Can I get some feedback on "the cover-up chapter" of State Secret before I write the second edition? I will serialize the chapter here.

[Steve Thomas]

On 3/15/2024 at 10:45 PM, Roger Odisio said:

 

BS:  Why?  Because Hoover and Bundy had both already decided by 4 pm that Oswald acted alone.   Why?  For the same reasons above - the executive branch did not want a destabilizing situation to develop.  Between 2 pm-4 pm, that decision was made by those two government actors in coordination with LBJ's people and immediately became the government's party line.

 

BS: The planners at the top?  I assume - like many of us - a tight network of military, intelligence, anti-Castro, and fascist elements that wanted to keep American policy focused on building the national security state and away from international cooperation.

 

 

 

Bill,

I think big money and elements of the military assassinated JFK and wanted people to believe that it was a conspiracy.

They wanted to bring about WWIII because they believed that the USA would survive it.

If 10 million or 100 million people died as a result, then so be it. It's just so much collateral damage. People die in war all the time. The'd be left to pick up the pieces, and maybe profit from all the construction projects that would ensue. Fewer people to exploit scarce natural resources too.

The two main driving factors in the early 1960's were the space race, and the atomic bomb. Everything else was so much fluff.

There were discussions in another thread about Harold Byrd. Something that caught my attention earlier... He sold his oil company and invested in uranium. Uranium deposits are found near oil fields. You control the oil, you control the uranium. You control the uranium, you control the bomb.

More sober-minded people stepped in and blamed it on a lone nut. 

Steve Thomas

[Sandy Larsen]

17 hours ago, Bill Simpich said:

However, although Newman and Scott (to name just two) have provided well-documented analyses that  mole hunts were conducted with Oswald’s file…

…in the JFK critical community it seems like no one cares.

 

Bill,

I certainly care, and I think there are others who do as well. I'd like to see a debate on the reason(s) identification disinformation was inserted into Oswald's 201.

The reason provided by Jim Hargrove is the one I've always thought to be the case. But I'm open to the possibility of there being mole hunts. However, I need an educated proponent to convince me.

 

17 hours ago, Bill Simpich said:

 So I will broaden my request - any analysis about the coverup or the molehunts gratefully appreciated.  Thanks.

 

I have created a thread for this discussion to take place:

 

 

[Bill Simpich]

Thanks, Ron, I have studied Hill's "unknown witness" of a 5 foot 10, 160-170 pound man and consider Hill's identification equally suspect as Sawyer's.  Both of those Dallas police officers were bad apples.  Sawyer was fired by 1967 and left in disgrace.

Sandy, thank you for creating a site for the molehunt discussion.  I will address Jim Hargrove's thoughts on the subject there.

Here is my follow-up for the fourth of the fifth subchapters.  I think the events of Nov. 23 illustrate how the tapes were a "poison pill" that caused everyone to cover up whether they were part of the plan to kill JFK or not.   The internal correspondence also shows that neither the FBI or the CIA believed the notion that Soviet official Valeriy Kostikov was part of any "assassination bureau" - Angleton's contribution to the cover-up - and he knew better:  

November 23: How the Tapes Became a State Secret

a.  Nov. 23 was the day the tapes became a state secret

November 23 was the day that the tapes became a state secret. Scott had decided to take a secretive approach with the tapes that supposedly contained Oswald’s voice. Keep in mind that transcriber Boris Tarasoff and others had discussed the importance about any call made by an American to an “enemy” embassy, and that Scott had a separate file set aside for all Americans who visited representatives of a Soviet bloc embassy. (See Chapter 5) Such a tape was not likely to be erased.

The plane arrived at Love Field in Dallas at 2:47 AM CST on the morning of the 23rd. Dallas FBI chief Shanklin mused in his report that Hoover’s right-hand man Alan Belmont had told him that “we have on file practically all the information on Oswald down there in Mexico City except the fact that CIA had secured some information that this individual very probably called from the Cuban Embassy to the Russian Embassy.”[ 42 ] An October 16 memo to the FBI had tipped off the Bureau that Oswald had personally met with Kostikov on September 28, but did not mention the phone call later that day. The call on the 28th was the hot topic of concern that terrible night, with the CIA unwilling to firmly commit that the caller was Oswald.

Goodpasture testified in 1995 that she recalled a reference that Rudd hand carried the tape dub to Laredo. If this is true, it would mean that the tapes were literally taken by Rudd from Dallas and down to the Mexican border. 

The importance of the sending of the tapes to the FBI cannot be overemphasized, for two reasons.

First, by sending the tapes, Scott was sending the most powerful evidence about Oswald. As we will see, this evidence was covered up almost immediately and denied under oath for many years.

Secondly, the following officers swore under penalty of perjury that the tapes did not exist by the time of the assassination: David Phillips (twice), Ann Goodpasture, Robert Shaw, and Deputy Chief of Station Alan P. White.[ 43 ] We know that Goodpasture lied; she was not just mistaken. Goodpasture said that it was her understanding that Rudd was given a tape to take to Texas and that Scott had a copy “squirreled away in his safe”.[ 44 ] Assuming that Phillips was in on the molehunt, then he lied as well. White’s credibility in this affair is low - Warren Commission staffers David Slawson and William Coleman admitted in a 2003 interview that White was the one who actually played the Oswald tape for them in Mexico City during April 1964.[ 45 ] Slawson had promised the CIA during the Warren Commission investigation that the report would say nothing about the wiretaps, before Slawson and Coleman admitted the existence of the tapes to researchers Tony Summers, Peter Dale Scott, and finally the Assassinations Records Review Board in the early 90s. Goodpasture then changed her testimony from “denial” in 1978 to “admission” in 1995.[ 46 ]

John Whitten is the only CIA official I know of who admitted under oath that the tapes existed at the time of the assassination before Goodpasture finally admitted the truth in 1995.[ 47 ] Whitten wrote in the days after the assassination that "the actual tapes were also reviewed" and a copy of the Oct 1 "intercept on Lee Oswald" was discovered after the assassination.

At 9:15 am EST, Gordon Shanklin (left)
told Alan Belmont (right) that Oswald was
impersonated on the September 28 call.

The Church Committee staff refused to accept the FBI’s assurances that the tapes had been destroyed. What the staff missed, unfortunately, was a report from Alan Belmont. (Since the action largely shifted from Dallas to Langley, events will be described using Eastern Standard Time.) At 9:15 am EST, Shanklin told Belmont that Oswald was impersonated on the September 28 call.

“The Agents who spoke to Oswald have listened to the tape provided by the CIA of the call allegedly made by Oswald to the Soviet embassy, and they do not think that the individual was Oswald, as his voice is different and he spoke in broken English.”[ 48 ]

Angleton himself had the highest praise for Belmont’s acumen. "In the old days, Oswald's return to the US after his redefection would have been the highest priority for the counter-intelligence community. However, when Al Belmont left the bureau, its CI (internal security) operations fell apart."[ 49 ]

At 10 am EST, Hoover and LBJ discussed
how the Mystery Man photo and the tape
did not match with Oswald’s appearance
or his voice – and how there may have
been two people in Mexico City that
day. Incredibly, this presidential phone
call has been erased.

Because the existence of the Mexico City tapes was treated as a dark national security secret, the HSCA reported the stories of these tapes in a deceptive manner, saying in their reports that no "recording of Oswald's voice" was ever "received" or "listened to" in the United States.[ 50 ] Peter Dale Scott suggests that “this language is a lawyer's subterfuge: what was received and listened to was precisely not a recording of Oswald's voice.”[ 51 ]

At 10 am EST, Hoover and LBJ discussed how the Mystery Man photo and the tape did not match with Oswald’s appearance or his voice – and how there may have been two people in Mexico City that day. Hoover also admits in private the opposite of what he has said in public: “The evidence against Oswald is not very very strong.” The entire tape of this approximately fourteen minute conversation has been mysteriously erased, while the transcript somehow survived.

b.   After this critically important Hoover-LBJ call, things happen very quickly

At 11:45 am, someone at CIA contacted FBI liaison Sam Papich and told him about the impersonation of Eldon Hensen in Mexico City back in July.

Belmont told Tolson that he called Shanklin at 11:50 am EST. This was at least their second conversation that morning about the agents and the tape. Years later, the Church Committee was fascinated by Belmont’s story:

"Inasmuch as the Dallas agents who listened to the tape of the conversation allegedly of Oswald from the Cuban Embassy to the Russian Embassy in Mexico and examined the photographs of the visitor to the Embassy in Mexico and were of the opinion that neither the tape or the photograph pertained to Oswald, I requested Shanklin to immediately send a photograph of Oswald to our Legal Attache. This will be done by Agent Rudd who is returning to Mexico City by air. CIA in Mexico should check the photograph of Oswald against visitors to the Soviet and Cuban embassies to see if they can identify him."

Right after talking to Tolson about Shanklin, Belmont got on the phone with Shanklin’s deputy Kyle Clark at 12 am EST. Belmont asked Dallas deputy chief Clark about the Hidell name, and whether one or two people had Hidell identification. Belmont asked Clark to explore all angles of the Hidell story, as well as any embassy visits by people who may be identical with Hidell in Mexico City. A big to-do list was created after this call.

c.  Goodpasture, O’Neal and Helms suggest a change in the narrative

While Belmont was talking with the Dallas FBI office, Anne Goodpasture made an incredible statement in a memo at 11:59 am: “In view Oswald in Sov Union and fact he claimed on 1 Oct LIENVOY to have visited Sov Emb 28 Sep, Subject…probably Oswald.  Station unable compare voice as first tape erased prior receipt of second call.”

Those calls were made three days apart. The protocol was to destroy no tapes for at least two weeks, and 30 days for tapes on Cuba. According to Tarasoff’s testimony, he would have just returned the tape on or about September 30.

It is obvious that Goodpasture was covering up, especially as we see that the Belmont-Shanklin conversation refers to unnamed FBI agents listening to the September 28 conversation. Goodpasture’s testimony in 1995 refers to the October 1 conversation. Perhaps the duplicate of the tapes that the FBI agents listened to contained both conversations.[ 52 ]

At 12:10 pm, CI-SIG Birch O'Neal asks Mexico City “are original tapes available?” Author Rex Bradford asks: “(C)an this cable have been anything other than a big hint that a new story about the tapes’ existence (or lack thereof) was desired?”

At about the same time, Goodpasture put out a big story. She said that "Douglas J. Feinglass (note: Boris Tarasoff’s pseudonym) who did transcriptions says Oswald is identical to the person para one speaking broken Russian who called from Cuban embassy September 28 to Soviet embassy".[ 53 ]

This Tarasoff memo was passed on the same day from Helms to FBI liaison Sam Papich. Helms emphasized that voice comparisons were made and that the call on the 28th matched the call on the 1st. A plan seems to be taking shape. Tarasoff is never sought out for an interview. Instead, Tarasoff and his wife are hidden away from the investigators and treated as non-entities. Even five years later, when Goodpasture wrote a history of the JFK case, she referred to Tarasoff merely as "Transcriber” and said nothing about Oswald’s supposed “terrible Russian”.[ 54 ]

While Helms, O’Neal and Goodpasture were going through these machinations, Belmont was still ostensibly in the thick of his investigation. At 12:40 EST, Belmont called the legal attache Clark Anderson to let him know that Oswald's photo is being sent back with Rudd. We have some good stories (see Chapter 5), but no photos of Oswald in Mexico City have surfaced to this day.

During this day, Shanklin and Belmont have been the two men at the center of the investigative activities. During the afternoon, we see Shanklin offering a new tune. At about 3:30 pm EST (2030 Zulu), Shanklin tells Hoover "the actual tape from which this transcript was made has been destroyed". Ed Lopez and Dan Hardaway wrote a good memo about this change in the story.

I don’t believe the change in the story. With the assistance of his aide Fletcher Thompson, Hoover then wrote a memo to the President, and another to the Secret Service chief Rowley, with both memos saying that FBI agents reviewed the tape and concluded that the voice was not Oswald’s. The Secret Service’s letter was hand-delivered on the morning of the 24th, indicating that the Secret Service and LBJ got the correct story while everyone else got the cover story.[ 55 ] 

4.  The lone nut/no tapes story is polished throughout the week following the assassination

a.  The attacks on Sylvia Duran

After Scott saw the photos of Oswald on TV the night of the assassination, he informed CIA HQ of his suggestion to Gustavo Ortiz (also known as LITEMPO-2, who would become President of Mexico in 1964) that Duran be arrested. Based on the Duran-Oswald phone call on September 28 from the Cuban consulate, Scott wanted Duran held incommunicado until she provided everything she knew about Oswald. Scott added that “LITEMPO-2 can say DFS coverage revealed call to him if he needs to explain.”[ 56 ] This is another indicator that DFS had its own set of tapes and transcripts from the Mexico City station, and was not forced to rely on CIA largesse. These tapes may still exist today.

Duran was taken into custody by the Mexican police on November 23, and released the next morning. The Mexicans told Scott that they would pretend that the decision to arrest Duran came from “Mexican initiative” rather than from Scott.[ 57 ]

The official record of Duran’s interview is missing. We have a third-hand version, summarized and translated into English.[ 58 ] We also have reports from “R. L. Easby”, the pseudonym for deputy chief Alan White. The initial report from Easby states that “Echevierra told COS Duran was completely cooperative.” In fact, Duran was abused. This statement indicates that “Easby” may have inspired David Phillips; as we will see, Phillips falsely described the double agent Gilberto Alvarado as “completely cooperative” a couple of days later.[ 59 ]

From a conversation she had with Ed Lopez, we know that she said that her interrogators mistreated her during this interview and a second one days later.[ 60 ] The ambassador urged them to “go all out” while questioning her. Duran was interrogated by Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, the same DFS officer who threatened to hang Alvarado by his balls a few days later.[ 61 ] Duran told Joaquin Armas that she was shoved around and her arms had black and blue marks. Significantly, she was asked if she had intimate relations with Oswald. The initial report of her interrogation alludes to this, stating that Duran gave Oswald “on a piece of paper, her name Silvia Duran with the office telephone number but that Oswald was not given her address since he had no reason to have it.”[ 62 ] Historian Gerald McKnight states that “the line of questioning originated with COS Win Scott. The CIA was trying to force Duran to confess to entrapping Oswald, luring him with sexual favors into a Cuban conspiracy to kill JFK.”[ 63 ] That would have created the basis for an invasion of Cuba.

There is a mysterious unsigned memo in the files, extremely well written, with details few would know, and with a Spanish phrase sprinkled in it. The writer refers to the Marines as the “Infanteria de la Marina”. Win Scott wrote “read to President the night of 11/25/63”. This was the President of Mexico and not Lyndon B. Johnson.

It is designed to spread blame on the Cubans and Soviets, and Silvia Duran in particular. Oswald is described in the very first paragraph as 5’ 10”, 165, with blue-grey eyes. The memo then says that Oswald met with Duran at the embassy on September 28, and falsely states that “no details of conversations Oswald had inside the Cuban embassy are available.” We have Scott repeating a flat-out lie to the President of Mexico – as seen in Chapter 5, the wiretaps of September 27 are filled with details of what Oswald told Duran. The typeface in an adjoining document reveals it was written by the same person who ran the soon-to-be-reviewed Alvarado scam to push the story of a known informant on the Communists.

Who was that person? The “adjoining document” about Alvarado reveals the author to be A. C. Plambeck with the State Department’s Office of Security. I assume that Plambeck used the same typewriter in writing both the Alvarado memo and the author of the “5 foot ten/165” memo described above. Plambeck was with Eldridge Snight, a security officer for the State Department but identified by Win Scott as an “officer of this Section”. The memo says that Oswald embraced a woman from “Calle Juarez 407”. That is the address for Luisa Calderon, who the station had been surveilling for months.

I believe Calderon was being used here as “embroidery” for the story because Cuban intelligence was questioning her loyalty based on an alleged affair with an American named Oscar Cower from Los Angeles. Calderon had also been unwittingly at the center of the impersonation that Phillips and Shaw had engineered to fool Eldon Hensen (see Chapter 3). Calderon was to become the focus of a CIA-driven wild goose chase with a claim that she had foreknowledge of the assassination. A LIENVOY tape revealed that when Calderon was asked if she had heard the news, Calderon had joked, “Yes, of course, I knew almost before Kennedy.” The CIA did not provide documents to the HSCA showing that Calderon’s initial response prior to the alleged “foreknowledge” was her surprise and a statement that the news had to be “a lie”.

b.  The FBI and CIA admit that there is no proof that Kostikov was ever part of any “assassination bureau” – Angleton’s contribution to the cover-up

Statements made by the Soviet consuls many years later (see Oleg Nechiporenko’s Passport to Assassination) indicate that Oswald personally met with Kostikov, Yatskov and Nechiporenko on the morning of the 28th, although we can’t prove that Oswald’s visit was known to the Mexico City station until much later. What we do know is that the Mexico City station claimed on the day after the assassination that it was very concerned about the October 1 phone call from “Oswald” to the Soviet Embassy, asking for Kostikov. If Kostikov was such a dangerous man, why wasn’t the CIA on top of Kostikov on a daily basis after the October 1 phone call was translated?

The answer is that no one was worried about Kostikov until after the assassination. Before that, the emphasis was in trying to recruit him to the American side – see, for example, the REDCAP memo for September 27.

Right after JFK was killed, Angleton received a call from Anatoliy Golitsyn, a Soviet defector that had become Angleton’s most trusted source. Golitsyn told Angleton that “the modus operandi with any defector from anybody’s army to the Soviet Union required that he go through processing by the 13th Department of the KGB.”[ 64 ]

This is why much ado was made on the day after the assassination about a claim made by counterintelligence chief for the Soviet station, Tennent (Pete) Bagley. Bagley insisted there was strong proof that Kostikov was a member of the KGB’s 13th Department in charge of assassinations.[ 65] The CIA’s belief that Kostikov was a member of Dept. 13 was based solely on a “clandestine contact.”[ 66 ]

This contact was a double agent known as TUMBLEWEED. Kostikov made it possible for TUMBLEWEED to get together in the US with Oleg Brykin, a KGB member of the 13th Department. Golitsyn was the source of this information, passed on to Jim Angleton and then on to Bagley.[ 67 ] However, as stated in Chapter 3, Angleton had told the FBI as recently as June 1963 that Kostikov had nothing to do with the 13thDepartment. The FBI’s response to Golitsyn’s claim was that neither agency could be certain that Kostikov was part of the 13th Department.[ 68]

Bagley’s strong opinion, however, was a force to be reckoned with. Bagley was the chief counterspy for the Soviet Russia division, and had been stationed in Switzerland (eventually to become station chief) during the time that Oswald was due to attend Albert Schweitzer College.[ 69 ] Bagley had been transferred from Berne to Langley where he gained a rapid promotion to become C/SR/CI.

Like Angleton, Bagley believed in Golitsyn’s theory of the “Monster Plot” – that the entire Sino-Soviet split was a fake maneuver designed to lull the West into dropping its defenses and making itself vulnerable to the Communist menace. Bagley went so far as to write in his November 23 memo that “one of Harold Wilson’s principal scientific advisors is Captain Ian Maxwell, who has a long Soviet intelligence background. This may shed new light on (Golitsyn’s) report, i.e., that Harold Wilson may be a Soviet agent.” Like Bagley, Mexico City station chief Win Scott was a “Fundamentalist” – one who subscribed to Angleton and Golitsyn’s school of thought about a monolithic Communist threat – and it’s no accident that Scott’s pen name for his Mexico City memoirs was Ian Maxwell. Scott did not want Maxwell to be forgotten.

There has been speculation that Bagley may have played a role in suppressing Kostikov’s name from the twin October 10 memos. Kostikov could have been the centerpiece of discussion, since Mexico City’s memo of October 8 said that Oswald was trying to reach Kostikov on October 1. Many people believe that the absence of Kostikov’s name in these memos was very important and helped “dim the lights” on Oswald prior to November 22. That may be true, but I think there’s a more important insight here.

My thinking is that the alleged Kostikov-Oswald conversation was no secret. Kostikov’s name was flagged in the aforementioned Mexico City memo to the FBI on October 16, with no expression of concern by either the letter-writer or any of the numerous recipients. The October 16 memo said that “Lee Henry Oswald” had talked with Kostikov on September 28. Written by Barbara Manell from Mexico City’s Soviet desk, she directed a copy of the October 16 memo to the extremely anti-communist Ambassador Thomas Mann. Bert Turner at the FBI and key people at other agencies also received this information. Yet no one lifted a finger of concern.[ 70 ]

Manell could have toned it down by mentioning that Oswald and Kostikov were talking about a visa. Instead, she wrote that there was “no clarifying information”, which was not only untrue but added an unnecessary level of intrigue. When challenged on this point, Manell made it clear that “they had no need to know all those other details.”

Similarly, Manell claimed that she did not know that the September 28 transcript mentioned the Cuban consulate, or she would have included that information in her memo. But she told the HSCA that she “had rechecked the transcripts by this time, as otherwise she would not have used such certain language.”

The memo also indicates that it was Manell herself who figured out that the officer who spoke to Oswald was Kostikov. Nothing in the record explains how she came to that conclusion. When interviewed, she didn’t remember anything except she knew a lot about Kostikov, and “I probably decided that it was Kostikov”. Again, I do not see a hint of concern by anyone about Kostikov, Department 13, or anything else.

In regards to all of these items, Manell maintained that “we were told what to send and that is what we sent…I did what headquarters asked me to, to the best of my knowledge.”[ 71 ]

Golitsyn played a role in sparking the conversation about Department 13, as he called Angleton on the day of the assassination and told him that “the modus operandi with any defector from anybody’s army to the Soviet Union required that he go through processing by the 13th Department of the KGB…which is called their Affairs for Executive Action. And this was the SOP on the dealing with military defectors.”[ 72 ]

The FBI did not want to let Golitsyn see their intelligence, saying that it was against their policy to provide such material to defectors.[ 73 ] By December 20, Win Scott wrote his superior that the CIA wasn’t even sure whether Kostikov was KGB or GRU (Soviet military intelligence), which meant that Scott was uncertain whether Kostikov was part of KGB’s Department 13.[ 74 ] A similar conclusion was drawn by FBI counter-intelligence head Bill Branigan, who told Division 5 chief William Sullivan that there was “no indication that Lee Harvey Oswald was ever recruited or trained by Department 13.”[ 75 ] Nonetheless, Angleton’s assistant Ray Rocca wrote a damning report by the end of January, telling the Warren Commission that Oswald was mixed up with Kostikov, who worked with the Soviet assassination specialists at Department 13. Rocca added that Department 13 analyzed every military defector to the USSR “to determine the possibility of utilizing the defector in his country of origin.”

A report on “Soviet assassination and kidnapping” was presented to the Warren Commission on 2/17/64.[ 76 ] It focused on attacks on a White Russian official in 1954, Radio Free Europe in 1959, and what was known as “the Stashinsky murders” of the 1950s. The last case cited in the article is 1961, with the last page of the study concluding that “the assassination of an Allied official would be highly unlikely and probably unprofitable.”[ 77 ] 

Shortly before the Warren Report went to press, Hoover aide John C. Stokes stated the CIA had “overstated its case” about Kostikov and Department 13. Stokes went to great lengths to point out that the FBI had provided all this information to Angleton before the assassination, and Angleton’s response had been to write a memo on June 25, 1963 saying there was no information in the files to support the claim that Kostikov was part of Department 13.[ 78 ]

By 1976, Angleton testified to the Church Committee that there was never any confirmation of the Department 13 story.[ 79 ] CIA counter-intelligence chief David Blee admitted in 1982 that the CIA was never able to prove that Kostikov was part of Department 13, and that the last known assassination attempt conducted by that agency was in 1959.[ 80 ]

There was never any good reason to believe that Kostikov was a member of Department 13 or any “assassination bureau”. It was made up from whole cloth after the assassination. It was a provocation, designed to distract the investigators. It’s entirely possible Golitsyn believed it, but Angleton used the Department 13 story to drive the cover-up. The CIA’s psychiatrist Charles Bohrer told the head of the Soviet Russia division that Golitsyn was offering much the same picture as he had when he defected to the USA, “dangling before the Agency very enticing and intriguing statements in exchange for acceptance, entrée, support and control…re Gaitskill, Wilson, Penkovsky, the Communist split, wild, crazy – the product of a sick mind?” Bohrer was stunned by Golitsyn’s contention that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent.

Golitsyn had been seen a year earlier by another CIA psychiatrist, Dr. John Gittinger’s, whose 1962 report was much the same as Bohrer’s in 1963. Gittinger said that “our tests showed Golitsyn was clinically paranoid. I know I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw a bomber. I find it amazing how much of what he said was accepted. It remains incomprehensible to me…He suffered from a form of megalomania.”[ 81 ] For Jim Angleton to rely on Golitsyn’s speculation - while ignoring his own pre-assassination written statement saying that Kostikov was not a Department 13 official - is strong evidence of cover-up.

c.  Jack Whitten was appointed as chief of the CIA’s investigation into the JFK assassination

On November 23, Helms appointed Jack Whitten as the chief of the CIA’s investigation into the JFK assassination. The period of Whitten’s leadership role has been described as the “GPFLOOR phase” that focused on the cable traffic around the world and the focus on Oswald’s activities in Mexico City.[ 82 ] Rocca describes Whitten and J. C. King (C/WHD) as the two Washingtonians in charge; Win Scott in Mexico was responsible, and Phillips was also “knowledgeable”.[ 83 ]

Whitten believed that one of the reasons he was given the case was that Angleton was so close to the FBI. There was “initially the possibility that the FBI was in some way derelict or involved or something like that...Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was not in bed with the FBI, and I was not and Angleton was."

Given that Angleton’s source Golitsyn had made such a wild charge that contradicted the FBI’s belief about Kostikov being harmless, that may have been a factor as well. Jack Whitten spoke for much of the Agency when he said that Angleton’s view of the world was bizarre and over-suspicious. Helms may have been decided to keep Angleton under wraps, at least initially. Helms had to have known about the molehunt and how badly Angleton was compromised in that affair. I see no proof that the FBI figured out prior to the assassination that the twin 10/10/63 memos were part of a molehunt. However, the FBI did know that there was a big problem with the Mexico City tapes not containing Oswald’s voice. What was Helms going to do about the FBI? I think his successful game plan was to convince Hoover to hold back on exposing the tapes. Both Hoover and Helms wanted to weather this disaster. When supervisors Sullivan and D.J. Brennan were discussing the CIA’s plans to open new domestic contact offices in the US a couple months later, Hoover reminded them, “OK, but I hope you are not being taken in. I can’t forget CIA withholding the French espionage activities in USA, nor the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, only to mention two of their instances of double dealing.”[ 84 ] I believe Hoover’s frustration was about the tapes.

Whitten believed that another reason he was chosen as chief investigator in the JFK case was because Mexico was part of his bailiwick as the chief of the Central American desk, and that Helms knew him as a successful investigator of big cases and a polygraph operator. I think the biggest factor was that Bustos had written the 10/10 letters as Whitten’s subordinate, and Whitten had signed off on the letters without realizing that they were part of a molehunt. If Whitten remained in that state of mind throughout the investigation, that secret would be kept safe.

d.  Instead of being informed about Cubela, Whitten is offered Ramon Cortes as a Castro-did-it suspect

On Whitten’s first day as chief of the JFK investigation, Angleton’s people immediately sent him off on a wild goose chase. No one ever stepped forward and told Whitten anything about the Castro assassination plots, or anything about how closely the Cuba division was working with Rolando Cubela in the days before November 22.

Instead, the files reveal a very different story, encapsulated in a handwritten note to Whitten from Ray Rocca during the late night hours of November 23. Rocca intoned that “here is the assembled file”, and added that these documents were too sensitive to be shared with the FBI.[ 85 ] The key documents cited by Rocca expound the theme of Oswald’s Soviet connection, and the importance of following Kostikov everywhere.

“Priority” was given to the possibility that Duran might have been exchanging information for sexual favors – this lead never went anywhere, but an unfounded rumor that Oswald and Duran had sexual relations has persisted in CIA circles ever since 11/22/63.[ 86 ] The purpose of this rumor has been to make Duran look untrustworthy.

The attachments to Rocca’s note point right to links between Castro’s mistress and aide Celia Sanchez with Dallas import-export agent Ramon Cortes discussed in Chapter 3. Both Sanchez and Cortes were close to Maria Witoski, also known as AMKIRK-1. Witoski was the estranged wife of Rene Vallejo, Castro’s closest aide who had been negotiating the possible rapprochement between Castro and JFK for the last several months.

Rocca provided a backgrounder of Celia Sanchez, stating she was the head of intelligence in late 1958 before Batista was overthrown, and how she was presently the political officer for the Communist Party as well as Fidel's secretary and mistress. He then turned to three pages on the Saavedra family, and how Cuban interior minister Raul Saavedra was married to Nenita Sanchez, a close relative of Celia Sanchez.

The final page recited five of the greatest hits from the file of the double agent Ramon Cortes, much of which was discussed in Chapter 3. All five hits point to Cortes’ close relations with Cuba, while ignoring his covert relations with the American government. The last two hits point to Cortes’ relationship with Witoski/AMKIRK-1; as discussed earlier, she was close friends with Celia Sanchez.

During 1962, June Cobb, a major source of information on the FPCC, was accepted by the CIA as a contract agent. Rocca’s last memos focus on how Witoski wrote June Cobb and accepted her invitation to come to Mexico, while saying how much she’d like to see Cortes again.[ 87 ]

By early December, CI-SIG chief Birch O’Neal confirmed that a French diplomat outside of the US was saying JFK was killed due to a joint plot by the Chinese government and Castro, with Cortes and Saavedra in the middle of it all. O’Neal also admits that the tips from the French diplomat “have proven to be not too reliable”. It is third-hand information from “a source” to the French diplomat “Unstar”, and then to WAVE staffer Dudley Jentons aka J. Deering Danielson.[ 88 ]

On the 10th, Cortes was questioned by the FBI. He admitted that he was friends with Witoski and her boss, Castro’s disloyal secretary Juan Orta. (Orta was the man who received from a courier sent by Sam Giancana and the CIA the poisoned pills to kill Castro shortly before the Bay of Pigs.) Cortes denied ever meeting Castro’s mistress Celia Sanchez, but remembered Witoski telling him about her friendship with her.[ 89 ] Cortes’ story was that he had "beat the Cuban government out of $80,000," and that he was now seeking protection from Dimas Figueredo, his former shoe factory partner and operative in Mexico City’s Gyrose Debriefing Unit. After months of reports on Cortes that wasted precious time, the case simply faded away. Cortes received criminal immunity in return for his continued cooperation about the Cubans.[ 90 ] The CIA agreed not to provide the sources in the Cortes investigation to the FBI.[ 91 ] Besides leading Whitten and the FBI on a wild goose chase, the Cortes story is probably included in the “French espionage activities” that had Hoover so mad at the CIA’s double-dealing.

 

 

 

[Roger Odisio]

On 3/17/2024 at 8:05 PM, Bill Simpich said:

Thanks, Ron, I have studied Hill's "unknown witness" of a 5 foot 10, 160-170 pound man and consider Hill's identification equally suspect as Sawyer's.  Both of those Dallas police officers were bad apples.  Sawyer was fired by 1967 and left in disgrace.

Sandy, thank you for creating a site for the molehunt discussion.  I will address Jim Hargrove's thoughts on the subject there.

Here is my follow-up for the fourth of the fifth subchapters.  I think the events of Nov. 23 illustrate how the tapes were a "poison pill" that caused everyone to cover up whether they were part of the plan to kill JFK or not.   The internal correspondence also shows that neither the FBI or the CIA believed the notion that Soviet official Valeriy Kostikov was part of any "assassination bureau" - Angleton's contribution to the cover-up - and he knew better:  

November 23: How the Tapes Became a State Secret

a.  Nov. 23 was the day the tapes became a state secret

November 23 was the day that the tapes became a state secret. Scott had decided to take a secretive approach with the tapes that supposedly contained Oswald’s voice. Keep in mind that transcriber Boris Tarasoff and others had discussed the importance about any call made by an American to an “enemy” embassy, and that Scott had a separate file set aside for all Americans who visited representatives of a Soviet bloc embassy. (See Chapter 5) Such a tape was not likely to be erased.

The plane arrived at Love Field in Dallas at 2:47 AM CST on the morning of the 23rd. Dallas FBI chief Shanklin mused in his report that Hoover’s right-hand man Alan Belmont had told him that “we have on file practically all the information on Oswald down there in Mexico City except the fact that CIA had secured some information that this individual very probably called from the Cuban Embassy to the Russian Embassy.”[ 42 ] An October 16 memo to the FBI had tipped off the Bureau that Oswald had personally met with Kostikov on September 28, but did not mention the phone call later that day. The call on the 28th was the hot topic of concern that terrible night, with the CIA unwilling to firmly commit that the caller was Oswald.

Goodpasture testified in 1995 that she recalled a reference that Rudd hand carried the tape dub to Laredo. If this is true, it would mean that the tapes were literally taken by Rudd from Dallas and down to the Mexican border. 

The importance of the sending of the tapes to the FBI cannot be overemphasized, for two reasons.

First, by sending the tapes, Scott was sending the most powerful evidence about Oswald. As we will see, this evidence was covered up almost immediately and denied under oath for many years.

Secondly, the following officers swore under penalty of perjury that the tapes did not exist by the time of the assassination: David Phillips (twice), Ann Goodpasture, Robert Shaw, and Deputy Chief of Station Alan P. White.[ 43 ] We know that Goodpasture lied; she was not just mistaken. Goodpasture said that it was her understanding that Rudd was given a tape to take to Texas and that Scott had a copy “squirreled away in his safe”.[ 44 ] Assuming that Phillips was in on the molehunt, then he lied as well. White’s credibility in this affair is low - Warren Commission staffers David Slawson and William Coleman admitted in a 2003 interview that White was the one who actually played the Oswald tape for them in Mexico City during April 1964.[ 45 ] Slawson had promised the CIA during the Warren Commission investigation that the report would say nothing about the wiretaps, before Slawson and Coleman admitted the existence of the tapes to researchers Tony Summers, Peter Dale Scott, and finally the Assassinations Records Review Board in the early 90s. Goodpasture then changed her testimony from “denial” in 1978 to “admission” in 1995.[ 46 ]

John Whitten is the only CIA official I know of who admitted under oath that the tapes existed at the time of the assassination before Goodpasture finally admitted the truth in 1995.[ 47 ] Whitten wrote in the days after the assassination that "the actual tapes were also reviewed" and a copy of the Oct 1 "intercept on Lee Oswald" was discovered after the assassination.

At 9:15 am EST, Gordon Shanklin (left)
told Alan Belmont (right) that Oswald was
impersonated on the September 28 call.

The Church Committee staff refused to accept the FBI’s assurances that the tapes had been destroyed. What the staff missed, unfortunately, was a report from Alan Belmont. (Since the action largely shifted from Dallas to Langley, events will be described using Eastern Standard Time.) At 9:15 am EST, Shanklin told Belmont that Oswald was impersonated on the September 28 call.

“The Agents who spoke to Oswald have listened to the tape provided by the CIA of the call allegedly made by Oswald to the Soviet embassy, and they do not think that the individual was Oswald, as his voice is different and he spoke in broken English.”[ 48 ]

Angleton himself had the highest praise for Belmont’s acumen. "In the old days, Oswald's return to the US after his redefection would have been the highest priority for the counter-intelligence community. However, when Al Belmont left the bureau, its CI (internal security) operations fell apart."[ 49 ]

At 10 am EST, Hoover and LBJ discussed
how the Mystery Man photo and the tape
did not match with Oswald’s appearance
or his voice – and how there may have
been two people in Mexico City that
day. Incredibly, this presidential phone
call has been erased.

Because the existence of the Mexico City tapes was treated as a dark national security secret, the HSCA reported the stories of these tapes in a deceptive manner, saying in their reports that no "recording of Oswald's voice" was ever "received" or "listened to" in the United States.[ 50 ] Peter Dale Scott suggests that “this language is a lawyer's subterfuge: what was received and listened to was precisely not a recording of Oswald's voice.”[ 51 ]

At 10 am EST, Hoover and LBJ discussed how the Mystery Man photo and the tape did not match with Oswald’s appearance or his voice – and how there may have been two people in Mexico City that day. Hoover also admits in private the opposite of what he has said in public: “The evidence against Oswald is not very very strong.” The entire tape of this approximately fourteen minute conversation has been mysteriously erased, while the transcript somehow survived.

b.   After this critically important Hoover-LBJ call, things happen very quickly

At 11:45 am, someone at CIA contacted FBI liaison Sam Papich and told him about the impersonation of Eldon Hensen in Mexico City back in July.

Belmont told Tolson that he called Shanklin at 11:50 am EST. This was at least their second conversation that morning about the agents and the tape. Years later, the Church Committee was fascinated by Belmont’s story:

"Inasmuch as the Dallas agents who listened to the tape of the conversation allegedly of Oswald from the Cuban Embassy to the Russian Embassy in Mexico and examined the photographs of the visitor to the Embassy in Mexico and were of the opinion that neither the tape or the photograph pertained to Oswald, I requested Shanklin to immediately send a photograph of Oswald to our Legal Attache. This will be done by Agent Rudd who is returning to Mexico City by air. CIA in Mexico should check the photograph of Oswald against visitors to the Soviet and Cuban embassies to see if they can identify him."

Right after talking to Tolson about Shanklin, Belmont got on the phone with Shanklin’s deputy Kyle Clark at 12 am EST. Belmont asked Dallas deputy chief Clark about the Hidell name, and whether one or two people had Hidell identification. Belmont asked Clark to explore all angles of the Hidell story, as well as any embassy visits by people who may be identical with Hidell in Mexico City. A big to-do list was created after this call.

c.  Goodpasture, O’Neal and Helms suggest a change in the narrative

While Belmont was talking with the Dallas FBI office, Anne Goodpasture made an incredible statement in a memo at 11:59 am: “In view Oswald in Sov Union and fact he claimed on 1 Oct LIENVOY to have visited Sov Emb 28 Sep, Subject…probably Oswald.  Station unable compare voice as first tape erased prior receipt of second call.”

Those calls were made three days apart. The protocol was to destroy no tapes for at least two weeks, and 30 days for tapes on Cuba. According to Tarasoff’s testimony, he would have just returned the tape on or about September 30.

It is obvious that Goodpasture was covering up, especially as we see that the Belmont-Shanklin conversation refers to unnamed FBI agents listening to the September 28 conversation. Goodpasture’s testimony in 1995 refers to the October 1 conversation. Perhaps the duplicate of the tapes that the FBI agents listened to contained both conversations.[ 52 ]

At 12:10 pm, CI-SIG Birch O'Neal asks Mexico City “are original tapes available?” Author Rex Bradford asks: “(C)an this cable have been anything other than a big hint that a new story about the tapes’ existence (or lack thereof) was desired?”

At about the same time, Goodpasture put out a big story. She said that "Douglas J. Feinglass (note: Boris Tarasoff’s pseudonym) who did transcriptions says Oswald is identical to the person para one speaking broken Russian who called from Cuban embassy September 28 to Soviet embassy".[ 53 ]

This Tarasoff memo was passed on the same day from Helms to FBI liaison Sam Papich. Helms emphasized that voice comparisons were made and that the call on the 28th matched the call on the 1st. A plan seems to be taking shape. Tarasoff is never sought out for an interview. Instead, Tarasoff and his wife are hidden away from the investigators and treated as non-entities. Even five years later, when Goodpasture wrote a history of the JFK case, she referred to Tarasoff merely as "Transcriber” and said nothing about Oswald’s supposed “terrible Russian”.[ 54 ]

While Helms, O’Neal and Goodpasture were going through these machinations, Belmont was still ostensibly in the thick of his investigation. At 12:40 EST, Belmont called the legal attache Clark Anderson to let him know that Oswald's photo is being sent back with Rudd. We have some good stories (see Chapter 5), but no photos of Oswald in Mexico City have surfaced to this day.

During this day, Shanklin and Belmont have been the two men at the center of the investigative activities. During the afternoon, we see Shanklin offering a new tune. At about 3:30 pm EST (2030 Zulu), Shanklin tells Hoover "the actual tape from which this transcript was made has been destroyed". Ed Lopez and Dan Hardaway wrote a good memo about this change in the story.

I don’t believe the change in the story. With the assistance of his aide Fletcher Thompson, Hoover then wrote a memo to the President, and another to the Secret Service chief Rowley, with both memos saying that FBI agents reviewed the tape and concluded that the voice was not Oswald’s. The Secret Service’s letter was hand-delivered on the morning of the 24th, indicating that the Secret Service and LBJ got the correct story while everyone else got the cover story.[ 55 ] 

4.  The lone nut/no tapes story is polished throughout the week following the assassination

a.  The attacks on Sylvia Duran

After Scott saw the photos of Oswald on TV the night of the assassination, he informed CIA HQ of his suggestion to Gustavo Ortiz (also known as LITEMPO-2, who would become President of Mexico in 1964) that Duran be arrested. Based on the Duran-Oswald phone call on September 28 from the Cuban consulate, Scott wanted Duran held incommunicado until she provided everything she knew about Oswald. Scott added that “LITEMPO-2 can say DFS coverage revealed call to him if he needs to explain.”[ 56 ] This is another indicator that DFS had its own set of tapes and transcripts from the Mexico City station, and was not forced to rely on CIA largesse. These tapes may still exist today.

Duran was taken into custody by the Mexican police on November 23, and released the next morning. The Mexicans told Scott that they would pretend that the decision to arrest Duran came from “Mexican initiative” rather than from Scott.[ 57 ]

The official record of Duran’s interview is missing. We have a third-hand version, summarized and translated into English.[ 58 ] We also have reports from “R. L. Easby”, the pseudonym for deputy chief Alan White. The initial report from Easby states that “Echevierra told COS Duran was completely cooperative.” In fact, Duran was abused. This statement indicates that “Easby” may have inspired David Phillips; as we will see, Phillips falsely described the double agent Gilberto Alvarado as “completely cooperative” a couple of days later.[ 59 ]

From a conversation she had with Ed Lopez, we know that she said that her interrogators mistreated her during this interview and a second one days later.[ 60 ] The ambassador urged them to “go all out” while questioning her. Duran was interrogated by Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, the same DFS officer who threatened to hang Alvarado by his balls a few days later.[ 61 ] Duran told Joaquin Armas that she was shoved around and her arms had black and blue marks. Significantly, she was asked if she had intimate relations with Oswald. The initial report of her interrogation alludes to this, stating that Duran gave Oswald “on a piece of paper, her name Silvia Duran with the office telephone number but that Oswald was not given her address since he had no reason to have it.”[ 62 ] Historian Gerald McKnight states that “the line of questioning originated with COS Win Scott. The CIA was trying to force Duran to confess to entrapping Oswald, luring him with sexual favors into a Cuban conspiracy to kill JFK.”[ 63 ] That would have created the basis for an invasion of Cuba.

There is a mysterious unsigned memo in the files, extremely well written, with details few would know, and with a Spanish phrase sprinkled in it. The writer refers to the Marines as the “Infanteria de la Marina”. Win Scott wrote “read to President the night of 11/25/63”. This was the President of Mexico and not Lyndon B. Johnson.

It is designed to spread blame on the Cubans and Soviets, and Silvia Duran in particular. Oswald is described in the very first paragraph as 5’ 10”, 165, with blue-grey eyes. The memo then says that Oswald met with Duran at the embassy on September 28, and falsely states that “no details of conversations Oswald had inside the Cuban embassy are available.” We have Scott repeating a flat-out lie to the President of Mexico – as seen in Chapter 5, the wiretaps of September 27 are filled with details of what Oswald told Duran. The typeface in an adjoining document reveals it was written by the same person who ran the soon-to-be-reviewed Alvarado scam to push the story of a known informant on the Communists.

Who was that person? The “adjoining document” about Alvarado reveals the author to be A. C. Plambeck with the State Department’s Office of Security. I assume that Plambeck used the same typewriter in writing both the Alvarado memo and the author of the “5 foot ten/165” memo described above. Plambeck was with Eldridge Snight, a security officer for the State Department but identified by Win Scott as an “officer of this Section”. The memo says that Oswald embraced a woman from “Calle Juarez 407”. That is the address for Luisa Calderon, who the station had been surveilling for months.

I believe Calderon was being used here as “embroidery” for the story because Cuban intelligence was questioning her loyalty based on an alleged affair with an American named Oscar Cower from Los Angeles. Calderon had also been unwittingly at the center of the impersonation that Phillips and Shaw had engineered to fool Eldon Hensen (see Chapter 3). Calderon was to become the focus of a CIA-driven wild goose chase with a claim that she had foreknowledge of the assassination. A LIENVOY tape revealed that when Calderon was asked if she had heard the news, Calderon had joked, “Yes, of course, I knew almost before Kennedy.” The CIA did not provide documents to the HSCA showing that Calderon’s initial response prior to the alleged “foreknowledge” was her surprise and a statement that the news had to be “a lie”.

b.  The FBI and CIA admit that there is no proof that Kostikov was ever part of any “assassination bureau” – Angleton’s contribution to the cover-up

Statements made by the Soviet consuls many years later (see Oleg Nechiporenko’s Passport to Assassination) indicate that Oswald personally met with Kostikov, Yatskov and Nechiporenko on the morning of the 28th, although we can’t prove that Oswald’s visit was known to the Mexico City station until much later. What we do know is that the Mexico City station claimed on the day after the assassination that it was very concerned about the October 1 phone call from “Oswald” to the Soviet Embassy, asking for Kostikov. If Kostikov was such a dangerous man, why wasn’t the CIA on top of Kostikov on a daily basis after the October 1 phone call was translated?

The answer is that no one was worried about Kostikov until after the assassination. Before that, the emphasis was in trying to recruit him to the American side – see, for example, the REDCAP memo for September 27.

Right after JFK was killed, Angleton received a call from Anatoliy Golitsyn, a Soviet defector that had become Angleton’s most trusted source. Golitsyn told Angleton that “the modus operandi with any defector from anybody’s army to the Soviet Union required that he go through processing by the 13th Department of the KGB.”[ 64 ]

This is why much ado was made on the day after the assassination about a claim made by counterintelligence chief for the Soviet station, Tennent (Pete) Bagley. Bagley insisted there was strong proof that Kostikov was a member of the KGB’s 13th Department in charge of assassinations.[ 65] The CIA’s belief that Kostikov was a member of Dept. 13 was based solely on a “clandestine contact.”[ 66 ]

This contact was a double agent known as TUMBLEWEED. Kostikov made it possible for TUMBLEWEED to get together in the US with Oleg Brykin, a KGB member of the 13th Department. Golitsyn was the source of this information, passed on to Jim Angleton and then on to Bagley.[ 67 ] However, as stated in Chapter 3, Angleton had told the FBI as recently as June 1963 that Kostikov had nothing to do with the 13thDepartment. The FBI’s response to Golitsyn’s claim was that neither agency could be certain that Kostikov was part of the 13th Department.[ 68]

Bagley’s strong opinion, however, was a force to be reckoned with. Bagley was the chief counterspy for the Soviet Russia division, and had been stationed in Switzerland (eventually to become station chief) during the time that Oswald was due to attend Albert Schweitzer College.[ 69 ] Bagley had been transferred from Berne to Langley where he gained a rapid promotion to become C/SR/CI.

Like Angleton, Bagley believed in Golitsyn’s theory of the “Monster Plot” – that the entire Sino-Soviet split was a fake maneuver designed to lull the West into dropping its defenses and making itself vulnerable to the Communist menace. Bagley went so far as to write in his November 23 memo that “one of Harold Wilson’s principal scientific advisors is Captain Ian Maxwell, who has a long Soviet intelligence background. This may shed new light on (Golitsyn’s) report, i.e., that Harold Wilson may be a Soviet agent.” Like Bagley, Mexico City station chief Win Scott was a “Fundamentalist” – one who subscribed to Angleton and Golitsyn’s school of thought about a monolithic Communist threat – and it’s no accident that Scott’s pen name for his Mexico City memoirs was Ian Maxwell. Scott did not want Maxwell to be forgotten.

There has been speculation that Bagley may have played a role in suppressing Kostikov’s name from the twin October 10 memos. Kostikov could have been the centerpiece of discussion, since Mexico City’s memo of October 8 said that Oswald was trying to reach Kostikov on October 1. Many people believe that the absence of Kostikov’s name in these memos was very important and helped “dim the lights” on Oswald prior to November 22. That may be true, but I think there’s a more important insight here.

My thinking is that the alleged Kostikov-Oswald conversation was no secret. Kostikov’s name was flagged in the aforementioned Mexico City memo to the FBI on October 16, with no expression of concern by either the letter-writer or any of the numerous recipients. The October 16 memo said that “Lee Henry Oswald” had talked with Kostikov on September 28. Written by Barbara Manell from Mexico City’s Soviet desk, she directed a copy of the October 16 memo to the extremely anti-communist Ambassador Thomas Mann. Bert Turner at the FBI and key people at other agencies also received this information. Yet no one lifted a finger of concern.[ 70 ]

Manell could have toned it down by mentioning that Oswald and Kostikov were talking about a visa. Instead, she wrote that there was “no clarifying information”, which was not only untrue but added an unnecessary level of intrigue. When challenged on this point, Manell made it clear that “they had no need to know all those other details.”

Similarly, Manell claimed that she did not know that the September 28 transcript mentioned the Cuban consulate, or she would have included that information in her memo. But she told the HSCA that she “had rechecked the transcripts by this time, as otherwise she would not have used such certain language.”

The memo also indicates that it was Manell herself who figured out that the officer who spoke to Oswald was Kostikov. Nothing in the record explains how she came to that conclusion. When interviewed, she didn’t remember anything except she knew a lot about Kostikov, and “I probably decided that it was Kostikov”. Again, I do not see a hint of concern by anyone about Kostikov, Department 13, or anything else.

In regards to all of these items, Manell maintained that “we were told what to send and that is what we sent…I did what headquarters asked me to, to the best of my knowledge.”[ 71 ]

Golitsyn played a role in sparking the conversation about Department 13, as he called Angleton on the day of the assassination and told him that “the modus operandi with any defector from anybody’s army to the Soviet Union required that he go through processing by the 13th Department of the KGB…which is called their Affairs for Executive Action. And this was the SOP on the dealing with military defectors.”[ 72 ]

The FBI did not want to let Golitsyn see their intelligence, saying that it was against their policy to provide such material to defectors.[ 73 ] By December 20, Win Scott wrote his superior that the CIA wasn’t even sure whether Kostikov was KGB or GRU (Soviet military intelligence), which meant that Scott was uncertain whether Kostikov was part of KGB’s Department 13.[ 74 ] A similar conclusion was drawn by FBI counter-intelligence head Bill Branigan, who told Division 5 chief William Sullivan that there was “no indication that Lee Harvey Oswald was ever recruited or trained by Department 13.”[ 75 ] Nonetheless, Angleton’s assistant Ray Rocca wrote a damning report by the end of January, telling the Warren Commission that Oswald was mixed up with Kostikov, who worked with the Soviet assassination specialists at Department 13. Rocca added that Department 13 analyzed every military defector to the USSR “to determine the possibility of utilizing the defector in his country of origin.”

A report on “Soviet assassination and kidnapping” was presented to the Warren Commission on 2/17/64.[ 76 ] It focused on attacks on a White Russian official in 1954, Radio Free Europe in 1959, and what was known as “the Stashinsky murders” of the 1950s. The last case cited in the article is 1961, with the last page of the study concluding that “the assassination of an Allied official would be highly unlikely and probably unprofitable.”[ 77 ] 

Shortly before the Warren Report went to press, Hoover aide John C. Stokes stated the CIA had “overstated its case” about Kostikov and Department 13. Stokes went to great lengths to point out that the FBI had provided all this information to Angleton before the assassination, and Angleton’s response had been to write a memo on June 25, 1963 saying there was no information in the files to support the claim that Kostikov was part of Department 13.[ 78 ]

By 1976, Angleton testified to the Church Committee that there was never any confirmation of the Department 13 story.[ 79 ] CIA counter-intelligence chief David Blee admitted in 1982 that the CIA was never able to prove that Kostikov was part of Department 13, and that the last known assassination attempt conducted by that agency was in 1959.[ 80 ]

There was never any good reason to believe that Kostikov was a member of Department 13 or any “assassination bureau”. It was made up from whole cloth after the assassination. It was a provocation, designed to distract the investigators. It’s entirely possible Golitsyn believed it, but Angleton used the Department 13 story to drive the cover-up. The CIA’s psychiatrist Charles Bohrer told the head of the Soviet Russia division that Golitsyn was offering much the same picture as he had when he defected to the USA, “dangling before the Agency very enticing and intriguing statements in exchange for acceptance, entrée, support and control…re Gaitskill, Wilson, Penkovsky, the Communist split, wild, crazy – the product of a sick mind?” Bohrer was stunned by Golitsyn’s contention that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent.

Golitsyn had been seen a year earlier by another CIA psychiatrist, Dr. John Gittinger’s, whose 1962 report was much the same as Bohrer’s in 1963. Gittinger said that “our tests showed Golitsyn was clinically paranoid. I know I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could throw a bomber. I find it amazing how much of what he said was accepted. It remains incomprehensible to me…He suffered from a form of megalomania.”[ 81 ] For Jim Angleton to rely on Golitsyn’s speculation - while ignoring his own pre-assassination written statement saying that Kostikov was not a Department 13 official - is strong evidence of cover-up.

c.  Jack Whitten was appointed as chief of the CIA’s investigation into the JFK assassination

On November 23, Helms appointed Jack Whitten as the chief of the CIA’s investigation into the JFK assassination. The period of Whitten’s leadership role has been described as the “GPFLOOR phase” that focused on the cable traffic around the world and the focus on Oswald’s activities in Mexico City.[ 82 ] Rocca describes Whitten and J. C. King (C/WHD) as the two Washingtonians in charge; Win Scott in Mexico was responsible, and Phillips was also “knowledgeable”.[ 83 ]

Whitten believed that one of the reasons he was given the case was that Angleton was so close to the FBI. There was “initially the possibility that the FBI was in some way derelict or involved or something like that...Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was not in bed with the FBI, and I was not and Angleton was."

Given that Angleton’s source Golitsyn had made such a wild charge that contradicted the FBI’s belief about Kostikov being harmless, that may have been a factor as well. Jack Whitten spoke for much of the Agency when he said that Angleton’s view of the world was bizarre and over-suspicious. Helms may have been decided to keep Angleton under wraps, at least initially. Helms had to have known about the molehunt and how badly Angleton was compromised in that affair. I see no proof that the FBI figured out prior to the assassination that the twin 10/10/63 memos were part of a molehunt. However, the FBI did know that there was a big problem with the Mexico City tapes not containing Oswald’s voice. What was Helms going to do about the FBI? I think his successful game plan was to convince Hoover to hold back on exposing the tapes. Both Hoover and Helms wanted to weather this disaster. When supervisors Sullivan and D.J. Brennan were discussing the CIA’s plans to open new domestic contact offices in the US a couple months later, Hoover reminded them, “OK, but I hope you are not being taken in. I can’t forget CIA withholding the French espionage activities in USA, nor the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, only to mention two of their instances of double dealing.”[ 84 ] I believe Hoover’s frustration was about the tapes.

Whitten believed that another reason he was chosen as chief investigator in the JFK case was because Mexico was part of his bailiwick as the chief of the Central American desk, and that Helms knew him as a successful investigator of big cases and a polygraph operator. I think the biggest factor was that Bustos had written the 10/10 letters as Whitten’s subordinate, and Whitten had signed off on the letters without realizing that they were part of a molehunt. If Whitten remained in that state of mind throughout the investigation, that secret would be kept safe.

d.  Instead of being informed about Cubela, Whitten is offered Ramon Cortes as a Castro-did-it suspect

On Whitten’s first day as chief of the JFK investigation, Angleton’s people immediately sent him off on a wild goose chase. No one ever stepped forward and told Whitten anything about the Castro assassination plots, or anything about how closely the Cuba division was working with Rolando Cubela in the days before November 22.

Instead, the files reveal a very different story, encapsulated in a handwritten note to Whitten from Ray Rocca during the late night hours of November 23. Rocca intoned that “here is the assembled file”, and added that these documents were too sensitive to be shared with the FBI.[ 85 ] The key documents cited by Rocca expound the theme of Oswald’s Soviet connection, and the importance of following Kostikov everywhere.

“Priority” was given to the possibility that Duran might have been exchanging information for sexual favors – this lead never went anywhere, but an unfounded rumor that Oswald and Duran had sexual relations has persisted in CIA circles ever since 11/22/63.[ 86 ] The purpose of this rumor has been to make Duran look untrustworthy.

The attachments to Rocca’s note point right to links between Castro’s mistress and aide Celia Sanchez with Dallas import-export agent Ramon Cortes discussed in Chapter 3. Both Sanchez and Cortes were close to Maria Witoski, also known as AMKIRK-1. Witoski was the estranged wife of Rene Vallejo, Castro’s closest aide who had been negotiating the possible rapprochement between Castro and JFK for the last several months.

Rocca provided a backgrounder of Celia Sanchez, stating she was the head of intelligence in late 1958 before Batista was overthrown, and how she was presently the political officer for the Communist Party as well as Fidel's secretary and mistress. He then turned to three pages on the Saavedra family, and how Cuban interior minister Raul Saavedra was married to Nenita Sanchez, a close relative of Celia Sanchez.

The final page recited five of the greatest hits from the file of the double agent Ramon Cortes, much of which was discussed in Chapter 3. All five hits point to Cortes’ close relations with Cuba, while ignoring his covert relations with the American government. The last two hits point to Cortes’ relationship with Witoski/AMKIRK-1; as discussed earlier, she was close friends with Celia Sanchez.

During 1962, June Cobb, a major source of information on the FPCC, was accepted by the CIA as a contract agent. Rocca’s last memos focus on how Witoski wrote June Cobb and accepted her invitation to come to Mexico, while saying how much she’d like to see Cortes again.[ 87 ]

By early December, CI-SIG chief Birch O’Neal confirmed that a French diplomat outside of the US was saying JFK was killed due to a joint plot by the Chinese government and Castro, with Cortes and Saavedra in the middle of it all. O’Neal also admits that the tips from the French diplomat “have proven to be not too reliable”. It is third-hand information from “a source” to the French diplomat “Unstar”, and then to WAVE staffer Dudley Jentons aka J. Deering Danielson.[ 88 ]

On the 10th, Cortes was questioned by the FBI. He admitted that he was friends with Witoski and her boss, Castro’s disloyal secretary Juan Orta. (Orta was the man who received from a courier sent by Sam Giancana and the CIA the poisoned pills to kill Castro shortly before the Bay of Pigs.) Cortes denied ever meeting Castro’s mistress Celia Sanchez, but remembered Witoski telling him about her friendship with her.[ 89 ] Cortes’ story was that he had "beat the Cuban government out of $80,000," and that he was now seeking protection from Dimas Figueredo, his former shoe factory partner and operative in Mexico City’s Gyrose Debriefing Unit. After months of reports on Cortes that wasted precious time, the case simply faded away. Cortes received criminal immunity in return for his continued cooperation about the Cubans.[ 90 ] The CIA agreed not to provide the sources in the Cortes investigation to the FBI.[ 91 ] Besides leading Whitten and the FBI on a wild goose chase, the Cortes story is probably included in the “French espionage activities” that had Hoover so mad at the CIA’s double-dealing.

 

 

 

Some loose ends, Bill.

 

You said:  "Whether or not LBJ gave the Secret Service orders to take such action, the result was pre-ordained.  No forces in the executive branch were willing to entrust the autopsy in the hands of the Dallas authorities in the middle of a national crisis.   JFK's body was going to immediately return to Washington - period."

 

Yes, the decision to snatch the body was "preordained".  It was central to the coverup plan devised before the murder, since an autopsy would reveal that their Oswald single shooter story was false. That was the crisis they faced. That's why the body was grabbed.  Not some national, destabilizing situation about a possible war with the SU. They of course knew neither the Cubans nor Soviets did it.

 

The evidence that LBJ ordered the body to the plane seems pretty clear.  Jack Valenti was sitting next to him on the plane when he gave the order.  In his book defending Johnson, A Very Human President,1975, Valenti said it was the first decision of his presidency and a good one.  

 

The story has been told that in snatching the body the SS pulled a gun on Rose and/or shoved him against the wall. Possibly.  It's more likely the situation was resolved with the words, "we have an order from the President,"  And, "the President has to get back to DC for his own safety, he wants to take Jackie with him, and she won't leave won't leave without the body".

 

Taking the body at that time--absent an indication that someone else ordered it, or someone else told Johnson to order it-- is more evidence that Johnson was involved in the planning before the murder. He knew what he had to do right from the beginning of the coverup.

 

"The Johnson team had been nervous about a military attack all day, and did not want to give any signals that could lead towards a conflict with the Soviet Union." Nah, more Johnson misdirection, which he embellished while waiting on the plane with an offhand comment wondering if the missiles were flying yet (as if he wouldn't know that if they were).

 

While everyone else on the plane was urging Johnson to get the hell out of there, and go back to DC, Johnson held up the departure for, I think, more than an hour because he said he wanted to be sworn in first, and only by Judge Sarah Hughes, who had to be found and brought to the plane. An utterly bogus reason. He knew he already was President. The real reason was he had to wait for the body to get to the plane.

 

I'm still pondering your contention that there were two coverups. My first reaction was no, there was only one--the coverup being executed by the planners of the murder.  But you're right; there also was the plan to cover up the CIA involvement with Oswald. It was run by CIA staff in conjunction with the coverup of agency involvement in the murder.  I just think that second plan is much less important today to those piecing together what happened.

[Sandy Larsen]

On 3/14/2024 at 3:50 PM, Bill Simpich said:

Cover-up architect Jim Angleton was motivated by the Mexico City situation, but would have little reason to quibble with Hosty's sentiments until 1967. That was the year that Angleton learned some information from a double agent that “tended to absolve the Soviets”. That was the same year that the KGB conducted a big study into the JFK assassination and concluded that it was a domestic operation. Angleton was shaken by this revelation, obtained from a double agent known only as “Byetkov”. 

On 3/14/2024 at 3:50 PM, Bill Simpich said:

(New note:  Thomas Graves points out that "Byetkov" appears to be Obyetkov - who was the guard that LHO allegedly spoke to on Sept 28 and Oct 1.  At least one of these phone calls was memorialized on audiotape - and has now disappeared.)

@Bill Simpich

 

Bill,

Researcher Thomas "Tommy" Graves wrote the following and sent it by e-mail to me. You might be interested in it.

The problem is, "Byetkov"/Obyedkov wasn't a U.S.-loyal double agent -- he was, as Angleton says in his 6 February 1976 Church Committee testimony (where he refers to "Byetkov"/Obyedkov as "the other hangnail"), a Kremlin-loyal triple agent (i.e., the CIA mistakenly thought it had successfully recruited him). I don't know if Angleton realized that *in 1963,* but he talks about it in his 1976 Church Committee testimony, and in retrospect it's very important for the simple reason that one shouldn't trust what a Kremlin-loyal triple agent tells one. Da?

Another problem is that Bill conflates "Byetkov"/Obyedkov with Boris Orekhov (SHAMROCK), another Kremlin-loyal triple agent, who duped J. Edgar Hoover in 1966 (iirc) into believing that the KGB had undertaken a six-month investigation (it hadn't) right after the assassination (not ostensibly "in 1967," as Bill seems to believe) and guess what? -- allegedly determined that the evil, evil Military Industrial Complex (or some-such thing) had killed JFK!!!  I seem to remember having found a document about SHAMROCK in this regard a few years ago at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website.

Yet another mistake that Bill keeps making is that alleged JFKA "cover up artist" wasn't Angleton, but, according to John Newman and British researcher Malcolm Blunt, KGB "mole" Bruce Solie in the mole-hunting Office of Security, who not only sent (or duped his confidant,  protégé, and mole-hunting subordinate, Angleton, into sending) Oswald to Moscow in 1959 as an ostensible "dangle" in a *planned-to-fail* hunt for "Popov's Mole" (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA, but hid OS documents on Oswald from the Church Committee and the HSCA and seems to have managed to lose Volume V of the OS files on Oswald in the late 1970s.

 

EDIT: Made a correction for Tommy.

 

[Sandy Larsen]

10 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Researcher Thomas "Tommy" Graves wrote the following and sent it by e-mail to me. You might be interested in it.

@Bill Simpich

Tommy continued:

PS  Have you had an opportunity, yet, to check out my 25 free-to-read articles at Substack under my banner "How the KGB Zombified the CIA and the FBI"? I've only had it for about three weeks and I already have 24 followers!

 

[Robert Morrow]

Will the people on this thread give me some feedback on the post below? Was Lee Harvey Oswald really 131 pounds at the time of his arrest by the Dallas Police? Did the DPD actually weigh him? I happen to *think, guess, postulate* that Oswald was indeed about 131 pounds on 11-22-1963. What do you guys think.

Oswald was described as weighing 131 pounds in his arrest sheet with the Dallas police on 11/22/63. The source is Oswald's arrest card with the Dallas police.

 Do you think the Dallas police actually weighed Oswald in the police station to come up with his weight of 131 pounds?

 See page 54 of this 1134 page PDF at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website:

 showDoc.html 

 

showDoc.html

 Oswald is described as age 24, 5 feet 9 1/2 inches tall and 131 pounds with blue eyes.

[Paul Brancato]

Wow Bill - some doozies here since your last post. It seems to me that Newman is on the wrong track. I may be mistaken, but having had many exchanges with Tommy Graves years ago before he left the forum, I think he sees a Soviet plot to kill JFK. it also seems to me that Newman is heading in the same direction. Your research on Golitsyn and Angleton and Tennent Bagley shows the trio to be paranoid at best, and certainly up to something nefarious. Can I use the word ‘liars’? 
Might I ask - what is your impression of where Newman is going with all this? Blunt, Bagley, Solie? It feels like a resurrection of James Angleton. 

[Bill Simpich]

Paul, I think Newman is going in the right direction.  I don't see him as moving towards a Soviet plot to kill JFK.  I think he is right that Solie was a mole.   I am not an expert on Bagley, and I have been cautious about him in the past, but he appears to me at this point as one of the good guys.   He concluded, among other things, that LHO was a "witting" defector in the USSR.

I think McCord is now in Newman's sights.   Let's see where it goes.

 

[Richard Bertolino]

On 3/12/2024 at 5:04 PM, Bill Simpich said:

Education Forum colleagues:

Ten years after I wrote State Secret, I have received much valuable feedback on the book (which can be found on the Mary Ferrell website)

With the new releases and some new discoveries, I am warming up to write a second edition.  It may take a little while, because the JFK lawsuit I am working on remains my first priority.  

Among other reasons, I have discovered that AMKNOB-1 was not the double agent Santiago Garriga of the would-be Fair Play for Cuba Committee in Miami (also known as Juan Cruz, a fascinating figure in his own right) - no, AMKNOB-1 was a double agent known as "the Swiss" -  Piero Fedeli Medici, who had a fascinating inter-relationship in 1963 with the cousin-in-law of Antonio Veciana, Cuban agent Guillermo Ruiz/AMAUTO-1 that I am studying as of this day.   My mistaken identification was a fortuitous mistake that led to more discoveries.

I may even do two versions - a super-short version for the general public and a tightened version for the research community.  Up to this time, the research community has always been my intended audience.

I noticed that I never received any feedback on my "cover-up chapter" - which was my original intent for the book until the Mystery of Mexico City became foremost in my mind.

I think the best way to get this feedback is to serialize the cover-up chapter.  The first few chapters are pretty short.  As the book reaches its conclusion, the final two chapters became much longer than I intended.  "The Set-Up and the Cover-Up" - Chapter 6 - is the longest of all.

So I will break the cover-up chapter into five or more sub-chapters.  I will begin with the "set-up" - you have to have a set-up before any cover-up.   I have shortened the chapter to some degree already.  Let me know if it is clear enough.  

All thoughtful comments appreciated!   

I.   The set-up

1.  The sixth floor was insecure

It’s hard to think of a less secure sniper’s nest than the sixth floor. Six men had been up there all morning on November 22 laying a wood floor, and they were nowhere near done. It was an optional sniper post at best. The entire sixth floor was open storage space. Anyone could walk in at any minute.

In fact, the men had planned to eat lunch on the sixth floor that day, and Bonnie Ray Williams left the floor at 12:15 only when he realized no one was coming up to join him.   The sixth floor was not Oswald’s turf – as an order filler, he would only come up there when he needed some books to pack into a carton, and then he was on his way again. The best evidence is that Oswald wasn’t on the sixth floor on the day of the assassination, but on the first or second floor.

2.  The two lunchroom theory

 I never understood why there weren’t more witnesses coming forward and saying that they saw Oswald in the lunchroom. Then I found out that Oswald regularly ate his lunch in the first floor lunchroom called the “domino room” where the African American employees would gather, instead of in the all-white, main lunchroom on the second floor that had all of the soft drink machines. This behavior was Oswald’s regular practice. When he went to court in New Orleans in August 1963, he sat on the side of the courtroom with the African Americans. During that same month, Oswald was seen in the predominantly black voter registration line. Many African Americans were dissuaded from providing testimony due to racism, and this is one more example of it. Oswald himself told his interrogators that he saw Junior Jarman and a second short another African American man that he recognized in the domino room while he was eating lunch during noontime, which was subsequently verified. It has been suggested that Oswald may have left the domino room “to go up to the second floor to get a coke.”[ 1 ] Maybe we should rehabilitate what we called during the Vietnam War “the domino theory” - many things fall in line when you look at the story this way.

I’m also relying on several witnesses. Carolyn Arnold stated on November 26 that she saw Oswald on the first floor a few minutes before 12:15 pm. On the sixth floor itself, Bonnie Ray Williams told the Warren Commission that he was up there until about 12:15, and Oswald was not there. Arnold Rowland said that he saw an African American man and a white man with a rifle in two separate windows on the sixth floor at 12:15 pm. Carolyn Walter also saw two men on the sixth floor a few minutes later, one of them with a rifle. The HSCA photographic panel found that someone rearranged the boxes in the sniper’s nest within two minutes after the shooting – given Oswald’s verified appearance on the second floor with Patrolman Marrion Baker ninety seconds after the shots, I don’t see how Oswald had the time to do this rearrangement.

3.  The humanitarian weapon

It’s even less likely that anyone used the Mannlicher-Carcano later found near the sixth floor stairwell to fire at anything. This rifle is what Oswald supposedly used to kill JFK and wound Connally by firing three shots from behind the president’s car in the motorcade. It’s hard to imagine why Oswald would have used it – it was a mail order weapon ordered under the name of Oswald’s supposed chief of the New Orleans Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Alex Hidell. Of all the rifles in the world, what assassin would use a rifle that would maximize chances of getting caught?

This rifle was hardly an assassin’s choice – the Mannlicher-Carcano was a World War I relic best known as the “humanitarian weapon” during World War II because it never killed anybody on purpose - MCs could be purchased for three dollars each in lots of 25. On the day the rifle was found, the firing pin was found to be defective or worn-out, the telescopic sight was not accurately sighted, and no ammunition clip was officially reported. Without an ammunition clip, a gunman would have to hand-load cartridges. 

4.  An unknown man provided “5 foot 10, 165 pounds” tip at JFK crime scene

The unknown white male's
"five foot ten/165"
description of the shooter was
announced five times by the
Dallas police dispatcher
Murray Jackson in the hour
after the assassination

Fourteen minutes after the shooting, a 12:44 pm radio call in Dallas gave a description of a man with a rifle on the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository. This radio call was based on the report of an “unknown white man’s” report to police inspector Herbert Sawyer. “Slender white male about 30, five feet ten, 165”.[ 2 ] The dispatcher Murray Jackson relied on this description, providing it again at 12:47, 12:49, 12:55 and 1:08, offering it as “all we have” prior to the shooting of Tippit at 1:09 pm.

Ann Egerter and the FBI had used the phony Webster-like description of Oswald as “5 feet ten, 165” repeatedly to describe Oswald since his time in the USSR in 1960. This was no molehunt. This was a manhunt.

The specificity of the “5 feet ten, 165” tip cannot be squared with the impossibility of providing a height-and-weight ID of a sixth floor sniper located at a window and only visible from near-waist height. You’re only seeing a portion of his body. There is no way to tell how tall he is, much less how much he weighs. What you would notice would be his clothes – but the witness noticed nothing on that subject.

Also, there’s nothing “slender” about any man who is 5 foot 10 and 165. Such a man comes up with a body mass index (or “BMI”) of 23.7 – right in the middle of the American population. “Average” is BMI of between 23 and 26.

Oswald, however, was generally referred to as “slender” in his CIA and FBI records. His weight was generally between 126 and 140.

J. Edgar Hoover exhausted all leads before concluding that the 5'10"/165 description came from an “unidentified citizen” that approached Sawyer. No one ever convinced the FBI that the alleged witness Howard Brennan provided this tip. 

 No one to my knowledge ever remarked that the tip largely matched Oswald’s FBI description from 1960 until his arrest in August, 1963, when he was described as five foot nine/140. The absence of important evidence in the record - what Peter Dale Scott refers to as “the negative template” – is often the strongest evidence of all.

5.  Oswald probably played no role in the Tippit shooting

After Sawyer called in with the five-ten/165 description, police dispatcher Murray Jackson explained over the radio that Sawyer’s call was about a suspect in the President’s shooting that had been sighted at the Texas School Book Depository. Two officers immediately reported that they were either at the location or en route. For no understandable reason, Dispatcher Jackson then summoned patrolmen J. D. Tippit and R. C. Nelson and mysteriously asked them to “move into Central Oak Cliff area”. This is the neighborhood where Oswald lived. By this time, Oswald was heading for home.

Nine minutes later, Dispatcher Jackson informed Tippit at 12:54 that “you will be at large for any emergency that comes in” nearby “Lancaster and 8th” in the Oak Cliff neighborhood – placing him less than a mile from Oswald’s address at 1026 North Beckley and far away from the manhunt in downtown Dallas three miles away! Years later, Jackson made the improbable claim to CBS News that he “realized that, as you said, that we were draining the Oak Cliff area of available police officers, so if there was an emergency, such as an armed robbery or a major accident, to come up, we wouldn’t have anybody there…”[ 9 ]

In a multiple hearsay story that is worthy of consideration, Tippit’s father told author Joseph McBride that he learned from Tippit’s widow that an officer told her that Tippit and another officer had been assigned by the police to hunt down Oswald in Oak Cliff. The other officer was involved in an accident and never made it to the scene, but “J.D. made it”.[ 10 ] Tippit’s widow has never made a statement for the record. When you have a witness that has offered limited interviews but no sworn testimony, that’s when a hearsay account may provide the reason why the witness is reluctant to talk. Tippit’s story is backed by none other than Johnny Roselli’s associate John Martino – both of these men admitted their involvement in JFK’s murder. Martino said that Oswald “was to meet his contact at the Texas Theater” in his Oak Cliff neighborhood.[ 11 ]

I think it’s more likely that Oswald went straight to the Texas Theater, and was never at the Tippit crime scene. Butch Burroughs, a Texas Theater concessions employee for decades, told author Jim Marrs in 1987 that he sold Oswald popcorn right around 1:15 pm. Author Dale Myers challenged Burroughs, saying that he “told the Warren Commission that he didn’t see Oswald slip into the theater. He also didn’t mention selling popcorn to Oswald.” Myers missed the point. Ticket taker Julia Postal quoted Burroughs as saying “Well, I saw him coming out.”, presumably when Oswald bought the popcorn. Burroughs was never asked by the Warren Commission if he saw Oswald prior to the police hunt.

Burroughs also told Marrs that Julia Postal knew that she sold Oswald a ticket earlier that day, but didn’t want to admit it. She moved away from Dallas to escape questioning on the subject. When Ms. Postal was asked by researcher Jones Harris if she realized upon seeing Oswald’s face that she might have sold him a ticket, she burst out in tears.

(Theater patron Jack) Davis stated that Oswald sat next to him and then another patron before going out to the lobby. According to author Lamar Waldron, Oswald was armed with half a box top saying “Cox’s, Fort Worth”. If Waldron is correct, Oswald was apparently trying to meet someone who had the other box top half.[ 13 ] Manuel Artime did this kind of thing – his practice was to meet AMWORLD officers with torn one dollar bills.

6.  One unknown man described Tippit's shooter as "5 foot 10, 160-170 pounds"

Another unknown man told Officer Gerald
Hill at the Tippit crime scene that the man
who shot the policeman was a white male
about 5 foot 10 inches, weighing 160
to 170 pounds.

As soon as Officer Gerald Hill came on the scene, he was approached by an unknown witness. Hill said “the first man that came up to me, he said ‘The man who shot him was a white male about 5 foot 10 inches, weighing 160 to 170 pounds, had on a jacket and a pair of trousers, and brown bushy hair.” Hill never got the man’s name, turned him over to another officer, and no one knows his identity.

Patrolman Howell W. Summers called in a description from witness Ted Callaway of a “white male, twenty-seven, five feet eleven, a hundred sixty-five, black wavy hair, fair complected, wearing a light grey Eisenhower-type jacket, dark trousers and a white shirt…(with) a 32 dark-finish automatic pistol.” Oswald owned a 38 caliber revolver, not a 32 automatic.

Joseph McBride is the author of the new book Into the Nightmare, focusing on the Tippit case. A key aspect of the case is Detective Jim Leavelle’s admission that cartridge shells supposedly found at the crime scene were never actually marked on the scene by the Dallas police. McBride points out that “given that the HSCA relied solely on the shells to make its case that Oswald shot Tippit, Leavelle’s admissions that the shells were not marked at the scene help nullify that homicide case against Oswald.”[ 15 ]

One aspect of the Tippit case has fascinated me since it was revealed by FBI agent Jim Hosty in 1996. Hosty revealed that FBI agent Robert Barrett said that a wallet containing identification for Oswald and his purported alias Alek James Hidell was left at the scene of Tippit’s shooting and found by police captain W. R. Westbrook near a puddle of blood.

The rifle found on the sixth floor was ordered
by A. Hidell, with Oswald's post office box as
the return address. The Warren Commission
was told by postal inspector Harry Holmes
that anyone who had access to Oswald’s PO
box could have picked up the rifle without
even showing identification.

 

7.  A second unknown man said the suspect handed something to Tippit through the open passenger window

FBI agent Barrett claims to this day that an unknown witness told him that Tippit pulled over and the gunman handed something through the open passenger window to Tippit inside the car. Barrett believes that Tippit saw the two IDs for Oswald and Hidell, got out of the car to question Oswald, and was shot. Barrett admits that he doesn’t know who the witness was, and can’t verify it, but the wallet was “there”.

Who would hand their entire wallet to a police officer when asked for identification when not under arrest? It looks like someone planted a wallet with Oswald’s identification on the ground at the scene, framing him with a throw-down wallet much as others have been framed with a throw-down gun.

8.  A third unknown man handed Oswald's wallet to the police at the crime scene

An unknown man provided Oswald's
wallet to Officer Kenneth Croy at the
crime scene where Officer Tippit was shot.
The wallet contained ID for both Lee
Oswald and Alek J. Hidell. The finding of
this wallet was hidden until 1996.

I say that because since Hosty’s revelation in 1996, we have learned quite a bit more, thanks to researcher Jones Harris. When Sergeant Kenneth H. Croy arrived as one of the first officers on the scene, an unknown man handed him a wallet. Croy handed the wallet to Sergeant Calvin Owens.[ 17 ] Owens apparently gave it to Westbrook, who displayed it to Barrett. After the wallet was videotaped, it went back to Westbrook’s custody, and Hosty tells us that it was never seen again. Westbrook and Barrett were in charge of the scene at the Texas Theater when Oswald was arrested. When Oswald refused to provide his name, Westbrook ordered, “Get him out of here.”

The history of Oswald’s wallets can only be described with three words: Smoke and mirrors. Only after the release of the Warren Report did the FBI evidence inventory show three wallets for Oswald: B-1 (the arrest wallet), 114 (brown billfold) and 382 (red billfold). No wallets were found at his rooming house. 

The “arrest wallet” appeared on videotape at the Tippit crime scene; we have discussed how no one knows how it appeared on the scene. This arrest wallet of Oswald’s was supposedly removed from his pocket by Officer Paul Bentley following his arrest and while on the way to City Hall, Bentley said that he reviewed the contents and saw the identification for Oswald and Hidell. Since Bentley’s recent death, FBI agent Robert Barrett now says that Bentley was lying.

(Whether or not Barrett is telling the truth...)  The best evidence indicates that an unknown citizen brought the wallet to the murder scene, based on Officer Croy’s interview with Jones Harris.

 

 

Although no ammo clip was official reported, one apparently was photographed being dusted by Lt. Day and apparently sticking out of the rifle as Day carried it off.

 

Edited April 25 by Richard Bertolino
attachment removed

[Richard Bertolino]

On 3/12/2024 at 5:04 PM, Bill Simpich said:

Education Forum colleagues:

Ten years after I wrote State Secret, I have received much valuable feedback on the book (which can be found on the Mary Ferrell website)

With the new releases and some new discoveries, I am warming up to write a second edition.  It may take a little while, because the JFK lawsuit I am working on remains my first priority.  

Among other reasons, I have discovered that AMKNOB-1 was not the double agent Santiago Garriga of the would-be Fair Play for Cuba Committee in Miami (also known as Juan Cruz, a fascinating figure in his own right) - no, AMKNOB-1 was a double agent known as "the Swiss" -  Piero Fedeli Medici, who had a fascinating inter-relationship in 1963 with the cousin-in-law of Antonio Veciana, Cuban agent Guillermo Ruiz/AMAUTO-1 that I am studying as of this day.   My mistaken identification was a fortuitous mistake that led to more discoveries.

I may even do two versions - a super-short version for the general public and a tightened version for the research community.  Up to this time, the research community has always been my intended audience.

I noticed that I never received any feedback on my "cover-up chapter" - which was my original intent for the book until the Mystery of Mexico City became foremost in my mind.

I think the best way to get this feedback is to serialize the cover-up chapter.  The first few chapters are pretty short.  As the book reaches its conclusion, the final two chapters became much longer than I intended.  "The Set-Up and the Cover-Up" - Chapter 6 - is the longest of all.

So I will break the cover-up chapter into five or more sub-chapters.  I will begin with the "set-up" - you have to have a set-up before any cover-up.   I have shortened the chapter to some degree already.  Let me know if it is clear enough.  

All thoughtful comments appreciated!   

I.   The set-up

1.  The sixth floor was insecure

It’s hard to think of a less secure sniper’s nest than the sixth floor. Six men had been up there all morning on November 22 laying a wood floor, and they were nowhere near done. It was an optional sniper post at best. The entire sixth floor was open storage space. Anyone could walk in at any minute.

In fact, the men had planned to eat lunch on the sixth floor that day, and Bonnie Ray Williams left the floor at 12:15 only when he realized no one was coming up to join him.   The sixth floor was not Oswald’s turf – as an order filler, he would only come up there when he needed some books to pack into a carton, and then he was on his way again. The best evidence is that Oswald wasn’t on the sixth floor on the day of the assassination, but on the first or second floor.

2.  The two lunchroom theory

 I never understood why there weren’t more witnesses coming forward and saying that they saw Oswald in the lunchroom. Then I found out that Oswald regularly ate his lunch in the first floor lunchroom called the “domino room” where the African American employees would gather, instead of in the all-white, main lunchroom on the second floor that had all of the soft drink machines. This behavior was Oswald’s regular practice. When he went to court in New Orleans in August 1963, he sat on the side of the courtroom with the African Americans. During that same month, Oswald was seen in the predominantly black voter registration line. Many African Americans were dissuaded from providing testimony due to racism, and this is one more example of it. Oswald himself told his interrogators that he saw Junior Jarman and a second short another African American man that he recognized in the domino room while he was eating lunch during noontime, which was subsequently verified. It has been suggested that Oswald may have left the domino room “to go up to the second floor to get a coke.”[ 1 ] Maybe we should rehabilitate what we called during the Vietnam War “the domino theory” - many things fall in line when you look at the story this way.

I’m also relying on several witnesses. Carolyn Arnold stated on November 26 that she saw Oswald on the first floor a few minutes before 12:15 pm. On the sixth floor itself, Bonnie Ray Williams told the Warren Commission that he was up there until about 12:15, and Oswald was not there. Arnold Rowland said that he saw an African American man and a white man with a rifle in two separate windows on the sixth floor at 12:15 pm. Carolyn Walter also saw two men on the sixth floor a few minutes later, one of them with a rifle. The HSCA photographic panel found that someone rearranged the boxes in the sniper’s nest within two minutes after the shooting – given Oswald’s verified appearance on the second floor with Patrolman Marrion Baker ninety seconds after the shots, I don’t see how Oswald had the time to do this rearrangement.

3.  The humanitarian weapon

It’s even less likely that anyone used the Mannlicher-Carcano later found near the sixth floor stairwell to fire at anything. This rifle is what Oswald supposedly used to kill JFK and wound Connally by firing three shots from behind the president’s car in the motorcade. It’s hard to imagine why Oswald would have used it – it was a mail order weapon ordered under the name of Oswald’s supposed chief of the New Orleans Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Alex Hidell. Of all the rifles in the world, what assassin would use a rifle that would maximize chances of getting caught?

This rifle was hardly an assassin’s choice – the Mannlicher-Carcano was a World War I relic best known as the “humanitarian weapon” during World War II because it never killed anybody on purpose - MCs could be purchased for three dollars each in lots of 25. On the day the rifle was found, the firing pin was found to be defective or worn-out, the telescopic sight was not accurately sighted, and no ammunition clip was officially reported. Without an ammunition clip, a gunman would have to hand-load cartridges. 

4.  An unknown man provided “5 foot 10, 165 pounds” tip at JFK crime scene

The unknown white male's
"five foot ten/165"
description of the shooter was
announced five times by the
Dallas police dispatcher
Murray Jackson in the hour
after the assassination

Fourteen minutes after the shooting, a 12:44 pm radio call in Dallas gave a description of a man with a rifle on the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository. This radio call was based on the report of an “unknown white man’s” report to police inspector Herbert Sawyer. “Slender white male about 30, five feet ten, 165”.[ 2 ] The dispatcher Murray Jackson relied on this description, providing it again at 12:47, 12:49, 12:55 and 1:08, offering it as “all we have” prior to the shooting of Tippit at 1:09 pm.

Ann Egerter and the FBI had used the phony Webster-like description of Oswald as “5 feet ten, 165” repeatedly to describe Oswald since his time in the USSR in 1960. This was no molehunt. This was a manhunt.

The specificity of the “5 feet ten, 165” tip cannot be squared with the impossibility of providing a height-and-weight ID of a sixth floor sniper located at a window and only visible from near-waist height. You’re only seeing a portion of his body. There is no way to tell how tall he is, much less how much he weighs. What you would notice would be his clothes – but the witness noticed nothing on that subject.

Also, there’s nothing “slender” about any man who is 5 foot 10 and 165. Such a man comes up with a body mass index (or “BMI”) of 23.7 – right in the middle of the American population. “Average” is BMI of between 23 and 26.

Oswald, however, was generally referred to as “slender” in his CIA and FBI records. His weight was generally between 126 and 140.

J. Edgar Hoover exhausted all leads before concluding that the 5'10"/165 description came from an “unidentified citizen” that approached Sawyer. No one ever convinced the FBI that the alleged witness Howard Brennan provided this tip. 

 No one to my knowledge ever remarked that the tip largely matched Oswald’s FBI description from 1960 until his arrest in August, 1963, when he was described as five foot nine/140. The absence of important evidence in the record - what Peter Dale Scott refers to as “the negative template” – is often the strongest evidence of all.

5.  Oswald probably played no role in the Tippit shooting

After Sawyer called in with the five-ten/165 description, police dispatcher Murray Jackson explained over the radio that Sawyer’s call was about a suspect in the President’s shooting that had been sighted at the Texas School Book Depository. Two officers immediately reported that they were either at the location or en route. For no understandable reason, Dispatcher Jackson then summoned patrolmen J. D. Tippit and R. C. Nelson and mysteriously asked them to “move into Central Oak Cliff area”. This is the neighborhood where Oswald lived. By this time, Oswald was heading for home.

Nine minutes later, Dispatcher Jackson informed Tippit at 12:54 that “you will be at large for any emergency that comes in” nearby “Lancaster and 8th” in the Oak Cliff neighborhood – placing him less than a mile from Oswald’s address at 1026 North Beckley and far away from the manhunt in downtown Dallas three miles away! Years later, Jackson made the improbable claim to CBS News that he “realized that, as you said, that we were draining the Oak Cliff area of available police officers, so if there was an emergency, such as an armed robbery or a major accident, to come up, we wouldn’t have anybody there…”[ 9 ]

In a multiple hearsay story that is worthy of consideration, Tippit’s father told author Joseph McBride that he learned from Tippit’s widow that an officer told her that Tippit and another officer had been assigned by the police to hunt down Oswald in Oak Cliff. The other officer was involved in an accident and never made it to the scene, but “J.D. made it”.[ 10 ] Tippit’s widow has never made a statement for the record. When you have a witness that has offered limited interviews but no sworn testimony, that’s when a hearsay account may provide the reason why the witness is reluctant to talk. Tippit’s story is backed by none other than Johnny Roselli’s associate John Martino – both of these men admitted their involvement in JFK’s murder. Martino said that Oswald “was to meet his contact at the Texas Theater” in his Oak Cliff neighborhood.[ 11 ]

I think it’s more likely that Oswald went straight to the Texas Theater, and was never at the Tippit crime scene. Butch Burroughs, a Texas Theater concessions employee for decades, told author Jim Marrs in 1987 that he sold Oswald popcorn right around 1:15 pm. Author Dale Myers challenged Burroughs, saying that he “told the Warren Commission that he didn’t see Oswald slip into the theater. He also didn’t mention selling popcorn to Oswald.” Myers missed the point. Ticket taker Julia Postal quoted Burroughs as saying “Well, I saw him coming out.”, presumably when Oswald bought the popcorn. Burroughs was never asked by the Warren Commission if he saw Oswald prior to the police hunt.

Burroughs also told Marrs that Julia Postal knew that she sold Oswald a ticket earlier that day, but didn’t want to admit it. She moved away from Dallas to escape questioning on the subject. When Ms. Postal was asked by researcher Jones Harris if she realized upon seeing Oswald’s face that she might have sold him a ticket, she burst out in tears.

(Theater patron Jack) Davis stated that Oswald sat next to him and then another patron before going out to the lobby. According to author Lamar Waldron, Oswald was armed with half a box top saying “Cox’s, Fort Worth”. If Waldron is correct, Oswald was apparently trying to meet someone who had the other box top half.[ 13 ] Manuel Artime did this kind of thing – his practice was to meet AMWORLD officers with torn one dollar bills.

6.  One unknown man described Tippit's shooter as "5 foot 10, 160-170 pounds"

Another unknown man told Officer Gerald
Hill at the Tippit crime scene that the man
who shot the policeman was a white male
about 5 foot 10 inches, weighing 160
to 170 pounds.

As soon as Officer Gerald Hill came on the scene, he was approached by an unknown witness. Hill said “the first man that came up to me, he said ‘The man who shot him was a white male about 5 foot 10 inches, weighing 160 to 170 pounds, had on a jacket and a pair of trousers, and brown bushy hair.” Hill never got the man’s name, turned him over to another officer, and no one knows his identity.

Patrolman Howell W. Summers called in a description from witness Ted Callaway of a “white male, twenty-seven, five feet eleven, a hundred sixty-five, black wavy hair, fair complected, wearing a light grey Eisenhower-type jacket, dark trousers and a white shirt…(with) a 32 dark-finish automatic pistol.” Oswald owned a 38 caliber revolver, not a 32 automatic.

Joseph McBride is the author of the new book Into the Nightmare, focusing on the Tippit case. A key aspect of the case is Detective Jim Leavelle’s admission that cartridge shells supposedly found at the crime scene were never actually marked on the scene by the Dallas police. McBride points out that “given that the HSCA relied solely on the shells to make its case that Oswald shot Tippit, Leavelle’s admissions that the shells were not marked at the scene help nullify that homicide case against Oswald.”[ 15 ]

One aspect of the Tippit case has fascinated me since it was revealed by FBI agent Jim Hosty in 1996. Hosty revealed that FBI agent Robert Barrett said that a wallet containing identification for Oswald and his purported alias Alek James Hidell was left at the scene of Tippit’s shooting and found by police captain W. R. Westbrook near a puddle of blood.

The rifle found on the sixth floor was ordered
by A. Hidell, with Oswald's post office box as
the return address. The Warren Commission
was told by postal inspector Harry Holmes
that anyone who had access to Oswald’s PO
box could have picked up the rifle without
even showing identification.

 

7.  A second unknown man said the suspect handed something to Tippit through the open passenger window

FBI agent Barrett claims to this day that an unknown witness told him that Tippit pulled over and the gunman handed something through the open passenger window to Tippit inside the car. Barrett believes that Tippit saw the two IDs for Oswald and Hidell, got out of the car to question Oswald, and was shot. Barrett admits that he doesn’t know who the witness was, and can’t verify it, but the wallet was “there”.

Who would hand their entire wallet to a police officer when asked for identification when not under arrest? It looks like someone planted a wallet with Oswald’s identification on the ground at the scene, framing him with a throw-down wallet much as others have been framed with a throw-down gun.

8.  A third unknown man handed Oswald's wallet to the police at the crime scene

An unknown man provided Oswald's
wallet to Officer Kenneth Croy at the
crime scene where Officer Tippit was shot.
The wallet contained ID for both Lee
Oswald and Alek J. Hidell. The finding of
this wallet was hidden until 1996.

I say that because since Hosty’s revelation in 1996, we have learned quite a bit more, thanks to researcher Jones Harris. When Sergeant Kenneth H. Croy arrived as one of the first officers on the scene, an unknown man handed him a wallet. Croy handed the wallet to Sergeant Calvin Owens.[ 17 ] Owens apparently gave it to Westbrook, who displayed it to Barrett. After the wallet was videotaped, it went back to Westbrook’s custody, and Hosty tells us that it was never seen again. Westbrook and Barrett were in charge of the scene at the Texas Theater when Oswald was arrested. When Oswald refused to provide his name, Westbrook ordered, “Get him out of here.”

The history of Oswald’s wallets can only be described with three words: Smoke and mirrors. Only after the release of the Warren Report did the FBI evidence inventory show three wallets for Oswald: B-1 (the arrest wallet), 114 (brown billfold) and 382 (red billfold). No wallets were found at his rooming house. 

The “arrest wallet” appeared on videotape at the Tippit crime scene; we have discussed how no one knows how it appeared on the scene. This arrest wallet of Oswald’s was supposedly removed from his pocket by Officer Paul Bentley following his arrest and while on the way to City Hall, Bentley said that he reviewed the contents and saw the identification for Oswald and Hidell. Since Bentley’s recent death, FBI agent Robert Barrett now says that Bentley was lying.

(Whether or not Barrett is telling the truth...)  The best evidence indicates that an unknown citizen brought the wallet to the murder scene, based on Officer Croy’s interview with Jones Harris.

 

 

One should note that the DPD description was of a man with a rifle "running from the building," not of a man on the 6th floor.

[Matt Cloud]

9 hours ago, Bill Simpich said:

Paul, I think Newman is going in the right direction.  I don't see him as moving towards a Soviet plot to kill JFK.  I think he is right that Solie was a mole.   I am not an expert on Bagley, and I have been cautious about him in the past, but he appears to me at this point as one of the good guys.   He concluded, among other things, that LHO was a "witting" defector in the USSR.

I think McCord is now in Newman's sights.   Let's see where it goes.

 

Unfortunately, Newman's analysis ends where it begins -- with Solie.  Any defensible discussion of Popov's allegations -- that there was a mole in the U-2 program -- would seem to require beginning with a round-up of potential candidates who would have access to this information.  Newman does not provide this in his work and, again, ends his search with the same suspect that he begins it with.  Solie.  Simultaneously, however, yes, he also indicates Solie is working on instruction of James McCord, but why that doesn't make McCord the mole is hard to follow by Newman.  Perhaps that is indeed where he is going.  

However the case, any thorough investigation of Popov's claim must include an individual Newman makes no mention of at all -- John N. McMahon, who had executive responsibilities in the U-2 program in 1959, and would debrief Francis Gary Powers after his shoot-down, as well as defectors Golitsyn and Nosenko, among others.  In John Hart's 1976 study of Angleton's Monster Plot, McMahon's name is completely removed from Bagley's (?) draft of the report.  What was submitted before Congress and HSCA, that is, contains no explicit McMahon reference whatsoever.  Curious.

[Bill Simpich]

Thanks to all who weighed in - here is the last section of the Cover-Up chapter - all comments appreciated.

November 24: The cover-up goes into high gear after Oswald is killed

The CIA’s Cuba division said it had no duty to conduct an investigation

The next day, November 24, Angleton learned from Win Scott that Cubela had met with Kostikov at the Soviet consulate back in late 1962.[ 92 ] Angleton said that FitzGerald would only provide Cubela’s 201 biographical file. FitzGerald relied on his divison’s autonomy and refused to provide the Cubela operational file to Angleton’s staff or to the Warren Commission. The story is that FitzGerald did not want to be subjected to an Angleton molehunt.[ 93 ]

With all the interest that both the FBI and the CIA had in Cubela over the years, Angleton’s claim that he did not know about Cubela’s background is not credible.[ 94 ] Equally incredible is Helms’ and FitzGerald’s testimony that they did not “ask” Cubela to assassinate Castro.[ 95 ] FitzGerald knew that Cubela was insecure, and that he had a problem.

From the moment of the assassination, FitzGerald was concerned that the assassin came from the ranks of the anti-Castro Cubans. FitzGerald was close to JFK, and wept when Oswald was killed, saying, “Now we’ll never know.”[ 96 ] FitzGerald died in 1967. His executive officer testified that the Headquarters Cuban desk was not asked to conduct any investigation into the Kennedy assassination.

Shackley did not feel he had any duty to investigate the assassination. "I was just told to watch the island." said Ted Shackley. "The mainland was the FBI's territory." [ 97 ] Similarly, no one from Shackley’s JMWAVE station in Miami conducted any serious investigation on the assassination. Individuals who allegedly gave orders to do some investigating were JMWAVE C/FI Warren Frank, Tony Sforza, and the former LIENVOY chief Charles Anderson III. Anderson was told by Sforza that he had received specific instructions from Shackley about how the AMOT service was to go about aiding in the investigation. Anderson said that the CIA had limitations on its “right to conduct investigations of persons residing in the USA, whether they were alien residents or US citizens.”[ 98 ] I am unaware of any documents created as a result of these probes.

Another officer said that when he spoke to his agents in meetings in Miami, Tampa, Nassau and Mexico City about the murder of JFK, his briefing was strictly oral and contained no written questions.[ 99 ] JMWAVE said little on the subject other than that the Cuban exiles were in grief despite their policy differences with JFK.[ 100 ]

When Angleton was asked about it many years later, he explained that the WAVE materials were under Western Hemisphere chief J. C. King, that the Headquarters materials were under FitzGerald, and that CI did not have access to their information “as far as it related to the Kennedy assassination or to the leads on the Cubans.”

The FBI’s Nationalities Intelligence conducted no investigation

Hoover had his own derelictions to hide. There was no good reason to Hoover to abruptly pull Nationalities Intelligence off the case after their avid work on the FPCC and Oswald. Hoover did not want the record to reflect the depth of the anti-Castro exiles’ anger at JFK. Nor did Hoover want to know what Nationalities Intelligence chief Ray Wannall knew about the FPCC and Oswald before November 22. The FBI men in Dallas certainly did not want Hoover or the public to know that Oswald had worked at the Jaggars photographic firm and had assisted the Army Mapping Service, an agency that was analyzing maps of Cuba obtained by U-2 flights during the height of the Cuban missile crisis.[ 101 ] Ann Egerter claimed months later that she had no way of knowing whether Oswald had ever worked for the Jaggars firm.

In the first days after 11/22, Ray Wannall, repeatedly provided the FBI with essential background on Oswald, including but not limited to letters that Oswald had written to the FPCC in New York City and turned over to the FBI by agent T-3245-S*, who was almost certainly FPCC staffer Victor Vicente. Vicente was the same man that Anita Potocki and the joint CIA-FBI team had inserted into Cuba in the AMSANTA operation during the summer of 1963. Wannall and his Nationalities Intelligence division were cut out of the assassination investigation.[ 102 ]

A flow chart details those in charge of the espionage aspects of Oswald’s case involved the espionage chief Bill Branigan of the Domestic Intelligence Division and his men: Burt Turner, Lambert L. Anderson, Marvin Gheesling, and Charles Brennan. The department not included on this flow chart is Ray Wannall’s Nationalities Intelligence Division, and its Cuban section.[ 103 ] This is no accident.

The FBI’s approach to the Oswald file was to label it as a “dual-captioned” matter prior to the assassination. Oswald’s defection and his ongoing contacts with the Soviets had been the terrain of Bill Branigan’s Espionage Section since 1959, while the Cuban side of the Oswald file was handled by Ray Wannall and Nationalities Intelligence.[ 104 ]

Ray Wannall testified to the Church Committee that Nationalities Intelligence was within the Counter-intelligence Branch and handled matters relating to countries other than the Soviet Union, Soviet Bloc, and Communist China.[ 105 ]

Ray Wannall's deposition is absolutely devastating. Just about the first question is: "Do you know Vince Nasca?" Wannall had known Nasca well, and since 1951.[ 106 ]

Wannall then stated who were the FBI’s top experts on Cuba during 1963:
"Anti-Castro would be Vince Nasca, and pro-Castro I guess would be Ray Mullens, not certain. Coordinated by Richard Cotter, unit chief, most outgoing flowed thru him, not ingoing. As section chief, I had pretty good knowledge of this material."[ 107 ]

Nasca received copies of Oswald’s exploits right after his defection to the Soviet Union – he signed for these documents with his initials VHN. Nasca and Wannall were kept in the loop on discussions about assassinating Castro even after JFK’s death. Nasca, who was the FBI’s absolute expert on the Cuban exiles, told the Church Committee during the 70s that he was given no investigative tasks regarding the JFK assassination. If they kept a heavy hitter like Nasca away from the investigation, it’s a sure thing that Hoover had zero concern that Castro was involved in killing Kennedy.

But that’s not all. Wannall admitted that his entire Nationalities Intelligence division was kept out of the JFK investigation.

"(T)he investigation of the assassination was not in the Division and I wasn't privy to any of the discussions."
"Were you at any time tasked with any requirements in that investigation or any people under you tasked?"
"I can't recall that we were, because even the phases of it that spilled over into our Division were handled in another section."
"Which section was that?"
"That was the Espionage Section."
"Was that Branigan's section?"
"Yes".[ 108 ]

Richard Cotter, who was Wannall’s #1 man between 1962 to 1965, described Branigan's section as "the Soviet section". Cotter is very clear that "if the Bureau was involved in exploring a Cuban involvement in the assassination, it almost certainly would have been run out of our section, yes." He agreed that Nasca, Wannall and himself was the go-to guys on Cuba. He agreed with Wannall that there were never even any discussions about whether any Cubans were involved in the JFK assassination. Cotter admitted that the obviousness of such a possibility "looks like two and two today, but apparently it didn't look like two and two then".

Unlike Wannall, who looks like a straight shooter until you review his interview, Cotter comes across as a truth teller. Cotter told with some pride the aforementioned story about a COINTELPRO action that successfully turned FPCC leaders Richard Gibson and Berta Green against each other, and said that he got mail about Oswald visiting both the Soviet and Cuban consulates before the assassination. The Cuban angle was the reason the Oswald case came to his desk.

Going back to Cotter's boss, Wannall admits over and over again that he was cut out of the investigation of JFK's murder and did nothing, although his section housed the experts on the subject. Wannall finally speculates that maybe his section questioned informants, only to be confronted with a memo saying such a practice was "Not desirable. Would serve to promote rumors." signed by Cotter.

Finally, in utter frustration, the interrogator Paul Wallach – the most thorough of all the attorneys in this case - let Wannall have it:

"What I'm getting at very frankly, Mr. Wannall, is that we have an investigation where a heck of a lot of Bureau evidence, your agents did thousands of man-hours of work tracing down every possible piece of physical evidence, every possible ramification in certain areas, whereas in the Cuban area it seems very frankly that almost nothing was done, and what I'm trying to get a grasp on, what the Senators are concerned about, is why?"

Since Wannall had no answer, he went off into an anecdote.

Wallach, undaunted, went at it again: "it appears to me as a layman that we have this huge counterintelligence machinery that was never called into play in the Cuban area...” Again, Wannall did not deny it.

Wallach ended by confronting Wannall with a story about Johnny Roselli’s lawyer, Edward P. Morgan. Morgan recounted how Castro was ready to retaliate about the assassination attempts on his life, that the FBI was notified in an "eyes only" memo that Morgan knew where Castro's purported JFK assassins were living in New Jersey, and that the FBI did no follow-up. Wannall had nothing to say.

Wannall’s boss William Sullivan made it clear that Hoover should not have brushed Morgan’s revelation aside.[ 109 ] It seems plain that Hoover did not want to know who killed JFK, whether the assassins came from the left or the right.

The FBI’s Soviet experts didn’t want to know about the Cuban evidence

A veteran agent, Kenneth Raupauch, revealed that the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division kept the evidence regarding the "so-called Cuban faction" strictly to themselves. The FBI’s Soviet experts Gheesling, Turner, Brennan, and Lambert L. Anderson kept close control of any information involving Cuba. Turner was the one who held the assignment card for Oswald prior to the assassination.

The focus for these men was "Oswald and security". Turner was considered the most brilliant by everyone, but he was not top dog. Turner answered to supervisors Branigan, Lenihan, John Stokes, Leonard Linton, and Gheesling.

Lenihan's responsibility was New Orleans and Oswald generally. This came directly from Hoover, and included Oswald's FPCC contacts in New York. Stokes was Mexico City. Gheesling was Dallas. Lenihan is very careful to say any Cuban leads would be for "Cuban section of our division", without saying who that is. It was Lambert Anderson.

Lambert L. Anderson was an intriguing character, as he was with Nationalities Intelligence, had the FPCC file, and he was "the new guy" at the Cuban desk. He answered to Branigan and Robert Lenihan, who were the case supervisors of the Domestic Intelligence Division.[ 110 ] He only served with the Cuban section for a short period of time, for a few months in 1963. FBI supervisor Richard Cotter said Anderson was “fairly new…I wouldn’t consider him an expert on Cuba, but he did have this case.” [ 111 ]

Hoover’s reaction to Oswald’s death was to focus on him as the lone assassin

Right after Oswald was murdered on November 24, Hoover told White House aide Walter Jenkins in a phone call “the thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”[ 112 ]

At 4 pm that afternoon, Al Belmont called Shanklin to say that he was sending two of his investigators, Richard Rogge and Fletcher Thompson, down to Dallas to essentially wrap the case up. This memo is written with absolute authority, by a man who had been the head of counterintelligence for the FBI over the years and was clearly more in command than Hoover himself. This is hours after the shocking murder of Oswald that made most people in America sit up and wonder how many people were involved in the JFK assassination. Belmont calmly remarked, “We will set forth the items of evidence which make it clear that Oswald is the man who killed the President.”[ 113 ]

On the next day, November 25, assistant attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach wrote a devastating memo to LBJ aide Bill Moyers stating that “the public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.”[ 114 ] Curiously, Katzenbach said shortly before he died that “I’d almost bet on the (anti-Castro) Cubans” as being in on the assassination – probably because he was no longer worried about triggering a war with the Soviets.[ 115 ]

Also on November 25, Lyndon Johnson let columnist Joe Alsop know that he thought that Texas officials should resolve the case with the aid of the FBI, which would avoid any suggestions of “carpet-baggers”. Alsop pushed for non-Texan jurists to aid a national scope to the effort, but LBJ was wary of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department people “lobbying them against the President”.[ 116 ] LBJ, like most politicans, wanted an investigation that he could control.

On November 26, Belmont emphasized that it was important for the FBI to get out its report on the assassination as fast as possible. The emphasis was to ensure the public that they got the right man, and to get out their insight on Oswald’s background. Again, there was no concern about the shocking manner of Oswald’s death. “This report is to settle the dust…” I believe Belmont wanted everyone to go back to sleep, now that JFK was buried. Belmont emerges during this time as a key decision-maker, maybe even more than Hoover himself.

 

Nov 23: Alan Belmont, the FBI's #3 man, had a big to-do list on the Oswald case

Nov 24: As the country reeled in shock after Oswald's shooting, Belmont calmly wrote "we will set forth the items of evidence which make it clear that Oswald is the man who killed the President."

Nov 26: Belmont explained that an FBI report would be promptly completed in the next week "to settle the dust…”

 

David Phillips and other provocateurs convinced Johnson that a blue-ribbon commission was necessary to avoid the threat of war

Other forces still wanted to whip the nation into the mood for war. Months later, when David Slawson met with Win Scott in Mexico City, Slawson made a point of citing the provocations of three men during the first two weeks after the assassination: Nicaraguan double agent Gilberto Alvarado, pre-Castro’s Cuba military intelligence chief Salvador Diaz Verson, and credit agency inspector Oscar Gutierrez Valencia.[ 117 ] Because of space limitations, I will only briefly discuss the Alvarado provocations, and will write a separate article about them in the future that is in greater depth. (Also see Rex Bradford’s articles on the subject at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website). I believe that these provocations were done in coordination with intelligence operatives aimed at sabotaging the investigation, and that much of it is the work of covert action chief David Phillips. HSCA counsel Dan Hardaway was convinced that Phillips was in charge of the disinformation passed on during the cover-up phase.[ 118 ] I believe that Phillips had to improvise the provocations on the spot, which is why, for example, the Alvarado story did not succeed in putting the US on a war footing against Castro. It played a big role, however, in forcing LBJ to form the Warren Commission.

On November 26, CIA officer John Whitten sent a cable saying that he and Mexico City CIA station director Win Scott had uncovered evidence that Castro had paid Oswald to assassinate Kennedy. This was the information that came from the Nicaraguan agent Gilbert Alvarado, who also appears to have been working for US intelligence as he pointed the finger at the Cuban government as the cause of the assassination. Scott had told the Mexican president the previous day that he suspected Cuban involvement.

On November 27, a conversation between CI/SIG chief Birch O'Neal and FBI liaison Sam Papich reveals that further analysis of Department 13 led them to believe that Kostikov is probably not a modern-day Antichrist. O’Neal said that he will call “Pete.”[ 119 ] This phone call was transcribed, and O’Neal wrote his own memo summarizing the call.[ 120 ] Pete Bagley, chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Russia station, modified his claim of four days earlier. Bagley now admitted that although Kostikov was KGB, the claim that he was with Department 13 was based solely on Kostikov’s involvement with TUMBLEWEED.[ 121 ]

LBJ told his mentor Richard Russell that a relucant Earl Warren was finally convinced to head the Commission when "I just pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City..."

Over the days from the 25th to the 29th, the phony Alvarado and Kostikov evidence forced President Lyndon Johnson to change his mind about Texans leading the assassination investigation. Johnson knew that Alvarado’s information was explosive and could send the US into a war with Cuba, which could drag in the USSR. The Kostikov evidence, shaky as it was, could also mean war with the Soviet Union. Reversing course, Johnson announced the formation of a blue-ribbon panel now known as the “Warren Commission” on November 29. With no advance notice to Johnson’s friend Senator Dick Russell, LBJ announced that Russell would be one of the commissioners. Always the dealmaker, LBJ reassured Russell that “all you’ll do is evaluate the Hoover report he has already made.”[ 122 ]

For weeks after the assassination, the agencies were buried with phony evidence tying Oswald to a Soviet assassination team and Red Cuban plots. Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy probably knew little about the tapes, but acquiesced to the cover-up rather than run the risk of a war on Cuba which might include the USSR. This story explains why LBJ was so insistent that Chief Justice Earl Warren chair the investigating commission and prevent the possibility of "40 million dead Americans", and why the Warren Commission was denied access to the investigators, witnesses and documents needed to solve the case. To win over Warren, LBJ said that “I just pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City.”

Immediately after this panel of chieftains was chosen, the Alvarado story was revealed to be a hoax. As seen above, it would take longer for the Kostikov story to be completely discredited. However, now the story of the assassination would be carefully massaged by men who knew how to work with evidence.

After Hoover released CD 1, Whitten was stunned when he reviewed it

After the FBI had the opportunity to review the Dallas crime evidence for 72 hours, they sent it back to Dallas. After the Dallas police created a belated inventory on 11/26/63, the evidence was provided to the FBI for a second time. This time, the evidence went to Wally Heitman, the Spanish-speaking Dallas FBI agent. Other writers have said that this sifting exercise was done to enable the FBI to review troublesome evidence such as Oswald’s wallets, as well as suppress problematic evidence such as Oswald’s Minox camera which was better known as a spy camera. In my mind, that’s right. Any other conclusion would require someone coming up with a full inventory for November 22. On November 26, Belmont gave the go-ahead to Dallas chief Shanklin to send this material to Washington, DC, acting as though they were seeing all of it for the first time.

In the days ahead, Hoover was furious at Curry, refusing to work with the Dallas police for years afterwards. I think it was either because of Curry’s admission that the evidence was originally sent to Washington on the night of the assassination, or Curry’s continual refusal to agree that the assassination was caused by Oswald acting alone.

In any case, Hoover followed Belmont’s advice – he bore down and produced a mammoth report on December 1 that claimed to address all the major issues of the assassination. As the report was based on the assumption that Oswald was the assassin and acted alone, the conclusion was predictable. This document is now known as Commission Document 1, or CD 1, and became the foundation for the Warren Report. Hoover promptly leaked it to the press to ensure everyone heard the FBI’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone and unaided.

When Whitten got a look at CD 1 on or about December 6, he discovered “details of Oswald’s political activity in the United States; the pro-Cuban activity; …and so on.”

Whitten said that the possible involvement of the Miami station did not emerge until he read CD 1 and learned more about Oswald’s pro-Castro activities in the US. The “basic source materials” can be seen in the carefully drafted packages put together during Whitten's short tenure by supervisors Manning Clements, Warren de Brueys, and Robert Gemberling. These were men that knew how to put together reports that eliminated most of the evidence that the Bureau didn’t want to hear about. Whitten emphasized that “I did not know anything about the CIA’s assassination plans against Castro. If I had, my investigation would have been entirely different. We would have had the Miami station kick off the full investigation.” Whitten also felt that the Cubela story was an “absolutely vital factor in analyzing the facts around the Kennedy assassination.” Unfortunately, most people did not know about the CIA’s plans to assassinate Castro until about 1975, despite the best efforts of journalists like Jack Anderson and a handful of others.

At the same time, Whitten was apparently willing to go along with a plan to keep any information about the Mexico City tapes out of the general discussion, as shown below. After getting a look at CD 1 on December 6, Whitten wrote a memo to CIA Director McCone and other higher-ups stating, “There was absolutely no mention of the CIA in the report.”[ 123 ] Wittingly or unwittingly, Whitten’s action let anyone who knew the truth know that the Oswald imposter story – which is probably what the Mexico City station was referring to years later as “the Identity Case” – was not currently in consideration by the FBI and that it was probably safe to omit it from the investigation.[ 124 ]

Meanwhile, Whitten couldn’t understand why the FPCC revelations in the report had been held back from him for two weeks, especially since Oswald’s FPCC ties were all over the newspapers. Whitten mentioned that “Oswald’s correspondence with American communists and with the Fair Play for Cuba committee is recorded in original letters.” The only thing that seemed to surprise him was Marina’s story that Oswald shot at General Edwin Walker. Marina was in a tough spot. It was reported that she said she would cooperate with the FBI if they could give her “some concrete assurances” that she could stay in the U.S.

On that same day, someone at the CIA completed his own preliminary biographical study of Oswald.[ 125 ] The study has nothing about the incident with General Walker, but several references to Oswald’s FPCC activities in 1963.[ 126 ] Whitten’s report was not yet completed.

Helms reassures Whitten that he can hold on to the investigation

Whitten wrote a memo to Helms on 12/11/63 stating what his plans were for the investigation. Helms initialed his responses to each paragraph, including agreement to give Whitten leave from his present job as WH/3, which Whitten described to Helms as “a branch with 45 people in headquarters and well over 100 in seven Central American countries”.[ 127 ]

Whitten never made any waves about the tapes or the difficulty the witnesses had in identifying Oswald in Mexico City, but he did flag the concern that CD 1 might reveal the phone tap operations in Mexico “because the Soviets would see that the FBI had advance information on the reason for Oswald’s visit to the Soviet Embassy”.[ 128 ]

What Whitten meant in this passage illustrates the importance of being able to interview key witnesses while they are still alive. What did the FBI know about why Oswald was going to visit the Soviet Embassy? It sure looks like FBI supervisors knew that Oswald was wittingly or unwittingly part of an intelligence operation – such as the Tilton-Anderson anti-FPCC operation. It’s clear why Whitten cared if the Soviets would see that the FBI knew in advance that Oswald wanted a visa – because it might reveal the Mexico City wiretap operations.

As Whitten was mulling over the next stage for the investigation, the new Warren Commission members and counsel were not impressed by the FBI’s work in the preparation of CD 1. CD 1 simply placed all the blame on Oswald, and displayed little investigative zeal other than placing a lot of raw reports between two covers. Sullivan told the Church Committee that Hoover then leaked the contents of CD 1 to the press in order to “deliberately pre-empt the Warren Commission’s findings”. On December 16, Chief Justice Earl Warren and chief counsel J. Lee Rankin discussed the problem and decided that they would need “some investigative staff” of their own when they reach a “tender spot” because they had no reports from the CIA or the State Department and “the (FBI) report has so many holes in it…it just doesn’t seem like they’re looking for things that this Commission has to look for.”[ 129 ]

Whitten proceeded to expand an earlier 11/24 memo, entitled “We Discover Lee Oswald in Mexico City”.[ 130 ] Right about the same time, Whitten’s supervisor J.C. King wrote him a memo about the investigation to date, saying that matters have focused on Mexico City because of the Station’s superb job. He adds that “your analyses were major factors in the quick clarification of the case, blanking out the really ominous spectre of foreign backing.”[ 131 ] On about December 17, Whitten circulated this “Lee Oswald” memo and asks for corrections from Birch O’Neal and other CIA counterintelligence officers. Whitten’s memo ignored the role of the twin 10/10/63 cables, but it did suggest that the tapes survived the assassination.

Angleton makes his move right before Christmas

Whitten claimed that he had no idea about Oswald’s FPCC escapades and the rest until just hours before a major meeting with Helms about Whitten’s report in December. Whitten wrote that this initial draft would change when he obtained new information from the FBI, and sent it to McCone, Helms, Angleton, O’Neal and Murphy.[ 132 ] A note on a still-partially redacted routing slip indicates that SR/CI was to play a role in editing this initial draft of his report on Lee Oswald.[ 133 ]

By December 20, Whitten had expanded his first draft into a second draft. The new draft says “our Mexico City station was given full background information on Oswald in a cable”.[ 134 ] It seems to me that Whitten had bought the faulty description of Oswald, even though it had his name as “Lee Henry Oswald” and no photograph. I don’t think Whitten was hiding any guilty knowledge.

At the 12/24 meeting, Whitten said that “Angleton started to criticize my report terribly - without pointing out any inaccuracies, it was so full of wrong things, we could not possibly send it to the Bureau, and I just sat there and did not say a word. This was a typical Angleton performance. I had invited him to comment on the report and he had withheld all of his comments until he got to the meeting whereupon Helms turned the operation, the investigation, over to Angleton’s staff.”[ 135 ] Helms turned the case over at Angleton’s request, based on its counterintelligence ramifications. Whitten said that he went along and “suggested that it be turned over because of the Soviet angle that had now been discovered, (because of) the disclosure about his biographic information about his stay in Soviet Russia, which was obviously very important.”[ 136 ] Whitten felt that “Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in bed with the FBI, and I was not and Angleton was.”

After the meeting, Whitten circulated a memo asking for feedback because of its “inaccuracies and policy errors”. Whitten describes what he has done as a “working paper for those who prepare the final report”.[ 137 ] A note on the memo states: “On January 8 or 9, I discussed Whitten’s draft with him, told him Mr. Rocca was to write the report I was and he would be called upon for verification of statements in it no doubt and I did not have time to edit or comment on the treatment of various aspects. He said he would be in contact with Mr. Rocca, and I later learned he was.” [ 138 ]

Ray Rocca, Angleton’s Chief of Research and Analysis (CIRA) became the liaison between the CIA and the Warren Commission. Rocca’s version places the date of the shift from Whitten to himself on 1/12/64.[ 139 ] Rocca, however, gave a pass to the CIA’s Miami station during the Warren Commission’s investigation. As Angleton testified, Rocca was “the point of contact except on matters pertaining to WAVE…If WAVE has thousands of operations going on, I’m not going to use my liaison people doing their business when they could have direct contract (sic) with the Bureau.”[ 140 ]

Whitten on Bill Harvey: "He was too young to have killed McKinley and Lincoln."

In attempting to justify Angleton’s takeover of the investigation, Angleton’s successor George Kalaris inadvertently made a startling admission. Kalaris mused that CI Staff was the most logical candidate to lead the investigation, as they were the CI liaison with the FBI and the Secret Service, as well as a source of information related to the protection apparatus for senior US officials.[ 141 ] The implications of this revelation will be discussed further in the final chapter.

Years later, Whitten said that “I didn’t know about the assassination plans of the CIA against Castro. This was not disclosed to me. Had I known that, my investigation would have been entirely different.” Whitten said that he would have started the investigation in Miami. When asked about why Bill Harvey asked his wife to burn all of his papers, Whitten’s response was that “He was too young to have killed McKinley and Lincoln. It could have been anything…I think Harvey was a man who did great damage to the Agency. I told the Senate Committee – I went out of my way to tell them in my emphasis that assassinations and things like that are something really abhorrent to all the rank and file of Agency officers. It is unthinkable.”

The deepest reason Jack Whitten was taken off the Oswald case

I believe that the deepest reason Whitten was taken off the case can be found in a Whitten memo, DIR 89366 - this is a priority memo to Mexico City dated 12/16/63, seeking an immediate response. Whitten asked “For our analysis of this case, can MEXI shed light on who Aparicio is, whether he has that number (author’s note: The phone number 14-12-99, quoted by Duran in a passing reference to Aparicio at the beginning of the 9/28 call), and what this might have to do with our case...please have monitors make every effort to identify voices of various Soviets to whom Oswald spoke on the telephone or who dealt with his case with Sylvia Duran". Whitten took pains to write that his request was being made pursuant to "direction of Helms”. Whitten labeled it as a priority memo. We saw in Chapter 3 Aparicio’s fascinating history as the case officer for double agent AMKNOB-1.

I believe that Raul Aparicio was not only the Cuban embassy’s cultural attache and main press contact, but he was also a double agent working on behalf of the United States. The reference to Aparicio in the September 28 call was not only a signal to the Mexico City station that LIENVOY was compromised. It was also a signal that the operation with Aparicio was compromised.

It looks like Aparicio may have had some kind of relationship with Spanish-speaking CIA agent Daniel Flores. His stepmother was born in Mexico. Flores was approved to work on a special project by a CIA sigint (signals intelligence) officer. A sigint matter would indicate that Flores was working with Staff D. When HSCA counsel Ed Lopez went to Mexico City in 1978, he conducted an interview with “Daniel Flores aka Luis Aparicio”. Many baseball fans will remember the famous Chicago White Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio during the 1960s. Lopez asked Duran during her interview if she saw “Luis Aparicio” at a twist party in Mexico City. Was “Luis Aparicio” a momentary lapse by Lopez, did “Luis” have a relationship with Raul Aparicio, or did the CIA have a real live CIA officer inside the Cuban embassy? I have the feeling that this won’t take too much longer to figure out.

Whitten’s December 16 request may have been the deepest reason that Whitten was taken off the JFK case as lead investigator. It may explain why Angleton invented a fight at Whitten on December 24, and Helms asked for Whitten to step down the same day.

The problems raised by Whitten’s December 16 memo are legion. Most importantly, by asking the monitors to compare voices of people that spoke with Oswald or Duran during his visit, Whitten is assuming at this late date that the tapes were still in existence, just as he did many years later when questioned by the HSCA.

Another problem was his query about Raul Aparicio. If Whitten’s questions had been fully answered, it would have focused attention on the 9/28 memo, that Aparicio's line 14-12-99 was tapped, and that Aparicio was at the Cuban Consulate during the Oswald visit. Scott did not want any additional scrutiny about this 9/28 call.

Scott also wanted to avoid Whitten's other questions - Can MEXI shed light on who Aparicio is? Is 14-12-99 his phone number? Is it relevant to our case? Scott knew who Aparicio was, and that David Phillips knew the details. This memo, received on the 16th, went from Scott to White to Goodpasture to Phillips to back to Scott. Scott scribbled a note on the memo, saying, "That's Raul Aparicio, Cuban embassy official, get Dave to give details...he was on lienvoy 9 dec...close to ambassador...”

After four days without a response to his priority memo, Whitten must have sensed that Scott was disturbed. Whitten thought he knew what the problem was. Whitten wrote a follow-up memo to Scott, providing him with the assurance that “our present plan in passing info to Warren Commission is to eliminate mention to telephone taps in order protect your continuing ops.”

Unwittingly, Whitten then put his foot in it. “Exact detailed info from REDACTED (two names) on just what Silvia Duran and other officials said about Oswald’s visits and his dealings would be valuable and usable corroborative evidence. Request you requestion them carefully on these points, attempting get as much authentic data as possible, without mixing in what they knew from newspapers. Pls cable summaries and pouch detailed statements.”

It’s obvious Whitten wanted Scott to quiz the CIA’s informants at the embassy and “requestion them carefully”. A review of the file shows that is precisely what needed to happen. But it never did. By the 24th, Angleton and Helms took the case away from Whitten, and never followed up on this memo.

Only on December 27, after Whitten had been deposed as the chief of the JFK investigation, did Scott come up with any kind of response. It was another lie. "141299 is home number of Raul Aparicio Nogales, cultural attache of embassy. Doubt any connection with GPFLOOR (the Oswald investigation) as Aparicio was on sick leave during significant period...no further info because tapes have been erased.”[ 142 ] Goodpasture suppressed any mention of this detailed request in her chronology.

Scott had told a whopping lie to Whitten. Whether or not Aparicio was on sick leave (which I doubt due to lack of evidence, although we have indications he was a diabetic), the CIA’s own log shows that Aparicio was at the Cuban Embassy at 9:25 am on Sept 30. That date was certainly within the significant period of the Oswald visit. September 30 is included within the “significant period” surrounding the Sept 28 call where Aparicio’s name is mentioned!

Once Angleton had control of the investigation, he decided to “wait out the commission”, while he chased every Soviet angle in sight. Angleton had Rocca write the aforementioned key memo linking the September 28 phone call with the “assassin” Kostikov. Meanwhile, Helms prevented the Warren Commission from seeing the actual October 10 documents and others – only provides paraphrased documents. See David Wise’s article from back in 1968, that shows how frustrating this situation was.

When staffer David Slawson got persistent about wanting to go deeper into the Mexico City matter, Scott and White actually played the tapes for Slawson and his colleague William Coleman on April 9, while swearing them to secrecy.[ 143 ] Now there was no more risk of the story of the tapes being blown. The Warren Report was hurried out the door by late September, ostensibly to avoid influencing the 1964 presidential election. The findings relied heavily on the FBI’s initial product pushed out the door in early December – Oswald was the assassin and acted alone.

In the final chapter, we will review who might have been in on the assassination itself, and I will offer some thoughts on how to approach resolution and justice in the JFK case. At this point in the story, did the government have any concern that the impersonation might have been done by the Soviets or the Cubans? Apparently not on the part of the CIA. A CIA memo states that “following a thorough review and study of all available material, the Agency was unable to prove that Oswald had been acting under direction of the KGB”. The same finding was made regarding Cuba. We will take a look at the domestic front.

 

 

[Matt Cloud]

Thanks, Bill.  Sovietology may be out of your wheelhouse, but are there any indications as to any Soviet concern that a right-wing takeover was occurring in the U.S. during and after the assassination?  Or were they just happy not to be blamed?  If so, that would represent a failure in Cold War understanding would it not - that what happens on one side of its algebraic equation has to also happen on the other side?  Did Soviets reciprocate, as the logic would dictate they must, with a hard-left takeover?  

[Bill Simpich]

Matt,

Here's one analysis of the Soviets' concern of a right-wing takeover, from none other than Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as recently as 2017:

While the FBI was investigating possible involvement of the Soviet Union in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Soviet authorities were voicing suspicions that U.S. right-wing groups -- and even Kennedy's own vice president -- were behind the killing, newly released documents show.

The Soviet KGB claimed it had information tying Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president as a result of the assassination, to the killing, according to a 1966 letter to a presidential assistant from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that was released for the first time late on October 26.

The letter is among 2,800 previously classified Kennedy assassination documents that were released this week following an order by U.S. President Donald Trump. According to White House officials, Trump said in a memorandum that he had "no choice" but to keep some files secret because of national security concerns raised by the FBI and CIA.

The documents capture the frantic days after the November 22, 1963, assassination, during which federal agents madly chased after tips and sifted through leads worldwide.

But Kennedy scholars say the thousands of documents do not appear to contain any bombshell revelations about the killing that shocked the world.

The claim was contained in instructions from Moscow to the KGB residency in New York "to develop information" on Johnson, Hoover said in the letter, which cited an "FBI source" that had "furnished reliable information in the past."

Johnson has long been a focus of some conspiracy theorists, but no credible information has ever linked him to the assassination.

The documents show that the FBI's own chief suspect right after the assassination was the Soviet Union, with much attention given to assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's contact with "a member of the Soviet KGB Assassination Department" at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico, documents showed.

But Moscow believed Oswald was a "neurotic maniac" whose goal was to further a right-wing conspiracy trying to poison U.S.-Soviet relations, according to a just-released U.S. intelligence report issued days after the assassination.

Later, in May 1964, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev met influential Washington newspaper columnist Drew Pearson in Cairo, Egypt, and told him that he thought a right-wing conspiracy was behind the killing, according to another intelligence report.

Khrushchev told Pearson he could not believe the conclusion investigators had reached at that time: that both Oswald and Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who fatally shot Oswald, had acted alone.

"He did not believe that the American security services were this inept," according to a CIA report of the discussion.

Pearson "got the impression that Chairman Khrushchev had some dark thoughts about the American right-wing being behind this conspiracy" and rejected all arguments to the contrary, the report said.