Oh, Hey! The CIA Admitted To Lying About JFK’s Assassination, But No One Really Noticed (FLASHBACK)

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the early ’60s, John F. Kennedy forced out then-director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, replacing him with engineer John McCone. McCone was an outsider to the “boy’s club” at the CIA, and Kennedy hoped the new director might shake things up and bring a fresh perspective to the organization. When Kennedy was assassinated, McCone faced the Warren Commission as the chief proponent of the Lone Gunman theory — the assertion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

In September of 2014, 50 years after his death, the CIA released a classified document related to the investigation into the Kennedy assassination. It concedes that more than 70 percent of the American public believes Kennedy’s death was part of a larger conspiracy, and admits that McCone kept a lot of information secret that could have aided the commission’s investigation.

CIA historian David Robarge included this classified report with his biography of John McCone, who died in 1991. The biography is still unpublished, but the CIA has gone public with the report in order “to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s connection to JFK’s assassination” (according to their statement to POLITICO).

Chief among the facts that were never brought to light during the hearings were the multiple assassination attempts of Fidel Castro by the CIA, and even the mafia, which could have led to the possibility of a retaliation on Cuba’s part. Undocumented conversations took place after JFK’s death between attorney general Robert Kennedy and McCone; Robert Kennedy’s awareness of the CIA’s attempts on Castro’s life makes it difficult to conclude he wasn’t also afraid that Cuba had a part in his brother’s death. The attempts on Castro’s life were later made public in the ’70s, but this declassified document adds new background information to the commonly accepted idea that the CIA knew more about Kennedy’s murder than they told us. Kennedy At Dallas

One example of CIA obfuscation: The agency was apparently tracking Oswald before 1963, after he tried to defect to the Soviet Union in the ’50s. It was part of an incredibly illegal operation called HTLINGUAL that had the CIA opening people’s mail. It’s obvious why the agency wouldn’t want that to come out during a murder investigation. It also demonstrates a knowledge of a known threat in Oswald, years before the agency says he “went rogue” and killed Kennedy:

Max Holland, one of the most fair minded scholars of these events, has concluded that “if the word ‘conspiracy’ must be uttered in the same breath as ‘Kennedy assassination,’ the only one that existed was the conspiracy to kill Castro and then keep that effort secret after November 22nd.” In that sense – and that sense alone – McCone may be regarded as a “co-conspirator” in the JFK assassination “cover-up.”

The agency still maintains that this information is “benign,” claiming McCone didn’t think Cuba was involved in Kennedy’s death. The picture painted by the report is that he was hands-on in dealing with the Warren Commission, and he kept past actions of the agency a secret to ensure Oswald’s conviction. McCone allegedly was certain that Oswald acted alone, so he pushed that agenda.

Being that most of the CIA activity with Cuba happened before McCone’s time with the organization, it’s a wonder why he went to such great lengths to cover up the past director’s actions. The report offers no conclusive answer for that, but does hint that the Johnson administration was involved in the cover-up:

[McCone] shared the administration’s interest in avoiding disclosures about covert actions that would circumstantially implicate [the] CIA in conspiracy theories and possibly lead to calls for a tough US response against the perpetrators of the assassination… If the commission did not know to ask about covert operations about Cuba, he was not going to give them any suggestions about where to look.

The report also alleges that McCone was not conspiring with Dulles, his predecessor and a member of the commission, to cover up past deeds at the CIA. But he could.

Rest assured that his predecessor would keep a dutiful watch over Agency equities and work to keep the commission from pursuing provocative lines of investigation, such as lethal anti-Castro covert actions.

Despite withholding evidence from the Warren Commission, the surviving members of that investigation still believe that ballistic information proves Oswald acted alone. The importance of this classified document going public is that it shifts blame for faulty investigative work from the Warren Commission to McCone’s deception. The CIA also insists it had nothing to do with a conspiracy by the U.S. government to kill Kennedy. Kennedy Assassination

The lack of interest around this declassified report (there are still 15 “blanked out” areas of the statement that involve names and places, presumably for security reasons) is a sad statement about how little we are surprised that the government covers up its own misdeeds. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is a major part of our recent history, yet news that our spy agency was active in hiding the truth from a major investigation into JFK’S death seems to have become something of a passing interest.

The world loses interest, because the assassination becomes just a matter of history to more and more people.

It’s not exactly tinfoil hat-level stuff, but conspiracy theorists could argue with some merit that it’s easy to admit to a small lie in order to spare a bigger one. (And real conspiracy theorists would say, “THIS IS J.F.K. WE’RE TALKING ABOUT. HOW DID THIS NOT HIT THE NEWS CYCLE?”)

Then of course there is the worry — natural when someone finds out they’ve been lied to — that perhaps a bigger set of lies is still out there somewhere.

FR dqban22 wrote this last year, it needs to be repeated:

“Who ignore history is damned to repeat it.” George Santayana.

JFK’s “dreary account of mismanagement, timidity and indecision” as Eisenhower described his handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion emboldened the Soviets to install Nuclear missiles in Cuba the following year.

Khrushchev documents in his memoirs how Castro pleaded with him to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the U.S. in October of 1962. The telegram making the plea sits in the Kennedy Library today. Some think Khrushchev’s fear of Castro’s officers somehow getting hold of the Nuclear buttons was a bigger factor in his decision to remove the Missiles than the “blockade” (in fact, 55 ships breached it) imposed by the Kennedy administration around Cuba at the time.

The prudence of Khrushchev’s decision was revealed the following month by Castro’s second- in - command, Che Guevara. “If the missiles had remained,” he told The London Daily Worker in November 1962 “We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. We must never establish peaceful co-existence. In this struggle to the death between 2 systems we must gain the ultimate victory. We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims.”

He didn’t get his hands on the missiles but Castro emerged the big winner of the Missile Crisis. “Many concessions were made by the Americans about which not a word has been said...perhaps one day they’ll be made public,” said Fidel Castro in a speech in 1966.

“We can’t say anything public about this agreement. It would be too much of a political embarrassment for us.” That’s Robert F Kennedy to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in October of 1962.

The Cuban regime tried to obliterate New York and Washington with a nuclear attack during the October Missile Crisis of 1962. “In November 1962, the Castro brothers’ and Che Guevara’s agents had targeted Macy’s, Gimbels, Bloomingdales, and Manhattan’s Grand Central Station with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The Holocaust was set for detonation the following week, on the day after Thanksgiving.” (Humberto Fontova)

Castro has been a strong ally of Islamic terrorism. Cuba continues to serve as a base for coordination and mutual support among transnational terrorist organizations. At Tehran University he stated to the thunderous applause of students and faculty, “The imperialist king will finally fall,” (AFP, May 10, 2001). Immediately afterward the Iranian Press Service proudly proclaimed that “Iran and Cuba reached the conclusion that together they can tear down the United States.” (IPS, May 10, 2001).

According to World renown and highly respected American investigative journalist and author, Claire Sterling, : “All of the world’s emerging terrorist bands in the 1970’s were indebted to the Cubans and their Russian patrons for that honeycomb of camps around Havana. None could have started without rudimentary training, and those who didn’t train in Cuba were trained by others who did.” (“The Terror Network, The Secret War on International Terrorism.”)

As reported by Sterling, “Castro was training the advance guards of the coming European fright decade – Palestinians, Italians, Germans, French, Spanish Basques – and forming guerrilla nuclei in practically every Western hemisphere state south of the American border. As far back as 1962, Castro’s camps were taking in 1,500 Latin American guerrillas a year. . ‘Any revolutionary movement anywhere in the world can count on Cuba’s unconditional support,’ declared Castro at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana”. It was then and there that the international terrorism network was consolidated under Castro’s leadership.”

Fidel Castro “jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six. He came closer than anyone in history to starting a world-wide nuclear war.” Humberto Fontova. (http://www.carolinajournal.com/opinions/display_story.html?id=11121)

It is suicidal turning a blind eye to Castro, a deadly enemy at 90 miles south of Key West that does not hide his hatred for U.S.

After the restoration of diplomatic relations comes the end of the embargo.

To complete Obama’s betrayal of the American people, with the normalization of relations and reversal of the wet foot /dry foot policy comes the opening to Cuba of the American and International bank credits that will sustain the Cuban regimen passing to the American taxpayers the same heavy burden that helped to bankrupt the Soviet Union.

Don’t fool yourself, the hatred of the Cuban Stalinist regime towards U.S. remains the same today as 50 years ago, and Cuba was and remain a threat to the security of United. There is a Chinese spy base 50 miles of Havana and a Russian spy station in Havana outskirts. Both capable of listening or US. communications and cyber warfare.

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