by Mark Lane
As is the case with most authors, I have not been concerned with the politics of the publishing house that agrees to publish my work. In 1967, Taurus Ediciones, S.A., with offices in Madrid, Spain, published Juicio Precipitado [Rush to Judgment].
Francisco Franco had seized control of Spain with the help of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in 1939. He was still the dictator when Taurus published Juicio Precipitado, and he continued on for almost another decade until his death.
An editor with the Spanish publisher, no doubt closely associated with the government, met with me. He advised me that he and his government were aware of the threats I had received in the United States and of my own government’s expressed hostility to my efforts to uncover the facts. He concluded that if at anytime I had the need to seek sanctuary, Spain would be willing to welcome me. He reminded me that even the great Zola was forced to flee France for looking into and publishing information about the Dreyfus case. I thanked him for the offer and assured him that I was quite certain that I would not ever feel compelled to leave my country. I added, however, that if the circumstances required it, I would gratefully accept his offer.
I was bemused by the fact that while Falangist Spain published my work, the Soviet Union refused to do so and all of the countries allied with it during the Cold War, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania and others outside of Europe, also refused. During the period after the assassination until the agreement with the British publisher Bodley Head, I was without funds and an offer from any country to accept my work and pay even a nominal fee would have been greatly appreciated–but no such offer came.
I had asked my British publishers to attempt to have the book published in every country. They tried, but the Soviet bloc was adamant. The questions that lingered—did the Soviets oppose my inquiry? And if so, why?—may have been answered later in one of the top secret documents I received from the government in 1975.
The minutes of a Warren Commission secret session revealed that the CIA had told Chief Justice Earl Warren a legend. It stated that Lee Oswald, who was the assassin, had met with the leader of the KGB in charge of assassinations in the United States while they were in Mexico City. Oswald, according to the story, then went back to the United States and killed the president. The CIA also told Warren that the Soviet Union was not involved in the assassination but that if the facts were revealed Americans would believe that the USSR was complicit and World War III might result. Warren then decided to state that Oswald was the lone assassin in order to prevent that catastrophe. The fact that Oswald was not involved in the assassination and that he had not been in Mexico City was not known to Warren; he relied upon the CIA and enlisted in the crusade to save civilization.
The theory, concededly unsupported by documents, that the CIA had also advised the Soviet Union of its precarious position, and cautioned them against asserting that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate the president, might account for that country’s reluctance to publish books challenging the commission, including Rush to Judgment.
A Bodyguard of Lies
“Truth is so precious that she should always
be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
—Winston Churchill
Churchill was speaking of conditions in wartime. Unfortunately, the spy organizations consider themselves to always be at war, and too often against the rights of their own citizens. Since World War II the United States has been involved in a series of wars, some never ending. Yet even during the pacific periods, when our country was at peace, the CIA was at war. To understand that is to comprehend the CIA’s mindset.
As was the case with Rush to Judgment, the intelligence agencies in the United States during the early 1990s were concerned about my manuscript Plausible Denial. Since the book demonstrated that the Central Intelligence Agency was complicit in the arrangements to assassinate President Kennedy, that Agency opposed its publication through its numerous assets. Their reach did not extend to a very small publisher, Thunder’s Mouth Press, but they no doubt felt confident that it was not likely to reach a wide audience.
That prediction was incorrect and the reviews were far more favorable than I could have predicted given the evidence cited in the book and the inescapable conclusion of the CIA’s guilt. The Los Angeles Times wrote that the “evidence for Hunt’s complicity is quite persuasive.” The San Francisco Chronicle asserted that Plausible Denial was “a convincing indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency as the primary conspirator behind the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963.” TIME magazine said that the book “targets high-level CIA figures as the plotters behind the assassination” and added its own comment that “20 years of investigations have shown that the CIA was no stranger to complicity in assassinations.” Kirkus Reviews concluded that the book “sounds like the last word on the assassination.”
Of course that suggestion or hope could not be fulfilled. The CIA, with its unsupervised multi-million-dollar budget and with its bought assets in the media, was certain to respond. That agency had been engaged in efforts to destroy me just for raising a question about the Warren Commission’s magic bullet theory. Plausible Denial went far beyond that simple analysis and led to the doorstep in Langley. An awful and mighty fabricated response was inevitable. It was predictable that it would come from a person on the CIA payroll, unwilling to admit who his masters were.
The CIA, in a now fully exposed cover story, stated that E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate felon and a CIA operative who made no secret of his hatred for President Kennedy, was not in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Only Hunt and the CIA made that claim. However, Hunt had told several contradictory stories under oath about his whereabouts that day. Eyewitnesses, including those who had been employed by the CIA, later stated that they saw Hunt in Dallas on the day Kennedy was assassinated. There is testimony that Hunt was the paymaster for the assassination and that he was seen in Dallas paying the participants.
Hunt had stated that he was home with his children watching the tragic events on television for seventy-two hours starting just after the assassination. Hunt’s own adult children refused to testify at his trial in support of that false story. Not one was willing to come forward to support that alibi. A jury sitting in the United States District Court found against Hunt and his alibi. I wrote about the trial and cited the relevant evidence in Plausible Denial.43
After the trial, Hunt constructively admitted his role in the assassination. In an interview with a reporter for the Financial Times of Canada, Hunt stated that he would reveal the entire story of his complicity if paid several million dollars so that he could leave the country and move to a nation without extradition agreements with the United States. And finally in a deathbed confession to his son St. John Hunt, he admitted his role in the assassination of the president.
Christopher Andrew has offered himself as an objective historian, author, and host of television programs.44He has neglected to state that he is a much-prized asset of the CIA. Andrew lectures for the CIA, and makes a living writing books for the CIA that are favorable to the CIA and are featured and promoted on the CIA’s official website, cia.gov. He also is paid to write reviews denouncing books that are critical of the CIA.
While he proclaims that he is a historian, he appears primarily to be a CIA transmission belt; he obtains information from his associates in the intelligence communities and passes it along to an unsuspecting public as the result of his own research. He is British and the only non-American to have been trusted by the CIA to have served on the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Future of the U.S. Intelligence Community. An English history professor who has access to top secret information that most Americans don’t even suspect exists, and is helping to determine the future of the CIA and other spy organizations, raises questions about his independence and objectivity that he is unwilling to answer.
Andrew admits that he read Plausible Denial. Nevertheless, Andrew wrote that Hunt �
��had been wrongly accused of being in Dallas on the day of the assassination.”45 In a book filled with citations and footnotes, many of them misleading or inaccurate, Andrew offered no citation to the record, no fact and no basis for that statement. The only truthful citation could have been “the CIA told me to write that.” Since Hunt was in Dallas there could be no evidence to the contrary.
Andrew also states that I had been a successful writer, but during “the late 1960s and early 1970s” I was less successful due to the fact that the “most popular books were now those that exposed some of the excesses of the conspiracy theorists.”46 Those assertions are false. Andrew cites only Case Closed, a book that received national attention when it was published in 1993 and that Andrew apparently believed had a retroactive impact upon me during the 1960s and 1970s. Subsequently when the author of Case Closed was charged with misstatements, he retained me to represent him, publicly explaining that he believed that had Oswald lived and if I served as his counsel he would have been acquitted.
Andrew neglects to mention that in 1991 Plausible Denial was a New York Times best seller. While facts are not determinative for this historian, for those who prefer fabrications created in Langley when presented through the filter of an academic English accent, Andrew is your man.
Vasili Mitrokhin, coauthor of The Sword and the Shield with Andrew, was born in Central Russia in 1922, and joined the MGB during 1948. In 1953 the name of the Soviet secret police organization was changed to the KGB. Mitrokhin was particularly inept and was reprimanded by his superiors in 1956; he was then re-graded for his unsatisfactory performance and designated as unfit for operational tasks. He was sent to the archives as a librarian.
In 1992 he met with CIA officers in Riga, Latvia, showed them some handwritten notes and asked for payment and a safe and luxurious asylum in the United States. He told a story so fanciful that even the imaginative and eager CIA officers considered it to be an entirely fraudulent effort. His documents were examined and the CIA rejected them.
He said that his pages were documents that he had created, at first by looking at KGB files starting in 1972, remembering what he had seen and then, when he returned home, working from his memory, he wrote down all of the specifics including names, code names, dates and all important facts. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm might have been impressed, but unlike the desperate Mitrokhin, they honestly entitled their work Fairy Tales. Although in an office surrounded by copy machines, he had not copied one single page of any Soviet document, preferring to rely upon his memory.
Later he claimed that he had spent almost all day, every day, copying the files onto pieces of paper in his own handwriting. He then, he said, smuggled them out of the building, knowing that if he was caught he might be executed. Apparently he never thought of using a copy machine to print one page to substantiate his claims.
The rules of the records room that the KGB called the Archives required that no one person could alone have access to any files; that employee was required to have another person accompany him while examining records.
How Mitrokhin managed to spend so many hours alone with the records for a very long time, complete no other task that had been assigned to him and escape notice is not explained, perhaps because it is inexplicable.
When the CIA reviewed Mitrokhin’s claims, they were struck by the absence of one page of proof that real documents existed. The CIA rejected his notes, his proposed deal and his story. Scholars and experts in the field asked pertinent questions that received no answer. How could Mitrokhin devote almost all of his time to memorizing documents and later hand-copying documents? Had he no other duties? Didn’t his supervisors note the absence of the work that he was being paid for?
Mitrokhin kept shopping around for a lucrative asylum opportunity. He approached British intelligence, MI6, a group both less meticulous and apparently more imaginative than the CIA, and an organization that had particular experience in exploiting a similar opportunity to its own advantage. He neglected to tell that spy organization that the CIA had rejected his offer.
The CIA and Andrew assert that Mitrokhin “re-copied” his entire “archive” during seven years of silence after he met with the CIA and British intelligence officers, during which time he revised his notes apparently to order. It also provided time for the agency to find an author both loyal and avaricious enough to publish blatantly false allegations.
Questions about Andrew arose as well. How did it come about that he had entered into an exclusive and lucrative deal with Rupert Murdoch to publish the material that made serious, and again unproven, charges against Murdoch’s enemies in the British Labour Party. Murdoch and his associates were less careful in demeaning Michael Foot, the leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983, claiming he knowingly accepted cash from KGB agents. Foot immediately filed an action for libel against Murdoch and his newspapers. He was successful and won an award for very substantial damages.
His own literary agent describes Christopher Andrew as the “in-house historian for MI5.” Andrew’s enrollment in the Security Service drew criticism from authentic historians and other commentators who questioned his impartiality.
One victim wrote sardonically that Andrew was the “loyal servant” of the “Ministry of Truth.” A member of the House of Lords questioned the handling of the Mitrokhin material. Another member of the Parliament asked why the files remained secret and noted the “propensity to exaggerate, especially when there was the possibility of a financial return on the publications of their books.”
Andrew published false information about me in The Sword and the Shield. Andrew apparently claims that a payment, $500, was made to me by a Canadian lawyer for airfare to a conference of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers in Budapest and that the sum had in some mysterious way been provided by the KGB.47
Secondly, according to Andrew and his lawyers, a Russian journalist was based in New York City starting in 1966. Apparently, Andrew claims that during that period some unnamed close friend working with me gave me $1,500 to encourage me to write a book that I had already written, obtained a publisher for, and was editing in London. When Andrew published the false information, I contacted a leading London law firm, Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, solicitors, who demanded that the publisher withdraw its false allegations. Counsel for the publishers responded that they never thought I had done anything wrong and that Andrew had stated quite clearly that, “Lane had not been told the source of the money” and that if it was given to me it came from “a close friend” of mine. The statement was an outright lie, but it was carefully structured so that it could not be the basis for a lawsuit since it accused me of no wrong-doing. I suspect that someone at the CIA had clued Andrew in on how to make false, but protected, statements. For example, Andrew claimed that Harry Hopkins, one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s closest advisors and the man largely responsible for the creation of the New Deal, the cornerstone of the domestic recovery plan for America, knowingly passed secret information to the Soviets and money to the Communist Party of the United States. Those absurd charges were clearly defamatory, but again Andrew was insulated. He made those allegations only after Hopkins had died and there could be no legal action taken.
The Russian journalist may have been in New York, but at that time I was not. I also was meeting with editors of the Bodley Head, an established, conservative British publishing firm that had agreed to publish Rush to Judgment. With me were Deirdre Griswold and Michael Lester; both helped with additional research and Lester served as the typist for some edits.
I was living in a flat on Kings Road, near World’s End, owned by Lord Russell’s peace foundation while I completed editing my book. Many folks visited me there including officers of Russell’s foundation, Paul McCartney, documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio and representatives of numerous publishers and newspapers. It was only after I completed my work and the publisher had signed a contract for world rights to my book that I returned to New York. T
hat trip was arranged because the English publishers had negotiated a deal with Holt, Rinehart and Winston for American rights to the book. Both the American and British editions were published in 1966.
I was very encouraged with the success of the book, and I was not in need of any encouragement from the KGB. I also had been given a couple of advances and was not in need of $1,500, and no friend or associate would have thought it appropriate to offer me any money and none did. It was at that time, as we have seen, that the CIA sought to subvert my work. I also maintained records of all funds that were donated. One sum was large enough to permit me to buy an airplane ticket to Dallas from New York. It was given to me directly by Corliss Lamont, a well-known and politically active philanthropist and leader of the American Humanist Association. He also made major financial contributions to Harvard and Columbia. The second-largest contribution was from Woody Allen. It was fifty dollars.
Mitrokhin had told the CIA of his files during 1992. Plausible Denial, demonstrating the CIA’s complicity in the assassination, was published in 1991. Yet it was not until 1999 that the allegation that the KGB had encouraged my efforts was published for the first time. The CIA was uncharacteristically patient for a very long time, if that agency is to be believed. It had, in the past, organized intricate assassination plans against dissenters, including heads of state, in far less time.
The normal channel regularly observed by the Soviet Union to “encourage” authors was to publish their works in the Soviet Union and in its numerous dependent states, as I have observed. No book that I have ever written was ever published in any of the Soviet bloc countries.
Andrew and Mitrokhin stated that the KGB gave the money to a person who was a friend of mine who then may have given it to me. There was no such transaction and Mitrokhin and Andrew did not identify the name of the “friend.” They could not have fabricated the “friend” without my being able to deal directly with that falsity. When I demonstrated that I had kept records of all contributions, Max Holland, another CIA media asset who spread the story, then added that the money could have been given to me in very small amounts. Perhaps when I was discussing the case each night for months from the stage of a small theatre in New York, a couple of hundred Russian agents, wearing long leather coats, slipped in unnoticed and each paid a dollar for admission. It would have been easier for the Soviet Union to publish my book, as they had done for so many other American authors they supported. In an effort to put the story to rest, I wrote to Andrew shortly after the book was published and asked for a response: