The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (25 page)

Lawford was worried enough about Monroe’s threat to hold a press conference that he called Bobby Kennedy to tell him that unless he told Marilyn face to face why the affair was over, she could well go public. Lawford later denied that Bobby actually flew to L.A. from San Francisco (where he was scheduled to address the American Bar Association) on the weekend of August 4.
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But Lawford’s recollection, which he later changed, differs from the persuasive evidence of Peter Spada and Anthony Summers that Kennedy did indeed travel to Los Angeles and saw Monroe during the final hours of her life. Whether or not Bobby was in fact there on August 4 — 5, one thing is certain: the FBI and various members of the Los Angeles Police Department scrubbed the entire scene clean.

For both Jack and Bobby, the whole episode and its tragic conclusion now threatened their marriages. According to Lawford, Bobby was deeply shaken. Jackie didn’t need to know all the details to get wind of a full-court cover-up and, furiously, took Caroline and a dozen Secret Service agents with her to Ravello, Italy, to stay with her sister. According to George Smathers, “It was her way of telling him that he’d gone too far this time. The possibility that she might be humiliated or embarrassed really got to her. She didn’t like it, not one damn bit.”
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As
Time
reported, “Jacqueline Kennedy originally planned to stay at Ravello for two weeks. But the two became three, and now they have stretched into four. . . . [S]he might yet declare herself a permanent resident.” When Jackie showed up in AP photographs with handsome billionaire Gianni Agnelli, Jack angrily sent her a cable: “A LITTLE MORE CAROLINE AND LESS AGNELLI.” Bobby also went on an extended vacation, but no record exists of the nature of his reconciliation with Ethel.

The Kennedys may have dodged a deadly projectile of their own reckless launching, but they were now wholly compromised by J. Edgar Hoover. When W. H. Ferry of the Fund for the Republic publicly criticized Hoover for his shameless and absurd campaign against communism in the United States, who should rise to Hoover’s defense but Bobby Kennedy. “Attorney General Kennedy defended FBI Chief Hoover against the charge that he magnifies Communist strength at home and abroad,” the AP reported. “To the contrary, Kennedy said, Hoover’s dedication and effort is the major reason for the numerical weakness of Communists in the United States.”

The
Baltimore Sun’s
Phil Potter, then in New Delhi, couldn’t believe Kennedy’s statement. “Is this the price you pay for the privilege of passing in and out through the doors of the Justice building?” he wrote Kennedy on August 7. “How do we preserve the union when he’s dread?”
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Kennedy sent him a jocular reply: “In answer to your question of what we’ll do when Edgar is dead — we’ll always have you, my friend.”
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But Hoover was not satisfied. On August 16, he sent the attorney general a “personal memo” smearing his stricken father, the very man who had secured Hoover’s reappointment in December 1960:

Before the last presidential election, Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of President John Kennedy) had been visited by many gangsters with gambling interests and a deal was made which resulted in Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and others obtaining a lucrative gambling establishment, the Cal-Neva Hotel, at Lake Tahoe. These gangsters reportedly met with Joseph Kennedy at the Cal-Neva, where Kennedy was staying at the time.
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Bobby’s reaction is not known.

July — August, 1962

Washington, D.C., Havana, Point Mary, Key Largo

T
he irony about Bobby Kennedy’s bureaucratic backfilling during the first two weeks of May 1962 was that it gave Johnny Rosselli new standing in the CIA. After his meeting with Kennedy, Sheffield Edwards informed Bill Harvey, chief of ZR/RIFLE, that “tacit approval” of Richard Helms would be necessary were Rosselli to be further involved in the murder-Castro plot. (Doing his own backfilling, Edwards claimed in an internal memorandum that Harvey had promised he was “dropping any plans for the use of Subject [Rosselli] for the future.” In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975, Harvey called this a lie.)
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After Rosselli received Helms’s “tacit approval,” he was given the nominal rank of colonel, and David Morales, JM/WAVE’s hotheaded chief of operations, was formally seconded to the assassination mission. Toward the end of May, the CIA built a small base for Rosselli’s unit on Point Mary, Key Largo, clearing out an acre or so of the thick mangrove forest for rough-hewn sheds and two crude structures. Offshore, a floating dock was anchored into the coral reef. The purpose of the base was to train snipers.

Rosselli had soon charmed everyone in sight. He was the only person who could make the incendiary Morales laugh. They would drink until the sun came up, usually joined by Rip Robertson, the hard-bitten Texan and decorated veteran of World War II who was the favorite “boom and bang” guy among the exiled Cubans. A favorite bar was Les Deux Violins, where, according to one of his Cuban operatives, “Johnny knew all the help by their first name, tipped hugely, and would tell farcical stories about his days with Al Capone,.”
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Throughout his criminal life, Rosselli had befriended men more dangerous and sociopathic than these. As before, defenses were dismantled and egos enhanced in the course of hard drinking. The Rosselli touch — his seeming ability to seduce anyone — was made evident in Colonel Bradley J. Ayers’s memoir. Ayers and his wife had invited over a man named Wes, a major then working for the CIA. “Wes had been drinking before he got to the house that night. He and John Roselli [
sic
], the dapper American agent in charge of the continuing attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, had been on a weekend binge together. They’d become close friends as they worked together, and with Roselli a bachelor and Wes without his family in Miami, their drinking relationship was a natural extension of their duty relationship. ”
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Colonel Ayers, who was training commandos in small-team tactics at his own base on a nearby key, visited Rosselli’s encampment on Point Mary. There he met Rosselli’s commander, a tall young Cuban called Julio who spoke excellent English. Julio told Ayers that his teams operated independently, without direct supervision of a CIA case officer. According to Julio, Colonel Rosselli used the team from time to time for raids and other operations. Rosselli was one of only two Americans authorized to go into Cuba on clandestine missions.

After spending the night on Point Mary with Rosselli’s commandos, Ayers was jolted out of his sleep early the next morning by the crack of a rifle. “It’s just our sharpshooter doing his daily marksmanship practice,” Julio explained. To Ayers’s amazement, the sniper then nailed a cormorant perched on a mangrove stump some 500 yards offshore. Julio further explained that the man was rehearsing “for the day when he could center the crosshairs of his telescopic sight on Fidel Castro.” Upon hearing of President Kennedy’s assassination the following year, Ayers wrote, his mind flashed back to that morning on Point Mary and the explosion of purple cormorant feathers on the distant mangrove stump.
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The scene on Point Mary was the direct result of an Operation Mongoose meeting in the attorney general’s office on January 19. “No time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared,” the memo summarizing the meeting stated. “Yesterday . . . the president indicated that the final chapter had not been written — it’s got to be done and will be done. ”
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On the basis of this meeting, General Lansdale produced a nine-page memorandum outlining everything from political intrigue, economic warfare, psychological operations, and paramilitary action. Within the interstices of this policy lay the mandate of assassination, Phase II.
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Even if a more reasoned American policy were possible, Castro did nothing to encourage it. On January 23, he publicly observed: “How can the rope and the hanged man understand each other, or the chain and the slave? Imperialism is the chain. Understanding is impossible.”
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The modus vivendi Che Guevara had spoken about to Richard Goodwin at the Punta del Este Conference the previous August was probably a delaying tactic to buy time for the Castro regime.
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Neither Fidel nor Che felt an entente with Washington was possible; imperialism, they believed, was conceived in violence and dedicated to conquest.

Under the expanded mandate of Operation Mongoose, south Florida became a huge staging area for the not-so-secret war against Cuba. Located south of Miami in a heavily wooded 1,571-acre tract, JM/WAVE was now the largest CIA station in the world. Its code name was Zenith Technological Enterprises, and phony charts and business licenses adorned the offices of the wooden clapboard buildings to provide the thinnest possible semblance of cover. Behind these buildings was a huge rhombic antenna scanner pointing south. By the spring of 1962, JM/WAVE employed more than two hundred American operatives who, in turn, deployed about 2,200 Cuban agents, each one ensconced in front operations that ranged from insurance agencies to boat-repair yards. JM/WAVE had a navy of over 100 craft, including the 174-foot former sub chaser Rex, stuffed with electronic gear and studded with 40-millimeter and 20-millimeter cannons, and capable of lowering 20-foot fiberglass speedboats via crane into the water, to dozens of V-20 Swift craft with exhaust deflectors or black rubber rafts powered by Mercury outboards. According to one former agent, the Miami River experienced late-afternoon traffic jams of CIA boats on their way back to their moorings. The air force included 50 amphibians, dozens of single-engine patrol craft, and, on select occasions, F-105 Phantoms from nearby Homestead Air Force Base. The sound of detonations of
plastique
on the outskirts of Miami — part of the CIA’s training of anti-Castro sappers — alarmed citizens, who were routinely told they were demolitions for freeway excavations.
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By the first week in April 1962, the plot to kill Castro was again under way. On April 8, Rosselli flew to New York to meet with Bill Harvey.
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A week later, the two met again in Miami to discuss the plot in greater detail. In good part, Harvey was taking the measure of his Mafia counterpart. At the Miami meeting he pulled a pistol out and slapped it on the table.
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Rosselli proved suitably deferential. Rosselli’s plan was again to pass poison pills through Tony Varona to a Havana restaurant where Castro liked to eat. In exchange, Varona wanted the CIA to provide him with high-powered rifles, handguns, detonators, and boat radar. Harvey agreed. On April 21 he flew from Washington to deliver four poison pills directly to Rosselli, who got them to Varona and thence to Havana. That same evening, Harvey and Ted Shackley, the chief of the CIA’s south Florida base, drove a U-Haul truck filled with the requested arms through the rain to a deserted parking lot in Miami. They got out and handed the keys to Rosselli. Not fully trusting the mafioso, Harvey had the parking lot surveilled. Sure enough, two Cubans drove up and Rosselli gave them the keys. They took the truck somewhere and unloaded it.
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The manner of the exchange proved important. Rosselli was now handling conventional weapons for the CIA, beginning what would become his full incorporation into the Agency’s south Florida war machine. He was also developing a personal relationship with Harvey, Operation Mongoose’s point man, who briefed Attorney General Kennedy and other leading members of the administration on the get-Castro effort. Throughout April, there was, as the House Select Committee on Assassinations staff later termed it, “intense contact between HARVEY and ROSSELLI.”
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This gave Rosselli insight into a growing rift between Harvey and the attorney general. It was Harvey who introduced Rosselli to David Morales, who had been brought in the previous November in preparation for Phase II.
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Late that summer, Rosselli led his first nighttime mission across the Windward Passage in a pair of swift V-20s. The V-20 was the workhorse of the CIA fleet, admirably suited to its unique tasks. With its gun mounts and twin 100-horsepower Graymarine engines concealed by fishing nets, the boat looked like any other medium-sized craft plying the route. It also had a double hull made of fiberglass, capable of withstanding the pounding of the open sea as well as collisions with coral reefs. The V-20’s top speed was 40 knots. By the summer of 1962, the Cubans were deploying the best Soviet patrol craft. One such Cuban patrol boat spotted Rosselli’s raiders and gave chase, ripping the bottom out of Rosselli’s boat with machine-gun fire. Rosselli jumped into the water and swam to the second craft, which managed to make it back to camp.
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On his second run toward the coast of Cuba, Rosselli’s V-20s were again intercepted and the lead boat was sunk. Rosselli managed to get aboard a small dinghy before the speedboat went under. He drifted alone for several days in the boat and was given up for dead back in Florida until an American patrol cutter rescued him and brought him back to camp.
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Giancana, for one, thought he was crazy to risk his life, but Rosselli had always been an over-the-top type who fed on the intensity of camaraderie in combat. On Point Mary today, aside from a couple of ruined docks, you can find a great profusion of beer and liquor bottles among the mangrove roots — the detritus of good times and cruel dreams.
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