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

by Philip Shenon

  Warren had allowed the commission to approach the Russian government to ask for its records on Oswald’s two-and-a-half-year stay in the Soviet Union. But for the chief justice, Russia and Cuba were very different types of countries. He saw a distinction between the long-established, gray-haired Communist leaders in Moscow—he had met Khrushchev only the summer before, during his vacation with Drew Pearson—and the angry, bearded young revolutionaries led by Castro who had taken control in Havana in 1959.

  Slawson did not see the difference, at least not when it came to collecting the evidence he needed to do his work, and so he did something that he admitted was totally out of character—he decided to ignore Warren. “Any information that we could get we ought to get,” he remembered thinking. He might be risking his job, but “I simply disobeyed orders and went ahead and made the request to the State Department.”

  An approach to Castro’s government was considered so sensitive that the letter to the Swiss government had to be signed personally by Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Slawson could only hope that Warren, unaware of any of this, did not bump into Rusk on the Washington social circuit that spring and begin discussing the commission’s work. Slawson’s request got results: Havana produced the paperwork, including copies of what appeared to be Oswald’s visa application, as well as the passport-sized photographs that Oswald had submitted.

  Weeks later, in one of his rare face-to-face encounters with the chief justice, Slawson was asked for an update on his efforts to gather evidence from foreign governments. Slawson noted, sheepishly, that a package of material about Oswald had arrived from Cuba—the material that Warren had specifically ordered him not to request.

  Warren was outraged. “I thought I told you we didn’t want it,” he said.

  Slawson had to lie. “I am sorry,” he told Warren. “I didn’t understand it that way.”

  Once the Cuban files were in hand, Slawson was grateful that Warren did nothing to block their use. “He accepted the fact that we had it,” Slawson said. “He did not make any effort to suppress it.” With additional help from the CIA, much of the material, including Oswald’s signature on the visa form, was authenticated.

  22

  THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  FEBRUARY 1964

  True to his word to read every piece of paper that came into the commission’s offices, Norman Redlich spent much of February paging through the FBI files that had been flooding in, and he was the first to notice a crucial deletion.

  It was sometime early that month when he came across an intriguing document: the FBI’s typewritten, word-for-word accounting of what Oswald had written down in an address book found by Dallas police among his belongings. The typewritten document was supposedly prepared by the bureau as a courtesy to the commission and other investigators, since Oswald’s handwriting could be difficult to read.

  Redlich, characteristically, took the next time-consuming step, something he knew others on the staff might not bother with. He decided to compare—page by page—what was in the address book with what the FBI’s typewritten account showed. Redlich was not a trained prosecutor, but he lived by the conviction that a good lawyer reviewed every bit of raw evidence gathered for a case, no matter how tedious that might be. He wanted to be sure the FBI had not unintentionally misstated any of what Oswald had written down.

  The handwritten and typewritten accounts matched up, at least for the first twenty-four pages of the FBI report. Then he came to page 25. He turned to what should have been the corresponding pages of Oswald’s address book and saw what was missing. On that page, Oswald had written “AGENT JAMES HASTY,” a misspelling of the name of James Hosty, the FBI agent in Dallas. Beneath the agent’s name, Oswald had noted Hosty’s office address and, it appeared, the license plate number of his FBI car. The entry was dated November 1, 1963—three weeks before the assassination.

  Yet neither the agent’s misspelled name nor any of the other information about Hosty had been transferred to the FBI report. Redlich immediately suspected that this might be a crude attempt by the bureau to hide evidence about its ties to Oswald. He rushed to find Rankin, who was also alarmed. It was one thing for the commission weeks earlier to try to tamp down loosely sourced newspaper reports suggesting that Oswald might have been an FBI informant. Now, it seemed, the bureau might actually be doctoring evidence.

  Rankin called a staff meeting on February 11, 1964, to announce what Redlich had discovered and to ask their advice. Several of the lawyers felt that the deletions were the final straw. At the very least, it seemed, the FBI was trying to obscure the fact that it had the president’s killer under such close surveillance just weeks before the assassination that Oswald had written down an FBI’s agent’s name, address, and license-plate number. “Of course we thought they were covering up,” Slawson recalled. Specter was also convinced this was no innocent oversight: “It was self-protection at its worst—it raised the obvious question of what else was withheld that the commission never found out.” Griffin saw it as the moment when the commission’s lawyers became convinced that they could not trust the FBI—ever.

  This time, Rankin would not offer Hoover the courtesy of a face-to-face meeting. Instead, he wrote the director, demanding an explanation of how and why the deletion had occurred. “Needless to say, we would like a full explanation,” he told Hoover. The letter asked Hoover to identify, by name, all of the agents and supervisors who had prepared the report or “made any decision to omit information from the report.”

  Hoover responded in kind: he, too, was outraged. He insisted in a letter to Rankin that the information about Hosty had not been included in the typewritten report simply because it did not offer an “investigative lead” of any value. In other FBI documents describing the contents of Oswald’s address book, he noted, there was a clear reference to the Hosty entry—just not in this particular document. “This bureau, from the beginning of this investigation, has developed and reported all relevant facts and it will continue to do so,” he declared.

  Hosty himself knew that what Hoover had written was untrue. He was later told that the Dallas FBI agent who prepared the typewritten report—a friend named John Kesler—had intentionally left out the information about Hosty to try to protect him from even more harsh scrutiny from FBI headquarters. As Hosty described it, “Kesler had simply been trying to save me from Hoover’s wrath.”

  * * *

  It was too late for that, as Hosty already knew. In December, he had received his formal, possibly career-killing reprimand signed by Hoover. Without making any direct reference to the assassination or to Oswald, Hoover wrote that “your recent handling of a security-type case was grossly inadequate.” Hosty could only assume the letter was referring to his failure to interview Oswald that fall and his failure to alert the Secret Service about Oswald’s presence in the city. “It should have been apparent to you that he required a status which would have insured further investigative attention,” the letter continued.

  Hosty had begun to think of himself as a victim. It was better for the FBI to criticize the supposed errors of a single field agent in Dallas than to question whether the FBI as a whole had made much larger mistakes before and after the assassination. “I was the classic scapegoat for J. Edgar Hoover,” Hosty said later. “Following the assassination, Oswald had whined to the press that he was just the patsy. Now, I knew who was the real patsy.” Several of his colleagues agreed. “You’re going to be the goat,” he was told by another Dallas agent, Vince Drain.

  Hosty could not deny that he did have moments of doubt, asking himself: “Could I have prevented President Kennedy’s assassination?” Over time, though, he became convinced that he had done nothing wrong; nothing he had learned before the assassination suggested Oswald was violent. In fact, Hosty thought the record showed he had been diligent in his investigation. The national-security case file on Oswald, opened after he returned from Russia in 1962, had actually be
en closed by another FBI agent in Texas; that agent thought Oswald posed no obvious threat. It was Hosty who had reopened the file.

  He sensed, almost from the start, that FBI headquarters was determined to end the investigation of the assassination quickly—with Oswald identified as the sole assassin—whatever the facts. There was no eagerness to search for a possible foreign conspiracy, which made Hosty suspect that something was being hidden from him. “I didn’t know what was going on back in Washington,” he said. “But something was afoot.” He recalled an astonishing order from Gordon Shanklin—the agent in charge of the FBI’s Dallas field office and “a man who wouldn’t blow his nose unless he cleared it first with someone”—on November 23, the day after the assassination. Shanklin told his agents that “Washington does not want any of you to ask questions about the Soviet aspect of this case. Washington does not want to upset the public.” And it was Shanklin who, the next day, ordered Hosty to destroy Oswald’s note—the note that Hosty had ripped up and flushed down a toilet. (Although Shanklin would deny years later that he had ordered the note’s destruction, other FBI employees in the Dallas field office distinctly remembered that the order had come from him.)

  Despite Hoover’s reprimand, Hosty was assigned to work on the assassination investigation. Excluding him might have been seen as a public admission that the Dallas field office had done something wrong in its surveillance of Oswald before the president’s murder. But he said he was told to keep his name off any paperwork that would be forwarded to Washington and might end up on Hoover’s desk. “My name had brought public embarrassment to Hoover and the FBI.”

  In the months after the president’s murder, Hosty’s central goal was to do what he could to hold on to his job. He had eight children, the youngest of them only three months old on the day of the assassination; his three-year-old son, Dick, had been born with cerebral palsy and required intensive, and expensive, physical therapy four times a week. The way to survive within the bureau, he knew, was to follow orders. “In 1942, when I joined the Army as an 18-year-old, one of the first lessons I learned was that in battle, a private had to blindly obey orders,” he wrote. “In many ways, the FBI was like the military.”

  In mid-December, he was ordered to follow up on an urgent lead. He was asked to try to determine if there was any truth to a perplexing story being told by a seemingly credible young Cuban-American woman who lived in the Dallas area. The woman, Silvia Odio, claimed she had met Oswald weeks before the assassination in the company of two anti-Castro activists who came to her door late one night. Odio, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of two prominent anti-Castro activists then imprisoned in Cuba, had other witnesses to back her up, including a teenage sister who said she was in the apartment the night of Oswald’s visit.

  Hosty interviewed Odio on December 18. She was, he recalled, “a strikingly beautiful woman who had fled Cuba when her father was imprisoned by Castro for disloyalty.” She appeared to be part of the Cuban elite that fled to the United States in the aftermath of Castro’s rise to power—“the pampered Cuban upper class,” as Hosty described it. She was clearly intelligent and well educated; her law school studies in Cuba were interrupted by Castro’s revolution, she said.

  Her story, if true, indicated either that Oswald had aligned himself with anti-Castro Cubans shortly before the assassination or—more likely, in Hosty’s view—that he had tried to infiltrate the anti-Castro movement in a demonstration of his support for Castro’s revolution. Hosty knew that earlier that year, while living in New Orleans, Oswald had tried to infiltrate an anti-Castro group known as the DRE, possibly to gather information for the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

  As Odio described the encounter, she was at home in her apartment one night in late September when three strangers arrived at her door and introduced themselves as anti-Castro activists passing through Texas. Two of the men were Latinos, possibly Cubans, and spoke Spanish; one of the Latinos went by the “war name” of Leopoldo. She said the third man was clearly not Latino, spoke no Spanish, and was introduced as “Leon Oswald,” an American who was “very much interested in the Cuban cause.” Leopoldo said the three men had come to ask for Odio’s help in raising money and buying weapons for the anti-Castro movement—a request often made of Odio because of her father’s prominence among exile groups. “We are very good friends of your father,” Leopoldo said. He seemed to be telling the truth, she said, because he knew “so many details about where they saw my father and what activities he was in.” Leopoldo claimed that he and the other two men had just come from New Orleans—why New Orleans, he did not explain—and were about to leave on a trip. “I didn’t ask where they were going,” Odio said. The next day, she got a call from Leopoldo. She thought he was trying to flirt with her—another common experience for Odio, given her beauty—and he asked what she had thought of “the American.”

  “I didn’t think anything,” Odio replied.

  “You know our idea is to introduce him to the movement in Cuba, because he is great, he is kind of nuts,” he told her.

  Leopoldo described the American as a former marine who was an expert rifleman and who thought President Kennedy deserved to be assassinated. “He told us you don’t have any guts, you Cubans, because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that.”

  She heard nothing more about “Leon Oswald” until after the assassination, when she and her sister, Annie, saw television pictures of the man accused of killing President Kennedy—the same man who had appeared at her apartment a few weeks earlier.

  Annie, a student at the University of Dallas, asked the question first, Odio remembered. “She said, ‘Silvia, you know that man?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and she said, ‘I know him. He was the one that came to our door.’”

  The Odios had been too frightened to go to the FBI or to the Dallas police after the assassination because they worried that their father’s anti-Castro movement might be blamed for Kennedy’s murder, Silvia said. Instead, it was a friend of hers who contacted the FBI, without her knowledge.

  During the interview with Hosty, Odio freely admitted something that, she knew, might affect the way the FBI evaluated her story. She was, as she put it, “emotionally disturbed” and suffered from fainting spells. Her mental troubles had begun after her husband abandoned her in Cuba, leaving her with four children to support; at the time of the assassination she had been under the care of a Dallas psychiatrist. But, as she reminded Hosty, someone else saw Oswald at the door: her sister. And there were others who would vouch for her credibility. She said she had, before the assassination, told her psychiatrist in detail about the odd visit from the three men, including the “Anglo.”

  Hosty was intrigued by Odio’s story, although he understood the risk—given Hoover’s determination to prove that Oswald had acted alone—in pursuing evidence of a possible conspiracy. He contacted Odio’s psychiatrist, Dr. Burton Einspruch, who confirmed that she had told him about the late-night visit by the three men, shortly after it occurred. Einspruch told Hosty he thought she was being truthful.

  Years later, Hosty said he never doubted Odio’s truthfulness; she seemed to believe what she was saying. “She’s not a phony,” he commented. “It made sense to her. I really believe she believes she saw Oswald.” But he had encountered this many times before—witnesses who became confused after a shocking crime and who believed they had seen something they could not have seen. Ultimately, Odio’s psychiatric problems led him to discount her story. Einspruch told Hosty that Odio suffered from “grand hysteria, a condition he found to be prevalent among Latin American women from the upper class.” And Hosty thought that might explain Silvia Odio’s confusion. He thought Annie might have confirmed her sister’s account in a demonstration of family solidarity, not because it was true.

  In the weeks after the assassination, Hosty had too much other work to do, and he put Silvia Odio’s claims out of his mind. “I h
ad a stack of other leads to pursue.” After filing her witness statement, “I more or less forgot about Odio.”

  23

  THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  FEBRUARY 1964

  The reports from the FBI’s Dallas field office about Silvia Odio were directed to the “conspiracy” team—David Slawson and William Coleman. The reports were not flagged by the bureau as especially important, but Slawson, in particular, seized on them. He recalled reading about the young woman in Dallas and being excited by the idea that a credible witness could place Oswald in the company of anti-Castro Cubans shortly before the assassination. It fit in with one of the conspiracy theories that Slawson treated most seriously.

  If the commission determined that Castro had no hand in the assassination, he wondered, was it possible that Castro’s most passionate opponents—anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the United States—were involved, possibly as revenge against Kennedy for not having done more to oust the Communist government in Havana? He tried to imagine the web of conspiracy that might tie Castro’s opponents to Kennedy’s murder. His theory of that conspiracy was so complicated that Slawson, despite all of his years of training as a physicist and his ability to put the scientific mysteries of the universe into layman’s terms, found it difficult to explain to colleagues on the staff. It would involve layers of duplicity—double crosses and triple crosses both by Oswald and by the anti-Castro exiles he might have met.

  One possibility: knowing that Oswald was in reality an outspoken champion of Castro’s revolution, anti-Castro exiles might have set him up to take the blame for the assassination by killing Kennedy themselves and then framing Oswald by planting his rifle at the Texas School Book Depository. Another, even more complex scenario: anti-Castro Cubans had lied to Oswald and convinced him that they, too, were Castro supporters, and that he could best support the Cuban government by killing Kennedy. After the assassination, some anti-Castro exile groups had tried to argue that Oswald was in fact an agent of Havana and that Kennedy’s murder needed to be answered with an immediate American invasion of Cuba. “That was my major suspicion—the anti-Castro community, largely centered in Florida, wanted to effectively frame Castro for the assassination, so they could trigger a war,” Slawson recalled. “That’s what made the Silvia Odio story so interesting to me.”