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

by Philip Shenon

  The next day, Griffin and Hubert mounted something close to an insurrection. They sent a memo to Rankin and Willens, recommending that the commission leave questions about Ruby and about Oswald’s murder out of the commission’s final report entirely. “We do not think the Ruby aspects of the case should be included,” they wrote. “There is no possibility that this work can be properly done so as to be useful in the final report.”

  They said the commission could offer the public a sensible explanation for why questions about Ruby were not addressed, given his continuing appeal of his murder conviction. “If Ruby’s conviction is reopened and our report is in any way hostile to Ruby, the commission could be justly criticized for issuing a report which impaired his right to a fair trial,” the two lawyers wrote. Including material about Ruby in the report could create a serious conflict of interest for the chief justice. “Is it proper,” they asked, “for a commission of the high rank and prestige of this commission to comment extensively about a person whose case is on appeal and will surely get to the United States Supreme Court?”

  Willens’s response was blunt. He told them to finish the job as best they could and not to expect more help. It was not up to them to decide what information got into the commission’s report. “We should proceed as though we were definitely going to publish something on this subject,” he wrote.

  Griffin and Hubert stepped up their protest, this time with an eleven-page memo to Rankin that listed all of their unanswered questions about Ruby. They cited the many gaps in the commission’s evidence about Ruby’s activities in the months before Kennedy’s assassination. They also outlined an explosive theory about ties between Ruby and Oswald: “We believe that the possibility exists, based on evidence already available, that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald. We suggest that these matters cannot be left ‘hanging in the air.’ They must either be explored further or a firm decision must be made not to do so, supported by stated reasons for the decision.”

  The memo essentially called the bluff of their superiors, and it produced what Willens later called “substantial discussion” about what could be done to satisfy Griffin and Hubert. In a memo dated June 1, Willens told Griffin to “submit to me in writing in the next few business days every investigative request” that “was necessary to complete the investigation.” That same day, Hubert announced to Rankin that he would leave the investigation by the end of the week. Bitter over how the commission had ignored his work, Hubert had been planning for weeks to scale back his work on the commission and return to New Orleans. Now, he wanted to leave entirely. He told Rankin he needed two days “to clean out my desk and also to vacate my apartment.” He said he would be available to return to Washington on weekends, if needed, for special projects and that he would travel to Dallas if the commission finally took Ruby’s testimony.

  That, it was decided, would not be necessary. Days later, when the commission finally scheduled a trip to Texas to question Ruby, Hubert and Griffin were not invited, and Arlen Specter went in their place. Their colleagues felt badly for Hubert and Griffin. According to David Belin, they were “brilliant lawyers who were crushed that they were not allowed to be present at the interrogation of the man they had been investigating for so many months.” Later, however, Griffin insisted he understood and accepted the decision to exclude him. After his confrontation with Sergeant Dean, “I had become an embarrassment,” he said. His reappearance in Dallas might stir up local officials in protest.

  * * *

  The man who was at the center of so much turmoil inside the Warren Commission, Jack Ruby, had spent most of the winter and spring in a jail cell in Dallas—occasionally trying to hurt, if not kill, himself.

  As defense lawyers prepared to appeal his conviction for Oswald’s murder, Ruby was being held at the Dallas county jail. On April 26, just after midnight, he tricked guards into getting him a glass of water so he could try again to injure himself. When the guards stepped away, Ruby charged into the concrete wall of his cell, headfirst. He was found, bleeding and unconscious, and taken to a hospital for X-rays, which revealed no serious injury. In searching his cell, guards discovered that he had begun removing the lining from his prison clothes, apparently to make a noose.

  The next afternoon, Ruby had a visitor—Dr. Louis West, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma Medical Center, who had been hired as a consultant by lawyers handling Ruby’s appeal. West met with Ruby in a private interview room and found him “pale, tremulous, agitated and depressed.” He could see the large cut on Ruby’s head. Why had he tried to hurt himself? the doctor asked.

  Ruby said he felt guilty. “The Jews of America are being slaughtered,” he replied. “Twenty-five million people.” They were being killed in retaliation for “all the trouble” he had created by murdering Oswald. Ruby said his own brother, Earl, was among the victims of this genocide—“tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated and burned in the street outside the jail.” Ruby said he could “still hear the screams” of the dying Jews. “The orders for this terrible ‘pogrom’ must have come from Washington, to permit the police to carry out the mass murders without federal troops being called out or involved,” he told West. He was responsible for “a great people with a history of 4,000 years to be wiped out.”

  When West tried to assure him he was wrong, Ruby “became more suspicious of my sincerity and once or twice seemed about to attack me,” the psychiatrist said.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know about it—everybody must know about it,” Ruby snapped. He had smashed his head against the wall “to put an end to it.”

  In his report to defense lawyers, West said that Ruby referred frequently to Oswald, describing him as “the deceased” or “that person.”

  The next day, West went to see Ruby again, and he seemed in better condition. Still, as West watched, Ruby experienced hallucinations that caused him to “quickly rise, move to a corner of the room and stand with head cocked, eyes wide and darting about.” At another moment, Ruby “crawled under the table to listen” to the voices he was hearing. “The hallucinations were of human groans and cries, sometimes of children or a child,” West wrote. Ruby believed they were coming from “Jews under torture.”

  West said he was convinced this was not play-acting. “Ruby is technically insane at this time,” he concluded. Ruby was “obviously psychotic—he is completely preoccupied with the delusions of persecution of the Jews on his account. He feels hopeless, worthless and guilty because he is to blame for the mass-murders of his own people.” Ruby did not belong in jail, West said. “This individual should be in a psychiatric hospital for observation, study and treatment.”

  Two weeks later, a Dallas psychiatrist, Robert Stubblefield, visited Ruby at the request of the judge in Ruby’s trial, and he agreed that Ruby was severely mentally ill and in need of hospital treatment. Ruby readily acknowledged to Stubblefield that he had killed Oswald, and that he had done it—as he had claimed from the beginning—to help Jacqueline Kennedy. “I killed Oswald so Mrs. Kennedy would not have to come to Dallas and testify,” he said. “I loved and admired President Kennedy.”

  Ruby insisted, again, that he had acted alone in murdering Oswald, Stubblefield reported. His enemies “think I knew Oswald, that it was a part of some plot,” he told the psychiatrist. “It’s not true. I want to take a polygraph test to prove that I did not know Oswald, that I was not involved in killing President Kennedy. After that, I don’t care what happens to me.”

  31

  THE STATE DEPARTMENT

  WASHINGTON, DC

  TUESDAY, APRIL 7, 1964

  In the final days of planning for their trip to Mexico City, David Slawson and William Coleman decided they had no higher priority there than to arrange an interview with Silvia Duran. Her importance to the investigation had only grown in the weeks since January, when the two lawyers heard her name for the first time. “Duran could be my mo
st important witness,” Slawson told himself. “Just imagine what she might know.” At the request of the CIA, Duran was going to be cited, by name, as an essential source for information in the commission’s final report about Oswald’s visit to Mexico. The CIA was eager not to give away any details of its elaborate photo-surveillance and wiretapping operations in Mexico City. Instead, the agency wanted the commission, whenever possible, to attribute information only to Duran if her testimony overlapped with what the CIA had also learned through its spycraft. If the CIA had its way, what Duran disclosed to her Mexican interrogators—or, at least, what the Mexicans claimed she had disclosed—would be the only publicly available record of many of Oswald’s activities in Mexico.

  The day before their departure, Slawson and Coleman were invited to the State Department for a briefing by Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann, the former American ambassador in Mexico City; he had left Mexico four months earlier. Slawson and Coleman were ushered through the lobby, past the rows of brightly colored foreign flags that decorated the hallways, and into Mann’s offices. He invited the two lawyers to take a seat, and he apologized for the unpacked boxes; he was still settling back into Washington, and it had been a busy time. In his new job, he said, he oversaw all Latin American affairs for the State Department and, given his growing friendship with President Johnson, a fellow Texan, he was a frequent visitor at the White House.

  Since Slawson had finally been given a chance only two weeks earlier to read through all of Mann’s top secret cable traffic from Mexico from late November, he knew just how valuable Mann’s perspective might be on the question of a foreign conspiracy. So Slawson and Coleman asked the question directly: Was Mann still convinced that the Kennedy assassination was a Cuban plot?

  He was, he said, even if he still could not prove it. Mann felt “in my guts” that Castro was “the kind of dictator who might have carried out this kind of ruthless action, either through some hope of gaining from it or simply as revenge.” The fact that Oswald had visited both the Cuban and the Russian embassies before the assassination “seemed sufficient … to raise the gravest concerns” that Oswald had acted at the direction of the Cubans, possibly with the tacit agreement of their Soviet backers. Mann said his suspicion of a Communist plot had only grown stronger after he learned about the Nicaraguan spy in Mexico City who claimed to have seen Oswald being paid $6,500 in the Cuban embassy, and after learning about the intercepted phone call between Cuba’s president and the country’s ambassador to Mexico, in which the two Cubans talked about the rumors that Oswald had been paid off.

  Mann excused himself, saying he had to leave for another meeting, although he invited Slawson and Coleman to consult with him again after their trip. As he shook their hands good-bye, Mann turned to Slawson and asked if the commission felt he had overreacted to the evidence. Had he been “unduly rash” in suspecting a Cuban conspiracy in the assassination? No, Slawson replied. Although the evidence increasingly pointed away from any foreign involvement in Kennedy’s death, the commission’s investigators had “found nothing in what the ambassador had done to be unjustified.”

  In the days before the trip, Slawson received a separate briefing from the CIA on what to expect in Mexico City. “The CIA told me that Mexico City was a spy headquarters, so to speak, for lots of countries—like Istanbul used to be in detective thrillers. The spies always met in Istanbul.” In the early 1960s, Mexico City was a capital of Cold War espionage, and Slawson was excited to see it for himself.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, April 8, Slawson and Coleman, accompanied by Howard Willens, boarded an Eastern Airlines plane at Dulles Airport and flew to Mexico City, arriving that evening at six. They were met at the airport by Clark Anderson, the FBI’s legal attaché in Mexico. Because of the color of his skin, Coleman was used to being harassed when he traveled, both at home and abroad, and an immigration officer tried to block his entry to the country, questioning whether he had proper vaccination papers. He was waved through after an Eastern Airlines manager noted “something to the effect that Mr. Coleman was a representative of the Warren Commission,” Slawson wrote later.

  Coleman was nervous throughout the visit, fearing his life was in danger because of the secrets he knew from the commission. He had known threats of violence in the past—they were common for anyone prominent in the civil rights movement—but it was more frightening to face that danger in the streets of a foreign capital. If there had been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, it seemed possible to Coleman that some of Oswald’s coconspirators were still in Mexico, eager to kidnap him and force him to share what he knew. “If the Mexicans were involved in the conspiracy, maybe they would kill me,” he worried. That first night, he had trouble sleeping in his room at the Continental Hilton Hotel, especially after he heard a mysterious rustling.

  “About three o’clock in the morning, I could hear scratching at the windows, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, somebody’s come to kill me,’” Coleman remembered. “I’d better get the hell out of here.… I was scared as hell.”

  The next day, he asked a CIA official standing outside the hotel if there had been any threat. No, the CIA man assured him. “Don’t worry, we watched you all night.”

  That morning, the commission’s delegation arrived at the sprawling American embassy compound on Paseo de la Reforma, where they were introduced to Winston Scott, the CIA’s station chief, and to the newly arrived ambassador, Fulton Freeman, who had been in the city only two days. At a meeting with Scott and the ambassador, Coleman explained that the commission lawyers planned to meet with Mexican officials and hoped to conduct depositions, especially with Duran. Freeman had been briefed enough to know how important Duran was, and how delicate a subject she was for the Mexican government. The ambassador said that “seeing Silvia Duran would be a highly sensitive matter and that it should be discussed fully” before anyone approached her, Slawson recalled. Freeman said he would give his approval for an interview with Duran “so long as we saw her in the American Embassy and made clear to her that her appearance was entirely voluntary.”

  Slawson and Coleman met separately with Anderson and his FBI colleagues in the embassy. Although Anderson would concede years later how limited the bureau’s investigation in Mexico City had been, he left his visitors that day with the impression that the FBI had been aggressive in following up on leads about Oswald. Anderson gave off “a very good impression of competence,” Slawson wrote later.

  The commission lawyers asked Anderson what he made of Duran. He said he believed she was a “devout Communist” who, while married and the mother of a young child, had a reputation for a scandalous private life. As Anderson put it, she was a “Mexican pepperpot” and notably “sexy.” He agreed with the ambassador that a request to interview her would be a “touchy point” for the Mexican government, although he said he would try to help. He had good news for them about Duran—just that morning, the FBI had finally obtained a copy of her signed statement to her Mexican interrogators about Oswald, a document the commission had previously known nothing about. Slawson and Coleman said they wanted a copy as soon as possible.

  * * *

  The two lawyers spent much of the afternoon with Scott, and they found that the CIA station chief lived up to his reputation for unusual intelligence. He impressed Slawson with his milky, southern-bred charm, and the two men bonded over the discovery of their shared love of math and science. Both talked about how they had almost ended up in academia—Slawson trained in physics at Princeton, Scott in mathematics at the University of Michigan. “It was common ground,” Slawson remembered. “There was something simpatico between us.” (Since Scott operated undercover for the CIA, identified officially to the Mexican government as an employee of the State Department, Slawson removed all references to his real name in his later reports about Mexico City, replacing it with the single letter “A.”)

  Slawson and Coleman were impressed when Scott took them downstairs in the embassy to a
soundproof safe room for his initial briefing about Oswald. “It was way down in the basement—it may have even been in a subbasement,” Slawson remembered. “Everything that was told to us in the safe room or shown to us was considered top, top secret.” During the briefing, which was also attended by the embassy’s number-two CIA officer, Alan White, Scott turned on a small radio; he said it would muffle the sound of their conversation, a precaution in case someone was trying to listen in. “It was all very cloak-and-dagger,” Slawson said.

  As he began the briefing, Scott went out of his way to convince the visiting lawyers that he and the agency intended to cooperate fully with the commission and that he intended to hold nothing back, even at some risk to the CIA. He said he understood that the lawyers had “been cleared for Top Secret and that we would not disclose beyond the confines of the commission and its immediate staff the information we obtained through him without first clearing it with his superiors in Washington,” Slawson recalled. “We agreed to this.”

  Scott then described, in detail, how Oswald had been tracked in Mexico using some of the CIA’s most sophisticated surveillance technology, including wiretaps of almost all phones at the Soviet and Cuban embassies, as well as with the banks of hidden cameras mounted outside the two embassies. The exhaustive surveillance had begun, he said, within hours of Oswald’s first appearance at the Cuban embassy. He then described how the Mexico City station had responded to the assassination, immediately compiling dossiers on “Oswald and everyone else throughout Mexico” who might have had contact with the alleged assassin. He pulled out the transcripts of what he said were Oswald’s phone calls to the Cuban and Soviet embassies. The lawyers raised Duran’s name, and Scott acknowledged that she had been of “substantial interest to the CIA” long before the Kennedy assassination because of her affair with a senior Cuban diplomat, Carlos Lechuga, while he was Cuba’s ambassador in Mexico; Lechuga had gone on to become his nation’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York. After the assassination, Scott said, the CIA had worked closely with Mexican authorities, “especially on the Duran interrogations.”