The DRE, in the words of an Agency memorandum, had been “conceived, created, and funded by the CIA.” By 1963, it funded the DRE to the tune of $51,000 a month—or $385,000 at today’s rates—regularly delivered to the group’s leaders in a brown paper bag. A problem had arisen, however. Not satisfied with a psychological warfare role, the group’s leaders insisted on taking the paramilitary fight against Castro—even when doing so conflicted with Kennedy administration policy. A new CIA case officer, appointed in the months before the President’s assassination, had the task of trying to steer the DRE away from military activity and towards political action and intelligence collection.
This fit well with the way the exiles of the DRE handled Lee Oswald in New Orleans. There was the street confrontation, a visit to Oswald’s apartment by a DRE man posing as a fellow supporter of Castro, and a call for congressional investigation of Oswald.12 Then, within hours of Oswald’s arrest after the assassination, there was a DRE information blitz to hammer home the message that the killer was a leftist supporter of Fidel Castro.
The CIA did not inform the Warren Commission that it had created and subsidized the DRE, even though the group’s connection to Oswald was potentially of great significance.13 The Agency’s behavior toward the House Assassinations Committee in the matter, meanwhile, amounted to downright obstruction.
The Committee pursued its numerous requests to the CIA under a working arrangement negotiated by Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, an arrangement that—in theory—offered better access to Agency material than that enjoyed by any previous congressional probe. As things turned out, however, Committee staff found themselves frustrated by procrastination and an “inability to find” what was requested. Two investigators became so desperate to get responses to their requests, they told the author, that they would arrive at CIA headquarters before the liaison office opened and leave only when it closed.
Only years later did anyone discover just whom the CIA had called back from retirement to supervise liaison with the Committee. He was George Joannides, the very former case officer who had been assigned to the DRE in 1963. Joannides had been in almost constant touch with the DRE in the months before the assassination, and immediately afterward had handled its leaders’ request for clearance to generate publicity about Oswald’s pro-Castro activity. On the day in 1964 that the Warren Commission wrote to the DRE’s Carlos Bringuier to come to Washington, DC, a travel form shows, Joannides flew to New Orleans. In the late 1970s, as liaison to the Assassinations Committee, however, he concealed this background. Joannides even claimed, according to one investigator, that “he could not find any records indicating the name of the DRE’s control officer.”14
This gross deception was exposed only in 1998, to the outrage of those who had been duped.15 Had he known the truth during the Committee’s tenure, former Chief Counsel Blakey said, he would have demanded that Joannides be removed as liaison officer and be questioned on oath as a material witness. That was the mildest of Blakey’s comments. He called the ruse that had been perpetrated on the Committee “criminal … a willful obstruction of justice… . Anyone who corruptly endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede the power of inquiry [by Congress] is guilty of a felony.”
“The Agency set me up …” the former Chief Counsel said, “I no longer believe anything the Agency told the Committee.” Professor Anna Nelson, who had been a member of the Assassination Records Review Board, felt that the CIA had “destroyed the integrity of the probe made by Congress” and suggested a congressional probe of “the CIA’s alleged corruption of its inquiry into the Kennedy assassination.” Judge John Tunheim, the Records Review Board’s former chairman, said the episode showed that “the CIA wasn’t interested in the truth about the assassination.”
Washington reporter Jefferson Morley, who was first to reveal Joannides’ duplicity, has fought a long court battle to obtain further relevant records on the officer’s activity. A decade on, as these pages went to press, the fight had gone all the way up to the federal Court of Appeals. The CIA claimed it could locate no monthly reports by Joannides for the period, even though—for the officers who preceded and succeeded him—the filing of regular reports was routine. The Agency refused to release 295 documents from Joannides’ administrative file—on “national security” grounds.
In 1981, after his work as liaison for the Assassinations Committee, Joannides received one of the CIA’s highest awards, the Career Intelligence Medal. Yet even the memo approving the award has been withheld—again citing “national security.”
A National Archives request to review the withheld Joannides material has also been turned down. And this when the documents withheld concern a man who has been dead for more than twenty years and—if the records do relate in any way to the Kennedy assassination—to a murder half a century old.
Just as CIA material on Joannides remains unavailable, so, too, do 605 pages on David Phillips, who was the Agency’s chief of Cuban operations in November 1963. As reported in previous pages, Phillips supervised early efforts to counter the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, headed the unit responsible for surveillance during the Oswald visit to Mexico City in 1963, and is also believed to have promoted the fortunes of the DRE exile group from the outset. He aroused the suspicions of Assassinations Committee staff for another reason.
The Committee gave serious consideration to the possibility that David Phillips was the man behind the pseudonym “Maurice Bishop,” the officer alleged by Alpha 66 leader Antonio Veciana to have met with Oswald before the assassination and—after it—to have ordered the fabrication of a phony link between Oswald and a Cuban diplomat in Mexico.***
Investigators asked Ross Crozier, a former CIA officer who had served at the Agency’s Florida headquarters, to respond to three names: “Bishop,” “Knight”, and the true name of an officer who had once worked out of Havana. Crozier at once stated correctly that the latter was the true name of a man he had met. The name Knight, he recalled, had sometimes been used by Howard Hunt. “Bishop,” he said, had been a name David Phillips used. He coupled the name “Bishop,” moreover, to the first name “Maurice”—a name the Committee investigators had not mentioned.16
Phillips, however, flatly denied the suggestion that he might have been Veciana’s case officer. Veciana, for his part, would say of Phillips only, “It’s not him… . But he knows.” Committee investigators were faced with a nomenclature puzzle they never resolved—and eventually ran out of time.17 This author, however, traced a person whose statements corroborated Veciana’s claim that his clandestine contact used the name Bishop.
The new witness was a Cuban exile—a woman who requested anonymity—who had earlier, before they both left Cuba, worked as Veciana’s secretary in Havana. In exile, when he became a leading activist, she had agreed to act as a sort of human answering machine and take messages for him. During the interview, the author ran through a large number of names of people who might have called—all of them entirely imaginary except the name “Bishop.” She promptly responded that, of all the names mentioned, the one name she remembered was Bishop. That name, she said, was linked in her mind to that of a American woman called Prewett.
“Prewett,” it emerged, turned out to be Virginia Prewett, a Washington journalist who long specialized in Latin American affairs. In her articles in 1963, the files showed, she praised the raids on Cuba by Veciana’s group Alpha 66 and lambasted the Kennedy administration for clamping down on exile activity. In an interview with the author, she admitted having had contact with Alpha 66. Asked about Veciana, she said initially, “Where is he now?”—then backed off and claimed she had never met him. Asked about Bishop and the CIA, Prewett said at first, “Well, you have to move around people like that,”—then that she had not known him. Asked about David Phillips, she said she had never met Phillips. Phillips himself, asked about Prewett, said they had met on more than one occasion and that he had known her
quite well.
The Assassinations Committee, in 1979, declared itself not satisfied with either Phillips’ or Veciana’s answers on the matter of Maurice Bishop. The Committee “suspected Veciana was lying when he denied that the retired officer [Phillips] was Bishop.” It said of Phillips that he “aroused the Committee’s suspicion when he told the Committee he did not recognize Veciana as the founder of Alpha 66, especially since the officer had once been deeply involved in Agency anti-Castro operations.”
The investigator whose special focus had been investigating Phillips, Gaeton Fonzi, wrote later that Phillips had “committed perjury before the Committee. It could have been proven, [and] he would have been convicted.” Former Chief Counsel Robert Blakey restricted himself to saying drily that the Committee had been “less than satisfied” with Phillips’ candor.
A graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Glenn Carle, has recalled how Phillips helped him get into the CIA in the early 1980s—a favor that launched him on a long career as a Clandestine Services officer. In conversation with Phillips, he recalled in 2013, he asked him about the allegation that he had been “Bishop.” The response he received is startling, given Phillips’s history of flat-out denial.
“He did not say, ‘Yes, I am Maurice Bishop,’ Carle remembered, “It was clear to me, however, that he was the man who had used the Bishop alias… . Phillips’ reaction was to acknowledge that he was the man in question… . He tacitly accepted its accuracy; but he did not explicitly confirm to me that he had done what he was accused of doing: meeting with Oswald. He avoided discussing this point.”18
Asked by his brother David whether he had been in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Phillips reportedly replied, “yes.” He vouchsafed no more than that, and died soon afterward, in 1998.
Phillips attracted controversy even from the grave. He left behind the draft of a novel featuring a character who had been a CIA officer based in Mexico City, as he himself had been in real life. “I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald,” Phillips the author had his fictional character write in a letter. “We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba… . I don’t know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the President’s assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt.”
Shortly before his death, Phillips had talked on several occasions with a former Assassinations Committee staffer named Kevin Walsh. “My private opinion,” he told Walsh in all apparent seriousness, “is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including rogue American intelligence people.”
This very senior former CIA officer—Phillips had eventually risen to be chief of the Western Hemisphere Division—knew well that this extraordinary remark would be quoted. Was it mischievous, a thumbing of the nose at those he saw as having tormented him? Or did he know something the public did not, something that—even if he personally was innocent in the assassination—he felt bound to conceal? What is not in doubt was that Phillips, and others from the Agency before him, had ducked and weaved and dissembled in the face of official investigation.
The CIA-Mafia Cuba plots, the Assassinations Committee declared in 1979, “had all the elements necessary for a successful assassination conspiracy—people, motive, and means—and the evidence indicated that the participants might well have considered using the resources at their disposal to increase their power and alleviate their problems by assassinating the President. Nevertheless, the Committee was ultimately frustrated in its attempt to determine details of those activities that might have led to the assassination… .”
Former Warren Commission counsel Burt Griffin, a judge in later life, blamed the federal intelligence agencies for the failings of both the official investigations. “I feel betrayed,” he said, “I feel that the CIA lied to us, that we had an agency of government here which we were depending upon, and that we expected to be truthful with us, and to cooperate with us. And they didn’t do it. The CIA concealed from us the fact that they were involved in efforts to assassinate Castro, which could have been of extreme importance to us. Especially the fact that they were involved in working with the Mafia.”
Griffin felt the same about the FBI, because it had not pursued the leads that pointed to possible conspiracy. “What is most disturbing to me,” he said, “is that these two agencies of government, that were supposed to be loyal and faithful to us, deliberately misled us.”
“Consider the possible reality,” he had suggested to the House Assassinations Committee, “that under the American system of civil liberties and the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, it is virtually impossible to prosecute or uncover a well-conceived and well-executed conspiracy.”
In 1979, Committee Chief Counsel Robert Blakey believed a prosecution was possible in the case of President Kennedy’s assassination. There were at that time, he said, still “living people who could have been involved” in the President’s assassination. “These people,” he went on, “should be vigorously investigated by all constitutional means… . There are things that can be done, in a criminal justice context, to move this towards trial.” Blakey thought he could “come close” to securing convictions.
To all intents and purposes, however, the U.S. Justice Department sat on its hands—a lapse the former chief counsel termed “diabolical.” As the new century began, though, Blakey became resigned to the fact that it was too late for prosecutions. The mysteries surrounding the murder of the 35th president of the United States, he now conceded, would never be solved, for John F. Kennedy’s death no longer seemed to matter. As a generational milestone of national trauma, November 22, 1963 had been replaced by September 11, 2001.
“Everybody will know who I am now,” Lee Oswald had remarked while being interrogated. Fifty years on, however, Oswald remains ill defined, a figure in the fog of incomplete investigation and the absence of real official will to discover the full truth.
None of the key characters in the tragedy now remains alive. Oswald is in his reinforced grave at Fort Worth’s Rose Hill Cemetery, Jack Ruby in a Jewish cemetery in Chicago, Carlos Marcello in his tomb near New Orleans, Santo Trafficante in a mausoleum at La Unione Italiana Cemetery outside Tampa. The men whose job it was to “keep the secrets” of their epoch—Richard Helms, James Angleton, David Phillips, George Joannides—all are gone.
The murder victim, John F. Kennedy, slumbers on in his place of honor at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, beneath a flickering flame.
*** See “Bishop” references in Chapter 18. The Assassinations Committee Report referred only to a “retired officer” having been considered as “Bishop,” but the officer is repeatedly identified as Phillips in the related Appendix.
Image Gallery
2. The killing ground. Dealey Plaza, from the Book Depository window where a gunman allegedly lay in wait.
3. Seconds before the shooting started. At about this moment, the Governor’s wife remarked to the President, “Mr. Kennedy, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”
4. Was there one person, or two, behind the sixth-floor windows? (see inset)
5. The ambush. Beyond the stricken President is the area of the grassy knoll where House Assassinations Committee acoustics experts placed a second gunman – a finding now challenged. Some suspected that one of the objects in this damaged Polaroid photograph (see box) may be a man’s head.
6. Did a second gunman fire at the President from this vantage point to his right front? The witness pointing, railroad supervisor Sam Holland, said he saw smoke by the picket fence.
7. A botched autopsy. One of the medical drawings published by the House Assassinations Committee. The medical panel, working from an original photograph, concluded that the early doctors made a four-inch
error in placing an entrance wound in the President’s head. (medical illustration drawn from photograph)
8. Best evidence. Some of the autopsy photographs have been seen by the public, some not. Confusion continues. No damage to the rear of the President’s head is seen in this photograph. Yet Dallas doctors described a massive wound. The explanation may be that the scalp is being pulled down for the photograph, thus covering a gaping hole.
9. Lee Oswald, aged 20, at the time of his defection to the Soviet Union.
10. Surveillance by chance? Oswald (arrowed) photographed in 1961 in the Soviet city of Minsk. The photo, taken by American tourists, reached CIA files.
11. Giving up on communism? Oswald and his Soviet wife Marina leave Minsk by train in 1962. While en route – in Holland or when he reached the United States – was the defector questioned by U.S. intelligence?
12. The friend with links to American intelligence. George de Mohrenschildt, who became Oswald’s mentor in Dallas, has been linked to the CIA and to U.S. Army Intelligence. Just as the House Assassinations Committee was planning to question him, he killed himself.
13. 14. 15. The rifle found at the scene. Ordered in the name of “Hidell,” it led straight to Oswald. Was Oswald’s finger on the trigger on the day of the assassination? Did the almost intact bullet (left) cause both the President’s first wound and the Governor’s multiple injuries?
Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Page 40