A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (23 page)

The discussion left the commissioners struggling directly, for the first time, with the question of whether they could trust the FBI to conduct so much of the commission’s essential detective work, given the bureau’s determination to prove that Oswald had acted alone.

“They have decided that it is Oswald who committed the assassination, they have decided that no one else was involved,” Rankin said.

Russell: “They have tried the case and reached the verdict on every aspect.”

Boggs: “You have put your finger on it.”

Warren now supported sending Rankin in to confront Hoover directly. He outlined what he expected Rankin to do: “Go to Mr. Hoover and say, ‘Mr. Hoover, as you know, there are rumors that persist in and around Dallas, and it is getting into the national press, to the effect that Oswald was an undercover FBI agent.’” Rankin, he said, would ask for a vow from Hoover that “you will give us all the information that you have which will enable us to ferret this thing out—to the very limit.” The commission voted unanimously to dispatch Rankin to talk to Hoover the next day.

16

THE OFFICES OF THE DIRECTOR

THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

WASHINGTON, DC

TUESDAY, JANUARY 28, 1964

Rankin was ushered into Hoover’s suite of offices in the Justice Department building at three p.m. on Tuesday, January 28. He had been to these offices before, many times, during his years at the department in the Eisenhower administration.

Some of Hoover’s deputies thought his offices were surprisingly unpretentious, with beaten-up, overstuffed couches for visitors. Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach described the choice of furnishings as intentional; they were meant to be a symbol of Hoover’s “stern rejection of frivolity.” In an outer office, behind the desk of Hoover’s longtime secretary, Helen Gandy, sat the two standard-issue gray file cabinets that housed the so-called Official and Confidential files that were considered too sensitive for routine storage elsewhere. They contained derogatory private information on hundreds of politicians and other public figures, including—it would later be discovered—several members of the Warren Commission.

The effect of opening the door to the inner office to discover the unsmiling, bulldog-faced Hoover seated at his desk, on a platform slightly elevated from the floor, was like encountering “the Great and Powerful Oz,” DeLoach said. That, too, was intentional. FBI employees “never felt at ease in his presence,” DeLoach said. “Agents viewed him with awe and terror. You were a cog in the vast machinery of the universe. You existed at his whim, and if he chose to, he could snap his fingers and you’d disappear.”

Rankin took a seat, and within minutes he realized that if there had ever been any sort of friendship between Hoover and himself, it was over. Like Chief Justice Warren, Rankin was now perceived as one of Hoover’s enemies—“hostile to him and to the FBI,” Rankin said.

He began by explaining the reason for his visit. He told Hoover that the commission was eager for the FBI to disprove the rumors that Oswald had been an FBI informant, and to do it as quickly as possible. The commission was trying to deal with the issue delicately to avoid any embarrassment to the bureau, especially any perception that “the commission was investigating the FBI,” he said.

Hoover’s response was blunt and chilly, his notes from the meeting would suggest. He appeared insulted by the implication that the FBI would ever have a relationship with a man like Oswald. The idea, he said, was preposterous. “I told Rankin that Lee Harvey Oswald was never at any time a confidential informant, undercover agent and even a source of information for the FBI, and I would like to see that clearly stated for the record of the commission and I would be willing to do so under oath,” Hoover wrote in a memo to deputies.

He used the meeting to launch a wider attack on the commission and what he saw as thinly veiled public criticism of the FBI by the chief justice. Hoover was still angry over Warren’s description of the initial FBI report in December as containing only “skeletal” information. He reminded Rankin of the extraordinary demands that the commission was making of his agents in Dallas and elsewhere. Every day, sometimes several times a day, Rankin dispatched letters—directly to Hoover—that effectively demanded that the bureau pursue some new witness or lead. Hoover “commented upon all the man hours that we were demanding of him, and how it was a burden to the FBI,” Rankin noted. He left the meeting with a depressing realization that from now on and for months to come he would have to struggle to avoid “an open fight” with the FBI. The bureau’s attitude would be “surly” and “reluctant,” even as the commission continued to depend on the FBI for much of its basic detective work.

*

Within the bureau, Hoover’s critics—and even some of his most loyal deputies—marveled at the director’s ability to marshal the same set of facts to make different arguments in front of different audiences. It was a skill that Hoover had first mastered as a student at Central High School in Washington, DC, where he was champion of the school’s undefeated debate team. Decades later, he would talk with gratitude of what he had learned in debate class.

This remarkable dexterity was on full display after the Kennedy assassination. In public, Hoover could argue persuasively that the FBI was offering full cooperation to the Warren Commission. The bureau had nothing to hide, he insisted, because it had done nothing wrong in its surveillance of Oswald before Kennedy’s murder. He told the commission—and the White House and the Washington press corps—that the FBI had made no serious mistakes. Since Oswald did not appear to be a threat, there had been no need for the FBI to alert the Secret Service to his presence in Dallas ahead of Kennedy’s visit. “There was nothing up to the time of the assassination that gave any indication that this man was a dangerous character who might do harm to the president,” Hoover later told the commission under oath.

Behind closed doors at the FBI, however, Hoover’s view, shared with his deputies, was precisely the opposite. Within days of the assassination, he determined that the FBI had, in fact, bungled its investigation of Oswald before the assassination—and that many bureau agents and supervisors needed to be disciplined as a result. In late November, he directed the bureau’s Inspection Division, its internal watchdog, to determine whether there were “any investigative deficiencies in the Oswald case.” The answer came on December 10, when the division’s head, Assistant Director James Gale, known internally as “The Barracuda,” reported that serious errors had indeed been made by several employees, including agents in Dallas and New Orleans who had failed to keep a close watch on Oswald.

Gale recommended disciplinary action, although he cautioned Hoover about the risk of punishing anyone until after the Warren Commission had finished its investigation. If the punishments became known outside the FBI, it would undermine Hoover’s insistence that the bureau had done nothing wrong. Hoover waved Gale’s concerns aside. He would go forward with the punishments because “such gross incompetency cannot be overlooked, nor administrative action postponed,” he wrote to Gale.

DeLoach urged Hoover to reconsider. If news of the disciplinary actions leaked outside the bureau, it would be seen “as a direct admission that we are responsible for negligence which might have resulted in the assassination of the president,” DeLoach wrote. Hoover’s mind was made up, however. “I do not concur,” he wrote back.

DeLoach could tell Hoover was looking, desperately, for a scapegoat; he needed someone to blame for the indisputable fact that a man under FBI surveillance in the fall of 1963 had eluded the bureau long enough to gun down the president of the United States. “Rain clouds had formed in his office,” DeLoach remembered. “He wasn’t about to shoulder the blame. He decided to spread it around.”

Within days, seventeen bureau employees in Dallas, Washington, and elsewhere were notified—privately—that they were being disciplined for “shortcomings in connection with the investigation of Oswald.” Included on the list was James Hosty, the agent who had been responsible for the Oswald investigation in Dallas. The disciplined employees were told their failures included the decision not to place Oswald on the FBI’s internal Security Index, a roster that would have been shared with the Secret Service ahead of Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.

Despite his public assurances to the contrary, Hoover determined that Oswald’s name should have been on the index. The failure to do so “could not have been more stupid,” Hoover wrote. “Certainly no one in full possession of all his faculties can claim Oswald didn’t fall within this criteria.”

*

There was another issue at the heart of the investigation on which Hoover was consistent in his comments, publicly and privately. He was adamant that Oswald had acted alone. As he told the commission, he believed there was “not a scintilla of evidence showing any foreign conspiracy or domestic conspiracy” in the president’s murder.

Hoover’s view of Oswald as the lone gunman took hold internally during the weekend after the assassination. On Saturday, November 23, the day after the president’s murder, the FBI dispatched a Teletype to its field offices nationwide declaring that Oswald was “the principal suspect in the assassination” and that FBI agents could “resume normal contacts with informants and other sources.” In other words, with the assassin in custody, agents not directly involved in the assassination investigation could resume all regular duties; there was no need for their help.

Hoover’s files suggest that, after his first confused calls with President Johnson in late November, the FBI director never seriously considered the possibility that the Soviet Union was involved in the assassination. Like his old friend James Angleton at the CIA, the FBI director seemed even less suspicious about a Cuban tie, despite the many unanswered questions about Oswald’s trip to Mexico City and his links to pro-Castro activists in the United States. The pattern established at the CIA was also seen at the FBI. While the question of possible Soviet involvement in the assassination was at least raised within the bureau, few questions were asked about the Cubans. The FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, which oversaw the Oswald inquiry, asked a squad of the bureau’s Washington-based intelligence specialists on the Soviet Union and the KGB to review evidence about Oswald’s years in the Soviet Union and his possible ties to Russian agents operating in the United States, and they found nothing to support the idea of a Soviet conspiracy. But congressional investigators later determined that no similar requests were made of the FBI’s counterintelligence analysts who specialized in Cuba; the bureau’s Cuba experts were effectively cut out of the investigation.

Questioned years later, the FBI supervisor reputed to be the bureau’s top analyst on Fidel Castro and the Cuban government in 1963 said he was never asked to attend a single meeting at FBI headquarters to discuss the assassination. And he did not pursue the questions himself. He admitted later that he never bothered to go back and review news coverage of Castro in the weeks leading up to the assassination, to see if there were clues the FBI might have missed. He had no memory of having ever read an alarming article published by the Associated Press on September 8, 1963, by an AP reporter in Cuba who interviewed Castro briefly at a reception at the Brazilian embassy in Havana. In the interview, Castro suggested that he knew the Kennedy administration was trying to assassinate him and that he was ready to respond in kind. “U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe,” Castro was quoted as saying. The story was given prominent play in the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, a newspaper that Oswald was known to have read avidly when he lived in the city at the time. The FBI supervisor would acknowledge years later that “in retrospect, that certainly looks like a pointed signal,” less than three months before the assassination, that Kennedy’s life might have been in danger.

Word of Hoover’s insistence that Oswald was the lone assassin reached Mexico, where the bureau had a staff of nearly a dozen agents and other employees operating out of the U.S. embassy. As a result, the FBI investigation of Oswald’s trip there that fall was limited from the start. The FBI’s top official in the embassy, Clark Anderson, a twenty-two-year veteran of the bureau who held the title of legal attaché, had known about Oswald’s presence in Mexico within days of his arrival in September. Anderson had received a detailed report in October prepared by his CIA counterpart, Winston Scott, about Oswald’s contacts in Mexico City with both the Cuban and Soviet embassies. Anderson recalled that he asked no questions at the time about how Oswald’s visits to the embassies had been detected by the CIA. In fact, Anderson, who had a cordial but not close relationship with Scott, later claimed that at the time of the assassination he knew nothing at all about the CIA’s elaborate photo-surveillance and wiretapping operations in Mexico City. That was the CIA’s business, not his, he said.

FBI headquarters had known about Oswald’s trip weeks before the assassination. On October 18, Anderson sent a memo to Washington in which he outlined what was known about Oswald’s stay in Mexico, including his September 28 meeting in the Soviet embassy with a diplomat, Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, who was known to be a top KGB operative. The CIA believed Kostikov was a member of the KGB’s thirteenth directorate, which was responsible for overseas assassinations and kidnappings; he operated undercover as a regular member of the Soviet diplomatic corps.

The question of how much the CIA knew about the conversations between Oswald and Kostikov, and why that information was not shared immediately by FBI headquarters with its field agents in Dallas in advance of Kennedy’s visit, would never be fully answered. Some of the answers were likely to be found in the sclerotic bureaucracy of the FBI; sensitive information often moved slowly within the bureau.