The Three Barons

by J. W Lateer

  At the following website: [Spartacus –Educational.com/JFKbuckleyW.htm] more information regarding the intelligence role of Mr. William F. Buckley can be found.

  For background on the Scaife Foundation, see: [www.snipview.com/q/Scaife%20Foundations] [search “william j gill” “allegheny foundation’]

  And at: [en.wikepedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife]

  More details about these foundations appear at: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#topic/alt.politics/democrats.d/_C50j3UIrUO]

  Chapter 30

  Otto Otepka, SISS and the JFK Assassination

  The Background of Otto Otepka

  In her updated assassination history, noted JFK author Professor Joan Mellen presents a great deal of significant new research on the subject of State Department Security Analyst Otto Otepka.

  Joan Mellen was apparently the last historian to interview Otepka just prior to his death in 2010. Based on her April 2006 interview, Mellen broke some very important new ground in regard to Otepka. In the interview, Otepka went as far as to suggest that the reason he was hounded out of his Security job at the State Department by Robert Kennedy and others was because of his ongoing investigation of defector Lee Harvey Oswald.

  In this chapter, the focus will be on Otto Otepka and his relationship, not only with his employer the State Department, but more importantly, his relationship with the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, a/k/a SISS. As we have said before, an understanding of the role of Joe McCarthy, the role of Otto Otepka as well as the role of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee are absolutely necessary to properly understand the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

  Your author was in his early teens in 1963 and was very interested in current events. And the name Otto Otepka was in the headlines of the period. That part is basically true. Otepka had become the focus of an important Senate investigation back in the early 1960’s. Although the real connection of Otepka to the Congress was close, Otepka was neither a Teamster, nor an Iron Curtain related spy. He he was, in fact, a somewhat hapless employee of the U.S. Government.

  It is clear that the dynamic forces which caused the JFK assassination were the desperate attempt of the reactionary forces of anti-Communism to preserve their privileges in the democratic capitalistic countries of the West. Many Americans are still around who lived during that period. It is stunning and disheartening, however, that the majority of facts which determined the events from 1945 to 1963 in U.S. history were, and are still, so well hidden that it takes literally years of research to dig out the truth about what was actually going on behind the scenes at the time.

  There were any number of events which highlight the hidden collision between religion, democracy, nuclear security, the press and very wealthy individuals which together gave birth to all the hobgoblins of Communophobia. But more than anything else, the key to understanding those events is to study and understand the fundamental attempt by those hiding in secrecy, to weaken and destroy the office of the President, the elected majority of Congress, legitimate law enforcement agencies, honest judges, justices and the traditionally non-political officers of the military.

  So let’s look at Mr. Otto F. Otepka as a prime example of a front-line soldier in this vicious war for control of the United States Government, which would be for nothing less than control of the entire planet Earth itself.

  Otto F. Otepka was Deputy Director of the United States State Department’s Office of Security in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was fired as the State Department’s chief security evaluations officer on November 5, 1963. He lost his job because he had allegedly furnished classified files to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. Significantly, this firing came only 17 days before the JFK assassination.

  Otto Otepka was important because he was literally almost the only point man and insider in the battle for control of the U.S. State Department. The reader can better understand this battle for control of the State Deparment by trying to understand the actual situation in 1960.

  To conservatives who were hold-overs in the Federal Government and who still represented the Eisenhower administration, it was disturbing to think that JFK and his liberal Democratic friends could gain control of U.S. foreign policy. If this were allowed to happen, it would reverse all the hard work done by Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA, by John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, and not to mention the fervent and nasty victories (if you could call them victories) by the Red-baiters such as Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, HUAC and all the rest during almost the entire decade of the 1950s.

  If we examine the situation of Otepka in the State Department, we can learn about the tactics of these conservative anti-Communists like Joe McCarthy and the Dulles brothers who wanted to impose their party line on the country, despite the fact that they represented only a minority of the opinions that Americans actually held on the issue.

  These extreme anti-communists were a minority of the membership of Congress, a minority of the Federal Judiciary and certainly a minority of members of the military and employees of all levels of government. But they were mostly wealthy, most were rigidly religious, and some were in control of key media outlets. They perceived that their rights and privileges were not just called into question, but that their backs were actually to the wall at the most fundamental level.

  So where did Otto Otepka fit into this picture? Otto Otepka was born in Chicago on May 6, 1915. In 1963, he was about 47 years old. Otepka was a very typical American. He attended Harrison Technical High School in Chicago. After his high school graduation, Otepka continued his education while employed by the U.S. Government starting in 1936. His first position in the government was with the Farm Credit Administration. Otepka received his law degree in June, 1942 by studying in night-school, from Columbus College, now merged with Catholic University of America. The first month following his college graduation, he left the Bureau of Internal Revenue where he had worked for three years and went on to new challenges.

  When World War II broke out, Otepka worked as a personnel classification specialist for the United States Navy. After an honorable discharge, Otepka moved to the U.S. Civil Service Commission as an investigator in 1946. At the Civil Service Commission, Otepka worked almost exclusively on what were being described as “loyalty cases.” In this context, the word “loyalty” basically meant the analysis of whether a person was a believer in the American form of government or whether he held beliefs which were considered Communist or in other ways extreme. It was felt that “loyalty” questions could compromise the employee’s ability to perform his job in the government.

  The definitive work on the case of Otto Otepka is a book entitled The Ordeal Of Otto Otepka by William J. Gill. We introduced Willam J. Gill in the previous chapter. In this book about Otepka (which we will sometimes shorten to “OOO”), author Gill tells us that Otepka was appointed Technical Advisor on Loyalty in the Central Office Investigations Division of the Civil Service Commission in 1947.

  The Beginnings of Anti-Communism and the Issue of Security

  There are at least five terms that describe the legal issues at play in the era of the Red Scare. These terms are 1) espionage, 2) sabotage, 3) loyalty 4) security and 5) sedition. For most of America’s history, anti-spy efforts were mainly directed against the problems of espionage and sabotage. Law enforcement tended to focus on these things rather than the more vague and amorphous problem of loyalty, security and sedition.

  There had been some very notorious instances of sabotage. The most famous was the “Black Tom” explosion in New York City during World War I, where people were killed and a huge portion of the port facilities in New York had been destroyed. And this was just one act by an enemy saboteur.

  The concept of espionage needs little illustration. The Rosenbergs, who sold U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, were espionage artists who did great damage to our country.

  After we consider sabotage and espionage, we next consider �
��loyalty” which has also been known as “sedition.” We have all heard of the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1790’s. So the battle against “disloyalty” or “sedition” also has a long history. But there are many more problems with the enforcement of “loyalty” than battling outright “sabotage” or “espionage.” A flare-up of fear surrounding the issues of loyalty and sedition had occurred at the time of the famous Palmer Raids in 1919. These raids, which were carried out by the Justice Department, were directed against leftists and Anarchists.

  But following the Palmer Raids, the powerful Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone issued an edict to the FBI that every American should be aware of. He decided that the FBI could only investigate persons who were suspected of violating a specific Federal statute. This policy eliminated political witch hunts. Further, this required a hands-off policy regarding those who merely held unpopular beliefs. Remarkably, even though J. Edgar Hoover is often dismissed as a thug, it is important to remember that Hoover observed this hands-off policy laid down by Stone long after Harlan Fiske Stone was no longer Attorney General. This policy was the standard during the entire period between the World Wars.

  It was only when the Soviets along with the U.S. and the U.K. had defeated Hitler that “security” and “loyalty” questions began to emerge, directly targeted against Communism. It could fairly be said that the U.S. government did not attack those who were sympathetic to the Nazi’s in the same way it targeted Communists or Communist sympathizers. In this context, it should be kept in mind that there was no real possibility that Communists could ever take over the United States.

  The drastic methods of slander and blacklisting used by anti-Communists such as Joe McCarthy and his supporters were actually targeted at influencing U.S. foreign policy toward other countries. As we look into the particular battles over the issue of anti-Communism, this will become increasingly clear.

  When it comes to the relationship between between our government and any particular religion, it is the dogma of American civics and education that religion is transparent to the U.S. Government. In that sense, religion is invisible. Religious freedom is the watch-word. And to enforce religious freedom, it is considered necessary to be color-blind to religious issues as such.

  But when the epic battle against Communism began in earnest in 1945, the role of various religions came up to front and center. The American public was told that Soviet Communism was “atheistic.” According to the extreme anti-Communists like McCarthy, that was all anyone needed to know. Whether the Soviet attitude toward religion was any different from our Constitutional ban on establishment of religion was never considered. Americans never knew that Stalin was at one time a student in a religious seminary. Having described the facts and forces of anti-Communism in the 1950’s, let us look at the situation of Otto Otepka and see how the battle against Communism, influenced in part by religion, affected him in his quest to instill “loyalty” into the State Department.

  Otto Otepka Joins the State Department Battle Over Loyalty and Security

  Beginning with his job as State Department Security Evaluator during the McCarthy era, Otto Otepka was one of the most important front-line players, especially following the fall from grace and then the death of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1957.

  Otepka, like McCarthy, had attended a Catholic university. During the period from the middle 1950’s to the late 1960’s, Otepka, like McCarthy, became involved in the furious bureaucratic war against his superiors at State around the issue of loyalty, the same superiors who were targeted by McCarthy.

  Otepka always claimed that he was motivated by a slavish adherence to all the rules. There were several key statutes, regulations, and executive orders which governed State Department Security. Otepka’s job was to weed out subversives (and also homosexuals, alcoholics, and other “high risks”) from the State Department by following these laws and rules.

  However, when we examine Otepka’s application of his vaunted rules, it becomes painfully clear: Otepka’s subjective judgment was the “rule.”

  In the book named Despoilers of Democracy, by Clark Mollenhoff, at p. 244, (hereinafter DOD) says that Otepka considered himself at that point to be a moderating force in this bureaucratic battle against Communism. On June 15, 1953, Otto Otepka transferred from the Civil Service Commission to the Department of State.

  In this struggle, Otepka had been recruited by R.W. “Scott” McLeod. McLeod had been brought into the State Department by the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, to be a hatchet-man for for the vociferous anti-Communist faction at State, which was actually a numerical minority of the State Department employees. In this effort, Otepka began his work as a security evaluator.

  Otepka and Scott McLeod were mentioned in a magazine called The Reporter, in an article titled “Big Brother at Foggy Bottom,” which described the new policies under Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 (which elimiated the distinction between “loyalty” and “security”), and the reaction of State employees to it. As it worked out, in at least one atypical case, Otepka found himself actually engaged in a behind-the-scenes struggle against that “most powerful man in America,” Senator Joe McCarthy.3 The battle was joined in 1953 when the Senator put the heat on the State Department to fire a man named Wolf Ladejinsky.

  It is important to understand the process where conservative Democrats and Republicans wanted to wrest control of the State Department away from Liberal Democrats and the thousands of career diplomats who populated the State Department bureaucracy.

  The State Department Security Case of Wolf Ladejinsky

  Ladejinsky was an influential agricultural economist. He had served in the Department of Agriculture, the Ford Foundation and the World Bank. His focus had been on the Far East. Among other things, Ladejinsky would become an advisor to South Vietnam leader Ngo Dinh Diem, from 1955 to 1961. Ladejinsky’s specialty was land reform.

  Land reform was the practice of taking of estates from wealthy landlords, carving them up and then transferring them to peasant farmers. Such land reform was actually an important issue in the American Revolution, but most Americans don’t realize it.

  Ladejinsky considered land reform to be one of the most effective ways to battle and co-opt Communism. Ladejinsky was actually a strong anti-Communist. The catch was that he thought pro-American anti-Communists could essentially win a “bidding war” against the Communists in China by promising even more to the peasants than the Communists promised.

  This question of outbidding Mao Tse Tung for the hearts of the Chinese peasant could never really be mentioned or seriously discussed. The plan of taking land from landlords and gifting it to tenants was something that wealthy Americans would consider subversive per se, regardless of its potential as an anti-Communist strategy. Any strategy which involved a “bidding war” to win over the Asian peasant, (effectively out-bidding the Communists in the eyes of the peasant), would never even be remotely considered by McCarthy and his backers, even if it actually would work!

  In 1953, McCarthy demanded that the State Department fire Wolf Ladejinsky. In addressing the demands of Senator McCarthy, Otepka became involved in the security evaluation of Wolf Ladejinsky.(see DOD p.245) The evaluation of Ladejinsky had convinced Otepka that he was not a subversive. But soon thereafter, Ladejinsky had his security clearance revoked by others besides Otepka.

  Otto Otepka had cleared Ladejinski while the latter was at State. But Ladejinsky was transferred to the Department of Agriculture, which was run by Secretary Ezra Taft Benson, a militant conservative (even by Eisenhower standards), possibly the most extreme right-wing person in Ike’s administration.

  Ladejinsky was quickly fired by Benson. Benson considered Ladejinsky a “security risk” despite lack of any hard evidence against him. The reason was that, at the time, Ladejinsky had three sisters living in the Soviet Union and that he supposedly had a clearance from the Communist Party to work certain places. It was alleged that Ladejinsky was a member of
two supposedly Communist front organizations. One of these was a small book store, Ladejinsky merely had his name on a customer list. That was only because he had purchased a book at that store and nothing more.

  The press set upon President Eisenhower about the case of Ladejinsky. The focus of this criticism was that Harold Stassen, (the former Republican Governor of Minnesota) had named Ladejinsky to the Foreign Operations Administration to direct land reform in South Vietnam. In that post, Ladejinski had enjoyed an even higher level of security clearance than at State. (The issue of land reform in South Vietnam, as we can now see in light of history, would probably be the most contentious of any possible issue in the entire U.S. Government).

  Another issue regarding the loyalty of Ladejinsky was his association with an entity called Amtorg. Amtorg was the Russian trading agency. Even famous author James Michener had written that Ladejinsky was considered “Communism’s most implacable foe in Asia.” Ladejinsky was still fired.

  Author William J. Gill claimed that he himself, as Otto Otepka’s biographer, had at least one thing in common with Otepka: Gill claimed to be opposed to merely throwing mud on people for political gain. Gill portrays Otepka as a man totally functioning on laws, rules and regulations and not merely following emotion or a political agenda. Though probably true to some extent, as we shall see, Otepka was seemingly more motivated by allegiance to powerful conservatives. This would include Senators from both parties that made up the membership of the formidable Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.

  But prior to 1960, in addition to the Ladejinsky case, Otepka had been involved in two other of the most important cases in his time involving State Department security.