On February 8, 1964, Hudkins elaborated on his story to the FBI, telling Agents Vincent Drain and James Wood that his original belief that Oswald was an FBI informant started when Dallas assistant district attorney William Alexander told him that in Oswald’s notebook, taken from his apartment on the afternoon of the assassination, there appeared the name of FBI agent James Hosty, Hosty’s office and home telephone numbers, and the license plate number on Hosty’s car. He coupled this information with what Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, had told him in an interview, that she believed her son had been doing important subversive work for the government. He said that subsequently a Dallas official not working for the federal government had told him Oswald was on the payroll of either the FBI or the CIA, with “voucher number 179” (not 172), and received no less than $150 nor more than $225 per month. The Dallas official presumably was Sweatt, though the details given to the FBI were slightly different from what Hudkins told the Secret Service. Hudkins refused to disclose the identity of the Dallas official to the FBI or to furnish a signed statement.6
Earlier (January 25, 1964), however, Alexander told the FBI that Hudkins had come to him sometime in December saying he was working on a really good story trying to prove Oswald was a paid informant for the FBI or CIA, Hudkins saying he had received information that Oswald’s address book had Hosty’s name and telephone number in it as well as possibly the license plate number of his car. Alexander, who already knew this, told Hudkins, “It looks like you have the story there,” suggesting to Hudkins that his information was correct. Alexander also said that after a bond hearing for Ruby on January 21, while reporters were standing around outside the courtroom waiting for a ruling from the judge, he heard a number of them talking about the possibility that Oswald was a counterspy for the FBI or CIA and also remembered hearing one reporter—he didn’t know who—talking about Oswald receiving $200 a month from one of these federal agencies beginning in September of 1962 and his payroll voucher number being 179.7 When the FBI reinterviewed Alexander on February 13, he reiterated his story and vigorously denied he was the source of the rumor when the special agents told him that their investigation “strongly implied that he was.”8
It would have been nice if Allan Sweatt, whom Hudkins originally said he received his information from, had cleared up the matter, but he simply muddied it further. On the evening of January 24, 1964, the Secret Service informed a member of the Warren Commission staff that Sweatt had been interviewed and stated he received his information about the allegation and details of Oswald’s paid informant status from Alexander and Hudkins. And Secret Service inspector Thomas J. Kelley expressed his view that Hudkins “was not very reliable,” based on previous unfounded reports which he had furnished to the Secret Service.9
In Hudkins’s testimony before the Church Committee in 1975, his vague and incoherent answers were only exceeded by the inept questioning of a Church Committee staff member. In bits and pieces, Hudkins claimed that he did not receive information from Sweatt about Oswald receiving $200 a month from the FBI and having an informant number of S172. In one of the very few good questions asked, staff counsel queried Hudkins as to why Secret Service agent Lane Bertram would state, in his report, that Hudkins had told him this if Hudkins hadn’t? Hudkins responded, “I would like to ask Lane [Bertram] that myself…All of his [Bertram’s] stuff was obviously to my mind routed through the FBI…It had to come from the FBI.” So according to Hudkins, FBI agents made up the story that Oswald, the accused presidential assassin, had been a paid FBI informant. Well, they’d certainly have a great motive to make up such a story—to implicate themselves in Kennedy’s murder.
Hudkins also denied telling the FBI on February 8 or any other time about believing Oswald was an FBI or CIA informant with voucher number 179 who received between $150 and $225 per month. So apparently the FBI report by Special Agents Drain and Wood was also a fabricated, untruthful report. The true story, Hudkins said, is that he admitted to Drain the previous month that he, Dallas Morning News reporter Hugh Aynesworth, and Assistant DA Bill Alexander, during a conference call, presumably on another matter, decided to concoct the story that Oswald was a paid informant for the FBI with a payroll number of S172 or S179 (he said they never discussed the amount of money Oswald was paid each month) so they could test whether their phones were being tapped by the FBI. When Church Committee staff member William Wallach mentioned that Alexander hadn’t told Chief Justice Warren and General Counsel Rankin this when he, DA Henry Wade, and Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr met with them in Washington on January 24, 1964, Hudkins said, “Knowing Bill Alexander, he wasn’t lying to them. He just wasn’t telling them all the information [he knew].”10
When the HSCA interviewed Hudkins in 1978, he said that he and Aynesworth (he never mentioned Alexander this time) decided to test their suspicion that they were under FBI surveillance by discussing over the telephone a fabricated FBI payroll number for Oswald. He said they discussed the numbers S172 and S179. According to Hudkins he was soon contacted by the FBI to find out what he knew about Oswald’s alleged informant status. He said that in his January 1, 1964, article for the Houston Post on the Oswald informant allegation, he merely quoted what others had said. It consisted of “wondering aloud” rather than having any evidence, adding that he did not know whether Oswald was an FBI informant.11*
When I called Aynesworth about all of this, he chuckled and said, “Lonnie made up the whole story,” though he said there was a kernel of truth to it. Aynesworth, who later became a Newsweek correspondent, told me, “Lonnie was a nice, friendly, likable guy, but he had a habit of making up stories.” That’s why, Aynesworth said, Hudkins had ended up losing jobs at papers. (He had been with the Dallas Morning News, then Houston Post, the Baltimore News-American, then some paper up in Buffalo, all before Aynesworth lost track of him in the late 1970s. In his testimony before the Church Committee in November of 1975, Hudkins listed eleven media employers in his career to that point.) Aynesworth said that since he was the lead reporter on the Kennedy assassination for the paper of record on the case, the Dallas Morning News, “All leads on the case came across my desk. During the week following the assassination, I was working very hard on my account of Oswald’s escape route, and Lonnie was calling me constantly for leads. On one of his calls, he said he had a hunch that Oswald was a paid informant for the FBI. He asked me to check and see what I could find. The next time Lonnie called I got a number, S172, off my desk—with all the papers and reports on my desk there were always a lot of numbers and I can’t remember at all where I got the number—and gave Lonnie the number just to get rid of him more than anything else. So I made up this number, and the next thing you know Lonnie wrote his big story in the Houston Post saying the number was S179, and Oswald was paid $200 a month. There’s nothing to this Oswald FBI informant story. And as far as Lonnie and I testing our suspicions that we were under FBI surveillance by the two of us making up the number and talking about it over the phone, that’s not true at all, although there was a period, when I later got a hold of Oswald’s diary before anyone else, that I believe the FBI was tapping my number.”12
Since Aynesworth has acknowledged that he was the source of the FBI informant number (which Hudkins changed by seven digits), the allegation that Bill Alexander, DA Henry Wade’s chief assistant, was a party to making the informant story up, falls. When I called Alexander anyway for his comments on the allegation, his recollection of the incident was that “Lonnie [Hudkins] and one or two of his fellow reporters covering the assassination got the idea—I don’t know from where—that maybe Oswald was an FBI informant. Hudkins told me, or maybe it was one of the other reporters involved, I forget, that to flush out the FBI, they made up a bogus FBI informant number for Oswald, and one of them called the FBI and asked whether this number belonged to Oswald, hoping that in the process they might find out if, in fact, Oswald was an informant. They got nowhere. I heard it said that I was one of the ones who had
dreamed up this whole Oswald FBI informant story, but that’s not true. I was told about it. I didn’t do anything.” Alexander said he was never party to any telephone conference call with Hudkins and Aynesworth in which it was decided to come up with the phony informant story.
When I asked Alexander if he called the FBI to let the bureau know it was a phony story, Alexander, no fan of the FBI because of what he believes is its lack of cooperation with local law enforcement, said no. “I thought it was a funny story, but I decided to let them [FBI] find out on their own it was all bull——.” However, the Warren Commission took the rumor very seriously, and Alexander said that on January 23, 1964, he, Henry Wade, and Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr were summoned back to Washington, where they met the following day with Warren, Rankin, and another person whom Alexander can’t recall. Alexander said Wade knew nothing about the matter and all Carr knew was someone calling him on the phone and telling him about the rumor. Alexander said he didn’t want to hurt Hudkins and his fellow reporters, who were “nice guys and hadn’t really hurt anyone by their prank,” but he also “didn’t want to mislead the Warren Commission,” so he told them it was common knowledge among the media covering the case in Dallas that the story about Oswald’s informant number and wages of $200 per month from the FBI was false and trumped up by some reporters to flush the FBI out, but he doesn’t think he mentioned Hudkins’s name.13
There is no transcript or recording of the informal January 24, 1964, meeting in Washington, but Rankin, who was present at the meeting, never said in his memorandum to the files subsequent to the meeting that anyone in the Texas contingent (which included Carr’s assistants, Leon Jaworski and Dean Storey) had said the rumor was false and trumped up. However, Rankin did say that Alexander and Wade “both indicated that they would not vouch for the integrity or accuracy” of the reporters who were promulgating the story.14
District Attorney Henry Wade, in his testimony before the Warren Commission, said he had heard the rumor that Oswald was an FBI informant but had no knowledge of its veracity, and added that “Alexander mentioned it some, but Alexander is not a great lover of the FBI. They fuss all the time openly.”15
Whatever the illegitimate birth of the rumor, it has led a robust life among conspiracy theorists, despite the fact that there is no evidence to support it. The Warren Commission took the testimony of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Assistant to the Director Alan H. Belmont, FBI agents John W. Fain and John L. Quigley (who interviewed Oswald in Fort Worth upon his return from Russia), and FBI agent James P. Hosty, people who would have knowledge of Oswald’s informant status if it were true. “All declared, in substance,” the Commission said, “that Oswald was not an informant or agent of the FBI, that he did not act in any other capacity for the FBI, and no attempt was made to recruit him in any capacity…This [position was] corroborated by the Commission’s independent review of the Bureau files dealing with the Oswald investigation.”16* Among other evidence under penalty of perjury, on February 6, 1964, Hoover gave a sworn affidavit to the Warren Commission that he “caused a search to be made of the records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice, by employees of the said Bureau of Investigation acting under his direction, and that said search discloses that Lee Harvey Oswald was never an informant of the FBI, was never assigned a symbol number in that capacity, and was never paid any amount of money by the FBI in any regard. Such a statement can be made authoritatively and without equivocation because of the close supervision FBI Headquarters affords its security informant program and because of the safeguards established to ensure against any abuse or misuse of the program.”17 And on February 12, 1964, Hoover sent to Rankin nine additional affidavits from each FBI agent who had any direct contact with Oswald (e.g., Hosty, Fain) or would have had any indirect contact with him if he had been a paid informant (e.g., J. Gordon Shanklin, special agent in charge of the Dallas FBI office, who would have had to “authorize and approve of any payment to confidential informants”), all attesting under penalty of perjury that Oswald was not an FBI informant.18 The HSCA likewise conducted an investigation of the issue and “found no credible evidence that Oswald was an FBI informant.”19
When, in analyzing an allegation (here, the Oswald FBI informant story), you find that you’re spending most of your time not in trying to determine if it’s the truth, since you know it’s a lie, but who (here, Hudkins, Alexander, Sweatt, Aynesworth, etc.) is telling the truth about the lie, then it’s time to move on to another subject.
Apart from the rumor that Oswald was a paid informant for the FBI, the belief has persisted among some conspiracy theorists that Oswald worked for the FBI in some never-disclosed capacity, and eventually killed Kennedy as a hit man for the FBI. But no one has ever offered any evidence to support this allegation, and the reason, obviously, is that none exists. The notion of Oswald working for the FBI produced a rather humorous exchange between Warren Commission members Allen Dulles and John McCloy at an executive session of the Commission on January 27, 1964:
Dulles, to the Commission at large: “This fellow [Oswald] was so incompetent that he was not the kind of fellow that Hoover would hire…Hoover didn’t hire this kind of stupid fellow.”
McCloy: “I wouldn’t put much confidence in the intelligence of all the agents I have run into. I have run into some awfully stupid agents.”
Dulles: “Not this irresponsible.”
McCloy: “Well, I can’t say I have run into a fellow comparable to Oswald but I have run into some very limited mentalities both in the CIA and the FBI. (Laughter)”20
Besides the informant allegation, other alleged specific associations between Oswald and the FBI have surfaced throughout the years. One that has received some attention is the allegation of one Orest Pena, a member of an anti-Castro group, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, who operated a New Orleans bar, the Habana Bar and Lounge. On national television (CBS) in 1975, Pena claimed for the first time that he had seen Oswald with FBI agent Warren de Brueys “numerous times” in New Orleans, and that before he, Pena, testified before the Warren Commission in 1964, de Brueys threatened him physically not to reveal this information.21 Pena repeated the allegation of de Brueys’s threat in his 1978 deposition before the HSCA, saying de Brueys told him “that if I talk about him [before the Warren Commission] he will get rid of my ass.” Pena added that the Warren Commission counsel who took his testimony in 1964, Wesley J. Liebeler, did not let him talk freely, so he decided to “keep my mouth shut.” So if we’re to believe Pena, not only de Brueys, but also Liebeler was an accessory after the fact to the murder of Kennedy, trying to suppress the truth. No one has insulted Liebeler by asking him if he prevented Pena from talking freely (his Warren Commission testimony consumed seventeen pages in the volumes, about thirty pages of transcript, in which Pena gives many long and free-flowing answers), but de Brueys, in his deposition before the HSCA, categorically denied ever threatening Pena to not tell the truth in his Warren Commission testimony.22
How did Pena know de Brueys? Pena told the HSCA that he had been an FBI informant and “Warren C. de Brueys was the FBI agent assigned to me.” Although de Brueys also denied this, it’s more a matter of semantics than disagreement in that de Brueys acknowledged that since Pena was a bar owner, he was an occasional source of information for him, but there was no systematic reporting relationship. The HSCA found that FBI records confirmed that Pena was not an FBI informant for de Brueys or any other agent.23
On the matter of seeing de Brueys with Oswald “numerous times” in New Orleans, Pena backed down in his HSCA testimony. Pena testified that he used to see Oswald “go to the restaurant [Greek restaurant on Decatur Street in New Orleans] in the morning with other federal agents from the Customs House Building,” that he saw de Brueys at the restaurant “at the same time,” and that he saw Oswald, de Brueys, and several other federal agents leaving the restaurant together and going back to the Customs House Building. When he wa
s specifically asked if he ever observed “Oswald and de Brueys speaking to each other,” Pena responded, “I cannot answer that question. If I cannot prove myself what de Brueys did to me, how am I going to prove other things?”
Question: “My question is, Mr. Pena, do you recall ever seeing Oswald and de Brueys speaking together or acting in such a way that you would think that they knew each other?”
Answer: “I believe they knew each other very, very well.”
Question: “Can you explain why you believe Oswald and de Brueys knew each other very well?”
Pena answered unresponsively and unintelligibly that “my belief, I would have to report in as informant to Mr. de Brueys. I have to report myself to Mr. de Brueys and that is my point of view on that question.” He then immediately added what appeared to be the main reason for his belief that Oswald and de Brueys knew each other: “When Oswald was transferred to Dallas, Mr. Warren de Brueys was transferred to Dallas, Texas, at the same time.” He said he was “very, very, very sure” this was “before the assassination.”24
De Brueys testified that it was “an unmitigated lie” that he knew Oswald or that Oswald was an FBI informant for him. “It has no basis whatsoever in fact.” He added he never even met Oswald, and never “knowingly” spoke to him over the phone, explaining that people can call “under pretension.” And the HSCA confirmed that de Brueys was sent to Dallas on temporary assignment to aid in the investigation the day after the assassination, and remained there until January 24, 1964.25 Further, Dallas FBI agent Jim Hosty, who was de Brueys’s partner in Dallas in the post-assassination investigation, told me de Brueys “arrived in Dallas from New Orleans the day after the assassination.”
Reclaiming History Page 219