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00:01:36He says, can you get me four automatic rifles with a telescope sight on them?
00:01:42I got the money.
00:01:44Money's no object.
00:01:45It was a question of how and when, not a question of whether as to the necessity of eliminating
00:01:55Kennedy.
00:01:56Every week, every president receives threats to his life.
00:02:03I doubt that there was any special threat to President Kennedy's life.
00:02:08It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade group.
00:02:24There has started shooting.
00:02:25I repeat, a shooting in the motorcade in the downtown area.
00:02:29The president's car is now going past me.
00:02:31Now traveling at a very high rate of speed, Secret Service men standing up in the limousine.
00:02:36They are armed with submachine guns.
00:02:38You see Mrs. Kennedy's pink suit.
00:02:39There's a Secret Service man spread eagle over the top of the car.
00:02:42At this point, it looks as though it could have been one or two or even all of the people
00:02:46within the car may have been the victims.
00:02:48May have been struck by shots.
00:02:49We don't know.
00:02:53Parkland Hospital has been advised to stand by for a severe gunshot wound.
00:02:57And just now, we've received reports here at Parkland that Governor Connolly was shot
00:03:01in the upper left chest and the first unconfirmed reports say the president was hit in the head.
00:03:07That's an unconfirmed report that the president was hit in the head.
00:03:10The policeman says, no, you cannot come in here.
00:03:13You cannot come in here.
00:03:14We'll let nobody else in.
00:03:16We're definitely the president.
00:03:17We have a bulletin coming in.
00:03:19We're now switching directly to the parts of the hospital.
00:03:22The president of the United States is dead.
00:03:25President Kennedy has been assassinated.
00:03:28It's official now.
00:03:29The president is dead.
00:03:37There's only one word to describe the...
00:03:40picture here, and that's grief.
00:03:42Eighty minutes after the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested.
00:03:51The public events of that day in Dallas remain painfully familiar to most Americans.
00:03:57But it's now possible, for the first time, to piece together some of what was going on behind the scenes,
00:04:02using official government documents that have only recently become available.
00:04:06Without any investigation, the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, reported to Attorney General Robert Kennedy two hours after the assassination,
00:04:15I think we have the man who killed the president.
00:04:19The president's body came back to Washington on Air Force One.
00:04:34And everyone now had only one question.
00:04:37Who killed John Kennedy and why?
00:04:40As America mourned the lost leader, the new president, Lyndon Johnson,
00:04:58was determining how best to end speculation about the assassination.
00:05:02The massive solemnity of the last rites made it all the more difficult to make it possible.
00:05:32for Americans to accept that their president had been killed by a lone nut
00:05:36called Lee Harvey Oswald. So great an event could surely not have so pathetic
00:05:41a cause. Every sort of rumor with implications the new president found
00:05:48horrendous now sprang up. Some accused Johnson himself of being behind the
00:05:54assassination. Others saw the new president as the next target of a
00:05:58conspiracy aimed at destroying the whole system of American government. On
00:06:04November 29th Chief Justice Earl Warren agreed to chair a presidential
00:06:08commission. The rumors must be quenched and speculation ended Johnson told Warren.
00:06:14Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had already written to Johnson's
00:06:18top aide. The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin and that he
00:06:24did not have Confederates. After 10 months work the Warren Commission produced its
00:06:30verdict. It exactly echoed the Katzenbach memo. Oswald was the lone assassin and
00:06:36there was no evidence of a conspiracy. The conclusions were presented as
00:06:40unanimous. The then congressman Gerald Ford declared the monumental record of the
00:06:48Warren Commission will stand like a Gibraltar of factual literature through
00:06:52the ages to come. I think the Warren Commission has in fact collapsed like a
00:06:59house of cards and I believe that the Warren Commission was set up at the time to
00:07:04feed pablum to the American people for reasons not yet known and that one of the
00:07:09biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time. Senator
00:07:14Schweiker's views are based on his official investigation into the performance of the
00:07:18the FBI and the CIA at the time of the assassination. The most important thing was
00:07:24that the intelligence agencies did all the wrong things if they really were
00:07:28looking for conspiracy or to find out who killed John Kennedy. Schweiker's committee
00:07:34was formed as a result of Watergate. Its findings together with startling new
00:07:39evidence unknown to the Warren Commission caused Congress to set up its own
00:07:43assassinations committee. It has a larger staff and a larger budget than the Warren
00:07:48Commission, plus its own investigators. Its mandate includes a complete
00:07:52reinvestigation of the murder of John F. Kennedy.
00:07:57The committee will come to order. At this stage we are playing the cards very close to our vest. We don't want things to come out piecemeal and have speculation begin
00:08:11down one line of inquiry. And so at this time we aren't revealing or going into any of the evidence.
00:08:21The assassinations committee is now holding sessions behind closed doors after beginning as a public shambles.
00:08:28It's unlikely to issue a report this year, but it is now possible to make public the source of many of the committee's new leads.
00:08:35For years, many of the essential documents relating to the Kennedy assassination were kept classified under tight security in the National Archives.
00:08:45But under the Freedom of Information Act, many official documents that the government and its agencies would prefer to keep secret have been pried out.
00:08:54Within the past few months, in much publicized releases, the FBI has made available some 80,000 pages of its own records about the assassination.
00:09:02Significantly, however, the Bureau has still held back 10% of its material, claiming reasons of national security, or to protect informants, or on grounds of privacy.
00:09:16Many documents released under the Freedom of Information Act are a source of frustration.
00:09:21This CIA memo has half-blank first pages, then a blank page, and so on and on.
00:09:28Such industry by the censor has fueled suspicions that a cover-up is continuing.
00:09:33Well, there have been some instances of files being, I guess you would say, maliciously withheld or even destroyed.
00:09:46Let me give you an example without running the risk of maligning someone myself.
00:09:53Well, we don't know what the motive is, and this is the kind of problem we run into.
00:09:58The Pentagon has destroyed its Kennedy assassination files.
00:10:03The Army file on the Kennedy assassination has been destroyed.
00:10:08And we don't know why that was done.
00:10:12The full name is Lee Harvey Oswald, O-S-W-A-L-D.
00:10:1880 minutes after the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine, age 24, was arrested and charged with shooting a police officer.
00:10:27I really don't know what the situation is about.
00:10:29Nobody has told me anything because I'm accused of murdering the police.
00:10:36I know nothing more than that, and I do request someone to come forward to give me a legal assistance.
00:10:46Did you call the president?
00:10:47No, I have not been charged with that.
00:10:49In fact, nobody has said that to me yet.
00:10:52The first thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question.
00:10:59Dallas police produced the alleged Kennedy murder weapon.
00:11:04They claim to have found it one hour after the assassination in the Texas School Book Depository,
00:11:11and that it belonged to Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:11:15Without any doubt, he's the killer.
00:11:17The law says beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty,
00:11:21which there's no question that he was the killer of President Kennedy.
00:11:25This photograph, purportedly showing Oswald holding the murder weapon,
00:11:29appeared on the front page of Life magazine in February 1964.
00:11:34It was one of two that had been found by police with Oswald's possessions the day after the assassination.
00:11:40The pictures appeared in the Warren Commission report
00:11:43and helped convince the American public of Oswald's guilt.
00:11:46On television, two of the Warren Commission counsel and chief apologists made great play with the photograph.
00:11:53We know that Oswald had possession of that rifle because we have his wife saying that it was, quote,
00:12:05fateful rifle of Lee Oswald.
00:12:08We obtained the actual photographs that the Warren Commission used from the National Archives
00:12:14and showed them to a top forensic expert.
00:12:17Detective Superintendent Malcolm Thompson worked for 30 years in the forensic science laboratory
00:12:23and photographic unit in the British police force.
00:12:26His job was to spot fakes and match likenesses.
00:12:30Thompson minutely examined the Warren Commission photographs.
00:12:34Among other things, he compared them with the photographs taken of Oswald by the Dallas police.
00:12:39The Dallas police photo showed Oswald had a rather pointed chin.
00:12:44On the Warren Commission photograph, even allowing for the shadow, the chin appeared unmistakably square.
00:12:50One can only conclude that Oswald's head has been stuck onto a chin, not being Oswald's chin.
00:12:59Then, to cover up the montage, retouching has been done.
00:13:06And when we consider this area of retouching here, one finds that there's a bulge in the line.
00:13:14And without doubt, that shows this area between the head and the pillar has been retouched.
00:13:21But when one examines the shadow content, one sees the gun at an angle to the body which does not relate to the angle in the shadow.
00:13:34The gun is reaching far more out to the right, more in a horizontal position here in relation to the body shadow,
00:13:43than the gun is actually being held by the person.
00:13:46Are you suggesting that those shadows have actually been touched in?
00:13:51They've been touched in.
00:13:52Yeah.
00:13:55Again, the arm just doesn't look natural.
00:13:58In fact, it looks as if it's been stuck onto the body.
00:14:03After examining these photographs, what is your professional opinion on them?
00:14:08I think they're a fake.
00:14:10Thompson's view was confirmed by the commanding officer of the Canadian Air Force Photographic Department.
00:14:17He found that the heads were exactly the same size, although the bodies were two centimeters different.
00:14:23He then made transparencies of the two heads, one red and one blue.
00:14:28He then superimposed the two supposedly different heads and found that they matched exactly, a photographic impossibility.
00:14:34The Warren Commission's case against Oswald centered on the celebrated theory of the single bullet that allegedly went through both the President and Governor Connolly to emerge virtually unscathed.
00:14:47One Warren Commission lawyer said,
00:14:50To say they were hit by separate bullets is synonymous with saying there were two assassins.
00:14:56In other words, two people were involved.
00:14:59Newly released documents about the Warren Commission deliberations show the members were far from unanimous about the controversial single bullet theory.
00:15:08Former Senator John Sherman Cooper is the first member of the Warren Commission to agree to talk on television about what went on inside the deliberations.
00:15:19Yes, there were disagreements.
00:15:21I think the most serious, one of the ones that comes to make it most vividly, of course, was the question of whether or not the first shot went through President Kennedy and then through Governor Connolly, who was sitting on the jump seat in front of him.
00:15:42I heard Governor Connolly testify very strongly that he was not struck the same bullet.
00:15:49And I could not convince myself that the same bullet struck both of them, although there were experts who said it could.
00:16:05You mean that you yourself weren't convinced about the single bullet theory?
00:16:10No, I wasn't convinced by it. Neither was Senator Russell.
00:16:13Just before he died in 1971, Senator Russell caused the first cracks in the Warren Commission's Gibraltar of factual literature.
00:16:21Russell said publicly, I think someone else worked with Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:16:26Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry was in the fatal motorcade just ahead of the President and cannot accept the Warren Commission view that the only shot came from behind.
00:16:35I think there's a possibility that one could have come from in front of us.
00:16:40We've never been able to prove that. But just in my mind and by the direction of the blood and brain from the President from one of the shots, it would just seem that it would have to be fired from the front rather than behind.
00:17:00I can't say that I could swear that I believe there was one man and one man alone. I think that there's a possibility there could have been another man.
00:17:09In his 12 hours of questioning by Dallas police, Oswald continuously denied he had shot the President.
00:17:16The notes of his interrogation have never been produced.
00:17:19The Assistant Attorney General of Dallas, William Alexander, was present at several of the interrogation sessions,
00:17:25and he remains disturbed by the curious demeanor of Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:17:30I was amazed that a person so young would have the self-control that he had.
00:17:37It was almost as if he had anticipated the situation. It was almost as if he had been rehearsed or programmed to meet the situation that he found himself in.
00:17:52It was almost as if he anticipated every question, every suggestion, every move that any of the people in charge of him made.
00:18:04Rehearsed by whom?
00:18:06Who knows?
00:18:07The question, who was Lee Harvey Oswald, is central to the mystery.
00:18:12It's now possible to re-examine Oswald's life in the light of documentary evidence unknown to the Warren Commission or deliberately withheld.
00:18:21Oswald spent his early years in an orphanage.
00:18:26At the age of 17, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps.
00:18:30A year later, he was sent to one of the most secret U.S. bases in the world, Atsugi in Japan.
00:18:36From here, the CIA operated spy flights over Communist China using U-2 reconnaissance planes.
00:18:43Oswald became a radar operator, granted special security clearance with access to top secret codes and flight plans.
00:18:54Oswald was known as something of a loner.
00:18:57He began to learn Russian, and he earned the nickname, Comrade Oswaldkevich.
00:19:03The Marxist Marine in the CIA base seemed a curious contradiction.
00:19:07He crossed paths with Sergeant Jerry Hemming, who also served in radar control at the Atsugi base,
00:19:14Naval Intelligence.
00:19:17The first time we met Oswald, I felt he was working for somebody.
00:19:22And I felt at that time it was Naval Intelligence.
00:19:26What made you feel that he was working for an intelligence?
00:19:28Well, the questions he was asking, and by his obvious knowledge of my background, somebody had briefed him.
00:19:36In autumn, 1959, Oswald suddenly left the Marines and went to Moscow.
00:19:41Unexplained money and an unlisted flight enabled him to arrive at the American Embassy.
00:19:46There, he told Consul John McVicker, he intended to become a Soviet citizen and turn over American radar secrets.
00:19:54McVicker felt he was following a pattern of behavior in which he had been tutored by a person or persons unknown.
00:20:01Seemed to be using words he had learned, but did not fully understand.
00:20:05In short, it seemed to me there was a possibility that he had been in contact with others before or during his Marine Corps tour,
00:20:13who had guided him and encouraged him in his actions.
00:20:18Oswald went to work in a radio factory in the Russian city of Minsk.
00:20:22But in America, at the same time, Oswald's identity was causing a problem for the FBI.
00:20:28In a secret memorandum, J. Edgar Hoover wrote on June 3, 1960,
00:20:33there is a possibility that an imposter is using Oswald's birth certificate.
00:20:37Later, another memo described that possibility as fact.
00:20:41During his two and a half years in Russia, Oswald got married to Marina Prusikova, the niece of a Red Army colonel.
00:20:51He is thought to have been a Soviet intelligence officer.
00:20:57In 1962, Oswald was allowed to leave Russia for the United States.
00:21:02The defector was allowed back into the country with no hostile reception.
00:21:06Richard Sprague was the director of the House Assassination Committee at its formation.
00:21:12His trip to Russia raised a number of questions that we wanted to get into.
00:21:17For example, when any American went to Russia and renounced his American citizenship
00:21:27and subsequently changed his mind and wanted to come back to this country,
00:21:32upon returning to this country, there was a thorough debriefing by the CIA,
00:21:40with one exception, as far as we could ascertain, Oswald.
00:21:45The key is, why did they let him bring a Russian-born wife out contrary to present Russian policy?
00:21:51He had to get a special dispensation from the highest levels to bring his Russian-born wife out.
00:21:58That in itself says that somebody was giving Oswald highest priority,
00:22:02either because we had trained and sent him there and they went along and pretended they didn't know to fake us out,
00:22:10or, in fact, they had incalcated him and sent him back here and were trying to fake us out that way.
00:22:16But he got a green light that no other American had gotten at that particular point in time.
00:22:21The CIA deputy director of plans, Richard Helms, swore to the Warren Commission
00:22:26that the agency never had or contemplated any contact with Oswald.
00:22:31That testimony is now known to be false.
00:22:34A CIA document by an unnamed agent has recently been released under the Freedom of Information Act.
00:22:40The officer writes,
00:22:42We showed intelligence interest in Oswald and discussed the laying on of interviews.
00:22:51It is now known that the Soviet secret police, the KGB, did consider using Oswald,
00:22:57according to a top Soviet intelligence official who defected to America.
00:23:03Ex-President Johnson said,
00:23:05I don't think the Warren Commission or me or anyone else is absolutely sure of everything that might have motivated Oswald
00:23:12or others that could have been involved.
00:23:14But he was quite a mysterious fellow and he did have connections that bore examination.
00:23:20Shortly after his return from Russia, Oswald took a Greyhound bus to New Orleans.
00:23:26He lived there until September 1963, two months before the assassination.
00:23:32At that time, New Orleans was one of the main centers of right-wing exiles from Castro's Cuba.
00:23:42In New Orleans, Oswald remained true to his image as an amateur Marxist, and this time the cause was Cuba.
00:23:52Soon after arriving, he was out on the streets distributing pro-Castro leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba committee.
00:23:59Oswald was the committee's local spokesman and only member, a futile gesture in the New Orleans of 1963.
00:24:09Oswald had picked the very issue which had bedeviled the presidency of John F. Kennedy from the beginning.
00:24:19Fidel Castro's takeover was already a most urgent problem when Kennedy reached the White House.
00:24:27Dr. Carlos Bringer, a rabidly anti-communist Cuban exile, encountered Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans.
00:24:35Today, as then, Bringer has no doubt about Oswald or who was behind his actions.
00:24:41Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy.
00:24:44Lee Harvey Oswald killed officer typically.
00:24:47Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist.
00:24:50Lee Harvey Oswald was a Castro follower.
00:24:53It has been proof that the Kennedy government was trying to get rid of Castro.
00:24:59I am sure that Castro got rid of Kennedy.
00:25:05In the months before the assassination, billboards in the streets of Havana blatantly identified Cuban public enemy number one, President John F. Kennedy.
00:25:19And three months before the assassination, Fidel Castro publicly warned,
00:25:24United States leaders should realize that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.
00:25:33Today, Castro denies that he had anything to do with the assassination.
00:25:37Why? Because we do not believe that the system is abolished by liquidating the leaders.
00:25:45It is the system that we opposed, the reactionary ideas, not the men.
00:25:51Our reaction to the assassination was one of grief, because it seemed to us a painful, tragic way for Kennedy's life to end.
00:26:04Unknown to President Kennedy throughout his time at the White House, the CIA was hatching an extraordinary series of assassination plots against the life of Fidel Castro.
00:26:14These plots were never revealed to the Warren Commission, even though one of its members, Alan Dulles, had himself been director of the CIA when the plans were conceived.
00:26:24In 1976, one of the plot's coordinators secretly informed the government he believed some of his associates had gone on to murder the president.
00:26:33The sensational revelation, detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee report, was that the CIA had recruited hitmen for the anti-Castro plots by making a deal with the Mafia.
00:26:46This is how it happened.
00:26:48The CIA, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, commissioned one of its consultants, Robert Mayhew, the right-hand man of Howard Hughes, to set up the contract.
00:26:58Johnny Roselli, mob leader in Las Vegas, was the first contact.
00:27:02He recruited Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mafia leader, who in turn brought in Santos Traficante, the man who had been at the top of the Havana Mafia before Castro took over.
00:27:16The fashionable Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami, was the setting for one of the first meetings between the CIA and the Mafia.
00:27:26Among those present was a man who now calls himself Dr. Peters.
00:27:30He has now chosen to live in a remote mountain farmhouse thousands of miles away from Miami.
00:27:36We arrived at the Fontainebleau Hotel.
00:27:39We checked into a private suite that was occupied by Mr. John Roselli of Los Angeles and Vegas and Sam Giancano from Chicago.
00:27:52I recall we were all down in the boom-boom room having food and drinks.
00:27:58Now, as this conversation developed, I learned that Mayhew, through the CIA, had a contract to have Castro killed.
00:28:13The method to be used was a liquid, a little bottle that was to be administered in his food.
00:28:25And it wouldn't take effect for two or three days.
00:28:32If it would make the person ill, it would take two or three days to kill him.
00:28:38But then an autopsy would not show the poison.
00:28:42So why did the CIA need to go to the Mafia?
00:28:45They had no other way of getting to people in Cuba.
00:28:50You had to have some individual or somebody that knew a lot of Cubans and knew the type of Cubans that could be prevailed upon to get into such a plot.
00:29:04Who would those contacts in Havana take?
00:29:06Well, the main contact would have been Santos Traficante.
00:29:11Santos Traficante was a man with good reason to join murder plots against Fidel Castro.
00:29:19In pre-revolutionary days, Havana had been the world capital of organized crime.
00:29:24Traficante was one of its bosses.
00:29:26There was a profit of $100 million a year from gambling, prostitution, drugs, and luxury hotels.
00:29:38But under Castro, everything changed.
00:29:44Within 18 months, the hotels were deserted, the casinos nationalized, and Santos Traficante was in jail.
00:29:52The humiliated Mafiosi now had a common cause with America's invisible government.
00:29:59Things did go on at the CIA that the President did not totally know about.
00:30:03That's become clear in the investigations of subsequent CIA activities in Cuba,
00:30:09most particularly the attempts to assassinate Castro.
00:30:13President Kennedy certainly knew nothing about that.
00:30:15Are you saying that President Kennedy didn't know of the attempts by the CIA, the plots by the CIA to assassinate Castro?
00:30:25Correct.
00:30:26Did the President know about the liaison there was clearly between the CIA and the Mafia?
00:30:33No.
00:30:35Although this had come to the notice of Robert Kennedy?
00:30:40Yes, and I shouldn't say no so categorically because I wasn't privy to all private conversations between the two of them.
00:30:47But again, bear in mind that that was a liaison established before the Kennedy administration took office.
00:30:53It was brought to the attention of Robert Kennedy in a context which indicated that that liaison had ended.
00:31:00So Robert Kennedy merely dismissed it saying,
00:31:04I'm going to do anything like this again, make sure I know about it.
00:31:08So I doubt that having ended, he would have brought it to the attention of the President.
00:31:13In the years after the assassination of the President, Robert Kennedy was reportedly tormented by the notion that the CIA mafia plots had backfired against his brother.
00:31:27Judge Bert Griffin was one of the legal counsel for the Warren Commission.
00:31:31He now feels that the Commission was duped by the CIA, which concealed its assassination plots against Castro.
00:31:38I feel betrayed.
00:31:39I feel betrayed.
00:31:40I feel that the CIA lied to us, that we had an agency of government here, which we were depending upon, that we expected to be truthful with us and to cooperate with us, and they didn't do it.
00:31:57The CIA concealed from us the fact that they knew that they were involved in efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro, which could have been of extreme importance to us.
00:32:12Especially as the CIA were involved in working with the mafia at that time.
00:32:17Of course.
00:32:18Of course.
00:32:19Of course.
00:32:20If that had been told us, Wyatt would have completed a set of links to a whole range of investigations that, based on the evidence that we did have, seemed to be speculative and unlikely to be productive.
00:32:39One such area of evidence was a further episode in the strange travels of Lee Harvey Oswald, and it involved Cuba.
00:32:47Allegedly, he traveled to Mexico City, and according to the Warren Commission, made a visit to the Soviet Embassy, and twice, with an urgent request for permission to visit Havana, to the Cuban Embassy.
00:32:58The commission examined Oswald's visa for Mexico, number 24085, but in the list of other visa applicants made in New Orleans the same day, the FBI said it could not identify the person next to Oswald, 24084.
00:33:15It was not true.
00:33:17We now know the second traveler's identity.
00:33:20The missing name was William George Godet.
00:33:25His identity has been revealed only because of a bureaucratic blunder, when another FBI document was declassified.
00:33:32At the time he received his visa for Mexico immediately before Oswald, Godet was, and had been for years, an operative for the CIA.
00:33:40I cannot account for why my name was not on that list, and it actually should have been on it.
00:33:50Now, again, who was responsible, I don't know.
00:33:56People have inferred that maybe they found out because of my CIA connections, it would be better my name was deleted from that list.
00:34:06I have no control over what the CIA did or didn't do down in Mexico.
00:34:11Are you saying it was a pure coincidence that your name was on the list next to his?
00:34:16I would say so, yes.
00:34:18I know it's hard to believe because this word coincidence keeps cropping up in everything that I seem to do, that I'm just loaded down with coincidences.
00:34:30But I'll have to let it go at that.
00:34:35The new assassinations committee has reopened the investigation into Oswald's alleged visit to Mexico City.
00:34:42And the story has grown stranger and stranger.
00:34:45The Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City were under 24 hour a day surveillance by the CIA.
00:34:52Phone calls supposedly and every person who entered the embassies was photographed by hidden cameras.
00:35:05But as the record now reveals, these were the photographs which the CIA produced.
00:35:10And according to the CIA, they purport to show a man who identified himself as Lee Harvey Oswald entering the Cuban embassy.
00:35:21The photographs allegedly of Oswald going into the Cuban embassy, as we all know, in fact, were not photographs of Oswald.
00:35:37Secondly, it turns out that those photographs, even if they were of the wrong person, you would expect they would be of a person entering the Cuban embassy.
00:35:47But it turns out they are photographs of someone entering the Russian embassy.
00:35:52And there's a question raised, how could they so mix up even what building they're talking about?
00:35:59In addition, when we inquire, well, where were the photographs you took of people who entered the Cuban embassy on the day in question?
00:36:09We're told that the cameras did not work that day. And we then want to start talking.
00:36:15I want to talk to the camera people. I want to find out, is that true? And that's where we get stopped.
00:36:20Unbeknownst to me and deliberately denied to me during the hearings of my subcommittee was another set of photographs of this same man.
00:36:28We put Lee Harvey Oswald's name on him. We say we now don't know who he is.
00:36:33And we deliberately withheld from the Warren Commission and my committee two other photographs of this man in two separate changes of clothing.
00:36:40The cover up is going on.
00:36:43On whose instructions do you think those photographs could have been withheld now from your committee?
00:36:51Well, it has to be somebody very high up in government who doesn't want it to come out.
00:36:55I don't know who held it up.
00:36:57But all I can say is I'm sure it was at the highest level because I think this whole thing points to being at the highest level.
00:37:04Because Oswald's alleged phone calls to the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City were allegedly tape recorded,
00:37:14the CIA presented the Warren Commission with a transcript of what he supposedly said.
00:37:20But it claimed the actual tapes were destroyed before President Kennedy's murder.
00:37:25The House Assassinations Committee learned differently.
00:37:29The CIA said that they had reused that tape prior to the assassination of President Kennedy,
00:37:38yet the FBI has a document stating that some of their agents listened to the tape after the assassination of President Kennedy,
00:37:47and the voice on there was not Oswald's.
00:37:50In addition, the CIA presented a transcript of that conversation.
00:37:57We had interviewed the typist who typed it up,
00:38:02who said that the transcript presented was not in fact what was typed up by whoever it was who spoke on that conversation.
00:38:11These are areas that I wanted to get into.
00:38:16There is now new evidence that someone in the CIA did try to implicate Cuba in the assassination,
00:38:24and on top of that confused the investigation into the activities of the real Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:38:30Antonio Veciana was once a CIA operative.
00:38:33He says that within days of the assassination, his CIA case officer asked him to persuade his cousin Reese in Cuba's embassy in Mexico to say Oswald had been there.
00:38:45He may question me, do you think if we can offer good money, a great deal of money to Reese in Mexico?
00:39:00So you think that the American case officer, the American intelligence officer, was trying to make up a story?
00:39:06A story?
00:39:07Yes.
00:39:08Why did you never give this information to the Warren Commission?
00:39:10I never received a subpoena or I never received a call.
00:39:13And in my profession, you know, this is a risk to talk.
00:39:20And now it's 15 years.
00:39:23But in that time, it's better to be quiet and to be silent.
00:39:27Sometimes we ask ourselves if someone did not wish to involve Cuba in this.
00:39:33Because I'm under the impression that Kennedy's assassination was organized by reactionaries in the United States.
00:39:39And that it was all the result of a conspiracy.
00:39:42This is my opinion.
00:39:45And my impression is that the man who carried it out was a provocateur.
00:39:50The great hope of the Cuban exiles during Kennedy's presidency was the amphibious landing at the Bay of Pigs.
00:40:01Instead, it was a victory for Castro.
00:40:04In the wake of the exiles defeat, President Kennedy seemed to provide the boost of morale the exiles needed.
00:40:10Castro and his fellow dictators may rule nations.
00:40:14They do not rule people.
00:40:16They may imprison bodies, but they do not imprison spirits.
00:40:21They may destroy the exercise of liberty, but they cannot eliminate the determination to be free.
00:40:32Thousands of dispossessed Cubans gathered to hear the president in Miami.
00:40:37And the promise in his words was just what they wanted to hear.
00:40:40I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.
00:40:51The speech was rapturously received.
00:40:54But in the crowd were many who blamed Kennedy for not intervening at the Bay of Pigs.
00:40:59U.S. authorities were now actually preventing many guerrilla raids against Castro.
00:41:03And some suspected Kennedy was going soft on communism.
00:41:06In the eyes of some CIA-trained militants, Kennedy had become a traitor to the cause.
00:41:15At that time, in late 1962, Jerry Hemming, ex-marine and intelligence operative, was training anti-Castro guerrillas.
00:41:25He worked with some of the most violent Cuban militants with the most passionate feelings about the exile cause.
00:41:32Were you ever offered money to assassinate President Kennedy?
00:41:36Directly.
00:41:37On numerous occasions.
00:41:40In our activities seeking support for the Cuban exiles, we encountered people from most of what we would call a varied political spectrum.
00:41:55The majority of them right-wingers, conservatives, anti-communists.
00:42:02Within these elements, groups of people, there were quite a few very outspoken.
00:42:09As relationships developed and as time went on, some of them very pointedly made statements as to how to resolve the communist menace, how to resolve Castro.
00:42:22Quite often it would boil down to, why are we wasting our time trying to get Castro?
00:42:28Why don't we go to the root of the problem and eliminate the communists in Washington, the number one man, JFK?
00:42:39In the six months before the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald stepped into yet another role and created new mysteries.
00:42:48This was to be perhaps the most contradictory episode of all.
00:42:52For during his time in New Orleans, Oswald, on the street, the pro-Castro agitator, cultivated opposite causes and unlikely friends.
00:43:02Oswald went privately to offer his services and military experience to Carlos Bringer, who was a leading member of an exile organization set up by the CIA.
00:43:13He was claiming that he was anti-Castro, but he had experience in guerrilla warfare and training in the Marines, and that he was willing to train Cubans to fight against Castro.
00:43:27Two days later, Bringer was outraged to see Oswald handing out pro-Castro leaflets.
00:43:33I encountered him with the sign Viva Castro and hands of Cuba. Viva Fidel was the reading of the sign.
00:43:41Viva Fidel.
00:43:42Viva Fidel.
00:43:43And he's, I was surprised when he was the same man that has been in my store offering his service to trained Cubans.
00:43:53One of the most important Warren Commission witnesses about the double life of Lee Harvey Oswald has never before agreed to speak publicly.
00:44:02Sylvia Odio, who has now changed her name and residence.
00:44:06She lived here in Dallas in September 1963.
00:44:11She was a wealthy Cuban exile activist.
00:44:14Two months before the assassination, she received a visit from two Latins and one American,
00:44:19at the time when Lee Harvey Oswald was supposedly visiting the Cuban embassy in Mexico.
00:44:25I was visited by a man and two other men, but specifically Lee Harvey Oswald, even though he introduced himself as Leon Harvey Oswald at the time.
00:44:36You have no doubt at all in your mind, now or then, that this was Lee Harvey Oswald?
00:44:42Oh no, not at all.
00:44:43He was Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:44:46At the meeting, Oswald and the two men told Mrs. Odio they had just come from New Orleans
00:44:52and wanted to know if she would finance some anti-Castro operations they were planning.
00:44:57She refused.
00:44:58But the next morning, she received a telephone call from one of the two Latins.
00:45:05It was from Leopoldo, which was a tall guy.
00:45:08And he told me what, the first thing he said was, what do you think of the American?
00:45:13And I said, well, I didn't think very much. I didn't make an opinion.
00:45:16He says, well, you know, he's kind of loco.
00:45:18Loco means crazy in Spanish and kind of nuts.
00:45:21And he's a Marine, an ex-Marine.
00:45:25He's an expert marksman.
00:45:27And he would be a tremendous asset to anyone, except that he said, you never know how to take him.
00:45:35You know, he can go either way.
00:45:37So I didn't know if he was trying to sell him to me or he was trying to get an opinion from me.
00:45:42See what I mean?
00:45:44So this guy, Leopoldo, insisted that the American had said that we Cubans should have shot President Kennedy after Bay of Pigs,
00:45:57that we didn't have any guts and that we should do something like that.
00:46:01So immediately I realized that there was an assassination idea or plot.
00:46:09The Warren Commission was disturbed by Mrs. Odeo's testimony.
00:46:14Papers now declassified show that commission staffers found Mrs. Odeo extremely credible.
00:46:20But members of the commission decided to ignore her story.
00:46:23The chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin, said testily, at this stage we are supposed to be closing doors, not opening them.
00:46:30That may have been a bad misjudgment.
00:46:33I still believe that he had nothing to do with Cuba, with Fidel Castro.
00:46:42I still believe that he had something to do with sources within the United States using, perhaps, Cubans in this conspiracy.
00:46:54But I still believe that it is a conspiracy.
00:46:57And the interesting thing is that here was Oswald, who had two associations.
00:47:02One is with Sylvia Odeo, with a group of anti-Castro Cubans.
00:47:06So he was clearly, clearly with them and associating with them, who had some motivation.
00:47:11Same time he was handing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee with the other side of the fence.
00:47:16So the two groups that had the most motivation to assassinate the president, he was dealing with.
00:47:22And we decided not to investigate either avenue.
00:47:25We didn't want to be embarrassed by the Cuban connection.
00:47:28Was there no investigation at all of Oswald's connections with the proud anti-Castro factions?
00:47:37Very little. In fact, this gets back to being an agent or double agent, because he played both roles.
00:47:43Many people said he was a forthright, upstanding American as a young person.
00:47:49And yet, later depicted him as a Castro-loving, Cuban-loving, Russian-loving person.
00:47:55That smacks of an intelligence relationship with someone who's assuming a false identity.
00:48:01There is now considerable evidence of Oswald's links with agents from the CIA and the FBI in the months before the assassination.
00:48:09In August 1963, in Dallas, the CIA operative, Antonio Bessiana, met with his case officer, Maurice Bishop.
00:48:17Bishop was the CIA coordinator of the most violent anti-Castro exile group.
00:48:23And in Dallas, he also met with Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:48:27I saw Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, in a meeting of 10 or 15 minutes with Mr. Maurice Bishop in Dallas at that time.
00:48:37And you feel certain that Oswald was working with or associated with American intelligence?
00:48:43Well, at least he was associated with Maurice Bishop.
00:48:47And if Maurice Bishop was an intelligence, he was working for an intelligence service in the United States, I don't doubt that he was working with him.
00:48:59Before the Dallas meeting, Oswald had lived for five months in New Orleans.
00:49:06There he had stamped on the bottom of some of his pro-Castro leaflets the address 544 Camp Street.
00:49:13But this was the center for anti-Castro activities.
00:49:16It was occupied by a former top FBI agent, Guy Bannister, now heavily involved with right-wing Cuban exiles.
00:49:24Bannister met with Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:49:28I do know that I saw him one time with a former, I think he was an FBI agent, a man by the name of Guy Bannister.
00:49:36And Guy, of course, is now dead. What Guy's role was in all of this, I really don't know.
00:49:44But I did see him and discuss various things with Bannister at the time.
00:49:51And I think Bannister knew a whole lot of what was going on.
00:49:57In Magazine Street, New Orleans, Oswald worked for the William Riley Coffee Company.
00:50:02And would often make visits next door to the Crescent City garage.
00:50:07It was the garage that the FBI used to park its unmarked cars.
00:50:11Its owner, Adrian Alba, says that on at least two occasions, he personally witnessed Lee Harvey Oswald receiving white envelopes delivered in cars that were part of the FBI pool.
00:50:28Alba had no idea what the envelopes contained.
00:50:31He is now afraid to talk publicly, like another witness who privately confirms that he saw Oswald in the company of an FBI special agent in New Orleans.
00:50:43It has now become clear that the FBI did have something to hide in its relationship with Oswald.
00:50:49Two years ago, the House committee charged with oversight of the FBI called the Bureau's special agent in Dallas at the time of the assassination to testify.
00:50:58He is James Hostie.
00:51:00His name and address were eventually found in Oswald's notebook, though they had originally been removed by the FBI.
00:51:07Now, Hostie was to reveal a more startling cover-up.
00:51:11He had received a note from Oswald just before the president was killed.
00:51:16Before the president was killed, Hostie sent the note and a memo to his superior, Gordon Shanklin.
00:51:21The memorandum and the note in question, he handed it to me and he said, in effect, Oswald's dead now.
00:51:30There can be no trial. Here, get rid of this.
00:51:33I then proceeded to tear it up.
00:51:37His presence, he said, no, get it out of here.
00:51:39I don't even want it in this office. Get rid of it.
00:51:42I then took it out and destroyed it.
00:51:44And how did you destroy it?
00:51:45I took it into the washroom and flushed it down the drain.
00:51:49Agents, how about it?
00:51:51I understand about 30.
00:51:52About 30. How many in the Washington field office and headquarters?
00:51:56To my knowledge, none.
00:51:57Well, wasn't Mr. Shanklin on the telephone a lot?
00:52:02A lot with J. Edgar Hoover?
00:52:04He was on the telephone to FBI headquarters.
00:52:07I don't know specifically who he was talking to.
00:52:10Were he and Mr. Hoover rather close?
00:52:13Well, he worked for Mr. Hoover and he reported to him.
00:52:19The feisty J. Edgar Hoover was determined that the FBI should emerge with its reputation enhanced from the assassination inquiry.
00:52:27But it's now clear from the Senate Intelligence Committee report that Hoover and his top aides deliberately withheld many vital areas of information from the Warren Commission.
00:52:37The Commission had no independent investigators and relied totally on the FBI.
00:52:46Did you trust J. Edgar Hoover?
00:52:48I don't think any of us trusted J. Edgar Hoover when it came to the question of the image of the FBI.
00:52:55But do you think that for one reason or another the FBI deliberately misled the Warren Commission?
00:53:02I think in any area where Oswald's relationship to the FBI, even as a suspect from the FBI, could have supplied a motive for Oswald, in those areas we could not trust Hoover.
00:53:20I'm just a patsy!
00:53:25I'm a patsy, said Oswald.
00:53:29But whatever he might eventually have revealed about his links with intelligence agents was lost to history when he was silenced forever in Dallas police headquarters.
00:53:39Do you have anything to say in your defense?
00:53:54Oswald has a shot!
00:53:56Oswald has a shot!
00:53:58The suspect's name is Jack Rubenstein, I believe.
00:54:03He goes with the name of Jack Ruby.
00:54:06Jack Ruby, the Dallas strip club owner, claimed his sensational debut on national television was purely spontaneous.
00:54:13He told the Warren Commission he shot Oswald in a moment of frenzy to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the grief of returning to Dallas for Oswald's trial.
00:54:21His lawyer, Tom Howard, confirmed this moving tale.
00:54:25He told me that really the first thing that he remembered of the shooting itself was when he was in the homicide office after the shooting and he said they were shouting and someone was shouting at him,
00:54:44You shot Oswald. Why did you shoot Oswald?
00:54:49And that's really the first recollection he has of it.
00:54:53I would think that we would at least plead temporary insanity.
00:55:01Years later, it became clear that Ruby's reason for shooting Oswald was just a clever lawyer's invention.
00:55:11In a note to a different lawyer at his trial, seven months after the assassination, Ruby wrote,
00:55:16You should know this.
00:55:18Tom Howard told me to say that I shot Oswald so that Caroline and Mrs. Kennedy wouldn't have to come to Dallas to testify.
00:55:25Okay?
00:55:26This note was unknown to the Warren Commission or to the jury in Ruby's trial, as was much else about the life of Jack Ruby.
00:55:35The commission found no substantiation for rumors linking Ruby with pro or anti-Castro activities,
00:55:43and no significant link between Ruby and organized crime.
00:55:47Jack Ruby died of cancer in 1967.
00:55:53He's buried in Chicago where his career began.
00:55:56In the 30s, under his original name, Jack Rubenstein, he was a runner for Al Capone.
00:56:04In 1939, he made the news.
00:56:06He was involved in police inquiries following the murder of a Chicago union boss.
00:56:11Jack Rubenstein was then the local union secretary.
00:56:15Twenty years later, Robert Kennedy, in his book on the underworld, The Enemy Within,
00:56:19called this murder a key step towards mafia domination of the Teamsters Union.
00:56:25From Chicago, Ruby moved to Dallas, where he was to run the Vegas and Carousel strip clubs.
00:56:31But in report after report from the FBI and Dallas police,
00:56:35Ruby is identified as a key figure in narcotics, gambling, and prostitution.
00:56:40Jack Ruby was the man to see in Dallas.
00:56:42His best friend, who represented Ruby's direct link to the top mafia bosses, was Louis J. McWillie.
00:56:50I idolized that boy, Ruby told the Warren Commission.
00:56:53In 1958, McWillie left for Cuba.
00:56:57And Ruby became involved in running guns to Castro.
00:57:05The guns came from the mafia, who wanted Castro to be in its debt.
00:57:09At the time, the boss of the Havana underworld was Santos Traficante.
00:57:14And he employed Louis J. McWillie.
00:57:18A recently declassified FBI document that intrigued the Senate Intelligence Committee,
00:57:24indicates that McWillie became a close associate of some of the most prominent mafia leaders.
00:57:29The report indicates,
00:57:31McWillie solidified his syndicate connections through his association with Santos Traficante.
00:57:39Traficante was jailed when Castro took over.
00:57:42Then Ruby contacted an intimate of Castro, the gun runner, Robert McKeon.
00:57:47He wanted to know if he could come down to talk to me about a few things that he wanted to talk about.
00:57:53Getting somebody out of Cuba, if I could help him get them out.
00:57:56I said, well, that's all right. Come on down.
00:57:59So, I think the next day, he came out to the bar where I owned it.
00:58:08And he walked up and he was well dressed.
00:58:12He was dressed real nice, you know, and he introduced himself to me.
00:58:18And I said, well, you're the one that called last night.
00:58:21He said, yeah, my name is Ruby, Jack Ruby.
00:58:23I'd like to go over to Cuba.
00:58:24He said, wonder if you'd give me a letter of introduction to Castro.
00:58:28I said, no, I wouldn't want to do anything like that.
00:58:32He said, well, I certainly wouldn't make it worth your while to do it.
00:58:37I said, what do you mean worth my while?
00:58:39And he said, well, it'd be worth a lot of money to me.
00:58:43And I said, well, I don't know how much money it'd be worth.
00:58:47I said, but, and so he mentioned $25,000.
00:58:51But to my opinion, that was quite a bit of money.
00:58:53Well, I found out later through friends of mine that he did go to Cuba and he did use my name.
00:59:00There is documentary evidence that when Ruby reached Havana, he paid several visits to the jailed mafia leader Santos Traficante.
00:59:08It comes in a declassified CIA cable quoting a British journalist who was in the same jail as Traficante.
00:59:15The memo says, Traficante was visited frequently by an American gangster type named Ruby.
00:59:21Traficante was released after six months in jail.
00:59:24He left Havana to run the organized crime empire in Florida.
00:59:28Nothing in relation to this, okay?
00:59:30No comment.
00:59:32It was in Miami that Traficante became the top coordinator of the secret CIA mafia plots against Castro,
00:59:38working with Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana.
00:59:41But while the invisible arm of the American government was embracing the mob, all unknown to President Kennedy,
00:59:47his administration had launched an unprecedented war on organized crime, led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
00:59:54I think that in the field of organized crime, I think it's a very serious situation that's facing the country in the present time.
01:00:03I think a lot of steps can be taken in order to deal with the problem.
01:00:07I think it's gotten much more serious over the period of the last ten years.
01:00:10During the Kennedy administration, organized crime convictions increased from 35 in 1960 to 163 years later.
01:00:20And in the same period, the number of mafia leaders targeted for prosecution rose from 40 to 2,300.
01:00:29Robert Kennedy's first major target was Carlos Marcelo, still one of the three most powerful mafia leaders in the country.
01:00:37His personal empire extends through Texas and most southern and border states.
01:00:42His base is in New Orleans, in a state where crime income is put at over $1 billion a year.
01:00:48Marcelo had long been an adversary of the Kennedys, since he had appeared before their senatorial committee on organized crime
01:00:55and exercised his constitutional rights.
01:00:59...of government to keep unionization out of Jefferson Parish.
01:01:03A decline enhanced on the ground of men coming from the nation.
01:01:06Now, according to the information that we have, you are an associate of Mr. Frank Casello, is that right?
01:01:12A decline enhanced on the same ground.
01:01:15In 1961, Marcelo was picked up on the street and deported to Guatemala.
01:01:20The Attorney General had struck.
01:01:22It was a public humiliation that Marcelo did not forget.
01:01:25After legal finagling, he returned to America.
01:01:28And in September 1962, he called a meeting at a hunting lodge outside New Orleans.
01:01:33One of those present told Pulitzer Prize-winning crime journalist Ed Reed
01:01:37how Marcelo sought revenge on Bobby Kennedy.
01:01:42Bobby, to him, represented a stone in his shoe.
01:01:48A place where it hurts the most.
01:01:50He put it out,
01:01:52which means take the stone out of his shoe.
01:01:56And of course, this is a reflection of the business that was within Carlos and Marcelo.
01:02:02And my informant heard him say very distinctly that in order to do away with Bobby,
01:02:08you had to get rid of the President of the United States.
01:02:12And that you had to find a nut who would be capable of assassinating the President.
01:02:17Carlos said, if you cut the head off a roof, the tail falls off.
01:02:21And this was the reason he gave for going for the President, Jack Kennedy, instead of Bobby Kennedy.
01:02:28Marcelo's reported threat was no isolated event.
01:02:31Mob minds think alike.
01:02:33At exactly the same time in Miami Beach, two men met in the Scott Bryant Hotel.
01:02:38One was Jose Alaman, a wealthy Cuban exile.
01:02:42The other was Santos Traficante.
01:02:44Traficante had promised to loan Alaman one and a half million dollars.
01:02:49It was to come from the Mafia-dominated Teamsters Union led by Jimmy Hoffa.
01:02:54Traficante told Alaman, Jimmy Hoffa has personally okayed it.
01:02:59Enough hot-bellied, slick individuals who represent the employers entirely.
01:03:06But to Traficante's fury, Hoffa and the Teamsters were now the major targets of the Kennedy's personal war on organized crime.
01:03:15Traficante told Alaman, have you seen how the President's brother is hitting Hoffa?
01:03:20He doesn't know that this kind of encounter is very delicate.
01:03:24Mark my words, this man Kennedy is in trouble and he will get what is coming to him.
01:03:30When Alaman countered that he thought Kennedy would be re-elected, Traficante retorted, no Jose, he is going to be hit.
01:03:38Before the assassination, Alaman, who was regarded as highly reliable by the FBI, reported Traficante's threat to the Bureau.
01:03:47Alaman was never asked to testify to the Warren Commission, nor was Traficante.
01:03:52The new House Assassinations Committee sees things differently.
01:03:56The whole truth and nothing but the truth, as you shall answer unto God.
01:04:02Thank you, you may be seated.
01:04:05Last year, it subpoenaed Santos Traficante and asked him,
01:04:09Did you ever discuss plans to assassinate President Kennedy?
01:04:13Prior to November 22, 1963, did you know Jack Ruby?
01:04:17While you were in prison in Cuba, were you visited by Jack Ruby?
01:04:21Traficante's lawyer, who also has Carlos Marcello as a client, asked for the television cameras to be excluded.
01:04:28Traficante then replied to all three questions.
01:04:35I respectfully refused to answer, pursuant to my constitutional rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
01:04:43Two of Traficante's associates in the CIA mafia plots against Castro were not so fortunate.
01:04:49In 1963, Sam Giancana was obsessed about the Kennedy's assault on organized crime, with good reason.
01:04:58Robert Kennedy had placed him top of the hit list for special attention.
01:05:12In 1975, Giancana was shot dead after he had been slated to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
01:05:19A year after Giancana's death, Johnny Roselli did testify in secret.
01:05:24Roselli, it emerges, had met Jack Ruby in Miami two months before the Kennedy assassination.
01:05:30He apparently told the committee his co-conspirators in the CIA mafia plots had gone on to murder Kennedy.
01:05:37And Jack Ruby was ordered to eliminate Oswald, said Roselli.
01:05:41Two months after giving new secret information to Intelligence Committee investigators,
01:05:48Roselli's mutilated body was found floating in Miami's dumbfoundling bay, stuffed in an oil drum.
01:05:56He was killed to shut him up once and for all.
01:06:03You see, originally, now this is personal opinion,
01:06:09originally this was to be a great secret.
01:06:15This was never to leak.
01:06:17You know, this is a terrible thing to have one country plotting to kill the leader of another country.
01:06:24Mayhew blew it first, he became the squealer.
01:06:27So he was out.
01:06:30The rest of us all kept quiet, forgot about it.
01:06:34I never heard of it.
01:06:36Who wanted to stop Johnny Roselli talking?
01:06:47Well, it'd be my opinion,
01:06:50that there's only one man that had most to lose.
01:06:55You might want to name him, because I have no proof.
01:07:07One man who's very big and has a big business.
01:07:11It's an unlawful business, a legal business.
01:07:15He was involved.
01:07:18He did not want, and he was given a guarantee, I understand,
01:07:24when they talked to him that he would never surface, his name would never be used.
01:07:28This was to be a great secret.
01:07:33When the Senate committee was formed, the headlines in Chicago said,
01:07:36Ginkano is, you know, hired to kill Castro.
01:07:42So a few days later, before Sam can come here to testify, he's dead.
01:07:48There's a gun found a few days later.
01:07:55The gun originally was purchased in Miami.
01:07:59Now, when do you get a hit man in Chicago going all the way to Miami to buy a gun?
01:08:04Then in Chicago, you get a gun on every corner.
01:08:07Somebody didn't want Sam to testify, and all Sam was going to say,
01:08:17I gave a contact to Santos.
01:08:22Period.
01:08:23I don't know anything more about it.
01:08:25Santos struck a contact.
01:08:26That would have been the headline.
01:08:28Was there anything about the way they were killed that indicated?
01:08:32Well, in Sam's case, the shooting, placing the bullets around the mouth,
01:08:43which is a mob's way of saying, keep your mouth shut, seal his lips.
01:08:49It's an old mob method to warn others not to talk.
01:08:56The Kennedy war on organized crime had begun in the late 50s,
01:09:00when they probed union corruption and Jimmy Hoffa's role in the Teamster Mafia alliance.
01:09:06Back to this, a strike-breaking union-busting bill.
01:09:09Mr. Hoffa, this bill is not a strike-breaking union-busting bill.
01:09:13You're the best argument I know for us.
01:09:15Your testimony here this afternoon, your complete indifference to the fact that
01:09:18numerous people who hold responsible positions in your union come before this committee
01:09:24and take the Fifth Amendment because an honest answer might tend to incriminate them.
01:09:28Leaving one committee session, Hoffa was heard to mutter,
01:09:32that SOB, I'll break his back, the little son of a bitch.
01:09:36The next morning, Bobby Kennedy picked up the remark.
01:09:39While leaving the hearings after these people had testified regarding this matter,
01:09:43did you say that SOB, I'll break his back?
01:09:47Who?
01:09:48You.
01:09:49Say to who?
01:09:50To anyone.
01:09:51Did you make that statement after these people testified before the committee?
01:09:55I never talked to either one of them after testifying.
01:09:57No, I'm not talking about to them.
01:09:59Did you make that statement here in the hearing room after the testimony was finished?
01:10:05Not concerning them, far as I know of.
01:10:07Well, who did you make it about?
01:10:08I don't know.
01:10:09I may have been discussing somebody in the figure of speech.
01:10:11Well, who did you make the statement?
01:10:12Whose back were you going to break?
01:10:13I don't even remember it.
01:10:14Well, whose back were you going to break, Mr. Hoffa?
01:10:16The figure of his speech, I don't even know who I was talking about,
01:10:18and I don't know what you're talking about.
01:10:20When Jack Kennedy became president and his brother attorney general,
01:10:25the war with Hoffa intensified.
01:10:27Robert Kennedy set up a special task force.
01:10:30It was known as the Get Hoffa Squad.
01:10:33Over 190 Teamster officials and associates,
01:10:36many of them underworld figures, were indicted while John Kennedy was president.
01:10:41I had no respect for him on the committee as a senator,
01:10:45and I had nothing to do with him as president because I did not believe
01:10:49that he viewed the Teamsters other than a stepping stone for his advancement,
01:10:55and that he would do anything, in my personal opinion,
01:11:00to destroy the Teamsters Union because he could not have his way with the Teamsters Union,
01:11:04particularly myself.
01:11:06An absolute spoiled brat, a man who never had the work,
01:11:10a man who had no principle.
01:11:12I had no respect for him then.
01:11:14I have no respect for his memory now.
01:11:16The tough man Hoffa did not take threats from anyone.
01:11:20It will not happen because if it does, he's going to get hurt.
01:11:23Hoffa himself is now presumed slain.
01:11:26He disappeared while attempting to regain control of the Teamsters.
01:11:30But in 1962, as his problems with the Justice Department grew,
01:11:34Hoffa seemed prepared to take his violent hatred of the Kennedy brothers to the ultimate extreme.
01:11:39At that time, Edward Parton was one of Hoffa's top lieutenants.
01:11:45Parton says that while at Teamsters headquarters in Washington,
01:11:49Hoffa said of Robert Kennedy,
01:11:51someone needs to bump that son of a bitch off.
01:11:54His house isn't guarded.
01:11:55You know somewhere where you can get a hold of a plastic bomb?
01:11:58Somebody must be got to throw one in his house,
01:12:00and the place will burn after it blows up.
01:12:07I learned in 1962 that Mr. Parton had been entrusted with the mission of securing plastic explosives
01:12:17to be used in either blowing up Mr. Bobby Kennedy, then the U.S. Attorney General,
01:12:24in his automobile or in his home.
01:12:27Did you learn anything that backed that up from your own personal experience?
01:12:32Yes. There were two telephone calls that were monitored by me.
01:12:37The calls originated with Mr. Parton
01:12:40and terminated with Mr. Hoffa on the other end of the line.
01:12:45Mr. Parton discussed as briefly as possible, being cut off by Mr. Hoffa,
01:12:53that he had obtained the plastic explosive that Mr. Hoffa was seeking.
01:13:00Do you consider that Mr. Hoffa's hatred or motive for murder
01:13:04was directed against the Kennedys in general?
01:13:07Yes, I do.
01:13:09And could also have been directed against the President?
01:13:12Yes, I believe that.
01:13:14Were there close links between Hoffa and the leaders of organized crime?
01:13:19Those who are purportedly members of organized crime, such as Mr. Carlos Marcella of New Orleans,
01:13:27was closely linked to Mr. Hoffa according to what Mr. Hoffa told me in 1964.
01:13:35Was he capable of carrying out his threats?
01:13:38I think that he fully intended to carry the threats out.
01:13:44I really think that he had the capability.
01:13:48It was a question of how and when, not a question of whether he had doubts as to the necessity of eliminating at least Mr. Bobby Kennedy.
01:14:03And possibly his brother also?
01:14:05And possibly his brother also.
01:14:07We contacted Edward Parton, who lives in Louisiana and was a key prosecution witness against Hoffa in 1964.
01:14:16Hoffa was sentenced to eight years in prison for a jury tampering offense.
01:14:21Parton agreed to meet us for an interview in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at the Holiday Inn.
01:14:30Mr. Parton never turned up for the interview, although we waited many hours.
01:14:34He made himself impossible to contact, either at his home or his office.
01:14:39But eventually, this letter from Parton reached us.
01:14:42He said,
01:14:43I'm sorry.
01:14:45I can't keep the appointment with you, for the safety of my family and myself.
01:14:50Especially my family, whom I have had to move out of the state and hide.
01:14:54I just don't think it would be fair to them.
01:14:56All I can say is that if you live in Louisiana,
01:14:59there are a couple of high-up officials who have links with certain people,
01:15:02that a person would have to be a fool not to know the games they play.
01:15:06I pray that someday high officials of the country, or the news media,
01:15:10can see under their cloak of respectability and expose them for what they are.
01:15:15I have seen some of the injustices handed down since Hoffa's existence,
01:15:19and I want my children to not have to live in it,
01:15:21because until now, they have only known fear, death, and the threat of death.
01:15:26Sincerely, E.G. Parton.
01:15:29It is now known that in the month before the assassination,
01:15:33Jack Ruby was in contact with some of the most powerful Teamster officials in the country,
01:15:38including Barney Baker,
01:15:40described by Robert Kennedy as Hoffa's roving organizer and ambassador of violence.
01:15:48Before he died, Jack Ruby gave one interview not seen till now on national television.
01:15:54The only thing I can say, what is your name, and I don't know how to do it.
01:15:57Harry Kendall.
01:15:58Harry Kendall.
01:15:59Harry Kendall.
01:16:00Harry Kendall.
01:16:01Harry Kendall.
01:16:02Everything pertaining to what's the surface.
01:16:04The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives.
01:16:14Harry Kendall.
01:16:16Harry Kendall.
01:16:19In other words...
01:16:20I'm the only person in the background,
01:16:23...that knows the truth pertaining to everything relating to my stench.
01:16:29everything relating to my sentence.
01:16:31Do you think it better come out?
01:16:34No, because unfortunately the people that have so much to gain and have such a material motive
01:16:53for putting me in a position I'm in
01:16:57We'll never let true facts come aboard to the world.
01:17:04Are these people in very high positions yet?
01:17:07Yes.
01:17:12Arlington Cemetery, winter, 1978.
01:17:19Every season that passes renders the truth about President Kennedy's death
01:17:24at once more remote and more urgent to discover.
01:17:27What we know now but didn't know then made the reopening of the investigation imperative.
01:17:33The Warren Commission acted to squelch what it called dirty rumors, but many of them have turned out to be true.
01:17:42It no longer seems paranoid to brood about the suggestive and possibly monstrous interconnections between all the evidence that has emerged.
01:17:52President Kennedy is dead and nothing will bring him back.
01:17:57But as with Watergate, the unraveling of the cover-up may tell the American people more than the crime itself.
01:18:04What is most disturbing to me is that two agencies of our government that were supposed to be loyal and faithful to us deliberately lied to us.
01:18:14I feel outraged that we have not discovered the truth when I think the American public needs to know the truth for history's sake, for all of us.
01:18:27I'm very angry at all the forces that I cannot understand.
01:18:31So much has happened, not only with respect to the CIA, but with respect to Watergate and so on, that I obviously cannot exclude anything as being beyond the realm of possibility.
01:18:46The impossible has happened many, many times.
01:18:48One of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time.
01:18:53One of the biggest areas have happened many, many years now in the history of the government before it was considered.
01:19:00One of the biggest areas of the border was not dead yet because electric vehicles were attacked that time.
01:19:07So that's the, one of the biggest areas now in the history of the government was being from the country that was supposedly prepared to land.
01:19:14One of the biggest areas of the country is in the country with regard to the country.