Subject: Russell's Nassau article (long)
Date: 15 Mar 1999 06:22:25 GMT
From: atlasrecrd@aol.com (Atlasrecrd)
Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk

Here is the article Jim refered to.

The Cubans backed up their claim with new evidence linking right-wing
Cuban exiles, renegade CIA officials, organized-crime figures and
possibly wealthy Texans to the conspiracy--a complex scenario in which
accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was set up as (in his own words) a
"patsy" whose history would implicate Havana and its Soviet allies.

After the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brought the USA and USSR to
the brink of nuclear war, Kennedy's agreement with the Soviets
officially barred further US attempts to overthrow Castro or invade
Cuba, and US-Soviet relations began to thaw. Even though the CIA
continued to plot Castro's assassination, the Kennedy Administration
quietly began seeking a rapprochement with Cuba, says Escalante. But
before long, wind of the President's efforts got to the CIA and its
Miami-based Cuban-exile minions.

Exile militant Felipe Vidal Santiago, arrested on a 1964 sabotage
mission into Cuba, told his captors that in Washington, DC in December
1962 he met with a lawyer/lobbyist connected to a "Citizen's Committee
to Free Cuba." This lawyer informed Vidal Santiago of a conversation
he'd had with Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, soon to be US ambassador to
South Vietnam, who said he'd heard from Kennedy aide Walt Rostow of "a
plan to open a dialogue with Cuba."

"Vidal told us he was very surprised," says Escalante. In fact Vidal,
infuriated and betrayed, had alerted his exile cohorts, as well as a CIA
contact, Colonel William Bishop. "It was almost like a bomb, an
intentional message against Kennedy." Vidal was also an information
conduit for General Edwin Walker, the ultra-right Texan paramilitary
leader at whom Oswald had allegedly taken a shot in April 1963. And FBI
files call Vidal a "very close friend" of Miami mobster John Martino,
who intimated to family and associates that he had foreknowledge of the
JFK assassination.

Then in April of 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald--only nine months back from a
two-and-a-half year "defection" to the Soviet Union--moved to New
Orleans and set up a one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba
Committee. By this time, the Kennedy Administration was clamping down on
CIA-backed exile raids against Cuba, and the exiles were publicly
accusing Kennedy of betraying their cause.

"By mid-1963, we had infiltrated a special group of exiles working with
the CIA," says Escalante. "A CIA official came to a safe-house in Miami
and said to a group of Cuban exiles, `You must eliminate Kennedy.'"

The Cubans did not know this CIA man's name, but they knew plenty about
David Atlee Phillips, who was running the CIA's covert operations out of
its Mexico City station. It has long been speculated that Phillips was
really "Maurice Bishop", who was identified by exile leader Antonio
Veciana, speaking to Congressional investigators in 1978, as his CIA
case officer, involved in numerous assassination plots against Castro.

Veciana claimed "Bishop" introduced him to Oswald at a meeting in Dallas
in September 1963. Although Phillips' physical description was a
near-match for that provided by Veciana, the exile would never
positively identify Phillips as "Bishop". Phillips, who died in 1988,
denied using the alias or working with Veciana.

Now the Cubans say they have evidence that "Bishop" was indeed Phillips.
"In 1979, Veciana told one of our informants in Miami he had been pushed
to identify the CIA officer by the House Select Committee on
Assassinations and had given a fake name, but that it was David
Phillips," says Escalante. "A close friend of Veciana also told us
Phillips had threatened Veciana so he would not reveal his true
identity." Further corroboration came from another informant to the
Cuban government who had delivered a written message from Phillips to
Veciana in 1959, when he was still in Havana.

One of Phillips' close associates was a Miami-based CIA officer named
David Morales. Escalante says Morales was identified by Rolando Cubela
as "one of the officials" who spoke with him in Paris in September 1963
about assassinating Castro. Cubela, a Cuban official who was really a
double-agent code-named AM/LASH by the CIA, was in Paris picking up his
weaponry--a pen containing lethal poison--to kill Castro at the very
moment of JFK's assassination. In the aftermath of the JFK
assassination, his mission to assassinate Castro was scotched. Cubela, a
crony of top Miami mobster Santos Trafficante, was finally arrested in
Cuba in 1966.

Trafficante was one of several gangsters hired by the CIA to recruit
Cuban exiles into assassination plots against Castro. His Havana casino
operations had been shut down by Castro when the Revolution took power
in 1959, and he was briefly imprisoned; Rolando Cubela is believed have
helped negotiate his release. Upon arriving in Miami in 1960,
Trafficante found himself among the top targets of US Attorney General
Robert Kennedy--the president's kid brother.

Mob Lawyer, a recent book by the late Trafficante's attorney, Frank
Ragano, contains allegations that the mobster worked with New Orleans
mob boss Carlos Marcello and Teamsters' Union leader Jimmy Hoffa--both
targets of Robert Kennedy's far-reaching corruption probes--in helping
plan the JFK assassination. New information released at the Nassau
conference supports these allegations.

Havana's Missing Pieces

The Cubans' information comes from Tony Cuesta, a Cuban exile leader
taken prisoner in a 1966 raid. "Cuesta was blinded in an explosion and
spent most of his time in the hospital," Escalante recalls. In 1978, he
was among a group of imprisoned exiles released through a deal with the
Carter Administration. "A few days before he was to leave," continues
Escalante, "I had several conversations with him, and he wrote up a
declaration. Cuesta volunteered, `I want to tell you something very
important, but I do not want to make this public--because I am returning
to my family in Miami, and this could be very dangerous.' I think this
was a little bit of thanks on his part for the medical care he
received." Cuestra died in 1994.

In his written statement, Tony Cuesta named two other exiles involved in
the JFK assassination, Eladio del Valle and Herminio Diaz Garcia. "We
asked, but he did not want to be questioned further about this,"
Escalante says.

Eladio Del Valle was murdered in Miami in 1967, on the same night that
David Ferrie--Carlos Marcello's personal pilot, and an associate of both
del Valle and Oswald--supposedly committed suicide in New Orleans, hours
before he was to be questioned by District Attorney Jim Garrison about
the assassination. According to Escalante, del Valle served in both
military intelligence and the judicial police in the regime of Fulgencio
Batista, the Cuban dictator ousted by Castro. "Del Calle was in charge
of narcotics in a town south of Havana, where he had business dealings
with Santos Trafficante," Escalante's Cuban files show. After Castro's
triumph, del Valle fled to Miami and formed the "Anti-Communist Cuban
Liberation Movement."

"We managed to penetrate this organization," reveals Escalante. "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."

Herminio Diaz Garcia died in Cuba during the same 1966 raid in which
Tony Cuesta was arrested. Escalante says Diaz, "a hit man from the '40s,
part of a gangster group in Cuba, "had been recruited in 1958 by
Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo for an assassination plot
against Costa Rica's President José Figueres. "They were arrested in
Costa Rica and expelled to Mexico," says Escalante. But Diaz Garcia
killed several people in the 1950s. In 1960, he was Santos Trafficante's
bodyguard. He left Cuba by the end of 1962 via Mexico. We knew he was in
Miami, working with Trafficante and Tony Varona"--another exile involved
in CIA/Mafia plots against Castro. But until Cuesta's revelation, the
Cubans had never suspected Diaz Garcia of involvement in the JFK kill.

Further substantiation was also provided this writer by Richard Case
Nagell, a CIA/KGB double agent whose body was found last November 1 in
Los Angeles--just as the AARB was attempting to reach him for an
interview. I interviewed Nagell extensively for my book, The Man Who
Knew Too Much (Carroll & Graff, NY 1992), in which he recounts
penetrating several plans to assassinate Kennedy, all involving
embittered Cuban exiles, during the 1962-3 period. Nagell would never
reveal the identity of two exiles he claimed deceived Oswald into
believing they were Castro operatives. But he did say that del Valle was
in touch with one of the Oswald-linked exiles. And every time I probed
him, Nagell always steered the conversation to Tony Cuesta--the man who,
according to the Cubans, knew the answer to my question.

Havana-Washington Shadow Play

In September 1963, just two months before the assassination, Cuban UN
Ambassador Lechuga was contacted by one of Kennedy's trusted UN
delegates, William Attwood. "He told me this was a private interview,"
Lechuga recalls. "We spoke on three occasions, trying to break the ice
between our countries. Attwood said we should begin a dialogue. He said
the idea came from Kennedy, but that we should keep the conversations
secret because if the Republicans found out there would be a huge
scandal in Congress."

Lechuga says he was surprised by the American approach, because exile
raids and efforts to destabilize Cuba were continuing. Adds Escalante:
"There was a double track happening. One path was continued sabotage and
isolation of Cuba, to force us to sit down at the negotiating table
under very disadvantageous conditions. So the Cuban government took its
time to deeply study Attwood's proposal. In our view, one strategy was
coming from the Administration and another from the CIA, the exiles and
the Mafia." The Cubans are convinced that word about the secret talks
leaked out, and sparked a conspiracy to kill the American President and
invade Cuba.

In September 1963, Rolando Cubela travelled to Brazil to meet with CIA
contacts about killing Castro. Simultaneously, an American journalist,
Daniel Harker, interviewed Castro at a gathering inside Havana's
Brazilian Embassy. Harker's article quoted Castro saying: "United States
leaders should think that if they assist in terrorist plans to eliminate
Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe." The story, widely
disseminated in the US press, would be used by right-wing elements as
evidence that Cuba was behind the assassination.

But Escalante says the article was a distortion. He says what Castro
really stated was: "American leaders should be careful because [the
anti-Castro operations] were something nobody could control." He was not
threatening JFK, but warning him.

In late September that year, Oswald left New Orleans for Mexico City. On
the way, he showed up in Dallas at the door of Cuban exile Silvia Odio,
in the company of two Latins who identified themselves as "Angel" and
"Leopoldo," who told Odio they were soliciting funds for the
Revolutionary Junta (JURE), Odio's exile organization.. After the visit,
according to Odio, "Leopoldo" telephoned her and described their US
companion as "kind of loco. He could go either way. He could do
anything--like getting underground in Cuba, like killing Castro. He says
we should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs."

The Cuban hypothesis is that the Odio incident had a dual design. JURE
was run by Manuel Ray, a moderate exile leader opposed by the CIA but in
close touch with the Kennedy Administration. But the Cubans say "Angel"
and "Leopoldo" were agents from the right-wing exile group Revolutionary
Student Directorate (DRE), which operated under the CIA's direction. It
was the DRE's propagandists who actively sought to tie Oswald to Cuba
immediately after the assassination. Escalante offered a possible
identification of "Angel" as DRE leader Isidro Borja, who closely
resembled a man seen standing behind Oswald in a famous photo, helping
him pass out "Fair Play for Cuba" leaflets in New Orleans.

Then on September 27, 1963, Oswald showed up three times at the Cuban
consulate in Mexico City, seeking an immediate visa to visit the island.
He also visited the Soviet embassy on the same day. (Some researchers
believe this could have been an imposter "Oswald", but the Cubans say it
was the real Oswald.) Oswald's request was turned down. He angrily
stormed out, and shortly returned to Dallas. Says Escalante: "We believe
Oswald was acting according to plan--to travel to Cuba for a few days,
in order to appear as a Cuban agent after the assassination."

Escalante further claims that when that plan failed, the CIA's David
Phillips arranged to have letters addressed to Oswald from Havana. On
the final day of the 1995 Nassau conference, a slide-show depicted five
letters addressed to Oswald from Cuba; two dated before the
assassination, three immediately after. One of these letters,
intercepted by Cuban authorities, was dated November 14, 1963 and
addressed to "Lee Harvey Oswald, Royalton Hotel, Miami" (where Oswald
had never, in fact, stayed). It was signed "Jorge". According to Arturo
Rodriguez, "The text was of a conspiratorial character. It was written
on the same kind of typewriter as the two others, which the FBI has
concluded were composed on the same machine. We think all these letters
were written by the same person--as part of a plan to blame our country
for the assassination."

Felipe Vidal Santiago told Cuban intelligence that on the weekend before
the assassination, he was invited to a meeting in Dallas by the CIA's
Colonel William Bishop. "It was supposed to be a meeting with a few
wealthy people to talk about financing anti-Castro operations," says
Escalante. Bishop left on his own "for interviews" numerous times during
their stay in Dallas. After approximately four days they returned to
Miami.

Not long before his death in 1993, Col. Bishop confirmed to this writer
that he had knowledge of the JFK plot. The Cubans indicate that the
Vidal-Bishop Dallas trip concerned plans for re-taking the island once
Castro's people had been implicated in the assassination.

Escalante surmises: "Oswald was an intelligence agent of the US--CIA,
FBI, military, or all of these, we don't know. He was manipulated, told
he was penetrating a group of Cuban agents that wanted to kill Kennedy.
But from the very beginning, he was to be the element to blame Cuba."

"Not less than 15 persons took part in the assassination," Escalante
theorizes. "At the same time, knowing a little about CIA operations, we
see how they used the principle of decentralized operations--independent
parties with a specific role, to guarantee compartmentalization and to
keep it simple."

The Nassau gathering marked the inception of what is anticipated will be
an ongoing exchange between Cuban and US researchers into the
assassination. The hope is that access to Cuban documentation might be
provided in the future--such as Tony Cuesta's written "declaration". The
fact that former Cuban intelligence officials are willing to share their
knowledge signifies a momentous watershed in the ongoing effort to
unravel the haunting mystery of who really killed JFK.