The Oswald file at CIA

[Larry Hancock]

The reason I asked the question is that I dislike throwing terms like "front company" around casually as much as I dislike tossing out the "mafia" or even the "Cubans"...   The CIA had a host of different relationships with individuals and companies, they had proprietary "front" companies, companies they assigned people to who took jobs there and ran certain matters under business cover, they had partners who simply loaned them assets like aircraft, ships etc and also offered CIA personnel commercial covers, they vetted individual professionals for use if necessary for domestic incidents, they vetted detective agencies for use as covers and to do investigations domestically for them (as the FBI also did), they had commercial fronts who really were independent businesses but gave business transaction covers for leasing, purchases, etc, and they had domestic and off shore banks where they used cover accounts...some with individuals, others with companies.  And that's just part of it. So when I asked about Mullen I really was interested in what the Mullen public relations company was specifically doing for the CIA?  Was it just a matter of Mullen himself having a relationship, did the CIA use his company for species domestic public relations campaigns of some sort? Up to this point in time the only thing solid I have seen is that the company provided "commercial covers" for CIA personnel working abroad - in Europe and the Far East. Which was so common you could find a couple of dozen international companies (probably many more) doing the same thing upon request.  Supporting the CIA against the communist threat was considered to be highly patriotic and many high level business people volunteered their firms to be used as covers or even for intelligence collection. 
 

[B. A. Copeland]

On 6/4/2019 at 9:52 AM, Larry Hancock said:

The reason I asked the question is that I dislike throwing terms like "front company" around casually as much as I dislike tossing out the "mafia" or even the "Cubans"...   The CIA had a host of different relationships with individuals and companies, they had proprietary "front" companies, companies they assigned people to who took jobs there and ran certain matters under business cover, they had partners who simply loaned them assets like aircraft, ships etc and also offered CIA personnel commercial covers, they vetted individual professionals for use if necessary for domestic incidents, they vetted detective agencies for use as covers and to do investigations domestically for them (as the FBI also did), they had commercial fronts who really were independent businesses but gave business transaction covers for leasing, purchases, etc, and they had domestic and off shore banks where they used cover accounts...some with individuals, others with companies.  And that's just part of it. So when I asked about Mullen I really was interested in what the Mullen public relations company was specifically doing for the CIA?  Was it just a matter of Mullen himself having a relationship, did the CIA use his company for species domestic public relations campaigns of some sort? Up to this point in time the only thing solid I have seen is that the company provided "commercial covers" for CIA personnel working abroad - in Europe and the Far East. Which was so common you could find a couple of dozen international companies (probably many more) doing the same thing upon request.  Supporting the CIA against the communist threat was considered to be highly patriotic and many high level business people volunteered their firms to be used as covers or even for intelligence collection. 
 

Just for the record Larry, instead of tossing that term around casually, how would you go about it? (no sarcasm *ever* intended with you :)!

[Larry Hancock]

The best I can recommend is to try and be very specific, in this case rather than just just calling Mullen a CIA front first I'd try to clarify what type  (what services did they provide)...from the choices I gave above.  For starters its pretty clear Mullen was used to provide work/commercial covers for overseas CIA personnel. 

Then I'd suggest digging down and calling out who authorized that for the company, was it Mullen himself?  It appears that there might have been only a handful of senior Mullen administrative managers who know of an agreement with the CIA, who had been vetted and who could give orders inside the company to hire people, assign people etc...knowing the people in question were CIA.  In some instances we have actually found documents which show the relationship between a company and the Agency so you can figure out who the key individuals are....with real commercial companies as compared to media companies the vetted manages were able to not only provide jobs but to authorized cargo on to ships or planes and even route them appropriately, which takes some corporate clout. I've even seen documents relating how a senior company officer volunteered to travel or to send the companie's people on trips to collect open source intelligence through business contacts.

The point of all that would be to figure what Mullen was really doing for the Agency and if it was more than just providing job covers for people going overseas - did they do the same thing domestically,  suggesting Hunt was actually planted inside Mullen with some specific goal in mind.  Or did Mullen do much more, actually functioning to plant domestic news leaks, propaganda etc.  Or as a PR firm were their files used to prospect for CIA favorable (or unfavorable) media outlets. Its easy to figure out the role of lots of commercial "assets",  banks, air transport companies, maritime sales firms - and its often documented in their own operations files (Gary Murr found and shared lots of examples of such commercial assets in his AMWORLD work). 

And who could have made that agreements between the CIA and Mullen. Those sorts of details would really flesh out the story on Hunt....and for all I know somebody had done that and I missed it.  I've read several Watergate books and don't recall that level of detail, but I've not revisited it for some time now. I do find it fascinating that Hunt was apparently preparing and planting what were to be official documents blaming the Diem assassination on JFK personally....was that really his task, or just a Hunt thing. And how would that benefit the CIA to justify all the trouble getting him into the White House to do only that?

Anyway, its the same approach I would try to take in connecting the dots between the Agency and any particular company that appears to have had a relationship with it - in order to understand who provided access and the true role of the "front".

 

[Paul Jolliffe]

On 6/5/2019 at 7:31 PM, Larry Hancock said:

 

And who could have made that agreements between the CIA and Mullen?

 

Well, for starters, I'd take a close look at the man who bought the Robert Mullen Co. in 1971, Robert Bennett. Jim Hougan wrote that Bennett was his most likely candidate for "Deep Throat" until Mark Felt was outed. (Personally, I believe it likely that Bob Woodward used the pseudonym "Deep Throat" as cover for the fact he was getting information from multiple sources within the CIA.)

As Hougan wrote in 2011: "Politically hyper-active during the Nixon Administration, Bennett was also the Washington representative of the Howard Hughes organization (which was just entering negotiations with the CIA over plans to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean’s floor). It was Bennett who suggested that Hunt might want to interview ITT lobbyist Dita Beard, and it was Bennett who volunteered his own nephew to work as an infiltrator at the DNC. One might go on with Bennett’s contributions to the Watergate affair, but the point is made: Bennett was an extremely well-placed source, if not a co-conspirator."

Further:

"That he was also a key source of Bob Woodward’s during the Watergate affair is memorialized in a Memorandum to the Record written by Martin J. Lukoskie, Bennett’s CIA case-officer in 1972 . [The memo was first published in the so-called “Nedzi Hearings” of the House Armed Services Committee’s “Inquiry into the Alleged Involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Watergate and Ellsberg Matters,” which began May 11, 1973. See, also, Secret Agenda, pages 329-31.] According to Lukoskie, Bennett “established a ‘backdoor entry’ to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm which is representing the Democratic Party (and the Washington Post )…” Bennett’s job was to “kill off any revelation” about the Mullen Company’s relationship to the CIA. A second part of his brief was to dissuade reporters from pursuing a ‘Seven Days in May’ scenario” that would have implicated the CIA in a conspiracy to “take over the country.”

Finally:

"The relationship between Bennett and the Post was subsequently clarified by Lukoskie’s CIA boss, Eric Eisenstadt. In a memo to the Deputy Director of Plans, Eisenstadt wrote that Bennett “has been feeding stories to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post with the understanding that there be no attribution to Bennett. Woodward is suitably grateful for the fine stories and by-lines he gets and protects Bennett (and the Mullen Company).” [The memo is dated March 1, 1973.]

It’s enough to make you wonder, though not, apparently, enough to make the press wonder. But this is what the Deep Throat mystery is all about. It’s not just a parlor game to canonize yet another celebrity. Rather, it’s a question of deciding whether or not the Post’s coverage was manipulated by a cabal of spooks who were working to destroy an unpopular president." 

I'd say the answer to Hougan's good question is "Yes, absolutely!"

Note too that the CIA itself took a deep interest in the Washington Post story that claimed that Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee would release testimony that indicated that the CIA recommended E. Howard Hunt's employment at Mullen. (Also look at the intriguing "rumors" that the Hunt recommendation was from Richard Helms himself!) (pages 2 and 3 of the file below.)

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP84-00499R000200010002-2.pdf

 

[Guest]

From the Blunt archives.