Excerpt of Mushroom Cloud by Thomas J. Yeggy

Dr. Caleb Young was a good and conscientious man. That’s how General George Marshall described this chief scientist for the CIA. In November 1963, just days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Marshall and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wanted to tap Dr. Young for what they hoped would be an inside view of the CIA and its possible nefarious activities. They longed to know what Young knew about the CIA’s potential involvement in Kennedy’s assassination. Katzenbach appealed to the grand jury and got what he wanted. Its subpoena powers pulled Young in for a lengthy and clandestine inquiry.

Caleb Young arrived early to the hearing in December 1963. He wanted to arrange the sixty-eight neatly indexed binders in chronological order across the huge conference room table at the Department of Justice (DOJ). He had been debriefed by CIA agents Sidney Graybeal, Chief of the Guided Missile and Space Division, and field agent Joseph Bulik. He now knew the Justice Department was primarily concerned with what involvement the CIA may have had in the Kennedy assassination, but they also wanted to know what communications he’d had with a Soviet GRU agent, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, at the ten Pugwash Conferences from July 1957 through September 1962. Penkovsky had not attended the first conference in July 1957, and Young needed to set that record straight.