A Comprehensive Review of Reclaiming History Part VIII

James DiEugenio 24 Bugliosi’s Bungle, Part VIII
one of Mary Bancroft’s childhood friends had turned out to be a landlady for
Marina Oswald … and that the landlady was a well-known leftist with distant
ties to the family of Alger Hiss.” (Evica, p. 230) Dulles had a weird sense of humor:
to some, those facts are no laughing matter.
In addition to his being in Dallas three weeks before the assassination, Lisa
Pease has discovered another curious location for Dulles on the actual day of
the assassination. According to notes written on his calendar, Dulles happened
to be at “the Farm”. You have to know something about CIA shorthand to understand
what that means. As Jim Hougan discovered, it can actually refer to
two places: the CIA training facility in Camp Peary, Virginia, or Mitch Werbell’s
sixty-acre weapons development laboratory in Georgia (Hougan, Spooks, p. 29).
As Hougan notes, the confusion in the names is deliberate, for Werbell was a
wizard in creating lethal weapons to be used in counter-insurgency warfare and
assassinations, neither of which the CIA wanted to be openly involved with. In
discussing a silencer created by Werbell, Hougan noted the following: that the
sound pattern created in Dealey Plaza—with shots heard in two directions—
could well have been created by two teams using Werbell’s partial directional
silencers (ibid., p. 36). It would be interesting to hear Dulles explain why he was
at either place on that day.
VIII.6
“I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our
CIA.”
——Harry Truman, December 22, 1963
Let me conclude this section on Dulles with a famous newspaper column written
by President Truman and published in the Washington Post. Truman wrote
that he had become “disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original
assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm
of the government.” Truman said that he never dreamed that such a thing
would happen when he signed the National Security Act: he thought that it
would be used for intelligence analysis, not “peacetime cloak and dagger operations”.
He continued that the CIA had now become “so removed from its intended
role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious
foreign intrigue—and a subject for Cold War enemy propaganda”. He went as
far as suggesting that its operational arm be eliminated. He concluded with the
warning that Americans have grown up learning respect for “our free institutions
and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something
about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our
historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.” This column was published
on December 22, 1963, one month to the day after Kennedy was killed.
Ray Marcus first brought this editorial to relevance in his self-published monograph
entitled Addendum B: He called it the “least known important public policy
statement by a president or former president in the 20th century”. There was
even more to the story than anyone thought; and Marcus, through the Truman
Library, has filled it in.
ASSASSINATION RESEARCH / Vol. 6 No. 1 © Copyright 2009 James DiEugenio