No proof in diverse JFK files
WASHINGTON Botulism pills. Conspiracy theories. What the United States government might have known and still won’t say about Lee Harvey Oswald.
The release of thousands of records relating to the assassination of President John F Kennedy hasn’t settled the bestknown, real-life whodunit in American history. But the record offers riveting details of the way intelligence services operated at the time and are striving to keep some particulars a secret even now. ● Just a few hours after Lee Harvey Oswald was killed in Dallas, FBI Director J Edgar Hoover dictated a memo saying the government needed to issue something ‘‘so we can convince the public’’ that Oswald killed Kennedy.
The FBI director composed the memo on November 24, 1963 – two days after Kennedy was killed, and just hours after nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station.
Hoover said the FBI had an agent at the hospital in hopes of getting a confession from Oswald, but Oswald died before that could happen. He said he and a deputy were concerned about ‘‘having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin’’.
Hoover lamented how Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, was considering appointing a presidential commission to investigate the assassination.
He said Oswald wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, which the FBI intercepted, read and resealed. Hoover said the letter had been addressed to the embassy official ‘‘in charge of assassinations and similar activities on the part of the Soviet government’’, and that ‘‘to have that drawn into a public hearing would muddy the waters internationally’’.
He said the letter was unrelated proof that Oswald committed the murder. ● Johnson believed Kennedy was behind the assassination of South Vietnam’s president weeks before his death, and that Kennedy’s murder was payback.
US Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms said in a 1975 deposition that Johnson ‘‘used to go around saying that the reason [Kennedy] was assassinated was that he had assassinated President [Ngo Dinh] Diem and this was just justice. Where he got this idea from, I don’t know’’.
Johnson was also quoted in Max Holland’s book, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, as saying that Kennedy died because of ‘‘divine retribution’’.
‘‘He murdered Diem and then he got it himself,’’ Johnson reportedly said. REUTERS ● The former Soviet Union’s intelligence agency allegedly claimed it had information tying Johnson to the assassination of Kennedy.
In a 1966 letter to a presidential assistant, Hoover wrote that an FBI source reported that KGB officials claimed to have information in 1965 ‘‘purporting to indicate’’ that Johnson had a role in the assassination. The source had ‘‘furnished reliable information in the past’’.
Johnson has long been a focus of some conspiracy theorists, but no credible information has been revealed linking him to the assassination. ● A British newspaper received an anonymous phone call about ‘‘big news’’ in the US 25 minutes before Kennedy was shot, one file says.
A batch of 2800 declassified documents includes a November 26, 1963 memo from the CIA to Hoover about a call received by the Cambridge News on November 22.
The memo from Deputy CIA Director James Angleton says the caller said ‘‘the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news, and then hung up’’.
Anna Savva, a current Cambridge News reporter, said there was no record of the call.
The phone call was first reported decades ago by Kennedy conspiracy theorist Michael Eddowes. In the 1980s, Eddowes, a British lawyer, claimed to have a CIA document mentioning the call.
Eddowes, who died in 1992, wrote a book alleging that Kennedy’s assassin was not Oswald but a Soviet imposter who took his identity. As a result of his efforts, the killer’s body was exhumed in 1981. An autopsy confirmed that it was Oswald. AP