60 Years Ago Today - The Plot Begins
60 Years Ago Today - The Plot Begins
Part 33
Lee Harvey Oswald got the idea of assassinating President Kennedy 60 years ago today. Up until that day he was desperate to get to Cuba but he was well disposed toward the President. Indeed, he and his wife Marina had a photo of Kennedy alongside a photo of Fidel Castro on their mantel piece. That all changed on Monday morning, 9 September 1963, when Oswald read an interview of Castro which made the front page of the New Orleans Times Picayune as well as every other major newspaper in the US.
Castro had made an impromptu appearance at a reception hosted by the Brazilian Embassy in Havana on Saturday evening, 7 September. He took the initiative to approach an American journalist named Daniel Harker and offered him a quick interview. In the interview Castro said, “We are prepared to fight them and answer them in kind. United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe. Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves since they, too, can be the cause of an attempt which will cause their deaths.”
Castro made these threatening comments because he knew that a senior Cuban government official was meeting in Brazil at that very time, 5-8 September, with a senior CIA officer named Nestor Sanchez.
The senior Cuban official, Rolando Cubela, volunteered to assassinate Castro and establish a new Cuban government that was less hostile to the United States. Sanchez told Cubela that his proposal would be brought to the attention of the “highest levels” of the US government and promised a response at their next meeting, scheduled for 29 October in Paris.
By speaking to Harker, Castro had gone out of his way to warn the CIA that he knew about the ongoing discussions with Cubela. Unfortunately, we ignored the warning. What we found out some years later was that Cubela was a double agent. He was not working with the CIA, he was working for Cuban Counterintelligence. Everything the CIA would ask Cubela to do would be immediately reported back to Castro.
But in the Harker interview, Oswald must have felt that Castro was speaking directly to him. Five months before he had attempted to assassinate Edwin Walker in an effort to earn a place for himself in Cuba. Just two weeks before he had renewed practicing with his sniper rifle, explaining to his wife, “Fidel Castro needs defenders. I’m going to join an army of volunteers. I’m going to become a revolutionary.”
The threats against President Kennedy from Castro himself would have a profound impact on Oswald - - and, in 11 weeks, on the nation.
Only one more thing: a link to someone deeply involved in the House Select Committee on Intelligence investigation, who summarized what is far more likely to have happened in the JFK assassination, and backed up with much more relevant, cogent, well-sourced facts, as opposed to leaving us wondering, inter alia, why the hell Lee Harvey Oswald did not proudly proclaim his "world-historical service to the heroic Cuban Revolution," instead of acting stunned and asking several times for "legal representation," which was denied here is the link:
ratical.org/ratville/JFK/GaetonFonzi/WhoKilledJFK.html
And a sample of the material:
Editor’s note: I wish to express my gratitude to Maria Fonzi for letting me borrow her November 1980 copy of Gaeton Fonzi’s Washingtonian article—as well as the February 1981 issue with Robert Blakey’s letter and Fonzi’s response—in order to scan the originals and craft this hypertext edition. As Marie shared with me in a July 2017 e-mail, “Today I found Blakey’s original letter threatening him with litigation, followed by finding Phillips’ law suit for 35 million. Gaet’s reaction was to expand the Washingtonian article into a book. I always told him that he was brave. But he was more than that; he was fearless!” Recently Marie explained how this “article was originally written for Philadelphia Magazine; Alan [Halpern] got fired; Alan made contacts and The Washingtonian bought the story. Gaet owned rights to the story and gave it to Bernie [McCormick] to publish in his magazines.” The book this article was expanded into was aptly titled, The Last Investigation. See Also: Original Manuscript of The Last Investigation.
*****
WHO KILLED JFK?
BY GAETON FONZI
The Washingtonian
November 1980, pp. 157-192.
There Were Two Conspiracies in the Kennedy Assassination: The First Was to Murder the President. The Second Was to Pretend There Was a Full and Complete Investigation.
This Is the Story of Government Investigator Gaeton Fonzi and His Three-Year Search for the Truth, His Efforts to Track Down a Mysterious American Spymaster Seen in Dallas with Lee Harvey Oswald in September 1963, His Work for the House Assassinations Committee That Was Supposed to Tell the American People What Really Happened on November 22, 1963.
Fed Up with the Politicizing of This Last Investigation, He Breaks His Oath of Silence to Tell What the Insiders Know About the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It Is a Suspenseful Spy Story, It Is a Clear-Eyed Account of How Washington Handles Serious Issues, and It Is History.
Contents
The Historical Imperatives
A very hot day in Dallas in the summer of 1978. I could see the city’s 106-degree fever shimmering from the gray macadam. I waited on the south curb of Elm Street for a break in the traffic and then walked out into the center lane. The street is not as wide as it appears in photographs. Right about ... here. I looked over at the grassy knoll. There was only a stillness there now, a breezeless serenity. On my right was the familiar red brick building, flat, hard-edged, its rows of sooty windows now dull. In my mind, I dropped into a well of time and fell against that instant of history.
A man was killed here.
Here, in an explosively horrible and bloody moment, a man’s life ended. That realization—a man was killed here—had been oddly removed from the whirlwind of activity in which I had been involved. A man was killed here, and what had been going on in Washington—all the officious meetings and the political posturing, all the time and attention devoted to administrative procedures and organizational processes and forms and reports, and now all the scurrying about in a thousand directions in the mad rush to produce a final report—all of that seemed detached from the reality of a single fact: A man was killed here.
I had been working as an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations for more than a year and a half. Now I was one of the few investigators remaining on the staff. The rest had been fired after less than six months of a formal investigation. And now I was standing in Dealey Plaza, on the spot where President John F. Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, and wondering what the hell had gone wrong.
I stood in Dealey Plaza on that hot day in 1978 and could not help thinking that the powers that controlled the Assassinations Committee would have searched much harder for the truth if they had remembered that instant of time when a man’s life ended here. *****
WALKER? The disgraced far right-wing Maj. General Edwin Walker wasn't shot at by Oswald, you have been misled, try visiting kennedysandking dot com for the conclusive refutations of this bogus tale, including an eyewitness who stated he saw two people leaving (separately) and driving away, Oswald couldn't even drive, and the bullets didn't match the Mannlicher-Carcano Oswald supposedly owned (another hoax, look into that, Klein's Sporting Goods sent a different model to the PO Box rented (but not by Oswald) under the name "AJ HIddell," so Oswald could NOT have even showed up and signed for it, besides all that, Oswald could at that time walk into any shop or store selling rifles or pistols and ammo in Texas, and buy one or more, no questions asked, no background check, no identification needed, the works. So why order a rifle from a Chicago-based sporting goods store?