Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  The surviving CIA officer who could clear up the mystery of what the CIA really knew regarding Oswald in the Cuban Embassy is Ann Goodpasture. According to Allan White, the Mexico Deputy Chief of Station, Goodpasture worked hand-in-glove with both key decedents, David Phillips and Win Scott, and “her main responsibilities were to handle the surveillance operations.”10 In addition, before his death, David Phillips nominated Goodpasture for the Career Intelligence Medal, in part because “she was the case officer responsible for the identification of Lee Harvey Oswald in his dealings with the Cuban Embassy in Mexico.”11

  When contacted by the author, Goodpasture refused to be interviewed. When interviewed by the staff of the HSCA on March 13, 1978, Goodpasture denied all knowledge of photos, wiretaps, sources, and tapes that might bear on Oswald. Goodpasture’s 1963 fitness report notes that she was connected to the CIA’s most secret compartment at headquarters, Staff D, the agency’s designation for the office run by William Harvey. As has been seen, Harvey’s office controlled the ZR/RIFLE and AM/LASH assassination projects. In her position, Goodpasture might have been privy to both the AM/LASH plot and Oswald’s threat/offer in the Cuban Embassy.

  When the author interviewed the HSCA investigators who compiled the Mexico City Report, they agreed that Goodpasture withheld key details from them. One Congressman stated flatly, “She lied to us.”

  An examination of Luisa Calderon’s alleged foreknowledge of the Kennedy murder further suggests that the CIA had early, untapped information about Oswald. After his defection to the Soviet Union, Oswald had been the subject of a “201” or “Personality” file that tracked his movements whenever they were brought to the Agency’s attention. One document placed in his file, after the Mexico City trip but before the assassination, was a memo detailing a tapped phone conversation that took place on July 19, 1963 between Cuban Embassy employee Calderon and an American about to relocate to Dallas.12 When queried by a Congressionally-appointed investigator, Russell Holmes, who was the custodian of the Oswald 201 file (and assistant to CIA Director Richard Helms), verified that the document was added to the file before the assassination.

  Russell Holmes’ admissions present a major problem for the Agency. Not only did he admit the existence of the Calderon material in Oswald’s pre-assassination file: it was included, he said, because Calderon was a contact of Oswald in the Cuban Embassy. When Holmes was reminded of the CIA’s claim that it did not know of Oswald’s Cuban Embassy visit until after the assassination, he merely smiled sheepishly.13

  The CIA’s conundrum is clear: its professed lack of knowledge of Oswald’s Cuban Embassy visits was the excuse it offered for not informing the FBI and Kennedy’s security detail about this portion of Oswald’s Mexico City escapade. An admission that it knew and purposely did not pass along the information to the FBI would brand the CIA as tragically negligent.

  So, despite the evidence that the CIA knew of Oswald’s Cuban embassy visits at the time they occurred, the Agency tried to make it appear otherwise. Two months after the assassination, the CIA wrote the Warren Commission that in the days after the tragedy, it learned for the first time from its Mexico City sources that Oswald had visited the Cuban Consulate and had met with Sylvia Duran.14 Although this memo to the official investigators is at odds with the document trail and the memories of many other agency personnel in Mexico City, it served a clear purpose: to clear the CIA of negligence in connection with Kennedy’s death.

  In later years, CIA executives admitted that their investigation was seriously deficient. Miami Station Chief Ted Shackley said that he conducted no follow-up with his sources on the Oswald case. Shackley explained that because the CIA had not penetrated Castro’s spy apparatus, the Agency “couldn’t pursue the possibility of Castro’s involvement.”15

  Raymond Rocca, James Angleton’s assistant, was in a position to observe the CIA’s investigation of the assassination, known in the Agency as “GPFLOOR.” Rocca would later tell a Congressional investigator that the CIA provided no name traces on Cuban agents operating in Mexico City. Further, he commented that the Cuban diplomatic and intelligence personnel in Mexico City should have been more carefully examined. Rocca was also concerned about Castro’s penetration of the New Orleans-based exile activities. He pointed out that Castro agent Fernando Fernandez was sending Castro intelligence about New Orleans via a mail drop in Mexico City.

  In sum, Rocca believed that Cuban leads should have been pursued much more aggressively.16 His superior, counterintelligence chief Angleton, agreed that “the Mexican phase of the investigation was unsatisfactory.” Angleton expressed worry over reports that Castro, years earlier, had been photographed in Mexico City with a KGB official. Again raising the specter of a Cuban plot originating with a KGB faction—a guaranteed nuclear trigger—Angleton would later testify that he was opposed to “ever closing the case of the assassination.”17

  The FBI: “A Poor Investigation”

  It was not long before the Justice Department and the FBI assumed total control of the assassination investigation from the CIA. As far as the Justice Department was concerned, Nicholas Katzenbach would handle things by proxy for Bobby Kennedy, who, after his frenetic “cleanup” on the heels of the assassination, removed himself from the scene altogether. As RFK’s Deputy Attorney General, Katzenbach was Kennedy’s close ally and trusted friend.

  Within three days of the assassination, Katzenbach issued a now infamous memo to the Johnson White House which made the Justice Department’s position clear. It stated: “The public must be convinced that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who were still at large. . . Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off.”18

  Thirty years later, Katzenbach would explain that “there was fear that the Soviets could be responsible. And that could be a major problem.”19 George Ball, an undersecretary who was then running the State Department in the absence of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, would agree, saying, “We were just scared to death that this was something bigger than the act of a madman.”20

  In practical terms, it was a wise decision to prune away any speculation, especially considering the sensational range of rumors that were circulating. However, the directive to convince the public of Oswald’s guilt not only was prejudicial in the other extreme, but helped create an atmosphere in which Oswald became the investigators’ sole agenda. Proof of this can be seen in Hoover’s conversation with Katzenbach the day after the memo was issued. One of Hoover’s assistants wrote that Hoover interpreted Katzenbach’s directive as asking for a quick FBI memo for RFK that would “settle the dust, insofar as Oswald and his activities are concerned, both from the standpoint that he is the man who assassinated the President, and relative to Oswald himself and background.”21

  In light of these three things—the CIA’s activity, the agenda set by RFK’s Justice Department, and the blessing given it by Johnson’s White House—the narrow investigation that followed was, in retrospect, predictable. Thirty years later, Nick Katzenbach, whose memo effectively set the tone for the investigation, said it was not his intention to produce a whitewash. However, he euphemistically conceded, “The memo is not as artfully worded as I would like it to be.”22 (Notwithstanding that, it’s virtually impossible to interpret his words any other way.)

  The FBI’s investigation was run by the Domestic Intelligence Division, under the leadership of William Sullivan. FBI agent Harry Whidbee is one of the few agents to have spoken openly about the deficiencies of the Sullivan strategy. As an agent based in California, Whidbee was directed to investigate Oswald’s Marine buddies—the ones who served with him at El Toro. In 1988, Whidbee told an interviewer:

  It was a hurry-up job. Within three weeks, a letter of general instruction came to the field divisions. We were effectively told, “They’re only going to prove he [Oswald] was the guy who did it. There were no co-conspirators, and there was no international conspiracy.” I had conducted a couple of interviews a
nd those records were sent back again and rewritten according to Washington’s requirements.23

  One of the investigation’s supervisors later testified, “Our investigation was primarily concentrated on Lee Harvey Oswald: Was he the assassin? And to get the complete background investigation of him. . . It was an investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man.”24 This same supervisor further stated that the Bureau never conducted an investigation to determine whether the Cuban government was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy.25

  In his book The Bureau, Sullivan admitted, “There were huge gaps in the case, gaps we never did close. For example, we never found out what went on between Oswald and the Cubans in Mexico.”26 The leading Cuban experts within the Bureau resided in the Nationalities Intelligence Section. The supervisor of this department testified that he never received memoranda or instructions to contact Cuban sources about possible Cuban involvement in the assassination. In addition, this supervisor was never informed of Castro’s September 1963 warning of possible retaliation against U.S. leaders.27

  Laurence Keenan: The FBI in Mexico City

  “The most vivid memory I have is that of Ambassador [Thomas] Mann telling me ‘The missiles are going to fly.’”

  —Lawrence Keenan, the FBI Agent in charge of the Mexico City investigation28

  J. Edgar Hoover may have sent an FBI supervisor to Mexico City, but to describe his resulting investigation as cursory would be exceedingly generous to the FBI. He spent all of five days there, barely enough time to unpack his bags. This FBI supervisor would later testify that his main purpose in visiting was to discredit the Gilberto Alvarado claim that Oswald was seen accepting money in the Cuban Embassy. He further testified that he never even had the opportunity to question Alvarado. He merely accepted the Mexican Police’s word that Alvarado had recanted.29 Consequently, the supervisor spent the bulk of his visit observing the FBI’s attempts to trace Oswald’s bus companions on his border crossings.

  This supervisor’s name was not included in the 1976 Congressional report of his interrogation. However, it is now known that the man was Laurence Keenan. Prior to 1963, Keenan served as the FBI’s Legal Attaché (LEGAT) in Madrid. In the fall of 1963, he was back at headquarters, assigned to the Foreign Liaison Desk, under the supervision of William (Bill) Sullivan. At the time of the assassination, Keenan was at the FBI’s Quantico training facility, undergoing the periodic retraining (known as “in-house” work) required of all Bureau agents.

  Keenan recalled, “Two days after the assassination, Bill Sullivan handed me a memo asking me to go to Mexico City.” The memo was signed by the entire Bureau triumvirate—Hoover, Alan Belmont (Hoover’s assistant), and Bill Sullivan. Keenan, they thought, would be suited to the role because, as a result of his Madrid stint, he was fluent in Spanish. Furthermore, he was well-acquainted with Mexico City’s LEGAT, Clark Anderson, who had served with Keenan in Spain.30

  Keenan recently sat down for a series of interviews and was extremely candid about his feelings toward not only the FBI’s post-assassination agenda, but his Mexican investigation specifically. “The memo [from the FBI’s top officials] was ambiguous,” Keenan says. “It stated that I would have the complete cooperation of the Agency [CIA], which didn’t happen.”

  That is an understatement. According to Keenan, he was initially met by CIA’s Win Scott and Dave Phillips. “My briefing consisted of them listening to my resumé. They never said a word to me,” Keenan remembers. This stony silence continued for the duration of Keenan’s stay. Such treatment, however, was not surprising to the FBI man. He is quick to point out that the inter-agency rivalry was total and unrelenting during those years. “There was an impenetrable wall between the CIA and the FBI. There was not enough trust to coordinate the investigation,” Keenan points out. “There was absolutely no conversation between myself and [Win] Scott. It just wasn’t done. There was no support.”31

  Keenan adds that he was given little support from Washington to follow his investigative instincts. “I had the feeling that we didn’t want to broaden the investigation,” Keenan says. “The strings were being pulled at a higher level.” It was in this atmosphere that Keenan attempted to do his work. In 1993, he told Frontline:

  It was surprising how fast things developed. We had the information later that afternoon [of the assassination] that an ex-Marine was involved. I think the name was pronounced to us even then: Lee Harvey Oswald. He was described as a loner, a kook. The information at the time was definitely that it was no conspiracy. The crime was already solved. There was definitely a feeling that there was not going to be any investigation pursuing this. Within a few days. . .[it was confirmed that] this was a single assassin and there was no thought of any further investigation. The idea was to wrap this thing up as soon as possible. . . We could say that the investigation was over, and there was no feeling that there was any conspiracy. In fact, this was discouraged. Any idea that Oswald had a confederate or was part of a group or a conspiracy definitely placed a man’s career in jeopardy.32

  Keenan did not feel it necessary to explain why an unauthorized question could jeopardize an FBI career. Every agent knew that any little thing he did that might irritate J. Edgar Hoover could get him fired or sent to a highly undesirable post. Imagine the fear generated by utterly disagreeing with Hoover about who had killed the President. Keenan did not need sensitive antennae to deduce that the despotic, supremely self-promoting Director had already made up his mind about the killing. Of his specific activities in Mexico City, Keenan recalled, “We had the feeling that the Cubans would have pulled out all the stops to assassinate the President, if given the opportunity. . . to isolate themselves—without any definite information or evidence tying them to the assassination.”33

  His concern notwithstanding, Keenan readily admits that the FBI did next to nothing to ameliorate suspicions that the Cubans had been involved. “I had the feeling that Duran was a CIA source. We knew of her scandalous reputation within a day. I wanted to interview her, but that was off-limits. I wanted to interview Alvarado, but was told that he was unavailable.”34 He continues:

  It was a very subtle affair. . . The idea was to wrap this thing up as soon as possible. . . I was in somewhat of a paradox. I had the authority, in fact you might say the jurisdiction, to conduct this investigation, yet having telephone contact with Washington, I realized that these orders were somewhat “paper” orders—that they were not to be taken literally. My desires to continue the investigation were frustrated from day one. . . I was blocked. . . I requested to see Sylvia Duran. However, I wasn’t getting the support either from my own Legal Attaché office or from the CIA. This was a very tender, very sensitive moment. We’re talking about nuclear engagement—nuclear war. . . We had to be very careful on whose toes we were stomping. . .

  We’d call it [the investigation] window dressing. There was not an attempt, really, to take charge of the investigation, and delve into it the way we should have. . . Again, it was a window dressing, paper investigation. Looking back, I feel a certain amount of shame. I think the FBI can look back and feel that this one investigation disgraced a great organization.

  Most damning, Keenan says, was the fact that “I went down there with no knowledge of Kennedy’s anti-Castro plots.”

  The Warren Commission

  “So-called Presidential Commissions do not work. They never will. Such commissions, in my opinion, are not a valid part of the American system.”

  —Senator Charles Keating, a member of The President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography35

  “The Warren Commission wasn’t trying to get to the bottom of it. They were trying to prevent World War III.”

  —Jim Hosty, 1993 interview

  “You can imagine what the reaction of the country would have been if this information [of Cuban involvement] came out I was afraid of war.”

  —Lyndon Johnson, to columnist Drew Pearson36

  “The U.S. governmen
t not only has the right but the obligation to lie if it means the prevention of an atomic war.”

  —Arthur Sylvester, Asst. Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy administration37

  “We don’t send in a bunch of carpetbaggers. That’s the worst thing we could do right now.”38

  Using these words three days after the assassination, President Lyndon Johnson informed columnist Joseph Alsop that Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr would conduct the investigation into the president’s death. Johnson feared an uproar in the south over “states’ rights” if the inquiry was not conducted by Texas state officials. Within four days, however, the suggestions of others would prevail. RFK’s number two man in the Justice Department, Nick Katzenbach, was insistent: The public must be convinced of Oswald’s sole guilt, and so he told Johnson and everyone else within earshot.

  Eventually, President Johnson came to agree that because so few trusted the FBI, the investigative groundwork would need to be done by someone other than Carr (a young, unknown southerner). Thus, on November 29, 1963, LBJ signed into law Executive Order 11130, establishing a blue ribbon Presidential Panel to report on the assassination. Johnson’s next problem was convincing trustworthy, prestigious citizens to sit on the new commission. Consulting again with his trusted attorney, Abe Fortas, Johnson determined that there would be six panelists and a Chairman. The first two, as will be seen, were chosen for him.39