A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (33 page)

The Odios had been too frightened to go to the FBI or to the Dallas police after the assassination because they worried that their father’s anti-Castro movement might be blamed for Kennedy’s murder, Silvia said. Instead, it was a friend of hers who contacted the FBI, without her knowledge.

During the interview with Hosty, Odio freely admitted something that, she knew, might affect the way the FBI evaluated her story. She was, as she put it, “emotionally disturbed” and suffered from fainting spells. Her mental troubles had begun after her husband abandoned her in Cuba, leaving her with four children to support; at the time of the assassination she had been under the care of a Dallas psychiatrist. But, as she reminded Hosty, someone else saw Oswald at the door: her sister. And there were others who would vouch for her credibility. She said she had, before the assassination, told her psychiatrist in detail about the odd visit from the three men, including the “Anglo.”

Hosty was intrigued by Odio’s story, although he understood the risk—given Hoover’s determination to prove that Oswald had acted alone—in pursuing evidence of a possible conspiracy. He contacted Odio’s psychiatrist, Dr. Burton Einspruch, who confirmed that she had told him about the late-night visit by the three men, shortly after it occurred. Einspruch told Hosty he thought she was being truthful.

Years later, Hosty said he never doubted Odio’s truthfulness; she seemed to believe what she was saying. “She’s not a phony,” he commented. “It made sense to her. I really believe she believes she saw Oswald.” But he had encountered this many times before—witnesses who became confused after a shocking crime and who believed they had seen something they could not have seen. Ultimately, Odio’s psychiatric problems led him to discount her story. Einspruch told Hosty that Odio suffered from “grand hysteria, a condition he found to be prevalent among Latin American women from the upper class.” And Hosty thought that might explain Silvia Odio’s confusion. He thought Annie might have confirmed her sister’s account in a demonstration of family solidarity, not because it was true.

In the weeks after the assassination, Hosty had too much other work to do, and he put Silvia Odio’s claims out of his mind. “I had a stack of other leads to pursue.” After filing her witness statement, “I more or less forgot about Odio.”

23

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

FEBRUARY 1964

The reports from the FBI’s Dallas field office about Silvia Odio were directed to the “conspiracy” team—David Slawson and William Coleman. The reports were not flagged by the bureau as especially important, but Slawson, in particular, seized on them. He recalled reading about the young woman in Dallas and being excited by the idea that a credible witness could place Oswald in the company of anti-Castro Cubans shortly before the assassination. It fit in with one of the conspiracy theories that Slawson treated most seriously.

If the commission determined that Castro had no hand in the assassination, he wondered, was it possible that Castro’s most passionate opponents—anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the United States—were involved, possibly as revenge against Kennedy for not having done more to oust the Communist government in Havana? He tried to imagine the web of conspiracy that might tie Castro’s opponents to Kennedy’s murder. His theory of that conspiracy was so complicated that Slawson, despite all of his years of training as a physicist and his ability to put the scientific mysteries of the universe into layman’s terms, found it difficult to explain to colleagues on the staff. It would involve layers of duplicity—double crosses and triple crosses both by Oswald and by the anti-Castro exiles he might have met.

One possibility: knowing that Oswald was in reality an outspoken champion of Castro’s revolution, anti-Castro exiles might have set him up to take the blame for the assassination by killing Kennedy themselves and then framing Oswald by planting his rifle at the Texas School Book Depository. Another, even more complex scenario: anti-Castro Cubans had lied to Oswald and convinced him that they, too, were Castro supporters, and that he could best support the Cuban government by killing Kennedy. After the assassination, some anti-Castro exile groups had tried to argue that Oswald was in fact an agent of Havana and that Kennedy’s murder needed to be answered with an immediate American invasion of Cuba. “That was my major suspicion—the anti-Castro community, largely centered in Florida, wanted to effectively frame Castro for the assassination, so they could trigger a war,” Slawson recalled. “That’s what made the Silvia Odio story so interesting to me.”

For the commission, there were now “The Two Silvias,” as they became known around the offices. There was Silvia Odio in Dallas, and there was Silvia Duran in Mexico City. The fact that both Silvias were exotic, strikingly attractive young Latin women was not lost on Slawson and his male colleagues.

At first, Slawson could do little to pursue Silvia Odio’s allegations on his own; he could only hope that the FBI would continue to press the investigation in Dallas, especially by establishing the identity of the two Latino men who were reported to be traveling with Oswald. Slawson said years later that he never focused on Hosty’s continued involvement in the investigation and how that might have been a conflict of interest. He said he did not recall ever noticing Hosty’s name on the paperwork about Odio. Slawson and the rest of the commission’s staff were ignorant of Hoover’s move to discipline Hosty and several other FBI employees over their failures before the assassination.

There was more that Slawson could do to follow up on Silvia Duran. He had seen her early on as a key witness in his part of the investigation—“perhaps
the
essential witness”—given her repeated interactions with Oswald in Mexico. As Helms had recommended, Slawson and Coleman planned to go to Mexico that spring; during the visit, they could press for an interview with Duran. Slawson read the full CIA reports about her, and he was aware of the rumors that she was an intelligence operative—possibly for the Mexican government, possibly even for the United States.

Slawson said he was never told directly why CIA and FBI officials in Mexico City made no request to interrogate Duran themselves, leaving her to be questioned instead by the Dirección Federal de Seguridad, or DFS, the brutal Mexican spy agency. It complicated his investigation, since the Mexicans had not provided the United States any sort of transcript of Duran’s interrogation. Instead, the Mexicans offered only a summary of what they said she had told them. For Slawson, the summary raised as many questions as it answered.

*

When it came to imagining conspiracy theories about the assassination, Slawson knew he was “an amateur,” he joked later. Spinning those theories was becoming a business, in fact, and a lucrative one. Marguerite Oswald and Mark Lane were in the midst of their national speaking tour that spring, raising money as they went, and Lane planned to travel across Europe to spread his message of Oswald’s innocence. Like his colleagues, Slawson said he never troubled himself with Lane. “He was lying so blatantly, I couldn’t imagine anyone taking him seriously.”

In Europe, Lane would find a rapt audience for conspiracy theories, even more so than in the United States. The popular French newsmagazine
L’Express
had begun running a series of articles by an American expatriate journalist, Thomas Buchanan, who suggested—on the basis of what was later found to be confused, scant evidence—that Kennedy had been murdered in a conspiracy by right-wing Texas industrialists and oilmen. Over time, Buchanan would claim that Oswald and Ruby had known each other and that Ruby had loaned Oswald the money he needed to pay back the State Department for his travel costs to return to the United States in 1962. By late winter, Buchanan was writing a book titled
Who Killed Kennedy?
and he had lined up publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the United States, a more serious writer, Harold Feldman of the
Nation
, continued to suggest that Oswald might have been an FBI informant. In February, Redlich prepared a detailed memo suggesting that Feldman’s reporting was “sufficiently accurate to warrant consideration.” Redlich, who had written for the
Nation
himself, felt the magazine raised valid questions about the seeming ease with which Oswald had received a new passport when he returned to the United States after his failed defection to the Soviet Union, a fact that might suggest some secret, long-standing tie between Oswald and the State Department or the CIA. “In general, it is wise to study articles such as this one rather than dismiss them because of their inevitable factual inaccuracies,” Redlich wrote. “They may contain the germ of an idea which we might otherwise overlook.”

*

Redlich would soon find himself the target of conspiracy theories. On February 12,
Tocsin
, a small, right-wing newsletter based in Oakland, California (“The West’s Leading Anti-Communist Weekly”), published a front-page article about Redlich’s work on the commission. The headline: “Red-Fronter on Death Probe.” The article began: “A prominent member of a Communist front is a member of the staff of the Warren Commission investigating the slaying of President Kennedy. He is Norman Redlich, a professor at New York University Law School.” The article suggested that Redlich was a leftist plant, noting his past membership in the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, a New York–based lawyers’ group that had been labeled a Communist front by the FBI. The committee was organized in the early 1950s to defend people targeted as Communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Within days, Congressman John F. Baldwin, a Northern California Republican, forwarded a copy of the
Tocsin
article to Gerald Ford, his GOP colleague in the House. “I am quite concerned about this article about a man who has been employed as assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, of which you are a member,” Baldwin wrote in a scolding letter on February 12. “You may possibly want to do something about this.”

The next day, an agitated Ford replied to Baldwin: “I share your concern about the allegations.… We are having this matter investigated.” He noted to his colleague that when the commission was formed, “I insisted, among other things, that no member of the staff have any past association with extremist groups of any kind.” If Ford was angry, he felt he had good reason to be; despite his insistence that the commission’s staff members have no extreme political ties, left or right, Redlich had been hired anyway. Now, Ford could see, he risked being embarrassed over this among his own conservative colleagues in Congress.

Ford decided to do some digging of his own. He contacted the House Un-American Activities Committee, then led by Congressman Edwin Willis, a staunchly conservative Louisiana Democrat, and asked for a full report on Redlich. Ford was sent a two-page memo that listed Redlich’s ties to civil liberties and civil rights groups that the committee considered subversive. It was no surprise that Redlich had earned the wrath of the Un-American Activities Committee since he had appeared at several rallies in New York to denounce the committee and its work.

*

The discoveries about Redlich were the latest frustration for Ford in dealing with the chief justice and the commission. Just days earlier, he had been forced to respond to a furor sparked by Warren’s baffling public comments on the first day of Marina Oswald’s testimony. Asked by reporters gathered at the VFW building if the commission would make public the information she and other witnesses revealed, the chief justice replied: “Yes, there will come a time.… but it might not be in your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security. This would be preserved but not made public.” He was quoted separately by the Associated Press as saying that if Mrs. Oswald’s testimony revealed national-security secrets, they might have to be suppressed for decades—“and I say that seriously.”

His remarks produced an uproar, since they seemed to support the arguments of conspiracy theorists that the commission intended to hold back the full truth about the assassination. The alarm spread to the commission’s staff, with several of the young lawyers wondering what the chief justice was talking about. Arlen Specter said he knew, the minute he heard about Warren’s comments, that the chief justice had “seriously damaged the commission’s reputation” and threatened “to cast a pall on everything the commission did.” From what he now knew about Warren, Specter thought he understood what had happened: the chief justice had become flummoxed by the reporters’ questions and blurted out something he did not mean, to stop the journalists from pressing him further. This was Warren’s “spontaneous way of avoiding the questions,” Specter recalled. The chief justice was not “a man who could think quickly on his feet.”

The blunder resulted in angry editorials in conservative newspapers that had been hostile to Warren for years. The
Columbus Enquirer
of Columbus, Georgia, said the chief justice had “injected a new sinister note” into the investigation. “Warren’s remarks could undermine public confidence,” the paper said in an editorial, calling on the commission to “issue an immediate statement on what he meant.” The chief justice was denounced on the House floor by Representative August Johansen, a Michigan Republican whose congressional district was near Ford’s. He charged that Warren’s comments “struck at the very heart of the all-important factor of public confidence” in the investigation.

In a letter sent to angered constituents, Ford wrote that he, too, was startled by what Warren had said—and that the chief justice was simply wrong. “I can assure you as one member of the commission that all information relative to the solemn responsibility of the commission will be made public at the time the report is published.”

Friends of Warren’s began to worry that he had done serious damage to the investigation. A senior editor at
Newsweek
magazine, Lester Bernstein, was so alarmed by the gaff that he asked Katherine Graham, the president of the Washington Post Company, the magazine’s owner, to forward a letter to him at the Supreme Court. He knew she was a good friend of the chief justice’s. In a tone that might be read as condescending, Bernstein urged Warren to stop talking to reporters entirely. “It seems to me that you are courting an undesirable—and unnecessary—impression by publicly discussing the investigation, however guardedly, while it is in progress,” he wrote. “To deal casually on a day-to-day basis with reporters invites risks of misquotation, misunderstanding and sensational exploitation, all of which, I believe, played a part in the recent clamor of whether or not you said that some evidence in the case would be withheld ‘in our lifetimes.’” He urged Warren to hire an experienced public spokesman.