Legacy of Secrecy (31 page)

began to be linked to JFK’s assassination in the press by the late 1970s.

As the rest of the story unfolds, the significant weight of the evidence

argues against Helms’s knowing participation in JFK’s murder. As a

Washington insider, Helms would have known that JFK’s murder would

at least severely delay, and probably end, any chance for a coup with

Almeida. Helms knew that LBJ hated Bobby, who had kept LBJ out of

the loop about the coup plan, and that there would be little chance LBJ

would continue Bobby’s pet project. Also, as of November 22, Helms

had everything he wanted from the Kennedys. They had bought his

story of Cuban weapons being found in Venezuela, reducing any chance

of a breakthrough with the secret peace initiatives of William Attwood

and Jean Daniel.

Memos from Bobby’s Cuban subcommittees show that Helms was

not in favor of the peace feelers to Castro, but he didn’t have to kill JFK

to ensure that those efforts failed. These memos say that if there had

been a next step in the Attwood peace process, it would have involved

Attwood’s going to Varadero Beach to meet with Fidel. That would

have given Helms a prime opportunity to have Castro assassinated. In

the spring of 1963, Helms had already shown a willingness to endanger

JFK’s emissaries in his quest to assassinate Fidel. These included not

only the exploding seashell he considered, which would have also killed

JFK’s representative James Donovan, but also in his actual attempt to

assassinate Fidel with guns while Donovan was in Cuba, negotiating the

release of several prisoners (including four CIA men) with Castro.

It’s difficult to envision a scenario in which it would have made sense

for Helms to have JFK assassinated when the JFK-Almeida coup plan,

and even his own unauthorized Castro operation, were so close to frui-

tion.22 The same is true for Desmond FitzGerald, who was closer to, and

sometimes socialized with, Bobby Kennedy. Additionally, neither man

had been involved with the Bay of Pigs, so they lacked bitterness over

that failure as a motivating factor. The same can’t be said, however,

for David Morales and some others. Additionally, one can ask whether

Helms trusted his protégé Hunt too much, or if Hunt trusted some of

those he worked with too much. Did Helms come to suspect any of

them in the JFK assassination? Helms cleaned house of only a few, start-

ing with Tony Varona; others continued working with him until the

time of Watergate and even beyond. Certain Cuban exiles, and others

in positions to know about Helms’s unauthorized operations, contin-

ued to receive CIA support for years, sometimes decades, despite their

committing other crimes, and even spectacular terrorist acts, against

innocent civilians. Was this part of the price Helms and others paid to

keep their secrets from being exposed? (Many of Helms’s secrets, from

AMWORLD and the JFK-Almeida coup plan to Artime’s involvement

in the CIA-Mafia plots were not publicly exposed until after Helms’s

death in October 2002.) The rest of the book will help to answer those

questions.

Even without being involved in JFK’s assassination, Helms still had

plenty of motivation for cover-ups afterward: to protect the viability of

the coup plan with Almeida, to prevent a crisis with Russia over Cuba,

and to block the exposure of his own unauthorized operations. These

cover-ups would help him rise in power, which allowed him to cover

up even further. As his biographer said, “when Helms said secret, he

meant
secret
—in the words of Lyman Kirkpatrick, secret from inception

to eternity.” 23 Starting on the afternoon of November 22, Helms would

spend the rest of his life making sure that was the case.

Helms’s early background as a journalist helped him continue to

expand his influence in media circles, which in turn allowed him to

influence their coverage of him and the CIA. His biographer writes

that “Helms’s reputation for integrity extended to the Washington press

corps. . . . He lunched frequently with reporters like the Alsop brothers,

James Reston, and C. L. Sulzberger of the
New York Times,
Hugh Sidey

of
Time,
[and] Chalmers Roberts of the
Washington Post.”
They saw him

as “well wired in the Washington establishment and one who could be

trusted not to mislead.” 24 In light of the many CIA operations, autho-

rized and unauthorized, that we now know Helms kept secret, as well as

his later conviction for lying to Congress, the media’s view of Helms as

truthful seems incredible, to say the least. Yet it goes a long way toward

explaining how he was able to keep so much about JFK’s assassination

so secret for so long.

The change in presidents also allowed Helms to keep his secrets from

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

being exposed. LBJ would learn much about the anti-Castro operations

in the coming days. But Helms wouldn’t inform him of some aspects

until 1967, and other parts Helms would never reveal to either LBJ or

his successor in the White House, Richard Nixon.

Other CIA officials involved in the unauthorized operations heard the

news in different ways. Desmond FitzGerald was said to be having

lunch with an aide in Georgetown, a short drive from the site where

Harry had been meeting with CIA officials until they took a lunch break.

The aide said that after FitzGerald got a call about what had happened in

Dallas, FitzGerald was “white as a ghost.” After FitzGerald told the aide,

“The President’s been shot,” the aide said, “I hope this has nothing to do

with the Cubans.” 25 Also in Washington, the CIA’s Counter-Intelligence

Chief, the spectral James Angleton, was also having lunch when he got

the news. Angleton probably knew about some of Helms’s unauthorized

operations, since the safe houses where Artime and other exile leaders

working for Bobby and Helms stayed were sometimes bugged, because

Counter-Intelligence was supposed to make sure Castro’s agents didn’t

infiltrate exile operations.26 Angleton was meeting at a restaurant with a

colonel in the French Secret Service (the SDECE, the same organization

Michel Victor Mertz sometimes worked for). Ironically, the restaurant’s

owner was linked to the French Connection heroin bust that eventually

sent Mertz to prison.27

Miami Station Chief Ted Shackley didn’t deal with the day of JFK’s

assassination in his 2005 autobiography, which avoids many sensitive

topics. Shackley did write that many months before JFK’s death, his

operations chief “Dave Morales and I spent many a Miami evening by

my swimming pool, discussing the problem” of Bobby Kennedy’s pres-

sure to do more about Cuba.28 Shackley surely knew about the actions

of Rosselli with Morales in terms of the unauthorized Castro assassina-

tion plot. How much Shackley knew, suspected, or came to learn later

regarding Morales’s work with Rosselli on the JFK hit may never be

uncovered.

A far more objective book about Shackley, by
Nation
writer David

Corn, accurately notes that “in the fall of 1963, Shackley had a lot to

track. His own officers were planning attacks. Artime’s forces were

building up, [as was] the CIA-backed JURE of Manolo Ray.” 29 We have

examined much of the raw cable traffic—at least, those cables that have

been released—that went from or to the CIA’s huge Miami station in

the weeks before and after JFK’s assassination. The number of ongoing

operatives and operations was staggering at a time when the general

public—and, even later, Congressional investigators—had been told

that the CIA’s Cuban operations had been practically eliminated. Some

of the cables are completely coded, some partially, and others are still

censored. While few operational cables have been released, CIA infor-

mants were often talking about Harry Williams, Bobby Kennedy, Man-

uel Artime, Manolo Ray, Eloy Menoyo, and Tony Varona, with hints of

the impending coup.

Clearly, Shackley had a lot to keep under control on November 22,

ranging from AMWORLD to whatever he had been told about the JFK-

Almeida coup plan to Helms’s unauthorized plots. It’s important to

keep in mind that even though cables might appear to have been sent

from Shackley to CIA Director McCone, they usually went to Helms,

who decided which cables to show or tell McCone about. As David

Corn later wrote, for Shackley’s actions in the immediate aftermath of

JFK’s murder, “in 1979, the House Select Committee [on Assassinations]

judged Shackley harshly. . . . His station, its report declared, ought to

have debriefed thoroughly all its sources to determine if there were any

links between Oswald and Havana, and it should have swept fully its

contacts to see if any anti-Castro partisans possessed knowledge per-

taining to the murder of the President.” 30 What the Committee didn’t

realize then was the extent to which Shackley had been at least aware

of unauthorized operations, like the use of Rosselli, and operations that

were still being withheld from the Committee in 1979, like Phillips’s use

of Joannides to run the DRE exile group that had contact with Oswald.

As detailed in Chapter 64, in 1978 Shackley was still a high-ranking CIA

official when Joannides was assigned to be the CIA’s liaison with the

Committee—and Joannides told the Committee he couldn’t locate the

CIA man who had run the DRE.

As CIA Director John McCone sped toward Bobby’s Virginia estate, he

later told author William Manchester he was thinking, “You wonder

who could be responsible for a thing like this? Was this the result of

bigotry and hatred that was expressed in certain areas of the country,

of which Dallas was one? Was this an international plot?” In the CIA’s

copy of the original transcript of Manchester’s interview with McCone,

declassified in 1998, McCone admitted that “this was a question that

plagued us day and night for a long time.” In stark contrast to the lone-

assassin story that Hoover presented in private within hours, and to

the public by the following morning, McCone said, “I don’t recall that

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

I reached an immediate judgement.” McCone said that after Oswald

surfaced as the prime suspect, “we went to work in depth on this thing to

determine whether Oswald had any association [with] or was receiving

direction from any external [source]. And there were days there where

we didn’t know. There were of course conflicting reports.”31

This situation worsened after Oswald (whom McCone called “the

main source of information”) was murdered, because “nothing could

be proven, nothing could be checked, so people get so convinced them-

selves that something is a fact that they feel that they must convey

them.”32 McCone appears to be addressing the situation in the days and

weeks after Dallas, when he received many disturbing reports—which

turned out not to be true—linking the Soviets or Fidel to JFK’s murder,

and McCone apparently didn’t consider the possibility that the false

information had been planted deliberately.

Of course, McCone didn’t know that Helms was withholding a wealth

of critical information from him. And when McCone met with Bobby

Kennedy at Hickory Hill, he was talking to someone else who’d had

much of the same important information withheld from him. Their lack

of knowledge prevented both of them from realizing that the individu-

als originating or pushing some of those “conflicting reports” may have

had ulterior motives, designed to deflect attention from themselves or

their associates.

When McCone arrived at Bobby’s mansion, the Attorney General and

his wife “were alone . . . in the library of the second floor.” Earlier, Bobby

had placed calls to Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Not long after McCone’s

arrival, Bobby received a call from Secret Service Agent Clint Hill tell-

ing him his brother was dead. McCone described Bobby as “being just

aghast, as though he had received unbelievable news.” But McCone

said that Bobby was initially stoic, and though “obviously shaken to an

unbelievable degree [he] retained his composure in a most remarkable

manner” as he called his brother Edward and family members to deliver

the devastating news.33

McCone later told Manchester that “the Attorney General and I then

went out into his yard and we walked for a long time and talked about

a great many things.” Manchester interviewed McCone for his book

Death of a President
just months after JFK’s death, so it’s not surprising

that McCone would have been vague about some of the “great many

things” he talked about with Bobby. To Manchester, McCone focused on

things like whether Bobby should fly to Dallas. Bobby’s initial impulse

was to head to Dallas and “return with the body and Mrs. Kennedy.”

McCone says that he “urged that he not do that” because it would take