William Worthy, correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American, delivered a quiet denunciation of the Cental Intelligence Agency last night at Dudley House.
He said the CIA should be forced to "get out of the assassination field," and that its influence on the government's policies should be reduced. "Once you start assassinating people for political reasons, the lines become blurred, and anybody can get put on the list," Worthy declared.
Asked for predictions of future CIA activities, he guessed the CIA might interfere in Chile, if the Socialist-Communist coalition won in the elections next September, and in South Vietnam, if President Johnson negotiated a settlement there.
Got Trujillo, Diem
The CIA, Worthy claimed, was responsible for the assassination of Rafael Trujillo Molinas in the Dominican Republic and for the overthrow of the Diem regime in South Vietnam. He read from an article in the New Republic which backed up the former claim.
Discussing President Kennedy's assassination, Worthy said that one of his first thoughts afterwards was that it could have been a CIA plot. There was still not enough evidence available to disprove this hypothesis, he declared.
Worthy also denounced the CIA for using newspapermen and scholars as informants. Foreign correspondents, he claimed, were often "de-briefed" by the CIA on their return to the United States, and scholars were "asked to look into things" when on archaeological or anthropological trips.
Worthy said a former CIA employee had told him that his daily activities were traced by the CIA when he was in China.
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