by Lisa Pease
757 Turner and Christian, p. 148. Oddly enough, Owen claimed to have been threatened after reporting his Sirhan contact to the police while using a phone booth in front of the Carolina Pines restaurant. After he left the phone booth and drove into Griffith Park with his friend, boxer Johnny Gray, someone shot at their car. According to Gray, Owen had asked Gray to open the windows moments before and Gray felt the bullets had whizzed right through.
758 Lisa Pease, “Bremer and Wallace: It’s Déjà vu all over again,” Probe, Vol. 6 No. 4, viewable at kennedysandking.com/articles/bremer-wallace-it-s-deja-vu-all-over-again.
759 Memorandum from Baxter Ward to fellow supervisors, July 29, 1975, published in the Appendix of The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup, by William Turner and Jonn Christian. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993, originally published by Random House, 1978), p. 374.
760 Turner and Christian, p. 13.
761 Turner and Christian, Location p. 12.
762 Turner and Christian, Locations 663, 788, and 1729; Statement of Jerry Owen, taken by the LAPD on June 5, 1968 at the University Detective Division.
763 FBI airtel from SAC, Las Vegas to Director, FBI, June 10, 1968, quoting Ralph Donald, “Pastor Notes Sirhan Vegas Visit,” Las Vegas Sun, June 10, 1968.
764 Ibid.
765 Ibid.
766 Ibid.
767 “Statement of Local Minister,” FBI files, L.A.F.O. No. 56-156: Volume 3 (Ser. 501-750), www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=99632&search=Harrell#relPageId=26&tab=page.
768 LAPD interview report of LVPD interview of Rev. Douglas Harrell, typed August 13, 1968.
769 Emma Dumain, “Pelosi Praises Feinstein, Calls CIA Director’s Statements ‘Befuddling,’” Roll Call, www.rollcall.com/218/pelosi-praises-feinstein-calls-cia-director-brennan-statements-befuddling/, March 13, 2014, accessed October 21, 2017.
770 Daniel Chaitin, “Schumer warns Trump: Intel officials ‘have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you’,” Washington Examiner, January 3, 2017, www.washingtonexaminer.com/schumer-warns-trump-intel-officials-have-six-ways-from-sunday-at-getting-back-at-you/article/2610823.
MISSION: POSSIBLE
“In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it. The vast clandestine apparatus we built up to prove our enemies’ resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves; and that vast army of clandestine personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disastrous consequences for them and us.”
THE MORNING OF JUNE 5, 1968, CIA OFFICER JOSEPH BURKHOLDER Smith heard on his car radio that Robert Kennedy had been shot. He was on his way to teach a class to a group of Army officers who were going to Vietnam as part of a joint CIA-Defense Department unit. When Smith arrived, an Army colonel who led the unit Smith was about to teach shocked Smith with the following exhortation:
“Congratulations,” said the colonel, “now it won’t be us. You guys are great. Only, for Christ’s sake, having your agent use that small-caliber weapon is taking an awful chance. He’s not dead yet.”771
Why did the Army Colonel immediately assume, without any evidence, that the CIA had killed Senator Robert Kennedy? Because he had seen the system from the inside, perhaps more than had Smith, who assured his class, also without evidence, that the CIA hadn’t killed Kennedy.
After the CIA’s operations were exposed in the wake of the Church and Pike Committees, Smith wrote he was shocked to find out how much he didn’t know about his employer, despite his many years working for the Agency.772 But Smith continued to defend the Agency against all comers, even when an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations came knocking on his door. As Upton Sinclair once said, “It’s impossible to make a man understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
Regardless of whether Smith was shocked or posturing, the Army colonel had a clearer view of how the CIA operated, and the ways in which the CIA’s world vision clashed with that of the Kennedys, than most reporters do today.
Some people really can’t believe that CIA people would ever do such a thing. Aren’t they the ultimate patriots, putting their lives on the line to defend us? It’s important to understand that, like the Army colonel, there were a number of people in the military and intelligence establishments who felt the Kennedy brothers were Communist sympathizers or worse, so killing them was, in their minds, an act of patriotism, not treason. That the Kennedys weren’t Communists or sympathizers was a difference of fact, not opinion, but when people only listen to lies that support their beliefs, instead of the facts that challenge them, terrible things can happen.
The politics of the Kennedy brothers have been deliberately muddied for that reason: If you believe the Kennedy brothers were of the same mind as the CIA of the time, you’ll find it impossible to believe that operatives of the CIA killed both brothers. But if you understand that there was an epic power struggle going on between the Kennedys and the CIA at the time of President Kennedy’s death, and that Robert Kennedy’s policies would have not only mirrored but exceeded those of his brother’s on the left of the political spectrum, the picture of why both Kennedys were killed becomes much clearer.
To fully understand the war between the CIA and the Kennedy administration, we have to understand how the CIA operated prior to the Kennedy administration.
The CIA blackmailed its way into existence
AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN DISBANDED the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. Many OSS members lost their jobs, and the rest were folded into other remaining government agencies. In 1946, “a group of management advisors” reviewed intelligence information going to President Truman, the Secretary of State and others, and concluded the information could have come from press reports, so why pay for a spy agency. Miles Copeland, one of the founding fathers of the CIA, wrote in veiled language about how the CIA essentially ran an operation to silence critics:
There are several stories in the CIA’s secret annals to explain how the dispute was settled, but although they “make better history,” as Allen Dulles used to say, they are only half-truths and much less consistent with the ways of government than the true one. Old-timers at the Agency swear that the antiespionage people would almost certainly have won out had it not been for the fact that an Army colonel who had been assigned to the management group charged with the job of organizing the new Agency suborned secretaries in the FBI, the State Department, and the Defense Department and organized them into an espionage network which proved not only the superiority of espionage over other forms of acquiring “humint” (i.e., intelligence on what specific human beings think and do in privacy), but the necessity for its being systematized and tightly controlled. The colonel was fired, as were the secretaries, but by that time General John Magruder, then head of the group that was organizing the CIA, had in his hands a strong argument for creating a professional espionage service and putting it under a single organization.773
Copeland explains this effort included the targeting of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover:
Also, thanks to the secretaries and their Army spymaster, he had enough material to silence enemies of the new Agency—including even J. Edgar Hoover, since Magruder was among the very few top bureaucrats in Washington on whom Hoover didn’t have material for retaliation.774
Hoover had long been accused of having a homosexual relationship with his top aide Clyde Tolson. According to two sources, the blackmail against Hoover included a photograph:
John Weitz, a former officer in the OSS, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, recalled a curious episode at a dinner party in the fifties. “After a conversation about Hoover,” he said, “our host went to another room and came back with a photograph. It was not a good picture
and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson
Weitz told author Anthony Summers his host was none other than James Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief. Gordon Novel also sourced a photo of Hoover having sex with Tolson to Angleton:
“What I saw was a picture of him giving Clyde Tolson a blowjob,” said Novel. “There was more than one shot, but the startling one was a close shot of Hoover’s head. He was totally recognizable. You could not see the face of the man he was with, but Angleton said it was Tolson. I asked him if they were fakes, but he said they were real, that they’d been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me.”775
Novel reiterated this same story to me when I talked to him in Las Vegas in 2004. During New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation of the JFK assassination, Garrison told Playboy Magazine that Novel worked for the CIA. Novel then sued Playboy for defamation. But in his deposition, Novel opened by claiming immunity under the National Security Act of 1947, the very act which formed the CIA. Hoover didn’t want him to pursue the lawsuit, but Angleton did, so Angleton showed Gordon the pictures to get Hoover off his back. “I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used,” Novel told Anthony Summers. Novel then approached Hoover while he was having dinner with Tolson at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. and mentioned he had seen the photos. According to Novel, Hoover nearly choked on his food.776
Summers wrote that Meyer Lansky, a Mafia capo, was also shown the pictures of Hoover, which would explain why Hoover was unable to pursue mob prosecutions during his tenure. Former FBI agent Bill Turner quit the FBI in large part due to Hoover’s denial that there was such a thing as organized crime. The OSS and the Mafia had worked together during WWII to protect American ports from Nazi agents. That may have been the way the OSS thanked its partner.
John Meier, a top aide to Howard Hughes, told me that Hoover had expressed to him in a private conversation that he was “powerless” against the CIA. If the CIA had blackmail material on Hoover, that would explain why Hoover never blew the whistle on the myriad evidence of conspiracy his FBI agents dug up in both the JFK and RFK assassinations.
Hoover wasn’t the only one targeted. Copeland wrote about “Byzantine intrigue” designed to keep Congress in check. Former Crossfire host and erstwhile CIA employee Tom Braden was shocked when Allen Dulles repeated back to him one morning a bedroom conversation Braden had had with his wife the night before. Braden confirmed to writer David Wise that Angleton had placed the tap. Braden also described how Angleton would discuss the previous night’s “take” with Allen Dulles in the guise of fishing talk.777 How better to ensure the CIA’s survival than to know the secrets of those who might otherwise rein you in? Perhaps that explains why even—and perhaps especially—our elected officials to this day are afraid to challenge the CIA.
In 2007, Senator Jay Rockefeller chastised a young reporter named Charles Davis for thinking that, because he was the Senate Intelligence Chairman, he had any power over the CIA:
DAVIS: Is there anything you could do in your position as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee to find answers about this, if it is in fact going on?
ROCKEFELLER: Don’t you understand the way Intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m Chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time. I only get, and my committee only gets, what they want to give me.
DAVIS: Is there any way someone, maybe not you, they can somehow press the administration to find something—if they’re doing something that may be illegal—
ROCKEFELLER: I don’t know that. I don’t know that. I deal with Intelligence. That’s it. They tend to avoid us.
DAVIS: Well, what do you think about these allegations?
ROCKEFELLER: I’m not—I don’t comment on allegations. I can’t. I can’t afford to.778
Eisenhower failed to exercise oversight
WITH THE ELECTION OF PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, THE nascent CIA took an early turn for the worse. The CIA’s leaders held the view that America had the right to decide the fate of the rest of the world. In a world with finite resources, whoever controlled oil, the rare earth minerals necessary for plane and computer parts, precious metals like gold and silver, and pipeline and shipping routes for oil and other resources would dominate the world economy.
The CIA and the establishment that supported it had no qualms advocating and executing covert action to overthrow governments whose economic policies did not provide the U.S. an advantage over all other nations in areas with key resources. In the present era, we can see clearly now how disastrous those policies were in Latin America, in the Middle East, and everywhere else the CIA has meddled. Iran may never have become a fundamentalist state had the CIA not overthrown the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh.
No one epitomized the establishment more than the brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles. These two had both worked for the powerful Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, protecting the corporate interests of clients that included the powerful Rockefeller clan. Together, they ran America’s overt and covert foreign policy for eight years. And under them, a tragic number of democratically elected leaders would be overthrown.
In 1951, two men were elected president that would become targets of the nascent CIA: Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Both men wanted to stop the exploitation of their people by foreign interests, predominantly British and American business interests. Both took steps to nationalize their most valuable resources—oil in Iran and farmland in Guatemala, and both were then labeled “Communists” and overthrown by the CIA in the mid-1950s.
Not all the CIA’s coup attempts were successful. The CIA tried and failed to overthrow President Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958. A plot to kill Castro designed to coincide with the Bay of Pigs failed. An attempt to foment a revolution in Albania failed miserably. Amazingly, no matter how massive the failure, the CIA always seemed to be rewarded with increased funding, as if more money would solve the fundamental problem: You can’t bully the world into submission. People will eventually stand up for themselves and their country, when pushed to the brink.
From nearly its inception, the CIA acted independently of the president, a legacy from its freewheeling “anything goes” WWII mentality. This became painfully obvious during the administration of President Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s warning about the “military-industrial complex” rings hollow in light of the way he facilitated these interests.
In his book Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur Schlesinger described how people around Eisenhower tried to warn him that the CIA was becoming a monster. In the wake of the CIA’s “successful” coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), President Eisenhower rewarded the CIA with more power and less oversight. Ironically, it was his own Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, which Eisenhower created in 1956, that saw the CIA’s “successes” in a different light:
Almost at once the board had appointed a panel, led by Robert Lovett and David Bruce, to take a look at CIA’s covert operations. “Bruce was very much disturbed,” Lovett told the Cuba board of inquiry in 1961. “He approached it from the standpoint of ‘what right have we to go barging around into other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that or the other office?’ He felt this was an outrageous interference with friendly countries. … He got me alarmed, so instead of completing the report in thirty days we look two months or more.”
The 1956 report, written in Bruce’s spirited style, condemned “the increased mingling in the internal affairs of other nations of bright, highly graded young men who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being. … Busy, moneyed and privileged, [the CIA] likes its ‘King Making’ responsibility
(the intrigue is fascinating—considerable self-satisfaction, sometimes with applause, derives from “successes”—no charge is made for “failures”—and the whole business is very much simpler than collecting covert intelligence on the USSR through the usual CIA methods!).”779
Unfortunately, the Board of Consultants was utterly unsuccessful in persuading Eisenhower to shepherd the CIA appropriately:
The Board of Consultants had no visible impact. Allen Dulles ignored its recommendations. Eisenhower gave it no support. But its testimony demolishes the myth that the CIA was a punctilious and docile organization, acting only in response to express instructions from higher authority. Like the FBI, it was a runaway agency, in this case endowed with men professionally trained in deception, a wide choice of weapons, reckless purposes, a global charter, maximum funds and minimum accountability.780
More disturbing was Schlesinger’s note that “Bruce and Lovett could discover no reliable system of control” over the CIA. The Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), which Eisenhower created in 1953 to coordinate and implement national security policies between various government agencies, which had power over the CIA, served instead to rubber-stamp CIA’s operations. The Bruce-Lovett report noted that “no one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day to day operation, has any detailed knowledge of what is going on.” As Schlesinger wrote:
With “a horde of CIA representatives” swarming around the planet, CIA covert action was exerting “significant, almost unilateral influences … on the actual formation of our foreign policies … sometimes completely unknown” to the local American ambassador. “We are sure,” the report added, “that the supporters of the 1948 decision to launch this government on a positive [covert] program could not possibly have foreseen the ramifications of the operations which have resulted from it.” Bruce and Lovett concluded with an exasperated plea:
“Should not someone, somewhere in an authoritative position in our government, on a continuing basis, be … calculating … the long-range wisdom of activities which have entailed our virtual abandonment of the international ‘golden rule,’ and which, if successful to the degree claimed for them, are responsible in a great measure for stirring up turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today? … Where will we be tomorrow?781