Cuba Paid Oswald to Kill Kennedy, New Film Says

[jAZ]

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/arti...04111709990002

Updated: 10:55 AM EST
Cuba Paid Oswald to Kill Kennedy, New Film Says

By Mark Trevelyan, Reuters

BERLIN (Jan. 4) - Cuba lay behind the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald and its agents provided the gunman with money and support, an award-winning German director says in a new documentary film.

Wilfried Huismann spent three years researching "Rendezvous with Death," based on interviews with former Cuban secret agents, U.S. officials and a Russian intelligence source, and on research in Mexican security archives.

The film, shown to journalists in Berlin on Wednesday, says Oswald traveled to Mexico City by bus in September 1963, seven weeks before the Kennedy shooting, and met agents at the Cuban embassy there who paid him $6,500.

Oscar Marino, a former Cuban agent and a key source for the documentary, told Huismann that Oswald himself had volunteered for the assassination mission and Havana had exploited him.

"Oswald was a dissident. He hated his country...Oswald offered to kill Kennedy," Marino said in the film.

"He was so full of hate, he had the idea. We used him...He was a tool."

He said he knew with certainty that the assassination was an operation of the Cuban secret service G-2, but would not say if it was ordered by President Fidel Castro.

Oswald was shot dead by Jack Ruby two days after killing Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

The film argues Cuba wanted to eliminate Kennedy as the chief enemy of its Communist revolution, and portrays him and Castro as dueling opponents each trying to assassinate the other first.

Former CIA official Sam Halpern told Huismann: "He (Castro) beat us. He bested us. He came out on top, and we lost."

FBI PROBE ABORTED

Laurence Keenan, an officer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who was sent to Mexico City immediately after Kennedy's death to investigate a possible Cuban connection, said he was recalled after just three days and the probe was aborted.

"This was perhaps the worst investigation the FBI was ever involved in," Keenan said. "I realized that I was used. I felt ashamed. We missed a moment in history."

Keenan, 81, said he was convinced Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, blocked further investigation because proof of a Cuban link would put him under irresistible pressure to invade the island, a year after the Cuban missile crisis had brought the United States and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

"Most likely there would have been an invasion of Cuba which could have had unknown consequences for the whole world," he told journalists at the screening, saying that was why Johnson preferred to accept Oswald was "a crazed lone Marxist assassin."

Interviewed for the film, Alexander Haig, then a U.S. military adviser and later secretary of state, quoted Johnson as saying "we simply must not allow the American people to believe that Fidel Castro could have killed our president."

"And the reason was that there would be a right-wing uprising in America, which would keep the Democratic party out of power for two generations," Haig said.

He added that Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the assassinated president and attorney general in his administration, had personally ordered eight attempts on the life of Castro, who is still in power to this day.

Cuban and Russian sources interviewed in the film say the KGB alerted the Cubans to Oswald in mid-1962 after he left the Soviet Union, where he had lived for three years, and returned to the United States with his Soviet wife and their daughter.

Cuban intelligence first made contact with Oswald in November 1962, according to the film.

Huismann also unearthed a U.S. intelligence report shown to Johnson which said Cuban secret service chief Fabian Escalante flew via Mexico City to Dallas on the day of Kennedy's assassination, and back again the same day.

Tracked down by the film maker, Escalante denied he had been in Dallas and evaded questions about Cuba's alleged role. "What is truth, what are lies?" he said, smiling.


01/04/06 11:12 ET

[jAZ]

This actually makes too much sense. It's not kookey enough.

[greg63]

They provided the magic bullet.

[jidar]

Oswald was a communist and is known with certainty to have made several attempts to become involved with the Cubans, he viewed that as a stepping stone to the Russians.
It's actually pretty plausible.

[jAZ]

Originally Posted by jidar

...he viewed that as a stepping stone to the Russians.
It's actually pretty plausible.

It is, but he had already "stepped" to the russians stone. He lived there for 3 years and married a russian woman. I found the latter quotes from Haig and the Escalante to be very interesting.

[Pitt Gorilla]

That's cold, calling him a "tool."

[jidar]

Originally Posted by jAZ

It is, but he had already "stepped" to the russians stone. He lived there for 3 years and married a russian woman. I found the latter quotes from Haig and the Escalante to be very interesting.

He lived in Russia but he had zero connections with the KGB while there other than being under constant surveilance. Oswald decided he wanted to work for the KGB after he returned to the US and so he got involved with Cubans in the US hoping to exploit their relationship with the Russians to get involved with them.
Or so I read.
Of course I also read that these attempts were clumsy and didn't lead to anything.

[jAZ]

Originally Posted by jidar

He lived in Russia but he had zero connections with the KGB while there other than being under constant surveilance. Oswald decided he wanted to work for the KGB after he returned to the US and so he got involved with Cubans in the US hoping to exploit their relationship with the Russians to get involved with them.
Or so I read.
Of course I also read that these attempts were clumsy and didn't lead to anything.

Ahhh! Makes sense now.

[JohnnyV13]

There's one really big hole with one of Haig's statements. How in the hell does Bobby Kennedy order Castro's assassination WHEN HE IS ATTORNEY GENERAL?

The Attorney General heads the justice department, which includes all federal law enforcement agencies under its umbrella. The key here is "DOMESTIC LAW ENFORCEMENT". Now, the FBI can investigate the Kennedy assasination in Mexico because it concerns a domestic law enforcement issue, but no domestic law enforcement agency has the power to perform covert operations on foreign soil.

Now, you might say that Bobby Kennedy, for all intents an purposes was the no. 2 man in JFK's administration. Even so, don't you think Bobby is going to royally piss off some other dept heads in D.C. if he's ordering hits that he has no authority to order? Wouldn't the CIA director be rather pissed? Or the NSA, for that matter. And WHO is going to implement Bobby's order...the FBI? Gee, and Hoover just LOVED the Kennedy's didn't he? Do you think Hoover is going to sit on his hands while Bobby issues totally unconstitutional orders?

The other question is why would Al Haig know this about Bobby?

[greg63]

Originally Posted by jAZ

"He was a tool."

[arrowheadnation]

I too found that to be cold.....

but hilarious.

[banyon]

Oh, good, for a second I thought this was about the MTV Vee-Jay.

[Miles]

"Damn, I knew I left something out."

[scho63]

I continue to firmly believe as I have stated in other posts that there is ZERO chance Oswald acted alone. There is at least two other players in this mess; Russia, Cuba, the Mob

----------------------
http://news.yahoo.com/book-former-ci...180735990.html

(Reuters) - Lee Harvey Oswald had closer ties to Cuba's intelligence agency in the months before his fatal shooting of John F. Kennedy than previously known, according to a new book by a former CIA analyst.

Furthermore, the CIA lied about its knowledge of those ties to the Warren Commission that was tasked with investigating the crime, according to Brian Latell, the CIA's national intelligence officer for Latin America from 1990 to 1994 and author of the book "Castro's Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, & the Assassination of John F. Kennedy," due out on July 9.

Cuba also hid what it knew about Oswald, writes Latell, citing a CIA wiretap of a conversation between two Cuban secret service agents he uncovered in declassified archives.

"I am now convinced that Oswald was engaged with the Cubans," Latell told Reuters.

While he is careful not to suggest Oswald killed Kennedy on instructions from Havana, Latell says the new evidence confirms a widely held belief that Oswald was motivated to kill Kennedy by a fervent desire to impress Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

"I'm convinced he wanted to defect to Cuba," Latell said. "He loved Cuba and Castro, and wanted to join the revolution."

Latell's book, which is a revised edition of an earlier work on Cuban intelligence published last year, is based on new pieces to the puzzle uncovered from several sources, including the unpublished memoirs of Thomas Mann, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico at the time of the assassination, as well as an interview with a former Cuban intelligence agent and declassified government documents.

Seven weeks before Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, Oswald famously traveled to Mexico City by bus hoping to obtain a visa from the Cuban embassy there to visit Havana. Cuba denied him a visa, but the bus trip, and Oswald's known communist sympathies, have long generated suspicion of Cuban involvement in Kennedy's death, although no hard evidence has ever been found.

"What he did during most of the time he spent in the Mexican capital remains perhaps the most important unsolved mystery of the Kennedy assassination," writes Latell, who spent much of his career at the CIA working on Cuba.

U.S. officials never admitted the full extent of what they knew, fearing perhaps they would face public pressure to retaliate against Cuba if greater evidence of a Cuban link became known, Latell argues.

Mann learned shortly after Kennedy's death that Oswald had stayed at the Hotel del Comercio in Mexico City, known by the CIA to be a haven for Cuban spies in Mexico working for the DGI, Havana's national intelligence agency, closely run by Castro.

Mann learned this information at the time from the CIA station chief in Mexico, according to his memoirs, written in 1982. But when he raised it with his superiors in Washington, Mann was silenced by the State Department and told to cease his inquiries about Oswald's stay in Mexico.

Mann was furious and objected, but did as he was told. "In the week after the assassination Mann was convinced Cuba was involved. He was convinced Oswald was working for the Cubans at the hotel," Latell said.

"He started getting very aggressive and upsetting apple carts in Washington."

Mann, who died in 1999, was reposted out of Mexico barely a month after the Kennedy assassination.

During its investigation of the crime in 1964, the Warren Commission was curious about the Mexico trip. But when the commission traveled to Cuba and asked about Oswald's hotel stay, the CIA hid its knowledge about goings on at the hotel, according to Latell.

The Warren Commission later declared that it found no evidence of Cuban government involvement in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

In his research on Cuban intelligence Latell also discovered records of a CIA wiretap of a phone conversation between two DGI officials in Mexico and Havana shortly after the assassination in which they discussed the events in Dallas. One of them remarked how interesting it was that Oswald had wanted to fight for the revolution. How could they have known that, Latell asks, unless the DGI already had a file on him?

Latell suspects Cuba was aware of him as far as 1959 when Oswald first sought contact with Cuban officials at the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles.

Castro has always asserted that Oswald was totally unknown to Cuban authorities. Latell and others find that hard to believe, citing reports that after being denied a visa in Mexico, Oswald shouted, "I'm going to kill Kennedy," in the street outside the Cuban consulate.

"We thought that was incriminating of Oswald," said Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel to the 1977 House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, which re-examined the evidence in Kennedy's death.

Castro was asked about Oswald's shouted threat, but denied any knowledge of it.

"We found that it did happen and he lied about it," said Blakey, adding that the motive of Oswald's Mexico trip remains unclear as Latell's book does not reveal exactly what occurred in the Hotel del Comercio.

Latell also cites an interview with a former Cuban agent tasked with monitoring U.S. communications, who said that on the day of the assassination he was ordered to stop all CIA tracking efforts and redirect his antennae toward Texas.

"Castro knew Kennedy was to be fired upon," Latell says the agent told him.

U.S. officials covered up these vital clues because they were concerned about the consequences if a Cuban connection was publicized, Latell argues.

"Had it been known it could have triggered an invasion of Cuba," he said. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, "didn't want that" so soon after the missile crisis that had brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war barely a year earlier.

"They went nose to nose before and they didn't want to do it again," Latell says.

[loochy]

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