A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination

by Philip Shenon

  * * *

  Within a week of the call from Willens, Slawson was on his way east to Washington, driving across the country from Colorado in a Buick sedan that his father had lent him. “It was one of those huge things, with fins, so inappropriate for me.” He wanted to reach Washington as quickly as possible. “I didn’t have much money, so I would drive as far as I could each day.” He arrived in Washington on Sunday night, January 19—it was the first time he had ever been in the capital—and found a room at a cheap motel. The next morning, he pulled on a coat and tie and showed up at the commission’s offices, where he was introduced to Willens and Rankin. He did not remember being asked what assignment he wanted. Instead, he was told that he would be the junior member of the “conspiracy” team, working under William Coleman. Slawson was delighted; it was exactly the assignment he wanted.

  Slawson did not know Coleman’s name, although he was impressed when he learned that his new partner had also graduated at the top of his class at Harvard and that he had been involved in Brown v. Board of Education. It was the first time that Slawson had worked closely with a black lawyer. He did not recall feeling intimidated by the assignment that he and Coleman were given. They were being asked to determine if a foreign government—most likely, the Soviet Union or Cuba—had just killed the president of the United States, an act that might easily lead to a nuclear war. “I wasn’t overwhelmed,” Slawson said, “I was thrilled.” That was true of many of his new colleagues. “I don’t think I ever doubted my intellectual ability,” Slawson said. “I don’t think any of us did.”

  He got to work immediately. That afternoon he was asked to go to the lobby of the VFW building to meet someone who claimed to have evidence that would point to a conspiracy in the assassination. Slawson went downstairs and encountered a white-haired, well-dressed man—in coat and tie—who appeared to be in his late forties. At first, the man seemed reasonably articulate and coherent. “I didn’t want to cut him off, because maybe the guy had something,” Slawson recalled. Two hours later, an exasperated Slawson realized that “I had a paranoid nut on my hands.” The secret of the Kennedy assassination, the man said, could be found in a message written on a piece of paper that had been buried beneath a rock somewhere in Switzerland. “He wanted us to fly him to Switzerland, where he would point out the rock,” Slawson said.

  After the man finally left, Slawson kicked himself for having wasted so much time listening to the man’s delusions. Later, he realized that the experience had been valuable. In his first hours on the commission’s staff, he had learned that many people who, at first, seemed sober witnesses with important information to share about the assassination were in fact “nutty as a fruitcake.”

  Slawson recalled being introduced to Coleman that Friday, when Coleman made what would become his one-day-a-week visit from Philadelphia. The two men formed a close, frictionless partnership. Like several of the “senior” lawyers, Coleman planned to work only part-time on the investigation. He had warned Warren and Rankin that his appearances in Washington would have to be sporadic because of his caseload back at his firm. It was Slawson who would do most of the digging and writing, and that suited Slawson fine.

  * * *

  Early on, Slawson kept an open mind on whether the president had been killed in a foreign conspiracy. Coleman, however, was more suspicious. “At the beginning, I really thought it was the Russians or the Cubans,” he said, remembering how he feared the investigation might turn up evidence that would force the United States to go to war.

  For several weeks, Slawson rarely left his small office on the fourth floor of the VFW building. He had thousands of pages of documents to read. He and his new colleagues were being flooded with classified files—many of them stamped TOP SECRET—from the FBI and CIA. Given his focus on possible foreign conspiracies, Slawson knew that he, more than most of the other staff members, would need to understand the CIA and how it operated. He was excited to realize that he would soon meet some real spies.

  In dealing with the CIA, Slawson believed the commission might have an extraordinary resource in one of its members: Allen Dulles, who had led the CIA from 1953 until his ouster in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Dulles’s forced retirement produced surprisingly few hard feelings between him and President Kennedy. “He dealt with his ouster with a great deal of dignity, and never attempted to shift the blame,” Robert Kennedy said later. “The President was very fond of him, as was I.” It was Robert Kennedy, President Johnson said, who had recommended Dulles’s appointment to the Warren Commission.

  Slawson assumed that if the CIA had information tying Oswald to a conspiracy, Dulles would know how to ferret it out. But that was before he actually met Dulles. When the two men were finally introduced, Slawson found the former spymaster to be surprisingly doddering and fragile. He still resembled a “boarding-school master,” in the words of Richard Helms, his former deputy at the CIA, with “parted gray hair, carefully trimmed moustache, tweeds and his preferred rimless, oval glasses.” But by early 1964, Slawson thought, Dulles had the look of a schoolmaster in ill health and well past retirement.

  He seemed much older than his seventy years. It had been that way since the Bay of Pigs. Robert Kennedy recalled that Dulles had “looked like living death” in his final days at the CIA: “He had gout and had trouble walking, and he was always putting his head in his hands.” The gout lingered into his service on the Warren Commission. He often came into the offices of the commission and padded around in bedroom slippers because shoes were too painful. Years later, after learning how much Dulles had known—and possibly withheld—from the commission, Slawson still wanted to believe the best about him. He suspected that Dulles, after the humiliation of his ouster from the agency and in the haze of his final years, had simply forgotten many of the most important secrets he had once known.

  11

  THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1963

  In the first hours after the assassination, the CIA’s number-two official, Deputy Director Richard Helms, decided he had to bring some order to the frantic search at CIA headquarters for information about the president’s murder. Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, who had no real background in intelligence issues before joining the CIA in 1961, was content to leave major decisions about the investigation to Helms, a career officer who was the agency’s real spymaster. On November 23, the day after the assassination, Helms created a team of about thirty analysts gathered from around Langley to search for evidence about Oswald and any possible foreign conspiracy. At a meeting of his deputies that morning, Helms announced that John Whitten, a forty-three-year-old CIA veteran who had often handled special projects for Helms, would lead the team.

  Whitten’s real name would not have been recognized by some of his colleagues, at least not by those who knew him through the paperwork that his office produced. He was known on paper by one of his agency-approved pseudonyms, John Scelso; the Scelso name appeared on internal cables in which the agency wanted to keep the number of people who knew his real identity to a minimum.

  When President Johnson created the assassination commission a week after the president’s murder, Whitten, a sometimes abrasive man who started his intelligence career as an army interrogator, was given the additional responsibility of day-to-day contact with the commission’s staff. At the time, he was chief of the agency’s covert operations in Mexico and Central America, a job he had held for about eight months. His branch was known as WH-3—the third branch of the Western Hemisphere division of the CIA’s Clandestine Services—and was responsible for all American espionage operations in the area that stretched from the U.S.-Mexican border to the southern borders of Panama.

  Like so many of his colleagues, Whitten did not go home at all on the night of November 22. He remained at the agency until the next day, as the CIA gathered up intelligence about Oswald. Whitten discovered what he said was a modest a
gency file on Oswald as a result of his attempted defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 and his return to the United States three years later. Far more intriguing, Whitten thought, were the reports from his CIA colleagues in Mexico who had conducted surveillance of Oswald during his mysterious trip there in September.

  At the meeting on November 23, Helms told the others that Whitten would have “broad powers” and that all information about the assassination should be directed to him, even if that broke traditional lines of reporting. As Whitten recalled it, Helms announced that Whitten “was to be in charge of the investigation, that no one in the agency was to have any conversations with anyone outside the agency, including the Warren Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, concerning the Kennedy assassination without my being present.” Whitten thought Helms had entrusted him with the assignment because “I had investigated a number of other giant operations of absolutely critical importance for him over the years and had come up, you know, with the right answers.”

  Among the others in Helms’s office for the Saturday meeting, Whitten recalled, was James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s counterintelligence director—the “mole hunter” who was responsible for detecting the efforts of foreign spy agencies to infiltrate the CIA with double agents. Angleton’s presence in a room was always troubling to Whitten. The two men had clashed repeatedly over their careers, especially when Whitten reviewed spy operations that somehow involved Angleton. “None of the senior officials at the agency were ever able to cope with him,” Whitten said.

  Angleton, then forty-six, was as eccentric and secretive a figure as anyone who worked at the agency. Whitten thought of him as a sinister force, a man with a hawk-like stare who was driven by paranoid suspicion of Communist infiltration of the CIA. Inside the agency, it was understood that Angleton’s paranoia was the result of the treachery of his once-close friend Kim Philby, the high-ranking British spy who turned out to be a KGB mole. Angleton had a “sense of dread of foreign conspiracies and an over-suspiciousness” that was simply “bizarre,” Whitten recalled. The Yale-educated Angleton, who was raised in Europe, reveled in his reputation for Anglophilic eccentricity, including his dedication to the hobby of orchid growing and his love of poetry. He also reveled in secrecy, so much so that no one—not even Helms, his supposed boss—seemed to know what Angleton was actually up to. It was obvious he enjoyed the confusion—or, in Whitten’s view, the chaos—that he created. Drawing on the words of the poet T. S. Eliot, Angleton was fond of describing the work of counterintelligence as a “wilderness of mirrors.”

  “Everything that Angleton did was so secret,” Whitten remembered. “Several times in my career, I was appointed to investigate or handle or look into investigations that Angleton was running. This always caused bitter feelings—the most bitter feelings.” When he was asked by Helms or others to confront Angleton, Whitten did it with trepidation. “I used to go in fingering my insurance policy, thinking about notifying my next of kin.”

  Angleton had a portfolio of responsibilities that went beyond counterintelligence. Part of his power derived from his close friendship with FBI director Hoover. Whatever the rivalry between the CIA and the bureau, the two men shared a similar fixation on the dangers of Communism, and the Soviet Union in particular. “He had enormously influential contacts with J. Edgar Hoover,” Whitten said of Angleton. In turn, Angleton was “extremely protective of the FBI” and “would not allow any criticism of them or any kind of rivalry.” Whitten figured that was part of the reason why he, not Angleton, was given responsibility for the Oswald investigation. Initially, Helms may have feared that Angleton would help his friends at the FBI cover up blunders they had made in their surveillance of Oswald before the assassination. “One of the reasons that Helms gave me the case in the first place was that Angleton was so close to the FBI,” Whitten said. “The FBI could be extremely clannish and protective of their own interests. I think that J. Edgar Hoover and others wanted to make very, very sure that they could not be criticized, and they wanted all the facts before they would let anybody else know anything.”

  Angleton’s influence also extended to several of the CIA’s most important overseas spy stations, which were run by his friends and protégés, including Winston Scott, the station chief in Mexico City. And both Angleton and Scott were close to Allen Dulles.

  Whitten admitted he took some pleasure from Angleton’s discomfort about the Oswald investigation. “In the early stages Mr. Angleton was not able to influence the course of the investigation, which was a source of great bitterness to him,” Whitten recalled. “He was extremely embittered that I was entrusted with the investigation and he wasn’t.”

  * * *

  Believing that he had Helms’s full support, Whitten went to work to piece together Oswald’s life story and to understand his possible motives for killing Kennedy. Much of Whitten’s time was spent reading through stacks of paperwork that related to the assassination. “We were flooded with cable traffic, with reports, suggestions, allegations from all over the world, and these things had to be checked out,” he said. “We dropped almost everything else and I put a lot of my officers to work on tracing names, analyzing files.” Much of it was “weirdo stuff,” tying Oswald to every sort of coconspirator, including space aliens, he recalled.

  Whitten said he knew nothing about Oswald, including his name, before Kennedy’s murder. Although the Mexico City station answered to Whitten’s staff at the WH-3 branch and had dispatched several cables to headquarters that fall about the surveillance of Oswald during his trip to Mexico, Whitten did not recall seeing any of them. That was not surprising, he said, since at the time Oswald appeared to be just another of the “small-potatoes defectors” and “kooks” who turned up occasionally in the Mexican capital.

  According to Whitten, several American soldiers and defense-industry workers approached the Russian embassy in Mexico City in the 1950s and early 1960s to defect or sell secrets. They were detected so frequently by the CIA’s Mexico City station that Hoover, who was routinely briefed on the cases so the FBI could track potential spies when they returned to the United States, “used to glow every time he thought of the Mexico [City] station—this was one of our outstanding areas of cooperation with the FBI,” Whitten said.

  Whitten shared Hoover’s admiration for the Mexico City station—and especially for Scott, who “was as good a station chief as we had, and you could fairly say that he had the best station in the world.” Under Scott, the station had developed a network of paid informants throughout the Mexican government and among the country’s major political parties. According to Whitten, Scott also oversaw the CIA’s most extensive and sophisticated electronic surveillance operation in the world. Whitten said that every phone line going in and out of both the Soviet and the Cuban embassies in Mexico City was tapped by Scott’s station—about thirty lines in all. There were banks of CIA surveillance cameras around both embassies.

  Whitten thought that explained why some of the information about Oswald had been slow to reach CIA headquarters in the weeks after Oswald’s visit. Scott and his staff were victims of their own success. The Mexico City station was overwhelmed by a backlog of surveillance tapes—tapes that needed to be translated into English and transcribed—and photographs.

  Whitten recalled that he immediately began to pursue a question that he knew the Warren Commission and other investigators would want answered: Given the bizarre circumstances of his aborted defection to the Soviet Union, had Oswald ever worked for the CIA? The answer, Whitten said he quickly discovered, was no. “Oswald was a person of a type who would never have been recruited by the agency to work behind the Iron Curtain or anywhere else.… Oswald’s whole pattern of life was that of a very badly, emotionally unbalanced young man.”

  Whitten said he was told by Helms to cooperate fully with the Warren Commission, except when it came to divulging the details of how the CIA actually gathered information—“sources and methods,” in the age
ncy’s jargon. He said the commission was kept ignorant about the CIA’s electronic surveillance programs in Mexico City and elsewhere, at least at the start. “We were sure to give them everything when we thought we could do that without revealing how, exactly, we got the information,” Whitten recalled. He said the CIA was particularly concerned that the existence of the wiretapping and photo-surveillance programs in Mexico City might become public, which would tip off the Soviets and Cubans and destroy the programs’ value. “We wondered whether divulging this to them might not unnecessarily compromise forever our capability,” Whitten said. “There was no nefarious reason for our not giving it to them. It was simply that we did not consider it vitally relevant and we wanted to protect our sources.”

  * * *

  The frenzy at CIA headquarters in the hours after the assassination was matched by that of the agency’s Mexico City station, then housed on the top floor of the U.S. embassy on the Paseo de la Reforma, a central thoroughfare in the heart of the Mexican capital. Scott seemed to understand instantly the questions he would face from Langley and from Washington. Just a few weeks earlier, his station had conducted a supposedly intensive surveillance operation on the man who had apparently just killed the president of the United States. The station had secretly recorded telephone calls made by Oswald—and about Oswald—during several days that fall, and the agency was trying to determine if its surveillance cameras had caught Oswald’s image during his visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies. Some of the wiretap transcripts had been marked “urgent” and sent straight to Scott’s desk, his files showed. Could the CIA—and its Mexico City station, in particular—have done anything to stop Oswald?