A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (79 page)

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Cynthia Thomas was more shocked than her husband at the news that his career at the State Department was over. Certainly she was angrier. Charles had always been the fatalist between them. It did not make sense, they both knew. Charles had been uniformly—and enthusiastically—praised by the ambassadors he had worked under during his eighteen years in the Foreign Service. The bad news reached him while he was back in Washington in 1969. Since he had failed to win a promotion in time, he was being dismissed—“selected out.” “It seemed nonsensical,” Cynthia said. “Charles was the best sort of American diplomat.”

It was then, in his final act as a State Department employee, that Thomas typed up his July 1969 letter to Secretary of State William Rogers, with a last plea that someone review the allegations made by Elena Garro. “A careful investigation of these allegations could perhaps explain them away,” Thomas wrote. “Until then, however, their public disclosure could reopen the debate about the true nature of the Kennedy administration and damage the credibility of the Warren report.”

In the letter, Thomas speculated, apparently for the first time on paper, why the CIA had not wanted to get to the bottom of the story in Mexico City: “Some of the people appearing in the Elena Garro scenario may well be agents of the CIA.” He did not identify who the possible CIA agents might be or how they might have interacted with Oswald in Mexico.

A month later, on August 28, the State Department’s Division of Protective Security passed on his letter to the CIA, with a cover memo asking for the spy agency to consider pursuing the allegations. The CIA’s response to the State Department was dated September 16. At forty-six words, the memo could not have been much shorter:

SUBJECT: Charles William Thomas

Reference is made to your memorandum of 28 August 1969. We have examined the attachments, and see no need for further action. A copy of this reply has been sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Secret Service.

The memo was signed by CIA counterintelligence director James Angleton and his deputy, Raymond Rocca. Angleton’s name meant nothing to Cynthia Thomas and, decades later, she said she thought it had never meant anything to her husband, either. “I don’t think we had any idea who Angleton was,” she said. “Why should we?”

That summer, Thomas began a difficult job search that would only end with his suicide two years later. The search was much harder than he could have imagined, Cynthia said. When prospective employers asked Thomas why he left the State Department short of the retirement age, he felt compelled to tell them the truth: he had been forced out. He tried, but failed, to find work elsewhere in the government, including at the CIA, Cynthia said. She remembered that Win Scott in Mexico City had offered “to write recommendation letters for him” but “never did.” She came to understand that there was a “concerted effort by the State Department” to block her husband from getting a job on Capitol Hill. Money became a problem almost immediately. The family had no real savings. The Thomases and their two young daughters lived in a rented house in Washington. To provide at least a small income, Thomas put his law degree to work part-time to defend indigent criminal defendants in Washington’s municipal criminal courts. The pay was $7.50 an hour. He was “too proud” to ask for anyone’s help in finding a permanent job, Cynthia said.

Even though the State Department and the CIA had refused his request to reopen the investigation in Mexico, Thomas tried to follow up himself. Late in 1969, he began to search for Garro. She had left Mexico City the year before as a result of the furor she created with public comments in which she alleged that left-wing intellectuals bore responsibility for instigating large antigovernment protests that fall; the protests were put down brutally by the Mexican government, resulting in the death of scores, if not hundreds, of protesters and bystanders. Thomas eventually located Garro in New York, where she was living—destitute—with her daughter.

His handwritten notes of his phone conversations with Garro—placed in a file folder labeled
KENNEDY
that was found after his death in his black leather briefcase—suggest that Garro had nothing new to say about the long-ago encounter with Oswald. She was too confused—and paranoid. “She has been in hiding,” apparently fearing that she was in danger in Mexico, Thomas wrote. “She said ‘they’ were coming after her again.” At Thomas’s request, a friend of his in New York invited Garro and her daughter to dinner. The friend reported back that she “had never seen anyone as frightened.”

On April 12, 1971, the day he committed suicide by putting a gun to his head in the family’s second-floor bathroom, three more rejection letters arrived in the mail, including one for a job as staff director of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Thomas was told that the committee had decided on a younger man. He killed himself with a gun he had bought years earlier as a souvenir of a visit to Cuba in the 1950s.

In his briefcase, after his death, Cynthia found the
KENNEDY
folder, although she said she did not understand its significance at the time. The file was also stuffed with yellowed newspaper and magazine clippings about the continuing disputes over the findings of the Warren Commission. He had clipped out articles about Richard Russell—and Russell’s belief that the commission’s report was wrong. Years later, Cynthia Thomas would say she knew “almost nothing at all” about Garro’s allegations about Oswald and Silvia Duran. It was typical that her husband would not have shared such sensitive information with her at the time, Cynthia said. “He was right not to tell me,” she said. “This was embassy work, and it was sensitive. My goodness, it was about President Kennedy’s assassination. Charles was not supposed to bring something like this home to share with his family.”

After the suicide, she began a one-woman campaign to prove that her husband was the victim of injustice within the State Department’s promotion system and to fight for his posthumous reinstatement to the Foreign Service, as well as his back salary and pension. It was a campaign prompted, in part, by her family’s desperate financial condition. At the age of thirty-five, with two young children, she had been left with a single physical asset of any value—a used 1967 Plymouth sedan worth $500—and $15,000 in debts, including $744.02 she owed to a Washington funeral home for her husband’s burial.

She began hearing rumors, almost immediately, that there was more to her husband’s forced departure from the government than the family had been told—that the CIA was involved and that it somehow related to his posting in Mexico. Her notes from the time show that a well-connected European journalist in Washington told her that “high sources” in the U.S. government believed that Thomas was ousted because someone had spread false rumors connecting Thomas to “the Mexican left.” More specifically, she was alerted that Stanley Watson, Scott’s deputy in the CIA’s Mexico City station, had somehow “damaged” Charles’s career prospects behind the scenes.
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It had been reported in diplomatic circles in Mexico that Watson, possibly at Scott’s urging, had begun a whispering campaign aimed at Thomas, suggesting that he was too close to Mexican Socialists. Decades later, the Thomases’ friend Guadalupe Rivera, a law professor who would later be elected to the Mexican Senate, recalled hearing the news in 1971 of Thomas’s suicide and immediately assuming it was linked to Watson’s rumor campaign, which had reached her, too. She was overheard at a party in Mexico City discussing the suicide and blurting out, “It was that pig, Stanley Watson.” Cynthia said she could not understand why Watson, or Scott, or anyone else at the CIA, would have been so determined to see her husband forced out of the government.

After his suicide, former colleagues at the State Department said they were astonished to learn that Thomas’s career might also have been derailed by what the department claimed was an innocent clerical error—the misfiling of a glowing job evaluation prepared in 1966, while Thomas was in Mexico. It was the evaluation that described Thomas as “one of the most valuable officers” in the Foreign Service and recommended his immediate promotion. The department said that the report had been mistakenly placed in the file of the other diplomat who had the name Charles Thomas. The report was placed in the proper file two days after the promotion board had turned Thomas down. The board chose not to reconsider its decision, since it was not the board’s mistake that resulted in the misfiling.

Cynthia Thomas’s campaign, combined with the internal furor at the State Department over the treatment of her late husband, forced the department to overhaul its promotion policies for the diplomatic corps. In 1973, a federal judge in Washington ruled the department’s promotion process unconstitutional as a violation of due process of law; the ruling came in a lawsuit that had been financed by donations from the Charles William Thomas Defense Fund, which had been established by his widow and some of Thomas’s old colleagues.

In January 1975, Congress provided Mrs. Thomas with some small amount of justice; it passed a so-called private bill that posthumously restored her husband to active duty in the Foreign Service, which meant that she and her two children would be entitled to the salary he had lost until the time of his death, as well as insurance benefits. The total compensation came to about $51,000. Mrs. Thomas was also hired by the State Department as a foreign service officer, and she went on to work as a diplomat in India and Thailand before retiring in 1993.

After passage of the bill in 1975, Mrs. Thomas received a letter from the White House—a formal apology for the government’s treatment of her husband. “There are no words that can ease the burden you have carried over these years,” the letter began. “The circumstances surrounding your husband’s death are a source of deepest regret to the government he served so loyally and so well and I can only hope that the measures which came about as a result of this tragedy will prevent reoccurrences of this kind in the future.” The letter was signed by President Gerald R. Ford.

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Charles Thomas was not the only veteran of the United States embassy in Mexico to die in April 1971. Two weeks after Thomas’s suicide, Winston Scott died at his home in the Mexican capital, at the age of sixty-two, after what was reported as an accidental fall. He appeared to have succumbed to internal injuries after tumbling from a ladder in his backyard.

News of Scott’s death reached CIA headquarters almost immediately, and one of his former deputies in Mexico, Anne Goodpasture, now living in the United States, said she knew she had to act. Within hours, she said, she contacted Angleton to warn him that Scott had almost certainly kept classified documents at his house in Mexico City. It was well known among Scott’s deputies that he took files home and did not always return them. Goodpasture recalled that Scott had at least one thick-walled safe in his house. She did not rule out the possibility that he had “squirreled away” at least one copy of a 1963 CIA surveillance tape of some of Oswald’s telephone calls in Mexico.

Angleton flew to Mexico in time for the funeral. He recalled years later to congressional investigators that he had been dispatched to the funeral by Richard Helms, another old friend of Scott’s. “I was appointed as an official by Dick to go down there” as a show of the agency’s respect, Angleton said. The trip had a second purpose, he acknowledged. “Win was going to write a book, a manuscript,” Angleton said. “It was sort of a last will and testament of an operator.” Since Scott had not submitted the book to the CIA for the prepublication security review it would have needed, “my purpose was to go down and get all copies,” Angleton said. “I was a close friend of his and I knew his wife and all that.” Helms would later claim that he had only a vague memory of Angleton’s trip—and the reasons for it. “There may have been some concern that maybe Scott had something in his safe that might affect the agency’s work,” Helms said, suggesting that the decision to enter Scott’s home and empty out his safe was routine. “The agency just wanted to double-check and be sure there was nothing of that kind there.”
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Scott’s family recalled the unexpected knock at the door of their Mexico City home and how Scott’s widow, Janet, discovered Angleton standing there. He announced that he had come to collect classified material that might be in the house. The family submitted to his inspection, and Angleton took several boxes of documents back to Langley, including two copies of the memoirs.

Much of Scott’s manuscript would remain classified in the CIA’s archives decades after his death, but a chapter focusing on the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald in Mexico was quietly declassified in 1994 and released to Scott’s family, part of the flood of millions of pages of government documents related to the Kennedy assassination that were declassified by the government in the 1990s, largely in response to the popularity of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-laden 1991 film
JFK
.

And what was in that chapter would shock former investigators for the Warren Commission when they finally saw it in 2012 and 2013.
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Far from giving reassurance that the CIA had not hidden secrets, Scott’s memoirs suggested just how much information had been intentionally withheld from the Warren Commission, often by Scott himself. There were startling differences between what Scott wrote in his book and what the CIA had told the commission years earlier.

Scott had assured the commission in 1964 that the government had come across no credible evidence, certainly nothing in Mexico, to suggest a conspiracy to kill the president. In his memoirs, however, Scott offered precisely the opposite view. What happened in Mexico, he wrote, raised the suspicion that Oswald was in fact an “agent” for a Communist government—Scott thought it was the Soviet Union—who might have been directed to kill Kennedy. “Above all, Oswald’s visits at both the Communist Cuban Embassy and the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City during his brief five-day stay in September–October 1963 are, together with what is known of what took place during these visits, sufficient to make him a suspect agent, acting on behalf of the Soviets, in several things, possibly including the assassination of President Kennedy,” Scott wrote. “It is evident that there are sufficient data for at least a suspicion that Oswald worked for the Soviets.”