By

Joan Mellen

Part 2:

BOBBY KENNEDY MEETS OTTO F. OTEPKA, DECEMBER 1960

Bobby Kennedy's hostility to Otto Otepka surfaced in December 1960, even before the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, but after Otepka had begun to evaluate Lee Oswald. At 7 P.M. one evening, in the gathering winter darkness, Dean Rusk, Kennedy's Secretary of State designate, requested that Otepka meet with him. Otepka assumed that the purpose of the meeting was a discussion of security clearances for Kennedy appointees. What turned out to be the troubling reality was that Rusk, whom Otepka had only just cleared, was functioning as an intermediary. It was Bobby Kennedy who wanted to meet with Otepka.

Bobby was late. Otepka and Rusk sat twiddling their thumbs in the deserted building until Robert Kennedy finally appeared. Offering no apologies, he complained that he had become lost in the labyrinthine corridors. It was in these same corridors, nearly three years later that Bobby's “confidential assistant,” Walter Sheridan, would be handed the tapes of the illegal surveillance of Otepka's telephone and office.

Eschewing preliminaries, Bobby came to the point. He was concerned that W.W. Rostow be granted a security clearance for his cabinet appointment. On two previous occasions, in 1955 and 1957, Otepka had declined to clear Rostow as a foreign policy expert. There was something not quite right about this man, Otepka thought. He pointed out to Bobby that Air Force Intelligence had voiced doubts about Rostow.

Those people are “nuts!” Bobby blurted out. His anger seemed incommensurate with the issue and surprised Otto Otepka, who was a calm, reasoned man not accustomed to such outbursts of emotion in the course of his work. Otepka's instincts regarding Rostow were both correct and incorrect. Otepka was incorrect in believing that Rostow was a Communist sympathizer of any kind, despite his family background. He was right that the man was not what he seemed. John F. Kennedy's inexperience and naivete – he would go on to circumvent the security problem by appointing Rostow to his White House staff – was to emerge when Rostow revealed his true colors.

Before long, Rostow began to beat drums for a ground war in Vietnam, a policy John F. Kennedy did not and would never favor. Rostow's bleating for war would be heeded to the full once Kennedy was dead and Lyndon Johnson became president. By 1965, Rostow was demanding that 500,000 troops at the least be sent to Vietnam.

Bobby emerged enraged from the only face-to-face encounter he would ever have with Otto Otepka. He perceived that he had confronted a man who would not be bullied and who was not subject to political influence. As for Otepka, he at first believed that Bobby's inexplicable hostility must be based on his refusal to clear Rostow, and also a shadowy figure named William Wieland, who had once sold arms to Fidel Castro. It was not so. It is not clear when Robert Kennedy became aware of Otepka's handling of the investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald. But Otepka became certain that it was this investigation rather than his unwillingness to clear minor Kennedy appointees that led to Otepka's demotion.

OTTO OTEPKA IS PLACED UNDER SURVEILLANCE

In November 1961, five months after Oswald reclaimed his passport for return to the United States, and nearly a year after Otepka's meeting with Bobby Kennedy, Otepka was informed that the Office of Security was being re-organized. His job as Deputy Director was eliminated. In January 1962, Otepka became chief of a newly-created Division of Evaluations, a position where he would enjoy far fewer responsibilities.

Four months later, in April 1962, Robert Kennedy sent a long-time family loyalist named John Francis Reilly to head the State Department Office of Security. Roger Jones, who was Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Administration, later confided to author Michaux Henry Wilkinson, that Robert Kennedy told him personally that he wanted Reilly to be made Director of the Office of Security. Reilly had no experience either in security work or in personnel evaluation. He seemed an odd choice, this Justice Department lawyer. Reilly, a Massachusetts Irishman, had been recommended officially by Bobby Kennedy's own executive assistant, Andy Oehmann. By Reilly's own later admission, he was “sent over here to do a job, and by God I'm going to do it!”

The other piece of the puzzle was soon in place. That same April, Otepka's Division of Evaluations was removed from responsibility for the “Intelligence Reporting Branch,” which was transferred to the Executive Office. This unit, from which Otepka was effectively excluded, now had the responsibility for receiving all intelligence reports from the FBI and CIA. The Intelligence Reporting Branch, far removed from the eyes of Otto Otepka, now decided whether information was of significance for personnel security purposes. It was this “Intelligence Reporting Branch” that forwarded relevant data to other bureaus and offices – or did not.

Another four months passed. In August 1962, a month after Lee Oswald returned to the United States, Reilly was promoted to the newly-created position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Security, the more easily for him to proceed against Otto Otepka. Now four more Kennedy people arrived at the Office of Security to keep watch over Otepka. They included Joseph E. Rosetti, who had served in John F. Kennedy's congressional office; Massachusetts Kennedy intimate, Robert J. McCarthy; and Charles W. Lyons, also from Massachusetts. These three were joined by David I. Belisle, a National Security Agency operative and friend of Walter Sheridan's from his days at NSA. Belisle was to serve as Otepka's immediate superior.

So the effort to ruin Otepka proceeded. Eventually he would be charged with prosecution under the Espionage Act, not for providing intelligence to the Soviet Union, or to “Peiping,” as Dean Rusk would always refer to the capital of China. No, it was to a subcommittee of the United States Senate that Otepka would be charged with providing “secret” information.

The charge was entirely bogus. No documents Otepka presented to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, before which he was called to testify, were classified. Moreover, he had obtained permission to testify from the Secretary of State himself. It was against the law for a public official to refuse to cooperate with a committee of Congress. Otepka had no choice but to testify.

Under watchful eyes, in his capacity as an evaluator, Otepka continued to work on his Oswald file. More details raised “red flags.” Oswald obtained a visa to the Soviet Union in Helsinki in two days –normally it took at least thirty days. (The State Department would lie to the Warren Commission and tell them that it took one to two weeks). Otepka wondered what Oswald actually did in the Soviet Union. He examined Marina's propitious exit; it was known to take wives of U.S. citizens five months to a year for official permission to leave, and Oswald was no simple citizen: wasn't he a defector, a traitor? Otepka would have liked to have examined Marina's family history, he told me, and her connections to the Soviet secret police.

On April 4, 1962, Otepka consulted the Passport Office, inquiring whether “there has been a change in the Subject's citizenship.” He requested any other information which might be of assistance to the Navy in considering Oswald's case. Otepka told me he had hoped to have examined the anomaly that Oswald had received an exit visa a month and a half before he actually left Russia, and, again, there was the matter of that State Department loan that made his return home possible.

When Otepka learned in June 1963 that Oswald received a U.S. passport on one day's notice, it confirmed his uneasiness. He did not blame Francis Knight in the passport office. Knight later told Otepka that she was following orders, that “she would issue a passport to a baboon if she knew that was the policy.”

In those years, wire taps were illegal unless there was probable cause that national security was being compromised. By 1962, Otepka's telephone was being tapped. The tap was instituted by an electronics expert hired personally by Reilly named Elmer Dewey Hill, who would be assisted by others. Out of a room directly across from Otepka's new hole-in-the-wall office in exile, Hill made his tapes.

Now every evening Otepka's trash was confiscated. One night at 10 P.M., David Belisle, and a subordinate named Terence Shea, broke into Otepka's office – only to discover Otepka sitting at his desk. Undaunted, they claimed they were searching for evidence that Otepka had provided classified information to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, although there was no evidence that he had done so. He had not.

An Otepka colleague named Stanley Holden, who would soon be fired from the electronics unit, disturbed by Otepka's mistreatment, confirmed to him that the bugging had included not merely his telephone, but every word spoken in his office. Holden named Rosetti, Belisle and Shea as having led the surveillance, both of Otepka in his office, and Otepka in his private life. (Much later, a mastermind of an electronics expert named Bernard Spindel would reveal that a “Justice Department Agency” had a permanent tap into the main telephone line in Washington, D.C.).

In December 1963, Stanley Holden, in sworn testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, revealed that, in June, John Reilly had Otepka's safe drilled open and personally searched the safe. Reilly had also gone through Otepka's desk and files. Otepka did not remain silent.

On the day after Dean Rusk ordered Reilly to find out how Otepka had managed to obtain proof that tapes were being made of his conversations, Stanley Holden met with a strange “accident.” His face and tongue were slashed so badly that stitches were required. Terrified, Holden claimed, not very persuasively, that a heavy spring had come loose in his lab and hit him in the face.

Then Joe Rosetti and Robert McCarthy showed up at Holden's home. McCarthy began to shout so loudly that the neighbors became witnesses. “Where is your loyalty?” he screamed at Holden for having revealed the wire taps to Otepka. “Don't you have any loyalty at all? Don't you think you owe Joe Rosetti any loyalty?” McCarthy concluded his tirade with a threat. “I'll get you for this!”

It strains credulity to believe that such a fierce campaign could have anything to do with Otepka's providing the Internal Security subcommittee with unclassified information (He gave them three innocuous documents, to which the legislative branch of government was entitled legally). It is equally unlikely that Otepka was being treated as if he were a criminal because he had denied a security clearance to some political has-beens, as he did in the case of Kennedy's Ambassador-designate to Ireland, the owner of a construction business who turned out to be covered in graft and corruption.

Otepka was now relieved of any responsibility for security. He was given make-work, updating the Office of Security handbook. He was ordered to summarize each day's Congressional Record. Otepka was not, however, a man to give up and suffer injustice without a struggle. From the moment he was driven from his position of responsibility and tossed into a limbo of boring tasks designed to press him to resign, Otepka became determined to learn who was responsible for his political demise – and why.

What Otepka did not know at the time, information that is only emerging now, more than four decades later, is Bobby Kennedy's extraordinary interest in Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination of his brother. Bobby's obsession with Otto Otepka suggests that more than a year before John F. Kennedy's death, he was concerned with Oswald. The curious intervention of the Department of Justice with the Dallas Police in the matter of Oswald's having fired shots at General Edwin Walker, and Justice's insistence that the Dallas Police not arrest Oswald, not pursue him, is one example. The telling document disappeared from the Dallas police files, and has not yet re-emerged, but General Walker told his friend Louisiana judge John R. Rarick about it at the time. Near death, Walker urged the House Select Committee on Assassinations to investigate this extraordinary intervention that traces back to Bobby Kennedy.

Another example of Bobby's awareness of Oswald came to the author in an interview with Bobby's operative Angelo Murgado, which is described in “A Farewell To Justice.”

Another hint, as yet a mere suggestion, of a relationship between Bobby Kennedy and Oswald has also emerged. “A Farewell to Justice” describes Oswald's movements in the towns north of Baton Rouge in the spring and summer of 1963. Both before and after they joined Jim Garrison's investigation, Anne Dischler and state trooper Francis Fruge worked undercover for the Sheriff's department of Lafayette Parish, among ten other Parishes. In a newly recovered notebook, Dischler revealed to the author, is evidence that Dischler and Fruge learned that an aide of Robert Kennedy's had communicated with people in Lafayette, Louisiana.

The information came through the Billie White Answering service in Lafayette; the note of the Kennedy office connection to Lafayette, through which Oswald (or a man calling himself “Oswald”) passed, stopping at the Holiday Lounge, was written in Fruge's hand. The caller described himself as an “aide” working for Robert Kennedy.

At the moment the story stops there. But combined with Murgado's testimony, that during the summer of 1963 Bobby's employees knew about Oswald, knew even that he worked for the New Orleans field office of the FBI, this revelation of Bobby Kennedy's communications with someone in the then obscure town of Lafayette raises questions. Where Oswald, or someone called “Oswald,” made an appearance, it emerges that Robert Kennedy was not far behind, whether in the presence of an underling, this as yet nameless aide, or Walter Sheridan, or, less likely, in the person of Kennedy himself.

This new evidence matches Bobby's concerned telephone call to Dr. Nicholas Chetta, inquiring as to the cause of death of David Ferrie, Oswald's closest New Orleans cohort. The incomplete notes in Anne Dischler's notebook connect as well to the uneasy presence in Dallas in late September at Sylvia Odio's of Murgado, who was working for Bobby Kennedy, along with Oswald.

The many connections between Robert Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald help to clarify that question that had so plagued Jim Garrison: why did Bobby Kennedy send Walter Sheridan to New Orleans to destroy, discredit and undercut his investigation? Sheridan, short and stocky, with his beaky nose, slit-like eyes, and outrageous violations of people's privacy and rights, was in New Orleans for one purpose alone, to demolish Garrison's work. This reality was clear to many, not least lawyer and Office of Naval Intelligence operative Guy Johnson. Sheridan “was clearly sent here by the Kennedys to spike Garrison,” Johnson said matter-of-factly.

Garrison himself had no doubt that Sheridan had been sent by Bobby to destroy his investigation, as he told John Wingate on the WOR-TV (New York) television program: “Robert Kennedy has without any question made a positive effort to stop the investigation and if he denies it here, he is a liar.” On “Mike Wallace At Large,” Garrison told reporter Joseph Wershba: “I cannot say with certitude what motivates this man. [Robert Kennedy]. I can only say that if my brother were killed, I would be interested in getting the individuals involved no matter who they are and I wouldn't be interested in any way in the political aspect…it may be that Bobby is more interested in politics than I am.” Yet Bobby's motive extended beyond his Presidential ambitions.

The answer seems increasingly apparent: Bobby was attempting to ensure that Garrison be sufficiently discredited so that should Garrison uncover Bobby's relationship with Oswald in the years preceding the assassination of his brother, no one would believe him. Otto Otepka becomes a historical precursor of Garrison, another investigator whose work and career Bobby Kennedy would destroy in an effort to conceal Bobby's close knowledge of Oswald. At first glance, Otepka, conservative, a loyal government employee, and Garrison, liberal, flamboyant, and a devoted admirer of John F. Kennedy, have little in common. Yet they both suffered greatly as targets of Bobby Kennedy's desperate effort to conceal what he had been up to.

In retrospect, it becomes apparent that Bobby was frantic that no one discover that he had involved Oswald in his own operations against Fidel Castro. Up in Jackson, Louisiana, not far from Lafayette, at ease chatting with attendants at the East Louisiana State Hospital at Jackson, and overheard by the medical director of the hospital, Dr. Frank Silva, during the summer of 1963, Oswald had bragged about how he had been enlisted to kill Fidel Castro. Here was the real Oswald, no Marxist, but a government operative. And at every turn Bobby Kennedy hovered near. Garrison knew that Oswald had been up in Clinton and Jackson and might well have uncovered Bobby's connection to him had Walter Sheridan not been dispatched to New Orleans to turn his investigation upside down.

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