By PHILIP SHENON and LARRY J. SABATO
August 03, 2017
After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November
1963, the CIA appeared eager, even desperate, to embrace the version
of events being offered by the FBI, the Secret Service and other
parts of the government. The official story: that a delusional
misfit and self-proclaimed Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald killed
the president in Dallas with his $21 mail-order rifle and there was
no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic. Certainly, the
CIA’s leaders told the Warren Commission, the independent panel that
investigated the murder, there was no evidence of a conspiracy that
the spy agency could have foiled.
But
thousands of pages of long-secret, assassination-related documents
released by the National Archives last week show that, within a few
years of Kennedy’s murder, some in the CIA began to worry internally
that the official story was wrong—an alarm the agency never sounded
publicly.
Specifically, key CIA officials were concerned by the mid-1970s
that the agency, the FBI, the Secret Service and the White House
commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren had never
followed up on important clues about Oswald’s contact with foreign
agents, including diplomats and spies for the Communist governments
of Cuba and the Soviet Union, who might have been aware of his plans
to kill Kennedy and even encouraged the plot. (There is no credible
evidence cited in the documents released so far that Cuban leader
Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders had any personal role in
ordering Kennedy’s murder.)
The CIA documents also offer tantalizing speculation about the
chain of events in late 1963 that explained Oswald’s motives for
killing Kennedy, which have previously never been established with
certainty—how he may have become enraged after reading a detailed
article in his hometown newspaper in New Orleans in September
suggesting that his hero Castro had been targeted for assassination
by the Kennedy administration. According to that theory, Oswald, who
had rifle training in the Marine Corps, then set out to seek
vengeance on Castro’s behalf—to kill Kennedy before the American
president managed to kill the Cuban leader.
If that proved true, it would have raised a terrible question for
the CIA: Was it possible that JFK’s assassination was, directly or
indirectly, blowback for the spy agency’s plots to kill Castro? It
would eventually be acknowledged the CIA had, in fact, repeatedly
tried to assassinate Castro, sometimes in collusion with the Mafia,
throughout Kennedy’s presidency. The CIA’s arsenal of weapons
against Castro included a fungus-infected scuba suit, a
poison-filled hypodermic needle hidden in a pen—and even an
exploding cigar. The Warren Commission, never told about the CIA’s
Castro plots, mostly ducked the question of Oswald’s motives, other
than saying in its final report that he had expressed a “hatred for
American society.”
JFK historians and the nation’s large army of private
assassination researchers are still scrambling to make sense of the
latest batch of tens of thousands of pages of previously secret CIA
and FBI documents that were unsealed last week by the National
Archives. The documents—441 files that had previously been withheld
entirely, along with 3,369 other documents that had been previously
released only in part—were made public under terms of a 1992 law
that requires the unsealing of all JFK assassination-related
documents by October, the law’s 25-year deadline.
Since the release last week, researchers do not appear to have
identified any single document that could be labeled a bombshell or
that rewrites the history of the assassination in any significant
way. Many of the documents, which were made public only online, are
duplicates of files that had been released years earlier. Other
documents are totally illegible or refer to CIA and FBI code names
and pseudonyms that even experienced researchers will take months to
decipher. Several documents are written in foreign languages.
Still, the newly released documents may offer an intriguing
glimpse of what comes next. The National Archives is required to
unseal a final batch of about 3,100 never-before-seen
JFK-assassination files by the October deadline, assuming the move
is not blocked by President Donald Trump. Under the 1992 Kennedy
Assassination Records Collection Act, the president is the only
person empowered to stop the release. (Congressional and other
government officials have told us in confidence that at least two
federal agencies—likely the CIA and FBI—are expected to appeal to
Trump to block the unsealing of at least some of the documents. Even
after 54 years, some government officials apparently still want to
keep secrets about this seminal event in U.S. history. The CIA and
FBI acknowledged earlier this year they are conducting a final
review of the documents, but have been unwilling to say if they will
ask the president to block some from being released.)
None of the files released last week undermines the Warren
Commission’s finding that Oswald killed Kennedy with shots fired
from his perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book
Depository in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza—a conclusion supported by 21st
century forensic analysis—and that there was no credible evidence of
a second gunman.
But the new documents do revive the question of why the CIA, so
skeptical internally of many of the commission’s other findings by
the 1970s, never acknowledged those suspicions to later government
investigators—or to the public. Documents released decades ago show
that CIA and FBI officials repeatedly misled—and often lied
outright—to Chief Justice Warren and his commission, probably to
hide evidence of the agencies’ bungling in their surveillance of
Oswald before the president’s murder. The CIA appears also to have
been determined to block the commission from stumbling on to
evidence that might reveal the agency’s assassination plots against
Castro and other foreign leaders.
The CIA historian's report from 2013 that refers
to the "benign coverup." (Click to view full
document.)
In 2013, the CIA’s in-house historian concluded that the spy
agency had conducted a “benign cover-up” during the Warren
Commission’s investigation in 1963 and 1964 in hopes of keeping the
commission focused on “what the Agency believed was the ‘best truth’
— that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted
alone in killing John Kennedy.”
Labeled “SECRET” and stamped “REPRODUCTION
PROHIBITED” on each page, this 1975 memo lists
several important clues about Oswald that went
unexplored in the months and years after Kennedy’s
death. (Click to open full document)
But what if the “best truth” was wrong? According to documents
made public last week, the CIA was alarmed by the mid-1970s to
realize that no one had properly followed up on clues about an
especially mysterious chapter in Oswald’s life—a six-day, apparently
self-financed trip to Mexico City beginning in late September 1963,
two months before the assassination. The reason for the trip has
never been determined with certainty, although he told his wife,
Marina, that he went there to obtain a visa that would allow him to
defect to Cuba, much as he had once attempted to defect to the
Soviet Union.
The CIA acknowledged long ago that the agency’s Mexico City
station had Oswald under surveillance during the trip, and that he
met there with Cuban and Soviet diplomats and spies. The CIA station
chief said later he was convinced that Oswald had a brief sexual
relationship with a Mexican woman who worked in the Cuban consulate.
Although there is no credible evidence of Soviet involvement in the
assassination, Oswald’s other contacts in Mexico included—shockingly
enough—a KGB assassinations expert who doubled as an accredited
Soviet diplomat. A top-secret June 1964 FBI report, made public in
the 1990s but apparently never seen by key investigators for the
Warren Commission, suggests that Oswald was overheard threatening to
kill Kennedy during his visits to the Cuban diplomatic compound in
Mexico.
The files released last week also show that the CIA and other
agencies failed to pursue clues that Oswald, who publicly championed
Castro’s revolution even while serving in the Marine Corps, had been
in contact with Cuban diplomats years before the Mexico
trip—possibly as early as 1959, when he was deployed to a military
base in Southern California. The information initially came to the
FBI and the Warren Commission from a fellow Marine who recalled how
Oswald boasted about his contacts with Cuban diplomats in Los
Angeles, where Castro’s government then had an office.
The account from the fellow Marine was of “a lot more possible
operational significance” than was realized in the months after the
assassination but was never “run down or developed by
investigation,” according to a 1975 CIA internal memo released last
week. “The record of the beginning of OSWALD’s relationship with the
Cubans starts with a question mark.”
That 27-page memo, which does not identify its author, is among
the most intriguing of the documents in last week’s batch unsealed
by the National Archives. Copies of the document were found inside
larger CIA files released last week, including thick agency files
labeled HELMS HEARING DUPLICATE. That seems to suggest the memo was
given to former Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, who
led the agency from 1966 to 1973, when he was later summoned to
testify secretly to Congress about his involvement in the CIA
assassination plots against Castro and other foreign leaders.
Similar documents about the Kennedy assassination and Oswald were
written in the 1970s by a senior CIA counterintelligence official,
Raymond Rocca, who had served as the agency’s chief liaison to the
Warren Commission.
Labeled “SECRET” and stamped “REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED” on each
page, the 1975 memo lists several important clues about Oswald that
went unexplored in the months and years after Kennedy’s death.
(Versions of the same CIA memo were part of the flood of millions of
pages of documents released after the 1992 law, although it has
never attracted detailed attention outside a small circle of
assassination researchers. Brian Latell, a respected former CIA
analyst on Cuban intelligence, cited a version of the document in
his 2012 book Castro’s Secrets , which suggested much closer
links between Oswald and Cuba than had previously been known.)
The 1975 document noted the failure of the CIA, FBI and the
Warren Commission to interview a key witness in Mexico City—Silvia
Duran, the Mexican woman who worked in the Cuban consulate and was
reported to have had the affair with Oswald. She is the “sole live
witness on the record regarding Oswald’s activities,” yet her
testimony “was taken and presented, solely, by the Mexican
governmental authorities,” the CIA memo said. Duran, who is still
alive, has repeatedly insisted she had no sexual relationship with
Oswald, although she readily acknowledges that she helped him with
his unsuccessful visa application for Cuba.
It was that same CIA memo that offered a detailed theory of the
chain of events that led Oswald to kill Kennedy—how Oswald, who
lived in his hometown of New Orleans for much of 1963, may have been
inspired to assassinate the president if, as seemed probable, he
read an article on Monday, September 9, in the local newspaper, that
suggested Castro was targeted for murder by the United States.
The article, written by a reporter for The Associated Press in
Havana and then published prominently in the Times-Picayune ,
was an account of an AP interview with Castro two days earlier, in
which the Cuban strongman angrily warned the Kennedy administration
that he was aware of U.S. assassination plots aimed at Cuban
leaders, presumably including him, and was prepared to retaliate.
The article quoted Castro as saying: “U.S. leaders would be in
danger if they helped in any attempt to do away with leaders of
Cuba.”
The September 1963 Times Picayune story. (Click
to view full-size image.)
The CIA memo suggested that if Oswald, who was known to be an
“avid reader” of the Times-Picayune , saw the article, it
might have put the idea in his head to kill Kennedy as retaliation
for the threat the United States posed to Castro—an idea that would
have been in his mind as he left for his trip to Mexico that month.
The possibility that Oswald read the article “must be considered of
great significance in light of the pathological evolution of
Oswald’s passive/aggressive makeup” and “his identification with
Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution,” the CIA memo said.
Immediately after the assassination, the CIA’s Mexico City
station warned CIA headquarters that the AP article might contain a
vital clue about Oswald’s motives for killing Kennedy—and even about
possible Cuban involvement. But according to the 1975 analysis,
“There is no evidence in the files on the Kennedy assassination that
the Castro interview was considered in following up leads or in
dealing with the Warren Commission, although Mexico Station
specifically directed headquarters to the AP story very shortly
after the Dallas killing.”
Previously released internal documents from the Warren Commission
show that one of the commission’s most aggressive staff lawyers
believed that Castro’s remarks to the AP—and the possibility that
Oswald read the article—might be of great significance in explaining
Oswald’s motives. But the internal files show that more senior staff
members decided against any reference to the AP article in the
commission’s final report for fear of feeding conspiracy theories
about a possible Cuban link to Kennedy’s death. It does not reflect
well on the legacy of either the CIA or the commission that, half a
century after those gunshots rang out in Dealey Plaza, the newly
released documents suggest that at least some of those conspiracy
theories might be true.
Philip Shenon, a former Washington and foreign
correspondent for the New York Times, is the author
of
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy
Assassination .
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