Reclaiming History (378 page)

†Ragano also writes in his book that in 1972, when Jimmy Hoffa, who had been released after serving four years of a thirteen-year sentence for labor racketeering and jury tampering, was unsuccessful in wresting control of the Teamsters back from his handpicked successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, who he felt had “double-crossed” him, he asked Ragano to ask Trafficante “to get rid of that fucking Fitz” for him. Ragano writes that when he passed the request on to Trafficante, Trafficante said impassively, “‘Just tell him that it will be done.’ Santo was obviously annoyed at Jimmy’s demands and had no intention of getting entangled with him.” (Ragano and Raab,
Mob Lawyer
, pp.267–268)

^*
Though he probably had, as many people who never kill do, murderous instincts. The bantam Hoffa, at a dinner he had with RFK at his lawyer’s home in Washington, D.C., before they became bitter enemies, told RFK, “I do to others what they do to me, only worse” (Kennedy,
Enemy Within
, p.41).

^*
Even former Florida senator George Smathers, a close friend of JFK’s who, during JFK’s Senate years, flew off to places like the Riviera and Havana with the married JFK for “bachelor holidays” of easy living, acknowledged to author Michael Beschloss that he personally saw Judith Campbell Exner being taken into the president’s private quarters at the White House by William Thompson, a railroad lobbyist who had gone with Kennedy and Smathers on their 1958 pleasure trip to Havana (Beschloss,
Crisis Years
, p.141). With respect to Kennedy’s women, Beschloss writes that “Kennedy’s Choate School friend Le Moyne Billings felt that in the late 1940’s after Kennedy’s beloved sister Kathleen [with whom, among all his siblings, he was the closest] was killed in an air crash and he was told that he too might soon die of Addison’s disease, ‘he just figured there was no sense in planning ahead anymore. The only thing that made sense…was to live for the moment, treating each day as if it were his last, demanding of life constant intensity, adventure, and pleasure.’ [Of course, several years before Kathleen’s death, and with avoidance of war being a simple matter given the power and influence of his father, Joe, John Kennedy enlisted in the navy and risked his life, becoming a war hero.] Even as President, Kennedy’s tomorrow-we-die streak remained, evinced by his promiscuity with women and his indifference to physical risk. Secret Service men complained that he was ‘a notoriously poor driver who drove through red lights and took many unnecessary chances.’ Sometimes he dismissed the agents, saying, ‘Whoever wants to get me, will get me’” (Beschloss,
Crisis Years
, p.10).
But at least as to JFK’s legendary womanizing, his latest biographer, Robert Dallek, points out that long before the diagnosis of Addison’s disease and the death of his sister Kathleen in 1948, and the death of his brother Joe Jr. in 1944 when his plane exploded in midair crossing the English Channel, JFK was unable to exercise any restraint when it came to women, and started accumulating an impressive list of conquests by his late teens. “He had so many women, he could not remember their names,” Dallek writes. While it is easy enough for a man to be a womanizer on his own, with JFK it was an accepted family tradition, an “entitlement” of his privileged background, if you will. His father, a natural role model for a young man, took licentiousness to new levels, the former ambassador to Great Britain trying to get in bed one night with one of his daughter’s friends who was staying over. (Dallek,
Unfinished Life
, pp.47–49)

^*
I mean, it’s not as if the mob did not have access to electronic surveillance equipment. It did. Indeed, in October 1960 Giancana himself arranged for the bugging of the Las Vegas apartment of comedian Dan Rowan to find out if his then girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, was being unfaithful to him with Rowan (Blakey and Billings,
Plot to Kill the President
, p.381; Gentry,
J. Edgar Hoover
, p.486; see also 10 HSCA 174).

^*
It is true, however, that in the immediate wake of the assassination, Kennedy’s brother Robert had understandable suspicions about CIA involvement in his brother’s death, as he did about Castro and organized crime. RFK’s aide, Walter Sheridan, said that RFK had told him, “You know, at the time I asked [CIA Director John] McCone…if they [CIA] had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me. And they hadn’t” (Interview of Walter Sheridan by Roberta Greene on June 12, 1970, for RFK Oral History Program, John F. Kennedy library).

^*
On June 23, 1976, the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (popularly known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho) released its report dated April 23, 1976, in which it stated that “between 1960 and early 1963 the CIA attempted to use underworld figures for [Castro’s] assassination,” but found no connection between these attempts and Kennedy’s assassination. Although the committee reached no final conclusion and recommended further investigation, it said it could find no CIA complicity in the assassination (Church Committee Report, pp.2–3, 6). The moving force behind investigating whether the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s assassination was Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, and the chairman of the committee assigned Schweiker and Senator Gary Hart of Colorado to head up, as a subcommittee, the investigation of this issue. This is why this particular report (the Church Committee had a broader mandate) is often referred to as the Schweiker or Schweiker-Hart Subcommittee Report. This book refers to it as the Church Committee Report.

^*
The fear was deeper than that. Only those who lived through it can accurately recall it. Michael Burke, the chief of covert operations for the CIA in Germany for part of the cold war (he went on to head the New York Yankees), says, “The Cold War in those days was a very real thing with hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops, tanks and planes poised on the East German border, capable of moving to the English Channel in forty-eight hours.” Another CIA official at the time, Hugh Cunningham, perhaps expressed it the best. Survival itself was at stake, he remembers. “What you were made to feel was that the country was in desperate peril and we had to do whatever it took to save it.” (Marks,
Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”
, p.28)

†To those who find humor in incongruity, as I can, the image of highly educated and urbane Ivy League types dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and speaking ferociously grammatical English (down to the forms of the verb “to be”), sitting around a table sipping martinis and casually musing about the best way to do in, say, Fidel Castro, might induce a smile.

^*
It wasn’t the Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels brand of Communism that America feared so much, but the Russian, totalitarian kind, symbolized by the erection of the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1961. The wall, built by the Communists not to keep people from getting in but to keep them from getting out (those who tried were often shot on the spot by armed guards atop the concrete and barbed-wire structure), spoke more eloquently, all by itself, than the millions of words being written at the time on both sides of the Iron Curtain trying to sell the virtues of democracy vis-à-vis Communism, and vice versa. Capitalism, with all its inevitable sins, was a saint next to Russia among all freedom-loving people.

^*
Under 61 Stat. 495 Chapter 343 (The National Security Act of 1947), Section 102 created the Central Intelligence Agency. Section 102 (d) (3) provided “that the Agency shall have
no
…
internal
[domestic]
security functions
.” Prior to the creation of the CIA, in 1940 the FBI started conducting foreign intelligence operations in Central and South America to gather information on the Nazis during the Second World War. This was terminated with the creation of the CIA as the lead federal agency in the gathering of foreign intelligence. (Whitehead,
FBI Story
, pp.15, 211–212; HSCA Report, p.241)

†Often referred to as “the first genuine foreign intelligence agency in U.S. history” (Powers,
Man Who Kept the Secrets
, p.25), it was not. The Special Intelligence Service, a branch of the FBI formed in 1940, apparently was. (See endnote discussion.)

^*
Partnerships and relationships formed by the OSS with allies
before
the war ended (e.g., future CIA counterintelligence head James Angleton with British counterintelligence chief Kim Philby), and with prior enemies immediately afterward (e.g., Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, who, knowing Germany was about to fall and planning to reinvent himself as anti-Nazi, moved fifty steel containers of his intelligence files on Russia from the Russian front back to a secure location underground in the German state of Bavaria and offered them to the OSS and his American captors), would carry far into the cold war struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Some were helpful (Gehlen, through his National German Intelligence Service [BND], which worked closely with U.S. intelligence) and others not (Philby). (Helms with Hood,
Look over My Shoulder
, pp.83–85; Trento,
Secret History of the CIA
, pp.22–23; Powers,
Man Who Kept the Secrets
, pp.28, 85–86; Ashley,
CIA Spy Master
, p.61)

†The National Security Council was also created by the National Security Act. Its members are the president, vice president, and secretaries of state and defense, with advisory members being the director of the CIA and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

^*
The reader should realize that many in the conspiracy community would give their right arm if they could prove that Oswald was a CIA agent. If they could do this, it would be the answer to their most wondrous dreams, the solution, at last, to the Kennedy assassination. This is because they are too blind when it comes to the assassination to realize that even if Oswald were a CIA agent, it would only be one step in their quest for the Holy Grail. They’d still have to prove that the reason why the CIA lied about Oswald’s relationship with the agency was not because it didn’t want the world to know that one of its agents murdered the president (as, on a lesser scale, a religious order would not want it to be known that one of its priests was a child molester), but because number one, the CIA decided to murder Kennedy, and number two, the agency got Oswald to murder Kennedy for it.

^*
Many conspiracy theorists take their theory about rogue or maverick agents even further and allege, without having the courtesy of providing an iota of evidence, that the CIA leadership found out what the rogue agents did and covered up for them to protect the CIA from extinction. But this is ludicrous. If the nation found out that some rogue CIA agents had murdered the president, there would be extreme shock, but the CIA itself would very likely survive. But if the CIA leadership covered up the awful deed and the nation found out, not only would this most certainly sound the death knell for the CIA, but the CIA leaders would have their reputations and careers destroyed and they’d be prosecuted for being accessories after the fact to Kennedy’s murder.

^*
The ARRB “examined extensive CIA records concerning the history and operations of the CIA in or against the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s. The Review Board found no records that suggested that Oswald had ever worked for the CIA in any capacity, nor did any records suggest that Oswald’s trip and defection to the Soviet Union served any intelligence purpose” (Final Report of the ARRB, p.85).

^*
If he did, he certainly would have had a difficult time doing so, he and his wife having left Dallas to live in Haiti (where he had a contract with the Haitian government) at the end of May in 1963, almost a half year before the assassination (9 H 167, 276, WCT George S. de Mohrenschildt). And as I understand it, communication facilities (which would have been needed to stay in touch with Oswald) in Papa Doc Duvalier’s dump of an island were not noted for their efficiency.

^*
On December 12, 1963, de Mohrenschildt wrote a letter from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to “Mrs. Janet Lee Auchincloss, 3044 O Street N.W., Washington D.C.,” the salutation of “Dear Janet” certainly indicating familiarity. “I ask you,” he wrote, “to express my deepest sympathy to your daughter and tell her that both my brother and I will always remember her as a charming little girl from East Hampton.” He alludes to “the strange fate which made me know Jackie when she was a little girl” and adds, in an indelicate aside, that this fate “made me also know the assassin (or
presumbable
[
sic
] assassin), his wife and child. And your daughter has been of such help to the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation which we had started in Texas several years ago. [De Mohrenschildt’s only son died in 1960 of cystic fibrosis.] She was an honorary chairman of this Foundation.” De Mohrenschildt proceeded to become even more indelicate, no, insensitive, by saying, “I still have a lingering doubt, notwithstanding all the evidence, of Oswald’s guilt.” (De Mohrenschildt Exhibit Nos. 13 and 14, 19 H 556–557) Mrs. Auchincloss turned the letter over to the Warren Commission (9 H 275, WCT George S. de Mohrenschildt).

^*
When de Mohrenschildt wasn’t asking questions instead of giving answers, and was not talking in circles, he was refreshingly informational. For instance, Oltmans said de Mohrenschildt told him a group of people killed Kennedy, but he didn’t know if Oswald was one of the shooters. “I am still not sure,” he said, “whether Oswald shot himself or not. I have never been able to ascertain that.” And he said governmental agencies were involved in the assassination. “I think he said it was the CIA and FBI,” Oltmans told the HSCA, adding that George had told him “the proof of that is in my manuscript.” That disjointed manuscript of de Mohrenschildt’s relationship with Oswald did not have, of course, any such proof. What it did have was more of George’s haziness. For instance, at one point he says, “I never, never worked for CIA…I cannot say that I never was a CIA agent, I cannot prove it. I cannot prove either that I ever was. Nobody can.” George de Mohrenschildt, his inherited sense of
noblesse oblige
still intact, was just trying to be helpful. (12 HSCA 314)
Before HSCA counsel Tanenbaum’s questions exposed Oltmans as having nothing to say, Oltmans, because he was a journalist, received a lot of national exposure, giving “various morning press and television interviews,” including on the aforementioned
Good Morning America
show and an NBC show, as well as a front-page story in the
New York Times
(
New York Times
, April 2, 1977, pp.1, 12; see also
New York Times
, April 4, 1977, p.50). The
Times
, wondering about the “flurry of publicity created by Oltmans” with his oblique hearsay charges, decided to call the Netherlands to find out just who Oltmans was. “He is half journalist, half showman. Nobody takes him very seriously,” said Peter d’Hamacourt, whom the
Times
described as being “widely regarded as one of the best investigative reporters in the Netherlands.” D’Hamacourt said that Oltmans’s work consisted of “a lot of guessing stories,” adding, “You don’t know where his facts end and his imagination begins.” The news director of a large daily in Rotterdam described Oltmans to the
Times
as “the stuntman of Dutch journalism. He has great skill in moving in on a small story and working on it until he builds it up into an exclusive big deal. He pumps up all his stories, and we think him not to be very reliable.” (
New York Times
, April 12, 1977, p.18)