by Gus Russo
For a time, Belin considered calling a national press conference to air the dirty laundry. Instead, he decided, on November 22, 1975, to call for a formal reopening of the Kennedy assassination investigation. He vowed to make certain that a new committee investigating foreign assassinations, chaired by the Democratic Senator from Idaho, Frank Church, was apprised of the contents of the documents.
When Nelson Rockefeller was later asked who he believed instigated the Castro murder plots, he responded, “I think it’s fair to say that no major undertaking by the CIA was done without the knowledge and/or approval of the White House.”36
The Church Committee
“There is no doubt in my mind that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated by Fidel Castro, or someone under his influence, in retaliation for our efforts to assassinate him.”
—Senator Robert Morgan, member of the Senate Intelligence Committee (the “Church Committee”)37
In January 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence came into existence. Chaired by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, it became known (gratefully) as the “Church Committee.” Its broad mandate was to investigate the government’s full range of intelligence activities in an attempt to determine which programs may have been “illegal, improper, or unethical.”38 The Committee was to give special attention to the Rockefeller Commission’s uncompleted work on assassinations.
The Committee and The CIA Code of Silence
“The Company was hung out to dry by the White House. . . Presidents come and go, but the agencies that serve them—be it the FBI, CIA, or IRS, or any other—continue far beyond any one administration. For the government of the United States to try and save face at the expense of its agencies was no more acceptable then than now.”
—Robert Maheu, CIA-Mafia go-between in the anti-Castro plots39
“The Agency was neither intoxicated with power nor warped in its judgments by hubris. It exerted itself, moreover, only at the direction of the President.”
—Former CIA Director Richard Helms, 199440
Throughout its one-year probe, the Church Committee attempted to find out from the CIA what the chain of command was for the plots against Castro, only to be met with silence. Church’s aide, Loch Johnson, expressed disgust at the CIA’s tactic of stonewalling the Committee. He wrote, “No cooperation was forthcoming without constant prodding by the Committee.”41 Another staffer remarked, “The only successful CIA assassination plot has been against the Church Committee itself.” Given the CIA’s directive of plausible denial, these staffers shouldn’t have been surprised.
One of the oldest traditions in the world of secret agencies is their willingness to “take the heat.” Richard Helms, and numerous others, have publicly expressed pride for fulfilling their role of “keeping these things out of the Oval Office.” CIA historian Thomas Powers explained: “They refused to take the rap, but declined to incriminate the President. They were good soldiers—up to a point. Kennedy Administration officials wisely decided not to press them. Head-scratching bafflement was the only answer these officials chose to give when asked how it [the assassination plotting] could have happened.”42
The Church Report conceded, however, that the Special Group (Augmented) was designed to insulate the President from the unscrupulous aspects of the CIA and Operation Mongoose. It has already been noted that the assassination project protocol specified “nothing on paper.” Thus, even if a CIA officer wanted to break ranks, how could he prove what he knew? Thomas Powers has written:
Any CIA officer who said he’d been told to kill Castro by either Kennedy or his advisors would find himself facing a great many formidable enemies indeed, without many friends to come to his aid. It would be his lonely word against that of a host of much better-known men. The CIA officials who know where the orders were given, and when, and in what words, not only don’t want to explain their explicit pledge to keep quiet, they do not quite dare. They would be destroyed in the process.43
. . . Can anyone doubt the response of the Kennedy people, and very likely the Committee itself, if some CIA official had risked the complete absence of a single piece of paper to back him up and had said, “Well, who do you think ordered Castro’s assassination, the office boy? It was John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby.” If Helms had said that (which in my opinion he could have), he not only would have been the target of some extremely caustic comment, but from that day forward he would have lunched alone.44
“Helms,” of course, was Richard Helms, who in 1961 succeeded Richard Bissell as the CIA’s chief of Clandestine Services, and three years later was named CIA Director by LBJ. Helms was a member of the Eastern/liberal/Democratic wing of the CIA that had so much in common with the Kennedys. Like Jack Kennedy, Richard Helms was a Harvard-educated Navy man. When it came to covert action, however, Richard Helms differed with the Kennedys.
Long-considered an opponent of large-scale covert action, preferring instead covert intelligence gathering, Helms tried to distance himself from operations like the Bay of Pigs, ZR/RIFLE, and Bobby Kennedy’s Cuba Project. Still, he participated in these activities when so directed. And no matter how much he disagreed with these activities, he was not about to talk about them out of school. Adhering strictly to his CIA secrecy oath later earned Helms the moniker (and book title), “The Man Who Kept the Secrets.” His loyalty to both the CIA and the Oval Office is the stuff of legend, having consistently chosen to take the heat for operations often ordered by others.
Time and time again, Helms refused to tell Congressional investigators about presidentially-ordered covert directives with which he had dutifully complied. Whether it was the Kennedy-inspired Cuba Project, or the Nixon-ordered coup in Chile in 1970 (dubbed, of all things, Project Camelot), Richard Helms would not be drawn out. In fact, CIA officers such as Dulles and Helms have publicly admitted that they would lie to a Congressional oversight committee to protect the president. By 1977, Congress had had enough, and Helms was cited for perjury for his testimony denying CIA involvement in the Chilean coup. At that time, Helms explained to the Justice Department:
I found myself in a position of conflict. I had sworn my oath to protect certain secrets. I didn’t want to lie. I didn’t want to mislead the Senate. I was simply trying to find my way through the very difficult situation in which I found myself.45
Helms’ friend from the Mexico City Station, Dave Phillips, wrote that, “Helms was Director during a period when it was axiomatic to respond any way possible to Presidents. He had learned to understand them. And, in the process, he had held the umbrella to catch the crap so CIA’s people could get on with their job.”46 Helms would later say, “I just think we all had the feeling that we’re hired to keep those things out of the Oval Office.” However, he would admit to having the clear impression from the Kennedys that “if he [Castro] had disappeared from the scene, they would not have been unhappy.”47
Helms and his colleagues, unlike many of their critics, are well-aware of the true nature of the CIA’s role. That role was defined by the Agency’s founder, President Harry S Truman, who said unambiguously, “I got a couple of admirals together and they formed the Central Intelligence Agency for the benefit and convenience of the President of the United States.”48 Since the CIA’s inception in 1948, Truman’s dictum had been honored.
The CIA’s Sam Halpern puts it this way: “We are the Praetorian Guard. It’s our job to protect the president. We work for the President of the United States and then he goes to the American public. We’re the fall guys. We take the blame and that’s the way it works.” Even E. Howard Hunt, who was a CIA officer assisting in the Bay of Pigs planning, recalled the Taylor Commission’s investigation of that fiasco, but could just as easily been describing the Church Committee dynamic, when he wrote:
No one in the Agency, needless to say, was allowed to rebut even the most glaring fabrication. . . however, [the investigation’s] unannounced aim bec
ame clear: to whitewash the New Frontier by heaping guilt on the CIA.49
This whitewashing clearly benefited Robert Kennedy as well. As one former high-ranking CIA officer told CIA historian Leonard Mosely, “Where Castro and Cuba were concerned, Bobby Kennedy went further than Henry II, and everybody covered up for him.”50
Finally, in 1997, Richard Helms, exhausted from thirty-plus years of “catching the crap,” gave up “The Big Secret,” telling a TV producer what he hadn’t been ready to tell the Church Committee: “There isn’t any doubt as to who was running that effort. It was Bobby Kennedy on behalf of his brother. It wasn’t anybody else!”51
The CIA, fed up with having the blame pointed at them, finally passed the buck. Timothy Crouse, of the Village Voice, wrote at the time of the hearings, “A subtle pattern begins to emerge. One suspects that the Agency may be trying to peddle certain crimes of its own choice, trying to guide the Church Committee toward certain items and away from. . . God knows what.” In 1994, Senator Richard Schweiker, who headed the Kennedy assassination portion of the Committee’s inquiry, stated, “It seems to me that we were intentionally misdirected.”52 The CIA, offering the public a patsy at which to direct its anger, essentially gave up the Mafia as a “limited hangout” (In Washington parlance, a “limited hangout” usually refers to making some minor admission of error.)
Although Helms’ testimony and his 1967 Inspector General report pointed the finger at the Mafia, Harvey, and FitzGerald (who had died by the time of the Church hearings), Helms himself adamantly denied any hands-on involvement with the plots. His testimony may have been, at best, disingenuous.
On July 16, 1975, the Committee heard from Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty who, during the Kennedy administration, was the liaison officer between the Air Force and the CIA. Prouty was asked if he had any knowledge of U.S. efforts to assassinate Castro. Without hesitation, Prouty described an incident that took place (pre-Kennedy) in early 1960:
The only time that the assassination of an individual was ever put in so many words that I knew of was the night or the day that I was told to set up an airplane to take two men into Cuba, and they were going to assassinate Castro. I needed to decide what kind of plane to send. . . They showed me photographs. . . of a little curved road in what looked like a sugar cane area. And they told me it was very close to Havana, as close as they dared go. . . And they said, ‘Well, we can get a light plane in there.” Well, the Agency had a special plane that we call in the Air Force L-28—a Helio Courier. It can land in 120 feet. . . We set up a plane. . . We closed down air defense so they wouldn’t intercept it. . . We dummied flight plans so that the FAA wouldn’t miss an airplane. . . The object was assassination.53
When asked who attended the meeting, Prouty responded, “There was CIA Operations division, Air Division, which was Dick Helms, and Des FitzGerald, and the whole crowd, the real pros.” Asked why he was certain Helms was there, Prouty answered that not only did he recognize him, but the meeting “was held in his office.”
Bolstering Prouty’s assertion of Helms’ complicity in the assassination projects is a CIA memo that surfaced in the 1970’s. The result of a Freedom of Information request, the February 19, 1962 memo from Helms to Bill Harvey authorizes Harvey to hire the assassin known as QJ/WIN for the Executive Action capability code-named ZR/RIFLE. According to Helms’ directive, QJ/WIN was to be paid $14,700 per annum in salary and expenses.54
The CIA’s collective testimony presents a classic example of what has come to be called the “Potomac Two-Step.” Frank Church remarked, “When Helms said that the CIA never killed any foreign leader, that statement is correct, but not necessarily complete.”55 In fact, the CIA participated in several assassinations, but would always bring in outside subcontractors.
Like so much other embarrassing testimony that pointed away from the Mafia—and towards the White House—Prouty’s testimony was not mentioned in the Church Committee Report, perhaps because the Committee knew this was one escapade that couldn’t be explained away by claiming “the Mafia did it.”
The CIA was not alone in obfuscating ultimate culpability. One by one, officials from Kennedy administration departments paraded before the Church Committee, professing ignorance, memory loss—or both—when it came to answering the $64,000 question: Did the Kennedys order Castro’s assassination? McNamara, Bissell, Bundy, Goodwin, and numerous others, like Helms, took great pains to distance themselves and the White House from the plotting. It became clear that these men had dual motivations: to protect not only the memory of their friend John Kennedy, but their own reputations. Given how long they testified, it could be supposed that at least one official would slip up, much as Kennedy’s Mongoose coordinator, Edward Lansdale, had before the Rockefeller Committee. This time, however, with no pressure from Church Committee members, the wall of secrecy remained inviolate.
Sitting at home at the time of the Kennedy officials’ testimony was Bill Harvey. As the sole official who admitted under oath that he had been involved in the assassination projects, he was furious. Harvey had friends on Capitol Hill who provided him the galleys of the Church Committee’s hearing transcripts. Harvey was astounded to see the extent to which the Kennedy administration officials obfuscated the facts. Harvey read how witness after witness misrepresented the events at the critical SGA meetings on Cuba. “Liar! Liar!” Harvey wrote again and again in the margins of the transcripts. Harvey was particularly rough on McNamara and McCone, pointing out that Mongoose and the assassination plots were McNamara’s ideas in the first place.56
The CIA’s retired Western Hemisphere Chief J.C. King, who had first proposed Castro’s assassination to Allen Dulles, believed he could put to rest, once and for all, the question of White House authorization. “Dad was given an office at the CIA for his permanent use after he retired in 1964,” says King’s son Frank King. “In that office he had a safe. During the Church hearings, he said he had a document that showed Bobby Kennedy had authorized the plots. When he went to retrieve it from the safe, it was missing.”57
In the end, only Bill Harvey admitted a role in the Castro assassination plots. A committee investigator later recalled, “All these big shots from the Kennedy administration came slinking in, worried about their reputations. And then came Harvey—the assassin himself—saying, ‘Yeah, I did it, and I’d do it again if ordered.’”58
The secrets CIA officials refused to betray had, in fact, long ago been admitted presidential in nature. JFK, one month before his death, said publicly, “I have looked through the record very carefully over the last nine months, and I can find nothing to indicate that the CIA has done anything but support policy. It does not create policy. . . I can assure you flatly that the CIA has not carried out independent activities, but has operated under close control of the Director of Central Intelligence, operating with the cooperation of the National Security Council and under my instructions.”59
Robert Kennedy agreed. Prior to his own 1968 assassination, Bobby said that CIA programs were approved at the highest levels of each administration. “If the policy was wrong, it was not the product of the CIA but of each administration,” Bobby advised. “We must not forget that we are not dealing with a dream world, but with a very tough adversary.”60
With that, the Kennedys’ old friend Allen Dulles readily agreed, saying, “The facts are that the CIA has never carried out any action of a political nature. . . without appropriate approval at a high political level in our government outside the CIA.”61
Completing the circle, a CIA official who was a key figure in the AM/LASH plots told the author on condition of anonymity, “Nothing would have happened if the White House hadn’t signed off on it.”62
Clearly the main accomplishment of the Church Committee’s CIA queries was making public large sections of the 1967 CIA Inspector General’s Report, initially commissioned by Lyndon Johnson. This marked the first time that the government officially admitted to undertaking assassination plots against fore
ign leaders, including Fidel Castro. The committee’s chief failure, like that of most such investigations, was its inability to determine “where the buck stopped.” In fairness, this failure cannot be blamed entirely on retired CIA and Kennedy administration officials. It is an indisputable fact that the Committee itself was a willing participant in the coverup.
The Church Committee Coverup
“The Church Committee has attempted a coverup from the governments end. The Mafia, by silencing Giancana forever, has clamped down the lid from its end.”
—William Safire, New York Times columnist63
“If you can’t get it right, at least get it written.”
—Church Committee motto hung on the wall of the staff office
Giving a group of politicians the job of assigning blame to other politicians should be understood by all to be an impossibility of the highest degree. There is a built-in structural problem, best-described by the biblical verse, “Let those without sin cast the first stone.” One has only to note the impotence of the 1997 Congressional probe into campaign finance irregularities. The paradigm was also demonstrated in the Iran-Contra Hearings, in which it was shown that illegal activity took place that no one initiated or sanctioned. Like the prevailing definition of God, the public is told that these kinds of activities have no beginning or end. They just are.
Other built-in obstacles blocked the scope and effectiveness of probes into CIA operations. Traditionally, few in Congress ever challenged the CIA’s activities, or even exhibited interest in monitoring them. According to Frank Church’s aide, Loch Johnson, “Until the establishment of the Church Committee, the CIA, with its thousands of employees, large budget, and risky operations spanning the globe, was subjected to roughly 24 hours of legislative ‘probing’ in both chambers over an entire year.”64 However, one Congressman who was interested was Les Aspin. The Wisconsin Democrat once asked CIA Director William Colby what happens when an oversight committee objects to a CIA operation. Colby “was stunned,” according to Aspin. “The question had never come up before. The committees preferred not to get involved.”65
