* * *
In Washington that summer, FBI director Clarence Kelley, beginning his third year in charge at the FBI, thought he was making progress in distancing the bureau from the increasingly dark legacy of his predecessor, the late J. Edgar Hoover. “We are truly sorry,” Kelley would declare publicly, apologizing after the flood of posthumous revelations about Hoover’s abuses of power, which included the FBI’s illegal harassment for decades of civil rights leaders and antigovernment protesters; the abuses ended only with Hoover’s death in 1972. “No FBI director should abide incursions upon the liberties of the people,” Kelley said.
Still, in his years at the FBI, Kelley, the jut-jawed former police chief of St. Louis, Missouri, found himself dragged over and over again into internal investigations of the misdeeds, and often the crimes, of FBI agents and other bureau employees during the Hoover years. Those crimes, Kelley discovered to his astonishment in the summer of 1975, included the destruction of critical evidence about the Kennedy assassination by FBI agents in Dallas.
That July, Tom Johnson, the publisher of the Dallas Times Herald, the city’s number-two newspaper, requested an urgent face-to-face meeting with Kelley. The FBI director agreed, and Johnson flew to Washington the next day. Ushered into Kelley’s office, Johnson recalled later, he took a seat and wasted no time before revealing to Kelley why he was there: his newspaper was working on a story that suggested a massive cover-up in Dallas of what the FBI had known about Lee Harvey Oswald.
After years of hearing “so many nut stories, so many conspiracy theories” about the assassination, Johnson said, this “horrifying” story seemed to be true. The newspaper had learned that in early November 1963, just weeks before the assassination, a furious Oswald had arrived unannounced in the Dallas field office of the FBI, and that he left behind a threatening handwritten note. In the note, Oswald had apparently complained about the bureau’s surveillance of his family, but the exact wording of his threats—and their target—was a mystery, since the note had vanished after the assassination. The FBI had covered up the note’s existence and Oswald’s visit, never telling the Warren Commission about any of it. It was the Texas publisher himself who had gotten the tip about the note and its disappearance—from an FBI official in Dallas he would refuse to name—and Johnson planned to write the story along with reporter Hugh Aynesworth, the longtime scoop artist of the Dallas Morning News who was now working at the rival Times-Herald.
“Kelley looked at me, and his expression was beyond being startled,” Johnson recalled. “He looked bewildered.” Kelley vowed to investigate. He asked Johnson “to send me the full story in writing, and give me some time to check on it.”
It took little time for Kelley to determine “that the worst of it was painfully true.” He was able to establish that Oswald had in fact delivered a handwritten note to the FBI field office in Dallas in early November 1963 and that it had been torn up and flushed down a toilet by Special Agent James Hosty, on orders of his supervisor, Gordon Shanklin, in the hours after Oswald’s murder.
Kelley was appalled, he said. “Buried for 12 years was this FBI cover-up,” he wrote later. “Why did the FBI people do this? The reason, at least in the beginning, was easy enough to understand: hide the news from Hoover.” He could imagine how, after the assassination, Hosty and Shanklin had panicked at the note’s existence. “To the world at large, they must have reasoned, it might look as if the FBI had the assassin within its grasp—and then let him get away. To J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, it most certainly would have looked that way.” Kelley imagined how the disclosure “would have ignited an inferno of retribution in Hoover.”
Kelley called Johnson in Dallas and told him he was free to run the story—because it was true. The article was published on August 31, 1975, and “was a sensation from coast to coast,” Kelley said.
The incident led Kelley to step up what would be a personal, informal investigation of what had been hidden in the FBI’s raw investigative files about the Kennedy assassination—what else the Warren Commission had never been allowed to see. The assassination was a subject on which he had always considered himself something of an armchair detective. “I regarded the Kennedy assassination as a piece of personal unfinished business,” he said. Like most career law-enforcement officials, Kelley had “witnessed a considerable amount of heart-wrenching tragedy.… One becomes not necessarily immune to it, but in some ways, insulated against it.” But not that one time in November 1963, he said. “President Kennedy’s death staggered me.”
He followed the many conspiracy theories about the assassination. “I read any number of the so-called ‘assassination books,’” he wrote later. “The FBI file on the assassination is the largest ever created by the bureau on a single subject.… As director, I had access to all of it and, as time permitted, I reviewed portions of it.”
Over the years, as he gathered up and paged through the bureau’s raw files, he became particularly troubled, he said, by one subject: Oswald’s visit to Mexico City. Kelley read about the CIA surveillance operation there that had targeted Oswald—and how the CIA’s information had been mishandled after it was relayed to the FBI in the fall of 1963. Something important had happened in Mexico, Kelley decided. “Oswald’s stay in Mexico City apparently shaped the man’s thinking irrevocably.”
Kelley came across Hoover’s top secret June 1964 letter addressed to the commission—the letter that commission staff lawyers say never reached them—about Oswald’s declaration in the Cuban embassy in Mexico City that he intended to kill Kennedy. From what Kelley was reading, there was no doubt that the incident had happened. “Oswald definitely offered to kill President Kennedy,” he said. And from what he found elsewhere in the FBI’s files, Kelley came to believe that Oswald had made an identical threat when he met with diplomats—and spies—at the Soviet embassy in Mexico, including the feared KGB agent Valeriy Kostikov. “The importance of Kostikov cannot be overstated,” Kelley said. Well before Kennedy’s assassination, Kostikov was known to both the CIA and to Soviet intelligence analysts at FBI headquarters as a specialist in assassinations.
That did not mean that the Cubans or the Soviets were behind Kennedy’s murder, Kelley stressed. Kostikov also had routine diplomatic duties at the embassy as part of his cover. “I personally think the Soviets informed Oswald that they wanted no part of his scheme,” Kelley said. As for Castro, the FBI had determined that “the dictator thought at the time that the offer might be a deliberate provocation by the U.S. government or that Oswald was simply a madman” and that Cuban diplomats in Mexico probably had nothing further to do with him.
Still, what was in the FBI’s files—and never shared with the Warren Commission—was astonishing enough. It suggested that the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico had known for weeks before the assassination that Oswald was talking openly of his intention to kill the president.
What followed Oswald’s Mexico trip were a series of bureaucratic delays and blunders within the FBI that prevented much of the information, including the fact that Oswald had met in Mexico with a KGB assassinations expert, from reaching the FBI office in Dallas. In Washington, the FBI and CIA “had enough combined information on Oswald’s trek to Mexico City to put his name in lights on a presidential security list of threats,” Kelley said. But Hosty “was kept in the dark.” The Dallas agent was given only sketchy information about the Mexico City trip; he was told nothing about Kostikov’s true identity. “Apparently within the machinery of the bureau, those responsible just did not put two-and-two together fast enough,” Kelley said.
After the assassination, Kelley learned, FBI supervisors in Washington—and, he believed, the Johnson White House—decided to keep those details away from Hosty and his colleagues in Dallas for fear of sparking a global crisis over the possibility of a Communist conspiracy in Kennedy’s death. Kelley determined that at least two memos about the events in Mexico were removed from Oswald’s case file in Dallas in the days after the
assassination in the hope that Hosty had not yet read them. Kelley said he believed the order to remove the memos had come from the FBI’s former number-three official, Assistant Director William Sullivan, and that Sulivan appeared to be acting on orders from the White House, which “seemingly considered the risk of a confrontation with the Soviet Union over the Kennedy assassination too great.” In memoirs published in 1979, two years after his death in a hunting accident, Sullivan did not address Kelley’s allegations, although he admitted that the FBI and the CIA had never gotten to the bottom of many of the mysteries about the president’s murder, especially those connected to Oswald’s trip to Mexico. “There were huge gaps in the case, gaps we never did close,” Sullivan wrote. “We never found out what went on between Oswald and the Cubans in Mexico City.”
Kelley came to see Hosty as a victim. He was convinced that if Hosty had been told everything that FBI headquarters knew about Oswald’s Mexico trip, he would have alerted the Secret Service to the obvious threat that Oswald posed. The FBI, Kelley said, would have “undoubtedly taken all necessary steps to neutralize Oswald.” And that was Kelley’s larger conclusion—that President Kennedy’s assassination could have been prevented, perhaps easily. Despite Hoover’s insistence that Oswald was a lone wolf whose plans to kill the president could never have been detected by the bureau, the truth was different. If the FBI’s Dallas office had been aware of what was known elsewhere in the FBI and CIA about Oswald at that moment, “without doubt JFK would not have died in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963,” Kelley said. “History would have taken a different turn.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1977, the former American ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Mann, made an extraordinary demand of congressional investigators. Then in retirement in Texas, he told staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he would reveal the truth of what happened in Mexico City in the days after the assassination—information that he had withheld from the Warren Commission—but only if then president Jimmy Carter personally agreed to grant him immunity from prosecution. Like James Angleton, Mann seemed to know there was much more about Kennedy’s murder that the government—the CIA, in particular—would want to keep hidden forever; he was not going to reveal it without direct approval from the Oval Office.
The report of the House investigators, which remained classified for years after they traveled to Texas to interview Mann, shows that the former ambassador hinted at what he was prepared to say under oath if he got immunity—that he had been personally ordered by Secretary of State Dean Rusk in the days after Kennedy’s murder to shut down any investigation in Mexico that would “confirm or refute rumors of Cuban involvement in the assassination.” Mann said he believed the same “incredible” order had been given to Winston Scott, the CIA station chief, and Clark Anderson, the FBI legal attaché, by their superiors back in the United States. “Mann did not believe that the U.S. government would stop the investigation solely on the grounds that it would create a flap with the Cubans,” according to a long-classified summary of his interview. “Mann stated that … if he had to make a guess, there was a 99 percent chance that the investigation was stopped because it would have resulted in the discovery of covert U.S. government action” in Mexico that somehow targeted Castro. He concluded that Silvia Duran “was probably an agent for the CIA.” He also said that Robert Kennedy “was heavily involved in counterintelligence activity in 1964,” although there is no elaboration on that point in the summary.
Mann died in 1999, and the two House investigators who interviewed him are also no longer alive. Surviving staff members of the House Assassinations Committee say they cannot recall why the committee did not obtain immunity from the White House that would have allowed Mann to testify. Although he was briefly interviewed by the Warren Commission’s staff, Mann was not called to give formal, sworn testimony to the commission, either. Instead, the principal State Department witness before the commission was Secretary Rusk, who swore that he knew of no evidence of a conspiracy involving Cuba or any other government. He died in 1994.
The House committee did take sworn classified testimony in 1978 from Ray Rocca, who—unintentionally—offered new evidence of the CIA’s lies to the Warren Commission. Even as Win Scott was assuring the commission in 1964 that the CIA’s Mexico City station had no serious suspicion about a conspiracy, he was apparently saying precisely the opposite to colleagues at the agency. It was not just in his never-published memoirs that Scott revealed his doubts that Oswald had acted alone; he told it to Rocca, too. “He was so firmly committed—Win was, personally—to the fact of Cuban involvement,” said Rocca, who seemed unaware that Scott had said the opposite to the Warren Commission. “I can’t believe—absolutely—that he would ever withhold it.”
* * *
I spoke with James Angleton once in my life, as a young reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times. I don’t remember the story I was working on, but it would have been in the early 1980s and somehow involved the CIA, and an editor in the bureau thought that Angleton, who had befriended a number of the more blue-blooded editors at the Times over the years, might offer some useful perspective. Like Angleton and so many others at the CIA, my editor was a proud graduate of Yale University. Angleton would then have been a few years into his forced retirement.
What I remember of the interview is that Angleton spoke in riddles, never answering any question I asked him, but suggesting that I needed to put myself on the path to some larger truth about protecting the United States from its adversaries behind the Iron Curtain. The conversation was perfectly bizarre (and not so different from the phone conversation that David Slawson described from 1975). The truth is that I thought Angleton might have been drunk; by the end of his career, his debilitating alcoholism was well known in intelligence circles. He died in 1987, at the age of sixty-nine.
In the years since that strange phone call, as more and more of the details of his thirty-year-old spying career have emerged, it has become clear that Angleton’s legacy at the CIA was a uniquely disastrous one. He was the mole-hunter who never found a mole, but whose liquor-fueled, nicotine-stained paranoia about Communist infiltration of the spy agency and the rest of the government destroyed many lives, including those of agency colleagues he effectively accused of treason. There were others he suspected might be Soviet agents: Henry Kissinger, former British prime minister Harold Wilson, and Angleton’s last boss at the CIA, Director of Central Intelligence William Colby.
The record shows Angleton delighted in creating an aura of menace and mystery about himself, and in promoting a sense of tragic romance about the work of counterintelligence, and at those labors he was undeniably successful. Since his death, he has become a figure in popular culture, portrayed on film by, among others, the actor Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd. Several major biographies have been written about Angleton, and more are coming. I suspect that he would have found it amusing, and probably satisfying, that half a century after the Kennedy assassination, a journalist like me could spend years in a “wilderness of mirrors” that he had created.
Going into this project, I had no idea—and I think many serious historians had no idea—that Angleton even had a role in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination. Nor did David Slawson and the other staff lawyers on the Warren Commission who were receiving information from the CIA only after it was filtered by Angleton and his staff. It was only when I shared the results of my research for this book with Slawson that he realized the control that Angleton, whose name he did not know in 1964, had exercised on the commission’s work.
This is not speculation: Angleton and his colleagues, especially his old friend Win Scott in Mexico City, did muddy the facts about the assassination, making it impossible today to know the full truth, especially in answering the all-important question of whether Oswald had been encouraged or even ordered to pick up that rifle in Dallas. There is example after example of how Angleton and Scott tried to shape—or rather,
warp—the official history of the assassination. We know that:
• In early 1964, Angleton muscled aside a senior colleague to take control of the flow of information to the Warren Commission, even as he was maintaining discreet lines of communication to his friends at the FBI and to a commission member, Allen Dulles, who was his former boss at the CIA. John Whitten, the CIA colleague he pushed aside, was convinced that Angleton was tied to the CIA’s plots with the Mafia to oust Castro.
• Angleton swooped down into Mexico City in the days after Scott’s death in 1971 to seize Scott’s memoirs, in which Scott revealed just how much information had been withheld from the commission, as well as his suspicion that there might well have been a foreign conspiracy behind Kennedy’s murder.
• In 1969, Angleton signed the letter that dismissed the request by the diplomat Charles Thomas for a new investigation of the allegations made by Elena Garro about the “twist party” in Mexico and about a sexual relationship between Oswald and Silvia Duran. That single act by Angleton meant that Garro’s claims would not be pursued again until after she—and most of the people who might support her account—were dead.
As for Scott, his former CIA colleagues in Mexico City recall those audiotapes and surveillance photos of Oswald that Scott would later insist did not exist. The record shows he repeatedly dismissed the evidence that Thomas brought to him from Elena Garro, even after Scott gathered intelligence independently that supported elements of her story, including what Scott would later describe as “the fact” of an affair between Oswald and Duran. All the while, Scott was establishing a written record in which he questioned Garro’s mental stability, while Scott’s former deputy launched a whispering campaign in Mexico City aimed at discrediting Charles Thomas.
Here is speculation that I clearly label as such: Is it possible that Angleton or Scott had a hand in the disappearance of J. Edgar Hoover’s explosive letter to the Warren Commission in June 1964 in which he reported that Oswald had stormed into the Cuban embassy in Mexico City and declared his intention to kill President Kennedy—a story that supposedly came to the FBI straight out of the mouth of Fidel Castro? The letter from Hoover appears never to have reached the commission, although it turned up decades later in the archives of the CIA.
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Page 63