by Gus Russo
For his part, FBI Director Hoover led the Warren commissioners to believe that the Bureau had conducted a thorough investigation of the assassination. He also wrote the Commission a letter assuring them that Oswald had not fulfilled the requirements to place him on the Security Index of dangerous persons. Both contentions were lies. As pointed out earlier, the FBI had already prevented supervisor Lawrence Keenan from performing his investigation of Oswald in Mexico City. Hoover knew that if the significance of the Mexico City developments were known, the FBI would be destroyed. Furthermore, during the Commission’s work, a Hoover-ordered internal probe by the FBI concluded that Oswald should have been on the Index and that his passport should have been revoked. In private, Hoover agreed with this conclusion. He even insisted, over strenuous objections, that seventeen agents, including Jim Hosty, be censured. The cited agents “could not have been more stupid,” Hoover wrote. Regarding the responsible agents, Hoover added:
They were worse than mistaken. Certainly no one in full possession of all his faculties can claim Oswald didn’t fall within this [Security Index] criteria. . . Such gross incompetency cannot be overlooked nor administrative action postponed.82
When Bureau officers objected to the censures, citing the restrictions of the Third Agency Rule, Hoover was adamant: “We were wrong,” he wrote. “I do not intend to palliate actions which have resulted in forever destroying the Bureau as the top level investigative agency.”83 This was, however, Hoover’s private position. His public stance, dictated by his overriding desire to protect the Bureau’s image, had to be that the FBI agents in charge of Oswald’s case had done nothing wrong.
In fact, J. Edgar Hoover was too concerned with the reputation of his FBI to be overly concerned with a thorough investigation of the crime itself. And the best way to protect its reputation was to focus the entire investigation, and fix all the blame, on Lee Harvey Oswald alone. Hoover’s man in charge of the investigation, William Sullivan, candidly admitted, “Hoover’s main thought [regarding the Kennedy investigation] was always how to cover, how to protect himself.”84 Clearly, Hoover wanted to stop any speculation that Oswald was someone whose murderous impulse could have been predicted. Anything the Director could do toward this end, he did, including narrowing the investigation before it got started in November 1963 and supervising a woefully inadequate investigation for the Warren Commission.
Not only had the CIA and FBI backed away from investigating the Cuban angle, but now their chief officers met in secret to coordinate their responses to the Warren Commission. The Church Committee later located a memo from the CIA’s head of Counter-intelligence, James Angleton, to the FBI’s William Sullivan. In the memo, Angleton suggests that both agencies coordinate their replies to questions posed by the Warren Commission. The memo included a list of questions that the Commission would ask CIA, along with the CIA’s replies. This way, neither agency would suffer potential embarrassment.85 Senator Richard Schweiker, who chaired the Committee’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, later stated, “That was one of the most shocking things we learned—that the CIA and FBI rehearsed and coordinated their Warren Commission testimony.”86
With J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and Allen Dulles in agreement that not only would there be no investigation of Cuban complicity, but the Kennedys’ provocation of Castro would not be divulged, the Warren Commission set about its work. Within these parameters, the result was a foregone conclusion.
The Workings of the Commission
Although the Commission held its first meeting on December 5, 1963, it didn’t actually hear its first witness until February 5, 1964. By then, the Commission had set up shop in the old VFW Building near the Supreme Court. At one of the Commission’s first meetings, Allen Dulles opened the session by passing out copies of a ten-year-old book discussing seven previous attempts against U.S. presidents. The thesis of the book was that assassins are typically loners and misfits. Dulles pointed out to his fellow commissioners that “you’ll find a pattern running through here that I think we’ll find in this present case.”87
The Commission’s original deadline of June 30, 1964 was determined to be unreasonable, and the report was finally delivered three months late on September 24, 1964. Despite the extension, the overwhelming impression left by a close read of the Commission’s work is of leads left unpursued because of time constraints. A typically disturbing example occurred when a Commission attorney was asked in May 1964 to follow up on an allegation that disputed Oswald’s timeline and contacts made en route to Mexico City. The attorney responded, “We’re closing doors, not opening them.”88
Of the $1.2 million allocated to the investigation, a staggering $608,000 went to the cost of printing the report and the 1500 copies of its 26 volumes. In the interim, the Commissioners personally heard only 94 witnesses of the 25,000 questioned by its investigative arm, the FBI. Official meetings were poorly attended. Commissioner Russell, still seething with hatred for Warren, attended only 15 out of 244 hours of hearings, and heard only 6 percent of the testimony. Although the staff attorneys themselves heard more than 500 witnesses, the ensuing work suffered from the fact that neither the Commission members nor their staff were professional investigators.89
In 1992, in an article about the inner workings of the Warren Commission, US. News and World Report stated:
Warren never considered hiring anyone outside the legal profession for the main stuff. In some ways, that decision was crucial. Lawyers, by inclination and training, were drawn to unified explanations for the assassination. Accustomed to ordering vast universes of facts, they found it difficult to imagine the murky conspiracy theories that might have come more easily to private investigators.90
The commissioners were further hampered by the fact that they were all successful professionals with careers that couldn’t be abandoned for almost a year while the Commission did its work. In 1992, US. News and World Report summarized:
These busy men ignored most day-to-day operations. The retired Dulles dropped by, often merely to shoot the breeze. Russell drafted a letter of resignation to LBJ, furious at not being notified of an early meeting. Even when he was notified, he came to fewer meetings than any other commissioner.91
All the foregoing difficulties led to a dismally truncated investigation.
The Commission’s oversights (and those of its investigative arm, the FBI) would fill many pages. Consider the following examples:
The FBI found time to note Jack Ruby’s mother’s dental records, but neglected to interview Sylvia Duran, Teresa Proenza, and other Cuban Embassy employees.
The Bureau compiled life histories of everyone who rode on the bus to Mexico with Oswald, but deemed it of little interest to take formal testimony from the CIA’s Win Scott and David Phillips, or critical witnesses such as Pedro Gutierrez, Gilberto Alvarado, Luisa Calderon, and Gilberto Lopez.
The investigators interviewed owners of printing shops in New Orleans to determine where Oswald had his FPCC leaflets printed, but when it came to the address on the leaflets, “544 Camp Street,” key figures who had worked in that building (like Sergio Arcacha) were never interviewed, or were dealt with in a brief and cursory phone call (like Guy Banister).
The Bureau obtained information on the Socialist Party connections of the grandfather (born in the 1870s) of the estranged husband of the woman with whom Marina Oswald lived, but never determined the name of the man whom the police said drove Oswald to the Dallas rifle range.
Although Oswald was clearly obsessed with Cuba, and was known to be in proximity to staging areas for the government’s “Cuba Project,” the man who ran that project with an iron fist, Robert Kennedy, was not required to testify, and the Commission didn’t press the issue.
On April 8, 1964, three Warren Commission attorneys traveled to Mexico City, where they would spend four days. They essentially met with the U.S. Embassy’s CIA and FBI staff, and retraced Oswald’s movements. They interviewed n
one of the witnesses or possible suspects cited earlier. In their memo summing up the trip, staffers wrote, “We did not want any appointments made at this time. . . We wanted to leave the entire problem open”—a curious decision, given that the actual writing of the Warren Commission’s report would commence in a few weeks.92
On June 11, 1964, Earl Warren made a last-ditch attempt to get Robert Kennedy to contribute to the investigation. In a letter to the Attorney General, Warren asked whether RFK knew of “any additional information relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy which has not been sent to the Commission.” Warren also asked the Attorney General about “any information suggesting that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy.”
In his book, Final Disclosure, Warren Commission attorney David Belin wrote, “Robert Kennedy did not respond until August 4, nearly two months later, when he wrote that ‘all information relating in any way to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in the Department of Justice’ had been referred to the Warren Commission.”93 According to Belin, the RFK letter went on to say:
I would like to state definitely that I know of no credible evidence to support the allegations that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy. I have no suggestions to make at this time regarding any additional investigation which should be undertaken by the Commission prior to the publication of its report.94
Attorney Belin queries, “Why did it take Kennedy so long to reply?” Predictably, JFK aide/sycophant Kenny O’Donnell tried to put the most benign spin on RFK’s silence, telling former Speaker of the House, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, “Tip, you have to understand. The family—everybody—wanted this thing behind them.”95 Others, however, sensed a darker agenda. David Belin postulates: “Perhaps Robert Kennedy could not decide whether to tell the Warren Commission about the assassination plots against Castro. He eventually decided to withhold the information.” Bobby Kennedy’s continued pattern of stonewalling the Commission (he also wanted to withhold the autopsy material) brought Belin to the brink of resigning.96 Close friend and aide to both JFK and RFK, Senator Harris Wofford, concluded:
There was nothing Robert Kennedy could see to do or say about it. There was no way of getting to the bottom of the assassination without uncovering the very stories he hoped would be hidden forever. So he closed his eyes to the coverup that he knew (or soon discovered) Allen Dulles was perpetrating on the Warren Commission, and took no steps to inform the Commission of the Cuban and Mafia connections that would have provided the main clues to any conspiracy. . . In this situation, he was putting his brother’s and the country’s reputation above the truth. . . Robert Kennedy was his brother’s keeper.97
And although Bobby would provide the Commission no information on his classified Cuban operations, he clearly spared no energy in trying to determine what the Commission was uncovering on its own. In a confidential interview in 1997, a senior Justice Department official, known to be assigned to the Commission staff, admitted he was planted there to be Robert Kennedy’s eyes and ears. The attorney stated that other staffers and members, including Redlich (norman), Rankin, Warren, and Willens (Howard), were aware of his subterfuge. Bobby’s aides, Jack Miller and Jack Cassidy, were also aware.
Bobby’s mole continued, “I’m undercover there. Everybody on the Commission isn’t supposed to know that I’m a plant, but it was understood. . . We go to lunch and they [other staff members] ask me how I got there. I never told those guys. I’d go and come from the offices and they’d ask: ‘What are you doing?’ I spent three hours a day at the committee—no secretary. My function was simply to read. . . . I thought [Kennedy’s assassination] was [the result of] a foreign plot—Cuba.”
When Jackie Kennedy testified before the Commission, RFK was not only allowed to look on, but, incredibly, was given permission to have Nick Katzenbach edit the transcript to Bobby’s liking.98 The Attorney General told Nick Katzenbach that he wouldn’t even read the [Warren Commission] report, saying, “I don’t care what they do. It’s not going to bring him [my brother] back.”99
As a final insult, the Commission never called the man who would have been the repository of the most sensitive intelligence reports: the new President, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The Non-Consensus
“Judgments were made back then that seemed rational and reasonable. Today, with a totally different atmosphere, those judgments might seem improper.”
—President Gerald Ford, former Warren Commission member, 1995100
“We were wrong, in my opinion, in issuing the statement that ‘there was no evidence of a conspiracy.’ That was the wrong statement. . . Statements, like that sweeping ‘no conspiracy’ one, [do] a disservice to our overall work.”
—Judge Burt Griffin, Warren Commission staff lawyer, 1992101
“Hale felt very torn during his work on the Commission. He wished he’d never been on it and wished he’d never signed it [the final report].”
—Lindy Boggs, the widow of Warren Commission member, Congressman Hale Boggs102
“I think someone else worked with [Oswald]. . . There were too many things—some of the trips he made to Mexico City, and a number of discrepancies in the evidence that caused me to doubt that he planned it all by himself.”
—Senator Richard B. Russell, Warren Commission member, 1970103
LBJ received the Warren Commission’s Report on September 24, 1964. One might infer that the deliverance of the report to Johnson meant that the signees agreed with its conclusions. That is not the case. The Commissioners and their staff expressed dissatisfaction from the beginning, and their doubts only increased with later revelations, especially those concerning the U.S.-sponsored assassination plots. The Commission members who most vocally disagreed with its conclusion were Senator Richard B. Russell, and House Majority Leader Hale Boggs. Senator Cooper was troubled by the events of Dealey Plaza. Even future President Gerald Ford expressed misgivings about the Commission’s treatment of the conspiracy possibility. The only two members who remained silent were RFK’s appointees from the intelligence community, Dulles and McCloy.
In a handwritten note found among Senator Russell’s papers in the Russell Memorial Library at the University of Georgia, Russell seemed to express his fears of a coverup within the Warren Commission. During a discussion with Warren, Russell (the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, which oversaw the CIA) had been surprised to learn that Warren already seemed to know about the Alvarado story. Russell wrote, “[Warren] knew all I did and more about CIA. Something strange is happening—Warren and Katzenbach know all about FBI and they are apparently through psychiatrists & others planning to show Oswald only one who even considered—This to me is an untenable position— I must insist on outside counsel—’Remember Warren’s blanket indictment of the South.’” (Warren was outspoken on the cause of civil rights.)104
Russell became so convinced that the Warren Commission wasn’t obtaining all the intelligence needed to make a thorough report, he indeed did secure “outside counsel,” secretly commissioning his own private investigation. According to his assistant, Colonel Philip Corso, who conducted the inquiry, no records of it were to be kept on paper. All briefings of the Senator were to be oral. Corso, a twenty-year Army Intelligence veteran, had been on loan to the CIA in the 1950’s and was later named a National Security Advisor to the Eisenhower White House.
The first thing Corso did was to contact an old friend, CIA officer Frank Hand. Hand was the CIA’s liaison to the Operations Coordinating Board. He later was assigned to Mongoose chief Edward Lansdale’s office. In 1967, when the CIA Inspector General wrapped up his report on the assassination plots, Hand’s name appears (p. 114) as Lansdale’s aide, and it is Hand who, according to the Inspector General, had removed the phrase “liquidation of foreign leaders” from a sensitive CIA report. Hand was clearly a well-placed source.
Over the years
, Russell’s associates have expressed their certainty that the senator, because of his Congressional position as CIA overseer, was privy to the Castro assassination plots. This would explain why, in a November 29, 1963 phone conversation, Russell is heard telling President Johnson, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Castro—” At that point, Johnson cuts him off, saying, “Okay, okay, that’s what we want to know.” Regarding Russell’s possible knowledge of the plots, his biographer wrote that because the Senator “possessed secret information others [on the Commission] did not have, he may have had reason to suspect some kind of conspiracy. Whatever he knew, if anything, he took to his grave”105 when he died on January 21, 1971. According to Corso, Russell told him, “You know, we can’t publish this. They’ll never believe it and they’ll never put it in print.”106
But Russell was so troubled that he, along with fellow commissioners Cooper and Boggs, demanded an eleventh-hour, pre-release, executive session to air their disputes. At that session, held just six days before the report was handed over to President Johnson, the dissenting Commissioners had their say. The meeting remains the only executive session for which no transcript can be found, although one was known to be kept. Rumors abound that the meeting was a no-holds barred shouting match. Russell said he made known his objections to numerous Warren conclusions, delivered a written dissent to the Chairman, and received Warren’s guarantee that it would be included in the final report. The concluding words of Russell’s written dissent are worth reproducing in full:
There are several bits of evidence that have raised questions in my mind that are not answered by any evidence the Commission could procure. Among these are the extent of Oswald’s associations with the large number of Cuban nationals who were students in the educational institutions in Minsk during his residence there; the nature and extent of his relationship with foreign nationals who may have had a purpose in wishing to kill the President of the United States; the scope and number of communications he may have had with such persons after his return to the United States, and a detailed account of all of Oswald’s movements, contacts and associations on his secret visit to Mexico a few weeks before the assassination of the President. The inability to gather all evidence in these areas as well as a number of suspicious circumstances, deduced from the record as made, to my mind preclude the conclusive determination that Oswald and Oswald alone, without the knowledge, encouragement or assistance of any other person, planned and perpetrated the assassination.