JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (62 page)

More broadly, he proposed that their rival nations transform the Cold War into its moral equivalent: “a desire not to ‘bury’ one’s adversary, but to compete in a host of peaceful arenas, in ideas, in production, and ultimately in service to all mankind . . . And in the contest for a better life all the world can be a winner.”
[10]

In his American University address, Kennedy had appealed to Americans and Russians alike to recognize, for the sake of all, what they had in common: “if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
[11]

Now speaking to the representatives of all nations, he again envisioned the hope of a peaceful, transformed planet over against the threat of extermination:

“Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world—or to make it the last.”
[12]

He concluded by suggesting that the members of the United Nations engage together in an experiment in peace:

“Two years ago I told this body that the United States had proposed, and was willing to sign, a limited test ban treaty. Today that treaty has been signed. It will not put an end to war. It will not remove basic conflicts. It will not secure freedom for all. But it can be a lever, and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends: ‘Give me a place where I can stand—and I shall move the world.’

“My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.”
[13]

When he said these words, John Kennedy was secretly initiating his own risky experiment in peace. That same day at the United Nations, Kennedy told UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson that his assistant, William Attwood, should go ahead “to make discreet contact” with Cuba’s UN ambassador Carlos Lechuga.
[14]
Was Fidel Castro interested in a dialogue with John Kennedy? A strongly affirmative answer would come back from Castro, who had been urged by Khrushchev to begin trusting Kennedy. Although Kennedy specified that the CIA not be told of his Cuban initiative, Attwood later wrote, “the CIA must have had an inkling of what was happening from phone taps and surveillance of Lechuga.”
[15]
Attwood also said, “There is no doubt in my mind. If there had been no assassination we probably would have moved into negotiations leading to a normalization of relations with Cuba.”
[16]
In September 1963, eleven months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK had turned in a new direction. He was now following up the test ban treaty with Nikita Khrushchev by reaching out to his other enemy, Fidel Castro, in spite of the obvious dangers involved.

Kennedy and Khrushchev, in almost choosing total darkness, had been moved to see the light. They had then reached an agreement whereby they could lead by example, in the presence of all nations, in seeking the moral equivalent of war—using the test ban as a lever to move the world to a just and lasting peace. Thanks to John Kennedy’s and Nikita Khrushchev’s mutual turning away from nuclear war, they now had the power to make peace. But with determined Cold Warriors surrounding them, neither man would long retain that power. Their time for making peace would soon pass.

On October 9, 1963, one week before Lee Harvey Oswald began his job at a site overlooking the president’s future parade route, an FBI official in Washington, D.C., disconnected Oswald from a federal alarm system that was about to identify him as a threat to national security. The FBI man’s name was Marvin Gheesling. He was a supervisor in the Soviet espionage section at FBI headquarters.
[17]
His timing was remarkable. As author John Newman remarked in an analysis of this phenomenon, Gheesling “turned off the alarm switch on Oswald literally an instant before it would have gone off.”
[18]

Four years earlier, in November 1959 shortly after Oswald told the U.S. Embassy in Moscow he would give military secrets to the Soviet Union, the FBI issued a FLASH on Oswald. A “Wanted Notice Card” was sent throughout the Bureau stating that anyone who received information or an inquiry on Oswald should notify the Espionage Section, Division 5.
[19]
By its FLASH the FBI had put a security watch on Oswald that covered all its offices. That watch was abolished on October 9, 1963, for no apparent reason, only hours before the FBI received critical information on Oswald. When Marvin Gheesling canceled Oswald’s FLASH,
[20]
he effectively silenced the national security alarm that was just about to sound from an incoming CIA report on Oswald’s (or an impostor’s) activities in Mexico.

From the perspective of the plot to kill Kennedy, the cancellation of the FBI’s FLASH came in the nick of time. Oswald was to play the indispensable role of scapegoat in the scenario, requiring that he be quietly manipulated right up through the assassination. Had the FBI alarm sounded, Oswald would have been placed on the Security Index, drawing critical law enforcement attention to him prior to Kennedy’s visit to Dallas. That much pre-Dallas focus on the patsy would have made it impossible to play out the assassination scenario. The FBI watch on Oswald had to be revoked immediately. It was.

What would have sounded the alarm on Oswald was the CIA’s October 10, 1963, message to the FBI about Oswald contacting the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.
[21]
Because Oswald’s security watch had just been lifted, the CIA’s October 10 message managed to document his latest Soviet connection in a way that would become explosive
after
the assassination, while at the same time avoiding a security alert on Oswald
before
the assassination. It was a brilliant tactic in manipulating the FBI that demonstrated just how sophisticated the plotters’ knowledge and control was of their national security bureaucracy. John Kennedy was killed by people who knew their national security state inside out and could direct it according to their will.

Even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was subservient to this kind of power.

When Hoover learned after the assassination that supervisor Marvin Gheesling in the FBI’s Soviet Espionage section had canceled the security watch on Oswald, he imposed censure and probation on Gheesling.
[22]
We have no evidence that Hoover himself had given any order to cancel the FLASH on Oswald. On the contrary, he seems to have been quite upset by Gheesling’s action. He wrote angrily on the document censuring Gheesling: “Yes, send this guy to Siberia!”
[23]
(“Siberia” in Hoover’s geography turned out to be the Detroit FBI office.)
[24]

Hoover’s comments suggest he was not a total master of his own house. A higher authority in the national security complex was bypassing him. We have already seen how Hoover scrawled another revealing comment on an FBI memo whose subject was that of keeping track of CIA operations in the United States. In that case Hoover was skeptical that the FBI could avoid being manipulated by the CIA. He wrote doubtfully: “O.K., but I hope you are not being taken in. I can’t forget the CIA withholding the French espionage activities in the USA nor
the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico
, only to mention two instances of
their double-dealing
.”
[25]

By “false story,” Hoover meant false to the FBI—not the CIA’s staged duplicity to the public whereby Oswald posed as a pro-Castro activist, but rather the CIA’s behind-the-scenes lies to its co-intelligence agency, the FBI, by a deeper cover story. What was the CIA story on Oswald’s trip to Mexico that was false to the FBI?

An important clue has been provided by a Senate committee’s 1976 investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies. The Church Committee discovered that on September 16, 1963, the CIA informed the FBI in a memorandum that the “Agency is giving some consideration to countering the activities of [the Fair Play for Cuba Committee] in foreign countries . . . CIA is also giving some thought to planting deceptive information which might embarrass the Committee in areas where it does have some support.”
[26]

The obvious “foreign country” for the CIA’s planting of such “deceptive information” was Mexico, near New Orleans, where Lee Harvey Oswald had already just embarrassed the FPCC by his summer antics in its name. As we know, Oswald or someone acting in his name was just about to make his famous trip to Mexico. But as the FBI would learn, “Oswald’s” trip would have a much deeper purpose than to counter and embarrass the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

On the day after the CIA’s deceptive advisory memo to the FBI, Oswald (or an impersonator) stood in line to get his tourist card from the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans. Immediately ahead of him was CIA agent William Gaudet, who had worked secretly for the Agency for more than twenty years. Gaudet then went to Mexico at the same time as Oswald.
[27]
Oswald, or his stand-in, was again being shepherded by the CIA. As we have seen, the CIA then proceeded to record “Oswald’s” communications with the Cuban and Soviet consulates. The evident purpose was not so much to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (the CIA’s false story to the FBI) as to identify Oswald with Cuba and the Soviet Union, in order to scapegoat all three together in the president’s upcoming murder.

The FBI’s Marvin Gheesling may then have canceled Oswald’s FLASH because of the CIA’s false advisory, or from a similar memorandum that has not been declassified. From the CIA story, Gheesling could easily have been misled into thinking Oswald was only working under cover in Mexico to counter the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. As a CIA operative, Oswald did not belong on the Security Index. Thus his security watch was lifted. His staged Soviet connection could then be documented for scapegoating purposes after Dallas, but without sounding a national security alarm that would have put a spotlight on Oswald and prevented Dallas from happening.

In spite of Hoover’s recognition of the CIA’s “double-dealing,” the FBI went along with it by covering up the Oswald-Gaudet-CIA connection. Oswald’s Mexican tourist card was No. 824085. The FBI claimed after the assassination that it could find no record of the holder of preceding card No. 824084. In 1975 the name that corresponded to 824084 was mistakenly declassified. It was the CIA’s William Gaudet.
[28]

Even within his own FBI domain, the notoriously autocratic J. Edgar Hoover gave way to a greater authority when it came to the forward progress of the plot to kill the president, as well as its cover-up afterwards. A more powerful agency was in control of key mechanisms throughout the entire U.S. government. Hoover told an associate, “People think I’m so powerful, but when it comes to the CIA, there’s nothing I can do.”
[29]

In early August 1963, what has been recognized as the first organized protest against the Vietnam War took place.
[30]
In New York, Tom Cornell and Chris Kearns of the Catholic Worker vigiled by themselves for nine days in front of the Manhattan residence of South Vietnam’s observer to the United Nations. Their signs read: “We Demand an End to U.S. Military Support of Diem’s Government.” On the tenth day, Cornell and Kearns were joined by 250 more demonstrators from the Catholic Worker and other peace groups. They were filmed by ABC News.
[31]
The antiwar movement had begun—three months after John Kennedy told Mike Mansfield he was preparing for a complete U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam.

This is not to say that the president was ahead of the peace movement. He had merely told Mansfield that he intended to end the U.S. military involvement. Nevertheless, his first step in actually withdrawing troops was not far behind the first antiwar demonstration. It was only two months later, on October 11, 1963, that he signed his presidential order for an initial withdrawal of one thousand U.S. troops from Vietnam by the end of the year, anticipating in that same order a complete troop withdrawal by the end of 1965.
[32]

But how does a president of the United States try to end a war, when virtually his entire Cold War bureaucracy wants to continue it? That was the problem John Kennedy was trying to work through in the fall of 1963, like a coach trying to guide a team that is determined to do the wrong thing on the playing field no matter what. Kennedy’s team was only half-listening to him on war and peace, when they listened to him at all.

The president’s increasing isolation from his bureaucracy was evident in the resistance and outright manipulation he was beginning to experience from even his inner circle. Even the more liberal members of that circle could not agree with the glimpses they were getting of his heretical thinking on Vietnam. As John Kenneth Galbraith recognized, John Kennedy was constantly thinking ahead of everyone on his staff. Nevertheless, those around him were catching on to the benumbing truth that their president, who kept his cards extremely close to the vest,
did
want to withdraw from Vietnam and
did not
want the Saigon coup that several of them had pushed and that he had reluctantly authorized. The coup they thought necessary before they could defeat the Communists on the battlefield was a step he feared would only make matters worse in a disastrous cause. To their dismay, it seemed that Kennedy thought the Southeast Asian battlefield they were warming up to with anti-communist gusto was already a complete loss.