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‘Coup in Camelot’ is a new documentary about the investigation of America’s most infamous crime. Narrated by Peter Coyote and directed/produced by Stephen Goetsch, the film shines new light on the ‘forensic fingerprints’ surrounding the day in November 1963 that left the country without its 35th president, also on JFK’s plans for peace and the U.S. immersion in Vietnam following his death.

 

Howelings

 

By Mark Howell

 

Strange Connections

 

 

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Kennedy assassination is aware of the CIA plots to assassinate Castro, plots that were never revealed to the Warren Commission.

But the CIA had certainly considered assassinating other foreign leaders. One such plot, never executed, was against Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, a plot allegedly orchestrated by a veteran CIA officer who’d once been Nasser’s closest Western adviser. That same man had been involved in the 1954 CIA-inspired plot that placed the Shah of Iran in power, overthrowing the then Prime Minister.  In that plot, code-named Operation Ajax, he worked closely with Archibald Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt. 

This CIA officer’s name was Miles Copeland, Jr., who knew that his son is Stewart Copeland, drummer for The Police.

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Those who have visited Cape Florida State Park with its majestic lighthouse, the oldest standing structure in Miami-Dade, may have wondered why it’s named Bill Baggs State Park and who Bill Baggs was.

William Calhoun Baggs was editor of The Miami News from1957 to 1969, one of a small group of Southern newspaper editors who campaigned for civil rights for African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.

Unknown at the time was that Baggs became one of the journalists involved in the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, an effort to influence American media, which was organized by Cord Meyer.

Together with previous attacks on the State Department and other government agencies, in the late 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy began to target the CIA, which he claimed harbored more than 100 closeted Communists. Baggs joined philosophically with both Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner of the CIA at Operation Mockingbird in supporting and defending Meyer, who had organized much of the program. American mainstream journalists attacked McCarthy.

Baggs cultivated numerous news sources from within the anti-Castro Soldier-of-Fortune community in South Florida, including Gerry Patrick Hemming, familiar to Key West readers of the research into the Kennedy assassination and the activities of soldiers of fortune training on No Name Key in the early 1960s conducted by Tim Gratz and Mark Howell who grew to know Hemming in depth.

Baggs also worked with Frank Sturgis and Bernard Barker to develop news leads and sources about the South Florida anti-Castro exile community long before they were involved with the 1970s Watergate scandal.

Baggs regularly talked with South Florida CIA case officers such as David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt, on various topics related to the intrigues among South Florida anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

Baggs was a longtime supporter of liberal Democrats such as Rep. Claude Pepper and Senator Dante Fascell. And was often criticized for his support of civil rights, his opposition to the Vietnam conflict and his promotion of social welfare programs for the elderly, the infirm and the disadvantaged in South.

The Cape Florida State Park was renamed in Baggs’ honor due to his pioneering conservation efforts in rescuing the southeast section of Key Biscayne. A large sign has now been installed at the park recognizing the site as part of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, since hundreds of slaves and Black Seminoles escaped from there to freedom in the Bahamas in the early 1820s until construction of a manned lighthouse at Cape Florida in 1825 cut off that escape route.

Bill Baggs died of a heart attack in 1969 at the age of 48.

 

 

 

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