By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
The media’s love affair with Fidel Castro apparently outweighs their love for President John F. Kennedy and his Camelot era. Otherwise, the communist role in the Kennedy assassination would be prominently noted during the 50th anniversary coverage of the JFK assassination.
Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist member of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee and, after his arrest, tried to reach Communist Party USA attorney John Abt to act as his counsel. “Before Mr. Abt could accept or reject the bid, Mr. Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby,” The New York Times noted.
William J. Murray writes in his book, My Life Without God, that his mother, atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, was a communist who was ordered to report to an office of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and destroy any references in the files to Oswald’s involvement with the group.
Oswald’s Russian connections are sometimes noted in the anniversary coverage, but treated as inconclusive, or even as evidence that the Soviets could not possibly have killed Kennedy because their connection to Oswald was too well-known and too many fingers would point to Moscow as the culprit!
“Oswald was a supporter of Soviet-backed Cuba,” CNN reports. But it then quotes an amateur researcher named Dave Perry as saying, “We know Oswald was in the Russian embassy in Mexico City. We even know who he talked to. But we don’t know what was said. Then a few weeks later, he shoots Kennedy.”
In fact, as noted by former FBI agent Herman Bly in his book, Communism, the Cold War, and the FBI Connection, Oswald met with a Soviet KGB espionage agent connected with KGB Department Thirteen, which was in charge of assassinations. Bly had gone to the U.S. Embassy in 1965, on assignment for the CIA, and reviewed its files on Soviet personnel in Mexico City.
Yet, Perry assures CNN that the Soviets were not involved. “The Russians would never have ordered Oswald to kill Kennedy because of his well-known links to Russia and his pro-Cuban sympathies,” Perry says. “Russia’s leaders knew they would have been the first suspects if they’d engineered an assassination by Oswald. It would have been an act of war, which could have triggered a nuclear attack.”
On the contrary, the possibility of a nuclear war, coming so soon after the Cuban missile crisis, is why the communist connection to Russia and Cuba would be played down. Bly writes, “…I believe the heads of the FBI, CIA, and President Johnson wanted the Oswald case brought to a conclusion as fast as possible as they did not want another crisis with the Soviet Union so soon after the Cuban missile crisis.”
Oswald’s well-known communist connections help explain the plot and the communist cover-up.
The Soviets tried to mask their connection to Oswald by publishing through a KGB front company, Marzani and Munsell, the book, Oswald, Assassin or Fall Guy. The book was dedicated to Mark Lane, whose book, Rush to Judgment, blamed right-wingers for the Kennedy assassination.
This KGB disinformation campaign was called “Dragon Operation,” an effort to shift blame for Kennedy’s murder away from the communists.
The KGB’s Mitrokhin archive shows indirect Soviet support for Lane, considered “the most talented of the first wave of conspiracy theorists researching the Kennedy assassination.” Soviet funds were funneled to him through an associate, the book says.
I.F. Stone, the so-called maverick left-wing journalist later exposed as a Soviet agent, also joined the effort to blame the Right.
“For 15 years of my life at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community, I was involved in a world-wide disinformation effort aimed at diverting attention away from the KGB’s involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald. The Kennedy assassination conspiracy was born—and it never died,” says Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc. Pacepa wrote the book, Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination.
As we have pointed out, the former Romanian intelligence chief documents that Oswald was recruited by the KGB when he was a U.S. Marine stationed in Japan and that, after defecting to the Soviet Union, he came back to America three years later for the express purpose of killing Kennedy. Even though the Soviets, for their own reasons, subsequently tried “to turn Oswald off,” Oswald went ahead with the plan and was already “programmed” by the communists to kill Kennedy.
Kenneth J. Dillon, a former Foreign Service officer and intelligence analyst, writes that “Given Oswald’s aggressive mentality [he had tried to kill right-wing General Edwin A. Walker] and track record (well known to the KGB), it would have required very little for the KGB to insert into his mind the suggestion that he should assassinate Kennedy. Indeed, virulent communist hate propaganda during Oswald’s years in the Soviet Union might have instilled in his impressionable brain the need to take action, as the occasion presented itself, against those like the American president who thwarted the progress of communism.”
Like his brother Robert, John F. Kennedy was an anti-communist liberal. (RFK would be assassinated five years later by a Marxist Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan).
Humberto Fontova, the author of two excellent books on Castro’s support in Hollywood and the American media, has written extensively on the Castro connection to Oswald. He notes that Castro declared on September 7, 1963, that “U.S leaders who plan on eliminating Cuban leaders should not think that they are themselves safe! We are prepared to answer in kind!”
Castro hated JFK for authorizing an invasion of Cuba and the overthrow of the Castro regime. Castro himself was the target of CIA assassination plots authorized and supervised by JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy, JFK’s Attorney General. Former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoir, Khrushchev Remembers, that Castro hated the U.S. so much that he urged a Russian nuclear strike on the U.S.
Former CIA officer Brian Latell’s book, Castro’s Secrets, includes the revelation from a high-ranking Cuban defector that Fidel Castro knew Oswald was going to kill President Kennedy. The book adds to the evidence that Castro had foreknowledge of the plot to kill JFK.
Pacepa believes the evidence suggests that Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald, was also a Cuban agent whose assignment was to keep Oswald from talking. He is suspicious of the circumstances surrounding Ruby’s death as well.
As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination, it is worth remembering that the cover-up of Oswald’s communist connections began soon after the assassination and continues to this day. In his 1964 book, None Dare Call it Treason, John Stormer wrote, “Volumes could be written on the press coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination by a communist killer. Even after Oswald was captured and his Marxist affiliations disclosed, TV and radio commentators have conducted a continual crusade of distortion and smear to direct the blame against right wing or conservative groups.”
In fact, the FBI file on one of the most influential journalism educators in U.S. history, Curtis MacDougall, reveals that he was telling people in 1964 that Oswald was a “fall guy” in the assassination and that the real culprits were “rightists.” MacDougall is quoted as saying that he had been in New York City at a publisher’s party for the announcement of a book with the “true facts” about the murder. That book was Oswald, Assassin or Fall Guy.
The same publisher, the KGB front company Marzani and Munsell, also published MacDougall’s book on the Progressive Party, Gideon’s Army.
Fifty years after the fact, our media have not acknowledged and explained to the American people the substantial evidence that an American president was killed as a result of a communist conspiracy based in Moscow and Havana.
A good summary of the evidence is in Pacepa’s latest book, Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism.
Humberto Fontova’s latest book, The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro, will help explain why our media go out of their way to dismiss the evidence.
It seems that our media love Castro and his “progressive” fellow travelers more than they want the facts about the Kennedy assassination to come out.
But the media will certainly exploit JFK’s death. We are all witnesses to that.
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at email@example.com. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.