Wednesday December 15th, the National Archives released close to 500 new documents on the Kennedy assassination. Within hours of that release, CNN yawned that “JFK researchers [are] underwhelmed by [the] latest release of assassination documents.”
The New York Post disagreed. It pointed to new evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who shot John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had met with Russia’s spy agency, the KGB, two month before Oswald killed Kennedy.
So is there gold in the new Kennedy assassination documents or is there merely gravel?
I made a random dive into the new material, and here’s what I found.
There is a 27-page paper marked “secret” and titled “WARREN COMMISSION, EVIDENCE NOT CONSIDERED.” It’s dated April 15, 1975, twelve years after the Kennedy assassination. The document is a detailed letter by David W. Belin to Mr. E. Henry Knoche. David Belin was an attorney for the Warren Commission, the presidential probe tasked with getting to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination. E. Henry Knoche was deputy director of the CIA.
The document delivers a simple message. Fidel Castro had seized Cuba in 1959 and at the time of the Kennedy assassination was slowly turning the island into a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. Four years into his regime, Castro was under two threats from the United States, the threat of an invasion like the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and the threat of assassination.
Yes, America was trying to kill Fidel Castro with what Wikipedia calls “a staggering number of assassination plots,” from poison pills to a rooftop sniper.
So Castro granted an interview to a reporter from America’s biggest wire service, the Associated Press, with a clear purpose, to reach Americans. In essence, Castro told America that if the USA plotted his death, he, too, would plot the deaths of American leaders.
Castro revealed in his interview that the leader he despised the most was John F. Kennedy. Said Castro, Kennedy was the worst dictator of his day, “the Batista of his time,” a ruler like the Cuban leader Castro had overthrown. What’s more Castro called Kennedy a “Cretan,” an idiot, and “the most opportunistic American President of all time.”
Castro let it be known in his interview that anything Kennedy tried to do to him, he would do to leaders like Kennedy. Or, in his words, “U.S. leaders would be in danger if they helped in any attempt to do away with leaders of Cuba. …We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders· should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.’”
Meanwhile, a Castro fan-boy, Lee Harvey Oswald, apparently read a three-column headline story on Castro’s words in his local New Orleans newspaper, the Times Picayune. Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and had lived there for three years before he’d moved back to the USA. So he was in tune with the Marxist leader’s words.
And here’s the key. According to the Belin letter, Oswald had been furiously trying to get a visa to go to Cuba. But the Cubans had turned him down. Over and over again. Russia’s KGB had apparently not taken Oswald seriously either. Both the Russians and the Cubans apparently believed that Oswald may have been a CIA plant and was a little bit crazy.
But that didn’t stop Oswald from doing his part for the Russian and Cuban cause. Why?
In the last few years, we’ve learned from our war with the Islamic State, ISIS, how a message in the media can reach lone wolves and inspire them to kill. Including slightly crazy lone wolves. In fact, a terrorist group can harvest the insane and turn them into weapons. It can use them as suicide bombers or assassins. And we’ve learned from ISIS that this form of parallel-distributed conspiracy can take place without direct contact.
That appears to be what happened to Lee Harvey Oswald. He appears to have taken Castro’s message as a call to action. So to live out Fidel Castro’s wishes, it looks like Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger on his own.
Are there other clues like this in the new trove of documents? I suspect there are. And they are now available for you and me to search at the website of the National Archives.
References:
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/release2021
https://nypost.com/2021/12/15/oswald-met-kgb-before-jfk-assassination-records-dump-shows/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/15/politics/biden-administration-jfk-documents/index.html
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Howard Bloom has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his seven books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am et every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.institute.