The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (56 page)

After Whitten was removed from the investigation, Helms replaced him with CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, under whom the internal CIA investigation seems to have been designed more to hide information than to uncover it. Angleton heard all of the claims from Mexico City that Oswald had killed JFK on Fidel Castro’s orders and had access to other incendiary reports, like those concerning shadowy Cuban agent Miguel Cases Saez and young Cuban exile Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, both of whom went from Texas to Mexico City and then to Cuba. Not surprisingly, the paranoid Angleton concluded that Fidel had killed JFK and that both Saez and Lopez were involved, according to intelligence journalist Joseph Trento. Fifteen years later, when Congressional investigators got to see many of the files about Saez and Lopez, they exposed the numerous flaws in Angleton’s conclusion.

In December 1963, one CIA memo says that President Johnson received a secret Agency report about Oswald and JFK’s assassination. Angleton’s conclusions probably fed Johnson’s belief that Fidel had orchestrated JFK’s assassination. In addition, Helms made Angleton his key contact with the Warren Commission, both for providing it information and for withholding material Helms didn’t want the Commission to see. Hence, the Warren Commission saw nothing about the JFK–Almeida coup plan, AMWORLD, the surveillance of Oswald, any of his intelligence activities, or anything else that might have triggered a real investigation or cost Helms his job.

Richard Helms mysteriously dumped exile leader Tony Varona in January 1964 for unknown reasons. Congressional investigators found that “Varona . . . had to leave Miami in early 1964 and move to New York to seek employment,” and a CIA memo from August 1964 noted a
New York Times
article about Varona headlined “Cuban Anti-Castro Chief by Day Selling Cars in Jersey by Night.” Varona’s quick fall from grace raises suspicions that someone in the CIA such as Helms, or perhaps even RFK, suspected that Varona was involved somehow in JFK’s death. Helms had access to the Varona–Chicago Mafia payoff memos and would have known about Varona’s long ties to Rosselli and Trafficante through the CIA–Mafia plots. Peter Dale Scott notes that an “agreement was in force from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, exempting the CIA from a statutory requirement to report (to the Justice Department) any criminal activity by any of its employees or assets.” If Helms knew or suspected that Varona—or other CIA assets—had any involvement in JFK’s death, he might simply have dealt with it himself.

It’s important to point out that one of the first things Helms would do after becoming CIA Director a few years later would be to
fire another Trafficante associate, Bernard Barker, because—as Helms later testified—Barker “was involved in certain gambling and criminal elements.”

Robert Kennedy would also have close associates conduct secret investigations of his brother’s murder for much of the rest of his life. For months after his brother’s murder, associates described him as being “shattered,” with some indicating he might have in some way blamed himself for his brother’s death. RFK’s secret investigations started the day JFK died, when the Attorney General called “Julius Draznin in Chicago, an expert on union corruption for the National Labor Relations Board,” according to author David Talbot. He said that RFK “asked Draznin to look into whether there was any Mafia involvement in the killing of his brother.” Draznin turned in his report three days after Ruby had shot Oswald. Draznin’s report “detailed Ruby’s labor racketeering activities [and] wide syndicate contacts.” RFK later said that “when he saw Ruby’s phone records, ‘The list was almost a duplicate of the people I called before the [Senate] Rackets Committee.’”

Robert Kennedy conducted his own secret investigation of JFK’s murder, using Walter Sheridan, the head of his “Get Hoffa Squad.” Sheridan’s widow later confirmed that her husband and RFK worked together on the secret inquiry. John Davis independently confirmed that Walter Sheridan had “conducted an informal investigation and concluded . . . Marcello might well have been involved.” According to Sheridan’s son, the search left Sheridan “convinced that President Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy.”

Those investigations are probably why, by 1966, RFK would tell his friend Richard Goodwin that he thought “that mob guy in New Orleans”—Marcello—was behind his brother’s death, as Goodwin
told me. The following year, after David Ferrie’s name finally surfaced as a suspect in JFK’s murder, RFK had his press aide, Frank Mankiewicz, conduct yet another secret investigation. Mankiewicz said he “came to the conclusion that there was some sort of conspiracy, probably involving the mob, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and maybe rogue CIA agents.” But when he tried to tell RFK, “it was like he just couldn’t focus on it. He’d get this look of pain, or more like numbness, on his face. It just tore him apart.”

In late 1963, that numbing pain was still constant for RFK, but he seemed determined to do something about Cuba and the coup plan. He seems to have become confident that the coup plan with Almeida was still secure enough to continue. My source, John H. Crimmins—Coordinator of Cuban Affairs for the US State Department—told me that “nothing ever surfaced” to make him think Castro was involved in JFK’s murder, even after it “was looked at over the course of the days and weeks” after JFK’s death. He felt the same way even decades later. Also, a formerly “top secret, eyes only” memo “from Gordon Chase of the National Security Council Staff” implies that McGeorge Bundy, the “President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs,” was able to provide some type of “assurances re Oswald” on December 3, 1963 which indicated that Oswald was not a Castro agent.

Commander Almeida was still safe and undetected, but the same wasn’t true for one of his associates. A couple of rumors about the Almeida coup plan were reported to the CIA in the days after JFK’s death, and it’s possible that Fidel’s agents in Miami might have heard the same or similar rumors. Perhaps out of caution, Commander Almeida left Cuba, in a way that would not arouse suspicion. On Thursday, November 28, 1963, a CIA memo was sent from the Miami station to McCone, reporting the “departure [of] 2 Britannias
[airliners], probably for Algeria, with 170 Cubans aboard headed by Juan Almeida.”

Commander Almeida’s information, or his instinct, was correct because just two days later, on Saturday, November 30, a CIA memo revealed that “a Western diplomat . . . had learned [from someone in the Cuban government] that Che Guevara was alleged to be under house arrest for plotting to overthrow Castro.” This wasn’t just some rumor off the street because the CIA said the “source” of the information about Che’s involvement “in an anti-Castro plot” was a “trained observer of proven reliability who is a member of the Western diplomatic community in Cuba.” The timing of Che’s arrest, just one day before the originally scheduled coup date, raises the possibility that Fidel had learned something about the coup and had arrested one of those he thought was responsible.

Che’s house arrest probably lasted for only a short time, perhaps just a day or two. December 2 is one of Cuba’s biggest holidays, the anniversary of the founding of the Cuban Army, whose first battle saw Almeida save his friend Che’s life. As Commander of Cuba’s Army, Almeida was also considered its founder, so the Cuban public would definitely notice if he didn’t appear for the celebration. Apparently things had calmed down enough for Almeida to return from Algeria to be part of the celebration, something Almeida would not have done if he feared that he was returning home to the same fate as Che. The day after the big December 2, 1963, celebration, a CIA report says Almeida “expressed [his] despair” to a subordinate.

But at some point after that, Almeida communicated to Harry Williams that he was still willing to stage a coup against Fidel, if RFK and new President Lyndon Johnson would back him. RFK believed that a free and democratic Cuba would be the best memorial to his
slain brother. Williams was ready as well, and he tried to use his contact in Cyrus Vance’s office—Joseph Califano—to arrange a meeting with LBJ. Williams said that Califano told him that upon hearing Williams’s name, LBJ had evoked the Kennedys’ responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster and then declared, “I don’t want to see any goddamn Cuban, especially that son of a bitch Williams.” Apparently, LBJ had heard enough about the coup plan from McCone to worry that JFK’s death was retaliation from Castro.

In the early weeks of January 1964, RFK decided to swallow his pride, put his own feelings aside, and plead his case personally to President Johnson. Their relationship had been terrible since 1960 and had worsened since JFK’s death, because Robert Kennedy felt that Johnson had moved into the White House and asserted control too quickly. But Robert Kennedy’s meeting with LBJ about the coup plan did not go well. Only the two of them were present, and RFK later told Williams that President Johnson listened sympathetically but made it clear that he would not continue with the plan. LBJ’s decision also included ending the Cuban exile troop training program at Fort Benning, since those exiles’ real purpose had been to be among the first US troops into Cuba after the coup. However, LBJ did agree to continue funding RFK’s favored Cuban exile groups in case they proved useful in the future. This was LBJ’s way of preserving his options and asserting control: Formerly, Cuban operations had essentially been run by Robert Kennedy through Army Secretary Cyrus Vance and Richard Helms. Now the CIA would take primary responsibility, with McCone reporting to LBJ, and RFK no longer had any role in Cuban operations.

RFK offered to back Williams with his personal fortune, but Williams felt they had both done—and sacrificed—enough, so he went
back to being a mining engineer, far away from the intrigue of exile politics. Williams communicated the news to Almeida, who apparently ended any planning for a coup. According to Williams, RFK made sure Almeida’s family—still outside of Cuba on a seemingly innocent pretext—was covertly sent “$3,000 that the family used. And then [in addition to that money] Bobby send them a pension. You know, they received a check every month. Out of the budget,” apparently of the CIA. Almeida’s first wife and two daughters reportedly never returned to Cuba to live, and those payments continued for decades. As for who in the Agency continued making those covert payments and monitoring the CIA’s surveillance of Almeida’s family, those files have not been released. However, at least initially, it was probably E. Howard Hunt and his aide Bernard Barker, since they had already been working on the top-secret operation.

A month after his meeting with President Johnson, RFK himself was expressing a different, more enlightened attitude about Castro. In an exchange with CIA official Desmond FitzGerald, RFK proposed seeking an accommodation with Fidel instead of trying to overthrow him. That was emblematic of RFK’s development over the next four years, as he grew from being a tough bulldog of a prosecutor and protector of JFK to being one of the most progressive members of the Senate.

CIA OFFICIAL RICHARD Helms had not changed his feelings about Fidel, however. Files show that Helms combined the remnants of RFK’s exile operation—Manuel Artime, Manolo Ray, and Eloy Menoyo—with his own CIA–Mafia and Cubela assassination plots. Hunt’s friend Artime continued to get the lion’s share of the money, which CIA accounts say totaled $7 million, while some former officials
say it was several times that amount. With planes and ships going to his Central American bases full of CIA arms and supplies—and returning empty of cargo—Artime was also soon involved in drug trafficking with Santo Trafficante’s organization.

A December 6, 1963, attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro involving Herminio Diaz—Trafficante’s bodyguard and narcotics trafficker—was first documented in 2006 by author Larry Hancock. One CIA memo talks about “an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro after his TV appearance on 12/6,” and FitzGerald or one of his men added a comment linking it to “continuing rumors of a plot to assassinate Castro which is connected with Herminio Diaz.”

On the day after Diaz’s attempt to kill Fidel, Helms approved a December 7, 1963, memo sending low-level Cuban official Rolando Cubela a weapons cache of shotguns, pistols, grenades, “C-4 [explosives],” and “rifles with scopes.” The material, especially appropriate for an assassination attempt, was slated to be delivered in January 1964 under David Morales’s supervision. Morales remained good friends with Johnny Rosselli, and in 1964 Morales made at least one trip to visit the Mafia don in Las Vegas. Rosselli continued to split his time between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where he moved into a large, lavish apartment on Beverly Glen, near Beverly Hills. Prospering in the immediate years after the JFK assassination, Rosselli even joined the prestigious L.A. Friars Club and was soon bilking stars of the era, including Milton Berle and Phil Silvers, in an elaborate poker scam.

Helms kept other aspects of the CIA–Mafia plots going as well, retaining European assassin recruiter QJWIN on the CIA payroll in December and for several months thereafter—until reports about Trafficante’s associate Michel Victor Mertz surfaced in Europe and to the CIA, at which point QJWIN was fired. As for Mertz, the Warren
Commission never learned about him, though the FBI gave them—with no explanation—a few memos showing the Bureau had checked for airline passengers in Dallas named Mertz on November 22, 1963. Aside from having $1 million in heroin stolen from in France near the one-year anniversary of JFK’s death, Mertz prospered and lived extremely well after the assassination. According to one report, one of his homes was “a gigantic estate in the Loiret region near Orléans, measuring about five miles on one side by about six or seven miles on the other.” In Paris, Mertz had a swank townhouse on Boulevard Suchet, an area also home to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Even after his heroin network was busted at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1965, and Mertz was profiled in a Pulitzer–Prize-winning heroin exposé by
Newsday
, Mertz served only a brief, comfortable detention in France a few years later. While the man whose alias Mertz used in 1963—Jean Souetre—eventually talked to journalists and allowed himself to be photographed, Mertz remained reclusive and threatening to investigators until his death on January 15, 1995. Even his death was kept relatively secret for such a notorious figure, hindering efforts to get US government files about him released.