A Tribute to Moses Aleman

 

            Moses “Moe” Aleman passed away on Friday, November 27, 2020, from complications of COVID-19.  Moe took the photograph of John F. Kennedy that is on the cover of the book.  Moe was an FBI agent in the Tampa field office when Kennedy visited the city on November 18, 1963, four days before he was assassinated in Dallas.  Agents from the FBI’s Tampa office were assigned to assist the Secret Service in providing security for Kennedy’s speech at the baseball stadium, Al Lopez Field.  They were told to bring their cameras and film and take pictures of any Ku Klux Klan or anti-Castro demonstrators.  When none showed up, Moe trained his camera on the President as he went by in a limousine.  Moe said it was the same car in which Kennedy was killed and had the same driver.  Moe was proud of the photograph and its historic significance.  He readily gave me permission to use it on the book’s cover.  It is a bit ominous though.  In hindsight, Kennedy’s careless exposure to the unseen crowd seems to portend the coming tragedy.

            Moses Aleman was born in Texas to immigrants from Mexico.  He was proud of growing up in a bilingual environment.  He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and served in the Air Force where he got to know several FBI agents.  They encouraged him to join the bureau.  An influx of Latino immigrants, particularly those fleeing Cuba after the Castro revolution, created a need for FBI agents who could speak Spanish.  Moe loved to tell the story of taking the FBI’s admission test.  He was given two newspapers, one in English and the other in Spanish.  The test was to translate an article from the English paper into Spanish and the Spanish paper into English.  Moe was not allowed to use an English-Spanish dictionary.  He was ushered into a testing room and given an hour to do the job.  Moe would laugh at this point in telling the story and explain:  “I was completely bilingual.  I finished the test in five minutes.”

            Moe later discovered that the FBI was not to his liking and left for a career in security for the Federal Aviation Administration.  Yet he always remembered that day in November 1963 when he helped protect the President of the United States and took his picture.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself signed letters of commendation to Moe and other FBI agents in Tampa for their work.  Perhaps Hoover felt that if they had been in the FBI’s Dallas field office, John Kennedy might have survived his trip to that city, or perhaps he wanted to deflect criticism of the FBI’s failures in Dallas. 

            Because Moe was such an interesting person and because his life story was so exceptional, I wanted to write more about him in Murder, Inc., but that would have been off topic.   He made a small but important contribution to the theme though.  A CIA source in Mexico City had told the agency that a Cuban American from Tampa had been “involved” somehow in Kennedy’s assassination along with Lee Harvey Oswald.  The individual had left Tampa for Texas a few days before Kennedy was killed and then crossed the border into Mexico the night of the assassination.  This raised the possibility that he was fleeing the United States.  And indeed five days later, he seemed to flee again as the only passenger on a flight from Mexico City to Havana. This was all that was known about the individual.

            The CIA asked the FBI to run an investigation in Tampa on him.  Moe got the assignment.  He was never told the reason for the investigation, however.  He first learned that from me.  I sent him his old reports, which had been declassified and put in the National Archives collection on Kennedy’s assassination. 

           Moe’s work is relevant to my book because the FBI never told the Warren Commission about the Cuban American, his suspicious travel, or the allegation that he was involved in the assassination.   The Warren Commission never saw Moe’s reports.  These were facts that the CIA and FBI didn’t want the Warren Commission to have.  They didn’t fit with the narrative of Oswald as acting alone that the Warren Commission planned to lay out to the public.  Did the two agencies act with the implicit or explicit approval of the White House?  Probably.  That is, in plainer terms, the episode suggests a cover up to avoid disclosing Kennedy’s own attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.  He was, as President Lyndon Johnson would later say, running a “Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean.” 

            And this brings me to a final reason that Moses Aleman’s story was important to my narrative.  He typified most of the FBI and CIA officers I encountered personally or through their reports in researching the book.  They were competent and professional.  They did not withhold or destroy documents, as some did, or distort disquieting information to protect careers or reputations.  Moses Aleman did his duty in the highest traditions of government service.

Interview on BYU Radio

     Marcus Smith did this interview that was aired on BYU Radio on November 6, 2020.  The interview is particularly interesting because Mr. Smith had read the book in detail.

Book Talk

When the coronavirsu pandemic caused the Alexandria, Virginia, public library to cancel my book talk, we moved the presentation to Zoom and recorded it.  The 45-minute presentation is an easy way to find out what the book is about.  Images of the people and places personalize the story.
Murder, Inc., Book Talk

November 19, 1963 The White House record

While the CIA record in the previous post shows that November 19 was the day it made the decision to give Cubela assassination weapons, the White House log, below, shows that the CIA's deputy director for plans Richard Helms, FitzGerald's superior, met with John Kennedy from 6:15 until 6:55 that same evening.  Helms writes about this in his memoir, A Look over My Shoulder, and says he met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy first, and it was the attorney general who said he needed to see the president and called to make the appointment.
     Earlier this same day, the CIA had received a cable from the Paris station indicating that Cubela planned to return to Cuba.  If the CIA was to meet his request for assassination weapons, it was now or never.  Thus, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Helms's real purpose in going to Robert Kennedy was to see if the CIA should provide the weapons and that he bucked the decision up to his brother.
     Helms writes in his book that Hershel Peake was with him and brought along an FAL rifle with Cuban markings from an arms cache found in Venezuela.  A week earlier, the president asked Helms to get "hard evidence" of Castro exporting the revolution to other Latin American countries, and it is plausible that this was a reason for Helms's actions.  Moreover, Peake was a CIA officer stationed in Venezuela.  However, this doesn't adequately explain why Helms felt he had to go to Robert Kennedy first.  Since John Kennedy had been the one to ask for such hard evidence, why didn't Helms go directly to him?  Besides, the White House meeting lasted forty minutes, but Helms only devotes a paragraph to it in his memoir.  The likelihood is that the two men discussed more than the arms cache.  Given the length of the meeting, Helms probably needed a decision from the president, and, therefore, a time-consuming, back-and-forth conversation ensued, a conversation about whether to give in to Cubela's request for assassination weapons.

November 19, 1963 CIA memorandum for the record

A document pointing to the president's approval of the CIA's complicity in Cubela's plan to shoot Fidel Castro is this November 19, 1963, memorandum for the record by case officer Nestor Sanchez, who was handling Cubela.  Readers can see the document for themselves. 

     It is initialed by Sanchez.  It refers to Kennedy's Miami speech.  That was when he called Castro a "barrier to be removed."  Since that speech was delivered on Monday, November 18, the date on the memo is reinforced.  It also indicates that Sanchez will tell Cubela that FitzGerald, who he knows only as James Clark, helped write the speech.  By being sure Cubela has a copy of the speech, the CIA wants him to know his plan has Kennedy's support.

     Cubela will be given high-power rifles with scopes.  Their purpose is unmistakable.  PBRUMEN is Cuba; C-4 is an explosive; S/W is secret writing; and AMTHUG is Fidel Castro.

     Notice the last paragraph saying that FitzGerald wants written reports kept to a minimum.  If so, why did Sanchez put everything down in writing?  Bureaucrats normally write memorandum for the record when they worry that they might be blamed for something in the future and want a contemporaneous record.  An unanswered question is whose handwriting is on the memo.  It isn't Sanchez because he wouldn't write C/SAS and then spell out that this is FitzGerald.  Presumably the handwriting is a later investigator, perhaps the Inspector General.  But then the words "high power" are also in handwriting, and the original typed words are illegible.  That is odd.  

     I have included the National Archives' index sheet to make clear that this document has been declassified in full and is public.

      I say this document points to John Kennedy's approval because Richard Helms wrote in his memoir that he met with Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy this same day, November 19.  Although nothing proves this memo was written after the meeting, the connection is too strong to be coincidence.

Demeanor

A reader, who is a lawyer, emailed me to ask what the demeanor of the CIA witnesses was at the Church committee hearings in 1975-76.  In legal parlance, demeanor means how the witness presented himself while testifying.  Did he look like a liar?  Did you (the judge or jury) believe him?  On an appeal, the appellate court will defer to findings of fact by the trial judge because he was the one who saw the demeanor of the witness.

            Before answering, I want to point out differences between the Church Committee hearings and a trial.  First, one must distinguish between the Church committee’s public and nonpublic hearings.  At public hearings, only the senators and the chief counsel and minority counsel could ask questions.  At nonpublic hearings, the questioning tended to be a free-for-all among senators and staffers, whether lawyer or not.   Rarely if ever would there be an uninterrupted line of questioning by a single lawyer as you see in court trials.  This gave witnesses time to think about what they just said and correct it.  Moreover, the questioning at nonpublic hearings never got tough.  After all, the Senate is a political institution, and hearings are expected to be conducted with decorum.  They aren’t winner-take-all contests like court trials.  Senators and staff often knew the witnesses and were on good terms with them.  They might have chatted informally about the issues before the witnesses were questioned under oath.  Jim Angleton was example.  He went out of his way to talk to staffers at the committee’s offices.  He has been vilified at times, but that isn’t fair to the man.  He had his faults, but lying wasn't one of them.  Actually, he was better off the record than he seems in the formal transcripts.  Ted Shackley was another example.  He might be guarded in chats and careful with his words, but he never seemed to mislead.

    Richard Helms was different.   His testimony in Appendix B of the book was typical.  But then he operated at a much higher level than most other witnesses.  When Senator Church asked if the CIA were a rogue elephant, Helms was the pachyderm.  But he had long experience in both secret operations and political ones and was no amateur at answering questions when the stakes were high.

     Then there were witness like William Harvey.  He gave such rambling answers to questions that I don’t think anyone at the hearings understood him. Maybe that contributed to his success in working with spies.  In writing the book, I spent a great deal of time trying to decipher his testimony and, as I conclude in the book, think he was saying he had an assassination team in Cuba at the end of the missile crisis.  Yet the Church committee didn’t feel this way when it wrote its report.  They may have been so put off by the witness’s rambling demeanor that they didn’t read the transcript closely.

     Most other CIA witnesses had little to contribute to the question of whether the Kennedys knew of the assassination operations.  They never met with the Kennedys personally, and their superiors certainly weren’t going to share with them anything like assassination.  They came across as truthful, but that would be expected given their positions.

     Nestor Sanchez was different.  Years after he appeared before the Church Committee, he told Brian Latell for the book Castro’s Secrets that he met with Robert Kennedy more than once.  That would have startled the Church committee.  He never mentioned it to the committee according to the transcripts.  Then there was his testimony about what happened to the poison pen at the November 22 meeting with Cubela.  Sanchez couldn’t remember.  This wasn’t some long ago event at the time he testified.  It had happened only twelve years earlier and had to be the most momentous meeting in his CIA career.  As I say in the book, he had to know that the poison pen, or whatever it was, was terribly compromising for the CIA.  No CIA case officer would hand a foreign agent a piece of exotic technology and then not remember if the agent walked off with it.

     This brings me back to Richard Helms.  He appeared seven times before the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee.  He knew from Senator Church’s public rogue elephant question that the key issue was whether John Kennedy approved meeting Cubela’s request for assassination weapons.  Yet he never volunteered in any of his appearances that he had met with Kennedy on the very day the CIA made the decision to give Cubela those weapons.  Under such circumstances, Helms’s demeanor at the hearings doesn’t seem to matter.

The Telephone Logs

          

The “rogue elephant” question is a central theme of the book.  Did John Kennedy know of and approve the CIA’s plots against Fidel Castro?  This was Senator Frank Church’s question, and the Church Committee found no evidence of presidential approval.  But of course, this might be because of the way the CIA did business.  It didn’t commit to writing anything on such nasty subjects as assassination.  The book discusses the CIA’s aversion to putting things down on paper and its habit of faking the written record at times.

            But as Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s telephone logs revealed, the CIA couldn’t control everything.  From the National Archives, I obtained a copy of a cable from Paris to CIA headquarters saying that Rolando Cubela wanted to meet with Robert Kennedy personally for assurance that the Kennedys knew of and approved the CIA’s plan to have Cubela lead a coup in Cuba.  That cable was “slotted” at 2:50 in the afternoon of October 11, 1963, Washington DC time.  The slotted time, said a CIA administrative memorandum written in that period, was when cables were put into distribution at headquarters, but the cables were usually delivered to the action officer about an hour and a half earlier. Desmond Fitzgerald was the action officer on this cable, so it would have been delivered to his office around 1:30. 

            Upon reading the cable, Fitzgerald likely wondered if Robert Kennedy would agree to such a meeting.  Therefore, I asked Dan Moorin, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, to review the Attorney General’s telephone logs for the fall of 1963 at the Kennedy Library.  I gave Dan a list of names to look for, and he took this photograph of the record of a call from FitzGerald to Robert Kennedy within an hour of FitzGerald’s receipt of the cable on October 11.  It is some of the most direct and powerful evidence that the Kennedys were fully aware of what the CIA was doing and approved of it.  As any trial lawyer will tell you, there is a big difference between telling the jury about a document and letting them see it for themselves.

Back Story #3, Moses Aleman

Moses Aleman

Moses Aleman took the photograph on the book’s cover, a fact that obviously pleases him.  In 1963, Moe was an FBI agent in Tampa, Florida.  My first contact with him was a phone call to ask if he remembered his 1964 investigation of Gilberto Lopez, a Cuban-American who had lived in Tampa. Moe's investigation determined that on November 17, Lopez had been at a Fair Play for Cuba meeting, expecting a phone call from Cuba to give him the go-ahead to travel there.  He left Tampa on November 20.  He was next seen on the night of Kennedy’s assassination, November 22, crossing the border from Texas into Mexico at Laredo.  He then traveled to Mexico City and flew to Havana on the night of November 27 as the only passenger on a Cubana Airlines flight.  Mexican authorities told the CIA that they thought Lopez had been involved in the assassination.  At the request of FBI headquarters, Moe filed several reports which contain about all that is known about Lopez.

            In calling Moe, I had hoped that he  could tell me more than was in his FBI reports.  Alas, he said this was just one of hundreds of investigations he had done.  Indeed, he didn’t remember anything until I sent him copies of his declassified reports from the National Archives.  But his memory was certain about one thing: He was never told that the interest in Lopez stemmed from allegations he was involved in Kennedy’s assassination.

            Once we finished discussing Lopez, Moe wanted to talk about President Kennedy’s visit to Tampa on Monday November 18.  The Secret Service had tasked the FBI office in Tampa with helping with security.  Kennedy was going to give a talk at the baseball stadium there, and the Secret Service wanted FBI agents posted around the stadium.  Moe was near first base where Kennedy’s car would exit.  It was the same car and same driver, Moe says, that were in Dallas four days later.

            The FBI expected both anti-Castro and Ku Klux Klan demonstrators at the event.  Since it didn’t have photographs of supporters of these groups, the Tampa FBI office instructed its agents to bring their own cameras to photograph the demonstrators.  None showed up, so Moe took pictures of the president, including the one on the book’s cover with Kennedy standing up in the car as he exited the stadium.  The agents’ various photographs of the event were posted on a bulletin board at the Tampa FBI office afterwards, and everyone was asked to vote on the best.  Moe’s photograph won.  Naturally, he is quite proud of it, and it hangs in his house.  He gave me permission to use it gratis.  The image isn’t perfectly focused, and the color has faded with age.  But the graphics department at the University of Nebraska Press turned those into strengths for a dramatic, ghostly book cover using the never-before-published photograph of John Kennedy four days before the Dallas tragedy.

            After Kennedy’s assassination, FBI Director Hoover sent Moe and other Tampa agents certificates of appreciation for their work in guarding the president on November 18.  Their work was one of the few bright spots in the FBI’s presidential security efforts at the time.  Hoover secretly censured several agents for their failures in investigating Oswald before the assassination.

            Moses Aleman has so many interesting stories that I had to resist the temptation to tell more of his back story in the book.  He grew up in a bilingual household in Texas, comfortable with both English and Spanish.  After graduating from the University of Texas, Moe went into the Air Force where he was in intelligence and had occasion to work with FBI agents.  One day, he overheard two agents speak to each other in rather halting Spanish.  They were surprised when he joined in with far more fluency than they had learned at language school in Monterey, California.  The agents said that the FBI needed Spanish-speaking agents because of the Kennedy administration’s interest in Cuba and urged Moe to join when he got out of the Air Force.  Moe likes to tell of taking the FBI’s language test.  He was given two newspaper articles, one in English and one in Spanish, and told he had an hour to translate each article into the other language without use of a dictionary.  “I was completely fluent in both languages,” he says, adding that he finished the test in five minutes.

Photo Back Story #2, Oswald's radio

I was well into my research for the book when I read in Brian Latell’s Castro’s Secrets that Lee Harvey Oswald owned a Russian radio.  The photograph of his Turist PMP-56 pictured above was provided by the National Archives.  Spy agencies around the world give agents one-way-listen (“OWL”). Since the radios don’t transmit, they can’t be picked up by security forces in a country.  Oswald’s ownership of a Russian radio was, therefore, suspicious in the least.

            The Turist was the first portable radios with rechargeable batteries made behind the Iron Curtain in Latvia.  It picked up the two broadcast radio bands in Europe, the long-wave and the medium-wave.  The former is not used for broadcasting in the Western Hemisphere, but the medium-wave band is the same as the AM radio band in the United States.  The radio was named Turist because it was portable and because it had an external antenna attachment that the owner could use to pick up distant stations when he was traveling.

            After Oswald’s arrest on the afternoon of the assassination, Dallas police went to his rooming house with orders to collect his possessions as evidence.  They cooled their heels there waiting for a justice of the peace to show up with a search warrant.  They then boxed up everything in Oswald’s room, took it to the police station, and photographed his possessions.  In addition to the radio itself, they had the external transformer that served as a base for the radio and recharged the batteries.  There is no mention or photograph of an external antenna or wire.  In this police photograph, the radio is tuned to about 1330 KHz on the AM band.  Presumably, this was the last station Oswald listened to.

            Dallas News reporter Lee Aynesworth went to Oswald’s rooming house after the search and interviewed Arthur and Gladys Johnson, who owned the rooming house.  When asked what Oswald did in the evening, they told Aynesworth that Oswald would retire to his room early and listen to the small radio.  The Warren Commission did not mention the radio in its report, choosing instead to say that Oswald watched television in the evenings. 

            The Warren Commission did ask NSA to look at the radio.  NSA reported that it found nothing “of cryptological significance.”  This tends to suggest the NSA only looked at the radio to see if had decoding electronics. In response to my Freedom of Information Act request, NSA wrote me that it could not locate the report of the individual who had actually inspected the radio.  Thus, there is no way to know what the inspector looked for, but according to a later FBI report, the radio didn’t work when it got it from Dallas police, and this was before the FBI sent it to NSA.  The NSA’s internal documents, not furnished the Warren Commission, mentioned NSA had a report from British intelligence about the Turist.  This suggests that British intelligence was interested in the Turist as something the Soviets and their clients might give spies as OWL radios.  But NSA claims that today it has nothing on this subject.

            A radio engineer told me that an AM signal from Cuba could easily be heard on the coast of Texas at night but that Dallas was too far inland to pick a signal up without an external antenna.  A shortwave broadcast from Cuba would reach Dallas though.  A ham operator in Dallas said a signal on the upper part of the AM band, such as 1330 KHz, might be heard in Dallas because he had once picked up a Cuban broadcast on a slightly higher frequency in the shortwave band. 

            The radio is now in the possession of the National Archives, so I asked to be allowed to inspect it.  I planned to take along someone who knew about radios.  Although the National Archives allowed me to inspect some of Oswald’s books, it refused to let me see the radio, giving the odd reason that the radio was evidence in a criminal case.  The Archives did agree to take photographs of the radio, inside and out, and send them to me. Comparing the photograph (below) with those of the standard Turist that I found online, I could see the internal ferrite antenna was broken off at one end and the copper coil moved.  Did this allow it to pick up shortwave?  Experts say the only way to know is to test it, something no one has ever done. 

            AM signals travel farther at night because the sun’s heating of the atmosphere during the day interferes with signals.  Because of this, the Federal Communications Commission in the 1960s required most AM stations to reduce power at night but allowed a few “clear channel” stations around the country to boost power.  The clear channel stations could be picked up hundreds of miles away. One in Texas had listeners all over the Plains States.  The FCC obviously could not control Cuban stations, and, oddly given the Kennedy administration’s hostility toward Cuba, did not even keep data on Cuban stations.  However, a world radio publication of the time said that in 1961, the Cuban station on frequency 1330 was operating at 1,000 watts of power.  This was high power since non-clear channel stations in the U.S. had to reduce power to less than 10 watts, and Cuba may have increased power by 1963.

Photo Back Story #1, the White House meeting

While photographs are normally added to a book to help the reader visualize the story, the process of obtaining several of the photographs in my book actually contributed to the research.  This Back story #1 is about the two photographs of the December 19, 1963, meeting at the White House with President Johnson. 

            I discovered them after writing the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Texas and asking for permission to use a photograph it had online of the CIA’s Richard Helms.  The library’s photo staff gave me permission and, with words authors love to hear, said there was no charge.  I had not been able to find any photograph of Desmond FitzGerald and asked if the library might by chance have a photograph of him as well.  The staff said that his name was not in its database but that if I knew a date when he was at the White House, they might have a photograph.  “December 19, 1963,” I wrote back in an email.  That worked.  The library sent me six photographs of the meeting, two of which are in the book.

            Suddenly, I could see the faces of all the men – and they were all male – that I had been reading about in declassified Top Secret memoranda for the record.  There was FitzGerald, Helms, General Carter, Cyrus Vance, and the others.  I eventually was able to put names to all the faces.  I compared these names with other records of who attended.  There are differences as I note in the book.

            You see FitzGerald standing at the table in a room that isn’t full yet.  He apparently has just walked in.  This would fit with what he wrote in his memorandum about the president starting the meeting before everyone had arrived and while the White House photographer was still taking pictures.  Spies hate to have their picture taken, and FitzGerald’s memorandum suggests displeasure. 

            FitzGerald’s memorandum records that LBJ said someday they, including Johnson, would have to answer to the “grand jury of public opinion” for what had been going on.  He presumably meant the CIA’s plots to assassinate Castro.  And in the one photograph, the president appears less than happy.  Maybe the photographer captured the very moment FitzGerald was writing about of Lyndon Johnson venting his feelings about the CIA’s Murder, Inc.  (Click to enlarge images).

The Dog That Didn't Bark

The Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Dog that Didn’t Bark” is a good metaphor for introducing readers to Murder, Inc., The CIA under John F. Kennedy.  In the story, the great detective is called to solve a crime that has stumped police.   All they have is a missing racehorse and its dead trainer.  Holmes draws attention “to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." A puzzled policeman retorts: “The dog did nothing."  Ah, Holmes responds, that was the curious incident.  The watchdog should have barked when someone took the horse out of the stable.  Since it didn’t, it must have known the thief.  Holmes continues.  The trainer bet against the horse in an upcoming race and intended to lame it, but the horse kicked and killed him when he tried.  Mystery solved because of what didn’t happen.

            The fifty-six-year-old mystery surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination may be thought of in the same way if one substitutes the CIA and other intelligence agencies for the dog.  They didn’t bark.  They didn’t know the culprit though; rather they didn’t want to know.  Just three days before his death, the assassinated president apparently authorized the CIA to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and President Lyndon Johnson allowed this to be covered up.  The cover up has lasted all this time despite attempts by a presidential commission, a vice presidential commission, and committees of the Senate and House of Representatives to get at the truth.  It raises the question, still relevant today, of how democracy can co-exist with a culture of what seems like out-of-control secrecy by our secret agencies.

            Of course, conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination abound.  A common theme for years was that the government knew Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the assassin and hid this in “secret files.”  But when these files were opened to the public in 1998, nothing of the sort was found.

            Murder, Inc. takes a different approach.  It looks into the secret files to learn what didn’t happen.  It details Kennedy’s and Johnson’s radically different Cuban policies, the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro, and how the investigation of Kennedy’s murder was steered away from foreign involvement.

            I first became interested in the subject when I was a lawyer for the Senate intelligence committee in 1976.  The committee looked into CIA plots to assassinate Castro and their relationship to Kennedy’s assassination.  I remember my surprise when a witness from an intelligence agency explained that foreign intelligence agencies don’t have trained assassins like the fictional James Bond.  Instead, they manipulate malcontents and misfits like Oswald for what more stable men would consider suicide missions.  Borrowing from Sherlock Holmes, I found it curious that Richard Helms, deputy director of the CIA in 1963, testified that the thought Castro might have retaliated never occurred to him.  His denial was ludicrous: The CIA was meeting in Paris with a Cuban agent and promising him sniper rifles to assassinate Castro at the exact moment Kennedy was gunned down by a sniper in Dallas on November 22, 1963. 

            A penchant for avoiding the subject of retaliation pervaded the federal government’s investigation of Kennedy’s assassination.  A few examples make the point.  The CIA, in the words of its own historian, ran a “passive, reactive, and selective investigation.”  It never let its Cuban experts, who were plotting the assassination of Castro, talk to the Warren Commission lest the public learn this unsavory fact.  At the FBI, twenty-four hours after the assassination, orders went out to agents in the field not to develop new leads.  A U.S. ambassador hinted to the Soviet Union’s ambassador that the U.S. government would avoid an aggressive investigation.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had already advised the White House to be careful about finding foreign involvement, and so had Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department.  When Warren Commission lawyers visited the CIA station in Mexico City in April 1964 to look into Oswald’s trip there two months before the assassination, they were assured by CIA men there that the CIA had absolutely no evidence of a conspiracy. In fact, a few weeks before the Warren Commission visit, Mexican authorities told the CIA they had evidence others were involved.

            An explanation for this cover up may be found in a CIA-created doctrine called “plausible denial.”  If the CIA is caught with its hand in the cookie jar, engaging in something it doesn’t want the public to know about, it concocts a plausible cover story to deny the truth.  In the event the unpleasant deed is something the president ordered, such as an assassination, the CIA may be forced to fall on its sword and accept responsibility, but it will deny the president knew.

            How else to explain another curious incident?  On November 19, 1963, after months of delay, the CIA finally made the decision to provide its Cuban agent the assassination weapons he wanted.  However, it kept this secret from the Warren Commission.  Twelve years later, it confessed the assassination plot to a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and to the Senate intelligence committee.  But, it told neither of these investigations nor a 1978 investigation by a House committee an equally damning fact:  Deputy Director Helms met alone first with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and then with President John Kennedy on that same November 19.  Helms saved this incriminating detail for a memoir published posthumously in 2004 when he could no longer be asked if Kennedy authorized Castro’s assassination at the meeting.

            The CIA-created doctrine of plausible denial has been used to deceive four major investigations by the executive branch and Congress.  When Richard Helms was called to account by a vice presidential commission and a Senate committee twelve years after Kennedy’s death, he obviously did not tell the whole truth.  Did President Gerald Ford authorize this?  Helms likewise deceived the House assassination committee in 1978.  Did President Jimmy Carter personally authorize the deception? 

             This is only one example of a culture of government secrecy that was born in times of hot war long ago, extended into the Cold War, and continues today.  If our elected representatives can be deceived on repeated occasions on an issue of such public importance as the possibility that a foreign government used assassination to pick the president, who can call the intelligence agencies to account?