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

by Philip Shenon

  After his suicide, former colleagues at the State Department said they were astonished to learn that Thomas’s career might also have been derailed by what the department claimed was an innocent clerical error—the misfiling of a glowing job evaluation prepared in 1966, while Thomas was in Mexico. It was the evaluation that described Thomas as “one of the most valuable officers” in the Foreign Service and recommended his immediate promotion. The department said that the report had been mistakenly placed in the file of the other diplomat who had the name Charles Thomas. The report was placed in the proper file two days after the promotion board had turned Thomas down. The board chose not to reconsider its decision, since it was not the board’s mistake that resulted in the misfiling.

  Cynthia Thomas’s campaign, combined with the internal furor at the State Department over the treatment of her late husband, forced the department to overhaul its promotion policies for the diplomatic corps. In 1973, a federal judge in Washington ruled the department’s promotion process unconstitutional as a violation of due process of law; the ruling came in a lawsuit that had been financed by donations from the Charles William Thomas Defense Fund, which had been established by his widow and some of Thomas’s old colleagues.

  In January 1975, Congress provided Mrs. Thomas with some small amount of justice; it passed a so-called private bill that posthumously restored her husband to active duty in the Foreign Service, which meant that she and her two children would be entitled to the salary he had lost until the time of his death, as well as insurance benefits. The total compensation came to about $51,000. Mrs. Thomas was also hired by the State Department as a foreign service officer, and she went on to work as a diplomat in India and Thailand before retiring in 1993.

  After passage of the bill in 1975, Mrs. Thomas received a letter from the White House—a formal apology for the government’s treatment of her husband. “There are no words that can ease the burden you have carried over these years,” the letter began. “The circumstances surrounding your husband’s death are a source of deepest regret to the government he served so loyally and so well and I can only hope that the measures which came about as a result of this tragedy will prevent reoccurrences of this kind in the future.” The letter was signed by President Gerald R. Ford.

  * * *

  Charles Thomas was not the only veteran of the United States embassy in Mexico to die in April 1971. Two weeks after Thomas’s suicide, Winston Scott died at his home in the Mexican capital, at the age of sixty-two, after what was reported as an accidental fall. He appeared to have succumbed to internal injuries after tumbling from a ladder in his backyard.

  News of Scott’s death reached CIA headquarters almost immediately, and one of his former deputies in Mexico, Anne Goodpasture, now living in the United States, said she knew she had to act. Within hours, she said, she contacted Angleton to warn him that Scott had almost certainly kept classified documents at his house in Mexico City. It was well known among Scott’s deputies that he took files home and did not always return them. Goodpasture recalled that Scott had at least one thick-walled safe in his house. She did not rule out the possibility that he had “squirreled away” at least one copy of a 1963 CIA surveillance tape of some of Oswald’s telephone calls in Mexico.

  Angleton flew to Mexico in time for the funeral. He recalled years later to congressional investigators that he had been dispatched to the funeral by Richard Helms, another old friend of Scott’s. “I was appointed as an official by Dick to go down there” as a show of the agency’s respect, Angleton said. The trip had a second purpose, he acknowledged. “Win was going to write a book, a manuscript,” Angleton said. “It was sort of a last will and testament of an operator.” Since Scott had not submitted the book to the CIA for the prepublication security review it would have needed, “my purpose was to go down and get all copies,” Angleton said. “I was a close friend of his and I knew his wife and all that.” Helms would later claim that he had only a vague memory of Angleton’s trip—and the reasons for it. “There may have been some concern that maybe Scott had something in his safe that might affect the agency’s work,” Helms said, suggesting that the decision to enter Scott’s home and empty out his safe was routine. “The agency just wanted to double-check and be sure there was nothing of that kind there.”*

  Scott’s family recalled the unexpected knock at the door of their Mexico City home and how Scott’s widow, Janet, discovered Angleton standing there. He announced that he had come to collect classified material that might be in the house. The family submitted to his inspection, and Angleton took several boxes of documents back to Langley, including two copies of the memoirs.

  Much of Scott’s manuscript would remain classified in the CIA’s archives decades after his death, but a chapter focusing on the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald in Mexico was quietly declassified in 1994 and released to Scott’s family, part of the flood of millions of pages of government documents related to the Kennedy assassination that were declassified by the government in the 1990s, largely in response to the popularity of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-laden 1991 film JFK.

  And what was in that chapter would shock former investigators for the Warren Commission when they finally saw it in 2012 and 2013.* Far from giving reassurance that the CIA had not hidden secrets, Scott’s memoirs suggested just how much information had been intentionally withheld from the Warren Commission, often by Scott himself. There were startling differences between what Scott wrote in his book and what the CIA had told the commission years earlier.

  Scott had assured the commission in 1964 that the government had come across no credible evidence, certainly nothing in Mexico, to suggest a conspiracy to kill the president. In his memoirs, however, Scott offered precisely the opposite view. What happened in Mexico, he wrote, raised the suspicion that Oswald was in fact an “agent” for a Communist government—Scott thought it was the Soviet Union—who might have been directed to kill Kennedy. “Above all, Oswald’s visits at both the Communist Cuban Embassy and the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City during his brief five-day stay in September–October 1963 are, together with what is known of what took place during these visits, sufficient to make him a suspect agent, acting on behalf of the Soviets, in several things, possibly including the assassination of President Kennedy,” Scott wrote. “It is evident that there are sufficient data for at least a suspicion that Oswald worked for the Soviets.”

  His memoirs revealed that, despite his insistence to the commission that there were no surveillance photos of Oswald in Mexico City, the CIA had in fact obtained photos of him outside both the Cuban and Soviet embassies. “People watching these embassies photographed Oswald as he entered and left each one, and clocked the time he spent on each visit,” Scott wrote. He also suggested that there were reels of audiotapes from CIA wiretaps that had captured Oswald’s voice in his phone calls to the embassies—tapes that Scott had claimed in 1963 and 1964 had all been erased. “Oswald was of great interest to us,” Scott wrote. “His conversations with personnel of these embassies were studied in detail.”

  In 1976, the House of Representatives established a special committee to reinvestigate the assassinations of both President Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Over the next two years, investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations tracked down at least three CIA officials who remembered seeing surveillance photos of Oswald in Mexico City. Among them was Stanley Watson, Scott’s former deputy, who recalled a single surveillance photo of Oswald, alone, taken from the rear—“basically an ear and a back shot.” Watson said he believed Scott had been capable of hiding or destroying material he did not want his CIA colleagues to see. He recalled how Scott had taken home contents of his embassy safe at his retirement; Watson also knew how Angleton had come to Mexico City to seize material from Scott’s home after his death. He volunteered that he thought Scott was capable of “phonying” evidence. “I never believed Win Scott the first time he told me something.”

&n
bsp; In 1992, Congress established the Assassination Records Review Board to speed up the declassification of virtually all records related to the Kennedy assassination. The board forced the CIA to make public some of the records of the informants network maintained by Scott and his colleagues in Mexico City. On the list of Scott’s informants was a former Mexican Interior Ministry official, Manuel Calvillo, and it was a name that would have been familiar to Elena Garro and her daughter. Calvillo was the family friend who, immediately after the assassination, contacted the Garros to urge them to go into hiding. If their account to Charles Thomas was true, it meant that the Mexican official who told Elena Garro and her daughter to say nothing to anyone about Oswald—about Silvia Duran, about the party, about Oswald’s two “beatnik” traveling companions—was also working for the CIA.*

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  1975 AND THEREAFTER

  In February 1975, David Slawson, now on the faculty of the law school at the University of Southern California, was thankful that he had turned down the job offer a decade earlier from Robert Kennedy. The proposal had come through Joe Dolan, then Kennedy’s Senate aide, when Slawson was still at the Justice Department in Washington. Kennedy had wanted Slawson to sign on as legal counsel in his Senate office, with plans for Slawson to join Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968. Slawson said he cringed at the thought that, had he joined the campaign, he might well have witnessed Kennedy’s assassination at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The hotel was just down the road from Slawson’s office at USC.

  He was also glad that he had not become associated with Kennedy’s political entourage after all the ugly revelations about Kennedy’s possible role in the CIA assassination plots targeting Castro. A special Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho confirmed once and for all in the mid-1970s that the CIA had organized murder plots against several foreign leaders. The CIA’s inspector general identified eight separate sets of plots directed at Castro alone in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations; the details of some of the schemes seemed drawn from a bad spy novel, with an arsenal of murder weapons to be smuggled into Cuba that included poison pens, poison pills, a fungus-infected scuba suit, and an exploding cigar.

  James Angleton, a central witness before the Church Committee, was never directly tied to the Castro plots, although the committee turned up at least one well-placed CIA official who appeared convinced of a connection: John Whitten, the agency veteran who had been pushed aside by Angleton in the Oswald investigation in 1964. Whitten testified to congressional investigators that he understood Angleton “was one of several people in the agency who were trying to use the Mafia in the Cuban operations.” Whitten recalled how, long before the Kennedy assassination, he had been forced to call off a CIA operation in Panama to search for the bank deposits of American mobsters because “Angleton vetoed it.” Whitten said he was told at the time that “Angleton himself has ties to the Mafia and he would not want to double-cross them.” Angleton was forced to resign from the agency in late 1974 as a result of the separate disclosure that, for years, he had overseen a massive, illegal domestic spy operation that had gathered information on American citizens, including opening their mail.

  In Los Angeles in the 1970s, Slawson admitted that he could not follow every twist and turn of the congressional investigations of the misdeeds of the CIA. He was busy with his classes at USC, and there were times, he said, when Southern California seemed to exist in a different universe from Washington, DC. He was alarmed, though, every time he read some new disclosure about CIA activities that should have been revealed to him a decade earlier at the Warren Commission, especially about the Castro plots. While the plots did not necessarily have any connection to Kennedy’s murder, the CIA had abdicated its responsibility to tell the commission about them. “The decision to withhold that information was morally wrong,” Slawson said.

  For a time, he was not so angry that he wanted to be drawn into “the circus” that had become the national debate about the assassination. For years, he was happy to leave the public debate to some of his old friends from the commission, especially David Belin, who became a fixture on radio and television programs in defending the Warren Commission’s findings; Belin would write two books on the subject.

  Slawson ended his silence once and for all, though, in February 1975, when he was contacted by a Washington correspondent for the New York Times who asked him to take a look at an intriguing FBI document that had just been unearthed in the National Archives. It was a memo to the State Department from J. Edgar Hoover in 1960, three years before the Kennedy assassination, about Oswald, who would then have been living in Russia. The memo questioned whether an “imposter” might somehow be using Oswald’s birth certificate; the issue had apparently first been raised with FBI agents in Dallas by Oswald’s ever-excitable, conspiracy-minded mother, Marguerite.

  As he read through the fifteen-year-old FBI memo, Slawson knew enough about Oswald’s mother to know that there was almost certainly nothing to this. Slawson had heard no suggestion at all during his work on the Warren Commission that anyone had impersonated Oswald in Russia. Still, he was angry because he was certain that he had never seen Hoover’s 1960 memo, and he should have seen it when he worked at the commission; he would have remembered it.

  So he agreed to go on the record with the Times—both to attack the CIA and to join the growing calls for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination, if only to determine why this document and so much other information, especially about the Castro plots, had been withheld. For former staff members on the commission, Slawson’s comments represented a turning point—the Warren Commission’s chief investigator on the question of whether President Kennedy had died in a foreign conspiracy now believed that the question needed to be asked again. “I don’t know where the imposter notion would have led us—perhaps nowhere, like a lot of other leads,” Slawson told the Times. “But the point is we didn’t know about it. And why not?” He wondered if the CIA had been behind a decision to withhold the 1960 memo, just as the agency had withheld information about the Castro plots. The CIA “may have covered this up,” he said.

  Within days of the article in the Times, the phone rang in Slawson’s home in Pasadena. It was a Sunday morning, he thought.

  He had never heard the caller’s voice before. It was plummy. At first, it sounded friendly.

  “This is James Angleton,” the caller said.

  Slawson was not sure he knew exactly who Angleton was at the time. “I think I only knew he was high up at the CIA.” Angleton’s role in the CIA’s domestic-spying operation, Operation Chaos, had been exposed by the Times only several months earlier, resulting in his resignation in December 1974.

  Angleton would not physically depart his offices at CIA headquarters for months after resigning, however. And he made clear to Slawson that, even in his forced retirement, he was continuing to monitor how he and the agency were being depicted in the press, especially when it came to the Kennedy assassination.

  Angleton wanted to talk about the article in the Times about Oswald and the Hoover memo. He briefly explained his background. “He really piled it on, how important and aristocratic he was,” Slawson said.

  Angleton then moved on to make it clear that he was an old friend of USC president John Hubbard, a former American diplomat and, by definition, Slawson’s boss. “He asked how the president was getting along, as if I must be great buddies with the president,” said Slawson, who in fact barely knew Hubbard.

  It was then that the conversation took a menacing tone. Angleton wanted to know if Slawson had been accurately quoted in the article in the Times. He wanted to know exactly what Slawson had said to the Times reporter, and if it was true that Slawson wanted a new investigation of elements of the Kennedy assassination.

  The threat was clearer in Angleton’s sinister tone than in his words, Slawson said.

  Angleton suggested that the CIA needed Slawson’s help—his continuing help—as a “pa
rtner.” As a partner in what? Slawson wondered.

  “We want you to know how we appreciated the work you have done with us,” Angleton said. Slawson reminded himself that he had never worked for the CIA; he had investigated the CIA.

  “We hope you’ll remain a friend,” Angleton said. “We hope you’ll remain a partner with us.” Angleton spoke slowly, pausing to allow Slawson to take in what he was saying.

  As he put down the phone, Slawson thought the message was obvious: “The message was: We know everything you’re doing. We’ll find it out. Just remember that. The CIA is watching you.” He and his wife, Kaaren, were both alarmed by the call. What did it mean that this apparently powerful figure at the CIA would contact them out of the blue to suggest that Slawson was asking too many questions about the Kennedy assassination? Slawson was convinced that Angleton was giving him a warning: “Keep your mouth shut.”