Rear Admiral Rufus Taylor ONI Records Missing?

The Rufus Taylor Records Gone Missing?

“In its Final Declaration of Compliance, ONI stated that it conducted an extensive review of ONI records held at Federal Records Centers throughout the country. ONI did not identify any additional assassination records. ONI was unable to find any relevant files for the Director of ONI from 1959 to 1964.” - Final Report ARRB


The Office of Naval Intelligence maintains that the records of its former director Rufus Taylor and his predecessor are missing. They just don’t know where they are or even if they still exist.

From another agency, the ARRB obtained an unsigned affidavit Taylor wrote professing that the ONI did not utilize Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of the President, as an agent or asset, and there is record of Taylor himself ordering a record “to be prepared” as requested.

For some reason it is hard for me to fathom the idea that the Office of Naval Intelligence – the oldest, smallest and most powerful of all US government intelligence agencies, somehow lost the entire office files of their director from 1959-1964, including those of Taylor, who served as director of ONI from June 1963 to May 1966.

If this were a poker game and I could call them on it I would, but in further developing Peter Dale Scott’s “negative template” approach, so I though it appropriate to take a closer look at Admiral Rufus Taylor, and what role he played in the proceedings.

It turns out that rear Admiral Rufus Taylor USN was the first intelligence specialist to hold the position of Director of Naval Intelligence. June 1963. - 1)

In his honor the Rufus Taylor Awards are presented annually at the Navy Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center (NMITC), Dam Neck, Virginia and at the Fleet Intelligence Training Center (FITC) San Diego, California 2)

Then Taylor turns up, even after retirement, trying to suppress Victor Marchetti’s book"The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. This is from Victor Marchetti concerning Taylor’s efforts to stop publication:

MARCHETTI: What I learned in my dealings with Congressmen, in the CIA and after leaving, was that the men who wanted to change the situation didn't have the power, while those who had the power didn't want any change. With Congress a hopeless case, and the White House already in the know and well satisfied to let the CIA continue to operate in secrecy, I decided to talk to the press. I gave my first interview to U.S. News and World Report, and that started the ball rolling. Soon I was in touch with publishers in New York, talking about doing a book.

I soon got a telephone call from Admiral Rufus Taylor, who had been my boss in the agency, but by that time had retired. He told me to meet him at a motel in the Virginia suburbs, across the Potomac from Washington. My suspicions aroused by the remoteness of the room from the office, I was greeted by Admiral Taylor, who had thoughtfully brought along a large supply of liquor: a bottle of scotch, a bottle of bourbon, a bottle of vodka, a bottle of gin ... "I couldn't remember what you liked," he told me, "so I brought one of everything."

I began to make noise: flushing the toilet, washing my hands, turning on the television. Admiral Taylor was right behind me, turning everything off. I kept making noise, jingling the ice in my glass and so on, until the admiral sat down. There was a table with a lamp on it between the admiral's chair and the one which he now told me to sit down on. He looked at me with a little twinkle in his eye: the lamp was bugged, of course.

We talked, and Admiral Taylor told me the CIA was worried about what I might write in my book. He proposed a deal: I was to give no more interviews, write no more articles, and to stay away from Capitol Hill. I could write my book, and then let him and other retired senior officers look it over, and they would advise me and the agency. After that the CIA and I could resolve our differences. I told him, "Fair enough." We had a drink on it, and went out to dinner. That was our deal

What I didn't know was that a few nights later John Erlichman and Richard Nixon would be sitting in the White House discussing my book. There is a tape of their discussion, "President Nixon, John Ehrlichman, 45 minutes, subject Victor Marchetti," which is still sealed: I can't get it Ehrlichman told me through contacts that if I listened to the tape I would learn exactly what happened to me and why.

Whatever the details of their conversation were, the president of the United States had decided I should not publish my book. I was to be the first writer in American history to be served with an official censorship order served by a court of the United States, because President Nixon did not want to be embarrassed, nor did he want the CIA to be investigated and reformed: that would have hampered his ability to use it for his own purposes. A few days later, on April 18, 1972, I received a federal injunction restraining me from revealing any "intelligence information." After more than a year of court battles, CIA and the Cult of Intelligence was published. The courts allowed the CIA to censor it in advance, and as a result the book appeared with more than a hundred holes for CIA-ordered deletions. Later editions show previously deleted words and lines, which the court ordered the CIA to restore in boldface or italics. The book is therefore difficult to read, indeed something of a curiosity piece. And of course all the information which was ordered cut out ended up leaking to the public anyway.

All this was done to help the CIA suppress and distort history, and to enable presidents to do the same. Presidents like Harry Truman, who claimed falsely that "I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations," but who willingly employed the agency to carry out clandestine espionage and covert intervention in the affairs of other countries. Or Dwight Eisenhower, who denied that we were attempting to overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia, when we were, and was embarrassed when he tried to deny the CIA's U-2 over flights and was shown up by Khruschev at Paris in 1960. John F. Kennedy, as everyone knows by now, employed the CIA in several attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. We used everyone from Mafia hoods to Castro's mistress, Marita Lorenz (who was supposed to poison the dictator with pills concealed in her cold cream -- the pills melted). I have no doubt that if we could have killed Castro, the U.S. would have gone in.

There was a fairly widespread belief that one reason Kennedy was assassinated was because he was going to get us out of Vietnam. Don't you believe it He was the CIA's kind of president, rough, tough, and gung-ho. Under Kennedy we became involved in Vietnam in a serious way, not so much militarily as through covert action. It is a fact that the United States engineered the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam's premier, and Ngo Dinh Nhu, his powerful brother. A cable was sent out to the ambassador which said, "If Lou Conein goofs up [Lucien Conein was a key CIA operative in Saigon], it's his responsibility." So when E. Howard Hunt faked these memos and cables when he was working for the "plumbers" on behalf of President Nixon (and against the Democrats), he knew what he was doing. That was his defense, that he wasn't really forging or inventing anything. "Stuff like that really existed, but I couldn't find it," he said. Of course Hunt couldn't find it by that time the original documents were gone. But Hunt knew what he was doing.

President Nixon's obsession with secrecy led to the end of his presidency, of course. As indicated earlier, Nixon was determined to suppress my book. On several occasions after his resignation, Nixon has been asked what he meant when he said that the CIA would help him cover up the Watergate tapes, because "they owed him one." He has responded, "I was talking about Marchetti," in other words the efforts (still secret) to prevent The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence from being published. END Marchetti on Taylor. 3)

TAYLOR also had strong feelings about the attack on the USS LIBERTY: Taylor “was one of many lifelong military professionals who maintained (and so documented when he wrote it to HELMS) that the 07 JUN67, murderous 25-minute act-of-war attack by Israel on the U.S.S. Liberty ship was a deliberate attack (inflicting 34 dead and 172 wounded American servicemen from a crew of 294), and that the U.S. government covered-up, and continues to cover-up, that fact. (Due to continuing pressure by the pro-Israel lobby within the United States, this attack remains the only serious naval incident that has never been thoroughly investigated by Congress; to this day, no surviving crew member has been permitted to officially and publicly testify about the attack).” 4)

TAYLOR & the FOUNDING of Navy TASK FORCE 157. According to Paul H. Nitze, "Instructions for the coordination and control of the Navy's clandestine intelligence collection program," (December 7, 1965. Top Secret, 5 pp.), Taylor established Task Force 157, which Ed Wilson exposed to Bobby Inman, who immediately shut down.

The U.S. Navy had conducted clandestine human intelligence operations during the 1930s and World War II. By the mid-1960s the Navy, however, was largely out of the clandestine HUMINT business. Then, in 1965, Admiral Rufus Taylor asked Thomas Duval and Thomas Saunders to set up a Navy HUMINT program. Despite some concern by senior Navy officers about the "flap potential," their proposal was approved - resulting in this memorandum from Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze. The memorandum provides a rationale for the creation of a new HUMINT organzation, relevant definitions, and establishes the responsibilities of senior officials. With regard to security, the memo mandates that very existence of the program be classified Secret…..Nitze's memo would lead to the establishment, in 1966, of the Naval Field Operations Support Group (NFOSG) to conduct clandestine HUMINT operations. It would soon be given an alternative designation - Task Force 157 - by which it would become more commonly known. 5)

Ed Wilson said he was responsible for the physical security of U2 bases in Japan when Oswald was there, and brokered a deal to sell Gadhafi tons of plastic explosives, some of which were probably used in the Lockerbee and German disco attacks. Wilson lived in Libya for years and was snookered back to USA by the same Federal prosecutor who handled the Leiteler assassination case (Gene Proper). Wilson was released from federal prison when it was shown that Wilson was still working for the CIA.

Of Rufus TAYLOR researcher MAE BRUSSELL said, “When Richard Helms, former CIA chief, was questioned about Oswald's Navy Intelligence work, he said, ‘Why ask me? Call Navy Intelligence.’”

Mae Brussell: “And he threw out the name Rufus Taylor. And he mentioned that Taylor just died last week. He was a very important witness who died a week before Helms was to testify. Rufus Taylor, Annapolis graduate, studied in Japan from 1938 to 1941, was a native of St. Louise, Missouri, and was with General Macarthur after the war in Japan. Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence for the entire Pacific fleet, he was in Japan from 1941 to 1959 and in Navy Intelligence at the time that Lee Oswald was over there in 1959 in the Philippines, at the Atsugi Air bases and was involved with the U2. Oswald served in the Marines with top secret security clearance at the time that Rufus was Pacific Intelligence Chief. Oswald went to the Soviet Union and Rufus went to Washington, D.C. Oswald said, "I'm going to give away radar secrets." Rufus then became the Director for Foreign Intelligence in the Soviet Union. Rufus was the Director of Navy Intelligence in 1963 up until the time Kennedy was killed - from 1963 to 1966. During 1967 through 1969, Rufus became the Deputy Director of the CIA--the number two post under Helms.”6)

Department of the Navy
Office of Naval Intelligence

2 Oct 97

From: Commander, Office of Naval Intelligence
To: Chief of Naval Operations

Ref: (a) CNO (NO9BL) e-mail of 8 Sept. 97

1. Per reference (a), the following responses are provided:

Question 1: Review Board request for records identified in the office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) regional office located in Dallas, TX, in 1963.

Answer: The ONI office located in Dallas, TX, in 1963 was associated with the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, then a component command of ONI. Those records, if any, are now under their control and are not within ONI record group 289 at the Washington National Records Center (WNRC).

Question 2: Review Board request for any information from Naval Attaches assigned to Moscow or Mexico City.

Answer: No records regarding Naval Attaches assigned to Moscow or Mexico City during this period were found within ONI records at the WNRC.

Question 3: Review Board request that ONI confirm whether the files for the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations (Intelligence) had been located and whether the files of the Director of Naval Intelligence in 1959 had been identified and reviewed.

Answer: ONI has completely surveyed all of its documents within record group 289. While correspondence originated by commands subordinate to ONI remain stored pending disposition determination, no records specifically from the Director of Naval Intelligence were identified. The possibility that those records were accessioned to the National Archives or were filed in another record group cannot be discounted. Most likely, record group 38 under OPNAV control may contain responsive records.

BK Notes; Just knowing the basic history of ONI, their mission, and how its very purpose is to make and preserve records – I just don’t believe they lose anything by accident, especially when it comes to the records of their director.

1) History of ONI – Dorwart, Jeffery.
2) Navy Marine Intelligence Training Center – Fleet Intelligence TC
3) Victor Marchetti – Re: CIA & Cult of Intelligence
4) Taylor & Liberty – Official Coverup
5) Taylor & Task Force 157 – Separate and independent HUMIT intelligence network based at ports throughout the world.
6) Mae Brussell on Taylor – World Watchers International (WWI)