A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (47 page)

From a distance, Slawson and Coleman had a favorable impression of Duran. Whatever her political views, she was said to be smart and gutsy. “From what we heard about her, she was a woman of real character,” Slawson said. “I can’t remember whether it was reading between the lines or what, but Bill and I had some reason to see this woman was a straight-shooter.” He thought she might say things in Washington that she had been too scared to say in Mexico. Even if she stuck by the account she had given to her Mexican interrogators, Slawson believed it was important for the commission to judge her credibility face-to-face. “There was obviously some chance of getting more detail from her, especially if she trusted us,” Slawson said. “And if we weren’t beating her up.”

The first challenge, he said, was simply to determine where Duran was. Her protective husband, Horacio, had moved her into hiding and was blocking access. “We couldn’t get to her, the CIA couldn’t get to her, nobody could,” Slawson recalled. “She was hiding out” and her husband was “mad as hell” about the way she had been treated.

Slawson could not recall exactly when he got the news, but within weeks of his return from Mexico, Ray Rocca reported that the agency had made contact with the Durans and believed Silvia Duran would agree to come to Washington. Slawson remembered that Rocca seemed excited by the news—“he was really eager”—and wanted to help with the logistics. Rocca asked if the commission wanted the agency to take the next step and make arrangements for Duran to travel, probably with her husband. “Bill and I didn’t have to think two minutes to say, ‘Yes, yes,’” Slawson recalled.

He was exhilarated to think he would now get a chance to talk to the woman who—more than anyone else, possibly including Marina Oswald—may have known Oswald’s thoughts in the weeks before he killed Kennedy. Slawson suspected that to Oswald, Duran must have seemed a kindred spirit. She was a fellow Socialist and a fellow champion of Fidel Castro. She could speak with him in English, and she seemed genuinely to want to help him get his visa for a trip to Cuba. She had been “very, very sympathetic to him,” Slawson said.

Slawson remembered telling Rankin about the CIA’s good news on Duran and asking permission to begin organizing her travel. “And Lee said, ‘I’ll talk to the chief.’” It was typical of Rankin not to make a decision like this himself, no matter how obvious it seemed to be, Slawson recalled. “He made no decisions without the chief’s approval.”

And Rankin returned with Warren’s unexpected, baffling reply. “The chief says no,” he told the stunned Slawson. There would be no interview with Duran.

Slawson could not recall if Rankin offered a detailed explanation for Warren’s reasoning, but the chief justice seemed to be suggesting that Duran’s support for Castro and her self-declared Socialism—she denied to her Mexican interrogators she was a Communist—made her unacceptable as a witness. It was similar reasoning to Warren’s earlier decision to block Slawson from seeking paperwork from the Cuban government about Oswald—the decision that Slawson had decided to ignore, at his peril.

In passing on Warren’s decision about Duran, Rankin cushioned the blow by telling Slawson that “the decision wasn’t final” and that he could appeal directly to Warren if he felt so strongly about the need to interview her.

Slawson was astonished at the idea that he might be denied the chance to talk to Duran. “It was stupid, stupid,” he thought. Much as his colleague Arlen Specter felt he needed Kennedy’s autopsy photos and X-rays to do his work in reconstructing the events in Dealey Plaza, Slawson needed to talk to Duran if the commission wanted to rule out any possibility of a conspiracy. The commission did not have to accept anything Duran had to say at face value, he reminded himself. “We didn’t have to accept her word,” Slawson said. “But we should talk to the enemy if we need to.”

He told Rankin he wanted to see the chief justice as soon as possible, and he asked for help from Howard Willens, who was “totally supportive” of the plan to bring Duran to Washington. Increasingly, Willens was viewed by Slawson and some of the other lawyers as their best advocate—much more so than Rankin. There were reports that, behind closed doors, Warren was angry about what he saw as Willens’s impertinence. “He thought Howard was disrespectful,” Slawson said. “Howard was maybe the only guy who disagreed with him to his face.” Warren, for his part, confirmed that years later, saying that Willens “was very critical of me from the time he came over to us” from the Justice Department.

Slawson was nervous as he prepared himself for the meeting. The chief justice appeared in the commission’s offices virtually every day but continued to have little interaction with the young lawyers. He rarely invited conversation. “He was the chief justice of the United States, and you didn’t go in there to shoot the breeze with him,” Slawson said. “He would have given you short-shrift if you tried.” Still, Slawson and Willens quickly got their appointment, and Slawson remembered that he was received graciously by Warren, who welcomed the two lawyers into his office with a smile. “He asked us to have a chair, and we did, and then we made our case to him.”

Slawson explained why Duran might be such an important witness, since she might offer information about Oswald that she had not risked sharing with the Mexican police. He argued that there was the possibility that the Mexican police had intimidated, even tortured her into silence, so that she would not reveal details pointing to a conspiracy hatched on Mexican soil.

What was there to lose by talking to her? Slawson remembered asking Warren. “There might be something valuable to gain.”

The chief justice did not hesitate with his answer: He had not changed his mind. There would be no interview with Duran. Slawson said he remembered Warren’s exact words:

“You just can’t believe a Communist,” Warren said. “We don’t talk to Communists. You cannot trust a dedicated Communist to tell us the truth, so what’s the point?”

He invited no more argument. “He just gave us his opinion, and that was that,” Slawson recalled. On the Supreme Court, the chief justice might have a reputation as a champion of the rights of the political left, including Communists, but in this case, “he accepted the stereotype of a Communist as someone close to evil,” a category in which he apparently placed Silvia Duran.

Slawson walked out of Warren’s office feeling defeated. He remembered turning to Willens and saying, “Jesus, that is a big disappointment and a big mistake.” But short of resigning from the staff, which he never seriously considered, Slawson concluded there was nothing more he could do.

Decades later, Slawson said he remained mystified by the chief justice’s decision on Duran: “It’s crazy we didn’t talk to her.” He came to wonder if the decision was a political calculation; Warren might have worried that the commission’s right-wing critics would criticize him for giving credibility to an alleged Communist. More troubling, Slawson said, was the possibility that Warren had been secretly pressured to leave Duran alone. In light of what he later learned about the CIA, Slawson suspected—but could not prove—that Warren had been asked by the spy agency not to interview Duran. Slawson believed Rocca was sincere in offering to help bring Duran to Washington. But he wondered if others, much higher in the agency, were frightened of what she might reveal about Oswald or about American intelligence operations in Mexico City.

Warren, he later learned, had given in to pressure from the CIA about another possible foreign witness, Yuri Nosenko, the Russian defector. In June, Warren met privately with Richard Helms to hear the CIA’s plea that the commission drop any reference to Nosenko in its final report. Helms “took me aside and told me that the CIA had finally decided that the defector was a phony,” Warren remembered. And the chief justice agreed to the request, even though the commission had never been given a chance to interview Nosenko or even to submit written questions to him through his CIA handlers. “I was adamant that we should not in any way base our findings on the testimony of a Russian defector,” Warren said later. Nosenko, like Duran, could not be trusted to tell the truth.

*

As the commission began to consider how to organize and write its report, Willens sent out memos to the staff listing the “loose ends” of the investigations, many of which involved Slawson and questions about a possible foreign conspiracy. That was no criticism of the quality of Slawson’s work, he said. It reflected, instead, the mammoth task of trying to prove or disprove a conspiracy with evidence that often seemed vague or conflicting.

Although the evidence clearly pointed away from any involvement by the Kremlin, Slawson decided in April to ask the FBI and CIA to gather more information about Oswald’s stay in the Soviet Union, including evidence that might substantiate his claim in his “Historic Diary” that he attempted suicide shortly after he arrived there in October 1959. Oswald wrote that he tried to end his life after Soviet officials initially refused to allow him to stay in the country. “I decide to end it,” he wrote in the entry for October 21. “Soak wrist in cold water to numb the pain. Then slash my left wrist. Then plunge wrist into bathtub of hot water.” He was discovered by a Russian tourist guide an hour later and taken to the hospital “where five stitches are put in my wrist.”

Slawson felt the commission could not ignore the possibility that Oswald was lying and that the suicide attempt had been concocted as part of a KGB cover story—possibly to allow him to disappear from the streets of Moscow for a time to receive training as a spy. Oswald’s autopsy report showed there was a scar on his left wrist, but Slawson wanted to be sure it was deep and dramatic enough to suggest an actual suicide attempt. Specter was responsible for the medical evidence, so Slawson wrote him a memo, asking that he question Dallas pathologists about the scar: “If the suicide incident is a fabrication, the time supposedly spent by Oswald in recovering from the suicide in a Moscow hospital could have been spent by him in Russian secret police custody being coached, brainwashed, etc.” Slawson knew the CIA was so interested in verifying Oswald’s account of the suicide attempt that it had considered exhuming his body to inspect the scar. The FBI opposed the proposal and the CIA dropped the idea, fearing it might inspire even more wild conspiracy theories.

Mexico City was never far from Slawson’s thoughts that spring. After his trip there in April, he drafted a letter to the FBI listing dozens of new questions that the commission wanted answered in Mexico. He asked the FBI to prepare itemized estimates of how much money Oswald might have spent in Mexico City, down to the cost of purchasing six picture postcards of the kind found in his possession after the assassination. Since Oswald had reportedly attended a bullfight, Slawson wanted the FBI to establish “the cost of a ticket of the bullfight for the section in which Oswald probably sat.” The idea, Slawson said, was to determine if Oswald would have needed to accept money from someone to cover his travel costs.

Slawson also had many unanswered questions about “the other Silvia”—Silvia Odio, the Dallas woman who claimed to have met Oswald in the company of anti-Castro activists. Slawson was convinced that the FBI had been too eager to dismiss her story. In a memo to his colleagues on April 6, he said his research showed that “Mrs. Odio checks out as an intelligent, stable individual.” He was increasingly convinced she was telling the truth, at least as she understood it. “There is a substantial chance that if Mrs. Odio backs down from her story, it will not be because she disbelieves it, but because she is frightened.”

The FBI reported that it had been unable to find the two Latino men who had supposedly been seen with Oswald at Odio’s door, but that did not surprise Slawson: he suspected the pair might have gone into hiding to avoid being accused of involvement in the assassination and that they might since have tried to intimidate Odio into silence. “They could by now very easily have brought pressure or threats to bear on Mrs. Odio to keep quiet.”

Slawson planned a visit to Dallas that spring, in part to take Odio’s testimony. In advance of the trip, his colleague Burt Griffin, already in Texas, was asked to interview witnesses who might corroborate Odio’s story, including her psychiatrist, Burton Einspruch. Griffin tracked down Einspruch at his offices at Parkland Hospital, an institution that had already figured in so much of the investigation in Dallas. “Einspruch stated that he had great faith in Miss Odio’s story of having met Lee Harvey Oswald,” Griffin reported back. The psychiatrist recalled how she told him—before the assassination—of her troubling encounter with the three strangers, including the man she now identified as Oswald. “In describing Miss Odio’s personality, Dr. Einspruch stated she is given to exaggeration but that the basic facts which she provides are true,” Griffin wrote. “Her tendency to exaggerate is an emotional type, characteristic of many Latin-American people, being one of degree rather than basic fact.”

Odio’s claims intrigued several of the commission’s other staff lawyers. Slawson was so consumed by other work in Washington that he did not object when Jim Liebeler, who had become a close friend, volunteered to take on the assignment of interviewing Odio during a trip he had scheduled to Dallas. Liebeler had special reason to look forward to the interview: the photographs of Odio forwarded to the commission from the FBI in Dallas showed that she was, as reported, as pretty as a fashion model. While in Dallas, Liebeler was also scheduled to interview Marina Oswald, and she was lovely, too.

34

THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

MAY 1964

Wesley “Jim” Liebeler was a force of nature. He was a true libertarian, ready to ignore—or better yet, outrage—anyone who tried to impose rules on him. When it came to politics, he was a conservative Republican. He was fiercely anti-Communist and talked about it, and there were rumors on the staff—apparently untrue—that he was a member of the ultraconservative John Birch Society. Rankin remembered Liebeler as an “extreme conservative in rather a hotbed of liberals on our staff, and he early on became disenchanted with some of the others.” Liebeler’s disdain was often directed at Norman Redlich, who was as liberal on political issues as Liebeler was conservative. “Mr. Redlich and I have quite profoundly different views of the world on political questions,” Liebeler said later.