KGB public assassinations

         Was Yevgeny Prigozhin's very public death an assassination, when a plane carrying him exploded and fell from the sky?  In Murder, Inc., I wrote how the former Russian security service, the KGB, used public assassinations.  I pointed out on page 98 that typically the KGB's Department 13, which specialized in assassination and sabotage, would not want the assassination to be traced back to it.  However, "Sometimes, an intelligence service may want its adversary to know who was responsible in order to send a message.  In the book KGB, John Barron described the assassination of a journalist in Afghanistan during the Soviet war there: 'The assassination was deliberately crude.  Its intent was not only to eliminate an effective Soviet adversary but also to terrorize potential adversaries into silence.  The assassins also left behind discernible Soviet traces.  Witnesses testified that the men arrived in a Soviet jeep.'"

Secret CIA black bag jobs revealed in the JFK releases

     A surreptitious break-in for the purpose of searching for and seizing documents is called a "black bag job."  It is illegal regardless of whether private parties or government agents do it. Under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, government must obtain a search warrant from judicial authorities if they want to enter private property.  The most famous case, perhaps, was the break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate by men working for the Committee to Re-Elect President Richard Nixon.  They went to jail, and Nixon was forced to resign.  At least some of the burglars were former CIA employees and contractors.  

    One reason the Senate created the Church Committee was to look into what other illegal things the intelligence agencies might be doing. The Committee discovered the FBI had been conducting black bag jobs, but in the wake of Watergate, the FBI realized they were illegal and stopped. No one suspected the CIA might also be doing black bag jobs though, at least not in the United States.  The CIA was prohibited by law from collecting domestic intelligence. This was the FBI's job, and Director J. Edgar Hoover jealously guarded his prerogative. 

    Thus, it comes as a surprise to find a CIA document, released under the JFK Collection Act, indicating it had a team to perform black bag jobs, and on at least one occasion, a domestic black bag job was requested.  The November 9, 1962 document is somewhat confusing because it does not appear to be the original document but rather a sanitized version of a cable.  There are no To or From fields, but it seems to be a document from the JMWAVE in Florida to CIA headquarters requesting a black bag team.  WAVE wanted the team to break into the headquarters of a Cuban exile group and seize financial records. The CIA was funding the group but thought they were misusing the funds. WAVE planned to question the group about the matter and didn't want it to destroy the records.  

     The document is initialed by HFS, whoever he was. Bill Harvey was probably still in charge of Cuban operations at the CIA at this time, but he would be relieved later that month. I point out in Murder, Inc. that he was relieved because of a confrontation with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, but there was a general feeling at the CIA that Harvey ran a loose ship and played fast and loose with the law.

    The exile group was probably Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil or DRE.  Other released documents show that later in November 1962, Nestor Sanchez and Richard Helms met with DRE leaders to discuss its misuse of funds.  Perhaps, the break-in wasn't approved. Or perhaps it was, giving the CIA evidence, if need be, to prove its point to the leadership.

     I was on the Church Committee and don't remember being told the CIA did domestic black bag jobs.  In fact, I knew that when it wanted the overseas mailing list of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, it asked the FBI to get them in a black bag job at the committee's offices in New York. The FBI took its time, though, and didn't get the list to the CIA until after the Kennedy assassination.  I asked four other Church Committee staffers recently if they had heard of the CIA conducting black bag jobs within the United States.  They all said, no, and would be appalled if it were true since the CIA never mentioned it to the Church Committee as far as they knew.