Over the decades we have come to learn – and much has been written – about the CIA’s engagement with DA Garrison’s investigation of President Kennedy’s murder. Generally that writing has focused on the CIA, its Garrison Working Group (formed in September 1967) and the fact that Garrison’s ultimate target in his prosecution was Clay Shaw (who in the 1950s had been a source for the CIA, collecting information domestically and in international travel for the Trade Mart in New Orleans).

There has been much less attention to the full chronology and backstory to the CIA’s involvement. A story which began with the very early involvement of LBJ and the Justice Department. The backstory actually began in December, 1966 well before the first February, 1967 newspaper reports of Garrison’s effort. It began with an effort by Johnny Roselli to promote the story of a Cuban assassination team killing the president.

This backstory is examined in detail in Chapter 9 of Someone Would Have Talked (paperback edition, 2010) but, in brief, it all began well before the first media coverage of Garrison’s investigation. And it began with a sensational outreach by John Roselli, a participant in the CIA’s efforts to kill Fidel Castro, efforts which began in 1960 and extended into 1963.

Roselli funneled his conspiracy revelations though a former FBI agent, previously cleared by the CIA for operational activities, who had become a powerful DC lawyer, with excellent media contacts. Those contacts took the story to columnists Jack Anderson and his associate Drew Person. Pearson began developing his own story on a Castro plot but, as a close friend of Johnson, related Roselli’s information to the President on January 16, 1967.

The story was in circulation at high levels in D.C. when, on Monday, February 20th, Attorney General Clark called President Johnson, advising Johnson of the Garrison investigation and that alarming fact that Hale Boggs had related to Clark that Garrison was telling people Johnson had known about the assassination and a conspiracy. During that call the two men also discussed Roselli’s information about a Cuban plot.

Clark (and the DOJ) began following the both the Roselli story and the Garrison investigation, information Johnson on March 2, with Clark relating to the President that a radio station had a team inside Cuba following Roselli’s leads which linked Oswald to a team of Cuban exiles captured by Castro and turned on President Kennedy. By March the FBI was also reporting to Johnson on the CIA’s activities in organizing a plot using gangsters to assassination Fidel Castro – providing the motive for Roselli’s ‘blow back’ story. That led to a series of efforts by Johnson to pressure the CIA for information on that project – and serious push back from the CIA in providing any details.

By summer 1967, the Attorney General, the FBI an the CIA had all become focused on DA Garrison’s investigations, the President’s concerns about it and the fact that Garrison was opening the door to a great many things that nobody wanted public – including what Anderson had written about in March of that year as a ‘political H Bomb’ related to American assassination plots against a foreign nation’s leader.

By September, 1967, when the CIA convened its first Garrison Group meeting, not only had one of its own contacts (Clay Shaw) been charged by Garrison, but Shaw’s own lawyers had contacted the DOJ for assistance, requesting direct contact with the CIA.

Shaw’s lawyers had themselves provided a list of individuals they felt would be named in the trial – a list sufficient to provoke remarks during the meeting about how many individuals connected to the CIA in one fashion or the other were in play. The CIA’s Director of counter intelligence even stated his opinion that Garrison might be able to obtain a conviction in the New Orleans case, something that would have had extreme consequences for the Warren Commission’s (and Johnson’s credibility).

The rest of the meeting’s discussion, continued in successive meetings and actions to block access to individuals and information by Garrison’s investigation. There was also a stated concern that while the Agency had documented its own contacts with Cuban’s it had limited information on what might have been going on inside the Cuban exile groups.

Much has been made of the statement during the first CIA group meeting about a potential conviction of Shaw for conspiracy, with the assumption that it reveals the CIA had full knowledge of an actual conspiracy Shaw’s involvement. A counter argument might be made that the concern was coming from Shaw’s on attorney’s as part of their effort to pressure DOJ and the CIA for support. Certainly it would be strange for such an actual statement confirming CIA knowledge of conspiracy to show up in a document later approved for release by the Agency.

If you are interested in further discussion of all this, you might want to listen to the following radio interview: https://aarclibrary.org/larry-hancock-a- political-h-bomb/