by Joan Mellen
Residing in Minneapolis in September 1962, Norton was approached by a man he knew as “Mr. Bertrand,” who handed him an attaché case. His assignment was to deliver this case to a “Harvey Lee” at the Hotel Yamajel in Monterrey, Mexico. It contained $50,000 and was destined for the anti-Castro movement.
Norton says he had previously met Bertrand at the Double Gate Country Club in Albany, Georgia, where he had been performing. He had also heard that Bertrand had been flown to Georgia by a man named “Hugh Pharris,” who had appeared at the club in sunglasses.
At the Yamajel, “Harvey Lee” told Norton he was from “New Orleans.” A southerner himself, Norton verified that Oswald’s accent was both correct and unlikely to be faked. “Harvey Lee” was a man of slight build with thinning hair and extremely reticent. There was no question in Norton’s mind but that he was an Agency employee. (That Oswald was living in Fort Worth, working at Leslie Welding, did not preclude his having met Norton in Monterrey.)
In return for the attaché case, Oswald handed him a portfolio of documents, which Norton said he delivered to a CIA operative in Calgary, Alberta. He had recognized Oswald right after the assassination, although he had not known him as “Oswald.” Later another Norton CIA contact, Edgar A. Horhorouny (Eddie Horouny), whose cover was as a still photographer at WDAK-TV, channel 28, in Columbus, told Norton that the real name of “Bertrand” was Clay Shaw.
In New Orleans Donold P. Norton identified Oswald’s photograph, and also Clay Shaw’s as the man he had known as “Mr. Bertrand.” He looked at a photograph of David Ferrie. The “repulsive photograph” was not “Hugh Pharris,” Norton said.
He hadn’t come forward because he feared for his life, Norton explained. He didn’t believe Oswald shot President Kennedy because he was with the CIA, “and if he did it, then you’d better believe the whole CIA was involved.” He was willing to testify against Clay Shaw in court.
Checking out Norton’s background, Garrison discovered he had been arrested once, but never convicted of anything. He thought Norton might be a former CIA employee who “had encountered a corner of the operation.” Yet there was a “question mark and we don’t need him.”
No information in Garrison’s office was safe from the CIA, which soon did a check on Norton, on “Hugh Pharris” and on Norton’s “bodyguard,” a plainclothes Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer and Norton friend named Lou Reisig. CIA then issued its standard boilerplate denial: “We can find no record of any of the names involved and have never had any association with them.” For someone of whom they had never heard, the CIA made a concerted effort, scouring the Cuban Operations Group at JMWAVE and Counter Intelligence for traces of “Donald P. Norton.”
In New Orleans, Irvin Dymond requested that Lloyd Ray, an old friend, put him in touch with someone “in authority in CIA” about the Vancouver Sun’s Norton article. The request went up to Lawrence Houston himself, who responded favorably: “We have means of getting this information to Dymond for use in preparing Shaw case without involving Hunter [Leake] or Agency.” The Shaw lawyers had a particular request: they wanted Lloyd Ray publicly to deny that Norton “had ever worked for the Agency.”
CIA complied. Donovan E. Pratt even had a ready explanation for this extraordinary interference in a state prosecution: It is suggested that “the only reason given for our interest is that Norton has made false allegations that CIA employed him.”
In September 1967, Reisig was assaulted by three men in white shirts and ties in a Vancouver parking lot. “Keep your nose out of anything that concerns the United States,” he was told. In a written statement, Reisig said he believed “that these were CIA men who would have reason to beat [me] because of my association with Norton.” Asked if he believed the CIA was behind Kennedy’s death, Reisig said, “I don’t think. I know they were.”
Learning of the incident, Jim Garrison requested a copy of the police report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Instead, the Vancouver police sent the Reisig file to J. E. Milnes, SAC at the FBI’s Seattle field office, refusing Garrison on the ground that they could furnish information only to “police agencies.” Vancouver offered Milnes the opportunity to decide “what portion if any of the information” should be made available to the district attorney’s office in New Orleans.
Milnes stonewalled, then insisted he was not “in a position in this case to advise you concerning the disposition of material from your files.” He would not authorize the Vancouver police to release any files to New Orleans. The reaches of the FBI to protect the CIA and to thwart Jim Garrison extended well north of the border.
The Warren Commission did not summon Richard Case Nagell, who was available, and even wrote to J. Lee Rankin offering to testify. Nor did they call Norton, who was not. The Warren Commission volumes quote Nagell only in an FBI report in which Nagell claims that “his association with Oswald was purely social.” There is no mention of New Orleans, or, Jim Garrison noted, why Nagell was even questioned.
JOHN F. KENNEDY, JIM GARRISON AND A J . THE CIA
11
I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards.
—John Fitzgerald Kennedy
THE HISTORICAL RECORD CORROBORATES Richard Case Nagell’s view that the CIA hated Kennedy most “for planning to curb activities of spook outfits, especially CIA.” Reading an April 1966 New York Times article, “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool?” Jim Garrison also registered Kennedy’s profound warfare with the Agency. He circled the paragraph where Kennedy was quoted by an insider as threatening to “splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.” He also marked a sentence where Kennedy countermanded President Eisenhower, who had exempted the CIA from control by American ambassadors abroad. Kennedy reversed that, putting the ambassadors in control.
By the end of 1966, Garrison was persuaded that Kennedy was murdered as a result of his struggle with the CIA, and, behind it, the Pentagon’s “war machine,” which was determined to have its ground war, if not in Cuba, then elsewhere. A month after Kennedy’s death, former president Harry Truman expressed on the front page of the Washington Post his dismay that the CIA he created had been running a shadow government, becoming “operational.” Truman declared that the CIA was “in urgent need of correction.” (Brazenly, Allen Dulles had even told a reporter to think of the CIA as “the State Department for unfriendly countries”).
New York Times columnist Arthur Krock had warned of CIA malfeasance two months earlier. The CIA, Krock wrote, was a “malignancy” on the body politic. With startling prescience, in October of 1963, Krock in his outrage all but predicted the Kennedy assassination. If the United States ever experiences an attempted coup, Krock wrote, “It will come from the C.I.A. and not the Pentagon.” Between Kennedy and the CIA there was now raging “an intra-administration war,” with the military working under the leadership of CIA serving those corporations that stood most to gain from a ground war.
Liberal journalist Walter Lippmann could not help but note that the CIA was bursting the bounds of its mandate. Forty years later, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy adviser, would remark quietly to Jim Garrison’s old classmate Wilmer Thomas that they had been at war with “the National Security people.” That the CIA exacted its revenge on Kennedy has been an open secret since 1963.
After CIA in 1954 had overthrown President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala, President Eisenhower recognized that the Agency was dangerously out of control. He established a “President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities.” Its conclusion was that the CIA’s clandestine services were “operating for the most part on an autonomous and free-wheeling basis in highly critical areas,” in direct conflict with State Department policy; its recommendation was that Eisenhower fire Allen Dulles, or at the very least force him to accept an administrative deputy. Eisenhower’s reward was that the clandestine services, then run by Richard Bissell, former assistant of Frank Wisner, sabotaged the May 1, 1960 foray
of the U-2 flown by Francis Gary Powers. The U-2 fleet had been dubbed “RBAF,” which stood for “Richard Bissell’s Air Force,” one more indication of CIA arrogance. The Agency lied directly to Eisenhower, insisting that should the plane be shot down, neither the aircraft nor the pilot would survive. So Bissell would lie to John F. Kennedy and insist that “failure was almost impossible” at the Bay of Pigs.
Despite Eisenhower’s reluctance, the CIA insisted upon a flight close to the time of Eisenhower’s scheduled May 16th summit with Khrushchev, de Gaulle and Macmillan, arguing, with no discernible evidence, that this last flight was urgent. Years later, the CIA would admit in hearings before the Senate that this flight wasn’t particularly necessary at all. The issue of CIA malfeasance in the failure of Powers’ mission was not even raised.
Eisenhower, reluctantly, had declared that the cut-off date for U-2 flights was May 1st, assuming that meant the CIA would organize the flight during the last two weeks of April. But it was on May 1 that Francis Gary Powers was sent aloft. In insisting on that one additional overflight, Bissell succeeded in making policy, meant destroying detente and with it Eisenhower’s desire to cut the country’s defense budget. Rapprochement with the Soviet Union meant for Eisenhower a subsequent redirecting of the country’s resources to its domestic needs. This was not to be.
Powers’ mission seems to have been doomed. Both the circumstantial and the direct evidence that Powers’ flight was interfered with by those in charge are overwhelming. “Powers came down because his aircraft was fixed to fail,” stated retired Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who was in charge of providing military support for the clandestine services, and whose data should not be disregarded because of his speculations about a “secret team.” Powers’ flight was made to fail by a shortage of the proper fuel, Prouty concluded. Prouty was also alarmed that the flight violated standard procedure. Powers was laden with identification, not least a Department of Defense identification card. The U-2 itself bore identifying marks, violating a National Security Council edict. Whereas Powers should have been bearing no identity, he was possessed of enough for the Soviets promptly to announce that he was a “spy” from the United States. “That is why Powers survived and why they landed in good shape,” Prouty reasoned. “‘They’ equals Powers and the U-2.”
Other evidence suggests that the CIA deliberately routed Powers into the path of nests of Soviet missiles it knew could shoot him down if he was flying too low. That Powers’ top secret camera had been removed suggested that someone knew this plane was not coming home. It was a catastrophe timed to thwart the May 16th summit with Premier Khrushchev that Eisenhower hoped would cap his presidency.
Seizing the high road, Khrushchev immediately demanded that Eisenhower admit he had no knowledge of the flight and fire Dulles and Bissell. The CIA had forced Eisenhower’s hand, realizing that he “could not honestly say that he didn’t know what was going on,” Prouty writes in The Secret Team. “At the same time he had to announce to the world that he had known about the flight.” “The White House and the other agencies did not so much approve the flights as hold a veto power over them,” David Wise and Thomas B. Ross write in their very cautious little book, The U-2 Affair. When Eisenhower in his much-quoted farewell address warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, Prouty speculates, he had in mind his own political sabotage at the hands of the CIA in the U-2 fiasco. During the summit that failed, a trigger-happy Pentagon man even put the U.S. military on alert for ten hours, fanning the flames of Cold War belligerence Eisenhower had intended the summit to defuse.
Powers himself could not help but note that he had been given a “dog” of a plane, which had never flown right and was possessed of a fuel tank “which wouldn’t feed all its fuel.” There had been almost no overflights from early 1958 until April 1960, Powers notes. The purpose of his own flight he did not know. Even before he reached the Soviet border, Powers writes in his memoir, “I had the feeling they knew I was coming.” Powers concludes: “No man, even in the privacy of his innermost thoughts, likes to admit he has been used.”
Powers writes that he was disgusted when his defense counsel argued that it should have been Allen Dulles and the CIA in that Moscow dock. It was in fact so. Questioned by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on where he had received the authority for Powers’ flight, Dulles replied, “Well, we had a group.” Bissell was conspicuously absent that day.
If U-2 flights were suspended routinely at politically sensitive moments, they certainly were not suspended this time. No credible explanation for this was provided at the inquiry. The proceedings were edited by Chip Bohlen and Richard Helms, who had replaced Bissell as deputy director for plans. Helms moves to the heart of the U-2 story, just as he will to the assassination of President Kennedy. Under the practiced hand of Helms, a censored version of the hearing was produced. Nothing from Dulles’ five-and-a-half hour testimony was quoted. Some records were burned.
A few years later, Powers resigned from the CIA. When the Agency awarded its “intelligence star” to pilots who had participated in the U-2 program, Powers was not among them.
Powers adds that a CIA officer was given a leave of absence so that he might help prepare material on the U-2 incident for President Eisenhower’s memoirs, so nervous was the Agency with regard to its role in the U-2 incident. Powers goes so far as to admit that there are “clues” that the CIA “betrayed” his final U-2 flight, only, suddenly, in an abrupt reversal, to term that betrayal, which he had already documented, a “wild fantasy.”
When, years later, a writer as careful as Michael Beschloss suggested the fragility and instability of the U-2, no less a high level CIA figure than Lawrence R. Houston accused Beschloss of getting his facts wrong in the pages of Periscope, the journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. That the U-2 was not shot down and obliterated in itself suggests that the Soviets were very well informed of its capabilities and peculiar, indeed, “fragility.” Confusing the issue was that radar expert Lee Harvey Oswald had been dispatched into the Soviet Union, and would even appear at Francis Gary Powers’ trial. In fact, the Soviets were well aware that there were U-2’s at Atsugi.
A startling new FBI document of April 21, 1966, reveals that the Soviets knew not only that U-2’s were being dispatched, but how to disable them. The information provided to the Soviets did not come from Lee Harvey Oswald. Rather, the source was a former United States Army sergeant named Jack Edward Dunlap, assigned to the National Security Agency. Committing treason, Dunlap had given the Soviets “important information regarding the U-2 flights over the USSR.” It was Dunlap’s information that “provided the Soviet Union with the capability of shooting down the Powers U-2 aircraft.”
As late as March 18, 1971, a “top secret” document notification was placed in the files of both Jack Edward Dunlap and “Gary Francis Powers” [sic] with “direct reference” to the “TS document” revealing that Dunlap had admitted to his wife “that he furnished information to the Soviets for money.”
An “extremely sensitive source who has furnished reliable information in the past” told the FBI as well that “as a result of Dunlap’s information the Soviets were well aware of when the U-2 planes crossed over the Soviet Union. The Soviets always had their antiaircraft guns trained on these planes.” It was in part as a result of his being pressed by China that Khrushchev shot down Powers’ U-2 aircraft. Khrushchev had planned to use Dunlap’s information at the United Nations, but was dissuaded because it might compromise Soviet agent Dunlap. Dunlap also “gave the Soviets lists of sources of information the Americans had in the Soviet Union and a lot of reports on Central Intelligence Agency matters.” That the CIA knew about Dunlap’s reporting to the Soviets on the U-2 seems apparent.
On the night of July 22–23, 1963, Jack Edward Dunlap committed suicide.
Within a month of Kennedy’s inauguration, the CIA had also defied him, meeting on February 16, 1961, without his knowledge,
with assassins planning the murder of President Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Kennedy’s policy was that the United States should not initiate the overthrow of Trujillo, at least not before we knew what government would succeed him. Concealing its actions from the president and defying his expressed wishes, the CIA went ahead anyway. It had attempted the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo without clearing the idea with Eisenhower, and saw no reason to relinquish its power to the new young president. A CIA cable on the Trujillo assassination reads: “This matter is not to be discussed with State Department.”
In violation of its charter, CIA had long been operating domestically, creating a Domestic Operations Division to “handle all of this domestic activity.” Led by C. Tracy Barnes, CIA opened offices from New York to Los Angeles. In 1975 James Angleton admitted, “Going back to OSS days, we’ve had operations that were domestic.” The FBI’s intelligence service was increasingly nervous. As D. J. Brennan put it, echoing Eisenhower’s President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, “CIA is too prone to freewheeling.”
The CIA put John Kennedy on notice from the moment he took office. Allen Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence, and Richard Bissell invited a dozen White House aides to the all-male Alibi Club. Already Bissell was superintending the CIA’s attempts to murder Fidel Castro using biological contamination. “Liquid bacteria might be best,” Bissell advised, “in his coffee, tea or bouillon.”
After dinner, Bissell addressed his guests. “I’m your man-eating shark,” he declared. Listening, CIA man Robert Amory approved. Bissell was getting “a head start on State,” warning the Kennedy team that “the CIA was a secret state of its own.” Nor had this CIA shadow government bothered to inform President-elect Kennedy that the CIA had enlisted the Mafia in its attempts to murder Castro. Running this government within the government was a group at the highest level of the CIA: Dulles, Bissell, Helms, Frank Wisner and Kim Roosevelt, as well as the ubiquitous Lawrence Houston. James Angleton, chief of Counter Intelligence, was on board. On the agenda were assassinations that “did not appear on paper.”
