UPn 11/18 1201 Reno on JFK assassination: 'I'll never forget it' WASHINGTON (UPI) -- Attorney General Janet Reno says like most Americans she remembers where she was when she heard that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated -- her small law office in Miami. "I'll never forget it," she says. Monday is the 30th anniversary of JFK's assassination. RTw 11/18 1131 ANOTHER KENNEDY LEGACY -- BILL CLINTON By Laurence McQuillan WASHINGTON, Nov 18 (Reuter) - As the myths and memories of John Kennedy are recalled 30 years after his death, his legacy is alive in the Clinton White House. President Clinton, who traces his interest in politics to America's 35th president, does not talk often about Kennedy's influence on his life, but that influence is clear -- and has been since Clinton launched his presidential bid. During emotional rededication ceremonies for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston last month, Clinton spoke of his childhood hero. Avoiding personal recollections, Clinton said Kennedy,"changed the way we think about our country, our world and our own obligations to the future." After the formal remarks in the glare of television cameras, however, Clinton turned what was supposed to be a brief tour of the facility into a detailed inspection of each exhibit -- asking a steady stream of questions as he viewed the memorabilia with old Kennedy cronies. Since that fateful day on November 22, 1963 all presidents, Democrats as well as Republicans, have invoked Kennedy's name to further their particular political cause. Bill Clinton is different, however. He, like other members of the first generation raised with television and rock 'n' roll, is a product of the Kennedy mystique. "Bill Clinton did model himself after Kennedy," said Richard Reeves, author of the new biography, "President Kennedy -- Profile of Power." Clinton "was a student of the Kennedy campaign ... and now that he's president, he's checking the guy out again," said Reeves, who recently spent hours visiting the White House so the current president could discuss his predecessor. Kennedy and Clinton are "alike in so many ways," said Reeves, noting that "Kennedy had this chaos around him and as far as I'm concerned Clinton does too ... They wanted these jobs because that's where the action was." Long-time friends from Arkansas say Clinton's mother, Virginia Kelley, exerted a considerable influence on her son. While that's undoubtedly true, she says her son's handshake with Kennedy four months before the president was assassinated was momentous. Clinton, a delegate to Boys' Nation, a civics programme run by the American Legion, came to the White House in 1963 with vague thoughts about becoming a teacher or a minister or maybe a musician. Then he shook Kennedy's hand. "When he came back from Washington, holding this picture of himself with Jack Kennedy, and the expression on his face, I knew right then that politics was the answer for him," Kelley told Charles Allen, co-author of "The Comeback Kid," a Clinton biography. That picture was used prominently in Clinton's campaign to unseat Republican George Bush. And last July, 30 years to the day after he had been one of the few in his group to grasp Kennedy's hand, Clinton invited another contingent of Boys' Nation delegates to the White House. Standing at roughly the same spot in the Rose Garden where he stood three decades before, Clinton shook hands with each boy present and made sure a White House photographer captured the moment before he let go. Clinton is the first person still in his 40s to be president since Kennedy, a feat that invokes the kind of generational change that Kennedy's election brought to the Washington landscape some three decades ago. Clinton's travel during his first year in office does more than leave his mark across the country -- it follows in Kennedy's footsteps. From a warehouse at the Port of New Orleans to a small high school football stadium in Los Alamos, New Mexico to a hotel in Boston, Kennedy had been there before him. And Kennedy's bust sits in the Oval Office, just behind the large oak desk that was once used by the nation's 35th president -- and now carries the workload of its 42nd chief executive. REUTER WP 11/18 Deadlines Missed on Release of JFK Data; Review ... Deadlines Missed on Release of JFK Data; Review Board Not in Place; Agencies Have Not Produced Records By George Lardner Jr. Washington Post Staff Writer There are plenty of scofflaws in town when it comes to the JFK records act, a House committee was told yesterday. Not all of the offenders were listed at the hearing by name, but they include President Clinton, two congressional committees, the FBI, the immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Office of Naval Intelligence (now the Naval Investigative Service). The underlying principles of the law, according to the Senate report on the measure, are "independence, public confidence, efficiency and cost effectiveness, speed of records disclosure and enforceability," Washington lawyer James H. Lesar told the House Government Operations Committee yesterday. Lesar, who is head of the nonprofit Assassinations Archives and Research Center, added that with the law now more than a year old, "it can only be said that these principles have been repeatedly violated. At best, only 10 to 20 percent of the total universe of Kennedy assassination records has been released." The law, enacted by Congress 13 month ago, called for public disclosure of all government records on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy unless there are "clear and convincing" reasons for continued secrecy. Government agencies and affected congressional committees were to make initial disclosures under the law no later than last Aug. 23. A five-member review board, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was to sift through remaining records and decide which should be made public. The board can hold hearings and subpoena witnesses and documents if necessary. The deadline for Clinton to make his nominations under the law expired last Jan. 25, five days after his inauguration. His first four appointments were made public in late August and early September, but the formal nomination papers were not all sent to the Senate until late October, the White House said yesterday. The fifth name was submitted on Nov. 4. Under the meticulously written law, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee is supposed to hold confirmation hearings "within 30 days in which the Senate is in session after the nomination of three review board members." With the 30th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination coming up Monday, there had been talk of holding hearings then, but it appeared yesterday that the Senate would adjourn this weekend. That would make it impossible for the review board to begin work until next year. Steve Tilley, who is JFK liaison officer at the National Archives, where all the records are to be kept, confirmed yesterday that the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Naval Investigative Service, and both House and Senate intelligence committees have yet to produce a single page under the law. The FBI, Lesar complained, also is taking the position in federal court that more than 265,000 pages of records it made available to the House Assassinations Committee in the late 1970s "are not Kennedy assassination records because they relate to organized crime activities." It will be up to the review board to try to settle such disputes. Under the law, it was given three years at most "from the date of enactment" to do its work; more than a third of that time already has expired. APn 11/18 0141 JFK Files Copyright, 1993. The Associated Press. All rights reserved. By JOHN DIAMOND Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- Amateur and professional sleuths may have to wait another five years to get a look at thousands of government documents on President Kennedy's assassination that remain secret. A House panel examining the implementation of a 1992 law designed to release assassination documents heard testimony Wednesday indicating that, even though a mountain of material already has been made public, much remains under lock and key. "Are federal agencies cooperating fully, or is there resistance that fosters continued public distrust of the government?" asked House Government Operations Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich. With the 30th anniversary of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination days away, witnesses told the panel that the cooperation a year after the passage of the Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 is mixed. "Nothing approaching the professed goals of the act has happened," said James Lesar, head of the private Assassination Archive and Research Center. "Disclosure has not been prompt, nor does it even remotely approach complete disclosure." Lesar estimated that no more than 20 percent of the full record is available to the public. Conyers said he was "dismayed" that President Clinton took most of the year -- instead of the 45 days provided by the law -- to appoint a review board to approve the release of documents. He said the Senate will not likely confirm the nominees until next year. Interest in the files is intense. Since Aug. 23, when the Central Intelligence Agency's file on Lee Harvey Oswald was made public, the archives have handled some 2,000 research requests. Army Maj. John Newman, who spent months poring over the most recently released JFK material, praised the CIA for being willing to release material embarrassing to the agency. The same could not be said of the FBI and the Department of Defense, Newman said. Lesar said the FBI still refuses to make public material relating to organized crime, an area conspiracy theorists consider critical to a thorough review of the record. James Johnston, who was counsel to the Senate's 1975 Church Committee probe into CIA activities, presented the committee with newly released documents indicating that the CIA suspected Cuba of planting assassins in the United States. On Dec. 5, 1963, two weeks after the assassination, the CIA's Mexico City station chief reported on the "suspicious" sudden departure of Gilberto Lopez from the United States. Lopez was a Cuban-born American living in Tampa, Fla., a city visited by Kennedy a week before the assassination. The day after the killing, Lopez crossed the border from Texas into Mexico. The Cuban government cut through red tape to give Lopez a Cuban visa. On Nov. 27, 1963, Lopez was the only passenger on a Cubana airline flight from Mexico City to Havana. The following March, another CIA memo stated that an agency source "reported in late February that Gilberto Lopes (sic), U.S. citizen, was involved in Kennedy assassination." Johnston said the documents, by themselves, do not prove a Cuban-led conspiracy to kill Kennedy. But, given the CIA's own efforts to overthrow Castro, they suggest a hesitancy to probe the Cuban angle thoroughly, possibly because the CIA "feared that it would learn that its strategy had backfired in the most tragic way." RTw 11/17 1246 JFK MURDER MYSTERY STILL ALIVE AFTER 30 YEARS By Tabassum Zakaria DALLAS, Nov 17 (Reuter) - Thirty years later the question still rages: Who shot JFK? The whodunnit of the century, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, has spawned many theories of conspiracy that are at odds with an official verdict that no plot could be found. But many experts say a definitive answer has never been found. The official Warren Commission investigation said loner Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy and a family photo of Oswald with a rifle in his hands remains etched in the American consciousness. But so does doubt. A CBS poll this week showed that nine of 10 Americans believe that Oswald did not act alone and 50 percent think the CIA was part of the conspiracy. Two years ago, Oliver Stone's film "JFK" set the whole country talking about conspiracy and produced a wave of rebuttals culminating in Gerald Posner's bestseller "Case Closed" that argues Oswald did it alone. A Newsweek-Washington Post-CBS investigation this week says the answer is that Oswald probably acted alone. But that verdicts is challenged by a host of experts. Those who have undertaken a generation of research say finding the truth is important because the assassination began the long process in which Americans lost their faith in government. "This country is very distrustful of our government," said Gary Shaw, 55, an architect who has researched the assassination for 30 years. "I don't know that we can ever have a definitive answer and bring the perpetrators to justice, but we can have the truth," he said. The offical commission headed by Chief Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren said Oswald was the assassin, killing the president with a rifle from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. But that finding was disputed by many. Witnesses swear they heard a shot coming from a grassy knoll near the president's motorcade. Others believe the fingerprints found on the rifle were placed there after Oswald's death. A House of Representatives committee on the assassination in 1979 said Oswald fired three shots and there was a 95 percent probabilty that a second gunman fired a fourth shot that missed. Conspiracy theories have pointed fingers at the Soviet government, the Cuban government, anti-Castro Cubans, the CIA, the Mafia, and right wing extremists. But after 30 years of research and the opening of previously sealed documents this summer, one irrefutable answer to the murder mystery has yet to emerge. Posner said his investigation shows that Oswald acted alone. Posner, 39, studied Oswald's psychology and said he was unstable and was committed to an assassination. When Kennedy's trip to Dallas was announced he saw it as "a gift on a silver platter," especially since he had just gotten a job at the school book depository that overlooked Kennedy's motorcade. Posner's investigation used a computer simulation to show how one bullet could have struck Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally and still exit without major damage. Newsweek, which conducted an investigation with The Washington Post and CBS News of thousands of pages of secret cables, memorandums and phone records released by the National Archives in August, said the conclusion was the Warren Commission's findings were probably correct. Newsweek argues that a government cover-up occurred afterwards, but to protect bureaucrats not conspirators. "Time and technology is really catching up with the conspiracy theorists," said Posner, who conducted a three-year investigation. "The highwater mark for the conspiracy industry may have been Oliver Stone's 'JFK'." Jim Marrs, 53, whose book "Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy" was partial basis for the movie, said, "I can accept Oswald was the lone assassin if they can prove it to me." Robin Marra, 40, assistant professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, said 30 years have not diminished interest in the puzzle because, "a lot of people still wonder what would have happened if Kennedy had lived." "When have you ever seen a discussion of this case that begins with the assumption that Oswald was presumed innocent until proven guilty? Presumption of innocence I think vanished in the first 48 hours," he said. "If in fact there's an after life, the first question I'm going to ask is, 'Who killed JFK?'," Marra said. REUTER RTw 11/17 1159 CIA BARES OLD PLOTS TO KILL CASTRO By Jim Wolf WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (Reuter) - The CIA has released its most complete account yet of its plots with the Mafia to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro in the early 1960s and establish a "stand-by" assassination capability. Details of the schemes, involving poisoned cigars and poison-tipped ballpoint pens among other gadgets, are spelled out in a CIA inspector general's report declassified last week. It was sent to the National Archives Friday as part of a government-wide opening of material related to the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy. The document disclosure was mandated by Congress last year. The 133-page report, dated May 23, 1967, catalogues one of the most embarrassing chapters in covert operations, outlined in the mid-1970s by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat. Although classified until now, the inspector general's report had been cited extensively by Church's committee, which reported in 1976, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which reported in 1979. What had been missing were the riveting details of the full report, which includes enough cloak-and-dagger intrigue to fill a Tom Clancy spy thriller. For instance, it cites schemes to poison Castro's cigars, spray an LSD-like chemical at him or use a chemical to make his beard fall out. It also chronicles two attempts to supply poison pills to underworld gambling kingpins who thought they could slip them to the Cuban leader. The report spells out efforts to build a poison-packed hypodermic syringe into a Paper-Mate brand pen. "The needle was so fine that the victim would hardly feel it when it was inserted," the inventor, Edward Gunn, chief of the CIA's office of medical services operations division, was quoted as telling the inspector general. The document provides the fullest picture so far of a shadowy programme called Executive Action Capability, described as "a general standby capability to carry out assassinations when required." It quotes William Harvey, the clandestine officer who coordinated anti-Castro plots in 1962 and 1963, as saying he had been told by Richard Bissell, a former CIA deputy director, that the (Kennedy) "White House has twice urged me to create such a capability." The report said the programme, which came to be known as ZRRIFLE for no obvious reason, had as its "principal asset" an agent codenamed QJWIN. He was originally recruited to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, a militant leftist who was the first prime minister of Belgian Congo, now Zaire, the report said. The report did not specify a date for the Lumumba plot. It seemed to suggest the idea was dropped after a would-be assassin, whose name was blacked out, decided he wanted "no part" in an assassination attempt, and asked to be released -- which Bissell granted. Lumumba was killed early in 1961 during the Congo crisis. The CIA has denied any responsibility. The report says: "There is no indication in the file that the Executive Action Capability of ZRRIFLE/QJWIN was ever used." "This reconstruction of agency involvement in plans to assassinate Fidel Castro is at best an imperfect history," the report begins. "Because of the extreme sensitivity of the operations being discussed or attempted, as a matter of principle, no official records were kept of planning, of approvals or of implementation." The report said CIA documentation on assassination plots was so thin that it had to rely on the memories, "often fogged by time," of the handful of senior operatives who admitted any knowledge. The inspector general, Jack Earman, added that the accounts he gathered were often conflicting and that it was difficult to know whether some of the plots ever went beyond the "talking phase." The report was ordered by then-CIA Director Richard Helms, whos used it to brief President Lyndon Johnson on May 10, 1967. Johnson, who suspected a conspiracy behind Kennedy's assassination, later told a television interviewer "Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got to him first." Jim Johnston, counsel to the Church Committee, recently told a congressional panel that he had concluded, based on newly released CIA documents, that Castro apparently sent several teams to kill Kennedy in retaliation for the CIA plots. REUTER RTw 11/17 1134 HUNDREDS OF KENNEDY BOOKS CLOG LIBRARY SHELVES By Irwin Arieff WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (Reuter) - John Kennedy's charmed life and violent death have intrigued writers ever since his assassination 30 years ago, driving them to churn out hundreds of books about the former president. The Library of Congress lists 506 books on Kennedy in its computerized card catalogue. They include everything from a nannie's account of caring for his children to William Manchester's classic tale of a death of a president to scores of books debating whether the 35th president was murdered by the Mafia, the CIA, Fidel Castro, the KGB or by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. The number of Kennedy books far outnumber those written about Republican Dwight Eisenhower, his predecessor in the White House who served for eight years to Kennedy's two years and 10 months, or about Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy and plunged the nation deep into the Vietnam War. A search at the Library of Congress for books about Eisenhower or Johnson turns up between 200 and 300 titles for each of those two former presidents. But Abraham Lincoln, probably the country's most universally admired president who served from 1861 to 1865 until he too was assassinated, easily outstrips Kennedy, with 2,610 books about him listed in the library's computer. "I don't think anyone can explain the Kennedy phenomenon," said John Stewart, who heads the education department at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. "It obviously relates to the way he died. It is an unexplanable historical event," Stewart said in a telephone interview. "If he had died of a heart attack, people wouldn't be as interested." Even had he died of natural causes, Kennedy would still intrigue authors due to his youth and style, the glamour of his White House and the era in which he served. The early 1960s, when Kennedy was president, marked the beginnings of the Vietnam War, the emergence of a rebellious new generation of young Americans and a revolution in civil rights. Many of the Kennedy books clogging library shelves deal with his assassination, but topics range from the conspiratorial to the worshipful, from the sublime to the ridiculous. A random sampling turned up titles ranging from "President JFK and I Prove Life After Death" and "Meet John Kennedy," to "John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism" and "White House Nannie: My years with Caroline and John Kennedy Jr." Thirty years after his death, books about the president still engender controversy and cram the bestseller lists. Among the more notable recently is Gerald Posner's "Case Closed," which argues that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, and that the official Warren Commission investigation into the case was right -- there was no conspiracy. Posner was partly motivated by the hit film of two years "JFK," which argued that everyone but Oswald probably killed the president and now his book is spurring others to write books proving that the case is far from closed. REUTER RTw 11/17 1123 KENNEDY LEGACY BLURRED BY CAMELOT IMAGE By Michael Posner WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (Reuter) - Thirty years after bullets ripped into John Kennedy and sent the world into shock, historians are still weighing the legacy of a presidency that is often blurred by heady images of Camelot. Almost half of all Americans were not even born in the Kennedy presidential years so for them and for many others, views of the man have been influenced by rosy portraits depicting courage, excitement and youth that often cloaked shortcomings. Kennedy was what the country seemed to need at that moment in 1960 when the Massachusetts senator defeated President Dwight Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, for president -- a vibrant figure grabbing the stage after years of America being governed by older men. A Navy lieutenant in World War Two who explained how he became a hero by quipping, "It was easy. They sank my boat," Kennedy was an appealing figure from a big and successful Irish-American family rooted in Democratic politics. "He happened to step on the scene at precisely the right moment for the qualifications he had," said George Reedy, who served as press secretary to Kennedy's vice president and successor, Lyndon Johnson. "Kennedy basically was a political leader and an administrator," Reedy told Reuters. "He was not the kind of man who resolved arguments and put people together (to pass laws) which was the essence of being a politician." He was a handsome, urbane, witty 43-year-old projecting strength and "vigor" -- pronounced "vigah" in his Boston accent -- with a glamorous wife with a whisper-soft voice who brought culture and two young children to the White House. Jacqueline was a trend-setter, popular as he was. During a 1961 visit to France, crowds surrounded her and he later joked "I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris." There were were scenes of happy family life etched in America's minds from magazines and TV, a man who sailed around his Cape Cod summer home, played games of no-holds-barred touch football and issued calls for service to country. So it seemed the world could hardly believe radio newscasts that "three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade today in Dallas" read about 12:34 p.m. Texas time. "The reason why the shock was so great, why when one heard the news last night one felt suddenly so empty, was because it was the most unexpected piece of news one could possibly imagine," said David Frost on a British television programme the day after the November 22 killing. "It was the least likely thing to happen in the whole world." Historian Bruce Catton wrote then "What John F. Kennedy left us was most of all an attitude. To put it in the simplest terms, he looked ahead." "We stand today on the edge of a new frontier -- the frontier of the 1960s," Kennedy said in his presidential nomination acceptance speech in Los Angeles that ushered in the his "New Frontier" theme of the presidency. But years later the veneer from the Kennedy years has faded. Since his death, the happy family man has been portrayed in biographies as a philanderer who had many affairs, including an alleged one with Marilyn Monroe and a woman, Judith Exner, who had ties to the Mafia. He advocated social change but his record was spotty. "I think it (his record) ultimately will be a mixed record," presidential scholar Mark Rozell told Reuters. "We are still in the adulation stage 30 years later," Rozell said. "There has been so much emphasis of style over substance, the emphasis on the imagery, his youthfulness and vigour, things which cut a very appealing figure for the man. But ultimately, the historical record must emphasise accomplishments as well as shortcomings." Nevertheless, Kennedy will be remembered as the man who stared down Nikita Khrushchev in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and forced removal of atomic warheads 90 miles from the U.S. And the ill-fated, U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba a year earlier by anti-Fidel Castro Cuban emigres most likely will be seen as Kennedy's weakest moment as president, yet one that he salvaged by taking full blame for the bungled operation. Despite pressing demands for equal rights for blacks in the 1960s, it was Lyndon Johnson who won civil rights bills. On the plus side, Kennedy's vision came true of putting an American on the moon by the end of the 1960s and his signing of a pact with the Soviet Union banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere was predecessor to subsequent treaties. And on the negative side was Vietnam -- he was the president who put troops in that Southeast Asian country, setting the stage for a war that ripped the United States apart. Kennedy had told Americans "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." And that phrase saw its sternest test in Vietnam, as a protest movement grew to epic proportions and Americans fought Americans over fighting a war in a far-away country. REUTER UPn 11/16 1830 CBS poll: Americans believe CIA helped assassinate JFK NEW YORK (UPI) - Nearly half of Americans believe the CIA was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and only 11 percent believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot Kennedy, a poll released Tuesday by CBS News shows. CBS surveyed 1,117 people on their beliefs about who orchestrated the shooting of Kennedy in Dallas' Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963. Eighty-nine percent of those questioned said they do not think Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy. Asked who they believe was involved, 13 percent of those surveyed said the Soviet Union was behind the assassination. Twenty-two percent blamed the Cubans. And 37 percent said the Mafia was responsible. Forty-nine percent said the CIA was involved in murdering Kennedy. Four out of five people surveyed said the government covered up the truth about the assassination. Although a sizable majority in all age groups believe an entity other than Oswald was involved in a conspiracy to murder Kennedy, a pattern based on generational differences emerged in the CBS poll. Eighty-six percent of those surveyed who were 18 to 29 years old -- born after the assassination -- believe there was an official cover-up, compared to 77 percent of those 45 to 64 years old. Sixty-four percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said the CIA was involved, compared to 42 percent of those 45 to 64 years old. CBS pointed out there has always been skepticism that Oswald acted by himself; a 1963 Gallup poll showed two-thirds believed others were involved. But the news agency said its poll shows there are many explanations plausible to Americans today. The poll had a three percent margin of error in either direction. RTw 11/16 1537 KGB COLONEL SAYS SOVIETS DEEPLY DISTRUSTED OSWALD (Eds: Updates with Nechiporenko interview) By Arthur Spiegelman NEW YORK, Nov 16 (Reuter) - Lee Harvey Oswald desperately begged the Soviet embassy in Mexico for a visa two months before the assassination of John F. Kennedy and one of the KGB agents he pleaded with thinks the world would have been spared great tragedy had it been granted. The agent is retired KGB Colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, who has come in from the cold to reveal that the Soviet secret police deeply distrusted Oswald, especially after he pulled a gun on them, and wouldn't have anything to do with him. To hear Nechiporenko, author of a new book on Oswald and the KGB, tell it: Kennedy's assassin was a deeply neurotic man on the verge of breakdown two months before the November 22, 1963 murder in Dallas that changed the world. Nechiporenko says he knows the truth about Oswald's two-and-a-half year stay in the Soviet Union and his mystery visits to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City because he had access to the KGB's secret files and was one of three Soviet agents who interviewed Oswald in Mexico City in September 1963. "After the assassination when I heard these speculations about how we used Oswald, I smiled and thought if they only knew the truth. But I also had this bitter feeling that our refusing him a visa probably brought the tragedy in Dallas closer," he said. "If anything we thought he might be an American agent or, if not that, a man who might be headed for tragedy," he said in an interview Tuesday as he toured New York, accompanied by a press agent, to promote his new book, "Passport to Assassination," and two U.S. TV documentaries on the assassination that he helped make. The former spy chief's only need for American agents these days is to forge book and TV deals. Oswald's Mexico City visits to the Soviet and Cuban embassies have long fuelled conspiracy theories that the Russians or Fidel Castro were behind the assassination. But the retired 61-year-old KGB man says nothing could be further from the truth. The KGB wound up interviewing Oswald in Mexico City because all the officers in the consulate "were KGB men and all Oswald wanted was either a Soviet or Cuban visa. "He came to us because he wanted a visa to go back to the Soviet Union and because he said the FBI was following him. He told us 'I am afraid...they'll kill me. Let me in,"' Nechiporenko said. At the second interview at the embassy, the colonel said Oswald pulled out a gun and laid it on a table, saying: "See this is what I have to carry to protect myself." The Russians scrambled to grab the gun and unload it. Nechiporenko thinks it was the same weapon that was later used by Oswald to kill a Dallas policeman after the Kennedy assassination. The colonel said that the KGB records in Moscow showed that the Soviet spy agency had no interest in Oswald because no one believed he had any information of value and because he was deemed a neurotic from the start. He was only allowed to stay in the Soviet Union after he attempted suicide and the Russians feared throwing him out would cause a scandal. When Oswald wanted to leave because he was bored by his work in a factory in Minsk, he hurried the process along by making two home-made bombs creating fears that he would cause big trouble if the Russians refused to let him leave, Nechiporenko said. Recalling his own meeting with Oswald, the colonel said he was struck by his "aloofness -- it seemed he was looking through me, totally wrapped up in his own thoughts." Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 but became disillusioned and returned to the United States in 1962. "The more we talked to him and the more we looked at him, the less interesting he became to us," Nechiporenko said. In his book, he recalls Oswald's anger at being told he would not receive a visa and his saying, "That doesn't suit me. This will all end in tragedy. .... If they don't leave me in peace I will defend myself." REUTER RTw 11/16 1223 KGB AGENT REVEALS DETAILS OF MEETING WITH OSWALD By David Ljunggren MOSCOW, Nov 16 (Reuter) - A retired KGB agent has cast light on a key episode in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald just two months before the assassination of U.S. President John Kennedy in November 1963. Oswald, who was arrested for the killing but was himself shot dead two days later, visited the Soviet consulate in Mexico twice in September 1963 in a bid to be allowed back into the Soviet Union, complaining of harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Former vice-consul and KGB colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, who spoke to Oswald at the first meeting, said it was clear that he was a neurotic. "What struck me when I saw him was his aloofness -- it seemed he was looking through me, totally wrapped up in his own thoughts," he told the daily Izvestia newspaper published on Tuesday. Researchers have long sought access to what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other U.S. agencies learned of Oswald's meetings in Mexico City. Nechiporenko, who said Oswald had also tried to get a visa to Cuba, claimed the CIA's monitoring equipment in the consulate was faulty and missed the key episodes. Some conspiracy theorists say Kennedy fell victim to a large-scale plot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, but Nechiporenko is convinced Oswald acted alone. A U.S. commission headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded in 1964 that Kennedy was killed by Oswald acting alone. Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 but became disillusioned and returned to the United States in 1962. But in September 1963 he appealed to the consulate to be allowed back to the Soviet Union, complaining the FBI was harassing him and preventing him from getting a good job. "The more we talked to him and the more we looked at him, the less interesting he became to us," said Nechiporenko, one of three KGB agents present during the conversations. Oswald flew to Mexico to avoid dealing with the Soviet embassy in Washington and became very agitated when told he could only receive his visa in the United States and would have to wait for four months for permission. "Hardly able to keep control over himself he leaned across and almost shouted in my face: "That doesn't suit me. This will all end in tragedy'," Nechiporenko said. Oswald turned up the next day in an even more agitated mood, at one point brandishing a revolver. "If they don't leave me in peace I will defend myself," he told two of Nechiporenko's colleagues. "At the time the phrase meant nothing special to our counter-intelligence officers but they remembered it well on November 22," said Nechiporenko. The agents took their time forwarding Oswald's request to Moscow, sure the Soviet authorities would not want him back. The KGB was said to have discovered to its horror in 1962 that Oswald, who worked in a Belarussian factory during part of his stay in the Soviet Union, was making bombs in his flat. The secret police were already convinced the American was not an intelligence agent. "No opponent would consider us to be such fools that they would send us such manure," Nechiporenko quoted a previously top secret KGB report as saying. But Vladimir Semichastny, who headed the KGB at the time of the assassination, said in his memoirs he was convinced Oswald could not have killed Kennedy. "The second I heard the name Oswald in the reports from Dallas my suspicions that something fishy was going on were strengthened," Izvestia quoted the memoirs as saying. REUTER WP 11/16 To KGB Agents, Oswald Was `Extremely Agitated' Last of three articles By George Lardner Jr. and Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writers Less than two months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald sat in a consular office at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, pleading desperately for a visa to return to Russia and tearfully claiming persecution by the FBI. "I am afraid . . . they'll kill me. Let me in!" he sobbed, and with that pulled a revolver out of his jacket, according to an inside account of Oswald's perplexing visit to Mexico 30 years ago by the KGB officers who dealt with him. Their story is contained in a new book, "Passport to Assassination," that, along with interviews and newly released U.S. government documents, draws a much fuller picture of Oswald and what may have driven him to shoot the president of the United States. The Soviet portrayal of Oswald as a nervous, agitated man obsessed by what he regarded as the FBI's invasion of his life reinforces the possibility that Oswald was on the edge of violence unless he could escape from the United States, particularly from the bureau. He had been disenchanted with life in the Soviet Union and left. Now he was disenchanted again. In late September 1963, while his pregnant wife and first child went off to live with friends in a Dallas suburb, Oswald traveled from New Orleans to Mexico City to try to get a transit visa to Cuba with the Soviet Union as his final destination. But he was told at the Cuban Consulate on Sept. 27 that the Cubans would not let him travel to Havana unless he first obtained a visa to continue to Russia. At the Soviet Embassy that afternoon, Oswald met with a consular official named Valeriy Kostikov, in reality a Soviet KGB officer whose specialties included assassination. One of the first things Kostikov recalled of this initial meeting was that Oswald said "he lived for a while in the Soviet Union" and kept repeating that "the FBI is after him." Late for a luncheon date, Kostikov turned the visitor over to another KGB officer on consular duty, Oleg Nechiporenko, author of the book. When Nechiporenko told Oswald that he could only get a visa in Washington in a process that would entail a four-month wait, Oswald shouted, "This won't do for me! This is not my case! For me, it's all going to end in tragedy," Nechiporenko said. At that point, Nechiporenko, who was head of foreign counterintelligence at the embassy's KGB station, said he decided Oswald was not worth further attention. "(He) did not have any interest for us," Nechiporenko wrote. "It was perfectly clear that our own internal counterintelligence back home had already studied him. Now that he was under FBI surveillance, let him be their headache, I thought." Oswald had not given up yet. He went back to the Cuban Consulate where he claimed to have gotten a Soviet visa and now wanted a transit visa to Havana. The employee he spoke with, Silvia Duran, called to double-check. Kostikov told her the Soviets had promised Oswald nothing. The upshot was another shouting match, this time between Oswald and Cuban consul Eusebio Azcue. Duran told Mexican police after the assassination that Azcue informed Oswald that people like him "were doing harm to the Cuban revolution" and ordered him to leave the consulate. The next morning, Saturday, Sept. 28, Oswald returned to the Soviet Embassy while the KGB men were suiting up for a soccer game with their rivals in miltary intelligence, the GRU. This time, he was brought to a third consular official and KGB officer, Pavel Yatzkov, who remembered, according to a CIA report, that Oswald "was nervous and his hands trembled." Within minutes they were joined by Kostikov, who spoke English. Oswald told his story again about his 2 1/2 years in the Soviet Union and his return to the United States in 1962. According to Kostikov, Oswald even dropped hints that he had "supposedly carried out a secret mission" without specifying what it was or who it was for. Oswald then repeated his request for a visa to Moscow and said he was "motivated by the fact that it was very difficult for him to live in the United States, that he was constantly under surveillance, even persecuted, and that his personal life was being invaded, and his Russian wife and neighbors interrogated. He claimed he lost his job at a photo lab because the FBI had been around his place of employment asking questions. "In recounting all this, he continually expressed concern for his life," Kostikov said. He described Oswald as "extremely agitated and clearly nervous, especially whenever he mentioned the FBI." It was at that point that Oswald pulled out the revolver and put it on a table, saying, "See? This is what I must now carry to protect my life." Yatzkov grabbed the gun, took the cartridges out and put them in a drawer. When the meeting was over, Oswald picked up the gun again, put it in his pants, and Yatzkov gave back the bullets. Oswald was known as a loner and was in trouble from the time he was a teenager. He joined the Marines at 17, read Marxism, studied Russian and criticized capitalism when politics was discussed. He got into trouble with a superior while serving in Japan and was busted in rank. Discharged in November 1959, he sailed to England, telling his mother he was going to school in Switzerland. Instead he went to Moscow and tried to become a Soviet citizen. He carried on with several Russian women and finally married Marina Prusakova, 19, a pharmaceutical assistant in Minsk, where Oswald had been settled. By then he had soured on Soviet communism and was ready to go home. The Soviets were happy to see him leave and let Marina go with him because she was a lowly clerk at her factory, but it took almost a year before the U.S. government would let him back in. Oswald was a target of FBI interest from the time his boat, the Maasdam, docked in Hoboken, N.J., on June 13, 1962. But the statements Oswald reportedly made to the KGB in Mexico City about the bureau's interest in him clearly were exaggerated. In fact, in those days the FBI did not keep close tabs on any of the 17 returned defectors from the Soviet Union. They did, of course, keep some tabs on him. The bureau had been interviewing neighbors, some employers, and others as part of an ongoing investigation of Oswald as a possible recruit of the KGB. FBI agents questioned Oswald directly in June 1962 just after his return from Moscow and again in August. The bureau went looking for him again in Fort Worth and Dallas in the spring of 1963. A second FBI agent questioned a landlady who told him that she had just evicted Oswald because he had been "drinking to excess and had been beating his wife on numerous occasions." Oswald had had a bad temper since he was a child. When he was a teenager, he sometimes slapped his mother and he threatened his stepbrother's wife with a pocketknife. When his mother told him to put it away, he hit her. In 1953, while living in New York, Oswald was sent to Youth House, the city's detention home for delinquent children, for six weeks of "observation and diagnosis." "Lee has vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which he tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations," the chief psychiatrist at Youth House wrote after interviewing the 13-year-old Oswald. "(W)hen we asked him whether he prefers the company of boys to that of girls, he answered - `I dislike everybody.' " Oswald's mother, Marguerite, however, "never admitted that there was anything abnormal about Lee's behavior," Robert Oswald, Lee's brother, wrote later. "If she had faced it - if she had seen to it that Lee received the help he needed - I don't think the world would ever have heard of Lee Harvey Oswald." In the fall of 1962, according to his wife Marina, Oswald began taking an interest in the controversial activities of right-wing retired Army Gen. Edwin A. Walker. Oswald complained of Walker's anti-civil rights stances and associations with the militantly anticommunist John Birch Society. "The fact that Walker, who seemed to carry about in his very person the threat of `fascism' in the United States, actually lived close at hand in Dallas, seems to have stirred Lee a good deal," according to Marina's biographer, Priscilla McMillan. In late January 1963, Oswald ordered his revolver, a Smith & Wesson .38 Special caliber, and that same day, McMillan reported, he first hinted to Marina that he was thinking of sending her back to Russia. Marina said his abuse stepped up around the same time, when he discovered a letter she had written to an old boyfriend in Minsk. By March, he was photographing Walker's house in Dallas and filling up a blue loose-leaf folder with notes for an escape route and other data suggesting his plans to shoot the general. "He wanted to leave a complete record so that all the details would be in it," Marina told McMillan. On March 12, Oswald ordered his rifle, a Mannlicher-Carcano. Both the rifle and the revolver arrived around March 25 and on March 31, in his back yard, Oswald asked Marina to photograph him, all in black, holding both weapons. Walker was sitting at his desk at home around 9 p.m. April 10, 1963, when a rifle bullet smashed through a window and skimmed his hair. There were no witnesses, although a 14-year-old from a nearby house told police that right after the shooting he saw two men, in separate cars, drive out of a church parking lot adjacent to Walker's home. Marina told FBI agents Oswald came home by bus, after burying the rifle, which he retrieved four days later. Walker, who died recently, never believed Marina's account. Oswald moved to New Orleans later that month to find a job and in early May he was joined by Marina and their baby. He began organizing a local Fair Play for Cuba Committee, handing out pro-Castro circulars and membership applications in an apparent search for attention. On Aug. 9, Oswald got into a scuffle with three anti-Castro Cuban exiles and wound up in jail, where he asked to be interviewed by the FBI. An agent interviewed him at the police station on Aug. 10, and Oswald told false stories about the size of the pro-Castro group he supposedly was running and the meetings it was holding. The notoriety caused by his arrest won Oswald a radio interview and then a broadcast debate, which ended disastrously for Oswald. The host, who had checked with the FBI, almost silenced Oswald by bringing up his defection to Russia. With life unhappy and another child on the way, Oswald had been talking for months about leaving the country again and going to Cuba or returning to the Soviet Union. He had already been seeking permission for Marina to return and, in June, he wrote the Soviet Embassy in Washington asking for himself. By mid-September, the Oswalds agreed that Marina would return with daughter June to the Dallas area to live with a friend, Ruth Paine. After they left New Orleans on Sept. 23, Oswald departed for Mexico. He had told Paine he was going either to Houston or Philadelphia to look for a job. In Moscow, Oswald's visa requests for Marina and himself were routed to an unenthusiastic Soviet bureaucracy familiar with the defector's case. Back in November 1959, according to Nechiporenko, Oswald had been debriefed twice by KGB counterintelligence agents when they were weighing whether to permit him to stay and if he had promise for Soviet intelligence. But the KGB lost interest in Oswald after the ex-Marine went to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and told officials there he was going to defect and if necessary tell secrets to the Soviets. With that act, Nechiporenko said, Oswald "had exposed himself forever to American intelligence and therefore became useless to KGB intelligence." As was done in all defector cases then, it finally took a resolution by the Central Committee to allow Oswald to remain in the Soviet Union over the KGB's opposition. Nechiporenko was given access to Oswald's KGB files for his book, a concession others have been seeking for years. His presentation parallels much other information from both U.S. and Soviet sources, but in some areas his facts are unique and so far uncheckable. In the book, he quotes for the first time from a Nov. 27, 1959, memo on Oswald signed by then-Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and then-KGB Chairman Aleksander Shelepin at the direction of Anastas Mikoyan, a member of the Politburo. The memo permitted Oswald to stay for a year, "keeping in mind that Oswald has not been sufficiently studied" to give him the citizenship he was looking for. This also would give the KGB time to determine whether he was an American spy. The KGB refused to let him reside in Moscow but agreed to Minsk. There the local KGB assigned his case "to the so-called highest category, that is, one involving espionage," Nechiporenko said. "All means of available surveillance and countersurveillance technology were at the KGB's disposal, in addition to as much manpower as was needed to carry out round-the-clock observation of the subject." On Dec. 21, 1959, the KGB opened an espionage file on Lee Harvey Oswald. Back in the United States, government agencies, including the Navy, the FBI and the State Department, had already started their own files. Shelepin's successor as head of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, said in a recent interview that he got reports on Oswald "from time to time" while he was living in Minsk. When the KGB intercepted Oswald's first letter to the U.S. Embassy in 1961 indicating he was thinking of leaving the Soviet Union, it was immediately reported to Semichastny. "Thank God!" Semichastny remembers saying. "Immediately we sent a note to the Ministry of Internal Affairs saying let him out." Oswald, it is now clear, was subjected to extremely tight surveillance in the Soviet Union, much tighter than he ever got from the FBI. Oswald's KGB files, Nechiporenko said, include reports from fellow workers, neighbors and even from several of the women he dated. In Minsk, Oswald joined a hunting club at the factory where he worked and in August 1960 was permitted to buy a shotgun. After Kennedy's assassination, there were early reports from a KGB defector that Oswald was a poor shot, but the Warren Commission was given access to top-secret intercepts in which Minsk military officials claimed credit for teaching him how to shoot, according to commission lawyers. An FBI report on a talk Oswald gave in the summer of 1963 noted that Oswald talked of how much he enjoyed his weekend hunting trips outside Minsk. At the end of 1961, according to Semichastny, the KGB decided "we were certain that this kind of person could not be a U.S. intelligence agent" and recommended to the Supreme Soviet that no obstacles be placed in the way of the Oswalds' departure. Soviet permission was granted in December, but the U.S. bureaucracy proved sluggish. Fearful that U.S. intelligence might require Oswald to demonstrate his allegiance with some anti-Soviet activity, the KGB stepped up its surveillance, Nechiporenko reported. It soon discovered that Oswald was trying to build some bombs and had made "two iron casings" each with two compartments, "one filled with shot and the other explosives," as well as paper-tube fuses. Surveillance was ratcheted up again, "especially before different celebrations, congresses and high-level political meetings," Nechiporenko said, but ultimately, Oswald threw away the bomb casings. "The KGB was greatly relieved, but it did not discount the possibility of another weird act before his departure," the retired KGB colonel said. All this was on the KGB's mind in late September 1963 when their Mexico City station cabled Moscow for instructions on how to deal with Oswald's newest request for a visa. By the time of the assassination, the KGB files also contained a Nov. 9 letter Oswald wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, reporting on his trip to Mexico and his description of yet another confrontation with "the notorious FBI." Still pressing for a visa, Oswald said he had been "warned" that the FBI would "take an interest" in him again if he tried his Fair Play for Cuba activities in Texas. He also complained that an FBI agent " `suggested' to Marina Nichikayeva that she could remain in the United States under FBI `protection.' " Oswald said he objected strenously. The Byelorussian KGB in Minsk wanted Marina Oswald back "for propagandistic purposes," but Moscow said no. The KGB there and the Foreign Ministry rejected her request Oct. 7, 1963, while her husband's request was still pending. The KGB in Minsk was informed of the decision about Marina in a letter dated Nov. 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was killed. When Oswald's picture flashed onto TV screens in Mexico City later that day, Kostikov rushed into Nechiporenko's office and shouted: "Oleg, they just showed the suspect in Kennedy's death on TV! It's Lee Oswald, the gringo who was here in September! I recognized him!" Researchers Anne Eisele in Washington and Yevgenia Albats in Moscow contributed to this report. RTw 11/16 1223 KGB AGENT REVEALS DETAILS OF MEETING WITH OSWALD By David Ljunggren MOSCOW, Nov 16 (Reuter) - A retired KGB agent has cast light on a key episode in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald just two months before the assassination of U.S. President John Kennedy in November 1963. Oswald, who was arrested for the killing but was himself shot dead two days later, visited the Soviet consulate in Mexico twice in September 1963 in a bid to be allowed back into the Soviet Union, complaining of harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Former vice-consul and KGB colonel Oleg Nechiporenko, who spoke to Oswald at the first meeting, said it was clear that he was a neurotic. "What struck me when I saw him was his aloofness -- it seemed he was looking through me, totally wrapped up in his own thoughts," he told the daily Izvestia newspaper published on Tuesday. Researchers have long sought access to what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other U.S. agencies learned of Oswald's meetings in Mexico City. Nechiporenko, who said Oswald had also tried to get a visa to Cuba, claimed the CIA's monitoring equipment in the consulate was faulty and missed the key episodes. Some conspiracy theorists say Kennedy fell victim to a large-scale plot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, but Nechiporenko is convinced Oswald acted alone. A U.S. commission headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded in 1964 that Kennedy was killed by Oswald acting alone. Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 but became disillusioned and returned to the United States in 1962. But in September 1963 he appealed to the consulate to be allowed back to the Soviet Union, complaining the FBI was harassing him and preventing him from getting a good job. "The more we talked to him and the more we looked at him, the less interesting he became to us," said Nechiporenko, one of three KGB agents present during the conversations. Oswald flew to Mexico to avoid dealing with the Soviet embassy in Washington and became very agitated when told he could only receive his visa in the United States and would have to wait for four months for permission. "Hardly able to keep control over himself he leaned across and almost shouted in my face: "That doesn't suit me. This will all end in tragedy'," Nechiporenko said. Oswald turned up the next day in an even more agitated mood, at one point brandishing a revolver. "If they don't leave me in peace I will defend myself," he told two of Nechiporenko's colleagues. "At the time the phrase meant nothing special to our counter-intelligence officers but they remembered it well on November 22," said Nechiporenko. The agents took their time forwarding Oswald's request to Moscow, sure the Soviet authorities would not want him back. The KGB was said to have discovered to its horror in 1962 that Oswald, who worked in a Belarussian factory during part of his stay in the Soviet Union, was making bombs in his flat. The secret police were already convinced the American was not an intelligence agent. "No opponent would consider us to be such fools that they would send us such manure," Nechiporenko quoted a previously top secret KGB report as saying. But Vladimir Semichastny, who headed the KGB at the time of the assassination, said in his memoirs he was convinced Oswald could not have killed Kennedy. "The second I heard the name Oswald in the reports from Dallas my suspicions that something fishy was going on were strengthened," Izvestia quoted the memoirs as saying. REUTER RTw 11/18 1310 THE KENNEDYS PUBLIC LIVES OF TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY By Christopher Wilson HYANNIS PORT, Mass, Nov 18 (Reuter) - From the wide veranda of her home here on Cape Cod, Rose Kennedy can look out across the lawn where those famous games of touch football were played, to the cobalt blue bay where her son John loved to sail his boat, the "Victura." Those sunlit scenes of America's most famous family are being played and replayed across the nation in a blizzard of made-for-TV movies, magazine specials and new books as the 30th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy approaches. But for Rose, the 103 year-old matriarch of the Kennedy clan, there can be no more difficult time. It was in the Hyannis Port house, built by her husband Joseph Kennedy, that she received the news of the violent deaths of four of her nine children. Her eldest son Joseph was killed in World War II; her daughter Kathleen died in a 1948 plane crash; President John Kennedy was killed by an assassin's bullets in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and Senator Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles in 1968 as he campaigned for president. The house, the orginal building in a compound that now includes half a dozen homes all belonging to Kennedys, is not a grand palace or a mansion, but rather a rambling wooden Victorian house in the Cape Cod style, with shuttered windows and sweeping views. Inside it is crammed with photographs and framed letters from presidents, kings and prime ministers. The couch in the living room hasn't been recovered since Pope Pius XII sat there many years ago, and the TV remote control in one corner is plastered with typed instructions to help an old woman find the right buttons. Off the living room is John's bedroom. Plain, almost spartan, it's centerpiece is a wooden four-poster bed left much the same as it was when he last slept there. On a wall hangs a black-and-white photograph of the full Kennedy family, complete with a diagram of silhouettes giving all their names. Once described by John as the glue that held the family together, Rose, is today confined to her home after a series of strokes that has left her too frail even to attend mass at the local Catholic church. The woman who, in a life of triumph and tragedy never shed a tear in public, gave to her children a powerful sense of the importance of public service as well as the duty that accompanies being born to wealth and power. "She instilled in all of us the four most important things in our lives," her only surviving son, Edward, now a senator from Massachusetts, said on her on her 100th birthday. "Her love of family, her sense of history, her interest in politics and a commitment to serving others." Today many of the Kennedys work in the public sector, or are involved in public life. Here is a list of what has happened to the immediate family of John Kennedy 30 years after his death: -- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, widow, 64, divides her time between homes in New York City, Martha's Vineyard and New Jersey. She works three days a week as an editor at publisher Doubleday in New York. Her frequent companion over the past 10 years has been diamond dealer and financier Maurice Tempelsman, 64, a major Democratic Party contributor whom she has known for more than 30 years. -- John Kennedy Jr, son, 33, a graduate of Brown University and New York University Law School -- not Harvard, the alma mater of most of the Kennedy men. He later worked as an assistant district attorney in New York City. Dubbed "the sexiest man alive" by People Magazine in 1988, he is currently dating actress Daryl Hannah. Rumours of marriage plans for the two have remained just that. -- Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, daughter, 35, graduated from Harvard University and is now president of the Presidential Library Foundation. In 1986 she married Edward Schlossberg, an artist and designer. They have three children. -- Edward Kennedy, 61, John Kennedy's only surviving brother. A Democrat from Massachusetts, he is one of the longest serving members of U.S. Senate, dividing his time between Boston and Washington. He divorced his first wife Joan in 1982 and last year married Victoria Reggie, a Washington lawyer. -- Jean Kennedy Smith, sister, 66, present U.S. ambassador to Ireland. Prior to her appointment in April 1993, she was best known for her work in founding the Very Special Arts programme, which seeks to make the arts more accessible to millions of adults and children. Smith was thrust in to the media spotlight two years ago when her son, William Kennedy Smith, was accused but later acquitted of raping a woman at the family's Palm Beach estate. -- Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister, a graduate of Stanford who worked in both the State and Justice departments. She later took over direction of the Joseph P. Kennedy foundation for the mentally retarded and founded the Special Olympics for the disabled. Married in 1953 to Sargent Schriver, the couple had five children -- all of whom were at one time in public service. Her daughter Maria, a television newswoman, is married to actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. -- Patricia Kennedy Lawford, sister, married and later divorced the late actor Peter Lawford. She has homes in Santa Monica, California and New York. She has three daughters and a son, Christopher, an actor in Hollywood. REUTER UPn 11/18 1336 Reno on JFK assassination: 'I'll never forget it' WASHINGTON (UPI) -- Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday that like most Americans she remembers where she was and what she was doing when she heard that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Reno was responding to a question at her weekly news conference. "I was in a small law office that I had in Miami. The investigator came in and told me...I went home about two hours later," she said. Reno showed obvious emotion as she told how she watched the constant television coverage later with her mother and grandmother. "I'll never forget it," Reno said. Monday is the 30th anniversary of JFK's assassination in Dallas. APn 11/18 1141 Independent Counsel Copyright, 1993. The Associated Press. All rights reserved. By LARRY MARGASAK Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate today voted to revive independent counsel investigations, while restricting future counsels from writing final reports with the judgmental language used to describe Edwin Meese and the Iran-Contra scandal. The 76-21 vote sent the bill to the House. A key supporter there, Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., called the Senate vote "encouraging" and added the House would consider the measure "early next year." Chief Senate sponsor Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the vote will "restore public confidence in government" because high officials "close to the president must be prosecuted by persons not appointed by the government." The bill also includes provisions to control the costs of independent counsel investigations. Independent counsels are appointed by a special federal court. The law was the government's major tool for investigating top federal officials without the taint or appearance of conflict-of-interest. Its expiration last December -- after a life span of 14 years -- "left a gaping hole in our criminal justice system which it is up to us to repair," Levin said of the five-year reauthorization measure. The law died, in part, because of Republican rage over independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's seven-year, $35 million Iran-Contra investigation of top Reagan administration officials. Levin included language that explicitly permits investigations of lawmakers by independent counsels, while retaining the option for the Justice Department to probe members of the House and Senate. But it was Republican Leader Bob Dole who sponsored a provision, inserted Wednesday by voice vote, that would restrict what future independent prosecutors could say in their final reports. The still-secret Walsh report on the Iran-Contra scandal concludes that top cabinet officers in the Reagan administration participated in a coverup, according to information on Walsh's findings obtained by The Associated Press. And Dole's restriction, Levin said, definitely would have prevented conclusions in a critical 1988 independent counsel report on Meese, who served as attorney general in the Reagan administration. Dole's restriction on reports by independent counsels, and the grand juries they supervise, is a departure from normal practice. State grand juries typically have authority to issue highly critical reports of public officials or private individuals or companies even if the grand jurors, and the state prosecutors who supervise them, decide not to indict anyone. The intent of Dole's amendment, as explained by several senators, is to prevent a future counsel from stating that someone broke the law, if that person was not indicted in the investigation. The amendment would "restrict the nature of the report to the facts," said Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine, co-sponsor of the revival bill. The counsel could not engage "in either speculation or expressions of opinion as to the culpability of individuals," unless there was an indictment, Cohen explained. Technically, the Dole language would delete a provision from the old law that required the counsel to report "fully and completely" on the investigation. According to sources who have seen the still-unreleased Iran-Contra report, the document concludes that "the president's most senior advisers and the Cabinet members on the National Security Council participated in the strategy to make National Security Council members (Robert) McFarlane, (John) Poindexter and (Oliver) North scapegoats whose sacrifice would protect the Reagan administration in its final two years. "In an important sense, this strategy succeeded," the report added. "Independent counsel discovered much of the best evidence of the coverup in the final year of active investigation." The only Cabinet official indicted in the scandal was former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Two weeks before Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on charges of lying in order to hide his handwritten notes on the scandal from investigators, he was pardoned by President Bush. In 1988, another independent counsel, James McKay, found that Meese -- then attorney general -- had probably broken two tax laws and probably twice violated a criminal conflict-of-interest law. The probable tax violations concerned a $20,000 capital gain on the sale of $55,000 in securities. The probable conflict-of-interest entailed Meese's involvement in Justice Department decisions with the regional Bell telephone companies at a time when Meese held stock in the firms. UPn 11/18 1123 Senate renews independent counsel act WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The Senate has renewed the independent counsel act first passed in 1978 as a result of the Watergate scandal. The law is intended to assure the public that the executive branch will not investigate itself when charges of misconduct are raised. APn 11/18 1315 Jonestown Today Copyright, 1993. The Associated Press. All rights reserved. By BERT WILKINSON Associated Press Writer GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) -- Few Guyanese care to recall the deaths of more than 900 followers of an American cult leader in their jungle commune 15 years ago. In fact, they hope its anniversary today passes with little notice. Residents who live near the rusting farm equipment and furniture that were part of the 300 acres carved from rain forest and called Jonestown are more concerned about finding jobs with its newest foreign occupant, an Asian timber enterprise. Even that South Korean-Malaysian company wants nothing to do it. "We don't plan to touch it at all," said Lloyd Searwar, a spokesman for Barama Co. Ltd., whose concession includes the former commune. "All we have done is to improve the road passing on the outside of it for our purposes." About the only people interested are local entrepreneurs and the 13-month-old administration of President Cheddi Jagan. Next month, a government-appointed tourist board will start looking at proposals to turn the site, now nearly covered with tropical undergrowth, into a tourist attraction. Fleeing allegations of misconduct, the Rev. Jim Jones led followers of his San Francisco-based Peoples Temple in 1977 to Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America. The cult leader believed he would be safe from what he perceived as media and police persecution. In Jonestown, he and his followers built cottages, workshops and dormitories in tidy rows, grew fruit and vegetables and raised chickens and pigs on land 200 miles northwest of the capital. Late the next year, U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, D-Calif., flew to Guyana to investigate reports of abuse in the cult. Jones' followers shot to death Ryan, three journalists and a temple defector, and wounded 11 in an ambush at Port Kaituma airport. Jones had held monthly suicide rehearsals. On Nov. 18, 1978, just hours after Ryan was killed, he directed his followers to drink grape-flavored punch laced with potassium cyanide. Some were forced to take the poison, some were shot to death. In all, 912 followers died. Jones had a bullet wound in his head. It is not known whether he was shot or committed suicide. "It was an American tragedy that occurred on our soil ... within our borders," former Prime Minister Hamilton Green told The Associated Press on Wednesday, defending the decision by the former government to allow Jones to set up the cult in this country. He says it says something about America that a group would have left the comforts of home to set up a new life in virgin territory. "Something was missing in the American way of life for that to happen," he said. "It is something for scholars to ponder." Green says that Guyana, with a population of 750,000 and an area the size of Iowa, found Jones' proposal to set up the jungle agricultural township in line with government efforts to get Guyanese to move away from urban centers. Just months before the massacre that Saturday evening, Jonestown was close to self-sufficiency in food. Government officials hoped it would serve as a model for city-loving Guyanese, Green said. Fifteen years later, Jonestown is gone. Guyana still has vast underdeveloped lands, people still flee its less developed rural areas for the city. And the country still fights to shed the image of a country where such a macabre event could occur.