The CIA

SAIGON, Oct.2 1963 – The story of the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in South Viet Nam is a dismal chronicle of bureaucratic arrogance, obstinate disregard of orders, and unrestrained thirst for power….One very high American official here, a man who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA’s growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even if the White House could control it any longer. …”If the United States ever experiences a ‘Seven Days in May’ it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon,” one U.S. official commented caustically.

Richard Starnes’ Article, Washington Daily News, 10 2 1963

Introduction

Following the assassination of JFK, some people suspected that a Seven Days in May scenario had occurred. Former President Harry Truman published a remarkable editorial in the early edition of the Washington Post exactly one month following JFK’s assassination, on December 22, 1963. The title of the article was “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence” and it contained the following:  “I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”

The editorial was quickly pulled and did not appear in later editions of the newspaper.  For more on this see:   Why Did WaPost Censor Harry S. Truman's OpEd on CIA, December 22, 1963

CIA Assassinations

Last week we saw the ZR/RIFLE assassination program that William Harvey set up, with its guidelines: “Never mention word ‘assassination’… no projects on paper… strictly person to person, singleton ops, planning should include provision for blaming Sovs or Czechs in case of blow… should have phony 201 (file) in RG (Central Registry) to backstop this, all documents therein forged and backdated… should look like a CE (counter espionage/counter intelligence) file… [executive action would] require most professional, proven operationally competent, ruthless, stable, CE-experienced ops officers.”

There are other CIA assassination manuals and guidelines which have come to light. These show the use of clever sophisticated planning. For example, in “A Study of Assassination”, it says, “In lost assassination [where assassin is targeted to die in as part of the plot], the assassin must be a fanatic of some sort. Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives. Since a fanatic is unstable psychologically, he must be handled with extreme care. He must not know the identities of the other members of the organization, for although it is intended that he die in the act, something may go wrong.”

A very interesting potential case of “lost assassination” is the 1957 assassination of Guatemalan dictator Carlos Castillo Armas.  Armas had come to power by means of the 1954 coup superbly executed by the CIA in Operation PB/SUCCESS. However, by 1957 there were tensions between Armas and the CIA as well as the Mafia. Armas was apparently assassinated by 20 year old Romeo Vasquez Sanchez, a member of the Presidential Palace Guard who apparently then took his own life. However, many feel that he was a patsy; he had been dismissed from the army in 1955 due to his communist ideology, yet somehow got hired onto the Palace Guard. Correspondence from the Latin American service of Radio Moscow was found in his apartment following his death, along with an incriminating diary. If this was a “lost assassination” conspiracy plot, it worked exceedingly well, as there was no proof to tie the alleged assassin to either the CIA or mafia.

See: CIA Hit in 1950s mirrors JFK Assassination

Another interesting assassination plot was described by Antonio Veciana in testimony to HSCA. This was an assassination plot against Castro to have taken place during a visit to Chile in 1971. As Larry Hancock describes in NEXUS (p158), David Atlee Phillips (aka Maurice Bishop) of the CIA helped to organize the plot which included multiple shooters with concealed weapons, an attempt to slow Castro’s car during the attack using a stalled vehicle and the use of a car bomb as a backup. There was also a designated patsy, a former Castro supporter who had been turned against him, and faked documents and photographs were prepared associating the patsy with the Russians; the patsy was to be killed following the attack. Veciana described the plot as “very similar to the assassination of Kennedy.”

CIA Involvement with Oswald

There is however a line of argument for CIA complicity in the JFK assassination plot that emerges from a careful read of CIA documents which were declassified in the 1990’s. The argument is by John Newman, a military intelligence career staffer who analyzed all the CIA documents released by the ARRB, especially the document routing slips which showed who prepared the documents and who read what when. When the HSCA asked for these routing slips, the CIA lied and said that they were no longer in existence, but John Newman later found them at the National Archives. I will attempt to outline below some of the evidence which is given in Newman’s excellent book, Oswald and the CIA.

As we saw in Week 5: Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald’s trip to Russia had many hints that he was guided by the CIA. He acquired his Russian visa in Helsinki in only two days, due to a relationship between the CIA and the Helsinki Soviet consular official, when in all other locations a visa would have taken six weeks to receive. We looked at the apparent coincidence between Oswald’s offer to share with the Russians radar secrets learned during his stay at the top secret CIA U2 base in Atsugi Japan, and the frantic search among the CIA counterintelligence staff for a Russian spy in the CIA, in Peter Dale Scott’s Oswald and the Hunt for Popov’s Mole. Newman adds as evidence to that thesis that many of the documents and cables surrounding Oswald’s attempted defection in October 1959 were kept as “soft” files, or desk files in James Jesus Angleton’s counterintelligence group. The main agency-wide 201 file on Oswald wasn’t opened until December 9, 1960, by Ann Egerter, in CI/SIG: CounterIntelligence/Special Investigations Group. This was a top secret mole hunting group within CI. Egerter’s boss was Birch O’Neal, and he reported to James Jesus Angleton. The HSCA tried to determine what prompted the opening of the 201 file and was told that it was opened when Birch O’Neal received a request for information on defectors to the Soviet Union, with Oswald’s name, and at that point CI/SIG realized Oswald was a defector. But Newman shows that Egerter had had possession of the American embassy cables regarding Oswald’s defection for over a year. Angleton’s successor, George Kalaris wrote a memo in 1975 stating that Oswald’s 201 file was opened when Oswald showed renewed interest in returning to the United States. However, officially, in December 1960, nobody in the US had heard from Oswald in over a year. Newman suggests that Oswald may have had an US intelligence contact within Russia and points to Leo Setyaev. There are other hints of an Oswald communication channel from Peter Wronski such as Ella German’s report that Oswald received shipments of books in Russia from his brother at a time when no one in the US reportedly knew where he was, and his Minsk friend Titovets’ comment that Oswald once gave him a book but first carefully scissored out a dedication on the first page.

The HSCA looked for evidence of any relationship between Oswald and the CIA and found none. However, as Newman shows, subsequent document releases show that the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division showed “operational interest” in Oswald, and that CIA operatives had interviewed a former Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union and had worked at the Minsk radio plant; this could only have been Oswald. It would certainly have been surprising if the CIA had not interviewed Oswald, and as noted above, it is not surprising that they lied about this.

Oswald’s next potential interface with the CIA came in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 when he posed as an anti-Castro militant attempting to infiltrate the CIA sponsored Cuban exile group the DRE, and then was arrested in a scuffle with DRE members who saw him handing out Fair Play for Cuba literature. Jim DiEugenio in his book Destiny Betrayed p158, points out that Oswald was passing out the 1961 version of the Corliss Lamont pamphlet, The Crime Against Cuba, which was unavailable in 1963. The CIA had ordered 45 copies of the Crime Against Cuba in 1961.   Oswald’s arrest and subsequent publicity in a radio show is consistent with the theory that he was part of an operation by the FBI or CIA to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald’s radio appearance did succeed in that regard in suggesting that the FPCC was stage managed by the Soviets. In his book The Kennedy Conspiracy (2002), Anthony Summers claims that released documents show that both the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation penetrated the FPCC. Summers points out that the CIA side of the operation was directed by David Atlee Phillips and quotes CIA officer Joseph Smith as saying: “We did everything we could to make sure it was not successful – to smear it… to penetrate it. I think Oswald may have been part of a penetration attempt.” There is one report by Antonio Veciana of Alpha 66 that Oswald met with David Atlee Phillips in the late summer of 1963.  Phillips, as we saw in Week 8 was Chief of Cuban Operations and deputy Chief of the Mexico City’s CIA station based in Mexico City. Veciana testified that Phillips had organized Alpha 66 as a way to “put JFK’s back to the wall.” We will look more closely at Phillips and Mexico City next.

October 9 MEXI Cable #6453

Oswald reportedly left Mexico City on Wednesday, October 2. On October 9, the Mexico City CIA Station (hereinafter MEXI) sent a cable to CIA headquarters (hereinafter HQ) summarizing the October 1 “Oswald” call and mentioning Kostikov’s name.  The cable has the curious cryptonym LCIMPROVE, the same program that enabled Oswald to get a speedy tourist visa from Helsinki into Russia.

This cable also enclosed a photograph of a male appearing to be an American entering the Soviet embassy on October 1. That photo, of course, was the Mystery Man:

This cable is very curious because it states that Oswald said he visited the embassy on September 28, but the cable dates the photo to October 1, with no information that Oswald was at the embassy on October 1. There are two interpretations: either MEXI did a quick check of the surveillance photos and the mystery man was the only American looking person they could find, or alternatively, someone in the MEXI station was trying to divert attention away from the real Oswald. David Atlee Phillips, the Deputy Director of MEXI is a favored suspect of the second theory.

October 10 CIA HQ cable to MEXI

One might be tempted to think that the drafter was just an incompetent bureaucrat, if not for the fact that two hours after the  cable to FBI, State and Navy was sent, the same person sent a response to MEXI.

As can be seen, this cable gave Oswald’s description as that in his 201 file: 5’10” 165 pounds, light brown wavy hair, blue eyes.   Not only that but it also stated that “latest HDQS info was an ODACID report dated May 1962″ and “US EMB Moscow stated twenty months of realities of life in  Soviet Union had clearly had maturing effect on Oswald”. The cable's author, Charlotte Bustos-Videla, was an outstanding analyst.   In addition, the name of a person who reviewed both cables is the same: Jane Roman. Jane Roman, who worked as head of liason for James Jesus Angleton’s counterintelligence group had just a few days before signed for an FBI report on Oswald which described his altercation with the DRE in New Orleans in August and subsequent arrest, so she clearly knew the latest info on Oswald was much more recent than May 1962; she did not mention Oswald's Fair Play for Cuba activities.

John Newman’s conclusion was that this was not incompetence, this was the Counter Intelligence group deliberately dialing down Oswald’s threat profile, by specifically not passing on the KGB assassination operative Kostikov’s name to FBI, State and Navy, and sending mollifying information on Oswald back to MEXI, at a time when the drafters in CI knew Oswald was engaged in subversive Fair Play for Cuba operations. In addition, based on routing slips, Newman suggests that one of three people in CI kept the FBI report on Oswald’s FPCC operations out of Oswald’s 201 file: Ann Egerter, her boss Birch O’Neal, or his boss James Jesus Angleton (p621-622). In 1994, after these cables had been released by the ARRB, John Newman and Jefferson Morley interviewed Jane Roman about these issues. The full story can be seen in the essay What Jane Roman Said.

Newman pointed out to Roman that the routing slip for Oswald’s 201 file included many of the top names in the covert Directorate of Plans. “Is this the mark of a person’s file who’s dull and uninteresting?” he asked. “Or would you say that we’re looking at somebody who’s—“

“No, we’re really trying to zero in on somebody here,” Roman acknowledged.

Newman then pointed out the glaring contradictions between the two HQ cables that she had signed off on, as well as the fact that HQ cable to MEXI was authenticated by J.C. King, head of all CIA operations in the Western Hemisphere and the releasing officer was Tom Karamessines, top deputy to covert operations chief Richard Helms. Roman acknowledged that in the MEXI cable she was signing off on something she had known to be untrue. Her rationalization was “To me its indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need to know basis. …There wouldn’t be any point in withholding it [the recent information about Oswald],” she answered. “There has to be a point for withholding information from Mexico City. … I would think that there was definitely some operational reason to withhold it [the information at headquarters on Oswald], if it was not sheer administrative error, when you see all the people who signed off on it.”

The implication is that there was an active CIA operation involving Oswald in Mexico City. That operation may have been part of a plan to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba, an operation which David Atlee Phillips, Chief of Cuban operations in Mexico City was working on. Alternatively, it could have been a plan exploring ways to achieve expedited visa access into Cuba, just as Oswald had gotten an expedited visa into the Soviet Union. No matter what the operational interest, the idea is that there was a legitimate operation by CIA HQ using Oswald as either a witting or unwitting low level intelligence asset. Operational security would require the CIA HQ to dial down the level of interest in Oswald from everyone without a need to know; hence the cable to MEXI withholding the information about Oswald’s FPCC activities and the cable to FBI, State and Navy with a false physical description and dropping the reference to Kostikov. The legitimate operation would have required someone in MEXI who could pull the surveillance pictures which must have been taken of Oswald entering and leaving the Soviet embassy and the Cuban consulate. That person would most likely have been David Atlee Phillips, who, as Jefferson Morley writes, “had responsibility for reviewing the photographs of all visitors and deciding if their contacts with the Cubans warranted further action.” (p 179)

On top of this legitimate operation, Newman suggests there were JFK assassination plotters who impersonated Oswald in the telephone taps, thus fatefully linking Oswald to Kostikov. As Newman says, “The inevitable conclusion is that someone who was privy to the plot against President Kennedy had the inside knowledge and authority to use a legitimate operation of the CI section of the SAS for another purpose. That purpose was to build into the fabric of the plot to kill the President a virus that would lay dormant for six weeks then balloon into a WWIII scenario on the day of the assassination. Moreover, the designer knew that it would appear upon the death of the president, as if a botched CIA operation had played a key role in the president’s murder. Just as WWIII would drive Earl Warren into the planned national security coverup, this botched CIA operation would bring the Agency into line as well.”

In accusing a group within Angleton's Counter-Intelligence unit in the CIA, as well as CIA personnel in Mexico City of being assassination plotters,  John Newman is being rather conspiratorial.  Is there a more innocent explanation for their behavior?  As my podcast hosts say, let's unpack this.  On 1 October 1963 there was a phone call by an imposter, who identified himself as Lee Oswald and said he didn't remember the name of the consul he spoke with.   "Kostikov" was the answer.  This could have been a deliberate attempt to link Oswald with the name of a KGB assassination agent, or, more likely,  it could have been a fishing expedition by MEXI CIA to find out who Oswald spoke with.  Charlotte Bustos-Videla, the analyst in Cuban Special Affairs Staff did send out misleading cables to both the Mexico City CIA station and the rest of government, which had the effect of dialing down the threat level of Oswald.  But that could have been just because that group, which was responsible for covert operations against Castro, was using Oswald wittingly or unwittingly in an intelligence operation, such as finding ways to infiltrate spies into Cuba.  James Jesus Angleton did not think that Kostikov was responsible for assassinations, although he said the opposite to the Warren Commission.  So it's not surprising that the CIA didn't get upset before the assassination about Oswald meeting Kostikov.  J. Edgar Hoover did, however, believe that Kostikov was Department 13 and Hoover had access to all the same telephone transcripts in Mexico City that the CIA did.  So it is very suspicious that Hoover didn't investigate Oswald prior to the assassination.  Not only did Hoover not investigate an Oswald-Kostikov link, the FBI removed Oswald from their security watch list on October 9, 1963.  So the FBI was dialing down Oswald's threat level, alongside the CIA.  This suggests that Oswald was being used, wittingly or not, in the joint CIA-FBI program to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  It is true that after the assassination, Tennent Bagley's memo connecting Oswald to Kostikov served to raise the specter that Oswald assassinated JFK on the orders of the KGB, which gave Hoover and LBJ the justification needed for a cover-up.  But if Oswald was well known to the FBI and CIA, even working for them in some capacity, both agencies would desperately want a cover-up so that their institutional reputations wouldn't be damaged.  Maybe the plotters were at senior levels in the CIA and built the Oswald-Kostikov connection into the plot to prevent a serious investigation.  Or maybe the plotters were rogue elements within the CIA that knew of the Oswald-Kostov connection.  Or maybe the Oswald-Kostikov connection was just fortuitous happenstance.

Potential Conspirators

If you buy into the theory of JFK assassination plotters building a false link of Oswald to Kostikov in order to force a lone nut cover up of the plot, who are the likely candidates? The evidence points towards two people: David Atlee Phillips and James Jesus Angleton.  As we saw in Week 7, Phillips helped Antonio Veciana form the violent Alpha 66 Cuban exile group, with an aim to “force Kennedy’s back against the wall” through commando raids that would ratchet up the tension between the Soviet Union and the US.  Veciana claimed to have seen Phillips and Oswald at a meeting in Dallas in late summer 1963. Phillips was head of the propaganda efforts against FPCC, which could have involved Oswald, and was Chief of Cuban Operations in the Western Hemisphere, interfacing closely with David Morales who was running the Castro assassination teams from the CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami. As Deputy Chief of Station at MEXI, Phillips would have had access to the top secret Soviet and Cuban telephone taping operations and the ability to insert imposter telephone calls into the system. Phillips had a long background in propaganda operations, and several post assassination stories linking Oswald to Castro, like the Gilberto Alvarado story and the Pedro Charles letters, had the characteristics of Phillips’ disinformation projects. As HSCA investigator Dan Hardway told Gaeton Fonzi, “I’m firmly convinced now that he ran the red herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him. That’s what got him very upset. He knew the whole thing could unravel.” (p293)

James Jesus Angleton was CIA head of Counterintelligence, an autonomous group within the CIA which investigated the CIA itself for infiltration of possible Soviet spies. CI had enormous power within the CIA, had its own secret filing systems and was insulated from traditional oversight within the agency. Angleton was close to Bill Harvey, who ran Staff D and built a covert assassination program named ZR/RIFLE, and Angleton himself was a member of the “Health Alteration Committee” who approved assassination with poisons.

Richard Helms originally tasked John Whitten (aka Scelso) to investigate JFK’s assassination on behalf of the CIA.  When Whitten found out that the FBI and CIA were withholding information from him he complained, and Helms ordered Angleton to take over the investigation.  Angleton remained primary CIA liason with the Warren Commission, where he refused to turn the MEXI cables over to the Warren Commission, telling his deputy that he “would prefer to wait out the Commission.”

Similarly, when the HSCA was established to investigate the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, the CIA brought George Joannides out of retirement to be the CIA interface with the HSCA.  In 2003, Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter forced the CIA to disclose that Joannides was the CIA case officer for the anti-Castro DRE, the group which Oswald tried to infiltrate and then stage managed an altercation with in New Orleans in the summer of 1963.  So it seems that the CIA brought in Angleton and Joannides to control the information flow to the Warren Commission and HSCA in order to protect secrets about the CIA's relationship with Oswald.

Angleton was notoriously paranoid about Soviet infiltration of American government, fiercely supporting his Russian defector Anatoli Golitsin who accused such figures as Henry Kissinger, UK’s Harold Wilson, and Averell Harriman as being KGB agents. One can only guess as to how he interpreted JFK’s rapprochement with Castro and Khruschev. We know from Angleton’s memos and testimony that he was aware at that time that the FBI believed Kostikov was KGB Department 13, involved in sabotage and assassination. However, the only direct evidence pointing towards Angleton’s involvement in a JFK plot is his counterintelligence staff’s involvement in dialing down the threat level on Oswald by hiding his tie to Kostikov in the cable to FBI, State, and Navy, and filing the Oswald FBI reports describing his FPCC activities in CI files outside of Oswald’s 201 file and hiding Oswald’s FPCC involvement from MEXI staff. For more on Angleton, see James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination