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Committee of six senior CIA officers that Richard Helms convened in September 1967 to manage the agency's response to Jim Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw, who had been a source of its Domestic Contact Service. | 1967-09-20 | Langley, Virginia | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-21 |
The Garrison Group was an ad hoc committee of "six of CIA's highest officials" that Director Richard Helms formed in 1967 "to formulate a strategy" toward the investigation of the Kennedy assassination by the New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison. Its first meeting is recorded in a memorandum of September 20, 1967.1
Shaw and the Agency
Garrison's defendant, Clay Shaw, had been a source of the Central Intelligence Agency's Domestic Contact Service. His first report, of December 1948, concerned trade with Czechoslovakia, and he reported "on 33 separate occasions" through 1956 on economic matters in Latin America and Europe, unpaid. The contact division closed the case on June 4, 1956. Two days after Shaw's arrest the chief of the service's New Orleans office, Lloyd Ray, cabled headquarters recommending that the general counsel be briefed "to be on the safe side."1
Rocca and Houston
Helms assigned the matter to Raymond Rocca, chief of research and analysis on the CIA Counterintelligence Staff. Rocca wrote on April 26, 1967, that it would be "unwise to dismiss as trivial any attempts by Garrison to link the Agency to his plot," whose effect "will not depend principally upon their veracity" but on "their timeliness and extent of press coverage." On May 1 the former assistant attorney general Herbert J. Miller Jr. telephoned the general counsel, Lawrence Houston, with information "from within Garrison's office" supplied by the NBC reporter Walter Sheridan. In September Shaw's lawyers asked the Department of Justice for guidance on Garrison's claims about the agency and were refused. Houston's memorandum of October 2, 1967, set out each allegation and the facts, recommended doing nothing beyond resisting subpoenas, and warned that if Shaw were to "be convicted on information that could be refuted by CIA," then "we may be in for some difficult decisions." Rocca wrote on March 1, 1968, that Garrison's new charge of a plot by the agency and the military-industrial complex "is by and large the Moscow line."1
After a federal court enjoined Garrison's last prosecution of Shaw in 1971 the director of the Domestic Contact Service wrote to his Dallas, Texas office: "Looks like Mr. Garrison is on the ropes and will have all he can do to keep the hornets away."1
The House Select Committee on Assassinations asked the agency in January 1978 for its files on "Jim Garrison aka Wackenhut Corp." and on the "Garrison 1967 investigation."2
Footnotes
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Holland, Max. "The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination," Studies in Intelligence, vol. 45, no. 5, 2001. https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Lie-That-Linked-CIA.pdf The documents are cited there to the Russell Holmes Papers and the HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection, National Archives. ↩︎
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Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Legislative Counsel, HSCA request OLC 78-0070/1, January 12, 1978, CIA Reading Room document 00491180. ↩︎