47

The CIA Also Participated in the Cover-Up

Like a true government agency, after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Central Intelligence Agency immediately went hard to work: covering their own rear ends!

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency engaged in a cover-up of highly relevant information when the Warren Commission was investigating President John Kennedy’s assassination. . . . President Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy became party to the effort which consisted of withholding key facts from the Warren Commission.⁴⁵⁰

Among that highly relevant information that the CIA closely guarded and/or destroyed, was evidence related to Lee Harvey Oswald and his actions on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies. It’s pretty easy to see why they did that, even though it’s clearly obstruction of justice. Anything linking the President’s assassin to the Agency would have been extremely embarrassing.

The CIA lied about Oswald not being debriefed after he returned from his “defection” to the Soviet Union. Researchers uncovered evidence in 1993 that Oswald had been debriefed by the Agency.

Upon Oswald’s return to the U.S. in 1962, he was, in fact, ‘debriefed’ by a CIA officer named Aldrin [‘Andy’] Anderson. The debriefing report was read by CIA officer Donald Deneselya, who confirmed this in an interview for this book on May 25, 2007, as well as in the 1993 PBS Frontline program, “Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?”⁴⁵¹

Their diversionary tactics were employed right from the start too:

Soon after the assassination, Johnson was led to believe by the CIA that Kennedy might have been the victim of a Soviet conspricay.⁴⁵²

Here’s another example of their “obfuscations” of the truth, from Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott:

More importantly, the CIA and FBI conspired to suppress a major clue to the existence of a pre-assassination conspiracy. This was that an unknown person had falsely presented himself as Lee Oswald in a phone call to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. The FBI initially reported that the person making the recorded call ‘was not Lee Harvey Oswald.’ Later the FBI and CIA conspired, swiftly and clumsily, to conceal both the falsity of the impersonation and the fact that FBI agents had exposed the falsehood by listening to the tape.⁴⁵³

That might sound confusing but its ramifications are huge. And, as Scott points out, the way that the Agency covered their intelligence uses of Oswald at the top secret CIA base in Atsugi, Japan, then as a “false defector” to the Soviet Union, and then in Mexico City probably explains what it was that they were actually covering up:

It is important to understand that this suppression was entirely consistent with intelligence priorities of the period. This important clue had been planted in the midst of one of the most sensitive CIA operations in the 1960s: its largest intercept operation against the telephones of an important Soviet base. One can assume that this clue was planted by conspirators who knew that the CIA response would be to suppress the truth. As a result the CIA protected its sources and methods [in accordance with the responsibilities enumerated in its enabling statute]. The result was obstruction of justice in a crime of the highest political significance.⁴⁵⁴

And even after Oswald was eliminated, the CIA was still hard at work on damage control:

Richard Helms, who was then in charge of clandestine operations for the CIA, sent a memo to the FBI on February 18, 1964. Helms was interested in a scar that Oswald was supposed to have had on his left wrist, after he allegedly attempted suicide in Moscow in 1959. Helms requested any FBI information, ‘including the undertakers, copies of any reports, such as autopsy or other, which may contain information pertinent to this point. . . . The best evidence of a scar or scars on the left wrist would of course be direct examination by a competent authority and we recommend that this be done and that a photograph of the inner and outer surfaces of the left wrist be made if there has been no other evidence acceptable to the [Warren] Commission that he did in fact attempt suicide by cutting his wrist.’⁴⁵⁵

As I showed you earlier in this book, the CIA also played a role in “helping” the other side in the Jim Garrison investigation and in altering the Zapruder film of the assassination. They also worked with Time-Life to control that film and thereby manage the early information about the assassination:

For many years, [chief of Time-Life media empire, Henry] Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA was C. D. Jackson, a Time, Inc., vice president who was publisher of Life Magazine from 1960 until his death in 1964. . . . He also ‘approved specific arrangements for providing CIA employees with Time-Life cover. Some of these arrangements were made with the knowledge of Luce’s wife, Claire Booth.’ [Herself a member of the Committee to Free Cuba, immediately after the assassination Mrs. Luce disseminated information implicating Oswald that she’d received from a group of CIA-backed Cuban exiles whom she supported.]⁴⁵⁶

So the CIA and those acting on its behalf were very busy pointing fingers at Cuba and the Soviets and away from Oswald’s links to intelligence.

These facts started to seep out eventually; you can only hide a skunk for so long before it starts to stink. Eventually even former staff attorneys of the Warren Commission started calling the CIA liars. Here’s how former Warren Commission counsel Burt Griffin put it:

I feel betrayed. I feel that the CIA lied to us, that we had an agency of government here which we were depending upon, and that we expected to be truthful with us, and to cooperate with us. And they didn’t do it.⁴⁵⁷

Part of the Agency’s concern was what Senator Frank Church figured out later anyway; that the CIA was using Mafia killers to try and assassinate Fidel Castro. They wouldn’t reveal that earlier; it was a fact, but as Counsel Griffin noted, a fact that they withheld:

The CIA concealed from us the fact that they were involved in efforts to assassinate Castro which could have been of extreme importance to us. Especially the fact that they were involved in working with the Mafia at that time.⁴⁵⁸

Congressman Don Edwards, who was a Chairman of House committee hearings in 1975—and was himself a former FBI agent—reached some pretty dramatic conclusions about it all:

There’s not much question that both the FBI and the CIA are somewhere behind this cover-up. I hate to think what it is they are covering up—or who they are covering for.⁴⁵⁹

And as investigative author Anthony Summers summarized it at the end of his book on the Kennedy assassination:

There is no longer any denying it. Above and beyond the information published in the main body of this book, documents now available confirm that the CIA and the FBI have long covered up what they knew about Oswald before the assassination.⁴⁶⁰

Even the CIA needed help for such a massive campaign of deception, which leads us to Operation Mockingbird and how the government really pulled off the outrage that President Nixon called the “greatest hoax ever perpetuated.”⁴⁶¹ It was easy, as they had control of most of mainstream media!

⁴⁵⁰ Tad Szulc, “FBI-CIA Cover-Up Alleged,” May 28, 1976, The Evening Bulletin: jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/S%20Disk/Szulc%20Tad%20New%20Republic%20The%20JFK/Item%2004.pdf

⁴⁵¹ Janney, Marys Mosaic, 430.

⁴⁵² Talbot, “The mother of all cover-ups.”

⁴⁵³ Peter Dale Scott, “Deep Politics III, Overview: The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico,” December, 2000: history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm

⁴⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵⁵ Ventura & Russell, American Conspiracies, 37.

⁴⁵⁶ Russell, On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, 35.

⁴⁵⁷ Summers, The Kennedy Conspiracy, 376.

⁴⁵⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁴⁶¹ Anderson, “Revelations and gaps on Nixon tapes.”