This film is much worth seeing. And it deserved a much larger platform than it got last year. Right now, it's the best screen depiction of Kennedy's foreign policy that I know of, writes Jim DiEugenio.
A valuable Big Picture book, one with many new sources for study, which bring in much fascinating information. The light [Swanson] sheds on men like Nitze and Acheson show just what hollow clowns the so-called Wise Men of the media really were. [The book] also demonstrates just how powerful and dangerous the Military Industrial Complex has become. By showing Kennedy's opposition to it, he may have also shown why Kennedy was killed, concludes Jim DiEugenio.
The once progressive co-author of A Populist Manifesto with this book has written the worst kind of alternative history, one seriously colored by the view from the present, and more specifically, of those who won and those who lost, with a decided bias in favor of those who won, writes Jim DiEugenio.
A Federal appeals court says the CIA doesn't have to reveal information about the Bay of Pigs.
by Josh Gerstein, At: Politico
John Kelin reports on the letter Antonio Veciana wrote to Marie Fonzi on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, confirming the identification of Phillips with the alias Maurice Bishop.
Arnaldo Fernandez takes a (skeptical) look at the Herminio Diaz story.
Self-promotion by adopting the right talking points characterizes the work of people like Sabato, eager to become televised mouthpieces of establishment propaganda in an age of dying empire, writes Mike Swanson.
If one wants to read the real story behind what happened inside the Warren Commission, read Inquest or Breach of Trust, not this book, writes Jim DiEugenio.
Jim DiEugenio writes of how the author of what was a good book on the JFK case when it first came out has subsequently held less tenable views of both John Kennedy and his assassination, and how he blindly jettisons Garrison's achievements.
This is a kind of odd book. Even for the MSM. Clarke and his cohorts seem to be just catching up to what people in the know understood about Kennedy decades ago. But only now, in 2013 can this be revealed. But even then, it must be accompanied by the usual MSM rumor-mongering and dirt. I guess, under those restrictive circumstances, this is the best one can expect from someone who trusts the likes of Ben Bradlee, concludes Jim DiEugenio.
CUBA 1960 and LANSDALE’S PLAYBOOK By: Paul Bleau
Introduction
The CIA executive action program, code-named ZR RIFLE ZRRIFLE, was in full display by mid-1960 in plans to remove Castro. This was one year before William Harvey perfected it.
The CIA tapped into regime change expertise from its Far East resources, who developed a strategy to devise an assassination attempt on Castro that would be blamed on Chinese Communists. This approach had been used successfully in the Far East and would be enacted for the eventual assassination of the Cuban leader JFK, according to most researchers.
The 1960 plan involved CIA officers Desmond Fitzgerald, JC King, James Noel, and likely Ed Lansdale and David Phillips, who operated out of Cuba in 1959-60. The stratagem of blaming Chinese Communists may have been linked to American interests in the Far East. Most observers believe that by 1963, there was a shift to putting the blame squarely on the Soviets and Cubans for the assassination of JFK. While this focus was intensive, we may ask ourselves if the 1960 plot may have resurfaced as a contingency plan.
In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson and the U.S. war machine were itching for its full-fledged military entry into the Vietnam arena, the U.S. fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident false reports of Vietnamese attacks on U.S. destroyers. Was there also a belated attempt to try and factor the Chinese into a conspiracy that eliminated JFK?
While the following December 1963 CIA file did not gather much interest, it is one of a number that began circulating right after the assassination 104-10308-10320 ATTRIBUTION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY'S ASSASSINATION TO AN ALLEGED CHICOM/CASTRO PLOT. In it, details are planted around Chinese and Castro sympathizers backing a plot, with funding received at an unidentified Wall Street Bank. Two individuals (Ramon Cortes and Inu Fernandez) are fingered as intermediaries present in Dallas and possibly being involved. (For more on Cortes, see State Secret -Chapter 6, Bill Simpich).
Were there to be links between these two and Oswald? Was there some sort of tactic being contemplated here to help bolster motivation for a conflict on the other side of the world? We may never know the answers to these questions- it was sometime in early December 1963 that the CIA and Ambassador Thomas Mann in Mexico received their marching orders from Hoover and LBJ to stop arguing in favor of a Castro connection to a murder plot. In 1966, Mafioso Johnny Rosselli, who was the link between the mafia and the CIA in a partnership to eliminate Castro, said the following:
The last of the sniper teams dispatched by Robert Kennedy in 1963 to assassinate Fidel Castro was captured in Havana. Under torture, they broke and confessed to being sponsored by the CIA and the US government. At that point, Castro remarked that, 'If that was the way President Kennedy wanted it, Cuba could engage in the same tactics'. The result was that Castro infiltrated teams of snipers into the US to kill Kennedy.
Roselli’s propensity to talk too much is what likely got him killed, chopped up, and put in a drum that was found floating in Dumfoundling Bay. Roselli was certainly wrong about Castro leading the operation; in fact, the super secret CIA Inspector General report on the plots was written to correct errors in his story. Rosselli may have been right about who some of JFK’s shooters were. He certainly was spot on about the tactics that were used if one considers the following CIA execution plan:
File 104-10315-10011
This document is as explicit as it can get when it comes to directly evoking the use of the ZRRIFLE executive action program for the removal of Fidel Castro. Thrown right in the reader’s face is the subject of the Dispatch: “Proposed operation to have the Chinese Communists suspected of an assassination attempt.”
There is a lot to unpack in this planned false flag:
Fitzgerald headed the Far East Division between 1957 and 1962, when he worked closely with Ed Lansdale, a legendary PSYCHOLOGICAL OPS expert. In 1953, Lansdale was sent to Vietnam to act as a consultant for the French in their efforts to repel the uprising in their colony. The plan was to mount a propaganda campaign to persuade the Vietnamese people in the south not to vote for the communists in the forthcoming elections.
“In the months that followed they distributed targeted documents that claimed the Vietminh and Chinese communists had entered South Vietnam and were killing innocent civilians. The Ho Chi Minh government was also accused of slaying thousands of political opponents in North Vietnam.” https://spartacus-educational.com/COLDlansdale.htm
In late 1961, Robert Kennedy and the all-powerful SAG team tasked Lansdale to lead Operation Mongoose, a covert action program for sabotage and subversion against Cuba. Lansdale appointed William Harvey as his CIA point person, who maintained a CIA relationship with Roselli all the way to 1963, even though RFK had demoted him after the Missile Crisis. It was Desmond Fitzgerald who replaced Harvey.
ZRRIFLE Plus
The Executive Action program perfected by William Harvey in 1961 was really a spinoff of assassination programs used throughout the ages. Harvey learned about these in meetings with British and French intelligence who were well acquainted with the finer points of this science. e.g., British MI 5 officer Peter Wright. Mafia collaboration synergized these techniques.
What is fascinating with the current file is the level of detail shared and that it predates Harvey’s work and is suggestive of what many have come to think about what took place on November 22, 1963.
Let us break down the plan and then translate it to the JFK assassination conspiracy:
PROPOSED OPERATION TO HAVE CHINESE COMMUNISTS SUSPECTED OF ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT = PROPOSED OPERATION TO HAVE CASTRO BLAMED FOR JFK ASSASSINATION
Replace this with JFK’s exposure in upcoming motorcades and appearances in crowded places.
Better yet, let’s plan the route ourselves with help from our CIA asset, Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell… sketches and maps: As in Sergio Arcacha Smith’s possession of the sewage systems maps and David Ferrie’s sketch of Dealey Plaza… Places of vantage; like Dealey Plaza where there can be triangulation of fire… Routes of escape/ Exfiltrating… Through the railyards, in the Nash Rambler with a Latino getaway driver, through the panicked crowds, Red Bird Airport, the Flight from Dallas in a CIA plane… Locations of sites for caching the weapons… as in Julia Ann Mercer’s sighting of Ruby the morning of the assassination involved in delivering a package near the knoll, or Lee Bowers (railroad tower operator) seeing suspicious movements in the railyards and the TSBD being open to renovation teams during the days preceding the motorcade.
In other words, let us add touches such as an FPCC-linked, Castro-backed commie-assassin to the mix through impersonations, incriminating forged correspondence, false testimonies of assets alleging interaction between the patsy and the enemy as well as financial backing (recall the false testimony of Oswald receiving payouts in the Cuban embassy in Mexico City), back-yard photos portraying Oswald as an unhinged, well-armed Marxist fanatic, etc.
Simply put, we need more than just a good story… we need to set the stage with rumors and fabricate trails of “evidence” for the red herring to be believed: Planting wallets, leaking propaganda through media assets, tampering with evidence, framing patsies and opponents, etc.
Conclusion
While some lone-nut theorists have often brought up the complexity of carrying out what many researchers have come to believe about the assassination, file 104-10315-10011 tells a compelling story: Regime change specialists like Lansdale, Harvey, Fitzgerald, and Phillips all had plenty of experience in the use of ZRRIFLE-like tactics during the decade that preceded Castro’s rise to power; they all likely became involved in applying these tactics for the elimination of Castro beginning in 1960; they were all omnipresent in regime change special ops aimed at Cuba in 1963 and these are the tactics that have been revealed with time, according to many researchers, to be the ones that were used to remove Kennedy.
So yes, orchestrating a regime change is complex… Only real specialists can deliver something this grandiose.