50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: LBJ's Memo To General Cabell

Prior to being fired by JFK following the CIA's 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, former Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell's brother--then-CIA Deputy Director (Gen.) Charles Cabell--apparently was warned by then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson that JFK intended to decrease the CIA's power in Washington, D.C. As former CIA operative Robert Morrow revealed in his early 1990s book First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated In The CIA-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy:


"On Sunday, April 24, 1961, one week after the fiasco on the beaches, I received a call from [former CIA official] Tracy Barnes...He requested that I meet him at the Golden Parrot in Washington for lunch on Monday...I agreed to see General Charles Cabell and was in his office one hour after leaving the Golden Parrot...A third man was with Cabell when Barnes and I entered his office. He was introduced as the Deputy Director of Plans for the Agency, Richard Bissell.

"The General did not waste time with further amenities and chatter...

"`Well, young man, I assume Tracy has told you about the Agency's problems with the White House.'...

"He then reached into his top desk drawer, removed a large file folder and handed it to me.

"The first item I removed from the folder was a memorandum, handwritten on the official stationery created exclusively for the vice-president of the United States. Beneath the stationery's engraved: `Office of the Vice President of the United States,' the salutation read: `My dear Charles':

"...After a number of critical, self-serving comments abaout the intention of the president and his brother to build a Kennedy dynasty in the White House, Lyndon Johnson proceeded forthrightly to the crux of his message.

"The vice-president had learned, `strictly by accident' of the secret directives issued to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara by President Kennedy...McNamara was ordered to employ any and all means at his disposal, which would result in the revocation of the CIA's power...McNamara was further authorized to establish an alternative intelligence agency...

"Immediately beneath the last-written line were the vice-president's initials, `LBJ'."

Morrow also recalled that, after being shown LBJ's memo to the soon-to-be-axed CIA deputy director, he was allowed to "read through numerous reports dealing with everything from unsavory campaign tactics authorized by Kennedy to surveillance reports which explicitly detailed the manner in which he [JFK] occupied many of his nights," during the next half-hour.

Coincidentally, prior to former CIA Deputy Director [Gen.] Cabell's 1971 death, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was apparently preparing to accuse the former deputy CIA director of "conspiring to assassinate" JFK.

(Downtown 1/18/95)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Cabell's Nixon Connection

The mayor of Dallas on November 22, 1963, Earle Cabell, was the brother of former CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell. After being fired by President Kennedy following the failure of the CIA's 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Dallas Mayor Cabell's brother was hired by both Billionaire Howard Hughes and NASA as "a consultant." He also was introduced by Clay Shaw at a Foreign Police Association meeting in New Orleans which he addressed in May 1961. And prior to former CIA Deputy Director Cabell's 1971 death, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was preparing to accuse him of conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy.

Around three years before President Kennedy was eliminated, Cabell was one of the CIA officials who "briefed Vice President Nixon about the plans to assassinate Fidel Castro" and "In October [1960], just a few weeks before the national elections, Nixon and CIA Deputy Director Cabell meet secretly with [Cuban Exile Leader Mario Garcia] Kohly on the golf links of the Burning Tree Club in suburban Washington consummating a deal," according to former CIA contract agent Robert Morrow's The Senator Must Die book. (Morrow was hired by the CIA to work as Cuban Exile Leader Kohly's technical advisor and consultant in the early 1960s). According to Morrow, at the secret October 1960 meeting between Cabell, Nixon and Kohly, Nixon "had agreed that Kohly could eliminate all of the prominent Cuban leftist leaders after a successful invasion" and "the plot would assure Kohly of being the new president of Cuba."

The Senator Must Die also revealed in 1988 that:

"In a Warren Commission document (WCD 279, still classified), Marion Cooper, a former CIA operative, disclosed that on January 1, 1955, he attended a meeting in Honduras with Vice President Richard Nixon, at which the planned assassination of President Jose Antonio Remon of Panama was discussed in detail. Among those present: the hit team hired to kill the Panamanian leader.

"The following day, Remon was machine-gunned to death at a racetrack outside Panama City."

(Downtown 7.22/92)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Former CIA Deputy Director Cabell Wrote Autobiography

In his 1979 book, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story, Peter Wyden noted that the brother of the mayor of Dallas on November 22, 1963--former CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell--wrote an autobiography prior to his death in 1971. And in its September 16, 1973 issue, the Washington Post reported that "New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, as late as March 1971, was preparing to accuse former Dallas Mayor Cabell's brother of `conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.'"

In a 1992 telephone interview, Bay of Pigs author Wyden told Downtown that he was only shown by Cabell's sons the portion of Cabell's then-unpublished autobiography which dealt with the Bay of Pigs events and he did not know why Cabell's autobiography was not published as of 1979. He also stated in 1992 that there is a possibility that Cabell's autobiography was published in the 1980s.

Wyden did not recall anything in the tone or content of the portion of Cabell's autobiography which he read, however, which indicated that Cabell felt any special rage towards JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Wyden thought that although Cabell was a "great conservative guy" in his politics, he was too "routine-minded" to be capable of being involved in some kind of plot to assassinate JFK. In Wyden's view, Cabell was "the kind of guy who could only follow S.O.P.--standard operating procedure."

Wyden noted that he had neither attempted to investigate the JFK assassination, himself, or read any recent books about the JFK assassination, but his impression is that Oliver Stone's JFK film was "a propaganda hoax" which was wrong to "glorify" New Orleans D.A. Garrison. Wyden felt that Stone's film was "an effort to capitalize on this conspiracy paranoia," and he "was offended" by Stone's JFK movie. One possible explanation for the popoularity of recently published books on the JFK assassination, in Wyden's view, was that this mass sentiment still represents "part of the mourning" process for JFK.

When he wrote in the late 1970s about Charles Cabell in Bay of Pigs, Wyden was not aware that Cabell's brother, Earle Cabell, was the Mayor of Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated. But he felt that this fact was of "peripheral" importance to the subject of his Bay of Pigs book.

(Downtown 5/20/92)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Mayor Earle Cabell and The Dallas Civil Liberties Uniion On Nov. 22, 1963

According to The Death Of A President by William Manchester, "Mayor Earle Cabell's first reaction to the arrest" of Lee Harvey Oswald "was sanguine" and "that Friday he expressed confidence that the assassination `would not hurt Dallas as a city.'"

According to The Day Kennedy Was Shot by Jim Bishop, "Oswald had told the [Dallas police] officers that if he could not locate [Emergency Civil Liberties Lawyer] Abt, he would consult the American Civil Liberties Union" and "he had also declared that he was a member of the ACLU."

When Dallas Civil Liberties Union President Olds and other local ACLU officials met in Dallas's Plaza Hotel in the late evening of Nov. 22, 1963--after Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz had refused Olds' telephone request to be allowed to meet with Oswald--"someone suggested `Call the Mayor,'" according to The Day Kennedy Was Shot.

Coincidentally, when Dallas Civil Liberties Union President "Olds got on the phone again and asked for Mayor Earle Cabell" and "gave his name and rank," he "was told that the mayor was busy" and he "wondered what could keep a mayor busy after 11 p.m.," according to The Day Kennedy Was Shot.

Dallas Mayor Cabell's Nov. 24, 1963 Call To Dallas Police Chief Curry

At the very moment Lee Oswald was silenced by Jack Ruby, "Chief Curry, ludicrously, was upstairs in his office, responding to a phone call from Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, and had not checked for himself to see if orders were being carried out properly in the basement," according to Who Was Jack Ruby? by Seth Kantor.

And according to High Treason by Robert J. Groden and Harrison Livingstone, "Jesse Curry, the Chief of Police, was about to go down to the basement of the police station to supervise the transfer of Oswald to the County Jail when his phone rang, and the mayor, Earle Cabell, kept him on the line until Oswald had been shot by Ruby."

Yet according to Cabell Exhibit No.1 of the Warren Commission, "Copy of an FBI Report of an interview with Mayor Earle Cabell dated Dec. 12, 1963," former CIA Deputy Director Cabell's brother originally told the FBI Special Agent that after Ruby shot Oswald:

"He received a telephone call from a friend of his, whom he did not name, that Oswald had been shot and to turn his television set on, which he did. He then received a call from Chief Curry advising that Oswald had been shot. Mayor Cabell relates that he then told Chief Curry that he was watching television regarding the incident at that moment.."

And when he testified before the Warren Commission on July 13, 1964, former CIA Deputy Director Cabell's brother again claimed that Dallas Police Chief Curry telephoned him at the very moment Oswald was being transferred:

Mr. CABELL: "He called me...I was in the den where I was sitting and taking these telephone calls and then just as I get it turned on, they still had not removed Oswald at the time because this was just a matter of a minute or two from the actual shooting. Then Chief Curry called and said, `They have just shot Oswald.' And I said, `Yes, I have it on tv now'..."

Why do you think Dallas Mayor Cabell apparently didn't want to admit that just prior to Oswald's silencing, he just apparently happened to telephone Dallas Police Chief Curry?

(Downtown 3/11/92)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell's Clay Shaw Connection

Coincidentally, the person who was unsuccessfully prosecuted for conspiring to assassinate JFK, Clay Shaw, "was asked to introduce the deputy director of the CIA, General Charles P. Cabell, who was in New Orleans to address the Foreign Policy Association," in May 1961, according to Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation Into The Assassination of John F. Kennedy by Henry Hurt.

According to the same book, "Shaw was program chairman" of the New Orleans Foreign Policy Association group and "General Cabell's speech in New Orleans came les than one month after he had personally supervised the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion."

Reasonable Doubt also observed in 1985 that "Today it is known that Cabell and his associates were vehement in their rage toward what they perceived as President Kennedy's `desertion' on the morning of the invasion--the President's refusal to send in military force sufficient to ensure victory."

CIA Deputy Director Cabell's 4 A.M. Bay of Pigs Appeal To JFK

In their book, The Invisible Government, David Wise and Thomas Ross described how CIA Deputy Director Cabell unsuccessfully begged JFK in the early morning hours of April 17, 1961 to approve a second U.S. air strike on Castro's air bases:

"...At 4 a.m. Cabell could stand it no longer. He decided to appeal again to [then Secretary of State Dean] Rusk.

"Cabell drove through the darkened capital to Rusk's hotel...In Rusk's apartment he again expressed his fears over the cancellation of the air strike. Despite the hour the Secretary of State called the President once more in Middleburg. This time Cabell did speak directly to him. In answer to the CIA official's pleadings the President's reply was still negative."

More On `Old Tige' Cabell

Coincidentally, former CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell and former Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell's grandfather--William `Old Tige' Cabell--helped design the Confederate battle flag while serving on the staff of Confederate General J.E. Johnston. As a Confederate General during the Civil War, the Cabell brothers' grandfather also led a raid into Missouri in October 1864. At the time of his death in 1911, "Old Tige" Cabell was the honorary commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans organization. Between 1893 and 1907, former Confederate General William Cabell was also one of the supervisors of the Louisiana State Lottery and its successor, the Honduras National Lottery.

(Downtown 3/11/92)

50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: Who Changed JFK's November 22, 1963 Motorcade Route?

According to On The Trail Of The Assassins by Jim Garrison:

"The last-minute change in the parade route in Dallas was highly suspicious and raised serious questions about the mayor of Dallas, Earle Cabell, and his brother, former Deputy Director of the C.I.A., Charles Cabell, who had been fired over the Bay of Pigs fiasco [of 1961]. The parade route change, along with other leads pointing to the C.I.A., had been covered up neatly by the Warren Commission and its point man for intelligence issues, former C.I.A. Director Allen Dulles."

Former New Orleans D.A. Garrison also recalled that:

"The original route scheduled for the motorcade did not go right past the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald had been working...In fact, as late as the morning of the assassination the motorcade route was still diagrammed on the front page of the Dallas Morning News as continuing on Main Street to the center of Dealy Plaza."

Coincidentally, Garrison noted in his book that when he "pulled open my middle desk drawer and took out a copy of the Dallas Morning News front page that had been introduced as a `Warren Commission exhibit,'" he discovered that "on five-sixths of the Dallas Morning News where the diagram of the motorcade route was supposed to be" there "was nothing but a large square of solid gray."

On The Trail Of The Assassins also noted that although "there are also people who say that a map of the amended route was published sometime before November 22," coincidentally, "no such document has surfaced."

After JFK fired C.I.A. Deputy Director Charles Pearre Cabell, "General Cabell's subsequent hatred of John Kennedy became an open secret in Washington," according to Garrison. As Garrison also noted in his book:

"In most countries, a powerful individual who has been in open conflict with a national leader who was later assassinated would receive at least a modicum of attention in the course of the posthumous inquiry...Certainly a powerful individual who also held a top position in a major espionage apparatus and had been at odds with the departed leader would be high on the list of suspects."

Yet, according to Garrison, "General Cabell, who fit the description perfectly, was never even called as a witness before the Warren Commission."

(Downtown 2/26/92)