JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

they could not give him a quick visa. They offered him instead the necessary forms to be filled out. Oswald didn’t take them. Oleg Nechiporenko joined the three men as their conversation was ending. For the second day in a row, he accompanied a depressed Oswald to the gate of the embassy, this time with Oswald’s returned revolver and its loose bullets stuck back in his jacket pocket. Nechiporenko says that he, Kostikov, and Yatskov then immediately prepared a report on Oswald’s two embassy visits that they cabled to Moscow Center.[139]

Thus, in the CIA’s interpretation of events, documented by fraudulent phone calls, the Cuban authorities and Soviet assassin Kostikov were working together in their control of Oswald’s address and movements, two months before Kennedy’s assassination. As researcher John Newman said in a presentation on these documents, “It looks like the Cubans and the Russians are working in tandem. It looks like [Oswald] is going to meet with Kostikov at a place designated by the Cubans . . . Oswald expected to be at some location fixed by the Cuban Embassy and wanted the Russians to be able to reach him there.”[143]

The alarming implications of the CIA’s Mexico City case against Oswald had to be faced on the morning after the assassination by the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. As a result of the public disclosure under the JFK Act of LBJ’s taped conversations, we now know how Johnson was informed of the CIA setup. Michael Beschloss, editor of the Johnson tapes, tells us that at 9:20 a.m. on November 23, 1963, Johnson was briefed by CIA director John McCone about “information

on foreign connections to the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, which suggested to LBJ that Kennedy may have been murdered by an international conspiracy.”[144] Then at 10:01 a.m. Johnson received a phone briefing on Oswald from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It included the following exchange:

Hoover says he has the proof: “We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald’s name.” Hoover knows very well that the falsified evidence of a Cuban-Soviet plot to kill Kennedy (which Johnson has just been given by McCone) came from the CIA. Hoover simply gives Johnson the raw fact of an Oswald impostor in Mexico City, then lets Johnson chew on its implications.

operations in the United States: “O.K., but I hope you are not being taken in. I can’t forget the CIA withholding the French espionage activities in the USA nor the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico, only to mention two instances of their double-dealing.”[147]

Hoover’s view suggested CIA complicity in the assassination. Even assuming for the moment that Johnson himself was innocent of any foreknowledge or involvement in the plot, nevertheless for the new president to confront the CIA over Kennedy’s murder, in a war within the U.S. government, would have been at least as frightening for him as an international crisis.

One must give the CIA (and the assassination sponsors that were even further in the shadows) their due for having devised and executed a brilliant setup. They had played out a scenario to Kennedy’s death in Dallas that pressured other government authorities to choose among three major options: a war of vengeance against Cuba and the Soviet Union based on the CIA’s false Mexico City documentation of a Communist assassination plot; a domestic political war based on the same documents seen truly, but a war the CIA would fight with every covert weapon at its command; or a complete cover-up of any conspiracy evidence and a silent coup d’état that would reverse Kennedy’s efforts to end the Cold War. Lyndon Johnson, for his part, took little time to choose the only option he felt would

leave him with a country to govern. He chose to cover up everything and surrender to Cold War prerogatives. However, he was not a...

Once the CIA realized its Mexico City scenario was being questioned and could implicate not the Communists but the CIA itself in the assassination, the Mexico City Station back-pedaled to cover up the false evidence. It began to say that its audiotapes of the “Oswald” phone calls to the Soviet Embassy had been routinely destroyed, and therefore no voice comparisons were

possible to determine if the speaker really was Oswald.[148] (This bogus CIA claim was being made at the same time that Hoover and the FBI were listening to their own copies of the tapes, then making voice comparisons, and reporting their provocative conclusions to President Lyndon Johnson.)

Thus, on November 23, Mexico City CIA employee Ann Goodpasture, an assistant to David Phillips, sent a cable to CIA headquarters in which she reported the Saturday, September 28, call, then stated: “Station unable compare voice as first tape erased prior receipt second call.”[149] On the next day, Mexico City cabled headquarters that it was now unable to locate any tapes at all for comparisons ...

extensive analysis, the House Select Committee’s Lopez Report concluded that these and other CIA statements about tapes having been erased before voice comparisons could be made conflicted with sworn testimony, the information on other cables, and the station’s own wiretapping procedure.[151] Although FBI director Hoover was angry at not having been let in initially by the CIA on “the false story re Oswald’s t...

On November 25, 1963, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach sent a memorandum to Bill Moyers, President Johnson’s press secretary, urging a premature identification of Oswald as the lone assassin lest speculation of either a Communist or a right-wing conspiracy get out of hand: “1. The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that

the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.

“2. Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists. Unfortunately the facts on Oswald...

“He came down here and told me no—twice. And I just pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City and I said, ‘Now I don’t want Mr. Khrushchev to be told tomorrow—and be testifying before a camera that he killed this fellow and that Castro killed him and all I want you to do is look at the facts and bring in any other facts you want in here and determine who killed the President.’”[154]

“Russell means [Khrushchev thought he’d get along] better with Kennedy than Johnson.”

Thus the stage was being set, four days before Dallas, for the beginning of a Kennedy–Castro dialogue on U.S.–Cuban relations. Both Kennedy and Castro, with the encouragement and support of Nikita Khrushchev, were listening to the high notes of a song of peace their governments were still unable to hear. As carefully as porcupines making love, they were preparing to engage in a dialogue on the strange proposition that the United States and Cuba might actually be able to live together in peace.

Three times he had me repeat certain remarks, particularly those in which Kennedy expressed his criticism of the Batista regime, those in which Kennedy showed his impatience with the comments attributed to General de Gaulle, and lastly those in which Kennedy accused Fidel of having almost caused a war fatal to all humanity.”[166]

“I believe Kennedy is sincere,” he began. “I also believe that today the expression of this sincerity could have political significance. I’ll explain what I mean,” he said, then gave a sharp critique of Kennedy that at the same time revealed his unique understanding of the president’s situation:

I have not forgotten the Machiavellian tactics and the equivocation, the attempts at invasion, the pressures, the blackmail, the organization of a counter-revolution, the blockade and, above everything, all the retaliatory measures which were imposed before, long before there was the pretext and alibi of Communism. But I feel that he inherited a difficult situation; I don’t think a President of the United States is ever really free, and I believe Kennedy is at present feeling the impact of this lack of freedom.

“Six months before these missiles were installed in Cuba, we had received an accumulation of information warning us that a new invasion of the island was being prepared under sponsorship of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose administrators were humiliated by the Bay of Pigs disaster and by the spectacle of being ridiculed in the eyes of the world and berated in US government circles.

also knew that the Pentagon was vesting the CIA preparations with the mantle of its authority, but we had doubts as to the attitude of the President. There were those among our informants who even thought it would suffice to alert the President and give him cause for concern in order to arrest these preparations.

Kennedy reminded the Russians that the

United States had not intervened in Hungary, which was obviously a way of demanding Russian non-intervention in the event of a possible invasion.

the Russian and Cuban governments had reached the definite conviction that an invasion might take place from one moment to the next. This is the truth.”

He asked us what we wanted. We replied: do whatever is needed to convince the United States that any attack on Cuba is the same as an attack on the Soviet Union. And how to realize this objective? All our thinking and discussions revolved around this point. We thought of a proclamation, an alliance, conventional military aid. The Russians explained to us that their concern was twofold: first, they wanted to save the Cuban revolution (in other words, their socialist honor in the eyes of the world), and at the same time they wished to avoid a world conflict. They reasoned that if

conventional military aid was the extent of their assistance, the United States might not hesitate to instigate an invasion, in which case Russia would retaliate and this would inevitably touch off a world war

Nevertheless, we were not gambling with the peace of the world. The United States was the one to jeopardize the peace of mankind by using the threat of war to stifle revolutions.”[168]

extraordinarily rapid course of events in Latin America.”[169] Castro added, however, his political assessment that “Kennedy’s good ideas aren’t going to yield any results. It is very easy to understand and at this point he surely is aware of this because, as I told you, he is a realist. For years and years American policy—not the government, but the trusts and the Pentagon—has supported the Latin American oligarchies. All the prestige, the dollars, and the power was held by a class which Kennedy himself has described in speaking of Batista.”

Castro’s view of Kennedy was changing. He had been influenced especially by his pro-Kennedy tutorial in the Soviet Union with Nikita Khrushchev. “I know,” Castro told Daniel, “that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with. I have gotten this impression from all my conversations with Khrushchev.”[172]

When Castro had hung up the phone, he repeated three times, “Es una mala noticia.” (“This is bad news”). He remained silent, waiting for another call with more news. As he began to speculate on who might have targeted Kennedy, a second call came in: The hope was that the president was still alive and could be saved. Castro said with evident satisfaction, “If they can, he is already re-elected.”[175]

Castro stood up, looked at Daniel, and said, “Everything is changed. Everything is going to change.”[176]

Chase also recognized that the pro-Castro image of Oswald was not helpful: “In addition, the fact that Lee Oswald has been heralded as a pro-Castro type may make rapprochement with Cuba more difficult—although it is hard to say how much more difficult.”[180]

New York on December 17. Attwood was simply told by Johnson at lunch that “he’d read my chronological account of our Cuban initiative ‘with interest.’”[182] “And that was it,” Attwood wrote two decades later in describing the end of “the Cuban connection.”[183] It had in fact died on November 22, 1963, with John Kennedy. It would not be revived by any other U.S. president in the twentieth century.

now believe that this hostility between Cuba and the United States is both unnatural and unnecessary—and it can be eliminated . . .

hostile action—if he will inform me, unofficially, that a specific action is required because of domestic political considerations, I shall understand and not take any serious retaliatory action.”[185]

On June 26, 1964, Stevenson wrote a “Secret and Personal” memo to Johnson saying Castro felt that “all of our crises could be avoided if there was some way to communicate; that for want of anything better, he assumed that he could call [Howard] and she call me and

would advise you.”[186] Again Johnson gave no response.

In the 1970s, Fidel Castro reflected on a peculiar fact of Cold War history that related closely to the story of John Kennedy. Thanks to the decisions made by Khrushchev and Kennedy, “in the final balance Cuba was not invaded and there was no world war. We did not, therefore, have to suffer a war like

Vietnam—because many Americans could ask themselves, why a war in Vietnam, thousands of miles away, why millions of tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam and not in Cuba? It was much more logical for the United States to do this to Cuba than to do it ten thousand kilometers away.”[189]

“U.S. Curbs Miami Exiles to Prevent Raids on Cuba,” New York Times (April 1, 1963),

Memorandum for the Record: Subject: Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, prepared by the Inspector General and delivered in installments to the Director of Central Intelligence in April-May 1967; from Section 6, “Schemes in Early 1963.” In an introduction to the report as printed by Prevailing Winds Research, Peter Dale Scott has written: “The IG Report was the result of an investigation ordered in 1967 by President Johnson, after a Drew Pearson–Jack Anderson column of March 7, 1967, had published for

the first time details of ‘a reported CIA plan in 1963 to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro.’ However, Johnson never got to see the actual report: [CIA Director] Helms merely spoke to him from a set of notes which excluded the key events of late 1963.”

“Interview of U.S. Newswoman with Fidel Castro Indicating Possible Interest in Rapprochement with the United States,” which was declassified on June 19, 1996. Peter Kornbluh posted the document as part of his “Electronic Briefing Book.”

Banister made a similar remark to George

Higginbotham, another one of his infiltrators into suspect groups. When Higginbotham alerted his boss to Oswald’s leafleting, Banister responded, “Cool it. One of them is one of mine.” New Orleans District Attorney interviews with George Higginbotham, April 12, 16, 17, 1968; cited by Davy, Let Justice Be Done, pp. 41 and 288.

United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies: Final Report (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), p. 14.

Oswald’s proficiency in Russian, by the time he met Marina, by his previous year and a half in the Soviet Union, where his co-workers at the Minsk Radio Plant had especially helped him with the language. However, the Warren Commission’s general counsel J. Lee Rankin told the commission members at a closed-door meeting that “we are trying . . . to find out what [Oswald] studied at the Monterey School of the Army in the way of languages,” suggesting Oswald received the kind of expert assistance in Russian given to the U.S. military’s counterintelligence agents.