Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK

by Mark Lane

  For many Americans, the only mystery remaining about the location of the origin of the fatal shot was, “who named it?” While the words “grassy knoll” appear in Rush to Judgment, 6 I did not devise that phrase. I merely repeated it.

  On February 18, 1964, I interviewed Jean Hill, a Dallas school teacher. The Warren Commission had been in existence since November 29, 1963, but I had not questioned a single eyewitness before my telephone conversation with Ms. Hill. Two weeks after my talk with her, I testified before the Warren Commission. Jean had told me that she heard between four and six shots. When I asked her where she was standing in Dealey Plaza, she asked if I was familiar with the relevant geography; and when I told her that I had never been to Dallas, she described the area and her location and said that “shots had come from behind a wooden fence on the grassy knoll.” I informed the seven members of her observations. The area had been christened by Jean Hill and she never knew that she had named it. She could have said, “little hill,” “small incline,” or “mound,” or selected a number of other descriptive terms. Instead she became a contributor to the lexicon of our time.

  I met Jean for the first time at a conference in Dallas many years after the assassination. Prior to that time our relationship had consisted of the one telephone conversation. She told me then that she had not known that she had named the area where we were then standing until she read A Citizen’s Dissent, a book I had written.7

  In 1991, President George H. W. Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court. During the hearings Anita F. Hill, a professor of law now at Brandeis University, testified about the actions of Thomas when Hill was working with him at the U.S. Department of Education and later at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She gave details of gross sexual misconduct by Thomas, and her testimony was supported by statements made by several other women and men. I followed the matter closely as I had been counsel for women who had suffered sexual harassment on the job and who had later filed lawsuits.8 I was very impressed by Ms. Hill, as were several other members of the trial bar with whom I discussed the case. It is rare in such matters to secure support from other witnesses since the harassment is generally done in private and the victims are often reluctant to discuss it.

  Arlen Specter, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cruelly and unprofessionally cross-examined her and denounced her as a perjurer. Later Anita Hill said, “I knew his questions were both insincere and ill-informed. With every question he asked, it became clearer that despite any declaration to the contrary, he viewed me as an adversary. Rather than seeking to elicit information, his questioning sought to elicit conclusions he had reached before the hearings began.”

  If Anita Hill had spoken with Jean before the hearings in Washington, she may have known the type of man she would face. On one occasion I asked Jean about her appearance before the Warren Commission counsel. She said that there was a court reporter and Arlen Specter. She said that Specter did everything possible to force her to state that she had heard only three shots and that none of them came from the grassy knoll. Jean told me that Specter said that he would release the rumor that she had had an extramarital affair and that in the end she would end up looking as if she was crazy, “just as Oswald’s mother had.” She said that he wanted her to accept the conclusions that he had reached before he met her. She added, “He was so mean I could hardly believe it.” I asked her if she could understand his anger. She answered, with a straight face but a twinkle in her eyes, “Maybe he just doesn’t like women named Hill.”

  The Mannlicher-Carcano

  Three officers allegedly found a weapon on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository Building on November 22 and examined it.9

  They were joined by a captain and a lieutenant of the Dallas police who closely examined the German Mauser. One of them, Lieutenant J. C. Day, ejected a live round from the chamber while Captain Will Fritz observed. The Dallas authorities told the press that the rifle they had found was a 7.65 German Mauser and the Dallas district attorney’s statement at a well-attended press conference confirmed that finding. One of the officers who found the weapon, Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman, made a sworn statement describing the German Mauser in exquisite detail, including its 4/18 telescopic sight.

  The next day, November 23, the FBI reported that Oswald allegedly had owned an Italian Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5. The Dallas police and soon the Warren Commission shared another magic moment. They decided retroactively that the weapon discovered on November 22 had, overnight, changed both nationality and size: it was Italian, not German, and it was 6.5, not 7.65. Norman Mailer reminded us sardonically that the confusing conjuration required not a rifle expert but a Zen master, while Walter Cronkite unctuously sought to reassure America by stating that “we must have faith” in the commission.

  When I testified before the Commission I did so upon the condition that I be able to examine the weapon. I held it in my hands and read to the members the words clearly stamped on the rifle: “MADE ITALY” and “Cal. 6.5.” I wondered how anyone who had looked at that weapon could have identified it differently. The Italian rifle became part of the foundation upon which the government built its case, but as it turns out it, too, became suspect.

  Walter H. B. Smith, who was the author of several books published by the National Rifle Association, wrote in The Basic Manual of Military Small Arms that the Italian Mannlicher-Carcano rifles “are poor military weapons in comparison with United States, British, German or Russian equipment.”Mechanix Illustrated found it to be “crudely made, poorly designed, dangerous and inaccurate.” Jack O’Connor, in The Rifle Book, said that the action is “terrible” and that the weapon tends to blow “the firing pin in the shooter’s face.” No wonder no expert employed by the government could replicate the results that the government claimed that Oswald had achieved, in time or accuracy.

  When Bertrand Russell arranged for me to speak about the issues in several European countries including France, England, Denmark, Sweden, Scotland and Italy, I made reference to the Mannlicher-Carcano at a talk in Italy as the weapon the government had credited for achieving such startling results. I spoke in English; most of those present awaited the translation as I paused. A few immediately broke into uncontrolled laughter. When my remarks were offered in Italian to the large audience, waves of derisive and mischievous howls, shrieks and laughter began and ended only when I asked for an explanation. One elderly gentleman near the back of the auditorium stood, a microphone was brought to him and he said, “We have always thought that the Mannlicher-Carcano was the reason we lost World War II.”

  The Zapruder Film

  Abraham Zapruder, an amateur photographer, created the most important evidence available in Dealey Plaza. He stood in front of the wooden fence with a motion picture camera, a Bell and Howell 8 mm camera, and filmed the president and other occupants of the limousine while the shots were being fired. A Secret Service interview report stated that Zapruder had told the Secret Service that the assassin had fired from directly behind him. The film, according to the commission and its experts, ran through the camera at the rate of 18.3 frames per second; it was therefore not only a filmic record, but the clock for the assassination. The commission found that the time span between the first shot to strike the president and the bullet which shattered his skull “was 4.8 to 5.6 seconds.” The indisputable evidence revealed that at least five shots were fired; and even the Warren Commission concluded that an expert required a minimum of 2.3 seconds between one shot and the next, demonstrating that one person using that weapon could not have been responsible for all the shots fired.

  The problem with the film is that it was not available to the American people, or even to the FBI, the Secret Service, or the Warren Commission. It had been purchased by LIFE magazine, which declined to share it. More than three months passed before agents of the FBI and the Secret Service, together with representatives of the commission, saw the original film, although still
s from the film had been published in LIFE one week after the assassination.

  When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison indicted Clay Shaw for conspiracy in the assassination, he subpoenaed the film from LIFE. It was a late afternoon when Jim and I were discussing a restaurant for dinner that evening. The city was filled with some of the finest restaurants in the country; but for reasons never discovered by me, Jim preferred the mundane cuisine served at the New Orleans Athletic club, where the aroma of sweaty sneakers and socks was never far away. That night I won the debate, and we ate at Antoine’s. When we returned to his office, Jim stood up abruptly, pointed to a file on his desk and said, “Mark, the Zapruder film is in there.” Jim left the office, adding, “When you leave, just lock up.”

  The next morning, for reasons that I do not wish to recall, Jim’s evidence was back at his desk and I was the owner of one hundred copies of the film. I decided to share this largesse with those who might be interested. I sent copies to Walter Cronkite and other influential media grand pooh-bahs. None of them ever utilized that rare resource.

  My next media interview was with a well-respected personality who broadcast nightly from a radio station. I brought an 8 mm projector and a screen to the studio. He said, “Mark, you know this is not television.” I said, “Nevertheless, we are going to show the Zapruder film to your audience.” He asked how that could be accomplished. I said, “I will play it, and you will see it and narrate it to your audience.” On the air I played the film and he said as the bullet struck the president in the head, “Oh my God, he was hit from the right front. He was driven backward and to his left.” In that manner, the first showing of the Zapruder film was accomplished on a radio station.

  Subsequently, I was invited to speak at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. It is the only liberal arts college with a criminal justice focus in the United States. When the college was founded in 1964, the classes were held at the police academy and it remains a training facility for local, state, and federal law enforcement personnel. I asked the school to announce that I would show the Zapruder film to the present and future criminologists. When I arrived at the school, an attorney approached me and said that he represented Time–Life, the owners of the film, and that I was instructed not to show the film unless I could prove that I was an owner. I responded that I was an owner since I was an American, our president had been killed and we were entitled to all of the evidence. Of course, being a trained lawyer in a large Wall Street law firm, he was unable to follow my clearly logical argument. What he did comprehend, however, was that I was going to announce to the members of the press, who were also present, that two magazines, theoretically responsible for broadcasting the news, TIME magazine and LIFE, ironically a photo magazine, were seeking to suppress the information. He left the hall. I set up the screen and the projector.

  Just before I was introduced by a professor, the corporate lawyer returned to convey a message to me from his clients. “Time–Life has given you permission to broadcast our film this one time today.” I thanked him and said, “Nevertheless, I’m going to show it.”

  Why Did the CIA See John Kennedy as Their Enemy?

  The orthodox method, employed by prosecutors the world over during recent centuries to determine why a crime was committed, is to apprehend the culprit and slam him figuratively or literally against the wall until he reveals his motives and his associates. More civilized societies employ the former method; more barbaric the latter. While Bush and Cheney advocated torture, and those means have been employed by our interrogators the world round, it is a little more difficult to determine at present into which category we fall. But regrettably, fallen we have.

  In the death of President Kennedy, no measures were employed since the prosecutors and their legion of FBI, CIA and local police agents declined to look for the assassins and actively sought to obscure the facts. There was, therefore, no one to question with the exception of Lee Oswald, who had been murdered in the Dallas Police and Courts Building by a friend of the local police, a man who had worked for Hoover’s FBI in Dallas. Absent a confession and with much information destroyed or distorted, we are reduced to using our minds to think about and evaluate the total circumstances and seek explanations here, as we do daily when called upon to make difficult decisions. First the facts.

  President Kennedy was furious with the CIA’s deliberately false reports to him about prospects of victory at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He fired its director, Allen Dulles, and later told his brother Bobby that he planned to dissolve the CIA, create a new agency and place Bobby in charge. Panic, fear and outrage reverberated through the halls at Langley.

  In September 1963, Kennedy decided to end the war in Vietnam and he began to withdraw troops, then called advisors. The CIA strongly opposed those efforts and privately said sardonically, “it may be a dirty little war but it is the only one we’ve got.”

  And he was exploring an amicable agreement with Cuba, over the heated objections and acts of sabotage by the agency.

  The Witnesses

  In any murder investigation, an inquiry is made into those who might have motivation or who profited by it. Cui bono, who benefited, is the starting point. On October 2, 1963, Richard Starnes, an editor of The Washington Daily News and a respected reporter, wrote from Saigon that the CIA had “arrogantly” rejected orders from President Kennedy about ending the war in Vietnam. He said that if an attempted military coup against Kennedy took place, it would be organized by the CIA. He stated that Kennedy was reluctant to confront the agency head on, perhaps because he was “simply afraid they’d kill him if he tried.”

  On that same day, Arthur Krock devoted his daily column, “In the Nation,” in The New York Times, to “The Intra-Administration War in Vietnam.” Krock, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was the nation’s most famous conservative journalist and was referred to as the “Dean of Washington newsmen.” He was very close to President Kennedy. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage, was drafted and written in Krock’s Georgetown home. Krock wrote, quoting a “very high American official,” that “the CIA’s growth was ‘likened to a malignancy’ which the ‘very high official was not sure even the White House could control … any longer.’ ‘If the United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government] it will come from the CIA … ’ The agency ?represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone’ … The CIA may be guilty as charged.” Starnes also reported that President Kennedy had commissioned a major inquiry into the misconduct of the CIA. The Krock and Starnes predictions were published in October 1963. Kennedy was murdered the next month.

  A serious inquiry would have begun by calling Krock and Starnes and exploring the facts surrounding Kennedy’s fear about being overthrown or killed by the CIA. The commission and its FBI and CIA agents stated that they had questioned 25,000 witnesses. Krock was never interviewed, Starnes was never interviewed, and Dulles, who had engaged in the misconduct leading to the threats, had become the leader of the investigation.

  Who did testify? Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House, used his power to prevent the Congress from looking into the murder. He was confident that Oswald was the lone assassin, basing his belief upon testimony from two men, Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers. Those of us who worked in Kennedy’s presidential campaign knew that Kenny and Dave were close to John, called themselves The Irish Mafia,and became presidential assistants after the election. Both men, seated in a car directly behind the Secret Service car that followed the president’s limousine, had testified before the commission and later insisted that all of the shots had been fired from the Texas School Book Depository Building behind the president.

  In his autobiography, published a quarter of a century after the assassination, Tip O’Neill made these admissions for the first time.

  I was never one of those people who had doubts or suspicions about the Warren Commission’s report on the president�
��s death. But five years after Jack died, I was having dinner with Kenny O’Donnell and a few other people at Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant in Boston, and we got to talking about the assassination.

  I was surprised to hear O’Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence.

  “That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he replied. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to.”

  Dave Powers was with us at dinner that night, and his recollection of the shots was the same as O’Donnell’s. Kenny O’Donnell is no longer alive, but during the writing of this book I checked with Dave Powers. As they say in the news business, he stands by his story.

  And so there will always be some skepticism in my mind about the cause of Jack’s death. I used to think that the only people who doubted the conclusions of the Warren Commission were crackpots. Now, however, I’m not so sure.10

  And so almost a quarter of a century after the assassination, one of the leaders of Kennedy’s party decided, in public, for the first time, that the issue was not settled, as Powers and O’Donnell joined the vast majority of the witnesses in Dealey Plaza who had previously sworn or stated that shots had been fired from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. Even the members of the Warren Commission, along with its lawyers and its apologists in the media and elsewhere, agreed that Oswald was not lurking back there. We also learned that Tip, Dave and Kenny knew where to dine on excellent seafood in Boston.