Legacy of Secrecy (62 page)

ciates were linked to the Odio incident.

Warren had probably been told only about the CIA-Mafia plots that

ran from 1960 to 1962, since the FBI was also aware of those, but it’s

doubtful that Warren was told that the plots had continued into 1963.

Helms had no incentive to tell Warren something that remained hidden

even from his own CIA Director, especially since problems with the

plots kept coming up in early 1964. In April 1964, FitzGerald and Helms

“terminated” (as in fired) QJWIN after news reports surfaced briefly in

Europe, linking Jean Souetre and Michael Mertz to JFK’s assassination.

These news reports led to the inquiry that generated the only memo the

CIA has ever released about Mertz, the one page (from a much longer,

still withheld document) concerning his deportation that was quoted

in an earlier chapter.

The European articles also caused the FBI to look for anyone with the

name of, or a name similar to, Mertz who flew out of Dallas after JFK’s

assassination. However, no news about this was reported in America

at the time, and it’s not clear what, if anything, the Warren Commis-

sion was told about Mertz or Souetre. While the Commission received

a few documents about the FBI’s search in early 1964 for November 22,

1963, Dallas airline passengers named Mertz, those were just a hand-

ful of more than a hundred thousand pages of FBI files showered on

the Warren Commission. Lacking more information from the FBI or

CIA, Commission staffers probably didn’t realize the significance of

the documents.27

On March 2, 1964, Helms received reports of yet another Mafia plot

to assassinate Castro, though he didn’t tell McCone and Bobby about

it until three months later. According to Congressional investigators,

Helms wrote that CIA “officials have learned of several plots by exiles to

assassinate Castro. Some of them are connected to the Mafia.” However,

Helms “does not mention [to McCone] the [earlier] CIA sponsored plots”

with the Mafia. Helms said the March 1964 plots “involved ‘people

apparently associated with the Mafia’ who had been offered $150,000 by

Cuban exiles to accomplish the deed. Helms’s memorandum stated that

the sources of the reports were parties to the plots who had presumably

given this information to CIA officials with the expectation that they

would receive legal immunity if the plots succeeded.”28

Three months later, in June 1964, Helms told McCone that, naturally,

“the CIA representatives had told the Cuban informants that such action

would never be condoned.” Helms’s delay in relaying this information

begs the question of whether he was giving the plots three months to

work, before finally informing his Director. Helms still had at least one

possible pathway of information from the Mafia: Though Johnny Ros-

selli no longer went to the Miami CIA station, David Morales visited the

Mafia don in Las Vegas in early 1964.29

Helms continued to withhold much important information from the

Warren Commission, including the CIA’s ongoing contacts with Rolando

Cubela. More than a decade later, the Senate Church Committee would

write that “it is difficult to understand why those aware of the opera-

tion did not think it relevant, and did not inform those investigating

President Kennedy’s assassination of possible connections between that

operation and the assassination.”30 In hindsight, the motive for Helms’s

omission is clear: At the very least, revealing those connections would

have cost Helms his job and probably would have made CIA officials

like David Morales, and possibly even Helms himself, suspects.

Some Warren Commission staff members were already becoming

frustrated with—and perhaps even suspicious of—the CIA. Congres-

sional investigators later found that on March 12, 1964, there had been

a “very important meeting between 6 Warren Commission staffers and

3 CIA men.” During the meeting, Helms told the staffers that “two

case officers would know for sure whether Oswald was an agent.”

The investigators, writing fifteen years later, found Helms’s comment

“very interesting,” and wondered why Helms limited it to “just two

officers. . . . Who were they, were they the only ones who had contact

with Oswald?” In the meeting, Helms stated that “Oswald was not an

agent,” but said that the Warren Commission “would just have to take

his word for it.”31

Ever since a false report about Oswald’s being an FBI informant

had surfaced in January 1964, the Commission had been worried that

Oswald had been an undercover operative for some US agency. They

were not reassured when Hale Boggs asked fellow Commissioner and

former CIA Director Allen Dulles if the CIA had “agents about whom

you had no record whatsoever.” Dulles answered that “the record might

not be on paper,” and that even if it was, it might be “hieroglyphics

that only two people knew what they meant, and nobody outside the

Agency would know.”32

On April 30, 1964, the Warren Commission decided to have top

302

LEGACY OF SECRECY

officials from the CIA and FBI testify about the matter.33 On May 14,

Helms, McCone, and J. Edgar Hoover all testified to the Commission that

Oswald wasn’t an agent or informant for their agencies. In an extremely

technical way, they were correct: As Helms would testify under oath in

1978, Oswald was the responsibility of the defense establishment, not

the CIA. General Joseph Carroll, of the Defense Intelligence Agency,

should have been subject to the same scrutiny, though it’s unclear how

much even he knew about Oswald’s 1963 activities. Indications exist that

the heads of Naval and Marine Intelligence knew more than General

Carroll, but they never testified either. Essentially, each of the agencies

was passing the buck to the other, leaving the Commission, and the

public, in the dark.

Congressional investigators later noted that Helms blatantly lied to

the Commission on several points.34 The same day as Helms’s testimony,

one of Helms’s CIA officials was also lying to the FBI about a report the

bureau had received concerning Artime’s AMWORLD camps in Guate-

mala. The FBI had learned that the “military forces in [Guatemala] were

under the direct control of the US, that there are three military camps

training mercenary forces which were originally organized for an inva-

sion of Cuba.” But on May 14, 1964, the FBI was told “it was the very

strong opinion of CIA that the information [about the camps] is false.

CIA officials speculated . . . the information may have been [planted]

for deception or provocation.”35

CIA files released in 1992 show that in 1964, affidavits had been pre-

pared for Helms and three other CIA officials, in case the Warren Com-

mission pressed them for more disclaimers about Oswald. The affidavits

stated that Oswald “was not an agent, employee, or informant”; that the

CIA “never contacted him, interviewed him, talked with him, or received

or solicited any reports or information from him, or communicated with

him, directly or indirectly, in any other way”; and that “Oswald was

never associated or connected, directly or indirectly, in any way whatso-

ever with the Agency.” There are blanks for the CIA officials to sign and

for each affidavit to be sworn and notarized. However, only McCone

signed an affidavit for the Warren Commission. Helms didn’t sign his,

and a note in the CIA file reads: “never sent to Commission.”36

Although Helms lied and obfuscated about Oswald, the coup plan,

and his unauthorized operations, he did tell the Warren Commission

about troubling information that kept them concerned about a poten-

tially devastating confrontation with the Soviets. A KGB officer named

Yuri Nosenko, who had recently defected to America, claimed that he

had read the KGB file on Oswald, and that it showed the Russians had

no interest in Oswald. One of the CIA officers who helped Nosenko get

from Europe to America was James McCord, the future Watergate bur-

glar who also allegedly assisted Harry Williams with the JFK-Almeida

coup plan.37 Once Nosenko was in the US, a CIA memo confirms that

Harry Williams’s other CIA contact, “Howard Hunt, [was] told about

the doubts regarding AEFOXTROT [Nosenko’s] bona fides” on April

9, 1964.38

Richard Helms made sure Earl Warren knew that Helms and others

in the CIA weren’t certain that Nosenko was telling the truth about the

KGB’s lack of interest in Oswald. Helms pointed out that Nosenko might

have been sent to the US as a false defector, a double agent. While the

Warren Commission decided that Nosenko’s testimony was too sensi-

tive to mention in its report, Helms ordered the defector’s interrogation

to be stepped up.39

The way the CIA handled Nosenko in 1964, and for the next several

years, evokes twenty-first-century concerns about the treatment of US

prisoners at Guantanamo and in Iraq. Even Helms admits that Nosenko

was held “in strict solitary confinement [and] subjected to various psy-

chological pressures.” This scenario went on for years, well after Helms

became CIA Director. Yet in his autobiography, Helms tries to put the

responsibility onto unnamed others for these actions, though he spe-

cifically exonerates James Angleton. In contrast, CIA Miami Chief Ted

Shackley said in his autobiography that it was the paranoid Angleton

who pressed for Nosenko’s “abusive confinement”; Shackley also main-

tains that Nosenko was legitimate.40

From our perspective, Helms had much to gain from keeping Nosenko

in solitary, with his status undetermined, for more than four years. As

long as the Warren Commission and high officials like President Johnson

thought the Soviets might be behind JFK’s assassination, their fear of

possible Soviet reprisals would keep them from pursuing investiga-

tions that could expose Helms’s unauthorized operations, like the 1963

CIA-Mafia plots.41

Chapter Twenty-two

The lies and omissions of Helms, Hoover, and several agencies rendered

any real investigation by the Warren Commission staff almost impos-

sible. Because the Commission was still receiving reports implicating

Fidel in JFK’s murder, national-security concerns remained high. How-

ever, the Commission didn’t realize that most of the reports were linked

to associates of Manuel Artime and Santo Trafficante.1 Because the Com-

mission staff didn’t know about Artime’s work on AMWORLD and the

CIA-Mafia plots with Trafficante, they didn’t realize the “Castro did it”

reports were disinformation designed to distract and divert them. That

same lack of information caused Commission staff to dismiss reports

about John Martino’s accurate statements about JFK’s planned coup and

invasion, which may have been seen as the ravings of a far-right fanatic

who was bitter about his time in Castro’s prisons.

In
Vanity Fair
, Anthony Summers wrote that in an attempt to resolve

the “Castro did it” stories, Earl Warren “dispatched staff counsel Wil-

liam Coleman on a secret mission. Coleman, who has spoken of the trip

privately, [said], ‘It was top-secret.’ Asked to confirm or deny that he

had met Castro, he said only, ‘No comment.’ What Coleman will say is

that his mission helped convince him that Castro had nothing to do with

the president’s death.”2 No files about Coleman’s “secret mission” have

ever been released; they are just some of the sensitive Warren Commis-

sion files still being withheld, while others have been released only in

recent years.

Quoted here are newly declassified files about the Warren Commis-

sion’s largely unknown electronic surveillance of Marina Oswald. This

surveillance included a break-in to bug her bedroom, delve into her

sexual habits, and tap her phone. These files offer a rare glimpse of an

all-too-common FBI practice at the time (and in later years), of invasive

surveillance in the name of national security. It also shows how many

files about JFK’s death have been, and are still being, withheld from Con-

gress and the public. Only a few memos have been declassified about

this bugging operation, as well as one in Tampa, though more subjects

were the targets of such surveillance.3

The phone taps on Marina resulted from a conversation between

J. Edgar Hoover and Warren Commission General Counsel J. Lee Rankin,

the investigation’s executive director.4 Rankin called Hoover on Febru-

ary 24, saying he would “hate to have [Marina] just run out on us,” and

that he wanted “a stake-out on her which would watch her and see

who is visiting her.” Hoover added helpfully that the FBI should “also

consider getting a telephone tap in there.” As he had done with Martin

Luther King, the FBI Director went beyond Rankin’s official request and

apparently decided on his own to also install bugs (listening devices) in

Marina’s new residence. Hoover got approval for the phone taps from