Legacy of Secrecy (17 page)

for years, but also has allowed himself to be photographed, confident

that no photograph could ever show him in Dallas. In contrast, Mertz

was extremely reclusive and never talked to reporters, even when there

were news stories about him in France. (In the 1980s, there was a report

that a journalist disappeared after trying to track down Mertz.) Unlike

Souetre, Mertz avoided being photographed whenever possible.
News-

day
found only two fuzzy photos of Mertz for the Pulitzer Prize–winning

report it published in the early 1970s, at the direction of publisher Wil-

liam Attwood, JFK’s former special envoy. A few years later,
Newsday’
s

lead reporter for the story told researcher Gary Shaw that their Mertz

photos had vanished from the files.39

In a similar way, Mertz himself had been mysteriously absent from

the fall 1963 Senate hearings that spawned Joe Valachi’s sensational tes-

timony. Though all of Mertz’s associates were named, and their actions

in Texas, Mexico City, and Montreal were detailed, Mertz himself was

not mentioned. That’s likely because of Mertz’s work for French Intel-

ligence (in France, Mertz was known as one of “the untouchables”), and

possibly because of work Mertz or his associates were doing for some

American agency. Mertz had three associates who still operated in Cuba,

which could have made him valuable to the CIA.40

As Chapter 15 documents, the CIA’s William Harvey and Counter-

Intelligence Chief James Angleton had been interested in using French

assets to assassinate Fidel Castro. James P. Kelly, a former Senate

investigator for Bobby Kennedy, later talked about members of French

Intelligence “who [had] approached US w/capacity to hit Castro.” That

was confirmed by the former head of French Intelligence in the US in

1963, who was working for Angleton at the time, and who later told a

Senate investigator about “an offer by French Intelligence to the CIA to

carry out the Castro assassination for them.”41 For the CIA to turn to the

French Connection for such assistance would be consistent with their

past behavior, since the BBC News Service points out that “in 1947, the

CIA’s supply of arms and money to Corsican gangs recruited to harass

French trade unionists in Marseilles docks was the beginning of the

‘French Connection,’ which supplied heroin to North America until the

early 1970s.”42

If Mertz was used in, or learned of, the CIA’s use of French operatives

against Fidel, it could have been through his or his associates’ contact

with QJWIN, retained by the CIA to look for just such people. QJWIN

was involved in narcotics (the CIA had to intervene to keep him out

of prison in 1962), and by 1963 there were more than a dozen paral-

lels between QJWIN and Mertz (listed at www.legacyofsecrecy.com43).

Definitive analysis isn’t possible, because many of the files about QJWIN,

including notes on French criminals QJWIN had targeted for recruit-

ment, have not been declassified or are heavily censored. Also, William

Harvey’s notes for the ZRRIFLE project that included QJWIN say that

files should be “forged and backdated,” meaning that even the files that

have been released could be suspect.44 Harvey later claimed that QJWIN

had never been used for Cuban operations, but Harvey’s own expense

reports prove this statement is false. INS provided some information to

French authorities, which shows that while Mertz usually traveled to

America alone on his frequent trips, an “unnamed colleague of Mertz”

began traveling in “parallel [to] Mertz” shortly after JFK’s assassina-

tion.45 Given the many similarities between them, Mertz’s colleague

could have been QJWIN or one of his recruits.

From other associates in his heroin network, Mertz could also have

learned of Helms’s other unauthorized plots to kill Castro. For example,

also named in the fall 1963 Senate hearings on narcotics was Chicago

hit man Charles Nicoletti. By October 1963, Nicoletti was part of the

CIA-Mafia plots with Johnny Rosselli, and unconfirmed reports place

Nicoletti in Dallas at the time of JFK’s death. Also, Mertz, using the

Souetre alias, had apparently visited a Cuban exile training camp out-

side of New Orleans that was linked to Guy Banister, who was working

for Carlos Marcello at the time.46

Mertz had once infiltrated Souetre’s anti–de Gaulle group by passing

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

out leaflets on a Paris street, getting into a fight, and being arrested. That

could have been the inspiration for Banister’s having Oswald do almost

the same thing in New Orleans three months before JFK’s assassination.

Oswald might even have tried a dry run for his New Orleans stunt in

Montreal, where Mertz maintained a home: According to information

the Secret Service would receive just five days after JFK’s death, the

“Senior Customs Representative, US Treasury Department Bureau of

Customs, Montreal, Canada” reported that several witnesses there saw

Oswald passing out the same type of Fair Play for Cuba Committee

leaflets he used in New Orleans. One of the witnesses was Customs

Investigator Jean Paul Tremblay, who was “positive that this person was

Oswald.” Investigator Tremblay said that Oswald had been accompa-

nied by three people, and he felt “he could identify [them] because he

was working on cases involving Cuba at the time.”47 For reasons that

remain unclear, the Secret Service and the FBI never pursued this lead.

Mertz’s choice of “Souetre” as an alias was especially appropriate,

since the real Souetre had been the subject of a memo from Richard

Helms in July 1963,48 and had met with a CIA representative (E. Howard

Hunt, according to one report) in May 1963. This would help to ensure

that Helms and his associates would want to cover up any indication

that Souetre was in Dallas at the time of JFK’s murder.

Chapter Five

Dallas was the third attempt by Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli to kill

JFK in November 1963. The first had been in Chicago, the territory of

Johnny Rosselli’s Mafia family, on November 2, 1963. The second was

during the longest domestic motorcade of JFK’s presidency, in Santo

Trafficante’s Tampa on November 18, 1963.

The four-man plot to assassinate JFK during his November 2, 1963,

Chicago motorcade was kept out of the press at the time, and was

reported only briefly in one small article in 1967. Although it received

a bit more press coverage in the mid-1970s, the story is still largely

unknown to the American public. Parts of it were mentioned in Warren

Commission documents (but not in the Commission’s widely available

Final Report), and in the late 1970s, the House Select Committee on

Assassinations (HSCA) investigated the attempt.

The plot to assassinate JFK during his November 18, 1963, motorcade

in Tampa (just hours before his speech later that evening, containing the

lines written for Almeida) was also completely withheld from the press

when it occurred. Just one small article about it appeared after JFK’s

death, but the story was quickly suppressed the following day. The

Warren Commission was never told about the Tampa attempt, nor was

the HSCA. None of the six government committees that investigated

aspects of JFK’s assassination were told about the Tampa attempt until

we privately informed the JFK Assassination Records Review Board

about it in 1994. Approximately six weeks later, the Secret Service

destroyed files covering the Tampa motorcade, as they later admitted

to the Review Board, despite the 1992 JFK Act requiring the files’ pres-

ervation and release. Though we confirmed the attempt with the Tampa

Chief of Police and with other Secret Service and Florida law enforce-

ment sources, the public didn’t learn about the attempt to assassinate

JFK in Tampa until 2005, when we first published the information.

Before we describe the attempts to kill JFK in Chicago and Tampa, it’s

important to look at them from JFK and Bobby’s point of view, keeping

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

in mind the impending coup with Almeida and the Cuba Contingency

Plans to deal with any retaliation by Castro, even the “assassination of

American officials.” Even as Bobby’s subcommittee continued its Cuba

Contingency planning in November, the Kennedys would use some of

the thinking behind those plans in dealing with the Chicago and Tampa

attempts. JFK and Bobby both had to keep a lid on the plots while they

were investigated, as they proceeded with the coup planning (in case

the attempts turned out to have nothing to do with Castro or Cuba). The

ability of the President, Bobby, and key officials to suppress the news

about the Chicago and Tampa attempts set the tone for what would

happen in Dallas a short time later.

Even as Chicago residents had started to line the announced motorcade

route on November 2, 1963, JFK canceled his trip literally at the last min-

ute because the Secret Service had learned of the assassination threat. As

Pierre Salinger explained to us, just after he had assured the press that

JFK wouldn’t cancel the motorcade because of a crisis in Vietnam, he had

to quickly issue two different phony excuses to the news media.

According to Chicago Secret Service Agent Abraham Bolden, whose

account was confirmed by other law enforcement sources uncovered

by journalist Edwin Black, the plot involved four men, two of whom

were briefly detained and released, and two who were never appre-

hended. A fifth man, an ex-Marine whose job reportedly overlooked

JFK’s motorcade route, was arrested. In his car, he had an M1 rifle and

three thousand rounds of ammunition. Knowing of at least two potential

assassins at large, JFK and Bobby apparently decided to cancel JFK’s

entire trip. They also decided to keep any mention of the assassination

threat out of the press—and the press complied, even though years later

several newsmen admitted to having heard about the four-man threat

at the time.1 The Kennedys had done this kind of news management

on a smaller scale in the past, involving incidents as diverse as leaks

about the Bay of Pigs and JFK’s indiscretions. The CIA had handled

smaller incidents related to Cuban operations, such as the September

1963 affair in Florida, when the CIA made sure “two local newspapers

. . . suppressed” and turned over photos of several covert Cuban exile

operatives after their boat had problems.2

Suppressing a news story on the scale of the Chicago threat against

JFK took a new level of coordination among Bobby and several agen-

cies, but the Cuban aspects of the threat seemed to justify it. Not until

years later would the public learn that the ex-Marine who was arrested,

Thomas Vallee, had recent ties to a Cuban exile group affiliated with one

of Bobby’s exile leaders for the coup, Eloy Menoyo. Vallee also had ties

to the John Birch Society, widely known at the time for its extreme stands

against civil rights, Martin Luther King, and JFK, especially his seem-

ingly soft stance on Cuba. The CIA and INS had also received reports of

a possible Cuban agent named Miguel Casas Saez in Chicago, but they

were unable to track him down. In addition, two of the men sought in

the Chicago incident had Hispanic names, and a later CIA memo says

the plot allegedly involved “Cuban dissidents,” which meant “exiles.”

Those Cuban connections are why Bobby and JFK kept any mention of

the four-man Chicago plot, and the real reason for JFK’s sudden cancel-

lation, out of the press at the time.3

As far as the Mafia bosses were concerned, their man Richard Cain

was in a perfect position to help influence and monitor law enforce-

ment’s reaction to the Chicago plot. As we noted earlier, Cain was a

“made” member of Giancana’s Chicago Mafia, even while he was the

Chief Investigator for the Cook County/Chicago Sheriff, heading a staff

of more than two dozen. Congressional investigators documented that

Cain had worked on the CIA-Mafia plots with Trafficante and Rosselli,

had bugged a communist embassy in Mexico City in 1962, and in August

1963 had begun working for the CIA as an asset. CIA files withheld

from Congressional investigators show that Cain had learned about

AMWORLD, and that his information was sent on a secure path straight

to Desmond FitzGerald. Cain also had inside knowledge of the $200,000

Mafia bribe to Tony Varona.4

Three weeks after Chicago, the Kennedys faced a huge dilemma when

officials discovered another plot to assassinate JFK, this time during his

long Tampa motorcade on November 18. Officials uncovered the plot

less than twenty-four hours before JFK’s arrival and advised him to

cancel his visit, since at least two potential assassins were on the loose.

However, another sudden cancellation was not a viable option for JFK.

While he and Bobby had been able to keep the real reason for the Chi-

cago cancellation out of the press, another major motorcade canceled at