Charles Cabell was born
in Dallas County on 11th October, 1903. He graduated from West
Point Military Academy in 1925. He also studied at the Command
and General Staff School (1940) and the Army and Navy Staff College
(1943).
During the Second
World War Cabell was was a member of the advisory council for
the United States Army Air Force headquarters
in Washington before being made commander
of the Forty-fifth Combat Wing of the Eighth Air Force in the Europe.
He also served as Director of Plans (December, 1943 - April, 1944),
Director of Operations and Intelligence Mediterranean Allied Air Forces
(July, 1944 - May, 1945) and attended the Yalta
Conference in February, 1945.
After the war he was the
United States air representative on the military staff committee of
the United Nations in New
York. In 1951 he was appointed director of the staff for the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, where he worked under General Omar
Bradley. In 1953 he was appointed deputy director of the Central
Intelligence Agency.
In this job he was involved in organizing the Bay
of Pigs invasion. It is also believed that Cabell was involved
in developing plans to assassinate Fidel
Castro.
His brother Earle
Cabell was
elected mayor of
Dallas in May 1961. He therefore was involved in planning the trip
John
F. Kennedy made
to Dallas on 22nd November, 1963. James
H. Fetzer believes
that the brothers were
involved in the
plot to kill Kennedy: "The two combined motive, means, and opportunity."
Cabell retired as a four-star
general in 1963 and later became a consultant to the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration.
Charles Cabell died in
Arlington, Virginia, on 25th May, 1971.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Jim
Garrison,
On the Trail of the Assassins (1988)
General Charles
Cabell was the brother of Earle Cabell, former mayor of Dallas. Now
the eleventh-hour change in the President's motorcade route was even
more intriguing to me, and I immediately headed for the public library.
Before sunset I had become the leading expert in New Orleans on General
Charles Cabell, who, it turned out, had been fired as the C.I.A.'s
number two man by President Kennedy. General Cabell had been in charge
of the Agency's disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. In the final hours,
while Castro's small air force was tearing the landing effort apart,
Cabell had managed to get through a call to President Kennedy in an
attempt to halt the disaster. Just over the horizon, by something
less than happenstance, lay aircraft carriers with fighter planes
on their decks, engines warming, up. General Cabell informed the President
that these fighters could reverse the course of disaster in minutes
and secure the success of the invasion. All that was needed was the
President's authorization.
On the preceding day Kennedy
had assured the assembled media that if anyone invaded Cuba (and the
air had become rife with invasion rumors) there certainly would be
no help from the U.S. armed forces. He flatly turned Cabell down.
With that the invasion's chances sank, as did the general's intelligence
career. President Kennedy asked for Cabell's resignation and the general
was subsequently replaced on February 1, 1962, as the C.I.A.s deputy
director. General Cabell's subsequent hatred of John Kennedy became
an open secret in Washington.
In most countries, a powerful
individual who had been in open conflict with a national leader who
was later assassinated would receive at least a modicum of attention
in the course of the posthumous inquiry. A major espionage organization
with a highly sophisticated capability for accomplishing murder might
receive even more. Certainly a powerful individual who also held a
top position in a major espionage apparatus and had been at odds with
the departed leader would be high on the list of suspects.
However, General Cabell,
who fit that description perfectly, was never even called as a witness
before the Warren Commission. One reason may have been that Alien
Dulles, the former C.I.A. director (also fired by President Kennedy),
was a member of the Commission and handled all leads relating to the
Agency. During the nine years that Dulles had been the CIA's chief.
General Charles Cabell had been his deputy.
(2)
James
H. Fetzer, Assassination
Science and the Language of Proof, included in Assassination
Science (1998)
The Deputy Director
for Operations at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion was an Air
Force Lt. General by the name
of Charles Cabell. Cabell had overseen attempts by the CIA in collusion
with the Mob - which wanted to regain its casinos and resorts in Havana,
where it was running the largest money-laundering operation in the
Western hemisphere - to take out Castro. It was Cabell who, in the
presence of Dean Rusk, called JFK to plead with him for the close
air support he believed the President had promised, but which JFK
refused to provide. He would later return to the Pentagon, after being
relieved of his position at the CIA by JFK, where he would describe
the President as a "traitor".
Charles Cabell was born
in Dallas in 1903. His brother Earle was born near Dallas in 1906.
In 1961, Earle Cabell became Mayor of the City of Dallas. In his capacity
as Mayor, he not only supervised the police department but oversaw
ceremonial activities, including parade routes and motorcades. There
is no way that the Presidential motorcade could have taken the peculiar
and improper route it took through Dealey Plaza - which even contradicted
the route published in the morning paper - without the approval of
the Mayor. The two combined motive, means, and opportunity. The psychodynamics
of the assassination, as I reconstruct the crime, thus appear to have
pitted two rich and powerful right-wing brothers against two rich
and powerful left-wing brothers.
| If
you have ever been tempted to believe that President Kennedy was
killed by a lone, demented gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald, then
Assassination Science is the one book which will convince you,
beyond any reasonable doubt, that there was indeed a conspiracy
and a cover-up. Completely lacking the wild speculations that
have marred some books on the shooting of Kennedy, Assassination
Science sticks to the hard facts, interpreted by medical and scientific
expertise. (James
H. Fetzer, Catfeet, ISBN 0 8126 9366 3, £9.00) |
James
H. Fetzer, Assassination Science, Catfeet (1998)
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
