As likely as not, Oswald’s apparent clash with the exiles was a staged propaganda operation—the sort of seemingly harmless trick that could be pulled, with variations, all over the United States. By 1963 the FBI, the CIA, and U.S. Army Intelligence were engaged in precisely such clandestine operations against numerous left-wing organizations. In the FPCC’s case, there had long been a sustained effort not merely to penetrate and spy on the group, but to damage and discredit it.
“We did everything we could to make sure it was not successful,” Joseph Smith, a former CIA Clandestine Services officer, told the author, “to smear it, and I think to penetrate it.”
Outsiders knew little of this until the Senate Intelligence Committee probe of 1976, and much may still remain hidden. One document the Senate published, an FBI memo written in September 1963, shows that such operations had been going on almost as long as the FPCC had existed. The memo concluded:
We have in the past utilized techniques with respect to countering activities of mentioned organization in the U.S. During December 1961, [FBI] New York prepared an anonymous leaflet which was mailed to selected FPCC members throughout the country for the purpose of disrupting FPCC and causing split between FPCC and its Socialist Workers Party (SWP) supporters, which technique was very effective. Also during May 1961, a field survey was completed wherein available public source data of adverse nature regarding officers and leaders of FPCC was compiled and furnished [FBI executive] Mr. DeLoach for use in contacting his sources.
Other documents show that the CIA had penetrated the FPCC with its own agents, who supplied the Agency with photographs of documents and correspondence purloined from FPCC files. Army Intelligence, too, had “operational interest” in leftist groups, including the FPCC. The Intelligence Committee discovered at least one case in which a government informant had been “fronting” as a Castro supporter while remaining an approved source of Army Intelligence.
These were facts that the FBI, the CIA, and Army Intelligence would fail to share with the Warren Commission. The Army Intelligence role is especially troubling because of the revelation that the Defense Department, which once had a file on Oswald and Hidell, destroyed it. Congressman Preyer, a Committee member, told the author he thought the destruction of the file “malicious.” The U.S. Army’s action, the Assassinations Committee’s Report noted, made it impossible to resolve from documentary evidence whether Oswald had an “affiliation with military intelligence.”
In 1963, Army Intelligence controlled more agents, and was funded almost as well, as the CIA. As Congressman Preyer observed, it emerged in the 1970s that the Army had long been conducting surveillance and keeping files on thousands of private U.S. citizens. All this was done in the name of national security, and prime targets were dissident leftists of the kind Oswald publicly appeared to be. Once this invasion of privacy had been exposed, files hopefully were—as Congressman Preyer surmised—destroyed to protect the rights of the citizens who had been spied on. Probably, however, the same housecleaning operation also removed traces of how the Army’s spying had been conducted and who had been doing it. Something of how the system worked had, however, gotten into the press as early as 1963.
One newspaper article, ironically published in Dallas, Texas, had outlined exactly how somebody like Oswald could have been used. It stated that military intelligence teams from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force—working in cities across America in liaison with the FBI and the police—were assigned to guard against “subversives seeking to harm the nation’s security.” One way of doing it, the article added, was to penetrate “subversive” groups. This was being done by undercover agents who had “actually joined these groups to get names, addresses, past activities, and future plans, or have established networks of informants to accomplish the same result… . Often one small tip from an individual has meant bringing the pieces together for some Intelligence agency.”
This information appeared in the first week of August 1963, the very week that, in New Orleans, Lee Oswald, and Carlos Bringuier engaged in that unconvincing fracas over the FPCC. Other records show that Army Intelligence was deeply involved in monitoring domestic activity involving Cuba. Against that background, and with the knowledge that Army Intelligence destroyed its “Oswald-Hidell” records, it certainly seems possible that Oswald may have been part of an intelligence operation.
If so, was he being spied upon, or was he himself engaged in an intelligence game? The speculation is justified not least because—buried in the text of a congressional report, long ignored—lies a story and a personality remarkably similar to Oswald’s.
In November 1963, just four days before the Kennedy assassination, a young man called John Glenn appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Questioning revealed that he had joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in autumn 1962 and had tried to visit Cuba, at first by traveling through Mexico. Then in summer 1963, at the very time Oswald was active in New Orleans, Glenn did reach Cuba, and—having outstayed his original visa—tried to travel on to Algeria, another citadel of the Left. The parallels with Oswald are numerous. Just as Oswald’s fare home from Russia had once been paid by the State Department, so Glenn’s was paid from Europe. Like Oswald, Glenn used a post-office box as a mailing address and subscribed to The Militant. Like Oswald, he had previously traveled to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in his case supposedly as a guide for an American “travel agency.”
It remains possible that Glenn was a genuine supporter of leftist causes, but his background is suggestive. He had abruptly interrupted his university career to join the U.S. Air Force, where he became an intelligence operative. He received a “Crypto” clearance and studied Russian. His career as a leftist began soon after he left Air Force Intelligence. The result of his foray to Cuba was an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee that smeared the FPCC as a Communist front organization.
Whether or not Glenn was an authentic leftist or a plant, a released document relating to an FBI informant in July 1963 makes it entirely clear that penetration operations were taking place. It reads:
[T]he undersigned went to New York … to brief an FBI informant who is going to Cuba for two weeks… . He has been under FBI control for nearly [three] years penetrating the three pro-Castro organizations in NYC: the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC); the Casa Cuba, and the José Martí Club… . [I]n the last six months, he has become a valuable penetration for the FBI… . He has the appearance and other attributes … for the role of pro-Castro revolutionary. The Cubans have expressed an interest in his moving to Cuba to work.
Once Oswald had been exposed as a former defector to Russia, anti-Castro militant Carlos Bringuier also issued a shrill call for a congressional inquiry into Oswald’s activities, just as there had been into Glenn’s. While we cannot draw firm conclusions, the similarities between Glenn and Oswald are very striking. Meanwhile, several pieces of information about the New Orleans affair—at one time unknown or unexplained—fit neatly into the scenario of deliberate subversion against the FPCC.
Bringuier was New Orleans delegate of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE)—an exile group that had been deeply involved with the CIA since the Bay of Pigs, and would continue to be so involved until years after President Kennedy’s assassination. Another former DRE leader, Isidor Borja, would tell the Assassinations Committee that he “recalled Bringuier’s contact with Oswald and the fact that the DRE relayed that information to the CIA at the time [author’s emphasis].”
The CIA’s Howard Hunt, in testimony to the Assassinations Committee, said the DRE had been “run” for the Agency by David Phillips, a senior CIA officer who, for reasons that will become clear as the story unfolds, likely knew more about Oswald than he ever revealed.
The fingerprints of Intelligence activity mark every stage of the process by which Oswald was exposed as a Communist. Little about that, it seems, was
spontaneous. First, Bringuier got the ball rolling with a call to William Stuckey, a young New Orleans reporter who had a weekly radio program on station WDSU. Stuckey recorded and broadcast his initial interview with Oswald—one that he was later to recall as having been oddly “deliberate”—then began to arrange the follow-up television debate.
What ensued was a classic case of media manipulation for political profit. Stuckey found himself showered with information guaranteed to smear Oswald. First, according to Stuckey, the Special Agent in Charge of the local FBI office, Harry Maynor, obligingly read out large extracts from Oswald’s file to him over the phone. That, Stuckey was to say, was how he learned of Oswald’s earlier defection to the Soviet Union. It was not the tight-lipped response a journalist might normally have expected from the Bureau, and Stuckey wondered later whether he had been set up.3
The DRE’s Bringuier also eagerly pressed similar information on the reporter—information he had obtained, he said, by sending Carlos Quiroga, an exile associate posing as a Castro sympathizer, to see Oswald. Quiroga, a CIA memorandum shows, was “a candidate for the CIA Student Recruitment Program, designed to recruit Cuban students to return to Cuba as agents in place.”
Finally, the same day, Stuckey received a call from Edward Butler, executive director of a right-wing propaganda organization called the Information Council of the Americas (INCA). He told Stuckey that, following his own calls to Washington, he had confirmed Oswald’s Soviet connection with “someone at the House Un-American Activities Committee.” CIA records show that the CIA had repeated contacts with Butler in the 1960s. A 1965 document would describe him as a “very cooperative source and seems to … welcome any opportunity to assist the CIA.” His production manager at INCA in the summer of 1963, meanwhile, was a member of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the anti-Castro government-in-exile the CIA had created.
The outcome of the Oswald radio debate was a foregone conclusion. Oswald, Communist and traitor, was duly ambushed on the air. After the assassination, the story of the exposé was laid out for the public in the Warren Report—without the details about how Stuckey had been primed and by whom. INCA’s man Butler was never summoned to be asked about the “someone” in Washington who had told him of Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union. Nor was Carlos Quiroga.
The FBI record of its contact with Stuckey suggests that he gave the Bureau information about Oswald, rather than the other way around. This is one of a series of disquieting inconsistencies that raise questions about FBI probity—pointers, once again, that may suggest American intelligence agencies had some special knowledge that tempered their handling of the Oswald case.
First there is the contact between Oswald and the FBI of August 10, following the fracas with Carlos Bringuier. In custody at the New Orleans police station, Oswald had taken the initiative of asking to see someone from the FBI, an organization he supposedly detested. He asked and the FBI obliged. For an hour and a half, Special Agent John Quigley sat talking with Oswald in the New Orleans police station.
According to Quigley, he had gone to the police station unbriefed, with no knowledge of Oswald’s history. “I did not know who this individual was at the time,” he would testify to the Warren Commission. Yet in 1961, during Oswald’s time as a defector to the Soviet Union, his U.S. Navy file had been reviewed by the FBI in New Orleans, the city of his birth—by Agent Quigley.
A contemporary report by Quigley may tell us why Oswald may have wanted to see an FBI agent after the clash with Bringuier. Quigley noted that he had been contacted by a police intelligence officer who “said that Oswald was desirous of seeing an agent and supplying to him information with regard to his activities with the FPCC in New Orleans [author’s emphasis].” Quigley’s report of what Oswald told him was not included in any reports to FBI headquarters, field offices, or other agencies, for two months to come—until after Oswald had made the pre-assassination trip to Mexico that was in time to become so controversial.
The performance of the New Orleans FBI office was patchy in other ways. As the Senate Intelligence Committee noted with puzzlement, the FBI had closed its security case on Oswald in late 1962—even though mail intercepts had revealed his contacts with the newspaper The Worker. This was a communist contact, in FBI terms, and should have justified the prompt reopening of the file.4 Likewise, the record suggests that in April 1963, when FBI intelligence revealed that Oswald was in touch with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee—a major target of both the FBI and the CIA—nobody at Bureau headquarters reacted.
In August, when Oswald made news with his New Orleans street activities, FBI headquarters did ask the New Orleans office to investigate and report in full. Yet no report was sent until more than two months later, and it would be oddly uninformative. The paper record does not reflect the attention the FBI in fact paid to Oswald, according to witnesses interviewed by the author.
Oswald’s landlady in New Orleans, Nina Garner, said FBI agent Milton Kaack questioned her about Oswald within three weeks of his arrival in New Orleans. FBI director Hoover would tell the Warren Commission that he had obtained affidavits from every agent who had been in contact with Oswald, or who might have had knowledge of an attempt to recruit Oswald as an informant. In fact, two agents who had been involved in pre-assassination inquiries into Oswald’s activity signed no such affidavits. One of them was New Orleans’ Milton Kaack.
When the author contacted Kaack in retirement years later, the agent became more apoplectic than any of the many law enforcement agents the author had previously interviewed . He cried, “No! No! … You won’t get anything out of me,” and hung up.5
A story that the alleged assassin was a paid informant, with a payroll number, had been one of the first problems faced by the Warren Commission. The Assassinations Committee, for its part, considered allegations that Oswald had had some sort of relationship with the FBI while in New Orleans.
There was the claim of Orest Pena, a New Orleans bar owner who in 1963 himself supplied occasional information to FBI agent Warren De Brueys.6 Pena was to say he had seen Oswald with Agent De Brueys on “numerous occasions” and that De Brueys threatened him physically before his Warren Commission appearance, warning him to keep quiet. Former agent De Brueys repeatedly denied Pena’s accusation, and the Assassinations Committee believed him. Though the author also found De Brueys credible, interviews with Pena gave the impression that he produced his accusation about the FBI contact to hide some different but relevant truth.
Pena was active in anti-Castro exile politics and deeply involved with the Cuban Revolutionary Council. When Carlos Bringuier was arrested after the fracas with Oswald, it was Orest Pena who secured his release. In that sense, he was well placed to have information on the Oswald’s activity. In his interviews for this book, meanwhile, he insisted that he knew Oswald had been working “for a government agency” in the summer of 1963.7
In 1994, the author tracked down a former FBI informant—documented as such—who said he learned that Oswald was indeed used by the FBI in New Orleans.
Joseph Burton, who—at the time of the author’s interview—was running a locksmith’s business in Plant City, Florida, said he was employed by the FBI for two years in the early 1970s to pose as a Marxist and infiltrate radical groups. He was sometimes accompanied by a woman from New Orleans, also an FBI asset.
The Bureau has admitted that Burton was “a valuable and reliable source” and was paid for his services. A senior official confirmed to the New York Times that the woman, whose name was not revealed, performed missions abroad for the FBI.
“I did several trips with her,” Burton told the author, “and she said she and her husband—they were both working for the Bureau—knew Oswald had been connected with the FBI in the New Orleans office. Her Bureau contact, she said, told her Oswald had been an informant… . I talked about Oswald with the agent I usually met with in New Orleans. And he said, ‘Oh, we ow
ned him,’ or something to that effect. They always used that statement if they were paying someone to cooperate with them.”
The totality of the information about Oswald’s activity in New Orleans justifies real suspicion that Oswald was wittingly or unwittingly manipulated by a government agency. The information fits with the FBI’s Counterintellingence Program (COINTELPRO), instituted a few years earlier specifically to discredit and disable groups that were seen as subversive.
High on the COINTELPRO target list, along with the Communist Party and—less predictably—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), was the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
COINTELPRO tactics called for spreading adverse publicity about groups and their members—not least by feeding potential smear information to cooperative journalists—and by setting up phony chapters of targeted organizations. By late 1963, a senior FBI official would report that “aggressive FBI investigation of the organization, coupled with an effective campaign of exposure of subversive influences in the group by the public press,” had been highly successful against the FPCC.
“The episode of Oswald’s FPCC chapter,” the historian David Kaiser wrote in 2012, “bears all the marks of a COINTELPRO operation… . The behavior of the New Orleans police and the FBI certainly suggested that they knew Oswald’s chapter was bogus.”
Down the years, speculation as to the role of U.S. intelligence has been the common denominator of the persistent doubts about the true role of Lee Oswald. Oswald trailed behind himself, from Japan in 1958 to New Orleans in 1963, the shadow of an undefined connection with the secret world. How one interprets it all ranges from the reasonable man’s skepticism over the apparent lack of intelligence interest in Oswald on his return from Russia, to Orest Pena’s shrill accusations against the FBI in New Orleans.
Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Page 24