LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  On July 3, 1963, Hoover told the Kennedys that Rometsch was alleged to be from East Germany and to have formerly worked for Walter Ulbricht, the Communist leader of East Germany. He went on to say that the FBI suspected that she was a spy.82 RFK also realized that Bobby Baker, who had arranged these sessions, not only had tapes and photographs of JFK’s sexual activities involving Rometsch, but also knew about earlier trysts with Maria Novotny and Suzy Chang, both of whom were from Communist countries and had been named as part of the spy ring that had trapped John Profumo, the British war minister. Bobby knew that Johnson, through his connections with both Bobby Baker and Hoover, would have also known all about these vulnerabilities of his brother and would not hesitate to use the knowledge to his own advantage. RFK became convinced that if these stories were published, his brother might be forced to resign.83

  Hoover, of course, knew all about JFK’s involvement with Ellen Rometsch when JFK was still sleeping with her. Apparently, the president agreed with the other fifty customers that Baker had referred to, and wanted to keep her on. By the time Baker started dropping her name, in reaction to the pressure that Bobby was putting on him, Hoover had already directed his FBI agents to question Rometsch about her time in East Germany. They came to the conclusion that she was probably a Soviet spy. When Hoover then passed this information on to the Kennedys, Robert Kennedy arranged to give her $50,000 and have her sent back to Germany. She was satisfied with this arrangement for a short time, but then wanted to return to the United States to marry her boyfriend. The Kennedys now had to raise more money to keep her in Germany, and happy and content to remain there. For that, JFK decided to recruit his old pal Grant Stockdale to help raise additional money.84

  By this time, AG Kennedy knew that the lid was very close to blowing, and he had to do everything he could to keep that from happening. There was pressure from the Republicans to have Rometsch returned to Washington to be interviewed, an idea that caused AG Kennedy to appeal to Hoover’s sense of patriotism to stop, in the interests of the presidency itself. After discussing it with Hoover by telephone in the morning, he met with him the same afternoon to force him to persuade the Senate leadership to abort the Senate investigation of this story, because it was “contrary to the national interest.” He also told him to let it be known that other leading members of Congress would be drawn into this scandal, and so it was also contrary to the interests of Congress.85

  The Fallout from the White House Sexcapades

  Although the attitude of journalists in the 1960s toward the private lives of politicians was generally more benign, when the situation did rise to a level at which it could not be kept from the public, the ensuing scandal was generally much greater than might now be the case. As noted earlier, such a scandal brought down the British government. John F. Kennedy had been intimate with some of the same women who were involved in the British scandal, so by the fall of 1963, the festering animosities threatened the continued existence of the Kennedy administration.

  Seymour Hersh interviewed four former Secret Service agents who reported that they saw a president obsessed with sex, willing to take enormous risks to gratify that obsession, a president who came late many times to the Oval Office and who was not readily available for hours during the day. According to a Secret Service agent who was on the Kennedy presidential detail, “When she (Jackie) was there, it was no fun. He just had headaches. You really saw him droop because he wasn’t getting laid. He was like a rooster getting hit with a water hose.”86 Secret Service agents were frustrated by the many unknown women who were brought to the president for one-night stands. The women were not searched before meeting the president. The agents feared that one of these women would blackmail or even kill JFK. This was not the only way the agents felt derelict in their duty; they also allowed crimes to go unreported. When traveling, local officials would often bring call girls and hookers (often more than one at a time) to the president. The agents, rather than arresting the president or his aides, friends, and supporters for procuring prostitutes, would say nothing. There were many budding Hollywood starlets brought to the White House for their services with it made clear that sex with the president could help a career, but news of the affair would end it.87

  Long after his death, incredible rumors and credible stories emerged of JFK’s love life with beautiful women of many backgrounds: Audrey Hepburn, Jayne Mansfield, Gene Tierney, Marlene Dietrich, Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, and Rhonda Flemming were among the Hollywood set; Angie Dickinson was also widely rumored to have shared a bed not only with Elvis Presley but with the president as well (presumably at different times). However, she may not have been totally satisfied by that rendezvous since she reportedly said JFK’s brutal lovemaking style was “the best twenty seconds of my life.” His German spy lover, Inga Arvad, later confided to columnist Arthur Krock that “Jack was a poor lover—a ‘boy, not a man, who was intent upon ejaculation and not a woman’s pleasure.’”88 That lament is curiously similar to one supposedly made by his wife, as reported in the book Grace and Power by Sally Smith: “Jackie said JFK was a flop as a lover. She told a friend he ‘just goes too fast and falls asleep.’”

  JFK’s poolside cavorting may have been a factor in his death: In September 1963, while frolicking poolside with another of his sexual partners (possibly Fiddle or Faddle, the secretaries from the White House staff who were evidently hired on the basis of skills other than the usual filing, typing, and shorthand variety), JFK tore a groin muscle. To relieve pain and promote healing, he had to wear a stiff shoulder-to-groin brace that locked his body in a rigid stationary posture. It was far more constraining than his usual back brace, which he also continued to wear. The two braces made it impossible for JFK to bend in reflex when he was struck in the neck by a bullet fired by the assassins in Dealey Plaza. The president’s back remained erect for the last, fatal, shot, allowing his head to stay in a relatively stable, upright position.

  Lest the reader conclude that the reason for this journey “into the weeds” of the lurid bedroom antics of the president and his brother, the “assistant president,” with beautiful women was merely a prurient detour, it is the undeniable direct connection between the brothers’ risky behavior and what several other men thought of them that formed a critical mass that eventually exploded in Dallas (and possibly again five years later in Los Angeles and Memphis, but that’s a subject for other books). Those other men, representing the highest levels of the military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies of the government—led all along, since even before their 1961 inauguration, by the vice president of the United States—decided that the Kennedys’ activities were tantamount to a serious national security risk and amounted to “consorting with the enemy.” These men had the power to eliminate this risk and came to believe that JFK’s liaisons were nothing other than treasonous acts that had to be dealt with accordingly.

  The Cast of Spooks—Key CIA Men

  In addition to Bill Harvey, who was described at length in the previous chapter, there were a number of men of the CIA who deserve a few words in order to properly set the context into which the nation, and the world, was thrust during the early 1960s as the cold war reached a boil.

  Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence

  Allen Dulles, previously a member of the OSS before coming to the CIA at its inception, took over from Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith when Eisenhower appointed Smith to become secretary of state in 1953. Dulles served until November 1961, when he was fired by President Kennedy for the failures of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Due to his background, Dulles was mostly interested in covert operations and proceeded quickly to take the agency into the uncharted waters of overthrowing governments unfriendly to the United States. During his tenure as DCI, he initiated coups in Iran in 1953 and Costa Rica and Guatemala in 1954, which were considered successful because they accomplished the goal, irrespective of the later consequences. The operations not considered successful included those of Indonesia
and Tibet in 1958, Vietnam from 1954 through 1964, and Operation Mongoose against Cuba in 1961–1962. Considering this record and later developments in these countries, in retrospect it is hard to consider any of this work a success. John F. Kennedy certainly had his doubts, which led to him firing Dulles, along with Gen. Charles Cabell, ostensibly for their parts in the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. These firings were widely considered to be the first step in his longer-term plan to break up the CIA, carrying out his vow “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”89

  The Guatemala operation was owned by Allen Dulles, who did not approve of the small group of advisers to President Jacobo Arbenz who were seeking socialist remedies for the rural poverty afflicting much of the population of their country. When the Arbenz government moved to expropriate 174,000 acres from United Fruit Company, Dulles decided to take action despite the strong objections of the State Department. Called Operation Success, it cost about $3 million and lasted eight months. The overthrow of a small country’s democratically elected government in 1954, due to a perception held by a few people in Washington that somehow Guatemala was a threat to the security of the United States, led to a civil war that lasted decades and cost over two hundred thousand lives.90 Dulles considered Operation Success a success, at least compared with his multiple failures to stop the spread of Communism in Europe, because it turned around the socialistic direction of the Guatemalan government. This was the first covert operation for a young David Atlee Phillips, who received a Distinguished Intelligence Medal for his creation of a “completely notional situation” (i.e., hypothetical) that led to the Guatemalan government being deluded into thinking it was in far worse shape than it actually was, leading to its early surrender.

  The final, black irony of Allen Dulles’s career was his appointment, by the new president Lyndon B. Johnson, to serve on the commission charged with certifying the integrity of the investigation into John Kennedy’s assassination, though his real mission there was to help protect secrets. That project, of course, would be considered a definite success.

  Unfortunately, the fallout from the many illegal operations allowed by Dulles would continue for at least two decades; it could be argued that the biggest fallout occurred just one decade after Dulles ascended to his position as DCI, an event generally referred to as “the crime of the century.” Many of the same men involved in the Guatemala coup, for example, would turn up in Dallas on November 22, 1963, including E. Howard Hunt, Edward Lansdale, Tracy Barnes, Grayston Lynch, “Rip” Robertson, David Sanchez Morales, and David Atlee Phillips. Others who were not there, yet were figuratively only one step removed, included Bill Harvey, Frank Wisner, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, Richard Helms, and Allen Dulles.

  The Enigmatic James Jesus Angleton

  The head of the CIA’s counterintelligence branch for twenty years, through 1974, Angleton was known widely as the “poet-spy,” whose literary journal, Furioso, published the works of Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, and Archibald MacLeish. He also enjoyed growing orchids and has been memorialized in more than one movie for these avocations. Toward the end of his career, he would sit before a congressional committee and say that “it is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.”91 To say that Angleton was a complex man, full of contradictions, would be an understatement; perhaps his pursuit of artful things and delicate flowers was meant to balance his senses.

  Like many of his peers, Angleton was in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II predecessor to the CIA. For Angleton, the cold war was an extension of WWII, morphed into an anti-Communist crusade with his double agents engaged in an underground battle against the international Communist peril. Angleton became involved as a supervisor of a CIA assassination unit in the 1950s, headed by Army Colonel Boris Pash. This unit was designed especially for the killing of suspected double agents, according to the statement of E. Howard Hunt. According to Mark Lane, “Pash’s assassination unit was assigned to James Jesus Angleton.”92 Angleton also had a long association with a number of Mob figures, from his days in Italy with the OSS and later through a number of connections with Meyer Lansky.93 After his retirement, he told an investigator that he knew which Mob figures had killed Sam Giancana and blamed the Church Committee for causing his death, as well as Johnny Rosselli’s, by demanding testimony on topics about which the Mafia’s code of silence (omerta) required absolute secrecy.94 In his oversight of the CIA’s counterintelligence division, the program of international mail interception had tracked Lee Harvey Oswald from his visit to the Soviet Union and tracked him during his trip to Mexico City.95

  David Martin’s book Wilderness of Mirrors thoroughly described the myriad of deceptions and disinformation the CIA has employed since its inception. But it was Angleton who originally coined the phrase Martin used for the book title, an excellent and succinct description of Angleton’s life. Unfortunately, his increasingly obsessive, ultimately unsuccessful hunt for “moles” (KGB double agents) within the CIA led him to collect thousands of files on CIA employees and others whom he suspected. His files closely resembled (and no doubt were somewhat redundant of) the files being collected by his friend J. Edgar Hoover, labeled “official and confidential” and “personal,” a shameful collection of rumors, innuendos, and fabrications.

  Angleton’s paranoia about moles under every chair, and his habit of labeling anyone who disagreed with him as a spy, intimidated the agency to the extent that recruitment of agents had to be suspended. By talking in riddles and conducting his domain as if he were the only person alive who really understood the world of counterintelligence—together with the huge files he kept on all CIA officers and key political figures—he had successfully intimidated his superiors from taking action against him for decades, before being removed by William Colby in 1974. By then, he had already removed many of the files he maintained, including everything he had on John F. Kennedy. For all his paranoia about moles within the CIA, he had been mesmerized by the defector Anatoli Golytsin, who manipulated him. He was also naïve about Harold “Kim” Philby, a high-ranking officer of the British Intelligence Service MI-6 who, it turned out, was actually a doubled master Soviet KGB agent; Angleton himself, “the hunter of moles,” had confided many of the nation’s secrets to Kim Philby during their weekly lunches together at Harvey’s or La Nicoise restaurants.96

  Theodore “Ted” Shackley, the Linguistics Major

  Ted Shackley had a background in linguistics at the University of Maryland, which was his entrée into the world of spooks not far from College Park, across the Potomac River in Langley, Virginia. Before that, he served in the army’s counterintelligence division, where he became involved with the recruitment of Polish agents. Upon joining the CIA, he became involved in numerous “black operations” and became known as the Blond Ghost for his refusal to be photographed. Others believe that this appellation referred to a mysterious series of deaths that occurred shortly after he was posted in various stations; he had worked under Bill Harvey since 1953. About the same time as Operation Mongoose was launched, Shackley was named the station chief of the Miami station, known under its code name JM/WAVE. He was responsible for the CIA officers who were supervising approximately two thousand Cuban exiles and agents still living underground in Cuba, as well as their own navy fleet, comprised mostly of agile speedboats, built with heavy hulls and large, powerful engines.

  David Atlee Phillips, a.k.a. Maurice Bishop

  Shackley’s second in command of JM/WAVE was David Atlee Phillips, who was identified under his code name Maurice Bishop. Phillips’s first duty as a CIA operative was during the insurrection he induced; his role in that operation was to create a blitz of propaganda to persuade the Guatemalan government that it was in far worse shape than it was in reality. He received a Distinguished Intelligence Medal for his role in deluding an entire government of their fatal deficiencies, which led to the Gua
temalan government not mounting an effective defense when the revolution began.

  Phillips was involved in directing Oswald to some degree, certainly by the time Oswald had returned to Dallas, where he was seen meeting with Phillips by Antonio Veciana. There are two possibilities as to what this involvement was:97

  • Preparing a number of witness sightings and paper trails purposely implicating Oswald in advance of his mission, including the trip to Mexico, for the purpose of connecting Kennedy’s assassination directly, and quickly, to Cuba and the Soviet Union, as a means to trigger an invasion of Cuba, at the risk of Soviet retaliation.