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

by Mark Lane

  Shaw died at 12:40 AM at his home. Wegman was notified, immediately dressed and arrived at Shaw’s residence approximately one hour later. Although Wegman knew that the sitter had been engaged in cleaning “the victim’s face and while doing so, the victim gasped and apparently expired,”56 he did not contact the police department or the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office. Instead he called a funeral home, the House of Bultman, run by friends, at 1:30 AM. The funeral parlor representatives arrived in less than half an hour and removed the body and the “procedure of arterial injection and aspirating of the body cavities took place.” Those efforts prevented an autopsy from taking place.

  Clearly, the two detectives assigned to the case and their supervisor, a lieutenant, were suspicious, as was the chief of detectives who “instructed” them to “initiate an investigation into the death.” One day had elapsed after the death before they learned of it. Then, an unusually extensive local police investigation into the cause of death was initiated. Shaw’s attorney, identified in the police report as “E. Wegman,” told the police officers that he had not notified the New Orleans Police Department and the New Orleans Coroner’s Office of the death “because it was his understanding that that it was not necessary.” That was not the law and Wegman was an experienced lawyer.

  Thirteen days after the death, the police completed their inquiry and issued a report. The report states that Shaw’s condition was terminal; however, it added that the “exact cause of Mr. Shaw’s death could never be determined without the results of an autopsy.” Shaw’s trial lawyer did not request an autopsy and had taken action that prevented it from becoming a possibility.

  While Holland wrote that the prosecution of Shaw was a farce and without basis, the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that evidence developed by Jim Garrison and his office had “established an association of an undetermined nature between David Ferrie, a suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, and Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  During June 1984, I was present at the deposition of Richard Helms, the former Director of the CIA. The attorney for E. Howard Hunt, a party in the case, sought to foreclose the issue by asking Helms if the CIA had anything to do with the assassination of the president. I expected no confession; I did anticipate an outraged and ringing denial. Neither occurred. The tepid response was, “to the best of my knowledge,” the CIA had not murdered the president. Counsel persisted, hoping for a more definitive assurance. He asked if the CIA had covered up the facts surrounding the assassination. Helms paused, perhaps remembering that he was a convicted criminal who had committed perjury in his testimony before a committee of the United States Senate. Then he stated that, “to the best of my knowledge,” the CIA had not done that.

  When it was my turn I asked Helms if he had ever heard of Clay Shaw. At once the CIA’s lawyers, two were present, and Hunt’s lawyers, two more, huddled with Helms. When the time-out ended Helms asked me, “Clay Shaw?” Then he added, “Can you help me a little as to who Clay Shaw was.” The past tense indicated that Helms was aware of more facts than he pretended to know.

  Helms had been called as a witness in a previous case involving Hunt. I had obtained a copy of his testimony in that matter. I told Helms that Shaw was the person whom he, Helms, had previously identified, while under oath, as being a contact of the CIA’s Domestic Contact Division, and that Shaw was the person Helms had sworn had carried out missions for the CIA. I read his previous testimony to him and asked if he had made it. Helms replied that it did not refresh his recollection, but if it said in the transcript that he had made those statements, “I guess I did.”

  During the colloquy between counsel, Helms took out a single sheet of paper and looked at it. When I asked him if Shaw worked for the CIA he studied that document. I asked him if that sheet was a copy of the transcript of his earlier testimony in which he admitted the CIA–Shaw relationship. He said that it was. I asked how he obtained that page and one of his CIA attorneys stated, “His counsel provided it” for Helms’s “perusal.”

  That additional assertion indicated that Helms, Hunt’s lawyers and the CIA lawyers had all agreed to dissemble and to agree that Helms should deny facts under oath that they knew to be true. Their conduct was unethical and bordered on criminal. I was not concerned about their duplicity; I was satisfied that we had established the link between Shaw and the CIA. I called Jim Garrison at once and reported the exchanges. He said that if he had had that information at the time of the trial Shaw would have been convicted. Possibly he was correct. I could never prophesize what twelve men and women, good and true, might decide in the jury room, but I knew that the case against Shaw would have been immeasurably stronger if Shaw had not committed perjury at his trial and if the CIA had not been the constant source of disinformation.

  Had Shaw survived until after June 5, 1984, when Garrison discovered that Shaw had been associated with the CIA, he might have faced legal difficulties. There is no statute of limitations for murder in Louisiana; even if there were a time-limiting statute it would have been tolled in the event of deliberate concealment of material facts. Shaw had died almost ten years before the date Garrison learned that the CIA admitted that the connection had existed. His death prevented him from facing the possibility of a motion to reopen the murder case against him.

  Vincent Bugliosi and Rewriting History

  Actually he named it Reclaiming History. After reviewing the facts you choose which title is more appropriate. When it first appeared I declined to review it for magazines and newspapers for several reasons. I saw little reason to publicize a book that no one was reading. Also I had a personal interest in the matter since Bugliosi, who had never interviewed me, stated that I was a “fraud” for denying the conclusions of the Warren Report. He wrote, it is a “fact” that “virtually all intelligent people who are knowledgeable of the facts (both of which Lane is) know that Oswald killed Kennedy and almost assuredly acted alone.” He continued that, therefore, “one is compelled to conclude that from the very beginning, Lane was a fraud in his preachments about the Kennedy assassination.” Off with my head. As for you, dear reader, who may agree with me that the Warren Commission Report was flawed, are you also a fraud or merely ignorant or unintelligent?

  I also declined to bring legal action against him at that time for the same reasons. The book had been heralded with much publicity, Hollywood fanfare and purportedly serious and certainly favorable reviews in the established press. When Rush to Judgment was published the CIA directed its assets to review it most unfavorably. Some of the same people are still at it, now marching in lockstep with Bugliosi. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, for example, gave it a rave review written by Max Holland. The WSJ neglected to inform its readers that Holland is published on the CIA official website (cia.gov) as the CIA expert employed in defending that agency from any charge of implication in the assassination of President Kennedy.

  The WSJ also failed to inform its readers that Holland had repeatedly published defamatory articles on the CIA official website against critics of the Warren Commission. Holland, for his part, refrained from telling readers of the WSJ that Bugliosi had praised him in the very book that he was reviewing. Bugliosi in his book had very kind words for his future reviewer, Max Holland, calling him “a serious student of the assassination whose primary agenda is to ferret out the truth.” That weasel-like reference was, I am sure, inadvertent, since Bugliosi did not reveal Holland’s mole-like work for the CIA.

  Nevertheless, almost no one seemed interested in it. Years ago, while visiting the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, I asked a clerk if the Bugliosi book was there. She replied, “You mean the cinder block; yes we have it; no one is buying it.” I did not inquire further, never to know if no one was purchasing the book or no one was buying its concept.

  I confess, for I am a man who admits it when he makes a mistake, I purchased a copy. I knew that it was not on The New York Times best-seller lis
t for either books of fiction or fact, but anxious to see how it was doing I checked with Amazon and discovered that it was the 802nd most popular book at that time. Only 801 books at Amazon were selling at a faster clip. Until then I had not realized that there were so many different books for sale at any given time or that I had ever been a member of so small a minority. A little more than one month after publication date is the crucial time for a book’s sales. While the first week’s sales primarily result from media exposure and reviews, as the book matures subsequent sales figures are based primarily on word of mouth—the opinions of those who have actually read it. I can recall no other book so well promoted that fell into oblivion so quickly.

  Of course, Bugliosi will have an explanation for so telling a rejection by the American people; he always does. Bugliosi had stated that there “are two reasons” why a book he had written previously was a failure, that is why so few people bought it. “One reason, I think, is because the book had not been available the way it should be [sic]. And the second reason is for the first time in my literary career I have not gotten on the main talk shows in the morning, the morning network shows.”57

  You may be asking what has changed my mind about reviewing Bugliosi. Tom Hanks has. He announced that he was going to produce, with HBO, a thirteen-part mini-series to prove the accuracy of the Warren Commission Report. Ten of the programs, each one hour long, would deal with Bugliosi’s view of the events, and three hours would be given to Bugliosi to attack those who disagree with him. He expects to air these programs in November 2013, during the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination. Hanks expects the program to be very successful, stating that “a lot of conspiracy types are going to be upset.” And then he adds, “If we do it right, it’ll be perhaps one of the most controversial things that has ever been on TV.” Hanks is entitled to his position; here is mine. If the program repeats the defamatory and entirely false statements that Bugliosi included in his book, I assure you I will file a lawsuit against all those associated with the project, since I have already put them on notice and sent them the documents demonstrating Bugliosi’s errors. A high point of that proceeding would be Hanks trying to answer questions about what is in Bugliosi’s book, a work that I am quite confident he has never read. In Hollywood, generally some clerical employee reads a work and then drafts a two-page essay about the substance. That document is then given to someone closer to the star who realizes that it is far too long, and then reduces it to a paragraph or two.

  Do you think it is likely that Tom Hanks knows anything about the sources utilized for the book? Among those Bugliosi relies upon are Max Holland and Christopher Andrew. Holland appears several times throughout the work and Bugliosi identifies him as a “Warren Commission chronicler and assassination researcher” (p. 77). He refers to him as an “assassination researcher, Max Holland” (p. 456). He also makes this reference, “as writer Max Holland says” (p. 940). He also refers to him as “the very literate Max Holland” (p. 999). And in summation, he asserts that “no one has put” it “any better than writer and assassination researcher Max Holland” (p. 1346). Then, when Holland personally attacked Oliver Stone, Bugliosi wrote, “Max Holland said it well” (pp.1434–5).

  In addition, he lists Holland as a source for information in footnotes 129–30, 133, 780, 812 and 813. Bugliosi fails to inform his readers that Max Holland is a CIA media asset.

  Holland also relies upon statements made by Andrew, but fails to identify that source as an asset of the Central Intelligence Agency. I doubt that that information found its way into the summary that Hanks might have read, but I am providing him adequate time to do some research before the cross-examination begins.

  For the last several years, when asked to speak at a conference about the assassination of John Kennedy or comment upon a new scientific finding again refuting the coincidence theory of history, I have respectfully declined with these words: it is round. For the world is not flat and further proof of that theory is not required by most of us and of little interest to almost all of us.

  Bugliosi’s version of the long since thoroughly discredited Warren Commission Report requires a body strong enough to pick it up [the publisher boasts that it weighs five and one half pounds] and a great deal of determination if one contemplates actually trying to read it.

  Publishers Weekly, almost always the author’s sympathetic friend, refers in its review to Bugliosi’s “obsession” and states that “Bugliosi is not always temperate in his language, for example, twice he makes the nonsensical claim that Warren Commission ‘critics were screaming the word conspiracy before the fatal bullet had come to rest.’”

  I was, I believe, the first to publicly raise concern about the conclusions of the FBI; I raised questions, did not offer any conclusions, and I did so quietly, in an article I had written and in an interview conducted by a New York Times veteran and exemplary journalist. It was J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, who had first raised the issue of conspiracy by stating that Oswald had acted alone, and remarkably he did so very soon after the arrest of Oswald. Later I wondered how that statement could be made so prematurely, even before the FBI had conducted a reasonable inquiry. No screaming, no unrested bullet and no allegations of conspiracy.

  Bugliosi’s obsession took some considerable time to evolve. Decades had passed since the assassination while Bugliosi remained silent. A special committee of the United States Congress had conducted an investigation and concluded that in all likelihood there had been a conspiracy. Of course the committee’s chief counsel, its experienced former assistant district attorneys, its studious investigators, and all the member of Congress who endorsed that view, being neither ignorant nor stupid, were according to Bugliosi’s definition, “frauds.”

  It may be instructive to examine the then-developing evidence prior to Bugliosi’s tardy interest in a matter that had passionately concerned millions of Americans. The leading CIA official in charge of defamation directed against those who did not accept the Warren Commission view of the events, and who helped to prevent the publication of Rush to Judgment, was David Atlee Phillips, who bragged that he ran the Western Hemisphere for the CIA. Phillips was based in Mexico City when Oswald was alleged to have been there. Oswald was not there but William F. Buckley was. He was employed by the CIA as a secret agent as he later admitted to me under oath. Buckley played an active role in defending the CIA by insisting that Oswald had been the lone assassin.

  On February 6, 1985, a jury in a United States District Court found that my client, a newspaper defendant that had alleged that E. Howard Hunt and the CIA had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, was not guilty of libel.

  The jury verdict in the case preceded Bugliosi’s interest in the assassination. His present book proclaims that he has been at work on the subject for twenty years. That means that his work began not long after the jury had spoken, and just as the CIA was utilizing all of its assets to deny its involvement and to support efforts that would conclude that Oswald had acted alone. I know of no evidence that demonstrates that Bugliosi acted for the agency, either knowingly or inadvertently. It would be interesting, however, to learn where the funding for a massive book that few would read and for twenty years of work had originated.

  One fact is obvious. In Bugliosi’s huge volume there is an enormous list of names in the index, including Elvis Presley, Paul Newman, Ann Landers, Frank Sinatra, “Blaze Starr, a stripper,” “Sunshine (dog), 51” [although there is no reference to Sunshine on page 51, a distressing, oft-repeated feature of Bugliosi’s book where citations, even for a scholarly researcher, become bridges to nowhere], Sterling Hayden, and of course that nostalgic favorite, Charles Manson. In Bugliosi’s jaunt through Hollywood, on page 1353, we learn that Oliver Stone, whom Bugliosi detests, is the “only child of a Jewish father and French Catholic mother.”

  The name of Arthur Krock is absent. Mr. Krock’s credibility is relevant, particularly since he did not offer documentary s
upport for his prophetic words published during October 1963. Here, however, we are not considering a supermarket tabloid or the warnings of Chicken Little. The publication is The New York Times and the journalist is a recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and generally considered to be the most responsible and respected writer of his time. He knew the Kennedy family well.

  Krock was a conservative who chided Kennedy through the editorial page of the Times regarding what he considered to be the president’s too liberal position on the question of civil rights.

  On October 3, 1963, Krock published an historic column in The New York Times. Entitled “The Intra-Administration War in Vietnam,” Krock revealed that the White House had declared war on the CIA and that the CIA was responding. Krock wrote, “the CIA had flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge” and that in one instance the CIA had “frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought from Washington.” The reason was that the CIA “disagreed with it.” The issue that caused the CIA such concern was the efforts to end the war in Vietnam.

  Krock wrote that “the CIA’s growth” was “likened to a malignancy” that his source, “a very high official,” was “not even sure the White House could control … any longer.”

  Krock wrote that by releasing this information the “executive branches have expanded their war against the CIA from inner government councils to the American people via the press.” Did we listen then? Are we listening now?

  Here are Arthur Krock’s frightening and prophetic words. Relying upon the “high official,” certainly with the president’s approval, Krock wrote, and The New York Times published these words:

  “If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government it will come from the CIA.”