Legacy of Secrecy (90 page)

he made sure it was included. Helms was probably confident that he

could rationalize his lie to Rusk if need be, since Helms had withheld

the most damaging information about the Cubela/AMLASH plots from

the IG Report. The suppressed information ranged from Manolo Ray’s

contacts with Cubela to Manuel Artime’s work with the Mafia when

Artime was meeting with Cubela.

Helms had dealt with several presidents by that time, and he under-

stood how they operated: LBJ was not going to read the 134-plus-page

memo himself, and likely not even a several-page summary. The matter

was so explosive that LBJ would probably not even have a trusted staff

member read it for him. Helms therefore prepared a few pages of notes

so that he could give LBJ a verbal summary. Congressional investiga-

tors later found that Helms hadn’t bothered to prepare any notes about

the CIA-Mafia plots or the Cubela plots that continued past mid-1963.

Helms was at a loss to explain why when he testified to Congress, but

he clearly never intended to detail for LBJ the CIA activities that were

most relevant to Anderson’s columns and JFK’s assassination.

Helms went to the White House to brief LBJ orally about the IG Report

on May 10, 1967, taking only his notes and not even a copy of the Report.

While LBJ could have demanded to see it, Helms apparently hoped that

by verbally emphasizing the sensitive nature of the CIA-Mafia plots he

had inherited, LBJ would be content to trust Helms to keep the whole

situation under wraps—and that was exactly what happened.27

Helms did not tell LBJ about details in the report like the poison

pen the CIA tried to give to Rolando Cubela on the day JFK was killed.

When Senator Frank Church asked Helms about that years later, Helms

testified, “I just can’t recall having done so.” Helms tried to claim to

Church and the other senators that the Cubela operation hadn’t been

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

an assassination plot, but the senators had seen the IG Report by then

and knew Helms was lying. At the time of this testimony, Helms and the

CIA (including then-director George H. W. Bush) were withholding even

more damaging information from the senators, including the Almeida

coup plan and its infiltration by Mafiosi linked to JFK’s assassination.

When Helms briefed President Johnson on May 10, 1967, the only

other person at the meeting was LBJ’s press secretary, probably in case

the material ever surfaced in the news.28 By the end of the briefing, LBJ

was apparently content to let the matter rest with Helms, as long as it

stayed out of the press. By feeding LBJ’s suspicions of Castro, Helms’s

presentation also appears to have succeeded in removing the CIA from

LBJ’s list of suspects in JFK’s assassination. In later years, LBJ would

admit privately to a journalist that “we were running a damn Murder

Incorporated in the Caribbean” and “Kennedy was trying to get Castro,

but Castro got to him first.”29 Leaving LBJ with that impression would

also help Helms justify his ongoing anti-Castro operations, which were

proving more and more problematic.

After his meeting with LBJ, Helms held on to the IG Report for twelve

days before returning it to the CIA’s inspector general. Helms probably

kept the report for as long as he did because his Cuban exile opera-

tions were in a sensitive phase, and because he wanted to make sure

nothing new about the CIA-Mafia plots surfaced from Jack Anderson’s

or Garrison’s investigation. On the following day, May 23, 1967, Sen-

ate investigators later found that “all notes and other derived source

material of the IG Report are destroyed.” Thomas Power writes that the

destruction included “every scrap” of the inspector general’s investiga-

tion: “every transcript of an interview, every memo, every note made by

the investigators. The draft which Helms had read went into a safe, his

briefing notes neatly attached to the front, and it stayed there, untouched

and unread, until . . . 1973,” after Richard Nixon had sacked Helms in

the wake of Watergate. President Nixon had wanted access to material

contained in the IG Report, but Helms had refused to give it to him.30

By mid-May 1967, Helms had succeeded in fending off LBJ’s interest

in the 1963 CIA plots involving the Mafia, plots that Helms must have

suspected could have backfired against JFK. In addition, someone had

persuaded Jack Anderson to stop writing articles about the matter, even

though he still had important unused material. But what about the origi-

nal catalyst for the affair, Johnny Rosselli?

Rosselli had finally gotten what he—along with Marcello and Traff-

icante—had wanted for almost a year. Page 132 of the IG Report relates a

May 3, 1967, discussion between the CIA and the FBI’s liaison to the CIA.

The FBI liaison said that Rosselli had the “CIA ‘over a barrel’ because

of ‘that operation.’ [The FBI liaison] said that he doubted that the FBI

would be able to do anything about either Rosselli or Giancana because

of ‘their previous activities with [the CIA].’”31

In other words, because Rosselli had leaked his role in the CIA-Mafia

plots to Jack Anderson, the FBI would have to hold off on pursuing the

immigration charges that had surfaced one year earlier. Rosselli, Mar-

cello, and Trafficante had achieved a major goal of the strategy they had

begun developing the previous year.

Chapter Thirty-six

Richard Helms had extricated himself from the mess caused by mingling

the CIA with the Mafia, which had contributed to JFK’s assassination.

Now, the same pattern was about to repeat itself in the coming months.

Helms’s increasingly unsettled Cuban operations would help to trig-

ger a series of events leading to yet another high-profile assassination

involving Carlos Marcello.

As JFK’s murder had, this one would involve Cuban-exile gunrun-

ning and drug trafficking. However, there would be major differences

between the two assassinations, from the nature of Marcello’s participa-

tion to the CIA’s shifting role with Cuban exiles. By 1967, the CIA’s anti-

Castro effort had dwindled from what it had been just a few years earlier.

With the massive escalation of intelligence operations in Southeast Asia

and the high level of covert activity in other Cold War hot spots, Cuba

was no longer the major focus it had been earlier in President Johnson’s

term. Even inside the US, Helms’s increasing focus on domestic surveil-

lance of antiwar critics was supplanting anti-Castro operations as the

CIA’s primary domestic operation.

However, Castro was still entrenched just ninety miles from the US,

and looking for opportunities to export his revolution and influence.

According to the FBI, almost a thousand Cuban exiles arrived each

week in Miami, and there were “136,244 Cuban refugees . . . in South

Florida.”1 The CIA still had to gather intelligence about Cuba and take

what action it could against Fidel. Something could always happen to

Fidel and Raul, creating an opening for Almeida. Given the usual shelf

life of Latin American dictators, Fidel had already achieved a relatively

long run—and in 1967, it would have been inconceivable to Helms that

Fidel would remain in power for another four decades. Helms needed

the CIA to maintain a network of exile operatives, in case an opportu-

nity arose, while the Agency kept at least a small amount of pressure

on Castro’s regime.

As
Ramparts
had shown, cracks were starting to appear in the CIA’s

ability to manage the US news media, so it was more important than

ever to hide the CIA’s role in Cuban exile operations. Gone were the days

when the Miami CIA station employed six hundred people who man-

aged three thousand exile CIA assets and fifty corporate fronts.2 While

the CIA’s covert Cuban operations were much better concealed by 1967,

its assets—and former assets—were much harder to control.

While the 1967 Cuban operations of CIA Director Helms and Deputy

Director for Plans Desmond FitzGerald were more deniable, the agency’s

looser control led to problems that sometimes made the news. Like

Helms, FitzGerald had much more on his plate than just Cuba. In May

and June 1967, FitzGerald and the CIA were able to accurately predict

both the Six-Day War in the Middle East and Israel’s quick victory, but

those efforts took time and attention away from supervising officials

overseeing Cuban operations.

Desmond FitzGerald’s health was deteriorating, but he tried to put

up a good front and continue his work. A CIA associate described Fitz-

Gerald to Evan Thomas as looking “physically ill; his face was ‘flushed

and puffy’ [because] FitzGerald was . . . suffering from a circulatory

problem.” FitzGerald had only a short time to live, and his health likely

affected the lack of direction and supervision that plagued Cuban oper-

ations.3 These management problems would lead to terrorist acts by

Cuban exiles in the US and other countries, and some writers viewed

those exiles as being out of control, as going beyond what their CIA case

officers wanted. On the other hand, that may have been the impression

Helms and FitzGerald wanted to create: that the exiles were acting on

their own and were not under Agency control.

Even Cuban exiles the CIA admits were under its direct control at the

time, like Luis Posada, were sometimes involved with the Mafia—with

the CIA’s knowledge, if not approval. For example, CIA files document

that in the summer of 1967, Posada was dealing explosives with one

Mafia figure who was later linked to a Marcello casino deal, and with

another mobster who had worked for Trafficante and run guns with

Jack Ruby.4

The CIA’s less hands-on approach relegated many Cuban exiles to a

gray area. Some CIA-backed exiles worked with non-CIA exiles, while

former CIA assets seeking to continue the struggle against Castro began

receiving support from sources whose backing (or US approval) was

unclear. Still other exiles who had once been CIA assets had to simply

find a new way to earn a living.

Given the Miami nexus of exile operations and Trafficante’s continued

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

presence there, it shouldn’t be surprising that in 1967, drugs became an

increasing problem among formerly—and perhaps some currently—

CIA-supported exiles. According to noted intelligence journalist Joseph

Trento, the problem became so widespread that by the following year,

the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) would find “itself arresting scores

of former CIA employees. These Cuban ‘freedom fighters’ were using

their CIA training for a life of crime [and justifying] their actions by

claiming that they were using the ill-gotten funds to continue the effort

against Castro, an effort that the CIA had abandoned. Many of these

men were working directly for Santo Trafficante.”5

Tom Tripodi was a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent assigned to the

Miami CIA station’s security office. He wrote that the CIA originally

looked the other way when some exiles began smuggling car parts and

other black-market goods to Cuba: “The CIA was happy, because the

smuggling gave a sense of purpose and a means of funding to a group it

had trained for a counter-revolution that every day seemed less likely to

occur.” However, now that the CIA had “instructed them in the fine art of

smuggling, some of them applied their newly learned expertise to drug

trafficking.” Tripodi found that some exile drug “suspects employed

many of the intelligence and security techniques they had learned from

the CIA, making” the job of US drug agents more difficult. Yet for some

exiles, the downsizing of anti-Castro CIA operations left “the drug trade

as their only viable means of support.”6

Former FBI agent Bill Turner has pointed out that the CIA’s Miami

operations had created a tradition of lawlessness. In addition to the

fact that the CIA’s charter forbade it from conducting operations on

America soil, “every time a [CIA] boat left for Cuba or a plane dumped

firebombs, the Neutrality Act was broken. . . . The transportation of

explosives on the highways transgressed Florida law. The possession of

illegal explosives and war
matériel
contravened the Munitions Act, and

the procurement of automatic weapons defied the Firearms Act.” The

CIA even set up false corporations and filed false tax returns, all while

quietly arranging “for nonenforcement. An elaborate recognition system

was devised, and police, sheriffs, Customs, Immigration, Treasury, and

the FBI all looked the other way.”7 Some exile assets knew the CIA had

given massive support to Manuel Artime while he was smuggling drugs

and working with the Mafia. In some ways, the Cuban exiles getting into

drug trafficking and arms smuggling in 1967 were simply continuing

an already established tradition.

Trafficante and his organization were no doubt happy to add such