JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (115 page)

[
33
].
Warren Report
, p. 734.

[
34
]. Former FBI director Clarence M. Kelley was stressing the importance of Kostikov, “which cannot be overstated,” by citing this statement by former Dallas FBI agent Jim Hosty. Clarence M. Kelley and James Kirkpatrick Davis,
Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director
(Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel & Parker, 1987), p. 268.

[
35
]. Kelley citing Hosty, ibid.

[
36
]. See chapter 2 of this book.

[
37
].
WCH, Exhibit
15, vol. 16, p. 33 (emphasis added).

[
38
].
WCH, Exhibit
3126, vol. 26, p. 790.

[
39
]. Transcript of Telephone Conversation between Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, November 23, 1963, 10:01 AM; p. 2; Box 1, LBJ Library. Just how sensitive this phone conversation was can be seen from its tape and transcript history. After the call from Hoover was transcribed from the audiotape by a member of LBJ’s secretarial staff, that specific conversation was erased from the tape, leaving a fourteen-minute gap in the midst of eleven other non-erased calls made on November 23, 1963. Rex Bradford, “The Fourteen-Minute Gap,”
Kennedy Assassination Chronicles
(Spring 2000), p. 29.

According to acoustics experts hired in 1998 by the Johnson Library and the National Archives and Records Administration, “the erasure was most likely intentional and is irreversible.” Max Holland,
The Kennedy Assassination Tapes
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 69.

Fortunately the transcript of the conversation has survived, but not without at least one challenge to its Soviet Embassy references. In the upper righthand corner of my LBJ Library copy of the transcript, there can be read the hand-printed words: “DELETE P. 2 ref. To Soviet Embassy.” Below these words are the circled initials: “TJ.” In response to my phone query of February 18, 2005, to the LBJ Library, senior archivist Claudia Anderson said that “TJ” was probably Tom Johnson, President Johnson’s longtime assistant. Tom Johnson (no relation to LBJ) could have made the notation on the transcript any time between late November 1963 through his years as Johnson’s post-presidential aide from 1969 until LBJ’s death in 1973. The most likely period for the note to have been written would seem to be soon after the transcribing of the November 23 tape, when the Mexico City issue was most alarming and when the tape itself was probably erased on the orders of Lyndon Johnson. If there was a further reference to the Soviet Embassy (either the embassy in Mexico City or the one in Washington) that was in fact deleted, then the Hoover-Johnson conversation was even more sensitive than the transcript reveals.

[
40
]. Hoover was also soft-pedaling the letter’s two paragraphs complaining about the FBI. In the first such paragraph (the fifth paragraph of the letter), “Oswald” stated:

“Agent James P. Hasty [Hosty] warned me that if I engaged in F.P.C.C. [Fair Play for Cuba Committee] activities in Texas the F.B.I. will again take an ‘interrest’ [
sic
] in me.”
WHC, Exhibit
15, vol. 16, p. 33.

In the second FBI-related paragraph (the sixth paragraph of the letter), the text continued:

“This agent also ‘suggested’ to Marina Nichilayeva that she could remain in the United States under F.B.I. ‘protection,’ that is, she could defect from the Soviet uion [
sic
], of couse [
sic
], I and my wife strongly protested these tactics by the notorious F.B.I.” Ibid.

“Oswald” (or the CIA in the name of Oswald) has thereby given the FBI alibis for its pre-assassination contacts with the Oswalds, while at the same time making the FBI uncomfortable for having been put up front and on record for even its “innocent” contacts with “the assassin.” Meanwhile, to Hoover’s annoyance, the manipulating CIA has remained invisible both in the letter and in the larger Oswald story, while the FBI has been exposed to public scrutiny for its documented contacts with Lee and Marina Oswald.

[
41
]. “From the Mainstream Press: ‘Soviets Believed Oswald Letter Fake’ and ‘More On All This,’”
Fair
Play Magazine
Web site (September 1, 1999).

[
42
]. A. Dobrynin, Cipher Telegram, Special no. 2005, November 26, 1963. Russian original and English translation (by Office of Language Services, Department of State) in National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

[
43
]. John A. McCone, “Memorandum for the Record,” November 25, 1963. Copy from LBJ Library.

[
44
]. Ibid. McCone in his memorandum notes that National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy also attended the 12:30 p.m., November 23, 1963, briefing of Johnson on Mexico City. McCone then went over the Mexico City information again in a phone conversation that evening with Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Ibid.

[
45
]. Michael R. Beschloss, editor,
Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-64
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 72. Cf. Holland,
Kennedy Assassination Tapes
, p. 205.

[
46
]. Beschloss,
Taking Charge
, p. 67. Cf. Holland,
Kennedy Assassination Tapes
, p. 197.

[
47
]. Dobrynin, November 26, 1963, Cipher Telegram.

[
48
]. Anastas I. Mikoyan, Telegram to the Soviet Ambassador, Washington; included with Dobrynin’s November 26, 1963, telegram in packet of documents given to President Bill Clinton by President Boris Yeltsin in June 1999. Russian original and English translation in National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

[
49
]. Beschloss,
Taking Charge
, p. 72. Cf. Holland,
Kennedy Assassination Tapes
, p. 206.

[
50
].
WCH
, vol. 3, p. 13.

[
51
]. Ibid., p. 15.

[
52
]. Ibid., pp. 14-17. Ruth Paine testified to the Warren Commission that she gave the “original” handwritten draft of the letter to “an FBI person” who appeared at her house on November 23, 1963. She said she also gave the FBI her copy of that draft in her own hand, probably the next day. Ibid., p. 17.

[
53
]. Ibid., pp. 13-18.

[
54
]. Jerry D. Rose, “Gifts from Russia: Yeltsin and Mitrokhin,”
The Fourth Decade
(November 1999), p. 5. Rose reproduces both the typed letter and the draft in his article, so that readers can compare the two. Both versions of the letter are also included on p. 311 of the
Warren Report
, but in too illegible a form for any comparisons to be made. The typed letter is reproduced more clearly twice in the Warren Commission Hearings:
WCH
, vol. 16, p. 33, as Commission Exhibit 15; vol. 18, p. 539, as Commission Exhibit 986. The handwritten “draft” can be read in its reproduction as Commission Exhibit 103,
WCH
, vol. 16, pp. 443-44.

[
55
]. In the “draft,” Oswald’s complaints about the FBI have been moved up to become the third and fourth paragraphs, thereby replacing the suggestion of a Soviet/Cuban conspiracy as the main subject of the letter. The Soviet/Cuban material in the typed letter’s third and fourth paragraphs has been dropped down and merged into a final paragraph in the “draft.” The de-emphasized Soviet/Cuban connection has then been rendered innocuous by the “draft’s” crossed-out words, now made available to the Warren Commission for its overall exegesis of the letter.

[
56
]. Peter Dale Scott noted the “draft’s” neutralizing of the letter’s conspiratorial language, especially in its description of Kostikov’s role, in his essay, “The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico,” p. 13, from the on-line book,
It’s the Economy, Stupid!
, edited by Kent Heiner (Bellingham, WA: Mem Publishing, 2002).

[
57
].
Warren Report
, p. 310.

[
58
]. On April 17, 1964, J. Lee Rankin, general counsel of the Warren Commission, wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover saying the Commission had approved Mrs. Ruth Hyde Paine’s request for “the return to her” of the “rough draft of a letter in the handwriting of Lee Harvey Oswald which Mrs. Paine testified she found in her residence.” The Commission also approved at the same time Paine’s request for the return of her personally annotated 1963 date book and calendar. Letter from J. Lee Rankin to J. Edgar Hoover, April 17, 1964. FBI Files, JFK Record Number 124-10147-10029.

When she was notified at the end of April that the Warren Commission had approved her request, Ruth Paine may have thought she had gone too far in asking for the return of a letter that had become important government evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy. The “draft” letter then became a hot potato. When the Dallas FBI office tried to return it to Paine by order of the Commission, she immediately gave it back to the Commission, saying now that it would be “more proper” to keep it in the public archives. But she restated, as the Dallas FBI reported to Hoover, that “if this item is not made public property by the Commission after their hearings are recessed, and it is to be returned to the private property domain, she would like to have it back at that time.” Letter from SAC, Dallas, to Director, FBI, April 28, 1964; FBI Files, JFK Record Number 124-10147-10022.

At that point the Warren Commission had no intention of preserving for any future critical examination, as to its source and authenticity, the original document Ruth Paine said she wanted back. On May 4, 1964, Hoover sent back again the “original rough draft letter in the handwriting of Oswald” to the Dallas FBI office for its return once and for all to Paine. Hoover said with finality that the Commission had ruled that it was “advisable to give it to Mrs. Paine,” which the FBI then did. Message from Director, FBI, to SAC, Dallas, May 4, 1964; FBI Files, JFK Record Number 124-10147-10022.

[
59
]. Thomas Merton,
Peace in the Post-Christian Era
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2004), p. 119.

[
60
]. Heather A. Purcell and James K. Galbraith, “Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?,”
The American Prospect
(Fall 1994), pp. 88-96.