With this backdrop of the national spotlight being on the Mafia as never before, with Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department putting unprecedented heat on organized crime, and with Kennedy and Senator McClellan, the senate subcommittee chairman, calling for new and tougher legislation to combat the Mafia, I can just picture Vito Genovese, the “boss of bosses,” per Valachi, in his hospital bed with a heart condition at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas,152 telling a mob courier in a raspy voice, “Tell the boys that it’s always good to strike when the iron’s hot. We’re hot now. We’ve been waiting for the spotlight like this for a long time. Now’s the best time to whack Kennedy.”
Even if one wanted to believe that Genovese or any other Mafia leader would order Kennedy’s death around the time of the Valachi hearings, how could one do it without tying up and gagging one’s intellect first?
No other reasoning is needed or has to be adduced to show that organized crime was not behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but I should add one more point: although organized crime had considerable power in the world of crime at the time of the assassination, what power could it possibly have had over others to get them to go along with its plot to murder Kennedy?
Quite apart from the absence of any evidence, as well as the illogic, that organized crime killed Kennedy, we know that this theory by conspiracy theorists is absolutely negated by many other theories they cherish and hold close to their bosoms. For instance, the conspiracy theorists believe that the route of the president’s motorcade in front of the Book Depository Building was set up by the conspirators who killed the president. But even Jim Garrison, the New Orleans DA who prosecuted an innocent man for conspiracy to murder Kennedy (see later text) asks, How in the world would the Mafia be able to control the parade route?153 The theorists believe that the Zapruder film was tampered with, that the wounds on Kennedy’s body were altered, and the autopsy surgeons distorted their findings. But again, how could organized crime have exercised any influence or control over such matters and people? And so on. To pull off the monstrous conspiracy that conspiracy theorists have crafted in their minds, many agencies of government, like the FBI, even the Secret Service, would have had to have cooperated. But how in the world could organized crime have control over such agencies?
Equally importantly, it is conspiracy dogma that the Warren Commission suppressed the truth about the assassination from the American people. But it covered it up for whom? Organized crime? Please. If the Warren Commission were to cover up the truth, which is a notion ludicrous on its face, it would be to protect a person, agency, or group that was a part of its establishment world. The CIA, Secret Service, FBI, military-industrial complex, or LBJ would qualify. But the mob? Again, please. (For the same reason, the Warren Commission covering up for Castro, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, or the KGB is silly on its face. And by extension, the chief investigative arm for the Warren Commission, the FBI, covering up for Castro, the KGB, or organized crime is also ludicrous on its face.)
That the Warren Commission would not be covering up for organized crime is a verity that no reasonable person can dispute. Yet conspiracy theorists (Jim Garrison was a rare exception), even very intelligent ones like David E. Scheim, who has a doctorate in mathematics from MIT, apparently haven’t thought about this. In his book Contract on America, Scheim, clearly without cognizance of this verity, has no trouble writing things like this: “Glaring clues to Mafia assassination culpability [for Kennedy’s murder] were buried, distorted and disingenuously deflected in the Warren Commission’s final report”; “Telephone records and other documents showed extensive contacts between Ruby [whom Scheim describes as the most important source of information on the Kennedy assassination then alive] and underworld figures from across the country in the months before the assassination…That evidence establishing these criminal ties had been repeatedly suppressed or distorted by the Warren Commission.”154 Another verity is at play here: there is virtually no correlation between intelligence and common sense.
To put it mildly, it is almost insane to believe that organized crime would decide to murder the president of the United States, then take this insanity to an even higher level by getting Oswald, of all people, to do the job, then take the insanity to previously unimaginable heights by getting Ruby to silence Oswald. What fool could possibly believe this?
CIA
For years, conspiracy theorists have written books about the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement in the assassination of JFK. And as conspiracy theorist E. Martin Schotz, a mathematician and practicing psychiatrist, puts it, “I and other ordinary citizens know, know for a fact, that there was a conspiracy [to murder Kennedy] and that it was organized at the highest levels of the CIA.”1 The fact that Schotz and his fellow conspiracy theorists haven’t been able to come up with any evidence connecting the CIA to the assassination or Oswald has not troubled them in the least. In their opinion, they have been able to come up with motive (JFK’s refusal to give air support to the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, his allegedly being soft, in the eyes of some, on Communism, his aim to cut the CIA budget by 20 percent by 1966,2 etc.), means, and opportunity, which, as mentioned earlier, is not coming up with any hard evidence at all.
Whatever the CIA’s short laundry list of dissatisfactions (some merely illusory, some real) with Kennedy, as I discuss later in the anti-Castro Cuban exile section of this book, Kennedy was highly disturbed with the CIA for its incompetence and its having misled him on the probable success of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Perhaps the most famous alleged quote from Kennedy about his animus toward the CIA after the Bay of Pigs debacle was that he wanted “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” But in the two and a half years after the attempted invasion he never did anything remotely close to this, and it is not known to whom he supposedly said these words. The New York Times only said that Kennedy made this statement “to one of the highest officials of his administration.”3
The reality is that the relationship between Kennedy and the CIA, though strained by the Bay of Pigs debacle, was not nearly as bad and combustible as conspiracy theorists would want people to believe. And as we shall see, and most important on the issue of motive, the period of difficult relations was apparently short-lived.*
We know that no one has ever come up with any evidence of any kind that the CIA decided to kill Kennedy, and got Oswald or anyone else to do the job for it. Indeed, despite the admitted problems Kennedy had with the CIA over the Bay of Pigs invasion, William Colby, who was a ranking official in the CIA during the period of the assassination and went on to become CIA director, would later write, “The fact of the matter is that the CIA could not have had a better friend in a President than John F. Kennedy. He understood the Agency and used it effectively, exploiting its intellectual abilities to help him analyze a complex world, and its paramilitary and covert political talents to react to it in a low key way.”4
And in 1996, the CIA released a study titled “Getting to Know the President, CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992,” by the CIA deputy director for intelligence, John L. Helgerson. On a one-year assignment, Helgerson interviewed “former presidents, CIA directors, and numerous others involved” in the nine presidencies covered by the subject period to ascertain the CIA’s relationship with the various presidents. On the issue so dear to conspiracy theorists—the CIA’s alleged animosity for Kennedy, and hence, its motive to kill him—it is very noteworthy that Helgerson’s study reported that “the [CIA’s] relationship with Kennedy was not only a distinct improvement over the more formal relationship with Eisenhower, but would only rarely be matched in future administrations.” And alluding, by implication, to the strained period with Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961, the report goes on to say that “in November 1961, Allen Dulles had been replaced by John McCone, who served Kennedy as DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] for almost two years. In the early par
t of this period, McCone succeeded in rebuilding the Agency’s relationship with Kennedy. McCone saw Kennedy frequently, and the President—more than any other before or since—would telephone even lower level Agency officers for information or assistance.”5
One reason why it’s been so easy for the conspiracy theorists to focus on the CIA is that since it officially started operations on September 18, 1947 (after being created under the National Security Act passed in July of that year to help fight the cold war against Communism and give the president centralized and coordinated foreign intelligence, which the country lacked prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), it has been a shadowy, somewhat autonomous governmental agency whose mantra seems to be secrecy (its motto in a clandestine operation is that if the participants say nothing at all they’re talking too much), Machiavellian intrigue, and operating outside the constraints of the law. As former CIA director Richard Helms once said about the culture of the CIA, “The only sin in espionage is getting caught.”
If the CIA could actually have begun a study, code-named “Artichoke,” in 1954 (later abandoned as not being feasible) to find out whether a person, through mind control, could be induced to commit an assassination against his will;6 get in bed with organized crime in a plot to murder Castro;* sponsor the coup (its first attempt to topple a foreign government) against Iran’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953, which actually aborted a move toward democracy in that country; engineer, by funding and directing a rebel force, the frightened resignation of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the leftist Guatemalan president, in 1954; plot to assassinate the left-leaning premier of the Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960; be heavily supportive (to the extent of supplying arms) to dissidents who eventually assassinated Dominican Republic strongman Rafael Trujillo in 1961; encourage a coup of South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, that resulted in his assassination in early November of 1963; promote the military coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973; and so on—how much of a stretch is it to believe the agency had the type of mentality to murder its own president? Almost as much of a stretch as to believe that American soldiers who kill their counterparts in wars to defeat a foreign dictator like Hitler or Mussolini are just as likely to commit treason by trying to forcibly overthrow the government of the United States. But not to the buffs. They see no difference at all between the CIA, an American federal agency, trying to kill Castro and killing their own president.
In its early years more than now, the CIA was composed mostly of men who, though not necessarily born to the manor, were tweedy, often intellectual, Ivy League alumni (authors Warren Hinckle and William Turner observed that Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones Society had “more CIA men than the Vatican has cardinals”)7 who shared a deeply patriotic love for this country and its always rim-full plates and cocktail glasses, and a pulsating fear that global Communism might end the party.* Though they were “gentlemen” warriors, they procured ring-around-the-collar men much more coarse than they to implement their plans. And they were committed and passionate enough to not be above whatever it took—including assassination of foreign leaders, even breaking bread with organized crime—to carry out their mission “in the national interest.”8†
These men (e.g., Harvard-trained lawyers like Tracy Barnes and Desmond FitzGerald, Yale economics professor Richard Bissell, Wall Street lawyer Frank Wisner, etc.), author Evan Thomas writes, “were not a secret cabal. Their views on the need for covert action against the Soviet Union and communist insurgencies around the world were widely shared at the upper levels of government…If their masters in Congress and the executive branch did not know precisely what [they] were up to in this era, it is in part because they did not wish to know.” Thomas said that these men “found in their [previous] wartime experiences a sense of drama and meaning that could not be matched back at their law firms or lecture halls in peacetime. They saw the opportunity of American predominance [in world affairs] and reached out to seize it.” Thomas quotes a former deputy inspector of the CIA, Ed Applewhite, who worked alongside the elitist pioneers of the CIA, as saying, “They arrogated to themselves total power, with no inhibiting precedent. They could do what they wanted, just as long as ‘higher authority,’ as we called the president, did not expressly forbid it. They were extremely aristocratic in their assumptions…, very romantic and arrogant. They had a heaven-sent obligation and, God knows, what opportunity. They ate it up.”9 The freewheeling life they were leading was so intoxicating that the independently wealthy FitzGerald would let “his paychecks pile up on the front-hall table” of his Georgetown home.10
But at the bottom of it all, and hence, the historical context in which all of the CIA’s “homicidal tendencies” in the 1950s through the mid-1970s have to be viewed, but not condoned, is this country’s—some now say—hysterical fear of the spread of Communism.* Let’s not forget that the early years of the CIA were contemporaneous with a culture in Washington and elsewhere in which loyalty oaths and blacklists were looked on as acceptable means to combat Communism here at home.
Internationally, many nations in Eastern Europe and elsewhere did indeed fall under Communist (i.e., Soviet) influence or control following the end of the Second World War. The war had no sooner ended than a new struggle began. The Communist threat, emanating from what came to be called the “Sino-Soviet bloc,” led to a U.S. policy of containment intended to prevent further encroachment into the “Free World.” And this policy enjoyed widespread popular support in America. Castro’s assumption of power in Cuba was viewed as particularly ominous since it was the first significant penetration by the Communists into the Western Hemisphere, a Soviet outpost at America’s doorstep.11
With the Soviet leaders making no effort to conceal their objective of a world Communistic state, America’s leaders were willing to commit U.S. combat troops abroad (e.g., Korea and Vietnam) to abort the “domino effect” of Soviet imperialism. And in some cases, assassination was deemed to be the most appropriate means to prevent the metastasizing of Communism. Though clearly contrary to American ideals, the Church Committee said that “the [assassination] plots occurred in a Cold War atmosphere perceived to be of crisis proportions” and concluded that “those involved [at the CIA]…appeared to believe they were advancing the best interests of their country.” Despite all the plotting and all the efforts, the Church Committee found that “no foreign leaders were killed as a result of assassination plots initiated by officials of the United States.”12
We all know, of course, that today’s CIA has reached a nadir in the public’s perception of its competence and effectiveness, mostly because of its catastrophic failure to learn of Osama bin Laden’s plan to attack the United States on September 11, 2001, and its terribly clumsy and incorrect assessment of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. But it wasn’t always this way. As Philip Taubman writes, in the early years CIA Director Allen W. Dulles was able to build “a first class intelligence agency, a pioneer in espionage science and technology.” The CIA took the lead “in developing exotic hardware that revolutionized the spy business, including highflying spy planes and satellites. Eisenhower’s decision to turn the project over to the CIA instead of the Air Force—he thought the agency was more nimble and better at keeping secrets—gave it an important new role that produced some prized accomplishments, including the first photo reconnaissance satellite in 1960.”13
The five paragraphs that created the CIA in the National Security Act of July 26, 1947, do not specifically authorize the conduct of covert political activity nor, apparently, was that the original intent—its main function being the “correlation, evaluation and dissemination” of “intelligence as [it] relates to the national security.”14 So how did the CIA, our government’s principal foreign intelligence spy organization,* get involved in foreign assassination plots and become the paramilitary force it was in the 1960s? One could argue that it was in its genes. The CIA’s genetic predecessor, the Office of Strategic Serv
ices (OSS), was formed in December of 1942 at the height of the Second World War† and headed by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a prominent Wall Street lawyer and World War I hero (Congressional Medal of Honor). Donovan was “an incurable romantic” who “molded the OSS into his own image: dashing, slightly madcap, and highly effective.” He set the tone for the later CIA by recruiting men from the nation’s upper class such as the son of Andrew Mellon and both sons of J. P. Morgan Jr., and including scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Walt Rostow, and William Langer. “This led to sniffing [by some] that OSS stood for ‘Oh So Social.’” But no one claimed the OSS didn’t get the job done.15
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