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FIFTY-FIVE

I shall now borrow Publishers Weekly’s nice précis of this long highly detailed book, which states that Gerald Posner’s polemic, Case Closed(1993),

took the CIA’s lack of involvement for granted, and that, according to this mammoth and painstakingly researched account, was a big mistake. It is Waldron and Hartmann’s…contention—bolstered by access to many previously unavailable files, and interviews with little-known as well as prominent figures—that the CIA knew a great deal about the assassination. But the agency couldn’t admit what it knew because that could uncover the existence of a U.S. plan for a coup in Cuba, run by JFK’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The assassination, say the authors, was carried out by hired gunmen on the orders of three noted Mafia dons whose lives were being made miserable by RFK’s ruthless pursuit—and these Mafia men knew about the planned invasion because they had worked with the CIA on previous efforts to topple Castro. Oswald, long a hidden CIA agent, was set up as the patsy, and it had always been Jack Ruby’s job to eliminate him if he wasn’t killed at the scene of Kennedy’s shooting. How do the authors make their case? With a relentless accumulation of detail, a very thorough knowledge of every political and forensic detail and the broad perspective of historians rather than assassination theorists.

Ultimate Sacrifice describes how the Kennedy C-Day plan was penetrated by three Mafia godfathers—Carlos Marcello (New Orleans), Santo Trafficante (Tampa, Florida), and Johnny Roselli (out of Chicago). All three were being vigorously pursued by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, along with a dozen of their associates of whom six were also working on the Castro murder case. The crime bosses then used parts of the C Plan, aka AMWorld, to arrange JFK’s assassination in a way that would prevent a thorough government investigation in order to protect the Coup Plan, its participants, as well as, naturally, national security by invoking the secrecy surrounding the C Plan. The Mob bosses targeted JFK twice before Dallas, once in Chicago on November 2 (JFK called off his motorcade) and then in Tampa on November 18 (he survived unscathed). Ultimate Sacrifice reveals and details why Robert Kennedy later told several close associates the name of the godfather (Carlos Marcello) who had ordered his brother killed—but he couldn’t do anything about it for fear the Soviets might go to war: Irony in tragic action…I recall when over the years I’d be asked why what happened at Dallas happened, I’d answer: “Because Bobby had broken a truce made with the Mob by Joe Kennedy in 1960. Bobby, seeking glory, broke it by hounding Teamster boss Hoffa, and going after the Mob bosses”: in the case of Carlos Marcello of New Orleans (and sometimes Havana), Bobby had him deported to Guatemala. Trafficante, a Florida boss, was recorded as telling Marcello that they must kill Bobby but Marcello said no. “When a dog bothers you, you don’t cut off its tail.” Thus was the murder of JFK ordered and carried out by the same team that his brother was assembling to murder Castro and prepare the way for an invasion of Cuba at the request of a Kennedy-selected provisional government. This is classic irony and on the bloodiest scale. Had word leaked out, the Soviets in order to avenge Castro might have used its nuclear-tipped missiles against some fifty U.S. cities. Hence, the use of Oswald as patsy and his murder by a fellow CIA agent Jack Ruby: the transcript of Ruby’s later quizzing by a clueless Chief Justice Earl Warren is worthy of that non-ironist Samuel Beckett.