Legacy of Secrecy (10 page)

just that reason, shows that Almeida’s work for JFK hadn’t leaked, at

least to officials on Cubela’s level. So it’s not hard to see why Helms felt

he could get away with pushing Cubela to assassinate Fidel himself,

since it was, in some ways, only a half step more than Cubela was offi-

cially doing anyway.

Desmond FitzGerald had suggested earlier schemes to kill Castro,

which were never authorized by the Kennedys. In fact, the Kennedys

were not told about them at all, because they involved having JFK’s

personal emissary, James Donovan, give Fidel a poisoned diving suit

during their negotiations about a small prisoner release in the spring

of 1963. Fidel and Donovan shared an interest in scuba diving, so Fitz-

Gerald even suggested rigging an exploding seashell to kill Fidel.

Helms and FitzGerald were the highest CIA officials who knew about

the unauthorized attempts to kill Fidel. From Helms’s perspective, the

CIA-Mafia plots, QJWIN, and Cubela-as-assassin might have been

viewed simply as backup plans in case some problem developed with

Almeida. Others might see them as an attempt by Helms to have Fidel

eliminated by a CIA-originated plan, instead of one in which the CIA

was only a supporting player. It’s also possible that Cubela was being

groomed as a patsy to take the fall when Fidel was killed by other means.

Also, if at the last minute Almeida proved unwilling or unable to place

assassins to kill Fidel at Varadero, it’s possible that Helms wanted to

make sure people were available to do the job.

On November 19, 1963, Helms had shown JFK an arms cache, sup-

posedly from Cuba, that had been found in Venezuela, indicating that

Fidel was exporting his Revolution to the rest of Latin America.37 JFK and

Bobby seemed impressed, and it may have been Helms’s way to ensure

that, just in case their secret peace feelers appeared to be meeting with

success, they didn’t get cold feet about the coup plan. (In subcommittee

meetings, Helms had been opposed to any attempt at negotiation with

Fidel.)

Of the CIA officers that declassified files linked to the AMWORLD por-

tion of the JFK-Almeida coup plan, three were of particular importance

in 1963 and the decades that followed: David Atlee Phillips, David

Morales, and Henry Heckscher. They continued working together

into the 1970s, even using aspects of AMWORLD for coup attempts in

Chile.

David Atlee Phillips was officially the Chief of Cuban Operations at

the CIA’s Mexico City station, but he had a separate role for AMWORLD,

in which he reported directly to Desmond FitzGerald in Washington.

He used different cover identities (among them Lawrence F. Barker

and Michael C. Choaden) for various operations, and dozens of aliases

(including Maurice Bishop, according to Congressional investigator

Gaeton Fonzi).38

Phillips was a writer and propaganda specialist; according to E. How-

ard Hunt, Phillips also “ran” the DRE, a small Cuban exile group that

was not part of the coup plan. This raises suspicion about the unusual

amount of TV, radio, and newspaper publicity Lee Oswald generated in

August 1963, when he had a brief street altercation with the only mem-

ber of the New Orleans DRE branch. At the time, Oswald was the only

member of a phony Fair Play for Cuba (FPCC) chapter in New Orleans,

though he avoided associating with real leftists or pro-Castro people in

the city.39 Shortly after Oswald’s radio and TV appearances, Phillips sup-

posedly met with Oswald and Menoyo’s exile partner in Dallas. A short

time after that, Oswald took his unusual trip to Mexico City, Phillips’s

main base. There, Oswald was one of three individuals linked to Artime

associates who visited the Cuban embassy within days of each other

(sometimes on the same day) in an attempt to get into Cuba.

Phillips’s former boss in Cuba during the time of the Revolution was

David Morales, a gruff Hispanic Indian from New Mexico. Though Phil-

lips would eventually surpass Morales in CIA rank, in 1963 Morales

was still the more senior of the two. Morales was seen within the CIA

as someone willing to deal with the Mafia and assassinations, and he

was close to Mafia don Johnny Rosselli in the fall of 1963. At that time,

Morales was the Chief of Operations at the huge Miami CIA station,

code-named JMWAVE. It was the largest CIA station in the world, even

though it was based in the United States, where the CIA is not sup-

posed to conduct covert operations. The CIA memo from June 1963 that

created AMWORLD established a special communication center for it

38

LEGACY OF SECRECY

at JMWAVE that allowed Morales, FitzGerald, and Helms to bypass

the normal bureaucratic structure and most employees at the Miami

station. It’s unclear how much the Miami Station Chief, Ted Shackley,

knew about AMWORLD and Almeida at that time.

Morales’s position in the AMWORLD part of the JFK-Almeida coup

plan also gave him a way to use it for his own ends, or those of his close

friend Johnny Rosselli. Morales had several code names and cover iden-

tities we know of so far, like “Stanley R. Zamka” and “Dr. Gonzales.”40

But if his close associate David Atlee Phillips is any indication, Morales

had many more, and even one of those could have allowed him to fun-

nel his time to aid Rosselli in a way that wouldn’t be obvious to his

superiors. Morales frequently traveled from his home base of Miami to

Mexico City and to Washington, meaning that no one superior had a

full view of his activities.

A fellow CIA agent said that Morales “was a roughneck. He was a

bully, a hard drinker, and big enough to get away with a lot of stuff other

people couldn’t get away with.” Yet Morales had polish when he needed

it. By his own admission in a CIA file, he worked with “senior offi-

cials [in] Latin American countries,” and ten years after JFK’s murder,

Morales would become “counterinsurgency advisor for Latin American

matters to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.”41 Just prior to that,

Morales had been one of four regional directors for the CIA in Vietnam

for the Operation Phoenix assassination program, which resulted in the

deaths of 20,857 people, according to the testimony of later CIA Director

William Colby.42

Morales was capable of more than being a manager, and didn’t mind

killing people himself. His best friend says, “Morales claimed credit for

having killed dozens of Tupamaro guerrillas in Uruguay in a door-to-

door search of the apartment building where many of them lived.”43

According to the number-two man at the Miami CIA station in 1963, “if

the U.S. government as a matter of policy needed someone or something

neutralized, Dave would do it, including things that were repugnant to

a lot of people.”44

David Morales also reportedly met with Rolando Cubela, in Septem-

ber 1963, as one of the CIA men pressuring Cubela to assassinate Fidel.45

As Chief of Operations in Miami, Morales would also have been respon-

sible for providing rifles with scopes to Rolando Cubela in Cuba. It’s

important to point out that Cubela himself was not the one who asked

for the meeting in Paris on November 22, 1963; the time was set by some-

one in the CIA, though it’s unclear by whom. Also, Morales’s Cuban

exile informants (in the group code-named AMOT) were responsible

for the hazy reports of a Cuban agent near Chicago, and in Florida, that

helped to trigger national security secrecy after the Chicago and Tampa

attempts.

Henry Heckscher’s role in AMWORLD is documented by recently

released CIA files, showing that he was Manuel Artime’s CIA case officer

in the summer and fall of 1963. However, Heckscher didn’t work with

any of our four sources who worked with the Kennedys on the coup

plan, so it’s not clear how much he knew about Almeida. Heckscher was

a higher-level CIA official than either Morales or Phillips, and had first

worked with them in 1954, on the successful CIA coup that overthrew

the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Joining Heckscher,

Phillips, and Morales in the 1954 coup operation was E. Howard Hunt,

which makes it logical that Helms would have them working together

again in 1963 on another coup.46

E. Howard Hunt, later infamous as a Watergate figure, was one of the

CIA officers working most actively on the Almeida side of the coup

plan. In his later years, Hunt was litigious, so we avoided mentioning

certain things about him in our earlier book. But we can now reveal that

Harry Williams confirmed in taped interviews that Hunt was part of the

CIA effort that helped with the most sensitive parts of the JFK-Almeida

coup plan. (A top Kennedy aide indicated that Harry’s statements about

Hunt were correct.) The activities involving Hunt included paying the

first installment of $50,000 (out of $200,000) to Almeida in a transaction

that Bobby Kennedy authorized and the CIA arranged. Hunt was also

part of the secret operation in which Almeida’s wife and children left

Cuba under a pretext prior to November 22, 1963. The plan was for them

to wait out the coup in another country, while under secret CIA sur-

veillance. This may have been designed to ensure that Almeida didn’t

double-cross the CIA and the Kennedys. Bobby had also authorized

Harry and the CIA to assure Almeida that his family would be taken

care of financially if anything happened to Almeida and they couldn’t

return to Cuba.47

Harry told us that Hunt was one of two CIA officials assigned to assist

him. According to former FBI agent William Turner, the other was Hunt’s

future Watergate partner, James McCord. However, McCord declined

to speak with us about this, and
Vanity Fair
had a similar lack of success

when it tried to contact McCord about the matter in 1994.48 According to

Harry, Hunt seemed to resent having to help him, since Hunt was used

to giving orders to Cuban exiles, instead of taking them.

Prior to working on the JFK-Almeida coup plan, Hunt’s career in

40

LEGACY OF SECRECY

the CIA had been erratic, but his friendship with Richard Helms had

allowed him some measure of success. Before getting to know Helms,

Hunt had worked with David Atlee Phillips, David Morales, and Henry

Heckscher on the CIA’s successful 1954 coup in Guatemala. According

to Helms’s biographer, Thomas Powers, Hunt first met Helms in 1956.

Powers says that “Hunt conceived of Helms as a friend, admired him

openly, and more than once called on him for help.” David Atlee Phillips

wrote that Hunt “idolized” Helms—perhaps because Helms helped him

after Hunt’s botched stint as the CIA chief in Uruguay.

It’s often overlooked that while Hunt was in Uruguay in early 1960,

“he was secretly organizing a plot to overthrow the Uruguayan gov-

ernment,” according to noted journalist Tad Szulc. According to Szulc,

it’s not clear who ordered Hunt “to start organizing a coup,” since

“neither the White House nor the State Department ever entertained

such ideas” about Uruguay. In any event, Hunt was transferred from

Uruguay to work on the CIA’s attempt to overthrow another govern-

ment—that of Fidel Castro in the operation that eventually grew into

the Bay of Pigs.49

E. Howard Hunt played an important role in the Bay of Pigs opera-

tion, until he dropped out at the last minute in April 1961, to protest

including the liberal Manolo Ray in the post-Fidel government. If it had

been up to Hunt, after Fidel’s elimination Cuba would have been ruled

by his good friend, the ultra-conservative Manuel Artime. But the Ken-

nedys insisted on Ray’s inclusion, so Hunt left the operation. Shortly

after he did, the CIA-Mafia plots failed, as did the rest of the Bay of Pigs.

More than a year earlier, Hunt had written a memo suggesting the assas-

sination of Fidel in conjunction with a small invasion, so it’s intriguing

to speculate that Hunt may have had some role in, or knowledge of,

the CIA-mafia plots. Buttressing that is that when Dominican dictator

Rafael Trujillo was assassinated with CIA assistance just a month after

the Bay of Pigs, Trujillo’s Security Chief claimed that Hunt and Johnny

Rosselli had been involved.50

In 1961, Richard Helms helped Hunt find new opportunities in the

CIA. Hunt had been given permission to write spy novels under a pseud-

onym, and Thomas Powers notes that Helms “liked Hunt’s books . . . he

kept copies of them in his office which he sometimes gave to visitors.”51

Apparently, Helms’s personal relationship with Hunt was enough for

him to assign Hunt to work with Harry on the JFK-Almeida coup plan,

despite Hunt’s antipathy for some of its leaders, like Ray. From Helms’s

perspective, Hunt’s experience in planning coups in Guatemala, Uruguay,

Cuba, and possibly the Dominican Republic must have made Hunt seem

like a logical choice. Still, Hunt’s friendship with Artime and dislike of