Legacy of Secrecy (78 page)

Helms lied to the Warren Commission when he told them no one in the

CIA had suggested interviewing Oswald. In 1964, James Angleton and

his chief deputy were working with Helms on dealing with the Warren

Commission, and the same people and departments helped to compile

the January 4, 1967, CIA memo, furnishing “most of the themes” attack-

ing critics. Also involved in preparing the memo was the Covert Action

staff, and given the turf wars at the CIA, only Richard Helms could have

ordered such a coordinated effort.

The official who signed off on the January 1967 anti-critics memo was

Cord Meyer, the Chief of Covert Action, who reported to Helms and

FitzGerald.7 Aside from protecting CIA operations, Cord Meyer had an

additional, personal reason to stifle further journalistic prying into JFK’s

life and death. In 1967, the American public was still eight years away

from the first news reports of any extramarital affair by JFK, but Meyer’s

ex-wife had been one of JFK’s more regular mistresses.

Cord Meyer and his wife, Mary, had divorced soon after the 1959 death

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of their son. Unlike her straitlaced husband, Mary was free-spirited and

artistic. She was also the sister-in-law of JFK’s good friend,
Washington

Post
editor Ben Bradlee. According to historian Richard Reeves, JFK’s

affair with her lasted from February of 1962 until his death. Among

Washington’s social set, their liaison had not been that unusual.

In 1964, Mary Meyer was shot and killed during an apparent

robbery.8 By 1967, Cord Meyer had no desire to see the press dredge

up his wife’s death or affair with JFK, so he would have been glad to

help Helms clamp down on Warren Commission critics.9 While Cord

Meyer’s actions in 1967 have not been declassified, a later example

shows what he probably did if information embarrassing to the CIA

threatened to become public. In 1972, Meyer tried to suppress the

publication of
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
by Alfred McCoy,

which noted the drug trafficking of Santo Trafficante and associates of

Manuel Artime.10

The CIA’s January 4, 1967, memo encouraged the CIA “Chiefs, [of] Cer-

tain Stations and Bases,” to have their personnel attack critics of the

Warren Report, as well as to disseminate helpful information and propa-

ganda supporting the Report’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone. The

memo opens with a four-page overview, supplemented by forty-nine

pages of articles and additional information.

The CIA memo often does the same thing it accuses the Warren Report

critics of doing: distorting the truth. Some of its claims are misleading or

simply false, as is clear from reading all of the relevant books and articles

the CIA memo refers to. The memo also ignores the fact that Helms and

other top officials had withheld massive amounts of crucial information

from the Warren Commission.

At times, the CIA memo resorts to McCarthy-esque Red baiting,

smearing critics as being under the sway of communists. Those claims,

along with others the memo details, would continue to be used against

Warren Report critics (including members of Congress and government

investigators) for decades to come, and even today. That’s not because

current authors who support the Warren Report are working for the

CIA, but because the CIA’s arguments and claims (some gathered from

the press) were codified and recycled back to the press and then to the

public, where they continue to keep resurfacing.

The title of the January 4, 1967, CIA memo is “Countering Criticism

of the Warren Report.” The CIA department that sent it was named

“WOVIEW,” a code name that has not previously appeared in any book.11

The memo’s aim “is to provide material for countering and discrediting

the claims” of Warren Report critics, whom the memo calls “conspir-

acy theorists.” Many mainstream journalists still use that term today to

describe anyone who disagrees with the Warren Report. To provide legal

cover for a document that was distributed relatively widely within the

CIA, the agency claims the memo’s purpose was “to inhibit the circula-

tion of such claims in other countries,” even though the CIA’s earlier

action in regard to
Ramparts
and
The Invisible Government
illustrates that

the US was a primary concern. CIA Station Chiefs were told to

discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts

(especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren

Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly pos-

sible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation,

and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of

the opposition. Point out that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to

be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists.12

The CIA station chiefs were ordered “to employ propaganda assets

to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and fea-

ture articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.” Among the

attacks to be used against critics were claims they were “wedded to

theories adopted before the evidence was in,” and were “hasty and inac-

curate in their research.” The opposite was true in many cases, since the

Warren Commission had to complete its inquiry in a matter of months,

and the FBI admits essentially completing its own investigation in four

days, while the critics had years to pore over material before arriving at

conclusions of conspiracy. The memo says critics should also be derided

as being “financially interested.”13 The CIA seems to resent that “Mark

Lane’s
Rush to Judgment
, published on 13 August 1966, had sold 85,000

copies by early November,” and suggests using his lucrative sales to

claim that all conspiracy writers were motivated by money—despite

that fact that several of the books cited by the CIA had sold only a few

thousand copies.

CIA personnel are told that “in private or media discussion,” they

should claim that “no significant new evidence [underlining in original]

has emerged which the Commission did not consider.” The CIA memo

does not acknowledge any possibility that journalists or investigators

might turn up information that was overlooked by, or unavailable to,

the Warren Commission or the FBI. It does not state that such evidence

should be evaluated or considered; it notes only that anyone disagreeing

with the “lone nut” conclusion should be countered and discredited.14

The CIA memo accurately observes that in the recent flurry of articles

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and books, “no new culprits have been convincingly identified.” Helms

and the FBI had withheld so much information from the Warren Com-

mission that the Mafia was almost never mentioned, and the critics could

mount only vague theories about the possible involvement of Cuban

exiles or CIA personnel. The CIA memo is less accurate when it claims

that “critics . . . place more emphasis on the recollections of individual

eyewitnesses . . . and less on ballistic, autopsy, and photographic evi-

dence.” The Warren Commission’s own twenty-six supporting volumes

show that the Commission (and FBI) often cherry-picked witnesses and

parts of their statements to support the Commission’s case, and several

of the critics’ books did, in fact, make extensive use of “ballistic, autopsy,

and photographic evidence.”15

CIA personnel are told to point out to media assets “that Robert Ken-

nedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy’s brother, would

be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy.” It’s sadly ironic

that at the very time when the CIA memo was being issued, Bobby

was getting ready to reactivate his own private investigations into his

brother’s murder. Plus, as Bobby had stated in Congressional testimony

before JFK’s assassination, the top men in the Mafia always insulate

themselves in the case of mob hits, and prosecuting such a criminal

conspiracy is almost impossible.16

The CIA memo makes a valid point regarding the overly large “mys-

terious death” lists some writers were using at that time, prior to the

flurry of murders in the mid-1970s, the victims of which would include

Giancana, Hoffa, Rosselli, and Nicoletti. It also tells CIA Station Chiefs

that when they release propaganda supporting the Warren Report,

they should emphasize the fact that “the Commission staff questioned

418 witnesses [and] the FBI interviewed far more people, conducting

25,000 interviews and reinterviews.” (The fact that none of those inter-

views involved Cuban exile leaders working for the CIA or the Mafia is

ignored.) CIA personnel are told that “reviewers of other books might be

encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the

Report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.” How

many reviewers obeyed the CIA’s directive, and how many of those

reviews were placed by E. Howard Hunt, we can only wonder.17

It should be noted that the CIA’s anti-critic memo was only a supple-

ment to whatever efforts Helms, FitzGerald, and Hunt were pursuing

as part of their usual contacts with publishers and the press. While pro–

Warren Commission books would start appearing within months of the

CIA memo’s release, what role, if any, the CIA played in their production

or promotion is impossible to discern. Those questions can be answered

only when the files of Hunt, WOVIEW, and others are declassified.

The CIA memo’s lowest point is when it helpfully details how Nazi

files can be used to discredit author and Holocaust survivor Joachim

Joesten, author of
Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy
and other works criticizing

the Warren Report. Bernard Fensterwald and Michael Ewing point out

that “Helms’ aides had used data on Joesten which had been gathered

by Hitler’s Chief of S.S. on November 8, 1937.” The CIA’s January 4,

1967, memo lists three places, including the National Archives, where

CIA personnel or friendly journalists can obtain the Nazi information

to use against Joesten.18 The effort to discredit Joesten was part of a CIA

approach to demonstrate that “some writers appear to have been pre-

disposed to criticism [of the Warren Report] by anti-American, far-left,

or Communist sympathies.” Included in the list to smear are notables

like England’s Bertrand Russell.19

Helms succeeded in getting the CIA, as an organization, behind the

cover-up he needed to conceal his own misjudgments and unauthorized

activities, but the effects of Helms’s effort would persist for decades:

When Watergate triggered a series of Congressional inquires that started

to expose the CIA’s extensive use of the press, some of Helms’s former

subordinates and successors (including George H. W. Bush) used the

press as part of a strategy to subvert and shut down those investiga-

tions. That allowed CIA manipulation of some press assets to continue

during the Iran-Contra scandal, the first Iraq War, and the run-up to

the second Iraq War. Helms’s and Hunt’s actions in the late 1960s mir-

ror today’s problems with news coverage of issues ranging from Iran

to North Korea, where CIA “black propaganda,” ostensibly targeted

overseas, is widely reported in the American press.

As if the January 4, 1967, memo is still in force today, the CIA even

now officially acknowledges only the Warren Report’s findings, and

ignores the conspiracy conclusions of Congress. Unofficially, a few for-

mer CIA officers tell journalists about the discredited “Castro did it”

theory. Peter Dale Scott observes that only journalists who support the

Warren Commission or “Castro did it” theories are treated by the CIA

as “privileged authors, those who (unlike the rest of us) are able to inter-

view CIA officers and quote from unreleased classified documents.”20

The CIA and FBI were not alone in their effort to support the Warren

Report and attack its critics. Both the Secret Service and the Defense

Intelligence Agency may have made similar efforts to protect their

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reputation and operations, but their files in that regard have never been

released. The bottom line is that many US agencies and officials had a

variety of reasons to avoid reopening the JFK investigation in 1967, as

well as in the aftermath of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King

and Bobby Kennedy, and in the years that followed.

Chapter Thirty-one

On January 3, 1967, Jack Ruby died at Parkland Hospital, three weeks

after being diagnosed with cancer. His death, which occurred the day

before the CIA issued its internal memo attacking Warren critics, was no

doubt a relief to Richard Helms, since it eliminated the chance of any CIA

secrets coming out at Ruby’s new trial. Ironically, Ruby’s death shared

the front pages with bigger headlines about Rolando Masferrer’s failed