President Kennedy, and he denied ever having made a threatening remark against the President.
The committee found it difficult to understand how Aleman could have misunderstood Trafficante during such a conversation, or why he would have fabricated such an account. Aleman appeared to be a reputable person, who did not seek to publicize his allegations, and he was well aware of the potential danger of making such allegations against a leader of La Costa Nostra. The committee noted, however, that Aleman’s prior allegations and testimony before the committee had made him understandably fearful for his life.
The committee also did not fully understand why Aleman waited so many years before publicly disclosing the alleged incident. While he stated in 1976 that he had reported Trafficante’s alleged remarks about the President to FBI agents in 1962 and 1963, the committee’s review of Bureau reports on his contacts with FBI agents did not reveal a record of any such disclosure or comments at the time. Additionally, the FBI agent who served as Aleman’s contact during that period denied ever being told such information by Aleman.
Further, the committee found it difficult to comprehend why Trafficante, if he was planning or had personal knowledge of an assassination plot, would have revealed or hinted at such a sensitive matter to Aleman. It is possible that Trafficante may have been expressing a personal opinion, “The President ought to be hit,” but it is unlikely in the context of their relationship that Trafficante would have revealed to Aleman the existence of a current plot to kill the President. As previously noted with respect to Carlos Marcello, to have attained his stature as the recognized organized crime leader of Florida for a number of years, Trafficante necessarily had to operate in a characteristically calculating and discreet manner. The relationship between Trafficante and Aleman, a business acquaintance, does not seem to have been close enough for Trafficante to have mentioned or alluded to such a murder plot. The committee thus doubted that Trafficante would have inadvertently mentioned such a plot. In sum, the committee believed there were substantial factors that called into question the validity of Aleman’s account.
Nonetheless, as the electronic surveillance transcripts of Angelo Bruno, Stefano Magaddino and other top organized crime leaders make clear, there were in fact various underworld conversations in which the desirability of having the President assassinated was discussed. There were private conversations in which assassination was mentioned, although not in a context that indicated such a crime had been specifically planned. With this in mind, and in the absence of additional evidence with which to evaluate the Aleman account of Trafficante’s alleged 1962 remarks, the committee concluded that the conversation, if it did occur as Aleman testified, probably occurred in such a circumscribed context.
As noted earlier, the committee’s examination of the FBI’s electronic surveillance program of the early 1960s disclosed that Santos Trafficante was the subject of minimal, in fact almost nonexistent, surveillance coverage. During one conversation in 1963, overheard in a Miami restaurant, Trafficante had bitterly attacked the Kennedy administration’s efforts against organized crime, making obscene comments about “Kennedy’s right-hand man” who had recently coordinated various raids on Trafficante gambling establishments. In the conversation, Trafficante stated that he was under immense pressure from Federal investigators, commenting “I know when I’m beat, you understand?” Nevertheless, it was not possible to draw conclusions about Trafficante actions based on the electronic surveillance program since the coverage was so limited. Finally, as with Marcello, the committee noted that Trafficante’s cautious character is inconsistent with his taking the risk of being involved in an assassination plot against the President. The committee found, in the context of its duty to be cautious in its evaluation of the evidence, that it is unlikely that Trafficante plotted to kill the President, although it could not rule out the possibility of such participation on the basis of available evidence.
KISSINGER ASSOCIATES
According to the Bible Code conspiracy, the Good Book contains hundreds of secret predictions. In
Mind you, you don’t have to be a Bible Code basher to believe that Dr Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, is evil. British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens, in
The “senior constitutional officer” Hitchens referred to was General Rene Schneider, former Commander-in- Chief of the Chilean Army; it is asserted that Kissinger ordered Schneider’s assassination because he refused to back plans for a military overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende. Schneider’s family tried to sue Kissinger in a Washington, DC, federal court; the case was dismissed, not on its merits, but because the political question doctrine made it non-justiciable. In connection with Kissinger’s alleged role in the disappearance of citizens in South America during Operation Condor, a cross-national scheme by which right-wing dictatorships “disappeared” opponents, Kissinger had had to sidestep legal summons from investigators in Spain, Chile, Argentina and France.
When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the musical satirist Tom Lehrer quipped, “It was at that moment that satire died. There was nothing more to say after that.” Kissinger had only recently instigated the mass carpet bombing of Cambodia to cut off North Vietnamese supply routes. Neither did Kissinger’s thesis that a limited atomic war was winnable, as advanced in his
After Kissinger left office, his musings were still in demand on the international power circuit. He also knew anybody who was anybody. In 1982, Henry Kissinger—born Heinz Kissinger, in Germany in 1923, by the by—founded a private New York-based international consulting agency. In the words of Hitchens, the said Kissinger Associates “exists to facilitate contact between multinational corporations and foreign governments”. Kissinger co-opted a number of big names, such as former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and NATO chief Lord Carrington, and with such luminaries, collective know-how and connections, Kissinger Associates could hardly fail. And it didn’t. Within five years, the company had paid off its foundation loans, and was turning over $5 million per annum. Kissinger Associates does not disclose its clients’ identities, and when Kissinger himself was asked to head the 9/11 inquiry he stood down rather than reveal the company’s client list as asked to do by Democrats concerned about conflicts of interest. Still, some information leaks out—or is burbled out by CEOs only to anxious to boast their connection to Dr Kissinger—and Kissinger Associates’ known clients include such mega- players as Union Carbide, Coca-Cola, HSBC, American Express, Fiat and Heinz.
Given Kissinger’s track record, it hardly comes as a surprise that pertinent questions have been raised about the activity of Kissinger Associates in, inter alia, the BCCI banking scandal, the ecological catastrophe in Indonesia caused by mining client Freeport McMoran, loans and exports to Hussein’s Iraq, and undue influence on Capitol Hill on behalf of clients, even client states. (Despite Henry Kissinger’s avowed anti-Communism, he is big in China, and has lobbied on China’s behalf; he was an almost lone Western voice supporting the Communist dictatorship’s crackdown on democratic protesters in Tiananmen Square.) Kissinger Associates’ staff also have the useful habit of dropping in and out of government—Brent Scowcroft and Laurence Eagleburger both served in the regime of George H. W. Bush, for example—which, it is suggested, gives the Associates unparalleled access to power, plus inside information which can be turned to unfair commercial advantage.
Kissinger Associates goes from strength to strength. So, inevitably, do suspicions about its influence.
Watch this space.
