NEW DOCUMENTARY: Who Really Killed Kennedy?

NEW DOCUMENTARY: Who Really Killed Kennedy?

… A second investigation years later, by a congressional committee, reported that there had “probably” been two snipers — one of them Oswald — and thus a conspiracy. As with the Warren commission, the committee said that it found no evidence to implicate Cuba. The German documentary, aired for the first time last night by Westdeutscher Rundfunk, claims to have found such evidence. Wilfried Huismann, an award-winning film-maker, presented a chilling scenario. On July 18, 1962, soon after Oswald’s return to America from the Soviet Union, Vladimir Kryuchkov, a future KGB chief, sent a telegram about Oswald to the head of Cuban intelligence, Comandante Ramiro Valdes. Though Oswald was “unstable”, he said, the Cubans should take a look at him. Señor Valdes’ staff did as their Soviet counterparts suggested, and had their first contact with Oswald in November, a few weeks after the Cuban missile crisis. More contacts followed — directed, according to the documentary, by Rolando Cubela, then a trusted Castro associate. Oswald was supplied with modest sums of money, and acquired a file at Havana headquarters in a section assigned to “Foreign Collaborators”. The pivotal encounter, the episode most incriminating to the Cubans, took place less than two months before the assassination. Fabián Escalante, a future chief of intelligence, and his nephew Aníbal, the son of a former president of the Cuban Communist Party, are named in the programme as having met Oswald. The young American said that he wanted to become a “soldier of the Revolution”. To prove it he would kill Kennedy. He was supposedly twice observed in the Cuban Embassy’s garage — a location chosen because the Cubans knew the offices and corridors of their diplomatic mission were riddled with CIA bugs and hopelessly insecure — with another agent of State Security, a tall, thin, black man called César Morales Mesa. He allegedly paid Oswald the less than princely sum of $6,500. On November 22, 1963, after Kennedy was killed, the Cubans abandoned Oswald to his fate. He had been given certain assurances, presumably of a safe haven, but these were now forgotten. Oswald was arrested by Dallas police, but was shot dead by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner while being transferred to the county jail. …

$6,500
to kill a president: did Oswald sell his soul to Cuba?

A German television documentary is claiming to have put the case
together, which links Castro with Oswald and also establishes that he killed
Kennedy for $6,500.

Obviously, I can't speak
to it after simply reading the article, but it's very interesting. I've been
studying John F. Kennedy since I was a kid, as many readers know. My political
show is entitled “Weeping for JFK.” So, whenever I find new writings
or theories about Kennedy it's impossible not to investigate.

Will American audiences see the documentary? Doesn't look like
it so far.

The common theory among most is that the mob, due to Bobby Kennedy's
zealotry, killed JFK out of revenge. After all, it was the mob in West Virginia,
not Illinois, that helped put Kennedy over the top in 1960. In fact, back then,
a Catholic getting elected in West Virginia was seen as near impossible. Thanks
to Daddy Joe and the mob, with a little help from Frank Sinatra, the JFK team
pulled it off. However, many believe even this theory to be bogus, due to FBI
surveillance records that have recently been release. I'm still not convinced.

Gerald Posner's Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination
of JFK, has changed many minds to the theory that Oswald acted alone. I'm
an amateur compared to investigative Gerald Posner, who has delved
extensively into every aspect, but I remain a skeptic.

Many years ago, in my youth, I attended John F. Kennedy seminars
conducted by Mark Lane, who convinced me that the Kennedy assassination could
not have possibly been done by a lone wolf like Oswald. However, Lane was definitely
in the Oliver Stone category of conspiracy theorists, which is a little wild
for me to accept today.

After studying Arlen Specter's single bullet theory, I found it
totally ludicrous, as does my weapons expert husband.

Jefferson
Morley of the Washington Post has much more on this story, which
he's covered for decades.

The rational reader is confronted by the paradox that while plenty of wacko theories circulate on the Internet, a good-faith parsing of the evidence can still yield reasonable doubt. After all, many people in high places concluded that JFK had been ambushed by his enemies. Lyndon B. Johnson, for one, never believed that Oswald acted alone; he suspected Cuba's Fidel Castro had retaliated for CIA efforts to kill him. House Speaker Tip O'Neill said that JFK aide Kenneth O'Donnell had told him in 1968 that “he had heard two shots” from the “grassy knoll.” Conspiratorial fears found support in 1979 when the House Select Committee on Assassinations, led by former federal prosecutor G. Robert Blakey, concluded that JFK had been killed by unidentifiable conspirators. Former cabinet secretary Joseph Califano, intimately involved in JFK's Cuba policy, wrote in his autobiography that he had “come to share LBJ's view” that Oswald was not a loner. In 1997 it was revealed that Bobby and Jacqueline Kennedy believed there was a conspiracy in Dallas.

Conspiracy
Theories, by Jefferson Morley

But Jefferson Morley didn't just do the research, he filed a Freedom
of Information Act lawsuit to get the documents.

It is disappointing to learn that the Central Intelligence Agency filed motions in federal court in May 2005 to block disclosure of records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy forty-one years ago. In response to the journalist Jefferson Morley's lawsuit brought under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA is seek-ing to prevent release of records about a deceased CIA operations officer named George E. Joannides. Joannides's story is clearly of substantial historical interest. CIA records show that the New Orleans chapter of a Cuban exile group that Joannides guided and monitored in Miami had a series of encounters with the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald three months before Kennedy was murdered. Fifteen years later, Joannides also served as the agency's liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He did not disclose his role in the events of 1963 to Congress. The public record of the assassination and its confused investigatory aftermath will not be complete without his story. The spirit of the law is clear. The JFK Records Act of 1992, approved unanimously by Congress, mandated that all assassination-related records be reviewed and disclosed “immediately.”

BLOCKED

There is no conclusive proof of a conspiracy and never has been,
which Gerald Posner drew out to a definitive conclusion in his book, which garnered
much praise and changed a lot of minds.

However, there are just too many oddities that add up to the possibility
there was a conspiracy. That's where I remain, but the bottom line is that we'll
likely never know for sure, especially since our government doesn't want us
to.