JFK Film Generates Buzz Abroad
Does the world press care more about the murder of an American president than the U.S. media?
You might get that impression from global reaction to a new film by an award-winning German filmmaker alleging that Fidel Castro's government helped Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The film, "Rendezvous with Death," broadcast in Germany last week, provoked buzz in the online press around the world -- but not much in the United States.
I've been writing about Kennedy's assassination for twenty years -- for the Post's Book World, Salon, New York Review of Books, Washington Monthly, Reader's Digest and Miami New Times -- and I've seen much less significant stories get much more attention.
The film, which features a remarkable on-camera statement from a top retired CIA official, naturally made news in Germany. Director Willi Huismann was interviewed by the Deutsche-Welle broadcast network and received a lengthy write up in Spiegel Online. DPA, the German news service, was skeptical, quoting a senior German diplomat involved in Cuban affairs who said the film's thesis has "absolutely no political logic."
In Mexico City, three leading Spanish-language dailies, Cronica, Milenio, and La Jornada, picked up on the story. La Jornada headlines with the interview of retired (now deceased) CIA officer Sam Halpern, who seemed to think Cuban communists orchestrated Kennedy's death: "Castro nos gano" or Castro beat us. Halpern was the former right hand man of late CIA director Richard Helms. If confirmed, Halpern's assertion would expose the worst CIA intelligence failure prior to Sept. 11.
News sites in San Luis, Mexico, and Caracas, Venezuela, also picked up the story. So did The Australian, the Colombian news site Terra, El Mundo in El Salvador, Spain's IBL News
and Britain's BBC.
In an interview with The Times of London, director Huismann detailed what JFK author Anthony Summers called a "chilling scenario": that a Soviet intelligence officer recommended in July 1962 that Cuban security services consider using Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and recently returned to the United States.
"The young American said that he wanted to become a soldier of the Revolution. To prove it he would kill Kennedy. He was supposedly twice observed in the Cuban Embassy's garage -- a location chosen because the Cubans knew the offices and corridors of their diplomatic mission were riddled with CIA bugs and hopelessly insecure with another agent of State Security, a tall, thin, black man called César Morales Mesa. He allegedly paid Oswald the less than princely sum of $6,500," wrote Summers.
Cuban State Security had initially cultivated Oswald, one former agent told Huismann, simply because he was available. "You take what you can get . . . We believed in the revolution and were determined to export it."
On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot dead as his motorcade passed through downtown Dallas. Oswald was arrested 90 minutes later and shot dead two days later by local nightclub owner Jack Ruby while being transferred to the county jail.
While the story that Oswald received $6,500 from a Cuban source to kill Kennedy has been effectively debunked, the Daily Telegraph said the film "offers the most convincing evidence that Fidel Castro's regime was behind the most talked-about murder of the 20th century."
In Cuba the state-controlled Granma assailed the film, describing it as part of an ongoing "conspiracy" against Cuba. Granma commentator Gabriel Molina reiterated Havana's long-held view that Kennedy's assassination was orchestrated by rogue CIA officers and Cuban exiles with the "collateral objective" of "liquidating the Cuban Revolution."
"The most important documentation on the Dallas shooting has been retained as secret in a vault in the archives of the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon, and Hill not be classified until 2013," said Molina.
Molina got the date wrong but he is correct that many JFK assassination records remain secret. The CIA recently acknowledged that it retains 1,100 JFK documents that it will not release in any form until 2017, if then.
La Nueva Cuba (in Spanish), an opposition Cuban Web site, confirmed the existence of one of Huissman's key archival sources: the records of Mexico's Directorate of Public Security from 1963. A Mexican government archivist told LNC that the records, which have never been made public, were shown to Huismann because he is the only journalist who has asked for them.
The Spanish daily ABC said "Huismann's work is exhaustive, plausible and covers all sides. One cannot ask more of a documentary."
The German filmmaker, says the Spanish news site Diario Exterior, has shown that the JFK assassination story has yet more secrets to yield, predicting "the thousands of pages that remain to be studied promise to bring more surprises."
By comparison, coverage in the United States, where the film has not yet aired, has been minimal. The most prominent Western news sites to cover the film are the Miami Herald (which ran a British account), the Washington Times and the Toledo Blade.
By Jefferson Morley |
January 13, 2006; 10:37 PM ET
| Category:
Americas
Previous: Guardian Reporter Briefly Detained in Iraq |
Next: Pakistan's Press Turns on Washington
Posted by: mfm | January 13, 2006 02:03 PM
While it will no doubt be of historical interest in the future, I see no political advantage to opening old wounds while Castro is still alive. I do not know if Castro was involved, but the CIA attempted to kill Castro too.
I didn't get a chance to vote for John Kennedy, because I was in the army in Germany. We had just come off a field problem at Ft. Lewis, when we heard about Kennedy's death, and I saw Oswald killed on live TV that night. I did vote for Robert Kennedy in the California Primary that he won. I turned off the TV after his acceptance speech because of college homework, and I didn't find out he had been killed until the next day. It was one of the few times in my life I wasn't interested in breakfast. We had lost Martin Luther King the previuous spring,so 1968 was a rough year.
I am not interested in revenge, and I don't belong to the Pat Robertson school of diplomacy. Leave it to history.
Posted by: P. J. Casey | January 13, 2006 02:15 PM
mfm:
2017 is the date decided because the CIA assumed that anyone that had anything to do with Kennedy's death and subsequent investigation would be dead by that point.
Posted by: Brian | January 13, 2006 02:32 PM
Jefferson---
I have been following this story too and like you wonder why the international press is giving it more coverage.
All I know is that Bernard Fensterwald, former staffer to the U.S. Senate's Kefauver Crime Committee in the 1950's, went to his grave believing firmly and strongly that there was at least a mafia connection if not more. As a former research associate in the papers of Estes Kefauver at the University of Tennessee's special collections library, I never knew Fensterwald personally but firmly trust his research skills and insight.
Surely some folks who knew Fensterwald have noticed about this movie too! Oliver Stone's doubts abd movie don't "hold a candle" to Fensterwald's solid research.
Posted by: Robert Badgett Allen | January 13, 2006 02:45 PM
My first job was with a textbook publishing company that had a branch office in the Texas School Book Depository. In some photos, one can see that the boxes on which Oswald allegedly rested his rifle bore the name of our company, the South-Western Publishing Company.
At that time (1969) coworkers told me that employees in the Dallas office on that dark day had for years complained that significant information they provided to investigating authorities was never included in the official reports.
Years later, as a federal government employee, I witnessed several
"investigations" (related to other matters) in which officials repeatedly avoiding accepting testimony and evidence that might contradict the official story.
When, ultimately, I became a government whistleblower, the first major newspaper to cover the story was not American, although the safety of Americans were at stake, but British.
The cost to Americans of media's avoidance of hard stories goes up each year. Last year, it was Katrina, which might have been avoided if newspapers been more responsive to whistleblowers. Next year, who knows?
Posted by: L M Lewis | January 13, 2006 03:16 PM
Somehow, it will all be Bush's fault. Of course, the greatest whistleblower ever was Scooter Libby, and see what happened to him. To this day, an unqualified blond airhead can send her lazy, unemployed husband to a foreign country on a matter he knows nothing about, let him drink at government expense, allowing him to lie about his "mission" which oddly was so secret he was never sworn to secrecy, while his politically motivated and post-partum depression wife took out her anger at all republicans (George Bush made me have twins)
Posted by: Karen | January 13, 2006 04:43 PM
The assertions made here are unbelievable for a number of reasons.
1. The politics are all wrong. Kennedy was reaching out to Castro at the time. If anything, it's the anti-Castro rebels who had the motive, because they were angry at Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
2. If, as this seems to assert, the movie assumes that Oswald was the killer, then that's a pretty big leap, given the Zapruder film, the logistics of the magic bullet theory, the physics for which are questionable, and Oswald's shooting skills, reputedly not very good, and certainly not good enough to make two hits at that distance on a moving target with a rifle that was notorious for being off the mark.
Long story short, the reason why it hasn't garnered much attention here is because it's far-fetched garbage, and doesn't fit the circumstances at all.
Check out this Guardian report, which blows this film's premise totally out of the water: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1093178,00.html
Posted by: Matt | January 13, 2006 04:55 PM
I take offense to Karen's remarks:
>Somehow, it will all be Bush's fault.
The only thing you say that is correct.
>Of course, the greatest whistleblower ever was Scooter Libby, and see what happened to him.
He lied to prosecutors about spreading lies. That is why he is in trouble.
>To this day, an unqualified blond airhead can send her lazy, unemployed husband to a foreign country on a matter he knows nothing about, ...
Wilson was a former ambassador and he was not sent by his wife. She suggested him. Higher officials in the CIA sent him.
>...let him drink at government expense, allowing him to lie about his "mission" which oddly was so secret he was never sworn to secrecy, while his politically motivated and post-partum depression wife took out her anger at all republicans (George Bush made me have twins)
I don't know how to respond to the rest of this except to say its not very convincing and filled with a lot of hate.
Wilson was the American ambassador to Iraq when Saddam was using Americans in Iraq as human shields. He was called to Saddam's office where he thought he would be killed with the human shields. He wore a necktie which was a handsman noose and told Saddam that if he was going to kill him he might as well do it with his own noose.
Wilson is a patriot everyone should admire. To discredit him is unAmerican.
Posted by: Sully | January 14, 2006 11:43 AM
Its simple really, the Kennedy assasination is a western phenomenon and to bring it up makes money, especially if you can twist things to show a conspiracy. Oliver Stone knew this. UFOligists know this. Its our ability to continuously be fooled by sellers of snake oil that allows those who want to make a buck to roll out anything we would pay money to see hoping it to be true.
This movie only shows the lack of skepticism in Europe and the ability of Europeans to be lead by their noses.
The reason it hasn't hit America yet is we've seen these "movies" over and over again, from Oliver Stone to documentaries on PBS, Discovery, History and other programming. We are numb and more than skeptical when someone comes out with "new proof". Give Americans some credit for ignoring this one.
Posted by: Sully | January 15, 2006 11:23 AM
By now, we all know that the Warren Commission Report is essentially a book of fiction. Hopefully, the truth is out there, as they say. I'd love to know what it is before I die.
Posted by: MKM | January 17, 2006 10:56 PM
Really looking forward to 2017. :)
Posted by: Alexander | January 20, 2006 08:09 PM
> Check out this Guardian report, which blows > this film's premise totally out of the water:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1093178,00.html
No actually that doesn't impact on what the documentary presents at all. Try watching it to discover it's contents before deciding what they are. You are assuming a level of oversight which everyone in the documentary denies existed.
Posted by: Sol | July 22, 2006 07:01 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.
Jefferson, can you explain the logic behind the 2017 date? I don't understand why important documentation would be sealed off if it could answer questions.