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

by Philip Shenon

  Mann received more news that he considered alarming. On November 26, the CIA had secretly recorded a telephone conversation between Cuban president Osvaldo Dorticós and Cuba’s ambassador to Mexico, Joaquin Armas, in which Armas described the questions that had been asked of Silvia Duran during her interrogation by the Mexicans, including whether she had “intimate relations” with Oswald and whether Oswald had received money from the embassy. “She denied all of that,” Armas said in the call, seemingly relieved. Still, Dorticós sounded anxious about why the Mexicans were asking questions about the money, as if there might be some truth to the allegation that Oswald had been paid off. In a cable to Washington, Mann said he thought Dorticós’s anxiety “tends to corroborate Alvarado’s story about the passing of the $6,500.”

  Word of Alvarado’s allegations, and Mann’s growing suspicions, spread beyond the State Department, ultimately reaching the Oval Office. (President Johnson said later he cited the rumor about the $6,500 payment to Chief Justice Warren in their Oval Office meeting.) The questions about Alvarado’s truthfulness would consume the U.S. embassy in Mexico City for days, and led Ambassador Mann, who worried that he was not being fully briefed by the FBI, to request that the bureau dispatch a senior Washington supervisor to Mexico City. He wanted the bureau to take the investigation in Mexico much more seriously.

  * * *

  Back in Washington, Hoover dismissed Mann and his concerns. The ambassador, Hoover wrote to a deputy, was “one of those pseudo investigators, a Sherlock Holmes” who was trying to tell the FBI its business. Still, Hoover had reviewed the raw intelligence about Alvarado, and he could not deny that the Nicaraguan’s allegations would have to be investigated. If true, they would “throw an entirely different light on the whole picture” of the assassination, Hoover conceded. He agreed to dispatch an FBI supervisor from the bureau’s training academy in Quantico, Virginia, Laurence Keenan, who knew nothing about the Oswald investigation but who spoke Spanish.

  Keenan, who had been with the FBI a dozen years, would look back on the assignment as the most bizarre and troubling of his career. He did not realize it at the time, he said, but he came to understand years later that he had been part of a charade to avoid discovering the full truth about Oswald in Mexico. It was a charade intended to avert the possibility of a nuclear war with Cuba, he believed. “I realized I was used,” Keenan said.

  He was given the assignment at about eleven a.m. on Wednesday, November 27, and put on a plane to Mexico at four that afternoon. Before he left, he was given a “very short briefing” in Washington about the assassination investigation and about the Alvarado allegation. “I was completely in charge of the full investigation there in Mexico.

  “I didn’t even have a visa or a passport,” he said, recalling that his wife met him at the office with a suitcase and fresh clothes before he sped to Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, for his flight.* “I got in a car that rushed me off to Dulles and was escorted with a siren through city traffic.”

  He arrived in Mexico City late that night and was met by Anderson, an old friend. According to Keenan, he and Anderson talked into “the wee hours of the morning” about the investigation. Keenan decided he had two responsibilities in Mexico. First, he would try to interview Alvarado to gauge his credibility. Second, he would protect the bureau’s reputation “from any future allegation that the investigation was shoddy,” given Ambassador Mann’s alarm that something had been missed. He was there, as he put it later, to “cover ourselves, to pacify the ambassador.”

  In the ambassador’s office the next morning, Keenan met with Mann and Scott. The ambassador “expressed his opinion that he felt that this was definitely a conspiracy and that we must turn over the last stone to find out if there is any overt conspiracy on the part of the Cubans,” Keenan recalled. Mann noted the Associated Press article from September in which Castro had seemed to threaten Kennedy’s life.

  Keenan then made his presentation, telling the ambassador what he had been told the day before in Washington: the FBI believed there was no conspiracy. “Every bit of information that we had developed in Washington, in Dallas and elsewhere, indicated that this was a lone job,” he explained. “This appeared to be a lone job—a one-in-a-million shot.”

  Still, Keenan said he wanted to talk to Alvarado “to go the last mile, to turn the last rock over.” He turned to Scott, who was holding the Nicaraguan spy in one of the CIA’s safe houses in Mexico City. “We would like very much to set up a conference or an interview with Alvarado,” he said. Keenan could not remember how Scott replied. “He was not particularly communicative,” he said of the CIA station chief.

  Keenan had another message for the ambassador from FBI headquarters. He wanted the embassy to understand that the bureau did not consider the investigation of Oswald’s activities in Mexico City to be its responsibility. It was a job for the CIA.

  That afternoon Keenan got a shock. Within hours of his meeting, he was told that the CIA had decided to turn Alvarado over to the Mexican government immediately for further interrogation—before the FBI was given its chance to talk to him. The CIA’s decision was “very definitely” peculiar, Keenan remembered. “I have no way to specifically say this was CIA’s attempt to torpedo my investigation.”

  Keenan soon found himself with little to investigate, especially after the CIA reported that the allegations made by Alvarado had fallen apart. On November 30, the Mexican government reported that Alvarado had recanted, claiming that he made up the story about the Cuban payments to Oswald because “he hates Castro and thought that his story, if believed, would help cause the U.S.A. to take action against Castro,” according to a CIA report. With Alvarado’s reversal, “the pressure was off,” Keenan recalled. “There was really nothing for me to coordinate or do at this point.” He left Mexico on December 2, five days after he arrived, and had nothing more to do with the Oswald investigation. (The day of Keenan’s return to Washington, Alvarado, now officially discredited by the Mexicans and the CIA, reversed himself again, returning to his original story about seeing Oswald receiving money from the Cubans. The Nicaraguan claimed he had recanted only because his Mexican interrogators had threatened to torture him by hanging him “by the testicles.”)

  Waiting in Keenan’s office mailbox when he returned was a memo announcing his immediate reassignment as a supervisor in the bureau’s field office in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was, he said, a “wonderful job,” one he had coveted, especially with the harsh winter weather on the East Coast fast approaching. He was expected in San Juan four days later.

  Keenan left Washington so quickly that he did not even have time to brief FBI headquarters officials involved in the Oswald investigation about what he had learned in Mexico City, including tantalizing information about Silvia Duran, the young Mexican woman. Duran, he had been told, was a low-level spy for the Mexican government “and possibly the CIA.” As Keenan put it years later, Duran was not “very, very high” in the hierarchy of the Cuban embassy. “I don’t believe she ever had access to classified information.” He did not recall hearing allegations suggesting a relationship between Oswald and Duran outside their meetings at the Cuban consulate. Nor did he recall ever thinking that the CIA had not interrogated Duran itself—and did not allow the FBI to—because she might work for the agency.

  * * *

  Mann also left Mexico City in a hurry. On December 14, President Johnson promoted him to the job of assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, as well as to an additional post in Washington as special assistant to the president. Before departing Mexico, Mann expressed his frustration about the assassination investigation; he suggested to embassy colleagues that he had given up trying to get to the bottom of what had happened in Mexico City. At least he would be well placed at the president’s side in Washington if new evidence about a conspiracy emerged.

  In one of his final cables to the State Department from Mexico, Mann wrote in December that he was
not optimistic that “we shall be able to find anything definitive on the central issue” of a Cuban conspiracy to kill the president. He was quoted by an American reporter years later as saying that the seeming lack of interest by the CIA and the FBI in getting to the bottom of what had happened in Mexico City was “the strangest experience of my life.”

  17

  THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

  WASHINGTON, DC

  JANUARY 1964

  Francis Adams, the former New York City police commissioner, towered over the other staff lawyers. The fifty-nine-year-old Adams was well over six feet tall. And Arlen Specter, his junior partner on the team responsible for reconstructing the events of the assassination, said it was not just Adams’s height that made him seem big; it was Adams’s sense of his own importance in the world. He was “the picture of the high-powered Wall Street lawyer,” always convinced he could bend anyone to his will, Specter remembered.

  Specter came to like Adams, despite the older lawyer’s arrogance. Adams had an outspoken contempt for all places that were not New York City, and Specter, a native of Kansas, found his partner’s big-city chauvinism funny, not insulting. In their first meeting, Adams looked over Specter’s résumé and noted that the younger lawyer, the son of a Ukrainian émigré fruit peddler, was born in Wichita.

  “Wichita?” Adams asked drily. “Where was your mother on her way to at the time?”

  Adams showed up in Washington a few days after Specter had begun work in the commission’s office. He explained that he felt the investigation could move quickly, since Oswald was so obviously guilty. “He said, ‘It’s just another simple murder case,’” Specter recalled.

  Adams deserved some of his self-regard, Specter knew. During his tumultuous eighteen-month tenure as New York’s police commissioner, beginning in January 1954, Adams took what were remembered as historic steps to root out corruption on the police force. He targeted a budding crime wave in the city by forcing hundreds of reluctant police officers out of desk jobs and putting them on street patrols, earning the public’s gratitude. After leaving the police department, he established himself as one of the city’s most sought-after and best-paid courtroom lawyers.

  Specter remembered going to lunch with Adams near Lafayette Square, a few blocks from the White House, at an expensive French restaurant (“Frank Adams did not dine at any other sort of restaurant”), and Adams insisted on picking up the tab. He boasted to Specter that he could better afford the meal since “his daily charge for trial work was $2,500.” Specter gulped at what he considered “a giant sum of money.” Adams earned more in a day than Specter would earn in a month on the commission’s staff.

  Almost from the start, Adams seemed uncomfortable at the commission. It was going to be a difficult assignment. He and Specter would have to produce a detailed, second-by-second chronology of the events of the assassination, as well as review and understand much of the medical and ballistics evidence. Adams, however, had “no drive for detailed work,” Specter said. At his law firm, he supervised five or six associates when preparing a case, he told Specter. But at the commission, he and Specter were on their own. “He was unused to working on a prolonged project with only one junior associate, and especially with one so young,” Specter said.

  Adams soon established a routine. He usually arrived after eleven a.m. “He chatted briefly, fingered some files and phoned his New York office before finding some reason to leave,” Specter recalled. Adams had a pressing caseload back in New York that winter, he warned his partner in early January. “Adams told me right from the start that he had to work on a major antitrust case by mid-February—five weeks away—and he implied that he expected to finish the work by then.” Adams’s firm had a Washington office, and he spent many days there, rather than on Capitol Hill in the cramped office he shared with Specter.

  After a few weeks, Adams disappeared altogether, essentially abandoning the commission. He came down to Washington on a handful of days that winter and spring, including the day in March that Specter had scheduled for the deposition of the navy pathologists who had conducted the president’s autopsy. Specter was introducing the doctors to Chief Justice Warren that day when Adams entered the room. He was such a stranger in the commission’s offices that Warren did not recognize him.

  “Good afternoon, Doctor,” Warren said to Adams, who stood there, mortified not to be recognized by the chief justice.

  “And that was the last we saw of Frank Adams,” Specter said.

  Adams’s disappearance was fine with Specter, who was described by many of his colleagues as the single most self-confident young man they had ever met. “I thought it was an advantage not to have to work with anybody,” he explained. “I didn’t have to share the work. All I had to do was do it.”

  After the initial staff meeting in January, Warren had little contact with the young staff lawyers, which disappointed many of them. He delegated responsibilities through Rankin and through Rankin’s two increasingly influential deputies—Redlich and Willens. Warren also met frequently with a few of the “senior” lawyers, especially his old friend Joseph Ball. The two men liked to swap stories about their early adventures in the law back home in California. “He was one of the finest men I ever knew,” Ball said of Warren. “He was strong physically, morally and mentally, and he had a great soul.”

  Warren’s routine was to arrive in the commission’s offices early each morning, usually by eight, and then leave about an hour later for the Supreme Court, two blocks away. At about five, he would return, often remaining in the commission’s offices for several more hours.

  Among the young lawyers, only Specter had frequent face-to-face dealings with the chief justice—the result of Adams’s disappearance. As effectively the sole member of his team, Specter was left to conduct many of the commission’s most important witness interviews by himself, often with Warren listening in. Specter established a courteous, if sometimes chilly, relationship with the chief justice. Warren was used to people being intimidated in his presence; he clearly enjoyed being at the center of, and usually directing, conversations. Specter, however, would insist that he was never intimidated by the chief justice and that he stood up to him when necessary.

  “It was a thrill to work for Warren,” Specter said years later. “We felt we were in the presence of history. But what was there to be intimidated about? I was not intimidated by him. I was aggravated by him sometimes.”

  * * *

  Specter formed an early bond with David Belin, the Iowa lawyer—in part, Belin believed, because he and Specter were Jews raised in stretches of the Midwest where Jews were a novelty, and often an unwelcome one. Belin made friends easily; he was ebullient, full of energy and ambition, and he relished his standing as the “Iowa country boy” and “hayseed” suddenly working among lawyers from New York and Washington. He was appalled by Adams’s disappearance from the investigation, and he urged Specter to protest. “Adams should have been asked to resign when it became apparent that he was not going to undertake his responsibilities,” Belin said later. He was grateful that his own partner, Joseph Ball, was so fully committed to the commission’s work. Ball had taken a leave of absence from his firm in Long Beach, and the Californian’s sweet charm and capacity for hard work made him popular throughout the commission’s staff. Specter remembered Ball as “cherubic, with a twinkle in his eye,” who “made women swoon, even at 62.”

  Ball and Belin, responsible for finding evidence to prove that Oswald was the assassin, became so close that their names were often uttered together as a single word—“Ball-Belin”—by Rankin and his deputies. Early on, Ball, Belin, and Specter saw how their investigations would overlap, and they hit upon a way to divide up their duties. Ball and Belin “would handle all witnesses at the assassination scene except for those in the motorcade, whom I would handle,” including Governor Connally and the Secret Service agents, Specter said.

  Specter took responsibility for the medical evidenc
e, including the analysis of the results of the autopsy at the Bethesda hospital. Determining the source of the bullets—presumably, Oswald’s rifle—remained a subject for investigation by Ball and Belin. As for the scientific analysis of the ammunition, “we decided that the bullet in flight was the dividing point,” Specter said. “Before the bullet left the barrel, it was the responsibility of Ball and Belin. After striking the president, it was my responsibility.”

  For all three men, the early days of the investigation were consumed by reading. Ball and Belin took nearly a month to read through all of the paperwork from Dallas produced by the FBI and the Secret Service. Belin established an index-card system that allowed the three men to cross-index the information they were receiving from different agencies “so we didn’t have to read everything twice,” Ball said.

  They were all struck by the FBI’s apparent certainty about the number and sequence of shots in Dealey Plaza, especially since the three of them found the ballistics evidence so confusing. According to the FBI, Oswald fired three shots: the first hit Kennedy in the upper back or lower neck, the second hit Connally, and the third struck the president in the head—the fatal shot. But the FBI’s reports did not make clear how the bureau had arrived at those conclusions.

  * * *

  Down the hallway in the VFW building, Norman Redlich was preparing for the commission’s interview of Marina Oswald, and his research was exhaustive to the point of obsession. He outlined hundreds of questions that Oswald’s widow could be asked. He prepared a mammoth typed chart in which he laid out, chronologically, every significant moment of her life, beginning with her birth in the northern Russian city of Molotovsk on July 17, 1941, and continuing through the president’s murder in Dallas. He listed questions that could be addressed to her about every major event of those twenty-two years, with the questions divided into subcategories, based on information that she had given to other investigators. She could be challenged on everything she had already told the FBI and the Secret Service, as well as what others had said about her.