Jewel in the Crown

Over the last few years the CIA has continually promised to come clean about its illegal covert activities conducted throughout the post war decades. It refers to these hitherto unreleased files as its “family jewels.” In keeping with its record of disinformation and propaganda the Agency has finally put some of these gems on public display.
We now understand the term “executive action,” the assassination of foreign leaders deemed dangerous to American interests. We have also learned about “plausible deniability,” the euphemism for framing a group or an individual to cover up US involvement in these deaths. It has been revealed that the biggest perceived threat to American interests in Latin America was the regime of Fidel Castro.
The CIA has acknowledged its role in attempting to invade Cuba and kill America’s nemesis, albeit forty years late. It has also had to admit to their Agents not being up to the job and having to sub-contract the hit out to the Mafia, who also failed. Their candour on these matters has to be applauded but as usual they’re being economical with the truth. There is one gem they’re still refusing to put on public display, the “Jewel in the Crown.” It concerns US Intelligence links with Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John Kennedy, which has necessitated the biggest cover up in modern history.
After the assassination in 1963 the Warren Commission was convened to investigate. And even though one of the men on the Committee was ex-CIA chief Allen Dulles, who’d been sacked by Kennedy only two years before over his incompetent handling of the invasion of Cuba, now known as the Bay of Pigs, the Agency still managed to keep the attempts on Castro’s life and other key information from the Commission.
So they were not aware at the time of the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro, their links to the Mafia nor the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald dead, Jack Ruby, and his mobster connections. We now know Ruby was invited to Cuba on at least one occasion to meet with mobster and casino owner Lewis McWillie, a man who was later involved in Mafia plots to eliminate Castro. And in another affront to the Commission’s credibility, their final report stated Ruby had no links to organised crime, when one his so called friends making that statement turned out to be Dave Yarras, a Mafia hitman. Their final report predictably concluded that neither Oswald nor Ruby was part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy and therefore Oswald acted alone.
However the majority of the American public was not taken in by their findings and various Senate Committees were convened in the mid-seventies to launch further investigations. It was then discovered that CIA chief Richard Helms had committed perjury when he told the Warren Commission that the Agency had no knowledge of, or contact with, Lee Harvey Oswald before Kennedy’s assassination. We now know the CIA held a 201 file on Oswald that was several years old and a special group within the Agency known as the Special Affairs Staff (SAS) was monitoring his movements. And it’s also highly likely that, as he was an ex-marine, US Naval Intelligence also held a file on him.
The CIA continued to be unhelpful and sought to frustrate the ongoing investigations into the assassination, so much so that the Chairman of one committee, G R Blakey, was moved to comment,

“I now no longer believe anything the Agency told the committee any further than I can obtain substantial corroboration for it from outside the Agency for its veracity. We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission.
We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency. Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story. I am now in that camp.”


He went further, accusing the keeper of the CIA files on the assassination, George Joannides, of having played a part in Kennedy’s death. With good reason. In the months leading up to the shooting the CIA was fronting a militant anti-Castro group known as the DRE. Agency Psychological Operations expert, Joannides, was the liaison officer to the group. Several witnesses testified to seeing Oswald, or someone very much like him, attending DRE meetings shortly before the assassination.
And the links to the CIA don’t end there.
Before he died, Joannides’s CIA colleague and fellow psyops expert, David Atlee Phillips, left a manuscript intimating that Oswald was being used by them in a plot to kill Castro. He then went on to say that someone or some group turned the mission round and Kennedy was assassinated instead. But he didn’t identify the perpetrators.
Because of his secretive psyops role for the CIA, Phillips was known to use many aliases, one of which was believed to be Maurice Bishop. Tony Veciana, leader of the anti-Castro terrorist group known as Alpha 66 testified to his CIA liaison officer having that name, and his description of him matched that of David Atlee Phillips. He also stated that he had seen Bishop in the company of Lee Harvey Oswald on several occasions.
But number one suspect in any conspiracy to kill Kennedy has to be Fidel Castro. Secret Agents of his, G2, were known to have infiltrated anti-Castro groups in Miami and may well have got wind of a plot to kill their leader, which they then turned round. So Oswald could well have been working both sides of the fence. However Kennedy was also hated by elements within the CIA/Mafia who could have orchestrated the “hit” or at the very least turned a blind eye. Is this the “jewel in the crown,” the gem the CIA won’t disclose? It is high time the CIA, FBI and US Naval Intelligence came clean about their links to Oswald and the role psychological warfare experts, David Atlee Phillips and George Joannides played in manipulating him. In the meantime read my book “Play it Again Uncle Sam” which is a novel based on these events.
Go to www.playitagainunclesam.com