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 saying he had been.
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 fabrication 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.
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