By

Joan Mellen

Part 5:

INTERVIEW WITH OTTO OTEPKA

In April 2006, I drove three hours across the swamp land of Alligator Highway in central Florida in search of Mr. Otto Otepka. His ordeal now forty years lost in the fog of history, Mr. Otepka was about to celebrate his ninety-first birthday. His directions were impeccable. Without incident, I drove into a sleepy Florida town and up to the door of a modest stucco cottage.

I peered through a screen door, and Mr. Otepka greeted me from a leather recliner, his voice clear and booming. He apologized for not rising to his feet, but he had suffered a muscle pull that made walking painful. His hair was still black, his back broad. His stature remained as it must have been in the days when he was driven from his position by enemies whose motive for years would elude him. Otto Otepka was, more than forty years later, the same man described by a colleague to the “New York Times” the day after he was demoted by the State Department, “calm, deliberate, articulate and cautious.”

He ushered me into his study, a small room crammed with books, filing cabinets. Boxes crammed with paper stretched to the ceiling. All this material bore on his case, not least the boxes of transcripts of the hearings that resulted in Otto Otepka's complete vindication.

Prominently displayed in Mr. Otepka's study is a commendation for meritorious service awarded to him by President Eisenhower. On the wall is a sign reading, “This job is so secret I don't know what I'm doing!” A photograph of Bill Clinton and the White House bears this legend: “No Enemy Would Dare Bomb This Place And End The Chaos.” Otto Otepka's sense of humor remained intact.

He removed a bulging file devoted to the career of Walter Sheridan. There is no doubt in Mr. Otepka's mind now that Bobby Kennedy and Walter Sheridan had been behind the theft of the defector files from his office safe. On a rickety copier, page by page, Mr. Otepka reproduced for me his Sheridan file. It includes Sidney Goldberg's newsletter where Sheridan is identified conclusively as the person behind the destruction of Otto Otepka. Mr. Otepka began to keep a Sheridan file when he realized that Robert Kennedy's secret connection to Oswald lay “at the root of his troubles.”

Mr. Otepka had no doubt that Sheridan's role in his destruction was connected to some problem that Robert Kennedy had with Oswald. As Warren Commission documents began to dribble into the National Archives, he began a file on Oswald and his defection. It was important to him that I understand: he had made no copies of the Oswald documents he had collected when he investigated Oswald for the Department of State security office. Those he now had in his possession had come from the Archives. For Otto Otepka, based on his experience, the resort to illegal methods to accomplish political ends began not with Richard Nixon and the Watergate conspiracy, but with the Kennedys.

What sounded alarms, Mr. Otepka told me, what drove Robert Kennedy to drive him from his position, was that he had requested of the CIA that it look into the defectors to the Soviet Union whose names sat in his office safe. It had been a routine request, he said. It was what you did when a name elicited questions, as “Lee Oswald, tourist” did. Mr. Otepka's experience suggests that Robert Kennedy was aware of Lee Oswald considerably before Angelo Murgado, working for Bobby, ran into Oswald in New Orleans during the summer of 1963 and again in late September at the Dallas home of Mrs. Sylvia Odio where Murgado appeared in the company of his fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs, Bernardo de Torres.

All Mr. Otepka knew for certain when his safe was burgled was that someone wanted to know what he had learned about Oswald. He concluded that John Francis Reilly and David Belisle had been assigned to steal the defector files to help Robert Kennedy cover up his use of Oswald. There was no question in Mr. Otepka's mind that Robert Kennedy had selected the people who suddenly become Otepka's superiors.

The Oswald question remained perplexing. We went over the subject several times. Oswald was not an applicant for work in the State Department, yet Mr. Otepka was to analyze his record. CIA was on the distribution list for the file listing the “defectors.” Mr. Otepka's job was to correlate the existing files of people whose names were on that list of defectors, Lee Oswald, “tourist,” among them. Other files, such as those from the Bureau of Soviet Affairs, needed to be consulted. He had asked himself whether the Oswald file had bearing on an existing security case, either on the file of an applicant or of an already cleared employee. Who was this Oswald?

Mr. Otepka remarked that much that has been written about him is false. Journalist Sarah McClendon wrote in her memoir, “Mr. President, Mr. President,” that Otto Otepka had told her he knew who had killed President Kennedy.” Mr. Otepka told me that he had never said any such thing. All he might have done was reiterate the conclusion of the Warren Report. And, of course, he had never provided classified information to anyone.

“I am at a loss as to why CIA didn't receive distribution,” he mused, returning to the trajectory of the Oswald file.

Robert F. Kennedy had enlisted Walter Sheridan, and others, to damage his career in his effort to conceal that he was using Oswald in his anti-Castro activities, Otepka concluded. Otepka was a threat because he could expose who Oswald was. It was at least “plausible,” he says, remaining cautious, that Oswald was a false defector in the Soviet Union. Had they allowed him to uncover Oswald, investigate him as he investigated all those whose names were sent to him in his capacity as Deputy Director, and even as Chief of Evaluations, at the State Department Office of Security, history might have been different.

In the course of his travail, Otto Otepka exposed Robert Kennedy and Walter Sheridan for their flagrant disregard of the law. They had not counted on his tenacity, or on his unbroken record of integrity. In his simple dignity, he has outlasted them both.

The Otepka case, not least, keeps alive a question that cries out for further investigation. How was Bobby Kennedy using Oswald? Was he Oswald's ultimate handler? Was Bobby protecting and utilizing Oswald at the same time as the CIA, unbeknownst to him, was laying the groundwork for framing Oswald for the murder of his brother?

Bobby's press officer, Edwin Guthman, has revealed that Bobby dispatched Walter Sheridan to Dallas immediately after the assassination, ostensibly to look into the possibility of Mafia involvement in President Kennedy's death. The absence of Dallas police records of the interrogation of Oswald raises a further question. Could Sheridan, astonishing as the suggestion appears, have made an appearance at that scene?

September 4, 2007

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