50 Years Since JFK Assassination Retrospective: How CIA's Tokyo Station Reacted To JFK's Death

In Chapter VI of its report, the Warren Commission stated the following:

"Director John A. McCone and Deputy Director Richard Helms of the Central Intelligence Agency testified before the commission that no one connected with the CIA had ever interviewed Oswald or communicated with him in any way. In his supplementing affidavit, Director McCone stated unequivocally that Oswald was not an agent, employee, or informant of the CIA, that the Agency never communicated with him in any manner or furnished him any compensation, and that Oswald was never directly or indirectly associated with the CIA..."

Yet Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of J.F.K. by Warren Hinckle and William Turner described the reaction at the CIA's Tokyo Station to news of JFK's death on November 22, 1963 by stating the following:

"There was joy in the CIA's Tokyo Station...`The conservatives were obviously elated and there was talk of an invasion of Cuba,' said Jim Wilcott, the Tokyo Station financial officer in 1963. According to Wilcott, CIA hardliners `hated Jack Kennedy' because they felt he betrayed the agency over the Bay of Pigs. Agents were breaking out bottles and having drinks to Oswald. Tongues became loose, and there was a great deal of talk about Oswald's connections with the CIA. It was accepted as given that Oswald worked for the agency. This is what Wilcott says he learned:

"`Oswald was originally under control of the Tokyo Station's Soviet Russia Branch. He was trained at Atsugi Naval Air Station, the secret base for Tokyo CIA special operations...When Oswald returned from the USSR in June of 1962, he was brought back to Japan for debriefing. They were having some kind of difficulty with Oswald...He became difficult to handle...'"

The same book noted the following:

"Wilcott told the authors that at first he found it difficult to accept that the man who was said to have shot the president [JFK] worked for the CIA. `Then I heard about more and more employees who had been working on the Oswald project in the late 1950s.' Part of Wilcott's job was to hand out cash for covert CIA operations. `When I expressed disbelief, they told me, "`Well, Jim, so and so drew an advance from you for Oswald'" or "`You gave out money for the Oswald project under such and such a crypto.'"'"

The Deadly Secrets book by Warren Hinckle and William Turner also asserted that "Nixon may have felt the need to cover up Watergate because an investigation would have exposed CIA misdeeds" and "such an investigation would have divulged the deadliest secret of the 20th Century--the government entanglements with organized crime, the mob-CIA plots to kill Fidel Casatro, and the great backfire when the mob and the CIA plotters turned on President Kennedy and murdered him in Dallas."

(Downtown 6/29/94 and 7/13/94)