The controversy sparked by the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK led to the bipartisan congressional passage of the JFK Assassination Records Act in 1993. That act created the JFK Assassination Records Review Board and led to the release of nearly six million JFK assassination records. The Board also met and held public hearings with researchers and previous government investigation participants. I was fortunate to be invited to the very first such meeting along with two other researchers and Robert Blakey, who headed up the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s, and David Slawson, one of the lawyers who had worked on the Warren Commission in 1964.
Something I saw happen at that meeting has been on my mind ever since. My book, Oswald and the CIA, was already at the printing press and I had given an advance copy to the Review Board. I had heard, as many who had worked on the case had, the rumor about Slawson’s colleague, William Coleman, another Warren Commission attorney. The rumor was that Coleman had, at his poolside, told a British researcher that the two attorneys, Coleman and Slawson, had traveled to Mexico City in the spring of 1964 and listened to the tape-recorded intercept of a phone call allegedly made by Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City in the fall of 1963.
In view of the CIA’s claim that the tapes had all been erased several weeks before the assassination, this second-hand hearsay was interesting. The rumor about Coleman’s remark was nevertheless useless in terms of its credibility. That first Review Board “Experts Conference” changed the landscape around that rumor, however. Slawson was sitting across the table from me when one of the Board members asked him directly if he had listened to the Mexico City tapes. With cool composure he sat back in his chair and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not at liberty to discuss that.” Suddenly, the room was full of energy.
Another Board member explained the facts to Slawson: the Review Board was now, by statute, the governing authority on the withholding of any information concerning the JFK case. Slawson was asked a second time: “Did you listen to the Mexico City tapes?” Again, he replied with the exact same words, “I’m sorry, but I’m not at liberty to discuss that.” It was not my place to say anything to him but I wanted to, for I knew what was at stake. On the table was an advance copy of Oswald and the CIA, and in that book I had made the argument that Oswald’s voice was not on the Mexico City tapes.
I had advanced that argument solely on the content of the tapes. It was evident to me that whoever was speaking into the phone had not understood all of the details of Oswald’s experiences inside the Cuban Consulate and the Soviet Embassy—the diplomatic posts from which the CIA had intercepted the phone calls. I knew that a case could be made that one or more of the tapes of the alleged Oswald calls had survived because Hoover had said so to President Johnson on Saturday morning, just twenty-two hours after the assassination.
What Hoover told Johnson, moreover, is that the voice on the tape was not Oswald’s. I was both disappointed and annoyed by Slawson’s casual rebuff of the Review Board. If he and his Warren Commission partner on that trip had listened to the tape and it was not Oswald’s voice, then the very underpinning of the national security cover-up of the president’s murder would be exposed as a fabrication. This is what was at stake when Hoover gave LBJ the news.
When I wrote Oswald and the CIA, the “Lopez Report”—the investigation of Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City by Eddie Lopez and Dan Hardaway of the House Select Committee on Assassinations—had not been declassified. So I was unaware of the extent to which the story about the voice on the tapes had travelled on Saturday morning. As the months gave way to years, I made presentations at conferences and wrote several articles for PBS’s Frontline and other venues. As my research on the case progressed during the thirteen years after my book, the story in the Mexico City tapes and the story about the voice on them were always the fulcrum of my work.
In November of 1999, Deborah Reichman of the Associated Press was able, based upon all of the new evidence I had collected, to break the story of the tapes nationally. The fact that this evidence contradicted the CIA’s official story on the tapes was carried on all the main network evening news broadcasts and again at 11:00 P.M. The story received a solid 80% coverage rate the following day in the print media. Most of us in the research community—used to being marginalized by the mainstream media—were surprised at this positive media coverage. I suppose, in retrospect, that one reason we did so well is that the news story did not utter a word about a conspiracy in the president’s murder. To me, that did not matter. I knew that the story about the voice on the tapes would one day expose the lone nut theory propagated by Johnson and his commission of inquiry for what it was.
Mum was the word at the CIA, and it still is today. I am resigned to this now. We all are. President Kennedy did not die as the result of the acts of a single individual. There is a lot that we now know about the nature of the plot and the cover-up that followed the murder. I have left the original Oswald and the CIA intact, not because it was perfect, but because it is as good a snapshot as any of where, in my view, matters stood in 1995. For now, I have condensed my views as they have evolved in the last thirteen years into a new ending chapter for the 2008 edition.
I would like to thank Jefferson Morley, Rex Bradford, and Malcolm Blunt for their suggestions and observations on this new chapter.
John Newman, March 2008