For
more current information in defense of Otto Otepka see:
by:
Mellen, Joan
From
The Ordeal of Otto Otepka - Chapter XVI Open Sesame Otto
Otepka was born in Chicago on May 6, 1915 of
Czech-born immigrant parents. His father had been a blacksmith and worked in America at a forge. He could offer his brilliant
son little in the way of material support. Otepka worked his way through
college and law school. After a stint in Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian
Conservation Corps, in July 1942 he began his career in personnel security work with the Civil Service Commission as an
investigator on the look-out for Nazis and crypto-fascists. With an
interruption for service in the Navy, after the war he continued with the Civil
Service Commission in the security field.
IT
IS, PERHAPS, ONE OF THE CROWNING IRONIES OF THE LONG STRUGGLE
between totalitarianism and democracy that a group of United
States senators sought to alert the nation to
its rapidly deteriorating internal security at almost the precise moment that America was
faced with its most critical public confrontation with the Soviet
Union in the 1960's.
In October 1962, the
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, after nearly two years of exhaustive
hearings, approved the release of its first report on the Otepka case and State
Department security. Almost at once the report was smothered under the
avalanche of alarming news erupting from Cuba.
The man who first sounded the alarm on
the Soviet missile buildup on Cuba was (Republican) Kenneth B. Keating of New
York. (Keating
labeled Kennedy as a "carpetbagger" and was told of the missiles by Clair Booth Luce, who also had knowledge
of Oswald.) Two years later Keating was to be defeated in his campaign
for reelection by Robert F. Kennedy. But in that autumn of 1962 the silver-haired
Senator withstood the withering scorn heaped upon him by the Kennedy
Administration and turned it into his finest hour, an hour which unfortunately
his constituents soon forgot.
On the very last page of the
subcommittee's 202-page report, Senator Keating referred in a special statement
to the "breakdown" in the transmission of "vital intelligence to
top echelon State Department officials" that caused the policy failure
which permitted Fidel Castro's ascension to power. With an obvious eye on the massive
Soviet attempt to trans- form Cuba into
a bristling nuclear-weapons base, Keating regretfully remarked:
There is no evidence that any steps
have been taken to close this intelligence gap. On the contrary, the highly
questionable security practices of the [State] Department described in the
report suggest that we have not learned from the mistakes of the past.
The subcommittee report was broken into
three overlapping parts. The first dealt with Otto Otepka's difficulties in the
Office of Security; the second covered the deliberate subversion of law in the
issuance of pass- ports to Communists, and the third traced William Arthur
Wieland's mysterious career.
State Department officials were sharply
criticized for their handling of the Wieland matter, although Senator Dodd,
loyal Democrat always, strained hard in that election year to exonerate
President Kennedy and Secretary Rusk for their cover-up of Senor Montenegro.
However, even Dodd was almost rough on Rusk in a few places.
In a highly unusual move, the
subcommittee demanded that Otpeka be put back in
command of the twilight war against subversives in the State Department, a war
that had been suspended by tacit truce since Dean Rusk's elevation to Secretary
of State. The report said the committee urges that, as a minimum, Mr. Otepka be
restored to his position of Deputy Director of the Office of Security, where h
born of many years of highly responsible experience as a security officer, will
be of inestimable value to the Department of State, and not less importantly,
to the security of this country."
Significantly, the report was
unanimously signed by all nine members of the Senate subcommittee, five
Democrats and four Republicans. Except
for Dodd, all the Democrats were from the South-Chairman Eastland of Mississippi, Olin
Johnston of South Carolina, Sam
Ervin of North Carolina and
John McClellan of Arkansas. But
the Republicans represented a broad cross section of their party. In addition
to conservatives, Everett Dirksen, the minority leader, and Nebraska's Roman
Hruska, there was the New
York moderate, Ken Keating, and Hugh Scott
of Pennsylvanian increasingly identified with the most Liberal fringe of the GOP.
The Senators were particularly upset about
Secretary Rusk manipulation of security waivers. Rather pointedly, they singled
out Harland Cleveland's entry into State on a backdated waiver without even a
rudimentary name check with the FBI or other agencies. However, the Senators ~
revealed nothing of Cleveland's
interest in "getting Alger Hiss back into government." Nor did they
delve, even superficially, into the Assistant Secretary's many other attempts
to protect and promote security risks.
The subcommittee was deeply disturbed,
as it should have been, about a State Department effort to "monitor all
contacts" employees had with ! the
people's elected representatives on Capitol Hill. In a clumsy memorandum, Jack
Kennedy's former White House aide, Frederick Dutton, had ordered that
Department officials report "any meeting, telephone call, or social
contact they have with members of the Congress or Congressional staffs."!
Dutton had issued the order in February
1962. But the subcommittee found out about it, and the State Department, at
that time still somewhat sensitive to Congressional criticism, promptly
rescinded the order when the Senators protested. (It was put back into effect
at a later date.)
The Senate report reserved some of its
most blistering criticism for the State Department's successful attempt to set
itself above the law, the Congress, and even the Supreme Court in helping known
Communists travel on U.S.
passports. As knowledgeable Intelligence people had warned, this bit of
arrogance actually made the United State
an exporter of Communist
revolution, especially to Asia, Africa, and Latin
America.
Frances Knight, the petite but iron-willed Director
of the U.S. Passport Office, played much the same role on this front that
Otepka did in personnel security. And for her pains in striving to uphold the
law she was harassed and buffeted about almost as callously as the man in SY.
Miss Knight had taken charge of the Passport Office in 1955. It had long been in a state of hopeless
confusion, but Frances Knight , with the help of the
Office's able general counsel, Robert Johnson, had introduced modern management
methods, and in short order the shop was operating with surprising efficiency.
The waiting time for most passports was cut as much as a month, and sometimes
more, to a few days.
Robert D. Johnson was listed in Who's Who in the CIA:
"Born: October 7, 1926, Languages: German; 1944 to 1946 Captain in CIC of U.S. Army; from 1951 in Department of State; 1955 Chief of Intelligence Reporting Section, Department of State. Opa: Washington." The State Department Biographic Register indicated Robert D. Johnson became Chief of the Passport Legal Division in 1957. In 1962 he became the Chief Counsel of the Passport Division. Robert D. Johnson told Frances Knight: was not satisfied with the implication in Mr. Rando's (I knew Mr. Rando fairly well - Joe Payne) memorandum that we did NOT have a catch card on OSWALD. No one knows for sure whether we did or did not, and the making of the flat statement has caused many more questions than it has answered." [DOS RDJ to FGK 3.27.64] (These were people I worked with for over two years)
Equally important, Miss Knight insisted
on observing regulations which forbade passports for members of the Communist
conspiracy. (Of course the most important question I
was ever asked was, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the
Communist Party? Have you ever
affiliated with any member of the Communist Party?) Two Secretaries of State, Dean Acheson and Foster Dulles, had issued bans against the
worldwide wanderings of America subversives.
Moreover, the 1950 Internal Security Act was quite explicit in making it a criminal
offense for any State Department official to issue passports to individuals
who they had reason to believe were involved in Communist activities.
The Supreme Court, which has done its
part in undermining internal security laws, complicated the passport ban with
typically tortured rulings. In a 1958 decision it held that the right to travel
was a basic American liberty which could not be denied without due process of
law. Then, on October
10, 1961, it partially reversed itself by upholding the Subversive
Activities Control Board order requiring the Communist Party to register as a
subversive organization.
The Court's decision made it, among
other things, immediately unlawful, under Section 6 (b) of the Internal
Security Act, for a Communist to use a U.S.
passport. Any Communist could still sue
through the courts for a passport, but in doing so he would necessarily expose
his own and his comrades' underground activities. "At long last,;' the
subcommittee report said, "it appeared the United States had a
litigation-tested statute providing a method by which travel of Communist Party
members could be curtailed."
Amazingly, the Supreme Court decision
was soon subverted, mot by the Communist Party, but by
a small group of State and. Justice Department lawyers headed by Abram Chayes, Andreas Lowenfeld, Abba
Schwartz, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Walter Yeagley. Personally
approved by Dean Rusk on January
9, 1962, a new set of passport regulations drafted by this group
gave Communists the right to “confront” the individuals who identified them as
party members.
This had the effect, as the Senate
report noted, of "nullifying the law and facing the U.S.
government with the problem of either permitting the Communists and their attorneys virtually free access to the confidential files of
the FBI, the CIA, and other
investigative agencies, or issuing passports to Communists notwithstanding the
prohibition now in effect.
Frances
Knight and the Passport Office were placed in the impossible position of being
forced to grant passports to Communists even though she
and her staff knew they were violating the law and could be subject to
criminal prosecution. When Miss Knight and Bob Johnson testified before the
Senate subcommittee to this effect, their boss, Abba Schwartz, the new
Administrator of the Bureau of Security & Consular Affairs, began a long
campaign of harassment designed to drive them from their posts.
To cover the legal niceties, Chayes, Lowenfeld, et al., got
Rusk to set up a new Board of Passport Appeals.
The board was comprised of senior State Department officials who were
under order to remain deliberately ignorant of the cases they were to pass
on. In weight each case, they were
expressly forbidden to use FBI and
other Intelligence files. All they could consider was the "public
record"-newspaper stories and the like.
The board's intentional ignorance did
not help Frances Knight out of her predicament. Whether she liked it or not,
she had acquired considerable familiarity with the secret records of hundreds
of undercover Communists. Now, however, she was compelled to forget her
knowledge.
"As the issuing officer,"
Miss Knight told the subcommittee, "I am supposed to tailor my 'reason to
believe that the applicant is a member of a Communist organization' to data
which can be made public regard- less of how much classified information is
produced by the FBI or other agencies of government to the effect that the
individual is a dangerous Communist. ...
"I
maintain that no one can do this in good conscience," Miss Knight went on.
"This places me in a difficult position between the law and the
government's expert legal advisors who interpret the law.
"It is a
fact that under the present regulations, the more treacherous and vicious and
destructive the individual may be, the less likely it is that he will be denied
a passport. "
Both Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department
and Dean Rusk's Foggy Bottom brigade had implied through news leaks that the
State Department was going to crack down on Communist travel. But Miss Knight
charged in her Senate testimony that the public was being deliberately
"misled." "There appears
to be no realization," she said, "that the few (Communist)
functionaries who may be caught in this very ineffective net are relatively
unimportant." As the subcommittee report pointed out, the really dangerous
espionage agents have no public records which could be judged by Secretary
Rusk's monastic board.
Abram Chayes
thought Miss Knight was worrying herself needlessly about her dilemma. All she
had to do, he contended, was to brainwash herself of her prior knowledge about
Communist spies and saboteurs. "Brainwash" was not the word Chayes used. In fact he objected to it vigorously. But
Roger Jones openly admitted it was possible to "brainwash" a person
through "administrative order," and Jones, Chayes,
and other State Department officials made it abundantly plain that is just what
they wanted Miss Knight to do to herself.
Chayes
maintained that "a person who had acted under orders of a legitimate
superior would not be committing a crime. " This, of course, was exactly
the same rationale employed by Nazi underlings when they herded thousands of
prisoners into the gas ovens at Dachau and Buchenwald. But
the similarity didn't trouble Mr. Chayes, a former
professor at Harvard Law School who
had undoubtedly drilled his students in the same kind of amoral legal
convolutions.
Besides, Chayes
contended, it was the Secretary of State who was ultimately responsible for the
new passport regulations, and if anyone' was to be charged with violating the
law, it would be he. This was
reassuring. No one really expected the
Justice Department, which had to be the prosecuting agency, to bring criminal
charges against Dean Rusk.
Although the Senate subcommittee didn't
know it at the time, the man who had pushed most strenuously for by-passing the
law via the ersatz passport regulations was the Attorney General, Robert F.
Kennedy. Not only did he go all out for bestowing U.S.
passports on American Communists, Bobby also made it possible for foreign
comrades to travel at will within the United
States.
An admiring Arthur Schlesinger
revealed Bobby's role in considerable detail in A Thousand Days. Bobby, Schlesinger says, was "active on questions of visas
and travel restrictions. The basic immigration law excluded politically suspect
aliens from the country unless a waiver could be secured from the Department of
Justice. ...Robert Kennedy thought the system injurious to the national
interest, granted waivers whenever the State Department asked for them and, if
the Department hesitated, often spurred it on to make the application. "
Schlesinger adds that "the
Attorney General also strongly supported the move within the executive branch
to remove restrictions on American travel to China, Albania and
other forbidden lands." The people
who first recommended lifting the passport limitations, according to Schlesinger, were Averell
Harriman and George Ball, though they discreetly decided it would be wise to
keep Cuba on
the proscribed list for the time being.
But Bobby Kennedy "went even
further than the internal State Department proposal and favored lifting
restrictions on travel to Cuba as well,"
Schlesinger says. "It seemed to him preposterous
to prosecute students who had a desire to see the Castro regime in action. 'Why shouldn't they go?' he once said. 'If I
were twenty-one years old, that's what I would like to do this summer."
Though the late President Kennedy's
ardent admirers might find it difficult to believe, Jack was just as strong as brother Bobby for the new open-door visa policy. As Schlesinger puts it, the President "was vigorously of
the same mind." Jack told Abba Schwartz that he was "tired of the
impression of the United States as a
sort of police state, obsessed with security. ...It continued to enrage him to
read in the newspapers that a distinguished foreigner invited to the United
States had been turned down by a minor
consular official." The White
House, like State and Justice, invariably took steps to overrule the men in the
consulates who were trying to uphold the law.
Jack Kennedy apparently preferred not to
see that his position was analogous to inviting the termites to come on in and
chew the house down, while at the same time loosing our own home-grown termites
on the houses of all our neighbors in Latin America and
elsewhere.
The effect of the Kennedy brothers'
passport and visa policies was quickly felt in every country in the Free World
and in the colonies and newly emerging semi-states of Africa as
well. Terrorists like Holden Roberto,
who with the alleged aid of Bobby Kennedy's friend Frank Montero had touched off the
slaughter in Angola, were
invited to use the United
States as a base for their deadly activities.
Lionized by American diplomats at cocktail parties in New York and Washington
when he returned from his inhuman work in Africa, Roberto sought, and found,
financial support in the U.S. for continuing his Angolan "war of independence"
which in one day alone had butchered and maimed more than a thousand men, women
and children, both black and white.
American Communists were now free to reestablish
fully their direct lines of communication with the Kremlin and with KGB-MVD
agents all over the world. Admittedly, the passport restrictions had not always
thwarted them, since they could keep in touch with Moscow via
the Soviet bloc embassies in Washington, the
various Communist delegations at the U.N. in New
York, plus numerous other contacts in the
underground. However, these diplomatic and netherworld contacts were frequently
dangerous for espionage agents, since they subjected them to the possibility of
surveillance by the FBI, the one U.S.
agency they still feared. The FBI does not operate overseas except in the most
cursory manner. Thus the Kennedy’s, under the influence of Abram Chayes, Abba Schwartz and the rest, helped make life a lot
simpler for the growing army of domestic spies, saboteurs, and professional
agitators dedicated to the destruction of the American society.
It
would be impossible to calculate the mischief done by the relaxation of
passport and visa restrictions in the 1960's. Only a fool would deny this move
did not give the Communists far better opportunities to plan, organize, and
execute their multitudinous plots.
The following from http://ajweberman.com/nodules2/nodulec7.htm
On March 27, 1962, an Immigration and Naturalization Service official overrode
the determination of the Dallas immigration and Naturalization Service Office and waived
sanctions, granting special permission for Marina Oswald to enter the United States without the third country visa application. It would take
until May 1962 for the order to go into effect. Meanwhile, the American
Embassy, Moscow, sent the Soviet Desk of the State Department a letter that
suggested the OSWALDS immediately be sent on to Belgium. It was at this time
that John Noonan, State Department, Office of Security, (who was listed in Who's Who in the CIA) sent J. Edgar
Hoover a memorandum regarding OSWALD which was withheld as of 1994. A copy of
this memorandum was sent to the CIA. John Noonan, born November 25, 1918, became a State Department Special Agent on April 17, 1949. In October 1960 he joined the Intelligence Reporting Bureau
as Chief. He was head of the Records Service Bureau by 1962; he became
Supervisor of the Personnel Security Specialists of the State Department in
1968. [DOS Ex 35 (294) L; DOS secondary CIA referral #115 prim. ser. 0146; DOS
prim. ser. 0148 sec. ser. 117; DOS Bio. Reg. 1955, 1974]
On May 17, 1962, John Noonan of the State Department's Office of Security sent a
report on the status of American defectors in the Soviet Union to the FBI.
OSWALD was associated with "Gheesling" in
this highly deleted memo. [FBI 105-82555-UNREC 191 6.5.62]
On May 24, 1962 the OSWALDS appeared at the American Embassy, Moscow, to have their
immigration papers validated.
Joe Payne - In1975
after being asked to be transferred out of the Passport Office, where I was
still a minority employee, I was assigned to the records division, Medical
Records Section, under supervision of Mr. Robert. Massengill, just before being asked
by Mr. Jerold Jacaruso to begin training as Crypto Clerk
at the American Ethiopian Embassy.
The two people that were behind me were Mr. Jacaruso
and Mr. J.J. Passiorca.
John Noonan is
mentioned three times in the book “Ordeal of Otto Otepka”. Page 223 Reilly went so far as to relegate
the issuance of security clearances to SY’s file
room. John Noonan, the cooperative
supervisor of the files, was instructed to issue emergency clearances to
clerical applicants if Noonan deemed that the preliminary security checks had
failed to turn up any derogatory information.
Page 265 The department played hide-and-seek with the President’s
request for weeks on end. Finally, in
late April, a meeting was called by State’s Bureau of Inter-American Affairs to
discuss the next step. The Office of
Security was represented by John Noonan, major domo (A majordomo is the highest (major) person of a household (domo) staff, one who acts on behalf of the (often absent) owner of a typically large residence) of the file room.
Page 293
speaking of the charges that were levied against Otepkay
it speaks of the burn-bag brigade where another name I recognize, Joe Rosetti appears and appears many times in the book. John Noonan again is mentioned, regarding a
White House memo to McGeorge Bundy a report on how
Noonan had committed Otepka to the Latin American project; a memo that
evaluator Ray Levy had prepared with Fred Traband on
how SY would handle the investigation; another memo drafted by J.M. Barta in Inter-American Affairs.