Conspiracy Theories Part 3

      Parts 1 and 2 of this series on conspiracy theories should not be taken to suggest that I don't think the CIA was/is hiding something related to John Kennedy's assassination. I just don't think it was or is hiding something about its involvement. My book Murder, Inc. says it was hiding its plot to kill Fidel Castro. 

      The first clue that the CIA was hiding something about that plot is the CIA Inspector General's (IG) Report of 1967. Apparently, Lyndon Johnson ordered CIA Director Richard Helms to give him a report after LBJ heard Johnny Roselli's lawyer, Ed Morgan, was claiming Castro killed Kennedy in retaliation for CIA plot(s) against him. But the lengthy IG Report only contains one sentence about Kennedy's assassination, remarking on the "coincidence" that the CIA was meeting with Rolando Cubela about killing Castro at the very moment Kennedy was assassinated. Given that the report was seemingly written in response to Ed Morgan's claims, this is very strange. Even stranger is the fact that, according to the report, Helms ordered the IG to destroy all notes from the investigation and all copies of the report. This is a classic way to cover something up, but we don't know what that was because all the backup material was destroyed. Perhaps most significant, at least to me, is the fact that the report does not mention Richard Helms's meeting with President Kennedy about Cuba on November 19, 1963. That is the same day that Nestor Sanchez's memo, which was made public, says he got authority to give Cubela "sniper rifles." 

      Murder, Inc. details many other instances where documents are missing or investigatory leads were not followed, so I won't detail those here. However, I do want to make it clear that I did not think Nestor Sanchez, the CIA case officer who was meeting with Cubela when Kennedy was killed, was forthcoming in my interview of him in 1976. I remember he seemed uncomfortable during the interview. He seemed trying to guess where my questions were leading. I felt, and still feel, that his answers to my questions about what happened to the poison pen were evasive. You don't offer someone a James Bond-like assassination device and then not remember what happened to it. The interview was twelve years after the fact, but almost everyone would remember such a dramatic meeting. I was sure the IG talked to him in preparing the 1967 Report, and I'm sure he was debriefed immediately afterwards. But there are no documents. 

      I was not a rookie lawyer when I conducted that interview. I had been in Army counterintelligence for two years, six months of which were spent in being trained in how to conduct such investigations. I pressed on the poison pen because it was a tremendously compromising device if it fell into the hands of Cuban intelligence. CIA agents simply are not as casual about such items as Sanchez was in his testimony.

      It may be asked, of course, why would the CIA still be hiding this today.  The first answer is: Because it doesn't know what happened. Nothing incriminating was written down, or if it was, the documents were destroyed in 1963 or 1964.  There would have been documents relating to the manufacture of the supposed poison pen and custodial records about it being given to Sanchez. The CIA was not casual about such things. What if Sanchez had given the pen to Cubela, and the operation had been discovered by the Cubans? The CIA would want records and photographs of the device. It would want a sworn statement from Sanchez if he had, as he hinted in the interview, thrown it away after the meeting.

      The second answer, which I give in the book, is that the United States government did not want the Warren Commission to find a foreign conspiracy. Such a finding might well have set off World War III, with the United States invading Cuba and the Soviet Union coming to its defense. Within 45 minutes of Oswald's murder on November 24, 1963, FBI Director Hoover warned the White House's Walter Jenkins that public disclosure of foreign involvement should be avoided. Hoover knew at the time that the CIA had a plot to assassinate Castro. The same general sentiment was expressed later by a letter Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wrote to Bill Moyers at the White House. JMWAVE chief Ted Shackley testified that he assumed someone (at the CIA) would have investigated the relationship between the Cubela operation and JFK's assassination, but there are no documents from such an investigation. This seems like the kind of secret the CIA would still keep from the public today. 

Conspiracy Theories Part 2

    The second problem with those conspiracy theories that say the CIA was involved is that they never give a plausible reason for this. The CIA isn't a human being. It is a collection of individuals. It doesn't get mad. It doesn't hold grudges. Government agencies do have a bizarre tendency for self-preservation, but John Kennedy was the CIA's best friend in the 1960s. The CIA's director, John McCone, was close personally to Robert and Ethel Kennedy while lower level employees never had it so good. In the 1960s, the CIA under John Kennedy was probably the most admired agency of government. And while it is true that many anti-Castro Cubans were still angry over the Bay of Pigs, as Murder, Inc. shows, the AMLASH operation was one of the ways Kennedy was trying to demonstrate to the Cubans that he was doing something to get rid of Castro. Indeed, Robert Kennedy may have been leaking the plot to his anti-Castro friends for this very reason.

    Moreover in point of fact, I can't think of any occasion where a government agency of any kind or a conspiracy of individuals within an agency ever directed violence against political leaders.  The FBI could play tough with politicians and others with programs like COINTELPRO, but it never resorted to violence. Indeed, one of my assignments for the Church Committee was to fly around interviewing victims of COINTELPRO. When I described to the victims what the FBI had done to them, every one of them found the FBI's action laughable. An elected judge, for example, said the FBI's accusing him of being a Communist in a mailing to voters would have helped him win the election because the voters in his district had communist leanings.

    So in the various conspiracy theories that claim CIA involvement in the assassination, I've never found a plausible explanation of exactly who in the CIA was involved, how they would escape detection in an agency that prided itself on policing its own, why they wanted Kennedy assassinated, or how they avoided the FBI, Warren Commission, and later investigator discovering what they did.

    It would be very hard to go rogue in the CIA during the Cold War since it was very, very vigilant to penetration by the KGB and had a host of controls on employees.  

    The final trouble with most CIA conspiracy theories is that it makes no sense that the CIA would continue to hide such a conspiracy that happened more than sixty years go. That is, if the CIA did have evidence of a conspiracy in 1963, why would it still be resisting the disclosure, as most such theorists claim? The CIA isn't a human being. It doesn't get embarrassed. In 1976, it was relatively open with the Church Committee about its past misdeeds. It generally recognized that the United States is a democracy and that congressional oversight is part and parcel of that although it was perhaps more open with the president that with congress. 

Conspiracy Theories Part 1

     I usually try to avoid throwing cold water on conspiracy theories about the assassination because it probably does no good. But as a staff lawyer in a major, adversarial investigation of the CIA, the Church Committee, I feel I should address those theories that say the CIA was involved. It wasn't. Plus, I figure that this posting will certainly prompt rebuttals. 

     Theories about CIA involvement, such as Jim Garrison's, commonly say that a small group of low-level people in the CIA were involved although some theories claim a cover-up by more senior CIA officials. 

      There is no credible evidence of either such involvement by the CIA despite four outside investigations. First was the Warren Commission. Those who say there was a conspiracy and cover up have to explain why the Warren Commission didn't uncover it. After all, the FBI, not the CIA, did the bulk of the investigation.

      Second was the Rockefeller Commission in 1975. David Belin was its chief counsel and he had been a staff lawyer on the Warren Commission. He in fact was very interested in whether the CIA might have withheld information from the Warren Commission, but he found nothing.

       Third was the Church Committee. As has been documented in books by Loch Johnson and James Risen, the Church Committee staff consisted both of adversarial lawyers and CIA-friendly academics. Even lawyers in an adversarial role, like I was, had plenty of contact and were cordial with senior CIA officers. We talked with them both on the record and in casual conversations. I found James Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence in 1963 and point man for CIA contact with the Warren Commission, quite forthcoming in private. Ted Shackley, who ran JMWAVE, struck me as especially forthcoming among the CIA officers. Then there was Seymour Bolton who had been executive officer for Desmond FitzGerald. He was CIA liaison to the Church Committee. He wasn't forthcoming, but I never felt he lied. I felt the same way about Harold Swenson, who headed counterintelligence against Cuba under Desmond FitzGerald. He wasn't forthcoming , but he seemed to answer questions truthfully. 

       What do I conclude from this? None of these individuals knew of a conspiracy within the CIA, and it was certainly their responsibility to know. Granted, it might be possible to hide things from them, but the CIA had very good controls to prevent employees from going rogue. The short of it is that although the Church Committee's adversarial lawyers and CIA-friendly academics spent a year in close contact with those who had been at the CIA in 1963, the Church Committee never got so much as a whiff of high or low level CIA involvement in John Kennedy's assassination. 

      Fourth and last was the House Assassinations Committee under Congressman Pike and later Congressman Stokes. My sense is that the House committee's staff did not enjoy such close contacts with 1963 CIA personnel as the Church Committee staff did, but regardless the committee did not claim to find CIA involvement.