MORE INFORMANTS OUT THERE

THE JFK CASE: WHAT INFORMANTS ARE STILL OUT THERE?





There are many questions about the JFK assassination that can easily be answered - but only by eyewitnesses who aren't going to be alive for much longer. Do the math: It was 46 years ago this week. It's time for these eyewitnesses to tell their stories - or for the rest of us to at least know who to ask.

Thanks to the JFK Act of 1992 passed in the wake of Oliver Stone's well-known movie, many of the assassination documents were released in the last few years - but the rest are being held back to 2017 or even later. These documents are filled with blacked-out portions that hide the names of the informants and sources of the spy agencies. Some of these names we can figure out. I'll name a couple of them here. Others have gone public. All these names need to be public, before more of these sources pass away from old age.

Here's why it's important. Whether or not Oswald was a spy, he was in the middle of some intriguing operations centered in New York City a and Mexico City during the months before Kennedy was shot.
The purpose of these operations was not merely to spy on the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was the main antiwar network of the era and similar to United for Peace and Justice or ANSWER.
Rather, the goal was to isolate Castro's government in the eyes of the world and to pave the way for a second invasion of Cuba, much like George Bush's second invasion of Iraq.
These operations appear to have been used by someone - whether it was Oswald or someone else - as “protective cover” behind which they could engineer the assassination of JFK, causing the intelligence bureaucracies to instinctively cover up and protect their jobs and pensions, even at the cost of concealing known evidence about Oswald. Who was using who?

Individual claims for privacy are important. But in this case, justice demands that all available information be brought forward now. Embedded in this history are the strategies that push the American people into war - over and over again.

It's Time for Fair Play for the FPCC

In November, 1962, one month after the Cuban missile crisis, the New York papers were filled with headlines about a Cuban plot to bomb Bloomingdale's, other midtown shopping establishments, and military installations throughout the metropolitan area.

Arrested were one of the members of the UN Cuban mission and two members of the Casa Cuba Club, a club of pro-Castro Cuban exiles allied with the politically active Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) headquartered in New York.

This supposed 9/11-style plot was denounced by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and was yet another major black eye for Cuba and its allies. Whether this plot was real or faked, the evidence was never tested in court - the supposed saboteurs were returned to Cuba in April 1963 in exchange for CIA officials that Cuba refused to return in the recently-completed prisoner exchange from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

When Lee Harvey Oswald wrote his first letter to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee HQ in New York in April 1963, he asked for “forty to fifty” free copies of a 40 page pamphlet.

In a remarkable turn of events many years later, the author of the pamphlets turned out to be holding a receipt for 45 of these pamphlets from the CIA Acquisitions Division. These pamphlets were mailed to Oswald by FPCC worker Victor Thomas Vicente. Earlier this year, I was able to identify Vicente as a key informant for both the CIA and the FBI's New York branch.

After mailing the pamphlets, Vicente provided Oswald's letter to the FBI New York office as part of a “black bag job”, where he let FBI agents into the FPCC office so they could photograph the documents.

During the summer of 1963, the CIA sent Victor Vicente to Mexico City, then known as the “spy capital of the world”, and then to Havana to meet directly with Castro and Che Guevara and to film his travels for review upon his return to New York.


On September 16, 1963, John Tilton of the CIA's maritime operations branch sent a memo to the FBI asking for help in an operation designed to make the Fair Play for Cuba Committee look bad. He asked the FBI to provide FPCC stationery and an FPCC mailing list. Again, Victor Vicente took care of that request during the next month, and included in his package correspondence from Oswald. Another request made by Tilton was to plant “deceptive information” to embarrass the FPCC in areas where it had support. This may have been the reason for Oswald's trip to Mexico, whether he knew it or not. Oswald got in line to get a Mexican visa the day after Tilton's letter. Standing right in front of Oswald in line was William Gaudet, an editor of Latin American Reports, who worked with both the CIA and the FBI.

It's time to look at the impersonation of Oswald

In late September, Oswald visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City for the purpose of getting visas to visit both countries. As Oswald was a former defector to the Soviet Union and was planning on traveling with his Russian-born wife, CIA officials such as Cuba chief David Phillips admitted "we covered this man all the time."
After Oswald's capture on November 22, the HQ Mexico desk chief John Whitten wrote that among his fellow employees at Langley, “the effect was electric”. Two well-informed staffers had a footrace down the corridor for Oswald's file.

Many very strange events occurred during Oswald's visit. One is that although there was constant CIA photographic surveillance of those two embassies, the public has never seen a picture of Oswald in Mexico. Although the CIA's Mexico City chief of station Win Scott had been asking since October for a good photo of Oswald to compare against the photos they believed they had taken of Oswald, headquarters had never supplied one.

Even though Scott was supposedly warned by his assistant Anne Goodpasture that she "felt that it should not be sent out" as he might have the wrong picture of Oswald, he sent to DC immediately after the assassination a picture of a man that he wrongly claimed was “a certain person who is known to you” at the Soviet embassy.

After the dust settled, Scott came up with good pictures of Oswald standing outside the Cuban embassy, and two CIA men backed this story. These photos were removed from Scott's safe after his 1971 death by counterintelligence chief James Angleton, and have never seen the light of day.

Meanwhile, Scott sent a tape of Oswald calling the Cuban consulate on October 1 along with the picture. The FBI reported in writing that not only was the photo the wrong one, but the tape was not Oswald's voice!

This tape is the strongest evidence that Oswald was actually impersonated in Mexico City. That tape, like Scott's photos of Oswald, was also in the safe and has also been buried in the dark recesses of the government's archives. We still don't even know who at the FBI listened to the tape.

The CIA said nothing about Oswald's visits to the Cuban embassy in their lengthy memos about Oswald's activities in Mexico City. Richard Helms explained later that it was to “protect sources”. These sources may exist to this day, and may even shed light on the impersonation of Oswald.

J. Edgar Hoover called LBJ and reported the impersonation of Oswald to him. LBJ was aware that the CIA was trying to preserve "freedom of movement" to make the argument that Oswald's ties to Cuba were the basis to declare war. Once Oswald was assassinated by Ruby on November 24, LBJ and the FBI both seized the opportunity to proclaim that Oswald acted alone, and proceeded to conduct a cursory investigation - rather than open up a discussion of Oswald's possible sponsors that led to danger no matter where the evidence might go.

When the House Committee on Assassinations tried to interview the photographer (known variously as LIONION-1, LIFEUD-22, and LILILLY-1) of the Cuban embassy in the late 70s, the CIA interviewer initially assured them "no problem", set up an elaborate process to protect his identity, and then waited them out until the committee was about to disband at the end of 1978. In effect, the CIA told the committee - "oh, we told you months ago, he's in Madrid, and it would be a lot of work to make it happen.

In fact, Alberto Rodriguez Gallego had been in Madrid since 1972, with the CIA complaining that he might be a "double agent" To my knowledge, nobody's ever conducted a full-on interview of Alberto Rodriguez Gallego.

Why did the CIA distrust their own operatives immediately after Oswald's visit to Mexico?

Gallego has been questioned before, as had most of the CIA's surveillance operatives who were in contact with Oswald - but this questioning took place before JFK's assassination.
In studying the recently released records, I found previously unreported lie detector tests conducted not just on Gallego, but on the two CIA agents that ran the much bigger intelligence operation on the Soviet embassy; technical support on the embassy watch (LIMUST) the mobile surveillance team that followed Oswald (LIEMBRACE); most of the members of the airport surveillance operation of Cuban travelers (LIFIRE) and the intelligence operation at the university (LIMOTOR). They even polygraphed the political operative that supported people stuck in the city for weeks trying to get a Cuban visa (AMSUPER-1) and the political operatives in the city of Monterrey where Oswald's bus stopped overnight (LIVALVE-1 and others).

All of these lie detector tests were conducted in the two weeks immediately after Oswald's departure. Except for possibly the Mexican students - a story that is a story in itself - I see no indication that polygraphs were scheduled for any of these operatives, nor that they had been polygraphed for years before Oswald's visit. What happened during Oswald's visit to trigger all this distrust among the CIA's most trusted operatives?

There is one final new story I need to tell about the Mexican CIA station - this one goes back to the first months of 1963 and illustrates the nasty nature of CIA business.

The Guatemalan Coup of March 1963

During 1963, on orders from headquarters, station chief Win Scott conducted a self-described harassment campaign against the former President of Guatelmala, Juan Jose Arevalo. This harassment included mailing “poisoned” candy to Arevalo's family (which included five children) as he campaigned for a second chance to serve as president while in exile in Mexico City.

These documents also reveal that the CIA staged a scenario designed to make Arevalo believe that the Cubans at the embassy were planning to bomb him. The Cuban government was allied with the Guatemalan dissidents, and this was an effort to split Arevalo from other dissidents.

There was even a faked “montage” photo of Arevalo standing with a Soviet military attache that was released to the Guatemalan newspapers during this shortened campaign, which ended abruptly with a military coup before the election.

This military coup plunged Guatemala deeper into more than thirty years of terrible civil war that claimed 200,000 lives.

After the Guatemalan coup, Arevalo finally left Mexico for good the day after the Kennedy assassination, with the CIA monitoring his movements very closely during those final two months.

Juan Jose Arevalo was known as the FDR of Guatemala. His supporters, known throughout the Americas as “Arevalistas”, praised him for bringing democracy, free speech, and social services to his part of the world between 1944 and 1951 as Guatemala's first President. In exile in Mexico City, Arevalo was returning to the national stage by running for President a second time until a military coup ended his chances in March 1963.

Why was his family receiving death threats over the telephone and “poisoned” candy in the mail? Why were Cubans supposedly planning to bomb him? Why were the newspapers trying to ruin his campaign by running phony pictures with him alongside a Soviet general?

David Phillips, the CIA's chief of covert actions during this era, had won a Distinguished Service Medal, one of his agency's highest awards, for his work in overthrowing the Guatemala government. Throughout the early sixties, he was active in operations designed to undermine the FPCC. In early October, 1963, Phillips was transferred to become chief of Cuban operations and doubtlessly played a role in the decision to engage in mass polygraphs.

The montage photo is eerily reminiscent of a famous March 1963 photo of an armed Lee Harvey Oswald holding together in his fist the newspapers of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party. One of the only projects that those two parties were ever able to work together was in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which Oswald joined the next month. In one way, whether this photo is real or faked is immaterial. The photo was created to ensure that Oswald was seen as a person who could bring Communist forces together around Cuba with the power of the gun. That remains Oswald's image to this very day.

If those of us in the United States are serious about understanding our history in places like Guatemala and in Cuba, we will take action in the next few years to ensure that all of the documents about this era are fully released, including the names of the sources and informants. If that happens, we will learn a lot more about how "dirty tricks" affected US history as well as those in other lands. Write Congress and call on them to enforce the JFK Act by releasing all the documents and all the government's sources of information. When the American people are willing to take an unblinking look at ourselves and our institutions, the Kennedy assassination will no longer be a mystery.

- Bill Simpich is a civil rights attorney and an antiwar activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be reached at bsimpich@gmail.com

Here's the endnotes. There's a hyperlinked version at opednews.com in the news column that's easier to read. Give it a bump, maybe it'll get more
people to sign the petition to Congress to enforce the JFK Act! Bill

Endnotes:

http://www.newswithv...ws_worthy18.htm “a Cuban plot to bomb Bloomingdale’s…”

http://www.maryferre...absPageId=48642 “…other midtown shopping establishments”

http://www.maryferre...mp;relPageId=90 “Arrested...”

http://www.maryferre...mp;relPageId=89 “allied with the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee”

http://www.bibliotec...ecretgov_5h.htm “the supposed saboteurs were returned to Cuba in April 1963 in exchange for 3 CIA officials”

http://www.aarclibra...Vol20_0266a.htm “forty or fifty free copies of a 40 page pamphlet”

http://www.maryferre.../...&docId=1265 “the author of those pamphlets was holding a receipt for 45 of these pamphlets from the CIA Acquisitions Division.”

http://www.counterpu...ch07242009.html Victor Vicente was a “key informant” for both the CIA and the FBI

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=2 “he let FBI agents into the FPCC office so they could photograph the documents”

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=396499 “the CIA sent Vicente to Havana…to meet with Castro and Che Guevara”

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=377132 "an operation designed to make the FPCC look bad"

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=2 "Victor Vicente took care of that request during the next month"

http://www.maryferre...mp;relPageId=79 “Standing right in front of Oswald in line was William Gaudet”

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=488851 “Cuba chief David Phillips admitted, ‘We covered this man all the time.’”

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=7 “among his fellow employees at Langley, the effect was electric”

http://www.maryferre...mp;relPageId=12 "Win Scott had been asking since October for a good photo of Oswald"

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=3 “Goodpasture said she felt that it should not be sent out”

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=488851 “a picture of a man that he wrongly claimed”

http://www.maryferre...mp;relPageId=31 “Scott came up with good pictures of Oswald”

http://www.maryferre...mp;relPageId=34 “two CIA men backed this story”

http://www.maryferre...mp;relPageId=11 "the tape was not Oswald’s voice"

http://www.maryferre...mp;relPageId=33 “that tape…has also been buried”

http://www.history-m...-1963_0030a.htm “Hoover…reported the impersonation of Oswald”

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=429764 “LIONION-1”

http://www.maryferre...mp;relPageId=17 “LIFEUD-22”

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=234532 “(the photographer of the) Cuban embassy”

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=440480 "set up an elaborate process to protect his identity"

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=422559 “he’s in Madrid”

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=439480. "Alberto Rodriguez Gallego”

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=6 "1972"

http://www.maryferre...geId=2(Gallego) http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=7 (two CIA agents) http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=2 (LIMUST) http://www.maryferre...Id=2(LIEMBRACE) http://www.maryferre...ageId=2(LIFIRE) http://www.maryferre...geId=2(LIMOTOR) http://www.maryferre...Id=2(AMSUPER-1) http://www.maryferre...eId=2(LIVALVE-1 and others)

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=7 “poisoned candy to Arevalo’s family"

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=510952 “five children”

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=3 "bomb"

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=7 “a faked ‘montage’ photo of Arevalo standing with a Soviet military attaché”

http://www.washingto...9/clinton11.htm “200,000 lives”

http://www.maryferre...bsPageId=797258 “the day after the Kennedy assassination”

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=2 “monitoring his movements”

http://www.maryferre...mp;relPageId=49 “final two months”

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=5 “ensuring that Arevalo would never become president”

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=3 “(June Cobb) was also a CIA asset”

http://www.maryferre...amp;relPageId=3 “for his work in overthrowing the Guatemalan government”

http://www.spartacus...oswaldrifle.jpg “an armed Lee Harvey Oswald holding together in his fist the newspapers of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party”

http://www.petitiono...T/petition.html “Write Congress and call on them to enforce the JFK Act”[quote name='Joseph Backes' date='Nov 26 2009, 02:37 AM' post='174964']

THE JFK CASE: WHAT INFORMANTS ARE STILL OUT THERE?



By Bill Simpich (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)

For OpEdNews: Bill Simpich - Writer

There are many questions about the JFK assassination that can easily be answered - but only by eyewitnesses who aren't going to be alive for much longer. Do the math: It was 46 years ago this week. It's time for these eyewitnesses to tell their stories - or for the rest of us to at least know who to ask.

Absolutely correct.

Thanks to the JFK Act of 1992 passed in the wake of Oliver Stone's well-known movie, many of the assassination documents were released in the last few years - but the rest are being held back to 2017 or even later. These documents are filled with blacked-out portions that hide the names of the informants and sources of the spy agencies. Some of these names we can figure out. I'll name a couple of them here. Others have gone public. All these names need to be public, before more of these sources pass away from old age.

Here's why it's important. Whether or not Oswald was a spy, he was in the middle of some intriguing operations centered in New York City a and Mexico City during the months before Kennedy was shot.
The purpose of these operations was not merely to spy on the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was the main antiwar network of the era and similar to United for Peace and Justice or ANSWER.
Rather, the goal was to isolate Castro's government in the eyes of the world and to pave the way for a second invasion of Cuba, much like George Bush's second invasion of Iraq.
These operations appear to have been used by someone - whether it was Oswald or someone else - as “protective cover” behind which they could engineer the assassination of JFK, causing the intelligence bureaucracies to instinctively cover up and protect their jobs and pensions, even at the cost of concealing known evidence about Oswald. Who was using who?

Individual claims for privacy are important. But in this case, justice demands that all available information be brought forward now. Embedded in this history are the strategies that push the American people into war - over and over again.

Again right on the money.

It's Time for Fair Play for the FPCC

In November, 1962, one month after the Cuban missile crisis, the New York papers were filled with headlines about a Cuban plot to bomb Bloomingdale's, other midtown shopping establishments, and military installations throughout the metropolitan area.

Arrested were one of the members of the UN Cuban mission and two members of the Casa Cuba Club, a club of pro-Castro Cuban exiles allied with the politically active Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) headquartered in New York.

The UN Cuban Mission was the alleged source of funding for the full page ad announcing the formation of the FPCC according to the testimony of FPCC co-founder, Charles Santos-Busch before the Eastman Committee, Jan, 1961.

This supposed 9/11-style plot was denounced by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and was yet another major black eye for Cuba and its allies. Whether this plot was real or faked, the evidence was never tested in court - the supposed saboteurs were returned to Cuba in April 1963 in exchange for CIA officials that Cuba refused to return in the recently-completed prisoner exchange from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

And whether it was real or faked, it matches one suggestion from Operation Northwoods - a terror campaign in Miami or Washington where false evidence would implicate Cuban agents.

When Lee Harvey Oswald wrote his first letter to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee HQ in New York in April 1963, he asked for “forty to fifty” free copies of a 40 page pamphlet.

In a remarkable turn of events many years later, the author of the pamphlets turned out to be holding a receipt for 45 of these pamphlets from the CIA Acquisitions Division. These pamphlets were mailed to Oswald by FPCC worker Victor Thomas Vicente. Earlier this year, I was able to identify Vicente as a key informant for both the CIA and the FBI's New York branch.

After mailing the pamphlets, Vicente provided Oswald's letter to the FBI New York office as part of a “black bag job”, where he let FBI agents into the FPCC office so they could photograph the documents.

During the summer of 1963, the CIA sent Victor Vicente to Mexico City, then known as the “spy capital of the world”, and then to Havana to meet directly with Castro and Che Guevara and to film his travels for review upon his return to New York.

That is very interesting.

On September 16, 1963, John Tilton of the CIA's maritime operations branch sent a memo to the FBI asking for help in an operation designed to make the Fair Play for Cuba Committee look bad. He asked the FBI to provide FPCC stationery and an FPCC mailing list. Again, Victor Vicente took care of that request during the next month, and included in his package correspondence from Oswald. Another request made by Tilton was to plant “deceptive information” to embarrass the FPCC in areas where it had support. This may have been the reason for Oswald's trip to Mexico, whether he knew it or not. Oswald got in line to get a Mexican visa the day after Tilton's letter. Standing right in front of Oswald in line was William Gaudet, an editor of Latin American Reports, who worked with both the CIA and the FBI.

Significant actions of Oswald tended to follow that pattern.

On September 2, 1959, Richard Bissell issued a memorandum titled "Operations Against Soviet Targets". The operations listed were RED CAP, RED SOX and REDSKIN.

Oswald obtained his passport on September 4. In Moscow, a Redskin agent was present during Oswald's attempted defection. Moreover, this agent had been recruited by the First Consul dealing with Oswald.

During Sep/Oct of '62, Oswald was making inquiries about obtaining Russian newspapers and magazines. During this same period, the Pay and Postal rates Bill was going through Congress and the Senate on the way to being passed into law. Part of that debate was a proposed amendment to restrict foreign Communist literature.

After an amendment, the Bill passed in October and became law from Jan 7, 1963. This required PO to hold foreign
Communist propaganda for 20 days while addressee completed and returned form confirming they want the material forwarded to them. Straight after the law came in, Oswald began subscribing to Russian magazines.

On May 16 and May 20, 1963, the FBI received intelligence from two informants indicating that the FPCC had successfully cleaned up its house and was no longer under CP or SWP influence.

On May 26, Oswald writes to the FPCC requesting a charter, and follows up with a series of letters which seem to link the FPCC with CPUSA and SWP.

It's time to look at the impersonation of Oswald

I have two main suspects for this role.

This article looks at one of them: Border Crossing - Was it Oswald?

In late September, Oswald visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City for the purpose of getting visas to visit both countries. As Oswald was a former defector to the Soviet Union and was planning on traveling with his Russian-born wife, CIA officials such as Cuba chief David Phillips admitted "we covered this man all the time."
After Oswald's capture on November 22, the HQ Mexico desk chief John Whitten wrote that among his fellow employees at Langley, “the effect was electric”. Two well-informed staffers had a footrace down the corridor for Oswald's file.

Many very strange events occurred during Oswald's visit. One is that although there was constant CIA photographic surveillance of those two embassies, the public has never seen a picture of Oswald in Mexico. Although the CIA's Mexico City chief of station Win Scott had been asking since October for a good photo of Oswald to compare against the photos they believed they had taken of Oswald, headquarters had never supplied one.

Even though Scott was supposedly warned by his assistant Anne Goodpasture that she "felt that it should not be sent out" as he might have the wrong picture of Oswald, he sent to DC immediately after the assassination a picture of a man that he wrongly claimed was “a certain person who is known to you” at the Soviet embassy.

After the dust settled, Scott came up with good pictures of Oswald standing outside the Cuban embassy, and two CIA men backed this story. These photos were removed from Scott's safe after his 1971 death by counterintelligence chief James Angleton, and have never seen the light of day.

Meanwhile, Scott sent a tape of Oswald calling the Cuban consulate on October 1 along with the picture. The FBI reported in writing that not only was the photo the wrong one, but the tape was not Oswald's voice!

This tape is the strongest evidence that Oswald was actually impersonated in Mexico City. That tape, like Scott's photos of Oswald, was also in the safe and has also been buried in the dark recesses of the government's archives. We still don't even know who at the FBI listened to the tape.

The CIA said nothing about Oswald's visits to the Cuban embassy in their lengthy memos about Oswald's activities in Mexico City. Richard Helms explained later that it was to “protect sources”. These sources may exist to this day, and may even shed light on the impersonation of Oswald.

J. Edgar Hoover called LBJ and reported the impersonation of Oswald to him. LBJ was aware that the CIA was trying to preserve "freedom of movement" to make the argument that Oswald's ties to Cuba were the basis to declare war. Once Oswald was assassinated by Ruby on November 24, LBJ and the FBI both seized the opportunity to proclaim that Oswald acted alone, and proceeded to conduct a cursory investigation - rather than open up a discussion of Oswald's possible sponsors that led to danger no matter where the evidence might go.

When the House Committee on Assassinations tried to interview the photographer (known variously as LIONION-1, LIFEUD-22, and LILILLY-1) of the Cuban embassy in the late 70s, the CIA interviewer initially assured them "no problem", set up an elaborate process to protect his identity, and then waited them out until the committee was about to disband at the end of 1978. In effect, the CIA told the committee - "oh, we told you months ago, he's in Madrid, and it would be a lot of work to make it happen.

In fact, Alberto Rodriguez Gallego had been in Madrid since 1972, with the CIA complaining that he might be a "double agent" To my knowledge, nobody's ever conducted a full-on interview of Alberto Rodriguez Gallego.

Why did the CIA distrust their own operatives immediately after Oswald's visit to Mexico?

Gallego has been questioned before, as had most of the CIA's surveillance operatives who were in contact with Oswald - but this questioning took place before JFK's assassination.
In studying the recently released records, I found previously unreported lie detector tests conducted not just on Gallego, but on the two CIA agents that ran the much bigger intelligence operation on the Soviet embassy; technical support on the embassy watch (LIMUST) the mobile surveillance team that followed Oswald (LIEMBRACE); most of the members of the airport surveillance operation of Cuban travelers (LIFIRE) and the intelligence operation at the university (LIMOTOR). They even polygraphed the political operative that supported people stuck in the city for weeks trying to get a Cuban visa (AMSUPER-1) and the political operatives in the city of Monterrey where Oswald's bus stopped overnight (LIVALVE-1 and others).

All of these lie detector tests were conducted in the two weeks immediately after Oswald's departure. Except for possibly the Mexican students - a story that is a story in itself - I see no indication that polygraphs were scheduled for any of these operatives, nor that they had been polygraphed for years before Oswald's visit. What happened during Oswald's visit to trigger all this distrust among the CIA's most trusted operatives?

Mexican students? There a few stories there. One involves a person you mention a little further on - Arevalo and ties in with a certain NO crowd, as well. Don't mean to sound mysterious but this was information I developed for a joint project, and though that has gone by the wayside, I live in hope of a new inquiry in which she, and many others located, can be tapped to give evidence. Giving details publicly may cause problems with that.

There are however, the odd exceptions to the above where I don't think "pre-emptive" public disclosure can do any harm. One example of that was the subject of a Lancer presentation this year.

There is one final new story I need to tell about the Mexican CIA station - this one goes back to the first months of 1963 and illustrates the nasty nature of CIA business.

The Guatemalan Coup of March 1963

During 1963, on orders from headquarters, station chief Win Scott conducted a self-described harassment campaign against the former President of Guatelmala, Juan Jose Arevalo. This harassment included mailing “poisoned” candy to Arevalo's family (which included five children) as he campaigned for a second chance to serve as president while in exile in Mexico City.

These documents also reveal that the CIA staged a scenario designed to make Arevalo believe that the Cubans at the embassy were planning to bomb him. The Cuban government was allied with the Guatemalan dissidents, and this was an effort to split Arevalo from other dissidents.

There was even a faked “montage” photo of Arevalo standing with a Soviet military attache that was released to the Guatemalan newspapers during this shortened campaign, which ended abruptly with a military coup before the election.

This military coup plunged Guatemala deeper into more than thirty years of terrible civil war that claimed 200,000 lives.

After the Guatemalan coup, Arevalo finally left Mexico for good the day after the Kennedy assassination, with the CIA monitoring his movements very closely during those final two months.

Juan Jose Arevalo was known as the FDR of Guatemala. His supporters, known throughout the Americas as “Arevalistas”, praised him for bringing democracy, free speech, and social services to his part of the world between 1944 and 1951 as Guatemala's first President. In exile in Mexico City, Arevalo was returning to the national stage by running for President a second time until a military coup ended his chances in March 1963.

Arevelo was the author of the "The Sharks and the Sardines" As I recall, the book was not entirely well received by Castro. Oswald checked it out of the Dallas Library on Nov 6, '63 and it was due back Nov 13, but not returned.

Why was his family receiving death threats over the telephone and “poisoned” candy in the mail? Why were Cubans supposedly planning to bomb him? Why were the newspapers trying to ruin his campaign by running phony pictures with him alongside a Soviet general?

David Phillips, the CIA's chief of covert actions during this era, had won a Distinguished Service Medal, one of his agency's highest awards, for his work in overthrowing the Guatemala government. Throughout the early sixties, he was active in operations designed to undermine the FPCC. In early October, 1963, Phillips was transferred to become chief of Cuban operations and doubtlessly played a role in the decision to engage in mass polygraphs.

The montage photo is eerily reminiscent of a famous March 1963 photo of an armed Lee Harvey Oswald holding together in his fist the newspapers of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party. One of the only projects that those two parties were ever able to work together was in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which Oswald joined the next month. In one way, whether this photo is real or faked is immaterial. The photo was created to ensure that Oswald was seen as a person who could bring Communist forces together around Cuba with the power of the gun. That remains Oswald's image to this very day.

If those of us in the United States are serious about understanding our history in places like Guatemala and in Cuba, we will take action in the next few years to ensure that all of the documents about this era are fully released, including the names of the sources and informants. If that happens, we will learn a lot more about how "dirty tricks" affected US history as well as those in other lands. Write Congress and call on them to enforce the JFK Act by releasing all the documents and all the government's sources of information. When the American people are willing to take an unblinking look at ourselves and our institutions, the Kennedy assassination will no longer be a mystery.

- Bill Simpich is a civil rights attorney and an antiwar activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be reached at bsimpich@gmail.com

Posted 27 November 2009 - 04:08 AM

Greg,

Thanks for your supportive insights. I would like to know more about the Redskin story and several other items you mentioned.

The "Border Crossing" story about Reies Tijerina and his possible family connections was excellent. Wikipedia says that Tijerina is still alive and living in El Paso, and I bet he or other family members would be glad to address those questions you posed. Did you know that he joined forces with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Rescurrection City in the DC actions of 1968 after MLK was killed?
His book, "They Called Me King Tiger" is a treasure.

I have read Arevalo's "The Shark and the Sardines", and it's excellent. In many ways, it's just as current as ever.

I'm hoping to post more in the future about the "9/11-style plot" to blow up New York City commercial and military installations in Nov. 1962, I've seen very little written about it in the past; also more on the hunt to make the FPCC look bad.

The hyperlinked article at opednews.com must be getting traffic from forum members, it's up to #2 in "most viewed". Thanks to everyone who gave it a bump, bump it again!