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A CRUEL AND SHOCKING MISINTERPRETATION

Phil Shenon and I agree on at least a few things. In any resolution of the mysteries surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mexico City will undoubtedly be important. The investigation into what happened there in 1963 was, for some reason, seriously curtailed by the U.S. government. The government has, since then, fought tooth and nail to keep the full story about what happened there secret.

While I have never met Mr. Shenon, I have spoken with him several times by telephone. I first heard from him when he called me around 2011. He introduced himself as a reporter for Newsweek Magazine. He said he was working well in advance on an article for that magazine for the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder. He wondered whether I would be willing to talk about the HSCA’s investigation in Mexico City. I agreed to speak with him.

Over the course of that first conversation, and several follow-up calls from him over the next couple of years, it became apparent to me that Mr. Shenon was only interested in our work investigating what had happened in Mexico City in 1963 insofar as it might provide some kind of basis for linking Oswald to Castro or the Cubans. I tried to discuss the details of the HSCA investigation into what happened in Mexico City in its anomalous issues, but he was uninterested in those details. While there is an acknowledgment in his book, A Cruel and Shocking Act, stating that Ed Lopez and I were “generous with their time and interviews for this book,” precious little, if any, of what we shared with him made it into the book or any of his subsequent writing on the subject of Mexico City. Not only does Mr. Shenon ignore the post-HSCA materials we tried to bring to his attention, he also ignores the primary thrust of our report written for the HSCA.

I would not take issue with Phil Shenon if I thought what he is claiming is, merely, that the possibility of Cuban assistance to Oswald should be investigated. While I think the evidence of that is very weak at best, I will not deny that any avenue of investigation that remains open should be pursued. What I take issue with Mr. Shenon about is his single-minded concentration on that one issue and the resultant misrepresentation of facts and questions related to, and arising from, Lee Oswald’s activities in Mexico City. It appears to me that Shenon may be carrying water for the proponents of the original conspiracy theory – that Castro did it – rather than offering any objective review of the complete evidentiary base of that underlies the Mexico City visit. Shenon deliberately ignores the indicators and evidence that suggest Oswald’s trip to Mexico was either designed in advance, or spun in the aftermath, to give the appearance of Cuban and Soviet collusion in the Kennedy assassination.

Shenon’s thesis, as most recently explicated in his article in Politico, “What Was Lee Harvey Oswald Doing in Mexico?”, is built on suspicions expressed by some government officials after the assassination and Charles Thomas’s reporting of the Duran twist party – a report based on a story first told by Elena Garro de Paz. Many had initial suspicions after the assassination: Lyndon Johnson alleged a communist conspiracy within twenty minutes of JFK’s death; Bobby Kennedy’s first question to CIA Director John McCone that day was, “Did some of your guys do this?” (The Warren Commission, in Executive Session, was very concerned about Oswald’s intelligence connections, but Allen Dulles told them it was something that couldn’t really be proven, as a good intelligence officer would lie under oath to the Commission.) When Shenon and I talked, I tried to get him to consider evidence and facts that have come to light about Mexico City and the CIA’s handling of various investigations since, including the one I worked on in 1978, in his evaluation of the twist party story that lies at the root of his speculations. My efforts had no effect. Any possible explanation other than Cuban complicity has been ignored by Mr. Shenon who seems hell-bent on promoting the idea that Castro was behind the assassination, refusing to address any other possibility.

I tried, in vain as it turns out, to get Mr. Shenon to consider that what we had learned about Oswald’s activities, and the government’s reaction to those activities, could support a different explanation which also pointed to an additional avenue of investigation that needed to be publicized and followed. In my view, Oswald’s activities are more consistent with his being involved in an intelligence operation being run by U.S. intelligence than with him trying to make contact with Cubans to garner support for an assassination attempt on the sitting leader of this country.

To fully appreciate why I say that, a little background from Washington in 1978, is necessary. In 1978 the CIA resisted the HSCA’s inquiry into Mexico City more than any other area of inquiry. The chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, told the Committee on August 15, 1978, “[T]he deeper we have gotten into the Agency’s performance in Mexico City, the more difficult they have gotten in dealing with us, the more they have insisted on relevance, the more they have gone back in effect on their agreement to give us access to unsanitized files. For a while we had general and free access to unsanitized files. That is increasingly not true in the Mexico City area….” And we have since learned that they used George Joannides to shut down the investigation into Oswald and Mexico City. In doing so, they lied to us about who he was. He ran propaganda operations in

George Joannides

Miami in 1963-64 and was the case officer for DRE, the anti-Castro group that scored the anti-Fair Play for Cuba Committee coup using Oswald in New Orleans in August of 1963. As G. Robert Blakey has since acknowledged, “The CIA not only lied, it actively subverted the investigation.” I think the CIA expected we would take the superficial approach of considering the “Castro did it” theory, but when we went beyond the initial appearances and began pushing our investigation into the propaganda sources, seeking interviews with the actual penetration and surveillance agents, seeking to find others in Mexico City who may have seen Oswald, then the Agency resistance to our investigation turned to a stonewall. Shouldn’t it be enough to raise serious questions that when a Congressional Committee investigating specific disinformation operations ran by the CIA, the CIA brings one of those involved in the operation being investigated and uses him in an undercover capacity to forestall and subvert the investigation? But that’s not all.

Consider the scenario of U.S. intelligence involvement in Oswald’s activities in Mexico City that we were not able to fully investigate in 1978. Let’s start with some background on David Phillips. David Phillips was one of, if not the, most experienced, ingenious, respected, and qualified disinformation officers in the CIA. In 1963 he was stationed in Mexico City, but, in early October, he was temporarily assigned to duty at Headquarters because he was being promoted from running anti-Castro propaganda operations to overseeing all anti-Castro operations in the

David Atlee Phillips

Western Hemisphere. He was an experienced hand. In the late 1950’s he had been under non-diplomatic cover in Havana, where he worked with student leaders who would eventually form the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (“DRE”). During the Bay of Pigs, Phillips was stationed at CIA Headquarters where he had responsibility for the propaganda and psychological warfare aspects of the antiCastro operations. In running those operations he not only oversaw the operations he ran personally from Headquarters, he was also the supervisor of the propaganda operations flowing out of the JMWAVE station in Miami by William Kent (aka Doug Gupton, William Trouchard). When the students who had been recruited by Phillips fled Cuba, they were reorganized under Kent’s tutelage into the DRE based in Miami.

Phillips was transferred to Mexico City later in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs. Kent was promoted to Headquarters, and George Joannides took over Kent’s position in Miami, including supervision of DRE. While still stationed in Headquarters in the early 60’s, David Phillips had worked with Cord Meyer to develop the first disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting and disrupting a group of Castro sympathizers who had organized themselves into the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). In the summer of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald formed a chapter of the FPCC in New Orleans. In August of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald, still in New Orleans, had an encounter with DRE which led to a lot of publicity linking Oswald to communists, labeling him as pro-Castro, and discrediting the FPCC. In July and August of that year there is strong evidence that Oswald was used to identify and contact pro-Castro students at Tulane University. In early September, Oswald was seen with David Philips in Dallas.

On September 16, 1963, the CIA informed the FBI that it was considering action to counter the activities of the FPCC in foreign countries. To my knowledge, the operational files on this new anti-FPCC operation have never been released by the CIA. In New Orleans, on September 17, 1963, Oswald applied for, and received, a Mexican travel visa immediately after William Gaudet, a known CIA agent, had applied for one. On September 27 Oswald arrived in Mexico City. This activity did not occur suddenly or in a vacuum. Oswald had started establishing his pro-Castro bona fides earlier that summer in New Orleans, including establishing an FPCC chapter there.

There are too many similarities between Oswald’s activities in New Orleans and Mexico City to simply dismiss, without investigation or discussion, the possibility that he was being used in an intelligence operation, either wittingly or unwittingly, in both cities. In addition to his contacts with the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic facilities in Mexico City, which could have been part of an intelligence dangle, an attempt to discredit the FPCC, or both, there is now also evidence of Oswald’s contacts with students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his presence at social events with Cuban Consulate

Secret Wars Diary by David Atlee Phillips

employees. David Phillips frequently lied about Oswald and Mexico City, but in a footnote in a little known book he self-published, Secret Wars Diary, he wrote: “I was an observer of Cuban and Soviet reaction when Lee Harvey Oswald contacted their embassies.” [Emphasis added.] One purpose served by an intelligence dangle is to enable the dangling agency to observe the reaction and, from that observation, identify roles of employees, procedures and processes of the enemy.

There can be little doubt that Oswald’s activities, especially the more flagrant, blatant and egregious ones such as those alleged by Shenon to have occurred at the Cuban Consulate, could only have scandalized the Cuban diplomats who heard the threats and bluster – all to the discrediting of the FPCC, just as the publicity about the New Orleans encounter between Oswald and the DRE formed one of the propaganda nails in that organization’s coffin. It is much more likely, in my opinion, that the seasoned Cuban diplomats would be offended than it is that they would support someone exhibiting Oswald’s alleged behavior to attempt an assassination. It is much more likely that the Cuban diplomats would have, as the evidence shows they did, consider Oswald as a U.S. intelligence provocation. The Cubans knew of the surveillance on their facilities. Why would they use someone to do such a job who showed up under surveillance and announced his plans? On the other hand, someone as provocative as Oswald should have generated a cascade of response that, when observed by the watchers, would have revealed an abundance of information. It could also serve to discredit the FPCC with the Cubans. The CIA prevented us, in 1978, from interviewing then surviving penetration and surveillance agents who would have known more about such an operation.

In 1978, we knew not only about the allegations of the twist party, but also about the stories of Oswald’s contact with students. The CIA prevented us from interviewing Oscar Contreras, a student Oswald contacted. But Anthony Summers, and others, have interviewed him since. Contreras acknowledges that Oswald, in late September, 1963, approached him and three other students who were members of a pro-Castro student organization. He asked them for help getting a visa to Cuba from the Consulate. Contreras did have contacts at the Consulate and spoke to the Consul and an intelligence officer. Both warned him to have nothing to do with Oswald as they suspected he was trying to infiltrate proCastro groups. Contreras still wonders how Oswald identified him and his friends as the students, out of the thousands attending the University, as the ones with contacts in the Consulate. Shenon, some way or another, sees this incident as supporting possible Cuban involvement in the assassination. No mention is made to the similarity to what Oswald was doing with Tulane students in New Orleans.

While in New Orleans, Ruth Paine had asked fellow Quaker, Ruth Kloepfer, to check on the Oswalds while they were in New Orleans. Mrs. Kloepfer’s husband was a professor at Tulane University. There is information in the extensive records in this case that Oswald passed out FPCC leaflets near Tulane University and the homes of some of the professors there who were members of a local leftist group. The

Lee Oswald in New Orleans leafleting for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, 9 August, 1963

individuals who helped pass out pamphlets on the last occasion when Oswald passed out his FPCC literature in downtown New Orleans, were introduced by Oswald as students from Tulane. There are, keeping things in parallel, indications in the documentation about the case that Oswald, while in Mexico City, made contact with Quakers studying at the Autonomous University. There are indications that one Quaker student at the University at that time was an active agent of the CIA, although that person has never been identified and it has not been determined that he had any contact with Oswald in Mexico City. The reason that it has not been determined is that it has not been investigated.

It has to be pointed out that June Cobb, a known CIA agent, was very involved in Agency actions aimed at the FPCC in the early 1960’s. She appears again as the first person to report Elena Garro de Paz’s story about the Duran/Oswald twist party. At the time she made that report to the Mexico City CIA station, Cobb, a CIA asset, was renting a room from Elena Garro de Paz, Sylvia Duran’s cousin. And Shenon bases most of

Elena Garro De Paz

what he writes on a supposition that, based on this twist-party story, Duran was at the center of the Cuban recruitment of Oswald. But the fact is that it is still very much in question whether Duran had been recruited as an asset by the CIA. David Phillips, as well as other CIA employees, in 1978, were of the opinion that she may have been targeted for recruitment by the CIA. The CIA, then and since, has gone out of its way to keep details about Duran buried, claiming, among other things, to have destroyed her Mexico City P file.

But the point is, the activities in Mexico City in September and October, 1963, are a capsule version of Oswald’s activities in New Orleans in June, July and August of 1963. In the context of the other information we’ve learned about the CIA’s FPCC black propaganda operation, the people involved in those operations and the role of at least one of those people, George Joannides, in subverting the HSCA investigation, how can anyone not seriously consider whether Oswald’s Mexico City activities were part of a CIA anti-FPCC operation? The very first conspiracy theory, that Castro and the communists killed JFK – the one expressed by President Johnson 20 minutes after the assassination, and first seeing print in the DRE’s CIA funded newspaper, Trinchera, on November 23, 1963 – still has followers and proponents, the latest being Phil Shenon. None of the proponents, it seems, have ever really considered whether they may be the victims – or a part – of a very good, deliberate disinformation operation – possibly the best Phillips and Joannides ever ran.

________________________

Dan Hardway, J.D. Attorney in private practice; former investigator, House Select Committee on Assassinations.

22 November 1963 – 22 November 2022

To commemorate living with loss and suspicion for 59 years, the AARC offers the following:

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Paul Schrade dies; union leader survived bullet to the head when Robert F. Kennedy was killed

Paul Schrade, his head swathed in bandages, speaks to reporters.

By Steve Marble Obituaries Editor

Nov. 9, 2022 12:33 PM PT

Paul Schrade soaked up the excitement as the crowd roared and Robert Kennedy smiled and leaned into the microphone: “So my thanks to all of you, and on to Chicago we go.”

Kennedy had just won the 1968 Democratic presidential primary in California, and there was a palpable sense inside the old Ambassador Hotel that the young New York senator had seized enough momentum to carry his suddenly super-charged campaign through to the convention in Chicago.

And then everything went to hell.

An auto workers union leader who had introduced Kennedy to powerful labor figures such as Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Schrade was walking a pace or two behind Kennedy when the first shot was fired.

“I got hit by the first shot,” Schrade told The Times. “I was right behind Bobby. It was meant for him and got me. I thought I had been electrocuted. I was shaking violently on the floor and saw flashes.”

When he looked up, Schrade saw Kennedy slumped on the ground, a young busboy cradling the dying senator’s head in his hands. By the next morning, Kennedy was dead and a young Jordanian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan was behind bars, accused of killing the senator.

Kennedy’s death hung over the nation for decades, altering the course of American politics and forming a dismal closing chapter to a turbulent decade. To some, it marked a farewell to a generation’s innocence.

Schrade slid into depression, lost reelection to his union leadership post and returned to the auto assembly line. He also became convinced that there was more than one gunman in the hotel ballroom that June night and that Sirhan — who has repeatedly been denied parole over the last half century — did not fire the shot that killed Kennedy.

An authority on the Kennedy assassination who testified on Sirhan’s behalf at parole hearings, Schrade died early Wednesday after a brief illness at his home in Los Angeles, according to his brother-in-law, Martin Weil. Schrade was 97.

A white-haired Paul Schrade holds photos of a gun.

While he believed police and prosecutors had bungled the assassination probe and had failed to earnestly look for a second shooter, he spent the bulk of the energy chasing the causes Kennedy had embraced — ending the war in Vietnam, fighting for the marginalized, dampening the racism that still flared in plain view.

Schrade also helped lead the effort to transform the Ambassador Hotel into a school complex, upending Donald Trump’s plan to build what the future president pledged would be the tallest building in the country. The library at Robert F. Kennedy Communities Schools is now named in Schrade’s honor.

Born Dec. 17, 1924, Schrade was raised in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and briefly attended Yale before heading west for a job at North American Aviation in Los Angeles and then rising up the ranks of the United Automobile Workers Union. He struck up a friendship with Kennedy when the future senator’s brother was on his way to becoming president.

In 1965, he joined Chavez and Huerta in the farm workers’ struggles and twice arranged for Kennedy to travel to Delano to support striking farm workers. The connection between the New England-bred politician and the charismatic Chavez may well have helped propel Kennedy to victory in California.

Many of America’s darkest moments, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. among them, spawned mysteries and conspiracy theories. And so it was with the death of Robert Kennedy. How could it be that Kennedy was shot from behind while Sirhan was standing in front of him? Sirhan’s revolver held eight bullets, but some insisted nine shots had been fired. And a ballistics expert concluded the bullets had not been fired from the same gun.

Los Angeles police grudgingly reinvestigated the shooting in the 1970s, but reached the same conclusion: Sirhan was the lone gunman.

For his own part, Sirhan was little help. He testified that he had been at a firing range earlier that day, had come to the Ambassador to attend a party and had briefly left the hotel and then returned after deciding he was too drunk to drive. The rest of the night was enveloped in fog, he said.

Sirhan offered contrition at his parole hearings, but always stopped short of taking full blame.

“Sen. Kennedy was the hope of the world and I injured, and I harmed all of them and it pains me to experience that, the knowledge for such a horrible deed, if I did in fact do that,” he testified after being recommended for parole in 2021.

To Schrade, none of it added up. The police investigation felt rushed and sloppy, and key pieces of evidence had been ignored, he said. The closer he looked, the more convinced he was that Sirhan did not shoot Kennedy.

“Yes, he did shoot me. Yes, he shot four other people and aimed at Kennedy,” Schrade told the Washington Post. “The important thing is he did not shoot Robert Kennedy. Why didn’t they go after the second gunman? They knew about him right away. They didn’t want to know who it was. They wanted a quickie.”

In 2016, Schrade testified on Sirhan’s behalf but the parole board, as it had before and would again, denied him parole.

“Sirhan, I’m so sorry this is happening to you,’ Schrade shouted as Sirhan was led away in handcuffs.

When Gov. Gavin Newsom rejected parole for Sirhan in January 2022, marking the 16th time he’d been denied freedom, Schrade was saddened, but hardly surprised.

“He did not shoot Robert Kennedy and should have been released long ago,” he said.

Schrade is survived by a sister, Louise “Weezie” Stone Duff. His wife, Monica Weil, died in 2019.

Spate of global assassination attempts hints at a violent new era

By Adam Taylor

November 4, 2022 at 12:10 p.m. EDT

Supporters of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan chant slogans during a protest condemning the shooting that wounded him Thursday. (Fareed Khan/AP)

The attempted assassination this week of former Pakistani leader Imran Khan came just days after an intruder broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in what prosecutors say was a failed bid to harm or kidnap her. Weeks before that, a man approached former Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Buenos Aires and tried to shoot her in the face at close range.

That attack followed the July assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe by a man wielding a homemade gun in Nara city. And Abe was slain almost exactly a year after gunmen killed Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in a raid on his home in Port-au-Prince.

Together, these high-profile acts of violence potentially point to a new, volatile era in global politics, experts say. After years in which terrorist bombings dominated the headlines, this new spate of attacks is reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s, when major U.S. figures such as President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were killed in pivotal moments.

“There’s never going to be an end to individuals who want to assassinate public individuals,” said Colin P. Clarke, director of research and policy at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consultancy. But Clarke also said there were several factors that could lead to a rise in assassinations, including the “decline, at least in some parts of the world, of jihadi organizations” that favored different tactics.

In their place, “you’ve got the rise of far-right extremists who are far more decentralized,” he said. “And then you’ve got what people are calling ‘salad bar terrorism,’ which is when they kind of pick and choose different aspects of what motivates them to engage in these types of acts.”

Data from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which includes figures up to 2020, shows a sharp increase in assassination attempts on government figures around the world starting in 2014. The number of assassinations has stayed consistently high since then — even as the number of terrorist attacks has fallen.

A police car blocks the street below the San Francisco home of Paul and Nancy Pelosi on Oct. 28. (Eric Risberg/AP)

It’s a trend that may have been overlooked in recent years. Erin Miller, program manager at GTD, noted that most of the attacks targeted low- to mid-level officials — and not prominent political leaders such as Khan or Pelosi. The most recent statistics, she said, were dominated by insurgent-led attacks in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover in 2021.

GTD’s data suggests that the late 1980s was another period when assassinations spiked. Miller said terrorist attacks such as suicide bombings that often kill indiscriminately were used much less then.

“Targeting political leadership was a tactic used to get attention for a cause with less risk of alienating the civilian population,” Miller said. “In more recent years, assailants adopt both targeted assassinations and mass-casualty strategies.”

Part of the shift may be structural. As groups like the Islamic State lost their territory, Clarke said, there was a rise in violence committed by people working alone, some of whom had been radicalized online to hate or target specific individuals.

To some extent, there may also be a tactical logic to the shift. Assassination attempts on individuals can often prompt significant political changes. Some attacks have changed the course of history, though not always in precisely the way their perpetrators intended: The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Austria-Hungary in 1914, for example, is considered the spark for World War I.

Views of assassinations can also change over time. In India, the assassin who killed beloved independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi has retroactively been branded a “patriot” by some supporters of the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Some historians consider the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a far-right extremist in 1995 a disastrous moment for the Middle East peace process. But almost three decades later, the far right has emerged as kingmaker in the country’s most recent election.

Even in Japan, the shocking assassination of Abe in July sparked a surprising turn: The country took the alleged assassin’s motives seriously.

The alleged killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, told police he wanted to carry out the assassination because his mother had made large donations to the Unification Church, a religious group with which Abe apparently had close ties. After the killing, Abe’s former party pledged to end its relationship with the church, though it later backtracked.

Nara police direct pedestrians and traffic near the spot where former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot while delivering a campaign speech on July 8. (Hiro Komae/AP)

Japan, while generally nonviolent, has a significant history of political assassinations. But some countries that had long avoided attacks on senior officials have seen assassinations in recent years: Two British lawmakers have been killed in separate politically motivated attacks since 2016.

In Brazil, where there has long been political violence around election periods, the number of violent incidents involving political party representatives and supporters in the lead-up to the 2022 vote “eclipsed” that in the election four years before, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

At least some of the apparent rise in assassinations may be due to technological changes. Abe was shot with a “craft-made” gun created with readily available materials. Designs for similar weapons, which can be bought without a background trace and sometimes produced in a way that avoids metal detectors, can be found easily online.

There have been reported assassinations attempts via drone in recent years, such as the 2018 attack on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro during an event in Caracas. Maduro survived the alleged attempt, a low-tech echo of U.S. drone attacks like the one that killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020.

“Cruder technology lowers the barriers to entry for attackers, allowing even untrained or unprepared extremists … to attempt serious plots,” Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, two experts in counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote for the War on the Rocks website.

Experts have also noted an increase in assassinations committed with state backing, including the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the killing of Kim Jong Nam by North Korean agents, and numerous deaths linked back to the Russian state.

But the ever-widening political polarization around the world, aided by online echo chambers that can radicalize potential perpetrators and demonize potential victims, has only added to the risk of assassination — as in the attack at Pelosi’s home that left her husband, Paul, wounded.

Clarke noted that figures on both the left and the right in the United States have been targeted in politically motivated attacks. In some ways, the spate of attempted killings felt worse than what came before.

“We’ve been here before. We’ve survived it,” Clarke said of U.S. political violence. “But there are people I speak to who say this feels fundamentally different. It feels like nothing’s beyond the pale, at least in terms of the rhetoric.”

READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON POST

Investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him

Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961.

Courtesy of Dr. Susan Williams

United Nations General Assembly

Seventy-sixth session
Agenda item 131

Letter dated 25 August 2022 from the Secretary-General addressed to the President of the General Assembly

I have the honour to refer to General Assembly resolution 74/248 concerning the investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him on flight SE-BDY on the night of 17 to 18 September 1961.

In accordance with paragraph 1 of resolution 74/248, in March 2020 I reappointed Mohamed Chande Othman as Eminent Person to continue to review the information received and possible new information made available by Member States, including by individuals and private entities, to assess its probative value and to draw conclusions from the investigations already conducted. Owing to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in December 2020 the General Assembly decided, with my support, to extend the mandate of the Eminent Person, and also requested me to report to the Assembly before the end of the seventy-sixth session on progress that had been made.

I recall that I had previously appointed Mr. Othman as Eminent Person for successive periods in 2018 and 2017, pursuant to General Assembly resolutions 72/252 and 71/260, respectively, and I reported to the General Assembly on progress made in 2019 (A/73/973) and 2017 (A/71/1042). I also recall that I had previously appointed Mr. Othman as Head of the Independent Panel of Experts, established in accordance with Assembly resolution 69/246.

I renew my profound gratitude to the Eminent Person. The United Nations is indebted to him for this exemplary and consequential work in the pursuit of the full truth concerning the tragic event.

I am encouraged that the Eminent Person has received significant new information and that further advancements in the body of relevant knowledge have been made, following the review of many thousands of pages of records and forensic tests and consultation with experts. I note that such new information includes the areas of probable intercepts by Member States of relevant communications; the capacity of the armed forces of Katanga, or others, to have conducted a possible attack on flight SE-BDY; the presence in the area of foreign paramilitary and intelligence personnel; and further new information relevant to the context and surrounding events of 1961.

As in the 2019 report, the Eminent Person assesses that it remains plausible that an external attack or threat was a cause of the crash. I take note of the conclusion by the Eminent Person that it would not be reasonable at this point to reach a conclusion as to the cause of the tragic event based on presently available but incomplete information. At the same time, I am encouraged by the conclusion of the Eminent Person that, given the growing body of evidence, there remain only a limited number of hypotheses to explain what occurred on that fateful night.

I wish to express my gratitude to Member States, independent high-ranking officials appointed by Member States (Independent Appointees) to conduct reviews of their intelligence, security and defense files and private individuals and entities for their cooperation with the Eminent Person and their willingness to provide additional information.

I am encouraged that key Member States have committed at a high level to full cooperation and provided assurances that search requests have or will engage appropriate security, intelligence and defense agencies, and that Independent Appointees from a number of Member States have provided, and may provide in future, additional information. I am also encouraged by the significant information that has been provided to the Eminent Person by private individuals and non-governmental entities.

At the same time, the Eminent Person notes that: (a) no significant information has been provided by key Member States since mid-2017; (b) it is almost certain that further relevant information exists, including radio or other communications; (c) Member States have yet to discharge their burden of proof to show that they have conducted a full review of their records and archives resulting in full disclosure; (d) Independent Appointees may need more time to provide information; and (e) it would be neither judicious nor responsible to reach a conclusion without the benefit of all potentially material information, in circumstances where such information has been shown to be almost certain to exist.

Accordingly, I support the recommendation of the Eminent Person that the United Nations appoint an independent person to continue the work undertaken pursuant to the current mandate of the Eminent Person. I also support the Eminent Person’s recommendation that key Member States be again urged to appoint or reappoint Independent Appointees to determine whether relevant information exists in their security, intelligence and defense archives. More broadly, I call on Member States to ensure comprehensive access to all archives and provide relevant information, more than 60 years after the tragic event, and agree with the proposal of the Eminent Person that potential modes of disclosure and conditions of confidentiality be offered to Member States, without necessarily requiring that relevant information be disclosed in full or publicly.

I also support the Eminent Person’s recommendation that all Member States be encouraged to make assistance available to the independent person, including forensic analysis or other research.

Finally, I support the recommendation of the Eminent Person that the United Nations continue to work towards making key documents of the Dag Hammarskjöld investigation publicly available through a dedicated online collection, including documents pertaining to the 1961 United Nations Commission on Investigation, the 2013 Hammarskjöld Commission, the 2015 United Nations Independent Panel of Experts and the 2017 and 2019 reports of the Eminent Person, as well as his present report.

It remains our shared responsibility to pursue, with renewed urgency, the full truth of what happened on that fateful night in 1961. We owe this to Dag Hammarskjöld, to the members of the party accompanying him and to their respective families. We owe this also to the United Nations. I consider this to be our solemn duty and I will do everything I can to support this endeavour.

I call on the General Assembly to remain seized of the matter and to endorse the report of the Eminent Person and his recommendations, as discussed above.

(Signed) António Guterres

DOWNLOAD AND READ THE COMPLETE REPORT HERE:

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Publication Spotlight: Uncovering Popov’s Mole: THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY VOLUME IV by John M. Newman

Who was the Soviet mole in the CIA? Newman’s arguments will, I am sure, dominate all future discussions of this surprisingly important political question.

— Peter Dale Scott

The publication of Uncovering Popov’s Mole represents an unprecedented examination of the decades-long search, within the CIA, for a mole working for the KGB. Unlike a British mole working for the KGB in MI-6 (UK intelligence), who publicly fled to Moscow to avoid capture, the mole in the CIA was never exposed or identified up to the present day. This volume presents an entirely new hypothesis on the authority and objectives of the mole–working within the CIA’s Office of Security–and reveals a dramatic new context in relation to understanding Lee Harvey Oswald’s 1959 defection to the USSR.

The molehunt wrought catastrophic consequences to the Agency for more than two decades. When viewed as a calculated misdirection, being run by the mole himself, what does that mean in relation to the utilization of Oswald as bait? There are staggering ramifications, the scope and depth of which may take years to come to light.

However, Newman’s work makes clear how the mole in the Security Office deflected attention from himself by convincing the chief of CIA counterintelligence, James Angleton, that Oswald could be used as bait to find the mole working in CIA’s Soviet Russia Division. Furthermore, Uncovering Popov’s Mole shows how Angleton unknowingly provided all of the Agency’s sensitive secrets to the mole in the Office of Security–as he had previously to Kim Philby.

Uncovering Popov’s Mole is the fourth volume in Dr. Newman’s series on the life, public service, and assassination of President Kennedy: Volume I, Where Angels Tread Lightly; Volume II, Countdown to Darkness; Volume III Into the Storm; and Volume IV, Uncovering Popov’s Mole. Soon to be published: Volume V, Armageddon.

These projects reexamine sacred orthodoxies, introduce vital new facts, and challenge many commonly accepted assumptions and interpretations. Dr. Newman’s ongoing work demystifies our hidden history and illuminates the darkest passages of America in the Cold War.

New doors are about to open. Newman’s works are history in the making.

Dr. John Newman: Adjunct Professor of Political Science at James Madison University; Major U.S. Army Intelligence (Retired); Military Assistant to the Director of the National Security Agency, Lieutenant General William Odom. Newman’s other works include JFK and Vietnam (second edition pub. 2017), Oswald and the CIA, Quest for the Kingdom: The Secret Teachings of Jesus in the Light of Yogic Mysticism.

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Praise for Uncovering Popov’s Mole

With his trademark attention to the fine details of the files, John Newman here unravels the mystery of Popov’s mole, or how the edifice of US Cold War intelligence was rotten at its core. Then as now, hubris ruled the official view of Russia, leading then to the debacle in Vietnam and now to the brink of general war.

—James K. Galbraith

The University of Texas at Austin

A spy thriller worthy of Le Carré—John Newman has done it again. Using his formidable skills as an intelligence analyst, he leads us through the CIA’s wilderness of mirrors into America’s heart of darkness. His groundbreaking research turns decades of conventional wisdom on its head, and reveals the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the Cold War—the true identity of the KGB’s high-level mole in the CIA.

—Eric Hamburg

produced the film Nixon and is a former aide to Senator John Kerry and Representative Lee Hamilton

Major Newman dissects two battles fought behind the scenes during the tensest moments of the Cold War, one fought at CIA over indications that the agency had a KGB mole in its ranks, and one fought at the Pentagon over the role of nuclear weapons in America’s confrontation with the Soviet Union. In the process, Major Newman will leave readers with a brand-new understanding of 11/22/63 and its aftermath.

—Larry Haapanen

is the former editor, Kennedy Assassination Chronicles

John Newman has documented the complicated story of the USSR vs. USA “spy wars” throughout the 1950s and early 1960s in a way that makes this complicated subject eminently understandable. For me, it is now a very dramatic story, and a very human one, as well—featuring both honorable defectors, and dishonorable fake defectors, all from the USSR—and their motivations. Complicating the tale is a story of incompetence and deceit within the Central Intelligence Agency, amidst the never-ending search for the Soviet mole within the CIA. Newman reveals, for the first time, the virtually certain identity of the true Soviet mole within America’s spy agency—and the reasons why this individual was never discovered during his lifetime. John Newman is convinced that the fake defection of Lee Harvey Oswald to the USSR in 1959, an unsuccessful attempt to indirectly uncover the Soviet mole’s identity—was part of an elaborate “fake mole hunt” within the CIA, engineered as an intentional deflection by the Soviet mole himself! Finally, the author explains the unfolding spy wars saga in parallel with the simultaneous key developments in the nuclear arms race between the world’s two superpowers—something I have never seen anyone else do.

— Douglas Horne

former Chief Analyst for Military Records, ARRB