Suddenly the publication is halted and it is delayed one day.
No coherent explanation was given.
Perhaps someone in the White House looked over the material.
The
President's brother was then Attorney General of the United States. He
was later murdered as he was running for President in the 1968
elections, which facilitated Nixon's election for lack of a strong
candidate. The most dramatic thing about the case is that apparently he
had reached the conviction that John Kennedy had been victim of a
conspiracy. Thorough investigators, after analyzing the wounds, the
caliber of the shots and other circumstances surrounding the death of
the President, reached the conclusion that there had been at least
three shooters.
Solitary Oswald, used as an instrument, could not have
been the only shooter. I found that rather striking. Excuse me for
saying this but fate turned me into a shooting instructor with a
telescopic sight for all the Granma expeditionaries. I spent months
practicing and teaching, every day; even though the target is a
stationary one it disappears from view with each shot and so you need
to look for it all over again in fractions of a second.
Oswald
wanted to come through Cuba on his trip to the USSR. He had already
been there before. Someone sent him to ask for a visa in our country's
embassy in Mexico but nobody knew him there so he wasn't authorized.
They wanted to get us implicated in the conspiracy. Later, Jack Ruby,
--a man openly linked to the Mafia-- unable to deal with so much pain
and sadness, as he said, assassinated him, of all places, in a precinct
full police agents.
Subsequently, in international functions or
on visits to Cuba, on more than one occasion I met with the aggrieved
Kennedy relatives, who would greet me respectfully. The former
president's son, who was a very small child when his father was killed,
visited Cuba 34 years later. We met and I invited him to dinner.
The
young man, in the prime of his life, and well brought up, tragically
died in an airplane accident on a stormy night as he was flying to
Martha's Vineyard with his wife. I never touched on the thorny issue
with any of those relatives. In contrast, I pointed out that if the
president-elect had then been Nixon instead of Kennedy, after the Bay
of Pigs disaster we would have been attacked by the land and sea forces
escorting the mercenary expedition, and both countries would have paid
a high toll in human lives. Nixon would not have limited himself to
saying that victory has many fathers and defeat is an orphan. For the
record, Kennedy was never too enthusiastic about the Bay of Pigs
adventure; he was led there by Eisenhower's military reputation and the
recklessness of his ambitious vice-president.
I remember that,
exactly on the day and minute he was assassinated, I was speaking in a
peaceful spot outside of the capital with French journalist Jean
Daniel. He told me that he was bringing a message from President
Kennedy. He said to me that in essence he had told him: "You are going
to see Castro. I would like to know what he thinks about the terrible
danger we just experienced of a thermonuclear war. I want to see you
again as soon as you get back." "Kennedy was very active; he seemed to
be a political machine", he added, and we were not able to continue
talking as someone rushed in with the news of what had just happened.
We turned on the radio. What Kennedy thought was now pointless.
Certainly
I lived with that danger. Cuba was both the weakest part and the one
that would take the first strike, but we did not agree with the
concessions that were made to the United States. I have already spoken
of this before.
Kennedy had emerged from the crisis with greater
authority. He came to recognize the enormous sacrifices of human lives
and material wealth made by the Soviet people in the struggle against
fascism. The worst of the relations between the United States and Cuba
had not yet occurred by April 1961. When he hadn't resigned himself to
the outcome of the Bay of Pigs, along came the Missile Crisis. The
blockade, economic asphyxiation, pirate attacks and assassination plots
multiplied. But the assassination plots and other bloody occurrences
began under the administration of Eisenhower and Nixon.
After
the Missile Crisis we would have not refused to talk with Kennedy, nor
would we have ceased being revolutionaries and radical in our struggle
for socialism. Cuba would have never severed relations with the USSR as
it had been asked to do. Perhaps if the American leaders had been aware
of what a war could be using weapons of mass destruction they would
have ended the Cold War earlier and differently. At least that's how we
felt then, when there was still no talk of global warming, broken
imbalances, the enormous consumption of hydrocarbons and the
sophisticated weaponry created by technology, as I have already said to
the youth of Cuba. We would have had much more time to reach, through
science and conscience, what we are today forced to realize in haste.
President
Ford decided to appoint a Commission to investigate the Central
Intelligence Agency. "We do not want to destroy the CIA but to preserve
it", he said.
As a result of the Commission's investigations
that were led by Senator Frank Church, President Ford signed an
executive order which expressly prohibited the participation of
American officials in the assassinations of foreign leaders.
The documents published now disclose information about the CIA-Mafia links for my assassination.
Details
are also revealed about Operation Chaos, carrying on from 1969 for at
least seven years, for which the CIA created a special squadron with
the mission to infiltrate pacifist groups and to investigate "the
international activities of radicals and black militants". The Agency
compiled more than 300,000 names of American citizens and organizations
and extensive files on 7,200 persons.
According to The New York
Times, President Johnson was convinced that the American anti-War
movement was controlled and funded by Communist governments and he
ordered the CIA to produce evidence.
The documents recognize,
furthermore, that the CIA spied on various journalists like Jack
Anderson, performers such as Jane Fonda and John Lennon, and the
student movements at Columbia University. It also searched homes and
carried out tests on American citizens to determine the reactions of
human beings to certain drugs.
In a memorandum sent to Colby
in 1973, Walter Elder who had been executive assistant to John McCone,
CIA Director in the early 1970s, gives information about discussions in
the CIA headquarters that were taped and transcribed: "I know that
whoever worked in the offices of the director were worried about the
fact that these conversations in the office and on the phone were
transcribed. During the McCone years there were microphones in his
regular offices, the inner office, the dining room, the office in the
East building, and in the study of his home on White Haven Street. I
don't know if anyone is ready to talk about this, but the information
tends to be leaked, and certainly the Agency is vulnerable in this
case".
The secret transcripts of the CIA directors could contain
a great number of "jewels". The National Security Archive is already
requesting these transcripts.
A memo clarifies that the CIA had
a project called OFTEN which would collect "information about dangerous
drugs in American companies", until the program was terminated in the
fall of 1972. In another memo there are reports that manufacturers of
commercial drugs "had passed" drugs to the CIA which had been "refused
due to adverse secondary effects".
As part of the MKULTRA
program, the CIA had given LSD and other psycho-active drugs to people
without their knowledge. According to another document in the archive,
Sydney Gottlieb, a psychiatrist and head of chemistry of the Agency
Mind Control Program, is supposedly the person responsible for having
made available the poison that was going to be used in the
assassination attempt on Patrice Lumumba.
CIA employees assigned
to MHCHAOS the operation that carried out surveillance on American
opposition to the war in Vietnam and other political dissidents
expressed "a high level of resentment" for having been ordered to
carry out such missions.
Nonetheless, there is a series of
interesting matters revealed in these documents, such as the high level
at which the decisions for actions against our country were taken.
The
technique used today by the CIA to avoid giving any details is not the
unpleasant crossed out bits but the blank spaces, coming from the use
of computers.
For The New York Times, large censored sections
reveal that the CIA still cannot expose all the skeletons in its
closets, and many activities developed in operations abroad, checked
over years ago by journalists, congressional investigators and a
presidential commission, are not in the documents.
Howard
Osborn, then CIA Director of Security, makes a summary of the "jewels"
compiled by his office. He lists eight cases including the recruiting
of the gangster Johnny Roselli for the coup against Fidel Castro but
they crossed out the document that is in the number 1 place on Osborn's
initial list: two and a half pages.
"The No. 1 Jewel of the
CIA Security Offices must be very good, especially since the second one
is the list for the program concerning the assassination of Castro by
Roselli," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security
Archive who requested the declassification of "The Family Jewels" 15
years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.
It is notable
that the administration which has declassified the least information in
the history of the United States, and which has even started a process
of reclassifying information that was previously declassified, now
makes the decision to make these revelations.
I believe that
such an action could be an attempt to present an image of transparency
when the government is at an all time low rate of acceptance and
popularity, and to show that those methods belong to another era and
are no longer in use. When he announced the decision, General Hayden,
current CIA Director, said: "The documents offer a look at very
different times and at a very different Agency."
Needless to say
that everything described here is still being done, only in a more
brutal manner and all around the planet, including a growing number of
illegal actions within the very United States.
The New York
Times wrote that intelligence experts consulted expressed that the
revelation of the documents is an attempt to distract attention from
recent controversies and scandals plaguing the CIA and an
Administration that is living through some of its worst moments of
unpopularity.
The declassification could also be an attempt at
showing, in the early stages of the electoral process that the
Democratic administrations were as bad, or worse, than Mr. Bush's.
In pages 11 to 15 of the Memo for the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, we can read:
"In
August 1960, Mr. Richard M. Bissell approached Colonel Sheffield
Edwards with the objective of determining whether the Security Office
had agents who could help in a confidential mission that required
gangster-style action. The target of the mission was Fidel Castro.
"Given
the extreme confidentiality of the mission, the project was known only
to a small group of people. The Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency was informed and he gave it his approval. Colonel J. C. King,
Head of the Western Hemisphere Division, was also informed, but all the
details were deliberately concealed from officials of Operation JMWAVE.
Even though some officials of Communications (Commo) and the Technical
Services Division (TSD) took part in initial planning phases, they were
not aware of the mission's purpose.
"Robert A. Maheu was
contacted, he was informed in general terms about the project, and he
was asked to evaluate whether he could get access to gangster-type
elements as a first step for achieving the desired goal.
"Mr.
Maheu informed that he had met with a certain Johnny Roselli on several
occasions while he was visiting Las Vegas. He had only met him
informally through clients, but he had been told that he was a member
of the upper echelons of the 'syndicate' and that he was controlling
all the ice machines on the Strip. In Maheu's opinion, if Roselli was
in effect a member of the Clan, he undoubtedly had connections that
would lead to the gambling racket in Cuba.
"Maheu was asked to
get close to Roselli, who knew that Maheu was a public relations
executive looking after national and foreign accounts, and tell him
that recently he had been contracted by a client who represented
several international business companies, which were suffering enormous
financial losses in Cuba due to Castro. They were convinced that the
elimination of Castro would be a solution to their problem and they
were ready to pay $ 150,000 for a successful outcome. Roselli had to be
made perfectly aware of the fact that the U.S. government knew nothing,
nor could it know anything, about this operation.
"This was
presented to Roselli on September 14, 1960 in the Hilton Plaza Hotel of
New York City. His initial reaction was to avoid getting involved but
after Maheu's persuasive efforts he agreed to present the idea to a
friend, Sam Gold, who knew "some Cubans". Roselli made it clear that he
didn't want any money for his part in all this, and he believed that
Sam would do likewise. Neither of these people was ever paid with
Agency money.
"During the week of September 25, Maheu was
introduced to Sam who was living at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami
Beach. It was not until several weeks after meeting Sam and Joe who
was introduced as courier operating between Havana and Miami that he
saw photos of these two individuals in the Sunday section of Parade.
They were identified as Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficante,
respectively. Both were on the Attorney General's list of the ten most
wanted. The former was described as the boss of the Cosa Nostra in
Chicago and Al Capone's heir, and the latter was the boss of Cuban
operations of the Cosa Nostra. Maheu immediately called this office
upon learning this information.
"After analyzing the possible
methods to carry out this mission, Sam suggested that they not resort
to firearms but that, if they could get hold of some kind of deadly
pill, something to be put into Castro's food or drink, this would be a
much more effective operation. Sam indicated that he had a possible
candidate in the person of Juan Orta, a Cuban official who had been
receiving bribery payments in the gambling racket, and who still had
access to Castro and was in a financial bind.
"The TSD (Technical Services Division) was requested to produce 6 highly lethal pills.
"Joe
delivered the pills to Orta. After several weeks of attempts, Orta
appears to have chickened out and he asked to be taken off the mission.
He suggested another candidate who made several unsuccessful."
Everything
that was said in the numerous paragraphs above is in quotes. Observe
well, dear readers, the methods that were already being used by the
United States to rule the world.
I remember that during the
early years of the Revolution, in the offices of the National Institute
for Agrarian Reform, there was a man working there with me whose name
was Orta, who had been linked to the anti-Batista political forces. He
was a respectful and serious man. But, it could only be him. The
decades have gone by and I see his name once more in the CIA report. I
can't lay my hands on information to immediately prove what happened to
him. Accept my apologies if I involuntarily have offended a relative or
a descendent, whether the person I have mentioned is guilty or not.
The
empire has created a veritable killing machine that is made up not only
of the CIA and its methods. Bush has established powerful and expensive
intelligence and security super-structures, and he has transformed all
the air, sea and land forces into instruments of world power that take
war, injustice, hunger and death to any part of the globe, in order to
educate its inhabitants in the exercise of democracy and freedom. The
American people are gradually waking up to this reality.
Writings 
It was announced that the CIA would be declassifying hundreds of pages on illegal actions that included plans to eliminate the leaders of foreign governments. 
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