Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

launched a project to take on his own The argument is that the face of Castro's government is even lessness for Neame. More to the point, it is difficult to imagine as with a leader as Castro risking a continuation of his regime but of its entire island had he been linked to such a plot.

There is no more disposition, if no more evidence, to blame the CIA, either the top leadership of the agency of an ultra-right faction, which used the agency as a cover. The latter theory centers on the belief that there are really two CIAs: the "good" CIA, composed of the tweedy, analyst types who tend to be liberal, have gone to good schools, and were born somewhere in the Northeast; and the "bad" CIA, the operations boys who are always off smuggling opium, or training secret armies, and who didn't go to such good schools. This thesis is one of the enduring notions about the agency, and has been the subject of two minor best sellers. Last Man at Arlington in which the Kennedy assassination provided a backdrop for a number of mysterious murders, and Six Days of the Condor (soon to be Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford). More seriously, novelist Gore Vidal, writing in The New York Review of Books, finds, after an examination of E. Howard Hunt's novels, that Hunt's prose sounds remarkably like that of Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin of George Wallace. Hunt, of course, was an operations man at the CIA and thus one of the bad guys. Moreover, Hunt has some experience at forging documents connected with assassinations. At the suggestion of Chuck Colson, Hunt fabricated cables linking Kennedy to the assassination of Diem, which Colson then tried to peddle to the press. The attempt backfired, but Vidal finds it more than passing strange that recent assassins—Sirhan, Oswald and Bremer—all showed a penchant for leaving written evidence linking them to their alleged crimes. The question Vidal poses is whether they might have had benefit of a ghostwriter.

For one reason or another, none of these theories—these outrageous slanders-really washes. Besides the lack of evidence, the "CLA did it" theory is simply "too pat," too easily tailored to existing prejudices. The most serious investigators of the assassination are reluctant to point a finger anywhere. They are also the most pessimistic that the real murderers of John Kennedy will ever be found. There is a growing suspicion that Oswald—or whoever he was—was merely the first of many "passes," a word Oswald chose to describe himself. The CLA.

--most important for the assistant must have the skills and opportunities to doubt Oswald's guilt. The apprehension had none of them. There were many people, groups and agencies that matter that had been killed. Nobody dead. But the success and the opportunity must also be present. As a last step, the killers would have to have been able to neutralize the Dallas Police Department (more difficult than it seems). They would have to have been of sufficient stature to dissuade other investigative agencies, notably the FBI and CIA, from going after them. Because their exposure would do greater harm to the government and that wonderful catchall, "the public interest," than their actual apprehension. They would have to have had access to skilled, sophisticated trooper men. And that would have taken money, a great deal of money, without subsequent accounting.

As it happens, organized crime fits all these requirements exactly. Certainly, there was motive. The loss of casinos and heroin connections in Cuba because of the regime Kennedy refused to distodge has been reckoned in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Robert Kennedy's pursuit of organized crime had already seriously damaged the mob, especially in New Orleans, the terminus for the Cuban drug connection. And there were indications that the Kennedy brothers were going to hit Nevada next.

As for means, the mob has both the guns and the money to hire them. The opportunity was there for the taking.

The agency and the mob have enjoyed a cory relationship since World War II, when the Costa Nostra protected U.S. ports from Axis sabotage, as well as aided in the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy. The agency returned the favor in various ways. In the late '50s Robert Kennedy, then an investigator for the McClellan committee, encountered a mobster in Las Vegas who boasted, "You can't touch me. I've got immunity" from the CIA. Incredulous. Kennedy checked: the mobster was telling the truth. Later, during the Vietnam war, CIA aircraft ferned opium out of Southeast Asia; eventually the mob sold it as heroin on American streets. In 1971, during a intile-noticed trial of 11 members of a Costa Nostra family in federal court in New York, the defense called a surprise character witness the chief of the CIA's local office. The mobsters were not convicted. One indication of the closeness of the relationship between the agency and the mob is that the CIA maintains its large

for the V.I.A. that they saw one veteran observer of the agency is that the mob can perform certain actions which the arrest other can unwilling to undertake. In 1931 Kennedy discovered that the arrest and put out an assassination contract on Del Castro, and that the hat men were from the mob. Kennedy quickly stopped it.

Given that background, some critics of the Warren Commission contend that the mob, after murdering Kennedy, employed its long-standing immunity" to cut off CIA and other federal investigation of the assassination.

Unlikely as this scenario sounds, it dovetails nicely with the unanswered questions about Jack Ruby. According to the Warren Commission. Ruby was a rather innocent, if highly deranged, saloon keeper whose most noticeable

## Cuba, crime and the CIA. The three things that everyoné connected to the assassination has in common

vice seems to have been a bit of social gambling. The commission flatly rejected the oft-repeated accusation that Ruby had ties to organized crime. The commission ignored testimony before it by a Dallas police detective that he "regarded Jack Ruby as a source of information in connection with his investigatory activities." In short, Ruby was, as Scott notes, a police informant, specifically in the area of narcotics. Scott also points out that the commission ignored a report to the FBI seven years before the assassination that Ruby was providing the okays from the mob for independent operators to谋 drugs in and out of Dallas. At that, the commission hardly needed to read reports. Ruby's connections with the mob and with the police were common knowledge in Dallas. Even a former Dallas county sheriff detailed Ruby's background; once again, the commission ignored him. Instead, the commission blandly asserted that Ruby's friendships with criminals "throughout his life . . . were limited largely to professional gamblers." Ironically, there was one place where Ruby truly was inter

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