A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  Patman was a populist Texas Congressman, son of a tenant farmer. Unlike people like Herman and George Brown, he was a man who shunned the assistance of powerful friends. Chairing a House subcommittee on “Foundations,” Congressman Patman wondered whether these foundations were paying “their fair share of taxes.” Before long, Patman uncovered illegal CIA utilization of seemingly legal foundations, opening a Pandora’s box.

  A slew of foundations, some, but by no means all, Texas-based, were being used as conduits by CIA, dispensing “pass through” money to CIA proprietary interests. Among the richest was the Brown Foundation, the thirty-fifth largest among 22,000 foundations. CIA’s Central Cover Division, part of the clandestine services, sheltered these foundations from scrutiny.

  By January 11, 1968, all the documents generated by the Gurvich-Aynesworth involvement of George Brown in the Garrison investigation had been forwarded to the Director of the Domestic Contact Service and to Musulin of the Operational Support Staff. CIA now issued “Memorandum No. 8,” an overview of the persons named by Jim Garrison in his inquiry. Its subject was whether any of these people had CIA affiliations. Among those named in this widely distributed document, under “DDP contacts,” people who had made themselves available to the clandestine services, was George Brown.

  CIA writes, regarding Brown: “Garrison is reportedly trying to implicate him in the assassination plot. Has been both a DDP and DCS contact.” George Brown, CIA adds, “has cooperated closely with CIA in funding operations.” CIA leaves its relationship with George Brown at that.

  THE SILENCE OF ROBERT KENNEDY

  As I wrote in the original edition of A Farewell to Justice (See Chapter 12), Jim Garrison was perplexed and deeply frustrated that Robert Kennedy opposed his investigation. More, RFK gave comfort and credibility to his “Confidential Assistant,” that intelligence operative Walter Sheridan, who traveled to New Orleans to disrupt Garrison’s work. “If my brother were killed,” I quote Garrison as remarking, “I would be interested in getting the individuals involved, no matter who they were.”

  The issue resurfaced on August 14, 2012, in a Boston Globe editorial, “RFK’s family should release his papers.” It urges the Kennedy family to open the still sequestered Robert Kennedy Archive at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library and Museum. “One Kennedy family concern may be that the files could blemish the reputation of the former attorney general,” the Globe speculates, “who was allegedly involved with the administration’s schemes to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro.”

  In his 1968 affidavit, Jack Martin addresses the issue of Robert Kennedy’s curious silence on the subject of who murdered his brother. “Examine well,” Jack Martin writes, “the public image of those ’stalwart’ fellows of the enforcement services commanded by such as Robert F. Kennedy at the time.” The truth about who was behind the murder of President Kennedy could not have been so obfuscated and concealed, Jack Martin hints slyly, were it not for the obstructionist efforts of Robert Kennedy.

  Jack notes that Walter Sheridan was well-acquainted with Kim Philby, the MI6 agent who penetrated high CIA circles. Sheridan, Jack Martin contends, “served Philby as a tiatchet man’ from time to time before he vanished behind the iron curtain.” Philby returned to the bosom of his Soviet masters in December 1967, right in the middle of the Garrison investigation.

  Jack Martin places Philby in contact with Robert Kennedy and states that Robert Kennedy “mingled with numerous C.I.A. operational functionaries throughout his entire tenure of office.” As we were meant to do, I discounted such Jack Martin assertions. Yet subsequent CIA releases reveal them to be true. Jack refers to a document by J. G. Homme, Assistant Legal Counsel for the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee, that exposes “the fact that the genius R.F.K. put out his own personal ‘contract’ (order to murder) on Cuba’s Fidel Castro Ruz, in good old Gestapo-Nazi fashion. . . .”

  Jack Martin is bitter about Robert Kennedy as he condemns the Warren Commission for accomplishing “the same purpose as the Pearl Harbor-Commission of yesteryear: i.e., to side-track, confuse, muddle/uddle, and eventually surpress [sic] the whole ‘stinking matter!’ Thus, saving the genius R.F. K. who [was] blinded by his own foolish stupidity and naïve asininity, accomplished by a host of ‘friends,’ all murdered his own brother!”

  This seemed harsh indeed.

  Seven years have passed since the publication of A Farewell to Justice, and no witness has remained more credible than Angelo (Murgado) Kennedy, who revealed to me, matter-of-factly, the nature of his work for Robert Kennedy. It was Angelo Murgado, as he was called then, who made Kennedy aware of the odd figure of Lee Oswald in the summer of 1963. Murgado had been dispatched to New Orleans and this alone points to Robert Kennedy’s knowledge that something was brewing in that corruption-ridden, CIA-infected town.

  In retrospect, no moment was more compelling in the years of my research than that instant when Angelo, musing, staring into the middle distance of his memory, revealed how he had mistakenly accompanied Bernardo de Torres to Dallas to visit Cuban exile Sylvia Odio along with “Leon Oswald.” Even as Angelo admired all three Kennedy brothers, and would even change his name to “Kennedy,” he became unwittingly part of a scheme to implicate “Oswald” two months before the assassination of President Kennedy.

  “His brother was running for Mayor of Miami,” Angelo said, still staring into space, talking not to me, but to himself. De Torres was respectable. How could Angelo have known that he was being drawn into participating in the murder of President Kennedy? He was not posturing. He was not myth-making.

  In the years since the publication of A Farewell to Justice, Angelo Kennedy has not appeared to cash in on the notoriety attendant upon his being mentioned and pictured in a book about the Kennedy assassination. You will not meet him at one of the annual conferences in Dallas. That he had been involved in the horrendous crime, even peripherally, was painful, still upsetting more than forty years after the event. “I hate everything I have done,” Angelo Kennedy said, summing up.

  Following up on Angelo Murgado’s revelation that, working for Robert Kennedy in the summer of 1963, he had become aware of Lee Harvey Oswald and reported his findings to the president’s brother, I decided to investigate further. My goal was to penetrate more deeply the motive behind Robert Kennedy’s willful obstruction of Jim Garrison’s investigation.

  The theory that has been advanced, that Robert Kennedy was waiting to become President to tell what he knew, or to settle scores, suggests an extraordinary hubris that does not do credit to the President’s brother. As Jim Garrison often said, the only safety from dangerous enemies was to tell what you knew as soon as you knew it, to shout it from the roof tops, which was his own survival strategy. Why, then, did Robert Kennedy not only remain silent, but endorse publicly the findings of the Warren Commission, as he did?

  In Cracow, Poland, on June 29, 1964, for example, as reported in the New York Times, Robert Kennedy stated, unequivocally, that the president had been assassinated by Lee H. Oswald, “a misfit” and “a professed Communist.” Kennedy was emphatic. “There is no doubt that Oswald was the killer,” he said. “What he did he did on his own, and by himself.” The following September, RFK reiterated that he was “completely satisfied” with the Warren Report, and so it would go for the remainder of his life.

  In my efforts to answer the question as to why RFK remained silent and even endorsed the Warren Report, in 2006 I traveled to Florida to explore the RFK-Oswald connection in yet another context. What I discovered reveals Robert Kennedy’s extreme sensitivity to any information connected to Lee Harvey Oswald and his determination to prevent it from coming to light.

  Here then is a narrative of which Jim Garrison never became aware, yet which responds to his honest perplexity about why Robert Kennedy did not applaud, encourage and assist his lonely effort. It is a narrative worth telling in detail, I believe, for the unprecedented glimpse it offers into RFK’s motives and methods both before and a
fter the murder of his brother, and of the role Walter Sheridan played in Robert Kennedy’s operations.

  OTTO OTEPKA, ROBERT F. KENNEDY, WALTER SHERIDAN, AND LEE HARVEY OSWALD

  "During the period 1961 to 1964, the activities of Walter and Bobby, germane to the events in this memorandum, are almost inseparable. “

  Otto F. Otepka, “Memorandum,” September 20, 1968

  The story commences in 1957 when Otto F. Otepka was appointed Deputy Director of the State Department Office of Security. This meant that Otepka was in charge of granting security clearances for all State Department appointees. A cadre of people worked under his supervision. From this position of responsibility and trust, Otepka was plunged into a nightmare universe of disrespect and harassment. He was placed under surveillance at home and at work. Then he was reassigned to a lesser position, one from which he would no longer have access to inconvenient truths.

  Yet Otepka had done nothing wrong. Otto Otepka’s travail offers an extraordinary glimpse into the unseemly injustice heaped upon a career government officer who was framed from inside the government. His only sin was the scrupulous manner in which he performed his duties. Otto Otepka’s story illuminates the unrelenting attempts to derail Jim Garrison’s investigation, undermine and subvert his witnesses and bury his insights into Lee Oswald’s intelligence connections under a miasma of contradictions. The forces determined to conceal the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination were many, and they included surprising participants.

  Otto F. Otepka was born in Chicago on May 6, 1915, of Czechborn immigrant parents. His father had been a blacksmith and in America he worked at a forge. He could offer his brilliant son little in the way of material support. Otepka worked his way through college and law school.

  After a stint in Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, Otepka began his career in personnel security work. It was now July 1942 and his job was with the Civil Service Commission as an investigator on the look-out for Nazis and crypto-fascists. With an interruption for service with the U. S. Navy, after the war Otepka continued with the Civil Service Commission in the security field.

  In 1953, Otepka arrived at the Office of Security where he was charged with the authority to uncover either criminal acts—or Communist sympathies—of people who had been appointed to positions within the State Department. Otepka was a conservative, a man of the Cold War period. The Stalinization of Eastern Europe, from which his forbears hailed, repelled him.

  In his conduct of his duties, ideology took second place to scrupulousness and integrity. He was a methodical man, fairminded and exacting. He pointed out to me that he “never overstepped boundaries.” As a personnel security evaluator, he made certain to offer none of his personal opinions on American foreign policy.

  Otto Otepka could never be categorized as a “liberal,” even as his case is a reminder that “liberals” hold no special claim to integrity. He was a man of principle, a category that cuts across ideological lines. Otepka despised Senator Joseph McCarthy for his methods; he believed that Communist subversion might well be a threat to our system of government, but McCarthy’s rampages were not acceptable to him.

  “McCarthy didn’t identify Communists in the State Department,” Otepka told me indignantly, as if McCarthy’s crusade were a direct attack on his own life’s work. “He called people ‘Communists.’ A Communist is not a Communist because someone calls them that.”

  “There were Communists,” Otepka added, “but not those named by McCarthy.”

  Although Otepka denied security clearances to some people, he was not a man given to frivolous accusations. “I had never approved of Senator McCarthy’s tactics,” he said, speaking of the moment when his troubles began. “Everyone in the security field knew that.”

  Otto Otepka became the target of Walter Sheridan and Robert Kennedy, although he was neither a Teamster president, Jimmy Hoffa being their open target, nor another of their prime targets, the imaginative district attorney of Orleans Parish with history and the death of a President he revered on his mind. Yet just as Robert Kennedy and his long-time right-hand man, his “confidential assistant” Walter Sheridan, were to pursue Jimmy Hoffa and Jim Garrison with scant regard for the law, Otto Otepka too found himself among their victims.

  Walter Sheridan, whose career resume included his work as a National Security Agency operative, and who, along the way, garnered FBI and CIA clearances, employed the same grab bag of illegal and unscrupulous methods against Otto Otepka that he utilized against Hoffa and Garrison. On behalf of Robert Kennedy, a clique of Kennedy operatives planted in the Office of Security deprived Otepka of his position and his work. Otepka was never severed from government service. Instead, he was reassigned to positions with empty titles, positions without responsibility. He was consigned to career oblivion.

  At first Otepka believed that his ordeal was a consequence of his having denied security clearances to some Kennedy appointees, which he had done. This was not the case. Rather, his removal from any position of authority was based upon his development of a file relating to one “Lee Oswald, tourist,” one name among several on a list of “defectors” to the Soviet Union. Those quotation marks around “defectors” were added by CIA on an October 24, 1960 document that marked the beginning of Otto Otepka’s assignment to investigate Lee Harvey Oswald.

  "DEFECTORS”

  The story of Otto Otepka and Lee Oswald begins on June 1, 1960, when Oswald’s background and file began to be scrutinized by employees in the Office of Security at the State Department. Assisting in the effort was the Office of Intelligence Resources and Collection, Bureau of Intelligence Research. John F. Kennedy had not yet been elected to the presidency as several offices at the Department of State undertook the assignment of identifying and researching the backgrounds of a list of Americans who seemed to have defected to the Soviet Union, to Soviet bloc nations, or to Communist China.

  On December 5th, 1960, with John F. Kennedy not yet having assumed office, the Intelligence Collection and Distribution Division informed Otto Otepka that he and the Office of Security would handle the official list of Americans who had defected to the Communist bloc. Otepka began his effort to determine whether “Lee Oswald” had a connection to any existing security case, either of an applicant for a position with the State Department, or of an existing employee.

  The task of checking on Oswald, and exploring whether his name appeared in any existing security files, came to Otepka as chief security evaluator at State. Otepka followed the customary protocols. First he contacted the FBI. This was routine. CIA was next on his list.

  From the Department of State’s “Office of Intelligence, Resources and Coordination,” Robert B. Elwood wrote to Richard Bissell, then CIA’s DD/P (Deputy Director for Plans), a designation synonymous with the clandestine services. The subject line of his letter reads “Request For Information Concerning American ‘Defectors.”’ The quotation marks raise an implied question: Were these people really defectors, or were they American agents introduced into the Soviet Union while they worked for CIA Counter Intelligence in what came to be known as a “false defector” program?

  Bissell shipped the file to James Angleton, CI/SIG, and to Robert L. Bannerman, Deputy Chief of the Office of Security (OS) at CIA. Bannerman then sent Oswald’s name back to Otto Otepka. Angleton’s programs were not Bannerman’s concern.

  “It would all have gone through Angleton,” Bannerman confided to military intelligence officer and author John Newman. Oswald’s file danced from agency to agency in a parody of that dark 19th century satiric play, “La Ronde,” except that the subject here was not sexuality, but politics.

  As he would with any file, Otepka also distributed the “Oswald” records to his subordinates. These were eight or ten people, he told me, whose work he would then review. He sent Oswald’s name over to the Bureau of Soviet Affairs. It still seemed to be a routine matter.

  Oswald’s file was marked #39-61981. But sitting
as it did in the Central File Room of the Office of Security, the “39” denoting an “Intelligence File,” the Oswald material set off alarms.

  As time passed, questions surfaced. Otepka studied Oswald’s return from the Soviet Union in June 1962 aided by the unlikely assistance of a State Department loan. He pondered the speed with which Oswald’s Soviet wife, Marina, was cleared for entrance into the United States; it was, as we have seen, Donald Deneselya’s coming upon evidence of Marina’s quick clearance that led to his having to leave CIA. Otepka had no inkling that Oswald had been debriefed by CIA.

  By 1963, Otepka would be wondering why Oswald was issued a passport that would allow him to travel to Cuba and, seemingly, to the Soviet Union, despite a possible “criminal flag” in Oswald’s ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) file. It was at this time that Otepka’s safe in which he stored documents of the highest security was burgled. The Oswald file he had compiled disappeared for good.

  OTTO OTEPKA MEETS ROBERT F. KENNEDY, DECEMBER 1960

  Let us return to December 1960. John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert were not yet installed in power when Robert Kennedy’s hostility to Otto Otepka suddenly surfaced. Otepka had already begun to evaluate Lee Oswald.

  At 7 P.M. one evening, in the gathering winter darkness, Dean Rusk, John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of State designate, requested that Otto Otepka meet with him. Otepka assumed that the purpose of the meeting was to discuss security clearances for Kennedy appointees. Rusk, whom Otepka had only just cleared, turned out to be an intermediary. It was Robert Kennedy himself who had demanded an audience with Otto Otepka.

  Robert Kennedy was late. Otepka and Rusk sat twiddling their proverbial thumbs in the deserted building until he finally arrived. Offering no apologies, RFK complained that he had become lost in the labyrinthine corridors.