A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (78 page)

According to the debriefing report prepared by LIRING/3’s CIA handler:

Silvia Duran informed him that she had first met Oswald when he applied for a visa and had gone out with him several times since she liked him from the start. She admitted that she had sexual relations with Oswald.… When the news of the assassination broke, she was immediately taken into custody by the Mexican police and interrogated thoroughly and beaten until she admitted she had had an affair with Oswald. She added that ever since that she has cut off all contact with the Cubans, particularly since her husband Horacio, who was badly shaken by the whole affair, went into a rage and has forbidden her to see them.

She continued to insist that she “had no idea” of Oswald’s plans to kill Kennedy.

The informant’s report came at an anxious moment for the CIA, given the global media furor created by Garrison’s investigation in New Orleans—and his claim that the agency was involved in Kennedy’s murder. Within days of LIRING/3’s debriefing, Scott received a letter from a colleague at Langley that directed the Mexico City station to remain silent:

The Garrison investigation of the Kennedy assassination has prompted a rash of spectacular allegations and charges, some against the CIA. Although Garrison’s “case” is flimsy indeed and apparently largely made up of unsubstantiated rumors by an odd assortment of disreputable characters, every effort is being made to turn down all such charges and have the facts in hand. In this situation you understand, of course, that it is essential that all of us be particularly careful to avoiding making any statement or giving any indication of opinion or fact to unauthorized persons which could somehow be seized upon by any party, innocently or otherwise.

Scott pondered what to do. What would be the effect of a long-delayed disclosure that Oswald, supposedly monitored by the CIA in Mexico, had in fact slipped out from under the agency’s surveillance and into the bed of a local employee of Castro’s government? What would Garrison do if he learned that the agency had known—but failed to pursue, for years—claims of the affair? How would critics react to a disclosure that the CIA had never attempted to identify two young “beatnik” Americans who were reported to be traveling with Oswald in Mexico?

Scott and his colleagues were required under agency rules to file a report that summarized every significant encounter with paid informants, so they would need to forward a report to Langley on the latest debriefing with LIRING/3. Scott faced the question of how—and whether—to note Duran’s apparent confession of the affair. He hit on a solution; he mentioned Duran’s confession deep in his debriefing report, and without context, dismissing its importance. It would be the sixth paragraph of his eight-paragraph report:

The fact that Silvia DURAN had sexual intercourse with Lee Harvey OSWALD on several occasions when the latter was in Mexico is probably new, but adds little to the OSWALD case. The Mexican police did not report the extent of the DURAN-OSWALD relationship to the Station.

That was it. CIA analysts back at the agency’s headquarters who had not read anything else on the subject might assume that “the fact” of an affair between Oswald and Duran was old, unimportant news. Certainly, it appeared, that was what Scott wanted them to believe.

*

There was more troubling news for Scott that spring. In May 1967, an American diplomat working in the U.S. consulate in the Mexican port city of Tampico reported an encounter with a local newspaper reporter, Oscar Contreras, who claimed that he had spent several hours with Oswald in September 1963. At the time, Contreras was a law student at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University. He said he and a group of leftist friends, all of them known on campus as Castro sympathizers, were approached by Oswald, who asked for help in convincing the Cuban consulate to give him a visa. Contreras said he was unable to help, although he and his friends spent that evening and much of the next day with the young American. It was not clear who had sent Oswald to speak with the students, although Contreras said he had many friends at the Cuban embassy.

The account, if true, offered another belated example of gaps in the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald in Mexico—or, alternatively, how little Scott and his colleagues chose to tell CIA headquarters about what they had actually known. If the Mexican reporter’s account was accurate, Oswald had ducked CIA surveillance for at least a day and a half—about a quarter of his time in Mexico City.

*

It was at about that same time in 1967 that Scott began talking openly to his colleagues of his plans to retire from the CIA. After twenty years at the agency, most of them in Mexico, he said he wanted to leave the government and make some real money. He intended to remain in Mexico and set up a consulting firm, allowing him to profit from his many contacts in the Mexican government. He also intended to write his memoirs, including his account of what had happened with Oswald.

Scott had always considered himself a writer. He especially loved poetry and had self-published a collection of his own love poems under a pseudonym in 1957. It might have been an obvious thought, then, to put his life story, especially his many exciting adventures as a spy, on paper. In what appeared to be a grave violation of CIA security rules, he sent a detailed outline for his memoirs—through regular mail—to a friend in New York who was an editor at
Reader’s Digest.
He told the editor that the book would follow his spying career from its start in World War II, when he formed an early friendship with Allen Dulles, and reveal how he and Dulles had written a study of British intelligence agencies that was used in 1947 as the blueprint for the creation of the CIA. Much of the book would focus on Mexico. “During my 13 years in Mexico, I had many experiences, many of which I can write about in detail,” Scott told the editor. “One of these pertains to Lee Harvey Oswald.… I know a great deal about his activities from the moment he arrived in Mexico.”

Scott’s initial title for the book,
It Came to Little
, was drawn from a passage of the Bible—“Ye looked for much, and lo, it came to little”—and reflected his disenchantment with the CIA. “My theme is that with all our work, the dollars spent and the thousands of hours put into the battle against communism, we who were and those who are still in the CIA would have to admit that ‘it came to little,’ if we are honest,” he wrote. “The United States is getting more and more timid about confronting communism” even as “we are more and more deeply penetrated by communists.” He eventually settled on a different title—
The Foul Foe
—and decided on a pen name, “Ian Maxwell.” It was the same one he had used for his love poems.

*

When he decided to run for president in 1968, Robert Kennedy knew he might face questions about his brother’s murder. The prospect, as always, seemed agonizing.

His last substantive public comment about the Warren Commission came that March, while he was on the campaign trail in California. In a raucous meeting near Los Angeles with college students, he was asked if he would make the commission’s records public in response to the flood of conspiracy theories about the assassination. Reporters said that Kennedy tried at first to ignore the question but, after a moment’s hesitation, reconsidered. “If I became president, I would not reopen the Warren report,” Kennedy declared. “I have seen everything that’s in there. I stand by the Warren Commission.” He added that “nobody is more interested than I in knowing who was responsible for the death of President Kennedy.”

Three months later, on June 6, the night he won the California primary for the Democratic nomination, Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. He was gunned down by a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, who said he wanted to punish Kennedy for his support for Israel.

The assassination had immediate ramifications at the Supreme Court. Within a week, a shaken Chief Justice Warren asked for a meeting with President Johnson and announced that he intended to retire, allowing Johnson time to put a successor in place before the presidential elections that fall. Johnson had not sought reelection and, with Robert Kennedy’s death, the chances that the Republican nominee, former vice president Richard Nixon, would win the presidency had grown much stronger. Warren clearly did not want Nixon, his old nemesis, to have the chance to replace him.

The situation did not work out as Warren had hoped. Johnson nominated Abe Fortas as Warren’s successor, but Fortas ran into strong opposition, much of it tied to allegations of conflicts of interest from his continuing political counsel to the president. The nomination was withdrawn in October, and Johnson announced that he had asked Warren to remain at the court until Johnson’s successor, Democrat or Republican, was in place to make a new nomination. After Nixon’s election, the new president announced his selection of Warren Burger, a conservative appeals court judge from Minnesota, as chief justice. Burger was confirmed by the Senate in June 1969.

Warren gave few interviews in retirement, and when he spoke to reporters and historians, he preferred always to focus on his legacy on the court and as California’s governor—not on the commission. When pressed about the assassination, he said he had never wavered in his view that Oswald acted alone. He said he was not disturbed by polls that showed that a growing share of the public doubted the commission’s findings. “People are still debating the Lincoln assassination,” he said. “It’s understandable.”

In retirement, he made a decision that pleased former staff members of the commission: he decided to cooperate on a book that Lee Rankin and Alfred Goldberg planned to write as a formal defense of the commission. He granted an extended, tape-recorded interview to Goldberg on March 26, 1974. It would be one of his last interviews on any subject; he died in Washington less than four months later, on July 9, at the age of eighty-three. In the interview, Warren suggested that he regretted nothing about the way he conducted the investigation, apart from wishing that the commission had a face-to-face interview with President Johnson. He stood by his decision to block access to Kennedy’s autopsy photos and X-rays. “For good or ill, I take full responsibility for it,” he said. “I couldn’t conceive permitting these things being sent around the country and displayed in museums.” He said he was still convinced that the single-bullet theory was correct and that Governor Connally had been wrong to think he was hit by a separate bullet. “A shot can deaden one’s emotions or reactions.” He remained convinced that all of the bullets fired at Kennedy’s limousine had come from the Texas School Book Depository, not from the so-called grassy knoll or the railway overpass, as so many conspiracy theorists alleged. “No one could have fired from the knoll or the overpass without having been seen.”

Rankin and Goldberg abandoned plans for the book after they were unable to interest major publishers. “The publishing houses only wanted a book about a conspiracy to kill Kennedy,” Goldberg said. “That’s not what we were writing.”

*

In October 1968, with the election to choose his successor only a month away, Johnson granted a wide-ranging valedictory interview to veteran ABC News anchorman Howard K. Smith. Off camera, Johnson offered to tell the newsman a secret that, for now, Smith could tell to no one else. Smith agreed.

“I’ll tell you something that will rock you,” Johnson said. Fidel Castro, he said, was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first.”

Smith, who knew that Johnson was capable of “blarney,” pleaded for more information. “I was rocked all right,” he said. “I begged for details. He refused, saying it will all come out someday.”

In September 1969, in retirement at his vast ranch outside Austin, Texas, Johnson was interviewed by CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite for a planned series of programs about his presidency. In discussing the Kennedy assassination, Cronkite asked if Johnson still believed the Warren Commission was right and that there had been no conspiracy in Kennedy’s death.

“I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever been completely relieved of the fact that there might have been international connections,” Johnson said.

“You mean you still feel there might have been a conspiracy?” Cronkite asked.

“I have not completely discounted that.”

Cronkite sounded startled. “Well, that would seem to indicate that you don’t have full confidence in the Warren Commission.”

Johnson: “No, I think the Warren Commission study…” He paused. “I think first of all, it was composed of the ablest, most judicious, bipartisan men in this country. Second, I think they had only one objective, and that was the truth. Third, I think they were competent and did the best they could. But I don’t think that they or me or anyone else is always, absolutely sure of everything that might have motivated Oswald, or others that could have been involved.”

Cronkite knew he had a scoop, and a historic one. But before the interview could be aired, Johnson insisted that his comments about the commission and his fears of a conspiracy had to be cut from the interview on “national security” grounds. After a fierce internal battle, CBS agreed to edit out the material, although word of what Johnson had said leaked to other news organizations, including both the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
.

What led Johnson to doubt the Warren Commission so profoundly would never been entirely clear. Joseph Califano, his domestic policy aide at the White House from 1965 until 1969, recalled how Johnson often said privately to deputies that he was convinced that Oswald had been part of a conspiracy. It was a view shared by Califano, who had been the general counsel of the army during the Kennedy administration and was one of a small team of advisers to Robert Kennedy asked to dream up plots to oust Castro—and, if possible, to kill him—as part of Operation Mongoose. “Robert Kennedy was absolutely determined to assassinate Castro,” Califano said years later. “The Kennedys were obsessed with it.” Califano always suspected there was truth in the rumor that Castro, once he became aware of the assassination plots targeting him, retaliated by ordering Kennedy’s assassination. Califano said he believed Robert Kennedy assumed the same thing. “I have come to believe that Robert Kennedy experienced that unbelievable grief after his brother’s death because he believed it was linked to his—Bobby’s—efforts to kill Castro.”