On the Trail of a President’s Killers
Iona Andronov
New Times No. 3, 1977, pages 27–30
(Continued from New Times No. 2, 1977)
(Some paragraphs missing.)
“But surely with your position and popularity that is
unlikely!” my acquaintance had said, taken aback by the enormity of the idea.
The proponents of tough, or, as they used to be called,
“big stick,” policies were unfortunately sill very influential in the United
States, the President went on. They were categorically opposed to any move
towards let-up in the drive for preponderance of destructive power, to a
peaceful American-Soviet dialogue.
Asked who these sinister forces were, Kennedy said the
question was not an easy one to answer. The term “military-industrial
complex” which had gained wide currency was not an altogether precise
definition of the opponents of a peace policy, though it was correct up to a
point.
Eighteen months after that White House conversation,
President Kennedy, faced with covert opposition to his policy, had to concede at
last the ominous reality of the U.S. military-industrial complex. On this score
the late President’s aide Arthur Schlesinger tells us that when the topical
political novel “Seven Days in May” came out in 1962 the President read it
with great interest and took it very seriously. The plot of the book, written by
two Washington journalists, revolves around an imaginary conspiracy to seize
power, and the main characters are a President who has entered into peace talks
with Moscow, Pentagon generals out to overthrow him, reactionary politicians,
and ultra-Right representatives of the big press.
Although this very same press came down on the book as a
malicious fantasy, it nevertheless became a best-seller overnight, and Kennedy
asked Schlesinger to do whatever he could to have it made into a film “as a
warning to the nation.” Film director John Frankenheimer, who undertook to
screen it, recalls:
“President Kennedy wanted ‘Seven Days in May’ made. Pierre Salinger conveyed this to us. The Pentagon didn’t want it done. Kennedy said that when we wanted to shoot at the White House he could conveniently go to Hyannis Port that weekend.”
The film had its premiere at the end of 1963. In keeping
with the novel, it had a traditional happy end: the plotters were exposed and
foiled, the President remained alive and well, good triumphed over evil. In real
life things worked out differently. Kennedy did not live to see “Seven Days in
May” on the screen. Before it came out another denouement had been prepared in
the streets of Dallas.
The prologue to the Dallas tragedy is regarded today as
having been John Kennedy’s famous speech of June 10, 1963, in which he pledged
to dedicate his efforts to “the most important topic on earth: peace.” Later
he decided to begin to pull out the U.S. armed forces from South Vietnam and to
complete the withdrawal by the end of 1965. He summoned U.S. Ambassador Lodge
from Saigon to work out a definite plan for the evacuation. Lodge was to have
met with the President on November 24, 1963. But two days before the meeting
Kennedy was assassinated.
The day before the killing it had become known that the
President had laid the groundwork for a radical turn in U.S.-Cuban relations. A
witness to this is former adviser to the American U.N. delegation William
Attwood, who now lives near New York. The President asked Attwood to contact the
Cuban delegation in the U.N. and to sound out the possibility of talks with
Havana. According to Attwood, the President intended to lift the economic
blockade of Cuba, which was meaningless for the United States, and release Cuban
assets sequestered in U.S. banks. Here is what Attwood says now:
“It was quite obvious to me that Castro, at that time, wanted to normalize relations with us. I was on the phone at one point to Havana, setting up a possible meeting to discuss an agenda. In fact, I was supposed to see the President right after Dallas to discuss the kind of questions I’d be asking. Then, if Castro was agreeable, I was to go down very quietly. Not many people were aware of this undertaking. The State Department had its own policy towards Cuba, which was sort of a frozen, do-nothing policy. The CIA, what was left of the gung-ho types, might well still have been plotting something.”
Meanwhile the plotters got wind of the fact that Attwood
expected a favourable reply from Havana on November 23, and that indeed is what
happened. Besides, the CIA learned that the President proposed immediately after
the Dallas trip to begin the “clean-up” of the Intelligence services which
he had been considering for some time. He intended to change the top echelon of
the CIA and to place it under the control of his brother Robert, the
Attorney-General. Thus, had the President returned from Dallas, he might have
taken some cardinal decisions on the CIA, the problems of Vietnam and Cuba, and
U.S. foreign policy in general.
On the morning of November 22 the streets of Dallas were
strewn with leaflets with photographs of John Kennedy, full face and profile, as
in police records, and the text: “Wanted for treason. He is turning the
sovereignty of the U.S. over to the Communist-controlled United Nations. He is
betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies
(Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland). He has given support and encouragement to the
Communist-inspired racial riots.” Similar proclamations inciting to violence
against the President were printed the same day in the leading local newspaper
Dallas Morning News. Someone showed it to Kennedy on his arrival in Dallas, and
he had said to his wife:
“We’re heading into nut country today. But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle nobody can stop it, so why worry?”
The President’s motorcade made its way without mishap
through nearly the whole of Dallas to Dealey Plaza. When it reached the square,
Nellie Connally, the wife of the Texas Governor, who was sitting on the back
seat of the open car in which the Kennedys were riding, turned to the President
with a smile and said: “Well, Mr. President, you can’t say that Dallas
doesn’t love you.” Before the President had time to reply, three shots were
fired in quick succession.
“Here in America the Dallas crime is still called the
‘murder of the century,’” former New Orleans District Attorney Jim
Garrison told me. “But it was not only a murder. It was essentially a
camouflaged coup d’état.”
Garrison was perhaps exaggerating. Nevertheless it is quite
possible that the assassination of President Kennedy prolonged the U.S.
aggression in Vietnam for another nine years, blocked the normalization of
U.S.-Cuban relations, and ushered in a decade of unprecedented violence and
lawlessness on the part of the U.S. Intelligence services. The new investigation
of the death of John Kennedy, besides being a matter of tracking down the
plotters who have eluded capture, is at the same time a fully justified attempt
by Americans to dig down to the political roots of the Dallas crime so as to
make sure that nothing of the kind will happen again.
Rifles from the CIA
Practically every day in Dealey Plaza one can see groups of
tourists in front of the seven-storey brick building where 13 years ago Lee
Harvey Oswald, then arrested as the President’s killer, worked in a book
store-room. They stare up at the window on the sixth storey from which Oswald
fired.
But besides the building in Dealey Plaza there is another
spot with equally sinister associations—a grass-covered knoll nearby with some
bushes and a few trees. When the three rifle shots were fired at the President
at 12.30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, most of the witnesses of the tragedy turned
not to the windows of the book warehouse, but to this knoll whence the sound of
the gunshots came and where a momentary puff of powder smoke was seen. The first
shot, which wounded the President, did come from the direction of the warehouse,
but the third shot, which killed him, was, if witnesses are to believed, fired
from the hillock. People at its foot dropped to the ground for fear of being
hit. And one woman cried: “They’re shooting at the President from the
bushes.”
Some of the police escort first rushed from the warehouse
doors, but the officer in charge issued orders by radio for the knoll to be
surrounded and combed for snipers. The President’s bodyguards later testified
that the fatal last bullet had been fired from the knoll.
A member of the motorcycle escort named Bobby Hargis, who
had been riding next to the President’s car, also heard the shot from the
hillock, stopped, and, pulling out his gun, rushed towards the bushes. Another
policeman, Joe Smith, also made for the hillock where he found behind the bushes
a suspicious-looking individual. He pointed his gun at him and asked him who he
was. The man showed him a Secret Service credential. Thinking he was taking part
in the hunt for the killer, Smith apologized and continued the search.
Later it transpired that not a single member of the Secret
Service had been on the knoll. All the bodyguards had closed in around the
President, covering him with their bodies in case more shots were fired.
The mysterious gunmen on the knoll made their getaway, but
the police combing the neighborhood picked up six men who had tried to elude
them. The men were taken to a police precinct but released after a brief
questioning which yielded no evidence against them. For some strange reason the
usual procedure was not followed; no record was made of the interrogation, no
photographs and no fingerprints were taken. Some trace of two of the six men has
nevertheless remained. When they were being taken to the police precinct a news
photographer who happened to be on the spot snapped their picture, which by some
miracle has survived. Two of the men in the picture look exactly like the CIA
agents Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis who were recently exposed as having been
directly involved in the CIA plots to assassinate political leaders.
Only two years ago a special committee headed by
Vice-President Rockefeller, set up under pressure of American progressive
opinion to investigate past CIA crimes, took up the case of Hunt and Sturgis in
connection with the search for John Kennedy’s assassins.
The two men denied they were the men in the Dallas photo
and said that they had not even been in Dallas on the day of the assassination.
However, the committee established that on November 22 neither had been on duty,
and Hunt on the eve of the fatal day had gone on sick leave from the Washington
headquarters of the CIA.
The committee rightly doubted the evidence given by
relatives of Hunt and Sturgis that they had been at home on November 22. It also
established that both agents had made hostile remarks about Kennedy because of
his intention to settle the conflict with Havana. “It cannot be determined
with certainty where Hunt and Sturgis actually were on the day of the
assassination,” was the evasive conclusion of the committee. The two again got
away with it.
In April 1976 the Senate committee on intelligence issued a
report entitled: “The investigation of the Assassination of President John F.
Kennedy.” The document is again worded so as to conceal the names of persons
suspected of complicity in CIA criminal conspiracies. The CIA assassination
operation was capsuled in the code-name Amlash. The report refers to repeated
meetings in the autumn of 1963 with top officers of the CIA, who on November 19
“told the case officer that he was authorized to tell Amlash that the rifles,
telescopic sights and explosives would be provided.”
The weapons provided by the CIA were supposedly intended
for another attempt on the life of Fidel Castro. Yet the Senate report quotes a
secret CIA memorandum as saying that “Amlash had no plan to overthrow Castro.
Amlash never controlled a viable group inside Cuba which could attempt a coup
against Castro.” The senate report notes that soon after the assassination of
the President the CIA suspended contact with Amlash. If so, why were the rifles
with telescopic sights provided just before the Dallas events?
The CIA chiefs concealed all this not only from the
commission headed by the late Justice Warren, but also from those CIA officers
who were collecting documents for the Warren report. The CIA officer in charge
of this work now told the present Senate committee that he had known nothing of
the Amlash operation.
“Would you have drawn a link in your mind between that
and the Kennedy assassination?” he was asked.
“I certainly would think that that would have
been—become—an absolutely vital factor in analyzing the events surrounding
the Kennedy assassination,” was the reply.
The Senate committee’s finding was: “The Amlash
operation seems very relevant to the investigation of President Kennedy’s
assassination.” The Senators left the matter there, as if the whole thing had
become too hot to handle.
A public opinion poll conducted a month ago established
that 80 per cent of the American people lays the blame for the death of John
Kennedy on some undisclosed plotters and insist that they be brought into the
light of day. This has now been entrusted to the newly-formed House Select
Committee on Assassinations. From my talks with founders of the committee in
Washington I got the impression that they are aware of how difficult and
dangerous an undertaking they have embarked upon.
Human Targets
Bernard Fensterwald, whose office is located in
Washington’s 16th Street, not far from the White House, is one of
the best known lawyers in the United States. In the course of his many years of
legal practice he has taken part in some of the country’s most sensational
trials and investigations, including the Watergate affair and the assassinations
of Martin Luther King and John and Robert Kennedy. I first met him about three
years ago and am grateful to him for valuable advice. Shortly before last
year’s election campaign I called on him to find out what he thought the
chances were of Senator Kennedy running for President. Fensterwald did not mince
words.
“He’d be a fool if he did. For he would surely risk
sharing the fate of John and Robert. After all, the killers of the Kennedy
brothers, the men who hired the assassins and their omnipotent backers have not
been exposed.”
More than four years ago, at the time of the 1972 election
campaign, Democratic Party leaders worked hard to induce Edward Kennedy to
accept the Democratic presidential nomination, but he refused, pleading
“personal family responsibilities.” “It’s one thing when you’re the
target,” the Senator said. “It’s another thing when you make other people
the target.” His mother added: “There are still too many risks, as anyone
who reads the daily newspapers knows well.” The press at the time indeed made
it plain that Edward Kennedy was bound to be killed if he decided to contest the
election.
A year later, when the sensational inquiry into the
Watergate affair began, the investigations brought to light a corollary scandal:
Howard Hunt, one of the two men whose “doubles” were photographed in Dallas
not far from the spot where the President had been killed, was caught redhanded.
It was revealed that at the time of the 1972 presidential campaign he had been
plotting against Edward Kennedy. Pinned down by the facts, Hunt admitted that he
had persuaded General Lansdale and Commander Conein, both of the CIA, to join in
the projected secret operation. The former had earlier been in charge of the
dispatch of CIA killers to Cuba, and the latter had engineered political
assassinations in Indo-China. The new plot was abandoned because Edward Kennedy
publicly announced he would not run for President.
In September 1974, following the dramatic change in White
House incumbents, Democratic leaders again contemplated staking on Senator
Kennedy in the next election. But that same month the FBI announced that a plot
to kidnap the Kennedy children had been discovered. The Senator’s house was
placed under round-the-clock police protection. His wife broke down under the
strain of constant fear and had to go to a mental home. Ten days later Edward
Kennedy solemnly vowed not to accept the Democratic nomination.
“I simply cannot do that to my wife and children and
other members of my family,” he said.
If he did not keep his word, press commentators said, he
was doomed.
Last summer the Democratic leaders, reconciled to
Kennedy’s withdrawal from the election contest, rallied behind Jimmy Carter.
Shortly afterwards is was rumoured among the Democratic following that Edward
Kennedy might be given a high Administration appointment if Carter won. Just
about this time, on September 10, an unemployed worker named David King came to
the Massachusetts state police and reported that since August he had been
offered “big money from New York” for taking part in the killing of Senator
Kennedy.
He named as the main executor of the plot one Robert White,
“a hit man from the mafia.” According to King, White had also recruited a
waitress in a Springfield restaurant where a democratic banquet to which Edward
Kennedy had been invited was to be held. The price for the murder agreed upon
between White and his employers was the huge sum of two million dollars. At
first King had been tempted by the money offered by White, but later, when he
had seen White practising with a sawn-off shotgun, he had got cold feet. He
decided that the game was not worth the candle and he went to the police. Here
is what he told them:
“White said: ‘You can make $30,000 altogether. You get
$5,000 down, and after the job you get $25,000. The waitress was supposed to
serve breakfast, and Mr. White was supposed to walk in right behind her. He was
going to shoot Kennedy while he had breakfast. I wasn’t to do the killing. He
was to do the killing. All I was supposed to do was to keep the freight elevator
ready for him.”
On September 11, the police, having warned Kennedy of the
conspiracy, arrested White and the waitress he had bribed. King too was
detained. The Secret Service established that, according to information from
agents, White had been plotting the terrorist act a year ago. But neither then
nor now was there any direct evidence against him. Now he flatly denied any
compact with King, and there were no witnesses. The waitress too denied the
charge.
The investigation came to a dead end and all three suspects
were released. The instigators of the assassination who had offered them two
million dollars for the job remained anonymous, thus evading all responsibility.
“In the past 15 years or so political assassination has
unfortunately become an established tradition in this country,” Bernard
Fensterwald told me. “Formerly this was not so, not at any rate since
President Lincoln was killed a hundred years ago. Nowadays national political
leaders are being killed, and moreover with impunity. That is why it is
essential, even after a delay of 13 years, to find the killers of President
Kennedy. This must be done if such things are not to happen again.”
The tragedy in Dallas.
The death of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles.
The killing of Martin Luther King in Memphis.
Two attempts on the life of President Ford.
The exposed CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, Patrice
Lumumba, President Sukarno, and General Schneider, the commander of the Chilean
armed forces under the Allende government.
Will there be an end to this violence and terrorism?
New York
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