Long Island man at the center of the CIA cover-up of JFK’s killing

Historians continue to pore through thousands of once-classified documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. While no “smoking gun” revelations have emerged from the recently released tranche of papers, a Long Islander does figure prominently in a related CIA cover-up that is part of the long-running national drama.

Allen Dulles was living in Lloyd Neck when President Lyndon B. Johnson called on Nov. 29, 1963, seven days after JFK’s murder, asking the former CIA chief to be on the seven-member Warren Commission investigating the assassination. It was an odd request because JFK had replaced Dulles following the CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba. Yet Dulles would play a significant role in shaping the Warren Commission probe that helps explain why questions and conspiracy theories linger decades later.

Rather than expose some nefarious plot, the documents show that many in the U.S. government were involved in the oldest bureaucratic cover-up of all, commonly known as CYA (“cover your a**”), after Kennedy’s killing. Both the CIA and FBI were concerned about being blamed for failing to stop alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been on their radar screen before the president’s fatal visit to Dallas. Documents previously released show Oswald had visited both the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico two months before JFK’s murder.

The documents also show Dulles wanted to steer the Commission away from the CIA’s top-secret plot in the early 1960s to overthrow Castro, which included Mafia figures recruited as assassins.

Former President Gerald Ford, then a Republican congressman on the Warren Commission, later criticized Dulles for not disclosing this anti-Castro plot to his fellow Commission members. “He certainly should have because of his previous responsibilities,” Ford said in 2003. “At the time we thought we did a thorough job. Whether we slipped up on this particular aspect, history can only come up to its own conclusion.”

The JFK documents suggest Dulles wanted to influence the public’s reaction to the Warren Commission’s findings even before their release.

According to FBI documents dated early 1964, Dulles leaked information to an old World War II spy friend Ernest Cuneo, amid the Warren Commission probe. Both Dulles and Cuneo had worked together for America’s first spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services, during the war. Cuneo wanted to write an inside-the-Warren-probe piece for the Saturday Evening Post magazine, using Dulles as his main source, but then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover refused to cooperate with Cuneo.

Cuneo’s story was never published, and these FBI documents about Dulles are the only known evidence of a leak by a Warren Commission member to any person outside the government.

A memo by Hoover mentioned internal controversies within the Warren panel and U.S. agencies like the FBI about who might be responsible for security lapses leading to JFK’s murder. Hoover said federal Judge Edward Tamm stated that “Mr. Cuneo apparently has talked to Allen Dulles, who says the report is going to be a complete exoneration of the FBI for any responsibility because [sic] of the Secret Service’s claim that the FBI should have notified them about Lee Harvey Oswald being there and of his background, et cetera.”

For historians, these JFK documents provide many lessons about Cold War spycraft. Perhaps most significant were the bureaucratic efforts by the CIA and FBI to avoid any blame in the death of a president.

This guest essay reflects the views of Thomas Maier, a former Newsday reporter and author of “THE INVISIBLE SPY: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II.”