News and Views

Kindling for War and Coups: 7 Ways the U.S. Has Planned ‘False Flag’ Operations Against Cuba

A “false flag operation” is a time-tested technique of intelligence services. It is the propagation of a vicious lie—the deceptive attribution of an outrageous deed to the enemy—so as to justify hostility and war.

From the explosion on the Maine battleship in Havana Harbor in 1898 to the supposed attack on U.S. Navy ships in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 to the bogus story of Iraqi anthrax in 2002, American advocates of war have falsely attributed heinous crimes to target regimes for the purposes of justifying U.S. military action.

Once the jargon of military and intelligence professionals, the term “false flag operation” has entered the American vocabulary. Thanks to Alex Jones, James Fetzer and other hucksters, “false flag operation” now signifies treacherous machinations by unseen forces to dupe unwitting Americans into believing the media. To call the massacre of schoolchildren a “false flag operation,” as Jones and Fetzer have done, is itself a vicious lie that treats the victims and survivors as an enemy, the better to demonize mainstream news organizations. It is a demonstration of cruelty that is proven to drive traffic.

It was no surprise that when two Persian Gulf oil tankers were attacked last Thursday, “Gulf of Tonkin” immediately spiked on Google, while right-wing sites played up claims of a false flag attack.

Because false-flag thinking is both a right-wing media meme and a reality of geopolitical struggle, distinguishing between the two is more urgent than ever. It was no surprise that when two Persian Gulf oil tankers were attacked last Thursday, “Gulf of Tonkin” immediately spiked on Google, while right-wing sites played up claims of a false flag attack.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says a video of a ship, allegedly belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, alongside one of tankers, is “unmistakable” evidence of Iranian responsibility. The attacks, countered Iran’s parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani, were “suspicious.”

“Suspicious acts in the Sea of Oman against oil tankers… seem to be supplementary to the [U.S.] economic sanctions as the Americans went nowhere with the sanctions, [also,] especially, given America’s historical record in the area [of false flag ops],” Larijani said, according to Iran’s PressTV.

Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov recalled the U.S. government’s claims in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled “vials of white powder,” namely anthrax. The claims, which helped justify the disastrous U.S. invasion, were found to be false by the CIA.

The Russians and the Iranians aren’t the only ones to suspect a ruse. Julian Lee, oil industry analyst writing in Bloomberg News, didn’t use the term “false flag,” but he noted the timing of the attacks was most helpful to advocates of confronting Iran.

The attacks occurring during the visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Tehran, a visit blessed by President Trump. Abe urged Tehran to avoid conflict at all costs and pledged to do his utmost for a diplomatic solution. Then came an attack on a Japanese ship, Kokuka Courageous, which undermined and overshadowed his message.

Lee observed:

“This would seem very clumsy timing from a country seeing the first tangible signs of any easing of the crippling sanctions imposed by the Americans. But it is absolutely understandable if you’re someone whose ultimate goal is to derail any easing of tensions between the two nations, and to effect regime change in Tehran. Whoever is behind the attacks is no friend of Iran.”

Until the United States and Iran document their conflicting claims with verifiable evidence, the issue of who was responsible cannot be decided. The video, by itself, proves nothing.

As Defense One observed:

“The boat’s clear and distinct connection to Iran or the IRGC, however, is not evident in the video itself. Nor is it clear from the video (1) where the boat came from, (2) who the occupants were, (3) whether what was allegedly removed was in fact a limpet mine (as the OSINT folks at Bellingcat pointed out this morning), or (4) where the boat went to after its occupants concluded their activity from the side of the Courageous.”

Of course, the historical fact that false stories have proliferated as U.S. policymakers sought justification for war doesn’t prove anything specifically about the tanker attacks in 2019, except that it would be naïve to reflexively rule out a false flag operation.

The Northwoods Paradigm

What is indisputable is that the U.S. government has turned to false flag operations to achieve strategic goals. Case in point: Operation Northwoods, a top-secret plan to create a pretext for a U.S. invasion of Cuba in the early 1960s. At the behest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pentagon planners, assisted by CIA personnel, proposed a dozen different crimes that could falsely be blamed on communist Cuba.

Some of their schemes, as pitched by Pentagon planners, were:

“A series of well-coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.”
“A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms: a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba…”
“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington.”
“The terror campaign could be pointed at refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)…”
“Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions…” (After the reports of the tanker attacks last week, the Pentagon publicized the destruction of a U.S. military drone aircraft by Iranian-backed forces. )

The JCS unanimously approved the Northwoods plans in 1962 and 1963 and presented them to the White House. President Kennedy rejected the idea the first time, and ignored it the second. While never implemented, the Northwoods plans represented the Pentagon’s best thinking on how to carry out an “engineered provocation” at that time. The Northwoods documents are authentic, and the Defense Department has never disavowed the methods they espouse.

Made public for the first time in 1997, the 200-plus pages of Northwoods material illuminate seven key goals of what the JCS called “pretext operations.”

Create indignation among Americans. Or as the JCS stated, “place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances.”
Depict the enemy as a violent rogue actor. To make the bogus charges of terrorism stick, the Northwoods planners said, “Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement would also be helpful to projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.”
Contrive an “unprovoked” attack on the United States. The Northwoods planners said “It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs [Soviet-made fighter jets] have destroyed a USAF [U.S. Air Force] aircraft over international water in an unprovoked attack.”
Mimic real enemy actions, if possible. “Justification for U.S. intervention probably would be more convincing to the American public and rest of the world if it could be related to real and valid provocations rather than based wholly on manufactured cases which entail risk of compromise.”
Go to great lengths to generate false but incriminating detail. To stage a fake hijacking, the Northwoods planners suggested:

“An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization… At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft would be loaded with selected passengers, all board under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

“Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being [sic] transmitting on the international distress frequency a ‘MAY DAY’ message…”

If necessary, sacrifice human life to make the operation credible. In the Northwoods proposal to “sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated),” the merciless parenthetical shows that even people fleeing the target regime were considered potentially expendable to achieve U.S. goals.
Exploit the news cycle to promote false claims. In early 1962, the United States was preparing to launch astronaut John Glenn into space. Operation Dirty Trick would be mounted to “provide irrevocable proof that, should the MERCURY manned orbit flight fail, the fault lies with the Communists… This could be accomplished by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference…”

False flag operations, in other words, are not just a figment of the conspiratorial imagination. They have been seen as viable instruments of U.S. regime change policy. These tactics have never been repudiated by U.S. officials. That doesn’t mean last week’s tanker attacks were a false flag operation. It does mean false flag operations are a weapon in Washington’s arsenal.

Jefferson Morley
Independent Media Institute

Jefferson Morley is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent of the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., since 1980. He spent 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. He was a staff writer at Arms Control Today and Washington editor of Salon. He is the editor and co-founder of JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of JFK. His latest book is The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James Jesus Angleton.

This article was produced by the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Khashoggi Killing Inquiry Should Look Into Saudi Prince’s Role, U.N. Expert Says

By Nick Cumming-Bruce

June 19, 2019

GENEVA — Saudi Arabia is responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate last year, and there is “credible evidence” justifying an investigation into the role of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a United Nations expert said in a report released on Wednesday.

The expert, Agnes Callamard, also said that the United Nations secretary general should establish an international criminal investigation to ensure accountability for the crime.

“There is credible evidence warranting further investigation of high-level Saudi officials’ individual liability, including the crown prince’s,” Ms. Callamard said in a 100-page report, issued after a five-month investigation.

Prince Mohammed, the day-to-day ruler of Saudi Arabia, was already widely suspected of having ordered the killing, a conclusion reached by Western intelligence agencies.

But the report by Ms. Callamard, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions for the United Nations human rights agency, is the most complete set of findings yet made public on the death of Mr. Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi writer who lived in the United States.

“Evidence points to the 15-person mission to execute Mr. Khashoggi requiring significant government coordination, resources and finances,” Ms. Callamard wrote. “Every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the crown prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr. Khashoggi, was being launched.”

Mr. Khashoggi disappeared after visiting the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 to obtain papers that would have enabled him to marry his Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who was waiting outside.

Saudi officials said at first that Mr. Khashoggi had left the consulate alive and denied any knowledge of his whereabouts, but they later admitted that he had been killed in the building after what they said was a botched mission to bring him back to Saudi Arabia. A “local collaborator” disposed of his body, Saudi officials have said, but it has not been found.

“Mr. Khashoggi’s killing constituted an extrajudicial killing for which the state of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is responsible,” and may also have been an act of torture under international treaties, Ms. Callamard wrote. “His attempted kidnapping would also constitute a violation under international human rights law.”

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, dismissed the findings as a repetition of questionable claims made before.

“The report includes clear contradictions and allegations that challenge its credibility,” he wrote on Twitter. “We affirm that the judicial authorities of the kingdom are the only ones competent to look into this case with full independence, and we strongly reject any attempt to harm the kingdom’s leadership or to take the case away from Saudi justice.”

Saudi Arabia has put 11 officials identified as being linked to the killing on trial, but has conducted the proceedings in secret.

Western intelligence agencies have concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the killing of Mr. Khashoggi.CreditSergio Moraes/Reuters

Ms. Callamard said that the trial failed to meet international standards. She called for Saudi Arabia to suspend the trial and cooperate with the United Nations in conducting further investigations and in deciding on the format and location of a trial. Failing that, she said, it should carry out further investigations and allow international participation in the trial.

She urged the F.B.I. to open an investigation, if it has not already done so, and she asked the United States to make a determination under American law on the responsibility of the crown prince for Mr. Khashoggi’s death.

[Prince Mohammed has close ties to President Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The Khashoggi case puts them in an uncomfortable position.]

Ms. Callamard also called on the international community to impose targeted sanctions on Saudi officials said to have been involved in the murder, including Prince Mohammed. The sanctions should focus on the prince’s personal assets abroad “until and unless evidence has been produced that he bears no responsibility for the execution of Mr. Khashoggi.”

Ms. Callamard is to present her findings to the Human Rights Council in Geneva next week in a session that will also be addressed by Ms. Cengiz, Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancé.

Ms. Callamard coupled her recommendation with a scathing assessment of Saudi Arabia’s actions after the murder. She said that the Saudi investigation of the crime had not been conducted in good faith and that it may have amounted to obstruction of justice, citing evidence that officials hindered the work of Turkish investigators, including having the murder scene forensically cleaned before it could be examined.

She said that Saudi Arabia did not respond to her requests to visit the kingdom and did not reply to questions she submitted. The Turkish authorities gave her only limited access to evidence, allowing her to listen to about 45 minutes of the seven hours of recordings they had of Saudi officials in the period of Mr. Khashoggi’s death.

Despite such obstacles, her detailed report presents a damning picture of meticulous Saudi preparations for dealing with Mr. Khashoggi that began as soon as officials knew which day he would visit the consulate.

She cited recordings of a conversation between Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, a Saudi intelligence officer frequently seen in the company of Prince Mohammed, and Dr. Salah Mohammed Tubaigy, a forensic expert with the Saudi Interior Ministry, in which they appear to discuss dismembering Mr. Khashoggi. Dr. Tubaigy was on the team flown to Istanbul to deal with the dissident.

“Joints will be separated. It is not a problem. The body is heavy,” Dr. Tubaigy is quoted as saying. “If we take plastic bags and cut it into pieces, it will be finished. We will wrap each of them.”

Ms. Callamard said she did not have evidence pointing to the guilt of specific individuals, or indicating who ordered the crime. “What I do present is information that points to the potential responsibility of individuals and that is what needs to be investigated as a next step.”

Even if a high-level official did not order the murder, she added, “that did not mean that they are not responsible and do not have liability for the killing.”

She expressed concern about the possibility that Saudi Arabia might take similar actions in the future. Since Mr. Khashoggi’s killing, Ms. Callamard noted, there were credible reports of continuing rights violations, including torture and arbitrary detention, and threats against Saudi dissidents abroad.

Mona Boshnaq contributed reporting from London.

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.

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)

CONTINUE READING AT SPARTACUS

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.

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