A thumbs-up to Michael Isikoff and Gus Russo for their recent SpyTalk piece, “More CIA-JFK Assassination Conspiracy Nonsense.” They rightly fault The Washington Post for amplifying newly classified documents into “a bizarre, baseless take on Oswald and the CIA.”
Check out their critique: https://substack.com/home/post/p-168434398
That said, an ancient sidebar from CIA Station, Saigon, bears some consideration in this context.
Saigon Station may seem an unlikely venue for CIA-JFK-kill gossip — but it wasn’t, especially in 1969, when I was first assigned there.
For those who are not aficionados, here’s what you need to know to make your way through the following comment (and the Isikoff-Russo piece):
In the early 1960s, JMWAVE Station was the (now well-documented) CIA outpost in Miami, headed by Ted Shackley. One of its prime tasks was to monitor the activities of local pro- and anti-Castro groups. Lee Harvey Oswald orbited briefly in and out of these circles and was tracked for a time by Shackley’s deputy, George Joannides.
Out of this thin set of facts has grown a bevy of conspiracy theories alleging that the CIA had some hand in setting Oswald on his fateful course to Dallas.
Now here’s the Saigon angle.
Former JMWAVE station chief Shackley brought many of his old Miami crew with him to Saigon in 1969 when he became COS there. Among them: Joannides.
This was just six years after the Kennedy assassination, and there was much after-hours booze talk at the Duc Hotel and elsewhere about JMWAVE’s failure — I repeat, failure — to keep adequate tabs on Oswald through the Joannides surveillance op.
Shackley’s detractors mocked the op as typical of Ted’s penchant for creating the appearance of effective field operations just to cover himself with the numbers crunchers at Langley. He did this in Saigon to such an extent that he was eventually caught out.
Another “Kennedy assassination” rumor that made the rounds at Saigon Station had some substantive traction. It came from an interrogator on staff — a fellow who had played a role in the so-called “Nosenko case.” This involved the 1964 defection of alleged Soviet KGB officer Yuri Nosenko, who showed up in the U.S. shortly after the JFK killing and stoutly maintained that Moscow had had no role in it.
From the outset, the CIA’s legendary counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, suspected Nosenko of being a KGB plant whose job was to deflect suspicion from the Kremlin. He therefore had Nosenko detained and interrogated under brutal conditions for over three years and enlisted the talents of the interrogator now assigned to Saigon.
This guy, when in his cups, insisted to anyone within earshot that the real mind-boggler — the real news out of the JFK assassination — had to do with the killing of Oswald by allegedly mob-connected Jack Ruby.
By his account, the U.S. government had helped set up the hit — and had done so for good national security reasons. He said that American officials and their Soviet counterparts had been terrified that if Oswald were ever brought to trial and cross-examined about his dalliances with the Soviets, feckless though they had been, the public outcry in the U.S. might force a mortal confrontation with the USSR.
Ergo: for everybody’s sake, Oswald had to be silenced prior to trial.
The interrogator died after the fall of Vietnam, and I never heard anything to substantiate his story. And I have long since wearied of all such conspiracy theorizing.
But having been exposed in Saigon to Shackley’s penchant for overselling underperforming Station operations to benefit himself with CIA headquarters, I can easily accept that the Joannides surveillance of Oswald in Miami never amounted to very much.
As you might expect, I do remain intrigued by the interrogator’s story — and the idea that there was more than one finger on the trigger that sent Oswald to his untimely death. Indeed, the improbable visibility of the killing — the fact that it was staged in front of news crews and caught instantly on film — strengthens my feeling that there was much more to it than is reflected in standard Jack Ruby lore.
Imagine: If you were out to assure the American people — and the paranoid Russians, by extension — that Oswald’s knowledge would never be a threat to improved relations between the two great powers, then staging his demise under klieg lights, in full view of a worldwide audience, would be the logical way to go.
If this is too much to contemplate, forget I mentioned it. Trump is all we need of truly life-changing conspiracies — all neatly packaged in a single personality.