by Joan Mellen
Eschewing preliminaries, devoid of courtesy, Robert Kennedy came to the point. He was concerned that W. W. Rostow be granted a security clearance for his cabinet appointment. On two previous occasions, in 1955 and 1957, Otepka had declined to clear Rostow as a foreign policy expert. There was something not quite right about this man, Otepka thought.
Otepka pointed out to Robert Kennedy that Air Force Intelligence had voiced doubts about Rostow.
“Those people are nuts!” RFK blurted out. His anger seemed incommensurate with the issue and the occasion. A calm, reasoned man not given to outbursts of emotion in the course of his work, Otepka was taken aback by Robert Kennedy’s lack of restraint.
Otepka’s instincts regarding Rostow were both correct and incorrect. Rostow was no Communist sympathizer. Yet the man was not what he seemed. John F. Kennedy’s inexperience and naiveté—he would succeed in circumventing the security problem by appointing Rostow to his White House staff—would emerge when Rostow revealed his true colors.
Before long, Rostow would begin to beat the drums for a major ground war in Vietnam, a policy that John F. Kennedy categorically refused to pursue. Rostow’s bleating for a vastly expanded war would be heeded only after Kennedy was dead and Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency. By 1965, Rostow was demanding that 500,000 troops, at the least, be dispatched to Vietnam.
Robert Kennedy emerged from the only face-to-face encounter that he would ever have with Otto Otepka in a state of rage. He perceived that he had encountered a man who refused to be bullied, a man who was not subject to political influence. As for Otepka, he was confused. He considered that RFK’s inexplicable hostility must surely be based on his refusal to clear Rostow, as well as a dubious figure named William Wieland, who had once sold arms to Fidel Castro.
It is not clear when Robert Kennedy became aware of Otepka’s responsibility for handling the investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald. But Otepka became certain that it was this investigation, rather than his reluctance to clear minor Kennedy appointees, that led to his demotion.
OTTO OTEPKA IS PLACED UNDER SURVEILLANCE
In November 1961, five months after Oswald, still in the Soviet Union, reclaimed his passport to return to the United States, and nearly a year after Otepka’s chilly meeting with Robert Kennedy, Otepka was informed that the Office of Security was being re-organized. His job as Deputy Director had been eliminated. In January 1962, Otepka became chief of a newly created “Division of Evaluations,” a position where he would enjoy far fewer responsibilities.
Four months later, in April 1962, Robert Kennedy sent a longtime Kennedy family loyalist named John Francis Reilly to head the State Department Office of Security. Reilly had no experience either in security work or in personnel evaluation. Deputy Under-secretary of State for Administration, Roger Jones, later confided to graduate student Michaux Henry Wilkinson, who was writing a dissertation about Otto Otepka, that Robert Kennedy told him personally that he wanted Reilly to be appointed Director of the Office of Security.
This Justice Department lawyer seemed an odd choice. A Massachusetts Irishman, Reilly had been recommended officially by Robert Kennedy’s own executive assistant, Andy Oehmann. By Reilly’s own later admission, he was “sent over here to do a job, and by God I’m going to do it!”
In April, Otepka’s newly fashioned “Division of Evaluations” was removed officially from any responsibility for the “Intelligence Reporting Branch.” This role was now transferred to the “Executive Office,” a unit from which Otepka was effectively excluded. The “Executive Office” now enjoyed the responsibility for receiving all intelligence reports from the FBI and CIA. The Intelligence Reporting Branch, far removed from the scrutiny of Otto Otepka, now decided whether any given piece of information was of significance for personnel security purposes. It was this Intelligence Reporting Branch that forwarded relevant data to other bureaus and offices—or did not.
Meanwhile, in his capacity as an “evaluator,” Otepka continued to work on his Oswald file. More details raised “red flags.” Oswald had obtained a visa to the Soviet Union in two days—normally it took at least thirty. (The State Department would later lie to the Warren Commission and say that it took one to two weeks).
Otepka wondered what Oswald actually did in the Soviet Union. He examined Marina’s propitious exit. It was known to take wives of U.S. citizens five months to a year for official permission to leave the Soviet Union, and Oswald was no simple citizen. Wasn’t he a defector? A traitor? Otepka would have liked to have examined Marina’s family history, he told me, her connections to the Soviet secret police.
On April 4, 1962, Otepka consulted the Passport Office, inquiring whether “there has been a change in the Subject’s citizenship.” He requested any other information which might be of assistance to the Navy in considering Oswald’s case. Otepka told me he had hoped to have examined the anomaly that Oswald had received an exit visa a month and a half before he actually left Russia. And, again, there was the matter of that State Department loan that made his return home possible.
Only in June 1963 would Otepka discover that Oswald had received a U.S. passport on one day’s notice. This confirmed his uneasiness. He did not blame Frances Knight at the Passport Office. Knight later told Otepka that she was following orders, that “she would issue a passport to a baboon if she knew that was the policy.”
In August 1962, two months after Lee Oswald returned to the United States, John Francis Reilly was appointed to the newly-created position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Security, the more easily for him, it seems in retrospect, to proceed against Otto Otepka. At the same time, four more Kennedy loyalists arrived at the Office of Security to keep watch over Otepka.
They included Joseph E. Rosetti, who had served in John F. Kennedy’s congressional office; Robert J. McCarthy, a Massachusetts Kennedy intimate; and Charles W. Lyons, also from Massachusetts. These three were joined by the more experienced David I. Belisle, a National Security operative and a friend of Walter Sheridan’s from his days at NSA. Belisle would serve as Otto Otepka’s immediate superior.
Now the effort to ruin Otepka began in earnest. Eventually he would be threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, not for providing intelligence to the Soviet Union, or to “Peiping,” as Dean Rusk quaintly referred to the capital of China. Rather, it was to a subcommittee of the United States Senate that Otepka would be charged with providing “secret” information.
The charge was bogus. None of the documents that Otepka presented to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, before which he was called to testify, were classified. Moreover, he had obtained permission to testify from Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State himself. It was against the law for a public official to refuse to cooperate with a committee of Congress. Otepka had no choice but to testify. All that would come later.
In those years, wire taps were illegal unless you could establish probable cause that national security was being compromised. By 1962, Otepka’s office telephone was tapped. The tap was instituted by an electronics expert hired personally by John Francis Reilly named Elmer Dewey Hill. Hill brought with him an array of helpers. Out of a room directly across from Otepka’s new hole-in-thewall office in exile, Hill made his tapes.
Every evening, Otepka’s trash was confiscated. One night at 10 P.M., David Belisle, accompanied by a subordinate named Terence Shea, broke into Otepka’s office. Belisle and Shea were startled by the sight of Otto Otepka sitting there at his desk.
Undaunted, they claimed they were searching for evidence that Otepka had provided classified information to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, although there was no evidence that he had done so. They were the kind of operatives who knew that even when you were caught red-handed, you at once assumed an offensive posture. They knew too that higher authority was available to protect them from any repercussions for their illegal acts.
Stanley Holden, an Otepka colleague, himself soon to be fired from the elec
tronics unit, was disturbed enough by Otepka’s mistreatment to confide that the bugging of Otepka included not merely his telephone, but every word spoken in his office. Holden named Rosetti, Shea, and Belisle as having led the surveillance. They were also spying on Otepka at his home. (Much later, an electronics expert named Bernard Spindel would reveal that a “Justice Department Agency” had a permanent tap into the main telephone line in Washington, D.C.) By 2013, of course universal once-illegal surveillance would become the norm. In December 1963, Stanley Holden, in sworn testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, revealed that, back in June, John Reilly had Otepka’s safe drilled open. Reilly personally had searched the safe. He had also rummaged through Otto Otepka’s files.
On the day after Dean Rusk ordered Reilly to find out how Otepka had managed to obtain proof that tapes were being made of his office conversations, Stanley Holden, whistleblower, met with a strange “accident.” His face and tongue were slashed so badly that stitches were required. Terrified, Holden claimed, not very persuasively, that a heavy spring had come loose in his lab and hit him in the face. As if that weren’t enough, Joe Rosetti and Robert McCarthy showed up at Holden’s home. McCarthy began to shout so loudly that the neighbors emerged from their houses.
“Where is your loyalty?” McCarthy screamed at Holden, referring to Holden’s having revealed the wire taps to Otepka. “Don’t you have any loyalty at all? Don’t you think you owe Joe Rosetti any loyalty?” McCarthy concluded his tirade with a clear threat: “I’ll get you for this!” It was the Irish Mafia at its most repellent.
It strains credulity to suggest that such a fierce campaign could have been about Otepka’s having provided the Internal Security subcommittee with information. He had provided them with three innocuous documents, to which the legislative branch of the government was entitled legally. It is no less unlikely that Otto Otepka was being treated as if he were a criminal because he had denied a security clearance to some political has-beens, as he did in the case of Kennedy’s Ambassador-designate to Ireland, the owner of a construction business who turned out to be covered in graft and corruption.
Otepka was now relieved permanently of any responsibility for security matters. Instead he was given make-work, such as updating the Office of Security handbook. He was instructed to summarize each day’s Congressional record.
Otto Otepka was not a man to suffer injustice silently and without a struggle. From the moment he was driven from his position of responsibility and tossed into a limbo of meaningless tasks designed to pressure him into resigning, Otepka became determined to learn who was responsible for the demise of his career—and why.
What Otepka could not have known, and which has emerged, is Robert Kennedy’s unlikely interest in Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination of his brother. (See Chapter 23.) RFK’s obsession with Otto Otepka and his Oswald file suggests that more than a year before John F. Kennedy was killed, his brother was concerned with Oswald. The curious intervention of the Department of Justice with the Dallas police in the matter of Oswald’s having fired shots at General Edwin Walker in April 1963 invites pause.
Justice ordered the Dallas police not to arrest or pursue Oswald. The telling document exposing the role of the Justice Department in the case has not yet surfaced. But General Walker told his friend, Louisiana judge and former congressman John R. Rarick, about the role of the Justice Department in preventing an investigation of Oswald for the shooting.
General Walker was interviewed by a Florida researcher named Irv Heineman on August 1, 1992. To Heineman, Walker recounted that File #48156 was missing when the Dallas police files were opened. Walker also noted that a newspaper article published in Germany in the Deutsche Zeitung und Soldaten Zeitung (Munich) had speculated that had RFK not ordered the Dallas police to release Oswald in the Walker matter, he would not have been able to kill JFK. The communication to the Dallas police from the Justice Department requested that they not arrest Oswald in connection with the attempted assassination of General Walker “for reasons of state.” It arrived early the next morning following the shooting.
Heineman asked Walker whether Robert Kennedy was behind that communication. Yes, he was, Walker said. Dated April 11, 1963, Walker wrote a letter stating that ‘The Kennedy protection included an early-morning, secret release of the prime suspect Lee H. Oswald from Dallas Police custody.” It was signed by Walker in his spidery handwriting. That Oswald was held by the police was corroborated by a woman named Juanita Buchanan, who knew Oswald’s confederate, William M. Duff. Buchanan was the wife of the owner of the Eldorado Bar. Her husband knew Jack Ruby; she herself had worked for Ruby.
Walker urged the House Select Committee on Assassinations to investigate this extraordinary intervention that traced back to Robert Kennedy. His Birchite opinions in no way invalidate the man’s indignation that the Dallas police had been ordered by the federal government not to investigate a man who nearly killed him.
I learned after the publication of A Farewell to Justice that in May 1968 Jim Garrison attempted to arrange a meeting with Robert Kennedy through Kennedy-supporter Richard Lubic. The purpose, Lubic was told, was for Garrison to warn RFK of a possible attempt on his life. Lubic worked through Kennedy aide Frank Mankewicz to set up a meeting.
Mankewicz reported to Lubic that Robert Kennedy was not interested in meeting Jim Garrison. Not one to hold grudges, Garrison spoke warmly of a campaign trip RFK was planning to make to New Orleans. He promised that “Sen. Kennedy will receive a warm welcome here in his own right. Furthermore, I think he will find when he reaches Louisiana that we remember with affection his brother, the late President Kennedy.” Asked later if he had planned to subpoena Senator Kennedy, Garrison said, “this was the last thing on my mind.”
Why Robert Kennedy did not welcome Jim Garrison’s heroic effort is the question that lingers. It is difficult not to conclude that RFK was determined to ensure that Jim Garrison would be sufficiently discredited and thwarted so that, should the indefatigable Garrison uncover Robert Kennedy’s ties to Oswald before the assassination of his brother, no one would believe him. Otto Otepka stands as an unlikely precursor of Jim Garrison, a conservative as Garrison was a liberal, yet another investigator whose work and career Robert Kennedy would attempt to destroy in an effort to conceal RFK’s close knowledge of Oswald in relation to his own assassination attempts against Fidel Castro that will be demonstrated shortly.
At first glance, Otepka, a loyal government employee who went by the book, and Garrison, a flamboyant and devoted admirer of “Jack” Kennedy, seem to have little in common. Yet they both suffered greatly as targets of Robert Kennedy’s desperate effort to conceal his own operations. It is apparent that Robert Kennedy somehow had involved Oswald in his own murderous operations against Fidel Castro.
Up in Jackson, Louisiana, chatting with attendants at the East Louisiana State Hospital, Oswald had bragged about how he had been enlisted to kill Fidel Castro. Here was the real Oswald, no Marxist, but a government operative. At every turn Robert Kennedy hovered near.
Jim Garrison knew what Oswald had been up to in Clinton and Jackson. He might well have uncovered Robert Kennedy’s connection to Oswald had Walter Sheridan not been dispatched to New Orleans to create chaos in Garrison’s office and terrorize his witnesses.
Further evidence of Robert Kennedy’s concern about Oswald emerges in a newly recovered notebook of Anne Dischler. Dischler’s notes reveal that when she and state trooper Francis Fruge were working as investigators for Garrison, an aide of Robert Kennedy’s had communicated with people in Lafayette, Louisiana, a place where a man calling himself “Oswald” had surfaced.
The contact came through the “Billie White Answering Service” in Lafayette. This service handled labor unions and an oil company, and was associated with Jim Garrison’s law school classmate Judge Edmund Reggie, who was instrumental in getting FCC permits for Billie White. (Judge Reggie would become the father-in-law of Edward M. Ken
nedy.) A note that the Kennedy office had contacted the investigators is written in Francis Fruge’s handwriting.
The log refers to a call from an “aide to Bobby Kennedy.” It was at the Holiday Lounge in Lafayette that Oswald, or a man calling himself “Oswald,” had passed. Apparently Robert Kennedy and his aides were shadowing the Garrison investigators.
Dischler’s diary entry of November 27, 1967, reveals that Dischler and Fruge found the call from Robert Kennedy sufficiently important for them to decide to obtain Billie White’s log books. On December 4th, Dischler talked with Billie at home by phone. She will watch “Landry & Thomas phones,” Dischler’s notes read. Billie had noted a car parked near “Thomas res” and the license plate is recorded 211737, a black and white Ford. On December 4th, Billie said she had the book for them. Who Robert Kennedy was in touch with in Lafayette, Louisiana, remains an undeveloped lead.
No more is known about that telephone call handled by the Billie White answering service. But, combined with Angelo Murgado’s testimony, that during the summer of 1963 RFK’s employees knew about Oswald, knew even that he worked for the New Orleans field office of the FBI, this revelation of Robert Kennedy’s communications with someone in the then-obscure town of Lafayette, Louisiana, raises a red flag.
Wherever Oswald, or someone who called himself “Oswald,” made an appearance, Robert Kennedy was not far behind. Usually his intervention was undertaken by an underling, a nameless aide. For a big job, it was Walter Sheridan who represented Senator Kennedy, as he did when he traveled down to New Orleans to scuttle Jim Garrison’s investigation.
These new examples of Robert Kennedy’s attention to Oswald match RFK’s concerned telephone call to New Orleans coroner Dr. Nicholas Chetta. RFK himself called to inquire as to the cause of death of David Ferrie, Oswald’s closest New Orleans cohort. These many connections between Robert Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald help to clarify the question that had so plagued Jim Garrison: why did Robert Kennedy send Walter Sheridan to New Orleans to destroy, discredit, and subvert his investigation?