The original lie

Not too many folks paid attention to my post of two days ago, in which I discussed the new effort to blame Castro for the JFK assassination. This revised story will probably become "official" after Fidel dies. The winners write the history.

According to the recent German documentary which revived the Castro-did-it hypothesis, the Cubans gave Ozzie $6500 for the job. That odd figure didn't come out of nowhere. It first appeared in the 1964 Coleman-Slawson report, which detailed, for the benefit of the Warren Commission, Oswald's foreign activities. You can find a pdf of the relevant section here.

The mythical $6500 payday appears in a tale spun by one Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte. (If you load up the afore-linked file, scroll down past the first two-thirds.) Alvarado was a 23-year-old junior spook operating on behalf of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somosa, a man always willing to please American rightists. After the assassination, the young spy told the American embassy that he personally witnessed Oswald taking the sum of $6500 -- $5000 in payment and $1500 for expenses. The money came from Cuban officials as a pay-off for the assassination.

Unfortunately, the real Oswald appears to have been in New Orleans at the time this alleged transaction occurred. Under questioning, Alvardo admitted that he made up the whole story.

When asked why he concocted such a whopper, Alvarado said that his motive was to gain admittance to the United States and to join the fight against Castro. That explanation never made much sense. How could the creation of such a massive falsehood -- a lie which might have sparked a nuclear war -- possibly help a young Nicaraguan solve an immigration problem?

The real reason he volunteered this information should be obvious: Alvarado operated under the orders of the dictator Somosa. And who gave Somosa his orders...? Well, you can guess that part.

Now, I'm not the sort of person who likes to stay mired in the 1960s, so this blog will henceforward focus on current scandals. Even so, I can't help wondering: Why have our current disinformationists revived this ancient and long-discredited fib, as opposed to concocting an entirely new fib?