Legacy of Secrecy (105 page)

years.

Marcello could have found out about that surveillance through

numerous ways. Once more, Trafficante’s Sgt. de la Llana, coordinator

of Police Intelligence for the state of Florida, provides a good example,

since he shared information with intelligence units in other states, as

well as with the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the CIA. Mississippi’s

Sovereignty Commission, an official racist state organization, collected

intelligence on civil rights activists, antiwar protesters, and leftists in

general, all under the guise of fighting communism. That intelligence

was shared not only with state and local law enforcement, but some-

times with federal agencies in the state, including military intelligence.

Marcello’s political boss, Leander Perez, had been successful in persuad-

ing Louisiana to authorize the creation of a Sovereignty Commission

largely under his control. Several other Southern states, like Florida, had

similar bodies, and all could be used in learning about the surveillance

directed at Dr. King. Those connections could also allow Marcello and

his men to feed disinformation into the system before and after King’s

death, as they had done for JFK’s murder.15

The FBI and military intelligence were large parts of the growing

domestic surveillance network; both had been forced into cover-ups

after JFK’s murder, and the same could be done again. (The FBI’s COIN-

TELPRO operation in 1967 and 1968 is detailed in Chapter 45.) Using

information not declassified until seven years after King’s murder, jour-

nalist James Dickerson wrote that “by 1967 the U.S. Army” effort to

“gather information about the political activity of American citizens

[had grown to] 1,500 plainclothes agents . . . assigned to over 350 secret

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record centers.” They assembled “information on individuals attending

protest rallies, business executives who contributed money to political

causes, and politicians who voted for unpopular legislation.” Accord-

ing to Hancock and Wexler, the rationale was that “army surveillance

[was] designed to provide early warning of demonstrations, rallies,

and other gatherings which could lead to civil disturbances requiring

the deployment of Federal troops.” Martin Luther King—and even his

wife—became prime targets, and information on them was shared with

the FBI. According to Dickerson, several Southern cities were “desig-

nated a target city by the Army” for surveillance and operations, includ-

ing Memphis.16

In 1963, Guy Banister had helped Marcello compromise the FBI, but

four years later there were other ways to do that for the hit on Dr. King.

Through Banister and Regis Kennedy, Marcello would have known that

many in the FBI remained racist. Based on his public statements alone, J.

Edgar Hoover clearly hated Martin Luther King, and because FBI head-

quarters had fumbled its investigation of Milteer so badly in 1963 (and

again in 1967), the FBI would be loath to reveal its failings by following

leads to Milteer, even if his name should surface in King’s murder. The

FBI would eventually be so compromised in their investigation of King’s

murder that some people would come to believe that J. Edgar Hoover

and the FBI were behind King’s murder. However, William Bradford

Huie has pointed out that many of the people who believe that, includ-

ing associates of Dr. King, don’t realize that theory was originally put

forth by James Earl Ray’s third attorney, J. B. Stoner. Then again, even

Huie didn’t realize that Stoner was an associate of Joseph Milteer.17

Carlos Marcello would have considered all that, and more, before

making a decision about helping Joseph Milteer and his group. Mean-

while, events would continue to unfold with his drug network, James

Earl Ray, and the CIA that might have influenced Marcello’s final

decision.

Chapter Forty-two

In the fall of 1967, CIA Director Richard Helms had his hands full with

the aftermath of Israel’s Six-Day War in the Middle East, Cold War fronts

from South America to Europe, and especially Vietnam. He was con-

stantly under pressure from the US military to cut in half CIA estimates

of communist forces in South Vietnam, even as the number of US forces

there approached half a million. AMWORLD veterans like Ted Shackley

and “Chi Chi” Quintero were handling secret operations in Laos, where

heroin trafficking was booming. Helms was also overseeing the CIA’s

own rapidly expanding illegal domestic surveillance operation, which

would soon be named Operation CHAOS.1

As writer Verne Lyon pointed out, CHAOS grew out of the CIA’s early

Cuban operations with exiles in the US. It became so large that by 1964,

President Johnson had authorized the CIA to create “a new super-secret

branch called the Domestic Operations Division (DOD), the very title

of which mocked the explicit intent of Congress to prohibit CIA opera-

tions inside the U.S.” E. Howard Hunt was one of those assigned to this

new branch, one of whose responsibilities “was burglarizing foreign

diplomatic sites at the request of the National Security Agency (NSA),”

something Hunt did until shortly before the final Watergate break-in.

Lyon writes that “by August 1967, the illegal collection of domestic intel-

ligence had become so large and widespread that [Helms] was forced to

create a Special Operations Group [that] provided data on the U.S. peace

movement . . . on a regular basis.” By that time, Martin Luther King had

become a major part of that movement.2

The Chief of Special Operations was Tom Tripodi, who said it was

“responsible for extralegal domestic covert activities.” He writes that

“some of the guys who later would be bagged in the Watergate affair

worked for me. I understand that when I left the Agency, most of the

functions of [Special Operations] were transferred to a unit supervised

by E. Howard Hunt.”3

Oddly enough, the turf wars that had raged between the CIA, the FBI,

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and military intelligence were reduced somewhat by the cooperation

necessary for their often illegal domestic spying. For example, the CIA

and FBI were still overwhelmingly white, whereas Army Intelligence

could easily field black operatives when needed. According to Verne

Lyons, the CIA also expanded its cooperation “with local police and their

intelligence units . . . and began in earnest to pull off burglaries, illegal

entries, use of explosives, criminal frame-ups, shared interrogations,

and disinformation.” While federal agencies still protected their turf,

they also had to share information and sometimes coordinate surveil-

lance. Domestic surveillance information could flow from the FBI to

police intelligence to the 111th Military Intelligence Corps to the CIA

and back again, all below the radar of the American public and most of

Congress and the press.4

By fall 1967, AMWORLD veterans Hunt, David Atlee Phillips, and

David Morales had helped Richard Helms better control two areas

involving domestic operations. The CIA continued to closely monitor

the Garrison investigation and the prosecution of former CIA informant

Clay Shaw, hindering the former and aiding the latter. Mainstream press

coverage of Garrison was rarely positive, though how much of that was

due to CIA efforts, and how much was because of Garrison’s own fail-

ings, can’t be determined. Most important for Helms, Garrison’s activi-

ties no longer threatened to reveal his unauthorized operations, like the

CIA-Mafia plots and their tie to JFK’s murder. Also, the Jack Anderson

articles had stopped, and the Rosselli matter appeared to have quieted

down after the Mafia don’s recent legal troubles with the Friars Club.

The surge of pro-conspiracy JFK books had also ended, replaced by the

publication of a few anti-conspiracy “lone nut” books and articles, some

of which slammed critics of the Warren Report along the lines suggested

in the CIA’s January 1967 anti-critics memo.

As for Cuban operations, David Atlee Phillips was taking control just

as the CIA scored one of its biggest Cold War propaganda victories: the

capture and execution of Che Guevara, with the help of several veterans

of AMWORLD and the Almeida coup plan. Che had returned to Cuba

after his exile to Africa, though he made no public appearances and the

Cuban populace had no idea what had happened to him. After Rolando

Cubela’s trial, Che had been sent on his second doomed mission, this

time to Bolivia.

Richard Goodwin, JFK’s first Latin American aide, wrote that “it is

hard to think of a place where a guerrilla war would have been more

certainly doomed than the Bolivia of the mid-1960s. Everyone in Bolivia

was poor. The oligarchy had been driven from the country in the revolu-

tion of 1952 and the land redistributed . . . thus the revolutionaries had

no oligarchs to terrorize, no wealthy businessmen to hate, and no large

landowners from whom the soil could be wrested.” Goodwin adds,

“Nor were the stocky brown Indians of Bolivia likely to follow a roman-

tic white Argentine suddenly materializing from a place as foreign to

them as New York City or London. ‘The inhabitants of the region,’ Gue-

vara wrote shortly before his death, ‘are as impenetrable as rocks . . .

you talk to them, and in the depths of their eyes it can be seen that they

don’t believe.’” Goodwin said “the outcome was inevitable. Outside the

protective citadel of the Cuban island [Che] became an open target.”5

In Bolivia, Che not only lacked support from the Indian peasants

he was supposed to be fighting for, he didn’t even have the backing of

Bolivia’s Communist Party. In addition, Castro kept Che’s presence in

Bolivia a secret, so Che couldn’t attract international support or volun-

teers. In short, Che’s mission to Bolivia was a death sentence.6 Two years

after Che’s execution, historian Daniel James noted widespread belief,

in some parts of the world, that Castro was responsible for Che’s death:

“There is a school of thought which believes that Fidel betrayed Che.

Fidel, so its reasoning goes, deliberately sent Che to his doom.”7

James notes that Castro failed to provide Che with the aid and pub-

licity he requested and even refused to communicate with Che, leading

James to ask, “Why would Fidel abandon Che?” James documents that

Castro didn’t tell Cuba—or the world—that Che was leading the fight

in Bolivia, even when Che sent messages he wanted read to the public

on major Cuban holidays. As a result, Castro was “depriving Che of . . .

supporters inside Bolivia, where they were desperately needed. . . . Che

Guevara gained no supporters anywhere for the principal reason that

they did not know of his existence. To the world, Che Guevara was still

‘dead’ or otherwise disposed of.” Castro’s “silence had the effect of help-

ing to bury Che,” according to James.8

Castro was apparently determined not to rescue Che from Bolivia,

as he had in the Congo, no matter how bad things got. Historian Jorge

Castaneda pondered this issue in his recent biography of Che: “There

was no lack of Cuban commandos who would gladly have given their

lives to save Comandante Guevara” on a rescue mission to Bolivia. Cas-

tenada adds that “Fidel . . . might well have decided that a Che martyred

in Bolivia would better serve the Revolution than a Che living.” For

example, Castaneda points out that a year after Che’s death, “in 1968,

the Cubans attempted a similar rescue mission in Venezuela; they were

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able to save twenty-four surrounded guerillas.” 9 Yet Castro did nothing

to save Che from certain death.

Che’s fatal exile to Bolivia may have been the culmination of the

suspicion Fidel had harbored against him since November 30, 1963, the

eve of the original date for Almeida’s coup, when Fidel reportedly had

Che placed “under house arrest for plotting to overthrow Castro.” Che’s

second house arrest in March 1965, shortly after exile Eloy Menoyo’s

capture—and when Fidel was receiving reports about Cubela’s plotting

with Artime—followed by Che’s subsequent exile to Africa, suggest that

Fidel suspected Che was plotting with Menoyo, Artime, and the CIA. If

so, Fidel badly misjudged the situation, much to Commander Almeida’s

benefit and Che’s regret.

Bolivian and CIA forces captured Che Guevara on October 8, 1967.

Artime’s former lieutenant in the later stages of AMWORLD—CIA vet-

eran Felix Rodriquez—wrote a firsthand account of his involvement in

Che’s death. He was one of what some reports say were several CIA

agents present for Che’s execution. Felix Rodriquez gave the cover

name for his “CIA colleague” there as Eduardo.10 Castaneda writes that

after Che was captured, he said, “Don’t shoot, I am Che Guevara and I

am worth more to you alive than dead.” According to Castaneda, Felix

Rodriquez “recalled how Che seemed to think he would be tried and