This is a rumination on lies — layer upon layer of lies — told by US intelligence agencies and other officials about what Lee Harvey Oswald, or someone pretending to be him, was allegedly doing in Mexico City just weeks before the Kennedy assassination. The original goal, it seems, was to associate Oswald, in advance of the events of Dealey Plaza, with the USSR and Cuba.
The essay focuses on tales told by Richard Helms, a top official of the CIA in 1963 who later became its director — and is based on a talk given by Peter Dale Scott.
Scott is the popularizer of the expression, “Deep Politics,” and a virtuoso when it comes to what sometimes seems like grabbing smoke — capturing proof, however elusive, of motives and objectives that could explain the machinations of US intelligence agencies — and then analyzing the residue.
Not all of the chicanery Scott describes is subtle. For example, in an apparent attempt to bring the Russians into the picture, someone delivered to the FBI’s Dallas office a purported audiotape of Oswald calling the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. That failed, though, when FBI agents decided that the voice did not seem to be Oswald’s.
Then, two days later, the FBI got on board the subterfuge by falsely reporting that “no tapes were taken to Dallas.” Because of this lie, an investigation more than a decade later by the House Select Committee on Assassinations would erroneously declare that there was no “basis for concluding that there had been an Oswald impostor.” (The existence of an Oswald impersonator in the months before the president’s murder would in and of itself have been prima facie evidence of a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death.)
And then there was the attempt to set up a Soviet agent…
You will probably not be able to keep up with each tall tale, nor does it matter. They have a cumulative effect, one that explains why it is impossible to study these documents without coming away believing in conspiracy.
There is dark humor here — reminiscent of the television sit-com of the 1960’s, “Get Smart” — about a secret agent who was always telling one lie after another, blissfully unaware that each new lie not only undermined the last one, but any new one that came after:
Smart: I happen to know that at this very minute seven Coast Guard cutters are converging on this boat. Would you believe it? Seven.
Mr.Big: I find that pretty hard to believe.
Smart: Would you believe six?
Mr.Big: I don’t think so.
Smart: Would you believe two cops in a rowboat?
Um, would you believe that the US intelligence community has been telling us the truth all of these years?
Essay based on talk given by Peter Dale Scott at Third Annual JFK Assassination Conference in Dallas, 2015. (Produced by TrineDay Books, Conscious Community Events, and the JFK Historical Group.)
—WhoWhatWhy Introduction by Milicent Cranor
Why Helms Perjured Himself
I wish in this essay to show how Richard Helms first lied to the Warren Commission about the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald. I argue that his performance, and that of other CIA officials up to the present, constituted significant obstruction of justice with respect to one of this country’s most important unsolved murder cases.
Furthermore, we can deduce from the carefully contrived wording of Helms’s lies what the CIA most needed to hide: namely, that the CIA had recently launched a covert operation involving the name of Lee Harvey Oswald (and perhaps Oswald himself), only five weeks before President Kennedy was killed.
That operation—either in itself, or because it was somehow exploited by others—would appear to have become a supportive part of the assassination plot. It seems almost certain moreover that the “Oswald operation” became the focal point of the ensuing CIA cover-up, and of Helms’s perjury.
As I relate in my book Dallas ’63: The First Revolt of the Deep State Against the White House, there was culpable lying and cover-up from many others in high places, including individuals in the FBI, the Secret Service, ONI, and probably still more military intelligence agencies.
For example, the FBI first reported truthfully to both LBJ and the Secret Service on November 23 that a recording of someone calling himself “Lee Oswald” in Mexico City had been listened to by FBI agents in Dallas, who were “of the opinion that [the man in Mexico] was not Lee Harvey Oswald”.[1] Two days later Dallas FBI agents, along with the FBI Legat in Mexico City, reported falsely on November 25 that “no tapes were taken to Dallas”.[2] Subsequently the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) used this false report, compounded by false and misleading logic, to conclude that there was no “basis for concluding that there had been an Oswald imposter”.[3]
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We should not conclude from the change in the FBI’s story about the tapes that either it, or still less the HSCA, was involved in the Kennedy assassination. It does however seem extremely likely that further investigation of the Oswald imposter in Mexico City would have, one way or another, have led to exposure of the CIA’s Oswald operation exposed in this essay.
The CIA and FBI were not alone in their post-assassination falsification of facts about Oswald. At one point even the Mexican government participated in this high-level cover-up: It supplied when needed a falsified bus manifest and later a falsified version of its statement taken from Cuban Consulate official Silvia Durán.[4]
Without doubt the post-assassination cover-up of what happened was high-level, and widespread.
But the CIA lies differ from those of other agencies in two important respects. First, the CIA was lying about Oswald before the assassination, as well as after. Specifically the CIA lied about Oswald on October 10, 1963, in two important and lengthy outgoing cables, DIR 74673 and 74830, about which I shall say much more.[5] Second, the CIA lies have also continued over time, and can be construed as an on-going obstruction of justice.
One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize this. Tim Weiner, a New York Times journalist, has written a well-informed book about the CIA, Legacy of Ashes. In that book he, like other mainstream journalists, describes Oswald as a lone assassin. And yet he still acknowledges that the conduct of James Angleton, the CIA’s Chief of Counterintelligence (CI), was “an obstruction of justice.”[6]
