• Gallipoli: Historical debate rages over the century-old mystery of over Allies’ landing
• Gallipoli landings: Statue to honour first soldier ashore despite debate
Adopting a conversational tone, he famously told the prime minister that the Gallipoli campaign was “undoubtedly one of the most terrible chapters in our history”.
 
^{Anzac Cove soon after the beach landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula}
“Your fears have been justified,” Murdoch wrote. “This unfortunate expedition has never been given a chance.”
Having met with the Gallipoli correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett of The Daily Telegraph, Murdoch agreed that the only way to reveal the truth about the campaign was to flout the military censors. Initially, he tried to smuggle an uncensored letter by Ashmead-Bartlett to Herbert Henry Asquith, the British Prime Minister, but the document was intercepted in Marseilles.
 
^{Keith Murdoch}
Instead, Murdoch proceeded to London and decided to write his own account, penning his letter to the Australian prime minister from the offices of The Times. The letter was subsequently read by Asquith, who had it printed as a cabinet document; Hamilton was dismissed weeks later and the evacuation proceeded shortly afterwards.
In his letter, Murdoch gave high praise to the gallantry of the Australian troops and made it clear that he believed the disastrous effort to attack the peninsula was due to the “ghastly bungling” of the British commanders.
“Undoubtedly the essential and first step to restore the morale of the shaken forces is to recall [Hamilton] and his Chief of Staff [Lieutenant General Sir W. P. Braithwaite], a man more cordially detested in our forces than Enver Pasha [the Turkish war minister],” he wrote.
“It is not for me to judge Hamilton, but it is plain that when an Army has completely lost faith in its General, and he has on numerous occasions proved his weaknesses, only one thing can be done…. Our men have found it impossible to form a high opinion of the British K[itchener] men and territorials. They are merely a lot of child-like youths.”
After the war, Murdoch went on to buy an Adelaide newspaper and proceeded to build an Australian news stable which his son Rupert has transformed into a global media empire.
In 1970, Rupert Murdoch donated his father’s letter to the National Library of Australia and it was placed on a UNESCO heritage register earlier this year.
Historians believe Murdoch’s letter was unashamedly partisan but played a significant part in hastening the Gallipoli evacuation. The campaign led to the deaths of more than 44,000 allied soldiers and almost 87,000 Ottoman troops before the allies evacuated in December 1915 and January 1916.
Carl Bridge, an Australian history expert at King’s College London, said the letter was highly coloured and gratuitously omitted the achievements of the regular British soldiers at Gallipoli but “contained irrefutable evidence about the plummeting morale of the Australians”.
“Murdoch, perhaps the most distinguished journalist of his generation, was sent there as Fisher’s ‘eyes and ears’ and his incendiary report found its mark in the governing seat of empire,” Professor Bridge wrote in the The Australian, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia.
“Murdoch’s letter, along with a report from the South Australia-born Maurice Hankey, the British cabinet secretary, who visited Gallipoli at the same time, and other evidence, was instrumental in the British cabinet’s decision [to evacuate].”
Michael McKernan, an Australian historian and writer, said Murdoch took considerable risks during his visit, including going as far as Quinn’s Post, the most advanced Anzac post.
“He was a brave man,” Dr McKernan told The Telegraph.
“He was shocked and appalled by the sickness he saw and by the conditions the men were living in. He came away deeply pessimistic and aware that there were no prospect of success. The letter was the first time there was an honest representation of the way the Gallipoli campaign was being conducted.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, The Gallipoli Letter has been an enduring source of pride for the Murdoch family.
Murdoch’s grandson Lachlan, co-chairman of News Corp, delivered a speech last year in which he drew on the letter to protest proposed national security laws which tighten controls over journalists.
“Officially, my grandfather was to report on problems with postal services to Australian troops but Fisher wanted all the facts about the campaign, honestly and unfiltered,” he said.
“Keith Murdoch’s Gallipoli letter was Australia’s boldest declaration that our nation had a right to know the truth… And like Keith Murdoch, we must have the courage to act when those freedoms are threatened.”

Wilhelm Canaris was born in Aplerbeck, near Dortmund, on 1st January, 1887. Mark M. Boatner III has argued: “Canaris grew up in a wealthy, cultured, happy Westphalian family of right-wing but liberal Protestants.” A member of a wealthy family, Canaris entered the German Navy in 1905 and by 1911 reached the rank of lieutenant.
On the outbreak of the First World War Canaris was on the Dresden that took part in the Battle of the Falklands. Forced to land on Juan Fernandez Island, 400 miles from Chile, he was in an internment camp until escaping in August, 1915. He made “a daring two-week horseback ride through the Andes, helped by local Germans in eluding pursuit by Chilean police”.
Masquerading as “Reed Rosas”, the son of a Chilean father and British mother, he managed to reach Buenos Aires where he caught a Dutch ship bound for Rotterdam. He arrived back in Germany on 4th October 1915. Canaris was then sent to join the intelligence service for U-boat operations in the Mediterranean and for the next year he worked as an undercover agent in Italy and Spain before becoming a commander of a U-boat in 1917.
After the armistice in 1918 Canaris joined the Freikorps and took part in the Kapp Putsch. Later he was involved in secretly building submarines for the German Navy. He resumed his naval career and became increasingly involved with military intelligence. During this period he got to know Reinhard Heydrich. In 1931 Canaris was promoted to captain and in 1932 took command of the Schlesien. Two years later he replaced Erich Raeder as head of German military intelligence, the Abwehr.
Joachim Fest has pointed out: “Those who knew Canaris found him an enigmatic, inscrutable personality, who always maintained a certain distance from people as well as from his duties.” When the Nazi Party took power Admiral Canaris had to work with Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and the SS Intelligence Service. Canaris, who had a deep hatred of communism, persuaded Adolf Hitler to support the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. According to his biographer, Mark M. Boatner III: “As an ardent nationalist and righest with an almost pathological aversion to communism, Canaris sincerely approved of Nazism initially.” In 1938 he became head of the foreign branch of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the High Command of the armed forces.
Canaris was opposed to Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy. On the outbreak of the Second World War on 1st September, 1939, Hans Gisevius asked Canaris: “So what do you think now?” Canaris replied: “This means the end of Germany.” He also disapproved of Hitler’s methods. On hearing that Hitler wanted him to arrange the deaths of former French prime minister Paul Reynaud and General Maxime Weygandhe suddenly erupted in an angry denunciation of “these gangster methods of Hitler and his henchmen.”
It has been pointed out that during the war Canaris had a close relationship with Hans Oster, the head of the Military Intelligence Office’s central division, who turned it into a centre of activity for opponents of the regime. At the same time Canaris was meeting regularly with his most dangerous adversary, Reinhard Heydrich for morning horseback rides in Berlin’s Tiergarten. However, as Alan Bullock has pointed out: “The Abwehr provided admirable cover and unique facilities for a conspiracy.”
During the war Canaris gradually became disillusioned with Hitler and began leaking information to Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler and others plotting against the regime. Louis L. Snyder has argued: “Canaris gradually became an opponent of National Socialism and of Hitler’s policies. He joined the Resistance movement but was always against any attempt to assassinate Hitler…. According to a subordinate, General Edwin Lahausen, Canaris had human qualities that placed him far above the usual military bureaucrat. He hated violence and was confused and uncomfortable in his double role.”
Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was working for British intelligence during the Second World War, claimed that: “Late in 1942 my office had come to certain conclusions – which time proved to be correct – about the struggle between the Nazi Party and the German General Staff, as it was being fought out in the field of secret intelligence. The German Secret Service (the Abwehr) and its leader. Admiral Canaris, were suspected by the Party not only of inefficiency but of disloyalty, and attempts were being made by Himmler to oust the Admiral and to take over his whole organization.” Trevor-Roper also revealed that Canaris “was making repeated journeys to Spain and indicated a willingness to treat with us.”
In early 1944 a group of anti-Nazis that included Canaris, Friedrich Olbricht, Henning von Tresckow, Friedrich Olbricht, Werner von Haeften, Claus von Stauffenberg, Fabian Schlabrendorff, Carl Goerdeler, Julius Leber, Ulrich Hassell, Hans Oster, Peter von Wartenburg, Hans Dohnanyi, Erwin Rommel, Hans Oster, Franz Halder, Hans Gisevius, Fabian Schlabrendorff, Ludwig Beck and Erwin von Witzleben met to discuss what action they should take. Initially the group was divided over the issue of Hitler. Gisevius and a small group of predominantly younger conspirators felt that he should be killed immediately. Canaris, Witzleben, Beck, Rommel and most of the other conspirators believed that Hitler should be arrested and put on trial. By using the legal system to expose the crimes of the regime, they hoped to avoid making a martyr of Hitler. Oster and Dohnanyi argued that after Hitler was arrested he should be brought before a panel of physicians chaired by Dohnanyi’s father-in-law, the psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer, and declared mentally ill.
On 20th July, 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg attended a conference with Hitler on 20th July, 1944. It was decided to drop plans to kill Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler at the same time as Hitler. Alan Bullock later explained: “He (Stauffenberg) brought his papers with him in a brief-case in which he had concealed the bomb fitted with a device for exploding it ten minutes after the mechanism had been started. The conference was already proceeding with a report on the East Front when Keitel took Stauffenberg in and presented him to Hitler. Twenty-four men were grouped round a large, heavy oak table on which were spread out a number of maps. Neither Himmler nor Goring was present. The Fuhrer himself was standing towards the middle of one of the long sides of the table, constantly leaning over the table to look at the maps, with Keitel and Jodl on his left. Stauffenberg took up a place near Hitler on his right, next to a Colonel Brandt. He placed his brief-case under the table, having started the fuse before he came in, and then left the room unobtrusively on the excuse of a telephone call to Berlin. He had been gone only a minute or two when, at 12.42 p.m., a loud explosion shattered the room, blowing out the walls and the roof, and setting fire to the debris which crashed down on those inside.”
Joachim Fest, the author of Plotting Hitler’s Death (1997) has pointed out: “Suddenly, as witnesses later recounted, a deafening crack shattered the midday quiet, and a bluish-yellow flame rocketed skyward… A dark plume of smoke rose and hung in the air over the wreckage of the briefing barracks. Shards of glass, wood, and fiberboard swirled about, and scorched pieces of paper and insulation rained down… When the bomb exploded, twenty-four people were in the conference room. All were hurled to the ground, some with their hair in flames.” The bomb killed four men in the hut: General Rudolf Schmundt, General Günther Korten, Colonel Heinz Brandt and stenographer Heinz Berger. Hitler’s right arm was badly injured but he survived what became known as the July Plot.
The plan was for Ludwig Beck, Erwin von Witzleben and Erich Fromm to take control of the German Army. This idea was abandoned when it became known that Adolf Hitler had survived the assassination attempt. In an attempt to protect himself, Fromm organized the execution of Stauffenberg along with three other conspirators, Friedrich Olbricht and Werner von Haeften, in the courtyard of the War Ministry. It was later reported the Stauffenberg died shouting “Long live free Germany”.
According to Traudl Junge Hitler selected Hermann Fegelein to investigate the conspiracy: “Fegelein had been detailed to investigate the assassination attempt and track down the guilty men. He was personally indignant to think of anyone wanting to blow up such a splendid fellow as himself. I think he thought that was more criminal than any plan to get rid of Hitler, and he flung himself into the investigation with the zeal of his desire for revenge. Finally it became obvious even to Hitler that the resistance movement had spread more widely in the army than he had supposed. Distinguished names of men holding high rank were mentioned. He raged and shouted and said a great deal about traitors and scoundrels.” It is claimed that Fegelein often showed around the photographs of the hanged men who had been executed as a result of this failed assassination attempt.”
Canaris and Hans Oster were among the many arrested. During the investigation Fegelein discovered Osler’s three-page study on how the coup d’état was to be conducted. On 6th February 1945, with the Red Army now in Germany, the conspirators were moved to concentration camps where they were in less danger of being killed by bombs or liberated by advancing enemy troops. Oster was taken to Flossenburg Concentration Camp.
On 4th April 1945 they discovered Canaris’s secret diaries. This information was used in the trial of Oster, Canaris, Hans Dohnanyi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ludwig Gehre and Karl Sack. Oster appeared first and having abandoned hope, admitted everything. Canaris also confessed and the others followed. That evening the court pronounced the death sentence on all the men. That evening Canaris tapped out a final message to the prisoner in the next cell, a Danish secret service officer: “My days are done. Was not a traitor.”
Wilhelm Canaris was executed at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp on 9th April, 1945.

AS THE Jewish New Year, which is a time for reflection and introspection approaches, Yossi Cohen is very busy. Exactly on the second most holy Jewish holiday – which this year falls on September 10 – he will celebrate his 57th birthday. The elegant and charming head of the Mossad is preoccupied not only with supervising his agency’s operations around the globe but also with promoting his image and public relations.
More than all his predecessors who rarely met the media, Cohen hosts, from time to time, senior Israeli and foreign journalists and commentators.

Unlike his predecessors, he doesn’t shy away from cameras when he is seen in public places. Not that he reveals great secrets, but with his beaming smile, he gives the impression of openness.

Usually the meetings with journalists are held one on one, but sometimes in small groups. The meetings take place in his elegant office at Mossad headquarters on the hill overlooking Glilot junction, north of Tel Aviv.

Through the back door of the building, his assistant takes the visitor by the elevator up to his office on the second floor. First, the guest is seated on a leather sofa in the anteroom, which is filled with books or other gifts given to Mossad directors by their counterparts, including gifts from Arab and other Middle Eastern or Muslim countries, which don’t have official relations with Israel.

These gifts are a silent testimony to the widespread outreach of Israel’s foreign espionage service, which maintains official but clandestine liaison with around 150 spy agencies from all continents. In that sense, the Mossad before Cohen and under his leadership serves as a second, unofficial Foreign Ministry.

In one corner of the anteroom stands a gilded wand with the names, in Hebrew, of the past 10 directors written on metal plates.

When Cohen ends his term, the 11th metal plate with his name will be added.

Their terms are neither limited by law (unlike the CIA, there is no law regulating the Mossad) nor by a time limitation. With one exception, Mossad heads have served an average of six years. Cohen has been in office less than three years.

Four former Mossad chiefs have died.

Six – Zvi Zamir, Nahum Admoni, Shabtai Shavit, Danny Yatom, Ephraim Halevy and Tamir Pardo – are still among us, alive and kicking. They don’t hesitate to express their views on security and strategic issues, and their concerns how and where the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the country.

In that sense, Cohen is also an exception.

While most of the former directors can be identified as holding center and left of center outlooks, Cohen is a pragmatic right-winger and an admirer of Netanyahu. This makes him also the most politicized Mossad director ever.

As a serving director Cohen cannot speak his mind in public but he finds ways to do so in cabinet sessions, in appearances before sub-committees of the Knesset (the parliament) and in his off-the-record meetings with journalists and other guests.

Cohen is a very talented and skillful intelligence officer, who rose through the ranks of the organization.

He was born in Jerusalem to a modern-Orthodox religious family. His father, Leo, was a seventh-generation Israeli and a veteran of the pre-state Irgun (Etzel) underground led by Menachem Begin. After Israel gained its independence, Leo joined Bank Mizrahi, the only religious bank in the country, then owned by the National Religious Party and now by private shareholders. His mother was a teacher.

He went to a yeshiva (religious school) and after his military service at the young age of 21, he was accepted to the Mossad’s cadet school. He was the first cadet to wear a skullcap, which eventually he had to take off during his operational terms abroad so as not to be identified as a Jew and Israeli. Since then he no longer covers his head but he has remained an observant Jew, keeps tradition and tries to attend synagogue on Shabbat and most Jewish holidays.

He graduated from the cadet academy as a case officer (in Hebrew, the professional term is k’tzin isuf – a collection officer) in charge of locating, approaching and running agents. For most of his career he was in the same department code-named “Tsomet” (Junction), which is in charge of handling agents. Speaking English, French and Arabic, he excelled in this profession and was sent numerous times to Western Europe, where he served in the early 1990s.

From 2008 to 2010, he was appointed by then-Mossad chief Meir Dagan to be in charge as a special project manager of tackling the Iranian nuclear program, whose ultimate aim was to produce nuclear weapons.

During that time, according to foreign reports, the Mossad recruited more agents, assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotaged shipments of materials and equipment, and planted malwares and viruses, which damaged Iran’s computers operating the uranium enrichment centrifuges. No doubt that in this capacity, Cohen learned a great deal from Dagan, the master spy, and honed his operational skills. Indeed, Iran’s program was slowed down but it was international pressure and economic sanctions that forced Iran to negotiate and sign a nuclear deal in 2015 with six world powers.

Like Netanyahu, his political patron,

Cohen wasn’t pleased with the deal engineered by the Obama administration.

 Like Netanyahu, he supported the decision by the Trump administration to walk away from the deal and renew sanctions against Iran.

After Dagan completed his eight-year term, Cohen was appointed in 2011 as a deputy director under Tamir Pardo, the new Mossad director. There was no love lost between the two, and after two years, Cohen left the agency temporarily to become Netanyahu’s National Security Adviser. Whispering in Netanyahu’s ear, being close to him, was very helpful in paving the path for his current job. But it wasn’t sufficient. Cohen, who knows how to charm acquaintances and to identify power brokers, realized that Sara, on her husband’s decisions, holds the key to the door of the Mossad chief.

Cohen, who is married with four children (one of his sons has cerebral palsy), found the way to gain Sara’s trust. His main influence, though, is due to his proximity and access to the prime minister, who is his immediate superior. The position and responsibility of the head of Israel’s foreign espionage agency are an excellent vantage point from which to influence military and diplomatic developments in four major fields vital to Israel’s national interests: gathering intelligence, and executing special tasks, including assassinations, and sabotaging Israel’s enemies and their installations; providing the government with early warnings of impending wars and terrorist plots; and serving as a special secret envoy of the prime minister to Arab leaders, such as the king of Jordan, whose countries have full diplomatic relations with Israel, or with those who don’t wish to be seen in public with Israeli leaders but are ready to meet the Mossad head clandestinely. These may include, according to foreign reports, officials from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

Another important task is to maintain the special relations between Israel’s intelligence community and its counterparts around the world, especially the CIA. Cohen frequently travels to Washington to meet with his CIA counterpart and other national security officials. In these meetings, he exchanges intelligence data, analysis and sometimes even plans joint operations.

One such trip occurred last March when Cohen traveled with a flash drive to share the data on it with the CIA. It contained the complete central archive of Iran’s military nuclear power.

After two years of gathering intelligence, planning, preparations, surveillance and drills, Mossad operatives disguised with real and bogus identities, passports and cover stories broke in, after midnight on January 31, to a warehouse in a dreary suburb of Tehran. This was Iran’s nuclear treasure: data, drawings, blueprints, plans and timetables on how to produce nuclear weapons and warheads. According to foreign reports, the Mossad warriors knew beforehand what safes contained the most important folders and discs. They worked for two hours, while their comrades protected the premises from the outside. The safes were burned with torches, and after they found their bounty, the agents loaded it onto trucks and drove, most probably, to a neighboring country.

During the entire nerve-racking operation, Cohen and his top echelon watched online images broadcast by cameras. No doubt it was a brilliant and most daring operation showing the Mossad’s capabilities. Yet it didn’t bring the “smoking gun.” The expectation and hopes were to find the evidence to show that Iran was continuing with its military program. Such proof wasn’t found and the huge archive only confirmed and substantiated Iran’s work on the bomb until the nuclear deal was signed.

Cohen was disappointed, but he still believes that Iran is secretly plotting to renew its nuclear military work. Thus Iran is still high on his and the Mossad’s agenda.

Under Dagan and Pardo, the Mossad has grown from a relatively small spy agency into one of the biggest in the world. The Glilot complex is huge, with new buildings to house the 6,500 men and women directly employed under Cohen, in addition to at least another 1,000 subcontractors. From time to time, in special and really dangerous operations and in order not to endanger Israelis, the Mossad has also used well-trained and prepared foreign mercenaries.

This expansion has resulted in the Mossad becoming less of a human-based spy organization than it used to be, increasingly focused more on technology and cyber. When it comes to cyber, Israel, in general, and the Mossad, in particular, are on the cutting edge, with state-of-the-art equipment.

Cohen is not sitting on his laurels after stealing the Iranian nuclear archive. He wants also to walk in the footsteps of Dagan and leave his legacy as a director who is eliminating enemies more than any of his predecessors. Already, according to foreign reports, Mossad gunmen have killed at least four scientists working to improve the military capabilities of Hamas and Syria. Probably, there were more killings, which never made the headlines.

But Cohen also knows that his influential status and power as the director of the Mossad lie in his accumulation of destructive capabilities.

His judgment or lack thereof and his mistakes can cause embarrassment to the prime minister and damage Israel’s security interests and its foreign relations.

Thus, he fears his luck may sooner or later run out. This is the reason that he is talking about ending his term in January 2020, after just four years. But if the prime minister asks him to continue his service – and most probably Netanyahu will – it will be difficult for Cohen to say no.

Whatever he decides, Cohen may eventually enter politics. But before that, he will have to endure a three-year cooling-off period as dictated by the law. It is most likely that during this period, he will go into business to improve his and his family’s bank account.

Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>

John McCone came to the CIA as an outsider. An industrialist and an engineer by training, he replaced veteran spymaster Allen Dulles as director of central intelligence in November 1961, after John F. Kennedy had forced out Dulles following the CIA’s bungled operation to oust Fidel Castro by invading Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. McCone had one overriding mission: restore order at the besieged CIA. Kennedy hoped his management skills might prevent a future debacle, even if the Californian—mostly a stranger to the clubby, blue-blooded world of the men like Dulles who had always run the spy agency—faced a steep learning curve.
After JFK’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, President Lyndon Johnson kept McCone in place at the CIA, and the CIA director became an important witness before the Warren Commission, the panel Johnson created to investigate Kennedy’s murder. McCone pledged full cooperation with the commission, which was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, and testified that the CIA had no evidence to suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was part of any conspiracy, foreign or domestic. In its final report, the commission came to agree with McCone’s depiction of Oswald, a former Marine and self-proclaimed Marxist, as a delusional lone wolf.
Story Continued Below
But did McCone come close to perjury all those decades ago? Did the onetime Washington outsider in fact hide agency secrets that might still rewrite the history of the assassination? Even the CIA is now willing to raise these questions. Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission.
According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.
While raising no question about the essential findings of the Warren Commission, including that Oswald was the gunman in Dallas, the 2013 report is important because it comes close to an official CIA acknowledgement—half a century after the fact—of impropriety in the agency’s dealings with the commission. The coverup by McCone and others may have been “benign,” in the report’s words, but it was a cover-up nonetheless, denying information to the commission that might have prompted a more aggressive investigation of Oswald’s potential Cuba ties.
Initially stamped “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning it was not to be shared outside the agency or with foreign governments, Robarge’s report was originally published as an article in the CIA’s classified internal magazine, Studies in Intelligence, in September 2013, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. The article, drawn from a still-classified 2005 biography of McCone written by Robarge, was declassified quietly last fall and is now available on the website of The George Washington University’s National Security Archive. In a statement to POLITICO, the CIA said it decided to declassify the report “to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s connection to JFK’s assassination,” including the still-popular conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the assassination. (Articles in the CIA magazine are routinely declassified without fanfare after internal review.)
Robarge’s article says that McCone, quickly convinced after the assassination that Oswald had acted alone and that there was no foreign conspiracy involving Cuba or the Soviet Union, directed the agency to provide only “passive, reactive and selective” assistance to the Warren Commission. This portrait of McCone suggests that he was much more hands-on in the CIA’s dealings with the commission—and in the agency’s post-assassination scrutiny of Oswald’s past—than had previously been known. The report quotes another senior CIA official, who heard McCone say that he intended to “handle the whole (commission) business myself, directly.”
The report offers no conclusion about McCone’s motivations, including why he would go to lengths to cover-up CIA activities that mostly predated his time at the agency. But it suggests that the Johnson White House might have directed McCone to hide the information. McCone “shared the administration’s interest in avoiding disclosures about covert actions that would circumstantially implicate [the] CIA in conspiracy theories and possibly lead to calls for a tough US response against the perpetrators of the assassination,” the article reads. “If the commission did not know to ask about covert operations about Cuba, he was not going to give them any suggestions about where to look.”
Story Continued Below
In an interview, David Slawson, who was the Warren Commission’s chief staff investigator in searching for evidence of a foreign conspiracy, said he was not surprised to learn that McCone had personally withheld so much information from the investigation in 1964, especially about the Castro plots.
“I always assumed McCone must have known, because I always believed that loyalty and discipline in the CIA made any large-scale operation without the consent of the director impossible,” says Slawson, now 84 and a retired University of Southern California law professor. He says he regrets that it had taken so long for the spy agency to acknowledge that McCone and others had seriously misled the commission. After half a century, Slawson says, “The world loses interest, because the assassination becomes just a matter of history to more and more people.”
The report identifies other tantalizing information that McCone did not reveal to the commission, including evidence that the CIA might somehow have been in communication with Oswald before 1963 and that the spy agency had secretly monitored Oswald’s mail after he attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959. The CIA mail-opening program, which was later determined to have been blatantly illegal, had the code name HTLINGUAL. “It would be surprising if the DCI [director of central intelligence] were not told about the program” after the Kennedy assassination, the report reads. “If not, his subordinates deceived him. If he did know about HTLINGUAL reporting on Oswald, he was not being forthright with the commission—presumably to protect an operation that was highly compartmented and, if disclosed, sure to arouse much controversy.”
In the 1970s, when congressional investigations exposed the Castro plots, members of the Warren Commission and its staff expressed outrage that they had been denied the information in 1964. Had they known about the plots, they said, the commission would have been much more aggressive in trying to determine whether JFK’s murder was an act of retaliation by Castro or his supporters. Weeks before the assassination, Oswald traveled to Mexico City and met there with spies for the Cuban and Soviet governments—a trip that CIA and FBI officials have long acknowledged was never adequately investigated. (Even so, Warren Commission staffers remain convinced today that Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas, a view shared by ballistics experts who have studied the evidence.)
In congressional testimony in 1978, after public disclosures about the Castro plots, McCone claimed that he could not have shared information about the plots with the Warren Commission in 1964 because he was ignorant of the plots at the time. Other CIA officials “withheld the information from me,” he said. “I have never been satisfied as to why they withheld the information.” But the 2013 report concluded that “McCone’s testimony was neither frank nor accurate,” since it was later determined with certainty that he had been informed about the CIA-Mafia plots nine months before his appearance before the Warren Commission.
Robarge suggests the CIA is responsible for some of the harsh criticism commonly leveled at the Warren Commission for large gaps in its investigation of the president’s murder, including its failure to identify Oswald’s motive in the assassination and to pursue evidence that might have tied Oswald to accomplices outside the United States. For decades, opinion polls have shown that most Americans reject the commission’s findings and believe Oswald did not act alone. Four of the seven commissioners were members of Congress, and they spent the rest of their political careers badgered by accusations that they had been part of a coverup.
Story Continued Below
“The decision of McCone and Agency leaders in 1964 not to disclose information about CIA’s anti-Castro schemes might have done more to undermine the credibility of the commission than anything else that happened while it was conducting its investigation,” the report reads. “In that sense—and in that sense alone—McCone may be regarded as a ‘co-conspirator’ in the JFK assassination ‘cover-up.’”
If there was, indeed, a CIA “cover-up,” a member of the Warren Commission was apparently in on it: Allen Dulles, McCone’s predecessor, who ran the CIA when the spy agency hatched the plots to kill Castro. “McCone does not appear to have any explicit, special understanding with Allen Dulles,” the 2013 report says. Still, McCone could “rest assured that his predecessor would keep a dutiful watch over Agency equities and work to keep the commission from pursuing provocative lines of investigation, such as lethal anti-Castro covert actions.” (Johnson appointed Dulles to the commission at the recommendation of then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy.)
The 2013 report also draws attention to the contacts between McCone and Robert Kennedy in the days after the assassination. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, the attorney general was asked by his brother, the president, to direct the administration’s secret war against Castro, and Robert Kennedy’s friends and family acknowledged years later that he never stopped fearing that Castro was behind his brother’s death. “McCone had frequent contact with Robert Kennedy during the painful days after the assassination,” the report says. “Their communication appears to have been verbal, informal and, evidently in McCone’s estimation, highly personal; no memoranda or transcripts exist or are known to have been made.”
“Because Robert Kennedy had overseen the Agency’s anti-Castro covert actions—including some of the assassination plans—his dealings with McCone about his brother’s murder had a special gravity,” the report continues. “Did Castro kill the president because the president had tried to kill Castro? Had the administration’s obsession with Cuba inadvertently inspired a politicized sociopath to murder John Kennedy?”
The declassification of the bulk of the 2013 McCone report might suggest a new openness by the CIA in trying to resolve the lingering mysteries about the Kennedy assassination. At the same time, there are 15 places in the public version of the report where the CIA has deleted sensitive information—sometimes individual names, sometimes whole sentences. It is an acknowledgement, it seems, that there are still secrets about the Kennedy assassination hidden in the agency’s files.

Botham Shem Jean was identified as the 26-year-old businessman who was shot and killed by a female Dallas police officer who authorities say accidentally went into Jean’s apartment, thinking it was her own.
The cop wasn’t in her apartment; she was in his, and she had no reason to be there, police acknowledged in a statement. She then shot him, authorities say. Botham Shem Jean was only 26-years-old. He was originally from the Caribbean island nation of Saint Lucia, and, according to their Facebook comments and tributes, he was the pride of his family, a young man who came to America to study accounting and for whom great things were expected.
On LinkedIn, Botham Jean described himself as an “aspiring young professional” who was “engaged in developing a career built upon integrity, dedication and relationships, leveraging useful technologies to gain an understanding of and add value in a range industries, striving towards leadership in my career, my community and society.” He was working in Dallas as a risk assurance associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers, according to his LinkedIn page. In college, he was president of a Young Leaders group.
A former classmate who attended college with Jean in Arkansas, Landis Tindell, told Heavy in an email that he was a “great leader on our campus.” Tindell explained, “He was a campus leader. Very active in leading worship and campus student government. I don’t think there was a student on campus who didn’t know Botham. He was always friendly, always smiling, and just all around a great person.”
Here’s what you need to know:

---

1. Police Say the Police Officer Was in Full Uniform & Had Just Finished Her Shift When She Mistakenly Entered Jean’s Apartment

Although the female officer has not yet been identified, police did lay out some of the details relating to what happened. “On September 6, 2018 at about 9:59 p.m., an off duty Dallas Police officer called police dispatch and said she was involved in a shooting at the apartments located at 1210 S. Lamar,” they wrote.
“Preliminary information suggests that the officer arrived home in full uniform after working a full shift. The officer reported to the responding officers that she entered the victim’s apartment believing that it was her own. At some point, the officer fired her weapon striking the victim. Responding officers administered aid to the victim, a 26-year-old male, at the scene. The victim was then transported to the hospital and pronounced deceased. Next of kin notification has not been made at this time.”
Jean was identified by the Dallas Morning News, not police, as the victim. The Morning News asked the police whether the officer mistakenly thought Jean was an intruder – in Jean’s own apartment.
“I won’t go into that information right now,” Dallas police spokesman Sgt. Warren Mitchell said to the newspaper. “I mean, we have not interviewed her, and like I said this is just a preliminary statement. We still have a lot to do in this investigation. … This is all we can give you at this time.”

---

2. Botham Shem Jean’s Relatives Mourned Him in Tributes With His Uncle Calling It ‘the Worst Day of My Life Thus Far’

Botham Shem Jean’s uncle Earl Jean, who is a coach from St. Lucia, posted a photo tribute to his deceased nephew on Facebook.
“My heart goes with you my boy…never thought this day would come ,wanted to be there for you always my boy …how can this nasty world take you away from me ….this is the worst day of my life thus far….uncle loves you so much …there goes Mr.botham shem Jean….iam lost for words…part of me has left !Gone with the Angel’s ….lord keep me sane,” wrote a heartbroken Earl Jean.
Jean’s family members repeatedly expressed pride in him on Facebook. On a photo of Jean wearing a suit and tie, another relative wrote, “This is my work of art – dedicated, committed, hard-working, intelligent – Vote Botham for President!”

---

3. Botham Shem Jean Studied ‘Accountancy’ at a University & Was From Saint Lucia

On Facebook, Botham Shem Jean wrote that he had studied “accountancy” at Harding University. He also studied at Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, went to St. Mary’s College, and was from Castries, Saint Lucia. At St. Mary’s, Jean studied accounting and mathematics, and was the Young Leaders president and on the debate teams and in the choir.
He Facebook page said that he lived in Searcy, Arkansas, not Dallas, Texas, but it’s not clear whether it was just not updated yet. He wrote in 2013, “I miss St. Lucian food 🙁 I really want a breadfruit, dasheen, greenfig and saltfish now.”
The posts from Arkansas, which are a couple years old, include updates from Jean that say things like this, “8 hours of accounting…coming right up.” Harding University is a private college in Searcy, so it appears Jean was there to study accounting several years ago. A former classmate confirmed this in an email to Heavy, writing, “I went to Harding with Botham. I can confirm he graduated from there and was living in Dallas. A great leader on our campus and will be missed.”
His page also says he worked for a company named Harris Paints. More recently, according to his LinkedIn page, Botham Shem Jean was working for a company in Dallas, Texas called PwC as a “title risk assurance experienced associate.” He had held the position since July 2016, his page says, but had worked for the company since 2015. PwC is the major consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

---

4. Many Facebook Photos Show Jean in Suit & Tie & His Uncle Wrote That ‘the World Is at Your Door’

Jean’s photos on Facebook show a professional and generally smiling young man. His uncle Earl commented on his thread three years ago that the future looked very bright for Jean.
“Good looking and intelligent young Jean….the world is at your door…But everything in Gods timing. ..always proud of you!!” wrote Earl Jean.
On Twitter, Jean’s cover photo reads “Resist.” His tweets are private. “IzaLucian ?? — Can do anything, Can’t do everything,” his profile reads.
His mother, who still lives in St. Lucia, wrote, “Looking good my son!” Other comment threads similarly filled with flattery. “Look up Man in the dictionary and this photo will be next to it,” wrote one friend. “Presidential photo,” wrote one.
“This boy is and WILL ALWAYS BE a STAR!!!” wrote a woman named Desi Charles.

---

5. The Police Officer Is on Administrative Leave

According to the Dallas police statement, the officer “was not injured and will be placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.”
“The Dallas Police Department is conducting a joint investigation with the District Attorney’s Office. This investigation is ongoing and we will release additional details as they become available and it is appropriate to do so,” police wrote.