Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

The time was right for a reopening of the case. Watergate, and the earlier Church Committee revelations, had raised dark questions in the public’s mind about its own government. The American people’s confidence in the government was shaken further that year when television viewers watched the first national broadcast of the Zapruder film, after TV news showman Geraldo Rivera pushed ABC to air the horribly revealing footage on its late-night Good Night America show.

  Schweiker, regarded as something of a Boy Scout by his Senate colleagues, was equally dazed by what he was discovering in the catacombs of his government as he sifted through piles of evidence and declassified documents in the National Archives related to JFK’s assassination. After hearing of the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro, Schweiker initially suspected Kennedy was the victim of retaliation by the Cuban dictator. “But we never produced any evidence that Castro was involved,” recalled Dave Marston, the senator’s legislative counsel and his lead man on the subcommittee’s investigation. Schweiker’s suspicions then began to head in an even more explosive direction. “We don’t know what happened, but we do know that Oswald had intelligence connections,” Schweiker told the press. “Everywhere you look with him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence.”

  Marston, who later left Schweiker’s office to become U.S. attorney in Philadelphia and is now in private practice, is still convinced of this. “Oswald could not have acted alone,” he says today. “His global wanderings clearly point to something bigger going on. There were so many CIA people and other government agents scheming in Florida and New Orleans, doing the crazy things they do—it’s inconceivable that they didn’t know about Oswald.”

  Gary Hart was amazed to hear Schweiker voice his suspicions during meetings of the Church subcommittee. “Dick made a lot of statements inside the committee that were a lot more inflammatory than anything I ever said, in terms of his suspicions about who killed Kennedy,” Hart said in an interview for this book. “He felt, this is outrageous, we’ve got to reopen this. He was a blowtorch.”

  But Hart’s mind was also blown by what they were finding. As the Church subcommittee dug deeper into the swamps of anti-Castro intrigue that festered in Florida during the Kennedy years, Hart was stunned by the complexity of the anti-Kennedy ecosystem and by the intricate web that linked the CIA, Mafia, and Cuban exiles. “I think the whole atmosphere at the time was so yeasty,” he said. “And I don’t think that anybody had control of the thing. There were people plotting with people, the Mafia connections, the friendships between the Mafia and the CIA agents, and this crazy exile community. There were more and more layers, and it was honeycombed with bizarre people. I don’t think that anybody knew everything that was going on. And I think the Kennedys were kind of racing to keep up with it all.

  “If there was anybody who was on top of it, it was Dick Helms—the man who kept the secrets,” Hart added. “He would have been closer to knowing what was going on than anybody else, but I don’t think even he did. There was no mastermind there. There was too much going on, involving too many people. Too many rogue elephants all over the place. Too many ad hoc operations. It was just a nightmare. I think a big book could be written on Florida in the early sixties, just a huge book.”

  Hart makes clear that he doesn’t believe the assassination of JFK was an official CIA operation—his suspicions focus more on the Mafia. But he doesn’t rule out rogue agents who were working closely with the Mafia. And he believes the agency was involved in the cover-up. “If there was any lockdown, I’m sure Helms would have been part of it,” Hart said.

  In the course of the Church investigation, it became shockingly clear that the Senate panel was confronting ruthless forces. In June 1975, Chicago godfather Sam Giancana was shot to death in the basement of his home, one week before he was to testify in Washington. Soon after, Johnny Rosselli—the key liaison between the Mafia and CIA—was called before the committee on two occasions to answer questions about the Castro assassination plots. The following year, Schweiker subpoenaed Rosselli once more to answer questions about the Kennedy assassination in a tightly guarded session of his subcommittee. He was hoping to grill the gangster more, when—on July 28, 1976—Rosselli’s dismembered body was found stuffed in a rusting oil drum, floating in the waters off Miami. It was obvious that Rosselli’s former confederates would stop at nothing to prevent the Senate investigators from getting at the truth.

  “Rosselli was killed every way you can be killed,” Hart said. “He was garroted, his arms and legs were sawn off, he had a bullet hole in his head. I went down on behalf of the subcommittee, in secret, to meet with the Miami detectives and the Dade County sheriff’s office. And they showed me pictures of when they pulled him out of the water—terrible, the worst things I’d ever seen in my life. They told me it was a Mafia hit. It wasn’t amateur night.” Church Committee staff investigators concluded that Rosselli’s execution, as well as Giancana’s, had been ordered by Florida godfather Santo Trafficante, another key suspect in the Kennedy conspiracy.

  Stonewalled by CIA witnesses like Helms and violently deprived of key witnesses like Rosselli and Giancana, the Church probe finally ran out of time and political momentum. Frank Church went off to pursue the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, which he lost to Jimmy Carter. And Richard Schweiker was lured away from his Kennedy probe by Ronald Reagan, who was hoping to soften his image in his ill-fated challenge of President Ford by adding the moderate Pennsylvanian to his ticket.

  Looking back at his probe today, Schweiker is still perplexed by the lingering questions. The CIA’s rank duplicity deeply bothers him. “My opinion of the CIA has greatly diminished through the years,” he told me. Like Hart, he believes the agency engaged in a cover-up—and some of its rogue operatives might have been involved in the assassination itself. But the former senator has come to conclude that the JFK assassination was a Mafia plot. “I’ve gone through a lot of phases on this, but I now really think the assassination was basically a mob hit—it was the mob trying to get back at the Kennedys for cracking down on the Mafia.” But when Oswald comes up, Schweiker seems less certain that the assassination was a mob operation. The accused assassin was the product of a fake defector program run by the CIA, Schweiker observed. “And then he went haywire.” Schweiker is still clearly unsettled when he retraces Oswald’s footsteps before Dallas. “I certainly don’t believe the CIA gave us the whole story.”

  As for Hart, he too suffered disappointment in his later bid for presidential glory. He was knocked out of the 1988 Democratic nomination race when the press exposed his affair with model Donna Rice, after Miami Herald reporters hid in bushes outside his Washington home to catch him in the act. Hart tried to weather the political storm, arguing that a politician’s private life should not be exposed to peeping-tom journalism. But it was 1987, and in these pre-Clinton years, the media’s powers as morality enforcer were still largely unchallenged. Armed with a comical photo of the candidate cavorting with the blonde beauty on a luxury yacht appropriately named Monkey Business, the press soon pummeled Hart’s political career into the dirt.

  In later years, Hart salvaged his public reputation, serving with distinction as the co-chairman of a pre-9/11 commission that tried to warn the country of the dangers of terrorism and turning himself into a voice of reason against the Bush administration’s overreliance on a military response to the Al Qaeda threat. He still takes pride in the Church Committee’s efforts to subject the country’s shadowy intelligence apparatus to democratic controls—a struggle that has assumed new significance today.

  As he looked back at the Church Committee’s limited probe of the Kennedy assassination, Hart—a tall, fit, ruddy-faced man with a penchant for cowboy boots—suddenly made a startling charge. Whenever he was asked by reporters about the Kennedy assassination during his 1984 and 1988 presidential runs, Hart said, “I would tell the press that, based on my Church Committee experience, I believe there are sufficient doubts to justify reopening the files of th
e CIA, particularly in relationship to the Mafia. And I think that I signed my death warrant when I did that. I didn’t realize it at the time…but I think what happened to me in 1987 was a pure setup. I think what people discovered then was you can assassinate somebody without using a bullet.”

  Hart did not want to linger on this explosive assertion. He does not want to appear “wacky” or “obsessive”—labels, he pointed out, that are quickly applied to any politician who dares to call for reopening the JFK case. “You have to be very careful about falling into the conspiracy category,” he observed. But when pushed, Hart said that he received tips after the scandal broke that suggested a possible Mafia involvement in the Monkey Business affair. A prominent investigative reporter told Hart that after he began calling for a new JFK probe, close associates of Florida godfather Santo Trafficante expressed their strong displeasure with the senator. “We don’t think [Hart’s] any better than the Kennedys,” one of the mobsters told the reporter. But Hart chose not to pursue these leads. “I just didn’t want to make it my life cause,” he told me.

  It is easy to understand why Hart did not want to make this claim—that he was the victim of character assassination because of his stand on the JFK case—too loudly. The press had already pilloried him back in 1987 when he tried to make reporters’ window-peeping the issue, instead of his own sexual indiscretion. He was flayed for trying to dodge responsibility for the humiliating fiasco. Hart’s assertion that his political downfall was related to the JFK conspiracy would certainly have driven the media into a new frenzy. Since Hart himself has declined to pursue the matter, it would be hard to prove that he really was set up during the 1988 campaign. But what’s intriguing is that Hart believes it might be true. One of the few Washington officials to aggressively—if briefly—investigate the Kennedy assassination, Gary Hart came away from the experience with the belief that he was up against powerful forces that, years after JFK’s murder, were still determined to keep the truth from being revealed.

  SOON AFTER HE WAS hired as the deputy chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in December 1976, Robert Tanenbaum came to see Richard Schweiker in his Senate office. The Assassinations Committee was picking up the investigation where Schweiker and Hart had left it, and Schweiker was going to hand over his JFK file to the recently formed panel. Tanenbaum was a thirty-three-year-old, streetwise product of legendary New York D.A. Frank Hogan’s office, where he had won every one of his murder cases, rising to become deputy chief of the homicide bureau. When the young prosecutor was recruited by the chief counsel of the Assassinations Committee, Richard A. Sprague, he made clear that he would only take the job if he could treat the JFK investigation like one of his New York homicide cases—with no political compromises, no interference. Sprague, the former district attorney of Philadelphia, assured Tanenbaum that he had the same philosophy and the two men began assembling an aggressive team—including investigative reporter Gaeton Fonzi, an experienced holdover from the Schweiker subcommittee, and Cliff Fenton, a savvy, black homicide detective whom Tanenbaum brought with him from New York.

  But as soon as Tanenbaum began talking with Schweiker that day, he realized he had been very naïve. There was no way that this case would follow the usual steps of a homicide investigation. “First of all,” Schweiker told Tanenbaum, after asking all staff members to leave his office, “you should know that they’re going to stonewall you.” While the young prosecutor was trying to absorb this startling idea—that duly elected representatives of the American people should expect to be defied by forces more powerful than themselves—Schweiker told him something even more shattering. “In my judgment,” the senator said, “the CIA was involved in the murder of the president.”

  Tanenbaum physically recoiled. “When I heard that, every capillary in my body went into electrified shock,” he recalled. “This was a United States senator telling me this!”

  That night, Tanenbaum took the Schweiker file home to the townhouse near American University he had rented after moving to Washington. He and Cliff Fenton pored over the stack of papers until three in the morning. When they finally finished, Fenton got to his feet and made his way to the door, with Tanenbaum following him outside. Standing on the brick sidewalk in the early morning chill, the homicide cop looked at his boss and said, “We are in way over our heads. And there’s no Frank Hogan here to protect you.” Tanenbaum knew he was right.

  Nonetheless, the prosecutor plowed forward. He and Sprague began to subpoena CIA officials, bringing them before the House Committee to undergo aggressive questioning for the first time about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. When Tanenbaum first joined the committee, he had no strong opinions about the case—for years, he had assumed the Warren Commission had got it right. But as he and his investigators dug deeper, he came to the same conclusions as those of a long line of Washington insiders, from Bobby Kennedy to Richard Schweiker. “The more we looked into it, the most productive area of investigation was clearly the CIA—namely, those operatives who had worked with the anti-Castro Cubans,” Tanenbaum said in an interview.

  One of the CIA veterans who aroused the congressional investigators’ particular interest was David Atlee Phillips, the CIA disinformation specialist who had masterminded the propaganda campaigns for the Guatemala coup and the Bay of the Pigs invasion. Phillips was based in Mexico City when the CIA station there apparently falsified evidence to show that Oswald visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies just weeks before the assassination. Furthermore, Gaeton Fonzi came across explosive information that indicated Phillips had met with Oswald in Dallas in September 1963. But when the veteran spy appeared before an executive session of the Assassinations Committee, he put on an artful performance like the former actor he was, lying about his Mexico City role and his Oswald surveillance.

  It was a dramatic confrontation. On one side of the table was Bob Tanenbaum, the blunt-spoken, Brooklyn-born prosecutor—a hulking man who had attended the University of California’s Berkeley campus on a basketball scholarship. On the other was David Phillips, a tall, blond Texan with a long, deeply lined face who was nearly two decades Tanenbaum’s senior—a smooth, chain-smoking man from a Fort Worth family of fallen fortune who had risen to become chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere division. Phillips had recently stepped down after a quarter century in the spy business to become a CIA advocate as the head of the new Association of Retired Intelligence Officers.

  Phillips had mastered the aloof, country-club attitude of the agency’s WASP elite. Like his boss, Dick Helms, he acted as if he were doing committee members a favor by granting them his time. “They are very antiseptic people,” Tanenbaum said of Phillips and the other CIA overlords with whom he clashed. “I don’t know what world they’re living in. But they’re not in the world of ordinary America, of taking subways, hailing cabs, shopping at grocery stores.”

  Despite his other-worldly bearing, Phillips did not intimidate the Assassinations Committee deputy counsel. Tanenbaum had tangled with Mafia bosses, he had tried and convicted members of the Columbo crime family. He was not going to back away from the likes of David Phillips. “These guys act like they’re totally above the law,” Tanenbaum said. “But they were exactly the kind of guys I thought should be brought down, if in fact they were proven guilty.”

  As Tanenbaum was interrogating Phillips, the congressional investigator had in his possession an FBI memo that indicated Oswald had been impersonated by somebody else in Mexico City—a disturbing piece of evidence that suggested the accused assassin was the focus of a U.S. intelligence operation. CIA surveillance cameras installed outside the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City captured on film a man purporting to be Oswald. When Tanenbaum pushed Phillips to tell him where those photographs could be found, the former spy insisted they had been destroyed. But Tanenbaum knew he was lying. Since the FBI had viewed the CIA’s “Oswald” photos, they clearly had not been immediately “recycled” as Phillips claim
ed.

  Under the counsel’s relentless questioning, Phillips started getting entangled in his story’s inconsistencies. It was a taste of what might have been, if key suspects in the JFK assassination had been thoroughly subjected to this type of skilled prosecutorial scrutiny.

  “When he told us the photographs were gone,” Tanenbaum recalled, “I told him, ‘Well, the bottom line is there are three people in this room who know you just lied—Detective Fenton, me, and you.’ And then I had Cliff hand him a copy of the FBI memo.”

  Tanenbaum was astonished by what Phillips did next. “He read the memo. And then he just folds it up and leaves the room.” That is what David Phillips thought of Congress’s right to oversee U.S. intelligence.

  Tanenbaum wanted to drag the former CIA official back for another round of questioning. “Call him back,” the deputy counsel told the Assassinations Committee. “He’s in contempt, he committed perjury. Let him know it.” But committee members were beginning to get cold feet about their staff’s energetic methods. Tanenbaum wanted the spy agency to deliver unredacted documents to his office. But the committee wouldn’t back him up. “They were pulling the rug out from under us.”

  The assassination investigation started coming under fire in the press. A New York Times article clawed through Sprague’s past as a Philadelphia prosecutor, suggesting he was no stranger to controversy. An op-ed piece in the Times blasted the committee’s “McCarthy-era” tactics. Congressional funding for the investigation began to run out and Sprague and his staff stopped getting paid.

  Seeing the writing on the wall, Tanenbaum met with Sprague and convinced him that since they were not prepared to compromise their investigation, the only honorable course for them was to resign. “I didn’t want to participate in an historical fraud,” Tanenbaum later explained. “My daughter, when I was in Washington, was three years old…and I didn’t want to look at her years later and put my rubber stamp on a report that I knew was a fraud because it looked good on my résumé.”