The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (20 page)

According to historian Richard Mahoney, “Aleman later maintained that he reported this comment to two Miami FBI agents.”
Another historian confirmed: “Disturbed by what had transpired at that meeting, Aleman immediately began informing on Trafficante to” two FBI agents at “the FBI’s Miami Field Office, but Trafficante’s hints were apparently judged mere gangland braggadocio.” The historian goes on to write that “thirty years later Aleman’s accusations would resist positive confirmation, with Bureau records of his debriefings remaining classified.” One of the Miami FBI agents, “when advised of Aleman’s allegations, would affirm: ‘He’s a reliable individual.’” The
Washington Post
notes that after Aleman testified for the state, “Aleman’s relationship with the Bureau grew very close. The FBI men came to rely on him.” Declassified files I found bear that out and show that Aleman continued to provide information about Trafficante to the FBI through 1964.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations found Aleman and his story of Trafficante’s threats credible: “The Committee found that Santo Trafficante’s stature in the national syndicate of organized crime, notably the violent narcotics trade, and his role as the mob’s chief liaison to criminal figures within the Cuban exile community, provided him with the capability of formulating an assassination conspiracy against President Kennedy.” In addition, the House Select Committee found that “examination of the FBI’s electronic surveillance program of the early 1960s disclosed that Santo Trafficante was the subject of minimal, in fact almost nonexistent, surveillance coverage. During one conversation in 1963, overheard in a Miami restaurant, Trafficante had bitterly attacked the Kennedy Administration’s efforts against organized crime, making obscene comments about ‘Kennedy’s right-hand man,’” who had recently coordinated various raids on Trafficante gambling establishments. In the conversation, Trafficante stated that he was under immense
pressure from federal investigators, commenting, “I know when I’m beat, you understand.”

Like his partner Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante felt like he had been backed into a corner by the Kennedys and had nothing to lose by trying to assassinate JFK. Soon Johnny Rosselli joined them in their plotting, and new developments in the secret war between the United States and Cuba gave the three mob bosses a way to kill JFK while forcing high US officials to withhold crucial evidence from the press, the public, and each other.

Even as Marcello and Trafficante plotted their murder of President Kennedy, John and Robert Kennedy were working frantically behind the scenes to defuse the tense standoff of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nuclear-armed Soviet missiles in Cuba were aimed at the United States, just ninety miles away, and at the height of the Cold War any miscalculation could spell disaster.

President Kennedy reached an agreement with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev: The United States secretly agreed to remove US Jupiter missiles in Turkey targeted at Russia while Khrushchev would remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba. However, a myth has persisted ever since that “that Kennedy had struck a secret deal with Khrushchev binding the US to a commitment not to invade Cuba,” even though historians from the nonprofit National Security Archive at George Washington University first documented twenty years ago that that was not the case. Files declassified thirty years after the Missile Crisis revealed “that no such deal was ever made.” They explained that “President Kennedy’s pledge not to invade Cuba . . . was conditioned on the implementation of adequate inspection and verification procedures.” As JFK wrote to Khrushchev, only “upon the establishment of adequate arrangements through the United Nations to ensure
[that all the missiles had been removed would the United States] give assurances against an invasion of Cuba.” But as the National Security Archive historians documented, “Cuba did not allow on-site inspection” by the United Nations to verify the removal of the Russian missiles, so the pledge never took effect.

JFK’s Secretary of State at the time, Dean Rusk, confirmed that to me in a 1990 interview, explaining that Fidel Castro had been angry that he wasn’t consulted before Khrushchev made the deal with JFK and therefore refused to allow UN weapons inspectors into Cuba. In JFK’s November 20, 1962, prime-time press conference, he reaffirmed the need for UN inspections before putting a “no invasion pledge” into effect. In response to the question, “If we wanted to invade Cuba . . . could we do so without the approval of the United Nations?” JFK gave a carefully worded reply, saying that the United States reserved the right to act against Cuba “on our own if that situation was necessary to protect our survival or integrity or other vital interests.” Just over a year later, the specter of the Cuban Missile Crisis—and a secret Cuba plan begun by JFK six months after the Crisis apparently ended—would loom large over the secrecy surrounding his own assassination.

Central to understanding all that secrecy was a man who grew close to Robert Kennedy in the days after the Crisis appeared to have passed: Cuban exile Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams. Harry Williams, as he liked to be called, was a wounded survivor of the Bay of Pigs. He was one of sixty injured men Castro had released seven months earlier to spur US efforts to ransom the remaining prisoners, an effort that had been constantly thwarted by Richard Nixon and other conservatives. Before Williams and the others were released, Cuban authorities told the men they had to return to prison in Cuba by the end of 1962
if the United States did not ransom the remaining prisoners. Worse, they were told that one Bay of Pigs prisoner would be shot for each released prisoner who didn’t return.

At forty, Williams was older than most of the other exile fighters. He had been a mining engineer raising a family in Cuba before the Revolution. After his release in 1962, Williams took a leading role in trying to win the release of his comrades who remained in prison. The Kennedys were sympathetic, and Harry developed a working relationship with Robert Kennedy while trying to find some way to free the prisoners. Both JFK and RFK admired Williams because of his courage, which he had demonstrated on two notable occasions during and immediately after the Bay of Pigs disaster. Once ashore in Cuba, Williams “fought bravely” and was “blown into the air by an enemy shell . . . and hit by more than seventy pieces of shrapnel. Both of his feet were smashed and he had a hole near his heart and a large one in his neck,” according to one Cuban exile historian.

Williams was near death when Castro’s army brought him to a makeshift field hospital. What happened next became the stuff of legend among Cuban exiles. As Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Haynes Johnson wrote, Williams and the other wounded men in a makeshift field hospital “were suddenly confronted by the person of Fidel Castro.” The badly wounded “Williams . . . recognized him at once. He groped under his thin mattress and tried to reach a .45 pistol he had concealed there earlier in the afternoon.” As Williams told me, and as other exiles confirmed to Haynes, Williams gathered enough strength to point the weapon at Castro and—at almost point-blank range—to pull the trigger.

But the weapon only clicked—it was empty. Earlier, William’s compatriots had worried that he might be in such pain from his
wounds and so depressed over the failure of the invasion and their capture that he might use the gun on himself, so they removed the bullets while Williams was unconscious. Castro’s men quickly set upon Williams, but Fidel ordered them not to harm the gravely injured man and instead ordered that Williams and the other wounded men be taken to a hospital in a nearby city. There, an old friend, Cuban Army Commander Juan Almeida, visited Williams. Almeida was no doubt frustrated that the United States had never acted on his clear signals of dissatisfaction with Castro. Commander Almeida told Williams that the time for action against Fidel was not right, that he was too powerful in the wake of his victory at the Bay of Pigs. Almeida could not have known it then, but that situation would finally change six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Missile Crisis put on hold Williams’s efforts to persuade John and Robert Kennedy to ransom the remaining Bay of Pigs prisoners. Robert Kennedy was impressed when Williams volunteered to guide US troops on a mission to rescue the remaining prisoners if the United States had to attack Cuba during the Crisis, to take out the Soviet missiles.

After the Missile Crisis, as Castro’s end-of-the-year deadline approached, Robert Kennedy was shocked when Williams began making preparations to return to Cuba. Castro had given Williams and the others only until the end of the year to ransom the remaining prisoners. If the ransom was not paid, they had to return, and one prisoner would be shot for each man who did not. So Williams felt he had no choice but to go back to Cuba. John and Robert Kennedy felt great sympathy for the prisoners’ plight, but freeing them now became a personal matter for RFK. As documented by Haynes Johnson, Robert Kennedy moved heaven and earth in December 1962 to try to win
the prisoners’ release, searching for a ransom acceptable to both Fidel Castro and JFK’s Republican opponents.

JFK, RFK, their aides, and Williams were successful, and $53 million in food and medicine was transferred to Cuba. On Christmas Eve, the 1,113 prisoners returned to Miami. The Orange Bowl hosted a lavish ceremony for all the freed prisoners and their families, during which JFK made an impromptu pledge, promising to return the brigade’s flag to them “in a free Havana.” For President Kennedy, those weren’t just words. Operation Mongoose was officially over, but six months later, JFK, RFK, and Williams would have a new plan to topple Fidel, one that would trigger much of the secrecy that still surrounds JFK’s assassination.

*
It’s important to note that while Campbell did have a relationship with JFK, her later claims that she was a courier between JFK and Giancana were thoroughly debunked by Johnny Rosselli’s biographers.

*
After the meeting, Becker checked with someone who spoke Sicilian to make sure he understood the phrase exactly.

CHAPTER 8

Marcello Meets with Ruby and Oswald

B
Y EARLY 1963, Carlos Marcello appears to have been working with well-connected New Orleans private detective Guy Banister and pilot David Ferrie to set up Lee Oswald in relation to JFK’s assassination. US covert operations against Cuba would give Banister and Ferrie a way to accomplish that task. Though Operation Mongoose had ended, small-scale US covert actions against Cuba continued, and JMWAVE, the huge Miami CIA station, remained active. The United States also continued to distribute hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to a variety of Cuban exile organizations and leaders, including Tony Varona. According to the CIA’s Deputy Chief in New Orleans, Hunter A. Leake, both Banister and Ferrie continued to work for the CIA, and Cuba seems to have been their main focus. According to historian Michael Kurtz, Leake had admitted to him that Banister “served as a key CIA liaison with many anti-Castro Cuban refugees in southern Louisiana. Banister often handled details of the training and supplying of various anti-Castro organizations. Typically, Hunter Leake or another CIA agent from the New Orleans office would meet Banister in Mancuso’s Restaurant, located in the infamous 544 Camp Street Building.” The reasons for that building’s infamy were noted in
Chapter Two
and are explained later.

Kurtz wrote that the CIA’s Leake “provided Banister with substantial sums of cash, and Banister would use the money to purchase needed supplies and to pay the salaries of the men working in certain anti-Castro operations.” As for Ferrie, Leake told Kurtz that the pilot “performed a series of tasks for the CIA,” which included “conducting propaganda sessions among refugee units, thus reinforcing their hatred of the Castro regime; and serving as an intermediary between the CIA and organized crime.” The latter would have been easy for Ferrie in 1963 since he—like Banister—was working for Carlos Marcello.

Even though the official record shows that Oswald moved to New Orleans on April 24, 1963, he had made at least one trip to the city well before that date, according to Congressional testimony cited in
Chapter Two
. The testimony was first obtained in 1975, meaning that critical information was not available to the Warren Commission. Oswald’s visit had occurred in March, February, or perhaps as early as January. His trip there involved some sort of Cuba-related activity, resulting in his being jailed in New Orleans and claiming to the INS to be a Cuban exile, even though he couldn’t speak Spanish. Within a few months, numerous witnesses would place Oswald as working with Guy Banister and David Ferrie. However, Oswald’s unusual visit to New Orleans in early 1963—missing from Warren Commission records—suggests that he’d had contact with them well before that, which might even explain his later move to New Orleans.

In early 1963, Oswald engaged in several unusual activities that provoked controversy for decades. However, when viewed through the lens of the intelligence connections of Banister and Ferrie—and their work for Carlos Marcello—Oswald’s actions make perfect sense.

Oswald’s suspicious activities in the space of less than two months included apparently using an alias to order a pistol and a
rifle through the mail; photographing himself holding both weapons and two Communist newspapers (of opposing views); being linked to a shooting at the home of far-right, racist, retired General Edwin Walker; and writing letters to the head of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

Some of those activities are consistent with simply maintaining and building his cover as a Communist/Marxist while continuing to avoid meeting or talking to any real American Communists or Socialists. Other actions appear to have been undertaken in cooperation with—or on the orders of—someone else.

First, it seems odd that Oswald would order guns through the mail when cheaper and more reliable weapons were easily available in Dallas. Likewise, it seems strange for Oswald to suddenly develop a great interest in Cuba and to begin a phony one-man chapter of a small organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee when both Dallas and New Orleans had legitimate far-left and Socialist organizations that he could have joined. In early 1963—as Marcello and Trafficante were making plans to assassinate JFK—two related Congressional committees were looking into the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and into mail-order gun sales by the very firms from which Oswald ordered. Not only were both hearings in the newspapers of the time—making it easy to see where Banister or his associates got the idea to take advantage of them—but members of both Congressional committees had ties to Trafficante operatives Frank Fiorini and John Martino. Martino, who had finally been released from his Cuban prison the previous fall, was very bitter over his experience, blaming the Kennedy Administration for not securing his release sooner. In addition to his work for Trafficante, in 1963 Martino also became close to Johnny Rosselli, and the CIA admits that Martino—like
Rosselli—became a CIA asset. Also like Rosselli (and Marcello and Trafficante), late in life Martino admitted his involvement in the JFK assassination plot.