Johnson’s first calls as President were to two former leaders – Truman and Eisenhower – and to Edgar. Within days, at the White House, he would be pouring out his concern that he might be assassinated himself. Edgar offered the use of one of his own bulletproof cars, and Johnson responded emotionally. He thought, Edgar noted, ‘I was more than head of the FBI – I was his brother and personal friend … that he had more confidence in me than anybody in town …’
In one of his notes as Vice President, Johnson had spoken of continuing to rely on Edgar ‘in the years ahead.’ Now, his accession to power offered Edgar the likelihood of reprieve from the forced retirement that, under Kennedy, would soon have been his fate. Meanwhile, there was a most sensitive game to be played – tidying up after Dallas.
Thanks to two conflicting official verdicts, millions of Americans remain confused about the assassination. The initial inquiry, the Commission chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded that the President had been killed by twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, former Marine and recently returned defector to the Soviet Union, acting on his own. Yet as we now know, four of the Commission’s own eminent members had doubts. And in 1978, Congress’ Assassinations Committee decided that there had ‘probably’ been a conspiracy.
The committee believed Oswald was only one of two gunmen and that the murder was most likely planned by the Mafia. Others, pointing to evidence that Oswald had links to U.S. intelligence, wondered if it was quite so simple. Even a former chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, David Phillips, himself a committee witness, in 1988 declared his belief in a plot involving ‘rogue American intelligence people.’
There might never have been such confusion had the Warren Commission not had to rely on the FBI for the vast majority of its information. Edgar’s priority from the start was to protect himself and the Bureau and to insist that Oswald was the lone assassin. Less than four hours after the shooting, Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei was astonished to hear the Director declare himself ‘quite convinced they had found the right party.’ Yet called upon to brief the new head of state the next day, Edgar was less positive. Jotting down what Edgar told him, President Johnson wrote:
Evidence not strong … not strong enough to get conviction …
There was no more talk about weaknesses in the evidence the day after that, when Oswald had in turn been shot by Jack Ruby, and with no further prospect of a trial. ‘The thing I am concerned about,’ Edgar told the White House two hours after Oswald’s murder, ‘is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.’ Soon the President was saying he hoped he could ‘get by’ with a hastily prepared FBI report.1
Of the few FBI veterans prepared to discuss the Kennedy assassination, two senior officials* and a field agent told a story of rush to judgment and information distorted. ‘Hoover’s obsession with speed,’ said Assistant Director Courtney Evans, ‘made impossible demands on the field. I can’t help but feel that had he let the agents out there do their work, let things take their normal investigative course, something other than the simple Oswald theory might have been developed. But Hoover’s demand was “Do it fast!” That was not necessarily a prescription for getting the whole truth.’
Agent Harry Whidbee was assigned to talk to people who had known Oswald in California, where he had served during his stint in the Marines. ‘I remember distinctly,’ he told the author. ‘It was a hurry-up job. Within three weeks a letter of general instruction came to the field divisions. We were effectively told “They’re only going to prove he was the guy who did it. There were no co-conspirators, and there was no international conspiracy …” I had conducted a couple of interviews, and those records were sent back again and were rewritten according to Washington’s requirements.’
There are numerous stories of badgered witnesses and edited evidence. Two of President Kennedy’s senior aides, Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers, both believed shots had come from behind the fence in front of the motorcade – rather than from the building behind it, where Oswald supposedly lay in ambush. ‘I told the FBI what I had heard,’ O’Donnell recalled, ‘but they said it couldn’t have happened that way … So I testified the way they wanted me to.’
As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy would normally have played a key role in the investigation. But he remained traumatized and away from his office for weeks after the assassination. According to a senior FBI official, Edgar ordered aides to get the Bureau’s assassination report out of the Justice Department ‘before Bobby gets back.’
Edgar opposed inquiry by any body other than the FBI. Then, once Johnson decided he had to have a presidential commission to ward off calls for independent investigation, Edgar wanted to head it himself. When the job went to Chief Justice Warren, Edgar interfered from the start. He opposed the Chief Justice’s choice of Warren Olney, a former head of the Criminal Division at Justice and an expert on organized crime, as the Commission’s Chief Counsel. Lee Rankin, who was appointed, would conclude belatedly that ‘the FBI couldn’t be trusted.’
Edgar used Cartha DeLoach to liaise secretly with two members of the Commission: Senator Richard Russell and Congressman Gerald Ford, the future President. DeLoach gleaned details of the Commission’s secret deliberations from Ford, and supplied him with a secure briefcase to carry documents on a ski trip. Ford, said William Sullivan, was a member of the FBI’s ‘congressional stable …“our man” on the Warren Commission. It was to him that we looked to protect our interest and to keep us fully advised of any development that we would not like … and he did.’
Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson’s former aide, offered an explanation for Ford’s readiness to help the FBI. For a period in the year preceding the assassination, he and Ford both had access to a ‘hospitality suite’ at Washington’s Sheraton-Carlton Hotel rented by a mutual friend, the lobbyist Fred Black. ‘Like me,’ Baker said, ‘Jerry Ford had a key to the suite. And sometimes Black would tell me not to use the room, because Ford was meeting someone there.’
For two months in 1963, as later emerged during court proceedings against Black for tax evasion, the hotel room in question was bugged by the FBI. Baker speculated that the surveillance targeted against Black picked up compromising information on Ford, that it was passed on to Edgar, who then used it to pressure Ford into cooperating during his spell on the Warren Commission.
Edgar had long buttered up Chief Justice Warren, to the extent of running FBI checks on his daughter’s boyfriends. Now, however, he treated him as a nuisance. ‘If Warren had kept his big mouth shut,’ Edgar scrawled on one memo, ‘these conjectures would not have happened.’ He sent agents hunting for derogatory information on the staff of the Warren Commission.
At least one Commissioner felt pressured to toe the FBI line on the assassination. According to his son Thomas, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs ‘felt personally intimidated by the FBI’s visits to see him. It was, you know, “We know this and that about you, and a lot of things could come out in public about you …” My father tried not to let it affect his judgment.’2
Former Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, who stood in for Robert Kennedy in the wake of the assassination, would recall ruefully that Edgar and the FBI had a virtual monopoly on vital information. ‘I did not know what was going on,’ he said. ‘Nobody else in the government knew.’ Had they known, neither Katzenbach nor the Warren Commission would have placed any trust at all in Edgar. The FBI concealed evidence from the Commission and, in one damning episode, destroyed it.
Early on, Warren staffers became suspicious about a discrepancy between the original of Oswald’s address book and the FBI’s typed inventory of its contents. In the FBI version one page had been retyped, omitting some information that had appeared in the original. And part of the excised material was the name, address and car license plate number of an FBI agent, James Hosty.3
Hosty was the Dallas agent who, according to the Bureau, had had the routine
job of checking up on Oswald because of his background as a former defector. He testified that he never met Oswald, but left a message with Oswald’s wife not long before the assassination, asking him to call. If that was all, why then did the Bureau try to conceal the Hosty relationship from the Commission?
The FBI denied that it had, offering a complex bureaucratic explanation for the omitted entry. Commission staff remained skeptical. ‘We never forgot the incident,’ said attorney Burt Griffin. ‘It established in our minds that we had to be worried about them.’
This leads on to a horrendous discovery, something the Commission never found out. Oswald had told his wife’s close friend Ruth Paine that he had left a note at the Dallas office of the FBI following the Hosty visit. After the assassination, told by an agent that this was not so, Mrs Paine decided it had been just a tall story. In 1975, however, a congressional committee learned that the alleged assassin had indeed left a note at the FBI office two weeks before the assassination – addressed to Agent Hosty.
According to a receptionist, the note was a warning by Oswald that he would blow up the FBI office if they did not ‘stop bothering my wife.’ According to Hosty, there was no threat of violence – merely a warning that Oswald might ‘take appropriate action and report this to the proper authorities.’
That note is not part of the official record because, Hosty testified, Dallas Agent in Charge Gordon Shanklin ordered him to destroy it. The note was in Shanklin’s possession after the assassination. Two days later, when Oswald had been shot, Shanklin produced the letter from a desk drawer. He told Hosty, ‘Oswald’s dead now. There can be no trial. Here – get rid of this.’ Hosty then tore up the note in Shanklin’s presence, took it to the lavatory and ‘flushed it down the drain.’
Who originally issued the order to destroy Oswald’s note, and why, may never be known. Shanklin is dead and former Agent Hosty refused further comment. Agent Cril Payne, who served in Dallas during the inquiry that followed Hosty’s revelations, thought it ‘inconceivable’ that the note could have been destroyed without clearance from Washington. ‘The prevailing office rumors,’ he added, ‘were that J. Edgar Hoover had personally ordered the destruction of the note.’ According to two Assistant Directors, William Sullivan and Mark Felt, headquarters officials did know about the note at the time. It was Edgar, said Sullivan, who ordered that its very existence be kept secret from the Warren Commission.
‘We didn’t think,’ former Commission Chief Counsel Rankin later said ruefully, ‘that he would deliberately lie … There is an implication from that note and its destruction that there might have been more to it … Rankin was thinking of the bombshell that for a while threatened to change the course of the Warren inquiry, when the Attorney General of Texas, Waggoner Carr, reported ‘an allegation to the effect that Lee Harvey Oswald was an undercover agent of the FBI.’
Edgar flatly denied to the Commission that either Oswald or Ruby had ever been FBI informants. Yet it later emerged that the FBI had no fewer than nine contacts with Jack Ruby, long before the assassination. He was even listed in FBI files as a P.C.I. – Potential Criminal Informant. If Edgar misled the Commission about Ruby, what of Oswald?
The alleged assassin’s widow, Marina, was to say she believed he ‘worked for the American government.’ The former security chief at the State Department, Otto Otepka, recalled uncertainty, months before the assassination, as to whether the returned defector to the Soviet Union was ‘one of ours or one of theirs.’
Two witnesses from New Orleans, where Oswald spent time before the assassination, said they saw Oswald in the company of FBI agents there. A Dallas deputy sheriff, Allen Sweatt, was quoted as saying the Bureau was paying Oswald $200 a month at the time of the assassination and had assigned him an informant number.4
The Commission, however, never conducted a thorough probe of such claims.5 It ended up, the Assassinations Committee staff concluded in 1979, ‘doing what the members had agreed they would not do: Rely mainly on the FBI’s denial of the allegations.’
Commission Chief Counsel Rankin was puzzled from the start by the FBI’s stance on the assassination. Normally Edgar never tired of saying it was the Bureau’s job to offer facts, not conclusions. This time everything was different. ‘They haven’t run out all the leads,’ Rankin told the Commissioners, ‘but they are concluding that Oswald was the assassin … that there can’t be a conspiracy. Now that is not normal … Why are they so eager to make both of these conclusions?’
Some believe it was Edgar’s obsession with protecting his reputation that led him to shut out everything else. He scurried to send secret letters of censure to seventeen agents and officials – all men who had been involved in handling the Oswald case before the assassination. Had they performed properly, Edgar claimed, Oswald’s name would have been on the Security Index. Later, when the Warren Report gently chastised the Bureau for not having been alert enough, he punished some of the same men all over again. ‘The Bureau,’ he said, ‘will never live this down.’ Yet Oswald was not known to have said or done anything violent, anything at all that justified a warning to the Secret Service, the agency responsible for protecting the President. Edgar’s retribution against his own agents was merely a vindictive device to cover his own back.
The Assassinations Committee reported in 1979 that the FBI probe of Kennedy’s murder had been ‘seriously flawed,’ ‘insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.’ The committee’s own investigation, meanwhile, identified men who had said the President was going to be killed, along with associates who acted highly suspiciously before and after the assassination. It appears, moreover, that the FBI was aware in 1963 of all or most of the clues the committee followed sixteen years later.
Edgar, former aides confirmed, gave personal attention to all aspects of the assassination. ‘He got everything, knew about everything,’ Cartha DeLoach recalled. ‘We didn’t dare hold anything back.’ Yet Edgar ignored a mass of information that, when the Assassinations Committee came upon it years later, would suggest conspiracy.
More than three years before the assassination, when Oswald was an obscure defector living in the Soviet Union, a memo about him had gone forth under Edgar’s name. ‘There is a possibility,’ it warned the State Department on June 3, 1960, ‘that an imposter is using Oswald’s birth certificate.’
According to a former Army Intelligence colonel, Philip Corso, high-level U.S. officials said within weeks of the assassination that they knew two Oswald birth certificates, and two Oswald passports, had been in circulation before the assassination – and had been used by two different men. Corso cited two sources – Passport Office head Frances Knight and William Sullivan, then head of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division. Corso said it was in large measure his briefing on this matter that led Senator Richard Russell, one of the members of the Warren Commission, to doubt the lone-assassin theory.
There is some evidence that a few months after Edgar wrote his 1960 ‘imposter’ memo, someone was masquerading as Oswald. In January 1961, an American and a Cuban exile negotiated to buy ten Ford pickup trucks from a dealer in New Orleans. The dealer remembered the incident after the assassination, dug out the old sale form and found that his memory was not playing tricks. One of the truck purchasers had identified himself as Oswald, representing an organization called Friends of Democratic Cuba. The dealer’s form was withheld by the FBI until 1979, yet the lead had great potential significance.
Friends of Democratic Cuba was an anti-Castro group, and the attempt to buy trucks occurred during the buildup to the Bay of Pigs invasion. FBI agents were out asking about Lee Oswald’s business dealings within two weeks, and Passport Office concern about a possible imposter followed soon after. It seems that while the real, pro-Communist Oswald was far away in the Soviet Union, someone of the opposite political persuasion may have been using his name in the United States.
The coincidences proliferate. Gerard Tujague, a senior member of the same anti-Castro
group, had once employed the real Oswald as a messenger. And a leading member of the group, in 1961, was Guy Banister, a man of mystery not least because of his close relations with the FBI.
Guy Banister served with the Bureau for twenty years, seventeen of them as a Special Agent in Charge, and he was one of the handful of veterans who had worked alongside the Director in the field, during the recapture of escaped convicts in 1942. His Bureau career had ended in 1955, following major surgery and a warning to his wife that ‘as a result of brain damage, he would develop increasingly unpredictable, erratic conduct.’
The Banister who returned to Louisiana, the state of his birth, was a man disintegrating. His state of mind shifted from feisty to choleric to violent rage. Alcohol made the problem worse, and the pills prescribed by his doctors brought little relief.
None of this deterred Banister from his self-appointed role as superpatriot and crusader against Communism. He was a member of the John Birch Society and the paramilitary Minutemen, an investigator for Louisiana’s Committee on Un-American Activities and publisher of a racist tract called the Louisiana Intelligence Digest. He believed plans for racial integration were part of a Communist plot against the United States, and he worked feverishly in support of the CIA-backed campaign to topple Fidel Castro. On a journey to Europe he reportedly met with French terrorists plotting the assassination of President de Gaulle.
Like many former Bureau agents, Banister was a private detective, and he kept up his contacts with the Bureau at the highest level. ‘Guy was in touch with J. Edgar Hoover long after he left,’ said New Orleans Crime Commission Director Aaron Kohn, and the New Orleans office of the FBI was close by Banister’s detective agency. According to his secretary, Delphine Roberts, ‘Mr Banister was still working for them. I know he and the FBI traded information.’ FBI records confirm this, and a CIA document identifies Banister as one of the ‘regular FBI contacts’ of a Cuban exile leader.
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