Castro Saw Conspiracy In Dallas Latest Release Of Fbi Records On Jfk Show Dictator’s Reaction

Cuban leader Fidel Castro, while denying complicity by his nation in the assassination of President Kennedy, believed the 1963 murder resulted from a conspiracy of perhaps three people, according to previously secret FBI documents.

Castro also was quoted as saying that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald became angry and threatened to kill Kennedy when he was denied a visa by the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City earlier in 1963.

Many of more than 10,000 new FBI reports and memos, which the National Archives made public Thursday, added some footnotes to history by recounting the reactions to Kennedy’s assassination in Cuba and in the former Soviet Union. But they did not alter the FBI’s conclusion and that of the Warren Commission - that Oswald acted alone and that foreign powers were not involved.

Release of the newest files brought to more than 900,000 the number of once-classified CIA and FBI records that have been made public in response to the Congressional JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The action by Congress followed a rekindling of public controversy by Oliver Stone’s 1992 film, “JFK,” which was based on the theory that Kennedy was the victim of a government conspiracy involving the CIA and the Defense Department, among others.

The new documents came from the FBI’s previously secret file known as Operation SOLO, which involved the bureau’s focus on any links between the U.S. Communist Party and the Soviet Union, and from investigative files on Chicago organized crime figures Sam Giancana and Gus Alex that were examined in 1978 by a special House committee that reviewed the Warren Commission’s investigation.

The House panel questioned whether a single gunman such as Oswald could have fired all the shots. It also concluded that organized crime elements might have participated in the slaying.

Among the newly released documents was a June 17, 1964, report from the late J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, which imparted information gleaned from an unnamed FBI source whom Hoover deemed “reliable.”

The document said that Castro ordered his own tests made on a similar rifle and concluded “that Oswald could not have fired three times in succession and hit the target with the telescopic sight in the available time” and that therefore “it took about three people.”

FBI experts, however using the same rifle as Oswald - determined that three shots could have been fired by one person within the five to six seconds it took Oswald to shoot from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor of the old Texas School Book Depository in downtown Dallas.

Suggesting a motive for the slaying, Hoover quoted Castro as saying that Oswald “stormed into the embassy, demanded the visa and when it was refused to him headed out saying ‘I’m going to kill Kennedy for this.”’ Cuban officials had denied Oswald entry to their country on grounds the United States was openly hostile to them, Hoover’s letter said.