Reclaiming History (282 page)

Palamara, naturally, welcomes whatever company he can get. And in an interview with the HSCA in 1978, John Marshall, the retired former special agent in charge of the Miami Secret Service, told his interviewers that the Secret Service “could possibly have been involved in the assassination,” though he had nothing specific to support his speculation. The HSCA interviewer wrote that “it is the first time that an agent has acknowledged the possibility that the Secret Service could have been involved.”
¹⁸
Of course, as they say, “could have, schmood have.”

And then, there’s the inimitable Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, whom you will meet later as an adviser to Oliver Stone on Stone’s movie
JFK
. In the December 1999 edition of the magazine
Prevailing Winds
, Prouty asserts nakedly that on the day of the assassination “what happened to the Secret Service was not that the Secret Service didn’t do their job. They were told: ‘Your unit isn’t needed, you can go home.’” But as conspiracy theorist Walt Brown responds, “Colonel Prouty, who are these Secret Service agents? Who was ‘sent home’ from Dallas before the motorcade? Are you suggesting that the White House detail was
not
there?”
¹⁹

With respect to the argument made by Prouty and some other conspiracy theorists that the president’s protection was so bad it must have been intentional, I have a question. If that reasoning has merit, why don’t these same theorists allege that the Secret Service must have been complicit in the two attempted murders of Gerald Ford in 1975? In one of them, on September 5, 1975, former Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, attired in a bright red robe and matching turban, no less,
*
was able to walk up to within two feet of Ford in a public park in Sacramento and pull out and point her .45 caliber Army Colt pistol at him before being thrown to the ground.

What makes the Secret Service’s conduct even more egregiously incompetent in the Fromme-attempted assassination is that the Manson “Family” hated former president Nixon for declaring, in the middle of Manson’s trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders, that Manson was guilty. Also, for his continuation of the Vietnam War. And they had taken to calling President Ford, “the new face of Nixon.” After Manson was convicted of the murders he was incarcerated at San Quentin, but in October of 1974 was transferred to Folsom State Prison, fifteen miles west of Sacramento. Fromme moved to Sacramento to be near Manson and headed up the last remnants of the Family not behind bars. A few weeks before Ford came to Sacramento, Fromme and Sandra Good, a Family member, issued a communiqué to the media in Sacramento that “if Nixon’s reality wearing a new face [i.e, Ford] continues to run this country against the law, your homes will be bloodier than the Tate-LaBianca homes and My Lai put together.” I don’t know how many other potential likely assassins of Ford there could have possibly been in Sacramento, but even without the Manson Family’s feelings against him, I would think that Fromme and Good, being Manson Family members, would have been on the list of people in Sacramento that the Secret Service would be watching when Ford came to town, but they were not.
²⁰

Talk about being given a heads-up. On September 20, 1975, forty-five-year-old Sarah Jane Moore, a former FBI paid informant turned radical, called Inspector Jack O’Shea of the San Francisco Police Department and told him she was part of the protest movement in the city and was thinking of driving from San Francisco to Stanford University the following day to “test” the security system around President Ford when he spoke there. Moore implied, without expressly saying, that because of her state of mind, maybe O’Shea should put her in custody. O’Shea dispatched two officers to Moore’s residence, where they arrested her on a misdemeanor charge of being in possession of an unloaded .44 caliber revolver. (Moore had many bullets in her residence.) The police confiscated the revolver and released Moore from custody, but O’Shea called the local office of the Secret Service that night to alert them to Moore’s implied threat against President Ford and the fact she was found in possession of the revolver. The following day, September 21, the Secret Service interviewed Moore, ran a background check on her (which probably showed that she was, in fact, a former FBI informant) and, unbelievably, released her from custody, later saying that Moore was “not of sufficient protective interest to warrant surveillance during the President’s visit,” referring to Ford’s visit the next day in San Francisco. This gross negligence is magnified by the fact that Fromme’s attempt on Ford’s life had taken place just sixteen days earlier. The following morning at eleven, Moore bought a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver from a private seller, and four and a half hours later took a shot at Ford as he walked to his limousine after leaving the St. Francis Hotel. A former marine standing near her was able to push her arm down almost at the instant she pulled the trigger, causing the bullet to miss Ford.
²¹

And then there was the attempted murder of President Reagan by John Hinckley, the son of a Denver oil executive, on March 30, 1981, behind the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. The incompetence of the Secret Service enabled Hinckley, carrying a loaded .22 caliber gun, to position himself just ten feet from the president among TV camera crews and reporters assembled outside the back door of the hotel. Hinckley fired six shots at Reagan, one hitting the president in the chest. In emergency surgery, doctors removed the bullet from Reagan’s left lung. Again, making the incompetence worse, three civilians in the crowd behind the hotel, including an AP reporter and Pinkerton detective, said they (but apparently not the Secret Service) had noticed Hinckley looking “fidgety, agitated,” acting even “hostile” toward the reporters, and at times walking rapidly back and forth.
²²

The Fromme, Moore, and Hinkley cases are far more egregious examples of a lack of adequate Secret Service protection than the Kennedy assassination, yet the conspiracy theorists remain silent about them.

Although there is absolutely no evidence that the Secret Service was involved in the assassination, its performance left something to be desired, the HSCA concluding that “the Secret Service was deficient in the performance of its duties.”
²³
Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter put it better: “The Secret Service had the responsibility to protect the president and they did not protect the president.”
²⁴
*
Among other things—although these failures almost assuredly did not contribute to what ultimately happened—the Protective Research Section (PRS) of the Secret Service, whose job it is to gather and evaluate information on people and groups who are thought to present some potential danger to the president and make sure it is usefully disseminated, did not forward on to the agents responsible for Kennedy’s Dallas trip information it had on threats to the president’s life for his November 2, 1963, trip to Chicago (which had been canceled, but apparently for other reasons) or his November 18, 1963, trip to Miami (the Joseph Milteer threat [see later text], which the Secret Service learned of on November12), actions the HSCA said should obviously have been taken.
²⁵
Indeed, not only didn’t the name Lee Harvey Oswald appear in any Secret Service file prior to November 22, 1963—there being no record that it even knew of his existence—but the PRS never gave the Secret Service detail traveling with the president the name of even one individual in its “trip file” for the entire Dallas area who might be considered dangerous!
²⁶
According to Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, that was because a search of PRS files “revealed that there were no
known
individuals in the Dallas area [which had a population of around 700,000] who posed a direct threat to the President.”
²⁷

In a secret internal memo dated December 10, 1963, from FBI special agent J. H. Gale to Clyde Tolson, the number-two man at the bureau, in which he signed off on disciplinary action against thirteen FBI agents for their negligent pre-assassination handling of the case, Gale says that the FBI also never had Oswald’s name on any list of people to check out and watch when Kennedy came to Dallas. He writes, “It is definitely felt that subject Oswald should have been on the Security Index (SI) based on the following facts.” Gale sets forth eight facts, among which were Oswald’s defection to Russia and his contact with the Soviet embassy in Mexico that September and October.
²⁸
It is not the direct responsibility of the FBI to protect the president, but if Oswald had been on such an FBI Security Index, it would have been the responsibility of the FBI to furnish the information on Oswald to the PRS. The head of the PRS told the Warren Commission that the Secret Service had a standing request to all federal agencies to provide “any and all information that they may come in contact with that would indicate danger to the president.”
²⁹
And Sorrels said that if the FBI had informed him “that a defector to Russia was working along the motorcade route, I would have picked him up as part of the presidential protection.”
³⁰

Then there was the now famous incident of nine Secret Service agents, four of whom were assigned to the motorcade route, having had beer and mixed drinks at the Fort Worth Press Club the night before the motorcade, the last one leaving at 2:00 a.m. Seven agents then proceeded to the Cellar Coffee House in Fort Worth, which served no intoxicating beverages. Most left by 3:00 a.m., but one remained until 5:00 a.m. In a later investigation, their supervisor advised that each of the agents reported for duty on time the next day, with full possession of his mental and physical capabilities.
³¹
Though “the use of intoxicating liquor of any kind, including beer and wine,” by Secret Service agents “while they are in a travel status [with the president] is prohibited,”
³²
Chief Rowley elected not to discipline the agents because it might give rise to the inference by others that this violation had contributed to the assassination, and he was convinced that this was not the case.
³³

Those who believe the Secret Service was involved in the assassination should almost be put in the same zany category as those who believe that maybe Jackie Kennedy or RFK was involved. The mainstream conspiracy community has never made the allegation of Secret Service complicity. For example, in perhaps the principal book propounding the conspiracy theory of the assassination, Anthony Summers’s
Conspiracy
, the author doesn’t devote one page, not even one paragraph or one sentence, to the possibility of the Secret Service being involved. (As to whether there were “Secret Service” agents on the grassy knoll, he says that they were not “authentic” agents.)
³⁴
The idea is so outlandish that the Warren Commission couldn’t force itself to ask the question of Secret Service complicity, but the HSCA did, and concluded that it found “no evidence of Secret Service complicity in the assassination.”
³⁵

With respect to the issue of Oswald being a hit man for any U.S. intelligence agency such as the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service, there is, of course, no evidence of this whatsoever. One would think the conspiracy theorists, having failed abysmally to connect Oswald in any way to these intelligence agencies, would have their energy and enthusiasm drained. But they have remained undeterred and undaunted. Suggesting that the roots behind the assassination may have been in New Orleans, author Anthony Summers writes, “It may be that Oswald was at least—in the months before the assassination—one remove away from the formal structures of the intelligence community. In the world of intelligence, many operations are run through ‘cut-outs,’ buffer organizations or individuals whose sins can never formally be laid at the door of any agency or government. Thus, it
may
have been with Oswald in New Orleans.”
³⁶
And it also
may
be that since, after more than forty years of relentless searching, no one has ever come up with one iota of evidence connecting Oswald to any federal intelligence agency or even to any such “cut-out” buffer organization, the best course of action for those in the conspiracy community would be to just give up and find a new passion.

As the reader may have already inferred from the pages of this book and from simple common sense, none of the conspiracy theories make any sense. And among them, the theory that Oswald was acting at the behest of the KGB when he killed Kennedy, fueled in large part because Oswald was a Marxist who defected to the Soviet Union, is one of the very worst. As
Newsweek
pointed out in 1993, “Why risk nuclear war to replace a young hard-liner with an old one?” And, “Khrushchev was trying to make peace with Kennedy in 1963, not kill him.”
¹

Indeed, on the very day before the assassination, the National Council of Soviet-American Friendship was meeting in Washington, D.C., and a message from Khrushchev, written on November 19, was read to the council. Khrushchev observed “the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Normalization of relations between our countries, associated with the name of a great American, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was an historical landmark in developing relations between the Soviet and American people.” He recalled “the grim years of World War Two when we fought together side by side against the common enemy, Hitler’s Germany. The experience of the war years…shows that, despite the difference in our social systems, businesslike cooperation and friendly relations between the U.S.S.R. and United States are quite possible. Development of such cooperation on the basis of the principles of peaceful co-existence would meet the interests of people of our countries and would affect the entire international situation.”
²

And for his part, Kennedy gave no indication to Khrushchev by deed or word that he wanted to extend American hegemony throughout the world, and would therefore pose a threat to the Soviet Union. Kennedy’s foreign policy was always containment, not military expansionism. He had a pluralistic view of the world that, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. writes, was a central thesis set forth by Kennedy to Khrushchev at their Vienna summit in June of 1961, a thesis “which implied that nations should be free to seek their own roads to salvation without upsetting the balance between the superpowers.” The previous November, Schlesinger writes, Kennedy told an audience at the University of Washington “that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient—that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population—that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”
³
So even if Khrushchev were irrational enough to want to murder any adversary he perceived as constituting a threat to the Soviet Union, why would he feel Kennedy was such a threat? He didn’t. As Khrushchev said in a 1967 Moscow interview, “Although President Kennedy was young, he was obviously interested in finding ways to avoid conflict with the Soviet Union and somehow to solve those problems which might lead to war.”
⁴

There could be little question that after taking each other’s measure when they met as leaders for the first time at the Vienna summit in 1961, Kennedy and Khrushchev, despite the bluster and veiled threats at the summit by both sides, had started to forge a special tie that eased cold war tensions. By the summer of 1963 the two leaders even established a “hot line” for instantaneous communication between them.
⁵

Indeed, Khrushchev’s main adversary at the time of Kennedy’s death was not the United States, but China. Though both Communist nations wanted to turn the world Communistic, competition between them for leadership of the international Communist movement as well as disagreement on how to achieve world dominion (Khrushchev advocated a strategy that emphasized economic, diplomatic, and ideological means; Mao Tze-Tung, the Chinese leader, was inclined to more violent revolutionary tactics and subversion) led to increasing and public acrimony between the two nations, Khrushchev fearing the Chinese position would heighten the risk of nuclear war with America.
*
While the Sino-Soviet split widened, it appeared that Kennedy was moving cautiously toward a possible detente with Russia, which Khrushchev welcomed. For instance, to the consternation of conservatives, on October 9, 1963, just a month and a half before the assassination, Kennedy approved the sale of $250 million worth of wheat to the Soviet Union when Khrushchev turned to America for help in feeding millions behind the Iron Curtain.
⁶

If the Soviet Union were, in fact, behind the assassination, the mission would undoubtedly have been assigned to the KGB, its Secret Service. And as set forth earlier in this book, while Oswald was in the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1962, the KGB, rather than conspiring with Oswald, initially thought he might be an American intelligence agent, and even when that appeared unlikely, its agents followed him everywhere, including opening his mail and bugging his apartment in Minsk. Such conduct by the KGB really sounds as if it were in a conspiracy with Oswald to murder Kennedy, doesn’t it?

T
he contents of the five-foot-long KGB file on Oswald, naturally, have been hard to come by. But on February 4, 1964, Yuriy (frequently spelled “Yuri”) Ivanovich Nosenko, a thirty-six-year-old KGB agent, walked out of his room at the Hotel Rex in Geneva, Switzerland, and, leaving a wife and two children behind in Russia and his suitcase in his hotel room, defected to the West by going to a CIA safehouse in Geneva. Nosenko had been listed as an “expert” on the Soviet delegation to the seventeen-nation disarmament conference in Geneva, but his actual function was to act as the KGB’s watchdog over the rest of the Soviet delegation.
⁷
He had first approached American intelligence officers in Geneva when he was last there in June of 1962. Nosenko would eventually tell his CIA and FBI debriefers that as an agent in charge of KGB investigations of diplomats, journalists, tourists, and defectors from the United States (the American department of the internal counterintelligence service of the KGB), he was fully cognizant of the Oswald case. He said that he was one of the agents who had been assigned to Oswald and that he had looked at the KGB’s entire five-volume file on Oswald. He assured his American inquisitors that Oswald was never a KGB operative and that the KGB believed Oswald to be “mentally unstable” and had no use for him.
⁸

Nosenko ran into immediate credibility problems because Anatoliy Golitsyn, a KGB agent who had defected to the West in early 1962, got the ear of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary chief of counterintelligence whom David Atlee Phillips referred to as the “CIA’s answer to the Delphic Oracle: seldom seen, but with an awesome reputation nurtured over the years by word of mouth and intermediaries padding out of his office with pronouncements which we seldom professed to understand fully but accepted on faith anyway.”
⁹
*
KGB files would later reveal that Golitsyn, whom the KGB tried to discredit by falsely implicating him in contraband operations across the Finnish border, had betrayed a wide range of intelligence to the CIA, particularly on KGB methods of operation. However, he also fed Angleton and the CIA some unintentional misinformation that sprang from his paranoid tendencies—for example, that as part of the KGB’s effort at global deception, the Sino-Soviet split and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia were merely charades to deceive the United States.
¹⁰

Golitsyn convinced Angleton that Nosenko was a double agent and false defector who was part of a KGB disinformation effort to neutralize the CIA,
†
and that the KGB had already planted one of its agents “within the highest echelons of U.S. intelligence.”
¹¹
Golitsyn told Angleton that any subsequent KGB defector who vouched for Nosenko would also be a false defector, and indeed, Golitsyn said, any CIA officers who claimed to believe Nosenko’s alleged bona fides could possibly be moles for the KGB.

Angleton, already a congenitally suspicious person who was notorious for believing the KGB was behind every tree, was particularly amenable to accepting the mole possibility. Harold “Kim” Philby, Angleton’s counterpart as head of counterintelligence for the British SIS (Secret Intelligence Service), was a brilliant spy, someone whom a young Angleton, along with other OSS (Office of Strategic Services) agents during the Second World War, greatly admired, looked up to, and learned from. Angleton became a close friend of Philby’s, but Philby turned out to be a double agent who had worked with a KGB case officer for years. The Cambridge-educated Philby was actually recruited as a Soviet spy in 1934, six years before he joined the SIS. Angleton would later say, “Looking back on it, Kim taught me a great deal. He taught me never to assume anything…Once I met Philby, the world of intelligence that had once interested me, consumed me.” Philby’s double-agent status was an intelligence disaster not only for London but also, though to a much lesser extent, for Washington, since at the time his duplicity was discovered in 1951, he was the SIS’s liaison with the CIA in Washington (since 1949) and on the best of terms with intelligence officers, from CIA Director Allen Dulles on down, many of whom told him things over drinks they “regretted ever since.” Remarkably, Philby was so iconic and politically connected in Britain that he was allowed to resign from the SIS and was not publicly denounced as a Russian spy until after he defected, in 1963, to the Soviet Union, where the Soviets eventually put his image on a stamp.
¹²
Philby, living a reasonably pleasant life in Russia with his American-born wife, Eleanor, was well protected by the KGB, who believed that the CIA might try to assassinate him if it could find him.
¹³

In a book about Angleton,
Cold Warrior
, Tom Mangold writes, “For twelve years, from 1962 until 1974, the CIA conducted a civil war within its own corridors over Nosenko’s bona fides. An issue that would normally have been settled within weeks by mature men became a decade of destructive battles which left Nosenko…abused to the point of torture,
*
the operations of the CIA’s most important division effectively paralyzed, and the reputation of some of the agency’s most senior officers destroyed…The CIA’s entire top management was sucked into the battle. Neutrality was regarded with contempt.”
¹⁴

The internal conflict virtually tore the CIA in half, one side being led by Angleton, the other side, which accepted Nosenko’s bona fides, by eventual CIA director William Colby. The latter group ultimately prevailed. In a September 1, 1978, letter to the HSCA, written on behalf of the director of Central Intelligence, Scott Breckenridge of the CIA’s Office of Legislative Counsel wrote that “the final conclusion [of the CIA] was that [Nosenko] is a bona fide defector, a judgment that has been reinforced convincingly by 14 years of accumulated evidence.” Breckenridge said that the CIA was “unable to resolve satisfactorily the question of his bona fides until well after the Warren Commission had completed its work.”
¹⁵

Indeed, if the old expression “put your money where your mouth is” applies to the CIA, it seems very clear that the prevailing powers that be at the CIA came to the conclusion that Nosenko was bona fide a lot earlier than 1978, when they merely reported their conclusion. Apparently, when Nosenko defected on February 4, 1964, he was promised $25,000 a year in compensation by the CIA for future services. But “no effort was made to fulfill the promise until 5 years after Nosenko’s defection.” The CIA told the HSCA that “
following acceptance of Nosenko’s bona fides in late 1968
, an arrangement was worked out whereby Nosenko was employed as an independent contractor for the CIA, effective March 1, 1969. His first contract called for him to be compensated at a rate of $16,500 a year. As of 1978 he is receiving $35,325 a year. In addition to regular, yearly compensation, in 1972 Nosenko was paid for the years 1964–1969 in the amount of $25,000 a year…He also received…for March 1964 through July 1973 amounts totaling $50,000 to aid in his resettlement in the private [sector].”
¹⁶

Nosenko is not mentioned in the Warren Commission volumes. However, inasmuch as he defected in February of 1964, when the FBI was right in the middle of its assassination investigation, he naturally did not escape the attention of the bureau, which interviewed Nosenko twice in February and three times in March of 1964.
¹⁷
The FBI told the HSCA it had “no direct access to Nosenko from April 3, 1964, until April 3, 1969” (nearly all of which time Nosenko was in CIA custody), and that on October 1, 1968, four years after the Warren Commission concluded its investigation, it had advised the CIA that it “found no substantial basis to conclude that Nosenko was not a bona fide defector.” The FBI further told the HSCA that “effective May 11, 1977, the FBI
and
CIA concurred that Nosenko was a bona fide defector” and it did not “perceive any credible evidence that Nosenko’s defection was a Soviet ploy to mask Soviet governmental involvement in the assassination.”
¹⁸

Unlike the Warren Commission, which did not feel it had the capacity back in 1964 to determine Nosenko’s bona fides (see endnote discussion), and despite the aforementioned CIA and FBI assurances, the HSCA made every effort to determine whether or not Nosenko was a bona fide defector, but eventually the committee threw up its arms and conceded it was “unable to resolve” this issue. The HSCA did conclude, however, that Nosenko was “an unreliable source of information about the assassination, or, more specifically, as to whether Oswald was ever contacted, or placed under surveillance, by the KGB.”
¹⁹
But the matter of surveillance was conclusively put to rest by Norman Mailer’s book,
Oswald’s Tale
, published in 1995, in which Mailer was able to procure actual tapes and transcripts from the KGB’s surveillance of Oswald. (See Oswald biography section.)

The reason why the HSCA concluded Nosenko was unreliable was that it caught him in too many inconsistencies. For example, Nosenko told the HSCA in 1978 that Oswald had been under extensive KGB surveillance, including mail interception, wiretapping, and physical observation. But in 1964 he told the CIA there had been no such surveillance. Nosenko also told the CIA in 1964 that Oswald never received any psychiatric examination in Moscow after his suicide attempt, but he told the HSCA in 1978 he had. The HSCA also tended to disbelieve Nosenko’s claim that the KGB never had any direct contact with Oswald because it was not interested in him and never even bothered to interview him. Nosenko said that although the KGB was interested in the U-2 plane, the spy agency did not know that Oswald might have knowledge about the plane.
²⁰
One clear piece of misinformation Nosenko gave the HSCA was that Oswald’s phone in Minsk was “tapped,”
²¹
but Marina said they had no phone in their apartment in Minsk.
²²