by J. W Lateer
At the same time that Otepka was handed his termination letter, the Senate was ending debate of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The campaign in favor of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was run by Robert Kennedy in a very ruthless manner. It was claimed by opponents that FBI and CIA files were used to blackmail some senators.
A true discussion of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (NTBT) would begin with the fact that the Eisenhower Administration had agreed to a test ban moratorium in 1958. Author Gill would characterize the proponents of the NTBT as far-leftists and wishful thinkers. According to critics, the Eisenhower moratorium had allowed the Soviets to catch up and surpass U.S. [nuclear weapons] science. Supposedly, Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy saying “the time has come to put an end…to nuclear tests.” “This has become a giveaway” said Everett Dirksen. Senator Dodd was expected to lead the opposition to the NTBT. Dodd, however, switched sides and called for a “limited test ban.”
The list of those who in the end opposed the NTBT reads like a “who’s who” of ultra-right partisans. In this regard, Gill mentions General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The most well-known opponents in the end were Dr. Edward Teller, and several military men, among them Lewis Strauss, Admiral Arleigh Burke and Admiral Arthur Radford. General Thomas Power, still the head of the Strategic Air Command, was the only active-duty officer to oppose the treaty publicly. With this, he [Power] forfeited his expected promotion to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the Senate debates, opponents were Strom Thurmond, Barry Goldwater, Richard Russell (Chairman of the Armed Services Committee), John Stennis, and Frank Lausche of Ohio, the only Northern Democrat who opposed it. The bill passed 80-19. Notably, author Gill neglects to mention that the NTBT in the end outlawed only above ground testing. As we know now with the benefits of hindsight, underground testing proved to be more than adequate in creating ever-more destructive nuclear weapons.
Upon contemplating the cost of hiring a lawyer, Otepka was told by SISS that they would find the money to pay for his lawyer although they never lived up to that promise. One of the press officers of State had publicly confirmed the charges against Otepka on September 26, 1963. Strange things began to happen. News of the charges against Otepka was released in, of all places, Dallas, Texas. Dr. Robert Morris, the President of the University of Dallas and a former chief counsel of SISS was the person who released them.
Perhaps most importantly, Chairman Eastland, heretofore silent regarding SISS, stated in the press “The powers of Congress are at stake, and I intend to protect Mr. Otepka by every means at my command.” Rusk had always, to this point, refused to appear before SISS. Dodd flew to New York [where Rusk was] to deliver a subpoena. SISS source George Pasquale told them that Stanley Holden had told him of the plot to bug Otepka’s office. All of this activity creates the picture of frantic desperation.
By far the most important event in the SISS-State drama occurred on October 3, 1963. On that day, the day after Dodd confronted Rusk in New York, Stanley Holden suffered a mysterious “accident.” Like Otepka, Holden had been under clandestine surveillance for some time. Holden had been the chief of the State Department’s electronics unit. Holden had investigated the surveillance and had followed bugging wires to a point very close to the office of Elmer Hill, another electronic surveillance expert at the State Department. Holden and Joe Rosetti had gone to John Francis Reilly’s office to confront him regarding the surveillance. Reilly denied knowing anything. It was on this same October 3 that it was established that Reilly knew for a fact that Holden had been feeding information to Otepka.
It was at this point that George Pasquale called Holden’s home. Holden’s wife told Pasquale that Thursday afternoon Stan had suffered a severe face injury. His face and tongue had been badly cut. Stitches had been required. Mrs. Holden refused to give Pasquale any information on the cause of the accident. There were soon reports that Holden had been beaten up by the Reilly faction in order to prevent him from testifying to SISS. With the painful tongue injury, Stanley Holden could not talk about anything that day. On top of his injuries, Holden was confronted in his own home by Robert J. McCarthy. McCarthy was a Kennedy loyalist and investigator. There, McCarthy screamed at Holden, “Don’t you have any loyalty at all?”
The injuries to Stanley Holden are treated by some as just another background fact regarding the State-SISS confrontation. However, Holden’s injuries were more than business as usual. One would have to go back to the caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks in 1856 to find an example of a similar act of violence between participants in the operation of the Federal Government. (There were later, of course, numerous witnesses who died violently just prior to giving testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations). But the violence involving Stanley Holden was different in that it was open, notorious and occured in an epic confrontation between the Executive and the Legislative branches of the U.S. Government.
A mere six weeks later, the President of the U.S. lay dead, a victim, apparently, of what would be a cycle of violence, possibly hastened by the attack on Holden. This event, in addition to the JFK assassinatin, could have combined with the growing frequency of extremist church bombings and the insurrection against integration at Ole Miss to fuel passions. Perhaps beginning in these three weeks in 1963, one could date the real start of the violence of the 1960s.
There is something about the attack on Holden that bears the personal brand of Robert Kennedy and his aide and assistant, Walter Sheridan. Robert Kennedy was constantly acting with the desire never to be outdone. From the perspective of your author, this attack on Holden would fit perfectly into the events whereby certain people might become desperate enough to murder a President. Apparently the specter of U.S. foreign policy reverting to the control of people like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, (albeit moderated by Walter Rostow and Dean Rusk), was way too much to take for men like James O. Eastland and Everett Dirksen. These conservatives were looking at a future whereby the State Department would become agnostic on the issue of Communism. The looming situation which could find officials like Adlai Stevenson, Senator Paul Douglas and Eleanor Roosevelt even partially in control State Department policy, was just too much for the conservatives of both parties in Congress.
After the confrontation between Senator Dodd and Dean Rusk, Rusk worked with Undersecretary of State George Ball to come up with a reply to the committee. As a defensive measure, Rusk came up with a demand that SISS give him access to all the information in the possession of SISS. JFK was confronted with the Otepka issue in an October 9 press conference. Kennedy replied that the matter would go from Rusk to the State Department, then to the Civil Service Commission and finally, into the courts. On October 21, 1963, just four weeks prior to the assassination, Rusk finally appeared before SISS. Seven of the nine members of SISS were present. Rusk testified that “the Department of State, like any foreign office in any important country, has real security problems.” Rusk listed four major issues:
1. The Otepka case.
2. The new passport regulations.
3. The reorganization of Abba Schwartz’s Bureau of Security and consular affairs.
4. Certain aspects of the security practices within the Department.
Not under oath, Rusk said “I can assure you, however, that the charges were not brought [against Otepka] in retaliation for Mr. Otepka’s testimony before this Subcommittee, nor do they mark any attempt by the Department to interfere with the work of the subcommittee.”
Rusk claimed substantial compliance with the 1962 SISS recommendations, citing that only six waivers had been issued since the SISS recommendations. Rusk cited the decision that all FBI and CIA reports dealing with counter-intelligence be sent directly to the Bureau of Intelligence Research to help information to flow to the highest level. Rusk demanded that before any SISS hearing, the Chairman should send to State a statement of the scope and nature of the inquiry. Author Gill presents one of his rare o
penly biased conclusions, saying that the request of Rusk of advance notice of issues was an attempt to “control all witnesses and any information the subcommittee would receive from his department.”
This statement by Gill goes directly against the existing Supreme Court cases which required the witness before Congressional Committees to have notice about what the issues were regarding his testimony as a matter of due process, so he could know to which questions he could legally be required to respond. This prohibited wide open “fishing expeditions” which, under statute, could lead direcly to criminal prosecution. In effect, the witness, under these circumstances, should be entitled to know, in advance, of what criminal liabilities [if any] he might be facing. Rusk cited the 1948 Truman directive number 9835. Rusk also raised the specter of Joe McCarthy, because of which, Senators were afraid of being branded “McCarthyites.”
Senator McClellan protested, “I don’t see any reason why there is such a great secrecy between the Executive Branch and this committee?” McClellan mentioned “arbitrary attitudes” which he would oppose. When asked if Otepka had been dismissed because of his cooperation with SISS, Rusk said, “It was nothing to do with it.”
Senator Hruska got Rusk to admit that the formal charges against Otepka involved matters supplied to SISS by Otepka. Rusk then threw up the accusation made about the Department of trying to rehire Alger Hiss. Otepka compared himself to a prisoner in a burning prison having to choose between being burned alive, or hanged because of the escape. (OOO p. 306). On October 31, ten days after Rusk’s appearance, a brief letter signed by all the members of SISS was sent to Rusk, handled by Eastland, defending Otepka to the hilt. On November 5, 1963, Otepka was handed his “final” dismissal.
Dean Rusk, with the support of the Kennedy brothers, had thrown down the final gauntlet. The State Department had shown that it would bend the security laws any way they wanted, and they would hire security risks whenever they wished. Author Gill extends this policy quite a bit by saying that State would also push for convergence with Communism and sacrifice anyone in the construction of the “Rostowian dream.”
Tom Dodd did not get along very well with the Kennedys. But because of party dynamics, he could not afford to come out into an open feud with the Kennedys. Dodd, being a Northern Liberal, would have a unique roll in the Otepka controversy unlike his fellow Senators from the deep South. Bluntly, before a Senate Chamber mostly full, he declared [the firing of Otepka] “an affront to the Senate and a denial of its powers.” Dodd argued regarding the statute that gave the right of any Civil Service employee to turn over information to Congress. The reign of Bobby Kennedy in the Justice Department had made many in Congress fearful of wiretapping and surveillance. In Massachusetts, testimony had claimed that an agency of the Justice Department had permanently tapped the central phone exchange throughout Washington D.C.
In the three weeks prior to the JFK assassination there was a great deal of activity regarding the Otepka case, including the issue of wiretapping. It should be noted that in the SISS hearing on November 19, 1963, Senator James O. Eastland exercised his prerogative and chaired the hearing. A small number of newpapers had been following the story all along. One of these journalists was Clark Mollenhoff, who later wrote and published a book dealing with the Otepka case.
The New York Times covered the dismissal of Otepka on its front page. Dean Rusk accepted the resignations of Reilly and Hill yet David Belisle was spared being fired on the grounds that his testimony only involved the reporting of hearsay, not factual knowledge. There were questions emerging as to what the political support for Dean Rusk was on the part of President Kennedy. Some speculated that Rusk was quickly becoming a political liability for Kennedy.
Author Gill stops the action in the Otepka case on November 22, 1963. He begins a diversionary discussion of the role of Otto Otepka in the investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald prior to his, Otepka’s exile. We will summarize this background on the Otepka-Oswald connection as related by authors Mellen and Gill. Picking up on our prior discussion, we have seen that as early as June 1, 1960, the State Department Office of Intelligence Resources and Collection, Bureau of Intelligence Research began an investigation of certain defectors to the Soviet Union. On December 5, 1960, Otepka was asked to start work on a study of these American defectors. Otepka was asked to find out if they had any connection to employees or applicants for employment in the State Department. One of the names on that list was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Author Gill wondered whether, if Otepka had completed that study on Oswald, perhaps Otepka could have foiled the assassination. Despite the fact that the State Department testified that the typical wait time for an American to get a visa to travel from Helsinki, Finland to the Soviet Union was one to two weeks, Oswald got his in two days in October 1959. There were questions on why the U.S. Embassy in Moscow kept Oswald’s passport handy for him to flee back to the United States. Otepka would have raised the question as to who at the State Department was involved in approving the loan of $435.71 from the State Department which Oswald used to finance his return to the U.S. According to Gill, in June 1963 Oswald was granted a visa to return to Russia authorized by Abba Schwartz on one day’s notice. (OOO p. 326).
In writing about these events relating to Oswald, Gill is suggesting that under different rules, Otepka could have foiled the JFK assassination. This implies that Otepka would have had a continuing duty to monitor Oswald as well as any number of other defectors and/or possible spies. It is an apparent fact that Otepka had kept a file on Oswald in his safe and which disappeared when his safe was burglarized by State technical security officials. That seems to clash with what Gill has told us about Otepka’s function as being to investigate State Department employees. For what purpose was Otepka keeping the file on Oswald as an active one? Is Gill implying that Oswald would have been discovered as having a relationship to a State Department employee or applicant? We know that Agent James Hosty of the Dallas FBI was monitoring Oswald. Why would Otepka in the State Department be monitoring Oswald?
One of Johnson’s closest friends in the Senate was Senator Thomas Dodd. “It [the assassination] blotted out the Otepka case at the very moment that it threatened to blow up Dean Rusk’s Department of State.”
It is apparent to this author that William J. Gill had real-time intelligence connections in 1963 and that Gill knew that the timeline of the Otepka case exactly followed the timeline of the JFK assassination. Since your author has recently discovered that Gill was married at some point to a German Countess, he could very likely have been spoon-fed the inside information on the assassination from German sources). Further, let’s just look at the group of conservative Senators of both parties that JFK, Rusk and RFK were battling in the Otepka case. This group would include James O. Eastland, Richard Russell, Everett Dirksen, Sam Ervin, Thomas Dodd and the rest of their close allies. In the injuries suffered by Stanley Holden, the Otepka case had turned violent. Natural inhibitions against wholesale indiscriminate wiretapping had disappeared and were replaced by a feeling of suspicion revolving around surveillance.
Gill acknowledges that the Kennedy assassination had resolved, at least in both the short and intermediate term, the incipient, creeping agnosticism on the issue of international Communism. The plight of Otto Otepka and his dispute with the executive branch would be put on hold for at least five more years thanks to the tragic assassination of JFK. The administrations of LBJ and Nixon put an immediate halt to the advance of the “intelligentsia” who had come together in the three brief years of the JFK administration.
Immediately after the assassination, Lyndon Johnson could count on his friends Thomas Dodd and James O. Eastland who ran SISS to cover up the Otepka case and to try to fix the security problems. “Dean Rusk would prove the most durable [among Kennedy holdovers] of all, though before President Kennedy’s assassination, his position was easily the shakiest, next to Johnson’s…”
Almost the entire record of the Otepka
case was established before the JFK assassination. Some weeks before Otepka’s final SISS testimony, he had received an invitation to appear before the 1964 Republican platform committee at the San Francisco convention. When Otepka asked the State Department for permission to appear, he was denied approval.
It is a monument to the importance to LBJ of SISS, that Senator Thomas Dodd was brought to the White House by LBJ for the purpose of announcing his choice for his Vice-President. Senator Dodd and Hubert Humphrey were both touted as the last two possibilities for LBJ’s V.P.To this author, the [fake] consideration given to Dodd by LBJ for V.P. is another confirmation of the linkage between the Otepka case and the JFK assassination. Senator Dodd himself would have proved utterly incompetent to even function in a nationwide campaign for the Democratic ticket. LBJ, being an astute evaluator of people, would have known this better than anyone. The totally symbolic “courtship” of Thomas J. Dodd for V.P. was an acknowledgment by Johnson that he was ready to reward all of the people who had helped set up as well as cover up the JFK assassination. Dodd had enjoyed the Presidential limelight. He had secured the highest recognition he could expect for many services which he had rendered. The highest of these services was his playing the role as “Joe McCarthy, phase II,” i.e., uniting the John Birchers, the Southern Segregationists and the Northeastern Catholic anti-Communists like Dodd himself.
As
LBJ Assumes Power, Otto Otepka Recedes Into History
But the issue of security at the State Department became a moot point with the accession of LBJ. Like President Truman before him, LBJ came from an atypical southern State. Missouri and Texas were both geographically part of the south, and were dominated by the very large cities of Dallas, Houston, St.Louis and Kansas City. The multitude of connections that were enjoyed by LBJ (especially in his home state of Texas) totally eclipsed the miniscule number of truly loyal colleagues who could assist JFK and RFK. Both Truman and LBJ, as Senators, had focused only on the pork-barrel issues and on the institutional side of the Senate. As LBJ would soon demonstrate, he didn’t really know of, or care about, the quality of information and analysis of foreign policy. The Vietnam War fiasco stands as a testament to that reality. LBJ simply did not care about normalizing relations with China, Russia, Cuba or anywhere else. Because of this quality in LBJ, State Department security became irrelevant. LBJ would take his foreign policy advice from his former colleagues in the Senate or possibly from people like J.Edgar Hoover, the Pentagon or the CIA.
