The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (24 page)

However, Marcello and the other mob bosses needed something more than the CIA–Mafia plots to trigger a truly widespread coverup, one that would ensure there could be no thorough and complete investigation of JFK’s murder. Fear of revealing any possible link between the CIA–Mafia plots and JFK’s assassination would cause Helms and his close subordinates to hide important information from
investigators. However, the godfathers also needed a way to force CIA Director John McCone, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and new President Lyndon Johnson to withhold crucial information from the press and public, to prevent a potential nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

THE CIA AND the Mafia worked together on two well-documented attempts to kill Fidel Castro in the spring of 1963, efforts that would later be linked to JFK’s assassination by the Mafia. These two attempts aren’t well known and are missing from the CIA’s later accounts of the CIA–Mafia plots. However, Cuban authorities extensively documented the two attempts, having captured many of the Cuban participants and much of their CIA-supplied armaments and communications equipment. The Cubans photographed both men and material at the time, and the full details reached the American press a decade later.

Both of these attempts involved Mafia don Johnny Rosselli, operating under the supervision of CIA officer William Harvey. Harvey, a hard-drinking, rotund agent sometimes called America’s James Bond, was becoming close friends with Rosselli, who was an expert at manipulating people for his own ends. The first of the two attempts was on March 13, 1963, and was described in Cuban accounts as involving “a plan to assassinate [Castro] from a house near the University of Havana shooting with a mortar” and other weapons. Cuban forces captured and photographed “[b]azookas, mortars, and machine guns,” along with an assassination team of five men, including one named as a CIA agent. According to the account, “the instructions” for the attempted assassination “were given by the CIA through Guantánamo Naval Base.”

Naval War College historian David Kaiser documented that Johnny “Rosselli identified the team as his own” twice in later years. Four years after the attempt, Rosselli and his attorney spread provocative stories to select journalists, accounts that reached President Lyndon Johnson and other high-ranking US officials. Rosselli’s later story claimed “that the team had been tortured and captured and had confessed that they were on an official mission for the US government; and that this led to Castro’s decision to arrange the assassination of Kennedy.” Rosselli would leak the story again in 1971, adding even more details, including William Harvey’s name.

In planting those and similar fake stories blaming JFK’s murder on Fidel, Rosselli, Trafficante, and Marcello not only diverted blame for JFK’s murder away from themselves but also ensured that it couldn’t be fully investigated without exposing dark secrets the CIA and other high officials didn’t want revealed.

According to a 1975
Miami Herald
article, an even larger CIA attempt to kill Fidel occurred “at the Latin American Stadium on April 7, 1963.” It involved “sixteen men armed with pistols and fragmentation grenades.” At least three of the men were captured and photographed, along with a large array of weapons, including sniper rifles, machine guns, assault rifles, and pistols. Based on Rosselli’s later remarks, that attempt was also part of his CIA–Mafia plotting.

However, those two attempts wouldn’t have provided enough cover for Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli. Because Robert Kennedy and the CIA Director didn’t know about US backing for the attempts, they wouldn’t have had the same motivation as Richard Helms to cover up information if they were linked to JFK’s murder. So an embittered John Martino—an associate of Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli—helped concoct a plot designed to secure the backing of the
CIA Director and the Kennedys, a plot that was really about providing the Mafia cover for its planned assassination of JFK.

Martino found some powerful allies for his planned operation, including wealthy and influential William Pawley, a friend of former Vice President Richard Nixon, and Senator James O. Eastland, who was investigating the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at the time. The CIA officially authorized Martino’s plan—put together with the help of Rosselli and Trafficante—and code-named it Operation TILT.

Martino’s story was designed to appeal to the CIA and to JFK and was compelling though far-fetched. The plan’s stated goal was to send a ten-man Cuban exile team into Cuba to bring back three Soviet technicians, who were supposedly ready to defect and reveal that Soviet nuclear missiles remained hidden in caves in Cuba. The scenario sounded plausible to CIA officials because thousands of Soviet technicians and troops remained in Cuba. Fidel had never allowed the UN weapons inspections, so there was no way to prove with absolute certainty that some missiles weren’t hidden in caves or underground, beyond the view of American U-2 spy plane flights.

For President Kennedy, if Cuba still held on to Soviet missiles, he wanted to be the first to know, before his political enemies used the information to attack him. However, JFK, RFK, and their aides were skeptical of the story and didn’t become involved in the operation. Martino and his mobster bosses pressed ahead with the plan, hoping one or more JFK aides might decide to support the operation. The story did appeal to the nation’s most popular weekly news-photo magazine,
Life
, which “promised [to give] each of the three Soviet defectors $2,500 in return for their stories.”

However, Dr. Kaiser found that “Rosselli and Trafficante were using Martino [as a cutout] to enlist the help of the CIA” for the
operation. Historian Richard Mahoney documented that Operation TILT was actually an early attempt to lay the groundwork for the Mafia’s plot to assassinate JFK. Mahoney wrote that it “fit nicely with Rosselli’s later claim that President Kennedy was assassinated by an anti-Castro sniper team sent in to murder Castro, captured by the Cubans, tortured, and redeployed in Dallas.”

Martino’s ten-man exile team to be sent into Cuba was originally going to include Loran Hall, a US mercenary who had earlier spent time in detention with Santo Trafficante in Cuba. Kaiser wrote that John “Martino . . . asked Hall if he might be interested in something bigger than a raid, backed by ‘people’ from Chicago and Miami.” Hall was then taken to meetings in Miami in April 1963, first with “Trafficante [and then with] Giancana and Rosselli.” Martino explained “that the assassination of Castro was the real object of the raid.” Hall, smelling something fishy, wisely stayed out of the operation.

Eventually a team of ten armed Cuban exiles headed off toward Cuba, watched by a photographer from
Life
magazine, two CIA agents, and John Martino. The team never returned, and Cuban government officials claim the ten never landed in Cuba. In reality, no Soviet technicians waited, ready to defect—the entire story had been a ruse by Rosselli and Trafficante, spread by Martino to CIA officials. Kaiser points out that “ample evidence, however, shows that the raid was actually just another mob plot against Castro’s life, having nothing to do with Soviet technicians,” and that it was “sold to the Agency under a false cover.” As noted by historian Mahoney, the mob bosses’ real goal was to provide cover for JFK’s assassination.

It’s important to note that by the spring of 1963, Trafficante, Rosselli, and Marcello would have no longer seen killing Fidel as their highest priority. The pressure on the mob chiefs from JFK and RFK
had increased by that time. Carlos Marcello faced federal charges later in the year and knew he would be personally prosecuted by RFK’s men. Trafficante’s operations were under increasing assault, and their ally Jimmy Hoffa faced three trials for various crimes. Rosselli’s boss, Sam Giancana, was severely impacted by the FBI’s “lockstep” surveillance. Killing Fidel Castro while JFK and RFK were still in power would do the mob bosses little good, which meant that murdering JFK was much more important—and time sensitive—for the Mafia chiefs.

Ultimately, there was a major problem with Rosselli and Trafficante’s plan: John and Robert Kennedy never supported Operation TILT. Because they also knew nothing about the CIA–Mafia plots in March and April 1963, RFK would have no incentive to protect those operations if they appeared linked to his brother’s murder. Fortuitously for the mobsters, by the time Operation TILT ended in early summer 1963, a new US operation against Cuba had evolved. It was one the Kennedys fully supported and directed and that the three Mafia leaders would soon infiltrate. In pentrating this operation, the mob bosses would gain access to sensitive information that could compromise various branches of government, stifling any real investigation of JFK’s murder until at least the late 1970s.

BY APRIL 1963, Kennedy Administration policy about Cuba had become muddled, according to accounts from the various subcommittees of the National Security Council dealing with Cuba. Some officials pressed for strong action while others called for a more cautious approach. JFK didn’t want Cuba to dominate the headlines as it had during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That’s why he and his officials were careful not to remind the public that there was not yet a “no invasion pledge” because Fidel had not yet allowed UN weapons inspectors
into Cuba. Yet the secret war against Cuba, run out of Miami’s huge JMWAVE station, continued, with extravagant sums being spread among dozens of exile groups, large and small.

By the early spring of 1963, JFK had approved small exile raids against Cuban ships, but ships of other countries were not supposed to be attacked. However, Richard Helms appears to have taken a harder line against Cuba on his own, again without telling JFK or CIA Director McCone, which caused problems for President Kennedy.

For example, one CIA-backed Cuban exile group that Helms supported made an unauthorized attack in Cuba that violated JFK’s guidelines. On March 18, 1963, a group named Alpha 66, run by exile Antonio Veciana, “announced that it had [attacked] a Russian ship and a Russian training area” in Cuba. According to E. Howard Hunt, Alpha 66 and Veciana were handled for the Agency by his good friend CIA officer David Atlee Phillips. Veciana milked the operation for maximum publicity, Phillips’s specialty. Outraged at the unauthorized and dangerous attack on a Russian ship, JFK had the US State Department immediately condemn the raid. It’s highly unlikely that Phillips would have ordered Veciana to undertake the attack, which could have led to a new confrontation between the United States and the Soviets, without Helms’s approval. While the Kennedys wanted Alpha 66 and Veciana to receive no CIA assistance, Helms—without informing JFK or RFK—told Phillips to continue supervising Veciana and his group.

Also in 1963 Richard Helms approved an even more outrageous provocation, one that endangered the lives of three imprisoned CIA agents as well as JFK’s personal emissary, who was then trying to negotiate their release. The three agents were among the last twenty-seven US citizens still held in Cuban prisons. From January through
April 1963, JFK had prominent New York attorney James Donovan working to secure their release. Donovan had helped Robert Kennedy negotiate the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, and his rapport with the Cuban government soon translated to a working relationship with Fidel, which included accompanying the Cuban leader on skin-diving trips.

The CIA developed two plans to assassinate Fidel while he was skin diving with Donovan, something the Agency admitted both in internal reports and in Congressional testimony. One plan involved devising “an exotic seashell” to attract Fidel’s attention “in an area where Castro commonly went skin diving.” However, the shell would actually be “rigged to explode underwater,” killing Castro and anyone who might be with him. CIA Technical Services—the same group that created the poison pills for the Mafia to use against Fidel—“explored” the idea but found too many problems.

The “second plan involved having James Donovan . . . present Castro with a contaminated diving suit” as a gift. CIA Technical Services actually “bought a diving suit, dusted the inside with a [deadly] fungus . . . and contaminated the breathing apparatus with [tuberculosis bacteria].” The only reason “the plan was abandoned [was] because Donovan gave Castro a different diving suit on his own initiative” and “Helms [later] testified that the [poisoned] diving suit never left the [CIA].” The lethal plans approved by Helms were never revealed to Donovan, CIA Director McCone, JFK, or RFK. Donovan was already in some danger, since the CIA’s March 1963 and April 1963 assassination operations (about which Donovan knew nothing) were being planned while he was in Cuba, negotiating with Fidel. Ironically, Castro actually talked with Donovan about the CIA’s attempts to kill him while the men were on a skin-diving excursion.

For decades, and even today, former CIA personnel—in books and interviews—give the impression that the CIA undertook efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro only because President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy pressed it to do so. However, the facts show a different story. The CIA fully admits to many well-documented Castro assassination attempts that were not authorized by JFK, RFK, even CIA Director John McCone. More importantly, the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel began before JFK became President and continued long after he was dead.

IN A PRIVATE meeting with President Kennedy on April 15, 1963, CIA Director McCone advised him to either “establish relations with Castro” or “to overthrow him.” Surprisingly, JFK “suggested that both options might simultaneously be pursued”—a dual strategy that would become a reality by the fall. McCone followed up his meeting with a memo saying that “a military coup in Cuba [was] the United States’ only hope” to resolve the Cuba situation. Two days before McCone’s memo, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told a National Security Council subcommittee “that Castro must be overthrown, preferably by provoking an internal revolt that would allow the United States [military] to intervene.”

US officials made two attempts to identify Cuban military leaders willing to lead a revolt: a CIA operation named AMTRUNK (which involved
New York Times
journalist Tad Szulc) and a CIA task force with the recently created Defense Intelligence Agency, an umbrella agency designed to coordinate the intelligence services of all US military branches. Neither was producing results, especially since most of the power in Cuba was concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of officials that Fidel trusted.