|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In the spring of 1978 I was an assistant U.S. attorney in Miami, Florida, when I received a telephone call from G. Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), asking me if I would come to Washington, D.C. to help him with the public hearings the committee was about to hold on the Kennedy assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Blakey, whom I had gotten to know when I was working as Special Counsel on Organized Crime for Florida governor, Reubin Askew, told me he needed a trial lawyer to help with the investigation and for examining witnesses at the public hearings. Given the opportunity to “work in the history books,” I accepted and moved to Washington, D.C.
Eighteen years earlier in 1960, I was a high school student in Connecticut involved in my first political campaign by placing flyers under car windshield wipers encouraging people to come to the Bridgeport, Connecticut airport to welcome John F. Kennedy to Connecticut, two days before election day. I was there in the cold rain as he descended from Caroline, a propeller driven DC-3 airplane, and I watched as he left the airport on the drive up the Housatonic Valley to Waterbury where 30,000 people waited to greet him at three o’clock in the morning. Three years later, he was dead.
The murder of President Kennedy was a devastating blow to me as a young college student. It was as if the future, which up to then was bright with limitless possibilities, was ripped away. I can still recall walking along the Housatonic River the night of the assassination, the very same river along which Kennedy drove to Waterbury just three years prior, and hoping I would awake from a bad dream. Of course, it wasn’t a dream and so I moved on in life, still inspired by John F. Kennedy, but not looking deeper into the cause of his death, since I found it to be too painful.
So when Bob Blakey called, I responded. I spent five months involved in the investigation in Washington, D.C., Dallas, New Orleans, Chicago and Miami. I interviewed Marina Oswald and questioned her at the public hearing, presented the weapons used in the assassination at the hearings, and then packed my bags and drove home to Miami to my wife and two daughters to resume my life.
But because of the continued fascination with the Kennedy assassination, I was asked on numerous occasions over the years to speak on my experiences. I called my talk “The Unexplained Associations of Lee Harvey Oswald,” based on what I learned as committee counsel.
So, earlier this year a friend kept asking me to speak at a local men’s group on the topic. While I resisted doing so, those requests caused me to go back into my files and then expand on my own experiences by focusing on three books, out of perhaps the 40,000 written on the Kennedy assassination as estimated by the NY Times in 2013. It was from those books, plus my own experiences, that form the basis of my conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy, but that we most likely will never know the true story of whether he acted alone or was part of a conspiracy; the evidence, though not conclusive, points to the latter.
All of the investigations of the assassination were flawed from the beginning – guaranteed to fail – and they did. Looking back 60 years, and knowing what I know now about investigations and criminal prosecutions, it is hard to believe the mindset of government leaders in November 1963 whose seemingly sole objective was to point the finger at Lee Harvey Oswald and to conclude the investigation as quickly as possible.
The “Warren Commission” was established by Executive Order of the President on November 29, 1963, six days after the assassination. The final report of the Commission was delivered to the President ten months later on September 24, 1964. Their report found that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone and neither he nor Jack Ruby were part of a conspiracy. Almost immediately upon issuance of the report criticisms emerged and remain to this day. And because criticism of the Warren Commission persisted, along with allegations of conspiracies, possibly involving agencies of the U.S. government (CIA), the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States was created on January 4, 1974 by President Gerald Ford to determine whether any domestic CIA activities exceed the agency’s statutory authority and if so, to make appropriate recommendations. This Commission issued its final report six months later on June 6, 1975 and found “no credible evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby ever acted for the CIA in any capacity.”
In 1973 the Senate Watergate Committee’s investigation revealed certain national intelligence agencies had been ordered to carry out questionable domestic operations. In response, on January 21, 1975, the U.S. Senate created the Senate Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities. This Committee came to be known as the “Church Committee” after its Chairman, Frank Church of Idaho. While the Church Committee was not asked to investigate the Kennedy assassination, it did, through happenstance, open a door revealing an unknown possible link between the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald, as will be discussed below.
The Church Committee finished its work on April 29, 1976. And while the Church Committee was doing the work, on January 4, 1985, President Gerald Ford created the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, also known as the “Rockefeller Commission” after its Chairman, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. This commission completed its work six months later on June 6, 1975 and found no credible evidence “that either Lee Harvey Oswaldo or Jack Ruby ever had involvement with the CIA” and submitted its report to the President.
Because controversy continued to swirl about the Kennedy killing, in September, 1976 the U.S. House of Representatives created the House Select Committee on Assassinations (“HSCA”). Right from the start there was internal strife among committee members and staff resulting in changes at both levels – and nothing getting done on the investigation. It wasn’t until June, 1977 when Bob Blakey was hired, that the investigation got started in a meaningful way, with only 18 months left in the committee’s mandate to complete the investigation and write its report. Just like the previous three commissions and investigative committee, writing a report was the driving force – a fact that unites all four efforts to investigate the assassination and which led to all four’s failure. Simply put, a criminal investigation cannot be limited by an artificial deadline signaling the end of an investigation. As we are seeing in our time with a special counsel investigating allegations of insurrection and other alleged political crimes, it takes prosecutors and investigators, working with a grand jury with its subpoena power, to uncover evidence of criminal acts and, importantly, with no artificial deadline dictating the end of the investigation.
Of course, with the benefit of 60 years hindsight, it is easy to second guess what happened in the immediate aftermath of the assassination: Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, was traumatized and in no condition to direct a Department of Justice investigation bringing all of its resources to bear. With the attorney general sidelined, and the lone gunman as killer already being talked about, many have said President Johnson created a commission to essentially confirm the lone gunman theory, write a report and close the book. Of course, the book wasn’t “closed” and remains open to this day, as the recent revelations from a retired secret service agent who was riding with Kennedy on the day of assassination about a third bullet casing he found in the presidential car never accounted for by any investigation.
So many unexplained associations of Lee Harvey Oswald remain that we will never know the answers – too many years have passed, witnesses have died and memories faded. The following are but a few of the “unexplained associations”:
- Lee Harvey Oswald’s defection to the USSR, how he got there, returned to the U.S. and then seemingly was allowed to live without U.S. government acknowledged monitoring by the FBI, CIA or any other governmental agency.
- Marina Oswald: a mystery. When I examined her in my office and then at the public hearing she seemed programmed to repeat what had been written in a book about her and Oswald. I recall listening to her answer a question during the public hearing, and as she spoke I flipped through some pages of a book about her and Lee (whose title I can’t recall) and I realized she was reciting almost verbatim what was written in the book! So much for plowing new ground in 1978.
- Silvia Odio – a Cuban-American who said she met Oswald at her Dallas apartment in the company of two anti-Castro Cubans who identified him as Leon Oswald. The day after this meeting one of the men telephoned her and said Leon was “kind of loco” and that Cubans didn’t have the guts to kill Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs. The Warren Commission had the Odio information and chose not to believe her. When I met her in 1978 and discussed what she had experienced and saw, I found her to be extremely credible and, unlike the Warren Commission, I asked her who could corroborate her story. She said she had mentioned the incident to a psychiatrist whom she was seeing at the time. I interviewed him in Dallas and he recalled she had told him of the Oswald incident before the assassination. I recall asking him if he would had written her comments in his notes. He said yes. When I asked him where these notes were located he told me the warehouse where they had been stored burned down six months prior to my interview. To its credit, the HSCA concluded Silvia Odio was telling the truth and said in its report “The Committee was inclined to believe Silvia Odio.” Let that sink in for a minute: so much for Lee Harvey Oswald being a loner!
- Antonio Veciana – lastly, let me turn to the most troubling of Lee Harvey Oswald’s unexplained associations. I met Veciana in the spring of 1978 at his home in Little Havana, Miami. I was introduced to him by Gaeton Fonzi, an HSCA investigator who had previously worked for Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker who, along with Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, was co-chairing a subcommittee of the Church Committee. According to Fonzi, his first meeting with Veciana took place in 1976, shortly after Veciana had been released from prison on a drug smuggling charge. The “cover” story Fonzi gave Veciana about why he wanted to talk with him was about U.S. intelligence agencies and their involvement with anti-Castro groups – Fonzi said nothing about the JFK assassination. It was during this interview that Veciana revealed he used to deal with an American who had strong connections to the U.S. government and the Central Intelligence Agency and who financed Veciana’s two attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, one in 1961 in Havana and the other in 1971 in Chile. Veciana knew this American as Maurice Bishop. It was Bishop who suggested the creation of Alpha 66, the anti-Castro terrorist group headed by Veciana. During the course of the interview with Fonzi, Veciana said he had met with Bishop in places other than Miami and volunteered he met with Bishop in Dallas in September 1963 with Oswald present. Fonzi was astounded by this disclosure and found it extremely credible since the interview’s focus was not at all about the Kennedy assassination.
So, fast forward another year to 1977, Fonzi was hired as an investigator for the HSCA and he picked up where the investigation left off under Schweiker. Now the challenge was to identify Maurice Bishop, since it was assumed the name was false. And it was. When questioned, the CIA denied any such person was ever employed there. It became the task of the HSCA to try to uncover the true identity of Maurice Bishop. Fonzi and the committee spent months in this endeavor and finally, through diligent legwork focused on David Atlee Philips, a career intelligence operative at the CIA who ultimately became the CIA’s Chief of Operations for the Western Hemisphere. However, when HSCA brought both Veciana and Phillips together in a room so Veciana could make the identification, Veciana denied Phillips was Bishop. At the time I recall Fonzi telling me he thought Veciana was lying and that all the evidence HSCA had uncovered about Philips, including that he had used the alias Maurice Bishop, pointed strongly that Philips and Bishop were one and the same.
It was not until Veciana was in his late 80s and nearing the end of his life that he finally admitted Philips and Bishop were the same person! More than fifty years from the assassination Veciana, in almost a dying declaration, confirms a direct link between a CIA operative and Oswald.
So, 60 years from November 22, 1963, we live with a distinct possibility that John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone, and there was a link between Oswald and an agency of the U.S. Government.
Had the U.S. Government investigated this matter as it should have – by the U.S. Department of Justice with all of its powers – without artificial deadlines and political considerations – the crime may have been solved and the perpetrators punished. Instead, since November 22, 1963, there has been a steady erosion of trust in our government and institutions, including in our present time where we face a very real prospect of our country losing its democratic form of government altogether. It could be said it all started on that November morning in Dallas.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In addition to the biographical information contained in the article, McDonald is currently of counsel to Miami law firm McLuskey, McDonald and Hughes, was an adjunct law professor at St. Thomas University for eighteen years teaching trial advocacy, and served eight years as an elected official in his local municipality, Pinecrest, Florida, including two years as vice mayor. He began his career as an FBI agent.
