#HistoricalFigure

People (17)

• Che Guevara Ernesto 'Che' Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary who witnessed the 1954 CIA-backed coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, became a key military commander of the Cuban Revolution, served as Minister of Industries in Cuba, and was captured and executed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967 with CIA assistance - with agency officer Felix Rodriguez present at his death.
• Clay Shaw New Orleans businessman and Trade Mart founder, arrested by Jim Garrison in 1967 for conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination and acquitted in 1969, who reported to the CIA's Domestic Contact Service from 1948 to 1956.
• Diana, Princess of Wales Princess of Wales whose 1997 death alongside Dodi Fayed is referenced in research tied to the PROMIS scandal and its web of interconnected intelligence figures.
• Grigori Rasputin Grigori Rasputin was a Russian mystic and self-proclaimed holy man who exerted significant influence over the late Russian Imperial family.
• Jack Ruby Jack Ruby (born Jacob Rubenstein) was a Dallas strip club owner with organized crime connections who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of Dallas Police headquarters on November 24, 1963 in front of live television cameras, was convicted of murder but died of cancer in January 1967 before retrial, and whose pre-assassination contacts with mob figures remained a focus of the HSCA's conspiracy investigation.
• Jacobo Arbenz Jacobo Arbenz was the democratically elected President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954 whose land reform program expropriating United Fruit Company holdings prompted the CIA's Operation PBSUCCESS, which overthrew his government in June 1954 and established the CIA-backed coup as the template for subsequent Cold War interventions in Latin America.
• James Earl Ray James Earl Ray was the career criminal who pled guilty to the April 4, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, recanted three days later claiming he was a patsy for a conspiracy organized by a mysterious figure called 'Raul,' and died in prison in 1998 with the conspiracy question still legally unresolved.
• Jim Garrison Jim Garrison was the New Orleans District Attorney who launched the only criminal prosecution related to the Kennedy assassination, arresting businessman Clay Shaw in 1967 on conspiracy charges, losing the case in 1969 after what he argued was active CIA obstruction, and becoming the basis for Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK.
• John Krol Archbishop of Philadelphia from 1961 to 1988 and cardinal from 1967, who led sixteen religious leaders in condemning R.C. Horsch's film Black Mass in 1975.
• Josef Cardinal Mindszenty Hungarian Cardinal whose apparently coerced 1949 show-trial confession alarmed CIA analysts and directly triggered the creation of Project BLUEBIRD, the Agency's first formal behavioral control program.
• Lee Harvey Oswald Lee Harvey Oswald was the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas - a former U.S. Marine stationed at the CIA's U-2 base at Atsugi who defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, returned to the United States in 1962, distributed Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets in New Orleans in summer 1963, visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City that September, and was shot by Jack Ruby two days after arrest; the CIA's counterintelligence division (CI/SIG) had maintained a 201 file on him since December 9, 1960, and a senior CIA officer who signed a key pre-assassination cable later stated she was 'signing off on something that I know isn't true.'
• Martin Luther King Jr Civil rights leader who led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington, won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, was targeted by FBI COINTELPRO, and was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
• Patrice Lumumba Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the independent Congo (June 1960), deposed and delivered to Katangan forces by a CIA-backed conspiracy involving Joseph Mobutu within months of independence, and killed on January 17, 1961 - a case the Church Committee found involved CIA assassination planning, making him the emblematic victim of Cold War CIA intervention in African decolonization.
• Peter Fechter Peter Fechter was an eighteen-year-old East German bricklayer who became one of the Berlin Wall's most visible victims when, on August 17, 1962, he was shot while attempting to cross at Checkpoint Charlie and left dying in the death strip for nearly an hour while Western observers, journalists, and American soldiers watched without intervening.
• Rafael Trujillo Rafael Trujillo was the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination on May 30, 1961, who received CIA support through much of his rule until his sponsorship of assassination plots against Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt led the CIA to supply weapons to the opposition conspirators who killed him - making him a Church Committee case study in CIA involvement in foreign leader assassination.
• Rosa Parks Rosa Parks was an NAACP secretary in Montgomery, Alabama, whose December 1, 1955 arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott and launched the organized civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s - though her action was a strategic NAACP decision rather than a spontaneous individual act.
• Samira Khashoggi Fayed Sister of Adnan Khashoggi and mother of Dodi Fayed, connected to the Khashoggi family's arms dealing network.