Page 4 - aruba-today-20171028

A4 U.S. NEWS
Saturday 28 OctOber 2017
Botulism pills, the CIA, the Mob and the JFK assassination

Continued from Front invasion of Cuba and sev- Told later about “every-
eral assassination attempts thing,” Kennedy was “un-
This isn’t the first time John- against Castro had failed. happy, because at that
son’s theory has been At least two efforts to kill time he felt he was making
aired. He was also quoted Castro were made with a very strong drive to try to
in Max Holland’s book, CIA-supplied lethal pills and get after the Mafia.
The Kennedy Assassination organized crime-made “So his comment was to
Tapes, as saying that Ken- muscle in early 1961, ac- us that if we were going
ney died because of “di- cording to the document. to get involved with the
vine retribution.” The CIA’s mob contacts in- Mafia, in the future at any
“He murdered Diem and cluded John Rosselli, a top time, to ‘make sure you
then he got it himself,” lieutenant to Chicago mob see me first.’”
Johnson reportedly said. boss Sam Giancana, who The document was made
Kennedy’s position on Di- weren’t told but guessed public in 1997 and con-
em’s assassination is still de- the CIA was behind the of- tained in an Associated
bated, said Ken Hughes, a fer. The pair, later victims of Press report at that time.
historian at the University of mob hits, said they want no
Virginia’s Miller Center. part of any payment — but STRANGE CALL
A month before Diem’s as- still, $11,000 in payments A British newspaper re-
sassination, the south Viet- In this Nov. 22, 1963 photo, President John F. Kennedy waves from were made for expenses. ceived an anonymous
namese generals planning his car in a motorcade in Dallas. Riding with Kennedy are First The mobsters came to the phone call about “big
Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, right, Nellie Connally, second from
the coup told the CIA that left, and her husband, Texas Gov. John Connally, far left. The attention of the CIA a year news” in the United States
they would overthrow the National Archives released the John F. Kennedy assassination earlier when Giancana 25 minutes before Presi-
government if they could files on Thursday, Oct. 26, 2017. asked a CIA intermediary dent John F. Kennedy was
be assured that Ameri- (AP Photo/Jim Altgens) to arrange for putting a lis- shot in 1963, one file says.
can aid would continue shed light on that question scribed the CIA’s $150,000 tening device in the Las Ve- A batch of 2,800 declassi-
and Kennedy told them it is a CIA report on the U.S. offer to have Cuban leader gas room of an entertainer fied documents includes a
would, Hughes said. government’s involvement Fidel Castro assassinated — he suspected of having an Nov. 26, 1963 memo from
But a dispute remains over in the Diem coup. The re- but the mob insisted on tak- affair with Giancana’s mis- the CIA to FBI director J. Ed-
whether Kennedy insisted cord was supposed to be ing the job for free. tress. gar Hoover about a call re-
that Diem go unharmed or released Thursday but was The underworld murder-for- The task was handed off ceived by the Cambridge
whether the president left among the hundreds that hire contract was detailed to a private investigator News on Nov. 22, the day
it up to the South Vietnam- Trump blocked from be- in a summary of a May 1962 named Arthur Balletti, who Kennedy was killed in Dal-
ese generals to decide coming public. CIA briefing for then-Attor- put the listening device in las, Texas.
what to do, said Hughes, ney General Robert Ken- a phone in the hotel room. The memo from deputy
who is writing a book on the CASTRO, THE CIA AND nedy. By then, the Kennedy “The CIA reportedly did not CIA director James Angle-
subject. A MOBSTER’S MISTRESS White House had launched know of the specific pro- ton says the caller said “the
One of the files that could A 1975 document de- its unsuccessful Bay of Pigs posed wiretap.” Cambridge News reporter
should call the American
Embassy in London for
some big news, and then
hung up.” Anna Savva, a
current Cambridge News
reporter, said Friday there’s
no record of the call. “We
have nobody here who
knows the name of the
person who took the call,”
she said.
The memo was released
by the U.S. National Ar-
chives in July.
The phone call to the
Cambridge News was first
reported decades ago by
Kennedy conspiracy theo-
rist Michael Eddowes. In
the 1980s, Eddowes, a Brit-
ish lawyer, claimed to have
a CIA document mention-
ing the call.
Eddowes, who died in
1992, wrote a book alleg-
ing that Kennedy’s assas-
sin was not Lee Harvey Os-
wald but a Soviet impostor
who took his identity.
As a result of his efforts,
the killer’s body was ex-
humed in 1981. An autop-
sy confirmed that it was
Oswald.q