New JFK documents reveal assassin’s CIA monitor was Jewish spy Reuben Efron

[Mart Hall]

5 hours ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

 

1. Lt. Col. Efron knew the real name of the Central Intelligence Agency-controlled HTLINGUAL "cabinet noir" operation's Counterintelligence code-name for looking at Lee Harvey Oswald's mail, "6lGlOAK." 

 

4. Lt. Col. Efron had the operational knowledge to relay the report the Oswald-bound letter directly to Deputy Chief of Counterintelligence, United States Army Lt. Col. Raymond George Rocca—tells me that he was directly debriefed that there was a special access program (we now know the code-name, "6lGlOAK,") specifically targeting Lee Harvey Oswald.

 

No, Mr. Larsen, it appears that United States Army Lt. Col. Reuben Efron was not some low-level card-puncher—he had very target specific knowledge of sensitive CIA Counterintelligence programs, the identity of the targeted individual (Oswald), code-name of program ("6lGlOAK"), and the superior officers involved (CI/SIG officer Ann Egerter & DC/CI Lt. Col. Raymond Rocca).

 

   

Robert, I have only spent a few hours studying these references so I don't want to sound in any way like I am attempting to pass myself off as an expert on the matter, but I think you may have misunderstood the reference "61G10AK". This is not a code name of the program but a reference given to a single piece of mail that had been intercepted. 

Joe Backes provided a link a few weeks ago to a folder containing HTLINGUAL files on Oswald.

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=55323#relPageId=36&search=61g10ak

 

The folder contains a number of mail intercepts with references: 

62L11A (62 is the year of the mail, L is the corresponding month of the mail (11th letter of alphabet, November)

62C05A (March 62)

63E22U (May 63) (Erick to Marina)

63A24W (Jan 63) (Galina to Marina)

61G10AK (July 61) (Marguerite to Lee)

64J22BM (Sep 64) (Marina to Galina)

After the year and month, I think that the next digit in the reference is possibly to identify an individual (2 being Marina) but without seeing more mail and references I would not say that is anyway certain. 

 

The format of these references were not just used to record the Oswald's mail, on page 130 of the file you can see references to mail from May 1958, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Gerry Down]

9 minutes ago, Mart Hall said:

Robert, I have only spent a few hours studying these references so I don't want to sound in any way like I am attempting to pass myself off as an expert on the matter, but I think you may have misunderstood the reference "61G10AK". This is not a code name of the program but a reference given to a single piece of mail that had been intercepted. 

Joe Backes provided a link a few weeks ago to a folder containing HTLINGUAL files on Oswald.

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=55323#relPageId=36&search=61g10ak

 

The folder contains a number of mail intercepts with references: 

62L11A (62 is the year of the mail, L is the corresponding month of the mail (11th letter of alphabet, November)

62C05A (March 62)

63E22U (May 63) (Erick to Marina)

63A24W (Jan 63) (Galina to Marina)

61G10AK (July 61) (Marguerite to Lee)

64J22BM (Sep 64) (Marina to Galina)

After the year and month, I think that the next digit in the reference is possibly to identify an individual (2 being Marina) but without seeing more mail and references I would not say that is anyway certain. 

 

The format of these references were not just used to record the Oswald's mail, on page 130 of the file you can see references to mail from May 1958, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for this helpful post.

[Gerry Down]

6 hours ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

Aah, I see Mr. Koch, I stand corrected—you are not anti-Jewish—you are just a destructive provocateur with a kindergarten sense of humor that likes tormenting people's social ethics and logic based on historical empirical fact.

 

My apologies, I owe you an ass. 

 

Well, have fun I guess—a word of advice: the girls on the playground really don't like it when you pull their hair, & boogers are for tissue paper, not the underside of the desk...

 

 

 

 

You're embryonic observations are correct, Mr. Larsen—the name of the officer specifically tasked with opening up Lee Harvey Oswald's mail while in the Soviet Union under the Central Intelligence Agency-controlled HTLINGUAL "cabinet noir" operation is the only thing that is new, as this operation was already known going back to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970's.

 

However, the military intelligence background of CIA sheep-dipped, United States Army Lt. Col. Reuben Efron (birth name Ruvelis Effronas) is a matter of supreme importance.

 

Unfortunately, there is very little on United States Army Lt. Col. Reuben Efron, other than the fact that his family fled Nazi Germany in 1939, he served in the United States Army Air Forces during WWII as an interpreter, was later a military attaché to rabidly pro-segregationist Democratic senator Richard Brevard Russell Jr. during the senator's 1955 trip to the Soveit Union (where the two men witnessed a "flying saucer"), and in 1971, then retired Lt. Col. Efron urged then US President Richard Milhous Nixon not to secure a détente with the Soveit Union concerning the Egyptian-Israeli border crisis. 

 

Considering that Lt. Col. Reuben Efron was military attaché to rabidly pro-segregationist Democratic senator Richard Russell and he urged then US President Richard Nixon not to secure a détente with the Soveit Union concerning the Egyptian-Israeli border crisis, I personally think that gives us a glimpse into Lt. Col. Efron's political spectrum—Lt. Col. Efron had no problem with serving directly under a man promoting racist segregationist domestic policies and took a destructive, anti-communist, pro-Zionist stance when it came to the 1971 Egyptian-Israeli border conflict.

 

A man after Allen Welsh Dulles' own dark heart, to be sure...

 

 

 

• https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=234516#relPageId=1&search=Reuben_Efron

 

It appears, Mr. Larsen, that United States Army Lt. Col. Reuben Efron was no low-level paper-pusher—according to the above linked document, Lt. Col. Efron had operational knowledge of four very important things:

 

1. Lt. Col. Efron knew the real name of the Central Intelligence Agency-controlled HTLINGUAL "cabinet noir" operation's Counterintelligence code-name for looking at Lee Harvey Oswald's mail, "6lGlOAK." 

 

2. Lt. Col. Efron knew the real name of CIA Directorate of Plans (DDP) Action Officer Ann Egerter of the CIA Counterintelligence Special Investigations Group (CI/SIG) and that CI/SIG officer Egerter was concerned about Lee Harvey Oswald in a Counterintelligence capacity.

 

3. Lt. Col. Efron had the operational wherewithal to not only recognize Lee Harvey Oswald by name, but Lt. Col. Efron was debriefed that Lee Harvey Oswald was important to the Deputy Chief of Counterintelligence, United States Army Lt. Col. Raymond George Rocca. 

 

4. Lt. Col. Efron had the operational knowledge to relay the report the Oswald-bound letter directly to Deputy Chief of Counterintelligence, United States Army Lt. Col. Raymond George Rocca—tells me that he was directly debriefed that there was a special access program (we now know the code-name, "6lGlOAK,") specifically targeting Lee Harvey Oswald.

 

No, Mr. Larsen, it appears that United States Army Lt. Col. Reuben Efron was not some low-level card-puncher—he had very target specific knowledge of sensitive CIA Counterintelligence programs, the identity of the targeted individual (Oswald), code-name of program ("6lGlOAK"), and the superior officers involved (CI/SIG officer Ann Egerter & DC/CI Lt. Col. Raymond Rocca).

 

Now, does any of this information indicate that United States Army Lt. Col. Reuben Efron had anything to do with murdering President Kennedy?

 

No, it does not.

 

   

There's a fatal flaw in your logic. If you read the Efron document, Efron seems to think his superiors are so clueless about LHO that he actually had to go through the files to pick out info on him, a letter his mother wrote, which the memo presumed his superiors don't know about.

Efron therefore assumes LHO was of such little interest to CI that they would not have already been aware of that letter.

[Robert Montenegro]

3 hours ago, Mart Hall said:

Robert, I have only spent a few hours studying these references so I don't want to sound in any way like I am attempting to pass myself off as an expert on the matter, but I think you may have misunderstood the reference "61G10AK". This is not a code name of the program but a reference given to a single piece of mail that had been intercepted. 

Joe Backes provided a link a few weeks ago to a folder containing HTLINGUAL files on Oswald.

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=55323#relPageId=36&search=61g10ak

 

The folder contains a number of mail intercepts with references: 

62L11A (62 is the year of the mail, L is the corresponding month of the mail (11th letter of alphabet, November)

62C05A (March 62)

63E22U (May 63) (Erick to Marina)

63A24W (Jan 63) (Galina to Marina)

61G10AK (July 61) (Marguerite to Lee)

64J22BM (Sep 64) (Marina to Galina)

After the year and month, I think that the next digit in the reference is possibly to identify an individual (2 being Marina) but without seeing more mail and references I would not say that is anyway certain. 

 

The format of these references were not just used to record the Oswald's mail, on page 130 of the file you can see references to mail from May 1958, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fascinating—well, I stand corrected, thank you—no matter how long I study these CIA documents, I always end up learning something new.

[Robert Montenegro]

3 hours ago, Gerry Down said:

Thanks for this helpful post.

Same here—thank you for the correction.

[Robert Montenegro]

3 hours ago, Gerry Down said:

There's a fatal flaw in your logic. If you read the Efron document, Efron seems to think his superiors are so clueless about LHO that he actually had to go through the files to pick out info on him, a letter his mother wrote, which the memo presumed his superiors don't know about.

Efron therefore assumes LHO was of such little interest to CI that they would not have already been aware of that letter.

I'm not so sure that we can deduce such a dramatic didactic between Lt. Col. Efron and his superiors lack of knowledge of a target–specific, special–access project concerning Mr. Lee Oswald's to & from correspondence.

 

Quite to the contrary—it appears Lt. Col. Efron knows CI/SIG Action Officer Ann Egerter is involved in a special–access, eyes–only counterintelligence project concerning Mr. Oswald's mail—as a point of fact, Professor Peter Dale Scott, NSA officer Maj. John Newman, Bill Simpich are all of the concensus that Mr. Oswald's mail was being intercepted by CIA back when he was stationed in Atsugi, Japan.

 

Plus, the fact that Lt. Col. Efron is aware of CIA Counterintelligence, Special Inveatigations Group interest in Mr. Oswald is so telling that Lt. Col. Efron has been debreifed—how else would he know to reach out to them?

 

That's just how I interpret the syntax of the document—take it for what it is worth...

 

Edited August 6, 2023 by Robert Montenegro

[Gerry Down]

9 minutes ago, Robert Montenegro said:

Quite to the contrary—it appears Lt. Col. Efron knows CI/SIG Action Officer Ann Egerter is involved in a special–access, eyes–only counterintelligence project concerning Mr. Oswald's mail

That's jumping to a conclusion. Ann Egerter might simply be the point person in the CI department for HTLINGUAL documents into the CI department.  The Efron memo says the FBI would also be interested in this in addition to Ann Egerter. If Efron thought the CIA were using LHO in some kind of secret counterintelligence operation, they would not want the FBI to know about it. The CIA did not like sharing details of high level operations with the FBI. The mention of FBI at the end tends to suggest Efron views the issue as a simple routine checking up on a redefector coming back into the country. 

[Tom Gram]

5 hours ago, Mart Hall said:

Robert, I have only spent a few hours studying these references so I don't want to sound in any way like I am attempting to pass myself off as an expert on the matter, but I think you may have misunderstood the reference "61G10AK". This is not a code name of the program but a reference given to a single piece of mail that had been intercepted. 

Joe Backes provided a link a few weeks ago to a folder containing HTLINGUAL files on Oswald.

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=55323#relPageId=36&search=61g10ak

 

The folder contains a number of mail intercepts with references: 

62L11A (62 is the year of the mail, L is the corresponding month of the mail (11th letter of alphabet, November)

62C05A (March 62)

63E22U (May 63) (Erick to Marina)

63A24W (Jan 63) (Galina to Marina)

61G10AK (July 61) (Marguerite to Lee)

64J22BM (Sep 64) (Marina to Galina)

After the year and month, I think that the next digit in the reference is possibly to identify an individual (2 being Marina) but without seeing more mail and references I would not say that is anyway certain. 

 

The format of these references were not just used to record the Oswald's mail, on page 130 of the file you can see references to mail from May 1958, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does anyone have good unredacted copies of the actual HTLINGUAL work product that was withheld from the WC? I haven’t looked in a while, but the only stuff I have looks like this: 

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=145505#relPageId=53

These illegible black blobs are the Nov. 62 envelopes from Marina where she used Alex Kleinlehrer’s post office box and 602 Elsbeth St. as a return address. 

The other letters, envelopes, etc. in this copy from the FBI Oswald HQ file on MFF contain several redactions. I’m sure it’s all released in full now, but it’d be nice to have a copy of this stuff that doesn’t look like complete ass. 

[Robert Montenegro]

2 hours ago, Gerry Down said:

That's jumping to a conclusion. Ann Egerter might simply be the point person in the CI department for HTLINGUAL documents into the CI department.

 

Well, as I stated, it's not my conclusion, it's Maj. John Newman's.

 

In any case, even if Lt. Col. Efron had not been debriefed on a counterintellignce project targeting Mr. Oswald (which would really simplify his narrative to being that of an administor, and not a covert operative), he still knew to contact a member of CI/SIG, which is an interesting insight into the day-to-day operational structure of CIA proper.

 

Could it be that the bulk of the Counterintelligence officers in Mexico City serving under Winston Scott were not nefarious in their intent, and were just preforming regular day-to-day functions?

 

That would really simplify the narrative surrounding President Kennedy's murder...

 

   

Edited August 6, 2023 by Robert Montenegro

[Mart Hall]

On 8/5/2023 at 3:00 PM, W. Tracy Parnell said:

Jefferson Morley's Claims about Reuben Efron (onthetrailofdelusion.com)

I read through the Litwin article (out of interest). I don't wish to discuss the "Claims" Morley made that are "refuted" by so-called "facts" from Litwin, but it did lead me to the following WC exchange, regarding arrangements for Marina's testimony and provided me with a wry smile. 

Sen Russell: What interpreter have you arranged to have?

Rankin: We have asked the State Department to furnish one and they have said they would do so. And we also are going to have a man from the Secret Service here who has been talking to her and translated everything so we could be sure about anything she said we wouldn't have to rely on just one person. 

Sen Russell: There is a fellow here named Rueben Efron who is one of the best that I ever saw.

Rankin: Is he with the State Department?

Sen Russell: Do you know him, Mr Dulles? [a small clue that Russell knew Efron was CIA]

Dulles: I don't think I do.

The Chairman: Senator, is he with the Statement Department?

Sen Russell: No Sir. 

 

Senator Russell's next comment is "Has it ever been determined whether he (Oswald) could drive an automobile or not?" 

Lets move it on and not disclose that Efron is CIA. 

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=98219#relPageId=83

 

 

 

 

 

[Matthew Koch]

15 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Thanks BC - this is a great interview with Talbot, who wrote one of the books mr. Koch should read, the Devil's Chessboard. 

Read it when it came out, I thought Brothers was a better book but I didn't like the left bias Talbot has. I thought the first 3rd was really boring and it reminded me alot of Anne Jacobson's Paper clip book. Here's my notes: 

The Devils Chessboard

By David Talbot 2015

 

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall

make you free.

-THE INSCRIPTION CHOSEN BY ALLEN DULLES FOR 
THE LOBBY OF CIA HEADQUARTERS, FROM 
JOHN 8:31-32 –P.x

 

T hat little Kennedy ... he thought he was a god."

The words were sharp and wrong, like a curse shattering the civility of the soft evening air. They seemed particularly strange com­ing from the genial older gentleman strolling by Willie Morris's side. In fact, they were the only strident remarks that Morris had heard him utter in the past few days, as the graying spymaster regaled his young visitor with a lifetime of covert adventures.

And then the storm passed. The man was himself again—the chatty and amiable Allen Welsh Dulles, a man whose conviviality masked a world of dark secrets. The two men continued their walk on that In­dian summer evening in 1965, ambling along the rust-colored brick sidewalks as the lampposts began casting their yellow light on pictur­esque Georgetown—home of Washington hostesses, martini-loving spies, influential newspapermen, and the assorted insiders who fed off the fizz and sizzle of the nation's capital. Turning the corner from the unassuming, two-story brick mansion on Q Street that Dulles rented, they now found themselves on R Street, straddling the vast greenery of the Dumbarton Oaks estate. –P.1

. The Failed invasion­, Dulles said, was "the blackest day of my life."

In public, the newly minted president, John F. Kennedy, took responsi­bility for the fiasco and made gracious remarks about Dulles as he prepared to usher the aging spy out the door, after a half century of public service encompassing eight different presidencies. But in private, a vicious war had begun between the Kennedy and Dulles camps, with the two men and their advocates working the press and arguing not just the botched me­chanics of the invasion, but the past and future of U.S. foreign policy.

The Bay of Pigs came after a long string of Dulles victories. Given free rein by President Eisenhower to police the world against any in­surgent threat to U.S. dominion, Dulles's CIA overthrew nationalist governments in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, and even targeted troublesome leaders in allied European countries. Dulles called mself "the secretary of state for unfriendly countries"—which had an ominous ring when one took note of what happened to unfriendly countries in the American Century. Meanwhile, his brother John Fos­ter Dulles—Eisenhower's official secretary of state—brought the gloom of a doomsday-obsessed vicar to his job, with his frequent sermons on Communist perfidy and his constant threats of nuclear annihilation. John Foster Dulles needed Communism the way that Puritans needed sin, the infamous British double agent Kim Philby once remarked. With his long, dour face topped by his ever-present banker's homburg, the elder Dulles always seemed to be on the brink of foreclosing on all human hope and happiness. –P. 2

The Dulles brothers were not intimidated by mere presidents. When President Franklin Roosevelt pushed through New Deal legislation to restrain the rampant greed and speculation that had brought the coun­try to economic ruin, John Foster Dulles simply gathered his corporate clients in his Wall Street law office and urged them to defy the pres­ent. "Do not comply," he told them. "Resist the law with all your

_...might, and soon everything will be all right."

Later, when Allen Dulles served as the United States' top spy in con­tinental Europe during World War II, he blatantly ignored Roosevelt's policy of unconditional surrender and pursued his own strategy of se­cret negotiations with Nazi leaders. The staggering sacrifice made by the Russian people in the war against Hitler meant little to Dulles. –P. 4

By October 1963, Dulles felt confident enough to speak out against Kennedy's foreign policy in public, ignoring the Washington etiquette that deemed is bad form to criticize a president whom you recently had served. Dulles declared that the Kennedy presidency suffered from a

yearning to be loved by the rest of the world." This "weakness" was not e mark of a global power, insisted Dulles. "I should much prefer to have people respect us than to try to make them love us."

In the weeks leading up to the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, the flurry of meetings at Dulles's home in­tensified. Among the CIA men coming in and out of Q Street were several who later came under investigation by the House Select Com­mittee on Assassinations and other probes for their possible connection to the president's murder. And on the weekend of the assassination, Dulles hunkered down for unexplained reasons at a secret CIA facility in northern Virginia known as "the Farm," despite the fact that he had been removed from the agency two years earlier. Such was the odd swirl of activity around the "retired" Dulles. –P. 8

Throughout his life, Allen Dulles was slow to feel the distress of others. As a father, his daughter Joan would recall, Dulles seemed to regard his children with a curious remoteness, as if they were visitors in his house. Even his son and namesake Allen Jr. made little impact on him when he excelled in prep school and at Oxford, or later, in the Korean War, when the young man was struck in the head by a mortar shell fragment and suffered brain damage. Clover Dulles called her col and driven husband "The Shark." –P.39

In truth, while Dulles punctually showed up for work at Sullivan _and Cromwell each morning, he never retired from the intelligence game. No sooner had he resumed his life in New York than he began taking a leadership role in prestigious organizations and placing himsel at the center of postwar political debates. At the end of 1945, Dulles was elected president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group whose membership of prominent businessmen and policy makers played a key role in shaping the emerging Cold War consensus. Dulles would huddle with his colleagues in a soundproof room at the council's headquarters on the Upper East Side as if he were already running the robust new spy agency that he envisioned.

Dulles's stubborn insistence on staying in the middle of the post­war action paid off. In April 1947, he was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to present his ideas for a strong, centralized intel­ligence agency. His memo would help frame the legislation that gave birth to the CIA later that year. –P.145

 

As Journalist David Halberstam later observed, “The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in th open. This was not just an isolated phenomenon but part of something larger going on in colossus. A true democracy had no need for a vast, secret security apparatus, but an imperial country did…. What was evolving was a closed state within an open state.” –P. 205

 

In truth, the CIA became an effective killing machine under Dulles. Allen Dulles was an assassination enthusiast throughout his espionage career, from the days of his involvement in the Operation Valkyrie plot against Hitler onward. Later in his career, any nationalist leader who seemed a problem for U.S. interests was viewed as fair game. During the 1957 Suez crisis, as a group of foreign policy officials and com­mentators gathered for dinner at the Washington home of Walter Lipp­mann, the conversation turned to Egypt's defiant leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. One of the guests jested, "Allen, can't you find an assassin?" To the group's amazement, Dulles took the comment in dead seriousness. "Well, first you would need a fanatic, a man who'd be willing to kill himself if he were caught," said the spymaster, puffing thoughtfully on his pipe. "And he couldn't be an outsider. He'd have to be an Arab. It would be very difficult to find just the right man." –P. 248

 

Ironically, the Doolittle Report gave Dulles even more justification for his remorseless shadow war by concluding, "It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world dom­ination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rule_,

in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply." Dulles could not have put it more zealously himself.

Dulles's CIA operated with virtually no congressional oversight. In the Senate, Dulles relied on Wall Street friends like Prescott Bush of Connecticut—the father and grandfather of two future presidents—to protect the CIA's interests. –P. 249

 

In one of the declassified documents, an unnamed CIA official ex­pressed his confidence on the eve of the Guatemala coup that "the elimi­nation of those in high positions of the [Arbenzl government would bring about its collapse." Another document—a chillingly detailed, nineteeAl page CIA killing manual titled "A Study of Assassination"—offered the!". most efficient ways to butcher Guatemala's leadership. "The simplest tools are often the most efficient means of assassination," the manual help­fully suggested. "A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice." The manual also advised assassins which parts of the body to strike for the most lethal effect, noting that "puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. . . . Absolute reliability is ob­^tained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region." –P. 263

 

But the real body count in Guatemala started after the invasion, when the CIA-backed regime of Castillo Armas began to "clean" the nation of political undesirables, labor organizers, and peasants who had too eagerly embraced Arbenz's land reforms. It was the beginning of a blood-soaked era that would transform Guatemala into one of the twentieth century's most infamous killing fields. The "stainless" coup, as some of its CIA engineers liked to call it, would actually result in a tide of gore, including assassinations, rampant torture and executions, death squad mayhem, and the massacres of entire villages. By the time

the bloodletting had run its course, four decades later, over 250,00./people had been killed in a nation whose total population was less than four million when the reign of terror began. –P. 262

 

Gehlen was deeply grateful to Dulles, whom he code-named "The Gentleman," for his unflaggin_g support. "In all the years of my _collab^­oration with the CIA, I had no personal disputes with Dulles," Gehlen wrote in his memoir. " –P. 276

 

Angelton confided to journalist Joseph Trento near the end of his life. “You know how I got to be in charge of w be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends. They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler's pals would come out." –P. 334

 

Dulles and Angleton shared a disdain for Washington bureaucracy and for the governmental oversight that comes with a functioning dem­ocratic system. Later, in the post-Watergate '70s, when the Church Committee opened its probe of CIA lawbreaking, Angleton was called to account for himself. As he completed his testimony, the Gray Ghost rose from his chair, and, thinking he was now off the record, muttered, it. is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has Xo comply with all the overt orders of the government." It was a concise articulation of the Angleton philosophy; in his mind, CIA overseers were a priestly caste that, because the fate of the nation had been placed in its hands, must be allowed to operate unfettered and above the law.

"Allen wasn't red-tape and neither was daddy," said Siri Hari. "You know, back then, people were much more interesting. ... I don't think it was a case of resenting bureaucracy, because the bureaucracy just never came that close to them anyway, so why would they resent it? They probably just felt, you know, a little beyond it, a little above it." –P. 336

 

 

But there had been many changes over the following year, as Castro moved to deliver on the promise of the revolution, nationalizing the sugar and oil industries, and beginning to transform Cuba from a vassal state of the United States to a sovereign nation. By early 1960, Dulles had resolved the debate within his intelligence agency over Castro's true identity, deciding that he was a dedicated Communist and a serious threat to U.S. security. The CIA director's hardening line mirrored that of friends in the business world like William Pawley, the globetrotting entrepreneur whose major investments in Cuban sugar plantations and Havana's municipal transportation system were wiped out by Castro's revolution. One of a coterie of vigorously anti-Communist interna­tional businessmen who provided the CIA with foreign information and contacts, as well as guns and money, Pawley began lobbying the Eisenhower administration to take an aggressive stand against Castro when he was still fighting Batista's soldiers in the rugged peaks of the Sierra Maestra. After Fidel rode into Havana on a tank in January 1959, Pawley, who was gripped by what Eisenhower called a "pathological hatred for Castro," even volunteered to pay for his assassination. As the Eisenhower administration took an increasingly belligerent posture

action, the Castro regime, Pawley found himself at the center of the action, boasting that he was "in daily touch with Allen Dulles." –P. 340

 

As Castro prepared to return home at the end of his tumultuous week in New York, he gave a spirited press conference at the airport. Why was the Cuban delegation departing on a Soviet jet, a reporter shouted? Because the United States had impounded all of Cuba's airliners as a result of claims against his government, he responded. What do you want us to do?" Castro asked plaintively. "You leave us without petroleum—Khrushchev gives us petroleum. You [cut] our sugar [imports]—Khrushchev buys our sugar. . . . You take away our planes—Khrushchev gives us his plane."

The CIA knew what it wanted Castro to do. Shortly after the Cuban leader arrived home in Havana, as he addressed a teeming crowd from the balcony of the Presidential Palace, a bomb went off in the park be­hind the palace, followed by a second explosion within the hour. Later in the day, a third bomb—more powerful than the other two—rocked Havana. The CIA^-sponsored terror campaign aimed at killing Castro and destroying his government was quickly escalating. –P. 348

 

America could not continue to inspire the world, Kennedy went on, unless it "practiced what it preaches" at home. "If a Negro baby is born here and a white baby is born next door, the Negro baby's chance of finishing high school is about 60 percent of the white baby. This baby's chance of getting through college is about a third of that baby's. His chance of being unemployed is four times that baby's." All that must change, JFK told the audience. "White people are a minority in the world," he said. They could no longer hold back the dreams of the res of the world. Kennedy vowed that if he were elected, he would alig America with the winds of change. "I believe it is important that the president of the United States personify the ideals of our society, speak out on this, associate ourselves with the great fight for equality."

In the next three years, as Cuba became the flaming focal point of U.S. foreign policy, Kennedy would continue to wrestle with his rela­tionship to Castro and the revolutionary change that he represented. As president, JFK's posture on Cuba gradually softened, with the White House inching awkwardly toward a state of peaceful coexistence with the neighbor whom Kennedy once called "dangerous." The fitful pro­cess of rapprochement with Cuba would set off a turbulent reaction in Washington, particularly within the national security circles still dominated by Dulles hard-liners. In these men's minds, it was not just Havana that loomed as a hotbed of dangerous ideas, it was the Kennedy White House. –P. 351

By April 1954, when Kennedy stood up on the Senate floor to chal­lenge the Eisenhower administration's support for the doomed French war in Vietnam, he had become an informed critic of Western impe­rialism. Even as France headed toward its Waterloo at Dien Bien Phu that spring, the Eisenhower administration insisted that massive U.S. military aid and firepower could help turn the tide for the embattled French forces. But, as Kennedy told the U.S. Senate, "to pour money, materiel and men into the jungle of Indochina . . . would be danger­ously futile and self-destructive." The young senator had a much firmer grasp of the realities of national insurgencies than Eisenhower and his aging secretary of state. "I am frankly of the belief that no amount

of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, 'an enemy of the people' which has the sympathy and covert support of the people." History would soon prove him right. –P. 361

 

 

Dulles was confident enough that the Dulles era would continue under JFK that he made boasts to that effect on the Washington din­ner parry circuit, within full earshot of Kennedy loyalists. Shortly after Kennedy took office, the painter William Walton, a close friend of JFK and Jackie, found himself at a gathering at Walter Lippmann's house where Dulles was a fellow guest. "After dinner, the men sat around

"awhile in an old-fashioned way, and [Dulles] started boasting that he was still carrying out his brother Foster's foreign policy. He said, you know, that's a much better policy. I've chosen to follow that one." Wal­ton, who loathed the CIA boss, couldn't believe Dulles's audacity. The spymaster knew that Walton was one of Kennedy's inner circle, but he felt no need to hold his tongue. Dulles was clearly sending the new pres^­ident a message—and Kennedy's close friend duly delivered it. Early the next morning, Walton phoned JFK at the White House and reported what Dulles had told Lippmann and his guests. "God damn it!" swor^e Kennedy. "Did he really say that?" –P. 374

Dulles, Doug Dillon (then serving as a State Department and secretary), and William Burden, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, le _the charge within the Eisenhower administration to first demonize and then dispose of Lumumba. All three men had financial interests in the Congo. The Dillon family's investment bank handled the Congo's bond issues. Dulles's old law firm represented the American Metal Company (later AMAX), a mining giant with holdings in the Congo, and Dulles was friendly with the company's chairman, Harold Hochschild, and his brother and successor, Walter, who served in the OSS during the war. Ambassador Burden was a company director, and Frank Taylor Ostrander Jr., a former U.S. intelligence official, served the Hochschil brothers as a political adviser. –P. 377

 

"We want no part of the Cold War," Lumumba declared. "We want Africa CO remain African with a policy of neutralism." But in the Dulles _worldview, there was no such thing as neutrality. And anyone who pro­fessed such notions belonged to the enemy camp. At a July 22, 1960, National Security Council meeting in the Eisenhower White House—just three weeks after Lumumba's independence day speech—Dulles denounced the Congolese leader as "a Castro or worse. . . . It is safe to go on the assumption that Lumumba has been bought by the Commu­nists."

Doug Dillon strongly backed Dulles's distraught view of Lumumbi as a Soviet accomplice. It was an alarmist view calculated to convince Eisenhower that the African leader had to be terminated. As it turned out, the president required little persuasion. By the summer of 1960, Ike was sick, tired, and cranky—and he had little patience or understand­ing for Third World freedom struggles. Conferring with the British foreign minister Lord Home, Eisenhower quipped that he hoped "Lu­mumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles." At an NSC meeting in August 1960, Eisenhower gave Dulles direct approval to "eliminate" Lumumba. Robert Johnson, the minutes taker at the NSC meeting, later recalled the shock felt in the room: "There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued." Johnson said there was nothing ambiguous about Eisenhower's lethal order. "1 was sur­prised that I would ever hear a president say anything like this in my presence or the presence of a group of people. I was startled."

Over the next several months, the CIA, working with its allies in Belgian intelligence, engineered a military coup led by a cocky, ruth­less, twenty-nine-year-old colonel named Joseph Mobutu that forced Lumumba out of office and placed him under house arrest. –P. 379

 

Dulles told an NSC meeting on September 21, 1960, "as long as he 
was not yet disposed of." Three days later, Dulles made it dear that he 
wanted Lumumba permanently removed, cabling the CINs Leopold-

"le station, "We wish give [sic] every possible support in eliminating 
Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position."

Washington ascribed a kind of witchcraft-like power to Lumumba. Dulles marveled at the man's political survival skills, and Dillon was amazed at his powers of persuasion. "He had this tremendous ability to stir up a crowd or a group," said Dillon. "And if he could have gotten out and started to talk to a battalion of the Congolese Army, he proba­bly would have had them in the palm of his hand in five minutes."

To prevent that from happening, the CIA recruited two cutthroats from the European criminal underworld, whom they code-named QJ­WIN and WI-ROGUE. These Tweedledum and Tweedledee assassins were such loathsome mercenaries that even their CIA handlers found them "unsavory." ROGUE was the kind of morally unhinged man "who would try anything once, at least," said his agency supervisors, untrou­bled by the "pangs of conscience." While ROGUE went about trying to organize an "execution squad" to kill Lumumba, WIN focused on penetrating the protective ring of UN troops that encircled the house where the Congolese leader was in custody. QJ-WIN had been supplied with a tube of poison toothpaste, which had been delivered to the CIA station in Leopoldville by Sidney Gottlieb, the agency's wizard of tox­ins. Dr. Ewen Cameron, of the notorious Allan Institute, had analyzed Lumumba at the CIA's request and determined that he must brush his teeth regularly, since they looked gleaming white in photos. Therefore, Ewen assured Dulles, chemically altered dental products were the key to getting rid of Lumumba. –P. 380

 

In fact, Devlin appears to have been more a driver of the action lead­i_ng to Lumumba's death than a participant. On January 17, 1961—three days before Kennedy's inauguration—Lumumba was taken from his jail all and hustled onto a Belgian' chartered plane. Congolese authorities took this action under strong pressure from Devlin, who was the king­maker behind the Mobutu regime. With Devlin's full knowledge, Lu­mumba was then flown to Katanga, a mineral-rich province that had bro­ken away from the Congo and was run by violent enemies of Lumumba. The CIA station chief later acknowledged that Lumumba's transfer to

Katanga amounted to a death sentence. "I think there was a general  sumption, once we learned that he had been sent to Katanga, that h goose was cooked," Devlin told the Church Committee years later.

Devlin knew of Lumumba's imminent transfer by January 14, three days ahead of time. But he did nothing to inform Washington until Janu­ary 17, when Lumumba was already well on the way to his doom. Devlin knew that cabling Washington risked tipping off Africa policy makers in the incoming Kennedy administration, who likely would have intervened to save Lumumba. By keeping quiet, Devlin sealed Lumumba's fate.

Larry Devlin was no rogue agent—he was an up-and-coming in­telligence officer whose Congo exploits had won glowing marks back at CIA headquarters. The Congo station chief's decision to keep Lu­mumba's fate quiet until it was too late to do anything about it was clearly made in consultation with his supervisors. Devlin suffered no agency reprimands for his actions in the Congo, and, in fact, his in­telligence career continued to thrive after Lumumba's demise. Before retirin_g from the CIA in 1974, to pursue a new career in the Congo's lucrative diamond industry, Devlin rose to become chief of the CIA's Africa Division. –P. 385

 

This promise did not come true for the Congo. The mourners at Lu­mumba's wake knew how profound a loss it was, and what it meant for their nation. "There is nothing for us CO do now," muttered Lumumba's brother-in-law. "He is gone. There is no one to take his place."

With one of Africa's brightest lights extinguished, the Congo slid into an endless nightmare of tyranny and corruption. Propped up by the United States, Mobutu began a thirty-two-year dictatorship that looted the country of its wealth and left the nation in ruins. In his ram­pant thievery, Mobutu modeled himself on King Leopold. So smug was the dictator in his ironfisted rule that he declared Lumumba a national

The CIA officials responsible for Lumumba's murder also

hero, a sick joke that only he could afford to enjoy.

a change of heart about the man who had once haunted their days. In 1962, shortly after Dulles's departure from the CIA, he remarked, "I think we overrated the Soviet danger, let's say, in the Congo." And Devlin, for his part, insisted he had never thought Lumumba's assassi­nation was essential to U.S. security: "I didn't regard Lumumba as the kind of person who was going to bring on World War III," he later told the Church Committee. These expressions of remorse—if they can be called that—came far too late for the man who was the hope of the Congo. –P. 389

 

Some explained that his absence was part of his modus operandi—he was in the habit of leaving Washington on the _eve of critical missions to make it seem as if nothing significant was about to occur. Dulles himself airily dismissed his strangely timed Puerto Rico trip. He had planned the Young Presidents speaking engagem_ent months before, he explained, and if he had canceled at the last minute, it would have created suspicions. Besides, he added, "I knew I could get back with the speed of aircraft; it was only a question of six or eight hours." But the CIA's own official history of the Cuba fiasco, prepared in the late 1970s and early '80s, concluded that Dulles's absence was inexcusable." Dulles, the report added, "was the one man who might have persuaded the president to permit the D-Day [air] strike."

Some of the sharpest criticisms of the Bay of Pigs operation, in fact, came from within the CIA itself. Dick Drain was among those who later aimed fire at Dulles, when he spoke with Jack Pfeiffer, the CIA historian who prepared the voluminous report on the Bay of Pigs. Drain was a Bung ho officer who fit the agency profile, right down to mem­bership in Yale's secretive Skull and Bones society (Class of '43). But years after he picked up Dulles at the Baltimore airport, Drain vented about the agency's handling of the doomed Cuba enterprise. He was as­tounded by the poor quality of the staff assigned to the high-stakes Bay of Pigs operation, Drain told Pfeiffer, despite Dulles's insistence that it would be run by the agency's best and brightest. "Allen Dulles, always meaning what he said, would say repeatedly, 'Now I want the very best people assigned to this project. There is nothing more important that we are doing than this. . . . I want people pulled our of tours overseas if necessary, this thing must be manned.' " –P. 396

had no Spanish language whatsoever, and my entity oposure had been punching cows in Arizona in 1940. That doesdN_. rall_y bring you up much on Latin America and Latinos, and any of _ch_ar. I had never been on amphibious operations, and if that was char­acteristic of my qualifications, it really characterized the whole damn operation—about which, it seemed to me, there was a good deal of

Well-meaning hypocrisy."

Drain's criticisms of the enterprise echoed those in an earlier CI< report, the damning internal investigation carried out by the agency's i_nspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, in the months immediately fol­lowing the disaster. The Kirkpatrick Report, one of the most surpris­ingly honest self-evaluations ever produced within the CIA, found that despite Dulles's insistence on "high-quality personnel," the Bay of Pigs operation was staffed largely by the agency's losers. According to CIA files, seventeen of the forty-two officers assigned to the operation were ranked in the lowest third of the agency, and nine were ranked in the lowest tenth. The IG's report concluded that Dulles had allowed his division chiefs to dump "their disposal cases" on the Cuba project. C

Robert Amory Jr., the CIA's highly respected chief of analysis, was one of those who was inexplicably kept away from the Bay of Pigs oper­ation, despite his extensive experience with beach landings as an Army Corps of Engineers officer in the South Pacific during World War II. Amory—who had literally written the book on the subject, Surf and Sand, a regimental history of his twenty-six amphibious operations—was stunned by Dulles and Bissell's decision CO keep him on the side­lines. The CIA men sent to Miami to work with the exile leaders and to Guatemala to help train the brigadistas were "a bunch of guys who were otherwise not needed," Amory later recalled. "They were a strange bunch of people with German experience, Arabic experience, and other things like that. And most of them had no knowledge of Spanish .. and absolutely no sense or feel about the political sensitivities of these/ [Cuban exiles]. . . I think we could have had an A team, instead oN being a C-minus team." –P. 397

Bissell, and their Bay of Pigs team. When plans for the Cuba invasion grew more ambitious and began leaking to the p_ress as early as November 1960, the report stated, the CIA should have te_r minated its role in the mission since it had outgrown the agency's co_

urr capability. "When the project became blown to every newsp_aper

reader," the report noted acerbically, "the agency should have infor_med higher authority that it was no longer operating in its charter." The criticisms went on and on, each one more devastating than the last. As the project grew, the agency reduced the exiled leaders to the status of puppets. . .. The project was badly organized. . . . The agency becam_e so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically. Furthermore, it failed to keep [the presi­dent and his] policymakers adequately and realistically informed of the conditions essential for success."

Kirkpatrick, who prepared his devastating report with the help of three investigators, flatly rejected the main CIA alibi for the failed mission—that Kennedy was to blame by blocking the agency's last-minute requests for air strikes. The invasion was "doomed" from the start by the CIA's poor planning, the inspector general concluded. Even if the air strikes had allowed the invaders to move inland from the shore, his report stated, the "men would eventually have been crushed by Castro's combined military

:sources strengthened by Soviet Bloc—supplied military materiel." Perhaps the most devastating revelation about the CIA operation emerged years later, in 2005, when the agency was compelled to release the minutes of a meeting held by its Cuba task force on November 15,

1960, one week after Kennedy's election. The group, which was deliber^- ating on how to brief the president-elect on the pending invasion, came

to an eye-opening conclusion. In the face of strong security measu^res that Castro had implemented, the CIA task force admitted^, their invasion plan was “now seen to be unachievable, except as a joint [CIA/Department of Defense] action.” In other words, the CIA realized that its Bay of Pigs expedition was doomed to fail unless its exile brigade was reinforced by the power of the U.S. Military. But the CIA never shared this sobering assessment with the president. –P. 398

Now Kennedy began to show some of his own icy, if more restrained, temper. He had made it clear all along that he did not want the Bay of Pigs to blow up into an international crisis with the United States in the middle—and here was his Navy chief urging just such a course of ac­tion. "Burke, I don't want the United States involved in this," he firmly repeated one more time.

"Hell, Mr. President," the admiral shot back, "but we are involved!"

But Kennedy stood his ground. As he had repeatedly warned them, there would be no air strikes, no Marine landings—and the fate of the Bay of Pigs operation was sealed.

They were sure I'd give in to them," Kennedy later told Dave Powers. "They couldn't believe that a new president like me wouldn't panic

and try to save his own face. Well they had me figured all wrong."

JFK was even more vehement when he spoke with another old friend, Paul "Red" Fay Jr., whom Kennedy installed as undersecretary of the Navy. "Nobody is going to force me to do anything I don't think is in the best interests of the country," he vented. "We're not going to plunge into irresponsible action just because a fanatical fringe in the country

urs so-called national pride above national reason."

As the last of the brigadistas were rounded up by Castro's troops in the swamps surrounding the Bay of Pigs, Dulles seemed shell-shocked. He had never suffered a humiliation like this in his career. Seeking con-

solation, solation, Dulles made a Thursday night dinner date with his old proteg: 
had been 
Dick Nixon. The spymaster was acutely aware that if Nixon ha have

the one sitting in the White House, the events in Cuba would have taken a different course. –P. 402

If Dulles thought he could escape Kennedy's wrath by making Bis­sell the scapegoat, he was deeply mistaken. Both CIA officials would eventually be ousted, but JFK placed most of the blame squarely on the top man. The CIA chief later swore that he never "sold" the president on the Bay of Pigs scheme. "One ought never to sell anybody a bill of goods," he told an interviewer for the JFK Presidential Library. But Kennedy knew the truth. Dulles had lied to his face in the Oval Office about the chances for the operation's success. "I stood right here at Ike:4 desk," Dulles told JFK on the eve of the invasion, "and I told him I w certain our Guatemalan operation would succeed—and, Mr. President, the prospects for this plan are even better than they were for that one."

Kennedy and Dulles had not gotten off to a good start with each other during the first months of the new presidency. The minor rifts and strains began accumulating from the very beginning. Still wedded to the ancien regime, Dulles never hung an official portrait of Presi­dent Kennedy in the CIA headquarters. The CIA director immediately created an atmosphere of distrust between his agency and the White House, telling his deputies CO make sure that they retrieved any sensitive documents they showed to Kennedy's staff, so they didn't wind up in White House files. Dulles "didn't really feel comfortable with" Ken­nedy, observed Bob Amory. –P. 403

Dulles's corporate circle encouraged his aggressive political tactics by sending him supportive messages. Charles Hilles Jr., executive vice president of ITT, was among those who wrote Dulles to buck him up after the Cuban catastrophe. "I have the greatest admiration for your calmness and fortitude, and for your devotion to the country's good," wrote Hilles on May 4, "and I sense that I am one of an overwhelming majority." The following month, a conservative New York corporate attorney named Watson "Watry" Washburn, known as a tennis wiz­ard in his youth and later as the attorney who defended P. G. Wode­house against the IRS, offered Dulles more militant encouragement. Washburn urged Dulles to slough off his earlier failure and organize a new invasion of Cuba to liberate the Bay of Pigs captives from Castro's prison on the Isle of Pines. "This would be mere child's play as a mili­tary operation," assured Washburn, "and would qualify as an humani­tarian enterprise rather than Imperialism.'"

If Dulles had lost the battle at the Bay of Pigs, he was determined to win the war of ideas over the failed operation. He began his psywar campaign by sending an all-station cable to CIA personnel with his ver­sion of the Cuba disaster. According to Ralph McGehee, a twenty-five-year CIA veteran serving in Vietnam at the time, Dulles's cable to his troops "implied that had events taken their planned course, we wouN hav_e been victorious in [the] invasion of Cuba." The Dulles message, which the Old Man continued to promote for the rest of his life, was emphatically dear: the mission had been doomed by Kennedy's failure of nerv_e, or, as he put it more diplomatically in his unpublished article for Harper's, by the president's lack of "determination to succeed." –P. 405

 

Years after the Bay of Pigs, Dulles was still spinning reporters, schol­ars, and anyone else who showed an interest in the fading story In April 1965, when a Harvard Business School student named L. Paul Bremer III—who would find his own place in the annals of American disasters as President George W. Bush's proconsul in Iraq—sent Dulles his dissertation on the Bay of Pigs, the spymaster sought to correct the young man's impression that it was a CIA failure. It was Kennedy's "fi­nal decision to eliminate the air action" that had killed the expedition, Dulles wrote Bremer. "I can assure you that it would never have been mounted . if it had been even suspected that this vital element of the would be eliminated." –P. 406


The Bay of Pigs debacle produced a "stuttering rage" among CIA of= i_t added to the anti-Kennedy passions flaring within the CIA.

firers aligned with Dulles, according to CIA veteran Joseph B. Smith—especially among those on the Cuba task force. "I had the feeling all _those [agents] there felt almost that the world had ended," Smith re­membered. In August, months after the failed venture, when longtime veteran Ralph McGehee returned from Vietnam to agency headquar­ters, he, too, found the CIA in turmoil. Rumors spread that Kennedy was going CO exact his revenge by slashing the CIA workforce through a massive "reduction in force," code-named the "701 program" by the agency.

"It seemed [to us] that the RIF program was aimed more at the CIA than other agencies," McGehee observed. "This was a tension-filled, dismal time. . . . The halls seemed filled with the strained, anxious looks of the soon-to-be unemployed."

When Kennedy's ax did fall, McGehee was stunned by the carnage. "About one of every five was fired. The tension became too much for some. On several occasions, one of my former office mates came to the office howling drunk and worked his way onto the 701 list."

The anti-Kennedy rage inside CIA headquarters also reverberated at the Pentagon. "Pulling out the rug [on the Bay of Pigs invaders]," fumed Joint Chiefs chairman Lemnitzer, was "unbelievable . . . abso­lutely reprehensible, almost criminal." Years later, the name Kennedy still made "31-Knot" Burke boil over. "Mr. Kennedy," the admiral told an oral historian from the U.S. Naval Institute, "was a very bad presi­dent.... He permitted himself to jeopardize the nation." The Kennedy team, he added, "didn't realize the power of the United States or how to use the power of the United States. It was a game to them.... They were inexperienced people." –P. 411

 

But "poor Allen Dulles," as Jackie took CO referring to him, was

likely untouched by the president's gesture. The CIA director's resent­ment of Kennedy was growing by the day, as his fingers slowly lost their grip on power. Feeling the young man's arm wrapped paternally around his shoulder would have chilled Dulles, not warmed him. The spymas­ter had served every president since Woodrow Wilson. And now, here he was, being comforted by this weak pretty boy who did not belong in the same company as the great men who preceded him. It was appalling that he, Allen Dulles, should be consoled by such a man.

Though Dulles himself kept his fury carefully concealed, his most loyal aides and political allies freely vented their feelings against the Kennedy White House on the Old Man's behalf. Howard Hunt, who worked as the CIA's political liaison with the volatile Cuban exile com­munity on the Bay of Pigs, called Dulles and Bissell "scapegoats to expiate administration guilt." Hunt, whose anti-Communist passions equaled those of his militant Cuban compadres, was deeply moved by the way his boss comported himself during his slow fadeout at the CIA. "As a member of Dulles's staff," Hunt remembered, "I lunched in the Director's mess, seeing him return from each [Taylor] Committee ses­sion more drawn and gray. But on raking his place at the head of the table, Mr. Dulles's demeanor changed into hearty cheerfulness—a jo here, a baseball bet there, came from this remarkable man whose Ion career of government service had been destroyed unjustly by men who were laboring unceasingly to preserve their own public images." –P. 425

 

••"We tried to make a pleasant evening of it," Bush wrote, "but I was  ber sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedy's [sic] that ban [sic] about the fiasco. And here they were making Allen seem _to be the goat, which he wasn't and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them." –P. 426

 

. Coming across Schlesinger pounding away at his typewriter one day in his remote East Wing office, JFK smiled, "N_ow Arthur, cut it out. When the time comes, I'll write The Age of Kennedy' But after the Bay of Pigs, feeling increasingly besieged within his own administration, Kennedy embraced Schlesinger's role as court chron.. icier. The president encouraged Schlesinger to begin taking notes at

kite House meetings. "You can be damn sure that the CIA has its

..rcords and the Joint Chiefs theirs," JFK told him. "We'd better make sure we have a record over here." –P. 436

 

 

Chatting with Schlesinger in the Oval Office on June 4, Kennedy said, "I understand better every day why Roosevelt, who started out such a mild fellow, ended up so ferociously anti-business." JFK vow_ed that he was not going to appease his big business critics by taking _wh_at O'Donnell described as "an ass-kissing posture." To counter the corps-

 e assault on his presidency, said Kennedy, "[wje have to put out the ture of a small group of men turning against the government and the economy because the government would not surrender to them. That is the real issue." –P. 446

 

The climate of conflict surrounding the Kennedy presidency had a way of evoking the grim topic. Outraged by the president's strong stand against the steel industry, Henry Luce invoked the fate of Julius Caesar in a harsh editorial in Fortune, warning JFK that he should "beware the ides of April." But Kennedy never backed down from his ongoing duel with the steel industry. In October 1963, just weeks before his assassi­nation, JFK's Justice Department filed price-fixing charges against U. Steel and other steel companies, based on Bobby's earlier grand jury probe of the industry. To the end of his life, Kennedy made it clear that there would be no "ass-kissing" for those corporate powers that tried to undermine his presidency. –P. 447

 

Luce was not the type CO let sentiment cloud his political judgm_ent, however, and he remained loyal to the Republican ticket. But Lift _mat azine, his influential flagship publication, gave Nixon a tepid endors_e­ment, leaving the door open for Kennedy. Luce admired JFK's intellect and cultural sophistication. But he questioned whether he would be a sufficiently aggressive foe of Communism. After finishing their lobster dinner that night, in fact, Luce had warned Joe Kennedy that he would

ot stand for it if JFK proved too much of a compromiser in the White ouse. "If he shows any signs of weakness in general toward the anti-Communist cause, or to put it more positively, any weakness in defend­ing and advancing the cause of the free world, why then we'll certainly be against him," Luce told the Kennedy paterfamilias. –P. 448

 

Kennedy achieved the compromise by agreeing to remove U.S. mis­siles from Turkey, which the Soviet Union found equally menacing. In fact, the president had been trying to get the obsolete Jupiter missiles demobilized for over a year but had been stymied by State Department f_oot-dragging—just one more example of the intransigence and insub­ordination that bedeviled his administration. JFK was furious when he learned that his original order to remove the Jupiter rockets from Turkey had been ignored. "The President believed he was President, and thaIN_. his wishes having been made clear, they would be followed and the mis­siles removed," Bobby Kennedy lacer wrote in Thirteen Days, his memoir about the missile crisis. The President believed he was President ... it was a striking turn of phrase, one that captured JFK's uncertain grasp on the wheel of power. –P. 451

 

The anti-Kennedy feelings were particularly virulent in the Air Force, which was under the command of cigar-chomping General Cur­tis LeMay, who had made his savage mark on history with the fire­bombing of Tokyo during World War II. The president and the general regarded each other with barely concealed disgust. Twenty-five years af­ter JFK's death, LeMay and his top Air Force generals were still brood­ing

 Force oral history project. "The Kennedy administration," LeMay

ing about Kennedy when they sat down to be interviewed for an official

growled, "thought that being as strong as we were was provocative to the Russians and likely to start a war. We in the Air Force, and I per­sonally, believed the exact opposite."

LeMay and his generals continued to angrily replay the "lost oppor­tunity" of the Cuban Missile Crisis: it was the moment we could have gotten the Communists out of Cuba," LeMay declared. We walked Khrushchev up to the brink of nuclear war, he looked over the edge, and had no stomach for it," said General David Burchinal, who served as LeMay's deputy during the crisis. "We would have written our own book at that time, but our politicians did not understand what happens when you have such a degree of superiority as we had, or they simply didn't know how to use it. They were busily engaged in saving face for the Soviets and making concessions, giving up the Jupiters deployed ^overseas—when all we had to do was write our own ticket." –P. 453

 

Dulles's old friend, Bill Pawley, the right-wing Miami entrepreneu^r 
who had long collaborated on secret CIA missions, was also warned 
about his involvement in the exile raids. But he remained defiant, hatching a plot so ambitious that he claimed it would bring down Kennedy. In April, Pawley wrote a long letter to his political comrade Dick Nixon, declaring, "All of the Cubans and most Americans In this part of the country believe that to remove Castro, you must first get rid 
Kennedy, and that is not going to be easy." –P. 454

 

. The blunt-spoken, pistol-packing Harvey was not a good fit with the CIA either, but the agency would find ways to put him to use. Dulles and Helms thought he had a "cop" mentality. Harvey, in turn, dismissed the CIA's upper echelons as "Fifth Avenue cowboys" and "xxxxing namby pambies." He was no hayseed, he felt obliged CO remind colleagues—he had been raised by a single mother who became a full professor at In­diana State University, and he had a law degree. He liked to rattle the agency's Ivy League types during meetings by pulling out one of the many guns he owned, spinning the cylinder and checking the load, as if he were about to use it.

From his days as an FBI Red-hunter, when he tracked down Com­munists and fellow travelers in Washington, Harvey became convinced that high society was riddled with traitors. Harvey's class resentments no doubt played a role when he became the first CIA official to sniff out Kim Philby, the witty, urbane, Cambridge-educated double agent who was stationed in Washington from 1949 to 1951. At one of Philby's liquor-soaked parties, Guy Burgess—the most flamboyant member of the Cambridge spy ring—drew a lewd, crotch-baring caricature of Har­vey's wife, Libby, a boozy Indiana gal who never fit into the CIA social set. A drunken Harvey threw himself at Burgess and had to be pulled away by Angleton. It was the Indiana "cop" who saw through Philby, not Angleton, who remained forever beguiled by his British friend. An­gleton and Harvey were the odd couple of CIA counterintelligence—"the poet and the cop," as one observer called them. –P. 469

 

In 1962, Helms—who, along with Angleton, had replaced the "re­tired" Dulles as Harvey's main patrons at the agency—promoted the agency tough guy, naming him head of the CIAs entire Cuba opera­tion, Task Force W. Helms and Harvey kept much of the operation, including their assassination efforts against Castro, a secret from Pres­ident Kennedy as well as from CIA director McCone. Harvey grew deeply contemptuous of the Kennedy brothers, whom he regarded as rich boys who were playing with the nation's security. He concluded that their subversion program aimed at overthrowing Castro's regime, code-named Operation Mongoose, was all for show. Harvey thought so little of the man JFK put in charge of Mongoose, Air Force officer Ed­ward Lansdale, that he would lift his ass in the middle of their meetings and let loose a fart or pull out a knife and begin to trim his nails.

Harvey came to hate Bobby Kennedy—the CIA overseer who was constantly nipping at his heels—most of all. RFK browbeat Harvey so severely during one White House meeting on Cuba that Max Taylor later told the attorney general, "You could sack a town and enjoy it." Harvey took to calling RFK "that xxxxer" and began suggesting that some of the attorney general's actions bordered on treason.

"Bobby Kennedy and my husband were absolute enemies, just pure enemies," recalled CG Harvey in her retirement home, channeling Bill Harvey's deep resentments years later. "[Bobby] was an idiot ... and he had no confidence in himself, because his brother put him in a job that he really wasn't capable of handling. It made for a lot of stress for the people who were working in law enforcement." –P. 472

 

 

In 1998, when a French investigative jo ^SaSS_nalist named Fabrizio Calvi came to interview Wyatt about Operation Gladio at his retirement home on California's Lake Tahoe, the former CIA official felt compelled to raise the subject, out of the blue, as Calvi was leaving. "As he was walking me out to my car, Wyatt suddenly said, `You know, I always wondered what Bill Harvey was doing in Dallas in November 1963; " Calvi recently recalled. "Excuse me?" said the stunned French journalist, who realized that Harvey's presence in Dal­las that month was extremely noteworthy.

Wyatt explained that he had bumped into Harvey on a plane to Dallas sometime before the assassination, and when he asked his boss why he was going there, Harvey answered vaguely, saying something like, "I'm here to see what's happening."

When Calvi tried to pursue the conversation, Wyatt cut it off as abruptly as he had started it and said good-bye. Calvi himself forgot about Wyatt's remarks until years later.

"I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Harvey was in Dallas in November 1963," House Assassinations Committee investigator Dan Hardway, who was assigned by the panel to probe possible CIA con­nections to JFK's murder, observed years later. "We considered Harvey to be one of our prime suspects from the very start. He had all the key connections—to organized crime, to the CIA station in Miami where the plots against Castro were run, to other prime CIA suspects like Da­vid Phillips. We tried to get Harvey's travel vouchers and security file from the CIA, but they always blocked us. But we did come across a lot of memos that suggested he was traveling a lot in the months leading up to the assassination." (More recent legal efforts by the author to obtain Harvey's travel records from the CIA also proved fruitless, despite the 1992 JFK Records Act, which required all federal agencies to release documents related to the Kennedy assassination.) –P. 477

 

Dulles was among those who maintained warm relations with the vice president, even as both men's stars fell within the Kennedy court. In retirement, the spymaster continued to invite Johnson to Washing­ton functions. And, in the summer of 1963, Johnson hosted Dulles at his ranch in the Texas Hill Country, sixty miles WeSC of Austin. Dulles's Visit to the LBJ Ranch did not appear in his calendar, but it was brie ^noted in a syndicated news photo, which appeared in the Chicago Tri­bune on August 15, that showed the vice president astride a horse, while ^a beaming Lady Bird and Dulles looked on. –P. 495

 

Saint's father had always insisted that he had nothing to do with Kennedy's death, that he was at home in Washington the day of the assassination, not in Dallas, as many JFK researchers alleged. Hunt claimed that he was shopping for ingredients at a Chinese grocery store in Washington, to cook dinner that night with his wife, when the news bulletin about Kennedy came over the car radio. But Saint, who was in the fifth grade at the time, had no memory of his father being home that day when he was let out early from school, or later that evening. And he found his father's cover story about cooking the Chinese meal, which Hunt told under oath at a trial related to the Kennedy assassination, absurd. "I can tell you that's the biggest load of crap in the world," Saint John told Rolling Stone in 2007. "My dad in the kitchen? Chopping veetables with his wife? I'm so sorry, but that would never happen. Ever.

His mother told Saint John, around the time of the assassination, ^that his fathe_r had indeed been in Dallas. The mystery of his father's :hereabouts that day would prey on Saint for years. He was determined

"gage his father on the subject before it was too late. –P. 497

 

In fact, among the strange and murderous characters who converged on Dallas in November 1963 was a notorious French OAS commando named Jean Souetre, who was connected to the plots against President de Gaulle. Souetre was arrested in Dallas after the Kennedy assassi­nation and expelled to Mexico. Souetre's expulsion brought an urgent inquiry from French intelligence officials to the CIA about the danger­ous outlaw's likely whereabouts, since de Gaulle was about to travel to Mexico for a state visit.

Hunt's speculations about the Kennedy conspiracy were in line with the suspicions of the House Assassinations Committee. When the con­gressional inquiry got under way in 1976, the panel's most energetic investigators zeroed in on the CIA's anti-Castro operation as the nest from which the JFK plot had sprung—and Bill Harvey soon emerg^e as a prime suspect.

"We tried to get Harvey's travel vouchers and security file from the CIA, but we were never able to," recalled Dan Hardway. Hardw g was the bright Cornell Law School student to whom the congressional committee gave the weighty task of investigating the CIA's possiblid fi_nk_s to the _assassination. "One CIA official told me, 'So you're from  Congress—what the hell is that to us? You'll be packed up and gone in

a couple years, and we'll still be here.'

"But we did come across documents that suggested Harvey was trav­_eli_ng a lot in the weeks leading up to the assassination, while he was supposed CO be running the Rome station. . . . Near the end of our i_nvestigation, I typed up a memo, making my case against Harvey as a leading figure in the crime. I typed it up in the committee's secure room, on the yellow security paper with a purple border marked 'To Secret.' That memo has since disappeared."

While the Miami conspirators made it clear that Bill Harvey was playing a central role in "the big event," they assured Hunt that the chain of command went much higher than Harvey. Vice President Johnson himself had signed off on the plot, Morales insisted. Hunt found this plausible. As he observed in his memoir, "Lyndon Johnson was an opportunist who would not hesitate to get rid of any obstacles in his way." –P. 503

 

Likewise, after the violently inclined Harvey alarmed F. Mark Wy_ ate, his Rome deputy, so severely that Wyatt asked to be transferred home, Harvey's performance continued to be rated "outstanding" by agency officials. Harvey's March 1965 report commended "his deter­mination to accomplish his basic objectives regardless of the obstacles which he encounters." The Rome station "must be guided with a stron_g hand," the report continued, "which Mr. Harvey is well able to suppl_y.. Dick Helms had sent Wyatt to Rome to help keep an eye on Harve_y. But when Wyatt was recalled to Langley and told Helms about the extreme methods that Harvey was employing in Rome, the CIA did nothing to discipline Harvey. Instead, it was Wyatt who found his ca­reer stalled.

Harvey always vehemently denied that he was a reckless maverick. Testifying before the Church Committee, he insisted that he had never done anything that was "unauthorized, freewheeling or in any way out­side the framework of my responsibilities and duties as an officer of the agency." The truly alarming thing is that Harvey was probably telling the truth. But the men who had authorized his extreme actions were quite willing for him to take the blame. Like Hunt, he was "an easy target" for the spymasters.

Bill Harvey and Howard Hunt both prided themselves on being part of the CIA's upper tier. But that's not how these men were viewed at the top of the agency. Hunt liked to brag that he had family connec­tions to Wild Bill Donovan himself, who had admitted him into the OSS, the original roundtable of American intelligence. But it turned out that Hunt's father was a lobbyist in upstate New York to whom Donovan owed a favor, not a fellow Wall Street lawyer. Everyone knew Hunt was a writer, but they also knew he was no Ian Fleming. –P. 508

 

After returning to New Orleans with his mother in ¹⁹⁵⁴, the fifteen-year-old Oswald hooked up with the Civil Air Patrol, a group of young men interested in learning how to fly. The military auxiliary group, which was founded during World War II to help defend Amer­ica's coastlines against German and Japanese attack, not only trained

"Nkture pilots, it inculcated the patriotic Cold War values of the time,

../Kmong its founders was David Harold Byrd, a right-wing Texas oilman and defense contractor. Byrd also owned the Texas School Book De­pository, the Dallas warehouse where Oswald would be hired in the fall of 1963 and allegedly establish a sniper's lair on the sixth floor of the building. It was just one of the many curiosities that marked the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. –P. 512

 

There was a magical element to Oswald's journey. Despite the fact that he was a broke ex-serviceman who had only $203 in his bank ac­count when he left America, Oswald enjoyed the best accommodation_s. In Helsinki, he stayed in two of the city's finest hotels, the Torni and the Klaus Kurki. After checking out, he still had enough money to buy a ticket on the overnight train to Moscow.

If Oswald was being moved by an unseen hand, his performance at the U.S. embassy in Moscow—where he arrived on a Saturday morning in October to theatrically announce his defection—seemed a particu­larly awkward piece of staging. There was a scripted quality to the way he renounced his citizenship and declared his intention to turn over military secrets to the Soviets. Listening to the slightly built young man,

American consul Richard Snyder had the distinct feeling that "this was

part of a scene he had rehearsed before coming into the embassy. It was a preplanned speech." –P. 514

 

Later, de Mohrenschildt proved adept at working his connection_s at the Dallas Petroleum Club, a hotbed of anti-Kennedy ferment, whose leading members—including oilmen Clint Murchison Sr., H. L. Hunt, and Sid Richardson—were tied to Dulles, Lyndon Johnson, and J. Ed­gar Hoover. The Petroleum Club also counted D. H. Byrd, the Texas School Book Depository owner, and Mayor Earle Cabell, brother of Dulles's former CIA deputy, among its regulars. De Mohrenschildt put Byrd's wife on the board of the charity that he had set up to fund cystic fibrosis research. It all came together at the Petroleum Club—the deals, the good works, and the darker stuff—over drinks in the club's wood-paneled rooms, located downtown in the elegant Baker Hotel.

The international oil business and the U.S. intelligence establish­ment were overlapping worlds, and de Mohrenschildt soon found himself with a foot in each one. He alluded cryptically to this early in his Warren Commission testimony, when he mentioned that he was involved in "a controversial business . . . international business." But commission attorney Jenner quickly steered the conversation away from these dangerous shoals. "Also, I gather that you are a pretty lively char­acter," Jenner interjected inanely. –P. 524

 

In the end, no Warren Commission witness betrayed Oswald more deeply than George de Mohrenschildt. His testimony before the commission—the lengthiest of the hearings—did more to convict Os­wald in the eyes of the press and the public than anyone else. He tied Oswald to the alleged murder weapon, telling the commission about the day when an agitated Marina showed him and his wife the rifle that Lee had stashed in a closet. And most important, de Mohrenschildt gave the Warren Commission the motive for killing Kennedy that the panel had sorely lacked. Oswald, the baron speculated with devastating ffect, "was insanely jealous of an extraordinarily successful man, who was young, attractive, had a beautiful wife, had all the money in the world, and was a world figure. And poor Oswald was just the opposite. He had nothing. He had a bitchy wife, had no money, was a miserable failure in everything he did." Shooting Kennedy, he concluded in _one of the more memorable phrases produced by the official investigation,

made Oswald "a hero in his own mind." –P. 526

 

After the de Mohrenschildts concluded their Warren Commission "ordeal," they were invited by Janet Auchincloss and her husband to their home on 0 Street in Georgetown. Relaxing with his old friend in the comfortable splendor of her home, the baron and his wife felt confident enough CO voice their true feelings about the assassination. By now, it was dawning on the couple that the Warren Commission was not interested in the real story of the president's murder. They suspected that the true purpose of the investigation was "to waste the taxpayers' money and CO distract [the] attention of the American people from t [real culprits] involved in the assassination." –P. 529

 

The CIA, which took a strong interest in the anti-Communist leftlⁱl _eventually took an interest in Ruth's father. According to a CIA docu­ment, Hyde was considered "for a covert use" in Vietnam in 1957, but for unexplained reasons the agency decided not to utilize him. Hyde did work for a year in Peru, setting up co-dp credit unions for the U,S. Agency for International Development (AID), an organization whose work was often entwined with that of the CIA. Government documents suggest that Ruth's sister, Sylvia, later went to work for the CIA, and Sylvia's husband, John Hoke, was employed by AID.

In short, the young Dallas housewife who took the Oswald family into her care was not simply a Quaker do-gooder but a woman with a politically complex family history. She grew up in that strongly anti-Communist wing of the American left that overlapped with the espi­onage world. Ruth Paine was not an operative herself, but there was a constellation of dark stars hovering all around her, even if she chose not to pay attention.

But it was the family background of Ruth's husband, Michael, that most directly overlapped with Allen Dulles's world. Mary Ban­croft, Dulles's mistress, was one of the oldest friends of Michael Paine's mother—also named Ruth. Michael's parents, George Lyman Paine Jr. and Ruth Forbes Paine, were the kind of odd ducks that Mary liked collecting—quirky offspring of prominent New England heritage with minds as restless as hers. Lyman was an architect and a gentleman Trotskyite whose political activities earned him a place on the FBI's watch list. Ruth Forbes Paine hailed from a Boston blue-blood family that had made its fortune from the China [Ca and opium trade, and counted Ralph Waldo Emerson among its progenitors. She would give herself over to the pursuit of world peace and the exploration of human consciousness. –P. 537

 

Dulles himself acknowledged the flat-out weirdness of these curious facts and, in his own characteristic fashion, simply laughed it off. TIAN conspiracy-minded would have a field day, he chuckled, if they kntq that he had visited Dallas three weeks before the assassination and that he had a personal connection to the woman whom he identified as Ma­rina Oswald's "landlady."

But Ruth Paine was more than that. She was also the woman who—the month before JFK's arrival in Dallas—informed Lee about the job opening in the Texas School Book Depository, the warehouse building that loomed over the final stretch of President Kennedy's motorcade route. Ruth had been told about the warehouse job by a neighbor. The building was owned by yet another intriguing character in the Oswald drama, right-wing Texas millionaire, David Harold Byrd.

D. H. Byrd received scant attention after the Kennedy assassina­tion, despite his building's role in the crime. The Warren Commission never questioned him, and reporters did not profile him—even after the millionaire took the odd step of removing the eight-pane window from which Oswald allegedly fired his shots at Kennedy's limousigd and hanging it in his Dallas mansion. Byrd said he feared that souvenlig hunters might steal Oswald's so-called sniper's perch from the book warehouse, but he displayed the infamous window in his own home like a trophy. –P. 539

The owner of the Texas Book Depository was closely associated with a number of passionate Kennedy adversaries, including Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief whose relentless quest for a nuclear showdown with

e Soviet Union caused the president to question the general's sanity.

the

 bestowed a glowing Air Force commendation on Byrd in May 1963 for his role in founding the Civil Air Patrol, the military auxiliary group that counted a teenaged Oswald among its cadets.

Did Byrd and his associates in the national security field use Ruth Paine to maneuver Oswald into the Texas Book Depository by passing word of the job opening to her through her neighbor? Always looking for ways to help the distressed couple in her care, Ruth quickly tipped off Lee about the job. The earnest Quaker might have played a pivotal role in unknowingly sealing his fate. But one way or the other, Oswald seemed doomed to end up in the building and to meet his date with infamy. By October 1963, when he went to work in the building, there were too many unseen forces at work on the young man—who turned twenty-four that month—for him to call his life his own.

In the months leading up to the Kennedy assassination, Oswald was moved here and there with the calculation of a master chess player. In April, he returned to his hometown, New Orleans, with Marina and the girls, where he called attention to himself by jumping into the combus­tible world of Cuban politics. He reached out to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the leading pro-Castro group in the United States, which was the target of such heavy FBI and CIA pressure that its two founders _A later succumbed and offered their services as government informers. I the same time he was dallying with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Oswald also made contact with the Directorio Revolucionario Esod..s

._e

antil (DRE)—a group of young, militant, anti-Castro Cuban exiles. –P. 540

 

In early September, Oswald popped up again in Dallas, where he and his family would move back later that month. This Oswald sight­ing is an extremely suggestive one, since he was spotted in the company of none other than David Atlee Phillips—one of the more glaring in­dications that the ex-marine was the focus of an intelligence operation. Oswald and Phillips were observed talking together in the lobby of a downtown Dallas office building by Antonio Veciana, a prominent Cu­ban exile leader whose violent group, Alpha 66, had come close to kill­ing Castro with a bazooka attack. Veciana—who arrived at the Dallas building for his own meeting with Phillips, his CIA supervisor—would later recognize the slight, pale man he had seen with Phillips that af­ternoon, when Oswald's face was splashed across front pages and TV screens. Phillips had trained him well, Veciana later said. "He taughz­me how to remember faces, how to remember characteristics. I am su/6_\... it was Oswald!'

Veciana told his story to House Assassinations Committee investi­gator Gaeton Fonzi in the lace 1970s and later repeated it to journalists. But even when the aging exile leader climbed onstage at a Washington conference of JFK auwination researchers in September 2014 to retell his remarkable story, the mainstream press still did nothing to spotlight. –P. 541

Oswald was suddenly removed from the FBI "FLASHLIST"^—t bureau's index of suspicious individuals to be kept under close watch. off FBI officials took this surprising step despite Oswald's suspicious be­havior in Mexico City. The day after the FBI took Oswald he watch list, the CIA also downgraded him as a security risk. –P. 542 

In the days leading up to the assassination, he made bookstore and media appearances in Boston and New York. Early on the morning of November 22, Dulles caught a Piedmont Airlines flight back to Washington, landing at National Airport around 8:30 a.m. He was then driven to a hotel in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he ad­dressed a Brookings Institution breakfast meeting. After receiving the news from Dallas, around 1:30 that afternoon, Dulles took a car back to Washington with John Warner, a CIA attorney.

But, according to Dulles's date book, he did not spend the evening at home in Washington. He headed back to the northern Virginia

countryside, where he would spend the entire weekend at a top secret CIA facility known officially as Camp Peary, but within the agency a_s "the Farm."

At the time of the Kennedy assassination, Dulles had no formal role in government. As far as the public knew, he was a figure of the legendary past, a graying gentleman who supplemented his civil service pension by recycling colorful espionage tales of yesteryear and by deliv­ering sobering Cold War speeches. But the Farm was not a club for CIA retirees. It was a bustling clandestine center that Dulles himself had inaugurated soon after taking over as CIA chief, and it served a variety of tightly guarded functions.

Before the CIA took over Camp Peary—a sprawling compound in the densely wooded tidelands near Williamsburg—it was used as a Navy Seabees base and then as a stockade for captured German sailors. Dulles turned it into a spy training base for recruits who were headed overseas. According to former CIA agents Philip Agee and Victor Marchetti, among the well-trained professionals turned out by the Farm were skilled assassins. The facility was also what would later be termed a "black site"—a secure location where enemy cap­tives and suspicious defectors were subjected to extreme interrogatioⁿ methods. –P. 546

"The Farm was basically an alternative CIA headquarters, frov--' where Dulles could direct ops," said former congressional investigate

Dan Hardway.

This is the CIA command post where the "retired" Dulles situated himself from Friday, November 22, through Sunday, November 24—a highly eventful weekend during which Oswald was arrested and ques­tioned by Dallas police, Kennedy's body was flown back to Washington and subjected to an autopsy riddled with irregularities, and Oswald was gunned down in the basement of the Dallas police station by a shady nightclub owner.

A year after the assassination, Dulles was interviewed by an old CIA colleague, Tom Braden, for the oral history project at the JFK Library in Boston. Braden asked Dulles what he had thought of Kennedy "as a man." Dulles put on his mask of mourning and sympathy, as he could do in an instant. "Oh, I rated him high. , .. I shall never forget when I first heard the news of the Dallas tragedy. I felt that here is a man who hadn't had the chance really to show his full capabilities, that he was just reaching a point where his grasp of all the intricacies of the presi­dency were such that now he could move forward."

While serving on the Warren Commission, Dulles cold Braden, he had the opportunity to examine the assassination in exquisite detail. He talked about the events of that day as if he were inspecting the inner mechanism of a fine watch. He seemed in awe of the intricate meshing of synchronicities that had to occur in order for Kennedy to die that day. His description made it sound like the operation of a lifetime. –P. 547

In his calendar for October 2, 1963, Dulles penciled in an inter­esting appointment. "Dillon," he wrote—by which he meant C. Douglas Dillon, the Treasury secretary and former Wall Street fi­nancier. After Dillon's name, Dulles scrawled "Bank Reps." There was no further explanation for the scheduled appointment. But the prox­imity of the meeting to the Kennedy assassination raises compelling

questions, particularly since Dillon, as Treasury chief, was in charve^-7 of President Kennedy's Secret Service protection. And the banking ''' dustry was locked in a long-running battle with the president over his economic policies. –P. 549

In the case of Doug Dillon—who oversaw Kennedy's Secret Ser­vice apparatus—it simply meant making sure that he was out of town. At the end of October, Dillon notified the president that he planned to take a "deferred summer vacation" in November, abandoning his Washington post for Hobe Sound until the eighteenth of the month. After that, Dillon informed Kennedy, he planned to fly to Tokyo with other cabinet members on an official visit that would keep him out of the country from November 21 to November 27. If he was later asked to account for himself, Dillon would have a ready explanation. The tragic events in Dallas had not occurred on his watch; he was airborne over the Pacific at the time. –P. 560

To begin with, Oswald did not act like most assassins. Those who decapitated heads of state generally crowed about their history-making deeds (Sic semper tyrannis!). In contrast, Oswald repeatedly denied his guilt while in custody, emphatically telling reporters as he was hustled from one room to the next in the Dallas police station, "I don't know what this is all about. . . . I'm just a patsy!" And the accused assassin seemed strangely cool and collected, according to the police detectives who questioned him. "He was real calm," recalled one detective. "He was extra calm. He wasn't a bit excited or nervous or anything." In fact, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry and district attorney William Alexander thought Oswald was so composed that he seemed trained to handle a stressful interrogation. "I was amazed that a person so young would have had the self-control he had," Alexander later told Irish investigative journalist Anthony Summers. "It was almost as if he had been rehearsed or programmed to meet the situation he found himself in."

Oswald further signaled that he was part of an intelligence opera­tion by trying to make an intriguing phone call shortly before midnight East Coast time on Saturday, November 23. The police switchboard Operator, who was being closely monitored by rwo unidentified offi­cials, told Oswald there was no answer, though she actually did not put through the call. It was not until years later that independent research traced the phone number that Oswald tried to call to a former _v:U.S. Army intelligence officer in  intelligence officer in Raleigh, North Carolina. –P. 561

The Raleigh call probably sealed Oswald's fare, according to Mar­chetti. By refusing to play the role of the "patsy" and instead following his intelligence protocol, Oswald made clear that he was trouble. What would be the CIA procedure at this point, Marchetti was asked by North Carolina historian Grover Proctor, who has closely studied this episode near the end of Oswald's life? "I'd kill him," Marchetti replied.

as this his death warrant?" Proctor continued. "You betcha," Maretti said. "This time, [Oswald] went over the dam, whether he knew it or not. . .. He was over the dam. At this point it was executive action."

Oswald was not just alive on the afternoon of November 22, 1963; he was likely innocent. This was another major problem for the orga­nizers of the assassination. Even close legal observers of the case who continue to believe in Oswald's guilt—such as Bob Blakey who, after serving on the House Assassinations Committee, became a law pro­fessor at Notre Dame University—acknowledge that a "credible" case could have been made for Oswald's innocence based on the evidence. (The 1979 congressional report found that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy involving Oswald and other unknown parties.) Other le­gal experts, like San Francisco attorney and Kennedy researcher Bill Simpich, have gone further, arguing that the case against Oswald was riddled with such glaring inconsistencies that it would have quickly un­raveled in court. –P. 562

returning from Kennedy's November 24 funeral in Washington, de Gaulle gave a remarkably candid assessment of the assassination to his information minister, Alain Peyrefitte. "What happened to Kenned$ is what nearly happened to me," confided the French president. "His _gory is the same as mine. . . . It looks like a cowboy story, bur it's only an OAS [Secret Army Organization] story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists."

As a matter of survival, de Gaulle and his loyal deputies had been compelled to investigate the underworld where intelligence forces, po­litical zealots, and gangsters all converged. More than any other West­ern leader, he was well aware of how security services—in the name of combating Communism—joined hands with some of the most extreme and vicious allies to win their goals. De Gaulle was convinced that Ken­nedy had fallen victim to the same forces that had tried repeatedly to kill him.

"Do you think Oswald was a front?" Peyrefitte asked de Gaulle.

"Everything leads me to believe it," he replied. "They got their hands on this communist who wasn't one, while still being one. He had a sub par intellect and was an exalted fanatic—just the man they needed, the perfect one to be accused. . . . The guy ran away, because he probably became suspicious. They wanted to kill him on the spot before he could be grabbed by the judicial system. Unfortunately, it didn't happen ex­actly the way they had probably planned it would.. . . But a trial, you realize, is just terrible. People would have talked. They would have dug up so much! They would have unearthed everything. Then the security forces went looking for [a clean-up man] they totally controlled, and who couldn't refuse their offer, and that guy sacrificed himself to kill the fake _assassin—supposedly in defense of Kennedy's memory!

"Baloney! Security forces all over the world are the same when they do this kind of dirty wore As soon as they succeed in wiping our the false assassin, they declare that the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate as innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder. –P. P. 567

 

It was the national security establishment, not Bobby Kennedy, that advised the new president to put Dulles and McCloy on the Warren Commission. And Johnson—finely tuned to the desires of the men who had put him in the Oval Office—wisely obliged them.

The Dulles camp itself made no bones about the fact that the Old Man aggressively lobbied to get appointed to the commission, Dick Helms later told historian Michael Kurtz that he "personally pe\_.. suaded" Johnson to appoint Dulles. According to Kurrz, Dulles and Helms "wanted CO make sure no agency secrets came our during the investigation.... And, of course, if Dulles was on the commission, that would ensure the agency would be safe. Johnson felt the same way—he didn't want the investigation to dig up anything strange. –P. 573

 

Despite Dulles's efforts to keep the commission away from any hints of a domestic conspiracy, from time to time uncomfortable questions along these lines cropped up. During an executive session convened by the panel on December 16, 1963, Warren raised an especially sen­sitive matter—the mysterious failure of the country's security agencies to keep close watch on someone with Oswald's background. How, for instance, did a defector simply stroll into the U.S. immigration office in New Orleans—as he did the previous summer—and obtain a passport to return to Russia? "That seems strange to me," Warren remarked,

Actually, passports were rather easy to obtain, Dulles observed. When the discussion turned to the puzzling ease with which Oswald got permission to return CO the United States with his Russian wife, Dulles offered that he would like to get these aspects of the inquiry "Into the hands of the CIA as soon as possible to explain the Russian parts."

Senator Russell, long used to dealing with the intelligence commu­nity, reacted skeptically. "I think you've got more faith in than than₍ have. I think they'll doctor anything they hand to us." –P. 577

 

Dulles and McCloy, in fact, were very concerned about European public opinion regarding the Kennedy assassination, and they urged the commission to closely monitor both Lane and Thomas G. Buchanan, a Paris-based American journalist who had written the first JFK con­spiracy book, Who Killed Kennedy?—an advance copy of which was airmailed to Dulles from the CIA station in London, where it was pub­lished. During an executive session in April, Dulles even proposed that Buchanan be subpoenaed to appear before the commission.

Earl Warren was obsessed with press coverage of the inquiry and

gonized over press leaks, including a May report by Anthony Lewis „tin The New York Times—midway through the panel's work—that the inquiry was set to "unequivocally reject theories that the assassination was the work of some kind of conspiracy." Warren was very upset by the premature news report, which suggested that the commission had rushed to judgment before hearing all the evidence. The leak was clearly intended to counter the publicity being generated by authors like Lane and Buchanan. –P. 582

By 1967, polls showed that two-thirds of the American public did not accept the Warren Report's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. That same year, against the backdrop of growing public skepticism, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison launched the first (and what will likely be the only) criminal investigation related to the Kennedy assassination. "At the beginning of the investigation," Garrison later wrote, "I had only a hunch that the federal intelligence

community had somehow been involved in the assassination, but I did not know which branch or branches. As time passed and more leads turned up, however, the evidence began pointing more and more to the CIA."

In February 1968, Garrison subpoenaed Dulles to testify before an Orleans Parish grand jury—which undoubtedly came as a cold slap for a man long accustomed to being invited to speak before gatherings of the Brookings Institution, Princeton alumni association, Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment, and other august forums. As Garrison and his investigators examined the work of the Warren Commission, they discovered that "leads pointing to the CIA had been covered up neatly by [the panel's] point man for intelligence issues, former CIA director Allen Dulles. Everything kept coming back to Cuba and the Bay of Pigs and the CIA." –P. 596

Furthermore, evidence indicated that thirteen shots were fired in in the pantry that night—five more than the number of bullets that Sirhan's gun could hold. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles cor­oner who conducted the autopsy on Kennedy, thought that all of the evidence pointed to a second gunman. "Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy," Noguchi would flatly state in his 1983 memoir. –P. 611

John Meier—a former executive in Howard Hughes's Las Vegas organization—ha_s tied Cesar to CIA contractor Bob Maheu, wh_{o was} hired by Hughes to run his Vegas operation in the 1960s. Meier claim_s he was introduced to Cesar in Las Vegas before the RFK assassination by Jack Hooper, Maheu's security chief: Meier also stated that after Kennedy's murder, he was warned by Maheu and Hooper never to men­tion Cesar's name or his connection to Maheu.

But Maheu strongly denied the accusations. "Everything about [Meier] was a lie," he snarled during an interview at his Las Vegas home before his death in 2008. "He was a 14-carat phony." Cesar, too, has rejected Meier's accusations, with Moldea—speaking on behalf of the former security guard—dismissing them as "just more garbage being peddled by Meier."

Maheu pointed out that Meier was accused of evading taxes on money he allegedly skimmed from Hughes mining deals and was con­victed on a related charge of forgery. But it was Maheu himself who was the biggest crook in his Nevada organization, Hughes told the press after fleeing Las Vegas in 1970. Maheu was "a no-good, dishonest son of a bitch [who] stole me blind," fumed the eccentric billionaire. While running Hughes's gambling casinos, Maheu had made sweetheart deals with mobsters and allowed the CIA to pay off politicians with Hughes cash and to exploit Hughes's corporate empire as a front for spy activi­ties. While Maheu was being paid over $500,000 a year by Hughes as his Las Vegas overseer, he still treated the CIA like his top client.

Maheu never concealed his hatred for the Kennedys. He even ac­cused JFK of homicide during his testimony before the Church Com­mittee, for withholding air support from the Bay of Pigs invaders. "As r as I'm concerned," he said, "those volunteers who got off the boats • t day were murdered." But Maheu denied playing a role in the Kennedy assassinations. –P. 612

 

These were some of James Jesus Angleton's dying words. He deliv­ered them between fits of calamitous coughing—lung-scraping seizures that still failed to break him of his cigarette habit—and soothing sips of

Nta."Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were

Angleton told Trento in an emotionless voice. "The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted.... Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it."

He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day—Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were "the grand mas­ters," he said. "If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell."

Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. "I guess I ill see them there soon." –P. 620

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Robert Montenegro]

4 hours ago, Mart Hall said:

I read through the Litwin article (out of interest). I don't wish to discuss the "Claims" Morley made that are "refuted" by so-called "facts" from Litwin, but it did lead me to the following WC exchange, regarding arrangements for Marina's testimony and provided me with a wry smile. 

Sen Russell: What interpreter have you arranged to have?

Rankin: We have asked the State Department to furnish one and they have said they would do so. And we also are going to have a man from the Secret Service here who has been talking to her and translated everything so we could be sure about anything she said we wouldn't have to rely on just one person. 

Sen Russell: There is a fellow here named Rueben Efron who is one of the best that I ever saw.

Rankin: Is he with the State Department?

Sen Russell: Do you know him, Mr Dulles? [a small clue that Russell knew Efron was CIA]

Dulles: I don't think I do.

The Chairman: Senator, is he with the Statement Department?

Sen Russell: No Sir. 

 

Senator Russell's next comment is "Has it ever been determined whether he (Oswald) could drive an automobile or not?" 

Lets move it on and not disclose that Efron is CIA. 

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=98219#relPageId=83

 

 

Incredible!

 

Another piece of the mosaic falls into place about United States Army Lt. Col. Reuben Efron...

[Allen Lowe]

On 8/3/2023 at 7:21 PM, Sandy Larsen said:

This is important stuff. The subject of the article, Reuben Efron, is the guy who recently was discovered to have been assigned by the CIA to read Oswald's mail. Remember? Jefferson Morley reported on this a couple weeks ago. He said it was a very important find. This article gives a lot of details about Efron.

 

I have great respect for the way you handle things - BUT LOOK AT HIS HEADLINE: "JEWISH SPY" - it is crazy that you don't see this as an anti Semitic dog whistle - WTF DOES it have to do with the fact that Efron was Jewish? Geez. you really don't get it. So please explain to me why it is OK in the title to refer to his being Jewish? Really, try and justify it.

 

[Sandy Larsen]

5 hours ago, Allen Lowe said:

I have great respect for the way you handle things - BUT LOOK AT HIS HEADLINE: "JEWISH SPY" - it is crazy that you don't see this as an anti Semitic dog whistle - WTF DOES it have to do with the fact that Efron was Jewish? Geez. you really don't get it. So please explain to me why it is OK in the title to refer to his being Jewish? Really, try and justify it.

 

Allen,

First, I don't believe it is anti-Semitic to note that someone is Jewish. Just like I don't believe it is racist to note someone is black or white, etc., or that it is anti-Russian to note that somebody is Russian, etc., etc.. These are all just facts to me.

If somebody wants to assume that stating such a fact without an apparent reason for for doing so is anti-that-fact, well that is their prerogative. But that makes no sense to me. I need to see the "anti" part before judging something to be anti. Either that, or I need to know that the author is  known to be anti.

I read much of the article. It was written by a well-known (among Jews) Jewish  journalist who is known for his pro-Jewish and Pro-Israel articles. It was published in a pro-Jewish magazine for a pro-Jewish audience. The author seems to take some pride in the fact that CIA spy Reuben Efron is Jewish. The article is pro-Jewish, not anti-Semitic.

 

[Matthew Koch]

On 8/16/2023 at 7:40 AM, Allen Lowe said:

I have great respect for the way you handle things - BUT LOOK AT HIS HEADLINE: "JEWISH SPY" - it is crazy that you don't see this as an anti Semitic dog whistle - WTF DOES it have to do with the fact that Efron was Jewish? Geez. you really don't get it. So please explain to me why it is OK in the title to refer to his being Jewish? Really, try and justify it.

 

Check out this headline, I can't hear the music.. is this one anti Semitic also in your opinion? 

I learned from the article that Efron came the the USA via Cuba, which is pretty interesting..  

https://www.jta.org/2023/08/15/default/reuben-efron-the-cia-agent-who-tracked-jfks-assassin-tried-to-recruit-his-nephew-to-be-an-observant-jew

Reuben Efron, the CIA agent who tracked JFK’s assassin, tried to recruit his nephew — to be an observant Jew