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

by Philip Shenon

  Secretary of State Dean Rusk was called before the commission on Wednesday, June 10, to answer questions about his department’s performance. David Slawson was the staff lawyer responsible for preparing the list of questions for Rusk. He had always found the dour, fifty-five-year-old Georgian to be a remarkably unimpressive figure—a view widely shared, it turned out, inside the Kennedy administration. “Rusk seemed to be a deliberate non-thinker,” Slawson decided.

  Kennedy had chosen Rusk, a career diplomat, to run the State Department over several more high-profile, certainly more charismatic candidates because the president “intended to be his own Secretary of State,” according to Kennedy’s friend and adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. As time went on, the president despaired of Rusk’s meekness and his unwillingness to voice an opinion. “It was generally impossible to know what he thought,” Schlesinger wrote. “His colorlessness of mind appeared almost compulsive.” Jacqueline Kennedy told Schlesinger shortly after the assassination that her husband had intended to replace Rusk in a second term. “Dean Rusk seemed to be overtaken by that apathy and fear of making the wrong decision,” she said. “It used to drive Jack crazy.”

  Rusk had been kept on at the department by Johnson to show continuity with Kennedy’s foreign policy, and Rusk, seemingly more comfortable with a fellow southerner in the White House, became more assertive. He would go on to become a public champion of Johnson’s plans to escalate the military commitment in Vietnam.

  In his testimony to the commission, Rusk had little to offer beyond what the State Department had been saying consistently since Kennedy’s death—that it did not believe the Soviets or Cubans were involved. “It would be an act of rashness and madness for Soviet leaders to undertake such an action,” he said. “It has not been our impression that madness has characterized the actions of the Soviet leadership in recent times.” As for Cuba, “it would be even greater madness for Castro or his government to be involved.”

  Rankin stepped in, asking Rusk if he had read the cables sent to Washington immediately after the assassination from then U.S. ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann, who was convinced that Castro was behind the murder. Rusk acknowledged that he had read the cables and that they had “raised questions of the most far-reaching character involving the possibility” of a foreign conspiracy, “so I had a very deep personal interest in that at the time.” But the investigation of those allegations by the CIA and the FBI in Mexico and elsewhere had since “run its course,” as Rusk put it, without proof of Cuban involvement.

  Ford pressed his criticism that the department had been too quick to make public statements immediately after the assassination that seemed to rule out a foreign conspiracy. Rusk defended the statements: “We did not then have evidence of that sort, nor do we now, and the implications of suggesting evidence in the absence of evidence would have been enormous.”

  Ford: “I don’t understand that.”

  Rusk: “Well, for us to leave the impression that we had evidence that we could not describe or discuss, when in fact we didn’t have the evidence on a matter of such overriding importance, could have created a very dangerous situation in terms of—”

  Ford interrupted: “Wouldn’t it have been just as effective to say ‘no comment’?”

  Rusk: “Well, unfortunately, under the practices of the press, no comment would have been taken to confirm that there was evidence.”

  For the questioning of Rusk, Ford was, as usual, well briefed, and he decided to quiz Rusk on whether the secretary of state had ever bothered to acquaint himself with evidence that might still point to a Communist conspiracy. He asked Rusk if he had been aware of news reports that Castro, just weeks before the assassination, had warned publicly that he would retaliate with violence against American leaders who had targeted the Cuban dictator and his colleagues for assassination.

  Rusk said he recalled reading nothing, before or after the president’s murder, about Castro’s threats.

  * * *

  After Rusk’s testimony, Ford was convinced that the State Department should not “get off scot-free” in the commission’s final report. Two days later, he telephoned Rankin to make the point. Rankin was out of the office, so Ford instead talked to Slawson, who was then drawing up lists of questions for others from the department. “We cannot afford to be light or easy on the witnesses,” Ford told him. “The burden to prove that they acted properly is on them. We should make it as tough as possible for them. Our proper role is the ‘devil’s advocate.’”

  Ford asked Slawson what he thought of the State Department’s contacts with Oswald over the years and whether the department could have done more to stop him from getting his chance to kill the president. Slawson said he could not see how the department bore any responsibility for the assassination. The decision to allow Oswald to return to the United States “seemed to have been correct”; other Americans who had defected behind the Iron Curtain and then changed their minds had been treated much the same way, Slawson said.

  It was not the answer that Ford was looking for. He thought the State Department’s decision to allow Oswald to return had been made “much too glibly and routinely.” If Slawson was not going to get tough on Rusk’s deputies, Ford made clear, he would.

  42

  THE OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR

  THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 1964

  J. Edgar Hoover insisted on reviewing every important FBI document before it was sent to the commission. If the FBI uncovered new evidence related to the assassination, or if the bureau had a response to questions posed by one of the commissioners or the staff, the information was passed to the commission in the form of a letter on bureau stationery signed by Hoover. He sent hundreds of letters to the commission during the course of the investigation—often several a day—and they had a standard format. Each was addressed directly to Lee Rankin (“Dear Mr. Rankin”) and dispatched by armed couriers to the commission’s offices on Capitol Hill. Many of Hoover’s letters were classified TOP SECRET, the words typed across each page.

  When FBI documents arrived, Rankin would share them with Redlich. And if Hoover’s letters were particularly interesting or important, Redlich would in turn show them to his deputy, Mel Eisenberg; the two men, both proud New Yorkers, had become close friends over the months of the investigation. “We shared an office and talked all the time,” Eisenberg said. By June, Eisenberg had returned to his New York law firm part-time, but he was still in Washington two or three days a week. When Hoover’s letters involved questions about possible foreign involvement in the assassination, they were routinely directed to David Slawson.

  On Wednesday, June 17, according to Hoover’s files, the FBI director prepared an especially sensitive, top secret letter to Rankin. The contents were explosive, or at least they had the potential to be. According to Hoover’s letter, it appeared that Cuban diplomats in Mexico City had advance knowledge of Oswald’s plan to kill Kennedy—because Oswald had told them about it. If the information gathered by the FBI was correct, Oswald had marched into the Cuban embassy in Mexico in October 1963 and announced, “I’m going to kill Kennedy.”

  * * *

  Hoover might have feared the commission’s reaction to his letter. What did it mean that Cuban diplomats in Mexico had known weeks in advance about Oswald’s plans to murder the president? Was this evidence of the foreign conspiracy that Hoover had seemed so determined to rule out? More to the point for the FBI, did this information suggest that the bureau had bungled its investigation in Mexico City and that there might still be people there who needed to be tracked down because they had known about, or even encouraged, Oswald’s plans?

  The ultimate source of the information in the letter was, remarkably enough, Fidel Castro himself. The Cuban dictator’s words had been relayed to the FBI from a “confidential” bureau informant who “had furnished reliable information in the past,” Hoover wrote. According to th
e informant, Castro had recently been overheard in Havana talking about what his diplomats in Mexico City had known about Oswald. “Our people in Mexico gave us the details in a full report of how he acted when he came to Mexico,” Castro was quoted as saying.

  According to Castro, Oswald became infuriated when he was told that he would not be granted, on the spot, a travel visa for Cuba. He turned his rage not against the Cuban government but against Castro’s nemesis—Kennedy. Oswald seemed to blame the American president for the breakdown in relations with Cuba that was now making it so difficult for him to begin his new life in Havana. “Oswald stormed into the embassy, demanded the visa, and, when it was refused to him, headed out saying, ‘I’m going to kill Kennedy for this,’” Castro was quoted as saying. He said the Cuban diplomats in Mexico had not taken Oswald seriously and ignored his threat against the president’s life, believing that the young American might be some sort of CIA provocateur. The Cuban government, Castro continued to insist, had nothing to do with the assassination of the president.

  In the letter, Hoover offered no clue to the identity of the bureau’s confidential source in Havana. Years later, the FBI would reveal that it was Jack Childs, a Chicago man who posed as a devoted member of the American Communist Party but was, in fact, working for the FBI. Childs visited Castro in Havana in June 1964, the same month that Hoover prepared his letter to Rankin. Childs’s brother, Maurice, a fellow Communist Party member, also spied for the FBI. The work of the Childs brothers—Operation Solo, the bureau called it—would be considered one of the bureau’s greatest Cold War accomplishments. Under the cover of promoting the cause of Communism, the brothers traveled throughout the Communist world, meeting Khrushchev, Mao, and Castro, among others, and then feeding what they had learned back to the FBI. The bureau’s records showed that the information from the Childs brothers proved remarkably accurate.

  But the commission would never have the chance to ponder the implications of all this—including the possibility that Oswald had announced loudly to Cuban diplomats in Mexico City that he intended to kill the president—because Hoover’s June 1964 letter to Rankin appears never to have reached the commission. What happened to it would remain a mystery decades later. The letter could not be found in the commission’s files stored at the National Archives or in Rankin’s personal files, which his family donated to the archives after his death. Former staff members were perplexed when they heard about the existence of the letter. Eisenberg had no recollection of ever seeing it or of being told about it by Redlich or anyone else. He said he was convinced he would have heard about it if Redlich had seen it, since it was so obviously important. David Slawson was convinced he never saw it either; he said he would have remembered such a “bombshell” document. Although nothing in the public record suggests that Hoover’s letter ever reached the commission, a copy did reach another agency: the CIA. Decades after the Warren Commission completed its investigation, the letter turned up in the agency’s files that were declassified as a result of continuing debate over Kennedy’s death.*

  * * *

  As spring turned to summer in Mexico City in 1964, CIA station chief Winston Scott and his deputies in the U.S. embassy could begin to relax. It appeared they would escape any criticism in the Warren Commission’s final report. The station might have failed to detect the threat that Oswald posed, but the word inside the spy agency was that the Warren report would find no fault in Scott’s operation.

  Most of his key deputies had come under no direct scrutiny at all during the investigation. When the commission’s lawyers visited Mexico City in April, their questions for the CIA were answered almost exclusively by Scott himself; there was no record that they interviewed most of Scott’s deputies, including Anne Goodpasture—Scott’s “right-hand woman”—and David Atlee Phillips, one of Scott’s most trusted covert operatives.

  Phillips, a forty-one-year-old Texan who had been recruited by the agency while working as a newspaperman in Chile in 1950, was in charge of all espionage operations directed against the Cuban embassy. He had long experience in dealing with Cuba; he had been posted undercover in Havana twice in the 1950s and was part of CIA planning for the Bay of Pigs. Scott would describe Phillips as “the finest covert action officer” he had ever worked with. At a time in the early 1960s when James Bond was a new cultural phenomenon, he even looked the part. Strikingly good-looking as a younger man, Phillips had originally sought a career in New York as an actor; after World War II, he was drawn to a very different career, albeit one that would require an actor’s skill, in the newly created CIA.

  In his many years operating undercover, Phillips might have been forgiven for losing track of the false names he was supposed to call himself. He had two formal CIA pseudonyms (Michael C. Choaden and Paul D. Langevin), and he estimated that, over the years, he used as many as two hundred other names and aliases.

  He believed he had an unusually important job in Mexico. The Cuban embassy there was a staging post for Castro “in exporting his ideas of revolution in Latin America,” Phillips said years later. “I was to know what the Cubans were doing in Mexico City, specifically in their embassy, and to try to obtain as much information as possible about their intentions.” He was responsible for recruiting agents to spy against Cuba—most importantly from within the Cuban embassy—as well as to monitor Americans who made contact with the embassy and might offer themselves up as spies for Castro’s government.

  The CIA was not authorized to watch American citizens in Mexico or in any other foreign country “unless they are clearly engaged in the espionage game,” Phillips said later. But if an American visited the Cuban embassy and seemed suspicious, “it would be imprudent not to observe them long enough to find out what they are up to.” In some cases, he recalled, he tried to intercept potential American traitors in Mexico before they had a chance to hand over secrets to the Cubans. He would boast about one particular success in the early 1960s—how he foiled the traitorous plans of a “middle-grade United States military officer” who showed up in Mexico City with plans to sell defense secrets to Cuba. In that case, Phillips dispatched a Mexican agent who “spoke fluent English and could pass for a Cuban intelligence type” to meet with the officer. Pretending to be a Cuban spy ready to pay for the American’s secrets, the Mexican agent told the officer to return home to the United States to await further instructions from Havana. The investigation was then turned over to the FBI. “I don’t know how the case turned out,” Phillips wrote. “But it must have been a shock to the disloyal military man when, eventually, there was a knock on his door” and the caller was the FBI.

  After the assassination, Phillips insisted that Oswald had never fallen into the category of somebody worth paying much attention to, even after he was seen at both the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico; he was just a “blip on the station’s radar screen.” At the time of Oswald’s visit, he said, Oswald seemed to be no more than an adventurous American tourist who wanted a visa that would give him a chance to see life in a Communist country. His past exploits, including his failed defection to the Soviet Union, would only be learned later, after Oswald had left Mexico and it was too late for the CIA to act, Phillips said. Before the assassination, Phillips acknowledged, he had known the name of Silvia Duran. The CIA’s Mexico City station was well aware of her tangled romantic life, including her reported affair with the former Cuban ambassador to Mexico. Phillips said he believed he had read a transcript—in October, before the assassination—of a wiretapped telephone conversation between Duran and Soviet diplomats about visa requests involving an American man who would later turn out to be Oswald. But the conversation “didn’t mean anything to me, I’m sorry to say, until after the assassination.”

  Phillips said years later that he came to the conclusion that Oswald was “kind of a loony fellow who decided to shoot the president—and he did” and that there was “no evidence to show that the Cubans or the Soviets put him up to it.”

  * *
*

  Phillips thought he met with some of the Warren Commission staff members when they visited Mexico, although the commission’s paperwork made no mention of his name. His actions would not draw intense scrutiny until years later, when congressional investigators and others questioned whether Phillips had lied about his knowledge of Oswald. In the years to come, Phillips grew angry over conspiracy theories that suggested he and his CIA colleagues might have tried to recruit Oswald to spy against Cuba or that they had bungled an operation—similar to the one with the traitorous American military officer—in which they tried to intercept Oswald in Mexico City before he made contact with the Cubans. Phillips said the idea that he had been part of “a cover-up of the murder of one of my presidents disturbs me a great a deal, and my children.”

  But it is possible that no one—in the CIA or anywhere else in the government—did more to confuse the record about Lee Harvey Oswald and what the government had known about him before Kennedy’s assassination. At times, Phillips’s effort to muddy the record about what had happened in Mexico seemed almost pathological. He was, by profession, a man who traded in deception. It seemed, at times, that he was simply unable to tell the truth, if he knew it, about Oswald’s visit to Mexico. Even as he continued to insist that Oswald had been only a “blip” on the CIA’s radar, the agency eventually declassified cables showing that Oswald had in fact been closely tracked in the streets of the Mexican capital and that the CIA had alerted the FBI, the State Department, and other agencies—before the assassination—to his activities there.

  More significant, perhaps, were Phillips’s repeated misstatements under oath about his own whereabouts in September and October of 1963, when Oswald was in Mexico. While he initially claimed that he had been in Mexico throughout Oswald’s visit, CIA records showed that Phillips was out of the country for much, if not all, of the period. He was, at the time, either in Washington or in Miami. During his visit to Miami, he worked out of a CIA office that was helping mobilize groups of anti-Castro Cuban exiles—including at least one of the groups that Oswald had tried to infiltrate earlier in the year.