The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (42 page)

The attempt to kill JFK in Tampa was withheld from the Warren Commission and all later government investigating committees—until I told the JFK Assassination Records Review Board about it, in writing, on November 24, 1994. According to the Review Board’s Final Report, just two months later, “January 1995, the Secret Service destroyed Presidential protection survey reports for some of President Kennedy’s trips in the fall of 1963,” including Tampa. The Secret Service informed the Board a week after it destroyed the records, “when the Board was drafting its request for additional information.” That destruction apparently broke the law, since the 1992 JFK Act that created the Review Board had required agencies to preserve all relevant records. However, when the Secret Service destroyed records for JFK’s Tampa trip in 1995, Commander Almeida was still alive in Cuba—and his secret work for JFK not been publicly exposed—giving the Secret Service a possible national security reason for its actions.

After JFK’s death, the Tampa threat still could not be exposed to the general public since there was still the chance that Oswald or other suspects might prove to have connections to Castro or the coup plan. The public’s faith in the Secret Service, already at a low ebb after Dallas, would have been shaken to the core if weeks or months after JFK’s death it was revealed that the agency had covered up an assassination attempt in Tampa that had so many parallels with Dallas.

JFK GAVE SEVERAL speeches in Tampa, including one at the International Inn, where—four days later—Santo Trafficante would publicly toast JFK’s death. After JFK concluded his Tampa trip, a
member of the Tampa Police motorcycle detail told the
St. Petersburg Times
that “Chief of Police J. P. Mullins introduced each of us to the President,” who was no doubt grateful that he had survived the motorcade unharmed.

The ex-chief of the Florida Intelligence Unit told me that Santo Trafficante had called off the attempt to kill JFK shortly before the President’s arrival. He explained that Trafficante’s man in the Tampa Police Department, Sergeant Jack de la Llana, “was in the motorcade meetings and was feeding information to Trafficante at the time.” The official source, who also helped with JFK’s security, said it was “likely that de la Llana could have tipped off Trafficante about the [security] plans” and, once the plot became known, about the “threat alerts.”

Chief Mullins said his department provided much information to the FBI at the time of the Tampa threat. However, those documents have never surfaced in declassified FBI files. In fact, the declassified Tampa field office FBI file from the time of JFK’s trip at the National Archives makes hardly any mention of JFK’s trip to Tampa, indicating that Bureau files related to the threat were considered highly sensitive and filed separately.

The sheriff of a county adjacent to Tampa confirmed to the
Tampa Tribune
—in the small article that slipped out the day after JFK’s murder—that officers had been “warned about ‘a young man’ who had threatened to kill the President during that trip.” In the article, Chief Mullins mentioned another man at large, identified as a threat, and wondered “if the . . . two may have followed the Presidential caravan to Dallas.” Chief Mullins didn’t know at the time that Gilberto Lopez had indeed headed to Texas, reportedly Dallas, or that two more men investigated for JFK’s murder—involved with Trafficante’s
drug network and described shortly—were also headed from Florida to Dallas in the coming days.

ON THE EVENING of November 18, the President flew to Miami and gave his most important speech, with lines directed at Commander Almeida and his allies in Cuba. Those carefully crafted sentences were also designed so they would not upset JFK’s back-channel negotiations with Fidel. In his speech, JFK proclaimed:

What now divides Cuba from my country . . . is the fact that a small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. They have made Cuba a victim of foreign imperialism. . . . This, and this alone, divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible. Once this barrier is removed, we will be ready and anxious to work with the Cuban people.

The following day several newspapers trumpeted those lines almost too clearly. The
Dallas Times Herald
said, “Kennedy Virtually Invites Cuban Coup”; the
Miami Herald
said, “Kennedy Invites Coup”; and the
New York Times
proclaimed, “Kennedy says US will aid Cuba once Cuban sovereignty is restored under a non-communist government.”

Commander Almeida was satisfied with JFK’s remarks in Miami and communicated that to Harry Williams. Declassified files show that in the days following Almeida’s response to JFK’s speech, Robert Kennedy had his final meetings in Washington with Manuel Artime and Harry Williams before the coup. Robert Kennedy arranged
for Harry Williams to have a crucial meeting with CIA officials on the morning of November 22, 1963, as later confirmed by the
Washington Post
.

After JFK returned to Washington, he expressed his relief at surviving the trip to his close aide David Powers. According to Kennedy biographer Ralph Martin, JFK told Powers, “Thank God nobody wanted to kill me today!” JFK explained that an assassination “would be tried by someone with a high-power rifle and a telescopic sight during a downtown parade when there would be so much noise and confetti that nobody would even be able to point and say, ‘It came from that window.’”

After JFK’s Tampa motorcade and Miami speech, John and Robert Kennedy could breathe a sigh of relief as they looked ahead to JFK’s upcoming trip to Texas. They knew of no active threat in Texas as there had been in Chicago and Tampa. Moreover, Dallas didn’t have a large Cuban exile population to worry about, as did Tampa and Chicago.

CHIEF MULLINS WONDERED if “two [of the Tampa suspects] may have followed the Presidential caravan to Dallas,” and there is a well-documented account of two men and a woman doing just that. The woman was Rose Cheramie (one of many aliases used by Melba Christine Marcades), a member of the lowest rung of the Mertz–Marcello–Trafficante heroin network. Cheramie was a sometime B-girl, prostitute, and heroin courier for Ruby.

On November 21, 1963, Rose Cheramie had been dumped on the side of the road by two men she was riding with from Florida. She was eventually taken into custody by Louisiana State Police Lieutenant Francis Fruge, who drove her to East Louisiana State Hospital to be
treated for heroin withdrawal. Cheramie told Fruge that she and her two male companions had been on their way to Dallas, where the men were going to “kill Kennedy.” Her remarks were also heard by physicians at the hospital, including Victor Weiss, head of the hospital’s Psychiatry Department, who said that on Thursday, November 21, “Cheramie was absolutely sure Kennedy was going to be assassinated in Dallas on Friday and kept insisting on it over and over again to the doctors and nurses who were attending her.” According to Dr. Weiss, Cheramie said that “word was out in the New Orleans underworld that the contract on Kennedy had been let,” and Dr. Weiss assumed she was referring to Carlos Marcello’s organization. Cheramie would later be proven an accurate informant regarding Marcello’s part in the French Connection ring, but at this time no one was taking her seriously. It’s ironic that a woman who was one of the lowest members of Marcello’s crime empire came so close to exposing part of the godfather’s plot, which could have saved JFK’s life.

The man at the highest levels of that heroin network, Michel Victor Mertz, had been traveling in America in 1963, sometimes under his own name—most recently in October—and sometimes under the name of “Jean Souetre,” an old associate from a mission that Mertz had undertaken for French Intelligence several years earlier. Mertz, who won the French Legion of Honor for killing twenty Nazis for the French Resistance in World War II, sometimes did work for French Intelligence to avoid prosecution for his crimes.

Jean Souetre, the alias Mertz used in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and in the days before, was the name of a fugitive French officer who in 1962 had participated in the attempted assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle. This attempt was more serious than the one Mertz had foiled a year earlier, since Souetre’s group was able to
hit de Gaulle’s car with numerous bullets. The French President survived, and the incident inspired Frederick Forsyth’s novel
The Day of the Jackal
. Souetre was one of several men imprisoned for the attempt, though he later escaped.

Jean Souetre himself did not travel to America in the 1960s, and on November 22, 1963, the real Souetre was in Barcelona, Spain, and has witnesses to prove it. On the other hand, INS records provided to the French government show that Mertz traveled frequently to America in 1963 and before as part of his heroin-smuggling activities.

“Souetre” was a loaded name for Mertz to use as his own, since the real Souetre had met with—and sought support from—the CIA in May 1963 in Europe. Souetre had even been the subject of a memo by Richard Helms in the summer of 1963. Former Senate investigator Bud Fensterwald found that “the FBI had traced [the man they thought was] Souetre to Dallas a day before the assassination and then lost him.” The fact that Mertz was using the identity of a wanted French Presidential assassin, recently tied to the CIA, was sure to generate fireworks when his alias surfaced as being in Dallas when JFK was shot.

*
My own review of all the evidence shows that if Lopez did have contact with organized crime associates, he was being manipulated and was not knowingly working for the Mafia.

CHAPTER 14

JFK Is Assassinated in Dallas

I
N THE DAYS before the President’s trip to Dallas, John and Robert Kennedy were dealing with matters related to their upcoming coup in Cuba. Richard Helms had shown RFK and JFK a Cuban rifle from a “three-ton Cuban arms cache left by terrorists on a Venezuelan beach, as well as blueprints for a coup [by Castro] against” the president of Venezuela, according to historian Michael Beschloss. Helms was no fan of JFK and RFK’s secret peace feelers with Castro, so this was probably his attempt to short-circuit any peace negotiations and to cover himself if his unauthorized CIA–Mafia plots to kill Fidel were uncovered. A later US military investigation by Lt. Col. Alexander Haig and Joseph Califano—both working for Army Secretary Cyrus Vance—concluded that “many of the items found were in fact of US origin.” Even veteran CIA officer Joseph B. Smith would write in his memoirs that he “was not too impressed with this evidence of the Venezuelan guerrillas’ intended use of the arms. It sounded to me as though we might have manufactured it.”

Smith’s memoirs—written decades before the JFK–Almeida coup plan was first exposed—also contained an interesting remark he heard in 1964 from CIA official Desmond FitzGerald. Without providing any details about how it would have been accomplished, FitzGerald
told him, “If Jack Kennedy had lived . . . I can assure you we would have gotten rid of Castro by last Christmas [1963].” Even within the CIA, little more than a handful of people knew about Commander Almeida, but FitzGerald was one of them.

Robert Kennedy celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday on November 20, 1963, and shortly after that had his last meeting with Harry Williams. RFK had arranged for Williams to meet on Friday, November 22, with a group of CIA officials for a final planning meeting for the Almeida coup. After a session that would stretch from morning to afternoon, Williams would leave for Miami that night. From there, he would be flown to the US Naval Base at Guantánamo on November 23, and from there slip into Castro’s Cuba, to meet personally with Almeida and await the coup on December 1. The ten days from November 22 to December 1 would essentially be the countdown for the JFK–Almeida coup plan. Once Harry Williams was inside Cuba around November 26, there might be no turning back for JFK and RFK, since secure communication with Williams at that point might be impossible.

RFK appears to have been close to finally telling some Cabinet officials—including Dean Rusk—about Commander Almeida, letting them know that the coup plans they’d been working on for months were about to be put into effect. Responding to a still classified memo RFK had written on November 20 about Cuba, JFK’s National Security advisor McGeorge Bundy replied to RFK by saying, “The Cuban problem is ready for discussion now . . . so we will call a meeting as soon as we can find a day when the right people are in town.” JFK was getting ready to leave for Texas the next day, while Rusk and several other cabinet members would be flying to the Far East on the same day. Early the following week, around November 25, would be
the soonest all the administration’s top officials could be gathered. That may well have been the meeting at which officials like Rusk and McNamara would finally be told about Almeida, since at that point the coup would have been less than a week away.

JFK and RFK had been hoping for a breakthrough with their peace feelers, but progress was slow. A November 19, 1963, White House memo says that Special UN envoy William Attwood was dealing with Fidel’s doctor, who’d wanted Attwood “to come to Cuba” but Attwood had “replied this was impossible for the present.” He wanted Castro’s doctor to come to New York, but the doctor couldn’t make the trip. Instead he proposed having Attwood talk to Cuba’s envoy at the UN. Even this was just to have “preliminary talks . . . for the discussion of an agenda” for actual negotiations. The ball was left “in Castro’s court,” but the slow pace must have frustrated JFK and RFK, especially with the December 1 coup date looming.

The Kennedy brothers had no way of knowing that their other secret peace initiative was finally starting to produce results. In Cuba, French journalist Jean Daniel finally had the meeting with Castro he’d been waiting for since late October. According to Arthur Schlesinger, after “spending three fruitless weeks in Havana,” Daniel was surprised by a visit from Fidel Castro at 10:00 p.m., the night before the journalist was scheduled to leave Cuba. Daniel and Castro talked until 4:00 a.m., and Daniel conveyed Kennedy’s wishes from late October about his desire for dialogue. The two men arranged to have lunch again, to continue their discussion—on November 22, 1963. Not only is the date ironic, but the location of their lunch was to be Castro’s “villa at the beach,” at Varadero—the very place one later AMWORLD document identifies as a good place to assassinate Castro, since it was near the home of CIA asset
Rolando Cubela.
*
However, with no US embassy in Cuba or other secure way to communicate, JFK and RFK had no way of learning that Daniel had met with Fidel or that he was scheduled to meet with him again.