Legacy of Secrecy (46 page)

the Cuban Government and that I was the link for the International

Communists—the Cuban Communists, the Mexican Communists, and

the American Communists, and that we were going to kill Kennedy.”19

It’s important to remember that the DFS was simply asking questions

(and making statements) that revealed what someone at the Mexico City

CIA station had told them—probably Phillips or one of his associates

and/or sources. The question is, was Phillips acting on his own, or was

he being fed disinformation by one of his associates (like Morales) or

his sources?

Duran was released that weekend, after she identified Oswald as the

person she had dealt with at the Cuban embassy. Years later, she and

the Cuban consul would both indicate that the man had actually not

been Oswald, because he was much shorter, had blond hair, and was

older than the real Oswald.20 Where did the allegation about Oswald and

Duran’s affair originate? CIA files at the time said that Duran had had

an earlier affair—with Cuban UN envoy Carlos Lechuga—that she later

admitted to Congressional investigators. In the fall of 1963, Lechuga was

a key player in the secret peace negotiations between JFK and Castro,

through JFK’s special UN envoy William Attwood.21 It’s as if someone

in the CIA figured that tying Duran to Oswald would not only make

Oswald and the Cubans look guilty, but also help to torpedo any secret

peace negotiations that might continue after JFK’s death. Despite the fact

that Duran confirmed the story about her affair with Oswald only after

being beaten, Win Scott later reported it to Washington as fact.22

However, just four days after Duran’s release, and three days after

Oswald’s death, the CIA asked that Duran be arrested yet again—and

even requested that Duran once more be interrogated “vigorously and

exhaustively”—a polite way of saying “beaten.” To keep it deniable, the

next day the CIA sent a message saying, “We want the Mexican authori-

ties to take the responsibility for the whole affair.”23 This time, Helms

was on board, as was the FBI. An FBI memo sent to Clyde Tolson, the

FBI’s Deputy Director and Hoover’s longtime live-in companion, said,

“Mexican authorities [are] interrogating Duran vigorously and exhaus-

tively. We agreed to this interrogation.”24

What had changed between Duran’s release and the new CIA

demand that she be rearrested and tortured? The answer was additional

incriminating (though eventually discredited) stories about Oswald

that emerged from Mexico City, this time tying Oswald to the Soviets.

The CIA informed the FBI on November 23 about information that

“indicated [Oswald] had been in contact with Valery Kostikov, Soviet

Embassy, Mexico City, and that Kostikov had been tentatively identi-

fied as being with the department in KGB which handles sabotage and

assassinations.”

Within twenty-four hours after JFK’s assassination, someone linked

to the CIA’s Mexico City station wanted it to appear as if Oswald were

a pawn in a vast conspiracy, one that involved not just the Cubans,

but also KGB assassination experts. However, in the coming days, this

facade, too, would start to fall apart. By November 27, the CIA was able

to confirm to the FBI only that Kostikov “is an official for the KGB,” but

had dropped the allegation about his being part of the KGB’s assassina-

tion department.25 It turned out that Kostikov just happened to be one

of three officials at the embassy when Oswald visited it; he had actually

helped to calm down the agitated Oswald. In the 1990s, after the fall of

the Soviet empire, Kostikov and the other two officials would be inter-

viewed extensively about Oswald’s visit by journalists.

However, starting on November 23, 1963, and continuing for years,

the allegations about Kostikov and Duran would be taken very seriously

by LBJ, Hoover, McCone, and, for a time, even Bobby Kennedy. Congres-

sional investigators later found that on November 23, James Angleton’s

CIA counter-intelligence staff prepared “a memo suggesting sinister

implications of Oswald’s Mexico City contacts.”26 Even Helms was so

concerned on November 23 that he took the unheard-of step of telling

the Mexico City CIA station to “feel free to abandon cables and talk plain

English so that there can be no mistakes.”27 Helms knew the stakes were

incredibly high, whether he was starting to believe some of the allega-

tions or just wanted to ensure that things didn’t get out of hand.

David Atlee Phillips seems to have been a central figure in these and

other bogus allegations that kept springing up in the following days.

The evidence suggests three possibilities: First, given Morales’s con-

fession to JFK’s assassination, as well as his closeness to Phillips and

frequent travel to Mexico City, it’s possible that Morales was simply

having information fed to Phillips that he knew would wind up with

FitzGerald and Helms in Washington. Anything that made Oswald look

guilty and could prompt the invasion of Cuba—which Morales knew

had already been planned—would be good for Morales and his pal

Rosselli. In this scenario, Phillips would basically have been a conduit

for disinformation.

Second, it’s possible that Phillips and some others in the CIA who

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weren’t involved in JFK’s assassination, but who did know that Oswald

was a US intelligence asset, may have felt that Oswald was a turncoat

who was responsible for JFK’s murder. In that case, the CIA men might

simply have wanted to release information that would help to prompt

a US invasion of Cuba. (Arguing against this theory is the information

pointing to the Soviets, which could have forced the United States into

a serious conflict.)

The third possibility is that Phillips was a knowing participant in

JFK’s assassination, and this was part of the plot to make Oswald look

even more guilty and to prompt the invasion of Cuba. One point that

argues against this idea is that so much of the information links to Phil-

lips that he would have come under great suspicion if the plot had

started to unravel. In other words, if you know you’re passing along

bogus information, it seems preferable to put someone else’s name on

it so it can’t be traced to you. To some degree, Phillips did just that,

using his official Choaden and Barker cover identities, but higher-ups

in the CIA knew or could have easily found out that those aliases were

Phillips’s. The same would be true for a new CIA director named after

the 1964 elections or any time in the future.

In considering the above possibilities, one other potential link exists

between Phillips and the release of incriminating information about

Oswald and Mexico City: the incident we cited previously, when a mem-

ber of the DRE, the exile group Phillips ran for the CIA, called Clare

Booth Luce on Friday night, November 22, to mention Oswald’s trip

to Mexico. That trip wouldn’t become known by the press until forty-

eight hours after JFK’s murder, so the DRE member had to have inside

information. On the other hand, Phillips might have had nothing to do

with the call or with passing to the DRE information about Oswald’s

visit to Mexico, since a CIA memo about Richard Cain said that “the DRE

is a MOB-controlled organization, which, at times, seems to act inde-

pendently of its monitor.”28 The capitalization of “MOB” for emphasis

was in the original CIA memo, and the “monitor” it referred to could

have been Phillips or his subordinate George Joannides, who handled

day-to-day contact with the DRE.

Other information unrelated to Mexico, but incriminating to Cuba,

began to surface on November 23. One of David Atlee Phillips’s jour-

nalist associates, who had worked with Phillips in Havana, made sure

the CIA was aware of remarks Fidel had made to AP reporter Daniel

Harker in September 1963.29 The tip to the FBI by Phillips’s associate

claimed Castro had said, “If the United States causes him difficulty,

he has the facilities to ‘knock off’ United States leaders.” 30 In his talk

with Harker in Havana, Castro had condemned the exile raids against

Cuba, which, despite denials to the press, were really backed by JFK.

Harker wrote that Castro then said, “We are prepared to fight them and

answer in kind. United States leaders should think that if they are aiding

terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves would not

be safe.”31 After Kennedy’s death, Phillips’s associate and others took

Castro’s remark as a threat to assassinate JFK, although the comment

was not noted as such when the article first appeared.

Years later, Anthony Summers wrote that Castro told Congressional

investigators “he never intended his words to be taken as a physical

threat against [any] individuals in the United States.” Instead, Fidel

said “he probably meant to warn Washington that he knew of the plots

against his own life and that it was ‘a very bad precedent’ which might

‘boomerang’ against its authors.”32 Fidel’s former head of State Secu-

rity, Fabian Escalante, says that what Castro really said was: “Ameri-

can leaders should be careful because the [anti-Castro operations] were

something nobody could control.”33 Given that some men involved in

the Castro assassination plots, like Morales and Rosselli, confessed to

killing JFK, the Cuban dictator’s explanation makes sense, especially

since those admissions weren’t revealed until years after Castro talked

to the Congressional delegation. As several historians have pointed out,

it would have made little sense for Fidel to do something that would risk

having his country invaded in retaliation, just to make Lyndon Johnson

president. While Summers notes that Fidel said that “any successor to

President Kennedy was likely to be even tougher toward Cuba,” he also

points out an even more obvious argument that Castro did not make: “If

Castro had really intended harm to President Kennedy, he would hardly

have announced it to the [American] press two months in advance.”34

Given the September 1963 timing of Fidel’s remarks, it’s important

to reiterate that a confidential source who worked on the Cuba Contin-

gency Plans, and with officials like FitzGerald and Rusk, told us that he

and the others didn’t see Fidel’s remarks as threats against JFK. He said

Fidel’s comment had nothing to do with sparking the Cuba Contingency

planning, and that he felt Castro had no role in JFK’s death.35 However,

other high officials who were dedicated Cold Warriors were not so sure,

and some in the CIA kept focusing on Fidel’s comment to Harker into

the next decade.

Years after JFK’s death, another newspaper article from the weeks

prior started to get attention; it might also help to explain Bobby’s

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comments to McCone and to Haynes Johnson on November 22, which

directed suspicion toward the CIA and CIA-backed exiles. Arthur Krock

was a columnist for the
New York Times
who was quite close to JFK and

Bobby. In his October 3, 1963, column, he had written about remarks

another journalist had obtained from a “very high American official . . .

who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy.” Krock

wrote that, according to this official, “the CIA’s growth was ‘likened to

a malignancy’ which the ‘very high official was not sure even the White

House could control . . . any longer.’” The official went on to say, “If the

United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the

government] it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon [since

the CIA] represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to

anyone.”36

The part about “total unaccountability to anyone” certainly applied

to Richard Helms in 1963 and for the next decade. As for the “attempt

at a coup,” no credible evidence or confession has yet surfaced that

definitely implicates any official in the CIA who ranked higher than

Morales as a witting participant in JFK’s murder. As pointed out by Dr.

John Newman for PBS, the CIA’s lies about Oswald and Mexico City

“appear to have been invented to buttress the lone-assassin story—itself

ostensibly created for the purpose of preventing war and saving millions

of lives. Whether or not this also permitted conspirators to avoid the

scrutiny of investigation—a possibility I take seriously—is something

we will continue to debate.”37

Chapter Seventeen

Based on the information that has been declassified so far, we cannot

tell exactly when on November 23, 1963, top officials like McCone, LBJ,

Hoover, and Bobby started learning about the incriminating information

from Mexico City. CIA records claim that while McCone met with LBJ

for fifteen minutes at 9:15 AM that day, the two did not discuss Cuba. Yet

when LBJ talked with J. Edgar Hoover, just thirty minutes after McCone

left, LBJ’s comments and questions to Hoover made it clear that LBJ