50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Was CIA Involved In JFK Assassination Plot?

In its June 6, 1975 report, entitled "Allegations Concerning The Assassination of President Kennedy," the Rockefeller Commission On CIA Activities Within The United States stated the following:

"The second theory advanced in support of allegations of CIA participation in the assassination of President Kennedy is that various links existed between the CIA, Oswald and Ruby...

"There is no credible evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was ever employed by the CIA or ever acted for the CIA in any capacity whatever, either directly or indirectly..."

Yet in his early 1990s-published book, entitled First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated In The CIA-Mafia Murder Of President Kennedy, former CIA operative Robert Morrow stated that on Wednesday, October 9, 1962 a CIA official named Tracy Barnes "called and asked if I could meet with him at 7:30 p.m. that evening" and, when Morrow met with Barnes that evening, "Tracy reached into a briefcase next to his chair and pulled out a number of folders" and said the following to Morrow:

"To recapitulate, here's a rundown on [Clay] Shaw's inside group...His official relationship with the Agency is as a consultant...There is Jack [Ruby]...There is one other. The young man who served in the Marine Corps who now has the young Russian wife. His name is Lee Oswald...He served a covert stint in the Philippines with his MAAG group and, in September of 1959, at our request, he applied for and received a hardship discharge within three days. For obvious reasons, when we sent him to Russia posing as a defector, it was changed to a dishonorable discharge. From the marines, he went home to New Orleans. After spending a few days with his mother, he was reimbursed $2,000 from our local New Orleans office.

"...Oswald's...job was to make contact with a girl in Moscow who's the niece of a KGB colonel and get her out of Russia so her uncle could defect.

"The operation worked perfectly in the opening stages, but he was then exiled to Minsk for two years...

"On the night of his arrival back in the U.S. one of our people debriefed him and immediately reported into headquaraters in D.C.. He was told to send Oswald directly down south to await further contact. He finally hooked up with Jack [Ruby] in Dallas..."

Morrow also described what happened on Sunday morning, November 10, 1963:

"I checked into a motel on Pulaski Highway near my home, and placed the 5 p.m. call to [anti-Castro Cuban refugee leader Eladio] del Valle.

"Initially, del Valle queried me about the operation of the transceivers...

"...del Valle exclaimed, `They had better be perfect, compadre. They are for Texas!'

"`Texas?' I replied.

"`For the big one. Along with the rifles, in Dallasa. A head of state, remember?'

"`I don't understand del Valle,' was all I could manage to say in my confusion.

"`You will, compadre. I found out about it last night. Kennedy's going to get it in Dallas.'

"After this last statement, del Valle signed off."

(Downtown 7/21/93)

CIA Official Barnes's Rockefeller Connection

The former CIA official who Robert Morrow stated was apparently involved in the plot which assassinated JFK--Tracy Barnes--was apparently related to the family of a cnadidate for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination named Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. As The Man Who Knew Too Much by Dick Russell observed:

"...An athlete at Groton and then Yale, Barnes was another of the CIA's Ivy League lawyers who married well. His wife, Janet, was an Aldrich, related to the Rockefeller family."

The same book also noted that "Barnes retired from the CIA in December 1966...to become a special assistant" to "Yale University President Kingman Brewster, Jr." before dying of a heart attack on February 18, 1972.

On November 22, 1963 Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, the first announced presidential candidate to challenge JFK, was lunching privately with 1948 Republican Party presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey at the very moment JFK was shot. And according to Thomas E. Dewey And His Times by Richard Norton Smith, Dewey was also "due to meet Nixon for lunch" on that very same day, after Nixon returned from his Dallas "business trip."

During the 1970s, CIA official Barnes's Aldrich-Rockefeller relation was named both vice-president of the United States and chairman of the Rockefeller Commission On CIA Activities within The United States by former Warren Commission member and then U.S. president Gerald Ford.

(Downtown 7/21/93)