Transcription courtesy of Mary Constantine
JFK LANCER: CONVERSATIONS WITH ALAN DALE
Welcome to JFK Lancer Conversations, an on-line interview program featuring discussions with prominent authors, historical researchers and notable personalities associated with the study of President Kennedy's assassination.
NAME: BILL SIMPICH
DATE: MAY, 2013
DURATION: 01:17:53
ALAN DALE: Welcome to Conversations, my name is Alan Dale. The noblest pleasure, according to Leonardo da Vinci, is the joy of understanding. In pursuit of truth, as it may be revealed through the study of America's intelligence services during the era of the Cold War, few pleasures may be as elusive. Undertaking a scholarly study of even the most well documented news of the day may reveal underlying complexities which defy superficial reporting and discussion. And of the secret stories, hidden from the unwelcome scrutiny of our over-actively imaginations, we are inevitably discouraged, forced to confront the challenge of first unearthing the truth, and second, being able to accurately interpret and assess what we've learned.
Our topic today is analysis. Analysis may be defined as an intellectual process of breaking down a mysterious or complex subject into its basic components; a statement of the constituents of a mixture; a method in philosophy of resolving complex expressions into simpler or more basic terms; elucidation; clarification; to seek explanation; to achieve and attain the joy of understanding.
Our guest today is one of our most respected experts on the infrastructure of the CIA as it was in the 1960s. He is the author of ground-breaking articles which focus on the hidden intricacies of the CIA, and is a leading and insightful analyst of the intelligence files associated with Lee Harvey Oswald's enigmatic episode in Mexico City seven weeks prior to President Kennedy's assassination. It's my profound pleasure to introduce Bill Simpich to Conversations. Thank you for being with us.
BILL SIMPICH: Thank you Alan. It's a real pleasure being with you and being able to do this.
ALAN DALE: Likewise. During conversation you and I shared a few days ago you told me that you were drawn to complexities, and I would say that among all of the many, many complexities, none is more central to our study of President Kennedy's assassination than: Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? And maybe more specifically, what was going on in Mexico City seven weeks before the assassination? But before we go there, I'd really like to begin by asking: "What is the story of how you became involved in addressing these questions?"
BILL SIMPICH: Well I'm a civil rights lawyer, and so dealing with complexities and trying to figure out people's motivations is kinda what you have to do. You're playing the role of a prosecutor in the civil arena; not a criminal case you're waging, but you're waging them against authorities, be it governmental or corporate or police: those types of authorities. And in that arena I've had cases – one in particular, where I found that tracking the Kennedy case through its complexities and needing to take a flexible approach towards the monumental data you run into inevitably in any case like this, it just showed me a good template of what to avoid and what to confront head-on.
And in that process I got very fond of reading the FBI file in particular. And so I understand how to read an FBI file and a CIA file pretty well at this point. And after you've read the books; and the books are of great value of course, because they summarize it; but after you've read the books and you're running out of books, I really recommend to people that they turn to the documents directly, which can be found at Mary Ferrell. And you can read them initially for free and $40 a year for pretty much unlimited use. And I found it a real joy. It got me closer to understanding the Kennedy case, and other cases like Watergate etc, than I ever thought I would.
ALAN DALE: When we refer to the Oswald that we take for granted was the subject of the Warren Commission's conclusion that only a single individual participated in President Kennedy's assassination, who are we referring to?
BILL SIMPICH: In terms of Lee Harvey Oswald?
ALAN DALE: Mmm-hmm.
BILL SIMPICH: I will remain a agnostic about whether there was more than one, quote: 'Oswald' running around. There are several instances where I think – and we can talk about 'em – where I think he was impersonated for one event or another. And I recommend to everybody John Armstrong's book. I think it's very well done even though I don't agree with his central premise. His work is some of the very best work that's been done. I confine myself on the impersonation front primarily to the Mexico City event, because that's a hotly contested event about whether he was impersonated in Mexico City when he went to the embassies, or not. I really focus on the phone calls, 'cos that's where I think the center of the battle really is. I don't think – I know that many people here believe that he was impersonated at the Soviet and Cuban consulates, and many people believe he was not. And what I can offer – I think the analysis I'm going to offer with you – will illustrate it doesn't matter very much, if at all. Because what matters, I believe, is what happened after he was impersonated, on a couple of phone calls in particular.
ALAN DALE: Mmm-hmm. Which is what?
BILL SIMPICH: Well, that is what you'll probably have to tease out of me a little bit.
ALAN DALE: I hear ya. Well, it's only an hour show, and there's so much that I'd like to cover, but when we address the complexity of Mexico City – I spoke with Jefferson Morley; he referred to Mexico City of 1963 as the "Casablanca of the Cold War.” You've been quoted as referring to Mexico City as a "Disco for spies." I love that one, by the way, I think that one wins! What made Mexico City so colourful and so interesting that it should be described in these ways?
BILL SIMPICH: Well, let's put it this way: the only place that's really in competition is New York City, because that's where the UN is, alright? So that's a natural, and the diplomats have free run of the city etc – and diplomatic immunity. Now in Mexico City it's a little different. It's not within the United States boundaries so – and Mexico has always, and up to this day, has been a place where law enforcement pretty well looks the other way: you can't count on a lot of police power, although you can count on Mexico having plenty of good spies of their own.
So it is in the western hemisphere, and it is near the United States, and people do speak Spanish there, which is the prevailing language for most of the western hemisphere outside the US and Canada. And so you put all those factors together and many observers have stated that Mexico City was the most important place for the spy/counter-spy game in the western hemisphere, even more than New York. And what I think is important to note about that is what has been overlooked, I think, in the world of the Mexico City Station. As far as I can see from what I have read from direct quotes from people who worked there, they say the main thing was to find defectors, darn it. Get a defector and get 'em to counter-spy and give you the information, or get 'em to come across to the other side, but they preferred it if they defected in place, 'cos they could keep giving you more current-time information.
ALAN DALE: Certainly.
BILL SIMPICH: Either way, a great deal. And that's the job of what people commonly call counterintelligence. And that's the job which brings Jim Angleton and the counterintelligence section of the CIA into play.
ALAN DALE: Mmm-hmm. You've outlined five different aspects to your assessment of what was going on in Mexico City during this extraordinarily vivid and active period of activities, which included the appearance on, I think, September 26th, of someone walking into both the Cuban Consulate and the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City and claiming to be Lee Harvey Oswald.
BILL SIMPICH: Now, are you talking about September the 26th or September the 27th?
ALAN DALE: Well, you tell me.
BILL SIMPICH: OK, well the center of what we're looking at here is Friday September 27th. As I understand it, according to the documents we've been given, that's the day Oswald actually arrived in Mexico City.
ALAN DALE: OK. And then the first of the telephone intercepts that were transcribed took place on the 28th.
BILL SIMPICH: Was on the following day, the 28th.
ALAN DALE: Right, which was the Saturday.
BILL SIMPICH: Right, and then there's two other calls of import three days later on October 1st.
ALAN DALE: Well, let me – maybe I should begin by simply reciting the five central sort of points that I believe are the focus of a significant part of your work.
BILL SIMPICH: Sure, let's try it that way.
ALAN DALE: The first represents a coalition between the FBI and the CIA in an operation designed to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in foreign states.
BILL SIMPICH: OK, that's one.
ALAN DALE: OK. The second is to probe and recruit a man named Azcue, who was a Cuban diplomat, and who was thought to maybe be of value in terms of turning him, like you just said, while he was in place.
BILL SIMPICH: That's right. He was a Consul at the Cuban Consulate.
ALAN DALE: Mmm-hmm. The third introduces the infamous Valeriy Kostikov and is, just as with the Cuban Consul Azcue, to evaluate and possibly even recruit Valeriy Kostikov, is that right?
BILL SIMPICH: That's right. Earlier that year he had squired Khrushchev and Castro around the Soviet Union, and so I think he was highly desirable.
ALAN DALE: The fourth brings us back to James Angleton, counterintelligence Special Investigations Group, and the molehunt that may have been sort of the CIA within the CIA in Mexico City – and elsewhere for that matter.
BILL SIMPICH: That's kinda central to my belief about what happened here. I'm convinced at this juncture that a molehunt did take place, and the reason a molehunt took place, in a word, is because I think the station in Mexico City realized that it was not really Oswald on that phone call, and that threw all their security apparatus into overdrive.
ALAN DALE: Mmm-hmm. The fifth is what's been referred to, I think by Professor Peter Dale Scott, as the smoking file, and that's Lee Harvey Oswald's 201 file, which in the immediate aftermath of the – not to be confused with the file on Lee Henry Oswald – but that's the file that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination was found to contain only five files, and who knows what happened to many of the other things that should have been included.
BILL SIMPICH: Well I'll tell you. I've looked at it and I think I know what happened. In a word – and we can get into it in depth of course - but I think what happened was that literally many of the documents in the 201 file, the biographical file of Oswald were taken out of the file, and that way it lied to many of the CIA officers who were engaged in doing an investigation of Oswald. Only the CI officers – the counterintelligence officers and certain others – realised a molehunt was going on. But the molehunters themselves had taken the documents out of the file and put it in the Fair Play for Cuban file, which Newman calls the smoking file.
ALAN DALE: So when you say – so what you're really referring to there is elements, compartments or divisions within the CIA misrepresenting or lying to inquiries from other elements within CIA? Is that correct?
BILL SIMPICH: Right, and it's actually pretty common because it's compartmentalized – one part of the CIA literally doesn't know what the other side is doing. Sometimes they're working at cross-purposes, and sometimes they're just, you know, lying to each other because they have to. And that's what I think happened here. I'll get more into it, but I think that what we're dealing with is a situation where even the CIA didn't realize what had happened, except for a few people.
ALAN DALE: The Fair Play for Cuba Committee obviously was a big part of what we associate with Oswald's experience in New Orleans; his confrontation on the street with members of the Student – whatever the DRE was.
BILL SIMPICH: The Cuban exile group, that's right.
ALAN DALE: Right, Cuban - anti-Castro Cuban group - where he had represented to them that he was virulently anti-Castro; he'd made himself and his training available to them, and literally the next day they discover – they're tipped off - that he's out on the street handing out flyers for the Fair Play Cuba Committee.
BILL SIMPICH: And what that illustrates for us is that Castro was adroit at playing both sides; he was not just a lamebrain, not just a lamebrain guy.
ALAN DALE: You said "Castro". You mean Oswald?
BILL SIMPICH: Ah, I meant Oswald, of course, yeah.
ALAN DALE: Of course. And do you feel that there is reason to suspect that he was being directed in these postures? That this represents role-playing?
BILL SIMPICH: I think that – here's what I think on that: it's hard to say whether he was directed on that role-playing, because I'm quite convinced, as Norman Mailer said, that Oswald was a spy in his own mind. What we don't know is – we go to the documents we don't have. So what that leads me to come up with is, similar to being an agnostic about whether Oswald was in Mexico City or not, I'm an agnostic as to whether he was wittingly directed by personnel or not. Again, my posture is it doesn't really matter for our purposes most of the time whether he was doing it wittingly or unwittingly. The fact that he did it is enough, and where I think we have to move on little cat feet is what happened after the impersonation.
ALAN DALE: Mmm-hmm. Would you allow me to quote just a little paragraph from Robert Tannenbaum who, after his probably dreadful experience being in charge of the Congressional investigation for a short time – the House Select Committee - he became a novelist, and he wrote a book called 'Corruption of Blood' and I'd like to get your comment on a particular passage from that, if I may. Is that alright?
BILL SIMPICH: Oh, absolutely.
ALAN DALE: Using the mask – I'm not quoting yet – using the mask of a fictional construct, Mr Tannenbaum wrote the following: "Every intelligence agency is plagued by volunteers; individuals who wish to become spies. Virtually all of them are useless for real intelligence work; unstable, maniacal, lazy or criminal types for the most part, but some of them can be used as pigeons; that is as false members of a spy network who can distract the attention of counterintelligence operatives and can be betrayed to them with misleading or damaging information in their heads. Lists are kept of such potential pigeons at foreign CIA stations, and a marine spouting Marxist propaganda at a top-secret radar base could not have escaped those who keep them.” How do you feel about that suggestion?
BILL SIMPICH: Well, I'm familiar with that quote, and I think it's just about on the money. And to illustrate why I think that I'd like to go back to where I think this all began, in the Soviet Union, for just a moment.
ALAN DALE: Sure.
BILL SIMPICH: See, I've taken a very hard look at Oswald's life from start to finish. I felt that was the only way for me to understand what I wanted to know, which was basically: Who was Oswald? And what I realized reading it was that he – not only did he track a fellow named Robert Webster, who defected to the Soviet Union two weeks before he did, but Webster and he came back within two weeks of each other some two-and-a-half years later. I thought that was pretty odd, and I went a little deeper into it, and I noticed that – I saw photos of Webster and Oswald, and they looked very much alike. I mean, it's uncanny.
ALAN DALE: Really?
BILL SIMPICH: Yeah.
ALAN DALE: I didn't know that.
BILL SIMPICH: Yeah. If you look my story number five – I've written nine stories on Oswald so far and my number five I think in some ways is the most important.
ALAN DALE: And what's the name of that one?
BILL SIMPICH: Oh, it escapes me at the moment I'm sorry. 'The Double Dangle'!
ALAN DALE: 'The Double Dangle'.
BILL SIMPICH: Mmm-hmm. What I think happened in other words, is Webster was a fellow – a blond-haired fellow I might add, for those of you who follow the blond Oswald.
ALAN DALE: Right!
BILL SIMPICH: But be that as it may, this fellow was 5' 10" and 165, and he was a fellow who was very drawn to a particular woman, a trick that is called a honey trap in spy parlance, and he wound up defecting mainly for the love of this woman. Now what's interesting about it is – his marriage was on the rocks; his wife had a lot of illness issues – and what's interesting about it is that the Soviets wanted him, but I think the US wanted him to defect, and the reason they wanted him to defect was, both sides were interested in the same thing. Webster was a fiberglass expert and really knew how rockets and missiles relied on fibreglass and the like, and the US had a lead of about a dozen years in that technology, and they wanted to – the US wanted to know – if the Soviets were catching up on them or not. And Webster's knowledge was very helpful, but not – it wasn't going to be the be-all or end-all. I think he was a useful person to give up.
Now this is where I think Oswald came in. When – at one point when Webster was kind of on the fence about whether he was going to defect or not, he went on a long trip by car. Nobody knew where he was. That was the moment that Oswald got on a freighter and went to Europe and then the Soviet Union. And I think the reason he was on a freighter was 'cos they were putting Oswald on ice. I think wittingly or unwittingly Oswald was coaxed onto that freighter so he could 1) dodge counterintelligence that reads everybody’s passport at every airport, but 2) be in limbo while they looked for Webster and tried to decide what to do next.
ALAN DALE: How interesting.
BILL SIMPICH: And almost as soon as Webster emerged from the murk and said: "I'm here!" – or they found out where he was, let's put it that way – Oswald got off the freighter before his destination and made a beeline to Helsinki. And from Helsinki - there was a very interesting relationship between the Soviet and American Consul there, and the American Consul, right about that time, had offered a pair of Leonard Bernstein tickets to the Soviet Consul, and the Soviet Consul said: "In gratitude, I'm going to make sure that your people can get instant visas if they come to Helsinki from now on." So Oswald got into the Soviet Union almost – it was a land speed record. Nobody really had gotten in as fast as he. And so I use all that as what I consider mileage. During this period of time in the late 50's there was only about 20 Americans in the Soviet Union, outside of the American Embassy.
ALAN DALE: And this is what year?
BILL SIMPICH: 1958-1959
ALAN DALE: Right.
BILL SIMPICH: And so every one of those Americans was considered gold.
ALAN DALE: Sure.
BILL SIMPICH: Just by being there they knew where the - people in intelligence care about where the mailboxes are; where the telephone lines are. They care about every little detail, and so every American was precious, and you can look at Oswald's file and you see how closely counterintelligence followed this guy. He was treated the same way. I don't believe – I have no reason to believe – that he was an agent per se, but I think he was considered an extraordinary asset.
ALAN DALE: Per se.
BILL SIMPICH: Per se. And you don’t have to prove anything else, because it's all right there in the documents. You can see how they tracked him, you know, on a regular basis from 1959 to 1962. And you can see the officers doing it and one of the – or two of those officers - you see again in Mexico City. And that's what I'm warming up to, because what this meant was this: about halfway during his time in the Soviet Union the U2 went down. You see a lot of activity going on where they're trying to smuggle Webster out before the U2 went down, and then it's almost like the CIA knew it was coming, which I've always believed, frankly. But be that as it may, whether you believe that or not, the more important thing is that Webster couldn't get out after May '60. And Oswald, for his part, had been trying to get himself a good job in the Soviet Union by saying: "I've got some sensitive information on the U2" and he would get interviewed, and nothing happened. They just gave him a job at a sheet-metal factory, and he got paid more than the ordinary Joe, but that's all he got. He's not a promising future, and what you see right around that time after the U2 goes down is you see the FBI and Angleton's office in counterintelligence representing Oswald with Webster's physical characteristics. And they put that in his file.
ALAN DALE: Right. Is that the point at which a file with the name Lee Henry Oswald is produced by Ann Egerter?
BILL SIMPICH: That's right. That's absolutely right.
ALAN DALE: And what on earth do we make of this, except that it relates to something internal in the CIA?
BILL SIMPICH: That's right. I think it's a molehunt plain and simple. I think they are blurring Webster and Oswald together for their own purposes; they are creating a separate file – the Lee Henry Oswald file; and they are floating this around various agencies and seeing if the wrong person picks it up. And if the wrong person picks up the data, which is the Webster data: 5'10", 165 - instead of Oswald's, which was slightly shorter and slightly lighter - then you've got something real.
This is what - this is - I'm passionate on this subject because I've read so much about Angleton. He was a molehunter. He was a defense guy. He didn't do so much penetration as he did protecting the CIA from penetration, and the CI/SIG Office – the Special Investigations Group where Ann Egerter worked – she was an analyst – was devoted to being the office that spied on its own spies. They weren't a penetration outfit, they weren't trying to penetrate the Soviet Union as far as I can see. Their whole thing was defense defense defense; do not let the CIA get penetrated. But when a major agency gets penetrated by a major defector, all the secrets are gone. It's one of the most important offices there is, and they treated it that way. Everything was under lock and key, and they were routinely doing molehunts, making small changes with people's descriptions and names and this and that, precisely to see if it popped up in the wrong guy or gal's hands.
ALAN DALE: And then trace the leak.
BILL SIMPICH: Trace the leak! And there's your mole! There's your snitch.
ALAN DALE: But before he got into the Soviet Union and before all of whatever that represents, and the maybe correlation to Robert Webster I think is very, very interesting and I sure do appreciate you referring to that. Oh, he had wavy hair too, in that file.
BILL SIMPICH: Oh no, yeah, you can get into the wavy hair and a bunch of other small items, it’s quite fascinating.
ALAN DALE: But before the Soviet Union there was the Atsugi radar – very sensitive radar base in…
BILL SIMPICH: And Oswald was a radar guy, that's right. I don't think Oswald knew very much though. And I think that's why the Soviets really basically turned him down. They knew what he knew, and he didn't know much.
ALAN DALE: Mmm-hmm. But does it seem plausible to you, as it does to me, that he may have been – he may have aspired to and may have been marked for – special training in intelligence work during that period and then for - over a period of…
BILL SIMPICH: Unconvinced. Possible, but I'm unconvinced. I'm always ready to be educated but again, for the story I'm outlining here, it doesn't matter. If you take the approach I'm offering here, which is this approach of most simplicity, saying: "We don't know,” then that's one less thing we have to guess on.
ALAN DALE: So, I'm with you; I understand, but it's still difficult to resist the sort of speculation that he may have been – he may have drawn attention to himself seeking to have specialized training in intelligence work, but then it's my speculation that beyond that, they may have recognized that he was temperamentally unsuited for the kind of glamorous assignments to which he may have aspired.
BILL SIMPICH: Well, you know, but that's a jump ball. I mean, he may have been unsuited or he may have been suited, you know; he may have been trained or he may have not. And so all I'm trying to offer – I'm not saying that kind of speculation's not valuable – but I'm saying the less you have to speculate, the stronger your terra firma is. That's all I'm saying.
ALAN DALE: Gotcha! What's your assessment of the – the apparent suicide attempt in the Soviet Union?
BILL SIMPICH: Well, I'll tell you, I think that's nonsense, because if - I've read the documents really closely, and it was a superficial wound. Just that; it was just a superficial wound. He hadn't broken any major arteries, and the Russian doctors didn't believe him.
ALAN DALE: Wow! It's time for us to take a brief intermission. We're speaking with Bill Simpich, and it's a great honor to do so. Please stick around; we'll be back in just a moment.