30 March 2007
The Warren
Report has never been impeached, yet conspiracy theories persist, nay
thrive, after 40 years. It’s fair to ask why.
The most important
reason remains the factor that spawned wild speculation in the first place,
namely, the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald two days after the Kennedy
assassination by a self-appointed vigilante named Jack Ruby. The assassination
was a horrific act, yet one that the American public would have eventually come
to terms with had Oswald — a politicized sociopath, akin to Timothy
McVeigh — ever received his day in court.
But the right to due
process is so cherished by Americans that when this ritual is denied,
ineradicable doubt flourishes no matter how damning the state’s case.
The unavoidable
corollary of disbelief is that Washington was, at a minimum, uninterested in
catching the real culprits. It’s no coincidence that polls consistently have
shown that public trust in the US government began declining in 1964. Among
those who believe in a conspiracy, the most widely accepted theory is that
elements of the US government, most conspicuously the CIA, were complicit in gunning
down the 35th president in broad daylight.
How is it that
Americans have come to embrace a conspiracy theory that reads like a script
written by the KGB, the CIA’s mortal Cold War adversary? Well, it turns out
that Moscow’s relentless propagation of that virulent theory and its prevalence
here are no mere coincidence. One of the more amazing stories to seep out of
the former Soviet empire is the role Moscow played in exploiting Americans’ psychological
vulnerability after the assassination, and in preying on their devotion to due
process. We can piece together this concerted effort only now with the release
of documents from Soviet archives — some disclosures authorized, some
not. Taken together, they prove that the KGB played a central, pernicious role
in fomenting the belief that the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s assassination.
The first inkling of
an aggressive KGB posture is revealed in a document gratuitously cited by Boris
Yeltsin in his 1994 memoir. In a letter to the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union dated November 23, 1963 — when
Oswald was still alive — KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny recommends
publishing in a “progressive paper in one of the Western countries,” an
article “exposing the attempt by reactionary circles in the USA to remove
the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals, [i.e.,]
the racists and ultraright elements guilty of the spread and growth of violence
and terror in the United States.”
Two months later, R.
Palme Dutt, the Stalinist editor of a Communist-controlled British
journal called Labour Monthly, published an article that raised the
specter of CIA involvement without offering a scintilla of evidence. “[M]ost
commentators,” he wrote,“have surmised a coup of the Ultra-Right or
racialists of Dallas. That may be; but the trail, if followed up seriously,
seems to reach wider . . . on the face of it this highly organized coup (even
to the provision of a ’fall guy’ . . . and rapid killing of the fall
guy while manacled in custody, as soon as there appeared a danger of his
talking), with the manifest complicity necessary of a very wide range of
authorities, bears all the hallmarks of a CIA job.”
Five months later, in
June 1964, a freelance journalist named Joachim Joesten posited a strikingly
similar analysis in his book Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? Following
a chapter on “Oswald and the CIA,” Joesten asserted that the agency
was beyond presidential control and bitterly opposed to Kennedy’s policy of “easing
the Cold War.” It has long been a matter of record that Joesten’s book was
the first published in the United States on the subject of the assassination.
Until the notes of a former KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin were published
in 1999, however, it was not known that Joesten’s publisher, the small New York
firm of Marzani & Munsell, received subsidies totaling $672,000 from the
Central Committee of the Communist Party in the early 1960s.
These early efforts to
implicate the CIA met with little apparent success. But the KGB kept on trying
and finally hit the jackpot once a relatively unknown New Orleans district
attorney named Jim Garrison took a sudden interest in the assassination in late
1966. The word “dupe” has long been out of favor, but that’s precisely
what Garrison turned out to be after he arrested Clay Shaw in March 1967 and
charged him with conspiring to assassinate Kennedy. Owing to a clever piece of
KGB disinformation planted
in Paese Sera, a Communist-owned Italian newspaper, Garrison came to
believe that in Shaw he had apprehended an important “CIA operative.” And
on the basis of this deception (again, revealed by KGB archivist Mitrokhin),
Garrison constructed an entire conspiracy edifice, ultimately arguing that the
CIA had plotted the assassination-coup d’etat in concert with the
military-industrial complex — again, because Kennedy was allegedly
easing up in the Cold War.
If Garrison’s
persecution of Shaw hadn’t been genuine, and tragic, the whole episode would be
risible. It wasn’t. Garrison altered forever the parameters of Americans’ nagging
doubts, though that transformation went largely unnoticed at the time. Before
the spring of 1967, not even the Warren Report’s harshest critics
dared suggest the government itself was involved. Within the space of a few
weeks, Garrison single-handedly legitimated the fable of CIA complicity. Not
even Shaw’s exoneration in 1971 was sufficient to offset the insidious notion
planted by the KGB and unwittingly nurtured by Garrison. After receiving an
inadvertent assist from the Watergate and intelligence hearings of the
mid-1970s, the KGB could justifiably claim, by the end of the decade, that
owing to its “active measures,” more Americans believed in its
conspiracy theory (or some variation thereof) than in the findings of the
Warren Commission.
This preposterous
allegation of CIA involvement might have faded with time but for a chance
encounter in a Havana elevator between the publisher of Garrison’s 1988 memoir
and a powerful Hollywood director named Oliver Stone. In JFK,
Stone reconstructs Jim Garrison’s edifice so painstakingly that 88 minutes into
the movie, the KGB disinformation resurfaces. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner)
hands Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) the Italian newspaper clipping, and the
implication is created that Shaw was a“contract agent for the Central Intelligence
Agency.” Arguably, Stone’s 1991 movie is the only American feature film
made during the Cold War to have, as its very axis, a lie concocted in the
KGB’s disinformation factories.
If and when the
archives of the Communist Party’s “sword and shield” are fully
opened, the KGB’s indispensable role in propagating the lie of CIA involvement
will take its place among other triumphs of Russian deception, such as the
infamous Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Until then
there is only this sobering thought, long an axiom of professional intelligence
officers: We are never truly deceived by others; we only deceive ourselves.
This article first appeared in The
Washington Post, 22 November 2003
© 2003 by Max Holland
19 May 2007
The Power of Disinformation:
The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination
The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination
By Max Holland
The 1967 arrest and indictment of Clay Shaw for conspiring to kill President Kennedy was one of the greatest travesties in the history of American jurisprudence.
That much was
understood by 1969, once Shaw was acquitted after 54 minutes of deliberation by
a New Orleans jury. What was not understood until fairly recently, though, was
the lie at the core of DA Jim Garrison's persecution of Shaw. Garrison was
duped by a false allegation published in a Communist-controlled
Italian newspaper,Paese Sera. The Garrison saga would be almost laughable,
given how the DA was so easily fooled, save for the tragedy inflicted on Clay
Shaw, and the lasting damage Garrison wrought to the public perception of
what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963.
Garrison forever
changed the terms of public debate on the assassination. Before the New
Orleans district attorney became involved, the worst criticism made of the U.S.
government was that it had not been sufficiently devoted to, or diligent about,
finding the true perpetrators. Garrison made the U.S.
government--specifically, the CIA--complicit in the assassination itself.
Click on the title to
read “The Power of Disinformation: The Lie That Linked the CIA to the
Kennedy Assassination,” which appeared in Studies in Intelligence in
2001.
Oliver Stone, whose
1991 film JFK exalted Jim Garrison, critiqued the Studies article
in a 2002 paid
advertisement that appeared in The Nation magazine.
© 2001 by Max Holland
CIA – Center for the Study of
Intelligence – CSI
The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination
The Power of Disinformation
On 2 June 1961, just weeks after the
Bay of Pigs debacle, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee convened to take
testimony from Richard M. Helms, then an assistant deputy director of the
Central Intelligence Agency. In those halcyon days of the Agency’s relationship
with Congress, it was rare for a CIA official to give a presentation that
senators had every intention of making public. The subcommittee, dominated by
some of the fiercest anti-Communist members of the Senate,
undoubtedly wanted
to help repair the Agency’s tarnished image. The hearing, entitled “Communist
Forgeries,” would surely remind Americans of the threat that Communism posed to
Western interests and the Agency’s frontline role in containing that threat.[1]
Helms began his testimony by
describing an episode that had just faded from the headlines. It proved just
how virulent and resilient a lie can be when everything around it seems to fall
into place. Although Helms never used the precise term, the scheme he described
would eventually become better known by its KGB appellation: dezinformatsiya or
disinformation.
For years, Soviet propagandists had
sought to impugn the United States by linking it to France’s brutal
colonial war in Algeria. The effort was a mediocre success until
22 April 1961, when four Algerian-based generals organized a putsch
against President Charles de Gaulle, who was trying to extract France from the
seven-year conflict. Coincidentally, one of the plotters, Air Force Gen.
Maurice Challe, had served in NATO headquarters and was unusually pro-American
for a senior French officer. This fact provided the basis for a fabrication
that the plotters enjoyed the CIA’s support.[2]
“This lie was first printed on the
23rd of April by a Rome daily,” Helms testified. In English, the headline in Paese
Sera read, “Was the Military Coup d’état in Algeria Prepared in
Consultation with Washington?”[3] The very next day, Pravda,
citing Paese Sera, ran a story alleging CIA support for the revolt, as did
TASS and Radio Moscow. Other Soviet Bloc and then Western outlets picked
up the story, which gathered credibility with every re-telling. Eventually Le
Monde, the most respected and influential newspaper in France, ran a lead
editorial that began, “It now seems established that some American agents more
or less encouraged Challe.” The vehemence of the US Embassy’s denial was
primarily taken as an indication of the allegation’s truth.[4]
As the story spread to this side of
the Atlantic, the controversy grew to such a pitch that it threatened to
disrupt President Kennedy’s state visit to France, scheduled for May 1961.
Relations remained testy until Maurice Couve de Murville, France’s foreign
minister, went before the National Assembly and sought to quell the allegation.[5] Altogether, Helms observed, the
episode was an “excellent example of how the Communists use the false news
story” to stunning effect. And it had all started with an Italian paper that
belonged “to a small group of journals published in the free world but used as
outlets for disguised Soviet propaganda…instead of having this originate in
Moscow, where everybody would pinpoint it, they planted the story first in
Italy and picked it up from Italy….”[6]
Helms’s testimony reveals that the
CIA’s Counterintelligence (CI) Staff had a sophisticated understanding of how dezinformatsiya worked
by no later than 1961.[7] Yet six years later, a grander and
more pernicious concoction originating in the same newspaper, Paese Sera,
would go unexamined, unexposed, and unchallenged. This lapse, while
understandable in context, proved a costly one for the Agency over the long
run. Paese Sera’s successful deception turns out to be a major reason
why many Americans believe, to this day, that the CIA was involved in the
assassination of President Kennedy.[8]
Garrison Opens His Investigation
The complex story begins in early
February 1967, when the FBI and CIA learned about a striking development in New
Orleans. Two years after the completion of the federal inquiry into President
Kennedy’s death by the Warren Commission, the local district attorney, Jim
Garrison, had opened his own investigation into the November 1963
assassination.[9]Whatever Garrison was up to, he did not
seem intent on involving the federal government. So both the Bureau and the CIA
simply awaited the next development, believing, like most Americans, that no
responsible prosecutor would dare reopen the case unless he truly had
something.
On 17 February, the New Orleans
States-Item revealed Garrison’s reinvestigation to the world and ignited a
media firestorm. The first legal action, however, did not occur until 1 March
1967, when Garrison ostentatiously arrested an urbane local businessman named
Clay Shaw and charged him with masterminding a plot that culminated in
President Kennedy’s death.[10] Both the Bureau and the CIA rushed
to their respective files and ran name traces on Shaw, a man who had never been
linked to the assassination despite Washington’s painstaking investigation.
Insofar as the Agency was concerned, only one sliver of information was
noteworthy. The businessman now charged with the crime of the century had once
been a source for the CIA through its Domestic Contact Service (DCS).
The CIA’s concerted effort to gather
foreign intelligence from domestic sources had its roots in World War II. After
the conflict, careful analysis revealed that a coordinated effort to collect
information known to American citizens might have averted some bitter failures.
Thus, when the CIA was formed in 1947, it was handed responsibility for the
overt collection of foreign intelligence within the United States, and DCS
offices were discreetly opened in several major cities. DCS officers sought
contact with American citizens who traveled abroad and were in a position to
acquire significant foreign intelligence as a routine matter. The highest
priority, naturally, was attached to debriefing Americans who traveled behind
the Iron Curtain or to international conferences where they met Soviet Bloc citizens.
Although all DCS relationships with individual Americans were routinely
classified “secret,” the information gleaned was often no more confidential
than what could be gained from a close reading of the Wall Street Journal.
By the mid-1970s, DCS files contained the names of 150,000 Americans who had
willingly provided information or were promising sources.[11]
Shaw had volunteered his first
report to the DCS in 1948, the year that the division of Europe into
antagonistic blocs hardened. His offering concerned Czechoslovakia, a country
whose fate had gripped Americans’ imagination. Until February 1948,
Czechoslovakia had been a pluralistic, democratic state, mindful of Soviet
national security concerns but linked economically and intellectually to the
West. Then, in the space of seven days, it was abruptly transformed into a
Communist dictatorship, a shattering development because it suggested a replay
of events that had led to the last world war. In December 1948, Shaw informed
the CIA about the new regime’s effort to expand exports via the New Orleans
Trade Mart. He shared details about a lease for exhibition space that had been
negotiated with a Czech commercial attaché based in New York.[12]
That voluntary report led to an
extended relationship on matters involving commercial and international trends.
Shaw was an observant businessman who traveled widely. It was effortless for
him to pick up the kind of information useful to analysts inside the US
Government. Over the next eight years, Shaw relayed information on 33 separate
occasions, his fluency in Spanish helping to make him a particularly astute
observer of trends in Central and South America. His reports about devaluation
in Peru, a proposed new highway in Nicaragua, and the desire of Western
European countries to trade with the Soviet bloc—a subject of keen interest to
Washington because of worries about technology transfers—were invariably graded
“of value” and “reliable.”[13]
Why the relationship ended after
1956 is not revealed in any of the recently declassified CIA files or Shaw’s
own papers. Whatever the reason, the documentary record is clear: Shaw was not
handed off by the DCS and developed as a covert operative by the CIA’s Plans
(now Operations) Directorate. The relationship just lapsed. He had never
received any remuneration and probably considered the reporting a civic duty
that was no longer urgent once the hostility between the two superpowers became
frozen in place and a new world war no longer appeared imminent.[14]
Upon reviewing Shaw’s file after the
businessman’s arrest, Lloyd Ray, chief of the New Orleans DCS office, expressed
some concern but saw no reason to be alarmed. “While I do not expect that this
office will become involved in the matter,” Ray wrote in a 3 March 1967 cable
to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, “nevertheless there is always the
possibility of this.” Ray had joined the DCS in 1948 and knew Shaw personally.
A lawyer by training, he suggested briefing Lawrence Houston, the CIA’s general
counsel, on the facts of the relationship “to be on the safe side.”[15]
European Leftists Fan the Flames
The day after Ray’s cable, on 4
March, the left-wing Roman newspaper Paese Serapublished a “scoop” that
would reverberate all the way to New Orleans and Langley. According to the
afternoon daily, Clay Shaw was no mere international businessman. That
profession was a facade for his involvement in “pseudo-commercial” activities via
the Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), a trade-promotion group headquartered in
Rome from 1958 to 1962. The defunct CMC had been “a creature of the CIA,”
according to Paese Sera, “set up as a cover for the transfer to Italy
of CIA-FBI [sic] funds for illegal political-espionage activities.”
Revealingly, one of the CMC’s most nefarious acts, according to Paese
Sera, was support for the “philo-fascists” who had attempted to depose
Charles de Gaulle in the early 1960s.[16]
The plausibility of the Paese
Sera allegations was strengthened immeasurably by a contemporaneous media
firestorm. On Valentine’s Day, Ramparts magazine had ignited a
controversy over CIA subsidies.[17] As elite news outlets raced to
outdo Ramparts by revealing the methodology and extent of covert CIA
funding around the world, it became known that anti‑communist elements in
Italy had been among the beneficiaries of the CIA’s overseas largesse.
Moreover, as was the case in 1961, Paese Sera’s 1967 scoop was built
around certain undeniable facts: the CMC had existed in Rome; Shaw had been a
board member; and now he was charged with having conspired to murder President
Kennedy.
The Italian defense, interior, and
foreign affairs ministries denied the allegation of a link between the CMC and
the CIA, and mainstream Italian newspapers limited themselves to pointing out
the Roman connection of the businessman arrested in New Orleans.[18] Other outlets, however, showed less
restraint. On 5 March, the day after Paese Sera’s scoop, l’Unità, the
newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, published a front page story
headlined, “Shaw…was a Rome agent of the C.I.A.” Moscow’s Pravda picked
up the story on 7 March, publishing it under the simple headline, “Clay Shaw of
the CIA.” The same theme appeared in the 8 March edition of l’Humanité, the
newspaper of the French Communist Party, which reported that the “CIA used
[Clay Shaw] for its activities in Italy…where [he specialized] in the financing
of political groups considered to be ‘intransigent anti-Communists’.”[19] Similar stories then popped up in
the leftwing Greek and Canadian press, all of which echoed Paese Sera’s observation
that “in this complex and still obscure matter the CIA certainly has a hand.”[20]
Oddly, despite its vast
intelligence-gathering apparatus, the Agency missed the seminal article,
probably because Paese Sera was not a strict Communist party
organ, and therefore not monitored daily.[21] Once the accusation began appearing
in organs like Pravda,however, the story grabbed the attention of the
CIA’s CI Staff, which ran file traces on CMC and PERMINDEX, its Swiss-based
parent corporation. The results were uniformly negative. Neither company was a
proprietary or front, nor had either been used to channel funds to
anti-Communists as alleged. Agency files also proved that Shaw had never been
asked, after 1958, to exploit his affiliation with the CMC for any clandestine
purpose. “It appears that all of the Pravda charges are untrue,”
reads the Agency’s most detailed review of its links to Shaw, “except that
there was a CIA-Shaw relationship.”[22]
This emphasis—that there was a
“relationship”—marked a conceptual turning point. By focusing on a tangential
truth rather than the overwhelmingly falsity of the allegation, the Agency
effectively donned a set of blinkers. With its attention fixated on the DCS
link, it never dawned on the CIA that a disinformation scheme was at the root
of its problem with Garrison—despite Paese Sera’s well-documented
involvement in dezinformatsiya and the fact that efforts to link the
CIA to the Kennedy assassination had been a staple of communist-oriented
publications for three years.[23]
For the Agency, the eight weeks
between 4 March and 25 April 1967 were the calm before the storm. During this
period, Clay Shaw’s alleged connection to the CIA went unremarked in the United
States, save for a brief reference in a leftwing New York newspaper, the National
Guardian.[24] Still, the “gruesome proceedings”
in New Orleans, as DCS Director James Murphy labeled them, were grounds for
concern if not alarm. Garrison seemed intoxicated by the world’s attention and
was acting like a carnival barker rather than a DA investigating a grave
matter.
Helms, who had become Director of Central
Intelligence (DCI) in 1966, asked Ray Rocca, chief of Research & Analysis
for the CI Staff, to stay abreast of the situation. During the lull, a lively
debate took place between the CI Staff and the DCS over what to do. The latter
argued against devoting more time and effort to what already seemed to be a
“sensational hoax.” Rocca, however, wanted to stay ahead of the disclosure
curve, and ultimately his position prevailed. The CIA intensified its
monitoring weeks before Garrison actually trained his sights on the Agency. “We
regret to have to burden you with this sort of coverage,” wrote DCS Chief
Murphy in a 20 March letter to the New Orleans office, “but [it] could be
damaging to the Agency if some link could be exploded by enterprising news hounds.”[25]
Unbeknownst to the Agency, Garrison
had been convinced by the Paese Sera article that Shaw was linked to
the CIA; that association, in turn, implicated the CIA in a cover-up of the
Kennedy assassination. A diary kept by Richard Billings, a LIFE editor
who worked closely with the DA in the early stages of the investigation,
corroborates the timing and impact of the foreign disinformation on Garrison.
Billings’s entry for 16 March, less than two weeks after the publication of the
first Paese Sera article, notes that, “Garrison now interested in
possible connections between Shaw and the CIA…article in March issue Humanities [l’Humanité]
supposedly mentions Shaw’s company [CIA] work in Italy.”[26] Six days later, the DA had at least
one of the articles in hand. Garrison “has copy [of story about Shaw] datelined
Rome, March 7th, from la presse Italien [sic],” Billings records. “It explains
Shaw working in Rome in ‘58 to ‘60 period.”[27]
Dezinformatsiya thus exerted a
profound influence on the prosecution of Clay Shaw. Overriding the opposition
of his top aides, who had begged him to drop the case, Garrison now persisted
because the DA believed he had nabbed an important “covert operative.”[28]Under the duress and publicity of
indictment, Shaw would surely fold. And the moment he cracked, Garrison
imagined that it would be easy to unmask the sequence of events leading to the
assassination in Dallas.
US Media Pick Up the Thread
Despite the flurry of articles in
Europe’s pro-Communist press, the sensational revelation about Shaw was not
playing well at home. This was a problem for a DA whose modus operandi required
a steady drumbeat of positive publicity. Garrison dared not bring up the
allegation openly, as he later explained in a letter to Lord Bertrand Russell,
the famed British philosopher who was also an avid conspiracy buff. Doing so
might hand skeptics in the media the ammunition to destroy his controversial
probe.[29] Critical articles had begun to
appear, including a devastating exposé of Garrison’s sources and methods that
ran in the 23 April Saturday Evening Post.[30] Garrison wanted the Italian story
in the news, but via a hidden hand.
On 25 April, the New Orleans
States-Item published a front page, copyrighted story. The headline
read, “Mounting Evidence Links CIA to ‘Plot’ Probe,” and the primary source of
the article was “Garrison or one of his people.”[31] The story went on to report that
Shaw, the pivotal figure in Garrison’s investigation, had been linked to the
CIA “by an influential Italian newspaper.” It took more than 20 column inches
before the article notedthat Paese Sera was “leftist in its political
leanings.” (The US State Department routinely labeled the afternoon daily a
“crypto-Communist” newspaper.) Inexorably, the Associated Press picked up the New
Orleans States-Item scoop for distribution on its national wire. It was
reprinted, in truncated form, in hundreds of newspapers nationwide on 26 April.
Even the august New York Timesran a brief item from the wires about the
“mounting evidence of CIA links” in District Attorney Jim Garrison’s probe of
the assassination.[32] As Richard Billings noted in his
diary, “Now Garrison is hard on the trail of the CIA.”[33]
The New Orleans States-Item exclusive
confirmed the Agency’s worst fears. Just as the media were beginning to catch
on that Garrison’s case was flimsy, the DA was moving to draw the CIA into the
maelstrom. In a long memo prepared on 26 April, Rocca concluded that it would
be “unwise to dismiss as trivial any attempts by Garrison to link the Agency to
his plot.” Though it is impossible to discern what the New Orleans DA “knows or
thinks he knows,” wrote Rocca, the grim truth, given the Ramparts exposé,
was that the “impact of such charges…will not depend principally upon their
veracity or credibility but rather upon their timeliness and the extent of
press coverage.”[34]
From this point on, Garrison would
not utter a word without it being parsed inside Agency headquarters.
Having laid the groundwork with his
calculated leak to the New Orleans States-Item, Garrison now unleashed a
barrage of sensational accusations. In no particular order, Garrison alleged
that Kennedy’s alleged assassin Lee Oswald had been under the control of the
CIA; the CIA had whitewashed the real assassins; the CIA had lied to the Warren
Commission and concealed evidence with the FBI’s connivance— no, the CIA had
lied to the FBI too![35] As with Senator Joe McCarthy, the
legitimacy conferred by public office gave Garrison a license for audacious
mendacity, a privilege he exploited to the hilt. These charges made for new
accusatory headlines in New Orleans and elsewhere throughout the month of May,
but also served a second purpose. They had the simultaneous effect of blunting
the increasing number of articles criticizing the DA’s probe. The impression
left was that Garrison was being put under siege because he dared to tell the
truth.
A Rock and a Hard Place
The CIA occasionally responded to a
specific allegation from the barrage, but never issued a substantive, thorough
rebuttal for fear that it would only create a larger problem for itself and for
Shaw. Disclosing the Shaw-DCS connection was ruled out as too explosive, given
the nature of Shaw’s indictment and the spotlight the Agency was already under
because of theRamparts exposé. At the very least, DCS sources and methods
would be scrutinized, and virtually all Americans traveling abroad would fall
under suspicion. Every businessman or scholar who had ever cooperated
voluntarily would think twice before doing so again. The DCS as a whole would
likely be damaged, perhaps irreparably. Then, too, the Agency had to
contemplate the cost of disclosure to Clay Shaw. Garrison’s scapegoating of the
CIA left officers more persuaded than ever that the DA knew about Shaw’s DCS
contact, and that he probably intended to distort the connection during Shaw’s
trial.[36]
Despite the surface placidity of the
CIA’s “no comment” responses, internally the Agency was seething. The “Red
Flash” and “Red Comet” editions of the New Orleans States-Item, in
particular, were received with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for Pravda. The
CIA had weathered public debacles like the Bay of Pigs and the Ramparts exposé;
had deflected criticism in the press and from books; and had resisted attempts
to broaden Congressional oversight. Never in its 20-year existence, however,
had it confronted such a challenge from an elected public official with legal,
albeit limited, authority. Garrison’s allegations— the “grossest we have seen from
any responsible American official”—gave the Agency fits, just as they did Shaw
and Shaw’s lawyers.[37] For months, the tactics of what
Rocca called “that wild man down there” preoccupied senior CIA officers. When
Shaw’s trial appeared imminent, DCI Helms ordered an ad hoc committee
to formulate a strategy—six of CIA’s highest officials comprised this “Garrison
Group.”[38]
Ray, the New Orleans DCS chief, sent
reports back to headquarters about efforts to goad the Agency into a reaction
that would be good for a few more headlines. Ray also expressed concern over
the possibility that Garrison might bug DCS offices or tap its telephones, so a
secure communications link with CIA headquarters was established. As the
“bizarre and unsubstantiated” campaign to implicate the CIA reached a fever
pitch in the late spring, an Agency internal memo dated 6 June observed that
Garrison had “attacked CIA more vehemently, viciously and mendaciously than has
any other American official or private citizen whose comments have come to our
attention. In fact, he [has] outstripped the foreign Communist press, which is
now quoting him delightedly.”[39] Left-leaning and Communist organs
presented Garrison’s allegations as affirmation of America’s deeply confused
and corrupt political system. The KGB delighted in such Garrison quotes as one
saying that the CIA was “infinitely more powerful than the Gestapo [had been]
in Nazi Germany.”[40]
With the benefit of hindsight, it is
apparent that the Agency never gained its footing amid Garrison’s blizzard of
accusations, even though there were scattered clues as to what was going on
behind the scenes.[41] On 1 May, for example, Jack Miller,
a former assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s
Criminal Division, called the CIA’s general counsel to offer some intelligence
that had come to Miller “from within Garrison’s office.” Miller’s inside
information was that a “left-wing newspaper published in Rome, thePaese Sera,”
was the source for the story that Shaw was a director of the CMC and that the
CMC was a “CIA organization.” Miller apparently did not know, or did not
convey, how much importance Garrison attached to the ostensible revelation.
There is no evidence that the CI Staff followed up on his inside information.[42]
The CIA Continues To Play It Low Key
Like the Agency, Shaw’s lawyers were
groping their way through the fog of charges generated by Garrison via the
media. Shaw’s lawyers were confident that their client was leveling with them
and publicly denied that he was a clandestine CIA operative.[43] In September 1967, however, when a trial
appeared imminent, there was a revealing contact between Shaw’s attorneys and
the Justice Department. The defense team was “confused by the [CIA]
smoke-screen Garrison was raising,” and wanted to talk to someone in the
federal government “who could steer them as to the true facts and
circumstances,” according to an 18 September CIA memo.[44]
Some sharing of information might
have helped, but Agency officials found the request for cooperation too risky,
newly available documents show. “New Orleans is such a seamy maze that the risk
of under-the-table deals is always present,” concluded a 25 September Agency
memo. “Moreover, if Garrison learned of federal assistance to Shaw’s lawyers,
he’d play it to the hilt.”[45] Shaw’s defense team thus returned
to New Orleans empty-handed and puzzled over the government’s apparent
nonchalance, given that Washington was very much on trial, too.
Via this brief contact, the CIA
learned that one of its assumptions was wholly incorrect. All along, Agency
officials had presumed that Shaw told his lawyers about the DCS relationship
once his alleged link to the CIA became an issue. But after meeting with Shaw’s
defense team, Justice Department attorneys shared their “very clear impression”
that Shaw had not confided in his own lawyers.[46]
Overhanging everything, insofar as
the CIA was concerned, was the upcoming trial. The Agency had to proceed on the
assumption that Garrison would play his trump card in the courtroom and flummox
the jury. “The fact that Garrison’s charges against CIA are false,” noted a 13
September memorandum, “does not mean that when he goes to court his case will
collapse like a house of cards.”[47] The decision on how to prepare for
that dreaded day was outlined in a memo submitted by Houston to DCI Helms in
October 1967. It is perhaps the most revealing CIA document generated during
the entire affair, as it lays out all the sundry allegations of CIA involvement
and the truth in each instance. The CIA general counsel’s recommendation,
developed in consultation with other members of the Garrison Group, was stark:
other than active resistance to any subpoenas from Garrison, the best course of
action was to do nothing.[48]
The catch, Houston acknowledged, was
that a tight lip threatened to leave Shaw at Garrison’s mercy. Shaw’s lawyers
would have no way of refuting allegations without documents and testimony from
the CIA. Yet a controlled disclosure of exculpatory information seemed
unachievable. A local judge would be under intense pressure to rule that the
federal government could not both submit material evidence and hide behind
claims of national security or executive privilege. Under these circumstances,
Houston reasoned, the best thing to do would be to take no action whatsoever,
and hope that the defendant would win acquittal without CIA intervention. If
Shaw were to “be convicted on information that could be refuted by CIA,”
concluded Houston, “we may be in for some difficult decisions.”[49]
As it turned out, the dilemma
Houston described did not materialize for more than a year. Shaw’s talented
legal team, determined to win an acquittal, introduced several motions
(including a request for a change of venue) that had the effect of postponing
the trial repeatedly.
Meanwhile, Garrison kept fine-tuning
his theory about the assassination. In February 1968, he unveiled what would be
his final and enduring explanation during a Dutch television show hosted by a
left-wing, anti-American journalist named Willem Oltmans.[50] According to Garrison, it was no
longer the case that the CIA was an unwitting accomplice to the murder and then
an accessory after the fact. No, the truth had turned out to be much worse.
Garrison now averred that the Agency had consciously plotted the assassination,
executing the plan in concert with the “military-industrial complex.” Both had
a vested interest in the continuation of the Cold War and the escalation of the
hot war in Vietnam. President Kennedy wanted to end both conflicts; that was
why he had to be assassinated.
The shift in Garrison’s line went
largely unnoticed at first—except at the CIA, which was monitoring the DA’s
every utterance. As Rocca observed in a March 1968 memo, “Garrison has now
reached the ultimate point in the logic of his public statements…. This is by
and large the Moscow line.” For a fleeting moment, Rocca, one of the Agency’s
most esteemed counterintelligence experts, seemed to be musing about the
possibility of a Soviet hand in all that had happened, given that the statement
fit so neatly with Moscow’s known goals. But Rocca’s insight never went further
than this brief speculation.[51]
Around the same time in 1968,
Garrison began to recognize that an adverse legal outcome would detract from
what he had achieved in the public mind. Many of his key assistants didn’t
believe the accusations about CIA involvement; moreover, none of them could be
proved in court. While expressing confidence that the Shaw indictment would
never actually be tested in a courtroom, Garrison remarked to Tom Bethell, one
of his investigators, that we have “made our point.”[52] On this one issue, the
undesirability of a trial, the CIA was in complete agreement with its New
Orleans nemesis. The Agency vastly preferred no trial, even if it meant
Garrison prattling on forever about CIA involvement, uncontradicted by a
decisive verdict. By the time Shaw finally achieved his day in court on 21
January 1969, he was probably the only party who wanted to be there.
The Trial
The trial lasted 35 days. Despite
two years’ worth of allegations and a specific promise of testimony that would
“rock the nation,” Garrison’s case was remarkably unchanged from the loopy
account presented at Shaw’s preliminary hearing in March 1967. As such, it was
decidedly anticlimactic. Nonetheless, the Agency’s apprehension was palpable
throughout the trial. It closely monitored news accounts and ran name-checks on
the jurors and some witnesses. Officers were in attendance throughout.
The prosecution, to the Agency’s
surprise, never mentioned the CIA in the courtroom. The stance of the lead
prosecutor, James Alcock, was probably decisive in this regard. No one on
Garrison’s staff had belittled the notion of CIA complicity more than Alcock.[53] The closest Garrison came to
articulating his conspiracy theory about CIA involvement was during the
summation, when he appealed to the jury to deliver a message to those who had
plotted the coup d’état.[54] The jurors were not impressed, and
rendered a unanimous verdict of “not guilty” after deliberating
54 minutes.
Ultimately, it had been left to
Shaw’s attorneys to raise the issue that had caused such anxiety within CIA
headquarters for two years. They did so with dispatch, in one question during
direct examination of their client. “Have you ever worked for the Central
Intelligence Agency?” asked lead defense attorney F. Irvin Dymond. “No, I have
not,” replied Clay Shaw, reserving for himself a small kernel of truth that no
one else in the courtroom needed to know.[55]
Bittersweet Victory
A “glorious, a wonderful, a sweet,
and a very grand victory,” one of the defense lawyers called it. Yet for Shaw,
relief was short-lived. Within 48 hours, Garrison rearrested Shaw on two counts
of perjury, neither of which pertained to Dymond’s question. If convicted, he
faced a 20-year prison sentence. Garrison’s private correspondence right after
the verdict makes clear that he hadn’t wavered from the conviction that Shaw
was an “important CIA operative,” although he still never uttered those words
in public.
With the media now firmly on Shaw’s
side—even the New Orleans States-Item had done an about-face after
the verdict—the defendant’s lawyers allowed their client to begin speaking
publicly. That openness resulted in the most expansive answer Shaw would ever
give on the subject of the Paese Sera allegation. Still, he chose to
keep concealed his unpaid cooperation with the DCS.
The idea [behind the CMC] was to
have one place where buyers coming into the Common Market area would find all
the Common Market countries represented in one (trade) center…. It turned out
to be either badly planned or badly organized and it closed very shortly, and
that was the last I ever heard of it. I never heard that it was a CIA operation
and I don’t know that it was…. Other than what I’ve told you, I know nothing
more about the Centro Mondiale Commerciale. I have never had any connection
with the CIA.[56]
In 1971, Shaw’s lawyers reached a
court willing to put an end to Garrison’s abuse of prosecutorial authority. On
27 May, Federal Judge Herbert W. Christenberry enjoined Garrison from prosecuting
the perjury charges and, for that matter, ever hauling Shaw into a courtroom
again in connection with the Kennedy assassination.[57] The CIA let loose a sigh of relief
along with the long-suffering defendant. The Agency had been cautiously
following the case all the while, even though it no longer generated adverse
headlines—in fact, it was getting almost no headlines at all. “Looks like Mr.
Garrison is on the ropes and will have all he can do to keep the hornets away,”
noted DCS Director Murphy in October 1971, as he officially closed the file.[58] Garrison’s pursuit of Shaw was now
widely regarded as a legal farce and a fraud. The episode had even precipitated
a bitter split among the many critics of the Warren Commission report on the
assassination, nearly all of whom had flocked to Garrison’s side in 1967. Now
many of them considered the Orleans Parish DA to be the Joe McCarthy of their
cause. Just as the Wisconsin senator disgraced anti-Communism by making
reckless charges that ruined innocent peoples’ lives, they believed that
Garrison had irrevocably set back the case against the Warren Report by
persecuting an innocent man.
Battle Over Perceptions
Although 1971 marked the nadir of
Garrison’s legal quest, the Agency was mistaken in assuming that the struggle
over public perceptions had ended. An abject failure in courts of law,
Garrison’s probe achieved a latent triumph in the court of public opinion. The
DA’s message became part and parcel of what has been called “the enduring power
of the 1960s in the national imagination.”[59]
Garrison triumphed in this sphere
partly because his thirst for vindication was unlimited. He sloughed off
Christenberry’s decision and adopted the position that the validity of his
investigation ought not to be judged on its legal results. To anyone who would
listen, he claimed that the “company” (a.k.a. the CIA) was the all-powerful
entity that had thwarted his investigation. The defiant mood in the DA’s camp
was captured in a 10 July 1971 letter to Garrison from Ralph Schoenman,
Bertrand Russell’s former personal secretary and a like-minded conspiracy
theorist who remained staunchly supportive. Schoenman proposed the strategy
that Garrison would eventually pursue.
I have thought about the situation
with the company right now. One of their primary objectives is to keep you off
balance, defensive, always on the run from them and never able to pause
sufficiently to regain the offensive…. Paradoxically, by stopping you from
using the courts against Shaw, they have FREED you to put the case into a book.
Now it cannot be considered sub judice or prejudicial to a trial. So, I suggest
urgently that we take the offensive. Let’s get out a book, hard and fast, which
nails the case against Shaw that we couldn’t get into the courts…. let’s put
THEM on the defensive by blowing the Shaw case sky high with a muck-raking book
that closes in on the company even closer.[60]
Before Garrison could follow
Schoenman’s advice, however, the DA had to contend with a $5 million dollar
lawsuit lodged by Shaw, although his finances were so depleted that he could
barely afford to file. The retired businessman had retained four lawyers and a
small army of private investigators to keep pace with Garrison. Shortly after
giving his first deposition, Shaw died in August 1974, his lifespan doubtlessly
shortened by having his world shattered.
As the episode faded from view, the Paese
Sera articles became akin to the Dead Sea scrolls of the investigation, an
inner secret shared by Garrison’s shrinking band of die-hard believers. Shaw
was a “high-ranking CIA operative in Italy” and the Paese Sera articles
proved it. Within this small circle of pro-Garrison conspiracy buffs, the DA
was the person who had been martyred, victimized by the vast but hidden
power of “the company”andits “disinformation machinery.” The alleged link between
Shaw and the CIA became a staple of conspiracy books published in the
post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era.[61]
In December 1973, former CIA officer
Victor Marchetti went public with information that fanned the embers.
Marchetti, executive assistant to the Deputy Director of CIA before his
1969 resignation, had been present at several high‑level meetings in which DCI
Helms expressed sympathy for Shaw’s predicament. Marchetti overheard Helms
instructing General Counsel Houston to help Shaw, consistent with the Agency’s
interests. Marchetti aired this information shortly before publishing his 1974
exposé, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. In keeping with his
now-antagonistic relationship with the Agency, he couched the disclosure in
such a way as to suggest that it was just as likely that the CIA had concealed
a nefarious connection with Shaw as an innocuous one.[62]
Unfounded assertions of CIA
complicity were bolstered inadvertently by a series of investigations of the
Intelligence Community in the 1970s. The 1975 Rockefeller Commission report was
followed by the 1976 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and
the 1979 report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). All
examined the CIA’s activities both before and after Kennedy’s assassination,
and, in the case of HSCA, specifically looked into Shaw’s supposed role as a
high-ranking operative. The bottom line in each instance gave no credence to
any of Garrison’s allegations about Shaw and the CIA. Inexorably, however, the
mere fact that such questions were asked helped fashion Garrison into something
of a prophet in the public mind.[63]
In 1979, Shaw’s link to the CIA was
dredged up again when former DCI Helms gave a deposition in a libel case. The
lawsuit involved a 1975 book entitled Coup d’état in America: The CIA and
the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, yet another book that had swallowed thePaese
Sera deception.[64] Although not party to the suit,
Helms was deposed by the defendants’ attorney. Under oath, he divulged the
kernel of truth that the Agency and Shaw had struggled to keep secret when
Garrison’s probe was at its height. Helms accurately described Shaw’s contact
with the CIA from 1948 to 1956: at “one time, as a businessman, (Shaw) was one
of the part-time contacts of the Domestic Contact Division.”[65] Garrison, by then a Louisiana state
judge, pounced on Helms’s disclosure and distorted it. Garrison wrote in his
memoir that the disclosure represented “confirmation…that Clay Shaw had
been an agent.”[66]
Losing the Fight
Bolstered by these developments,
Garrison tried to implement the advice rendered by Schoenman in 1971: write a
“muckraking book” that would bring the Shaw-CIA connection front and
center. It took Garrison more than four years to find a publisher for his
memoir, although he hawked it with a promise to reveal, for the first time, the
actual CIA hand in the assassination. Fifteen major publishers rejected the
manuscript. Finally the memoir found a home at a small New York-based press,
which printed On the Trail of the Assassins in 1988. For the first time,
Garrison made explicit the connection between his grand conspiracy theory and
Shaw’s link to the CIA (Paese Sera’s version). To explain why he had not made
the affiliation known when it presumably might have counted—during the
trial—Garrison claimed that he did not learn about Shaw’s CIA activities in
Italy until after 1969.[67]
None of this seemed to matter, least
of all to the CIA, until the publisher of Garrison’s memoir thrust a copy into
the hands of filmmaker Oliver Stone during an international film festival in
Cuba.[68] That chance encounter eventually
led to the endorsement of Paese Sera’sdisinformation by a major Hollywood
film, JFK. In the movie, Garrison (portrayed by Kevin Costner) confronts
Shaw (played by Tommy Lee Jones) with an Italian newspaper article exposing
Shaw’s role as a CIA operative. The confrontation, of course, never occurred in
real life; yet the scene captures a hidden historical truth. The epicenter of
Garrison’s prosecution, and the wellspring for his ultimate theory of the
assassination, was the DA’s belief in a fantasy published by a
Communist-owned Italian newspaper.[69]
According to one historian who
admires Stone, the movie JFK probably “had a greater impact on public
opinion than any other work of art in American history” save Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.[70]While that may be hyperbole, not many
Hollywood films can claim to have generated new legislation. JFK ignited
a public clamor for millions of pages of documents that had been “suppressed”
as part of the government’s alleged massive cover-up.
In response, Congress passed a
sweeping statute in 1992, the President John F. Kennedy Records Collection
Act, which forced open all federal records relating to the assassination and an
unexpected amount of state, local, and private records as well—including those
of the former Orleans Parish district attorney. The law directed that these
documents be catalogued and housed at the National Archives.
Oliver Stone likes to assign full
credit for the legislation to his film, which is something of an exaggeration.
The coincidental end of the Cold War also played a critical role in the
enactment and implementation of the 1992 law. More disingenuously, Stone claims
that while the records declassified by the statute have not produced a “smoking
gun,” they have opened “a clear historical record of a cover-up taking place.”[71]
In truth, one legacy of Stone’s JFK is
an altogether ironic one. Far from validating the film’s hero, the new
documents have finally lifted the lid on the disinformation that was at the
core of Jim Garrison’s unrelenting probe. The declassified CIA records document
that everything in the Paese Sera story was a lie, and,
simultaneously, reveal the genuine nature and duration of Clay Shaw’s innocuous
link to the CIA. These same records explain why the CIA never responded
appropriately to the disinformation, as it had in Helms’s 1961 Senate testimony
and would later do in swift response to such schemes in the 1980s. Finally, the
personal files turned over by Garrison’s family underline the profound impact
that one newspaper clipping had on a mendacious district attorney adept at
manipulating the Zeitgeistof the late 1960s.
[1] Senate Judiciary Committee, Communist Forgeries (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1961). In September 1961, “Communist Forgeries”
became the first Senate hearing ever translated into three foreign languages
(Spanish, French, and Italian).
[3] “Preparato in accordo con Washington il colpo di stato
militare in Algeria?” Paese Sera, 22-23 April 1961.
[5] “Paris Rumors on C.I.A.,” The New York Times, 2 May
1961, and “French Minister Tries to Halt Rumors of U. S. Role in Mutiny,” The
New York Times, 6 May 1961.
[7] The KGB’s emphasis on dezinformatsiya as a
particularly useful “active measure” (the Soviet term for covert activities) is
a staple in intelligence literature. Among the earliest reliable accounts is
Ladislav Bittman, The Deception Game: Czechoslovak Intelligence in Soviet
Political Warfare (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Research Corporation,
1972). See also Vladislav M. Zubok, “Spy vs. Spy: The KGB vs. the CIA,
1960-1962,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, Issue 4, Fall 1994,
pp. 22-33.
[8] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American
Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 219-220. On
the 30th anniversary of the assassination, according to national polls cited by
Moynihan, three-quarters of those surveyed believed the CIA had murdered the
President.
[9] Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, had lived in New
Orleans for five months prior to the murder, which provided the pretext for
Garrison’s probe.
[10] For the circumstances of Shaw’s arrest, see Patricia Lambert, False
Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation (New York: M.
Evans, 1998). At the time of the arrest, Garrison had no knowledge of any
actual or presumed link between Shaw and the CIA.
[11] Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, Report
to the President(Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, June 1975), pp.
208-210.
[12] Subject: Clay L. Shaw, Enclosure 21, Microfilm, Box 23, HSCA
Segregated CIA Collection (hereafter HSCA/CIA Collection), John F. Kennedy
Assassination Records Collection, National Archives (hereafter JFK NARA). See
also Information Report No. 00-B-9381, Central Intelligence Agency, 27 December
1948, File JFK-M-04 (F2), Box 1, Miscellaneous CIA Series (hereafter CIA
Series), JFK NARA. Seven of Shaw’s reports are contained in this file.
[13] Memo to Director, DCS, from Chief, New Orleans Office, re
Clay Shaw, 3 March 1967, JFK-M-04 (F3), Box 1, CIA Series; Memorandum re
Garrison Investigation: Queries from Justice Department, 28 September 1967, Box
6, Russell Holmes Papers; various Information Reports, JFK-M-04 (F2), Box 1,
CIA Series—all JFK NARA.
[14] Memo to Chief, New Orleans Office, from Chief, Contact
Division, re Case 20791, 4 June 1956, JFK-M-04 (F2), Box 1, CIA Series,
JFK NARA.
[15] Memo, Director, DCS, from Chief, New Orleans Office, 3 March
1967, JFK-M-04 (F3), Box 1, CIA Series, JFK NARA.
[16] “Clay Shaw (arrestato per Kennedy) ha svolto un’oscura
attività a Roma,” (“Clay Shaw Carried Out Obscure Activity in Rome”) Paese
Sera, 4 March 1967. The “scoop” ran for three successive days in Paese
Sera. An accurate description of the CMC’s purposes is found in “Rome’s Trade
Center—How It Came To Be,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 17 September 1960.
[17] On 14 February 1967, Ramparts and The New York
Times simultaneously revealed that the National Students Association had
knowingly accepted cash subsidies from the CIA. See Michael Warner,
“Sophisticated Spies: CIA’s Links to Liberal Anti-Communists, 1949-1967,”International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter 1996/97,
pp. 425-433; Sig Mickelson, America’s Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free
Europe and Radio Liberty (New York: Praeger, 1983), pp. 121-124; and Cord
Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA (New York:
Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 85-94. In addition to lending the Paese
Sera story credence, the Ramparts exposé may have helped
precipitate the disinformation to begin with.
[18] Corriere della Sera, for example, ran a story on 5 March
entitled “Shaw fu nel consiglio di un centro economico di Roma,” (“Shaw Was on
the Council of an Economic Center in Rome”) that did not mention the CIA at
all.
[19] “Clay Shaw a travaillé à Rome pour les services US
d’espionnage,” (“Clay Shaw Worked in Rome for US Intelligence”), l’Humanité,
8 March 1967.
[20] “Vasta eco alle rivelazioni di Paese Sera sull’attivita
italiana di Clay Shaw,” (“Vast Echos from Paese Sera’s Revelations on
the Italian Activities of Clay Shaw”), Paese Sera, 6 March 1967. It
is possible, of course, that the stories simply reflected sloppy and
sensational journalism rather than intentional disinformation. Yet one of the
entries pertaining to Italy from the so-called “Mitrokhin archive” suggests a
KGB provenance. Vasili Mitrokhin, the former KGB archivist who defected to
Britain in 1992, brought with him 25,000 pages of handwritten notes about
highly sensitive documents. One brief note refers to a disinformation scheme in
1967 that involved Paese Sera and resulted in publication of a false
story in New York. See Max Holland, “The Demon in Jim Garrison,” Wilson
Quarterly, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Spring 2001.
[21] Though not the official organ, Paese Sera was a
proprietary company of the Gruppo Editoriale PCI, and thus owned by the Italian
Communist Party. Gaetano Fusaroli, Giornali in Italia (Parma, Italy:
Guanda Editore, 1974), pp. 300-301.
[22] Memo for Chief, CI/R&A, “Trace Results on Persons
Connected with Centro Mondiale Commerciale,” 24 March 1967; and “Subject: Clay
L. Shaw,” Enclosure 21; both in Microfilm Box 23, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK
NARA. Counterintelligence officers retrieved Italian coverage of the story as
it appeared in Corriere della Sera and Il Messaggero, but
not the seminal Paese Sera article.
[23] Memo from Rocca to Houston, 1 March 1968, Box 85, HSCA/CIA
Collection, JFK NARA. Though outdated, the best work on Soviet exploitation of
the assassination remains Armand Moss, Disinformation, Misinformation, and
the ‘Conspiracy’ to Kill JFK Exposed (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1987). See
also Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield:
The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic
Books, 1999), pp. 225-230.
[24] “New questions raised on JFK killing,” National Guardian,
18 March 1967. The New York-based Guardian may well have been the
publication referenced in the note from the Mitrokhin archives.
[25] Memo to Chief, New Orleans, from Director, DCS, 20 March
1967, JFK-M-04 (F2), Box 1, CIA Series, JFK NARA.
[27] “Dick Billings’s Personal Notes on Consultations and Interviews
with Garrison,” p. 25, Richard Billings File, Assassination Archives and
Research Center, Washington, DC.
[28] “The Case That Never Was: Former Aides Attack Garrison’s Case
Against Shaw,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, 20 November 1983. When asked in
this article why aides opposed Shaw’s prosecution, Garrison said that most of
his assistants were not privy to the behind-the-scene workings of his inquiry.
[29] Letter, Garrison to Russell, 27 August 1967, New Orleans
Public Library Microfilm #92-83, JFK NARA.
[30] James Phelan, “A Plot to Kill Kennedy? Rush to Judgment in
New Orleans,” Saturday Evening Post, Vol. CCXL, 6 May 1967, pp. 21-25.
[31] Interview with Rosemary James, 24 February 2000, and
interview with Ross Yockey, 1 March 2000. James and Yockey were two of the
five reporters credited with writing the story.
[34] 4 Memo for Assistant Deputy Director for Plans from Rocca, 26
April 1967, Box 6, Russell Holmes Papers, JFK NARA.
[35] The Times-Picayune and States-Item published
these allegations, and many others involving the CIA, during the months of May
and June 1967.
[36] See, for example, Memorandum No. 7, Re Garrison and the
Kennedy Assassination, 13 September 1967, Box 6, Russell Holmes Papers,
JFK NARA. In point of fact, Garrison was ignorant of the Shaw-DCS relationship
and would remain so for the duration.
[37] Memorandum, Garrison TV Interviews of 21 May 1967 and 28 May
1967, Box 84, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA.
[38] Memorandum for the Record, Garrison Group Meeting No. 1, 20
September 1967, Box 46, Russell Holmes Papers, JFK NARA.
[39] Memorandum, Garrison TV Interviews of 21 May 1967 and 28 May
1967, Box 84, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA.
[40] Memorandum No. 3, Garrison and the Kennedy Assassination, 1
June 1967, Box 84, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA.
[41] A July 1968 letter to Senator Richard Russell from DCI Helms
is an excellent summary of the CIA’s perception of the Garrison probe. Nowhere
does Helms mention a disinformation scheme as the wellspring of Garrison’s
accusations against the Agency. Letter, Helms to Russell with Attachment “Jim
Garrison and the CIA,” 24 July 1968, Box 85, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA.
[42] Memo for the Record, Report Concerning Garrison-Kennedy-CIA,
1 May 1967, Box 84, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA. Miller’s source was Walter
Sheridan, then a reporter for NBC News and formerly a top aide to Attorney
General Robert Kennedy.
[44] Memorandum for Executive Director-Comptroller, re Garrison
Investigation, 18 September 1967, Box 85, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA.
[46] Cable to New Orleans from Office of General Counsel, 29
September 1967, Box 86, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA.
[47] Memorandum No. 7, Re Garrison and the Kennedy Assassination,
13 September 1967, Box 6, Russell Holmes Papers, JFK NARA.
[48] Memorandum for the Director from Lawrence Houston, 2 October
1967, Box 85, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA.
[50] Memorandum for Director, FBI, 2 March 1968, re Garrison and
the Kennedy Assassination: Interview of Garrison on Dutch TV, 1 March
1968, Box 85, HSCA/CIA Collection, JFK NARA.
[54] Jim Garrison’s Closing Argument, 28 February 1969, State of
Louisiana vs. Clay L. Shaw, Criminal District Court, Parish of Orleans, State
of Louisiana, 198-059, Box 5, Jim Garrison Papers, JFK NARA.
[58] Memo to Chief, Dallas Field Office, from Director, DCS, 6
October 1971, File JFK-M-04(F3), Box 1, CIA Series, JFK NARA.
[59] “Steal This Myth: Why We Still Try to Re-Create the Rush of
the 60s,” The New York Times, 8 August 2000.
[60] Letter, Schoenman to Garrison, 10 July 1971, New Orleans
Public Library Microfilm, #92-83, JFK NARA.
[61] See, for example, Robert Sam Anson, “They’ve Killed the
President!” The Search for the Murderers of John F. Kennedy (New York:
Bantam, 1975), p. 122; Robert D. Morrow,Betrayal(Chicago: Regnery, 1976), p.
92; and Bernard Fensterwald, Coincidence or Conspiracy? (New York:
Zebra Books, 1977), pp. 452-453.
[62] Zodiac News Service Press Release, 21 December 1973,
File G-1396, World Trade Center, Box 8, Jim Garrison Papers, JFK NARA.
[63] Joe Manguno, “Was Jim Garrison Right After All?” New
Orleans, June 1976, and Richard Boyle, “The Strange Death of Clay Shaw,” True,
April 1975.
[64] Michael Canfield and Alan J. Weberman, Coup d’état in
America: the CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Third
Press, 1975), pp. 39-40.
[65] Deposition of Richard McGarrah Helms, 1 June 1984, E.
Howard Hunt, Jr., Plaintiff, v. Liberty Lobby, Inc., Defendant, No.
80-1121-Civ.-JWK, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, Box 6, Jim
Garrison Papers, JFK NARA.
[66] Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins: My
Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy (New
York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988), p. 276.
[69] To drive home the point, just before the credits roll a
reference is made to Helms’s 1979 deposition. Rather than quoting Helms, or
accurately characterizing Shaw as an unpaid and sporadic contact, the following
words appear against a black screen. “In 1979, Richard Helms, director of
covert operations in 1963, admitted under oath that Clay Shaw had worked for
the CIA.”
[70] Robert Brent Toplin, editor, Oliver Stone’s USA: Film,
History, and Controversy(Lawrence, KN: University Press of Kansas, 2000), p.
174.
Was Jim Garrison Duped by the KGB?
11 February 2002
By Max Holland
Alone on the evening
of March 5, 1967, Clay Shaw quietly pondered the nightmarish fate that lay
before him.
The week before, he
had been a respected citizen and reasonably prosperous retired businessman. He
fully expected that his toughest remaining decision would be to choose which of
his sophisticated passions to indulge; he was equally fond of the theater,
travel, New Orleans cuisine, and restoration of the French Quarter. Now all
that seemed a conceit belonging to another man’s life, four days after being
charged with the crime of the century by the district attorney for Orleans
Parish.
Shaw knew the
accusation was preposterous. He had no knowledge of President Kennedy’s murder
other than what he had learned about the 1963 assassination from the media. And
being a rational, educated man, he recognized that one day some court was bound
to declare him not guilty. But that was small consolation. “I realized,” the
53-year-old bachelor later wrote, “that I was on the other side of what would
be the great watershed dividing my life into two parts.” No matter how complete
his vindication, he could never hope to eradicate the strain of the initial
accusation. From this point on, Clay Lavergne Shaw would always be known as the
second man ever arrested and charged with carrying out Kennedy’s assassination.
“Why me?” Shaw wrote
in his new diary that evening. This question would baffle him until his death
in 1974. Only now, 35 years after the arrest, has it become possible to piece
together the complete but complicated answer to Shaw’s plaintive question. The
full story goes well beyond the familiar tale of Shaw’s ordeal at the hands of
a publicity-mad district attorney with few scruples. Indeed, Jim Garrison’s
relentless persecution of Shaw only makes sense when one factors in this last
secret: the hidden role played by an entirely unexpected actor, the Soviet KGB.
The KGB’s pernicious
contribution is best understood by looking at the trajectory of Garrison’s
public statements about the case. Initially, Garrison explained that in
indicting Shaw, he was only assuming an unsought, even unwanted burden. The
federal government’s bungling of the case left an honest prosecutor no other
choice, he asserted. Soon that rationale was replaced by a far darker fable.
Within two months of Shaw’s arrest, Garrison began articulating a truly radical
critique that challenged not only the veracity of the Warren Report but
the federal government’s very legitimacy. Ultimately, he would claim that the
people’s elected leader had been removed in a CIA-led mutiny and that the
plotters had been allowed to walk away unscathed. As he wrote in his 1988
memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins, “What happened at Dealey Plaza in
Dallas on November 22, 1963, was a coup d’Etat. I believe that it was
instigated and planned long in advance by fanatical anticommunists in the
United States intelligence community.”
The fact that a New Orleans
jury delivered a resounding verdict of “not guilty” at Shaw’s 1969 trial barely
hindered Garrison’s ability to market this myth of CIA complicity. He would
argue that the “validity” of his investigation ought not to be judged on its
technical, legal results.
And one has to admit
that, in the court of public opinion at least, Garrison, who died in 1992, by
and large succeeded, albeit with Hollywood’s help.
Opening the Records
Until recently, it was
impossible to revisit this episode as a historian would, by examining primary
documents. Garrison’s records were in the possession of his descendants, and
his successors in office; Shaw’s papers were in the hands of his attorneys and
friends; CIA records were secured in agency vaults. But all that began to
change after Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 film, JFK, which breathed
new life into Garrison’s decades-old charges. As the end of the Cold War eased
concerns about secrecy, Congress in 1992 passed the far-reaching JFK
Assassination Records Collection Act. It not only freed highly classified
documents from government bureaucracies, but authorized the gathering of
primary materials from nongovernmental sources.
What emerges from
these papers, and from unexpected quarters, is an altogether new view of the
Garrison story. The district attorney who legitimized the notion of CIA
complicity emerges as an all-too-willing accomplice to a falsehood. Garrison
allowed himself to be taken in by a lie, a lie that may well have been part and
parcel of the Soviet KGB’s relentless propagation of disinformation during the
Cold War.
To begin unraveling
the complicated tale, one has to go back to February 17, 1967, when the New
Orleans States-Item broke the sensational story that Garrison had opened a
new investigation into the Kennedy assassination. A media firestorm erupted,
with New Orleans at its center.
Stunning as this story
was, it had to compete for attention with another dramatic revelation. Earlier
that same week, Ramparts, a radical San Francisco-based magazine, revealed
that the National Student Association, the oldest and largest college-student
organization in the country, had knowingly accepted cash subsidies from the CIA
since 1952. A rash of stories quickly followed as elite news outlets raced to
outdo the upstartRamparts by exposing a variety of covert CIA subsidies to
private organizations in the United States and abroad. The agency seemed to
have its tentacles inside every sector of American society: student and teacher
groups, labor unions, foundations, legal and business organizations, even
universities. The disclosures lent substance to the criticism that the CIA was
nothing less than an invisible government. Amid the furor over theRamparts scoop,
Garrison ostentatiously announced the first result of his investigation: the
apprehension of Clay Shaw, the alleged “evil genius” behind the assassination.
Shaw, the former head of New Orleans’ International Trade Mart, was a socially
prominent retired businessman who also dabbled as a playwright (Tennessee
Williams was a friend) and had won local renown as an advocate of restoring the
city’s French Quarter.
It would take a book
to explain how Shaw came to be charged, and Patricia Lambert’s 1999 work, False
Witness, is a very good account. Suffice it to say that Garrison did not arrest
Shaw because he suspected a link to the CIA. Indeed, Garrison’s theory of the
crime at this stage was that Shaw, a homosexual, had been involved because of
his sexual orientation. “It was a homosexual thrill-killing,” Garrison
explained to a reporter shortly after Shaw’s arrest. Kennedy, averred the
district attorney, had been assassinated because he was everything the
conspirators were not: “a successful, handsome, popular, wealthy, virile man.”
In western Europe,
both Shaw’s arrest and the exposé on the CIA’s student activities made for
riveting headlines, especially in the left-wing, anti-American newspapers
subsidized directly or indirectly by the national Communist parties. One of
them was a Rome-based daily called Paese Sera. On March 4, 1967, three
days after Shaw’s arrest,Paese Sera managed to weave both stories together
in one arresting falsehood. Shaw,Paese Sera reported, had been involved in
mysterious, “pseudo-commercial” activities in Rome during the early 1960s while
serving on the board of a defunct company called the Centro Mondiale
Commerciale. The CMC, founded as the first steps were being taken toward a
European Common Market, had been dedicated to making Rome a hub of western
European commerce. But trade promotion was a façade, Paese Sera claimed.
The CMC had been a “creature of the CIA . . . set up as a cover for the
transfer to Italy of CIA-FBI funds for illegal political espionage activities.”
Paese Sera’s lie was
swathed in enough truth to make the “exposé” seem plausible in the context of
the time, or at least not completely absurd. The disclosures about covert CIA
subsidies had shown that anticommunist elements in Italy were among the largest
beneficiaries of the agency’s overseas largess, and other aspects of Paese
Sera’s scoop were verifiable: The CMC had existed in Rome before going out of
business in late 1962, and Shaw had joined its board of directors in 1958.
Consequently, Paese Sera’s allegation of a link between Shaw and the CIA
spread rapidly, parroted by like-minded media in western Europe and the
controlled press of the Soviet bloc.
Significantly, more
sober-minded newspapers in Italy treated the story quiet differently because
the Italian ministries of defense, foreign affairs, and foreign trade all
denied the core allegation that the CMC was a CIA front. Milan’s mainstream
newspaper, Corriere della Sera, limited itself to a matter-of-fact report
on Shaw’s Roman connection.
Highly Classified
More than three
decades after reliable Italian newspapers discounted the allegation, there is
now support for their position from official U.S. sources. In compliance with
the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, the CIA released highly
classified records pertaining to the assassination and its aftermath. Included
are dozens of agency documents generated in direct response to Paese Sera’s
1967 “scoop.”
These documents show
that when the allegations about Shaw’s link to the CIA surfaced in communist-party
organs, including Pravda, they immediately grabbed the attention of the
agency’s top counterintelligence officers. These anxious officials promptly ran
traces on the CMC to see what, if anything, agency files revealed about the
trade organization and its corporate parent, a Swiss-based company called
Permanent Industrial Exhibition (PERMINDEX). No links whatsoever to the CMC or
its parent were found. Nor was there any evidence that Shaw had ever been asked
by the CIA to exploit his CMC board membership for any clandestine purpose.
The allegation was a
lie, but who concocted it and for what possible reason? The obvious explanation
is that the scoop was a journalistic flight of fancy by mischievous Paese
Serareporters. In addition to its close identification with the Italian left, Paese
Sera was famous – or infamous – for its colorful exclusives, stories that
often provoked sarcastic comments in other publications and protests from
Italian officials. In American terms,Paese Sera was a heavily politicized
version of The National Enquirer. Yet there are ample grounds for
suspecting that something more was involved than tabloid opportunism. In the
1960s, Paese Sera figured in a number of dezinformatsiya –
disinformation – schemes instigated by the KGB, including one spectacularly
successful effort that is a matter of public record.
Paese Sera’s role as a
conduit for disinformation was first exposed in June 1961 during a U.S. Senate
hearing on “Communist forgeries.” The sole witness was Richard Helms, then the
chief of operations in the CIA’s Plans Directorate, and the first exhibit
in his testimony concerned Paese Sera. The afternoon daily had been
instrumental in a disinformation scheme alleging CIA involvement in an April
coup attempt against French president Charles de Gaulle – though, in fact, it
was reported, Kennedy had gone to extraordinary lengths to defend de Gaulle
against the plotters. Helms summed up the episode, which almost caused a breach
in Franco-American relations, as an “excellent example of how the communists
use the false news story.” And it had all started withPaese Sera and its
then-sister publication, Il Paese, Helms observed. The two Italian papers
belonged “to a small group of journals published in the free world but used as
outlets for disguised Soviet propaganda . . . Instead of having this originate
in Moscow, where everybody would pinpoint it, they planted the story first in
Italy.”
Paese Sera’s 1967
scoop about Shaw matched the earlier story in the speed and pattern of its
dissemination. The KGB itself may not have concocted either story, according to
several exports on disinformation. Ladislav Bittman, deputy chief of the
KGB-tutored Czechoslovakian disinformation section until his 1968 defection to
the West, observes that newspapers like Paese Sera often had one or
more journalists on their payroll who were, in effect, agents of influence.
Some were paid, and some were simply ideological sympathizers. Occasionally, a
journalist/ agent would be instructed to write specific articles or receive KGB
forgeries of classified U.S. or North Atlantic Treaty Organization documents.
But many were schooled to independently develop “certain themes” of enduring
interest to the KGB, such as stories about CIA malfeasance. Thus, an agent of
influence inside Paese Sera who was “well acquainted with the
Soviets’ propagandistic interests” might act on his own, Bittman notes.
Nonetheless, the story would still “qualify as a Soviet disinformation effort.”
The odds in favor of a
more direct KGB provenance rose sharply in the fall of 1999, when the so-called
Mitrokhin archive became available in the West. Literally a treasure trove of
information about Soviet “active measures,” the archive consists of 25,000
pages of handwritten notes about highly sensitive Soviet documents, taken
obsessively over a 12-year period by a former KGB archivist named Vasili
Mitrokhin. He defected to Great Britain in 1992 after the dissolution of the
Soviet Union, along with his family and six cases of his painstakingly compiled
notes. Mitrokhin arrived in London dead set on inflicting as much damage as
possible on his hated former employer by exposing the KGB’s subversive
activities worldwide. Mitrokhin’s archive included notes about 250IMPEDIAN reports, IMPEDIAN apparently
being the code name for active measures instigated by the KGB’s outpost in
Rome. His note on report No. 222, only one paragraph long, seems vague and
uninteresting at first glance. Titled “Disinformation Operations of the KGB
through Paese Sera,” the note states in part,” In 1967, Department A of
the First Chief Directorate conducted a series of disinformation operations . .
. One such emplacement in New York was through Paese Sera.”
An exhaustive search
of 11 nationally significant American periodicals and newspapers published in
1967 turns up only one significant reference to a story from Paese Sera.
On March 18, the National Guardian, an influential left-wing weekly,
published a front-page article about Shaw’s arrest. It included information
from Rome that had yet to appear in any other American publication, despite the
extensive coverage of Garrison’s doings in New Orleans: “The Guardian’s Rome
correspondent, Phyllis Rosner, quoting the Rome daily Paese Serra [sic],
reported that from 1961 to 1965 Shaw was on the board of directors of the
Centro Mondiale Commerciale, which the paper said was engaged in obscure
dealings in Rome . . . Paese Serra said it is believed that the CMC
was set up by the CIA as a cover for channeling funds into Italy.”
The Guardian billed
itself as a “progressive news weekly,” proudly independent of American
Communist Party orthodoxy. It identified with the burgeoning New Left group or
party during the 1960s and was nowhere more influential than in the city where it
was edited and published – New York.
Trying to determine
with precision what happened inside Paese Sera in March 1967 and who
was responsible, however, may be misguided. Regardless of whether the hoax was
intentional and malevolent, or simply a case of journalistic opportunism, the
truly significant part of the saga is what transpired after this particular
“revelation” reached the district attorney of Orleans Parish.
There were many
critics of the Warren Report, of course, other than Jim Garrison. But none
had the authority of a duly elected law official; none could match the
flamboyant Garrison’s skill in casting himself as the archetypal lone hero
battling for the truth; and none was more adept at manipulating the Zeitgeist of
the 1960s. His audacity and lack of scruples were breathtaking, though
camouflaged by lean good looks that made Garrison appear like a prosecutor
ordered by central casting. Not since Senator Joseph McCarthy had America seen
such a cunning demagogue.
No Inkling
In his memoir,
Garrison flatly denied learning about Paese Sera’s scoop in 1967. “We
had no inkling that Clay Shaw was much bigger and more powerful than his New
Orleans persona indicated,” wrote Garrison. “It was not until much later, well
after the [1969] Shaw trial when it could have been of any use to us, that we
discovered Shaw’s extensive international role as an employee of the CIA.”
Testimony from a
variety of sources proves that this version of what happened could not possibly
be true. The most indisputable evidence comes from a diary kept by Richard
Billings, a senior editor at Life magazine, who was one of Garrison’s
closest confidants during the initial phase of the investigation. Billings’
entry for March 16, 1967, 12 days after the publication of the first Paese
Sera article, notes, “Garrison now interested in possible connections
between Shaw and the CIA . . . Article in March issue Humanities[l’Humanitie,
the organ of the French Communist Party] supposedly mentions Shaw’s company
[CIA] work in Italy.” Six days later, according to Billings’ diary, Garrison
had at least one of the articles in hand. “Story about Shaw and CIA appears in Humanitie [sic],
probably March 8 . . . [Garrison] has copy date-lined Rome, March 7th, from la
presse Italien [sic],” noted Billings on March 22. “It explains Shaw working in
Rome ’58 to ’60 period.”
Verifying the impact
of the Paese Sera scoop on Garrison is a simple matter of juxtaposing
the district attorney’s private and public statements with Billings’s entries.
Once one does so, a heretofore hidden truth emerges. Though Shaw never deserved
to be indicted in the first place, Garrison relentlessly pursued him because, by
late March 1967, he believed he had in his clutches an important covert
operative of the CIA. Undoubtedly encouraged by conspiracy buffs who had
flocked to New Orleans (none of whom had yet accused the CIA of being
involved), Garrison now thought he was on the verge of exposing a scandal that
would make the controversy over the CIA’s secret funding of private groups in
the United States look minuscule by comparison. It would also elevate Garrison
into a national hero.
“I didn’t know exactly
how Shaw was involved,” said Garrison years later, in an unguarded but
revealing comment. “But with Shaw I grabbed a toehold on the conspiracy. I
wasn’t about to let go because of the technicalities.” In May 1967, just as the
first critical stories about his investigative methods had begun to appear in
the national press, Garrison launched a barrage of fresh accusations that
dominated national headlines for weeks. Though the facts were subject to daily
revision, the theme was constant: The CIA was an unwitting accomplice to the
assassination because some of its agents and former agents had acted on their
own, which the agency then tried to cover up. After the shock value of this
allegation wore a bit thin, Garrison dropped the “unwitting” and alleged
foreknowledge and complicity as well. It was a KGB dream come true. Here was an
elected American official claiming that Washington knew who killed President
Kennedy, but that the CIA called the tune in America. “The CIA has infinitely
more power than the [Nazi]Gestapo and the NKVD [Soviet internal security
police] of Russia combined, “Garrison told The Times-Picayune in May
1967.
Louisianians have long
been accustomed to a certain amount of theatricality in their politicians, and
one Bourbon Street store catering to the tourist trade mocked Garrison by
publishing a gag newspaper headline: “DA stops CIA in USA Takeover.” Elsewhere
in the United States, though, where district attorneys are taken more
seriously, the cumulative impact of Garrison’s allegations was dramatic. This
was the moment in time when the Orleans Parish DA altered forever the terms of
the assassination controversy.
A Louis Harris poll in
May 1967 revealed that for the first time since 1963, a sizable majority of
Americans (66 percent) believed that a conspiracy was behind the assassination.
A few months earlier, before news of the Garrison probe broke, only 44 percent
had expressed such a view. But the qualitative change, which Harris did not
measure, was of a greater and more lasting significance. In the space of a few
weeks, Garrison had legitimized the fable that the CIA was complicit in the
assassination of President Kennedy – and that American democracy itself was an
illusion.
Perfect Foil
One of the most astute
observers of this transformation was none other than Shaw. He discerned earlier
and more clearly than most that Garrison had found a perfect foil. The average
American was ambivalent about the super-secret agency, which was unlike
anything that had ever existed in peacetime America, and because of its very
nature, the CIA could not respond forthrightly to public attacks. The CIA was a
made-to-order “whipping boy and chief villain,” as Shaw later put it.
Shaw finally had the
chance to rebut his accuser in January 1969, in a trial that lasted 34 days.
Despite pretrial boasts of testimony that “will rock the nation,” Garrison
produced not a scintilla of evidence of CIA involvement in the assassination.
Indeed, the district attorney never even mentioned the agency in court.
Garrison may have been a demagogue, but he was no fool, and he certainly
realized that Italian newspaper clippings, seconded by Pravda, were
nothing more than inadmissible hearsay. The closest he came to articulating his
theory was during the summation, when he exhorted the jurors to strike a blow
against the government’s “murder of the truth.”
It took the jury just
54 minutes to render a unanimous verdict of not guilty. Never one to admit
defeat, Garrison then adopted the position that the prosecution had failed only
because a district attorney, no matter how dedicated, could not overcome a
secret organization as powerful as the CIA. As Shaw’s ordeal receded into
history – he died in 1974, nearly destitute after the trial and a subsequent
effort by Garrison to convict him of perjury – the Paese Sera articles
took on the status of a sacred text, an inner secret shared by Garrison’s
shrinking band of true believers. Within this circle, Garrison was considered
the martyr, victimized, ironically, by the vast but hidden power of the CIA and
its “disinformation machinery.”
In 1979, the Garrison
sect received an unexpected boost when Richard Helms, who had gone on to head
the CIA from 1966 to 1973, gave a deposition in a court case. Under oath, Helms
divulged a fact that the CIA had struggled to keep secret during Shaw’s
two-year ordeal, fearing that it would be distorted by Garrison and
misconstrued by the jury: Clay Shaw indeed had a relationship with the CIA,
beginning in 1948, though it was utterly unlike the one attributed to him in Paese
Sera. Like 150,000 other Americans during the darkest days of the Cold War,
Shaw volunteered information to the CIA that he routinely gathered during his
frequent trips abroad, mostly to Latin America during the late 1940s and early
1950s. The information was no more secret than what could be gleaned from a
close reading of The Wall Street Journal (Shaw’s reports are among
the CIA documents recently declassified), and the relationship ended in 1956.
Helms, in his
deposition, accurately described Shaw’s innocuous link with the CIA: At “one
time, as a businessman, [Shaw] was one of the part-time contacts of the [CIA’s]
Domestic Contact Division.” Still, the disclosure gave the hoax new life.
Garrison seized upon Helms’ deposition and claimed it represented “confirmation
. . . that Clay Shaw had been an agent.”
By the late 1980s,
Garrison’s pursuit of Shaw was widely regarded as a legal farce, yet despite
his defeat in the courts, he had achieved a powerful conceptual triumph. A majority
of Americans no longer believed that Warren Report, and CIA complicity of
one kind or another was widely presumed. Revelations of agency misdeeds by the
U.S. Senate’s Church Committee during the mid-1970s had inadvertently made
Garrison appear to be a prophet, though without much honor. When the former
district attorney attempted to sell his memoir, it took him more than four
years to find a publisher, though he promised to reveal, for the first time,
the actual CIA hand in the assassination.
Garrison’s 1988 memoir
forged the penultimate link in a grotesque claim that had begun in New Orleans,
stretched to Rome and ended in Hollywood. More than 25 years after first
appearing in Paese Sera, the lie about Shaw’s activities in Rome became
the basis for a pivotal scene in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Without this
encounter, there simply was no way to link Shaw with a vast conspiracy
involving the highest levels of government. The fictional scene, which occurs
88 minutes into the film, depicts a meeting in the district attorney’s office
between Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) and Shaw (played by Tommy Lee
Jones.):
Garrison shows Shaw a newspaper
clipping.
GARRISON: Mr. Shaw, this is [an]
Italian newspaper article saying that you were a member of the board of Centro
Mondiale Commerciale in Italy – that this company was a creature of the CIA for
the transfer of funds in Italy for illegal political-espionage activity. [The
article] says that this company was expelled from Italy for those activities.
SHAW: I’m well aware of that asinine
article. I’m thinking very seriously of suing that rag of a newspaper . . .
GARRISON: Mr. Shaw, [have] you ever
been a contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency?
Shaw glares at him. Silence.
To drive home the
point, just before the credits roll, the film refers to Richard Helms’ 1979
deposition. Instead of directly quoting Helms or accurately characterizing Shaw
as an unpaid, sporadic source whose last significant contact with the agency
occurred in 1956, Stone fills a black screen with these words: “In 1979,
Richard Helms, director of covert operations in 1963, admitted under oath that
Clay Shaw had worked for the CIA.”
In the gross
miscarriage of justice and history that Garrison engineered, Stone was only a
skillful and energetic accessory. Years before the filmmaker supplied the
megaphone, Garrison’s radical critique had prevailed in a larger cultural
sense. The film reflected and exploited that critique; it did not create it.
Garrison’s real legacy was not his investigation, but the public memory of his
allegations. During a tumultuous, lurid time, he capitalized on gnawing public
discontent with the Warren Report, legitimized a critique based on a hoax
and insinuated a false notion about CIA complicity that has grown in the public
imagination ever since.
That much at least is
true. If one also accepts the circumstantial corroboration that suggests the
hoax was KGB-inspired disinformation, then the ramifications go considerably
further. In that case, IMPEDIAN report No. 222 lifts the veil on the
single most effective active measure undertaken by the KGB against the United
States. But there is an old saw in the world of intelligence, which also
applies to history, especially as portrayed by Hollywood.
We are never truly
deceived by others. We only deceive ourselves.
This article first appeared in New
Orleans magazine, February 2002
© 2002 by Max Holland
© 2002 by Max Holland
How Moscow Undermined the Warren
Commission
The Warren
Report has never been impeached, yet conspiracy theories persist, nay
thrive, after 40 years. It’s fair to ask why.
The most important
reason remains the factor that spawned wild speculation in the first place,
namely, the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald two days after the Kennedy
assassination by a self-appointed vigilante named Jack Ruby. The assassination
was a horrific act, yet one that the American public would have eventually come
to terms with had Oswald — a politicized sociopath, akin to Timothy
McVeigh — ever received his day in court.
But the right to due
process is so cherished by Americans that when this ritual is denied,
ineradicable doubt flourishes no matter how damning the state’s case.
The unavoidable
corollary of disbelief is that Washington was, at a minimum, uninterested in
catching the real culprits. It’s no coincidence that polls consistently have
shown that public trust in the US government began declining in 1964. Among
those who believe in a conspiracy, the most widely accepted theory is that
elements of the US government, most conspicuously the CIA, were complicit in
gunning down the 35th president in broad daylight.
How is it that
Americans have come to embrace a conspiracy theory that reads like a script
written by the KGB, the CIA’s mortal Cold War adversary? Well, it turns out
that Moscow’s relentless propagation of that virulent theory and its prevalence
here are no mere coincidence. One of the more amazing stories to seep out of
the former Soviet empire is the role Moscow played in exploiting Americans’ psychological
vulnerability after the assassination, and in preying on their devotion to due
process. We can piece together this concerted effort only now with the release
of documents from Soviet archives — some disclosures authorized, some
not. Taken together, they prove that the KGB played a central, pernicious role
in fomenting the belief that the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s assassination.
The first inkling of
an aggressive KGB posture is revealed in a document gratuitously cited by Boris
Yeltsin in his 1994 memoir. In a letter to the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union dated November 23, 1963 — when
Oswald was still alive — KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny recommends
publishing in a “progressive paper in one of the Western countries,” an
article “exposing the attempt by reactionary circles in the USA to remove
the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals, [i.e.,]
the racists and ultraright elements guilty of the spread and growth of violence
and terror in the United States.”
Two months later, R.
Palme Dutt, the Stalinist editor of a Communist-controlled British
journal called Labour Monthly, published an article that raised the
specter of CIA involvement without offering a scintilla of evidence. “[M]ost
commentators,” he wrote,“have surmised a coup of the Ultra-Right or racialists
of Dallas. That may be; but the trail, if followed up seriously, seems to reach
wider . . . on the face of it this highly organized coup (even to the provision
of a ’fall guy’ . . . and rapid killing of the fall guy while
manacled in custody, as soon as there appeared a danger of his talking), with
the manifest complicity necessary of a very wide range of authorities, bears
all the hallmarks of a CIA job.”
Five months later, in
June 1964, a freelance journalist named Joachim Joesten posited a strikingly
similar analysis in his book Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? Following
a chapter on “Oswald and the CIA,” Joesten asserted that the agency
was beyond presidential control and bitterly opposed to Kennedy’s policy of “easing
the Cold War.” It has long been a matter of record that Joesten’s book was
the first published in the United States on the subject of the assassination.
Until the notes of a former KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin were published
in 1999, however, it was not known that Joesten’s publisher, the small New York
firm of Marzani & Munsell, received subsidies totaling $672,000 from the
Central Committee of the Communist Party in the early 1960s.
These early efforts to
implicate the CIA met with little apparent success. But the KGB kept on trying
and finally hit the jackpot once a relatively unknown New Orleans district
attorney named Jim Garrison took a sudden interest in the assassination in late
1966. The word “dupe” has long been out of favor, but that’s
precisely what Garrison turned out to be after he arrested Clay Shaw in March
1967 and charged him with conspiring to assassinate Kennedy. Owing to a clever
piece of KGB disinformation planted
in Paese Sera, a Communist-owned Italian newspaper, Garrison came to
believe that in Shaw he had apprehended an important “CIA operative.” And
on the basis of this deception (again, revealed by KGB archivist Mitrokhin),
Garrison constructed an entire conspiracy edifice, ultimately arguing that the
CIA had plotted the assassination-coup d’etat in concert with the
military-industrial complex — again, because Kennedy was allegedly
easing up in the Cold War.
If Garrison’s
persecution of Shaw hadn’t been genuine, and tragic, the whole episode would be
risible. It wasn’t. Garrison altered forever the parameters of Americans’ nagging
doubts, though that transformation went largely unnoticed at the time. Before
the spring of 1967, not even the Warren Report’s harshest critics
dared suggest the government itself was involved. Within the space of a few
weeks, Garrison single-handedly legitimated the fable of CIA complicity. Not
even Shaw’s exoneration in 1971 was sufficient to offset the insidious notion
planted by the KGB and unwittingly nurtured by Garrison. After receiving an
inadvertent assist from the Watergate and intelligence hearings of the
mid-1970s, the KGB could justifiably claim, by the end of the decade, that
owing to its “active measures,” more Americans believed in its
conspiracy theory (or some variation thereof) than in the findings of the
Warren Commission.
This preposterous
allegation of CIA involvement might have faded with time but for a chance
encounter in a Havana elevator between the publisher of Garrison’s 1988 memoir
and a powerful Hollywood director named Oliver Stone. In JFK,
Stone reconstructs Jim Garrison’s edifice so painstakingly that 88 minutes into
the movie, the KGB disinformation resurfaces. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner)
hands Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) the Italian newspaper clipping, and the
implication is created that Shaw was a“contract agent for the Central
Intelligence Agency.” Arguably, Stone’s 1991 movie is the only American
feature film made during the Cold War to have, as its very axis, a lie
concocted in the KGB’s disinformation factories.
If and when the archives
of the Communist Party’s “sword and shield” are fully opened, the
KGB’s indispensable role in propagating the lie of CIA involvement will take
its place among other triumphs of Russian deception, such as the infamous
Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Until then there is
only this sobering thought, long an axiom of professional intelligence
officers: We are never truly deceived by others; we only deceive ourselves.
This article first appeared in The
Washington Post, 22 November 2003
© 2003 by Max Holland
© 2003 by Max Holland
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