The WAR between JFK and CIA

[Cliff Varnell]

Sorry, Cliff, but I just can't buy it.

Not a problem, Jim. You and I are friends from waaay back.

At the very time the Kennedy Administration's war with the Central Intelligence Agency had blown up so badly it was in newspaper headlines,

Bingo!

From the Richard Starnes' Washington Daily News 10/02/63 article, from which Arthur Krock famously quoted.

Others Critical, Too

Other American agencies here are incredibly bitter about the CIA.

"If the United States ever experiences a 'Seven Days in May' it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon," one U.S. official commented caustically.

("Seven Days in May" is a fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the U.S. Government.)

CIA "spooks" (a universal term for secret agents here) have penetrated every branch of the American community in Saigon, until non-spook Americans here almost seem to be suffering a CIA psychosis.

Was this a "warning" to JFK that the CIA was plotting his overthrow, or was this a preemptive leak to help frame the CIA in advance in case the impending military-style ambush went awry?

I think there was a patsy-chain, Jim. There were a lot of guys on it. I think the reason Jack Lawrence went back to the car dealer and puked his brains out in the bathroom soon after the assassination was because he realized he'd been set up.

I think the reason LBJ had a breakdown in the AF1 bathroom (according to Gen McHugh) was because he realized he was set up to take the fall -- "They're going to get us all!" McHugh quotes the Texan as bawling out.

And that's why the CIA lost its shit over Garrison.

They knew they were set up, heads might have to roll, starting with that great career back-up patsy Howard Hunt.

we suddenly have all this chatter in Mexico City about a former USMC radar operator familiar with U-2 flights who had defected to the USSR telling our side he'd tell the Russians everything he knows, and Agency personnel in Mexico City AND CIA headquarters apparently can't tell how old he is or what he looks like.

And none of this is apparently important enough to bring to the attention of the Secret Service or the FBI.

I am willing to narrow my focus a bit, though. Bill Simpich knows a lot more about the Mexico City affair than I do, and here, minus all the evidence he puts together, is his take from the introduction of State Secret:
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I offer the hypothesis that David Morales ran a piggy-backed operation on top of an anti-Fair Play for Cuba Committee operation run by CIA officer John Tilton and FBI agent Lambert Anderson, outwitted both Angleton and Goodpasture, brought down the President, and got away with it. Whether or not Bill Harvey was part of this operation, his people were all over it and merit further scrutiny.
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My essential point is that Harvey brought together a nest of trained assassins within the CIA who hated JFK for two related reasons. One was because of Kennedy's repeated refusal to order a military invasion of Cuba, even after the humiliation at the Bay of Pigs and the horror of the Cuban missile crisis. Two was because Bobby Kennedy directly meddled in Agency operations in an insecure manner. That nest is the most likely place to find the people that were part of the impersonation of Oswald and the killing of JFK.

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Others have argued to me that Angleton and covert action chief David Phillips were part of a plan to kill Kennedy, but my present perspective is that both of them like Goodpasture and operations chief Richard Helms, who I believe were in on the molehunt - were entrapped by the impersonation.

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Angleton and Phillips drove the cover-up for their own protection. Otherwise, their careers and reputations would have been ruined, to say nothing of the future of the CIA. Phillips told investigator Kevin Walsh shortly before he died that he believed American intelligence officers were involved in the assassination. Angleton's last words were filled with regret and sorrow. "I've made so many mistakes."

In photo captions, Morales is identified as Counterintelligence and paramilitary chief at the CIA station in Miami and Harvey as the CIA official who ran Staff D signals intelligence, the anti-Castro Task Force W operation, and the ZR-RIFLE assassination program.

JIm

This is good stuff, no doubt. What I can't buy is the notion that Morales was at the top of the plot.

I can see Morales as operating primarily not as a CIA operative per se, but as an operative for a pan-organizational team of elite-backed drug smugglers.

Morales was someone's tool. He was expendable after all, right?