The Last Investigation
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The Last Investigation
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Overview
Now featuring a foreword from New York Times bestselling author Dick Russell.
Gaeton Fonzi’s masterful retelling of his work investigating the Kennedy assassination for two congressional committees is required reading for students of the assassination and the subsequent failure of the government to solve the crime. His book is a compelling postmortem on the House Select Committee on Assassinations, as well as a riveting account of Fonzi’s pursuit of leads indicating involvement in the assassination by officers of the Central Intelligence Agency.
First published in 1993 and now with a new foreword by Dick Russell, New York Times bestselling author of They Killed Our President! and 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read, Fonzi’s The Last Investigation was a landmark book upon its release. More than merely an indictment of the Committee’s work, The Last Investigation tells the story of the important leads Fonzi developed as an investigator, which sent him into the milieu of Kennedy-haters among anti-Castro exiles and CIA officers. In this highly readable book, the author follows the trail to formerly obscure CIA officers such as David Atlee Phillips and David Morales. New records declassified under the JFK Records Act have only added to the dark questions raised here.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781510740327 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 11/13/2018 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 504 |
| Sales rank: | 898,829 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
OF TRUTH AND DECEPTION
AFTER THE FIRST official Government investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy, Sylvia Meagher, writing in a small magazine called Minority of One, had this to say about the Warren Commission: "There are no heroes in this piece, only men who collaborated actively or passively — willfully or self-deludedly — in dirty work that does violence to the elementary concept of justice and affronts normal intelligence."
Incredibly strong words. Yet when they were written in 1967 — more than three years after the Warren Commission Report was released — most Americans still had no idea what she was talking about.
The members of the Warren Commission collaborating in dirty work? That was simply too preposterous to accept. Consider the stature and reputation of these men: Chairman Earl Warren was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the paradigm of objectivity; John J. McCloy had been president of the World Bank and chairman of the board of Chase Manhattan Bank — prestige personified; Allen W. Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, an Ivy League patrician who represented America's dauntless defense against the threat of international Communism's evil aspirations; Senator Richard Russell and Congressmen John Sherman Cooper, Hale Boggs and Gerald Ford all had reputations as being reasonable, politically responsible and honest. President Lyndon Johnson had personally chosen these honorable men to investigate the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. His Executive Order No. 11130 dated November 29th, 1963, directed the Commission to "evaluate all the facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin and to report its findings and conclusions to him."
On September 24th, 1964, the President's Commission presented its Report. A weighty 888-page volume, it included 81 pages of footnotes in very small type. The footnotes referred to the 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits which, said the Commission, supported the statements and conclusions in its Report. By sheer size alone, the Report certainly appeared to have covered "all the facts and circumstances."
However, those 26 volumes of documentary evidence were not published until two months after the Report was issued. And despite not having the corroborating documentation, the major national news media quickly accepted the Warren Commission's conclusions and praised the job it did. The New York Times's Harrison E. Salisbury called the Report "comprehensive, careful, compendious and competent."
Thus, national media shaped the American public's perception of the Warren Commission Report, since most Americans didn't have the time or opportunity to read the Report. Indeed, most journalists, although they had the time and the opportunity and were getting paid to do so, didn't read it. If they had, the Report would have immediately been the subject of intense questioning and criticism. Yet it wasn't. Neither were the Report's conclusions challenged when, two months later, the Commission's 26 volumes of evidence were released, although much of that evidence made obvious the distortions and contradictions in the Report. The media never told the American people what the Warren Commission did to them, how it did it or why.
Although the nation's top journalists and investigative reporters had donned blinders — not an unusual accessory for the Washington press corps back in that pre-Watergate era — a handful of private individuals, first driven by curiosity and then by a growing skepticism, had begun studying the Report and accompanying evidence. They didn't have to dig deeply to come up with a surprising number of unanswered questions and conflicts in the Report. Still, it was years before the public began hearing their voices. They didn't have access to the major media, so their questions and criticisms appeared in such limited-circulation and esoteric publications as The National Guardian, Liberation, Commentary, Minority of One, The Progressive and the unlikely Computers and Automation.
Then came a few books which were so incisive in their criticism of the Warren Report they couldn't be ignored: Edward J. Epstein's Inquest, Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment and Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After the Fact.
Although the other books achieved wider distribution, Meagher's was especially significant. It grew out of her monumental Subject Index to the Warren Report and Hearings and Exhibits, an awesome accomplishment. The Commission hadn't produced such an index, so her work became a seminal reference for the growing body of independent researchers. Meagher's comprehensive understanding of the evidence led her to declare that the Warren Commission's work exhibited "a high degree of negligence," and that its performance was "inept and undeserving of public confidence."
Then, slowly, the American people began to doubt the Warren Commission's strained conclusion that a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald, driven by "a deep-rooted resentment of all authority," had fired all the shots that hit and killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor John Connally. By 1975, the independent researchers had compiled a conclusive, documented list of shortcomings in the Warren Commission investigation and, despite riding a roller coaster of credibility, had made most Americans aware of it. For an overwhelming majority of the American people, those doubts had turned to disbelief and a few politicians began to hear the call for officially reopening the case.
Sylvia Meagher had early and eloquently expressed her hopes in Accessories After the Fact:
If closed minds continue to open, to receive and evaluate objectively the facts which are on the record, we may yet proceed to pursue the truth to its ultimate reaches — regardless of attendant dangers and doubts — so that history will know with certainty what happened in Dallas, and why.
To that end, investigation into the assassination and the related murders should be reopened, entrusted to an uncompromisingly independent, competent, and impartial body — a body committed to the use of adversary procedure, the rules of evidence, and total respect for justice in both the letter and the spirit. In other words, a body different from the Warren Commission.
That's exactly what the American people thought they were getting when, on September 17th, 1976, the U.S. House of Representatives passed House Resolution 1540 which established a Select Committee to "conduct a full and complete investigation and study of the circumstances surrounding the assassination and death of President John F. Kennedy. ..."
Finally, there was going to be a real investigation. Even if the specific individuals who killed President Kennedy couldn't be brought to justice, at least the forces and the motivation behind the assassination would be determined. The Warren Commission was purposely constrained to ignore or distort any evidence that didn't conform to its predetermined conclusion that the assassin was a lone crackpot firing from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building. This new Select Committee would not be bound by such political motivations and need not be concerned (as the Warren Commission reportedly was), that world peace would be threatened if the trails of the investigation led to foreign involvement. Now every avenue, both in and out of the country, within and without the Government itself, would be independently and honestly explored and we would finally know exactly what was down each of those roads. This investigation would be given such power and resources it would, by its very nature, be conclusive and absolute. Rumors and speculations would finally be laid to rest. There would be no need for future investigation; this would be the last investigation.
It had to be, for history's sake. This new investigation was a commitment to the American people that, this time, their Government would not deceive them. This time, the ultimate priority would be to an uncompromising search for the truth.
On July 17th, 1979, the Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Ohio Democrat Louis Stokes, called a press conference to formally release the last investigation's "final report."
This report was long overdue. After consuming more than $5.5 million over a two-year period, the Committee had legally ceased to exist the previous December. However, the Committee's Chief Counsel and Staff Director, G. Robert Blakey, wasn't satisfied with the final report the staff had compiled and so, in a bit of bureaucratic legerdemain, he had himself and a few select aides temporarily attached to the office of the Speaker of the House in order to obtain the additional time and money needed to reconstruct a new final report.
That reconstruction was dictated by testimony which emerged in the very last days of the Committee's investigation. After much controversy, acoustics experts, analyzing a tape recording of the sounds in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was shot, concluded that more than one weapon had been fired. (Part of Blakey's problem with meeting the deadline was the delay caused by the reanalysis of the tape; at varying times he had to be poised to write either a report declaring there was a conspiracy or one declaring there was no conspiracy.) As the final report put it: "Scientific acoustical evidence established a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy."
The presence of more than one gunman meant there was a conspiracy, yet the Committee had uncovered no hard evidence to indicate the character of that conspiracy. Blakey realized that would be too obvious a shortcoming in what he was determined to make an impressive document because it was, as he early told the staff, "the absolutely final report on the Kennedy assassination." Blakey, aware of the political priorities of the Committee members, knew the report had to have attention- getting impact or, as he called it, "sex appeal." The report could not, however, reflect the actual limitations of the staff's investigation without being an embarrassment. Instead, it had to convey the impression that enough hard digging had been done to provide the Committee with an insight into the nature of the conspiracy it had uncovered. Thus it became necessary to restructure the report. The question then became: Who to blame? The answer was Organized Crime. And, in retrospect, that answer should have been obvious from the beginning.
G. Robert Blakey was a 41-year-old criminal law professor at Cornell University when he was asked to take the reins of the Assassinations Committee following the forced resignation of his predecessor, former Philadelphia prosecutor Richard Sprague. Blakey had been with the Justice Department under Robert Kennedy, and his subsequent career was focused on Organized Crime — that nebulous entity which somehow achieved capitalized status over the years. Then head of Cornell's Organized Crime Institute, Blakey was considered one of the country's top experts in the field. He was a fixture at the numerous Organized Crime seminars held periodically by law enforcement interests and had personal contacts in most Federal agencies and in the Organized Crime sections of almost every major police department in the nation.
As soon as he was appointed, Blakey drew upon his colleagues in that particular fraternity to select his senior counsel for the Committee. Two of these appointments are notable. The lawyer he picked to head the Kennedy investigation task force, a bright, brisk Texan named Gary Cornwell, was chief of the Federal Strike Force in Kansas City. Cornwell had achieved major trial victories against key Midwest Mafia bigwigs. Blakey also hired a former New York cop named Ralph Salerno, who became special consultant to the Committee. A man who carries the Mob's organizational chart in his head, Salerno has for years earned a good living lecturing, writing books and appearing on radio and television shows as the capo de tutti capi of Organized Crime experts.
Blakey would later claim that he arrived in Washington without an inclination towards any conspiracy theory, least of all Mob involvement. Nevertheless his restaffing of key Committee jobs certainly gave it a new look. And when the time came and he had to pin the conspiracy on someone ... well, there was Organized Crime. But that had nothing to do, of course, with Blakey's personal feelings, that's just the way it looked.
Chief Counsel Blakey was an experienced Capitol Hill man. He had worked not only at Justice but on previous Congressional committees as well. So he knew exactly what the priorities of his job were by Washington standards, even before he stepped in. The first task, he announced in his inaugural address to the staff, was to produce a report within the time and budget restraints dictated by Congress. The second was to produce a report that looked good, one that appeared to be definitive and substantial. Somewhere along the line there would be an effort at conducting what I saw as a limited investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Bob Blakey himself is quite a literate fellow, but to give the report the required look, he brought in a top professional writer, former Life magazine editor Richard Billings, another veteran of Congressional committee operations. Together, Blakey and Billings would insure that the report was expertly constructed.
There is substance and there is the illusion of substance. In Washington, it is often difficult to tell the difference. But there was never any doubt that, regardless of the realities of the actual investigation, the Assassinations Committee's historical legacy would appear to have substance.
And it does. An impressively hefty tome — 686 pages thick, with twelve volumes of appendixes — the Committee's final report seems substantive. And yet, it actually makes very few definitive statements. Instead, it hedges, relying on phrases such as "on the basis of evidence available to it"; and, "the Committee believes"; and, "available evidence does not preclude the possibility"; and an abundance of such words as "probably," "most likely," "possible" and "may have been."
The point is that the Committee report does not come to any definitive conclusions; it does not actually state that Organized Crime was involved in the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. What the report does say is this: "The Committee believes, on the basis of evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of Organized Crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved."
That last cryptic statement specifically referred to two key mob bosses, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Santos Trafficante of Florida.
However, even that allegation, made in the report's "Summary of Findings and Recommendations," is a mere gesture. Because buried in the body of the report is the conclusion that "it is unlikely that either Marcello or Trafficante was involved in the assassination of the President."
This is only one example of the numerous contradictions inherent in the report, the result of the attempt to leave no base untouched, no area unexplored, however cursory the Committee's actual investigation. What the report does in the most quintessential way is — to use the expression popular among Committee staffers — "cover its ass." Which is ironic, because in doing so, the report exposed its own basic conflicts, as well as the shortcomings of what I can only call the Committee's pseudoinvestigation. That problem became clear when the first attempt was made to bring all the sections of the report together.
The Committee was organized into five major teams. These teams did not have formal titles and each had a series of responsibilities that often crossed into other areas. For example, Team Two handled the Organized Crime and Jack Ruby aspects of the investigation, but one of its members was deeply involved in the analysis of the medical information. Originally, each team consisted of two lawyers, three researchers and two investigators. There were also special project teams — ballistics, autopsy, acoustics, photographic and other areas involving expert consultants. By December, 1978, however, the staff had been drastically depleted through firings and resignations. The Committee was due to expire at the end of the month and each team was frantically writing what it thought would be its portion of the final report. When it became obvious that most teams wouldn't be finished before the Committee's demise, a young lawyer named Jim Wolf was given the job of gathering from each team a summary of its findings and putting them together into what would be a draft of the final report. That, at least, would be something for the Committee to release before it officially folded.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Last Investigation"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Gaeton Fonzi.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface 2013, by Marie Fonzi,
Prologue,
Introduction,
PART ONE A PANDORA'S BOX,
ONE Of Truth and Deception,
TWO Haunting Questions,
THREE The Right Place, the Right Time,
FOUR In Miami, the Seeds of Vendetta,
FIVE A 'Traitor' in the White House,
SIX Seduced by the Web Weavers,
SEVEN Searching for Ghosts in Key West,
EIGHT Boozy Revelations in Powder Springs,
NINE A Funny Kind of Guy,
TEN High Noon in New York,
ELEVEN Strangers at the Door,
TWELVE Waiting for the Man in Atlanta,
THIRTEEN Something Happened,
FOURTEEN The Spy Master Pulls the Strings,
FIFTEEN The Subplots of Deception,
SIXTEEN An Offer He Couldn't Refuse,
SEVENTEEN A Very Familiar Face,
EIGHTEEN Strange Silences in the Library,
NINETEEN Confrontation in Reston,
PART TWO THE INVESTIGATION,
TWENTY Off to a Stumbling Start,
TWENTY-ONE Programmed to Self-Explode,
TWENTY-TWO Chaos in Washington, Death in Manalapan,
TWENTY-THREE Truth and Consequences,
TWENTY-FOUR Inside Betrayals and Dirty Deals,
TWENTY-FIVE New Priorities, Same Old Game,
TWENTY-SIX Spooks, Rats and 'Reality',
TWENTY-SEVEN Good Guys, Bad Guys and the CIA,
TWENTY-EIGHT Some Kind of Investigation,
TWENTY-NINE A Massacre from Within,
THIRTY Setting Up the Scenario,
THIRTY-ONE Slip-sliding Away from the CIA,
THIRTY-TWO Signals from 'The Night Watch',
PART THREE A VERY PECULIAR SERVICE,
THIRTY-THREE Squirming Out of the Box,
THIRTY-FOUR Show & Tell in Mexico City,
THIRTY-FIVE Polishing the Badge of Honor,
THIRTY-SIX The Name Game,
THIRTY-SEVEN 'Uncle David' and the Ties that Bind,
THIRTY-EIGHT A Brotherhood of Deception,
THIRTY-NINE A Conflict of Recollections,
FORTY Murder Through a Forest of Mirrors,
FORTY-ONE The Crack in the Covert Web,
FORTY-TWO On the Trail of the Shadow Warrior,
FORTY-THREE Confessions of a Home Town Hero,
FORTY-FOUR The Final Confirmation,
FORTY-FIVE The Only Way Out,
EPILOGUE,
Looking Beyond the Conspiracy,
The Last Note,
Epilogue 2008,
Afterword by Marie Fonzi,
Selected Chronology,
Acknowledgments,
Index,