JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (52 page)

However, the Soviets had discovered the plot to kill the president and knew the CIA planned to implicate them.

As we learned from the confrontation of U.S. and Soviet tanks at the Berlin Wall, Nikita Khrushchev and his advisers sometimes knew more about U.S. military operations than did their commander in chief in the White House, John Kennedy. The same was true in the case of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, being carried out unknown to the president by his own Central Intelligence Agency—but not unknown to Soviet agents. JFK’s opponents in the Kremlin were not only secretly monitoring the CIA’s preparations to kill Kennedy. They were also trying to disrupt the plot, save the life of a president they knew they could work with, and keep from being scapegoated for his murder.

One of the most exhaustively researched books on President Kennedy’s assassination, Dick Russell’s
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, tells the story of a U.S. counterintelligence agent hired by the Soviets to kill Lee Harvey Oswald and thereby prevent JFK’s assassination. The double agent’s reluctance to become either Oswald’s assassin for the KGB, or a part of JFK’s assassination for the CIA, moved him to a desperate act.

Richard Case Nagell, “the man who knew too much,” walked into a bank in El Paso, Texas, on September 20, 1963, and calmly fired two shots from a Colt .45 pistol into a plaster wall just below the bank’s ceiling. He then went outside and waited in his car until a police officer came to arrest him. When questioned by the FBI, Nagell made only one statement: “I would rather be arrested than commit murder and treason.”
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Richard Case Nagell had been a U.S. Army counterintelligence officer from 1955 to 1959. He was assigned to Field Operations Intelligence (FOI), which he later described as “a covert extension of CIA policy and activity designed to conceal the true nature of CIA objectives.”
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During his FOI orientation at Far East Headquarters in Japan, Nagell was familiarized, he said, with “simple and intricate weapons to be used in assassinations.” He was also “advised that in the event I was apprehended, killed or compromised during the performance of my illegal FOI duties, the Department of the Army would publicly disclaim any knowledge of or connection with such duties, exercising its right of plausible denial.”
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In the late fifties while stationed in Japan, Nagell began his Army/CIA role as a double agent in liaison with Soviet intelligence. In Tokyo, Nagell’s path converged with that of counterintelligence agent Lee Harvey Oswald. Both men worked in a counterintelligence operation with the code name “Hidell,” which Oswald later used as part of his alias, “Alek James Hidell.” Nagell’s biographer Dick Russell believes it was Nagell who actually assigned the “Hidell” alias to Oswald.
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As a continuing double agent in 1963, Nagell was working with Soviet intelligence in Mexico City. He was reporting back to the CIA, in an operation directed by the chief of the CIA’s Cuban Task Force, Desmond FitzGerald. Assigned by the KGB to monitor Lee Harvey Oswald in the United States after Oswald returned from Russia, Nagell became involved in New Orleans and Texas with Oswald and two Cuban exiles in what he saw was a “large” operation to kill JFK.
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The Cubans were known by their “war names” of “Angel” and “Leopoldo.” Nagell told Dick Russell that Angel and Leopoldo “were connected with a violence-prone faction of a CIA-financed group operating in Mexico City and elsewhere.”
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He identified Angel’s and Leopoldo’s CIA-financed group as Alpha 66.
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Alpha 66 was the group of Cuban exile paramilitaries we have already encountered who were directed by David Atlee Phillips, Chief of Covert Action at the CIA’s Mexico City Station. In early 1963, Phillips deployed Alpha 66 in attacks on Russian ships in Cuban ports. The purpose of the provocative raids was to draw JFK into a war with Cuba. Kennedy responded by ordering a government crackdown on the CIA-sponsored raids, further antagonizing both the CIA and the exile community. Alpha 66 had ignited not a U.S. war with Cuba but a more lethal hatred of the president. This was the CIA-funded group Richard Case Nagell said Angel and Leopoldo belonged to, while they were meeting with Oswald.

In September 1963, Nagell was ordered by the KGB to convince Oswald that he was being set up by Angel and Leopoldo as the assassination patsy—or if that failed, to murder Oswald in Mexico City and then take up residence abroad. The Soviets wanted to save Kennedy by eliminating the scenario’s patsy, and to keep from becoming scapegoats themselves. As Nagell told Dick Russell, “If anybody wanted to stop the assassination, it would be the KGB. But they didn’t do enough.”
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Nagell met with Oswald in New Orleans. He warned Oswald that Leopoldo and Angel were manipulating him. Oswald was evasive and unresponsive to Nagell’s appeals that he quit the assassination plot.
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By that time Nagell had lost contact with his CIA case worker under Desmond FitzGerald. Rather than carry out the KGB’s orders to kill Oswald, he sent the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover a registered letter on September 17 warning of the president’s impending assassination, spelling out what Nagell knew of it. As he described the letter years later, “I informed the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
and
others
[in his communications with the CIA], as early as September 17, 1963, that Lee Harvey Oswald and two of his Cuban associates were planning to assassinate the President of the United States.”
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Nagell also said that his letter to the FBI made explicit he “had received instructions ‘to take care of’ Lee Oswald, that is, to kill him, in September 1963.”
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It is noteworthy that Nagell’s letter to Hoover specified that the attempt to kill Kennedy would take place around the latter part of September, “probably on the 26th, 27th, 28th, or 29th,”
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and that the location would be in Washington, D.C.
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From his mid-September knowledge of the assassination plot, Nagell thought Kennedy would be killed in Washington, at a time almost two months before his actual murder in Dallas.

Two weeks before Nagell’s letter to Hoover, Oswald was already preparing to follow a similar time line and itinerary. On September 1, 1963, Oswald wrote to the Communist Party in New York City: “Please advise me as to how I can contact the Party in the Baltimore-Washington area, to which I shall relocate in October.”
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Also on September 1, Oswald wrote to the Socialist Workers Party in New York: “Please advise me as to how I can get into direct contact with S.W.P. representatives in the Washington D.C.-Baltimore area. I and my family are moving to that area in October.”
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Nagell’s and Oswald’s pre-assassination letters were focused on the same area, Washington, D.C., and had roughly the same time frame—“probably” September 26-29 in Nagell’s assassination prediction, and “October” in Oswald’s anticipated move to “the Washington D.C.-Baltimore area.” But their letters were at cross purposes. Oswald, in his letter to the Communist and Socialist Workers parties, was obediently laying down a paper trail that could, if necessary, be used later to incriminate him as a Communist assassin of Kennedy in D.C. Nagell, in his letter to Hoover, was blowing a whistle on the same plot.

Having put his warning on record, Nagell then decided to remove himself from any possible role in the assassination plot. He therefore did his bank escapade in El Paso on September 20, 1963, to place himself in federal custody rather “than commit murder and treason.” He was convicted of armed robbery and served four and one-half years in prison.

Nagell’s shots in the El Paso bank gave his FBI letter a public exclamation point. Hoover knew that Nagell knew the CIA was planning to kill Kennedy in Washington around the end of the month (or in October—if, as likely, the FBI was also reading Oswald’s correspondence to two closely monitored Communist offices). In a dramatic but oblique fashion, with his shots in El Paso, Nagell had made public his noncooperation with the plot to kill the president. Up to that point, Oswald had apparently been scheduled to be moved into position “in the Washington D.C.-Baltimore area” for the strike on JFK. Now Nagell, by his shots in the bank, had given the CIA and FBI public notice that, unlike Oswald, he refused to be a pawn in the plot. Although the whistle Nagell blew to Hoover did not save Kennedy’s life, it may have been just loud enough with his bank caper to set back the plot two months.

After Nagell was arrested in El Paso, Oswald was redirected to Dallas. In late October, Oswald wrote from Dallas to Arnold Johnson, information director of the Communist Party in New York City: “In September I had written you saying I expected to move from New Orleans, La., to the Philadelphia-Baltimore area . . . Since then my personal plans have changed and I have settled in Dallas, Texas for the time.”
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The sheep-dipping of Oswald continued. To Johnson, Oswald noted he had attended an ACLU meeting in Dallas. He asked the communist’s advice on how he “could attempt to highten [
sic
] its progressive tendencies,” thereby associating himself with both the Communist Party and the ACLU.

In 1967 as a federal prisoner in Springfield, Missouri, Richard Case Nagell contacted New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. For Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, Nagell offered to turn over the tape recording he had made containing evidence of a conspiracy. Nagell said he had secretly taped a meeting he attended in late August 1963 with three other low-level participants in the plot to kill Kennedy. He identified the three voices on the tape beside his own as those of Oswald, Angel, and “Arcacha”—very likely Sergio Arcacha Smith, a Cuban exile leader who had worked closely with Guy Banister before moving from New Orleans to Texas in 1962.
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Nagell withdrew the offer of the tape, however, when Garrison’s staff member and intermediary, William R. Martin, told him he had been a CIA officer. Nagell suspected Martin’s association with the CIA had not ended, as Garrison himself would later conclude.
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In the decades after his release from prison in 1968, Nagell allowed a few researchers such as Dick Russell and Bernard Fensterwald to interview him, without ever disclosing the most critical evidence he retained. Nagell was afraid of the consequences to his two children if he revealed anything more than he had already.
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After talking with Nagell and investigating his story, Jim Garrison concluded: “Richard Case Nagell is the most important witness there is.”
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How did Nagell manage to stay alive all these years?

In 1990 he acknowledged that, after surviving three attempts on his life in the late sixties,
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he made a deal: “Stay silent and get your benefits from the military.”
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It would turn out to be a shaky deal. The dealers would recognize that Nagell’s conscience was too active for him to remain silent.

As a U.S. double agent in the fall of 1963, Nagell was stuck in an impossible Cold War dilemma. As a CIA counterintelligence agent, Nagell was acting out a role with the KGB in the United States and Mexico. But in his KGB-assigned task of watching Oswald, Nagell in turn infiltrated a CIA plot to kill Kennedy, one in which he was unwittingly becoming a participant alongside the patsy, Oswald. At that critical point his CIA case agent cut him off, leaving Nagell out in the cold to “commit murder and treason” by continuing to take part in the assassination of the president. On the other hand, if Nagell followed his Soviet orders to kill CIA-pawn Oswald and block Kennedy’s murder, he would also—this time from the CIA’s in-house viewpoint—“commit murder and treason,” against U.S. intelligence at the behest of the Soviet Union.
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Nagell decided the safest place for him to ride out the dilemma was in jail. But before putting himself there, he tried to preempt the plot to kill Kennedy (and to put his effort on record) by sending his registered letter to J. Edgar Hoover exposing the plot. The FBI would always claim, however, in denying it had any foreknowledge of the assassination, that it knew nothing of Nagell’s letter. Nagell was again left out in the cold—for the rest of his life.

On October 31, 1995, the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB) mailed Richard Case Nagell a letter seeking access to documents he claimed to have about a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. The ARRB had also decided to get a sworn deposition from Nagell. Thus a moment of truth was at hand. Dick Russell knew from remarks Nagell had made that “if an official government body ever took him seriously,” as was now finally the case, “
he would
probably cooperate
.”
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After three decades, the stage had at last been set for Nagell to tell his full story under oath, putting it on record before a government body authorized to review JFK evidence.