Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

  It was that word “security” again. As mentioned in the preface, Chief Justice Warren had used it in 1964 in answer to a question as to whether Warren Commission documentation would be made public. “Yes,” he had replied, “there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security. This would be preserved but not made public.”

  At the time, no one in the media raised objections about document withholdings that involved security—even if withholdings were a little difficult to square with the official verdict that the President had been killed by a single misguided young man acting alone. Oswald had previously lived in the Soviet Union, after all, and this was the height of the Cold War era. Withholdings justified by security seemed harder to accept, however, once the Assassinations Committee found that Oswald had probably not acted alone but as part of a plot involving the Mafia and anti-Castro operatives.

  A perennial explanation, of course, has been that secret intelligence agencies have to protect their information-gathering systems and the identities of personnel. On its face, that is acceptable—but only if that is the genuine reason for withholding documents. The concern has been that U.S. Intelligence agencies have continued to use the “national security” excuse for retentions that are unjustified.

  In 1977, when the FBI went through the motions of releasing a hundred thousand pages from its Kennedy assassination files, the U.S. media uttered an uncritical cheer. At the press conference to mark the event, reporters seemed uninterested or ill-equipped to ask probing questions. The author found himself virtually alone in pressing the FBI spokesman into an admission that “up to 10 percent of the [Kennedy] file will not be released.” One reason for retaining records, the spokesman said, was to protect individuals’ privacy. The other was the familiar one, “national security.” Even after the passage of the JFK Records Act in 1992, which mandated the release of all Kennedy assassination material unless a real case could be made for retention, the FBI continued to resist full disclosure.

  The Central Iintelligence Agency, for its part, over the years released assassination-related documents only when under intense pressure, at the insistence of congressional committees, or—in more recent years—when obliged to comply with the Records Act. Sometimes, “released” documents have turned out to be censored virtually out of existence.

  The Warren Commission, scholars now know, did not see a multitude of documents that are today deemed assassination-related. Senior Assassinations Committee staff, empowered to investigate the President’s murder with the authority of the House of Representatives, ended their probe still stymied by CIA procrastination and evasiveness.

  Much of this book will be given over to assembling the pieces we do have of the documentary jigsaw. Sometimes the emerging picture will seem to point to a sinister Communist conspiracy—a specter that President Johnson, just after the assassination, feared “could conceivably lead the country into a war which could cost forty million lives.” What was the truth about the many months Oswald the defector spent in the Soviet Union? What had his contacts been with Soviet Intelligence? Marina, the wife Oswald had brought home from Russia, remained something of a mystery in her own right. Even before the assassination, the CIA had pondered whether she might be a Soviet plant, sent to the United States with a phony identity. The Agency’s questions to the Russians about Marina failed to extract satisfactory answers.

  In 1964, when the Warren Commission considered the possibility that Marina might be a Soviet agent, Senator Russell commented almost casually, “That will blow the lid if she testifies to that.” She did not, of course, but there is little indication that the Commission were very keen to peer under the lid. Some leads, which raised questions not merely about the Soviets but about the activity of U.S. intelligence, were left unpursued.

  One of Oswald’s Dallas acquaintances, Teofil Meller, told police after the assassination that—in 1962—he had taken precautions before continuing to associate with the recently returned defector. He had checked with the FBI, he said, and agents had said Oswald was “all right.” What did that mean?

  Another Dallas resident, George de Mohrenschildt, befriended Oswald after his return from Russia. Like Meller, he later claimed he had felt the need to check up on Oswald, in his case by seeing J. Walton Moore, an agent with the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division. According to de Mohrenschildt, the agent replied without hesitation: “Yes, he is okay. He is just a harmless lunatic.” What would a CIA man in Dallas have known about Oswald, as early as 1962, to be able to give assurances without even checking CIA files? (The de Mohrenschildt connection will be discussed later.)

  Long after the assassination, while researching a book about Jack Ruby, the Scripps-Howard correspondent Seth Kantor realized that a call he had made in the early evening of November 22 had intriguing potential significance. Kantor, who had covered the Kennedy visit to Dallas, looked again at notes of calls he had made in the afternoon and early evening of the day of the assassination. His managing editor, the notes reminded him, had urged him to phone the Florida number of Hal Hendrix, a journalist who also worked for the Scripps-Howard chain. Hendrix, the editor told Kantor, “had some background on Oswald” for him.

  Kantor’s notes showed that—as early as 6:00 p.m. on the day of the assassination—Hendrix supplied details of Oswald’s past, his defection to Russia, and his recent pro-Castro activities. Now, in retrospect, Kantor pondered the fact that Hendrix had seemed knowledgeable about the alleged assassin.

  Hendrix was no run-of-the-mill journalist. Earlier in 1963, he had won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then he excelled himself again. In an article published on September 24, he cited observers saying that an “ouster” of the pro-Kennedy President Bosch of the Dominican Republic could occur “overnight.” Bosch was overthrown in a coup the very next day.

  Whatever his skills as a newsman, Hendrix reportedly had the advantage of having access to a CIA source at Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami. In the months and years to come, he would become known to his Washington colleagues as “The Spook”—because, in Kantor’s words, “of the handouts he reputedly took from the CIA.” In 1976, Hendrix would plead guilty to having withheld information from a Senate committee probe into multinational corporations and the CIA. He had lied to the committee with the collusion of the CIA, and had concealed his access to CIA information. This was the man who “had some background” on Lee Oswald to give Kantor in the early evening of November 22, 1963.

  As previously mentioned in the context of Oswald’s “Hidell” alias, U.S. Army Intelligence had a file on Oswald before the assassination. As a result, a colonel was feeding information to the FBI within an hour of Oswald’s arrival at the police station. It would be good to satisfy oneself that this was just an example of the efficiency of Army Intelligence. That, however, became impossible when the Army applied the ultimate censorship and destroyed its Kennedy files.

  Soon after the Assassinations Committee learned the military records had been shredded, Congressman Richardson Preyer told the author: “There have been instances of files being, I guess you could say, maliciously withheld or even destroyed… . We don’t know what the motive is.”

  It is hugely improbable that any U.S. agency—or top leadership of an agency—had any part in the assassination. The Assassinations Committee concluded in 1979 that neither the Secret Service, nor the FBI, nor the CIA, were involved as organizations. On the other hand, the Committee considered evidence indicating that individual members of agencies might have had prior covert associations with Oswald and might have even played a role in the assassination. One particularly serious allegation remains, as the Committee’s Chief Counsel put it, “undiscredited.”2 Yet the shifty behavior of the intelligence organizations may conceal—inefficiency aside—an embarrassing truth less heinous than actual involvement in
the assassination.

  The Warren Report stated, “Close scrutiny of the records of the federal agencies involved and the testimony of the responsible officials of the U.S. government establish that there was absolutely no type of informant or undercover relationship between an agency of the U.S. government and Lee Harvey Oswald at any time.” Today, with Watergate and a string of CIA scandals behind us, we know such all-embracing trust was naïve—the Warren Commission staff did not see all the records in 1964. In 1979, the House Assassinations Committee was careful not to express confidence that no agency had any type of relationship with Oswald.

  The transcript of one Warren Commission executive session, throws an interesting light on the CIA’s attitude to the ethics of disclosure in the early 1960s. Commission member Allen Dulles, himself a former CIA Director, briefed colleagues on how a CIA official would deal with inquiries about an agent he had recruited.

  Dulles: He wouldn’t tell.

  Chief Justice Warren: Wouldn’t he tell it under oath?

  Dulles: I wouldn’t think he would tell it under oath, no.

  Chairman: Why?

  Dulles: He ought not to tell it under oath. Maybe not tell it to his own government, but wouldn’t tell it any other way [sic].

  Chairman: Wouldn’t he tell it to his own chief?

  Dulles: He might or he might not.

  Whatever Lee Oswald might eventually have revealed about himself and U.S. intelligence was lost to history forever two days after his arrest. In the late morning of November 24, the Dallas police chief decided to move his prisoner to the county jail. In the basement of City Hall, as Oswald was being led to a police car, a bystander with a revolver lunged forward to fire a single lethal bullet into Oswald’s stomach (see Photo 44). Jack Ruby, a local club owner with Mafia connections, had silenced Oswald once and for all. The last words the accused assassin had heard before being shot were a newsman’s shouted question: “Have you anything to say in your defense?”

  Oswald was conscious for a few minutes after being shot. Police officers laid him down on the front floor of a nearby office, and one tried to talk to him. Detective Billy Combest told the author of Oswald’s dying response to questioning about the assassination: “At that time, I thought he was seriously injured, so I got right down on the floor with him, just literally on my hands and knees. And I asked him if he would like to make any confession, any statement in connection with the assassination of the President… . Several times he responded to me by shaking his head in a definite manner… . It wasn’t from the pain or anything—he had just decided he wasn’t going to correspond with me, he wasn’t going to say anything.”3

  Before Oswald was carried to an ambulance, someone applied artificial respiration—the worst possible treatment for an abdominal wound because it multiplies the chances of severe internal bleeding. At Parkland Hospital, the doctors who two days earlier had tried to save the President’s life now worked in vain over Oswald.

  The corpse was taken to a mortuary, where an FBI team photographed Oswald and took his fingerprints for the last time. Late on November 25, the same afternoon that President Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington, the alleged assassin was buried in a cemetery outside Dallas, in a moleskin-covered coffin, within a sealed concrete vault, beneath a black slab bearing only the word OSWALD. No details, not even dates of birth and death.

  Today, we still have only glimpses of who he really was in life.

  II

  OSWALD

  Maverick or Puppet?

  Chapter 8

  Red Faces

  “Ask me, and I will tell you I fight

  for Communism.”

  —Lee Harvey Oswald, in a letter from Russia, 1959

  The reaction in Dallas to the capture of Oswald could aptly be described as Pavlovian. The moment local officials realized he had been in Russia, and discovered armfuls of Communist propaganda amongst his belongings, they began sounding off about an international Communist conspiracy to kill the President.

  Far away in Washington and Moscow, a different breed of official reacted with more sophistication. CIA and the KGB officers knew full well the questions that would soon be asked: Was Oswald an agent? Was he one of ours or one of theirs? These questions still await satisfactory answers; those that have been given are riddles in the sand.

  In a 1975 memorandum, then CIA Director William Colby recalled how in November 1963 he had hurriedly consulted the files because “we were extremely concerned at the time that Oswald, as an American returning from the USSR, might have been routinely debriefed by DCD [Domestic Contacts Division].” None of the subsequent traces, Colby wrote, revealed Agency contact with Oswald.

  In February 1964, a Soviet intelligence officer defecting to the United States gave a glib account of Moscow’s reaction to the assassination. This was Yuri Nosenko, who claimed that within hours of the news he had himself been ordered to investigate the Soviet end of the Oswald case. A special plane had been dispatched to Minsk, where Oswald had lived, to collect all official papers on the alleged assassin’s stay in Russia. The results, Nosenko insisted, had been negative, because the KGB had “decided that Oswald was of no interest.” “I can unhesitatingly sign off,” he claimed, “to the fact that the Soviet Union cannot be tied into this in any way.”

  Neither the CIA nor the Soviet disclaimers convinced the Senate Intelligence Committee when, in 1975, it looked into the performance of intelligence agencies at the time of the Kennedy assassination. Senator Richard Schweiker, who was prominent in that inquiry and had access to many classified U.S. intelligence files, said of Oswald in an interview: “Either we trained and sent him to Russia, and they went along and pretended they didn’t know—to fake us out—or in fact, they inculcated him and sent him back here and were trying to fake us out that way.”

  Oswald did move in a mysterious way. And, in the effort to bring his shadowy profile into focus, the outsider labors under an enormous handicap. His main sources are people for whom untruth is a way of life—officials of the intelligence community.

  The author Edward Epstein caused a stir in 1978 with a book suggesting that Oswald may have been recruited by the KGB, though not with assassination in mind. Epstein drew heavily on interviews with former CIA Counterintelligence chief James Angleton—long unrivaled as an interpreter of Soviet skullduggery and also, famously, a master of deception and disinformation.

  In 1975, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Angleton was asked to verify a quotation of something he had reportedly said earlier. Angleton responded in characteristically opaque style: “Well, if it is accurate, it should not have been said.”

  By the time Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, Angleton was already embarked on the course that would define the rest of his career—and in a sense the Agency’s ability to operate effectively—the obsessive hunt for a mole. Angleton believed that an agent who answered to the Soviets had penetrated the CIA, and specifically the Soviet Russia Division. He was obsessed with the notion, an obsession that effected his every response to the defection to Russia of an insignificant young man called Oswald, and, in the long run, to the assassination itself.

  Our look at the world as seen by Angleton first follows the proposal that the youthful former marine Oswald was recruited by the Communists—bearing in mind always that he may also have been the tool of others with very different loyalties and purposes.

  The fledging Oswald was a contradiction. At sixteen, in New Orleans, he was reportedly devouring communist literature from the library and apparently writing to the Socialist Party of America for information.1 According to one high school friend, he began spouting about Socialism, declaring that he was “looking for a communist cell in town,” that “communism was the only way of life for the worker.”

  Another contemporary said that reports that the young Oswald had been “studying communism” were nonsense, that Oswald
had a funny way of showing that communism was the only course for him. For he was simultaneously trying to join the U.S. Marine Corps, a potent symbol of American “imperialism”—if you happened to be on Oswald’s professed side of the political fence.

  Oswald tried to cheat his way into the Marine Corps while still under enlistment age and—when he failed—began devouring his elder brother’s Marine Corps manual as avidly as he had reportedly been studying Marxist tracts. According to his mother, Oswald learned the handbook until he “knew it by heart” and finally succeeded in joining up six days after his seventeenth birthday. The shapes in the fog around Oswald will suggest, though, that his zeal to become a U.S. marine, like his socialist bent, may have been less than spontaneous.

  During basic training, recruit Oswald declared an interest in aircraft maintenance and repair, and spring 1957 saw him learning radar and air-traffic control. These and further assignments called for a security check, which Oswald passed. According to the official record, he was granted clearance at a “Confidential” level. Over these months, Oswald emerged as a loner who kept apart from his marine buddies. He did not always run with the pack when the unit was allowed out of camp, and some of his actions seem to have been a little mysterious. While at Keesler Air Force Base, friends thought Oswald used his weekend passes to go “home” to New Orleans, a hundred miles away. As we now know, however, his mother had moved to Texas. Other relatives, who did live in New Orleans, said Oswald did not come visiting.