Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics
Page 16
39 John Davis, The Kennedys, 495.
40 Assassination Plots Report, 175; citing Helms testimony of 6/13/75.
41 Assassination Plots Report, 87.
42 Attwood, The Twilight Struggle, 263.
43 Washington Post, March 7, 1967, p. C13 (column). Note that the only reference to this "counterplot" in the IG Report (p. 118: "Castro. . . is reported to have cooked up a counterplot against President Kennedy") is actually language taken, along with other details, from the much stronger Anderson column of March 3 (see below).
44 San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 1967, p. 41.
45 I have argued that the timing of Anderson’s charge involved other political issues as well, notably the unfolding Garrison investigation in New Orleans (Clay Shaw had just been indicted on March 1) and the inter-related matter of the conviction of Jimmy Hoffa (whose petition for relief had been denied by the Supreme Court on February 27, 1967) which depended on the testimony of an early Garrison target, Edward Grady Partin. See Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, 25-29; cf. Scott. Deep Politics, 187-90.
46 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 799; Doris Kearns. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,331.
47 Powers. 174-75; Ranelagh, 154-55. cf. 443 In 1969 Johnson had Connally tell Nixon that one of Nixon’s three main problems would be "disloyal people in State and CIA" (Haldeman, Haldeman Diaries, 102).
48 See Powers, 156-58, and passim. The redaction of the story by the Post likewise had the effect of protecting Kennedy and the CIA, both of whom the Post was probably closer to in 1967 than to the Johnson White House. The war was a factor here as well.
49 Forum, January 18. 1971.
50 Miami Herald, January 19, 1971; Watergate Hearings, 9913; cf. 9723, 9755. Columns reprinted with discussion in Peter Dale Scon, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Steller, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond, 375-80.
51 Fred Emery, Watergate, 33. Cf. H.R. Haldeman, Haldeman Diaries, 134, 297, etc.; J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare, 16-17, 81, etc. As in 1967, the timing of the column can be related to Hoffa’s legal difficulties as well: his petition for review of his Chicago Pension Fund conviction had just been denied by the U.S. Supreme Court, on January 11, 1971.
52 J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare, 26-27; Emery, 22 (Nixon on Helms). Of course Anderson was never as close to Nixon as be and Pearson had been to Johnson, but it was not until 1972 that Anderson also would be artacked by the Nixon White House as an enemy. In late March of 1972 Liddy and Hunt discussed drugs for "neutralizing" Anderson with Dr. Edward Gunn (Fred Emery, Watergate, 98), the former CIA doctor, now also in business with McCord (Hougan, 95n), who had earlier supplied the CIA lethal poisons for first Edwards and then Cubela (IG Report, 21, 93). Hunt and Liddy paid Gunn with a $100 bill from CRP intelligence funds (Liddy, Will,407-08), thus possibly laying yet another trail back to the 1960-63 "Bay of Pigs thing."
53 Hinckle and Turner, The Fish Is Red, 174.
54 The Cuban Government gave to Senator McGovern and later to the HSCA the name of one of the three men, Samuel Carballo Moreno (5 AH 264, 298); according to an earlier witness, Harry Dean, a Sam Moreno had been involved in a 1962 plot against President Kennedy in Mexico (AARC Archives, interview of Harry Dean).
55 Washington Post, September 7, 1976, C19. Reprinted at 5 AH 365; 10 AH 159-60.
56 Hinckle and Turner, The Fish Is Red, 171-73, 349-50; Scott, Deep Politics, 113-17.
57 Dispatch of 7/26/63 from COS, JMWAVE to Chief, SAS (FitzGerald), concerning JMWAVE Relationship to Pawley ("assistance");
58 Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, 452; Scott, Deep Politics, 117-20 (Ruby); Gaeton Form, The Last Investigation, 325 (Oswald)
59 G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings. The Plot to Kill the President, 80; citing memo of April 1, 1964 from Warren Commission counsel David Slawson to J. Lee Rankin, Scott, Deep Politics, 111-13, 338.
60 IG Report. 118, 133.
VII. OSWALD, HARVEY LEE OSWALD, AND OSWALD’S COMMUNIST PARTY CARD
"OSWALD, HARVEY LEE. . . CARD CARRYING MEMBER OF COMMUNIST PARTY"1
September 1994
Prologue
One cannot understand the assassination and related cover-up without analyzing the interlocking secrets about Oswald in government files, ranging from the CIA in Mexico City to the FBI, military intelligence, and local police in Dallas. The secrets which concern this paper are those reports, predating the assassination, that Oswald was a Communist, a KGB or Castro agent, a potential assassin, or all of the above. I have called such pre-assassination reports "phase-one" reports, because they generated the initial response to the assassination of some individuals in the CIA, FBI, military intelligence, and Dallas Police Department.
Particularly interesting are those false reports which passed from one agency to another, and which may indicate communication, or even collusion, between sources as far afield as Mexico City and Dallas. The falsity of these phase-one reports does not make them unimportant to the case, or to U.S. history. On the contrary, it is known that they became the pressing justification for creating the Warren Commission, which from the outset promoted what I have called the "phase-two" hypothesis: that Oswald acted alone. This hypothesis was equally unproven, but politically less disruptive and less dangerous to world peace.
Some of the false phase-one reports, on analysis, appear to be shallow and virtually groundless. Others, in contrast, may derive from other government secrets, quite possibly involving legitimate, if covert, government operations. Some may have been partly true.
This latter group includes two separate allegations, which sounded more sinister when reported together. One was that weeks before the assassination someone identifying himself as Oswald entered the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City and, in pursuit of a visa, presented documentation to establish his membership in the U.S. Communist Party. The other was that this person also offered to kill President Kennedy.
These two allegations helped engender the Warren Commission and subsequent cover-up. That they did so does not prove them to be part of the preliminary planning for the assassination. There may well be some other explanation for why the stories were floated. Even if relevant to the assassination, the stories may have been exploited by those responsible for it, not planted by them. At this point, one cannot say.
However the true relationship of Oswald to U.S. government agencies (and hence of these agencies to the assassination) can never be understood until these phase-one reports have been properly analyzed. Hence documentation of such phase-one allegations, even if known to be false, should be construed by the Review Board as "assassination-related."
The False Story of Oswald and an "International Communist Conspiracy"
The early rebuttal to the Warren Commission case of Oswald as a loner was the superabundance of extended government files showing continuous interest in him. With the newly released documents we realize more and more clearly that these files also contained alleged information (or disinformation) about Oswald that were potentially embarrassing to the agencies concerned. Prominent among these early allegations were the claims that he was a self-professed Communist, and that while in Mexico City he had talked of assassinating Kennedy in the Cuban Embassy.
These and other early claims about Oswald were not just eventually forgotten, they were systematically suppressed. The historical record of this suppression supplies a framework or structure for understanding more fully the dialectical process by which this nation arrived at its tenet of political orthodoxy: the belief that Oswald was a lone assassin. For each of these secrets has little meaning considered by itself. Put together, we see how those in power suppressed false evidence that Oswald was a Communist, or a KGB or Cuban agent, in order to arrive at the least disturbing alternative: that he acted alone.
Let us begin with the Dallas authorities: the Dallas Police Department, Sheriffs, and District Attorney’s office. The first secret here is that, the day of the arrest, the Dallas authorities made known their intentions to charge Oswald
as part of an international Communist conspiracy. This of course was no secret at the time, but it has become one since. We must look at it in the light of the simultaneous high-level efforts (to prove Oswald part of an international Communist conspiracy) that took place down in Mexico City.
The Dallas secret was officially covered up by Wade’s testimony to the Warren Commission, that "the rumor. . . we were getting ready to file a charge of Oswald being part of an international conspiracy" was scotched by him as baseless on the night of November 22 (5 WH 229; cf. 218, 240). Wade conceded that the FBI on the night of November 24 phoned from Washington "to have me quit talking about it," and "may have" asked him not to say that a foreign government was involved (5 WH 236-37). But Wade testified he had already made clear to State Attorney General Waggoner Canon November 22 that the "Russian conspiracy" idea "was silly because I don’t know where the rumor started" (5 WH 240).
Gerald Posner, in Case Closed, discusses this crucial matter in a footnote. He spoke to Wade’s assistant, William Alexander, who actually drafted the Kennedy murder indictment for Wade’s signature (23 WH 321, cf. 319). Posner writes that, on the night of November 22,
Alexander decided to "shake things up a bit" and spoke to a friend at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Joe Goulden, and told him that he intended to indict Oswald for killing the President "in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy."2
This was not (as Posner’s language might imply) a trivial matter, nor was Goulden the only man Alexander spoke to. In fact the story Alexander now admits spreading had activated alarmed responses that night all the way up to the White House, where someone ("around 8 or 9 o’clock at night on November 22") telephoned State Attorney General Waggoner Carr about it (5 WH 259). The content of that call was reportedly the same message repeated by federal officials for the next week, and used by Johnson to justify creating the Warren Commission: "This would be a bad situation, if you allege it as part of a Russian, the Russian conspiracy, and it may affect [the] international relations. . . of the country" (5 WH 240).
Declassified White House and FBI documents make it clear that "Dallas police. . . statements on the Communist conspiracy theory" were a principal reason why the Justice Department was determined by November 25 that "the public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin" (an "objective" which "may be satisfied" by "the appointment of a Presidential Commission").3
On November 29 Lyndon Johnson announced the formation of the Warren Commission. Lyndon Johnson’s conversation with Congressman Charles Halleck the same day gives the clearest picture of the role played by false "phase one" allegations: "This thing is getting pretty serious and our folks are worried about it. . . it has some foreign implications. . . CIA and other things. . . and I’m going to try to get the Chief Justice on it." Johnson added that "we can’t have Congress, FBI and others saying that Khrushchev or Castro ordered the assassination:" "This thing is so touchy from an international standpoint. . . .This is a question that could involve our losing 39 million people."4
Johnson drew particular attention to the plans which Senator Eastland had revealed to him the previous day, of holding hearings before his Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Speaking to House Speaker John McCormack, Johnson explained that he had to announce the Warren Commission quickly: "I better get him [Senator Eastland] to call off his investigation." He added that some Dallas official would testify that Khrushchev planned the assassination.5
But the Eastland Committee may have got wind of the still secret allegation that in Mexico City someone identifying himself as Oswald had offered to kill President Kennedy. Their staff person A1 Tarabochia, a Cuban exile, claimed to "know someone who has access to confidential information about the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City."6 Although Committee Counsel Julien Sourwine refused to reveal the identity of this informant, the thrust of the Eastland inquiry would seem to suggest that he was someone conversant with the alleged assassination offer.7
We know from FBI files that on November 24, 1963, the Eastland Subcommittee had already received testimony in executive session from Edward Scannell Butler, whose right-wing propaganda organization INCA managed the Oswald radio debate in New Orleans. According to an FBI summary of that testimony Butler spoke to the Subcommittee of Communist responsibility for the assassination:
Butler stated his impression of Oswald was he was a rational and wholly indoctrinated procommunist individual who. . . exhibited a tremendous capacity to repeat by rote communist propaganda. . . . Butler stated it seemed to him that the fact that many of the materials that Oswald had available to him were originally sponsored by official communist sources, placed the blame for Oswald’s actions on the authors or the disseminators of that material.8
As late as May 1964 Hoover affirmed to the Warren Commission, as he had earlier to LBJ and others, his opinion that Oswald "was a dedicated Communist."9
The Communist conspiracy theory that Butler and Hoover merely hinted at was voiced much more energetically in Dallas. Wade heard on November 22 from Carr and U.S. Attorney Barefoot Sanders, one of whom told him that "Alexander had said something about it" (5 WH 218, 240). A second source reportedly was David Johnston (5 WH 240), the Justice of the Peace who arraigned Oswald on the indictments Alexander prepared (15 WH 506-08), and who earlier that day had taken part along with Alexander in the search of Oswald’s apartment at 1026 North Beckley (15 WH 507).10 Wade testified that he asked both Alexander and Johnston about this, and they denied it (5 WH 240, cf. 218). That was enough for the Warren Commission, who did not query Johnston about the allegation (15 WH 503-13), and who, remarkably, did not interview Alexander at all.11
In November 1993 the PBS news show "Frontline" aired an interview in which former Dallas FBI agent James Hosty charged that the original indictment prepared by Alexander had charged Oswald in almost exactly the language admitted to by Alexander in his interview with Posner: murder "in furtherance of an international [rather than "Communist"] conspiracy." Lyndon Johnson himself, the show charged, had obtained the suppression of this phrase (20 WH 321, cf. 24 WH 830).12
Something like this phase-one/phase-two dialectic (the advancement of the Communist conspiracy allegation, followed by suppression of public reference to it) clearly did happen on November 22. Most of Wade’s Commission testimony (as well as Carr’s) concerned this matter, and Wade made it clear that "the calls from Washington and somewhere else" were "what prompted me to go down and take the complaint, otherwise I would never have gone down to the police station" (5 WH 229).13 The institutionalized forgetting of this episode must have begun by November 24, when Wade assured the press that he had called a press conference strictly on his own in response to newsmen "from all over the world. . . .I have heard nothing. . . from Washington or any of the officials in this country on this matter."14
However, in his various press conferences, Wade never ruled out the possibility that, whatever the indictment said, Oswald might be prosecuted as part of a conspiracy. Asked repeatedly on the night of November 22-23 if "this was an organized plot," Wade’s consistent answer was that "we don’t know" (24 WH 840; cf. 24 WH 836). The issue of Oswald’s "Communist" record (to which we shall return) drew the same agnostic answer: "Does he have a Communist record? WADE. I don’t know" (24 WH 840). Asked again, "Are you willing to say whether you think this man was inspired as a Communist or whether he is simply a nut or a middleman?" Wade answered, suggestively, ‘Til put it this way: I don’t think he’s a nut" (24 WH 840).
The FBI may have shifted from a phase-one to a phase-two mode as early as mid-afternoon. Around 2:30 PM (Central Standard Time) Dallas FBI Agent James Hosty, the man in charge of the Oswald file was ordered to join the Dallas Police Department in interviewing Oswald. At 4:05 PM he was ordered to desist from interrogating Oswald, and forbidden "to divulge anything to the Dallas police."15
Both the order to cooperate with the Dallas police, and the order to cease doing so, came from FBI Headquarters in Washington. The man who revealed this pub
licly, former FBI Director Clarence Kelley, explained that the author of the second order, FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan, read information on Oswald in the Headquarters file, "reviewed CIA surveillance data on the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, studied FBI wiretaps involving Oswald and Kostikov" (a KGB officer in that Embassy), then read the provocative follow-up letter of November 9 which Oswald had just sent about "comrade Kostin" (Kostikov) to the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
FBI Director Kelley is not alone in speculating that this information was used to silence Hosty, possibly with the approval of the new Johnson White House:
This information, it would surely have struck him [Sullivan], had such dire international implications that the White House must be informed immediately. Sullivan probably went straight to Hoover and then hastened to the National Security Council at the White House. No doubt, President Johnson [at that time still returning from Dallas on Air Force One] was then apprised. . . .So, it seems, the silence imposed on Jim Hosty originated at the highest level—the White House.16
But in his brief hour at the Dallas Police Department, Hosty had helped feed the phase-one fever in Dallas, by telling a police lieutenant, Jack Revill, that Oswald was a Communist.17 He had good grounds for saying this, but for thirty years America would not hear them. FBI Headquarters had already taken steps to suppress all stories at odds with its phase-two agenda, both those which were false and also those which were true.
The Revised Oswald Legend: Not a Communist, But a Marxist
The phase-two agenda of the FBI was clearly spelled out in an internal memo from Alan Belmont on November 24, 1963, outlining how an FBI memorandum to the Attorney General would
set out the evidence showing that Oswald is responsible for the shooting that killed the President. We will show that Oswald was an avowed Marxist, a former defector to the Soviet Union, and an active member of the FPCC, which has been financed by Castro.18