MEX’S IS THE REASON (SORRY)
I can’t believe it’s really here. JFK day. Like many a glasses-wearer born between 19s 60 and 90, I’ve been awaiting this day’s document dump with an Xmas-eve level of antsiness. And so, naturally, like the rest of the internet, reading through the actual declassified files is one of the greatest letdowns of my brief life.
Where’s the secret treaty inviting the USSR to collaborate with NASA on the Apollo program? Where’s the shelved announcement ordering the complete withdrawal of all US military forces from South Vietnam? Where’s Marilyn Monroe’s secret daughter, of trash novel fame? This is just a bunch of expense reports and illegible field memos. Even the redacted parts seem like they’re probably boring.
The JFK assassination is the literal mother of all conspiracy theories, as in it gave birth to the phrase if not the entire phenomenon. As Hunter Thompson once said about who shot JFK, before confessing to the crime himself then getting in a shouting match in a crowded restaurant after his son threatened to turn him in for it, “a whole generation of American journalists is still embarrassed by their failure to answer that question.” No revelation — at least no revelation without aliens — could possibly have lived up to 50 years of bladder-popping anticipation. And of course, the fact that the CIA was allowed to stroke out a handful of names as well as hold back an entire raft of documents at the last minute means that not only is one of the key players still improbably alive (and playing grabass from his wheelchair, hinthinthinthint) but that the Great American Mystery of the 20th century will continue through the 21st as exactly that.
The Tao of Pooh reader in me always took this as the ultimate lesson of Kennedy’s death. Having honed my pattern recognition on its Christmas-tree-lights tangle of characters, factions, and motives over hundreds of hours in books and on BBSs, I eventually hit the same wall every JFK conspiracizer does: There’s no answer. Simple as that. From there you either drive yourself crazy going back over all the clues to find sub-clues and meta-clues, or you accept the fact that you will never ever ever know the complete story. Which is HARD. Remember how people reacted to the end of Lost? And this is real life. Something DID happen. And we will never, never never never, NEVAR know what it was. Maddening.
The saving grace for the can’t-accepters was the existence of these files and the fact that one day within most of their lives, they’d all be released. It held the same preservative spell on the faithful as Christ’s Second Coming or the revelation of the Hidden Mahdi or that Kalki thing Current 93 was really into. And now, like all the predicted doomsdays we’ve lived through since 2000, it’s been postponed. Possibly indefinitely. That’s religion for you.
My excitement over the JFK file release was re-stoked by World’s Greatest Reporter Ron Rosenbaum a couple weeks ago when he reported on a reporter who’d gone down to Mexico and done some genuine fresh reporting on an old side character in the saga. To bring the uninitiated up to speed: Two months before the assassination, Lee Harvey went to Mexico City for a few days and basically made himself a nuisance at the Cuban and Soviet embassies there, presumably in order to get a visa to Havana and/or Moscow. While there, according to Octavio Paz’s wife Elena Garro, Oswald was invited to a “twist party” at one of the Cuban embassarios’ house. What happened at that party, besides slightly outdated dancing, has long been a speculator’s wet dream. The new reporting which caught Ron Rosenbaum’s eye was an interview with an attendee of the twist party which ultimately yielded the suggestion that the Cuban embassy folks may have told Oswald about all of the CIA’s assassination attempts on Fidel Castro and, whether they explicitly proposed it or he just took up the hint on his own accord, that put the beans in the baby’s ear that presicide was fair game.
So fiddle-dee-me when I’m scrolling through the archive last night and chance click on a file that for some reason is dated 00/00/0000. The pdf is an FBI memorandum on Señora Elena Garro de Paz, progenitress of the twist party story, and her worthiness as a source. The memo is pretty ho-hum up ’til the last page, item 10 on the author’s bullet list. Give it a peep.
The fact that an incident written off by the FBI as immaterial to their investigation is nevertheless “disturbing” to the CIA — so much so that they apparently insisted on not pursuing it — is a juicy little Lucy to start with. But the reasons given are pure paranoiac paydirt. Let’s enumerate them Count-style.
1. ha ha ha, The CIA recognizes that jurisdiction in this case belongs to the FBI. Yeah, this is an agency really known for its adherence to procedural boundaries.
2. ha ha ha, It’s tough to conduct an investigation in a foreign country. It’s also tough to operate a clandestine airline in a foreign hemisphere but somehow they managed that one.
3. ha ha — fine, I agree this is getting old — 3. the Mexico City station chief was pals with the Interior Minister. OK, that’s a little bit intriguing; why would their relationship preclude asking questions about a dance party at a diplomat’s apartment — a diplomat for a third (read: exterior) country — at which a soon-to-be presidential assassin was twisting, either again or the night away? Which brings us to
4. “the Garro scenario may have involved agents of the CIA.” In order of likelihood, this explanation roundly tops the other three and its implications are… well… implicational.
If there were spooks at the party where LHO got the idea to pop the president, that’s one of several black eyes for the agency. At best (for them) somebody should have flagged this would-be communist defector who’s being regaled with stories of how his government has tried to murder the leader of the country he’s been publicly advocating “fair play” for for over a year. At worst, and let’s be generous most likely, they’re the ones who told him. Whoops is very right.
Since, as explained above, I am of the Zen camp when it comes to this assassination, either case works for me. Whether the CIA let it or made it happen, or didn’t stop it is a matter for the diehard conspiracy junkies looking to cover the spread. In simple betting man’s terms, however, I’m calling it for the Company. There’s your Kennedy assassination plot, as the Scots say: It was the CIA, in the book depository, with the Oswald.
See y’all at the Hinkley record declassifying!
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