The Kennedy Half-Century (37 page)

Other documents seem to have vanished into thin air. Agent Raymond Rocca remembered at least one other Oswald-related cable that came in to Langley from Mexico City that has since gone missing. In 1978, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations showed the agent a cable dated October 9, 1963, Rocca said, “It is my impression that there were earlier cables, that there was an earlier cable.”
⁶⁶

In addition, CIA officials undeniably withheld important information on Oswald from the Warren Commission. Under a top secret program known as HT/LINGUAL, agents intercepted Oswald’s correspondence during his time in the Soviet Union. When members of the Warren Commission inquired about a letter Marguerite sent to her son in 1961 (which was intercepted and read by Langley), they were told that the letter contained “no information of real significance.” CIA’s own documents, however, show that the letter was passed along to at least one high-ranking official with the message, “This item will be of interest to Mrs. Egerter, CI/SIG, and also to the FBI.” “CI/SIG” refers to CIA’s Special Investigations Group, which was part of the agency’s counterintelligence division.
⁶⁷

The pieces of the Oswald puzzle stamped CIA may be ill-fitting, but they could reasonably create a portrait of covert action. CIA headquarters might have found a good use for Oswald and would not have wanted to share how much they knew about this particular asset with lower-level employees or foreign country stations.
⁶⁸
This reasonable interpretation of the evidence does not require a belief that a “rogue element” near the top of the CIA was preparing Oswald to assassinate Kennedy. It is more likely that the agency could have viewed Oswald as a malleable potential low-level operative with an unusual combination of background experiences and contacts, including firsthand knowledge of the Soviet Union, pro-Castro elements, and anti-Castro Cubans. At the least, despite his hotheaded nature, he could infiltrate and report about targeted groups. Oswald’s shady past, shaky economic situation, and seditious political views meant that the CIA held all the cards. Oswald was needy for money and attention, and he had an insatiable desire to feel important. After Kennedy’s assassination, the leadership of the CIA would have had the same motive as J. Edgar Hoover did at the FBI, to cover its tracks lest it be blamed for failing to spot and stop a potential presidential killer in its midst. To this day, the CIA remains tight-lipped about what it knew about Oswald, so much that journalist Morley has been forced to sue to gain access to potentially revealing CIA documents.

At the center of the CIA-Oswald puzzle is a deceased prominent figure in the agency, George Joannides. In the early 1960s, Joannides ran the psychological warfare branch at the CIA station in Miami, where he worked closely with the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE)—the same group Oswald crossed paths with in New Orleans. The CIA’s own records show that Joannides paid DRE $18,000 to $25,000 a month while assisting the group in planning its operations. In addition, Joannides traveled to the other key Oswald city, New Orleans, on CIA business in 1963 and ’64, although the details are unknown. At the time, DRE did everything it could to brand Oswald as a
Communist.
⁶⁹
After the scuffle in New Orleans, Carlos Bringuier challenged Oswald to a radio debate and forwarded a tape of the debate to Joannides. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, DRE released incriminating documents that helped shape public opinion about Oswald. When Jeff Morley asked to see Joannides’s reports, the CIA told him they never existed. “When a CIA case officer is running a group like that,” the reporter says, “the standard operating procedure was to file what was called a monthly progress report. I’ve spoken to probably ten former CIA people and asked them, ‘Is it possible that he [Joannides] didn’t report about this group? And every person I talked to said, ‘No, it’s not possible. He reported on that group.’ ” Morley also wonders about Joannides’s relationship with Karamessines, a fellow Greek American who approved the boilerplate message that went to Mexico City. All this leads to speculation that in the months leading up to the assassination, Karamessines and Joannides may have been grooming Oswald for an operation that involved DRE.

It is damning that the CIA withheld all information from the Warren Commission about Joannides’s Cuban efforts as well as the agency’s intense work to overthrow Fidel Castro—an undeniable possible motive for a counterassassination move against a U.S. president. This directly subverted the stated goals of the Warren Commission and denied to it the opportunity to more fully explain the events of November 22. In the 1960s, though, the CIA may have had the backing of President Johnson in its subterfuge. The Cold War was raging, and LBJ feared the American people would favor military retaliation if they suspected that Cuba or Russia was behind the assassination.
⁷⁰
What is far worse is that the CIA continued to refuse to provide this critical information when a new investigation of JFK’s murder was organized in the mid-1970s, at a time when political conditions were very different and retaliatory war would have been unthinkable after the Vietnam debacle. Both the public and the Congress were demanding to know the full truth after more than a decade of deceit. However, the House Select Committee on Assassinations had no more luck in prying the truth out of the CIA in the seventies than the Warren Commission had in the sixties. The only reason we know anything at all about Joannides’s connection to DRE is because of the Assassination Records Review Board, a federal panel assembled in response to Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie
JFK
. Stone’s incendiary charges of a CIA-led conspiracy to murder the president—however exaggerated or imagined they might have been—generated fierce demands from politicians and citizens for answers at long last.
⁷¹

“At long last” is a relative term with the CIA. More than twenty years later, we are still awaiting the release of key documents from the agency on matters
related to November 22. In 2005 the widely respected chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Robert Blakey, told a room full of assassination researchers in Bethesda, Maryland, that the CIA “set [him] up” in the late 1970s. Blakey revealed that the CIA called George Joannides out of retirement to serve as its liaison with the House Committee to “help it find and review CIA documents during its investigation.” This was despite Blakey’s agreement with the CIA that no one who had any connection to Oswald or assassination-related matters would be a part of the House Committee’s investigation. In 2011 Blakey went further in an interview for this book: “Of course they [the CIA] lied to us. There’s a federal statute that says what they did was a felony. Obstruction of a congressional investigation is a felony. They signed an agreement pledging full cooperation, and they broke the contract.” “The CIA duped Blakey, and he admits it,” commented the reporter Jefferson Morley. “This shows bad faith and [the CIA’s] intent to hide something. That’s why I don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, because they had the chance to come clean [during the House investigation], and instead they created a mechanism where this whole thing would stay hidden for another forty years,” until documents are finally released in 2017—assuming they still exist, have not been altered, or are not so heavily redacted as to be useless.
⁷²

It is even more outrageous than Morley suggests. Neither Joannides nor anyone else at the CIA ever told the House Committee that Joannides had worked with DRE in Miami and therefore had a clear conflict of interest. No one ever told the committee that within hours of Kennedy’s assassination, Joannides gave the green light to Cuban exiles in Miami to unleash a propaganda campaign linking Oswald to Castro, which affected newspaper coverage.
⁷³
In addition, according to Blakey, Joannides “frequently blocked the efforts of the House panel’s young researchers” when they tried to gain access to relevant CIA files. At the time, Blakey heeded the agency’s request that he tighten the reins on his aggressive aides, a decision he now regrets. In a stunning evaluation that speaks volumes about the CIA’s suspicious lack of candor throughout decades of investigation, Blakey flatly asserted, “I have no confidence in anything the agency told me.”
⁷⁴
He added, “Many have told me that the culture of the agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story. I am now in that camp.”
⁷⁵
CIA officials insist that they have been telling the truth all along and in 1981 awarded Joannides the Career Intelligence Medal, one of the agency’s highest honors.
⁷⁶

Americans who have followed the CIA’s postwar history instinctively suspect Blakey is correct. The paranoia of the nuclear age and the genuine threat posed by foreign enemies gave the CIA enormous and often little-supervised
power.
⁷⁷
A Senate investigation headed by Idaho Democrat Frank Church in the 1970s revealed that even presidents did not have full control over what went on at the agency.
⁷⁸
A decade before the Church Committee convened—just a month after the assassination, in fact—former president Harry Truman, the man who oversaw the creation of the CIA, published a knowing editorial in the
Washington Post
on the agency’s lack of accountability. “For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment,” Truman revealed. “It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”
⁷⁹
In a dangerous world, then and now, few serious people question the need for some kinds of counterintelligence and espionage. The CIA has proved its worth countless times, such as in the impressive operation in 2011 to find and kill Osama bin Laden. But Truman’s wise words, and the CIA’s actions before and after President Kennedy’s assassination, are a reminder of the urgent need for close supervision, unceasing vigilance, and in some cases, complete transparency—even from a secret spy division of government.
⁸⁰

Another peculiar story involving the CIA and Oswald concerns audio-tapes made during Lee Oswald’s trip to Mexico City. During the Cold War, American and Soviet intelligence agents routinely bugged each other’s telephones, and the CIA in Mexico City had tapped the phones at the Cuban and Soviet embassies. The CIA maintains that it does not have any original recordings of the calls Oswald made to the Soviet embassy because it routinely erased low-priority conversations and then reused the tapes.
⁸¹
Yet at least a couple of the “low-priority” calls involving Oswald (or an individual identified as Oswald) were important enough for the CIA to transcribe. On September 28, 1963, at 11:51 A.M., the CIA eavesdropped on a call made to the Soviet embassy in which Oswald tried to expedite his exit back to a Communist state. The American transcribers were native Russian speakers who described Oswald’s attempt at the language as “terrible, hardly recognizable.”
⁸²
Yet Oswald had studied Russian, spoke it at home, and lived in the Soviet Union for several years. On October 1, Oswald supposedly made another call to the Russian embassy. The same native Russian transcribers (Boris and Anna Tarasoff) testified that the male voice heard on the September 28 and October 1 tapes are from the same person, whether Oswald or someone else. In the wake of the assassination, FBI agents who listened to the tapes were convinced that the voice was not Oswald’s. These agents also saw the CIA’s photograph of “Oswald” and knew immediately the picture was not of the same man arrested in Dallas. On November 23, 1963, J. Edgar Hoover called the Oval Office:

JOHNSON: Have you established anymore about the [Oswald] visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico in September?

HOOVER: No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing for this reason. We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears there was a second person who was at the Soviet Embassy.
⁸³

Thus, the director of the FBI flatly contradicted the claim of the CIA that no tapes of the September 1963 events in Mexico City were preserved. J. Edgar Hoover unmistakably acknowledged the existence of at least one tape, and that FBI personnel had listened to it, determining that the voice (and photograph) were not Oswald’s. (Hoover’s assertion is backed up by two attorneys for the Warren Commission, who say a representative of the CIA played the tapes for them in early 1964.) So who was impersonating Oswald on the phone in Mexico City? Was this a CIA agent fishing for more information about Oswald’s intentions? Was it a CIA attempt to further tie Oswald to the Communists prior to an attempt on President Kennedy’s life? Or is it something else entirely? In addition, what actually happened to the tapes of Oswald or his impersonator? When were they lost or destroyed, and by whom?

It would also be very useful to know more about the LBJ-Hoover chat, and where it led, but (foreshadowing the infamous 18½-minute gap in a key tape of President Nixon during the Watergate scandal
⁸⁴
) there is a 14-minute gap in the tape of the conversation. In 1999, the researcher Rex Bradford requested this significant tape from the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. “And then something very funny happened,” Bradford says. “[The librarian] said, ‘Well, you know, that tape is very poor quality, hard to listen to, you see, he was using his vice presidential taping equipment, you don’t really want that tape.’ And I said, ‘… I have audio engineering friends, we can probably do something.’ ” Bradford says that after the librarian reluctantly sent him the cassette tape, he played it and heard “fourteen minutes of pure hiss” in the middle of the conversation, as though that portion had been erased. Bradford is skeptical of the librarian’s explanation because the other phone calls on the tape, presumably recorded with the same vice presidential equipment, were “just fine.”
⁸⁵