MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

I have had nearly a month to speed read or at least peruse over some of the many JFK files that were released last month. The release of some of the last of the government’s files concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy got seriously buried by other news. It was already pretty clear by the amount of material being dumped into the public domain that any news coming out of the release of the files would be buried by the sheer volume of the material.

It was also interesting to watch how the mainstream media addressed the issue of the files. They weren’t too quick to indicate what the files said about the assassination or the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald – they were more interested in unveiling weird documents that had really nothing to do with the assassination itself.

While some of the so-called secrets are already well known, mostly about assassination plots planned against Fidel Castro and suppositions about whether or not Hitler really died at the end of World War II, there are some interesting jewels that can be taken out of the remaining garbage that really is all about intelligence suppositions and believe it or not CIA or spook conspiracy theory.

The documents also seem to indicate that once again, the FBI tracks certain people, monitor here whereabouts and then for some reason — their targets wind up being suspects in major events.

In the nine months before Kennedy was killed, the Secret Service opened 413 investigative files on people they deemed a potential threat to the president and other senior officials, one investigative memo shows. The Secret Service opened cases based on referrals from the FBI, military, local police departments and other agencies but also based on individuals considered dangerous. That list overwhelmingly focused on Puerto Rican nationalists, who had been involved in an assassination attempt on President Truman in 1950, and black militants. The Secret Service said 42 of these were serious threats to the president. Among the most notable members on the smaller list were Thomas Vallee and Joseph Milteer. Vallee had a cache of weapons that was found in Chicago on the day of Kennedy’s scheduled visit to the city. Kennedy’s trip to Chicago was canceled at the last minute, and Vallee was arrested. Milteer was a Georgia organizer of white supremacists who was tape-recorded by an informant in early November, claiming he knew of plots in the works to kill the president with a high-powered rifle from a tall building.

One of the documents that I first looked at cited the words of an associate of Milteer named, Oren Fenton Potito.

Potito, a Christian Identity minister with a controversial background, to say the least. Having been associated with Wesley A. Swift’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian, it is said that Potito “practically deified Hitler,” perceiving the Nazi leader as a sort of “Christian savior” in modern times. The year prior to Kennedy’s assassination, Potito also became an organizer for the National States Rights Party.

The newly released document relates some rather unusual claims alleged by Potito at a public meeting, held in a restaurant in Saint Petersburg, Florida, on January 16, 1964.

According to the document: “In the course of his speech of some 3 hours following the dinner Potito touched on the association between Lee Harvey Oswald and Ruby.

Potato identified Ruby, real name Jack Rubenstein, as a Communist Party Member since 1929 and through this connection linked him to Oswald. He identified Oswald as a Communist through his association with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

J. Edgar Hoover even admitted in one of the memos that he felt there were some underworld dealings in Chicago where Jack Ruby was named as a person of interest.

According to Potito only two organizations knew the route of the parade in Dallas on November 22, 1963 for any period of time prior to the parade and these two were the United States Secret Service and the Dallas Police Department. Jack Ruby had insinuated himself into the Police Department circle, obtained the route and arranged with Oswald to take the job at the state school building along the route to carry out the assassination.

However, Potito believed that there was more than one gunman involved during the assassination.

Potito said the “Surgeon General’s report” on the assassination stated the first bullet entered the President’s throat below the Adam’s apple clearly showing that two persons were involved with the first shot being fired from the bridge across the park way in front of the car. To further substantiate this, Potito said there was a bullet hole in the wind shield of the President’s car.”

The newly released Kennedy papers have a lot of tracks on Jack Ruby and his sex businesses and how many of his clientele were under the watchful eye of J. Edgar Hoover.

A 1960 FBI memo described a “high-priced Hollywood call girl” who was approached by Fred Otash, a well-known Los Angeles private investigator, seeking information about sex parties involving then-Sen. John F. Kennedy; his brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford; Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. “She told the agents that she was unaware of any indiscretions,” the memo said.

An FBI file contains information on the bureau’s attempt to locate a stripper named “Kitty,” last name unknown. According to the file, another stripper named Candy Cane said Kitty had been an associate of Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald on Nov. 24, 1963. Leon Cornman, a business agent with the American Guild of Variety Artists in New Orleans, told the FBI that “the only stripper he knew by the name of Kitty who worked in New Orleans was Kitty Raville.”

“He advised that Raville committed suicide in New Orleans in August or September 1963.

A memo was produced that cited Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald and police officer J.D. Tippit – the John F. Kennedy look alike that that was allegedly killed by Lee Harvey Oswald 45 minutes after the assassination of JFK.

Informant H. Theodore Lee reported to J. Edgar Hoover about meetings that allegedly took place between Ruby, Oswald and Tippit, in fact one document that was release even names Tippit as a suspect in the assassination of the President.

Tippit, allegedly head of the right-wing John Birch Society in Dallas, and a third party who was possibly Oswald, met in Jack Ruby’s nightclub before the assassination.

Before the file dump happened at the request of President Trump the CIA quietly declassified a report showing that former CIA director John McCone was complicit in withholding information regarding the assassination; this in fact, makes the Kennedy case a de facto cover up of an even larger conspiracy.

Although there are plenty of irrational JFK assassination conspiracy theories, it is quite rational to conclude that a conspiracy of some sort took place. This rational belief should be compared not with superstitious beliefs, but with other rational beliefs.

According to a report provided by Politico, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a CIA “benign cover-up” intended to keep the Warren Commission focused on what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’ which was the lone wolf answer that is always given when organized intelligence operations muddy the waters of important events carried out by clandestine entities.

History books undaunted continue to say that Lee Harvey Oswald, with some vague motives, acted alone in killing John Kennedy. However, history books will not reveal that the most important information withheld by the CIA was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia.

A 1964 FBI memo that was recently released describes a meeting in which Cuban exiles tried to set a price on the heads of Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. “It was felt that the $150,000.00 to assassinate Fidel Castro plus $5,000 expense money was too high,” the memo noted. At a subsequent meeting, they settled on more modest sums: $100,000 for Fidel, $20,000 for Raúl and $20,000 for Che.

Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.

A draft report that was recently declassified by the House Select Committee on Assassinations found it unlikely that Cuba would kill Kennedy as retaliation for the CIA’s attempts on Fidel Castro’s life. “The Committee does not believe Castro would have assassinated President Kennedy, because such an act, if discovered, would have afforded the United States the excuse to destroy Cuba,” the draft states. “The risk would not have been worth it.”

The question is, how was this information considered benign by the CIA? Downplaying its significance is just another proof of a cover-up.

It was a cover-up that halted any further investigation into Oswald and his potential ties to Cuba and any of his possible connections or accomplices.

Another revelation is that the report indicates the CIA was actually in communication with Oswald before the assassination, and that the CIA had been secretly monitoring his mail.

This was highly illegal.

The new information that was released confirmed that the CIA had been monitoring Oswald almost two months before the assassination of Kennedy when he was in Mexico. On Sept. 28, 1963, a phone tap captured Oswald dialing the Soviet embassy from the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. Despite his broken Russian, he refused to speak English. “Please speak Russian,” Oswald pleaded when the Soviet officials answered him in his own language.

The CIA’s Mexico City translator “noted that Oswald American spoke terrible, hardly recognizable Russian.”

Several documents summarize internal discussions within Communist Party meetings after the assassination, discussing whether Oswald was innocent and whether communists would be blamed for Kennedy’s death. Agents ran down rumors from prisoners and poets.

The documents show that for years, the FBI used informants to monitor the Communist Party in Dallas — a group that consisted of five or six people, so small they could sometimes hold a meeting inside a car.

The report provided by the Warren Commission gives the impression that no suspect other than Oswald was seriously considered. This impression was confirmed when transcripts of the Commission’s executive sessions and other internal documents were made public several years later. Oswald was the only suspect, and his guilt was assumed even before the Commission had begun to assemble any evidence.

However, there are so many reasons why this is highly unlikely, first of all Oswald had no credible motive to kill Kennedy. We know that more than three shots were fired and that they were fired from more than one location. The rifle that was found on the sixth floor of the book depository was found to be inaccurate and unreliable and it was reported that Oswald was not a goof enough marksman. Test had found that Oswald did not fire a rifle on the day of the assassination and a lot of the evidence against him was manufactured after the event.

Under President Eisenhower, the CIA had instigated a series of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, using mobsters and anti–Castro Cubans. The policy continued under President Kennedy. Indeed, one such plot was in progress on the day of Kennedy’s own assassination. It has been suggested that Castro, who was well aware of the plots, took revenge by turning a set of assassins back on Kennedy.

In 1975, John Roselli, a mob boss from Las Vegas testified at the Church Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church (officially, the “U.S. Select Committee to Study Government Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities”) that the Mob and the CIA together had attempted to kill Castro during the early 1960s.

Roselli claimed the CIA hit team had been turned against Kennedy.

The newly unsealed Kennedy Papers also reveal a deposition given before the presidential Commission on CIA Activities in 1975 by Richard Helms, who had served as the agency’s director. After a discussion of Vietnam, David Belin, an attorney for the commission, turned to whether the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s killing.

Belin asked:

“Well, now, the final area of my investigation relates to charges that the CIA was in some way conspiratorially involved with the assassination of President Kennedy. During the time of the Warren Commission, you were Deputy Director of Plans, is that correct?”

After Helms replied that he was, Belin then asked: “Is there any information involved with the assassination of President Kennedy which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or agent…”

Conveniently, the documents were removed — there is no answer from Helms in print.

Secrecy breeds secrecy, though not always in the sense we expect. The real conspiracies of the assassination aren’t about who killed JFK or how. They began in the moments after his murder and have yet to untangle completely, because they’re about what the instruments of American power were up to while Kennedy was president.

Apparently, any examination of Kennedy’s death threatened to expose American CIA plots to overthrow foreign leaders, like Castro.

So the CIA offered nothing about U.S. assassination attempts to the Warren Commission, and Kennedy administration officials continued to stonewall congressional investigators a dozen years later.

The government sat on its information and the media of course is now using the new Kennedy revelations as a way to make Oswald’s movements appear much more mysterious to anyone trying to investigate the assassination than they probably were.

It’s not a plot to kill Kennedy that government officials have spent the past 54 years hiding, it’s all kinds of other miscellaneous files that shows their own incompetence.

Written by Ron Patton