A Conspiracy of Silences
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR A Conspiracy of Silences GENTLE READER, you may by now be surfeited with retrospectives occasioned by the 30th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's...
...Conceivably...
...The Childs brothers further quoted Castro as telling them that Oswald had been considered a dangerous provocateur and his offer was rejected...
...But indulge me...
...In Watergate, the chosen scapegoats were, successively...
...Officials present who knew the scenario to be false did not challenge it at the time—not even Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who afterward privately warned Reagan about it...
...The Warren Commission eventually concluded that neither the Russians nor the Cubans bore any responsibility for the assassination...
...No, I'm asking you about Mexico City," Hosty persisted...
...According to the report, Attorney General Edwin Meese III presented to a meeting of the President and his advisers on November 10, 1986, an essentially false scenario intended for public consumption...
...The CIA saw no reason to befriend the FBI, with which it was feuding, as usual...
...He even gave personal directions in three messages to Robert McFarlane and Oliver L. North while they were in Tehran in May 1986, unsuccessfully negotiating missiles for hostages...
...A Moral Indictment Soon the seven-year investigation of "the Iran-Contra affair" will come to an end with the release of the report of Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh...
...It appears that he specifically approved the changing schemes for shipping arms to Iran through Israel and later directly...
...At that moment the interrogation was interrupted by an officer who stuck his head into the room and said Oswald had to be taken down to the police lineup...
...The agency said it had reason to believe Kostikov was really a KGB officer with a background in its sabotage and assassination section...
...The CIA, he responded...
...Haldeman (who died on November 12 at age 67), and Domestic Affairs Adviser John D. Ehrlichman...
...Enough has become known of its contents to venture some conclusions...
...In Iran-Contra, the Walsh report says, McFarlane, North and Admiral John M. Poin-dexter were marked as the fall guys whose "sacrifice" would protect the Reagan Presidency for its final two years...
...The Cuban connection was a lead the FBI pursued on its own...
...Hosty noted...
...Oswald had been there in late September and stopped at the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban Embassy...
...The picture painted by Walsh, in some 600 pages, bears several remarkable resemblances to the one that emerged from the Watergate scandal...
...at the Soviet Embassy, had met with a consular officer named Valery Kostikov...
...I asked Hosty what made him inquire about Mexico City...
...Oswald looked startled and said something about having been to Tijuana once...
...So great was the tension between the two organizations that a memo recorded the CIA's anxiousness about the FBI, in its pursuit of organized crime figures, spying on the agency's dealings with Mafia Boss John Rosselli, one of the gangsters it had recruited as part of the effort to have Castro assassinated...
...Or, for that matter, by the Soviet KGB or Cuba's Fidel Castro...
...Castro had spoken about them publicly and warned that assassination could be a two-way street...
...The National Archives, repository of the Warren Commission files, has made available over a thousand boxes of memos, photos and investigative reports from the FBI and other sources...
...Johnson gave almost immediate orders to discourage any inquiry into Lee Harvey Oswald's motives that could reveal who might have been behind him...
...But what Walsh will offer in his hard-hitting report is another moral indictment of the misuse of Presidential power two decades after Watergate...
...There will be no more indictments?these are mainly precluded by the statute of limitations and by President George Bush's pardons for former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and others involved...
...Believers in conspiracy theories will be disappointed at not finding any credible evidence that President Kennedy was done in by the Pentagon brass, the CIA spooks or the Mafia mob...
...Hoover, Hosty said, was determined to get to the bottom of the situation and arranged to have two leading American Communists who were on the FBI's payroll fly to Havana to interview Castro...
...Castro could have tipped off Washington about the strange American who said he planned to kill the President...
...President Kennedy could have vetoed the anti-Castro plots Oswald apparently decided it was his mission to avenge...
...It was these contacts that raised suspicions of a foreign conspiracy...
...First, Ronald Reagan, while not the hands-on President that Richard M. Nixon was, is nevertheless depicted as more responsible for the basic decisions than he has let on...
...The CIA did not mention that Oswald had visited the Cuban Embassy at least twice...
...As for why the CIA alerted the FBI to Oswald's Russian contacts while concealing his Cuban contacts, undoubtedly it wanted to keep the lid on its schemes to kill Castro...
...They were finally exposed 12 years later in a Senate investigation prompted by my reports on CBS...
...on the phone to join the investigating commission, the President said: "This is a question that has a good many more ramifications than on the surface, and we've got to take it out of the arena where they're testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that, and check us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour...
...Would history have been different if responsible officials had acted differently...
...And neither the FBI nor the CIA saw any reason to level with the Warren Commission about their own failures...
...a retired FBI special agent and the last officer of the law to speak to Oswald before he was killed by Jack Ruby...
...Those awful days have been brought into somewhat better focus by newly released documents...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR A Conspiracy of Silences GENTLE READER, you may by now be surfeited with retrospectives occasioned by the 30th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22...
...Jack was the editor of the Daily Worker...
...Hosty had been keeping tabs on Oswald, had interviewed his friends and his wife, and even knew that he worked in the book depository...
...But Johnson and others initially worried that there might have been a foreign conspiracy, and they conspired to play down that possibility—the President out of a professed fear of public outrage plunging America into a nuclear war, the CIA and FBI out of more parochial concerns for their own reputations...
...How did he know about these plots...
...It suggested that Israel did not have permission to sell American missiles to Iran, although in fact it did, and that the President at first believed oil-drilling equipment was being shipped, although in fact he knew otherwise...
...The CIA had monitored some of Oswald's movements—particularly his telephone calls between the Cuban and Soviet embassies—but the agency was selective in what it told the FBI...
...routinely advised the FBI in October that Oswald had visited Mexico City in September and...
...A conspiracy of guilty silences...
...in addition, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, has opened up some 600 pages of transcripts of President Johnson's telephone calls in the period following the fateful shooting...
...White House Counsel John Dean, former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, Chief of Staff H.R...
...Third, again as with Watergate, fall guys were designated in an effort to protect higher-ups...
...The FBI informants, designated in Bureau files as "Solo Source," were the brothers Morris and Jack Childs of Chicago...
...It had learned, by "sensitive methods," that within days of the Kennedy assassination Castro, speaking to a group of his supporters in Havana, referred to Oswald applying for a Cuban visa in Mexico City and making "provocative remarks" that left embassy personnel suspicious about him...
...FBI agent Hosty, had he known more of what the CIA knew, could have alerted the Secret Service about the suspicious re-defector who worked along the motorcade route...
...Captured while trying to flee, Oswald was brought to Dallas police headquarters, his hands in cuffs behind his back, acting very cocky...
...But Castro saw no reason to befriend the Kennedy Administration since it was out to get him...
...On November 29, in the course of arm-twisting a reluctant Senator Richard B. Russell (D.-Ga...
...They reported being told by Castro that, at the Cuban Embassy, Oswald offered to kill President Kennedy to avenge the CIA's attempts on Castro's life...
...Hosty was among five investigators who interrogated him between 3:15 and 4:05 p.m...
...The special agent's last question was, "Lee, have you ever been to Mexico City...
...I talked recently to James Hosty Jr...
...Morris was the treasurer of the Communist Party...
...Simple...
...Second, just as with Watergate, fear of exposure led to an attempted coverup that was justified as necessary to protect the President...
...The President also mentioned what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had told him about "a little incident in Mexico City...
...which had general responsibility for watching Oswald as a re-defector from the Soviet Union...
Vol. 76 • November 1993 • No. 13
