Tag: Mafia

CIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: ‘The very top people’

Former CIA station chief Rolf Mowatt-Larssen addresses a conference of JFK researchers in Dallas in November 2019. (Credit: Jefferson Morley)

[ICYMI: Part I: A veteran CIA officer analyzes the death of a president.]

“Why am I doing this?” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen asked the audience at the Coalition Against Political Assassinations’ conference in Dallas. “As a CIA officer it’s a little controversial. What is my goal? My goal is to have an answer [about who killed JFK] for myself and my children.” That may sound overly ingenuous to some, but most people in the room, myself included, had the same agenda.

Mowatt-Larssen was nine years old when he heard the news from Dallas.

CIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: A veteran officer analyzes the death of a president

Rolf-Mowatt-Larssen
Former CIA station chief Rolf-Mowatt-Larssen addressed a conference of JFK researchers in Dallas in November 2019. (Credit: Jefferson Morley)

(This article, titled “Under CIA Eyes,” first appeared in Counterpunch, Vol. 25 published in January 2020.).

“I was struck by the intimacy and the smallness of the whole surroundings,” said retired CIA officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen after his first visit to Dealey Plaza in November 2019.

Dealey Plaza, a grassy Art Deco entry point to downtown Dallas, is where President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on November 22, 1963. Hundreds of thousands of people still come from around the world to see the spot where the popular liberal president was ambushed. Many of them have the same reaction to the crime scene: the intimacy, the smallness.

Mowatt-Larssen was not just any tourist.

CIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: ‘I’m not privy to who struck John’

[ICYMI: Part I : A veteran officer analyzes the death of a president / Part II: ‘The very top people.’ / Part III: The making of a patsy ]

The killing of Lee Harvey Oswald is another key to Rolf Mowatt-Larssen’s JFK analysis. He argues that one of the conspirators had to have had access to the Mafia bosses who could induce Jack Ruby to eliminate the accused assassin as a witness.

Jack Antonoff riffs on JFK’s assassination

Best known as the nerdy-looking frontman for pop rock act Bleachers,Jack Antonoff is much too thoughtful to be a pop music celebrity. . Though he broke into the mainstream as the guitarist for Fun, Antonoff also wrote a hit song “Brave” with Sara Bareilles, and wrote and produced three tracks from Taylor Swift’s latest record.

In his free time, Antonoff is a student of the JFK assassination.

 

How the CIA enlisted the Mafia to kill Castro

Jack Colhoun explains in Salon via Jacobin.

“Why would the CIA turn to gangsters? As CIA Director of Security Sheffield Edwards explained to the FBI: ‘Since the underworld controlled gambling activities under the Batista government it was assumed that this element would still continue to have sources and contacts in Cuba which could be utilized in connection with CIA’s clandestine efforts against the Castro government.’”

JFK witness: ‘My brother didn’t do it’

Richard Cain: law enforcement officer, friend of the CIA, and Mafia hit man

One question haunts JFK assassination debates. If Lee Oswald wasn’t the lone gunman, who shot the president?

In their 1993 best-seller, “Double Cross,” Chuck and Sam Giancana alleged that a man named Richard Cain was a gunman in Dealey Plaza. “It was Cain, not Oswald, who’d actually fired from the infamous sixth-story window,” they wrote on p. 466.

Richard Cain was not an implausible suspect. Born Richard Scalzetti, he was one of those protean characters who haunt the JFK assassination story. He worked for the Cook Country Sheriff’s office. He offered his services to the CIA in Mexico. He sought to blame JFK’s assassination on the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He was a Mafia hitman. He met a violent death. …

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