John F. Kennedy

The Assassination of JFK

Michael Scott's father, Winston, had been chief of the CIA's Mexico City station from 1956 until his retirement in 1969, so in 1985 when Scott dropped in at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he was greeted more cordially than one might expect from the not-entirely-inviting spy agency.

Scott's father, a career secret agent, died in 1971, apparently from complications of a household accident. At the time of his passing he had just put the finishing touches on a memoir of his cloak and dagger career. He planned a trip to Washington to voluntarily (even enthusiastically) have the text vetted by his former boss, director of Central Intelligence, Richard "man Who Kept the Secrets" Helms. But due to his demise, the elder Scott's travel plans were canceled. Within hours after Mrs. Scott found her husband's body drooping over the breakfast table, the CIA's legendary and consummately creepy counterintelligence chief James Angleton showed up on the Scott family doorstep in Mexico City, searching for the manuscript.

In 1985, Michael Scott was making ends meet as a Hollywood producer. Out of curiosity, he asked to see the never-published book. He hoped it would help him better understand his father's mysterious life. An inquiry to the CIA prompted the invitation to Langley. As he told the story to reporter Dick Russell, Scott was introduced to a "high-ranking officer who had obviously read the manuscript," who told him that "they had been forced to delete portions of the manuscript for national security."

What portions? The surviving Scott inquired.

"Well, there was some mention of Lee Harvey Oswald in some area," the CIA officer said, "and we don't want to make that public."

The CIA treated the son of one of its veteran officers no differently than it treated Congress and the American public. It held back or destroyed who-knows-how-many documents that could have illuminated the background of the JFK assassination - many relating to its formerly supersecret alliance with the mob to clip Castro,

Helms lied to the Warren Commission when he testified that the CIA never "contemplated" using Oswald as a contact. In fact, in 1960, according to internal CIA memos, the Agency "showed intelligence interest" in the then-obscure Oswald. During his condolence call at the Scott residence, Angleton scooped up a tape recording, purportedly of Oswald. The CIA tape came from Oswald's now-famous visit to Mexico City in the summer of 1963, just a few months before the Kennedy assassination.

Oswald - or someone pretending to be Oswald or someone identified as Oswald - went to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City petulantly and obstreperously demanding a visa to Castro's Cuba. He also reportedly met wit Soviet intelligence agents and tried to obtain a visa back to the Soviet Union where he had once defected (and returned to the United States strangely unmolested). Why? There are a number of theories. Perhaps Oswald was a disaffected nit smitten by delusions of Marxist grandeur (who later took out his private frustrations on JFK). Or perhaps he was working for an intelligence agency in an anti-Cuban operation. There were many underway at the time.

Or perhaps someone was trying to make Oswald look like a communist so that, the theory goes, the Soviets could take the blame for the subsequent assassination. After the assassination, there was an attempt by CIA operatives and powerful right-wingers (led by oilman H. L. Hunt) to finger Castro and/or Kruschev as the kingpin.

In any case, Oswald's voice was recorded in Mexico City and Winston Scott saved one of the recordings in his home. He kept it even after he retired. The CIA did not admit that such a recording existed until 1976. Then it lied that the recordings were all destroyed before the assassination. The FBI later said that the voice on the tapes was not Oswald's at all.

Someone impersonating Oswald prior to the assassination?

The Mexico City episode is crucial to any portrayal of Oswald as an emotionally volatile crank, but in a 1978 debate with attorney and pioneering conspiracy researcher Mark Lane, the CIA's former Western hemisphere chief David Atlee Philips announced that "there is no evidence to show that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Soviet embassy." If he didn't, who did? Lane described Philips's startling statement as a "confession."

Philips was the CIA spokesman before Congress about the Oswald tapes. This is the same David Philips suspected by the House Select Committee on Assassinations of doubling as "Maurice Bishop," CIA controller of the Cuban "Alpha 66" anti-Castro brigade. The same David Philips in charge of exculpating the CIA in the Oswald-Mexico City incident may have engineered the "Mexico City scenario" in the first place, according to Lane, who has made a legal and literary career out of blaming the CIA for JFK's death.

Alpha 66's Cuban leader, Antonio Veciana, claimed that at one of his hundred or so meetings with "Bishop," Oswald was there, not saying anything, just acting odd. "I always thought Bishop was working with Oswald during the assassination," Veciana told reporter Russell.

Veciana's cousin worked for Castro's intelligence service. After the assassination, Bishop wanted Veciana to bribe his cousin into saying that he met with Oswald, in order to fabricate an Oswald-Castro connection.

Investigators never established for sure that Bishop and Philips were one and the same, but descriptions of Bishop's appearance and mannerisms mirrored Philips's. a police artist's sketch of Bishop based on Ceviana's description jogged the memory of Senator Richard Schweiker, a member of the assassination committee, as being the spittin' image of Phillips. When the select committee's ace investigator Gaeton Fonzi finally brought Veciana and Philips together, the two started acting weird around each other. After a short conversation in Spanish, Philips bolted. Witnesses to the encounter swear that a look of recognition swept Veciana's visage, but Veciana denied that Philips was his case officer of more than a decade earlier.

"But," Veciana added cryptically, "he knows."

Veciana's reluctance to make the ID, Fonzi theorized, stemmed from two unfortunate events that had befallen the Cuban of late: one, he was convicted of running drugs and suspected that Bishop set him up; two, he was shot in the head.

Later Fonzi put the question to Ceviana in a more comfortably roundabout way. "Would you have told me if I had found Maurice Bishop?" he asked. "well, you know," said Veciana with a smile, "I would like to talk with him first."

Russell interviewed a retired army colonel named, coincidentally, Bill Bishop, who claimed to be a CIA-employed hit man (in his talk with Russell, Bill Bishop took credit for pulling the trigger on Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo). Bill Bishop said that he worked for the CIA's Mexico station with Philips and that he and Philips ran Veciana together. He later produced a tape recording of a phone call between Veciana and himself in the mid 1980s. The two clearly know each other.

There was definitely something the CIA did not want publicized about Lee Harvey Oswald. The Veciana saga might contain at least a clue. However, because no conspiracy theory has been more widely written about than the JFK assassination, no conspiracy theory has come in for more strident attacks. The credibility of the attacks rests on the lack of credibility of one Lee Harvey Oswald, a personage painted as so twisted and pathetic that he is precluded from even unwitting participation in any act more complex than a temper tantrum.

That view finds its most recent outlet in Gerald Posner's pompous book, Case Closed. To make sure that readers get his point, Posner gives his Oswald chapters such subtle titles as "He Looks Like a Maniac," "Our Papa is Out of His Mind," and "His Mood Was Bad."

When his treatise came out in 1993, marketed to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of President Kennedy's death, the enterprisingly smug Posner supplanted the Warren Commission as the final arbiter of JFK truth as far as the major media were concerned.

Jonathan Kwitny, himself a journalist of notable repute, explained the media's attraction to Case Closed.

"All the good young reporters and public officials who mistakenly swallowed the official FBI-CIA line on the assassination thirty years ago have been waiting all this time for someone to relieve them of the self-doubt they are too smart not to have suffered under," Kwitny wrote in the Los Angeles Times, giving Posner a rare negative review.

Posner's method of evading evidence that punctured his thesis was to obfuscate with unsupported assertions stated in a tone of unshakeable authority. The counterevidence was usually buried in a footnote. Nowhere was his technique more apparent that in his treatment of the incendiary Veciana-Bishop/Philips-Oswald story.

Posner states that "there are doubts" about whether Maurice Bishop ever existed. He does not state the source or substance of these "doubts," nor does he note that former CIA director John McCone did say that a "Maurice Bishop" worked for the agency. And in fact, a number of other CIA employees interviewed by Fonzi said the same, including one who spontaneously named Philips as "Bishop."

"The CIA denied that any case officer had ever been assigned to Veciana," says Posner. So what? The House Select Committee in its report "found it probable that some agency of the United States assigned a case officer to Veciana." Given the CIA's deep involvement in anti-Castro plots at the time, that agency was most likely the CIA.

It is true, as Posner(foot)notes, that the committee in its report said it "could not…credit Veciana's story." It also said, as Posner does not report, that "no evidence was found to discredit Veciana's story" and "there was some evidence to support it." In a footnote of its own, the committee acknowledged that it "suspected Veciana was lying, when he denied that [Philips] was Bishop." At the same time, said the report, Philips "aroused the committee's suspicions" by claiming that he didn't recognize Veciana, especially because Philips "had one been deeply involved in Agency anti-Castro operations."

The committee, mainly through its penchant for vacillation and its unwillingness to offend the CIA, created more confusion than it cleared up. Confusion has indeed been the one consistent quality of the now-three-decade-plus JFK case. Posner's aggravating work simply stirred the fog.

So who killed JFK? The CIA? Anti-Castro fanatics? The Mafia? The military? A cabal of wealthy right-wing extremists? Or were they all somehow in league? There is evidence for any of the above. And all. Perhaps there were multiple plots against Kennedy that coalesced into one gigantic coverup with each party protecting its own interests but not necessarily cognizant of its counterparts' involvement.

Dick Russell writes that there were three plots against JFK in 1963. His primary source is a man named Richard Case Nagell who tells of working for an array of intelligence agencies, domestic and otherwise. The first plot was to bomb JFK's speech at the Orange Bowl in Miami. The alleged CIA hit man Bill Bishop corroborated that story.

Plot number two - also corroborated independently by Bill Bishop - was scheduled for Los Angeles. Nagell's involvement was to shadow a Los Angeles leftist named Vaughn Marlowe who was "considered for recruitment to hit JFK," Nagell told Russell. The recruiters were L.A. members of Alpha 66. Marlowe didn't know he had been potentially, the original Oswald until years later when Russell informed him. But he did know that Nagell was shadowing him. During New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's highly publicized investigation of the JFK case, Marlowe wrote Garrison to tell him about Nagell.

Nagell was also aware of the third plot - so aware that Russell believes he was hired by the KGB to terminate the plot by terminating Oswald. Instead, Nagell deliberately got himself arrested by firing a gun inside a bank in El Paso on September 20, 1963.

According to the recollections of Nagell's arresting officer, Nagell said, upon being taken into custody, "I'm glad you caught me. I really don't want to be in Dallas."

"What do you mean by that?" the policeman asked.

You'll see soon enough," Nagell replied. Two months and two days later, in Dallas, President Kennedy was shot and killed.

Russell, unlike Posner, makes no claims to unimpeachable veracity. Far from it. But starting with Nagell, Russell winds through a menagerie of grim characters who fit in all of the categories mentioned above. Among the scariest and most powerful was Retired General Charles Willoughby, formerly intelligence chief for General Douglas MacArthur, but whose political leanings made MacArthur look like, well, JFK. MacArthur once described his underling as a "little fascist." Self-described hit man Bill Bishop also worked as an "intelligence aide" to MacArthur, according to a document turned up by Russell. "If true," Russell emphasizes, "that would mean Bishop had served under MacArthur's intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby."

Willoughby formed an ultra-rightist network whose most visible spokesman was fire-and-brimstone preacher Billy James Hargis and which included Texas oil baron H. L. Hunt and CIA-agent-turned-journalist Edward Hunter (credited with inventing the word "brainwashing"). Willoughby stayed in close touch with Allen Dulles, director of the CIA later fired by Kennedy - and subsequently appointed to the Warren Commission to investigate the slaying of the president who had fired him.

In 1975, after Russell wrote an article about the assassination for the Village Voice, he received an anonymous letter identifying "a famous American general who was born in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1892" as "have masterminded the assassination." The odd letter named this "Famous general," cryptically, as "Tscheppe-Weidenbach."

Years later, while Russell was reading the book The Origins of the Korean War by Bruce Cumings, he came across "an obscure mention that Adolf Tscheppe-Weidenbach of Heidelberg, Germany, had changed his name, upon arrival in the United States shortly before World War I, to Charles Willoughby."

Finally there is the story, recorded by Fonzi, of Dave Morales, a self-proclaimed CIA assassin who one night, with only close friends present, went into a boozy diatribe against Kennedy for sacrificing his CIA-trained comrades at the Bay of Pigs.

"Suddenly he stopped," Fonzi writes, "and remained silent for a moment. Then as if saying it only to himself he added: 'Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn't we?'"

Take a look at some Coincidences about the JFK Assassination.