by Joan Mellen
Then Bobby called Chicago lawyer Julius Draznin and charged him “to find out what the word in Chicago was on the hit.” In two to four days, as Draznin remembers, he had his answer: the assassination had not been a Mafia-organized operation. Draznin, an FBI liaison with organized crime, based in the field office of the NLRB, spent that week in close communication with Sheridan and Bobby. When Sheridan in 1975 told the Church Committee that the “mob” had been behind the assassination, he knew better. Bobby Kennedy reportedly even asked Daniel Patrick Moynihan to investigate whether Jimmy Hoffa could have blackmailed the Secret Service. The answer again came back to him: There was no evidence that organized crime had masterminded the murder of his brother. With Lee Harvey Oswald having been observed in the company of his own people, Bobby now had no alternative but to protect the Agency along with other, more important participants in the assassination of his brother.
Oswald, Jim Garrison concluded, had been “an employee of the CIA which skillfully nurtured him and convinced him that he was performing undercover intelligence assignments for the government.” Oswald was “bright and deeply experienced, if low level, and had he not been eliminated, he’d still be talking,” Garrison said. The Agency, Garrison was firmly convinced, was behind the assassination. “The CIA is a major menace to the democracy I thought we lived in,” he told the press.
“Jim,” William Alford said on a day when he was exhausted, “If the CIA killed the President, there’s nothing a chicken shit assistant district attorney from New Orleans is going to be able to do about it.” Knowing how deeply Garrison believed in his case, Alford figured he would be fired on the spot. Instead, Garrison burst out laughing.
“There’s probably nothing a chicken shit District Attorney is going to be able to do about it either,” he said.
Worried, the CIA watched. On February 6th, 1967, Lloyd Ray wrote to the Director of the Domestic Contact Service that there was “some truth in the allegation of the Garrison investigation.” He feared “Garrison will expose some CIA operations in Louisiana.” From the moment of its 1948 agreement with the CIA, the FBI had acquiesced in the CIA’s operating at home as well as abroad. Now the Agency relied on the FBI to help subvert Garrison’s work.
“Due to Garrison’s irresponsible actions,” Hoover raged, “no contact is being made with him or any member of his staff.” Should any agents be asked for information, they were to say, “No comment.” Robert Rightmyer, now the Special Agent in Charge in New Orleans, was warned: “Give Garrison nothing!” All personnel in New Orleans were to “keep their mouths shut.” The FBI hated Garrison with an “intense passion,” Gordon Novel was to discover from his own contacts with the Bureau. The only investigation they were making was of Garrison himself, even as the FBI claimed its interest was in continuing to investigate the murder of the president.
All leads reported to the FBI were suppressed. John Alice, working at an import-export firm at the International Trade Mart, came forward to the FBI and identified several figures in the photographs of Oswald handing out his leaflets. Jim Garrison was not informed. There was a call from a woman named Cecilia Pizzo, a friend of Delphine Roberts, who knew that “Clay Shaw and Clay Bertrand were one and the same person.” This, too, was suppressed. When Joe Oster reported that Oswald had frequented Thomas Edward Beckham’s mission, the FBI did not tell Jim Garrison. Examples of the FBI concealing valuable leads from Jim Garrison are manifold. Many Louisiana citizens believed that in presenting evidence to the FBI, they were simultaneously helping Garrison. It was not so.
The FBI papered its files with disinformation. “The Bureau’s extensive investigation of Ferrie failed to develop any evidence that he was known to Lee Harvey Oswald,” insists a statement issued in April 1967 by the intelligence component, Division 5.
Whether or not Hoover received a written warning from CIA operative Richard Case Nagell that the assassination of the president was being planned in New Orleans, there are on the record other suggestions of FBI foreknowledge. Dallas FBI agent James Hosty, in charge of Oswald, was ordered not to attend the luncheon for President Kennedy on November 22nd to which he had been invited. “If I knew what was good for me, I’d better stay away from there,” Hosty reported to the Church Committee that he was told.
Garrison perused a letter Oswald had written to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City on November 12, 1963, revealing that Oswald knew that an official at the Cuban embassy named Eusebio Azque was being recalled on November 18th, an extraordinary fact. In every interview Garrison gave he talked about Oswald’s intelligence connections. Langley contacted Lloyd Ray, while James Angleton briefed J. Edgar Hoover about the Paese Sera articles, with the CIA insisting, falsely, that the CIA “has not been in contact with Clay Shaw since May 1956.” The Agency was further dismayed when “Oswald was allegedly linked with CIA in some early newspaper stories.” In the States-Item, Hoke May was writing that Clay Shaw was and still is a CIA agent.
Lawrence Houston instructed Lloyd Ray to notify Washington at once should anyone in the New Orleans FBI or CIA be subpoenaed. John McCone repeated the boilerplate denial he had offered the Warren Commission on Angleton’s instructions: “Lee Harvey Oswald was never associated or connected directly or indirectly, in any way whatsoever with the Agency.”
Together, FBI and CIA had to figure out how to “allay the story of CIA’s possible sponsorship of Oswald’s activity.” Helms knew how to be emphatic. There was no record of Oswald’s contact with CIA, even “in the mind of any individuals,” was how Helms put it. Allen Dulles insisted he had no knowledge of Oswald. The Rock’s office put out the statement that there was “no record or indication that any other US government agency had used him as a source or had considered him for recruitment,” which was patently false.
It was Angleton who had run the false defector program. It was Angleton who moved people between the CIA and Customs, from Charles Siragusa, his World War II friend, to Oswald. If the CIA opened Oswald’s “201” file a year after he “defected,” at the end of 1960, his Counter Intelligence “SIG” file had long been in place. In 1976 the Church Committee would conclude that counterintelligence was the “focal point” of Oswald’s employment with the CIA, as documentation denied to Jim Garrison began to emerge.
Garrison did learn of a memo reflecting that Oswald “less than six weeks before the assassination . . . was under surveillance by both the FBI and the CIA.” It came in a notarized affidavit from State Department Officer James D. Crowley: “The first time I remember learning of Oswald’s existence was when I received copies of a telegraphic message, dated October 10, 1963, from the Central Intelligence Agency, which contained information pertaining to his current activities.”
Most of the documentation of Oswald’s CIA connections emerged after Jim Garrison’s investigation. This includes a document in which Thomas Casasin, a CIA employee in the “Soviet Realities” section, reveals that he wished to debrief Oswald after his return the Soviet Union only to be thwarted by Counter Intelligence. In a November 25, 1963, document, Casasin recounts that the Soviet Realities branch had an “operational intelligence interest in the Harvey story,” and had approached Oswald to use him as an outside contact. “It makes little difference now,” Casasin writes to Walter P. Haltigan after Oswald’s death, “but REDWOOD had at one time an OI interest in Oswald.” It was the summer of 1960. They had backed off because “this individual looks odd.”
Casasin then discovered that Counter Intelligence had possessed all the information he required, but was refusing to share it with him and the “6 branch.” Casasin had assumed that if Oswald had been debriefed, he would have been informed, yet he was not. Counter Intelligence Special Investigation Group (CI/SIG) knew Oswald well and were concealing what they knew from other Agency components, as one branch of the CIA reveals that Oswald worked for another, but had been kept in the dark about it.
Another example of counterintelligence protecting its preassassination relationship with Osw
ald was CIA’s concealing FBI reports on Oswald’s Canal Street fracas from its own Mexico City chief of station, Win Scott. This detail further corroborates that the CIA had orchestrated that Canal Street brouhaha with the DRE, whether through David Atlee Phillips or his deputy George Joannides.
Yet another trace of Oswald’s CIA connection appeared a decade after Garrison had officially concluded his investigation in a CIA telegram, a document marked #304-113. In the Soviet Union, the CIA had “interviewed a former Marine who worked at the Minsk radio plant.” Dated December 4, 1963, the telegram read: “Source reported Sov Con Gen told him 30 Nov that Oswald sent to USSR and married Svt girl under CIA instructions.” Yet another document has surfaced, placed in Oswald’s file in Mexico City. Its subject is a CIA proprietary called “Transcontinental SA,” an import-export company which, among other activities, bought up bankrupt factories and rebuilt them.
Transcontinental purchased helicopters in Los Angeles destined for Cuba. A third party served as intermediary in a mirror image of the Freeport Sulphur operation. The date is October 12, 1961, when Oswald was serving counter-intelligence in the Soviet Union, the same time that Oswald’s name was placed on that truck order at Bolton Ford in New Orleans. That Oswald’s name is on the Transcontinental document suggests his assignment with U.S. Customs.
Further evidence of the intelligence agencies’ awareness of Oswald emerges in fragments of the Church Committee files that reveal that, on November 22, 1963, Oswald’s name popped up on a National Security Agency “Rhyming Dictionary,” a list of names on other agency lists (“rhyming” was jargon for “comparison”). Both the CIA and the FBI contributed names to the NSA for its watch list, people who represented a “threat to the internal security of the country,” some because of “their training, violent tendencies and prominence in subversive activity.” Within NSA, the watch list was supervised by a CIA employee named Mabel Hoover. FBI, CIA and NSA have all publicly denied that Oswald was on their lists. The NSA material sent to the Warren Commission remains classified.
A CIA accountant with “top secret” clearance named James Wilcott, who had been with Oswald at Atsugi, had retired in 1966, having become disenchanted with the Agency. Wilcott, who never became a Garrison witness, revealed that Oswald had indeed been debriefed—at Atsugi—after he returned from the Soviet Union. On November 24th, Agency employees in Japan buzzed about “Oswald’s connection with the CIA,” and concluded that the assassination had been an “outright project of Headquarters with the approval of McCone, or under the direction of Dulles and Bissell.” The murder of President Kennedy was at the level of the DDP (Helms), Wilcott said, with Oswald having been “recruited from the military for the express purpose of becoming a ‘double agent.’”
Wilcott was certain: Oswald, who, he was told, had drawn an advance on his salary “some time in the past from you,” was “an employee of the agency and was an agent.” Oswald received “a fulltime salary for operational work.” There were at least six or seven people who “either know or believed Oswald to be an agent of the CIA,” Wilcott said.
Wilcott concluded that “Ruby was paid by CIA to do away with Oswald,” the plan being to “kill Kennedy, link Oswald to Castro and use this pretext to invade Cuba.” Marina had been a “sleeper agent,” recruited before Oswald’s false defection; CIA had made a deal to get her out of the USSR with Oswald. “The phony link to the Cuban government could not be established firmly enough to serve as an excuse to attack Cuba,” Wilcott concluded, hence the need to brand Oswald as the lone assassin.
As an insider, Wilcott was dangerous. In the waning days of the CIA-dominated HSCA, Robert Blakey chose Harold Leap to discredit Wilcott. Having come to HSCA from longtime service at the Drug Enforcement Agency, Harold Leap was the Agency’s man; whenever there was a CIA agent or asset to be interviewed, Blakey’ deputy, Gary Cornwell, sent Leap to New Orleans. Leap accompanied Robert Buras on his interview with William Gaudet.
Now Leap seized on Wilcott’s vagueness about naming the specific case officers who had initially informed him of Oswald’s CIA relationship. That Wilcott could not remember Oswald’s cryptonym also was useful to Leap in his effort to undermine Wilcott’s story. Questioning CIA people who had been at the Tokyo station, Leap fulfilled his mission: “None of the individuals had seen any documents or heard any information indicating that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA agent.”
Leap had trouble discrediting Wilcott, who in 1965 had passed his CIA polygraph. There was only one unfavorable comment: “Subject considered a very naive man.” Then Leap thought he hit pay dirt. “Jerry,” Jerome E. Fox, an intelligence analyst whom Wilcott had named as having talked to him about the Oswald-CIA connection, had returned to the United States in 1962! A relieved HSCA could now continue to protect the CIA unimpeded. Meanwhile Gaeton Fonzi, HSCA’s Miami investigator, learned from his own CIA source, Rolando Otero, that “Oswald was sent to Russia as a CIA agent and that the decision to kill Kennedy was made before his return to the United States.”
Antonio Veciana was an asset both for the CIA under the cryptonym AMSHALE, and for 902nd Military Intelligence, one of the military intelligence groups, William Pepper reveals in Orders to Kill, instrumental in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The 902nd was under the command of Major General William P. Yarborough, the army’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence, notorious for having founded the Green Berets at Fort Bragg. The 902nd, Pepper writes, “carried out some of the most sensitive assignments” and was “a highly secretive operation.” At CIA, Yarborough met directly with Richard Helms. So CIA and military intelligence worked hand in glove.
Veciana had told Gaeton Fonzi that he had seen his CIA handler David Atlee Phillips with Oswald in August of 1963. In an outline for a novel to be called “The AMLASH Legacy,” a roman à clef about the assassination, David Atlee Phillips has his hero, Harold Harrison, based on himself, acknowledge: “I was one of the two case officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald. After working to establish his Marxist bona fides, we gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba.”
Phillips has his Oswald character develop the Dealey Plaza plan, shooting with a sniper’s rifle from an upper floor window of a building on the route where Castro often drove in an open jeep. Unknowingly he is manipulated into assassinating John F. Kennedy instead of Castro. Slyly, Phillips places “Harrison” (himself) on the high seas at the moment when Veciana claimed he had seen his handler, Maurice Bishop, with Oswald.
Phillips blames the Soviet Union for masterminding the assassination, mingling truth with fiction. Warren Commission critics, as Helms had outlined, were dupes of the KGB, as Max Holland’s thesis about Jim Garrison once more can be traced, not only to Helms, but also to the most skillful of CIA propagandists, David Atlee Phillips. In an amusing side note, CIA’s Win Scott steals Harrison’s journal, even as, in real life, it was James Angleton who broke into Scott’s files after his death and stole his novel manuscript.
Yet another trace of David Atlee Phillips’ connections to the events of November 22nd, which included both the assassination of President Kennedy and the arming of Rolando Cubela with the means to assassinate Fidel Castro, emerges in a CIA cable. Miami is informing its Mexico City station that one “Henry J. Sloman,” an alias for longtime CIA asset Anthony (Tony) Sforza, would be arriving in Mexico on November 22nd. Because the CIA was fond of providing Mafia cover for some of its assets, many people mistakenly concluded that the Mafia had been behind the assassination of President Kennedy. CIA’s Sloman, himself, as Seymour M. Hersh points out, “was considered a professional gambler and a high-risk smuggler directly linked to the Mafia.”
In Mexico City, Sloman/Sforza was to meet the wife of an agent designated as AMHALF-2, and retrieve a message regarding the “Martime Exfil of headquarters asset” who was to arrive in Mexico “on 22 November,” and may have been Fidel Castro’s sister, Juanita. Sloman was ordered to contact Phillips, mentioned here under his longtime alias “
[Michael] Choaden,” on the next day and pick up the information that had arrived from “[02] Exit-3.” AMHALF would be a link person, part of the communication circuit providing intercepts for island assets. Between 1960 and 1963, there were something like 350,000 such intercepts either by land lines or on island assets, all directed to CIA.
Sloman was the case officer for, among others, Emilio Rodriguez, the oldest son of Arnesto Rodriguez and brother of Arnesto, Junior, whom Oswald had visited in New Orleans in an attempt to how he might involve himself in training camps for sabotage against Castro.
The header of this November 22nd, 1963, CIA cable includes the cryptonym PBRUMEN, which referred to Cuba. By its timing it suggests the Cubela assassination attempt of November 22nd. It also seems to suggest that Oswald was led to believe that he was involved in the attempts on Castro’s life and did not know he would be linked to the shooting in Dealey Plaza.
This extraordinary document, if fragmentary, is interesting, too, because it provides an alibi for David Atlee Phillips under the alias he used in Cuba, “Michael Choaden.” If Phillips was down in Mexico, as he would be expected to be, waiting to be contacted by Sloman, he was not in Texas; this cable would confirm for any record that David Atlee Phillips was somewhere other than at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.
David Atlee Phillips’ nephew Shawn recounts a conversation in which Phillips, dying of lung cancer, admitted to his estranged brother James Atlee Phillips that he was indeed in Dealey Plaza on November 22nd. “Were you in Dallas that day?” James Atlee Phillips, Shawn’s father, asked. From everything James Atlee Phillips knew, he suspected strongly that his brother was at the scene of the shooting of President Kennedy. David said “Yes,” Shawn told author Dick Russell. Then he broke down crying. After this they hung up the phone, as if all that needed to be said had finally been said. This moment of understanding created a peace that had eluded the brothers for some years.