One of the great mysteries of the twentieth century is whether there was a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy. Let me say clearly that if there was such a scheme, I had nothing to do with it. I was not in Dallas on November 22, 1963; I was not part of a plot to kill the president; and I had no knowledge of the planned assassination. The thought of perpetrating any crime against the president, even though I disagreed with many of his policies, is completely against my innermost convictions, as anyone who truly knows me would attest.
But this matter has cost me a lot of hardship and pain, as conspiracy buffs have linked my name to the terrible crime. It started in 1975 with a book that I shall not name here, in which the authors published photographs of three bums who were arrested on Dealey Plaza that day, asserting that two of the men pictured were myself and Frank Sturgis. The resemblance is only visible by somebody with an active imagination or someone examining doctored photos. The FBI was able to track down the bums—Gus Abrams, John Gedney, and Harold Doyle—whom they hauled in and interrogated. They didn’t know me and I didn’t know them.
I gave a thorough account of my whereabouts in Washington, D.C., that day, sued the authors, and thought that the situation was pretty much taken care of at the time. However, I had no idea about how JFK assassination conspiracies would morph and reconstitute themselves. In a way, it’s like the famous Hydra. You cut off one head, and two grow back.
In August 1978, a former CIA agent, Victor Marchetti, put out an article about the assassination in Spotlight, a weekly magazine published by the Liberty Lobby, a right-wing group that regularly published articles and advertisements with anti-Semitic, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi slants.
In this article, the author relied on a “1966 CIA memo” from Allen Dulles to James Angleton, which revealed that Frank Sturgis, CIA agent Gerry Patrick Hemming, and I had been involved in the assassination plot. The memo was supposedly in the hands of the House Special Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was scheduled to hold hearings later in the month.
The memo, of course, was either fictitious or forged, as it has apparently never seen the light of day and was never published by the HSCA. Nevertheless, I was called in front of the Assassination Committee on November 3, 1978, to give a detailed account of any knowledge I had of the event and about my whereabouts on the fateful day. This testimony, along with that of many other CIA operatives, including Richard Helms, Allen Dulles, and David Atlee Phillips, was finally declassified in 1995.
I read aloud a prepared statement to set the stage:
Not long after Watergate, it became fashionable in certain quarters to suggest that those guilty of Watergate’s heinous crimes might well be guilty of even worse monstrosities, including the assassination of a president of the United States: John F. Kennedy.
Photographs of myself and the other Watergate figures were published widely in this country and abroad. Meanwhile, assassination buffs had developed a number of theories—all at variance with the findings of the Warren Commission—that concentrated on suggested conspiracies. Books appeared, irresponsible headlines erupted in the tabloid press, and the media—ever eager for sensation—gave time and space to proponents of the wildest conceivable theories concerning the identity of the assassin of John F. Kennedy, his sponsors, if any, and so forth. I need hardly take your time or mine to itemize the incredible amount of trash that has been written and televised about that tragic event.
I tried to keep my voice steady and unemotional, befitting a court proceeding; but it proved impossible, and the anger I felt over the following material poured out in bitter tones.
In due course, a tabloid, the National Tattler, sometime around March 1974, I believe, published a story implying that I had been in Dallas when Kennedy was killed and had a hand in his assassination. In response, I sued the tabloid, which promptly went out of business and left me with a default judgment and additional legal costs.
So not only had I been maliciously slandered, but protecting my name against people who were trying to make a buck out of a piece of my flesh, cost me a huge amount of time, money, and aggravation that I couldn’t afford.
From here, I spelled out exactly why I could not be a suspect.
In March 1974—four years ago—I discussed a variety of accusations with the Rockefeller Commission. Although my testimony was not desired, I provided the commission with the following sworn affidavit:
1. On that date, I was an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, assigned to the Domestic Operations Division, located in a commercial building in Washington, D.C.
2. I was driving with my late wife on H Street near 8th or 9th Street when we first heard of the Kennedy shooting on our car radio. We had been purchasing Chinese groceries at a store named, as well as I can recall it, Wah Ling.…
Conspiracy theorists would later point out that there was no Wah Ling store near where I said it was at that time, which gave them ammunition to say that my entire testimony was a lie. They fail to mention that I amended this name just minutes later.
... I do not know how long after the initial radio reports were made that my wife and I first heard the news. [David] Brinkley was the commentator, I remember, because of his having theorized a right-wing plot: i.e., Dallas citizens had abused Adlai Stevenson and the climate of Dallas extremism had caused Kennedy’s shooting.
3. From the Chinese grocery store, we drove out Wisconsin Avenue to pick up our daughter, Kevan, from Sidwell Friends School. On joining us, my daughter told us what we already knew: that President Kennedy had been shot. She had learned this because two of Robert Kennedy’s children had been taken from Sidwell Friends School, presumably by Secret Service agents.
4. From Kevan’s school, we drove directly to our home on Baltan Road in Sumner, Maryland (off Massachusetts Avenue extended). At home was my newly born son, David (DOB 9/1/63); a maid, Mary Trayner; and my wife’s aunt, the late Leona Drexler of Chicago. Our elder son, St. John, a student at nearby Brookmont Elementary School, was probably already home. As I recall, our eldest child, Lisa, arrived soon afterward by bus from Ursuline Academy and joined us at the television set in our basement recreation room, where we stayed long hours watching the unfolding of events: the swearing in of LBJ, the arrival at Andres Field of the presidential coffin, etc.
5. As to why I was not in my office that entire afternoon, I can only presume that I had left early to help my wife shop for a planned Chinese dinner, in preparation of which I normally assisted.
6. I was never in Dallas, Texas, until late 1971, when at the request of Charles Colson [my later White House boss] I flew there to interview General Paul Harkins, former U.S. military commander in Vietnam.
7. I did not meet Frank Sturgis until the spring of 1972, the introduction being performed by and at the office of Bernard L. Barker.
8. I never at any time met or knew Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, or any person involved in the Dallas slayings.
9. I was not in Mexico in 1963. In fact, I was not in Mexico between the years of 1961 and 1970.
Of course, conspiracy theorists still have to bring up the following: that I have little but other people’s memories of the day to support my testimony, the reasons for which I spelled out now:
I have no diaries or other memorabilia prior to 1969, having destroyed as many outdated files and records as possible to save weight in the move to my Florida home in July 1974. I retained only such records, bank statements, etc., as are required by the five-year Internal Revenue Service for income tax purposes.
That was signed, notarized, and sworn to at the time.
Then I amended my statement about the Chinese grocery store, which conspiracy buffs fail to remember.
To that affidavit, I would add only that the name I accorded the Chinese grocery store was mistaken. Since revisiting the site, I have determined that the name of the store was Tuck Cheong.
From here, I contested the so-called photographic evidence of my complicity. I had calmed down somewhat over the last few minutes, but now I could feel the pulse in my throat again. It made me so mad that I had to spend my precious time on this earth repeating my innocence ad nauseam because of the ridiculous accusations of others.
Also in March 1974, I provided the Rockefeller Commission with seventeen different photographs of myself taken during the period 1961–1964. It is my understanding that these photographs were compared with those of the so-called Dallas tramps by an FBI photo analyst, Lyndal Shaneyfelt, who determined with professional finality that the tramp photos were not of Frank Sturgis or myself.
Then in October 1974, assertedly at the request of then FBI director Kelley, I assented to an interview by agents of the FBI’s Baltimore office. Their memorandum of the interview was made public last January.
But even that did not end the continuing harassment. Early in 1975, political activist Dick Gregory was given a series of photographs of the Dallas tramps together with several of Frank Sturgis and myself. In press conferences and talk shows, Gregory professed to see unmistakable similarity between the tramp photos and those of Sturgis and Hunt, and pressed the photographs upon the Rockefeller Commission with demands for satisfaction.
Shortly thereafter, in a timing sequence not entirely coincidental, a book by Alan Weberman and Michael Canfield was published, Coup d’ État in America, which relied heavily on a presumptive likeness of Sturgis and myself to the so-called Dallas tramps. The defamatory intent of the book was so clear that I sued the authors and publisher of the book for libel. The publishing company went out of business, and the publisher returned to his native Nigeria. Litigation against the two authors is active to this day.
That these smears have staying power was reflected during a series of lectures I gave to college audiences last year; invariably some questioner would advert to my supposed involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy on the assumption that I had occult knowledge of the tragedy.
I stopped and took a few deep breaths to keep my temper reined in before continuing.
From time to time, magazine articles rake over the cold ashes of supposed involvement in the Dallas assassination. And the more malicious underground press frequently dwells boldly on the subject, maligning and defaming me to my continuing detriment. Against these injurious falsehoods, I have found myself helpless, for the agitators and profiteers accept no answers save those they prescribe in advance.
Last August, two newspapers—Spotlight, published in Washington, D.C., and the News-Journal of Wilmington, Delaware—printed similar stories concerning me that I found profoundly disturbing. Their burden was that this committee had received from the Central Intelligence Agency a memorandum purportedly initialed by Director Richard Helms in 1966, stating that some day it might be necessary to reveal that Howard Hunt was in Dallas on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. Copies of both stories have been furnished to this committee together with my request that a copy of the alleged memorandum be furnished to me.
To date, the committee has not responded to my request, and I now renew it: I demand that the committee confirm or deny receipt of such a memorandum, and if the memorandum indeed exists, that it be furnished to me so that I may refute its contents in their entirety.
Because I was not in Dallas on the day President Kennedy was killed, I know that the purported memorandum is spurious. The veil of mystery surrounding it, however, is exceedingly damaging to me. The charge has been made; the committee is said to be the source of the false information, and it is within your power to set the matter straight once and for all.
Fair play demands it, and simple justice requires it.
Thank you.
The committee, of course, never furnished the memorandum.
In 1981, I won a $650,000 libel judgment against the Spotlight publisher, Liberty Lobby, which, unfortunately for my bank account, was overturned on a technicality when it was appealed. The case was retried, but a jury decided that the paper had not published the article in “a reckless disregard of the truth,” so therefore it did not fit a narrow legal definition of “malice,” and the jury ruled against me. There is an entire book to be written about the trial, but suffice it to say that any of the thousands of pages that try to connect me to the killing are utterly wrong, and a few books about the subject leave out many pertinent details and testimony that prove I was not in Dallas on the fateful day.
During the retrial, the defendant’s attorney, Mark Lane, trotted out a woman named Marita Lorenz who claimed to have been a former Fidel Castro mistress smuggled out of Cuba by Frank Sturgis under his alias, Frank Fiorelli. Described as a “curvy, black-haired… American Mata Hari” by New York Daily News reporter Paul Meskil, she was an oval-faced, doe-eyed, innocent-looking woman, sporting a classic Jacqueline Kennedy hairstyle. She laid out a bizarre scenario in which I, Sturgis, Hemming, Oswald, and a few murderous Cubans drove from Miami to Dallas to perpetrate the crime of the century. The woman was an amazing tale-spinner who could have had a great career as a spy novelist, but her testimony has been widely discredited, with a full account written by Gaeton Fonzi, a staff investigator for the HSCA, in The Last Investigation.
Did I get into a car loaded with guns in Miami and head for Dallas, as alleged by Marita Lorenz? The answer is no. Did I know Marita Lorenz? No. I didn’t know her, and I wouldn’t have wanted to know her. She was the type of person whom Frank Sturgis was accustomed to handling. She and Sturgis did know each other, and he reportedly conceived a plot to send her to Cuba to reunite with Castro, where she was supposed to administer poison pills to the dictator while he was asleep. She claimed that she met up with her jubilant lover but failed to give him the pills, because she had hidden them in a jar of cold cream, and they had melted. But if that’s true, Sturgis never told me about it before she told the story, so I would have to assume it never took place, as Sturgis was not a person who would avoid taking credit for an operation as worthwhile as that.
Many theories circle around Sturgis’s possible connection with the Mafia. Frank was not a man without a history. He had owned and managed clubs in Virginia Beach, ran guns to Cuba, volunteered for a couple of Central American revolutions, from which he extracted himself without injury, and acted as a petty thief for the Mafia before he eventually straightened out to some extent. Some journalists have connected him to Meyer Lansky and Santos Trafficante, which is entirely possible. He was an amazing individual who could and did pop up in the strangest places when you least expected him.
However, I don’t think Frank was part of a plot against JFK. He was a congenial guy who would follow orders but had a room-temperature IQ. He was also very discretionally challenged and would never have been able to keep such a huge secret until his death. He was very incensed by Marita Lorenz’s story connecting us to the plot, thus expanding her allotment of five minutes of fame to fifteen. So basically I don’t think Sturgis was part of a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, simply because nobody who was intelligent enough to concoct such a wide-ranging plot would have trusted him.
Another name that pops up in JFK conspiracy theories is Cord Meyer. He was a high-level CIA operative whose wife, journalist Mary Pinchot, was having an affair with John F. Kennedy. Meyer was the Yale-educated, blue-blooded son of a wealthy diplomat, who had once been elected the president of the United World Federalists—an organization supported by many intellectuals, such as Albert Einstein—which worked with the United Nations to build a “just world order,” hoping to prevent another world war. In 1951, he was recruited to the CIA by none other than Allen Dulles himself, who placed him under Frank Wisner in what has been called Operation Mockingbird, a highly successful project with the objective of having direct influence over the American media (more about this operation later). By the time of the assassination, Cord had been promoted to chief of CIA’s International Organizations Division.
Some theorists somehow connect dots between Meyer and Sturgis. This is highly improbable given Meyer’s status in the agency. The two just would never have come into contact with each other.
The theorists suggest Cord would have had a motive to kill Kennedy because his wife was having an affair with the president. In 1954, the Kennedys bought an estate just outside Washington, D.C., where they became neighbors of the Meyers. Cord’s wife and Jackie apparently became rather friendly and went on walks together.
Then, on October 12, 1964, Mary was tragically gunned down while walking on a towpath in Georgetown. By that time, she and Cord had divorced, and the media did not realize that her former husband was a high-ranking CIA official. Neither did they find out about her relationship with the president, so headlines about the murder quickly disappeared. Ray Crump, a black man, was arrested near the scene. Although he was acquitted of the crime, which remains unsolved, many court observers said that he got off because he had a good lawyer.
Mary had cautioned at least one close friend to grab her diary if anything ever happened to her. Journalist (later editor) Ben Bradlee happened to be married to Mary’s sister, Antoinette, who found the diary and letters shortly after the death. But there is an interesting fact here.
When the Bradlees arrived at Mary’s house shortly after the murder, they found James Angleton already there, rummaging around the house, looking for the diary and letters. No one has ever mentioned how the CIA official accessed the house, but Bradlee has said that the door was locked when he arrived. So does that mean Angleton broke in?
When Antoinette eventually found the diary, she turned it over to Angleton, who later admitted that the book detailed the affair, talking specifically about how Mary and Kennedy would drop LSD before making love. Mary apparently thought that JFK’s murder had taken place because the industrial-military complex couldn’t allow his mind to be expanded by the drug. The fact that Angleton was already in the house when Bradlee got there is mysterious, as so little time had gone by since the murder.
Journalist Leo Damore wrote in the New York Post that a CIA source told him that Mary’s death was probably a professional hit because “She had access to the highest levels. She was involved in illegal drug activity. What do you think it would do to the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, ‘It wasn’t Camelot, it was Caligula’s court’?”
So I think it probably was a professional hit by someone trying to protect the Kennedy legacy.
I don’t think that Cord Meyer killed his ex-wife, and I don’t think it was Angleton either, although he did apparently know that Mary and Kennedy had carried on the affair. He died without shedding much light on the matter. Cord Meyer is dead, too, as is Sturgis. No one ever made a deathbed confession about either crime.
As for Frank Sturgis, although he always craved action and felt that Kennedy had betrayed Brigade 2506, this was not the way he would have evened the score. And if he had been involved in the killing, he would have somehow passed the knowledge on to me—hinted at it in the very least. We spent a lot of time together as bunk-mates in prison in Danbury, Connecticut, after Watergate, and I’m quite sure he could never have kept this information from me, as we had a good relationship and he thought of me as his boss in covert affairs.
There has been suggestion in some circles that CIA agent Bill Harvey had something to do with the murder and had recruited several Corsicans, especially a crack shot named Lucien Sarti, to back up Oswald and make sure the hit was successful. Supposedly, Sarti was dressed in a Dallas police uniform and fired the fatal bullet from the grassy knoll behind the picket fence.
However improbable it might be, it is vaguely possible. Oswald was not a great marksman while in the marines, and if he did kill Kennedy, he got off the most accurate shots of his life. So he may have received some help.
Is it possible that Bill Harvey might have recruited a Mafia criminal to administer the magic bullet? I think it’s possible. I can’t go beyond that. Harvey could definitely be a person of interest, as he was a strange character hiding a mass of hidden aggression. Allegations have been made that he transported weapons to Dallas. Certainly it is an area that could use further investigation.
Since I don’t believe that Oswald had the ability to perform the horrible feat of accurate marksmanship that killed Kennedy, especially with the mail-order 1938 Italian-manufactured Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he used, I think there may have been another shooter behind the fence, although I would like to stress that I have no specific knowledge of who that person might be. I wish I did, but I don’t. Again, as technology gets better, perhaps a further examination of film and audio taken that day can formulate new leads.
But I am open to some postulation. While he always denied it, there has been enough speculation that David Atlee Phillips—using the pseudonym Maurice Bishop—met with Oswald in Mexico City before the assassination to have him called up in front of the HSCA to refute the allegations. After the Bay of Pigs, Phillips helped formulate plans to assassinate Castro and was named chief of Cuban Operations in 1963. In Miami, he helped support Alpha 66—an infamous anti-Castro group that made guerilla forays against Cuba—and reportedly told the organization’s founder, Antonio Veciana, that he hoped to provoke the United States into interceding in Cuba by “putting Kennedy’s back to the wall.”
So there are now three CIA agents who have been named in connection with Oswald—David Phillips, Cord Meyer, and Bill Harvey—all with means, motive, opportunity, or some connection to kill Kennedy. Perhaps, one day, a CIA archivist may stumble on some file that connects these operatives together.
If that’s the case, Harvey had seniority and would have been the person in charge, with the others taking orders from him. Phillips and I were basically the same rank, so we didn’t take orders from each other. But Harvey was senior to both of us by several grades. He had been deputy to Angleton and very deeply involved in counterespionage activities. Having been stationed in Rome, he very well might have come in contact with the Corsican Mafia and heroin traffickers whom theorists claim he recruited for the assassination. Some theorists hypothesize that two other high-profile individuals might have been involved: Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. As far as I’m concerned, as paranoid as he was, Nixon would never have been involved. He would not only have been horrified of the action but would never have trusted anyone to know he was involved.
Lyndon Johnson was an opportunist who would not have hesitated to get rid of any obstacles in his way. He could easily have been in touch with Harvey or Phillips. I think he and Meyer were too different socially to come in contact with each other. I do not know of any specific contact that the two had, but Phillips was a man on the way up and became a significant CIA figure whom LBJ would have wanted to get to know.
Harvey, however, is the most likely suspect. If he felt his position was in jeopardy, he was the type of person who would have taken drastic action to remedy the situation. It is a big leap, because he was a brain-addled pistol-toting drunk and very much under the thumb of his wife, who would have made the perfect concentration camp guard, but there is the slightest possibility that Harvey and LBJ could have formed some kind of thieves’ pact between them.
In Washington, there is a caste system in regard to who will talk to whom. Would LBJ have spoken directly to Harvey? Yes, I think he could have done that, as Harvey’s rank and position was such that a vice president could talk to him. Harvey may have had an intense personal dislike for the Kennedys and even had a severe clash with Bobby Kennedy around the time of the missile crisis. He posted an old slogan somewhere on the agency premises that read, “The tree of liberty must be nourished by the blood of patriots,” which incensed the attorney general, bringing them into direct confrontation.
While it seems that it would be a philosophy Bobby would have embraced, the two argued about it. Some say that Bobby was worried that Harvey was trying to glorify the Bay of Pigs invasion, which he did not himself believe in. Others have simply observed that Harvey was so under the influence of alcohol, he would have argued with anybody about anything. How Harvey had risen so high was a mystery to me. Sometimes the appointments to various CIA positions were entirely baffling, but I just mollified myself by saying that the DCI knew more than I did. The association between Harvey and the Corsicans also stems from a memo he authored when he was running the executive action program (which advocated the assassination of hostile targets), in which he professed a desire to employ Corsicans as hit men, whom he most likely would have used against Castro.
Conspiracy nuts say that the person who had the most to gain from Kennedy’s assassination was LBJ. There was nobody with the leverage that LBJ had, no competitor at all. He was the vice president, and if he wanted to get rid of the president, he had the ability to do so by corrupting different people in the CIA.
It has also been said by many LBJ biographers, such as Robert Caro in The Path to Power, that the man idolized money, was corrupt and unprincipled, with unlimited ambition—not the type of individual who was content to end his career as vice president (then considered a career-ending position treading water as flotsam in U.S. history, the stuff of future trivia questions). Many people conjecture that Johnson was set to drop even lower in footnote status, observing that he was destined to be cut from the 1964 presidential ticket. He and Kennedy did not get along, and theirs was completely a marriage of convenience facilitated by another power broker, “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran, who had played a backroom part in so much preceding U.S. history.
Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency without having to work for it himself, could have been a very tempting and logical move on Johnson’s part. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to make contact with Harvey, another ruthless man who was not satisfied with his position in the CIA and its government salary. He definitely had dreams of becoming DCI, and LBJ could do that for him if he were president.
If LBJ had anything to do with the operation, he would have used Harvey, because he was available and corrupt. LBJ had the money and the connections to manipulate the scenario in Dallas and is on record as having convinced JFK to make the appearance in the first place. He further tried unsuccessfully to engineer the passengers of each vehicle, trying to get his good buddy Governor Connolly to ride with him instead of in JFK’s car—where theorists observe he would have been out of danger.
Who knows the depths of Harvey’s criminal connections? He may easily have known Mafia members who have been named as possible conspirators, such as Johnny Roselli, Santos Trafficante, Sam Gian-cana, and Carlos Marcello. I don’t know if any of these people were involved. But these are names that have come up in connection with the assassination plot on Castro. The flames of the LBJ assassination theory have been stoked into bonfires by a few books citing Billy Sol Estes and Johnson’s friend, the powerful Texas attorney Ed Clark, as possible coconspirators.
Other scenarios include the assassination of Kennedy by a Cuban organization angered by the president’s failure to go after Castro again. After the Bay of Pigs, I had many of the principals come to me asking, “Eduardo, let me know when we are going to do it again!”
I tried to suppress any hope of reconstituting the invasion, as we had created as massive an effort as we ever hoped for, and its lack of success was probably final. It was apparent that any successful attack would entail the use of a great many U.S. troops, not a brigade of hastily trained adventurers. It was very discouraging news to the Cuban exile movement, which began to hate Kennedy for preventing the needed air support.
When Kennedy compounded his mistake by promising Khrushchev that the United States would not invade Cuba, a lot of exile groups felt that the president had sold them out. The leadership group in the Frente definitely considered him a traitor to the cause and were especially bitter and hostile to the president, whom they had once supported vociferously over Nixon.
Some of those Cuban exiles might have been involved in the assassination, though I couldn’t name anybody offhand. It is alleged that Antonio Veciana, the leader of the anti-Castro group Alpha 66, met with Dave Phillips in Mexico City and, at some time, with Oswald. So that is another avenue that could use further investigation.
Interestingly, even Fidel Castro’s name has been bandied about as a possible culprit, centering on a grudge against Kennedy for the president’s possible complicity with the Mafia to end his life. I suppose this is possible, but I interviewed a Cuban refugee woman in 1971 who happened to have been in Castro’s house at the time of Kennedy’s murder. She said that a pall of gloom settled over the household because Fidel and Kennedy had been working on a détente to lessen the tensions between countries. While this information was otherwise unverifiable, the woman had an air of credibility, and I furnished my tape of the interrogation to the CIA (from which I had already retired). I don’t think that I would have done such a thing if I was guilty of the crime, wishing instead to leave as many unanswered questions in the field as possible.
While many buffs cast a jaundiced eye on Phillips’s meeting with Oswald in Mexico City, if it happened, it would have been entirely appropriate for Phillips to meet with the man, as Phillips was station chief, and the station maintained surveillance of the Cuban embassy. Oswald had been spotted visiting there. The meeting may have been completely on the up and up, with Phillips trying to recruit Oswald. The CIA had a general policy that if we came across an interesting figure—and Oswald would certainly have been of interest as a U.S. defector who married a Soviet—he would have been a natural target for any alert CIA officer.
Phillips might have even given Oswald orders for some operation in Mexico, but the bureaucratic steps for something like that were pretty well established, so there should have been a paper trail left behind. If you’re dealing with an American who’s living abroad, then one set of procedural rules is followed. If the proposed asset is not American, there is another set of procedures and qualifications that come into play. Oswald, of course, would have been considered an American citizen. He had been in the Marine Corps, and so recruiting him, whether in Mexico or the United States, had a fixed set of requirements.
Could Phillips have tried to recruit Oswald on the sly? He certainly had the ability and the knowledge. I mean, we are talking about David Phillips, one of the most effective agents I have ever known. But precisely because of that, I cannot see Philips having anything to do with such an operation. He was a professional’s professional who took orders from the top and would have considered the presidency an inviolable position.
While Phillips was a consummate CIA officer, he wasn’t above a bit of disinformation. When I was in prison in Connecticut later on, someone mailed me a copy of Phillips’s book, The Night Watch, which I read with horror, as he used my name in connection with events that I had nothing to do with.
For example, he charged me with taking a group of Guatemalan men to a nightclub and wining and dining them, which never happened. I had an opportunity after I got out of prison to meet with Phillips before he died. He seemed a bit nervous when I told him that I had some questions about the book.
“Dave, you had an interesting story there. Why in the world did you mention me incorrectly in connection with this evening out on the town?” I asked.
He coughed before responding. “Well, my editor wanted something to spice up the book, and you were a well-known name and you were in prison, so I didn’t think you’d mind. So I tagged your name onto a couple of things that were fictional.”
“Well, you didn’t do me any favors with that,” I told him. “You could have just made up the name of a fictitious agent like everyone else.”
The reason why it was such a negative detail was that if I had been involved in such an affair, it would have been considered a clear security violation. It didn’t happen. I wondered over the years what possible benefit it could have been for him to write that.
I think that was the last time we spoke, and Phillips died fairly soon after our meeting. I have always been a little bitter about being treated that way after everything we had been through, especially as I had been instrumental in forwarding his career. I had heard about the job he was doing as agent in charge in Santiago, Chile, and was one of the officers who asked him up to Washington and Miami for interviews for PB/Success. On my recommendation, he became a CIA officer and not just a contract agent.
What about Jack Ruby? Was he recruited or pressured by the Mafia to kill Oswald? I think it’s possible, because otherwise we are floundering around trying to figure out a motive for Ruby to do what he did. At that time, I don’t think he was aware that he had terminal cancer, so that would lend itself to a Mafia plot.
There’s only one problem with that scenario. No one has ever talked. With all the top-level Mafia figures—capos, hit men, godfathers—who have been arrested and flipped or sent to jail and written books from within the witness protection program, wouldn’t someone have used the JFK knowledge as a get-out-of-jail-free card or a ticket to fame and fortune? Even Deep Throat has finally confessed! The Mafia failed to kill Castro and probably wouldn’t have been very adept at a complicated scenario like the Dealey Plaza operation, either. Most hits they accomplished were either brutal assaults in a controlled environment, such as a neighborhood street or a restaurant, using massive firepower, or the quick kidnapping and disappearance of a rival. Mafia hit men were not adept sharpshooters using high-power rifles. Also, they probably would have preferred doing the hit in a town where they had more knowledge of the terrain, such as New York or Chicago.
Another reason my name has become involved with the assassination is a notorious letter that was allegedly written by Oswald on November 8, 1963, reading:
Dear Mr. Hunt:
I would like information concerding [sic] my position. I am asking only for information. I am suggesting that we discuss the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else.
Thank-you [sic],
Lee Harvey Oswald
In 1974, after my name had been exposed in Watergate, the letter was mailed by the KGB to at least three conspiracy advocates, one of whom published it in a book. Afterward, the HSCA had the document examined by a handwriting expert, who pronounced it a forgery. Most likely, it was part of a clumsy disinformation campaign by the KGB. It certainly doesn’t read as if the person who wrote the letter was very conversant in English, even misspelling the word concerning. It may have been written by a person with a thick accent, spelling the word the way he pronounced it.
Defecting agents have confirmed that the KGB was involved in many strange and, to us, patently ridiculous propaganda campaigns. Trying to connect the CIA with the assassination of a beloved president may certainly have been on their agenda. The forger may also have been trying to implicate another famous Hunt: H. L. Hunt of Texas fame.
Another CIA person of interest who has been linked to that dreadful day is David Morales. Bill Harvey posted Morales to the CIA’s Miami station in 1961, where he became chief of Covert Operations for JM/Wave, an operation to destabilize Castro after the Bay of Pigs. Morales and Harvey could have been manufactured from the same cloth—both were hard-drinking, tough guys, possibly completely amoral. Morales was rumored to be a cold-blooded killer, the go-to guy in black-ops situations where the government needed to have someone neutralized. I tried to cut short any contact with him, as he wore thin very quickly.
It’s been written that I was working in Mexico when Lee Harvey Oswald went there. But if he was in Mexico City, I did not know about him at that time. I had no reason to know anything about him, as there was no general alert on Oswald anywhere, and I never heard his name until I read it in the newspaper after he killed Kennedy.
As far as I know, Oswald had no connection with the CIA at all, unless there was some contact initiated by Phillips because of the U.S. citizen’s previous defection and return. Someone may have tried to flip him, because it was very strange that he was ever allowed back into the United States.
In that regard, while I don’t think that there was ever any evil intent by an official to allow Oswald into the United States to kill the president, I do think that it was typical of the sloppiness and the disregard of the visa people in the Department of State. The official who accepted Oswald’s resignation from the United States in Moscow was Dick Snyder, a regular FSO (Foreign Service officer). I don’t know if he was ever queried about why he treated Oswald so gently. Snyder should have been sanctioned by the Department of State, but he never was.
Some people have said that there was a false defector program, in which the CIA would send people over to the Soviet Union and bring them back to debrief them. While a program of this type might have proved useful, I think that it credits the CIA with a lot more intelligence than it usually displayed. It never had such a program. It had a program of interviewing Cubans and Spaniards who had been arrested years before and sentenced to work in the Soviet Union. I remember that program because Archie Roosevelt was in Madrid in charge of screening these people. You got the names from the Spanish authorities, and he and his group would have an opportunity to question them about anything hot at that time, but that was the closest to what has been suggested.
As far as a possible connection between Oswald and the FBI goes, I would think that the bureau would have been extremely cautious with him. Oswald would have asked for money, which was in short supply at the FBI. The FBI had trouble flipping people or recruiting informers because they usually didn’t have enough hundred-dollar bills to arouse the interest of somebody whom they wanted to use. They were like our poor cousins. Besides, their scope was limited to criminal activity and criminal prosecutions, and I don’t know if Oswald had ever had any criminal activities that would have attracted the attention of the bureau.
I think Oswald was actually what he purported to be: a left-wing individual who for lack of any other determining goal had subscribed to the Marxist tenets of the Soviet Union. I think he was attracted by authority, and authority is something the Soviet Union had lots of. They could put people on top of him to hold him down and guide him so that he would do whatever they might want. That whole history of Oswald’s defection is a little uncertain as far as I’m concerned, because he came over with too much baggage, and that was revealed later on. Nobody knew it at the time, but I think the bureau was much more cautious of what they did with him.
The CIA never did anything with him and had no reason to. He was a nothing. Oswald was a kind of incompetent dreamer who drifted into Texas politics and then international politics. He got involved with Fair Play for Cuba (a pro-Castro group) and other causes, which limited his scope and limited our interest, if any, in him. I’m assuming that over the years any contact reports between Phillips and Oswald would be a matter of record. You could almost say if there was nothing in the file, then it never existed.
Why would Phillips have a meeting with Oswald? What did he want from Oswald? I think that anybody who had lived in the Soviet Union and had renounced American citizenship to do so would be a natural subject for contact and investigation. Although Phillips was not an investigator, maybe he received direct orders to go after Oswald and see if he could recruit him.
Who could have given Phillips those orders? It seems to me that Bill Harvey is the most likely candidate, because it was an off-key operation. Nothing was being handled through regular channels. But I truly don’t know.
Some buffs have even suggested that the mastermind behind the Kennedy assassination was Richard Helms. Again, I would have to say no. Helms was definitely nonpolitical, and he had prospered under the Democratic administration. But Helms was probably the most intelligent of all these people we are talking about. He had a wonderful education at Le Rosey in Switzerland. He worked in Germany, his German was very fluent, and he was a favorite of Allen Dulles—and with good reason, because I think Helms became one of our most effective chiefs of operations. That is what he was to me, and I found him a congenial figure.
But in the end, Helms was an expert in CYA (cover your ass), not CIA. When the time came when he might have been able to help me and come to my defense, Dick said, “Oh, Hunt.… Oh, well, I sort of know him. He was a romantic.” And that was all he had to say about me. He pretended that he barely knew me when in fact he had known me for years.
During the course of a year, we would have lunch between three and six times. In fact, Helms had made a confidant out of me, once calling me at the office to say, “Meet me downstairs right away. I have something to tell you.”
What he had to tell me was that he had broken up with his wife and had moved to a country club in anticipation of a divorce. This was, at the time, extremely privileged information. We had lunch about six weeks later. Helms told me that he had just been summoned down to LBJ’s ranch and had spent a wild weekend there riding a jeep at top speed through the property. Out of that emerged the confidence that he was going to be announced as the deputy director of the CIA, which, of course, evolved over time to DCI. So, as far as I know, I was the first person he told about such important events in his life.
LBJ appointed him as director, but he wouldn’t play ball with Nixon or comply with Nixon’s requests to investigate White House leaks, so the president basically fired him, sending him to Iran during Watergate.
Helms could always keep one thing in sight, and that was his future. He could judge if something was going to be negative, and then he would have nothing to do with it. And if he did, he would lie about it later. He was charged with a federal case of perjury, and he got out of that by paying a fine with money that was raised by people at the CIA who were fond of him. Not that he didn’t have money, but his followers were right there raising money, which amounted to about $2,000. A small sum compared to the money I had to pay after Watergate. Of course, I also spent thirty-three months in jail, which he didn’t have to do, either. But there were lots of people who got out by the skin of their teeth.
Nixon, on the Watergate tapes, made some famous statements about me. He said, “Howard Hunt, he knows too much. This is going to open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing.” He said something about “if you open that scab, there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to come out.” I was extremely surprised to find that out and even more perplexed when H.R. Haldeman wrote in his memoirs that “Bay of Pigs” was code language for the Kennedy assassination. In my mind, this proves that the president was even crazier than anybody gave him credit for. Does this mean he started to believe that he had something to do with the assassination, that I was involved, and that there was some terrible secret to uncover? Well, Ronald Reagan thought that he had fought in World War II, when what he was truly remembering was a movie that he starred in. So anything is possible.
In Nixon’s perspective, anyone who was not under his direct authority had to be dealt with very cautiously. And if he thought that I knew things that were only available to limited associates, then that would be cause for alarm on his part. Try as I might, I don’t know what he meant by that. The bare facts of the Bay of Pigs simply support the conclusion that we all know—that the United States trained these men, launched them, and that the necessity at the time of concealing the American hand was what in the long run destroyed the Bay of Pigs operation. It’s possible, knowing that Nixon was taping himself, that he started to use the Bay of Pigs as a euphemism for Project Gemstone (detailed later) or for the Watergate break-in itself, as the Cubans involved were all BOP veterans. Now that makes sense. I did know too much about Watergate. It was something he wanted to hide. It was a conspiracy that would end his presidency.
As long as we are on the topic of assassination, I suppose that this is as good a time as any to set the record straight concerning General Omar Torrijos of Panama (known as the “dictator with a heart”) and General Rafael Trujillo, the brutal leader of the Dominican Republic. Both were killed, and some people have suggested that I was involved. I was interrogated about these murders by the Assassination Committee.
A December 1977 syndicated column by Jack Anderson even quoted a supposed “secret memo” by a Miami prosecutor alleging that Mañuel Artime confessed that I had tried to recruit him to help assassinate Torrijos. This was written conveniently after Artime’s death, so he could not refute it, and no memo signed by Artime ever came to light.
I had no part in the death of either man. Both had plenty of homegrown enemies who are probably responsible without the complicity of the United States. In fact, Torrijos, while allowing drug smugglers too much latitude to operate in his country—which obviously irritated the U.S. authorities—nonetheless had a stable centrist regime in an area where other countries such as Nicaragua and El Salvador were plagued by unrest. I think that the CIA would have found a more coercive method to influence Torrijos than by sanctioning him.
I will reiterate here, though, that I do not believe the CIA had anything to do with JFK’s death. The upper echelon all had prospered under Democratic administrations. The crazier the world was, the more they were needed. The people who were fired after Bay of Pigs would have lacked the wherewithal to accomplish anything like this, even if it had crossed their minds, which it wouldn’t have. While there may have been rivalries between divisions over the years, lapses of judgment, and bureaucratic snafus, as there are today, these men had been wealthy power brokers before entering the CIA; they had all persevered through several administrations and were all near retirement age, anyway. If any high-ranking CIA officer had hated JFK enough to do him harm, he would have simply done it politically.
James McCord, a former CIA security officer, wrote lawyer Dan Schultz on December 17, 1976, during the time that I was suing the Liberty Lobby:
A false allegation was made shortly after March 23, 1973, that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were in Dallas at the time the President was killed, and a photograph was circulated purporting to be Hunt and Sturgis there at the time. Persons I know circulated and touted the story to the press, knowing the allegation was false in its entirety, and further that the men in the photographs bore no resemblance whatever to Hunt and Sturgis. I know that Hunt was not in Dallas and had no connection whatever with the President’s death.… Great anguish and damage has been done to Hunt, and no doubt will be taken into consideration by a parole board considering his release from prison.
I finished my testimony to the HSCA with these words:
I appreciate the opportunity to appear before the committee and to be interrogated as extensively and broadly as has been accomplished here this afternoon.… It is very hard to prove a negative, you know. I didn’t have anything to do with the assassination, didn’t know anything about it. It is unfortunate that everything I went through in Watergate has bled over into a great national tragedy, and that was the assassination of President Kennedy. And I think that the nation is willing to forgive Watergate now. I certainly think I have paid my penalty for being involved in it, but to have this new stain attached to me, relatively new—that is, in the last two or three years—this assassination of the President is something really that the nation is never going to forgive. I am afraid I will be forever stained with some kind of suspicion that I had something to do with it. It is very, very unfair.
I did my time for Watergate. I shouldn’t have to do additional time and suffer additional losses for something I had nothing to do with.