The JFK 100

In 1979, RICHARD HELMS, director of Covert Operations in 1963, admitted under oath that CLAY SHAW had worked for the CIA.

 

In 1979, former CIA Director Richard Helms was deposed as a witness in a libel case related to Michael Canfield and A. J. Weberman's book, Coup d'état in America. Helms testified accurately that at "one time, as a businessman, [Clay Shaw] was one of the part-time contacts of the Domestic Contact Division."⁽¹⁾

Clay Shaw was indeed a contact of the Agency's Domestic Contact Service (DCS), from December 1948 to May 1956.⁽²⁾ During that time, Shaw was one of literally thousands of US citizens debriefed each year about their travels and contacts abroad.⁽³⁾ Given the goals and activities of his employer, the International Trade Mart, it would have been unusual had the CIA not sought information from some of its employees. (The wholly innocuous information Shaw provided DCS is now available for inspection at the National Archives.)⁽⁴⁾

Contacts are neither contract agents nor employees of the CIA; they have no more status with that agency than an eyewitness to a crime has with the local police department.⁽⁵⁾ As a rule, contacts are not paid,⁽⁶⁾ as indeed, Shaw was not.⁽⁷⁾ More relevantly, "contact" status can certainly not be related to the notorious exploits of the CIA's Covert Action arm, which conspiracy theorists have endeavored for decades to link to the Kennedy assassination.

Had Oliver Stone been interested in the facts of the matter, he could have easily found this out. He never tried.

NOTES:

1. Deposition of Richard McGarrah Helms, E. Howard Hunt, Plaintiff, v. Liberty Lobby, Inc., Defendant, No. 80-1121-Civ.-JWK, US District Court, Southern District of Florida, cited in Max Holland, "The Power of Disinformation: The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination," Studies in Intelligence, September 1, 2001, p. 26.

2. CIA Memorandum, June 20, 1967, "Memorandum No. 4: Garrison and the Kennedy Assassination"; Record No. 180-10143-10220, Agency File Number 29-04-01, CIA Segregated Collection.

3. "For more than ten years the Contact Division of the CIA's Office of Operations, with its network of field offices throughout the country, has been tapping this vast potential of information on behalf of the intelligence community. Since 1948 over forty thousand individuals and companies have supplied information ranging into every field of intelligence. Through this collection operation the community has at its disposal the expert analysis and commentary of the most knowledgeable people in the academic, scientific, professional and industrial fields." (Anthony F. Czajkowski, "Techniques of Domestic Intelligence Collection," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1959; reprinted in H. Bradford Westerfield, editor, Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal, 1955-1992 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995]; thanks to Jerry Shinley.) Some sources place the figure much higher, at 25,000 annually during the Cold War. (See for example Final Report of the Subcommittee on the Assassination of John F. Kennedy of the Select Committee on Assassinations, House of Representatives, p. 218; G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, Fatal Hour [New York: Berkley, 1992], p. xvii; Gerald Posner, Case Closed [New York: Random House, 1993], p. 86 fn.; Edward Jay Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles [New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992], p. 565.) DCS was later renamed the Domestic Collection Division, and is now called the National Resources Division.

4. Patricia Lambert, False Witness (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 204. Lambert writes, "Shaw's contacts with the CIA's Domestic Contact Service were summarized in a memorandum released by that agency in 1992; some of the reports based on Shaw's information were released in 1994. Shaw was first contacted by the CIA's New Orleans office in December 1948; between 1949 and May 25, 1956 (when Shaw ceased to be a contact), he was contacted a total of thirty-six times. Eight reports were written based on Shaw's information. Six of those were "on hand" and described in the 1992 memorandum. Three concerned a trip Shaw made in March through May, 1949, to the West Indies, Central America, and Northern South America; and a fourth concerned a 1951 trip to Central and South America and the Caribbean area. The fifth report advised that Shaw had leased to the "CSR government" space for merchandise display in New Orleans for one year beginning in April 1949. The sixth, in March 1952, concerned a letter to the public relations director of the International Trade Mart from a trade consultant to the Bonn Government (CIA document, "Subject: Clay L. Shaw [201-813493]," "Enclosure 21"; "Approved for release 1992 CIA Historical Review Program"; Lambert, p. 325 fn.). Two of Shaw's DCS reports were deemed by the Assassination Records Review Board to contain material still legitimately considered sensitive, and for the time being, summaries of their content have been made available.

5. "The DCS's primary function has traditionally been to collect intelligence from Americans without resorting to covert methods [i.e., espionage]. . . . The DCS's normal operating technique is to establish relationships with businessmen, scholars, tourists, and other travelers who have made trips abroad, usually to Eastern Europe or China. These people are asked to provide information voluntarily about what they have seen or heard on their journeys. Most often they are contacted by the agency after they have returned home, but occasionally, if the CIA hears that a particular person plans to visit, say, a remote part of the Soviet Union, the DCS will get in touch in advance and ask the traveler to seek out information on certain targets" (Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence [New York: Dell, 1989], p. 199.)

6. CIA Director William Colby once explained that the CIA "can collect foreign intelligence in the United States, including the requesting [sic] American citizens to share with their Government certain information they may know about foreign situations, and we have a service that does this, and I am happy to say a very large number of American citizens have given us some information. We do not pay for that information. We can protect their proprietary interest and even protect their names if necessary, if they would rather not be exposed as the source of that information." (Marchetti and Marks, pp. 198-99.)

7. An internal CIA report states flatly, "We have never remunerated [Shaw]." (HSCA notes on Clay Shaw's CIA file, referring to "2/10/69--TWX #0002 to contacts/Washington, 10/13/67" [Record No. 180-10143-10221, CIA Segregated Collection, Box 19]; Lambert, p. 325 fn. 14).