In this 50th anniversary year of the JFK assassination, did you know all of the below are facts supported by documents released since the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992?
• While a million Americans were on the FBI’s subversives watch list in the early 60s and entertainers with remote ties to communism were still being blacklisted, defector and admitted traitor Lee Harvey Oswald was not. In fact, he could move freely about.
• In the summer of 1963, pro-Castro Oswald publicly scuffled with the nation’s most well-known anti-Castro group – the DRE – and their arrests and resulting debates were covered on radio and TV and in the newspapers. The DRE was financed and directed by the CIA’s Miami propaganda and counter-intelligence bureau.
• The DRE was also the first in the country to go public with a conspiracy theory with calls to the media the day of the assassination that led them to Oswald’s pro-Castro media exposure in New Orleans, implicating Castro’s involvement.
• The CIA operative in charge of the group – George Joannides – would later show up during the investigations in the 1970s by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He was brought out of retirement by the CIA to server as liaison with the committee, which had no idea he had been in charge of the anti-Castro group that was involved with Oswald that summer.
• HSCA chairman William Blakely later said Joannides would’ve been put on the stand and also charged with obstructing justice.
• FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told LBJ the day after the assassination that someone had impersonated Oswald in Mexico City in September 1963 according to CIA wiretaps and photos. That part of Johnson’s presidential tapes – 14 minutes – was erased and considered lost until someone found a transcript.
• Earlier wiretaps of Oswald did not mention that he had met with Soviet Embassy Consul Valery Kostinov. The imposter, however, made sure that Soviet and Cuban embassy staff confirmed on the wiretapped phone that Oswald had met with Kostinov.
• Kostinov was the head of KGB assassinations in the Western Hemisphere, a fact known only by handful of US intelligence officers
• Johnson did not divulge the Oswald Mexico impersonation story when he asked Supreme Court Justic Earl Warren to head the commission on JFK’s assassination. He did mention Oswald had met with Kostinov and that knowledge would lead to WWIII and the “deaths of 40 million Americans.”
• In case anyone missed the point, a typewritten Oswald letter was sent to the Soviet embassy in DC just two weeks prior to the assassination leading with the assertion he had met with “Comrade Kostin” in Mexico City. It showed up two days prior to the assassination because the FBI had stopped and searched it, as it did with all mail going to the Soviet embassy. Following the assassination, the Soviets considered the letter proof of a U.S.-based conspiracy and gave it (back) to the FBI. This document actually did show up in the Warren Commission report.
• In the month of his assassination, Kennedy had signed a memo to withdraw from Vietnam, had scheduled a back-channel meeting with Castro to normalize relations with Cuba, and was determined to achieve complete détente with the Soviets through his relationship with Khrushchev since the Cuban missile crisis had made both men distrust their military counsel. He had told a friendthat after his election he would be the first U.S. president to visit the Kremlin and end the Cold War forever.
“He looked far ahead and he wanted to change a great deal. Perhaps it is this that is the key to the mystery of the death of President John F. Kennedy.”
- written by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in a Sixth Floor Museum memory book in 1998
Allan Dulles, CIA – “That little Kennedy. He thought he was a god.”