Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up

[Octafish]

History that helps explain how today's America came to be or news without complete context to comfort the afflicted without really costing anybody (who matters) a thing.


[font size="1"]Former Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, President John F. Kennedy, newly-appointed DCI John McCone.[/font size]

Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up

John McCone was long suspected of withholding information from the Warren Commission. Now even the CIA says he did.

By Philip Shenon
Politico, October 06, 2015

John McCone came to the CIA as an outsider. An industrialist and an engineer by training, he replaced veteran spymaster Allen Dulles as director of central intelligence in November 1961, after John F. Kennedy had forced out Dulles following the CIA’s bungled operation to oust Fidel Castro by invading Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. McCone had one overriding mission: restore order at the besieged CIA. Kennedy hoped his management skills might prevent a future debacle, even if the Californian—mostly a stranger to the clubby, blue-blooded world of the men like Dulles who had always run the spy agency—faced a steep learning curve.

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But did McCone come close to perjury all those decades ago? Did the onetime Washington outsider in fact hide agency secrets that might still rewrite the history of the assassination? Even the CIA is now willing to raise these questions. Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission.

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Robarge suggests the CIA is responsible for some of the harsh criticism commonly leveled at the Warren Commission for large gaps in its investigation of the president’s murder, including its failure to identify Oswald’s motive in the assassination and to pursue evidence that might have tied Oswald to accomplices outside the United States. For decades, opinion polls have shown that most Americans reject the commission’s findings and believe Oswald did not act alone. Four of the seven commissioners were members of Congress, and they spent the rest of their political careers badgered by accusations that they had been part of a coverup.

“The decision of McCone and Agency leaders in 1964 not to disclose information about CIA’s anti-Castro schemes might have done more to undermine the credibility of the commission than anything else that happened while it was conducting its investigation,” the report reads. “In that sense—and in that sense alone—McCone may be regarded as a ‘co-conspirator’ in the JFK assassination ‘cover-up.’”
If there was, indeed, a CIA “cover-up,” a member of the Warren Commission was apparently in on it: Allen Dulles, McCone’s predecessor, who ran the CIA when the spy agency hatched the plots to kill Castro. “McCone does not appear to have any explicit, special understanding with Allen Dulles,” the 2013 report says. Still, McCone could “rest assured that his predecessor would keep a dutiful watch over Agency equities and work to keep the commission from pursuing provocative lines of investigation, such as lethal anti-Castro covert actions.” (Johnson appointed Dulles to the commission at the recommendation of then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy.)

The 2013 report also draws attention to the contacts between McCone and Robert Kennedy in the days after the assassination. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, the attorney general was asked by his brother, the president, to direct the administration’s secret war against Castro, and Robert Kennedy’s friends and family acknowledged years later that he never stopped fearing that Castro was behind his brother’s death. “McCone had frequent contact with Robert Kennedy during the painful days after the assassination,” the report says. “Their communication appears to have been verbal, informal and, evidently in McCone’s estimation, highly personal; no memoranda or transcripts exist or are known to have been made.”

“Because Robert Kennedy had overseen the Agency’s anti-Castro covert actions—including some of the assassination plans—his dealings with McCone about his brother’s murder had a special gravity,” the report continues. “Did Castro kill the president because the president had tried to kill Castro? Had the administration’s obsession with Cuba inadvertently inspired a politicized sociopath to murder John Kennedy?”

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/jfk-assassination-john-mccone-warren-commission-cia-213197

DUer MinM found on the DUer John Simkin's Education Forum what John Newman wrote regarding the importance of Mr. Shenon's parenthetical statement saying RFK recommended Dulles to serve on the Warren Commission:

Shenon’s latest piece in Politico (“Yes the CIA Director was Part of the JFK Assassination Coverup”) is a continuation of the newest stage—begun in 2013—of the propaganda campaign to convince Americans that Robert Kennedy got his brother John killed and then worked to cover it up. The genesis of this new stage was a call from a Warren Commission lawyer to Shenon, who then fed Shenon and used him as the mouthpiece for this outrageous scheme. The Castro-did-it propaganda was part of the true coverup of the plot to kill JFK, and it was in play even before the shots were fired in Dallas. But I knew when I read Shenon’s 2015 paper edition of his book, A Cruel and Shocking Act, that we would be facing a newer, carefully orchestrated campaign to stick it to the Kennedys right at the time when the battle lines are being drawn to force the release—as required by the JFK Records Act—of the remaining JFK records by October 2017. Now, Shenon takes a recently released internal CIA analysis (which also dates to 2013) about DCI McCone blocking the CIA’s anti-Castro plots from the Warren Commission, and uses it to bolster his (Shenon’s) baleful version of history. I will comment on that (David Robarge’s) analysis after thoroughly reading it. Shenon’s Politico piece ends by restating a myth he hopes to make stick: that President Johnson appointed former DCI Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission “at the recommendation of then Attorney General Robert Kennedy.” I will hold back here on commenting about this fabrication because David Talbot’s new book, The Devil’s Chessboard, (to be released next week) so thoroughly (pp. 572-574) demolishes it

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=22318

Professional Grade Perception Management, especially when considering that the CIA hired Mafia in 1960 when Eisenhower was president, not Kennedy, and Nixon was thought to be the next president.

AUG 1960: Richard Bissell meets with Colonel Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA's Office of Security, and discusses with him ways to eliminate or assassinate Fidel Castro. Edwards proposes that the job be done by assassins hand-picked by the American underworld, specifically syndicate interests who have been driven out of their Havana gambling casinos by the Castro regime. Bissell gives Edwards the go-ahead to proceed. Between August 1960, and April 1961, the CIA with the help of the Mafia pursues a series of plots to poison or shot Castro. The CIA’s own internal report on these efforts states that these plots "were viewed by at least some of the participants as being merely one aspect of the over-all active effort to overthrow the regime that culminated in the Bay of Pigs." (CIA, Inspector General's Report on Efforts to Assassinate Fidel Castro, p. 3, 14)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs/chron.html

So. If this is all ancient history, as some have asked over the years, why do so many bits and pieces of the story continue to find the light of day and make news? For instance, this intriguing history on the Bush connection from one of the nation's best known political science professors, Larry J. Sabato, author of "The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy," in April 1969, Prescott Bush wrote Clover Dulles regarding the change in leadership at CIA almost 8 years earlier:

I recall in the summer of 1961, after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs affair, you were away and we called Allen to come for supper, and he accepted. That afternoon he called and asked if he could bring a friend, and we said "surely." So he brought John McCone, whom we had known well, but had not thought of as a particular friend of Allen's. But Allen broke the ice promptly, and said, in good spirit, that he wanted us to meet his successor. The announcement came (the) next day. We tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco. And here they were making Allen seem to be the goat, which he wasn't and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them. (Misspellings corrected here.)

SOURCE p. 368 online:

https://books.google.com/books?id=X7OnBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA368&lpg=PA368&dq=john+mccone+%2B+prescott+bush&source=bl&ots=dJAjiC_h6D&sig=fkfjmBYhc8KD3Relu4Vc93mEyCo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CD0Q6AEwBmoVChMInOeZgovAyAIVBpiACh0JnAxi#v=onepage&q=john%20mccone%20%2B%20prescott%20bush&f=false

Clearly shows how the players, like the aspens, look like a forest of individual trees above ground, but really are connected by their roots underground.