Legacy of Secrecy (70 page)

his job by hiding his unauthorized assassination schemes with Cubela

from other US officials. The
New York Times
reported on March 6, 1966,

that Cubela planned “to shoot Premier Castro with a high-powered tele-

scopic rifle and later share [power] with Mr. Artime.” Former FBI agent

William Turner noted that when LBJ’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk

read about Cubela’s arrest “in the
New York Times
, [he] demanded to

know what the CIA’s role might have been.” The CIA’s “Helms sent him

a soothing memo stating that contact with Cubela had been confined

to ‘the express purpose’ of intelligence gathering. ‘The Agency was not

involved with Cubela in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro,’ Helms wrote

[to Rusk], ‘nor did it ever encourage him to attempt such an act.’”26

Helms’s statement was clearly false, as Rusk himself finally learned

almost ten years later, when Senate hearings finally exposed Helms’s

Cubela assassination operation. When we spoke to Dean Rusk about

this incident, his anger about Helms’s deception was still quite evident.

It was the only time in the interview when the consummate diplomat

showed a flash of real emotion. Rusk felt the CIA had gone far beyond

the scope of what the Johnson administration wanted, and then lied to

him about it. His anger at Richard Helms also extended to information

Helms gave him during the Warren Commission investigation, which,

Rusk learned later, was also false.27

Three months after Cubela’s arrest, a small group of exiles, including

Trafficante’s bodyguard, Herminio Diaz, and exile Tony Cuesta, appar-

ently tried to get into Cuba to assassinate Fidel. In March 1966, during

Cubela’s trial, the CIA had heard that Herminio Diaz was planning to

assassinate Fidel.28 In the May 1966 landing, three of the men, including

Diaz, were apparently killed, and two more were captured. One of those

was Tony Cuesta, who was blinded and lost one hand in the attack. The

Cubans identified one of Cuesta’s three dead compatriots as Herminio

Diaz—though it’s unclear how they established his identity—and the

matter seemed to end there.

Or maybe not. A CIA report written almost ten years later by Des-

mond FitzGerald’s former deputy says that while Herminio Diaz “was

identified by Radio Havana as a member of a commando group killed

while trying to land [in Cuba] for the purpose of assassinating Castro . . .

in August 1973, an individual with the same name and year of birth was

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

reportedly involved in narcotics trafficking in Costa Rica. A Cuban exile

source stated that he believed subject [Herminio Diaz] to be identical

with the narcotics trafficker in Costa Rica.”29

Herminio Diaz had been involved in drug smuggling with Santo

Trafficante, and Trafficante maintained a residence in Costa Rica that he

used when investigations flared up in America. Could Herminio and

Trafficante have arranged for Diaz’s seeming death in 1966, by planting

a fake ID on an exile who fit Diaz’s general description and then tip-

ping off Cuban authorities? According to British researcher John Simkin,

during Tony Cuesta’s long imprisonment in Cuba, “Cuesta realized he

had been set up [by] people who organized the assassination of JFK.”

When Tony Cuesta was finally released in 1978 through the efforts of

President Jimmy Carter, Cuesta told Cuban General Fabian Escalante

that Herminio “had been involved in the assassination of President John

F. Kennedy.” Cuesta asked Escalante to keep the information secret until

after Cuesta’s death, and Escalante waited until 1995 to reveal it to a

conference of US historians and officials.30

Whether or not Trafficante was tying up loose ends by having Diaz

killed, or making it look like he was dead, Richard Helms was definitely

cleaning house in 1966. LBJ had been dissatisfied with Admiral Raborn

as CIA Director almost from the start, and had begun grooming Helms

for the top spot. Richard Helms officially became CIA Director on June

30, 1966, putting him in the perfect position to ensure that his unauthor-

ized activities under JFK and LBJ weren’t exposed. Soon after taking

office, Helms terminated a CIA employee tied to Trafficante who had

worked on sensitive portions of the Almeida coup plan. The heyday of

Cuban operations was over, and the new focus was Vietnam and South-

east Asia, giving Helms an opportunity to send several of his operatives

as far away as possible.

Six veterans of AMWORLD and the anti-Castro operations were

shipped off to Laos in 1966, where the US had been waging a secret

war for years. These included Artime’s deputy “Chi Chi” Quintero,

former Miami CIA Chief Ted Shackley, and (after an assignment in South

America) David Morales.31 Some writers have portrayed their transfer

to Laos as a reward, giving them a choice assignment in an intelligence

hotspot where their covert war expertise could flourish. However, living

for long stretches in Laos’s relatively primitive conditions was a long

way from the poolside talks Morales and Shackley had formerly enjoyed

in Miami. Also, Helms knew that their anti-Castro operations had been

a failure at best, and at worst, somehow involved in JFK’s assassination.

(Some historians have deemed the group’s work in Laos, and then in

Vietnam, equally disastrous.) As for Manuel Artime, though he was

trained as a physician, he became a prosperous businessman, no doubt

helped by the money and contacts he had gained from selling off the

AMWORLD supplies. Artime traveled frequently to Central America,

pursuing business ventures with the notoriously corrupt Somoza family,

who ruled Nicaragua. (Marcello shared a Washington lobbyist with the

Somozas.) Artime also apparently maintained his involvement in the

narcotics trade, even as he continued to receive a regular salary from

the CIA into 1966.32

Helms and the CIA would have been aware of several books about

the JFK assassination slated for US publication later in 1966 that were

highly critical of the Warren Commission’s “lone assassin” conclusion.

Coupled with a new development concerning Johnny Rosselli and his

work for the CIA, those books might have made it seem wise for Helms

to keep Morales and the other AMWORLD veterans as far away as

possible from journalists and Congressional hearings. The impending

US books critical of the Warren Report also meant that Helms’s press

and publishing expert, E. Howard Hunt, would be more useful back in

the US.

Chapter Twenty-six

In the spring of 1966, Johnny Rosselli and Jimmy Hoffa began taking

increasingly desperate measures to avoid prison, ultimately setting off

a deadly chain reaction that would eventually lead to Rosselli’s grue-

some dismemberment murder, Hoffa’s disappearance, and the slaying

of Rosselli’s patron Sam Giancana, all in the mid-1970s. Much sooner

would come the brutal ax murder of Eladio del Valle, killed on the same

day David Ferrie died, both in early 1967. All of those deaths would be

linked to Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and the events surrounding

JFK’s assassination.

May 12, 1966, began as a typical morning in Beverly Hills for Johnny

Rosselli, who had led a relaxed and affluent life since JFK’s murder.

A few months after the assassination, Rosselli had moved to a Bev-

erly Glen Boulevard building that his biographers describe as having

“some of the most beautiful and luxurious apartments in the nation.”

Rosselli’s “suite of rooms on the eighth floor overlooked . . . the exclu-

sive Los Angeles Country Club” and was near the Beverly Hills busi-

ness district.1 While Rosselli was taking a stroll near Rodeo Drive that

morning, his serene world changed dramatically when two FBI agents

confronted him. One of them uttered a name that sent a chill through

Rosselli: Filippo Sacco.

The events that led to Rosselli’s fateful encounter with the FBI had

begun just weeks after JFK’s death, when the FBI busted a midlevel Bos-

ton mob courier, who started giving the Bureau information to stay out

of jail. The courier was careful not to tell agents his biggest secrets, but

FBI surveillance finally revealed that the courier had worked for Rosselli

for the past twenty-five years, taking money to the Mafia don’s mother

for her support. Rosselli couldn’t visit his mother himself, because even

though he was known as Johnny Rosselli in the power centers of Las

Vegas and Hollywood, to his Boston family he was Filippo Sacco. An

illegal immigrant who’d come to the US from Italy in 1911, Rosselli had

changed his name to avoid a narcotics charge in the 1920s. Like Marcello,

Rosselli was subject to deportation, something the FBI hadn’t known

about even when Rosselli was serving prison time in the 1940s for his

Hollywood studio shakedown.2

Aware of how much trouble the US had in trying to deport Marcello,

FBI agents built their case carefully for two years before finally confront-

ing Rosselli in May 1966 on a Beverly Hills sidewalk. The Bureau offered

Rosselli a deal if he became an informant for them, but he refused. Ros-

selli then called one of his first CIA contacts, Sheffield Edwards. Edwards

had been one of two CIA officials responsible for bringing Rosselli into

the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro in the summer of 1960.

A brief recap of CIA-Mafia plots is important, since several of the

participants played increasingly crucial roles in the events of 1966 and

beyond, culminating in the Watergate scandal. The plots had originally

begun in 1959, with Jimmy Hoffa as the CIA’s connection to (and cover

for) the Mafia, but they had not succeeded. Much evidence shows that as

the 1960 election approached, candidate—and vice president—Richard

Nixon had pressed the CIA to step up its efforts to kill Fidel. E. Howard

Hunt was also pushing the CIA to assassinate Castro around that time,

and working closely with Nixon’s top military aide for Cuba. CIA Secu-

rity Chief Sheffield Edwards had looked first at using former Chicago

FBI supervisor Guy Banister for a sensitive assignment as a “cover

mechanism” in August 1960, before deciding to use former Chicago

FBI agent Robert Maheu as the CIA’s new conduit to the Mafia. Maheu

and Banister had both worked with another former FBI agent, Carmine

Bellino, after all three left the FBI in the early 1950s.3

By August 1960, Robert Maheu was doing increasing amounts of

work for billionaire Howard Hughes, but since the CIA had helped to set

him up in business in the mid-1950s, Maheu agreed to help the Agency.

Maheu brought Johnny Rosselli into the plots; Rosselli then pulled in

Giancana, who in turn brought in Trafficante (and, according to some

evidence, Frank Fiorini). The hoped-for 1960 October surprise failed to

materialize, but the plots with Rosselli and Trafficante continued. Just

before the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA-Mafia plots failed to

kill Castro, due to CIA miscommunication regarding Tony Varona. The

plots survived, and Sheffield Edwards eventually passed them off to

William Harvey after Richard Helms decided to continue using Rosselli.

However, it fell to Edwards to brief Bobby Kennedy on the plots in May

1962, after a wiretap scandal brought them to J. Edgar Hoover’s atten-

tion. Edwards told Bobby that the plots had ended, though in reality

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Helms was determined to continue them. Carlos Marcello told an FBI

informant he had joined the CIA-Mafia plots as well.4

By the time Rosselli contacted Sheffield Edwards in May 1966,

Edwards had retired from the CIA but still had high-level contacts at the

Agency, from the days when he’d commanded seven hundred people

as its Security Chief. Edwards immediately told a high-ranking CIA

official about his talk with Rosselli. The smooth, dapper Rosselli had

couched his concern to Edwards in nice language that made it sound as

if he didn’t want the CIA dragged into a messy situation, but Rosselli’s

real goal was clear: He wanted the CIA to get the FBI off his back and

keep him out of jail.5

To make sure the CIA got the message, Rosselli also contacted his old

pal William Harvey. Though the CIA admits that Rosselli and Harvey

had remained in contact since 1964, Harvey no longer had much influ-

ence at the Agency. Rosselli’s other contact with the CIA, David Morales,

wasn’t available, since he was on assignment in South America. Johnny

Rosselli turned to a trusted friend, longtime Hoffa attorney Edward

Morgan, for advice.6 Rosselli and Morgan had a problem in common:

the impending imprisonment of Jimmy Hoffa, whose final appeal was

winding its way to the Supreme Court. Hoffa’s Teamster Pension Fund

was a major source of capital for the Mafia in Las Vegas, and losing

it would have a huge impact on Rosselli and the Chicago Mafia he

represented.

In addition to Rosselli’s immigration trouble with the FBI, he had