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

by James W. Douglass

Oswald quickly found work in New Orleans at the Reily Coffee Company. It was owned by William B. Reily, a wealthy supporter of the CIA-sponsored Cuban Revolutionary Council.[35] As researcher William Davy has shown by a recently declassified government document, Reily’s Coffee Company seems to have long been part of the CIA’s New Orleans network. According to a CIA memorandum dated January 31, 1964, “this firm [Reily’s] was of interest as of April

In a 1968 interview with the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office, CIA contract employee Gerry Patrick Hemming “confirmed that William Reily had worked for the CIA for years.”[37] As Lee Harvey Oswald went to work in New Orleans, he was in the company of the Company.

The Reily Coffee Company was located at the center of the U.S. intelligence community in New Orleans, close by the offices of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).[38] Directly across the street from Naval Intelligence and the Secret Service was another office that Oswald worked in, the detective agency of former FBI agent Guy Banister.[39]

Banister’s agents. Roberts told author Anthony Summers, “During the course of the conversation I gained the impression that he and Guy Banister already knew each other.”[42] Oswald and Banister then met behind closed doors for a long conversation. “I presumed then, and now am certain,” Roberts said, “that the reason for Oswald being there was that he was required to act undercover.”[43]

Oswald was given the use of an office on the second floor, “above the main office where we worked,” Roberts said. “I was not greatly surprised when I learned he was going up and down, back and forth.”[44] Roberts noticed that Oswald had pro-Castro leaflets upstairs, and she later saw him passing them out on the street. When she complained to Banister about Oswald’s pro-Castro

demonstrating, Banister said not to worry about him, “He’s with us, he’s associated with the office.”[45...

Former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt testified before the House Committee that the DRE was “run” for the CIA by David Phillips,[50] the same CIA man behind the scenes who as “Maurice Bishop” had directed the Alpha 66 raids designed to push President Kennedy

into war with Cuba.

The Warren Commission was well aware, by the time of Quigley’s testimony, of another possible reason why Oswald might have wanted to meet with an FBI agent—that Oswald was on the same payroll, “employed by the F.B.I. at $200 per month from September of 1962 up to the time of the assassination,”[56]

“employed by the F.B.I. at $200 per month from September of 1962 up to the time of the assassination,”[56] as stated by the commission’s general counsel J. Lee Rankin, at their closed-door meeting on January 27, 1964. The transcript of this remarkable session was classified “top secret” for a decade until researcher Harold Weisberg gained access to it through a legal battle and published all of it as his Whitewash IV in 1974. The purpose of the Warren Commissioners’ entire January 27 meeting was to deal with the disturbing information Rankin had received from Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr that “Oswald was an undercover agent for the F.B.I.”[57]

classified “top secret” for a decade until researcher Harold Weisberg gained access to it through a legal battle and published al...

Rankin called Carr’s report, with its specific payroll information, “a dirty rumor that is very bad for the Commission,” and said “it must be wiped out insofar as it is possible to do so by this Commission.”[58]

They said he had not.[59] Former CIA director Allen Dulles put their denials in a national security perspective at the January 27 meeting by saying frankly that the CIA employers of an agent “ought not tell it under oath.”[60] Dulles said that the same code of denial (or perjury, a word he didn’t use) applied to the FBI.[61] The January 27 meeting’s transcript is a revelation of how Allen Dulles, one of the master plotters of the Cold War and by logic a prime suspect in JFK’s murder, kept a bemused composure while guiding the circle of distinguished elders through the cover-up.

Oswald seems to have been working with both the CIA and the FBI. For the CIA, he was acting as a provocateur, subverting the public image of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. As we

shall see, Oswald was also being drawn into the plot to kill the president, in which his activities as a pro-Castro demonstrator were preparing the ground for his role as the assassination scapegoat. At the same time, Oswald was apparently an FBI informant. As we learn more about Lee Harvey Oswald, we will have to consider the possibility that the information...

The “debate” succeeded in thoroughly identifying Oswald’s FPCC chapter with his treasonous past. With this public relations disaster, his whirlwind New Orleans campaign had ended. He had not only succeeded in thoroughly discrediting the FPCC in New Orleans. After John Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald’s public association with the national Fair Play for Cuba Committee would demolish what little there was left of it.[67]

John Kennedy continued a policy of sabotage against Cuba that he may have seen as a bone thrown to his barking CIA and military advisers but was in any case a crime against international law. It was also a violation of the international trust that he and Nikita Khrushchev had envisioned and increasingly fostered since the missile crisis. Right up to his death, Kennedy remained in some ways a Cold Warrior, in conflict with his own soaring vision in the American University address.

When Khrushchev had agreed with Kennedy to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for a promise of no invasion, Castro had been almost as angry with Khrushchev as he was with Kennedy. He had reason to be upset. As Cuba’s former UN ambassador Carlos Lechuga put it in his book on the missile crisis, “[Castro] had been neither consulted nor even informed of the decision made in the Kremlin.

Khrushchev was, ever so gently, urging Castro to risk trusting Kennedy, as Khrushchev himself was beginning to do, in tandem with Kennedy’s beginning to trust him, sometimes to one or the other’s regret but with their mutually discovered commitment to peace as the foundation to which they could

always return.

Khrushchev was trying to pass on to his Cuban comrade the paradoxical enlightenment for peace that he and Kennedy had received together from the brink of total war. While trying not to sound overly positive about a capitalist leader, Khrushchev also couldn’t help but reveal the extraordinary hope he felt because of what he and Kennedy had managed to resolve. As Sergei Khrushchev put it, “Father tried to persuade Castro that the U.S. president would keep his word and that Cuba was guaranteed six years of peaceful development, which was how long Father thought Kennedy would be in the White House. Six years! Almost an eternity!”[78]

The CIA continued to monitor every step of this process. In a secret June 5, 1963, memorandum, Richard Helms wrote that the CIA had just received a report that, “at the request of Khrushchev, Castro was returning to Cuba with the intention of adopting a conciliatory policy toward the Kennedy administration ‘for the time being.’”[80]

When Castro was questioned about this statement by the HSCA in 1978, he said, “I don’t remember literally what I said, but I remember my intention in saying what I said and it was to warn the government that we know about the (attempted) plots against our lives . . . So, I said something like those plots start to set a very bad precedent, a very serious one—that that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions . . . but I did not mean to threaten by that . . . I did not mean by that that we were going to take measures—similar

measures—like a retaliation for that.”[83]

In our conversations he made it quite clear that he was ready to discuss: the Soviet personnel and military hardware on Cuban soil; compensation for expropriated American lands and investments; the question of Cuba as a base for Communist subversion throughout the Hemisphere.”[84]

More than a decade after JFK’s assassination, on January 10, 1975, William Attwood testified at a top-secret executive session

of Senator Frank Church’s Committee on Intelligence Activities. There the question was posed to Attwood: “Were you asked by President Kennedy to explore the possibility of a rapprochement with Fidel Castro and Cuba?” Attwood answered: “Yes . . .

believe that there is no country in the world, including all the African regions, including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime . . . I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to

rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.”[106]

he was still unable to see that it had been the ongoing threat of a U.S. invasion of Cuba (provoking the Soviet-Cuban decision to deter that invasion by nuclear missiles) that had caused the Cuban Missile Crisis, not Castro’s “‘will to independence,’ madness, or Communism.” Yet at the same time Daniel could see Kennedy was distinctly uncomfortable with the dead end where his assumptions led for the revolution he had just endorsed. His last comment to Daniel was: “The continuation of the blockade [against Cuba] depends on the continuation of subversive activities.”[108]

In the fall of 1963, as John Kennedy and Fidel Castro sought secretly a way of rapprochement, the CIA took its own secret steps in an opposite direction, toward setting up Lee Harvey Oswald as an identifiable Soviet-and-Cuban-directed assassin of the president. “Sheepdipping,” the process whereby sheep are plunged into a liquid to destroy parasites, had been applied in its intelligence sense to Oswald in New Orleans.

In early September, Oswald met CIA agent David Atlee Phillips in the busy lobby of a downtown office building in Dallas. Alpha

On November 22, Veciana would immediately recognize the newspaper and television pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald as being of the young man he had seen in Dallas with his own CIA handler “Maurice Bishop.”

Sixteen years later, after Veciana did finally describe the Oswald meeting to the House Committee and came to the very edge of identifying David Atlee Phillips as “Maurice Bishop,” he was shot in the head by an unidentified gunman in Miami. Veciana recovered from the assassination attempt. He never admitted

publicly that Phillips was Bishop, though he acknowledged as much privately to Fonzi.[112]

When I interviewed Antonio Veciana, he added details about the attempt to assassinate him. He said the FBI had warned him three times that he was about to be killed. Yet after he was shot, the FBI did nothing to investigate the incident. They said it was the responsibility of the Miami police, who in turn did no investigation.[113]By avoidi...

Phillips was Chief of Covert Action at the CIA’s Mexico City Station.

Two months before JFK’s murder, Phillips became Mexico City’s Chief of Cuban Operations.[114] Phillips was, from the beginning to the end of his CIA career, a team player. Following the Kennedy assassination, he rose to the rank of chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. Shortly before his retirement in 1975, he was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the CIA’s highest honor.[115] In the fall of 1963, David Atlee Phillips was working under Richard Helms, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans and mastermind of covert action.

As a result, what Oswald himself really did in Mexico City is in fact less certain today than what the CIA did in his name. The documents containing this self-revelation have finally been declassified and made available to the American public during the past decade as a result of the JFK Records Act passed by Congress in 1992.

On October 9, 1963, CIA headquarters received a cable from its Mexico City Station about an October l phone call to the Soviet Consulate that had been wiretapped, taped, transcribed, and translated from Russian into English. The call came from “an American male who spoke broken Russian” and who “said his name [was] Lee Oswald.”[120] The man who said he was Oswald stated that he had been at the Soviet Embassy on September 28, when he spoke with a consul he believed was Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov. He asked “if there [was] anything new re telegram to Washington.” The Soviet guard who answered the phone said nothing had been received yet, but the request had been sent. He then hung up.

The CIA’s October 9 cable from Mexico City is noteworthy in two respects. The first is the connection between Oswald and Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov. Kostikov was well known to the CIA and FBI as the KGB (Soviet Committee for State Security) agent in Mexico City who directed Division 13, the KGB department for terrorism, sabotage, and assassination. Former FBI director Clarence M. Kelley stressed in his autobiography: “The importance of Kostikov cannot be overstated. As [Dallas FBI agent] Jim Hosty wrote later: ‘Kostikov was the officer-in-charge for Western Hemisphere terrorist activities—including and especially assassination.

Equally noteworthy in the October 9 cable is the evidence it provides that the “Lee Oswald” who made the October 1 phone call was an impostor. The caller, it said, “spoke broken Russian.” The real Oswald was fluent in Russian.[122] The cable went on to say that the Mexico City Station had surveillance photos of a man who appeared to be an American entering and leaving the Soviet Embassy on October l. He was described as “apparent age 35, athletic build, circa 6 feet, receding hairline, balding top.”[123] In a CIA cable back to Mexico City on October 10, the Lee Oswald who defected to the U.S.S.R. in October 1959 was described as not quite 24, “five feet ten inches, one hundred sixty five pounds, light brown wavy hair, blue eyes.”[124]

What one is confronted with in the October 9 cable is an apparently damning connection between Oswald and a KGB assassination expert, but a connection made by a man impersonating Oswald. It is the beginning of a two-tracks Mexico City story. On one track is the CIA’s attempt to document Oswald’s complicity with the Soviet Union and Cuba in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. On the other track is the recurring evidence within the same documents of a fraudulent Oswald at work.

before, the cable made no reference to his specific connection with Kostikov.[125] Kostikov was not even mentioned.

This would be like a 2001 intelligence report on a suspected terrorist neglecting to mention that he had just met with Osama bin Laden. CIA headquarters was keeping its knowledge of the Oswald–Kostikov connection close to its vest. The CIA’s silence regarding Kostikov was maintained just long enough for Oswald to be moved quietly (without being placed on the FBI’s Security Index) into a position overlooking Dealey Plaza on November 22. After the assassination, the CIA used its dormant Mexico City documents to link the accused assassin Oswald with the KGB’s Kostikov.

On November 25, 1963, Richard Helms sen...

What was the Mexico City scenario’s purpose in the larger script written for the president’s murder? It is this question of ultimate purpose that the CIA’s Mexico City surveillance tapes will assist us in answering, after we first consider the September 27-28 visits to the consulates that were acted out in the name of Oswald.

old Soviet documents, a newspaper clipping on his arrest in New Orleans, a photo of Oswald being escorted by a policeman on each arm that Duran thought looked phony.[130] Duran also knew that

Consulate, insisting this time to Silvia Duran that he be granted a Cuban visa at once. He claimed that the Soviet Consulate had just assured him he would be given a Soviet visa. Duran checked by phone with the Soviets and learned otherwise.

Oswald became even more agitated than he had been the day before, referring to FBI surveillance and persecution. He took a revolver from his jacket pocket, placed it on a table, and said, “See? This is what I must now carry to protect my life.”[138] The Soviet officials carefully took the gun and removed its bullets. They told Oswald once again