The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  When Johnson clung to his idea of a Texas investigation, the sophisticated Alsop set him straight, as if lecturing a country simpleton. “My lawyers, though, Joe, tell me that the White House—the president—must not inject himself into local killings,” LBJ said, almost pleadingly. “I agree with that,” Alsop said as he smoothly cut him off, “but in this case it does happen to be the killing of the president.”

  Dulles immediately accepted Johnson’s request to join the commission when the president phoned him on the evening of November 29. “I would like to be of any help,” Dulles told Johnson, though he did feel compelled to at least raise the propriety of appointing a former CIA director who was known to have a troubled relationship with the deceased president: “And you’ve considered the work of my previous work and my previous job?” Dulles asked inelegantly.

  “I sure have,” LBJ replied, “and we want you to do it. That’s that. . . . You always do what is best for your country. I found that out about you a long time ago.”

  In the end, it all worked out just as the Washington establishment wanted—and as de Gaulle had predicted. The commission to investigate Kennedy’s murder was made up of pliable senators and congressmen who were close to the CIA, FBI, and Johnson—and it was dominated by the two craftiest men in the hearing room, Dulles and McCloy. After months of investigative wheel spinning, the panel would reach its foregone conclusion. Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the killing of the president. Case closed.

  When President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana—one of the new African leaders who had considered Kennedy a vital ally—was handed a copy of the Warren Report by U.S. ambassador William Mahoney, he opened it up, pointed at the name Allen Dulles in the list of commissioners, and handed it back to Mahoney.

  “Whitewash,” Nkrumah said simply. It summed up the entire charade.

  The Warren Commission was named after Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren, the distinguished jurist President Johnson strong-armed into chairing the JFK inquest. But as attorney Mark Lane—one of the first critics of the lone-gunman theory—later observed, it should have been called the “Dulles Commission,” considering the spymaster’s dominant role in the investigation. In fact, Dulles was Johnson’s first choice to chair the commission, but LBJ decided that he needed Warren at the helm to deflect liberal criticism of the official inquiry. Although the chief justice was a former Republican governor of California and an Eisenhower appointee to the bench, he had a sterling reputation among liberals for his court’s strong record on civil rights.

  “I don’t think Allen Dulles ever missed a meeting,” Warren remembered years later. Behind the scenes, Dulles was even more active than the commission chairman. Warren was forced to juggle his commission duties with his ongoing responsibilities on the high court. But Dulles was the only member of the panel without a day job. He was free to devote himself to commission work, and he promptly began assembling his own informal staff, drawing on the services of his former CIA colleagues and his wide network of political and media contacts.

  The other two principal players in the inquest were Dulles’s longtime friend and fellow Cold War heavyweight, McCloy, and future president Gerald Ford, who was then an ambitious Republican congressman from Michigan with close ties to the FBI. While the rest of the commission—Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana and Senators Richard Russell of Georgia and John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky—shuttled back and forth between the Capitol building and the National Archives, where the panel’s legal team had set up shop, the Dulles-McCloy-Ford triumvirate took control of the investigation.

  The three men demonstrated their dominance at the commission’s first executive session, held on December 5, 1963, when they joined forces to block Warren’s strong personal favorite for the chief counsel position, Warren Olney, a longtime political disciple of the chief justice. As an assistant attorney general in the Eisenhower Justice Department, Olney had earned the wrath of the FBI’s Hoover for his aggressive prosecution of civil rights cases and was suspected of being “hostile” to the bureau. Instead of Earl Warren’s man, the trio installed their own veteran of the Eisenhower Justice Department—a Republican Party stalwart named J. Lee Rankin. In 1958, Dulles had “heartily” recommended Rankin for membership in the Century Association, the exclusive midtown Manhattan social club. As the Warren Commission’s lead counsel, Rankin worked closely with the Dulles trio to set the parameters of the investigation, keeping the focus tightly on Oswald and assiduously avoiding any areas that carried the faintest tinge of conspiracy.

  Dulles tried to establish the framework for the inquiry early on by handing the other commission members copies of a book titled The Assassins by Robert J. Donovan, a Washington journalist. Donovan’s history of presidential assassins argued that these dramatic acts of violence were the work of solitary fanatics, not “organized attempts to shift political power from one group to another.” It was quickly pointed out to Dulles that John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln as part of a broader Confederate plot to decapitate the federal government, rather famously contradicted Donovan’s theory. But, undeterred, Dulles continued to push the commission to keep a tight frame on Oswald.

  Dulles was a whirlwind of activity, especially outside the hearing room, where he deftly maneuvered to keep the investigation on what he considered the proper track. He showered Rankin with memos, passing along investigative tips and offering guidance on commission strategy. There was no detail too small for Dulles to bring to the chief counsel’s attention. “A great deal of the description of the motorcade and the shooting will be unclear unless we have a street map and, if possible, a photo taken from the sixth floor window,” Dulles wrote Rankin in a July 1964 memo. “Is this possible?” Dulles was particularly eager to explore any leads suggesting Oswald might be a Soviet spy—a soon discredited idea that Angleton would nonetheless keep promoting for the rest of his life.

  Despite Dulles’s efforts to keep the commission away from any hints of a domestic conspiracy, from time to time uncomfortable questions along these lines cropped up. During an executive session convened by the panel on December 16, 1963, Warren raised an especially sensitive matter—the mysterious failure of the country’s security agencies to keep close watch on someone with Oswald’s background. How, for instance, did a defector simply stroll into the U.S. immigration office in New Orleans—as he did the previous summer—and obtain a passport to return to Russia? “That seems strange to me,” Warren remarked.

  Actually, passports were rather easy to obtain, Dulles observed. When the discussion turned to the puzzling ease with which Oswald got permission to return to the United States with his Russian wife, Dulles offered that he would like to get these aspects of the inquiry “into the hands of the CIA as soon as possible to explain the Russian parts.”

  Senator Russell, long used to dealing with the intelligence community, reacted skeptically. “I think you’ve got more faith in them than I have. I think they’ll doctor anything they hand to us.”

  Russell was edging painfully close to the fundamental problem at the core of the Warren panel’s impossible mission. How could the board run a credible inquest when it had limited investigative capability of its own and was largely dependent on the FBI and the other security agencies for its evidence—agencies that were clearly implicated in the failure to protect the president?

  The Warren Commission was, in fact, so thoroughly infiltrated and guided by the security services that there was no possibility of the panel pursuing an independent course. Dulles was at the center of this subversion. During the commission’s ten-month-long investigation, he acted as a double agent, huddling regularly with his former CIA associates to discuss the panel’s internal operations.

  Despite the chronic tensions between the CIA and FBI, Hoover proved a useful partner of the spy agency during the JFK inquiry. The FBI chief knew that his organization had its own secrets to hide related to the assassination, including its contacts with Oswald. Furthermore, taking its cues from
the CIA, the bureau had dropped Oswald from its watch list just weeks before the assassination. An angry Hoover would later mete out punishment for errors such as this, quietly disciplining seventeen of his agents. But the FBI director was desperate to avoid public censure, and he fully supported the commission’s lone-gunman story line. Angleton, who had a good back-channel relationship with the FBI, made sure that the two agencies stayed on the same page throughout the Warren inquest, meeting regularly with bureau contacts such as William Sullivan and Sam Papich.

  Angleton and his team also provided ongoing support and advice to Dulles. On a Saturday afternoon in March 1964, Ray Rocca—Angleton’s right-hand man ever since their days together in Rome—met with Dulles at his home to mull over a particularly dicey issue with which the commission was grappling. How could the panel dispel persistent rumors that the CIA was somehow a “sponsor” of Oswald’s actions? The story had broken in the press the previous month, when Marguerite Oswald declared that her son was a secret agent for the CIA who was “set up to take the blame” for the Kennedy assassination. Rankin had obligingly suggested that Dulles be given the job of clearing the CIA by reviewing all of the relevant agency documents that were provided to the commission. But even Dulles thought this smacked too much of an inside job. Instead, after conferring with Rocca, Dulles proposed that he simply provide a statement to the commission swearing—as Rocca put it in his report back to Dick Helms—“that as far as he could remember he had never had any knowledge of Oswald at any time prior to the date of the assassination.”

  But Senator Cooper thought the allegations that Oswald was some kind of government agent were too serious to simply be dispelled by written statements. During a Warren Commission executive session in April, he proposed that the heads of the CIA and FBI be put under oath and questioned by the panel. It was a highly awkward suggestion, as Dulles pointed out. “I might have a little problem on that—having been [CIA] director until November 1961.” There was a simple solution, however: put his successor, John McCone, on the witness stand. That was fine with Dulles, because—as he knew—McCone remained an agency outsider, despite his title, and was not privy to its deepest secrets.

  When McCone appeared before the Warren Commission, he brought along Helms, his chief of clandestine operations. As McCone was well aware, Helms was the man who knew where all the bodies were buried, and he deferred to his number two man more than once during his testimony. Conveniently ignorant of the CIA’s involvement with Oswald, McCone was able to emphatically deny any agency connection to the accused assassin. “The agency never contacted him, interviewed him, talked with him, or received or solicited any reports or information from him,” McCone assured the commission.

  It was trickier when Helms was asked the same questions. He knew about the extensive documentary record that Angleton’s department had amassed on Oswald. He was aware of how the agency had monitored the defector during his exploits in Dallas, New Orleans, and Mexico City. David Phillips—a man whose career was nurtured by Helms—had been spotted meeting with Oswald in Dallas. But when Helms was sworn in, he simply lied. There was no evidence of agency contact with Oswald, he testified. Had the agency provided the commission with all the information it had on Oswald, Rankin asked him. “We have—all,” Helms replied, though he knew the files that he had handed over were thoroughly purged.

  Helms was “the man who kept the secrets,” in the words of his biographer, Thomas Powers. Commission staff attorney Howard Willens politely called him “one of the most fluent and self-confident government officials I ever met.” Helms was the sort of man who could tell lies with consummate ease. It would eventually win him a felony conviction, and he wore it like a badge of courage. When one was defending the nation, Helms would lecture the senators who pestered him late in his career, one must be granted a certain latitude.

  It was David Slawson, a thirty-two-year-old attorney on leave from a Denver corporate law firm, who was given the unenviable job of dealing with the CIA as part of the Warren Commission’s conspiracy research team. Rankin had told Slawson to rule out no one—“not even the CIA.” If he did discover evidence of agency involvement, the young lawyer nervously joked, he would be found dead of a premature heart attack. But Rocca, the veteran counterintelligence agent assigned to babysit the commission, made sure nothing turned up. “I came to like and trust [Rocca],” said the young staff attorney, who found himself dazzled by his first exposure to a spy world he had only seen in movies. “He was very intelligent and tried in every way to be honest and helpful.” Slawson was equally gullible when evaluating Dulles, whom he dismissed as old and feeble—precisely the aging schoolmaster act that the spymaster liked to put over on people.

  Years later, as the Church Committee began to reveal the darker side of the CIA, Slawson came to suspect that Rocca had not been so “honest” with him after all. In a frank interview with The New York Times in February 1975, Slawson suggested that the CIA had withheld important information from the Warren Commission, and he endorsed the growing campaign to reopen the Kennedy investigation. Slawson was the first Warren Commission attorney to publicly question whether the panel had been misled by the CIA and FBI (he would later be joined by Rankin himself)—and the news story caused a stir in Washington. Several days after the article ran, Slawson—who by then was teaching law at the University of Southern California—got a disturbing phone call from James Angleton. After some initial pleasantries, the spook got around to business. He wanted Slawson to know that he was friendly with the president of USC, and he wanted to make sure that Slawson was going to “remain a friend” of the CIA.

  Far from shuffling through the Warren Commission proceedings, the septuagenarian Dulles seemed to spring back to life for the inquiry. In fact, the entire denouement to the Kennedy presidency gave new meaning to his career. While Earl Warren, who turned seventy-three during the investigation, seemed exhausted and demoralized by the experience, Dulles was energized. When a friend congratulated Dulles on his seventy-first birthday in April 1964, he responded, “There have been many, too many, of them. At least I can say that I don’t feel any older, despite the passage of time; and with the work of the President’s Commission, I find myself busier than ever.”

  Dulles went about the grave business of probing Kennedy’s death with an oddly sprightly attitude. When it came time for the commission to examine JFK’s gore-soaked clothing, Dulles stunned his fellow investigators with an inappropriate quip. “By George,” he exclaimed, as he inspected Kennedy’s tie, which had been clipped off with surgical scissors by the Parkland doctors, “the president wore a clip-on tie.” By contrast, when Warren had to view Kennedy’s autopsy photos, he later remarked, “[They] were so horrible that I could not sleep well for nights.”

  His new job on the commission gave Dulles an opportunity to connect with old friends, such as Mary Bancroft and actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr.—who passed along tips and bits of gossip related to the case—as well as British novelist Rebecca West. In March, Dulles wrote West, beseeching her to draw on her fertile imagination to come up with possible motives for Oswald’s crime. The commission was so baffled by the question that Warren even suggested leaving that part of the report blank. “I wish sometime you would sit down and write me a line as to why you think Lee Oswald did the dastardly deed,” Dulles wrote the novelist in March, as if discussing the plot of a whodunit. “All I can tell you is that there is not one iota of evidence that he had any personal vindictiveness against the man Kennedy.”

  Meanwhile, the following month, Mary relayed a news report about Mark Lane to Dulles, informing her old lover in high dudgeon that Lane had apparently told a conference of lawyers in Budapest “that the killers—plural—of JFK were still at large . . . even I am amazed that Lane has the temerity to go to Budapest and shoot off his mouth in that fashion. I regard him as insane—but nevertheless I do hope the FBI has its eye on him.”

  Dulles and McCloy, in fact, were very concerned about European
public opinion regarding the Kennedy assassination, and they urged the commission to closely monitor both Lane and Thomas G. Buchanan, a Paris-based American journalist who had written the first JFK conspiracy book, Who Killed Kennedy?—an advance copy of which was airmailed to Dulles from the CIA station in London, where it was published. During an executive session in April, Dulles even proposed that Buchanan be subpoenaed to appear before the commission.

  Earl Warren was obsessed with press coverage of the inquiry and agonized over press leaks, including a May report by Anthony Lewis in The New York Times—midway through the panel’s work—that the inquiry was set to “unequivocally reject theories that the assassination was the work of some kind of conspiracy.” Warren was very upset by the premature news report, which suggested that the commission had rushed to judgment before hearing all the evidence. The leak was clearly intended to counter the publicity being generated by authors like Lane and Buchanan.

  While the commission frantically attempted to determine the source of such leaks, the answer was sitting in their midst. The two most active leakers were Ford and Dulles. It was Ford who kept the FBI constantly informed, enabling Hoover to feed the press with bureau-friendly stories about the inquest. And Dulles used the CIA’s own network of media assets to spin Warren Commission coverage.

  The New York Times was a favorite Dulles receptacle. In February, the Times had run another leaked story—also bylined by Lewis—that clearly led back to Dulles. Lewis reported that Robert Oswald, the accused assassin’s brother, had testified that he suspected Lee was a Soviet agent. As the commission hunted the source of the leak, a staff attorney suggested that the Times reporter might have overheard a dinner table conversation that he and Dulles had with Robert Oswald at a Washington restaurant—a highly unlikely scenario that nonetheless provided Dulles with the fig leaf of a cover story.