Source of Trump's JFK claim also accused Rubio

Investigator Wayne Madsen claims the man standing to Lee Harvey Oswald's left in this 1963 photo could be Rafael Cruz.

The man behind the National Enquirer story that Donald Trump cited Tuesday – claiming Sen. Ted Cruz's father was with JFK's assassin – is blogger and independent investigator Wayne Madsen, a former National Security Agency employee with a background in Navy intelligence who also was the source of allegations published before the Florida Republican primary that Sen. Marco Rubio had a hidden past in Miami's homosexual community.

Madsen also once was hired by Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt to investigate alleged infidelities by D.C. lawmakers with prostitutes.

As WND reported, Ted Cruz unloaded on Trump to reporters in Evansville, Indiana, Tuesday morning, ridiculing his rival's "kooky" allegation and calling the GOP front-runner a "pathological liar," an "utterly amoral bully" and a "narcissist" who essentially makes President Obama look like an amateur by comparison.

In an interview Tuesday morning with Fox News, Trump floated the allegation that the man to the left of Lee Harvey Oswald in the iconic photograph of Oswald handing out "Fair Play for Cuba" pamphlets at the International Trade Mart in New Orleans on Aug. 16, 1963, is Rafael Cruz, the senator's evangelist father.

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being – you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump told Fox News.

Is he really Elvis? Did he know Lee Harvey Oswald? Find out who the real Rafael Cruz is in his 2016 autobiography, “A Time for Action.”

“What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up? They don’t even talk about that," Trump continued. "That was reported, and nobody talks about it. I mean, what was he doing – what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”

Trump reacted immediately to Cruz's criticism Tuesday with a statement, calling his rival "a desperate candidate trying to save his failing campaign" who doesn't have the "temperament" to be president.

'Ominous post'

Madsen told WND he was paid a minimal fee by National Enquirer for the use of research he already had posted on his site about Rafael Cruz.

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Nearly a decade ago, Madsen was hired by Hustler Magazine owner Larry Flynt to investigate the notorious Washington D.C. madam Deborah Palfrey and her "black book" of telephone numbers of famous clients.

The National Enquirer interviewed Madsen last month when a former lawyer for Palfrey, Montgomery Blair Sibley, said the madam's book includes a phone number that is "relevant to voters before they cast their ballot."

Madsen told the tabloid, “If Montgomery Sibley has what he says he has, it has to be Cruz.”

In his interview with WND on Tuesday, Madsen said he believes an Indiana blogger who was reported Sunday to have committed suicide, Gary Welsh, might have been killed because he was trying to advance the Rafael Cruz story.

Welsh, 53, a practicing attorney and the author of the widely followed conservative blog Advance Indiana, was found dead in the stairwell of his apartment building Sunday morning in an incident the Indianapolis Police Department ruled “a tragic suicide.”

See Sen. Ted Cruz's remarks to reporters Tuesday morning:

“My fear is that Wayne stumbled across some information he was going to publish that powerful forces in Indiana did not want to see appear in his blog,” Madsen told WND.

Madsen said Welsh opposed Cruz's candidacy and was "generally supportive of Trump."

The New York Daily News reported Monday that Welsh wrote "an ominous post" last week, just days before he was found dead, saying: “If I'm not around to see the vote results, my prediction is that Trump wins Indiana with just shy of 50% of the vote."

The Daily News quoted a friend, attorney Jim Klimek, whose description of Welsh's frame of mind before his death fit the suicide theory.

Klimek said Welsh's mood had been "deteriorating" in the past few weeks as he faced financial struggles, in part because his time spent blogging cut into his law practice.

Madsen said Welsh was his source for the photographs Madsen published Feb 4 that purported to show Marco Rubio at a 1995 "gay foam-bath party” in Miami's South Beach.

“I’m seriously concerned the ‘apparent suicide’ of Gary Welsh was a murder designed to look like a suicide," Madsen said. "I am as concerned about Welsh’s apparent suicide as I was equally serious when one my earlier sources, reporter Gary Webb, was found dead of a supposedly ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound.’”

Webb, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist known for his 1998 bestselling book about the CIA's role in Iran-Contra-related drug trafficking, “Dark Alliance,” was found dead in his home on Dec. 10, 2004, in what was ruled a suicide, despite Webb having suffered two gunshot wounds to the head.

Madsen wrote of his theory about Rafael Cruz in a post in early April:

Previous questions have surfaced about the 1960s activities of Rafael Cruz, Sr., the father of GOP presidential hopeful Rafael Cruz, Jr. (Ted Cruz). Based on the presence of the elder Cruz, an anti-Castro activist, in Dallas and New Orleans before the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy, there is a strong reason to believe that Cruz was associated with Central Intelligence Agency's anti-Castro operations.

Madsen wrote that a Cuban "hired by alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and who bears a striking resemblance to Cruz" is seen in the Aug. 16, 1963, photo.

Madsen said he had been "informed by a source that the individual to Oswald's left is none other than Rafael Cruz."

"The photograph at the trade mart was favorably compared to a 1954 photograph of Cruz attached to an official Cuban Ministry of Education document."

According to Cruz's account in his autobiography published by WND Books this year, "A Time for Action," he became an opponent of the Castro regime in 1959.

Rafael Cruz says he joined Castro's revolution against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista as a teenager, not knowing Castro was a communist. Cruz left Cuba for Texas in 1957, and after a visit to Cuba in the summer of 1959, he writes, he became a strong critic of Castro after the new leader seized private property and suppressed dissent.

So, if Cruz had turned against Castro several years before the 1963 New Orleans photo was taken, why would he be involved in a pro-Castro demonstration?

Madsen is among the JFK assassination researchers who believe the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans was a CIA front group, not a pro-Castro organization created by the Soviet Union. He contends Oswald was part of a CIA plot to kill Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Madsen, who has done extensive research in the JFK assassination collection at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, disputes Cruz's claim that he joined Castro's revolution and soured on it, insisting Cruz "has been less than forthcoming about the details of his time in New Orleans," claiming Cruz moved there in 1962 after living in Dallas.

Texas Department of Health Records obtained by a blogger show Cruz was living in Dallas in 1962, and a draft card from 1967 showed he lived in New Orleans at the time, but it doesn't indicate when he moved.

Photo match?

The August 1963 Oswald photo was examined by two experts hired by the National Enquirer who compared it with photos of Rafael Cruz from the late 1950s and early 1960s. One said there's "more similarity than dissimilarity" and the other concluded “they seem to match.”

McClatchy interviewed a JFK assassination expert, Gus Russo, however, who said the photo “evidence” is "very subjective."

"It’s not proof. It’s just an opinion. To charge something this big, you’d better have better proof than that ‘it looks like him,'" Russo said.

Russo said Oswald was not connected to the Cuban community in New Orleans, where he lived in 1963, and would not have had a Cuban supporter helping him.

“He was the ultimate loner,” said Russo.

Some bloggers who have critiqued Madsen's research, also have argued that the ears of the man in the New Orleans photo don't match Rafael Cruz's ears, as seen in contemporaneous photos.

School records of Rafael Cruz from 1954, when he was about 15.

On his blog, Madsen wrote that Cruz, "the son of an employee of the U.S. intelligence-linked RCA Corporation," left Cuba in 1957 for the Austin, Texas, where he enrolled at the University of Texas.

“This is a strange story since he claimed he left Cuba with only $100, which he said was sewn into his underwear," Madsen wrote. "Cruz eventually gained U.S. permanent residency and a degree in mathematics from the University of Texas. In 1959, Cruz married Julia Ann Garza and, after Cruz graduated from the University of Texas in 1961, the couple moved to New Orleans from Dallas after the birth of their second daughter on November 18, 1962.”

Madsen said Cruz worked for an oil company in New Orleans and has been "less than forthcoming about the details of his time in New Orleans and the time line that included his move from Dallas.”

In his follow-up article in April, Madsen noted that Rafael Cruz’s draft registration form listed his employer on July 26, 1967, as the Geophysics & Computer Service Inc., a French-based company linked to the large Schlumberger oil conglomerate, which "had been active with the CIA."

“Moreover, Jean de Menil, the son-in-law of Schlumberger founder Conrad Schlumberger, was a key figure in Permindex, the New Orleans-based CIA front headed up by Clay Shaw that was a key target of (Jim) Garrison's investigation of the New Orleans connection to JFK's assassination in Dallas.”

Madsen said he is preparing to publish research on documents at the National Archives proving Garrison was trying to find information on three individuals believed to be in Calgary, one of whom Madsen believes may have been Rafael Cruz.