Deep State

by Marc Ambinder

  Again, Lee Harvey Oswald pinged the Bureau’s radar when he subscribed to the Worker, a communist newspaper. The Dallas Field Office of the FBI noted this in Oswald’s file and reopened the case the following year. At the time, agents did not interview Marina, because her husband “had been drinking to excess and beating [her], and the relevant FBI manual provision required that he allow a ‘cooling off’ period.”∗

  Oswald again found himself on the business end of the FBI after he moved to New Orleans to organize a pro-Castro organization. But for all of Oswald’s strident Marxism and hostility, the interview yielded little new information for the file. It’s not illegal to be a political malcontent or a jerk.

  The Bureau wouldn’t know that Oswald left New Orleans for Mexico until after he’d already returned to the United States, and then only after the CIA forwarded an intercepted cable stating that “Lee Henry Oswald” had been in contact with the Soviet embassy in Mexico City.

  Oswald’s next stop would be Texas, and national tragedy.

  It should be very clear—it certainly was to FBI headquarters—that the Oswald case was mismanaged on an almost metaphysical level. After the president’s assassination, J. Edgar Hoover intended to drop the hammer on vast swaths of special agents. “I do not intend to palliate the actions which have resulted in forever destroying the Bureau as the top level investigative organization,” he noted. The Inspection Division, however, advised him that the Warren Commission would subpoena those agents, all of whom would be compelled to testify under oath that they had in fact been negligent. This would reflect poorly on the Bureau as a whole. Hoover’s obsession with preserving the image of the FBI would, as always, be paramount in the director’s agenda.

  Occam’s razor dictates that the president was slain by a deranged man, and that federal agents worked as federal employees often do: with minimum effort. Special agents with the New Orleans Field Office of the FBI had grown careless operating in an anti-Castro, anticommunist area. Dallas agents, meanwhile, either lacked the hard-charging spy hunter chops of those on the East Coast or were weary from decades of chasing phantom Texas commies. Likewise, the U.S. Secret Service let their guard down on a sunny day in Dallas, when adoring throngs surrounded the president.

  What complicates matters is plain embarrassment by law enforcement and damage control by the Kennedy family. Whatever one’s feelings of JFK, he was not shy about wielding executive power. He was stridently anti-Soviet. He ordered IRS audits with impunity. He micromanaged the CIA and developed a fascination with “wet” jobs—the kind of serious assassination missions only in the concept stages at the CIA. His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, ordered (an agreeable) Hoover to illegally wiretap Martin Luther King Jr., for fear the civil rights leader might be a communist and thus an embarrassment to the party.

  The Kennedy family had no interest in such matters being made public and did not ask for a sprawling investigation. Alan Dulles, Kennedy’s former director of central intelligence, got himself installed on the Warren Commission, which was responsible for investigating the assassination. (As Lieutenant Colonel William Corson, a Marine Corps intelligence officer assigned to the CIA, noted, “Allen Dulles had a lot to hide.”)10 Meanwhile, President Johnson feared that the American political right would tie the Kennedy assassination to the Soviet Union (Johnson himself suspected Soviet involvement) and use the tragedy to start World War III. Every investigation pointed to Oswald, and no investigation found foreign involvement.

  Still, the Johnson administration made it known to Hoover that any circumstantial evidence that might be used by politicians to stoke the flames of war was unwelcome. The Bureau issued multiple statements asserting Oswald’s guilt, and did in fact launch a cover-up. Only Hoover wasn’t hiding an X-Files–esque conspiracy; he was hiding red herrings. Simply put, everyone had something to hide when President Kennedy was killed, but it wasn’t government complicity. It was government incompetence.

  Over the years, the FBI has been accused of covering up its associations with Oswald (there were none), or of refusing to interview witnesses (virtually every witness who supposedly never talked to the FBI did in fact talk to the FBI), or even of complicity with the assassination itself. The FBI’s first report on the investigation was thin, and the Warren Commission refused to rely on it, reinterviewing witnesses. This infuriated Hoover, who redoubled the Bureau’s effort to track down every conceivable and even inconceivable lead. Still, despite the hard work put in by the Bureau (something even the agency’s critics acknowledge), historians who follow the Kennedy assassination oeuvre blame the FBI for barely looking into Oswald’s ties to Cuba, or at the mob’s growing dislike for the Kennedy brothers, and the FBI’s failure to deeply investigate the backgrounds of Oswald and Jack Ruby.11

  Oswald was known to the FBI because of his defection to Russia and repatriation back into the United States. An agent named James Hosty was assigned to his case. In early November, Oswald showed up at the Dallas FBI Field Office with a note for Hosty, who was out conducting interviews. He was upset that Hosty, trying to figure out what Oswald was up to, had shown up at his home and harassed his wife. The Hosty note has been fodder—pretty much the only fodder—for conspiracy theorists since its existence was disclosed. His supervisor at the field office knew about it and asked Hosty to write a memo for the record about what happened. That memo was never sent to the FBI’s internal registry, because it was theoretically embarrassing. (God forbid that Hoover find out.) But Hosty would testify fully and completely to the Warren Commission, and later to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. No evidence has ever challenged his story.

  Because a local FBI office decided to cover up an incidental, indirect contact between a special agent and a recently repatriated U.S citizen who later killed the president, the specter of other malfeasance has simply been assumed by conspiracy theorists.12 Had Hosty kept the note (which, because of all the cases he was working on at the time just didn’t seem that important to him) and not destroyed the contemporaneous memo, there would be nothing in the record about the FBI’s conduct before and after the assassination that would suggest anything other than candor in its dealings with independent investigators. The same can be said for the Secret Service, which was embarrassed by reports that a few agents had been drinking the night before the assassination (but nonetheless cooperated fully), and the CIA, which probably should have kept better tabs on Oswald overseas, but didn’t. (The Agency’s cooperation with the Warren Commission and later investigations waxed and waned in part because of the compartmented nature of intelligence operations.)

  Many tangential connections with Oswald surfaced after the fact simply because they were only discovered later. Not once did the CIA ever refuse to provide the House Select Committee on Assassinations with a document on national security grounds.13 If there was any erosion of faith that Americans had in their government as a result of the assassination, it was because the national security apparatus failed to prevent it.

  There was no cover-up. There was no conspiracy.

  And this is without considering the effects of social networks, instant information sharing, and the post-privacy age. As the World War II generation gives way to the next, papers and private files are passed onward. Considering the hundreds of people required to launch and maintain a conspiracy of assassination against the president, it’s almost impossible to believe that someone hasn’t turned up something—a smoking gun, so to speak. Yet nobody has posted a suspicious scanned document to Facebook, auctioned proof of government complicity on eBay, or simply handed files off to one of the thousands of reporters on Twitter. It defies credulity to claim a second generation of omertà-sworn LBJ loyalists.

  But the nature of state secrecy ensures that there will always be conspiracy theorists. Kennedy is but one in a list that grows every day, despite the pesky meddling of the duo of logic and facts. And magic bullets are nothing—no conspiracy theory has defied logic and facts longer than t
he idea that the government has hidden proof of alien contact for the better part of a century.

  ∗J. Edgar Hoover, for his part, considered this excuse “asinine,” and James Gale, assistant director in charge of the Inspection Division, later wrote that, if anything, “Mrs. Oswald definitely should have been interviewed and the best time to get information from her would be after she was beaten up by her husband.” Noted Hoover in the margin, “This certainly makes sense.”

  Notes

  1. Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 608.

  2. Max Hastings, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 448–499.

  3. Ibid., 456–457.

  4. Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986), 140–-155. See http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Time-Uses-History-Decision-Makers/dp/0029227917.

  5. Ibid., 142–143.

  6. Jack Pfeiffer, Official History of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Vol. I and II, Central Intelligence Agency, accessed from the National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs; see also Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New York: New Press, 1998).

  7. United States Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies, Book V, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, April 23, 1976.

  8. Richard Gid Powers, Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 2004), 263.

  9. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

  10. Joseph Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (Roseville, CA: Forum, 2001), 269.

  11. Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: Norton, 2007), 338 fn.

  12. Ibid., 158–159.

  13. Ibid., 1213, fn1.

  CHAPTER 8

  Inside the Enclave

  Rachel, Nevada, is an austere ranching town near the Groom Lake salt flat, with a friendly population of eighty, a small diner, a lone highway, and space aliens. (Well, nobody’s actually seen the space aliens, though UFOs are a common occurrence.) Groom Lake adjoins one of the most protected sites in the United States, and indeed the world—the Air Force Flight Test Center (Detachment 3) of Edwards Air Force Base, better known as Area 51.

  Privately owned land borders the perimeter of Area 51, but if the owners of those ranches decide to visit their inhospitable property, flight tests are canceled. The owners—private citizens—have signed nondisclosure agreements and are required by law to notify the Air Force of any visitors and to provide their names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers to the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which maintains a classified squad of agents devoted solely to the site and its counterintelligence needs. Visitors don’t want to set off any sensors, and any attempts to photograph employees entering the Janet terminal at McCarran International Airport are likely to result in a not-so-friendly investigator from OSI making not-so-polite inquiries.

  In theory and practice, any visitor lucky enough to catch sight of an odd-looking aircraft escaping at high speeds from Area 51, only to see it explode, seemingly shot down from nowhere, won’t be allowed to stay to see government employees collect the remains.

  That’s bound to start some rumors.

  The security and secrecy surrounding Area 51 has endured for more than sixty years. As we’ve seen, politics of varying sorts make sure the government isn’t good at keeping secrets forever, and the shelf life of a secret is getting shorter and shorter. What, then, could stay so secret for so long, unless it was the worst of the worst, something no one must ever know, or something no one would ever believe?

  The answer, of course, is that it is the least controversial kind of secret: new weapon systems. And many of the secrets created there, like flying drones, are no longer a secret. Theories of secret alliances with intergalactic governments aside, virtually anyone with a passing interest in aviation or defense is aware that the site is used to test secret programs. Commercial pilots know it as a restricted airspace—“the container”—where lethal force is used. Even the way that employees get to Area 51 is itself a part of popular culture. Janet Airlines, operated by EG&G, flies out of McCarran six times per day, its signature white jets with an ugly red stripe on the side being easily photographed by hobbyists. Microsoft Flight Simulator even uses the Janet flight to Area 51 to teach students how to turn a jet. As soon as the plane crosses into restricted airspace, an unidentified flying object whizzes by.

  The U.S. Air Force’s obsessive secrecy ensures that Americans remain confused about the site. Its program managers learned long ago, too, that mystique and money are related concepts. The more vital to national security Area 51 seems to be, the less vulnerable to the budget ax it will become.

  But the impishness of engineers and program managers provides a glimpse into the current roster of projects. Historian Trevor Paglen managed to obtain unit and mission patches from crews that worked at the site as recently as 2008, publishing a coffee table book that contained numerous artistic references to highly classified projects. He noticed that many patches contain joking references to aliens. Others have six stars—usually five stars in one configuration and one star in another (5 and 1, or 51). Still others refer to their particular aircraft’s unique stealth capabilities or high speeds. In their own way, using signs and symbols, they are bragging. Though the employees theoretically could not explain the meaning of the patches to outsiders, the fact that they exist (and they are real) is an outlet for the basic urge that accompanies most satisfying types of work. The employees want recognition for what they do. Because of this impulse, in many ways we know more about specific projects being tested at Area 51 than we do about the site itself. Also, a group of former Groom Lake engineers and employees operate an alumni website and regularly talk to journalists about their experiences, Air Force censorship be damned.1

  The Air Force acknowledges that it has an “operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada,” but that is the extent to which the public affairs officers are briefed, and that is the extent to which they are willing to share anything about the site with anyone.∗ It is hot and miserable in the desert, which is one of the reasons the location was chosen. It’s a natural deterrent to visitors who might lurk and stumble onto things they are not supposed to see. Ironically, under the arms control Open Skies Treaty ratified by the United States, foreign countries can capture aerial images of anything they want. The United States has even provided Russia with an airport diagram of the facility.2 But no photographs of the complex have entered the public domain since 1968; the National Archives segregates any imagery of the site that should have, under law, been automatically declassified. In 2000, John Pike, then director of the Public Eye program at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), took advantage of the newly flourishing world of commercial satellite companies. In theory you could order images of whatever you wanted. And FAS wanted to see what would happen if they asked for pictures of Groom Lake.

  Tim Brown, an imagery analyst who worked with Pike on the project, says, “There’s nothing really normal about the place. It’s a ripple in the space of reality.” In other words, it was the perfect subject to test whether the new commercial satellite technology could be used to shed light on long-held secrets like Groom Lake.

  They placed an order with Space Imaging, a commercial satellite company, for a one-meter image of the area. “We said, ‘Look, here are the coordinates, we want this facility, and that’s that.’ And then we waited. They said it could take weeks.”

  They waited. Weeks went by
with no response. Then a different satellite company released a less precise two-meter image of Groom Lake from the Russian Aviation and Space Agency. When Groom’s veil was pierced, Pike and Brown’s order suddenly came through. “The day after, wouldn’t you know, all of a sudden Space Imaging found our order behind a file cabinet and said, ‘Oh yeah, here’s your image.’”

  When Pike and Brown finally got the photos, they found that Groom Lake was a hive of activity. The photographs showed numerous newly constructed hangars, a baseball field, and other recreation areas, as well as evidence of a recent runway expansion. It was vindication for Pike. “Highlighting the discrepancy between what the public knows, and what the government will acknowledge, is a key instrument in teasing out the absurdities of the security enclave,” he wrote. “There is no better opportunity for such mirth than Area 51. The U.S. Government has only recently acknowledged the ‘fact of the existence’ of this facility, despite ample publicity and super-abundant speculation over the past decades.”3