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Conspiracy
The following text is from Anthony Summers' book Conspiracy.
A final solution to the mysteries of the assassination may now be impossible. In 1988, however, the FBI failed to pursue a lead that appears, on its face, to be unique, one that might conceivably identify the killers of President Kennedy and perhaps even bring some of them to justice. It is the result of years of dogged research by a California writer, Steve Rivele.
In 1985, Rivele became interested in the CIA's Executive Action program - revealed by the then Senator Walter Mondale following Intelligence Committee inquiries a decade earlier. Executive Action was the detailed planning, in 1961, for the assassination of foreign leaders, and it included the recruiting of a man known only by the code name "QJ/WIN," a foreign citizen with a criminal background recruited in Europe - as the Intelligence Committee described him.
Rivele's research plunged him deep into the history of the CIA's perilous collaboration with organized crime, at home and abroad. It led to a man called Christian David, a fifty-eight year old Frenchman nearing the end of a heroin trafficking sentence in the French Connection network, and the leader of the Corsican network in South America known as the Latin Connection. He had also worked for intelligence services, including the French SAC.
When Rivele interviewed David he was awaiting extradition to France, to stand trial for murdering a policeman, a killing committed in connection with the murder of Mohammed Ben Barka, the Moroccan politician. David told Rivele he had information on the Kennedy assassination. In return for this information, he said, he wanted a deal with the U.S. government that would block his return to France. For his part, he would tell all he knew to a grand jury.
Rivele found David an attorney. A federal judge temporarily halted David's extradition, ordering that he be taken off a plane bound for Paris and held in New York City. Although advised of the Kennedy assassination aspect of the case, the federal government got the judge to lift the stay of extradition and David was hastily flown to Paris. In prison there since 1985, he has been interviewed repeatedly by Rivele, as well as by James Lesar, a Washington attorney.
In May or June 1963, according to David, he was asked by Antoine Guérini, the Corsican Mafia boss in Marseilles, to accept a contract to kill "a highly placed American politician." Guérini made it obvious whom he meant, calling the politician "la plus grosse légume" - the "biggest vegetable." The President was to be killed on U.S. territory. David turned down the contract, on the ground that it was too dangerous.
The contract, said David, was accepted by Lucien Sarti, a Corsican drug trafficker
and killer, and two other members of the Marseilles mob, whom he refused to
name. They were, he said, "spécialistes de tir" - "sharpshooters."
He learned what happened some time after the assassination, at a 1965 meeting
in Buenos Aires. Present were Sarti, a drug trafficker called Michèle
Nicoli, David, and two others. This is how the assassination was carried out,
as David tells it.
Sarti and the other two assassins flew from Marseilles to Mexico City in the fall of 1963. They stayed there several weeks, and were then driven to the United States border, which they crossed at Brownsville, Texas, using Italian passports. They were met at the border by a representative of the Chicago Mafia, who conversed with them in Italian. He drove them to a house in Dallas.
In Dallas, according to David, the assassins took photographs of Dealey Plaza, and made a detailed plan for the killing. The plan was for a cross fire. On November 22, David told Rivele, three gunmen were in position. Two were in buildings to the rear of the President when he was hit - one of them "almost on the horizontal." The third killer, Sarti, dressed in some sort of uniform as a disguise, was "on the little hill to the front, the one with the fence." He had considered shooting from the railroad bridge, directly in front of the President, but found it too exposed and moved to better cover.
Four shots were fired that day, according to David, quoting Sarti and another of the assassins. The first shot, from the rear, struck President Kennedy in the back. The second shot missed, and hit "the other man in the car." The third shot, from Sarti on the hill, struck the President in the head, killing him. Sarti used "an explosive bullet", the only member of the group to use that kind of ammunition. The fourth shot missed the car altogether.
After the assassination, according to David's allegations, the murderers laid low in Dallas for about two weeks. Then - says David - they were then flown out of the country, the last part of the journey by private aircraft, to Montreal.
Asked who could corroborate his story, David suggested Rivele locate Michèle Nicoli, who had also been with the group in Buenos Aires in 1965, when the assassination was discussed. Rivele made contact with Nicoli, after a lengthy search, with the help of Michael Tobin, a high official in the Drug Enforcement Administration. Nicoli, who testified against French Connection members in 1972, was living under the Witness Protection Program, using a new name. The DEA official vouched for Nicoli's truthfulness in the strongest terms.
Rivele's contacts with Nicoli took place over many months, and he proved extremely reluctant to talk. In the end, however, he told both Rivele and Tobin essentially the same story as had David. So far as could be ascertained, he and David had not been in touch with each other since the early seventies.
Lucien Sarti, the alleged leader of the assassination team, was shot dead by Mexican police in 1972. The identity of his two accomplices remains unclear as of this writing. Apparently they are still alive.
By late 1987, after his own meeting with Nicoli, DEA official Tobin was satisfied - because of Nicoli's proven reliability - that the matter should be pursued. He considered the legalities of the situation and decided that - since in 1963 it was not a federal offence to assassinate the President - the assassination was covered by conspiracy and civil rights statutes. On the basis of those laws, he believed, a federal grand jury could be empanelled and indictments sought through a U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C.
In December 1987 Tobin formally notified his superiors that he wanted to conduct an investigation, drawing on Nicoli's statements. DEA officials said the matter was outside his jurisdiction and turned over the information to an Assistant Director of the FBI. In Paris, a U.S. embassy official made contact with the French lawyer acting for Christian David, the witness in jail in France. But that was that. By spring 1989, nothing substantive had been done by the FBI. As ever since 1963, the will was lacking.
For those who wish to see no further progress in the Kennedy case, a much-trumpeted British television program, produced in November 1988 by Central TV, was a welcome event. Among its many follies, the program named as Gunman Two and Gunman Three whose names had come up during Rivele's discussions with David, but who David had since specifically said were innocent. In the wake of the television program, one of the men produced a plausible alibi for November 22, and Rivele's exclusive story suddenly appeared - however unjustifiably - to have been exploded. Rivele's French publishers backed off, and no American publisher had been found as this book went to press. Rivele himself, disgusted with the Central TV fiasco, weary from years of non-stop investigation, turned to other work.
In France, meanwhile, Christian David has repeatedly avoided trial by staging "suicide" attempts, and languishes in Paris' La Santé prison. He has given his French lawyer a sealed envelope said to contain a written account of all he knows about the Kennedy assassination, which is allegedly more than he has so far told. Clearly, both he and the second witness, Michèle Nicoli, should be extensively interrogated by the proper authorities. We should be told why David's deportation was pushed through in haste in 1985, when federal authorities knew he was offering information in the Kennedy case.
As of this writing, the fact remains that two men exist - one of them regarded by officials as a most reliable source - who say they know how President Kennedy was assassinated. From what they say, it may be that two of the assassins - not to mention those who directed them - may still be alive, and could perhaps be brought to justice. There has not been such a situation in the quarter century since the assassination. Perhaps their story is unfounded, but, if the United States is a properly functioning democracy, it should be shown to be bogus. There should be an investigation, and full public disclosure of the results.