Was the FPCC CIA operation under the direction of Richard Thomas Gibson?

Jim Olmstead wrote:Currently I'm investigating that the FPCC was in fact a CIA operation, directed by it's founder Gibson. There are a lot of names and information to cross check, but if it can be shown that the FPCC was controlled by the CIA during the 1962-1963 period while Oswald was deeply involved in activities associated to the FPCC it is worth exploring in greater detail.

James K. Olmstead wrote:Hey Greg:  I never considered the FPCC any CIA run
front group in the past but have changed my mind since
I came back into the research.  Looking for other information now leads me behind the consideration in
greater detail. 

I would be glad to share concerns files and opinions with anyone following the same lines.  The doc that
I posted on provided me with 3 key areas of concern,
that make it necessary to re visit all considerations and files available.

I'll be around but may not be posting much.

Heading south soon for the winter, have a lecture to give to a small group interested in my work.  Hope all is well and wish all a happy holiday season. ....jko

Phil Hopley wrote:Thanks Greg and James,

Gibson was in the US military in the early 1950s then, after leaving the Army, headed to Paris, France, in 1955 and joined the US ex-pat community who mostly spent their time at the Cafe Tournon and the "left bank" crowd. He was there at the same time as James Baldwin and Norman Mailer (founding members of the FPCC, who, by the way, met at the home of Jean Malaquais, a Frenchman who spoke English and was a translator). Gibson became embroiled in what was referred to as the "Gibson Affair" involving African-American political cartoonist Ollie Harrington.  Harrington was heading to Sweden for a few months and sub-let his apartment to Gibson. Upon Harrington's return, Gibson refused to move out and would not allow Harrington access to his clothes, furniture, personal belongings. Gibson had also sold a lot of Harrington's clothes.  Harrington wouldn't report it to the Police and the matter dragged on for two years. With reference to Hazel Rowley's book, "no one trusted Richard Gibson, with his shifty manner and glib talk" (refer The Life and Times of Richard Wright, by Hazel Rowley, page 489)

Gibson, and his friend William Gardner Smith, wrote a letter to Look magazine and the London Observer critical of France's attitude towards Algeria but signed the letter as Ollie Harrington. After it was established that Gibson was the forger of Harrington's signature, Gibson was beaten so badly by Harrington that he was hospitalised for a week.  In a similar incident, Gibson wrote a letter to Time magazine attributing comments to ex-pat Richard Wright, which were critical of the US's treatment of African-Americans.  Gibson and Smith also accused Wright of being a Communist and that he worked for the FBI (he was neither). Subsequent to this, it was generally believed in the Paris ex-pat community that Gibson was secretly working for the CIA or FBI. 

From the rear flyleaf of his book "African Liberation Movements" (published in 1972), it states "Richard Gibson, born in California in 1931, began his career in journalism with the Philadelphia Afro-American. He was one of its founding editors, in 1962, in Algiers, of Revolution Africain, and he took charge of its monthly edition in English until 1964. Since then he has been a roving correspondent for Negro Press International and Tuesday magazine. He has worked for CBS News in New York and Agence France-Press in Paris, written for numerous papers in three continents, and broadcast on the African service of the BBC. His novel, A Mirror for Magistrates, was published in London in 1958.

As at May, 2017, Gibson was still alive and living in London where he has been director of such companies as The Hamden Trust; WAC Arts; YAA Asantewaa Arts & Community; Carnival Village Trust; Lassa Advice UK; Lassa; Lusophonia; Lusofonia Advice and Support Services Agency (Lassa); Centerprise Trust Limited.

I have a full set of Liberator magazine, (10 bound volumes) so will check them for Gibson's name.

Jeff Morley wrote:
CIA Reveals Name of Former Spy in JFK Files—And He's Still Alive
By Jefferson Morley On Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - 07:38

   
Richard Gibson working as a journalist for CBS Radio News. Photo: Richard T. Gibson Papers/George Washington UN

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Paris beckoned African-American intellectuals hoping to escape the racism and conformity of American life. Chief among them: Richard Wright, the acclaimed author of Native Son and Black Boy, who arrived in 1947. He was soon joined by Chester Himes, an ex-convict who mastered hard-boiled detective fiction, James Baldwin, the precocious essayist, and Richard Gibson, an editor at the Agence France-Presse.

These men became friends, colleagues and, soon, bitter rivals. Their relationship blew up after Gibson forged a letter, published in Life magazine under the name of one of Wright’s friends, attacking the French government for refusing to give up its colony in Algeria. Wright was enraged, and he dramatized their falling out in a roman à clef he called Island of Hallucination, which was never published, even after his death in 1960. In 2005, Gibson published a memoir in a scholarly journal recounting the political machinations his former friend had dramatized, telling The Guardian he had obtained a copy of the manuscript and had no objections to its publication. "I turn up as Bill Hart, the 'superspy...'," Gibson said of the story.

Wright's book was apparently prescient. On April 26, when the National Archives released thousands of documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, they included three fat CIA files on Gibson. According to these documents, he had served U.S. intelligence from 1965 until at least 1977. The Gibson files revealed his CIA code name, QRPHONE-1, his salary—as much as $900 a month—his various missions, as well as his attitude (“energetic”) and performance (“a self-starter”).

The most curious part of the story: Gibson is still alive. He’s 87 years old and still living abroad. (Gibson “will not be able to your questions,” said a family friend who answered the phone at his residence.)

The CIA is usually vigilant about defending the confidentiality of its sources and methods. In announcing the release of the JFK files last year, President Donald Trump declared the records would be opened in their entirety, “except for the names and addresses of living persons.” Save for Gibson’s apparently. (The CIA declined to comment for this story.)

Born in 1931, Gibson grew up in Philadelphia and attended Kenyon College. A stint in the Army gave him a taste for European life, and he moved to Rome and then to Paris. He wrote a novel and fell in—and out—with Wright and other expatriate intellectuals.

In 1957, Gibson left Paris and went to work for CBS Radio News, according to his newspaper reports. With a colleague, he covered the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power. In 1960, Gibson co-founded the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), which defended Castro’s government from negative coverage in the North American press.

Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now

When he left CBS, Gibson took over running the FPCC, and it grew rapidly on college campuses. He resisted subpoenas from Senate investigators seeking to discredit the group and urged civil rights leaders to support the Cuban cause.

Yet in July 1962, Gibson quit the FPCC and wrote an anonymous letter on the group’s stationery to the CIA. If the agency would arrange a secure meeting spot, he wrote, he could be of assistance.

The CIA figured out who wrote the letter was and made contact with the young intellectual. He had moved on to Switzerland to become the English-language editor of a new magazine called La Révolution Africaine. In a January 1963 memo, Deputy CIA Director Richard Helms informed the FBI that Gibson had told an agency source about the ideological direction and hiring plans of the magazine.

When President Kennedy was shot dead on November 22, 1963, the CIA asked him about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who had had corresponded with the FPCC. Gibson told them what little he knew but indicated he wanted to “maintain contact.”

In the summer of 1964, Gibson had another falling out, this time with the publisher of La Révolution Africaine who accused him of being an agent of the FBI and CIA. Whenever the charge was repeated years later, Gibson shrugged it off. "If I'm CIA, where's my pension?" he told The Guardian in 2006.

By then, Gibson was no longer working for the agency. But his file shows that a Langley officer contacted him in January 1965 and arranged for a debriefing and “test assignment” that summer. “After recruitment and agreement to...[polygraph] examination, Subject was introduced to his…case officer.” He soon began working for the intelligence service (it’s not clear if he had ever previously been a spy).

Four years later, according to his file, the agency increased Gibson’s tax-free salary of $600 a month to $900 a month (the equivalent of more than $6,000 in 2018 dollars). His mission: to report on “his extensive contacts among leftist, radical, and communist movements in Europe and Africa.”

Gibson and family settled in Belgium, where he lived the life of a cosmopolitan intellectual. He traveled widely and wrote a book about African liberation movements fighting white-minority rule. He also monitored the revolutionary poet-playwright, Amiri Baraka, who trusted him as an ideological comrade. In his letters to the CIA’s spy, Baraka signed off with the salutation, “In Struggle.”

While the newly released CIA files don’t include operational details, Gibson seems to have been a prolific spy. One CIA file asserts that in 1977, his file contained more than 400 documents.

His quip to The Guardian notwithstanding, Gibson even had a CIA pension of sorts. In September 1969, his case officer noted that “QRPHONE/1 has begun to invest up of his monthly salary and a reputable mutual fund of his choice. This modest investment program will enhance financial security in the event of termination and/or a rainy day.”

Gibson was still an “active agent” in 1977, when Congress reopened the JFK investigation and started asking questions about the agency’s penetration of the FPCC in 1963. The House Select Committee on Assassinations asked to see Gibson’s CIA file. The agency only showed investigators a small portion of his file, but the entirety of the still-classified material became part of the CIA’s archive of JFK records.

That designation would eventually change. In October 1992, Congress passed a law mandating release of all JFK files within 25 years. Gibson’s secret was safe for the time being. In 1985, he successfully sued a South African author who asserted he was a CIA agent. The book was withdrawn, and the publisher issued a statement declaring that “Mr. Gibson has never worked for the United States Central Intelligence Agency,” a claim that no longer seems tenable.

In 2013, Gibson sold his collected papers to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. To celebrate the acquisition, the university held a daylong symposium, “Richard Gibson: Literary Contrarian & Cold Warrior,” dedicated to “furthering our understanding of the intellectual and literary history of the Cold War.”

With the release of Gibson’s CIA files, scholars can now discern the hidden hand of the American clandestine service in writing that history. When it came to the character who inspired Bill Hart, “the superspy,” Richard Wright’s fiction was perhaps ahead of its time.