A TV crew followed Lee Harvey Oswald handing out communist leaflets. Why?
Documents about a psychological operation that might sink the CIA.
August 1963. A diminutive and awkward Lee Harvey Oswald is handing out leaflets in New Orleans alongside a few unnamed members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Cuba organization.
Some bypassers ignore him as he tries to hand them the leaflets urging America to back off Cuba. Others hastily but politely grab one as they hurry onwards with their lives. We know these details about this otherwise unremarkable leafleting event because for some reason, a local TV station was there filming him.
This was almost certaintly a CIA psychological operation. Let me explain.
Remarkably, the Lousiana chapter of The Fair Play for Cuba Committee had its office on 544 Camp Street, the hub of the New Orleans intelligence community. Here is the leaflet:
544 Camp Street was home to the CIA-affiliated anti-Castro group Cuban Revolutionary Council. It was also occupied by FBI agent and notorious anti-communist Guy Banister. On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, the day JFK was asssasinated, this event took place, according to the 1978 Congressional investigation:
Banister and one of his investigators, Jack Martin, were drinking together at the Katzenjammer Bar, located next door to 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. On their return to Banister's office, the two men got into a dispute. Banister believed that Martin had stolen some files and drew his .357 Magnum revolver, striking Martin with it several times. Martin was badly injured and treated at Charity Hospital. When questioned about the incident in December 1977 by investigators for the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), Martin said that in the heat of the argument just prior to the pistol-whipping he had said to Banister: "What are you going to do — kill me like you all did Kennedy?"
So, Oswald was leafleting in New Orleans for an organization with an intelligence address. It got weirder. Later that day, Oswald got into a fight with Carlos Bringuier, the New Orleans leader of a CIA-affiliated anti-Castro group called Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE).
Three days after the fight, Oswald was arrested and fined $10. While in jail he was visited by FBI agent, John L. Quigley. Five days later, Oswald debated the issue of Fidel Castro, Marxism and Cuba with Bringuier on the Bill Stuckey Radio Show, where he again declared, sometimes unprompted, his unwavering Marxist leanings.
Just months before the bullets rang in Dallas, this obscure Oswald figure kept getting media appearances with the sole purpose of touting his Marxist qualifications to American viewers.
This is where things are getting interesting. Three weeks ago, Judge John Tunheim, chair of Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), wrote a letter to President Joe Biden stating that the CIA in 1998 had lied to the ARRB when it requested information about the aforementioned anti-Castro group DRE.
The group was funded by the CIA from 1960 to 1966, and its funding dramatically peaked in 1963. The funds, as investigator Jefferson Morley notes, came through a secret psychological operations program called AMSPELL.
The ARRB requested the CIA to produce the name of the case officer who handled the DRE/AMSPELL. They also asked for “monthly progress reports” for the group in 1963.
The CIA replied in writing that they had no record of a DRE/AMSPELL case officer. This we now know is a lie. The ARRB and Judge Tunheim has called it out. The CIA has never explained why they lied about these questions.
CIA officer George Joannides was the chief of the psychological warfare branch JM/WAVE station in Miami. Joannides worked with DRE from December 1962 to April 1964; CIA monthly reports on the group from 1960 to 1966 have been declassified, except, as his Wikipedia profile even points out, for the period he lead the DRE/AMSPELL.
When Congress set up the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978 to investigate the assassination, the CIA brought Joannides out of retirement and suggested to the HSCA that he could help with the filing systems. The CIA did not disclose Joannides’ CIA ties nor his working on an Oswald related operation.
Remember, this was before anyone knew the CIA had lied about there not being a DRE/AMSPELL case officer (Joannides himself).
HSCA investigator Dan Hardway said in an interview that Joannides’ began slowing down the investigation:
“We ended up not getting the quick turn around on our requests and we started getting stuff that was really suspiciously absent materials. We started getting files with really strange gaps in them”.
For his cover-up work, the CIA praised Joannides in a 1979 job evaluation as the “the perfect man” to deal with the HSCA. Two years later, he received the agency’s Career Intelligence Medal for “exceptional achievement”.
Till this day, the CIA simply refuses to provide the Joannides documents, stating grave national security concerns. But we do know this: The DRE generated headlines about Oswald before the assassination, their members physically fought him, and they had him appear on TV and and participated in a radio debate with him.
Within hours of Oswald’s arrest after the assassination, Joannides’ AMSPELL agents in the DRE fed reporters the story that the president had been killed by Oswald.
One of the DRE members working for Joannides and the CIA was the anti-Castro Cuban Jose Lanuza, who in later interviews has confirmed what we all suspect those top-secret CIA documents might reveal.
Lanuza said that on the night of the assassination, the group communicated with Joannides. Lanuza recalled speaking with a dozen local and national reporters about the connection of JFK’s accused killer to the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The next day, the AMSPELL information fueled headlines that the American president had been killed by a “pro-Castro assassin.”
“We were used by the people who wanted to make Oswald take all the blame for killing Kennedy,” Lanuza said in an interview. “We were ideal cover for using the theme of Oswald being a Castro supporter. Somebody wanted to build up that story. That’s where we came in.”
Let me try to spell out the implications here: Oswald took part in a CIA operation in the summer of 1963 during which he, while being filmed by a TV crew, handed out leaflets for a “pro-Castro” organization whose local chapter building was inhabitated by intelligence officers. And then he got into a “fight” with an anti-Castro group also lead by a CIA agent. And then he debated this group on television.
This was the CIA priming and prepping the public perception of Oswald as the communist assassin.
During interrogation, Oswald denied shooting JFK. He famously told reporters that he was a “patsy”. The next day he was shot dead in police custody.
The assassination of JFK marked a silent revolution in America that can be understood in two ways. First, this was the CIA turning its tactics of color revolutions, coups and assassinations, perfected for the foreign policy scene, inward to America itself. Second, it was the total and utter usurption of any remnance of democracy in America by unelected permanent deep Washington DC. A sort of a counter-democratic revolution that put finance capital and the military industrial complex at the helms of monopolized power.
This revolution was not set off by a Marxist or otherwise empire threatening figure. Far from it, JFK firmly believed in American hegemony, but genuinely believed it could be brought about through the sheer strength and seduction of US “values” instead of military power. This slight but significant strategic difference made JFK the most hated man in the CIA and Pentagon.
To illustrate the unbridgeable gap between JFK’s guarded dovishness and the apocalyptic blood lust of the US deep state, consider General Thomas Power’s chastising the JFK administration for wanting to avoid nuclear war, saying that “the whole idea is to kill the bastards … At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win”.
Another General, Curtis LeMay, told JFK during a heated exchange about the Cuban missile crisis that he was “in a bad fix” if he continued rejecting the hawkish advances of the Pentagon.
The crisis itself was sparked by the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, when Fidel Castro defeated a covert CIA operation to invade Cuba and promptly enlisted the military support of the Soviet Union to deter future US aggression.
In 1961, JFK was newly inaugurated as president and the CIA had not fully disclosed the extent of its involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion, except to demand JFK provide air support it.
JFK’s discontent with the CIA turned into rage, often expressed through profanity-ridden rants to his staff.
“Those sons of bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work,” he told them. “Oh my God, the bunch of advisers that we inherited!”
He told his speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger he had made the mistake of thinking that “the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.”
That very same year, long before the Cuban missile crisis, long before the official fallout with Power and LeMay and the Pentagon/CIA brass, JFK told The New York Times that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”.
Two years after he made that vivid promise, something did splinter and scatter alright, but it was not the CIA. The now infamous Zapruder film preserved the grotesque assassination of a sitting US president at the hands of a rogue intelligence community that couped our government and has ruled us ever since.
The importance of exposing the truth about the assassination is a question about the cold war itself and the legitimacy of liberal Western capitalism. It will lead to an opportunity to rewrite post-WW2 history, to challenge our notions about The Soviet Union, to reject The End of History and and reimagine the “Clash of Civilization” narratives Americans have been so inculcated with.
Finally, Americans will have to understand that the real enemy is not Russians or Islam or communism or Chinese might (insert other boogeymen). The actual enemy is right here, residing in Washington DC.
You wrote: "a CIA-affiliated anti-Castro group called Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE)." And then immediately wrote: "about the aforementioned PRO-CASTRO group DRE." So is it for or against Castro? And why do you have so few sources, just in the form of links in the text? Surely you understand that the topic you're writing about is one of the most dangerously connected to the stereotype of a 0 sources redneck in a tinfoil hat. When writing an article, you should assume that the reader is dumb(I am) not charitable (I'm not) not interested, with a 5-year-old's attention span (check) and not believing anything (check). Maybe I could do a better job as a reader, but I'm really put off by the sources. I'm not going to click on each link, watch the full interviews, and verify that what you said about them is true. Not to mention that a lot of what you said was hard to follow--how does half of it prove that Oswald wasn't alone? Your article on Africa had a much higher standard, imo.