The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (38 page)

David Ferrie’s long-distance phone records show several collect calls placed to Ferrie from the Atlanta suburb of Marietta from August 16 to August 20; these calls might be related to Oswald’s trips. The FBI received reports of Oswald’s brief stopover in Atlanta from several individuals, including Hal Suit, the highly respected news director of Atlanta’s largest TV station. Some reports to the FBI mentioned Oswald leaving behind a pistol at the Holiday Inn in Marietta after he checked out. Oswald—or the person posing as Oswald—soon retrieved the pistol, but such an incident would tend to incriminate Oswald after JFK’s assassination. It might also be relevant that President Kennedy had originally planned to visit Atlanta, hold a motorcade, and give a major speech in the late summer of 1963—but local Democrats had urged him to cancel or scale back the appearance because of concerns about JFK’s stance on civil rights. Apparently, plans had already been made for Oswald to visit Atlanta en route to Chicago before JFK altered his plans.

Oswald apparently continued on to Chicago but first stopped at the University of Illinois at Urbana. An FBI memo says that Oswald reportedly inquired at the office of the Assistant Dean of Students about Cuban student organizations and asked the secretary “if . . . she had ever seen him on TV in New Orleans.” That helps date the visit after Oswald’s flurry of New Orleans publicity in mid-August. The FBI memo says that Oswald “expressed interest in any campus organization advocating humanist views.” Oswald seems to have made sure
that he would be remembered as being very interested in leftist causes. Oswald’s actions at the University of Illinois echo those observed at what is now the University of New Orleans. Historian Michael L. Kurtz, as a student in 1963, witnessed Guy Banister with Oswald there, both at various times debating students about integration.

Oswald’s trip north to Illinois might have included a visit to Canada. A report sent to the US Secret Service a week after JFK’s assassination from the “Senior Customs Representative, US Treasury Department Bureau of Customs, Montreal, Canada” said that “several persons have contacted this office recently and advised that Lee Oswald, suspected of assassinating the late President Kennedy, was seen distributing pamphlets entitled ‘Fair Play for Cuba,’ on St. Jacques and McGill Streets, Montreal, during the summer of 1963. Mr. Jean Paul Tremblay, Investigator, Customs and Excise, Montreal stated on November 27, 1963 that he received one of the abovementioned pamphlets from a man on St. Jacques Street, Montreal, believed to be in August 1963, and he is positive that this person was Oswald. Mr. Tremblay also stated that . . . the reason for paying special attention to [Oswald] was because he was working on cases involving Cuba at the time.” Canada, like Mexico, was a route for Americans to get into Cuba.

The point of the trip north by Oswald—or someone pretending to be him—was apparently to tie him to Vallee, thus linking Vallee to a seemingly pro-Castro, Communist radical. Oswald was already in the public record as having tried to infiltrate Bringuier’s anti-Castro group, so the plan might have been to link Oswald to the anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy Vallee to make it look as if Oswald had put Vallee up to shooting JFK. Of course, that link would need to be made public—with the help of Martino, Milteer, and Banister—only if Vallee were arrested for JFK’s assassination in Chicago.

The many parallels between Oswald and Vallee cited earlier, especially those from August to November 1963, indicate that whoever was manipulating Oswald’s movements was likely doing the same with Vallee. However, there was yet another young man—this time in Tampa—who had even more parallels to Oswald from August to November 1963: Gilberto Policarpo Lopez. Government files and sources show nineteen parallels in all, which indicate that Lopez was being manipulated as the perfect fall guy if the JFK assassination was in Tampa or if an additional patsy was needed for Dallas.

Oswald and Gilberto Lopez were both former defectors with a Russian connection in their background. Each had returned to the United States in 1962 from a Communist country. Both men had an unusual involvement with the small pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1963, after it became the subject of Congressional hearings and newspaper accounts. Both got into fistfights over seemingly pro-Castro statements, though at other times they made anti-Castro statements. Neither joined the Communist Party or regularly associated with American Communists. Both men were persons of interest to Naval Intelligence in 1963, and both were alleged by officials to be informants for a US government agency. Oswald and Lopez were about the same age, and both had left their wives a few months earlier, when each man had moved to a new city. Both lived in a city with much anti-Castro activity and a strong mob presence.

Both Oswald and Lopez attempted to get into Cuba in the fall of 1963 by going to Texas, crossing the border at Nuevo Laredo, and proceeding to Mexico City, where they hoped to make an air connection to Cuba. (CIA files show that undercover US intelligence agents also used this route.) Officials said that both Oswald and Lopez went at least part of the way by car, though neither man owned a car or had
a driver’s license or a known associate who drove him. CIA files show that each man was under Agency surveillance for at least part of his Mexico trip. And by November 1963, each would have a job in the vicinity of an upcoming JFK motorcade.
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FBI and government files confirm that Lopez left Tampa shortly after the attempt to assassinate JFK during his motorcade there. He went to Texas, where an unconfirmed newspaper account places him in Dallas on November 22, 1963. CIA and FBI files show that Lopez then crossed the border when it was reopened after JFK’s assassination and went to Mexico City. From there, unlike Oswald, Lopez would be successful in getting into Cuba.

Those parallels show that in the months before JFK’s murder, Oswald and Lopez were probably being manipulated by the same people, for the same purposes. Each man appeared to have some intelligence role, while neither realized that he was also subject to manipulation by the Mafia. By having Oswald visit Tampa shortly before the assassination—or at least planting information that he had—the Mafia also managed to link the two potential fall guys. This meant that much of the activity that seemed to incriminate one of the men could also be used to incriminate the other. The fact that both men seemed like troubled loners with no close friends would make it easy for the public to believe the two apparent malcontents had somehow conspired to vent their frustrations against JFK.

The Warren Commission got only fragments of information about Gilberto Lopez, though it did learn enough to write in one memo that Lopez was on a “mission” of some sort at the time of JFK’s
assassination. However, the Warren Commission was never told about the attempt to assassinate JFK in Tampa, so it apparently considered Lopez of only minor interest. The CIA, FBI, and military intelligence also withheld important information about Lopez from Congressional investigators in the 1970s. Memos from the House Select Committee on Assassinations show they knew they were being stonewalled by officials regarding Lopez, and they were unable to get the information they wanted before their terms expired.

Gilberto Policarpo Lopez was a young Cuban exile. In early 1963 Lopez lived south of Miami in the Florida Keys, but by the fall of 1963, he had moved to Tampa. Both areas were under the sway of godfather Santo Trafficante. Whereas most of the setting up of Oswald took place in Marcello’s territory, the unusual actions that appeared to link Lopez to JFK’s assassination were likely the result of manipulation by someone working for Trafficante. A likely candidate would be David Ferrie’s close associate in Florida named Eladio del Valle. Del Valle was a businessman and a Cuban exile involved in running narcotics for Santo Trafficante and was partners with Rolando Masferrer. (In 1967 del Valle was brutally murdered on the same night David Ferrie died.)

Trafficante surely knew the hysteria that would be generated if a Cuban exile was paraded in front of TV cameras as the supposed assassin of JFK had the President been killed during his Tampa motorcade. The same would be true if Lopez was found dead, either as a “suicide” after supposedly killing JFK or if shot by someone like Jack Ruby. The pressure on US officials to invade Cuba in retaliation would have been overwhelming—and Trafficante knew that the United States was poised and ready to do just that because so many of his associates had penetrated the JFK–Almeida coup plan.

IT’S IMPORTANT TO point out that while the massive weight of the evidence shows that Oswald was knowingly involved with US intelligence, the same is not necessarily true for Gilberto Lopez. A former chief of the Florida (Police) Intelligence Unit told me that Lopez was an informant for a US agency. But he might have been so unwittingly and not have known that a friend or associate was reporting his information to the agency. A friend or associate could have manipulated Lopez by playing on his hopes of getting a valid passport or for other reasons. Just as Oswald’s prospects were limited by his undesirable discharge (in case he ever decided to quit his covert activities before completing his mission), Lopez needed a valid US passport to freely travel between the United States and Cuba (where his family still lived, except for a brother who was in Russia).

From all the evidence I have seen—which includes every file on Lopez that has been released, material regarding attempts to get more of his files released, and an exclusive interview with his wife—I do not think Lopez had any knowing involvement in JFK’s assassination or Trafficante’s criminal activities. But he was the right person in the right place at the right time to be the perfect patsy for an attempt to kill JFK during his motorcade in Tampa.

Since it was just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, CIA assets Trafficante, Marcello, and Rosselli knew that if JFK was murdered in public and it quickly emerged that his killer had connections to Cuba and even Russia, high US officials could wind up facing two difficult choices, either of which would be good for the mob bosses. US officials could give in to a public outcry to retaliate against Cuba, which would serve to limit the murder investigation of JFK at a crucial time as the United States went to war. Or US officials could tamp down such speculation and limit a true, full investigation
of JFK’s murder to prevent calls for retaliation that could lead to World War III.

Historian and intelligence expert Dr. John Newman said, “It is now apparent that the World War III pretext for a national security cover-up was built into the fabric of the plot to assassinate President Kennedy.” If blamed for JFK’s murder, Oswald and Lopez would have been especially good at triggering “the World War III pretext for a national security cover-up,” but Vallee less so. However, the mob bosses—in particular Rosselli’s good friend and coconspirator David Morales—had one more potential “fall guy” who would at least appear to be in place in Chicago and in Dallas shortly before the attempts to kill JFK in those cities.

CIA documents say that a mysterious man from Cuba was reported in the Chicago area just prior to JFK’s planned motorcade there. The Cuban was named Miguel Casas Saez, aka Angel Dominguez Martinez, and he always seemed to be one tantalizing step ahead of the authorities. He was conveniently reported to be in Florida in the weeks before JFK’s Tampa motorcade. More ominously, CIA reports said that Saez was in Dallas when JFK was shot. He then fled to Mexico City, where a Cubana Airlines plane was held for him for five hours. Saez supposedly rode in the cockpit so the passengers wouldn’t see him. Thirdhand accounts by David Morales’s Cuban exile informants (code-named AMOTs) said the formerly poor Saez suddenly had money and American clothes after he returned to Cuba from Dallas. Like Oswald and Lopez, Saez also had a Russian connection: He had taken a Russian-language course and “speak[s] Russian quite well,” according to a CIA memo. That would have made it easy for Saez to talk with any of the thousands of Russian advisors and technicians still in Cuba in 1963.

The mysterious Cuban Saez was always reported to be in just the right place at the right time to trigger Newman’s “World War III pretext for a national security cover-up.” Later accounts show that the possibility that Saez and Lopez were Castro agents was a huge concern for the CIA’s powerful Chief of Counterintelligence, James Angleton.

It’s unclear now whether Saez was a real person or simply a creation of David Morales’s informants, but in 1963 and 1964, the CIA, the FBI, and other agencies thought he was real. However, though the Saez allegations concerned US officials in the crucial early period after JFK’s death, they eventually fell apart. When the initial report of the Cubana plane being held was finally declassified, it didn’t mention Saez at all. The most incriminating information in CIA reports was all thirdhand, from sources of questionable reliability whose names are still withheld today. But those sources worked for David Morales, who—by running covert operations at the huge Miami CIA station—was in the perfect position to feed the alarming reports into the CIA’s massive data collection system. Morales would have known how high US officials with access to the secret Saez reports would react after JFK’s murder.

If Saez was a real person, he might have simply been a Cuban on a low-level smuggling mission to the United States who was manipulated by David Morales or his associates so that his travels later looked suspicious. Having someone like Saez (or at least reports about such a person) and Lopez in Dallas would have been necessary for the mob bosses if evidence emerged soon after JFK’s murder that the President had been shot by more than one person or if something had happened to Oswald before the assassination.

Still more information falsely implicating Fidel in JFK’s murder—almost all of it linked to associates of Trafficante, David Morales,
Johnny Rosselli, or Bernard Barker—would emerge in the days, weeks, and months after the assassination. The Mafia chiefs knew those allegations were crucial to maintaining “the World War III pretext for a national security cover-up” that would protect Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli from close scrutiny.