In the months after Dallas, Robert Kennedy seemed eager to distance himself from Cuba, the battleground that had once absorbed so much of his aggressive energy. It was also the cauldron of intrigue that he associated with his brother’s murder. Reminiscing about the Kennedy administration over dinner with Bill Moyers in spring 1968, soon before his own assassination, a wistful Bobby remarked that he “wondered at times if we did not pay a very great price for being more energetic than wise about a lot of things, especially Cuba.”
Immediately after JFK’s assassination, the CIA and its Cuban assets began systematically promoting the idea that the Castro regime was behind the violent assault on the U.S. presidency. Robert Kennedy himself was one of the targets of this disinformation campaign. On November 27, 1963, someone identifying himself as Mario del Rosario Molina mailed a letter to Kennedy from Havana, informing him that a Castro agent in the United States named Pedro Charles had paid Oswald $7,000 to assassinate his brother. “Pedro Charles reached an understanding with Lee Harvey Oswald, an expert marksman, for the President to be killed and for an international scandal to be unleashed so that all the blame would fall on the racists and the extreme-rightists of the State of Texas,” read the letter. The mysterious communication had all the markings of the CIA’s anti-Castro propaganda campaign, and it failed to convince Bobby that the Cuban leader was behind his brother’s murder.
More important, Lyndon Johnson also resisted the intense pressures building within the government, refusing to be stampeded into declaring war on Havana. LBJ moved swiftly to defuse the ticking Cuba bomb, suspending CIA-sponsored raids on the island in January and making it clear to Erneido Oliva there would be no U.S.-backed invasion led by the Bay of Pigs veterans. At Johnson’s request, Bobby Kennedy accompanied Oliva to the White House the day LBJ delivered the bad news. The president wanted to make it clear there would be no more vague Kennedy promises of liberating Cuba. In a brusque, sixteen-minute meeting in the White House library, recalled Oliva, Johnson “flatly told me my program with the Cubans had to be terminated. Bobby didn’t say anything. You know they didn’t get along well. [Bobby] told me before that he had tried to persuade him…but he didn’t try and persuade the president of the United States in front of me. He was only listening, his head bowed, pretty sad.”
But the CIA would prove unresponsive to Johnson’s leadership, just as it was under Kennedy, continuing to sponsor unauthorized raids and assassination attempts on Castro. In February, the agency was soon back to its old game, trying to manufacture excuses to invade the island. This time it was reviving a scheme from the final days of the Kennedy administration.
On November 19, three days before he was assassinated, President Kennedy was startled when Richard Helms opened a canvas air travel bag in the Oval Office and pulled out a submachine gun. The weapon, Helms claimed, was part of a Cuban cache that had been found on a beach in Venezuela—dramatic proof of Castro’s brazen effort to subvert his neighbors’ governments. Helms’s message was all too predictable: it was time to get tough on Castro. But Kennedy seemed more disturbed by the fact that the CIA official had been able to blithely slip an automatic gun into the Oval Office unmolested by his Secret Service centurions. “It gives me a feeling of confidence,” he dryly told Helms.
After Kennedy’s death, the CIA resumed flogging the Venezuela weapons caper in hopes of driving a wedge between Cuba and the Organization of American States and establishing a pretext for war. The agency was having a hard time making its case, even within its own bureaucracy, where one official later declared himself “not too impressed with the evidence,” which struck him as suspiciously “manufactured.”
On February 28, 1964, Des FitzGerald paid a visit to Bobby Kennedy’s office to show him a copy of the “Spectrum Paper”—the latest CIA scenario for war on Castro—in hopes of enlisting his support. FitzGerald was under no obligation to seek Kennedy’s approval that day, since the new president had removed Cuba from RFK’s portfolio, but John McCone had suggested the visit, undoubtedly as a courtesy to the man who once spearheaded the government’s crusade against Castro.
As the attorney general perused the Spectrum Paper that day, it soon became clear he no longer had the heart for anti-Castro intrigue. He surprised FitzGerald by asking him whether the CIA’s Board of National Estimates “had ever directed its attention to the question of whether or not the United States could live with Castro.” The answer was obviously no—and the agency was not about to change now. And LBJ—to the agency’s delight—had made it clear he agreed with the agency, declining to pursue the back-channel peace negotiations initiated in JFK’s final months.
But FitzGerald found Kennedy strangely persistent. “[Kennedy] wondered whether it might not be a good idea for such [a peace assessment] to be produced,” FitzGerald later noted in his memo on the meeting. No, FitzGerald flatly told the attorney general, it was not a good idea to explore the peace option with Havana.
This post-Dallas picture of a wan and powerless Robert Kennedy is painful to behold. Here he is, facing a CIA official he once made tremble and all he can do is feebly suggest that the agency completely reverse its course on Cuba. FitzGerald and his colleagues back at Langley must have gloated at the fall of their rude overseer. The suspicions that Kennedy harbored about a CIA involvement in his brother’s murder must have made meetings like this all the more excruciating for him.
Kennedy did not suspect FitzGerald in particular of participating in any plot. In fact, the CIA official apparently shared RFK’s doubts about the lone gunman proposition. Watching TV with his wife on the morning of November 24 when Ruby suddenly burst in front of the cameras and shot down Oswald, FitzGerald began to cry. “Now we’ll never know,” he said. When FitzGerald dropped dead of a massive heart attack in July 1967 while playing tennis, Bobby Kennedy was among those who attended his funeral.
In the months after Dallas, Kennedy also seems to have maintained a civil relationship with CIA director John McCone, who often phoned Bobby at the Justice Department and invited him and Ethel to dine at his home. But this was not the case with other CIA officials.
Like McCone, Dick Helms—the real power at the agency—also strove to maintain close contact with Kennedy, offering to brief him on intelligence matters even though Johnson had ordered McCone to inform Bobby that he would no longer enjoy the same intelligence access in the new administration. On January 22, 1964, Helms wrote Kennedy a warm note, attaching a tribute to JFK that had been written by an editor of the London Sunday Telegraph. On March 4, 1964, Helms phoned Kennedy to congratulate him on the Hoffa conviction, making an appointment to see him the following week, without specifying the reason. The spymaster would call Kennedy’s office to see him at least twice more before he stepped down as attorney general in August. It is unclear why Helms continued to pursue a relationship with the lame-duck attorney general; it was certainly not out of affection for him. Helms had feared and reviled Kennedy when he reigned over the agency.
For the wily Washington operator, it must have been a case of keeping an enemy close. Helms was not interested in befriending Kennedy or consoling him, said RFK aide John Nolan, who observed the CIA official continue to court Kennedy when he became a senator. “Dick Helms was not a warm and cuddly guy. He was a consummate bureaucrat, and in that sense a savvy operator in Washington power games…. Calling Bob Kennedy every morning…was his way of either currying or maintaining favor with Bob Kennedy.”
Bobby clearly felt no warmth for Helms. The day after the assassination, the deputy CIA director handwrote a condolence letter to Kennedy on his home stationery. “There is nothing for me to say that has not been said better by many others,” wrote Helms. “When you sent me to see the president Tuesday afternoon [to discuss the Cuban arms allegedly found in Venezuela], he never looked better, seemed more confident or appeared more in control of the crushing forces around him. Friday struck me personally. Mrs. Helms and I extend our deepest sympathy and heartfelt condolences to y
ou and the family. We pray that you will continue to give us your leadership. Respectfully and sadly, Dick Helms.” Helms’s letter was smoothly crafted—down to his less-than-sincere “prayer” that Bobby remain the CIA’s master. But it apparently left Kennedy unmoved. “Dear Dick,” he perfunctorily replied two weeks later. “My thanks to you.” Condolence letters from a range of other well-wishers—Kirk Douglas, Hugh Downs, even Soviet ambassador Dobrynin—elicited warmer responses from Kennedy.
As Hoover did with the FBI, Dick Helms—working with his old mentor Allen Dulles—made certain that the CIA was insulated from the Warren Commission’s investigation. Dulles was the most diligent member of the commission. “I don’t think Allen Dulles ever missed a meeting,” Warren later recalled. Mark Lane would comment that the assassination panel should have been called “the Dulles Commission.” The former CIA chief had lobbied hard to get appointed to the panel. He lost no time in establishing himself as its dominant player, expertly deflecting the investigation away from the spy agency and herding his fellow panelists toward the lone gunman conclusion. No one in the mainstream press commented on the striking irony of the man whose career had been terminated by President Kennedy leading the inquiry into his murder. After being forced into political exile by JFK in 1962, the embittered Dulles found it hard to adjust to life outside Washington’s whirling power center. “He had a very difficult time to decompress,” observed James Angleton, who made a point of visiting his old colleague two or three times a week at his house. His service on the commission brought Dulles back to life. Though no longer on the CIA payroll, he served as the agency’s undercover man on the commission, leaking information to Angleton, with whom he continued to confer regularly.
Meanwhile, Helms moved swiftly to limit the CIA’s own probe of the assassination, taking the case away from the bright, aggressive official to whom it was originally assigned—a well-respected forty-three-year-old covert operations veteran named John Whitten—and handing it to the spooky wizard Angleton. Helms removed Whitten from the investigation at a December 6, 1963, meeting after the conscientious agent complained that information about Oswald—on whom the CIA had maintained files for at least three years—and his Cuba-related activities was being withheld from him. With Whitten out of the picture, the CIA’s probe of the Kennedy assassination soon became mired in Angleton’s misty swamps, where he and his counterintelligence sorcerers strained mightily to draw a connection between Dallas and Moscow.
Angleton, whose counterintelligence unit was in charge of monitoring defectors to the Soviet Union like Oswald, drew gauzy theories about the ex-Marine’s alleged KGB role. But Bobby Kennedy and his Justice Department team did not buy the spook’s theories. “A stranger man I never met—he just gave me the creeps,” said Nick Katzenbach, who talked to Angleton on several occasions. Angleton was known to loathe President Kennedy, whom he came to regard—in his alcohol-fueled paranoia—as an agent of the Soviet Union. If the Soviets had launched their doomsday missiles, he darkly muttered to reporters late in his career, the Kennedys “would have been safe in their luxury bunker, presumably watching World War III on television, [while] the rest of us would have burned in hell.”
Years later, as newly appointed CIA director William Colby prepared to sack Angleton in a sweeping effort to purge the agency of its past sins, the fallen spymaster made a strange and airy remark apparently related to the Kennedy assassination. In December 1974, pursued by the dogged Seymour Hersh, who was then investigating the CIA’s illegal domestic operations for the New York Times, Angleton suddenly blurted to the reporter, “A mansion has many rooms…I’m not privy to who struck John.” What did the cryptic remark mean? “I would be absolutely misleading you if I thought I had any fucking idea,” says Hersh today. “But my instinct about it is he was basically laying off [blame] on somebody else inside the CIA, and the whole purpose of the conversation was to convince me to go after somebody else and not him. And also that he was a completely crazy fucking old fart.”
In May 1978, John Whitten again surfaced in relation to the Kennedy probe, appearing before the House Select Committee on Assassinations to discuss his aborted investigation. Testifying for seven hours in secret session, using his old CIA code name “John Scelso,” the former agent—then living in Austria, where he had fled the intelligence world to sing with the Vienna Men’s Choral Society—drew a disturbing picture of the machinations of his former bosses, Dick Helms and Jim Angleton. Helms hid the CIA’s assassination plots against Castro from him, Whitten told the two committee investigators who were questioning him. If he had known about the plots, testified Whitten, he would have zeroed in on the CIA’s Miami station and conducted a thorough investigation of its activities. He told the congressional investigators that he was stunned to learn that Helms had chosen Bill Harvey—a “ruthless guy who was, in my opinion, a very dangerous man”—to run the assassination operation against Castro. When Harvey brought mobster Johnny Rosselli into the fold, Whitten added, it reenforced the sinister character of the scheme. “The very thought of Helms entrusting Harvey to hire a criminal to have the capacity to kill somebody violates every operational precept, every bit of operational experience, every ethical consideration.” Moreover, Whitten declared, it was a “morally highly reprehensible act” for Helms to withhold the Castro assassination plots from the Warren Commission. He had obviously done so “because he realized it would have cost him his job and precipitated a crisis for the agency.”
Then Whitten was asked an even more explosive question: Could Harvey have been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy? His elliptical reply was worthy of a longtime spy. “He was too young to have assassinated McKinley and Lincoln,” Whitten said.
Whitten also offered an unsettling view of Angleton. He regarded him as psychologically unsound, finding his “understanding of human nature…his evaluation of people, to be a very precarious thing.” Then came another provocative question: Did Angleton have ties to organized crime? This time Whitten’s answer was blunt: “Yes.” Angleton had covered for his Mafia associates in federal investigations, added Whitten, and he had used them in Cuba operations.
If John Whitten and his thirty-agent team had been allowed to carry out the CIA’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, the Warren Commission would have found itself deeply enlightened by their work. But Richard Helms and James Angleton made sure that did not happen. “Whitten was a rare CIA hero in the Kennedy assassination story whose personal odyssey is a poignant but unsettling reminder that inquiries into national tragedy can be compromised early on,” Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley has observed. Without an investigative unit of its own, the Warren Commission was utterly dependent on the information provided by Hoover at the FBI and Helms and Angleton at the CIA. The commission boasted some of the most distinguished names in Washington—from Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren on down—but its mission was compromised from the very start by its investigative weakness. The blue-ribbon panel would be the helpless pawn of two agencies that Robert Kennedy considered his mortal political enemies.
“NICK, WHAT DO I do?” wrote Bobby in his tight, tiny script on the letter he received from Earl Warren on June 12, 1964. There was a plaintive quality to Kennedy’s question, which was directed to his deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach, the man he had asked to take over Warren Commission-related duties at the Justice Department. Kennedy was in a dilemma. He had so far avoided testifying before the Warren Commission, but now the chairman—a man he greatly respected—was writing to tell him that before the panel wrapped up its investigation, it needed to hear directly from the attorney general. “In view of the widely circulated allegations on this subject,” Warren wrote, “the Commission would like to be informed in particular whether you have any information suggesting that the assassination of President Kennedy was caused by a domestic or foreign conspiracy. Needless to say, if you have any suggestions to make regarding the investigation of these allegations or any other pha
se of the Commission’s work, we stand ready to act upon them.”
Kennedy had made it clear to Katzenbach that he wanted nothing to do with the Warren Commission. “He said he didn’t give a damn whether there was any investigation,” the former Kennedy aide recalled. “‘What’s the difference? My brother’s dead.’ That’s what he would say to me.” But as Katzenbach suspected, that was not the full story behind Bobby’s refusal to cooperate with the commission.
Kennedy was not ready to publicly reveal everything he knew, and he certainly was not going to tell it to the Warren Commission—a panel that, despite its august composition, was under the control of his political enemies at the FBI and CIA. In true Kennedy fashion, he wanted to control any investigation of the crime—not only to ensure its authenticity, but to prevent any damage to his brother’s legacy and his own political future. Bobby knew that if the Kennedy administration’s secret war against Castro—a war that he was supposed to be overseeing—was revealed as the source of the plot against his brother, the family’s image could be badly tarnished.
Like others close to Kennedy, Katzenbach sensed that he was plagued by feelings of guilt over Dallas. “My own feeling was that Bobby was worried that there might be some conspiracy and that it might be his fault,” Katzenbach says today, sitting in the comfortably stuffed study of his stone house outside Princeton, New Jersey. “I think the idea that he could be responsible for his brother’s death might be the most terrible idea imaginable. It might very well have been that he was worried that the investigation would somehow point back to him.”
Kennedy’s political enemies—including Lyndon Johnson—were quick to play on his sense of guilt when it suited their purposes. Within days of the assassination, LBJ—irritated with Kennedy for a series of real and imagined slights, including brushing past him to embrace Jackie when Air Force One returned to Washington—was making incendiary comments to former JFK aides, knowing they would get back to Bobby, suggesting that the Kennedys themselves were responsible for the terrible fate that had befallen Jack. “I want to tell you why Kennedy died,” Johnson told White House staffer Ralph Dungan. “Divine retribution…divine retribution. He murdered Diem and then he got it himself.” The accusation was not true—JFK had dithered on the decision to back the coup in Saigon, and was appalled by its bloody outcome—but it was an expertly aimed dart at a man haunted by the notion that he and his brother had been “more energetic than wise on a lot of things.”
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) Page 39
