JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

George de Mohrenschildt told author Edward Jay Epstein he had “on occasion done favors” since the early 1950s for government officials connected with the CIA. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. The CIA contacts then helped de Mohrenschildt arrange profitable business connections overseas.

De Mohrenschildt said that in late 1961 he had met in Dallas with the CIA’s J. Walton Moore, who began to tell him about “an ex-American Marine who had worked in an electronics factory in Minsk for the past year and in whom there was ‘interest.’”[181] The Baron had grown up in Minsk, as Moore seemed to know before being told. The ex-Marine, Moore said, would be returning to the Dallas area. De Mohrenschildt felt he was being primed.

He told Moore he would appreciate help from the U.S. embassy

in Haiti in arranging approval by Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier for an oil exploration deal. Moore then gave de Mohrenschildt the go-ahead to befriend the Oswalds, which de Mohrenschildt promptly did—with the firm understanding that he was carrying out the CIA’s wishes. “I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it,” de Mohrenschildt said in his final interview. “Too much was

The Baron’s wife and daughter said it was he who organized Oswald’s securing a new job, four days after his move,

Whoever was responsible for Oswald’s immediate hiring, it was a remarkable achievement. Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, described by the Warren Commission simply as “a commercial advertising photography firm,”[186] had contracts with the U.S. Army Map Service. Its classified work connected with Oswald’s history as an apparent traitor. From interviews with Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall employees, Hurt concluded, “Part of the work appears to have been related to the top secret U-2 missions, some of which were then making flights over Cuba.”[187]

According to Oswald’s co-workers, some of them were setting type for Cuban place names to go on maps[188]—probably for the same spy planes whose radar secrets the ex-Marine had already offered to the Soviet Union. Oswald was once again, through the intervention of undercover angels, defying the normal laws of government security barriers.

As it turned out, in mid-March 1963 George de Mohrenschildt did receive a Haitian government contract for $285,000.[189] In April he left Dallas, and in May he met in Washington, D.C., with CIA and U.S. Army intelligence contacts to further his Haitian connections.[190] De Mohrenschildt then departed for Haiti. He never saw Oswald again.

None of George de Mohrenschildt’s extensive U.S. intelligence connections are mentioned in the Warren Report, which describes him vaguely as “a highly individualistic person ...

Relying on U.S. intelligence for its questions and answers, the Report concludes concerning George and his wife, Jeanne de Mohrenschildt: “Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witness contacted by the Commission has provided any information linking the...

Garrison identified de Mohrenschildt as one of Oswald’s CIA “baby-sitters,”

Garrison concluded from his conversations with George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt that the Baron was in some sense an unwitting baby-sitter, without foreknowledge of what was in store for the “baby” in his custody. Both de Mohrenschildts, Garrison said, were vigorous in their insistence to him that Oswald had been the assassination scapegoat.[194]

On March 29, 1977, three hours after his revelation of the CIA’s sanctioning his contact with Oswald, George de Mohrenschildt was found shot to death in the house where he was staying in Manalapan, Florida.

Though he had been Oswald’s CIA-approved shepherd in Dallas, George de Mohrenschildt had no “need to know,” and thus probably no understanding in advance of the scapegoat role that lay ahead for his young friend. In the years after John Kennedy and Lee Oswald were gunned down, the de Mohrenschildts seemed to grow in remorse for the evil in which they had become enmeshed.

Kennedy had become increasingly pessimistic about achieving a test ban. Domestic opposition was rising. Liberal Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York denounced the idea of a test ban.

Liberal Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York denounced the idea of a test ban. Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen said of Kennedy’s efforts to gain one, “This has become an exercise not in negotiation but in give-away.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff declared themselves “opposed to a comprehensive ban under almost any terms.”[197]

John O. Pastore of Rhode Island, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote the president that even if the current U.S. test ban proposal were accepted by the Soviets, “on the basis of informal discussions with other Senate leaders I am afraid that ratification of such a treaty could only be obtained with the greatest difficulty.”

On July 25, 1963, when the final text was ready, Harriman phoned Kennedy and read it to him twice. The president said, “Okay, great!” Harriman returned to the conference room and initialed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, outlawing nuclear tests “in the atmosphere, beyond its limits, including outer space, or under water, including territorial waters or high seas.”[207]

He quoted Chairman Khrushchev: “The survivors would envy the dead.”

“My fellow Americans, let us take that first step. Let us, if we can, step back from the shadows of war and seek out the way of peace. And if that journey is a thousand miles, or even more, let history record that we, in this land, at this time, took the first step.”

In the meantime, they were bucking the military-industrial complex, which had become alarmed at the president’s sudden turn toward peace and his alliance with peace activists in support of the test ban. The August 5, 1963, U.S. News and World Report carried a major article headlined, “Is U.S. Giving up in the Arms Race?” The article cited “many authorities in the military establishment, who now are silenced,” as thinking that the Kennedy administration’s “new strategy adds up to a type of intentional and one-sided disarmament.”[212]

The alarm was sounded even more loudly in the August 12 U.S. News with an article headlined, “If Peace Does Come—What Happens to Business?” The article began:

“This question once again is being raised: If peace does come, what happens to business? Will the bottom drop out if defense spending is cut?

The president’s peacemaking had moved beyond any effective military control or even monitoring. In the test-ban talks, the military weren’t in the loop. Kennedy had made a quick end run around them to negotiate the treaty. As JFK biographer Richard Reeves observed, “By moving so swiftly on the Moscow negotiations, Kennedy politically outflanked his own military on the most important military question of the time.”[214]

“But fate decreed otherwise, and the window of opportunity, barely cracked open, closed at once. In 1963 President Kennedy was killed, and a year later, in October 1964, my father was removed from power. The cold war continued for another quarter of a century

am not sure that the reduction of tensions is necessarily a good thing.” Admiral Arthur Radford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said, “I join with many of my former colleagues in expressing deep concern for our future security . . . The decision of the Senate of the United States in connection with this treaty will change the course of world history.”[219]

Warren Report, p. 712. U.S. Consul Richard E. Snyder at the Moscow Embassy stated in a State Department telegram: “I was sole officer handling Oswald case” (Commission Exhibit 909, WCH, vol. 18, p. 100). According to CIA documents, Richard E. Snyder had joined the CIA on March 27, 1950, only to “resign” six months later to begin a career of overseas U.S. embassy assignments for the State Department (CIA letter to Richard E. Snyder, March 27, 1950. JFK

Joan Hallett, a receptionist at the embassy who was married to the assistant naval attaché, recalled in a 1994 interview that, in contrast to the official story, Oswald had come “several times”

security officer “took him upstairs to the working floors, a secure area where the Ambassador and the political, economic, and military officers were. A visitor would never get up there unless he was on official business. I was never up there.” Anthony and Robbyn Summers, “The Ghosts of November,” Vanity Fair (December 1994).

McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 300. McKnight’s research into Oswald’s security clearances determined the fact that “when he served overseas at Cubi Point, the Philippines, and Atsugi, Japan,

Oswald had ‘Crypto’ clearance, probably one of a dozen or more special clearances at that time higher than ‘Top Secret’ . . . The Warren Commission knew about Oswald’s ‘Crypto’ clearance but suppressed it from being included in the record.”

[190]. According to a memorandum in de Mohrenschildt’s CIA file, he and his Haitian partner Clemard Joseph Charles were to meet in Washington on May 7, 1963, with CIA staff officer Tony Czaikowski and Assistant Director of Army Intelligence and CIA liaison Dorothe Matlack. Matlack confirmed the May 7 meeting in her testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) on September 4, 1978. She said de Mohrenschildt “dominated” Charles. Appendix to Hearings before the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives (HSCA) (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979), vol. 12, pp. 56-57.

As soon as one gets involved in the machinery of politics one gets involved in its demonic futilities and in the great current that sweeps everything toward no one knows what.”

For Americans, the unthinkable was not the act of waging nuclear war but the act of talking with the Communist devil who ruled the island nation ninety miles from Florida, who was in fact key to stopping a nuclear holocaust.

Based on recently declassified Kennedy administration documents, National Security Archive analyst Peter Kornbluh has concluded in a little-noted article that “in 1963 John Kennedy began pursuing an alternative script on Cuba: a secret dialogue toward an actual rapprochement with Castro.”[2] The documents Kornbluh discovered have confirmed and filled in a story that Cuban and American diplomats have been telling for

decades.

“JM/WAVE,” for its attacks on Cuba. Alpha 66 exile leader Antonio Veciana would admit years later to Gaeton Fonzi, a federal investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), that the purpose of the CIA-initiated attack on the Soviet vessel in Cuban waters was “to publicly embarrass Kennedy and force him to move against Castro.”[8]

“Maurice Bishop”/David Phillips carefully kept his distance from the Washington press conference that he had set up to publicize the Alpha 66 attack. However, he arranged for high-ranking officials in the Departments of Health and Agriculture to attend it, thus giving the event legitimacy and prominent coverage in the next day’s New York Times.[11]

It was followed up eight days later by another Cuban exile attack that damaged a Soviet freighter in a Cuban port.[12] The JM/WAVE chief of operations coordinating these efforts to force Kennedy’s hand against Castro was the CIA’s David Sanchez Morales, a longtime co-worker of David Atlee Phillips. Morales would also participate in JFK’s murder, as he would admit to friends in the 1970s.[13]

The initial arrests and boat confiscations resulted in confusing news reports that mirrored the internal government conflict between Kennedy and the CIA. The owner of one of the confiscated boats, Alexander I. Rorke, Jr., told the New York Times that “the United States Government, through the Central Intelligence Agency, had had advance knowledge of the trips” of his boat, the Violin III, into Cuban waters.[16] Rorke also said that “the C.I.A. had financed trips of the Violin III.” He added

“Coast Guard headquarters announced today that it had ordered six more planes and 12 more boats into the Seventh District to reinforce the patrols already assigned to the Florida-Puerto Rico area.

By enforcing President Kennedy’s new policy, the Justice Department and the Coast Guard were restraining a covert arm of the CIA from drawing the United States into a war with Cuba. Premier Fidel Castro responded with evident surprise by saying that Kennedy’s curtailment of the hit-and-run raids was “a step forward toward reduction of the dangers of crisis and war.”[19] However, as the Times reported on April 10, the Florida refugee groups subsidized by the CIA exploded with bitterness, charging the Kennedy administration with engaging in “coexistence” with

the Castro regime.[20]

The Cuban Revolutionary Council had been created by the U.S. government prior to the Bay of Pigs as a provisional Cuban government to seize power when Castro was overthrown. It also served as an umbrella organization for the variety of Miami exile groups. The CRC’s budget and funding came from the CIA. In

their boats that “the struggle for Cuba was in the process of being liquidated by the Government. This conclusion,” he felt, “appears to be confirmed, strongly confirmed, with the announcement that every refugee has received his last allotment this month, forcing them to relocate.”[23]

the release of more prisoners. In the meantime, the CIA had been at work on a plan to assassinate Castro, through his negotiating friend, Donovan. The top secret 1967 Inspector General’s Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro described the scheme: “At about the time of the Donovan-Castro negotiations for the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners a plan was devised to have Donovan present a contaminated skin diving suit to Castro as a gift . . . According to Sidney Gottlieb [head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division], this scheme

progressed to the point of actually buying a diving suit and readying it for delivery. The technique involved dusting the inside of the suit with a fungus that would produce a disabling and chronic skin disease (Madura foot) and contaminating the breathing apparatus with tubercle bacilli.”[26]

The Inspector General’s report noted explicitly that among “those who were involved in the plot or who were identified to us by the participants as being witting” was Richard Helms, then covert-action chief.[28] By 1967 when the report was written on the CIA’s plots to kill Castro, Helms had become the director of Central Intelligence.

memorandum written on May 1, 1963, by the Deputy Director of Plans (head of covert action) Richard Helms, that was not declassified until 1996. It was addressed to CIA Director John McCone. A scribbled “P saw” on the upper right-hand side of the document indicates it was read also by the president.[32] Thus we have become witnesses to Kennedy watching the CIA watching Castro approaching Kennedy, in response to Kennedy’s crackdown on the CIA’s covert-action anti-Castro groups. As the increasingly interested porcupines edged toward each other very carefully, the CIA’s chief of covert action was, as the president knew, monitoring very carefully their prickly courtship.

In a May 2, 1963, memorandum to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, McCone urged that the “Lisa Howard report be handled in the most limited and sensitive manner” and “that no active steps be taken on the rapprochement matter at this time.”[34] As would become apparent years later from research into the background of Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA was then also setting in motion a covert operation in New Orleans to ensure there would never be a Kennedy–Castro rapprochement.