The CIA and Media Coverage of JFK's Assassination
How a propaganda operation, code name AMSPELL, shaped the news from Dallas.
[Excerpted from Scorpions' Dance: The President, the Spymaster and Watergate (St Martin's Press, 2022]
Dick Helms was having a sandwich lunch with John McCone in the director’s suite on the seventh floor of the CIA building when an aide burst into the room. “The president’s been shot!” he cried.5 McCone turned on a television and watchedthe news bulletins from Dallas. Then, Helms recalled, the director “clapped his hat on his head and left to meet Bob Kennedy at his home at Hickory Hill, not far from the agency Headquarters.”
In his memoir, Helms chose not to mention Bob Kennedy’s first question to McCone when he arrived. Helms knew the story because his friend Arthur Schlesinger recounted it in his biography of RFK. Stunned by the news of his brother’s assassination, Kennedy voiced his gut suspicion. “I asked McCone . . . if they”—referring to the CIA—“ had killed my brother,” Kennedy said, “and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me and they hadn’t.” But Bob Kennedy was not convinced—not that day and not ever—by the denials of the CIA men. RFK would always believe his brother had been killed by some combination of anti-Castro Cubans, renegade CIA officers, and Mafia bosses.
Helms rushed to his office and sent a “book message,” a cable communication to every CIA office in the world, calling for “any bit of information conceivably pointing to a plot involving any foreign power.”
Within ninety minutes, a suspect in Dallas had been arrested. By four o’clock Eastern time, radio stations reported a man named Lee Harvey Oswald was being held in a Dallas jail on suspicion of killing a police officer. Within minutes a search of the Agency’s Central File Registry turned up a personality file, also known as a 201 file, for Oswald, which contained a handful of documents, indicating that Oswald was a twenty-four-year-old ex-marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959 and returned in June 1962. The Agency claimed it had received no information about him since then. That was the first story the CIA told about the Oswald file. It was far from the whole story.
“Tragic death of President Kennedy requires all of us to look for any unusual intelligence developments,” Helms said in his message. “Although we have no reason to expect anything of a military nature, all hands should be on the quick alert for the next few days while new president takes reins.”
At ten past six that evening, Miami station chief Ted Shackley sent a cable to Desmond FitzGerald with a copy going to Helms’s office. The station had heard from Luis Fernandez Rocha, the secretary general of the Cuban Student Directorate, whom Helms had grilled in his office almost exactly one year before. The AMSPELL agents said they knew all about the suspected assassin.
Jose Antonio Lanuza, a twenty-four-year-old law student and spokesman forthe group, recognized the name “Oswald.” He remembered that one of the group’sNorth American delegations had a run-in with an American named Oswald a few months before. He checked his files and found that Carlos Bringuier, the Directorate’s delegate in New Orleans, had a series of encounters with Oswald over the summer culminating in a debate on a local radio program. The file included Bringuier’s letters about Oswald and Oswald’s pamphlets from the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Within hours of the gunfire in Dallas, the AMSPELL network delivered an intelligence coup: Kennedy’s killer was a Castro supporter.
Lanuza went on to become a businessman and then a schoolteacher in Miami. In retirement, he and Luis Fernandez Rocha spoke freely about the DRE, the CIA,and their actions on the night of November 22, 1963.
“I went to Luis, and said, ‘We’ve got the guy.’ ” Lanuza recalled in an interview.
“Luis talked to Salvat.” Juan Manuel Salvat, cofounder of the DRE, was also a CIA asset, codenamed AMHINT-2.
“He said, ‘We have to tell our friends at the CIA.’ Luis made the phone call.”
Rocha said he did not recall the specifics of the conversation but agreed with Lanuza that he was there. The DRE’s friend at the CIA was “Howard,” the alias for George Joannides, the case officer whom Helms assigned to run the group after JFK complained about the “missiles in caves story. "If anyone called 'Howard,'” said Rocha, “it was me.”
“Howard” a.k.a. Joannides told them to wait an hour, Lanuza said. Joannides then passed the DRE’s information to station chief Shackley who relayed the news to Langley.
“AMHINT-53 reports AMSPELL delegate had radio debate with Lee H Oswald of Fair Play for Cuba Committee sometime in August 63 on New Orleans station WDSU,” Shackley wrote. “According [to] AMSPELL files, Oswald former US Marine had traveled Moscow [19]59 at which time renounced American citizenship and turned passport over to American consulate. Alleged Lee H. Oswald lived in home Sov[iet] Foreign Minister for two months. In course [of] radio debate subj. confessed he [was a] Marxist.”
Oswald never lived in the home of the Soviet foreign minister. Otherwise the DRE was remarkably well informed about the suspected assassin who had been in custody for barely two hours. Shackley cabled that he was not passing the DRE's information to the FBI or Secret Service because the AMSPELL assets were planning their own release to news organizations that evening.
A CIA propaganda operation was unfolding.
[Excerpted from Scorpions' Dance: The President, the Spymaster and Watergate (St Martin's Press, 2022]
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I have the book, Scorpions' Dance. It's excellent. Jefferson Morley is one of the best researchers and authors there is when it comes to the JFK assassination and related topics. Much appreciated sir.