Legacy of Secrecy (48 page)

racism was not uncommon in the FBI, which had few (if any) Hispanic

agents, and no actual black agents. However, even if Hoover had wanted

to conduct an all-out investigation into Cuban exiles associated with

Oswald or JFK’s murder, the poor level of cooperation between the CIA

and the FBI at the time would have made that impossible. For example,

when the FBI heard rumors of CIA-backed activity involving exile lead-

ers like Artime and Ray, the CIA blatantly denied any support for those

groups.7

Hoover eventually came to realize the CIA was lying to him about

Oswald’s Mexico City trip, as verified by a memo he wrote less than

two months after JFK’s assassination. Hoover raged in a handwritten

note that “I can’t forget CIA withholding the French espionage activi-

ties in USA nor the false story re: Oswald’s trip in Mexico City, only to

mention two of their instances of double dealing.” Dr. Newman found

that only “eighteen days after the assassination, [Hoover] censured,

demoted, or transferred everyone in the FBI that had been touched by

the Mexico City story.”8

However, because of national security, Hoover had to maintain a

grudging cooperation with the CIA and protect its secrets (just as the

CIA had to protect Hoover’s secrets). Hoover’s relations with the Secret

Service were better than his relations with the CIA, but not by much,

since Hoover had long wanted to take over presidential protection from

the Secret Service. Hoover was no doubt glad when LBJ had the FBI take

control of all aspects of the JFK investigation, which also made it much

easier to make sure leads embarrassing to the Bureau weren’t publicized

or pursued.

A good example of leads not pursued is the Chicago case mentioned

earlier, when a Cuban exile who had been getting money from Felipe

Rivero’s Mafia-backed group said that the exiles would be able to buy

arms “as soon as we take care of Kennedy.” The exile also had ties to

Phillips’s DRE group, which a CIA memo said was also mob backed.

Vincent Palamara found that when Chicago Secret Service agents like

Joseph Noonan investigated, they became “uneasy that the Cubans

might have some ties to the CIA.” But just days after JFK’s death, the

FBI took over and the Secret Service had to drop its investigation. Former

Senate investigator Bud Fensterwald wrote that Secret Service agents

were ordered not “to discuss . . . the assassination and investigation with

anyone from any other federal agency now or any time in the future.”9

The FBI essentially stopped investigating the exile group, thereby ensur-

ing that no ties could be found that might lead to Cuban double agents,

the Chicago JFK threat, or covert CIA operations.

On November 23, Hoover was also starting to utilize his extensive

domestic surveillance network in the JFK investigation. It is now known

that illegal FBI phone-tap operations were usually described in reports

as information received from an unnamed informant. In Dallas, Hoover

had apparently ordered wiretaps on the phone of the woman Marina

Oswald had been living with, Ruth Paine. A November 23 phone call was

intercepted between Ruth Paine and her estranged husband, Michael,

in which he said “that he felt sure Lee Harvey Oswald had killed the

President, but did not feel Oswald was responsible, and further stated,

‘We both know who is responsible.’”10 Both have denied having the

conversation, and the FBI has never released the actual transcripts of

that bugging operation. The conversation is known only because of one

FBI memo that attributed the information to an unnamed informant. In

later chapters, we will detail additional illegal domestic FBI surveillance

as part of its JFK investigation, including an FBI break-in to bug Marina

Oswald’s bedroom.

Hoover had other cover-ups to maintain, unrelated to his official

duties, even before Jack Ruby’s actions on November 24 would esca-

late Hoover’s concerns to a new level. By November 23, Hoover was no

doubt becoming aware of the accusations coming out of New Orleans

about his former Chicago FBI chief Guy Banister, and Banister’s associ-

ate David Ferrie. Any connection between them and Oswald would be

very embarrassing for the FBI, and Hoover’s concern probably resulted

in the gentle treatment of Banister following Ferrie’s return to Dallas the

following night.

Before JFK’s murder, Hoover might have been aware of the decision

not to tell Georgia FBI agent Don Adams—who was investigating Joseph

Milteer’s threats against JFK—any information about Milteer’s threats

being tape-recorded by a Miami police informant, or about the Tampa

attempt that followed Milteer’s threat.11 That information would seem

to have been crucial for Agent Adams’s preassassination investigation

of Milteer, but it was also withheld after JFK’s death, even as the FBI’s

investigation of Milteer continued. After JFK’s murder, the Milteer threat

and any other serious threats against JFK in the FBI’s files were almost

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certainly sought out by Hoover, who wanted to be sure the FBI hadn’t

missed anything that could embarrass Hoover and the Bureau. As for

Milteer, he was still talking to the Miami police’s informant, though

Hoover and the FBI wouldn’t find out what he was saying for several

days.

The day after JFK’s murder, Milteer was in South Carolina, talking to

William Somersett (the Miami police informant). Milteer “was very

happy over JFK’s death” and said, “It happened like I told you, didn’t

it? It happened from a window with a high-powered rifle.” Milteer also

mentioned traveling recently to “Dallas, Texas, as well as New Orleans,”

which is not surprising, since Milteer knew Guy Banister, whose major

client Carlos Marcello controlled the mob in both cities.12 Milteer would

make more provocative comments to the police informant the following

day, just before Oswald was shot.

At least for a while, another well-traveled person linked to Marcello—

French Connection heroin kingpin and assassin Michel Victor Mertz—

was in Dallas on November 23, 1963. Mertz had recently been in Texas

and Louisiana, using the name of an old adversary, Jean Souetre, while

the real Souetre was in Spain. Mertz’s alias was sure to trigger cover-ups

by the CIA and FBI, since the real Souetre was wanted by French authori-

ties because he’d participated in the 1962 attempt to assassinate Charles

de Gaulle, which had left the French president’s car riddled with bullets.

While the real Jean Souetre was a fugitive in Europe in May 1963, a CIA

official had filed a report about his meeting with Souetre, though Rich-

ard Helms decided in July 1963 to reject Souetre’s overtures.13 In the days

leading up to JFK’s trip to Dallas, former Senate investigator Bud Fen-

sterwald discovered that “the FBI had traced [the man they thought was]

Souetre to Dallas a day before the assassination and then lost him.”14 As

Souetre told us, via French journalist Stephane Risset, the man in Dallas

was actually Michel Victor Mertz, using Souetre’s name.

Only one page of Mertz’s CIA file has been released, and the follow-

ing memo is just part of a much longer document that is still withheld.

The memo was in response to FBI and French requests for informa-

tion, and states that “Michel Mertz . . . had been expelled from the US

at Fort Worth or Dallas 48 hours after the assassination of President

Kennedy.” The memo adds that the Frenchman “was in Fort Worth

on the morning of November 22 [as was JFK] and in Dallas in the

afternoon.” It also provides the Jean Souetre alias, as well as that of a

twenty-three-year-old aspiring French chef who was visiting Dallas at

the time. However, official records confirm the chef was not deported

and left Dallas legitimately.

This CIA memo was copied to Bobby Kennedy’s FBI liaison, Courtney

Evans. However, the memo wasn’t sent until more than three months

after JFK’s assassination, meaning that Bobby probably wasn’t aware

of Mertz’s presence in Dallas until that time. That tragic timing is com-

pounded by the fact that a Bureau of Narcotics report says it received

an anonymous letter, just a day after Mertz’s deportation, that described

heroin smuggling in Mexico City by one of Mertz’s close associates, who

also operated in Cuba.15 But Bobby would never have all the pieces he

would need to put together the story of Mertz. William Attwood’s prize-

winning
Newsday
series that exposed Mertz’s heroin trafficking with

Trafficante wouldn’t appear until five years after Bobby’s death; the CIA

memo about Mertz’s deportation from Dallas wouldn’t be released until

several years after the
Newsday
articles; and Souetre wouldn’t reveal that

Mertz had impersonated him until the early 1980s. It would also take our

review of Fensterwald’s files, and the release of the Bureau of Narcotics’

internal history of the French Connection (“Project Pilot,” first detailed

by author Douglas Valentine in 2004), to finally complete the puzzle.

A Houston dentist who had known Souetre years earlier in France

said he was interviewed by FBI agents who “told me that Souetre was

in Dallas that day [of JFK’s murder] and was flown out . . . as far as they

were concerned, in a government plane. But there was no record what-

soever of the plane being there.”16 The FBI wouldn’t find any record of

Souetre’s being “flown out” on a government plane, because the person

in question was actually Mertz who’d been posing as Souetre. Also,

when Mertz was picked up, he had switched to yet another alias, one

guaranteed to get him deported back to familiar territory.

Virgil Bailey, an INS investigator in Dallas in 1963, told researcher

Gary Shaw years later about “picking up a Frenchman in Dallas shortly

after the assassination of President Kennedy.” The man’s description

was very close to Mertz’s, and he looked just a few years older than

a cover identity Mertz often used. Based on age and description, the

man Investigator Bailey remembered could not have been either

the real Souetre or the young French chef. Bailey also recalled that “the

Frenchman . . . had been tried in absentia in France and was under a

death sentence for collaboration with the Nazis during World War II.”

Mertz could have picked up that alias from either of two of his heroin

associates, Joseph Orsini and Antoine D’Agostino, who had both earned

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“a death sentence in absentia” for Nazi collaboration. (Orsini’s nephew

would later be arrested as part of the Fort Benning heroin bust that

would eventually send Mertz, briefly, to prison.) Mertz’s cover story

apparently also tried to take advantage of the presence of the young

French chef visiting Dallas, since Bailey thinks the man they arrested

was “a chef or maitre d’ in an unknown Dallas restaurant.”17

Bailey’s supervisor at INS at the time, Hal Norwood, recalled other

aspects of the story. Norwood described the arrest of an “individual

who might have been French which occurred shortly after the killing

of the President. The Dallas police called INS and requested that they

come to city jail to investigate a foreigner that they had in custody.”

Norwood thought Bailey “was one of the men he sent” to pick up the

foreigner. “The man in question was a wanted criminal and shortly

after INS took him into custody, the head of Washington INS investiga-

tions called requesting a pickup on the man. They were surprised that

he was already a prisoner. . . . The Washington INS office was VERY

interested in the man and called twice regarding him,” according to the

INS supervisor.18

Mertz’s intelligence connections were enough to have the official

paperwork suppressed later, especially if he or his associates were

involved with QJWIN or another of Helms’s unauthorized Castro assas-

sination plots. The fact that the CIA discovered later that someone had

been using the names of both Souetre and Mertz would also allow an

official like Helms (or Angleton or Harvey) to ask INS officials to remove

the information about the deportation from their files, on national-

security grounds. In any event, it must have been deliciously ironic for

Carlos Marcello to see the same INS that had once deported him, on

the orders of Bobby Kennedy, now fly his heroin partner out of Dallas

shortly after JFK’s assassination.

Back in Washington, on the evening of Saturday, November 23, CIA

Director McCone “called Secretary [of State] Rusk and reviewed with

him the information received from Mexico City, most particularly the

holding of a Mexican employee of the Cuban Embassy by Mexican

officials for interrogation concerning Lee Oswald.” McCone wrote in

a memorandum for the record that he “explained to Rusk the informa-

tion that we had transmitted to the FBI and to the authorities in Dallas.