Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

by Tom O'Neill

Hoover released the FBI’s initial findings just two weeks after the killing, concluding that Oswald acted alone. “Hoover lied his eyes out,” the Warren Commission’s Hale Boggs later testified in HSCA hearings, “on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.” Dulles was no less complicit. He’d urged the Warren Commission to limit itself to reviewing the FBI’s investigation, rather than mounting its own. In secret, he met with Helms and other CIA officials to coach them on what questions the commission planned to ask. Faced with these revelations, the HSCA could only conclude that intelligence groups were hiding their links to Oswald and Ruby, if not a CIA effort to assassinate Castro. Some believed that the plot on Castro may have been turned on Kennedy, after his Bay of Pigs invasion failed and he embraced other policy changes that curtailed the agency’s influence, like reducing the U.S. presence in Vietnam, warming diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and decreasing military spending. Even President Johnson had his doubts. “The President felt that [the] CIA had had something to do with the plot,” said an Oval Office memo from ’67.