Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  The CIA dossier or 201 file on Oswald after December 9, 1960, and up to November 22, 1963, consisted of twenty-nine documents: seven documents received from the FBI, ten from the Department of State, two from the Department of Navy, one from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, four newspaper clippings, and five internal CIA notes, all of which the CIA turned over to the Warren Commission on March 6, 1964.43 In fact, prior to October 9, 1963, when the Mexico City office of the CIA sent a memorandum to CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., that an American male identifying himself as Lee Oswald contacted the Soviet embassy in Mexico City, “the Oswald file held by CIA [headquarters] consisted entirely of press materials and disseminations received from the Department of State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Navy Department.”44

  As indicated, and to the great dismay of the conspiracy community, the HSCA said that from its entire investigation, it found “no evidence” of any relationship that Oswald ever had with the CIA. The committee went on to say, “Moreover, the Agency’s investigative efforts prior to the assassination regarding Oswald’s presence in Mexico City served to confirm the absence of any relationship with him. Specifically, when apprised of his possible presence in Mexico City, the Agency both initiated internal inquiries concerning his background and, once informed of his Soviet experience, notified other potentially interested Federal agencies of his possible contact with the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.”45

  Not only is there no evidence that Oswald had any relationship with the CIA (i.e., no relationship that CIA headquarters was aware of and sanctioning), but as we’ve seen elsewhere in this book, Oswald clearly was not CIA agent or operative material. As John Scelso, chief of clandestine operations for the CIA in the Western Hemisphere at the time of the assassination, put it in sworn testimony before the HSCA,

  Oswald was a person of a type who would never have been recruited by the Agency…His personality and background completely disqualified him for clandestine work or for work as an agent to carry out the instructions of the Agency…When the Agency hires an agent, engages someone to do our work and gives him a certain amount of training and places him under our guidance, whether we pay him or not, or whether he signs an agreement or not, he has to meet certain standards. He has to go through a security check, a file check. And the Counter-intelligence Staff has to examine his personality and background and evaluate his reliability…Oswald, by virtue of his background and so on, would miserably fail to meet our minimum qualifications. Oswald would have been debriefed had he walked in and volunteered information, you see. However, he would not have been given any mission to perform. He might have been given instructions, you see, which would tend to neutralize him and make him less of a nuisance and danger than he otherwise would be, like go away and do not contact us any more…Oswald’s whole pattern of life was that of a very badly, emotionally unbalanced young man.46

  And author Peter Grose points out that in addition to Oswald’s “loose and undisciplined” life, “he stood out from his environment. His strange odyssey [to Russia] only invited questions from all around him. This is not the sort of person that those who build intelligence networks seek for their agents.”47

  But if the CIA, as an agency, wasn’t involved with Oswald in the assassination, what about the argument by many conspiracy theorists that “rogue elements” or agents within the CIA may have been, and it was they who were behind Oswald and the assassination? The conspiracy community has made this argument ad nauseam, but after well over forty years of investigation, isn’t it fair to ask the conspiracy theorists what evidence they have to support this contention? Of course, not only don’t they have any evidence, but with very few exceptions (e.g., David Atlee Phillips, see later text), they never even tell us just who they believe these rogue agents were. Instead, they can be no more specific than to resort to vague allusions such as “fairly senior or even highly placed…renegade CIA agents,”48 or “lower echelons” at the agency,49 or “angry…more fanatical rogue agents” at the CIA,50 or “a number of aberrant agents” in the CIA.51 I say this to the conspiracy community: Is that all you people have? After over forty years of investigation?*

  With respect to the argument that rogue agents within the CIA were behind Kennedy’s murder, the HSCA said it “attempted to identify [any such] CIA employees” but was unable to do so.52 The committee said that in that regard, “an effort was also made to locate a man identified as Maurice Bishop who was said to have been a CIA Officer who had been seen in the company of Lee Harvey Oswald. The effort to find ‘Bishop’ was likewise unsuccessful.”53

  The source of the Bishop-Oswald sighting was one Antonio Veciana Blanch, one of the founders of Alpha 66, a militant, anti-Castro exile group. In March of 1976, Veciana told a staff investigator for U.S. Senator Richard S. Schweiker, a member of the Church Committee, that between 1960 and 1973 he had a working relationship in the anti-Castro effort with someone known to him as Maurice Bishop, whom he believed to be a CIA agent. Veciana said that in 1973 Bishop had given him a suitcase containing $253,000 in cash for his services over the years in attempting to assassinate Castro. Two hundred and fifty-three thousand dollars? A quarter of a million dollars? In some kind of balloon payment delivered only at the end of thirteen years of work? Surely a believable story. (What’s particularly laughable about this is that Veciana was Alpha 66’s secretary of finance.) Veciana said that at one of his meetings with Bishop—in Dallas in August or early September of 1963—Lee Harvey Oswald was present. Veciana repeated these claims in testimony before the HSCA in April of 1978.54

  We know (see Oswald biography) that Veciana could not have met with Oswald and Bishop in Dallas in late August or early September of 1963, because we know Oswald was in New Orleans during this entire period. Moreover, though Veciana claims to have met with Bishop more than a hundred times, he could not point to a single witness to corroborate his association with Bishop, or help HSCA investigators locate Bishop, which they made an intense and unsuccessful effort to do. Coupled with the additional fact that the HSCA felt Veciana “had been less than candid” and waited more than ten years after the assassination to reveal his information, the committee concluded it “could not…credit Veciana’s story of having met with Lee Harvey Oswald.”55

  HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi had been convinced that Bishop was David Atlee Phillips, the head of the Cuba section at the CIA station in Mexico City at the time of the assassination, but when Fonzi arranged for Veciana to see Phillips at the HSCA hearings in Washington, D.C., Veciana said that although there was a “physical similarity,” Phillips was not Bishop. “No. It is not him,” he stated unequivocally.56 However, Fonzi remained convinced that “Maurice Bishop was David Atlee Phillips” and that Phillips “played a key role in the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy,”57 but never provided any evidence to support his accusation.

  An investigative journalist and former senior editor of Greater Philadelphia Magazine, Fonzi had long been a conspiracy theorist. Brought in as an HSCA investigator by Richard Sprague, the prominent Philadelphia prosecutor who was the HSCA’s first chief counsel, Fonzi believed that the CIA was complicit in the assassination, and the heart of his belief was that Phillips, using the pseudonym Maurice Bishop, was Oswald’s CIA case officer whom Veciana saw in Dallas in Oswald’s presence. It became a canard that many embraced, often to their considerable detriment. In their 1980 book, Death in Washington, authors Donald Freed and Fred Landis asserted not only that Phillips played a role in the cover-up of the assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier (along with his aide, Ronni Moffit) in Washington, D.C., in 1976, but also that he used the alias Maurice Bishop in serving as Oswald’s CIA case officer.58 Phillips’s 1982 libel lawsuit against the two authors and their publisher was settled in February 1986 with a retraction and an unspecified (but “suitable,” per Phillips) sum of money.59

  I spent a goodly amount of time preparing Phillips for his testimony in the Lo
ndon docu-trial as a rebuttal witness to Edwin Lopez, the former HSCA investigator who, like Fonzi, suggested CIA complicity in the assassination, and he said the entire Maurice Bishop allegation was “false and crazy.”60 But Phillips eventually decided not to testify. The main reason was that he had another libel lawsuit pending against the London Observer for publishing the same Maurice Bishop allegation, and his lawyer felt it would not be advisable for him to get into the same issue, if it came up, at our London trial because opposing counsel in the libel lawsuit might be able to derive some advantage from it. Additionally, though he had told me in an earlier letter, “I am going to depend on you to make it easier for me to avoid…violating my secrecy agreement” with the CIA, he wrote that as a former CIA officer, “I would probably be a lousy witness anyway, because I would have to avoid confirming or denying information” contained in still-classified reports, and “a jury would probably believe I was stonewalling.”61 On October 7, 1986, attorneys for the London Observer “unreservedly apologized” to Phillips in Britain’s High Court for suggesting he was in any way involved in Kennedy’s assassination, and agreed to pay all his legal expenses and a “substantial” sum in settlement.62 On October 12, 1986, the Observer printed its retraction in which it said that “there was never any evidence to support the suggestion” that Phillips knew Oswald.

  HSCA officials regretted not only parroting Fonzi’s Maurice Bishop allegation, but also having him as one of their investigators. In the November 1980 issue of the Washingtonian, Fonzi wrote a blistering, inordinately long article (virtually book size at eighty thousand words) about the HSCA, suggesting it was a farce that played “political games.” He continued to allege that Phillips might be Bishop and said that “what the Kennedy assassination still needs is an investigation guided simply, unswervingly, by the priority of truth,” describing Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey as a mere hired hand whose main objective was to shield government institutions from effective scrutiny and criticism.63

  The Washingtonian being a prestigious publication, Blakey and Gary Cornwell, deputy chief counsel to the HSCA, felt it advisable to respond in the Congressional Record. Blakey rued the day he departed from his policy of hiring impartial investigators, saying he kept Fonzi on the staff after Sprague left because “I felt that his obsession [over the CIA’s complicity in the assassination] would help assure that this aspect of the committee’s investigation would receive its due,” adding that committee staff members “derisively referred to [Fonzi] as an ‘Ahab’ and to his quest as a search for ‘Moby Dick.’” Cornwell was no more kind in his denunciation of Fonzi, referring to his “bad faith” and “lost credibility.”64 Michael Ewing, a member of the HSCA staff, was so put off by Fonzi’s article in the Washingtonian that he felt obliged to send a personal letter to Phillips himself, saying, “I wouldn’t want you to think that there are many of us who think like Gaeton Fonzi…I would like you to know that Fonzi’s writing does not reflect the views of responsible former members of the Select Committee.”65 In an eight-page letter to the editor of the Washingtonian, Ewing said that Fonzi “worked exclusively out of Miami, locating and interviewing Cubans,” and that he “never worked on the Committee in Washington” other than for a short period “during the editing process at the very end of the investigation. I think Fonzi’s nearly total absence from Washington—where, of course, the investigation was planned, directed and concluded—was probably a primary factor behind his embarrassingly misinformed perceptions of how the investigation was conducted.”66

  Congressman Richardson Preyer of North Carolina, the chairman of the HSCA subcommittee on the JFK assassination, also saw fit to write Phillips on November 19, 1980, to say, “I can understand your concern over the Fonzi article. Mr. Fonzi’s views are not shared by me nor, I think, by the Committee. I believed your testimony and did not find the testimony of Veciana credible.”67

  One of the main leads on a CIA-Oswald relationship that the HSCA pursued was the allegation of one James B. Wilcott, a finance officer for the CIA from 1957 until 1966. At the time of the assassination, Wilcott was assigned to the CIA station in Tokyo. (Oswald was assigned to the First Marine Air Wing at Atsugi Naval Air Station, about thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo, in 1957–1958.) Wilcott testified before the committee that the day after the assassination, “there was at least six or seven people, specifically, who said that they either knew or believed Oswald to be an agent of the CIA,” but could only recall the name of one, Jerry Fox, who “at least made some mention of it.” He did name several other fellow workers who made references to Oswald being an agent, but they did so only “in a speculative manner.” Wilcott said, “I didn’t really believe this when I heard it, and I thought it was absurd. Then, as time went on, I began to hear more things in that line.” The main thing, he testified, was an incident “two or three months after the assassination…when a [CIA] case officer came up to my window to draw money and he specifically said…‘Well, Jim, the money that I drew the last couple of weeks ago or so was money’ either for the Oswald project or for Oswald,” he could not remember which. If we’re to believe Wilcott’s story, the CIA case officer had been drawing money for Oswald or the Oswald project even though Oswald had already been dead for at least a month and a half. Since the CIA is notorious for secrecy, why would a CIA officer share the information that the presidential assassin had been a CIA agent with someone like Wilcott, who merely worked in the finance section? When asked that very question, Wilcott could only say lamely, “I don’t know how to answer that question.”

  Wilcott’s story started to quickly unravel when he was unable to identify the case officer who allegedly told him this, and could not recall what the officer told him Oswald’s cryptonym was. Nonetheless, though he had no evidence to support his position, he told the HSCA it was “my belief that [Oswald] was a regular agent and this was a regular project of the Agency to send Oswald to the Soviet Union.” He also believed Marina Oswald was a CIA agent who had been recruited before Oswald’s “phony defection” to the Soviet Union “and was waiting there in Tokyo for Lee Harvey Oswald.”*

  When Wilcott was asked, “Were you ever able to find any indication in any of the Tokyo station’s records that Oswald was, in fact, a CIA agent?” he responded, “Well, I never really looked,” even, he said, at his own disbursement records. Wilcott had a ready answer for why he never furnished his allegedly valuable information to the Warren Commission. “I really didn’t think that the Warren Commission was out to really get at the facts,” but he did bother to write an unpublished article on the matter, which he gave to the HSCA.68 Wilcott’s credibility suffered even further when an intelligence analyst whom Wilcott said he discussed the Oswald allegation with at the post told the committee he wasn’t in Tokyo at the time of the assassination, the committee verifying that he had been transferred back to the United States in 1962, the previous year. Finally, the committee interviewed many CIA personnel who had been stationed in Tokyo at the time, including the chief of the post and other personnel who surely would have known if Oswald had had any association with the agency in Tokyo, and all had no knowledge of such an association. The HSCA concluded that based on all the evidence, “Wilcott’s allegation was not worthy of belief.”69

  Another alleged Oswald-CIA link emerged when Gerald Patrick Hemming Jr. told conspiracy author Anthony Summers in 1978 that he was a former Marine sergeant who had been stationed at Atsugi air base in Japan working as a radar control operator shortly before Oswald did. He told Summers that he had been recruited by naval intelligence while there, and that he had met Oswald once at the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles. (At the time, Hemming was reportedly pro-Castro, but later switched sides when he and fellow former marine Frank Sturgis went to Cuba to help Castro in his revolution, and became disenchanted with Castro.) From the questions Oswald asked, Hemming said he got the impression that Oswald was “an informant or some type of agent working for somebody,” and that at Atsugi, Oswald would have been �
��a prime candidate for recruitment” by some U.S. intelligence agency. Apart from the fact that Hemming doesn’t make the allegation that Oswald was a CIA agent, only that he sensed he was “some type of agent,” Summers acknowledges that “Hemming’s reliability as a source has on occasion been called into question.”70

  Although it is an article of faith among most conspiracy theorists that the CIA was directly behind or at least somehow involved in the assassination, other than fanciful daydreaming on their part, the likes of Wilcott and Hemming are the only basis for their allegation.

  One relationship Oswald had which conspiracy theorists find particularly suspicious and incriminating is his friendship in Dallas with the Russian emigré of purportedly noble pedigree, George de Mohrenschildt. This relationship is discussed in depth earlier in this book, but it should be noted here that virtually all conspiracy theorists postulate that de Mohrenschildt had a very close relationship with the CIA, either as an agent or as some other type of operative, and many suspect he had a hand in the assassination.* But the HSCA thoroughly checked de Mohrenschildt’s background and concluded that there was “no evidence that de Mohrenschildt had ever been an American intelligence agent.” His contact with the agency seemed to be limited to being debriefed several times in Dallas between 1957 and 1961 by J. Walton Moore of the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service. For instance, Moore interviewed de Mohrenschildt following his return from a trip to Yugoslavia in 1957. (De Mohrenschildt went there, under salary with the International Cooperation Agency [ICA] in Washington, D.C., to “help [the ICA] develop oil resources” in Yugoslavia. The HSCA said that Moore “was an overt CIA employee…He was not part of a covert or clandestine operation.”)