In yet another media misfire concerning the Kennedy assassination, one encounters a Friday night piece ('He Saw A Startling Document In The JFK Files - Where Is It Now?')in the W. Post by David Ignatius in which he writes (likely for dramatic effect):
"In March 1976 a staffer named James Johnston who was investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was summoned to CIA headquarters to meet an unidentified agency representative. The man showed him an explosive document whose existence has never been revealed publicly — until now."
Woah! Until now? Why until now? We're awaiting the answer with bated breath and Ignatius gives us:
"The document said that “the Mexican government had investigated Kennedy’s assassination and concluded Cuba was responsible,” recalls Johnston, a lawyer and writer who has closely followed the assassination ever since. According to a vetting slip he saw that day, Johnston told me, this file had only been read by five other people, one of whom was Richard Helms, who headed the CIA from 1966 to 1973."
Okay, we need to unspool some layers of bullshit here. First,
as reported first in The Baltimore Sun: ('Kennedy and Castro:
What Might Have Been', Aug. 22, 1999, p. 1C), National Security
Archive records showed that starting in late 1962, JFK had begun a process
of rapprochement with Castro through intermediaries.
This portended a slow, deliberate effort to normalize all
relations with Cuba. Indeed, as late as September 24, 1963, Robert Kennedy had
informed then Deputy UN Ambassador Atwood, that JFK might be able to meet
Castro to finalize the deals, but not in Cuba, suggesting Mexico as an
alternative and a planned Mexico trip to enable a covert meeting.
Attwood, who had already negotiated the release of the Bay of
Pigs prisoners, was charged with becoming the first American emissary to secure
Castro’s ear and trust. In particular, to show good will and good faith,
Attwood arranged for $62 million in medicines and food aid as part of the
prisoner deal.
Attwood was also continually active in the spring of 1963,
securing the release of other prisoners, including three CIA operatives held in
Cuban jails[ibid] . Following each trip
Attwood was debriefed by U.S. Intelligence officials, and he always described
each meeting as “most cordial and intimate”.
ABC News reporter Lisa Howard offered herself as an
intermediary, and her apartment in New York as the venue, for the first
bilateral talks between U.S. and Cuban officials[Balt.
Sun, ibid.].
Question: Why in the hell would Cuba plan to kill JFK when he’d
already initiated rapprochement (and normalization of relations) with Fidel through discreet channels, using
William Attwood? It reeks of horse manure.
We next read from the pen of Ignatius:
"Even now, Johnston won’t reveal how the CIA obtained its information, except to say that the source was “sensitive and credible.” Johnston believes the CIA had showed him the document so it couldn’t be accused of hiding it from Senate investigators. The secret Mexican assessment was compelling because about two months before Kennedy’s death, Lee Harvey Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City seeking a visa. He went to the Soviet embassy there, too, where he also requested a visa and met with a KGB operative."
No, you inveterate dumpkopf, Oswald did NOT visit the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. The only CIA photo taken there, as reported in Military Science professor John Newman's book 'Oswald and the CIA' is shown here:
All this needs to be seen in the context of the five documents
the CIA released on Oswald in October of 1963. As noted by Peter
Dale Scott (‘Oswald, Mexico and Deep Politics’, 2013, p. 25) :
“at least three show signs of CIA doctoring and the first, which does not,
was nevertheless so misleading as to be possibly dishonest.” This was the
cable from the Mexico City Station on Oct. 8 that claimed Oswald had appeared
at the Soviet Embassy on Oct. 1, claiming he had spoken with Valeriy
Kostikov three days earlier. (Kostikov was top man in the KGB's
"Department Thirteen" - responsible for assassinations. As Scott
notes, ibid., this is why American Rightists made use of any
sources they could to try to parlay this into something to force the WC's
hand into a "phase one" conclusion. That included using Oswald's
brother, Robert.)
More sobering is Newman’s apt reflection on Oswald’s activities in New Orleans from May –Sept, 1963 (Oswald and the CIA, p. 292):
"The record of Oswald's stay in New
Orleans, May to September 1963, is replete with mistakes, coincidences, and
other anomalies. As Oswald engaged in pro-Castro and anti-Castro activities,
the FBI says they lost track of him. The Army was monitoring his activities and
says it destroyed their reports. The record of his propaganda operations
in New Orleans published by the Warren Commission turned
out to have been deliberately falsified."
Even more vexing and worrisome, is that the CIA had spies squirreled away inside the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City who could have pulled off all manner of chicanery, including altering the impostor Oswald's documents (substituting the real Oswald's photo, signature, etc.).
Oh yeah, and handing a fake “explosive”
document to Ignatius's secondary source James Johnston with absolutely no genuine provenance or chain of
evidence provided. Can you say gullible?
This is why I take most reports out of the WaPo to do with the JFK assassination with the proverbial grain of salt. In truth, the Post- likely because of its early Cord Meyer CIA connections - has been a prime mover of propaganda about the assassination. In my book, The JFK Assassination - The Final Analysis, for example, I cited the case of a deformed Dec. 23, 1991 Newsweek cover (Newsweek then owned by the Post) which fairly screamed:
'The Twisted Truth of 'JFK': Why Oliver Stone's
Film Can't Be Trusted'
The basis? The lead article by a Kenneth Auchincloss which
impudently insisted Oliver Stone was trying to "distort and re-create
history". How so? For example, claiming JFK wanted to "pull out of
Vietnam". However, just six years later, with the benefit of
Freedom of Information Act released files, The Baltimore Sun subsquently validated Stone's take with its column: Declassified Documents Hint at Plan to Bring Troops Home in 1965,
Dec. 23, 1997, p. 3A.
A subsequent book, JFK and Vietnam, by Lt. Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, disclosed this was not merely a "hint" but an actual, hands-on plan to remove all personnel by the issuance of National Action Security Memorandum 263.
Ignatius is then gracious enough to inform us:
"Johnston doesn’t have a copy of the document, and this report is based on his sole account and recollection. The CIA claimed it sent all Kennedy assassination documents to the National Archives in 1998, and they’ve been declassified and released in tranches since. With President Donald Trump’s order to release all remaining classified documents about the assassination, the Mexican report should have been included. But Johnston said he’s seen no evidence that the document he saw in 1976 has ever emerged."
That's because it was plausibly a whole cloth fabrication like those FPCC handbills given the Warren Commission, noted by John Newman. Of course there is no evidence for such a document because it contravenes all the known facts at the time, as reported in the Baltimore Sun piece to do with the Kennedy-Castro rapprochement.
Ignatius himself proclaims near the end of his piece:
"The Mexican government has never publicly stated its findings, Johnston says. As for Cuba, it denied any role soon after the assassination."
Of course, Cuba denied any role given it was already in the process of serious rapprochement with JFK's intermediaries, including William Attwood. So why the f*ck would Castro turn around and suddenly have him killed? Mexican document never publicly stating its 'findings'? Of course not given they were likely re-constituted CIA hatched codswallop.
Ignatius would be better served by researching the ZR/Rifle program - orchestrated under Helms. He would learn that ZR/Rifle was turned from targeting Castro to JFK- probably in late 1962 or mid 1963. It was all over except for the triangulation of gunfire that took the 35th president out. Who would have done it? A professional team dispatched to Dallas and basically admitted by Helms himself in later hearings. Most likely film scenario for the assassination:
The Assassination Sequence from Executive Action.
The (1975) Church Committee hearings and testimony were critical in establishing the existence of ZR/ Rifle. Former CIA Director Richard Helms -in one session - spoke to the Committee at length about ZR/Rifle. When pressed he even identified two hit team members by their code names: WI/ROGUE and QJ/WIN. He described the former as "a stateless soldier of fortune and a criminal" (Church Committee Report, pp. 43-44).
He summarized the second in these terse terms (ibid.):
"If you needed somebody to carry out murder I guess you had a man
who might be prepared to carry it out.”
More compelling still, a direct link of Richards Helms to
William Harvey and QJ/WIN appears in a February 19, 1962 memorandum from Helms
to Harvey obtained from the Assassination Archives in Washington, D.C.
Ignatius writes near the end of his shoddy piece:
“I’m not taken with conspiracy theories, and I continue to
believe that the most likely explanation is that Oswald was a lone assassin
operating on his own.”
Yet this guy didn’t even have the research acumen to check and see that the Warren Commission’s own team of riflemen could not duplicate Oswald’s alleged feat of marksmanship. [1].The rifle had to be altered away from the one Oswald supposedly used, according to the WC. The rifle sight itself was rebuilt and “metal shims were fitted to provide a degree of accuracy previously absent’.
When Ronald Simmons, the Chief of the Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch of the Army’s Ballistics Research Division was asked about this he replied: “Well, they could not sight the weapon in using the telescope” [2]. He added that the aiming apparatus had to be rebuilt by a machinist[3], with two shims added, one to adjust for the elevation, the other for the azimuth.
Looks to me like the WaPo and Ignatius have again been played by the CIA. Likely easy to do given his lack of knowledge and research concerning the case.
Other references:
[1] Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, 1964: Vol. II, p. 243 (Government Printing Office)
[2] Op. cit. p. 137.
[3] Op. cit. (Vol. II), p. 250.
See Also:
Dallas Journalists Need To Grow Up And Face The Reality of Conspiracy In Kennedy Assassination
- And:
