By

Joan Mellen

“ During the period 1961 to 1964, the activities of Walter and Bobby, germane to the events in this memorandum, are almost inseparable.”

Otto F. Otepka, Memorandum, September 20, 1968

Part 1.

Beginning in 1957, Otto F. Otepka served as Deputy Director of the State Department Office of Security. This meant that Otepka was in charge of granting security clearances for all State Department personnel. A cadre of people worked under his supervision. From this position of considerable responsibility, Otepka was plunged into a nightmare universe of harassment and surveillance. He was reassigned and removed to a position from which he could no longer reveal inconvenient truths. Yet he had done nothing wrong. It is an extraordinary tale of a career government officer being framed from within the government, his only sin the scrupulous manner in which he performed his duties.

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.

In 1953, Otepka arrived at the Office of Security where he was charged with the authority to uncover either criminal acts or Communist sympathies in the histories of people who had been appointed to positions in the State Department. Otepka was a man of his time, of the Cold War period and the Stalinization of Eastern Europe. Like many, he perceived a danger to the United States from the Soviet outreach. He was a methodical man, fair-minded, exacting and scrupulous. He told the author that he “never overstepped boundaries.” As a personnel security evaluator, he offered no personal opinions on American foreign policy.

Otepka was not a liberal, even as his case is a reminder that “liberals” hold no monopoly on integrity. He was a man of principle, a category that cuts across ideological lines. Otepka despised Senator Joseph McCarthy and his methods, even as he believed that Communist subversion was a threat to our system of government. “McCarthy didn't identify Communists in the State Department,” Otepka told me indignantly. “He called people ‘Communists.' A Communist is not a Communist because someone calls them that.” There were Communists, Otepka says, “but not those named by McCarthy.”

Although he denied security clearances to some people, Otepka was not a man given to frivolous accusations. “I had never approved of Senator McCarthy's tactics,” he said when his own troubles began. “Everyone in the security field knew that.” Otepka was neither a shady Teamster president, nor the imaginative district attorney of Orleans Parish with history and the death of a revered President on his mind. Yet just as Bobby Kennedy and his right-hand man, Walter Sheridan, were later to pursue Jimmy Hoffa and Jim Garrison with scant regard for the law, among their earlier targets was Otto Otepka.

Walter Sheridan, who began as a National Security Agency operative, and garnered FBI and CIA clearances, enlisted the same grab bag of illegal and unscrupulous methods against Otto Otepka as he would utilize against Hoffa and Garrison. He was Bobby Kennedy's “confidential assistant,” and on behalf of Bobby, aided by a clique of Kennedy loyalists planted in the Office of Security, he deprived Otepka of his position. Otepka was never severed from government service. Instead, he was reassigned to what seemed like higher positions, but which were, in fact, positions without responsibility, and which amounted to career oblivion.

Otepka at first believed that his ordeal was based on his having denied security clearances to some Kennedy appointees. This was not the case. Rather, his removal from authority was based upon his development of a file relating to one “Lee Oswald, tourist,” a name on a list of “defectors.” The quotation marks were added by the CIA itself for an October 24, 1960 document that marks the beginning of Otto Otepka's investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald.

“DEFECTORS”

It began that October, 1960, even before John F. Kennedy was elected. Several offices at the Department of State undertook to identify and research a list of Americans who had defected to the Soviet Union, to Soviet bloc nations, or to Communist China. The assignment to check on Oswald, and to explore whether his name appeared in any existing security files, came to Otepka as chief security evaluator at State. Otepka contacted the FBI at once. This was routine. The CIA was next on his list.

At the Department of State's “Office of Intelligence/Resources and Coordination,” Robert B. Elwood wrote to Richard Bissell, CIA's then DDP [Deputy Director, Plans, a designation synonymous with the clandestine service]. The subject of his letter was “Request For Information Concerning American ‘Defectors.'” The quotation marks raise an implied question: were they really defectors or were they American agents introduced into the Soviet Union working for CIA Counter Intelligence?

It became a variation on La Ronde. The files danced from Agency to Agency, component to component. Bissell shipped the file to James Angleton at Counter Intelligence and to Robert L. Bannerman, Deputy Chief of the Office of Security at CIA. Bannerman sent Oswald's name back to Otto Otepka. “It would all have gone through Angleton,” Bannerman told retired military intelligence officer and author, John Newman.

Beginning on June 1, 1960, Oswald's background and file began to be examined by employees in the Office of Security at the State Department. On December 5 th , 1960, the Intelligence Collection and Distribution Division informed Otepka that he and the Office of Security would handle the official list of Americans who had defected to the Communist bloc. By now, John F. Kennedy had been elected President, but had not yet taken office.

Otepka began the work of determining whether “Lee Oswald” had bearing on any existing security case, either of an applicant for a position with the State Department, or of an existing employee. As he would any file, Otepka distributed the one bearing the name “Oswald” to his subordinates, eight or ten people, he told me, whose work he would then review. He sent Oswald's name over to the Bureau of Soviet Affairs. It seemed to be all a matter of routine.

Oswald's file was marked #39-61981. Sitting as it did in the Central File Room of the Office of Security, the “39” denoting an “Intelligence File,” the Oswald material raised questions. As the months passed, more questions surfaced. Otepka examined Oswald's return from the Soviet Union with the unlikely assistance of a State Department loan. Otepka also pondered the speed with which Oswald's wife, Marina, was cleared for entrance into the United States. By 1963, Otepka would be wondering why Oswald was issued a passport for travel to Cuba and, seemingly, the Soviet Union, despite a possible “criminal” flag in Oswald's ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] file. It was at this time that Otepka's security safe was burgled and his Oswald file disappeared for good.

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