The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (2 page)

We will also explore the hidden history of the aftermath of JFK’s murder, including just how close the truth came to being exposed on several occasions. This history includes secret investigations conducted by the CIA, Naval Intelligence, and Robert Kennedy. The account shows why Robert Kennedy’s associates pushed for the creation of the Warren Commission and why it was limited to essentially endorsing a conclusion that had been publicly proclaimed within hours of JFK’s murder. That section includes the tragic story of Abraham Bolden, chosen by JFK to be the first black Presidential Secret Service agent, who was framed by the Mafia and then arrested when he tried to tell the Warren Commission about two earlier attempts to kill JFK, in Tampa and Chicago. The book also identifies the five later government investigating committees that had access to far more information than the Warren Commission. Those investigations eventually led Congress to conclude in 1979 that JFK had likely been killed as the result of a conspiracy, in which Carlos Marcello “had the motive, means, and opportunity.”

The book reveals what happened after Marcello made his JFK confession, unveiling details about JFK’s assassination in words recorded on undercover FBI audiotape. It shows why the 1992 JFK Act unanimously passed by Congress requires the Bureau to release those tapes and transcripts and why the CIA and Naval Intelligence should release their remaining files related to JFK’s assassination. According to NBC News, those agencies have still not released “millions” of pages of
records involving JFK’s assassination. (Some of the most important files that have been released are shown in the book’s photo-document section, some published for the first time.) However,
The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination
explains what is in the unreleased files, since much of the story came directly from Kennedy associates and others who experienced crucial events firsthand.

Along the way, the book also debunks some of the more pervasive myths about JFK’s murder that continue to surface on the internet, years after they were proven false. The book identifies those who were involved in JFK’s assassination, as well as those whose involvement—or lack of it—is less clear and may be determined only when the CIA, FBI, and Naval Intelligence release the rest of their JFK assassination files.

Releasing all the JFK assassination files is important because US–Cuba relations have been essentially frozen since the time of JFK’s assassination. In part, that’s because high US officials such as President Lyndon Johnson and CIA Director John McCone—and those involved in Cuban operations in 1963 who later became high officials, such as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig—believed fragmentary CIA reports that Fidel Castro was somehow behind JFK’s assassination. However, historians and researchers have shown that all the “Castro killed JFK” CIA reports were either debunked and/or can be traced back to the mob bosses and their CIA associates who later confessed their roles in JFK’s murder. Helping to expose that—and other parts of the hidden history of JFK’s murder—readers of this book can help to remove one of the last remaining obstacles to finally ending America’s fifty-two-year-long Cold War with Cuba.

CHAPTER 1

Evidence of Conspiracy

D
RAMATIC NEW EVIDENCE in
The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination
, much of it from government sources and associates of John and Robert Kennedy, proves clearly and simply for the first time that President John F. Kennedy was killed by a small, tightly held conspiracy directed by two Mafia godfathers. Using critical facts never reported before, this book documents exactly who was involved, why, and how they got away with it.

It builds on the findings of Robert Kennedy and his own secret investigations, as well as those of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The House Committee concluded in 1979 that JFK “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” and that two Mafia godfathers who were close associates—Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante
*
—“had the motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy.”

Using exclusive interviews and newly declassified files not available to that Committee, this book provides detailed proof of that conspiracy. In addition to Marcello and Trafficante, others involved included their associates Mafia don Johnny Rosselli and mobster John
Martino. Few realize that all four men made credible confessions to JFK’s murder, with Marcello providing by far the most detailed account, according to FBI files and sources that for the first time are fully detailed in this book.

All four mobsters had also been assets of the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1960s, working on the Agency’s plots to kill Fidel Castro—plots that began in September 1960 at the direction of then Vice President Richard Nixon, before JFK was elected President. Those CIA–Mafia plots against Castro continued into 1963 without the knowledge of President Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, or even JFK’s CIA director, John McCone.

Marcello and Trafficante used two active-duty CIA men in their assassination plan: CIA agent Bernard Barker and CIA officer David Morales. A Congressional investigator for the House Committee discovered that Morales—in 1963 a close friend of Johnny Rosselli—had confessed involvement in JFK’s murder to two close associates. Barker admitted under oath that he had watched JFK’s shooting as it happened, even though JFK’s motorcade through Dealey Plaza was not broadcast live, even in Dallas. Barker was also identified as being behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll at the time of JFK’s shooting by two credible eyewitnesses who encountered him, one of them a Dallas Deputy Sheriff.

Important new material from FBI files and personnel allows this book to detail for the first time Carlos Marcello’s own account of how he planned JFK’s murder and used trusted associates to carry it out. This new information finally connects all the dots, tying Marcello to the shooters, to Lee Oswald, and to Jack Ruby. What had formerly been a mass of compelling evidence—with a few key parts missing and some connections murky—now becomes a clear, coherent, and concise story of JFK’s murder.

For almost fifty years, polls have consistently shown that a majority of the American public believes JFK was killed as the result of a conspiracy. Distinguished tenured historians—among them CBS News consultant Dr. Douglas Brinkley, Dr. David Kaiser of the Naval War College, Dr. Gerald McKnight, Dr. David Wrone, and Dr. Michael Kurtz—have publicly expressed their belief that the historical evidence for a conspiracy in JFK’s murder is conclusive. Yet much of the US news media still reports on this topic as if only one official government committee, the Warren Commission, ever looked into JFK’s murder, and there has been only one “official” verdict: that a single assassin—depicted at the time and ever since as a “lone nut”—killed JFK. For the “lone nut” thesis to work, a bullet found in almost pristine condition had to have caused two wounds to JFK while also shattering Texas governor John Connally’s rib and wrist bones. The following chapter debunks this “single bullet theory,” long derided by its critics as the “magic bullet theory,” and shows how anyone can easily demonstrate the physical impossibility of the single bullet theory for him- or herself.

In reality, over the course of three decades, a half dozen government committees—including the House Select Committee and most recently, in the 1990s, the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, appointed by President Clinton—investigated JFK’s murder. Among the 4.5 million pages of government records the Review Board released during the 1990s was the uncensored FBI file with Carlos Marcello’s clear, direct confession to JFK’s murder, which I first uncovered at the National Archives in 2006. Several years earlier, I had helped high-level Review Board staff identify crucial JFK records that had not been released.

The news media rarely report that Robert F. Kennedy himself, along with numerous government officials who were associates of
RFK and JFK, voiced the belief that President Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy. Robert Kennedy told aide Richard Goodwin that he thought “that mob guy in New Orleans”—Marcello—was behind his brother’s death, as Goodwin confirmed to me. RFK learned about Marcello’s role because he directed several trusted aides to conduct small, secret investigations into his brother’s murder for him. RFK’s investigators included the head of the Justice Department’s “Get Hoffa Squad,” Walter Sheridan, and his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz. Both concluded that a conspiracy had killed JFK.

Other well-documented believers in an assassination conspiracy included President Lyndon Johnson, CIA Director John McCone, JFK’s personal physician Admiral George Burkley (the only doctor with JFK’s body at both Parkland Hospital and his autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital), JFK’s press secretary Pierre Salinger, and JFK aides Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Harris Wofford. Also expressing belief in a conspiracy were LBJ aides Joseph A. Califano Jr. and Alexander Haig, plus numerous Justice Department Mafia prosecutors for RFK, including Ronald Goldfarb and Robert Blakey—the last also authored the RICO Act, used in prosecuting organized crime, and directed the House Select Committee’s investigation. According to
Vanity Fair
, even Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry “believed two gunmen were involved,” while Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that CIA Director John McCone told Robert Kennedy he “thought there were two people involved in the shooting.”

JFK’s two closest aides, Dave Powers and Kenneth O’Donnell, actually witnessed two shots from the grassy knoll, from their perfect vantage point in the limousine directly behind JFK’s. (One of the Secret Service agents in their limo testified that he also thought that JFK’s fatal head shot came from the grassy knoll.) Powers and
O’Donnell both confirmed the grassy knoll shots to House Speaker Tip O’Neill, as O’Neill described in his 1987 autobiography,
Man of the House
. Later, in an exclusive interview with my research collaborator Thom Hartmann, Powers detailed how he was pressured to change his Warren Commission testimony “for the good of the country.” As I first discovered (with the help of the National Archives), Powers’s perjured affidavit was taken by Commission counsel Arlen Specter, the leading proponent of the single bullet theory, an important detail the Warren Commission omitted when it published Powers’s affidavit.

It’s important to stress that much of my information came not only from exclusive interviews with more than two dozen associates of John and Robert Kennedy but also from former FBI, Secret Service, military intelligence, and Congressional personnel, including those critical of how their agencies handled the investigation. All of those sources provided crucial firsthand information. While some of their disclosures have been detailed in my previous books dealing with the Kennedys—
Ultimate Sacrifice
(2005; updated 2006),
Legacy of Secrec
y (2008; expanded 2009), and several chapters in
Watergate: The Hidden History
(2011)—many important new revelations are detailed in this book for the first time.

It has taken almost fifty years for the full story of JFK’s assassination to emerge, for reasons of national security that are detailed later, compounded by the reluctance of agencies such as the FBI and CIA to reveal their own intelligence failures and unauthorized operations.

Government agencies and officials withheld many hundreds of thousands of pages of relevant files and information on covert operations from the Warren Commission, but neither the public nor most journalists knew that when the
Warren Report
was issued in September 1964. The sheer volume of information publicly available
today that was hidden from the Warren Commission is staggering: the CIA’s plots with dangerous mob bosses to kill Fidel Castro, the attempt to kill JFK in Tampa four days before Dallas and in Chicago before that, Jack Ruby’s work for the Mafia, Oswald’s many links to Carlos Marcello, and much more. Instead, the American news media embraced and helped to disseminate the
Report
since it had been approved by a distinguished panel headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Many people don’t realize that in addition to the best-selling one-volume
Warren Report
, the Commission also issued twenty-six volumes of supporting material. By 1966 authors and journalists were pointing out that the evidence contained in those twenty-six volumes didn’t support the
Warren Report
’s own conclusions. A flurry of critical books began to appear, starting with former Congressional investigator Harold Weisberg’s
Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report
, followed by
The Unanswered Questions about President Kennedy’s Assassination
by veteran reporter Sylvan Fox, who soon joined the
New York Times
. Next came Edward Jay Epstein’s
Inquest
, which even former JFK aides found compelling. Best-selling books followed: Mark Lane’s
Rush to Judgment
and Harvard professor Josiah Thompson’s
Six Seconds in Dallas
, as well as Sylvia Meagher’s
Accessories after the Fact
. All of those authors used the Warren Commission’s own information, along with fresh interviews and overlooked news accounts, to undermine the Warren Report’s “lone nut/single bullet” conclusion.

Those efforts helped to spark major investigations by the
New York Times
and major weekly magazines such as
Life, Look
, and the
Saturday Evening Post
. However, declassified files now show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA Director Richard Helms
immediately began a significant public relations counteroffensive, issuing detailed instructions on how to smear critics of the
Warren Report
. For example, in a January 4, 1967, CIA memo in which the Agency gives fifty-three pages of specific instructions on how to counter the growing tide of books and articles questioning the “lone nut” conclusion, a domestic operation far outside the bounds of the Agency’s charter. In many ways, those PR counteroffensives by the FBI and CIA would last for decades, and some writers make the case that they continue even today.