Legacy of Secrecy (42 page)

reports about the JFK assassination. He felt frustrated by the fact that

many of his department’s files about Trafficante had been destroyed

several years after he left office.17

We should point out that we don’t think Gilberto Lopez was know-

ingly involved in JFK’s death or the Tampa attempt. Moreover, based

on the descriptions, he was not one of the two men traveling with Rose

Cheramie. Given the many parallels between Lopez and Oswald that

we listed previously, both men were probably being influenced or

manipulated by the same type of individual, someone they trusted as

an intelligence or law enforcement figure, who was actually working

for one of the three Mafia chiefs. The same would be true for ex-Marine

Vallee in Chicago. In the same way the Mafia bosses’ plan to kill JFK in

Chicago included not just one backup city, but two (Tampa and Dallas),

they were prepared in case an accident or illness prevented one of their

fall guys from being in the right place at the right time.

The
Tampa Tribune
article was small and on an inside page; it wasn’t

front-page news; just filler about an odd aspect of JFK’s recent Tampa

trip. But since all word of the Tampa threat had been kept out of the

press, it quickly got the attention of the
Miami Herald
and the Associ-

ated Press. It’s not hard to imagine the reactions of Bobby, Hoover, LBJ,

the Secret Service, and McCone when they heard the Tampa threat had

started to leak. Tampa had a large Cuban exile population, and a sizable

minority of them supported Fidel; the Tampa chapter of the Fair Play

for Cuba Committee was an actual organization, not a phony one-man

front like Oswald had in New Orleans. While Lopez had apparently

not yet surfaced as a suspect, he soon would, and the national-security

implications were enormous. If the public found out that JFK had been

targeted during his Tampa motorcade just four days earlier, the press

and the public might not be so willing to swallow the official account of

a lone, unaided assassin in Dallas. If word of the Tampa plans emerged,

then the Chicago threat, which had contributed to JFK’s decision to

cancel his motorcade there, might also come out. It would look as if JFK

had been constantly stalked by Cubans or by the “international com-

munist conspiracy,” the very thing LBJ had his aide order Texas officials

to avoid mentioning.

Chief Mullins explained that he was never told why he had been

ordered to cut off all mention of the Tampa threat to the press, which is

one reason he was willing to talk to us about it in 1996. But in those days,

as today, the Tampa police cooperated with the local FBI and Secret Ser-

vice offices, and with other federal agencies like the CIA. Mullins there-

fore did what he was told. When the Associated Press and the
Miami

Herald
attempted to follow up on the revelations in the
Tampa Tribune

article, they were confronted by a wall of secrecy. The
Herald
reported

the next day that “the FBI, Secret Service, and local officers declined to

discuss the matter.” The Secret Service offered “no comment.” As for

the Secret Service memo quoted in the original
Tampa Tribune
article,

it appears to have vanished from the official record. While it might be

buried among the four million–plus pages of JFK files at the National

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Archives, it could also have been one of the files covering the period of

the Tampa attempt that the Secret Service would admit to destroying in

January 1995. That was approximately six weeks after the authors had

first informed the JFK Assassination Records Review Board about the

newspaper article describing the Tampa attempt.

It took thirty-three years for any researcher or investigator to locate

the first small article about the Tampa attempt, so other such articles

might still be out there, perhaps appearing in only one edition of a news-

paper. It took several days for all newspapers to completely adopt the

official story, and in the meantime, other stories briefly emerged, only

to quickly be shut down. On Monday, November 25, the
New York Post

reported that when Oswald went to Mexico, his “movements were

watched at the request of a ‘Federal agency in Washington’ [according

to] William M. Kline, assistant United States Customs Agent-in-Charge

of the Bureau’s Investigative Service.” The following day, the
New York

Times
reported from Mexico that Oswald’s “movements were followed

in Mexico by an unidentified United States Agency.” The same day, the

New York Herald-Tribune
added a report from US Customs official Oran

Pugh that the way Oswald was monitored at the border was “not the

usual procedure.”18 These stories, which hinted at the tight surveillance

of Oswald, were quickly squelched. The following year, the Warren

Commission would obtain carefully worded denials from the Customs

officials mentioned in the stories, though the subject would not be men-

tioned in the Commission’s Final Report.

Another example of a story’s slipping through the cracks in the early

days was an Associated Press article saying “someone telegraphed small

amounts of money to Lee Oswald for several months before the assas-

sination.”19 Though private pressure usually worked to control stories in

the media, just to make sure the message was abundantly clear, Hoover

later issued a statement, carried by the
New York Times,
saying that

Oswald had not been under surveillance by the FBI and was “neither a

spy nor a saboteur.”20

It’s ironic that on Saturday, November 23, some newspapers were

reporting information that was, in some ways, more accurate than

many of Hoover’s public statements. As we mentioned earlier, many

editorials written the previous day—before much about Oswald was

known—blamed JFK’s murder on right-wing extremists. They were

more correct than they realized, given the racist views of Marcello, his

white-supremacist associates like Guy Banister and Milteer, and the

far-right ties of others involved, such as Martino, Ferrie, and Masferrer,

and those on the plot’s periphery, like Artime and Rivero. Ironically,

the statements of communist dictatorships in Cuba and Russia were in

some ways closer to the truth than Hoover was. Far beyond the reach

of Hoover’s FBI, the official Soviet news agency, TASS, blamed “racists,

the Ku Klux Klan, and Birchers.” While not Klan members, both Banister

and Milteer had close associates who were, and Martino was one of the

most prominent speakers offered by the John Birch Society. Of course,

the Russians had their own self-interest at stake in pointing the finger

away from a seemingly lone communist assassin, as did Castro.

Fidel Castro was meeting with JFK’s personal emissary, French jour-

nalist Jean Daniel, at Varadero Beach when they received word of JFK’s

death. In both his private and public statements, Castro indicated JFK’s

death was a very bad thing. Castro didn’t mention the secret negotia-

tions when he issued a public statement on Saturday, but he did blame

JFK’s murder on “‘a macabre plan’ prepared by United States right-wing

extremists.”21

In Washington, Richard Helms was trying to orchestrate critical cover-

ups on two fronts, even as he tried to figure out what had really hap-

pened in Dallas. First, Helms had to be sure that no one—especially the

CIA Director, President Lyndon Johnson, or Bobby Kennedy—learned

of his unauthorized Castro assassination operations. Second, he also

had to protect the CIA’s authorized anti-Castro plots, ranging from

the JFK-Almeida coup plan and AMWORLD to the far less developed

AMTRUNK. Because there was some overlap between some of the

operations (AMWORLD’s Artime was part of both the JFK-Almeida

plan and the unauthorized CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro), he could use

actions to protect the authorized plans to simultaneously hide—and

even continue—his own unauthorized plotting.

First, Helms had to get control of all the CIA’s material on Oswald.

Historian Michael Kurtz has written that Hunter Leake, whom memos

confirm was Deputy Chief of the New Orleans CIA office in 1963, told

him “that on the day after the assassination, he was ordered to collect all

of the CIA’s files on Oswald from the New Orleans office and transport

them to the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.” Kurtz writes

that:

. . . [along with] other employees of the New Orleans office, Leake

gathered all of the Oswald files. They proved so voluminous that

Leake had to rent a trailer to transport them to Langley. Stopping

only to eat, use the restroom, and fill up with gas, Leake drove the

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

truck pulling the rental trailer filled with the New Orleans office’s

files on Oswald to CIA headquarters. Leake later learned that many

of these files were . . . ‘deep sixed.’ Leake explained that . . . the CIA

dreaded the release of any information that would connect Oswald

with it. Leake speculated that his friend Richard Helms, the Agency’s

Deputy Director for Plans, was probably the person who ordered

the destruction of the files because Helms had a paranoid obsession

with protecting the ‘company.’22

Leake’s remark about the “voluminous” files on Oswald makes sense,

given the information from our independent source about the “tight

surveillance” of Oswald, which was not known to Kurtz at the time of

his interview with Leake. Buttressing Leake’s credibility is the fact that

no routine reports from the CIA’s New Orleans office have ever surfaced

about former defector Oswald’s well-publicized pro-Castro activities

in New Orleans during August 1963, despite the CIA’s interest in both

former defectors and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Also, Leake’s

statement to Kurtz that “Oswald indeed performed chores for the CIA

during his five months in New Orleans during the spring and summer of

1963” fits with other information about Oswald’s work for Banister: the

remarkable amount of media coverage Oswald was able to generate in

such a short time, followed by Oswald’s meeting with CIA media expert

David Atlee Phillips, who was also working on AMWORLD.23 The last

part is important, because it suggests that Oswald had some role in an

authorized CIA operation like AMWORLD; otherwise, Helms couldn’t

have hoped to keep the efforts of Leake and “other employees of the

New Orleans office” secret from McCone.

It’s important to keep in mind that while Helms engaged in his cover-

ups, several of the authorized and unauthorized operations were still

active and viable. That meant that Helms had to find a way to conceal

information while still preserving those operations and his options. He

had to decide what to hide, and from whom, and what to reveal. Some

of the decisions Helms made that day would become CIA dogma for

decades, even as evidence emerged that the line Helms took couldn’t

possibly be true. As Dr. John Newman documented, this included the

CIA’s “decision soon after the assassination to deny that anyone within

the CIA—including the Mexico station—knew of Oswald’s visits to the

Cuban consulate until after JFK’s murder.” CIA files declassified later

show this claim was clearly false.24

Deceiving his own CIA Director, Helms apparently authorized Des-

mond FitzGerald, his head of Cuban operations, to tell McCone’s execu-

tive assistant only that a CIA case officer had been meeting with Cubela

in Paris when JFK was shot, and that FitzGerald himself had met with

Cubela the previous month. FitzGerald didn’t tell him anything about

the assassination aspects of the Cubela operation, since McCone hadn’t

been told about that part of the plan. That meant McCone’s assistant

wasn’t told about the poison pen the case officer tried to give Cubela, or

about his promise to deliver high-powered rifles with scopes for Cubela

to use in assassinating Castro, so McCone and his assistant probably saw

little to be concerned about.25

However, McCone’s assistant was struck by how emotional Fitz-

Gerald was when he told him about Cubela. He told
Newsweek
editor

Evan Thomas that “Des was normally imperturbable, but he was very

disturbed . . . shaking his head and wringing his hands.” He couldn’t

understand why FitzGerald appeared to be “distraught and overreact-

ing,” but he didn’t realize how much crucial information FitzGerald was

withholding from him and McCone. It’s also revealing that Helms had

FitzGerald tell McCone’s assistant about the Cubela meeting, instead

of Helms’s telling McCone directly.

McCone was at least generally aware of Cubela, as were a few others

outside of the CIA—but to them, Cubela was only someone who could

look for others to help stage a coup, and who could provide intelligence