-Caveat Lector- http://members.home.net/memresearch/econ/rogue.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://members.home.net/memresearch/econ/rogue.htm";> Rogue Elephant</A> ----- There were other factors that bred resentment of the administration among members of the military-industrial complex. The president and his Secretary of Defense had craftily awarded an immense defense contract on the basis of its foreseen effects on the 1964 presidential vote. The contract for the TFX (Tactical Fighter, Experimental) appeared sure to go to Boeing of Seattle and involved $6.5 billion, an unprecedented amount for a peacetime contract. The Source Selection Board had deliberated over the contract, and the general impression was that Boeing would be selected to build the 1,700 aircraft. Yet on November 24th, 1962, Defense Secretary McNamara announced that the contract would go to General Dynamics and Grumman. Though the administration wished the public to believe otherwise, this announcement was the result of a detailed study by McNamara's staff of the voting districts populated by the workers and dependents of Boeing and its competitors. McNamara's rejection of the Source Selection Board's recommendation, and the administration posture that accompanied it, sent shock waves through the military-industrial machine and the finance community. In an April announcement, McNamara's deputy Roswell Gilpatric spoke about the decision and noted: "We can try to make a special effort to give work where it can be done effectively and efficiently, to depressed areas." Perhaps some listeners saw the political motivation behind the awarding of the contract (Prouty 1992:143-49). With both the Justice Department and the Defense Department being used as political instruments, inside observers might have wondered what might come next. Would the emerging space program, led by Kennedy, be used similarly? Might traditional defense spending be cut in favor of the recently-approved Apollo space program (which admittedly had major defense implications), a more humane (and possibly more Kennedy-controlled) way to stimulate the economy? The potential loss of military-industrial revenue resulting from withdrawal from Vietnam does not seem sufficient alone to inspire a serious plot against the President. Powerful interests might for this reason give an approving nod to such a conspiracy but would not have sufficient motive to instigate one. But Vietnam involved more than just weapons. It was also strategically important for the heroin supply. If abandoned, the area's resources would be lost. Though by 1961 the CIA had positioned itself at all points in the French heroin supply chain, it was not yet in a position to muscle them out of the business. That would require more personnel; personnel which would only be supplied in the type of conflict that men like Edward Lansdale and Lyndon Johnson had been so busy creating and promoting. If Kennedy had his way, the American inroads into the Southeast Asian drug trade would be lost before they reached fruition. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy refused to send combat troops to Vietnam. By the end of his administration, though the number of American soldiers there had grown from 1,000 to 16,000 – as a result of bureaucratic pressures outside the White House, the recommendations of Ed Lansdale and others, and the diplomatic efforts of Vice President Johnson – the president had made clear his determination to reduce the American role in the conflict. He determined in the fall of 1963 to remove 1,000 advisors. By 1962 he was cracking down on crooked CIA operatives in Southeast Asia and secured an indictment against at least one of the major players: When President John F. Kennedy in 1962 attempted a crackdown on the most hawkish CIA elements in Indochina, he sought the prosecution of Willis Bird, who had been charged with the bribery of an aid official in Vientiane.But Bird never returned to the U.S. to stand trial (Krüger 1980:130; see also McCoy 1991:168-69). If Kennedy survived much longer, many drug profiteers and their henchmen – including Vice President Johnson – would be facing indictments and prison terms. But the assassination of November 1963 was a turning point in American policy; we will shortly see Lyndon Johnson’s reversal of Kennedy’s policies, the escalation of the war, and the transfer of several American mobsters and "black ops" personnel from Cuba to Southeast Asia, where they will continue to develop America’s market share in the drug economy. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Over the years, the individuals involved in the assassination and the roles they played have been revealed in various ways. Some of them are merely implicated by the testimony of others; some have privately confessed to their own involvement or are on record plotting against the president. A select few were caught on film; fewer still were photographed in Dealey Plaza, the site of the Dallas shooting, during the very hour of the assassination. Antonio Veciana, the head of the Cuban exile organization Alpha 66, captured the attention of investigators of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) during the late 1970s by saying that his CIA case officer, using the name "Maurice Bishop," introduced him to Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in October 1963. Veciana then tantalized the HSCA staff by all but identifying "Bishop" as David Atlee Phillips, a well-known CIA officer who had masterminded the propaganda aspects of the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 (Fonzi 1993). During the HSCA investigation a film surfaced – and later disappeared – showing Phillips, Veciana, Lee Harvey Oswald, Dave Ferrie, and several Cubans on a training exercise in Louisiana in September 1963 (Hopsicker 2001:153-54). Phillips was an actor as well as a propagandist and was capable of masterful deceit both in person and on a much larger scale. Phillips was without a doubt the mind behind one cover story for the assassination, namely that Oswald was an agent of Castro. Setting up an enemy government to make it appear responsible for CIA-organized assassinations was standard practice in the ZRRIFLE program as outlined by William Harvey: "Planning should include provisions for blaming Sov[iet]s or Czechs . . ." (Twyman 1997:397-404) Phillips had no doubt done so in the past and certainly continued to do so in the future. Phillips was probably behind some or all of the many "false Oswalds" appearing in Mexico City, Dallas, and other places, who were behaving ostentatiously in ways that would suggest Oswald was planning to kill the president and/or was under Communist control. In attempting to establish Oswald’s ties to Castro as fact, Philips had the aid of the Mexican Gobernacion, or ministry of the interior, which oversaw the DFS, the Mexican equivalent of the FBI (Scott 1993:104-105). The DFS was so deeply involved in the drug traffic that in later years DEA agents would regard a DFS badge as a "license to traffic." Through the DFS, Gobernacion issued cards to major drug traffickers identifying them as agents of the government. The DFS’ chief, Miguel Nazar Haro, was a close friend of Win Scott, the CIA’s Mexico City Station Chief, and it was through this station that false reports came from Gobernacion regarding Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged attempts to acquire visas at the Cuban and Soviet embassies just prior to the assassination. In further effort to paint the assassination as a Communist conspiracy, Phillips attempted to bribe one of Antonio Veciana’s relatives, a Cuban official in Mexico City, to say that Oswald had contacted him while there (Twyman 353). There is fascinating evidence that at least one faction within the CIA was aware of the assassination plot and tried to foil it, whether to prevent an international incident or to save the life of the President, it is not clear. Though he feared for his safety and would not speak straightforwardly about it, CIA agent Richard Case Nagell implied over many years that a Soviet "mole" in the CIA - along with CIA officer Tracy Barnes - sent Nagell first to infiltrate the Banister-Ferrie organization in New Orleans and then to assassinate Oswald and thus stall the plot against JFK. Nagell indeed investigated the Louisiana team which was setting Oswald up, but ultimately refused to kill Oswald. Nagell's handlers could only do so much to compensate without risking exposure; thus the plot went forward. The evidence that Nagell was able to produce is compelling. His story is extremely complicated and cannot be done justice in any less than several pages, which space is not available here. The fullest account ever assembled and published is Dick Russell's The Man Who Knew Too Much. The New Orleans chapter of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) was at the center of Oswald's New Orleans activities, during which his credentials were established as a Castro supporter. The CRC was crucial to setting up Oswald as the fall guy. The CRC's New Orleans chapter was led by the Cuban exile Sergio Arcacha-Smith and received funding from local mob boss Carlos Marcello through David Ferrie, Arcacha-Smith's partner and Marcello's legal researcher (North 1991:56). Their office was at 544 Camp Street, which was also in the same building as Guy Banister’s offices and by no coincidence also the address which Oswald once had printed on his pro-Castro leaflets. Carlos Bringuier, a Cuban who picked a street fight with Oswald and later debated with him on WDSU-TV, had been the CRC's secretary for publicity. For Bringuier, the CRC’s propagandist, Oswald was not in fact an adversary, but a public image project. With the help of Banister and Bringuier, Oswald raised the public profile of what was in reality a one-man, unauthorized chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). The FPCC was at the time a national organization regarded as subversive in some circles in the federal government. It is likely that Oswald thought he was building an intelligence "legend" that would enable him to infiltrate the FPCC, when he was in fact being set up as a pro-Castro patsy. After his pro-Castro credentials were established in New Orleans, Oswald moved into the Dallas orbit of Jack Ruby, a member of the weapons-smuggling network with which Ferrie and Banister were associated. Another of Tracy Barnes' agents was Robert Morrow, who was instructed by Barnes to purchase four 7.35 mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifles and modify them so that they could be easily broken down and reassembled. Morrow did so and delivered three of them to David Ferrie, who said they were for use against a "head of state." Morrow is certain that they were used in Dallas, as were the radios he created for Ferrie's compatriot Eladio del Valle. Some time after receiving the equipment, del Valle phoned Morrow to tell him that it would be put to use soon: Kennedy was about to "get it" in Dallas (Morrow 1993). An FBI informant had overheard a discussion earlier that year in which Cuban exiles discussed that there would be "snipers firing from several different points [and] a main signal would have to be given. . . .What you do is have something - a street sign, anything - and a guy standing beside it takes his hat off. He's telling you that your target's right on the money." (Russell 1992:410-415) Movies and photos of the assassination scene show that at the time of the first shot, a man is standing next to the presidential limousine and under a sign reading "Stemmons Freeway - Keep Right." The man does not remove a hat, but instead waves an open umbrella. After the shooting, he sits down on the sidewalk with the man who had been standing next to him. The second man appears to be holding a radio and has the unmistakable profile of CIA anti-Castro operative Gordon Novel (DiEugenio 1992). Immediately after the shooting in Dealey Plaza, some of the witnesses had rushed to the grassy knoll in pursuit of a gunman there. Deputy Sheriff Seymour Weitzman was the first officer to scale the fence, and he encountered Cuban Revolutionary Council member and Cuban exile leader Bernard Barker, who showed phony Secret Service credentials and told him that everything was under control. Beginning in June 1972, Weitzman ended up in at least three federal rest homes after having a nervous breakdown, possibly as a result of recognizing Barker in news coverage of the Watergate break-ins. Barker, a long-time associate of Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis from the anti-Castro operations of the early 1960s until the Watergate arrests of 1972, was identified by Weitzman from photographs shown to him (Weberman and Canfield 1992:56-57). About one half-hour after the shooting, men in Dallas Police uniforms pulled three tramps from a railcar behind the Texas School Book Depository. Though they were presumably booked by the police, there was no record of their arrest. But several photographs of the three men, commonly known as the "tramp photos," remain. It is clear that one of the three is none other than CIA officer Howard Hunt, a close associate of David Atlee Phillips, with whom he worked in the both the CIA’s Guatemalan campaign of 1954 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Hunt would later be arrested for his role in the Watergate affair. Though the identity of the other two "tramps" remains a controversy, this author is convinced that they are Texas hit man Charles Harrelson (father of actor Woody Harrelson) and Sam Giancana’s assistant Richard Cain. High on cocaine while being arrested for the murder of a federal judge several years later, Harrelson confessed to having been involved in the assassination of the president (Marrs 1989:333-337). In one photograph, a man is shown walking past the three in the opposite direction. This man was independently identified as Edward Lansdale by two men who knew Lansdale well (Twyman 1997:540). Howard Hunt has denied being in Dallas on the day of the assassination and has even brought suit against those who have published literature identifying him as one of the tramps. But he has been unable to establish a credible alibi, and one witness placed Hunt in Dallas on the previous day. In one of Hunt's libel suits, one Marita Lorenz gave sworn testimony that Lee Harvey Oswald, American mercenaries Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming, and Cuban exiles including Orlando Bosch, Pedro Diaz Lanz, and the brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampol, had met one November midnight in 1963 at the Miami home of Orlando Bosch and had studied Dallas street maps. She also swore that she and Sturgis were at that time in the employ of the CIA and that they received payment from Howard Hunt under the name "Eduardo," an a lias which Hunt is known to have used in his dealings with Cuban exiles. After studying the maps, she and the men departed for Dallas in two cars, taking a load of handguns, rifles, and scopes in the follow-up car. They arrived in Dallas on 21 November 1963, and stayed at a motel, where the group met Howard Hunt. Hunt stayed for about forty-five minutes and at one point handed an envelope of cash to Sturgis. About an hour after Hunt left, Jack Ruby came to the door. Lorenz says that this was the first time she had seen Ruby. By this time, she said, it was early evening. In her testimony, Lorenz identified herself and her fellow passengers as members of Operation Forty, the CIA-directed assassination team formed in 1960 in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion. She described her role as that of a "decoy." The group blamed Kennedy for the failure at the Bay of Pigs and conspired to kill him, she said. Knowing that something more sinister than gun-running was involved, she left the group about two hours after Ruby's visit and returned to Miami. Sturgis, she said, later told her that she had missed out on the group's killing of Kennedy (Lane 1991). An article written by former CIA officer Victor Marchetti appeared in the 14 August 1978 edition of The Spotlight, a Washington newspaper. In this article, Marchetti alleged that a decision had been made that March by the CIA to make a limited admission of CIA involvement in the assassination. According to "sensitive sources in the CIA and on HSCA [House Select Committee on Assassinations]," some of the minor figures in the conspiracy were to be exposed. Chief among these was to be Howard Hunt, then a major figure in the relatively recent Watergate scandal. Also allegedly marked for exposure were Gerry Hemming, a long-time Cuba mercenary, and Frank Sturgis, one of Hunt's fellow Watergate burglars. Jim Hicks told New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that he had been at Dealey Plaza as the radio coordinator for the gunmen (Groden and Livingstone 1989:213). Corroborating Hicks' own claims, CIA contract agent Robert Morrow recognized one of four radios he bought for Cuban exile Eladio del Valle in a photograph taken at Dealey Plaza that day. Though he did not name Hicks, Morrow described a photograph similar to one in which a small radio is seen protruding from the back pocket of a man fitting Hicks' description (Russell 1992:537). The Giancana biography also supports Hicks' story that the communications center for the assassination was in the Adolphus Hotel, across the street from Jack Ruby's night club, where high-level CIA officials were present (Giancana 1992:335). Hicks was taken to a military mental institution after talking to the authorities about his role and was kept there until his 1988 release, shortly after which he was murdered (Groden and Livingstone 1989:213). Critics of conspiracy theories regarding Kennedy's death point to the difficulty of getting the cooperation of several local and federal agencies in any undertaking; such critics reason that the orchestration of a criminal cover-up in such a manner would be nearly impossible. Ironically, it may have been not a criminal conspiracy but rather the efforts of JFK's own brother Bobby which provided the means for one element of the cover-up. As a contingency plan for possible violence against high-level U.S. officials as retaliation by Castro for plots on his life, Bobby and those close to him had decided that all information and evidence in an assassination of a public figure should be tightly controlled to reduce the possibility of speculation of Cuban responsibility. Such speculation could, of course, have sparked an international incident and this was something the Kennedys became increasingly wary of after the Cuban Missile Crisis. This well-documented contingency plan, discussed by researchers Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann on the A&E video production The Men Who Killed Kennedy, goes a long way to explain some of the events immediately following Kennedy's death, such as the illegal pre-autopsy removal of the president's body from Parkland Hospital and the manner in which the autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. After that, the Dallas authorities and conspiratorial or misguided elements in Hoover's FBI, led by Hoover himself, buried whatever evidence came up to threaten the official story. Thus we see that allegations of an official cover-up do not have to be as simple (and implausible) as to suppose that the conspiracy had to have been coordinated from the beginning by unified FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Dallas authorities. Oswald's pro-Castro cover as an FBI informant and his former espionage mission to Russia were exploited to paint him as a subversive; this image of Oswald, along with attempts by the conspirators to link the assassination to Castro, was a deliberate ploy. The presence of Cuban gunmen at Dealey Plaza and Oswald's alleged trip to the Russian and Cub an embassies in Mexico City in September were meant to point in Castro's direction. This ruse was meant - by the extreme right-wing element among the conspirators - to place the blame on the Communists (particularly Castro) and to provoke a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Theories that the assassination was really an act of revenge masterminded by Castro persist to this day; it is possible that the cover-up will continue as long as Castro is alive. It is only in recent years that the Assassination Records Review Board (created largely in response to public pressure which followed the release of Oliver Stone's film, JFK) has released documents several decades old which show that Castro's military went on alert following the assassination; apparently Castro was caught off-guard and feared that the assassination would be blamed on Cuba and that the U.S. would invade (Lewis 1997). In addition to having spent a year and a half at the controls of the CIA’s Cuban assassination machine, Edward Lansdale had proven himself in the Philippines and Vietnam to be a master magician, able to falsify events on the grandest scale. He, more than anyone else, would have been the man able to organize the assassination and the diversion of blame in Dallas. It may have been his sleight-of-hand that caused the President’s body to disappear long enough for military surgeons to alter it prior to the official autopsy (Lifton 1980). As the Kennedys’ man in charge of all Cuba operations, Lansdale would have known about the contingency plans which Robert Kennedy had put in place and which would have provided for just such an arrangement; William Harvey was likely to have known as well. In fact, such plans would have been difficult to prepare without word leaking to the administration’s enemies in the CIA, who had informants among the Secret Service. Once the plans were discovered, they would have been easy to exploit. Jack Ruby’s complicity in the assassination could not be hidden. As well as shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, Ruby had many other roles that weekend. After having been observed dropping off a gunman at the grassy knoll and possibly remaining to witness the assassination from the Dealey Plaza offices of the Dallas Morning News, he was seen at Parkland Hospital not long after the arrival of Kennedy's body, where someone planted a rifle slug on President Kennedy’s stretcher (Groden and Livingstone 1989:102,228,339). Ruby's next destination after the hospital may have been the Texas Theatre. Local resident George Applin sat six rows from the rear of the theater and was present as the Dallas Police made their arrest of Oswald. Applin told the Dallas Morning News in 1979 that he had seen Jack Ruby sitting in the back row that day watching as Oswald was arrested, though Applin suggested to Ruby that it would be safer for Ruby to move away (Marrs 1989:352). As the police closed in on Oswald, Assistant District Attorney Bill Alexander waited with several others at the back door, hoping to shoot Oswald in an attempt to flee the theater (Craig; Groden and Livingstone 1989:204). They were disappointed, for Oswald did not try to run. Two witnesses, including the one who had tipped off the police to Oswald's conspicuous entrance into the theater, insisted that they heard the authorities clearly indicate that Oswald was the President's assassin, though less than an hour had passed since the shooting (Marrs 1989:352). Some time during the day, Ruby made a trip to the bank, having suddenly freed himself from chronic financial troubles. He had owed the IRS almost $40,000, but he had $7000 in cash, half of which was found on him the Sunday morning following the Friday assassination. Some reports said that the trunk of his car was full of money (Groden and Livingstone 1989:241). At a midnight press conference at Dallas Police headquarters twelve hours after the assassination, he shouted out a correction to a statement identifying Oswald as a member of the "Free Cuba Committee," an anti-Castro organization. Ruby called out, "That's [the] Fair Play for Cuba [Committee], Henry," identifying Oswald with the pro-Castro organization in the name of which Oswald had distributed leaflets and made television appearances in New Orleans that summer (Scott 1993:161). Ruby knew Oswald, despite the government’s denials that this was the case, and even more significantly, he knew that Oswald’s part in the conspiracy was to be the pro-Castro patsy. The following day, Ruby met with Bill Alexander, whose task force at the Theatre had failed to dispose of Oswald (Groden and Livingstone 1989:120). The responsibility had now fallen to Ruby, who would have to kill Oswald during the transfer from police headquarters to the jail, or else there would be consequences coming from his Syndicate superiors which would be more terrible than a court-administered death penalty. That night, Ruby made an anonymous call to Dallas Police Officer Billy Grammer, threatening that if Oswald were moved as planned the next morning, "we will kill him." Ruby was either trying to get out of the assignment, hoping that the anonymous threat would result in a change of plans, or perhaps he was trying to manipulate the police into a situation that would somehow simplify the job (Marrs 1989:417). On the morning of November 24th, 1963, Ruby went to wire some money to Karen Bennett Carlin, an employee who was out of town and hard up. He then showed up at the nearby Dallas Police Headquarters one hour after Oswald's scheduled transfer, but apparently the police had delayed the transfer while waiting for him. He shot Oswald at the police station on live national television; he was immediately arrested and jailed. When Officer Don Archer brought him the news that Oswald was dead, and that Ruby would probably get the electric chair for it, Ruby seemed greatly relieved at the news, as though his life had depended on it (Marrs 1989:423-24). Rose Cheramie, a heroin addict, had been thrown from a moving vehicle by two men while on a drug pickup for Jack Ruby. On a trip from Florida to Texas in November 1963, she was left for dead in Louisiana and told hospital staff about the President’s impending assassination in Dallas (DiEugenio 1992:25-26). Jack Ruby, as mentioned previously, was a major figure in the drug trade, operating from both Dallas and Miami. But the Warren Commission, the 1964 panel appointed by President Johnson to issue an official report on Kennedy’s death, actively assisted Hoover’s FBI in obscuring Ruby’s organized crime connections, particularly with regard to narcotics trafficking. The Warren Commission had in its possession an FBI report linking Ruby to convicted narcotics trafficker Joseph Civello. In Contract on America, David Scheim points out a significant difference between the FBI report as it appears in the Commission’s published exhibits (Commission Exhibit 1536) and the report as originally written and stored among the Commission’s documents in the National Archives (Commission Document 84). The field report, filed by Special Agents Donald F. Hallahan and Thomas G. McGee on November 27, 1963 records the statement of one Bobby Gene Moore, a man then living in Oakland who had known Ruby in Dallas. Moore had seen a television interview in which one of Ruby’s associates asserted that Ruby had no connections to any gangsters. Moore wanted to go on record as having observed Ruby frequenting a gambling operation which took place in the liquor store attached to Moore’s rooming house. This much appears in Commission Exhibit 1536. The next three paragraphs of the report, however, were blanked out in CE 1536 in a way that one would not have known that those three paragraphs were even missing. The copy of the report as seen in Commission Document 84 – the version withheld from the public – goes on to say that Mr. Moore also worked for Joseph "Cirello" and Frank La Monte, handling imported Italian cheese. Based on the fact that Moore was not allowed to open certain shipments, he suspected that "Cirello" was importing narcotics. Furthermore, Jack Ruby was a frequent visitor and associate of Moore’s bosses, "Cirello" and La Monte. Moore then goes on to name two law officers who were regular patrons at the liquor store and were probably involved in the gambling operation and a municipal judge into whose car Moore was frequently requested by "Cirello" and La Monte to "put hams and other food stuffs." "Cirello" was of course Joseph Civello, who had been convicted on narcotics charges in the 1930s and was suspected by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to been a major trafficker in 1957 (Scott 1993:129). This incident of censorship not only demonstrates dishonesty by the Warren Commission but also shows the FBI’s habit of misspelling sensitive names (see also Scott 1993:207,341). The HSCA’s official investigation of the President’s murder made note that Jack Ruby was in contact with Teamster hit men Lenny Patrick and David Yaras throughout late 1963; the Warren Commission was aware that in the weeks before the assassination Ruby contacted convicted Teamster organizer Barney Baker, who in turn had called David Yaras in Florida on the night before the assassination (Scott, 1993:163). Ruby’s sister told the FBI of Ruby’s strong connections to Patrick and Yaras, but the Bureau misspelled Yaras’ name as "YERES." (Groden and Livingstone 1989:254). Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa had dreamed of assassinating Robert Kennedy to relieve the pressure brought on him by the Justice Department (Scheim 1983:86-87). Records of the FBI and the House Select Committee on Assassinations record that Hoffa discussed an assassination plan remarkably similar to the one eventually perpetrated in Dallas. Having been unceremoniously dumped in the Central American wilderness by immigration officials, New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello was infuriated and swore revenge on Bobby Kennedy. However, he spoke aloud his belief that the only way to stop Bobby Kennedy was to get rid of Jack. In September 1962, he made known his intention to assassinate the President. He was still facing deportation in 1963 and was in a court hearing with his legal assistant Dave Ferrie on the morning of the assassination. On his deathbed, Santos Trafficante expressed disagreement with Marcello’s solution. He told his lawyer, "Carlos f---ed up. . . . We shouldn't have killed Giovanni [Italian for 'John']. We should have killed Bobby." (Ragano and Raab 1994:348) Sam Giancana confided in his brother that his fellow crime bosses and elements in the CIA and military worked together to assassinate the President, with Texas oilmen paying for the murder (Giancana 1992: 329-332). This is corroborated by Lyndon Johnson’s mistress, Madeline Brown, who said that after she confronted LBJ about the rumors of his guilt in the assassination, Johnson became very angry and said that it had been done by the "oil people" and the CIA (Twyman 1997:851). The assassination’s ties to the oil industry go beyond the oil barons who paid for the hit. One of Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA handlers was oil-company geologist George DeMohrenschildt, who had many influential contacts and friends in the industry, including George Herbert Walker Bush and Jean De Menil, as mentioned previously. DeMohrenschildt was also familiar with Sam Giancana. The Texas wells services contractor Brown and Root (a large contractor involved in clandestine warfare, narcotics trafficking and offshore drilling) is a firm known to cooperate with the CIA; the Kennedy threat to the CIA-Mafia-Oil industry smuggling ring was a threat to Brown and Root. Brown and Root clearly benefited from the assassination, having been the number one power behind Lyndon Johnson’s political ascent and one of the greatest beneficiaries of his continued power and his escalation of the Vietnam conflict as soon as he was reelected in 1964 (Caro 1982). Brown and Root was awarded the contract for the dredging of Camh Rahn Bay. George Brown was also seen at the previously-mentioned gathering on the eve of the assassination. Gary Underhill was one of many former intelligence personnel who was "suicided" after proving unable to bear the strain of carrying the Agency’s dark secrets. He was close to many high officials in the military and CIA and was a former military affairs editor for Life magazine. On the day of the assassination and a few months before his own death, he frantically told friends that his life was in danger: Charlene Fitzsimmons realized something was wrong with the usually rational and objective Underhill. But Underhill instisted he had not been drinking. It was the Kennedy assassination, he explained. It was not what it seemed to be. "Oswald is a patsy. They set him up. It’s too much. The bastards have done something outrageous. They’ve killed the President! I’ve been listening and hearing things. I couldn’t believe they’d get away with it, but they did!" Charlie did not know what he was talking about. Who were "they"? "We, I mean the United States. We just don’t do that sort of thing! They’ve gone mad! They’re a bunch of drug runners and gun runners – a real violence group. God, the CIA is under enough pressure already without that bunch in Southeast Asia. Kennedy gave them some time after the Bay of Pigs. He said he’d give them a chance to save face." He could tell that Charlie did not believe him. "They’re so stupid," he continued. "They can’t even get the right man. They tried it in Cuba and they couldn’t get away with it. Right after the Bay of Pigs. But Kennedy wouldn’t let them do it. And now he’d gotten wind of this and he was really going to blow the whistle on them. And they killed him!" (DiEugenio 1992:28) This account echoes Sam Giancana’s description of the involvement of American "military brass" from Asia and reinforces the suspicion that the assassination was carried out with a view toward clearing the way for greater U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and thereby the restructuring of that region’s drug trade. The Underhill account identifies the Kennedy conspirators with both the Agency’s ZRRIFLE assassination program and its Southeast Asian operations. One man involved at the highest levels in both areas was Edward Lansdale. Another was Desmond Fitzgerald, who in 1962 left his assignment as the CIA’s head of Far Eastern operations to replace William Harvey as head of the Cuba task force. Fitzgerald took many members of his Far Eastern staff with him on the Cuba assignment. On the day of the Kennedy assassination, Fitzgerald was in Paris meeting with a Cuban agent, code-named AMLASH, whose mission was to assassinate Castro. Desmond Fitzgerald was personally close to Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City, where Fitzgerald often traveled in 1962-63 (Russell 1992:241-42). The first National Security Action Memorandum issued by President Johnson was finalized only two days after President Kennedy’s death and had probably been drafted before that time in anticipation of the President’s demise. NSAM 273 of November 24, 1963, according to General Maxwell Taylor, "ma[de] clear the resolve of the President to ensure victory." But Johnson would not escalate the conflict until making it past the next November’s elections: "At a White House reception on Christmas eve, a month after he succeeded to the presidency, Johnson told the Joint Chiefs: ‘Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.’" (Scott 1993:32) Johnson’s first full term of office began in January 1965. That year, Ed Lansdale went to Vietnam as Senior Liaison Officer of the U.S. Mission to South Vietnam. The years 1965 and 1966 were enormous landmarks for CIA involvement with Southeast Asian heroin. The CIA-mafia alliance moved many of its former Cuba operatives to Southeast Asia. By 1965, a power-hungry Laotian general named Ouane Rattikone was "on a big move . . . to consolidate the opium business" and had cut the Corsican transport pilots out of the picture, leaving Air America as the only alternative (McCoy 1972:301,362-63). From that point on, General Ouane was "the principal overseer of the shipment of opium out of the Golden Triangle via Air America" (Chambliss 1988a) as the CIA-owned airline began picking up the Hmong opium in the hills and flying it to Long Tieng and Vientiane, the political capital of Laos. The business developed, and as time went on the opium was transported aboard Air America from remote airfields in Laos, Burma, and Cambodia to marketplaces and refineries in cities such as Bangkok, Hong Kong, Vientiane, and Saigon. The CIA headquarters for secret operations in northern Laos came to share the city of Long Tieng with a heroin-refining laboratory which General Vang Pao opened in 1970 (McCoy 1972). Russell Bintliff, former special agent of the Army's Criminal Intelligence Command, discovered that with U.S. government financing, Pepsi-Cola set up a plant in Vientiane which "never produced a single bottle. . . . It was for processing opium into heroin." (Scheim 1983:274). Other sources say the plant (which began construction in 1965 and stood for several years unfinished) was used as a cover for purchases of chemicals vital to heroin processing (McCoy 1972:186). From there, the CIA's mafia associates took over and shipped the end product, heroin, into the U.S. for sale. Pepsi-Cola had other peripheral links to the drug trade: The major organizer of the opium and heroin traffic in Southeast Asia was a Chinese businessman from Laos by the name of Huu Tin Heng, who organized the Chiu Chow syndicate. Huu was, among other things, the Laotian manager of the Pepsi-Cola company. The president of Pepsi-Cola has been one of Richard Nixon’s long-time and most important friends and supporters. In return, Pepsi-Cola has received substantial help from Nixon, such as monopoly franchises in foreign countries, including a franchise on the Soviet Union market (Chambliss 1979). In the early 1960s, Pepsi-Cola had interest in removing Fidel Castro from Cuba due to his disruption of the company’s business in buying Cuban sugar. Richard Nixon cited business with Pepsi-Cola as being the reason for his presence in Dallas on the day of President Kennedy’s murder, but his alibi did not check out (Marrs 1989:270) ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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