Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [178]
‘We didn’t think,’ former Commission Chief Counsel Rankin later said ruefully, ‘that he would deliberately lie … There is an implication from that note and its destruction that there might have been more to it … Rankin was thinking of the bombshell that for a while threatened to change the course of the Warren inquiry, when the Attorney General of Texas, Waggoner Carr, reported ‘an allegation to the effect that Lee Harvey Oswald was an undercover agent of the FBI.’
Edgar flatly denied to the Commission that either Oswald or Ruby had ever been FBI informants. Yet it later emerged that the FBI had no fewer than nine contacts with Jack Ruby, long before the assassination. He was even listed in FBI files as a P.C.I. – Potential Criminal Informant. If Edgar misled the Commission about Ruby, what of Oswald?
The alleged assassin’s widow, Marina, was to say she believed he ‘worked for the American government.’ The former security chief at the State Department, Otto Otepka, recalled uncertainty, months before the assassination, as to whether the returned defector to the Soviet Union was ‘one of ours or one of theirs.’
Two witnesses from New Orleans, where Oswald spent time before the assassination, said they saw Oswald in the company of FBI agents there. A Dallas deputy sheriff, Allen Sweatt, was quoted as saying the Bureau was paying Oswald $200 a month at the time of the assassination and had assigned him an informant number.4
The Commission, however, never conducted a thorough probe of such claims.5 It ended up, the Assassinations Committee staff concluded in 1979, ‘doing what the members had agreed they would not do: Rely mainly on the FBI’s denial of the allegations.’
Commission Chief Counsel Rankin was puzzled from the start by the FBI’s stance on the assassination. Normally Edgar never tired of saying it was the Bureau’s job to offer facts, not conclusions. This time everything was different. ‘They haven’t run out all the leads,’ Rankin told the Commissioners, ‘but they are concluding that Oswald was the assassin … that there can’t be a conspiracy. Now that is not normal … Why are they so eager to make both of these conclusions?’
Some believe it was Edgar’s obsession with protecting his reputation that led him to shut out everything else. He scurried to send secret letters of censure to seventeen agents and officials – all men who had been involved in handling the Oswald case before the assassination. Had they performed properly, Edgar claimed, Oswald’s name would have been on the Security Index. Later, when the Warren Report gently chastised the Bureau for not having been alert enough, he punished some of the same men all over again. ‘The Bureau,’ he said, ‘will never live this down.’ Yet Oswald was not known to have said or done anything violent, anything at all that justified a warning to the Secret Service, the agency responsible for protecting the President. Edgar’s retribution against his own agents was merely a vindictive device to cover his own back.
The Assassinations Committee reported in 1979 that the FBI probe of Kennedy’s murder had been ‘seriously flawed,’ ‘insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.’ The committee’s own investigation, meanwhile, identified men who had said the President was going to be killed, along with associates who acted highly suspiciously before and after the assassination. It appears, moreover, that the FBI was aware in 1963 of all or most of the clues the committee followed sixteen years later.
Edgar, former aides confirmed, gave personal attention to all aspects of the assassination. ‘He got everything, knew about everything,