A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (80 page)

His memoirs revealed that, despite his insistence to the commission that there were no surveillance photos of Oswald in Mexico City, the CIA had in fact obtained photos of him outside both the Cuban and Soviet embassies. “People watching these embassies photographed Oswald as he entered and left each one, and clocked the time he spent on each visit,” Scott wrote. He also suggested that there were reels of audiotapes from CIA wiretaps that had captured Oswald’s voice in his phone calls to the embassies—tapes that Scott had claimed in 1963 and 1964 had all been erased. “Oswald was of great interest to us,” Scott wrote. “His conversations with personnel of these embassies were studied in detail.”

In 1976, the House of Representatives established a special committee to reinvestigate the assassinations of both President Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Over the next two years, investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations tracked down at least three CIA officials who remembered seeing surveillance photos of Oswald in Mexico City. Among them was Stanley Watson, Scott’s former deputy, who recalled a single surveillance photo of Oswald, alone, taken from the rear—“basically an ear and a back shot.” Watson said he believed Scott had been capable of hiding or destroying material he did not want his CIA colleagues to see. He recalled how Scott had taken home contents of his embassy safe at his retirement; Watson also knew how Angleton had come to Mexico City to seize material from Scott’s home after his death. He volunteered that he thought Scott was capable of “phonying” evidence. “I never believed Win Scott the first time he told me something.”

In 1992, Congress established the Assassination Records Review Board to speed up the declassification of virtually all records related to the Kennedy assassination. The board forced the CIA to make public some of the records of the informants network maintained by Scott and his colleagues in Mexico City. On the list of Scott’s informants was a former Mexican Interior Ministry official, Manuel Calvillo, and it was a name that would have been familiar to Elena Garro and her daughter. Calvillo was the family friend who, immediately after the assassination, contacted the Garros to urge them to go into hiding. If their account to Charles Thomas was true, it meant that the Mexican official who told Elena Garro and her daughter to say nothing to anyone about Oswald—about Silvia Duran, about the party, about Oswald’s two “beatnik” traveling companions—was also working for the CIA.
^*

58

1975 AND THEREAFTER

In February 1975, David Slawson, now on the faculty of the law school at the University of Southern California, was thankful that he had turned down the job offer a decade earlier from Robert Kennedy. The proposal had come through Joe Dolan, then Kennedy’s Senate aide, when Slawson was still at the Justice Department in Washington. Kennedy had wanted Slawson to sign on as legal counsel in his Senate office, with plans for Slawson to join Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968. Slawson said he cringed at the thought that, had he joined the campaign, he might well have witnessed Kennedy’s assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The hotel was just down the road from Slawson’s office at USC.

He was also glad that he had not become associated with Kennedy’s political entourage after all the ugly revelations about Kennedy’s possible role in the CIA assassination plots targeting Castro. A special Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho confirmed once and for all in the mid-1970s that the CIA had organized murder plots against several foreign leaders. The CIA’s inspector general identified eight separate sets of plots directed at Castro alone in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations; the details of some of the schemes seemed drawn from a bad spy novel, with an arsenal of murder weapons to be smuggled into Cuba that included poison pens, poison pills, a fungus-infected scuba suit, and an exploding cigar.

James Angleton, a central witness before the Church Committee, was never directly tied to the Castro plots, although the committee turned up at least one well-placed CIA official who appeared convinced of a connection: John Whitten, the agency veteran who had been pushed aside by Angleton in the Oswald investigation in 1964. Whitten testified to congressional investigators that he understood Angleton “was one of several people in the agency who were trying to use the Mafia in the Cuban operations.” Whitten recalled how, long before the Kennedy assassination, he had been forced to call off a CIA operation in Panama to search for the bank deposits of American mobsters because “Angleton vetoed it.” Whitten said he was told at the time that “Angleton himself has ties to the Mafia and he would not want to double-cross them.” Angleton was forced to resign from the agency in late 1974 as a result of the separate disclosure that, for years, he had overseen a massive, illegal domestic spy operation that had gathered information on American citizens, including opening their mail.

In Los Angeles in the 1970s, Slawson admitted that he could not follow every twist and turn of the congressional investigations of the misdeeds of the CIA. He was busy with his classes at USC, and there were times, he said, when Southern California seemed to exist in a different universe from Washington, DC. He was alarmed, though, every time he read some new disclosure about CIA activities that should have been revealed to him a decade earlier at the Warren Commission, especially about the Castro plots. While the plots did not necessarily have any connection to Kennedy’s murder, the CIA had abdicated its responsibility to tell the commission about them. “The decision to withhold that information was morally wrong,” Slawson said.

For a time, he was not so angry that he wanted to be drawn into “the circus” that had become the national debate about the assassination. For years, he was happy to leave the public debate to some of his old friends from the commission, especially David Belin, who became a fixture on radio and television programs in defending the Warren Commission’s findings; Belin would write two books on the subject.

Slawson ended his silence once and for all, though, in February 1975, when he was contacted by a Washington correspondent for the
New York Times
who asked him to take a look at an intriguing FBI document that had just been unearthed in the National Archives. It was a memo to the State Department from J. Edgar Hoover in 1960, three years before the Kennedy assassination, about Oswald, who would then have been living in Russia. The memo questioned whether an “imposter” might somehow be using Oswald’s birth certificate; the issue had apparently first been raised with FBI agents in Dallas by Oswald’s ever-excitable, conspiracy-minded mother, Marguerite.

As he read through the fifteen-year-old FBI memo, Slawson knew enough about Oswald’s mother to know that there was almost certainly nothing to this. Slawson had heard no suggestion at all during his work on the Warren Commission that anyone had impersonated Oswald in Russia. Still, he was angry because he was certain that he had never seen Hoover’s 1960 memo, and he should have seen it when he worked at the commission; he would have remembered it.

So he agreed to go on the record with the
Times
—both to attack the CIA and to join the growing calls for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination, if only to determine why this document and so much other information, especially about the Castro plots, had been withheld. For former staff members on the commission, Slawson’s comments represented a turning point—the Warren Commission’s chief investigator on the question of whether President Kennedy had died in a foreign conspiracy now believed that the question needed to be asked again. “I don’t know where the imposter notion would have led us—perhaps nowhere, like a lot of other leads,” Slawson told the
Times
. “But the point is we didn’t know about it. And why not?” He wondered if the CIA had been behind a decision to withhold the 1960 memo, just as the agency had withheld information about the Castro plots. The CIA “may have covered this up,” he said.

Within days of the article in the
Times
, the phone rang in Slawson’s home in Pasadena. It was a Sunday morning, he thought.

He had never heard the caller’s voice before. It was plummy. At first, it sounded friendly.

“This is James Angleton,” the caller said.

Slawson was not sure he knew exactly who Angleton was at the time. “I think I only knew he was high up at the CIA.” Angleton’s role in the CIA’s domestic-spying operation, Operation Chaos, had been exposed by the
Times
only several months earlier, resulting in his resignation in December 1974.

Angleton would not physically depart his offices at CIA headquarters for months after resigning, however. And he made clear to Slawson that, even in his forced retirement, he was continuing to monitor how he and the agency were being depicted in the press, especially when it came to the Kennedy assassination.

Angleton wanted to talk about the article in the
Times
about Oswald and the Hoover memo. He briefly explained his background. “He really piled it on, how important and aristocratic he was,” Slawson said.

Angleton then moved on to make it clear that he was an old friend of USC president John Hubbard, a former American diplomat and, by definition, Slawson’s boss. “He asked how the president was getting along, as if I must be great buddies with the president,” said Slawson, who in fact barely knew Hubbard.

It was then that the conversation took a menacing tone. Angleton wanted to know if Slawson had been accurately quoted in the article in the
Times
. He wanted to know exactly what Slawson had said to the
Times
reporter, and if it was true that Slawson wanted a new investigation of elements of the Kennedy assassination.

The threat was clearer in Angleton’s sinister tone than in his words, Slawson said.

Angleton suggested that the CIA needed Slawson’s help—his continuing help—as a “partner.” As a partner in what? Slawson wondered.

“We want you to know how we appreciated the work you have done with us,” Angleton said. Slawson reminded himself that he had never worked for the CIA; he had investigated the CIA.

“We hope you’ll remain a friend,” Angleton said. “We hope you’ll remain a partner with us.” Angleton spoke slowly, pausing to allow Slawson to take in what he was saying.

As he put down the phone, Slawson thought the message was obvious: “The message was: We know everything you’re doing. We’ll find it out. Just remember that. The CIA is watching you.” He and his wife, Kaaren, were both alarmed by the call. What did it mean that this apparently powerful figure at the CIA would contact them out of the blue to suggest that Slawson was asking too many questions about the Kennedy assassination? Slawson was convinced that Angleton was giving him a warning: “Keep your mouth shut.”

*

In Washington that summer, FBI director Clarence Kelley, beginning his third year in charge at the FBI, thought he was making progress in distancing the bureau from the increasingly dark legacy of his predecessor, the late J. Edgar Hoover. “We are truly sorry,” Kelley would declare publicly, apologizing after the flood of posthumous revelations about Hoover’s abuses of power, which included the FBI’s illegal harassment for decades of civil rights leaders and antigovernment protesters; the abuses ended only with Hoover’s death in 1972. “No FBI director should abide incursions upon the liberties of the people,” Kelley said.

Still, in his years at the FBI, Kelley, the jut-jawed former police chief of St. Louis, Missouri, found himself dragged over and over again into internal investigations of the misdeeds, and often the crimes, of FBI agents and other bureau employees during the Hoover years. Those crimes, Kelley discovered to his astonishment in the summer of 1975, included the destruction of critical evidence about the Kennedy assassination by FBI agents in Dallas.

That July, Tom Johnson, the publisher of the
Dallas Times Herald
, the city’s number-two newspaper, requested an urgent face-to-face meeting with Kelley. The FBI director agreed, and Johnson flew to Washington the next day. Ushered into Kelley’s office, Johnson recalled later, he took a seat and wasted no time before revealing to Kelley why he was there: his newspaper was working on a story that suggested a massive cover-up in Dallas of what the FBI had known about Lee Harvey Oswald.

After years of hearing “so many nut stories, so many conspiracy theories” about the assassination, Johnson said, this “horrifying” story seemed to be true. The newspaper had learned that in early November 1963, just weeks before the assassination, a furious Oswald had arrived unannounced in the Dallas field office of the FBI, and that he left behind a threatening handwritten note. In the note, Oswald had apparently complained about the bureau’s surveillance of his family, but the exact wording of his threats—and their target—was a mystery, since the note had vanished after the assassination. The FBI had covered up the note’s existence and Oswald’s visit, never telling the Warren Commission about any of it. It was the Texas publisher himself who had gotten the tip about the note and its disappearance—from an FBI official in Dallas he would refuse to name—and Johnson planned to write the story along with reporter Hugh Aynesworth, the longtime scoop artist of the
Dallas Morning News
who was now working at the rival
Times-Herald.

“Kelley looked at me, and his expression was beyond being startled,” Johnson recalled. “He looked bewildered.” Kelley vowed to investigate. He asked Johnson “to send me the full story in writing, and give me some time to check on it.”

It took little time for Kelley to determine “that the worst of it was painfully true.” He was able to establish that Oswald had in fact delivered a handwritten note to the FBI field office in Dallas in early November 1963 and that it had been torn up and flushed down a toilet by Special Agent James Hosty, on orders of his supervisor, Gordon Shanklin, in the hours after Oswald’s murder.