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

by James W. Douglass

When she complained to Banister about Oswald’s pro-Castro demonstrating, Banister said not to worry about him, “He’s with us, he’s associated with the office.”[45]

Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC),

“propaganda and information.”[51] In

The CIA has been feeding americans propaganda to achieve their own agendas foe decades- agendas sometimes at odds with the president/congress.

that Oswald was on the same payroll, “employed by the F.B.I. at $200 per month from September of 1962 up to the time of the assassination,”[56]

The January 27 meeting’s transcript is a revelation of how Allen Dulles, one of the master plotters of the Cold War and by logic a prime suspect in JFK’s murder, kept a bemused composure while guiding the circle of distinguished elders through the cover-up.

Oswald seems to have been working with both the CIA and the FBI. For the CIA, he was acting as a provocateur, subverting the public image of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. As we shall see, Oswald was also being drawn into the plot to kill the president, in which his activities as a pro-Castro demonstrator were preparing the ground for his role as the assassination scapegoat.

Through Oswald, whose Cuban connection would be further dramatized in the days ahead, Castro could become the larger assassination scapegoat, thereby justifying an invasion of Cuba in retaliation for its apparent murder of a president who had pledged personally not to invade Cuba.

While adhering to his promise to Khrushchev not to launch a U.S. invasion of Cuba, Kennedy nevertheless agreed to a modified version of the covert-action campaign against Cuba that he had endorsed as Operation Mongoose in November 1961.

For the remaining five months of his life, John Kennedy continued a policy of sabotage against Cuba that he may have seen as a bone thrown to his barking CIA and military advisers but was in any case a crime against international law. It was also a violation of the international trust that he and Nikita Khrushchev had envisioned and increasingly fostered since the missile crisis. Right up to his death, Kennedy remained in some ways a Cold Warrior, in conflict with his own soaring vision in the American University address.

Sixteen years later, after Veciana did finally describe the Oswald meeting to the House Committee and came to the very edge of identifying David Atlee Phillips as “Maurice Bishop,” he was shot in the head by an unidentified gunman in Miami.

What one is confronted with in the October 9 cable is an apparently damning connection between Oswald and a KGB assassination expert, but a connection made by a man impersonating Oswald.

After the assassination, the CIA used its dormant Mexico City documents to link the accused assassin Oswald with the KGB’s Kostikov.

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. Hoover’s own reaction to the CIA’s Mexico City subterfuge was recorded seven weeks later, when he scribbled at the bottom of an FBI memorandum about keeping up with CIA 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]

Lyndon Johnson’s CIA and FBI briefings left him with two unpalatable interpretations of Mexico City. According to the CIA, Oswald was part of a Cuban-Soviet assassination plot that was revealed by the audio-visual materials garnered by its surveillance techniques. According to Hoover, Oswald had been impersonated in Mexico City, as shown by a more critical examination of the same CIA materials. Hoover left it to Johnson to draw his own conclusions as to who was responsible for that impersonation.

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.

Kennedy issued his secret order for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263.[3] It was an order that would never be obeyed because of his murder.

JFK felt that his own demise was increasingly likely if he continued to buck his military advisers. He then proceeded to do exactly that. After vetoing the introduction of U.S. troops at the Bay of Pigs, he resisted the Joint Chiefs’ even more intense pressures to bomb and invade Cuba in the October 1962 missile crisis. Then he simply ignored his military and CIA advisers by turning sharply toward peace in his American University address, his Partial Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev, and his quest for a dialogue with Fidel Castro. His October 1963 decision to withdraw from Vietnam once again broke the Cold War rule of his national security state. As Merton had hoped, Kennedy was breaking through to a deeper humanity—and to its fatal consequences.

“Operation Northwoods”

“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

The overarching truth plaguing Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s agreement on a neutral and independent Laos was that peace in Laos and Vietnam was interdependent. John Kennedy contradicted his commitment to a peaceful settlement of the Laos crisis by his decision to deploy CIA and military advisers there and to arm covertly the members of the Hmong tribe (known by the Americans as the “Meos”).

Communist states’ compliance with the neutrality declaration and accepted language declaring that Laotian territory would not be used in the affairs of neighboring states—meaning the North Vietnamese could not use the trails through Laos to support the insurgency in South Vietnam.”[119] This largely unwritten understanding would become known in U.S. circles as the “Pushkin agreement.”

Averell Harriman told Arthur Schlesinger in May 1962 that JFK’s Laos policy was being “systematically sabotaged” from within the government by the military and the CIA. “They want to prove that a neutral solution is impossible,” Harriman said, “and that the only course is to turn Laos into an American bastion.”[122]

October 16-28, 1962, Cuban Missile Crisis.

A little noted characteristic of John Kennedy, perhaps remarkable in a U.S. president, was his ability to listen and learn.