It has been suggested by John Simkin that Kilgallen suspected that "Out-of-Towner" was a CIA spy. She therefore told her friends this is what he said so that if anything happened to her, a future investigator would realize that he was a CIA agent with links to Clare Booth Luce...

The well-built, 29-year-old Ron Pataky was quite a ladies' man. He had been engaged to the famous singer Anna Maria Alberghetti, squired Mia Farrow while staying at her mother, Maureen O'Sullivan's New York apartment, and brags that he "dated half of the females in Hollywood." So why his interest in Dorothy Kilgallen, who was old enough to be his mother?

Conspiracy buffs will no doubt seize on the fact that Pataky told us, "I knew Sam Giancana through Phyllis McGuire. Drunk one night, I tried to put the make on her. That didn't work..."

Decades later, Ron Pataky, then 56, went on to earn a master's degree in Christian Counselling from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Christian Counselling from Trinity Theological Seminary in Newburgh, Indiana...

Howard Hughes knew before President John Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy did that the CIA was trying to kill Castro. Hughes found out when Maheu had to ask for a leave of absence to run the operation.

The Kennedy brothers found out about the plots shortly after the FBI uncovered a bugging operation in Las Vegas.

Sam Giancana, one of the Mafia members hired to kill Castro, had suspected his mistress Phyllis McGuire was having an affair with Dan Rowan (of the Rowan and Martin “Laugh-In” comedy team). Maheu, as a favor to Giancana, hired a Florida detective to bug Rowan’s hotel room. But the detective left his equipment in plain sight, and the maid reported the equipment to the police, who contacted the FBI. The CIA admitted to Hoover that CIA was directly involved in the bugging and convinced Hoover not to further investigate. The CIA then told Robert Kennedy about the CIA’s use of Giancana in a plot to kill Castro. Given that Robert Kennedy had faced Giancana down in a courtroom (where he famously accused Giancana of giggling like a little girl), trying to prosecute him for Mafia activities, Robert was understandably furious at CIA for using the Mob, and furious at them trying to kill Castro...

During her 35-year career as a gossip columnist, crime reporter and panelist on the weekly TV game show, "What's My Line?," Dorothy Kilgallen ("Dolly Mae" to her friends), was a fearless journalist who broke major stories, and was the only reporter to interview Lee Harvey Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby. Her biggest case yet -- investigating President John F. Kennedy's assassination, and finding fault with the official story -- became the last one she ever pursued. She died mysteriously in November 1965, after being threatened, but the cops never probed further. Thanks to reruns on the Game Show Network, fans are still talking about Dorothy, including Larry King of CNN, and Dominick Dunne, who wrote about her in Vanity Fair. Now, shocking new information has emerged.

As a formidable crime reporter, Kilgallen immediately started asking tough questions of the authorities. She had a good contact within the Dallas Police Department, who gave her a copy of the original police log that chronicled the minute-by-minute activities of the department on the day of the assassination, as shown in the radio communications. This allowed her to report that the first reaction of Chief Jesse Curry to the shots in Dealey Plaza was: "Get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened up there." Kilgallen noted that he lied when he told reporters the next day that he initially thought the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository.

Dorothy challenged the credibility of Howard Brennan (who supposedly gave police a description of the shooter). She wrote articles about how important witnesses had been intimidated by the Dallas police or FBI.

In the midst of her aggressive reportage on the Kennedy case, Dorothy met a man who was to intrigue her the last months of her life. He helped her on some of her JFK stories but ultimately was to come under suspicion by amateur sleuths as having been involved in her death. Questions about him were raised by Lee Israel, who wrote the 1979 biography "Kilgallen." She never printed his name, and referred to him only obliquely as "the Out-of-Towner." But he is Ron Pataky, and he was interviewed by Midwest Today publisher Larry Jordan...

On Sept. 25, 1964, Kilgallen ran an interview with Acquilla Clemons, one of the witnesses to the shooting of Officer Tippit whom the Warren Commission never questioned. Clemons told Kilgallen that she saw two men running from the scene, neither of whom fit Oswald's description.

Dorothy also approached one of Jack Ruby's lawyers, Joe Tonahill. Surprisingly, Ruby (who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald, who was suspected of assassinating John Kennedy) agreed to talk with her. Some have speculated that Ruby would not have told her anything important, but Tonahill strongly disagrees. "This interview with her was a very significant point in his classless life," Tonahill asserts. He affirmed that Ruby "cooperated with her in every way that he could, and told her the truth as he understood it. It was just a very agreeable conversation between them. I just can't understand people doubting the sincerity of that interview."

The attorney, who observed the two talking, said that "I don't think there was any doubt about it... Jack was highly impressed with Dorothy Kilgallen... Of all the writers that were down there during the Ruby trial -- about 400 from all over the world -- she probably was the one that, to him, was the most significant."

Kilgallen never published any information she obtained from her private talk with Jack Ruby, but Ron Pataky says that's because she was "saving it for a book." She was under contract to Random House, Bennett Cerf's company, to produce a tome that was supposedly going to be a collection of stories about the famous murder trials she had covered. Instead, says Ron, "It would have been on JFK, the entire assassination. That's what we were really working on. Of course. Who better to write it? When she got into the JFK thing, as we all know, the world went crazy. But given her background, given the people she spoke with, don't you think the obvious thing would be that that would be THE book?"

One of the biggest scoops of Kilgallen's career came when she obtained the 102-page transcript of Ruby's testimony to the Warren Commission. Readers were shocked at the hopelessly inept questioning of Ruby by Chief Justice Warren, and by Warren's failure to follow up on the leads Ruby was feeding him. Attorney Melvin Belli called Dorothy's scoop "the ruin of the Warren Commission." Incidentally, John Daly, moderator of "What's My Line?", was married to Chief Justice Warren's daughter, Virginia...

Three days after Dorothy died, Bob and Jean Bach invited her widower Richard Kollmar over for dinner. Bob then asked him, "Dick, what was all that stuff in the folder Dorothy carried around with her about the assassination?" Richard replied, "Robert, I'm afraid that will have to go to the grave with me."

At the funeral, Dorothy's bereaved mother, Mae, angrily confronted Dick Kollmar. Pointing a finger at him, she said, "You killed my daughter, and I will prove it." But Marc Sinclaire said, "I don't think he could have done it. I think more than one person was involved in Dorothy's death."

On January 7, 1971, Richard Kollmar was found dead in bed of a drug overdose, just like Dorothy. David Susskind's widow, Joyce, described Dick as "this guy who was always in his cups. He had the looks, he had the intelligence to do something with his life if he had not had this alcoholic cross to bear."

In 1975, the FBI contacted Dorothy's son, Dickie, still trying to locate his mother's papers. Her JFK notes were never found..

Dick Kollmar told inconsistent stories to the police. In one version, he claimed that Dorothy had returned from "What's My Line?" at 11:30 p.m. "feeling chipper," that she "went in to write column," that he had said goodnight and then gone to bed.

Dorothy's inquiry into Jack Ruby's ties to the mob, and her relentless exploration of the Warren Report's gross inadequacies, threatened to expose dark secrets that powerful people both in and out of government did not want revealed. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act confirm that the FBI perceived her exposés as enough of a threat that they monitored her closely.

Incredibly, the CIA had 53 field offices around the world watching her on her foreign travels. Given this context, it is hard to see her untimely death as a mere accident.

There is no statute of limitations on murder, and there are enough people alive who could be questioned. But will there be enough interest by the powers that be to pursue this? As Dorothy once reflected, "Justice is a big rug. When you pull it out from under one person, a lot of others fall, too." Justice needs to be done in this case.
http://www.midtod.com/new/articles/7_14_07...

George Joannides role in the JFK story has never been explained by the agency.

A three-judge appellate court panel ruled in December that the agency had to search its files for records of Joannides' secret operations in 1963, when he served undercover in Miami running "psychological warfare" operations against the government of Fidel Castro. The court also ordered the CIA to explain why 17 reports on Joannides' secret operations in 1962-1964 are missing from the National Archives.

The CIA provided no written explanation of its actions during a hearing before Judge Richard Leon. Afterwords, agency attorney John Truong claimed orally that a search of files on Joannides operations found no records responsive to my 2003 Freedom of Information Act request.

Truong offered no explanation, written or oral of the missing records, In December, Judge Judith Rogers ruled that the CIA's previous explanation of the 17 missing reports was inadequate. "On remand the CIA must supplement its explanation," she wrote. That has yet to happen, despite the agency promising to comply with the appellate court order by April 30.

John Tunheim, a federal judge who chaired the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, said the Joannides files should be made public.

"Had the Review Board known the truth about George Joannides everything bearing his name would have been made public," Tunheim said in an interview. The ARRB, a civilian review panel created by Congress in the wake of the controversy over Oliver Stone's "JFK," declassified thousands of assassination records between 1994 and 1998

Joannides, who died in 1991, is the most curious figure to emerge in the vast JFK literature in recent years. Unbeknownst to investigators, Joannides' propaganda network proved influential in the media reaction to JFK's murder. Declassified CIA records show that he gave $25,000 a month to the leaders of a Cuban student group whose members had a series of encounters with Lee Harvey Oswald in August 1963. When Kennedy was shot dead on a Dallas street three months later, the CIA-funded group made headlines around the world by publicizing Oswald's pro-Castro activities and linking him to the Cuban leader.

Joannides' role in enabling that story remained secret for 38 years. His financial support for Oswald's Cuban antagonists was not disclosed to the Warren Commission which investigated Kennedys' death and concluded that Oswald acted alone. In 1978 Joannides was called out of retirement to serve as the Agency's liaison to a congressional committee that reopened the JFK investigation. The Agency did not disclose his role in the events of 1963 to Congress. The story of Joannides' actions did not begin to emerge until 2001 when I published a story in a Miami newspaper...

CorpWatch Managing Editor Pratap Chatterjee has just returned from Iraq where he was embedded with the US military and investigating the outsourcing of both military logistics and intelligence gathering. A new Corpwatch report offers a scathing assessment of intelligence contractors L-3 and Titan. We also speak to Marwan Mawiri, who worked in Iraq as a translator with Titan in 2003 and 2004...

In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned the country about the "unwarranted influence" of the "military-industrial complex." But back then, only a relative handful of companies did business with the Pentagon. Today, the military-industrial web is everywhere, Nick Turse writes in his new book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. And "it's nothing like the olive-drab outfit of Eisenhower's day: It reaches deeper into American lives and the American psyche than Eisenhower could ever have imagined. The truth is that, at every turn, in countless, not-so-visible ways wrapped up with the military."...

n fact, the Pentagon payroll is a veritable who's who of the top companies in the world: IBM; Time-Warner; Ford and General Motors; Microsoft; NBC and its parent company, General Electric; Hilton and Marriott; Columbia TriStar Films and its parent company, Sony; Pfizer; Sara Lee; Procter & Gamble; M&M Mars and Hershey; Nestlé; ESPN and its parent company, Walt Disney; Bank of America; and Johnson & Johnson among many other big-name firms. But the difference between now and then isn't only in scale. As this list suggests, Pentagon spending is reaching into previously neglected areas of American life: entertainment, popular consumer brands, sports. This penetration translates into a remarkable variety of forms of interaction with the public...

At the time of its announced closure, Antioch College, perhaps America’s most progressive and well-known peace college, had a few visible capitalist hawks on its board of trustees.

Bruce P. Bedford, one of only three trustees not a former alum, had been appointed to the board of Arlington, Virginia, company GlobeSecNine in 2005. The company is described by a representative of investment corporation Bear Sterns as having "a unique set of experiences in special forces, classified operations, transportation security and military operations." One can only speculate why the nation’s longest-standing anti-imperialist education institution would appoint a trustee with extensive ties to the military and security industrial complexes.

Business Wire on May 4, 2005, described GlobeSecNine as follows: "GlobeSecNine invests in companies providing U.S. defense, security, global trade management and supply chain solutions to the public and private sectors, and has a strategic alliance with The Scowcroft Group, a business advisory firm headed by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft."

Bedford served on the GlobeSecNine Board of Advisors with Scowcroft and co-founder of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center Fred Turco. Others affiliated with the company are tied directly to the prison industrial complex and the anti-liberal "war on drugs," for example Jack Lawn, former administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who serves on the board of directors.

On July 3, 2007, Michael Alexander’s name was removed from the list of Antioch trustees. Two days earlier, he had been sworn in as president of Lasell College in Newton, Massachusetts. There has been speculation that Antioch’s campus would make a great retirement community, much like the one at Lasell, known as Lasell Village, "a state-of-the-art eldercare community with the first-of-its-kind built in educational component."

In 1998 Alexander founded AverStar, where he served as chairman and chief executive officer, and did business primarily with NASA and the Defense Department. In 2000, Alexander’s AverStar defense company merged with the Titan Corporation.

In March 2005, Titan pleaded guilty and paid the largest penalty under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in history for bribery and filing false tax returns.

L-3 Communications acquired the Titan Corporation on July 29, 2005. As their corporate website described the company, it "is a leading provider of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems, secure communications systems, aircraft modernization, training and government services. The company is a leading merchant supplier of a broad array of high technology products, including guidance and navigation, sensors, scanners, fuzes, data links, propulsion systems, simulators, avionics, electro optics, satellite communications, electrical power equipment, encryption, signal intelligence, antennas and microwave components. L-3 also supports a variety of Homeland Security initiatives with products and services. Its customers include the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, selected U.S. Government intelligence agencies and aerospace prime contractors."

The L-3 Communications Titan Group brags that 8,000 of its 10,000 employees have "security clearances" and that they are a leading provider of C4ISR, Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance -- "developing and supporting the systems of today and tomorrow for the United States and Allied Militaries and defense-related agencies in order for them to carry out their assigned missions," according to their website.

While Anitoch board members Bedford and Alexander cozied up with U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security, students at the university sponsored a national teach-in to expose the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay on October 5, 2006.

How a college targeted by the FBI and its notorious COINTELPRO operation during the Cold War as a "vanguard of the New Left" managed to place two "spook"-connected trustees on their board is a mystery worth exploring.

Antioch resides in the shadow of Wright Patterson Air Force Base and its legendary Foreign Technologies Division that reverse engineers weapons systems from other nations. Its larger neighbor to the west, Ohio State University, has long been tied up with the CIA’s favorite nonprofit institution, Battelle, and was one of the 30 or so universities involved in the MK Ultra mind control LSD experiments in the 1960s.

The Dayton Daily News is reporting that a $5 million accounting error caused the radical college to close. Others have pointed to the long-standing rumors of intelligence ties to the Antioch Europe in Transition study program.

If the CIA or U.S. intelligence services were involved in the subversion of America’s most anti-imperialist and pro-peace college, it wouldn’t be the first time that the progressive college campuses have been infiltrated. The CIA subverted the National Student Association in the late 50s and early 60s. The agency also has been accused of subverting everything from fraternities to Fullbright scholars to Peace Corps workers.

The role of these trustees must be heavily scrutinized. Antioch alumni should be ashamed to allow their college to die until they get to the bottom of this spooky mystery.

Douglass sources Richard Mahoney's extraordinary JFK:Ordeal in Africa, one of the finest books ever written on President Kennedy's foreign policy. To fill in the Kennedy-Castro back channel of 1963 he uses In the Eye of the Storm by Carlos Lechuga and William Attwood's The Twilight Struggle. On Kennedy and Vietnam the author utilizes Anne Blair's Lodge in Vietnam, Ellen Hammer's A Death in November, and Zalin Grant's Facing the Phoenix. And these works allow Douglass to show us how men like Henry Cabot Lodge and Lucien Conein did not just obstruct, but actually subverted President Kennedy's wishes in Saigon...

The leading conservative mounting the effort to dethrone Diem was Henry Cabot Lodge. Kennedy had planned to recall Ambassador Nolting and appoint Edmund Gullion to the position. And, as readers of the Mahoney book will know, Gullion was much more in tune with Kennedy's thinking on Third World nationalism. He had actually tutored him on the subject in 1951 when Congressman Kennedy first visited Saigon. But Secretary of State Dean Rusk overruled this appointment, and suggested Lodge for the job. Lodge lobbied hard for the position because he wanted to use it as a springboard for a run for the presidency in 1964.

Many, including myself, have maintained that if there was a black-hatted villain in the drama of Saigon and the Nhu brothers in 1963, it was Lodge. Douglass makes an excellent case for that thesis here. Before moving to Saigon, Lodge consulted with, of all people, Time-Life publisher Henry Luce. He went to him for advice on what his approach to Diem should be. (p. 163) Kennedy's foe Luce advised Lodge not to negotiate with Diem. Referring him to the work of a journalist in his employ, he told Lodge to engage Diem in a "game of chicken". What this meant was that unless Diem capitulated on every point of contention between the two governments, support would be withdrawn. The ultimate endgame would be that there would be nothing to prop up his rule. And this is what Lodge did. With disastrous results.

From the time of the August cable, Lodge plotted with CIA officer Lucien Conein to encourage the coup and to undermine Diem by ignoring him. Even though, as Douglass makes clear, this is contrary to what JFK wanted. Kennedy grew so frustrated with Lodge that he sent his friend Torby McDonald on a secret mission to tell Diem that he must get rid of his brother Nhu. (p. 167)

It was Lodge who got John McCone to withdraw CIA station chief John Richardson who was sympathetic to Diem. Lodge wanted McCone to replace him with Ed Lansdale. Why? Because Lansdale was more experienced in changing governments. Richardson was withdrawn but no immediate replacement was named. So in September of 1963, this essentially left Lodge and Conein in charge of the CIA's interaction with the generals. And it was Conein who had been handling this assignment from the beginning, even before Lodge got on the scene. Around this time, stories began to emanate from Saigon by journalists Richard Starnes and Arthur Krock about the CIA being a power that was accountable to no one.

It was Lodge, along with establishment journalist Joe Alsop -- who would later help convince Johnson to create the Warren Commission -- who began the stories about Diem negotiating a secret treaty with Ho Chi Minh. (p. 191) This disclosure -- looked upon as capitulation-- further encouraged the efforts by the military for a coup. In September, Kennedy accidentally discovered that the CIA had cut off the Commodity Import Program for South Vietnam. He was taken aback. He knew this would do two things: 1.) It would send the South Vietnamese economy into a tailspin, and 2.) It would further encourage the generals because it would convey the message the USA was abandoning Diem. (p. 195)

On October 24th, the conspirators told Conein the coup was imminent. JFK told Lodge he wanted to be able to stop the coup at the last minute. (Conein later testified that he was getting conflicting cables from Washington: the State Department was telling him to proceed, the Kennedys were telling him to stop.) At this time Diem told Lodge he wanted Kennedy to know he was ready to carry out his wishes. (p. 202) But Lodge did not relay this crucial message to Kennedy until after the coup began.

The rest of Douglass' work here confirms what was only suggested in the Church Committee Report. Clearly, Conein and Lodge had sided with the generals to the ultimate degree. And, like Lenin with the Romanov family, the generals had decided that Diem and his brother had to be terminated. Lodge and Conein helped the coup plotters to facilitate the final bloody outcome. In turn, by using the Alsop-Lodge story about the Diem/Ho negotiations, the CIA egged on the murderous denouement. (p. 209) Not knowing Lodge was subverting Kennedy's actual wishes, Diem kept calling the ambassador even after the coup began. This allowed Lodge to supply his true location to Conein after the brothers had fled the bombed presidential castle. So when the brothers walked out of the Catholic Church they had taken refuge in, they thought the truck that awaited them was escorting them to the airport. But with the help of their two American allies, the generals had arranged for the truck themselves. And the unsuspecting Nhu brothers walked into the hands of their murderers.

Kennedy was so distraught by this outcome he decided to recall Lodge and fire him. He had arranged to do this on November 24th. Instead, President Johnson called the ambassador back with a different message: the US must not lose in Vietnam. (p. 375)...

Douglass mentions the Nags Head, North Carolina military program which launched American soldiers into Russia as infiltrators. Near the end of the book (p. 365), with Oswald in jail about to be killed by Jack Ruby, Douglass returns to that military program with Oswald's famous thwarted phone call to Raleigh, North Carolina: the spy left out in the cold attempting to contact his handlers for information as how to proceed. But not realizing that his attempted call will now guarantee his execution...

Falls Church adjoins Langley, which was then the new headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, a prized project of Allen Dulles. It was from Falls Church that Ruth Paine journeyed to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald, who she had been introduced to by George DeMohrenschildt. After she picked Marina up, she deposited her in her home in Irving, Texas. Thereby separating Marina from Lee at the time of the assassination.

Some later discoveries made Ruth's itinerary in September quite interesting. It turned out that John Hoke, Sylvia's husband, also worked for AID. And her sister Sylvia worked directly for the CIA itself. By the time of Ruth's visit, Sylvia had been employed by the Agency for eight years. In regards to this interestingly timed visit to her sister, Jim Garrison asked Ruth some pointed questions when she appeared before a grand jury in 1968. He first asked her if she knew her sister had a file that was classified at that time in the National Archives. Ruth replied she did not. In fact, she was not aware of any classification matter at all. When the DA asked her if she had any idea why it was being kept secret, Ruth replied that she didn't. Then Garrison asked Ruth if she knew which government agency Sylvia worked for. The uninquiring Ruth said she did not know. (p. 171) This is the same woman who was seen at the National Archives pouring through her files in 1976, when the House Select Committee was gearing up.

When Marina Oswald was called before the same grand jury, a citizen asked her if she still associated with Ruth Paine. Marina replied that she didn't. When asked why not, Marina stated that it was upon the advice of the Secret Service. She then elaborated on this by explaining that they had told her it would look bad if the public found out the "connection between me and Ruth and CIA." An assistant DA then asked, "In other words, you were left with the distinct impression that she was in some way connected with the CIA?" Marina replied simply, "Yes."...

To me, the most interesting and least discussed piece of the Watergate puzzle is the piece related to Howard Hughes. By the early sixties, the Hughes corporation was already enmeshed with the CIA. Hughes had selected Robert Maheu to run his organization. Maheu had been a CIA asset for years, and was their chosen “go-to” guy when the Agency decided to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Howard Hughes knew before President John Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy did that the CIA was trying to kill Castro. Hughes found out when Maheu had to ask for a leave of absence to run the operation.

The Kennedy brothers found out about the plots shortly after the FBI uncovered a bugging operation in Las Vegas. Sam Giancana, one of the Mafia members hired to kill Castro, had suspected his mistress Phyllis McGuire was having an affair with Dan Rowan (of the Rowan and Martin “Laugh-In” comedy team). Maheu, as a favor to Giancana, hired a Florida detective to bug Rowan’s hotel room. But the detective left his equipment in plain sight, and the maid reported the equipment to the police, who contacted the FBI. The CIA admitted to Hoover that CIA was directly involved in the bugging and convinced Hoover not to further investigate. The CIA then told Robert Kennedy about the CIA’s use of Giancana in a plot to kill Castro. Given that Robert Kennedy had faced Giancana down in a courtroom (where he famously accused Giancana of giggling like a little girl), trying to prosecute him for Mafia activities, Robert was understandably furious at CIA for using the Mob, and furious at them trying to kill Castro.

In its own Inspector General Report, the CIA reported that while they told Kennedy about the plots that had already concluded, they never divulged that additional plots that were continuing. I’ll do a separate post on the Castro plots at some point -– but my conclusion will be the same as that in the CIA’s internal study, which no proponent of the Kennedys' guilt in this matter ever cites: the Kennedys never approved any plots to kill Castro. The CIA, by its own admission, had no executive authority for these plots.

In 1968, John Meier, who worked for Howard Hughes, learned inadvertently of the CIA’s relationship with Howard Hughes when Maheu told Meier that Michael Merhage was going to be working with them in South America, asking Meier to help Merhage with contacts in Ecuador. Meier did, not knowing that Merhage was not really a Hughes employee, but a CIA employee using Hughes’ company for cover. Merhage assumed that Meier was himself CIA, and spoke openly to Meier about the Agency’s interest. (Merhage was so bumbling that one of Meier’s Ecuadoran contacts told Meier they had figured Merhage for an agent right away.)

Merhage’s next bumble takes us right back to the primary subject of this article. Thinking Meier was a CIA man like himself, Merhage gave Meier a directive from the CIA to Hughes dated September 2, 1968, containing a list of American politicians the CIA wanted funded through the Hughes corporation. Among the names Strom Thurmond, Wallace Bennett, Paul Laxalt, James Eastland, and many others, was the name Gerald R. Ford. The CIA wanted Hughes to give money to Ford’s campaign. (Source: “Hughes, Nixon, and the CIA: The Watergate Conspiracy Woodward and Bernstein Missed,” by Larry DuBois and Laurence Gonzales, Playboy, September, 1976.) Was the agency rewarding Ford for his service on the Warren Commission?

Shortly after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, John Meier had occasion to speak with J. Edgar Hoover, whom he knew personally. Hoover told Meier that the FBI knew that Maheu had been responsible for the hit on Bobby Kennedy, but that he was powerless against the CIA. He was, of course, powerless, so long as that blackmail photo was out there. (For more on this episode, see my articles on the Robert Kennedy assassination in The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X. And while Meier’s credibility is shaky on some issues, I believe it was more than a coincidence that Robert Maheu called John Meier out of the blue, after ten years, the very day I was en route to see Meier. And when I met Meier, it was to talk about a different topic, not the RFK case, which I had not yet written about. This came up tangentially, which made his assertion all the more credible, I felt.)

Two years later, Hoover cut off all communication between the FBI and the CIA. I know Hoover couldn’t have done that without risking the exposure of that photo unless he had, by then, put together counterblackmail material. I wonder if Hoover’s independence from CIA came, at least in part, from something Hoover could prove about the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968.

After Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the CIA’s relationship with the Hughes organization became even closer. Hughes ordered Maheu to seize the moment and hire away Robert Kennedy’s political organization. Hughes, ever Machiavellian, knew that Larry O’ Brien and other top lieutenants from Bobby’s campaign would be jobless. Maheu was tasked with hiring them into the Hughes organization. If the CIA was behind the assassination of Robert Kennedy, what better way to keep Kennedy’s closest associates dependent for their lives and careers on the CIA? In any case, this simple act paved, in many ways, the start of the road to Watergate...

Schlesinger saw right away how huge a problem the whole Watergate episode represented for the Agency. The CIA was forbidden, by its charter, to operate domestically. Spying on Americans was absolutely illegal, and what else were E. Howard Hunt and the Watergate burglars doing but exactly that? Schlesinger knew, from his longtime experience in government, that these activities were likely the tip of the iceberg. So on May 9, 1973 Schlesinger sent a memo to all CIA employees asking that anyone with any knowledge of illegal activities should come forward:

The resulting report prepared from responses came to be known as “the family jewels.” Colby preferred to call them, more accurately, “our skeletons in the closet." And as proof that some secrets can be kept forever, in 2005, former Senator Gary Hart, who had actually seen this report, says most of what’s in there has never reached the public..

By December, the family jewels were bubbling just under the surface. Schlesinger had learned of Operation CHAOS – Angleton’s large, domestic, and very illegal domestic spying operation, and told Angleton, “this thing is not only breaking the law, but we’re getting nothing out of it.” (See Cold Warrior, by Tom Mangold.) Despite both fearing and respecting Angleton, Schlesinger put an instant end of the program. But when the baton was passed to Colby, the issue didn’t end there..

President Ford learned about the CIA’s illegal activities while in Vail. He had called Bill Colby at CIA and asked to be briefed immediately. Colby forwarded to Ford, via Kissinger, the “family jewels” report. When Ford returned to DC on January 3, 1975, he called Colby over to the White House for a private meeting. The next day, he announced he was forming a “blue ribbon” commission to be headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller that would conduct an inquiry into the CIA’s domestic activities. As Daniel Schorr noted in his book Clearing the Air:

The administration seemed anxious to seize the initiative, perhaps to head off a potentially more troublesome congressional investigation -- a standard defensive tactic.

Having served on the Warren Commission, Ford must have known what he was doing would produce more cover-up than revelation. Indeed, when the appointments were made, the press yelled immediately that the fix was in. The other Commission members were John T. Connor, C. Douglas Dillon, Erwin N. Griswold, Lane Kirkland, Lyman L. Lemnitzer, Ronald Reagan, and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. Ford’s fellow Warren Commission member David W. Belin was given the role of Executive Director. The formal Commission title was “U.S. President's Commission on CIA activities within the United States.” It’s important to remember, as you read what follows, that the focus of the commission was on CIA activities within the United States.

At a White House luncheon for New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and its editors, Ford made a blunder so egregious it launched four separate investigations of the CIA:

Toward the end of the conversation, the subject of the Rockefeller commission came up. One editor, noting the predominantly conservative and defense-oriented membership of the commission, asked what credibility it would have. President Ford explained that he needed trustworthy citizens who would not stray from the narrow confines of their mission because they might come upon matters that would damage the national interests and blacken the reputation of every President since Truman.

“Like what?” asked the irrepressible Times managing editor, A. M. Rosenthal.

“Like assassinations!” President Ford shot back, quickly adding, “That’s off the record!”

The Times executives went into a huddle in their Washington office and agreed, after a spirited argument, to keep the President’s confidence.

This secret, however, got out, and word got around that Ford had been concerned about revealing assassinations. Daniel Schorr went to Colby and asked what was meant. Colby said Ford’s comments referred to foreign assassination plots, and Schorr satisfied himself that’s what Ford was referring to.

It bears repeating that the Rockefeller commission was only to look into the CIA’s domestic activities. If that were the case, why should Ford worry that an investigation of the CIA domestic activities would reveal information about foreign assassinations? Of course, the unasked question was this: Was there some domestic assassination the CIA have been involved with that Ford knew about? As a member of the Warren Commission, was Ford worried about exposing the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination? I’ve been disappointed, over the years, that most commentators on the commission never point out this other probable explanation for his strange outburst. To me, it seems likely Ford feared the exposure of a domestic assassination conspiracy. I believe strongly that Bill Colby revealed details of foreign assassination attempts in order to draw attention away from the one assassination that should have been on everyone’s mind after Ford’s outburst: the assassination of President Kennedy..