by Joan Mellen
The reality was clear. As lawyer and Office of Naval Intelligence operative Guy Johnson put it, Sheridan “was clearly sent here by the Kennedys to spike Garrison.” As for Guy Johnson himself, he enjoyed Top Secret clearance from the Office of Naval Intelligence as of May 1954, the same year in which he was granted Covert Security Clearance for Project QKENCHANT, for which Clay Shaw was also cleared. All was as Jim Garrison perceived. The years have supplied greater detail.
OTTO OTEPKA INVESTIGATES HIS OWN CASE
Determined to discover why he had landed in professional exile, demanding answers, Otepka approached friendly contacts in the FBI with whom he had worked in the past. He was being investigated by “higher authority in the Department of Justice,” he was told. Otepka was too experienced not to perceive the meaning. The “higher authority,” he told me, could not have been J. Edgar Hoover, who was always identified not with the Department of Justice, but with the “Bureau.” The reference could only have been to the Attorney General himself, Robert F. Kennedy.
It was in June 1963, after the Lafayette incident, and after the Walker shooting, that Otepka’s files on Oswald were stolen from his safe. The culprits, Otepka wrote in a 1976 letter to author Edward J. Epstein at Reader’s Digest magazine, were his superiors, people close to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Otepka’s crime had been his examination of Oswald, as it had been his assigned responsibility to do.
That June, Otepka was removed from the State Department’s Office of Security entirely. He was not fired, nor would he ever be. But in September 1963 ten criminal charges were leveled against him. He had become another man in the literature of the Kennedy assassination who knew too much. Otepka wrote in his letter to Epstein:
It is my understanding that Herman E. Kimsey, for 8 years Chief of Research and Analysis, CIA, had considerable knowledge concerning CIA personnel in assassination plots. Kimsey left CIA in 1962. He died in 1972. Reportedly he confided much information to his closest friend in the CIA, Leonard Davidov, who is now a vice president of Peoples Drug, Washington, D.C.
Davidov was a friend of George de Mohrenschildt, that CIA asset who had handled Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas and Fort Worth only to move on to Haiti where he hoped to be instrumental in CIA’s overthrowing Dr. Francois Duvalier and replacing him with banker Clémard Joseph Charles.
With charges pending against him, it was more urgent than ever that Otto Otepka determine why this was happening to him. In a Memorandum dated January 9, 1964, Otepka describes an interview he conducted with William R. Cathey, Chief Special Agent for Southern Bell Telephone Company.
Cathey told Otepka that an organization called “Five Eyes” had “contracts with several government agencies, including one with the Department of Justice.” Otepka learned too that home telephones in the Washington, D.C., area were being bugged with the assistance of an employee of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company.
Under oath at his 1967 hearing, Otto Otepka finally articulated in public and for the record what he had long come to believe, but had never voiced. Asked who was out to get him, he named “a high official of another government agency . . . the person was Robert Kennedy.” Elmer Dewey Hill, who had done much of the wire tapping, admitted that the tapes of Otepka’s conversations had been handed to “some stranger” at John Francis Reilly’s behest. Reilly had instructed him, Hill testified, to hand over the tapes at a predesignated spot “to a person with whom he was unacquainted.” The name of that stranger would soon emerge.
At this same hearing, John Francis Reilly admitted under oath that it had been Robert F. Kennedy himself who had appointed him in 1962 to head the Office of Security at the State Department. He revealed too that he had been instructed to intercept all conversations carried out in Otepka’s office, not merely his telephone calls. Asked for the name of the mysterious stranger to whom Elmer Hill had revealed that the tapes of Otepka’s telephone and office had been delivered, Reilly refused to provide it.
Hill, Reilly, and Belisle all had broken the law. All escaped without punishment, although Hill and Reilly were both charged with perjury. Walter Sheridan stepped in and requested of Under-Secretary of State George Ball and Deputy Under-Secretary of State J. Crockett that David Belisle not be “asked to resign,” despite Belisle’s apparent malfeasance. Under the protection of Robert Kennedy, Belisle was spirited off to a safe new job—at the American Embassy in Bonn.
THE IDENTITY OF THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER IS REVEALED
It was in an unlikely venue that the truth finally emerged regarding who had ordered the surveillance of Otto Otepka and who had collected the surveillance tapes. It was not the New York Times or the Washington Post that revealed the name of that “stranger.” Rather, the truth emerged in a Washington, D.C.-based weekly newsletter called the Government Employees Exchange. This newsletter was run by a man named Sidney Goldberg, a one-man editorial staff. It was Goldberg who broke the story.
In an extraordinary piece of investigative journalism, in the issue of the Government Employees Exchange dated September 4, 1968, Goldberg wrote that a source had come forward with the truth about who was behind the harassment and persecution of Otto Otepka. Goldberg had learned that the Otepka surveillance tapes had been prepared by one Clarence Jerome Schneider, an electronics expert on Reilly’s staff. They had been delivered directly into the hands of none other than Robert Kennedy’s right-hand man, Walter Sheridan, in those corridors of the State Department where RFK had lost his way in December 1960.
This same “knowledgeable source,” as Goldberg termed him, also identified Sheridan as “one of the chief contacts” for Robert F. Kennedy with International Investigators Incorporated. Operating out of Indianapolis, this firm was a “hush-hush” organization providing “industrial security services,” both to the federal government and to private employers. Among their specialties were “wiretap operations.”
Outsiders dubbed them “The Three Eyes,” Goldberg discovered. Their employees used the nickname “The Five Eyes.” The company was paid in “unvouchered funds” and supplied with immunity from prosecution. Justice Department records would never reveal the role either Robert Kennedy or Walter Sheridan played in the surveillance of Otto Otepka.
Goldberg noted that although Sheridan was officially on the payroll of the Justice Department, his office was located physically at the White House. “Through a series of interconnected transfers of funds,” Goldberg writes, “Walter Sheridan disposed over the personnel and currency of whole units of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
This seems to be an exaggeration, but for the fact that Robert Kennedy in 1962 and 1963 spent more of his time at his office at Langley, involved in CIA operations, than he did at the Justice Department. Wire tap tapes, including “voice profiles,” made at the White House by the Secret Service and at the Department of State, were passed on to Sheridan and retained in a separate facility.
Goldberg’s source also reported that Robert Kennedy had attempted to plant an anti-Hoffa article in Life magazine. This ploy was exposed in the New York Times on March 3, 1965. The source had discovered that the disgruntled Teamster whom RFK planned to use against Hoffa was one “Sam Baron,” referred to as “Brown” in an exchange of letters between Hank Suydam of Time/Life in Washington, D.C., and Life editor Edward K. Thompson.
Walter Sheridan did not miss Goldberg’s expose. Incensed, Sheridan made a personal appearance at Goldberg’s tiny office. Denying any involvement in the Otepka case, Sheridan demanded a full retraction. He threatened Goldberg that he would sue him unless Goldberg furnished him with the name of his source. As Sheridan had bullied Garrison witnesses in New Orleans, so he attempted to frighten Goldberg into giving him what he wanted. Goldberg refused to name his source. Goldberg held his ground.
A decade later, author Jim Hougan interviewed Goldberg for his original investigative book, Spooks, published in 1978. Hougan found Goldberg to be a frightened, shattered man. His newsletter had long since folded. When Hougan a
sked to read Goldberg’s Otepka files, Goldberg refused.
Hougan begged Goldberg at least to give him the name of the source who had identified Sheridan. Goldberg refused this request as well, protecting his source to the end. Goldberg did reiterate to Hougan that Walter Sheridan was the “chief contact” between “The Five Eyes” and Robert Kennedy.
There was no question in Hougan’s mind that Goldberg was telling him the truth. When Hougan later sought microfilms of the Government Employees Exchange weekly from the Library of Congress, he was told that they had been “misplaced” and were unavailable.
Still, as a result of his interview with Goldberg, Hougan was able to contribute more detail to the saga of the Otepka tapes. Apparently, the tapes had been sent first to CIA to eliminate background noise. Then the tapes traveled back to John Francis Reilly. It had been Reilly himself who had passed the tapes to that “unidentified man in the corridor of the State Department.” This was Walter Sheridan. Goldberg’s source was also aware that David Belisle, while he was a National Security Agency employee, had done “certain favors” for the Kennedys.
Over the years, Otto Otepka told me, he talked to Sidney Goldberg often. He found Goldberg “a bit eccentric.” Goldberg was a man full of passion, but credible.
Had he asked Goldberg for the name of the person who revealed that Walter Sheridan had taken possession of the surveillance tapes?
“You can’t ask a newsman for his sources,” Otepka said.
The story of what happened to Otto Otepka emerged slowly and incompletely. Only in the wake of press indignation about Otepka’s harsh treatment did Senator Thomas J. Dodd add another piece to the puzzle of Robert Kennedy’s and Walter Sheridan’s persistent obstruction of justice. Dodd revealed that he had called off four days of scheduled hearings during which the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security planned to question Edward Grady Partin about his relationship with Fidel Castro “because Bobby Kennedy told me to do so.”
Partin had already been reimbursed for his appearance when the hearing was canceled. Robert Kennedy and Walter Sheridan had come far enough with Partin to make certain that he not be afforded an opportunity to change his mind about implicating Jimmy Hoffa.
Senator Dodd had elaborated. Robert Kennedy told him that “he and the Justice Department had a personal interest in Partin and didn’t want the hearings held. Bobby Kennedy had been the Attorney General and you don’t say no to him. He made the request a personal matter and I honored it.”
Otto Otepka drew the only conclusion available to him: “Bobby Kennedy, still ensconced at justice immediately following the death of his brother, wielded his power and sought the aid of his chief investigator, Walter Sheridan, to get what he was after, no matter how it was done.” For Robert Kennedy, the end justified the means; in this he was not all that different from his arch adversary Lyndon Johnson. It was in 1968 that Otepka finally realized that it was “the influence of [Bobby] Kennedy [that] caused the failure of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to call material witnesses like Schneider and prevented the thorough and timely resolution of my case.”
OTTO OTEPKA STUDIES THE HOFFA CONVICTION
With time on his hands, even as he remained employed by the Department of State, yet bereft of any real work, Otto Otepka began to scrutinize Walter Sheridan’s methods in his single-minded effort to convict Jimmy Hoffa. Otepka made no judgment on the guilt or innocence of Hoffa. He focused on the means by which the Hoffa conviction was obtained.
In a 1968 “Memorandum,” Otepka writes that “it became generally known through the government intelligence community in Washington that the free-wheeling Sheridan had FBI agents perform electronic surveillance operations for the ostensible purpose of gathering evidence on which to prosecute Teamster Union President James Hoffa.” Otepka’s tone is measured, like the man himself.
George W. Bush’s, and Barack Obama’s, persistent surveillance of American citizens in the millennium locates an unhealthy antecedent in Sheridan’s relentless and then illegal wire-tapping. Otepka noted that “government intruders intercepted conversations of American citizens in no way connected with Hoffa, nor in any way related to national security, and compiled dossiers for future reference.” His words are eerily prescient. Robert Kennedy and Walter Sheridan played a significant role in providing a precedent for George W. Bush’s, and Barack Obama’s, assaults on the U.S. Constitution. Despite the horrific price that Robert Kennedy paid— and the cost to him of his persistent silence about his brother’s death, it is for the sake of curtailing the staggering inroads into the sanctity of the Constitution that his unsavory methods need to be examined and rejected. We had already arrived at the surveillance nightmare of the millennium.
Lauded as the historian of historians, Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger went on to lie for Walter Sheridan and Robert Kennedy, providing another misguided precedent: the embedding of the press and authors for sale in politics. “In the entire investigation in connection with the Hoffa cases,” Schlesinger would write, “there has not been one instance of wiretapping or bugging of Hoffa.” Schlesinger had to have known that the truth was otherwise. Readers might consult the three-part series on the Hoffa trial by Fred Cook published in The Nation magazine.
Each night during the Hoffa trial in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Justice Department lawyers, under Sheridan’s direction, would play tapes of conversations between Hoffa and his attorneys. These tapes had been obtained by the illegal bugging of Hoffa’s hotel suite at the Patton Hotel. They were utilized by the prosecution to determine what questions to ask in court the following day.
Later, Sheridan, a consummate liar, claimed he “didn’t know of any wire tapping or bugging in the Hoffa case.” Then he came face to face with a retired police detective named Herman A. Frazier. Frazier trapped Sheridan effectively. Only through a wire tap could Sheridan have known about a fake name, “Armentrout.” When Sheridan asked Frazier about “Armentrout,” the truth became apparent. Sheridan had listened to a wire tap.
Conservative publisher William Loeb of the Manchester, New Hampshire Union-Leader swore out an affidavit that Cartha DeLoach, third in command at the FBI, had revealed to him that Walter Sheridan had headed up Robert Kennedy’s “wiretapping unit” and that Robert Kennedy had also instructed the IRS to tap wires. Furious, truth not being meant for public consumption, DeLoach denied that he had told Loeb about the wire taps. But he had. To borrow Jack Martin’s cliché, the cat was out of the bag.
Otto Otepka perused a 1964 Life magazine article written, he discovered, with Walter Sheridan’s cooperation. (As A Farewell to Justice reveals, on occasion Sheridan would assume the persona of a newsman—NBC commentator, or magazine writer, as the situation warranted. See Chapter 12.) This article describes the chief witness against Hoffa, Edward Grady Partin, who had been paid, illegally by Sheridan, as “a high-minded man having been involved only in some inconsequential brushes with the law, but now working on the side of justice and law and order.” Partin happened to be in jail “because of minor domestic difficulties,” Life enthused over the man who had committed crimes ranging from first degree manslaughter, rape, and kidnapping to assault and battery and forgery.
Otepka noted that on the witness stand during the Hoffa trial, Sheridan swore under oath that he knew of no payments of money to Partin, an outright lie. Sheridan denied that he had authorized payments for Partin’s services as a federal undercover agent, which would have been against the law. (The money came to Partin in denominations of fifty and one hundred dollar bills mailed from a bank in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.) When Partin, not easily controllable, not even by the likes of a Walter Sheridan, admitted that he was, indeed, paid, then added, “They still owe me!” Sheridan passed responsibility for this obstreperous figure onto his assistant, former FBI agent Frank Grimsley.
Obviously less comfortable with perjury than Sheridan, Grimsley admitted that the plan to pay Partin originated with Sheridan. The government had no choice but to
produce a Justice Department memorandum, dated July 3, 1963, signed by Sheridan and requesting that a check be made out to A. Frank Grimsley, Jr. Grimsley had been instructed to “give this money to a confidential source.”
There were others connected to Robert Kennedy’s obsessive “get Hoffa” campaign who would testify to Sheridan’s obstruction of justice, people Sheridan was unable to silence. Frederick Michael Shobe testified that Sheridan had hired him to harass and embarrass Hoffa and the Teamsters Union. Shobe confided that he was paid in cash, sometimes directly by Sheridan. He was able to produce Sheridan’s unlisted home number in Bethesda, Maryland. Shobe had served time for burglary, forgery, and armed robbery, rendering him vulnerable to blackmail. Yet he told the truth.
Walter Sheridan had threatened him, Shobe testified. Sheridan had “reminded” Shobe that he had associated with questionable people, violating the terms of his parole. Instead of returning to prison, Shobe was offered the opportunity to join Sheridan’s special investigative squad. As further inducements, Sheridan then dangled a presidential pardon and a federal job before Shobe. As A Farewell to Justice showed, Sheridan enlisted the identical technique in his attempts to bribe Jim Garrison’s witnesses Perry Raymond Russo and Marlenę Mancuso.
It was when he discovered that the job Sheridan was offering him was located in Japan that Shobe balked. He went on to testify for the defense.
Hoffa’s lawyer asked Shobe whether Sheridan had been explicit about his plan to “get Hoffa.” Shobe said that he was. Sheridan had told Shobe that Hoffa should be in jail anyway, “and that . . . if we have to resort to unfair tactics, well, that’s where a person like myself came in at . . . to get him by any means, fair or foul.”
Did Sheridan say all this to him directly?