In an interview with William Law and Mark Sobel in 2005, Gene Wheaton claimed that Raphael Quintero and Carl Jenkins were both involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

I have created a web page on Quintero. I would be grateful if members post any information they have on him.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKquintero.htm

In my opinion Quintero makes a good candidate. He was a member of the Recovery of the Revolution (MRR Party). Its two leading members, Manuel Artime and Tony Varona, have both been closely identified with the assassination of JFK.

In 1976 Quintero was recruited by CIA agent, Edwin Wilson, to assassinating Libyan dissident in Egypt. This suggests that Quintero had previous experience of killing people for political reasons. Apparently, he was suggested for the job by Tom Clines, who had worked under Ted Shackley at the JM/WAVE station in Florida. It is believed that in the early 1960s Quintero carried out assignments for David Morales while he was chief operating officer at JM/WAVE.

Just some info I didn't find on your page.

North took bold steps in late June 1985 to solve the problems he perceived with contra weapons procurement, while laying the foundation for a system that could supply both the northern and southern fronts. North convened a meeting on June 28, 1985, in Miami with Secord; Thomas Clines, a former CIA officer who by then was acting as Secord's overseas arms buyer; Raphael Quintero, another former CIA officer who had been acting as Secord's ``man on the scene'' in Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica; Calero; and contra military commander Enrique Bermudez. The men met through the night, during which North announced that he would suspend his cash payments to Calero: Henceforth, Secord would arrange for all weapons purchases and deliveries. North also stressed to Calero and Bermudez, whose ties were closest to contra forces in the north, that they had to work with him and Secord -- including sharing precious supplies -- to build a viable southern front.


George

Thanks for that. Interesting that he was Secord's "man on the scene'' in Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica. I will add it to the page. Did it come from a quote from a book?

John,

found it on one of the pages I saved concerning Ollie North, its within the first quarter of the page

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/part_i.htm


FWIW

George

Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero, CIA veteran, once said that if he were granted immunity and compelled to testify about past actions, it would be the biggest scandal ever to hit the United States. An explosives expert and sniper, Quintero got his early training as a member of the CIA's Operation 40 Assassination Unit, also called the "shooter team". This elite group, born of secret collaboration between agents of the CIA, the Mafia, and Richard Nixon, was formed to assassinate Fidel and Raul Castro and Che Guevara. Led for many years by E. Howard Hunt, the shooter team was part of an advance unit that was left stranded in Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Quintero escaped from Cuba and returned to Miami, where he began working under then CIA agent Thomas Clines. This work included engaging in CIA covert operations in Southeast Asia, Iran, and Central America.

http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com...hi_Chi_Quintero

http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/chris.holt/h...a.cards/23.html

John,

I think we have to be very careful in characterising what Wheaton said in that interview. A careful review of the interview, and I think William and Mark would agree with me, leaves *open* the question of whether or not Quintero was directly involved or whether or not he and Jenkins simply *knew* those people who were. Indeed, my suspicion is that if either or both men had direct involvement, that Wheaton wouldn't be alive: it wouldn't be a simple 2-3 day choice over whether or not they wanted to tell what they knew to the Senate. My hope is that Quintero or others might one day offer what they know about the issue; if they he not have direct involvement, accusing him of such would likely hinder our efforts in that regard.

-Stu

Could you post the relevant comments of the transcript when he mentions the JFK assassination? It is possible that Wheaton was only saying the same thing that he (Source 48) told Daniel Sheehan in December 1986. Apparently Carl Jenkins (Source 49) told Sheehan the same story but later he denied this.

In 1986 Wheaton and Jenkins bore a grudge against Shackley, Quintero, Clines and Secord (they had been cut-out of the Iran-Contra deal). It would be interesting to discover if Wheaton has a motive for his current comments.

deleted

Thanx Tosh. As always, fascinating. Now let's see GH come back and say these are "phony" documents!!
Belated "happy birthday", by the way. I sure missed our buddy J this past 11/8 on his. Still hard to believe- (accept)- that he's really gone. J would always call on my birthday and say "let me be the first to wish you a happy birthday" and when I'd tell him my daughter, or sister had already called first he'd say "I'm talking about NEXT year". His wit lasted down to the very end.

Dawn


John: Just a note from memory: I too, was under Clines operations at one time and met with Wilson in Denver many times in the early eighties. I worked UC OPs MX for a brief time and was associated with KIKI and Shaggy.

Susan Baldwin and Hector Gomez(?) two DEA agents and investigators of the time reported in a classified Secret memo on a ranch in MX that belong to Quintero. As a side bar it is interesting because it referes to the "CIA Thing" of weapons for the Contra. Wheaton knows about this. Its interesting reading.. pdf/DEAfiles.pdf]http://www.toshplumlee.info/pdf/DEAfiles.pdf
[/quote]

In the early eigties, the northern front through association with Adolfo Calero was not going well so Fernandez utilized Chi Chi to work through Enrique and supply a route of passage for American Military Personnel through the southern front to go operational and do the deeds. It was very effective for a short time and relied on Hull to provide a staging ground beyond his narcotics trafficing operation. This was the groundwork for FRANg33. This was how it became so bloody in '81. Jack and Jill Didn't Come Home. Very few are left to tell the story and even fewer are willing.

Al

I believe this picks up where the following left off almost a year ago, when Tosh went on the wagon of internet posting; but now that he's fallen off....


T.C.

deleted

[quote name='William Plumlee' date='Dec 5 2005, 05:23 PM' post='47428']
[quote post='47371' date='Dec 5 2005, 12:23 AM' name='John Simkin']


"......John: Just a note from memory: I too, was under Clines operations at one time and met with Wilson in Denver many times in the early eighties. I worked UC OPs MX for a brief time and was associated with KIKI and Shaggy.

Susan Baldwin and Hector Gomez(?) two DEA agents and investigators of the time reported in a classified Secret memo on a ranch in MX that belong to Quintero. As a side bar it is interesting because it referes to the "CIA Thing" of weapons for the Contra. Wheaton knows about this. Its interesting reading...." http://www.toshplumlee.info/pdf/DEAfiles.pdf
[/quote]
----------------------------------

Larry Barcella, who I worked with on the "Letelier Assassination Case" (1977) -- lured Ed Wilson to the Dominican Republic during mid-1982. Barcella, after leaving his job as Asst. U.S. Attorney (Wash. DC); was hired by the Antigua government to get Israeli Mossad agent Mike Harari. Harari had imported a few thousand AK-47s into Colombia, and delivered them to the "Right-Wing Death Squads" [A.U.C.]

Wilson was in continuous custody [bailed denied] since 1982, and remains so today !!

So there is NO WAY that he was running around during the "Contra" business !!

Chairs,

GPH

_______________________________________


[www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2003/11/edwin_wilson_am.php]
Archives -- November 10, 2003

EDWIN WILSON: AMERICA'S MAN IN THE IRON MASK
by Eric Margolis
NEW YOK - The shocking case of former CIA officer Edwin P. Wilson recalls the words of the great American thinker, H.L.Mencken: ‘Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.’

The Wilson case has outraged me for 20 years. In 1982, the federal court in northern Virginia ’ the same hang-em high, Soviet-style court the Feds now use to try terrorism cases ’ sentenced Wilson to 10 years in prison for selling 22 tons of explosive to Libya. He was also convicted on shaky charges of attempted murder and sentenced to another 15 years. Wilson, now 75 years old, has served 20 years in maximum security prison.

I always believed Wilson innocent and spoke to him many times in prison. ‘I was framed by the government,’ Wilson told me, ‘they want me to disappear. I know too much. ’ His words shake me to this day. ‘They buried him alive in prison,’ a former CIA official confided to me.

Last week, Federal District Judge Lynn Hughes in Houston, Texas, threw out Wilson’s two-decades old conviction. Judge Hughes wrote: ‘government knowingly used false evidence against him,’ concluding ‘honesty comes hard to government.’

Wilson was no angel. The veteran, tough as nails CIA field agent specialized in running arms and mounting coups. He was one of the agency’s old-time ‘cowboys.’ In 1971, Wilson officially ‘retired’ from CIA and went into business on his own. In reality, CIA used Wilson for potentially explosive clandestine deals it wanted to keep ‘deniable.’

I first heard of Wilson and partner, Frank Terpil, while covering the Angolan War between Soviet and Cuban-backed Marxist forces and Jonas Savimbi’s anti-communist UNITA guerilla army. UNITA was secretly armed by South Africa and the US, but Washington did not want to be seen as an ally of the apartheid regime. So CIA used Wilson and Tirpil to channel arms to Savimbi, using CIA-front firms and banks in Asia and Europe.

In the late 1970’s, CIA sent Wilson and Terpil to Libya to covertly strengthen the regime of Muammar Khadaffi. Washington planned to use the fiery Libyan leader as its strongman in North Africa, just as it was using longtime CIA ‘asset’ Anwar Sadat in Egypt.

Wilson sold Libya C-4 explosives and arms, and sent teams of ex-Green Berets to train Libyan commandos and ‘terminate’ some of Libya’s many enemies abroad. The explosives, Wilson has always maintained, were for Libya’s oil industry.

But while CIA was backing Khadaffi, the new Reagan Administration sought to distance itself from the soft policies of the Carter Administration by denouncing Muammar Khadaffi as the world’s leading terrorist and a threat to America.

CIA was ordered to overthrow Khadaffi, putting the agency in a frightfully embarrassing dilemma. Bureaucratic panic erupted at Langley. The Libyan operation was ordered immediately shut down and all records destroyed.

As word of secret US backing of Khadaffi leaked out, Wilson and Terpil were cut adrift and proclaimed outlaws. They fled to the Mideast. In 1982 Wilson was lured by American agents to the Dominican Republic, kidnapped to the USA, and charged with gun-running.

During numerous trials, Wilson maintained he had been working for CIA. He was not allowed to cross-examine CIA witnesses for ‘security reasons’ - shades of today’s terrorism trials.

The third-ranking CIA official provided a false affidavit to Justice Department prosecutors that the agency ‘had no knowledge of Edwin P. Wilson.’ This was a lie, a fact discovered by Wilson’s tenacious lawyer, David Adler, by poring through 300,000 documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. A lie prosecutors were aware of, found Judge Hughes, who said the jury would have acquitted Wilson had government told the truth.

In the early 1980’s, an old friend, Ed G, an Iranian-born American accountant with no intelligence experience, was convinced by CIA it was his ‘patriotic duty’ to go to Iran and build a new agent network in Tehran to replace the previous one rolled up by the Islamic revolution.

After three years of amateurish spying, Ed’s cover was blown. He fled for his life. On returning to the US, Ed called his CIA controller and was told, ‘there is no one here by that name, and we have no record of you.’ Another disaster was simply erased by throwing agents to the wolves. Penniless, Ed was reduced to begging money from friends and finally working as a shoe salesman. Compared to Wilson, he was lucky.

It is terrifying to see government’s massive weight crush an innocent man. Wilson became America’s ‘Man in the Iron Mask.’ Judge Hughes called the case ‘double-crossing a part-time, informal government agent.’ She aptly used the term ‘framed’ to qualify this disgusting legal outrage. High Justice Department officials involved in this crime are today serving judges. They, and the retired CIA official, should be prosecuted.

The Wilson case should remind us of all the US Justice Department’s recent and ongoing ‘terrorism’ prosecutions, where individuals, mostly foreign-born, poor, and uneducated ’ many of them Pakistanis - have had the book thrown at them and are threatened with life terms if they do not confess to crimes. While truth is the first victim of nationalist hysteria, justice is always the second.

In spite of Judge Hughes’ ruling, The government refuses to release Wilson and is now considering an appeal. Shame.

Posted by Eric Margolis on November 10, 2003 11:50 AM
----------------------------------------------------------------------


[quote name='Dawn Meredith' post='47434' date='Dec 5 2005, 06:33 PM']
Thanx Tosh. As always, fascinating. Now let's see GH come back and say these are "phony" documents!!
Belated "happy birthday", by the way. I sure missed our buddy J this past 11/8 on his. Still hard to believe- (accept)- that he's really gone. J would always call on my birthday and say "let me be the first to wish you a happy birthday" and when I'd tell him my daughter, or sister had already called first he'd say "I'm talking about NEXT year". His wit lasted down to the very end.

Dawn


John: Just a note from memory: I too, was under Clines operations at one time and met with Wilson in Denver many times in the early eighties. I worked UC OPs MX for a brief time and was associated with KIKI and Shaggy.

Susan Baldwin and Hector Gomez(?) two DEA agents and investigators of the time reported in a classified Secret memo on a ranch in MX that belong to Quintero. As a side bar it is interesting because it referes to the "CIA Thing" of weapons for the Contra. Wheaton knows about this. Its interesting reading.. pdf/DEAfiles.pdf]http://www.toshplumlee.info/pdf/DEAfiles.pdf
[/quote]
----------------------------------

Larry Barcella, who I worked with on the "Letelier Assassination Case" (1977) -- lured Ed Wilson to the Dominican Republic during mid-1982. Barcella, after leaving his job as Asst. U.S. Attorney (Wash. DC); was hired by the Antigua government to get Israeli Mossad agent Mike Harari. Harari had imported a few thousand AK-47s into Colombia, and delivered them to the "Right-Wing Death Squads" [A.U.C.]

Wilson was in continuous custody [bailed denied] since 1982, and remains so today !!

So there is NO WAY that he was running around during the "Contra" business !!

Chairs,

GPH

_______________________________________


[www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2003/11/edwin_wilson_am.php]
Archives -- November 10, 2003

EDWIN WILSON: AMERICA'S MAN IN THE IRON MASK
by Eric Margolis
NEW YOK - The shocking case of former CIA officer Edwin P. Wilson recalls the words of the great American thinker, H.L.Mencken: ‘Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.’

The Wilson case has outraged me for 20 years. In 1982, the federal court in northern Virginia ’ the same hang-em high, Soviet-style court the Feds now use to try terrorism cases ’ sentenced Wilson to 10 years in prison for selling 22 tons of explosive to Libya. He was also convicted on shaky charges of attempted murder and sentenced to another 15 years. Wilson, now 75 years old, has served 20 years in maximum security prison.

I always believed Wilson innocent and spoke to him many times in prison. ‘I was framed by the government,’ Wilson told me, ‘they want me to disappear. I know too much. ’ His words shake me to this day. ‘They buried him alive in prison,’ a former CIA official confided to me.

Last week, Federal District Judge Lynn Hughes in Houston, Texas, threw out Wilson’s two-decades old conviction. Judge Hughes wrote: ‘government knowingly used false evidence against him,’ concluding ‘honesty comes hard to government.’

Wilson was no angel. The veteran, tough as nails CIA field agent specialized in running arms and mounting coups. He was one of the agency’s old-time ‘cowboys.’ In 1971, Wilson officially ‘retired’ from CIA and went into business on his own. In reality, CIA used Wilson for potentially explosive clandestine deals it wanted to keep ‘deniable.’

I first heard of Wilson and partner, Frank Terpil, while covering the Angolan War between Soviet and Cuban-backed Marxist forces and Jonas Savimbi’s anti-communist UNITA guerilla army. UNITA was secretly armed by South Africa and the US, but Washington did not want to be seen as an ally of the apartheid regime. So CIA used Wilson and Tirpil to channel arms to Savimbi, using CIA-front firms and banks in Asia and Europe.

In the late 1970’s, CIA sent Wilson and Terpil to Libya to covertly strengthen the regime of Muammar Khadaffi. Washington planned to use the fiery Libyan leader as its strongman in North Africa, just as it was using longtime CIA ‘asset’ Anwar Sadat in Egypt.

Wilson sold Libya C-4 explosives and arms, and sent teams of ex-Green Berets to train Libyan commandos and ‘terminate’ some of Libya’s many enemies abroad. The explosives, Wilson has always maintained, were for Libya’s oil industry.

But while CIA was backing Khadaffi, the new Reagan Administration sought to distance itself from the soft policies of the Carter Administration by denouncing Muammar Khadaffi as the world’s leading terrorist and a threat to America.

CIA was ordered to overthrow Khadaffi, putting the agency in a frightfully embarrassing dilemma. Bureaucratic panic erupted at Langley. The Libyan operation was ordered immediately shut down and all records destroyed.

As word of secret US backing of Khadaffi leaked out, Wilson and Terpil were cut adrift and proclaimed outlaws. They fled to the Mideast. In 1982 Wilson was lured by American agents to the Dominican Republic, kidnapped to the USA, and charged with gun-running.

During numerous trials, Wilson maintained he had been working for CIA. He was not allowed to cross-examine CIA witnesses for ‘security reasons’ - shades of today’s terrorism trials.

The third-ranking CIA official provided a false affidavit to Justice Department prosecutors that the agency ‘had no knowledge of Edwin P. Wilson.’ This was a lie, a fact discovered by Wilson’s tenacious lawyer, David Adler, by poring through 300,000 documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. A lie prosecutors were aware of, found Judge Hughes, who said the jury would have acquitted Wilson had government told the truth.

In the early 1980’s, an old friend, Ed G, an Iranian-born American accountant with no intelligence experience, was convinced by CIA it was his ‘patriotic duty’ to go to Iran and build a new agent network in Tehran to replace the previous one rolled up by the Islamic revolution.

After three years of amateurish spying, Ed’s cover was blown. He fled for his life. On returning to the US, Ed called his CIA controller and was told, ‘there is no one here by that name, and we have no record of you.’ Another disaster was simply erased by throwing agents to the wolves. Penniless, Ed was reduced to begging money from friends and finally working as a shoe salesman. Compared to Wilson, he was lucky.

It is terrifying to see government’s massive weight crush an innocent man. Wilson became America’s ‘Man in the Iron Mask.’ Judge Hughes called the case ‘double-crossing a part-time, informal government agent.’ She aptly used the term ‘framed’ to qualify this disgusting legal outrage. High Justice Department officials involved in this crime are today serving judges. They, and the retired CIA official, should be prosecuted.

The Wilson case should remind us of all the US Justice Department’s recent and ongoing ‘terrorism’ prosecutions, where individuals, mostly foreign-born, poor, and uneducated ’ many of them Pakistanis - have had the book thrown at them and are threatened with life terms if they do not confess to crimes. While truth is the first victim of nationalist hysteria, justice is always the second.

In spite of Judge Hughes’ ruling, The government refuses to release Wilson and is now considering an appeal. Shame.

Posted by Eric Margolis on November 10, 2003 11:50 AM
----------------------------------------------------------------------

deleted

You have constantly misrepresented the way Wheaton has provided information on the assassination of JFK. This is either because you have not read my postings on the subject or that you have read them but not understood them (from past history both of these theories are possible). Another possibility is that you have read and understood the postings but because they do not fit into your theory that “Castro” ordered the assassination of JFK you are pretending you are “intellectually challenged”.

I will briefly state the order of events so that you cannot claim ignorance.

(1) In 1986 Gene Wheaton gave information about CIA illegal activities to Daniel Sheehan. At this stage Wheaton gave no information on Carl Jenkins. In fact, at this time, Jenkins was also providing information to Sheehan. The main concern of Wheaton and Jenkins was to provide information about the illegal activities of Ted Shackley, Tom Clines, Richard Secord and Edwin Wilson.

(2) In 1986 Wheaton also provided information on Shackley and company to investigative journalists like Joel Bainerman. These journalists have made it clear that Wheaton did not seek money for this information. However, at this time he was unwilling to be named as a source.

(3) In 1988 Daniel Sheehan was in serious trouble. The courts were demanding that he named his sources. Eventually, Wheaton agreed to give evidence in court against the CIA. This took place in Florida in March, 1988. However, he did not make any accusations against Jenkins. Wheaton had not been employed directly by the CIA and so his evidence was dismissed as “hearsay”. Sheehan, or one of his friends, then leaked the name of Jenkins as being one of his major sources. This information appeared in the press. Jenkins then gave interviews claiming that he had met with Sheehan but he must have misunderstood his comments and had not accused CIA officials as being involved with illegal activities. As a result, Sheehan’s case was chucked out and he had to pay considerable damages to Shackley and his friends.

(4) In 1995 Wheaton contacted the Assassination Records Review Board claiming he had information about the involvement of the CIA in the assassination of JFK. The ARRB eventually arranged for its chief investigator, Anne Buttimer, to meet Wheaton. During their meeting Wheaton named Carl Jenkins and Chi Chi Quintero as being involved in the assassination. However, he was very reluctant to go on record as the man who named these CIA operatives. This is why Buttimer does not name Jenkins and Quintero in the report dated on 12th July, 1995. Jenkins can only be identified by his CV that Wheaton sent to the ARRB.

(5) Despite follow up letters by Wheaton, the ARRB failed to investigate if Jenkins was involved in the assassination of JFK. It seems that Wheaton now decided to drop the matter.

(6) In 2005 a researcher discovered Wheaton’s documents at the ARRB. These documents were brought to the attention of Larry Hancock. He arranged for William Law and Mark Sobel to interview Wheaton. It was during this filmed interview that Wheaton named Jenkins and Quintero. Further research of recently released documents indicated that Jenkins and Quintero might well have been involved in the assassination.

(7) Although Wheaton mentioned these names in this interview it is far from clear that he wanted to be seen as the man who named CIA operatives as being involved in the assassination of JFK. This has only become public knowledge because of the postings that have taken place on this Forum and on my website pages on Wheaton, Jenkins and Quintero. Jenkins and Quintero are now both aware of these accusations. So also are the CIA aware of this development. At the moment Jenkins or Quintero have not denied Wheaton’s claims. It will indeed be interesting to see what action these two men decide to take.

I've replied in at least three other threads so let me just reiterate:

1) What do you claim I misrepresented? I'll prove it came exactly from one of your posts.

2) What evidence is there in newly released documents providing further evidence to link (or even possibly link) Jenkins to the assassination?

I would also remind you that in another thread I asked you days ago to identify any factual errors in "Live By the Sword". It appears to me that "Ultimate Sacrifice" does indeed show through documents not then available to Russo that Russo's arguments about the Kennedy campaign against Castro were "right on the money".

So I anxiously await any evidence you have (other than Wheaton's statement) to link Jenkins to the assassination.

But to reiterate for the umpteenth time, I think Wheaton's allegations should be seriously investigated. In fact, they should have been investigated ten years ago, when he should have taken them to law enforcement authorities!

I agree Stu. I don't understand the reasoning either. This could well sabotage the entire investigation Larry Hancock and William Law are working on. Let's give them some time and space instead of making unsupported claims.

Meanwhile, we are not putting out a transcript of the interview at this time. It was shown at NID to PREVIEW an ongoing investigation that will be published in total in Larry's upcoming book. We made that clear. I am very disappointed with the way this forum has handled this new information.

Debra

I am sorry you don’t like the way I run this Forum. Criticism like this goes with the territory. I suspect you have also had to endure similar criticism about the way you run the JFK Lancer Forum.

When the film was shown at the conference no request was made to keep the contents secret. Therefore I thought I was free to post details on the Forum. I have also carried out my own research and have posted what I have found out. I don't believe this has stopped Chi Chi Quintero and Carl Jenkins from giving William Law an interview. In fact, I have told by the person who is "looking" after them, that they are unwilling to be interviewed by anyone. The only thing they are willing to say about Wheaton's allegations is "no comment".

However, they might be persuaded to change their mind. For example, one of the UK's national television stations, C4, has a film crew in the United States at the moment and are trying to get an interview with Quintero and Jenkins.

Unless someone wrote down what Wheaton said concerning Jenkins and Quintero and the JFK assassination during the screening we will have to wait until Larry Hancock’s book is published. I suppose that should increase sales. This Forum will do what it can to publicize the new edition of the book. We did a pretty good job with the first edition. Recently I claimed on the Forum that it is the best book ever published on the assassination. I assume the second edition will be even better.

John,

I can promise you that the audience was told this showing was part of an special ONGOING investigation. We have presented embargoed information before at NID many times. (Lamar's 2004 presentation for example.)

It has nothing to do with books sales. It has to do with doing a through and complete investigation. Background, document searches, careful questioning comes before public accusations or even speculation. Why do you think Larry's book is so good? Because he is so through. Besides, had I wanted to promote his book, I could have come home from NID and posted the interview all over the Lancer site. This I did not do.

I hope this helps you understand where I am coming from. I won't discuss this in public further and I don't wish to be your enemy.

Debra

PS: no one appreciates more than I the burdens of a forum.

_________________________________________


As far as I can tell, Larry is thorough through-and-through!

_________________________________________

Thanks Mark, that gives me a good introduction to illustrate why this sort of thing can be convoluted and productive at the same time.

For example, irrespective of any other possible results, Wheaton's ARRB informtion has already given us:

1. A lead to Carl Jenkins who without doubt played a significant and previously undocumented paramilitary role prior to the BOP. Including organizing a Castro assassination attempt previously unknown.

2. Jenkins documents gave us some new insights into AM/WORLD.

3. Jenkins AMWORLD documents led us to a mysterious set of CC initials which in turn led us to Henry Hecksher.

4. Exploring the career of Hecksher may well have solved the mystery of Richard Case Nagell's "BOB" - if that is true it adds a significant amount of credibilty to portions of Nagell's story....

and explains exactly why and when Nagell was targeted on certain exiles.

..........and the list goes on....

Not to mention that Wheaton's direction has caused us to take another serious look at Irving Davidson's different associations....you've gotta love someone who lived in the same block or so as Fred Black, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover and Bobby Baker. And who talks about dropping over to watch football with Hoover and Tolsen...and is the same guy that was representing Marcello in DC. And as Pat Speer has pointed out, probably represents Johnson in the Dominican...at the same time to of the key men on the ground there are none other than David Phillips and Carl Jenkins.

Bottom line, there is no doubt Wheaton knew some very interesting people... irrespective of what he may or may not have gotten right about the gossip he heard.

-- Larry

Larry, do you agree with Stu and Debra that Wheaton was ambiguous about whether Jenkins was one of the conspirators or merely "was involved" with them?

Stu also agrees with me, as I read his post, that IF indeed Jenkins was a key conspirator, and Wheaton knew about Jenkins' role, Jenkins would be a dead man.

I agree (and have so stated before) that clearly Wheaton knew a lot of people at high levels and what he said ought to be carefully researched (perhaps even by a grand jury). Even if Wheaton correctly stated only that Jenkins knew who the conspirators were, that ought to lead to questioning of Jenkins. By compulsory legal process if necessary.

Tim, to my recollection Wheaton stated that Jenkins had trained the individuals that were involved in the shooting. However it was and is unclear to me whether that could simply mean he trained them for an attack on Castro. And that could have been in 1961 or in 1963.

Wheaton may have said something more suggestive about their direct involvement, at this point I simply do not recall. Certainly he implies in his approach to the ARRB that they would be guilty of some level of conspiracy since he mentions immunity... however that could mean a number of different things.

It took me six years to research and think that I understood Nagell, who definitely said different things at different times for situational reasons. It took me about four years to think I understood Martino. It's way too early for me to imply that I understand Wheaton or his information. He's "real", no doubt about that and so are Jenkins and Quintero. And there are ways of corroborating some of this that go way beyond just the three men.

Beyond that I'm not prepared to say....but we will present as much detail in the second edition as we can develop and offer it to everyone to reach their own conclusion.

....Larry

Larry, I am sure every single Forum member eagerly awaits your second edition!

Nestor Pino was in Brigade 2506 and was captured at the Bay of Pigs. He was later sent to Ft. Benning and wound up a career colonel in the U.S. Army. He appears to have been available for anti-Castro operations.

At the time of Iran-Contra affair Bill Bode was Special Assistant to Undersecretary for Security Assistance at State Department. Knew Pino so probably involved with earlier anti-Castro operations.

Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero was Bay of Pigs veteran who handled MRR infiltrations into Cuba. Associate of Felix I. Rodriguez who was also involved with the 1963 MRR coup/invasion plan. Later involved with Iran-Contra, as was Rodriguez.

Interestingly, General Escalante told me his operative Sgt. Hernandez had Artime's headquarters in Nicaragua so bugged that they knew everything the MRR was planning.

Interesting article that has just been published on the National News Agency Cuba (AIN).

http://www.ain.cubaweb.cu/idioma/ingles/20...ne12cia-jfk.htm

The CIA and Its Cuban-American Connection to the JFK Assassination

Havana, Jan. 12 (AIN) Information from Cuban-born CIA agents could shed light on the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

In a long article published in the Granma newspaper on Wednesday, Cuban journalists Lazaro Barredo and Reinaldo Taladrid revealed statements made by ex-CIA operatives Antonio Veciana and Rafael Quintero. Veciana and Quintero told the media that they possess significant information on the Kennedy case.

"I got some hot stuff, but I'm holding it as my life insurance," said Antonio Veciana to Gaeton Fonzi, in an article in "Esquire" magazine, reported the Granma newspaper.

The paper cited Rafael Quintero, one of the mercenaries recruited by former CIA director George Bush (father) to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion. Quintero said "if I say what I know about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the biggest scandal that has ever rocked the US."

However, long-time CIA links between Cuban-born agents and Kennedy's assassination, explained Granma, have been explored by other authors as well in studies that led to the making of US films such as "Executive Action" and "JFK."

Some of those investigations have also disclosed the roots of the current relationship between the Bush family and Miami-based Cuban-American ultra rightwing circles .

In an article published by the US magazine "The Realist," researcher Paul Kangas affirms that among CIA agents recruited by George Bush (father) to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion were Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Bernard Baker and Rafael Quintero.

The day JFK was assassinated, Hunt and some others who would later be part of the Watergate team were photographed in Dallas, as was a group of Cubans; including one of them close to the presidential limousine who was holding an umbrella as a signal for Kennedy to be gunned down, the Granma article reads.

Hunt and Sturgis shot at JFK from the grassy knoll. They were photographed and seen by 15 witnesses, Kangas said.

The US elite made great efforts to blame Cuba for the assassination of Kennedy, including several misinformation campaigns, the article explains. Those campaigns took place in Dallas, Miami and Mexico City and were aimed at fabricating a "revolutionary" image of Lee Harvey Oswald as a "defender of the Cuban Revolution." For that reason, Oswald -a former US marine- appeared in pictures during solidarity-with-Cuba activities expressing himself aggressively.

An even riskier disinformation campaign was carried out in Mexico City, where Oswald went to the Cuban embassy requesting an entry visa for Cuba. The action was filmed from a CIA observation point across from the Cuban diplomatic mission.

What is curious is that Veciana told Fonzi that during one of his contacts with "Bishop" (CIA veteran David Attle Phillips) in early 1963, Phillips told him that he knew Vecina had a cousin who was a member of the Cuban intelligence services and that he worked at the Cuban embassy in Mexico. Bishop suggested that if Veciana convinced his cousin to work for them on a very specific issue, he would get whatever payment he wanted.

The Granma newspaper explained that Veciana told Fonzi that he had never talked about his cousin with "Bishop" and that by that time "Bishop" had been assigned to the US embassy in Mexico and had travelled to Dallas in several occasions.

The fact is that Veciana was the cousin of the wife of the then Cuban consul in Mexico City, Guillermo Ruiz. Ruiz. The wife was the target of a recruitment effort shortly after the assassination of JFK and was supposed to travel to the US to testify about Oswald's "complicity" with the Cuban intelligence services, Granma explains.

This relation between the CIA and its accomplices is nothing new. The attempts to topple the Cuban Revolution date back a long time, even before its triumph in 1959.

In 1958, David Attle Phillips, who would become the head of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, made a working visit to Havana as an expert in psychological warfare. He participated in the creation of Operation 40 and set up Radio Swam.

Beginning in 1959, as an official of the CIA, George Herbert Bush received instructions on how to finance new anti-Castro groups created by the CIA. In this way infamous terrorists -such as Felix Rodriguez, Jorge Mas Canosa (former president of the National Cuban American Foundation) and Luis Posada Carriles-became part of the CIA connection.

Hunt and Sturgis in Dealey? Bush recruiting Hunt? Methinks Granma is a bit senile...

I would be very interested in reading the article published in the Granma newspaper on Wednesday, where Cuban journalists Lazaro Barredo and Reinaldo Taladrid revealed statements made by ex-CIA operatives Antonio Veciana and Rafael Quintero. I have searched the web but the article does not appear to have been published online yet.

This appears to be the article:

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2006/enero/vie...4familia-i.html

Thanks Ron. I have posted it on the Forum because sometimes these articles are taken down:

Havana. January 13, 2006

The Bush family, the Cuban mafia and the Kennedy assassination

BY REINALDO TALADRID and LAZARO BAREDO

IN 1959, a young officer and businessman from Texas received directions to cooperate in funding the nascent anti-Castro groups that the CIA decided to create, but it wasn’t until 1960 that he was assigned a more specific and overt mission: to guarantee the security of the process of recruiting Cubans to form an invasion brigade, a key aspect within the grand CIA operation to destroy the Cuban Revolution.

The CIA Texan quickly took a liking to the Cuban assigned to him for his new mission. The system of work, although intense, was simple. Féliz Rodríguez Mendigutía, "El Gato," would propose a candidate to him, who would then be checked out, both in the Agency and among the Miami groups, and finally, the Texan would give the go-ahead.

In that period, Félix Rodríguez already knew quite a few Cubans, like Jorge Mas Canosa (subsequently the leader of various counterrevolutionary organizations and then president of the Cuban-American National Foundation) and had confirmed his loyalty to "the cause" and to the Americans. For that reason he was among the first to be proposed. He passed through the process satisfactorily, and in a meeting in the city of Miami, which the Texan liked to make as formal as possible, Jorge Mas Canosa officially became an agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Jorge Mas didn’t know how to thank Félix for what he had done for him. From that moment he was constantly grateful to him and, at the same time, obedient to his every petition.

But Jorge Mas was far from imagining the significance of this recruitment on the rest of his life. The significance rested on the fact that that Texan officer who undertook his recruitment process, approved it and then notified him at that meeting, was none other than George Herbert Walker Bush, the same man who, later, between 1989 and 1992, was the 41st president of the United States.

Various sources coincide on the foregoing. Paul Kangas, a Californian private investigator, published an article containing part of his investigations in The Realist in 1990, in which he affirms that a newly discovered FBI document places Bush as working with the now famous CIA agent Félix Rodríguez on the recruitment of ultra-right wing exiled Cubans for the invasion of Cuba.

For his part, in his "Report on a Censored Project," Dr. Carl Jensen of Sonoma State College states: "… there is a record in the files of Rodríguez and others involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, which expounds the role of Bush: the truth is that Bush was a senior CIA official before working with Félix Rodríguez on the invasion of Cuba."

But Kangas is more precise in his quoted article, when he states:

"Traveling from Houston to Miami on a weekly basis, Bush, with Félix Rodríguez, spent 1960 and 1961 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion."

Other publications that have referred to the theme are The Nation magazine, whose August 13, 1988 edition reveals the finding of "a memorandum in that context addressed to FBI chief J. Edward Hoover and signed November 1963, which reads: Mr. George Bush of the CIA;" or the Common Cause magazine that, on March 4, 1990, affirmed: "The CIA put millionaire and agent George Bush in charge of recruiting exiled Cubans for the CIA’s invading army; Bush was working with another Texan oil magnate, Jack Crichton, who helped him in terms of the invasion."

Without knowing it, Jorge Mas had become part of something far more complex than the planned mercenary invasion. The recent recruited CIA agent became one of the participants in what was originally known as Operation 40.

Operation 40 was the first plan of covert operations generated by the CIA to destroy the Cuban Revolution and was drawn up in 1959 on the orders of the administration of President Ike Eisenhower.

In his book Cuba, la Guerra secreta de la CIA (Cuba, the CIA’s Secret War), Divisional General (ret) Fabián Escalante Font, former head of the Cuban Counterintelligence Services, explained what occurred in the early 1960.

"A few days later (end of 1959), Allen Dulles, chief of the CIA, presented to the King (Colonel, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA) memorandum to the National Security Council, which approved the suggestion of forming a working group within the agency which, in the short term, would provide ‘alternative solutions to the Cuban problem.’"

The group, Escalante Font relates, was composed of Tracy Barnes as head, and officials Howard Hunt, Frank Bender, Jack Engler and David Atlee Phillips, among others. Those present had one common characteristic: all of them had participated in the fall of the Jacobo Arbenz government in Guatemala.

General Escalante recounts in his book that, during the first meeting, Barnes spoke at length on the objectives to be achieved. He explained that Vice President Richard Nixon was the Cuban "case officer" and had met with an important group of businessmen headed by George Bush and Jack Crichton, both Texas oil magnates, to collect the necessary funding for the operation.

In a 1986 edition of the Freedom Magazine U.S. journalist L.F. Proury explains that Richard Nixon had long and close links with the Bush family dating back to 1946 when Nixon, responding to a petition by Preston Bush (George’s father) presented himself as a candidate for the U.S. Congress, financed by the old Bush.

The group constituted within the CIA, states Escalante in his book, set up various teams in charge of organizing clandestine operations, psychological warfare actions and exerting economic and diplomatic pressure, which would put paid to the island government. This was compounded by the preparation of an elite group of Cuban agents who, after specialized training, would infiltrate Cuba and deal a mortal rearguard blow to the Revolution, which included the assassination of its principal leaders.

Jorge Mas Canosa gave his recruiters a very positive impression and was immediately assigned to a special mission. "Now things are going to take off," he said enthusiastically.

In the Exito magazine, Mabel Dieppa narrates:

"He was sent to a U.S. Marines training camp close to the Mississippi River, where he was trained to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion."

But Jorge Mas, as stated, had been attached to a very special group, still within the preparations for the mercenary invasion. The group was composed of 160 men of total confidence and was headed by the traitor and likewise CIA agent Higinio Díaz Ane (Nino). In the abovementioned book, General Escalante explains: "These men were given the mission to attack the town of Baracoa, in the easternmost part of the island, in order to distract the revolutionary forces when the brigade landed at the Bay of Pigs." Once they had taken Baracoa, they were to head for the Guantánamo Naval Base and, simulating Cuban troops, organize a provocation by attacking the installation, thus facilitating a U.S. military response with a formal reason for intervening in the conflict created by the mercenary invasion. That plan was the secret mechanism that the CIA and the Pentagon had up their sleeve, and nobody, not even President Kennedy, knew of it.

On the day of the invasion, the 160 "elite" agency men left in a boat for their destination but, on reaching Baracoa, fear at the movement of Cuban troops in the area won out over the sterling training they had received, and they confined themselves to continue navigating south of the island until they reached the westernmost extreme. From there, they headed for Puerto Rico, arriving there the same day. In Miami, as a joke, this action was christened "Skirting round Cuba."

After the Bay of Pigs defeat in April 1961 the CIA recouped its men. It reiterated its confidence in them and assigned them new missions, maintaining the objectives that gave rise to Operation 40.

In the weekly Política, the author Natacha Herrera explained:

"Along with another 207 agents, Mas went to Fort Benning, Georgia for basic U.S. army training and was selected to take a special intelligence, clandestine communication and propaganda course."

In his extensive work published for the Esquire magazine in January 1993, Gaeton Fonzi affirms that in Fort Benning, Mas Canosa’s friends with whom he was most closely linked in complex covert operations were Félix Rodríguez and Luis Posada Carriles," the latter of whom became notorious for the sabotage of a Cubana Airline passenger plane in full flight over Barbados in 1976.

"After Fort Benning," says the U.S. investigator, "there was some CIA connection in every move or action in Jorge Mas’ career."

Precisely because of the outstanding results obtained in Fort Benning, the Agency later assigned Mas Canosa to another delicate mission. On this occasion, he would have to move to an "ultra-secret" base located a little south of Fort Benning, to join what was known as the "New Orleans group." That group, which took its name from the location of the base on the outskirts of the southern U.S. city, was mainly composed of veterans from the Bay of Pigs and Fort Benning, although some agents of confidence like Antonio Veciana, recently arrived from the island and reportedly very close to Jorge Mas in that period, were incorporated. Their preparation was sui generis. The group took a course on the use of means and methods of combat of the Cuban army.

The content of the mission was disclosed by General Escalante in his book: "Once again, the plot consisted of a self-provocation against the Yankee base (of Guantánamo), via the infiltration of a commando of 150 men who trained in an ultra-secret CIA base on the outskirts of the southern U.S. city of New Orleans."

The mission was cancelled due to the occurrences that gave rise to the Missile Crisis in October 1962, which convinced the organizers of the inevitability of a direct military intervention by the U.S. army without the need of any pretext."

After this new failure, Mas Canosa was full of rage and impotence and acknowledged to the U.S. writer Pat Jordan in an interview that, "the two men he most hated were Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy."

In the United States, the media has once again picked up on the relationship of the émigré Cubans who worked for the CIA with the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

During a long conversation with the investigator Gaeton Fonzi in Havana, we discovered a story that, given its content, it is worth reproducing. Fonzi is not just any common or garden investigator. He had devoted much of his life to working for various congressional committees, including those responsible for investigations into the covert activities of the CIA and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A few years ago, and after much effort, Fonzi managed to get a private interview with Antonio Veciana, the same old buddy of Jorge Mas in the "New Orleans group," where the two of them became close friends while fulfilling CIA missions. Veciana had been interrogated by the Grand Jury charged with investigating the assassination of President Kennedy, and years later, had had some drug-related problems; but he vehemently affirmed to Fonzi that these difficulties were nothing more than a "trap" set up by somebody.

"I have a lot of information, but I am keeping that to myself because it is my life insurance," Veciana told Fonzi."

Antonio Veciana Blanch was a public accountant who worked for the Cuban sugar magnate Julio Lobo. He rapidly opposed the Cuban Revolution and, in 1960 was recruited by the CIA in Havana. He received his initial training in an English Language Academy supervised by the U.S. embassy in the Cuban capital. In October 1961, after the failure of a plot he devised to assassination Prime Minister Fidel Castro with a bazooka during an event at the former Presidential Palace, Veciana fled Cuba.

In the interview that he gave to Fonzi he related that, once in Miami, he was looked after by a CIA official who used the pseudonym of Maurice Bishop. Among other tasks, this "Bishop" ordered Veciana to promote the creation of the ALPHA 66 organization.

"Bishop" had frequent contact with Veciana from 1962-1963 in the city of Dallas. Veciana recalled that, at one of those meetings in a public building, he saw Lee Harvey Oswald.

Fonzi noted that various acts of disinformation were organized as part of the operation that cost the life of President Kennedy: one in Dallas, another in Miami and a third in Mexico City. The objective of the disinformation was to manufacture the image of a "revolutionary" Oswald, a "defender of the Cuban Revolution."

Hence the ex-marine was filmed in acts of solidarity with Cuba, demonstrating in a very aggressive manner. But the most daring act of disinformation was effected in Mexico City. There, Lee Harvey Oswald turned up at the Cuban embassy to ask for an entry visa to the island. All of that was filmed from a surveillance post that the CIA had opposite the Cuban embassy, so that it would be documented.

The strange thing is, as Veciana told Fonzi, in one of his contacts with "Bishop" in early 1963, the latter said that he knew that he (Veciana) had a cousin in Cuban Intelligence, who was located at the Cuban embassy in Mexico. "Bishop" stated that if it suited his cousin to work for them in a very specific action, he would pay him whatever he wanted. Veciana commented to Fonzi that he had never spoken of this cousin to "Bishop" and also, at that time, "Bishop" was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and even went directly from the Mexican capital to some contacts in Dallas.

In fact Veciana was the cousin of the wife of the then Cuban consul in Mexico City, Guillermo Ruiz, and in the days following the assassination of Kennedy, that woman was the victim of a recruitment attempt in the same city, with the clear proposition that, once in the United States, she would testify as to Oswald’s "complicity" with the Cuban secret services.

Questioned by Fonzi as to the existence of renewed contacts with "Bishop" after the Dallas homicide, Veciana answered that there had been, particularly in 1971, when he received an order to leave for Bolivia and work in the U.S. embassy in that country, where he would appear as an official for the Agency for International Development (USAID) and should wait for a visit from a known person. Fonzi checked the USAID archives in Washington and found an application form to enter the USAID in the name of Antonio Veciana, handwritten in letters distinct from those of Veciana and unsigned.

The "known person" who contacted him in Bolivia was "Bishop," at that time located in the U.S. embassy in Chile. "Bishop" immediately incorporated him into a team plotting an attempt on the life of President Fidel Castro, who was to visit the South American country.

Fonzi told us that he interviewed Antonio Veciana again, but this time accompanied by a specialist with the aim of composing a photofit of "Maurice Bishop" so as to determine his real identity.

Veciana gave a detailed description and the photofit was made. Fonzi spent weeks trying to identify the character, and one Sunday, suddenly received a call at home from a Republican senator for Pennsylvania for whom he was working at the time, and whom he had consulted on the identity of the man in the drawing.

The senator assured him that the he was absolutely sure that the man using the pseudonym of Maurice Bishop was none other than David Atlee Phillips. He was a veteran CIA officer who was in Havana on a working visit in 1958 as a specialist in psychological warfare, participated in the creation of Operation 40 and later, as part of the same, organized the Radio Swann transmitter. With time, Phillips would become head of the Western Hemisphere Division of the Agency.

However, at the end of 1993, in the documentary ¿Caso cerrado? (Case Closed?), the former chief of Cuban Security , Divisional General (ret) Fabián Escalante, revealed a secret report from one of his agents, which spoke of a meeting between Antonio Veciana and David Phillips in a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the early 70s.

"Veciana told me," said the Cuban agent, "that he was a CIA agent and it was the CIA that assassinated Kennedy and that senior CIA officials including David Phillips, the official attending to him, were behind it all. Veciana never wanted to give me any details of that affirmation, but recently, I have been able to confirm it, because once when I was in a hotel with Veciana, I heard a conversation that he had with his officer, David Phillips, in which Veciana swore that he would never talk about what happened in Dallas in 1963."

General Escalante guarantees that the source has direct access to Veciana, and was in his total confidence:

"I believe," Escalante affirmed, "that that is very important information because I have to say that, in 1973, when Antonio Veciana was liquidated by the CIA; in other words, when the CIA took him off their books, he received a compensation payment of $300,000."

But there is more. According to Cuban State Security investigations disclosed by General Escalante in the abovementioned documentary, various witnesses quoted by the Warren Commission described two Cubans, one of them black, leaving the Daley Plaza Book Deposit in Dallas, a few minutes after the assassination was effected. In parallel, through secret information and public testimony (the statement by Marita Lorenz, ex-CIA agent to a congressional committee), Cuban Security knew that two days before the assassination various Cubans were in Dallas with weapons and telescopic sights, including Eladio del Valle and Herminio Díaz, two paid killers and expert sharpshooters linked to the Mafia and Batista politics. The physical characteristics of Del Valle and Herminio Díaz matched the descriptions that various witnesses gave to the Warren Commission of the two Cubans seen leaving the building seconds after the president had been assassinated.

The really curious fact is the final fate of both of them: Eladio del Valle was brutally murdered in Miami when Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney initiated his investigation into the Kennedy assassination; Del Valle was chopped into pieces with a machete. Even more interesting was the end of Herminio Díaz, who died near the Havana coast in 1965, when he collided with a patrol boat while trying to infiltrate the island with the mission of assassinating Osvaldo Dortícos and submachine gunning the Riviera Hotel

In order to fulfill the mission on which he was sent, Díaz had to infiltrate the island right in the capital via Monte Barreto in Miramar (where a number of hotels are currently going up) at a time when, because of an incident at the Guantánamo naval base, the Cuban army was on combat alert, and aerial and coastal vigilance was been reinforced to the maximum. In the eyes of experts, and the Cuban Security, the operation was a veritable suicide mission.

The financial organizer and planner of such "a strange mission" was none other than Jorge Mas Canosa.

But the history of the CIA’s links with its Cuban agents and the Kennedy assassination has not only been explored by Fonzi. Many other authors and investigators, and even the film studios that gave origin to the U.S. movies Executive Action and JFK, have covered the subject.

In an article published in The Realist magazine, the investigator Paul Kangas affirms:

"Among other members of the CIA recruited by George Bush for the (Bay of Pigs) invasion) were Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Bernard Baker and Rafael Quintero… On the day that JFK was assassinated, Hunt and some of the subsequent Watergate team were photographed in Dallas, as well as a group of Cubans, one of them with an opened umbrella as a signal, alongside the president’s limousine, right where Kennedy was shot… Hunt and Sturgis fired on JFK from a grassy knoll. They were photographed and seen by 15 witnesses."

On May 7, 1990, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Frank Sturgis acknowledged:

"…the reason why we robbed in Watergate was because (Richard) Nixon was interested in stopping the news leaks related to the photos of our role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

Another of Bush’s recruits for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Rafael Quintero, who was also part of this underworld of organizations and conspiracies against Cuba, stated:

"If I was to tell what I know about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the greatest scandal that has ever rocked to nation."

Up to here are certain details of one of the existing theories on the above-mentioned event but, will the whole truth come out some day? Will Antonio Veciana, former member of the "New Orleans group," decide to reveal his "life insurance" or Rafael Quintero, to tell what he knows and thus, "rock the nation?"

It is possible that this investigative reporter real name is Steve Kangas rather than Paul Kangas. Steve Kangas was working on a book about CIA covert activities when on 8th February, 1999, he was found dead in the bathroom of the offices of Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: "Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?"

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKkangas.htm

While there is probably some truth in the Granma article, it is mixed in with so much hearsay and non-fact that it is essentially lost. Yes, it would be interesting to hear what Veciana and Quintero have to say... but what is this stuff on Rodriguez working as a recruiter?

As I remember Rodriguez's story, he was basically a kid during the Bay of Pigs, and was still living in Cuba. He was committed to working with the underground, and knew an invasion was coming, but was not informed beforehand and was totally caught by surprise when it came... As I recall his book, he is quite critical of the CIA on this issue. He felt the underground should have been forewarned so that they could either have joined in or taken evasive action. As it was, Castro merely had them all rounded up...

In my opinion, this Granma article is a knowing collection of half-truths and innuendos designed to counter-attack Russo and Huisman's movie.

The U.S. Government isn't the only one that lies to its people.

The Granma article on George senior's services for the Bay of Pigs and subsequent operations is fascinating. Is that why one of the invasion ships was named the Barbara J? And why did George de Mohrenschilt's telephone register contain the name and address for Poppy Bush and his oil company Zapata?

In 1974 Frank Sturgis told me that Hunt said they were burglarizing DNC to prove that Castro had sent $200,000 to the Democrats. Frank obviously is referring to the photos of the "three tramps" in Dealey Plaza. I spent two days riding around with him and can attest that he isn't in the pictures.

I believe Martinez claimed that Hunt lied to the Cubans in order to get them to help out in the burglary. Evidently, Hunt used the fact that Castro had sent McGovern a list of CIA assassination attempts on himself to imply that McGovern was in bed with Castro. Consequently, one of the things the "burglars" were told to look for in the DNC was anything connected to Castro. Sturgis' story seems to be consistent with Martinez'.

An explosives expert and sniper, Quintero got his early training as a member of the CIA's Operation 40 Assassination Unit, also called the "shooter team". (John Simkin)

Here are three from that group. Quintero on the right.

James

Inside the Shadow Government was published in 1988. Written by Edith Holleman and Andrew Love, the book is the declaration of Plaintiffs’ Counsel filed by the U.S. District Court, Miami, Florida, on 31st March, 1988. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two U.S. journalists based in Costa Rica, Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey. The 29 defendants included several members of Operation 40. This is what the document has to say about Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero.

(1) Quintero was a member of the Operation 40 assassination team (page 7)

(2) Thomas Clines worked under Ted Shackley as a case officer for Operation 40. Clines directly supervised many of the Cuban exiles including Rafael Quintero, Felix Rodriquez and Raul Villaverde. Edwin Wilson also worked under Clines as part of Operation 40.

(3) Shackley brought Quintero, Villaverde and Rodriguez to Laos to train men to perform assassinations. Quintero was a specialist sniper.

(4) Between September 1973 and April 1975, Shackley, Clines, Secord and Quintero siphoned off a percentage of the funds derived from the opium profits of Vang Pao.

(5) Shackley, Clines and Quintero had strong ties with the Nugan Hand Bank.

(6) Clines, Wilson, Shackley, Quintero and Ricardo Chavez (another member of Operation 40) set up American Petroleum Institute Distributors (API).

(7) Shackley, Clines and Quintero helped arrange the assassination of anti-Shah activists in Iran. Rafael and Raul Villaverde were used as assassins.

(8) In August 1976, the top three managers of the IBEX project – William C. Cottrell, Robert R. Krongard and Donald G. Smith were assassinated. Gene Wheaton believes the men were killed to cover up a scam for skimming profits from the IBEX project. Wheaton also believes that Secord, Clines, Hakim, Shackley and Quintero were involved in these assassinations.

(9) Quintero told Wheaton that “if he were ever granted immunity and compelled to testify about past acts, it would be the biggest scandal ever to hit the United States”.

(10) Between March and July 1979, Quintero supplied arms and munitions to Anastasio Somoza.

(11) William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beruit, worked with Quintero at the Pemex Corporation in the early 1980s.

(12) Quintero was providing arms to the Contras from March 1984.

(13) In 1986 Quintero asked Felix Rodriguez to obtain a fraudulent end user certificate from an official in El Salvador.

(14) In July 1985, Oliver North had a meeting with Secord, Clines and Quintero concerning funds for the FDN.

(15) In March 1986 Quintero was in Costa Rica managing an airstrip.

(16) Quintero had originally been trained as an assassin by Carl Jenkins.


Notes

1. Testimony of Felix Rodriguez, Iran-Contra Hearings, 27 May, 1987 (pages 231-243)

2. Miami Herald, 23rd October, 1986, Washington Post, 24th October, 1986 and John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, 1986 (page 370)

3. Deposition of Gene Wheaton (1-3, 7-8 March, 1988)

4. Interview with Frank Terpil by Jim Hougan conducted in 1983

5. James A. Nathan, Dateline Australia: America’s Foreign Watergate, Foreign Policy, 1982-1983 (page 183)

6. Australia-New South Wales Joint Task Force Report on Drug Trafficking, 1983 (page 736)

7. Edwin Wilson, statement (17-18 December, 1987)

8. Deposition of Gene Wheaton (1-3, 7-8 March, 1988)

9. Deposition of Gene Wheaton (1-3, 7-8 March, 1988)

10. Edwin Wilson, statement (17-18 December, 1987)

11. No documentation supplied.

12. Deposition of Carol Hernandez Prado (5 May, 1987)

13. Testimony of Felix Rodriguez, Iran-Contra Hearings, 27 May, 1987 (pages 231-243)

14. Iran-Contra Congressional Report (page 60)

15. Deposition of Tomas Castillo, Iran-Contra Congressional Report (page 20)

16. Deposition of Gene Wheaton (1-3, 7-8 March, 1988)

James,

Are there any frontal photos of Quintero? Judging simply from his profile he looks like he could be a candidate for Lamppost Man at Main and Houston.

Ron

See below:

John,

Thanks. So much for Lamppost Man.

Picture taken in 1964. Rafael Quintero is second from the left and Manuel Artime is in the middle. Does anyone know the names of the other men in the picture?

James, do you know the answer to this question?

John,

I would only be guessing but the guy on the far right looks a bit like Jose Bacallao Perdomo and the guy third from the right might be Roberto Perez San Roman, but like I said, I am far from sure.

The guy on the far left appears in other group photos of Quintero and MRR guys but I don't know his name.

I also have no idea when it comes to that arm band. It looks like a trident or pitchfork. I have asked several of the guys who were around at the time and they don't know either.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

James

Thank you for that. The photograph is actually owned by Quintero but he was unwilling to identify the other men in the picture.

Like I said, John, I am only speculating here. The guy to Artime's right could be pilot Hector Varone. A profile shot of him will be available on the web site that will support Larry's upcoming book.

James

The only thing that Quintero says about the photograph is that it shows the leaders of Artime's U.S. supported "autonomous group" that operated against Cuba from bases in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. That should narrow it down a bit.

Quintero on the far right, Artime next to him. That trident arm band has me at a loss.

James

Chi Chi Quintero in a Mexican jail (thought you would like to see that James).

John,

Are you sure that is not Rafael Caro-Quintero?

James

I am sure you are right. The caption with the picture comes from Jonathan Kwitny's The Crimes of the Patriots. I suspect the mistake came from Wide World Photos who supplied the picture.

It is a great book that has a lot of useful information on the CIA and illegal dealings in drugs and arms. However, he made the mistake of looking at the connection between Ted Shackley, Tom Clines, Edwin Wilson, Michael Hand, Bernie Houghton, Paul Helliwell, Chi Chi Quintero and George Bush and died before his time in 1997.

I have just discovered that Chi Chi Quintero died earlier this month. I have been trying to get Quintero to answer my questions for some time (via Don Bohning). It was hoped that he would be persuaded to talk to the BBC about Gene Wheaton's accusations that he was involved in the assassination of JFK.

His obituary in The Independent had this to say about Quintero:

After the assassination of JFK, when it emerged that Lee Harvey Oswald was pro-Castro and had attempted to get to Cuba, the group known as Operation 40, and notably the name Rafael Quintero, were mentioned in several of the conspiracy theories that spread over the years. The Cubans, one theory went, never forgave JFK for with-holding air support during the Bay of Pigs, effectively condemning them to defeat and, in many cases, execution.

If Quintero had any such secrets, he took them with him to his grave. But he was once quoted as saying: “If I were ever granted immunity, and compelled to testify about past actions, about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the biggest scandal ever to rock the United States.”

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obitu...icle1919493.ece