American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (5 page)

His answer was, “Ask me anything you'd like.”

I told him about how I was only twelve years old when John F. Kennedy was killed. And how later, as an adult, I started studying the murder. I told him that I came to not believe the Warren Commission, or what my country has portrayed as what happened. I said, “Naturally, in studying this, there are a few scenarios where you come up very strongly as being a part of it, that Oswald was somehow linked to you. You were around back then, and much older than I was, and more involved—I would like to know your perception of what happened to John F. Kennedy.”

For the next twenty minutes, I couldn't stop him from talking. First of all, he said it was an “inside job,” meaning that the assassination was orchestrated from within the United States. He very intently stared at me and said—which also told me that he was aware of my military background—“You know as well as I do, Oswald couldn't make the shots.” Then he went on to explain the reason he knew that. During the Cuban Revolution, he was the main guy who taught and carried out sniper work. Knowing all he did about this, he knew Oswald couldn't have accomplished the job with the antiquated Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that he used.

Then Fidel described why it was an inside job. First of all, he said, he was very close to the Soviet Union at that time. “The Soviets didn't do it,” he stated emphatically. In fact, the Kremlin leaders had told him about Kennedy: “You can talk to this man.” Apparently the Russians were pleased that Kennedy had enough of an open mind to at least consider their side's position, on Cuba and other matters. Besides, neither country wanted another nuclear confrontation like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Secondly, Castro said, “
I
didn't do it.” Again his gaze was penetrating. He went on, “I'm not suicidal crazy. Why would I destroy my Cuba, the country I love so much. If I would have ordered Kennedy killed, and the United States found out, we wouldn't exist anymore. They would have unleashed everything they had on us, and basically blown us off the face of the earth. Why would I take that risk?”

It made sense to me. Not only that, but look who was waiting in the wings—Lyndon Baines Johnson. I didn't see his becoming president as a positive for Fidel Castro.

He also recalled for me how, at the moment Kennedy was killed, he was meeting in Havana with a French journalist named Jean Daniel, whom Kennedy had personally sent to see him. Castro felt very strongly that Kennedy was considering a change in policy towards Cuba. I could tell that he felt Cuba was worse off without Kennedy alive.

He said again, “It was completely an inside job. It was done by people within the United States of America.”

I wanted to ask for specifics—it felt like he knew some—but our time was up.

That last night, I turned to my Cuban bodyguards and asked them to take me out for a night on the town. They took me to the infamous Club Havana. It's a beautiful nightclub, maybe the biggest one in Cuba, with a Vegas-type entertainment show where they bring out Latino comedians, a variety of different musical acts, and have beautiful Cuban girls who dance in their feathered native costumes.

The night wore on. Castro apparently has informants everywhere. One of them came up and whispered something to my bodyguard, who then told me. It seems that some CIA operatives were tailing me. I thought to myself—is that for my benefit, or for theirs? Am I in some type of danger that they need to be following me around? I don't think so. I doubt that Fidel Castro would want an American governor coming to harm on his island, when I'm there on a mission of good will. So I ruled out that somehow the CIA were hanging around to protect me, especially considering I had my own armed bodyguards plus the three assigned by Fidel.

The Cubans had only one question: Did I want to lose them? If this made me uncomfortable, they would help me get rid of these guys and we could go on about our business. I said, “No, we're not going to even acknowledge that they're here. Who cares, we're not doing anything wrong. There's nothing they'll be able to blackmail me with, or take back to the U.S. about any misbehavior on my part. Let's ignore them, they're not going to ruin our night.”

So we ended up going to another club, and I don't know if we were followed there or not. The subject was never brought up again. It could be the Cuban security team decided on a means to lose them on the way; I never inquired. What I did do was put this incident on file in the back of my mind.

When I came back to the States, a week or so later I had a two o'clock meeting penciled in on my schedule—but whom I was supposed to meet with was blank. That's very unusual for a governor's public schedule. So I asked my chief of staff, “What's the deal with the two o'clock meeting?” He rolled his eyes and said, “CIA.”

I expected it, because they have their jobs to do. I had been with Castro and why wouldn't they want to debrief me? And that's precisely what it was. The two agents from the CIA came into my office—one of them I'd already met, shortly after I became governor—and they very respectfully gave me the old “Twenty Questions” routine. They went through their litany, and I answered them as honestly as I could. Typical intelligence questions: What did Castro's health appear to be like? Was he in control of all his faculties? Did he seem bright for his age?

I said I felt that he was very much in control. His mental capacity seemed to be right-on. I offered a few opinions. I told them, “I know his mom lived to be a hundred, so it's in his genes, and looks to me like he just might make it. Do I think this guy is gonna die within the next couple of years? I'd have to tell you no, he looks fit as a fiddle for his age.”

Their faces were expressionless. They said they were finished, and thanked me. I looked coldly at them and said, “You're done. You're all done?”

They said yes.

I said, “You're sure? There's no other question you want to ask me, there's nothing you want to tell me, anything like that?”

“No, sir, we're all done.”

In that case, I wanted to send them back with something to think about. “Well,” I said, “I have something that I want to tell
you
, and I'll leave it up to your discretion who should hear this. You take it to whoever you think is appropriate. A need-to-know basis.”

They feigned being very surprised and said, “Governor, we don't understand what you're talking about.”

I said, “Well, here's what I'm talking about. If you or your people ever put a tail on me again, and don't tell me beforehand, and I discover it—you're gonna find the tail floating in the river.”

They looked at me in seeming astonishment. They looked at each other and pretended they didn't have a clue as to what I was talking about.

I said, “That's fine. If
you
don't get it, you can take it and tell it to somebody that does. I'm sure somebody upstairs, above you, knows exactly what I'm talking about—
if
you don't. So you be the judge, like I say take it to where it needs to go.”

I've often wondered how far it went. Did it get to George Tenet, who was the director of the CIA at the time? To George Bush? Dick Cheney? Or maybe it didn't even leave the room. Maybe they didn't even bother with passing along my little message, I don't know. But at least I got it off my chest, and let them know that the next time they try to fool me, they ought to do a better job.

One night after I got back to Minnesota, I had dinner with Jack Tunheim. He was a Minnesota federal judge who, after Oliver Stone's
JFK
film came out, was put in charge by President Clinton of reviewing the still-classified assassination archives for potential release. Tunheim told me that, in following up on the intelligence side, he'd encountered some of the shadiest characters that he'd ever come across. The judge also told me I had great knowledge of the case, and that I was on the right track.

On the fortieth anniversary of the assassination on November 22, 2003, I decided to go to Dallas again to pay my respects. I'd left office the previous January. I was the only elected official who spoke in Dealey Plaza that day. No one else even bothered to show up. This speaks volumes to me. Does our government still have a collective guilty conscience when it comes to John F. Kennedy?

When I ended up teaching at Harvard in 2004, I decided to focus my next-to-last class on the Kennedy assassination. I knew that was a gutsy move to make at the Kennedy School of Government. I hadn't wanted to try it too soon because, if Harvard objected, I didn't want to go through a big fight. Anyway, I got away with it. My guest speaker was David Fetzer, a University of Minnesota Duluth professor and former Marine who's an expert on the ballistics evidence that shows it had to be more than just Oswald shooting.

I noticed there were people in my class that day who'd never attended any of the others. They were too old to be students. Their sole purpose in being there was apparently to debunk any conspiracy theories. They didn't completely disrupt the class, but they would speak out of turn and insinuate that it was un-American and undermining our great country by bringing up the past and questioning the integrity of all those great men on the Warren Commission. Never question your government was the message. So where did these people come from? I suspect they were plants, sent in by somebody in the Bush Administration.

So that's my personal experience with the assassination of JFK. What I respect most about the man is that he was willing to grow and change his views while in office, for the sake of the greater good. Without his going up against the generals who wanted to attack Cuba and take out the Soviet missiles in the fall of 1962, I wouldn't be sitting here today writing this book. We'd have all been victims of a nuclear holocaust. But because Kennedy wasn't afraid to take on the powers-that-be—not just the military madmen but the CIA, the Mafia, and the right-wing Texas oilmen, among others—he made enemies. So many enemies that it's almost impossible to sort out which one eventually killed him.

The conclusion of Robert Blakey, who ran the House investigation back in the late 1970s, was that the Mob was most likely behind the assassination. On this question, I have to defer to what Kevin Costner said in Oliver Stone's
JFK
movie: “I don't doubt their involvement ... but at a lower level. Could the Mob change the parade route ...? Or eliminate the protection for the president? Could the Mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back? Could the Mob get the FBI, the CIA, and the Dallas Police to make a mess of the investigation? Could the Mob get the Warren Commission appointed to cover it up? Could the Mob wreck the autopsy? Could the Mob influence the national media to go to sleep?”

Now let's run down some comments made by government officials at the time, most of which haven't been made public until recent years.

President Johnson, on the telephone recordings made of his White House conversations: “I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept the fact that he pulled the trigger.”
⁶
However, he also told his friend and Warren Commission member Richard Russell, the senator from Georgia, that he didn't believe in the single-bullet theory.

President Nixon, on the White House tapes, talking about the Warren Commission: “It was the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetuated.”
⁷

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, responding to the question, “Do you think Oswald did it?”: “If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this country. Our whole political system could be disrupted.”
⁸

Warren Commission member Hale Boggs: “Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission—on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.”
⁹

Senator Russell: “[I] never believed that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy without at least some encouragement from others ... I think someone else worked with him on the planning.”

Who was this guy Oswald anyway? A lot more than a 24-year-old loner, that's for sure. Does it make sense that this Marine radar operator who arrives in Moscow in 1959 offering secrets to the Russians then comes home married to a colonel's niece and never gets debriefed by the CIA—let alone charged with a possibly treasonous act? The Warren Commission knew, from Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr
and
District Attorney Henry Wade, that Oswald apparently was FBI informant No. 179 and was making a couple hundred dollars a month in wages from the Bureau!
¹⁰
Wade's source said that Oswald had a CIA employment number as well.

Of course, we can't know for sure which Oswald this was. Let me explain. At the time the Warren Commission places Oswald on a bus heading to Mexico City to try and get a visa to Cuba, he was also in Dallas with two Latinos at the door of Silvia Odio. Later on, as the assassination date approaches, he's supposedly target-practicing at firing ranges and driving a car like a maniac—except he doesn't know how to drive or have a license. Well, how could Oswald be in two places at once? Maybe there were
two men
, and one of them was setting up the other as the fellow who'd take the rap for the assassination.

This question of double identity has been around since 1967, when Richard Popkin published a little book called
The Second Oswald
. A decade after that came Michael Eddowes's best-seller,
The Oswald File
. His hypothesis was that the Marine Oswald went to the USSR, but a different “Oswald” came back—actually a Russian spy who then killed the president. In 2003 came John Armstrong's exhaustively researched
Harvey and Lee
, where the premise is that two males who looked very much alike were groomed from an early age as part of a CIA operation.