JFK and the Unspeakable, p.314

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

James W. Douglass

  Navy medical corpsman Paul O'Connor, who helped the doctors with the president's autopsy, was dismayed, he said, by "the fact that we weren't able to do certain critical things like probe the throat wound that we thought was a bullet wound.  We found out that it was a bullet wound years later."

  In an interview years later, O'Connor described how the military command kept the three Bethesda doctors from probing the throat wound, which had been identified in Dallas to the world's press as an entrance wound:

  "It got very tense.  Admiral [Calvin] Galloway [the chief of the hospital command] started getting very agitated again, because there was a wound in his neck . . . and I remember the doctors were going to check that out when Admiral Galloway, told then, 'Leave it alone.  Don't touch it.  It's just a tracheotomy.'

  "He stopped anybody from going further.  Drs. Humes and Boswell, Dr. Finck, were told to leave it alone, let's go to other things."

  Paul O'Connor's fellow hospital corpsman, James Jenkins, who also assisted in the autopsy, confirmed that the doctors were obeying military orders. Jenkins, too, said the pathologists' failure to probe the president's wounds was done at the command of Admiral Calvin Galloway, the hospital commander, who directed the autopsy from the morgue's gallery.

  Jenkins thought it odd the autopsy would even be done at Bethesda, rather than by the civilian doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas:

  "In retrospect, I think it was a controlling factor.  They could control Humes, Boswell, and Finck because they were military . . . I think they were controlled.  So were we.  We were all military, we could be controlled.  And if we weren't controlled, we could be punished and that kept us away from the public."

  Jenkins said that his experience of the president's autopsy changed forever his view of his own government:

  "I was 19 or 20 years old, and all at once, I understood that my country was not much better than a third world country.  From that point on in time, I have had no trust, no respect for the government."

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JFK and the Unspeakable, p.153

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

James W. Douglass

  Richard Case Nagell, "the man who knew too much", walked into a bank in El Paso, Texas, on September 20, 1963, and calmly fired two shots from a Colt .45 pistol into a plaster wall just below the bank's ceiling.  He then went outside and waited in his car until a police officer came to arrest him. When questioned by the FBI, Nagell made only one statement: "I would rather be arrested than commit murder and treason."

   …

  As a continuing double agent in 1963, Nagell was working with Soviet intelligence in Mexico City.  He was reporting back to the CIA, in an operation directed by the chief of the CIA's Cuban Task Force, Desmond Fitzgerald.  Assigned by the KGB to monitor Lee Harvey Oswald in the United States after Oswald returned from Russia, Nagell became involved in New Orleans and Texas with Oswald and two Cuban exiles in what he saw was a "large" operation to kill JFK.  The Cubans were known by their "war names" of "Angel" and "Leopoldo".  Nagell told Dick Russell that Angel and Leopoldo "were connected with a violence-prone faction of a CIA-financed group operating in Mexico City and elsewhere."  He identified Angel's and Leopoldo's CIA-financed group as Alpha 66.

  Alpha 66 was the group of Cuban exile paramilitaries we have already encountered who were directed by David Atlee Phillips, Chief of Covert Action at the CIA's Mexico City Station.  In early 1963, Phillips deployed Alpha 66 in attacks on Russian ships in Cuban ports.  The purpose of the provocative raids was to draw JFK into a war with Cuba.  Kennedy responded by ordering a government crackdown on the CIA-sponsored raids, further antagonizing both the CIA and the exile community.  Alpha 66 had ignited not a U.S. war with Cuba but a more lethal hatred of the president.  This was the CIA-funded group Richard Case Nagell said Angel and Leopoldo belonged to, while they were meeting with Oswald.

  In September 1963, Nagell was ordered by the KGB to convince Oswald that he was being set up by Angel and Leopoldo as the assassination patsy — or if that failed, to murder Oswald in Mexico City and then take up residence abroad.  The Soviets wanted to save Kennedy by eliminating the scenario's patsy, and to keep from becoming scapegoats themselves.  As Nagell told Dick Russell, "If anybody wanted to stop the assassinations, it would be the KGB. But they didn't do enough."

  Nagell met with Oswald in New Orleans.  He warned Oswald that Leopoldo and Angel were manipulating him.  Oswald was evasive and unresponsive to Nagell's appeals that he quit the assassination plot.

  By that time Nagell had lost contact with his CIA case worker under Desmond Fitzgerald.  Rather than carry out the KGB's orders to kill Oswald, he sent the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover a registered letter on September 17 warning of the president's impending assassination, spelling out what Nagell knew of it.

   …

  Having put his warning on record, Nagell then decided to remove himself from any possible role in the assassination plot.  He therefore did his bank escapade in El Paso on September 30, 1963, to place himself in federal custody rather "than commit murder and treason".  He was convicted of armed robbery and served four and one-half years in prison.

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JFK and the Unspeakable, p.379

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

James W. Douglass

  Soon after Kennedy's murder, a man Press Secretary Pierre Salinger described as "a high official of the Soviet Embassy in Washington" told Salinger over a private lunch how Krushchev had reacted to the assassination.  He had first wept, then withdrew into a shell.  "He just wandered around his office for several days, like he was in a daze," the Soviet official said.

  The president's assassination placed the Kennedy family in the peculiar position of feeling they could trust the Russians, supposedly their enemies, more than they could trust their own government.  Their new sense of where their real friends lay had followed the president's own realization of what was, for him, a fatal truth.  He had known for some time he had more in common with his enemy, Nikita Krushchev, than he had with his own people in the CIA and the Pentagon.  Kennedy and Krushchev knew their world had turned upside down following the Missile Crisis, making their outward belligerence a thin cover for their having become secret allies.  They were still struggling on many fronts but now had a new, shared mission — to end a conflict, the Cold War, that neither wanted and that they now knew, from their immersion together in an imminent holocaust, could doom the human race.  In the process of their collaboration, friends had become enemies, and enemies friends.  The Kennedy family's quiet shift of trust in the same direction immediately after Dallas has been revealed by recently unearthed evidence of their having then sent a secret messenger to Moscow.  He was JFK's close friend, painter William Walton, in whom he had confided his decision to visit the Soviet Union.

   …

  In early December 1963, William Walton traveled to Moscow on behalf of Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy to convey a secret message to the Soviet leaders about President Kennedy's assassination.  Walton used an already scheduled trip, at JFK's request "to visit Moscow to meet Soviet artists," as a cover for his revised purpose of telling the Russians what the Kennedys thought lay behind Dallas.  The Kennedys' message to the Russians was retained in top-secret Soviet intelligence archives.  It was discovered in the 1990s by researcher-writers Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, who then reported it in their 1997 book on the Cuban Missile Crisis, "One Hell of a Gamble."

  Walton conveyed the Kennedys' secret assessment of the assassination to Georgi Bolshakov, the journalist/intelligence agent who had been their most trusted Soviet confidant in the months around the time of the Missile Crisis.  In Washington, working out of the Soviet Embassy, Georgi Bolshakov had met repeatedly with Attorney General Robert Kennedy in secret to convey questions and concerns between Chairman Krushchev and President Kennedy.  In Moscow, after the assassination, he was in a corresponding position to relay Walton's discreet information to Chairman Krushchev.

  The Kennedys informed Bolshakov through Walton that, "despite Oswald's connections to the communist world," they believed "there was a large political conspiracy behind Oswald's rifle," that came from a different source.  In their view, "the President was felled by domestic opponents." He had been, the Kennedys thought, "the victim of a right-wing conspiracy."

  Walton added that the Russian leaders should have no illusions that Lyndon Johnson would continue JFK's work for peace.  Johnson, Walton said, would be "incapable of realizing Kennedy's unfinished plans."  The new president's "close ties to big business would bring many more of its representatives into the administration," whose adverse impact on hopes for peace Chairman Krushchev would understand.

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JFK and the Unspeakable, p.253

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

James W. Douglass

  In the years to come, Fidel Castro would conclude that Nikita Krushchev and John Kennedy had negotiated a correct way out of the missile crisis, in spite of his own opposition.  He would then admit honestly that he had been too blind to see a liberating way out at the time.  In a 1975 interview, he acknowledged that he had been "enormously irritated" by the way in which the crisis had been resolved, with no guarantee of Cuba's security against a U.S. invasion.  "But if we are realistic," he added, "and we go back in history, we realize that ours was not the correct posture."  Upon further reflection he had come to feel "history has proven that the Soviet position [of withdrawing its missiles in return for a no-invasion pledge] was the correct one" and that Kennedy's promise not to invade Cuba [turned out to be] a real promise and everyone knows that.  That is the truth."  JFK's successors in the White House adhered to that promise, even though they failed to follow up on his beginning negotations with Castro.

  Castro had seen Kennedy change as president: "I have an impression of Kennedy and of Kennedy's character, but I formed it over the years that he was President from different gestures, different attitudes.  We mustn't forget the speech he made at American University several months prior to his death, in which he admitted certain truths and spoke in favor of peace and relaxation of tensions.  It was a very courageous speech and it took note of a series of international realities…  This was Kennedy after two years in the presidency, who felt sure of his reelection, a Kennedy who dared make decisions — daring decisions…

  "One of the characteristics of Kennedy was courage.  He was a courageous man.  A man capable of taking a decision one way or another, a man capable of revising a policy, because he had the courage to do so."

  Speaking to members of Congress who visited Cuba in 1978, Castro said of his former enemy, "I can tell you that in the period in which Kennedy's assassination took place Kennedy was changing his policy toward Cuba…  To a certain extent we were honored in having such a rival…  He was an outstanding man."

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