Reclaiming History (274 page)

The
Washingtonian
being a prestigious publication, Blakey and Gary Cornwell, deputy chief counsel to the HSCA, felt it advisable to respond in the
Congressional Record
. Blakey rued the day he departed from his policy of hiring impartial investigators, saying he kept Fonzi on the staff after Sprague left because “I felt that his obsession [over the CIA’s complicity in the assassination] would help assure that this aspect of the committee’s investigation would receive its due,” adding that committee staff members “derisively referred to [Fonzi] as an ‘Ahab’ and to his quest as a search for ‘Moby Dick.’” Cornwell was no more kind in his denunciation of Fonzi, referring to his “bad faith” and “lost credibility.”
⁶⁴
Michael Ewing, a member of the HSCA staff, was so put off by Fonzi’s article in the
Washingtonian
that he felt obliged to send a personal letter to Phillips himself, saying, “I wouldn’t want you to think that there are many of us who think like Gaeton Fonzi…I would like you to know that Fonzi’s writing does not reflect the views of responsible former members of the Select Committee.”
⁶⁵
In an eight-page letter to the editor of the
Washingtonian
, Ewing said that Fonzi “worked exclusively out of Miami, locating and interviewing Cubans,” and that he “never worked on the Committee in Washington” other than for a short period “during the editing process at the very end of the investigation. I think Fonzi’s nearly total absence from Washington—where, of course, the investigation was planned, directed and concluded—was probably a primary factor behind his embarrassingly misinformed perceptions of how the investigation was conducted.”
⁶⁶

Congressman Richardson Preyer of North Carolina, the chairman of the HSCA subcommittee on the JFK assassination, also saw fit to write Phillips on November 19, 1980, to say, “I can understand your concern over the Fonzi article. Mr. Fonzi’s views are not shared by me nor, I think, by the Committee. I believed your testimony and did not find the testimony of Veciana credible.”
⁶⁷

O
ne of the main leads on a CIA-Oswald relationship that the HSCA pursued was the allegation of one James B. Wilcott, a finance officer for the CIA from 1957 until 1966. At the time of the assassination, Wilcott was assigned to the CIA station in Tokyo. (Oswald was assigned to the First Marine Air Wing at Atsugi Naval Air Station, about thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo, in 1957–1958.) Wilcott testified before the committee that the day after the assassination, “there was at least six or seven people, specifically, who said that they either knew or believed Oswald to be an agent of the CIA,” but could only recall the name of one, Jerry Fox, who “at least made some mention of it.” He did name several other fellow workers who made references to Oswald being an agent, but they did so only “in a speculative manner.” Wilcott said, “I didn’t really believe this when I heard it, and I thought it was absurd. Then, as time went on, I began to hear more things in that line.” The main thing, he testified, was an incident “two or three months after the assassination…when a [CIA] case officer came up to my window to draw money and he specifically said…‘Well, Jim, the money that I drew the last couple of weeks ago or so was money’ either for the Oswald project or for Oswald,” he could not remember which. If we’re to believe Wilcott’s story, the CIA case officer had been drawing money for Oswald or the Oswald project even though Oswald had already been dead for at least a month and a half. Since the CIA is notorious for secrecy, why would a CIA officer share the information that the presidential assassin had been a CIA agent with someone like Wilcott, who merely worked in the finance section? When asked that very question, Wilcott could only say lamely, “I don’t know how to answer that question.”

Wilcott’s story started to quickly unravel when he was unable to identify the case officer who allegedly told him this, and could not recall what the officer told him Oswald’s cryptonym was. Nonetheless, though he had no evidence to support his position, he told the HSCA it was “my belief that [Oswald] was a regular agent and this was a regular project of the Agency to send Oswald to the Soviet Union.” He also believed Marina Oswald was a CIA agent who had been recruited before Oswald’s “phony defection” to the Soviet Union “and was waiting there in Tokyo for Lee Harvey Oswald.”
*

When Wilcott was asked, “Were you ever able to find any indication in any of the Tokyo station’s records that Oswald was, in fact, a CIA agent?” he responded, “Well, I never really looked,” even, he said, at his own disbursement records. Wilcott had a ready answer for why he never furnished his allegedly valuable information to the Warren Commission. “I really didn’t think that the Warren Commission was out to really get at the facts,” but he did bother to write an unpublished article on the matter, which he gave to the HSCA.
⁶⁸
Wilcott’s credibility suffered even further when an intelligence analyst whom Wilcott said he discussed the Oswald allegation with at the post told the committee he wasn’t in Tokyo at the time of the assassination, the committee verifying that he had been transferred back to the United States in 1962, the previous year. Finally, the committee interviewed many CIA personnel who had been stationed in Tokyo at the time, including the chief of the post and other personnel who surely would have known if Oswald had had any association with the agency in Tokyo, and all had no knowledge of such an association. The HSCA concluded that based on all the evidence, “Wilcott’s allegation was not worthy of belief.”
⁶⁹

Another alleged Oswald-CIA link emerged when Gerald Patrick Hemming Jr. told conspiracy author Anthony Summers in 1978 that he was a former Marine sergeant who had been stationed at Atsugi air base in Japan working as a radar control operator shortly before Oswald did. He told Summers that he had been recruited by naval intelligence while there, and that he had met Oswald once at the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles. (At the time, Hemming was reportedly pro-Castro, but later switched sides when he and fellow former marine Frank Sturgis went to Cuba to help Castro in his revolution, and became disenchanted with Castro.) From the questions Oswald asked, Hemming said he got the impression that Oswald was “an informant or some type of agent working for somebody,” and that at Atsugi, Oswald would have been “a prime candidate for recruitment” by some U.S. intelligence agency. Apart from the fact that Hemming doesn’t make the allegation that Oswald was a CIA agent, only that he sensed he was “some type of agent,” Summers acknowledges that “Hemming’s reliability as a source has on occasion been called into question.”
⁷⁰

Although it is an article of faith among most conspiracy theorists that the CIA was directly behind or at least somehow involved in the assassination, other than fanciful daydreaming on their part, the likes of Wilcott and Hemming are the only basis for their allegation.

O
ne relationship Oswald had which conspiracy theorists find particularly suspicious and incriminating is his friendship in Dallas with the Russian emigré of purportedly noble pedigree, George de Mohrenschildt. This relationship is discussed in depth earlier in this book, but it should be noted here that virtually all conspiracy theorists postulate that de Mohrenschildt had a very close relationship with the CIA, either as an agent or as some other type of operative, and many suspect he had a hand in the assassination.
*
But the HSCA thoroughly checked de Mohrenschildt’s background and concluded that there was “no evidence that de Mohrenschildt had ever been an American intelligence agent.” His contact with the agency seemed to be limited to being debriefed several times in Dallas between 1957 and 1961 by J. Walton Moore of the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service. For instance, Moore interviewed de Mohrenschildt following his return from a trip to Yugoslavia in 1957. (De Mohrenschildt went there, under salary with the International Cooperation Agency [ICA] in Washington, D.C., to “help [the ICA] develop oil resources” in Yugoslavia. The HSCA said that Moore “was an
overt
CIA employee…He was not part of a
covert
or clandestine operation.”)

Around this time, as the HSCA pointed out, “upon returning from trips abroad, as many as 25,000 Americans annually provided information [about countries they had visited] to the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division [actually, Domestic Contact Service] on a nonclandestine basis. Such acts of cooperation should not be confused with an actual Agency relationship.”
⁷¹
But since a great many conspiracy theorists believe the CIA was behind the assassination, they feel it simply cannot be a benign coincidence that Oswald had a friend who was connected in any way with the CIA.

Speaking of coincidences, as mentioned in the Oswald biography section, what a remarkable coincidence that de Mohrenschildt knew Jackie Kennedy and her mother, Janet Auchincloss. Additionally, as alluded to earlier, de Mohrenschildt, quite a writer of letters, wrote a letter to President Kennedy on February 16, 1963, congratulating Kennedy on his recent goal to try to make the average sedentary American more physically fit. De Mohrenschildt told Kennedy of the long and physically rigorous journey, by foot, that he and his wife had taken in 1961 throughout Latin America, and said that if the “typescript and many photographs” of the journey he offered to send Kennedy impressed him, “I would ask you, Mr. President, for a foreword to my book.” He closed by saying, “By the way, I am an old friend of the Bouvier family and of Mrs. Janet Auchincloss, but I prefer to write to you directly, as ‘getting fit’ seems to be a personal concern of yours. Please accept my sincere wishes of success in all your endeavors. Sincerely yours, George De Mohrenschildt.”
*

A man of George de Mohrenschildt’s innate theatricality just had to exit this planet with a bang. His Haitian adventure, intended to put him on easy street like all of his others, had failed, his Haitian Holding Company folding in 1967. George and Jeanne returned to Dallas, where George seemed to be resigned, for the first time in his life, to living a more mundane existence, and took a position as an assistant professor of foreign languages, teaching French at Bishop College, a small black school in South Dallas.
⁷²
In the early 1970s he started slipping into dementia, Jeanne later saying that he began acting in an “insane manner,” having delusions of persecution. He also attempted suicide and beat her, breaking several of her ribs and damaging several teeth. In November of 1976, she finally got him committed to a state mental institution. But he was released after around three months.
⁷³

If George was limiting himself to an ordinary life of teaching with an occasional attempted suicide, someone else wanted to bring him back on stage for one last chance at a prize. NOS Television (a small group of TV and radio stations in the Netherlands) journalist Willem Oltmans, who attended Yale University in 1950, met Marguerite Oswald on an American Airlines flight from New York to Dallas in 1964, and Marguerite succeeded in convincing Oltmans that her son may not have acted alone in the assassination. Back in the Netherlands, when he told a clairvoyant, Gerard Croiset, Marguerite’s story, Croiset said that Oswald had a Dallas friend with the letters
sch
and
de
in his name. This man was of noble descent and was a geologist, Croiset said, and it was he, backed by big Texas oil interests, who had been the architect behind Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald being the fall guy. Oltmans returned to Texas, and Marguerite pointed to de Mohrenschildt as Croiset’s mysterious Mr. X. Oltmans eventually hooked up with de Mohrenschildt, and per de Mohrenschildt, they became personal friends and de Mohrenschildt believed he had “convinced” Oltmans that he “had nothing to do whatsoever with the JFK assassination.” Indeed, de Mohrenschildt thought about suing Croiset but said he was probably “broke” anyway. Despite de Mohrenschildt’s denials, Oltmans persisted in trying to get de Mohrenschildt to confess, visiting him and Jeanne every year and hoping for a breakthrough.

According to Oltmans, but not de Mohrenschildt, he got what he wanted in February of 1977 in Dallas. On April 12, 1977, after an appearance on the
Good Morning America
show that morning where he said Oswald and de Mohrenschildt were involved in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, Oltmans told the HSCA in executive session all he knew about the de Mohrenschildt story. He testified that when he would visit de Mohrenschildt every year or so in Dallas, the latter was always “a man who wins tennis matches, who is always suntanned, who jogs every morning, who is as healthy as a bull.” But Jeanne de Mohrenschildt told him during one visit in late 1976 that George was in a mental hospital and receiving electric shock treatments, and when Oltmans saw him on February 23, 1977, though he was out of the mental hospital, there was a “total transformation” in him. He was “shaking” and “trembling.” Oltmans said, “I couldn’t believe my eyes. The man had changed drastically.” Oltmans said that de Mohrenschildt took him out to Bishop College. Per Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt proceeded to confide in him that he was “responsible” for what Oswald had done “because I guided him. I instructed him, to set it up.” De Mohrenschildt begged Oltmans to “take me out of the country because they are after me,”
they
being Jews, the CIA, and FBI. Because of feeling “responsible” for Oswald’s conduct, de Mohrenschildt spoke many times to Oltmans of wanting to kill himself, not wanting to be around when his children learned of his responsibility, and said he had tried to commit suicide several times but had failed.

When Oltmans excitedly called collect from a pay phone in the library at Bishop College to his home office in the Netherlands to report that he had gotten a “confession” in the Kennedy assassination from de Mohrenschildt, he was instructed “to get him at any cost…to the Netherlands.” But de Mohrenschildt suddenly started to waver and it wasn’t until March 1 that the two flew, at NOS’s expense, to New York, stayed overnight at the Waldorf hotel (NOS’s “at any cost”), and then traveled on to London and the Netherlands the next day. In Amsterdam on March 3 and 4, de Mohrenschildt negotiated with the head of Dutch National Television himself, Karl Enklraar, as well as the representative of a book publishing house, on the sale of TV, film, and book rights to his story, all of which, he said, was contained within a manuscript he had left behind in Dallas. The understanding was that NOS would put de Mohrenschildt up in a hotel for a month and be given a staff to help him get the story out quickly.