Legacy of Secrecy (148 page)

constant struggle with the CIA for documents and access to personnel.

Blakey tried to strike a middle ground, though he learned only in the

1990s about a 1978 incident with the CIA that made him realize how the

Agency had deceived the HSCA.

Fonzi and his fellow investigators were interested in the DRE, a CIA-

backed exile group Oswald contacted in August of 1963. While E. How-

ard Hunt had testified that David Atlee Phillips ran the DRE for the

CIA, another agent handled their day-to-day supervision. The HSCA

wanted to talk to that agent, but the CIA claimed they couldn’t locate

him. Around the same time, to help smooth out problems between the

CIA and HSCA, the CIA called out of retirement Agent George Joan-

nides, assigning him to be the CIA’s liaison to the HSCA staff.42

What the CIA didn’t tell the HSCA—and no one learned until Jef-

ferson Morley discovered it in the 1990s—was that George Joannides

had been the CIA official in charge of the DRE in 1963. Joannides started

working for the HSCA in June 1978, but he never told the HSCA about his

work with the DRE—or that he was the man they’d wanted to interview.

In 1981 the CIA gave Joannides a medal, but according to David Talbot,

“today Blakey says that if he had known Joannides’ background, he

would have immediately relieved him of his duties and made him ‘a

witness under oath.’”43

What possible justification could Joannides and his superiors have

used, to get authorization for such deceit from anyone in the CIA’s chain

of command? There is no reason to think the approval went as high as

Director Stansfield Turner, since many longtime CIA officials regarded

him as an outsider. On the other hand, the ambitious Ted Shackley had

both the capability and the personal incentive to stifle the HSCA investi-

gation. Shackley was the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations in 1978—

comparable to Helms’s 1963 position of Deputy Director for Plans—and

Joannides had worked with the DRE while based at Shackley’s JMWAVE

CIA station in Miami in 1963.

Shackley might have had the same thin reed of a national security jus-

tification (or rationalization) Helms had used at times for his cover-ups,

because of an unusual meeting at the UN just weeks before Joannides

was recalled from retirement. America’s UN Ambassador at the time,

Andrew Young, reported to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. On April 22,

1978, Young met at the UN with Commander Juan Almeida. Given the

international publicity of the HSCA investigation, which often included

coverage of the CIA’s attempts to eliminate Fidel Castro, it’s likely that

Almeida wanted some assurance from Vance that his name would not

be exposed by the investigation.

If some US official had asked the CIA to try to protect Almeida, it’s not

hard to image Ted Shackley taking that opportunity to also protect him-

self and his associates by having Joannides assigned as the CIA’s liaison

to the HSCA. Around the time of the Almeida UN meeting, three veter-

ans of the JFK-Almeida coup plan—Varona, Phillips, and Morales—had

been interviewed or were slated for an interview, and the HSCA was

making constant requests for the files of Artime and others associated

with AMWORLD. Joannides would have been the ideal candidate to

make sure the HSCA didn’t get too close to Almeida, while also protect-

ing the secrets Shackley shared with Helms.

Other battles with the CIA drained the HSCA staff’s time and energy,

from their Mexico City investigation to Helms’s testimony. Many critics

charged that Helms had gotten off too easily for lying to Congress, and if

he were caught lying under oath again, the Carter administration would

have to punish him more harshly. A close reading of Helms’s August

9, 1978, HSCA testimony shows that he was fairly candid about some

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

things, saying that in 1963 “the US Government had a policy for many

months of trying to mount a coup against Fidel Castro [and] these opera-

tions were known to the Attorney General of the United States [and to]

the President of the United States [and] all kinds of people high up in

the government.” Helms added that “if you go through the records of

those years, you will find the whole US government was behind this

one.” Helms knew that while the CIA was withholding much from the

Committee, Cyrus Vance and the US military were also not being forth-

coming about the 1963 plans. However, Helms also comes across in his

testimony as incredibly arrogant, not willing to admit well-documented

facts such as the assassination aspects of his Cubela operation.44

In addition to the CIA and US military, other agencies like the Secret

Service and the FBI were keeping crucial facts from the HSCA, including

everything about the Tampa attempt against JFK and most information

about the Chicago attempt. The CIA stonewalled HSCA attempts to

learn more about Gilberto Lopez, and the Defense Department did like-

wise regarding the Marine Intelligence investigation of Oswald, until

the Committee’s time had run out.45

Regarding Martin Luther King, the HSCA “concluded that there was a

likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination of Dr. King” and that “the

expectation of financial gain was Ray’s primary motivation.” The HSCA

reached that conclusion despite investigating Joseph Milteer only for

JFK’s murder, not Dr. King’s, and paying little attention to Marcello for

King’s assassination. That’s because the FBI had apparently withheld

the information given to the Justice Department about Carlos Marcello

and the Mafia’s brokering of the contract to assassinate Dr. King for a

small clique of white racists.

As the House Select Committee on Assassinations rushed to finish its

work on the JFK assassination, acoustic tests indicated there had been

at least one shot from the grassy knoll. But those findings have been

the source of much debate ever since, and we have not factored them

into any of our findings. When the HSCA submitted its Final Report on

March 29, 1979, its ultimate conclusion about JFK’s murder was that

it was likely a conspiracy, involving at least one shot from the grassy

knoll. In addition:

The Committee found that Trafficante, like Marcello, had the motive,

means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy.46

For both Marcello and Trafficante, the committee “was unable to estab-

lish direct evidence of Marcello’s complicity.” It could just as well have

added “because of all the material the CIA, FBI, and other agencies

withheld.” The HSCA also recommended that the Justice Department

pursue the matter further.47 Within six years, the FBI would obtain a clear

confession by Marcello to JFK’s assassination—only to suppress it, until

its full publication for the first time in
Legacy of Secrecy
.

Chapter Sixty-five

By 1980, as if exhausted by the five investigating committees that began

with Watergate and ended with the House Select Committee on Assas-

sinations, the government and the press had lost interest in the assassi-

nations of JFK, Bobby, and Dr. King. This dormant phase would last for

most of the decade. The Justice Department wasn’t acting on the HSCA’s

request to follow-up on its leads, but the FBI’s undercover BRILAB oper-

ation targeting Carlos Marcello still simmered just below the surface.

Before BRILAB erupted in the press, several former government

investigators tried to sustain interest in the assassinations, in effect con-

tinuing the quest Bobby Kennedy had begun soon after his brother’s

murder. Former HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey wrote an account

of his inquiry,
The Plot to Kill the President
, that implicated Marcello and

Trafficante more strongly than the HSCA’s carefully worded conclusions

had. His former investigator Gaeton Fonzi had been frustrated by CIA

stonewalling and the lack of attention that Phillips, Veciana, and Odio

received in the HSCA’s Final Report—so he wrote a detailed article

about it for the
Washingtonian
magazine, which he would later expand

into a book,
The Last Investigation
. FBI veteran William Turner had seen

publicity for his 1978 book
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
appar-

ently stymied by its publisher, but in 1981 he finally used portions of his

1973 interview with Harry Williams in his next book,
The Fish Is Red
.

Turner’s
The Fish Is Red
included new information about JFK’s assas-

sination but was devoted primarily to offering the first book-length

account of the US’s secret war with Fidel Castro—a battle that was

entering a new phase. After Ronald Reagan was elected president in

November 1980, the undercover war between the US and Cuba began

heating up again, with a new focus on Central America as the surrogate

battleground. As the
San Francisco Chronicle
reported, Reagan’s new Sec-

retary of State, Alexander Haig, “regarded [the Sandinistas in Nicaragua

and the rebels in El Salvador] as mere tentacles. He sought to go after the

body of the octopus—Castro’s Cuba. Proposals for forcing confrontation

with Castro were repeatedly advanced by Haig.”1 As a result, half a

dozen veterans of 1963 operations like AMWORLD—including Rafael

“Chi Chi” Quintero and Luis Posada—became involved in US covert

operations in Central America that would result in the Iran-Contra scan-

dal. Commander Juan Almeida remained unexposed and high-ranking

in the Cuban government—and potentially useful to the US at some

point, if Castro should die, become ill, or be deposed. Almeida’s family

outside Cuba continued to receive covert support from the CIA.

On June 4, 1981, four black prisoners attacked and knifed James Earl

Ray almost two dozen times, but the incident was little-noted in the

press and created no new interest in Dr. King’s assassination. Ray recov-

ered and continued serving his life sentence. Sirhan Sirhan was also

doing life, his death sentence having been thrown out with all the others

in California because of an earlier Supreme Court decision.

By 1981, Carlos Marcello was feeling the full force of the FBI’s BRILAB

sting, which had grown out of the Watergate-era prosecution of Nix-

on’s former attorney general Richard Kleindienst. Facing the biggest

legal battle of his life, Marcello was under indictment in Louisiana for

trying to bribe state officials in a multimillion-dollar insurance scam.

In Los Angeles, he’d been indicted for trying to bribe a federal judge.

Even worse, much of the evidence was in the godfather’s own words,

recorded by a bug and phone taps the FBI had finally placed in Mar-

cello’s office at the Town and Country Motel. They were augmented by

secret recordings made by convicted insurance swindler Joe Hauser,

who wore a wire for the FBI in hopes of securing an early release. He

was aided by two undercover FBI agents, who pretended to be crooked

businessmen in an elaborate operation that included a posh office for a

phony company.2

In Miami, Santo Trafficante was under indictment for a $1 million

fraud scheme involving a labor union. Both Trafficante and Marcello

were also hit with RICO racketeering charges, using the statute that

G. Robert Blakey had helped create. Trafficante would avoid conviction,

but Marcello’s luck had finally run out.

Marcello’s BRILAB battles played out prominently in the national

press, but the articles rarely mentioned his name in conjunction with

JFK’s assassination. The 1,200 hours of BRILAB recordings, along with

unrecorded information from Hauser, contained only tantalizing hints

about Marcello and JFK. They weren’t mentioned in the press and were

barred from the trial, at Marcello’s lawyers’ request, so they wouldn’t

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

prejudice the jury. Still, the jury was able to hear hours of Marcello dis-

cussing the blatant corruption and crimes he had been committing for

years. Marcello was convicted in Louisiana on August 4, 1981, and in Los

Angeles on December 11, 1981. The following year, he was sentenced to

seven years for the Louisiana counts and ten years for the Los Angeles

counts. His powerful attorneys did everything they could, but on April

15, 1983, Marcello’s BRILAB appeal was denied and he was ordered to

begin serving his sentence immediately.3

At age seventy-three, Marcello faced seventeen years in prison. He

was initially sent to familiar territory: the US Medical Center for Fed-

eral Prisoners, in Springfield, Missouri, where Marcello had spent six

months a decade earlier. The prison and its parklike grounds were des-

ignated as level one, meaning it was one of the least secure and most

comfortable federal prisons. But after a year, Marcello was transferred to

the maximum-security federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, an imposing