.rshein,
nstad
Washington D.C.
Monday, January 27, 1964.
The President's Commission met, pursuant to call, at 2:30 p.m., in the Hearing Room, Fourth Floor, 200 Maryland
Avenue, Northeast, Washington, D. C., Chief Justice Earl Warren presiding.
PRESENT:
Chief Justice Earl Warren, Chairman
Senator Richard B. Russell, Member
Senator John Sherman Cooper, Member
Representative Hale Boggs, Member
John J. McCloy, Member
Allen W. Dulles, Member
- — -
J. Lee Rankin, General Counsel
The Chairman: Well, gentlemen, our meeting will come to order.
I am sorry that I was a little late, but no, Senator Russell, I wasn't out playing golf or anything.
Well, gentlemen, since we met last week, Mr. Rankin and I have explored this situation we discussed considerably. We talked to the Texas people, and we have given considerable thought to it since, and I am going to ask Mr. Rankin to start at the beginning and just tell you the story as we have got it.
Mr. Rankin. I received a call from Waggoner Carr, the Attorney General of Texas, and in that call he was quite excited. He was on his way to Texarkana from Austin.
Mr. Dulles. This is after our meeting the other night?
Mr. Rankin. This was before.
Mr. Dulles. Going back?
Mr. Rankin. Yes.
He said he thought he had some information that he thought should get to me immediately and it was to the effect that the F.B.I. had an undercover agent who was Oswald, and he said it came up this way that the matter was developed at a meeting in chambers with the judge, Brown, of the court, and it was in relation to the production of evidence where Ruby's attorney asked that part of the evidence that the F.B.I. developed be furnished to them, and during that time the District Attorney had responded or opposed the motion for the evidence by saying
that the various usual grounds and that the F.I.B.[sic] never did this before, and in addition to that he thought heknew[sic] the reason why they were willing to do it this time, and it was that Oswald was an undercover agent for the F.B.I.
Sen. Russell. Was this in open court, Mr. Rankin?
Mr. Rankin. That is what I understood.
Mr. Dulles. In chambers?
Mr. Rankin. In chambers.
That he also knew the number that was assigned by the F.B.I. to Oswald which was No. 179, and he knew that he was on the payroll or employed, I think that is the way he put it, employed by the F.B.I. at $200 per month from September of 1962 up to the time of the assassination.
That was all that he knew about it. He didn't get the information form District Attorney Wade, but he had gotten it from someone else and he didn't tell me who that was, but he said it was a person in whom he had complete faith and could rely upon.
I called the Chief Justice immediately and went over and saw him and told him the story, and he thought it was material of such importance to the Commission that the entire Commission should be called and advised with regard to it.
We had a meeting, then, and told the information, and it was the consensus of the meeting that we should try to get those people up here, including the District Attorney, Wade, the
Attorney General, Special Counsel with the Attorney General, Leon Jaworsky, and Bob Stacey[?], and Mr. Alexander, the Assistant District Attorney at Dallas.
We asked them to all come up, and they did on Friday. At that time they were -- they said that the rumors were constant there, that Oswald was an undercover agent, but they extended it also to the C.I.A. and gave that to him, and none of them had any original information of their own.
They said that the source of their information was a man by the name of Hudkins who was a reporter for the Houston Post, and that it had been circulated by a greater portion of all the reporters in the Dallas area who had been working on this matter in various forms.
Sen. Russell. Did he explain why it hadn't been published? This would have gone across the country like wild fire.
Mr. Rankin. Well, they said part of it had been published. The fact that it was claimed that Oswald was an undercover agent, and I noticed The Nation, although I hadn't seen it before, refers to an article in January, the first of January by Hudkins from which he referred to the undercover agent's story.
But he does not give the number or the $200 a month at that time.
We then asked if they asked Hudkins of where he had got his story and they said they had not. We asked if there was
any other place, and they don't know of any other place that they could assign.