Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (20 page)

Lemnitzer even fell afoul of fashion-conscious Jackie Kennedy. “We all thought well of him until he made the mistake of coming into the White House one Saturday morning in a sport jacket,” she contemptuously remarked, underlining how class and culture, not just politics, divided the Kennedy White House from the military.

Lemnitzer, a far-right ideologue whose endorsement of General Edwin Walker’s paranoid indoctrination of Army troops had raised the suspicions of Senator William Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee, was equally dismissive of the Kennedy crowd. He thought their administration “was crippled not only by inexperience but also by arrogance arising from failure to recognize [their] own limitations…. The problem was simply that the civilians would not accept military judgments.”

On March 16, three days after his meeting with McNamara, Lemnitzer was summoned by President Kennedy to the Oval Office for a discussion of Cuba strategy that was also attended by McCone, Bundy, Lansdale, and Taylor. At one point the irrepressible Lansdale began holding forth, as usual, on the improving conditions for popular revolt inside Cuba, adding that once the glorious anti-Castro revolution began, “we must be ready to intervene with U.S. forces, if necessary.” This brought an immediate reaction from Kennedy, ever alert after the Bay of Pigs about being sandbagged into a military response in Cuba. The group was not proposing that he authorize U.S. military intervention, was it? “No,” Taylor and the others immediately rushed to assure him.

But Lemnitzer could not restrain himself. He jumped in at that moment to run Operation Northwoods up the flagpole. The general spared the president the plan’s more gruesome brainstorms, such as blowing up people on the streets of Miami and the nation’s capital and blaming it on Castro. But he informed Kennedy that the Joint Chiefs “had plans for creating plausible pretexts to use force [against Cuba], with the pretexts either attacks on U.S. aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we would retaliate.”

Kennedy was not amused. He fixed Lemnitzer with a hard look and “said bluntly that we were not discussing the use of U.S. military force,” according to Lansdale’s notes on the meeting. The president icily added that Lemnitzer might find he did not have enough divisions to fight in Cuba, if the Soviets responded to his Caribbean gambit by going to war in Berlin or elsewhere.

Despite the president’s cold reaction, the Joint Chiefs chairman persisted in his war campaign. About a month after the White House meeting, Lemnitzer convened his fellow service chiefs in “the tank,” as the JCS conference room was called. Under his direction, they hammered out a stern memo to McNamara insisting “that the Cuban problem be solved in the near future.” That would never be accomplished by waiting around for Ed Lansdale’s fairy-tale popular uprising, the memo made clear. There was only one way of getting the job done: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States.”

Lemnitzer was wearing out Kennedy and McNamara’s patience. After a National Security Council meeting in June, the president took the general aside and told him he wanted to send him to Europe to become NATO’s new supreme allied commander. Kennedy would replace Lemnitzer as the nation’s top military man with the more amenable Max Taylor. He would have one less warmonger to harass him about Cuba.

WHEN IT BECAME CLEAR
to Richard Helms that President Kennedy was not going to take Cuba by military force, “the gentlemanly planner of assassinations,” as biographer Thomas Powers anointed him, took it upon himself to rekindle the Mafia plots against Fidel Castro. Helms did not tell the Kennedy brothers, nor did he notify his nominal superior at the CIA, John McCone. He simply ordered his Cuba man, Bill Harvey, to renew the contract on Castro. Equally frustrated by the Kennedys’ cautious handling of the Havana regime, Harvey lost no time in re-contacting his friend, Mafia emissary Johnny Rosselli.

Just days before the agency’s Lawrence Houston and Sheffield Edwards assured Bobby Kennedy that the CIA-Mafia collaboration had been shut down, Harvey handed poison pills prepared in CIA labs to Rosselli. But the plotters apparently decided that firing at Castro with long-range rifles during one of his public appearances had more chance for success than an attempted poisoning. So soon afterwards, Harvey and Ted Shackley, head of the JM/WAVE station, rented a U-Haul truck, packed it full of rifles, handguns, and explosives, and drove it one night to a dark parking lot in Miami, where Rosselli stood waiting in the shadows. The CIA men handed the mobster the keys to the truck. He in turn passed the weapons to henchmen from the Cuban exile world, including men he had done business with ever since the lurid glory days of Batista. The assassination conspiracy against Castro—a three-headed Gorgon featuring the CIA on top, flanked by the Mafia and its Cuban accomplices—was again in motion.

This time Harvey cut out Chicago godfather Sam Giancana and Florida godfather Santo Trafficante, both of whom had been involved in the original Mafia plot. But he felt he could trust Rosselli, whose contacts with the CIA dated back to Guatemala in the 1950s, where the gangster got involved in political intrigues on behalf of gambling interests and the powerful fruit companies. Rosselli was a smooth operator, a polished link between the criminal underworld and the above-ground world of power. The two men made an odd couple—the sharply groomed and deeply tanned mobster with his alligator shoes and $2,000 watch and the rumpled, frog-faced government man in his drab brown suits. But Harvey convinced himself that Rosselli was not just a slick hoodlum from the mean streets of East Boston, but an American patriot. He gave Rosselli the false cover of an Army colonel and granted him complete access to the JM/WAVE headquarters, where the gangster met on a daily basis with CIA assassin David Morales.

Testifying before the Church Committee, Harvey got defensive when Rosselli’s name came up. “I was not dealing with the Mafia as such, pardon my saying so,” the CIA man insisted. “I was dealing with, and only dealt with, an individual who allegedly has had contacts with the Mafia. He is charged, but not provably charged, with having been a part of the so-called Chicago Family.” Harvey sounded more like his old friend’s Mafia lawyer than a high-ranking U.S. intelligence official. He seemed all too comfortable in the criminal world. Bill Harvey was a “thug” in the blunt assessment of CIA colleague John Whitten. Former Senator Gary Hart, one of the more active members of the Church Committee, is still unnerved by the ease with which Harvey crossed into the underworld. “He became best friends with Rosselli and they vacationed together,” Hart recalled. “I find this totally bizarre…. I don’t like CIA agents who become family friends with the Mafia.” While growing up, Sally Harvey, the spy’s adopted daughter, learned to call her father’s gangster friend “Uncle Johnny.”

In his 2003 memoir, Helms seemed to hang the CIA-Mafia rap on the conveniently deceased Harvey. Helms claimed that he was as flabbergasted as anyone else when he first heard about the plot. “After checking into it, I told Bill Harvey—who agreed entirely—to close it down,” wrote Helms. This assertion was false from beginning to end, and Helms provided no evidence to support it.

Blaming Harvey seemed to be Helms’s fall-back position. In 1975, when Helms was brought first before the Rockefeller Commission and then the Church Committee to testify about the Castro plots, he tried to pin the blame, as he had threatened to do over breakfast with his friend Henry Kissinger, squarely on Robert Kennedy. Helms was treated gently by the Republican-run Rockefeller panel, which was stocked with members—like the resilient General Lemnitzer—who were perfectly happy to hear the Kennedys charged with Cuban treachery. But the spymaster came under tougher questioning from the Democratic-controlled Church Committee, and he was compelled to bob and weave before the senators.

Helms appeared before the panel headed by Idaho Democrat Frank Church on a sweltering July afternoon. His testimony, which was delivered in a closed session in the Russell Senate Office Building, was a masterpiece of evasion, innuendo, and deception. “I don’t want anybody on this committee to think I am being slippery,” Helms told the senators at one point. But this is precisely what he was, as he feigned ingratiating cooperation with the legislators while twisting them into knots with bureaucratic doublespeak.

“I never liked assassination,” Helms assured the senators, in a bid to claim the moral high ground. But they could not imagine how much pressure that Bobby Kennedy was bringing down on the agency to do something—anything—to get rid of Castro.

“Since he was on the phone with you repeatedly, did he ever tell you to kill Castro?” Senator Church asked him point blank. “No,” Helms admitted. But he could not leave his answer as simple as that. “Not in those words, no.” He never received a direct assassination order from Kennedy, that is true, Helms acknowledged. And far be it from him “to put words in a dead man’s mouth”—that would not be “fair of me,” he said. Nonetheless, Helms got the distinct impression in conversation with Kennedy that “we have to find a way to…get rid of this fellow.” Helms simply got the “feeling that [Kennedy] would not be unhappy if [Castro] had disappeared off the scene by whatever means.”

Helms’s testimony was filled with winks and nods about Robert Kennedy, but no proof. When pushed by the committee, Helms admitted that Kennedy had been kept in the dark about Harvey’s poison pills and guns and was deceived by the CIA when its emissaries told the attorney general that it was no longer working with the Mafia. (Harvey himself conceded to the Senate panel that if RFK had wanted to kill Castro, he, Harvey, would have been the last person that Kennedy would have put in charge of the operation.) The CIA death plots against Castro preceded the Kennedy administration, Senate investigators would conclude, and they continued long after the Kennedy presidency ended.

When his Bobby-made-me-do-it defense began to crumble, Helms fell back on Plan B, which was apparently throwing Harvey over the side. The truth, Helms confided to the Church Committee, was that he had “very grave doubts about the wisdom” of the whole Mafia scheme. But Harvey “tried to convince me that he had been in the FBI a long time” and this is the way G-men “handled these matters and so forth.” Besides, he really didn’t take the Harvey-Rosselli cloak and dagger stuff all that seriously anyway. “I thought that Harvey was sort of on a wild good chase, frankly.”

As his usual mask of self-assurance began to wilt under the questioning, Helms even began to point a finger at his oblivious former boss, John McCone. Helms admitted that he and Harvey had decided to keep McCone blissfully ignorant about the Castro plots—because McCone was “taking over a new job” and the murderous intrigue was “going to look very peculiar to him.” But then he contradicted himself by charging that McCone “was involved in this up to his scuppers just the way everybody else was that was in it. I have no reason to impugn his integrity. On the other hand, I don’t understand how it was he didn’t hear about some of these things that he claims he didn’t.”

McCone did not know about the CIA’s dark side because he did not look hard enough. But Helms also did not want him to know. This was the secret core of the agency, the inner sanctum to which only Helms—and a few other top officials whose spy service dated back to the OSS days—had access. The intelligence world was a unique realm with its own rules and codes of behavior. Helms, in his patronizing way, tried to explain this to the senators on the Church Committee. “When you establish a clandestine service [like] the Central Intelligence Agency,” he enlightened them, “you established something that was totally different from anything else in the United States government. Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you should have it, it works under different rules…than any other part of the government.”

When McCone was brought before the Church Committee, he was put in the embarrassing position of admitting that he did not control the agency that President Kennedy had entrusted to him. JFK’s CIA director did not find out about the Mafia conspiracy until August 1963, he told the committee, when he read about it in a Chicago newspaper. He immediately confronted Helms with the newspaper account, but his number two man falsely assured him the plot was old news. “He was very clear that this was something that had been canceled, in 1961, before I took office,” said McCone.

It was not until an investigator for the Rockefeller Commission informed McCone in 1975, a dozen years after his conversation with Helms, that he realized his second-in-command had lied to him and that the Mafia plots had continued throughout his CIA tenure. “The fact that this happened is very disturbing to me,” an unnerved McCone said at the time. “Because it gives some credibility to the accusation that some things have gone on in the CIA that have been unsupervised and uncontrolled.”

This is precisely the conclusion that the Church Committee came to when it released its final report in April 1976, concluding that the CIA had acted like “a rogue elephant.”

A disturbing suspicion ran throughout the Church hearings, like a dark thought that can only be faced in a dream. If the CIA was capable of working hand in hand with bloody Mafia assassins against Castro, what else was the agency capable of? This is why the Castro plots and the revelations of CIA treachery against other foreign leaders exploded in the media at the time and continue to echo in the national conscience even today. When men with the dark, unlimited license that Helms argued should be accorded the CIA are set loose upon the world, they can also perform their shadowy deeds closer to home.

During his appearance before the committee, Ted Sorensen made an eloquent case for why President Kennedy would never have approved the CIA’s “wet work.” Assassination, Sorensen told the senators, “was totally foreign to his character and conscience, foreign to his fundamental reverence for human life and his respect for his adversaries, foreign to his insistence upon a moral dimension in U.S. foreign policy and his concern for the country’s reputation abroad, and foreign to his pragmatic recognition that so horrendous but inevitably counterproductive a precedent committed by a country whose own chief of state was inevitably vulnerable, could only provoke reprisals and inflame hostility on the part of those anti-U.S. forces whose existence was never dependent upon a single leader. Particularly ludicrous is the notion that one of his background would have ever knowingly countenanced the employment for these purposes of the same organized crime elements he had fought for so many years.” It was a noble statement of the administration’s philosophy, which held that the U.S. government should not resort to the ways of the jungle, even if our enemies did. But, as Sorensen acknowledged, it was not shared by all of Kennedy’s government.