Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  Even this version of the Anderson ‘‘counterplot" story, as published belatedly in the Washington Post, was a bowdlerized one. Four days earlier Anderson’s column, as originally published, contained a much stronger story, not just that Castro had "cooked up a counterplot," but that this counterplot had possibly been executed:

  President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb—an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy (Dem.-N.Y.) may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother. . . .One version claims that underworld figures actually were recruited to carry out the plot. Another rumor has it that three hired assassins were caught in Havana.,..For weeks after the tragedy, this column was told, Bobby was morose and refused to see people. Could he have been plagued by the terrible thought that he had helped put into motion forces that indirectly may have brought about his brother’s martyrdom? Some insiders think so.44

  Note that p. 118 of the IG Report quotes many of these specific details: "underworld figures," "three hired assassins," "Castro. . . cooked up a counterplot": Yet the Report wholly fails to investigate, just like the Washington Post, the centra) thesis that the Robert Kennedy authorized a CIA plot which then "possibly backfired" against Kennedy.

  There was a lot of politics to the timing of Anderson’s charge, and it involved among other matters the worsening war scene in Vietnam.45 Both Pearson and Anderson were close to Johnson, who by 1967 was convinced that Bobby Kennedy was the leader of those forces opposing his Vietnam policies from the left.46 Johnson’s almost paranoid obsession with Bobby could only have been enhanced on March 2, 1967, the day before the Pearson-Anderson column appeared, when Robert Kennedy came forward with a controversial proposal for the suspension of bombing against North Vietnam. By this time Johnson’s paranoia had also come to embrace the CIA, whose initial support of the escalated war had become much more critical in late 1966.47

  Hence the Anderson column must have struck Johnson as a convenient opening to gather ammunition against Robert Kennedy and the CIA at the same time. His request to Helms for the facts must have struck Helms too as part of a political strategy against Robert Kennedy, in which the CIA, even if not the primary’ target, would also get mauled. Assuredly Helms’ sense of loyalty to the CIA would have justified in his eyes a refusal to become part of this game.48 But Helms’s refusal to execute Johnson’s request for information about this sensitive area only makes sense if we accept that there was indeed something to the Anderson story.

  Before proceeding, I should also make it clear that I do not believe (as Jack Anderson apparently still does) that Castro killed Kennedy. Nevertheless I now believe that the March 3 allegation, that the CIA plot "possibly backfired," was suppressed in the Post and the IG Report because it had hit a nerve. That is. it contained an element of truth and people (probably in the CIA) knew it.

  The extreme sensitivity of this allegation was demonstrated again in January 1971, when Anderson repeated it. This time Anderson outlined the CIA-underworld plots in some detail, naming Maheu, Harvey, O’Connell, Roselli, the CIA poison pills, and "Cuban assassination teams equipped with high-powered rifles."49 Once again Anderson asked the forbidden question: "Could the plot against Castro have backfired against President Kennedy?" Once again, predictably, this part of his column was suppressed, not just by the newspapers publishing it, but by the Senate Watergate Committee which found it relevant.50

  By this time, of course, Robert Kennedy was dead. However most accounts of Watergate agree that by early 1971 Richard Nixon’s "abiding nightmare" was that his nemesis Larry O’Brien "would somehow rebuild Teddy Kennedy to be [Nixon’s] opponent for the presidency in 1972. "51 Once again Jack Anderson appeared to threatening a Kennedy-Helms area of vulnerability, at a time when the Nixon White House (with a more hard-line Vietnam policy) was hostile to both men.52

  Not until September 1976, after Roselli had testified and been murdered, did Jack Anderson spell out the "political H-bomb" that he had merely hinted at in 1967. The full Rosselli allegation was not just about a "counterplot" or a "retaliation," but an actual turnaround of mob killers from their original target (Castro) to President Kennedy. This time the Washington Post finally ran the full story:

  Before he died. Roselli hinted to associates that he knew who had arranged President Kennedy’s murder. It was the same conspirators, he suggested, whom he had recruited earlier to kill Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. . . .Snipers were dispatched to a Havana rooftop. They were caught. The word reached Roselli that some of the plotters had been tortured and that Castro had learned about the whole operation. . . .

  PDS Comment: This would appear to be the three-man team who on March 13, 1963 set up a sniper’s nest at the University of Havana and were discovered by security police just before Castro arrived for a scheduled appearance.53 The location suggests that the men may have been drawn from the university milieu of the old anti-Batista Directorio Revolucionario that produced both Juan Orta (the associate of Trafficante and Varona who was central to the 1960-61 plots) and the 1963 plotter Rolando Cubela, a former DR leader and friend of Orta (IG Report, 80).54

  According to Roselli, Castro enlisted the same underworld elements who he had caught plotting against him. They supposedly were Cubans from the old Trafficante organization. Working with Cuban intelligence, they allegedly lined up an ex-Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been active in the pro-Castro movement. According to Roselli’s version, Oswald may have shot Kennedy or may have acted as a decoy while others ambushed him from closer range.55

  Almost certainly the CIA knew of the three-man plot against Castro in March 1963, whether or not it was itself involved. As I have written elsewhere, there was at least one other three-man assassination team that was sent, this time with CIA support, against Castro in 1963. These three men were Eddie "Bayo" Perez and the other two survivors of the so-called Bayo-Pawley mission, sent in the summer of 1963 by Roselli’s close friend and room-mate John Martino.56 The recently released CIA documents confirm "the large amount of assistance from JMWAVE" (the CIA’s Miami station) for this mission, and also the efforts of John Martino to exfiltrate Angel Luis Castillo Cabrera, "Bayo"’s brother-in-law, to join them.57

  This Luis Castillo is the "Castillo" cited by the IG Report on p. 118 as corroboration of the "counterplot." Martino himself claimed before his death to have had special knowledge concerning the Kennedy assassination, to have known Ruby in Cuba, and even to have watched Oswald passing out his pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans.58 Above all, Martino had already given to the Warren Commission and to the FBI an early version of the Roselli-Anderson story, that the Kennedy assassination "had been an act of retaliation for an anti-Castro plot."59

  The Anderson column was explicitly about "a reported CIA plan in 1963." Thus it is most disingenuous of the IG Report to focus on the reported "rumor" of a three-man team, and conclude that this must refer to an assassination plot in 1962 60 Not only is such an inference impossible, it is dishonest. Such dishonesty suggests that at least some of the sources and/or authors of the IG Report were suffering from a guilty conscience: they knew there was something to hide.

  Whether or not one believes Castro’s intelligence networks to have been involved, one can entertain the hypothesis that a shooter team, in effect licensed by the CIA to kill Castro, might then have returned from Cuba and killed the President instead. Such an idea, floated by Martino and later Roselli, would have exerted pressure on the CIA whether true or untrue. The mere appearance that a CIA team had been "turned around," while other killers took care of the actual job, would have been enough to coerce the CIA and its friends into the ranks of those claiming to be true believers in a lone assassin.

  Such a possibility is by no means proven. But one is more inclined to take it seriously, once one has been exposed to the evasiveness and false logic of the IG Report. We must add to this the indications we have seen, that the mob and their in-house allies did not merely execute the CIA’
s assassination plans, but helped originate them to serve their own ends.

  Given these signs of a mob influence within the CIA (as within the FBI), it seems at least possible that the mob could have helped secure CIA authorization for a plot against Castro, which it then exploited to murder the President of the United States.

  1 Church Committee, Assassination Plots Report. 179 (Johnson); Washington Post, March 7, 1967, p. CI3 (column). The IG Report refers to "Drew Pearson’s column of 7 March 1967" (p. 6); the column itself made it clear that it was written by Pearson’s associate Jack Anderson. I shall refer to it hereafter as the Anderson column, as I consider the distinction to be important.

  2 H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s other top aide, wrote that in 1969, immediately after be came to office. Nixon charged Ehrlichman to obtain from the CIA a "document," described by the President as a complete report on the Bay of Pigs, that Richard Helms refused to deliver to the President. (H.R. Haldeman, with Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power, 25-26). Id Ehrlichman’s romanle, The Company, the document requested by President "Monckton" was a document dealing with CIA sponsored assassinations in the Caribbean. Ehrlichman’s notes of a meeting on September 18, 1971, record that the President instructed him to tell CIA to turn over "the full file [on the Bay of Pigs] or else (House Judiciary Committee, Impeachment Hearings, Appendix Three; see also Arthur M. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 523-24). It remains unclear if Nixon’s intent was to obtain the IG Report or the earlier in-house Kirkpatrick Report on the Bay of Pigs failure, which also existed in just one copy (Ranelagh, The Agency, 381; cf. 531), or both. The "full file," in theory, should have delivered both. Go the Watergate "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, Nixon predicted that Hunt "will uncover a lot of things," including "the whole Bay of Pigs thing;" and Haldeman’s book later surmised that "in all those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination" [Haldeman, The Ends of Power, 39]. Haldeman backed away from this speculation before his death, but it was a reasonable one we now learn that E. Howard Hunt’s name is almost certainly included in the IG Report, at pp. 99 and 101 [14-letter redactions; cf. below at footnote 6; Warren Hinckle and William Turner, The Fish Is Red. 240]).

  3 5 AH 20, 109-20; Scoti, Deep Politics, 179-80.

  4 Scott, Deep Politics, 180-81; 5 AH 163. De Giorgio was both £ gambler and a dealer ai the Capri, where Lansky’s associate Charles Tourine was the lead mob owner, and Ruby’s friend McWillie was manager (5 AH 163) Twenty years later, when Tourine and his crime associate Joe Nesline were active in Amsterdam and Hamburg criminal activities, the Cellini brothers and Giuseppe de Giorgio were again present. See Alan Block, Perspectives on Organizing Crime, 234-36.

  5 HSCA investigator Michael Ewing told Warren Hinckle and Bill Turner that Varona "was dealing with Lansky, who offered to back him;" and that it was actually Lansky who turned Varona over to Trafficante (Hinckle and Turner, The Fish Is Red, 75). This appears to be the source for Charles Rappleye’s claim that "Varona had met with Meyer Lansky to secure financing for his nascent Frente" (Rappleye and Becker, All-American Mafioso, 192).

  6 Szulc and Meyer, The Cuban Invasion, 107; Wyden, Bay of Pigs, 116; cf. Hunt, Give Us This Day, passim. Bissell replaced Hunt with James Noel (called "Jim Noble" in Wyden’s account, and "Jim" in Hunt’s). Noel and Hunt disliked each other intensely, but would later supervise the 1965 assassination meeting between Rolando Cubela (AMLASH) and Artime (when Noel acted as Cubela’s case officer, and Hunt as Anime’s). See IG Report, 99-101; Hinckle and Turner, The Fish Is Red, 240.

  7 Time, January 27, 1961, April 28. 1961 (Varona); Hugh Thomas, The Cuban Revolution, 508 (Ray). The new CIA releases contain a letter of 3/3/61 from U.S. businessman William D-Pawley, warning of the dire dangers if either Ray or Miro Cardona were given important positions in a new post-Castro government.

  8 Szulc and Meyer, 92-94. This book does not name Hunt; but cf. Szulc, Compulsive Spy, 84-85, 91-93; Hunt, 157-64.

  9 See Scon, Deep Politics, 166-69, 173-75.

  10 Scott, Deep Politics, 356; John H. Davis. The Kennedys, 56-57, 75-77, 485-86.

  11 Davis, Kennedys, 289-90 (Kennedy in 1960).

  12 Robert F. Kennedy, The Enemy Within, 228, 240-41; Scott, Deep Politics, 173; Moldea, The Hoffa Wars, 131, 277, 387.

  13 Brashler, The Don, 196.

  14 Cf. Assassination Plots Report, 77. Maheu also claims that he learned that Giancana and Trafficante "were among the ten most powerful Mafia members. . . after seeing their pictures in a magazine soon after meeting them" Maheu. Next to Hughes, 141). But the Church Committee was unable to locate the article, and other investigators have questioned its existence.

  15 Maheu’s questionable investigative activities for Williams and Hoffa had come under Robert Kennedy’s hostile scrutiny during the Rackets Committee Hearings (pp. 15247-49, 19672-74).

  16 Rappleye and Becker. All-American Mafioso, 152-55.

  17 Scott, Deep Politics, 217-41.

  18 Kessler, The Richest Man in the World, 183.

  19 Kessler, The Richest Man in the World, 165.

  20 IG Report. 67-69, 125 Trafficante testified to the HSCA that Roselli "told me that the CIA and the United States Government was involved in eliminating Castro" (5 AH 357). So much for generating cover and deniability!

  21 George Crile. Washington Post, May 16. 1976, reprinted at 5 AH 309; see also Arthur M. Schlesinger. Robert Kennedy and His Times, 520.

  22 Rappleye. All-American Mafioso, 184-85; Assassination Plots Report, 75.

  23 Robert Maheu and Richard Hack, Next to Hughes (New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1992), 136-38.

  24 Maheu, Next to Hughes, 47. Maheu adds the intriguing detail that Edwards and the CIA Office of Security disliked Bobby Kennedy from as early as 1954. when they tried in vain to get Maheu to cease sharing an office with the Kennedys’ accountant and trouble-shooter. Carmine Bellino: "Because of Bobby, the CIA told me that if I were to work with the Agency, I would have to move away from Carmine and any possible Kennedy connection. I said I couldn’t afford to move out. So the company put me on a monthly retainer of S500, thereby becoming my first steady client and enabling me to move into an office of my own."

  25 Assassination Plots Report, 74-75. Hougan. Secret Agenda, 12 (‘‘proprietaries"); Alan A. Block. Perspectives on Organizing Crime, 168-71.

  26 Cun Gentry, Hoover, 531-32; Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential, 242-45; Scott, Deep Politics, 144-46. etc.

  27 Washington Post, May 16. 1976, CI; reprinted at 5 AH 309.

  28 IG Report. 62a-65; Assassination Plots Report, 132-35; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 531 ("Plainly Kennedy had known nothing about assassination plots"); Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 155 ("The record is clear, then, that Kennedy was thoroughly briefed about the details"); Hinckle and Turner, The Fish Is Red, 124 ("Kennedy was bopping mad that be had not been told"), Roelagh, The Agency, 384n ("Robert Kennedy had known about this involvement for at least a year"); John H Davis. The Kennedys, 743 ("I do not. . . believe that Kennedy learned that Giancana had been hired by the CIA until the spring of 1962").

  29 Assassination Plots Report, 123-31. The question of Kennedy knowledge of course raises the role of Judith Campbell Exner, who in the period 1960-62 became the simultaneous friend of John Kennedy and of Sam Giancana. Originally Exner claimed to have no knowledge of the CIA-mafia plots (Davis. The Kennedys, 739-43). By 1991 she was claiming, somewhat implausibly, that she had been pan of an April 1961 hotel-room meeting where John Kennedy and Giancana plotted the death of Castro together (Sunday Times [London], October 6, 1991).

  30 Assassination Plots Report, 139-70.

  31 Assassination Plots Report, 170-73.

  32 Arthur Schlesinger links the success of the Donovan-Nolan mission to the important interview given by Castro to Lisa Howard in late April, which in turn helped set up the secret Attwood-Lechuga discussions of Fall 1963 (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 583-84).

  33 Assassination Report
, 85-86; IG Report, 75. FitzGerald told the IG Report authors that the plot began after he took over the SAS staff in January 1963. The Church Committee considered it "likely that the activity took place earlier, since Donovan had completed his his negotiations by the middle of January 1963" (Assassination Plots Report, 86). But the premise for this conclusion was obviously incorrect.

  34 Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. 150. The fact that Donovan and Castro planned to dive together may possibly have inspired FitzGerald’s famous plan to kill Castro with an exploding sea-shell (Assassination Report, 87, IG Report, 77). FitzGerald’s assistant Samuel Halpern told Thomas Powers that be "protested the seasbell plan. . . .Castro blowing up on the ocean floor would point a finger directly at the United States" (Powers, 150). But there is no trace of such protest in the 1C Report, which has this to say: "FitzGerald states that he. San Halpern, and [redacted] had several sessions at which they explored this possibility, but that no one else was ever brought in on the talks. Halpern believes that he had conversations with TSD on feasibility. . . ." (IG Report, 77). Halpern’s protest was first recorded after FitzGerald had died suddenly in July 1967, three months after the preparation of the IG Report.

  35 William Attwood, The Twilight Struggle, 257-62.

  36 William Atrwood, The Twilight Struggle. 258; Schweiker-Hart Report. 20 (September 5); IG Report, 84-86; Schweiker-Hart Report 13-14 (September 7).

  37 William Atrwood, The Twilight Struggle, 264.

  38 Schweiker-Hart Report, 17n (citing Executive Officer testimony, 4/22/76, p. 55); emphasis added. The two senior dissenting officers were Joseph "Langosch," chief of SAS/C1, and Theodore Shackley, the chief of the Miami JMWAVE station (Schweiker-Hart Report. 74-75). The Church Committee, finding written evidence of which the IG Report was unaware (IG Report, 92). concluded that FitzGerald had attended the November 22 meeting with Cubela as well (Assassination Plots Report. 89. Daniel Schorr. Clearing the Air. 166). Thomas Powers, relying on an anonymous CIA source (Halpem?) disputes this (p. 343n)