A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (17 page)

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THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1963

In the first hours after the assassination, the CIA’s number-two official, Deputy Director Richard Helms, decided he had to bring some order to the frantic search at CIA headquarters for information about the president’s murder. Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, who had no real background in intelligence issues before joining the CIA in 1961, was content to leave major decisions about the investigation to Helms, a career officer who was the agency’s real spymaster. On November 23, the day after the assassination, Helms created a team of about thirty analysts gathered from around Langley to search for evidence about Oswald and any possible foreign conspiracy. At a meeting of his deputies that morning, Helms announced that John Whitten, a forty-three-year-old CIA veteran who had often handled special projects for Helms, would lead the team.

Whitten’s real name would not have been recognized by some of his colleagues, at least not by those who knew him through the paperwork that his office produced. He was known on paper by one of his agency-approved pseudonyms, John Scelso; the Scelso name appeared on internal cables in which the agency wanted to keep the number of people who knew his real identity to a minimum.

When President Johnson created the assassination commission a week after the president’s murder, Whitten, a sometimes abrasive man who started his intelligence career as an army interrogator, was given the additional responsibility of day-to-day contact with the commission’s staff. At the time, he was chief of the agency’s covert operations in Mexico and Central America, a job he had held for about eight months. His branch was known as WH-3—the third branch of the Western Hemisphere division of the CIA’s Clandestine Services—and was responsible for all American espionage operations in the area that stretched from the U.S.-Mexican border to the southern borders of Panama.

Like so many of his colleagues, Whitten did not go home at all on the night of November 22. He remained at the agency until the next day, as the CIA gathered up intelligence about Oswald. Whitten discovered what he said was a modest agency file on Oswald as a result of his attempted defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 and his return to the United States three years later. Far more intriguing, Whitten thought, were the reports from his CIA colleagues in Mexico who had conducted surveillance of Oswald during his mysterious trip there in September.

At the meeting on November 23, Helms told the others that Whitten would have “broad powers” and that all information about the assassination should be directed to him, even if that broke traditional lines of reporting. As Whitten recalled it, Helms announced that Whitten “was to be in charge of the investigation, that no one in the agency was to have any conversations with anyone outside the agency, including the Warren Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, concerning the Kennedy assassination without my being present.” Whitten thought Helms had entrusted him with the assignment because “I had investigated a number of other giant operations of absolutely critical importance for him over the years and had come up, you know, with the right answers.”

Among the others in Helms’s office for the Saturday meeting, Whitten recalled, was James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s counterintelligence director—the “mole hunter” who was responsible for detecting the efforts of foreign spy agencies to infiltrate the CIA with double agents. Angleton’s presence in a room was always troubling to Whitten. The two men had clashed repeatedly over their careers, especially when Whitten reviewed spy operations that somehow involved Angleton. “None of the senior officials at the agency were ever able to cope with him,” Whitten said.

Angleton, then forty-six, was as eccentric and secretive a figure as anyone who worked at the agency. Whitten thought of him as a sinister force, a man with a hawk-like stare who was driven by paranoid suspicion of Communist infiltration of the CIA. Inside the agency, it was understood that Angleton’s paranoia was the result of the treachery of his once-close friend Kim Philby, the high-ranking British spy who turned out to be a KGB mole. Angleton had a “sense of dread of foreign conspiracies and an over-suspiciousness” that was simply “bizarre,” Whitten recalled. The Yale-educated Angleton, who was raised in Europe, reveled in his reputation for Anglophilic eccentricity, including his dedication to the hobby of orchid growing and his love of poetry. He also reveled in secrecy, so much so that no one—not even Helms, his supposed boss—seemed to know what Angleton was actually up to. It was obvious he enjoyed the confusion—or, in Whitten’s view, the chaos—that he created. Drawing on the words of the poet T. S. Eliot, Angleton was fond of describing the work of counterintelligence as a “wilderness of mirrors.”

“Everything that Angleton did was so secret,” Whitten remembered. “Several times in my career, I was appointed to investigate or handle or look into investigations that Angleton was running. This always caused bitter feelings—the most bitter feelings.” When he was asked by Helms or others to confront Angleton, Whitten did it with trepidation. “I used to go in fingering my insurance policy, thinking about notifying my next of kin.”

Angleton had a portfolio of responsibilities that went beyond counterintelligence. Part of his power derived from his close friendship with FBI director Hoover. Whatever the rivalry between the CIA and the bureau, the two men shared a similar fixation on the dangers of Communism, and the Soviet Union in particular. “He had enormously influential contacts with J. Edgar Hoover,” Whitten said of Angleton. In turn, Angleton was “extremely protective of the FBI” and “would not allow any criticism of them or any kind of rivalry.” Whitten figured that was part of the reason why he, not Angleton, was given responsibility for the Oswald investigation. Initially, Helms may have feared that Angleton would help his friends at the FBI cover up blunders they had made in their surveillance of Oswald before the assassination. “One of the reasons that Helms gave me the case in the first place was that Angleton was so close to the FBI,” Whitten said. “The FBI could be extremely clannish and protective of their own interests. I think that J. Edgar Hoover and others wanted to make very, very sure that they could not be criticized, and they wanted all the facts before they would let anybody else know anything.”

Angleton’s influence also extended to several of the CIA’s most important overseas spy stations, which were run by his friends and protégés, including Winston Scott, the station chief in Mexico City. And both Angleton and Scott were close to Allen Dulles.

Whitten admitted he took some pleasure from Angleton’s discomfort about the Oswald investigation. “In the early stages Mr. Angleton was not able to influence the course of the investigation, which was a source of great bitterness to him,” Whitten recalled. “He was extremely embittered that I was entrusted with the investigation and he wasn’t.”

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Believing that he had Helms’s full support, Whitten went to work to piece together Oswald’s life story and to understand his possible motives for killing Kennedy. Much of Whitten’s time was spent reading through stacks of paperwork that related to the assassination. “We were flooded with cable traffic, with reports, suggestions, allegations from all over the world, and these things had to be checked out,” he said. “We dropped almost everything else and I put a lot of my officers to work on tracing names, analyzing files.” Much of it was “weirdo stuff,” tying Oswald to every sort of coconspirator, including space aliens, he recalled.

Whitten said he knew nothing about Oswald, including his name, before Kennedy’s murder. Although the Mexico City station answered to Whitten’s staff at the WH-3 branch and had dispatched several cables to headquarters that fall about the surveillance of Oswald during his trip to Mexico, Whitten did not recall seeing any of them. That was not surprising, he said, since at the time Oswald appeared to be just another of the “small-potatoes defectors” and “kooks” who turned up occasionally in the Mexican capital.

According to Whitten, several American soldiers and defense-industry workers approached the Russian embassy in Mexico City in the 1950s and early 1960s to defect or sell secrets. They were detected so frequently by the CIA’s Mexico City station that Hoover, who was routinely briefed on the cases so the FBI could track potential spies when they returned to the United States, “used to glow every time he thought of the Mexico [City] station—this was one of our outstanding areas of cooperation with the FBI,” Whitten said.

Whitten shared Hoover’s admiration for the Mexico City station—and especially for Scott, who “was as good a station chief as we had, and you could fairly say that he had the best station in the world.” Under Scott, the station had developed a network of paid informants throughout the Mexican government and among the country’s major political parties. According to Whitten, Scott also oversaw the CIA’s most extensive and sophisticated electronic surveillance operation in the world. Whitten said that every phone line going in and out of both the Soviet and the Cuban embassies in Mexico City was tapped by Scott’s station—about thirty lines in all. There were banks of CIA surveillance cameras around both embassies.

Whitten thought that explained why some of the information about Oswald had been slow to reach CIA headquarters in the weeks after Oswald’s visit. Scott and his staff were victims of their own success. The Mexico City station was overwhelmed by a backlog of surveillance tapes—tapes that needed to be translated into English and transcribed—and photographs.

Whitten recalled that he immediately began to pursue a question that he knew the Warren Commission and other investigators would want answered: Given the bizarre circumstances of his aborted defection to the Soviet Union, had Oswald ever worked for the CIA? The answer, Whitten said he quickly discovered, was no. “Oswald was a person of a type who would never have been recruited by the agency to work behind the Iron Curtain or anywhere else.… Oswald’s whole pattern of life was that of a very badly, emotionally unbalanced young man.”

Whitten said he was told by Helms to cooperate fully with the Warren Commission, except when it came to divulging the details of how the CIA actually gathered information—“sources and methods,” in the agency’s jargon. He said the commission was kept ignorant about the CIA’s electronic surveillance programs in Mexico City and elsewhere, at least at the start. “We were sure to give them everything when we thought we could do that without revealing how, exactly, we got the information,” Whitten recalled. He said the CIA was particularly concerned that the existence of the wiretapping and photo-surveillance programs in Mexico City might become public, which would tip off the Soviets and Cubans and destroy the programs’ value. “We wondered whether divulging this to them might not unnecessarily compromise forever our capability,” Whitten said. “There was no nefarious reason for our not giving it to them. It was simply that we did not consider it vitally relevant and we wanted to protect our sources.”

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The frenzy at CIA headquarters in the hours after the assassination was matched by that of the agency’s Mexico City station, then housed on the top floor of the U.S. embassy on the Paseo de la Reforma, a central thoroughfare in the heart of the Mexican capital. Scott seemed to understand instantly the questions he would face from Langley and from Washington. Just a few weeks earlier, his station had conducted a supposedly intensive surveillance operation on the man who had apparently just killed the president of the United States. The station had secretly recorded telephone calls made by Oswald—and about Oswald—during several days that fall, and the agency was trying to determine if its surveillance cameras had caught Oswald’s image during his visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies. Some of the wiretap transcripts had been marked “urgent” and sent straight to Scott’s desk, his files showed. Could the CIA—and its Mexico City station, in particular—have done anything to stop Oswald?

Scott was a force unto himself at the CIA. A mathematician by training, he had begun a PhD program at the University of Michigan before being pulled away from the scholar’s life in the 1940s by the FBI, which recruited him to apply his mathematical talents to cryptography. During World War II, Scott had joined the Office of Strategic Services, the spy agency that was the predecessor of the CIA. At the OSS, he would establish lifelong friendships with several fellow spies—among them Angleton, Dulles, and Helms—who would all go on to join the CIA when it was created in September 1947.

Among his deputies in Mexico, few were closer to Scott than Anne Goodpasture. She had also begun her spying career at the OSS. During World War II, she was posted in Burma with a fellow OSS agent, Julia McWilliams, who later gained fame as a cookbook writer under her married name, Julia Child. In later years, Goodpasture denied she was ever close to Angleton, but it was understood inside the agency that Angleton had actually dispatched her to Mexico; he had been impressed by her diligence in an earlier counterintelligence operation. Scott, Angleton’s friend, agreed to add her to his staff in 1957, a year after his own arrival.

Goodpasture was sometimes confused for a secretary or a typist in the CIA offices in Mexico City, and the sexism of that assumption always bothered her, she said. She was, in fact, a key deputy—Scott’s “Girl Friday” or “right-hand woman,” as she put it. She was not a street spy—most of her work was done within the confines of the U.S. embassy—but she knew spycraft, including how to open a sealed envelope so no one would notice, a technique known as “flaps and seals.” Her friendship with Scott was made easier by their common roots in the South; Goodpasture was a Tennessean. Both were courtly and soft-spoken. (Among the secrets kept by Goodpasture was her exact age, which does not appear on many of her key personnel files. At the time of the Oswald investigation, she appeared to colleagues to be, like Scott, in her midfifties.) “He was a southern gentleman,” she said of Scott. “I felt he fancied himself as an intellectual.… He was particular about his dress, and he always wore dark suits and white shirts.”