What Happened to CIA Number 110669? Was It Oswald?

Honorable Men

Chapter 10.

What Happened to CIA Number 110669? Was it Oswald?

If the Commission had had its way, and this includes the staff, and Rankin in particular, it might have been that all of what could be known of the reports that Oswald had worked for some federal agency would have been those news stories that were not followed up and could not be.

This would have been true as long as there was no access to the Commission's records and then the Commission arranged a severe restriction on them.

It did not and it could not classify the few records provided it by the executive agencies, mostly the FBI with a little from the Secret Service.. All of them were angled to be self-serving.

But it did classify its own records.

With a single exception, a perhaps purposeful exception.

As we saw, it classified all its stenographic transcripts TOP SECRET. When the Government Printing Office could not set type on the highly classified stenographic transcripts of the testimony that the Commission published, Rankin reduced the classification on them -- on what was to be published - to CONFIDENTIAL.

The Commission had no authority to classify anything.

When I was forced to sue to obtain these executivesession transcripts they were still classified TOP SECRET after more than a decade. The classification stamps that were cancelled are visible on every page of my facsimile reproductions of them.

That one exception is Rankin's memo on his and Warren's questioning of the Texans. He did not classify it at all and duplicate copies were placed in several files, including the Commission's CIA file.

That Rankin memo is selfserving for its five and a half typed pages.

It includes only what he wanted to include of what they heard from the Texans.

Along what it does not include is the almost desperate secrecy he and Warren imposed.

It does not include that they originally planned to fly the Texans up in such secrecy there were going to use an Air Force plane so nobody would see them. It does not include that they swore the Texans to strictest secrecy. These we learn from agency records.

To the best of my knowledge those agency records have never been reported.

This is consistent with their decision to destroy the part of their January 22 executive session recorded by the court reporter.

It is consistent with the intent to exercise the tightest possible control over all the information that the only officiallydesignated assassin reportedly had had some connection with some government agency.

The subject of the Rankin memo is, "Rumors that Oswald was an undercover agent." He does not say for some government agency.

That should be kept secret in the official investigation of that assassination?

The staff may not have been fully informed but it was well informed. It knew not only of those published stories, it also knew or and had access to all agency records before Rankin ever did. It knew the Texans were there, too.

That the staff knew what was up is reflected in his memo. On its second page he states, "On Thursday, January 23, 1964, Secret Service Report No. 767 was brought to my attention. This report is dated January 23, 1964 . . ." In fact that report is dated January 3, 1964. The "period covered" is 12/16 -- 12/17/63"

It was not new, it had merely been ignored.

It was called to Rankin's attention by a staff member who was aware of the executive session of January 22 and the coming of the Texans the next day.

I wrote about this some years before this writing (of 1993). I use this substantially as I wrote it years ago. While I then was not, as now, focusing on the staff, aside from what may not have reached the staff of that January 22 session, this was all available to and known to the staff.

The staff that to this day has remained silent about it.

On such bodies the staffs do not generally set policy but they do carry policy out.

It was once the respected tradition that public servants refused to be part of policies they believed wrong, regardless of the cost of that refusal. It was believed that the public had the right to expect this of its employees. It was also considered the course of honor, of personal and professional honor.

On all such bodies the real work is done by the staff. With regard to what the staff does and does not do, it implements policy.

With this Commission more than with most such bodies the actual hearings were mostly by the staff, with no Member present. This alone gave it more to do with policy. There are few of those depositions, the means by which most of the testimony was adduced, in which what the staff should have and did not do is not do is not readily apparent.

Three of the many illustrations that come to mind are David Belin's inability to get Oswald to the scene of the Tippit killing before it was reported on the police radio and Wesley Liebeler's comment when from the evidence Oswald could not have filed his change of address in Dallas with the New Orleans post office.

With the latter, as I exposed it in Oswald in New Orleans, Liebeler merely commented that he'd add that to the stack, meaning of unsolved problems that nobody could try to solve. He did not try. That mystery, to, remains.

Belin engaged in the time reconstruction in an effort to demonstrate that Oswald could have gotten to the scene of the Tippit killing from his rooming house in time to fire those shots. As I exposed in Whitewash II The FBI-Secret Service Cover-Up, what Belin actually proved is that getting Oswald there on time to be the killer was not possible. In addition, Belin had the affidavit T. F. Bowley in which he alleged that it was he who used the police radio to report the Tippit killing after Tippit had been killed. Bowley had looked at his watch. Tippit was dead more than five minutes before the time Belin fixed. Bowley's timing, too, eliminated Oswald as that killer. With Bowley, Belin did not call Bowley to testify. Belin merely said he and Bowley proved was impossible is what happened.

The Commission staff knew from the FBI reports that the print job on the handbill Oswald distributed in New Orleans was not picked up by Oswald. This alone meant that Oswald was not then alone. This is true of someone mailing his change-of-address card more than a week after he left New Orleans. But the Commission began with the intent of finding that Oswald was entirely alone. So, the staff ignored the evidence and instead implemented policy. Which is exactly what Belin did, the Commission having begun with the determination to find that Oswald killed Tippit. Belin phonied the case that he did, ignoring the evidence that Oswald could not have.

The Commission's record, abounds in such illustrations.

Including that of the report Oswald had been some kind of government undercover agent.

The Commission refused to investigate that and did all it could to keep it secret. The staff went along with this policy determination and was silent about the Commission's refusal to make the required investigation.

That is what the Commission did. It refused to make the required investigation.

And to keep it all as secret as was possible.

Without the total silence of everyone on the staff it could not have..

It may well have been that the rumor was false, had no foundation in fact. That Oswald never had any extra money indicates he got no money from any such work. Marina, who had a similar suspicion, confirmed to me that they never had any money other than what Oswald earned or from his unemployment check.

This is immaterial. The Commission was required to investigate those reports. It did not when it first learned about them and it did not when, in panic, it knew that the Texans might investigate those reports.

The last recorded words of that January 22 session were Rankin's. He assured the members that "if you don't want them," nobody else would see the transcripts. (Only he did not know that Ford was an FBI Informer. The FBI's records reveal that it had a full account, immediately.

As we saw recorded in the records of court reporting services provided, Rankin kept his word by not arranging for any court reporter to be present two days later, on January 24, when he and Warren, alone, met with and questioned the four Texans Rankin had asked to rush to Washington in the secrecy. But it was not secret from the FBI that wanted the Commission to "fold up and quit" because what it claimed to have already done "closes the case" in which "they found their man. There is nothing more to do." So, the Commission "can go home and that is the end of it." (The FBI kept tabs on the Texans, too.)

This is the way that the executive session ended and it is the way that of January 24 began, with the Commission's determination to control information and to suppress it. Keeping their word, that "we would have records of meeting," was not nearly as important as covering their asses from the FBI's pounding that began with the FBI's leaking that before the Commission its first hearing it acknowledged, expecting the perpetual secrecy, they thought in its January 22 executive session. The FBI's leaking, the terrified Commissioners at their January 22 session recognized, had already controlled what they dared think of doing and concluding.

So, as there is no record. of most of what transpired at that January 22 session, there is no stenographic transcript at all of January 24. All that is known to exist that might reflect what happened when Warren and Rankin met with the Texans is this self-serving memorandum to files" by Rankin. He was so anxious to control what was on paper he did not even date his memorandum. Front content it was written after the Texans departed for home after the January 24 session and before the beginning of the next session on January 27.

If ever there was an asscovering bureaucrat it was Rankin. His memo includes only what he wanted it to include. With a single exception, an exception here saved for its use in context, there is nothing in the memo that could haunt the Commission or its Members or its general counsel. That Rankin did record this one exception, with consummate brevity, in the starkest possible form, seems to reflect his fear that because the Texans who were his source might for some reason not keep it secret, covering his own and the Commission's asses dictated that he not totally suppress what he barely mentions that is so germane to the report that Oswald had served the federal government as an undercover informer.

If the Commission had any interest in fact, any interest in establishing the truth, it required a verbatim transcript of what the Texans knew and said so that there would be no questions about that or about the possible meaning of any word or the possibility that Warren and Rankin might not remember it all or might get some of it twisted.

The absence of the court reporter, reflects the determination not to have a dependable record, it establishes that the Commission did not want to establish fact, did not seek truth. It represents the determination not to investigate when it had to investigate.

What reason can there be for this other than fear it might be true?

It was going to find Oswald had not served any government agency even if he had.

Rankin began his "memorandum for the files" by stating not that they had appeared earlier in the press, as they had, but that "Allegations have been received by the Commission to the effect that Lee Harvey Oswald was an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Central Intelligence Agency" before the assassination and that "This memorandum reviews these allegations and summarizes the action taken by the Commission.."

As anyone reading this memorandum later would have no way of knowing without extensive knowledge of the Commission's and FBI's records, this quotation from that memo is not true. They mentioned some of the allegations but did not "review" them all and the only "action" the Commission took was to talk further about this "dirty rumor" three days later. This is proven by the transcript of that January 27 executive session I got by FOIA.

Rankin next recounted his getting Carr's phone call on the twenty-second. He said that Carr indicated that this allegation was in the hands of the press," not that it had been published beginning six weeks earlier. he then attributed Carr's information "ultimately" to Wade simultaneously stating that Carr said he had not discussed it with Wade.

Next he records that he discussed this with Warren and only Warren, not another Member or staff lawyer, and that Warren suggested that they ask Carr" to come to Washington as soon as possible" bringing Wade and his assistant, Bill Alexander, "to discuss this matter."

Rankin did more than "have a discussion with" Warren. Before he phoned Carr he also had "a discussion with" Jaworski. He does not say how but it was probably by phone. He also does not say why he spoke to Jaworski first. How Jaworski was not a member of the Texas Court of Inquiry, as for example, Dean Storey was. Yet the invitation recorded by Rankin, after "discussion" with both Warren and Jaworski, was to invite Carr of the Texas Court of Inquiry but not Jaworski.

Rankin makes no mention of the existence of the Texas Court of Inquiry, which the Commission and the White House set out immediately to nullify. They succeeded.

(To the best of my knowledge the most thorough research into the domination and nullification of the Texas Court of Inquiry by the Johnson administration and the Warren Commission was by the late Sylvia Meagher. Her records are deposited at Hood College, Frederick, Maryland, where mine also will be. The Johnson White House was intensively involved in seeing to it that this Texas Court of Inquiry would amount to nothing. It wanted the Commission to be in charge, with no competition at all. In this it and the Commission succeeded so completely that when the Texas Court of Inquiry finally issued its "report," that shabby document was a mere nineteen plus pages in length, printed in small headline type, which is exceptionally large for text paper, with wide margins and small pages. That egg was laid in public on October 5, 1964, after the Report was issued. It endorsed the Report.)