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A CRUEL AND SHOCKING MISINTERPRETATION

Phil Shenon and I agree on at least a few things. In any resolution of the mysteries surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mexico City will undoubtedly be important. The investigation into what happened there in 1963 was, for some reason, seriously curtailed by the U.S. government. The government has, since then, fought tooth and nail to keep the full story about what happened there secret.

While I have never met Mr. Shenon, I have spoken with him several times by telephone. I first heard from him when he called me around 2011. He introduced himself as a reporter for Newsweek Magazine. He said he was working well in advance on an article for that magazine for the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder. He wondered whether I would be willing to talk about the HSCA’s investigation in Mexico City. I agreed to speak with him.

Over the course of that first conversation, and several follow-up calls from him over the next couple of years, it became apparent to me that Mr. Shenon was only interested in our work investigating what had happened in Mexico City in 1963 insofar as it might provide some kind of basis for linking Oswald to Castro or the Cubans. I tried to discuss the details of the HSCA investigation into what happened in Mexico City in its anomalous issues, but he was uninterested in those details. While there is an acknowledgment in his book, A Cruel and Shocking Act, stating that Ed Lopez and I were “generous with their time and interviews for this book,” precious little, if any, of what we shared with him made it into the book or any of his subsequent writing on the subject of Mexico City. Not only does Mr. Shenon ignore the post-HSCA materials we tried to bring to his attention, he also ignores the primary thrust of our report written for the HSCA.

I would not take issue with Phil Shenon if I thought what he is claiming is, merely, that the possibility of Cuban assistance to Oswald should be investigated. While I think the evidence of that is very weak at best, I will not deny that any avenue of investigation that remains open should be pursued. What I take issue with Mr. Shenon about is his single-minded concentration on that one issue and the resultant misrepresentation of facts and questions related to, and arising from, Lee Oswald’s activities in Mexico City. It appears to me that Shenon may be carrying water for the proponents of the original conspiracy theory – that Castro did it – rather than offering any objective review of the complete evidentiary base of that underlies the Mexico City visit. Shenon deliberately ignores the indicators and evidence that suggest Oswald’s trip to Mexico was either designed in advance, or spun in the aftermath, to give the appearance of Cuban and Soviet collusion in the Kennedy assassination.

Shenon’s thesis, as most recently explicated in his article in Politico, “What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico?”, is built on suspicions expressed by some government officials after the assassination and Charles Thomas’s reporting of the Duran twist party – a report based on a story first told by Elena Garro de Paz. Many had initial suspicions after the assassination: Lyndon Johnson alleged a communist conspiracy within twenty minutes of JFK’s death; Bobby Kennedy’s first question to CIA Director John McCone that day was, “Did some of your guys do this?” (The Warren Commission, in Executive Session, was very concerned about Oswald’s intelligence connections, but Allen Dulles told them it was something that couldn’t really be proven, as a good intelligence officer would lie under oath to the Commission.) When Shenon and I talked, I tried to get him to consider evidence and facts that have come to light about Mexico City and the CIA’s handling of various investigations since, including the one I worked on in 1978, in his evaluation of the twist party story that lies at the root of his speculations. My efforts had no effect. Any possible explanation other than Cuban complicity has been ignored by Mr. Shenon who seems hell-bent on promoting the idea that Castro was behind the assassination, refusing to address any other possibility.

I tried, in vain as it turns out, to get Mr. Shenon to consider that what we had learned about Oswald’s activities, and the government’s reaction to those activities, could support a different explanation which also pointed to an additional avenue of investigation that needed to be publicized and followed. In my view, Oswald’s activities are more consistent with his being involved in an intelligence operation being run by U.S. intelligence than with him trying to make contact with Cubans to garner support for an assassination attempt on the sitting leader of this country.

To fully appreciate why I say that, a little background from Washington in 1978, is necessary. In 1978 the CIA resisted the HSCA’s inquiry into Mexico City more than any other area of inquiry. The chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, told the Committee on August 15, 1978, “[T]he deeper we have gotten into the Agency’s performance in Mexico City, the more difficult they have gotten in dealing with us, the more they have insisted on relevance, the more they have gone back in effect on their agreement to give us access to unsanitized files. For a while we had general and free access to unsanitized files. That is increasingly not true in the Mexico City area….” And we have since learned that they used George Joannides to shut down the investigation into Oswald and Mexico City. In doing so, they lied to us about who he was. He ran propaganda operations in

George Joannides

Miami in 1963-64 and was the case officer for DRE, the anti-Castro group that scored the anti-Fair Play for Cuba Committee coup using Oswald in New Orleans in August of 1963. As G. Robert Blakey has since acknowledged, “The CIA not only lied, it actively subverted the investigation.” I think the CIA expected we would take the superficial approach of considering the “Castro did it” theory, but when we went beyond the initial appearances and began pushing our investigation into the propaganda sources, seeking interviews with the actual penetration and surveillance agents, seeking to find others in Mexico City who may have seen Oswald, then the Agency resistance to our investigation turned to a stonewall. Shouldn’t it be enough to raise serious questions that when a Congressional Committee investigating specific disinformation operations ran by the CIA, the CIA brings one of those involved in the operation being investigated and uses him in an undercover capacity to forestall and subvert the investigation? But that’s not all.

Consider the scenario of U.S. intelligence involvement in Oswald’s activities in Mexico City that we were not able to fully investigate in 1978. Let’s start with some background on David Phillips. David Phillips was one of, if not the, most experienced, ingenious, respected, and qualified disinformation officers in the CIA. In 1963 he was stationed in Mexico City, but, in early October, he was temporarily assigned to duty at Headquarters because he was being promoted from running anti-Castro propaganda operations to overseeing all anti-Castro operations in the

David Atlee Phillips

Western Hemisphere. He was an experienced hand. In the late 1950’s he had been under non-diplomatic cover in Havana, where he worked with student leaders who would eventually form the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (“DRE”). During the Bay of Pigs, Phillips was stationed at CIA Headquarters where he had responsibility for the propaganda and psychological warfare aspects of the antiCastro operations. In running those operations he not only oversaw the operations he ran personally from Headquarters, he was also the supervisor of the propaganda operations flowing out of the JMWAVE station in Miami by William Kent (aka Doug Gupton, William Trouchard). When the students who had been recruited by Phillips fled Cuba, they were reorganized under Kent’s tutelage into the DRE based in Miami.

Phillips was transferred to Mexico City later in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs. Kent was promoted to Headquarters, and George Joannides took over Kent’s position in Miami, including supervision of DRE. While still stationed in Headquarters in the early 60’s, David Phillips had worked with Cord Meyer to develop the first disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting and disrupting a group of Castro sympathizers who had organized themselves into the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). In the summer of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald formed a chapter of the FPCC in New Orleans. In August of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald, still in New Orleans, had an encounter with DRE which led to a lot of publicity linking Oswald to communists, labeling him as pro-Castro, and discrediting the FPCC. In July and August of that year there is strong evidence that Oswald was used to identify and contact pro-Castro students at Tulane University. In early September, Oswald was seen with David Philips in Dallas.

On September 16, 1963, the CIA informed the FBI that it was considering action to counter the activities of the FPCC in foreign countries. To my knowledge, the operational files on this new anti-FPCC operation have never been released by the CIA. In New Orleans, on September 17, 1963, Oswald applied for, and received, a Mexican travel visa immediately after William Gaudet, a known CIA agent, had applied for one. On September 27 Oswald arrived in Mexico City. This activity did not occur suddenly or in a vacuum. Oswald had started establishing his pro-Castro bona fides earlier that summer in New Orleans, including establishing an FPCC chapter there.

There are too many similarities between Oswald’s activities in New Orleans and Mexico City to simply dismiss, without investigation or discussion, the possibility that he was being used in an intelligence operation, either wittingly or unwittingly, in both cities. In addition to his contacts with the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic facilities in Mexico City, which could have been part of an intelligence dangle, an attempt to discredit the FPCC, or both, there is now also evidence of Oswald’s contacts with students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his presence at social events with Cuban Consulate

Secret Wars Diary by David Atlee Phillips

employees. David Phillips frequently lied about Oswald and Mexico City, but in a footnote in a little known book he self-published, Secret Wars Diary, he wrote: “I was an observer of Cuban and Soviet reaction when Lee Harvey Oswald contacted their embassies.” [Emphasis added.] One purpose served by an intelligence dangle is to enable the dangling agency to observe the reaction and, from that observation, identify roles of employees, procedures and processes of the enemy.

There can be little doubt that Oswald’s activities, especially the more flagrant, blatant and egregious ones such as those alleged by Shenon to have occurred at the Cuban Consulate, could only have scandalized the Cuban diplomats who heard the threats and bluster – all to the discrediting of the FPCC, just as the publicity about the New Orleans encounter between Oswald and the DRE formed one of the propaganda nails in that organization’s coffin. It is much more likely, in my opinion, that the seasoned Cuban diplomats would be offended than it is that they would support someone exhibiting Oswald’s alleged behavior to attempt an assassination. It is much more likely that the Cuban diplomats would have, as the evidence shows they did, consider Oswald as a U.S. intelligence provocation. The Cubans knew of the surveillance on their facilities. Why would they use someone to do such a job who showed up under surveillance and announced his plans? On the other hand, someone as provocative as Oswald should have generated a cascade of response that, when observed by the watchers, would have revealed an abundance of information. It could also serve to discredit the FPCC with the Cubans. The CIA prevented us, in 1978, from interviewing then surviving penetration and surveillance agents who would have known more about such an operation.

In 1978, we knew not only about the allegations of the twist party, but also about the stories of Oswald’s contact with students. The CIA prevented us from interviewing Oscar Contreras, a student Oswald contacted. But Anthony Summers, and others, have interviewed him since. Contreras acknowledges that Oswald, in late September, 1963, approached him and three other students who were members of a pro-Castro student organization. He asked them for help getting a visa to Cuba from the Consulate. Contreras did have contacts at the Consulate and spoke to the Consul and an intelligence officer. Both warned him to have nothing to do with Oswald as they suspected he was trying to infiltrate proCastro groups. Contreras still wonders how Oswald identified him and his friends as the students, out of the thousands attending the University, as the ones with contacts in the Consulate. Shenon, some way or another, sees this incident as supporting possible Cuban involvement in the assassination. No mention is made to the similarity to what Oswald was doing with Tulane students in New Orleans.

While in New Orleans, Ruth Paine had asked fellow Quaker, Ruth Kloepfer, to check on the Oswalds while they were in New Orleans. Mrs. Kloepfer’s husband was a professor at Tulane University. There is information in the extensive records in this case that Oswald passed out FPCC leaflets near Tulane University and the homes of some of the professors there who were members of a local leftist group. The

Lee Oswald in New Orleans leafleting for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, 9 August, 1963

individuals who helped pass out pamphlets on the last occasion when Oswald passed out his FPCC literature in downtown New Orleans, were introduced by Oswald as students from Tulane. There are, keeping things in parallel, indications in the documentation about the case that Oswald, while in Mexico City, made contact with Quakers studying at the Autonomous University. There are indications that one Quaker student at the University at that time was an active agent of the CIA, although that person has never been identified and it has not been determined that he had any contact with Oswald in Mexico City. The reason that it has not been determined is that it has not been investigated.

It has to be pointed out that June Cobb, a known CIA agent, was very involved in Agency actions aimed at the FPCC in the early 1960’s. She appears again as the first person to report Elena Garro de Paz’s story about the Duran/Oswald twist party. At the time she made that report to the Mexico City CIA station, Cobb, a CIA asset, was renting a room from Elena Garro de Paz, Sylvia Duran’s cousin. And Shenon bases most of

Elena Garro De Paz

what he writes on a supposition that, based on this twist-party story, Duran was at the center of the Cuban recruitment of Oswald. But the fact is that it is still very much in question whether Duran had been recruited as an asset by the CIA. David Phillips, as well as other CIA employees, in 1978, were of the opinion that she may have been targeted for recruitment by the CIA. The CIA, then and since, has gone out of its way to keep details about Duran buried, claiming, among other things, to have destroyed her Mexico City P file.

But the point is, the activities in Mexico City in September and October, 1963, are a capsule version of Oswald’s activities in New Orleans in June, July and August of 1963. In the context of the other information we’ve learned about the CIA’s FPCC black propaganda operation, the people involved in those operations and the role of at least one of those people, George Joannides, in subverting the HSCA investigation, how can anyone not seriously consider whether Oswald’s Mexico City activities were part of a CIA anti-FPCC operation? The very first conspiracy theory, that Castro and the communists killed JFK – the one expressed by President Johnson 20 minutes after the assassination, and first seeing print in the DRE’s CIA funded newspaper, Trinchera, on November 23, 1963 – still has followers and proponents, the latest being Phil Shenon. None of the proponents, it seems, have ever really considered whether they may be the victims – or a part – of a very good, deliberate disinformation operation – possibly the best Phillips and Joannides ever ran.

________________________

Dan Hardway, J.D. Attorney in private practice; former investigator, House Select Committee on Assassinations.

John Judge Letter to ARRB Outlining Pentagon Thesis

John Judge (1948 – 2014) was a respected researcher, writer, public speaker, and community organizer. He was a co-founder of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA), and organized COPA’s annual JFK conference held each year in Dallas, Texas. Judge was an early advocate for the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board. He continued to campaign for the de-classification and full-disclosure of Kennedy and King assassination records still being withheld by the U.S. federal government.

“What’s more important is the principle that this public information belongs to us, the people of the United States and not to some secret government or intelligence network or any president or any Congress who are merely hired by us to do our bidding.” — John Judge

Dated 25 April, 1996, following is Judge’s 6-page letter to Jeremy Gunn who served on the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) staff as Chief of Research and Analysis, General Counsel, and was eventually appointed as Executive Director. Click on page to enlarge.

Judge for Yourself: A Treasury of Writing by John Judge – April 13, 2017 may be purchased at Amazon. Click HERE.

George DeMohrenschildt’s Address Book

00 00 RIF 180-10091-10071 GEORGE DEMOHRENSCHILDT ADDRESS BOOK

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Spartacus Blog: The Death of Bernardo De Torres by John Simkin

A few days ago a friend of mine living in Florida sent me a link to an article in a small circulation weekly newspaper, The Miami Times. It told the story of the death of Bernardo De Torres. The article was written by De Torres long-term friend, Owen Band. The two men were both involved in the “drug business” in Miami in the 1970s. According to Band: “Bernardo de Torres was my friend, mentor, and at times my surrogate father. We met when I was floundering, a year after I had been dropped off the wait-list at Harvard Law School and suffered a nervous break down… Bernie concluded it was time for me to move on with my life. I was never cut out for drug dealing, he said, and I was smart enough to make it legitimately.” Band had lost contact with De Torres and he had been dead for several months before he heard the news. (1)

I have been writing about Bernardo De Torres for nearly 20 years, as you will find out if do a search of Google. This has not always been the case. When I first created a page on De Torres, Google refused to include it in their search results. This was very unusual as in those days, anybody I produced a page on would within a few days it was ranked first at Google (this is because of the large number of websites – about 170,000 – that were linked to my website). (2)

After I complained about it I was contacted by Daniel Brandt, who had established the website Namebase, a web-based cross-indexed database of names that focuses on individuals involved in the international intelligence community. He told me that his page on De Torres was also not appearing in the index. As a result, he established Google-Watch, to monitor the way it censored material on the web. (3)

Although Google refused to reply to my complaint about the non-listing of Bernardo De Torres, they eventually reinstalled my page into its index. However, Brandt was not so lucky and the once so valuable websites, Namebase and Google-Watch are no longer in existence. Unfortunately he gave up his fight against Google in February, 2012, and took down all his sites. (4) I had been writing about the John F. Kennedy assassination for many years and Google were quite willing to index the vast majority of pages that I produced. That is not true today as Google punish you for writing anything bad about them. For example, see this article, Google, Bing and Operation Mockingbird: The CIA and Search-Engine Results. (5)

Bernardo De Torres

The initial censorship convinced me that Bernardo De Torres was an important figure that needed to be looked at very closely. At first most of my information came from a former employee of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). I will call him Daniel Ralston (this is not his real name or the name that he currently uses). He went on to do freelance work for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). During this period he became friends with people who were intimately involved in the assassination. He claimed that David Sanchez Morales, who worked at JM/WAVE, the CIA station in Miami had organised the assassination. Morales was operations chief for the CIA’s covert operation to train and infiltrate teams into Cuba to destabilize the Fidel Castro government. The role of De Torres was to make sure that those involved in the assassination did not talk about it afterwards.

Ralston had a huge collection of photographs of people he told me were involved in the events surrounding the assassinations. This included CIA agents and people they used to carry out certain illegal activities. Some of these looked like surveillance photographs, whereas others were fairly intimate family photographs. He encouraged me to publish most of these photographs but some he asked me not to do this as it would get him into trouble with dangerous people. He seemed particularly scared of De Torres.

I tried to get an interview with De Torres but he refused to talk to me. However, one of his children, did agree to give me information on her father. Some of his former colleagues also gave me information. De Torres had also been mentioned in a couple of books on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Orlando Letelier. He was also mentioned in books on the international drug trade and CIA backed coups in South America. This is his story.

Bernardo De Torres was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1934. He moved to the United States in 1955 and later worked as a private investigator in Miami. De Torres was a strong opponent of Fidel Castro and during the Bay of Pigs Operation was Chief of Intelligence for Brigade 2506 where he worked under David Sanchez Morales. During the invasion he was captured and was held in captivity until 24th December, 1962. On his release he joined his brother Carlos in Miami. (6)

According to his daughter: “He (De Torres) was already working with the CIA against him (Castro) in 1959. After he came back from the invasion he was in critical condition for a of couple months. He was shot in the back of his head beneath his cerebellum and the bullet broke into five pieces. He went under surgery and had four of those pieces removed. One had to stay because it was too close to an area that if accidentally harmed could make him paralyzed.” (7)

In 1963 De Torres resumed work as a private investigator. According to Gerry P. Hemming De Torres worked for Charles Siragusa, who was involved in foreign assassinations. (8) Hemming had established Interpen (Intercontinental Penetration Force) and De Torres became associated with several of the Interpen members, including Loran Hall, Roy Hargraves, William Seymour, Lawrence Howard, Steve Wilson, Howard K. Davis, Edwin Collins, James Arthur Lewis and Dennis Harber. (9)

Tom Bethell, who worked for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, interviewed Hemming about Interpen and he claimed that in 1963 there were “numerous teams with paramilitary inclinations out to ‘get’ Kennedy. Some of these teams had been approached by wealthy entrepreneurs of the H. L. Hunt type, (though not, I think, in fact H.L. Hunt), who were interested in seeing the job done and even provided financial assistance.” (Haroldson L. Hunt, a wealthy oil man from Texas.) After the assassination of Kennedy members of these teams “have been returning to their sponsors, taking credit for the assassination, and at the same time requesting large additional sums of money so that they won’t be tempted to talk about it to anyone. In turn, the sponsors have apparently been hiring Mafia figures to rid themselves of these blackmailers.” (10)

Silvia Odio

Silvia Odio was a member of the anti-Castro group Junta Revolucionaria Cubana (JURE). Her father Amador Odio, was among Cuba’s wealthiest men, the owner of the country’s largest trucking business. However, he had fought Cuban dictators and helped to overthrow General Gerardo Machado in 1933. He was an early supporter of Castro, but had turned against him when “Fidel betrayed the Revolution” and along with Manuel Ray, had helped form one of the first anti-Castro groups within Cuba. (11)

Odio later told the FBI and the Warren Commission that on 25th September, 1963, while living in Dallas, she received a visit from three men who claimed they were from New Orleans. Two of the men, Leopoldo and Angel, were Cubans, who said they were members of JURE. The third man, who they named as Leon Oswald, was introduced as an American sympathizer who was willing to take part in the assassination of Fidel Castro. After she told them that she was unwilling to get involved in any criminal activity, the three men left. Odio later identified Leon as Lee Harvey Oswald. (12)

The following day Leopoldo called her on the telephone. He told her it was his idea to introduce the American into the underground “because he is great, he is kind of nuts”. Leopoldo also said that the American had been in the marine corps and was an excellent shot, and that the American said the Cubans “don’t have any guts because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that, because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba actually.” (13)

William Seymour, Dennis Harber, Isidro Berja and Bernardo De Torres

A report carried out by the FBI suggested that the three men may have been members of Interpen (Loran Hall, William Seymour and Lawrence Howard). Hall admitted they “had gone to the apartment of a Cuban woman who lived in a garden style apartment located on Magellan Circle in Dallas… and said that he could not picture this woman in his mind now. He said that her name was possibly Odio. He said that he seemed to recognize this woman’s name as Odio because of the association with the name of the Cuban professor who had the same name.” (14)

Angelo Murgado was another member of the anti-Castro Cubans who was associated with Bernardo De Torres. He was a member of a group led by Manuel Artime. In August 1963, Murgado and Artime had a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy. Murgado warned the attorney general about the behaviour of some anti-Castro Cubans: “I told him that we have to keep a sharp look on those Cubans. I was afraid that one of our guys would go crazy… The same way that a lot of people are trying to hit Castro, there are a lot of people trying to hit the president of the United States… We have a lot of crazy sons of bitches and they’re willing to pull anything.” (15)

Bernardo De Torres is fourth from the right (Miami, September, 1963)

Joan Mellen, has carried out extensive research into the Odio incident. She claims that in an interview with Angelo Murgado she claimed he was “Angel” and “Leopoldo” was Bernardo de Torres. In an article published in 2005 she claimed that “Bernardo de Torres, who testified before the HSCA with immunity granted to him by the C.I.A., so that he was not questioned about the period of time leading up to the Kennedy assassination, as the C.I.A. instructed the Committee on what it could and could not ask this witness. Both the Warren Commission and the HSCA buried the anti-Castro theme, and never explored what Bobby (Kennedy) might have known.” (16)

John F. Kennedy Assassination

According to his daughter, Bernardo De Torres was employed by the CIA to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy: “Yes, he worked for several years with the CIA at uncovering all the possible people that were on the their list. At one time, they put him under the spot light and he was proved without a doubt that he had anything to do with it. He was actually in Florida with my stepmother at the time of the assassination and was working on his other job as military coordinator for Brigade 2506. It’s located in Miami in Little Havana…. I think he came to a conclusion in his investigation and thinks he knows who were the people who killed JFK but doesn’t like or want to deal with what he found because all of sudden he stopped researching and never spoke about it again. Normally he doesn’t stop until he has found the answers.” (17)

In 1966 Bernardo De Torres joined Jim Garrison in his investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. William Turner, the author of Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails (2001) has argued: “A veteran of the Bay of Pigs, De Torres showed up on Garrison’s doorstep early in the probe, saying he was a private detective from Miami who wanted to help, and dropping the name of Miami DA Richard Gerstein, a friend of Garrison’s, as an opener. In retrospect, Garrison remembered that every lead De Torres developed ended up in a box canyon. He also learned that De Torres was forwarding reports on his investigation to the Miami CIA station.” (18)

Garrison asked Bernardo De Torres to find Eladio del Valle so he could be interviewed about the assassination. Del Valle, a wealthy former Cuban congressmen under Fulgencio Batista, had headed the Free Cuba Committee in Florida, and reportedly had links to Santos Trafficante. (19) He was also a close friend and associate of David Ferrie, another man who Garrison was investigating. “In the course of checking out all possible associates of Oswald’s in the city, we discovered that the alleged assassin had been seen during the summer with a man named David Ferrie. I got my people on the telephones right away to investigate a possible Oswald-Ferrie relationship.” (20) Del Valle had reportedly paid Ferrie $1,500 a mission to make air raids against Cuba. (21)

Dick Russell, while researching his book, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins (2008), interviewed Fabian Escalante, the former chief of Cuba’s G-2 intelligence agency. According to Escalante: “Del Valle was in charge of narcotics in a town south of Havana, where he had business dealings with Santo Trafficante… We managed to penetrate this organization. We came to know a lot of plans for exile invasions, secret overflights to provide arms to internal rebel groups. David Ferrie was the pilot for some of these flights. One of our agents talked on many occasions with Del Valle, who in 1962 told him that Kennedy must be killed to solve the Cuban problem.” (22)

Another member of this group was Herminio Diaz Garcia. He arrived in the United States in 1963 and that September the CIA considered recruiting him as an agent because of his ties to Efiigenio Amejeiras Delgado, Castro’s vice-minister of the armed forces, who was reportedly conspiring with Rolando Cubela. As David Kaiser pointed out: “It is not clear from available files whether he was in fact recruited.” (23) Diaz Garcia was killed on a penetration mission into Cuba on 29th May, 1966. (24)

Garrison became suspicious of De Torres and on 7th January, 1967, he ordered his staff “under no circumstances” to offer any information to him. Four days later he wrote at the top of one of De Torres’ memos: “His reliability is not established.” Garrison became convinced that De Torres was working for JM/WAVE, the Central Intelligence Agency station in Miami. Declassified documents show that De Torres gave the CIA’s final report on Jim Garrison on 2nd March, 1967. According to Gaeton Fonzi, De Torres’s CIA handler was Paul Bethel. (25)

Another researcher, Larry Hancock, has argued that “It certainly appears that De Torres’ role in the Garrison investigation is suspicious, and it supports Otero’s remarks to HSCA investigators that De Torres had ‘penetrated’ Garrison’s investigation. It also shows that De Torres had an agenda of his own in addition to getting intelligence about Garrison’s investigation and investigators. That agenda involved once again shifting attention to Fidel Castro and a Cuban hit team rather than the activities of the Cuban exiles.” (26)

On 17th February, 1967, The New Orleans States-Item reported that Jim Garrison was investigating the assassination of Kennedy. It also said that one of the suspects was David Ferrie. Five days later Ferrie’s body was found in his New Orleans apartment. Garrison pointed out that “suddenly the newspapers, the television, and the radio people had decided that Ferrie’s death – and the possibility it may have resulted from suicide or foul play – may have validated my investigation.” Although two suicide notes were found, the coroner did not immediately classify the death as a suicide, noting there were indications Ferrie may have suffered a brain hemorrhage. Eventually the coroner announced that Ferrie had died of “natural causes”. (27)

Eladio del Valle was murdered in Miami on 22nd February, 1967. He had been shot in the heart at point-blank range, and his skull was split open. (28) Diego Gonzales Tendera, a close friend, later claimed Del Valle was murdered because of his involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (29) It has been suggested by Garrison’s chief investigator, Louis Ivon, that Bernardo De Torres was involved in the killing. “Eladio del Valle’s body was left in the vicinity of Bernardo De Torres’s apartment.” (30)

Larry Hancock has suggested that “Bernardo De Torres… diverted Garrison to a certain extent as well as aggressively re-introducing Castro suspicions. He did that with his insistent media promotion of a story pertaining to Secret Service fears of a Castro hit team in Miami during Kennedy’s visit there shortly before the Texas trip. Between February 18 and February 22, the Garrison investigation received considerable unwanted publicity, much of it based upon inquiries within the Miami Cuban community as well as the involvement of Bernardo De Torres. De Torres was quite visible in his comments and declarations, eventually leading the whole matter off in a direction pointing at a threat against John Kennedy from Castro agents.” (31)

CIA Activities

After leaving the Garrison investigation De Torres was employed by Mitch WerBell as an arms salesman in Latin America. According to Peter Dale Scott, De Torres also worked for Miguel Nazar Haro, the head of the powerful Mexican intelligence agency, Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS). De Torres reportedly provided Nazar’s death squad with weapons. “In fact, it was common knowledge that when De Torres went to Mexico he was picked up at the airport by Nazar’s personal limousine – without having to go through customs or immigration – and swiftly taken to Nazar’s office.” (32)

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RELATED: Bernardo De Torres Background

JFK Records Suit Tests CIA Secrecy on Assassination

(Photo by STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images)

by Jefferson Morley April 30, 2019

On April 29, my attorney Dan Hardway filed a petition for certiorari asking the Supreme Court to review my case, Morley v. CIA. When I filed this Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit 16 years ago, I sought certain files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

The JFK story still resonates, albeit more faintly than it once did. Kennedy was a popular liberal president who, at the time of his death, was challenging the country to embrace civil rights and “a strategy for peace” to end the Cold War. Detested in the Pentagon and CIA as a weakling and traitor, Kennedy was shot dead as his open-air motorcade passed through downtown Dallas on a sunny day in November 1963.

I never expected the case would take so long or rise so high. Yet I am not surprised. I always believed FOIA litigation could shed new light on the causes of JFK’s assassination, a national trauma on par with 9/11 for the next generation. I anticipated new information would clarify long-standing questions about America’s most enduring murder mystery. And I expected the CIA would resist full disclosure. The federal courts have been divided on the merits of my case, leaving the Supreme Court as the final arbiter.

My lawsuit, filed in December 2003, sought records to clarify the CIA’s response to JFK’s murder. After Kennedy was killed, the Dallas police department immediately picked up an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald and claimed he shot the president. Oswald denied the charge and was killed in police custody the next day. A year later, a commission of Washington insiders concluded Oswald acted “alone and unaided.” JFK’s death was not politically motivated, it was proclaimed.

As the biographer of two top CIA operations officers who were deeply knowledgeable about the events of 1963, I don’t find the official story of a “lone gunman” to be credible. The CIA men I wrote about did not believe it, not in the privacy of their thoughts and actions. They knew far more about Oswald, the supposed assassin, before JFK was killed than they disclosed to investigators. Declassified records and interviews demonstrate that the agency settled on the story of a “lone gunman” in order to conceal its deep pre-assassination interest in Oswald from law enforcement, Congress, and the American people.

With the help of Jim Lesar, a veteran FOIA litigator, I sought to learn more via a request for information about a Miami-based CIA operative named George Joannides who handled sensitive matters for senior officials in Langley. The request turned into a long-running lawsuit. Thanks to a unanimous December 2007 appellate court decision, issued over strenuous CIA objections, I obtained more than a thousand pages of material.

‘Presumed Assassins’

The redacted Joannides files illuminated two previously unknown aspects of the JFK story.

The first was Joannides’ role in an authorized and deniable CIA psychological warfare operation that generated propaganda about Oswald. A job evaluation from 1963 revealed Joannides ran a CIA-funded anti-Castro student group, the Cuban Student Directorate, known by the code name AMSPELL. Within 48 hours of Kennedy’s death, Joannides’ agents published the first JFK conspiracy theory, claiming Oswald and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, were “the presumed assassins.”

The second story revealed by my lawsuit was Joannides’ obstruction of a congressional investigation. In 1978, after the Watergate-era revelations about CIA abuses, Congress re-opened the JFK probe by creating the House Select Committee on Assassination. The agency called Joannides out of retirement to serve as liaison with the Committee investigators. He shut down their inquiries. Even under direct questioning, he did not disclose the Oswald-AMSPELL activity. A 1979 job evaluation praised Joannides as “the perfect man” for dealing with the Committee. In 1981 he received the agency’s Career Intelligence Medal for “exceptional achievement.”

Intrigued, I sought to obtain another 330 records about Joannides that the agency withheld on grounds of “national security.” In June 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected my arguments and said the CIA had complied with the FOIA. The substantive part of the case was over.

I then asked the court to order the government to pay for cost of my litigation, namely Lesar’s fee for hundreds of hours of time he spent crafting the arguments that freed the Joannides files. Under the FOIA, the government is required to pay court costs if the plaintiff has “substantially prevailed.”

The law is designed to incentivize the government to follow the FOIA and to compensate citizens, reporters, and whistleblowers who seek information in the public interest. One of the four factors in awarding legal fees is whether the information sought has the potential to benefit the public.

I thought I cleared that bar easily. The New York Times, Fox News, Associated Press, Politico, and USA Today covered Morley v. CIA. The Washington Post and two dozen other mainstream news sites published the AP story. The Times and other sites published a photo, obtained via FOIA, which showed Joannides receiving his medal.

In December 2011 District Court Judge Richard Leon dismissed my request for legal fees, asserting the litigation had uncovered little of substance. I appealed. In June 2013 the Court of Appeals reversed Leon’s decision. In July 2014, Leon threw out my case on different grounds. In January 2016, the appellate court reversed him again.

Throughout this legal slog, the CIA and Justice Department’s lawyers have insisted there is no public benefit to the disclosure of Joannides’ JFK-related activities. Move along, says the CIA. There’s nothing to be learned in the Oswald-AMSPELL story or in the ancient Joannides files that contain sensitive valuable “national security” secrets.

Last July, on a fourth hearing, a divided three-judge panel dismissed my case. Now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in his last decision before he joined the high court, assessed the value of my FOIA lawsuit as “small.”

Judge Karen Henderson, the senior judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals, issued a stout dissent, saying I clearly deserved to have my court costs paid. Kavanaugh’s decision, she declared, “ignored our precedent and misapplied our mandate.”

Findings

What has Morley v. CIA revealed about JFK’s assassination?

For 16 years, I resisted definitive conclusions about Joannides’ role in the events that led to JFK’s death. I truly wasn’t sure. I wanted to see all of the CIA’s records on the subject first.

I awaited the promise of the JFK Records Act of 1992: full disclosure. The law, passed unanimously by Congress, mandated the release of all of the government’s JFK files within 25 years, that is to say, by 2017. The promise, alas, was betrayed by President Trump. He used the one loophole provided in the law, allowing for continued postponement of release of assassination records. Trump, the conspiracy theorist, certified that disclosure would cause “an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations” and that “the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

In his October 2017 White House directive, Trump stated he had “no choice” (curious phrase) but to allow federal agencies to continue to withhold thousands of JFK assassination files from public view– including the Joannides files. In April 2018, the National Archives reported that 15,834 assassination records remain redacted, most of them by CIA and FBI. These files will remain sealed until April 2021 at the earliest,

‘No-Brainer’ on Secret JFK Files

The continuing secrecy around thousands of JFK files surprises Judge John Tunheim, former chair of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). The ARRB was a civilian review board that declassified hundreds of thousands of JFK files in the mid-1990s.

“My assumption was that all the remaining records would simply be released in 2017,” Tunheim, now the senior federal judge in Minnesota, told me in an interview. “At that point in time [1998], our thinking was there is no legitimate reason to withhold information about how we collected information fifty years ago, that there would be no legitimate reason for protecting things that were that old.”

The agency’s stance on the Joannides files is particularly obtuse, Tunheim said. In 1998, the JFK review board asked the agency to provide relevant Joannides files. The agency handed over exactly 11 pages of material. The CIA “fooled’ the board about the extent of the Joannides files, Tunheim said. “We would release them in full today without a moment’s hesitation,” he said. “It’s a no-brainer.”

Of course, the fact that the CIA is sitting on thousands of JFK files in 2019 does not necessarily mean the U.S. government is hiding evidence of a conspiracy in 1963. As President Obama said in a 2009 memorandum, “the problem of overclassification” is endemic in the federal government. I’m pretty sure that 95 percent of the still-secret JFK files are historically irrelevant. It’s the remaining five percent, however, that interests historians, researchers, journalists and students.

The files I sought in my lawsuit are a case in point. They do not contain evidence that Joannides plotted against JFK’s life. They contain plenty of evidence that he abetted those who did, after Kennedy was dead. He wasn’t in Dallas when JFK was killed. He helped run the coverup in Miami and Langley afterwards. He died in March 1990.

‘We Were Used’

I did not take my case to the Supreme Court to vindicate any conspiratorial interpretation of JFK’s death. I pursued new information to fill out the fact pattern around the assassination with confidence that people can make up their own minds about what it shows.

My reading of the evidence conforms with that of knowledgeable observers. Attorney General Robert Kennedy concluded his brother was ambushed by enemies in his own government. So did the widowed First Lady, Jackie Kennedy.

Two astute contemporaries, Fidel Castro and Charles DeGaulle, also believed that Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy emanating from within U.S. security forces. Castro was a battle-hardened Marxist revolutionary. DeGaulle was a continental conservative snob. They knew, as well as anyone, the workings of American power and the machinations of the CIA. More recently, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a retired CIA station chief and Just Security editor, told a conclave of retired spies that he believes if the CIA were responsible for JFK’s murder, it was likely certain rogue CIA officers in Miami.

Morley v. CIA produced documentary evidence consistent with the Castro-DeGaulle-Mowatt-Larssen interpretation of November 22, 1963. The Joannides’ files laid bare agency operations around Oswald. Joannides’ propaganda agents among anti-Castro Cuban students created a plausible public record—in intelligence parlance, a “legend”—that Oswald was a leader of a pro-Castro group called Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in New Orleans. The FPCC was a popular socialist organization with 30 chapters on college campuses that defended Castro’s revolution, which had abolished racial segregation and redistributed land to poor people.

The CIA operation that monitored and manipulated Oswald emerged from a joint CIA-FBI program known as COINTELPRO. Short for Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO sought to undermine and destroy civil rights and antiwar organizations from 1958 to 1974. According to this declassified memo, the CIA was conducting a secret operation against the FPCC as of mid-September 1963.

Joannides was involved. Within hours of Oswald’s arrest, his AMSPELL agents in the Cuban Student Directorate fed reporters the story that the president had been killed by a leader of the FPCC.

One of those AMSPELL agents was Jose Antonio Lanuza. A retired school teacher in Miami, Lanuza served as spokesman for the CIA-funded Cuban Student Directorate in 1963. According to a JFK Library memo, the Cuban students received $51,000 a month from the CIA.

On the night of November 22, 1963 Lanuza recalls the group communicated with the group’s CIA handler, Joannides, whom he knew as “Howard.” Lanuza also recalls speaking with a dozen local and national reporters about the connection of Kennedy’s accused killer to the pro-Castro FPCC. The next day, the AMSPELL information fueled headlines that the American president had been killed by a “pro-Castro assassin.”

“We were used by the people who wanted to make Oswald take all the blame for killing Kennedy,” Lanuza said in an interview. “We were ideal cover for using the theme of Oswald being a Castro supporter. Somebody wanted to build up that story. That’s where we came in.”

The first-day AMPSELL publicity blitz did much to convince the public that a liberal president had been killed by a communist.

But was it true? Under interrogation, Oswald denied shooting Kennedy. He told reporters that he was a “patsy.” The next day he was shot dead in police custody by a Dallas nightclub owner with organized crime connections. These shocking and baffling events gave birth to a thousand conspiracy theories.

I took my case to the Supreme Court to bypass the theories and get the facts: to complete the historical record of a critical moment in which American democratic institutions were attacked, a record that the American people do not yet fully possess.

CIA Medal

Perhaps the biggest single revelation generated by Morley v. CIA was the medal given to Joannides. Inside the agency, one might say that Joannides protected the agency’s “sources and methods” around the Oswald/AMSPELL/FPCC operation. Outside the agency, you could say he was honored, at least in part, for perpetuating the JFK cover-up.

House Select Committee on Assassination general counsel G. Robert Blakey, now emeritus professor at Notre Dame law school, told PBS Frontline that Joannides had obstructed Congress’ investigation, a felony. Was he concealing the existence of a CIA operation to falsely blame Oswald for killing JFK? Or just CIA incompetence? Absent full disclosure, definitive conclusions are elusive.

Morley v. CIA fell short of getting the whole story. The agency identified but never released 330 Joannides files I sought. These include 44 documents from 1963 and 1978, which concern Joannides’ cover and “intelligence methods.” They are key to the JFK story. I suspect they identify the senior agency officers who authorized psychological warfare operations that linked Oswald to Castro’s Cuba before and after JFK was killed.

According to the agency, not a single word contained in these antique records – even with any potentially appropriate redactions for sources and methods – can be made public in 2019 without threatening “national security.” Given that most of the records in question are more than 50 years old, the claim seems far-fetched, if not suspicious. Nonetheless, the federal courts agree it is accurate.

‘Entirely Unreasonable’

The question now before the Supreme Court is not conspiracy. The issue is accountability and how the FOIA seeks to insure it. In the July 2018 majority opinion, Kavanaugh ruled the CIA acted “reasonably” in spurning my JFK queries. Judge Henderson countered that the government’s actions were “entirely unreasonable” and I should be awarded court costs.

The high court now has the opportunity to decide. The answers are a long time coming.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Watergate conspirator James McCord, Jr. died two years ago. His death was never announced.

Watergate witness James McCord, left, seated with attorney Bernard “Bud” Fensterwald, right, testifies in a 1973 hearing of the Senate Select Committee on the Watergate case. (AP)

By Emily Langer ,

Harrison Smith and

Kate Morgan

April 18 at 5:50 PM

James W. McCord Jr., a retired CIA employee who was convicted as a conspirator in the Watergate burglary and later linked the 1972 break-in to the White House in revelations that helped end the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, died June 15, 2017, at his home in Douglassville, Pa. He was 93.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to his death certificate obtained at the Berks County Register of Wills office in Reading, Pa.

Mr. McCord’s death was first reported in “Dirty Tricks,” a 2018 history of the Watergate investigation by filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan. But the news did not appear in local or national media outlets and surfaced online only in March, when the website Kennedys and King published an obituary referencing his gravesite in Pennsylvania.

Mr. McCord served in the CIA for 19 years, including as chief of the agency’s physical security division, before his supporting, at times sensational role in the events that precipitated the first resignation in history of a U.S. president.

He had retired from the spy agency and was privately employed as head of security for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President — commonly called CREEP — when he became entangled in a scheme to burglarize and bug the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington.

Mr. McCord had once taught a college course on how to protect buildings from intrusions, and he helped lead the operation. Preparing for the break-in, the conspirators rigged door latches at the Watergate complex with adhesive tape to prevent the doors from locking.

Mr. McCord shows how to rig the transmitter of a bugging device in a telephone at a hearing in Washington on May 23, 1973. (Charles Del Vecchio/The Washington Post)

The tape caught the attention of a security guard, Frank Wills, who alerted the police to suspicious activity in the building. In the early-morning hours of June 17, 1972, plainclothes officers entered the Democratic headquarters and found five burglars clad in suits and surgical gloves.

[‘The Post’ and the forgotten security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in]

Those men — Mr. McCord, Bernard L. Barker, Frank A. Sturgis, Eugenio R. Martinez and Virgilio R. Gonzalez — were carrying bugging devices, cameras, film and a walkie-talkie. Mr. McCord initially used the alias Edward Martin but was quickly connected to the reelection committee.

His arraignment, covered by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for one of the newspaper’s first articles about the events now collectively known as the Watergate scandal, was memorably dramatized in the 1976 film “All the President’s Men.”

Portrayed by actor Richard Herd, Mr. McCord is asked by a court official about his previous line of government work. “C-I-A,” he whispers, in an early hint that the break-in was more than a “third-rate burglary attempt,” as White House spokesman Ronald L. Ziegler dismissively described it.

John J. Sirica, the federal judge who presided over the Watergate cases, controversially threatened defendants with stiff sentences if they did not assist investigators. Facing a possible 45 years in prison, Mr. McCord submitted to Sirica a letter that The Post described years later as a “bombshell.”

“There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent,” Mr. McCord wrote in the March 1973 document, delivered to the court after his conviction and before his sentencing. “Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to the very structure, orientation, and impact of the government’s case, and to the motivation and intent of the defendants.”

He further wrote that “others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, when they could have been by those testifying.”

Days later, Mr. McCord appeared before the Senate Watergate committee and testified that Liddy had told him John N. Mitchell, the reelection committee chairman and former U.S. attorney general, had approved the bugging scheme. Mr. McCord further said he had been informed that White House counsel John W. Dean III and Nixon aide Jeb Stuart Magruder knew in advance of the plan.

Mr. McCord continued to deliver allegations of misconduct at high levels. In a May 1973 memorandum to Senate and other investigators, he wrote that he and the other burglars were pressured to falsely testify that the Watergate scheme was executed at the behest of the CIA — an account that would have exculpated the reelection committee and one that he refused to give.

“Even if it meant my freedom, I would not turn on the organization that had employed me for 19 years,” he wrote. “I was completely convinced that the White House was behind the idea and ploy which had been presented, and that the White House was turning ruthless.”

Mr. McCord also testified that John J. Caulfield, a Nixon administration official, relayed an offer for clemency and a future job if Mr. McCord agreed not to testify against Nixon officials and to accept a prison sentence.

Mr. McCord’s statements, some of them made in closed-door Senate sessions and reported by the media, were credited with helping to break open the Watergate investigation by connecting the burglary to high-ranking Nixon officials.

Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974. Mr. McCord served four months in prison.

“I have no regrets in telling the truth,” he said when he reported to the penitentiary in March 1975. “I think in the long run it’s been extremely beneficial to the country to have become aware of what occurred. I was probably the first to tell the truth on Watergate.”

[Herbert Kalmbach, ‘most mysterious figure’ in the Watergate scandal, dies at 95]

James Walter McCord Jr. was born in Waurika, Okla., on Jan. 26, 1924. He was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, serving as a bombardier during World War II, and graduated in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas. He was an FBI special agent before joining the CIA in 1951, and in 1965, he received a master’s degree in international affairs from George Washington University.

After retiring from the agency, which bestowed on him an award for distinguished service, he ran a security consulting firm in Rockville, Md. In subsequent years, he worked in Colorado for a company that promoted alternative energy.

His wife, Sarah Berry McCord, died in 2014. He had three children, but a complete list of survivors was not available. Calls seeking comment from his family were not immediately returned.

In 1974, Mr. McCord self-published a book, “A Piece of Tape — The Watergate Story: Fact and Fiction,” that discussed at least one scenario of events that might have been.

Shortly before the Watergate break-in, Mr. McCord wrote, the burglars considered calling off the plan when they discovered that someone had noticed and removed the adhesive tape they placed on the door latches. Rather than aborting the operation, they rigged the locks again.

It was Wills, the $80-a-week security guard, who spotted the tape the first time. He did not overlook it the second.