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

by Philip Shenon

  That was it. CIA analysts back at the agency’s headquarters who had not read anything else on the subject might assume that “the fact” of an affair between Oswald and Duran was old, unimportant news. Certainly, it appeared, that was what Scott wanted them to believe.

  * * *

  There was more troubling news for Scott that spring. In May 1967, an American diplomat working in the U.S. consulate in the Mexican port city of Tampico reported an encounter with a local newspaper reporter, Oscar Contreras, who claimed that he had spent several hours with Oswald in September 1963. At the time, Contreras was a law student at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University. He said he and a group of leftist friends, all of them known on campus as Castro sympathizers, were approached by Oswald, who asked for help in convincing the Cuban consulate to give him a visa. Contreras said he was unable to help, although he and his friends spent that evening and much of the next day with the young American. It was not clear who had sent Oswald to speak with the students, although Contreras said he had many friends at the Cuban embassy.

  The account, if true, offered another belated example of gaps in the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald in Mexico—or, alternatively, how little Scott and his colleagues chose to tell CIA headquarters about what they had actually known. If the Mexican reporter’s account was accurate, Oswald had ducked CIA surveillance for at least a day and a half—about a quarter of his time in Mexico City.

  * * *

  It was at about that same time in 1967 that Scott began talking openly to his colleagues of his plans to retire from the CIA. After twenty years at the agency, most of them in Mexico, he said he wanted to leave the government and make some real money. He intended to remain in Mexico and set up a consulting firm, allowing him to profit from his many contacts in the Mexican government. He also intended to write his memoirs, including his account of what had happened with Oswald.

  Scott had always considered himself a writer. He especially loved poetry and had self-published a collection of his own love poems under a pseudonym in 1957. It might have been an obvious thought, then, to put his life story, especially his many exciting adventures as a spy, on paper. In what appeared to be a grave violation of CIA security rules, he sent a detailed outline for his memoirs—through regular mail—to a friend in New York who was an editor at Reader’s Digest. He told the editor that the book would follow his spying career from its start in World War II, when he formed an early friendship with Allen Dulles, and reveal how he and Dulles had written a study of British intelligence agencies that was used in 1947 as the blueprint for the creation of the CIA. Much of the book would focus on Mexico. “During my 13 years in Mexico, I had many experiences, many of which I can write about in detail,” Scott told the editor. “One of these pertains to Lee Harvey Oswald.… I know a great deal about his activities from the moment he arrived in Mexico.”

  Scott’s initial title for the book, It Came to Little, was drawn from a passage of the Bible—“Ye looked for much, and lo, it came to little”—and reflected his disenchantment with the CIA. “My theme is that with all our work, the dollars spent and the thousands of hours put into the battle against communism, we who were and those who are still in the CIA would have to admit that ‘it came to little,’ if we are honest,” he wrote. “The United States is getting more and more timid about confronting communism” even as “we are more and more deeply penetrated by communists.” He eventually settled on a different title—The Foul Foe—and decided on a pen name, “Ian Maxwell.” It was the same one he had used for his love poems.

  * * *

  When he decided to run for president in 1968, Robert Kennedy knew he might face questions about his brother’s murder. The prospect, as always, seemed agonizing.

  His last substantive public comment about the Warren Commission came that March, while he was on the campaign trail in California. In a raucous meeting near Los Angeles with college students, he was asked if he would make the commission’s records public in response to the flood of conspiracy theories about the assassination. Reporters said that Kennedy tried at first to ignore the question but, after a moment’s hesitation, reconsidered. “If I became president, I would not reopen the Warren report,” Kennedy declared. “I have seen everything that’s in there. I stand by the Warren Commission.” He added that “nobody is more interested than I in knowing who was responsible for the death of President Kennedy.”

  Three months later, on June 6, the night he won the California primary for the Democratic nomination, Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. He was gunned down by a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, who said he wanted to punish Kennedy for his support for Israel.

  The assassination had immediate ramifications at the Supreme Court. Within a week, a shaken Chief Justice Warren asked for a meeting with President Johnson and announced that he intended to retire, allowing Johnson time to put a successor in place before the presidential elections that fall. Johnson had not sought reelection and, with Robert Kennedy’s death, the chances that the Republican nominee, former vice president Richard Nixon, would win the presidency had grown much stronger. Warren clearly did not want Nixon, his old nemesis, to have the chance to replace him.

  The situation did not work out as Warren had hoped. Johnson nominated Abe Fortas as Warren’s successor, but Fortas ran into strong opposition, much of it tied to allegations of conflicts of interest from his continuing political counsel to the president. The nomination was withdrawn in October, and Johnson announced that he had asked Warren to remain at the court until Johnson’s successor, Democrat or Republican, was in place to make a new nomination. After Nixon’s election, the new president announced his selection of Warren Burger, a conservative appeals court judge from Minnesota, as chief justice. Burger was confirmed by the Senate in June 1969.

  Warren gave few interviews in retirement, and when he spoke to reporters and historians, he preferred always to focus on his legacy on the court and as California’s governor—not on the commission. When pressed about the assassination, he said he had never wavered in his view that Oswald acted alone. He said he was not disturbed by polls that showed that a growing share of the public doubted the commission’s findings. “People are still debating the Lincoln assassination,” he said. “It’s understandable.”

  In retirement, he made a decision that pleased former staff members of the commission: he decided to cooperate on a book that Lee Rankin and Alfred Goldberg planned to write as a formal defense of the commission. He granted an extended, tape-recorded interview to Goldberg on March 26, 1974. It would be one of his last interviews on any subject; he died in Washington less than four months later, on July 9, at the age of eighty-three. In the interview, Warren suggested that he regretted nothing about the way he conducted the investigation, apart from wishing that the commission had a face-to-face interview with President Johnson. He stood by his decision to block access to Kennedy’s autopsy photos and X-rays. “For good or ill, I take full responsibility for it,” he said. “I couldn’t conceive permitting these things being sent around the country and displayed in museums.” He said he was still convinced that the single-bullet theory was correct and that Governor Connally had been wrong to think he was hit by a separate bullet. “A shot can deaden one’s emotions or reactions.” He remained convinced that all of the bullets fired at Kennedy’s limousine had come from the Texas School Book Depository, not from the so-called grassy knoll or the railway overpass, as so many conspiracy theorists alleged. “No one could have fired from the knoll or the overpass without having been seen.”

  Rankin and Goldberg abandoned plans for the book after they were unable to interest major publishers. “The publishing houses only wanted a book about a conspiracy to kill Kennedy,” Goldberg said. “That’s not what we were writing.”

  * * *

  In October 1968, with the election to choose his successor only a month away, Johnson granted a wide-ranging valedictory interview to veteran ABC News anchorman Howard K
. Smith. Off camera, Johnson offered to tell the newsman a secret that, for now, Smith could tell to no one else. Smith agreed.

  “I’ll tell you something that will rock you,” Johnson said. Fidel Castro, he said, was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first.”

  Smith, who knew that Johnson was capable of “blarney,” pleaded for more information. “I was rocked all right,” he said. “I begged for details. He refused, saying it will all come out someday.”

  In September 1969, in retirement at his vast ranch outside Austin, Texas, Johnson was interviewed by CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite for a planned series of programs about his presidency. In discussing the Kennedy assassination, Cronkite asked if Johnson still believed the Warren Commission was right and that there had been no conspiracy in Kennedy’s death.

  “I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever been completely relieved of the fact that there might have been international connections,” Johnson said.

  “You mean you still feel there might have been a conspiracy?” Cronkite asked.

  “I have not completely discounted that.”

  Cronkite sounded startled. “Well, that would seem to indicate that you don’t have full confidence in the Warren Commission.”

  Johnson: “No, I think the Warren Commission study…” He paused. “I think first of all, it was composed of the ablest, most judicious, bipartisan men in this country. Second, I think they had only one objective, and that was the truth. Third, I think they were competent and did the best they could. But I don’t think that they or me or anyone else is always, absolutely sure of everything that might have motivated Oswald, or others that could have been involved.”

  Cronkite knew he had a scoop, and a historic one. But before the interview could be aired, Johnson insisted that his comments about the commission and his fears of a conspiracy had to be cut from the interview on “national security” grounds. After a fierce internal battle, CBS agreed to edit out the material, although word of what Johnson had said leaked to other news organizations, including both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

  What led Johnson to doubt the Warren Commission so profoundly would never been entirely clear. Joseph Califano, his domestic policy aide at the White House from 1965 until 1969, recalled how Johnson often said privately to deputies that he was convinced that Oswald had been part of a conspiracy. It was a view shared by Califano, who had been the general counsel of the army during the Kennedy administration and was one of a small team of advisers to Robert Kennedy asked to dream up plots to oust Castro—and, if possible, to kill him—as part of Operation Mongoose. “Robert Kennedy was absolutely determined to assassinate Castro,” Califano said years later. “The Kennedys were obsessed with it.” Califano always suspected there was truth in the rumor that Castro, once he became aware of the assassination plots targeting him, retaliated by ordering Kennedy’s assassination. Califano said he believed Robert Kennedy assumed the same thing. “I have come to believe that Robert Kennedy experienced that unbelievable grief after his brother’s death because he believed it was linked to his—Bobby’s—efforts to kill Castro.”

  * * *

  Cynthia Thomas was more shocked than her husband at the news that his career at the State Department was over. Certainly she was angrier. Charles had always been the fatalist between them. It did not make sense, they both knew. Charles had been uniformly—and enthusiastically—praised by the ambassadors he had worked under during his eighteen years in the Foreign Service. The bad news reached him while he was back in Washington in 1969. Since he had failed to win a promotion in time, he was being dismissed—“selected out.” “It seemed nonsensical,” Cynthia said. “Charles was the best sort of American diplomat.”

  It was then, in his final act as a State Department employee, that Thomas typed up his July 1969 letter to Secretary of State William Rogers, with a last plea that someone review the allegations made by Elena Garro. “A careful investigation of these allegations could perhaps explain them away,” Thomas wrote. “Until then, however, their public disclosure could reopen the debate about the true nature of the Kennedy administration and damage the credibility of the Warren report.”

  In the letter, Thomas speculated, apparently for the first time on paper, why the CIA had not wanted to get to the bottom of the story in Mexico City: “Some of the people appearing in the Elena Garro scenario may well be agents of the CIA.” He did not identify who the possible CIA agents might be or how they might have interacted with Oswald in Mexico.

  A month later, on August 28, the State Department’s Division of Protective Security passed on his letter to the CIA, with a cover memo asking for the spy agency to consider pursuing the allegations. The CIA’s response to the State Department was dated September 16. At forty-six words, the memo could not have been much shorter:

  SUBJECT: Charles William Thomas

  Reference is made to your memorandum of 28 August 1969. We have examined the attachments, and see no need for further action. A copy of this reply has been sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Secret Service.

  The memo was signed by CIA counterintelligence director James Angleton and his deputy, Raymond Rocca. Angleton’s name meant nothing to Cynthia Thomas and, decades later, she said she thought it had never meant anything to her husband, either. “I don’t think we had any idea who Angleton was,” she said. “Why should we?”

  That summer, Thomas began a difficult job search that would only end with his suicide two years later. The search was much harder than he could have imagined, Cynthia said. When prospective employers asked Thomas why he left the State Department short of the retirement age, he felt compelled to tell them the truth: he had been forced out. He tried, but failed, to find work elsewhere in the government, including at the CIA, Cynthia said. She remembered that Win Scott in Mexico City had offered “to write recommendation letters for him” but “never did.” She came to understand that there was a “concerted effort by the State Department” to block her husband from getting a job on Capitol Hill. Money became a problem almost immediately. The family had no real savings. The Thomases and their two young daughters lived in a rented house in Washington. To provide at least a small income, Thomas put his law degree to work part-time to defend indigent criminal defendants in Washington’s municipal criminal courts. The pay was $7.50 an hour. He was “too proud” to ask for anyone’s help in finding a permanent job, Cynthia said.

  Even though the State Department and the CIA had refused his request to reopen the investigation in Mexico, Thomas tried to follow up himself. Late in 1969, he began to search for Garro. She had left Mexico City the year before as a result of the furor she created with public comments in which she alleged that left-wing intellectuals bore responsibility for instigating large antigovernment protests that fall; the protests were put down brutally by the Mexican government, resulting in the death of scores, if not hundreds, of protesters and bystanders. Thomas eventually located Garro in New York, where she was living—destitute—with her daughter.

  His handwritten notes of his phone conversations with Garro—placed in a file folder labeled KENNEDY that was found after his death in his black leather briefcase—suggest that Garro had nothing new to say about the long-ago encounter with Oswald. She was too confused—and paranoid. “She has been in hiding,” apparently fearing that she was in danger in Mexico, Thomas wrote. “She said ‘they’ were coming after her again.” At Thomas’s request, a friend of his in New York invited Garro and her daughter to dinner. The friend reported back that she “had never seen anyone as frightened.”

  On April 12, 1971, the day he committed suicide by putting a gun to his head in the family’s second-floor bathroom, three more rejection letters arrived in the mail, including one for a job as staff director of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Thomas was told that the committee had decided on a younger man. He killed himself with a gun he had bough
t years earlier as a souvenir of a visit to Cuba in the 1950s.

  In his briefcase, after his death, Cynthia found the KENNEDY folder, although she said she did not understand its significance at the time. The file was also stuffed with yellowed newspaper and magazine clippings about the continuing disputes over the findings of the Warren Commission. He had clipped out articles about Richard Russell—and Russell’s belief that the commission’s report was wrong. Years later, Cynthia Thomas would say she knew “almost nothing at all” about Garro’s allegations about Oswald and Silvia Duran. It was typical that her husband would not have shared such sensitive information with her at the time, Cynthia said. “He was right not to tell me,” she said. “This was embassy work, and it was sensitive. My goodness, it was about President Kennedy’s assassination. Charles was not supposed to bring something like this home to share with his family.”

  After the suicide, she began a one-woman campaign to prove that her husband was the victim of injustice within the State Department’s promotion system and to fight for his posthumous reinstatement to the Foreign Service, as well as his back salary and pension. It was a campaign prompted, in part, by her family’s desperate financial condition. At the age of thirty-five, with two young children, she had been left with a single physical asset of any value—a used 1967 Plymouth sedan worth $500—and $15,000 in debts, including $744.02 she owed to a Washington funeral home for her husband’s burial.

  She began hearing rumors, almost immediately, that there was more to her husband’s forced departure from the government than the family had been told—that the CIA was involved and that it somehow related to his posting in Mexico. Her notes from the time show that a well-connected European journalist in Washington told her that “high sources” in the U.S. government believed that Thomas was ousted because someone had spread false rumors connecting Thomas to “the Mexican left.” More specifically, she was alerted that Stanley Watson, Scott’s deputy in the CIA’s Mexico City station, had somehow “damaged” Charles’s career prospects behind the scenes.* It had been reported in diplomatic circles in Mexico that Watson, possibly at Scott’s urging, had begun a whispering campaign aimed at Thomas, suggesting that he was too close to Mexican Socialists. Decades later, the Thomases’ friend Guadalupe Rivera, a law professor who would later be elected to the Mexican Senate, recalled hearing the news in 1971 of Thomas’s suicide and immediately assuming it was linked to Watson’s rumor campaign, which had reached her, too. She was overheard at a party in Mexico City discussing the suicide and blurting out, “It was that pig, Stanley Watson.” Cynthia said she could not understand why Watson, or Scott, or anyone else at the CIA, would have been so determined to see her husband forced out of the government.