The Ghost

by Jefferson Morley

  “But as the car got closer to us,” Newman went on, “you could see the blood on Governor Connally; you could see the president. He had a … he was sort of turning his head in toward the crowd, and you could tell something was most definitely wrong. Just as the car got straight in front of us, in the backseat of the car where he was sitting, ten or twelve feet from us … the third shot rang out.”

  Newman spoke with a steady, well-modulated voice forty-plus years later. His account had not changed since the day it happened, when he told the story to a TV reporter. Now retired from the plumbing business, he and Gayle had nine grandchildren. Newman could still see the nightmare unfolding.

  “Of course, I knew most definitely that was a gunshot,” he said, “and the side of his head blew off. You could see the white matter and the red and he fell across the seat over into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap, and she hollered out, ‘Oh my God no, they’ve shot Jack,’ and I turned to Gayle. I said, ‘No, that’s it,’ and I hit the ground, because at that moment, what was going through my mind was that shot was coming right over the top of our heads.”

  That shot was coming right over the top of our heads.

  As Bill and Gayle Newman and their kids lay on the grass, the crowd around them roiled in panic at the sound of gunfire.

  Dallas police chief Jesse Curry was riding in the lead car of the motorcade. When he heard the shots, he shouted into his radio, “Get a man on top of that triple underpass,” the area above and behind the Newmans, “and see what happened up there.”66 What Curry meant to say, he later told the Warren Commission, was “Get someone up in the railroad yard and check.”67 He was talking about the place that would come to be known as the “grassy knoll.”

  As the motorcade careened away toward the Stemmons Freeway, the shocked crowd looked to the upper floors of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, from which some of the shots had sounded.

  The fifth car behind President Kennedy’s limousine was the press car. It carried four men: Malcolm Kilduff, Kennedy’s acting press secretary; Merriman Smith, the White House correspondent for United Press International; and two other wire-service reporters. The hard-drinking Smith had shaken his daily hangover, straightened his tie, and was paying close attention. No sooner had he heard the report of multiple gunshots than he glimpsed the crowd’s freeze-frame reactions: a man sitting on the curb … a couple and their kids sprawled on the grass … some colored kids running away … a lady wearing a babushka … a man with an umbrella … a motorcycle cop abandoning his Harley-Davidson and running up a grassy embankment.

  Nine minutes later at a pay phone in Parkland Hospital, Smith dictated to his editor the details of what he had seen. Shots had been fired at President Kennedy.

  “Some of the Secret Service agents thought the gunfire was from an automatic weapon fired to the right rear of the president’s car, probably from a grassy knoll to which police rushed,”68 Smith said.

  He had coined a phrase that would never be forgotten:… a grassy knoll to which police rushed.

  Scores of eyewitnesses were later interviewed by the FBI, the Dallas police, and reporters. By the most conservative reading, about 40 percent of them, some fifty people, including twenty-one law-enforcement officers, had the same experience as Bill Newman and Merriman Smith.69 They believed a gunshot had come from in front of the motorcade, from the grassy knoll.

  Bystanders converged on the spot and the parking lot by the railroad yard. Behind a stockade fence, they found a sea of cars, some cigarette butts, and footprints. If there had been a gunman hidden there, he was gone.

  * * *

  ROBERT KENNEDY WAS EATING a chicken-salad sandwich and talking Justice Department business with an aide at Hickory Hill when he received a phone call from J. Edgar Hoover, and then another call, confirming the president was dead.

  Kennedy’s world vanished. He called John McCone at CIA headquarters and told him to come over. The two men had become close over the last two years. Like Bob Kennedy, McCone was a practicing Catholic. They shared politics and personal tragedy. Bob and Ethel helped McCone when his wife succumbed to cancer. “There was almost nothing we could say to another,” recalled McCone of that day.70

  The two men went outside and strolled on the vast lawn of Hickory Hill. They talked about the president’s enemies in the CIA and in Miami. Robert Kennedy would later tell Arthur Schlesinger about the conversation. “You know at the time I asked McCone … if they [meaning CIA-backed enemies] had killed my brother and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and they hadn’t.”

  When Kennedy and McCone returned to the house, the TV news reported that a suspect had been arrested in the shooting of the president, a defector named Oswald, a supporter of Castro, a leftist, a Communist.

  * * *

  AFTER LUNCH ON NOVEMBER 22, Angleton had just started his long-awaited confrontation with French intelligence officials over Golitsyn’s allegations of penetration.71 He was making his case to Colonel de Lannurien, the chief of SDECE, when someone came into the room to report that President Kennedy had been shot dead. The meeting was canceled.

  Angleton hastened back to Langley. When the transistor radios around the CIA offices reported that a suspect named Oswald had been arrested, a senior analyst in the Counterintelligence Staff named Paul Hartman spoke up.

  “You know, there’s a 201 file on this [expletive],” he said, “and SIG has it.”72

  Indeed, the Special Investigations Group did have a file on Kennedy’s accused killer. It was a pregnant moment for Angleton. He was responsible for tracking defectors. He had put Oswald’s name on the LINGUAL mail-opening list in 1959. Jane Roman had signed for three FBI reports on Oswald in the last two months. His friend Bill Hood had signed off on the mole hunt in Mexico. He had called attention to the intelligence function of the Cuban Consulate in his Cuban Capabilities memo. Angleton would never speak publicly of such things.

  Later that day, Angleton was called into a meeting in Dick Helms’s office. The deputy director was worried that CIA personnel might be involved in the killing of JFK. “Make sure we had no one in Dallas,” Helms told an aide when he heard the news that day.73

  Helms wanted all of his top lieutenants in the same room. His deputy Tom Karamessines was there. So were Desmond FitzGerald, the chief of the anti-Castro operation, and John Whitten, chief of the Mexico desk. Helms gave orders: Angleton would handle liaison with the FBI. FitzGerald would review Oswald’s Cuban contacts. Whitten would write up all incoming information in a summary report.

  Whitten was well qualified for the assignment. A career officer who spoke excellent German, he had distinguished himself in several counterespionage investigations in Europe.74 Whitten spent the rest of the day collating reports. Late that night, he wrote up the Agency’s first report on Kennedy’s assassination, which Helms passed to John McCone. The director shared it with the new president, Lyndon Johnson, on the morning of November 23.

  “As far as we could see,” Whitten explained, “Oswald was the assassin and there was no indication that we had that there were other participants in the assassination, and there was no indication, visible indication, that he was a Soviet or Cuban agent, even though the possibility could not be excluded.”75

  * * *

  MILLIONS OF PEOPLE IN the United States and around the world winced and wept. On a Hollywood back lot, costumed cowboys sat down on the job, heads bowed. In New York City, construction workers put hard hats to their hearts. In Harvard Square, a crowd rushed a newsstand for the latest news.76 In Columbus, Mississippi, high school students cheered the death of the liberal president and a teacher ordered her class to sing “Dixie” in gratitude.77

  People everywhere gathered around their televisions and radios, which amplified and spread the news from Dallas. The suspected assassin was a Communist. He had even defended Fidel Castro on a New Orleans radio station. NBC News played a tape recording of Oswald. The president hadn’t been dead two hours, and tens of millions of Americans h
eard the voice of the suspected assassin defending “the principles of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”78

  Unbeknownst to the American people, the effort to link the accused assassin to the notorious FPCC emanated from CIA propaganda assets. The tape of Oswald’s radio appearance had been made by a man named Edward Butler. He ran a right-wing organization called the Information Council of the Americas, which promoted an anti-Communist political agenda in Cuba and the Caribbean. Butler mixed with the FBI and CIA men working in New Orleans. When Oswald appeared as an FPCC spokesman, Butler taped his radio appearance as evidence of Communist perfidy. After JFK was dead, he was glad to share the tape with NBC News.

  The linkage of Oswald to the FPCC was corroborated by the Agency’s assets in Miami and New Orleans. Within hours of the announcement of JFK’s death, the leaders of the Miami-based Cuban Student Directorate were calling reporters with details of their encounter with Oswald and his pro-Castro ways. The reporters they spoke to did not know the leaders of the directorate were paid by a CIA program with the code name of AMSPELL. The Cuban agents were run by George Joannides, chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the WAVE station in Miami. He gave the directorate $51,000 a month. Within forty-eight hours, the CIA’s favorite young Cubans published a news sheet declaring Oswald and Castro were “the Presumed Assassins.” It was the first JFK conspiracy theory to reach public print. It was funded by Joannides, who was Dick Helms’s man in Miami.

  * * *

  LATE ON THE NIGHT of November 22, Angleton received a call from the Secret Service. They had learned from the FBI that Oswald had visited Mexico City in October. What did the CIA know?

  A lot, said Angleton. He shared several cables he had received from Win Scott. One concerned surveillance photographs of six unidentified visitors to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. Another concerned a passenger manifest identifying three recent air travelers from Mexico City, one of whom might have been Oswald. Angleton passed this material to the Secret Service, on the condition that it not be shared with anyone.

  The next day, Angleton shared more intelligence with the FBI. He handed Sam Papich six items about Oswald. They were letters intercepted by the LINGUAL mail-surveillance program. Three came from Oswald’s mother. Angleton thought they were significant.

  Two of the letters, he told Hoover in a memo, indicated Oswald was known to his wife’s friends in the Soviet Union as “Alik.” He noted that the FBI had already discovered that “a rifle of the same type used in the assassination” had been ordered in the name of “Alek Hidell” and delivered to a post office box registered in Oswald’s name. Under the circumstances, Angleton told Hoover, “the fact Oswald was known to his Russian friends as ‘Alik’ may be significant.”79

  In Dallas, Oswald was in police custody and denying everything. He denied he had gone to Mexico City. He denied he had ordered the rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository. When brought before reporters, he denied shooting the president.

  “I’m just a patsy,” he shouted before he was led back to his cell.80

  * * *

  ANGLETON TOOK A CALL from Anatoly Golitsyn, who said that the Soviet government would have monitored any defector who, like Oswald, had served in the U.S. Army, Navy, or Marine Corps.

  “The modus operandi with any defector from anybody’s arm[ed forces] to the Soviet Union required that he go through processing by the Thirteenth Department of the KGB, their assassination department,” Golitsyn said.81

  Angleton had to suspect Moscow or Havana might be behind the crime in Dallas. Like the CIA-funded Cuban students, he was not averse to linking Oswald to Castro. On the panicky night of November 23, Helms’s deputy Tom Karamessines sent Win Scott a message warning him not to take any actions that “could prejudice [U.S.] freedom of action on the entire question of [Cuban] responsibility.”

  Questioned about the event many years later, Angleton allowed that he had a “vague recollection” of Karamessines’s order. “If Tom intervened it was for good reason … because he had superior information,” Angleton said. He, too, wanted to preserve the U.S. “freedom of action” in the wake of JFK’s death.

  The CIA’s gambit wasn’t hard to figure. It was the NORTHWOODS concept: If the crime in Dallas could be blamed on Castro, the United States would have a justification for the overdue elimination of the Communist regime in Havana.

  In the Cuban capital, Fidel Castro intuited the CIA’s machinations. The Cuban leader was brooding aloud into a microphone. When he first heard the news from Dallas, Castro was worried. “Malo noticias,” he told a visitor. “Bad news.”82 Now he was speaking publicly about the killing of the American president. As a revolutionary, Castro said, he hated systems, not men. Yes, Kennedy had once sought to destroy his revolution. Since the October crisis, he had also shown moderation.

  “¿Qué es tras el asesinato de Kennedy? ¿Cuáles fueron los motivos reales?” “What is behind the assassination of Kennedy? What were the real motives?” Castro asked.

  “What forces, factors, circumstances were at work behind this sudden and unexpected event that occurred yesterday?… Even up to this moment, the events that led to the murder of the President of the United States continue to be confused, obscure and unclear.”

  He warned that Cuba would be blamed.

  “We foresaw that from these incidents there could be a new trap, an ambush, a Machiavellian plot against our country,” he declared. “That on the very blood of their assassinated president there might be unscrupulous people who would begin to work out immediately an aggressive policy against Cuba, if the aggressive policy had not been linked beforehand to the assassination … because it might or might not have been. But there is no doubt that this policy is being built on the still warm blood and unburied body of their tragically assassinated President.”83

  * * *

  “DEAR MR. ATTORNEY GENERAL,” wrote Dick Helms on his personal stationery on November 23. “There is nothing for me to say that has not been said better by many others.

  “When you sent me to see the president on Tuesday afternoon, he never looked better, seemed more confident or appeared more in control of the crushing forces around him. Friday struck me personally.”84

  When Bob Kennedy read the letter, he put it aside, temporarily incapable of response. Helms was referring to a meeting just a few days before, in which Helms and RFK had urged the president to get tougher on Castro. Helms had brought a machine gun, supposedly captured from the Cubans, into the Oval Office to support his point. Jack had made a joke about the gun. Three days later, a pro-Castro gunman blew his head off in broad daylight—or so the CIA’s propaganda assets wanted him to believe.

  Grief overwhelmed Bob Kennedy’s emotions as suspicion dominated his thoughts. A week later, he and Jackie sent a private message to Premier Khrushchev via their friend William Walton, a painter who was traveling to Moscow. The president’s brother and widow wanted the Soviet leadership to know they did not believe press reports suggesting the Soviet Union was involved with Oswald. RFK and Jackie told the Soviets they believed that the president was killed by domestic opponents.85

  Robert Kennedy knew Fidel Castro had not killed his brother. He knew the KGB wasn’t involved. He could not be so sure about the CIA men or their allies in Miami and in the Mafia. And that was the punishing hell of it for Bob Kennedy: his naïveté. He had trusted the CIA. He had believed in their mission. And now that Jack was gone, he had their condolences.86

  NOAH’S CLOAK

  ANGLETON WOULD LATER SAY his instinct was to suspect a Communist conspiracy. The facts, which he knew before almost everybody, justified such an inference. Oswald was a former defector, a Marine Corps radio operator who had a security clearance. He was an open leftist. He affiliated himself with the FPCC, designated by executive order as a subversive organization, and targeted by the CIA and FBI for years. Oswald had visited the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, which Angleton had identified as a contact point for U.S.-based sympathizers
. At the Soviet embassy, Oswald had met with a consular official named Vladimir Kostikov, who was known to Angleton. Just six months before, Hoover had asked Angleton if Kostikov was with the KGB’s Department Thirteen, responsible for assassinations.87 Angleton said no.

  “Putting it baldly,” said Pete Bagley, deputy chief of the Soviet Russia Division, “was Oswald, wittingly or unwittingly, part of a plot to murder President Kennedy in Dallas?”88

  Angleton didn’t contact Win Scott himself. He delegated the task, ordering that the surveillance records be checked. Who was Kostikov? Whom had he met with?

  Within the day, the Mexico City station sent a list of all persons known to have been in touch with Kostikov in recent months. The Counterintelligence Staff then shared the list with Desmond FitzGerald, chief of the Cuba operation. FitzGerald saw that Kostikov had been visited by a Cuban government official named Rolando Cubela, and he had a huge problem.

  FitzGerald knew Cubela. He knew that Cubela was a moody doctor turned revolutionary commandante who thought Castro was ruining Cuba. The CIA had dubbed him AMLASH and recruited him as an assassin in 1961 and 1962. Just three weeks before, FitzGerald had traveled to Paris to meet with him personally. At the suggestion of Dick Helms, FitzGerald had presented himself as a representative of Bob Kennedy, even though he had not spoken with RFK about the matter. FitzGerald and Cubela had discussed their options in murder weapons.89

  FitzGerald faced trouble, if not disgrace. If Cubela/AMLASH had met with Kostikov, maybe he had told him and the KGB about FitzGerald’s recruitment pitch. Maybe Cubela had played him and the CIA for fools, enabling Castro to strike first in Dallas, using Oswald as his pawn.

  Under the circumstances, FitzGerald didn’t want to have anything to do with Angleton. He regarded Angleton as mentally unstable, drunken, and conspiratorial. He handed the list back without saying anything.90