Legacy of Secrecy (146 page)

of
Time
’s
article about Hoffa’s role in the 1959 CIA-Mafia plots. Traf-

ficante, Marcello, and others couldn’t afford to let Hoffa testify under

oath about those or any other plots. On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa was

spotted leaving a restaurant near Detroit, headed for what he thought

was a meeting with New Jersey mobster Tony Provenzano, an associ-

ate of Carlos Marcello’s. Hoffa was never seen again, and no body was

ever found.11

Government informant Crimaldi said that “he had heard information

that the same man that killed [Giancana] took care of Hoffa for the same

reason: he knew about the Castro plots [and] it had been Hoffa who was

the original liaison between the CIA and the [Mafia].”12

Rolando Masferrer was killed in a spectacular car bombing on Octo-

ber 31, 1975. His death could have been related to the Church Com-

mittee hearings or to the general upsurge of violence in Miami’s exile

community, fueled by politics and the expanding drug trade. A current

article about JFK’s assassination was on Masferrer’s desk when he died.

John Martino, Masferrer’s mutual associate with Trafficante, had died

of natural causes a few months earlier. In declining health, Martino had

finally confessed his role in JFK’s murder to two friends, his business

partner and reporter John Cummings. The Church Committee appar-

ently never learned about Martino or his published statements about

the Kennedys’ 1963 coup and invasion plan.

Johnny Rosselli used Jack Anderson to ensure he didn’t meet the same

fate as Giancana and Hoffa. Anderson’s September 1, 1975, column said

that Rosselli wasn’t being deported because of his war record, helping

Rosselli show Trafficante and Marcello that he wasn’t getting preferen-

tial INS treatment because he was testifying. Rosselli was back in front

of the Church Committee on September 22, ten days after Helms had

faced the Committee yet again.

The CIA withheld a massive amount of information from the Church

Committee, a situation that wouldn’t change when President Ford

fired William Colby and replaced him with George H. W. Bush, who’d

headed the Republican National Committee during the latter stages of

the Watergate investigation. At times, information found its way to the

Committee from non-CIA sources—like the leads about the 1959 CIA-

Mafia plots—only to hit a stone wall because the CIA withheld crucial

information related to those leads. The Church Committee was never

told about the JFK-Almeida coup plan, and thus knew nothing about the

Mafia’s infiltration of it. It received a few leads that could have pointed

it in the right direction, if not for the information withheld by the CIA

and other agencies.

On October 1, 1975, the Church Committee told the Justice Depart-

ment it wanted “telephone logs derived from electronic surveillance”

on seven people—including Trafficante, Tony Varona, Manolo Ray, and

Harry Williams. Whoever tipped off the Committee had either worked

with Bobby Kennedy or knew someone who had, because the memo lists

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Harry’s name as “Enrico Ruiz Williams.” “Enrico” was Bobby’s nick-

name for Harry, since he had trouble pronouncing Harry’s first name,

“Enrique.” The Justice Department acknowledged having electronic

surveillance on Trafficante, but it’s not known what—if anything—they

provided about Harry.13

At one point, the Church Committee asked the deputy attorney gen-

eral for all the materials they had on “Major Juan Almeida,” as well as

Maurice Bishop (spelled “Morris”). This generated a document group,

called the “Senstudy,” of CIA files that had been given to the FBI. A

dozen documents about Almeida were part of the Senstudy, all FBI

copies of CIA documents, but the CIA did not provide their own copies

of those documents to the Church Committee. These Almeida docu-

ments don’t address the coup plan, but do talk about Almeida’s dis-

satisfaction with Castro and his desire to defect shortly before the Bay

of Pigs. However, the request for the Almeida documents was sent five

days after the Church Committee completed its Final Report, so there

was little the Committee could have done with the material—especially

since Bush and the CIA were still withholding all information about

the Almeida coup plan, AMWORLD, and Artime’s involvement in the

CIA-Mafia plots.14 Inside the CIA, the small fig leaf of justification was

no doubt that Almeida was still of potential value since he remained

unexposed, plus the CIA’s secret support for his family, which made

the whole matter an ongoing operation. Ted Shackley probably over-

saw that support after Phillips’s resignation, since by 1975 Shackley

was the highest CIA official remaining who had supervised 1963 Cuban

operations.

While CIA officials withheld the most important information, they

were usually quick to acknowledge more esoteric, unused assassination

schemes, diverting attention from the plots that used high-powered

rifles and might remind the public of JFK’s murder. The CIA knew that

unusual items like shellfish toxin would interest journalists and televi-

sion audiences, and the increasingly publicity-hungry Senator Frank

Church—eying a run for president in 1976—took the bait, holding two

days of hearings on the poison.

In the fall of 1975, the Church Committee started to fragment for sev-

eral reasons, in part because there was too much to investigate and too

little information being provided. By this time, the Church Committee

was investigating not only the CIA—in areas ranging from Chile to

assassinations to domestic surveillance—but also the FBI and military

intelligence. In addition, Church was investigating the FBI’s COINTEL-

PRO efforts against Martin Luther King. Their revelations helped to

generate a 1977 Justice Department Task Force Report that critically

reviewed the FBI’s investigation of Dr. King’s murder.

Leaks were another problem for the Committee. Though they didn’t

jeopardize real CIA operations, they did generate headlines—the most

notable being the November 1975 leak about Judith Campbell, the

woman who’d had relationships with JFK, Johnny Rosselli, and Sam

Giancana. However, in some cases it’s unclear if leaks came from Com-

mittee staffers or from one of the federal agencies being investigated.

One significant development for the Church investigation was when

Schweiker and Hart’s JFK subcommittee hired journalist Gaeton Fonzi

in November 1975. What Fonzi assumed would be a weeks-long inves-

tigation would turn into a three-year quest involving both houses of

Congress.

Fonzi and Hart were constantly frustrated by CIA stonewalling.

Hart took particular interest in CIA assassin recruiter QJWIN. The CIA

refused to tell the senator QJWIN’s true identity, but when pressed it

arranged for Hart to meet QJWIN in Europe. But after Hart flew across

the Atlantic for the meeting, the enigmatic QJWIN failed to show up.

After the Schweiker-Hart JFK subcommittee folded, a freedom of infor-

mation lawsuit by Bernard Fensterwald would turn up one page from

a CIA file about Michel Victor Mertz, the French assassin with so many

parallels to QJWIN. Even that lone CIA page about Mertz came about

only because of an order by Watergate Judge John Sirica. When Fen-

sterwald’s client Gary Shaw tried to get photos of Mertz from William

Attwood’s
Newsday
team, the newspaper found their one grainy photo

of Mertz was no longer in the file.15

The CIA had used its considerable media assets and savvy, as well as

David Atlee Phillips and his group, to counterattack Church and Con-

gress. They got the ammunition they needed to eventually end Church’s

investigation when, on December 23, 1975, Greek rebels murdered Rich-

ard Welch, the CIA’s Station Chief in Athens. The Ford administration,

backed by CIA boosters in the press and Congress, claimed that leaks

in the media had caused Welch’s death. The charge was false, since

Welch had been publicly identified as a CIA agent since 1969 and made

no attempt to hide his home address—even though many Greeks were

angry over US support for the brutal dictatorship that had ruled their

country in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though nothing in the Church

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Hearings had prompted Welch’s murder, a masterful spin campaign

gave the opposite impression and helped to end the Church Commit-

tee’s investigations in a matter of months.16

Before the Committee ended, David Atlee Phillips himself became

embroiled in the Church investigations. In July 1974, Antonio Veciana

had been arrested in a drug bust, telling an associate that “the CIA

framed him because he wanted to go ahead with another attempt to kill

Castro.” Veciana was convicted and sentenced to twenty-seven months

at the federal prison in Atlanta.17 After his release, on March 2, 1976,

Veciana told Gaeton Fonzi about his control agent, who used the name

Maurice Bishop. It was Senator Schweiker himself who said on April

11, 1976, that a police artist drawing of Bishop—based on Veciana’s

description—looked like a CIA agent who’d testified to his committee:

David Atlee Phillips.18

That began a cat-and-mouse game between Phillips and Fonzi that

would last for three years, first in the Senate investigation and then in

a new House committee. Veciana was always reluctant to definitively

identify Phillips as Bishop. Phillips would dissemble and even lie in his

sworn testimony to Congress, but to the frustration of Fonzi and other

staff members, no perjury charges resulted.19

William Harvey also tried to obscure vital information in 1976, when

he was working as an editor for publisher Bobbs Merrill, a subsidiary

of ITT. That year, Bobbs Merrill was readying for publication a book by

former Army Ranger Bradley Ayers, detailing his work with the CIA in

south Florida in 1963 and 1964. Not bound by the usual strict CIA secrecy

oath, Ayers’s book mentioned Harvey (renamed “Harold”), Shackley,

David Morales (“Dave”), and Johnny Rosselli. Using Rosselli’s real

name, Ayers described the mobster’s exile sniper team and friendship

with Morales. Later, Ayers said that someone at the publisher altered his

book and he hadn’t known that Harvey worked there.20 In June 1976, the

overweight, hard-drinking William Harvey died of heart problems.

On April 23, 1976, Johnny Rosselli testified to Richard Schweiker’s

small JFK subcommittee. When pressed, Rosselli admitted he had

no facts to substantiate his Castro retaliation theory of JFK’s murder.

Though the Final Report of the main Church Committee was published

that day, Schweiker was determined to continue his investigation, using

Fonzi and his own office staff. Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Com-

mittee learned of other important information, such as the Cuba Con-

tingency Plans from the fall of 1963 to deal with possible retaliation by

Fidel, like the assassination of American officials. The Senate staffers

had stumbled across a reference to the material in a Justice Department

file, since the CIA had not given their copies of the plans to the inves-

tigators. Tad Szulc even wrote an article about the Cuba Contingency

Plans that appeared in the
Boston Globe
and the
New Republic
, revealing

that “Robert Kennedy, the CIA and the FBI decided to keep from the

Warren Commission the fact that a special group had been set up to

protect American leaders from possible Cuban assassination plots.” But

no other journalist followed up Szulc’s work (until we did in the 1990s),

and it was dangerous for Szulc to write more without exposing his own

work on AMTRUNK.21

When the summer of 1976 began, the press suddenly appeared tired

of investigations of the CIA. Or perhaps they had gotten the message

that the Ford administration and conservative members of Congress

wanted such things stopped—and if Ford won the election, the reporters

could be frozen out for four years.

Senator Schweiker was determined to forge ahead and issued his JFK

subcommittee’s report on June 23, 1976. Though largely ignored by the

news media, it was filled with important information, despite all the

material withheld by the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence. Schweiker

also planned to recall Johnny Rosselli for more testimony.

Facing more interrogation, from increasingly informed Senate staffers,

Rosselli would have consulted with his attorney, Tom Wadden. Rosselli

had another problem: During intense questioning, he had reportedly

given Congressional investigators Santo Trafficante’s name. Rosselli

had to explain to Wadden why that, or further testimony, was so dan-

gerous. According to historian Richard Mahoney, Rosselli confessed to

Wadden his “role in plotting to kill the President”—something Wadden