Demeanor

A reader, who is a lawyer, emailed me to ask what the demeanor of the CIA witnesses was at the Church committee hearings in 1975-76.  In legal parlance, demeanor means how the witness presented himself while testifying.  Did he look like a liar?  Did you (the judge or jury) believe him?  On an appeal, the appellate court will defer to findings of fact by the trial judge because he was the one who saw the demeanor of the witness.

            Before answering, I want to point out differences between the Church Committee hearings and a trial.  First, one must distinguish between the Church committee’s public and nonpublic hearings.  At public hearings, only the senators and the chief counsel and minority counsel could ask questions.  At nonpublic hearings, the questioning tended to be a free-for-all among senators and staffers, whether lawyer or not.   Rarely if ever would there be an uninterrupted line of questioning by a single lawyer as you see in court trials.  This gave witnesses time to think about what they just said and correct it.  Moreover, the questioning at nonpublic hearings never got tough.  After all, the Senate is a political institution, and hearings are expected to be conducted with decorum.  They aren’t winner-take-all contests like court trials.  Senators and staff often knew the witnesses and were on good terms with them.  They might have chatted informally about the issues before the witnesses were questioned under oath.  Jim Angleton was example.  He went out of his way to talk to staffers at the committee’s offices.  He has been vilified at times, but that isn’t fair to the man.  He had his faults, but lying wasn't one of them.  Actually, he was better off the record than he seems in the formal transcripts.  Ted Shackley was another example.  He might be guarded in chats and careful with his words, but he never seemed to mislead.

    Richard Helms was different.   His testimony in Appendix B of the book was typical.  But then he operated at a much higher level than most other witnesses.  When Senator Church asked if the CIA were a rogue elephant, Helms was the pachyderm.  But he had long experience in both secret operations and political ones and was no amateur at answering questions when the stakes were high.

     Then there were witness like William Harvey.  He gave such rambling answers to questions that I don’t think anyone at the hearings understood him. Maybe that contributed to his success in working with spies.  In writing the book, I spent a great deal of time trying to decipher his testimony and, as I conclude in the book, think he was saying he had an assassination team in Cuba at the end of the missile crisis.  Yet the Church committee didn’t feel this way when it wrote its report.  They may have been so put off by the witness’s rambling demeanor that they didn’t read the transcript closely.

     Most other CIA witnesses had little to contribute to the question of whether the Kennedys knew of the assassination operations.  They never met with the Kennedys personally, and their superiors certainly weren’t going to share with them anything like assassination.  They came across as truthful, but that would be expected given their positions.

     Nestor Sanchez was different.  Years after he appeared before the Church Committee, he told Brian Latell for the book Castro’s Secrets that he met with Robert Kennedy more than once.  That would have startled the Church committee.  He never mentioned it to the committee according to the transcripts.  Then there was his testimony about what happened to the poison pen at the November 22 meeting with Cubela.  Sanchez couldn’t remember.  This wasn’t some long ago event at the time he testified.  It had happened only twelve years earlier and had to be the most momentous meeting in his CIA career.  As I say in the book, he had to know that the poison pen, or whatever it was, was terribly compromising for the CIA.  No CIA case officer would hand a foreign agent a piece of exotic technology and then not remember if the agent walked off with it.

     This brings me back to Richard Helms.  He appeared seven times before the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee.  He knew from Senator Church’s public rogue elephant question that the key issue was whether John Kennedy approved meeting Cubela’s request for assassination weapons.  Yet he never volunteered in any of his appearances that he had met with Kennedy on the very day the CIA made the decision to give Cubela those weapons.  Under such circumstances, Helms’s demeanor at the hearings doesn’t seem to matter.