Why the CIA was involved in the JFK Assasination

[Robert Howard]

If there was ever a document that implied culpability to some degree by the Central Intelligence Agency (Clay Shaw's status with the CIA circa 1963 has not been resolved beyond a reasonable doubt, I stipulate), I believe this is at least one of them; If someone as high up on the food chain as Ray Rocca was in the CIA there has to be concrete evidence to that effect. Since the date of this document is September 20, 1967, it can be a valid speculation that "General Counsel's discussions with Justice [Dept.] might have been through Jack Miller - a former Ass't. Atty. General in charge of Justice Department's Criminal Div. who had contacted the CIA General Counsel to "offer intelligengce from within Garrison's office." Meanwhile, the Justice Dept. had by this time concluded that Shaw had not come clean with his lawyers regarding his ties to the CIA's Domestic Contacts Services. It should also be pointed out that Raymond Rocca knew Shaw personally before Garrison's investigation even had begun. But Garrison made, at least as far as linking the CIA to Shaw and hence the Kennedy assassination, one fatal mistake; he went from linking Shaw to the CIA, to Shaw and the CIA in concert with the "military-industrial complex." The rest as we all know is history. Part of the problem was that ostensibly Garrison did not learn the exact nature of Shaw's relationship with the Domestic Contacts Division until after the fact, many of his investigators did not know and lead prosecutor for Garrison, James Alcock was very skeptical of a Shaw link to the CIA.

History has tended to blend the perceptions of the Shaw trial into two distinct camps of pro and con regarding CIA complicity. A September 1977 memo written by HSCA staff counsel Jonathan Blackmer concluded: "We have reason to believe Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and possibly one of the high-level planners or 'cut out' to the planners of the assassination."

At least one of the members of the "Garrison Group," Raymond Rocca is on record as believing that Clay Shaw would be convicted by Garrison in the upcoming trial. I believe the reason that was so is for the following:

At the time of the House Select Committee investigation in 1976, inquiries to the CIA about Clay Shaw were coordinated by J. Walton Moore, the former Dallas CIA contact for Oswald's friend George DeMohrenschildt.

Another recently-released document connects Shaw to the top secret project ZRCLIFF, which was run out of William Harvey's super-secret Staff D along with the ZRRIFLE assassination program.

More to Come.

[Robert Howard]

If there was ever a document that implied culpability to some degree by the Central Intelligence Agency (Clay Shaw's status with the CIA circa 1963 has not been resolved beyond a reasonable doubt, I stipulate), I believe this is at least one of them; If someone as high up on the food chain as Ray Rocca was in the CIA there has to be concrete evidence to that effect. Since the date of this document is September 20, 1967, it can be a valid speculation that "General Counsel's discussions with Justice [Dept.] might have been through Jack Miller - a former Ass't. Atty. General in charge of Justice Department's Criminal Div. who had contacted the CIA General Counsel to "offer intelligengce from within Garrison's office." Meanwhile, the Justice Dept. had by this time concluded that Shaw had not come clean with his lawyers regarding his ties to the CIA's Domestic Contacts Services. It should also be pointed out that Raymond Rocca knew Shaw personally before Garrison's investigation even had begun. But Garrison made, at least as far as linking the CIA to Shaw and hence the Kennedy assassination, one fatal mistake; he went from linking Shaw to the CIA, to Shaw and the CIA in concert with the "military-industrial complex." The rest as we all know is history. Part of the problem was that ostensibly Garrison did not learn the exact nature of Shaw's relationship with the Domestic Contacts Division until after the fact, many of his investigators did not know and lead prosecutor for Garrison, James Alcock was very skeptical of a Shaw link to the CIA.

History has tended to blend the perceptions of the Shaw trial into two distinct camps of pro and con regarding CIA complicity. A September 1977 memo written by HSCA staff counsel Jonathan Blackmer concluded: "We have reason to believe Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and possibly one of the high-level planners or 'cut out' to the planners of the assassination."

At least one of the members of the "Garrison Group," Raymond Rocca is on record as believing that Clay Shaw would be convicted by Garrison in the upcoming trial. I believe the reason that was so is for the following:

At the time of the House Select Committee investigation in 1976, inquiries to the CIA about Clay Shaw were coordinated by J. Walton Moore, the former Dallas CIA contact for Oswald's friend George DeMohrenschildt.

Another recently-released document connects Shaw to the top secret project ZRCLIFF, which was run out of William Harvey's super-secret Staff D along with the ZRRIFLE assassination program.

More to Come.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

After going back and reading threads that reference the Solares Hill articles, the always fascinating Gerry Patrick Hemming posts, whom I personally am very glad has chosen to join the Forum, I went back to analyze some information that I had previously read specifically the Lopez Report which concerns the HSCA investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald's trip to Mexico City. At the same time I re-read some material by Peter Dale Scott, whom I respect as one of if not the most cerebral of all JFK researchers. As the Joan Mellen book approaches its release I would strongly suggest forum members read or re-read Peter Dale Scott's Deep Politics III which can be found on the web at

http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm#_ftn113

The information he presents includes CIA shennanigans concerning false stories concerning Lee Harvey Oswald - attempting to link him to manipulated or outright false stories such as the Alvarado claim that Oswald volunteered in the Cuban Embassy to kill Kennedy and was given $6,500.00 by them to do the job, a claim he later recanted. but was possibly used by newly sworn-in President LBJ to induce Earl Warren to accept the position as head of the Warren Commission. What is even more interesting is that Alvarado's story may have been planted by the CIA; as the FBI regarded Alvarado as a "CIA source." In addition there were cables referencing Alvarado and endorsing his crediblity as a source being sent out by David Atlee Phillips under the pseudonyms M.C. Choaden & L.F. Barker. (As a brief aside, I would compare this to the DRE news story eminating out of Florida in the same time frame spouting Oswald/Fidel as behind the assassination, the DRE dis-information that inspired this article had the approval of George Joannides.)

Another revealing tidbit that Scott provides is that the "Oswald" type-written letter as well as the draft version which was addressed to the Soviet Embassy and subsequently conveniently given to the FBI by Ruth Paine (when they came to her house after the asasination) does not appear to be Oswald's after all, at least according to the Soviets and JFK researcher Jerry Rose the latter who has shown inconsistincies between the draft version and the type-written one, mainly that the type-written version was finalized before the draft version, in fact the type-written version contains six mis-spelt words that are nor mis-spelt in th draft version. Scott, standing on solid ground also points out that other items that were taken from the Paine household are considered suspect such as the Edwin Walker note and the pristine Mexico City bus tickets.

This portion of the page is verbatim

The DFS was involved in the LIENVOY intercept project and probably manned the listening posts. The DFS may have been assisted in this LIENVOY project by Richard Cain, an expert telephone tapper and adjunct to the CIA-Giancana [ZR/RIFLE] assassination connection, when he was in Mexico City in 1962 as a consultant to a Mexican Government agency. Richard Cain at the time was also part of that Dave Yaras-Lennie Patrick-Sam Giancana element of the Chicago mob with demonstrable links to Jack Ruby in 1963, and the HSCA speculated that Cain may have been part of the 1960-61 CIA-Mafia plots against Castro. [Cain's CIA file, according to a later CIA memo, "reflects that...in 1963...he became deeply involved in the President Kennedy assassination case.][163]

Since 1995 new releases from Cain’s FBI file have revealed that the file identified Cain not with the CIA or its Bay of Pigs Cuban Front the FRD, but as “a former United States Army Military Intelligence Officer.[164]

As a separate item alluding to recent posts concerning Isidro Borja - the Cuban government believes that he may one of the individuals present in the background as Lee H. Oswald is handing out FPCC leaflets in Cuba.

And in closing, in Noel Twyman's Bloody Treason he mentions that Bernado de Torres ostensibly "Leopoldo" has been established as a contact of David Sanchez Morales.

[Tom Marchand]

Has it ever been proven that Clay Shaw and Clay Bertrand were the same person?

[James Richards]

As a separate item alluding to recent posts concerning Isidro Borja - the Cuban government believes that he may one of the individuals present in the background as Lee H. Oswald is handing out FPCC leaflets in Cuba.

And in closing, in Noel Twyman's Bloody Treason he mentions that Bernado de Torres ostensibly "Leopoldo" has been established as a contact of David Sanchez Morales. (Robert Howard)

Hi Robert,

I've had a good look at those images showing Oswald handing out the leaflets in New Orleans and the only guy who goes close to Borja is this man below in the comparison. I don't think this is in fact Borja. Gerry Hemming has identified Borja as the man seated between Dennis Harber and Bernardo De Torres in the first attachment.

The man in New Orleans does resemble a man who was part of a protest in Canada with Russell McLarry. (on the right in the comparison)

FWIW.

James

Edited October 2, 2005 by James Richards

[Robert Howard]

If there was ever a document that implied culpability to some degree by the Central Intelligence Agency (Clay Shaw's status with the CIA circa 1963 has not been resolved beyond a reasonable doubt, I stipulate), I believe this is at least one of them; If someone as high up on the food chain as Ray Rocca was in the CIA there has to be concrete evidence to that effect. Since the date of this document is September 20, 1967, it can be a valid speculation that "General Counsel's discussions with Justice [Dept.] might have been through Jack Miller - a former Ass't. Atty. General in charge of Justice Department's Criminal Div. who had contacted the CIA General Counsel to "offer intelligengce from within Garrison's office." Meanwhile, the Justice Dept. had by this time concluded that Shaw had not come clean with his lawyers regarding his ties to the CIA's Domestic Contacts Services. It should also be pointed out that Raymond Rocca knew Shaw personally before Garrison's investigation even had begun. But Garrison made, at least as far as linking the CIA to Shaw and hence the Kennedy assassination, one fatal mistake; he went from linking Shaw to the CIA, to Shaw and the CIA in concert with the "military-industrial complex." The rest as we all know is history. Part of the problem was that ostensibly Garrison did not learn the exact nature of Shaw's relationship with the Domestic Contacts Division until after the fact, many of his investigators did not know and lead prosecutor for Garrison, James Alcock was very skeptical of a Shaw link to the CIA.

History has tended to blend the perceptions of the Shaw trial into two distinct camps of pro and con regarding CIA complicity. A September 1977 memo written by HSCA staff counsel Jonathan Blackmer concluded: "We have reason to believe Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and possibly one of the high-level planners or 'cut out' to the planners of the assassination."

At least one of the members of the "Garrison Group," Raymond Rocca is on record as believing that Clay Shaw would be convicted by Garrison in the upcoming trial. I believe the reason that was so is for the following:

At the time of the House Select Committee investigation in 1976, inquiries to the CIA about Clay Shaw were coordinated by J. Walton Moore, the former Dallas CIA contact for Oswald's friend George DeMohrenschildt.

Another recently-released document connects Shaw to the top secret project ZRCLIFF, which was run out of William Harvey's super-secret Staff D along with the ZRRIFLE assassination program.

More to Come.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

After going back and reading threads that reference the Solares Hill articles, the always fascinating Gerry Patrick Hemming posts, whom I personally am very glad has chosen to join the Forum, I went back to analyze some information that I had previously read specifically the Lopez Report which concerns the HSCA investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald's trip to Mexico City. At the same time I re-read some material by Peter Dale Scott, whom I respect as one of if not the most cerebral of all JFK researchers. As the Joan Mellen book approaches its release I would strongly suggest forum members read or re-read Peter Dale Scott's Deep Politics III which can be found on the web at

http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm#_ftn113

The information he presents includes CIA shennanigans concerning false stories concerning Lee Harvey Oswald - attempting to link him to manipulated or outright false stories such as the Alvarado claim that Oswald volunteered in the Cuban Embassy to kill Kennedy and was given $6,500.00 by them to do the job, a claim he later recanted. but was possibly used by newly sworn-in President LBJ to induce Earl Warren to accept the position as head of the Warren Commission. What is even more interesting is that Alvarado's story may have been planted by the CIA; as the FBI regarded Alvarado as a "CIA source." In addition there were cables referencing Alvarado and endorsing his crediblity as a source being sent out by David Atlee Phillips under the pseudonyms M.C. Choaden & L.F. Barker. (As a brief aside, I would compare this to the DRE news story eminating out of Florida in the same time frame spouting Oswald/Fidel as behind the assassination, the DRE dis-information that inspired this article had the approval of George Joannides.)

Another revealing tidbit that Scott provides is that the "Oswald" type-written letter as well as the draft version which was addressed to the Soviet Embassy and subsequently conveniently given to the FBI by Ruth Paine (when they came to her house after the asasination) does not appear to be Oswald's after all, at least according to the Soviets and JFK researcher Jerry Rose the latter who has shown inconsistincies between the draft version and the type-written one, mainly that the type-written version was finalized before the draft version, in fact the type-written version contains six mis-spelt words that are nor mis-spelt in th draft version. Scott, standing on solid ground also points out that other items that were taken from the Paine household are considered suspect such as the Edwin Walker note and the pristine Mexico City bus tickets.

This portion of the page is verbatim

The DFS was involved in the LIENVOY intercept project and probably manned the listening posts. The DFS may have been assisted in this LIENVOY project by Richard Cain, an expert telephone tapper and adjunct to the CIA-Giancana [ZR/RIFLE] assassination connection, when he was in Mexico City in 1962 as a consultant to a Mexican Government agency. Richard Cain at the time was also part of that Dave Yaras-Lennie Patrick-Sam Giancana element of the Chicago mob with demonstrable links to Jack Ruby in 1963, and the HSCA speculated that Cain may have been part of the 1960-61 CIA-Mafia plots against Castro. [Cain's CIA file, according to a later CIA memo, "reflects that...in 1963...he became deeply involved in the President Kennedy assassination case.][163]

Since 1995 new releases from Cain’s FBI file have revealed that the file identified Cain not with the CIA or its Bay of Pigs Cuban Front the FRD, but as “a former United States Army Military Intelligence Officer.[164]

As a separate item alluding to recent posts concerning Isidro Borja - the Cuban government believes that he may one of the individuals present in the background as Lee H. Oswald is handing out FPCC leaflets in Cuba.

And in closing, in Noel Twyman's Bloody Treason he mentions that Bernado de Torres ostensibly "Leopoldo" has been established as a contact of David Sanchez Morales.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

THE THREE OSWALD DECEPTIONS: THE OPERATION, THE COVER-UP AND THE CONSPIRACY

by Peter Dale Scott

This piece was originally published in: Deep Politics II: Essays on Oswald, Mexico and Cuba (Essay completed April, 1994)

Right-Wing Conspiratorial Pressures on the CIA

In the preceding two chapters I have argued that, beginning some two or three months before the assassination, events attributed to Oswald were systematically misrepresented in CIA files. These misrepresentations appear to have been part of an intelligence operation, whether one run by the CIA or possibly some other agency.

However these misrepresentations need not necessarily have been conscious preparations for the "lone assassin" phase-two account of the Kennedy assassination. One can imagine an alternative version of events, in which some or all of the authors of the misrepresentations are not themselves part of a complex assassination conspiracy (involving a "phase one" story about Oswald and Kostikov), but the victims of such a conspiracy.

This alternative version supposes a force outside the CIA, but knowledgeable about CIA operations and procedures, and possibly represented within its ranks. In such a situation someone could embarrass the CIA into evasive procedures, delays, and even falsifications.

Let us pursue the hypothesis that the CIA had mounted a counterintelligence operation involving Oswald, or the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, or the Cuban Embassy there. And let us return to the distinction raised by the authors of the Lopez Report, that Oswald visited the Cuban and Soviet Embassies on September 27, but that the man who identified himself as Lee Oswald on October I (and allegedly "spoke with consul whom he believed be... Kostikov") was someone else, an impostor. (1)

If so, the second man may well have been part of a plot, launched outside the CIA, to implicate Oswald as the patsy in the assassination. If Oswald was part of a different, authorized CIA operation, then the evasive behavior of Egerter, Roman, et al. would be understandable. The standard CIA procedure of reporting such Embassy contacts to the FBI would have put the authors of the October 10 messages in a bind; they did not want the Oswald-Kostikov link to be investigated, because in the resulting "flap" the authorized Oswald operation would be blown.

There are indications that through the immediate post-assassination period the CIA continued to be subjected to embarrassing pressures from "phase one" advocates outside, but close to, the Agency. A long CIA memorandum of 11 December 1963 welcomed the announcement by the New York Times one day earlier that the FBI had found Oswald to be categorically the lone assassin, and not the agent of any foreign government. The memo continued:

These disclosures presumably eliminate the possibility of further confrontations with Mr. Robert Slusser. In the event that Mr. Slusser continues to insist that the President was murdered by the Soviet secret police, the following additional negative indications and observations may be of some value. (2)

The memo continued for three and a half single-spaced pages to argue against the KGB "phase one" hypothesis, suggesting by its thoroughness that the confrontations with Mr. Slusser had been taken seriously.

A published authority on Soviet affairs, Robert Slusser was almost put into a position to lend credibility to his hypothesis. Early FBI reports about Lee Harvey Oswald's brother Robert indicate that at one point Mr. Slusser was about to be hired to write Marina's story. Eventually, after what looks like intrigue, the contract went instead to Priscilla Johnson (later Priscilla Johnson McMillan). Her book, long delayed in its appearance, corroborated the FBI's and Warren Commission's "phase two" finding that Oswald acted alone. (3)

Other right-wing sources, often explicitly hostile to the CIA, kept alive the phase-one specter of a link between Oswald and either Soviet or Cuban intelligence. From as early as December 1963, the CIA itself was blamed by such sources, either implicitly or explicitly, for its part in the President's murder. John Martino, an active plotter against Castro with a mob background, surfaced one such story in December 1963. blaming the President's death on Castro's response to a plot between Kennedy and the Soviets to have Castro replaced in Cuba by Huber Matos, a former Castro ally now detained in a Cuban jail. (4)

This alleged plot was a veiled allusion to the AMTRUNK plan mounted by the CIA and Robert Kennedy in 1963 to use old allies of Matos to overthrow Castro. (5) But Martino the source is perhaps more interesting than his story. In 1963 he had been receiving support for his own anti-Castro operations from Julien Sourwine, Chief Counsel for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. (6) It was this Committee, the reader may recall, whose phase-one interests were Johnson's reason (or pretext) for setting up the Warren Commission.

There was no shortage of such allegations, though they often came back to the same sources. Early in 1964, Colonel Philip J. Corso, a veteran of Army Intelligence and old foe of the CIA, told his friend Julien Sourwine (who in turn told the FBI) that Oswald was tied to a Communist ring inside the CIA. (7) Congressman Michael Feighan, for whom Corso worked as an aide, was reported to be "very curious concerning an intelligence report to the effect that there is a special school for assassins near Minsk, Russia, where Oswald worked in a factory." (8) An article in the journal of the John Birch Society, whose author Revilo Oliver later cited sources among veterans of army intelligence and the FBI, also argued that Kennedy's murder "was part of a Communist plot engineered with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency," and cited the "fake 'revolt'" plotted by Kennedy and Khrushchev to replace Castro with a crypto- Communist "'agrarian reformer.'" (9)

Thus the right-wing pressures which forced the Warren Commission into being continued to play on it throughout its existence. And insofar as one can detect a common source for all these stories, that source would appear to be not only outside the CIA but extremely hostile to it.

The word "outside" here can however be misleading. Every one of the allegations here summarized drew on inside information. For example John Martino reported in his December 1963 article that Oswald had tried to penetrate the anti-Castro Cuban group JURE: this claim was not generally known at the time but it was later corroborated by Silvia Odio's account of her meeting with Oswald in September 1963. Furthermore the Kennedys and the CIA had a plan (AMTRUNK) to oust Castro, which would have used, among others, the forces of JURE. The plan was still on-going in 1964, and thus extremely sensitive. Above all it planned to install a new government which would be free from mob influence, a detail which was sufficient to incur the hostility of mob allies like John Martino.

These so-called "outsiders" knew enough about the ways of government, and specifically the CIA, to embarrass it into cover-up. It seems likely therefore that somewhere they had their spies inside government, and possibly inside the CIA.

The Most Likely Manipulator: David Atlee Phillips

So far this discussion has focused on those "phase one" stories linking Oswald to Soviet or Cuban intelligence which at the time existed uniquely in government files, and which for a while the U.S. Government took seriously. We have not yet mentioned the veritable blizzard of similar stories which reached the FBI and CIA from external sources after the assassination. After November 24 there were still more "phase one" stories attributing a similar role to Jack Ruby. And to all these anti-Communist stories denouncing the KGB and Cuba one must add those stories with an opposite political spin, linking Oswald and/or Ruby to right-wing Texas millionaires, oilmen, anti-Castro Cubans, the mob, or the right-wing terrorist Minutemen. Most of these leads did not check out.

There were so many such false leads that one might be easily tempted to write them all off as meaningless "noise." However House Committee researcher Dan Hardway chose to look closely at all the stories that came out of Mexico City and Miami connecting Oswald with Soviet or Castro intelligence. According to his colleague Gaeton Fonzi, "Hardway's research had indicated that most of the individuals originating the reports" were assets of the Mexico City Station's Chief of Covert Action and Cuban Operations, David Phillips. (10)

Hardway had the opportunity to quiz Phillips about this at an informal Committee interview, with Fonzi present. Hardway was armed at the interview with documentation from the Agency to dispute Phillips' claim that these assets had been run by other CIA agents. After the session, Hardway told Fonzi,

I'm firmly convinced now that he ran the red-herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him. (11)

To date I have been unable to contact Dan Hardway, although another good source has confirmed that he did conduct this research. It is also clear that a number of the "phase one" stories linking Oswald to Cuba did come from a single milieu of anti-Castro Cubans in Miami close to, and in some cases supported by, the CIA's JM/WAVE station there. David Phillips does therefore seem a likely candidate to have coordinated the stories coming out of Mexico City and Miami. For in the second half of 1963 he was cross-posted to both stations, as Chief of Cuban Operations in Mexico City, and as Chief of Psychological Operations (i.e. propaganda) in Miami. (In fact it is possible that David Phillips held down three posts in 1963, and was doubling also as a member of the Special Affairs Staff Counterintelligence (SAS/CI) staff.)

A small intelligence-backed "press agency," the Agencia de Informaciones Periodisticas (A.I.P.), was a source for one recurring Oswald story, that he had worked on behalf of Cuban intelligence in the Miami area. (The A.I.P. attracted notice again during the wave of Chilean-financed Cuban terrorism of the mid-1970s, involving many Cuban exile veterans of the JM/WAVE operations, when the A.I.P. was revealed to be an agency by then financed by the Chilean intelligence service DINA). (12) The story was traced by the FBI to Fernando Fernandez Capada of the A.I.P., who told it to Jim Buchanan, a close ally of Frank Sturgis; the story was later publicized by Frank Sturgis and John Martino. (13)

Another A.I.P. story, traced to Dr. Fernando Carrandi, spoke of Ruby's travel to Cuba. Those involved in circulating this story included Salvador Lew, p.r. agent for the CIA-backed Comandos Mambises, and Paul Bethel, described by Fonzi as "a close friend of David Atlee Phillips." (14) Yet another Oswald-Cuban intelligence story involved Miguel "Cuco" de Leon, senior adviser to Manuel Artime in the JM/WAVE-backed Operation Second Naval Guerrilla. (15)

Any evidence for linking Phillips to these intelligence-tinged stories has not yet been made public. We have however Phillips' own statements that he was involved in the transmission of both of the key "phase one" allegations promoted in CIA cables, the Kostikov story of October, and the Alvarado story of November 25.

As mentioned above, it would appear that Phillips' claim to have signed off on the Kostikov cable of October 8 is simply not true. Phillips claimed this in sworn testimony, as part of his effort to rationalize the delay of one week in transmitting the intercepted conversation of October 1. (16) Phillips' admitted role in the transmission of the Alvarado story, that Oswald was paid money in the Mexico City Cuban Consulate to kill Kennedy, is however corroborated by the documentary record. Here too there is a difference between Phillips own account and the cables however. In his autobiography Phillips describes the story he heard from Alvarado's lips as a lie easily seen through, indeed as a "transparent operation." (17) In the cables sent after his interviews with Alvarado, however, the tone is quite different. There we hear that "This officer was impressed by Alvarado ... wealth of detail Alvarado gives is striking." (18) One cable described Alvarado as a "quiet, very serious person, who speaks with conviction;" another, the next day, called him "completely cooperative." (19)

Most revealing was the description of Alvarado as a "well-known Nicaraguan Communist underground member," whereas in fact (as he himself revealed later the same day) he was a penetration agent of the right-wing Somoza Government of Nicaragua. (20) (This revelation was quickly confirmed by CIA cables from Managua and Headquarters). (21)

Winston Scott, Ambassador Thomas Mann, and the Mexican DFS

Assuredly Phillips was not alone in backing the Alvarado story at the time. Ambassador Thomas Mann, together with Station Chief Win Scott and FBI Legal Attache Clark Anderson, sent a Flash cable on November 26 suggesting that Silvia Duran should be rearrested in order to corroborate it:

We suggest that the Nicaraguan be put at the disposition of President Lopez Mateos on condition that Lopez Mateos will agree to order rearrest and interrogate again Silvia Tirado de Duran along following lines: A. Confront Silvia Duran again with Nicaraguan and have Nicaraguan inform her of details of his statement to us. B. Tell Silvia Duran that she is only living non-Cuban who knows full story and hence she is in same position as Oswald was prior to his assassination; her only chance for survival is to come clean with whole story and to cooperate completely.... Given apparent character of Silvia Duran there would appear to be good chance of her cracking when confronted with details of reported deal between Oswald, Azcue, Mirabal [the two Cuban consuls] and Duran and the unknown Cuban negro [described by Alvarado]. If she did break under interrogation - and we suggest Mexicans should be asked to go all out in seeing that she does - we and Mexicans would have needed corroboration of statement of the Nicaraguan. (22)

Mann on his own went on to recommend the arrest of three Cuban members of the Cuban consulate, and later to argue forcefully that Castro was the "kind of person who would avenge himself " by assassinations. (23)

These cables were in defiant opposition to the cooler approach in Washington. Headquarters had already tried to oppose the original arrest of Duran, rightly fearing that the arrest (and interrogation by the Mexican secret police, or DFS) "could jeopardize U.S. freedom of action on the whole question of Cuban responsibility." (24) Headquarters replied again to the new Duran cable, warning the Station Chief that the Ambassador was pushing the case too hard, and his proposals could lead to an international "flap" with the Cubans. (25)

Headquarters were absolutely right in their concern that the Mexican DFS were out to "prove" an international conspiracy involving Oswald with Cuba. Silvia Duran later confirmed that in their interrogations of her:

all the time they tell me that I was a Communist ... and they insisted that I was a very important person for ... the Cuban Government and that I was the link for the International Communists - the Cuban Communists, the Mexican Communists and the American Communists, and that we were going to kill Kennedy, and I was the link. For them I was very important. (26)

In its performance however, the DFS was almost certainly (as Edwin Lopez has since corroborated to me) tightly controlled by the CIA Station. The DFS was part of the Mexican Ministry of the Interior, or Gobemacion; its Minister, Gustavo Diaz Ordiz, was a CIA asset, and also a close friend of Station Chief Win Scott (the best man at Scott's third wedding), as well as of Ambassador Mann - and Lyndon Johnson. (27) Details of Duran's interrogation suggest that the DFS, seeking to prove her conspiratorial involvement, was being fed clues by the Americans. (28)

Given the predisposition of the DFS to find a conspiracy, a fact known even in Washington, and given the well-known brutality of DFS interrogation methods (which included torture), it is particularly revealing that Mann and Scott would recommend asking the DFS "to go all out in seeing that she [Duran] ... break under interrogation." Circumstances suggest that the documentary record here is incomplete, in at least two respects:

1) Contrary to the records we now have, Duran had already been tortured, and had already "confessed" to a sexual involvement with Oswald, since expunged from the record.

2) Mann's apparently reckless defiance of official instructions against the arrest of Duran was probably based on unofficial guidance from a very high level in Washington.

A Suppressed "Phase One" Story: Oswald's Alleged Sexual Liaison

Alvarado introduced a sex angle into his fantastic story about seeing Oswald be paid $6,500 to kill someone. He spoke of a "pretty girl" in the Consulate (whose manners reminded him of a "prostitute") who had given Oswald an embrace and also a home address "where he could find her." (29)

In 1967, transmitting an agent's report of an interview with a source who knew Duran, Win Scott commented:

The fact that Silvia DURAN had sexual intercourse with Lee Harvey Oswald on several occasions when the latter was in Mexico City is probably new, but adds little to the OSWALD case. The Mexican police did not report the extent of the DURAN-OSWALD relationship to this Station. (30)

Scott's choice of words ("fact," "extent") is indicative of earlier events involving Duran that have not hitherto been publicly reported.

In fact Scott had both misrepresented what the informant apparently said (reporting sexual relations with Oswald, but not "on several occasions"), and suppressed its most important revelation, that she had been tortured by the DFS until she "admitted that she had had an affair with Oswald:"

[Long redaction] XXXX continued that Silvia Duran informed XXXX that she had first met Oswald when he applied for a visa and gone out with him several times since she liked him from the start. She admitted that she had sexual relations with him but insisted that she had no idea of his plans. When the news of the assassination broke she stated that she was immediately taken into custody by the Mexican police and interrogated thoroughly and beaten until she admitted that she had had an affair with Oswald. (31)

It is noteworthy that Scott, far from rebutting the torture allegation, apparently accepted it as a fact, and one not worth commenting on.

The Lopez Report, in transmitting this interview, commented that "Silvia Duran admitted that the Mexican police had questioned her on this point but denied that she had had an affair with Oswald." (32) This account is confirmed by its cited source, Silvia Duran's interview of June 6, 1978.

Cornwell: Did the officers from the Securidad Department ever suggest to you during the questioning that they had information that you and Oswald had been lovers?

Tirado [Duran]: Yes, and also that we were Communists and that we were planning the Revolution and uh, a lot of false things. (33)

Curious as to why Ms. Duran had not been asked about the torture, I contacted Edwin Lopez, who had translated at the interview. He confirmed that, off the record, Ms. Duran had said that she was tortured badly, and that indeed in recalling this she had broken down and wept. She had however declined to say anything about the torture on the record because, as a citizen and resident of Mexico, she feared reprisal.

One hesitates now to make any revelation that would put Ms. Duran at risk. The issue however is an important one. According to the account which Scott accepted as "fact," she was not only tortured on the matter of the liaison, but coerced into admitting it. If Scott's blase comment is true (this "adds little to the OSWALD case"), then the accounts of her confession have probably been altered, to convert a suppressed "phase one" story of a sexual liaison into the innocuous "phase two" version published by the Warren Commission. (34) Lending credence to this hypothesis is the known fact that the published version was censored and rewritten (by the CIA, according to the Lopez Report) on at least one other point, Duran's original description of Oswald as "blonde and short." (35)

Were Mann and Scott Backed in Their Defiance of Official Instructions?

All this lends dramatic urgency to the question of whether or not Scott and Mann were "acting alone" in their defiant recommendation, against earlier official instructions from Headquarters, that Duran be rearrested by the DFS, and coerced into corroborating the Alvarado story.

One interpretation of the known facts is to postulate a real division within the Administration, between "phase one" enthusiasts like Scott and Mann (who wanted to ask the DFS "to go all out") and "phase two" pragmatists like Karamessines, who struggled in vain to prevent the arrest and rearrest from taking place.

The chief problem with this analysis is that Scott and Mann drew no disapprobation for their course of action. Scott remained in his post as Chief of Station until his retirement six years later. Mann, far from being rebuked, was swiftly promoted by the new President, Lyndon Johnson, on December 14, 1963, to become the new Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs. (Mann's promotion was the more dramatic because unexpected; he had earlier announced, under Kennedy, his plans to retire at the end of the year). (36)

A second interpretation of the facts is that beneath the apparent contest of opposing forces, "phase one" and "phase two," a higher authority was manipulating the Alvarado story, backed as it was by Scott and Mann, towards the desired "phase two" outcome of the Warren Commission and Report. I truly do not know whether or not such a higher authority existed. If it did, however, it almost certainly involved Lyndon Johnson.

Lyndon Johnson was a close personal friend of the soon-to-be-elected Mexican President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who has been described as the most right-wing (and pro-American) President since Miguel Aleman in the early 1950s. Just as Diaz Ordaz maintained tight control over the DFS (along with his good friend Win Scott), so Johnson was the friend and hope of those in the CIA who thought that Kennedy had been wrong to dismiss Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

As Johnson barely spoke Spanish, he relied in his meetings with Diaz Ordaz on the translating ability of a fellow Texan, Thomas Mann. As Mann later told author Dick Russell,

Lyndon Johnson had lines into Mexico that I knew nothing about. He was an amazing man. He didn't speak Spanish, but he was a good friend of [Gustavo] Diaz Ordaz, who became President of Mexico. He used to come down and see Johnson at the ranch several times, and Johnson would have me down to translate. (37)

(For what it is worth, former KGB Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko reports that his DFS contact told him that "many in the DFS felt that Lyndon Johnson was responsible" for the assassination). (38)

Johnson was not particularly close to the CIA as an Agency. His lack of interest in intelligence estimates has been cited as a reason for the resignation of CIA Director John McCone in 1965, and Johnson's replacement of him by an inept outsider, Admiral William Raborn. (39) In 1966 Johnson did however give the CIA its first Director who was also a career officer, Richard Helms. Helms had been close to Dulles since their days together in Germany with OSS. (40) (Helms later revealed that Johnson had explained to him in 1965 that Raborn was a "temporary measure," and that Johnson would appoint Helms when he had proved himself as Deputy Director). (41)

What remains unknown is the extent of the new President's knowledge of the "phase one" rumors which, as he informed Earl Warren, were "floating around." If he had any intimate knowledge of either the Kostikov story or the Alvarado story, he must have known that a true investigation of the case would have to be at arms length from the CIA. Instead Johnson named Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission. Dulles' strategic location was to play an important role in the CIA cover-up that ensued. If there was a conspiracy to ensure such a cover-up, then the naming of Dulles to his new post was almost certainly part of it. (42)

However important the personal connection between Johnson, Diaz Ordaz and Thomas Mann, it could never, however, have explained the strange falsifications of CIA messages that occurred at CIA Headquarters. To explain that phenomenon we must look inside the Agency itself.

Such a program of falsification and subsequent cover-up could have been coordinated, I shall suggest, by those who were closest to former Director Allen Dulles.

The Dulles-Angleton-Hunt-Phillips "Agency--Within-the-Agency"

In 1963 the "responsible" press, the New York Times and the Washington Post never commented critically on Johnson's choice of Allen Dulles, the most important official fired by John F. Kennedy, to serve on the Commission investigating the President's murder.

Even though one would never expect them to play this critical role, they should have, for Allen Dulles was perhaps the Kennedys' most powerful enemy in the U.S., arguably more powerful even than the new President. Dulles had resented his being made to take the blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco: "He thought other people should be resigning before he did, and made it clear that he was thinking of one person in particular, Robert Kennedy." (43)

Before the assassination, Dulles had fought back in the media, leaking his resentment against the Kennedys to the sympathetic ears of Charles J. V. Murphy of Fortune magazine, part of Henry Luce's Time-Life empire. Murphy's pro-Dulles apologia, "Cuba: The Record Set Straight," was simultaneously a piece lobbying for escalated U.S. involvement in Indochina, just before Kennedy's first major Vietnam decision. (44) In this counter-attack, Dulles had Agency support. Dulles asked to have one of his CIA proteges, E. Howard Hunt, go over Murphy's article in detail; and Hunt was accordingly instructed to do so. (45)

If Hunt was close to Dulles, he was even closer to his own protege, David Atlee Phillips. In fact it was probably through Hunt that Phillips became "an active player in a small clique within the CIA hierarchy who were almost autonomous in their operational capabilities," an OSS brotherhood of whom Allen Dulles, inside the Agency or out, was the acknowledged leader. (46) What merits further investigation is that members of this brotherhood played key roles on both sides of the Oswald "phase one"-"phase two" dialectic.

The key to Dulles' "agency-within-the-Agency," as Aarons and Loftus have called it, was the power Dulles had conferred on his close friend Jim Angleton. (47) As Counterintelligence Chief Angleton was authorized to spy on the rest of the CIA, and maintain a CI network of assets in other branches. The close connection between Dulles and Angleton endured well beyond Dulles' departure from the Agency. (48)

One sign of in-house CIA intrigue over the assassination is that those responsible for falsifying the Oswald-Kostikov story were not punished, or even distanced from the investigation of Kennedy's murder. On the contrary, John Scelso (actually John Whitten) of WH/3, the Mexico desk, and Birch D. O'Neal, the head of CI/SIG, both involved in the falsified October messages from Headquarters, were assigned after the assassination to key roles in the CIA investigation and resulting liaison with the FBI. (49)

The man responsible for these assignments was Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms, another Dulles loyalist and OSS brother. It is not clear that Helms' role was conspiratorial. On the contrary, while Scelso may have encouraged the proliferation of "phase one" Oswald stories, Helms appears to have constrained them. (50) What remains to be explored is whether these two apparently opposing efforts were actually part of a single coordinated scenario.

Helms's assignment of Scelso and O'Neal to the investigation made the same kind of sense as Johnson's putting Dulles on the Warren Commission. On the Commission, it is generally conceded, Dulles actively covered up the CIA involvement in the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro. (51) The House Committee, in an Appendix to its Report, concluded that Helms himself, "though the main contact with the Commission, apparently did not inform it of the CIA plots to assassinate Castro," and found a further "indication that his testimony before the Commission was misleading." (52)

Helms and Angleton designated Angleton's Chief of Research and Analysis, Ray Rocca, to be the CIA's point of contact with the Commission. (53) Angleton clearly hoped by doing so to prevent a number of highly relevant counterintelligence operations from being exposed, such as the CIA's illegal HT/LINGUAL mail-opening program (overseen by Birch D. O'Neal), and the photographic and electronic surveillance of the Soviet and Cuban Embassies in Mexico City. (54)

Angleton also visited Dulles on instructions from Helms, in order to learn and prepare for the questions which Dulles thought the Commission might put to the CIA. (55) Angleton's consistent approach was. in Rocca's words, "to wait out the Commission." (56) One might have expected as much from the man who would later tell the Church Committee, "It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the Government has to comply with all the overt orders of the Govemment." (57)

Having observed how closely the Dulles-Helms-Angleton network controlled the Warren Commission after the assassination, one is moved to ask about certain pre-assassination personnel movements, presumably authorized by Helms, which affected the Oswald-Kostikov story. One crucial move was the recall in 1963 of Tennant Bagley from Berne to Langley, where he was rapidly promoted to chief of the Counterintelligence Branch of the Soviet Division" (C/SR/CI). (58) This promotion came in time for him to suppress mention of Kostikov in the October messages, and then sound the assassination alarm about Kostikov on November 23.

Another move at this time was the temporary duty assignment of David Phillips, the Chief of Cuban Operations and Covert Action at the Mexico City Station, to Washington and Miami, "from at least late September to October 9, 1963." (59) In view of allegations about Hunt's Counterintelligence activities at this time (see below), it is relevant that while in Washington Phillips appears to have been attached to the Counterintelligence Staff of Fitzgerald's Special Affairs Staff devoted to anti-Castro operations.

Then there is the much disputed question of whether, as Tad Szulc has alleged, Howard Hunt was assigned to temporary duty in Mexico City for the period of August and September 1963, at the time of Oswald's alleged visit there. (60) Both Hunt and the CIA have strongly denied this claim. It is however supported by the sworn testimony of David Phillips in a libel suit, that he had seen Hunt in Mexico City at the time Hunt denied being there. (61) In a 1973 House Watergate Hearing, Hunt testified how a retired CIA agent "had during the Cuban operation been my inside man in the Embassy when I was outside in Mexico operating as part of the Cuban task force." (62)

An even more dramatic allegation, also strongly disputed, is that Hunt was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, at the time of the assassination. According to reporter Joseph Trento, a secret CIA memo of 1966, said to have been initialed by Angleton and Helms, emphasized the importance of keeping Hunt's presence there a secret, and suggested a cover story to provide Hunt with an alibi. (63) According to author Dick Russell, Trento later told him that Angleton himself was the source of the story, and arranged for a copy of the internal CIA memo to be delivered to him, as well as the House Committee. (64) If this is true, Angleton's role is sinister, and apparently part of a cover-up, whether the memo is real (and Hunt was in Dallas), or whether it was disinformation (and Hunt was not).

Trento told Russell he understood from Angleton that Hunt was in Dallas because "of a serious counterintelligence problem with the [CIA] Cubans," some of whom were known to be "penetrated by Castro's intelligence." (65) Far-fetched as an explanation to justify Hunt's presence in Dallas, it would make sense of his temporary detachment to Mexico City, where a number of JURE Cubans, suspected by Hunt and Angleton for their left-leaning politics, were preparing to take part in a Bobby Kennedy-backed operation against Castro. It would indeed have been characteristic of Angleton to use a CIA officer like Hunt, not nominally part of the Counterintelligence Staff, to spy on left-leaning CIA-sanctioned operations. And Hunt's animosity against the Cuban Manuel Ray of JURE, conceded by Hunt himself in his memoir Give Us This Day, was well-known throughout the Agency.

The CIA itself has said that Hunt's title at this time was Chief of Covert Operations for the Domestic Operations Division headed by Dulles' old friend Tracy Barnes. (66) Szulc however has wtitten that Hunt was asked to assist Dulles in writing a book, The Craft of Intelligence, that Dulles wrote following his involuntary retirement in 1961. (67) Just how long it took to complete the book is not clear; it was however published in 1963. Certainly the book would have given Hunt the opportunity to spend many long hours (presumably on Company time) with Dulles, his former boss.

A third person who would presumably have been present would have been Howard E. Roman, Dulles' close friend and alleged collaborator on the book. (68) Another member of the OSS "Old Boy" brotherhood in the CIA, Roman resigned in 1962 before taking up the book-writing job with Dulles (and possibly Hunt). Roman went on to write a total of two books (and two more edited volumes) with Dulles. In that capacity he was with Dulles at the moment, on November 22, 1963, when Dulles heard of the President's murder. (69)

Roman's post-war career had been with Soviet matters, but I know nothing to connect him officially with the Lee Harvey Oswald files. The same cannot however be said of his wife, Jane Roman. A CIA official herself, it was Jane Roman who, as noted earlier, was the releasing officer on the falsified CIA cable to Mexico City on October 1963.

Conclusion: The "Phase One" Stories Affected History

Assuredly the new President was not prevaricating, or being over-cautious, when he spoke to Chief Justice Warren of the risk of war. "Phase one stories" were not just street rumors, they were being promoted energetically and almost conspiratorially, at at least the Ambassadorial level.

We need to insist that the promotion of such stories, per se, does nothing to link the proponents to the assassination. It is hardly surprising that opponents of Castro within the Government, along with anti-Castro Cubans in Miami, should seize this opportunity to reverse what they saw, rightly or wrongly, as the Kennedy policy of prolonged inaction.

With the pre-assassination Kostikov story, on the other hand, we can be more specific. Unlike the Alvarado and other false stories, the Kostikov story was never exploited to achieve a policy change. It remained a secret in government files, and those who spoke publicly of KGB involvement never referred to it. To say that the falsifications of the October 1963 CIA messages had something to do with the plot to kill the President does not tell us anything about the motives of those falsifying the cables. As said above, they may have been illegal conspirators, or they may have been responding to a potential embarrassment created for them by these conspirators.

One can reach one simple conclusion about these two alternative ways of reading the facts: The public has both the right and the need to know which of these alternatives is the true one.

The first person one would have wanted to interrogate under oath about these falsifications, and about other falsehoods in his own earlier testimony, would have been David Atlee Phillips. Mr. Phillips unfortunately has since died, as have Win Scott and other relevant witnesses. This only adds to the urgency of securing testimony under oath from those who survive.

Notes

1. Lopez Report, 242-50; MEXI 6453 of 8 October 1963. According to the full script, the name of Kostikov was actually raised by "Oswald"'s interlocutor, the Soviet Embassy guard Obyedkov, rather than by Oswald (Lopez Report, 79).

2. Memo of 11 December 1963 to Chief/Soviet Russia from Neil Huntley, C/SRI. "Additional Notes and Comments on the Oswald Case;" CIA Document #376-154.

3. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Marina and Lee (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

4. John Martino, "Cuba and the Kennedy Assassination," Human Events, December 21, 1963, 3.

5. The chief of these allies were the JURE leaders Manuel Ray, Ramon Barquin, and Napoleon Becquer (10 AH 137; cf New York Times, April 19, 1962).

6. Scott, Deep Politics, 116; 11 AH 65.

7. Scott, Deep Politics, 215. See Chapter VII.

8. The Cross and the Flag, March 1964, 31. The CIA investigated the rumor of a Minsk assassination school early on, and pronounced it to be untrue.

9. Scott, Deep Politics, 215; Revilo Oliver, American Opinion, March 1964; 15 WH 710.

10. Fonzi, 292.

11. Fonzi, 292-93.

12. Magnus Linklater et al., The Nazi Legacy (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 278.

13. WCD 1020.1-6, 16; 26 WH 424-25; Scott, Deep Politics, 338.

14. WCD 916.2-3. Bethel was also involved in another false story of hit teams dispatched by Castro to kill Kennedy: see WCD 893.1-7; 22 WH 864, Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 60-61.

15. WCD 770.7-9; Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 18, 20.

16. Lopez Report, 127-28; Fonzi, 293. After interrogating Phillips informally on this issue, Hardway told Fonzi that, "based on the research he had done tracking the routing of the cables and the lack of credible answers about them from Phillips, he believed there was a strong possibility the cables were created after the fact" (Fonzi, 293).

17. David Phillips, The Night Watch (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 141-42; quoted in Scott, Deep Politics, 122.

18. MEXI 7104 of 27 November 1963; CIA Document #174-616.

19. Mexico City cable of 26 November 1963 (MEXI 7067?), retransmitted as DIR 85199 of 27 November, WCD 1000B.4; WCD 1000C.2.

20. Memo of 26 November, WCD 1000A; MEXI 7083 of 26 November.

21. MANAGUA cable of 26 November, 262237Z; DIR 85196 of 27 November 1963.

22. MEXI 7072 of 26 November 1963; CIA Document #128-590.

23. MEXI 7104 of 27 November 1963; MEXI cable of November 28 1963, Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, 441. Cf. 3 AH 569.

24. DIR 84916 of 23 November; Lopez Report, 185-86; Schweiker-Hart Report, 25.

25. DIR 85371 of 28 November 1963; Lopez Report, 187; Schweiker-Hart Report, 29.

26. 3 AH 91; Cf. 3 AH 86. Note that the DFS exempted the Soviets from their hypothetical conspiracy, as did Ambassador Mann (Summers, 441).

27. Scott, Deep Politics, 123; Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975), 274-75; Dick Russell, 454, 457-58. In late 1963 Diaz Ordaz was on leave as the Presidential candidate of the ruling PRI; but his replacement as Acting Minister, Luis Echeverria, was also a CIA asset on the CIA payroll.

28. For example, the Americans knew that Duran's name and the telephone number of the Cuban Consulate, 11-28-47, were in Oswald's address book (16 WH 54). Duran told the House committee that the DFS "asked me I don't know how many times, the way that I used to give my name and telephone number and they made me write and they take the paper out and then again, they ask me, how do you do this, and I write it down, and I give the paper. I think I do this five or six times" (3 AH 102).

29. MEXI 7067(?) of 26 November 1963; WCD 1000B.

30. Dispatch HMMA-32243 of 13 June 1967 from COS, Mexico City, to Chief, Western Hemisphere Division; CIA Document #1094-965.

31. TX-1937 of 26 May 1967, CIA Document #1084-965, reporting interview of informant in safehouse on 25 May, 1967. In 1964 the Station had also heard the allegation of an Oswald-Duran liaison from a dubious witness, Elena Garro, with strong DFS connections (Lopez Report, 207, 220; 3 AH 302).

32. Lopez Report, 254.

33. 3 AH 86.

34. 24 WH 565.

35. Lopez Report, 190; Scott, "The Lopez Report," 6.

36. Scott, Deep Politics, 94.

37. Russell, 454.

38. Oleg Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination (New York: Birch Lane/Carol Publishing, 1993), 181.

39. John Ranelagh, The Agency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 422-23. Raborn is remembered in the Agency as the man who asked "Who's this fellow Oligarchy?' and who thought that "KUWAIT" was a CIA cryptonym.

40. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys (New York: Scribner's, 1992). 160-61.

41. Ranelagh, 448.

42. Johnson did invoke the threat of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee as a major part of his case for a Warren Commission. As a man with years of Washington experience, he must have known of the on-going collaboration between Eastland and Sourwine of the Subcommittee with elements inside the CIA.

43. Leonard Mosley, Dulles (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1978), 473. Although Dulles had offered to resign at the moment of failure, the offer had been refused. He declined to offer his resignation again, after being rebuked in a secret in-house CIA review. Thus he was fired, and without prior warning (ibid.).

44. Charles J. V. Murphy, "Cuba: The Record Set Straight." Fortune, September 1961. Discussion in Paul W. Blackstock, The Strategy of Subversion (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964), 250; Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), 19-20.

45. Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974), 95; E. Howard Hunt, Under Cover (New York: Berkley, 1974), 216.

46. Fonzi, 331, 346n. Cf. Scott, Deep Politics, 54, 67, 322. Phillips had not served in OSS; his mentor Hunt had.

47. Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 260,

48. David Wise, Molehunt (New York: Random House, 1992), 39; Scott, Deep Politics, 67.

49. 11 AH 57, 476, 485.

50. Scelso's role is hard to assess. On November 23, 1963, when ordered by Assistant Deputy Director of Plans Karamessines to tell the Mexico City CIA Station to stop the arrest of Silvia Duran, Scelso entered a memo for the record, which said in part, "We phoned as ordered, against my wishes, and Scelso wrote a FLASH cable which we did not then send" (TX-1240 of 23 November 1963; C/WH/3 memo for record; emphasis added). On the other hand, he soon afterward prepared a summary report for Helms which was transmitted to President Johnson. "This report stated that Oswald probably was a lone assassin who had no visible ties to Soviet or Cuban intelligence though such ties could not be excluded from consideration" (11 AH 477).

51. Mosley, 477-78; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 536, 663.

52. 11 AH 58.

53. 11 AH 47, 477-79.

54. 4 AH 215; 11 AH 476, 479, 491; AR 205.

55. 4 AH 232-35.

56. 4 AH 215, 232.

57. Hersh, Old Boys, 317; citing Seymour Hersh, New York Times Magazine, June 25, 1978.

58. Mangold, 170.

59. Lopez Report, 128.

60. Szulc, Compulsive Spy, 96, 99.

61. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1991), 193. Hunt had made the sworn statement, "I was not in Mexico between the years 1961 and 1970." Phillips testified under oath that he had seen Hunt in Mexico City "sometime between September of 1961 and March of 1965," adding that he "must have seen him once or twice" somewhere in Mexico prior to November 22, 1963.

62. Nedzi Hearing, 518 (June 28, 1973).

63. Wilmington Sunday News Journal, August 20, 1978; reprinted in Lane, Plausible Denial, 152-55; Dick Russell, 474-75. In his book Lane claims that former CIA official Victor Marchetti had told him about this memo prior to the Trento story, citing Marine intelligence Colonel William Corson as his source (Lane, 134-35). Corson was close to Trento. The two eventually were co-authors of the book Widows.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid.

66. San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 1974, 1.

67. Szulc, 95.

68. Mosley, 475-77.

69. Mosley, 477.

[Tim Gratz]

I am no defender of the CIA as an institution in the late fifties and early sixties. I think its assassination plotting was tantamont to conspiracy to commit murder and those involved should have been prosecuted. If in fact RFK was not privy to any assassination plots I believe he had an obligation, when the plots were revealed to him by Col. Sheffield Edwards on May 7, 1982, to arrest Edwards, Bisell, Maheu and Rosselli, despite the furor this would have obviously entailed. How could the AG have overlooked a conspiracy to commit the most heinouis crime? Now I do believe that Castro was a terrible vicious dictator who, consistent with the standards of the Nuremberg trials, should have been arrested, tried and hung (if convicted), just as were the Nuremberg defendants and Eichman. But there is a difference between trying a war criminal and plotting his murder. If a police officer kills a murderous mafioso, it is still vigilante justice that cannot be justified under our system of laws. (I am not sure, and I doubt, if our constitution would permit the asassanitation of a terrorist, if authorized by statute and an executive determination; but that academic question need not be considered since there was no such statute in effect when the CIA plotted the murder of Castro. (It should also be noted that I have questioned on another thread if in fact the CIA as an instution plotted Castro's assassination if the plotters were limited to a very small handful of CIA officers and Dulles was not privy to the plot; but my point is that the CIA officers who plotted murder were criminals.)

That being said, in my opinion the theory that the CIA plotted JFK's murder through Clay Shaw is bunk. The clearest proof of this is that the CIA did not, through cut-outs, provide for Shaw's defense and Shaw's costly legal defense left him destitute. Why would the CIA have done that and risked Shaw making a deal with Garrison to inculpate his superiors? Can there be any doubt that, had Shaw offered to "give up" Hunt, Helms, Phillips or whomever, Garrison would not have cut a deal with Shaw? And the fact that Shaw did not even offer a deal is proof to a reasonable certainty that he COULD NOT.

If I recall correctly, all the Blackmer memo was doing was reciting what Garrison himself thought. Robert, do you have the entire memo? If so, can you post it?

[Robert Howard]

I am no defender of the CIA as an institution in the late fifties and early sixties.  I think its assassination plotting was tantamont to conspiracy to commit murder and those involved should have been prosecuted.  If in fact RFK was not privy to any assassination plots I believe he had an obligation, when the plots were revealed to him by Col. Sheffield Edwards on May 7, 1982, to arrest Edwards, Bisell, Maheu and Rosselli, despite the furor this would have obviously entailed.   How could the AG have overlooked a conspiracy to commit the most heinouis crime?  Now I do believe that Castro was a terrible vicious dictator who, consistent with the standards of the Nuremberg trials, should have been arrested, tried and hung (if convicted), just as were the Nuremberg defendants and Eichman.  But there is a difference between trying a war criminal and plotting his murder. If a police officer kills a murderous mafioso, it is still vigilante justice that cannot be justified under our system of laws.  (I am not sure, and I doubt, if our constitution would permit the asassanitation of a terrorist, if authorized by statute and an executive determination; but that academic question need not be considered since there was no such statute in effect when the CIA plotted the murder of Castro.  (It should also be noted that I have questioned on another thread if in fact the CIA as an instution plotted Castro's assassination if the plotters were limited to a very small handful of CIA officers and Dulles was not privy to the plot; but my point is that the CIA officers who plotted murder were criminals.)

That being said, in my opinion the theory that the CIA plotted JFK's murder through Clay Shaw is bunk.  The clearest proof of this is that the CIA did not, through cut-outs, provide for Shaw's defense and Shaw's costly legal defense left him destitute.  Why would the CIA have done that and risked Shaw making a deal with Garrison to inculpate his superiors?  Can there be any doubt that, had Shaw offered to "give up" Hunt, Helms, Phillips or whomever, Garrison would not have cut a deal with Shaw?  And the fact that Shaw did not even offer a deal is proof to a reasonable certainty that he COULD NOT.

If I recall correctly, all the Blackmer memo was doing was reciting what Garrison himself thought.  Robert, do you have the entire memo?  If so, can you post it?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You have a valid point in your response, and which in theory I agree. The CIA appears to have left Shaw "hanging in the wind." Note that I say appears. I have not had any success in locating the Blackmer memo, all I have found is a short excerpt. I did not post it because of its short length, as I would rather post the entire memo. I will continue to search for it.

To respond to the point you raised that "the theory that the CIA plotted JFK's murder through Clay Shaw is bunk," is obviously not going out on a limb; the material that I have posted on this thread so far, is central to unraveling the activities and what was the motivation of CIA officials and other parties manipulating facts to put a particular spin on Oswald's activities before the assassination; I will be the first to admit that the Garrison trial has more intrigues than a John Le Carre novel, my perception is that Garrison's entire case hinged on proving the Clay Shaw/ClayClem Bertrand alias as well as the credibility of the testimony of Vernon Bundy and Perry Russo and others. Bundy, a heroin addict and the Russo hypnosis issue, together with the ruling that the Bertrand alias was inadmissable killed the case; what is just as obvious is that preceeding the trial people were dying like flies, David Ferrie, Eladio del Valle, Nicholas Chetta, Clyde Johnson, and Albert Bogard. To say that the Clay Shaw trial was not conducted amidst ideal circumstance's for Garrison, is the understatement of the year for reasons I do not feel necessary to elaborate; imagine what could have been resoved had his request for extradition of individuals like Eugene Brading had not been blocked by then Gov. Ronald Reagan or for that matter Sergio Aracha Smith, as well as compelling the testimony of Allen Dulles, Charles Cabell etc. been honored by the govt. Obviously a fantasy scenario, I admit but bits and pieces of evidence have emerged that could have made the investigation more credible such as the fact that apparently Kerry Thornley picked up the FPCC leaflets that Oswald distributed something the FBI knew and deliberately did not follow up on at Hoover's direction and links to Guy Bannister and Tulane University such as Col./Dr. Jose Rivera that were at the time unknown, while all of this is neither here nor there as far as whether Clay Shaw's ostensible participation in a "plot to kill JFK, was part of an official CIA program designed to kill Kennedy" (a conjecture that I myself, do not find credible) it is also not going out on a limb to observe that "a deliberate effort was made to obfuscate and prevent facts from being made known that were relevant to resolving the issue of conspiracy in the death of JFK."

I believe as many researchers do, that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, and that there was a cover-up which "may or may not have been executed by the same parties that were involved in the assassination." Indeed, my perception is that IF Clay Shaw, David Ferrie and others) were acting together in a plot to kill JFK, they were not involved as "agents of the CIA" that almost goes without saying as far as I am concerned, the troubling part is that 42 years after the assassination we are still left hanging because our government has no interest in making the truth known. Conspiracy theories flourish in an atmosphere of uncertainty about "what actually happened." Given the current state of the union, that does not bode well for any American who wants to live in a free and open society.

My intention in starting this thread is in resolving the gray area between the "conspiracy to kill JFK" and suspicious activities on the part of the CIA before and after 11-22-1963; by the following: James Angleton, Allen Dulles, David Atlee Philips, George Joannides, Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt.

Edited October 2, 2005 by Robert Howard

[Tom Marchand]

That being said, in my opinion the theory that the CIA plotted JFK's murder through Clay Shaw is bunk.  The clearest proof of this is that the CIA did not, through cut-outs, provide for Shaw's defense and Shaw's costly legal defense left him destitute.  Why would the CIA have done that and risked Shaw making a deal with Garrison to inculpate his superiors?  Can there be any doubt that, had Shaw offered to "give up" Hunt, Helms, Phillips or whomever, Garrison would not have cut a deal with Shaw?  And the fact that Shaw did not even offer a deal is proof to a reasonable certainty that he COULD NOT.

In my opinion, this does not dismiss the possibility that Shaw was involved only that the CIA was not directly involved in the assassination. We know that Shaw had some-type of relationship with the CIA and I have to assume that if Shaw was personally involved with the assassination the CIA would have heard about it through the grapevine. In this case, why would the CIA get involved with Shaw's defense? To me, this situation is simular to the case of Barry Seal.

Additionally, if the CIA was directly involved and Shaw was their man, why not just have Shaw killed?

Having said that, I personally feel Garrison was on to something down in New Orleans but I do not believe that Shaw was involved to the degree that Garrison states. I have not seen any creditable evidence showing Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand.

[Larry Hancock]

Robert, based on the Garrison era documents I've seen so far, it appears that it was the FBI and the Justice Department which covertly (and illegally) came to Shaw's defense. Lisa Pease and Jim D. have written on this at some length in their Probe articles and its clear that the FBI put its on network of former FBI agents to work supporting Shaw (the FBI's use of former agents running Detective and Security agencies has been far underestimated and my well have been superior to the CIA's front company tactic, at least for domestic activities) and Justice Department lawyers were in direct communications with Shaw's defense team, who had indeed appealed to Justice themselves. While the FBI was aggressivelly trying to help Shaw's defense, the CIA moved into a defense mode, first trying to come up with tactics in Virginia to ensure they could not be served with papers and then trying to determine the exposure of their employees and contacts in New Orleans should Garrison get to them there. The scope of the FBI and Justice reaction may indicate several things....but at the core it was probably driven by a need to cover up the FBI's use of Oswald and protect DuBurys (sp).

The FBI was set up be a real loser if Garrison had proven in Oswald's association with Bannister, his function as an intelligence dangele and the use of the FBI former agent network to support CI activities. Eventually we learned all about that but it would have been critical news in 67 with the FBI and CIA turning on their full fledged internal subversive efforts against the War protesters and Black activists.

The CIA internal memos show that two names really concened them, one was Santana who was an operational boat guide on Cuban infiltration missions in 62 and 63 and the other was LaBorde, who had worked on one of the most famous vessels, the Tejuana, prior to the BOP. Anyone digging out the details of the Tejuna and who bought it and crewed it would have found out a good deal of how the CIA used their business networks in the U.S., including private contributions for deniable actions....something that would have reached from the King Ranch to New York City through New Orleans. Not to mention what an investigation of the CIA's pre-BOP operations in the New Orleans area might have turned up.....especially any real investigation of the CLIP project.

I guess my point in all that rambling was to suggest that you examine not just the CIA's issues with Garrison but that you give attention to what the FBI and Justice were doing in their direct intervention with Shaw's defense team.

-- Larry

[Robert Howard]

Robert,  based on the Garrison era documents I've seen so far, it appears that it was the FBI and the Justice Department which covertly (and illegally) came to Shaw's defense.  Lisa Pease and Jim D. have written on this at some length in their Probe articles and its clear that the FBI put its on network of former FBI agents to work supporting Shaw (the FBI's use of former agents running Detective and Security agencies has been far underestimated and my well have been superior to the CIA's front company tactic, at least for domestic activities) and Justice Department lawyers were in direct communications with Shaw's defense team, who had indeed appealed to Justice themselves.  While the FBI was aggressivelly trying to help Shaw's defense,  the CIA moved into a defense mode, first trying to come up with tactics in Virginia to ensure they could not be served with papers and then trying to determine the exposure of their employees and contacts in New Orleans should Garrison get to them there.  The scope of the FBI and Justice reaction may indicate several things....but at the core it was probably driven by a need to cover up the FBI's use of Oswald and protect DuBurys (sp).

The FBI was set up be a real loser if Garrison had proven in Oswald's association with Bannister, his function as an intelligence dangele and the use of the FBI former agent network to support CI activities.  Eventually we learned all about that but it would have been critical news in 67 with the FBI and CIA turning on their full fledged internal subversive efforts against the War protesters and Black activists.

The CIA internal memos show that two names really concened them,  one was Santana who was an operational boat guide on Cuban infiltration missions in 62 and 63 and the other was LaBorde, who had worked on one of the most famous vessels, the Tejuana, prior to the BOP.  Anyone digging out the details of the Tejuna and who bought it and crewed it would have found out a good deal of how the CIA used their business networks in the U.S., including private contributions for deniable actions....something that would have reached from the King Ranch to New York City through New Orleans.  Not to mention what an investigation of the CIA's pre-BOP operations in the New Orleans area might have turned up.....especially any real investigation of the CLIP project.

I guess my point in all that rambling was to suggest that you examine not just the CIA's issues with Garrison but that you give attention to what the FBI and Justice were doing in their direct intervention with Shaw's defense team.

-- Larry

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thanks for the heads up; is that Emilio Santana you are referring to?

[Larry Hancock]

Yes Robert, it would be Emilio Santana. Fortunately for the CIA and unfortunately for Garrison, they found that Santana had actually purchased a car and used the CIA as an employment reference on the paperwork. You can imagine how much Jim would have enjoyed having that in hand.

He would also have enjoyed having the photos which show Ferrie with Stugis and one of Sturgis associates taken in the summer of 1962....clearly Ferrie had some prior association with folks out of Miami pre-BOP. And that would have been one more real and very significant actual CIA asset....so significant that Helms had to obfuscate if not actually commit perjury covering up the CIA's use of Sturgis as an informant. Not just an informant but someone they initially came across because of his offer to help them asssassinate Castro. And of course when Garrison was using De Torres as an investigator he really had no idea whe he might be connected to. I'm sure that Joan will go into far more of this than I'm even aware of but Garrison and New Oreleans were in the midst of a host of Cuban secret war activities from both before and after the BOP - which meant that there were a host of things that the Agency, the Bureau and a variety of individuals were driven to hide. It's only been in the last few years that most of the hidden NO activity has emerged.

- Larry

[Robert Howard]

Yes Robert, it would be Emilio Santana. Fortunately for the CIA and unfortunately for Garrison, they found that Santana had actually purchased a car and used the CIA as an employment reference on the paperwork. You can imagine how much Jim would have enjoyed having that in hand.

He would also have enjoyed having the photos which show Ferrie with Stugis and one of Sturgis associates taken in the summer of 1962....clearly Ferrie had some prior association with folks out of Miami pre-BOP. And that would have been one more real and very significant actual CIA asset....so significant that Helms had to obfuscate if not actually commit perjury covering up the CIA's use of Sturgis as an informant. Not just an informant but someone they initially came across because of his offer to help them asssassinate Castro. And of course when Garrison was using De Torres as an investigator he really had no idea whe he might be connected to. I'm sure that Joan will go into far more of this than I'm even aware of but Garrison and New Oreleans were in the midst of a host of Cuban secret war activities from both before and after the BOP - which meant that there were a host of things that the Agency, the Bureau and a variety of individuals were driven to hide. It's only been in the last few years that most of the hidden NO activity has emerged.

- Larry

Larry: I really appreciate you getting back with me on Emilio Santana. What you mentioned in your response is fascinating to me especially with regards to Santana, moreover I wanted to ask you what is your information source on the "photos which show Ferrie with Sturgis.....taken in the summer of 1962...."

Also do you know the identity in the photo's you referenced of "Sturgis' associate."

Look forward to hearing back from you.

Edited October 4, 2005 by Robert Howard

[Robert Howard]

Yes Robert, it would be Emilio Santana. Fortunately for the CIA and unfortunately for Garrison, they found that Santana had actually purchased a car and used the CIA as an employment reference on the paperwork. You can imagine how much Jim would have enjoyed having that in hand.

He would also have enjoyed having the photos which show Ferrie with Stugis and one of Sturgis associates taken in the summer of 1962....clearly Ferrie had some prior association with folks out of Miami pre-BOP. And that would have been one more real and very significant actual CIA asset....so significant that Helms had to obfuscate if not actually commit perjury covering up the CIA's use of Sturgis as an informant. Not just an informant but someone they initially came across because of his offer to help them asssassinate Castro. And of course when Garrison was using De Torres as an investigator he really had no idea whe he might be connected to. I'm sure that Joan will go into far more of this than I'm even aware of but Garrison and New Oreleans were in the midst of a host of Cuban secret war activities from both before and after the BOP - which meant that there were a host of things that the Agency, the Bureau and a variety of individuals were driven to hide. It's only been in the last few years that most of the hidden NO activity has emerged.

- Larry

Larry: I really appreciate you getting back with me on Emilio Santana. What you mentioned in your response is fascinating to me especially with regards to Santana, moreover I wanted to ask you what is your information source on the "photos which show Ferrie with Sturgis.....taken in the summer of 1962...."

Also do you know the identity in the photo's you referenced of "Sturgis' associate."

Look forward to hearing back from you.

In posting this information I am not implying that it is evidence of complicity of the principals in the assassination of JFK, but I am stating that this information would have fell under the category of "If it hadn't been destroyed we would know if they were actual conspirators or covering-up some very unsavory activities pertaining to CIA Operations."

From the ARRB Final Report

Destroyed and/or Missing Files

b. John McCone

....Within the McCone papers, the Review Board noticed several file folders with notations or sheets indicating documents on a wide variety of subjects which are either missing or were destroyed. Of the missing or destroyed documents, two refer to the Kennedy assassination. One document from a 1963 listing is described as "Date of Meeting26 Nov; ParticipantsDCI & Bundy; Subjects CoveredMsg concerning Pres. Kennedy's assassination." The second document is described as "Date of Meeting19 May 64; ParticipantsDCI, J.J. McCloy; Dinner at ResidenceRe: Oswald." This document is annotated "Destroyed 12872." CIA historians noted that both documents were missing when they reviewed the files in 1986. The Review Board designated as assassination records all relevant documents from the McCone files including the notations on the destroyed and missing records.

e. James J. Angleton.

Knowledge of the records that James J. Angleton, Chief of Counterintelligence for thirty years, allegedly created, and the probable destruction of those records after his retirement, has generated extensive public interest. In an attempt to satisfy the public's curiosity about Angleton's files, the Review Board asked the CIA (1) to search for any extant records that Angleton maintained, and (2) to account for the destruction of his files or the incorporation of his files into other filing systems. In response, the Directorate of Operations provided three memoranda that document CIA's multi-year review of Angleton's counterintelligence files.14 These memoranda state that CIA reviewed Angleton's records and incorporated a small percentage into the files of the Directorate of Operations. CIA destroyed other records, either because the records were duplicates or because CIA decided not to retain them. The Directorate of Operations did not provide destruction records to account for the Angleton files

g. William Harvey.

William Harvey was intricately involved in the planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion and the various assassination plots against Fidel Castro. The Review Board received a query from a researcher concerning the possible existence of "operational diaries" that Harvey may have created. CIA searched its Directorate of Operations records and did not locate any records belonging to Harvey. The introduction to the 1967 CIA Inspector General's (IG) report on plots to assassinate Castro notes that Richard Helms directed that, once the IG's office produced the report, CIA should destroy all notes and source material that it used to draft the report. CIA may have destroyed Harvey's alleged diaries in response to Helms' directive. Finally, Review Board staff also asked various CIA reviewers who worked on records relating to the Bay of Pigs whether they had located any operational diaries belonging to Harvey. Despite its efforts, the Review Board did not locate any diaries.

Included but not missing info/RLH

4. George Bush

A November 29, 1963, memorandum from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the Department of State refers to the fact that information on the assassination of President Kennedy was "orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency." At the request of the Review Board, the CIA made a thorough search of its records in an attempt to determine if the "George Bush" referred to in the memorandum might be identical to President and former Director of Central Intelligence George Herbert Walker Bush. That search determined that the CIA had no association with George Herbert Walker Bush during the time frame referenced in the document.

The records that the Review Board examined showed that the only other "George Bush" serving in the CIA in 1963 was a junior analyst who has repeatedly denied being the "George Bush" referenced in the memorandum. The Review Board staff found one reference to an Army Major General George Bush in the calendars of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles. There was no indication if this General Bush could be the referenced George Bush. The Review Board marked the calendar page as an assassination record.

6. White House Communications Agency

WHCA was, and is, responsible for maintaining both secure (encrypted) and unsecured (open) telephone, radio, and telex communication between the President and the government of the United States. Most of the personnel that constitute this elite agency are U.S. military communications specialists; many, in 1963, were from the Army Signal Corps. On November 22, 1963, WHCA was responsible for communications between and among Air Force One and Two, the White House Situation Room, the mobile White House, and with the Secret Service in the motorcade.

The Review Board sought to locate any audio recordings of voice communications to or from Air Force One on the day of the assassination, including communications between Air Force One and Andrews Air Force Base during the return flight from Dallas to Washington, D.C. As many people are now aware, in the 1970s, the LBJ Presidential Library released edited audio cassettes of unsecured, or open voice conversations with Air Force One, Andrews Air Force Base, the White House Situation Room, and the Cabinet Aircraft carrying the Secretary of State and other officials on November 22, 1963. The LBJ Library version of these tapes consists of about 110 minutes of voice transmissions, but the tapes are edited and condensed, so the Review Board staff sought access to unedited, uncondensed versions. Since the edited version of the tapes contains considerable talk about both the forthcoming autopsy on the President, as well as the reaction of a government in crisis, the tapes are of considerable interest to assassination researchers and historians.

Given that the LBJ Library released the tapes in the 1970s, the paper trail is now sketchy and quite cold. The LBJ Library staff is fairly confident that the tapes originated with the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). The LBJ Library staff told the Review Board staff that it received the tapes from the White House as part of the original shipment of President Johnson's papers in 1968 or 1969. According to the LBJ Library's documentation, the accession card reads: "WHCA?" and is dated 1975. The Review Board staff could not locate any records indicating who performed the editing, or when, or where.

The Review Board's repeated written and oral inquiries of the White House Communications Agency did not bear fruit. The WHCA could not produce any records that illuminated the provenance of the edited tapes.

The tapes and transcripts of William Manchester's interviews of Robert F. Kennedy and Jacqueline B. Kennedy are subject to a 1967 legal agreement which states that they were not to be made public for 100 years "except... on the express written consent of plaintiff [Jacqueline B. Kennedy]." With Mrs. Onassis's death, her daughter Caroline Kennedy became her representative and is the only person with authority to give consent to open this material.

The Review Board recognizes that the interviews have extraordinary historical value and so it pursued this matter with the JFK Library and with William Manchester. After evaluating whether the the court order could be lifted, the Review Board decided to approach Caroline Kennedy to discuss the possibility of having the tapes and transcripts opened at the Kennedy Library. Caroline Kennedy wrote to the Review Board in late August 1998, informing the Board of her decision not to release the material at this time, nor would she agree to allow one of the Review Board members to review the material to determine whether the tapes contained assassination-related material.

With regards to the numerous CIA Files on Lee Harvey Oswald "At the time of the assassination, the CIA held four types of records which contained information on Lee Harvey Oswald: a 201 or personality file which was released to the public in 1992; an Office of Security file which nearly duplicated the pre-assassination 201 file; HTLINGUAL records; and records within a general file on U.S. citizens who had defected to another country.

i. Security file. CIA's search of its Office of Personnel Security database produced the original Office of Security's subject file on Lee Harvey Oswald (#0351164) established circa 1960. The first volume of the Security file contains 19 documents, similar but not absolutely identical to the pre-assassination volume of Oswald's 201 file. The Review Board identified an additional six documents, which appear to pre-date the assassination, in later volumes of the Security file. Although the HSCA reviewed the Office of Security file in 1978, Congress did not include this file with the other material viewed by the HSCA that it sequestered. Consequently, this file did not end up in the CIA sequestered collection.2 As a result of the Review Board's request, CIA transmitted its Office of Security file to the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFK Collection) at NARA.

iii. HTLINGUAL records. HTLINGUAL is the crypt for CIA's mail opening and mail cover program for 1952 to 1973. The CIA reported to the Review Board that it destroyed most of its formal HTLINGUAL records in 1990 at the direction of CIA's Office of General Counsel. The CIA sequestered collection, however, does contain several "soft" or working files on Lee Harvey Oswald and the HTLINGUAL project, including the "soft" file held by the Special Investigations Group of the Counterintelligence Staff (CI/SIG). In response to the Review Board's request for additional information, the CIA located additional references to HTLINGUAL records in archival files of the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans (now the Deputy Director of Operations). CIA processed the relevant records for release to NARA.

c. Possible ONI post-defection investigation.

The Review Board became aware of an individual named Fred Reeves of California, who was reputed to have been in charge of a post-defection "net damage assessment" of Oswald by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) shortly after Oswald's defection to the U.S.S.R. The Review Board contacted Reeves, interviewed him twice by telephone, then flew him to Washington, D.C., where the Review Board staff interviewed him in person.4

In 1959, Reeves was a civilian Naval Intelligence Operations Specialist.5 Reeves told the Review Board that a week or so after Oswald defected to the U.S.S.R., two officers from ONI in Washington, D.C.,6 called him and asked him to conduct a background investigation at the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro, CaliforniaOswald's last duty station before his discharge from the Marine Corps. Reeves said that he went to El Toro, copied Oswald's enlisted personnel file, obtained the names of many of his associates, and mailed this information to ONI in Washington, D.C. He said that ONI in Washington ran the post-defection investigation of Oswald, and that the Washington officers then directed various agents in the field. Although Reeves did not interview anyone himself, he said that later (circa late 1959 or early 1960), approximately 12 to 15 "119" reports concerning Oswald (OPNAV Forms 5520119 are ONI's equivalent of an FBI FD302 investigative report), crossed his desk. Reeves said he was aware of "119" reports from Japan and Texas, and that the primary concern of the reports he read on Oswald was to ascertain what damage had been done to national security by Oswald's defection. Reeves reported that he also saw eight to ten "119" reports on Oswald after the assassination, and that he was confident he was not confusing the two events in his mind.

In the spring of 1998, Review Board staff members met with two Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) records management officials, one of whom personally verified that he had searched for District Intelligence Office records (with negative results) from the San Diego, Dallas, and New Orleans District Intelligence Offices in 1996 with negative results. This search included "119" reports from the time period 19591964, during an extensive search of NCIS record group 181. The search included any records that would have been related to Oswald's defection. Thus, the Review Board ultimately located no documentary evidence to substantiate Reeves' claims.

"

[Guest Matt Allison]

That guy is Borja?????????

Borja is not pictured in any of the photos you show.

As a separate item alluding to recent posts concerning Isidro Borja - the Cuban government believes that he may one of the individuals present in the background as Lee H. Oswald is handing out FPCC leaflets in Cuba.

And in closing, in Noel Twyman's Bloody Treason he mentions that Bernado de Torres ostensibly "Leopoldo" has been established as a contact of David Sanchez Morales. (Robert Howard)

Hi Robert,

I've had a good look at those images showing Oswald handing out the leaflets in New Orleans and the only guy who goes close to Borja is this man below in the comparison. I don't think this is in fact Borja. Gerry Hemming has identified Borja as the man seated between Dennis Harber and Bernardo De Torres in the first attachment.

The man in New Orleans does resemble a man who was part of a protest in Canada with Russell McLarry. (on the right in the comparison)

FWIW.

James

Edited October 5, 2005 by Matt Allison

[Robert Howard]

You've gotta love Hemming's stupid game...

That guy is Borja?????????

LOL.

Ummmm, no.

Despite what assclown Hemming and those idiot LaFontaines say, Borja is not pictured in any of the photos you show.

As a separate item alluding to recent posts concerning Isidro Borja - the Cuban government believes that he may one of the individuals present in the background as Lee H. Oswald is handing out FPCC leaflets in Cuba.

And in closing, in Noel Twyman's Bloody Treason he mentions that Bernado de Torres ostensibly "Leopoldo" has been established as a contact of David Sanchez Morales. (Robert Howard)

Hi Robert,

I've had a good look at those images showing Oswald handing out the leaflets in New Orleans and the only guy who goes close to Borja is this man below in the comparison. I don't think this is in fact Borja. Gerry Hemming has identified Borja as the man seated between Dennis Harber and Bernardo De Torres in the first attachment.

The man in New Orleans does resemble a man who was part of a protest in Canada with Russell McLarry. (on the right in the comparison)

FWIW.

James

Larry, I hope you jump in on this regarding the "film" Robert Tannenbaum saw before it allegedly disappeared from the HSCA after being found at Georgetown U.

"Here is Tanenbaum's description of what the film contained,

condensed from his novel based in part on his HSCA experiences,

*Corruption of Blood.* The plot of the novel is fictionalized; the

evidence discussed is not.

". . . The small square screen showed a shadowy landscape, some bushes

and trees, then a road. The film was black-and-white and grainy, or

perhaps the graininess was just an artifact of the ground-glass screen of

the editing machine. In any case, the film seemed to have been shot in

bad light, at dusk perhaps, or in moonlight.

"The camera panned across dark woods that seemed vaguely tropical --

palmettos, Spanish moss, and hanging vines -- past an open field, and

onto the road again. A line of two-and-a-half-ton military trucks

appeared, moving slowly, their headlights cut to thin slits. The trucks

stopped and soldiers leaped out and lined up on the road. They were

dressed in fatigues and soft caps. Most carried rifles, but there were

some with machine guns and mortar components, and . . . one with a folded

bazooka.

"The film now cut jerkily to maneuvers: the soldiers rushed across the

field and flung themselves down, while others provided covering fire. The

film was silent, but you could see the pinpoints of fire from the rifles

and the shimmering gouts of muzzle blast from the machine guns. It cut to

a mortar team firing, dropping the shells in odd silence down the tubes

and shielding their ears from the blasts. . . . they seemed well drilled.

". . . Now the camera was obviously in a vehicle of some kind, an open

vehicle because the camera could pan around 360 degrees. A jeep: the

well-known square hood flashed by and then the backs of the heads of two

men with military caps on. A white road sign loomed up and started to

whip by. . . . The road sign had the shape of Louisiana and a number."

This is by Lake Pontchartrain, near New Orleans. The jeep ride ended and

the camera cut to a group of five men standing around a jeep, talking, as

troops filed by in the background. There were two unidentified Cubans.

There was a "stocky guy with the round face" -- Antonio Veciana of the

CIA-backed anti-Castro squad, Alpha 66. There was a "tall, ugly guy" --

Guy Banister, head of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean,

resident of 544 Camp Street, New Orleans. There was a figure wearing

civilian clothes, "a tall man with dark hair, a prominent nose, and

deeply impressed wrinkles under his eyes . . . turning away from the lens

as the shot opened, as if more interested in some background object than

in the conversation the men were having; that, or he had a predisposition

to avoid being the subject of photography. Tanenbaum believes this man

was CIA officer David Atlee Phillips.

"In the treacly movements of slow motion, the camera's view moved to

another group of men standing by a truck. One of the men in the group

turned around and smiled at the camera. It was actually more of a smirk

than a smile, the famous smirk. . . . Lee Harvey Oswald." There were

several unidentified men.

". . . The screen brightened. It was full day. Some men were shooting

pistols at a crude outdoor firing range, firing at man-shaped targets

nailed to trees." Antonio Veciana appeared in civilian clothes now,

"holding an .45 and smiling. The view moved unsteadily at each soundless

explosion. Two men, grinning, held up a well-punctured target. A man in a

black T-shirt and ball cap sat at a table loading bullets into pistol

magazines. He looked up for an instant, frowned, spoke briefly, and

lowered his head again so that the bill of the cap obscured his face. He

resembled Oswald, but Tanenbaum thought it had "to be some time later

than in the first scenes, because his sideburns grown longer. . . .

More shooting, men posing with weapons, then a close-up of a round-faced

man with a fright wig and patently phony, impossibly thick eyebrows. . .

David Ferrie . . . nobody else looked like Ferrie."

The film cut to a shot of the man who looked like Oswald in the ball cap

and black T-shirt. "The shot was taken from the rear and showed him

standing, aiming at a target twenty-five yards downrange and firing off

seven shots rapidly. . . . The camera moved in for a close-up of the head

of the target silhouette. It was shredded and flapping away from its

fiberboard backing. There was more target practice, then another twenty

seconds of paramilitary exercises. Then it ended."

END

Larry, I have read that at one time you were skeptical about the story of the film, to me Robert Tannenbaum is a very credible source. (Not that I am implying you feel differently).

Over the last two or three years have you or anyone else heard anything more about it? To me this film would be extremely significant, if it still exists; I know I'm reaching but I thought it was worth a post.

Edited October 5, 2005 by Robert Howard