Countdown to Darkness — POSTSCRIPT:

SY HERSH AND THE KENNEDY-CAMPBELL AFFAIR

The genesis of JFK’s affair with Judith Campbell began with a 1960 plot by Chicago Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana to ensnare the senator into a relationship with her. Giancana’s original motive was to increase his leverage over the Kennedy family. He used his lieutenant Johnny Roselli to engineer this sordid scheme. The exposition of Giancana’s plan led to appalling and tragic unintended consequences when it became entangled in the Central Intelligence Agency’s plan to use him to assassinate Fidel Castro. Those consequences included the assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963, the assassination of Giancana on 19 June 1975—the day before his and Judith Campbell’s scheduled appearances before the Church Committee—and the assassination of Roselli in August 1976.

Only Judith Campbell lived to tell the story about her role as a courier between JFK and Giancana. But years passed before she dared to discuss it. She gave a detailed accounting of her courier work to investigative journalist Sy Hersh about two years before her death from breast cancer in 1999. Because Hersh’s track record includes several examples of questionable (to say the least) reporting, his publication of Campbell’s courier role in his book The Dark Side of Camelot has not been well received by the public and by some of the JFK research community whom I both know and respect. It is well known that a month before publication of Hersh’s book, a segment about legal documents allegedly containing JFK’s signature was removed from the galleys. That segment was based on fraudulent documents created by a paralegal, Lawrence Cusack, alleging that JFK had arranged for hush money to keep details of an affair with Marilyn Monroe quiet.

I am aware of Sy Hersh’s 1968 role as press secretary to Eugene McCarthy, Richard Goodwin’s defection to join the Kennedy campaign on the eve of the Indiana Primary, and of Hersh’s bitterness that came as the result of Robert Kennedy getting into the race after assuring Kennedy loyalists and antiwar leaders that he would not challenge the Democratic Party nominee. In spite of the drawbacks to Hersh’s take on JFK, I realized that in researching and writing Countdown to Darkness there was no way around evaluating three of Hersh’s claims in The Dark Side of Camelot: 1) the Campbell courier role between JFK and Giancana, 2) the Clarence B. Sprouse fall 1960 briefing for JFK about the CIA plan for the exile invasion (and Alabama Governor John Patterson’s warning to JFK about the same subject),[1] and, 3) with just two weeks to go before Election Day, JFK’s alleged note to himself to talk to Allen Dulles to make sure nothing would be done about Cuba before the election.[2]

The alleged courier role played by Campbell between JFK and Giancana cannot be casually dismissed simply because Hersh wrote about it. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan also realized they had to vet the courier story for their 2005 biography Sinatra: The Life. Summers and Swan offered this observation:

Yet much of what Campbell claimed is credible. A good deal of it is supported by phone records, White House logs, and other documentation. Interestingly, some of her more controversial claims, suspect because she did not make them publicly until many years had passed, were first made contemporaneously as private confidences.^[3]

I agree that there is supporting documentation that supports the credibility of her claim. It needs to be further evaluated, and I will deal with this documentation in greater detail in Volume III, Into the Storm. I also agree that only speaking contemporaneously about her courier work in private helps the claim’s credibility. Yet, I would also think that keeping it private until many years had passed makes it more likely, not less, that Campbell’s claim might be true. If she made up this story for money, we would expect to have seen it used in her autobiography My Life. But she didn’t.

It is sensible to point out that Judith Campbell had good reason to keep her courier role secret for many years after her appearance before the Church Committee. In that appearance she was not under oath, and she denied having done anything for John Kennedy. As I mentioned above, the evening prior to her appearance before the committee, one end of the courier operation, Sam Giancana, had been assassinated. JFK, the other end of that operation, had already been assassinated in 1963.

All of the books about Campbell that I have searched—and I make no claim to having seen all that have been published—have failed to point out that Campbell gave details of her courier role publicly on national television five years before her interviews with Hersh. During a 4 February 1992 interview on Larry King’s television show, Campbell told the astonished talk show host that, during a 6 April 1960 dinner, Kennedy had asked her to set up a meeting with Giancana and take a “satchel” to him containing “a great deal of money.” I watched the interview live when it took place in 1992, and I reprinted the relevant extract from the transcript in Countdown to Darkness.[4]

Had the only source of Judith Campbell’s role as a courier between Kennedy and Giancana been Sy Hersh, then I would look upon this allegation with suspicion. But there is much more than Sy Hersh to consider in this matter. If her affair with JFK had taken place outside of the context of the CIA’s plot to use Giancana to assassinate Fidel Castro, then I would not have delved so deeply into the matter. However, given the way events unfolded in the fall of 1960, there was no way to avoid it.

What I offered in the present volume is only the beginning of the CIA-Mafia entanglement with this affair. The Giancana-Roselli relationship that developed out of these events has long legs looking forward in my plans for further investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy.

[1] I have submitted a FOIA request to the CIA for any documents made in connection with the Sprouse briefing.

[2] I have submitted research requests with the JFK Library about this and plan spending time there looking for this and other important documents that might help explain the raw hatred for Kennedy that followed his handling of the Bay of Pigs.

[3] Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, Sinatra the Life (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), p. 265.

[4] See p. 204.

RELATED: Publication Spotlight: Essential New Works by Dr. John M. Newman

Dr. Newman’s books are available HERE

Book Review: Spies in the Congo by Susan Williams

Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War II

Author: Susan Williams
Publisher: Public Affairs Books | 9 August, 2016

An important new book has just been published by Susan Williams, author of the 2011 work “Who Killed Hammarskjöld?” that has led to the United Nations reopening the investigation of the death of Dag Hammarskjöld. Williams’ new book is titled “Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War 11”. It reveals previously little known information about the US atomic bomb project, the Manhattan Project. The story opens with Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning of a possible Nazi program to build an atomic bomb. Einstein, writing also on behalf of other atomic scientists, alerted Roosevelt to the three potential sources of uranium ore for a bomb- small and less concentrated deposits in Canada and Czechoslovakia, and the best source for almost unbelievably concentrated uranium ore, in the Belgian Congo.

Williams describes how FDR soon established U.S. bases in West Africa, as well as air and sea routes from the U.S. to the region. Gen. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, designated obtaining the uranium from the Congo mines a top priority. Williams describes the Manhattan Project as a secret ‘state within the state’, known to a select few government officials and financed through secret accounts.

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the CIA, was assigned a highly secret task of preventing smuggling of uranium from the Congo to Germany. OSS opened offices in West Africa, the Belgian Congo and Portuguese East Africa, and operated under a cover story of preventing the transfer of industrial diamonds to Germany for its war effort. Williams had access to released OSS records, which tell a previously unknown story of top priority U.S. intelligence activity in Africa during World War II.

It may not surprise students of Cold War struggles in the Congo to learn that the uranium mine in the Congo was located in the Katanga province. Katanga was the site of prolonged and violent clashes backed by the Cold War adversaries, not to mention its relevance to the murder of Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba on January 17, 1961. Control of the uranium mine is a likely cause of these events.

Williams writes of OSS personnel who are virtually unknown even to students of intelligence, and may have as yet unknown significance. An emerging story is that of Huntington Harris, who served as the head of OSS in West Africa, as well as its principal in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). In 1945 he was sent to Rome by OSS as part of a ‘special Vatican project’. James Angleton was chief of station for OSS in Italy at this time and involved in Vatican projects.

According to released OSS records available at the National Archives, in Portuguese East Africa, Huntington Harris was case officer for Werner von Alvensleben, a German who was a valued double agent for OSS, and a subject of a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the federal court in Washington D.C. Harris tried mightily to get von Alvensleben and wife admitted to live in the U.S. after the war, but was blocked by the U.S. Department of State. Von Alvensleben’s personal history included serving as an assassin for the Nazis in 1933 in the Austrian Tyrol while he was a member of the Bavarian Military Police headed by Heinrich Himmler. Von Alvensleben remained in Portuguese East Africa after World War II where at first he worked for the U.S. consulate and later established the largest big game hunting operation in Africa, Safarilandia.

Of interest to Americans in particular is that von Alvensleben journeyed to Dallas, Texas in late 1963 as the guest of D. Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository building. Byrd was reported to be at Safarilandia on the date in November 1963 on which President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, allegedly as a result of shots fired from Byrd’s Texas School Book Depository building. Byrd, an oil producer and defense contractor, is also a subject of a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Werner von Alvensleben was widely known in big game hunting circles for his proficiency with the Mannlicher-Schoenauer rifle, described by firearms experts as the “World’s Finest Rifle”. Kennedy was said to have been assassinated by shots from a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle which used ammunition virtually identical to that fired in the Mannlicher-Schoenauer. Warren Commission member (and former High Commissioner for Germany) John McCloy, in the official investigation of Kennedy’s assassination, questioned the FBI’s firearms expert as to whether the ammunition of the two rifles could be fired interchangeably. The FBI expert said he did not know the answer as he was unfamiliar with the Mannlicher-Schoenauer rifle.

“Spies in the Congo” is a major work that significantly broadens our understanding of World War II and the Cold War in Africa, and opens up the possibility of other major breakthroughs in our knowledge and understanding of the period.

– Review by AARC President, Dan Alcorn.

Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic mission in World War II may be ordered HERE.

U.N. Chief Presses to Unlock Mystery of Dag Hammarskjold’s Death

By ALAN COWELL SEPT. 6, 2016

LONDON — A few days from now, the anniversary of one of the most enduring international mysteries will slide by, hardly likely to be marked by those in Britain and the United States accused of withholding the secret clues to its resolution.

On the night of Sept. 17-18, 1961, an airplane carrying Dag Hammarskjold, the United Nations secretary general, crashed near the airport in Ndola in what was then called Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Mr. Hammarskjold was on a mission to end a secessionist war next door in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. All 16 people aboard the plane perished.

Gerald Ford White House Altered Rockefeller Commission Report in 1975; Removed Section on CIA Assassination Plots

White House Aide Dick Cheney Spearheaded Editing of Report to Dampen Impact

New Documents Cast Further Doubt on Commission’s Investigation, Independence

President Ford formally receives the Rockefeller Commission report, June 6, 1975. (Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library)

Washington, DC, February 29, 2016 – The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney.

Today’s posting includes the entire suppressed section on assassination attempts, Cheney’s handwritten marginal notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the public. The documents show that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political operatives.

This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period.

Among the highlights of today’s posting:

White House officials of the Ford administration attempted to keep a presidential review panel—the Rockefeller Commission—from investigating reports of CIA planning for assassinations abroad.

Ford administration officials suppressed the Rockefeller Commission’s actual report on CIA assassination plots.

Richard Cheney, then the deputy assistant to the president, edited the report of the Rockefeller Commission from inside the Ford White House, stripping the report of its independent character.

The Rockefeller Commission remained silent on this manipulation.

Rockefeller Commission lawyers and public relations officials warned of the damage that would be done to the credibility of the entire investigation by avoiding the subject of assassinations.

President Ford passed investigative materials concerning assassinations along to the Church Committee of the United States Senate and then attempted—but failed—to suppress the Church Committee’s report as well.

The White House markup of the Rockefeller Commission report used the secrecy of the CIA budget as an example of excesses and recommended Congress consider making agency spending public to some degree.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

The Rockefeller Commission, the White House and CIA Assassination Plots

By John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi |National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 543

The current controversy over drone attacks has an important backstory. During the 1970s it became known that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had plotted the murder of foreign individuals. These persons for the most part were prominent leaders or even heads of state. That the U.S. government had in any way been engaged in murder became a dark charge against the CIA, and helped inflame the political climate in a way that ensured investigations of the U.S. intelligence agencies would occur.

During those 1975 investigations, particularly those of the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, allegations of CIA involvement in assassinations were among the most important lines of inquiry. President Gerald R. Ford himself had a key role in triggering the investigations, inadvertently but artlessly revealing the fact of CIA involvement in plotting assassinations during a meeting with press editors.[i]

There had already been revelations of illegal domestic activities by the CIA. These led to the creation of a presidential panel under Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, and committees of inquiry in both houses of the United States Congress. Ford’s January 1975 admission of CIA involvement posed a dilemma for the administration. Vice President Rockefeller attempted to head off inclusion of the subject, restricting consideration of assassinations to the question of what role Cuba might have had in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That proved unacceptable to some members of his own commission, among them then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan. When the Rockefeller Commission took a vote on whether to include charges of CIA assassination plots in its inquiry, the group overrode its own chairman.[ii]

Rockefeller’s key opponent in the fight over investigating assassinations was the panel’s staff director, David W. Belin. A lawyer for the Warren Commission, empanelled to look into the Kennedy assassination in 1963-1964, Belin had been handpicked by Ford for the Rockefeller group. Ford, one of the Warren commissioners, was confident of Belin’s loyalty, but this time the lawyer fought hard to investigate deeply.

The investigators sought CIA documents on assassination plots conducted in its history and information on administrative routines. They also questioned key witnesses. As CIA lawyer John S. Warner admitted under questioning, the agency “certainly” had “no specific authorization” to conduct assassinations (Document 7). Warner additionally admitted he was “not clear” that a president had the constitutional authority to order an assassination, though that “might” lie within his powers.

Documents in this electronic briefing book reveal the views on the assassination reports of not only Belin but key members of his staff. At the time, in the spring of 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee) was just being constituted but the Rockefeller Commission inquiry was already in progress. Days after Church Committee members met with President Ford, press adviser David Gergen advised the president to say nothing about assassinations (Document 1).

The jurisdictional and procedural issues regarding whether to include an investigation of assassination plotting, so far as the Rockefeller inquiry was concerned, were fought out over this same period (Documents 2,3,4,5). White House officials, including panel chairman Rockefeller, continued a rearguard action in opposition, first to covering CIA assassination plots at all, and later to including that material in the Rockefeller Commission report. Belin continued to press for the coverage, took a primary role in interviews the commission conducted for this part of its inquiry, and became the main author of the portion of the report dealing with CIA plotting against Fidel Castro (including Operation ZR/RIFLE).

CIA cover memo for file describing Project ZR/RIFLE, relating to plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro (see Document No. 9)

The Rockefeller Commission collected a wide array of evidence, as illustrated by a staff member’s report on what could be learned from the papers of former CIA Director John McCone, and a CIA compendium document on the ZR/RIFLE project (Documents 8, 9, 10).

As of mid-April 1975, Belin expected to have the assassination portion of the panel report complete by the end of the month. He so informed White House officials. However, the CIA dragged its feet on providing materials, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who initially promised cooperation, provided little. Kissinger became a major actor in the struggle to suppress the Rockefeller assassinations report.[iii] When Belin scheduled a press conference to announce the panel’s assassination findings, deputy assistant to the president Richard Cheney and White House Counsel Philip Buchen, citing Kissinger’s concerns, intervened to induce Belin to cancel it.

As the Rockefeller Commission moved toward finalizing its report, panel staff concluded that the assassinations issues were going to be buried. Several recorded their objections to this course (Documents 11, 12). The Rockefeller Commission’s public affairs director, for one, observed that leaving out assassinations would make the report seem like a cover-up and cast doubt on the Commission’s entire project (Document 13). Nevertheless Belin and staff could not prevent determined superiors from holding back the entire subsidiary report that dealt with assassinations.

Meanwhile at the White House, Cheney led the way in “editing” the Rockefeller report—including suppressing the assassinations section. The final draft of the full report contained a brief passage noting that President Ford had asked the panel to investigate the assassination plots after its inquiry began, that the staff had not been able to complete the investigation, and that Ford had then asked that assassinations material be turned over to him. The Cheney edit inserted doubts by adding that it was unclear whether assassinations fell within the scope of the Commission’s mandate, thus resurrecting jurisdictional issues which had previously been resolved. The revised language also reduced President Ford to a bit player—asserting only that he had “concurred” in the panel’s decision to investigate rather than that he had revealed the existence of CIA plotting and then been obliged to modify the Commission’s terms of reference to include an investigation of the matter. White House editors also changed the original text, from indicating that records were still in the process of being turned over to the president, to the statement that it already “has been” done.

CONTINUE READING AT THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE

Professor David Wrone – The Warren Report on the Murder of JFK: Truth or Cover-Up?

39 minutes (https://vimeo.com/123052883)

David Wrone, Ph.D: A former professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, where he taught American history, Indian History and the JFK assassination for 35 years. He has published numerous book reviews on the subject and edited The Legal Proceedings of the 1975 court record on the fight to obtain the January 27, 1964 executive session transcript of the Warren Commission. He co-edited, with D. Guth,“The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography,” 1963-1979 (Greenwood Press, 1980). He is the author of, “The Zapruder Film” (University Press of Kansas).

In his 40 years of research and reading on the assassination, he has concentrated on the evidence found in files of the FBI and has sued the government for Zapruder film records, especially relating to its acquisition and purchase. Professor Wrone received his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Illinois-Urbana. He is Secretary and a member of the Board of Directors of the AARC.