Final_Judgment

[106] Final Judgment 167
identity of the witness was considered so sensitive that the CIA insisted on
withholding his real name so he testified under the alias "John Scelso."
According to Scelso's story, it was he, "Scelso," who had initially been
placed in charge of the CIA's end of the assassination investigation, but—
according to Scelso—Angleton "immediately went into action to do all the
investigating." 294 (This suggests, of course, that Angleton did have a very
specific interest in controlling any evidence which did emerge.)
The testimony by Scelso also brought forth some interesting
revelations about Angleton's organized crime connections. At one point in
his testimony, a committee attorney, Michael Goldsmith, asked Scelso the
intriguing question, "Do you have any reason to believe that Angleton
might have had ties to organized crime?" 295 to which Scelso responded in
the affirmative.
Scelso went on to explain that the Justice Department had once asked
the CIA to determine the true names of people holding numbered bank
accounts in Panama because the mob was hiding Las Vegas "skim" money
there. Scelso commented that "We were in an excellent position to do this
and told them so—whereupon Angleton vetoed it and said, 'That is the
[FBI's] business." 296
When Scelso discussed this with another CIA officer, the other officer
"smiled a foxy smile and said, 'Well, that's Angleton's excuse. The real
reason is that Angleton himself has ties to the Mafia and he would not want to
double-cross them. " 2 9 7
Indeed, Angleton, Israel's point man at the CIA, was well-placed to
help cover up the real truth about Israel's role—along with that of the CIA
and the Lansky syndicate—and ultimately he did.
THE NOSENKO AFFAIR: PLACING BLAME
It was Angleton who emerged in the period of the Warren Commission
investigation as the leading CIA critic of Russian Soviet defector Yuri
Nosenko. Nosenko, who defected to the United States in 1964, claimed to
have been the KGB's case officer who handled Lee Harvey Oswald during his
sojourn in Russia (presumably as a defector.)
Nosenko's most provocative claim was that, contrary to some
suspicions—and allegations—the Soviet KGB had absolutely nothing to do
with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Thus, those such as Israel's
man at the CIA, Angleton, who wanted to hang the blame on the KGB for
the president's murder, had what appeared to be a bona fide Soviet defector
on their hands whose claims ran contrary to the propaganda line they sought
to promote. Angleton was Nosenko's loudest and most vociferous accuser,
determined to prove Nosenko a liar. Angleton subjected Nosenko to 1,277
days of torture, questioning and deprivation, but Nosenko stuck to his story.
Angleton was clearly determined to disprove the one man who was
clearly well-informed enough about the Soviet KGB to dispute the claim
that the Soviets were behind the JFK assassination. Eliminating the Soviets
as a suspect would, of course, shift suspicion elsewhere. Looking elsewhere