Book by former CIA analyst sheds light on Cuba, Kennedy, Oswald

[Zorro]

Lee Harvey Oswald had closer ties to Cuba's intelligence agency in the months before his fatal shooting of John F. Kennedy than previously known, according to a new book by a former CIA analyst.

Furthermore, the CIA lied about its knowledge of those ties to the Warren Commission that was tasked with investigating the crime, according to Brian Latell, the CIA's national intelligence officer for Latin America from 1990 to 1994 and author of the book "Castro's Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, & the Assassination of John F. Kennedy," due out on July 9.

Cuba also hid what it knew about Oswald, writes Latell, citing a CIA wiretap of a conversation between two Cuban secret service agents he uncovered in declassified archives.

"I am now convinced that Oswald was engaged with the Cubans," Latell told Reuters.

http://news.yahoo.com/book-former-cia-analyst-sheds-light-cuba-kennedy-180735990.html

Hmmmmmm.......and one wonders why Fidel remains unforgiven....

[struggle4progress]

1. Mebbe. Not bloody likely IMO. The Soviets were the most important backer of Cuba in that era,

and Oswald's bizarre psychiatric behavior in defecting to the USSR and then un-defecting would have convinced the USSR he was unreliable, and they would have passed the caution to the Cubans

Supporting this view, I note he was in New Orleans a while, handing out pro-Cuba literature, to which he had oddly added a street address for a building that housed the offices of an anti-Castro activist. He then traveled to Mexico City, seeking a visa to visit Cuba, which (after consultations with the Soviets) was denied. Oswald's educational background does not suggest an aptitude for language: he seems to have had difficulty learning Russian, and it is unclear where he would have learned Spanish, if he ever did

There's a curious official indifference to his comings and goings: he had previously moved to Russia, renounced his US citizenship, was given a nothing job nowhere, eventually got bored, and decided to leave. Presumably, the Russians weren't concerned that he'd learned anything of value, or could offer anything of value, so they let him leave. It might be more curious that the US took him back, in that era; maybe they checked him out and decided he was a misguided nutcase; maybe he just slipped through the cracks; maybe he had been a botched attempt to plant an agent in Russia

[MinM]

2. A Review of 'ÄúCastro'

The End of an Obsession: A Review of “Castro’s Secrets”

After almost half a century of conspiracy theories on the JFK assassination, [font color="blue"]a former CIA analyst and current research associate at the Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (ICCAS) at the University of Miami[/font] [font color="red"]has accidentally given the conclusive evidence that Castro had nothing to do with Oswald or Kennedy’s death[/font]. In his latest book, Castro's Secrets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Dr. Brian Latell insisted on unveiling a conspiracy of silence: Castro would have known in advance Oswald was going to kill Kennedy and chose to remain silent about it. Far from making even a circumstantial case against Castro, Dr. Latell actually paved the way for critical thinking which erases any cloud of suspicion...

In the June 2012 edition of the electronic newsletter, The Latell Report, published by the ICCAS-UM , Dr. Latell summed up: Childs learned that Castro received the information about Oswald’s appearances at the Cuban embassy, because he was told about it immediately. Fidel spoke to Childs on the basis of facts given to him by his embassy personnel, who dealt with Oswald, and apparently made a full, detailed report. By trimming the phrase “after President Kennedy was assassinated” from the Childs report, Dr. Latell turned this alibi into a smoking gun against Castro, who had denied any foreknowledge of Oswald in both his speech at the University of Havana on November 27, 1963, and his Radio/TV appearance on November 23, 1963.

Dr. Latell boasts about catching Castro in a lie, but only by keeping hidden the actual time ”after President Kennedy was assassinated” in which Castro knew about Oswald. Childs also tapers the story by furnishing the exact location of the Oswald outburst: the Cuban embassy, not the consulate, located in a separate building. The Lopez Report [a.k.a. "Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City", 1978] actually states that the CIA photographed the visitors to the Cuban diplomatic compound from two different windows in a third floor apartment at 149 Francisco Marquez Street (see pages 12 ff.) because the entrance to the embassy was on the corner of Tacubaya Alley and the entrance to the consulate, on the corner of Zamora Street.

Moreover Childs came to the foregone conclusion that Castro had nothing to with the assassination. After discussing his statements with Beatrice Johnson, the CPUSA representative in Cuba, Childs and Johnson decided never to talk again about the issue because it was dynamite. Hoover took it seriously, but Dr. Latell does not. He dared to manipulate time and location for making his point, and no wonder the issue exploded in his hands...

http://www.ctka.net/reviews/Fernandez_Latell.html

From Salon.com

The return of "Castro did it" theory
by Jefferson Morley
March 22, 2012

...Which raises an obvious question: If this evidence is so compelling in 2012 why didn’t the CIA and FBI forward it to the Warren Commission for investigation back in 1964? The answer is found in the hundreds of thousands of new JFK documents forced into the public record in the 1990s. The CIA and FBI didn’t investigate what the DGI knew about Oswald in 1964 because any such inquiry would have revealed the curious role that the CIA itself played in the genesis of the “Castro did it” theory.

As I reported for Salon in 2003, within hours of JFK’s murder, an Agency student group in Miami was giving reporters evidence of Oswald’s pro-Castro ways. Declassified CIA records show that the group, Cuban Student Directorate, received $51,00 a month from an undercover CIA officer running “psychological warfare” operations. The group’s revelations about Oswald’s public support for Castro in New Orleans generated scores of headlines across the country that linked Kennedy’s murder to a “Castroite.” When the Cuban students proclaimed in print the next day that Oswald and Castro were the “presumed assassins,” it was the first JFK conspiracy theory to reach public print. Whether Latell knows it or not, his book is a direct descendant of this CIA-funded operation...

http://www.salon.com/2012/03/22/the_return_of_castro_did_it_theory/