Church was lying; there is no other word for it. More than a decade after his death in 1984, Kathryn Olmsted, a scholar researching a book about the CIA scandal, found a few letters among the Church collection at Boise State University suggesting that Church had remained in extensive contact with Joseph Napolitan, a sophisticated political operative who had worked in the presidential campaigns of Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey. The letters show that Church was committed to a run for the presidency in 1976 and, with Napolitan’s advice, sought in the fall of 1975 to use a much-anticipated series of public hearings to rally popular support for his campaign by dramatically showing the extent of CIA and FBI abuses.
By late summer, however, Church’s presidential ambitions were in big trouble. He had campaigned for the committee chairmanship early in the year in the belief it would focus on domestic spying and other outrages that had been promulgated in the Johnson and Nixon administrations, with their paranoia about anti–Vietnam War activists. By spring there was a new element—reporting suggesting that Jack Kennedy had teamed with his brother Bobby, then the attorney general, in repeated attempts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro, perhaps as payback for Castro’s outmaneuvering of the President at the Bay of Pigs.
Jack Kennedy had been a role model for Church, who was smitten by all things Kennedy. Church had delivered a passionate keynote at the 1960 Democratic convention that nominated Kennedy and, with his wife, had taken Teddy Kennedy on a safari to Africa in 1961, a year before the youngest Kennedy would win a Senate seat from Massachusetts. He had every reason to believe that his years of loyalty and friendship would be repaid by Kennedy family support in his race for the presidency.
It was a classic conflict of interest: An all-out inquiry into the Kennedy brothers’ wrongdoing in the early 1960s would cost him vital Kennedy family financial and political support in 1976. So Frank Church trimmed. The CIA, he declared early in the assassination investigation, should be compared to a “rogue elephant on a rampage” that had spun out of presidential control. He went further that fall when he publicly confronted William Colby with an electronic gun that, so he claimed, was capable of firing a dart filled with a highly lethal toxin into an intended assassination victim. The Agency had been ordered a decade earlier to destroy such materials, Church claimed, but had chosen to defy the presidential order. The show-and-tell generated enormous headlines and television coverage, as Church knew it would, and left the impression that not even a president could stop assassination planning.
Church’s posturing was too much for Gary Hart, who had been elected to the Senate as a Democrat from Colorado in 1974 and had been serving for less than a week when he was appointed by Mike Mansfield as the most junior member of the committee. He was a quick study and took the assignment seriously, especially after a Republican investigator named David Bushong and a colleague turned up evidence that Jack Kennedy, while in the White House, was having an affair with Judith Exner, a sometime Los Angeles model who was sleeping at the same time with Sam Giancana, a notorious Mafia leader. Hart later told me of his surprise, as a most junior senator, at being asked by Church to meet privately with Ted Kennedy to inform him about the game-changing new information. “I did so and Ted simply thanked me and said nothing else,” Hart said. The link between Exner and Kennedy was known to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, so the committee would learn, but had been kept from the Warren Commission during its investigation of Jack Kennedy’s assassination.
Church’s waffling as new details of Kennedy’s recklessness poured forth ended any chance, slim as it was, of significant cooperation with the Republicans on the committee. Once again, my work on intelligence issues for the Times, and my continuing access to information, led to some special access inside the committee. I had a few private meetings at critical times with various members, Democrat and Republican, and with a few of the senior members of the staff. Goldwater had correctly come to believe by the spring of 1975 that Church, as chairman, was doing all he could to protect the Kennedy family and was using the hearings to run for the presidency. As the investigation neared its end, there was another private meeting of the lions of the Senate—Mansfield, Fulbright, Church, and Goldwater—to decide how to handle the issue of presidential responsibility. The Democratic staff aide also attended the session and told me years later what he had not told me at the time—that Goldwater flatly declared, at one point, “We know what the Presidents have done,” referring to Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s authorization of the assassination of foreign leaders. Goldwater then added, in language that the aide had not forgotten, “If there was presidential authorization for what the Agency was doing, we have the responsibility of deciding what is constitutional or not.” The issue was whether the CIA was acting as if it were part of the king’s personal staff, as Richard Helms had suggested at one point, or whether the men running the Agency were subject, like all citizens and all government entities, to the checks and balances of the Constitution.
In the end, the committee took a pass on the issue of presidential authority and noted it was unable to “make a finding that the assassination plots were authorized by the Presidents or other persons above the governmental agency or agencies involved.” Its final report, titled “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” was marked by language that can only be described as anodyne:
The Committee finds that the system of executive command and control was so ambiguous that it is difficult to be certain at which levels assassination activity was known and authorized. This situation creates the disturbing prospect that Government officials might have undertaken the assassination plots without it having been incontrovertibly clear that there was explicit authorization from the President. It is also possible there might have been a successful “plausible denial” in which Presidential authorization was issued but is now obscured….There is admittedly a tension among the findings.
Gary Hart would tell me years later that, in essence, the Democrats on the committee had blinked. “My role was to pursue matters that others didn’t want to know about. What we could not find is anyone under either President [Eisenhower or Kennedy] who would say, ‘He ordered it and he knew.’ Lots of euphemisms—‘who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’ kind of stuff. It wasn’t that witnesses told us the boss ordered it and we, the committee, covered it up. We simply could not get anyone to state that a president ordered an assassination. But it was clear they knew what was going on.”
After talking to Hart, I tracked down David Bushong, the Republican investigator who had worked directly for Barry Goldwater, and he told me that Goldwater was convinced there was ample evidence to prove that the path to presidential authorization ran through Bobby Kennedy. “We never directly tagged Jack Kennedy with authorization—a direct order to assassinate Castro—but we did tag Bobby with participating as well as authorizing an assassination attempt during a secret meeting,” Bushong said. “Bobby was coordinating covert operations in Cuba and separately participating in meetings that involved using Giancana’s mob to get poison pills to Castro. And we had Hoover, who warned the President over a lunch about wiretaps showing that he was dealing with Judy Exner while she had ties to Giancana. Kennedy immediately cut off all contact with Exner. Six weeks later, Bobby authorized the passing of the poison pills to Cuba. All of this gets us to a strong case of presidential authorization to take to the senators.”
The inevitable result was acute mistrust at the top of the CIA—even among those who knew mistakes had been made—because Helms and other senior Agency officials found it impossible to believe that Frank Church and the Democratic senators did not understand that when the issue was assassination, the CIA had been doing what the President wanted, without, of course, anything in writing. The full extent of the CIA’s contempt for Church, justified or not, came through in the declassified history of Bill Colby’s tenure as director that was written by Harold Ford. John Waller, who later became
the CIA inspector general, insisted in an interview with Ford that Church “was not interested in the issues. In our humble opinion, he was running for President….Putting it bluntly, he was a political prostitute, not a seeker of truth.” Richard Lehman, a respected intelligence officer who later became chairman of the National Intelligence Council—the in-house group responsible for long-term strategic analysis—depicted Church as “a sanctimonious son of a bitch. Hypocrite, thy name is Frank Church….I’m convinced that he leapt for the job, hoping that it would turn out to be a chariot that would carry him to the presidency.”
Given my involvement with the Church Committee members and senior staff, it did not take long for me to renew old contacts and get what I needed. A large FedEx box arrived one morning at my office, with no return address, full of highly classified CIA documents that had not been made public by the committee. I knew who sent them, of course. The papers made it clear that the continuous pressure to assassinate Fidel Castro emanated from Jack Kennedy. They also revealed that Kennedy knew precisely what Nixon was planning that fall against Castro—an invasion by Cuban dissidents. The plotting for what became known as the Bay of Pigs was a grave state secret, but senior Agency officers—fellow Ivy League graduates who socialized with Kennedy—shared the information with candidate Kennedy in the early fall. Kennedy, tough-minded as always, enraged Nixon and undoubtedly won crucial votes in Florida by taking him to task during the latter stage of the 1960 campaign for not doing enough about Castro. Nixon kept the secret and lost the election.
I took what I knew about the very tough Kennedy to Sam Halpern, a veteran of the kill Castro days in the Agency who had retired after years of working closely with Richard Helms. I could not understand, I told Halpern, why Kennedy would take the enormous risk, even in late 1963, to keep pressuring the CIA to do to Castro what it could not. Halpern’s answer was startling: If you want to understand Kennedy’s recklessness, go find his Secret Service agents. I did just that, and eventually ended up getting four retired Secret Service agents who were assigned to Kennedy’s personal detail—men who were willing to take a bullet for him—to talk about his recklessness about sex. They also agreed to talk on the record, despite the knowledge that doing so would surely lead to censure and worse from their fellow retired agents.
The Secret Service agents were a major positive for the book. There was an equally significant negative, one that began innocuously. In my years as a reporter, I had repeatedly been approached by those with a story that, so they would insist, I had to investigate. I cannot recall any story I wrote based on a walk-in. In the process, though, I got to know some fascinating people. One of them was a likable businessman named Hal Kass from Annapolis, Maryland, who had been swindled in a business deal that I was not interested in writing about. Hal took no offense at my lack of interest, and we occasionally shared a sandwich when he was in Washington. He was a collector of historical documents and, knowing I was at work on a book about Kennedy, told me about what was purported to be a cache of previously unknown Kennedy notes and memos that had been offered to him and other wealthy collectors by a broker representing Lawrence Cusack. I checked around and learned that Cusack, known to his friends as Lex, was the son of a prominent New York lawyer whose clients included the Archdiocese of New York and Gladys Baker Eley, the mother of Marilyn Monroe. Cusack worked as a paralegal in his father’s firm. The Cusack papers were said to be full of devastating stuff, in Kennedy’s handwriting, about the Mafia and womanizing, including back-and-forth exchanges with Marilyn Monroe. I was assured that the papers had been analyzed and authenticated by one of America’s foremost handwriting experts on such material; that, I learned, was true. I had no idea at the time what a shell game the business of handwriting documentation was, and was delighted when the businessman agreed to put me in touch with Cusack and his broker. The initial batch of documents I was permitted to photocopy—it took months to get Cusack to allow it—made sense to me.
I had no hesitation about immediately sharing them with Mark Obenhaus, the documentary filmmaker. I had approached Mark about working together on a Kennedy film as soon as I made contact with the Secret Service agents and learned that a few of them were willing to talk about Kennedy on camera. The Cusack documents were an added bonus, pending verification, of course. More than a year later, the verification was still uncertain. I believed the documents were real, and so did Mark, to a lesser degree, but we were troubled by the fact that Cusack and the broker for the sale of the documents would conveniently manage to come up with more of them in response to the frequent questions we raised. All of this was done in total secrecy.
I continued to research and write my revisionist book on the Kennedys as Mark and I and his production crew—we were under contract for a two-hour documentary with ABC—filmed interviews all over America. We knew we had a great story with or without the Cusack papers. The Secret Service agents had told what they saw, and we had gone deep into the Bay of Pigs story, as seen from the point of view of those CIA participants who felt that Kennedy had betrayed them.
The Kennedy book was set for publication in the fall of 1997 by Little, Brown, and the advance sales were running very high, enough to justify a first printing of at least 350,000 copies, without any public knowledge of the Cusack papers. Mark and his staff and I continued to brood about them. We wanted to go public with them of course, but we had come to distrust the so-called handwriting authenticators. Obenhaus spent tens of thousands of dollars within a year on handwriting experts who repeatedly assured us that the Cusack documents were the real thing. The always careful Mark kept on looking and eventually was led to a retired FBI document expert named Jerry Richards who found anomalies in a few documents—overwriting and the like—that raised serious questions. At the same time, in the late summer of 1997, Ed Gray, one of Mark’s assistant producers, broke through. Ed’s assignment included being in charge of vetting the papers, and he realized that two of the alleged Kennedy letters, dated in 1961 and 1962, included zip codes that did not exist at the time. Ed, while in college, had spent the summer of 1969 working for the post office and somehow correctly remembered that America’s uniform five-digit zip code system went into effect across the nation in mid-1961.
That was it. The papers were fraudulent. The next step was to tell the senior executives at ABC, arrange for the network to alert the FBI, and then make public the existence of the papers and the pending criminal investigation of Cusack. (He was eventually found guilty in a New York federal court of thirteen counts of forgery and sentenced to ten years in jail.) Without the documents, my book and the documentary were full of new information and new insights into the Kennedy presidency. I wanted to do what I had done before when working with Obenhaus: write a piece for the Times about the paper fraud and how we finally unraveled it, but was persuaded instead to break the story of Cusack and his papers in an interview for the ABC-TV news show 20/20. How naive I was. The ABC interview, as edited, hung me out to dry. The network executives had invested $3.5 million in the two-hour documentary on Kennedy, which was to be broadcast in prime time at the end of the year, and, as I could not imagine, they were terrified that ABC would be accused of having been taken in by the fake Kennedy papers. I initially had been fooled, I admitted on air, but the notion that it was part of the reporting process and the fact that there always was great uncertainty about the papers—especially by Obenhaus and his team, but also by me—was left, as the cliché has it, on the cutting room floor. It was all about me, the reporter who broke My Lai, being duped.
The ensuing scandal over the fake JFK papers, as the tabloids put it, sold a lot of books but left me an easy target for the many in America who doted on all things Kennedy. I was in a war with Camelot I did not want and could not win. Needless to say, the documentary, when aired on ABC, was not called The Dark Side of Camelot but Dangerous Years.
While doing research on my Kennedy book, I learned that I, as well as many other journali
sts, had wronged Edward Korry, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Chile from 1967 to 1971. He emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of the socialist government put in place by Allende after his election as president in 1970. In late 1974, after my initial articles about the CIA’s dirty role in Chile were published, he had been publicly accused, along with Richard Helms and two other State Department officials, of providing misleading testimony to a Senate committee. Korry, who retired from government service after leaving Chile, insisted at the time that he had no knowledge of any coup plotting and focused in his complaints on my Times stories. He had befriended Abe Rosenthal at some point in his career and took his complaints to him. I explained to Abe that I had written a story about a routine report by a Senate committee, one of many stories I wrote about Chile, and there was no reason to believe Korry was not linked to the CIA’s anti-Allende plotting. I was very surprised to learn six years later that Korry, indeed, had not been trusted by the CIA station chief and was excluded from any knowledge of what became known as the station’s Track Two plotting to undermine the Allende government. I called Rosenthal and told him that I, and the paper, had screwed Korry. Abe told me to write a story about it for the front page of the paper.
The twenty-three-hundred-word piece I did was held for a few weeks—Abe wanted it on page 1 and needed a quiet day to get it there—and published in early February 1981. Abe and I both felt we had done right by Korry. The reaction from our peers, however, was cynicism, highlighted by a Time essay titled “The 2,300-Word Times Correction.” The notion that Abe and I and the Times had righted a wrong in such prominent fashion—something rare in the newspaper world—was not acknowledged. The published dispatch was far more than a mere correction; it was an essay explaining how a newspaper, relying on a congressional report, can get stories wrong. After reading the Time piece, Abe told me, “I’m never going to show my ass to them again.” I was especially pissed because the magazine had the gall to wrongly declare that the information I had learned from internal CIA documents—all of which were highly classified—“had been kicking around for years.” There was also a widely shared suggestion in the media, pushed by Korry for reasons I could not fathom, that I had told him I would write a correction only if he provided me with adverse information about Kissinger. Such stuff was published repeatedly in the mainstream media without one reporter calling me. If one had, I might have produced letters to me from Korry, urging me to come talk to him about Kissinger. His easily refuted insinuation was published as fact again and again without any question raised about Korry’s acknowledgment that if his allegations were correct, he had succumbed to my blackmail.
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