Legacy of Secrecy (34 page)

of the US intelligence assets being sent into Cuba before the coup.22

Back at the Ebbitt Hotel, Haynes Johnson said farewell to his friend

Harry Williams without mentioning Bobby’s statement that “One of

your guys did it.” Haynes writes that he “stumbled out of the Ebbitt

lobby [still] shaken by . . . what Robert Kennedy had said to me.”23 Alone

in his hotel room, Harry Williams soon received a provocative call, the

first of what appear to have been several attempts by certain exiles to

quickly spread word of Oswald’s guilt and his apparent Castro ties to

the news media.

The man who called Harry was Alberto Fowler, the bitter former Bay

of Pigs prisoner who had shadowed JFK in Palm Beach the day before

JFK’s Tampa motorcade. To Harry, Fowler implied that Oswald had

been acting on behalf of Castro, urging Harry to tell Bobby Kennedy

that Oswald had been passing out pro-Castro leaflets on the streets of

New Orleans and spouting pro-Castro remarks on New Orleans radio

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

and television. Fowler indicated that Oswald’s pro-Cuba activities had

been well-covered by New Orleans news outlets. When Harry said get-

ting through to Bobby would be very difficult, Fowler urged Harry to

contact his friends in the news media, since word had traveled through

exile circles that Harry was helping with the upcoming NBC News Bay

of Pigs special.

Harry knew Fowler, but not well, and Fowler was not part of the JFK-

Almeida coup plan. Cultured and sophisticated, Fowler had been left

psychologically scarred by his grueling ordeal as a Bay of Pigs prisoner.

But Fowler was a highly respected member of the exile community and

the Director of International Relations at the New Orleans Trade Mart.

He had formerly been a member of Tony Varona’s exile group, which is

probably how Fowler knew to reach Harry at the Ebbitt Hotel.

Harry thought Fowler’s information was important, and tried with-

out success to reach Bobby. (Harry would hear from Bobby the follow-

ing day.) Next, Harry tried calling Chet Huntley at NBC News. At an

informal meeting at RFK’s Virginia estate, Bobby had introduced them

in preparation for the Bay of Pigs special. Harry said that he and Chet

Huntley had “hit it off. He had said, ‘Call me whenever you want,’

because Huntley wanted the news” about exile activities.

On November 22, Harry wasn’t able to speak to Huntley directly

because the newsman was anchoring much of NBC’s by-then-

continuous coverage of the events from Dallas. But Harry left a mes-

sage with a detailed account of what Fowler had told him. At 7:00 PM

(Eastern time), Huntley introduced the audio of Oswald’s interview on

New Orleans’s WDSU-TV. At 7:43, NBC ran both the audio and video of

Oswald’s interview, allowing America to see and hear Oswald praising

Castro, talking about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and declaring,

“I am a Marxist.”24

Fowler’s call to Harry was the first of three efforts to quickly publicize

Oswald’s seemingly pro-Castro sentiments, but each attempt was by

people or groups tied to the Mafia and close associates of David Morales.

In addition to Fowler’s admitted shadowing of JFK on the day before the

Tampa assassination attempt, Fowler has made other interesting admis-

sions. Fowler would later tell the New Orleans District Attorney that as

far as JFK’s assassination was concerned, “I didn’t kill him . . . but I wish

I had.” Fowler cast the comment as a joke, the same way he later tried to

explain away his shadowing of JFK from an adjacent house.25

However, Fowler admitted to the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
that

he “had been resentful of Kennedy; in fact, I had even written a long

article for
U.S. News & World Report,
showing my resentment for the

lack of air cover that had been promised for [the Bay of Pigs invasion].”

The article appeared less than two weeks after Fowler’s release from a

Cuban prison. Fowler, like other Bay of Pigs prisoners, had been freed

as part of the deal worked out by Bobby and Harry.26 Writing his slam

of JFK must have been one of the first things the embittered Fowler did

after he was released.

Fowler’s associates were involved with Artime’s exile training camp

outside New Orleans, the one David Ferrie and Oswald allegedly vis-

ited. It was closed after several associates of Marcello, Rosselli, and Traf-

ficante were arrested with an arms cache less than a mile away.27 The

arms cache had been the idea of Frank Fiorini, and Fowler had a close

friend in common with the Trafficante bagman.

Fowler also had ties to Tony Varona, who worked with Rosselli and

Trafficante, and to other CIA assets. Originally, the CIA had wanted

Fowler to head the New Orleans chapter of Varona’s exile group, but

Fowler declined.28 Two CIA assets worked at the Trade Mart with Fowler,

including William Gaudet, who helped with the CIA’s surveillance of

Oswald. Fowler himself was on the International Advisory Committee

for INCA, the group that helped to arrange and publicize Oswald’s radio

debate. Also on the Committee with Fowler was Oswald’s childhood

idol, Herbert Philbrick, whose television series
I Led Three Lives
detailed

his years as a deep cover undercover US intelligence asset pretending

to be a communist
.

Was Fowler part of the plot to kill JFK—or was he being used or

manipulated by someone else? While Fowler was extremely conserva-

tive, and very intolerant of minorities such as blacks and gays, he had

no history of criminal behavior or violence (aside from his days as a

fighter at the Bay of Pigs for the CIA). However, the same is not true

for the man who assisted Fowler in shadowing JFK just before Tampa:

Felipe Rivero.

At the time of JFK’s assassination, Rivero was one of the highest-

ranking members of an exile group—usually called by its initials, the

JGCE, or “the Junta”—whose major funding came from the Chicago

Mafia. Three months before JFK’s assassination, in August 1963, Rivero

and his group had tried to become involved in Harry’s plans. Files con-

firm that he was rejected, and was instead referred by Bobby and Harry

to the State Department, as sometimes happened to groups deemed

unsuitable for inclusion in the coup plan.29

In April 1963, a month before Almeida contacted Harry about

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

staging a coup, declassified CIA files show that Rivero was working with

Manuel Artime on a scheme to embarrass JFK. A cable from the Miami

CIA station to CIA Director McCone said that Rivero “had the backing

of Manuel Artime, who has been with him quite frequently” to publicize

a request from a group of Bay of Pigs veterans that “President John F.

Kennedy return the Brigade flag” that JFK had been given at the Orange

Bowl on December 29, 1962, to celebrate the prisoners’ release.

The CIA memo calls “Felipe Rivero the official front man for this

plan,” which would involve sending announcements to “all local radio

and television outlets” about their demand. Rivero and Artime were

acting in response to a perceived lack of action on JFK’s part to topple

Fidel; the information in the report came from Bernard Barker and one

of David Morales’s AMOT informants.30 The plan apparently fell apart

when the Kennedys increased their attention to and support of Artime.

Just over a month later, the opportunity with Almeida presented itself,

and a month after that, Artime was being set up in what would eventu-

ally become the $7 million AMWORLD operation. Harry Williams once

indicated that Artime’s support from the Kennedys always involved a

touch of “blackmail”—perhaps Artime’s threat to demand the flag’s

return was what Harry was referring to. Rivero, on the other hand,

turned to a Mafia-backed organization for his own support.

In the years after JFK’s assassination, Rivero would help plan a wave

of terrorist bombings in the United States, Canada, and Latin America.

Rivero’s most infamous bomb attack occurred on September 21, 1976,

when a car bomb exploded in the middle of Washington, D.C., tak-

ing the life of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier. With Lete-

lier were two Americans: Michael Moffit, who survived, and his wife,

Ronni. As journalist Joseph Trento described, Ronni Moffit “drowned

in her own blood” from a severed artery, while Letelier’s body was

“torn in two.”31 Files from the Dade County Manager’s office state that

“authorities believed that Rivero had planned Letelier’s assassination.”32

However, Rivero was never prosecuted for this or other acts of violence

he was connected to in the 1970s. In 1975, two close friends of Rivero

blew up Trafficante associate Rolando Masferrer in Miami in another

car bombing. The same Rivero associates were also linked to the bomb-

ing of a packed Cubana airliner less than two weeks after the Letelier

bombing.33

Felipe Rivero wasn’t just intolerant toward minorities, like his friend

Alberto Fowler; Dade County files described Rivero as a “neo-Nazi.”

His beliefs became abundantly clear in 1992, when Rivero invited and

hosted ex-Klan head David Duke to speak to his organization. Several

other participants in JFK’s assassination, including Joseph Milteer and

Guy Banister, were also white supremacists. They were part of the nexus

of illegal arms sales by the Mafia, whose two largest customer groups

were Cuban exiles and white supremacists. The day before JFK was

shot and Fowler called Harry Williams, a Cuban exile backed by Riv-

ero’s group had made a suspicious remark to an associate. According to

Vanity Fair,
on November 21, 1963, while a Cuban exile was “negotiat-

ing an arms purchase in Chicago,” the exile stated that “the money for

the guns would come through shortly . . . ‘as soon as we take care of

Kennedy.’”34

The Chicago Secret Service heard about the remark and began inves-

tigating. But author Vince Palamara writes that “Chicago Secret Service

agent Joseph Noonan . . . and other agents were uneasy that the Cubans

might have some ties to the CIA.” The agents were correct, because the

suspect had ties not only to Rivero’s group, but also to the DRE, which

David Atlee Phillips ran for the CIA with the help of George Joannides.

Palamara writes that “a little later, they received a call from (Secret Ser-

vice) Headquarters, to drop everything . . . and send all memos, files,

and their notebooks to Washington, and not to discuss the case with

anyone.”35 The case was taken over by the FBI, which let it die. This was

just one of many examples in the aftermath of JFK’s murder in which

potential ties to Cuba, exiles, or the Chicago or Tampa threat weren’t

adequately explored, for fear of where they might lead or what they

might expose.36

Rivero’s partner, Alberto Fowler, would later take a more active

role in diverting suspicion from himself, Rivero, other exiles, and the

Mafia when Fowler became the main Cuban exile investigator for New

Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1967. Shortly after Fowler

started working for Garrison, Fowler’s gay associate at the Trade Mart,

former occasional CIA asset Clay Shaw, became the primary focus of

Garrison’s investigation.

Fowler’s call to Harry late in the afternoon of November 22 was soon

followed by two more attempts to quickly tie Oswald to Fidel Castro,

thereby implicating Fidel in JFK’s death. The reason was made clear in

a CIA memo a few days later, which said that “rumors are now circu-

lating among Exile groups [about Castro’s] involvement in Kennedy’s

death. Authors [of] these rumors not identified but it[’s] clear this [is]

being done primarily in [an] attempt to provoke strong US action against

Cuba.”37 The memo obscures the fact that some in the CIA knew, or

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

should have known, the source of “these rumors,” since the following

two incidents involved groups being run by David Atlee Phillips and

George Joannides for the CIA.

On the evening of November 22, a CIA memo confirms that members

of Phillips’s DRE had information about Oswald’s time in the Soviet

Union, stemming from Oswald’s radio debate with a DRE member three

months earlier. However, the author of the CIA memo (someone at the

Miami station, where Morales ran operations) says that the “above info

has not been passed to the Secret Service, State, or FBI as [the DRE] plans

a news release” to publicize its information. It seems odd that the CIA

would withhold information from other federal agencies just so a small

exile group could issue its own news release.38

Later that night, another DRE member contacted Clare Booth Luce,

wife of the publisher of
Time
and
Life
magazines. She and her husband

were ardent anticommunists, and she had been funding several DRE

members.39
Vanity Fair
reports that her caller made the most direct accu-