Reclaiming History (276 page)

Along with all his other demons, according to one of his friends, Samuel B. Ballen, who had dinner in Dallas with de Mohrenschildt shortly before he died, de Mohrenschildt was “beating himself pretty hard” with guilt over the assassination. He knew Oswald had liked and looked up to him, and wondered whether something he had done or said, something “childish” and “sophomoric” on his part, might have nudged Oswald over the edge in the direction he ultimately took. Ballen felt depressed over his meeting with de Mohrenschildt, later recalling that for all of his friend’s frailties, the greatest of which was his “utter irresponsibility,” George, he believed, was “one of the world’s great people,” and looking back, felt he had been dining with “Hemingway before the suicide.”
⁹⁰

Both the HSCA and the Warren Commission took a more than casual interest in de Mohrenschildt to determine if he was an intelligence agent with a possible connection to the assassination, the latter question being the whole point of the exercise. The HSCA never got around to addressing itself to this ultimate point of its inquiry, but it did so indirectly by concluding it had found “no evidence that de Mohrenschildt had ever been an American intelligence agent.”
⁹¹
And nothing in its report or volumes suggests he was acting at the behest of any foreign country in his association with Oswald. The Warren Commission said its investigation had not produced “any evidence linking [de Mohrenschildt] in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy.”
⁹²

T
he effort by the conspiracy theorists to connect Oswald to the CIA is so intense that one conspiracy author, John Newman, actually managed to devote 612 pages to the task. In
Oswald and the CIA
, Newman, a former military intelligence officer, reads between the lines and the grammatical contours of hundreds of documents (CIA, FBI, Department of State, etc.) and finds “peculiar,” “strange,” “unusual,” and “intriguing” entries and omissions everywhere concerning Oswald, from which he constructs one anemic inference upon another. His book reminds me of the story about two psychiatrists who pass each other on the street one day and when one says, “Good morning,” the other mutters to himself, “I wonder what he meant by that?” After taking his readers on a guided “journey through the labyrinth” of intelligence documents and files on Oswald, Newman, despite the presumptuous title of his book, comes up completely empty-handed.
⁹³
If any reader can find in Newman’s book any evidence that Oswald was a CIA agent or operative, or even that he, at any time, talked to or communicated with a member of the CIA, on the street, over the phone, by carrier pigeon, or in any other way, please let me know.

I have a very important suggested area of research for Mr. Newman and other members of the conspiracy community. If Oswald was a CIA operative—indeed, if he killed Kennedy for the CIA—I would imagine he would have been paid handsomely by his employers. Even if he wasn’t, we certainly can assume he was not working for free. Yet we know that Oswald always was very low on money, leaving behind for his wife and two children the grand total of $183.87. We also know from his 1962 federal income tax returns (Oswald was in Russia in 1960 and 1961) that his declared income was $1,354.06.
⁹⁴
Granted, he would not declare money given to him from the CIA to kill Kennedy, but the question for researchers is, What did Oswald do with his CIA (or FBI, KGB, mob, etc.) money? Although he didn’t have to draw attention to himself by flaunting it on luxuries, wouldn’t he have at least used it to pay for a normal, regular room for himself instead of living in a virtual closet on North Beckley? So what did Oswald do with his CIA money? Where is there one tiny piece of evidence that Oswald lived, in any way at all, above his means?

Though if Oswald had been a CIA agent or operative, we could probably expect the CIA to deny this fact, what follows are brief excerpts from the CIA’s 1963 report on its awareness of Oswald prior to the assassination. It should be noted that after almost
forty-four years
of investigation and searching by conspiracy theorists for contrary evidence, nothing has ever surfaced to rebut these assertions by the CIA:

Lee Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959…Since Oswald was a former Marine and a U.S. citizen, his defection was of primary interest to the State Department, the FBI, and the Navy Department. CIA does not investigate U.S. citizens abroad unless we are specifically requested to do so by some other Government Security agency. No such request was made in this case…During the 2½ year period that Oswald was in the Soviet Union, CIA had no sources in a position to report on his activities or what the KGB might be doing with him. The good Soviet sources we had were engaged in reporting on other important matters, and they were not directed to check on U.S. defectors like Oswald…It was suspected that Oswald and all other similar defectors were in the hands of the KGB and carefully watched by them, so any casual operation to learn their whereabouts or activities would have been highly dangerous and probably unsuccessful…To sum up our interest in Lee Oswald before he visited Mexico, we knew he was a U.S. defector to the Soviet Union, we read the FBI reports on him, we watched as the State Department did its job of screening him for repatriation, and we knew the FBI was keeping track of him in the U.S.A. As a footnote, it should be added that we were not even aware of the existence of Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who later shot Oswald. We had a few Rubys in our files, but none were Jack Ruby. On 9 October 1963, our Mexico City Station received information from a very sensitive source indicating that Lee Oswald had been in contact with the Soviet Embassy there on 1 October…It appeared that he had visited the Embassy as early as 28 September 1963…The name Lee Oswald meant nothing to our Mexico City Station, but our Headquarters in Washington checked its files and when we disseminated the report on 10 October 1963 to the FBI, the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Navy Department, we commented in the report that he might be identical with the former Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959.
⁹⁵

To repeat, because it warrants being repeated, after over four decades of painstaking scrutiny by literally thousands of conspiracy-minded researchers in this country as well as around the world, no one has come up with any evidence to contravene anything set forth in this simple CIA report of December 20, 1963, a little less than one month after the assassination.

Vladimir Semichastny was the director of the KGB during Oswald’s time in Russia. The KGB surveilled Oswald and quickly learned, Semichastny said, that he was a “mediocre, uninteresting, useless man.” He said it best about Oswald’s alleged connection to the CIA: “I had always respected the CIA and FBI, and we knew their work and what they were capable of. It was clear that Oswald was not an agent,
couldn’t
be an agent, for the CIA or FBI.”
⁹⁶

In addition to conspiracy theorists being unable to find any evidence of Oswald killing Kennedy for the CIA, four national investigative commissions or committees found no CIA involvement in Kennedy’s death. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone and he was not an agent of the CIA.
⁹⁷
The HSCA also searched and searched and could find “no evidence of any relationship between Oswald and the CIA.”
⁹⁸
Apart from finding no connection between the CIA and Oswald, the committee likewise (even assuming for the sake of argument that Oswald was not the assassin) could find no connection between the CIA and the assassination itself.
*
And it should not be forgotten that the HSCA had every reason to want to uncover such a CIA conspiracy. Not only would it be doing its job, it would also receive a great deal of praise, even adulation, from the American people. And the HSCA was particularly predisposed to wanting to find evidence of CIA (or FBI, Secret Service, etc.) complicity since it desperately needed (but never got) any proof to support its ultimate conclusion of a conspiracy. All the committee had was the eventually discredited “fourth bullet” from the acoustic analysis,
nothing else
. But after a very intensive investigation of the CIA, the HSCA concluded that the CIA was “not involved in the assassination.”
⁹⁹

Two other national bodies investigated possible CIA involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy. Going beyond the mandate of the executive order signed by President Gerald Ford on January 4, 1975, to “determine whether any domestic CIA activities exceeded the Agency’s statutory authority,” the so-called Rockefeller Commission (formally, “Commission on CIA Activities within the United States’), named after its chairman, Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, investigated whether the CIA was involved in the assassination of JFK. In addition to Rockefeller himself, the members of the Commission included distinguished Americans such as C. Douglas Dillon, former secretary of the Treasury; Lane Kirkland, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO; former California governor Ronald Reagan; Erwin N. Griswold, former U.S. solicitor general and former dean of Harvard Law School; and Lyman L. Lemnitzer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. David W. Belin, a former assistant Warren Commission counsel, was the executive director, and a staff of nine attorneys with substantial investigative experience was recruited. President Ford directed the CIA and other federal agencies to cooperate with the commission. The commission wrote that “much of the evidence [it] examined has come from CIA files and personnel. But the Commission has sought wherever possible to verify the evidence independently.” After five months of investigation, in its June 6, 1975, report to President Ford, the commission said that “numerous allegations have been made that the CIA participated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The Commission staff investigated these allegations. On the basis of the staff’s investigation, the Commission concluded there was no credible evidence of any CIA involvement” in the assassination of President Kennedy.
¹⁰⁰

Finally, the U.S. Senate’s 1975–1976 Church Committee, though highly critical of the CIA’s plots to assassinate Castro and the CIA’s concealing this information from the Warren Commission, said its investigation had not “uncovered evidence” of CIA complicity in Kennedy’s assassination.
¹⁰¹

It is very noteworthy that the
only
books written that suggest the CIA was behind the assassination are those by conspiracy theorists, who are convinced that a conspiracy was behind the assassination
whether or not the CIA was involved
. On the other hand, a considerable number of books have been written about the CIA and its history, warts and all, and not one of their authors, even though they had every ethical, professional (Pulitzer Prize, esteem of peers, etc.), and commercial reason to expose the CIA, or rogue elements thereof, as being behind the assassination, found the need to devote more than a paragraph or two in their long books to Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination. (Where there are more than a few paragraphs, the discussion usually concerns Yuriy Nosenko’s information about Oswald that divided the CIA over Nosenko’s bona fides—see KGB conspiracy section later in text.) What does that tell you? It can only tell you one thing. They never wrote anything about the CIA’s alleged connection to the assassination because in their minds there simply was nothing substantive and credible to write about. And this dismissal, by omission, of the allegation of CIA complicity in the assassination (which, if true, would be far and away the most important part of their book) reflects their obviously considered assessment that such an allegation is so groundless it deserved none of their ink.

Indeed, as I have alluded to elsewhere in this book, the very thought of CIA officials (or rogue elements) sitting around the table at CIA headquarters or elsewhere actually plotting to murder the president of the United States belongs, if anywhere, in a Robert Ludlum novel. For those who may not know—people oftentimes refer to a particular true-crime book as a novel—novels are fiction, not nonfiction.

The other federal intelligence agency that many conspiracy theorists have sought to implicate in the assassination is the FBI, the main villain being J. Edgar Hoover, its longtime director. Born in Washington, D.C., on New Year’s Day in 1895 of American, British, German, and Swiss stock, Hoover graduated from George Washington University’s nighttime school of law in 1916, passed the bar, and was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia in 1917. In July of that same year, he started working for the Department of Justice as a clerk in the files division, earning an annual salary of $990. The Department of Justice remained his only employer for fifty-five years, Hoover dying while still in office in 1972. Today, FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., are in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, which was dedicated on September 30, 1979.

It is often said that Hoover, in 1924, became the first director of the FBI. This is not completely accurate. The first criminal investigative division in the Department of Justice was created on July 1, 1908, and informally called the Special Agent Force. It consisted of thirty-five investigators under the command of a “chief examiner,” Stanley W. Finch. The head of the Justice Department, Charles J. Bonaparte (a grandnephew of Napoleon Bonaparte), formalized this arrangement by issuing an order on July 26, 1908, and the FBI considers that day as the date of its birth. So technically, Finch was the first director of what eventually became known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Special Agent Force was named the Bureau of Investigation on March 16, 1909. Finch was succeeded by A. Bruce Bielaski in 1912, William J. Flynn in 1919, and William J. Burns in 1921. Hoover, who had become an assistant director of the Bureau of Investigation, was appointed director, at the age of only twenty-nine, on May 10, 1924. The Bureau of Investigation was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on March 22, 1935.
¹

Though, on the operational charts, it is under the jurisdiction of the attorney general in the Department of Justice, through practice and tradition the FBI, particularly during the Hoover years, has had “a very large measure of autonomy in their operations.”
²

The conspiracy theorists who maintain that the FBI was behind the assassination say that the bureau “could not do its job [investigating the assassination] because its leader at the time of the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover, participated in the conspiracy.”
³
In other words, how can you possibly trust members of the conspiracy to investigate their own conspiracy? Unfortunately, there is not a shred of evidence to support this wild allegation.

The suspicion that the FBI may have been involved in the assassination stemmed in part from the early revelation that the FBI had interviewed Oswald in New Orleans and Dallas before the assassination, and the finding of Agent Hosty’s name, contact information, and license plate number in Oswald’s address book. Both of these matters are discussed elsewhere in this book and provide no basis whatsoever for the inference of FBI complicity. But what immediately caused concern and anxiety, particularly with the Warren Commission, was the rumor that Oswald had been a paid FBI informant. This rumor started, tentatively, just two weeks after Kennedy’s death, in a December 8, 1963, article in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
by reporter Joseph Goulden in which he referred to “the FBI attempt to recruit Oswald as an informant.” Goulden said his unnamed source “did not know if the FBI succeeded in hiring Oswald.” But two articles appearing shortly thereafter stated that the bureau had succeeded, officially starting the rumor. The first was a January 1, 1964, article in the
Houston Post
by Alonzo (Lonnie) Hudkins in which Hudkins said his (again) unnamed source told him that Oswald had been assigned informant number S179 and was on the FBI payroll receiving $200 per month at the time of the assassination.
*
Hudkins’s article created such a storm that at 5:30 p.m. on January 22, just two days after the Warren Commission first met with its staff, Chairman Warren hurriedly called the members of the Commission into emergency session to inform them that General Counsel Rankin had received a telephone call earlier in the day from Waggoner Carr, the attorney general of Texas, in which he informed Rankin of the rumor circulating in Dallas and seemingly embraced the rumor as possibly being true.
⁴

Who was Hudkins’s unnamed source who started the rumor? What follows here is a series of denials and contradictions (unavoidably difficult reading) that make the answer to this question impossible at this time. When Secret Service agent Lane Bertram interviewed Hudkins on December 17, 1963 (pursuant to a phone call by Hudkins to the Dallas office of the Secret Service the previous day), Hudkins said that his source was Allan Sweatt, chief of the Criminal Division of the Dallas sheriff’s office. Sweatt, he said, had told him it was his “opinion” that Oswald was a paid FBI informant,
⁵
though Sweatt’s saying it was only his opinion is inconsistent with the details he allegedly gave Hudkins of Oswald receiving $200 per month and having an informant number of “S172” (not 179).

On February 8, 1964, Hudkins elaborated on his story to the FBI, telling Agents Vincent Drain and James Wood that his original belief that Oswald was an FBI informant started when Dallas assistant district attorney William Alexander told him that in Oswald’s notebook, taken from his apartment on the afternoon of the assassination, there appeared the name of FBI agent James Hosty, Hosty’s office and home telephone numbers, and the license plate number on Hosty’s car. He coupled this information with what Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, had told him in an interview, that she believed her son had been doing important subversive work for the government. He said that subsequently a Dallas official not working for the federal government had told him Oswald was on the payroll of either the FBI or the CIA, with “voucher number 179” (not 172), and received no less than $150 nor more than $225 per month. The Dallas official presumably was Sweatt, though the details given to the FBI were slightly different from what Hudkins told the Secret Service. Hudkins refused to disclose the identity of the Dallas official to the FBI or to furnish a signed statement.
⁶

Earlier (January 25, 1964), however, Alexander told the FBI that Hudkins had come to him sometime in December saying he was working on a really good story trying to prove Oswald was a paid informant for the FBI or CIA, Hudkins saying he had received information that Oswald’s address book had Hosty’s name and telephone number in it as well as possibly the license plate number of his car. Alexander, who already knew this, told Hudkins, “It looks like you have the story there,” suggesting to Hudkins that his information was correct. Alexander also said that after a bond hearing for Ruby on January 21, while reporters were standing around outside the courtroom waiting for a ruling from the judge, he heard a number of them talking about the possibility that Oswald was a counterspy for the FBI or CIA and also remembered hearing one reporter—he didn’t know who—talking about Oswald receiving $200 a month from one of these federal agencies beginning in September of 1962 and his payroll voucher number being 179.
⁷
When the FBI reinterviewed Alexander on February 13, he reiterated his story and vigorously denied he was the source of the rumor when the special agents told him that their investigation “strongly implied that he was.”
⁸

It would have been nice if Allan Sweatt, whom Hudkins originally said he received his information from, had cleared up the matter, but he simply muddied it further. On the evening of January 24, 1964, the Secret Service informed a member of the Warren Commission staff that Sweatt had been interviewed and stated he received his information about the allegation and details of Oswald’s paid informant status from Alexander
and
Hudkins. And Secret Service inspector Thomas J. Kelley expressed his view that Hudkins “was not very reliable,” based on previous unfounded reports which he had furnished to the Secret Service.
⁹

In Hudkins’s testimony before the Church Committee in 1975, his vague and incoherent answers were only exceeded by the inept questioning of a Church Committee staff member. In bits and pieces, Hudkins claimed that he did not receive information from Sweatt about Oswald receiving $200 a month from the FBI and having an informant number of S172. In one of the very few good questions asked, staff counsel queried Hudkins as to why Secret Service agent Lane Bertram would state, in his report, that Hudkins had told him this if Hudkins hadn’t? Hudkins responded, “I would like to ask Lane [Bertram] that myself…All of his [Bertram’s] stuff was obviously to my mind routed through the FBI…It had to come from the FBI.” So according to Hudkins, FBI agents made up the story that Oswald, the accused presidential assassin, had been a paid FBI informant. Well, they’d certainly have a great motive to make up such a story—to implicate themselves in Kennedy’s murder.

Hudkins also denied telling the FBI on February 8 or any other time about believing Oswald was an FBI or CIA informant with voucher number 179 who received between $150 and $225 per month. So apparently the FBI report by Special Agents Drain and Wood was also a fabricated, untruthful report. The true story, Hudkins said, is that he admitted to Drain the previous month that he,
Dallas Morning News
reporter Hugh Aynesworth, and Assistant DA Bill Alexander, during a conference call, presumably on another matter, decided to concoct the story that Oswald was a paid informant for the FBI with a payroll number of S172 or S179 (he said they never discussed the amount of money Oswald was paid each month) so they could test whether their phones were being tapped by the FBI. When Church Committee staff member William Wallach mentioned that Alexander hadn’t told Chief Justice Warren and General Counsel Rankin this when he, DA Henry Wade, and Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr met with them in Washington on January 24, 1964, Hudkins said, “Knowing Bill Alexander, he wasn’t lying to them. He just wasn’t telling them all the information [he knew].”
¹⁰

When the HSCA interviewed Hudkins in 1978, he said that he and Aynesworth (he never mentioned Alexander this time) decided to test their suspicion that they were under FBI surveillance by discussing over the telephone a fabricated FBI payroll number for Oswald. He said they discussed the numbers S172 and S179. According to Hudkins he was soon contacted by the FBI to find out what he knew about Oswald’s alleged informant status. He said that in his January 1, 1964, article for the
Houston Post
on the Oswald informant allegation, he merely quoted what others had said. It consisted of “wondering aloud” rather than having any evidence, adding that he did not know whether Oswald was an FBI informant.
¹¹
*

When I called Aynesworth about all of this, he chuckled and said, “Lonnie made up the whole story,” though he said there was a kernel of truth to it. Aynesworth, who later became a
Newsweek
correspondent, told me, “Lonnie was a nice, friendly, likable guy, but he had a habit of making up stories.” That’s why, Aynesworth said, Hudkins had ended up losing jobs at papers. (He had been with the
Dallas Morning News
, then
Houston Post
, the
Baltimore News-American
, then some paper up in Buffalo, all before Aynesworth lost track of him in the late 1970s. In his testimony before the Church Committee in November of 1975, Hudkins listed eleven media employers in his career to that point.) Aynesworth said that since he was the lead reporter on the Kennedy assassination for the paper of record on the case, the
Dallas Morning News
, “All leads on the case came across my desk. During the week following the assassination, I was working very hard on my account of Oswald’s escape route, and Lonnie was calling me constantly for leads. On one of his calls, he said he had a hunch that Oswald was a paid informant for the FBI. He asked me to check and see what I could find. The next time Lonnie called I got a number, S172, off my desk—with all the papers and reports on my desk there were always a lot of numbers and I can’t remember at all where I got the number—and gave Lonnie the number just to get rid of him more than anything else. So I made up this number, and the next thing you know Lonnie wrote his big story in the
Houston Post
saying the number was S179, and Oswald was paid $200 a month. There’s nothing to this Oswald FBI informant story. And as far as Lonnie and I testing our suspicions that we were under FBI surveillance by the two of us making up the number and talking about it over the phone, that’s not true at all, although there was a period, when I later got a hold of Oswald’s diary before anyone else, that I believe the FBI was tapping my number.”
¹²

Since Aynesworth has acknowledged that he was the source of the FBI informant number (which Hudkins changed by seven digits), the allegation that Bill Alexander, DA Henry Wade’s chief assistant, was a party to making the informant story up, falls. When I called Alexander anyway for his comments on the allegation, his recollection of the incident was that “Lonnie [Hudkins] and one or two of his fellow reporters covering the assassination got the idea—I don’t know from where—that maybe Oswald was an FBI informant. Hudkins told me, or maybe it was one of the other reporters involved, I forget, that to flush out the FBI, they made up a bogus FBI informant number for Oswald, and one of them called the FBI and asked whether this number belonged to Oswald, hoping that in the process they might find out if, in fact, Oswald was an informant. They got nowhere. I heard it said that I was one of the ones who had dreamed up this whole Oswald FBI informant story, but that’s not true. I was told about it. I didn’t do anything.” Alexander said he was never party to any telephone conference call with Hudkins and Aynesworth in which it was decided to come up with the phony informant story.

When I asked Alexander if he called the FBI to let the bureau know it was a phony story, Alexander, no fan of the FBI because of what he believes is its lack of cooperation with local law enforcement, said no. “I thought it was a funny story, but I decided to let them [FBI] find out on their own it was all bull——.” However, the Warren Commission took the rumor very seriously, and Alexander said that on January 23, 1964, he, Henry Wade, and Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr were summoned back to Washington, where they met the following day with Warren, Rankin, and another person whom Alexander can’t recall. Alexander said Wade knew nothing about the matter and all Carr knew was someone calling him on the phone and telling him about the rumor. Alexander said he didn’t want to hurt Hudkins and his fellow reporters, who were “nice guys and hadn’t really hurt anyone by their prank,” but he also “didn’t want to mislead the Warren Commission,” so he told them it was common knowledge among the media covering the case in Dallas that the story about Oswald’s informant number and wages of $200 per month from the FBI was false and trumped up by some reporters to flush the FBI out, but he doesn’t think he mentioned Hudkins’s name.
¹³