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7. The JFK Assassination and Later Deep Events: Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11

Two kinds of power can be discerned at work in the byzantine processes of American politics. In The American Deep State, I used two terms from Hannah Arendt (following Thucydides) to describe them: “persuasion through arguments” (πείθειν), versus “coercion” by force and violence (βία).”¹ In another essay, Arendt wrote that only the former was true power: “violence and power [i.e., persuasive power] are not the same.… Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”² One can add that a persuasive politics is one of openness, whereas a violent politics is usually shrouded in exclusion and secrecy.

The distinction is both extremely important and hard to define precisely; a number of other opposing terms can be used, that are roughly but not exactly coterminous. Arendt herself also writes of “top down” and “bottom up” power, others of egalitarian or democratic versus oppressive power. It is clear that top-down power is not always violent, just as democratic power is not always nonviolent. However the terms “persuasive,” “bottom-up,” and “democratic,” even if not synonymous or exactly coterminous, help us to focus on a Socratic ideal of influence by persuasion that has, though the centuries, been a lodestar of western civilization. By contrast their opposites—“violence,” “top-down,” “repressive”—epitomize what I believe civilization should be moving away from.

These dyadic alternatives represent not just alternative ideologies and life-styles, but also divisions in most large-scale societies and bureaucracies. Here we find agencies, like the U.S. State Department, whose stated aim is diplomatic persuasion, and other agencies, like the Pentagon, whose business, ultimately, is violence. In America always, but particularly in the Kennedy era, we have seen occasional confrontations between the two tendencies on both the bureaucratic and also the popular levels: witness the wrangles over the meaning and application of the Second Amendment.

In this book I would also like to paraphrase Arendt’s contrast between power and violence by using two common terms with a common Greek origin: true power unites consolidates a society through dialogue; violence divides a society through the dialectics inherent in violence. For whereas power tends to resolve and reduce social tensions through persuasion, violence tends to perpetuate them by creating resentment and opposition.

As authors from Aeschylus to Jacques Ellul have written, “violence creates violence.”³ The dialectical response may be delayed for centuries, as in pre-revolutionary France or Tsarist Russia, but violence can create social divisions that are very difficult to resolve or dissipate. America is an outstanding exemplar of both forces: the product of a revolution proclaiming equality, it is still living with the violent consequences of slavery.

In foreign policy Since World War Two, American foreign policy has witnessed the interplay of two opposing strategies towards the Soviet Union: coexistence through persuasive diplomacy at the United Nations, versus military dominance disguised by the code phrase “Peace Through Strength.” The title of a policy book by statesman-financier Bernard Baruch in 1952, “Peace Through Strength” was a slogan used by Ronald Reagan (and by Republican platforms since) to describe an overt strategy of global domination and American hegemony. It was used to proclaim the official end of an earlier U.S. foreign policy, dating from the end of Eisenhower administration to the beginning of Jimmy Carter’s – a policy of détente.

But the Pax Americana in the post-Reagan era of U.S. hegemony has not been peaceful at all, quite the reverse. As former U.S. Army officer Andrew Bacevich has commented, “belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work. ‘Peace through strength’ easily enough becomes ‘peace through war.’”⁴ In my last chapter I compare the last years of the Pax Americana today to the last years of the Pax Britannica in the late 19^th Century, when hubristic over-reaching led dialectically to a series of minor conflicts, followed by a World War.

The tension between the two American policies, détente versus hegemony, has been acute since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jack Matlock, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and an adviser on Russian affairs to Reagan and G.H.W. Bush, has said more than once that when Gorbachev, after negotiations the West, agreed in 1990 to pull back Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, the West in return gave a “clear commitment” not to expand.⁵

Yet the American response was in fact quite different. As Matlock wrote recently in the Washington Post,

President Bill Clinton supported … the expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries. Those moves seemed to violate the understanding that the United States would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe.… [To Putin] President George W. Bush … delivered the diplomatic equivalent of swift kicks to the groin: further expansion of NATO in the Baltics and the Balkans, and plans for American bases there.⁶

On one level it is possible to view American foreign policy of the last half century as one of a shifting ebb and flow between the two policies, détente versus hegemony. But on another level there has been an unchecked and significant structural change between the agencies advocating them. Since World War Two there has been a visible loss of power by those U.S. agencies advocating détente (most notably the State Department) to the agencies advocating expansion and hegemony (the Department of Defense, and its post-war ally in intervention, the CIA).

The massive projection of U.S. wealth and power abroad has produced a massive increase of covert unchecked power in Washington, to the extent that we now have what the journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called

two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre—and its entirety … visible only to God.⁷

The latter has become so powerful that some of us have come to call it the “deep state.”⁸

Mike Lofgren has described the visible public state as “the tip of the iceberg,” and the covert deep state as “the subsurface part of the iceberg.”⁹ But this metaphor, though spatially useful, misses an important difference between the two levels. The public state that we see is a defined structure; the deep state, in contrast, passes through covert agencies into an undefined system, as difficult to define, but also as real and powerful, as a weather system. More specifically, it interacts not only with the public state but also with higher sources of its power: most significantly with the financial institutions of Wall Street that were responsible for forcing a CIA on a reluctant President Truman in the first place.¹⁰

Because of this interaction, I find myself sometimes using “deep state” in an inclusive sense, to refer to all those forces outside the public state with the power to influence its policies, and more often using “deep state” in a restrictive sense, meaning those active covert agencies in and around Washington, that sometimes take guidance in their policies, not from the White House, but from the deep state as a whole. This ambiguity in language may sometimes be confusing, but reflects the ambiguity and diffuseness of deep power itself.

For example, we must also take into account the private consulting firms, like Booz Allen Hamilton, to which 70 percent of America’s huge intelligence budget is now outsourced.¹¹ And they in turn work with the huge international oil firms and other multinational corporations that project a U.S. presence throughout the world.¹² These corporations, and oil companies in particular, desire U.S. hegemony as a guarantee to their overseas investments, and as an inducement to governments in remote places like Kazakhstan to be open to influence from America, not just from their immediate neighbors Russia and Iran.

The power of the public state is based on the constitution and periodic elections, and is thus limited by checks and balances. The power of the covert deep state, in contrast, is unchecked; and has expanded as the global U.S. presence has expanded. The two kinds of power were destined to come into conflict. The public state aims at openness and persuasion. The deep state represents the opposite, intervention by secrecy and violence.

This is a book about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who after the brush with nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis took initial steps to reduce the role of hegemonic violence in American foreign policy. But on another level this is also a book tracing, especially in its last chapter, how the forces of hegemonic violence in America came to be prevalent over the once predominant forces in America calling for containment, parity, and coexistence.

It is a central proposition of this book that the road to U.S. hegemony must be understood as in part a consequence of a series of structural deep events. And this series began with the assassination in 1963 of a president who was moving to change U.S. policies with respect to Cuba, Vietnam, and above all the Soviet Union.

By “structural deep events” I mean events that are never fully understood, arise out of ongoing covert processes, have political consequences that enlarge covert government, and are subsequently covered up by demonstrable omissions and falsifications in historic records. Here the assassination in Dallas can be compared to later structural deep events, notably Watergate and 9/11.¹³

I cannot say often enough that I am not attributing all these deep events to any single agency or “secret team.” Nor is the purpose of this book to identify the president’s killers. But in Chapter 2 I will show how alleged evidence about Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico was manipulated and altered by elements in the CIA and their Mexican clients, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS). In other words, elements in the U.S. Government (not limited to the CIA) were involved in the assassination cover-up.

In Chapter 3 we will see that Oswald, far from being a neglected “lone nut,” had generated government files that were being manipulated and altered from at least the time of his alleged defection to the Soviet Union in 1959. In Chapter 4, we will see how these manipulated files became the subject of extended disagreement between the State Department, on the one hand, and military intelligence agencies, on the other – at a time when State and Pentagon were also divided on the issue of coexistence with Cuba and the Soviet Union, or alternatively the rollback of communism by invading Cuba.

Glenview, Illinois, the home of Marine Intelligence files on Oswald, had also hosted a meeting in 1960 of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade (CACC) that attacked Eisenhower’s growing rapprochement with Moscow. The CACC was part of a well-funded interlocking right-wing complex of anti-détente organizations that also included the John Birch Society and the American Security Council.

I deal with the assassination itself in Chapter 5, and show how some elements in this Birchite right-wing complex exploited the assassination for political purposes. This paralleled the manipulation of the U.S. official investigation of the assassination, in a brief vain attempt to implicate a Cuban, Paulino Sierra Martinez. (Sierra had been working, at the request of Robert Kennedy, to move out of the United States Cuban exile groups who had been attacking Soviet ships in Havana harbor.) Some in the Birchite complex may even have had prior knowledge of the assassination.

In Chapter 6 I look at the mysterious movements of a wealthy right-wing industrialist, William Pawley, a man with Birch Society connections who also had the ear of Republican presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. In particular we shall look at how a mysterious raid into Cuba the summer before the assassination, the so-called Bayo-Pawley mission (involving at least two of the future Watergate burglars), may have been planned precisely to ensure that the CIA, Life, President Nixon, and perhaps even the Kennedy family, would later be coerced into an assassination cover-up.

In moving from a focus on Oswald’s files to a focus on the assassination itself, this book will survey many different aspects of the American deep state, from those forces underpinning the power of the Kennedy White House to those opposed to the Kennedy White House. In my last two chapters I will argue that a showdown in the 1960s and 1970s between those two opposing attitudes to power – the open forces of democratic persuasion (the public state) versus the exclusive and covert forces of violence and dominance (the deep state), led to a series of structural deep events: Dallas, Watergate, and the so-called October Surprise of 1980. All three terminated the careers of presidents who had attempted to cut back the growing power of the CIA.

In Chapter 7 I will argue that these structural deep events (even though not the work of a single mastermind or secret team) were nonetheless all inter-connected, arising from a common milieu and with certain recurring characteristics.

In Chapter 8 I shall argue also that in the same two decades embracing the Vietnam War (1960–1980), the growing unchecked power of the deep state contested and repeatedly overcame the democratically elected authority of the White House. Three presidents in this period —Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter—took steps to challenge the growing power of the CIA; and in diverse ways all three saw their political careers terminated by structural deep events: assassination, Watergate, and the so-called October Surprise. (Less dramatically, the careers of Johnson and Ford were also ended.)

But in this unfortunate and very conflicted period in U.S. presidential history, the first of these shocks to White House power came from the gunshots in Dallas in 1963.

¹ Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 93.

² Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 155. Cf. Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2003), 218.

³ Jacques Ellul, trans. Cecelia Gaul Kings, Violence; Reflections From A Christian Perspective (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), 125.

⁴ Andrew Bacevich, “The Western Way of War Has Run its Course,” CBS News, August 4, 2010.

⁵ Uwe Klussmann, Matthias Schepp, and Klaus Wiegrefe, “NATO’s Eastward Expansion: Did the West Break Its Promise to Moscow?” Spiegel Online International, November 26, 2009, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html: “After speaking with many of those involved and examining previously classified British and German documents in detail, SPIEGEL has concluded that there was no doubt that the West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia.”

⁶ Jack Matlock, “Who is the bully? The U.S. has treated Russia like a loser since the end of the Cold War,” Washington Post, March 14, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-is-the-bully-the-united-states-has-treated-russia-like-a-loser-since-the-cold-war/2014/03/14/b0868882-aa06-11e3-8599-ce7295b6851c_story.html.

⁷ Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little Brown, 2011), 52.

⁸ Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 267.

⁹ Mike Lofgren, “A Shadow Government Controls America,” Reader Supported News, February 22, 2014, http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/22216-a-shadow-government-controls.

¹⁰ Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 12–16.

¹¹ Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 6.

Those who have spent years trying to assess the role of the Kennedy assassination in US history are accustomed to the debate between structuralists and conspiratorialists. In the first camp are those who argue, in the spirit of Marx and Weber, that the history of a major power is determined by large social forces; thus the accident of an assassination, even if conspiratorial, is not an event altering history. (On this point Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn agree with the mainstream US media they normally criticize.)

At the other end of the spectrum are those who talk of an Invisible Government or Secret Team, who believe that surface events and institutions are continuously manipulated by unseen forces. For these people the assassination exemplifies the operation of fundamental historical forces, not a disruption of them.

For years I have attempted to formulate a third or middle position. To do so I have relied on distinctions formulated partly in neologisms or invented terms. Over forty years ago I postulated that our overt political processes were at times seriously contaminated by manipulative covert politics or parapolitics, which I then defined as “a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.”¹ In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, I moved towards a less conspiratorial middle alternative. I discussed instead the interactions of what I called deep political processes, emanating from plural power sources and all only occasionally visible, all usually repressed rather than recognized. In contrast to parapolitical processes, those of deep politics are open-ended, not securely within anyone’s power or intentions.

In 1995 I brought out Deep Politics II (since reissued as Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics),² which I thought of at the time as a case study in deep politics: how secret U.S. government reports on Oswald in Mexico became a reason to cover up the facts about the assassination of JFK. But it was also a specialized study, since in this case most of the repressed records of events, now declassified, occurred within the workings of the CIA, FBI, military intelligence, or their zones of influence. It was hence largely a study in parapolitics. It verged into true deep politics only near the end, when it described how a collaborating Mexican agency, the DFS (Dirección Federal de Seguridad) was deeply involved in the international drug traffic. Deep Politics, in contrast, looked continuously at the interaction between government and other social forces, such as the drug traffic.

Both books represented an alternative kind of history, or what I call deep history. Deep history differs from history in two respects. First, it is an account of suppressed events, at odds with the publicly accepted history of this country. (One might say that history is the record of politics; deep history, the record of deep politics.) Second, deep history is often restored from records which were themselves once repressed. In short, deep history is a reconstructed account of events denied by the public records from which history is normally composed.³

A key example concerns a tape of someone calling himself “Lee Oswald,” discussing in a phone call to the Soviet Embassy about having met a consul there by the name of Kostikov, a KGB agent. As we shall see, this tape should have been preserved and investigated as a prime piece of evidence to frame Oswald as an assassin. We have documentary evidence, initially suppressed, that one day after the President’s murder this tape was listened to by FBI agents in Dallas, who determined that the speaker was in fact not Lee Harvey Oswald. Yet almost immediately this event was denied by other reports, including cables claiming—falsely—that the tape had already been destroyed before the assassination.

A brief but important digression here about history. Most people assume that “history” simply refers to what has happened but is now gone. In fact the dictionary reminds us that the first meaning of the word (cognate to the word “story”) is to a narrative or record of events, and only after that to “the events forming the subject matter of history.”⁴ What of events whose records are destroyed or falsified? These dictionary definitions seem to assume that what is true is also what is recorded.

There is thus a latent bias in the evolution of the word “history” that is related to the structuralist, rationalist assumptions referred to in my first paragraph. History (or at least what I like to call archival history) has always been the way a culture chooses to record and remember itself; and it tends to treat official records with a respect they do not always deserve.

It is reasonable to talk about the CIA records in this book as suppressed, as so many of them were never allowed to reach even the Warren Commission, let alone the public, until up to three decades later with the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Thus neither the Commission nor the American public were allowed to hear about allegations that Oswald had had sexual relations with two employees of the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, that at least one of these liaisons (with Silvia Durán) had been part of an international Communist plot against Kennedy, and that Durán had admitted this (albeit under torture) in response to questions from the Mexican DFS or secret police.

More importantly, the CIA and FBI suppressed a major clue to the existence of a pre-assassination conspiracy. This was that an unknown person had falsely presented himself as Lee Oswald in a phone call to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. The FBI initially reported that the person making the recorded call “was not Lee Harvey Oswald.”⁵ Later the FBI and CIA conspired, swiftly and clumsily, to conceal both the falsity of the impersonation and the fact that FBI agents had exposed the falsehood by listening to the tape. The Warren Commission learned nothing about these two facts.

It is important to understand that this suppression was entirely consistent with intelligence priorities of the period. This important clue had been planted in the midst of one of the most sensitive CIA operations in the 1960s: its largest intercept operation against the telephones of an important Soviet base. One can assume that this clue was planted by conspirators who knew that the CIA response, possibly approved by higher authority, would be to suppress the truth. The CIA was protecting its sources and methods (in accordance with the responsibilities enumerated in its enabling statute). The result was obstruction of justice in a crime of the highest political significance.

As we shall see in the following pages, one of the important sources of covert agencies’ power is their ability to falsify their own records, without fear of outside correction. Does this ability to rewrite their own history empower them to affect, if not control, the history of the rest of society? I believe the evidence in this book will justify a limited answer to this question: covert agencies, and the CIA in particular, were powerful enough to control and defuse a possible crisis in U.S. political legitimacy. They did so by reinforcing an unsustainable claim: Oswald killed the President, and he acted alone.

But the power of the CIA to influence history became even greater when, as we shall see, they acted in concert with forces allied to the powerful international drug traffic. Most people are unaware of the size of this unrecorded drug economy. In 2008 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated the profits from the global drug trade to be $352 billion; and reported that the funds from laundering illicit drugs, now often estimated to be third largest commodity in international trade, “became an important factor” in preventing a number of major banks from collapsing during the 2008 economic meltdown.⁶

While estimates of the unrecorded drug traffic remain questionable, it is obvious that this traffic is large enough to be a major factor in both the economic and political considerations of government, even while it does not form part of recorded economic statistics. The unrecorded, illicit, but nonetheless important shadow economy is so large, and so powerful, that often governments have no choice but to plan to manage it, even before attempting to suppress it.⁷

There is a third factor contributing to the invisible alliance of the CIA, the independently wealthy, and the banks that cater to them. Informed observers of American politics have more than once commented to me that most of the hundred wealthiest people in the US know each other, and in addition often have connections to both the CIA and to organized crime. There is no shortage of anecdotal examples: James Angleton of CIA Counterintelligence delivering the sole eulogy at the small private funeral of Howard Hughes, or Joseph Kennedy Sr. being a point-holder in the same casino (the Cal-Neva) as Chicago mob figure Sam Giancana.⁸ Perhaps more relevant to the milieu of the JFK assassination is the example of Clint Murchison, Sr. Murchison paid for the horse-racing holidays of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at the same time as he sold stakes in his investments to mob figures like Jerry Catena, and enjoyed political influence in Mexico.⁹

These connections are no accident. More often than not, as we shall see in examining the career of William Pawley, the extremely wealthy acquired their resources by ignoring or bending the rules of society, not by observing them. In corrupting politicians, or in bypassing them to secure unauthorized foreign intercessions, both the mob and the CIA can be useful allies. In addition drug profits need to be laundered, and banks can derive a significant percentage of their profits by laundering them, or otherwise bending or breaking the rules of their host countries.¹⁰ Citibank came under Congressional investigation after having secretly moved $80 million to $100 million for Raúl Salinas de Gortari, brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas.¹¹

As a rule the power of the biggest drug traffickers is not autonomous, but depends on their government connections; and the top trafficker in any country is usually the one with the best government connections. This means not just that the government is protecting certain drug traffickers, but also that these drug traffickers will have an interest in protecting the government. I believe that an example of this is the collaboration we shall examine in Mexico, between the CIA and the corrupt DFS, to influence history by presenting false stories about Oswald. But it would be very wrong to think of the CIA-DFS collaboration as a simple alliance.

One of the most crime-ridden CIA assets we know of is the Mexican DFS, which the US helped to create. From its foundation in the 1940s, the DFS, like other intelligence agencies in Latin America, was deeply involved with international drug-traffickers.¹² By the 1980s possession of a DFS card was recognized by DEA agents as a “license to traffic;” DFS agents rode security for drug truck convoys, and used their police radios to check of signs of American police surveillance.¹³ Eventually the DFS became so identified with the criminal drug-trafficking organizations it managed and protected, that in the 1980s the DFS was (at least officially) closed down.¹⁴ Thus the CIA-DFS alliance was at best an uneasy one, with conflicting goals. The CIA’s concern was to manage and limit the drug traffic, while the DFS sought to manage and expand it.

Management of the drug traffic takes a variety of forms: from denial of this important power source to competing powers (the first and most vital priority), to exploitation of it to strengthen the existing state. There now exists abundant documentation that, at least since World War II, the US Government has exploited the drug traffic to finance and staff covert operations abroad. Perhaps the most conspicuous example is the massive paramilitary army organized and equipped by the CIA in Laos in the 1960s, for which drugs were the chief source of support. This alliance between the CIA and drug-financed forces has since been repeated in Afghanistan (1979), Central America (1982–87), and most recently Kosovo (1998).

It is now fairly common, even in mainstream books, to describe this CIA exploitation of the drug world as collaboration against a common enemy. For example Elaine Shannon, in a book written with DEA assistance, speaks as follows of the CIA-DFS alliance:

DFS officials worked closely with the Mexico City station of the US Central Intelligence Agency and the attaché of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The DFS passed along photographs and wiretapped conversations of suspected intelligence officers and provocateurs stationed in the large Soviet and Cuban missions in Mexico City.… The DFS also helped the CIA track Central American leftists who passed through the Mexican capital.¹⁵

But it is important to remember that such alliances were often first formed in order to deny drug assets to the enemy. In Mexico as in Asia, just as in the US “Operation Underworld” on the docks of New York City, the US Government first began its drug collaborations out of fear that drug networks, if not given USG protection, would fall under that of some other foreign power.

“Operation Underworld,” like its Mexican equivalent, began after signs that the Sicilian Mafia in New York, like the drug networks Latin drug networks of Central and South America, were being exploited by Axis intelligence services. The crash program of assistance to Kuomintang (KMT) drug networks in post-war Southeast Asia was motivated in part by a similar fear, that these networks would come under the sphere of mainland Chinese influence.

Thus it would be wrong to portray the CIA-drug alliance, particularly in Mexico, as one between like-minded allies. The cooperation was grounded in an original, deeper suspicion; and, especially because dealing with criminals, the fear of betrayal was never absent. This was particularly true of the DFS when guided by Luis Echeverría, a nationalist who in the late 1960s (despite being a CIA asset, with the cryptonym LITEMPO-8) developed stronger relations between Mexico and Cuba. Some have questioned whether the increased Cuban-Mexican relations under his presidency (1970–76) were grounded partly in the drug traffic, overseen by his brother-in-law.¹⁶

Even in 1963 the fear of offending Mexico’s (and Echeverría’s) sensibilities led the CIA to cancel physical surveillance of a Soviet suspect (Valeriy Kostikov); the CIA feared detection by the DFS, who also had Kostikov under surveillance.¹⁷ By the 1970s there were allegations that the CIA and/or FBI were using the drug traffic to introduce guns into Mexico, in order to destabilize the left-leaning Echeverría government.¹⁸

This is perhaps the moment to point out another special feature of the US-DFS relationship in Mexico. Both the CIA and FBI (as Shannon noted, and as we shall see) had their separate connections to the DFS and its intercept program. The US effort to wrest the drug traffic from the Nazi competition dated back to World War II, when the FBI still had responsibility for foreign intelligence operations in Latin America. Winston Scott, the CIA Station Chief in Mexico City, was a veteran of this wartime overseas FBI network; and he may still have had an allegiance to Hoover while nominally working for the CIA.¹⁹ We shall see that on a key policy matter, the proposed torture of Oswald’s contact Silvia Durán, Scott allied himself with the FBI Legal Attache and the Ambassador, against the expressed disapproval of CIA Headquarters.

What is particularly arresting about this CIA-mob nexus that produced false Oswald stories, is its suggestive overlay with those responsible for CIA-mob assassination plots. Key figures in the latter group, such as William Harvey and David Morales, did not conceal their passionate hatred for the Kennedys. It is time to focus on the CIA-mob connection in Mexico as a milieu which will help explain, not just the assassination cover-up, but the assassination itself.

From other sources, we learn more about the autonomy of the CIA. It was almost by accident that the public learned of a secret agreement, in violation of a Congressional statute, whereby the CIA was exempted from reporting crimes of which it was aware to the Justice Department. This agreement was so secret that for almost two decades successive Attorneys General were unaware of it.²⁰ (My understanding is that the agreement arose from a “flap” in Thailand, where a CIA/OSO officer who was about to report on the local drug traffic was murdered by another from the OPC, who was working with it.)²¹

Although this agreement was temporarily ended under the Ford Administration, a new secret Memo of Understanding under Reagan again lifted the obligation to report the criminal acts of CIA assets who were drug-traffickers. I have argued elsewhere that these covert agreements have been significant factors in augmenting the flows of heroin and cocaine into this country.

Obviously a memo from the Reagan Administration is of little relevance to the Kennedy assassination. But it is of extreme relevance that a prior agreement was in force from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, exempting the CIA from a statutory requirement to report any criminal activity by any of its employees or assets. This agreement, drawn up under Eisenhower and eventually rescinded under Gerald Ford, was so secret that the Attorneys General under JFK and LBJ (including Robert Kennedy) were never informed of it.²² We can assume however that the agreement was known to those CIA officers who suppressed an important clue that would have led to their Soviet intercept program, and thereby obstructed a proper investigation of President Kennedy’s murder.

This exemption from a statutory obligation might be considered anomalous, except that in one form or another the CIA has enjoyed such exemptions for most of its history.

Oswald, Russia, and Cuba: How the Managed Oswald Stories Led to the Warren Commission

As noted earlier, the DFS played a central role, along with the CIA, in the management of conspiratorial stories about Oswald in Mexico, including the false Oswald-Soviet intercept. The key to this procedure, as I argued in Deep Politics, was a two-fold process. “Phase One” put forward the phantom of an international plot, linking Oswald to the USSR, to Cuba, or to both countries together. This phantom was used to invoke the danger of a possible nuclear confrontation, which induced Chief Justice Earl Warren and other political notables to accept “Phase Two,” the equally false (but less dangerous) hypothesis that Oswald killed the President all by himself.

This book affords a close-up look of the genesis of the Phase-One story, and how it was first promoted and then defused by the CIA. Michael Beschloss has revealed that, at 9:20 AM on the morning of November 23, CIA Director John McCone briefed the new President. In Beschloss’ words: “The CIA had information on foreign connections to the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, which suggested to LBJ that Kennedy may have been murdered by an international conspiracy.”²³ (It is not certain whether the conspiracy McCone referred to on November 23 involved Cuba or the Soviet Union.)

Beschloss’s account implies that McCone’s “information” concerned Oswald’s alleged visit in September 1963 to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City:

A CIA memo written that day reported that Oswald had visited Mexico City in September and talked to a Soviet vice consul whom the CIA knew as a KGB expert in assassination and sabotage. The memo warned that if Oswald had indeed been part of a foreign conspiracy, he might be killed before he could reveal it to U.S. authorities.²⁴

An internal CIA memo of November 23, asserting the claim Oswald talked to Kostikov, bases it on an alleged phone intercept that, I shall argue, was almost certainly falsified.²⁵

President Johnson appears to have had this information in mind when, a few minutes after the McCone interview, he asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover if the FBI “knew any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy.” ²⁶

But widely scattered clues suggest that the US Government was thinking of a Cuban connection to Oswald even before the Soviet one. Already on November 22 the FBI was reporting a claim never mentioned in CIA records: that the false Oswald-Soviet phone call was made by Oswald while telephoning “from the Cuban Embassy.”²⁷

FBI Agent James Hosty, who handled the Oswald file in Dallas, has written that he learned later from two independent sources that at the time of Oswald’s arrest, “fully armed warplanes were sent screaming toward Cuba. Just before they entered Cuban airspace, they were hastily called back. With the launching of airplanes, the entire U.S. military went on alert.”²⁸

These planes would have been launched from the U.S. Strike Command (USSTRICOM) at McDill Air Force Base in Florida. We have a cable from U.S. Army Intelligence in Texas, dated November 22, 1963, transmitting a false report to the Strike Command that Oswald had defected to Cuba in 1959 and was “a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.”²⁹ As discussed below, these allegations are incompatible with the present “Phase-Two” account of Oswald’s life, but were corroborated at the time. At 4:00 PM on the afternoon of November 22, Hoover told Bobby Kennedy that Oswald “went to Cuba on several occasions, but would not tell us what he went to Cuba for.”³⁰ (There is nothing in current FBI files on Oswald, as released to the public, to suggest either that Oswald had visited Cuba, or that he had been interrogated about such visits by the FBI.)

We know from other sources that Bobby Kennedy, on the afternoon of November 22, was fearful of a Cuban involvement in the assassination. Jack Anderson, the recipient of much secret CIA information, suggests that this concern may have been planted in Bobby’s head by CIA Director McCone.

When CIA chief John McCone learned of the assassination, he rushed to Robert Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia, and stayed with him for three hours. No one else was admitted. Even Bobby’s priest was turned away. McCone told me he gave the attorney general a routine briefing on CIA business and swore that Castro’s name never came up.… Sources would later tell me that McCone anguished with Bobby over the terrible possibility that the assassination plots sanctioned by the president’s own brother may have backfired. Then the following day, McCone briefed President Lyndon Johnson and his National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. Afterward McCone told subordinates—who later filled me in—what happened at that meeting. The grim McCone shared with Johnson and Bundy a dispatch from the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, strongly suggesting that Castro was behind the assassination.³¹

Such dispatches did emanate from the Mexico City embassy, although we know of none as early as November 23. Three days later the Ambassador, Thomas Mann, the CIA Station Chief, Winston Scott, and the FBI Legal Attache, Clark Anderson, enthusiastically promoted wild allegations that Oswald’s act had been plotted and paid for inside the Cuban Embassy.³² We know that McCone was wedded to this story, and continued to share it confidentially even after its narrator, the Nicaraguan double agent Gilberto Alvarado, recanted it on November 30.

The publicly released CIA record shows no trace of any linkage between Oswald and Cuba from Mexico until late November 23, long after McCone saw the President. But as we shall see this absence is itself suspicious, indeed hard to believe. There are too many loose clues that CIA Headquarters already had heard more about Oswald and Cuba than the purportedly complete record of CIA cables would account for. This would suggest that the record has been smoothed over to efface any “Phase-One” trace of a credible Cuban implication.

For example, one of the CIA officers in Mexico City who worked on the pre-assassination Oswald file “was certain that a second cable reporting Oswald’s contacts with the Cuban Embassy had been sent to Headquarters prior to the assassination.”³³ But there is no surviving CIA trace of any reason on November 22 to link Oswald, or the assassination, to Cuba, or possibly covert action against Cuba.

The FBI, in contrast, has now released a November 22 memo that already linked Oswald to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico:

By Secret teletype dated 10/10/63 CIA advised … that a sensitive source on 10-1-63 had reported that Lee Oswald contacted the Soviet Embassy … inquiring whether the Embassy had received any news concerning a telegram.… (The Legal Attache in Mexico advised 11-22-63 that this was a telephone call made from the Cuban Embassy to the Soviet Embassy and a transcript thereof is being forwarded.)”³⁴

There is no known corroboration for the Legal Attache’s claim on November 22 that the call was made from the Cuban Embassy. However this early mention of the Cuban Embassy suggests that the FBI in Mexico City may indeed have had its own sources of information, including both intercepts and informants. (It is now officially admitted that the CIA had penetration agents inside the Cuban Embassy, and the FBI may have as well.)³⁵

Perhaps the strongest indication of deeper FBI knowledge is a CIA memo of December 11; this argued against the public release of the first FBI report on the case, “because the Soviets would see that the FBI had advance information on the reason for Oswald’s visit to the Soviet Embassy.”³⁶ Advance information???

It is commonplace now to attribute the cover-up to early reports about Oswald and Cuba. For example, Jack Anderson suggests that a cover-up was ordered by Johnson himself, on the basis of what McCone told him on November 23 about Mexico City. According to Anderson, McCone argued that

Nikita Khrushchev was on the ropes inside the Kremlin, humiliated over backing down … during the Cuban missile crisis. [This was indeed true, as his ouster in 1964 would show.] If Castro were to be accused of the Kennedy assassination, Americans would demand revenge against Cuba, and Khrushchev would face another Cuban crisis.… This time he might do something reckless and provoke a nuclear war, which would cost forty million lives. It was a staggering figure that the new president repeated to others.³⁷

Telephone transcripts in the LBJ Library confirm that LBJ used this argument to coerce Senator Richard Russell into serving on the Commission.³⁸ Chief Justice Earl Warren told William Manchester that Johnson persuaded him to lead the Warren Commission by raising the same threat of war against Castro and Khrushchev: “Why, if Khrushchev moved on us, he could kill 39 million in an hour.”³⁹

Whatever the details, we see how important were CIA stories about Oswald’s foreign involvements in securing a Commission committed from the outset to the finding that Oswald acted alone. The CIA’s role might be defensible if the information were objective and well-grounded. But as this book will show, the stories of Oswald’s Cuban involvements were virtually worthless. The two main sources for them, Silvia Durán and Gilberto Alvarado, both changed their stories repeatedly, under the threat or actual application of torture by the Mexican secret police. Alvarado actually recanted his story, as the Warren Commission was informed; however the Warren Commission did not learn that Alvarado claimed to have been told that, if he did not recant, he would be hung by his testicles.⁴⁰ And the supposed objective record of intercepted phone calls by Oswald is, as we shall see, just as seriously flawed.

In the days after the murders in Dallas, the U.S. was flooded with dubious stories, most of them swiftly discredited, linking Oswald to either a Cuban or Soviet conspiracy. Those which most preoccupied the FBI and CIA all came out of Mexico. These stories exhibited certain common characteristics.

1) They all came either directly from an intelligence source, or from someone in the hands of an intelligence agency. Nearly always, the agency involved was the Mexican DFS or secret police. The DFS, along with the Nicaraguan intelligence service, which was also a source, were under CIA tutelage.

2) The stories changed over time, to support either a pro-conspiratorial hypothesis (“Phase One”), or a rebuttal of this (“Phase Two”).

3) The Warren Commission was led to believe that the “Phase-One” stories were without basis. In fact a number of unresolved anomalies suggest that behind them was some deeper truth, still not revealed.

4) As just noted, the two main sources, Silvia Durán and Gilberto Alvarado, gave varying stories while detained by the DFS. Of the two, Durán was actually tortured, and Alvarado reportedly threatened with torture. Far from regretting this use of torture, the Ambassador, Thomas Mann, the CIA Station Chief, Winston Scott, and the FBI Legal Attache, Clark Anderson, argued strenuously, in the face of Washington’s expressed disapproval, for Durán’s arrest and rearrest by the DFS, and that DFS torture be used again. ⁴¹

In retrospect, these stories should not have been taken seriously. In fact the CIA was able to rely on them, not as a source of truth, but as a source of coercive influence over the rest of government. It will help us to understand what was going on if we refer to the stories, not as “information” or even as “allegations,” but as managed stories. To say this leaves open the question of who were the ultimate managers—the DFS, U.S. officers in Mexico, or higher authorities in Washington.

The full history is complex and confused, with many unanswered questions. But nearly all of these managed stories, along with others outside Mexico to be discussed later, resolve into this simple pattern of a Phase One/Phase Two evolution.

Luis Echeverría, the Mexican Minister of Gobernación (which directed the DFS), told Winston Scott on November 23 that Silvia Durán had given a “written statement attesting to two visits by Oswald.”⁴² According to the sequence of documents in Oswald’s 201 file, no written statement from Durán’s DFS interview reached CIA Headquarters until November 28, after Langley had asked for it on November 27.

There is however evidence that the CIA HQ received a written Durán statement, not in the Oswald 201 file, from a back channel.⁴³ Already on November 24 we find a cable from “John Scelso” (John Whitten) at Headquarters, who has already read it: “After analyzing all the [cable] traffic and reading the statement of Silvia Duran, one important question still puzzles us.”⁴⁴ Even earlier, on November 23, the CIA opined in a Headquarters memo to the FBI that Oswald probably wanted a Soviet visa first, then a Cuban transit visa while waiting for it. The memo added that “This is also the conclusion reached by Silvia Duran, the Mexican national employee of the Cuban Embassy who dealt with OSWALD.”⁴⁵ Durán could indeed easily have voiced this opinion, but there is nothing in the Oswald 201 file that indicates how CIA HQ could have known this.