Legacy of Secrecy (84 page)

tigation and Ferrie’s death were in the headlines. The Mafia had so far

escaped any mention in those matters, so it was better not to include the

Mafia in the fresh leaks to Garrison and WINS. However, Jack Anderson

already had the Mafia angle, and he wasn’t about to be scooped on the

story he’d had first.

As LBJ and Connally ended their call on the evening of March 2, 1967,

Jack Anderson was getting ready to go on television to reveal Rosselli’s

story. He had already submitted an explosive column about the story,

to run the following day in more than six hundred newspapers. Several

factors figured into Anderson’s decision to finally run the story he’d

been sitting on for a month and a half. Anderson may have heard about

the WINS story and wanted to salvage what was left of his exclusive. He

later wrote that “we never conceded the field if there was a sliver of a

chance that we could scoop the competition.”11 However, given the lead

time necessary for a column syndicated to so many newspapers, includ-

ing morning papers going to press by midnight, Anderson had probably

written, edited, and submitted his column well before the WINS story

aired. It’s also possible that Anderson had come under additional pres-

sure from Morgan to run the story, since Hoffa was only days away from

having to report to prison.

Anderson ran Rosselli’s story when his boss, Drew Pearson, was not

just out of town, but out of the country. Pearson was on a tour of five

South American countries with his friend Chief Justice Earl Warren.

We now know from Drew Pearson’s diaries that Pearson would not

have run the story.12 Anderson’s decision to run it may also have been

influenced by his business and personal ties to Rosselli’s associates Ed

Morgan, Robert Maheu, and Hank Greenspun.

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Jack Anderson had other associates who could have been used to

influence Anderson to run the story. Anderson was very close to Carlos

Marcello’s Washington lobbyist, who was also reportedly involved in

the efforts to keep Hoffa out of prison. In addition, Anderson was a

longtime friend of Frank Fiorini, Trafficante’s operative who had spread

a somewhat similar story he’d gotten from John Martino shortly after

JFK’s assassination. (In 1972, Anderson would pay Fiorini’s bail after

he was arrested as one of the Watergate burglars, under the name Frank

Sturgis.)13

Decades later, Anderson would finally admit that by spreading Ros-

selli’s story, he “may have been a card [Rosselli] was playing.” As a

Congressional report later concluded, “Rosselli manipulated the facts of

the plots into the retaliation theory in efforts to force the CIA to intervene

favorably into his legal affairs.”14 However, in March 1967, Anderson

believed what he was hearing from the Mafia don, especially when Wil-

liam Harvey confirmed Rosselli’s account. Harvey was still a CIA official

at the time, though Anderson didn’t realize that Harvey might have been

acting more for himself and his friend Rosselli than for the CIA.15

Anderson was convinced he had a real scoop, since by March 2, 1967,

he claimed to have “two memos from the CIA’s most sensitive files,

which summarize the whole operation.”16 An internal CIA Inspector

General’s report appears to confirm that Anderson and Pearson had at

least one sensitive government memo about assassinating Castro.17

While much has been written about Jack Anderson’s March 3, 1967,

column, almost nothing has appeared about his first revelation of the

story, on Washington’s WDCA-TV at 10:55 PM on March 2. Anderson’s

revelation on their TV show
Expose
was discovered only recently because

it was the subject of a newly declassified CIA memo. Such programs were

regularly monitored by the CIA, a practice that continued at least into

the 1980s, when the CIA had episodes of NPR’s
Diane Rehm
radio show

transcribed when they featured serious JFK assassination experts.

Anderson’s Washington TV revelation on March 2 is important

because the
Washington Post
decided not to carry his March 3 column with

Rosselli’s story, perhaps because the column reflected badly on Bobby

Kennedy, who had good relations with the
Post
. Editor Ben Bradlee

was close to JFK, and Bobby himself had written
Post
owner Kather-

ine Graham the previous day about his Vietnam speech. However, the

Post
did carry a later Anderson column about the subject that criticized

Bobby, so it’s also possible that Anderson’s televised preview of his

column caught the attention of Richard Helms or one of his men, who

then asked the
Post
not to run it.18

While Drew Pearson was a well-known media figure by the 1960s,

having portrayed himself in Hollywood films like
The Day the Earth

Stood Still
, his junior partner, Jack Anderson, was relatively unknown.

But Anderson knew the Rosselli story had enough bombshells to make

a name for himself, and it did. As recorded in the CIA memo of the

broadcast, Anderson said that JFK

. . . was angered at the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and blamed

[the] CIA. He quoted Kennedy as desiring to break up the Agency.

[JFK] assigned his brother, the Attorney General, to watch over [the]

CIA. Anderson implies Robert Kennedy controlled the Agency. The

Attorney General, seeking revenge on Castro for the Bay of Pigs,

planned through [the] CIA the assassination of Castro or considered

it. Castro learned of the CIA plot to kill him, or obtained information

which led him to believe such a plot existed. Castro arranged the

assassination of the President in retaliation.19

In addition to Anderson’s television appearance on March 2, 1967,

he took one more step to ensure that he got credit for the scoop: He sub-

mitted the next day’s column with a special by-line: “Today’s column is

by Jack Anderson.” A few newspapers, like the
New York Post
, joined the

Washington
Post
in not carrying the column, but most of the column’s

six-hundred-plus newspapers weren’t so cautious. Johnny Rosselli’s

leaked information was soon being read by millions of people from

coast to coast.20

Bobby Kennedy may have watched or heard about Anderson’s TV

broadcast, but he certainly found out about the following day’s explo-

sive newspaper column. Though the
Washington Post
didn’t carry the

March 3, 1967, column, out-of-town newspapers were plentiful in Wash-

ington, D.C., so Bobby would have been reading the bombshell column

by the afternoon at the latest. The column’s headline varied from news-

paper to newspaper (in New Orleans, it was “Was JFK killed in CIA

backfire?”), but Anderson wasted no time in making sure that readers

knew they were looking at a shocking story about Bobby Kennedy. The

column opened by saying:

President Johnson is sitting on a political H-Bomb—an unconfirmed

report that Sen. Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassina-

tion plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother.21

It’s not hard to imagine Bobby’s reaction, when he saw his own worst

fears from the day of his brother’s murder reduced to cold print in

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

America’s most popular newspaper column. Bobby probably felt an ini-

tial burst of anger, followed by dread at the prospect that his secret plans

and cover-ups might now be exposed—the coup plan with Almeida;

the cover-up of the November 1963 Tampa and Chicago attempts—and

that somehow, those events had boomeranged against JFK, resulting in

his death.22

Anderson’s column quickly made it clear that this wasn’t idle rumor

or wild speculation: “Top officials, queried by this column, agreed that

a plot to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was ‘considered’ at

the highest levels of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time Bobby

was riding herd on the agency. The officials disagreed, however, over

whether the plan was approved and implemented.” Bobby knew that

was essentially true, but he also knew there had been not just “a plot,”

but rather, several efforts to eliminate Castro: the JFK-Almeida coup

plan, the CIA’s other authorized efforts like AMTRUNK, and the CIA’s

plots with the Mafia that Bobby had been told were stopped in May

1962.

Anderson made it clear that he also knew about the CIA-Mafia plots,

writing, “One version claims that underworld figures actually were

recruited to carry out the plot. Another rumor has it that three hired

assassins were caught in Havana. . . . ” The last sentence may have been

confusing for Bobby, since it hinted at the spring 1963 attempts that he

and JFK had not authorized or known about.

The next major point in Anderson’s column was one Bobby had seen

before. Though he no longer believed it, this leak by Johnny Rosselli

would have a huge impact on relations between the US and Cuba for

decades, one that persists to this day:

The rumor persists, whispered by people in a position to know, that

Castro did become aware of an American plot upon his life and

decided to retaliate against President Kennedy.

While acknowledging that “whether the assassination plot was ever

actually put into effect is disputed,” Anderson points out that “some

insiders are convinced that Castro learned enough at least to believe the

CIA was seeking to kill him. With characteristic fury, he is reported to

have cooked up a counterplot against President Kennedy.”

This Anderson/Rosselli implication that Castro had orchestrated

JFK’s murder would continue to reverberate among official circles in

Washington into the 1970s, ’80s, and even today. Blaming Castro for

JFK’s death would be “whispered by people in a position to know”

about some of the US’s covert efforts against Fidel in 1963—among them

Alexander Haig, an aide to Cyrus Vance in 1963 who went on to become

President Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff and Ronald Reagan’s Secretary

of State. Haig was one of the few officials eventually willing to state

publicly his belief that Fidel had JFK killed. However, other high US

officials believed—and probably still believe today—the same thing, not

realizing that the story (and reports that seemed to back it up) originated

with Johnny Rosselli’s associates. Yet this belief among some officials is a

major reason why, in 2008, Cuba is treated far more harshly than former

US enemies like China and Vietnam.

While Bobby didn’t fall for Anderson’s “Castro killed JFK” claim, the

column was filled with other worrisome information that Bobby knew

was accurate:

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco . . . the President’s real watchdog was

his brother, Bobby, who ended up calling the shots at the CIA. . . .

During this period, the CIA hatched a plot to knock off Castro. It

would have been impossible for this to reach the high levels it did,

say insiders, without being taken up with the younger Kennedy.

Indeed, one source insists that Bobby, eager to avenge the Bay of

Pigs fiasco, played a key role in the planning.23

Of course, Anderson’s source left out the fact that Bobby’s role with

the CIA applied only to Cuba and the operations he had authorized.

The column also omits the US military’s leading role in some 1963 anti-

Castro operations. But Anderson’s—or, rather, Rosselli’s—true target

was clearly Bobby. They went for the jugular by saying:

Some sources consider Robert Kennedy’s behavior after the assas-

sination to be significant. He seemed to be tormented, they say, by

more than the natural grief over the murder of his brother. . . . Four

weeks after the tragedy, this column was told, Bobby was morose

and refused to see people. Could he have been plagued by the ter-

rible thought that he had helped put into motion forces that indi-

rectly may have brought about his brother’s martyrdom? Some

insiders think so.24

Reading that statement must have been torture for Bobby, salt rubbed

into the slowly healing wound of his grief over his brother’s murder.

It was all too accurate, but not in the way that Anderson (or his source,

Rosselli) implied. Any guilt that Bobby felt would have been over the

Mafia’s infiltration of the JFK-Almeida coup plan, and the mob’s use of

certain elements of it to kill JFK.

Jack Anderson’s repeated citing of unnamed “insiders” left Bobby

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

boxed in. He didn’t know who was talking to Anderson or what they

knew. Was it a disgruntled US official who was simply confusing a jumble

of Castro elimination plots? Or was someone deliberately deceiving Jack

Anderson and Drew Pearson, trying to tie Bobby to the CIA-Mafia plots?

Could it be LBJ, getting back at Bobby? At that time, Bobby had few

people he could turn to for advice or counsel, since most of his associates

hadn’t been told about the coup plan with Almeida or the CIA-Mafia