What is going on in this new CNN article by Thomas Maier claiming that the “U.S. Releases Most but not All JFK Assassination Files”?

https://www.cnn.com/…/us-assassination-attempt-m…/index.html

It’s an interesting article, but there is nothing new here. And contrary to the video attached to the print article, no new document or documents have been recently released about plots to assassinate Castro. The CNN article mentions CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell’s false story that–right after the inauguration–he was pressured by the White House to establish an assassination capability in the CIA to dispose of Castro. As I demonstrated in Chapter Seven of my latest (2019) volume, Into the Storm, that was a lie and Bissell knew it was a lie. When Bissell appeared before the Church Committee on 17 and 22 July 1975, he retracted his claim that President Kennedy told him to create an Executive Action project. At length, the committee concluded this: “His testimony, given in light of information obtained since his earlier appearances, was that there was no White House urging for the creation of the Executive Action project.” At the end of several weeks of depositions to sort out the facts, the committee’s investigation established that an Executive Action capability had neither been requested by the president nor discussed with him. What Was the Motive for Bissell’s Deception?

Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, President Kennedy, John McCone

This question needs to be answered and I believe it can be answered with confidence. By the time Kennedy was in the White House, Bissell was desperate for a miracle. Bissell calculated that if Harvey was convinced that the new president was secretly serious about assassinating Castro, then the gun-toting king of luncheon martinis might be motivated to help make it happen. For Bissell, much more than his position as the DDP was riding on the success or failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In early 1961, Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles wanted Bissell to accept the position of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Bissell got an appointment with Secretary of State Rusk to talk about it, and Rusk said he would be delighted if Bissell served in that position. Afterward, Bissell spoke with the president. Kennedy told Bissell it would be best if he remained in his job as the CIA Deputy Director of Plans. Kennedy had let it be known that Bissell would be replacing Dulles as DCI in July 1961. It was “no great secret,” Bissell wrote in his memoir, that JFK “viewed me as Dulles’ successor.”

Clearly, nothing less than Bissell’s future chance to become the Director of Central Intelligence was at stake. This single fact explains a lot about Bissell’s flawed judgement. In his mind at the time, Castro’s assassination before the exile landing was the only card left in the deck and the only person able to play that card appeared to be Harvey. Having accepted that the ends justified the means, Bissell lied to Harvey. Bissell fabricated his story about a presidential order at the first possible opportunity—immediately after Kennedy’s inauguration.

None of Bissell’s lies resulted from a dislike, let alone a hatred, for John Kennedy. But his selfish interests had long term consequences that he could not have foreseen. His last lie was his worst lie. Bissell could never have imagined that his whopper about a presidential order to establish an Executive Action capability would ultimately fall into the hands of a CIA staff officer who held nothing but hatred for the Kennedy brothers. Bissell could never have imagined that his last lie would be used to deprecate his former friend John Kennedy in perpetuity. Bissell could never have imagined that the CIA would carry on his Mafia plot to assassinate Castro, lie to Attorney General Robert Kennedy that it had been terminated, and then continue the operation against the AG’s orders and behind his back. And, finally, Bissell could never have imagined that Sam Halpern would lie to the Agency and to the world that RFK had waged a secret Mafia campaign to assassinate Castro.

All of these unforeseen events would come to pass. Both Bissell and Halpern lied about what I have dubbed the “White House pressures ploy.” But their motives differed. Bissell lied about it at the time (early 1961) to protect his chance to become the DCI. Halpern lied about this alleged ploy much later to buttress his forty-year-long false campaign to blame Bobby Kennedy for his brother’s assassination.

Charles and Cynthia Thomas with one of their children (Credit: Cynthia Thomas)

Jeff Morley|27 March, 2019

The late Charles Thomas belonged to an exclusive, unhappy and forgotten club: U.S. government officials whose efforts to honestly investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 cost them their jobs and reputations.

Last week the Washington Post ran an obituary of Cynthia Thomas, the widow of Charles Thomas. It was an unusual tribute. The Washington Post, now acknowledges that there are good and solid reasons for perfectly sane people to reject the U.S. government’s implausible and widely disbelieved official theory that a “lone gunman” killed JFK for no discernible reason.

This is a welcome and overdue development, as the facts of Thomas’s tragic story attest.

Thomas, a Foreign Service officer, was stationed in Mexico from 1964 to 1967. In the course of his consular duties, Thomas gathered first-hand information from credible sources about the visit of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to Mexico City six weeks before JFK’s assassination. Thomas assumed that the CIA and FBI would be interested in his new evidence. He assumed wrong.

In fact, Thomas was punished for asking questions about JFK’s assassination. Despite glowing job recommendations, he was inexplicably dismissed from the Foreign Service in 1969. “It was nonsensical,” Cynthia Thomas told a reporter, “Charles was the best sort of American diplomat.”

Two years later, Charles Thomas put a gun to his right temple in the second-floor bathroom of the couple’s home in northwest Washington, and pulled the trigger.

‘Sandbagged’

Other than its violent end, Thomas’ story resembles that of John Whitten, a senior CIA official, who died in 2000. Whitten too paid a price for asking JFK questions.

In 1963 Whitten served as chief of the Mexico desk in the clandestine service. He came up through the agency’s Berlin base where he pioneered the use of the polygraph in counterespionage investigations. He investigated the famous case of Otto John, the West German intelligence chief who defected to East Germany in the 1950s.

The day after JFK was killed, deputy CIA director Richard Helms put Whitten in charge of collating all reports on Oswald. Arrested for killing Kennedy, Oswald denied responsibility and told reporters he was “a patsy.” Oswald was then killed in police custody.

The more Whitten learned about Oswald’s Cuban contacts, the more he wanted to investigate. With a clerical staff of 30, he launched a counterespionage investigation of Oswald, a leftist who had lived in the Soviet Union.

John Whitten: His Oswald investigation was also killed

Within a month, Whitten was, in his own words, “sandbagged” by CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton.

“Angleton started to criticize my report terribly without pointing out any inaccuracies,” Whitten told Senate investigators in closed-door testimony. “It was so full of wrong things, we could not possibly send it to the Bureau, and I just sat there and I did not say a word. This was a typical Angleton performance. I had invited him to comment on the report, and he had withheld all of his comments until he got to the meeting. ”

A legendary and controversial figure in the annals of the CIA, Angleton is best-known for the “mole hunt,” his ceaseless unsuccessful effort to find a Soviet spy inside the CIA in the late 1960s. As I recounted in my 2017 biography of Angleton, The Ghost, Angleton and his molehunters closely monitored Oswald’s travels, foreign contacts and political activities from November 1959 to November 1963.

At a bitter meeting on Christmas Eve 1963, Whitten was relieved of his duties. “Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in bed with the FBI,” Whitten. “I was not, and Angleton was.”

The questions Whitten wanted to pursue about Oswald and the Cubans were never asked, much less answered, by the Warren Commission, which concluded predictably that Oswald acted alone, and that no one in the government was to blame.

When Whitten, an outstanding undercover officer, received a poor job evaluation in 1965, he quit the CIA and moved to Europe to join the Vienna Men’s Choir.

Snatched

Thomas and Whitten’s story also resembles that of Win Scott, the veteran chief of the agency’s Mexico station in the 1960s.

As told in my 2008 biography, Our Man in Mexico, Scott and his deputy Ann Goodpasture, launched their own private investigation of Oswald at the same time as Thomas. Like Thomas, Scott came to reject the official theory of a “lone gunman.” He wrote as much in an unpublished memoir in 1970.

Angleton suppressed Win Scott’s JFK dissent too. When Scott died suddenly in April 1971, Angleton flew to Mexico City and seized Scott’s unpublished manuscript. It would be 20 years before portions of Scott’s memoir surfaced with its damaging account of how the CIA had fed a lie to the Warren Commission about Oswald.

CIA officials then disparaged Scott, who had received the agency’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal in 1969. One CIA official said Scott had “gone to seed.”

Unwelcome Questions

For Thomas’s obituary, the Post turned to an outside writer, former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon. The author of two well-reported books about the Warren Commission and 9/11 Commission, Shenon reported Thomas’s story for The Guardianlast spring.

In the Post, Shenon wrote:

Declassified government files released in the 1990s suggested to her and her family — and to some historians and researchers who have studied the case — that her husband’s career was ended to stop him from continuing to raise unwelcome questions inside the government about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy: specifically, about whether the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had accomplices in Mexico,

Thomas’s “unwelcome questions,” Shenon contends, concerned a possible Cuban communist conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

The long-classified State Department and CIA documents show that her husband alarmed his superiors in the late 1960s by pressing for a new investigation that might have pointed to a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death. It was a plot, he suspected, that had been hatched on Mexican soil and somehow involved officials of the communist government of Cuba.

The implication of the Post’s obituary is that the U.S. government protected Fidel Castro from credible evidence of Cuban involvement in JFK’s assassination–and continues to protect the Cuban government to this day.

As I explain in this piece for Salon, the “Castro did it” theory lacks plausibility.

Why would the CIA protect the impudent revolutionary leader who loved baiting the U.S. government as “Yanqui imperialists” and “war criminals?” The U.S. government had–and has–a policy of unremitting hostility toward the government of Cuba. The agency mounted scores, if not hundreds, of conspiracies to assassinate Castro. Declared U.S. policy long called for the overthrow of Castro’s government.

If Thomas’ evidence credibly pointed to Cuban involvement, why wouldn’t U.S. officials have publicized it in order to discredit Castro, facilitate the overthrow of his government, and do justice for the slain president?

To protect themselves is the obvious answer. But what did the CIA have to hide?

CONTINUE READING THE FULL ARTICLE AT JFKFACTS

Officials searching through debris after the plane carrying Dag Hammarskjold crashed in Northern Rhodesia.CreditCreditCentral Press/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

A few provocative tidbits have emerged about the mysterious 1961 death of United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, just months before the world body may forever close the book on the unsolved case.

Dag Hammarskjold in 1959.CreditAssociated Press

Was Robert Maheu, an aide to Howard Hughes, responsible for Bobby Kennedy’s assassination?

Robert A. Maheu pauses outside federal court in Los Angeles in 1974, where a jury ruled that he had been defamed by billionaire Howard Hughes. A new book claims that Maheu, a longtime CIA operative, may have arranged the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) (Bettmann/Bettmann Archive)

Robert A. Maheu was such a colorful character that it’s widely believed the television show “Mission: Impossible” was based on him and his private investigative agency.

As an ex-FBI agent, the CIA asked him to handle jobs it wanted to steer clear of, such as lining up prostitutes for a foreign president or hiring the mafia to kill Fidel Castro. For more than 15 years, Maheu and his Washington-based company were on monthly retainer to “The Agency,” CIA records show. And during much of that time, Maheu was the right-hand man to Howard Hughes as Hughes bought up vast swaths of Las Vegas and helped finance CIA operations.

Now, a new book alleges that Maheu may have performed another mission for the CIA: the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.).

A spokeswoman for the CIA declined to comment on the book’s allegations, though she acknowledged that Hughes did finance some CIA operations.

Maheu would have had access to the CIA’s experiments in hypnosis and mind control, which were being conducted at the time in California and elsewhere. That would have enabled him to frame Sirhan Sirhan as a patsy for the slaying of Kennedy, while other gunmen actually fired the fatal shots, argues author Lisa Pease, who spent 25 years researching her book, “A Lie Too Big to Fail.”

Pease is not the first person to link the CIA to the June 1968 assassination of Kennedy, in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Sirhan’s lawyers in 2010 accused the CIA of hypnotizing Sirhan and making him “an involuntary participant.” The agency may have feared Kennedy because he opposed the CIA’s expansive use of power and would have pressed the agency for answers in the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, five years earlier, Pease theorizes.

[Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son, RFK Jr., doesn’t believe it was Sirhan Sirhan]

With Maheu’s contacts throughout the CIA and organized crime, he is “the most credible high-level suspect for the planner of Robert Kennedy’s assassination,” Pease wrote. Maheu died in Las Vegas in 2008 at age 90, after a career that the New York Times once described as having “aspects of a novel jointly written by Ian Fleming and Harold Robbins.”

Pease’s book builds on the work of numerous prior authors who concluded that Sirhan did not kill Kennedy but was convicted by the misdeeds of the Los Angeles police and district attorney, and the ineptitude of his defense lawyers, who never challenged any of the physical evidence. Chief among that evidence is the autopsy finding that Kennedy was shot point blank in the back of the head, while Sirhan was in front of Kennedy. Witnesses at the scene of the shooting were adamant that Sirhan never got close enough to fire at close range — he was pinned down by a hotel maître d’ after two shots from in front of Kennedy, and emptied the rest of his eight-shot pistol wildly while he was held down.

The courts in California have rejected such claims, and Sirhan has repeatedly been denied parole, most recently in 2016. He is serving a life sentence in a prison outside San Diego and has maintained since his arrest that he does not remember firing any shots at Kennedy. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and police declined to comment for this story. A former Los Angeles assistant prosecutor has testified against Sirhan at parole hearings, but he, also, declined to be interviewed.

Kennedy speaking at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles early on the morning of June 5, 1968, just past the midnight of June 4. He was shot shortly after the speech. Some critics allege that Sirhan Sirhan was wrongly convicted of the slaying. (Dick Strobel/AP)

Pease believes Sirhan had been hypnotized and was firing blanks, and she quotes witnesses who told police they saw shredded paper fluttering through the air as the shots were being fired, indicative of casings containing an explosive charge but no bullets. Pease cites witnesses, such as the wife of author George Plimpton, who said they saw gunmen behind Kennedy. One of those, an armed security guard named Thane Cesar, had previously worked for Maheu in Los Angeles, Pease found.

Continue reading at the Washington Post