The Kennedy Half-Century (38 page)

Other tapes related to the assassination have disappeared altogether or had significant portions erased under mysterious circumstances. Anne Goodpasture, a CIA operative who worked with Win Scott (Mexico City’s station chief), told a reporter in 2005 that she thought Scott had made a copy of Oswald’s taped conversation with Soviet embassy officials and “squirreled it away in his safe.” A subsequent lawsuit filed by Scott’s son Michael revealed that his
father’s safe did indeed contain audiotapes, which further highlights James Angleton’s personal visit to Mexico City to clean out Scott’s safe shortly after he died, taking the contents with him back to D.C. It was the last anyone outside the CIA would see or hear of that tape—vital evidence that also has significant historical value. The question is why. What was Angleton trying to conceal?
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This individual, whose picture is shown on page, has never been identified.

9
Rounding Up the Usual Suspects: The Assassination’s Puzzle Palace

The FBI and the CIA are at the heart of many conspiracy theories about JFK’s killing. Researchers tend to be harsh, and some assume the absolute worst about Hoover and key leaders inside the CIA—direct involvement in JFK’s assassination—without providing ironclad proof of the most serious allegations. There is no question, however, that both agencies were trying to cover their tracks to avoid blame; insiders quickly picked this up. Shortly after November 22, John Whitten, a CIA agent who ran covert operations in Mexico and Central America, was put in charge of the CIA’s internal investigation of Oswald, a job that required close contact with FBI officials. In December 1963, the agent caught a glimpse of the early FBI report on the assassination, the same one that served as the starting point for the Warren Commission. Whitten was shocked when he realized that both the FBI and CIA had been purposely withholding critical information from him. When Whitten complained to his superiors, he was “told that his services would no longer be needed” and “was sent back to his Latin American duties.” Apparently, Whitten was taken off the case by James Angleton, CIA’s director of counterintelligence.
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But a cover-up to avoid culpability for missing signs of an impending assassination, or having worked with the assassin in some undercover capacity prior to November 22, is very different from the institutional orchestration of the murder of a U.S. president. Author Mark North has accused Hoover, in effect, of being a silent accomplice to the assassination. In his book
Act of Treason
, North argues that the FBI director knew about a Mafia plot to kill JFK but did nothing about it for two reasons. First, Hoover thought of Kennedy as “an indecisive, immoral liberal who, if left in place, would destroy the nation.” The irony, given Hoover’s unconventional private life, must be noted. And second, because “JFK had made it known that he intended, by the end of
his first term in office, to retire [Hoover] and replace him with a man of his own, more liberal political philosophy.” This argument is weak. While Kennedy would no doubt have preferred someone other than Hoover as FBI director, Hoover had cleverly accumulated evidence of JFK’s infidelities and had made certain the Kennedys were aware of his proofs—which provided an unusual form of job security.

In any event, North claims that the “overwhelming body of evidence” points to the New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello as the person who masterminded the assassination. By the fall of 1962, Marcello was facing a federal indictment, possible deportation, and relentless attacks from Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. He “realized that by placing the presidency in the hands of Lyndon Johnson” he could possibly “remedy the situation.” It was “common knowledge,” says North, that LBJ had “no interest in pursuing the Mafia.” Before the Kennedys came to power, the FBI director had sometimes turned a blind eye to mob activity. During World War II, for example, the federal government essentially subcontracted the security of New York’s waterfront district to a Mafia thug, Charles “Lucky” Luciano. The deal was simple: if Luciano’s henchmen kept an eye out for German and Japanese saboteurs, then Hoover’s G-men would not examine their business activities too closely.
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In Hoover’s eyes, the Communists and their “useful idiots” in the United States were a greater threat than “patriotic” Mafia bosses.
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FBI informers and pre–November 22 eavesdropping had yielded a couple of clues that mob godfathers had drawn a bead on JFK. The assassination researcher Lamar Waldron has asserted, “In autumn 1962, according to one of his former associates, [Carlos] Marcello met with three men on the mobster’s 3,000-acre estate outside New Orleans.” During this meeting, the conversation turned toward the Kennedys. Marcello detested RFK, who was working to dismantle his business operations and had even secured his deportation to Guatemala. He “referred to President Kennedy as a dog, with his brother Robert being the tail. ‘The dog,’ he said, ‘will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail.’ ” In other words, Marcello believed he needed to kill JFK in order to neutralize Bobby.
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Marcello is not the only Mafia chieftain to be implicated by assassination researchers. Santo Trafficante, a mob boss whose fiefdom was southern Florida, supposedly made a similar threat during a conversation with a Cuban exile, Jose Aleman. According to Aleman, Trafficante complained that the Kennedy brothers were “not honest. They took graft and they did not keep a bargain … Mark my word, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him.” When Aleman remarked that JFK would probably win a second term, Trafficante allegedly replied, “You don’t understand me. Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.”
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The lack of swift and decisive action once these threats became known to the FBI is disturbing. But it pales by comparison with the bureau’s casual attitude toward Lee Harvey Oswald. How could Oswald have escaped identification as a real and present danger, given his unusual history as a turncoat and agitator? In the entire United States there lived only a handful of former defectors to Communist states; in Texas, exactly one, Lee Oswald. Make no mistake—the FBI knew that Oswald was in the Lone Star State. By October 1963, the bureau also “knew him as a possibly deranged Marxist who supported the Cuban revolution, who was capable of violence, and who had been in recent contact with Soviet intelligence officers.” Hoover’s G-men also knew where Oswald worked, and one might think this relevant fact would have occurred to an alert bureau matching up potential assassins with presidential motorcade routes. The FBI certainly realized this after the fact. Agent James Hosty had been tracking Oswald for months and, under orders, destroyed evidence after the assassination to cover the bureau’s tracks. “We failed in carrying through some of the most salient aspects of the Oswald investigation,” Hoover later admitted. “It ought to be a lesson to us all, but I doubt if some even realize it now.” The magnitude of the FBI’s mistake should not be understated. Hoover himself termed it “gross incompetency” and it resulted in the decapitation of the elected U.S. government.
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However, incompetency does not equal complicity in the murder of a president. The evidence, fairly sifted, does not justify such speculation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency are frequently lumped together in the public’s mind as secretive organizations. But their missions and methods are different, and that distinction applies to any study of the Kennedy assassination. In matters pertaining to November 22, the CIA’s role was utterly unique—a subtle, ambiguous, murky tale that befits the nature of the agency. It is highly unlikely that the CIA had any institutional role in John Kennedy’s murder, nor were the vast majority of its personnel trying to cover up the real facts. In truth, the agency spent considerable resources in diligently checking out all manner of rumors and reports. On November 24, 1963, for example, the U.S. naval attaché in Canberra, Australia, reported a telephone call from “an anonymous individual who had described himself as a Polish chauffeur for the Soviet Embassy in that city. This individual, while discussing several matters of intelligence interest, touched on the possibility that the Soviet government had financed the assassination of President Kennedy.” The Navy office had received a similar call the previous year, before Dallas. Australian authorities shrugged off the incident, but the CIA launched a full inquiry and sent reports to the White
House, the State Department, the Secret Service, and the FBI. A few days later, the agency also received information from the Dutch Foreign Office that hinted at Cuban Communist involvement in Kennedy’s murder. When a Dutch official had mentioned the Bay of Pigs fiasco during a November 7, 1963, reception at the Soviet embassy, Ricardo Santos, a senior official of the Cuban embassy in the country, allegedly replied, “Just wait and you will see what we can do. It will happen soon.” When the Dutch official asked for specifics, Santos merely said, “Just wait, just wait.”
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The CIA also investigated a letter sent to the U.S. embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, dated November 25, 1963, which claimed that Chinese Communists had indoctrinated Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union. According to the letter’s author, the Chinese had hired Oswald to pose as a Castro sympathizer so that the United States would bomb Cuba once Oswald had killed the president. This attack would in turn force the Soviets to retaliate against the Americans and simultaneously share their nuclear secrets with the “Red Chinese.” Once the Communist bloc won the war, the Chinese would assassinate Soviet premier Khrushchev and take over the world.

The Stockholm embassy considered the letter a “crank”—after all, if the writer had known all this he would have been one of the world’s best-informed people, and would not likely have had to resort to an anonymous letter to an out-of-the-way embassy. Nonetheless, the CIA had the missive forwarded to Langley for analysis.

The CIA chased other phantoms. The Berlin station interviewed a Moroccan student named Mohammed Reggab who claimed that he had known Marina Oswald in 1961 and kept a picture and letter from her at his house in Casablanca. The CIA gave Reggab a polygraph test and decided that he was lying. Another dead end involved a twenty-four-year-old Army private named Eugene Dinkin. On the very same day he was scheduled to receive a psychiatric evaluation, Dinkin went AWOL from his unit in Metz, France, and entered Switzerland using a fake ID and “forged travel orders.” On November 6 and 7, “he appeared in the press room of the United Nations office in Geneva and told reporters he was being persecuted. He also wished to alert the world to the U.S. government’s ‘propaganda campaign.’” More important, at least one reporter thought she heard Dinkin say that “they” were plotting against JFK and that “something” big would happen in Texas. The CIA investigated Dinkin’s story, but could not find any evidence linking him to the Kennedy murder.
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Between October 1963 and September 1964, CIA employees were diverted from other duties to investigate scores of allegations that led nowhere. Did the Soviets take advantage of the confusion to launch a disinformation campaign blaming right-wing, anticommunist elements for Kennedy’s murder? It
is certainly possible and would have served their interests. On November 26, 1963, a CIA agent with the code name of W/1 met with a Soviet spy known only as M in a busy café on the Rue Marcelin Berthelot in Paris. W/1’s mission was to gauge the Soviet reaction to Kennedy’s assassination and find out what they knew about Oswald. M pointed out that Kennedy had been opposed by a number of powerful right-wing organizations, thereby implying that one of these groups had likely planned the president’s murder. In addition, M predicted that the U.S. investigation of the assassination would turn up nothing since “the Dallas police had silenced Oswald.” When W/1 asked about Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, M denied ever knowing the ex-Marine and insisted—obviously incorrectly—that foreigners were not allowed to work in the USSR.

The historian Max Holland believes that Soviet disinformation of this sort helped spark the most famous anti–Warren Commission event of the 1960s, later to be memorialized inaccurately in Oliver Stone’s movie
JFK
. New Or-leans’s flamboyant district attorney, Jim Garrison, held a show trial in 1969 to find President Kennedy’s real killers. Garrison charged a local businessman, Clay Shaw, with JFK’s murder, but in Garrison’s concoction, the murder conspiracy was much wider, taking in a good portion of the U.S. government, especially the CIA. Max Holland uncovered a 1967 article in an Italian newspaper,
Paese Sera
, that claimed Clay Shaw had served on the board of a dummy corporation in Rome (Centro Mondiale Commerciale, or CMC) that funneled cash to CIA operatives. The story was totally false, but Holland says that it helped convince Garrison that he was on to something big. Twenty years later, the same bogus story made it into Stone’s movie. During a scene in the district attorney’s office, Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) confronts Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) while holding a copy of the article:

GARRISON: Mr. Shaw, this is [an] Italian newspaper article saying that you were a member of the board of Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Italy—that this company was a creature of the CIA for the transfer of funds in Italy for illegal political espionage activity. [The article] says that this company was expelled from Italy for those activities.

SHAW: I’m well aware of that asinine article. I’m thinking very seriously of suing that rag of a newspaper …