Do we know for sure that the mob and CIA were working together?
According to pbs.org, “Though the details are murky and RFK’s involvement has never been proven, it went something like this. CIA operatives, aware that the Mob was eager to renew the profitable gambling business it enjoyed under the Batista regime, hired Mafia hitman Johnny Rosselli to kill Castro. If this wasn’t sordid enough, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover learned of the plot from FBI surveillance of Mob boss Sam Giancana, who just happened to share a mistress with John Kennedy. These machinations have provided much of the fuel behind various conspiracy theories of John Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in 1963.”
Was Lee Harvey Oswald involved with the camps?
The volume of proof that Oswald had connections to antiCastro groups and the mob in New Orleans, as well as covert government agencies, is quite overwhelming. Plus, witnesses and reports place Oswald busily traveling around the region – from Clinton to Baton Rouge to St. Tammany – during the summer of 1963. There is allegedly an 8mm film somewhere in the Georgetown University archives (prominent government officials claim to have seen it) that shows Oswald in a covert military training camp, and there are even witnesses who claim they saw him and a group of Cuban men in black combat gear conducting military training maneuvers in Madisonville’s Bedico Creek, lending a little support to the theory that there may have been multiple camps. Some pretty strong evidence comes from the testimony of attorney Robert K. Tanenbaum, a former mayor of Beverly Hills, who served as Deputy Chief Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1976-77. He wound up removing himself from the investigation after becoming frustrated by what he viewed as systemic obstruction, but years later he revealed that “...during that time, the focus of our investigation that was most fruitful had to deal with the anti-Castro, Cuban, CIA connection to the assassination. And that is to say briefly, we tried to deal with documentary evidence… we had information from unimpeachable sources that Lee Harvey Oswald was a contract employee of the CIA and the FBI. We had information of Oswald being in Clinton, Louisiana with [David] Ferrie and other anti-Castro individuals and various soldiers of fortune types who were contracted employees of the CIA. We came across a film of anti-Castro Cubans… and these soldier of fortune types with the contract employees of the CIA.... Again, it was somewhat shocking to me because I learned when I was in public school, that there was the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and Coast Guard. I didn’t know about any secret armies that were existing in America.”
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How do we know there was covert activity specifically in Lacombe?
A Times-Picayune article, dated August 2, 1963, reports that the FBI had raided a property the day before, and that “FBI agents discovered a large cache of bomb-making material, including more than a ton of dynamite. The couple [identified in another part of the article as Mr. & Mrs. William J. McLaney] who maintained the residence reportedly loaned it to a Cuban friend. Mrs. McLaney said the friend had been extolled by friends of theirs in Cuba, where they had lived in the pre-Castro era.” William J. McLaney, incidentally, is the brother of Mike McLaney, who had mob connections and was part-owner of Havana’s Hotel Nacional de Cuba before Castro took power, and was briefly jailed by Castro. The article goes on to list other items seized in the raid, including 20 empty 100-pound bombs and various bomb making materials, such as a 50-pound container of Nuodex, used to make napalm. All of it was seized and there were multiple arrests, but no convictions. According to several sources, these weapons and explosives were bound for Havana, where they would wreak havoc on oil refineries, thus sending a message to and helping to destabilize the Castro regime.
Why Lacombe?
Sleepy Lacombe seems like such a quiet, unassuming little hamlet. So why would it wind up being the locale of such international subterfuge? Two factors could explain that. In addition to easy access to the anti-Castro McLaney family’s property, its remote location and swampy terrain were ideal for preparing to invade the Bay of Pigs, a similarly swampy area on the southern coast of Cuba.
Where were the explosives found?
Curiously, the Times-Picayune article doesn’t provide the specific address of the cottage, but they do give some precise details about its location, including the fact that it’s “the second house on a street” that runs “perpendicular to U.S. Hwy 190, east of the city of Mandeville and west of the city of Lacombe… one block to the west of Pontchartrain Street.” It doesn’t take a detective to locate the house, but it would take x-ray vision – or a personal invitation – to see it. The current residents might be private by nature, or perhaps they’ve been harassed by other looky-loos, because the property is now locked up like a fortress: it’s surrounded by heavy vegetation, an opaque fence, and an imposing gate.
Where was the training camp, and how do we know it existed?
A lot of evidence comes courtesy of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who launched his own investigation into the Kennedy assassination, resulting in a trial, a book (On the Trail of Assassins), as well as him being portrayed by Kevin Costner as the hero in Oliver Stone’s JFK. EDGE August | September 2018