Corruption of Blood (50 page)

“To understand the next phase, you have to know that every intelligence agency is plagued by volunteers—individuals who wish to become spies. Virtually all of them are useless for real intelligence work, unstable, maniacal, lazy, or criminal types for the most part, but some of them can be used as pigeons, that is, as false members of a spy network who can distract the attention of counterintelligence operatives, and can be betrayed to them with misleading or damaging information in their heads. Lists are kept of such potential pigeons at foreign CIA stations; I began to keep such a list of American citizens for PXK.”

“Oswald,” said Karp.

“Indeed, Oswald was precisely the type, but of course, I was long gone from the CIA by the time Oswald entered its purview, during his time as a marine in Japan, in 1958. Nevertheless, PXK was still alive. Lists were still maintained, and a marine spouting Marxist propaganda at a top-secret radar base could not have escaped the attention of those who maintained them. Bureaucracy, even invisible bureaucracy, has considerable inertia. The man you know as Maurice Bishop found Oswald’s name and looked him up in Texas in 1962, and cultivated him, using some of our old assets in the White Russian community.”

“Okay, we know you knew Bishop from way back,” Marlene said. “How did he suddenly surface with reference to Oswald and PXK?”

“Oh, Bishop was quite ready to kill Kennedy from the moment the Bay of Pigs invasion was betrayed. He simply didn’t know how to carry it off. He came to me and I told him about the PXK plan and how to find out who was on the current list. There were several potential candidates, but Oswald was by far the best: the infantile Marxism, the megalomania, the propensity for violence, the Soviet defection, even the family link to organized crime. He was perfect. The final joy was when Bishop met Oswald and realized that the man bore a close resemblance to … I believe you know him as William Caballo. It was obvious that we had the germ of a perfect PXK operation.

“The next step was to get Oswald deep into the Cuban exile orbit. He was told that he was being prepared to assassinate Fidel Castro, then we switched him to Kennedy. In fact, he did not care at all whom he was going to shoot. He was in it for the thrill. At last he was being taken seriously by important people and embarking on large undertakings. He was told, of course, to maintain his leftist connections, which he did to the extent he was capable of performing any assigned task. The story Bishop gave him was that as a good leftist, it would be easy for him to get close to Castro, as if even the most incompetent Communist counterintelligence apparat would have taken more than three minutes to see through him. And the Cubans, as poor Bishop learned, are far from incompetent.

“Bishop assembled the other members of the team and gave them the operational names by which you know them. A romantic, Bishop, like so many of the people who entered the CIA just after the war. Of course, PXK gave him the chess theme, so I suppose I am responsible for that bit of fun. The assassination was planned and the necessary arrangements were made, and then everything fell apart. A complete failure.”

“What!” Marlene and Karp spoke in unison.

“I mean, of course, the first attempt. In Miami, 1961. Oswald had wandered off somewhere, and missed the pickup. Bishop was in a rare state. He wanted to scratch Oswald and start afresh with somebody else, but I dissuaded him. I recall telling him that we would never again find somebody with so many of the characteristics we wanted in a lone, deranged assassin. Except the ability to fire a rifle accurately, of course, which we did not in this case require. I suggested Dallas as the next venue. This was in June of sixty-three, just after the Dallas speech was scheduled.”

“But Oswald only got his job in the book depository in October,” said Karp.

“That’s right. The book depository wasn’t part of the original plan. We were exploring ways to work the thing at the airport, or the Trade Mart where he was giving the speech. I had the group up here for a couple of weeks in late August, early September, to work out alternate plans. It was quite professional, with little models of the various buildings and escape routes. Oswald was very impressed. He stayed on for some special training, we called it, in which drinking and willing ladies figured prominently. During that period, Caballo went to Mexico City. We cut Oswald loose on October third, and he went back to Dallas. He wanted money, which we refused to give him. He had to fit into his background we said, he had to get a regular job. He didn’t like that much, but we knew that with serious money in his pocket, he might decide to do anything—go to China, or Australia, or God knows what. As I said, an extremely unstable young man. During the next month, of course, Caballo was also in Dallas, being Oswald, shooting his rifle, for example, buying ammunition for it, making himself memorable, as he had on the bus trip and at the Communist embassies in Mexico.”

“Oswald gave his rifle to Caballo?” asked Karp in disbelief.

“Of course not. Ah, a clarification. Caballo and Oswald had no contact, of course. Bishop kept them strictly apart at the guerrilla operations and during training. It was Turm and Bishop who acted as intermediaries throughout all of this. Turm got the rifle; he admired the weapon and said he wanted to have it checked out by a gunsmith. Oswald was ridiculously proud of that piece of junk. It also gave us the premise for the real assassination weapons.”

“Real … ?”

“Yes. Caballo procured four mint M1938 Mannlicher-Carcano rifles from the same series as Oswald’s own. He cut the barrels down, tuned them up nearly to match standards, and fitted them with folding stocks and high-quality optics. The finished weapons were works of art, a little over twenty inches long and concealable under a jacket when they were folded.”

“But the ballistics still wouldn’t match Oswald’s rifle,” Karp objected. He realized he was treating Blaine like just another Kennedy nut with a theory.

Blaine seemed to realize this and gave him a long, humorous stare. “No, but they’d be close, perhaps close enough for government work, as the saying goes, and of course the ammunition was exactly the same as Oswald’s. In any case, while this was going on, Oswald got the job in the book depository, in mid-October I think, and shortly after that, the White House added plans for a motorcade to the trip. Bishop, through his sources, was able to get preliminary plans for the route, and when we saw where they intended to go, everything fell into place. The other plans were immediately abandoned and we settled on a shooting from the book depository. Perhaps that was foolish, but I balanced the possibility of something going amiss in a more spontaneous plan against the overwhelming advantage of having the shooting done from Oswald’s place of work.

“In the morning, Oswald dutifully brought his silly rifle in his homemade paper sack. The plan called for him to shoot from the second-floor window, from which he had an easier escape route. Just after he arrived, however, Carrera walked in and told him that the plan had been canceled, that the FBI had become suspicious of him, and that he was to hide his rifle on the sixth floor behind some cartons, lie low, and await orders.”

“He
bought
that?”

“Oh, yes. He was already nervous from his earlier contretemps with Agent Hosty. It was plausible.”

“Not to mention that he was basically a paranoid maniac to begin with,” added Marlene.

“How true,” said Blaine. “In any case he did as he was told. Carrera stayed on the second floor and went to the window.”

“Nobody noticed him?” asked Karp.

“Another Latino man in work clothes in a book warehouse? This was not the Federal Reserve, Mr. Karp; people were coming in and out with deliveries all the time. Caballo came in about eleven and went to the sixth floor. He talked to no one, but several of Oswald’s co-workers saw him and accepted him as Oswald. He removed Oswald’s rifle from its bag and arranged the bag and rifle artistically in the places where they were to be found by the police. He placed three spent cartridges from Oswald’s rifle, brass that he’d secured at the firing range, on the floor.”

“Why three?” asked Karp.

Blaine shrugged. “I have no idea. He was improvising by then. Perhaps he and Carrera agreed that they would only need three shots. Now to the event: the motorcade arrived and made the turn onto Elm Street. Carrera fired first, striking Kennedy in the upper back. Kennedy moved in reaction to that shot, and that threw Caballo’s aim off and he hit Governor Connally instead. A few seconds after that, he fired again and hit Kennedy in the back of the head. Carrera folded his weapon, stuck it under his jacket, and walked out the back. He went one street over, where Guel was waiting for him in a station wagon. Caballo picked up his own spent cases and walked down the stairs and out the back too, with the weapon under his jacket. Unfortunately he was seen doing it, which made for some confusion afterward, since Oswald was at that time having his famous Coke in the second-floor lunchroom. Of course, as soon as Oswald learned that the president—not Castro—had really been shot, he realized that something was desperately wrong. He simply left and went home, without even trying to take his rifle. Naturally, Bishop, who had excellent connections with the Dallas Police Force, was able to leak Oswald’s description and address to them. Unfortunately, they dispatched Officer Tippet.”

“Why unfortunately,” Marlene asked.

“I mean unfortunately for Tippet. Tippet and Oswald knew each other. They were rather birds of a feather, in fact: tough-talking real men with guns. They used to meet at Jack Ruby’s place. Oswald had armed himself and was wandering aimlessly. He now must have understood that all his delusions had come to nothing; he was simply being set up as a fall guy for the assassination. When Tippet approached him, Oswald panicked and killed him.”

“So Tippet wasn’t sent to assassinate Oswald?” asked Karp.

“Not by us, at any rate. No, we had Ruby set up to do that from the beginning. I thought an assassin assassin, so to speak, with organized-crime connections, was a nice touch. The last little item was that Turm went up to Parkland and dropped the magic bullet on a stretcher lying in the hallway. That was, of course, one of the errors; he should have used a banged-up slug; he had plenty, from his target practice with Oswald’s rifle. The other error was the shot from the second floor. A proper autopsy would have recognized that this shot was angled upward and could not possibly have come from the sixth floor.”

“What about the autopsy?” Karp asked. “Did you fiddle with that too?”

“No, in fact, we simply trusted to the incompetence and confusion of the federal government, a never-failing friend. The Secret Service, the FBI, and of course, our own CIA had all been very derelict, which helped prove my theory. Once a plausible patsy was presented to them, moreover, one who had all the kaleidoscopic qualities of Lee Harvey Oswald, every responsible party would join in the effort to enhance evidence pointing to Oswald and suppress any which did not or which pointed back at the agency in question. And so it proved; as you should know, it is proving so yet.”

Blaine relaxed back onto his pillow and closed his eyes. He looked utterly spent. Karp and Marlene waited for him to resume, but instead a dark woman in a nurse’s uniform strode out onto the terrace, nodded at the two of them, smiled at Blaine, and said, “It’s time, Mr. Blaine.” She knelt and released the brakes on the bed, and switched on a motor. Blaine said, “I’m sorry I am unable to continue for the moment. I have to get my oil changed. Perhaps this would be a good time for you to have lunch.”

The mechanized bed rolled off, guided by the nurse. A Mexican in a white coat brought out a tray with an assortment of sandwiches and fruit and set it down on the little table.

They ate without much appetite, speaking little, as if the place were listening, as if Blaine were still there.

An hour passed. The nurse rolled Blaine back to the terrace. He asked how their lunch had been and whether they wanted anything. The treatment he had received seemed to have exhausted him even more. He was speaking very slowly now, with long pauses between thoughts.

“Where were we? Ruby, of course, did his part the following day. He had cancer, you know, and we took care of his family. By that time, the group had scattered. The Dallas police and the FBI combined to make a botch of the evidence. The seed was planted for a thousand conspiracies, of which our little impromptu would appear as just one. I must say, however, that you came as close as anyone to ferreting us out. Bishop was quite beside himself when he learned you had the film and were on to Mr. Mosca.”

Karp ignored the implied compliment. “What about the grassy knoll shot?” he demanded. “Who did that?”

“That? If there ever was such a shot, I’m as much in the dark about it as you. Have you ever seen a bullfight? No? Well, on occasion, people in the stands become so overwhelmed by the event that they leap out into the arena and try to work the bull themselves. They call them
espontáneos.
That’s what the Grassy Knoll shot was, I believe, an
espontáneo,
one of the many citizens of Dallas who wanted Kennedy dead. Perhaps it was another conspiracy; we certainly didn’t have any fake Secret Service men about. Or perhaps it was an
actual
lone nut.” He uttered a hacking chuckle. “Ironic, when you come to think of it. All that trouble, my precious PXK operation, the clever plans, and all we had to do was sit back and watch some idiot Birchers with a deer rifle do the job. In fact, if I were still hale, I could take you on a round of bars and barbecue joints in south Dallas and find half a dozen men who’d confess to being the trigger man on the grassy knoll. It’s a wonder that anyone in Dealey Plaza survived the day.”

Karp asked a few more questions, which Blaine answered with declining strength, about the murders committed as part of the cover-up. Blaine acknowledged them, but did not seem to know the details. He assumed they had been ordered by Bishop and carried out by Caballo.

“What about Gaiilov?” Marlene asked.

“Ah, yes. Very sad, and very coincidental. Do you know that just this morning poor Armand took his own life by means of a shotgun blast to the head?”