Chapter 8: CIA, NATO and the Great Heroin Coup: How Miami Became the Center of International Fascism and the Murder of President Kennedy

[This is a chapter from my newly released book ‘The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set: the Birth of International Fascism and Anglo-American Foreign Policy.’ For further details on different formats and how to purchase click here.] The audio version of this chapter is available here.

“The merger of European and American fascism was toasted in Miami.”

-Henrik Kruger’s The Great Heroin Coup

Operation Underworld & the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)

Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano (1897-1962) was the most powerful and successful gangster in American history. He is regarded as the father of modern organized crime in the United States for having established ‘The Commission’[1] in 1931. In 1936 Luciano was convicted for compulsory prostitution and running a prostitution racket. He was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison, but during the Second World War, the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) made him an offer. Luciano was promised eventual liberty in return for delivering the Southern Italian Mafia as the fifth column backing the Allied cause against Mussolini. This would be the seed that would generate the powerful Mafia families of Southern Italy, assigned by the United States to act as praetorian guards within the stay-behind armies. Meyer Lansky, head of the Jewish mob, became the liaison between Luciano and ONI and Operation Underworld was born.

Luciano ordered his men to obey Lansky who became essentially the head of a large portion of the Italian-American Mafia. Thomas Dewey (then Governor of New York), although responsible for putting Luciano in prison, pardoned him in 1946 due to his service towards the Allied cause and Luciano was deported to Italy along with some of his lieutenants, however, not before he met with agents of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services).

In June 1973, Le Monde spelled out the American side of the intelligence-Mafia connection:

“Instructed by his [Luciano’s] own experience of collaboration with the American intelligence services, Lucky Luciano used to recommend to his honorable correspondents scattered from Beirut to Tangiers, via Ankara and Marseilles, to operate as he had done. It was in this way that drug dealers and couriers served as informants to MI5, to CIA, to [the French] SDECE, to the [West German] Gehlen organization, even to the Italian SIFAR.”[2]

This special relationship between the Mafia and these intelligence agencies would go strong for several decades.

Meyer Lansky’s Cuban Empire

Meyer Lansky (1902-1983) together with Lucky Luciano created the National Crime Syndicate, known simply as ‘the Syndicate’. Lansky was the Syndicate’s financial wizard and its chairman from around 1947. In the early fifties, he began building his Cuban Empire, headquartered in Havana. Lansky literally governed Cuba over the head of his close friend, then President of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista. When free elections chased Batista from office in 1944, Lansky also left Cuba, entrusting his empire to the Trafficante family headed by Santo Sr.

Lansky and Batista settled in Hollywood, Florida, just North of Miami. Before long, Lansky was running an illegal casino empire on the East coast and expanded the narcotics trade founded by Lucky Luciano. The older Mafia dons deemed the narcotics trade taboo, so Lansky’s wing of the Syndicate cornered the market with Trafficante’s eldest son Santo Jr., overseeing heroin traffic. When Santo Sr. died in 1954, Santo Jr. Trafficante became Lansky’s right-hand man and manager of his Cuban interests.

When Lansky’s illegal casinos in Florida were shutdown in 1950, Lansky promoted Batista’s return to power in Cuba. And thus, likely not coincidentally, Fulgencio Batista who served as the ‘elected’ president of Cuba from 1940-1944, returned to Cuba as a U.S. backed military dictator from 1952-1959, until he was overthrown by the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro.

With Castro at the helm of Cuba, Lansky and Trafficante were in trouble, they had been given a clear message by Castro that they were no longer welcome in the Cuban kingdom. Along with Lansky and Trafficante, half a million Cubans left the island in the years following, and a quarter of a million made their new home in Florida, the site of Trafficante’s new headquarters.

After having been driven out of Cuba and his casinos shutdown in Florida, Lansky created a similar gambling paradise in Nassau, Bahamas. Besides the gambling take, the greater part of the incredible bonanza from U.S. narcotics deals (the Corsicans share included) was laundered via Lansky’s Miami National Bank to Nassau and to numbered accounts in Switzerland and Lebanon.[3] Lansky would eventually become the world’s crowned narcotics king. His decisions affected everyone, including the heavyweights in France and Italy. Lansky’s connections ran through Las Vegas, Rome, Marseilles, Beirut and Geneva.

Miami as the New Center for ‘Internacional Fascista’

Early in 1980, Alan Pringle, head of the DEA’s Miami office, told an Associated Press reporter that Miami banks constitute “the Wall Street” of the drug dealers.[4] It was Henrik Kruger who first exposed this in 1980 with his superbly researched book The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism, where Miami was revealed to be the new center for this international fascism as a consequence of the ‘great heroin coup.’

It is beyond the scope of this book to go through this in detail, however, the important points demonstrated by Kruger are that the Corsican mafia, with Turkey and Lebanon as raw producers, were replaced as the main producers and dealers of high-grade heroin by the Sicilian mafia – along with lower-grade production from Southeast Asia and South America. This transition was supported and enforced by the CIA who controlled the DEA. Nixon’s ‘War on Drugs’ did shutdown certain producers and channels of heroin, but it was ultimately designed to open up new producers and channels that would be under tighter American control. Just like in Vietnam, the French would be pushed out of any authority by the Americans and they were to be from now on subservient to this new king of the jungle.

Lansky’s Syndicate was instrumental in guiding this transition safely into the hands of the CIA and its allied intelligence agencies, largely affiliated with NATO’s Operation Gladio. Miami became a center of operation for not just Meyer Lansky but for the CIA as well in all-things heroin.

Henrik Kruger writes in The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism:[5]

“Internacional Fascista is the outgrowth of many years of planning in Madrid by the late Nazi, Otto Skorzeny[6], who in the fifties had worked for the CIA. On its rolls are former SS agents, OAS terrorists, hatchet men for Portugal’s dreaded secret police (PIDE), terrorists from Spain’s Fuerza Nueva, Argentine and Italian Fascists, Cuban exiles, French gangsters from SAC, and former CIA agents hardened by terror campaigns in [the CIA’s] Operation 40, Guatemala, Brazil and Argentina.

Besides CORU[7], Internacional Fascista’s militants have at various times numbered the Army for the Liberation of Portugal (ELP) and its Aginter Press contingent under Yves Guerin-Serac, the Italian Ordine Nuovo led by Salvatore Francia, and Pierluigi Concutelli; Spain’s Guerillas of Christ the King, Associacion Anticommunista Iberica and Alianza Anticommunista Apostolica (AAA) which is not to be confused with the Argentine AAA that is also represented in Internacional Fascista and the Paladin group.”

The significance of Miami in the netherworld of international fascism remains one of America’s better kept secrets. Its tendrils stretched across the Atlantic to the Aginter operation, originally in Lisbon, and Skorzeny quietly sitting in Madrid at the centre of this arms smuggling web. To Kruger, the Miami-Lisbon-Madrid-Rome axis was the logical continuation of the CIA’s record in forging alliances with high Nazi officials.

The neo-fascist Paladin Group as well as the Spanish intelligene agency, La Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS) were both run by the Nazi war criminal Colonel Otto Skorzeny. Miami was an international junction and all-purpose clearing house for the CIA’s hugely lucrative narcotics rackets and much else besides, including international terrorism or as Kruger put it “the merger of European and American fascism was toasted in Miami.”

Miami’s CIA station JM/WAVE was a major U.S. covert operations and intelligence gathering station which operated from 1961 to 1968. It sponsored a series of hit-and-run attacks on strategic Cuban targets and involved greater manpower and expenditures than the Bay of Pigs itself. Some 300 agents and 4600 Cuban exile operatives took part in the actions of JM/Wave.

Kruger writes in The Great Heroin Coup:[8] 

“As later revealed, one of its last operations was closed down because one of its aircraft was caught smuggling narcotics into the United States…In the JM/Wave period a great expansion in China [Kuomintang] Lobby-Trafficante-Cuban exile-CIA connections occurred…With the start of its secret war, the new station became the agency’s largest and the command post for its anti-Castro operations worldwide. Its annual budget of $50-100 million financed the activities of 300 permanent employees, most of them case officers who controlled an additional several thousand Cuban exile operatives. Each major CIA station had at least one case officer assigned to Cuban operations who ultimately reported to Miami. In Europe all Cuban matters were routed through the Frankfurt station [in Germany], which in turn reported to JM/Wave.

…In 1963 the agency masterminded a revolution in Honduras, another in the Dominican Republic, and a third in Guatemala. In 1964 it assisted in General Branco’s military coup in Brazil. In 1965 the Special Forces joined U.S. Marines in suppressing civil war in the Dominican Republic, and in 1966 the CIA aided and abetted Colonel Ongania’s military coup in Argentina.

… In that same period, Cuban exile activist organizations sprouted all over Miami’s Little Havana. They spawned, in turn, terrorist subgroups like Alfa 66 and Omega 7, whose more notorious leaders…had been trained by the CIA…

…When JM/Wave was dismantled, Shackley and his staff left Miami for Laos, leaving behind a highly trained army of 6000 fanatically anti-Communist Cubans allied to organized crime and powerful elements of the U.S. far Right…” 

JM/Wave covered anything and everything Cuban, wherever in the world it might be. CIA maintained its largest station, JM/WAVE, and operated a bustling network of paramilitary training bases as well as safe houses. Howard Hunt and Bill Harvey both worked for JM/Wave who we will come to know shortly.

Miami Cubans joined Aginter Press terrorists in Guatemala. One hundred Florida-based Cubans joined the Aginter Press-ELP fascist army in Spain, where they became involved in acts of terrorism.

At this point, we should be seeing a picture that has painted NATO/CIA/Italian-American Mafia/Cuban exiles/and fascists including Nazis all working for the same apparatus and essentially the same goal: to overthrow democratically elected leaders and replace them with dictators and fascist right-wing governments. The profits of the narcotics trade are used in turn to fund right-wing terrorist activity globally, using the network of Gladio. The ‘great heroin coup’ that Henrik Kruger exposed was about having complete control over the profits of heroin for this very purpose.

Nixon’s White House Plumbers and ‘The War on Drugs’

The history of Nixon’s involvement in Watergate is intertwined with that of his personal involvement with drug enforcement. Nixon’s public declaration in June 1971 of his war on heroin promptly led to his assemblage of the White House Plumbers, Cuban exiles and even ‘hit squads’ with the avowed purpose of combating the international narcotics traffic.

Kruger writes in The Great Heroin Coup:[9]

“On 17 July 1972 James McCord, Frank Sturgis, Bernard Barker, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, and Virgilio Gonzalez, led by [E. Howard] Hunt and [G. Gordon] Liddy, broke into the Democrats’ Watergate offices in Washington. Of these seven men, four were from Miami, four were active or former agents of the CIA, four had been involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and three were closely linked to the Cuban narcotics Mafia.”

Frank Sturgis (original name Frank Fiorini) was one of Trafficante’s CIA contacts. In the late 1960s, Sturgis ran the Miami-based International Anti-Communist Brigade (IACB), said to be financed by Meyer Lansky’s Syndicate.[10]

E. Howard Hunt’s credentials go as far back as the Second World War, stationed in Kunming South China in the province of Yunnan while working for the OSS. This branch of the OSS was backing Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) army, who were supposedly fighting the fascist Japanese while also fighting a civil war with the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong. Yunnan under Chiang Kai-shek (along with a faction of the OSS’s overseeing), became the center of Chinese opium cultivation and Kunming the hotbed of military operations, including Claire Chennault’s 14th Air Force and Detachment 202 of the OSS.  This is where Hunt met Lucien Conein, Captain of the French Foreign Legionnaire-turned OSS agent.

Kruger writes:[11]

“E. Howard Hunt was clearly the China/Cuba/Latin America lobby’s man. That he is also tied to WACL is suggested by the fact that William F. Buckley, Hunt’s close friend for twenty years and the godfather to his children, was one of the WACL’s top U.S. supporters. Also connected to the same lobby groups are Lucien Conein and the State Department’s former intelligence chief, Ray S. Cline, who continues to be a frequent guest at the Taiwan WACL stronghold.

Hunt and Conein were the vital forces behind the White House’s great heroin coup. Hunt secured the Cuban exiles their necessary footing…”

To be clear here, what Kruger is referencing as the China/Cuba/Latin America Lobby is not in reference to their communist leaders but rather their fascist leaders; Chiang Kai-shek, Batista, and the Latin American fascist dictators. Indochina remained Conein’s base of operation after WWII, when like Hunt he slid over from the OSS to its successor the CIA. He then operated throughout South and North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma and became the top U.S. expert on the area as well as on the opium smuggling Corsican Mafia.

Peter Dale Scott wrote in his foreword to Kruger’s The Great Heroin Coup:[12]

“But some of the old China hands with network connections began moving to the new DEA. As we have seen, Hunt secured a post for his old OSS-Kunming friend Lucien Conein in what eventually became DEA, and Conein in turn recruited his own band of CIA Cubans in Deacon I, at least one of whom, according to CIA reports, has already taken part in a death squad operation.

…a number of recent revelations…link those in the Aginter-CORU[13] connection to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. At least three Cubans prominent in the Letelier case have also been revealed, by the recent publications of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, to have been allied in a 1963 Cuban exile junta which, the Committee reported, warranted a ‘thorough investigation’ in the Kennedy assassination case. Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in New Orleans brought him into contact with an anti-Castro group financially backed by this junta, and to Americans with links to the future Aginter community and possibly the OAS. And on 23 November 1963, Jean Rene Souetre, an OAS terrorist and future Aginter operative, was, according to recently declassified CIA reports, allegedly ‘expelled from the United States at Fort Worth or Dallas 18 hours after the [Kennedy] assassination.’” 

Kruger writes:[14]

“When Lucien Conein became the head of the DEA’s Special Operations Branch he allegedly carried out an assassination program after setting up the DEA’s Special Operations Group (DEASOG), under cover of the BR Fox Company and house on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. DEASOG’s twelve members – the Dirty Dozen – were hard nosed and experienced Latino CIA agents transferred over to the drug agency for the occasion. Prior to DEASOG, Conein had set up another DEA ‘intelligence’ operation, Deacon I, employing Cuban exile veterans of CIA training camps, who were supervised by thirty other Cubans, all formerly of the CIA’s Clandestine Services… The emergence of the DEA was the next to last phase of the heroin coup. Hunt and Conein’s CIA agents moved into DEA intelligence and operations…” 

In 1952, President Arbenz of Guatemala pushed through a sweeping land reform bill which aimed at redistributing 70% of the country’s farm acreage back to the people and out of the hands of the 2% landowners. Amongst that 2% was the United Fruit Company, which had multiple ties to Washington DC and the CIA, including Walter Bedell Smith (former Director of the CIA) who was on its board after the coup, Henry Cabot-Lodge’s family fortunes on the Cabot side and Allen and John Foster Dulles’s law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.[15] On behalf of United Fruit, the CIA orchestrated a coup and E. Howard Hunt was the agency’s chief political action officer to overthrow Guatemala’s President Arbenz in 1954.[16]

Kruger writes:[17]

“Some people effectively overlapped the entire spectrum of the alliance. Among them are Howard Hunt and Tommy Corcoran, the man behind United Fruit’s dirty work. United Fruit was a client of the Miami-based Double-Chek Corp., a CIA front that supplied planes for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Corcoran was the Washington escort of General Chennault’s widow Anna Chen Chennault, erstwhile head of the China [Kuomintang] Lobby, the key to Southeast Asian opium.”

Along with the CIA’s new official drug policy came the unofficial one. The latter dirty work was performed by a large faction within the DEA who tolerated, if not outright encouraged, a large and apparently independent army of Cuban exile terrorists, trained by the CIA, and available for action in Latin America at the request of its presiding dictators.

However, this was all supposed to have happened nearly a decade sooner.

According to a June 2, 1964 New York Times article:[18]

“Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon wanted the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to take place before the national election Nov. 8 1960…Nixon was hoping for the invasion before November 8 because ‘it would have been a cinch to win’ the election if the Eisenhower Administration destroyed Fidel Castro in the closing days of the Presidential campaign.”

Nixon was Vice President to Eisenhower for 8 years, from January 1953 to 1961. Nixon was supposed to have the upcoming Presidency, everyone knew it, but Kennedy, who was aware of this secret invasion plan, was able to take the election from underneath Nixon’s nose because of his calculated hard stance against Castro and support of a rebellion in Cuba during the public debate, whereas, Nixon thought it best to pretend to oppose such a thing because he thought it would compromise the actual plan to do that very thing.

And just like that, decades of planning went out the window, Nixon was out and Kennedy was in.

The Northwood Plot, the Bay of Pigs and    Operation ‘Elimination by Illumination’

Kennedy was not the only one to crash the party. The overthrow of Batista and the expulsion of Lansky’s Cuban Empire including its heroin trade by Fidel Castro in 1959 was problematic to say the least for such long-term plans. Fidel Castro, like de Gaulle, was a master at thwarting assassination attempts and coups, and would govern Cuba from 1959 to 2011. Castro’s Cuba was considered unacceptable for the very plain reason that he was upsetting the status quo of how ‘business’ was supposed to be done. There was a lot of money that was lost for big business with Castro’s takeover, not just for Lansky’s Syndicate but for such Fortune 500 names as the United Fruit Company, U.S. Steel, DuPont and Standard Oil, among many others, which tells you something about the real sort of business these companies are involved in.[19] Thus, Castro had to go. And in came the CIA and Pentagon to the rescue, or at least that was how the script was supposed to go…

Kennedy was inaugurated January 20th, 1961. As already discussed in the previous chapter, along with inheriting the responsibility of the welfare of the country and its people, he was to also inherit a secret war with communist Cuba run by the CIA with the Bay of Pigs treason occurring only three months into his term.

Kruger writes:[20]

“Never before had there existed a more remarkable, fanatical group of conspirators than that assembled to create, finance, and train the Bay of Pigs invasion force. The top CIA figures were Lansdale protégé Napoleon Valeriano, the mysterious Frank Bender, and E. Howard Hunt, who was himself involved in at least one of the attempts on Fidel Castro’s life. They were supported by a small army of CIA operatives from four of its Miami cover firms.”

Peter Dale Scott writes in his foreword to Kruger’s The Great Heroin Coup:[21]

“…the CIA reassembled for the Bay of Pigs the old Guatemala team (including Hunt…who oversaw Cuban recruitment). With the failure of the Bay of Pigs, Cuba became to America what Algeria had been to France. The explosive political controversy meant that thousands of Cuban exiles, many of them with backgrounds in the Havana milieu, were trained by the U.S. as guerillas and/or terrorists, then left in political limbo… At least one CIA project growing out of Operation 40 (the control element in the Bay of Pigs invasion force), had to be terminated, when the drug activities of its members became too embarrassing. In 1973 Newsday reported that ‘at least eight percent of the 1500-man [Bay of Pigs] invasion force has subsequently been investigated or arrested for drug-dealing.’” 

There would be many more attempts to assassinate and overthrow Castro. One of the kookier plans would come from, not surprisingly, covert operations expert Edward Lansdale who was chief of the Saigon Military Mission and a protégé of General Lemnitzer; who wanted to send a submarine to the shore outside Havana where it would create an “inferno of light.” At the same time, according to Lansdale’s plan, Cuba-based agents would warn the religious natives of the second coming of Christ and the Savior’s distaste for Fidel Castro. The plan was called ‘Elimination by Illumination,’ but was ultimately shelved.[22] It would be funny if such plans stayed on paper, but these men were responsible for the torture and deaths of countless individuals for the plans that made it into reality.

As soon as General Lemnitzer became Army Chief of Staff in 1959, he installed Lansdale at a desk in Deputy Defense Secretary Gilpatric’s office in the Pentagon. Lansdale was put in charge of Operation Mongoose under direct patronage of Lemnitzer with the main object to eliminate Castro in direct defiance of federal law prohibiting political assassinations. Operation Mongoose was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians and covert operations carried out by the CIA and was run out of JM/Wave in Miami. Lansdale would participate in many covert operations including raids and bombings in Cuba and other targets all over Latin America.

In March 1962, General Lemnitzer, not taking a hint as to what happened to Dulles, Bissell and Cabell, decided it would be a good idea to propose Operation Northwoods to President Kennedy for approval. Operation Northwoods was a proposed false-flag operation against American citizens, which called for CIA operatives to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets and subsequently blame the Cuban government in order to justify a war against Cuba. The plan was drafted by General Lemnitzer specifically and had a striking similarity with NATO’s Operation Gladio. The logic of Northwoods was the stripe of Gladio. The general staff inclined towards prefabricated violence because they believed benefits gained by the state count more than injustice against individuals. The only important criterion was reaching the objective and the objective was ultra right-wing government.

There was not a single item in the Northwoods manual that did not amount to a blatant act of treason, yet the U.S. military establishment dispatched Top Secret – Justification for U.S. military Intervention in Cuba straight to the desk of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, for onward transmission to President Kennedy. Needless to say, President Kennedy rejected the proposal and a few months later General Lemnitzer’s term was not renewed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having served from October 1st 1960 to September 30th 1962.

Operation Northwoods memorandum March 13, 1962. Source: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20010430/doc1.pdf.

However, NATO lost no time, and in November 1962 Lemnitzer was appointed commander of U.S. European Command and as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) of NATO, the latter to which he served from January 1st, 1963 to July 1st, 1969.

Lemnitzer was a perfect fit to oversee the cross-continental Gladio operations in Europe. He had been a prime motivating force in setting up the Special Forces Group in 1952 at Fort Bragg, where commandos were trained in the arts of guerilla insurgency in the events of a Soviet invasion of Europe. Before long the men who proudly wore distinctive green berets were cooperating discreetly with the armed forces of a string of European countries and participating in direct military operations some of them extremely sensitive and highly illegal if not downright treasonous.

One of these operations was the NATO/CIA coalition which had sponsored at least two attempts to assassinate President de Gaulle.[23] In response to this, de Gaulle had kicked NATO’s headquarters out of France, removed France from NATO and had given Lemnitzer a summary order to quit NATO. If President de Gaulle’s orders had been denied, he would have been prepared to go to war, and thus there was a bit of reshuffling, but essentially the game continued intact.

To the CIA and Pentagon, Kennedy was a bull in a China shop. Kennedy’s insistence to supervise unorthodox warfare inhouse, his backing off in the U.S.-Soviet missile crisis, the removal of frontline missiles from Turkey, undermining and scheming to end the Vietnam war, upsetting Cuban exile operations and reversing America to peacetime footing when it was perfectly obvious the Pentagon thought the threat of the Soviets and Chinese was never greater. And the ultimate insult, the firing of CIA godfather Allen Dulles and the First Chief of Staff General Lemnitzer packed off to exile.

The CIA, Pentagon and NATO were in agreement. Kennedy had to go.

NATO’s Gladio and the OAS as instruments of MURDER INC.

Jim Garrison was the District Attorney of New Orleans from 1962 to 1973 and was the only prosecutor to bring forth a trial concerning the assassination of President Kennedy. During his investigation, Garrison came across numerous connections, though at the time he did not know enough to fully connect all of the dots. One important dot was Guy Banister, former chief of the Chicago FBI office and deputy superintendent of police in New Orleans who began his career in the Second World War with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Banister in his ‘retirement years’ had set up his own small detective agency which was conveniently located directly across the street from the offices of ONI and the Secret Service. Furthermore, across Lafayette Park and a short walk down St. Charles Avenue was the headquarters of the CIA.

Garrison writes in On the Trail of the Assassins:[24]

“Banister’s operation also included the processing and handling of anti-Castro trainees passing through the city. Many of the exiles were recruits from the West arriving for guerilla training at the camp north of Lake Pontchartrain. Others were sent on to Florida for similar training being conducted by the CIA there. Occasionally a handful of graduates of the Florida training program would stop at Banister’s, a road stop as well as a headquarters for lodging and eating arrangement to be made on their way back to their homes in the vicinity of Dallas…”

Garrison uncovered the Banister apparatus, which was part of a supply line that ran along the Dallas-New Orleans-Miami corridor. These supplies consisted of arms and explosives for use against Castro’s Cuba. David Ferrie, who was former OSS, worked for Guy Banister and Clay Shaw (also former OSS). David Ferrie was one of the leaders of the local Cuban Revolutionary Front. Garrison discovers during his investigation that Banister was engaged in the training and equipping of commando units for paramilitary action inside Cuba, thus clearly tying the FBI and CIA into the activities of Banister and Ferrie.

In addition, Jack Ruby had a special relationship with the Dallas office of the FBI. In 1959 Ruby met at least nine times with one of the Dallas Bureau’s agents.[25] At that time he also purchased a microphone equipped wristwatch, a bugged tie clip, a telephone bug, and a bugged attaché case. These facts suggest that Jack Ruby was probably a regular informant with the local Bureau office.[26] Jack Ruby’s name became infamous throughout the world as the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters. The Dallas Police Department would also mysteriously lose the record of Lee Harvey Oswald’s interrogation.

Garrison continues:[27]

“…reviewing the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Allison G. Folsom, Jr., who was reading aloud from Oswald’s training record. He described a grade that Oswald had received in a Russian examination at El Toro Marine Base in California shortly before his highly publicized defection to the Soviet Union…in 1966…I was still in military service – by now a major – and I could not recall a single soldier ever having been required to demonstrate how much Russian he had learned… Lee Oswald – in 1959, at least – had received intelligence training. I knew, as did anyone with a military background, that Marine intelligence activity was guided by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).

…in the summer of 1963. Oswald had been spotted participating in several pamphleting incidents…The Warren Commission had concluded from this and other evidence that Oswald was a dedicated…communist who had joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to support Fidel Castro.

Because of several inconsistencies, this facile explanation had never sat quite right with me…Oswald had stamped the 544 Camp address…on his public handouts…I wanted to look at the place firsthand.”

Garrison discovers that both the entrance to 544 Camp and 531 Lafayette (the address to Banister’s detective agency) led to the same place. Thus, tying Oswald, whom the Warren Commission had readily labeled a pro-Castro communist, directly with Banister and his Cuban exile operations!

Garrison also discovers that George de Mohrenschildt was the ‘baby-sitter’[28] of Oswald. During the Second World War, de Mohrenschildt had worked for French Intelligence and among his close friends was Jean de Menil the president of Schlumberger Corporation which had close ties with the CIA.[29]

Garrison writes:[30]

“The Schlumberger Corporation was a huge French owned company, which serviced oil producers worldwide by using explosives and geological measuring devices…It had been a supporter of the French counter-revolutionary Secret Army Organization (OAS), which attempted to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle several times in the late 1950s and early 1960s for his role in freeing Algeria in North Africa. The CIA, which was also supportive of the French OAS generals, had supplied Schlumberger with anti-personnel ammunition…”

Garrison continues:[31]

“This observation, had we known about it in 1967, would have brought us full-circle all the way back to the blimp base at Houma, Louisiana, where David Ferrie and others from Guy Banister’s operation repossessed the munitions from the Schlumberger bunker which the CIA earlier had given to the assassination- minded OAS. It would certainly have helped our case against Shaw to have been able to link him definitively with the CIA. Unfortunately, however, with our limited staff and finances, and many leads to follow, our investigation was not able to uncover any of this crucial background information when we needed it most.”

George de Mohrenschildt according to Garrison was probably given no indication of what laid down the road, but there is now little doubt that he had been operating under deep cover as an agent of the CIA. It was de Mohrenschildt who had convinced Oswald to move to Dallas, after he was first dispatched to New Orleans for sheep-dipping (made to look like a pro-Castro communist) courtesy of Guy Banister. Oswald is then introduced to Ruth Paine via de Mohrenschildt. Paine is the person who arranged Oswald to work at the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald was reported to have fired the shots at Kennedy.[32] George de Mohrenschildt had supposedly ‘committed suicide’ on March 29th, 1977, only hours after arranging to meet an investigator from the House Select Committee on Assassinations, where he reportedly was about to change the original testimony he delivered to the Warren Commission.

* * *

E. Howard Hunt, made infamous as one of Nixon’s White House Plumbers caught in the Watergate scandal and subsequently serving 33 months in prison, was not quite the bumbling fool that he was portrayed to be, although he did most certainly ruin his own life and the life of his family; his daughters’ blaming him (with due cause) for the death of their mother and his two sons becoming meth addicts and drug dealers.

Hunt in fact confessed to his estranged first son, whom he named Saint John, that he knew the secrets to Kennedy’s murder when he thought he was on his deathbed. In fact, he would live four years more and would once again turn his back on his son, criticizing him for a life that amounted to nothing and demanding all the JFK memos he had given Saint returned to him. Saint who was concerned that these secrets would be buried along with his father, attempted to get as much out of him before he died, some of this information was published in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.[33] Among the names mentioned by E. Howard Hunt implicated in the murder of Kennedy was Bill Harvey.

Harvey joined the CIA in 1947 (at its very inception) and ran the CIA’s Berlin station during the 1950s. While in Germany, Harvey worked closely with high-ranking ‘former’ Nazi Reinhard Gehlen’s notorious organization and Gehlen came to consider him a “very esteemed [and] really reliable friend.”[34] In November 1961, Harvey was put in charge of the top-secret CIA operation to kill Castro code named ZR/RIFLE.[35] He began to work directly with Mafia ambassador at large, Johnny Rosselli (whom E. Howard Hunt also worked with).

David Talbot writes in The Devil’s Chessboard:[36]

“In 1962, Helms – who along with Angleton, had replaced the ‘retired’ Dulles as Harvey’s main patrons at the agency [CIA] – promoted the agency tough guy [Bill Harvey], naming him head of the CIA’s entire Cuba operation, Task Force W. Helms and Harvey kept much of the operation, including assassination efforts against Castro, a secret from President Kennedy…”

Bill Harvey was positioned as Rome station chief, after Cuba, to oversee Gladio operations in Italy. Harvey was reportedly with Mark Wyatt (another CIA agent stationed in Italy) attending a meeting at the Gladio base in Sardinia when they heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot.[37] However, Bill Harvey was in Dallas in November 1963, according to Wyatt who told French investigative journalist Fabrizio Calvi in an interview about Operation Gladio.[38]

House Assassinations Committee investigator Dan Hardway, who was assigned by the panel to probe possible CIA connections to JFK’s murder, observed years later:[39]

“We considered Harvey to be one of our prime suspects from the very start. He had all the key connections – to organized crime, to the CIA station in Miami where the plots against Castro were run…We tried to get Harvey’s travel vouchers and security file from the CIA, but they always blocked us. But we did come across a lot of memos that suggested he was traveling a lot in the months leading up to the assassination.”

Talbot writes:[40]

“As Hunt related his story to his son, he remained fuzzy about his own involvement in the plot. In the end, he [Hunt] said, he played only a peripheral ‘benchwarmer’ role in the killing of Kennedy. It was Bill Harvey who was the quarterback, according to Hunt…While assembling his Castro assassination team, Harvey had reached out to a variety of underworld professionals, including (with Helms’s permission) the infamous European assassin code-named QJ-WIN, whom the CIA had recruited to kill Patrice Lumumba. And Harvey was well positioned as Rome station chief to once again plumb the European underworld for a Dallas killing team.”

Thus, it should be no surprise with Harvey being directly connected with Gladio operations via the United States and Europe, that among the strange and murderous characters who converged on Dallas in November 1963 was a notorious French OAS commando named Jean Souetre, who was connected to the assassination plots against President de Gaulle. Souetre was arrested in Dallas after the Kennedy assassination and expelled to Mexico without questioning.[41] 

Kruger concludes:[42]

“…In addition to, or rather behind, the CIA’s new official policy there is also an unofficial one. It manifests in such matters as the manipulation of the DEA to perform what previously had been CIA dirty work, and in the toleration, if not encouragement of a large apparently independent army of Cuban exile terrorists, available for action in Latin America at the request of the presiding dictators.

…We cannot, of course discount the possibility that the unofficial policy is in fact executed by former agents who had either been purged from the agency, or left in protest against its more moderate line. However that implies that a renegade CIA faction now runs an independent secret service…” 

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Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

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Footnotes:

[1] The Commission is the governing body of the Italian-American Mafia, formed in 1931 by Charles "Lucky" Luciano following the Castellammarese War. The Commission replaced the title of capo di tutti i capi ("boss of all bosses"), held by Salvatore Maranzano before his murder, with a ruling committee that consists of the bosses of the Five Families of New York City, as well as the bosses of the Chicago Outfit and, at various times, the leaders of smaller families, such as Buffalo, Philadelphia, Detroit, and others. The purpose of the Commission was to oversee all Mafia activities in the United States and serve to mediate conflicts among families.

[2] French daily Le Monde, June 17-18, 1973, pg. 11.

[3] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 89.

[4] Ibid, pg. 203.

[5] Ibid, pg. 209.

[6] Recall Otto Skorzeny from Chapter 1, who worked with Mosley within the Operation Gladio framework.

[7] CORU was a Cuban exile umbrella organization; Coordinacion de Organisaciones Revolucionarias Unidas. CORU’s headquarters were in Miami.

[8] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 206.

[9] Ibid, pg. 126.

[10] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 145.

[11] Ibid, pg. 193.

[12] Ibid, pg. 21.

[13] CORU was a Cuban exile umbrella organization; Coordinacion de Organisaciones Revolucionarias Unidas. CORU’s headquarters were in Miami. Aginter Press’s relation to NATO’s Gladio was discussed in Chapter 6.

[14] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 163.

[15] Talbot, David. (2015) The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. Harper New York, pg. 279.

[16] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 130.

[17] Ibid, pg. 131.

[18] Raymond, Jack. (June 2, 1964) 2 Say Nixon Wanted '60 Cuba Foray. The New York Times. https://web.archive.org/web/20220501163103/https:/www.nytimes.com/1964/06/02/archives/2-say-nixon-wanted-60-cuba-foray.html.

[19] Talbot, David. (2015) The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. Harper New York, pg. 459.

[20] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 144.

[21] Ibid, pg. 16.

[22] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 143.

[23] Cottrell, Richard. (2015) Gladio, NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis. Progressive Press.

[24] Garrison, Jim. (1991) On the Trail of the Assassins. Warner Books, pg. 43-44.

[25] Ibid, pg. 254.

[26] Ibid, pg. 254.

[27] Ibid, pg. 24-25.

[28] A ‘baby sitter’ is a term used by American intelligence agencies to describe an agent assigned to protect or otherwise see to the general welfare of a particular individual.

[29] Garrison, Jim. (1991) On the Trail of the Assassins. Warner Books, pg. 61.

[30] Ibid, pg. 45.

[31] Ibid, pg. 103.

[32] Ibid, pg. 72.

[33] Hedegaard, Erik. (April 5, 2007) The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt. Rolling Stone Magazine. https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-last-confession-of-e-howard-hunt-76611/. Retrieved October 2022.

[34] Talbot, David. (2015) The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. Harper New York, pg. 470.

[35] Ibid, pg. 471.

[36] Ibid, pg.472.

[37]  Ibid, pg. 476.

[38] Talbot, David. (2015) The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. Harper New York, pg. 477.

[39] Ibid, pg. 477.

[40] Ibid, pg. 502.

[41] Ibid, pg. 502.

[42] Kruger, Henrik. (1980) The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism. South End Press, pg. 192.