Castro
Ordered Kennedy's Assassination,
According to a German Documentary
German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann spent years digging into the assassination
of US President John F. Kennedy. His documentary "Rendezvous
With Death -- Why Kennedy Had to Die," about Cuban leader Fidel
Castro's role in the murder is set to premiere Friday, January 6,
2006 on German public TV.
In an interview with Germany's international braodcaster Deutch Welle,
Huismann says he spent three years researching for his documentary
in Mexico, the United States and Cuba.
He found strong ties between Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who murdered
Kennedy, and Fidel Castro. Several witnesses are shown in the film,
including Cuban former secret agents, U.S officials, and a Russian
intelligence source. Huismann also did some research in Mexican security
archives.
"Oswald had been an agent for the Cuban intelligence services
since November 1962. He was a political fanatic and allowed himself
to be used by the Cuban intelligence services to kill John F. Kennedy,"
Huismann added.
The film, shown to journalists in Berlin on Wednesday, says Oswald
traveled to Mexico City by bus in September 1963, seven weeks before
the Kennedy shooting, and met agents at the Cuban embassy there who
paid him $6,500.
Oscar Marino, a former Cuban agent and a key source for the documentary,
told Huismann that Oswald himself had volunteered for the assassination
mission and Havana had exploited him.
"Oswald was a dissident. He hated his country…Oswald offered
to kill Kennedy," Marino said in the film.
He said he knew with certainty that the assassination was an operation
of the Cuban secret service G-2, but would not say if it was ordered
by Fidel Castro.
"It was a Cuban reaction to the repeated attempts of the Kennedy
brothers, above all the younger Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel
Castro through political assassination -- a duel between the Kennedys
and the Castros, which, like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists
dead," Huismann said to DW journalist Jose Ospina Valencia.
After Kennedy's death on Nov. 22, 1963, Huismann says, Lyndon B. Johnson
found out that the US had a secret, illegal murder program focused
on Fidel Castro. He hadn't been informed before that. He knew that
Castro knew, and he was afraid that the discovery of these mutual
assassination attempts could force him to carry out an invasion of
Cuba, which he believed could result in a third -- nuclear -- world
war. And as a conservative pragmatist, he decided within a few hours,
in agreement with Robert Kennedy, to drop the whole thing and to ban
FBI and CIA officials from pursuing the trail leading to Cuba.
Laurence Keenan, an officer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) who was sent to Mexico City immediately after Kennedy's death
to investigate a possible Cuban connection, said he was recalled after
just three days and the probe was aborted.
"This was perhaps the worst investigation the FBI was ever involved
in," Keenan said. "I realized that I was used. I felt ashamed.
We missed a moment in history."
Questioned about a possible prosecution of Castro for his alleged
responsibility in the Kennedy's murder, the filmmaker said it could
never happen.
"In my opinion, even the conservative Bush government wouldn't
take any political or legal steps to avenge the crime. Then they'd
also have to put the American politicians on trial who were involved
in assassinating foreign statesmen. They include Alexander Haig, who
testified as a witness in my film, and others who are still alive,"
Huismann said.
