The Death of Dorothy Hunt: An Exploration of the Assassination of JFK, Part 6

For some reason, Congressional supporters of the Pentagon forced the ouster of the first counsel, Richard Sprague. It was also known that the Army was in charge of the Kennedy autopsy and there is a great deal of evidence that it was , at the least, badly botched. A comparison of what the doctors in Texas and others there saw with the official autopsy leads to the conclusion that somethings were changed and that the head wound weas changed so it would appear that the bullet came from the back.

Much information has been lost, including tissue samples, and serious questions have been raised about the x-rays and photographs that have been purported to be those of the dead Kennedy. It also told that one doctor did not dissect the neck because he was ordered not to do so.

The investigation was hampered by many things—bickering over the hiring of staff, much time spent on writing operational procedures and working out delicate relationships with government agencies, and the purge of many staffers to save money at a crucial time. In the end, the committee decided that more people than Oswald were involved but it failed to put key witnesses to this fact on the stand. It also decided that at least four shots were fired. The holes in the back of Kennedy’s shirt and coat made the single shooter and magic bullet theories untenable. It found strong evidence that the FBI knew in 1963 that information that Lee Harvey Oswald had telephoned and visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City was very doubtful. Yet the committee fudged its conclusion on this and did not pursue the matter. Studying what went on in the committee led many connected to it to wonder if those who led it really wanted to learn what had happened on November 22. An investigation conducted by the Attorney General of Texas, Waggoner Carr, was to show that Oswald was also acting as an FBI informer since 1962.

The committee wasted a great deal of time running down a red herring offered by Clare Booth Luce. The source of her information soon shot himself. She turned out to be an officer of the Retired Intelligence Officers Association. After November 22, Mrs. Marina Oswald broke off ties with her friend Ruth Paine on the advice of the Secret Service. They told her that Mrs. Paine was “sympathizing with the CIA.” George DeMohrenschildt was to later admit that a CIA man suggest he befriend Oswald. DeMohrenschildt shot himself before being called to talk to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.


The possible involvement of Cuban exiles was only traced around the periphery. Rolando Otero told an investigator that he had repeatedly heard that the CIA was involved and that about 30 CIA personnel were in Dallas that day. He was soon shipped off to prison with a forty year sentence. The chief witness against him was Ricardo “the Monley” Morales, a CIA hit man. A Treasury man from Minnesota came into Miami to instruct other witnesses, who had been rounded up and taken to a safe house, in what they should say in court. The committee investigator traced Otero’s two sources, “Carlos” and “Ten-One,” but he was forbidden to look closely into their backgrounds or what they were doing in the mid-1970s.

Fabian Escalante, probably a Cuban government asset, claims that Antonio Cuesta, while being held by the Cubans, confessed to being involved in the assassination. He named three others who were part of the Forty: Eladio Del Valle, Rolando Masferrer and Hermino Diaz Garcia. John Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter that he had been involved in the logistics of the assassination, mainly making payments. He thought two Cubans were directly involved, one being Garcia. The other was Virgilio Gonzalez, who was also connected with the Forty. Florence Martino , wife of John, said her husband told her on the morning of November 22 that Kennedy would die that day. Fred Claasen told the House Committee that Oswald thought he was working for the Cubans. He was to meet a contact at the Texas Theater and helped to leave the country, but he made a mistake shooting the policeman. Ruby had to eliminate Oswald.


In the early nineties, it was learned that James E. Files ( John Sutton), a prisoner in the Joliet State Penitentiary, admitted to having been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Files had long worked for Charles Nicoletti, an assassin for the Ginancona crime family. Files also implicates Johnny Roselli. For a few days before the murder, Files claimed he was with Oswald in Mesquite, Texas, and he added that Oswald may not have had a drivers license but he could drive an automobile. He also described some men giving Jack Ruby and others Secret Service identifications. On the day of the murder, Nicoletti asked him to be his back-up shooter, and Files claimed he was on the grassy knoll and that Oswald did not fire a shot. Sutton claimed that he had worked for David Atlee Phillips in training Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion and that he had met Oswald through Phillips. Through Phillips, he also met Clay Shaw. Witnesses have turned up who claim Files was at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. A former CIA agent/Army officer has also said Files ( then Sutton) was part of the Miami CIA operation in 1961. Though Files knew many details concerning the event, some aspects of his story seem inconsistent. It would make good sense for someone connected with the CIA to place Files at the murder scene. Likewise, the image of the mob as a powerful organization can only be enhanced by such claims.


In 1995, agent Gene Wheaton approached the Assassinations Information Review Board with the claim that he knew Cuban CIA assets participated in the assassination. He was boarding in the home of a retired agent, Carl E. Jenkins, who had been helping Cubans get in and out of Cuba and his host as well as several Cubans talked about their roles. In 2005, he said both Jenkins and Rafael ‘Chi Chi’ Quintero were involved.

The names of the people who shot Kennedy and the details on CIA involvement will never be known. The House Select Committee on Assassinations knew that the leader of Alpha 66, an extremist Cuban-American group said he saw Bishop with Lee Oswald in Dallas before the assassination. There is a great deal of evidence that the CIA people who worked with the Bay of Pigs Cuban-Americans shared with them an intense hatred of Kennedy. They were angry when Kennedy reacted to their refusal to obey some of his orders, and they believed that JFK had decided to shut down the efforts to assassinate Castro. Perhaps some in the CIA knew that Kennedy ordered McNamara to prepare a plan for withdrawal from Vietnam by late 1965. . Documents proving this surfaced in 1997. And of course there was a pile of evidence that Oswald was tied to the intelligence community. The committee never got beyond that, and it had in place institutional arrangements that prevented it from going farther—not that it wanted to. The CIA denied having an agent by that name or having a record of anyone using that alias. Later, a former investigator for the committee built a good case that David Atlee Phillips used that name, and that his close friend E. Howard Hunt also used it.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy was a huge historical event, and there still is not enough evidence to piece together what actually happened. There is more than enough evidence to suspect that the official story was essentially a fabrication, but it still proves very difficult to sort out all the contradictions and identify and deal with deliberate disinformation. This is probably true with the respect of many other contemporary events. For example, no one can prove for certain why the US invaded Iraq. Historians, due to a methodology inherited from Leopold von Ranke, may find themselves with no choices but to repeat the official or default stories about the assassination and Iraq, perhaps adding that some have questioned these accounts.

The people who planned Kennedy’s murder could have accomplished this
without so much fanfare. It could have been done in a way to arouse almost no suspicion. Rather it was accomplished in the Dealey Plaza shooting gallery, with all sorts of messy details, and an explanatory theory that would only be accepted by the weak-minded. It was a way of announcing to the citizens of a one-time democracy that other forces were now in control and that ordinary citizens might as well swallow hard and accept it.