When the LN Narrative Ruled--And Snuffed Out Leads Into Cuba?

[Benjamin Cole]

The story is well-worn, of President LBJ and FBI Chief Hoover quickly settling on an LN-JFKA narrative, and prodding the WC to do the same thing. (It should be noted the skeptical HSCA concluded the same thing regarding the physical act, but left open whether LHO had manipulators or confederates).

Usually, the political left (which owned the JFKA debate until the last 15 years or so) claims the LN narrative was to protect the CIA, and MIC, and globalist-capitalist cabals.

In fact, LBJ's stated worry was that if G2 or KGB was involved in the JFKA, that might trigger a nuclear holocaust. LBJ had learned about LHO's MC visit, to Valery Kostikov, purported KGB-New World head of wet-work, in September. That's bad optics, and LHO had also lived in the Russia, and was an outspoken Marxist.   

Indeed, there were serious people, not anti-commie hysterics, who contended that LHO had links back to Cubans and G2--and they paid a price for their viewpoints.

Thomas C. Mann, the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico at the time of the John F. Kennedy assassination, was a primary proponent of the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to Cuban intelligence.

Following the assassination on November 22, 1963, Mann and the CIA’s Mexico City station chief, Winston "Win" Scott, investigated Oswald’s visit to Mexico City seven weeks earlier. Their belief in a "Cuban connection" was based on several key factors:

Embassy Visits: Oswald had visited both the Cuban and Soviet embassies in late September 1963, seeking a visa to defect to Cuba.

Surveillance Data: Mann was briefed by the CIA on phone taps and photographic surveillance showing Oswald's interactions with Cuban consulate employee Silvia Durán and Soviet officials.

Direct Suspicions: Mann told colleagues hours after the assassination that he was "certain" Oswald had not acted alone and that a plot may have been hatched on Mexican soil.

Mann later testified to congressional investigators that he was directly ordered by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to shut down his investigation into the Cuban connection. He believed the White House and State Department suppressed this information to avoid public pressure for a military retaliation against Cuba, which could have triggered a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.

Mann later told Dick Russell: "It surprised me so much. That was the only time it ever happened to me - We don't want to hear any more about the case - and tell the Mexican government not to do any more about it, not to do more investigating, we just want to hush it up.... I don't think the U.S. was very forthcoming about Oswald... it was the strangest experience of my life."

In 1964 Mann was moved out his Ambassadorship to Mexico into a do-nothing job, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Mann, who previously had a deep, nearly lifelong interest in international affairs, quit the State Department in 1966, and joined the Automobile Manufacturing Association.

But Mann got off lucky, compared to another US diplomat in Mexico, named Charles Thomas, who committed suicide after his career was destroyed.

---30---

From The Guardian, a leftist Brit newspaper---

JFK documents could show the truth about a diplomat's death 47 years ago

Family of Charles Thomas are pleading with Trump to release papers they say show his 1971 suicide stemmed from officials wanting to shut down effort to reopen JFK investigation

Charles Thomas was a rising star at the state department in the early 1960s, a career diplomat who had served across Latin America and Africa. His colleagues were convinced he would earn the rank of ambassador. They agreed that the tall, jut-jawed, preppy, handsome Thomas – described by colleagues as “the diplomat from central casting” – adored his wife Cynthia and two young daughters.

But then something went horribly wrong. In 1971, at the age of 48, Thomas killed himself.

The death certificate showed that on Monday 12 April, at about 4pm and in the second-floor bathroom of his family’s rented home on the banks of the Potomac river in Washington, Thomas lifted a gun to his head. Cynthia, downstairs, thought the boiler had exploded.

The reasons for the suicide were not a complete mystery. Thomas had been despondent after he had been denied a promotion two years earlier and forced out of the state department. In the 1960s, the department had an up-or-out policy – diplomats were either promoted or they were “selected out”, to use the department’s Orwellian term.

For Cynthia and the rest of the family, the nightmare was compounded months later by a terrible discovery – Thomas had been “selected out” in error. A clerical mistake had apparently cost him his cherished 18-year career.

According to the department, Thomas was denied a promotion because part of his personnel records, including a glowing job evaluation from the embassy in Mexico, had been accidentally misfiled. The family received a formal written apology, signed by Gerald Ford. Congressional outrage led the state department to overhaul its promotion system.

But now, four decades later, Thomas’s widow and others say they are convinced they are still being denied the full truth about what put Thomas on a path to killing himself. In that cause, they are pleading with Donald Trump to release classified documents from the National Archives.

The documents are long-secret government files about – of all things – the assassination of John F Kennedy.

‘True nature of the Kennedy assassination’

The Thomas family acknowledges that theirs is a bizarre and complicated story. But they are convinced – with good reason, given what they have discovered – that if Thomas’s personnel records were misfiled it was intentional, and that it was never the real reason for his firing.

They are certain that Thomas lost his career – and ultimately his will to live – because senior officials were determined to shut down his persistent, unwelcome and ultimately fruitless effort to reopen an investigation of JFK’s murder.

There is a long paper trail. Documents released to the public show that during a posting in Mexico in the mid-1960s, Thomas came across evidence that showed Lee Harvey Oswald – who visited Mexico City in September 1963, weeks before killing Kennedy – had been in contact there with Cuban diplomats and spies who wanted JFK dead and might have offered help and encouragement.

In internal memos not made public until years after his death, Thomas told supervisors such information from Mexico could undermine the findings of the presidential panel that determined in 1964 that Oswald acted alone. In one memo, Thomas warned that the Mexico information “threatened to reopen the debate about the true nature of the Kennedy assassination and damage the credibility of the Warren report”.

For historians, Oswald’s trip to Mexico has never been adequately explained. Available records shows that the CIA and FBI knew much more about it – and the threat Oswald posed – than they ever shared with the Warren commission. The agencies appear to have withheld evidence out of fear they might be blamed for bungling intelligence that could have saved Kennedy’s life.

Oswald, a Marine Corps veteran and self-declared Marxist who had once tried to defect to the Soviet Union, met in Mexico with Cuban and Soviet diplomats and spies and, according to a long-secret FBI report, talked openly about his plan to kill Kennedy.

Given Trump’s deadline next week – a deadline he set himself – to release thousands of still-classified documents related to the assassination held by the National Archives, the Thomas family says questions about their family tragedy are urgent once again.

Many of those documents are known to have come out of the files of the CIA station in Mexico at about the time of Oswald’s visit, which suggests they could bolster Thomas’s suspicions about what happened there.

In an interview, Thomas’s youngest daughter, Zelda Thomas-Curti, a Minneapolis business consultant who was born in Mexico, described her father as “one of America’s most important – if mostly unrecognized – 20th-century government whistleblowers”.

On behalf of her family, including her own three children, Thomas-Curti said she had written to Trump, to ask him to do justice to her father’s memory by releasing all remaining JFK files.

“Washington overpowered my father like a steam shovel, tossing him into a heap like discarded dirt,” she wrote. “But he was a hero who was out there fighting for the truth.” She told Trump that she wanted “my three children to know that their grandfather was a real-life hero”.

Thomas’s widow, Cynthia, who went on to her own career in the state department and now lives in Minnesota, said the family deserved to see all the JFK documents. “My grandchildren are entitled to know the truth about Charles,” she said.

‘As much access as possible’

In 1992, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. Lawmakers hoped it would damp down raging conspiracy theories created by the release of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-laden film, JFK, the year before.

The law called for release of all assassination-related documents. As a result, millions of pages were made public in the 1990s. Several thousand other documents, initially held back because of national security concerns, were supposed to have been released last October, the 25th anniversary of the law’s passage.

But Trump delayed the release for another six months, citing security concerns raised by the CIA and FBI. The new deadline is 26 April.

The White House has given no clue about whether the president will now allow the full library of documents to be made public. But Trump, who is no stranger to conspiracy theories, including about the Kennedy assassination, has vowed transparency. “The American public expects – and deserves – its government to provide as much access as possible” to the JFK records, he said last year.

The exact number of assassination-related documents still held is in question, since there is no definitive public inventory. A research group, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, said last month its tally showed more than 21,890 documents were still being withheld in full or in part.

The National Archives has produced a bare-bones index, which shows that many of the documents are drawn from the CIA station in Mexico City. For Thomas’s family, as well as for many JFK historians, that suggests those documents may refer to surveillance of Oswald and his contacts in Mexico.

Previously declassified files show that CIA officers in Mexico conducted close surveillance of Oswald as he apparently sought a visa to defect to Havana. The files show that he visited both the Cuban and Soviet embassies and that he may have had a brief affair with a Mexican woman who worked in the Cuban consulate.

In a once-classified 2013 internal CIA report, the agency’s chief historian concluded that the CIA had conducted a “benign cover-up” to withhold “incendiary” information. The cover-up, the report said, was intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’ – that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy”.

‘A responsibility for seeing it through’

Previously declassified records referring to Thomas show that he was repeatedly rebuffed when trying to reopen an investigation of Oswald’s Mexico trip.

In a memo written in 1969, in his final days at the department, Thomas made a last plea that someone go back to Mexico. Though he made no allegation that Fidel Castro had any personal role in any plot to kill Kennedy, Thomas wanted the US to investigate whether the Warren commission had missed evidence of a conspiracy in JFK’s death between Oswald and Cubans loyal to the Castro regime.

“Since I was the embassy officer who acquired this intelligence information,” Thomas wrote, “I feel a responsibility for seeing it through to its final evaluation.”

The memo outlined a story that Thomas first heard in 1965 from a friend – Elena Garro de Paz, a prominent Mexican writer whose husband, Octavio Paz, later won the Nobel prize for literature. Garro said she had encountered Oswald at a family dance party in Mexico City in the fall of 1963 that was attended by Cuban diplomats and Mexican leftists who supported the Castro revolution. According to Garro, people at the party had spoken openly of their hope that Kennedy would be killed.

According to Garro, who died in 1998, Oswald was invited to the party by her cousin Silvia Duran, a vivacious young woman who worked at the Cuban consulate. Garro told Thomas she was certain Oswald and Duran had a brief affair.

In the years since Thomas’s paperwork was made public, Duran, who is still alive, has insisted that she did not have an affair with Oswald and only met him inside the Cuban consulate. But other Mexicans, including members of Duran’s extended family, have disputed her account. A Mexican journalist recalled seeing Oswald at a separate reception, at the Cuban embassy.

[Lance Payette]

My problems with this are more philosophical. Given Oswald's purpose for going to MC and the state he was in after that purpose was frustrated, I find it exceedingly unlikely that anyone in any official capacity would have thought he was a likely candidate to assassinate JFK - or even a candidate for a discussion of the topic. The Cubans surely had far more plausible candidates for that mission if they had wanted JFK dead. If LBJ was savvy enough to realize a pro-Castro assassin had the potential to trigger WW3, Castro and the Russians certainly knew that as well. It just makes no sense at all insofar as the KBG is concerned and pretty much no sense at all insofar as Castro is concerned.

Could the newspaper accounts of possible "revenge assassination" by Castro have planted these thoughts in Oswald's head? Sure. Could he have been aware from his time in New Orleans - as Gus Russo says many in both the pro- and anti-Castro camps were - of JFK's and RFK's imminent plans to avenge the Bay of Pigs and their humiliation by Castro? Absolutely. Could Oswald, in his frantic state, have said "Damn it, I'll assassinate JFK if that's what it takes!" Sure, it's possible. Does anything after his return from MC really suggest that any such plan was in the works? Well, no. The JFKA looks pretty much like last-minute happenstance, an opportunity handed to Oswald on a golden platter that may have crystallized, on or after the motorcade route was announced on 11-19, his previously vague notions of winning Castro's approval by assassinating JFK.

If there was anything resembling a conspiracy, I have to believe it was more in the vein of informal conversations Oswald may have had with other angry Castro supporters, possibly in MC and possibly involving promises to Oswald if he could actually pull it off, but surely no conversations with anyone in either embassy or consulate or otherwise in any official capacity. It just makes no sense to me. You're going to risk your own execution and the annihilation of Cuba (if not the world) by hatching a plot with this frantic, erratic, impoverished American with a $30 revolver in his jacket?

Sure, the MC trip is shrouded in mystery and intrigue - largely because CTers want it to be. I have no idea why Charles Thomas killed himself. Perhaps his career really was derailed because he was turning into an assassination pest. I remember a psychiatrist saying, "People don't kill themselves because they lose their careers or their spouses die. They kill themselves because their shoelaces break." Meaning that the immediate trigger for a suicide is seldom what family and friends think "must have been" the cause.