A Reporter Got an Anonymous Letter Claiming an Unknown Man Was Behind Kennedy's Killing

It is 1975 in the New York offices of the Village Voice, a weekly newspaper. Typewriters clatter, reporters gather around the coffee machine, and cigarette smoke hangs in the air. Dick Russell, a reporter who had recently written about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is opening his mail.

One envelope stands out. It is from someone who calls himself the Brooklyn waiter. He says he has read Russell's article on the assassination and that Russell is now part of what he calls the great game of researching it. Then he offers a tip: the mastermind behind Kennedy's killing, he writes, was a man named Adolf Sheppey Wiedenbach.

Russell had never heard the name. He kept reading, and then he set the letter aside, because he had no way to check it. That odd name came back 15 years later, attached to the chief of intelligence for Gen. Douglas MacArthur in World War II and Korea.

There was no internet in 1975, no search box for an unfamiliar name. Russell said he simply did not know what to make of the claim or who Wiedenbach could be. Years later, Russell said he was "working on a book about the assassination" when he came across an article about Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, who had been chief of intelligence for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the American commander in the Pacific.

The connection caught his eye for another reason. Richard Case Nagell, a former intelligence operative, had worked for a top secret Army intelligence unit under Willoughby's command, a unit that Nagell described as "designed to conceal the true nature of CIA objectives."

Russell kept digging into Willoughby. He learned that the general was an extreme, far right anticommunist with ties to Allen Dulles, the former chief of the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, to the Hunts, a Dallas oil family, and to Cuban exiles.

Then Russell found one more detail. Willoughby's birth name was Adolph Sheppey Wiedenbach, nearly letter for letter the name in the old anonymous letter.

The match was in the names, and Russell could not verify the link, leaving him with the question he had shelved in 1975: whether the anonymous writer had named the real man behind Kennedy's killing.