Naming Names in the JFK assassination-- and an Acceptable Answer If Not Justice

 From the Rob Reiner podcast "Who Killed JFK?"--

... With all of the information now available to us, we can name four assassins who were all present in Dallas that day. It's possible to make a highly educated guess as to who those shooters were and who was responsible for where they were placed. The people were about to name were all cold blooded assassins. 

"To me, it was a job, no more and no less, and a human target is no damn different." That's Colonel William Bishop again talking about his mindset during assassinations. 

Later on, during this interview with Dick Russell, Bishop admits that he himself had a hand in the 1961 assassination of Raphael Trujillo, president of the Dominican Republic. "You look upon your target as a ten can. You don't allow yourself to become emotionally, psychologically, or mentally involved with your target. You have to be attached to be good at it cold". 

Okay, So who were the men in Dallas? "First there was a Cuban exile named Herminio Diaz Garcia". 

That's Fabian Escalante, a former Cuban intelligence officer. Escalante said that Herminio Diaz is one of the people that we think was almost definitely involved in the plot against Kennedy. Who is Herminio Diaz Garcia? 

Escalante said that in the 1940s he was a gangster in Cuba. He participated in a plot to kill the president of Costa Rica. He said that Herminio killed several people in the fifties. 

In 2013, an old friend of Garcia's, Rinaldo Martinez Gomez, gave an interview stating that Garcia had admitted to him that he had been part of the JFK assassination team. Garcia was killed in 1966 while on a mission into Cuba to try and assassinate Fidel Castro. 

We think another shooter was a man named Jean Swetra. We mentioned Swetra in an earlier episode. He was a notorious French assassin. CIA files declassified in 1977 revealed that Swetra was in Dallas on November 22nd, and was then quickly and quietly deported from the country almost immediately after the assassination. 

We believe another shooter was a man named Charles Nicoletti, also known as Chucky the Typewriter. He was part of the Chicago mob and a hitman for Sam Giancana. You may remember Sam Giancana was one of two mobsters, along with Johnny Rosselli, that agreed to help Bill Harvey assassinate Castro. Nicoletti was murdered in 1977, right before he was due to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. 

The fourth shooter we know about was a man named Jack Cannon. Cannon worked under Charles Willoughby. Willoughby was the guy you talked about earlier, the guy you received the letter about exactly. Willoughby was the head of intelligence for Douglas MacArthur, and after World War 2, Cannon worked with Willoughby. Cannon ran a Bloe black ops group known as the z or Z Unit. 

When I wrote my book on Richard K. S Nagel, The Man Who Knew too Much, he told me that Canon was a part of the CIA unit that reported to Willoughby, and he indicated that Canon was directly involved in the assassination of JFK. 

It seems like a lot of people to be working on a secret plot. It was all compartmentalized. Everything was done on a need to know basis. Most likely none of the shooters were aware of the others, so in that sense, they didn't work together. The CIA agents that we talked to said that people in operations like this would be given very specific instructions of what they were expected to do. They would know little or nothing about the other people involved. 

As both of you said a little while ago, it's nice to name the shooters, but knowing who put them there, that's the real question. Who do you think orchestrated the assassination of JFK? 

The challenge to answering that is that people want a simple answer, and it isn't simple. I can hear the audience groaning as you say that. No, no, no, don't worry. We're about to answer you very directly. But it isn't a one word answer. It wasn't the CIA, the mafia, or the Cuban exiles, but it was rogue individuals that came from those worlds. Operation Northwoods and ZR Rifle served as the blueprint. The people that wrote those documents never thought they would ever see the light of day. They thought that it would stay secret forever. 

Allen Dulles, the godfather of the CIA, kept these programs from the War and Commission. He knew what a bombshell it would be, so to start, none of this happens without the knowledge of Allen Dulles. We don't think that Dulles played an active role in the planning, but we do think he would have been aware of the plan. Why do you say that? Because it's inconceivable that he wouldn't be aware of something like this, and it explains why he was at the remote CIA facility known as The Farm on the day of the assassination. What's The Farm? 

"This was the top secret facility. What the hell was Allen Dulles doing going to a CIA facility when he had been fired two years before?" That's David Talbot, the author of a book on Dulles called The Devil's Chessboard. 

He [Dulles] was there all during that fateful weekend when President Kenny was killed and when Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald on national television with Dulles's approval. 

I think that James Angleton and David Attlee Phillips were responsible for ultimately setting up Oswald. You'll remember James Jesus Angleton as the poet spy. He named his world of counterintelligence the Wilderness of Mirrors. He and David Attlee Phillips, who worked under Angleton, were the ones moving Oswald around the chessboard. They were developing him as a pro communist who would ultimately take the blame. [garbled] a damn thing in the world, but a decoy. He was a patsy. We started this investigation with Lee Harvey Oswald famously saying "I'm just a patsy". 

And now Rob, you're fully explaining why you think that's true. Let's take a moment to understand why Oswald's saying he's a patsy is so important. 

"If I was arrested for a murder I didn't commit, I would say I'm innocent. I didn't do it. You got the wrong guy. But Oswald says I'm just a patsy. Now, why would he say that? If you look at assassinations of world leaders throughout history, Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, what happened after their deaths? Somebody claimed responsibility? Exactly when he was arrested, he said, I'm a patsy. That's not the words of an assassin who proudly kills the president." That's David Talbot again. 

"John Wilkes Booth said sic semper tyrannus. As he'd left to the stage after killing Lincoln, he was proud that he'd killed the president sic semper tyrannus, which means thus always to tyrants, if you're going to kill somebody for political reasons, and you think that you're doing your country a great service, you want to own it. What about those who say he was just someone looking to make his mark on the world, even more reason to own it. If you're nobody and you want to feel important, to take your place in history, you want to own that. Setting up Oswald to take the fall also explains the cover up." 

How do you mean, Well, we know that Oswald had extensive connections to the CIA, So the people who had been handling him since the late fifties, they now had a personal incentive to make sure that everything was covered up. Their fingerprints were all over Oswald, even if they had nothing to do with the assassination directly, and any real investigation would reveal their involvement. So the men responsible for Dallas were counting on the fact that the CIA and FBI would have to close ranks in the cover up because of their connections to Oswald. 

Exactly. Anyone who dealt with Oswald handled his file, read his mail, cut his paychecks, gave him his assignments while he was in the Marines, took care of him when he got out. They now had to deny any connection to Oswald, even if they had nothing to do with the assassination. And we know what happened to those who tried to talk. 

Okay, so you're saying that we have Dulles as aware of the event, and Angleton and Atlee Phillips making sure there was a patsy to take the blame, but who actually orchestrated? 

This evidence leads us to the ZR Rifle Chief Bill Harvey as the strategist and General Charles Willoughby as the tactician. Willoughby and Harvey then tapped the mafia and the Cuban exiles to help provide the shooters. 

"I think Harvey and Rosselli and a couple other guys were the people who were training the assassins, and the theory is that Harvey decided to direct those assassins against Kennedy." That's Robert Blakey again. You'll remember he was in charge of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979. They concluded that President Kennedy was murdered as a result of a conspiracy. Harvey's hatred for Kennedy was well documented. He hated the president's politics, and he saw his path toward peace as the act of a trader, and he hated Kennedy personally for banishing him to Rome. 

As we know, Harvey was also in charge of the CIA's program of hiring assassins to kill political leaders around the world, and Willoughby was as staunch and anti-Communist as you could find. He was deeply involved in organizations like the John Birch Society and others that would stop at nothing to destroy the Red menace. He also had a history of involvement in violent black ops. The assassination in Dallas came directly out of the Operation Northwoods and ZR Rifle playbooks. It had been implemented against world leaders many times, just never at an American target. 

I'm sure the audience, just like me, needs a moment to digest all this. 

To me, the names of the shooters and the men behind them is less important than the reason it happened. Kennedy represented progress. He wanted to move us away from nuclear annihilation toward peace, but sadly it prompted a coup that profoundly changed history. Up next, why it matters that we're asking that question today? 

I came into the story interested in whether the question who killed JFK could actually be answered? And to what degree did this question destabilize American's faith in our country's leadership. The murder of President Kennedy seems to be a moment where trust was replaced with growing skepticism. 

Here's Robert Blakey, who led the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976, who still puzzles over it almost forty years later. Do you think who killed JFK Is even a relevant and important question today? 

Yes. If you talk to young people today, they're turned off by the society in which they live. They're cynical. Where did the cynicism come from? I think the cynicism that are characteristic of young people today are not entirely related to but are the outcome of the cynicism over the War On Commission War. To this day, a US president was assassinated, and it's likely that the real perpetrators were not held accountable. The fact that some of these perpetrators may have been officials in the US agencies designed to protect us is likely the very reason why people like rob continue to pursue this question. 

That and the fact that clues and leads just keeps slipping out, like the Katzenbach Memo, which ordered the Warren Commission to pin it all on Oswald that was only revealed in the 1970s, the expose about George Joannides, the CIA liaison to the House Select Committee, that only came out in 2001. And in 2023, former Secret Service agent Paul Landis came forward with a testimony that throws into question the single bullet theory. 

It's impossible to stand at a fixed point in history and say with one hundred percent certainty we know who killed JFK. Because the story continues to evolve. So then what does closure look like? You're never gonna know for sure. There is no document that eventually someone releases that says, okay, here was the plot in full. 

I think the only closure you get is that you come to certain conclusions. So this podcast series is going to show that there was a huge cover up going on. To people like Dick Russell crystallizing his theory is closure. For others like Jefferson Morley, closure isn't up to us. The CIA records that are still classified they will help answer this question. In other words, as long as the government is holding on to records, this story isn't over. But as time passes, even that becomes more complicated. You know, one thing that we see is when they release these records, you know, people who would have been really interesting to interview have died. They can't talk anymore. This guy writes a detailed memo. His name didn't come out until 2022, you know, and when we get the name, you going, look, the guy died in 2017. You know, if we'd had that document in 2017, that would have been a very important interview for historians like John Meacham. It's about what America might have been had Kennedy survived. It is tempting to want to see our martyred King as wiser and better than he might have turned out to be. But it's not nostalgic to say that the Kennedy of '61 was not the Kennedy of '62, and that Kennedy of '62 was not the Kennedy of '63. I think there's a piece of Americana that feels like, if Kennedy had survived, the country would have avoided the Vietnam war, because that's what Kennedy was promising when he was murdered. It's impossible to know if that would have happened. But it's enticing to envision that alternate reality. And after spending time with Dick and Rob, I've come to see how that reality may be a bastion of healing in what otherwise is a wound in their psyche. 

The loss of President Kennedy happened in their formative years, and the way they describe it, it was like losing a parent. The reason they want they need to know the truth is because only then are they able to heal. Rob, you're handing the story off to the next generation. What do you hope for? I hope they continue to demand the truth from their government, and not just about what happened to President Kennedy, but as a way of coming to grips with our past. If we want to continue to strive for a more perfect union, in order to preserve our democracy, it has to be built on a foundation of truth.