Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (67 page)

But as soon as Tanenbaum began talking with Schweiker that day, he realized he had been very naïve. There was no way that this case would follow the usual steps of a homicide investigation. “First of all,” Schweiker told Tanenbaum, after asking all staff members to leave his office, “you should know that they’re going to stonewall you.” While the young prosecutor was trying to absorb this startling idea—that duly elected representatives of the American people should expect to be defied by forces more powerful than themselves—Schweiker told him something even more shattering. “In my judgment,” the senator said, “the CIA was involved in the murder of the president.”

Tanenbaum physically recoiled. “When I heard that, every capillary in my body went into electrified shock,” he recalled. “This was a United States senator telling me this!”

That night, Tanenbaum took the Schweiker file home to the townhouse near American University he had rented after moving to Washington. He and Cliff Fenton pored over the stack of papers until three in the morning. When they finally finished, Fenton got to his feet and made his way to the door, with Tanenbaum following him outside. Standing on the brick sidewalk in the early morning chill, the homicide cop looked at his boss and said, “We are in way over our heads. And there’s no Frank Hogan here to protect you.” Tanenbaum knew he was right.

Nonetheless, the prosecutor plowed forward. He and Sprague began to subpoena CIA officials, bringing them before the House Committee to undergo aggressive questioning for the first time about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. When Tanenbaum first joined the committee, he had no strong opinions about the case—for years, he had assumed the Warren Commission had got it right. But as he and his investigators dug deeper, he came to the same conclusions as those of a long line of Washington insiders, from Bobby Kennedy to Richard Schweiker. “The more we looked into it, the most productive area of investigation was clearly the CIA—namely, those operatives who had worked with the anti-Castro Cubans,” Tanenbaum said in an interview.

One of the CIA veterans who aroused the congressional investigators’ particular interest was David Atlee Phillips, the CIA disinformation specialist who had masterminded the propaganda campaigns for the Guatemala coup and the Bay of the Pigs invasion. Phillips was based in Mexico City when the CIA station there apparently falsified evidence to show that Oswald visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies just weeks before the assassination. Furthermore, Gaeton Fonzi came across explosive information that indicated Phillips had met with Oswald in Dallas in September 1963. But when the veteran spy appeared before an executive session of the Assassinations Committee, he put on an artful performance like the former actor he was, lying about his Mexico City role and his Oswald surveillance.

It was a dramatic confrontation. On one side of the table was Bob Tanenbaum, the blunt-spoken, Brooklyn-born prosecutor—a hulking man who had attended the University of California’s Berkeley campus on a basketball scholarship. On the other was David Phillips, a tall, blond Texan with a long, deeply lined face who was nearly two decades Tanenbaum’s senior—a smooth, chain-smoking man from a Fort Worth family of fallen fortune who had risen to become chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere division. Phillips had recently stepped down after a quarter century in the spy business to become a CIA advocate as the head of the new Association of Retired Intelligence Officers.

Phillips had mastered the aloof, country-club attitude of the agency’s WASP elite. Like his boss, Dick Helms, he acted as if he were doing committee members a favor by granting them his time. “They are very antiseptic people,” Tanenbaum said of Phillips and the other CIA overlords with whom he clashed. “I don’t know what world they’re living in. But they’re not in the world of ordinary America, of taking subways, hailing cabs, shopping at grocery stores.”

Despite his other-worldly bearing, Phillips did not intimidate the Assassinations Committee deputy counsel. Tanenbaum had tangled with Mafia bosses, he had tried and convicted members of the Columbo crime family. He was not going to back away from the likes of David Phillips. “These guys act like they’re totally above the law,” Tanenbaum said. “But they were exactly the kind of guys I thought should be brought down, if in fact they were proven guilty.”

As Tanenbaum was interrogating Phillips, the congressional investigator had in his possession an FBI memo that indicated Oswald had been impersonated by somebody else in Mexico City—a disturbing piece of evidence that suggested the accused assassin was the focus of a U.S. intelligence operation. CIA surveillance cameras installed outside the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City captured on film a man purporting to be Oswald. When Tanenbaum pushed Phillips to tell him where those photographs could be found, the former spy insisted they had been destroyed. But Tanenbaum knew he was lying. Since the FBI had viewed the CIA’s “Oswald” photos, they clearly had not been immediately “recycled” as Phillips claimed.

Under the counsel’s relentless questioning, Phillips started getting entangled in his story’s inconsistencies. It was a taste of what might have been, if key suspects in the JFK assassination had been thoroughly subjected to this type of skilled prosecutorial scrutiny.

“When he told us the photographs were gone,” Tanenbaum recalled, “I told him, ‘Well, the bottom line is there are three people in this room who know you just lied—Detective Fenton, me, and you.’ And then I had Cliff hand him a copy of the FBI memo.”

Tanenbaum was astonished by what Phillips did next. “He read the memo. And then he just folds it up and leaves the room.” That is what David Phillips thought of Congress’s right to oversee U.S. intelligence.

Tanenbaum wanted to drag the former CIA official back for another round of questioning. “Call him back,” the deputy counsel told the Assassinations Committee. “He’s in contempt, he committed perjury. Let him know it.” But committee members were beginning to get cold feet about their staff’s energetic methods. Tanenbaum wanted the spy agency to deliver unredacted documents to his office. But the committee wouldn’t back him up. “They were pulling the rug out from under us.”

The assassination investigation started coming under fire in the press. A
New York Times
article clawed through Sprague’s past as a Philadelphia prosecutor, suggesting he was no stranger to controversy. An op-ed piece in the
Times
blasted the committee’s “McCarthy-era” tactics. Congressional funding for the investigation began to run out and Sprague and his staff stopped getting paid.

Seeing the writing on the wall, Tanenbaum met with Sprague and convinced him that since they were not prepared to compromise their investigation, the only honorable course for them was to resign. “I didn’t want to participate in an historical fraud,” Tanenbaum later explained. “My daughter, when I was in Washington, was three years old…and I didn’t want to look at her years later and put my rubber stamp on a report that I knew was a fraud because it looked good on my résumé.”

Sprague resigned as the Assassinations Committee chief counsel in March 1977, returning to Philadelphia to practice law. Soon after, Tanenbaum followed him out the door, moving to California, where he branched out from law to serve as mayor of Beverly Hills and to pursue a successful new career as the writer of best-selling legal thrillers.
Corruption of Blood
, his 1996 novel, would tell the dark tale of what happened when Manhattan prosecutor Butch Karp went to Washington and tried to solve the Kennedy assassination.

Sprague was replaced as chief counsel by G. Robert Blakey, a Cornell law professor and organized crime expert who had written the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, the 1970 law that would finally bring the powerful Mafia families to their knees. There was a poetic justice to Blakey’s role in creating RICO—he was, in effect, finishing the crime-busting crusade he had begun under Bobby Kennedy as a young Justice Department lawyer. And, by taking on the Assassinations Committee job, he was continuing Bobby’s mission to crack the murder of JFK. Blakey was a Kennedy loyalist and he was dedicated to getting to the bottom of the mystery that still haunted America. But, unlike Sprague and Tanenbaum, he was also experienced in the Byzantine ways of Washington bureaucracy and he was determined to save the besieged investigation by steering clear of explosive confrontations.

To do this, Blakey made a fateful decision—in effect, he accepted the investigative limits that his predecessors had stormily challenged, choosing to take the CIA’s word that it was fully cooperating with his probe and handing over all relevant documents. After the Assassinations Committee released its final report in 1979, Blakey crowed that his strategy of voluntary cooperation had worked: “In point of fact, the committee ultimately obtained from the CIA every single document that it wanted. No limitations were put on it. We got deeper and wider in the agency files than any other congressional committee in the history of Congress—bar none.”

But the young staff investigators who had been given the job of prying information out of the CIA knew differently. They had been stonewalled by the agency every step of the way. One of these investigators was Dan Hardway, a long-haired Cornell law student from West Virginia whom Blakey had brought with him to Washington. Hardway would roll into the CIA headquarters’ parking lot every day in a chopped, circus-red VW dune buggy blasting Talking Heads out of oversized speakers, accompanied by his equally energized fellow investigator Eddie Lopez, a Puerto Rican New Yorker also from Cornell Law School.

“We were not popular in Langley,” chuckled Hardway years later. The two youthful Blakey aides were investigating Oswald’s links to the CIA and his murky visits to Mexico City. But as they tried to track down relevant documents in the agency’s labyrinthine citadel, a veteran agent named George Joannides—the former Helms man who had been brought out of retirement to serve as the CIA’s liaison with the Assassinations Committee—suddenly appeared to block them. “They brought him in to shut us down,” says Hardway flatly today.

Hardway and Lopez complained to their law professor that Joannides was obstructing their investigation. But when Blakey took their grievances to the CIA, intelligence officials assured him that they were fully cooperating, telling him that his investigators were just hot-headed kids. Blakey chose to believe the agency.

Hardway felt that Joannides was hiding evidence of a conspiracy that involved CIA officers. Like Tanenbaum, he came to suspect David Phillips, who he believed had run the disinformation aspect of the assassination. Immediately after JFK was shot, Phillips’s operation began to spread bogus stories linking Oswald to Castro—with a speed that made the propaganda campaign seem preplanned. When the retired spy was finally brought back before the committee, it was the law student—wearing a red cotton plaid shirt and faded jeans—who grilled Phillips this time. If Phillips thought the long-haired coal miner’s son with the West Virginia twang could be easily brushed off, he soon found out he was wrong. As Hardway bore down on Phillips, the retired spook fidgeted and chain-smoked his way through the interrogation. At one point, Phillips had three or four cigarettes going at once. “The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him. That’s what got him very upset. He knew the whole thing could unravel.”

But in the end, the House Select Committee on Assassinations chose not to pursue Phillips or other suspicious CIA figures and its final report let the agency off the hook. The study found that President Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”—an historic break from the federal government’s lone gunman dogma. And it pointed a finger at the Mafia and Cuban exiles, declaring that the conspiracy might have involved members of those groups. But the report cleared the intelligence agency, even though a number of the committee’s own staff members—including Hardway and Fonzi—believed that some CIA officials were deeply implicated.

Though the committee’s final report was circumspect about the principal source of the plot, Blakey himself pulled no punches. “I think the mob did it,” he bluntly told the press. Over the years, Blakey would be sharply criticized by Fonzi and other assassination researchers for his single-minded focus on the Mafia. Some of them, including Hardway, argued that the Mafia vs. the CIA debate about the assassination was a false dichotomy. At the operational level, the two organizations had merged in shadowy enterprises like the Castro murder plots. And Hardway was convinced that rogue agents had joined with gangsters and anti-Castro militants to kill JFK.

Hardway—who through the years kept in touch with his old professor, for whom he still felt great respect and affection—would continue to thrash out this old debate with Blakey whenever they talked. “I don’t know how many times since 1978 that Bob and I have had this conversation,” said Hardway, who is now a small-town lawyer in North Carolina. “I will tell him, ‘Bob, you’re right—the mob was involved. But Bill Harvey, David Phillips, and some of the people from the CIA were also involved.’ He’ll say, ‘No, they weren’t, Dan.’ I’ll say, ‘Yes, they were, Bob.’”

In April 2001, something happened that shook Bob Blakey’s certainty. That month, the weekly
Miami New Times
published a story on George Joannides—the veteran CIA agent whom Hardway and Lopez had accused of blocking their investigation. The article revealed that Joannides, who was based in Miami in the early 1960s, was the agent in charge of DRE—the CIA-financed Cuban exile student group that had worked hard to implicate Oswald as a Castro stooge, before and after Dallas. In other words, Joannides had played an intriguing role in the Oswald mystery, but had chosen to keep this hidden from Blakey’s committee. Meanwhile, the career spy—who died in 1990—had used his liaison position with the committee to deflect scrutiny from the CIA. The
New Times
article, which was written by
Washington Post
reporter Jefferson Morley, stunned and outraged Blakey. Over two decades earlier, he had praised the CIA for its cooperation with his investigation. Now the law professor realized his young investigators had been right about the CIA—he had been duped.