Notes on the JFK Assassination

Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. University of California Press, 1996.

4 The Warren Report’s representation of Jack Ruby as a loner was clearly false; the FBI went to great lengths to conceal Ruby’s connections to organised crime.

38 On November 25 1963, in advance of the Warren Commission being established, its conclusions were published in an AP wire story:

‘FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said today all available information indicates that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy’.

When an FBI assistant director objected that this could not be determined at such an early stage Hoover responded: ‘It seems to me we have the basic facts now’.

On November 29 Hoover stated in a memo that the investigation would be wrapped up quickly after a Mexican lead have been pursued.

Scott’s argument is that this first cover-up was a false but plausible story of an international communist conspiracy which would be supported by superficially credible evidence but this was later changed to ‘Oswald as lone gunman’.

39 The most robust piece of evidence undergirding the communist conspiracy story is a pre-assassination cable to CIA Director McCone on October 9 1963 from Winston MacKinlay Scott, a CIA station chief in Mexico City, which referred to an American male identifying himself in broken Russian as Lee Oswald at the Soviet Embassy on 28 September asking a Consul he believed to be Vladimirovich Kostikov if there was anything new re: telegram to Washington.

Kostikov had been identified by the CIA and FBI as a member fo the KGB’s Thirteenth Department: responsible for sabotage, murder and potentially the operator of a training school for assassins in Minsk, where Oswald had lived from 1959 - 61 as a defector.

Just before the assassination the FBI intercepted a letter to the Soviet Embassy dated November 9 1963 supposedly signed by Oswald referring to ‘my meetings with comrade Kostin in the Embassy of the Soviet Union…had I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business’.

44 The FBI assisted the CIA in concealing information or not following up on leads or interviewing witnesses; the FBI vetoed the collection of testimony from John Wilson Hudson and was pro-active in propagating the premature finding that Oswald was the lone assassin.

49 Bill Somersett, an informant for the Miami police, recorded Joseph Adams Milteer, a man with connections to the Ku Klux Klan and an organiser for the National States Rights Party, on tape in November 1963 about plans which were ‘in the working’ to assassinate JFK ‘from an office building with a high powered rifle’.

Southern racists were organising around this time to defy federal orders for desegregation. A Miami detective’s report of the New Orleans Congress of Freedom, Inc. records ’there was indicated the overthrow of the present government’.

50 High ranking members of the armed forces were members of this organisation; there were significant amounts of resentment within the army, e.g. General Edwin Walker, who was forced to retire from the army in 1962 for disseminating right-wing propaganda inside the army; Walker was arrested at a desegregation riot at the University of Mississippi that same year.

Four days after the assassination Milteer was jubilant and was adamant his foreknowledge was not a coincidence; in two FBI reports from Miami Somersett is described as a reliable source, but the FBI demanded that this reliability statement be amended.

55 Charles Douglas Jackson, a CIA specialist in psychological operations also worked as the publisher of Life magazine.

Jackson was responsible for Life’s purchase of the rights to the Zapruder film and allegedly stopped Life’s presses to alter the selection of frames to be published from the film.

Alan Foster Dulles - Director of the CIA until JFK forced him out in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs operation - and Jackson together arranged to have Marina’s CIA veteran Isaac Don Levine ghost-write Marina Oswald’s article for Life, a detail which was covered up by the Warren Commission.

58 The Warren Report describes a man who met Oswald on his return from Russia as ‘a representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society’, a human services support system facilitating interactions between individuals at transit hubs.

What the Warren Report doesn’t mention is that this man, Spas T. Raikin was a Bulgarian émigré and Secretary-General of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.

In 1964, when Robert Kennedy was the Attorney General, the Justice Department compiled an index for the Warren Commission staff of all of Jack Ruby’s acquaintances who had been interviewed by the FBI before February 4 1964.

Around 100 names were missing from this index, all of whom pertained to interviews the FBI conducted with figures from organised crime or corrupt political backgrounds.

61 The House Committee noted that the Warren Commission’s representation of Ruby as a loner were faulty.

While the House Committee found that Ruby’s connections with the organised crime world were mentioned in reports received by the FBI in the weeks following Oswald’s shootings, the FBI had not followed up on these connections; Mafia specialists or organised crime units were not consulted to asked to participate to any significant extent.

62 Agent William Sullivan was later disciplined by Hoover for what the Inspection Division determined was a lax investigation of Oswald prior to the assassination; within Sullivan’s Domestic Intelligence Division, the investigation of Oswald was assigned to a team of agents from the Bureau’s Soviet section.

While there were numerous experts on Cuban activities and émigré activity within these divisions, none were consulted or asked to participate in the investigation, despite Oswald and Ruby’s connections with individuals active in Cuban anti-communist circles.

This was a problem for Sullivan’s Intelligence Division due to the Kostikov cable and Oswald’s letter to the Soviet embassy.

63 Inspector James H. Gale, who J. Edgar Hoover assigned to review the Bureau’s handling of Oswald, said that Oswald should have been placed on a Security Index after the Kostikov cable and his application for a passport denied; the FBI advised the Warren Commission that the cable would not have warranted this rejection.

64 Hoover placed the investigation of Oswald in the hands of Alan Belmont, William Sullivan and William Branigan, all of whom had responsibility for COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program focused on discrediting and neutralising organisations the FBI regarded as subversive, including the Communist Party, anti-war organisations, civil rights activists and Black power parties.

65 - 6 Belmont and Branigan had collaborated in the murder of the Rosenbergs; a compliant witness, who had earlier testified that Ethel was not involved was ‘reinterviewed’ for 400 hours until the necessary incrimination was secured.

69 Scott points out that the House Committee, like the Warren Commission, was unable to secure full co-operation from the FBI or the CIA; Justice Department officials were similarly obstructive and sometimes hostile.

Its findings that there was a probable conspiracy to shoot the President with ‘a high probability that two gunmen fired at him’ was widely derided and denounced by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

However, the House Committee continued to perpetuate the cover-up of the Warren Report, especially in regard to Jack Ruby’s connections with law enforcement, politicians and businessmen, even with the Warren Report’s Committee producing a report entitled: ‘Possible Associations Between Jack Ruby and Organised Crime’, which ran to 1,044 pages.

70 According to his lawyer, Ruby was an informer for the Kefauver Senate Special Committee investigating crime in interstate commerce; in return for his testimony they agreed to ignore police corruption in Dallas, specifically with regard to criminal takeover of the national wire racing service.

This takeover was a key piece of infrastructure in organising criminal activity, including drug trafficking. Money arising from these operations was reinvested in international hotels, defense industries which formed crucial parts of the US’ growing military-industrial establishment.

Scott argues Ruby was involved in major drug trafficking operations but was protected from arrest as he was a police informant with connections with judges and other powerful figures within the Dallas political establishment.

73 An important figure here is Clint Murchison, Sr., who made his money from the Teamsters’ Pension Fund, dominated by the Mafia and shipping heroin / cocaine to the US.

78 Oswald was stationed with the Marine from 1957 - 8, his Marine Air Control Squadron was assigned to a station at Atsugi in Japan, one of the major bases for the CIA’s U-2 reconnaissance flights over the USSR.

He was part of Operation Strongback, a military task force backing a 1958 attempt to overthrow Sukarno. His apparent defection to the USSR in 1959 was part of a wave of defections by men with backgrounds in intelligence; Scott argues this was a US operation to penetrate the USSR.

On his return to Dallas in 1962 Oswald maintained connections with the intelligence world and did classified work for the US army at the graphic arts company Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall.

This job was arranged by Baron George de Mohrenschildt, a spy during World War II, who seems to have been involved with a CIA-approved plot who overthrow Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier; de Mohrenschildt was introduced to the Oswalds by J. Walton Moore, a CIA employee.

80 It is increasingly clear that Oswald’s activism as a Castro sympathiser, distributing Fair Play for Cuba Committee literature, functioned as a smoke-screen; this literature was stamped with the address of an anti-Castro activities committee headed by a militant anti-Communist Guy Banister.

81 Three witnesses interviewed by the House Committee placed Oswald in Banister’s presence at this address.

Oswald was in contact with at least five anti-Castro Cuban members of the CIA-backed Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), which had up until late 1962 been housed in the same building and was also connected with Banister.

Carlos Bringuier, a former member of the CRC, had a street scuffle with Oswald; Oswald was the only party fined for his involvement.

Bringuier arranged for local news TV cameras to be present at the court hearing, when Oswald and a number of CRC Cubans engaged in a shouting match.

Bringuier’s colleagues arranged a debate betweeen Bringuier and Oswald on the radio at which Oswald declared himself a Marxist.

82 Oswald’s bail was paid by Emile Bruneau, a state boxing commissioner and friend of Oswald’s uncle Dutz Murret, who had ties to the mafia.

83 - 4 Oswald appeared on the TB and raido a number of times, on one such occasion he was filmed leafletting for the FPCC in New Orleans where he hired Charles Hall Steele Jr. to help ; the Warren Commission said he did so for 12 to 15 minutes, an FBI report said a few moments; TV cameras filmed this event after receiving a call from Oswald.

93 Many senior figures in the Cuban exile and anti-communist organisations had connections with in United Fruit and Standard Fruit & Steamship, companies with material interests in preventing Communist regimes from coming to power in Central and South America.

Two men working with these companies were in contact with Oswald while he was at the peak of his political activism in New Orleans.

There was a certain amount of tension between these companies and the Kennedy administration’s preference for democratically elected governments in the region. [citation needed]

The banana firms supported a coup against Honduran president Ramón Villeda Morales, which began by U.S. trained army pilots attacking the presidential palace.

94 Kennedy refused to recognise the new Honduran government of General Oswaldo López Arellano; President Johnson’s undersecretary of state for Latin American affairs, Thomas Mann, was involved in planning the coup, granted recognition in December 1963.

Manuel Gil, who had arranged for the televised broadcast of the Oswald-Bringuier debate, was an employee of Standard Fruit. He was also an association of the Information Council of the Americas, a joint CIA and Standard Fruit front based in New Orleans.

102 Fruit companies in New Orleans did much to create the client regimes of Latin America; gangsters based in New Orleans organised the 1911 Honduran revolution that led to the ascendancy of European bankers and bondholders.

108 Across the world the anti-communist policies and actions of the US state apparatus, including the CIA and the military upheld the interests of US multinational companies, such as oil companies and ITT.

While in Europe these activities were often more subtle, in Latin America US agents had freer hands; Rip Robertson, a Marine Corps officer was fired by the CIA for authorising one of his pilots to drop a bomb down the smokestack of a British cargo carrier.

111 John Martino and a man named John Rosselli had been centrally involved with the CIA in overthrowing the democratically elected government in Guatemala in 1954.

After the Bay of Pigs and Martino’s release from prison in Havana, he and Rosselli moved to Florida to organise Cuban-exile resistance.

116 In doing so they forged connections with personnel in Lake Pontchartrain, where the CIA operated a base for training anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

Both Martino and Rosselli were convinced Castro was behind the assassination of JFK.

This represented a problem for more senior figures in intelligence circles such as Jackson and CIA operative William Pawley, as they had worked with Martino in a separate operation to undermine Kennedy’s Cuban-missile-crisis-settlement by seeking to expose supposed offensive weapon capacities in Cuba.

According to Loran Hall, another anti-Castro activist, the real objective of this mission was to assassinate Castro and collect a bounty the Mafia had put on his head.

117 Both Martino and Rosselli met Jack Ruby and worked with him in Havana in 1959 when they were smuggling casino profits out to the US.

The House Committee concluded that Ruby was most likely serving as a middleman for gambling interests.

127 One of the most misleading aspects of the Warren Report was its insistence that Ruby had no connections to the world of organised crime; Ruby was in fact deeply integrated into a broad section of Dallas society including politicians, cops, judges, traffickers, prostitutes.

128 This section of the Warren Report required extensive re-writing in order to downplay these connections, some witnesses were ignored, statements were edited.

137 In 1959 the FBI developed Ruby as a informant and reimbursed him for expenses.

164 - 6 The CIA collaborated with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to utilise drug trafficking networks to fund the activities of anti-communist organisations and paramilitaries. [Gary Webb writes on this]

167 Offers the example of a heroin trafficking with the assistant of the anti-Communist and pro-Kuomintang Hip Sing tong gang, at a time when KMT guerillas were being supported by the CIA in Burma; the US press was told the heroin had come from Communist China.

173 Union leader Jimmy Hoffa, with the assistance of the Justice Department, cops and the FBI led a number of campaigns against communists in a rival union which had defected to the more militant CIO; Hoffa was promoted to national leadership off the back of this campaign which also brought him into closer connection with mob elements in Chicago and a Waste Handler’s Union in which Ruby headed a local.

174 The Teamsters were also involved in trafficking operations, an alliance which was initiated when the US government released a number of Mafia figures from prison and deported them to Sicily where they acted as an anti-Communist militia to help elect the CIA-favoured Christian Democratic party.

Hoffa’s first mob contact Frank Coppola, the godfather of Hoffa’s foster son Chuck O’Brien, was involved in a May Day massacre in Sicily in 1947, funded by former OSS chief William Donovan in which eight people were killed and 33 wounded.

498 people, mostly socialists and communists were killed the following year.

Former CIA officer Miles Copeland defended these operations in 1989: ‘had it not been for the Mafia the communists would by now be in control of Italy’.

242 Rather than conduct their own investigation, the Warren Commission allowed the FBI and CIA to investigate themselves.

243 Dallas district attorney Henry Wade and Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr testified to the Warren Commission that Oswald was an FBI informant; he had a federal government voucher for $200 at the time of his arrest and FBI agent James Hosty’s name and phone number was in his address book.

245 In 1962 Oswald was able to get a job at a firm doing classified work for the Army Security Agency where he professed communist sympathies and retained complete access to classified FBI documents.

295 At the first meeting of the Warren Commission Allen Dulles handed out copies of a book which defined the parameters for the Commission’s work, arguing that European assassinations were different from American ones; European assassins worked in conspiracies, American assassins acted alone.