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[  ]   18 “I Share That Guilt” November 22 helped make Win Scott a legend in the annals of the CIA. The Mexico City station’s handling of the assassination and its aftermath enhanced Win’s already considerable reputation in the upper reaches of the U.S. government. Kennedy’s murder had exposed the sorry state of the Secret Service, the Dallas police, and the FBI, all of which failed in their duties to protect the president. By contrast, the performance of the Mexico City station, while not perfect, was a matter of immediate pride inside the agency. Few knew that Win had helped perpetrate a wide-ranging cover-up of CIA operations around Oswald that, as it came to light in coming years, would enmesh the agency in conspiratorial suspicions. On December 16 the chief of the Western Hemisphere division, J. C. King, thanked Win for the station’s assistance in the assassination investigation, praising “the really outstanding performance of Mexico City’s major assets and the speed, precision and perception with which the data was forwarded. Your LIENVOY data, the statements of Sylvia Duran, and your analyses were major factors in the clarification of the case, blanking out the really ominous specter of foreign backing.” Win stashed a copy of King’s commendation in his office safe, along with other tapes and documents that he valued highly. King’s choice of words reflected Washington’s priorities in the weeks after the assassination. The “blanking out” of possible foreign involvement was at the very top of the priority list. For Jim Angleton, the priority was even more specific: ensuring that the Warren Commission learned the absolute minimum about the Cuban “ i s h a r e t h a t g u i l t ”    [  ] angle to the Oswald story and the way the CIA had handled it. Angleton’s first step was to marginalize John Whitten, chief of the Mexico and Central America desk, whom Dick Helms had assigned to review all the agency’s Oswald files. Brilliant if overbearing, Whitten had a track record of success in complex counterespionage investigations. With a staff of thirty people working up to eighteen hours a day, he read every report related to Oswald, no matter how ludicrous or trivial. As he drafted his findings, Angleton grew annoyed. “In the early stage Mr. Angleton was not able to influence the course of the investigation, which was a source of great bitterness to him,” Whitten said in secret sworn testimony in 1978. “He was extremely embittered that I was entrusted with the investigation and he wasn’t. Angleton then sandbagged me as quickly as he could.” Whitten soon discovered that he, like Win, had been cut out of the Oswald loop by his superiors. In early December 1963, he attended a meeting at the Justice Department and came away stunned by what he had not been told. “For the first time I learned a myriad of vital facts about Oswald’s background which apparently the FBI had known throughout the initial investigation and had not communicated to me,” he said. “For the first time I learned that the FBI was in possession of diary-like material which Oswald had had in his possession and was found after the assassination. I learned for the first time that Oswald was the man who had taken a pot shot at General Edwin Walker, two key facts in the entire case.” “None of this had been passed to us,” he said. Whitten was specific about the information denied him. “Oswald’s involvement with the pro-Castro movement in the United States was not at all surfaced to us [meaning him and his staff] in the first weeks of the investigation.” Whitten had never received the FBI reports on Oswald from Dallas and New Orleans, nothing from the AMSPELL files on the DRE. All Whitten knew about Oswald’s encounters with the Cuban students in New Orleans came from the Washington Post. When Whitten complained to Helms at a meeting on Christmas Eve 1963, the deputy director relieved him of all JFK responsibilities on the spot. “Helms wanted someone to conduct the investigation who was in bed with the FBI,” Whitten said bluntly. “I was not and Angleton was.” As Angleton took over as the agency’s liaison to the Warren Commission, he made sure its investigators never saw a key piece of paper: John Whitten ’s November 23 memo on how Tom Karamessines had ordered Win not to...

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