The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (36 page)

President Kennedy, RFK, and other key officials in the Kennedy Administration were very concerned about Cuba and the 1964 election. William Attwood said in a memo that they needed to “remove the Cuban issue from the 1964 campaign.” Talks with other Kennedy aides show that John and Robert Kennedy shared that opinion, and it was one factor in scheduling the JFK–Almeida coup plan for December
1, 1963, a date confirmed in a memo by CIA Director John McCone and by RFK’s top exile aide, Harry Williams. That way, the Cuba situation would be resolved—one way or the other—before the official start of the campaign in January 1964. In addition, CIA files and Harry Williams said that after December 1, Cuban officials planned to institute a draft, which would dilute the loyalty of Commander Almeida’s army, allowing Cuban intelligence and other rival factions in the Cuban government to infiltrate his ranks. As Dean Rusk and a Kennedy aide explained to me, having the coup by December 1 was also necessary so that US troops wouldn’t be fighting in Cuba during the Christmas holidays and any US air support for the coup would be over before the Pearl Harbor anniversary on December 7.

What would happen if Fidel found out about the JFK–Almeida coup plan, or one of the less advanced efforts like AMTRUNK, and decided to retaliate against the United States in some way? That question was obviously on the minds of John and Robert Kennedy, who took steps to deal with just such a situation. Today, even most historians have no idea that in the days and weeks before JFK’s murder, Robert Kennedy had a secret subcommittee developing plans for what to do if a US official was assassinated.

The development of “contingency plans” for dealing with the possible “assassination of American officials” grew out of planning for the coup and involved many of the same officials, such as Colonel Alexander Haig, who worked for Army Secretary Cyrus Vance and his aide Joseph Califano. This planning had begun in September 1963, but since some of the officials working on these Cuba Contingency plans didn’t know about Almeida, they no doubt viewed the issue far differently, and with far less urgency, than the few who did. Only three of the many files this subcommittee generated have been declassified,
though I also spoke with two members of the Kennedy Administration who were familiar with the plans.

One of my sources was John H. Crimmins, Coordinator of Cuban Affairs for the US State Department. Crimmins worked on developing and writing the Cuba Contingency Plans but, like his boss Dean Rusk, had not been told about Commander Almeida. The other source was a Kennedy aide, who wishes to remain confidential, who saw the plans after they were drafted and who did know about Almeida and the imminent coup. While declassified plans show that the subcommittee believed the “assassination of American officials” to be “likely” in the fall of 1963, the subcommittee considered assassination attempts “unlikely in the US.” Members believed that if Fidel found out about US plans and decided to retaliate, he would risk assassinating an American official only outside the United States—for example, in a Latin American country.

RFK and the officials working on the plans, especially those who knew about Almeida, were considering how the United States should react if, for example, the US ambassador to Panama was assassinated and his murder appeared to be linked somehow to Cuba and the upcoming coup. One of Cyrus Vance’s memos about the coup stresses the importance of having certain types of “information . . . to enable the President to make” viable decisions so they could avoid any situation where the President “would lack essential, evaluated information . . . but would at the same time be under heavy pressure to respond quickly.” Robert Kennedy and the other officials didn’t want JFK to be under pressure from the public, the press, or Congress to take hasty action against Cuba if early reports pointed toward Cuban involvement in the death of a US official in Latin America. A quick US military attack against Cuba could provoke devastating retaliation from
Russia. Also, imagine the disaster if the United States started bombing Havana only to have evidence emerge proving the US official had been killed not by Fidel but in a routine crime.

To avoid those problems, the Kennedy aide cautiously indicated some of the conditions necessary for JFK to make an informed, reasoned response to the apparent assassination of a US official in Latin America. First, the United States would need to control and limit initial publicity to keep the news media from generating an outcry for an immediate military response against Cuba. To protect Almeida, any possible links between the assassination and the coup plan would have to be hidden from the press. US investigating agencies would need to take control of the investigation from local authorities as soon as possible, including gaining possession of important evidence. The autopsy would have to be conducted at a secure US military facility to ensure that information couldn’t be leaked to the press. All of this would give JFK the time and information needed to make an appropriate response.

Some aspects of what many call the cover-up regarding JFK’s assassination—from controlling news accounts to his controversial military autopsy—were thus actually planned weeks and months before JFK’s murder but were intended to manage a completely different situation. The thinking behind the Cuba Contingency plans, and the need to protect the secrecy of Almeida’s coup plan to preserve his life and to prevent a possible nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, is responsible for much of the secrecy that surrounds JFK’s murder, even today. In addition, because officials like Alexander Haig had spent months working on scenarios involving possible retaliation by Fidel against US officials, they would be extremely receptive to the Mafia’s fake “Castro did it” information after JFK’s murder.

Those inside and outside the CIA who would press the “Castro did it” line often point to remarks Fidel made to Associated Press reporter Daniel Harker in September 1963. In a talk with Harker in Havana, Castro condemned the exile raids against Cuba, which, despite denials to the press, were really backed by JFK. Harker wrote that Castro then said, “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves would not be safe.” Soon after Kennedy’s death—and even today—some claim that Castro’s remark was a threat to assassinate JFK, although the comment was not noted as such when the article first appeared.

Years later, Anthony Summers wrote that Castro told Congressional investigators that “he never intended his words to be taken as a physical threat against [any] individuals in the United States.” Instead, Fidel said “he probably meant to warn Washington that he knew of the plots against his own life and that it was ‘a very bad precedent’ which might ‘boomerang’ against its authors.” Fidel’s former head of State Security, Fabian Escalante, says that what Castro really said was, “American leaders should be careful because the [anti-Castro operations] were something nobody could control.” Given that some men involved in the Castro assassination plots, such as Morales and Rosselli, confessed to killing JFK, the Cuban dictator’s explanation makes sense, especially since those admissions weren’t revealed until years after Castro talked to the Congressional delegation. As several historians have pointed out, it would have made little sense for Fidel to do something that would risk having his country invaded in retaliation, just to make Lyndon Johnson President. While Summers notes that Fidel said that “any successor to President Kennedy was likely to be even tougher toward Cuba,” he also points out an even
more obvious argument that Castro did not make: “If Castro had really intended harm to President Kennedy, he would hardly have announced it to the [American] press two months in advance.”

Given the September 1963 timing of Fidel’s remarks, it’s important to reiterate that State Department official John Crimmins, who was working on the Cuba Contingency Plans soon after Fidel’s remarks, told me that he and the others on the subcommittee didn’t see Fidel’s remarks as a threat against JFK. He said Fidel’s comment had nothing to do with sparking the Cuba Contingency planning and that he felt Castro had no role in JFK’s death.

EVERYTHING WAS ALMOST set for the Kennedys’ exile leaders and groups involved in the coup plan: The Cuban American troops at Fort Benning were trained and ready, and one of the leaders of that group had been told about Commander Almeida. CIA memos confirm Harry Williams’s accounts of meeting with liberal exile leaders Manolo Ray and Eloy Menoyo to get them to fully commit to his operation. Until they did, they couldn’t be completely informed about Commander Almeida, though the CIA memo about Williams’s meeting with Ray contains a cryptic reference to Almeida.

Exile leaders Manuel Artime and Tony Varona did know about Commander Almeida, but both men were proving problematic. Artime increasingly tried to bypass Williams and go directly to Robert Kennedy, causing gradually escalating friction between Artime and Williams. Unknown to Williams, Artime was working on the CIA–Mafia plots, and key CIA officials were not only aware of Artime’s Mafia involvement, they also looked at using it as “cover” for the CIA supplying him weapons. At the same time, Tony Varona was leaking information about the coup to another Trafficante associate, former
Cuban President Carlos Prio. CIA memos show that Prio resented the fact that Williams—and not he—was leading the coup plan.

Yet another Trafficante associate, Bernard Barker, had helped CIA officer E. Howard Hunt with the initial payment of $50,000 to Almeida (out of a promised $500,000—almost $3 million in today’s dollars), to help get Almeida’s wife and children out of Cuba on a seemingly innocent pretext.

Rosselli had his own pipeline to information about the coup plan, via his increasingly close friend David Morales. Morales was also involved in the CIA–Mafia plots and the related Castro assassination plotting with disgruntled Cuban official Rolando Cubela.

With all those connections in place, Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli were ready for their first attempt to kill President Kennedy, during his upcoming motorcade through Chicago. The other elements they would need to put their plan into effect were experienced hit men, someone to be quickly blamed for the hit, and someone to make sure the fall guy was swiftly eliminated.

REVEALED HERE FOR the first time is how Carlos Marcello arranged for two of the hit men he used to kill President Kennedy. In 1985 Marcello confided to his cellmate, FBI informant Jack Van Laningham, that “two dagos came from Italy” to act as gunmen in JFK’s assassination. Marcello explained that the gunmen first came to Canada, then into Michigan. The godfather made that revelation in the cell he shared with Van Laningham while the FBI secretly recorded Marcello’s remarks via a bugged transistor radio that Van Laningham had given Marcello.

Van Laningham’s revelation from Marcello has never been published or revealed anywhere before its appearance in this book. It’s
important to note that six years before Van Laningham told me about Marcello’s claim, author Charles Brandt published a book that helps support what Van Laningham said. Brandt’s book was about a mob assassin and Teamster associate of Jimmy Hoffa named Frank Sheeran. It was titled
I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa
. In the 2004 book, Sheeran talked about:

how Carlos Marcello liked to send to Sicily for war orphans with no families. They would get smuggled in from Canada, like through Windsor, right across the water from Detroit. The Sicilian war orphans would think they had to take care of a matter and then they could stay in America . . . they would [kill someone] and then they would get in the getaway car and be taken somewhere and [they would be killed] and nobody back in Sicily would miss them. Because they were orphans and had no family there would be no vendettas.

Marcello told Van Laningham that the two gunmen came into the United States through “Selfridge” but provided no other information about that locale. There is only one Selfridge in Michigan. It is an Air National Guard station just north of Detroit and across the bay from Canada. It’s interesting to note that Selfridge is only a few dozen miles from the restaurant where Jimmy Hoffa would later disappear. It is also not far from the Windsor border crossing that Sheeran said Marcello used for his hit men from Italy.

Bringing the gunmen into the United States through Canada and then Michigan is significant for two reasons. First, that was part of a heroin smuggling route through Montreal used by Marcello’s French Connection associates. The Montreal heroin ring also ran an
immigration and illegal-identity racket for “supplying false papers”—what would be called identity theft today. In addition to smuggling, the ring was also used for new Mafia recruits, immigrants fresh from Italy and Sicily who needed cover identities. The illegal-identity part of the heroin ring was run by three Mafiosi, including two longtime associates of Michel Victor Mertz, Marcello’s heroin partner. By bringing the two gunmen in through that route, they could easily be supplied with hard-to-trace cover identities. Second, it’s possible they were brought into the United States via Canada—instead of someplace closer to Marcello’s territory—because they were going to be used in the attempt to assassinate JFK in Chicago.

Years before Van Laningham and Frank Sheeran made their revelations, Marcello biographer John H. Davis described a similar scenario based on his extensive research into Marcello’s method of operating. In 1989 he wrote that “the individuals who actually performed the assassination [for Marcello] would have come from out of state or from outside the country . . . they would have accomplished their mission and quickly left the country.”

Carlos Marcello didn’t tell Van Laningham exactly when the hit men came into the United States, so it’s unclear if they made it to Chicago or if they went straight to New Orleans after the Chicago attempt was called off. It’s also likely they weren’t the only shooters but simply the ones provided by Marcello. There were three cities planned for the assassination—Chicago, Tampa, and Dallas—and three fall guys to take the blame: Vallee, Lopez, and Oswald, one for each of the mob bosses (Rosselli, Trafficante, and Marcello). Given the long period of careful planning, and making sure that even backup plans had backups, it’s likely the same was true for the gunmen. It would have made sense to have at least two teams of two shooters
in case something unexpected happened to one or two of the shooters before JFK’s assassination. Over the years, seriously suggested or rumored shooters have included Trafficante’s enforcer Herminio Diaz, his heroin partner and acknowledged assassin Michel Victor Mertz, Chicago hit man Charles Nicoletti, and one or two of Rosselli’s highly trained Cuban exile sharpshooters.