Gaeton Fonzi > Quotes

“Moby Dick was a helluva lot more than just a fish in the ocean.”)”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“The Chilean secret intelligence officer “Juan Williams” was Michael Townley; “Romeral” was an associate named Armando Larios.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“Desmond FitzGerald, then Chief of the Far Eastern Division, was made head of the CIA's Cuban Task Force W after its former boss, William Harvey, the Agency's handler of the Mafia Castro assassination plots, had been caught still dealing with the Mob even after Robert Kennedy had issued a cease and desist order.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“The Committee had to conclude that both Veciana and Phillips were liars. Any other conclusion would have opened doors that the Committee did not want to open; would have questioned the validity of the Committee’s entire relationship with the CIA; would have raised ominous doubts about the worth of the Agency’s promise to cooperate with the Committee; would have made suspect the Agency’s veracity in responding to questions, in making documents available and in providing access to all its files; and would have challenged the Agency’s claim of having had no association with Lee Harvey Oswald and no knowledge of the circumstances of Kennedy’s assassination.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“In time the mass firing came to be known within the Agency as “Turner’s Halloween Massacre.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“It has been suggested that Nixon’s antidrug campaign was, in actuality, a bid to establish his own intelligence network. It has also been suggested that it was exactly that bid which brought the sucker setup that was Watergate and Nixon’s political assassination.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation

“The Commission decided that the order of the hits and the miss was irrelevant and made no determination of the sequence.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“Blakey spoke up. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve laid this all out to you from the beginning. I said we would spend the first months looking at the entire spectrum of the case and defining our goals. Well, we reached the point where we must start moving on the report. Our main priority is the report.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“I also didn’t tell him that, just for the hell of it, Al and I had checked the telephone calls the witness had made immediately after he received the subpoena to testify before the Committee. He had made a lot of calls but the one that stuck out was the one to McLean, Virginia.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“I was really beginning to understand what it’s like to work in Washington. Blakey obviously knew: What’s important is not what you do, but how what you do looks while you’re doing it, how it looks after you’ve done it, and how it will eventually look in relation to how everything else you’ve done looks.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“Chief Counsel Bob Blakey would later tell journalist Tony Summers that he had been privately briefed by the CIA about the issue. So, while he personally accepted the notion that David Phillips was, indeed, Maurice Bishop, he didn’t believe that Veciana ever saw Oswald.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“mentioned a Maurice Bishop to him. “This Bishop you ask about, I do not know,” he said. “But I believe it could be true because Veciana is an action man and to do all the things he did you have to have a lot of connections, and that’s not too easy.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“he was not invited to join Blakey, a select few staffers and a couple of the Committee members on a trip to Cuba to interview Castro. When Al was hired by the Committee, he was told by then-Deputy Counsel Bob Tanenbaum that his early acquaintance with Castro as his New York bodyguard would be utilized by the Committee to establish a rapport. And if Castro cooperated, he could be a valuable new source of information.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“he called together his closest associates on the staff and gave us these final words of advice: “The one thing you have to remember about this town is to stick together and watch your ass.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“Questioned by investigator Fonzi, he admitted there was conflicting evidence that “gave us a lot of concern.” Specter’s inability to resolve the contradictions led Fonzi to his initial surmise of a conspiracy.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“Under such a propaganda barrage, the Arbenz government fled the country before many real bullets could fly. Phillips later termed the technique, which he would use again, “the big lie.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation

“funding right-wing newspapers and opposition groups, and likely funding a national truckers' strike. (The truckers managed well, despite having no strike fund and no visible means of support.)”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“(The CIA and the Washington D.C. Police Department had an established relationship through a cooperative training program.)”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“we fell into a trap that Blakey had set. Other teams also wound up in the same trap. It sprung from our attempt to structure a question that would be vital, answerable within the time and resources allowed and, at the same time, broad enough to permit the widest scope of investigation. We didn’t realize that those prerequisites combined to produce results that might look good but were actually superficial.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“Later, when Kennedy went to a special conference in Central America to rally support for his Cuba policy, Alpha 66 deliberately created an international incident by attacking a Soviet freighter in the Cuban port of Isabela de Sagua.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“Bringuier later debated Oswald on a local radio program where, led on by the right—wing talk show host, Oswald admitted he had lived in Russia and declared he was a Marxist. A recording of that program was nationally disseminated immediately after the Kennedy assassination.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“All Cubans work for the CIA,” he laughed. He admitted taking the Agency’s secrecy oath after leaving Fort Benning but said he didn’t remember when he left the Agency’s employ. Didn’t remember? He laughed again.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“My American friends never understood the politics or the violence that comes with Latin politics,” she wrote. “To this day I have not been able to explain, but only to describe, the passion Cubans feel for the freedom that’s taken for granted in this country.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“from Brazil he went to Venezuela—he was again recalled to Washington in June of 1973 and was made Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division just as the anti-Allende campaign was succeeding in Nixon’s goal of “making the economy scream.” That September, Allende was killed and General Augusto Pinochet and the junta took power.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“It would later become one of the first pieces of “evidence” to plant the seed of suspicion of a foreign conspiracy in President Johnson’s mind,”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“interesting that Blakey was assuming that the CIA would be sensitive to evidence indicating it had been involved in pulling strings for Veciana.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“Fenton’s investigators began growing stir crazy. There are only so many coffee breaks a man can take a day.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“program emanating from the highest echelons of the U.S. government to prevent Salvatore Allende from taking power. Having won the election with a plurality of the votes, Allende's presidency needed confirmation by the Chilean congress.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“CORU took credit for more than fifty acts of violence, including bombings, kidnappings and assassinations in Miami, New York, Panama, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. As Bosch would later boast to New Times journalist Blake Fleetwood: “Everything was planned there.” It was during this period that the Letelier assassination and the Cubana airlines bombing took place.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK

“On my official first day I sent to Washington a list of witnesses I planned to interview and noted those I thought should testify under oath. William Pawley was near the top of that list. Exactly one week later, William Pawley, in bed in his mansion on Miami Beach with a nervous ailment, put a gun to his chest and committed suicide.”
― Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK