The Kennedy Half-Century (39 page)

GARRISON: Mr. Shaw, [have] you ever been a contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency?

Shaw had worked with the CIA as a paid informant, but only for a brief period in the 1950s. Yet Stone portrayed Shaw as one of Langley’s top
operatives. After the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s, Holland found a telling document in the Soviet archives entitled “Disinformation Operations of the KGB through
Paese Sera.”
According to the document, “Department A of the First Chief Directorate” began “a series of disinformation operations” in 1967 that included feeding phony stories to an “emplacement” in New York. Holland dug through old newspapers until he found the CMC story reprinted in a New York-based weekly called the
National Guardian
. Logically, the KGB’s goal was not just to point an accusing finger at its right-wing enemies but also to keep public suspicion away from the Soviets while the American people sought a fuller answer to the Kennedy murder mystery.
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Long before Oliver Stone turned his prodigious talents to the Kennedy murder, the KGB and the Soviet leadership were worrying about the public framing of the assassination, given Oswald’s defection to the USSR. Yet much of the informed speculation from the very beginning pointed to JFK’s domestic enemies, not his foreign adversaries. Those believing this conjecture included some of the Kennedy family. In late November 1963, Robert Kennedy arranged a meeting in Russia between an artist friend of his, William Walton, and a Soviet defense attaché, Georgi Bolshakov, who had helped the Kennedys during the Cuban Missile Crisis by serving as a diplomatic back channel to the Kremlin. Walton and Bolshakov met at a restaurant in Moscow called the Sovietskaya. “Bolshakov, who had himself been deeply moved by [the] assassination, listened intently as Walton explained that the Kennedys believed there was a large political conspiracy behind Oswald’s rifle. Despite Oswald’s connections to the Communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents.”
¹⁰

Some of JFK’s aides long believed much the same. During a dinner at Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant in Boston five years after the president’s death, Kenny O’Donnell told the future Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, that he had heard two shots come from behind the picket fence on November 22. O’Donnell was in a car closely following the presidential limo when JFK was killed. “That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” O’Neill replied. O’Donnell admitted as much and explained why. “I told the FBI what I had heard but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family.” Dave Powers, another close JFK adviser sitting next to O’Donnell in the car, attended the same dinner with O’Neill. Powers confirmed O’Donnell’s recollection, claiming he had also heard two shots from the grassy knoll.
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For a long time, Ted Sorensen, JFK’s loyal wordsmith, accepted the conclusions of the Warren report. In his bestseller
Kennedy
(first published in 1965), Sorensen wrote, “Personally I accept the conclusion that no plot or political motive was involved, despite the fact that this makes the deed all the more difficult to accept.” But toward the end of his life, Sorensen had second thoughts. Encouraging a read of James Douglass’s
JFK and the Unspeakable
, Sorensen said, “I endorse no conspiracy books, but that one made an impression. Its thesis is that Kennedy was killed by those opposed to his switch toward peace regarding the Soviets, the Cubans, and the North Vietnamese. That has a credible ring to it but lacks hard evidence including names that could stand up in [a] courtroom.”
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Strangely, President Kennedy himself had considered the possibility of a military and intelligence community coup d’état. “It’s possible,” he told Red Fay, one of his closest confidants, in the summer of 1962. “It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young president, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.”
¹³

Given the lack of hard evidence, to accuse any arm or agency of the federal government of orchestrating Kennedy’s assassination is both irresponsible and disingenuous. At the same time, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that a small, secret cabal of CIA hard-liners, angry about Kennedy’s handling of Cuba and sensing a leftward turn on negotiations with the Soviets and the prosecution of the war in Vietnam, took matters into their own hands lest the United States go soft on Communism.
¹⁴
There are plenty of historical parallels. In 44 B.C., twenty-three Roman senators stabbed Julius Caesar to death because they considered him a tyrant. In 1865, a handful of Southern nationalists hatched a successful plot against Abraham Lincoln for similar reasons. In 1914, members of a secret Serbian sect known as the “Black Hand” murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie, precipitating World War I. In the early 1960s, the CIA tried to assassinate Fidel Castro at least eight times, and the Cuban regime claims the attempts numbered closer to six hundred. The idea that a rogue element within the CIA, operating as an impregnable cell, could have assassinated Kennedy is not a mere flight of fancy. After all, during the Cold War, top CIA officials often ran clandestine
operations without much or any oversight, and conducted disinformation campaigns that covered their tracks well.
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Those who lived through the tumult following the Kennedy assassination remember that few initially mentioned the CIA as a possible culprit. No one except for a tiny elite group of insiders knew of the CIA’s efforts to kill Fidel Castro, or of some CIA higher-ups’ views of President Kennedy. It would have been considered unpatriotic at the time to suggest seriously the possibility of CIA involvement—although a few years later, President Johnson expressed a belief in private in 1967 that the CIA had had a role in Kennedy’s death.
¹⁶
The Communists, on the other hand, were juicy targets right from the beginning. Since Oswald had embraced Marxism, defected to the USSR, and handed out flyers for Fidel Castro, many Americans thought it reasonable to assume that the Soviets or Cubans could have been behind JFK’s murder.

Once Oswald was arrested, his Marxist past became known within hours, and an incident in the Dallas district attorney’s office nearly lit the fuse on a confrontation with the Soviet bloc. Assistant D.A. Bill Alexander searched Oswald’s apartment, which was cluttered with books and letters making clear his ideological affiliation. By ten P.M. on November 22, Alexander was composing Oswald’s indictment when a Dallas reporter called and Alexander answered the phone. The reporter wanted to know about Oswald. “I told him [Oswald] was a Communist,” said Alexander. The reporter replied that he would need something more substantial than Alexander’s word. “All right, how about if the indictment reads, ‘Oswald did then and there with malice aforethought kill John Kennedy, president of the United States, in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy’?” The reporter was well pleased: “Yeah, I can run with that.” Washington was not as pleased once word reached senior officials there. Clark Clifford, a high-level adviser to Presidents Truman and now Johnson (later LBJ’s defense secretary), called district attorney Henry Wade, Alexander’s boss, to protest vigorously. “What the hell is Alexander trying to do, start World War III?” thundered Clifford. The “Communist conspiracy” clause was quickly dropped from both the indictment and the newspaper.
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Nonetheless, Lyndon Johnson feared precisely this scenario: that the public would conclude the Communists were behind JFK’s murder, inevitably sparking a demand for nuclear retaliation—which in turn was a powerful motive for pinning it all on Oswald as a lunatic gunman. The irony is that, again completely in private, LBJ often told aides and reporters that Castro was responsible for Kennedy’s murder and thus Johnson’s own presidency.
(As noted above, Johnson had also confidentially suggested that the CIA had an undefined role in the events of November 22.)
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Among LBJ assistants who have confirmed the president’s Castro allegations is Joseph Califano, later President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare.
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During a confidential interview with ABC journalist Howard K. Smith in October 1968, Johnson said, “I’ll tell you something about Kennedy’s murder that will rock you … Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got to him first.” Smith said that he was “rocked all night” by Johnson’s shocking statement, but that the president never gave him any additional details.
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LBJ told Leo Janos of
Time
magazine that Kennedy “had been operating a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean.” Even Earl Warren had suspicions about Cuba and considered the Communist nation “one of the principal suspects.”
²¹
As author Henry Hurt points out, Castro “possessed the motive, means, and opportunity” to kill Kennedy, especially since the dictator had successfully infiltrated the Cuban exile community with an army of undercover agents.
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Castro cast suspicion on himself by delivering a vitriolic speech in Brazil a few weeks before the assassination. “United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders,” he warned, “they themselves will not be safe.”
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Of course, the Cuban dictator knew what Americans did not: He was a constant CIA target.

Did Johnson really have proof that Castro was responsible for Kennedy’s murder? A mysterious meeting held in Mexico City among high-ranking federal officials offers tantalizing clues. Shortly after the assassination, U.S. ambassador Thomas Mann convened with FBI agents Larry Keenan and Clark Anderson, CIA station chief Winston Scott, and CIA agent David Atlee Phillips in Mann’s office. When Mann suggested that Cuban and Russian Communists might have planned November 22, Keenan assured him that it was an open-and-shut case—an emotionally disturbed Marxist named Lee Oswald had acted completely on his own. Mann was flabbergasted. “I hadn’t reached any conclusion,” he would say later, “and that’s why it surprised me so much. That was the only time it ever happened to me—‘We don’t want to hear any more about that case—and tell the Mexican government not to do any more about it … We just want to hush it up.’ ”
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Brian Latell, a former CIA agent and Cuba expert, recently published a book that raises new questions about Castro’s possible links to November 22. In 2007 Latell was granted permission to interview Florentino Aspillaga, a high-level Cuban defector who worked for Castro’s intelligence service in the early 1960s. Aspillaga told Latell that on the morning of the assassination, four hours before Kennedy died, he received orders to monitor radio signals coming from Texas. Aspillaga explained that the unusual directive caught him off guard since he was normally told to monitor CIA radio traffic. Separately,
Latell discovered that Oswald may have bluntly threatened to kill Kennedy during his visit to the Cuban consulate in September 1963, and that Castro was quickly informed of Oswald’s vow. Yet Castro did not send any warnings through his channels to Washington. None of this is conclusive. Perhaps on November 22, Castro and his henchmen may have wanted to know if Kennedy would address Cuba again in his scheduled speeches; just a few days earlier in Tampa and Miami, JFK had bashed Castro at length.
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And it may be that the Cubans dismissed Oswald’s rant as unserious. It may also be true that Castro, having been targeted so often by the CIA for assassination, felt no special obligation to alert the American authorities about a threat on Kennedy’s life.
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We cannot really know what role Cuba might have played unless investigators gain unfettered access to Castro government documents, assuming they exist and have not been altered. Still, the best available evidence casts doubt that Castro was actively involved in Kennedy’s murder, and nothing Latell has uncovered proves otherwise. While it is always possible that Castro’s reaction to the news of Kennedy’s death was feigned, he did not seem like a man who had been embroiled in a plot or had advance knowledge. The Cuban dictator appeared “shocked and saddened” by the announcement and said over and over again, “Es una mala noticia” (“This is bad news”). Also, shortly before the assassination, Castro told the French journalist Jean Daniel that Kennedy had a chance of becoming “the greatest president of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists.” In the end, the CIA was officially unable to establish any links between Cuba and JFK’s death. On March 3, 1964, a CIA operative sent Langley the details of an interview he had conducted with a Cuban official who claimed that “Castro felt that it was possible that … Kennedy would have gone on ultimately to negotiate with Cuba,” not because of “love for Cuba” but rather “for practical reasons.” Moreover, he had heard Castro denouncing LBJ “in harsh terms,” hardly the reaction expected if Castro had wanted to replace JFK with LBJ—and there was no reason prior to November 22 for Castro to believe that Johnson would be better on Cuba policy than Kennedy had been.