Reclaiming History (273 page)

Also, contrary to allegations by conspiracy theorists, the HSCA could find no evidence that Oswald “ever received any intelligence training or performed any intelligence assignments during his term of service.”
³¹
Although Kerry Wendell Thornley, a member of Oswald’s unit at El Toro Marine base near Santa Ana, California, testified before the Warren Commission, “Oswald,
I believe
, had a higher clearance” than confidential, “probably a secret clearance,”
³²
the HSCA learned that Oswald only had a security clearance of confidential (the lowest) and “never received a higher classification.”
³³
Oswald’s Marine Corps records show that he was “granted final clearance up to and including CONFIDENTIAL.”
³⁴
While it is true that John Donovan, the officer in charge of Oswald’s radar crew in Santa Ana, testified before the Warren Commission that Oswald “must have had secret [above confidential, but below top secret] clearance to work in the Radar Center,”
³⁵
the HSCA concluded that Donovan’s assumption was incorrect. A review by the HSCA of the U.S. Marine Corps personnel files of four enlisted men who had worked with Oswald in either Japan or California (Richard Call, Zack Stout, Robert Augg, and Nelson Delgado) revealed that all only had, like Oswald, a security clearance of confidential.
³⁶

The CIA (specifically, the Special Investigations Group [SIG] of the CIA’s counterintelligence unit) did not open a 201 file (a file kept on an individual, including CIA employees, that brings him into the agency’s records system) on Oswald until December 9, 1960,
after
he had defected to the Soviet Union, and then only after the agency had received a request from the State Department for information on American defectors.
³⁷
However, the agency, before December 9, was already receiving information on Oswald from other agencies of the government.
³⁸
It had four written communications in 1959 from the State Department pertaining to Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union, the first one dated October 31, 1959, from Moscow, and a fifth communication dated May 25, 1960.
³⁹

The CIA told the HSCA that there were “no specified criteria for automatically opening a 201 file on an American.”
⁴⁰
And when the HSCA reviewed the 201 files of twenty-nine other defectors, eight of whom had 201 files opened
before
their defection, they found that for only four of the remaining twenty-one the files were opened
because
of the defection. The files on the seventeen other defectors were opened from four months to several years after the defection. The HSCA said that “at the very least, the committee’s review indicated that during 1958–1963, the opening of a [201] file years after a defection was not uncommon. [Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union first came to the attention of American officials in Moscow on October 31, 1959. So his 201 file was opened more than thirteen months later.] In many cases, the event was triggered by some event, independent of the defection, that had drawn attention to the individual involved.”
⁴¹

The HSCA went on to say that “the existence of a 201 file does not necessarily connote any actual relationship or contact with the CIA.” Though not automatic, such a file is normally opened by the CIA when “a person is considered to be of potential intelligence or counterintelligence significance.” Oswald’s 201 file, the HSCA said, “contained no indication that he had ever had a relationship with the CIA.”
⁴²

The CIA dossier or 201 file on Oswald after December 9, 1960, and up to November 22, 1963, consisted of twenty-nine documents: seven documents received from the FBI, ten from the Department of State, two from the Department of Navy, one from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, four newspaper clippings, and five internal CIA notes, all of which the CIA turned over to the Warren Commission on March 6, 1964.
⁴³
In fact, prior to October 9, 1963, when the Mexico City office of the CIA sent a memorandum to CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., that an American male identifying himself as Lee Oswald contacted the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, “the Oswald file held by CIA [headquarters] consisted
entirely
of press materials and disseminations received from the Department of State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Navy Department.”
⁴⁴

As indicated, and to the great dismay of the conspiracy community, the HSCA said that from its entire investigation, it found “no evidence” of any relationship that Oswald ever had with the CIA. The committee went on to say, “Moreover, the Agency’s investigative efforts prior to the assassination regarding Oswald’s presence in Mexico City served to confirm the absence of any relationship with him. Specifically, when apprised of his possible presence in Mexico City, the Agency both initiated internal inquiries concerning his background and, once informed of his Soviet experience, notified other potentially interested Federal agencies of his possible contact with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.”
⁴⁵

Not only is there no evidence that Oswald had any relationship with the CIA (i.e., no relationship that CIA headquarters was aware of and sanctioning), but as we’ve seen elsewhere in this book, Oswald clearly was not CIA agent or operative material. As John Scelso, chief of clandestine operations for the CIA in the Western Hemisphere at the time of the assassination, put it in sworn testimony before the HSCA,

Oswald was a person of a type who would never have been recruited by the Agency…His personality and background completely disqualified him for clandestine work or for work as an agent to carry out the instructions of the Agency…When the Agency hires an agent, engages someone to do our work and gives him a certain amount of training and places him under our guidance, whether we pay him or not, or whether he signs an agreement or not, he has to meet certain standards. He has to go through a security check, a file check. And the Counter-intelligence Staff has to examine his personality and background and evaluate his reliability…Oswald, by virtue of his background and so on, would miserably fail to meet our minimum qualifications. Oswald would have been debriefed had he walked in and volunteered information, you see. However, he would not have been given any mission to perform. He might have been given instructions, you see, which would tend to neutralize him and make him less of a nuisance and danger than he otherwise would be, like go away and do not contact us any more…Oswald’s whole pattern of life was that of a very badly, emotionally unbalanced young man.
⁴⁶

And author Peter Grose points out that in addition to Oswald’s “loose and undisciplined” life, “he stood out from his environment. His strange odyssey [to Russia] only invited questions from all around him. This is not the sort of person that those who build intelligence networks seek for their agents.”
⁴⁷

B
ut if the CIA, as an agency, wasn’t involved with Oswald in the assassination, what about the argument by many conspiracy theorists that “rogue elements” or agents within the CIA may have been, and it was they who were behind Oswald and the assassination? The conspiracy community has made this argument ad nauseam, but after well over forty years of investigation, isn’t it fair to ask the conspiracy theorists what evidence they have to support this contention? Of course, not only don’t they have any evidence, but with very few exceptions (e.g., David Atlee Phillips, see later text), they never even tell us just who they believe these rogue agents were. Instead, they can be no more specific than to resort to vague allusions such as “fairly senior or even highly placed…renegade CIA agents,”
⁴⁸
or “lower echelons” at the agency,
⁴⁹
or “angry…more fanatical rogue agents” at the CIA,
⁵⁰
or “a number of aberrant agents” in the CIA.
⁵¹
I say this to the conspiracy community: Is that all you people have?
After over forty years of investigation
?
*

With respect to the argument that rogue agents within the CIA were behind Kennedy’s murder, the HSCA said it “attempted to identify [any such] CIA employees” but was unable to do so.
⁵²
The committee said that in that regard, “an effort was also made to locate a man identified as Maurice Bishop who was said to have been a CIA Officer who had been seen in the company of Lee Harvey Oswald. The effort to find ‘Bishop’ was likewise unsuccessful.”
⁵³

The source of the Bishop-Oswald sighting was one Antonio Veciana Blanch, one of the founders of Alpha 66, a militant, anti-Castro exile group. In March of 1976, Veciana told a staff investigator for U.S. Senator Richard S. Schweiker, a member of the Church Committee, that between 1960 and 1973 he had a working relationship in the anti-Castro effort with someone known to him as Maurice Bishop, whom he believed to be a CIA agent. Veciana said that in 1973 Bishop had given him a suitcase containing $253,000 in cash for his services over the years in attempting to assassinate Castro. Two hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars? A quarter of a million dollars? In some kind of balloon payment delivered only at the end of thirteen years of work? Surely a believable story. (What’s particularly laughable about this is that Veciana was Alpha 66’s secretary of finance.) Veciana said that at one of his meetings with Bishop—in Dallas in August or early September of 1963—Lee Harvey Oswald was present. Veciana repeated these claims in testimony before the HSCA in April of 1978.
⁵⁴

We know (see Oswald biography) that Veciana could not have met with Oswald and Bishop in Dallas in late August or early September of 1963, because we know Oswald was in New Orleans during this entire period. Moreover, though Veciana claims to have met with Bishop more than a hundred times, he could not point to a single witness to corroborate his association with Bishop, or help HSCA investigators locate Bishop, which they made an intense and unsuccessful effort to do. Coupled with the additional fact that the HSCA felt Veciana “had been less than candid” and waited more than ten years after the assassination to reveal his information, the committee concluded it “could not…credit Veciana’s story of having met with Lee Harvey Oswald.”
⁵⁵

HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi had been convinced that Bishop was David Atlee Phillips, the head of the Cuba section at the CIA station in Mexico City at the time of the assassination, but when Fonzi arranged for Veciana to see Phillips at the HSCA hearings in Washington, D.C., Veciana said that although there was a “physical similarity,” Phillips was not Bishop. “No. It is not him,” he stated unequivocally.
⁵⁶
However, Fonzi remained convinced that “Maurice Bishop was David Atlee Phillips” and that Phillips “played a key role in the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy,”
⁵⁷
but never provided any evidence to support his accusation.

An investigative journalist and former senior editor of
Greater Philadelphia Magazine
, Fonzi had long been a conspiracy theorist. Brought in as an HSCA investigator by Richard Sprague, the prominent Philadelphia prosecutor who was the HSCA’s first chief counsel, Fonzi believed that the CIA was complicit in the assassination, and the heart of his belief was that Phillips, using the pseudonym Maurice Bishop, was Oswald’s CIA case officer whom Veciana saw in Dallas in Oswald’s presence. It became a canard that many embraced, often to their considerable detriment. In their 1980 book,
Death in Washington
, authors Donald Freed and Fred Landis asserted not only that Phillips played a role in the cover-up of the assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier (along with his aide, Ronni Moffit) in Washington, D.C., in 1976, but also that he used the alias Maurice Bishop in serving as Oswald’s CIA case officer.
⁵⁸
Phillips’s 1982 libel lawsuit against the two authors and their publisher was settled in February 1986 with a retraction and an unspecified (but “suitable,” per Phillips) sum of money.
⁵⁹

I spent a goodly amount of time preparing Phillips for his testimony in the London docu-trial as a rebuttal witness to Edwin Lopez, the former HSCA investigator who, like Fonzi, suggested CIA complicity in the assassination, and he said the entire Maurice Bishop allegation was “false and crazy.”
⁶⁰
But Phillips eventually decided not to testify. The main reason was that he had another libel lawsuit pending against the
London Observer
for publishing the same Maurice Bishop allegation, and his lawyer felt it would not be advisable for him to get into the same issue, if it came up, at our London trial because opposing counsel in the libel lawsuit might be able to derive some advantage from it. Additionally, though he had told me in an earlier letter, “I am going to depend on you to make it easier for me to avoid…violating my secrecy agreement” with the CIA, he wrote that as a former CIA officer, “I would probably be a lousy witness anyway, because I would have to avoid confirming or denying information” contained in still-classified reports, and “a jury would probably believe I was stonewalling.”
⁶¹
On October 7, 1986, attorneys for the
London Observer
“unreservedly apologized” to Phillips in Britain’s High Court for suggesting he was in any way involved in Kennedy’s assassination, and agreed to pay all his legal expenses and a “substantial” sum in settlement.
⁶²
On October 12, 1986, the
Observer
printed its retraction in which it said that “there was never any evidence to support the suggestion” that Phillips knew Oswald.

HSCA officials regretted not only parroting Fonzi’s Maurice Bishop allegation, but also having him as one of their investigators. In the November 1980 issue of the
Washingtonian
, Fonzi wrote a blistering, inordinately long article (virtually book size at eighty thousand words) about the HSCA, suggesting it was a farce that played “political games.” He continued to allege that Phillips might be Bishop and said that “what the Kennedy assassination still needs is an investigation guided simply, unswervingly, by the priority of truth,” describing Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey as a mere hired hand whose main objective was to shield government institutions from effective scrutiny and criticism.
⁶³