I recently had a holiday in Cuba and found this book available in English everywhere. I found it very convincing as to who was behind the conspiracy. If you plan a holiday in Cuba pick up a copy there.

"ZR Rifle" appeared at about the time when Fonzi's "Last Investigation," Scott's "Deep Politics," and Prouty's "JFK" showed up in the bookstores. Since Ms. Furiati has been characterized as "sympathetic" to Castro's revolution, I approached it with caution, only because I needed to know if the book itself could be discredited as another strand of misinformation in an entire web of misinformation spun over the course of forty years.

What I find instead is another well-researched and objective attempt to explain more clearly the strands in the conspiracy web already suggested by the contemporary literature. As I began reading "ZR Rifle," I attempted to verify each fact presented in succession against what I know from other independent sources. I relaxed those efforts after fifty or sixty pages because the book is well-footnoted and the documentary support for its explanation is solid. The book, which can be read in one sitting, adds more detail and clarity to the speculations and background provided by the other authors of this last decade's research.

"ZR Rifle"s strongest point is its reliance on documents and testimony provided by General Fabian Escalante, a veteran official of the Cuban State Security Service -- Castro's intelligence agency. Imagine, if you will, a country in a state of seige, a country made a pawn in the dangerous game of Cold-War nuclear weapons strategies, and a country that began to suspect itself as the intended scapegoat of a conspiracy hatched on American soil to murder an American President. Escalante occupied a position at the center of Cuba's own investigation to discover the Truth about the Guns of Dallas. Such a perspective provides ponderous advantages, because, unlike the problem of the fox guarding the chicken-coup, Cuban intelligence was able to place its own agents among the Cuban-exile community with a primary objective of turning up new facts. And these new facts substantiate what we already know about the complicity of David Atlee Phillips and other non-mob actors within the CIA itself.

The book presents a new challenge for researchers of both the "serious" and armchair variety who want to unravel the complicated inconsistencies concerning the "Oswald in Mexico" story. Cuban documents -- specifically passport applications -- controvert the idea that Oswald was never in Mexico. The facts that document his presence there raise additional questions as to why the CIA propagated the photos of the beefy-looking Oswald imposter, and the meaning of last November's revelations about voice-print identification inconsistencies with the real Oswald. The one certainty that stands out, other than the Cuban evidence, is that all the paradoxes concerning Oswald in Mexico bear the trade-mark of David Atlee Phillips.

My own model of the assassination has the shape of an hour-glass, or two pyramids each facing the opposite direction and intersecting at their apex. As with any methodical murder investigation, the "bottom-up" approach represented by Furiati and Fonzi fills in the details of the actual operations and execution of the conspiracy. Prouty's book, "JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Assassination of . . ." represents a perspective from the other pyramid. The implications about the power-elite responsible for the Guns of Dallas are clear, but more evidence is needed. Americans in the year 2000 can easily vote on their suspicions alone. Those citizens of a more cerebral inclination can simply cut to the chase and formulate their own alternative replacements to the US Constitution. But to actually implement such a change requires massive public support that can only derive from a ponderous body of facts.

That is probably why Furiati was unable to publish her book in the United States. Again, there is a smoking gun in the hands of unidentified media influentials. One can only speculate that someone -- someone -- still worries about the sort of name-dropping that occurs on page 15 of Furiati's book. The fact that the ARRB Final Report was published in the same month that Congress voted to impeach Clinton, and that chapter 6 of that report contains thought-provoking comments about the individual mentioned by Furiati -- is no mean or insignificant coincidence.

The same group that was trying to kill Castro did succeed in assassinating President Kennedy. They are: anti-Castro Cubans, CIA, mafia, and the Watergate burglers.