The Grand Finale of The Red River Brief (The Wrong Brother): Part IX
To be partially incorrect is to fail. This is the final chapter of the series. Thank you for your patience. And 11/22/23 will be the 60th anniversary of JFK's assassination.
Considering Carlos Marcello’s sturdy relationship with the CIA in addition to his organized crime brethren, and considering the fact that Mike Maroun’s brother Autrey was a two-star general in the United States Army whose military record between 1959 and 1964 is seemingly not listed in any of his searchable biographies, it is far from circumspect to imagine their retaliatory aims directed at President Kennedy. The CIA had an entire department dedicated to the purpose of Executive Action: the planning required to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power. It had been used in Guatemala in 1954 and would be in play again with in Cuba. Eventually, the writers of this doctrine would use a nearly identical plan against their own Commander-in-Chief.
Even before JFK took office, President Eisenhower approved a plan by the CIA with a $13M budget to overthrow Castro with paramilitary forces trained outside of Cuba for guerrilla actions (a base was established by Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana). The strategy for this mission was organized by Richard Bissell and Richard Helms. After Kennedy’s inauguration, the original plan morphed into Operation Mongoose and a number of agency players came to the forefront. The list of names will be more than familiar to ardent assassination researchers, and may even strike a chord or two with JFK plot novices, but it certainly is an illustrious group of government employees: William K. Harvey, Ted Shackley, General Edward Lansdale, E. Howard Hunt, and Frank Sturgis.
Operation Mongoose also initiated the CIA’s outreach for assistance with organized crime families that had lost their casino gaming interests in Cuba after the communist revolution. This was no minor collaboration. It was not merely running guns and gaining intelligence in Sicily and mainland Italy during WWII thanks to the network of mob boss Lucky Luciano (Operation Underworld). This was the upper echelon of the intelligence community in the United States actively partnering with the Mafia to assassinate the leader of a foreign nation. General Lansdale appointed William K. Harvey to lead Group W to coordinate this effort.
In March of 1961, a few weeks before Marcello’s deportation to Guatemala, Harvey arranged for CIA operative Jim O’Connell to meet with Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante, Johnny Roselli, and Robert Maheu (Richard Nixon’s famed bagman) at The Fontainebleu Hotel in Miami. It is crucially important to remember that President Kennedy had authorized this operation. Mahue informed Giancana, Trafficante, and Roselli that the government was willing to pay $150,000 for the job. And O’Connell allegedly gave poison pills to Roselli at the meeting that were to be used against Castro.
But let us not believe for a single moment that the Mafia’s interest with Operation Mongoose was solely monetary or even mildly patriotic. In the book Sons and Brothers by novelist Richard D. Mahoney, the aim of Roselli and the organized crime factions was not just to assassinate Castro but also to set up the United States government for blackmail, were it to be needed, at a later date.
Organized crime was laying a long, bright trail of evidence that unmistakably implicated the CIA in the Castro plot and this evidence would prove critical in the agency’s cover-up of the Kennedy assassination itself.
Basically, by the Spring of 1961, we had a new, two-month-old presidential administration authorizing a covert operation by the CIA to assassinate the leader of an island nation just ninety miles from Florida with the aid of the Mafia. And, just over two years later, those same CIA officials and organized crime leaders would be conspiring to assassinate the president who had approved their union in the first place. In many respects, JFK and RFK were a bit too clever for their own collective good. The deportation of Marcello, the alliance with organized crime, the failure at the Bay of Pigs, and the resulting JFK-orchestrated cleansing of the CIA’s ruling class because of that failure would lead to November 22, 1963 in Dallas.
President Kennedy made a critical mistake in summarily dismissing Dulles, Bissell, and Cabell. These were not shallow, ineffective men. They were ruthless men of action. Bissell had been in charge of the coordination with Lockheed for the U-2 spy plane; Cabell had also been deeply involved with the U-2 program and, as an Air Force general in Europe, was noted as a mastermind for the details of planning required for bombing missions. As for Dulles, he was—and remains—the preeminent spy in the history of the United States. He had the opportunity to meet with Hitler, Mussolini, Goebbels, and—it is presumed—even Admiral Darlan in the 1930s while serving as a legal advisor to the delegation on arms limitation at The League of Nations. Dulles was recruited to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) by its founder William J. Donovan, was posted to Bern, Switzerland, and worked feverishly with resistance groups in Europe during WWII. Additionally, Dulles was a close associate and friend to both General Lansdale and General Cabell. After the war, his fervent stand against Nazism shifted: Dulles was placed in charge of Operation Paperclip.
Dulles served for six months as the OSS Berlin station chief. In 1947, Congress created the Central Intelligence Agency and Dulles (see photo below) was closely involved with its development. His translator at this time was Henry Kissinger, who worked for Army Intelligence and was later to become National Security Advisor and Secretary of State during the Nixon administration (and remained Secretary of State for President Ford).
Dulles' CIA Operation Paperclip was specifically designed to assimilate Nazi war criminals—including SS officers and functionaries—into the American establishment by obscuring their histories and preventing efforts to bring their true stories to light. Later, the program was hailed through state-sponsored propaganda as having a focus strictly on scientists and technicians. And, while it is true that thousands of these engineers were brought to the United States to work with NASA and other entities, the reality is that tens of thousands of full-fledged Nazis were processed through Camp Ruston in NW Louisiana (30 miles from Shreveport). Operation Paperclip was led by officers in the United States Army from Supreme Allied Headquarters in Frankfurt where, of course, Mike Maroun was stationed and working directly under General Eisenhower (the future President whose Vice President was Richard Nixon). Autrey Maroun served as an adjutant at the Nuremberg Trials, too.
Although the program officially ended in September 1947, those Army officers (including the Maroun brothers) and others carried out a conspiracy until the mid-1950s that bypassed both law and presidential directive to keep Operation Paperclip going. Neither Presidents Truman nor Eisenhower were informed that their instructions to close the op had been ignored by Dulles and others.
One of the more befuddling aspects of nearly all JFK assassination research is that extraordinary journalists and documentarians are unable to comprehend the guile and treachery of other extraordinary men. At a certain point of their investigations, they are faced with the reality/dilemma that the subject matter is too overwhelming, too convoluted, and too confusing to ever reach a viable conclusion. Our earlier explanation involved both the dilution of facts and evidence and the desire for renumeration for book deals, etc. But there is more to it. That is why we stated quite coherently that the actual identities of the shooters involved in the assassination do not matter.
We have an idea who they are, and we have a compelling reason for believing we have an idea who they are, but we will never be able to definitively prove who they are. And that is the frustrating dead end that investigative writers encounter. It is the moment at which they have to make a critical decision: admit defeat or alter the truth to fit a narrative. There are no riches awaiting the journalists who fall on their swords for integrity’s sake, but there is the potential for riches for those who choose otherwise. Again, the conundrum of single-gunman theorists not working together, and that of massive conspiracy theorists not working together, implies that few in the JFK assassination industry actually care about getting to the real truth. They prefer to promulgate their own, distinctive—and partially incorrect—truths for profit.
What does it mean to be partially incorrect?
Simply put, it is every word written after that just-described terminal juncture. They get so close, these experts, but somehow they fail to tie together the glaring coincidences and probabilities of overlapping characters with mutually-beneficial intentions. No one is ever going to completely solve the JFK plot without an intelligence agency whistleblower, though it’s highly unlikely that there are any viable documents of this sort on file, or the discovery of a deceased perpetrator’s diary in a basement or attic. No one. But at least we have an idea through The Red River Brief that makes the most sense, probability-wise.
In conclusion, if nothing in The Red River Brief is to be believed other than the proper identification of Alexandre Brun de Saint-Hippolyte, the mystery man photographed outside of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City (September 1963) considered to be “The Rosetta Stone” of the JFK assassination plot, by his own granddaughters…what is the mathematical probability that all of the other listed assertions are incorrect?
The world may never know the entire story, but prove this brief wrong; it took scribbling with a Sharpie on a warehouse wall in Shreveport to visualize the connections of this crime’s perpetrators and to comprehend the multitudinous coincidences that evolved through those connections to become likelihoods.
