A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination

by Philip Shenon

  Scott was a force unto himself at the CIA. A mathematician by training, he had begun a PhD program at the University of Michigan before being pulled away from the scholar’s life in the 1940s by the FBI, which recruited him to apply his mathematical talents to cryptography. During World War II, Scott had joined the Office of Strategic Services, the spy agency that was the predecessor of the CIA. At the OSS, he would establish lifelong friendships with several fellow spies—among them Angleton, Dulles, and Helms—who would all go on to join the CIA when it was created in September 1947.

  Among his deputies in Mexico, few were closer to Scott than Anne Goodpasture. She had also begun her spying career at the OSS. During World War II, she was posted in Burma with a fellow OSS agent, Julia McWilliams, who later gained fame as a cookbook writer under her married name, Julia Child. In later years, Goodpasture denied she was ever close to Angleton, but it was understood inside the agency that Angleton had actually dispatched her to Mexico; he had been impressed by her diligence in an earlier counterintelligence operation. Scott, Angleton’s friend, agreed to add her to his staff in 1957, a year after his own arrival.

  Goodpasture was sometimes confused for a secretary or a typist in the CIA offices in Mexico City, and the sexism of that assumption always bothered her, she said. She was, in fact, a key deputy—Scott’s “Girl Friday” or “right-hand woman,” as she put it. She was not a street spy—most of her work was done within the confines of the U.S. embassy—but she knew spycraft, including how to open a sealed envelope so no one would notice, a technique known as “flaps and seals.” Her friendship with Scott was made easier by their common roots in the South; Goodpasture was a Tennessean. Both were courtly and soft-spoken. (Among the secrets kept by Goodpasture was her exact age, which does not appear on many of her key personnel files. At the time of the Oswald investigation, she appeared to colleagues to be, like Scott, in her midfifties.) “He was a southern gentleman,” she said of Scott. “I felt he fancied himself as an intellectual.… He was particular about his dress, and he always wore dark suits and white shirts.”

  Despite their mutual respect, there was never any doubt who was in charge and who, ultimately, kept the secrets—Scott. Within the station, information flowed to and through Scott exclusively, to the point of obsessiveness, she remembered. “He maintained his own set of classified files, separate from those of the station, that he stored in several different combination safes in his office, and a large one at his home,” she said. “Win never trusted anyone.” Scott had several other deputies, she recalled, but they were “deputies pretty much in name only because Win was there all the time” and made “every decision.”

  Goodpasture liked and respected Scott, although she did not believe he always told the truth when he reported back to Langley. In her view, that explained why he spent long days at his desk—he needed to be there to control the flow of information and make sure that no one had the chance to detect his dishonesty. “They would find out that he was probably exaggerating things,” Goodpasture would tell the Washington author Jefferson Morley. “There were numerous instances in which he changed figures. Somebody would describe a crowd of 500 in the newspaper; he would add another zero.”

  According to Goodpasture, Scott became especially anxious—paranoid, even—after the Kennedy assassination, and especially after the creation of the Warren Commission. He made it clear to Goodpasture and his other deputies that he would take control of every detail of the interactions between the station and the commission. Over time, he went a step further, largely sealing himself off from Goodpasture and her colleagues whenever the subject of Oswald came up. She said that the topic was simply not discussed after the assassination: when the commission began to address questions to the CIA that needed to be answered in Mexico City, Scott would deal with them himself. He did not share the questions with Goodpasture, nor ask her or her colleagues to review the station’s files for information. Instead, when the questions came in, he would ask for the Oswald files to be brought to him, search for an answer, then report back to Langley himself. There was never any discussion of Goodpasture testifying before the Warren Commission or being questioned by its staff, even though she had been part of the surveillance operation aimed at Oswald. Scott, she knew, intended to answer all of the commission’s questions himself.

  12

  THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  DECEMBER 1963

  By early December, Whitten and his thirty-member team at the CIA believed they had a basic understanding of Oswald’s life story. They even had a preliminary sense for what might have motivated him to kill the president.

  Whitten put together a report—he recalled that it was about twenty pages—for distribution within the agency, summarizing what was known. By this point, he believed Oswald was some kind of “pro-Castro nut” who had probably acted alone. Despite Oswald’s contacts with the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, Whitten saw no evidence that Castro’s government had anything to do with the assassination. Whitten’s specialty was Latin America; he knew a lot about Cuba, and he doubted that Castro would risk his regime’s survival by recruiting a disturbed young man like Oswald as an assassin. Whitten seemed to trust that if there was anything more to be found in Mexico City, Scott would find it.

  As he finished the report, Whitten was outraged—but not surprised, he said—to hear from CIA colleagues that Angleton was pursuing his own, informal investigation of Oswald and discussing the case with his friends at the FBI. “It was in total defiance of Helms’s orders,” Whitten said. He confronted Angleton, who, to Whitten’s astonishment, readily confirmed that the rumors were true, as if Helms’s rules simply did not apply to him. He acknowledged that his FBI contacts updated him daily on the assassination investigation. Without Whitten’s knowledge, Angleton had also begun meeting regularly with their old boss, Allen Dulles, now on the commission. Whitten complained to Helms, who made clear he did not want to get involved in a dispute between his two deputies. Whitten said that Helms never wanted to confront the always difficult Angleton. If Angleton was making trouble, “you go tell him” to stop, Helms told Whitten.

  Whitten began to worry that Angleton, given his close ties to Hoover and others at the FBI, was receiving different and perhaps better information than the bureau was sharing with him. His fears were realized when he was invited to the office of Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach in December to review the initial, four-hundred-page FBI report on Oswald. As he read, Whitten was furious to discover how much he did not know—how much the FBI had withheld from him. The bureau had passed along tidbits about Oswald, but Whitten’s team knew few of the most important details in the FBI report, including the fact that Oswald had apparently tried to assassinate someone else that year: Retired Army Major General Edwin Walker, a prominent right-wing extremist, who had been shot at from outside his home in Dallas in April.

  Whitten was also startled to discover that Oswald had kept some sort of diary and that the FBI had evidence of his ties to pro-Castro activists in the United States, including a prominent pro-Castro group known as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald had claimed to run the committee’s New Orleans branch when he lived in Louisiana earlier that year. In August, he had been arrested in New Orleans during a streetside scuffle with several anti-Castro Cubans.

  As he read on, Whitten remembered, he felt humiliated. He had just turned in a report to the CIA that was supposed to be a detailed portrait of Oswald. But as he sat there at the Justice Department, paging through the “vast amount of information” in the FBI document, he realized that his own report was so full of gaps that it was “simultaneously outdated and made redundant by the FBI’s report.” His report was “useless.”

  The situation provided Angleton with his opportunity to push Whitten aside. At a meeting of Helms and his deputies, Angleton savaged Whitten, describing his earlier Oswald report as “so full of errors that we couldn’t possibly send it over t
o the FBI.” Whitten found the comment bizarre, since the report “was never supposed to be sent to the FBI.” As Helms listened, Whitten tried for a moment to defend himself, explaining that the FBI had obviously hoarded information about Oswald that it should have shared from the start. Angleton ignored the explanation and continued his attack. “He sandbagged me,” Whitten said.

  Angleton urged that the Oswald investigation be taken away from Whitten and handed over, at once, to his own counterintelligence staff—in particular, to one of Angleton’s most trusted deputies, Raymond Rocca. And Helms agreed. Without further discussion, Helms announced in his characteristically matter-of-fact tone that the entire Oswald investigation would be moved into Angleton’s office, and that Angleton would now be responsible for the agency’s dealings with the Warren Commission.

  Whitten was struck that Helms had apparently overcome his earlier concern about Angleton’s close friendship with Hoover. Indeed, Helms suddenly seemed eager to have the FBI and CIA work closely together on the Oswald investigation. “Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in bed with the FBI,” Whitten recalled bitterly. “I was not, and Angleton was.”

  * * *

  Within the CIA, Helms depicted the transfer of the Oswald investigation to Angleton as routine—as if anything involving the assassination could be considered routine. Whitten’s specialty was Mexico and Central America, and by the time Angleton took over, the Oswald investigation had expanded well beyond Latin America—to the Soviet Union and parts of the world that Angleton better understood. “We could see this investigation broadening far beyond Mexico City and it didn’t make much sense to have it in the hands of someone who was running the Mexico City desk,” Helms said years later.

  Richard McGarrah Helms had always had the ability to make the extraordinary seem routine—dull, even. As deputy director for plans, he was responsible for all covert CIA operations around the globe. With his slicked-back hair, well-tailored suits, and careful diction, the fifty-year-old looked and sounded the part of a dapper spy. The son of an aluminum industry executive, he attended high school in Switzerland and was fluent in French and German. He was introduced to spying when he served in naval intelligence during World War II, which brought him into the OSS, and then the CIA. He was known for his no-nonsense style and dry wit. He typically ended conversations with the phrase: “Let’s get on with it.”

  Helms told colleagues that he intended to cooperate fully with Warren and the commission. “The whole thrust of the agency was to be of as much help as we possibly could and to go over the edge, if necessary.” But his definition of full cooperation had an important caveat. The CIA would respond to any request made by the Warren Commission—“when they asked for something, we gave it to them”—but he said he felt the CIA had no responsibility to volunteer information unless it directly involved Oswald and the assassination. Full cooperation, to Helms’s mind, did not mean that the CIA had to open up all of its files to the Warren Commission about its most secret operations. He might be criticized for the decision someday, he knew, but so be it. “It is an untidy world,” he said.

  * * *

  David Slawson, still new to his work at the commission, knew nothing about the internal strife at the CIA over the Oswald investigation. As it was, he had plenty to do. With Coleman planning to be in Washington only one day a week—and given a prohibition on phone calls to Coleman to discuss classified information—Slawson knew he would do much of this work by himself.

  He was struck by how much of the material that was being handed to him was stamped SECRET or TOP SECRET. It was especially surprising since he, like the other young lawyers, did not have a security clearance at first. The decision had been made, presumably by Warren and Rankin, that he and the other lawyers could see classified documents without a full background check. Slawson and the others were happy not to question the decision.

  Even though he was reading through CIA material that had been gathered inside the agency by John Whitten, Slawson later said he had no memory of ever meeting Whitten or even hearing his name. Nor did he ever hear Angleton’s name or learn that the CIA’s counterintelligence chief was responsible for determining what information the commission saw. Instead, he was introduced within days of his arrival in Washington to Raymond Rocca.

  Slawson thought the CIA had done itself a favor by assigning the hard-charging forty-six-year-old Rocca as its liaison to the commission; Rocca would appear in the commission’s offices almost every day. “I came to like and trust him,” Slawson said. “He was very intelligent and tried in every way to be honest and helpful.” If the CIA withheld information from the commission, Slawson came to believe, it was because it had been withheld from Rocca, too.

  Rocca, a San Franciscan who had a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley, was typical of many CIA officials who dealt with the commission. They tended to be smart, well educated, and articulate. They were very different from their more hardscrabble, blue-collar counterparts at the FBI and the Secret Service. Slawson said he found himself amused—not disturbed—by Rocca’s fervid anti-Communism, a belief that “the Communists were behind everything” that went wrong in the world. Rocca, Slawson recalled, became apoplectic when discussing Castro. “One day we were talking about Cuba, and he was on one side of the table and I was on the other, and he jumped up and almost screamed, ‘Fidel Castro?’ he said. ‘That man is evil. Evil.’”

  Slawson realized early on that he had little choice but to trust Rocca and his colleagues at the CIA. The commission had almost nowhere else to turn for most of the information it would need regarding questions involving the Soviet Union, Cuba, and other foreign adversaries that might have had something to do with Kennedy’s death. “There was no way that I could imagine carrying on an investigation of foreign intelligence operations like this, other than through the CIA,” Slawson recalled. Even so, he tried to devise strategies that would allow him to double-check what he was being told by the spy agency. Early on, he established a policy of requesting the same government document from every agency that might have received it. If a report had been prepared for the CIA and the State Department, he would request it from both agencies. If one agency failed to produce a copy of a document, the other might turn it over. Slawson admitted that it was exciting to be exposed to spies and learn some of the secrets of the CIA. Spy novels and movies—Dr. No, the first film based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond character, had opened in 1962 and been a worldwide hit—were then at the heart of American popular culture.

  In January, the CIA offered, and Slawson eagerly accepted, a briefing on the KGB and its history of assassination attempts. The briefing led him to believe that Kennedy’s murder would have been completely out of character for the KGB. “They gave us background material on how Russian spies killed people when they wanted to,” including a history of all known KGB murders outside the Soviet Union, “and none of them fitted the pattern of Lee Harvey Oswald,” Slawson remembered. “When the Russians did something, they tried to make sure they were never detected. They would make it appear like a natural death or in some way an accident.”

  Seemingly true to their promise to share all information in CIA files that might involve the assassination, Rocca and others at the agency began to volunteer eye-popping, top secret information to Slawson. In the early weeks of the investigation, Rocca told Slawson that he had a piece of information that the young lawyer could share with no one else, including members of the commission, at least not at first. Tantalized, Slawson agreed. “There has been a defection,” Rocca told him somberly. “It may be a very important defection.” He explained that a mid-ranking KGB officer, Yuri Nosenko, had just defected to the West and was now in the CIA’s custody. Nosenko claimed that he had read through the complete files maintained by the KGB on Oswald during his years in the Soviet Union and that the files proved that Oswald had not been recruited by the KGB—that he was not a Soviet sp
y. The Russian was still being interrogated, Rocca said, but if his information could be verified, it would exonerate the Soviets from involvement in the assassination.

  * * *

  Back at Langley, all information about Oswald and the assassination was now being funneled into Angleton’s office, including the information being gathered in Mexico City by Winston Scott. Angleton, like Whitten, considered Scott to be a model spy.

  The focus of the investigation changed dramatically under Angleton. For reasons he never fully explained, he turned the investigation away from the hunt for clues about a Cuban conspiracy. Instead, he wanted to focus almost exclusively on the possibility that the Soviet Union was behind the assassination, an idea that reflected his decades-long obsession with the Soviet threat. In his colleagues’ view, Angleton believed that while Castro was dangerous, Cuba was still a sideshow in the larger Cold War struggle between Moscow and Washington. From Angleton’s staff, three other counterintelligence analysts were chosen to work with Rocca; all were KGB specialists.

  Whatever Angleton’s view, Castro had never stopped being the obsession of others at the CIA. During the Kennedy administration, the agency established a special unit, the Special Affairs Staff, or SAS, to direct secret operations to overthrow Castro. The SAS had its own counterintelligence analysts who, although they did not answer to Angleton, were supposed to work with his staff. In dealing with the Warren Commission, congressional investigators would later show, Angleton bypassed the SAS almost entirely; its analysts were never asked to look for evidence of a possible Cuban conspiracy in the president’s death.

  On February 20, Angleton received what would seem to be troubling news. One of his deputies sent Angleton a memo reporting that at least thirty-seven documents had disappeared from the internal file the CIA had maintained on Oswald before the assassination. The missing documents included seven memos from the FBI, two documents from the State Department, and twenty-five CIA cables. Several weeks later, when the Warren Commission’s staff was invited to the CIA to review the file, Angleton’s team insisted that the file was complete. The commission’s records suggest its investigators were never told that, for at least some period of time, dozens of documents about Oswald had vanished.