by H. N. Lloyd
When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963; both Silvia and Annie Odio positively identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the Leon Oswald who had visited their apartment those few short weeks before. Silvia and Annie took their story to the FBI, and naturally to the Warren Commission. Now the Warren Commission had difficulty in reconciling this story with what they were taking as the established fact; that Lee Harvey Oswald was in Mexico at the time attempting to defect back to Russia or Cuba. Also if the Commission were to give credence to the Odio story; it damaged the credibility of the conceit that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nutter working on his own, not only that but in the official version of events Oswald was to be cast as a leftist nutter, not a right wing anti-Castro one. The Commission were acutely aware of this, Warren Commission attorney David Slawson put it simply, ‘if what she recollects was true, then I cannot think of an innocent explanation for it, it would indicate very clearly a connection between Oswald and the anti-Castro Cubans’. In August 1964; Chief Investigator Rankin wrote directly to J. Edgar Hoover regarding his concerns over the Odio story, Rankin put it in plain English, ‘It is a matter of some importance to the Commission that Mrs Odio’s allegations be either proved or disproved’. Aware that the Odio story made the initial FBI investigation into the assassination look shoddy, and also proved that the FBI’s initial testimonies over Oswald’s movements in the run up to the assassination to either be wrong through incompetence or a deliberate lie, the FBI gave the Commission the perfect excuse to ignore the Odio’s and stick to what the FBI had been telling the Commission all along, that Oswald was a lone communist sympathiser. The FBI told the Commission that the Odio sisters were mistaken in their identification of Oswald; and that the three men who had come to visit her seeking a letter of support were in fact known Cuban agitators called Loran Hall, Lawrence Howard and William Seymour. Only Loran Hall was willing to testify to this. The Commission took his testimony as fact, despite Lawrence Howard and William Seymour denying the allegation. Loran Hall’s testimony looked even more dubious when it became known that he was one of the CIA’s main go to guys for their black-ops in Cuba. Hall himself retracted his testimony two days after making it, but it was too late, the Commission had closed the book on the Odio incident.
With the investigation concluded, and reaching the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin, all that needed to happen was for the members of the Commission to put their signature to the finished eight hundred and eighty-eight page document; and its twenty-six volumes of corroborating evidence. Only there was a dissenting voice, Senator Richard Russell was not happy with the conclusion that Oswald acted alone, he felt that the impossible acrobatics of the ‘Magic Bullet’ made this conclusion unlikely, and he refused to put his name to the final report. With Russell speaking out; other members of the Commission began to raise their concerns, John Sherman Cooper and Hale Boggs also refused to sign off on the Commission’s findings. So in order to placate the trio of dissenters, Earl Warren arranged for the three men to be flown out to Dallas to view the assassination site, and to be walked step by step carefully through how the ‘Magic Bullet’ theory was the only workable conclusion. Only it didn’t work, it made Russell even more stubborn, sitting in the spot where Oswald was supposed to have sat; and looking threw a telescopic scope, it made him more adamant that the Commission’s conclusions were impossible. On Wednesday the 16th of September 1964, Russell put his concerns in writing to Warren, he would not subscribe to the ‘Magic Bullet’ theory, therefore there had to have been two gunmen carrying out the assassination. On Friday the 18th of September 1964, the Commission met for the last time. At that meeting Russell demanded that his concerns over the ‘Magic Bullet’ and therefore there being a second gunman; be placed in writing in the final report. Earl Warren refused, there would be no descent, no footnote questioning and confusing what would be written down in the history books. As a compromise Warren agreed that in the report the language used to describe the ‘Magic Bullet’ would be toned down, so that instead of the report saying one bullet definitively caused all the injuries to the two men, the report would state that the evidence was simply ‘persuasive’. This was semantics, legal jargon in order to get Russell, Boggs and Cooper to sign the final report. Unbeknown to Russell, Warren went further in completely wiping Russell’s concerns of conspiracy from history. The minutes of the meeting where Russell highlighted his concerns in great detail were amended to remove his voice of dissent; they now simply stated in general terms that ‘administrative matters’ had been discussed. When Russell discovered how Earl Warren had pulled one over on him, by effectively removing his concerns from the report and the Commissions minutes; he was aghast with horror, but it was too late, the Warren Commission had already been published. Russell was so furious it destroyed his friendship with Lyndon Johnson, and he never spoke to his friend again. When asked years later why Russell’s dissent over the ‘Magic Bullet’ had been removed so-completely from history, even from the minutes of the Commissions meetings, Gerald Ford said that the stenographers ‘did what they were supposed to do’. If Russell, Boggs and Sherman had stuck to their guns; then history would have to be written very differently today, because the official report would not have had the 100% seal of approval it was seen to have, the wider public would have known that eminently sensible people who had looked at the evidence were not persuaded by it. In turn those who questioned the official version of events would not be met with sneers of derision; because that questioning started in 1964 with members of the Commission itself being unhappy with the official findings; and refusing to put their names to a possible whitewash.
Despite the obvious flaws with the report the majority of its members remained undaunted by the criticism levelled against their findings. In 1999 Warren Commission member; and former President of the United States Gerald Ford; went on record as saying that the Commission was correct to find that there was no evidence of a conspiracy either foreign or domestic against President Kennedy, and that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, his final word on the matter rang hollow, ‘There has not been one scintilla of credible evidence since the Commission’s findings which would undercut those two decisions’.
House Select Committee Review on Assassinations
The House Select Committee on Assassinations; was set up in the wake of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, more commonly known as the Church Committee, after its chair Senator Frank Church. This wide ranging investigation into the FBI, CIA and NSA uncovered some frightening facts; for starters the NSA, which people previously joked had stood for No Such Agency; was finally confirmed to exist, and that all three of these agencies had been carrying out nefarious; and in some cases illegal acts over the course of many decades. Among the crimes uncovered were the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba; the first democratically elected President of Congo, Rafael Trujillo; the sometime democratic President sometime dictator of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem; the first democratically elected President of South Vietnam, General Rene Schneider; the Commander in Chief of the Chilean Army, plus several botched attempts at killing Fidel Castro. This was the 1970's, America had lost its innocence, war in Vietnam had dragged on for nearly a decade, leaving those who were conscripted to return home jaded and battle damaged, then Watergate happened, Richard Nixon became the only US President ever to resign lest he face the disgrace of impeachment. The threat of nuclear holocaust hung heavy over the nations head every day, there was no optimism; and people no longer trusted the government. Added to this the fact that hundreds of books had been written questioning the facts around President Kennedy's death, the Zappruder film had been released; which raised even more questions and caused an outcry, and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison had brought a criminal case to trial; alleging a conspiracy surrounding the Presidents murder. It seemed no one believed or trusted the lone gunman theory anymore, so the Church Committee had the m
andate to open the books on the shadowy intelligence agencies that many accused of being implicit in President Kennedy’s murder; and who had done so much to take away that innocence from the nation. The Church Committee concluded in part, ‘This report documents the failures of the US Intelligence establishment in their investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination, and their cover-up to the Warren Commission’.
When the nation found out just how many people their government had secretly murdered, people who had been in positions of power and responsibility around the world, they began to ask if it possible that these shady intelligence agencies had been operating on American soil? Could those whose political blood had been spilt on American soil have died at the hands of the agencies that were meant to protect American citizens? In 1976 the American senate decided that the people deserved answers to their questions, and so after a vote of 280 to 60 the senate formed the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA) to see if one or all of the American intelligence agencies had played any part in the assassinations of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, civil rights leader the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr or the Alabama Governor George Wallace.
The HSCA, like the Warren Commission would be bipartisan; with members from both sides of the political spectrum overseeing the investigation. Thomas N. Downing (Democrat/Virginia) Henry B. Gonzalez (Democrat/Texas) Louis Stokes (Democrat/Ohio) would act as the Committees Chairmen. L. Richard Preyer (Democrat/North Carolina) Walter E. Fauntroy (Democrat/Columbia) Yvonne Bathwaite Burke (Democrat/California) Christopher Dodd (Democrat/Connecticut) Harold Ford (Democrat/Tennessee) Floyd Fithian (Democrat/Indiana) Robert E. Edgar (Democrat/Pennsylvania) Samuel Leeper Devine (Republican/Ohio) Stewart McKinney (Republican/Connecticut) Charles Thone (Republican/Nebraska) and Harold S. Sawyer (Republican/Michigan) all sat on the committee to review its evidence and findings. Serving as investigator for the HSCA was G. Robert Blakey, a man who had been the driving force behind the Organised Crime Control Act, and who was seen as a renowned expert on organised crime. The Kennedy assassination was a little personal to Blakey, he had worked under President Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy, when Robert Kennedy had been Attorney General, Blakey had been an adviser on Kennedy’s fight against the Mafia. Blakey had left his role shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy, his faith in the new administration shattered. Yet he had still worked tirelessly to fight organised crime, drafting law which would make it easier for Judges to order wiretaps on known Mafia figures. Appointing Blakey as the prime investigator showed that the HSCA meant business, and wasn’t going to pull its punches with any of the dubious organisations or individuals it would have to inevitably deal with.
Of course organisations whose bread and butter work is clandestine, borderline illegal; operations weren’t going to just hand the HSCA the rope to hang themselves with, and straight away they began to play dirty. The CIA appointed a special liaison to the HSCA, someone who knew the CIA’s workings and could ‘help’ the investigators find any documents they needed; and track down any witnesses they wished to question. The man appointed as liaison was George Joannides. Joannides was a Greek born immigrant, the son of a prominent newspaper reporter. He had studied law; before working briefly as a reporter himself, before moving into the diplomatic services working for the Greek Embassy. In 1951 he was recruited by the CIA, quickly moving up the ranks to become the head of JM-WAVE, this was a covert division of the CIA; which operated from the middle of a dense wood on the outskirts of Miami, Florida. The department ran under the cover of being Zenith Technological Enterprises, but it was in fact a top secret experimental psychological warfare division of the CIA. JM-WAVE had been involved in several black-ops; including Operation MONGOOSE, the secret operation to create acts of subversion and sabotage in Cuba, which in turn evolved into the ongoing and increasingly ludicrous plots to assassinate Castro. As part of this work; Joannides had to work closely with Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) a right wing anti-Castro and indeed anti-Kennedy movement of Cuban exiles. This was where the conflict of interest came in for Joannides, because Lee Harvey Oswald was a known associate of DRE. In short the HSCA was entrusting a man who may have been lying for fifteen years about Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA links, to give the HSCA the files and the contacts he might have been trying to protect all that time. G. Robert Blakey was furious when he found out about Joannides links to the very events the HSCA was trying to investigate, ‘I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency co-operated with the committee...I was not told of Joannides' background with the DRE, a focal point of the investigation. Had I known who he was, he would have been a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the staff or by the committee. He would never have been acceptable as a point of contact with us to retrieve documents... That the Agency would put a material witness in as a filter between the committee and its quests for documents was a flat out breach of the understanding the committee had with the Agency that it would co-operate with the investigation’. As a result; Blakey began to campaign for the CIA to be forced to turn over any files they held pertaining to the movement and actions of Joannides in 1963. Both the CIA and the courts refused Blakey’s requests for this information. In a mounting war of words Blakey accused the CIA of Obstruction Of Justice, but there was nothing he could do. Then to add further insult to injury for Blakey, Joannides was subsequently implicated in the 1968 assassination of his friend Robert Kennedy, when a photograph turned up purportedly showing Joannides in the Ambassador Hotel; the scene of his friends murder, on the day of Robert Kennedy’s assassination.
With the proceedings already well and truly compromised; the HSCA got underway in earnest, then like the plot of a bestselling fictional thriller several key witnesses were murdered, Mob boss and CIA operative ‘Handsome’ Johnny Roselli began to testify before the HSCA; when all of a sudden he was discovered strangled, shot, his legs sawn off and his body stuffed into a barrel that was dumped in Dumbfoundling Bay, Maimi. Charles ‘Chuckie Typewriter’ Nicoletti was executed as he waited in his car in a car park in North Lake, Illinois. The notorious Mob boss and CIA operative Sam Giancana had co-operated with the Church Committee, telling them that the Mob and the CIA were, ‘different sides of the same coin’, and he had started to tell people that he intended to tell all to the HSCA. Giancana was under witness protection at the time of his death; due to his previous testimonials to the Church Committee, despite this on the night of Thursday the 19th of June 1975, an unidentified operative withdrew Giancana’s police protection, and later that evening Giancana was gunned down in his kitchen as he cooked his dinner. Former President of Cuba, Carlos Prio, was called before the HSCA, but before he could testify he was found with a shotgun blast to the face, a death that, despite the impossible angle of the shot; was declared a suicide. A HSCA investigator was actually on the way to the home of CIA operative and alleged Oswald handler George DeMorenschildt, when DeMorenschildt allegedly shot himself in the face with a shotgun as well. People began to question not just the murders and suicides that were taking place amongst the witnesses, but also the sheer number of those due to give evidence who were dying in accidents or of ‘natural causes’. Former FBI Agent Louis B. Nichols, J. Edgar Hoovers’ liaison to the Warren Commission; suffered a fatal heart attack just days before he was due to testify, now any rational person will say heart attacks happen, but Nichols had previously been of good health, and the incident appeared to be part of a growing pattern. Donald Kaylor, the FBI agent who took the fingerprint samples in the Texas School Book Depository; also died of a heart attack days before he was due to testify before the HSCA. J. M. English, the FBI Forensic Scientist who tested the rifle and pistol allegedly fired by Oswald, also suffered a fatal heart attack before he could testify. FBI agent James Cadigan was due to give evidence based on many of the top secret document he had viewed relating to the assassination; he allegedly tripped down the stairs at his home and died. Four former colleagues, all of w
hom had worked on the same high profile case, all dying within weeks of each other, all before they could give evidence before a Congressional Committee looking into that case. Even with the deaths being ascribed to accidents and natural causes; you can see why people began to ask questions and call foul.