by Curt Gentry
Although everyone in Washington and in the field knew where the director stood, the public didn’t. This was remedied on November 25, three days after the assassination.
“WASHINGTON NOVEMBER 25 (AP): FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said today all available information indicates that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“ ‘Not one shred of evidence has been developed to link any other person in a conspiracy with Oswald to assassinate President Kennedy,’ Hoover said in a statement.”
Hoover was still pushing, hard, for the immediate release of an FBI report on the assassination. On November 26 he discussed this with Katzenbach, who felt that the FBI report “should include everything which may raise a question in the mind of the public or press regarding this matter. In other words, this report is to settle the dust, in so far as Oswald and his activities are concerned, both from the standpoint that he is the man who assassinated the president, and relative to Oswald himself and his activities and background.”14
Courtney Evans, who was still acting as liaison between the FBI and the Justice Department, although with greatly reduced influence, interjected a note of caution. There is “no doubt” Oswald had fired the gun, Evans memoed the director. “The problem is to show motive. A matter of this magnitude cannot be investigated in a week’s time.”
Hoover, who was not about to take any advice from Courtney Evans, felt otherwise, scribbling across the bottom of the memo, “Just how long do you estimate it will take? It seems to me we have the basic facts now.”15
But Hoover’s plan to wrap up the case with a single report, thus avoiding the risks of exposing the FBI’s deficiencies and cover-ups in the case, ran into a major obstacle: the president. On November 29 Hoover received a telephone call from Johnson. All the wiles of the Texas wheeler-dealer come out in the FBI director’s brief memorandum of their talk. First Johnson buttered him up, told him what he wanted to hear. “The President said he wanted to get by with my file and my report.” Anticipating what was coming—there had already been talk of an independent investigation, while both the House and the Senate wanted to conduct their own probes—and still hoping to forestall it, Hoover interjected: “I told him it would be very bad to have a rash of investigations.” But Johnson, while not necessarily smarter, was, after all, the president: “He then indicated the only way to stop it [the conspiracy talk] is to appoint a high-level committee to evaluate my report and tell the House and Senate not to go ahead with the investigation.” Temporarily defeated, and not at all happy about it, Hoover stated that “that would be a three-ring circus.”16
That afternoon President Johnson signed Executive Order 11130, establishing what would become known as the Warren Commission.*
Hoover knew what was important: he ordered an immediate file check on each of the commission members; and, having solved the Kennedy case to his satisfaction, he now turned his attention to a matter of graver import, the search for scapegoats.
James Gale, chief of the Inspection Division, conducted the probe. In mid-December the director secretly censured seventeen agents for their “failures” and “deficiencies” in the pre-assassination investigation of Oswald. Most of the agents—eight at headquarters, nine in the field—were cited for having failed to place Oswald on the Security Index or for “inadequate reporting” or “insufficient investigations” of his activities since his return from Russia. The penalties ranged from letters of censure to transfers and suspensions without pay. This way if the Warren Commission criticized the FBI, for failing to alert the Secret Service to Oswald’s presence in the Dallas area, for example, Hoover could reveal the disciplinary actions and say, I’ve already determined who the guilty people were and punished them.
Assistant Director William Sullivan, the most senior official censured, strongly objected to the censures, not because he’d been cited—he wadded up and threw his own letter in the wastepaper basket, in the presence of one of Tolson’s spies—but because of the effect on the morale of his men. In his frantic attempt to cover his own behind, Hoover was “in effect saying that you must share a measured guilt for the assassination of the president of the United States…a terrible charge…a terrible thing to do to those men.”17
As usual, the punishments increased in severity as they moved down the chain of command, with the most serious being reserved for SA James P. Hosty, Jr.*
Hoover used the Chinese water torture to discipline Hosty. On December 13, 1963, he placed him on ninety days’ probation; on September 28, 1964, one day after the Warren Commission issued its final report, he ordered him transferred to Kansas City, Missouri; on October 5 he suspended him without pay for thirty days and again placed him on probation; on October 8 he denied Hosty’s hardship-exemption request (Hosty and his wife had seven children, two of whom had respiratory problems, and had requested reassignment to a warmer climate); and on October 9 he refused Hosty’s offer to work while suspended. Tolson also placed a “stop” on Hosty’s personnel file: he would receive no further promotions so long as Hoover and Tolson ran the FBI.*
It was the FBI’s biggest investigation. All of the major field offices participated. Over eighty Bureau personnel were sent to Dallas, over 25,000 interviews were conducted, and 2,300 reports, consisting of 25,400 pages were prepared. The House Select Committee on Assassinations later found that in many ways the FBI did an admirable job. “Given the FBI’s justifiable reputation as one of the most professional and respected criminal investigative agencies in the world,” the committee wrote in its final report, “its effort in the Kennedy investigation was expected to be one of the highest degree of thoroughness and integrity. Indeed, it was an effort of unparalleled magnitude in keeping with the gravity of the crime, resulting in the assignments of more Bureau resources than for any criminal case in its history.”19
But there were problems. Hoover’s predisposition to proving Oswald acted alone was one; haste was another. And there were the jurisdictional disputes: the FBI versus the Dallas PD and, particularly, the FBI versus the Dallas district attorney’s office, which was prosecuting the Ruby case.† And there was the structure of the FBI itself. Many things simply fell between the cracks.
Assistant to the Director Alan Belmont had overall supervision of the case, but the investigation itself was handled by two divisions. The Domestic Intelligence Division, headed by Assistant Director William Sullivan, was charged with investigating Oswald’s background, activities, associations, and motivations, and any questions regarding a possible foreign conspiracy. But Sullivan himself later characterized that effort as rushed, chaotic, and shallow, despite the enormous amount of paperwork generated. The investigation of a possible foreign conspiracy was assigned to the Soviet Section, because of Oswald’s Russian links.‡ Although there were specialists on Cuban affairs and exile activities assigned to domestic intelligence, they were rarely consulted. Thus the whole fertile area of pro- and anti-Castro Cubans, which suggested myriad conspiratorial possibilities, was barely touched. The General Investigative Division, headed by Assistant Director Alex Rosen, handled the criminal aspects of the case, how many shots were fired, their trajectory, and so forth. But Rosen would observe that determining whether persons other than Oswald were involved was an “ancillary matter” that was not part of his division’s responsibility. Characterizing his portion of the investigation, Rosen later stated, “We were in the position of standing on the corner with our pocket open, waiting for someone to drop information into it, and we utilized what was fed to us and disseminated it…to the Warren Commission.”21
The gaps extended down the chain of command. The probe of Jack Ruby was assigned to the Civil Rights Division, which was a part of the General Investigative Division, on the theory that Ruby had violated Oswald’s civil rights by killing him. But all of the experts on the Mafia and organized crime were in the Special Investigative Division, which was headed by Assistant Director Courtney Evans. With Kennedy’s death, Ev
ans had become persona non grata in the Bureau, and organized crime had immediately ceased to be a priority. The director wasn’t even speaking to Evans. As a result, the agents best qualified to look into Ruby’s underworld connections were simply cut out of the investigation. As Evans would put it, “They sure didn’t come to me…We had no part in that that I can recall.”22 Ruby had been an underling of the old Capone mob in Chicago and had been sent to Dallas to help set up a syndicate gambling operation. The FBI never discovered this, though an enterprising reporter, Seth Kantor, White House correspondent for Scripps Howard, did.* Ruby had run casino money from Havana to Miami for Santos Trafficante, Jr., but it was the House Select Committee on Assassinations, not the FBI, which uncovered this, sixteen years later, after following a seemingly cold trail. Ruby also had close ties with the Carlos Marcello outfit. Again, the FBI drew a blank, in part because the New Orleans portion of the investigation was handled by the FBI supervisor Regis Kennedy, who still professed to believe that Marcello was a “tomato salesman.” Perhaps this is also why the FBI, though aware that Oswald had an uncle in New Orleans, Charles F. “Dutz” Murret, who was like a surrogate father to him, and with whom he frequently stayed and from whom he obtained money, dismissed evidence that Murret was a bookmaker and gambling-joint operator who subscribed to the Marcello-controlled racing wire, or why it minimized the fact that Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, had for many years been “a close friend” of the mobster Sam Termine, who, though on the payroll of the Louisiana State Police, acted as a chauffeur and bodyguard for the man who’d told his associates they were going to use a “nut” to take the rock out of his shoe. The FBI did obtain Ruby’s telephone records, but again it was the House Select Committee on Assassinations, not the FBI or the Warren Commission, which spotted a pattern in the timing of these calls and identified many of their recipients as Teamsters officials and mobsters. Relying on FBI-supplied data, the Warren Commission reported that virtually all of Ruby’s Chicago friends stated that he had no close connections with organized crime. And who were these character references? Among them were Lenny Patrick (twenty-eight arrests, on charges ranging from extortion to murder, but only one conviction, for bank robbery), a close associate of Sam Giancana; and Dave Yaras (fourteen arrests but no convictions), another close associate, whom Ovid Demaris described in Captive City as “a prime suspect in several gangland slayings” and one of “more than a score of men who worked on contract for the board of directors.”23 The FBI could hardly deny knowing their backgrounds. The Bureau had files on each, and in 1962 Yaras had been picked up on an FBI bug discussing in gory detail a Mafia hit he was planning to make in Miami, which the Bureau was able to prevent. Even J. Edgar Hoover knew Patrick and Yaras. The two men—who were also suspects in the slaying of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel—had been indicted, along with another of Ruby’s friends, William Block, for the 1946 murder of James Ragen, whom FBI Director Hoover had declined to protect.*
The House Select Committee on Assassinations, after reviewing all the stillextant files and obtaining testimony from many of the still-surviving witnesses, concluded in 1979 that “the FBI’s investigation into a conspiracy was deficient in the areas that the committee decided were most worthy of suspicion—organized crime, pro- and anti-Castro Cubans, and the possible associations of individuals from these areas with Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. In those areas in particular, the committee found that the FBI’s investigation was in all likehood insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.”25
That J. Edgar Hoover didn’t want to find one helped.
From its inception, Hoover treated the Warren Commission as an adversary. He publicly offered it his full cooperation—after all, it was a creation of the president—but instructed his agents to volunteer nothing beyond what was requested, and then only after prior approval of FBIHQ. He delayed responding to its requests, until the committee was under tremendous pressure to issue its report, then inundated it with materials he knew its staff wouldn’t have time to examine carefully.
The commission was totally dependent on him—as Chairman Warren observed in their first session, not one of its seven members had any investigative experience—and yet, increasingly, came to distrust him.
It also feared him.
The first session was on December 5. And the commission members had nothing to work with. The promised FBI report hadn’t yet arrived. But for a dime they could read it, in the Chicago Tribune or Washington Star, Crime Records having two days earlier leaked it to those papers, causing Senator Russell to ask caustically, “How much of their findings does the FBI propose to release to the press before we present the findings of this Commission?”*26
Warren was quite content to read the FBI report, when and if it arrived, discuss it, then issue a report on the commission’s findings. But others, and they were in the majority, thought a more comprehensive investigation was mandated, complete with subpoena powers and their own independent investigators. Otherwise the FBI would be investigating itself. McCloy: “There is a potential culpability here on the part of the Secret Service and even the FBI, and these reports, after all, human nature being what it is, may have some self-serving aspects in them.”27
Hoover’s informant on the commission promptly reported back its deliberations, via DeLoach.
The last thing Hoover wanted was a group of private snoops conducting their own investigation, and perhaps finding things the FBI hadn’t. The committee “should be discouraged from having an investigative staff,”28 Alan Belmont noted, and it was. Although the commission did obtain subpoena power from Congress, the FBI would continue to investigate itself.
By December 9 the commission had received the Bureau’s five-page report on the assassination.
WARREN: “Well, gentlemen, to be very frank about it, I have read the FBI report two or three times and I have not seen anything in there yet that has not been in the press.”
BOGGS: “…reading the FBI report leaves a million questions.”29
By December 16 the committee had received the Bureau’s initial, fivevolume report of its investigative findings, but no one was happy with it.
MCCLOY: “Why did the FBI report come out with something that was inconsistent with the autopsy?…The bullet business has me confused.”
WARREN: “It’s totally inconclusive.”
BOGGS: “Well, the FBI report doesn’t clear it up.”
WARREN: “It doesn’t do anything.”
BOGGS: “It raised a lot of new questions in my mind…There is still little on this fellow Ruby, including his movements…what he was doing, how he got in [the Dallas jail], it’s fantastic.”30
There was much criticism of the FBI report, the members finding that it “lacked depth,” was “hard to decipher,” and had “so many loopholes in it.” As Rankin put it, “Anybody can look at it and see that it just doesn’t seem like they’re looking for things that this Commission has to look for in order to get the answers that it wants and it’s entitled to.”31
The inadequacies of the FBI’s fabled investigative efforts shocked the commission members, some of whom showed an abysmal ignorance about the intelligence agencies. Chief among them was Chairman Warren. Asked by McCloy whether he had contacted the CIA, Warren responded, “No, I have not, for the simple reason that I had never been informed that the CIA had any knowledge about this.”
McCloy: “They have.”
Warren: “I’m sure they have, but I did not want to put the CIA into this thing unless they put themselves in.”32 The former CIA director Allen Dulles volunteered to expedite the CIA reports.
Senator Russell, who distrusted both the FBI and the CIA, suggested that a staff member “with a more skeptical nature, sort of a devil’s advocate,” should analyze the FBI and CIA reports for “every contradiction and every soft spot…just as if we were prosecuting them or planning to prosecute them…Maybe the other fellow could do it, go through here and take these reports as if we were going to prosecute J.
Edgar Hoover.”33
It is surprising that Russell’s remarks, when reported back to Hoover, did not cause the FBI director to have a second heart attack.
On January 22 Chairman Warren called a secret session to discuss a startling new development. He said, “I called this meeting of the commission because of something that developed today that I thought every member of the commission should have knowledge of, something you shouldn’t hear from the public before you had an opportunity to think about it. I will just have Mr. Rankin tell you the story from the beginning.”
The sensational development, Rankin explained, was the claim of Attorney General Waggoner Carr of Texas that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a paid FBI informant.
The committee was stunned. “If that was true and it ever came out and could be established,” Rankin said, “then you would have people think that there was a conspiracy to accomplish this assassination that nothing the Commission did or anybody could dissipate.”
BOGGS: “You are so right.”
DULLES: “Oh, terrible.”
BOGGS: “The implications of this are fantastic, don’t you think so.”
WARREN: “Terrific.”
RANKIN: “Now it is something that would be very difficult to prove out…I am confident that the FBI will never admit it, and I presume their records will never show it.”34