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• Creating the above sightings and paper trails for some other mission being set up for Oswald but being usurped later by superiors in Washington (i.e., Angleton) and/or Miami (Harvey) for the mission to kill Kennedy.
The second possibility was the most likely, involving a simulated assassination being set up as the pretext to indirectly force Kennedy into an invasion of Cuba. That plan was hijacked along the way and recast as an actual assassination, but Oswald’s role remained the same: the patsy of the operation. This attempt ultimately failed, of course, because after Kennedy was assassinated, it became Lyndon Johnson’s choice; his preference all along was to avoid a confrontation with the Soviet Union, as some in the Pentagon (e.g., LeMay, Willoughby) would have preferred. Johnson probably did not favor this because it might result in leveling Washington DC, taking him out with it, thereby ruining his opportunity to be the greatest U.S. president of all time.
David Atlee Phillips said before he died that fringe elements of U.S. intelligence may have been involved in the conspiracy.98 According to his nephew Shawn Phillips, as David neared death, Shawn’s father, James Phillips, contacted his brother David after a six-year estrangement caused by their inability to converse about some of David’s secrets. James had already concluded that David “was seriously involved” in the JFK assassination; Shawn wrote, “Finally, as David was dying of irreversible lung cancer, he called Jim and there was apparently no reconciliation between them, as Jim asked David pointedly, ‘Were you in Dallas on that day’? David said, ‘Yes’, and Jim hung the phone up.”99
David Sanchez Morales, the Big Indian
David Sanchez Morales worked closely with David Atlee Phillips and Bill Harvey. He was also very close to Johnny Rosselli and John Martino. Thanks to his successful work on a number of black bag operations, he developed a reputation as the best CIA assassin in Latin America. Morales was an important figure at the Havana station between 1958 and 1960, working under the cover of an advertising agency headed by David A. Phillips. He was involved in setting up the JM/WAVE CIA station in Miami and planning the Bay of Pigs invasion, and before that, he participated in Operation Phoenix, in Laos and Vietnam, a program that involved widespread destruction of entire villages and the inhabitants thereof, and eventually led to the My Lai massacre.
Morales was a big, muscular man of very dark complexion, nicknamed El Indio (the Indian). Several witnesses on Dealey Plaza, most of whom were not called to testify before the Warren Commission, described a man fitting Morales’s description. These witnesses saw such a man at the windows of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository shortly before Kennedy’s motorcade passed by, as well as minutes after the shooting, fleeing from the back of the building with two other men in a station wagon. Under the influence of alcohol, he had hinted to close friends that he had been involved in the Kennedy assassination, saying, “‘Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?’”100
Morales was a close associate of David Phillips, who was second in charge at JM/WAVE. He was a very active CIA asset, showing up in Guatemala in 1954, Venezuela during 1955–1958, Havana in 1960, Peru during 1965–1966, Laos in 1966, Bolivia in 1967, and Chile in 1973. Wherever the action was, Morales could be found close by. Morales died on May 8, 1978, from a sudden heart attack under mysterious circumstances; his death occurred just days before he was scheduled to testify for the House Select Committee of Assassinations.
Antonio Veciana, of Alpha 66
Veciana was the head of Alpha 66, by far the most violent of the several exile groups that were committed to murdering Fidel Castro and returning Cuba to its rightful owners. It was also the group most hateful of both Kennedys, and many within it had sworn to kill them both if they did not make good on their empty promises to return Cuba and oust Castro.
Veciana was recruited in Havana in 1960 by his CIA contact, Maurice Bishop (generally thought to be David A. Phillips, though Veciana was very coy about that and never admitted it), who tutored him in such guerrilla methods as psychological warfare, organization of cells, counterfeiting Cuban currency, maritime sabotage, and political assassination.101 What is known is that the CIA agent working under the Maurice Bishop code name was involved in the attacks on Soviet ships coming into Havana, and that Veciana said that Bishop had told him it was his intention to cause trouble between Kennedy and the Russians so that JFK would be forced to violate his pledge to Khrushchev not to invade Cuba; furthermore, Bishop had told him that Kennedy was inexperienced and surrounded by others who could not properly run the country and that their mission was to force Kennedy into removing Castro’s regime.102 Once, in Dallas, he met Bishop at the Southland Center; Bishop was accompanied by a stranger whom, after the assassination, he recognized as Lee Harvey Oswald. Veciana was adamantly certain that the stranger was either Oswald or his “double.”103
George de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s Mysterious Friend
George de Mohrenschildt was a well-connected oil geologist and happened also to be a relative of Jacqueline Kennedy. A well-educated world traveler, he was probably the least likely person to become Oswald’s best friend in Dallas; yet that is exactly what he did, assisting him in finding a job and relocating to New Orleans and then back to Dallas. He had begun writing and talking in the second half of the 1970s. Writers Willem Oltems and Edward Epstein were after de Mohrenschildt for more of his story, and so was HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi. Within hours of Fonzi’s calling upon de Mohrenschildt and leaving a card with his daughter, the man who had admitted talking about Oswald with the Dallas CIA representative was dead of a shotgun blast, allegedly self-inflicted. De Mohrenschildt’s death paradoxically played a role in the HSCA receiving its needed renewal with the new Congress. De Mohrenschildt’s role in setting up Oswald will be explored further in chapter 6.
George Joannides: A Varied, Virtual Mole
Many CIA secrets associated with the Kennedy assassination are still being protected from public scrutiny despite the 1992 passage of JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. Most of the agency’s files on Joannides, the chief of psychological warfare at the agency’s JM/WAVE station in Miami at the time, are a case in point. In 1963, he was in charge of leading the so-called DRE (Revolutionary Cuban Student Directorate). He provided them with up to $50,000 per month of agency funds, instilling in the process a military-style discipline and obeisance to his leadership; he was rated highly for his abilities in this regard, as noted in his job evaluation done in July 1963.104
A week after Joannides’s performance review, Lee Harvey Oswald had a confrontation with members of the DRE in New Orleans as he distributed his “free Cuba” pamphlets on a street corner, setting off a string of encounters between the supposedly pro-Castro ex-marine and the anti-Castro exiles. The DRE sent a member to Oswald’s house posing as a Castro supporter and subsequently challenged him to a radio debate. They made a tape of the debate, which was sent to Joannides. Because his files are still being withheld, it is still unknown what role Joannides had with the encounters between his DRE agents and Oswald. What is known is that within an hour of Oswald’s arrest on November 22, 1963, the leaders of the group he supervised—the DRE in Miami—went public with their documentation of Oswald’s involvement in support of Castro, providing the press information that would help shape the image just being formed by millions of Americans about the person who stood accused of killing the president.105
Joannides’s career was one of perpetual “virtual denials.” The Warren Commission was not informed about Joannides’s connection to the DRE and the men Oswald had confronted in New Orleans. Likewise, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was not informed of his previous duties when he was brought out of retirement and appointed as their liaison to the CIA. That connection was not uncovered for another twenty years, in 1998; Joannides had died seven years earlier, still holding his secrets. The former general counsel to the committee, Bob Blakey, was outraged at this news and maintained that this action constitut
ed obstruction of Congress.106
Researcher-author Jefferson Morley filed a suit against the CIA in December 2003, seeking records of Joannides’s activities in 1963 and 1978.107 A year later he was given about 150 pages of heavily redacted and incomplete records from Joannides’s personnel file. The Agency informed Morley that the remaining records about Joannides’s actions “will not be released in any form. These JFK assassination records are still considered secret in the name of national security”108 (emphasis added).
The records that the CIA did release are troubling. They show that Joannides traveled to New Orleans in connection with his CIA duties in 1963–1964 and that he was cleared for two highly sensitive operations in December 1962 and June 1963 but do not state any details regarding his assignments in those operations. The CIA was legally required to make these records public with the passage of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act.109 As the world awaits the release of legally mandated information, the CIA continues openly defying and obstructing Congress. In the meantime, the status of Mr. Morley’s continuing lawsuit with the CIA remains a topic of discussion on the Internet.*
Edward Lansdale: The Ugly American
Like many of his colleagues, Edward Lansdale had been in the OSS during World War II; after that he served in the army and then the air force. Before his service in the war, he had been an advertising executive and was—as most people drawn to that vocation are—rather flamboyant and gifted in people skills, at least with those who were malleable and vulnerable to his devices. Lansdale was a highly skilled political manipulator, whose character became ignominiously caricaturized as Colonel Hillindale in the novel The Ugly American.110 He had become a self-styled “expert” on Vietnam and was sent by the CIA to help the South Vietnamese government, becoming a personal friend of President Ngo Dinh Diem in the process. Lansdale had been there in March–May 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu; the peace conference in Switzerland which produced the Geneva Accords provided him a blueprint of how he and the CIA could wrest control of the government of the newly partitioned area south of the 17th parallel.
The Accords defined how the French and Viet Minh were to disengage, and for one year the population could choose which part of the partitioned Vietnam in which they wanted to live. Lansdale went to work to give incentives to people living in the more populous north, including most of the Catholic population, to move to the southern section. He developed a plan which used many of the eclectic ideas one might expect from a man with his background as an advertising executive: made-up disinformation and paid-off fortune-tellers, using the well-developed indigenous rumor mill, to sell the population on the merits of living south of the 17th parallel. One of the rumors fed to the villagers was that the Viet Minh had made a deal to allow Chinese troops into the north again and they were already beginning to rape the women and pillage the villages there. “Black leaflets” were distributed to warn people how to conduct themselves when the Viet Minh took over, and a description of how a program of “monetary reform” would commence, which had the effect of immediately halving the value of the currency. The leaflets, booklets, and rumors scared nine hundred thousand people enough to move south. Lansdale and his team had succeeded—through clever disinformation and psychological warfare tactics with a population which strongly believed in astrology, superstition, and soothsayers—in their ruse to sabotage the Viet Minh. An almanac was even printed and sold in the marketplaces which predicted great fortunes for those who decided to live in the south, whereas those in the north could expect only the bleakest existence. All of this caused great confusion just before the elections held as stipulated by the Geneva Accords. The result of Lansdale’s efforts was a successful birth of the Republic of South Vietnam, with Diem at the helm, deeply grateful to Edward Lansdale for the gift.
Lansdale’s real goal, however, was to become the ambassador to South Vietnam, in spite of the fact that he was not well liked by many people in the State Department; the sentiment was bilateral, and for that reason, his goal was not realistic. Within six days of his inauguration, President Kennedy reviewed a report from Lansdale that was “an extremely vivid and well-written account of a place that was going to hell in a hack.”111 He wrote it in a way that denigrated the performance of Ambassador Durbrow, which successfully convinced Kennedy to relieve the ambassador of his duties. After his command performance at the White House on January 28, Lansdale “returned to his office ‘jubilant,’ and boasted, ‘I’m going back to Vietnam in a higher assignment.’”112 He had worked closely with Diem in his efforts to depose Durbrow and take over as ambassador, liaising with his military and intelligence contacts, particularly his friend General Lionel McGarr (MAAG chief in Saigon) and William Colby, CIA station chief in Saigon.
In the State Department, Dean Rusk had been informed by his assistant for Far Eastern affairs, J. Graham Parsons, that Lansdale was too much of a maverick, who resented officials coming from foreign service training and was therefore not “a team player.” Rusk also learned of Lansdale’s covert credentials for the first time; all of this cost Lansdale any consideration of being named as the ambassador.113 Much of the discussion within the State Department regarding Lansdale remains classified or has disappeared, and the result is a “murky trail … typical of the life of Lansdale, who would probably turn in his grave if any question about him could be easily answered.”114 It appears now that Edward Lansdale had deluded himself into thinking he knew more about Vietnam than did anyone else, either there or in Washington, and set out to get Ambassador Durbrow thrown out and himself installed in his position. After failing at that, he wrote a report urging a large U.S. troop commitment to Vietnam, effectively taking sides against JFK’s stated objectives; the timing of this report indicates that it was done in conjunction with Lyndon Johnson’s visit to Vietnam, which further suggests that the document’s message was heavily influenced by Johnson.
Cord Meyer: One of the Blue Bloods of the CIA
Cord Meyer had always despised John F. Kennedy. Meyer had come from a long line of Yankee blue bloods listed in the New York Social Register who were accustomed to regal treatment and regular coverage in the society pages; they were presumed to be of higher intellect, greater erudition, and altogether more worthy of the respect and adulation of those poor souls beneath their station. He had been trained from an early age to treat the nouveau riche with a subtle disdain, or outright condescension, depending upon how far down the totem pole from his own lofty position in mainstream society he might deem someone to be. Those having been born of wealth and privilege for multiple generations were presumed to have a higher claim on the world’s opportunities than that of the class who had only made their way across the ocean in the last generation or two, whose grueling passage was made in the lower, smellier decks of the ocean liners. The Kennedys were among the latter group, despite the rapidity with which their bank accounts had caught up and surpassed many families whose ancestors had crossed the ocean on the Mayflower. Cord Meyer started out with a low regard for the immigrant’s son John F. Kennedy, and in the course of life’s events, his disdain would develop into a loathing contempt. In between the two, of course, was his wife, Mary Pinchot Meyer, discussed previously and whose brief reappearance awaits.
Young Cord was given a classically liberal education at Yale, where he was a member of the Scroll and Key Society, and became an advocate of world government as a means for solving all the world’s problems. In 1945, he took his young bride, Mary Pinchot Meyer, with him to San Francisco for the United Nations planning conference. John F. Kennedy also attended this conference and recognized Mary from having dated her during their prep school days; something happened between them in San Francisco during that conference, which years later, caused Kennedy to decline giving Cord Meyer a political appointment. He explained to Charles Bartlett, a mutual friend of theirs, that he could not support Meyer “due to some incident that occurred at the UN conference in San Francisco in 1945, there was no possib
ility.” This incident was widely believed to have been an attempt by JFK to seduce Cord’s new wife (it is not clear whether it was successful or not); regardless, Cord developed a visceral hatred for Kennedy from that day on.115
After the formation of the United Nations, Meyer established the United World Federalists, an organization that promoted the idea of a world without nuclear weapons. Cord Meyer had been shocked by the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, Meyer commissioned a film by Pare Lorentz called The Beginning or the End. Meyer wanted this film to be the definitive statement about the dangers of the atomic age. In the left versus right wings, which later developed within the CIA, there is little doubt which side Cord Meyer would inhabit. That Cord viewed the “Agency” in a third-person context, as though he had little control over its past, present, or future direction—despite his own influence over it—was evident up to his dying day, when someone asked him who he thought was behind the murder of his ex-wife; his response to that question was, “The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.”116
Richard Helms: Chief Dissembler
The largest question about Helms’s possible involvement surfaced in 1975 when the Church Committee began looking into the CIA’s ZR/RIFLE program, which he had a direct hand in creating. Helms testified about two members of that team—WI/ROGUE and QJ/WIN—who seemed to appear in advance of JFK’s assassination and then disappear back into the woodwork a few months afterward; it also revealed how Bill Harvey reported directly to Helms as well as his nominal boss, Angleton. A February 19, 1962, memo from Helms to Bill Harvey had authorized Harvey to hire the assassin known as QJ/WIN for the ZR/RIFLE operation.117 The testimony indicated that WI/ROGUE was “an essentially stateless soldier of fortune, a forger and former bank robber,” but the “principal agent” was QJ/WIN, whom Richard Helms described thusly: “If you need somebody to carry out murder, I guess you had a man who might be prepared to carry it out.”118 Documents would surface that proved not only that Dick Helms and Des FitzGerald ran ZR/RIFLE, but that Bobby Kennedy had authorized the plots, which were run by Bill Harvey; in the end, only Bill Harvey acknowledged his role in the assassination attempts against Castro.119