The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  “We tried to get Harvey’s travel vouchers and security file from the CIA, but we were never able to,” recalled Dan Hardway. Hardway was the bright Cornell Law School student to whom the congressional committee gave the weighty task of investigating the CIA’s possible links to the assassination. “One CIA official told me, ‘So you’re from Congress—what the hell is that to us? You’ll be packed up and gone in a couple years, and we’ll still be here.’

  “But we did come across documents that suggested Harvey was traveling a lot in the weeks leading up to the assassination, while he was supposed to be running the Rome station. . . . Near the end of our investigation, I typed up a memo, making my case against Harvey as a leading figure in the crime. I typed it up in the committee’s secure room, on the yellow security paper with a purple border marked ‘Top Secret.’ That memo has since disappeared.”

  While the Miami conspirators made it clear that Bill Harvey was playing a central role in “the big event,” they assured Hunt that the chain of command went much higher than Harvey. Vice President Johnson himself had signed off on the plot, Morales insisted. Hunt found this plausible. As he observed in his memoir, “Lyndon Johnson was an opportunist who would not hesitate to get rid of any obstacles in his way.”

  Hunt was mindful of Washington’s strict “caste system,” but he was convinced that “Harvey’s rank and position was such that a vice president could talk to him.”

  This is where Hunt began to obfuscate. There is no evidence that Lyndon Johnson and Bill Harvey were ever in close contact, and, in fact, the two men’s “rank and position” were disparate enough to make such communication unlikely. It is simply not credible that a man in Johnson’s position would have discussed something as extraordinarily sensitive as the removal of the president with a man who occupied Harvey’s place in the national security hierarchy.

  The man Johnson did know best in the intelligence world was Allen Dulles. Unlike Harvey, Dulles had the stature and the clout to assure a man like LBJ that the plot had the high-level support it needed to be successful.

  Howard Hunt was fully aware of the seating arrangements at the Washington power table. He knew, in fact, that Dulles outranked Johnson in this rarefied circle. Hunt undoubtedly realized that the vice president might be a passive accessory, or even an active accomplice, in what would be the crime of the century. But Johnson was certainly not the mastermind. And yet, loyal to the end, even on his deathbed Hunt could not bring himself to name Dulles—that “remarkable man,” as Hunt once gushed, whom it had been his “honor” to serve.

  In his memoir, Hunt engaged in a kind of sleight of hand, hypothesizing about the likely identities of the conspirators, as if he didn’t know for certain. But in his communications with Saint John, Hunt was more emphatic about the plotters. In addition to Harvey and Morales, the names David Atlee Phillips and Cord Meyer figured prominently in Hunt’s “speculations.”

  Phillips was the CIA counterintelligence specialist who had worked closely with Hunt on the Guatemala coup and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Like Harvey and Morales, Phillips did not belong to the Ivy League elite. The Texas-born, roughly handsome, chain-smoking Phillips had been a nose gunner during World War II, not an OSS gentleman spy. After the war, he rambled around Latin America, trying his hand at acting and publishing before being recruited into the CIA. His covert work won the admiration of Helms, who made him chief of the agency’s Cuba operations after Harvey was whisked off to Rome to escape Bobby Kennedy’s wrath. In that position, Phillips was free to roam within the “yeasty” world of anti-Castro and anti-Kennedy ferment, as Senator Gary Hart later described it.

  Meyer belonged to the agency’s Georgetown set. At Yale, he had dreamed of a writing career and—after returning from the war in the South Pacific, partly blinded by a Japanese grenade—he devoted himself for a time to the cause of world peace. But after he was initiated into the spy fraternity—where he fell under the spell of Jim Angleton—he became chief of the CIA’s culture war, secretly dispersing cash to the literary types whose ranks he once imagined joining. After his beautiful, artistic wife, Mary, left him, Meyer became an increasingly embittered Cold Warrior—and his disposition grew only gloomier when she became a mistress of JFK.

  Hunt carefully refrained from naming Dulles in his confessions, but nearly every CIA official whom he implicated led directly to the Old Man. Dulles had recruited them or promoted them or given them the agency’s most delicate assignments. Meyer was particularly beholden to Dulles, who had saved his career in 1953, when Joe McCarthy tried to purge the agency of those agents who had once been youthful idealists. In the fall of 1963, during the weeks leading up to the Kennedy assassination, Meyer was a guest at Dulles’s home on more than one occasion—along with another important member of Angleton’s shop, Jim Hunt (no relation to Howard), and Angleton himself.

  Howard Hunt might have been wary about joining a JFK plot managed by Bill Harvey. But if he knew that Allen Dulles was at the top of the chain of command, that would have instilled in him all the confidence he needed. Despite his coyness about his own role, some felt that Hunt had been much more than a “benchwarmer.” At one point, the CIA itself seemed poised to make Hunt the fall guy in the crime. In the 1970s, as congressional investigators inched uncomfortably close to some of the CIA’s most disturbing secrets, Hunt’s own colleagues seriously considered throwing him to the wolves.

  In August 1978, as the House Select Committee on Assassinations entered the final stage of its probe, a former CIA official named Victor Marchetti published an eye-opening article in The Spotlight, a magazine put out by the right-wing Liberty Lobby whose pages often reflected the noxious views of the group’s eccentric founder, Willis Carto. Marchetti wrote that CIA officials had decided that if the assassinations committee crept too close to the truth, the agency was prepared to scapegoat Hunt and some of his sidekicks, such as Sturgis. “[Hunt’s] luck has run out, and the CIA has decided to sacrifice him to protect its clandestine services,” Marchetti wrote. “The agency is furious with Hunt for having dragged it publicly into the Nixon mess and for having blackmailed it after he was arrested. Besides, Hunt is vulnerable—an easy target as they say in the spy business. His reputation and integrity have been destroyed. . . . In the public hearings, the CIA will ‘admit’ that Hunt was involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The CIA may go so far as to ‘admit’ that there were three gunmen shooting at Kennedy.”

  Marchetti described this CIA plan as a classic “limited hangout” strategy—spy jargon for releasing some of the hidden facts, in order to distract the public from bigger, more explosive information. While The Spotlight was a sketchy publication, Marchetti himself had credibility. A former Soviet military specialist for the CIA, he had risen to become a special assistant to Helms before resigning in 1969 over disagreements with agency policy. In 1973, Marchetti wrote a critique of the agency, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, which the agency forced his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, to heavily censor. But Marchetti remained a CIA loyalist at heart, and he retained strong ties to the agency.

  In the ensuing uproar over the Spotlight article, Hunt sued for defamation of character, insisting that he had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination, but he ultimately lost his court case. The Liberty Lobby’s attorney, famed JFK researcher Mark Lane, succeeded in convincing the jury that Hunt might indeed have been in Dallas, as his own son came to believe.

  During the trial, Lane uncovered the surprising identities of Marchetti’s sources: Jim Angleton and William Corson, a former Marine officer who had served with Dulles’s son in Korea and later worked for the spymaster. Marchetti was clearly a conduit for the deep rumblings from within Langley. His article was a fascinating window into the CIA’s organizational psychology during a period of the agency’s greatest distress.

  Marchetti himself was troubled by the unanswered questions swirling around the Kennedy assassination. “This is a thing in my mind that is not 100 percent certain�
��there is that two to three percent that remains open,” he said. And much of Marchetti’s suspicion focused on Hunt. “He might have been down there [in Dallas] for some other reason, but . . . who knows?” Some of the evidence about Hunt that came out during the Liberty Lobby trial, added Marchetti, “was just very, very strange.”

  As the CIA prepared its “limited hangout” strategy on the Kennedy assassination, Hunt was not the only officer considered “expendable” by the agency. Bill Harvey, too, felt that he was being hung out to dry when he was subpoenaed by the Church Committee to testify about the CIA’s assassination plots against foreign leaders. Word circulated in Washington that Harvey had gone “rogue.” Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, it was whispered, he had gone off the rails during his exploits in the espionage wilderness—his thinking had become unsound. Harvey was very familiar with the CIA’s character assassination machinery, and he now found himself a target of it: he had never been one of the Fifth Avenue cowboys, and now they were turning on him. Long after he was gone, Harvey’s family still resented the CIA high command for how they had treated him. They “threw him under the bus,” in the words of his daughter, Sally.

  Harvey’s widow, CG, was bitterly aware of the CIA class system. “Bill always had very good opportunities for travel and learning,” she said, still defending her late husband against the agency prejudices. “And for these people to turn up their noses and say that Bill was from nothing, just because he graduated in law school at Indiana University, always made me feel that they were jealous and that they really couldn’t carry his briefcase when it came to intelligence. . . . Bill gave his life to his country.”

  All the stories that came spilling out of the agency about Harvey’s wild ways—his love of guns, his fondness for birdbath-size martinis, his eruptions of black fury at the Kennedys—they were all meant to show that he was the type who could blow his top and do anything. But Harvey’s consistently glowing CIA fitness reports tell a different story. There was nothing rogue about Bill Harvey in these pages—he was portrayed as a dedicated and highly valued professional. Even after Harvey had enraged Bobby Kennedy with his Cuban antics, he continued to win enthusiastic reviews from his superiors. “It is difficult to prepare a fitness report on this outstanding officer, largely because forms do not lend themselves to measuring his many unique characteristics,” began Harvey’s October 1962 report, which cited his “professional knowledge . . . toughness of mind and firmness of attitude.” Harvey, the report concluded, “is one of the few distinctly outstanding officers” in the CIA’s action arm.

  Likewise, after the violently inclined Harvey alarmed F. Mark Wyatt, his Rome deputy, so severely that Wyatt asked to be transferred home, Harvey’s performance continued to be rated “outstanding” by agency officials. Harvey’s March 1965 report commended “his determination to accomplish his basic objectives regardless of the obstacles which he encounters.” The Rome station “must be guided with a strong hand,” the report continued, “which Mr. Harvey is well able to supply.” Dick Helms had sent Wyatt to Rome to help keep an eye on Harvey. But when Wyatt was recalled to Langley and told Helms about the extreme methods that Harvey was employing in Rome, the CIA did nothing to discipline Harvey. Instead, it was Wyatt who found his career stalled.

  Harvey always vehemently denied that he was a reckless maverick. Testifying before the Church Committee, he insisted that he had never done anything that was “unauthorized, freewheeling or in any way outside the framework of my responsibilities and duties as an officer of the agency.” The truly alarming thing is that Harvey was probably telling the truth. But the men who had authorized his extreme actions were quite willing for him to take the blame. Like Hunt, he was “an easy target” for the spymasters.

  Bill Harvey and Howard Hunt both prided themselves on being part of the CIA’s upper tier. But that’s not how these men were viewed at the top of the agency. Hunt liked to brag that he had family connections to Wild Bill Donovan himself, who had admitted him into the OSS, the original roundtable of American intelligence. But it turned out that Hunt’s father was a lobbyist in upstate New York to whom Donovan owed a favor, not a fellow Wall Street lawyer. Everyone knew Hunt was a writer, but they also knew he was no Ian Fleming.

  Hunt didn’t figure out how these men really saw him until it was much too late. “I thought—mistakenly—that I was dealing with honorable men,” he said near the end of his life.

  To the Georgetown set, there would always be something low-rent about men like Hunt—as well as Harvey and Morales. The CIA was a cold hierarchy. Men like this would never be invited for lunch with Dulles at the Alibi Club or to play tennis with Dick Helms at the Chevy Chase Club. These men were indispensable—until they became expendable.

  Hunt, Harvey, and Morales were among the expendable men sent to Dallas in November 1963. But the most expendable of all was a young ex-marine with a perplexing past named Lee Harvey Oswald.

  19

  The Fingerprints of Intelligence

  Lee Harvey Oswald was one of those bright, lost, fatherless boys whom society finds inventive ways of abusing. He never knew his father, Robert, who died of a heart attack before he was born. His mother, Marguerite, suffered from a high-strung disposition and was ill equipped to take care of her three sons. When Lee was three years old, his mother placed him in a New Orleans orphanage known as the Bethlehem Children’s Home, where his two older brothers already resided. Some of the children there fell prey to predatory members of the staff, and Lee was said to have witnessed scenes of sexual exploitation at a tender age. Marguerite withdrew Lee from Bethlehem after a year, and his two brothers came home several months later. But life in the Oswald family continued on a turbulent course, as Marguerite married for a third time and divorced, put her older sons in a Mississippi military school, and moved with Lee to Forth Worth. When Lee’s older brothers fled the domestic chaos and enlisted in the military, he was left adrift with his permanently unsettled mother.

  In the summer of 1952, when Lee was nearly thirteen, Marguerite packed up the two of them and headed to New York, where they moved in with her oldest son, John, who was now married and living in an apartment on the Upper East Side. Life was no more stable for Lee in New York, and he often cut class, riding the subways and roaming the streets. Arrested for chronic truancy, Oswald was confined for three weeks in the city’s Youth House for psychiatric evaluation.

  Dr. Renatus Hartogs, a German-trained physician who was chief psychiatrist at Youth House, found the intelligent and free-floating Oswald to be such an interesting case that he made the thirteen-year-old the subject of one of his seminars. Hartogs’s psychiatric profile of Oswald—which he would reprise for the Warren Commission a decade later—created the pathological framework by which the alleged assassin would be known for many years to come. Oswald, according to Hartogs, was an “emotionally disturbed, mentally constricted youngster” who was “suspicious and defiant in his attitude toward authority.” While a probation officer had found Lee to be a “small, bright and likable boy” with a reasonable explanation for his truancy—he thought school was “a waste of time” and “the other children made fun of him because of his Texas drawl and his blue jeans”—Hartogs saw Oswald as a walking time bomb. The only reason he had not “acted upon his hostility in an aggressive or destructive fashion” was that he had not yet “developed the courage.”

  Hartogs himself was a curious case, one of those intrepid explorers of the human mind who—with government encouragement and funding—had been willing to go to the scientific fringes. His résumé included a stint at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, where Dr. Ewen Cameron conducted his diabolical “Sleep Room” experiments. Hartogs went on to work with Dr. Sidney Malitz of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, which received funding from the Army Chemical Corps and the CIA to conduct drug experiments on unsuspecting patients involving LSD and mescaline. Later, after Hartogs was drummed out of psychiatry by a sensational sex scandal, he turned
himself into a hypnosis expert.

  Young Oswald had a searching mind. After the teenager was handed a pamphlet on a New York street corner about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—the spies condemned to death for passing atomic secrets to the Russians—he was moved to learn about Communism, forcing himself to read the heavy Germanic prose of Karl Marx. Oswald dreamed of an exciting world beyond the cramped hysteria of life with Marguerite—where he could make himself into whomever he wanted to be. I Led Three Lives was his favorite TV show—the serial based on the true story of Herbert Philbrick, the mild-mannered Boston advertising executive who had turned himself into an undercover agent for the FBI. The multilayered secrecy of Philbrick’s life resonated with the boy who yearned to escape the drab one-dimensionality of his own. But ignored at home, and left to fend for himself, Lee’s dreams only made him a soft target. As the teenaged Oswald ventured into the world, he was a mooncalf waiting to be exploited.

  After returning to New Orleans with his mother in 1954, the fifteen-year-old Oswald hooked up with the Civil Air Patrol, a group of young men interested in learning how to fly. The military auxiliary group, which was founded during World War II to help defend America’s coastlines against German and Japanese attack, not only trained future pilots, it inculcated the patriotic Cold War values of the time. Among its founders was David Harold Byrd, a right-wing Texas oilman and defense contractor. Byrd also owned the Texas School Book Depository, the Dallas warehouse where Oswald would be hired in the fall of 1963 and allegedly establish a sniper’s lair on the sixth floor of the building. It was just one of the many curiosities that marked the life of Lee Harvey Oswald.

  In New Orleans, young Oswald’s life began to intersect with older men who saw how he could be of use, including characters who would later have flamboyant walk-on roles in District Attorney Jim Garrison’s valiant but doomed investigation of the Kennedy assassination. David Ferrie—the Eastern Airlines pilot who supervised the local Civil Air Patrol chapter—was a particularly eccentric personality. Suffering from alopecia, Ferrie took to wearing an ill-fitting, reddish wig and filling in his missing eyebrows with theatrical slashes of greasepaint. Catholic-educated and homosexual, he led a secretive and tortured life. He liked to practice hypnosis techniques on the young cadets under his command and tried to lure them into a drug research program at Tulane University with which he was connected. A passionate anti-Communist, Ferrie threw himself into New Orleans’s steamy anti-Castro politics. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, he denounced Kennedy with such vicious abandon during a speech to a veterans group that he was asked to step down from the podium. The president “ought to be shot,” Ferrie began telling people.