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

by Mark Lane

  The members of the judicial branch were appointed by the president; but they could not become federal judges, either trial judges or appellate judges or justices of the Supreme Court, without the consent of the United States Senate. As a prophylactic attempt to isolate them from political interference, they each served for life, but they could, after a legislative trial, be removed from office for serious misconduct.

  Everywhere one looked one saw the intricate workings of the minds of the geniuses who designed our three-branch government, each acting independently on its own but all also requiring acts in accord with each other.

  Our system of governance has been traduced by the emergence of a fourth branch, the Central Intelligence Agency; a branch which repudiates legislative limits, ignores presidential edicts, and refuses to respond to the decisions of the judiciary. Unlike the other branches, mandated by the founders to be cooperative with the Congress, the president, and the court system, the CIA alone has insisted upon and created its own rules that exempt it from seeking collaboration with the legally authorized branches of government.

  Presidents and vice presidents have been impeached and prosecuted for relatively minor improprieties and crimes when compared with those committed by the CIA. Members of Congress have been censured, prosecuted and imprisoned for transgressions of less significance than those committed by the CIA. Judges have been removed from office for noncriminal conduct. Yet the CIA, which has engaged in acts of unspeakable depravity, operates beyond the reach of the law. Richard Helms, who committed a number of the most egregious criminal acts, was not prosecuted until he blatantly lied to Congress while under oath. After he was indicted, he was permitted to plead to a lesser count, received a suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine, which was paid by “friends” of the CIA. In every state of the United States and in federal prisons as well, there are prisoners who have been convicted of perjury in less serious matters and who are serving substantial sentences. In contrast, the CIA officials responsible for serious crimes leave office with their honors, medals, awards and their pensions intact.

  If citizens bring outrageous conduct by the CIA to the attention of the relevant congressional committees and an investigation ensues with orders to provide the telling documents, the CIA refuses to produce the crucial documents and instead orders the destruction of the documents so that the full nature of its transgressions may never be known. No CIA director or leader has ever been punished for these violations of the law although they were exposed by committees of the United States Senate under the leadership of Sen. Frank Church and Sen. Edward Kennedy.

  Presidents have asserted that the CIA establishes its own policies and refuses direct orders from the president. It has become the most powerful force in the nation. Members of the Congress, including those who sit on intelligence oversight committees, have no clue as to the plans of the CIA. Those who appropriate funds for the agency have no idea how the funds will be expended in the future or how previous funds were spent.

  Almost a month to the day after President Kennedy was assassinated, Harry S. Truman, the president who organized the CIA, wrote that he had expected it “to operate as an arm of the president.” He said that he expected the CIA to restrict its activities to analyzing intelligence reports from various groups including “the departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others (that) are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.” President Truman wrote that he “never had any thought” when he established the CIA “that it would be injected into peace time cloak and dagger operations.”

  Truman added that “complications and embarrassment” that the United States has experienced “are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the president has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.” President Truman concluded that “I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the president” and that the CIA’s “operational duties be terminated.” He concluded, “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”

  In the half century since then, the CIA was never restored and restricted to its original assignment. Instead its powers, its reach, and its independent operational aspects increased to the point where the United States now has two separate air forces. In the past the air forces of each branch of the military were merged for tactical and strategic reasons into one unit, and our nation had for the first time a United States Air Force. However, the CIA has since developed its own air force and now openly competes with the U.S. Air Force for bombing strikes in Afghanistan and claims that it is more effective than its rival.

  On the very day that I write these words, March 18, 2011, The New York Times reported that missiles launched by the CIA in northwest Pakistan struck a meeting of local people gathered to settle a dispute. “The attack, a Pakistani intelligence official said, killed 26 of the 32 people present.” The Times added that “attacks by American drones are immensely unpopular in Pakistan and have been a rallying point for anti-American sentiment.” One resident, the Times reported, said, “It will create resentment among the locals and everyone might turn into suicide bombers.”

  While Truman became the first president alarmed by its actions, he was not the last chief executive to express concern. As the unbridled power of the CIA grew, administrations refused to act to constrain it either through allegiance to the agency (George H. W. Bush, for example, had been its director before he became president) or through fear, just as no president was willing to ask for J. Edgar Hoover’s resignation as director of the FBI although his misconduct over a period of almost half a century was well known. Both intelligence groups maintained potentially embarrassing files and alliances with important members of the Congress and each administration was, of course, comprised of ambitious politicians.

  One young and principled leader told us that all things were possible and then was determined to act. John Kennedy decided to end the war in Vietnam, and after dismantling the CIA he intended to create an intelligence agency similar to the one Truman thought he had initiated, one that would gather information and neither conduct operations nor make policy. The new group was to be led by his brother, then the attorney general, Robert Kennedy. In Langley, where the agency was devoted to power and terrified that its dark secrets might become public knowledge and its leaders prosecuted, alarm metamorphosized into a near stampede. That frenzy gave way to devising a plan to assassinate the president, but only after a scheme to lead investigators to another suspect had been put into place.

  As we have seen, Helms led the effort to sabotage Kennedy’s efforts at rapprochement with Cuba. Kennedy was then constrained to open a secret channel to Khrushchev in the Soviet Union in order to exclude the CIA from further efforts to interfere with and doom his foreign policy initiatives. Kennedy’s instructions to Henry Cabot Lodge, the United States ambassador to Vietnam, about ending the war were not delivered due to CIA opposition to its contents.

  In October 1962, according to two reputable journalists, Arthur Krock in The New York Times and Richard Starnes, the Kennedy White House considered the CIA’s growth like “a malignancy” that President Kennedy might be unable to “control.” The White House had concluded that “If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the government it will come from the CIA.”

  The next month, in an act that the CIA likely considered self-defense, the agency, which had assassinated tens of thousands of its perceived enemies from village leaders to heads of state, assassinated President Kennedy before he could take action against it. In a criminal case where the defendant is prosecuted for murder, the last words of the victim on the crucial question are often admissible.

  Richard Nixon also felt the sting of the CIA. He had insisted that the Watergate episode in
volved the actions of the CIA and asked the agency for assistance. The CIA through Helms, its deputy director in charge of illegal actions, refused to assist the embattled president who was facing impeachment.

  H. R. Haldeman, the chief of staff of the White House, wrote that Nixon had told him, “Well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.” 135 According to Haldeman, Nixon suggested “the involvement of Hunt as a lever” and that “it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further.” According to Haldeman, Nixon “gazed out of the window, then turned to me: ‘When you get the CIA people in say, “Look, the problem is that this will open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing again.”’

  Haldeman said that just before he met Helms, “Nixon expanded on this theme: ‘Tell them if it gets out, it’s going to make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it’s likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs, which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA.’” Nixon and Helms both knew of E. Howard Hunt’s involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy.

  Nixon then sent Haldeman to meet with Helms. Haldeman explained in his book what transpired.

  So we had failed in our one previous attempt to obtain CIA cooperation, and now in Ehrlichman’s office on June 23, 1972, the CIA was stonewalling again. “Not connected.” “No way.” Then I played Nixon’s trump card. “The president asked me to tell you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs, and if it blows up, the Bay of Pigs may be blown … ”

  Turmoil in the room, Helms gripping the arms of his chair leaning forward and shouting, “the Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.”

  Silence. I just sat there. I was absolutely shocked by Helms’ violent reaction. Again I wondered, what was such dynamite in the Bay of Pigs story? Finally, I said, “I’m just following my instructions, Dick. This is what the president told me to relay to you.”

  Haldeman then discussed that Nixon had been sending a message in code to Helms since “in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.” The violent eruption by Helms when he learned that the president was threatening to reveal that the CIA had assassinated President Kennedy demonstrates without question that Helms clearly understood the coded message.

  Haldeman went on to write, “After Kennedy was killed the CIA launched a fantastic cover-up.” He wrote as well, “In a chilling parallel to their cover-up at Watergate, the CIA literally erased any connection between Kennedy’s assassination and the CIA.”

  No president except Kennedy had acted upon Truman’s advice that the CIA’s actions were detrimental to a democracy and had to be restrained. When Lyndon B. Johnson became president as the result of the murder, he demonstrated that he understood its meaning. From less than 20,000 advisors in Vietnam and very few American deaths there, his escalation began at once. In time 500,000 troops were sent to what was no longer a little war and more than 50,000 Americans died there. Johnson allowed the CIA to have its greatly expanded war and to increase its range of power.

  Johnson appointed a commission to investigate the assassination and although its formal title was The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, he later stated that he did not believe its central conclusion that Oswald was the lone assassin and that he did believe there had been a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Lawyers for the Warren Commission later stated that they had been misled by the CIA about the facts. The CIA also refused to provide relevant documents to the Warren Commission even when requested to do so. The CIA had achieved status as a major branch of the government and declined to operate cooperatively with the three other branches.

  The available evidence proves that in late September and early October 1963, weeks before the assassination, the CIA had made plans to provide documentation that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. The agency had chosen the victims, Kennedy and Oswald, for the crime that had not taken place, demonstrating beyond conjecture that it was the architect of the murder. Choosing the proposed culprit, for a crime that has not occurred, leaves little doubt about its sponsor.

  The entire complex plan to blame Oswald for a crime that he did not commit, a crime that had not even taken place when the CIA began to lay a trail that would inexorably lead to an innocent man, involved cables to Mexican police authorities, instructions from the CIA to its Mexico City assets in the police department there to arrest and silence a witness at the Cuban embassy, a citizen of Mexico, who would not accept the false CIA legend and subsequently the use of demagoguery to present a false legend to the Warren Commission as fact. Each action by the CIA, including its destruction of its own files when an inquiry began, is a building block in the case against the CIA for its part in the assassination.

  Under the direction of one of the highest-ranking CIA officials, David Atlee Phillips, based in Mexico City, an elaborate scheme was devised. Oswald, it was said, journeyed to Mexico City to meet with the KGB official at the Soviet embassy there, an official who, the CIA stated, was responsible for assassinations and acts of terror in the Western Hemisphere. Oswald then went to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City so that it could be said that he was arranging for a flight to Cuba from Mexico after he killed the president. The CIA, it would assert, had photographs of Oswald at the Soviet embassy and taped recordings of his discussions with the Soviets there. A tame Warren Commission accepted the story and stated that the story provided adequate motivation for the murder.

  In fact Oswald had never been to Mexico City, as the evidence reveals. The CIA had no photograph of Oswald at the Soviet embassy or anywhere else in Mexico City. The tape recording of “Oswald” speaking to personnel at the Soviet embassy was proven to be a CIA fabrication. The voice of the man claiming to be Oswald was not Lee Harvey Oswald; it was the voice of an imposter chosen by the CIA. The FBI agents who interviewed Oswald agreed that his voice was not on the recording.

  After he had committed perjury before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, David Phillips, the mastermind of the CIA scheme to implicate Oswald, stated publicly that Oswald had not visited Mexico City.

  The evidence, all of it including eyewitness accounts, medical testimony, photographs and motion picture films, shows that the fatal shot came from behind a wooden fence on the grassy knoll. It also demonstrates that two men were on the sixth floor of the depository building where a rifle was planted and later discovered.

  A man, likely the assassin, was emerging from behind the fence when a Dallas Police officer pointed a weapon at him as the likely suspect. Two men, strangers to the book depository, were seen leaving that building and were also stopped and questioned. Each of the three men escaped arrest by providing legitimate Secret Service credentials and each stated that he was in fact a Secret Service agent.

  The Secret Service is part of the Department of the Treasury, which prints millions of documents each year including our paper money. It did not prepare the credentials for the Secret Service White House detail for November 22 and November 23. The Secret Service also confirmed that the only agents in Dallas were those in the motorcade; none were behind the fence and none were at the book depository.

  Sidney Gottlieb was the director of a top secret group within the CIA engaged in methods that rivaled the Nazi concentration camp experiments, certainly not in scope or reach, but similar in depravity. He murdered Americans in the United States and tortured Vietnamese prisoners of war and then executed them and burned their bodies to cover his crimes. He prepared and carried poisoned pills to kill a head of state and originated plans to kill other leaders of their own countries. He never engaged in pure science. Each of his actions was devoted to some secret and illegal mission.

  How did the men acquire the credentials that provided a free pass for them? Those credentials were prepared and distributed by Gottlieb, the CIA’s leading expert for planning and executing the assassinations of heads of state.

  Postscrip
t

  There is more than sufficient evidence for the attorney general of the United States and for United States attorneys serving in various jurisdictions to impanel a grand jury and consider asking for an indictment of the CIA and its leaders.

  The failure of nerve and the lack of devotion to principle are all that prevents those sworn officers of the court from acting in accordance with the law and their obligations.

  If all that is now required is an accusation—I accuse.

  ML

  Notes

  128. Harry S. Truman, “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence,” The Washington Post, (December 22, 1963), p. A11.

  129. It is never pleasant to learn about the depravity of your fellow countrymen. When the practice is organized, continued, and authorized at high levels of government, it is necessary that we examine the facts and take steps to prevent a reoccurrence. Our nation is indebted to John Marks for his scholarship and courage in uncovering the CIA outrages referred to as MKULTRA. His book,The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” sets forth many of the details. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair, authors of Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, have also contributed to our knowledge. (Senators Frank Church and the Select Committee on Intelligence and Senator Edward Kennedy with his Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research properly met the political challenges.) This chapter has drawn many of the relevant facts from those efforts.

  130. Memorandum from the CIA Inspector General to the Director, 7/26/63. RETAIN?

  131. I spoke to groups of GIs at numerous occasions on United States Army bases, or in front of them, in opposition to the war. After one speech a GI handed me a note and then disappeared into the crowd. After the meeting I read it. It said simply, “Camp Detrick.” At a subsequent rally, removed in time and place from the earlier meeting, Barbara Dane, a fine organizer and singer, was given a note by a military officer. It was addressed to me and it said only “Camp Detrick.” A similar occurrence took place weeks later. We were puzzled by the reference. There was no active GI project at Camp Detrick to my knowledge, but I located a couple of anti-war GIs and asked if they knew of any special activity at Detrick. They did not.