by Gus Russo
According to court documents filed by Gordon’s attorney, one of the shooters recruited in the plot was turned around by Castro, and instructed to return and inform the planners (RFK, et al) that “for the vicious plot, he [Fidel] would have President John F. Kennedy assassinated.”36 Heather Gordon remembers, “Dad found out that one of his Cuban double agents was a triple agent reporting back to Fidel. He had him arrested.”37
In late 1961, after his Guantanamo stint, Gordon suffered a nervous breakdown and was sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital for mental evaluation. He was not allowed to see any member of his family for eight months. He told his family it was really a debriefing, and the extended stay an effort by the Kennedy administration to put the fear of God into him. After vowing to remain silent about the plots he had discovered at Guantanamo, Gordon won reassignment, serving out his career at posts in the Pentagon, Florida, New Orleans, and the Boston Naval Shipyards. During the latter part of this period, one incident stands out in Heather Gordon’s memory. “I remember in 1968, when Bobby was killed, dad jumped for joy. It was like a millstone was removed from his neck. He knew Bobby and felt that if he was elected, we’d have a mobster president.”
After retiring from the military in 1969, Gordon became bitter over what he perceived to be medical malpractice performed by military physicians on his wife. He wrote letters that may have contained veiled threats to reveal what he knew if his wife were not taken care of. The military threatened to lobotomize Gordon and keep him in Bellevue Hospital for life. His daughter Heather says: “They were afraid he’d write about Cuba. He was not the kind of guy you wanted mad at you, and he was a prolific writer.” Gordon’s sister-in-law says emphatically that Gordon told her he was going to write a book. Gordon, while stationed in New Orleans, told the details of the Cuba episode to fellow ONI officer Guy Johnson. Johnson, coincidentally Guy Banister’s attorney, thought Gordon could use Cuba as leverage over the military. Johnson had good contacts in Washington, and noted attorney F. Lee Bailey eventually took Gordon’s case. Bailey negotiated with the Pentagon. A deal was struck that accommodated Mrs. Gordon’s needs with the agreement that her husband remain mum on Guantanamo, and the matter was dropped.38
John Gordon went on to become assistant professor of history at Framingham State College. In 1970, two CIA officers showed up at his house in Framingham and brought Gordon to Washington, D.C., where he testified in closed session before the Senate Judiciary Committee (among whose members was Ted Kennedy). Consequently, according to court documents, Judiciary Committee member Senator Ed Long of Missouri gained “knowledge of where a record of the (Guantanamo) meeting may be maintained.” That proof has never surfaced, and Sen. Long’s own papers are voluminous and unindexed.
In 1976, Gordon relocated to Georgetown, SC, where he was Director of University of South Carolina’s Coastal Carolina College. He retired in 1986 and died of a heart attack on Sept 27, 1987, never being able to prove his own stories true.
For years, the seeds of doubt were rampant in the minds of the Gordon family. Was John Gordon exaggerating his experiences? How could they believe his stories? Eventually, vindication would appear for John Gordon and all those who stuck by him in the face of 33 years of government denials. With the passage of the JFK Act in 1992, sensitive government documents began being declassified, shedding light on much of the secret government operations of the Kennedy administration, including the Guantanamo affair. One investigation would conclude that the Guantanamo plotting likely had its origins in the stratagem that was micro-managed by Robert Kennedy—Operation Mongoose. (For further details on John Gordon, see Chapter Nineteen.)39
Camelot, /aka/ “Murder, Incorporated”
On January 25, 1961, just five days after the president’s inauguration and three months before the Bay of Pigs, JFK’s White House instructed CIA Director of Covert Operations Richard Bissell to create a permanent assassination capability. Bissell’s assistant, Tracy Barnes, remarked, “JFK was tough. He knew the difference between who you have to kill and who you don’t have to kill.”40
Bissell would initially testify that the idea of a permanent assassination capability probably had come from one of JFK’s top national security advisors, either McGeorge Bundy or Walt Rostow: “There is little doubt in my mind that Project RIFLE [the CIA’s cryptonym for the assassination project] was discussed with Rostow, and possibly Bundy.” One month after making this statement, Bissell would waffle, asserting his earlier testimony to be mistaken.41 However, in later years, Bissell slowly began to retreat from the party line. In 1975, he testified to the Senate that when he and Allen Dulles briefed President-elect Kennedy in Palm Beach in the fall of 1960, he said it was his “opinion” that Dulles told Kennedy “obliquely of this auxiliary operation, the assassination attempt.”
Thirty years after JFK’s 1963 assassination, Bissell began to open up more. “Allen Dulles had reason to believe that JFK knew [about the assassination plots], and there is no doubt that it was fully known to the Attorney General [Robert Kennedy],” he told author Richard Reeves.42 Finally, in 1994, in his last interview just prior to his death, Bissell removed any remaining doubt when he spoke with the daughter of a CIA pilot killed at the Bay of Pigs. She asked him directly about the assassination plots. Bissell replied, “There was never anything undertaken without presidential approval.”43
Almost apologetically, Bissell conceded in this final interview, “I was probably taken in by Kennedy’s charisma. He was such a complicated mix of accomplishment and mistakes that when he died, my children didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”44
In complying with the White House directive and Bobby’s pressure, Bissell initiated a project known as “Executive Action.” Bissell tapped the CIA’s version of James Bond, William Harvey, to plan the program. Harvey’s notes quote Bissell as saying, “The White House twice asked me to create such a capability.”45 Immediately after Bissell and Harvey received their orders from the White House, Harvey contacted the CIA’s wizard from the office of Science and Technology, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. “I’ve been asked to form this group to assassinate people and I need to know what you can do for me,” Harvey told Gottlieb.46 The scientist proceeded to develop lethal poisons for use against foreign leaders, especially Fidel Castro. And Harvey entered one of the most controversial periods of his illustrious career.
William King Harvey Plays “M”
Bill Harvey called the assassination capability “the magic button,” while the CIA’s internal code name for the undertaking was ZR/RIFLE. It was intended to be the most secure operation at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The directives and guidelines in the Agency’s action file were clear: “No projects on paper.” The magic button would “require professional, proven, operationally competent, ruthless, stable CE [counter-espionage]-experienced ops [operations] officers.”47
William King Harvey certainly fit the bill. He was a large, pear-shaped man who drank heavily but who remained perfectly capable of performing his professional tasks.48 Harvey had spent much of the 1950’s in West Berlin, where he supervised one of the CIA’s most publicized success stories, the Berlin Tunnel. The 600 yard-long tunnel from West to East Berlin was actually an elaborate system to tap Soviet military phone conversations. The setup functioned for almost a year before being discovered by the Soviets. (Since it is now known that the Soviets knew of the tunnel from its inception, the issue has been raised that perhaps all Harvey obtained was disinformation. However, in 1997, the CIA’s Berlin Station Chief at the time, David Murphy, recalled that Harvey’s tunnel reaped huge benefits for U.S. intelligence.)49
Prior to the tunnel, Harvey made a name for himself by discovering the KGB’s legendary “mole,” Kim Philby, who was successfully penetrating both the British and U.S. intelligence services for years. Brought back to the U.S., Harvey was appointed to head up ZR/RIFLE at first, and also, later, the newly-formed Task Force W—the Cuba Project. “Bill was brought in to mop up the mess after th
e Bay of Pigs,” says a longtime CIA fellow officer and confidante.
Considered a diamond in the rough, Harvey was a perfect match for the “James Bond”-loving JFK. CIA historian Thomas Powers described Harvey’s traits:
He once told an acquaintance that he had been to bed with a woman every day of his life since he was twelve. Colleagues remember him as the only CIA officer who carried a gun. He often left it in plain view on his desk. Sometimes he loaded the gun while he talked [to visitors]. Not just a gun, but a different gun every day, from the large collection he kept in a case at home.50
“There was absolutely no doubt what the subject was,” Harvey later said of his initial conversation with Bissell. “We were not talking about propaganda or a planted bank account, or a planted morals charge, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We were talking about direct elimination, assassination.”51 When it came time to implement America’s assassination capability Harvey called upon an asset the CIA had used before in the Congo to attempt to assassinate Premier Patrice Lumumba. The CIA’s hired assassin’s name has only recently (1996) been revealed as Jose Mankel, operating under the cryptonym QJ/WIN.52
Mankel-QJ/WIN was a drug smuggler and mercenary from Cologne, Germany. He was described by a senior CIA official as a man without scruples, a man who would do anything—including assassination.53 He was provided with plastic surgery and a wig before being sent into the Congo. Over a four year period from 1960 to 1964, when the CIA claims it terminated his contract, it paid him $18,000. The CIA also claims he never fulfilled the assignment.54 Harvey later testified that QJ/WIN indeed became a candidate in the Cuba Project, but would never seriously apply himself. (His contract was eventually terminated in February of 1964.)55
All the while, Bobby Kennedy kept pushing the throttle. Former Director of Operations Richard Helms later testified: “The Attorney General was on the phone to me, he was on the phone to Mr. Harvey. . . he was on the phone even to people on Harvey’s staff, as I recall it.”56 In these conversations, Bobby Kennedy made it clear that “the terrors of the earth” should be brought to bear against Castro.57
Jake Esterline, CIA Staff Officer in charge of the Cuba Project, recently recalled, “These things were known: that the Kennedys instigated the plots to assassinate Castro. Bill Harvey was working for Bobby Kennedy. . . Bobby was a terrier, he was a protector of his brother. . . The Kennedys were behind everything. I know this.”58 Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara cut to the chase: “We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter, and there was pressure from JFK and RFK to do something about Castro.”59
Phase Two assassination attempts used both Mankel and Rosselli, and again failed miserably. Often, the assassins-to-be got cold feet, or their proficiency came up short. The Kennedys, however, were convinced that sooner or later, one of their attempts would hit the mark. They therefore considered plans for a re-invasion to be coordinated with Castro’s death. On May 4, 1961, José Miro Cardona, President of the White House-backed Cuban Revolutionary Council, met with JFK and received, by Cardona’s account, a formalized “pact which called for a new invasion.”
While gambits with Rosselli and Mankel were being explored, the CIA initiated discussions with the man to be the focal point of the 1963 (Phase Three) assassination attempts, Rolando Cubela Secades, a high-ranking member of an anti-Batista movement which also became “disgusted” with Castro soon after the revolution. Initially contacted by the CIA in Mexico City in March 1961, Cubela, over the next two years, would engage the CIA in discussions that would center on his assassinating Castro with CIA assistance.60 The CIA would then secure asylum for Cubela in the U.S. The CIA kept him on hold for two years, only to be activated as AM/LASH-1 in the fall of 1963.61
With the Harvey actions proceeding, Robert Kennedy was growing impatient. He called Bissell into his office in November 1961. A CIA official who was present would later tell Congress that “Bissell was chewed out in the Cabinet Room by both the President and the Attorney General for, as he put it, ‘sitting on his ass and not doing anything to get rid of Castro and the Castro regime.’”62
All effort now was aimed at destroying Castro, not coming to terms with him. In August 1961, when Castro’s second-in-command, Che Guevara, approached JFK aide Richard Goodwin in Uruguay, and offered to broker a peace with Castro and Kennedy, Goodwin reported that Cuba didn’t expect an understanding with the U.S., but “they would like a modus vivendi.” The Kennedy brothers essentially said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”63 Being Kennedys, they were playing to win.
As 1961 was drawing to a close, New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc attended an informal dinner with JFK and his aide Richard Goodwin. “What would you think if I ordered Castro assassinated?” Kennedy asked a stunned Szulc. The reporter replied that it was not only immoral, but useless, as others such as Raul Castro were waiting in the wings.
Kennedy then said he was under extreme pressure to do away with Castro, but that he strongly opposed the idea. “I’m glad you feel the same way,” Kennedy said. The President then hinted at the source of the “extreme pressure” when he said to Szulc, “Look, I’d like you to talk to my brother.”64 Szulc later wrote of the episode:
I cannot say to what extent [President Kennedy] knew that November about a scheme elaborated by Military Intelligence officers soon after the Bay of Pigs (and of which I was vaguely aware of at the time) to kill Castro and his brother Raul, the Deputy Premier and Defense Minister, using Cuban marksmen who were to be infiltrated into Cuba from the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo on the island’s southeastern coast.65
Szulc’s information appears to corroborate the conclusions of John Gordon, who believed the plots to be authorized by Bobby Kennedy. John Kennedy’s confidante Senator George Smathers recently acknowledged, “Jack would be [saying] all the time, ‘If somebody knocks this guy off, O.K., that’d be fine. . . But Kennedy had to say he could not be a party to that sort of thing with the damn Mafia.” When asked if Bobby Kennedy knew of the assassination plots, Smathers responded, “Sure.”66
The Kennedys’ Unofficial Anti-Castro Campaign
Bobby and Jack Kennedy seemed to doubt from the start that their administrative charges would accomplish Castro’s elimination. And they probably were right to be dubious. Grayston Lynch, a CIA officer assigned to Operation Mongoose, is representative of his peers when he says, “If the CIA had been left to its own devices, the Agency would have ended the Cuba Project much earlier. The CIA wasn’t gung-ho about Cuba. It amounted to nothing but harassment, and at a terrific cost. We all understood that JFK wanted revenge for the Bay of Pigs.”67
Indeed, it now is clear that the Kennedy brothers decided early to hedge their bets. They would develop their own contacts in the continuing effort to have Castro killed.
In February 1962, President Kennedy’s Operation Mongoose adviser, Edward Lansdale, wrote a memo that resuscitated the Phase One strategy: using the Mafia to eliminate Castro. In one of his proposals to the president, Lansdale suggested “attacks on the cadre, including key leaders. . . Gangster elements might provide the best recruitment potential for actions against police-G2 [Cuban intelligence] officials.” Lansdale, however, saw this action as only the capstone to an internal revolt—a revolt that would have to be on the verge of success before assassinations were attempted.68
This suggestion clearly carried weight with Bobby Kennedy, who put Lansdale’s idea into action. Frustrated with ZR/RIFLE and Mongoose’s snail-like pace, Bobby supplemented the CIA’s efforts to kill Castro using a new entrée to Papa Joe’s sometime allies in organized crime. (There is a wealth of evidence now available that indicates Joe had no qualms about utilizing the mob’s talents, whether it was for the delivery of bootleg-era booze or for ballots in his son’s 1960 election.69)
The CIA’s Cuba Desk executive assistant Sam Halpern recently recalled the period:
One officer in the Agency was permanently assigned by Bobby Kennedy to
maintain liaison with organized criminals. Bobby hoped that some of them still maintained their underground contacts in Cuba, and that they could be utilized in the anti-Castro operations.70
Halpern says that the officer so-assigned spent so much time in mob havens such as Chicago, New York, and Las Vegas, that he [Halpern] used to jokingly address the guy (named Charlie) using an “Italian-sounding” name. In describing the activity to historian Max Holland, Halpern recalled, “It was Bobby and his secretary [Angie Novello] who called Charlie on what used to be called at the Agency a secure line, [to] give him a name, an address, and where he would meet with Mafia people.” Halpern remembers the agent going to places like Chicago, Miami, and even Canada. “The time, the place was all arranged by Bobby Kennedy and his Mafia contacts.” Like Bobby’s other attempts at “clandestine” activity, this gambit was also viewed by intelligence professionals as reckless and highly insecure. “We thought it was stupid, silly, ineffective, and wasteful,” Halpern recently stated. “But we were under orders, and we did it.”71
The agent was in fact named Charles Ford. “We gave him the nickname ‘Fiscalini,’” said Halpern, who added that Ford was also referred to as “Rocky.” Both Ford’s real name and nickname appear in RFK’s phone logs.72 “It was a tightly-held operation,” says Halpern. “Only Bill [Harvey], Bobby, and I knew of Charlie’s activity.” He also appeared at RFK’s office. At no other time in his professional career, said Halpern, did he hear of a CIA case officer showing up in the Attorney General’s office to discuss an operation. “Absolutely never. It was unique.”
The 1978 investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) offered a peek into Robert Kennedy’s personal dealings with other Cuban-focused mobsters—names included.
