Former Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. The CIA tried everything possible to assassinate him, but they didn't succeed

Critique of Oswald, the CIA, and a challenge to its author, a belated book review followed by a challenge to Professor John Newman, author of Oswald and the CIA.

The Warren Commission’s 1964 investigation into the Kennedy assassination failed to consider the CIA’s anti-Castro operations in any capacity at all... There could be no more profound omission to any study of Oswald’s activities in the months before the murder of Kennedy than that of the CIA’s anti-Cuban operations.

The Warren Commission’s failure to consider the CIA’s anti-Castro operations is most profoundly omitted. We have set forth above that the White House was directly responsible for the anti-Castro team. Robert Kennedy was responsible for the CIA’s anti-Cuban operations.

It may well turn out after future critical research that Robert Kennedy’s anti-Castro team got out of control and killed his brother. That might explain why the Warren Commission, out of respect for the Kennedy family, decided to overlook this ugly aspect of Robert Kennedy’s role in the unfortunate and the unwitting killing of his brother.

 It may turn out that the Warren commission proved to be a compassionate and responsible body by covering the sins of Robert Kennedy by arriving at conclusions WHICH constituted Epsteinian political truth. Right?

Richard M. Bissell

(p. 116) Richard M. Bissell agreed with King’s recommendation to consider assassinating Castro. Bissell was a powerful man in the CIA’s covert world: He was in charge of all the Agency’s clandestine services, then called the “Directorate of Plans.”

Over the years, we have gradually learned of Bissell’s role in the CIA’s original planning to assassinate Castro. First, there is the CIA’s own Inspector General’s Report, written in 1967 after a Jack Anderson broadcast leaking details of CIA’s links to the Mafia and assassination plots.

So, the CIA employed the Mafia in these anti-Castro plans. As you well know, sometimes the Mafia seems because of its clumsiness involved not in organized but rather disorganized crime. The Mafia is a dirty-dealing-double-crossing outfit that tends to get out of hand. It was clearly a mistake, a big mistake, for the CIA to have employed these duplicitous Italian gangsters in the anti-Castro operations. 

It may well turn out that the Mafia, because of its connections with Jimmie Hoffa and because of Hoffa’s hatred of Robert Kennedy, turned around from its assignment to kill Castro and killed the President.

If this blowback assassination is what happened, then the CIA should not be protected from criticism for having made a very serious mistake in employing those Italian gangsters. If this proves to be the case, the CIA should be forbidden in the future from employing the Mafia for any purpose.

Out of respect for Robert Kennedy and the Kennedy family, we should probably underplay somewhat Robert Kennedy’s role in heading up this operation. Don’t you feel that this disclosure of the CIA’s mistake, and the reason for the Warren Commission’s overlooking the anti-Castro evidence out of excessive concern for the Kennedy family’s feelings would go far towards renewing our faith in our open society?

Of course, I anticipated your assent. This would strip the assassination of Cold War aspects and make irrelevant all the historical material recently released by our State Department to which I will make further reference below. Those documents show that President Kennedy was, in his efforts to mollify the Cold War, involved in a lonely and unequal struggle against a national security state apparatus which opposed and hated him.

Living with Castro (Page 119)

The Vice President [Nixon] recalled that some State Department officials had earlier taken the position that we would be able to live with Castro.

Here we see this fixation on disposing of Castro was a Kennedy family problem. But for the Kennedy family, all that fuss over Cuba might have been avoided. It now turns out that we have proof that President Kennedy opposed the bombing and invasion of Cuba in the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis.

He opposed crushing Cuba when the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and all of the Congress were for it. It now turns out that President Kennedy at the time of his assassination was seeking to normalize relations with Cuba. But the U.S. Media refuses to reveal the proof of these Kennedy peace-making efforts to our citizens.

That proof is found in documents issued by the Department of State in its Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington provided as proof. So, don’t expect me to focus on the proof.

Now that we have this rich new historical source, I, as an historian will not change a word of what I said in my book. Rather, I choose to accept Jack Anderson and his Mafia story as my source for historical truth. For, after all, the rogue element scenario is rational. The thesis of a national security state Cold War killing of President Kennedy is totally irrational.

Covert Side of the CIA—Semi-Autonomous Operation

(p. 128) “This was a radical departure from standard Agency procedure,” Hunt observed, “but the system had been foreshadowed by the semi-autonomous status of our Guatemalan operation.” the entire covert side of the CIA was becoming a semi-autonomous operation.

So, if it turns out that elements of the CIA had a role in the assassination, we will be able to designate that role as outside of its systemic organizational structure. At some future date, we may decide to concede the immaculate invalidity of the well-intentioned and responsible Warren Commission and its Report. 

If we decide to admit to the fallibility of the single-assassin scenario, then we will be able to characterize those bad apples who killed Kennedy in a blowback intelligence situation as semi-autonomous to the CIA’s charter functions and therefore rogue elements. Right?

The FBI and Oswald Documents

(p. 153) When the FBI sent a list of Oswald documents—purporting to be its entire pre-assassination holdings—to the Warren Commission, February 26, 1960, the memo was missing. So was the entire story of what was in the FBI’s 1960 Dallas field office filed on Oswald.

The FBI failed to divulge all of its files on Oswald to the Warren Commission. This indicates that Oswald may have had FBI agency connections which the FBI was too embarrassed to reveal. But, the CIA had similar problems with its Oswald files, and yet we could not arrive at the conclusion that Oswald was a CIA agent. 

So, quod erat demonstrandum, we cannot arrive at the conclusion that Oswald was an FBI agent. Solid reasoning is so easy among people of goodwill when we are freed from the irritation of the fruitcakes who are always jumping to conspiratorial judgments for which there is no rational basis.

Church Committee, Castro and Cuba

(p. 202) The Church Committee report states how the idea of using the mob to kill Castro grew from Edwards’ idea of “contacting members of a gambling syndicate operating in Cuba.”

We cannot reiterate enough the connection of the mob’s efforts to kill Castro and the Kennedy assassination. You see, if we embrace this idea, then all we have to do to accomplish our purpose of restoring faith in our governmental institutions is to point out that the killing of Kennedy was an unfortunate mistake of the CIA and Robert Kennedy who were victimized by the Mafia.

Is this not the work of fine citizens in a society in which we are seeking through our work to make more open?