Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer's revelation that the Able Danger intelligence unit had reported to Philip Zelikow, the executive staff director of the 9/11 Commission, about identifications of Mohammed Atta and other future hijackers working as part of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States at least a year before 9/11, only for this vital information to be suppressed, invites a parallel with a presidential commission forty-two years ago this coming November.

As reported by the "New York Times" and other news organizations, not only was the information that an attack was being planned known, later Pentagon denials notwithstanding, but also Defense Department lawyers prevented the Able Danger unit from sharing this information with the F.B.I. A Navy captain named Scott Phillpott, according to the Associated Press, apparently also reported to the 9/11 Commission on these Able Danger findings, to no avail.

It may be that the immediate motive for the emergence of these astonishing facts involves lobbying for increasing funding for domestic military surveillance. Yet Colonel Shaffer has opened a window onto presidential commissions and their failure of responsibility to an informed citizenry. "Information has to get out, and I think we have to account for why some of these things weren't looked at as part of the overall report," Shaffer said on National Public Radio.

The incident suggests a parallel to the final days of the Warren Commission, which discovered that Lee Harvey Oswald had visited a Cuban exile and former law student named Sylvia Odio in Dallas in late September 1963. Just as the 9/11 Commission did not investigate the Able Danger information, despite Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer's offer to them of a full set of documents, so the Warren Commission conducted only the most cursory of inquiries into the Odio visit. As Mrs. Odio testified before the Warren Commission, she was told the next day by one of her visitors that Oswald had remarked, "President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that.... it is so easy to do it."

The Warren Commission lacked a context to evaluate this incident because it had not been informed of the C.I.A.'s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, now a matter of public record, and a matter to be concealed, unlike today when a Pat Robertson can openly advocate the assassination of a foreign leader. Had the Odio incident been explored fully, some uncomfortable truths might have emerged, truths that could have modified the conclusions of the Warren Report, just as Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer's information, tested, might have altered the findings of the 9/11 Commission, and the biography of Mohammed Atta been more thoroughly researched.

In my own study of the Kennedy assassination for my book, "A Farewell to Justice," I discovered that parallel to these secret efforts by the C.I.A., Robert F. Kennedy was organizing his own clandestine plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. The sources are the released minutes of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the Church Committee papers, and the Cubans who worked closely with the Attorney General.

Bobby's instruction to his special team was twofold. It was to discover a means of ridding the Kennedy administration of the Communist thorn in its side "ninety miles from home." It was also to protect his brother from the murderous impulses of an anti-Castro Cuban incensed by John F. Kennedy's refusal to support the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

Among those closest to Bobby Kennedy was a man still living in Florida today, Angelo Murgado, who, during the summer of 1963, traveled on Bobby's behalf to New Orleans. Moving among, as he puts it, "Castro's agents, double agents, and Cubans working for the C.I.A., he hoped to "neutralize" a future assassin.

In New Orleans, Mr. Murgado met Lee Harvey Oswald, who resided there in the city of his birth from April to September 1963. Hitherto unreported is that Bobby Kennedy became aware of Oswald - before the assassination.

Bobby even discovered that Oswald was working for the F.B.I., a fact brought to the attention of the Warren Commission as well, and subsequently confirmed for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s by an F.B.I. employee, William Walter, who viewed the Bureau's copious files on Oswald at the New Orleans field office when Oswald was arrested that August for a staged fracas on Canal Street where he was handing out "Fair Play for Cuba" leaflets.

"If the F.B.I. is controlling him," Bobby reasoned, according to Mr. Murgado, "he's no problem." Operating alone, covertly, suspecting a threat to his brother, Bobby underestimated who Oswald was and ceased to make him a major target of his concern. Bobby knew "something was cooking in New Orleans," Angel Murgado says, New Orleans that harlot city now destroyed by flood in a catastrophe of Biblical proportion, New Orleans that sin city where the Kennedy assassination incubated. But Bobby held back. He urged "caution," and apparently he did not share what he knew about Oswald with those who should have been expected to help him protect the President.

Angelo Murgado and a fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs, in September, were the men who traveled with Oswald from New Orleans to Dallas where they visited Sylvia Odio. (Mrs. Odio testified that the three traveled together although Angelo says that when he and Leopoldo, who drove from New Orleans together, arrived at Sylvia Odio's, Oswald was already there, sitting in the apartment. That "Leopoldo" and Angelo both knew Oswald, there is no doubt). Their objective, or so Angelo thought, was to search for help in their anti-Castro efforts; they talked to Mrs. Odio about buying arms to overthrow Castro. Angelo believed he could trust his companion, referred to in the Warren Report as "Leopoldo," because not only was he a fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs, but his brother was running for mayor of Miami. He was respectable.

Out of Angelo's hearing, "Leopoldo" phoned Mrs. Odio the next day to tell her how "Leon" Oswald had talked about the need to murder President Kennedy. "Leon" is "kind of nuts," Leopoldo said, a conclusion reflected in the Warren Report.

Placing Oswald in the company of so close an associate of Bobby Kennedy, in an incident that points to foreknowledge of the assassination, created a trap that would silence Bobby forever, rendering him powerless to make public what he knew about the death of his brother. He asked his aide, Frank Mankiewicz, whether "any of our people were involved," and, Mankiewicz told me, he thought, did you think there might be? The conversation stopped there.

Angelo had been betrayed by a companion he believed he could trust, a man not so much dedicated to the overthrow of Fidel Castro, as Angelo believed, as involved in arranging for Oswald to be blamed for the murder of the President, what the Odio visit was really about. The men who visited Mrs. Odio are identified here for the first time in print.

"Leopoldo" was Bernardo de Torres, who testified before the HSCA with immunity granted to him by the C.I.A., so that he was not questioned about the period of time leading up to the Kennedy assassination, as the C.I.A. instructed the Committee on what it could and could not ask this witness. Both the Warren Commission and the HSCA buried the anti-Castro theme, and never explored what Bobby might have known. It might be that the assassination of President Kennedy could have been prevented, just as the apprehension of the people uncovered by the Able Danger team, aided by the F.B.I., had it been granted the opportunity, might have altered the course of the 9/11 tragedy.

That Robert F. Kennedy not only knew about Lee Harvey Oswald, but also viewed him as a danger, is alone shocking. That Bobby put Oswald in New Orleans under surveillance, only to conclude that Oswald posed no threat because he was "just" involved in assassination plots against Fidel Castro, is a chilling precedent for the disasters we may continue to expect from a freewheeling approach to public accountability by government commissions that appear to be willing to keep the citizenry ignorant, and hence vulnerable to attack.

Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia

Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy’s murder.

Garrison began by exposing the contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in killing Kennedy. A Farewell to Justice reveals that Oswald, no Marxist, was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to sabotage Garrison’s investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. Garrison interviewed various individuals involved in the assassination, ranging from Clay Shaw and CIA contract employee David Ferrie to a Marine cohort of Oswald named Kerry Thornley, who at the very least was a Defense Intelligence Agency asset. Garrison’s suspects included CIA-sponsored soldiers of fortune enlisted in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, an anti-Castro Cuban asset, and a young runner for the conspirators, interviewed here for the first time by the author.

Building upon Garrison’s effort, Mellen uncovers decisive new evidence and clearly establishes the intelligence agencies’ roles in both a president’s assassination and its cover-up, set in motion well before the actual events of November 22, 1963.

From the new evidence in the National Archives' JFK Assassination Records Collection and interviews with over one thousand people, author Joan Mellen in her comprehensive new book A Farewell to Justice demonstrates how the cover-up began in Louisiana months before President Kennedy was shot in Dallas.

Biographer Joan Mellen met New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1969. His relentless search for the truth about what happened to President Kennedy made a deep impression upon her. In 1997, Mellen started to work on the story of Garrison's life.

Her biography turned into the story of Garrison's investigation and then into a new investigation of the assassination itself.

Working with thousands of previously unreleased documents and drawing on more than one thousand interviews, with many witnesses speaking out for the first time, Joan Mellen revisits the investigation of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, the only public official to have indicted, in 1969, a suspect in President John F. Kennedy’s murder.

Garrison began by exposing the contradictions in the Warren Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was an unstable pro-Castro Marxist who acted alone in killing President Kennedy. A Farewell to Justice reveals that Oswald was no Marxist and was in fact working with both the FBI and the CIA, as well as with U.S. Customs, and that the attempts to sabotage Garrison’s investigation reached the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Garrison interviewed various individuals involved in the assassination, ranging from Clay Shaw and CIA contract employee David Ferrie to a Marine cohort of Oswald named Kerry Thornley, who was also a Defense Intelligence asset. Garrison’s suspects included CIA-sponsored soldiers of fortune enlisted in assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, an anti-Castro Cuban asset, and a young runner for the conspirators, who speaks openly here for the first time.

Building upon Garrison’s effort, Mellen uncovers decisive new evidence and clearly establishes the intelligence agencies’ roles in both a president’s assassination and its cover-up, set in motion well before the actual events of November 22, 1963.

This book will become a landmark. As Mellen explains in the Preface, on the 40th Anniversary of President Kennedy's death in 2003, a Gallup Poll verified that twice as many people believed that the CIA was responsible for the assassination as believed that Oswald, a man without a motive, acted alone.

There are some subjects - and the web of conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy is certainly among them - that most members of the academic establishment avoid as much as possible.

And then there is Temple University's Joan Mellen, whose new book, A Farewell to Justice, pins the murder on the U.S. government itself.

"Long live tenure," said Mellen, an English professor who has written an eclectic collection of 17 books.

Her latest, which was published last week, started out as a biography of Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney whose investigation of the assassination was dramatized in Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK.

But in her research on Garrison, Mellen soon became fascinated by the assassination itself. After eight years of work, in which she says she conducted 1,200 interviews, Mellen concluded that Garrison had it right, and that the CIA - with the help of other government agencies - orchestrated the assassination and worked to thwart the district attorney's investigation.

"Intra-government warfare caused the death of President Kennedy," she said. "The evidence is conclusive."

Mellen presents her evidence in a dense and highly detailed 386 pages, with 140 additional pages of careful citations and sourcing.

In a review of the book, Publishers Weekly praised it for bringing "an astonishing amount of information to light," but complained that the narrative "confuses an already bewildering case by shifting timelines, authorial voices and locations with seemingly little cause."

For her part, Mellen considers the book a work of serious academic scholarship - even though she is a creative-writing professor and not a trained historian.

"If it weren't scholarship, it'd be worthless," she said.

Mellen, who was tenured in the early 1970s, said she was "not ambitious" and was unconcerned about any damage the book might do to her scholarly reputation.

Thus far, at least, Temple has been highly supportive of her work, Mellen said. The university public relations department has promoted her book, and university president David Adamany wrote her a letter commending her work as a "public intellectual," Mellen said.

"The serious historians have run away from this case," she said. "They don't want the taint; they want to be in the mainstream."

But poll after poll has demonstrated that a large majority of Americans do not believe the Warren Commission's findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Despite that, the subject is "taboo" in most academic circles, Mellen said. It would also seem, if the reaction of publishers is any gauge, that the popularity of JFK assassination books is on the wane.

Mellen found no takers for her full 1,500-page manuscript, and only one - a specialist Virginia press called Potomac Books - for the whittled down version.

A Farewell to Justice will have to sell well if Mellen is to recoup the $150,000 of her own money she estimates she spent researching the book.

"It consumed my life, but I'd do it again," Mellen said. "It's my contribution to history."

I'm the author of A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination and the Case That Should Have Changed History, my seventeenth book, whose credibility is attacked by Max Holland. Nation readers might give pause to Holland's five-year campaign of outright falsehoods about the investigation into the Kennedy assassination by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that have appeared in a range of publications from The Wilson Quarterly, The Atlantic, New Orleans and the Washington Post to, now, The Nation.

Garrison focused on the clandestine service of the CIA as sponsor of the Kennedy assassination as a result of facts he discovered about Lee Harvey Oswald, specifically Oswald's role as an FBI informant and low-level CIA agent sent to the Soviet Union by the CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence, James Angleton, as part of a false defector program. What Garrison had not yet discovered was that Oswald also worked for the US Customs Service in New Orleans.

Contrary to Holland's assertions of the innocence of Clay Shaw, the man Garrison indicted for participation in the murder of President Kennedy was indeed part of the implementation of the murder and was guilty of conspiracy. That Shaw was acquitted does not exonerate him for history. New documents indicate overwhelmingly that Shaw did favors for the CIA. On his deathbed he admitted as much. Shaw's repeated appearances in Louisiana in the company of Oswald demonstrate that Shaw was part of the framing of Oswald for Kennedy's murder. Shaw took Oswald to the East Louisiana State Hospital in an attempt to secure him a job there, one event among many never investigated by the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

Holland's assertion that Garrison based his conclusion that the CIA sponsored the assassination on a series of articles in an Italian newspaper is also incorrect. Garrison had focused on the CIA long before he learned that Shaw was on the board of directors of a CIA-funded phony trade front called Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), based in Rome. Indeed, the newspaper Paese Sera broke the story of Shaw's involvement after a six-month investigation into CIA interference in European electoral politics, only to discover that Garrison had indicted Shaw a few days before the first article was to appear. Moreover, the new documents reveal that CMC and its parent outfit, Permindex, were indeed CIA fronts.

The 1992 Assassinations Records and Review Act has disgorged dozens of documents showing that Shaw was a CIA operative. This is directly contrary to what Holland suggests--that Garrison was a willing victim of "the KGB's wildest fantasy." To cite one example, Shaw was cleared for a project dubbed QKENCHANT, which permitted him to recruit outsiders for CIA projects. Shaw was no mere businessman debriefed by the CIA. One document reveals that among those Shaw recruited in New Orleans was Guy Banister, former FBI Chicago Special Agent in Charge running an ersatz New Orleans detective agency whose side-door address (544 Camp Street) Oswald used on a set of his pro-Castro leaflets, until Banister stopped him.

The former editors of the now-defunct Paese Sera, whom I interviewed, from Jean-Franco Corsini to Edo Parpalione, insisted adamantly that neither the Italian Communist Party, nor the Soviet Communist Party, nor the KGB had any influence on the paper's editorial policy. Outraged by Holland's accusations, Corsini said that he despised the KGB and the CIA equally.

The roots of Holland's charge that Garrison was a dupe of KGB propaganda may be traced to an April 4, 1967, CIA document titled "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report." In it the CIA suggests to its media assets that they accuse critics of the Warren Report of "Communist sympathies." In April 1967 Garrison was at the height of his investigation: He is clearly the critic the CIA had in mind.

In 1961 Richard Helms had already developed the charge that Paese Sera was an outlet for the KGB and for Soviet propaganda. Helms was indignant, but the truth had appeared in Paese Sera: The attempted putsch against Charles de Gaulle by four Algerian-based generals had indeed been supported by the CIA. Holland has merely picked up where Helms, later to become a convicted perjurer, left off--repeating a scenario developed for him by Helms, with the addition of making the accusation of Soviet influence on Garrison.

My book is hardly a "hagiography of the DA," as Holland states. I present a flawed man who exhibited great courage in facing down both the FBI and the CIA in his attempt to investigate the murder of the President. Indeed, Garrison family members were dismayed that I did not present him in a more idealized form. I depicted him as an ordinary man who rose to distinction because of his single-minded commitment to the investigation.

Among the many errors in Holland's latest diatribe is that Shaw died "prematurely," as if somehow Garrison's prosecution hastened his end. In fact, Shaw was a lifelong chain smoker and died of lung cancer. Holland attacks Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the HSCA, for using acoustic evidence to suggest that there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy murder. In fact, the acoustic evidence of at least four shots being fired has been established scientifically by Donald Thomas in the British forensic journal Science and Justice (see also Thomas's well-documented paper, available online, "Hear No Evil: The Acoustical Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination," delivered November 17, 2001).

Blakey certainly can be criticized for his close relationship with the CIA throughout his HSCA investigation. His letters of agreement with the CIA are at the National Archives. The CIA decided how key witnesses were to be deposed, and Blakey acquiesced in all CIA demands and intrusions upon the investigation.

Before Blakey was hired, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg considered accepting the job as counsel. Knowing that the CIA had at the least covered up the facts of the assassination and at worst been involved, Goldberg telephoned CIA director Stansfield Turner and asked him whether, should he take the job, he would have full CIA cooperation. Silence emanated over the wires. Goldberg, naïve perhaps, asked Turner if he had heard the question. "I thought my silence was my answer," Turner said. Goldberg declined the job. Blakey took it. It is no surprise that Holland, who has consistently defended the CIA, does not raise the issue of Blakey's cooperation with the CIA during his HSCA tenure but focuses instead on Blakey's conclusion, forced by the irrefutable acoustic evidence, that there was a conspiracy.

It is one thing for Holland to spread his disinformation in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence. It is quite another for The Nation to allow him continued access without debate to its pages to obfuscate, slander authors like myself and deny evidence fully established--in particular about Jim Garrison and how the new documents establish his credibility and reveal how close he came to the truth, and in general about the Kennedy assassination's sponsors and accessories.

Phillips blames the Soviet Union for masterminding the assassination, mingling truth with fiction. Warren Commission critics, as Helms had outlined, were dupes of the KGB, as Max Holland's thesis about Jim Garrison once more can be traced, not only to Helms, but also to the most skillful of CIA propagandists, David Atlee Phillips. In an amusing side note, CIA's Win Scott steals Harrison's journal, even as, in real life, it was James Angleton who broke into Scott's files after his death and stole his novel manuscript.

Yet another trace of David Atlee Phillips' connections to the events of November 22nd, which included both the assassination of President Kennedy and the arming of Rolando Cubela with the means to assassinate Fidel Castro, emerges in a CIA cable. Miami is informing its Mexico City station that one "Henry J. Sloman," an alias for longtime CIA asset Anthony (Tony) Sforza, would be arriving in Mexico on November 22nd. Because the CIA was fond of providing Mafia cover for some of its assets, many people mistakenly concluded that the Mafia had been behind the assassination of President Kennedy. CIA's Sloman, himself, as Seymour M. Hersh points out, "was considered a professional gambler and a high-risk smuggler directly linked to the Mafia."

In Mexico City, Sloman/Sforza was to meet the wife of an agent designated as AMHALF-2, and retrieve a message regarding the "Martime Exfil of headquarters asset" who was to arrive in Mexico "on 22 November," and may have been Fidel Castro's sister, Juanita. Sloman was ordered to contact Phillips, mentioned here under his longtime alias "[Michael] Choaden," on the next day and pick up the information that had arrived from "[02] Exit-3." AMHALF would be a link person, part of the communication circuit providing intercepts for island assets. Between 1960 and 1963, there were something like 350,000 such intercepts either by land lines or on island assets, all directed to CIA.

Sloman was the case officer for, among others, Emilio Rodriguez, the oldest son of Arnesto Rodriguez and brother of Arnesto, Junior, whom Oswald had visited in New Orleans in an attempt to learn how he might involve himself in training camps for sabotage against Castro.

The header of this November 22nd, 1963, CIA cable includes the cryptonym PBRUMEN, which referred to Cuba. By its timing it suggests the Cubela assassination attempt of November 22nd. It also seems to suggest that Oswald believed that he was involved in the attempts on Castro's life and did not know he would be linked to the shooting in Dealey Plaza.

This extraordinary document, if fragmentary, is interesting, too, because it provides an alibi for David Atlee Phillips under the alias he used in Cuba, "Michael Choaden." If Phillips was down in Mexico, as he would be expected to be, waiting to be contacted by Sloman, he was not in Texas; this cable would confirm for any record that David Atlee Phillips was somewhere other than at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

That CIA contract pilot, Jim Rose, who had flown with David Ferrie, had begun to work for Garrison, even as he continued his missions for the clandestine services. Did he think the Agency was so big it could be out of control? Garrison asked Rose. The first time Rose walked into Tulane and Broad, Ivon frisked him, only to ignore a ballpoint pen.

"It's napalm," Rose said. "If I shot you, your face would go up in flames." Garrison dubbed him "Winston Smith," then "Winnie the Pooh," then "Rosalie." Rose worked on Shaw's telephone records and found the number of Sergio Arcacha Smith's lawyer. He identified one more CIA courier, William Cuthbert Brady. He knew Loran Hall and Lawrence Howard personally as "proficient riflemen and top-level guerrilla fighters."

In 1966, Rose had joined former Batista executioner Rolando Masferrer's invasion of Haiti to depose the dictator Duvalier. In his attempt to escape, he shot a man square in the face. McNabb, "Rose," was a stone-cold killer. He knew that among those working for Masferrer was William Seymour of No Name Key notoriety. Terming Masferrer "the most dangerous man in the United States," Rose suggested that if any anti-Castro leader were involved in the assassination, "his first choice" would be one of the Masferrer brothers.

Rose proposed a Miami-based scheme to Jim Garrison. To locate those Cubans photographed with Oswald outside the International Trade Mart, he would pretend to recruit mercenaries for a CIA proj¬ect in Biafra. A concealed Garrison investigator would photograph the applicants. Should Rose be exposed, Richard Gerstein would have him arrested and "put on the next flight to New Orleans."

In this effort, Rose contacted several CIA-linked reporters, among them, Donald Bohning, CIA's AMCARBON-3. "AM" stood for Cuba; "Carbon" was that CIA cryptonym for its writer assets. Bohning, who became the Latin American editor for Miami Herald, an Al Burt doppelganger, lunched weekly with CIA's Jake Esterline, one of the reluctant engineers of the Bay of Pigs operation. Bohning had received his Provisional Covert Security Approval as a CIA confidential informant on August 21, 1967, then Covert Security Approval itself on November 14th. On July 31 st, the DDP himself approved the use of Bohning in the CIA's Cuban operations.

Bohning informed Esterline of Rose's visit on March 28, 1968. A "Winston Smith," working for Jim Garrison, was looking into the activities of Rolando Masferrer in 1963, before the assassination. Rose was attempting to identify certain Cubans who had appeared in photographs. He was leaving for Biafra to fight as a mercenary next month.

Bohning declined to help Jim Rose. Later he found other journalists of his acquaintance had also been contacted, but with Rose using the name "Carl McNab"[sic]. "I use many different names for different purposes," Rose explained to Bohning when next they met. "I used to have still a different war name with the Company." That was "Carl Davis."

During that sojourn in Miami, while JMWAVE watched his every move, Rose met with Lawrence Howard. He didn't believe Masferrer was involved in the assassination, Howard said smoothly. "He's too smart for that." But others "in the ring around him could well have been." Masferrer had been sentenced to twenty-four years in prison for the abortive Haitian escapade, but Rose managed to meet with him.