LETTER TO SELECT COMMITTEE FROM TROWBRIDGE H. FORD RE THE ROCKEFELLER REPORT

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 01434863
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 28, 2022
• Document Release Date: August 7, 2017
• Case Number: F-2007-00094
• Publication Date: June 11, 1975

Approved for Release: 2017/01/18 C01434863
COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS
WORCESTER. MASSACHUSETTS 01610
DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
June 11, 1975
Select Committee to Study
Intelligence Activities
United States Senate.
Washington, D. C. 20510
Gentlemen:
The Rockefeller Report, while it makes some long overdue recommenda-
tions for better control of the Central Intelligence Agency, is an in-
adequate investigation of its activities. The inquiry, conceived of in
a political and governmental vacuum, based upon the false distinction
between domestic and foreign intelligence, composed of lawyers more atuned
to the needs of prosecuting crime than discovering truth, carried on in
a conventional bureaucratic way, and approved of by a body too closely as-
sociated with the object it was to investigate, mistakes, consequently, the
whole process by which the agency wandered further and further from its
statutory duties. The commission has assumed that the CIA is innocent of
any wrong doing except in specific areas in which almost a prima facie case
against it can be made and which the agency is willing to treat in a re-
sponsible way. In the process, the commission has mistaken things like
cause for effect, greater for lesser crime and reality for appearance.
The result is curiously reminiscent of another controversial report --
i. the Warren Report.
The role of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in this
whole process is not simply accidental. The CIA went wrong when certain
of its officials after the Bay of Pigs fiasco decided that for certain
partisan interests, they could better direct their dirty tricks against
the Democratic Administration in Washington. After their plots and de-
ceptions were frustrated by Kennedy's settlement of the Cuban Missile
Crisis, they, along with certain intelligence operatives associated with
the Defense Intelligence Agency, formed a marriage of convenience with
Richard M. Nixon and his associates. The plan was for the former to kill
the President, and for the latter to cover it up and explain it away. In
the process, things like Robert Maheu's plots against Castro were recast
so as to provide an explanation of the assassination before the event, as
Wallace Turner's series on Las Vegas in the NYT during the five days before
the killing so aptly illustrated. After the assassination, the CIA invented
and solved a plot against General de Gaulle in order to continue to keep
honest investigators in the dark. What Wayne Hawks unwittingly institu-
tionalized before the event, J. Edgar Hoover did wittingly after the event.
In this context, the performance of the Rockefeller Commission has
amounted to a cover-up. Rather than taking an open-,minded approach to
the whole process, it has latched onto the red-herrings of people like
Mark Lane, Bernard Fensterwald, Robert Groden, Dick Gregory and Ralph
Schoenman. The commission could have better spent its time checking
who they are and who supports them than going over the same old ground of
the "conspiracy buffs." An adequate explanation of JFK's murder has to
deal with more than just what Richard Helms or an associate is willing to
say about CIA's relationship with Ruby and Oswald, the Zapruder film,
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Select Committee
Hunt's location at the actual time of the shooting, where Nixon and
Hoover spent the previous evening, what Dallas Chief Postal Inspector
H. L. Holmes is willing to say about the murder scoriae, etc. In short,
the Commission did just what I warned it against -- i. eq., letting
agents of the intelligence community make monkeys of it.
In this situation, your committee's scope and responsibilities have
unavoidably been vastly increased. It must conduct a complete, open in-
quiry of a most complicated process which will finally determine what did
and what didn't happen in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Short of this, the
apparent guilty and the obvious innocent will be so polarized that the
nation's very continuance, at least in the manner that we have been ac-
customed, may well be in jeopardy. I wish you success.
Si cerely yours,
Trowbridge H. Ford
Associate Professor of
Political Science
c. c.: T e Rockefeller Commission.
I William Colby.
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