The Newly Released Files, Part 2

      The process for releasing the JFK files is like a slow leak. The information comes out drip by changed drip. The same document may have been released previously, but the new one will have a deletion, such as someone’s name, removed and replaced by the name. Nothing is dramatically new in any individual document. Collectively, however, they are adding to the story of a shoddy investigation of the assassination in 1963 and 1964, lackadaisical attitudes on the part of the intelligence agencies since, and a repeated lack of forthrightness to the public and to our elected representatives in Congress.

1.  Richard Helms and Nestor Sanchez meet with DRE leaders.  On November 13, 1962, as the Cuban Missile Crisis wound down, Helms and Sanchez met with Luis Rocha and Jose Lasa of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE). Helms was Deputy Director for Plans, the #2 job, at the CIA. Sanchez was a case officer (he handled agents) in what was then called Task Force W, run by Bill Harvey. It would be renamed the Special Affairs Staff when Desmond FitzGerald took over a short time later.  The meeting was held in Helms's office at CIA. Helms used his real name; Sanchez used an alias. Helms outlined the purpose of the meeting was first to gain information on the status of the Soviet missiles in Cuba and second to discuss the CIA/DRE relationship. This memorandum of the meeting gives a good feel for how the CIA did business in those days, but this isn't what is important about the document.

     Rather, the important thing is what would happen later. Sanchez would go on to become the CIA's case officer dealing with Rolando Cubela in a plot to overthrow/assassinate Fidel Castro.  Just over a year later, November 22, 1963, the two men would meet in a safehouse in Paris. At the meeting, Sanchez promised Cubela rifles with telescopic sights and a poison pen (or a dart pen).  This later meeting would end abruptly upon word of the President's death. That Sanchez would be the case officer both for DRE and Cubela might make sense because Cubela had led the DRE in Cuba during the Revolution. 

     I was unaware of Sanchez's connection to the DRE when I was on the Church Committee. I don't know if others on the committee were aware of this.  I never saw it mentioned in the documents. The bottom line is that the CIA was in a ticklish position dealing with the Church Committee. If it were forthright and told the committee that Sanchez had served as case officer to the DRE, the committee would surely have delved deeper into DRE and Oswald.

     The Warren Commission was interested in the DRE because Lee Harvey Oswald had a street confrontation with members in New Orleans in August 1963 and a debate on radio with one member.  At the time, Oswald was pro-Castro while the U.S. branch of DRE was anti-Castro.  The bottom line is that CIA had been in the same ticklish position with the Warren Commission. If it told the commission about its own ties to DRE, the commission might have been led to Sanchez and thus have learned about the CIA's plot to kill Castro.

2.  Recruitment of Esebio AZCUE Lopez. Azcue was the Cuban consul in Mexico City with whom Oswald met and argued during his visit there in September-October 1963. Oswald wanted a visa to Cuba. Azcue supposedly didn't like Oswald and told him he was giving the Cuban Revolution a bad name. Azcue would leave his post in Mexico and return to Cuba on November 18, 1963, four days before Kennedy was murdered.  The CIA assured the Warren Commission that Azcue's replacement had been announced well in advance, thus presumably demonstrating there was nothing sinister in his seemingly hightailing it back to Cuba before the assassination.  However, again the CIA wasn't forthright. It didn't tell the commission that it had given the green light to Azcue's recruitment -- although it didn't think he would be amenable.  Notably, the commission didn't get confirmation about Azcue's reason for leaving Mexico until a week before its report was publicly released. He was finally questioned about his encounter with Oswald by the House Assassinations Committee more than twenty years later. His testimony stuck to what was in the Warren Report.

3. Gilberto Policarpo Lopez. His story may be found in earlier posts on this blog, but the new releases merit revisiting his tale. Lopez crossed (fled?) from Texas into Mexico about twelve hours after the assassination. He arrived in Mexico City on November 25 and stayed in a hotel until flying to Havana as the only passenger on a regularly scheduled Cubana Airlines flight with a crew of nine.  CIA surveillance cameras at the Mexico City airport took a picture of him about to board the plane. He wore sunglasses. It was 7:00 pm.  The sunglasses hinder identification and suggest he had been warned about the surveillance.  

     In March 1964, the CIA received a report from Mexican police saying Lopez had been "involved in the assassination."  The CIA did nothing to investigate this report, nor did it tell the Warren Commission. In fact, it did just the opposite. When the Warren Commission staff visited Mexico City in April, the CIA station assured them that it had received nothing to suggest a conspiracy even though it had received the report on Lopez a month earlier.  Later FBI reports established that Lopez had been living in Tampa, but the FBI did not tell the agent doing the investigation of the allegation that Lopez was involved in the assassination. The agent reported that on November 17 Lopez was at a meeting of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee awaiting a phone call from Cuba for the go-ahead to return to the island (he had visited before).  There was no phone call.  The next day, President Kennedy visited Tampa.  This was the same day Azcue left Mexico. The same open-air convertible that ferried Kennedy around Tampa would be used in Dallas four days later.  And Lopez would leave for Texas on November 20, the same day the CIA signaled Cubela that it would provide him assassination weapons, and the same day Lee Harvey Oswald must have made the decision to kill Kennedy.

     The Church Committee's report was the first public mention of Lopez's possible connection to Kennedy's assassination.  With its mandate expiring, it recommended the newly-formed House Assassinations Committee continue the investigation.  However, because I wasn't satisfied that we had left no stone unturned, I went to the Secret Service to see if perhaps it had investigated Lopez.  After all, the Mexican police had claimed he was involved in Kennedy's assassination, and so I thought the Secret Service might have followed up as part of its protection of future presidents. I had experience in the Army intelligence with "watch lists" of possible threats to visiting bigwigs. For this reason, I went to Secret Service headquarters where I gave an agent identifying information on Lopez. After entering that information into his computer, he announced that the Secret Service had no file on Lopez.  "What is he alleged to have done?" the agent asked.  "Assassinate John Kennedy," I answered.  "Check with the CIA." The CIA may not have been of much help.  According to a document in the 2017 releases, the CIA Office of Security didn't have Lopez in its database before the Church Committee began investigating.

The new releases show the CIA was still casual about Lopez.  It wasn't until December 1976, six months after the Church Committee report was made public, that the agency prepared its own chronology.  Someone highligted in the margin that Lopez was alleged to have been involved in Kennedy's assassination.  Yet there is no evidence of any further investigation except in 1977, presumably for the House Assassinations Committee investigation, the CIA asked an officer who had been in the Mexico City station in 1964 if he remembered the Mexican police report that Lopez was involved in the assassination. The officer did not remember. However, he suggested a retired officer may have handled the report. There is no evidence the CIA contacted the retired officer.

     In the end, while the House Assassinations Committee report chided the CIA for its derelictions in 1963 and 1964, it did not investigate on its own.  Instead, it ventured that the Mexican police allegation about Lopez was probably wrong. However, since the House report does not mention President Kennedy's visit to Tampa on November 18, it didn't seem to understand how sinister the known facts about Lopez were and remain. Johnny Roselli was part of the underworld that the CIA recruited to assassinate Castro in the 1960-1962 time frame. He had contacts in Cuba who were close enough to Castro to kill him. In 1967, Roselli's lawyer suggested to the FBI that Castro had dispatched "teams" to several different cities to kill Kennedy.  Roselli had no memory of any of this when he testifed to the Church Committee.  He was murdered six months later. The question remains: Was Lopez on a team in Tampa?

4. AMTHUG is a sitting duck. A previously released document deserves mention on the matter of forthrightness. AMTHUG was the cryptonym for Fidel Castro, a combination of "AM" for Cuban-related matters and "Thug," which was, in the CIA's way of thinking, a mneomic device. This cable from the CIA station in Mexico to headquarters is dated November 10, 1963. "DEGRIP," a businessman who traveled to Cuba, told the CIA that Castro had resumed eating at the Montecatini restaurant in Havana. (It is still there). Castro arrived with only one security car as escort. He waited in the line outside just like a regular patron. Then he would enter with two companions, leaving his security detail outside. The other patrons were not disturbed or ejected. Castro would go into the kitchen alone to chat with the employees. The businessman provided this information, remarking "you can draw own conclusion on possibilities." He also commented that Castro "is a sitting duck."

In other words, twelve days before Kennedy was assassinated by the pro-Castro Oswald, the CIA station in Mexico City, which would soon be overwhelmed by demands from headquarters related to the President's assassination, was telling headquarters how Castro could be assassinated. Now the layman might think this happened all the time, and that might be true. However, during the Church Committee investigation of assassination plots against foreign leaders, the CIA repeatedly argued that John McCone, who was director in those days, was a Catholic and morally opposed to assassination. Everyone at CIA understood, supposedly, that McCone would not contenance assassination. It is, therefore, interesting to say the least that despite McCone's alleged injunctions against assassination, the Mexico station had no compunction against relaying information about how to assassinate Castro.

The Newly Released JFK Files, Part 1

      Since Murder, Inc. approaches President Kennedy's assassination from a different direction than most writers, I naturally have a different view of the National Archives' December 15 release of 13,000 documents in its collection that were formerly redacted or withheld.  The common approach is what might be called a "treasure hunt," looking for a smoking gun or needle in a haystack. None was found.

      I saw all the documents the CIA withheld from disclosure in the Warren Report when I was on the Senate intelligence committee staff in 1975-76.  The CIA never had a "smoking gun" because it didn't fully investigate Kennedy's assassination.  And this was because at the very moment of the killing in Dallas, the CIA was meeting with an agent in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.  As astonishing as it may be, no evidence has ever been produced that the CIA investigated a connection between its plot and the Kennedy assassination.  That is the point of my book.

      Moreover, while it is important to keep up the pressure on the government to release all the withheld and redacted documents in the JFK collection at the National Archives, it is also important to recognize that significant documents are not even in the collection. 

      Among the documents missing from the collection are these.  

1.  The Senate intelligence committee's transcripts of the CIA's JMWAVE chief, Ted Shackley, and the CIA's Tom Karamessines, who was Richard Helms's executive officer in 1963. In these transcripts, Shackley provided seemingly-informed speculation that the CIA investigated a connection between Kennedy's murder and its own plots against Castro.  Karamessinves talked about why he tried to prevent Mexican authorities from arresting Silvia Duran, the Cuban consulate employee who befriended Oswald in his attempt to get a visa to Cuba. 

2. A memo of August 13, 1963, from the CIA's Desmond FitzGerald to Joseph Califano of the Department of the Army entitled "U.S. Courses of Action in the Event of a Military Revolt in Cuba." The National Archives said this memo was turned over and seven copies made, but all copies have vanished. The significance of the memo is that in August of 1963, FitzGerald was seeking Califano's help in identifying conspirators in Cuba who would join a CIA-sponsored coup.  Among the names on which Califano furnished details was Rolando Cubela. 

3. An audio tape of the August 15, 1963, meeting at the White House attended by President Kennedy, and NSC advisor McGeorge Bundy and from the CIA,  Director John McCone, Richard Helms, William Colby, and Bruce Cheever. The tape was never identified to the Assassination Records Review Board, "ARRB," and is not part of the JFK Collection at the Archives but rather is at the Kennedy Library in Boston. Eighteen minutes are withheld as secret. 

4. The National Security Agency's internal report on its inspection of the Russian radio, a portable Turist model, that was found in Oswald's room after the assassination.  Although other NSA documents indicate such a report was the basis for a letter NSA wrote the Warren Commission and imply that the Turist might be a spy radio, NSA responded to an FOIA request I made in researching Murder, Inc., by saying the document no longer exists. This "lost" report took on added significance when the National Archives denied my request to have an expert examine the radio, giving the strange explanation that it was evidence in a crime. Photographs of the inside of the radio show changes from either accidental damage or intentional changes.  I hoped to determine if it could pick up shortwave transmissions that would have allowed Oswald to listen to radio stations in Cuba. 

5. The full contents of CIA Director McCone's memorandum of his briefing of President Lyndon Johnson on the night of November 28, 1963, at Johnson's house, The Elms, in northwest Washington, D.C. The parts of the memorandum which are public indicate that the President asked McCone about Cuba.  Again, this document was not identified to the ARRB and is not at the National Archives.

      In addition, accompanying this year's December 15 release is a letter from the current director of the CIA, suggesting that it will never agree to the release of some documents in the foreseeable future.  One reason is the familiar sources-and-methods claim.  The CIA says:

Human assets and sources are the bedrock of the CIA's clandestine intelligence collection mission, and the continued confidentiality of human sources and assets-regardless of the age of the information or whether the individuals are deceased-is critical to the CIA's intelligence mission....  If current or prospective sources or assets learn that the CIA was required to reveal identifying information about its intelligence assets and sources despite the CIA's assurances of confidentiality, such individuals are likely to refuse to work with the CIA, seriously impairing the CIA's ability to conduct intelligence operations in the future.

      But of course, the CIA has routinely released the names of its sources in many of the documents. This raises the question of the CIA's selectively protecting sources. Why is it protecting one dead human resource and not another?  Besides, it is well known that source names do leak out all the time. The 1963 so-called AMLASH plot is an example. Although the CIA claimed that only a handful of CIA officers knew who its sources and agents were in that operation in 1963, most if not all of those names are public today. 

      More troubling is another reason the CIA advances for not releasing documents, and this is that it might damage "foreign liaison relationships."  

Similarly, the disclosure of information about CIA's foreign intelligence liaison relationships is highly likely to damage such arrangements....  If the CIA cannot credibly promise foreign liaison services that their intelligence information and sensitive arrangements with the CIA will be protected from disclosure, the Agency cannot expect the same level of confidentiality and protection in return.... [F]oreign liaison partners may choose to limit or terminate cooperation with the CIA, significantly impairing CIA's ability to perform its foreign intelligence gathering mission.

     The CIA's claim creates a loophole in the JFK Records Collection Act big enough to drive a truck through. As you will read elsewhere in this blog, I have pressed for access to records other countries, including Mexico, may have that are related to the assassination. They could be highly relevant to what history ultimately concludes about John Kennedy's assassination. But the CIA claims a prerogative to withhold information relevant to the assassination of the President despite the passage of sixty years if the information came from a liason relationship with a foreign government.  To give the most dramatic example of what this might mean, the CIA is saying that even if a foreign government gave it evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy, the CIA would withhold that from the public. To the CIA, protecting liaison relationships is apparently more important than letting the public, and history, know the truth. 

     In short, the media is missing the point on its coverage of these releases. The CIA and FBI have not been sitting on smoking guns.  None of the withheld documents or redacted material will prove the Warren Commission was wrong. However, these releases undoubtedly will continue to build the case that the Warren Commission's work was crippled by its reliance on a CIA and FBI with agendas different from the public's.

      What the newly released documents say about this will be discussed in Part 2.  

A letter never sent

      One theme in Murder, Inc. is how poor the Warren Commission investigation was.  Many times it seemed intentionally so.  This is an example.

      At the end of the Warren Commission staff visit to Mexico City in April 1964, it drafted a letter for the United States embassy there to send to the government of Mexico, asking for copies of the files Mexican authorities had assembled in their investigation of the assassination.  But the letter was never sent.  There is no record of why.  The commission staff had discussed with Mexican authorities the Mexican investigation and had seen documents and reports from that investigation. However, no such documents are in the National Archives' JFK collection.  Mexico apparently never furnished the commission with the documents the staff wanted because the letter was never sent.  But the commission proceeded to issue its report without disclosing this investigatory failure.  See page 250 of Murder, Inc.

     The draft letter, below, is attached to David Slawson memorandum of the staff's trip to Mexico City, which is NARA 104-10150-10181.

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Tale of the Tape

     In writing Murder, Inc., I had used an audio tape of a conversation between Lyndon Johnson and Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) at 8:55 pm on the night of November 29, 1963. The men had talked earlier in the day at around 4 pm about the president appointing a commission to report on the Kennedy assassination and about who would be on it. Johnson made this second call to tell Russell that he would be on it. The following is part of the transcript which may be found here. 

      I happened to listen to it again recently and several new things caught my attention. First is that Russell didn’t like Earl Warren, didn’t want to serve with him, and didn’t think the Chief Justice should in any event be appointed to such a commission. And second, Johnson hints of something sinister about the assassination and suggests that the investigation could lead to WWIII if mishandled. This latter point surprised me more now than it did when I was writing the book. Before explaining, let me show you excerpts from the phone call. I think there are errors in the online transcript and have substituted corrections and added explanatory material. 

*** 

Russell: “I couldn’t serve on it [the Warren Commission] with Chief Justice Warren… I don’t like that man….I don’t have any confidence in him at all. 

LBJ: [W]e’ve got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and get us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour and you would put on your uniform in a minute [to prevent WWIII]… and you can do anything for your country and don’t go giving me that kind of stuff about you can’t serve with anybody… you’ll do anything. 

Russell: It is not only that… I just don’t think the Chief Justice should have served on it. 

LBJ: Well the Chief Justice ought to do anything he can to save America and right now… we’ve got a very touchy thing and… wait until you look at this evidence.. you, wait until you look at this report. 

Russell then says Johnson should have told him that he was going to put Warren on the Commission. LBJ counters by saying he had told Russell in the earlier call that he was going to do this. Russell responds, remembering correctly that in the earlier call, which was also recorded, Johnson said he planned to get someone from the Court, but he did not say it would be Warren. When Russell asks Johnson not to name him to the Commission, Johnson tells him that it has already been announced. Russell argues that he doesn’t have time and offers apparent health objections, saying “my future is behind me.” 

LBJ: [A]ll you’ll do [on the Commission] is evaluate the Hoover report he has already made. 

LBJ: [Y]ou’re going to lend your name to this thing because you’re head of the CIA Committee…. Secretary of State came over here this afternoon. He’s deeply concerned Dick [Russell] about the idea that they’re spreading throughout the communist world that Khrushchev killed Kennedy. [This doesn’t make sense. Why would the Soviets want to claim they killed Kennedy].. now he didn’t. He didn’t have a damned thing to do with it. 

Russell: Well, I don’t think he did directly. I know Khrushchev didn’t because he thought he’d get along better under Kennedy. 

LBJ: All right, but we’ve…. 

Russell: I wouldn’t be surprised if Castro had.

Johnson continues to encourage Russell to get along with Warren. “You can give him some confidence” and “I’m not afraid to put your intelligence against Warren’s.” Later, after discussing other, unrelated topics, Johnson brags about how he persuaded Warren to lead the commission. 

LBJ: Well you want me to tell you the truth? You know what happened? Bobby [Attorney General Robert Kennedy] and them went up to see him today and he turned them down cold and said NO. Two hours later I called him and ordered him down here and he didn’t want to come. I insisted he come.. came down here and told me No twice and I just pulled out what Hoover told me about a little incident in Mexico City and I say now, I don’t want Mr. Khrushchev to be told tomorrow and be testifying before a camera that he killed this fellow.. and that Castro killed him and all I want you do to is look at the facts and bring in any other facts you want in here and determine who killed the President.

     The conversation ends a few sentences later. 

*** 

     Several of the things Lyndon Johnson says in this conversation seem out of place when put in the chronology of what was known at the time. They raise questions about whether Johnson really understood the facts or whether he was exaggerating in order to persuade the reluctant Russell. 

     On November 24, five days before this phone call, Hoover had told LBJ’s aide Walter Jenkins that public disclosure of the possibility of foreign involvement should be avoided. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach gave the same advice to Bill Moyers, another LBJ aide, on November 26. And contrary to what LBJ says in this call, Katzenbach said that the right-wing in the United States, not the communist world, was claiming the communists were behind the assassination. 

     It isn't clear as to what Mexico City incident the president is referring to. The FBI and CIA knew almost immediately after the assassination on November 22 that Lee Harvey Oswald had visited the Soviet and Cuban consulates there, trying to get visas. This is probably not what Johnson had in mind. More likely, he is talking about the so-called Alvardo allegation. A man named Gilberto Alvardo had told Mexican authorities that he had seen Oswald take money from a man at the Cuban consulate. However, by November 28, CIA Director John McCone had sent a memorandum to Johnson’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy debunking Alvardo’s allegations and planned to cover the matter again with Bundy the next morning, November 29. In other words, by the time of this phone call, Johnson should have known that the CIA at least had concluded Alvardo’s allegations were specious. So again, either Johnson didn’t know the facts or he was exaggerating in order to get Earl Warren and Richard Russell on the commission – or perhaps both were true. 

     One thing is abundantly clear, though.  Lyndon Johnson feared that an investigation might uncover a foreign conspiracy and lead to nuclear war. 

     Finally, the conversation raises a question that I've not seen answered: What if anything had the CIA told Richard Russell about its investigation prior to this conversation. He was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which was at the time the only Senate committee that oversaw CIA operations.