The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (17 page)

That was only some of the crucial information the CIA hid from President-elect Kennedy, and the Agency would continue to deceive him after he took office. As the CIA would reluctantly admit years later in Congressional hearings, it had begun a program in 1960 to eliminate problematic foreign leaders, ominously named ZR/RIFLE. The CIA was also using ZR/RIFLE to try to assassinate another foreign leader, the charismatic Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, an attempt that succeeded shortly before JFK was sworn in. Involved in that assassination effort was a European assassin recruiter for the CIA code-named QJWIN. As detailed later, QJWIN would also be used in the plots to kill Fidel Castro and would surface in relation to JFK’s murder.

CIA Director Allen Dulles, a close associate of Richard Nixon, never told JFK that he was continuing the CIA–Mafia plots. He did want JFK to continue major covert action to overthrow Fidel Castro, but the four hundred Cuban exiles then being secretly trained by the CIA in Central America clearly couldn’t do the job. Dulles instead told JFK they were planning a Cuban exile invasion of Cuba, and Dulles quickly escalated the number of exiles being trained, which eventually reached two thousand.

Dulles knew that even two thousand Cuban exiles had no chance of staging a viable invasion against one hundred thousand members of the Cuban army and militia and against a Cuba populace that largely backed Fidel Castro. As a backup to the CIA–Mafia plots, he had CIA officers such as David Atlee Phillips begin a new plan that recycled the failed “fake Guantánamo attack” from December. While the vast majority of the CIA’s Cuban exiles were being trained at secret camps in Guatemala, a CIA memo “routed to David Atlee Phillips” says a secret exile training base was set up eight miles from New Orleans at the “Belle Chasse training camp,” located “at the US Naval Ammunition Depot.” JFK was told that the exiles being trained there were for a “diversionary landing” force that would stage a decoy attack on Cuba, far from the main exile force, to draw the attention of Cuban military forces.

However, the CIA’s real goal was different. After being trained at the secluded thirty-five-hundred-acre camp adjoining the Mississippi River, the exiles would sail into Cuba on their own ship, the
Santa Ana
. They were not told ahead of time the true nature of their mission. Like JFK, they believed they were going to stage a diversionary landing on the far eastern shore of Cuba to distract Fidel from the main force. Not until they neared shore would their CIA commanders break out Cuban military uniforms and explain they were to attack the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay in the guise of Castro’s forces. E. Howard Hunt’s associate David Atlee Phillips was handling propaganda for the whole Cuban operation and could ensure that the United States and the world quickly heard about Castro’s supposed attack on Guantánamo Bay. Even if the Mafia failed to assassinate Fidel before the CIA’s exile invasion, that fake attack was designed to force JFK to break his public pledge not to use US military force against Cuba.

The secret CIA exile training going on outside New Orleans gave Guy Banister and David Ferrie opportunities to become involved in the covert operation. In an unusual foreshadowing of events to come, it’s well documented that one of Banister’s associates even used the name “Oswald”—then in the Soviet Union—as an alias when trucks were purchased for Cuban exiles at a New Orleans Ford dealership. One of Banister’s associates involved had briefly employed Oswald when he was a teenager, which is probably why the name of the well-publicized defector was used.

More important, as New Orleans became a center of covert Cuban exile activity—a role that would continue into 1963—Marcello became involved in those operations. In addition to being part of the CIA–Mafia plots, Marcello donated money to Cuban exile groups. As he developed ties to Guy Banister and David Ferrie, Marcello’s access to covert US anti-Castro operations only increased. As for David Ferrie, in early 1961 he was still an Eastern Airlines pilot, but he claimed he took leave from that position to assist with the exiles’ Cuban invasion plans.

E. Howard Hunt and his assistant, Bernard Barker, played two roles in those invasion plans in the early months of 1961, after JFK became President. Officially, Hunt worked with exile leaders such as Tony Varona and Manuel Artime (Hunt’s best friend), who were supposed to run Cuba after Fidel was gone. However, the CIA admits that Varona was also working at the same time on the CIA–Mafia plots with his associate Santo Trafficante, as was Artime. Much evidence shows the same was true for Hunt and Barker, who were also involved in the CIA–Mafia plots since the new exile leadership of Cuba would have to be ready to take over as soon as the Mafia assassinated Fidel. Barker’s work for Trafficante could help that coordination.

Confirmation of Hunt’s CIA work with Rosselli in March 1961 came only in 2006, when former CIA Agent Bayard Stockton wrote that “in March 1961 [Johnny] Rosselli went to the Dominican Republic, accompanied by Howard Hunt of the CIA.” Stockton became a longtime
Newsweek
bureau chief after leaving the Agency, and his 2006 book
Flawed Patriot
, which confirmed that Hunt worked with Rosselli, was reviewed and approved by the CIA. Stockton’s account shows that E. Howard Hunt was working with Johnny Rosselli on assassination plotting, even as the CIA–Mafia plots were actively under way.

In early 1961 CIA Director Allen Dulles was confident that Castro would be killed by the CIA–Mafia plots or that JFK would be forced to commit US military forces because of the fake attack on Guantánamo. Allen Dulles was so sure of success that he ignored an incredible opportunity to ensure the fall of Fidel without resorting to deceiving JFK.

A CIA memo from February 20, 1961, identified “Commander Juan Almeida, who is Chief of Fidel’s army, Cuba and is about to defect.” On March 7, 1961, another CIA memo stated that “Major Juan Almeida, Chief of Staff of the Cuban Army, has been approaching certain Latin Ambassadors in Havana to determine whether he would be accepted” for political asylum. Both reports about Almeida’s dissatisfaction with Castro went to CIA headquarters in Washington.

This was a golden opportunity for the CIA. Commander Almeida was extremely popular in Cuba and was far more powerful than Che Guevara, who wasn’t even Cuban. In a population that was 70 percent of African heritage, Almeida was the highest-ranking black Cuban official. He was essentially the third-most-powerful man in the country, after Fidel and his brother Raul, and could have been an incredible covert ally for the United States.

Yet CIA Director Dulles was apparently so confident in the CIA–Mafia plots and the fake Guantánamo attack that the Agency made no approach to Commander Almeida. The CIA did not even tell President Kennedy what it had heard about Almeida. The CIA memos about Commander Almeida’s offers were not revealed during investigations, later that year, into the failure of the invasion, not even to the Agency’s own Inspector General. In fact, the memos were so sensitive that they weren’t declassified for decades. They remained unpublished until 2005 (after I was the first to find them in the National Archives).

Even as the CIA Director ignored Commander Almeida’s comments and kept them—and the CIA–Mafia plots and fake Guantánamo attack plans—secret from JFK, President Kennedy expressed his dissatisfaction with the CIA’s proposed landing site near the city of Trinidad. Given what little the CIA was telling him, JFK, a combat veteran from his PT boat days, thought a more secluded landing spot made more sense. Accordingly, the CIA chose a new beachhead on Cuba’s southwest coast in an area called the Bay of Pigs. In a tragic irony of history, when Fidel divided command of Cuba into thirds for defense against the anticipated invasion, Commander Almeida was given control of the portion of Cuba that included the Bay of Pigs. If the CIA had told JFK about Almeida, who could have been encouraged to remain in place and assist the United States, history could have been radically different.

Even as planning for the Bay of Pigs continued, Carlos Marcello was firmly in the sights of new Attorney General Robert Kennedy. With the start of RFK’s highly publicized war on organized crime, the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) finally began to target Carlos Marcello for strong action. RFK insisted on more aggressive action against the Tunisian-born Marcello, who wasn’t a
citizen and had only falsified birth records from Guatemala. Attorney General Kennedy decided to use Marcello’s own forgeries against him and had the INS arrange Marcello’s deportation to Guatemala.

On April 4, 1961, when Carlos Marcello went to the local INS office for what he thought was a routine visit, he was detained and then flown to Guatemala without a hearing. RFK publicly took full responsibility “for the expulsion of” Marcello and the following week had the IRS file “tax liens in excess of $835,000 against” Marcello and his wife.

Just seven months earlier, Marcello had given a half million dollars to the man he thought would be the next President, and now the enraged godfather found himself in Guatemala, the same small country where the CIA was training Cuban exiles for the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion. The US-backed dictator of Guatemala, already under pressure from his country’s press and populace for allowing the US-supported Cuban exile training, faced new scrutiny for allowing a notorious American godfather to reside in the country. He ordered Marcello and his American attorney detained and escorted to the border. From there Marcello was taken “20 miles into Honduras [and] unceremoniously dumped . . . on a forested hilltop with no signs of civilization in sight.” The man who was America’s most powerful godfather now had to scramble through the jungle-lined back roads of Honduras in his expensive Gucci shoes.

According to Marcello biographer John Davis, “Still wearing their city clothes and their city shoes stuffed with cash,” Marcello and his associate “had little to drink or eat. . . . Marcello found breathing difficult along the mountain-top road. He collapsed three times in the dust, complaining that he could not go on any farther, that he was finished, and that it was that rich kid Bobby Kennedy who had done this
to them. ‘If I don’t make it . . .’ Carlos told [his associate] at one point as he lay exhausted in a roadside gutter, ‘tell my brother when you get back, about what dat kid Bobby done to us. Tell ’em to do what dey have to do.’” Before arriving at a small airport, the exhausted Marcello plunged “down a pathless slope. They ended up in a burrow, bleeding from thorns, bruised by rocks, with Marcello complaining of a severe pain in his side” from “three broken ribs.”

Carlos Marcello, a hugely wealthy godfather who commanded an empire the size of General Motors, was now forced to struggle in the sweltering heat of the Honduran jungle, battling pain, thirst, hunger, and swarms of tropical insects. As the overweight Marcello trudged the muddy, desolate jungle road, with every painful step his thoughts were no doubt consumed with the two men he saw as responsible for his plight, John and Robert Kennedy.

Years later, the searing experience still haunted Marcello, and he talked of it often in prison to Jack Van Laningham during the CAMTEX operation. Marcello told Van Laningham that “he had been kidnapped and that he hated the Kennedys.” Even more, the godfather said he had been “furious” because of his ordeal “and vowed to get even with the Kennedys.”

*
Before turning to Maheu in late August of 1960, the CIA had run a security check on Guy Banister that same month to clear him for a sensitive operation. Instead, once Maheu was chosen, apparently by Nixon, Banister was assigned to a different Cuban operation for the CIA.

*
The link between the September 1960 Mafia–Nixon bribe and the fact that most of those contributing—Marcello, Trafficante, and Giancana—were also working at the behest of Nixon on his CIA–Mafia plot to kill Fidel was not publicly made until the publication of my book
Watergate: The Hidden History
in 2012.

CHAPTER 7

Marcello and Trafficante: Planning JFK’s Murder

A
S GODFATHER CARLOS Marcello trudged the jungle roads of Honduras while swearing vengeance against the Kennedys, the CIA and President Kennedy were in the tense days leading up to the supposedly secret exile invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Reports of the impending exile invasion were rampant in Miami and among reporters, and JFK had publicly pledged that US military forces would not be used to attack Cuba. Getting wind of the threat, Fidel Castro ordered the arrests of dissidents and suspects throughout Cuba as a precaution.

CIA Director Allen Dulles later admitted that he knew the Cuban populace—largely supportive of Fidel Castro and his regime—couldn’t be expected to “rise up” against Fidel, as CIA officials had indicated to JFK. Shortly before President Kennedy took office, Eisenhower had closed the US Embassy in Havana, depriving the United States—and President Kennedy—of a valuable listening post (and spy base) in Cuba. This lack of clandestine information from observers on the scene left JFK almost completely at the mercy of CIA officials regarding the situation in Cuba.

Director Dulles still depended on the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Fidel just before the invasion. The killing was supposed to throw that
country into chaos and force JFK’s hand, but a communications mix-up doomed that plan. The mistake happened after right-wing CIA officer E. Howard Hunt dropped out of the Bay of Pigs operation at the last minute, to protest the inclusion of a liberal in the prospective post-Fidel government.

Even without Hunt, the CIA–Mafia plots continued, with Cuban exile leader—and Trafficante associate—Tony Varona playing a key role. A Varona contact inside Cuba agreed to place a CIA-provided poison pill in Fidel’s food just before the invasion, after receiving a signal from Varona. However, the abrupt departure of Hunt—who handled exile leaders like Varona—left only a few officials who knew about the highly secret CIA–Mafia plots. Because Hunt was no longer involved, Varona was placed in a secure US military facility with the other exile leaders to await the outcome of the invasion and was unable to give the signal to poison Castro.