The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War by Hornberger Jacob

Author:Hornberger, Jacob
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Future of Freedom Foundation
Published: 2016-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

The Warren Commission

On January 22, 1964, the Warren Commission held a meeting that would be kept secret from the American people. The session was called to address the rumor that Oswald was a paid undercover agent for the FBI. After the session was over, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who was serving on the Warren Commission, stated that the transcript of the session should be destroyed. The Commission went along with Dulles’s suggestion. Years later, it turned out that a court reporter’s tape had survived the destruction. Its release was secured by longtime Kennedy assassination researcher Harold Weisburg.

How did the Warren Commission resolve the issue? They asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helms whether Oswald was, in fact, a U.S. intelligence operative. Both of them told the Commission that he was not, and that was the end of the matter.

The Commission obviously believed it had no choice but to accept the statements of both men at face value. After all, imagine the following headlines in the mainstream press: “Warren Commission Suggests CIA and FBI Lying about Oswald.”

That’s what the Commission would have been doing if it decided to delve more deeply into the matter — it would have been accusing Hoover and Helms of lying about Oswald. And how would the Commission have gone about investigating the matter? Obviously, both the FBI and the CIA would never have voluntarily turned over any documents indicating Oswald’s position.

So even investigating the rumor would have required an extremely aggressive action against both the FBI and the CIA. The chance that that would happen was nil. After all, this was the height of the Cold War. A fierce battle between the Warren Commission and the U.S. national-security state would obviously have posed a grave threat to national security, especially by suggesting that the CIA and the FBI were liars and that the supposed assassin of John F. Kennedy was an operative of U.S. intelligence.

The Warren Commission looked into that abyss and quickly turned away by accepting the representations of the CIA and the FBI that Oswald wasn’t a U.S. intelligence agent. After all, think about the potential ramifications if that was, in fact, what Oswald was. That would have converted Oswald from supposed lone-nut assassin to a supposed lone-nut CIA assassin. The Warren Commission would obviously have had a difficult time quickly reaching that conclusion without a serious investigation into Oswald’s CIA activities.

Actually though, there was another likely reason — a much bigger reason — that the Warren Commission refused to seriously investigate whether Oswald was, in fact, a U.S. intelligence agent. That reason would also explain why U.S. officials were so adamant about preventing Kennedy’s autopsy from being conducted in Dallas, as required by Texas law, and instead placing it into the hands of the U.S. military.

What was that much bigger reason? It revolved around the two most important words in the lifetimes of the American people since the end of World War II: “national security.”

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