Joan Mellen

LaRRY, You are talking without sources. They're in my new book. Some are from diplomats, some from sailors who talked with Admiral William Inman Martin, and one of whom, Moe Shafer, I talked to at length, etc. My book has surprised people, perhaps, because no one has written about how the attack on the USS Liberty came to pass.

LaRRY, You are talking without sources. They're in my new book.

If anyone wants to email me, it's joanmellen@aol.com. The website is www.joanmellen.com

Larry, I'm surprised to see you pontificating about the planes sent off by the carriers America and Saratoga without having read my book which describes the four flights, two from the USS America and two from the Saratoga. Admiral William Inman Martin sent nuclear enhanced planes to Cairo from the USS America simultaneously with the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty. When they are only seven minutes from target (in Cairo) he was ordered to call them back. Three other sets of planes were sent in the direction of the USS Liberty. The first of these rescue planes were dispatched by Captain Tully of the Saratoga. Then Tully sent another set of planes simultaneously with planes sent by Captain Engen of the USS America. It's all in my book, "Blood in the Water" which was vetted by the chief intelligence officer of the Liberty and another survivor who later worked for CIA.

In my 2005 book "A Farewell to Justice" I outlined that Donald Bohning was CIA's media asset "AMCARBON-3. I had many more documents than you cited. I had also at least a half dozen interviews with a CIA contract pilot named E. Carl McNabb, who visited Bohning in Miami, and who described to me his interviews with Bohning, interviews described in the CIA documents about AMCARBON-3. When I interviewed Bohning in Miami at the cafeteria of the Miami Herald, he denied knowing what AMCARBON-3 meant. He did remark that he lunched once a week with CIA's Jake Esterline. Bohning had the same publisher I did, Potomac Books Inc. He contacted them, outraged at the AMCARBON-3 material, and so I sent a huge file to Potomac with the documents. I also sent my notes of my interview with him. I have a huge file drawer on McNabb, who came to my attention because as "Jim Rose" he did some investigations for the Garrison office. That was the end of that until he attacked me on the Internet. We are in the "who knows who is working for whom" department, to say the least. This is a time waster for you, in replying to all those charges. If you have the time, I'm sure you will be able to do so. Please bear in mind that Fabian Escalante is not a reliable source. I discovered this when I interviewed this past December one of the Cubans who would know. All that will be in my new book, called, for now, "The Texas Robber Barons And The CIA."

In my 2005 book "A Farewell to Justice" I outlined that Donald Bohning was CIA's media asset "AMCARBON-3. I had many more documents than you cited. I had also at least a half dozen interviews with a CIA contract pilot named E. Carl McNabb, who visited Bohning in Miami, and who described to me his interviews with Bohning, interviews described in the CIA documents about AMCARBON-3. When I interviewed Bohning in Miami at the cafeteria of the Miami Herald, he denied knowing what AMCARBON-3 meant. He did remark that he lunched once a week with CIA's Jake Esterline. Bohning had the same publisher I did, Potomac Books Inc. He contacted them, outraged at the AMCARBON-3 material, and so I sent a huge file to Potomac with the documents. I also sent my notes of my interview with him. I have a huge file drawer on McNabb, who came to my attention because as "Jim Rose" he did some investigations for the Garrison office. That was the end of that until he attacked me on the Internet. We are in the "who knows who is working for whom" department, to say the least. This is a time waster for you, in replying to all those charges. If you have the time, I'm sure you will be able to do so. Please bear in mind that Fabian Escalante is not a reliable source. I discovered this when I interviewed this past December one of the Cubans who would know. All that will be in my new book, called, for now, "The Texas Robber Barons And The CIA."

Dear Nathaniel Heidenheimer, I appreciate the time you are taking on this topic. E-mail has its limitations, and there are a few misconceptions that I'll try to clear up. Let me say, first, that you use the term "motivation" several times. This is troubling, when it comes to a given individual, as in the case of Sam Halpern. In the case of CIA, I devote an entire chapter to chronicling CIA's political motivation to thwart President Kennedy at every turn, and his motivation, in turn, to reign them in. All that can be documented. Personal motivations, as in the case of Halpern, are impossible to penetrate unless the speaker helps us out, and why, indeed, should he! Let me say, again, with respect to "Taking Aim," that had I "world enough and time" I would have given a lengthy discussion of the attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and the CIA would be at the top of the list of perpetrators. I, perhaps mistakenly, didn't believe that I had to reinvent the wheel during my few minutes on the recent "Taking Aim" program. Since the 1967 Inspector General's Report, and the huge JMWAVE releases, the witness testimony, etc. I can't even begin to recite the litany of evidence of murder plots by the CIA this morning. I'm sure you're aware of it, so the point is a bit disingenuous. We know that the CIA was in the murder business, the Executive Action business. This is received wisdom. I perhaps should have nodded to that fact. For "young" listeners, I would hope that they would read "A Farewell to Justice" for my views and many other books as well, such as Gaeton Fonzi's. It's not a good idea to get your information from radio programs, which offer but a glimpse of the issues. We expected nothing more of the CIA given their record of assassinations and assassination attempts. We did expect more of the Kennedys, who presented themselves as peace-loving liberals. That THEY were also engaged in attempts to murder Fidel Castro is breathtaking, and of a different order of information than the CIA doing what had become its nature to do. I know I'm repeating myself, but if it were merely Halpern as the source, I would be suspicious too. But there is a considerable list of corroborators of Bobby's assassination schemes.The rule in journalism is that you need two. We've got three times that. Yes, Bobby was involved, from his office at Langley, in CIA organized plots as well as the plots on his own. CIA's efforts weren't mere "monitoring" of obstreperous exiles, as we know. That CIA was carrying on without telling the Kennedy administration is true, as you say. This still does not justify Bobby free-lancing with Lansdale and others. I don't know what you mean by "exiles on the outs," and I don't want to venture where I don't know: exiles on the outs with CIA were the people involved in the Kennedy assassination? Does this mean that CIA is not responsible? This takes us away from the matter at hand. Charles Ford, like the Kennedys, had his fingers in more than one pie, as the released documents show. He had that assignment from Bobby, out of Langley. He also was a CIA operative, as we know. (I didn't get the reference to Strunk and White, sorry). There is no doubt that the CIA ran its own show, and didn't inform the Kennedys of many things. That's in "A Farewell To Justice," and many other places, particularly in the biographies of John F. Kennedy. That's not new. (I am not including "The Dark Side Of Camelot" in any of this: the implication that JFK's policy-making was influenced by his infidelities is preposterous, and unproven). I might flag your use of the word "objective" along with your use of the word "motivation." This is not aesthetics. No one is "objective" here. Everyone is acting out of their own interests. This bears no relation on what is true and what isn't true. Yes, Charlie Ford testified that he didn't do anything naughty. What's useful in the Church committee records, which are filled with such denials as Ford's, is when the truth rears its head, as when Helms admits that he made up the story that Jim Garrison met Johnny Rosselli when he was in Las Vegas. Astonishing admission! But then, the Church committee had Rosselli testify and Rosselli made his own denial that he ever met Garrison. If you read the Rosselli transcript, it's clear he is dumbfounded. He never met Garrison in his life. He saw him on television. Reading that, I believed Rosselli. What did he care about Garrison anyway! But Helms sure did. I did not use Charles Ford's testimony in my "Taking Aim" interview. I used Halpern's oral history for the CIA. Are you referring to my 2005 program or to the recent one? On the 2005 program, did I discuss all this Ford/Fiscalini Castro issue? I can't remember. All along I thought you were referring to the recent "family jewel" program, and then I was not on for anything like the full hour. Bobby seems to have spent much of his time at Langley, which may account for the ease with which Hoover ran roughshod, etc. But it was, of course, Ramsey Clark that the FBI really ran roughshod over. Hoover had those files on the Kennedys, of course, and blackmail was his game, as we all know. I did not write that the CIA "decided to help assassinate Kennedy." Nor did I ever say anything about "a neutralist South Vietnam." That was never, ever in the cards. The Vietnamese were going for broke. These are indeed, inaccurate statements. What I wrote in "A Farewell to Justice" was that the clandestine service of the CIA organized the assassination of President Kennedy, and I have paid for taking that stand. What the Kennedys hoped for, a "Laotian solution" in Vietnam, would, of course, never have happened. It's what Bobby Kennedy said his brother DESIRED, not what would have come to pass, in my opinion. Vietnamese history tells that story. They had already beat back the Chinese, the Japanese and the French. There would never have been an investigation by RFK "with deeply compromised investigative agencies." That's a straw man you erect. Bobby knew better than that. Again, I am not getting into the CIA assassination plots that RFK may or may not have known about. I was confining my discussion to RFK's own private efforts. The why and the wherefore, I didn't discuss. The Kennedys were neither peace-seekers (!) nor hawks. They were pragmatic politicians. As one of the books (Kaiser's or another) quotes Kennedy intimate, Charlie Bartlett, their main concern was getting JFK re-elected in 1964. This was the continuing preoccupation and obsession. Given what was going on in the world, Bartlett was taken aback. Of course, politicians worrying about being re-elected is not a crime. This is what is to be expected of politicians. We are talking about politicians here, not saints, radicals, or even social reformers. Look at Chris Dodd here yesterday saying that the Democrats shouldn't devote themselves to impeaching George Bush, since this effort would hurt their chances for re-election. So politicians play their game. Obviously the Kennedys had no idea of the depth of opposition to them. I love Ted Sorensen's speeches, as I said in my last post, but rhetoric is not evidence. Regarding Bobby's last speeches, and his campaign, the approval he received from crowds was related to the need in this society for change, not, in any provable way, to what he would have done. I don't know what he would have done. This is not a fruitful question, it seems to me. You close with more of those comparisons I find odious. No one at the time, those who lived this history, confused Bobby Kennedy with Martin Luther King in terms of addressing the needs of the poor and the disenfranchised. Bobby can't ride those coattails, if you have an interest in history. And I have to say, this all seems like a fairy-tale to me, this glorification of Bobby Kennedy as someone people today believe would have marshaled social change in a meaningful way. I can imagine that those, now dead, who knew what Bobby was about because they were close to these events would be absolutely astonished. I really dislike being personal, but let me add that among my very closest friends for years was a Harvard classmate of John F. Kennedy's and a good friend of his (Kennedy appointed him to be Ambassador to Morocco, but he turned it down), and who later became Eugene McCarthy's campaign manager. He had a storehouse of evidence about Bobby's antics and tricks. He respected "Jack," but, like virtually every liberal of the day, despised "Bobby." Alas, he died some years ago, or I would have asked him to chat with you.

Thank you for your very kind reply. I appreciate it very much. I'm devoted to history, as best as I can be. I cannot comment on the spiritual transformation of politicians, not least when they are running for high office. No matter what the facts reveal, I am discovering, the Kennedys are protected by some people from scrutiny of their actions. To this religious sentiment, I don't know what to say. Regarding the Laotian solution, I was quoting Bobby Kennedy's own comments to Daniel Ellsberg. The Laotian solution created great suffering for many. Fine talk about the children of Appalachia didn't impress me in 1968 and it doesn't now, knowing what everyone knew about Bobby Kennedy at the time. For our situation today, I do not find anything in Bobby Kennedy's history that doesn't make things worse for us. I take much more seriously than you do the condoning of obstruction of justice from an Attorney General. How can we criticize the current occupant of that office and at the same time praise someone who violated the law repeatedly? The past does comment on the present, and lives among us. Please don't write that I am "mean" to Bobby Kennedy. This is really a last resort of, I don't know what. Bobby Kennedy is as accountable to history and to the public as much as any other politician. I often quote that line by Brecht, and you compel me to echo it again: Pity the land that needs a hero. I was as horrified by the assassinations as everyone else, and there were four in rapid succession. Today it seems more productive to focus on policy, and actions, and deeds, rather than on rhetoric, hopes, or religious fervor. Reading your email, I find the discussion seems to face a dead end. I am reminded of a recent appearance by Norman Mailer on Book tv. Mailer was asked why he believes people are still interested in John F. Kennedy. "He looked like a ski instructor," Mailer said, throwing up his hands. This is glib, this may seem insensitive, but worshipping at the shrine of politicians is probably not a good idea except in a religious context.

I believe Bobby Kennedy feared that his own ambition to become President would be thwarted if he demanded an investigation of his brother's death. Jim Garrison noted the irony, and with tongue in cheek, said, as I mention in "A Farewell To Justice," if it were my brother, I would want to know what happened to him. No one in the country was in a better position than Bobby to demand that justice be afforded his brother, yet he stood back and endorsed the fraud that was the Warren Commission. The opportunity to expose the truth was lost. I doubt whether Bobby would have conducted an open investigation of his brother's death even if he became President. Openness was not his approach, as witness all those illegal surveillances he sponsored. I did not know that Bobby thought he could persuade Ted Sorensen to head the CIA. Certainly Sorensen has the temperament for it, and as an international lawyer has been involved in policy making enterprises. Yet Sorensen enjoyed writing best, and once gave a seminar on how to write clearly and well to the lawyers at Paul,Weiss because lawyers, notoriously write so poorly. He put up the words "Fresh Fish Sold Here," then chipped away at the redundancies until the storekeeper was left with a sign that read, simply, "Fish." Those responsible for the death of President Kennedy did not want to take the chance of his brother becoming President. Bobby's modus operandi was always to settle scores: look at how he got back at Kenneth Keating, who was the recipient of CIA intelligence about Soviet missiles in Cuba before CIA reported its findings to the President himself! As President, Bobby could have taken revenge ("don't get mad, get even") at those who killed his brother, secretly and viciously. The rule of law was no priority for this particular Attorney General. Bobby might also have transferred the ground war in Vietnam to a Laos-like solution, with death squads roaming the countryside to get rid of radicals. We know this because Bobby revealed it to Daniel Ellsberg in an interview reported in Ellsberg's memoir. Bobby states that a Laos-like solution is what he believed his brother would have done, re: Vietnam, had he lived. Yet the ground war was indeed what the military-industrial complex wanted and needed. So in a way Bobby was assassinated for the same reason his brother was. That Bobby Kennedy would suddenly have sponsored an open investigation of his brother's death is inconceivable to me. That, according to reports, he planned to put Walter Sheridan at the helm of such an investigation, certainly demonstrates that any such effort would have been secret, illegal, and guilty of all manner of obstruction of justice. The historical record of how Sheridan approached his assignments from Bobby speaks for itself.

So we were comrades! I also am grateful for the nod to Halpern, who of course was telling the truth in that oral history: he was absolutely dumbfounded at the contradiction between RFK after the Mafia and enlisting them. On why JFK didn't support a ground war in Vietnam, I believe we have to look to the politics and economics of the Eastern establishment, of which JFK was a part. They were as nervous about the deficit and its impact on the economy as Zbigniew Brzezinski is today, why HE opposes the Iraq war, an unlikely comrade-in- arms for anti-war people indeed. But Brzezinski's strong statements against the Iraq war teach us something about JFK and the ground war in Vietnam.

Thank you very much for reading “A Farewell To Justice,” for listening to “Taking Aim,” and for sending along your questions. I appreciate it very much. I hope I can reply to these questions to your satisfaction. I remain the same person who wrote “A Farewell to Justice,” the person who placed responsibility for the assassination of President Kennedy at the door of the clandestine service and Richard Helms, along with close associates like Lawrence Houston, David Atlee Phillips and others. I don’t know who else has drawn that conclusion, but I did, and I stand by it. So I must not have made myself clear if you concluded that I was defending Helms for anything. What worse can be said of a person than that he was behind the planning of the murder of the head of state? I don’t remember the text of the “family jewel” to which you refer regarding the conversation between Kissinger and Nixon. Certainly I agree that Helms, chastised for perjury in a court of law, could never be believed unless there was massive corroborating evidence from other sources. Ramsey Clark was not directly involved in the CIA’s penetration of Jim Garrison’s office. Ramsey Clark, in fact, was left out of the loop, and briefed by the FBI so that he would state publicly what the Bureau wanted him to say. This is what he did. On the day that Clark enraged Hoover by saying that Clay Shaw had been “cleared,” Clark had just been briefed (that very morning) by Cartha DeLoach. Clark was repeating verbatim what DeLoach told him. Clark certainly functioned as a tool of the FBI and the cover-up in his calling of that group of doctors to rubber stamp the Warren Report (at the time of the Garrison investigation). Of course I don’t believe the official autopsy findings. I didn’t rely on my non-existent medical knowledge, however. I interviewed Dr. McClelland, and that interview is discussed in “A Farewell To Justice.” When I interviewed Clark at his office, he repeated the line he had been given by the FBI, that Jim Garrison had persecuted and prosecuted Clay Shaw because Shaw was gay.Clark mumbled this line, as if he no longer believed it, but it was what he still allowed himself to believe. This was not noble, no. There are no saints, and no heroes in this story, although some might even argue that Jim Garrison, in his commitment to his investigation, deserves high praise, no matter that he made inevitable mistakes. I was very amused by the person on the Forum who said, so you’re saying Jim Garrison was John F. Kennedy’s real brother? Garrison came to believe that it was his desire to be President that prevented Bobby from an open inquiry into his brother’s death. Garrison also said often that if only Bobby had gone public with what he knew about his brother’s death, his own life might have been spared. But that’s another subject. In general, of course, telling what you know is the best way to ensure yourself some measure of safety. Needless to say, I challenged the nonsense Clark repeated about Garrison going after Shaw out of some anti-homosexual sentiment. Clark has become a credible citizen, and a principled person, whether or not we might always agree with the causes he chooses. I believe that we are different people at different stages of our lives. The Ramsey Clark of today is not the man manipulated by Hoover and DeLoach. Clark was clearly uncomfortable with remembering those times, I am certain of that. He did tell me that he was appalled by Walter Yeagley and his unilateral, devious and suspicious approach to these issues: that might be a lead worth following up on. Shakespeare said that “comparisons are odious.” I don’t believe anything constructive can be gained by arguing about who is worse than whom. Sheridan was a criminal and a thug. Clark was a tool of the FBI, the tail, indeed, wagging the dog. Recall that he was still an acting Attorney General on that day that he said Shaw had been cleared. Helms was the planner of the deed. Each character should be discussed separately. That the CIA and FBI penetrated the Garrison investigation does not justify and excuse Walter Sheridan’s outrageous and illegal behavior first in Tennessee and then in New Orleans. Question number three lumps together Clark, the FBI and the CIA as if these were identical. I am uncomfortable with that approach. You also seem to conflate the FBI and the Justice Department. You need to add the fact that Hoover ran roughshod over the Justice Department. Regis Kennedy did testify before the Orleans Parish grand jury. He did not receive any immunity and was censored by his superiors for his honesty. The FBI did help Bernardo de Torres when he was called to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The CIA followed suit, of course. I am not sure to whom you refer by talking about “presidential immunity from testimony for key personnel in New Orleans.” Do you mean before the Warren Commission? The Orleans Parish grand jury? My book describes every example I knew of the penetration of Garrison’s office from William Martin to Pershing Gervais to Bill Boxley (alas, I had to cut a long chapter on Boxley because of space considerations). I left nothing out. On the radio, the subject was Bobby Kennedy and his role in, to use Garrison’s term, “torpedoing” the New Orleans investigation. I had no time to go over the entire penetration of Garrison’s office, but that’s all in the book. I worked very hard to get people to remember that list of CIA operatives sent to destroy Garrison, since the CIA did not permit the HSCA investigators to photocopy the document they read. It’s all in my book. You are quite correct that Garrison was doomed to fail given the sabotage of his office by all these people. It did not help, however, to have Bobby Kennedy sending Sheridan to New Orleans to “discredit,” “destroy,” and scuttle Garrison’s investigation, and Sheridan’s illegalities are not justified because other agencies were down there doing their worst. All these people are culpable. Garrison tried hard to conduct a real investigation despite all the obstacles. I don’t understand what you mean by a “real” investigation. Certainly the CIA, responsible for the crime, would not permit any honest government investigation. Please look again at the pages in “A Farewell to Justice” that describe how Mr. Blakey consulted with the CIA at every turn; the CIA commented on the questions asked during the depositions and edited every word of the report. I believe I cited many of these documents in “A Farewell To Justice.” I don’t see the logic of why the fox can’t investigate his own ravages of the henhouse as an excuse for Bobby Kennedy’s shameful attack on Garrison. In any case, what we know is what Bobby did. We don’t know what he would have done, could have done, had only done, etc. Based on my research, I don’t believe Bobby was waiting for the “right moment” to conduct a “real investigation,” as you seem to imply, if I read your comment accurately. The notion that he would have placed Walter Sheridan at the head of that investigation speaks for itself. I don’t believe that Bobby Kennedy is exonerated for his obsession with wiretapping (illegal) or his plots against Castro because of the perfidy of Helms, Angleton and others. I admit to holding Bobby Kennedy to a different standard because he professed to be different, as did the President. The Kennedys represented themselves as holding to liberal ideals. To add a personal note, I am a very old person, and so I remember John F. Kennedy’s campaign promises, as well as what happened after he was elected. In those times so long ago, a very big issue was desegregation of federal housing. It was a major campaign promise of the Kennedy campaign that as soon as he was elected, if he was, he would at once desegregate federally sponsored housing. Then it didn’t happen. At that moment, I stopped believing in the Kennedys. It was that important an issue. The assassination of Diem was another important moment. Years later, I met Ted Sorensen at a dinner party and told him about my disillusionment with respect to the desegration of federal housing, which would have been so easy. After dinner, Sorensen followed me into the living room where coffee was served and said: “He was going to.” Perhaps, and I believed him. When I was young and idealistic myself, “going to” was not an option. There are certain buzz words that point to the vilification of Jim Garrison. One is the false accusation, made I believe by Peter Dale Scott, that Jim Garrison gave Carlos Marcello a pass, and ignored his crimes. Anyone who resurrects that tired and inaccurate statement is vilifying Garrison, discrediting him once again and in a shameful manner. So calling Jim Garrison a “flawed hero” in the wake of repeating that lie about Marcello is truly damning with faint praise. I see no nuance here. To equate Ramsey Clark with Richard Helms is simply ahistorical and inaccurate. Clark certainly was no “hero” in the matter of the Garrison investigation, but he didn’t murder anyone either. I don’t find it appropriate to talk about Ramsey Clark and Helms in the same breath. Now we come to the matter of Halpern. I assume that you’ve read his oral history for the CIA, which cites many witnesses to Bobby Kennedy’s enlistment of CIA help to find Mafia helpers to assassinate Castro. Reading Halpern’s words, you can perceive his obvious perplexity at this contradiction: How could Bobby Kennedy, whose goal was to put away Mafia thugs attempt also enlist Mafia hitmen to plot against Castro’s life. The tone of that interview speaks volumes, and, yes, I believed Halpern’s evidence. Halpern, in addition to other details, points to a meeting of the Special Group Augmented where Edward Lansdale pretty much admitted to what he and RFK were up to regarding the murder of certain “leaders.” This does not make Halpern a saint. This does not mean that he was not Helm’s right hand man. I am uncomfortable, on the other hand, with the claim that Halpern was lying simply because his evidence undermines the project of reinventing Bobby Kennedy. The circumstances of that interview, an older Halpern looking back, also should be taken into account. I also believed Halpern because I found so much corroborating evidence. Ramsey Clark spoke to me about how astonished he was to find those plans in his desk sent by Lansdale to Bobby Kennedy with respect to assassination plots against Fidel Castro. F. Lee Bailey spoke to me with amazement too about that meeting at the Oval Office, attended by both Kennedy brothers, where an attempt on Castro’s life was discussed and organized. Angelo Murgado, who to this day admires Bobby Kennedy and speaks of him only with affection, spoke of Bobby Kennedy’s desire to eliminate Castro. There is more. I’m unclear about whose ego is involved. I am not an expert on the taping of Martin Luther King. I do know that Bobby Kennedy endorsed illegal surveillances. Please examine the Courtney Evans documents at the LBJ library. The Otepka case shows RFK’s endorsement of wiretapping writ large. The Hoffa case reveals the same thing. That Hoover was involved in illegal surveillance, which of course is well-known, does not justify Bobby Kennedy’s doing it. I, again, cannot understand that logic. I don’t want to play the game of who was “worse.” Both contributed to the Democratic Party today not being able to reject the present administrations NSA illegal surveillance program. All of them are to blame. My problem is with the suggestion that the Bobby Kennedy was someone to be admired, that he set an example that is valuable as we attempt to prevent the further assault on the Constitution by the present government. Please allow me to add that to preserve this democracy we have to be very careful about following the logic that the end justifies the means. I believe in the U.S. Constitution, and so would rather have a guilty Hoffa free than our right to due process be undermined. I do not justify anything Hoover did. Again, that radio program was about Bobby Kennedy, whose actions are not justified by Hoover’s crimes. To add another small personal note: I was an adult was Robert Kennedy ran for President, and a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War. I was not one of those goody two-shoes, as we called them, who put their faith in Eugene McCarthy as likely to get us out of Vietnam. Allow me to assure you that of those who were committed and fighting to end that war, no one I knew or every heard of, supported Bobby Kennedy. Rather, we were appalled that Bobby, noticing that McCarthy had done well in New Hampshire, suddenly entered the race for the Presidency. Liberal people of that day found Bobby Kennedy’s name synonymous with the adjective “ruthless.” There was cause. Regarding what is going on today: poor President Kennedy would have loved to be able to do to the CIA what the George W. Bush has done, subject them to his control. This leads us to another important issue, and one we should all ponder: On whose behalf did the CIA undertake the murder of President Kennedy? Did they do it for themselves, or because they represented other interests? Why did Bush establish a Director of National Intelligence? Might he not have had in mind taming the CIA, which, I believe we would agree, had run a shadow government making policy for so long? And for the “Taking Aim” audience, I didn’t think it was necessary to discuss the CIA’s history of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, although, of course, you’re certainly correct that they did make those attempts. I hope this responds to your questions.

In the interest of "full disclosure," Mr. Talbot had a "duty" to report to readers that I described Don Bohning's designation as AMCARBON-3; his relationship with the CIA; and his reporting to the CIA on the Garrison investigation in "A Farewell to Justice," published in 2005. Credible scholars (as distinct from plagiarists) acknowledge information that has already been reported by others. I know for a fact that a mutual acquaintance pointed out to Mr. Talbot that I discussed Bohning and the CIA in my book. It is amusing to me to make common cause with Don Bohning, whose work leaves something to be desired. But Mr. Talbot's complaints seem to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

In the interest of "full disclosure," Mr. Talbot had a "duty" to report to readers that I described Don Bohning's designation as AMCARBON-3; his relationship with the CIA; and his reporting to the CIA on the Garrison investigation in "A Farewell to Justice," published in 2005. Credible scholars (as distinct from plagiarists) acknowledge information that has already been reported by others. I know for a fact that a mutual acquaintance pointed out to Mr. Talbot that I discussed Bohning and the CIA in my book. It is amusing to me to make common cause with Don Bohning, whose work leaves something to be desired. But Mr. Talbot's complaints seem to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

What is the point of looking back at Bobby Kennedy, and searching for the truth of what he stood for and how he behaved? There is, of course, the obvious value in discovering the truth of history no matter where it leads. But in my mind is also the danger that just as there is a tendency to look at the Kennedys with rose-colored glasses firmly in place, and to look backward with nostalgia to what never was, so today there may be the impulse to look to the Democratic Party for a meaningful alternative to Bush and Cheney. In accepting the facts about the Kennedys, we sharpen our analytic approach to similar false alternatives in the present.

Letter to Time Magazine (unpublished): I applaud TIME magazine's courage in re-examining the issue of the murder of President John F. Kennedy (July 2). It has long been overdue that the mainstream media reconsider this unresolved, horrendous crime. As the author of "A Farewell to Justice" (2005), a work that examines whether there was a government conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy, however, I was taken aback by the appearance of the disingenuous, fictional essay by David Talbot, which is guilty of its own concealment and obscuring of well-established evidence. Far from the facts demonstrating that Bobby Kennedy planned to re-open the issue of his brother's death, my research revealed to me that Robert F. Kennedy declared in public appearances from 1964 to the year of his death, 1968, that he believed that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone and was guilty. Bobby did everything in his power to prevent any investigation of his brother's death, and that included making X-rays and autopsy photographs available to official investigators. Research has revealed his purpose: Bobby remained silent because he had something dark to hide. This underlies why no member of the Kennedy family, and no associates of the President, not the late Arthur Schlesinger, not Theodore Sorensen, not Richard Goodwin, or many others, including the next generation of Kennedys, would even discuss the issue for forty years and more. A White House Memorandum declassified as one of the CIA's "Family Jewels," and available at George Washington University's National Security Archive, discloses a conversation in which President Gerald Ford was told by his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, how Richard Helms had confirmed for him that "Robert Kennedy managed personally the operation on the assassination of Castro." Helms revealed only half of the truth. The CIA was engaged in separate plots against Castro, working on its own. Bobby, who had enlisted free-wheeling General Edward Lansdale, fresh from Vietnam, sought with his own recruits to organize a different set of plots designed to do away with Castro. A roaming Attorney General, Bobby had an office at CIA headquarters at Langley, running his Cuban operations, even as CIA officers like Helms, as Helms later revealed, somewhat gleefully, concealed from him their own activities. In his 1998 oral history for the CIA, available at the National Archives, CIA officer Sam Halpern confirmed that Bobby Kennedy had developed his own plans for the murder of Castro. Halpern recounts his discovery that Bobby sent a CIA operative named Charlie Ford, alias Rocky Fiscalini, to Canada to recruit Mafia assassins for the purpose. Halpern was astonished, given Bobby's much-publicized efforts to battle the Mafia, but he checked out his information, and it was so. Ramsey Clark confirmed for me that he personally had seen memos Lansdale prepared at Bobby's suggestion elucidating methods by which Castro could be dispatched. Like Halpern, with whom he had little in common politically, Clark was flabergasted. (Lansdale was not discreet about what he was up to either: at a meeting of President Kennedy's "Special Group - Augmented" in August 1962 he talked about the "elimination of leaders"). I discuss in "A Farewell to Justice" another example of Kennedy plots to murder Castro. This one was recounted to me by F. Lee Bailey, who has first hand knowledge of both Kennedy brothers being present in the Oval Office as Office of Naval Intelligence operative Guy Johnson introduced to them a Navy commander the Kennedys then enlisted to recruit a sniper to enter Cuba for the purpose of assassinating Fidel Castro. As for Walter Sheridan, the man Bobby would supposedly ask to investigate his brother's death, as soon - in breathtaking hubris - as Bobby became president, Sheridan was the mastermind of Bobby's "Get Hoffa" squad. He wire tapped conversations between Hoffa and his lawyer. He defied the law by paying such witnesses as Edward Grady Partin, who admitted on the stand that he was being paid, angrily pointing out that they still owed him money! Sheridan blackmailed and bribed others and so obstructed justice that when the Hoffa conviction came for review before the U.S. Supreme Court, an appalled Chief Justice Earl Warren voted to throw it out. Better that a guilty man go free, if he is guilty, than that the principle of due process be eviscerated. Maybe the argument that the ends justify the means worked in Joseph Stalin's Russia, but it does not in a democratic society. The obsession with illegal wire tapping by Kennedy and Sheridan was legendary. As we oppose George W. Bush's insistence upon National Security Agency illegal domestic surveillance of citizens, it is well to come unburdened by sacred cows from the past. An earlier example of how Bobby and the man Mr. Talbot calls, affectionately, "Walt," played fast and loose with the system of justice had Walter Sheridan assist Bobby in arranging that Otto Otepka, a high level officer in the State Department Office of Security, be removed from his post. The reason, I was able to establish, was that Mr. Otepka was about to investigate a list of defectors to the Soviet Union that included - Lee Harvey Oswald, "tourist." Bobby Kennedy concealed a history of protecting Oswald and seeing that he was not investigated, not in Dallas in April 1963 when shots were fired at General Walker, and not later. In 1967, Bobby Kennedy, now a U.S. Senator, dispatched Sheridan to New Orleans, for the purpose of ensuring that Bobby's plots to assassinate Fidel Castro would never emerge during the Garrison investigation. Bobby's "trusted aide," (Sheridan's actual title was "confidential assistant"), admitted openly that he was sent to New Orleans to "discredit" and "destroy" Garrison. He acknowledged to people in New Orleans whom he enlisted to help him that it was Bobby who sent him. Sheridan went on to attempt to bribe and blackmail Garrison witnesses. Garrison indicted him, only for Sheridan to flee the jurisdiction. Higher authority protected him. I established that Bobby Kennedy knew about Oswald, that Oswald's anti-Castro activities were known to Bobby months before the assassination of his brother, and that Oswald was even among those anti-Castro activists Bobby's people were attempting to enlist in assassination schemes against Castro. It is this fact that Bobby was trying desperately to conceal; this was why he did not, as Attorney General or as a United States Senator, act to investigate publicly the death of his brother. He had too much to hide, and his presidential ambitions were at stake. Do you think "any of our people were involved?" Bobby demanded of his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz immediately after the assassination of his brother. Obviously he meant Oswald. Mankiewicz told me he had thought then: "Did you think there might be?" Mr. Talbot would do well to withdraw the applications for sainthood he files for both Robert Kennedy and Walter Sheridan and reconsider his highly specious thesis. As a biographer, I am well aware of the temptation to hagiography, glorifying one's subject. A re-examination of those terrible times, however, is too important to the Republic at this perilous moment. Another cover-up is not what we need.

Just as the evidence is overwhelming that Bobby Kennedy sent Walter Sheridan down to New Orleans to discredit Jim Garrison and with his "White Paper" destroy the Garrison investigation into the murder of President Kennedy, so the documents are no less strong that Bobby enlisted Edward Lansdale in his plots against Castro. Sheridan NEVER acted on his own; Lansdale revealed Bobby's plots behind his back to J. Edgar Hoover. There is no possible truth to the defensive explanation that Lansdale was acting on his own....I realize that Bobby's application for sainthood must be protected at all cost...but this is absurd. Ramsey Clark never told me that Bobby had authored the document: what he told me was that he found documentation of mutual plots between Lansdale and Bobby. It comes to the same thing.... The truth will out, one hopes.

Thank you very much for your reply. It is true that members of the John Birch Society made financial contributions to Otto Otepka's defense fund. He could not have afforded to hire an attorney for his hearing were contributions not made from a variety of quarters. He told me emphatically that he was not a "Birchite" and he did not share their views. Let me add that were you to read "A Farewell To Justice," you might discern that my own views are as far from conservative as they could possibly be. Yet Mr. Otepka, as shrewd an assessor of someone's politics as you might imagine, was willing to share his experience and his files with me. Apparently, he does not judge people on an ideological basis. Nor do I. I assessed him to be an honest man, a category that cuts across narrow partisan lines. I would not have been able to interview John Rarick as a Clinton witness had I rejected him on political grounds, or had he rejected me for the same reason. Compare Mr. Otepka's open approach to an author with the refusal of Walter Sheridan's family to allow me to study the Sheridan papers. I filled out a form and applied (!), only to be turned down.

Ramsey Clark's surprise at finding those documents outlining RFK's plans with Edward Lansdale to assassinate Fidel Castro was genuine. Given that other evidence; the letters of Lansdale; the minutes of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; and yes, the shock evinced by Sam Halpern when he discovered the same thing, suggests that Clark was not lying. Why would he lie about such a thing anyway? If you had been present with me at his office, you would have seen that Clark presented this fact to me, not as prepared disinformation, thinking I was looking for evidence against Bobby Kennedy, but as something that occurred that had shocked him. Nor was Bobby Kennedy the subject of our discussion; Jim Garrison and Clay Shaw were our focus. Clark was very frank about how he had told the press that Shaw had been "cleared" after having been briefed that morning by Cartha DeLoach. A good research topic might be to explore how John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby were very different in their approaches to government, justice and the law. As I attempt to share with the forum people what my research uncovered, it occurs to me that Bobby's methods were not those of his brother, an idea I had never formulated, but which makes sense to me now. Bobby resembled the Dad more than his brother, Jack. And I'm writing not to "crucify" Bobby (he did that for himself), and the word of course suggests, again!, that he is to be spoken of in religious terms, but to study, beyond partisanship, what the Kennedy administration stood for, and what it accomplished. Bobby's attempt to destroy Garrison's work was shameful, and so extreme, that he must have had a good and highly personal reason to send his attack dog down to New Orleans to do his worst. The White Paper that Sheridan produced, a shoddy job as critics at the time noted, had been planned as the vehicle through which Sheridan would destroy Garrison's case. He had only to get as many Garrison witnesses as he could to come on television and repudiate Garrison. Many would not. I'd appreciate hearing some views on whether the Hoffa conviction should have been overturned, given the illegal means by which it was obtained, and whether, indeed, the end justifies the means.

I don't believe I see Garrison through rose-colored glasses. Unlike Garrison in his memoir, I discuss the false charging of Edgar Eugene Bradley, for example. I discuss Garrison's falling for the nonsense of "Farewell, America." Yes, compared with the forces arrayed against Garrison, he a small town prosecutor in state court, the adversary ranging from Richard Helms to Robert Kennedy, I judge that he should be respected for the effort he made. It's about time. Let me repeat, that Garrison knew full well that Sheridan had come down there to destroy him...Sheridan revealed that to practically everyone he met! Garrison remained perplexed. Why, why wouldn't Bobby Kennedy help him! The sources for Robert Kennedy's plots against Fidel Castro I've listed in a previous message. Ramsey Clark told me he found memos of these efforts in his desk (they had survived the Katzenbach years) when he became Attorney General. Now, if it is convenient for you to call everyone who offers a less than favorable view of the Kennedys a xxxx, you are free to do that under the first amendment. The same holds true for Sam Halpern. The CIA did not like the Kennedys (I have a whole chapter on that in "A FArewell to Justice."). But anyone who reads that oral history where Halpern is dumbfounded by the contradictory policy, the Kennedys making friends with Castro, and Bobby using Ford/Fiscalini to round up some Mafia in Canada to murder Fidel Castro, cannot in good conscience say that he is lying. Halpern simply can't believe what the evidence revealed to him, he is so surprised! I am not interested in what Sy Hersh made of that, or whether he "hated" the Kennedys. Halpern was not lying! I regret to say that I am old enough to remember Bobby Kennedy and the opinion the overwhelming majority of the liberal community had of him, to the end. A very close friend of mine was a friend of John F. Kennedy's, and a Harvard classmate. (He is interviewed in many of the biographies of President Kennedy). He liked "Jack" and Kennedy appointed him to be Ambassador to Morocco, a position he ultimately rejected, on the (bad) advice of David K. E. Bruce. My friend, along with his friends, thought Bobby was ruthless (the cliche that was true) and untrustworthy, and this was before my friend became campaign manager for Eugene McCarthy. The year, yes, was 1968. The issues here are bigger than "liked" and "hated" and someone's "corrupt opinions." Are Halpern's views corrupt because someone who needs to sanctify Bobby Kennedy says so? Anyone who titles a chapter "The Passion of Robert Kennedy" has sainthood in mind! I have no crusade against anyone. I have two full file drawers with evidence that Bobby Kennedy sent Sheridan down to New Orleans to scuttle Jim Garrison's case. I have Sheridan's own words. I have Richard Townley, Sheridan's own assistant, telling people, including the FBI, that Sheridan came down to "discredit" Garrison. Did Sheridan do all this on his own motivation? Sheridan had done some NBC work in, I believe, Detroit, before he blew into New Orleans with that investigative reporter cover. Garrison surely was right to question, if, as Sheridan claimed, he was there to investigate the Kennedy assassination, how come he didn't want to talk to anyone doing the investigation from Garrison's office? Instead, Sheridan, virtually the minute he arrived, hired Gordon Novel to steal documents and papers and whatever he could get his hands on, from Garrison's office. Novel admitted this to me. There is also a documentary record. By the way, the scene in my Sheridan article with Marlene Mancuso happened. I did four interviews with her. She had no reason to lie. Sheridan's attempts to bribe Russo are on tape. Garrison was not "tainted." He went down some blind alleys, but he was not "tainted." What does "tainted" mean in this context? (A rhetorical question). In any case, what Garrison needed was to be left alone to pursue his leads, not to persuade Sheridan, or Bobby Kennedy, of anything. By the way, the theory that the CIA sent Sheridan down there (the only other sponsor conceivable) can easily be disproved. So I'll conclude that in order to give credibility to Sheridan and Bobby Kennedy, David Talbot had to crucify Garrison, yet again. The alternative is too dark.

I smiled when I read the comment, meant sarcastically, that Jim Garrison was John F. Kennedy's "real brother." Well, Jim Garrison sacrificed his political career to investigate the murder of a beloved President. He paid little attention to crime in Orleans Parish, leaving that to his assistants, and not, by the way, Andrew Sciambra, who was a very young staff member. The President's own brother hedged. I did not write anywhere, not least on the Forum, that Jim Garrison was a "hero." (See the Brecht quotation again!). As Garrison said in his closing statement in federal court before his acquittal on bribery charges, the last perfect person walked the earth two thousand years ago. His point was that he was not a perfect person. Let's get back to the issue of protecting the most valuable components of this democracy, among them due process, equal treatment under the law, and the rule of law itself. I would argue that these are far more important even than releasing a guilty person because his conviction came at the expense of the Constitution. http://www.joanmellen.net/OTEPKA.htm

INTERVIEW WITH OTTO OTEPKA In April 2006, I drove for three hours across the swamp land of Alligator Highway in central Florida in search of Otto Otepka. His ordeal now forty years in the fog of history, Mr. Otepka was about to celebrate his ninety-first birthday. His directions were impeccable. Without incident, I drove into a sleepy Florida town, and up to the door of a modest stucco cottage. Mr. Otepka greeted me from his leather recliner, his welcome clear, and booming. He apologized for not rising to his feet. He had suffered a muscle pull that hampered his walking, he explained. His hair was still black, his back broad, his stature as it must have been in the days when he was driven from office by enemies whose motive for years would elude him. He showed me into his study, a small room crammed with books and filing cabinets. More file boxes reached to the ceiling. All contained the story of his case, along with transcripts of the hearings that resulted, finally, in Otto Otepka’s vindication. Prominently displayed in Mr. Otepka’s study is a commendation for meritorious service awarded to him by President Eisenhower. On the wall is a sign reading, “This job is so secret I don’t know what I’m doing!” A photograph of Bill Clinton and the White House bears this legend: “No Enemy Would Dare Bomb This Place And End The Chaos.” Otto Otepka’s sense of humor has remained intact. He removed a bulging file devoted to the career of Walter Sheridan. There is no doubt in Mr. Otepka’s mind now that Bobby Kennedy and Walter Sheridan had been behind the theft of the defector files from his office safe. On a rickety copier, page by page, Mr. Otepka copied for me his Sheridan file. It includes Sidney Goldberg’s newsletter where Sheridan is identified, conclusively, as the person behind the destruction of Otto Otepka. Mr. Otepka began to keep his Sheridan file when he realized that Robert Kennedy’s secret connection to Oswald lay “at the root of his troubles.” He had no doubt that Sheridan’s role in his destruction was connected to a problem Robert Kennedy had with Oswald. As Warren Commission documents began to dribble into the National Archives, he began a file on Oswald and his defection. He had made no copies of the Oswald documents he collected when he investigated Oswald for the Department of State, he told me emphatically. Those he now had in his possession had come from the Archives. For Otto Otepka, based on his experience, the use of illegal methods to accomplish political ends began not with Richard Nixon and the Watergate conspiracy, but with the Kennedys. What sounded alarms, Mr. Otepka told me, what drove Robert Kennedy to cast him into oblivion, was that he had requested of the CIA that it look into the defectors to the Soviet Union whose names sat in his office safe. It had been a routine request, he said, whenever a name elicited questions. Mr. Otepka’s experience suggests that Robert Kennedy was aware of Lee Oswald considerably before Angelo Murgado, working for Kennedy, ran into Oswald in New Orleans during the summer of 1963, and again in late September in the company of his fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs, Bernardo de Torres, at the Dallas home of Sylvia Odio. All Mr. Otepka could figure out when his safe was burgled was that someone wanted to know what he had found out about Oswald. He concluded that John Francis Reilly and David Belisle had been assigned to steal the defector files to help Robert Kennedy cover up his use of Oswald. There was no question in Mr. Otepka’s mind that Robert Kennedy had selected the people who suddenly became his superiors. The Oswald question remained perplexing. We went over the subject once more: Oswald was not an applicant for work in the State Department; it was a matter over which Mr. Otepka had no jurisdiction. CIA was on the distribution list. His job was to correlate the existing files of people whose names were on the list of defectors, Oswald, “tourist,” among them. Other files, such as those from the Bureau of Soviet Affairs, needed to be consulted. Did the Oswald file have bearing on an existing security case, either on the file of an applicant or an already approved employee? Mr. Otepka told me that much that had been written about him was false. Journalist Sarah McClendon had written in her memoir, “Mr. President, Mr. President,” that Otto Otepka had told her he knew who had killed President Kennedy. Mr. Otepka told me he never said any such thing. All he might have done was reiterate the conclusion of the Warren Report. And of course he had never provided classified information to anyone. “I am at a loss as to why CIA didn’t receive distribution,” he says, returning to the trajectory of the Oswald file. Robert F. Kennedy had enlisted Walter Sheridan to destroy his career in his effort to conceal that he was using Oswald in his anti-Castro activities, Mr. Otepka concluded. Otepka was a threat because he could expose who Oswald was. It was at least “plausible,” he says, remaining cautious, that Oswald was a false defector in the Soviet Union. Had they allowed him to uncover Oswald, investigate him as he investigated all those whose names were sent to him in his capacity as Deputy Director, and then Chief of Evaluations, at the State Department Office of Security, history might have been different. Through no choice of his own, Otto Otepka went a long way to exposing Robert Kennedy and Walter Sheridan for their flagrant disregard of the law. They had not counted on his tenacity, or on his unbroken record of integrity and honesty. In his simple dignity and pride, he has outlasted them both. NOTES For a general history of the Otepka case, see William J. Gill, “The Ordeal of Otto Otepka” (Arlington House: New Rochelle, New York, 1969). Jim Hougan exposes Walter Sheridan’s role in the Otepka case, and in facilitating Robert Kennedy’s wire tapping efforts, in “Spooks: The Haunting of America – The Private Use of Secret Agents” (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1978). See also, for the trajectory of the Oswald file: John Newman, “Oswald And The CIA” (Carroll & Graf Publishers: New York, 1995), pp. 170-172. Walter Sheridan issues his unconvincing denials in “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa” (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972). Sheridan repeats the falsehood that Otepka had broken a law by furnishing information to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (“he had been caught in the act”). This was simply not true: Dean Rusk as Secretary of State had granted Mr. Otepka permission to testify. Sheridan admits to no responsibility for the wire taps, but terms it a “mistake” that Security Division personnel had placed a bug on Otepka’s telephone. Sheridan recounts as well his confrontation with Sidney Goldberg at his “small” office, noting, gleefully, that Goldberg was the only employee on the paper. If he had any questions, Sheridan says he told Goldberg later on the telephone, he should send them to “Jack Miller.” Sheridan denies every charge made against him. He concludes the discussion of the Otepka case with the nasty speculation that Goldberg was in “dire financial straits”when he wrote the article and hoped to obtain money from the teamsters Pension Fund or the Manchester “Union Leader.” Indeed, Union leader publisher Loeb had come down hard on Sheridan for his wire tapping of Jimmy Hoffa and his lawyer, and for his general obstruction of justice in the Hoffa case. See also: Otto F. Otepka, “MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD.” September 20, 1968, Subject: Robert F. Kennedy, Walter Sheridan, Edward Grady Partin, et. al. Courtesy of Mr. Otepka. Otto F. Otepka to Hon. Orrin Hatch. February 16, 1981. 7 pages. Courtesy of Mr. Otepka. My interview with Mr. Otepka in Florida was on April 13, 2006. I also have drawn from: Interview with Irv Heineman, April 9, 2006. Mr. Heineman had interviewed Mr. Otepka earlier. Interview with Jim Hougan, May 17, 2007. Interview with Otto Otepka, May 23, 2007. Documents relating to Otepka and the Oswald file: HSCA. Record Number 180-10102-10298. From: Otepka, Otto F. To: Epstein, Edward, Reader’s Digest. 3/28/78. 3 pages. NARA. Document id number: 1993. 06.19.10:31:00:090000. JFK. Agfileno: 201-289248. JFK BOX #OSW13. Fol/Folder V53B. Title: AMERICAN DEFECTORS TO SINO-SOVIET BLOC COUNTRIES. 12/2/1960. From: WILLIAM MCAFFE/INR/CS/STATE. To: Mr. Otepka, SY/STATE. NARA. Document id number: 1993.06.10.18:04:90000. JFK 201-289248. OSW12 VOL/FOLDER V53B. TITLE: COMPARATIVE STATISTICS CONCERNING BLOC AND US DEFECTORS. 9/23/60. WHOFROM: RICHARD D. GATEWOOD, IRC/STATE WHOTO: WILLIAM B. MACMBER, JR./STATE. NARA. 1993. 05.19.10:15:01:210000. JFK. 201-289248. OSW13. VOL/FOLDER V53B. TITLE: AMERICAN DEFECTORS TO SOVIET BLOC COUNTRIES – LIST OF SEVEN NAMES. 10/18/60. WHOFROM: OTTO F. OTEPKA, SY/STATE. WHOTO: MR. RICHARD GATEWOOD, IRC/STATE. October 18, 1960. See also: CIA. 104-10007-10274. JFK 201-289248. TO: WIGREN, L. TITLE: OSWALD COMMISSION TO MEET 1 FEBRUARY. 12/18/63. SUBJECTS WC MTG. Documents regarding Robert F. Kennedy’s attempts to conceal his wire tap program. These documents are available at the LBJ library in Austin: --letter of J. Edgar Hoover to Honorable Bill D. Moyers, November 13, 1964. Agency: DOJ. Record Number: 177-10002-10074. Records Series: FILES OF MILDRED STEGALL, “SHERIDAN, WALTER.” LBJ LIBRARY. -----Memorandum of Courtney Evans and his meetings with Robert Kennedy: Agency: Department of Justice. 177-10002-10170. FILES OF MILDRED STEGALL, “MILLER, HERBERT J.” 4 pages. L BJ LIBRARY. ---letter of J. Edgar Hoover to Honorable Marvin Watson. June 23, 1965. AGENCY: Department of Justice. 177-10002-10071. FILES OF MILDRED STEGALL, “MILLER, HERBERT J.” LBJ LIBRARY. ---letter of J. Edgar Hoover to Honorable Marvin Watson, September 23, 1966. Agency: Department of Justice. 177-10002-10124. FILES OF MILDRED STEGALL, “EVANS, COURTNEY.” LBJ LIBRARY. ---Agency, LBJ. 177-10002-10123. FILES OF MILDRED STEGALL, “EVANS, COURTNEY.” September 27, 1966. LBJ LIBRARY. See also: Ben H. Bagdikian, “Big Brother Is Listening,” Saturday Evening Post. June 6, 1964. C. P. Trussell, “Hoffa Expose Bid Laid To Kennedy.” The New York Times. March 3, 1965. Arthur C. Egan, Jr. “Bobby Kennedy Made Me Call Off Subversion Probe.” Bridgeport Herald. March 19, 1967. Sidney Goldberg,” “’5 Eyes’ and ‘Doodlegrams’ Used by Depts. For Tapping.” The Government Employees Exchange. September 4, 1968. Edith Kermit Roosevelt, “Government’s Private Spy Net.” The Catholic News. January 20, 1977.

OTTO OTEPKA STUDIES THE HOFFA CONVICTION With time on his hands, Otepka began to examine Sheridan’s methods in his effort to convict Jimmy Hoffa. He made no judgment on the guilt or innocence of Hoffa himself. He was interested only in the means by which the Hoffa conviction was obtained. In a 1968 Memorandum, Otepka writes that “it became generally known throughout the government intelligence community in Washington that the free-wheeling Sheridan had FBI agents perform electronic surveillance operations for the ostensible purpose of gathering evidence on which to prosecute Teamster Union President James Hoffa.” His tone is measured, like the man himself. George Bush’s persistent surveillance of American citizens unimpeded by either warrants or probable cause finds an antecedent in Sheridan’s relentless wire tapping. So Otepka noted that “government intruders intercepted conversations of American citizens in no way connected with Hoffa, nor in any way related to national security, and compiled dossiers for future reference.” Lauded as the historian of historians, Arthur Schlesinger went on to lie for Sheridan and Robert Kennedy. “In the entire investigation in connection with the Hoffa cases,” Schlesinger would write, “there has not been one instance of wiretapping or bugging of Hoffa.” Schlesinger had to have known that the truth was otherwise. Readers might consult the three part series on the Hoffa trial by Fred Cook published in “The Nation” magazine. Otepka perused a 1964 “Life” magazine article written, he had discovered, with Walter Sheridan’s cooperation. It described Edward Grady Partin as “a high-minded man having been involved only in some inconsequential brushes with the law, but now working on the side of justice and law and order.” Partin was in jail “because of minor domestic difficulties,” “Life” wrote of the man who had committed crimes ranging from first degree manslaughter, rape, and kidnapping to assault and battery and forgery. For Partin, perjury was a misdemeanor. Otepka noted that on the witness stand during the Hoffa trial, Sheridan swore under oath that he knew of no payments of money to Partin, an outright lie. Sheridan denied that he had authorized payment for Partin’s services as a federal undercover agent, which would have been against the law. When Partin, not easily controllable, admitted that he was indeed paid, then added, “they still owe me!” Sheridan passed the responsibility onto his assistant, A. Frank Grimsley. Then Grimsley, a former FBI agent obviously less comfortable with perjury than Walter Sheridan, admitted that the plan to pay Partin originated with Sheridan himself. The government produced a Justice Department memorandum dated July 3, 1963, signed by Sheridan and requesting that a check be made out to A. Frank Grimsley, Jr. Grimsley was to “give this money to a confidential source,” it read. There were others whom Sheridan was unable to silence. Frederick Michael Shobe testified that Sheridan had hired him to harass and embarrass Hoffa and the Teamsters Union. Shobe testified that he was paid in cash, sometimes directly by Sheridan; he was ableo to produce Sheridan’s unlisted home number in Bethesda. Shobe had served time for burglary, forgery and armed robbery, rendering him vulnerable to blackmail. Sheridan had threatened him, Shobe testified. Hadn’t he associated with questionable people, violating his parole? Instead of returning to prison, Sheridan had promised, Shobe could join Sheridan’s special investigative squad. A presidential pardon and a federal job were dangled before him (Sheridan was to enlist the identical technique in his attempts to bribe Jim Garrison’s witnesses). When Shobe discovered that the job was in Japan, he balked, and went on to testify for the defense instead. Hoffa’s lawyer asked Shobe whether Sheridan had made it plain to him that his plan was to “get Hoffa.” Shobe said that it was. Sheridan had told him that Hoffa should be in jail anyway, “and that…if we have to resort to unfair tactics, well, that’s where a person like myself came in at…to get him by any means, fair or foul.” Did Walter Sheridan say this to him directly? “That is correct,” Shobe said. Shobe also revealed that Sheridan had attempted to intimidate a Hoffa co-defendant named Thomas E. Parks, a funeral home employee, to force Parks to testify against Hoffa. Unless Parks agreed, he would be falsely implicated in a bribery attempt. In another Sheridan-inspired scam, a fake arrest of Parks would occur and Parks would then be taken into the woods. His abductors would be identified as Hoffa’s strongmen, and they would dig a hole….Parks would be rescued at the penultimate moment. Shobe gave this testimony to the judge out of the hearing of the jury. He said he knew that the penalty for kidnapping in Tennessee was death. The prosecution did not challenge Shobe’s testimony. It was Sheridan’s modus operandi, the use of bribery, blackmail, and the intimidation of witnesses. After the Otepka case and the Hoffa case, not to mention his obstruction of justice in New Orleans, Sheridan was so impeachable that it is inconceivable that Robert Kennedy, even as President, would have set him loose to lead an investigation into his beloved brother’s death. BOBBY KENNEDY, WIRE TAPPER EXTRAORDINAIRE After the death of his brother, Robert Kennedy persistently lied about his encouragement of unauthorized wire tapping. A telling set of documents regarding Bobby’s attempt to conceal his knowledge about and sanction of illegal wire tapes resides at the LBJ library in Austin. The file opens with a 1964 letter from J. Edgar Hoover to Bill Moyers. A deputy attorney general had requested a name check and an Internal Revenue Service check “concerning Walter James Sheridan,” who needed to be cleared for re-employment as “confidential assistant” to Robert Kennedy, Hoover writes. He notes that on November 13, 1964, the House Judiciary Committee had approved a resolution inquiring into the Justice Department’s handling of “individual rights and liberties as guaranteed by the Constitution.” The Otepka case hovers below the surface of this sentence, along with the knowledge that it was Walter Sheridan who, in masterminding the surveillance and firing of Otepka, had violated his rights. Courtney A. Evans, an assistant FBI director, had been responsible for handling “liaison with the office of the Attorney General.” Evans had established a “close relationship” with Robert Kennedy, whom he met with repeatedly to discuss “the use of microphones [wire tapping] by the FBI” and “microphone surveillances in criminal-type as well as security-type investigations.” Evans presented Kennedy with written information about wire taps and it met with his “enthusiastic approval,” Evans recounted. The rights of citizens under the law was of small moment as the FBI and Bobby Kennedy pooled their knowledge of the latest technology in illegal wire taps. By December 24, 1965, Courtney Evans had retired from the Bureau and joined the law firm of another Kennedy acolyte, Herbert J. Miller, Jr., who would serve as Walter Sheridan’s lawyer on more than one occasion. It was Herbert J. Miller, Jr. who extracted Walter Sheridan when he was indicted by Jim Garrison for petty bribery and intimidation of witnesses. After Sheridan’s death, during the period of ARRB, the National Archives sought to have Sheridan’s papers as Kennedy assassination records transferred from the Kennedy Library where they had been deposited to the National Archives. Herbert J. Miller, Jr. stepped in, seized Sheridan’s papers from the Kennedy library, and removed them to the bosom of the Sheridan family, far from the prying eyes of historians. Miller’s taped interview with Jeremy Gunn of the ARRB is a masterpiece of obfuscation; on the subject of his now deceased client, Sheridan, and his antics in New Orleans, Miller refused to answer a single question for the historical record. One day Courtney Evans, at Bureau headquarters, shared with two FBI officials details of the contacts he had and written information he had furnished to Robert Kennedy “and other Justice Department officials” who had served under Kennedy. The subject was the FBI’s use of microphone surveillances. Then something odd occurred. After this meeting, Courtney Evans furnished Robert Kennedy with a letter denying that the two ever had any discussions about wire taps. Evans also lied and denied he had ever provided Kennedy with written material about the FBI’s use of microphone wire taps. Believing that Evans’ lies would protect him, defending himself in the press against persistent charges that he had sanctioned wire taps, Robert Kennedy, now no longer Attorney General, denied he knew anything about the FBI’s use of surveillance microphones. To demonstrate his veracity, Bobby released to the press the fraudulent letter that Evans had obligingly written for him. The letter is dated February 17, 1966. In it, Evans states falsely that he “did not discuss the use of microphones by the FBI with Robert Kennedy during his tenure as Attorney General.” Evans also denies he knew of any written material that was sent to Robert Kennedy “at any time” concerning microphone surveillances. Opening a second front, Bobby now sent Herbert J. Miller, Jr. to testify before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Miller argued that wire taps should be permitted, that legislation should be passed to authorize “limited and controlled interception and disclosure of telephone conversations.” Miller then went on to request that the FBI monitor and tape record a meeting between three people, one a former lieutenant governor of Nevada. The FBI denied the request. On September 26, 1966, Hoover wrote to Lyndon Johnson’s Special Assistant Marvin Watson, that the FBI had written evidence not only of Robert Kennedy’s authorization but of his “insistence on the usage of microphones as an investigative technique.” It was an example of the contradictory policies pursued by the Kennedys. Kennedy lobbied for greater use of wire taps, even as he denied being knowledgeable on the subject, just as John F. Kennedy pursued sabotage against Cuba while his emissary,William Attwood, pursued rapprochement with Fidel Castro. On December 11, 1966, the FBI released to the press two memoranda which had been personally prepared by Courtney Evans in 1961 for then Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Bobby at once ceased to speak to Courtney Evans, as if he were the one who had betrayed him. Assigned to damage control, Herbert J. Miller, Jr. dashed off a letter to Judiciary Committee chairman, Sam Evin. He doubted, Miller wrote, that anyone in the Justice Department knew about the FBI surveillances. “I did not know and I wager that the Attorney General did not know there was trespass,” Miller says. The ambiguous word “wager” tells it all. Herbert J. Miller, Jr. was nothing if not clever. As for Bobby Kennedy’s motive in spearheading his destruction, Otto Otepka has never gone beyond the statement that he believes that Bobby was involved in keeping Oswald’s activities secret. After the murder of his brother, Bobby had demanded of Frank Mankiewicz,”do you think any of our people were involved?” and Mankiewicz, taken by surprise, had thought, he told me, do you think there might have been? Bobby was well aware of Oswald and had kept silent before the assassination. The “our people” might well have included Oswald. In 1963, Bobby Kennedy had invoked the argument that “if the American people knew the truth about Dallas, there would be blood in the streets,” a preposterous idea and one purportedly used by Lyndon Johnson to persuade a reluctant Earl Warren to head his Presidential Commission. Bobby in the last year of his life, as he campaigned in California, stated over and over that he believed the Warren Commission and that Oswald had acted alone. It may well be that in private, accountable to no one, Bobby had murmured to bewildered friends that he would investigate his brother’s death once he was President. Later, he might discover reasons why reopening the issue was not such a good idea after all. After Robert Kennedy’s death, the Kennedy family continued to obstruct any investigation into the death of the President. Jim Garrison went into federal court to gain access to X-Rays and autopsy photographs for the Clay Shaw trial. Garrison’s assistant Numa Bertel actually won the case, only for the Justice Department lawyer opposing the release of the documents to be asked whether he planned to appeal. He had to consult the Kennedy family before he could make any decision, the lawyer said. The answer came back from the Kennedys. Yes, he would appeal. Time ran out, and the point became moot. In 1968, Richard Nixon appointed Otto Otepka to a Subversive Activities Control Board, not a very active body, and obviously an attempt to give the impoverished State Department officer some employment. Confirmation did not come easily. Falsely, Otepka was labeled a Birchite and an anti-Semite, although he was neither of these. Leading the attack against Otepka’s confirmation in committee was Edward M. Kennedy, fighting like a tiger to consign Bobby’s old adversary to oblivion. The full Senate eventually approved Otepka’s confirmation, 67-21. So it should not be surprising that Edward Kennedy would offer a flamboyant eulogy at Walter Sheridan’s 1995 funeral. Kennedy calls Sheridan an “extraordinary human being” with “a heart as large as his ability, and his courage and dedication to justice.” The most telling line in Teddy’s eulogy is this one: “When Walter surfaced with his catch, all the networks and reporters were there, ready to record it at our hearings.” Manipulation of the press was the least of Sheridan’s skullduggery.

“During the period 1961 to 1964, the activities of Walter and Bobby, germane to the events in this memorandum, are almost inseparable." (Otto F. Otepka, Memorandum, September 20, 1968) Beginning in 1957, Otto F. Otepka was Deputy Director of the State Department Office of Security. This meant that Otepka was in charge of security clearances for all State Department personnel with a cadre of people working under his supervision. From this position of considerable responsibility, Otepka was plunged into a nightmare world of harassment and personal surveillance until he was fired from government service. He had done nothing wrong. It is an extraordinary tale of a career government officer being framed, his only sin the scrupulous manner in which he performed his mandated duties. Otto Otepka was born on May 6, 1915 in Chicago of Czech-born immigrant parents. His father had been a blacksmith and worked in America at a forge. He could offer his brilliant son little in the way of material support. Otepka worked his way through college and law school. Following military service, he joined the Civil Service Commission as an investigator on the look-out for Nazis and crypto-fascists. In 1953, he arrived at the Office of Security with the authority to uncover both criminal acts and Communist sympathies in the history of people to be hired by the Department of State. Otepka was a man of his time, in particular of the Cold War period and the Stalinization of Eastern Europe. Like many, he perceived a danger to the United States from the Soviet outreach. He was a methodical man, fair-minded, exacting and scrupulous. He told the author that he “never overstepped boundaries.” As a personnel security evaluator, he offered no opinions on American foreign policy. Otepka was not a liberal, even as his case is a reminder that “liberals” hold no monopoly on integrity. He was a man of principle, a category that cuts across ideological lines. Otepka despised Senator Joseph McCarthy and his methods, even as he believed that subversion was a threat to our system of government. “McCarthy didn’t identify Communists in the State Department,” Otepka told me indignantly. “He called people Communists. A Communist is not a Communist because someone calls them that.” There were Communists, Otepka says, “but not those named by McCarthy.” Although he denied security clearances to some, Otepka was not a man given to frivolous accusations. “I had never approved of Senator McCarthy’s tactics,” he said when his own troubles began. “Everyone in the security field knew that.” Otepka was neither a shady Teamster president nor the imaginative district attorney of Orleans Parish with history and the death of a revered President on his mind. Walter Sheridan enlisted the same grab bag of illegal and unscrupulous methods against Otto Otepka as he would utilize against Jimmy Hoffa and Jim Garrison. The recent book, “Brothers,” in its effort to sanctify Bobby Kennedy, lies by omission about Sheridan. It ignores his considerable intelligence background, not to mention the litany of criminal acts relating to the obstruction of justice of which Sheridan was guilty, and which are on the public record. (“Brothers” finds its pale precedent in a little-known book about Edward M. Kennedy called “The Senator,” that whitewashes Sheridan as a mere “ex-FBI agent who had worked as a security consultant for Robert Kennedy.” So the distortions of history proliferate). On behalf of Robert Kennedy, Sheridan, aided by a group of loyalists planted in the Office of Security, successfully drummed Otepka out of the State Department, abruptly ending his nineteen year career. Before it was over, Otepka had concluded that his ruin was based not on his having denied security clearances to some Kennedy appointees, as first seemed to be the case. Rather, his ordeal was based upon his development of a file relating to one “Lee Oswald, tourist,” a name on a list of “defectors.” The quotation marks were added by the CIA for an October 24, 1960 document that marks the beginning of Otto Otepka’s investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald. “DEFECTORS” It began that October, 1960. Several offices at the Department of State undertook to identify and research a list of Americans who had defected to the Soviet Union, to Soviet bloc nations, or to Communist China. The assignment to check on Oswald, and to research whether his name appeared in any existing security files, came to Otepka as chief security evaluator at State. Otepka contacted the FBI at once. The CIA was next on his list. At the Department of State’s “Office of Intelligence/Resources and Coordination,” Robert B. Elwood wrote to CIA’s DDP, Richard Bissell. The subject of his letter was “Request For Information Concerning American ‘Defectors.’” The quotation marks suggest an implied question: were they really defectors or were they American agents? It was a variation on La Ronde. The files danced from Agency to Agency, component to component. Bissell shipped the file to James Angleton at Counter Intelligence and to Robert L. Bannerman, Deputy Chief of the Office of Security at CIA, who sent Oswald’s name back to Otto Otepka. “It would all have gone through Angleton,” Bannerman told retired military intelligence officer John Newman. Beginning on June 1, 1960, Oswald’s background and file were examined by employees in the Office of Security at the State Department. On December 5th of that year, the Intelligence Collection and Distribution Division informed Otepka that he and the Office of Security would keep the official list on Americans who had defected to the Communist bloc. Otepka began the work of determining whether “Lee Oswald” had bearing on any existing security case, either of an applicant for a position with the State Department or of an existing employee. As he would any file, Otepka distributed the one bearing the name “Oswald” to his subordinates, eight or ten people, he told me, whose work he would then review. He sent Oswald’s name over to the Bureau of Soviet Affairs. It was all routine. Oswald’s file was marked #39-61981. Sitting as it did in the Central File Room of the Office of Security, the “39” denoting an “Intelligence File,” the Oswald file raised questions. As the months and years passed, more questions surfaced. Otepka examined Oswald’s return from the Soviet Union with the unlikely assistance of a State Department loan. By 1963, Otepka was wondering why Oswald was issued a passport for travel to Cuba and the Soviet Union despite a possible “criminal” flag in Oswald’s ONI file. It was at this time that Otepka’s security safe was burgled and the Oswald files disappeared for good. BOBBY KENNEDY MEETS OTTO F. OTEPKA, DECEMBER 1960 Bobby Kennedy’s hostility to Otto Otepka began in December 1960, before the inauguration of John F. Kennedy and after Otepka had begun to evaluate Lee Oswald. At 7 P.M. one evening, in the gathering winter darkness, Dean Rusk, Kennedy’s Secretary of State designate, requested that Otepka meet with him. Otepka assumed that the purpose of the meeting was a discussion of security clearances for Kennedy appointees. What turned out to be the case was that Rusk, whom Otepka had just cleared, was only an intermediary. It was Bobby Kennedy who wanted to meet with Otepka. Bobby was late. Otepka and Rusk sat twiddling their thumbs until Robert Kennedy finally appeared. Offering no apologies, he complained about having become lost in the corridors, the same corridors where nearly three years later Bobby’s “confidential assistant,” Walter Sheridan, would be handed tapes of the illegal surveillance of Otepka’s telephone and office. Eschewing preliminaries, Bobby came to the point. He was concerned that W. W. Rostow be granted security clearance for a cabinet appointment. On two previous occasions, in 1955 and 1957, Otepka had refused to clear Rostow as a foreign policy expert. There was something not quite right about this man, Otepka thought. He pointed out to Bobby that Air Force Intelligence had raised doubts about Rostow. Those people are “nuts,” Bobby burst out. His anger seemed inappropriate and surprised Otto Otepka, a calm, reasoned man who was not accustomed to such expressions of emotion in the course of his work. Otepka’s instincts regarding Rostow were both correct and incorrect. Otepka was incorrect in believing that Rostow was a Communist or a Socialist of any kind, despite his family background. He was right that the man was not what he seemed. John F. Kennedy’s inexperience and political naivete – he circumvented the security problem by appointing Rostow to the White House staff – emerged when Rostow revealed his true colors. Before long, Rostow began to beat the drums for a ground war in Vietnam, a policy John F. Kennedy did not and would never favor. Rostow’s bleating for war would be heeded once Kennedy was dead and Lyndon Johnson became president. By 1965, Rostow was demanding that 500,000 troops at the least be sent to Vietnam. Bobby emerged enraged from the only face to face meeting he would ever have with Otto Otepka. He perceived that he had confronted a man who would not be bullied or influenced. As for Otepka, he at first believed that Bobby’s hostility was based on his refusal to clear Rostow, as well as a shadowy figure named William Wieland, who had once sold arms to Fidel Castro. It was not so. It is not clear when Robert Kennedy became aware of Otepka’s handling of the investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald, but Otepka would become certain that it was this investigation that led to his ruin rather than his unwillingness to clear minor Kennedy appointees. OTTO OTEPKA IS PLACED UNDER SURVEILLANCE In November 1961, five months after Oswald reclaimed his passport for return to the United States, and nearly a year after Otepka’s meeting with Bobby Kennedy, Otepka was told that the Office of Security was being re-organized. His job as Deputy Director would be eliminated. In January 1962, he was made chief of a newly-created Division of Evaluations, a position with fewer responsibilities. Four months later, in April 1962, Robert Kennedy sent a long-time family loyalist named John Francis Reilly to head the Office of Security. With no experience either in security work or in personnel evaluation, Reilly seemed an odd choice. He was a Justice Department lawyer and Massachusetts Irishman who had been recommended, it later emerged, by Bobby Kennedy’s own executive assistant, Andy Oehmann. By Reilly’s own later admission, he was “sent over here to do a job, and by God I’m going to do it!” Another four months elapsed. Then, in August 1962, a month after Oswald returned to the United States, Reilly was promoted to the newly created position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Security, the more easily for him to proceed against Otto Otepka. Now four more Kennedy people arrived at the Office of Security to keep watch over Otepka. They included Joseph E. Rosetti, who had served in John F. Kennedy’s congressional office; Massachusetts Kennedy intimate, Robert J. McCarthy; and Charles W. Lyons, also from Massachusetts. They were joined by David I. Belisle, a National Security Agency operative and friend of Walter Sheridan’s from his days at NSA. Belisle was to serve as Otepka’s immediate superior. So the effort to ruin Otepka began. Eventually he would be charged with prosecution under the Espionage Act, not for providing intelligence to the Soviet Union, or to “Peiping,” as Dean Rusk was always to refer to the capital of China. No, it was to a subcommittee of the United States Senate that Otepka would be charged with providing secret information. The charge was entirely bogus. No documents Otepka presented to the subcommittee were classified, and he had obtained permission to testify from the Secretary of State himself. Moreover, it was against the law for a public official to refuse to cooperate with a committee of Congress. Now under watchful eyes, Otepka continued to compile his Oswald file. More details raised a “red flag,” Otepka remembers. Oswald obtained a visa to the Soviet Union in Helsinki in two days – normally it took at least thirty. (The State Department would lie to the Warren Commission and tell them that it took one to two weeks). Otepka wondered what Oswald actually did in the Soviet Union. He examined Marina’s propitious exit; it was known to take wives of U.S. citizens five months to a year for official permission to leave. He would have liked to have examined Marina’s family history, he told me, and her connections to the Soviet secret police. On April 4, 1962, Otepka consulted the Passport Office, inquiring whether “there has been a change in the Subject’s citizenship.” He requested any other information which might be of assistance to the Navy in considering Oswald’s case. Otepka says he had hoped to have examined the anomaly that Oswald had received an exit visa a month and a half before he actually left Russia, and, again, there was the matter of that State Department loan. When Otepka learned in June 1963 that Oswald received a U.S. passport on one day’s notice, it confirmed his uneasiness. He did not blame Francis Knight in the passport office. Knight later told Otepka that “she would issue a passport to a baboon if she knew that was the policy.” In those years, wire taps were illegal unless there was probable cause that national security was being compromised. By 1962, Otepka’s telephone was being tapped. The tap was instituted by an electronics expert hired personally by Reilly named Elmer Dewey Hill, who would be assisted by others. Out of a room directly across from Otepka’s new hole-in-the-wall office, Hill made his tapes. Every evening Otepka’s trash was confiscated. One night at ten P.M., David Belisle and a subordinate named Terence Shea broke into Otepka’s office – only to discover Otepka sitting at his desk. Undaunted, they claimed they were searching for evidence that Otepka had provided classified information to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, although there was absolutely no evidence that he had done so. An Otepka colleague named Stanley Holden, who would soon be fired from the electronics unit, confirmed to Otepka that the bugging had included not merely his telephone, but every word spoken in his office. Holden named Rosetti, Belisle and Shea as having led the surveillance, both of Otepka in his office, and Otepka out of the office. (Much later a mastermind of an electronics expert named Bernard Spindel would reveal that a “Justice Department Agency” had a permanent tap into the main telephone line in Washington, D. C). On the day after Dean Rusk had ordered Reilly to find out how Otepka had managed to obtain proof that tapes were being made of his conversations, Stanley Holden met with a strange “accident.” His face and tongue were slashed so badly that stitches were required. Holden claimed, not very persuasively, that a heavy spring had come loose in his lab and hit him in the face. As if this weren’t enough, Joe Rosetti and Robert McCarthy showed up at Holden’s home. McCarthy soon began to shout so loudly that the neighbors became witnesses. “Where is your loyalty?” he screamed at Holden for having revealed the wire taps to Otepka. “Don’t you have any loyalty at all? Don’t you think you owe Joe Rosetti any loyalty?” McCarthy concluded his tirade with a threat. “I’ll get you for this!” It strains credulity to believe that such a campaign could have anything to do with Otepka’s providing the Internal Security subcommittee with unclassified information, which is what he did, and what he was within the law to do. It is equally unlikely that Otepka was being treated as if he were a criminal because he denied a security clearance to some political has-beens, as he did in the case of Kennedy’s Ambassador designate to Ireland, the owner of a construction business who turned out to be covered in graft and corruption. Otepka was relieved of any responsibility for security. Before he was fired for good, he spent years first updating the Office of Security handbook, and then summarizing each day’s Congressional Record. Otepka was not a man to give up and suffer injustice without a struggle. From the moment he was driven from his job, and tossed into what would become a four year career limbo, Otepka was determined to learn who was responsible for his political demise – and why. OTTO OTEPKA INVESTIGATES HIS OWN CASE Otepka first approached contacts in the FBI. He was being investigated by “higher authority in the Department of Justice,” he was told. Otepka was too experienced not to perceive what this meant. The “higher authority,” he told me, could not have been J. Edgar Hoover, who was always identified with the “Bureau.” It could only mean Robert Kennedy. It was in June 1963 that Otepka’s Oswald files were stolen from his safe. The culprits, Otepka was to write in a 1976 letter to author Edward J. Epstein, then at “Reader’s Digest” magazine, were his superiors, people close to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Otepka’s crime had been studying Oswald, as it had been his responsibility to do. That June, Otepka was fired. In September 1963, ten criminal charges were leveled against him. Still he kept trying to determine why this had happened to him, to collect information, to investigate his own case. In a Memorandum dated January 9, 1964, Otepka writes of his interview with William R. Cathey, Chief Special Agent for Southern Bell. Cathey told him that a company named “Five Eyes” had “contracts with several Government agencies including one with the Department of Justice.” Otepka learned too that home telephones as well were being bugged with the help of an employee of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company. Under oath at his 1967 hearing, Otepka finally articulated for the record what he had long believed but never voiced publicly. Asked who was out to get rid of him, he named “a high official of another government agency…the person was Robert Kennedy.” Elmer Dewey Hill, who had done much of the wire tapping, admitting that the tapes of Otepka’s conversations had been given to “some stranger” at Reilly’s behest. The name of that stranger would eventually emerge. John Francis Reilly stated under oath that it had been Bobby Kennedy himself who had appointed him to head the Office of Security in 1962. He admitted as well that he planned to intercept all conversations in Otepka’s office, not merely his telephone calls. Asked for the name of the mysterious stranger to whom Elmer Hill had revealed that the tapes of Otepka’s telephone and office had been delivered, Reilly refused to provide it. Ultimately, Hill, Reilly and Belisle, all of whom had broken the law, escaped without punishment, although Hill and Reilly were charged with perjury. Sheridan stepped in and requested of both Under Secretary of State George Ball and Deputy Under Secret of State J. Crockett that David Belisle not be “asked to resign,” despite Belisle’s apparent malfeasance. Under the protection of Kennedy and Sheridan, Belisle was spirited off to a job at the American Embassy at Bonn. THE NAME OF THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER IS REVEALED It was in an unlikely venue that the truth emerged about who ordered the surveillance of Otto Otepka. It was not the “New York Times” or the “Washington Post” that produced the name of the “stranger” to whom the surveillance tapes of Otto Otepka had been delivered. Rather, it was a Washington, D.C.-based weekly newsletter called the “Government Employees Exchange” run by a man named Sidney Goldberg. It was Goldberg, a one-man editorial staff, who broke the case and solved the mystery. In an extraordinary piece of investigative journalism, in the issue of the “Exchange” dated September 4, 1968, Goldberg wrote that a source had come forward with the truth about who was behind the harassment and firing of Otto Otepka. Goldberg learned that the Otepka surveillance tapes had been prepared by one Clarence Jerome Schneider, an electronics expert on Reilly’s staff. They were delivered into the hands of -- Bobby Kennedy’s right-hand man, Walter Sheridan. This same “knowledgeable source,” as Goldberg describes him, also identified Sheridan as “one of the chief contacts” for Robert F. Kennedy with International Investigators Incorporated out of Indianapolis, a “hush-hush” organization providing “industrial security services” both to the federal government and to private employers. Among their specialities were “wire tap” operations. Outsiders called them “The Three Eyes,” Goldberg learned. Employees used the name “The Five Eyes.” They were paid in “unvouchered funds” and provided with immunity from prosecution. So Justice Department records would never reveal the role either Robert Kennedy or Sheridan played in the surveillance of Otto Otepka. Goldberg notes that although Sheridan was on the payroll of the Justice Department, Sheridan’s office was physically located at the White House. “Through a series of interconnected transfers of funds,” Goldberg writes, “Walter Sheridan disposed over the personnel and currency of whole units of the Central Intelligence Agency.” Wire tap tapes, including “voice profiles” made at the White House by the Secret Service and at the Department of State, were passed on to Sheridan, and retained in a separate facility. Goldberg’s source also reported that Bobby Kennedy had attempted to plant an anti-Hoffa article in “Life” magazine. This ploy was exposed in the “New York Times” on March 3, 1965. The source had discovered that the disgruntled Teamster Bobby planned to use against Hoffa was one Sam Baron, referred to as “Brown” in an exchange of letters between Hank Suydam of Time/Life in Washington and Life editor Edward K. Thompson. Walter Sheridan did not miss Goldberg’s extraordinary article. Incensed, Bobby’s operative made a personal appearance at Goldberg’s tiny office. Denying any involvement in the Otepka case, Sheridan demanded a complete retraction. Sheridan threatened Goldberg that he would sue him unless Goldberg furnished him with the name of his source. Goldberg held his ground. A decade later, author Jim Hougan interviewed Goldberg for his acclaimed investigative book, “Spooks,” published in 1978. Hougan found Goldberg a frightened man, his newsletter having long since folded. He reiterated to Hougan that Walter Sheridan was “the chief contact” between the “Five Eyes” and Robert Kennedy. As a result of this valuable interview, Hougan was able to add further detail to the story of the Otepka tapes. Apparently, the tapes were sent first to CIA to eliminate background noise, then back to John Francis Reilly. It was Reilly himself who passed the tapes to an “unidentified man in the corridors of the State Department.” This was Walter Sheridan. Goldberg’s source also was aware that David Belisle, while he was a National Security Agency employee, had done “certain favors” for the Kennedys. Goldberg had been a courageous, and bold journalist, as witnessed by an article in the “Exchange” detailing how, after the Bay of Pigs, the CIA’s “New Team” used secret cooperating and liaison groups in the large foundations, banks and newspapers to change U. S. domestic and foreign relations through the infiltration of these organizations.” Goldberg even named a “New York Times” Executive Vice-President, Harding Bancroft. To Hougan, Goldberg now seemed a shattered man. When Hougan asked to read Goldberg’s Otepka files, Goldberg refused. Hougan begged Goldberg to give him the name of the source who had identified Sheridan. Goldberg refused this request as well, protecting his source to the end. Yet there was no question in Hougan’s mind that Goldberg was telling the truth. When Hougan later sought microfilms of the “Government Employees Exchange” weekly from the Library of Congress, he was told that they had been “misplaced.” Over the years, Otto Otepka told me, he talked to Sidney Goldberg many times. He found Goldberg “a bit eccentric,” a man full of passion, but credible. Had he asked Goldberg for the name of the person who revealed that Walter Sheridan had taken possession of the surveillance tapes? “You can’t ask a newsman for his sources,” Mr. Otepka says. The fragments of the story of what happened to Otto Otepka emerged slowly and incompletely. Only in the wake of press indignation about Otepka’s harsh treatment, did Senator Thomas J. Dodd add another piece to the puzzle of Bobby Kennedy’s and Walter Sheridan’s persistent obstruction of justice. Dodd admitted that in 1967 he had called off four days of scheduled hearings regarding Edward Grady Partin’s relationship with Fidel Castro “because Bobby Kennedy told me to do so.” Partin had already been reimbursed for his appearance when the hearings were canceled. Bobby and Sheridan had come far enough with Partin to make certain that he not be afforded any opportunity to change his mind about implicating Jimmy Hoffa. Senator Dodd elaborated: Bobby Kennedy had told him that “he and the Justice Department had a personal interest in Partin and didn’t want to have the hearings held…Bobby was the attorney general and you don’t say no to him. He made the request a personal matter and I honored it.” Otto Otepka drew the only conclusion available to him: “Bobby Kennedy still ensconced at Justice following the death of his brother wielded his power and sought the aid of his chief investigator, Walter Sheridan, to get what he was after, no matter how it was done.” The end justified the means. It was in 1968 that Otepka finally realized that it was “the influence of [bobby] Kennedy [that] caused the failure of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to call material witnesses like Schneider and prevented the thorough and timely resolution of my case.”

Woe to students of the Kennedy assassination were a sitting President ever to have unleashed Walter Sheridan to conduct an investigation of the death of President Kennedy, as David Talbot suggests was likely to have occurred. As Part Three of my essay on Sheridan reiterates (see below), Sheridan was guilty of bribery and blackmail, perjury and the intimidation of witnesses. Among his specialties was the illegal wire tap without a warrant or probable cause. Had Sheridan not been protected by higher authority, he would have spent long years in federal prison for his persistent obstruction of justice. Sheridan was, in fact, so impeachable, his crimes well known to so many, that he would have been a detriment to such an investigation. No matter what Sheridan's widow claims, it insults Robert Kennedy's intelligence and political acumen for anyone to believe that he would have set "Walt" loose to investigate his brother's death. In "Brothers," David Talbot eulogizes both Sheridan and Robert Kennedy, a historical cartoon that defies Talbot's fatuous claim that his analysis is "complex." To sanctify Sheridan, as he does, and to ask us to believe that Bobby Kennedy represented a Second Coming, David Talbot had no choice but to destroy, yet again, the character of Jim Garrison. It is painful for me to observe David Talbot's resurrection of the outright lie that Garrison covered up for Louisiana and Texas mobster Carlos Marcello. Whether this preposterous disinformation issues from a former Canadian diplomat or anyone else, it is simply not true, and to repeat it is calumny. If David Talbot had done any research in New Orleans before writing about Jim Garrison, he would have learned that Garrison's office was scrupulous and vigilant in its pursuit of any and all criminals. Consult Milton Brener, who was no fan of either Garrison or his investigation. Ask former United States Attorney John Volz, who later put Carlos Marcello in jail. Talk to William Alford. I wish I could have found a publisher for the 1500 page manuscript I wrote because it contains a detailed description of the Orleans Parish district attorney's office during the Garrison years. Consult also the Garrison office files and Garrison's memo on his consideration of organized crime as the primary sponsor of the Kennedy assassination. As for Jim Garrison's motivation, he entrusted the crime fighting to his able assistants, beginning in 1965. All Garrison cared about was learning what had happened to a beloved President. This was Garrison's sole motivation! If Carlos Marcello had planned the assassination of President Kennedy, if he had been seen traveling around Louisiana with Oswald, for example, Garrison would have said so. If there is complexity to be pondered, it derives from the irony that Jim Garrison profoundly admired President Kennedy, to whom he referred always and fondly as "Jack." Garrison was genuinely perplexed by Bobby Kennedy's efforts to, as Garrison put, "torpedo" his investigation. Garrison knew Sheridan was lying about his claim that he wanted to "find out" what he was up to because Sheridan never requested a meeting with anyone in Garrison's office connected with the investigation. After their meeting, arranged by Richard Billings, Garrison knew that Sheridan was lying when he talked about having come down to New Orleans to investigate the Kennedy assassination. About Sheridan's criminality, Garrison had no doubt. He had in his possession signed affidavits outlining Sheridan's attempts to bribe them and prevent them from testifying for him from both Perry Russo and Marlene Mancuso. Garrison charged Sheridan with petty bribery and the intimidation of witnesses, there being no statute in Louisiana against obstruction of justice at the time. Sheridan then fled Garrison's jurisdiction. Note in the essay in progress below the documents relating to Bobby Kennedy's relationship with Courtney Evans. Pity the land that needs a hero, Brecht said. (I'm paraphrasing). The search for the truth might well be all the spiritual sustenance we need. The elevation of ambitious politicians to sainthood is likely to prove disappointing. If there is a Sherlock out there who would like to help discover where Sidney Goldberg's papers are housed, that would begin a welcome and fruitful addition to this debate.

Woe to students of the Kennedy assassination were a sitting President ever to have unleashed Walter Sheridan to conduct an investigation of the death of President Kennedy, as David Talbot suggests was likely to have occurred. As Part Three of my essay on Sheridan reiterates, Sheridan was guilty of bribery and blackmail, perjury and the intimidation of witnesses. Among his specialties was the illegal wire tap without a warrant or probable cause. Had Sheridan not been protected by higher authority, he would have spent long years in federal prison for his persistent obstruction of justice. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=10074 Sheridan was, in fact, so impeachable, his crimes well known to so many, that he would have been a detriment to such an investigation. No matter what Sheridan's widow claims, it insults Robert Kennedy's intelligence and political acumen for anyone to believe that he would have set "Walt" loose to investigate his brother's death. In "Brothers," David Talbot eulogizes both Sheridan and Robert Kennedy, a historical cartoon that defies Talbot's fatuous claim that his analysis is "complex." To sanctify Sheridan, as he does, and to ask us to believe that Bobby Kennedy represented a Second Coming, David Talbot had no choice but to destroy, yet again, the character of Jim Garrison. It is painful for me to observe David Talbot's resurrection of the outright lie that Garrison covered up for Louisiana and Texas mobster Carlos Marcello. Whether this preposterous disinformation issues from a former Canadian diplomat or anyone else, it is simply not true, and to repeat it is calumny. If David Talbot had done any research in New Orleans before writing about Jim Garrison, he would have learned that Garrison's office was scrupulous and vigilant in its pursuit of any and all criminals. Consult Milton Brener, who was no fan of either Garrison or his investigation. Ask former United States Attorney John Volz, who later put Carlos Marcello in jail. Talk to William Alford. I wish I could have found a publisher for the 1500 page manuscript I wrote because it contains a detailed description of the Orleans Parish district attorney's office during the Garrison years. Consult also the Garrison office files and Garrison's memo on his consideration of organized crime as the primary sponsor of the Kennedy assassination. As for Jim Garrison's motivation, he entrusted the crime fighting to his able assistants, beginning in 1965. All Garrison cared about was learning what had happened to a beloved President. This was Garrison's sole motivation! If Carlos Marcello had planned the assassination of President Kennedy, if he had been seen traveling around Louisiana with Oswald, for example, Garrison would have said so. If there is complexity to be pondered, it derives from the irony that Jim Garrison profoundly admired President Kennedy, to whom he referred always and fondly as "Jack." Garrison was genuinely perplexed by Bobby Kennedy's efforts to, as Garrison put, "torpedo" his investigation. Garrison knew Sheridan was lying about his claim that he wanted to "find out" what he was up to because Sheridan never requested a meeting with anyone in Garrison's office connected with the investigation. After their meeting, arranged by Richard Billings, Garrison knew that Sheridan was lying when he talked about having come down to New Orleans to investigate the Kennedy assassination. About Sheridan's criminality, Garrison had no doubt. He had in his possession signed affidavits outlining Sheridan's attempts to bribe them and prevent them from testifying for him from both Perry Russo and Marlene Mancuso. Garrison charged Sheridan with petty bribery and the intimidation of witnesses, there being no statute in Louisiana against obstruction of justice at the time. Sheridan then fled Garrison's jurisdiction. Note in the essay in progress below the documents relating to Bobby Kennedy's relationship with Courtney Evans. Pity the land that needs a hero, Brecht said. (I'm paraphrasing). The search for the truth might well be all the spiritual sustenance we need. The elevation of ambitious politicians to sainthood is likely to prove disappointing. If there is a Sherlock out there who would like to help discover where Sidney Goldberg's papers are housed, that would begin a welcome and fruitful addition to this debate. P. S. Let me add that perusing the Internet I discovered a Forum Member writing that my evidence for believing that the Kennedy brothers were pursuing the removal of Fidel Castro was...Angelo Murgado. The individual must not have read my book very carefully. Just to set that record straight: among my sources for the private Kennedy effort against Fidel were not originally Mr. Murgado at all but: 1. the minutes of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; 2. correspondence of General Edward Lansdale; 3. the oral history for the CIA of Sam Halperin; 4. my interview with Ramsey Clark. Mr. Murgado was only confirming what all these sources, and others that don't come to mind right now, had revealed. The Otto Otepka, Robert F. Kennedy, Walter Sheridan and Lee Oswald essay can be found here: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=10074