Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  However, anyone concluding that Donovan only recruited from the elite would be wrong. It just so happened that the elite had much to offer. But the main imperative that drove Donovan was to find whoever could do the job, resulting, for instance, in his arranging for the release of a few master forgers from prison to work for the OSS. Shunning bureaucracy and convention, the free-wheeling Donovan was able to do things like this not only because it was his nature but also because he had the confidence of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who created the OSS by presidential order and appointed him to head it and to whom Donovan reported directly. They tell the story of Donovan, a Republican, bringing a silent pistol invented by his OSS into the Oval Office and firing it, and Roosevelt responding by telling Donovan he was the only Republican he would allow in the Oval Office with a gun.16

  Operating mainly in the European theater, with headquarters in London, the OSS was the nation’s first foreign spy agency. President Truman disbanded it on October 1, 1945, just two years before the CIA was created, and as writer William Bleuer points out, “Most of the early leaders and members of the CIA, like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms [even a much later leader, William Casey], cut their covert teeth with the OSS in World War II.” An integral part of the OSS’s mission of sabotage, espionage, and covert action in enemy territory was to aid in bringing about the death of America’s adversaries. Indeed, the pipe-smoking patrician Dulles, from his headquarters in Bern, Switzerland, became famous for his covert work with German military officers plotting the assassination of Hitler. To OSS veterans in the CIA, the “Cold War was [merely] a corollary of the shooting war from the beginning.”17*

  After the first four paragraphs of the aforementioned National Security Act of 1947, which enumerate the functions of coordinating, evaluating, and disseminating intelligence, paragraph five allows the CIA to perform such “other functions” relating to intelligence and affecting the national security “as the National Security Council† may from time to time direct.” (See expanded discussion on this issue with respect to the Special Group, a National Security Council creation, in the section dealing with whether President Kennedy knew of the CIA’s plan to kill Castro.) And at its first meeting in December of 1947, the National Security Council issued a top-secret directive granting the CIA authority to conduct covert psychological operations, primarily to counter, reduce, and discredit “International Communism” throughout the world in a manner consistent with U.S. foreign and military policies.18

  In December of 1963, President Truman, deeply dismayed over the direction in which the CIA had gone, wrote from his home in Independence, Missouri,

  I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this agency during my administration…A President’s performance in office is as effective as the…information he gets…The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering…But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department…Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without departmental “treatment” or interpretations. I wanted and needed the information in its “natural raw” state…The most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or lead the President into unwise decisions…For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government…I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations…This quiet, intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being integrated as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.19

  Since it has been established beyond all doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy, the conspiracy theorists who propound the idea of the CIA being behind Oswald’s act are necessarily starting out in a very deep hole before they even take their first breath of air. This is so because Oswald was a Marxist, and a Marxist being in league with U.S. intelligence just doesn’t ring true. More specifically, why would a passionate pro-Castro follower like Oswald want to join forces with the very U.S. intelligence agency—the CIA—that Oswald knew was behind the Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Castro, his hero? The conspiracy theorists realize, of course, the difficulty of knitting these conflicting threads together, and try to get around the problem by saying that Oswald was only “posing as a pro-Castro sympathizer.” In other words, Oswald was really a rightist who was only acting like a leftist. “Oswald’s actual political orientation was extreme right wing,” said New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. “Oswald would have been more at home with Mein Kampf than Das Kapital.”20 “Oswald was an American agent posing as a Marxist,” says conspiracy theorist James DiEugenio.21 But this contention cannot seriously and rationally be made. To believe it, one would have to disbelieve not only all of Oswald’s words, including those uttered when he was only a teenager, but all of his conduct, as well as the impressions (many given under oath) of the considerable number of people who knew Oswald personally and spoke of his being a confirmed and passionate Marxist. In other words, one would have to believe that year in and year out for almost a decade, Oswald was putting on an Academy Award–winning performance, fooling everyone, including his family and wife, by the virtuosity of his acting skills.

  In its final report, the HSCA took the Warren Commission to task for what it characterized as a virtual lack of investigation of the CIA, which itself was one of the federal agencies investigating the assassination. “Testifying before the Commission,” the HSCA Report says, “CIA Director John A. McCone indicated that ‘Oswald was not an agent, employee, or informant of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Agency never contacted him, interviewed him, talked with him, or solicited any reports or information from him, or communicated with him directly or in any other manner…Oswald was never associated or connected directly or indirectly in any way whatsoever with the Agency.’ McCone’s testimony was corroborated by Deputy Director Richard M. Helms.”22 Helms had told the Warren Commission, “I had all of our records searched to see if there had been any contacts at any time prior to President Kennedy’s assassination by anyone in the Central Intelligence Agency with Lee Harvey Oswald. We checked our card files and our personnel files and all our records. Now, this check turned out to be negative.”23

  The HSCA Report then goes on to say, “The record reflects that once these assurances had been received, no further efforts were made by the Warren Commission to pursue the matter.”24 But this simply is not true. Although the HSCA can take justifiable credit in investigating the CIA more than the Warren Commission did, the starting point for any investigation of the CIA, and the principal way to investigate it, would be to look at its entire internal file. If the people responsible for preparing the HSCA Report had bothered to read the very next page in the above-quoted joint testimony by McCone and Helms before the Warren Commission, they would have learned that the Warren Commission did, in fact, do this precise thing. Lee Rankin, Warren Commission chief counsel, asked Helms, “Can you tell the Commission as to whether or not you have supplied us all the information the agency has, at least in substance, in regard to Lee Harvey Oswald?”

  Mr. Helms: “We have; all.”

  Representative Ford: “Has a member of the Commission staff had full access to your files on Lee Harvey Oswald?”

  Mr. Helms: “He has, sir.”

  Representative Ford: “They have had the opportunity to personally look at the entire file?”

  Mr. Helms: “We invited them to come out to our bui
lding in Langley and actually put the file on the table so that they could examine it.”

  Chairman Warren: “I was personally out there, too, and was offered the same opportunity. I did not avail myself of it because of the time element, but I was offered the same opportunity.”

  Mr. Rankin: “Mr. Helms, can you explain, according to the limitations of security, the reasons why we examined materials but did not always take them, in a general way?”

  Mr. Helms: “Yes, I can. In our communications between individuals working overseas and in Washington, we for security reasons have a method of hiding the identities of individuals in telegrams and dispatches by the use of pseudonyms and cryptonyms. For this reason, we never allow the original documents to leave our premises. However, on the occasion when the representatives of the Commission staff looked at these files, we sat there and identified these pseudonyms and cryptonyms and related them to the proper names of the individuals concerned, so that they would know exactly what the correspondence said.”

  Mr. Rankin: “By that you mean the representatives of the Commission were able to satisfy themselves that they had all the information for the benefit of the Commission without disclosing matters that would be a threat to security; is that right?”

  Mr. Helms: “It is my understanding that they were satisfied.”25

  When I asked Warren Commission assistant counsel W. David Slawson (whose area of inquiry for the Warren Commission was the possibility of a conspiracy) about the HSCA’s remark that the Warren Commission never went beyond McCone’s and Helms’s assurances, he said, “That’s wrong. Rankin, [William] Coleman, I, and a few other members of the staff went over to CIA Headquarters at Langley, and to the best of my recollection—this was over thirty-five years ago—we looked at the entire CIA file.” (Warren Commission assistant counsel William Coleman told me that he and other members of the Commission staff went over to CIA headquarters “several times” to look at the Oswald file.) He added that although the Warren Commission staff ended up leaving most of the documents pertaining to Oswald in the CIA files, “We did get copies of a substantial number of them.” Slawson said that CIA agent Raymond Rocca, chief of research and analysis for counterintelligence, was assigned as the liaison between the Warren Commission and the CIA, and “whenever we needed anything, he got us what we needed. Rocca was not passive. For instance, he suggested lines of inquiry to us and helped us interpret and contextualize whatever KGB or other foreign intelligence documents came into our possession.”26

  It was Slawson’s belief that the CIA was very cooperative with the Warren Commission. The HSCA, after having said in its report that the Warren Commission did not investigate whether the CIA had any association with Oswald, went on later to say, in seeming contradiction, that it “contacted both members of the Warren Commission staff and those representatives of the CIA who played significant roles in providing CIA-generated information to the Commission. The general consensus of these people was that the Commission and the CIA enjoyed a successful working relationship during the course of the Commission’s investigation.”27 Slawson said that an example of CIA cooperation was when he, Coleman, and another assistant counsel, Howard P. Willens, flew to Mexico City to investigate Oswald’s contact with the Cuban consulate and Soviet embassy in April of 1964. He said that David Atlee Phillips, an official at the CIA station in Mexico City, and his number-one assistant (Slawson could not recall his name) took them into their operations room and “showed us everything, how they wiretapped all calls coming into the Soviet Embassy, where they had hidden cameras and listening devices, et cetera. They didn’t hold back anything.”

  Slawson said, “I can assure you that if, at any time, we came into possession of any evidence at all that showed any kind of relationship between Oswald and the CIA, or in any way pointed toward CIA complicity in the assassination, we would have vigorously pursued it. But nothing like this ever surfaced.”28 Coleman told me, “We looked at every conspiracy theory out there. We could find nothing to support any of these various theories.”29

  It’s curious the HSCA Report would state that the Commission never pursued the Oswald-CIA association further when, as indicated, the fact that the Commission did is on the very next page of the volume of Warren Commission testimony the HSCA cited, and is also in one of the volumes of the HSCA itself. HSCA volume 11, page 493 speaks of another visit to CIA headquarters, this time by Warren Commission counsel Samuel Stern, on March 25, 1964. “Stern’s memorandum of his visit reveals that he reviewed Oswald’s file with [Raymond] Rocca.” Stern also noted in his memorandum, the HSCA said, that in addition to reviewing Oswald’s entire file, “Rocca provided him for his review a computer printout of the references to Oswald-related documents located in the Agency’s electronic data storage system. [Stern] stated ‘there is no item listed…which we [the Warren Commission] have not been given in either full text or paraphrase.’”

  With respect to its own investigation, the HSCA said that “recognizing the special difficulty in investigating a clandestine agency, the committee sought to resolve the issue of Oswald’s alleged association with the CIA by conducting an inquiry that went beyond taking statements from two of the Agency’s most senior officials.” Accordingly, the committee made an effort “to identify circumstances in Oswald’s life or in the way his case was handled by the CIA that possibly suggested an intelligence association.” It also “undertook an intensive review of the pertinent files, including the CIA’s…Oswald file and hundreds of others from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and other agencies. Based on these file reviews, a series of interviews, depositions and executive session hearings was conducted with both Agency and non-Agency witnesses. The contacts with present and former CIA personnel covered a broad range of individuals, including staff and division chiefs, clandestine case officers, area desk officers, research analysts, secretaries and clerical assistants.” The HSCA also pointed out that “each of the present and former Agency employees contacted by the committee was released from his secrecy oath by the CIA.”

  Quite impressive, right? The conclusion formed from all of this? The HSCA said, “The results of this investigation confirmed the Warren Commission testimony of McCone and Helms…The committee found no evidence of any relationship between Oswald and the CIA.”* The HSCA added that “taken in their entirety, the items of circumstantial evidence that the committee had selected for investigation as possibly indicative of an intelligence association [CIA or other] did not support the allegation that Oswald had an intelligence agency relationship.”30

  Also, contrary to allegations by conspiracy theorists, the HSCA could find no evidence that Oswald “ever received any intelligence training or performed any intelligence assignments during his term of service.”31 Although Kerry Wendell Thornley, a member of Oswald’s unit at El Toro Marine base near Santa Ana, California, testified before the Warren Commission, “Oswald, I believe, had a higher clearance” than confidential, “probably a secret clearance,”32 the HSCA learned that Oswald only had a security clearance of confidential (the lowest) and “never received a higher classification.”33 Oswald’s Marine Corps records show that he was “granted final clearance up to and including CONFIDENTIAL.”34 While it is true that John Donovan, the officer in charge of Oswald’s radar crew in Santa Ana, testified before the Warren Commission that Oswald “must have had secret [above confidential, but below top secret] clearance to work in the Radar Center,”35 the HSCA concluded that Donovan’s assumption was incorrect. A review by the HSCA of the U.S. Marine Corps personnel files of four enlisted men who had worked with Oswald in either Japan or California (Richard Call, Zack Stout, Robert Augg, and Nelson Delgado) revealed that all only had, like Oswald, a security clearance of confidential.36

  The CIA (specifically, the Special Investigations Group [SIG] of the CIA’s counterintelligence unit) did not open a 201 file (a file kept on an individual, including CIA employees, that brings him into the agency’s rec
ords system) on Oswald until December 9, 1960, after he had defected to the Soviet Union, and then only after the agency had received a request from the State Department for information on American defectors.37 However, the agency, before December 9, was already receiving information on Oswald from other agencies of the government.38 It had four written communications in 1959 from the State Department pertaining to Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union, the first one dated October 31, 1959, from Moscow, and a fifth communication dated May 25, 1960.39

  The CIA told the HSCA that there were “no specified criteria for automatically opening a 201 file on an American.”40 And when the HSCA reviewed the 201 files of twenty-nine other defectors, eight of whom had 201 files opened before their defection, they found that for only four of the remaining twenty-one the files were opened because of the defection. The files on the seventeen other defectors were opened from four months to several years after the defection. The HSCA said that “at the very least, the committee’s review indicated that during 1958–1963, the opening of a [201] file years after a defection was not uncommon. [Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union first came to the attention of American officials in Moscow on October 31, 1959. So his 201 file was opened more than thirteen months later.] In many cases, the event was triggered by some event, independent of the defection, that had drawn attention to the individual involved.”41

  The HSCA went on to say that “the existence of a 201 file does not necessarily connote any actual relationship or contact with the CIA.” Though not automatic, such a file is normally opened by the CIA when “a person is considered to be of potential intelligence or counterintelligence significance.” Oswald’s 201 file, the HSCA said, “contained no indication that he had ever had a relationship with the CIA.”42