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

by Philip Shenon

  21

  THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  FEBRUARY 1964

  Several weeks into the investigation, the commission’s staff lawyers continued to assume the best about the CIA. The officials they dealt with were smart and often charming, and they seemed sincere in their assurances that the agency would share whatever information it had about Oswald. That was in sharp contrast to the attitude of much of the staff, and certainly of the commissioners, toward Hoover and the FBI; the bureau was now widely viewed as obstructing the commission’s work, probably to hide the bungling in its surveillance of Oswald before the assassination.

  Then, in February, came the first disturbing evidence that the CIA might be withholding something, too. That month the staff learned from the Secret Service that, in the hours immediately after the president’s assassination, it had been provided with CIA reports detailing what had been known about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City. The commission double-checked its files and determined that those reports had never been handed over to the commission; the CIA had never acknowledged that the reports even existed. The Secret Service declined to turn the reports over to the commission, saying that would be a decision for the spy agency since the reports were so highly classified.

  Since joining the commission, Rankin had dealt with the CIA mostly through Deputy Director Richard Helms, a man he had come to like and respect. Rankin recalled years later that he had believed at the time that Helms and other top officials at the CIA were cooperating fully. But the discovery of the missing CIA reports about Mexico City alarmed Rankin, and in this case he thought that he needed to go over Helms’s head. In February, he wrote directly to Helms’s boss, Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, insisting that the agency turn over copies of the reports that it had given to the Secret Service about Oswald’s Mexico trip. And just so there was no confusion in the future, Rankin asked in the letter that the CIA be prepared to gather up and hand over its complete files on Oswald, including a copy of every communication it had with other government agencies about him before and after the assassination. After the mix-ups and ill will between the commission and the FBI, Rankin was—politely, he thought—putting the CIA on notice.

  The commission received the CIA’s reply on Friday, March 6, when the agency turned over a thick file that, it said, contained all of the information the agency had ever gathered on Oswald, beginning with his attempted defection to Moscow in 1959. Willens, Rankin’s deputy, and others went through the file, and they could detect almost instantly how much was still missing. The file contained none of the paperwork or cable traffic about Oswald that the agency’s Mexico City station had sent to CIA headquarters that fall, for example.

  Willens called Helms, who admitted that some material was still being withheld because of “certain unspecified problems.” Willens recalled in a memo to Rankin that Helms tried to offer an explanation. “He stated that some of the information referred to has already been passed on to the commission in a different form and other of the material included irrelevant matters or matters that had not checked out.” This was unacceptable, Willens said; the commission needed to see everything. Helms pushed back, seeming to suggest—cryptically—that the young lawyer did not fully understand the implications of forcing the CIA to share everything it had on Oswald. The agency “would prefer not to comply,” he said. Unlike Rankin, Willens felt he had no authority to insist that Helms do anything, and so he and Helms agreed to discuss the issue at a meeting tentatively scheduled for the following week, when Helms planned to visit the commission’s offices in Washington.

  The following Thursday, at about eleven a.m., Helms sat down with Rankin and several of the other lawyers, including Willens, Coleman, and Slawson. Their questions for Helms were direct, including what was in many ways the central one for the spy agency: Was the CIA certain that Oswald had never worked for the agency as some sort of undercover agent, possibly during his years in the Soviet Union?

  Helms assured the lawyers that Oswald had never worked for the CIA in any capacity and that he and other senior CIA officials, including McCone, were ready to sign sworn affidavits, under penalty of perjury, to confirm it. But he was pressed: If the CIA had nothing to hide, why was it continuing to withhold information about Oswald’s trip to Mexico? Helms acknowledged that the agency had held back some specific reports because they might reveal the agency’s spying methods in Mexico City, including the wiretapping operations and surveillance cameras targeting the Cuban and Soviet embassies.

  Rankin still wanted to believe the CIA was telling the truth, and he and the other lawyers were impressed by the need to keep secret the CIA’s spycraft in Mexico. So he offered a compromise that Helms accepted. In the future, the agency would offer a sanitized summary of any report prepared for its files about Oswald, with the understanding that a commission staff member could go to CIA headquarters to review the full, original documents.

  There was more discussion of Mexico, including the commission’s concern about the many holes in the CIA’s knowledge of exactly where Oswald had gone in Mexico City, and the people he had met there, especially at night. He was registered at a small hotel near the bus station, but he could have been almost anywhere in the city after dark, apparently unobserved. “The evenings of his entire trip were unaccounted for,” Slawson remembered telling Helms, who responded with a suggestion: the commission’s lawyers should go to Mexico City themselves in search of answers. They would be in “a good position to bypass ordinary government channels and get things done,” Helms said, vowing that the CIA’s Mexico City station would do all it could to help. Slawson was excited by the idea.

  In the days following the meeting with Helms, the CIA did begin turning over more material, including the reports that the agency had provided to the Secret Service about the Mexico trip. Among them was a report, dispatched by the CIA at ten thirty a.m. the day after the assassination, that alerted the Secret Service to the fact that the CIA’s Mexico City station had a surveillance photograph of a man who might be Oswald. The photograph had still not been turned over to the commission, however, and, in a separate letter to Rankin, Helms explained why; the agency had felt no need to turn over the photo since the agency had quickly determined after the assassination that it was not of Oswald. The CIA, he suggested, had not wanted to burden the commission with unnecessary leads, since the photo apparently had no value. He invited Rankin to send a staff investigator over to the agency to see the photo, which captured the image of a full-faced man with Slavic features who appeared to be much taller and heavier than Oswald.

  In what seemed to be a new spirit of openness, the CIA also gave permission to the State Department in March to turn over two cables that the then U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Mann, had sent to the department and the CIA in late November about his suspicions of a Cuban conspiracy in Kennedy’s assassination. Helms admitted to deputies that he “brooded” over whether to allow the cables to be given to the commission. Slawson read them and realized—to his dismay—how much more the commission still did not know about what had happened in Mexico. He was struck by Mann’s almost panicked tone, and the ambassador’s conviction that Castro was somehow behind the president’s murder. The cables also hinted at evidence that the commission had not seen, including detailed transcripts of CIA recordings of Oswald’s phone calls in Mexico. Slawson found the memo in which Mann referred to the embassy’s reports of an affair between the former Cuban ambassador to Mexico and Silvia Duran, the “promiscuous-type” Mexican woman who had dealt directly with Oswald. Slawson worried about what else might be in the embassy’s files.

  In a memo to Rankin on April 2, Slawson said the commission needed to get copies of the transcripts of all intercepted phone calls in Mexico City that might be tied to Oswald. Beyond that, “we should see the entire Embassy file on the whole Kennedy assassination including copies of all correspondence to other government agencies.” And the commission,
he said, needed to know much more about that young Mexican woman: “We would like more information on Silvia Duran—for example, the evidence that she was a ‘promiscuous type.’”

  * * *

  In late March, Samuel Stern drove to CIA headquarters in suburban Virginia to begin to review the full Oswald files. He later remembered being impressed by the CIA’s sophisticated filing rooms, as well as its new data-processing system known as Lincoln, which made use of some of the federal government’s first computers.

  Stern was handed an inventory of all the Oswald documents, and he was then allowed to go—document by document—through the actual files to make sure they were complete. He found the cables prepared by the CIA’s Mexico City station about Oswald—the ones the commission had originally been denied. As best he could tell, nothing was missing from the Oswald “jacket,” as the collection of files was called. It was such a cynical, unsubstantiated thought that Stern did not repeat it in a memo he sent to Rankin about his visit, but he distinctly recalled thinking that day how easy it would have been for the CIA to have forged all this material or to have altered the inventory and removed documents from the “jacket” that it did not want to share. The CIA was in the business of keeping secrets, and if the agency chose to keep some secrets about Oswald and the assassination, the commission would not be able to detect it. “There was no way for us to get the ultimate, absolutely reliable certainty about anything,” Stern said.

  * * *

  It slowly dawned on David Slawson that winter that the CIA might be trying to recruit him. Later he became convinced of it. There was never a direct offer, but his conversations with Ray Rocca and other CIA officials would sometimes turn to Slawson’s plans after the commission went out of business, with the obvious suggestion that he might want to give up his legal career and join them. “They let it be known that if I was interested, they’d be interested.”

  He was flattered by their approach, he said, and at the time he did not see it as an effort to influence his work on the commission. The CIA was then a much-admired institution, Slawson said later. He had actually considered the idea of joining the agency years earlier, after learning that some of his Amherst classmates had become CIA officers. “They had seemed to hire high-caliber people,” he said. Slawson had left his graduate studies in physics at Princeton because he believed the law would be a more exciting career; perhaps, he thought, the CIA might be an even bigger adventure. For now, though, he had little time to ponder his next career move. In just a matter of weeks, he had been expected to turn himself into the commission’s in-house expert on the daunting question of whether there had been a foreign conspiracy to kill the president, and he was doing much of this work alone. Coleman, his partner on the “conspiracy” team, continued to come into Washington from Philadelphia only one day a week, and there were weeks he said he could not come in at all.

  Certainly Slawson felt he did not have time to focus obsessively on what else the CIA might be trying to keep him from knowing. Despite the flap over the Mexico City documents, he said, “I thought basically that the CIA was being honest.” He especially valued Rocca’s willingness to share with him the latest news about the debriefings of Yuri Nosenko, the former KGB agent. Years later, Slawson said he never had any sense of the turmoil that the case had created—that almost from the day of the defection, Nosenko’s case pitted some of the agency’s Soviet analysts, as well as the FBI, against James Angleton, Rocca’s boss. Angleton was convinced that Nosenko was a double agent who had been dispatched to the United States to try to exonerate the Soviet Union of any involvement in the Kennedy assassination.

  Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, thirty-six years old when he defected, had been in contact with the CIA since 1962, when, traveling undercover for the KGB in Switzerland, he said he was robbed of $200 by a prostitute. According to the CIA’s account, Nosenko approached an American diplomat he knew in Geneva and asked for a loan, saying he feared that if he did not account for the $200, his sexual indiscretions would be exposed to his KGB bosses. The incident became an opportunity to recruit Nosenko to spy for the United States.

  In February 1964, three months after the Kennedy assassination, Nosenko contacted the CIA again and said he needed to defect immediately and that he had important information about Lee Harvey Oswald. Nosenko’s defection was worldwide news—it was a front-page story in the New York Times—before he vanished, for years, from public view. Nosenko told his CIA handlers that he had personally reviewed the KGB files on Oswald and that they proved Kennedy’s assassin had never been a Russian agent. The Soviet spy agency considered Oswald too mentally unstable—“a nut,” as the English-speaking Nosenko put it—to be considered for intelligence work. It had abandoned any thought of recruiting him, Nosenko said, when Oswald attempted suicide in October 1959, shortly after his arrival in Moscow.

  The FBI believed Nosenko. J. Edgar Hoover and his counterintelligence deputies at the bureau, responsible for tracking down Communist spies on American soil, concluded that he was a bona fide defector. In earlier years, Hoover’s support might have provided the Russian with all the credibility he would need to be treated like a hero in Washington. But Nosenko had too powerful an adversary in Angleton, and it was Angleton who controlled the flow of information from the CIA to the commission—to Slawson, in particular. Angleton asked his staff to look for holes in Nosenko’s story that might prove he was a double agent. He worried, especially, that Nosenko had been sent from Moscow to discredit an earlier KGB defector then living in the United States, Anatoly Golitsin. For years, Golitsin had been feeding Angleton’s paranoia about KGB infiltration of the CIA; Golitsin insisted Nosenko was a double agent dispatched to the United States specifically to discredit him.

  Who to believe? If Nosenko was telling the truth, it would seem to rule out any Soviet involvement in the assassination. If he was lying, it suggested that the KGB was trying to cover up its relationship with the man who had just killed the president.

  Rocca insisted to Slawson that the best-informed people at the CIA believed Nosenko was a phony, and Slawson remembered seeing the logic of it. “The information that Nosenko brought over was just too convenient” in vindicating the Kremlin, Slawson said. Nosenko “had all the hallmarks of a plant.”

  Within the commission, the case files on Nosenko were treated with such secrecy that some of the other lawyers never even heard his name. In the commission’s files, he was often referred to simply as “N.” Slawson knew the commission would have to make a decision about how much, if any, of Nosenko’s information could be made public in its final report. If the CIA was right that Nosenko was a double agent, the commission would only serve the interests of the Kremlin by promoting Nosenko’s claims. “It would be basically exonerating Moscow.” On all of this, Slawson would, again, have to trust the CIA, which refused to allow him or anyone else from the commission to meet with Nosenko to try to verify his claims. “I asked to see him, and the answer I got was ‘no way.’”

  Slawson recalled that he was told little at the time about how Nosenko was being treated by his CIA interrogators. He did know that the Russian was being kept in solitary confinement, and Slawson remembered being troubled at the other harsh conditions that Nosenko might face; he had long assumed that solitary confinement, if it went on for long, could amount to “psychological torture.”

  It was far worse than Slawson imagined. Congressional investigators and even some CIA officials would later agree that Nosenko was subjected, for years, to torture. He was held in solitary confinement for 1,277 days—more than three years. Much of that time, he was housed at a CIA training site near Williamsburg, Virginia, in a specially built, uninsulated cell, lit by a single bulb that remained on twenty-four hours a day. He had no one to talk to apart from his interrogators. He was given nothing to read and denied basic comforts, including a toothbrush and toothpaste, for months at a time. “I had no contact with anyone,” Nosenko said later. “I could not read, I could not smoke, I e
ven could not have fresh air.”

  The Justice Department was complicit in the decision to treat Nosenko harshly. In April 1964, the department secretly signed off on all elements of the Russian’s confinement when a delegation of CIA officials visited Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach at his offices at the department. Katzenbach would later insist under oath that he could not recall the meeting, but CIA records confirmed that it had taken place. The documents showed that Katzenbach approved the CIA’s plans to confine Nosenko indefinitely, without any legal process or appeal.

  * * *

  In other ways, the CIA had continued to be quietly helpful to Slawson. It helped him prepare a request to the Cuban government for copies of all documents in its embassy and consulate in Mexico City involving Oswald. The request would have to go through the government of Switzerland, which served as a diplomatic go-between for Washington and Castro’s government, and Slawson requested permission from the commission to begin drawing up the paperwork.

  The request “went up through channels to Earl Warren, and his first response was no,” according to Slawson. “The reason he gave was that he did not want to rely upon any information from a government which was itself one of the principal suspects” in the assassination. Slawson was baffled. The commission, he thought, had the responsibility to gather evidence wherever it might be found, and then, when possible, to try to authenticate it. But the chief justice was apparently willing to block some important evidence from being gathered at all.