Kennedy’s Been Shot. Please Tell Me It Wasn’t One of Our Own Men
I am currently reading The Ghost by Jefferson Morley, a book about James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary and notorious counterintelligence chief. It is a fascinating book. Angleton inhabited a world in which suspicion was practically part of the job description, where intelligence services watched other intelligence services while simultaneously trying to determine whether they themselves had been penetrated. A world of double agents, missing files, secret operations and men who sometimes seemed incapable of telling the truth even when the truth would have been simpler.
Then I stopped at one passage.
It concerns November 22, 1963. John F. Kennedy has just been shot in Dallas. Morley describes Angleton being called later that day to a meeting in the office of Richard Helms, one of the most powerful men in the CIA. Then comes a remarkable sentence:
“The deputy director was worried that CIA personnel might be involved in the killing of JFK.”
Read that again.
The president of the United States has just been murdered, and according to Morley, one of the first thoughts occurring to a senior CIA official is that perhaps his own people did it.
Read literally, the scene is almost comical. Helms appears to react as though the CIA were some unruly bunch of teenage boys who had been left alone for the weekend.
Jesus Christ. What have the boys done now?
Kennedy’s been shot. Please tell me it wasn’t one of our own men.
It is an extraordinary image: the deputy director hearing that the president has been assassinated and immediately wondering whether somebody from his own shop has gone rogue and killed him.
If that is what happened, it is historically significant.
Fortunately, Morley provides a source.
His footnote points to a CBS 48 Hours interview with Richard Helms broadcast on February 5, 1992. The interview still exists. You can watch it.
So I did.
And that is where the problem began.
Morley quotes Helms in the book as saying:
“Make sure we had no one in Dallas.”
But that is not what Helms says in the interview. His actual words are:
“…to be sure that nobody had been in Dallas on that particular day.”
On its own, that discrepancy is hardly Watergate. Make sure instead of be sure does not change the history of the twentieth century. But if quotation marks are used, it seems reasonable to expect the words inside them to be the words that were actually spoken. Especially when the quotation is being used to support an extraordinary conclusion.
More importantly, the interviewer asks Helms about precisely the interpretation Morley later presents as fact. Had Helms checked because he was worried that CIA people might have been involved?
Helms replies:
“I did not think that anybody was involved. And don’t try and make me say it.”
That is rather difficult to miss.
Helms does not merely fail to say that he suspected CIA involvement. He explicitly rejects the suggestion.
His own explanation is considerably less dramatic. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the agency wanted to establish whether any of its people had been in Dallas and might have seen or heard something useful. Nobody yet knew what had happened. Was Oswald acting alone? Was there a Cuban connection? A Soviet one? Some larger operation? CIA personnel who happened to have been there might have been witnesses or sources of information.
Now, none of this means that Richard Helms should suddenly be mistaken for a Boy Scout.
Helms was a professional intelligence officer. The CIA’s conduct surrounding the Kennedy investigation was hardly a model of complete transparency. James Angleton’s handling of information concerning Lee Harvey Oswald raises serious questions of its own. Information was withheld, files travelled through obscure channels, and later investigators encountered material that had not been properly disclosed.
There are perfectly good reasons to treat statements by Helms with skepticism.
Perhaps he was lying in 1992.
Perhaps he was sanitizing what he had really thought in 1963.
Perhaps, after almost thirty years, he remembered events incorrectly.
Perhaps his concern on November 22 really was darker than he was willing to admit.
All of those possibilities are legitimate subjects for historical inquiry.
But then that is what one has to write.
Morley could have said that Helms later denied suspecting CIA involvement but that his actions on the day of the assassination raised questions about what had actually concerned him. He could have presented Helms’s explanation, explained why he found it unconvincing, and allowed the reader to judge the argument.
That would have been history: source, contradiction, interpretation.
Instead Morley writes:
“The deputy director was worried that CIA personnel might be involved in the killing of JFK.”
Full stop.
A possibility has become a fact.
Worse, the source cited for that fact contains an explicit denial of it.
Helms may have been lying. That is not the point. His denial does not establish the truth of his account any more than Morley’s suspicion establishes its falsity. The problem is methodological. It is not the historian’s job to decide silently that a witness is lying and then put the opposite statement into the witness’s head as historical fact.
If Morley believes Helms was lying, he has to make the case.
He cannot simply make Helms think something Helms explicitly denied thinking and put a footnote underneath it.
And that is where this small passage becomes much more interesting than Richard Helms, James Angleton or even Jefferson Morley.
It is about trust.
A work of historical nonfiction rests on a quiet agreement between author and reader. The author is allowed to interpret. He is allowed to speculate. He is allowed to distrust witnesses. He is even allowed to tell me that somebody is lying through his teeth.
But he has to tell me when he is doing it.
No reader checks five hundred footnotes. We extend credit to the author. When I read that Richard Helms was worried CIA personnel might have been involved in Kennedy’s assassination, and there is a footnote at the end of the sentence, I assume that somewhere behind that little number there is a document, an interview or a piece of testimony reasonably capable of supporting the statement I have just read.
A footnote has a peculiar psychological effect. It says: Don’t worry. Somebody checked.
But a footnote proves only that a source exists.
It does not prove that the source says what the sentence above it claims it says.
That distinction matters particularly when dealing with the Kennedy assassination, because there can be few historical events in which facts, suspicions, intelligence operations, missing records, lies, faulty memories, coincidences and fantasies have become so thoroughly entangled.
CIA. FBI. Mafia. Cuba. Soviet Union. Cuban exiles. Organized crime. One gunman. Several gunmen. For almost every imaginable theory there is a document somewhere, a witness, an unexplained connection, a suspicious meeting or a strange coincidence.
And legends rarely begin with one enormous invention.
They begin with a small step.
A source says A.
An author thinks A might mean B.
The next account says A suggests B.
Soon there are “indications” of B.
A little later, B becomes probable.
Eventually a book tells us:
B happened.
The footnote remains underneath.
And because the footnote remains there, the transformation becomes almost invisible.
The next author does not necessarily go back to the original interview. Why would he? Morley has already cited it. So he cites Morley. Someone else cites him. Eventually Richard Helms’s alleged fear that CIA personnel might have assassinated Kennedy begins circulating as an established historical detail.
Nobody has necessarily fabricated anything.
Everybody has a source.
And yet somewhere along the chain, the source stopped saying what everyone claims it says.
That is how legends acquire respectable clothes.
In Morley’s case, I happened to check. The interview is publicly available. It does not take long to watch. Suddenly I no longer had only Morley’s description in front of me. I had the man Morley was citing, speaking on a screen.
And he said something else.
That does not make The Ghost worthless. To conclude that would simply commit the same intellectual error in the opposite direction. Morley has assembled an enormous amount of material. Much of it is fascinating, some of it important, and much of it can be independently verified.
But something changes.
Trust.
Because once I discover that a source does not support an extraordinary claim made immediately above its footnote, I inevitably begin wondering about all the footnotes I did not check.
How often does this happen elsewhere?
And that is precisely where the Kennedy assassination becomes such fertile ground for mythology. If we stop distinguishing between what a source says, what it might mean and what we suspect really happened, eventually almost any story can be constructed.
All you need is a CIA contact in Marseille, a Corsican gangster and a mysterious lunch in a restaurant, and fifty pages later the Corsican Mafia has assassinated Kennedy on behalf of the CIA.
With footnotes, of course.
Perhaps, then, we should not be overly impressed by how many sources a history book contains.
The more important question is much simpler:
Do the sources actually say what the book says they say?