ARRB vs. FRUS Part 2

      Jeremy Gunn, staff director of the ARRB, persuaded the board to include CIA operations against Castro as "assassination records" because of the obvious, chronological connection between those operations and Kennedy's murder. Thus, records from the Church Committee on assassination as well as CIA records on its covert operations against Cuba were considered subject to disclosure. Nonetheless, the CIA didn't identify Director McCone's briefing of Lyndon Johnson about CIA Cuban operations to the ARRB, and so a key document was not made public at the National Archives.

      In 1997, however, while the ARRB was wrapping up its work, State Department historians were given access to two of McCone's memoranda of what he told LBJ for the FRUS series on U.S. policy towards Cuba in 1962-63.  The historians didn't make the entire memorandum public. Instead, they quoted a small part in the "editorial" comment below. 

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      381. Editorial Note On November 28, 1963, Director of Central Intelligence John McCone met with President Lyndon Johnson at Johnson’s residence for approximately 30 minutes. According to McCone’s memorandum for the record, November 29, the discussion on Cuba was as follows: 

      “The President then turned to Cuba. He asked how effective our policy was and what was the future of Cuba. He asked how effective the economic denial program was and how we planned to dispose of Castro. He said he did not wish any repetition of any fiasco of 1961, but he felt that the Cuban situation was one that we could not live with and we had to evolve more aggressive policies. He looks to us for firm recommendations. In this connection we should prepare a briefing and also we should study carefully various courses of action.” (Central Intelligence Agency, DCI/McCone Files, Job 80-B01285A, DCI Meetings with the President, 23 November-31 December 1963) 

       On November 30 McCone again met with President Johnson with McGeorge Bundy also present. The meeting lasted for approximately 1-1/2 hours and according to McCone’s memorandum for the record, December 2, the discussion on Cuba was as follows: 

      “The President again raised the question of what we were going to do in Cuba. Bundy advised that a policy meeting was scheduled for Monday, time not set, to discuss Cuban policy. I pointed out to the President the statements of President Kennedy on September 5th, September 13th, and November 20th, 1962 and then I showed the evidence that proved absolutely that arms had been imported into Venezuela from Cuba. I stated that most positive efforts should be made immediately to secure complete OAS agreement on a course of action which would involve a series of steps ranging from economic denial through blockade and even to possible invasion, but that it must be OAS action, otherwise it would involve confrontation with Khrushchev. I stated that if the action was a Hemispheric action I didn’t see that the USSR could do much about it. The President agreed but decided to await the policy meeting on Monday.”

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     The memo is notable for several things.  First, Lyndon Johnson said he wanted "more aggressive policies" than Kennedy's. It's hard to imagine what could be more aggressive than Kennedy's plan for a coup. What is more, in three weeks, Johnson reversed himself completely, warning the CIA on December 19, that someday it would have to answer for what it had been doing in Cuba. Second, his directive to McCone to prepare a briefing on various courses of action is undoubtedly what led FitzGerald to make oblique reference to the AMLASH operation in the document that led me to ask the CIA in 1976 for McCone's memoranda of his meetings with Johnson. Third, the first of these meetings took place at Johnson's house, The Elms, with no one else present. McGeorge Bundy was at the second, the next day. McCone apparently showed Johnson and Bundy the same Belgian FAL rifle, or at least a photo of it, that the CIA had found in an arms cache in Venezuela, a weapon Richard Helms had taken to Kennedy at the White House on November 19 as hard evidence of Castro's exporting the revolution to other Latin American countries. Since November 19 was the day the CIA decided to give Cubela the assassination weapons he had been requesting, it is inconceivable that McCone would not mention the AMLASH operation to Johnson in talking about the arms cache. Fourth, the FRUS editorial indicates that this was but one document from McCone's files on his meetings with Johnson from November 23 to December 31, 1963.  Only a few were given the ARRB.  State Department historians saw these two but the ARRB did not. Finally, in 1967 in a recorded phone conversation, John Connally told Johnson that reporters were telling him that Castro had Kennedy murdered in retaliation for assassination plots against him. Johnson responded that the allegations jogged his memory about "requests that were made of me back there right after I became president." He seemed to be saying that he was told about plans to assassinate Castro right after Kennedy's murder.

      When I as writing Murder, Inc., I emailed State Department historians in 2014 and asked for entire copies of McCone's two memoranda.  They replied:  "Unfortunately, we no longer have copies of the documents associated with that editorial note as backup documents for FRUS volumes are not permanent records."

      In short, some of the most significant Kennedy assassination records, McCone's memoranda of his meetings with President Johnson in the weeks after the assassination, were not given the ARRB and have not, to this day, been made public.

      Here is the typed version of LBJ's daily calendar for Nov. 28.  The McCone meeting is not listed, presumably because it was at Johnson's house.

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ARRB vs. FRUS Part 1

     This is the first of four posts about differences between the  records the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) -- and hence the National Archives -- got from the CIA pursuant to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 and the records State Department historians got from the CIA in preparation of the Foreign Relations of the United States histories (FRUS) that they  publish. As you will read, State Department historians had access to a highly significant JFK assassination record that was not turned over to the ARRB and National Archives. Moreover, not even the historians, apparently, were given access to a second possibly important assassination record.

      As the Church Committee was winding down and under deadline to get its report on the Kennedy assassination completed, I was concerned that although the committee had taken sworn testimony from 1963 CIA Director John McCone, it did not have memoranda of any meetings with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson about the AMLASH operation with Rolando Cubela.  McCone and the CIA were notorious for writing such memoranda.

      In this regard, I was puzzled by a memorandum Desmond FitzGerald prepared that summarized what Johnson should be told about Cuban operations, saying Cuban dissidents had been given general and specific assurances of support. President Kennedy's speech of November 18, saying Castro was a barrier to be removed, seemed such a specific assurance. Indeed a copy of the speech as it was reported by the NY Times was given to Cubela at the November 22, 1963, Paris meeting, and he was told the CIA wrote the speech.  This was true.  

     Lyndon Johnson had been kept out of the loop on Cuban operations when he was vice president. For this reason, I thought the CIA surely briefed him about the AMLASH operation after President Kennedy's death.  When I questioned FitzGerald's security officer about why there were no written records of such a briefing, he explained that such a sensitive matter, i.e. providing Cubela assassination weapons, would never be put in writing for the president.  Too many eyes would see it. In fact, he added, it probably would be conveyed by McCone to LBJ when no one else was present.  

     Therefore, I made a written request of the CIA for access to whatever papers the CIA had prepared for briefing Johnson about Kennedy's Cuban policy, e.g., FitzGerald's papers, and for memoranda of any of McCone's briefing of LBJ.  Below is the CIA's response.  It is NARA 157-10005-10402.  The letter from Walter Elder, the CIA's liaison to the committee, was addressed to committee staff director, William Miller.  The CIA denied  me access.  Among the reasons given was that some unnamed Church Committee staffer was once given access to the records.  (This doesn't mean he or she read them).  It was too late in the Church Committee's life to pursue the matter.

     In short, in 1976, when I asked to see memoranda of CIA Director McCone's briefings of Lyndon Johnson about Cuba after the assassination,  the CIA denied the request, saying someone else had looked at those memoranda.  But there was and is no record of who that person was or what he or she saw.  And even if he was allowed to see memoranda of McCone's briefings, he didn't acquire a copy for the Church Committee files. Indeed, there is no proof, other than Mr. Elder's assertion, that the Church Committee reviewed the memoranda.

Plan for RFK to meet Cubela?

      Seeing the actual documents is commonly better than reading about them, so I thought it might be valuable to see the CIA document that suggests Attorney General Robert Kennedy had agreed to meet with Rolando Cubela if necessary. Of course, this is a CIA document about its plan.  It doesn't prove the Attorney General had agreed.

        By way of background, on October 13, 1963, the CIA's Nestor Sanchez met with Cubela and Carlos Tepedino.  At that meeting, Cubela said he wanted to meet personally with Robert Kennedy. And so Sanchez cabled CIA headquarters: "recommend [Cubela} be flown back by military aircraft to U.S. for for two or three days.  Attempt arrange short meeting with [Robert Kennedy] or if this is not possible with other high official responsible for [Cuban] affairs."

        Within an hour of receiving the cable, Desmond FitzGerald called Robert Kennedy. The phone record of that call is in an earlier blog entry of August 26, 2019.  Ultimately though, the CIA decided instead to have Desmond FitzGerald fly to Paris and meet with Cubela under an alias as the personal representative of the Attorney General. The CIA document with the plans for that meeting is NARA 104-10102-10030.  It is a three-page undated and apparently sanitized document.  The first page is "Scenario" that describes the expected arrangements for the meeting, including an "impressive" safehouse under CIA control.  The third page, labeled Fall Back, below, provides that if the FitzGerald meeting isn't enough, Cubela will be flown back to the United States to meet with another high government official.  Although one might argue that this official might be Richard Helms or John McCone of the CIA, given that Cubela wanted to meet Robert Kennedy, there is little doubt that this was the CIA's fall back.

The Curious Case of the Ted Shackley Transcripts

      

       

      I was recently asked about the transcript of a Church Committee hearing in which I questioned the CIA's Ted Shackley. He testified twice before Committee.  I took a look at the transcripts of the two hearings and was surprised at what I discovered.  The two transcripts are curious both with respect to fact that the first was released in 1998 and the second withheld until 2017 and with regard to what Shackley said.

       The witness.  Ted Shackley was chief of the CIA's Miami station from February 1962 to July 1965.  In its heyday, the station was purportedly the largest CIA station in the world and the largest employer in Florida.  The transcript of the first hearing on August 19, 1975 dealt with assassination plots with Shackley testifying under the alias of "Halley."  He testified under his real name in second on May 6, 1976 about the Kennedy assassination, but his name is redacted.

       The two transcripts.  Shackley's 1975 testimony (taken by Fred Baron, the "Baron transcript," was released with redactions in 1998.  The Miami station was known by the cryptonym JMWAVE, often shortened to WAVE.  Although he testified under the alias of "Mr. Halley," his true identity is easily determined from the transcript because he was asked about passages in the CIA Inspector General's report in which he was named as helping the CIA's Bill Harvey move material in a U-Haul truck.  Since a portion of the report was attached to the transcript, you turn to the attachment and read that Shackley was the man who helped Bill Harvey in the move.  Someone at the CIA was careless when he or she approved the document and didn't redact Shackley's name from the attachment.   

     For inexplicable reasons, Shackley's 1976 testimony was withheld in 1998 and not released until 2017.  While his name is redacted in this transcript, he is identified as the chief of JMWAVE for the same period stated in the first transcript.  One might dream up sinister reasons for this.  Had Shackley said something in his second appearance that he did not say in the first?  Is that why it was withheld? I would be flattered by this interpretation since I was the lead questioner in the second, but  this doesn't seem likely from a reading of the two transcripts.  A more likely and prosaic explanation would be that Shackley testified under his true name the second time.  This forced CIA reviewers to redact his name and, in so doing, they may have decided to withhold the entire transcript from release in 1998.  But if this is the reason, they must not have read the transcript carefully enough to know that the witness in both transcripts is said to be chief of JMWAVE and he is identified as Shackley in the attachment to the Baron transcript. But, who knows what the reviewer's thinking was.  

     The May 6, 1976 transcript.  (The Johnston transcript).  If you read the whole transcript, you will see that there are several others at the hearing, Senator Richard Schweiker and Committee lawyer Paul Wallach, as well as Seymour Bolten and a man named "John _____" from the CIA.  The result is an unstructured and somewhat confusing interview as each questioner pursued his own line of inquiry. 

     Generally, as Shackley says, the FBI was responsible for both criminal and counterintelligence investigations within the United States.  But WAVE was an exception. The CIA station was conducting counterintelligence (but not criminal) investigations throughout the Cuban exile community.  Because WAVE could do domestic investigations, I wanted to find out how involved it was in the investigation of Kennedy's assassination.  

      In addition, I had cables from CIA headquarters to WAVE about the delivery into Cuba of sniper rifles that the CIA's Nestor Sanchez had promised Rolando Cubela at the key November 22, 1963, meeting in Paris. Cubela, a "comandante" of the July 26 Movement and a "Hero of the Revolution," was a friend of Fidel Castro.  But he thought Castro had betrayed the Revolution by embracing communists in the government and was prepared to overthrow him with or without the CIA's help.  At least, this is what he told the CIA. 

       After the Paris meeting, CIA told WAVE to plan on delivering a cache of weapons to Cubela.  But in a cable of December 6, 1963, the CIA backtracked and said the delivery had to be delayed pending review in Washington.  The implication was that Kennedy's assassination might change things with respect to the operation. (Page 202 Murder, Inc.)  

      My questions cover three main areas.  First, was the AMLASH (Cubela) operation an assassination?  The CIA had always argued it was not.  Rather, it characterized the operation as a coup.  I thought this was splitting hairs.  Cubela had been asking for rifles with telescopic sights, but the CIA dragged its feet until November 19, 1963.  It did not seem mere coincidence that Richard Helms met with the President at the White House that day and, on the same day, approved giving Cubela the sniper rifles he wanted. Second, what role did WAVE play in the investigation of the assassination?  And third, did the assassination result in a change in CIA policy towards Cuba?

       Rifles with telescopic sights are assassination weapons. Shackley discusses weapons in the Baron transcript.  He paid attention to weaponry.  Teams sent into Cuba commonly were given either short-range, self-defense weapons like pistols and light rifles or heavier machine guns for the backup teams that protected their comrades in the case of trouble.  (P. 32). The Cubans frequently talked about assassinating this or that leader, and when they did, they always thought of a long-range weapon, a rifle with a telescopic sight.  (P. 34).  Shackley recalled putting a cache into Cuba for Cubela, but he wasn't asked what was in the cache.  (P. 81).  (A cache was a sealed container, sometimes water proof, that would be infiltrated into Cuba by CIA teams.  This was classic spy-stuff. Larger boats would sail from Florida to Cuba carrying CIA-paid exiles, who would then get into smaller boats or inflatables and motor or paddle ashore to hide the cache in Cuba before returning to Florida).  However, later in his testimony, when Mr. Baron mentioned giving the Cubans high-powered rifles with telescopic sights and conceivably with silencers, Shackley pulled him up short.  "We had high-powered rifles. I cannot think now of a case where there was a sniper scope attached to the rifle.... I do not recall a sniper scope or a silenced rifle."  (P. 101).

     So I wanted to ask him specifically about the cache for Cubela.  Here is the exchange.  "Johnston:  Well, was it common to drop, to your knowledge, to drop rifles with telescopic sights?   Shackley: Well, I think the thing that would be uncommon would be the telescopic sights."  (p. 47).  Shackley knew what I was driving at.  He knew Sanchez promised Cubela rifles with sights at the November 22, 1963 meeting.  He knew President Kennedy had been killed by a rifle with a telescopic sight.  To Shackley and to other CIA officers, giving Cubela rifles with telescopic sights converted the AMLASH operation from a coup to an assassination. He also knew that when the cache was finally left for Cubela in February1964, after Kennedy's assassination and after the review in Washington, it did not contain sniper rifles.

     WAVE was not tasked to investigate Kennedy's assassination. Shackley says in the Johnston transcript that he was not given orders to investigate Kennedy's murder. (P. 9) WAVE's capability to conduct such an investigation in the Cuban community was, however, "quite good." (P. 11). WAVE did not have sources in Cuban intelligence in Cuba, but it did have sources who had access to people in Cuban intelligence.  It never tasked its sources to make inquiries though. (P. 13) Why?  Shackley gave the excuse that, after all, WAVE had no "hard information" that Cuba was involved in Kennedy's assassination.(P. 14) This excuse was obviously disingenuous.  Intelligence agencies don't wait for hard information before they investigate.  They investigate in order to get hard information.

     When pressed on why WAVE didn't task its sources in Cuba, Shackley responded obliquely:  "In my view, you would have had to have had a penetration of one or more of the Cuban intelligence services. The penetration would have had to have been in the 26th of July Movement [the cadre who had been in the Revolution with Castro] and had enough support with the top leadership that it could have moved freely in and out of a specific circle. Would probably had to have been at the level of a Comandante. We did not have that kind of resource in depth to conduct that kind of investigation." (P. 24)  

      By "comandante," Shackley was surely thinking of Cubela, but WAVE didn't control Cubela.  He was being run out of CIA headquarters.  When asked if he knew of Sanchez's November 22 meeting with Cubela, Shackley answered:  "No, I think the basic answer to that question is no, but if you looked at my previous testimony, I previously said that in the case of this Cuban comandante over the years, I had acquired some knowledge of the fact that he existed and he was being run by my colleagues in Washington, but that was not a clearcut assassination operation." (P. 34).  In other words, if the CIA wanted to determine whether the Cubans were involved in the President's assassination, the best person to ask was Cubela.  There is no record that it ever asked him.

      Although WAVE's capabilities to ask domestic sources about a Cuban connection to the Kennedy assassination were quite good, Shackley was never contacted by the Warren Commission. (P. 42). 

     Was there a change in Cuban policy after Kennedy's assassination? Murder, Inc. documents the "sea change" in U.S. Cuban policy in the wake of the assassination. I didn't have that documentation when I was interviewing Shackley, but I suspected this might be the case and wanted to ask him. On this line of questioning, Shackley's memory failed.  He didn't recall the December 6, 1963, cable from Sanchez, telling WAVE not to deliver the cache of assassination weapons to Cubela until a policy review in Washington was complete. (P. 49). He didn't recall a "stand down" in operations after the assassination.  Rather, he said, operations were always being called off.  (P. 50). He didn't recall if CIA Director McCone met with him in Florida after the assassination. He deflected the question by referring to a time in December 1962, a year earlier, when McCone (and John Kennedy) welcomed the return of Brigade 2506 from its imprisonment in Cuba at the Orange Bowl.  He couldn't recall if he had discussions with someone from CIA headquarters, such as McCone or Helms, about the direction of Cuban policy after the assassination.  (P. 64)  Shackley hedged: "I don't recall this kind of specific conversation with a particular individual, but I'm sure that these kinds of conversations must have taken place." (P. 65)    

      Shackley's selective memory. If you read through both transcripts, you will find that Shackley had a remarkable memory for things of relative minor importance, but on major matters such as those I was asking about his memory failed.  For example, he remembered General Lansdale's visit to WAVE in 1962 and what they talked about.  He only had one meeting with Lansdale in Florida.  He clearly remembered he never discussed assassination with McCone.  (Baron transcript 15, 27).  When Senator Schweiker asked him about his dealings with a banker, whose name is still redacted. Shackley's memory was spot on.  He remembered him.  And, when I asked if he and the banker ever discussed the Kennedy assassination, Shackley answered:  "No I wouldn't have talked about that.  My recollection of the kind of things that I would have talked about with _____ would have been the formation of some cover company, the purchase of a boat, the rental or term lease of you know pieces of acreage for training sites and things like that.  That is what I recall of _____ relationship with us at the time." (P. 75-76).  Exasperated by Shackley's selective memory, I had to observe:  "I guess I just have a little bit of trouble, [illegible] with your recollection of conversations with him. But you don't recall whether you talked to McCone or Helms about a connection between the Kennedy assassination and the Cuban operation."  Shackley answered by saying that the banker was an important man who made an impression on him, to which I responded sarcastically, "I thought Mr. Helms and Mr. McCone would also make an impression." (P. 76-77).

     Shackley distinguished coup from assassinations.  Murder, Inc. documents that the CIA met with Cubela on September 7, 1963, for the purpose of enlisting him in a coup plot in Cuba.  But, at that first meeting, he said he wanted to "eliminate" Castro.  In later meetings that fall, he repeatedly argued that Castro's assassination had to be the first step in the coup.  This is why he wanted certain "tools," such as rifles with telescopic sights and a dart pen. So a line of questioning in the Johnston transcript by Mr. Wallach is interesting.  It begins with Wallach asking if Castro was aware that the CIA was supporting Cubans in overthrowing his regime.  Shackley answered quickly "Yes." (P. 35).  But after some confusion over a follow up question, Wallach explained:  "I don't see that much of a distinction between sending someone in who is going to try to foment a revolution, the result of which would probably be the death of Castro as opposed to sending someone in to [kill him]. (P. 36). Shackley went out of his way to correct Wallach.  He answered a different question from Wallach before saying:  "I do want to come back to your point.  I do think there is a difference in the Latin American revolutionary sense of plotting revolution against somebody as opposed to plotting a specific assassination operation against a particular individual.  You know, maybe we have an honest difference of opinion on that point, but my view differs from yours."  (P. 37).  In hindsight, Shackley is giving a much stronger answer than I appreciated at the time.  

     Shackley was drawing a clear line between a coup and an assassination and was not going to let the record show him agreeing to Wallach's blurring that line.  This takes on added significance because Shackley was far more involved in and knowledgeable of the AMLASH operation than appears in these transcripts or than one might expect of a CIA station chief.  Desmond FitzGerald told him that he was going to meet with Cubela personally.  Shackley strongly advised against it, warning of the "flap" that might result if anything went wrong because FitzGerald was such a high-level CIA officer and well-known in Washington.  This would have been in October 1963 since FitzGerald met with Cubela on October 29.  Shackley was in attendance at a White House meeting with the President on November 12, 1963, ten days before Kennedy's death, at which FitzGerald and other top CIA officers briefed the President on the progress of the coup plot.  (Murder, Inc. 121, 137). Shackley's strong reaction to Wallach's conflating coup and assassination seems intended to state for the record that he was not consulted when the CIA approved promising Cubela assassination weapons at the November 22 meeting.

     Seymour Bolten's presence at the 1976 interview. Shackley's appearance at the May 6, 1976 interview was unusual in that he was accompanied by two other CIA officers. Bolten was one of several "liaison" officers from the CIA to the Church Committee. The last name of John, the other individual from the CIA, is still redacted.  Witnesses could be accompanied by their lawyers, but not by officials from their agencies.  I don't remember if Bolten made a special request to attend this interview or whether he and John showed up and weren't challenged.  I remember Wallach afterward complained to senior committee staff because Bolten had been FitzGerald's deputy in 1963.  This means he was involved in the AMLASH plot in 1963, but it was way too late to raise this.  The Church Committee's time was running out.  The committee's report on its investigation of the intelligence agencies performance in the investigation of Kennedy's assassination was released on June 23, 1976 a little over a month after Shackley's interview.

     A final curious coincidence is that Shackley's memoir was published posthumously by Potomac Books, a commercial publisher, in 2005.  Murder, Inc. was also published by Potomac Books in 2019, by which time, it had been acquired by the University of Nebraska Press.

   

Newly Released Files Part 4, The CIA in Mexico City

     The most intriguing documents in the new released files are ones relating to the CIA's Anne Goodpasture. She was a "charter member" of the CIA, having worked for its predecessor the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII.  Thus, like Julia Child, whom she knew in the OSS, Goodpasture was a trailblazer for women in the intelligence services.

      But her importance to this blog is that in 1977, during the House Assassinations Committee investigation, she prepared several memos on the operations of the CIA station in Mexico City at the time of Oswald's visit when he attempted to get to Cuba.  

      In 1998, Dr. Jeremy Gunn, executive director of the Assassination Records Review Board, interviewed Ms. Goodpasture and discussed some of the items below. That interview adds nothing to what appears in the following documents except that she spelled her first name Anne with an "e" whereas the CIA records show her name as Ann.

1. The Mexico City station.  In the first of the memos, Goodpasture describes the history of the counterintelligence work of the station in covering the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic establishments there.  She identifies nineteen of the CIA officers doing this work in 1963.  She is highly critical of the results of a liaison relationship with the Direcccion Federal de Seguridad (DFS) of the Mexican government, calling its agents "vicious, venal, corrupt extortionists." The CIA built its own surveillance of the Soviet and Cuban offices in Mexico City. This is how Oswald came to the CIA's attention when he contacted the Cuban and Soviet consulates to get visas.  The CIA's photograph of a man entering the Soviet establishment, mistakenly identified as Oswald, has been the subject of much controversy over the years, but the CIA's explanation that it was simply a mistake has been pretty much accepted. The important thing about this memo is the transcripts of the phone calls between the Soviet and Cuban consulates about Oswald's visa requests.  The bottom line is that the Soviets thought Oswald wanted to return to Russia with his wife and wouldn't give him a visa until it checked with the Soviet embassy in Washington.  The Cubans wouldn't give him an intransit visa that would permit him to stop there on the way to Russia unless he had a Soviet visa,

2. The Mexico City intercepts.  This 105-page document, apparently prepared by Goodpasture in 1977, includes the document discussed in paragraph 1 above, but it also includes the CIA cables to and from Mexico City reporting on intercepted phone calls (wiretaps) on phone lines at the Cuba and Soviet establishments related to Oswald's visit and to the assassination.

     The CIA's Mexico station realized that Oswald's visit to Mexico City in September and attempt to get a visa to Cuba may have been because "he was getting documented to make a quick escape after assassinating the president" and cabled CIA headquarters to make sure it understood this possibility. (Cable of November 24, page 77).   

      The next day, November 25, the station reminded headquarters of Castro's September 7, 1963 threat to assassinate Kennedy.  "FYI.  Presume headquarters is aware of AP story datelined Hava September 7.  At reception at Brazilian Embassy Castro is quoted: 'We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think (reflect) that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.'" (page 85)  The distribution of this cable at CIA headquarters included the Special Affairs Staff (SAS 5), which was Desmond FitzGerald's group. A case officer in SAS, Nestor Sanchez, had met with Cubela that very September 7 in Brazil. As pointed out in a previous post, Sanchez testified to the Church Committee that he did not know of this threat at the time. Sanchez also testified that he returned from the Paris meeting with Cubela to CIA headquarters on November 23, so he was there when this cable arrived. That SAS was so stupid as not to connect the Cubela plot with Castro's threat and with Kennedy's assassination is inconceivable.

    The most intriguing of these intercepts is a phone call at 12:50 pm Mexico City time.  (page 74) Before discussing the phone call, some background is needed.  This call was placed twenty minutes after Kennedy was shot in Dallas, which is in the same time zone.  News of shots being fired at the president went out to the world instantly.  At 12:40 Central Standard Time, Walter Cronkite reported on CBS that three shots were fired and the president was seriously wounded. The French reporter Jean Daniel was in Havana on this day interviewing Castro over lunch. Daniel wrote that the lunch was interrupted by someone bringing in news of the shooting. He said the time was 1:30 Havana time, which is an hour ahead of Dallas. In other words, Castro knew of the shooting around 12:35.  

    

     Now for the phone call.  It was from Alfredo Mirabal. He had just replaced Azcue as Cuban consul on Monday of that week.  The CIA later identified him as "the chief Cuban Intelligence officer in Mexico City." The intercept is a brief conversation with Valery Kostikov. He was in the Soviet consulate and was the man who Oswald had talked to there. Kostikov was also in Department 13 of the KGB, specializing in assassination and sabotage.  Mirabal called to speak to Pavel Yatskov, but according to the cable, he "was apparently unavailable" and Kostikov came on the line.

     The conversation makes no sense.   The men seem to be talking in code.  They surely knew about the shooting in Dallas by this time, yet they don't mention it.  After a brief exchange about whether Kostikov recovered a suitcase, Mirabal says:  "I called to tell you the following, that regarding that matter that we talked about to see if we could spend Sunday in Chapultapec Park because my wife is preparing some food to eat there."  Kostikov answers:  "I'm sorry but I've just made plans for another trip. I'm leaving this very day. So please forgive me for not being able to go with you.  (At this point Kostikov in error refers to Mirabal as Azcue and Mirabal corrects him)."  

     Did these men know Kennedy had been shot? Did they know or at least assume the CIA was listening in to their phone call?  If so, why would they use the telephone for any significant business? Does the conversation seem nonsense because they are talking in a kind of code? Why would the Cuban consul care about Kostikov finding a suitcase? Was the reference to Chapultapec Park a request to meet there where the CIA couldn't eavesdrop?  Why did Kostikov make the mistake of calling Mirabal, "Azcue." If this was indeed a social call, Kostikov is unlikely to have made such a mistake. Rather than being a social call, was Mirabal suggesting the men meet and talk about the assassination?  And did they have foreknowledge of the assassination and that Oswald was the assassin?  Did Kostikov make the mistake of calling Mirabal "Azcue" because Kostikov and Azcue had met Oswald on his visit to Mexico City in late September?  

     When I was on the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1976, I talked to James Angelton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief and the man who had interfaced with the Warren Commission, about this phone call.  I showed him the cable. Angelton had always said the CIA investigation of Kennedy's assassination would never close and had assigned his assistant Raymond Rocca to follow it.  Angelton agreed that Mirabal and Kostikov seemed to be talking in code because they knew, as all good spies do, the phone might be tapped, but he pointed out that while the timing and gobbledygook raise suspicsions, you can't reach conclusions from suspicions.  It is notable, however, that this cable apparently raised no suspicions in 1963, or, if they did, the CIA made a conscious decision not to pursue the matter.  For example, Kostikov was put under surveillance on November 22, and so the CIA should have learned if he in fact made a trip.  (Page 59). There is no evidence the CIA pursued the matter though.

      A final document in this set is a fitness report on Ann Goodpasture. I highlight this with some hesitation because publishing the fitness report seems an invasion of Ms. Goodpasture's privacy, as it would be for anyone's fitness report.  However, there is a relevant tidbit in her report.  The reviewer is John Whitten at CIA headquarters, who oversaw CIA operations in Mexico.  Whitten'c comments in the fitness report are that Ms. Goodpasture's ratings were too high because while her work was as good as that of others in Mexico City, it "is still not up to DDP [Deputy Director of Plans] standards." Whitten's complaint was not about the quality though but rather about how much money the Mexico City station was spending.  In particular, Goodpasture's LITEMPO project was too expensive.  "The agents are paid too much and their activities are not adequately reported." While Whitten's comments may be a bit crabbed, they do raise questions about how good the CIA investigation of the Kennedy assassination in Mexico City was.

The Newly Released Files, Part 3, Asciate ogni speranza, o voi ch'intrate

    The Italian words chosen for the title of this post, “abandon hope all ye who enter,” come obviously from Dante’s Inferno which has the words inscribed over the gates of hell. They could just as easily be used for the JFK Collection at the National Archives though. This is not to diminish the tremendous efforts of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), which oversaw assembly of the collection,  the employees of the government agencies that did the work, or those at the National Archives who maintain them. Yet for those who dive in thinking a smoking gun lurks in the records, asciate ogni speranza, o voi ch'intrate!

1. 40,000 unindexed FBI records. In December 1977, during the House Assassinations Committee investigation, CIA headquarters answered the Mexico City Station's request for copies of FBI documents related to the assassination work in Mexico City because "FBI does not have the personnel to examine first 40,000 pages.... These documents are not indexed.... There no way to determine which documents relate to Mexico City except by search of each individual document." The CIA sent three people to the FBI to do the work, but apparently after the first day of work, they got through only ten of the 200 "sections" of documents at the FBI. (See pages 184-85 of Murder, Inc. on the chaotic filing system for Hoover's feared FBI files).

     The researcher may find some comfort in the fact that the ARRB insured that the JFK Collection was indexed -- although hundreds of boxes of possibly related documents are not.

2. The CIA is not a monolith. It is often of two minds, but just as often it is careful as to which mind it makes public. For example, when Cubela's case officer, Nestor Sanchez, testified before the Church Committee in 1976, I asked him about Castro's September 7, 1963, threat that U.S. leaders would not be safe if they aided plans to eliminate Cuban leaders. This threat was made to an American reporter at a function at the Brazilian embassy in Havana. That very day, Sanchez met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with Rolando Cubela who told Sanchez he wanted the CIA’s help in "eliminating" Castro.

Q. Castro does give a warning about United States leaders aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuba leaders, and you were doing that very thing.

A. There is probably a coincidence there. I don't recall that I knew of this at that time [even though the coincidence suggests that Castro knew what Sanchez was doing], I've certainly heard it since, but I don't see the point that you are trying to make, because if Castro is behind or was behind AMLASH [Cubela], then are you proposing that he would also publicly in the Brazilian embassy state that this was going to take place? In other words, was he telegraphing this plan that he had?

      But while Sanchez was opining on this to the Senate Intelligence Committee, others at the CIA had reached the opposite conclusion. In a 1975 memo to Rockefeller Commission director David Belin, the CIA's E. Henry Knoche, wrote: "There can be no question... that this event represented a more-than-ordinary attempt to get a message on the record in the United States.... Castro's statements.... dealt principally with American political leadership, in particular President Kennedy, whom he excoriated in an extraordinarily provocative fashion... ('Kennedy is a 'cretin')."

     Of course, Knoche's views were not new.  When an interagency committee on Cuban affairs studied Castro's statement in the fall of 1963, before Kennedy's assassination, it concluded that Castro was threatening drastic action and might, among other things, assassinate an American businessman or diplomat in Latin America. It apparently didn't consider that he might do exactly what he said and assassinate the President. (Murder, Inc. pages 108-09).

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 answered

      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.  It is unclear if the letter was ever sent, but it certainly was not answered. The Warren Commission files contain nothing from Mexico's investigation. 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.  But the commission proceeded to issue its report without disclosing the investigatory failure.  

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

\

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.

The public's right to know

         When I was a lawyer for the Church Committee in 1975, James Angleton, the head of counterintelligence for the CIA, and I left together after a committee hearing. We had to take an elevator down from the hearing room in the Capitol to the rotunda.  Several celebrity senators like Walter Mondale and Gary Hart were on the same elevator.  When the door opened at the rotunda, the tourists there recognized the senators and immediately came over to shake their hands and get autographs.  On the way back to the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Angleton remarked that he never realized what it was like to be a senator. That is, he was surprised at the ready access voters had to politicians.  He said something like, “How can they be sitting in a room listening to the nation’s highest secrets one minute and the next minute walk out into a crowd and start shaking hands?”

James Jesus Angleton

Angleton had spent his life in clandestine service, defending a democracy he had never seen in action.  He typified many in U.S. intelligence in having an academic understanding of democracy but no “hands on” experience.  

I always wondered why politicians wanted to be on something like the intelligence committee. It fed their egos of course. They were privy to information that their colleagues did not have.  But how did this help them politically?  It wasn’t like getting a post office built or landing a new military base in their state.  It wasn’t even like sending a constituent an American flag that had flown over the Capitol. They couldn’t tell constituents about the good work they had done.

Of course, the senators did talk to reporters. On occasion, they might ask the staff what they could say in public about some secret they had learned.  But they often just made that decision on their own. I remember distributing a paper marked Top Secret to the senators at a hearing.  When the hearing was over and the senators were leaving, Senator Hart called out to another senator, saying in a loud voice, “You put that paper in the pocket of your jacket.  It is Top Secret.  You’ll have to leave it here.”  Still, the senators were surprisingly good at “declassifying” what they heard and explaining it to reporters. 

They sometimes made mistakes, but this is is a good thing. Democracy is better served by having politicians break through the morass of security classification and give the public a sense of what is going on rather than have the government operate in secrecy.  

Kennedy's classified White House tapes

      In the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Robert Kennedy called national security adviser McGeorge Bundy to ask who owned his brother's presidential papers. After checking with the State Department, Bundy told Kennedy that they were the personal property of the slain president. The attorney general then had the locks changed on the White House safes so that only he would have access.  He told the president's personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln to secure all the audio tapes that had been made of the president's meetings and take them to her apartment.  She did this and later turned the tapes over to Robert Kennedy.

      I didn't bother to find out what happened to the documents in the safes, but I presume they went to the Kennedy Library in Boston. I did look into the tapes. Some, but perhaps not all, are at the Kennedy Library. According to the library's explanation, Robert Kennedy donated a collection to the library, but the library doesn't know if he gave it everything that he acquired from Evelyn Lincoln.  

       Although the tapes obviously contained highly sensitive information, since they included the president's meetings with CIA officials, they bore no security classifications.  Nonetheless, after the library acquired them, intelligence officials reviewed and classified them.  Of particular interest to me is the tape of August 15, 1963.  The president and Bundy met with CIA Director McCone, Deputy Director Helms, Southeast Asia desk chief William Colby, and Bruce Cheever of the CIA.  The library's listing for this tape says "Eighteen minutes are deleted as secret."  Apparently the CIA or someone else went to the library, listened to the tape, and classified it. (See page 91 in Murder, Inc.) The library's listing says the meeting dealt with British Guinea among other things, but this doesn't make sense. The United States' interests in British Guinea were not particularly sensitive in 1963, and most of the CIA men at the meeting had nothing to do with the country.

      The Presidential Records Act, which was passed later, would not have allowed Robert Kennedy to take possession of the tapes.   But this is an instance where the government classified a presidential record after the president died and was succeeded.

       The final oddity of the Kennedy tapes is that they were not identified for the Assassination Records Review Board and never reviewed by it.  So the mysterious August 15, 1963 tape has not been subject to the periodic reviews for declassification of the JFK Records Act, and we may never know what is on it.

President's Power to Declassify

      Although I don't ordinarily defend Donald Trump, his statements on the president's power to declassify documents aren't as misplaced as some in the media make them out to be.  He told Hannity last night:  "If you're the president of the United States you can declassify just by saying: ‘It’s declassified.' Even by thinking about it." "There doesn't have to be a process. There can be a process, but there doesn't have to be. You're the president, you make that decision…I declassified everything."

       Well, his going on to say that the president only has to think in his head that a document is declassified and voila it is declassified is an exaggeration.  But there is no question but that the president can order documents declassified and that there is no formal process for this. 

       For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a U2 spy plane flying over Cuba took photographs of the sites the Russians had in Cuba for nuclear-capable missiles. These photographs were highly classified.

One reason for classification was "sources and methods."  The United States didn't want the Soviets to know how good U2 photographs were.  But Kennedy felt that he needed to release the photographs if he was to convince the American people and the world of the threat.  The story isn't new.  It has been written about a lot.  And while Kennedy may have been told about the sources and methods issue, there was no formal process. Kennedy was president, and he said the photographs needed to be released. I believe John Bolton in his book says Trump did the same thing with satellite photographs.

                Of course in Trump's case, some overt act of declassification is relevant since he's not president any more.  But that gets into issues that are beyond the point of this post.  

But Did He Read Murder, Inc.?

       "Unlike some of his predecessors, Mr. Trump did not care about intelligence reports about U.F.O.s, but he would ask questions about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."  Trump's Taste in Intelligence, The New York Times, September 2, 2022.  

       I want to put a little humor in this blog.  The FBI inventory of the material seized at Mar-a-Lago included several unidentified books, so maybe Murder, Inc. is among them.  Now, I doubt this since Trump is not known to be much a reader. But in that case, why did he stash the books away with classified documents?  Anyway, an author can only hope.:)

       On a more serious note, the New York Times might have expanded on why Donald Trump is interested in the Kennedy assassination -- but not UFOs. And if he truly is interested in the assassination, why didn't he declassify the so-called "secret files" when he had the opportunity as president?