"Rogue individuals" from the CIA, Mafia, and Cuban-exile community combined to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 22, 1963, according to a podcast series produced by Rob Reiner and Soledad O’Brien.
"It wasn’t the CIA, the Mafia or the Cuban exiles, but it was rogue individuals that came from those worlds," filmmaker Reiner says on "Who Killed JFK?"
Reiner said Cuban exiles were angry that Castro had taken over Cuba, the Mafia wanted its hotels and casinos back in Cuba, and U.S. government hardliners were furious at Kennedy for having gone soft on communism.
The 10-episode podcast, based on interviews and research, said that Operation Northwoods, a proposed fake operation that originated within the Department of Defense, and ZR/RIFLE Project, a CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro, served as the "blueprint" for the assassination.
Reiner said it was "inconceivable" that then-former CIA Director Allen Dulles was unaware of the plot against Kennedy.
The podcast claims CIA officer Bill Harvey was the "strategist" and former U.S. Army chief intelligence officer Charles Willoughby was the "tactician" who then tapped the Mafia and Cuban exiles to line up the assassins.
The podcast claims there were four shooters in Dallas on Nov. 22.
"There was definitely a shooter on the sixth floor of the schoolbook depository building. There was another shooter behind the picket fence on what we’ve come to call ‘the grassy noll,'" Reiner said.
"Based on bullet hole in Kennedy’s back and some of [Texas] Gov. [John] Connally’s wounds, there were most likely shooters in the Dal-Tex building and the county records building. And both of these buildings were across Houston St. behind the motorcade."
Reiner added that he and his team believe a "fatal headshot would have come from the overpass on the south noll."
The four shooters, according to the podcast, were:
- Cuban exile and hitman named Herminio Diaz Garcia, who was killed in 1966 in Cuba while trying to assassinate Castro.
- Jean Souetre, a French assassin, whom CIA files say was in Dallas on Nov. 22 and then "quickly and quietly" deported after the assassination.
- Charles Nicoletti, also known as "Chuckie the Typewriter," who was a hitman for Chicago Mobster Sam Giancana. Nicoletti was murdered in 1977, right before he was scheduled to testify before a House select committee on assassinations.
- Jack Canon, who as a lieutenant colonel had worked under Gen. Willoughby, chief of intelligence for Gen. Douglas McArthur during World War II and the Korean War.
The podcast said the plot likely was "compartmentalized," with those involved being instructed on a "need-to-know basis." Thus, each shooter probably didn’t know about the others.
The podcast’s last episode begins with Dick Russell, a former reporter for The Village Voice, explaining that in 1975 he received an anonymous letter from someone calling himself "The Brooklyn Waiter." The letter claimed that Adolph Tscheppe-Weidenbach was the "mastermind of the JFK assassination."
Years later, while working on a book of the assassination, Russell learned that Willoughby was born Adolf Tscheppe-Weidenbach.
The Warren Commission in 1964 concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin who killed Kennedy.
The podcast claimed Oswald was simply a scapegoat.
CIA records related to the assassination remain classified.
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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