Legacy of Secrecy (68 page)

the CIA (including a year and a half in Cuban prisons after the Bay of

Pigs) and to keep Artime from publicly protesting the US shutdown of

his operation. It might also have been a type of hush money, to ensure

that Artime didn’t expose Helms’s unauthorized operations to the press,

or Congress.

Richard Helms would have wanted to keep the shutdown of Artime’s

operation as quiet as possible so that it wouldn’t interfere with his own

rising career. Helms was promoted to Deputy Director of the CIA on

April 28, 1965. LBJ had grown tired of John McCone, who differed with

him over Vietnam, so LBJ appointed Vice Admiral William Raborn Jr. as

the CIA’s new Director. Since US law mandates that either the number-

one or number-two CIA official has to be a civilian, Helms was a logical

choice to take the number-two slot. Helms’s promotion was popular

at the CIA, unlike the selection of Raborn, whose military style was

resented by some in the Agency.

When McCone left the Agency, Bobby lost one of his better pipe-

lines into the CIA; while not friends, he and McCone were cordial, and

McCone kept Bobby up to date at times. Without McCone, Bobby had

to depend on Desmond FitzGerald to keep him informed. Though they

knew each other socially and played tennis, Bobby didn’t realize that

FitzGerald had been withholding important information from him

since early 1963, including Rosselli’s continuing work for the CIA and

FitzGerald’s Paris trip to meet Cubela while posing as Bobby’s personal

representative. As for Helms, he was civil to Bobby, but he felt an under-

current of resentment that stemmed from the pressure Bobby had put

on him regarding Cuba.

After Richard Helms was promoted, Desmond FitzGerald took

Helms’s old position as Deputy Director for Plans. These changes

allowed them to continue concealing their unauthorized 1963 opera-

tions, even as they started to scale back their anti-Castro programs. They

had a relatively free hand because—in a reversal of JFK’s policy—the

CIA had primary control of all Cuban operations, while the US military

and the DIA had only scattered exile assets.

Even though several high-profile Congressional committees inves-

tigated E. Howard Hunt, numerous gaps and inconsistencies exist in

Hunt’s CIA records and in his testimony covering his service from 1963

until his supposed retirement in 1970. Both the CIA and Hunt admit that

he and his family moved to Spain in 1965, though in testimony he was

unusually vague about the year when such a major move had occurred

(perhaps because he had traveled frequently to Spain before the move).

According to Tad Szulc, E. Howard Hunt remained active in Cuban

operations in 1965 with Cubela and Artime, even as most operations

wound down. Buttressing Szulc’s claim is the fact that Hunt later admit-

ted that when the House Select Committee on Assassinations “asked

for information about my work in Spain, the CIA told the Assassination

Committee that there was none available, classified or not.”14 Likewise,

the official reason given for Hunt’s move to Spain is clearly a cover story,

since—as noted earlier—he couldn’t be officially assigned there.

CIA files confirm that Helms had Hunt technically resign from the

CIA, while Hunt actually remained on the CIA’s payroll, leaving Hunt

free to pursue his assignment in Spain under deep cover. Some authors

have pointed out that Hunt would do essentially the same thing several

years later, when he would apparently resign from the CIA two years

before Watergate. Hunt testified that his work in Spain was supervised

directly by Helms’s deputy. Near the end of his life, all Hunt would

say about his activities in Spain was that he was working to develop

“confidential relationships with influential Spaniards who would some

day succeed Generalissimo Francisco Franco,” the dictator who, with

Adolf Hitler’s backing, had taken control of Spain in the 1930s. If that

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was part of Hunt’s assignment in Spain, it echoes not only what Hunt

was doing at the time with Artime and Cubela regarding Castro, but

also what Hunt had been doing previously with Harry Williams and

Commander Almeida. Hunt’s work in Spain may also have involved

the CIA’s ongoing support for Almeida’s wife and children—though

all of those files are still withheld, one of Almeida’s sons later became a

successful businessman in Madrid.15

Manolo Ray’s group, JURE, fell apart over the course of 1965. Ray had

been in touch with Cubela, since they had known each other previously

in Cuba and were much closer politically than either man was with the

extremely conservative Artime. However, Ray’s men, including Luis

Posada, grew increasingly frustrated over Ray’s lack of progress, and

Ray was apparently too cautious to tell them about Cubela. After JURE

disintegrated, Ray returned to private life and Posada appears to have

joined the RECE exile group.16

Some investigators, like Gaeton Fonzi, feel that Helms had a few

CIA officers maintain a deep-cover relationship with certain exiles for

covert operations, even after many exile assets started being phased out

in 1965. That way, the CIA had deniable assets to use against Cuba, but

the CIA’s role was so well hidden that the Agency wouldn’t be blamed if

the exiles were captured or suffered a spectacular failure. Among those

who continued to be supported even as Artime’s operations wound

down were Luis Posada and Antonio Veciana.

Alpha 66’s Veciana apparently continued to deal with David Atlee

Phillips (using the Maurice Bishop cover identity), but on a less frequent

basis. This setup fit with Helms’s new, more deniable approach, and

since Cuban operations were winding down, Phillips was given a new

position and a promotion. Helms and FitzGerald must have been satis-

fied with Phillips’s work in the past year, because in late April 1965 they

gave him his first Chief of Station post, in the Dominican Republic. This

allowed Phillips to remain close enough to retain some involvement in

Cuban operations, and the Dominican Republic had long been seen as

a good base for CIA-backed operations against Castro. But Phillips’s

main focus was on the situation in the Dominican Republic itself, a

hot spot that needed attention. The country’s problems had been on

the rise since the CIA-assisted assassination of dictator Trujillo in 1961.

Though largely forgotten today, US Marines had landed in its capital,

Santo Domingo, earlier in April 1965, just a month after the first official

US combat troops arrived in Vietnam.17

By late 1965, Vietnam and other parts of the world increasingly occu-

pied Richard Helms’s attention. Cuba was becoming a much lower

priority than it had been just a year earlier, but in only a few months,

one of Helms’s unauthorized Castro assassination operations would

threaten to become front-page news.

Kennedy spent much of 1965 and the early part of 1966 operating at

half speed, still trying to deal with the loss of his brother. In terms of

legislation, Bobby was not a notable freshman senator, but he tried to

expand his horizons and seek new experiences. Bobby had always been

a staunch anticommunist, but during a trip to South America he saw

firsthand the terrible conditions miners had to endure. Bobby emerged

from a tour of the pits proclaiming that if he had to work like that, he’d

be a communist, too. Several writers have noted that Bobby rarely men-

tioned Cuba, except to express his admiration for Che Guevara.1

Bobby also rarely mentioned his brother’s assassination, though he

still had to contend with it. Troubling information from Mexico City

implicating Fidel continued to trickle in, though there is no indication

that Bobby took it seriously. However, he knew that Almeida was still in

place in the Cuban government, and his family was still outside Cuba,

so he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize them—or to expose what

he and JFK had been planning with Almeida. That meant Bobby had

to make sure he controlled important evidence. “On April 26, 1965, the

Secret Service transferred the autopsy photographs and x-rays, and cer-

tain vital documents and biological materials, to the custody of the Ken-

nedy family at the request of Robert F. Kennedy,” according to Douglas

Horne, former Chief Analyst for the JFK Assassination Records Review

Board.2 Bobby also obtained crucial physical evidence, such as JFK’s

brain and tissue samples.

Bobby believed it was up to him to decide what to do with govern-

ment evidence about JFK’s assassination. He summed up his feelings

nine months later, when talking about the expensive bronze casket that

had officially held JFK’s body on the trip from Dallas to Washington. JFK

had been buried in a mahogany casket, supposedly because this bronze

casket had been damaged in some way. When Bobby told a General

Services Administration official he wanted the bronze casket dumped

at sea, the official said that would be destroying government property.

Bobby declared, “I think it belongs to the family and we can get rid of it

any way we want to.” Based on files declassified in 1999, CNN reported

that “the coffin, loaded with sandbags and riddled with holes, was taken

from the basement of the National Archives . . . and dumped from an Air

Force C-130 into the Atlantic Ocean at 10 AM on February 18, 1966.”3

Even as Bobby took control of key evidence, he must have felt some

measure of justice when he saw those he felt were involved in his broth-

er’s murder facing prison. Carlos Marcello was under indictment and

facing an August 1965 trial for bribing a juror and threatening a witness

at his November 1963 trial. Jimmy Hoffa had been convicted in his sec-

ond trial, in Chicago, and only a flurry of appeals delayed the start of his

long prison sentences for that conviction and the earlier one in Memphis.

Sam Giancana went to jail in June 1965 for refusing to testify about the

Mafia to a grand jury after being granted immunity, essentially ending

Giancana’s reign as Chicago’s most powerful mob leader.4

Bobby also followed the struggle for civil rights and was evolving

into one of its biggest public champions. However, 1965 was marked

by increasing violence related to the cause. The previous year, LBJ had

succeeding in passing the landmark civil rights legislation that Bobby

and JFK had wanted, but blacks were still often prevented from voting,

especially in the South. (One county in Alabama was 80 percent black,

but no African-American resident of that county had been allowed to

register to vote.)5 LBJ, Bobby, and Martin Luther King all supported the

new Voting Rights Act, but because it focused on the South, it would be

difficult to get through Congress, where longtime Southern members

wielded much power.

Dr. King’s Nobel Peace Prize in late 1964 had further increased his stat-

ure, but it only generated even more resentment from FBI Director J.

Edgar Hoover. Apparently due to pressure from LBJ, Hoover and Dr.

King met at Hoover’s office on December 1, 1964. Hoover touted to King

the arrests of white supremacists who had murdered two civil rights

workers in Mississippi, and King expressed gratitude when Hoover said

the FBI would soon arrest the killers of three more civil rights activists

(Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman). King emerged from the meeting

telling reporters that “the discussion was quite amicable.”6

While Hoover tempered his public tirades against King, his private

efforts against the civil rights leader continued. Hoover circulated a long

report accusing King of being “a wholehearted Marxist,” echoing the

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claims that the John Birch Society and white supremacists like Joseph

Milteer had been making for years. Hoover’s report went not only to

LBJ, but also to the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Directors of the

CIA and DIA, and Naval and Air Force Intelligence.7

Without telling LBJ, Hoover launched another covert attack against

Dr. King, apparently designed to encourage him to commit suicide.

Hoover had compiled portions of tapes his agents had recorded secretly

in King’s hotel rooms. He had William Sullivan, an assistant FBI direc-

tor for the King operation, write an anonymous letter as if it were from

a black man, telling King to “look into your heart . . . you are a colossal

fraud and an evil, a vicious one at that. . . . King, there is only one thing

left for you to do. You know what it is. . . . ” The tape compilation and

letter were then sent to King’s office at the Southern Christian Leader-

ship Council (SCLC) in Atlanta.8

The package sat unopened for a month before being forwarded to