FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE
How the KGB Duped Oliver Stone
Many Americans believe that JFK was
assassinated as the result of some sort of conspiracy, perhaps even by the
CIA—the direct result of a KGB influence operation.
By MAX HOLLAND
Helping defeat Hillary Clinton is
not the most successful influence operation Moscow has ever mounted against the
United States. The most momentous, yes. But any covert activity that is exposed
so rapidly and incites a backlash cannot be deemed an unalloyed accomplishment.
Moscow’s single most effective
influence operation remains the one induced 50 years ago this month, when the
now-defunct New Orleans States-Item published a front-page story on
April 25, 1967, entitled “Mounting Evidence Links CIA to ‘Plot’ Probe.” It was
an operation that culminated in an unimaginable achievement—inclusion in a
Hollywood blockbuster by Oliver Stone that contends the CIA was instrumental in
JFK's assassination.
That probe, as every conscious
American knew, was district attorney Jim Garrison’s re-investigation of
President Kennedy’s assassination amid a pronounced erosion of public
confidence in the Warren Report. On March 1, 1967, Garrison had
ostentatiously announced the arrest of Clay Shaw, a respected businessman, and
charged him with complicity in JFK’s death. It was an outlandish and baseless
accusation, yet Shaw would prove far from the only victim. The miscarriage of
justice that unfolded over the next two years would have vast, if largely
unappreciated, consequences for America’s political culture.
It would take a separate article (or
even book) to explain why Garrison ordered Clay Shaw’s arrest in the first
place (and some very good ones have been written, including Patricia Lambert’s False
Witness). Suffice it to say that at the time of the arrest and until later in
March, Garrison’s theory of the case was that JFK’s assassination was actually
a “homosexual thrill-killing.” The president had been murdered in broad
daylight because he was everything the conspirators were not: “a successful,
handsome, popular, wealthy, virile man.” Under this scenario, Shaw, who was gay
but closeted, also went by the name of Clay Bertrand, a mysterious person
linked to the assassination. “Bertrand” had supposedly tried to arrange a
defense counsel for Lee Harvey Oswald during the weekend following his capture
on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963. The Warren Commission and FBI thoroughly investigated
the “Bertrand” allegation in 1964, and had concluded (correctly) that it was a
fabrication concocted by a publicity-seeking New Orleans attorney named Dean
Andrews. “Bertrand” was not even a real person.
Nonetheless, Shaw’s surprise arrest
in 1967 naturally precipitated a media firestorm the likes of which had not
been seen since the assassination itself. As reporters from near and far
flocked to New Orleans—the universal reaction being that Garrison “must have
something”—headlines appeared around the globe, including in Paese Sera, a
small-circulation newspaper published in Rome. The story that ran in its pages
on March 4, however, was unlike any other. Clay Shaw, Paese Sera alleged,
had been involved in “pseudo-commercial” activities in Italy while serving on
the board of the defunct Centro Mondiale Commerciale. Ostensibly devoted
to making Rome a commerce hub, the CMC had actually been “a creature
of the CIA… set up as a cover for the transfer to Italy of CIA-FBI funds [sic]
for illegal political-espionage activities.”
One axiom of successful
disinformation is that context creates the illusion of what might be true. Here
the plausibility of Paese Sera’s falsehood was strengthened immeasurably
by a separate media firestorm that had been ignited Feb. 14. On that day, Ramparts magazine
had published full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The
Washington Post, proclaiming that its March issue would reveal how the CIA
“infiltrated and subverted” the National Student Association. Since then, media
outlets had been racing to outdo the upstart Ramparts by exposing
covert CIA subsidies to other organizations in the United States as well as
abroad, including anti-communists in Italy. Paese Sera’s “scoop,”
moreover, was built around a few undeniable facts: The CMC had
existed from 1958 to 1962; Shaw had been a board member; and now he was charged
with conspiracy.
In three weeks Garrison had the
Italian newspaper clipping in hand. Overnight the DA dispensed with his
“thrill-killing” theory and persuaded himself that because he had inadvertently
nabbed an important “company man,” the CIA was implicated in the assassination.
“Garrison now is hot on the CIA angle,” wrote Richard Billings in his diary on
April 3; Billings was a Life magazine editor given privileged access
to the investigation in return for what was expected to be a blockbuster cover
story. Or as Garrison himself recalled years later, “I didn’t know exactly how
Shaw was involved. But with Shaw I grabbed a toehold on the conspiracy. I wasn’t
about to let go because of the technicalities.”
Garrison didn’t know that Paese
Sera belonged to a select group of allegedly non-communist periodicals
used to propagate disinformation, rather than have these stories originate in
Communist Party organs. Paese Sera’s long-suspected role in Moscow’s
active measures was confirmed beyond any doubt in 1999, when historian
Christopher Andrew and former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrohkin published The
Sword and the Shield, a history of the KGB that is a treasure trove of
disclosures about Soviet clandestine and subversive activities during the cold
war.
Now it happened to be true that from
1948 to 1956, Shaw, like hundreds of other American businessmen, had
volunteered economic information to the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service,
routinely gathered during his frequent trips abroad, mostly to Latin America.
Shaw’s insights, however, were no more than what could be gleaned from a close
reading of The Wall Street Journal, and he was never a covert operative.
His relationship with the agency ended before the CMC was even
founded, and that trade promotion organization was never a CIA front.
The Italian defense, interior, and
foreign affairs ministries thus denied Paese Sera’s supposed scoop, while
the Rome Daily American observed that “the only thing the
Communist-leaning Paese Sera forgot to throw [into its snow job] was
the kitchen sink.” Still, throughout March and into April the story promptly
gained traction in the left-wing French, Italian, Greek, and Canadian press. Moscow’s Pravda picked
up the story too, publishing it under the simple headline, “Clay Shaw of the
CIA.”
In the United States there was
almost no coverage at all. This dearth was a problem for a DA whose modus
operandi required a steady drumbeat of positive publicity. Garrison
himself dared not bring up the allegation openly, as he later explained to
Bertrand Russell, the famed British philosopher, who was also an avid JFK
conspiracy theorist. Doing so might hand skeptics in the media the ammunition
to destroy his already-controversial probe. So Garrison leaked.
On April 25, the New Orleans
States-Item published its copyrighted story, reporting that Shaw, still
the only person indicted, had been linked to the CIA “by an influential Italian
newspaper.” It took more than 20 column inches before Paese Sera (routinely
labeled “crypto-Communist” by the State Department) was described as “leftist
in its political leanings.” The Associated Press picked up the States-Item scoop
for distribution on its national wire, and the story was reprinted, in varying
lengths, in hundreds of newspapers nationwide.
Having laid the groundwork, Garrison
now unleashed a barrage of accusations, one more sensational and jaw-dropping
than the next. The CIA had commanded Lee Harvey Oswald; the CIA had shielded
the real assassins; the CIA had deceived the Warren Commission and hid evidence
with the FBI’s connivance—no, the CIA had deceived the FBI too! As with Senator
Joe McCarthy, the legitimacy conferred by public office gave Garrison a license
for audacious mendacity. Except now the zeitgeist wasn’t that
Communists were under every bed—the CIA was. One Bourbon Street store that
catered to the tourist trade tweaked Garrison by publishing a mock newspaper
headlined: DA STOPS CIA IN USA TAKEOVER. Elsewhere in the United States,
though, where DAs were taken more seriously, the cumulative impact of
Garrison’s charges was dramatic. This was the moment in time when Garrison
ushered in a paradigm shift over the assassination.
As the DA’s “bizarre and
unsubstantiated” campaign to implicate the CIA reached a fever pitch in early
June, an internal agency memo observed that Garrison had “attacked [the] CIA
more vehemently, viciously and mendaciously than has any other American
official or private citizen whose comments have come to our attention. In fact,
he [has] outstripped the foreign Communist press, which is now quoting him
delightedly.” Garrison’s lean good looks camouflaged a cunning demagogue, who
challenged not only the veracity of the Warren Report but the federal
government’s very legitimacy, asserting that “what happened… in Dallas on
November 22, 1963, was a coup d’état… instigated and planned… by fanatical
anticommunists in the United States intelligence community.”
The toxic brew of a domestic
demagogue mixed with dezinformatsiya was a KGB dream come true: an
elected U.S. official was affirming what Moscow had been saying for years about
America’s corrupt political system and its military-industrial complex. In the
space of a few months, Garrison legitimated the fable that the CIA was
complicit in President Kennedy’s assassination and that American democracy
itself was an illusion.
Clay Shaw’s trial finally commenced
in January 1969. Despite two years of allegations and a promise of testimony
that would “rock the nation,” Garrison’s case was remarkably unchanged from the
loopy account presented at Shaw’s preliminary hearing. The prosecution failed
to produce a scintilla of CIA involvement, and jurors eventually rendered a
unanimous verdict of “not guilty” after deliberating 54 minutes.
Afterward, Garrison insisted that
the actual legal results did not make his investigation any less valid. The
centrality of the Paese Sera revelation to the DA’s theory about CIA
involvement became a sacred, inner secret known only to Garrison and closest
associates. In this scenario, Garrison was the martyr, victimized
(ironically) by the vast but hidden power of “the company” and its
“disinformation machinery.” Whether Moscow ever recognized the impact of Paese
Sera’s falsehood on the New Orleans district attorney contemporaneously is
unknown. What is certain is that the KGB did not rest on its laurels. For the
balance of the cold war, efforts to expose the ostensible role of the “American
special services” in the Kennedy assassination remained a staple of Moscow’s
active measures—to the point where the KGB “could fairly claim that far more
Americans believed some version of [Moscow’s] conspiracy theory… than accepted
the main findings of the Warren Commission,” as Andrew and Mitrokhin wrote.
In 1988, Garrison published a
memoir and made explicit the connection between his grand conspiracy and Paese
Sera. No one noticed, the Shaw prosecution having long been dismissed as a
legal farce. But then Garrison’s publisher thrust a copy of the memoir into the
hands of Oliver Stone during an international film festival in Havana. That
encounter led to Paese Sera’s disinformation becoming the centerpiece of a
Hollywood blockbuster. At the 88-minute mark of Stone’s JFK, Garrison
(portrayed by Kevin Costner) confronts Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) with a newspaper
article in Italian supposedly exposing Shaw’s work as a CIA operative. This
clash never occurred in real life, of course, but Stone was intent on conveying
the truth about the wellspring for Garrison’s ultimate conspiracy theory. “Mr.
Shaw,” the script reads, “this is an Italian newspaper article saying
you were a member of the Board of Centro Mondo [sic] Commerciale in
Italy, that this company was a creature of the CIA… ”
Garrison’s real legacy was not his
investigation, but the public memory of his lurid allegations, recycled and
amplified by Oliver Stone. More than 25 years after its premier, JFK is the way most Americans now learn about one of the most traumatic events in their
recent history. And according to one historian who admires Stone, JFK has
probably “had a greater impact on public opinion than any other work of art in
American history.” Indeed, the movie remains a great source of pride for Stone,
if not his masterpiece. Allegedly, the film exposed a fascist-led coup that
“hit the central nerve core of the establishment,” and has “held up very well
over time,” the director contended recently at the Lucca Film Festival in April, 2017.
Even allowing for hyperbole, that
is why a fantasy concocted by an Italian newspaper that trafficked in
disinformation remains Moscow’s single most successful influence operation.
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