By

Joan Mellen

Part 3:

OTTO OTEPKA INVESTIGATES HIS OWN CASE

Perplexed by his harsh treatment, determined to find out why he had been placed in professional exile, and now demanding answers, Otepka approached friendly contacts in the FBI. He was being investigated by “higher authority in the Department of Justice,” he learned. Otepka was too experienced not to perceive what this meant. The “higher authority,” he told me, could not have been J. Edgar Hoover, who was always identified with the “Bureau.” It could only mean the Attorney General himself, Robert Kennedy.

It was in June 1963, after the Lafayette incident, and after the Walker shooting, that Otepka's files on Oswald were stolen from his safe. The culprits, Otepka wrote in a 1976 letter to author Edward J. Epstein at “Reader's Digest” magazine, were his superiors, people close to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Otepka's crime had been his studying Oswald, as it had been his responsibility to do. That June, Otepka was removed from the Office of Security. He was never fired, nor ever would be. But in September 1963 ten criminal charges were leveled against him.

It was now even more urgent that Otepka determine why this was happening to him. The investigator had no choice but to investigate his own case. In a Memorandum dated January 9, 1964, Otepka describes an interview he conducted with William R. Cathey, Chief Special Agent for Southern Bell Telephone Company. Cathey told Otepka that a company named “Five Eyes” had “contracts with several Government agencies including one with the Department of Justice.” Otepka learned too that home telephones in the Washington, D.C. area were being bugged with the help of an employee of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company.

Under oath at his 1967 hearing, Otepka finally articulated in public and for the record what he had long believed, but never voiced. Asked who was out to get him, he named “a high official of another government agency…the person was Robert Kennedy.” Elmer Dewey Hill, who had done much of the wire tapping, admitted that the tapes of Otepka's conversations had been handed to “some stranger” at Reilly's behest. Reilly had instructed him, Hill said, to hand over the tapes at a pre-designated spot “to a person with whom he was unacquainted.” The name of that stranger would soon emerge.

At this hearing, John Francis Reilly admitted under oath that it had been Bobby Kennedy himself who had appointed him to head the Office of Security in 1962. He revealed as well that he planned to intercept all conversations carried out in Otepka's office, not merely his telephone calls. Asked for the name of the mysterious stranger to whom Elmer Hill had revealed that the tapes of Otepka's telephone and office had been delivered, Reilly refused to provide it.

Ultimately, Hill, Reilly and Belisle, all of whom had broken the law, escaped without punishment, although Hill and Reilly were both charged with perjury. Walter Sheridan stepped in and requested of both Under-Secretary of State, George Ball, and Deputy Under-Secretary of State J. Crockett, that David Belisle not be “asked to resign,” despite Belisle's apparent malfeasance. Under the protection of Kennedy and Sheridan, Belisle was spirited off to a new job – at the American Embassy at Bonn.

THE NAME OF THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER IS REVEALED

It was in a most unlikely venue that the truth emerged about who had ordered the surveillance of Otto Otepka, and who had collected those surveillance tapes. It was not the “New York Times” or the “Washington Post” that produced the name of that “stranger.” Rather, the truth emerged in a Washington, D. C.-based weekly newsletter called the “Government Employees Exchange,” run by a man named Sidney Goldberg. It was Goldberg, a one-man editorial staff, who broke the story and solved the mystery.

In an extraordinary piece of investigative journalism, in the issue of the “Government Employees Exchange” dated September 4, 1968, Goldberg wrote that a source had come forward with the truth about who was behind the harassment and persecution of Otto Otepka. Goldberg learned that the Otepka surveillance tapes had been prepared by one Clarence Jerome Schneider, an electronics expert on Reilly's staff. They were delivered into the hands of none other than Bobby Kennedy's right-hand man, Walter Sheridan.

This same “knowledgeable source,” as Goldberg describes him, also identified Sheridan as “one of the chief contacts” for Robert F. Kennedy with International Investigators Incorporated. This firm, operating out of Indianapolis, was a “hush-hush” organization providing “industrial security services,” both to the federal government and to private employers. Among their specialties were “wiretap” operations. Outsiders called them “The Three Eyes,” Goldberg discovered. Employees used the name “The Five Eyes.” They were paid in “unvouchered funds” and provided with immunity from prosecution. So Justice Department records would never be able to reveal the role either Robert Kennedy or Walter Sheridan played in the surveillance of Otto Otepka.

Goldberg notes that although Sheridan was on the payroll of the Justice Department, Sheridan's office was physically located at the White House. “Through a series of interconnected transfers of funds,” Goldberg writes, “Walter Sheridan disposed over the personnel and currency of whole units of the Central Intelligence Agency.” This seems an exaggeration, but for the fact that Bobby Kennedy spent more of his time at his office at Langley, involved in CIA operations, than he did at Justice. Wire tap tapes, including “voice profiles,” made at the White House by the Secret Service and at the Department of State, were passed on to Sheridan, and retained in a separate facility.

Goldberg's source also reported that Bobby Kennedy had attempted to plant an anti-Hoffa article in “Life” magazine. This ploy was exposed in the “New York Times” on March 3, 1965. The source had discovered that the disgruntled Teamster whom Bobby planned to use against Hoffa was one Sam Baron, referred to as “Brown” in an exchange of letters between Hank Suydam of “Time/Life” in Washington and “Life” editor Edward K. Thompson.

Walter Sheridan did not miss Goldberg's extraordinary article. Incensed, Bobby's operative made a personal appearance at Goldberg's tiny office. Denying any involvement in the Otepka case, Sheridan demanded a complete retraction. He threatened Goldberg that he would sue him unless Goldberg furnished him with the name of his source. Goldberg refused. Goldberg held his ground.

A decade later, author Jim Hougan interviewed Goldberg for his acclaimed investigative book, “Spooks,” published in 1978. Hougan found Goldberg to be a frightened man, his newsletter having long since folded. Goldberg did reiterate to Hougan that Walter Sheridan was the “chief contact” between the “Five Eyes” and Robert Kennedy.

As a result of Hougan's interview with Goldberg, Hougan was able to contribute more details to the story of the Otepka tapes. Apparently, the tapes were sent first to CIA to eliminate background noise, then back to John Francis Reilly. It was Reilly himself who apparently passed the tapes to that “unidentified man in the corridors of the State Department.” This was Walter Sheridan. Goldberg's source also was aware that David Belisle, while he was a National Security Agency employee, had done “certain favors” for the Kennedys.

Goldberg had been a courageous and bold journalist, as witnessed by another article in the “Exchange” that exposed how, after the Bay of Pigs, the CIA's “New Team” infiltrated secret cooperating and liaison groups in the large foundations, banks and newspapers to influence U. S. domestic and foreign relations. Goldberg even named a “New York Times” executive vice-president, Harding Bancroft, as having been involved.

To Hougan, Goldberg seemed a shattered man. When Hougan asked to read Goldberg's Otepka files, Goldberg refused. Hougan begged Goldberg to at least give him the name of the source who had identified Sheridan. Goldberg refused this request as well, protecting his source to the end. Yet there was no question in Hougan's mind that Goldberg was telling him the truth. When Hougan later sought microfilms of the “Government Employees Exchange” weekly from the Library of Congress, he was told that they had been “misplaced” and were unavailable.

Over the years, Otto Otepka told me, he talked to Sidney Goldberg many times. He found Goldberg “a bit eccentric.” He was a man full of passion, but credible. Had he asked Goldberg for the name of the person who revealed that Walter Sheridan had taken possession of the surveillance tapes?

“You can't ask a newsman for his sources,” Otepka said.

The fragments of the story of what happened to Otto Otepka emerged slowly and incompletely. Only in the wake of press indignation about Otepka's harsh treatment did Senator Thomas J. Dodd add another piece to the puzzle of Bobby Kennedy's and Walter Sheridan's persistent obstruction of justice. Dodd admitted that he had called off four days of scheduled hearings during which the Senate subcommittee on Internal Security planned to question Edward Grady Partin about his relationship with Fidel Castro “because Bobby Kennedy told me to do so.”

Partin had already been reimbursed for his appearance when the hearing was canceled. Bobby and Sheridan had come far enough with Partin to make certain that he not be afforded any opportunity to change his mind about implicating Jimmy Hoffa.

Senator Dodd had elaborated. Bobby Kennedy told him that “he and the Justice Department had a personal interest in Partin and didn't want to have the hearings held…Bobby had been the Attorney General and you don't say no to him. He made the request a personal matter and I honored it.”

Otto Otepka drew the only conclusion available to him: “Bobby Kennedy still ensconced at Justice immediately following the death of his brother, wielded his power and sought the aid of his chief investigator, Walter Sheridan, to get what he was after, no matter how it was done.” The end, for Bobby, justified the means. It was in 1968 that Otepka finally realized that it was “the influence of [Bobby] Kennedy [that] caused the failure of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to call material witnesses like Schneider and prevented the thorough and timely resolution of my case.”

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Publication date: November 16, 2005; hardcover; 576 pages

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