The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (55 page)

Even as RFK loyalists pushed for a Commission to investigate JFK’s murder, Hoover and the FBI continued their investigation, which would later form the basis for much of the Commission’s work. However, as mentioned in
Chapter Two
, author Henry Hurt found that an analysis of FBI documents eventually provided to the Warren Commission “showed that at least 60 witnesses claimed that the FBI in some way altered what the witnesses had reported,” and more witnesses have reported discrepancies since that time.

In addition, in at least two instances, the FBI simply rewrote memos to completely change their meaning—something an FBI agent would do only on orders from the highest authority. We know this only because the National Archives eventually released the original, unaltered memos. In one case, a November 27, 1963, FBI memo about Ruby originally cited his link to Dallas mob boss Joe Civello. But in the version the Warren Commission published, the final three paragraphs of the memo, which cover Civello—and his ties to narcotics—are completely missing.

In another instance of FBI document tampering, the FBI was trying to make the case that Oswald used brown paper from the Book Depository to wrap the rifle he allegedly carried to work on the day JFK was shot. The published version of a November 30, 1963, FBI memo says that the Book Depository paper was “found to have the same observable characteristics as the brown paper bag” found on the sixth floor after the shooting. However, the National Archives eventually released the original version of the same FBI memo, which said the Book Depository paper was “found not to be identical with the paper gun case” found on the sixth floor. The bottom line is that Hoover was using national-security concerns to build a case against Oswald, avoid Ruby’s Mafia ties, and hide anything that might embarrass him or the FBI.

Once President Johnson had been persuaded to appoint a Presidential Commission to investigate JFK’s murder, LBJ pulled out all the stops in telling men like Senator Richard Russell why they should join the Warren Commission. LBJ told him, “We’ve got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.” President Johnson did the same with Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom he wanted to chair the Commission. The Warren Commission’s real purpose was to end speculation about foreign involvement in JFK’s murder, which it eventually did.

The creation of the Warren Commission was announced on November 29, 1963. According to historian Michael Kurtz, “Richard Helms personally persuaded Lyndon Johnson to appoint former CIA Director Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission.” The other members were Georgia Senator Richard Russell, Kentucky Senator John
Cooper, Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs, Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford, and disarmament official John J. McCloy.

However, before the Commission could begin gathering evidence, their final conclusion was preordained when J. Edgar Hoover leaked the FBI’s own report and conclusions to the press on December 8, 1963. Hoover used his extensive media connections to make sure the FBI’s conclusions—that Oswald acted alone, Ruby acted alone, the two had no connection, and there was no conspiracy in JFK’s death—became front-page news.

At that point, the Commission couldn’t really come to any other conclusion, since it would have to depend on Hoover’s FBI for most of their investigative work. In addition, one of the seven men appointed to the Commission, Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford, went to one of Hoover’s top aides, who wrote that Ford told him “he would keep me thoroughly advised as to the activities of the Commission. He stated this would have to be on a confidential basis.” Five days later, Ford started delivering on his promise and was soon telling his FBI contact that “two members of the Commission [were] still not convinced that the President had been shot from the sixth floor window of the Texas Book Depository.”

Allen Dulles knew a great deal about US efforts to assassinate Fidel using Trafficante, Rosselli, and Marcello, but he didn’t tell the rest of the Commission. However, Earl Warren’s son indicated that the Chief Justice learned something about the plots, and Gerald Ford indicated years later that he’d become aware of them as well, though there is no way to know how much they knew or if it was accurate.

Later, Chief Justice Warren and Congressman Ford were the only members of the Warren Commission who went to Dallas to interview Jack Ruby. They even denied the request of the Commission’s
expert on Ruby to accompany them. When Ruby begged Warren and Ford to take him to Washington for questioning away from Dallas, they refused.

CARLOS MARCELLO AND Santo Trafficante didn’t want more situations like the Ferrie investigation, so even as the headlines were full of the FBI investigation and talk of the Commission, the godfathers’ men quietly supplied a steady stream of stories implying that Castro had ordered JFK’s death. This kept national security concerns alive in Washington, and the “Castro did it” stories of some—like John Martino—even contained hints of the JFK–Almeida coup plan. Other mob associates linked to such stories include Rolando Masferrer, Frank Fiorini, and Manuel Artime. The eager audience for these stories included officials such as CIA Director John McCone, J. Edgar Hoover, and Lyndon Johnson.

The stories spread by John Martino were especially provocative—and accurate, about matters the public wouldn’t officially learn about for decades. Appearing in small-market newspapers and radio broadcasts, Martino’s stories blamed Castro for JFK’s murder while hinting at the JFK–Almeida coup plan. They were just detailed enough to draw the attention of US officials but not enough to become major news stories. The stories helped to force top officials into a continuing cover-up about JFK’s assassination, in order to prevent a public outcry to invade Cuba and to avoid exposing Commander Almeida.

Martino’s stories began just two days after Oswald’s murder, when David Ferrie was essentially cleared of involvement in JFK’s death. The more national security pressure the Mafia bosses could keep on officials to stifle the investigation the better, and the more Oswald looked like a Communist working for Fidel Castro, the more
Jack Ruby looked like a patriot (and not a mobster). Martino was touring the country as a prominent member of the far-right John Birch Society Speakers Bureau, ostensibly to promote his book
I Was Castro’s Prisoner
. It’s unlikely that David Atlee Phillips or others in the CIA were behind Martino’s publicity efforts, because Martino’s book actually mentioned the name of Phillips’s associate, David Morales, a fact that the CIA wanted to keep secret.

Martino’s phony stories started out mildly, claiming that Oswald had gone to Cuba in the fall of 1963 and had passed out pro-Castro literature in Miami and New Orleans. Those tales brought Martino a visit from the FBI on November 29, but he refused to identify his sources.

An article under Martino’s name appeared in the December 21, 1963, issue of the right-wing journal
Human Events
, in which Martino took credit for revealing that “the Kennedy Administration planned to eliminate Fidel Castro . . . through a putsch, [and] the plan involved a more or less token invasion from Central America to be synchronized with the coup. A left-wing coalition government was to be set up, [and] the plan involved [the] US [military] occupation of Cuba.” At the time, that was more than many high-ranking US officials in the Johnson administration knew about the coup plan.

Martino knew about the involvement of Manolo Ray’s JURE exile group and wrote in the article that “Oswald made . . . approaches to JURE, another organization of Cuban freedom fighters, but was rejected.” As previously noted, three months earlier Martino and Masferrer had been linked to the attempt to smear Ray’s group by tying it to Oswald via Dallas JURE member Silvia Odio. When Martino’s article was published, only the FBI and a handful of Odio’s closest family and friends knew about Oswald’s visit to her in Dallas, and nothing about it had appeared in the press.

In Martino’s first major article, he only hinted that Oswald was working for Fidel Castro when he killed JFK. The following month, Martino revealed new details about the coup plan and implicated Fidel more directly, in a January 30, 1964,
Memphis Press-Scimitar
article headlined “Oswald Was Paid Gunman for Castro, Visitor Says.” It quotes John Martino as saying, “Lee Harvey Oswald was paid by Castro to assassinate President Kennedy,” and claiming that the murder was in retaliation for JFK’s “plan to get rid of Castro.” Martino described JFK’s top-secret coup plan with remarkable precision, saying: “There was to be another invasion and uprising in Cuba . . . and the Organization of American States . . . was to go into Cuba [and help] control the country until an election could be set up.” Martino even knew that “since the death of Kennedy, the work on an invasion has virtually stopped.”

It’s not hard to imagine the consternation Martino’s increasingly provocative articles caused among high-ranking officials in Washington. They attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, since FBI agents interviewed Martino yet again on February 15, 1964. In an era when Presidents and Congress treated Hoover and his FBI with deference, Martino basically thumbed his nose at the agents, declaring that “President Kennedy was engaged in a plot to overthrow the Castro regime by preparing another invasion attempt against Cuba.” The frustrated FBI agents wrote that “Martino refused to divulge the sources of his information or how they might know what plans President Kennedy might have had.”

Frank Fiorini, the future Watergate burglar under the name Frank Sturgis, was another Trafficante associate leaking information to the press implicating Fidel Castro in JFK’s murder. However, none of these other leaks hinted at the JFK–Almeida coup plan, and Martino’s
stories were unique in that regard, probably because (by his own admission) Martino had actually been part of the assassination plot. In addition, Martino knew Marcello, Rosselli, and Trafficante, while Fiorini was simply a bagman for Trafficante. Fiorini’s information implicating Fidel and the Cubans appeared in a Florida newspaper on November 26, 1963. In the article, Fiorini “claimed Oswald had been in touch with Cuban intelligence officials . . . and had been in touch with Castro agents in Miami.” The FBI immediately interviewed Fiorini, who maintained he’d been misquoted. Later, Fiorini admitted he’d received his information from John Martino.

Other efforts to link Oswald and Ruby to Fidel were less sophisticated, though they sometimes echoed the information in the memo that so alarmed Alexander Haig. These additional efforts range from the fake “Pedro Charles” letter mailed to Oswald from Havana on November 28, 1963, to stories linking Ruby to Cuban plots. It’s amazing how many dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pages of follow-up FBI and CIA memos were generated because of one or two obviously fake letters or stories. It’s likely that even more phony information implicating Fidel, with hundreds of pages of official follow-up memos, remains unreleased.

NATIONAL SECURITY CONCERNS—that Castro might have been behind JFK’s death in response to US actions against him—played a key role in the actions of LBJ, Hoover, and others. Hoover had almost certainly been told at least in general terms about the coup plan, by his good friend LBJ. As former FBI agent Harry Whidbee told
Vanity Fair
, “We were effectively told, ‘They’re only going to prove [Oswald] was the guy who did it. There were no co-conspirators, and there was no international conspiracy.’” An FBI supervisor at the time confirmed to
Vanity Fair
that “[w]ithin days, we could say the [JFK] investigation was over. . . . The idea that Oswald had a confederate or was part of a group or a conspiracy was definitely enough to place a man’s career in jeopardy.”

Government officials conducted many secret investigations into JFK’s murder, and not just because of all the phony mob-linked stories implicating Fidel Castro. Many leads and individuals couldn’t be investigated publicly or revealed to the Warren Commission, both for national security reasons and to avoid exposing the unauthorized operations and intelligence failures of various agencies and officials. The CIA, Naval Intelligence, LBJ (he asked Richard Helms to conduct one for him), and the FBI all had their own internal, secret investigations of the JFK assassination. However, their results weren’t shared between, or often even within, agencies.

As detailed in
Chapter Two
, my Naval Intelligence source said that after Oswald died, they quit shredding and sanitizing his surveillance files and began a lengthy investigation into the assassination. Naval Intelligence officially concluded that “Oswald was incapable of masterminding the assassination or of doing the actual shooting.” But that investigation was not shared with most officials inside Naval Intelligence, and there is no indication it was ever shared with other branches of the military, the Joint Chiefs, or President Johnson.

Richard Helms had more suspicions about the possible involvement of CIA personnel in JFK’s death than he ever acknowledged to the Warren Commission or to any of the later Congressional investigations. In a rarely noted television interview in 1992, Helms admitted that “we checked [to] be sure that nobody [with the CIA] had been in Dallas on that particular day [of JFK’s assassination].” Helms said they not only checked “at the time” but later, “when the
Warren Commission was sitting.” Those investigations have never been released, so there’s no way to know if Helms suspected Barker or other agents.

Helms had the CIA conduct its own internal investigation into Oswald and JFK’s assassination, a little-known fact first uncovered years later by Congressional investigators. Helms initially appointed an AMWORLD veteran, CIA officer John Whitten, to head the Agency’s secret investigation, but as soon as Whitten asked Helms for “files on Oswald’s Cuba-related activities,” he was taken off the JFK investigation and reassigned. In Congressional testimony long after the fact, Whitten said that Helms hadn’t told him anything about the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Fidel, and he was “appalled” when he heard about them twelve years later. Whitten also wasn’t allowed to see the files on Oswald that CIA agent Hunter Leake had delivered from the CIA’s New Orleans office to Helms, or told about the assassination aspect of the Rolando Cubela operation.