Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Read online

  PRAISE FOR NOT IN YOUR LIFETIME

  “An awesome work, with the power of a plea as from Zola for justice … a model of its kind of journalism.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Fresh and important … skillfully and compellingly written … serves to dramatize, as no previous book has done, the superficiality of the Warren Commission’s investigation … It reveals the appalling degree to which the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the various branches of Military Intelligence have failed to cooperate with the official investigations.” —The New York Times

  “The closest thing we have to that literary chimera, a definitive work on the events of Dallas … admirable reporting and compelling evidence.” —The Boston Globe

  “An important piece of work … exceptionally well written, with all the tone and tension of an Eric Ambler thriller.” —The New York Review of Books

  “A dark fascination, the deepest reading yet of the mysteries that whirl around that heartshaking moment in Dallas … a brilliant work of investigation and a subterranean history of our time.” —Don DeLillo

  “Monumentally important.” —Philadelphia Daily News

  “A powerhouse of a book … [Not in Your Lifetime] proves to any reasoning reader that at all events the Oswald story handed to the public was a pack of lies … tops the drama of any fictional thriller.” —New York Post

  “Huge, exhaustive, deeply unsettling … I now think that it is possible that the Kennedy assassination was the most far-reaching state crime ever committed in this country.” —The Village Voice

  “Superb investigative disciplines … and so readable.” —Norman Mailer

  “Tough-minded … comprehensive.” —Chicago Tribune

  “Careful and disquieting analysis of the mysteries of Dallas.” —Arthur Schlesinger Jr., two-time Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner and former Special Assistant to President Kennedy

  “This authoritative book opens a box of secrets. It offers disquieting, even terrifying, answers to the questions we have all been asking.” —Len Deighton

  “Of all the books written about the Kennedy assassination, this is the first one that has convinced me there is a plausible trail of evidence leading to a conspiracy.” —William Attwood, former Ambassador and Special Assistant to the U.S. delegation at the U.N.

  “So lucidly arranged and so forcefully mounted that I now feel compelled to believe that there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.” —Robert MacNeil, former Executive Editor of the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour

  “A thoughtful and responsible book.” —Former Congressman Judge Richardson Preyer, House Select Committee on Assassinations

  “Deserves to be read and taken seriously by all those who care about truth or justice.” —G. Robert Blakey, former Chief Counsel, House Select Committee on Assassinations

  “Right on the button … a choice book for the budding student of America’s crime of the century.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  Not in Your Lifetime

  The Defining Book on the

  J.F.K. Assassination

  Anthony Summers

  for Colm, Fionn, and Lara

  Contents

  Preface

  Main Characters

  Chapter 1: Ambush

  I. DALLAS: The Open-and-Shut Case

  Chapter 2: The Evidence Before You

  Chapter 3: How Many Shots? Where From?

  Chapter 4: Other Gunmen?

  Chapter 5: Did Oswald Do It?

  Chapter 6: The Other Murder

  Chapter 7: A Sphinx for Texas

  II. OSWALD: Maverick or Puppet?

  Chapter 8: Red Faces

  Chapter 9: Cracks in the Canvas

  Chapter 10: Mischief from Moscow

  Chapter 11: An “Intelligence Matter”

  Chapter 12: Oswald and the Baron

  III. CONSPIRACIES: Cuba and the Mob

  Chapter 13: The Company and the Crooks

  Chapter 14: The Mob Loses Patience

  Chapter 15: Six Options for History

  Chapter 16: Viva Fidel?

  Chapter 17: Blind Man’s Bluff in New Orleans

  Chapter 18: The Cuban Conundrum

  IV. ENDGAME: Deception and Tragedy

  Chapter 19: Exits and Entrances in Mexico City

  Chapter 20: Facts and Appearances

  Chapter 21: Countdown

  Chapter 22: Casting the First Stone

  Chapter 23: The Good Ole Boy

  Chapter 24: Hints and Deceptions

  Image Gallery

  Illustration Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Sources and Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Index

  Preface

  After fifty years, does the assassination of President Kennedy still matter? It is now as far from us in time as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was for people living during World War I. Nevertheless, the murder still haunts America and the wider world. For those who were adults at the time, the killing of President Kennedy is a generational milestone. For those much younger, what happened in Dallas persists as a spectral presence even in this new century.

  There are multiple reasons why the assassination lingers in the public mind. No other death of a single individual—and one so young, embodying the hopes of a new generation—so traumatized an era. It stays with us in part because John F. Kennedy was killed during the Cold War, at a time when nuclear war seemed a real and constant threat; and in part, too, because November 22, 1963, signaled an end to the sense of cozy security of the previous decade, the waning of public trust in authority. Above all, though, the assassination stays with us because of a perception by millions around the world that there is a mystery—that the full truth of what happened remains unknown.

  The idea that the murder of the 35th President of the United States was the result of a conspiracy, not the act of a lone assassin, was there from the start. Who might have been behind such a plot depended on a person’s political view, on what they read, on what broadcast made an impression at any given time. Had one or both of America’s Communist foes, the Soviet Union or its upstart protégé Cuba, had a hand in the assassination? Had anti-Castro exiles killed Kennedy? Or the Mafia? Or the CIA, or the “military industrial complex”? Or two or more of the above combined?

  What the polls have consistently shown is that millions do not believe what the official inquiry that followed the assassination, the Warren Commission, told them happened—that a loner named Lee Harvey Oswald, who had no known motive, killed the President. 74 percent of those Americans polled in a January 2013 study believed—to the contrary—that there had been a conspiracy. A 2009 CBS poll put the figure as high as 76 percent. 74 percent of respondents, according to the same poll, believed there had been “an official cover-up to keep the public from learning the truth about the assassination.” The vast majority, 77 percent, thought the full truth would never be known.

  This book was first published three decades ago as Conspiracy, a title deriving not from any fixed view of mine but because a new probe, by the House Assassinations Committee, had found there had “probably” been a plot. Four editions later, when I updated the book in 1998, a new publisher agreed to the title it now carries—Not in Your Lifetime. I should explain.

  In early 1964, as the Commission began its work, Chief Justice Earl Warren was asked if all the investigation’
s information would be made public. He replied, “Yes, there will come a time. But it might not be in your lifetime [author’s emphasis]. I am not referring to anything especially, but there may be some things that would involve security. This would be preserved but not made public.” Warren was thinking of alleged assassin Oswald’s visits to the Soviet Union and Mexico, he explained later, and there may indeed have been national security ramifications at that time.

  The Soviet, Mexican, and Cuban aspects of the case certainly were hypersensitive at the time—and in some respects may have implications today.1 Step by step down the years, however, and to the chagrin of some federal agencies, millions of pages of documents have been released. The JFK Act of 1992—more properly the President John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Collection Act—brought an avalanche of material into the public domain.

  Fifty years on, however, we do not have it all. Some Army Intelligence and Secret Service records have been destroyed. There are questions about the whereabouts of some Naval Intelligence material. In 2012, the National Archives stated that rather less than its 1 percent of assassination-related records—out of a total of some five million pages—will not be made public until 2017. It is not clear, and the Archives administration has not counted, just how many documents are actually involved. It is known, though, that the Central Intelligence Agency has withheld 1,171 documents as “national security classified.” Some of them, we know, are records that researchers very much want to see—in particular, documents relating to former CIA officers whose activities have aroused justifiable suspicion.

  Researchers have reacted with outrage. Professor Robert Blakey, who was Chief Counsel for Congress’ assassination investigation in the late 1970s, criticized the National Archives for using “bureaucratic jargon to obfuscate its failure to vindicate the public interest in transparency.” He laid the blame, though, not on the Archives so much as the CIA. “I think,” he wrote as this book went to press, “the Agency is playing the Archives.”

  Remaining documents will be released in 2017, the Archives administration has promised, “unless the President personally certifies on a document by document basis that continued postponement is necessary.” Full releases or no full releases, however, the lack of a real official will to investigate—long ago—means that outstanding mysteries about the assassination will never be resolved. This new edition of my book has been heavily rewritten, shorn of items that now seem redundant, and updated in light of information now available. Its title remains, however, Not in Your Lifetime.

  Anthony Summers

  Connecticut and Ireland

  2013

  Main Characters

  The author personally spoke with forty-eight of the principal characters listed below—along with many more interviewed for this book.

  John F. Kennedy: the 35th President of the United States

  The Oswald family

  Lee Harvey Oswald: the lone assassin, according to the first official inquiry. A later finding by a congressional committee suggested he had at least one accomplice.

  Marguerite Oswald: Oswald’s mother

  Marina Oswald (née Nikolaevna Prusakova): Oswald’s wife. They were married in the Soviet Union and she accompanied him back to the United States.

  Robert Oswald: Oswald’s elder brother

  Charles “Dutz” Murret: Oswald’s uncle in New Orleans, connected to organized crime

  Lillian Murret: Charles Murret’s wife

  Significant individuals

  William Alexander: Assistant District Attorney in Dallas

  Guy Banister: former senior FBI agent, allegedly involved with Oswald in New Orleans

  Comer Clarke: British reporter who claimed Fidel Castro told him that Oswald spoke of killing Kennedy while in Mexico City

  John Connally: Governor of Texas, seriously wounded in shooting that killed the President

  Oscar Contreras: Mexican leftist student who said he met a man who identified himself as Oswald but who may have been an impostor

  Jesse Curry: Dallas police chief

  Nelson Delgado: marine who served with Oswald

  George de Mohrenschildt: Russian émigré, linked to U.S. intelligence, who associated with Oswald on his return from the Soviet Union

  David Ferrie: former airline pilot with links to Oswald, the anti-Castro movement, and organized crime

  Captain Will Fritz: headed the Dallas police Homicide unit and questioned Lee Harvey Oswald

  Jim Garrison: New Orleans District Attorney who opened a local assassination investigation in 1967

  “Alek Hidell”: pseudonym Oswald used, probably derived from the name of John Heindel, a marine who had served with him. This name was used to purchase the rifle found at the Texas School Book Depository.

  Marie Hyde: American tourist who, in the company of her acquaintances Monica Kramer and Rita Naman, twice encountered Oswald in the Soviet Union

  Lyndon B. Johnson: Vice President who became President on the death of President Kennedy

  Robert F. Kennedy: President’s brother and Attorney General of the United States

  Monica Kramer: U.S. tourist in the Soviet Union who twice encountered Oswald in the company of her friend Rita Naman and their acquaintance Marie Hyde

  Clare Booth Luce: former U.S. diplomat and financial supporter of anti-Castro exiles, married to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines

  Thomas Mann: U.S. Ambassador in Mexico City

  John McVickar: U.S. consular official at the Moscow Embassy who dealt with Oswald

  Yuri Merezhinsky: Soviet citizen present when Oswald met his future wife, Marina

  Yuri Nosenko: KGB officer who defected to the United States after the assassination, claiming detailed knowledge of the Soviet handling of Oswald

  Ruth Paine: friend of Marina Oswald in Texas. Oswald stayed at her home on the eve of the assassination.

  Delphine Roberts: New Orleans right-wing activist and secretary to Guy Banister (her daughter was also called Delphine)

  Jack Ruby (née Rubenstein): Dallas nightclub owner, with lifelong links to organized crime, who shot and killed Oswald on November 24

  Richard Snyder: Consul at U.S. Embassy in Moscow who handled Oswald, had worked for the CIA

  J. D. Tippit: the Dallas policeman shot within hours of the President’s murder. Oswald was identified as his killer.

  Edward Voebel: New Orleans schoolfriend of Oswald who was in the Civil Air Patrol with him

  Major General Edwin Walker: right-wing agitator and victim of an assassination attempt—apparently by Lee Harvey Oswald—in April 1963

  Abraham Zapruder: amateur cameraman who shot a film of the assassination that became key evidence

  Individuals associated with U.S. intelligence

  James Angleton: CIA Counterintelligence chief whose depart-

  ment collected information on Oswald before the assassination. He liaised with the Warren Commission, and—in 1971—ordered material on Oswald to be removed from the home of CIA station chief in Mexico City

  “Maurice Bishop”: cover name reportedly used by a U.S. intelligence officer alleged to have met with Oswald before the assassination and to have tried to fabricate evidence linking him to Cuban intelligence. Controversy has swirled around the possibility that he may have been one and the same as the late David Phillips, a senior CIA officer involved in anti-Castro operations.

  Captain Alexis Davison: Assistant Air Attaché who doubled as doctor at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He had intelligence connections and met Oswald

  Allen Dulles: Director of the CIA until late 1961, later member of Warren Commission

  Desmond FitzGerald: head of the CIA’s Cuba operations who led plans to topple Fidel Castro and personally met with supposed Castro traitor Rolando Cubela

  William Gaudet: editor who worked for the CIA and wh
ose name appeared next to Oswald’s on Mexico City visa list.

  William Harvey: senior CIA official who coordinated CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro

  Richard Helms: CIA Deputy Director for Plans who headed covert operations in November 1963 and later became CIA Director

  Howard Hunt: senior CIA officer who was involved with anti-Castro operations

  George Joannides: CIA officer who controlled the DRE, the anti-Castro group that—for propaganda reasons—exploited Oswald’s pro-Castro activity. House Assassinations Committee Chief Counsel Robert Blakey condemned Joannides’ later role as CIA liaison to the Committee as having been “criminal.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Jones : Operations Officer, U.S. Army 112th Military Intelligence Group. Said that the Army had a file on Oswald.

  Robert Maheu: former Chicago FBI agent and liaison between the CIA and the Mafia

  John McCone: CIA Director at time of the assassination

  J. Walton Moore: CIA Domestic Contact Division officer in Dallas

  Otto Otepka: chief security officer at the State Department whose study of defectors included Oswald

  David Phillips: senior CIA officer running anti-Castro operations with an emphasis on propaganda—later headed Western Hemisphere Division. Phillips was in Mexico City at the time of Oswald’s visit in the autumn of 1963. It has been suggested that he used the cover name “Bishop.” See entry above.

  Winston Scott: CIA station chief in Mexico City in 1963. On his death, a draft manuscript with information on Oswald’s visit to Mexico—and tape recordings labeled “Oswald”—were removed from his home by the CIA and taken to Washington, DC.

  FBI

  Warren De Brueys: New Orleans special agent alleged to have been seen with Oswald

  Charles Flynn: Dallas agent who met Jack Ruby as a “potential criminal informant” in 1959

  J. Edgar Hoover: FBI Director

  James Hosty: Dallas agent who handled the Oswald case before assassination

  John Quigley: New Orleans agent who responded when Oswald asked to see an agent in New Orleans in summer 1963