Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK

by Mark Lane

  Q: Do you know an individual by the name of William Sampol?

  Wack: I do.

  Q: Where does he work?

  Wack: William Sampol works in an office of a New York state senator at 500 Fifth Avenue, New York City, on the forty-first floor.

  Q: Are you aware, sir, whether or not he has a relationship with the defendant Guillermo Novo Sampol?

  Wack: William Sampol is known to me as the cousin of Guillermo Novo.

  The “New York state senator” was never identified at the trial. Both the U.S. attorney and the FBI agent who testified knew that there was no office of a New York state senator on the forty-first floor of 500 Fifth Avenue. There were scores of senators in the New York State legislature; there were but two United States Senators in each state, including New York State. As the U.S. Attorney and the FBI agent knew, the office that Townley visited initially, and the FBI visited subsequently, was the office occupied by United States Senator James Buckley, the brother of William F. Buckley. Buckley had been elected to the Senate in 1970, winning 38.7 percent of the vote in a three-way race. He was defeated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan by a wide margin when he sought reelection, and then moved to Connecticut where he again lost when he ran for the Senate against Christopher Dodd.

  The meeting at Buckley’s office with his employee William Sampol and Guillermo Novo and Michael Townley, two of those convicted in the murder of Letelier and Moffitt, took place just days before the killings. While it has been charged that Senator Buckley was present at the meeting in his office, that matter has not been pursued by the United States Attorney’s Office. Instead, James Buckley was appointed to a lifetime position by President Reagan to serve on the second-most important court in the United States, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

  Finally, many years after appearing on Firing Line, I understood why I had been invited. It was not until my book was a best seller that Buckley sought my appearance in an effort to undermine the evidence that merely demonstrated that Oswald could not have been the lone assassin. Many were asking if Oswald had not killed Kennedy, who had? It was that questioning that Buckley sought to silence.

  For more than a decade, scores, then hundreds, of ordinary citizens began to research and investigate the facts surrounding the death of their president. Had their findings and the evidence they uncovered been credited by those in position to act, and had the Novo brothers been arrested as suspects in the assassination, they would have been unable to carry out the murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. To those apologists for the Warren Commission Report, including William Buckley, who said during his interview with me, “I don’t really much care who killed Mr. Kennedy,” it should now be clear that our efforts were not merely pure research.

  The question that remains is on whose behalf had the Buckley brothers worked, one meeting with the murderers in his office just before the killings took place, and the other, again covering up for his friends at the CIA as he had after President Kennedy had been assassinated. Based on the Lorenz testimony there was sufficient evidence for the federal government to consider indicting the Novo brothers for conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy and certainly to examine the evidence about others who had acted with them.

  But with the government holding to its preconception that Oswald acted alone, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, it was in no position to consider a conspiracy indictment against anyone. The refusal of the justice authorities at the highest state and federal levels to act appropriately in 1963 and 1964 meant that the identified assassins would be free to ply their trade. The murders in Washington, years later, was the price the two victims, Letelier and Moffitt, paid for the government’s refusal to act in a timely fashion against those who conspired to murder the president.

  The government knew Marita Lorenz quite well. The CIA had previously sent her to Cuba on a mission to assassinate Fidel Castro, and she had worked undercover for various other federal and state police organizations. I have examined a number of those authorizing documents. Her statement that the Novo brothers were prone to commit murder was later proven to be accurate when they were convicted of committing murders in the District of Columbia. As was the case with other witnesses who had inconvenient information to offer, the members of the Warren Commission were neither informed of her previous employment by the CIA nor of her statement about her trip to Dallas with Frank Sturgis and the meetings with the Novo brothers. Of course, Dulles was well-acquainted with her prior involvement with the CIA; he was the former director of that agency. When I took the deposition of Richard Helms, a director of the CIA, I asked about Sturgis. He testified, “Sturgis I have heard of.” He described the relationship between the CIA and Sturgis: “Frank Sturgis was an agent, an outside agent, a contract agent, of the agency.”

  The political members of the commission, the senators and representatives of Congress, however, were not permitted to hear her words. Their part in the investigation was limited in large measure to providing window dressing for Dulles and to discourage congressional committees from conducting parallel investigations.

  Although CIA officials subsequently conceded that the agency had a relationship with Sturgis, an examination of the Warren Commission Report reveals that the names Sturgis and Lorenz do not appear. An examination of page 885 of the report, the relevant portion of the index of those mentioned in the report, discloses that the names Guillermo Novo and Ignacio Novo are not present.

  Notes

  1. Warren Commission Report, p. x.

  2. Warren Commission Report, p. xi.

  3. New York Times, October 27, 2007, front page.

  4. During 1910, Paul Ehrlich, a bacteriologist, was seeking a cure for syphilis. He thought he had found it. He named the drug Salvarsan and called it the 7“magic bullet.” That magic bullet did not work then any more than it does now, but the name was later applied to characterize hoped-for drugs. Since the Warren Report shafted the country, its solution was proven to be false, and it was offered to tranquilize the population, the name seemed uniquely appropriate.

  5. Warren Commission Report, Commission Exhibit 2118, page 73; Commission Exhibit 2214, page 74; Commission Exhibit 2215, page 74.

  6. Rush to Judgment, published 1966, Chapter 2, “Where the Shots Came From,” page 37.

  7. A Citizen’s Dissent: Mark Lane Replies, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968, page 187.for women who had suffered sexual harassment on the job

  8. I successfully represented Cecily Coleman in a landmark case in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against a vice president of a major television network.

  9. Sworn Statement by Seymour Weitzman, Rush to Judgment, p. 409.

  10. Man of the House, Tip O’Neill, Random House, 1987.

  11. For almost three years following the assassination the national news media was reluctant to raise any question about the validity of the official story; that embargo was almost absolute for more than one year following the murder.

  12. ABC News Poll: Who Killed JFK, published November 16, 2003. Summary of ABC News, Harris and Time/CNN polls from September 1966 to November 2003.

  13. Ibid.

  14. The film Rush to Judgment includes her statement.

  15. Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Warren Commission Report), pages 637–668.

  16. Warren Commission Report , page 652.

  17. Hearings Before the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (Warren Commission), Volume XXV, page 874.

  18. Vol. V, page 178.

  19. Vol. V, page 181.

  20. Killgallen, Lee Israel, Delacorte Press, 1979.

  21. After studying the record, Hugh Trevor-Roper concluded in his introduction to Rush to Judgment Deputy Sheriff Craig gave an important and perhaps illuminating piece of evidence immediately after the assassination. If his evidence had been confirmed, the whole official story would h
ave been suspect from the start. Why was his evidence cut short and dismissed by the police at that early stage on the grounds that it “didn’t fit with what we knew to be true”—i.e. with the immediate police version of Oswald’s movements? What indeed were Oswald’s movements both before and after the assassination? Mr. Lane gives reason to suppose that the official version of his movements after the assassination is quite incorrect. (Rush to Judgment, p. 18)

  22. Black’s Law Dictionary, 6th Edition, West Publishing Co., 1990, p. 440.

  23. Plausible Denial, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991, p. 157

  24. The Warren Commission listed 552 persons as “witnesses whose testimony has been presented to the commission.” However, 458 of them never appeared before any commission member. Some merely signed affidavits that were prepared for them; others signed statements that they did not even attest to and some were questioned by junior lawyers.

  25. WCR, Volume VI, pp. 263–265.

  26. Ibid, p. 268.

  27. Ibid, pp. 260–273.

  28. Two Men in Dallas. A documentary film by Mark Lane, 1987.

  29. Warren Commission Report, p. 160.

  30. Ibid, p. 253.

  31. Two Men in Dallas, 1987

  32. The article was published in a journal, War and Peace Report, on May 13, 1963.

  33. The New Republic, December 14, 1963.

  34. Plausible Denial, Mark Lane. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.

  35. Some two decades ago I wrote Plausible Denial. It is the account of a trial involving E. Howard Hunt, an officer of the CIA, and his complicity in the assassination of President Kennedy. In summarizing that work here I have drawn upon transcripts from the trial in the United States District Court and related comments. A full account of that trial is presently available since Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. has now republished the original Plausible Denial.

  36. The United States President’s Commission on CIA activities within the United States, directed by Nelson Rockefeller (1975).

  37. Later, St. John Hunt stated that the story about the family being home so that Hunt and his wife could cook dinner was false. St. John Hunt said that not long before his father died he confessed to him that he had been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the president and that Frank Sturgis was part of the plot. He also said that Hunt later stated he was glad that Kennedy had been killed. The confession was published by Rolling Stone on April 5, 2007, and has appeared in a book and a DVD by the son.

  BOOK TWO

  THE MEDIA RESPONSE

  The KGB and Jim Garrison

  by Oliver Stone

  [I recently met with Oliver Stone to film an interview with him about the repercussions resulting from his historic film JFK, about the investigation that had been conducted by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison into the assassination. Stone’s films have been nominated for thirty-one Academy Awards and seventeen Golden Globes. He is considered a war hero for his service as an American infantry soldier in Vietnam and one of the country’s most successful and innovative filmmakers. He told me that he thought that George Orwell’s 1984 was apocryphal until he suffered from the relentless and cruel attacks by the media as a result of stating in his film what most Americans consider to be true, that the Warren Report’s conclusions were incorrect and that there had been a conspiracy to murder the president. He said, “It was as though I had been made into a non-person.” The statement below was Stone’s response to a false CIA-sponsored story linking Jim Garrison to KGB material.—ML]

  Nation contributing editor Max Holland wrote an article for Studies in Intelligence asserting that former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was duped by a KGB disinformation operation that led him, along with most Americans, to believe that the CIA had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

  This spring, Foreign Affairs magazine published a generous review of Holland’s article. As a writer of the film JFK, I sent a reply to Foreign Affairs. The editors refused to publish it. I offered to pay for an ad, but Foreign Affairs again refused.

  For the record, here is my reply:

  Dear Editors of Foreign Affairs:

  Philip Zelikow’s review of Max Holland’s recent article in the CIA publication Studies in Intelligence is a disservice to your readers. Zelikow uncritically accepts Holland’s theory that a KGB disinformation operation back in 1967 is at the root of most Americans’ current belief that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.

  Holland’s thesis rests on one unproven premise: that the KGB planted a false story in March 1967 in Paese Sera, an Italian left-wing newspaper. The story reported that Clay Shaw, then recently charged with conspiracy to assassinate the president, was a board member of Centro Mondiale Comerciale (CMC), an organization that had been forced out of Italy amid charges that it was a CIA money-laundering front.

  The problem Zelikow ignores is that Holland’s only evidence to support his premise is one handwritten note by a KGB defector named Vasili Mitrokhin that “refers to a disinformation scheme in 1967 that involved Paese Sera and resulted in publication of a false story in New York.” The note, supposedly summarizing a KGB document that Holland has never seen, does not mention Clay Shaw, Centro Mondiale Comerciale, Jim Garrison, or any specific New York publication.

  Holland speculates that the New York publication may have been the National Guardian, which based an article on the Paese Sera series. But one short article in an obscure left-wing weekly that routinely picked up stories from the international press does not seem like much of an accomplishment for a KGB disinformation operation. There is no evidence that the Guardian article was picked up anywhere else in the U.S.

  Rather than speculate, Holland might have tried to interview the editors of Paese Sera who were responsible for the articles on Centro Mondiale Comerciale, as scholar Joan Mellen has done for her forthcoming biography of Garrison. They would have told him that the six-part series had nothing to do with the KGB or the JFK assassination, that they had never heard of Jim Garrison when they assigned the story six months before, and that they were astonished to see that Shaw might have any connection to the assassination. The articles were actually assigned in the wake of a right-wing coup in Greece and were intended to prevent such a coup in Italy.

  Holland says, “everything in the Paese Sera story was a lie.” His evidence? A recently released CIA document saying that the agency itself looked into Paese Sera’s allegations and found that the CIA had no connection to CMC or its parent, Permindex. Holland may be willing to accept this as the whole truth, but it is unconvincing to the rest of us who have noticed the agency’s tendency to distance itself from its fronts, to release to the public only documents that serve its interest, to fabricate evidence, and to lie outright even under oath to congressional committees.

  Two important facts from the Paese Sera story remain true:

  1. CMC was forced to leave Italy (for Johannesburg, South Africa) in 1962 under a cloud of suspicion about its CIA connections.

  2. Clay Shaw was a member of CMC’s board, along with such well-known fascist sympathizers as Gutierrez di Spadaforo, undersecretary of agriculture for Mussolini; Ferenc Nagy, former premier of Hungary, and Giuseppe Zigiotti, president of the Fascist National Association for Militia Arms.

  Holland claims that the Paese Sera articles were what led Garrison to believe the CIA was involved in the assassination. This is nonsense. Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins describes in detail how his uncovering of various pieces of evidence actually led him to the conclusion that the CIA was involved. This gradual process began two days after the assassination when he questioned David Ferrie, a pilot who flew secret missions to Cuba for the CIA and trained Lee Harvey Oswald in his Civil Air Patrol unit. It included his investigation of a 1961 raid of a munitions cache by CIA operatives in Houma, Louisiana; the discovery that several of Oswald’s coworkers at Reily Coffee Company in New Orleans now worked at NASA; the fact that Oswald was working o
ut of an office that was running the CIA’s local training camp for Operation Mongoose; many eyewitnesses who saw Clay Shaw, David Ferrie and Oswald together, etc. No doubt the Paese Sera series was another piece of the puzzle for Garrison, but it was not the centerpiece of his thinking that Holland makes it out to be.

  From the moment his investigation of the JFK assassination became public, Garrison was pilloried in the press. This treatment was part of an orchestrated effort by the CIA to discredit critics of the Warren Commission. A CIA memo dated April 1, 1967, never mentioned by Holland or Zelikow, outlines the strategy and calls for the Agency’s “assets” in the media (writers and editors) to publish stories saying the critics were politically motivated, financially motivated, egomaniacal, sloppy in their research, supported the Soviet Union, etc. This is exactly the inaccurate portrait of Garrison that emerged in the press.

  With the publication of Holland’s recent article attempting to link Jim Garrison to the KGB, the CIA continues to pursue this misguided strategy of smearing Garrison and other critics of the Warren Commission. Fortunately, the American public has never bought the tired old lie that the CIA’s misadventures can be written off as figments of KGB disinformation. Too bad your critic did.