The CIA Nostra

45 YEARS AFTER THE ASSAINATION OF JOHN. F. KENNEDY

by Gabriel Molina

(December 08, Havana, Sri Lanka Guardian) CIA documents declassified since 1992 under the JFK Records Act, in conjunction with other investigations, demonstrate that President John F. Kennedy was the victim of a sinister conspiracy.

But the surviving assassins and masterminds, although identified by a House Special Select Committee, remain unpunished, at least until 50 years have passed since the assassination, in this case, in 2013.

Those accused of committing the most infamous crime of the 20th century: CIA officials, Italian-American and Cuban Mafiosi and their accomplices, Republican politicians in the main, and unscrupulous business magnates, have done the major part of the country’s dirty work for more than 50 years. They have been at the root of financial and electoral frauds, as well as the mass and individual crimes that characterize the extremely high degree of corruption in U.S. politics since then, especially those suffered worldwide under the Bush family administrations, which have placed that country and the world in crisis.

Despite the conclusions of the House Select committee on Assassinations (HSCA) pointing to the CIA and Mafia as suspects in the execution of the crime – a theory likewise reached by Robert. F. Kennedy, as was recently revealed – the group of killers were able to elude the torrent of evidence concerning the conspiracy that investigators are still unraveling.

Within Washington government circles the Kennedy brothers’ confrontations with Lyndon Johnson, which intensified in 1963, are well known. It had been decided to leave him out of the candidacy for the 1964 elections and there was talk of bringing corruption charges against him. The vice president and his Texas machinery had a notable influence on both Houses and was an obstacle to the president’s reforms, in particular of the oil industry and administrative corruption that peaked around Johnson. William Reymond’s book, Le Dernière Temoin (The Last Witness) compiles the confessions of Billie Sol Estes, a millionaire financier of Johnson, sentenced by the courts after being investigated by Robert Kennedy when he was attorney general. Estes said that Johnson forced him to keep silent about the dirty business that he was doing for both of them, as "Robert was going after Johnson above anyone else."

Estes and Reymond both state that the vice president attended the "Pre-assassination party, a meeting organized by a group of these politicians and business magnates just before the crime, on November 21, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, in the house of oil magnate Clint Murchinson, described as "the final coordination of the assassination," by investigator Carl Oglesby in his book The Yankee Cowboy War. I remember Oglesby in Washington when, during the 1978 Committee Hearing, he already suspected the major "benefactor" of the crime.

Oglesby also recounts the attendance of Johnson and Murchinson, a business partner of Meyer Lansky; J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, a close neighbor of the vice president and friend of the gangster Frank Costello; Allen Dulles, ex-director of the CIA; the oil millionaire H.L. Hunt; John J. McCloy; John Connally, former governor of Texas; General Charles Cabell and his brother Earle Cabell, mayor of Dallas; and Richard Nixon, all of them individuals who hated the Kennedy’s.

IMMORAL CIA-MAFIA COLLUSION

The Select Committee reached the conclusion that Carlos Marcello, don of New Orleans and part of Texas; Santos Trafficante of Florida; and James Hoffa, president of the truck drivers union, "had the motive, means and the opportunity to assassinate president Kennedy."

Other Mafia Italian-American capos such as Sam Giancana, John Roselli and Jack Ruby were likewise implicated.

The Committee established that New Orleans, capital of Marcello’s empire, was an important scenario in the conspiracies. Characters like Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, the brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll, Eladio del Valle, Jorge Mas Canosa, Herminio Díaz, Tony Cuesta, Pedero Luis Díaz Lanz and others all used to go there. It was in the same building where they met that Oswald developed his deception of supporting Cuba. The HSCA confirmed that these terrorists of Cuban origin who plotted to kill Fidel Castro, also conspired as individuals to assassinate Kennedy.

THE KENNEDYS AND THE CUBA "EMBARGO"

While still in the strategic office of justice secretary under the Johnson administration, Robert Kennedy attempted to normalize relations with Cuba one month after the assassination of his brother, who was promoting it at the time of his death. Robert described the limitations on travel to the island as a violation of American liberties.

Documents declassified by the National Security Archives on June 29, 2005, include a memo from Robert dated December 12, 1963, in which he pressed Justice Secretary Dean Rusk to make a rapid decision "to leave without effect current prohibitions such as those on travel," noting in the same memo that it was impracticable to arrest, charge and get involved in the persecution, in bad taste, of citizens seeking to travel to Cuba.

As Attorney General, Robert was investigating the CIA and the Cuban and Italian-American mafia in the context of the assassination because, since that very afternoon of November 22, he was even more convinced that the attempts to cast the blame on Cuba were part of that conspiracy.

As justice secretary he also knew prior to FBI reports that those groups hated the Kennedy’s and described them as traitors, given the outcome of Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the October Missile Crisis in 1962. If Robert Kennedy had harbored any doubts as to Mafia participation in the assassination, these were dissipated two days later, when Jack Ruby shot Oswald in the basement of the police precinct where he was being held as the alleged killer of John F. Kennedy.

At the end of 2006 it was exposed that members of the group of CIA officials suspected of having taken part in the assassination of the president were, outside of their functions, in the hotel where Robert was assassinated. Investigator David Talbot relived old wounds when he recounted in the Chicago Tribune that, after the assassination, his aides Draznin and Sheridan supplied Robert with rapid evidence of Ruby’s links with the Mafia.

GEORGE JOANNIDES, THE DOUBLE-GAME GREEK

The main CIA official presumably identified in the graphic evidence that came to light in 2006 on the assassination of Robert Kennedy was George Joannides, born in Athens in 1922, who joined the CIA in 1951 and, after 1959, was assigned to the JM/WAVE Station in Miami and worked closely with the Revolutionary Student Directorate (DRE), a terrorist group based in New Orleans.

Joannides, appointed by Richard Helms to represent the CIA in the Congress Committee investigation underway since 1976, took part in the DRE’s contacts with Lee Harvey Oswald in August 1963, prior to the Dallas crime. The CIA did not reveal that this official had played an important role in the events of 1963, particularly in covering up the Agency’s relations with Oswald, which made him a suspect in the conspiracy to link the "lone gunman" to the Cuban government.

Robert Blakey, chief of the Committee investigators, was furious when he discovered in 1998, via declassified documents, that this official had acted as a link between the DRE and Oswald. Blakey had trusted the collaboration that Joannides was giving the Committee on Richard Helms’ instructions. Joannides died in 1990.

He qualified it as outrageous that the CIA had not informed him of his financial relations and other connections with the DRE, which he considered "an obstruction of justice" and demanded the declassification of the rest of the Joannides and other assassination documents.

Blakey stated that, far from facilitating cooperation, Joannides was obstructing it. "I now believe that the proceedings lacked integrity, precisely because of Joannides… Now I do not believe anything that the Agency said to the Committee…"

The final report of the House Select Committee, published at the beginning of 1979, recommended that the investigation should continue. But the victory of the Ronald Reagan-George Bush duo in the 1980 elections meant that they avoided the truth emerging.

It should not be forgotten that George Bush Sr. was promoted to heading the CIA after his post as senior official responsible for conspiracies against Cuba. His pawns created the infamous alliance with Italian-American and Cuban Mafiosi, defended even now in the agonizing administration of his son. From the Bay of Pigs, as they like to call the "fiasco" of Playa Girón, to the current economic and financial crisis at global level, they have converted the Cosa Nostra into the CIA Nostra. - Sri Lanka Guardian