by Gus Russo
With the CIA and the FBI breathing down his neck for his alleged complicity in the Watergate coverup, Nixon attempted to blackmail the government agencies that might investigate his Watergate involvement. It was a desperate ploy, but in 1972 Richard M. Nixon was a desperate man. Frantic to avoid connection to the Watergate break-in, the beleaguered President hit upon his plan, deciding to elevate the term “coverup” to gargantuan proportions. In a bold and elegant stroke, he would use his knowledge of one coverup to help him create another. The basis for his leverage was what he referred to as “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.”
The first part of the coverup was quite simple: the White House would pay off the architect of the Watergate break-in, thus guaranteeing his silence. But it was part two that could only be defined as brilliant. Nixon knew what had gone on during the years of the Kennedys’ secret war, and the proof of it could simultaneously mute presidential aspirant Ted Kennedy and remove the weight of Watergate from the president’s shoulders. And it just might have worked had Congress never found out that Nixon’s “obstruction of justice” sessions were being taped.
Knowing that the logistical architect of the break-in was none other than former CIA propagandist E. Howard Hunt, Nixon saw a way out. Hunt and the Cuban burglars he had employed were exceedingly connected to “The Big Secret”—the hidden history—a secret that Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, the late Robert Kennedy, and a few other insiders shared. They were key players in the ill-fated Cuba Project—the one that most likely resulted in the act of retribution that cost John F. Kennedy his life.14
Hunt had served as the liaison to Arcacha’s CRC and as the case officer for Bobby Kennedy intimate Harry Williams. When Watergate erupted, Nixon would suggest that the CIA, not the FBI, investigate the White House. After that, Nixon would simply remind the CIA what he knew about its culpability in the plots against Castro.15 If anything would enable Nixon to control the investigation, that should do it. Even more propitious was the fact that the CIA director in 1972 was none other than Richard Helms. In 1963, Helms, as then-Director of Covert Operations, was one of the key participants in the ill-fated Castro assassination plots. Nixon may not have realized it, but in 1963 Hunt and Helms were only following Bobby Kennedy’s lead. Indirectly, it was Bobby Kennedy’s legacy that might now get Nixon off the hook.
The first hint of Nixon’s strategy came in a June 20, 1972 phone call to aide H.R. Haldeman.16 Nixon told Haldeman what to pass on to another aide, John Ehrlichman, who was up to his ears in “damage control.” “Tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs,” Nixon instructed.
Puzzled, Haldeman responded “The Bay of Pigs? What does that have to do with this?” Nixon answered, “Ehrlichman will know what I mean.”
As recounted by Haldeman, and verified by the “Watergate tapes,” the subsequent strategy sessions are stunning. Speaking with Haldeman on June 23, 1972, Nixon muses on how to deal with a hoped-for CIA investigation:
Well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things. . . Hunt will uncover a lot of things. You open up that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things. . . This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.
Haldeman had no idea what “hanky-panky” the president meant. It didn’t matter. Nixon instructed his aide, “When you get the CIA people in, say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing again. . . and for the good of the country, don’t go any further into this case, period.’” At a meeting later in the day, the president elaborated, “Tell them that if it gets out, it’s going to make the CIA look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it’s likely to blow the Bay of Pigs, which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA.”
In his autobiography, Haldeman concludes, “In all those Nixon references to the ‘Bay of Pigs,’ he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.” Haldeman sums it all up in the following passage:
And when Nixon said, “It’s likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” he might have been reminding Helms, not so gently, of the coverup of the CIA assassination attempts on the hero of the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro—a CIA operation that may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy, and which Helms desperately wanted to hide.17
Ever since his inauguration in 1969, Nixon had been pushing Richard Helms for information on the Castro assassination attempts. But Helms and the CIA’s General Counsel, Lawrence Houston, worried that an untrustworthy Nixon might make the sensitive information public to foster his own personal/political agenda. On October 8, 1971, after years of stalling, Helms gave Nixon three thin files on CIA operations. Nixon, and everybody else, knew there was much more, but Helms never delivered. Such intransigence would apparently lead Nixon to fire Helms in 1973.
Helms’ response was but another in a series of CIA refusals to divulge secret operations, or “snitch” on previous presidents for whom it had worked. President John F. Kennedy, in particular, owes a posthumous thanks to a long list of CIA executives who bit their tongues when they had the opportunity to disparage his memory.
If Nixon was correct about the importance of the Bay of Pigs to the CIA, he could only imagine what it had meant to the Kennedys. Unlike Rosselli, Giancana, and untold others, however, Nixon came up short when he dangled “the Cuba thing.” The strategy might have worked had incriminating tapes not been divulged by one of his own staffers. When Nixon’s own recordings forced him from office, it fell to his successor, former Warren Commission member Gerald R. Ford, and a former Warren Commission attorney, David Belin, to finally expose the sordid assassination plotting to the light of day.
The Rockefeller Commission
Until the mid-1970s, the U.S. government had never responded officially to the Jack Anderson/Drew Pearson story of Castro assassination plots. That stony silence would be broken as a result of a series of events that commenced in 1973.
On May 9, 1973, while attempting to ascertain if the CIA had any involvement in the Watergate break-in, new CIA Director James Schlesinger commissioned an internal report on all potential CIA abuses during the CIA’s entire existence. The resultant 693-page report became known as “The Family Jewels.” When a small portion of it was leaked to New York Times investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in 1974, the floodgates were opened.
Hersh, who had been developing the story for more than a year, disclosed a massive domestic CIA mail-opening operation known by the cryptonym MH/CHAOS. This operation, like so many other illegal operations that presidents routinely demanded of the CIA, began with a president’s orders. It seems that LBJ, at the height of his Vietnam travails, had grown convinced that the anti-war movement was funded by the International Communist Party. Johnson demanded CIA action. The trouble lay in the fact that the CIA was only chartered for foreign, not domestic, spying operations. If it existed as alleged, the MH/CHAOS operation represented a major abuse of power.
The story broke in the New York Times on December 22, 1974. President Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon when he resigned in August 1974, responded quickly. On January 4, 1975, Ford met with his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who reported to Ford on a recent conversation with friend and former CIA Director Richard Helms. As he would with no one else, Helms pulled no punches. “These stories are just the tip of the iceberg,” he told Kissinger. “If they come out, blood will flow.” Then the much-experienced CIA hand cut to the chase: “Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.”18 This was a bombshell, especially when coming from the man who was the CIA Director of Operations during the AM/LASH era.
The very next day, January 5, 1975, Ford appointed a commission to be chaired by Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate the alleged abuse of power. At a White House luncheon a week later, Ford made an off-the-cuff remark so sensational that it had to be read as intentional. While talking about the upcoming “Rockefeller Commission,” according to one witness, Ford said that:
He needed trustworthy citizens who would not stray from the narrow confines of their mission because they might come upon matters that could damage the national interest and blacken the reputation of every President since Truman.
“Like what?” asked the irrepressible New York Times managing editor, A.M. (Abe) Rosenthal.
“Like assassinations!” President Ford shot back, quickly adding, “That’s off the record!”19
It was clear that Ford was well versed on the contents of the “Family Jewels.” In 1964, as a member of the Warren Commission, Ford publicly declared himself dissatisfied with the Commission’s investigation of a possible foreign conspiracy. By being kept in the dark then, Ford may have seen the creation of the Rockefeller Commission as an opportune time to finally force the issue.
Like other presidential commissions, Rockefeller’s was doomed from the start. Given its appointees’ close ties to the intelligence community, it began its efforts with a major, built-in limitation, and, for that reason, was widely criticized in the press. Tom Wicker of the New York Times wrote:
The “blue ribbon” commission appointed by President Ford to protect the public against domestic spying by the CIA looks suspiciously like a goat sent to guard a cabbage patch. Having the CIA investigated by such a group is like having the Mafia audited by its own accountants.20
When the Rockefeller Commission hired former Warren Commission attorney David Belin as its executive officer, it probably didn’t know he was a stickler for public disclosure and would consequently be a thorn in the side of both the CIA and the Commission itself. Belin’s tenacity single-handedly forced the CIA to give him access to the “Family Jewels” manuscript. “It was hard to believe,” Belin later wrote, “page after page of confession.”
However, Belin soon noticed that one section of the report was blank. The CIA liaison explained that “those pages pertain to foreign matters and are not within your jurisdiction, because the commission’s jurisdiction only pertains to CIA activities within the United States.” Belin hit the roof, saying that the commission would determine what was relevant, not the CIA.
Belin was reluctantly granted access to the missing section, but only if he would read it at CIA headquarters, which Belin agreed to do. Belin wrote:
What I found was a sordid chapter in the history of our country—a chapter in which what we think of as the greatest democracy in the history of mankind adopted the philosophy of communism that the ends justify the means. The family jewels contained references to CIA consideration of plots to assassinate Cuban Premier Fidel Castro, Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, and possibly Premier Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. By far the most extensive plans were directed against Premier Castro.21
Former Warren Commission counsel David Belin now became the second person outside the Kennedy/CIA loop (the first was Ford) to learn that, on the very day John Kennedy was shot, the CIA, with Robert Kennedy’s imprimatur, was passing a poison pen to Rolando Cubela for Castro’s own demise. Incensed at what had been withheld from him when serving the Warren Commission, Belin became consumed by a desire to expose what he had learned. Predictably, the Rockefeller Commission vetoed Belin’s desire to go public with the information. Belin was stonewalled when he attempted to gain access to the minutes of the National Security Council meetings from 1960 through 1964—Rockefeller’s old friend, NSC advisor Henry Kissinger, denied the request. Similarly, the investigators were to obtain no cooperation from White House officials who served under Kennedy.
Behind the scenes and well off the record, Rockefeller was hotly pursuing another quest: to determine if Castro had retaliated against JFK for the murder plots. During the course of this secret investigation, Rockefeller located a still-unreleased document that seemed to point to Cuban involvement in JFK’s death. “We got this information and we put it together and it was hot,” Rockefeller later said. He decided to approach the last surviving Kennedy brother, Ted, to show him the document in question.
“Look, Teddy, this is being looked into informally,” Rockefeller told him. “Can you remember your brother talking about this?” Kennedy replied, “I only have vague recollections about this document. I talked about this maybe once or twice up at Hyannis Port.” There the matter was dropped. Rockefeller was content to have Congress pick up the ball if it so desired.22
McNamara’s timely case of amnesia
When he testified before the Rockefeller Commission, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara claimed total amnesia. He stated that his work on the Vietnam War was so consuming that he “had lost virtually all memory of what took place in the Kennedy administration.”23
The Rockefeller Commission pushed McNamara on the subject, but, still pleading amnesia, he said, “I have no notes—I did not take any notes of any meetings I attended with rare exceptions, and I have no other basis for refreshing my memory, and my memory of those years is very bad.”24 McNamara copped the classic Washington plea, adding, “I am sorry to say I cannot help you much with details about it because I can’t fish them out of my memory, but I could not exclude [the possibility] that there were contingency plans, and a contingency capability of some sort, or plans for such a capability at some time.”25
McNamara’s testimony before a Congressional committee one year later made it abundantly clear that the man was conflicted. He knew the plots had not originated with the CIA, but couldn’t say why he knew it. The former defense secretary stated:
The CIA was a highly disciplined organization, fully under control of the government. . . I believe with hindsight we authorized actions that were contrary to the interests of the republic. . . I don’t want it on the record that the CIA was uncontrolled.26
Rockefeller Commission Counsel Belin cited a damaging August 14, 1962 memo (prepared by William Harvey, the head of “Executive Action,” for the Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Helms) which more than makes up for McNamara’s memory lapse. The Special Group (Augmented), which included RFK and McNamara, had met on August 10th, 1962, and Lansdale wrote a highly sanitized August 13 memo about the meeting. Harvey’s August 14th memo filled in the blanks:
Reference is made to our conversation. . . Attached is a copy of that memorandum, excised from which are four words in the second line of the penultimate paragraph on page one. These four words were “including liquidation of leaders.”
. . . The question of assassination, particularly of Fidel Castro, was brought up by Secretary McNamara. . . It was the obvious consensus of that meeting. . . that this is not a subject that has been made a matter of official record. . .
Upon receipt of the attached memorandum, I. . . pointed out to Frank Hand the inadvisability and stupidity of putting this type of comment in writing in such a document. I advised Frank Hand that, as far as CIA was concerned, we would write no document pertaining to this and would participate in no open meeting discussing it I strongly urged Hand to recommend to Lansdale that he excise the phrase in question from all copies of this memorandum, including those disseminated to State, Defense, and USIA. . .27
Ironically, Harvey’s own memo about the dangers of express disclosure ultimately disclosed what he told everyone else to keep secret.
McGeorge Bundy’s testimony was also peppered with “I can’t recall” and “I don’t remember” responses. At one point, during testimony before the Rockefeller Commission, the one-time Kennedy advisor admitted having “a vague recollection of the existence, or the possible existence, of contingency planning in this area.” Des FitzGerald, who had died in 1967, could have given more information from the grave.28
In 1988, Richard Helms provided a possible explanation for these lapsed memories: “A lot of people probably lied about what had happened in the effort to get rid of Castro. . . There are two things you have to understand: Kennedy wanted to get rid of Castro, and the agency was not about to undertake anything like that on its own.”29 Helms would add that, “If President Kennedy had not been the motivating force, it [the C
uba Project] wouldn’t have taken on the size and character it did.”30
The Lansdale Admissions
In 1975, Edward Lansdale, in a two-part revelation, exposed what the Kennedys knew of the assassination plots, but it went largely unnoticed. In a newspaper interview in May 1975, the General said that he was acting under presidential orders, delivered through an intermediary, to develop plans for assassinating Fidel Castro. “On that project, I was working for the highest authority in the land,” he said—but refused to provide the intermediary’s name. When asked if it was McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, Lansdale told the newspaper, “No, it was someone much more intimate.”31
Lansdale would later deny under oath that he used the term assassination with the reporters. The reporters, also under oath, stood by their story.32
Should there be any doubt as to who the “more intimate” intermediary was, Lansdale would clear that up when he testified before the Rockefeller Commission later the same year. The general testified that, as the intermediary, the president “appointed his brother, who was the Attorney General.”33
To David Belin, who served as Counsel to both the Warren Commission and to the Rockefeller Commission, the conclusion was obvious:
Top officials inside the Kennedy administration were directly aware of the assassination plots against Fidel Castro; moreover, some of those officials were actively encouraging his liquidation. I believe that Robert McNamara was one of those parties. I also believe Robert Kennedy was another. And, if Robert Kennedy knew, I believe it is reasonable to assume that his brother, President John F. Kennedy, also knew and approved of the plans.34
Both Richard Bissell and Richard Goodwin agree with Belin. Bissell recently said that “there was never anything undertaken without presidential approval.” Prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion, JFK had instructed Bissell to form a permanent assassination squad (Executive Action). According to Bissell, Castro’s death was an integral part of the planning for the 1961 invasion. Richard Goodwin, JFK’s assistant in Latin American affairs, admitted in 1994 that “Robert Kennedy would never have done anything important without his brother’s OK. He was his brother’s chief assistant.”35
