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

by Mark Lane

  [This statement was written in 2002. At the time Holland was posing as an authentic contributing editor to the Nation. His ties to the CIA were not acknowledged or known. They are discussed here in the chapter entitled “The CIA and the Media.”—MLJ]

  Contacts with Totalitarian Structures

  When the CIA imposes sanctions upon a perceived opponent, whether the subject is an American or not, it is often quite unpleasant. Murder, torture, subterfuge and defamation appear to be among the chosen weapons. I have been fortunate since only the last options have been employed in my case.

  Before I wrote Rush to Judgment the CIA evidenced little interest in me. Those halcyon days began to fade when I sought a publisher for that work. Unpublished books apparently are not a matter of major concern. Visits to prospective publishers by intelligence assets made it impossible for me to find one in the United States for some time; only after a British publisher agreed to print it did an American company acquiesce.

  My journey to London to edit and revise the first book I had ever written brought me in contact with Benjamin Sonnenberg, Jr., an American living there. He had volunteered to the publisher for that task. He wanted no payment, just influence.

  His efforts were destructive and I finally asked him to withdraw after I had rejected all of his counterproductive offerings. Years later he wrote his own book, Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy.38 The confession that most intrigued me was his admission that he had been working for the CIA while he sought to edit my book. He provided details, including the name of his CIA contact and discussions that they had about Rush to Judgment.

  Of course, the CIA was ready with a response if one was needed. Never mentioning its own role in seeking to alter and then suppress Rush to Judgment, it later said that the KGB was somehow involved. My history with brutalitarian organizations, including the Soviet Union, its satellite nations, and the CIA, has demonstrated my animosity towards and distrust of all of them. For their part the Soviets and their friends have been displeased with my efforts to assist those who have struggled against their lack of democracy and due process, and have made that clear on more than one occasion.

  During April 1964, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) was holding its convention in Prague. I was invited to speak about the investigation into the assassination of John Kennedy.

  My government was interested in what I had to say, although I had made my case quite publicly at scores of colleges and law schools in the United States at which, on each occasion, special agents of the FBI and local police intelligence agents were present.39 Among those reports were documents showing that the FBI, and agents of the Department of Justice and of the United States Department of State reported upon my remarks in Budapest. The legal advisor to the Department of State, Abram Chayes, sent a secret letter with copies of two telegrams, one dated “April 6, 1964 at 10:13 AM” and the other “April 7, 1964 at 11:29 AM” to the Warren Commission on April 9, 1964, about my speech. I can only conclude that not much else was happening in the world at that time.

  The rivalry between the Soviet Union and China was rapidly becoming vitriolic. That year Mao stated that there had been a counterrevolution and that capitalism had replaced socialism in the USSR. Both countries were represented at the IADL convention.

  A delegation of Chinese lawyers called upon me at my hotel room to warn me that I should not speak at the meeting. “The assassination of your president is an irrelevancy and we do not care who gets the credit,” the spokesman said, adding that if I spoke his delegation would walk out and that I would be greatly embarrassed. I suggested that their. rejection would not harm my image in the United States and provided him with the name and room number of the reporter from The New York Times who was covering the event.

  I spoke to an attentive audience of lawyers and judges from numerous countries, including France, England, Germany and other Western democracies. A motion to conduct an international inquiry passed overwhelmingly with only the Chinese lawyers abstaining.

  Before I left the United States for the conference, a lawyer from Canada had provided me with the name of a man he said was a political prisoner in the East who had been held incommunicado and denied the right to counsel. He asked me to talk with the representative of the Justice Ministry about the matter. I tried several times to talk with the official, but he never responded to the messages, which surprised me since most of the officials there had been very supportive and generous with their time.

  On the next to last evening that I planned to spend in Budapest, I attended a social event for all of the delegates and speakers. I saw the official and introduced myself to him through his interpreter. He smiled, shook my hand and said that he had appreciated my speech.

  He remained smiling as I began to raise the matter of the political prisoner, but when I mentioned his name, even before my request to see the prisoner was translated, the smile was replaced with a scowl. He responded that it was rude of me to talk politics at a social celebration; I agreed but said that my efforts to meet at his office had brought no response. He stated that neither I nor any other lawyer would be permitted to see the prisoner, that I had overstepped the hospitality that had been shown me, and that I had likely violated some statute. He wheeled away and left the party as his entourage followed him.

  I returned to my hotel, and with the assistance of the concierge, I booked a flight to New York leaving the next morning. The FBI report stated that I had left Budapest for a “destination unknown.” Fortunately the pilot and each of the passengers knew where we were headed. In fact I had never seen an airplane ticket without the name of the city where the pilot had intended to land. I thought then that the secret police of many countries had much in common.

  That same year, a journalist from Czechoslovakia covering the United Nations interviewed me about the assassination of President Kennedy. He was intrigued by the facts and asked if he could meet with me for a series of additional interviews. I had some free time since the American media was demonstrating little interest in the subject. I visited him at a modest apartment near the U.N. that he, his wife and their young son occupied. We had dinner followed by an in-depth interview that continued for hours.

  Later, he called to tell me that the interview was to be published as a booklet in his country. Still later he called to tell me that he had received an award for his work. Subsequently, he was recalled to Prague.

  On January 5, 1968, Prague Spring arrived, early for the calendar but not too soon for the residents who had been dominated by the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. The enterprising journalist who had interviewed me was an activist in the liberation movement led by Alexander Dubcek, who began to remove restraints upon the media, permit free speech and unrestricted travel.

  During the night of August 20, 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and its allies began and continued until the next day. Two thousand tanks led 200,000 foreign troops and before nightfall on August 21 the country was occupied. Later, Dubcek was replaced and his reforms abolished.

  I made one visit to the country and met with a number of students who told me that I was under surveillance by the secret police. Unable to locate the address of the journalist who had interviewed me, I asked several writers for his contact information. A government official told me that he was on vacation and would not return to Prague for several weeks, long after I had left the country.

  That evening an author called to tell me that the journalist I was looking for was in prison charged with a violation of the Brezhnev Doctrine40 by suggesting that there should be “democratization.” He said that the journalist’s wife would like to meet with me and asked if I would be willing to see her. I said that of course I would.

  Several hours later there was a knock at my door. A young man whom I did not recognize asked if he could come in. He was, he explained, the journalist’s son; I had met him in New York when he was a child. He said that his mother wan
ted me to know that it might not be safe for me to meet her but that she was waiting a block away if I still wanted to see her. I put on my coat and he led me to her.

  She embraced me and said that of all the friends they had in America I was the only one willing to see her after her husband was arrested. I told her that I belonged to no political party where I was subject to discipline. Actually I was a member of no organized political party at that time; I was an enrolled Democrat.

  I asked what I could do to help. She said that some of the members of the Czech government respected the work I had done regarding the assassination of President Kennedy. Could I ask them to release her husband and could I, after returning home, ask people I knew to write to the government on behalf of her husband? I agreed to do whatever I could, but I assured her that I had little influence with any government.

  The next day I met with the official who had said that the journalist was on vacation. I petitioned for his release from prison. He asked when I was leaving the country and suggested that I should not attempt to extend my stay.

  The architecture, the food and, above all, the students were, in that order, historic, delicious, intelligent and curious. Nevertheless, I left at the assigned date and have not returned.

  When I arrived home, I sent letters and telegrams and made telephone calls and visits to enlist influential people to join in the effort for freedom. Later, almost certainly for reasons unrelated to my efforts, I was told that the journalist had been released.

  Years later, in 1972, I received an unusual request. The letter was postmarked Leipzig, Germany, and it invited me to be the one American judge at the Leipzig International Film Festival that had been held annually for the previous decades. It was the largest festival in Germany and the second largest in Europe. I thought they had made a mistake and confused me with someone else as I was not a filmmaker, not a director, and not even a regular moviegoer.

  My documentary film Rush to Judgment, although it had won some awards, was a simple work whose strength was not in its artistry or direction; it had simply permitted the eyewitnesses to the Kennedy assassination to speak to the American people. It was that film that apparently impressed the organizers of the Leipzig festival. I accepted the invitation.

  In four days the judges watched and graded more than one hundred films. Mercifully, most of them were short. I was also eager to visit the remarkable architecture of the city. I visited the University of Leipzig, founded in 1409, almost a century before Columbus lost his way to India and found America, but the rest of the time was spent in rooms watching documentary films.

  We each were given a scorecard, and we each studied the films with others in their assigned categories. Then we posted our score sheets on a bulletin board where the other judges could see them. I appreciated that method for its transparency, which indicated that the judges were going to make the award decisions without political interference. My impression proved to be wholly inaccurate.

  There were a number of important films shown, but the individual merits of some were lost for me since they were all compressed into a wearingly short and intensive period and projected one after the other. Thoughts of two films, though, still remain with me. One was quite political and the other seemingly without a specific viewpoint but all the more political for its exquisite simplicity.

  The first was called The Road; it had been translated from Vietnamese to German to English. It was a remarkable bit of history. The war in Vietnam was raging, and the United States Air Force was determined to prevent supplies, including weapons, ammunition, food and medicine, from reaching the National Liberation Front (NLF) fighters in the south of Vietnam. The road, called “The Ho Chi Minh Trail,” the lifeline for the NLF, was bombed and strafed daily and attacked with napalm and Agent Orange, an insidious defoliant.41

  At night hundreds of volunteers, most of them women, carried large rocks to fill the craters left by the bombs and then covered them with earth so that vehicles could pass. There was no single road; there were many paths through the jungle, hidden by the triple canopy of trees and other vegetation. The daily raids of napalm and Agent Orange were designed to kill those who lived in the area and to expose the paths.

  Some of our finest academic institutions, including Stanford University, helped to develop the “people sniffer” used by the Chemical Corps to locate the enemy. The Army Chemical Review much later revealed that “the detection methods used to locate people depended on effluents unique to humans … Ammonia, when combined with hydrochloric acid, a particulate, is detectable in a cloud chamber. Using these processes, scientists at General Electric developed people sniffer detection capabilities for the Chemical Corps … the people sniffer was a helicopter-mounted configuration called the XM3 airborne personnel detector … used almost daily in LOH-6, OH-58, and UH-1 helicopters.”

  The response from the NLF was less expensive and far less sophisticated. They hung buckets or helmets of mud and urine in trees far away from their location and the American forces dropped napalm, Agent Orange and anti-personnel cluster bombs42 on deserted areas while women repaired the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  At one point in the film the camera went far off message as it recorded trees, the earth, the sky and then nothing. The photographer had been killed by enemy fire. Within a moment another person picked the camera up and continued filming. It was a historic document and all who saw it experienced an emotional response.

  I nominated it for first prize in its category. I noticed that other judges had given the film high marks in their written and posted scorecards. Before the balloting began, not secret but blatantly open, we were addressed by the East German bureaucrat in charge of the festival. He said, without explaining, that the film was not going to win a prize. He proposed another film, a well-made documentary about working people in the Soviet Union, in my view a more pedestrian subject. It became clear that the Sino-Soviet split had its implication in Leipzig. The Soviet leaders were concerned that a victorious Vietnam might become an ally of China.

  I argued for the film and finally, although not another judge supported me, our official leader decided to withdraw his objection. The film was awarded a prize and most of the judges, except for a fairly well-known English author, declined to speak to me thereafter, apparently by agreement.

  The author invited me to dinner. I thought he had been assigned to me as a mission. He began, “Mr. Lane, the government here said that they knew they were taking a chance with you; they knew you were an independent and not subject to any particular political discipline. But they thought that you knew how things worked.”

  I asked him to explain “how things worked.” He said, “If you just go along you will be invited back next year as the American film judge, as we all have been several times.” I answered that I did want to see more of historic Leipzig, but the price was too high.

  He then went directly to the point. “We are both authors. We know that the Soviet Union and its allies do not abide by international conventions regarding copyright laws. They publish my books in the Soviet Union and several of the other countries. True, I cannot negotiate advances or royalties but they are fairly generous and they keep on printing my works. They support my work and they do it quite legitimately, and I am willing to accept their judgment in other matters. They also publish many American authors.”

  He pointed out that although Rush to Judgment was successful in the United States and Western Europe, it was never published in the Soviet Union. The reason, he said, is that I had not demonstrated sufficient respect for them, and I was repeating that mistake at the film festival. I thanked him for his candor. I suspect, but I do not know, that he likely reported back that his mission had been accomplished.

  The next day the judges met again to award prizes in other categories. My favorite then was a very low-budget film made by film students in a class in East Germany. It was about a statue of Kathe Kollwitz in East Berlin. She was a German artist who expressed her concern for the victi
ms of hunger, war and poverty through her drawings, woodcuts, etchings and lithographs. During World War I, when an appeal for children and elderly men to join the armed forces of Germany was made, she courageously opposed her government and said, “There has been enough of dying. Let not another man fall.”

  I had long admired her work and her perspective. The film began with a statue of Kollwitz seated in a chair. Citizens sitting on park benches or strolling through the park noticed that some children had climbed up onto her lap and were touching the statue’s face. Other kids were sitting on the arm of the statue.

  The pedestrians and those reposing on benches were asked about the scene. On camera they proclaimed that it was insulting to allow children to climb all over the sculpture. Each had a suggestion to keep the children away. A sign should be posted. An officer should be on duty. A fence, over which the children cannot climb, should be erected.

  The film ended with a brief interview of the artist who had created the statue. He was asked what he had in mind. He simply stated that Kathe so loved children that he sculpted a seated figure with flat planes so that children could climb up onto it and sit in her lap and touch her face.

  The controlling official said that the film I had nominated was not “political,” followed by the dreaded and dismissive proclamation that it “lacked socialist reality.” I observed that it was quite political, but I conceded that it was not as political as his disparagement of it. There was a period of embarrassed silence. No other judge expressed an agreement with me although several had previously given the film high marks on the posted scorecards.

  I was never invited back to be the American judge at the Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival.

  No book written by me has ever been published in the Soviet Union. The Soviet bureaucrats were apparently no more enamored of an independent voice than were their counterparts in Washington.