Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Neighbors said in his report that shortly before de Mohrenschildt shot himself with Mrs. Tilton’s shotgun, “he questioned Mrs. Viisola (the maid) about a scratching sound which apparently annoyed him. He speculated that it was a cat, which there are none in the Tilton residence, and he began to pace up and down the long main hallway, calling for a cat…Mrs. Viisola felt that the visitor was not behaving normally and was, in her own words, slightly mad.”87

  The Palm Beach County sheriff’s office was able to determine the precise time of death on March 29, 1977, at 2:21 (and 3 seconds) p.m. because Mrs. Tilton, who was out, was recording a television program and the “gunshot is audible” (per the sheriff’s office report) on the tape recorder. There were no “non-television-related sounds on the tape cassette,” the report said, to indicate anything other than a suicide.*

  Oh yes, in the left pocket of de Mohrenschildt’s pants when his body was found was a clipping of a front-page headline about him from the Dallas Morning News dated March 20, 1977 (nine days earlier), captioned “Mental Ills of Oswald Confidant Told.”88 Apparently de Mohrenschildt’s mental problems went way back. For instance, as noted earlier, Mrs. Igor Vladimir Voshinin, a member of the Russian emigré community in Dallas who knew de Mohrenschildt well, told the Warren Commission back in 1964 that “he was a neurotic person. He had some sort of headaches and sometimes he would flare into a rage absolutely for no reason at all practically…He complained to me several times that he could not concentrate very well.”89

  Along with all his other demons, according to one of his friends, Samuel B. Ballen, who had dinner in Dallas with de Mohrenschildt shortly before he died, de Mohrenschildt was “beating himself pretty hard” with guilt over the assassination. He knew Oswald had liked and looked up to him, and wondered whether something he had done or said, something “childish” and “sophomoric” on his part, might have nudged Oswald over the edge in the direction he ultimately took. Ballen felt depressed over his meeting with de Mohrenschildt, later recalling that for all of his friend’s frailties, the greatest of which was his “utter irresponsibility,” George, he believed, was “one of the world’s great people,” and looking back, felt he had been dining with “Hemingway before the suicide.”90

  Both the HSCA and the Warren Commission took a more than casual interest in de Mohrenschildt to determine if he was an intelligence agent with a possible connection to the assassination, the latter question being the whole point of the exercise. The HSCA never got around to addressing itself to this ultimate point of its inquiry, but it did so indirectly by concluding it had found “no evidence that de Mohrenschildt had ever been an American intelligence agent.”91 And nothing in its report or volumes suggests he was acting at the behest of any foreign country in his association with Oswald. The Warren Commission said its investigation had not produced “any evidence linking [de Mohrenschildt] in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy.”92

  The effort by the conspiracy theorists to connect Oswald to the CIA is so intense that one conspiracy author, John Newman, actually managed to devote 612 pages to the task. In Oswald and the CIA, Newman, a former military intelligence officer, reads between the lines and the grammatical contours of hundreds of documents (CIA, FBI, Department of State, etc.) and finds “peculiar,” “strange,” “unusual,” and “intriguing” entries and omissions everywhere concerning Oswald, from which he constructs one anemic inference upon another. His book reminds me of the story about two psychiatrists who pass each other on the street one day and when one says, “Good morning,” the other mutters to himself, “I wonder what he meant by that?” After taking his readers on a guided “journey through the labyrinth” of intelligence documents and files on Oswald, Newman, despite the presumptuous title of his book, comes up completely empty-handed.93 If any reader can find in Newman’s book any evidence that Oswald was a CIA agent or operative, or even that he, at any time, talked to or communicated with a member of the CIA, on the street, over the phone, by carrier pigeon, or in any other way, please let me know.

  I have a very important suggested area of research for Mr. Newman and other members of the conspiracy community. If Oswald was a CIA operative—indeed, if he killed Kennedy for the CIA—I would imagine he would have been paid handsomely by his employers. Even if he wasn’t, we certainly can assume he was not working for free. Yet we know that Oswald always was very low on money, leaving behind for his wife and two children the grand total of $183.87. We also know from his 1962 federal income tax returns (Oswald was in Russia in 1960 and 1961) that his declared income was $1,354.06.94 Granted, he would not declare money given to him from the CIA to kill Kennedy, but the question for researchers is, What did Oswald do with his CIA (or FBI, KGB, mob, etc.) money? Although he didn’t have to draw attention to himself by flaunting it on luxuries, wouldn’t he have at least used it to pay for a normal, regular room for himself instead of living in a virtual closet on North Beckley? So what did Oswald do with his CIA money? Where is there one tiny piece of evidence that Oswald lived, in any way at all, above his means?

  Though if Oswald had been a CIA agent or operative, we could probably expect the CIA to deny this fact, what follows are brief excerpts from the CIA’s 1963 report on its awareness of Oswald prior to the assassination. It should be noted that after almost forty-four years of investigation and searching by conspiracy theorists for contrary evidence, nothing has ever surfaced to rebut these assertions by the CIA:

  Lee Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959…Since Oswald was a former Marine and a U.S. citizen, his defection was of primary interest to the State Department, the FBI, and the Navy Department. CIA does not investigate U.S. citizens abroad unless we are specifically requested to do so by some other Government Security agency. No such request was made in this case…During the 2½ year period that Oswald was in the Soviet Union, CIA had no sources in a position to report on his activities or what the KGB might be doing with him. The good Soviet sources we had were engaged in reporting on other important matters, and they were not directed to check on U.S. defectors like Oswald…It was suspected that Oswald and all other similar defectors were in the hands of the KGB and carefully watched by them, so any casual operation to learn their whereabouts or activities would have been highly dangerous and probably unsuccessful…To sum up our interest in Lee Oswald before he visited Mexico, we knew he was a U.S. defector to the Soviet Union, we read the FBI reports on him, we watched as the State Department did its job of screening him for repatriation, and we knew the FBI was keeping track of him in the U.S.A. As a footnote, it should be added that we were not even aware of the existence of Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who later shot Oswald. We had a few Rubys in our files, but none were Jack Ruby. On 9 October 1963, our Mexico City Station received information from a very sensitive source indicating that Lee Oswald had been in contact with the Soviet Embassy there on 1 October…It appeared that he had visited the Embassy as early as 28 September 1963…The name Lee Oswald meant nothing to our Mexico City Station, but our Headquarters in Washington checked its files and when we disseminated the report on 10 October 1963 to the FBI, the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Navy Department, we commented in the report that he might be identical with the former Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959.95

  To repeat, because it warrants being repeated, after over four decades of painstaking scrutiny by literally thousands of conspiracy-minded researchers in this country as well as around the world, no one has come up with any evidence to contravene anything set forth in this simple CIA report of December 20, 1963, a little less than one month after the assassination.

  Vladimir Semichastny was the director of the KGB during Oswald’s time in Russia. The KGB surveilled Oswald and quickly learned, Semichastny said, that he was a “mediocre, uninteresting, useless man.” He said it best about Oswald’s alleged connection to the CIA: “I had always respected the CIA and FBI, and we knew their
work and what they were capable of. It was clear that Oswald was not an agent, couldn’t be an agent, for the CIA or FBI.”96

  In addition to conspiracy theorists being unable to find any evidence of Oswald killing Kennedy for the CIA, four national investigative commissions or committees found no CIA involvement in Kennedy’s death. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone and he was not an agent of the CIA.97 The HSCA also searched and searched and could find “no evidence of any relationship between Oswald and the CIA.”98 Apart from finding no connection between the CIA and Oswald, the committee likewise (even assuming for the sake of argument that Oswald was not the assassin) could find no connection between the CIA and the assassination itself.* And it should not be forgotten that the HSCA had every reason to want to uncover such a CIA conspiracy. Not only would it be doing its job, it would also receive a great deal of praise, even adulation, from the American people. And the HSCA was particularly predisposed to wanting to find evidence of CIA (or FBI, Secret Service, etc.) complicity since it desperately needed (but never got) any proof to support its ultimate conclusion of a conspiracy. All the committee had was the eventually discredited “fourth bullet” from the acoustic analysis, nothing else. But after a very intensive investigation of the CIA, the HSCA concluded that the CIA was “not involved in the assassination.”99

  Two other national bodies investigated possible CIA involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy. Going beyond the mandate of the executive order signed by President Gerald Ford on January 4, 1975, to “determine whether any domestic CIA activities exceeded the Agency’s statutory authority,” the so-called Rockefeller Commission (formally, “Commission on CIA Activities within the United States’), named after its chairman, Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, investigated whether the CIA was involved in the assassination of JFK. In addition to Rockefeller himself, the members of the Commission included distinguished Americans such as C. Douglas Dillon, former secretary of the Treasury; Lane Kirkland, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO; former California governor Ronald Reagan; Erwin N. Griswold, former U.S. solicitor general and former dean of Harvard Law School; and Lyman L. Lemnitzer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. David W. Belin, a former assistant Warren Commission counsel, was the executive director, and a staff of nine attorneys with substantial investigative experience was recruited. President Ford directed the CIA and other federal agencies to cooperate with the commission. The commission wrote that “much of the evidence [it] examined has come from CIA files and personnel. But the Commission has sought wherever possible to verify the evidence independently.” After five months of investigation, in its June 6, 1975, report to President Ford, the commission said that “numerous allegations have been made that the CIA participated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Commission staff investigated these allegations. On the basis of the staff’s investigation, the Commission concluded there was no credible evidence of any CIA involvement” in the assassination of President Kennedy.100

  Finally, the U.S. Senate’s 1975–1976 Church Committee, though highly critical of the CIA’s plots to assassinate Castro and the CIA’s concealing this information from the Warren Commission, said its investigation had not “uncovered evidence” of CIA complicity in Kennedy’s assassination.101

  It is very noteworthy that the only books written that suggest the CIA was behind the assassination are those by conspiracy theorists, who are convinced that a conspiracy was behind the assassination whether or not the CIA was involved. On the other hand, a considerable number of books have been written about the CIA and its history, warts and all, and not one of their authors, even though they had every ethical, professional (Pulitzer Prize, esteem of peers, etc.), and commercial reason to expose the CIA, or rogue elements thereof, as being behind the assassination, found the need to devote more than a paragraph or two in their long books to Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination. (Where there are more than a few paragraphs, the discussion usually concerns Yuriy Nosenko’s information about Oswald that divided the CIA over Nosenko’s bona fides—see KGB conspiracy section later in text.) What does that tell you? It can only tell you one thing. They never wrote anything about the CIA’s alleged connection to the assassination because in their minds there simply was nothing substantive and credible to write about. And this dismissal, by omission, of the allegation of CIA complicity in the assassination (which, if true, would be far and away the most important part of their book) reflects their obviously considered assessment that such an allegation is so groundless it deserved none of their ink.

  Indeed, as I have alluded to elsewhere in this book, the very thought of CIA officials (or rogue elements) sitting around the table at CIA headquarters or elsewhere actually plotting to murder the president of the United States belongs, if anywhere, in a Robert Ludlum novel. For those who may not know—people oftentimes refer to a particular true-crime book as a novel—novels are fiction, not nonfiction.

  FBI

  The other federal intelligence agency that many conspiracy theorists have sought to implicate in the assassination is the FBI, the main villain being J. Edgar Hoover, its longtime director. Born in Washington, D.C., on New Year’s Day in 1895 of American, British, German, and Swiss stock, Hoover graduated from George Washington University’s nighttime school of law in 1916, passed the bar, and was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia in 1917. In July of that same year, he started working for the Department of Justice as a clerk in the files division, earning an annual salary of $990. The Department of Justice remained his only employer for fifty-five years, Hoover dying while still in office in 1972. Today, FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., are in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, which was dedicated on September 30, 1979.

  It is often said that Hoover, in 1924, became the first director of the FBI. This is not completely accurate. The first criminal investigative division in the Department of Justice was created on July 1, 1908, and informally called the Special Agent Force. It consisted of thirty-five investigators under the command of a “chief examiner,” Stanley W. Finch. The head of the Justice Department, Charles J. Bonaparte (a grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte), formalized this arrangement by issuing an order on July 26, 1908, and the FBI considers that day as the date of its birth. So technically, Finch was the first director of what eventually became known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Special Agent Force was named the Bureau of Investigation on March 16, 1909. Finch was succeeded by A. Bruce Bielaski in 1912, William J. Flynn in 1919, and William J. Burns in 1921. Hoover, who had become an assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation, was appointed director, at the age of only twenty-nine, on May 10, 1924. The Bureau of Investigation was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on March 22, 1935.1

  Though, on the operational charts, it is under the jurisdiction of the attorney general in the Department of Justice, through practice and tradition the FBI, particularly during the Hoover years, has had “a very large measure of autonomy in their operations.”2

  The conspiracy theorists who maintain that the FBI was behind the assassination say that the bureau “could not do its job [investigating the assassination] because its leader at the time of the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover, participated in the conspiracy.”3 In other words, how can you possibly trust members of the conspiracy to investigate their own conspiracy? Unfortunately, there is not a shred of evidence to support this wild allegation.

  The suspicion that the FBI may have been involved in the assassination stemmed in part from the early revelation that the FBI had interviewed Oswald in New Orleans and Dallas before the assassination, and the finding of Agent Hosty’s name, contact information, and license plate number in Oswald’s address book. Both of these matters are discussed elsewhere in this book and provide no basis whatsoever for the inference of FBI complicity. But what immediately caused concern and anxiety, particularly with the Warren Commission, was the rumor that Oswald had bee
n a paid FBI informant. This rumor started, tentatively, just two weeks after Kennedy’s death, in a December 8, 1963, article in the Philadelphia Inquirer by reporter Joseph Goulden in which he referred to “the FBI attempt to recruit Oswald as an informant.” Goulden said his unnamed source “did not know if the FBI succeeded in hiring Oswald.” But two articles appearing shortly thereafter stated that the bureau had succeeded, officially starting the rumor. The first was a January 1, 1964, article in the Houston Post by Alonzo (Lonnie) Hudkins in which Hudkins said his (again) unnamed source told him that Oswald had been assigned informant number S179 and was on the FBI payroll receiving $200 per month at the time of the assassination.* Hudkins’s article created such a storm that at 5:30 p.m. on January 22, just two days after the Warren Commission first met with its staff, Chairman Warren hurriedly called the members of the Commission into emergency session to inform them that General Counsel Rankin had received a telephone call earlier in the day from Waggoner Carr, the attorney general of Texas, in which he informed Rankin of the rumor circulating in Dallas and seemingly embraced the rumor as possibly being true.4

  Who was Hudkins’s unnamed source who started the rumor? What follows here is a series of denials and contradictions (unavoidably difficult reading) that make the answer to this question impossible at this time. When Secret Service agent Lane Bertram interviewed Hudkins on December 17, 1963 (pursuant to a phone call by Hudkins to the Dallas office of the Secret Service the previous day), Hudkins said that his source was Allan Sweatt, chief of the Criminal Division of the Dallas sheriff’s office. Sweatt, he said, had told him it was his “opinion” that Oswald was a paid FBI informant,5 though Sweatt’s saying it was only his opinion is inconsistent with the details he allegedly gave Hudkins of Oswald receiving $200 per month and having an informant number of “S172” (not 179).