The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (42 page)

Bobby’s role went beyond this entirely constructive move to pacify and professionalize the returned fighters. At the April 18 meeting of the “Standing Group,” Kennedy pushed hard for more “sabotage and harassment, plus support of exile groups.”
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He also made commitments to both Artime and Ruiz-Williams to open up new anti-Castro fronts in third countries — Ruiz-Williams’s group in the Dominican Republic and Artime’s in Nicaragua, under the patronage of the son of Central America’s most sanguinary dictator, Anastasio Somoza.
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By early summer 1963, Luis Somoza was in Miami, meeting with exiled leaders and paramilitaries and discussing his plan to open up a new anti-Castro base from Nicaragua. The FBI reported that Somoza claimed that he had conferred with Secretary of State Dean Rusk in Washington and that he had even spoken by telephone with the president.

On July 15, 1963,
Miami News
Latin America editor Hal Hendrix broke the story under the headline “Backstage with Bobby,” detailing Kennedy’s role as the architect of the Nicaragua-based front against Castro.
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Artime’s revived movement would prove a complete and corrupt bust, but it would give the Somozas a welcome reprieve from Washington for their extraordinarily (even by Central American standards) brutal regime. It was the hell of good anticommunist intentions.

The president was tired, even disgusted, with the entire scene. After a March NSC meeting that dealt among other things with Castro’s lending military assistance to revolutionary movements outside Cuba, Bobby sent his brother a red-blooded memo urging more action. When there was no reply, Bobby sent a second memo. “Do you think there is any merit to my last memo?” he asked.
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Again Jack made no reply.

The situation meanwhile among the anti-Castro exiles in south Florida was taking on the character of an undeclared rebellion against the official cease-and-desist policy of the Kennedy administration. On March 18, Alpha 66, with the guidance of the CIA’s David Phillips, launched an attack on the island of Isabela de Sagua, wounding twelve Soviet soldiers and damaging the Russian freighter Lvov.
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Later that month, exiled Cuban fighters in Commandos L group blew up and sank the Russian merchantman Baku off the coast of Cuba. The Soviet Union delivered an angry protest to the United States. Washington assured Moscow it would control the raids. In a press conference, the president noted that such sorties could renew hostilities between the superpowers if they were not stopped.
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His exasperation was not shared by others in Washington. By this time the cause of liberating Cuba from Castro had become the grail of the Republican right.
Life
magazine editorially adopted the cause of the exiles as its own, with photo essays on the raids. Clare Booth Luce, the powerful wife of
Life
publisher Henry R Luce and herself a former congresswoman and United States ambassador, helped finance an anti-Castro platoon — an action that years later pulled her into the investigation of the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.
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Life
’s full-throttle opposition to Kennedy “appeasement” was a problem for the administration. Along with
Time
, also published by Luce, it was one of the two or three most influential magazines in the country. In April, the president had invited the publisher and his very political wife to lunch at the White House. The Kennedy charm did nothing to deter or otherwise disarm them. The Luces walked out of the lunch to protest the president’s warning to cool it on Cuba.
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With the president unwilling or unable to put his foot down, Cuba policy swung from nominal consideration of rapprochement with Castro, to plans to blow the man up as he was scuba-diving. Early in April of 1963, Washington terminated CIA assistance to the Cuban Revolutionary Council. CRC president Miro Cardona accused the Kennedys of treason. In July, William Donovan negotiated the release of an additional 10,000 imprisoned Americans and anti-Castro Cubans from Cuban jails. Castro let it be known through an interview with ABC’s Lisa Howard that some sort of entente with the United States was a possibility. But by this time the Standing Group, the reconstituted interagency task force charged with covert operations, had veered back toward sabotage. Bobby admitted on paper that the United States “must do something against Castro, even though we do not believe our actions would bring him down.”
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On June 19, the president, against his better judgment, acceded to the wishes of Bobby and CIA director John McCone and approved a major program of sabotage, including the bombing of refineries, ports, bridges, and power facilities.

It was a fateful decision for which Bobby must bear most of the responsibility. He wouldn’t stop. He continued to talk to members of the exile leadership, as phone logs from the attorney general’s papers demonstrate, and he shared their violent antipathy to Castro. Moreover, paramilitary activities continued to fascinate him. Captain Ayers, then serving as a CIA trainer of small-team tactics units, would later describe the attorney general turning up in October 1963 at a top-secret CIA outpost deep in the Everglades. In a clearing of the Waloos Glades Hunting Camp, Kennedy walked out of a Quonset hut and into the light of a campfire, shook Ayer’s hand, and wished him well on his mission to blow up Cuban ships.
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Within this chaos of policy, paramilitary ventures, and right-wing charges of Kennedy betrayal, certain mafiosi began moving their personnel, or “assets.” Although Bobby did not know it, the situation in south Florida among the exiles was white-hot. By April, the Miami Police Intelligence Unit was picking up reports that “all violence hitherto directed toward Castro’s Cuba will now be directed toward various governmental agencies in the United States.” This included the bombing of federal agencies. On April 18, a flyer signed by “a Texan” was circulating around the Cuban community. It read: “Only through one development will you Cuban patriots ever live again in your homeland as freemen. . . if an inspired Act of God should place in the White House within weeks a Texan known to be a friend of all Latin Americans. Though Johnson must now bow to these crafty and cunning Communist-hatching Jews, yet did an Act of God suddenly elevate him into the top position.”
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It wasn’t just exiled Cubans who were spinning out of control. Bill Harvey, the ZR/RIFLE spymaster Bobby had relieved of his role in the war against Castro, was back in touch with Johnny Rosselli. On February 13, 1963, Harvey and Rosselli had drinks together in Los Angeles. According to Harvey’s later testimony, they agreed to put the assassination plotting on hold but leave the bounty on Castro of $150,000 where it was.
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Under the klieg lights of the Church Committee investigation in 1975, this put a nice final punctuation point to the CIA-Mafia conspiracy, but there is evidence that Harvey’s collaboration with Rosselli continued.

In April, Harvey submitted an expense sheet to CIA administrators covering the period April 13 to 21. A hotel receipt indicated that Harvey had paid the bill of a “Mr. John A. Wallston” at a Miami hotel. Rosselli’s CIA alias was variously “John A. Ralston” or “John Ralston.” The entry also gave the client’s address as “56510 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.” Further, Harvey chartered a boat at Islamorada, Florida (Key Largo), which he also charged to the Agency after the fact.
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With a veritable navy of CIA craft in the vicinity, renting a boat seems a curious choice.

On June 20, Rosselli flew into Dulles airport in Washington and was picked up there by Bill Harvey. The FBI surveilled the two as they drove back into the District, picked up Harvey’s wife, and went out to dinner at Tino’s Continental Restaurant in northwest Washington. After dinner, Rosselli accompanied the Harveys to their home, where he spent the night.
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Harvey was later to characterize the meeting as social, but one old Rosselli retainer, D.C. police inspector Joe Shimon, thought the overnight stay at Harvey’s home “unlike Johnny unless, of course, they were doing business.”
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For Harvey the entire encounter was risky and he faced immediate trouble from the CIA brass after the meeting.
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But from Rosselli’s standpoint, the relationship was far more critical. JM/WAVE was a rich source of murderous assets and Harvey was still the key to Rosselli’s continued access to them. Under the CIA penumbra, Rosselli could move guns and assassins in relative secrecy. All experienced murderers seek cover. By putting the Agency’s fingerprints on operations, the mob could anticipate that the CIA would cooperate in the cover-up.

Twelve years later, in 1975, the Church Committee catalogued Harvey’s ZR/RIFLE files and found the dossier of one Harold Meltzer, whom Harvey had described as “a resident of Los Angeles with a long criminal record.”
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What the ZR/RIFLE memo did not say was that Meltzer was a longtime collaborator and sometime shooter for Rosselli.
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Who, if not Rosselli, would have introduced him and vouched for him to Harvey? It was yet another indication that the alliance between Harvey and Rosselli went far deeper than the one-shot joint venture to kill Castro. What sealed their relationship was a venomous hatred of the Kennedys, and their collaboration in the sensitive art of murder. For all of their differences of style — the pale, rotund Harvey with his lumpy countenance and the tanned, slender Rosselli with his husky sotto voce — these were men with the scent of blood in their nostrils and the taste of killing in their mouths.

Rosselli’s old friend Inspector Joe Shimon told the author (and the FBI, shortly after Rosselli’s murder) about a “little problem Johnny took to Bill Harvey.” One of Rosselli’s old flames, the wife of a newspaper publisher, had called him in 1973 to say that her husband had put out a contract on her. Could Rosselli help? According to the story Rosselli told Shimon, he turned to Harvey, who did the job himself. The husband died of a massive (and induced, Rosselli said) heart attack.
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Whether the story is true or not, here was Rosselli ten years later claiming that he and Bill Harvey were still trafficking in murder.

Beginning in April 1963, the Mafia began arming and organizing the Cuban exile movement to relaunch the anti-Castro cause. But was it Castro the Mafia was really after? In April, Dr. Paulino Sierra Martinez, a Cuban attorney from Chicago known to almost no one in the exile community in Miami, surfaced in south Florida to form a united front called the Junta de Gobierno en Exilio. The tall, dapper Sierra, who taught judo and spoke four languages, was accompanied to Florida by a curious character from Dallas named William Trull, an entertainer known to Texas right-wing millionaires like the Klebergs of the King Ranch. FBI reports reveal clearly that the two men scarcely knew each other and offered conflicting versions of why they had teamed up.
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In May, the
Miami News
reported in an article titled “Gamblers Pop Out of Exile Grab Bag” that Chicago-based gangsters were behind the government-in-exile move.
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One of the promoters of a united front meeting in Miami in May was George Franci, a Trafficante asset.

By June the question of whose money and muscle were behind Sierra became clearer when the FBI field office heard reports that gambling interests had offered up to $14 million in exchange for a 50 percent interest in gambling concessions in Cuba post-Fidel.
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The organization supposedly behind Sierra (which employed him), the Union Tank Car Company of Chicago, had no business interests in Cuba. Still, the company’s general counsel William Browder (later head of the Chicago Crime Commission) told FBI agents that although he didn’t know who was putting up all the money, it was “considerable” and he was managing it.
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So what was up?

The answer became obvious in late August, when Sierra went on a shopping spree for weapons that included ordering a two-man submarine from California. Rich Lauchli, a prominent Illinois arms dealer and Minuteman supporter, was one of the vendors.
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The FBI field office in Chicago spoke with Richard Cain, the talkative Mafia
capo regime
then serving as chief investigator for the sheriff of Cook County and who had earlier been implicated in the 1960-61 attempted Mafia hit on Castro. “Johnny’s involved,” Cain reported.
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He also said that Giancana and Humphreys, Ambassador Kennedy’s one-time luncheon guests with Rosselli, had been two of four underworld figures who had recently contributed $200,000 to the movement.
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In addition Sierra started making payments to the raider groups — MAPA, Alpha 66, Commandos L — and giving checks to proven sluggers like Tony Cuesta and Aldo Vera Serafin.
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There was talk of opening up chapters of the Junta de Gobierno en Exilio in cities like Los Angeles and Dallas. The “Government-in-Exile” was laying a wide network of arms and operatives and accumulating the payroll to go with it. Most of all, from the standpoint of Johnny Rosselli, it was creating an alibi that involved the secret recesses of the United States Government.
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