The Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies (Volume 16 – Number 2 – Fall 2008)
Distorting History by Don Bohning
It has long been said that newspapers provide "the first rough draft of history." If that's the case, then the "worst draft of history" can often be found on the Internet. While some websites are reliable and valuable research tools, others can be tendentious advocates for a point of view, twisting or ignoring information that does not support that point of view.
One need look no further for the latter than two websites based in Great Britain, run by John Simkin, a former member of a militant leftwing organization, the politics of which are now rejected by the mainstream British Labor Party.
The two sites,
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ and a related, but badly misnamed, website called the Education Forum, are obviously more interested in promoting a political agenda than providing facts. Focusing on a purported conspiracy in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, they are riddled with factual errors.
I first encountered the websites when Simkin contacted me after the 2005 publication of my book, “The Castro Obsession: US Covert Operations Against Cuba 1959-1965”. It did not take long to find that more often than not the information on his websites were at variance with well-documented facts based on my own interviews and the thousands of declassified official documents made publicly available in recent years.
Unfortunately for the sake of history, the only sources Simkin references - undocumented as they may be - are those that bolster his political agenda. Contrary and documented views, as I have personally discovered, are ignored.
Because it involves so many individuals, perhaps the most egregious and far-reaching - but only one of a multitude - of misrepresentations by Simkin that I have come across, involves a so-called Operation 40. The Spartacus website describes it as a unit of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) organized in early 1960 that engaged first in sabotage operations against Cuba and then "evolved into a team of assassins." It provides no credible documented evidence to support either the sabotage or assassination claims.
A U.S. government report published in 1975 based on a congressional inquiry headed by the late Idaho Senator Frank Church and entitled Alleged Assassination Plots Against Foreign Leaders, makes no mention of Operation 40. (1) Neither does a Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, prepared in 1967 by the CIA's inspector general under orders from then President Lyndon Johnson. It was declassified in 1993. (2) It is inconceivable that had Operation 40 been an assassination unit, as Simkin claims, that either or both the Church Committee and the CIA's Inspector General's Inspector General's report would not have made some made mention of it. Essentially, the only references to it as described by Simkin are contained in books and other works by conspiracy theorists, including Fabian Escalante, an official in Cuban State Security.
While there were unsuccessful plots to assassinate various foreign leaders, mostly involving Cuba's Fidel Castro, beginning in 1960, the only documented systematic CIA assassination program as such was code-named ZRRIFLE. Created by the late Richard Bissell, it was headed by the late Bill Harvey from November 1961 through the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962. Part of that period Harvey also headed Task Force W, the CIA component of Operation Mongoose, the multi-agency, post-Bay of Pigs program to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro. Mongoose was designed by Kennedy White House aide Richard Goodwin. As far as is known, ZRRIFLE never assassinated anyone. (3)
Contrary to Simkin's definition, Operation 40, as described by some of those who were part of it, as well as in official documentation, was the last unit formed for the failed, CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Its task essentially was to follow the Cuban exile invasion force, purge officials, seize documents and take over administration of "liberated" towns and villages.
When the invasion failed, the group returned to Miami, morphing into what was known locally as the Cuban intelligence organization in exile, the Cuban CIA or, more commonly, as Operation 40. Its CIA codename was AMOT. It operated under, but quasi-independently and at a separate location from JMWAVE, codename for the giant Miami CIA station then located at the University of Miami's South Campus (now the home - perhaps appropriately - for Metrozoo).
Headed by Joaquin Sanjenis Perdomo, a former police official in the pre-Castro Cuban government of Carlos Prio, it was disbanded in 1974 as part of the phase-out of JMWAVE operations. Its CIA case officer for at least two years, beginning in 1970, was the late Frank Belsito, who died in 2006. An account of AMOT can be found in a rather obscure book authored by Belsito, entitled: “CIA: Cuba and the Caribbean (CIA Officer's Memoirs)”. It was published in 2002 by Ancient Mariner Press of Reston, Virginia.
Simkin's website erroneously - as it does with so much other Cuba, Castro, and CIA material - describes the origin of Operation 40 as follows:
On December 11, 1959, J.C. King, chief of CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, sent a confidential memo to Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. King argued that in Cuba there existed a "far-left dictatorship which, if allowed to remain will encourage similar actions against U.S. holdings in other Latin American countries." It adds that "as a result of this memorandum Dulles established Operation 40. It obtained this name because originally there were 40 agents involved in the Operation." (4)
The original table of organization for what was to become the Bay of Pigs does reflect that 40 agents were initially assigned to the unit, including 18 at headquarters, 20 in the Havana station and two in Santiago, Cuba. (5) In sorting through thousands of pages of declassified official documents, I have never found a reference to this group as Operation 40. It is always referred to as the Cuba Task Force or WH Division/4 (WH/4). It was headed by the late Jake Esterline, whom I got to know well. Nowhere is there any documented evidence that it was an assassination unit, nor did Esterline ever mention it to me in numerous interviews and conversations.
Simkin says - citing Fabian Escalante, a Cuban State Security Officer as his source - that Operation 40's first action came March 4, 1960, "when La Coubre, a ship flying a Belgian flag, exploded in Havana Bay." The ship was actually a French ship carrying Belgian arms. Despite Escalante's claim and other speculation, there never has been any evidence produced that the La Coubre - laden with arms and ammunition - explosion was anything but an accident. The incident happened two weeks before President Eisenhower approved on March 17, 1960, what was to become the Bay of Pigs, the first covert action program aimed at Castro.
The Simkin website then goes on to claim that "Operation 40 was not only involved in sabotage operations. In fact it evolved into a team of assassins." He quotes one alleged member, the late Frank Sturgis, claiming that "this assassination group (Operation 40), would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military of the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of our own members who were suspected of being foreign agents… we were concentrating strictly on Cuba at that particular time."
There are two problems with that. As a reporter for The Miami Herald during that period, I knew quite well the late Frank Sturgis - or Frank Fiorini, the name he then went by - as a "soldier of fortune" floating around Miami. As other journalists who knew Sturgis, I would listen to him but rarely - if ever - found him believable. The other and more significant problem is that Sturgis always attempted to leave the impression that he somehow worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. In fact, he never did in any capacity, according to the 1975 Rockefeller Commission Report to the President on CIA activities.
The Report states categorically: "Frank Sturgis was not an employee or agent of the CIA either in 1963 or at any other time. He so testified under oath himself and a search of CIA records failed to discover any evidence that he had ever been employed by the CIA or had ever served it as an agent, informant or other operative." (6) That would mean that even if there were such an Operation 40, as described by Simkin, Sturgis was not part of it.
The Simkin website provides a list of "CIA officials and freelance agents" who allegedly belong to Operation 40. Among the Americans cited is the late Gerry Hemming, another "soldier of fortune" type who had even less credibility than Sturgis did among those who knew him, me included. Hemming, who had two arrests and one conviction for drug smuggling and another arrest for gun smuggling on his record, died early in February 2008 at his home in North Carolina. I was quoted accurately in his obituary as saying that "I did not believe anything he said." (7) I continued to receive rather bizarre emails from him until about a year before his death, including a request for a signed copy of my book.
As a personal example of the far-fetched tales Hemming was capable of telling, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I was asked by the Washington Bureau of what then was the Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) newspaper chain, to come to Washington and help edit copy for a few days. During that time, and in the immediate wake of the anthrax scare in Congress, I received a call from my wife in Florida who said Hemming wanted to get in touch with me. I called him at the North Carolina number he left with my wife. He said he wanted me to know that when he was flying dope out of Colombia years earlier for the M19 guerrillas, he had overheard them talking about putting anthrax into a load of "pot" destined for the United States.
The highest profile CIA figure Simkin fingers as a member of Operation 40, and as usual without any documentation, is Porter Goss, a CIA operative from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. (8) Goss subsequently served as a Republican congressman from Florida and as CIA Director from 2004 to 2006. In its account of Operation 40, the Spartacus website carries a photograph which it claims to have been "taken in a nightclub in Mexico City on 22nd January, 1963...it is believed men in the photograph are all members of Operation 40." Among them, allegedly, is Goss. I sent Goss a copy of the photo. In a subsequent telephone interview after seeing the photo, not only did he say he had "never heard of Operation 40," but declared with some vehemence the man identified in the nightclub photo "categorically, decisively and completely was not me."' Goss also cited other erroneous information, to be noted later, on the Simkin website as it related to his own career. The same erroneous information on Operation 40 and Goss - including the alleged picture - found on the Simkin website, also has been posted on the website of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. (Many universities will not accept any references in student research papers attributed to Wikipedia because of its factual unreliability. Florida International University in Miami, for example, has a banner hanging in its student union building informing students of that.)
Aside from Escalante, Escalante, hardly a reliable source, the closest thing to even a quasi-official documentation I have come across that Operation 40 as described by Simkin even existed, is a memorandum from the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an advisor to President Kennedy, to White House aide Richard Goodwin. It is dated June 9, 1961, less than two months after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Even that memo partially contradicts Simkin's version.
It reads in part: "Sam Halper, who has been the Times correspondent in Havana and more recently in Miami, came to see me last week. He has excellent contacts among the Cuban exiles. One of Miro's (Jose Miro Cardona, head of the Cuban exile political front created by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion) comments this morning reminded me that I have been meaning to pass on the following story as told me by Halper. Halper says that CIA set up something called Operation 40 under the direction of a man named (as he recalled) Captain Luis Sanjenis, who was also chief of intelligence. It was called Operation 40 because originally only 40 men were involved: later the group was enlarged to 70. The ostensible purpose of Operation 40 was to administer liberated territories in Cuba. But the CIA officer in charge, a man known as Felix, trained the members of the group in methods of third degree interrogation, torture and general terrorism. The liberal Cuban exiles believe that the real purpose of Operation 40 was to kill Communists' and, after eliminating hard-core Fidelistas, to go on to eliminate first the followers of (Manuel) Ray, then the followers of (Tony) Varona and finally to set up a rightwing dictatorship, presumably under [Manuel] Artime. (9) (Ray, Varona and Artime were all members of the exile political front organization created by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs.)
In fact, Halper, who died in 1989 of Alzheimer's disease, worked for Time magazine, not The Times as Schlesinger's memo says. Neither was he highly regarded as a reporter by his Time colleagues, among them Bernard Diederich and Jay Mallin. Both were Time correspondents covering Cuba and the Caribbean during the same period as Halper. Diederich was based in Haiti and Mallin in Havana. Both are still alive and with whom I remain in regular communication.
Mallin, in an email to me regarding Halper, said that "just mentioning his name gives me a nightmare. After one particular conversation with him on the phone, Carroll (Mallin's wife) said she never saw me so mad and upset… he called (from his hotel room in Havana) around 3 in the morning. He thought someone was trying to get in his room and wanted me to come down and protect him." According to Mallin, Time photographer Andrew St. George, created a word for Halper. He called it ‘halpering.' “It meant endless questions and rewrites of a draft of a story, usually while dressed in underpants in a hotel room, with papers scattered everywhere." (10)
Diederich tells a similar story, describing Halper as "a writer for the Hemisphere section of Time magazine in New York. He was no reporter, although he liked to ‘big foot' big stories. While we reporters wore open neck shirts when in the streets, he always wore a coat and tie. The exception was one morning I went to check on Sam at the Hotel Oloffson (in Haiti). He had just arrived from Ciudad Trujillo (now Santo Domingo). He stood in his room in his underwear and kept ordering orange juice, tiring out the poor waiter. He then said 'Diederich, get me a typist as I have this dispatch I need typed.' I asked whether he would receive a typist in his underwear and whether he might want a call gal, not a typist. I left in my jeep, went to a market, bought several dozens of oranges and had to have two fellows carry them to his room. I hoped it would sort of shock or at least insult him. Instead he nearly kissed me, and worse, I had to sit down and type his dispatch and then file it to Time in New York. It proved to be 30 pages long." (11)
There also is documented evidence and testimony available from much more reputable sources than those cited by Simkin to refute his characterization of Operation 40, evidence and testimony which I have called to his attention via email, but which he has chosen to ignore. It includes:
i) Manuel Ray, a member of the exile political front group formed by the CIA as the provisional government to take over the Cuban government after Castro was ousted, in testifying before a board of inquiry appointed by President Kennedy to look into the Bay of Pigs failure, was asked: "What was Operation 40?" Ray's response: "Operation 40 was a group that followed the invasion force, or it was planned for them to follow the invasion force, to organize each of the cities. It was outside of our organization." (12)
ii) The account appearing in an oral history of the Bay of Pigs by Victor Andres Triay, which says: "Also slated to land at Giron [Bay of Pigs] were the headquarters staff; the Heavy Weapons Battalion; a tank unit; and the group that made up Operation Forty, whose mission it was to administer occupied areas." (13)
iii) Nestor Carbonell provides a first hand account of his role in Operation 40 in his book entitled, “And the Russians Stayed”. At the same time, Carbonell debunks versions peddled by such biased and pseudo-historians as Simkin. Carbonell had just finished his work on the planning committee for the CIA-created, five-member exile junta that was to become Cuba's provisional government with Castro's ouster. After completing his planning work a month before the Bay of Pigs, Carbonell decided to enlist in the invasion force:
"Just before I left for Guatemala, some of my colleagues persuaded me to join a newly formed unit - Operation Forty - which was to be integrated into the brigade and charged with occupation and temporary administration of liberated territories. (I later heard bizarre stories, echoed by noted reporters and historians about the purported sinister task of this unit: that of eliminating "leftist" leaders, including Miro, who might stand in the way of ‘reactionary' plans!) This unit was composed of about eighty men, most of them young professionals known to me, and was headed by an amiable former colonel of the Cuban Army, Vicente Leon, who had honored his uniform throughout his career." (14)
iv) Carbonell goes on to describe how the Operation 40 unit, after some brief training in Miami, including polygraph tests, and being "apprised of our mission as guardians of public order and custodians of human rights," were then flown from Florida to Guatemala for further training. Then it was on to Puerto Cabezas, on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast, where they set sail for Cuba aboard the Lake Charles. The unit did not leave Nicaragua until two days after the invasion force, and never did land." (15)
As described in my own book, The Castro Obsession, Carlos Obregon, (who is not identified by name in the book as it relates to Operation 40, but has since given permission to use his name), a Cuban exile who worked for Operation 40 for several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, said he first became aware of the group in March 1961 (a month before the Bay of Pigs). He had arrived in Miami from Cuba two months earlier and was looking to enlist against Castro. A friend told him a special unit was being assembled as part of the total effort to unseat Castro, but it was somewhat independent and elite and was the place to be. He was told at the time that Operation 40's "main objective was to take over the administration of the towns and cities liberated by the invasion force, round up government officials and sympathizers and secure the files of the government's different intelligence organizations."
Obregon signed up too late to join the unit, but later became a team leader for CIA infiltration teams. When the teams started to be phased out in the late 1960s, he joined Operation 40, which was operating as an intelligence-gathering unit, under Joaquin Sanjenis, collecting information not only on arriving Cubans and Castro government officials, but also in monitoring Cuban groups in South Florida and what they were up to. They also produced occasional studies on the Cuban economy, especially the sugar industry. (16)
As an intelligence gathering unit, Operation 40 became, and remains, a controversial topic within the South Florida Cuban exile community, many of whom it spied upon. The late Rafael Quintero - who Simkin erroneously identifies as a member of his non-existent Operation 40 - is among those who expressed concern because of the vast files of information the group collected on the Cuban community and the potential for blackmail with that information.
"When the Bay of Pigs went kaput, they stayed as a group and Sanjenis became a very, very dangerous and powerful guy in Miami because he had a file on everybody… whose wife was whose lover, how much money etc... Some people tried to use that for blackmail," Quintero said in a April 2003 interview with me. "Actually, nobody knows where those files are. It's a big question mark." Operation 40 was shutdown in the early 1970s as part of the phase-out of active CIA sponsored anti-Castro activity. Quintero, who died in zoo6, also asked that he not be identified by name in my book because of Operation 40's controversial nature in South Florida's Cuban community. (17)
Apart from Operation 40, Simkin's website contains various individual biographies, all containing factual errors of people often linked by conspiracy buffs to the Kennedy assassination, among them Goss, Carl Jenkins and Rafael Quintero.
There are 15 pages devoted to Goss, including a two page opening biography and the rest an accumulation of excerpts from mostly obscure sources that generally echo Simkin's own radical views. They include the alleged picture of Operation 40 members - among them Goss - at a Mexico City nightclub in 1963, and which Goss categorically denies is he. (18)
The brief website biography is a mishmash of confusing and contradictory misinformation. It begins, saying that after joining the CIA in 1962, Goss spent the next few years at the JMWAVE station in Miami "where he worked with people such as Ted Shackley, David Sanchez Morales, Edward Lansdale, William Harvey and Tracy Barnes."
There are several problems with that, including the fact that William Harvey, Edward Lansdale and Tracy Barnes - while no doubt visiting Miami at one time or another - all worked out of Washington, not the Miami station. Goss, over the course of two recent telephone interviews, said "the JMWAVE stuff (regarding Goss) is nonsense. I knew Shackley but I was so junior compared to those people… a basic Boy Scout at that point." (19)
Neither, he said, did he work at the JMWAVE station over several years as Simkin's website claims, but only two to three months - primarily as a photo interpreter - in the period surrounding the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. He said he also did duty during that period as a small boat handler "as a matter of dealing with lots of people moving around but I never went into Cuba."
The Simkin website profile erroneously claims Goss was "one of the 400 officers who was employed on the [Operation Mongoose] project," the Kennedy administration's post-Bay of Pigs covert operation designed to bring down Castro. Goss, in a phone interview, said: "All I know about Mongoose and the Bay of Pigs is what I have read about."
Contradicting his own website profile information that Goss joined the CIA in 1962, two paragraphs later Simkin quotes Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA agent, as claiming that Goss was involved in paramilitary activity against the Cubans: "I know he was involved in the Bay of Pigs operation, he worked out of Miami with Cuban exiles… and took part in… attempts to overthrow Castro."
The Bay of Pigs took place in 1961 so it would have been impossible for Goss to have taken any role in it if he didn't join the CIA until 1962, as Simkin himself says. Goss confirmed that although recruited earlier, he did not actively start working for the CIA until late 1961 or early 1962, after first joining Army Intelligence through Yale University's Army Reserve Officers Training (ROTC) program. From there, he said he "gravitated to the CIA."
Goss confirmed that his first four to five years with the CIA involved the Western Hemisphere, namely Central America, Mexico and Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He said he was never permanently assigned to any CIA station in the area, always "traveling to those regions from Washington," with the Dominican Republic being "the only place I lived for any extensive period." He was assigned to London in the mid-1960s, retiring in 1970 for health reasons.
The website describes his "main area of expertise" as the "infiltration of trade unions and other organizations of the labour movement." While saying he was not at liberty to say what his main area of expertise was, Goss said the website description was "a stretch."
As inaccurate and misinformed as the Simkin website is on Goss, it pales in comparison to the fantasies he has manufactured when it comes to Rafael Quintero, whom I got to know quite well in researching my book. As with Goss and others, after providing a short biography of his "victim," Simkin follows it with several pages of background information excerpted from publicly available material, but only that which supports his own political agenda.
Quintero, who had agreed to do a book with me, died on October 1, 2006, before the project got underway. I did, however, tape interviews with him on four different occasions before his death. We also had several casual lunches together.
Simkin erroneously identifies Quintero as a member of Operation 40, which didn't even exist as Simkin and numerous other Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists describe it. In fact, as noted earlier, Quintero expressed concern about Operation 40 and the files it collected, fearing they could be used for other than intelligence purposes. In the Quintero profile, Simkin again resorts to the worn out quote by the late Frank Sturgis/Fiorini cited above as his version of Operation 40 documentation; Sturgis being a totally unreliable windbag and who, as the Rockefeller Commission documented, never worked for the CIA, despite his efforts to leave the impression that he did. (20)
Simkin claims - again erroneously as it relates to Quintero - that Ted Shackley the station chief for the CIA'S Miami station from 1962 to 1965, "was placed in charge of the CIA's secret war in Laos. He appointed Thomas G. Clines as his deputy. He (Clines) also took Rafael Quintero..." The problem with that is Quintero was never in Laos. According to both Clines, in a 2007 interview, (21) and Quintero's widow, Dolores, in an email to me, the only time Quintero ever visited anywhere in Asia came in the late 1980s, after he had joined Clines in a private business enterprise and he made a single business trip to the area with Clines. (22)
Again, distorting the facts, the Simkin website says in 1976 Quintero was recruited by rogue CIA agent Edwin Wilson to assassinate a Libyan dissident in Egypt and that he (Quintero) recruited Rafael and Raul Villaverde - two Cuban exile brothers - to help. That much is true, but the rest of what the Simkin website offers in its brief paragraph on the subject is an obvious attempt to link the Libyan assassination plot to the February 21, 1976 assassination in Washington, D.C., of Orlando Letelier, a prominent Chilean dissident. There was no connection between the two. From the Simkin website: "Four days before the assassination of Orlando Letelier, the Villaverde brothers returned to the United States. On 21st September, the day that Letelier was killed, Wilson phoned Quintero in Miami to call off the operation."
The real facts - which Simkin chooses to ignore - are that at the time Wilson approached Quintero, both had been working for Task Force 157, a maritime spy operation run by U.S. Naval intelligence. Wilson had been Quintero's case officer. The man Wilson wanted assassinated was not named, although Quintero believed it to be Carlos Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "The Jackal," an international hit man. Quintero also believed he was working for the U.S. government. Quintero and the Villaverde brothers flew to Geneva, where they met Wilson and Frank Terpil, a rouge CIA agent and arms dealer who eventually found sanctuary in Cuba.
In Geneva, Quintero and the Villaverde brothers were told the target was a Libyan dissident, who Wilson wanted eliminated on behalf of Libyan strongman Muamar Quaddafi, to whom Wilson had provided arms. After a heated argument, and discovering that the assassination was not a U.S. government operation, Quintero and the Villaverde brothers returned to the United States. Quintero then reported the incident to Clines, his former case officer. Wilson was eventually convicted and sentenced to prison. There was never any evidence that Quintero or the Villaverde brothers had anything to do with Letelier's assassination or that the two events were in any way related. (23)
It's uncertain from where Quintero's alleged link to the November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy - along with Carl Jenkins, another of his onetime CIA case officers - originated. The most likely source is Gene Wheaton, a strange duck who surfaced around the time of the Iran-Contra scandal, with which Quintero, Jenkins and Wheaton all became entangled.
Jenkins, a previous acquaintance of Wheaton, who had been sleeping in his car, provided him a place to sleep in a Washington DC area apartment that Jenkins kept during the Iran-Contra period. Jenkins, in a telephone interview, described Wheaton "as a piece of work," and cautioned me that "you should read a book on paranoia before you do any more. He (Wheaton) is a paranoid character of grandiosity and conspiracy. He's got to be in the middle of everything. Always seems to be one of these little guys on the fringe ...everything is a conspiracy."
Jenkins said Wheaton "had made some of these allegations" that he and Quintero had somehow been involved in the JFK assassination, but they had known nothing about them until later. "If somebody was in the same country at the same time, they were part of some sort of conspiracy," said Jenkins of Wheaton. "He had picked up a couple of old airplanes and tried to put together a cargo airline… he got a contract out of Memphis or Louisville, hauling stuff for somebody else. He had no assets, no capability. He had the grand idea that he would somehow get huge contracts for the Iran operation." (24)
According to Simkin's website - and without identifying the source, although it is likely to have been Wheaton - Quintero is quoted as once saying: "If I were ever granted immunity, and compelled to testify about past actions, about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be the biggest scandal ever to rock the United States." Quintero categorically denied to me in informal luncheon conversations before his death that he had ever made such a statement.
Quintero's widow, Dolores, called the quote attributed to him "totally fabricated ... my knowledge of his involvement with the CIA and Bobby Kennedy and (Manuel) Artime before we were married was extensive because he never kept anything from me." (25)
In a clear personal example of Simkin's duplicity, he says on his website that he had "attempted to contact Quintero via his close friend Don Bohning. Quintero refused to be interviewed but he did say that Gene Wheaton was telling the truth as ‘he knew it.' His explanation of Wheaton's story was that he and Carl Jenkins had been lying to him when they said they were involved in the assassination."
My only exchanges with Simkin have been via email and all of which have been stored in my computer since the first one in August 2005. In a November 11, 2006, email to Simkin I challenged him to send me a copy of the email in which I said what he claimed on his website. I never received a response. The only thing that happened is that the original posting, which read "as a joke," at time of my email to him, has been changed to say as "he knew it." That is followed by the alleged Quintero quote about the "biggest scandal ever to rock the United States."
In fact, Quintero said that on the day of Kennedy's 1963 assassination he was on a plane back from Washington to Central America, with an overnight stop at his mother's apartment in Miami. It was there he first learned of Kennedy's death when he turned on the television. It also appears most unlikely that had he been involved in JFK's death, he would have supported and worked for, as he did, Bobby Kennedy's 1968 campaign for President.
Jenkins also remembers what he was doing on November 23, 1963: teaching school. He was on home leave in Shreveport, Louisiana. A woman who was teaching history at a nearby high school was pregnant and wanted to take three months leave. He had a license to teach history, the school contacted him and he agreed to fill in and substitute for two months: November and December of 1963. "I returned to the school after lunch and the class was all atwitter, the President had been shot." (26)
Simkin's website has about as much misinformation about Jenkins as it does about Quintero. The second paragraph of the Jenkins profile states:
"In 1952, Jenkins joined the Central Intelligence Agency and for several years was involved in clandestine operations in Guatemala against President Jacob Arbenz. The plot against Arbenz became part of Executive Action (a plan to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power). It was during this period that he first worked with Tracy Barnes, E. Howard Hunt, William (Rip) Robertson, David Atlee Phillips and David Morales."
According to Jenkins he "had nothing to do with Guatemala" and wasn't even in the CIA. "I was a captain in the Marine Corps on active duty as an instructor for a reserve unit in Rome, Georgia. I didn't even know about Guatemala until years later." After nine years in the Marines, beginning in 1943, he was recruited by the Agency in 1952 and sent to "The Farm," the secret Agency paramilitary training facility in Virginia, as a survival instructor. With the Korean War ending in 1953 and the Agency cutting back in personnel, he rejoined the Marines and was sent to Rome, Georgia, where he spent 1953 and 1954 rebuilding a Marine reserve rifle company, before returning to the CIA in 1955. [The Arbenz overthrow in Guatemala occurred in 1954]. He later was involved in both the Bay of Pigs and in Laos, although contradicting Simkin's claim, he said he "never worked for [Ted] Shackley and never worked with him," in either Miami or Laos." (27)
Unfortunately, the distortions of history cited above regarding individuals and events I am familiar with, are probably only a small fraction to be found, not only on Simkin's websites, but on a vast number of others. The tragedy is that Simkin, and others like him who are interested only in promoting their own political point of view and ignoring any evidence that might contradict it, are doing a great disservice to the historical record. More serious researchers need to be aware of such charlatans.
Don Bohning, a former Latin America editor at The Miami Herald, is author of The Castro Obsession: US Covert Operations Against Cuba 1959-1965. Potomac Books, Washington, DC, 2005.
Notes
(1) Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental operations with respect to intelligence Activities. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. November 1975.
(2) Reports on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro. J.S. Earman, (CIA) Inspector General. May 23, 1967. (Declassified in 1993)
(3) An excellent account of the ZRRIFLE program can be found in the book, “Flawed Patriot: The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey”, authored by Bayard Stockton and published in 2006 by Potomac Books, Washington, D.C.
(4)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKoperation40.htm (2/28/08).
(5) Pfeiffer, Jack. [CIA historian], Volume III, p32: “The Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation: Evolution of CIA's Anti-Castro Policies”, 1951-59 (Declassified 6/17/05)
(6) The Nelson Rockefeller Commission Report to the President on CIA Activities, June 1975 (p252). Manor Books, New York
(7) Miami Herald. February 6, 2008. Gerry Hemming obituary.
(8) Telephone interview with Porter Goss, March 5
(9) Cuban-exile.com/doc_351-37S/doco355 (3/28/08).
(10) Email from Jay Mallin to author, April 17, 2007.
(11) Email from Bernard Diederich to author, May 17, 2007.
(12) Operation Zapata: The "Ultrasensitive" Report and Testimony of the Board of Inquiry on the Bay of Pigs. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984. p340
(13) Triay, Victory Andres: Bay of Pigs: An Oral History of Brigade 2506. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2001, p39
(14) Carbonell, Nelson T. And the Russians Stayed: The Sovietization of Cuba. (New York, NY. William Morrow, Inc.), pp 141-143.
(15) Ibid, pp157-175.
(16) Bohning, Don: The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-1965. (Washington, D.C., Potomac Books, 2005). P143-144. Although he is not identified in the book, the quote is from Carlos Obregon, who has subsequently given me permission to use his name.
(17) Ibid, p. 144. The quote is from Rafael Quintero - whom Simkin's website erroneously identifies as a member of Operation 40. In fact, Quintero was not a member and was wary about how the information the group gathered might be used. Quintero, who died in October 2006, also asked that his name not be used in my book at the time because of the unit's controversial nature in the Cuban exile community.
(18)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKgoss.htm (3/12/08).
(19) Telephone interviews by author February 29 and March 5, 2008, with Porter Goss at his Florida home.
(20)
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKquintero.htm (3/13/08)
(21) Interview by the author with Tom Clines at his home in Virginia, February 3, 2007.
(22) Email from Dolores Quintero, March 14, 2008, reconfirming a previous email to me categorically stating that her late husband had made only one trip to Asia and that with Clines on private business in the 1980s.
(23) The information cited is based on interviews with Tom Clines, Rafael Quintero, and his widow, Dolores, along with several books on the subject, including, The Death Merchant, by Joseph Goulden, published in 1984 by Simon and Schuster and Manhunt by Peter Maas, published in 1986 by Random House.
(24) Telephone interview with Carl Jenkins, September 6, 2007.
(25) Email to author from Dolores Quintero, November 7, 2007.
(26) Telephone interview with Carl Jenkins, September 6, 2007
(27) Telephone interview with Carl Jenkins, August 28, 2007
Tosh, might you have something to add about Op-40 and / or the Photo?!
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
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