Sam Papich

[John Simkin]

Sam Papich died last week. He was a FBI agent and in 1961 was investigating Sam Giancana. Papich was approached by CIA agents who were working with Giancana in the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. He told J. Edgar Hoover about what the CIA/Mafia plot. Papich was assigned the task of spying on the operation to kill Castro. Later he became the FBI's liaison officer with various divisions within the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1963 Papich was involved in the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. His main responsibility was coordinating CIA information for FBI agents investigating Lee Harvey Oswald.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKpapich.htm

[Shanet Clark]

John

Papich occupied a crucial role, and must have handled himself with unusual political tact to have lived so long.

As CIA liasson with the Hoover FBI investigating JFK's murder, he was structurally at the center of the political crisis of 1963-64.

Hoover was apparently furious that he had not been given more information about Oswald before the murder and he sacked seventeen senior officers in the aftermath. I have never felt that the Justice Department and FBI had prior knowledge of the intelligence and paramilitary agency actions involving Oswald and the murder of JFK.

Structurally Papich was at the center of the tense negotiations and series of coverups involving Hosty, Hunt, DeMorenschildt, Ruby, Oswald, Ferrie, Bannister and Mrs. Paine.

He was rewarded for his loyalty to the military agency corps by being named special advisor to the Joint Chiefs and by the VERY HIGH HONOR of being named to the PFAB, The President's Foreign Advisory Board, under Richard Nixon.

Cut and Paste Version of John Simkin's Spartacus text on Papich:

Sam Papich was born in 1914. He joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1941 and during the Second World War he did undercover work in South America.

In 1961 he was investigating Sam Giancana. Papich was approached by CIA agents who were working with Giancana in the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. He told J. Edgar Hoover about what the CIA/Mafia plot. Papich was assigned the task of spying on the operation to kill Castro. Later he became the FBI's liaison officer with various divisions within the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1963 Papich was involved in the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. His main responsibility was coordinating CIA information for FBI agents investigating Lee Harvey Oswald.

Papich retired from the FBI in 1970. Later he served on the President's Foreign Advisory Board and as a consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in an assessment of Soviet intelligence deception. In 1973 Papich became director of the Organized Crime Prevention Council.

Sam Papich died in Albuquerque on 22nd December, 2004.

Edited December 28, 2004 by Shanet Clark

[Tim Gratz]

Sam Papich died last week. He was a FBI agent and in 1961 was investigating Sam Giancana. Papich was approached by CIA agents who were working with Giancana in the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. He told J. Edgar Hoover about what the CIA/Mafia plot. Papich was assigned the task of spying on the operation to kill Castro. Later he became the FBI's liaison officer with various divisions within the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1963 Papich was involved in the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. His main responsibility was coordinating CIA information for FBI agents investigating Lee Harvey Oswald.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKpapich.htm

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Interesting that Papich died.

Does anyone have a photo of him?

I heard (read) the story a different way.

I read that after the McGuire Sisters appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in early October of 1960, Sam Giancana took the McGuire Sisters out to eat at his favorite Italian restaurant in Manhattan. Accompanying them was Robert Teeter, the husband of Dorothy McGuire. During the dinner, Giancana bragged that he was involved in a plot to kill Castro and that he expected Castro would be dead within thirty days. He did not mention the CIA sponsorship.

Teeter did not think it was a good idea for a mobster to be killing a foreign head of state so he went to the local FBI office to report Giancana's table talk. This was turned into a memo in which Teeter was only refered to as an "informant".

Papich delivered the memo to the CIA (either to Bissell or Edwards as I recall) on October 20, 1960 (the date is again from my memory of the reading).

It is my understanding that because the CIA became concerned about how much Giancana was talking it agreed to finance Maheu's bugging of Dan Rowan's hotel suite. THe bugging occured on October 31, 1960, but the detetective hired by Maheu botched the job and was caught. For a year and a half the FBI demanded to know from the CIA why Maheu should not be prosecuted for violating the federal wiretap statute. Finally, on May 7, 1962, CIA Inspector Laurence Houston and Sheffield Edwards met with RFK and informed him of the CIA/Mafia plots.

[James Richards]

If I remember correctly, didn't Angelton send Papich a memo around March of 1961 regarding the two guys (one calling himself Lee Oswald) from the Friends of Democratic Cuba who in January of the same year, tried to buy trucks from the Bolton Ford dealership?

If true, then Papich was well aware of the Oswald persona for over two and a half years before the assassination.

James

Edited December 29, 2004 by James Richards

[Shanet Clark]

So Angleton and Papich worked together on issues touching on Oswald and Cuban exilism.

Structurally he was a handler, a briefer and a front.

A go between. If there was a military defector from Atsugi into Moscow/Minsk, officers like Papich and Angleton must have known that the KGB must have known these were potential double agents.

Oswald's presence in the USSR and US and Atsugi and with organized crime Cuban exilists meant that US agencies of 1963 were responsible for him, either programming him or watching him because he may have been programmed in Minsk.

My point is that the joint intelligence programs were operating on domestic soil, under NSC-1947 and executive orders WITHOUT the knowledge or co-operation of the FBI and legitimate State and Local authorities.

The FBI and Hoover and the DAs under RFK were specifically circumvented,

under color of law, on domestic US terrain, for counter-intuitive and Cold War brinksmanship. Maheu and Papich used Roselli and Giancana and formed a CIA Cosa Nostra alliance, with greater WH western hemisphere interests (nelson rockefeller, united fruit co, the anti-arbenz front) inside the United States.

Papich unfortunately was a central agent in all this nefarious blind spying and domestic programs ab use of the late 1950s and early 1960's .

If I remember correctly, didn't Angelton send Papich a memo around March of 1961 regarding the two guys (one calling himself Lee Oswald) from the Friends of Democratic Cuba who in January of the same year, tried to buy trucks from the Bolton Ford dealership?

If true, then Papich was well aware of the Oswald persona for over two and a half years before the assassination.

James

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Edited December 29, 2004 by Shanet Clark

[Wim Dankbaar]

J – How long do you figure the government, CIA, FBI, as official agencies, has known about your participation in the JFK ….

JF- Well, I didn’t know it at the time, but I’ve learned and I’ve seen that, I’ve even been given the name of it, that the party that was the informant, and he was the tie-in between both the CIA and the FBI, and he was the one ...- and how he knew I was in Dealey Plaza, I don’t know – but he told the FBI that I was in Dealey Plaza and that I was one of the shooters.

J – When did that happen?

JF – He told them that as early as in 1964.

J – And nothing was done about it?

JF – I never even knew that anybody knew about it. Until I’ve seen some of the documents here, a couple of years back

[Stephen Roy]

Sam Papich died last week. He was a FBI agent and in 1961 was investigating Sam Giancana. Papich was approached by CIA agents who were working with Giancana in the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. He told J. Edgar Hoover about what the CIA/Mafia plot. Papich was assigned the task of spying on the operation to kill Castro. Later he became the FBI's liaison officer with various divisions within the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1963 Papich was involved in the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. His main responsibility was coordinating CIA information for FBI agents investigating Lee Harvey Oswald.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKpapich.htm

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Interesting that Papich died.

Does anyone have a photo of him?

Samuel J. Papich

[John Simkin]

Email from an anti-conspiracist journalist:

I note that you have highlighted Dick Russell’s book on your main page and so I wanted to pass on this tidbit. When i was interviewing Sam Papich, the FBI liaison officer to the CIA, about the FBI’s probe into the JFK assassination, several times he stopped the interview and referred me to that book. It was very strange, as if he was trying to tell me something. I’m not sure what, but he just kept saying it was an “interesting” account of events. Knowing Sam as I came to, I have been left with the impression that he regarded certain threads in that book has worthy of further exploration, but thought that journalists had not picked up on those threads.

He also mentioned in those interviews that the thing that bothered him most about the Warren report was that “this would have been very fancy shooting even for the best marksmen in the FBI. But everything we had on Oswald indicated that he was a crappy shot.”

You can use this information however you like, but please don’t attribute it to me....

[William Kelly]

Email from an anti-conspiracist journalist:

I note that you have highlighted Dick Russell’s book on your main page and so I wanted to pass on this tidbit. When i was interviewing Sam Papich, the FBI liaison officer to the CIA, about the FBI’s probe into the JFK assassination, several times he stopped the interview and referred me to that book. It was very strange, as if he was trying to tell me something. I’m not sure what, but he just kept saying it was an “interesting” account of events. Knowing Sam as I came to, I have been left with the impression that he regarded certain threads in that book has worthy of further exploration, but thought that journalists had not picked up on those threads.

He also mentioned in those interviews that the thing that bothered him most about the Warren report was that “this would have been very fancy shooting even for the best marksmen in the FBI. But everything we had on Oswald indicated that he was a crappy shot.”

You can use this information however you like, but please don’t attribute it to me....

Sam Papich

WIN #48-04 dtd 27 December 2004

Weekly Intelligence Notes (WINs) are commentaries on Intelligence and related national security matters, based on open media sources, selected, interpreted, edited and produced by AFIO for non-profit educational uses by AFIO members and WIN subscribers. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO RECEIVE THESE NOTICES....SEE REMOVAL INSTRUCTIONS AT BOTTOM

http://www.afio.org/sections/wins/2004/200....htmlObituaries

SAM PAPICH - An AFIO member and retired FBI Special Agent, he died peacefully, aged 90, on 22 December at his home in Albuquerque, NM, while taking a nap after a morning walk.

Papich was widely known and highly respected not only in the bureau but also in the CIA. For 20 of his 29 years with the bureau, he was a liaison officer with the agency. As such, he was often the referee in battles between the two bodies over which defectors from the Soviet Union were real and which were double agents. He sat at the table with bureau director J. Edgar Hoover and DCIs Allen Dulles and Richard Helms.

Forrest Putman, retired special agent in charge of the Albuquerque FBI office, said Papich was a legend. He countered Japanese and Nazi spies in South America during World War II, operating undercover, running spy networks and learning Portuguese. After the war, he served as the legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Brazil and supervised undercover operations in pre-CIA days.

In the early 1960s, the FBI was putting together a case against Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana and Papich was approached by CIA which was working with Giancana in the hopes of assassinating Fidel Castro. Hover ordered Papich to keep an eye on the CIA operation.

In 1963, Papich was involved in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination, coordinating CIA information for FBI agents investigating Lee Harvey Oswald. Papich was convinced Oswald acted on his own when he killed Kennedy.

After retiring from the FBI in 1970, Papich served on the staff of the President's Foreign Advisory Board and later as a consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a worldwide assessment of Soviet intelligence deception.

He was best known in New Mexico as a former director of the Governor's Organized Crime Prevention Commission.

Papich was born in Butte, MT, the son of a miner. He loved to garden, go fly fishing, and enjoy a good barbecue. Early in life he had been a professional football player. He was a lifetime fan of the Chicago Cubs.

Papich’s major concern in recent years was that terrorist threats would lead to domestic spying on Americans. "He was concerned with preserving constitutional rights in this new age," his son, Bill Papich, told the Albuquerque Journal.

Papich is survived by his son, his wife, Midge, and a daughter, Louise. (Joe E., DKR)