Tag: DRE

How CIA propaganda assets shaped JFK headlines

Excerpted from Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster and Watergate (St Martin’s Press, 2022

“I waited fifty minutes,” Lanuza recalled. “Then I started to call my list.” Decades later he could still rattle off the reporters’ names and publications from memory. “I called Hal Hendrix. He was the most important person in Miami News.” Hendrix, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the missile crisis, would later a corporate executive and CIA asset in Chile. Lanuza called Mary Louise Wilkinson, a sympathetic reporter at the Miami News. He called John Dille, a writer at Life Magazine who had written a laudatory cover story on the DRE.

The CIA’s favorite Cubans linked Oswald to Castro

[Excerpted from Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster and Watergate (St Martin’s Press, 2022)]

“At ten past six that evening, Miami station chief Ted Shackley sent a cable to Des Fitzgerald with a copy going to Helms’ office. The station had heard from Luis Fernandez Rocha, the secretary general of the Cuban Student Directorate, whom Helms had grilled in his office almost exactly one year before. The DRE boys said they knew all about the suspected assassin.

Perception management: public relations and the JFK story

Mike Kilroy, communications executive in Los Angeles, has some interesting things to say about the JFK assassination story and the art of public relations. In a presentation to a group of young professionals in the communications industry, Kilroy dissected how the story that President Kennedy had been killed by a pro-Castro communist was disseminated on November 22, 1963. It’s a story of perception management.

You can read Kilroy’s presentation here.

General Fabian Escalante: U.S. government withholds JFK records that undoubtedly prove a plot

Now available on You Tube retired Major General Fabian Escalante, former head and current historian of Cuba’s State Security Department,i gives a sneak preview of his upcoming book Beyond Any Reasonable Doubt. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Aggression Against Cuba.

Secret JFK document #3: the DRE/AMSPELL file

DREAmong the 1,100 secret CIA documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is an 86 page file of the anti-Castro group, Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE)

The group, commonly known as the Cuban Student Directorate, had a curious double role in the JFK assassination story–a role that the CIA chose to conceal from both the Warren Commission in 1964 and the House Selection Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s.

The deception was not minor: CIA-funded DRE was the first organization to call public attention to accused assassin Lee Oswald–before JFK was killed.

Castro and JFK’s assassination: the unknown stories

TrincheraHow the CIA tried to implicate Fidel Castro in JFK’s assassination.

Did Castro figure out JFK’s assassination in just five days?

Cuba’s JFK story: 638 Ways to Kill Castro.

Brian Latell indicts Castro again

Did the CIA seek to hypnotize an assassin to kill Fidel Castro?

November 5, 1963: Listen as JFK considers secret talks with Castro.

What Castro said about Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book in living color


Take look at this complete, full color reproduction of the address book of Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, who was slain in custody of the Dallas police on November 24, 1963. (Courtesy of A.J. Weberman)

JFK author Mary La Fontaine passes

Oswald TalkedComes the sad news that Mary La Fontaine has died. I first met Mary and her husband Ray in 1993 after reading a maunscript version of their book Oswald Talked. I was impressed with their writing for many reasons: its witty tone, its use of original sources,and  its granular depiction of a subject oddly ignored by JFK researchers: Cuban exiles in Dallas.

It was the LaFontaines who highlighted me to the role of the Cuban Student Directorate (DRE) in the JFK story, a hunch that was amply confirmed by my subsequent reporting. Without the LaFontaines, I might never have discovered the curious case of George Joannides.

Former CIA analyst Brian Latell: ‘Cuban intelligence officers were complicit in Kennedy’s death’

Former CIA analyst Brian Latell says Cuban government officials were complicit in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I have posted my take on Latell’s claims.

Here is how he made his case to me. The interview was conducted by email. I have deleted three questions for which Latell said he had no independent knowledge. Otherwise, Latell’s comments have not been edited.

CIA admits undercover officer lived in New Orleans

George Joannides, chief of CIA covert operations in Miami in 1963, also had a residence in New Orleans, according to the CIA.

In a court motion filed last week, the CIA acknowledged for the first time that deceased CIA officer George Joannides lived in New Orleans while handling contacts with an anti-Castro student organization whose members had a series of encounters with accused presidential assassin Lee Oswald in August 1963.

The unexpected admission came in arguments before a federal court judge about whether the CIA is obliged to pay $295,000 in legal fees incurred during my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit concerning certain 50-year-old JFK assassination records.

In a previous court filing, my attorney Jim Lesar argued that two documents released over CIA objections in 2008 were significant because they showed that Joannides’s espionage assignment took him to New Orleans where Oswald lived.

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