that the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and the Asian People's Anti-Communist League began preparations in 1956 for what would become known as the World Anti-Communist League (which was officially founded in 1966) just as Eisenhower was trying to shut the network down.
During this time Willoughby became an "agent" for the Hunt Oil Company after he "retired" from the army in 1951. One of Willoughby's duties for the Hunt family may well have involved managing their collaborations with the Syndicate, a task Willoughby was not doubt well qualified for after his extensive dealings with the yakuza and the role he played in the creation of Civil Air Transport/Air America (of which the Hunts were major financial backers of). Willoughby may even have been the one responsible for bringing the Hunt family in league with Jack Ruby.
Ruby was widely believed to be an informant for FBN agent George Hunter White, who in turn was a close associate of another FBN agent known as Garland Williams. Williams served as a military intelligence officer during Korea, strongly indicating that Willoughby was his commanding officer. Beyond this, both Williams and Willoughby seem to have played a role in the creation of Civil Air Transport/Air America. Shortly after the airline's creation Ruby would become one of the chief Syndicate men in Texas, a state already well on its way to becoming a major international narcotics hub. Did Ruby get this post due to a recommendation put in by George White to Williams, who passed it along to his former commanding officer and Hunt "agent" Willoughby?
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| Garland Williams |
Beyond the ICDCC, Willoughby also seems to have played a role in establishing the John Birch Society as well as the co-opting of the Minutemen (a topic of which much more information can be found on here). The above-mentioned military intelligence officer who took control of the West Coast Minutemen network, Colonel William Potter Gale, had served under Willoughby during WWII. Journalist Dick Russell believed that the Minutemen network controlled by General Edwin Walker was also affiliated with Willoughby via the figure of Larry Schmidt. Schmidt was yet another military man with ambitious plans for the far right.
"Schmidt had served two Army tours duty in West Germany and, though he was not a native Texan, came to Dallas straight from Munich after receiving his discharge. He had already mapped out plans in West Germany for an organization called CUSA, code for Conservatism-U. S. A. By June 1962, Schmidt had signed up several zealots in West Germany inside the Military Police and the Counter-intelligence Corps. As Look magazine later described it, Schmidt 'had trained a small, disciplined band of soldier-conspirators to follow him stateside and do, he hoped, "whatever was necessary to accomplish our goal."' The goal was to infiltrate right-wing groups across the United States and weld them into CUSA, with the grand design of taking control of American politics. Schmidt planned was to gain financial support from wealthy supporters such as Dallas's H. L. Hunt family."
(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pg. 203)
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| H.L. Hunt |
Guy Banister, as a former Naval intelligence officer and member of the Minutemen and John Birch Society as well as being an affiliate of the WACL, would be a logical choice for Willoughby's network, but I have found nothing directly linking them together. Willoughby had at least one former underlining in New Orleans involved with Banister's network, however: Colonel William Bishop, who was then the CIA handler for Alpha 66 (along with David Atlee Phillips) and was posted in New Orleans in 1963. Prior to joining the CIA Bishop had served under Willoughby during WWII in military intelligence.
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| Colonel Bishop |
What's more, several of the China cowboys (i.e. Hunt, Ray S. Cline, General John Singlaub, Mitch WerBell) would become involved in the creation of the WACL (as noted before here and here). At least one of these China cowboys, General John Singlaub, may even have served under Willoughby during Korea. As such, this researcher believes that it is entirely possible that Hunt and other members of the China cowboy clique had some type of involvement with the Willoughby network.
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| E. Howard Hunt (top) and General John Singlaub (bottom), who would go on to become a member of the American Security Council, the John Birch Society-affiliated Western Goals Foundation and chairman of the WACL |
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| General Van Deman |
After his "retirement" from the army its entirely possible Willoughby took on a role in industrial security similar to Van Deman's. Willoughby had already run a highly successful political suppression campaign in post-war Japan (noted extensively here) and would become involved with organizations such as his own ICDCC, the American Security Council (of which he was an early member of as noted before here) as well the JBS and Minutemen that all kept lists of "subversives" (more on information on the JBS' extensive role in this can be found here). This would certainly be in keeping with an industrial security agent. Other figures involved in the Kennedy assassination such Banister and the Paines (as noted extensively in part one) also kept such files and lists. Acclaimed researchers such as Peter Dale Scott have even given credence to the possibility that Oswald himself was involved in industrial security upon his return to the US (as touched upon briefly in part one of this series as well).
This would also imply that Willoughby was still in contact with military intelligence as well as the FBI. He may even have been the chief agent for these agencies in relation to the Kennedy assassination as Recluse firmly believes that the primary conspirators were a cabal comprised of members of the national security apparatus (CIA, NSA, FBI, the Pentagon and military intelligence, etc) rather than one specific agency (i.e. the CIA, as many assassination researchers widely claim).
The Pentagon especially would have had good reason to want JFK removed. At the time of the assassination Kennedy was seemingly engaged in a struggle with the military similar to the one he was waging with the CIA: He had removed General Walker for attempting to indoctrinate his troops with John Birch Society literature and had booted an army sacred cow, General Lyman Lemnitzer, out of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after the Operation Northwoods debacle, as noted in part one. Kennedy had also clashed with another powerful hawk, General Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. LeMay, like the rest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, favored escalation of the situation into a full scale war and was deeply offended when Kennedy opted to go with a measly naval blockade.
"On October 19, Kennedy had a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kennedy got into a back and forth with the hawkish Air Force general Curtis LeMay. LeMay was infamous for his firebombing strategies of Japanese cities, which left tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilians dead. LeMay frowned upon the blockade option. He also looked askance on Kennedy's worry that if he invaded Cuba, Khrushchev would take over West Berlin. LeMay predicted the opposite effect: 'If we don't do anything in Cuba, then they're going to push on Berlin and push real hard because they've got us on the run.' LeMay, who was never one to mince words, then went even further. To show his other disdain for the blockade concept, the World War II veteran actually brought up something rather bizarre. He said, 'The blockade and political action, I see leading into war... This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.' LeMay was now comparing Kennedy's preference for the blockade with Neville Chamberlain's giving away the Sudetenland to the Nazis, which encouraged Hitler to invade Poland. Although not expressing themselves in such extreme figures of speech, the rest of the chiefs of staff agreed with LeMay. LeMay them brought up Kennedy's September 13 comment about how seriously he would take the Russians making an offensive base out of Cuba. 'I think that a blockade, and political talk, would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I'm sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way too. You're in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President.' To which Kennedy replied that unless he had not noticed, LeMay was in there with him. Before Kennedy left, he closed with, 'I appreciate your views. These are unsatisfactory alternatives.'
"As startling as this dialogue was, what followed after Kennedy left the room equaled it. Marine Commandant David Shoup told LeMay, "You pulled the rug right out from under him. Goddamn.' LeMay laughed and said, 'Jesus Christ. What the hell do you mean?' Shoup replied with, 'He finally get around to the word "escalation." That's the only goddamn thing that is the whole trick. Go in and get out and get every goddamn one.' To which LeMay replied, 'That's right.'"
(Destiny Betrayed, James DiEugenio, pgs. 63-64)
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| General LeMay |
"... As we have seen, one of Kennedy's chief antagonists during the Missile Crisis was General Curtis LeMay. In the recorded calls between the White House and Air Force One on its return from Dallas to Washington for the autopsy, there had always been some missing tape. Clearly, this tape had been edited. But a fuller version was located in 2011. On this newly restored tape there is a stunning request that General LeMay should be located! All references to LeMay had previously been cut. But on this version, LeMay's aide wants to locate him badly and interrupts the dialogue in order to try and find him: 'This is Colonel Dorman, General LeMay's aide... General LeMay is in a C140. Last three numbers are 497.. He is inbound. His code name is Grandson. And I want to talk to him.' This places LeMay in the air on the way to Washington three hours after the assassination. When this author interviewed the late Paul O'Connor, who was at the autopsy that night, he related an unforgettable story. He said that there were dozens of military brass in the gallery, the likes of which he had never seen. Someone was smoking a cigar. Dr. Hughes called him over and said, 'Please go tell that man to stop smoking.' O'Connor went over, and as he approached him, he saw it was LeMay. Needless to say, he was not going to tell the Air Force Chief to stop anything. If this information is accurate, then it casts the darkest aspersions over why the doctors were not allowed to proceed normally."
(ibid, pgs. 302-303)
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| some believe LeMay was the inspiration for the character of Jack D. Ripper (above) in the Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove |
Another curious move taken by Kennedy, and rarely addressed by assassination researchers, was the founding of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). In theory the DIA was formed to streamline military intelligence operations but journalist Dick Russell also speculated that its creation may have been a subtle way of stripping some of the ultras in other branches of military intelligence of power.
Thus, the forces aligned against Kennedy in the CIA (the Dulles clique) and the Pentagon (the ultras, of which Willoughby's mentor, Douglas MacArthur, was the patron saint of, as noted before here) seem clear. Thus, an obvious question is whether or not there was a direct tie between the Dulles and Willoughby cliques. The simple answer is that on some level there was, at least between Willoughby and Dulles. Journalist Dick Russell notes:
"... Willoughby's papers, on file at the Douglas MacArthur Memorial Archives in Norfork, Virginia, contain considerable correspondence with Alan Dulles. In 1955, the General had offered his services to the CIA Director. Other of their letters refer to meetings with ex-Nazis such as General Hans Speidel."
(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pg. 485n31)Note that Willoughby offered his services to Dulles shortly before preparations for what would become the WACL began in 1956.
Ties between Willoughby and Angleton are harder to come but one possibility may be the figure of Robert Crowley.
"... one of the agency's most formidable covert action specialists, Robert T. Crowley. A Chicago-born West Pointer who'd served in Army intelligence during World War II in the Pacific, Crowley joined the Agency at its inception and rose quickly through the ranks despite the fact that he lacked the Ivy League pedigree of most of his associates. As assistant deputy director for operations, he was second in command in the clandestine services directorate until his retirement in the mid-1980s. Nicknamed 'the Crow,' he was one of the tallest men to ever work at the Agency, and his career was legendary. Crowley was the chief go-to guy in the CIA's liaison with multinational corporations – the largest of which was International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) – which the Agency often used as fronts for moving large amounts of money to fund international covert operations. Intimately involved with the CIA's overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in 1973, Crowley had earned the highest regard for his colleagues...
"Two Crowley colleagues who definitely one of 'the Crow' on their 'air hose' were William R. Corson and the already well-known, mercurial James Jesus ('Jim') Angleton, the CIA's notorious counterintelligence chief. Bob Crowley and Bill Corson were 'bosom buddies,' the closest of friends and colleagues, and together coauthored a book in 1985 entitled The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power. While Bill Corson was never officially titled in the agency, his close ties to both Crowley and Angleton, as well as his many covert operations for U.S. intelligence, were well-known...
"'The Three Musketeers' – Corson, Crowley, and Angleton – thus formed a unique phalanx of 'intelligence intelligentsia', and while it might not have been exactly 'all for one' or 'one for all,' their commitment and loyalty to each other and, of course, the Agency were legendary, as was their alcohol consumption. When William Colby finally sacked Angleton in 1974, it was Corson and Crowley who devised a plan to secretly squirrel away Angleton's most highly classified, top secret files out of Langley..."
(Mary's Mosaic, Peter Janney, pgs. 348-349)
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| a young Robert T. "the Crow" Crowley |
In this researcher's opinion it is highly probable that Angleton would have been interested in Willoughby. As noted above, one of Angleton's chief tasks was to spy on the CIA. By all accounts the counterintelligence chief was zealous in this endeavor as he was obsessed with the notion that the CIA was penetrated by the KGB on all levels. So to was Willoughby, who (along with MacArthur) had managed to keep the OSS out of the Pacific Theater due to fears of communist infiltration in the CIA predecessor. For this reason Willoughby, like many of the former FBI men who also came to work for Angleton in counterintelligence, would have had an obvious appeal to the CI chief. Perhaps this was one of the services Willoughby was offering Dulles in 1955. And certainly Crowley would have made an idea liaison between the two spymasters.
There is one other curious connection between Willoughby and Angleton that this researcher encountered in John Bevilaqua's groundbreaking and mind bending JFK – the Final Solution: the Pershing Expedition.
The Pershing Expedition was a venture into Mexico between 1916 and 1917 to "capture" bandit Poncho Villa. It was led by General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, a graduate of the first class of the Army War College. As noted in the final installment of my examination of the patriot movement, the Army War College indoctrinated military officers with deeply racist and eugenics-centric concepts well into the 1930s. Another graduate of the first class of Army War College in 1904 was General Ralph Van Deman, the architect of America's industrial security apparatus.
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| General Pershing |
And with that I shall wrap things up for the time being. Now that I've broken down my suspects for the plotting of the Kennedy assassination I shall move along to two of the most incredible instances of high strangeness surrounding the incident: the prospects that mind control was involved and the bizarre secret societies and cults that hovered in the background of the assassination. For now, dear readers, I leave you with journalist Dick Russell's account of a most curious anonymous letter he received at the onset of his investigation the JFK assassination that would haunt him for the rest of his life:
"It was just as my inquiries into... the Kennedy assassination were beginning, when the anonymous letter arrived in the mail:
.... You are now part of the great game of solving the JFK assassination riddle. The danger to those involved is immense, tantamount to playing Russian Roulette... Prior to his death sometime ago I spent several days with TSCHEPPE WEIDENBACH, a famous American general who was born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1892. He was one of our foremost experts in intelligence, particularly in the Far East... An enlighten conversation...The enclosed was written in the King Edward Sheraton Hotel, Toronto, Canada almost ten years ago... On your copy one name is blocked out... You may want to research down to the name which is part of the game we can't make it too easy...
"The enclosure, on a letterhead from the above-mentioned hotel, read as follows:
YOUR CANADIAN COMPUTERS RESEARCHING THE ASSASSINATION OF JOHN KENNEDY DEVELOPED LEADS TO A MAN NAMED TSCHEPPE-WEIDENBACH BORN IN 1892 IN HEIDELBERG, GERMANY AS HAVING MASTERMINDED THE ASSASSINATION WITH THE APPROVAL. 'THE' MAN WHO COULD DO NO WRONG IN AMERICAN HISTORY?
YOUR GEN [EASY RESEARCH] MIGHT WELL PROVIDE A LEAD TO THE CLEVER MIND FROM HEIDELBERG...
"Many years went by before I found out who 'Tscheppe-Weidenbach' was. It happened by chance, pursuing a history of the MacArthur period – an obscure mentioned that Adolf Tscheppe-Weidenbach of Heidelberg, Germany, had changed his name, upon arrival in the United States shortly before World War I, to Charles Willoughby."
(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 378-379)
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