ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT
The Last Investigation
by
Gaeton Fonzi
Part 2 of 2
[NOTE: this work may contain spelling and
other errors]
BACK TO PART ONE
THE LAST INVESTIGATION
Part 2 of 2
Late in July, I wrapped up a trip to Puerto Rico and flew back into Miami
International Airport. I came back with some significant pieces of
new information, found a few of the witnesses I had been looking for and
had a long and fruitful conversation with Manolo Ray, the head of the anti-Castro
organization Veciana had originally joined in Cuba and, later, the founder
of JURE, to which Silvia Odio had belonged. I was tried and dragging
my way though the Miami Airport when I noticed the headline on the
newsstand: Ronald Reagan had chosen Richard Schweiker as his Vice Presidential
running mate.
The next morning I was on the line with Troy Gustafson, then Schweiker's
press secretary. (With Marston leaving for the U.S. Attorney's job
in Philadelphia, Gustafson was taking over as the Kennedy Liaison.)
"I imagine you've seen the papers," he said. "Were you flabbergasted?"
That was a good word. "We all were," he said. "Only Schweiker
and Newhall knew about it since Tuesday. Schweiker was on vacation
in New Jersey when he got the call from Reagan's campaign manager who said
he wanted to meet him in Washington. The Senator and Newhall kicked
it around and decided it was the last chance for the moderate wing of the
part. Schweiker's really psyched up about it."
I wondered what it meant in terms of Schweiker continuing with a Kennedy
assassination investigation. "I don't know," Gustafson said.
"I haven't had a chance to discuss it with him. I know he really has
a sincere passion for it but I think a lot will depend on what happens in
Kansas City, whether Reagan and he get the nomination. I feel that
between now and then he's going to have a gear down. First of all,
he's just not going to have the time. Also, I think he's going to question
the propriety of continuing it because it's automatically politicized as
soon as he becomes a candidate."
We decided we should continue with the investigation until Schweiker himself
called us off it.
By early September, however, the factors had changed. Reagan and he
had not gotten the Republican nomination in Kansas City and Schweiker returned
to Washington terribly depressed. I've never discussed it with him,
but I believe it led him to re-evaluate his role in public life. Then,
too, partially as a result of the Schweiker Report, the groundswell for a
new investigation into the Kennedy assassination was beginning to take place
in the House of Representatives. If that developed, Schweiker had decided
he would end his efforts.
One morning I received a call from Sarah Lewis in Schweiker's office.
Lewis, an assistant to Gustafson, had been handling a lot of the Washington
research end of the investigation. She called to tell me she had just
learned that the Retired Intelligence Officers Association was going to have
a major two-day conference in Reston, Virginia, in the middle of the month.
That was the organization founded by David Phillips just about a year before.
It had been an instant success and, within months, claimed a few hundred
members. (It would later change its name to Association of Former Intelligence
Officers.) David Phillips would, we assumed, be a very visible figure
at the conference in Reston. It would be an excellent opportunity for
Antonio Veciana to tell us for sure whether or not Phillips could be Maurice
Bishop.
David Phillips knew we were coming. At least he knew I was coming.
Sarah Lewis had called and made arrangements for three of us to attend the
major luncheon on the last day of the conference. The tickets, $6.50
each, would be in my name. Phillips said we could pay at the door.
That morning, I met Veciana at the Washington National Airport. He
and his wife had driven his daughter to Tampa, where she was starting college,
and he had flown from there. I missed the opportunity of traveling
with Veciana, which I always enjoyed. It gave me the chance to chat
with him casually and I never failed to get additional insight into the man.
I guess I enjoyed also being privet to the fact that this soft-faced, parish
middle aged man learning comfortable back in his window seat reading the
real estate section of the paper and looking like a well-dressed, mild-mannered
business executive was actually one of the most fanatically dedicated anti-Castro
terrorists. Occasionally, his perspective would slip through.
I recall, for instance, chatting with him on one trip to Washington about
he question of whether or not the CIA should be involved in domestic operations.
"Oh sure, it must," Veciana said matter-of-factly. "Because then what
happens if you see someone passing secrets to the enemy? He must be
killed. He must." He turned back to reading his newspaper, as
if there could be no argument about that.
Sarah Lewis picked us up at the airport in her red Volkswagen. She
was a tall, attractive young woman with short blond hair and a pleasant smile.
Her research abilities had led her to an interest in the Kennedy assassination.
"Phillips is expecting us," se said, "although I guess he was puzzled by
Senator Schweiker's interest in the conference." Veciana smiled.
Reston had been born as a model bedroom community for the Washington bureaucrat,
an escape from he blight of the decaying urban core. Times change.
Like Philadelphia's Society Hill, downtown Washington is now the class enclave
and Reston is a massive suburban sprawl with problems of its own. But
it's still oppressively neat, pretty and well-manicured. Close by the
Agency's Langley base, Reston is home for a big bloc of CIA employees.
The Ramada Inn also fits in. A curving complex of white stucco, the
Inn is a large, modernistic structure with its own mini-convention facilities.
It took us a while to find it, so we arrived late.
There appeared to be no former spies lurking around the lobby, but a bulletin
board directed us to Bankers' Room "B" and "C" down the center hallway.
there were two large doors to the double banquet room. The one we came
upon first, closer to the lobby, turned out to be to the rear of the room.
That was simply because the podium and guest table had been set up at the
other end of the expanded room, closer to the second set of doors further
down the hallway. A luncheon ticket table, we later learned, had been
set up outside the rear door, but by the time we had arrived it was gone
and everyone was seated around large round tables in the banquet room.
We were thinking about quietly slipping in to the rear of the room when a
stocky fellow with a crew cut asked if we were from Senator Schweiker's office
by any chance. he said he had been waiting for us and that three seats
at Mr. Phillips' table had been kept aside. W apologized for our tardiness
and followed him into the room. We could later pay for out tickets
by mail.
It was noisy with chatter, the cacophony of tableware and the bustle of waitresses.
It was a very large crowd in a large room. We wound our way single
file through a curveway of packed tables until we came to the one in the
far corner of the room farthest from the door. I was ahead of Sarah
Lewis and Veciana. I immediately recognized Phillips sitting with his
back toward us. I wanted to be in a position to see his face and to
look at his eyes when he first saw Veciana, thinking I could perhaps catch
a glint of recognition. The fellow leading us tapped Phillips on the
back. Phillips jumped up[, whirled around, looked directly at me and,
smiling, extended his hand as he introduced himself. I watched his
eyes as I shook his hand, told him my name and said, simply, that I was with
Senator Schweiker's office. His eyes never left my face, although Sarah
Lewis was directly behind my right shoulder and Veciana was standing alongside
her. Phillips never even glanced at them.
I immediately turned and said, "I'd like you to meet Sarah Lewis...."
Phillips smiled a greeting and shook her hand. "....and this," I said,
"is Antonio Veciana." Phillips smiled a quick greeting at Veciana,
shook his hand and immediately turned back to me. "I'm glad you could
come," he said, "and I'm delighted that Senator Schweiker is showing an interest,
but I must admit I don't quite understand why you're here." He said
it very cordially and with a nice smile, then quickly added, "...but, of
course, you're most welcome." He gestured to the three empty chairs
across the table.
It all happened with such speed I was taken aback by the quickness of it.
I thought I would be able to tell, keen observer that I deemed myself, if
Phillips had exhibited even the slightest hint of having recognized Veciana.
Not only did Phillips not display that slightest hint, but his eyes moved
on to and off of Veciana so quickly -- in the flash of a brief handshake
-- that Veciana almost became a nonentity. Strange, too, when I thought
about it later, was that Phillips, when he rose and turned to greet me, did
not even momentarily glance at the two people standing immediately behind
me, not even at the pretty girl over my right shoulder. Was David
Phillips a very honest man or a master of deception? I thought, not
considering that perhaps I was making an arbitrary distinction.
We sat down opposite Phillips at the three places that had been reserved
for us. I sat on Veciana's left, Sarah Lewis on his right. Between
Phillips and I were his wife, Gina, a pleasantly attractive woman who, I
later learned, was a former secretary at the CIA, and, sitting on her right,
a United Press International reporter, a bluff, red-faced fellow just back
from 21 years as a foreign correspondent. Revelations about the CIA's
use of the press and the fact that the Agency actually had working journalist
on its payroll hadn't emerged yet and it never crossed my mind to be suspicious
of this fellow. Not even when he casually asked if I were attending
the luncheon for any specific reason. I sad no, I was working for Senator
Schweiker and I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet and talk with
David Phillips.
As soon as Veciana sat down, he reach into his breast pocket, pulled
out his glasses, put them on, folded his arms across his check and began
studying David Phillips. Inwardly I cringed. Subtle he wasn't.
For almost the entire luncheon, Veciana remained in the same position:
Leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest, staring at Phillips.
Occasionally he picked up his fork and dabbled at the food on the plate in
front of him, then he would lean back again, fold his arms and look at Phillips.
It obviously made Phillips very nervous. His hands were shaking noticeable.
He appeared to deliberately not look at Veciana and remained in animate conversation
with both his wife and the fellow to his left, a retired Navy officer, I
believe.
The table was very large and the room was noisy and so, at one point, when
Phillips learned over the two people between us and said something to me,
it was difficult to hear him. I thought he asked, again, about what
particular interest Senator Schweiker might have in a conference to retired
intelligence officers. I said that, really, it just gave me the opportunity
to meet him and that we were working on something we thought he might be
able to help us with. I suggested that after the luncheon, perhaps,
we could talk about it. He nodded his head and smiled, but because
of the din level I wasn't sure he caught everything I said. He turned
back to chatting with the fellow on his left. Veciana kept staring
at him.
I kept glancing at Veciana, trying to get a reaction. I didn't want
to appear too obvious by engaging him in a whispered conversation, but the
suspense finally got to me and I learned towards his ear and whispered, "What
do you think?" Veciana looked at me, shrugged his shoulders and turned
back to staring at Phillips.
I decided to survey the crowd. Perhaps, I thought, I might stumble
upon someone who looked even closer to the Maurice Bishop sketch than Phillips.
I don't know what I expected in terms of what a gathering of spies would
look like, but this group looked more like a crowd of college professors.
A lot of studious pipe-puffers. And more women than I expected.
I guessed that most of them were, or had been, intelligence analysts.
That, in fact, is what most CIA employees do.
When the guest speaker was introduced, I turned in my chair and put my back
to Phillips. Veciana moved only sideways and, I noticed, kept glancing
back at him. The guest speaker was a Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson,
the newly appointed head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
A handsome, broad-shouldered soldier with wavy hair and a ruddy complexion,
he wore a chest-full of colorful ribbons topped with the blue Combat Infantryman's
Badge. He had seen some action.
Polished, articulate, smoothly dramatic, General Wilson was out of the give'em-hell-Patton
school of military speakers. His speech was a model for the occasion.
It was an aggressive defense against the attacks then being launched against
the intelligence community. It was an us- against-them speech.
They don't realized how good we are, how sophisticated and modern our technology
is; they don't appreciate the tremendous accomplishments we've had; they
don't know of our successes or how often we've saved this country from possible
disaster. But we are not going to take this criticism lying down; we
are not going to let them forget how much they need us; we are going to show
them how tough we can be.
On the last point, General Wilson told a story that, as they say in show
biz, brought the house down. He told of being called to testify before
the House Select Committee on Intelligence. (That Committee, unlike
the Senate's, had refused to be fed its research and had issued a devastatingly
critical report on the sensitive area of the intelligence community's cost-
effectiveness.) General Wilson noted that the Committee was chaired
by "the Honorable Otis G. Pike, the Congressman from Suffolk County, New
York." He dripped a measure of acid cynicism over each slowly enunciated
syllable. the audience chuckled appreciatively.
On the appointed day of his testimony, General Wilson said, he decided to
arrive at the hearing room early to assess the situation, "as any good intelligence
officer would." He sat down at the table and opened his briefcase.
The TV cameras and the lights were being set up. He began shuffling
through his papers when "the Honorable Otis G. Pike the Congressman from
Suffolk County, New York" entered the room. The Congressman had decided
to arrive a bit early also, said the General, and went directly to his big,
black, high-backed Committee Chairman's seat in the center of the rostrum
above him. For a fleeting moment, said the General, he felt almost
as if he were in a traffic court, but as he sat there shuffling through his
papers, with the TV lights now bright on him and "the Honorable Otis G. Pike,
the Congressman from Suffolk County, New York," looming from the rostrum
above him, it brought to mind the story of this little old lady he knew back
in his hometown of Hill, Virginia.
It seems, said General Wilson, that this little old lady had a lifelong fear
of visiting the dentist. She possessed an ungodly, horrific apprehension
of the drill invading her mouth. She never went to the dentist in h
er life. But one day, with advancing age and worsening teeth, her pain
overcame her fears and she found herself leaning back in the dentist's chair.
And as the dentist came towards her, loomed over her and was about to put
the whirling drill into her mouth, he suddenly stopped cold. His eyes
widened and his face froze in shock. "Madam," he finally managed to
gulp, "may I ask you, please, why you have such a firm grip on one of the
most sensitive parts of my anatomy?" And, General Wilson said, as he
sat in the Committee hearing room with "the Honorable Otis G. Pike, the Congressman
from Suffolk County, New Your," looming above him, he thought of that
little old lady's reply to that dentist: "Well, doctor, we're not going
to hurt each other now, are we?"
A loud round of laughter and a spontaneous burst of applause indicate that
this audience very much appreciated the General's point.
When General Wilson finished his speech, the audience gave him a standing
ovation. I stood and clapped also. It was a helluva speech.
Veciana stood but didn't clap. Probably because the General didn't
say anything about the need to kill Castro. During the ovation, I took
the opportunity to lean to Veciana and ask, "Is he Bishop?" Veciana
removed his glasses and put them back in his packed. "No," he said
slowly shaking his head, "it is not him." He paused for a moment, then
added, "Well, you know, I would like to talk with him." I said I would
try to arrange that. What I had in mind, once I got the confirmation
that he wasn't Maurice Bishop, was to approach Phillips and directly ask
him for his help. I thought I'd tell him some of the details and show
him the composite sketch. I had brought a copy with me in a plain brown
envelope.
Phillips, however, was too fast for me. By the time I turned around
he had already shot out the back door. Then I realized that as president
of the association, he probably wanted to thank his guest speaker and had
ran ahead so he didn't get caught in the crowd at the rear of the room.
I quickly ran toward the rear door, beckoning Veciana and Sarah Lewis to
follow me.
The hallway was already jammed but I could see Phillips talking with General
Wilson at the front door. I began trying to push my way against the
flow of the crowd until I notice that Phillips, having shaken the General's
hand, was moving back down the hall toward me as he chatted with another
member. "Excuse me, Mr. Phillips," I said as I stopped him, maneuvering
him to the edge of the flow and against the wall. "I'd like you to
meet Antonio Veciana." I turned but Veciana wasn't there. I thought
that he and Lewis had been directly behind me but hey had gotten caught in
the crowd. It was now obvious to Phillips that I wanted to bring him
and Veciana together. "Well, as you know," I said, turning back to
Phillips, "I'm with Senator Schweiker and I thought you might be able to
help us with what we've been working on."
"What about." asked Phillips.
"The Kennedy assassination," I said, a bit surprised at the question.
Phillips smiled. "I'll be glad to talk with any Congressman, or any
representative of Congress...in Congress."
Veciana suddenly appeared at our side with Sarah Lewis directly behind him.
"This in Mr. Veciana," I said again. Veciana immediately asked Phillips
in Spanish if he had been in Havana in 1960. Phillips answered in Spanish,
yes, he was. Did he know Julio Lobo? Veciana asked. Phillips
said, yes, he remembered the name. Did he know Rufo Lopez-Fresquet?
Phillips said yes, then quickly asked Veciana, "What was your name again?"
"Antonio Veciana."
"Veciana?" Phillips repeated.
"Don't you know my name?"
Phillips shook his head slowly and, with apparent thoughtfulness, said, "No..."
Then he turned to me and asked, in English, "Is he with Schweiker's staff?"
Phillips now appeared quite nervous.
"No," I said. "Mr. Veciana has been helping us with our investigation."
"What investigation?"
I found it strange that he didn't quite understand. "The Kennedy assassination,"
I said again. "That's why I thought if we could talk, I mean nothing
official, just off the record if you prefer, you could be of some help.
I thought...."
He interrupted me with a forced smile: "I'll be glad to talk with any
Congressman, or any representative of Congress...in Congress." His
hands were visibly shaking. Unintentionally, with the push of the crowd
behind me, I had forced him up against the wall and it suddenly struck me
that we had inadvertently cornered him. "Well, there's an area I thought
you might help us with..." I began, thinking I could push a little.
His smile was frozen. "I told you, I'll be glad to talk with any Congressman,
or any representative of Congress...in Congress," he repeated.
Then, suddenly, he turned testy. "I'm sorry," he said, moving toward
an opening, "you've caught me at a very inopportune moment. As you
can see, this is all very hectic here and I'm quite busy, so if you'll excuse
me...." He kept the smile on his face but I was surprised at how clearly
and visibly shaken he appeared.
"No," I said, "I said, "I didn't mean I wanted to talk with you now, but
perhaps if I can give you a call...."
This time the smile was gone and with a blatant sigh of exasperation he repeated
again, now slowly and in mock rate. "I'll be glad to talk with any
Congressman, or any representative of Congress...in Congress. Now,
if you'll excuse me..." he pushed his way between us. I retreated,
thanked him for having us, told him I enjoyed the lunch and the guest speaker.
He smiled again nervously, said we been most welcome and quickly moved away.
Later, since I was not returning directly, we would drop Veciana off for
his flight back to Miami alone. On the ride from Reston he remained
strangely silent, but so did we all. What had just happened produce
a weird effect. I think we were a bit stunned and dared not come to
any conclusions about what had just happened until we mulled it over.
What I recall most clearly now is when we were walking back to Sarah Lewis'
car in the parking lot immediately after leaving Phillips. It was a
beautiful day, very bright after having been inside. Veciana didn't
say a word. His face was expressionless.
"He's not Bishop?" I asked again.
Veciana continued looking straight ahead as he walked. "No, he's not
him." A long silence. "But he knows." He knows? "What
do you mean, he knows?" I asked. "He knows," Veciana repeated,
without further explanation.
As we were waiting for Sarah to unlock the door of her Volkswagen, Veciana
turned to me and said, "It is strange he didn't know my name.
I was very well known." That's funny, because I was thinking exactly
the same thing.
For the next three months I thought a lot about what happened that day.
I saw Veciana only once or twice during that period and talked occasionally
with him on the telephone. He seemed not to want to discuss the incident
in detail. Once, when I did bring up David Phillips' name, he said
again. "He knows." When I asked, "You mean he knows who Maurice
Bishop is?" Veciana nodded his head. "He knows," he said.
"I world like to talk with him more." I assumed than that he meant
that if he could talk with Phillips at length we would be able to solicit
some clues from him about the real Maurice Bishop. I knew, from
Phillips' reaction from our request to have an informal discussion with him,
that was impossible.
In October, Schweiker concluded he could no longer justify being involved
in an investigation of the Kennedy assassination as a lone senator.
Also, he was disappointed at not having been appointed to the new Senate
Permanent Committee on Intelligence, the formation of which came out of the
recommendation of the Select Committee. (on the surface, by the way,
the formation of that Permanent Committee appeared to be a victory for those
who wanted more control over the intelligence community. It wasn't.
There had been four permanent Senate committees with oversight responsibilities
for intelligence activity. The Select Committee's report indicated
that the intelligence agencies hand these committees in their pocket and
that the committees had neglected their responsibilities. Nevertheless,
the intelligence community's power bloc in the Senate would not permit a
new wider-powered. Permanent Committee on Intelligence to be formed
unless the majority of its members came from the old oversight committees.
Schweiker was cut out, even though it was his fellow Pennsylvania Republican,
Minority Leader Hugh Scott, who helped select the members of the new committee.)
There were two key factors which forced Schweiker to wrap up his investigation
of the Kennedy assassination. One was the announcement by Senator Daniel
Inouye, the chairman of the Permanent Committee on Intelligence, that the
new body would continue the investigation of possible intelligence community
involvement in the Kennedy assassination begun by the Select Committee.
Schweiker didn't believe that it actually would, but because Inouye had made
the public announcement, it left Schweiker without foundation.
(Schweiker was right; the new committee made a few cursory moves than dropped
the subject.) The other factor was the indication that the House of
Representatives was finally being pressured into conducting its own Kennedy
assassination investigation. The independent researchers had been pushing
for it for years and were later joined by those who thought the Martin Luther
King assassination also required a valid investigation. They were getting
nowhere until Coretta King, the widow of the slain civil rights leader, went
directly to the Speaker of the House and said, "I would like to know what
really happened to Martin."
Years ago, in reviewing a book about he Warren Commission for a small magazine
called Minority of One, critic Sylvia Meagher wrote: "there are no
heroes in this piece, only men who collaborated actively or passively --
wilfully or self-deludedly -- in dirty work that does violence to the elementary
concept of justice and affronts normal intelligence."
It didn't take long for those who examined the final report of the Warren
Commission and its volumes of published evidence to conclude that its investigation
was deficient. Considering the Commission's resources and the opportunities
it had at the time to do a thorough investigation, its failure was, indeed,
a "violence to the elementary concept of justice." Its legacy was a
burning scission in this country's psyche.
Finally, on September 17th, 1976, the U.S. House of Representative passed
House Resolution 222 which established a Select Committee "to conduct a full
and complete investigation and study of the circumstances surrounding the
assassination and death of President John F. Kennedy..."
The politicians may have given it legal status, but the mandate came from
deep within the conscious of a nation fed up with the deceptions and confusions
spawned in the wake of the assassination.
When the Select Committee finally expired more than two years later, it performed
the tasks it assigned itself with -- to use the phrase it so favored in its
final report -- "varying degrees of competency."
What it did not do was "conduct a full and complete investigation."
What it did not do was respond to or even consider its higher mandate by
attempting to pursue the priorities of truth with unmitigated vigor.
In that failure, it, too, committed violence to something basic in the democratic
system.
What the House Select Committee did do -- with a high degree of competency
-- was conduct a political exercise.
The select Committee on Assassinations was born in the septic tank
of House politics. To many members it was simply a necessary device
politically inexpedient to oppose. Early in 1975, two Congressman had
each introduced their own bills to reopen the Kennedy assassination.
A fiery Texan named Henry B. Gonzalez, who had been a passenger in the Dallas
motorcade, included in his bill probes also into the murder of Robert Kennedy
and Martin Luther King. A respected Virginia veteran lawmaker, Thomas
N. Downing, introduced his bill when he developed serious doubts about the
Warren Commission Report. Both bills were stuck in the Rules Committee
for more than a year, until the Black Caucus put pressure on the House Leadership.
The bills were then merged and the resolution passed.
The seeds of dissension were early sown. Traditionally, the author
of a resolution establishing a select committee is named chairman of the
committee. Downing, however was a lameduck congressman who had not
sought reelection in 1976. His term would expire three months after
the new Committee was formed. Gonzalez, on the other hand, was a barroom-
brawling Mexican-American not especially respected by the House power brokers.
Thus, despite Downing's lameduck status, House Speaker Tip O'NEILL named
him chairman of the Selected Committee. That really burned Gonzalez.
The first month of the Committee's life was harbinger of what was to come.
It immediately mired itself in internal squabbling. Downing's first
choices as the Committee's chief counsel and staff director was Washington
attorney Bernard Fensterwald, an early Warren Commission critic who had established
a research clearing house and lobbying operation called the Committee to
Investigate Assassinations. Although, after Gonzalez objected to him,
Fensterwald withdrew himself from consideration, a story appear in the Washington
Star headlined: "is Fensterwald a CIA Plant? - Assassination Inquiry
Stumbling." It was later learned that material for the story had been
leaked from Gonzalez's office.
Downing and Gonzalez finally got together in early October and settled on
Philadelphia's Richard Sprague as the Committee's chief counsel. Sprague
had gotten national attention with his successful prosecution of United Mine
Workers President Tony Boyle for the murder of UMW reformer Joseph Yablonski.
In Philadelphia, where as First Assistant District Attorney he had run up
a record of 69 homicide convictions out of 70 prosecutions, Sprague was known
as tough, tenacious and independent. There was absolutely no doubt
in my mind when I heard of Sprague's appointment that the Kennedy assassination
would finally get what it needed: a no-holds-barred, honest investigation.
Which just goes to show how ignorant of the ways of Washington both Sprague
and I were.
Early in November, Sprague had lunch with Senator Schweiker in Washington.
He knew, of course, of the work of Schweiker in Washington. He knew,
of course, of the work of Schweiker's Senate Intelligence subcommittee, but
Schweiker also filled him in on the files his personal staff had compiled.
In those files was a fat stack of informally written memos reporting what
I had dug up in the field over the past year. Included were rough notes
of the Antonio Veciana and Maurice Bishop area of the investigation.
Schweiker, anxious to help Sprague as much as possible, arranged to turn
over some of these personal staff files to him. In a letter to Sprague
accompanying them, Schweiker noted: "Because of my concern for the
personal safety of some of the individuals who came forth to my staff, neither
my staff nor I have publicly divulged their names. I strongly urge
that this confidentiality continue to be respected..."
When he took the job, Sprague had done so with the stipulation that he would
have complete authority to hire his own staff and run the investigation as
he saw fit. He proposed setting up two separate staffs, one for Kennedy
and one foe King. He insisted on handling both cases as if they were
homicide investigations.
In the annals of the John F. Kennedy assassination, it was a novel approach.
And, judging from the reaction of many Congressman, it was a far too radical
approach. Especially since Sprague was obviously serious about it,
as indicated when he said he needed a staff of at least 200 and an initial
annual budget of $6.5 million and then refused to guarantee that would do
the job. Sprague hadn't settled into his shabby Washington office in
the rat-infested, yet-unrenovated former FBI Records Building when
the attacks against him began.
In December, Sprague called me and asked me to come to Washington to talk
with him. When I got there I found that he had turned over the material
Schweiker had given him to Deputy Chief Counsel Bob Tannenbaum, a veteran
homicide attorney Sprague had recruited from the New York District Attorney's
Office. Tannenbaum reviewed the material and suggested that Sprague
ask me to join the staff. I told Sprague I would if I could be free
to pursue those areas in which I had the most background and considered the
most potentially productive, especially that of intelligence agency involvement
with the anti-Castro exiles in Miami. He said I could. I also
suggested to Sprague that a more efficient investigation could be run if
most of the investigators left Washington and operated out of field offices
in Dallas, New Orleans and Miami. It was those cities which generated
the most evidentiary reports in the original FBI investigation. Sprague
agreed and asked one of his assistants to check into the availability of
government offices in each city.
I remember having lunch with Sprague and a few of his staffers that
day in Washington. I talked about some of the things I had worked on
with Schweiker and what I thought needed to be done. But Sprague, despite
the fact that he had been on the job for more than two months, seemed still
less occupied with the substance of the case than he did with other problems.
He had gotten critical blasts played large in the press from a few congressman
after word got around that the Committee would probably use such investigative
devices as lie detector tests, voice stress evaluators and concealed tape
recorders. Some lawmakers, including a couple of right-wing military
establishment supporters, suddenly expressed their grave concern for individual
rights and said that Sprague was threatening to trample on the civil rights
of people he would investigate. At lunch that day, I commented to Sprague
about the heat he seemed to be taking.
Sprague shook his head. "You know, I don't understand it. I've
never been in a situation like this before where I'm getting criticized for
things I might do. It's nonsense, but I don't know why it's happening."
I would not find out what was happening in Washington until much later.
I was arranged that I would officially join the Committee as a staff investigator
on January 1st, 1977. I returned to Miami and got immediately to work
renewing the contacts and sources I had let lapse over the previous few months.
I had accumulated file cases of documents and background material which I
use to begin structuring an investigative plan. After talking with
Sprague, I was now certain he planned to conduct a strong investigation and
I was never more optimistic in my life. I remember excitingly envisioning
the scope and character of the investigation. It would include a major
effort in Miami, with teams of investigators digging into all those unexplored
corners the Warren Commission had ignored or shied away from. They
would be working with squads of attorneys to put legal pressure on to squeeze
out the truth from recalcitrant witnesses. There would be reams of
sworn deposition, the ample use of warrants and no fear of bringing prosecutions
for perjury. We would cut our way through the thickets of false leads
and misinformation and attack the purveyors of self-serving distortions.
We would zero in on the hottest evidence and work day and night pursuing
its validity. We would have all sorts of sophisticated investigative
resources and, more important, the authority to use them. The Kennedy
assassination would finally get the investigation it deserved and an honest
democracy needed. There would be no more bull shit.
Little did I know it was only beginning.
What Sprague discovered when he arrived in Washington was that his first
order of business was not in setting up an investigation but simply keeping
the Committee alive. The Committee had been officially established
in September. All congressional committees legally expire at the end
of each congressional year and then, if they were mandated to continue under
the terms of their originating resolutions, the new Congress reconstitutes
them as a matter of course.
As soon as Sprague hit Washington, however, and it became obvious he meant
to conduct a true investigation, the flak began to fly. Fueled by some
of the press, including the New York Times, talk started circulating that
the reconstitution of the Assassinations Committee might not be as "automatic"
as it was assumed. The attacks increased when Sprague announced his
staff plan and budge. He did not pull either figure out of the air,
but analyzed the resources that the Warren Commission had available from
it own staff, the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA and the Justice and State
Departments. Sprague figured that the very nature of a truly independent
investigation would preclude the use of the investigative forces of those
other government agencies, especially since some of them would be under investigation
themselves. With a staff of 170 and a yearly budget of $6.5 million,
the Assassinations Committee would not have far more than the Warren Commission
in resources. (The Commission employed 83 people but used 150 full-time
agents from the FBI alone.)
Nevertheless, the budget was used as the focal point for additional attacks
on Sprague. HE was accused of being arrogant and disrespectful of congressional
protocol. Sprague, they said, had made a "mistake" in coming on so
strong. "Several people around here who are familiar with the bureaucratic
game told me to first present a smaller budge," Sprague admitted. "They
assured me that I could always go back later and plead for more. That's
the way they o things in Washington, I was told. Well, I won't play
that game." Perhaps Sprague didn't realize the power of the forces
he was us against.
On January 2nd, the day before the convening of the 95th Congress, there
appeared in The New York Times a major story headlined" "Counsel in
Assassination Inquiry Often Target of Criticism." Written by reporter
David Burnham, it was an incredibly crude example of the journalistic hatchet
job. It reviewed Sprague's 17-year career as a Philadelphia prosecutor
strictly in terms of the controversies he had provoked. There is no
doubt that Sprague's record has points worthy of valid criticism, but Burnham's
piece left out the grays and painted Sprague a heavy black. Even the
Philadelphia Bulletin's Claude Lewis, not particularly a Sprague fan, winced
at Burnham's blatant cut job. "You can dig up dirt on anyone if you
look hard enough," noted Lewis.
Intended or not, Burnham's piece had the effect of a well-placed torpedo.
It almost sand the Assassinations Committee. On January 4th, an attempt
to get a resolution reconstituting the Committee through by a unanimous-consent
voice vote failed. That meant the resolution would have to go through
a lengthy bureaucratic labyrinth, including passage through the Rules Committee
and a budget review exercise, before the Committee could officially be reconstituted.
It would take weeks.
In Miami, unaware of the behind-the scenes details, I was anxious to get
rolling. I kept calling Bob Tannenbaum, the boss of the Kennedy side
of the investigation. "Bob, I think it's initially important to coordinate
my area with what the rest of the staff id doing," I said. "I imagine
the staff is already organized into teams, but I think it's important that
a program for constant communication between teams and field investigators
be developed." I suggested I first come to Washington to get a better idea
of staff organization. Tannenbaum agree. He was a guy in his early
30s very big beefy but fit - a former Columbia University basketball
star and student radical who, rising quickly in New York DA Hogan's office,
became the epitome of the quick- thinking, fast-talking prosecutor.
Tannenbaum didn't want me to know how chaotic the mess was becoming in Washington.
"Let me work things out on this end," he kept saying, "and we'll plan on
getting together. Stay loose."
Stay Loose? We were suppose to be rolling on perhaps the most important
investigation in history, one of incredible scope and depth, and why the
hell weren't we moving?
In the next several weeks, my confusion and frustration multiplied.
Even now, one can view the series of events in Washington and the behavior
of some of the characters during that period as simply outrageous, unbelievably
stupid and/or breathtakingly asinine. Yet, when you consider what happened
in the end, the ultimate fate of Sprague and the Assassinations Committee,
one wonders if all along there wasn't a preordained pattern to the course
of events.
On February 3rd, the House voted to reconstitute the Assassinations Committee.
Temporarily. Still under sharp attack by certain conservative lawmakers
suddenly turned civil libertarians, the Committee was, as the Washington
Star put it, "given less than two months to justify its existence under conditions
that...make it almost impossible to develop new evidence." The House,
in keeping the Committee alive, provided only a maintenance budget, just
barely enough to cover the reduce salaries of its staff. (Everyone
had taken a 40% pay cut while waiting reconstitution.)
In Miami, I was keeping myself busy, but without the guidance of a structured
investigative plan all I could do was continue a scattergun approach to the
leads. I continued checking out Veciana's story, pursued Bishop possibilities,
dug into the activities of Santos Trafficante, Normie Rothman and other Organized
Crime figured and their possible contacts with Jack Ruby, continued research
into the CIA's role in anti-Castro activities and went on meeting with my
sources and contacts. More and more, when fresh information or a new
lead would come in, I found myself saying, "That seems worth checking.
As soon as we get some help down here and this thing gets organized, I'll
get back to you. ...Oh, yeah, just a few problems in Washington.
They'll get ironed out. We're beginning to get organized now."
I didn't realized that the chaos was just beginning. About a week after
the Committee was temporarily born again, I received a call from Bob Tannenbaum.
"Well," he sighed, "World War Three has started in Washington. It's
Gonzalez versus Sprague. You wouldn't believe it. Gonzalez is
taking back his stationary." His what? "Let me read you a letter.
It's dated February 9th, 1977. 'Dear Dick. Until the Select Committee
is properly organized and its rules established, a number of steps are necessary.
Accordingly, I hereby request and direct that you provide me at the earliest
practical time, but no later than noon Friday, February 11th, your written
assurance as given verbally to the Committee yesterday that, failing to recommend
necessary reductions in force, you guarantee compliance with the financial
limits imposed on the Committee. ...Owing to an evident inability
of the Committee in past times to adequately control the use of its letterhead
and franked materials, and in the absence of any present controls on such
materials, you are directed to return to me immediately any and all letterhead
material bearing my name. You are reminded that no expense or financial
obligation whatever may be made in my name, nor shall any vouchers or other
commitment obligating the Committee to expend funds be made without my prior
knowledge and personal, specific and written authorization...'"
Since all congressional committees use the postal franking privileges of
its chairman, and every expense voucher, travel order and most directives
and requests to other government agencies are made under the chairman's signature,
what Gonzalez was doing in effect, was virtually stopping the operation of
the Committee.
Gonzalez had been furious at not being named chairman of the Committee when
it was originally formed. He automatically stepped into the post, however,
when Downing retired, and the new Congress convened in January. (It
was, of course, something of a Catch 22 position since the Committee, not
yet reconstituted, was officially nonexistent.) Gonzalez, however,
wanted more than just the title. He wanted control and power to stack
the staff with his own people. Sprague wasn't about to give him that.
In December, Gonzalez had told sprague that, under the formula in the Congressional
Rules, the Committee could operate with a budget of $150,000 a month until
it was officially reconstituted. On the basis, Sprague began beefing
up his original start-up staff with new additions, all of who were put on
the payroll January 1st. I was in that group. Gonzalez, however, had
been mistaken about the Committee's budget. The rules actually permitted
it only $84,000 a month in expense while it waited reconstitution.
When Gonzalez was called on the carpet by the Rules Committee for the budget
over-run, he said that Sprague had hired the new staffers without his knowledge
or permission.
At a meeting of the members of the Assassinations Committee on February 8th,
Gonzalez repeated his charges against Sprague and ordered Sprague to fire
the people he had put on the staff on January 1st. Sprague denied he
had not told Gonzalez about the hiring and refused to fire anyone.
The other Committee members backed Sprague. Gonzalez fumed. The
next day he wrote the letter cutting off the staff's resources and demanding
the return of his stationary.
"And we just got another note from Gonzalez today," Tannenbaum added.
"Listen to this: 'Dear Mr. Sprague. You called me at 10:10 yesterday
morning. I was out. I returned the call at 11:30. You were
not in. You were at a staff meeting. Your secretary said she
would get you if it were important. I said, "I don't know if it's important.
I'm returning his call." I hang up. I then met the President
of the United States. I am the chairman. You are my employee.
Do not forget that.'" Tannenbaum had a problem reading that note to
me because he was laughing so hard. T he next day, I received my own letter
from Chairman Gonzalez. It was a form letter to all staffers:
"This is to convey to you my profound regret regarding the circumstances
which surround your present employment. "There is much confusion, and
I want you to understand that I am anxious to rectify this situation....
"It is highly deplorable that the person most responsible for your employment
did not advise you of the possible difficulty in getting the Committee reconstituted.
"As you know, I was not the chairman during the 94th Congress, but due to
errors which have been made under the former chairman, it has been a long
and hard struggle getting the Committee reconstituted...and it is only for
a very limited basis, through March 31, and for a very limited budge...
"No one likes a reduction in personnel, but...I hope that as soon as possible
I will be able to convey to you what the future status of personnel will
be with the Select Committee."
Gonzalez did not mention that not one other Committee member had backed him
on his demand that some of the staff be fired. Nevertheless, Gonzalez
kept on swinging. He went to the Attorney General and emended that
Committee staff members, who, while waiting for the investigation to get
structured, had begun researching the FBI files, be denied access to those
files. (It was probably the first time congressional history that a
committee chairman wanted noncooperation.) Next, Gonzalez cut off the
long-distance telephone calls, thereby isolating the only investigator --
me -- the Committee had in the field at the time. Sprague later put
it succinctly: "Gonzalez went berserk."
Gonzalez finally threw what he thought was his Sunday punch: He fired
Sprague. In a hand-delivered letter, Gonzalez charge that Sprague "has
engaged in a course of conduct that is wholly intolerable for any employee
of the House," and ordered him to vacate his office by 5 p.m. that day.
Gonzalez had uniformed Capital Police officers arrive at the staff offices
with orders to physically evict Sprague if he wasn't out. But within
a couple of hours after Gonzalez had sent the letter, the Committee's 11
members signed their own letter directing Sprague to ignore Gonzalez.
What was suppose to be an investigation into one of the most significant
and tragic events in this country's history had turned into, as George Lardner
of the Washington Post put it, "an opera bouffe." Editorial cartoonists
around the country were having a ball. "Pardon me, is this the offices
of the...nice shot...House Assassinations Committee?" asked an elephant character
walking in a roomful of stomping, swinging, kicking, brawling lawmakers.
Then Gonzalez took that one step too far. At an open meeting of the
Committee, he attacked the second-ranking Democrat, Congressman Richardson
Preyer, head of the Kennedy Subcommittee. Judge Preyer, a gray-haired,
soft-spoken, Southern gentleman known for his fair- minded, liberal intellect,
was one of the House's most respected members. When Gonzalez began
flying off the handle, Preyer suggested the Committee adjourn until some
problems were ironed out. Gonzalez exploded. "I'm the chairman!
I know you want to be chairman and you're trying to get rid of me!" he yelled
at Preyer.
According to Bob Tannenbaum, who was there: "Preyer's head actually
jerked back. It looked like a shot from the front, but I was
really a neurophysical reaction. It was really an embarrassing
moment for the old guy." Preyer recovered and said quietly, "I do not
seek the chairmanship, nor do I want it. I have a motion that we adjourn."
The Committee quickly backed him and the members hurried away -- except for
Gonzalez, who held an impromptu press conference at which he called Sprague
"a rattlesnake."
The next day I received a call from Tannenbaum. "Preyer and the other
members of the Committee are going to House Speaker O'NEILL to ask him to
remove Gonzalez from the chairmanship," he told me. "We're down to
the final act. IF Gonzalez is not removed, we're leaving.
There's no way we can go on with this man. He's gone mad."
As the news filtered down to me in Miami -- through calls made on the WATS
line of non- Committee telephones -- I became increasingly dumbfounded.
I had read of the scandalous and ridiculous or often just petty behavior
of our Washington lawmakers in so-called behind-the-scenes press reports
and gossip columns down through the years and I always thought they were
exaggerated or overly dramatized. But there I was, with privy to the
real inside, and it was actually happening.
Confronted with the unprecedented situation of committee members rebelling
against their own chairman -- and a problem fought with untold dire consequences
to the House's historical system of power brokerage -- House Speaker Tip
O'NEILL waffled. Appearing on a Face the Nation telecast, O'NEILL said
he lacked the power to remove a select committee chairman. He also
said the Assassinations Committee's problems would probably be worked out
and that he believed it would stay in business beyond its March 31st
deadline. Cryptically confusing, perhaps, but behind the scenes there
must have been some pressure brought on Gonzalez. "They tell us that
Gonzalez is going to go,' Tannenbaum reported to me, "but I think the bastards
are lying to us. I think what they're really angling for is a trade-off.
If Gonzalez goes, then Sprague will have to go." Although it wasn't
immediately apparent, Tannenbaum was right about he bastards.
Chairman Gonzalez resigned from his post -- and the Assassinations Committee
-- in the first week of March. He then flew home to San Antonio and
gave a long, raging "exclusive" interview to hometown newsman Paul Thompson
of the Express-News.
The next day I received a call in Miami from Associated Press reported John
Hopkins. "Have you ever been in Washington?" he asked.
I said sure I've been to Washington, why? "Because Gonzalez gave an
interview in Texas in which he claimed you've never been to Washington,"
Hopkins said. "He said he didn't know what you did in Miami and Sprague
wouldn't tell him." Hopkins also told me that Gonzalez claimed that he was
forced out of the investigation by "vast and powerful forces, including the
country's most sophisticated criminal element." "By the way," Hopkins
asked, "do you have any connections with Organized Crime?"
WHAT?
"In that interview," Hopkins said, "Gonzalez claimed you are supposed to
have underworld connections."
I had never met Gonzalez and I doubt that he knew anything about me personally.
But he did know my name from the list of new staffers whom Sprague had hired.
Gonzalez was making assumptions strictly on the basis of my name. That
steamed me. I don't think I've been more angry in my life with someone
I had never met. That night, if Gonzalez had lived in Miami, I would
have blown up his car.
It was nearing the end of March, 1977. Again the Assassinations Committee
was due to die unless the House granted it a continuance and approved a budget
for it. The resignation of Gonzalez and the appointment of a new chairman,
a big, balding, low-key Black Democrat from Ohio name Louis Stokes, finally
gave the Committee and its staff the chance to concentrate on the problem
of survival. From its birth, the Committee had been forced into a position
of having to make survival its priority. It was established in September,
1976, with a token budget and the right to live only until the end of the
year. The attacks against it had delayed its being reconstituted for
a month, and then it was given another token budge budget and the right to
live for only two more month. At each resuscitation, the dictates of
continued survival had to be met. The internal feuding naturally exacerbated
the situation tremendously.
The investigation of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther
King? Oh yeah, that's what Congress expected the Committee to be doing
while it kept it in a financial armlock and permitted the Committee's own
chairman to saw away at its leg. When the question of the Assassinations
Committees survival did come before the Rules Committee, its Chairman James
Delaney, a Democrat from New York, carped: "I'd like to know if they
have anything or if this is just a plain witch-hunt. I don't know if
it's a witch-hunt or not." Even House Speaker O'NEILL said at one point
he thought the Committee would have to produce "something of a sensational
nature" to survive.
All too quickly, the lesson of the warren Commission had been lost.
There could be no valid investigation of the Kennedy assassination unless
there was a objective, thoroughly structured approach unencumbered by political
pressures or lack of resources. But all Sprague and Tannenbaum
and the other staff directors could do in the first six months of the Committee's
life was concern themselves with political pressures and the question of
survival. A structured approach to the investigation could not be formulated.
What was needed was eyewash. The Committee had to look good.
The Committee had to look as if it were making progress. The Committee
had to look as if it were digging up sensational, new revelations.
If it didn't, there were too many members of Congress ready to cut off its
gonads for not performing.
Under such conditions, it is no wonder that within the Committee staff itself
problems began to arise. Tannenbaum was under pressure with Sprague
to ward off the attacks from the political front. He was under pressure
from having to evaluate and act upon the flood of information gushing in
the from army of both legitimate researchers and misinformation purveyors
while, at the same time, trying to acquaint himself with the incredibly intricate
details of the Kennedy case. He was under pressure from the staff to
begin a substantive investigation. And he was under pressure from Congress
and the press to come up with sensational revelations.
Tannenbaum became paranoid. He took a small group of staff members
into his confidence and distrusted everyone else. He paranoia was reinforced
when one staff member was revealed to be feeding Gonzalez reports of Sprague's
confidential talks to the staff. That, plus the fact of having to live
under a Damocles Sword for six months, produced a good deal of internal squabbling
and pretty bickering among the staff members. There were, however,
some young staffers who were legitimately concerned about the direction of
the investigation and the lack of dialogue concerning the establishment of
priorities when and if the Committee got funded. They began writing
memos detailing their concerns and urging the implementation of their suggested
courses of action. These became known among the staff as "C.Y.A." memos.
For "Cover Your Ass."
Isolated in Miami, without authorization or funds to go to Washington to
find out what the hell was really going on, I was at least able to function
a bit on my own, put up a good front with the people I was talking with and
chip away in a random way at the mountain of work to be done. In Washington,
the staff of investigators were, for the most part, spinning their wheels.
All they could do was handle what came across the transom. Cliff Fenton,
the Chief Investigator, was a former top New York homicide detective brought
in by Tannenbaum. Like all the other ex-badges from the Big Apple on
the Committee, Fenton was a sharp dresser. A hefty, easy-moving fellow,
Fenton gave the appearance of being a mellow, rambling' type of guy who spoke
with an inevitable chuckle that was indefensible contagious. I often
envision him back in Manhattan shuffling easily into the lock-up with a killer
in tow, the guy chuckling right along with Fenton as he was led to his cell.
But Fenton was a shrewd, street-wise cop who knew only one way to handle
an investigation: By putting men out to investigate. Before Gonzalez
cut off authorization to travel, Fenton had sent a few of his men out to
take random shots at leads that came in. They came back with enough
to convince him that, if he had his way, there would be an investigation
heavy with field work. Fenton never got his way. In the beginning,
in fact, he had a rough time keeping his men busy in Washington. Accustomed
to being on the street, they got itchy inside. But since only one or
two had any background familiarity with the Kennedy case, Fenton suggested
they spend their time reading the shelves of books that had been written,
mostly by Warren Commission critics. It was, however, a case of the
blind leading the blind. One of the best circulated around the office
was a large, soft-cover volume by Texans Gary Shaw and Larry Harris.
It was called Cover-up. It had a lot of pictures in it.
Although the Committee had been in existence for almost six months, it was
nowhere close to being able to function as an effective investigative body.
I didn't fully realized that until the last days in March, just before the
question of its survival would come up again on the floor of the House.
Late Monday afternoon, on March 28th, I received a call from Bob Tannenbaum.
The House was scheduled to voter that Wednesday on whether or not to continue
the Assassinations Committee. The Committee members as well as the
top staff counsel had been spending most of their time lobbying among the
individual lawmakers for support. Although many of his fellow congressmen
didn't care for Gonzalez, he was a member of the club. Some resent
Sprague -- viewed by a least one congressman as "just a clerk" -- for besting
Gonzalez in a head-to-head confrontation. That day, Gonzalez himself
had been on the floor of the House ranting again about Chief Counsel's insubordination."
He had even distributed a "Dear Colleague" letter to every House member urging
threat the Committee be dropped. He was thirsting for revenge.
I asked Tannenbaum how it looked. "It depends on who you talk to what
time of the day." He did not should optimistic. "Anyway, Wednesday
is the day. We'll know one way or the other." We talked about
the situation for a while and then I told Tannenbaum what I was doing while
waiting for the investigation to get organized. I had discovered there
was a CIA agent in Dallas named J. Walton Moore. He had been there
since the time of the Kennedy assassination and, in fact, was listed in the
telephone book down through the years -- except during the period of the
Jim Garrison investigation. On the chance that Moore might be Maurice
Bishop, I asked a friend of mine, a reporter on a Dallas television station,
to have a surreptitious photograph of Moore taken so I could show it to Veciana.
(Moore, it turned out, did not look like Bishop. However, the CIA was
informed that its agents photograph had been taken. The loose-tongued
photographer my friend obtained told another newsman at the station about
my request. That newsman, my friend later discovered, happened to be
a CIA asset.)
At any rate, I was telling Tannenbaum of my plans to have the photograph
taken. I told him that Moore was additionally interesting because he
had been in touch with George DeMohrenschildt, the much traveled oil consultant
who had befriend the Oswalds as soon as they had returned from Russia.
"By the way," Tannenbaum said. "I just got a call from the Dutch journalist,
Willem Oltmans. He's the guy I was telling you about."
Tannenbaum had told me about Oltmans but he needn't have. Oltmans
had gotten national publicity by appearing on various television interviews
and then going to Washington to tell his story to the Committee. He
had befriended DeMohrenschildt and claimed that DeMohrenschildt had confessed
that he was part of a "Dallas conspiracy" of oilmen and Cuban exiles with
"a blood debt to settle." DeMohrenschildt admitted, Oltmans said, that
Oswald "acted at his guidance and instruction."
DeMohrenschildt had reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown at the time hew
was talking with Oltmans, but he left a hospital in Dallas to travel with
Oltmans to Europe to reportedly negotiate book and magazine rights to his
story. Then in Brussels, Oltmans claimed, DeMohrenschildt ran away
from him and disappeared.
Now Tannenbaum told me that Oltmans had just called him from California.
Oltmans said that in tracking DeMohrenschildt he had just found that DeMohrenschildt
could be reached at a telephone number in Florida. Tannenbaum gave
me the number. That afternoon, I checked out the number. It was
listed to a Mrs. C.E. Tilton III in Manalapan. That was a small strip
of a town on the ocean south of Palm Beach noted for its wealthy residents.
(I would later learn that Mrs. Tilton was the sister of one of DeMohrenschildt's
former wives.) I decided it would be best if I could contact DeMohrenschildt
directly rather than by telephone. I planned on driving up to Manalapan
the next morning. I was excited about he opportunity to talk with DeMohrenschildt
and thought it incredibly fortuitous that he should turn up in South Florida.
George DeMohrenschildt had to be one of the most fascinating characters who
popped up in the original Warren Commission investigation. Born in
Russia in 1911, the son of a Czarist official who later became a wealthy
landowner in Poland, DeMohrenschildt received a doctorate in commerce from
the University of Liege in Belgium. He came to the United States in
1938 and worked for Shumaker & Co, and exporting firm. He was also,
he would later admit, connected with the French intelligence service.
In 1945, he went to Texas and got a master degree in petroleum engineering.
He then began traveling around the world as a consultant for various Texas
oil companies. In 1961, he showed up at a Guatemalan camp being used
by Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion. At the time, he and his
fourth wife were supposedly on a walking tour of South America. DeMohrenschildt
also worked for a period as a consultant in Yugoslavia for the International
Co-Operation Administration. His salary was paid by the U.S. State
Department under an arrangement similar to the one Antonio Veciana would
later have as a banking consultant in Bolivia.
DeMohrenschildt's associations were generally on the higher levels of society.
His first wife was Palm Beach resident Dorothy Pierson. His second
wife was the daughter of a high State Department official. His third
wife was Chestnut Hill socialite Wynne Sharples, now Mrs. Peter Ballinger
of Villanova. He married his fourth wife, Jeanne LeGon, in 1959 in
Dallas. Her father had been director of the Far Eastern Railroad in
Manchuria.
Given his background, it seemed strange that DeMohrenschildt would have befriended
an apparent working-class drifter like Lee Harvey Oswald. When Gary
Taylor, who had been married to DeMohrenschildt's daughter Alexandra, was
asked by a Warren Commission counsel if he though DeMohrenschildt had any
influence over Oswald, Taylor replied: "Yes, there seemed to be a great
deal of influence there." At the end of his questioning, Taylor was
asked if he had any further comments that might help the Commission.
"Well," he said, "the only thing that occurred to me was that -- uh -- and
I guess it was from the beginning -- that if there was any assistance or
plotters in the assassination that it was, in my opinion, most probably the
DeMohrenschildt's." The Warren Commission did little to explore the
contention.
On the morning of March 29th, 1977, I went looking for George DeMohrenschildt
in Manalapan. I found the Tilton home sitting on the edge of the ocean
highway behind a barrier of high hedges. It look as if it belonged
more in New England than Florida, a large, two-story structure of dark cedar
shingles and green trim. To the rear were a series of garages with
a carriage house above them. I drove directly into the wide yard beside
the house. As I got out of the car, there appeared from behind the
garage a tall, strikingly beautiful woman. She had smooth olive skin,
deep dark eyes and long black hair. Her statuesque body was clad in
a clinging black leotard. She was carrying a small towel and glowed
with a sheen of perspiration. She had obviously been exercising.
The woman turned out to be DeMohrenschildt's daughter Alexandra. After
I introduce myself, she told me that her father was in Palm Beach and that
she didn't know how to reach him. She said, however, that she was certain
he would be in the evening that and that I could reach him if I called about
8 o'clock. She gave me the telephone number I already had. The
only identification I had at the time as a business card with an engraved
gold eagle which identified me as a staff investigator for Senator Schweiker's
office. I crossed out Schweiker's name and wrote "House Select Committee
on Assassinations" above it and gave her the card. She said she
would tell her father to expect my call. She was cordial but direct,
as if she had taken my sudden appearance there a inevitable.
I would later learned that as I was talking with Alexandra DeMohrenschildt
her father was in a hotel room in Palm Beach being interviewed by a freelance
writer name Edward J. Epstein. Although the author of Inquest, one
of the first books critical of the Warren Commission, Epstein's contacts
with the CIA were considered suspicious by many of his fellow critics.
In addition, it was known that Epstein was then working under a lucrative
contract from Reader's Digest, a publication that had done cooperative projects
with the Agency, to write a book that would suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald
was an agent of Russia's intelligence service, the KGB.
The drive from Manalapan back to Miami takes about an hour and a half.
That afternoon I called Cliff Fenton, the chief investigator, and told him
what had happened. I said I would call DeMohrenschildt that evening
and probably set up an appointment to see him the next morning. "Fine,
Fine," Fenton said. "Well, you just keep on it." He was
obviously more occupied with he frantic efforts to keep the Committee alive
when it came up for a vote before the House the next day. "This is
crazy up here, just plain crazy," he said with his characteristic chuckle.
"I have never seen anything like this place."
About 6:30 that evening I received a call from my friend who is the television
reporter in Dallas. "Funny thing happened," he said. "we just
aired a story that came over the wire about a Dutch journalist saying
the Assassinations Committee has finally located DeMohrenschildt in South
Florida. Now DeMohrenschildt's attorney in Dallas a guy named Pat Russell,
he calls and says DeMohrenschildt committed suicide this afternoon.
Is that true?"
The manner in which the Assassination COMMITTEE reacted to the death of George
DeMohrenschildt revealed that the Committee -- six months after it was formed
-- was still totally incapable of functioning as a investigative body.
In reflected six months of political reality and how successful its opponents
had been in keeping it distracted and off-balance. DeMohrenschildt
may have been one of the most important witnesses in the Kennedy assassination
investigation. Within minutes after I confirmed and notified Washington
of his death, teams of Committee counsels and investigators could have been
descending on the scene to begin in intensive study of what happened, slapping
witnesses with subpoenas for later sworn testimony. What happened instead
was that to days after the incident, a junior counsel and a recently hired
investigator with little knowledge of who DeMohrenschildt even was holed
up to help me for a couple of days in my frenetic efforts. If it hadn't
been for the quick-thinking moves and assistance of Palm Beach State Attorney
Dave Bludworth and then-Detective Chief Dick Sheets in securing some of DeMohrenschildt's
documents, the Committee would have gotten no more than what the newspaper
reporters did. As it were, no subpoenas were ever served and no testimony
ever taken from at least two important witnesses: DeMohrenschildt's
daughter Alexandra and author Edward J. Epstein. Epstein who was interviewing
DeMohrenschildt just before his death, quickly flew out of Palm Beach before
I could question him.)
George DeMohrenschildt and returned to the Tilton home in Manalapan about
four hours after I had left it that morning. Alexandra told him of
my visit and gave him my card. The assassinations probe. As one
of the old guard told Delaware County Congressman and Committee member Bob
Edgar: "You guys dumped Gonzalez. I don't know Sprague at all,
but if you don't dump him too, you guys are dead in the water." Sensing
that feeling, Sprague had early offered to resign if it meant the difference
in keeping the Committee alive. Chairman Stokes assured him that would
not be necessary and that the Committee would stick with him. Then,
in the last hours of the evening before the House vote, Stokes called Sprague
to his office. Repeatedly, Stokes reviewed the situation and each time
painted it in gloomier terms. Finally, near midnight, Sprague realized
that despite Stokes' earlier assurances of supporting him, the ground was
being shoveled out from beneath him.
"Do you want me now to resign?" Sprague asked. Stokes put his
head down and remained silent. Bristling, Sprague stood up. "Gentlemen,"
he said, "it's clear it's in everyone's best interest if I resign."
He then called his secretary and dictated a two-sentence letter of resignation.
Sprague drove home to Philadelphia at 2 a.m. that evening, about the time
I was driving back to Miami from State Attorney Bludworth's office in Palm
Beach and wondering what the hell was going on in Washington. By 8
the next morning, while I was again trying to contact someone at the Committee
offices in Washington Sprague was on a plane to Acapulco. That day,
after four hours of stormy debate, the House voted to continue the Assassination
Committee at a budget reduced to $2.5 million for the year.
The key factors that drove Richard Sprague to resign as Chief Counsel of
the Assassinations Committee appeared, at the time, to be apparent and on
the surface. His proposed use of certain investigative equipment, his
demand for a expensive, unrestricted investigation, his refusal to pay politics
with Chairman Gonzalez -- all were apparent grounds for the vociferous criticism
which, in the long run, was debilitating to the Committee's efforts to get
on with its job. However, after his resignation and a brief respite
from the turmoil of Washington, Sprague was able to view his experience in
a broader perspective.
Shortly after he returned from Acapulco, he was interviewed by Robert Sam
Anson of New Times magazine. Sprague admitted that, with the barrages
flying at him from all directions, he and the staff had little time to actually
investigate. By his reckoning, he said, he spent "point zero one percent"
of his time examining the actual evidence. Yet, he told Anson, if he
had it to do over again, he would begin his investigation of the Kennedy
assassination by probing "Oswald's ties to the Central Intelligence Agency."
Recently, I asked Sprague why he had come to that conclusion. "Well,"
he said, "when I first thought about it I decided that the House leadership
really hadn't intended for there to be an investigation. The Committee
was set up to appease the Black Caucus in an election year. I still
believe that was a factor. But when I looked back at what happened,
it suddenly became very clear that the problems began only after I ran up
against the CIA. That's when my troubles really started."
In the early months of the Committee';s life, Sprague's critics both in Congress
and in the press were not only keeping him busy dodging the shots, they were
also demanding that the Committee produce some sensational new evidence to
justify its continuance. Sprague, therefore, was forced to take some
wild swings at what appeared to be a few obvious targets. One area
that very apparently needed closer examination was the CIA's handling of
the initial investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald's activities in Mexico City.
According to the information supplied to the Warren Commission by the CIA,
a man who identified himself as Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Cuban consulate
in Mexico City on September 27th, 1963. (That, by the way, the House
Assassinations Committee would later conflictingly conclude, was possibly
one of the dates Oswald appeared at Silvia Odio's door in Dallas.)
The Agency told the Commission that Oswald had been in Mexico City from September
26th to October 3rd. During the time, said the Agency, Oswald made
a number of visits to both the Cuban Embassy and the Russian Embassy attempting
to get an in-transit visa to Russia by way of Cuba. The CIA also claimed
that when Oswald visited the Russian Embassy he spoke with a Soviet consul
who was really a KGB intelligence officer.
It was later learned, however, that CIA headquarters in Washington
was not informed of the incident until October 9th, and then told only that
Oswald had contacted the Soviet Embassy on October 1st. The CIA station
in Mexico City told headquarters that it had obtained a photograph
of Oswald visited the Embassy and described the man in the photo as approximately
35 years old, six feet tall, with an athletic build, a balding top and receding
hairline.
When the Warren Commission asked the CIA for photos of Oswald taken
in Mexico City, the ones it produced depicted the man described in the original
teletype -- obviously not Oswald. Notified of this discrepancy, the
CIA said simply it had made a mistake and that there were no photographs
of Oswald taken in Mexico City. It never identified the man in the
photos. In fact, the CIA was able to produce very little hard evidence
regarding Oswald's activities in Mexico City. "For example," Commission
Counsel J. Lee Ranking complained, "they had no record of Oswald's daily
movements while in Mexico City, nor could they confirm the date of his departure
or his mode of travels."
Some Warren Commission critics would later interpret the incident as an attempt
by certain CIA personnel to falsely link Oswald to Communist connections
even before the Kennedy assassination. When Sprague first approached
this area, he discovered that the CIA officer in charge of reporting such
information from Mexico City at the time of Oswald's visit was former Bay
of Pigs propaganda chief David Atlee Phillips.
In the biography, The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service (published
in 1977), David Phillips spends just a few pages on the Kennedy assassination
and the Mexico City incident. He blames the cable discrepancy on a
mistake by an underling. He explains the lack of an Oswald photography
on the CIA's inability to maintain camera coverage of the Cuban and Russian
embassies on an around-the-clock and weekend basis. A seemingly strange
deficiency at a period so close to the Cuban missile crisis)
Sprague called David Phillips to testify before the Assassinations Committee
in November, 1976. According to Sprague, Phillips said that the CIA
had monitored and tape recorded Oswald's conversations with the Soviet Embassy.
The tape was then transcribed by a CIA employee who then mistakenly coupled
it with a photograph of a person who was not Oswald. Phillips said
that the actual recording was routinely destroyed or re-used about a week
after it was received.
Sprague subsequently discovered an FBI memorandum to the Secret Service dated
November 23rd, 1963. It referred to the CIA notification of the man
who visited the Russian Embassy. The memo noted that "Special Agents
of this Bureau who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Tex., have observed
photographs of the individual referred to above and have listened to a recording
of his voice. These Special Agents are of the opinion that the above-referred-to
individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald."
Sprague was intrigued: How could the FBI agents have listened to a
tape recording in November when Phillips said it had been destroyed in October?
Sprague decided to push the CIA for an answer. He wanted complete information
about the CIA's operation in Mexico City and total access to all its employees
who may have had anything to do with the photographs, tape recordings and
transcripts. The Agency balked. Sprague pushed harder.
Finally the Agency agreed that Sprague could have access to the information
if he agreed to sign a CIA Secrecy Agreement. Sprague refused.
He contended that would be in direct conflict with House Resolution 222 which
established the Assassination Committee and authorized it investigate
the agencies of the United States Government. "How," he asked, "can
I possible sign an agreement with an agency I'm supposed to be investigating?"
He indicated he would subpoena the CIA's records.
Shortly afterwards, the first attempt to get the Assassinations Committee
reconstituted was blocked. One of its critics was Representative Robert
Michel of Illinois, who objected to the scope of the Committee's mandate.
"With the proposed mandate," Michael harped, "that Committee could begin
a whole new investigating of the Central Intelligence Agency!" That,
says Sprague, is exactly what he intended to do. And that, he also
now contends, was the beginning to his end.
Richard Sprague resigned as Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations on March 30th, 1977 --- six and a half months after its formation.
The new Chief Counsel, Professor G. Robert Blakey of Cornell University,
was not appointed until June 20th, 1977 -- more than nine months after the
Committee was formed. During that entire period, the Committee staff
-- contrary to its reports to Congress indicating the "progress" of its investigation
-- was going around in circles. Whenever the politics and finances
permitted, Chief Investigator Cliff Fenton would send some of his men into
Dallas to check out a lead. Even with such a snapshot approach, the
fact that more often than not they returned with evidence that hadn't previously
been known or information from a witness who hadn't previously been interviewed,
indicated that the Kennedy case was still, despite the years, ripe for a
basic street-level investigation. But without a structured approach,
with an apparatus to analyze and chart the raw data and indicate the direction
of the next step, the Committee was running in place.
Deputy Chief Counsel Bob Tannenbaum had been to Miami Beach on his honeymoon.
His image of his Miami based investigator was of a guy in reflecting glasses
sitting around the pool at the Fontainebleau, sipping a daiquiri and watching
the bikinis go by. I did that, I told him, only on sunny days.
Actually, I had long ago decided to move out on my own . Regularly,
I sent lengthy memos detailing developments in the various areas I was looking
into. Any day now, I kept telling myself, the investigation would begin
and my raw date would be structured into the big picture to produce action
and direction. Eventually, as the file copies of my memos grew thicker
and the response from Washington grew thinner, I began getting the feeling
I was being a pain in the ass. I would later learn that both Tannenbaum
and Fenton were secreting most of my memos away in the back of their file
drawers, fearful of information form them leaking out and each privately
doubtful that nay real investigation would every start.
Finally, in the middle of April, I was authorized to take my first trip to
Washington since I had officially joined the Committee. I was treated
like a envied celebrity, the lucky guy out in the field who kept riding through
the thicket of flying arrows while the rest of the staff had been pinned
down at the fort. As I was being taken through some basic bureaucratic
process -- and finally getting an official identification badge -- Tannenbaum
was holding a staff meeting. He returned to tell me that the staff
had decided that I was the most important person on the staff in terms of
any real investigating the Committee had done thus far. That was a
very significant comment on the Committee's progress.
Actually, the staff was in sorry shape. It had lived on the brink of
the abyss for too long. Morale was horrendous and bitching was rife.
Many of the junior counsel complained to me that Tannenbaum treated them
like children. Tannenbaum complained to me that many of the junior
counsel were children. "They can't figure out a thing for themselves,"
he moaned. Of course, the enforced wheel-spinning for so many months
had gotten to every one. No matter what they did to keep themselves
busy, they knew that, until they were officially authorize to go on and a
new chief counsel appointed to lead the way they were, in fact, just keeping
themselves busy. To many, however, the pits of frustration were reached
when Tannenbaum ordered the staff to outline the 26 volumes of Warren Commission
evidence and testimony -- an exercise of meaningless redundancy.
After Sprague departed and it eventually because apparent that he wouldn't
fill the chief counsel slot, Tannenbaum's attitude deteriorated. He
hung on however, until Blakey settled in and then found himself a job at
the Justice Department. (He's now in private practice in California.)
But before he left, Tannenbaum got me what he had been promising for along
time: a little help in Miami.
The Miami branch of the Assassinations Committee became a two-man operation
when Al Gonzalez moved down from New York in August. A former cohort
of Chief Investigator Fenton's on the N.Y.P.D., Gonzales had retired as a
top detective and then worked for a while for the New York State commission
investigating the Attica riot. When Castro made his first visit to
the United Nations in early '60s, Gonzalez was picked to be his special bodyguard.
Al was a native New Yorker and not of Cuban heritage, but Fidel took a liking
to him, instead he remain at his side, put his arm around him and invited
him to be his personal guest in Cuba. Castro called him "El Grande."
Al was about 6'4" and weight about 270. I felt a little more secure
in Little Havana after Al joined me.
Although I had kept in touch with Antonio Veciana after the closing of Schweiker's
investigation, I called him on New Year's Day, 1977, as soon as I had officially
joined the House Select Committee on Assassinations. I told him that
Schweiker's office had turned my files over to the Committee and that I was
not working for it. I said I thought the new House Committee would
be much more effective than the old Senate Committee because it would
have more resources and be very independent. It was my first day on
the job. We chatted a bit and then Veciana asked if I knew that he
had been called back to Washington to appear before the new Senate
Permanent Committee on Washington to appear before the new Senate Permanent
Committee on Intelligence. I hadn't known. "I was three days
in Washington," Veciana said. "They asked me a lot of questions.
There were different people there now and I think some were with the FBI.
They asked me not only about the Kennedy assassination but also about the
Cuban cause here in Miami, about the bombings here and what was going on."
I asked whether he was questioned again about Maurice Bishop. "yes,
a little," he said. "They showed me some more pictures, but they were
not Bishop." We chatted a bit more and then I said that I would be
back in touch shortly, as soon as the Committee got organized -- any day
now. "Well, if I can help you, don't hesitate to call," he said.
From his initial leeriness, Veciana's feelings about me and obviously grown
to one of some trust. Two week later that trust was almost shattered.
The call came from late on a Friday afternoon Troy Gustafson in Schweiker's
office. "Veciana's cover has been blown," he said. "The whole
story is going to be in Jack Anderson's column next Wednesday." I almost
felt the blade burning deep into my back. It was a very personal reaction.
Someone, somewhere had betrayed me.
Gustafson told me he had just gotten a call from reporter George Lardner
at the Washington Post. Lardner had seem the advance mail copies of
two Jack Anderson columns which the Post was scheduled to run the following
Wednesday and Thursday. Although Veciana's name was not mentioned --
Anderson called him "mysterious witness Mr. X" -- the columns detailed his
entire relationship with a "Morris" Bishop. "Morris" was the erroneous
way I had spelled Bishop's first name on my initial rough notes of
my interviews with Veciana. Anderson obviously had copies of those
notes. I was furious. I was furious at the leak and at Anderson.
My old journalistic appreciation of a news scoop went out the window.
Didn't Anderson have any regard for Veciana's life? Lardner, who had
covered the Kennedy assassination and the intelligence community for years,
had immediately recognized "Mr. X" as being Veciana. Anderson had clearly
pinpointed him as the founder of Alpha 66 and the organizer of the Castro
assassination attempts in 1961 and 1971. Every Cuban exile in Miami
could easily identify Veciana as that person. Now Anderson was clearly
marking him as a tool of the CIA and a man who, in turn, had secretly
used his fellow exiles as tools of a government which, in the end, had also
betrayed them. Bombs had gone off in Little Havana for less reason
than that.
If Anderson had copies of my original rough interview notes, they could have
only come from one of four sources: From me, from Schweiker's office,
from the Senate Intelligence Committee or from the House Assassinations Committee.
The weight of motivation fell heavily on the last. The Committee had
just failed to be automatically reconstituted and it was scheduled to clear
its first key hurdle, the House Rules Committee, the following week.
Certain Congressman were crying for evidence of its effectiveness.
Anderson's column about the coup of "congressional investigators" undercovering
a "Mr. X" who met with Oswald could be the kind of publicity boost that might
push the Rules Committee into positive action.
Seething with anger, I called Tannenbaum. I was taken aback at what
appeared to be his genuine reaction of shock at the news. He swore
that the leak did not come from him or from Sprague. In fact, he, Sprague
was at that moment meeting with Schweiker and probably hearing about the
Anderson columns for the first time from the Senator himself. "I really
think this is an attempt to sabotage us," Tannenbaum said. "We
had already gotten word that certain Senators are trying to zing us and the
Senate Committee is not being cooperative at all."
In the end, I could not conclusively prove to myself where Anderson had gotten
copies of my rough notes. I knew for sure that they hadn't come from
me or from Schweiker's office. In speaking with the staff counsel on
the Senate Intelligence Committee who had recently interviewed Veciana, I
was assured that they hadn't come from him either. "It's extremely
damaging here," he said, "and I think blows any chance of ever getting to
the bottom of the thing. Also, you know we're not going to be able
to deal with the Miami Cuban community at all now. Once you blow your
sources down there you're cooked." That I was well aware of and it
increased my fury. There was no assessing the damage the leak could
produce in my effectiveness as an investigator. Why would any of my
sources trust me now? Why should Veciana ever again believe he could
tell me anything confidentially? Why should be continue to cooperate
at all?
Setting up a meeting with Veciana to tell him about the coming Anderson columns
was one of the most difficult things I ever had to force myself to do.
He could accuse me of betraying him and I could not prove to him that I didn't.
Veciana's reaction, however, was not directed against me. An expression
of heavy concern crossed his face and it became obvious as we started to
talk about it that he was extremely worried about the reaction among his
close associates in the anti- Castro movement. I got the impression
that he once again had become active and that his effectiveness was based
on their long trust in him. "It is very bad for me," he said.
"It is good that I am going away for a while." He had previously scheduled
a lengthy business trip to California.
Veciana and I spent the evening conjecturing about the source of the leak.
He told me that he still trusted me personally and believed that I wouldn't
have broken his confidence. At first he leaned toward the Senate Committee
as the source because in his recent call to Washington he had been questioned
by some men whose agency association he wasn't told. "Yet," he said,
"the Senate and Schweiker had my information for almost a year and it was
not leaked. I think maybe it was the House Committee."
I eventually had to come to agree with him. In questioning Tannenbaum
further he admitted he had briefed at least six of the twelve members of
the Assassination Committee on the details of the Veciana story and that
copies of the rough notes were put into the file system. That meant
that entire staff could have had access to them. Tannenbaum, however,
expressed the feeling that perhaps it was the CIA itself which engineered
the leak in order to damage the Committee's credibility. "Well, if
so, it was damn successful," I said. But Tannenbaum was not nearly
as agitated about the incident as I and repeatedly tried to calm me down.
"Well, at least Veciana's name wasn't mentioned," he said, "and at least
your name wasn't mentioned. So considered the bright side and perk
up a little bit. Think of the problems I have up here, and we're not
even in business yet. At least you're down there in the Sunshine State.
By happy, man. Hang in there!"
I hung in there, but to me the leak to Jack Anderson of the Veciana story
was another jolt from the black cloud of political priorities which overhung
the Assassinations Committee from the beginning. The risk to Veciana's
life wasn't considered, the damage to my effectiveness as a Committee investigator
wasn't considered and the perhaps irreparable harm it did to substantiative
progress in the investigation itself wasn't considered. Only the of
the survival Assassinations Committee mattered. I would have to remember
that, I told myself at the time, in dealing with my confidential sources
in the future. As long as I was working for Congress, I could never
again asked them for their implicit trust..
Months later, Bob Tannenbaum himself, after he had submitted his resignation
and called together his closest staff associates, gave us these final words
of farewell advice: "The one thing you have to remember about this
town is to stick together and watch your ass."
I did not meet G. Robert Blakey, the new staff boss of the House Assassinations
Committee until just before Bob Tannenbaum resigned late in July of 1977.
Between Sprague's departure and Blakey's arrival, Tannenbaum finally had
the opportunity to attempt some structuring of an investigation. Various
special projects -- such as accumulating the list of Dealey Plaza witnesses,
arranging autopsy and ballistic studies, preparing photo analysis and beginning
file research -- were beginning to keep the staff busy. In New Orleans,
a crucial area because of Oswald's contacts there with anti-Castro Cubans.
Chief Investigator Fenton borrowed from that town's police department two
street-wise cops to become, with Al Gonzales and I in Miami, the Committee's
only other "outside" investigators. (The New Orleans duo was an odd
couple: Bob Buras was a tough ex-Marine, serious, scripture-quoting,
born-again Christian; L.J. Delsa was an amiable, beer-guzzling, former undercover
narc with excellent contacts in the French Quarter. Strangely, they
clicked together and were early hard working and enthusiastic. They
got themselves in trouble later when they gave a witness a lie-detector test
without authorization. They made the mistake of thinking they
were conducting a real investigation.)
Late in June, I received a call from Tannenbaum. "I'm going to give
you an investigative plan," he said. "I'm getting it together now."
I said that was great but suggested that, first, the staff should be divided
into teams and the investigative areas defined. "Yeah, that's what
I'm going to do," Tannenbaum said. "Blakey starts officially on Friday
and I want you to come up next week to meet him. Meanwhile, I tried
to talk to him about it but instead he gave me this little book he wrote
called Techniques in the Investigation and Prosecution of Organized Crime.
He told me, "When I talk about an investigative plan, I want you to know
my lingo.' Then he hands me this cockamamie book."
The next week I was in Washington sitting in Tannenbaum's office when Blakey
struck his head in the door. "Come in, Bob," Tannenbaum Called.
"we're just getting a briefing of the Miami situation." Actually, Tannenbaum
had been telling me about a job interview he had that afternoon at the Justice
Department. Blakey strolled in, introduce himself, slouched in a chair,
leaned back and put his scruffy brown loafers up on Tannenbaum's desk.
Damn if he didn't look like a real Ivy League professor. He wore a
baggy, pin-striped gray suit, button-down blue Oxford shirt and an
archaic green slim-jim tie. He wasn't a big man, but his light paunch,
soft pale face and receding hairline made him look older than his 41 years.
Under heavy, gray-flecked brows, he had strikingly clear blue eyes.
He exuded a casual self-confidence and as I told him about what we were doing
in Miami, he expressed a keen interest. He asked particularly about
Santos Trafficante and his involvement in the areas I was investigating.
He then began talking about his days with the Organized Crime and Racketeering
Section of the Justice Department. "You want to hear something ironic?"
he said. "My last meeting with Bobby Kennedy was on November 22nd,
1963. He was running late fora luncheon appointment and had to hurry
off. He said we'd finish up when he returned. He never returned.
At lunch he got word of his brother's death in Dallas."
My first impressions of Bob Blakey where that he was very self-assured and
very knowledgeable in the ways of the Washington bureaucracy. And it
was obvious that he knew how to take over an operation because the first
thing he did when he arrived was nothing. That, as they tell you in
the military, is exactly what a new commander should o when he is assigned
a unit: Do nothing but walk around, look around, listen carefully and
ask question. The, when you move for control, do it firmly and with
hesitation.
Despite his soft-spoken, academically casual and sometimes even whimsical
demeanor (he invaded the home of some staff researchers on Halloween Eve
dressed as Cont Dracula), Blakey turned out to be a very cunning intellectual
strategist who took quite pride in h is ability to manipulate both people
and situations. His foil was the man he brought in to replace Tannenbaum
as Deputy Chief Counsel in charge of the Kennedy "task force." (That
was the inflated term used to identify each of the Committee's sub-staffs.
Inexplicable, the Martin Luther King task force had more investigators.)
Gary Cornwell, a 32-year-old Justice Department prosecutor out of the Kansas
City Organized Crime Strike Force, was a cocky, stocky, stumpy Texan
who exuded a brash pragmatism. He talked fast, loud and Texan, smoked
pipes and big cigars, drove a Datsun 280Z, wore cowboy boots and appreciated
both hard rock and Willie Nelson. I had to like the guy. But,
contrasts in character that they were, both Blakey and Cornwell viewed their
roles as staff director with the House Select Committee on Assassination
in the same limited perspective: they were the hired hands of the Congressional
Committee members and the priorities of their job were governed strictly
by the desires of those members.
By the time Bob Blakey was offered the position as Committee Chief Counsel
(a few nationally-known figures, including former Watergate prosecutor Archibold
Cox and former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, had reportedly refused
it), the public tumult the Committee had endured has convinced most of the
most of the members that they were trapped in a no-way-to-win situation.
They couldn't get out of it without losing some political face, but hey could
get it over with as soon as possible. When Chairman Stroke offered
Blakey the job, he told him that he definitely wanted the Committee's business
wrapped up within its to-year life span and final report done by the end
of the 1978 Congressional year.
The two-year limitation was an arbitrary and artificial one that, somewhere
along the line, because written in stone. Dick Sprague admitted to
some of the blame. "When I first came to Washington," he later told
Gallery Magazine writer Jerry Policoff, "I was asked how long it would take.
My response was, to properly investigate murder you can never put a time
limit on it. If you ask me what I think ought to be the time to get
the job done, my estimate would be two years. But if you've got an
outside limit, and people who are being investigated know that, they can
stall you for that length of time and defeat the investigation."
Sprague's fear of delaying tactics was based on solid historical precedent.
That's exactly what the CIA pulled on the Warren Commission. When the
Commission was pressing the Agency regarding some information about its Mexico
City operations, an internal memorandum written to then-Deputy Director Richard
Helms noted: "Unless you feel otherwise, Jim (Angleton) would prefer
to wait out the Commission on the matter...." (Angleton was the long-time
chief of the CIA's Counter-Intelligence Division which, strangely enough,
was the unit handling the Agency's dealing with the Warren Commission.)
At his first general staff meeting late in August, 1977, the new Chief Counsel
of the House Select Committee on Assassinations pointedly announced that
he had taken the job with the stipulation and the promise to Chairman Stokes
that the staff would finish its investigation and produce a report by December
31st 1978.
There would be absolutely no possibility, Blakey said, that the Committee
would be extended beyond time. And with that pronouncement, I suddenly
got a revealing insight into Bob Blakey's character. It also indicated
how he viewed the importance of John F. Kennedy's assassination in the large,
historical context. He said nothing incongruous about accepting a basic
and crucial limitation in conducting "a full and complete investigation"
of one of the most important events in this country's history.
At the time, I really didn't believe Blakey. I felt that once we started
rolling, once we started accumulating evidence that demanded further investigation,
well, then Blakey, with the backing of the staff, would stand up to the Committee
and the Committee would stand up to Congress and Congress would be forced
to give us more time and money. The Kennedy assassination was just
too important. We had to go all the way.
It was also at the initial staff meeting the at Blakey established what he
considered the peripheries of the Committee's operations. In clear,
simple and carefully defined terms reminiscent of a Pol Sci I lecture to
a class of frosh, he explained the differences between the function so a
legislative body and the goals of a law enforcement agency. Our primary
duty, he pointed out, was not to conduct a criminal investigation.
We were limited by the powers and privileges granted to Congress by the Constitution.
Our investigative power were merely an auxiliary of the legislative function.
We were not out to produce indictments. We had no legal sanction to
arrest or imprison anyone. Our goals were to gather evidence to be
presented at public hearing and, after that, produce a final report.
There was no doubt that Bob Blakey knew what he was about. Not only
was it apparent now that the staff would finally get truly organized, but
organization itself would be the essence of its being. That became
even more obvious when I was called back to Washington a few weeks later
for another general staff meeting. By that time every staff member
had received newly arrived Deputy Consul Cornwell's bey first memorandum.
It said, if full: "Attached hereto is copy of House Resolution 222.
Please familiarize yourself with this document." That, of course was
the resolution that had created the Committee almost one year before.
At the time, many staffers -- especially the youthfully cynical junior counsels
-- took Cornwell's premier memo as silly and gratuitous. But Cornwell
was laying the very first block in what both he and Blakey took to be their
ultimate goal: To build a record. That was the accent of the
second general staff meeting. It dealt with informational processing
and staff procedures, rules and regulations, the standardization of operations
and documentation production.
I remember returning from Washington after that meeting feeling as if I had
just been blanketed with a heavy, stifling shroud of regulations and procedures.
The investigators had been given a lengthy memorandum entitled "Investigative
Techniques and Procedures." Blakey called it "a summary of specific
guidelines." Among the points listed under "Travel" were: "Call
the office every day between the hours of 10:00 and 12 noon." And: "Be sure
to stay at a reputable hotel."
An even lengthier directive distributed to all staff members was "General
Operating Procedures." Attached to it were sample forms for an Outside
Contact Report, a Document Log, a Routing Slip, an Investigation Interview
Schedule and other standardized report. Illustrative of the type of
detailed control Blakey institute was this:
(9.) All correspondence intended for transmittal to anyone outside of the
staff will first be discuses (orally, or with the aid of a rough draft, as
the case may require) by the staff attorney, researcher, or investigator
with his immediate supervisor, (the Assistant Deputy Chief Counsel, Chief
Investigator, or Assistant Chief Researcher) and then will be typed in final
form, proofed and (if appropriate) signed. The completed letter ready
for mailing, together with all supporting documents will then be submitted,
first, to the staff member's immediate supervisor, and ultimately to the
Deputy Chief Counsel for review. When approved by the Deputy Chief
Counsel, the letter will be delivered by the Deputy Chief Counsel's secretary
to Security for copying. Unless otherwise specifically authorized,
two copies of each such piece of correspondence will be made in all cases
except Agency requests, where three copies will be made. One copy will
be treated as an "original document," and one copy will be treated as a "working
copy" and returned to its author (See Document Handling procedures below.)
With respect to Agency requests, the third copy will be delivered to the
Chief of Legal Staff for filing in the Agency Requests File. The original
(signed) letter will be delivered to the Chief Counsel for approval (and/or
signature), and then mailed by the Chief Counsel's secretary.
Although I recognized the point of such detailed procedures and, in fact,
felt the staff was in dire need of organizational control, it bothered me
that Blakey seemed far more concerned about he character of the record of
the investigation then he was with the character of its substance.
My concern deepened when, just prior to the staff meeting, Cornwell called
me into his office and told me he wanted to talk to me about the nature of
my report.
When I started investigating the Kennedy assassination with Senator Schweiker,
he was not concerned with formal reporting procedures. He was interested
in my spending my time developing information that might help resolve the
case. I was in almost daily telephone contact with other staffers in
his office who were working the case. I also regularly sent informally
written reports detailing and analyzing the information I was coming up with.
Although not required, I felt those were necessary to give Schweiker a basis
for evaluating the information, put it in perspective and provide a groundwork
for discussing where we were and where we were going. Facts can sometimes
be misleading. They are, as critic Dwight MacDonald said, like marbles
which take on different hues and tones according to the light in which they
are viewed. they often are, but don't necessarily have to be, related
to the truth---especially in the case of the Kennedy assassination which,
over the years, has become a field of study in itself. In my written
report, I attempted to use my background and knowledge of the case to give
Schweiker a broader perspective of the information we were developing.
When I joined the House Committee, I thought such analytical reports would
be especially useful since there was no other investigator with my experience
in the case.
Now Cornwell told me to stop them. "I want your reports to be strictly
factual," he said. "Just give us the information. I don't want
any of your analysis going into the record." I objected. That,
I said, would require ignoring the validity of the source of the information.
In Miami, where we are dealing with so many Cubans and soldiers of fortune
who are notorious disseminations of misinformation, to report their droppings
as gospel would produce a misleading record. "All right," Cornwell
said, "if you want to analyze the information put int on separate yellow
paper and I'll tell the mail room not to log it in." that didn't quite
answer the point of my objection, but I came to refer to the procedure as
the "Yellow Paper Ploy."
On the plan flying back to Miami after the staff meeting on procedures, I
tape recorded a note of my feelings at the time: "For the first time,
I'm beginning to understand what it's really like to work in Washington.
Blakey obviously knows what's important here. And what's important
is not what you do, but how what you do looks while you're doing it, how
it looks after you did it, and how it will eventually look in relation to
how everything else you did looks. It's a funny house of mirrors.
But I'm very concerned about the importance given to reports and procedures.
It's clear, in talking with the other investigators, it produces an aura
of restrictiveness, like we're going into the game chained to the bench.
It's instant frustration. Yet we can't say the hell with it and walk
off the court. Then we lose before we start and nothing would get accomplished.
Maybe how we look will be important in the long run."
There is no doubt that, in the long run, Blakey produced a record that looks
impressive. In its final published reports, a compilation of the Committee's
legal memoranda alone took a separate hefty volume of 925 pages. And
the Committee turned over to the National Archives more than 800 boxes of
files -- many times more than the Warren Commission produced. That,
of course, looks impressive, but the substance of those files won't be available
for public scrutiny for 50 years. I don't know whether or not Blakey
knew it was in the works or whether or not he, behind the scene, had anything
to do with it, but just prior to the Assassinations Committee's expiration,
the House promulgated a new regulation automatically restricting all records
not publicly released by any committee. The Assassinations Committee's
files would, of course, be valuable to independent researchers who wanted
to continue investigating the Kennedy murder. They would be even more
informative if they included the collection of memos I kept in my file marked
"Yellow Paper Poly."
This is not the whole story of the operations of the House Select Committee
on Assassinations as produced under the direction of its Chief Counsel G.
Robert Blakey. That's a composite of the activities of several dozen
persons, a few of whom were actually trying to find out what happened in
Dallas on November 22nd 1963. This, rather, is the story of how the
leader so the Committee early decided not to fulfill the Congressional mandate
"to conduct a full and complete investigation." It's the story of how
the Committee was structured, its priorities set, its investigative force
employed and its final report written so as to conceal that fact.
It is also the story of how, after the decision was made to not fulfill its
Congressional mandate, the Committee had to distort its conclusion concerning
a crucial, perhaps critical, area of evidence so as not to invalidate the
thrust of its final report. And so, in the end, it's the story of how
the American people were mislead by their own government.
By the end of its first year of operation, the Assassinations Committee was
beginning to slowly roll forward. With the exception of those in the
administrative, legal and documents handling sections, the staff was divided
into five major "Teams." Each team had two or three attorneys, researchers
and investigators. The "outside" investigators in New Orleans and Miami
were at the disposal of all the teams. Each team had more than one
area of investigation. In Miami, AL Gonzalez and I worked mostly with
Team 2, which had the Organized Crime and Jack Ruby areas, and with Team
3, which had Anti-Castro Cubans and New Orleans.
Bob Blakey spent the first few months on the job as Chief Counsel and Staff
Director establishing administrative processes and procedures, cracking up
the record-building machinery and formulating what he called "working relationships"
with other government agencies. He did, however, at an early staff
meeting, outline the Committee's specific goals and direction. For
the first few months, he said, each team would review its areas of investigation
thoroughly. He called it "foraging." The second phase, he said,
would than entail defining the priority "issues": that is, deciding the crucial
questions in each area. ("Issue" was the favorite word, I discovered,
among Washington lawyers. They used it to mean "question." The
third phase would be the concentrated investigation of those key questions.
Then would come the public hearings and writing the final report.
It all made a good deal of sense and it finally appeared that a real investigation
might be getting under way. However, when Blakey began concerning himself
with the substance of the case, an indication of his attitude towards the
various methods of investigation became clear. Compared to his interest
in the empirical aspects of the investigation -- what the investigators on
the street were actually coming up with -- he spent a disproportionate share
of his time looking after the scientific examination of the evidence.
He had the academician's view of scientific evidence having what he called
the "greatest reliability." That's undoubtedly why so much time and
money was spent on such things as neutron activation analysis, acoustics
studies, ballistic and trajectory analysis and other scientific studies.
But science, like statistics, can lie and two scientists often read the same
results in opposite ways. It happened, for instance, with the panel
of forensic pathologists when one eminent doctor totally disagreed with the
findings of his eminent peers.
Another critical defect Blakey largely dismissed was that some of the evidence
being scientifically evaluated couldn't be authenticated as being the original
evidence. The chain of custody could never be proven in any court.
In fact, the state of security in which some of the evidence was kept was
illustrated in 1972 when it was discovered that someone had stolen into the
National Archives' security area and taken President Kennedy's brain and
a set of microscope tissue slides that might have conclusively shown which
way the fatal bullet came from. Although hits have come from the Kennedy
family that Robert Kennedy wanted the brain in order to properly bury his
brother's body, that doesn't explain the theft of the tissue slides as well.
And stored in the same security area were other crucial pieces of physical
evidence, including the photos and x-rays which the Committee used to corroborate
the single bullet theory. The Committee concluded that the photos and
x-rays are authentic, yet one of its own photo consultants, Robert Groden
is now claiming to have found signs of forgery in this evidence.
Another question of authenticity involves the bullet fragments subjected
to neutron- activation analysis and whether or not they were the same fragments
tested in 1964. those are only a few of the questions the critics are
now asking. There will be many more, each putting another crack in
Blakey's theory of scientific evidence having the "greatest reliability."
My own early impression was that Blakey's initial leaning toward putting
wight on scientific analysis was partially the result of his lack of confidence
in the investigative staff. Although Blakey was eventually able to
stack the staff counsel positions heavy with people he hired himself -- Cornell
Law grads and individuals with backgrounds in prosecuting Organized Crime
-- most of the investigative staff had already been hired by the time he
arrived. And because former Chief Counsel Sprague had viewed the Kennedy
assassination as a homicide case, almost all the investigators were from
the ranks of police homicide squads, the largest number from New York.
Unfortunately, the bulk of Blakey's past associations, as a Justice Department
attorney and a major mahout in the anti-Organized Crime fraternity, had been
with law enforcement personnel of more sophisticated breeding, mostly FBI
agents and Internal Revenue specialists. Now here he was on the Committee
stuck with a bunch of street cops. The way in which Blakey eventually
structured the investigation indicated that he thought little of the potential
effectiveness of his investigative staff. Whether he was right or just
manifesting intellectual arrogance will never be know. Neither will
it be know if the investigators would have come up with more substantial
results if they had been left to conduct an investigation in their own way.
They were never given a chance.
In Miami, and working still pretty much on our own, Al Gonzales and I were
making progress in seeking links between what we considered the potentially
hottest leads, those involving the association of anti-Castro activists with
intelligence operatives. Then suddenly from Washington came a ripple
which forewarned of a new strategy directive from Blakey. It came with
a call from Edwin Lopez, one of the young researchers on Team 3, the anti-Castro
unit. Lopez, a very bright guy attacking his new job with youthful
fervor, was one of the small group of law school students Blakey had brought
from Cornell. Out of New York's Puerto Rican barrio, Lopez was a brilliant
free spirit who wore long curly locks, an infectious smile, baggy jeans and
flip-flops. He was only 21 but he looked 16. Lopez told me that
Team 3 had a major meeting with Deputy Chief Cornwell that morning.
"I think we may have some problems," Lopez said. "In our discussion
with him, Gary craftily manipulated the conversation around to Miami.
Then he asked, 'What the hell are those guys doing down there? Someone
call Fonzi and ask him to answer the question in 20 words or less.'
So I raised my hand and said that I could answer the question in five words:
'Trying to solve the case.' Then he said, 'Well, those guys are running
around down there and they're never going to come up with anything
we can resolve in time. I've got to bring them into our framework.'"
Lopez, who was a little fellow with a soft whisper of a voice, sounded very
concerned. "To tell you the truth," he said, "that really shocked me.
I couldn't believe he didn't know what you guys are doing down there.."
I couldn't believe it either, and didn't. I knew Cornwell had to be
aware of exactly what we were doing if he read the reports -- both formal
and on yellow paper -- which were flowing across his desk. I also didn't
believe he wasn't well aware of the importance of Miami. What the critics
had come to call "the Cubanization of Oswald" is one of the major mysteries
of the Kennedy case. Although he assumed a pro-Castro public posture,
Oswald's contacts were mostly with anti-Castro activists. Miami was
the heart of anti-Castro activism and the headquarters of the groups with
which Oswald had contact. Cornwell knew that very well, along with
the specifics of what we were pursuing. I wondered what he meant when
he talked about bringing the Miami investigators 'into our framework."
Shortly afterwards, Al Gonzales and I were called back to Washington for
another major meeting. Eddie Lopez met us at the airport, a dour expression
on his usually grinning countenance. "No one is very happy around here,"
he
