Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (70 page)

According to his lawyer, Robert Walton, Morales revealed that he was involved in both Kennedy assassinations. Walton has told this to several researchers over the years, including former congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi, who recounted the story in his 1993 book,
The Last Investigation.
Walton repeated the story on camera to Shane O’Sullivan for the BBC report. According to Walton, Morales told him “I was in Dallas when I, when we got that mother fucker, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard. What was said to me was that he was in some way implicated with the death of John Kennedy, and let’s go one step further, and also with Bobby.”

Ruben “Rocky” Carbajal—who was one of Morales’s closest friends, from childhood until the day the CIA operative died—has told researchers a similar story, but does not directly implicate his old friend in the killings. I visited with Carbajal in Nogales, Arizona, the border town where he has retired, chatting with him for hours in the bar and dining room of his favorite hangout, the Americana Motor Hotel, and at his hillside home overlooking the parched, scrubby terrain of Mexico. Carbajal, who was celebrating his eightieth birthday with a group of his old compadres over beers and glasses of Scotch when I found him, is a blunt-spoken, profane man. Short and spry, with well-groomed white hair and mustache, he was dressed sharply—in tan leather jacket, beige velour pullover, tailored brown slacks, and two showy rings—and carried himself like a scrappy bantamweight despite his advanced years. He and Morales grew up together in the tough streets of Phoenix, fighting with “the Okies” and playing together on the Phoenix Union High School football team, where Carbajal was the quarterback and Morales was his wide end. The two boys were closer than they were to their own brothers; they went everywhere together, with the bigger Morales acting as his friend’s bodyguard. Morales’s father abandoned the family when he was only four, and the Carbajal family—which owned a popular Mexican restaurant named El Molino that was frequented by Barry Goldwater and other Arizona VIPs—embraced Morales as one of their own.

Nearly three decades after Morales’s death, Carbajal is still intensely loyal to the memory of the man he calls “Didi.” Carbajal regards his late friend’s covert assignments for the CIA as courageous missions that bestowed on him heroic stature. “When some asshole needed to be killed, Didi was the man to do it,” Carbajal told me, drinking Bud Lites and chain-smoking Marlboros in the Americana dining room. “You got that right. That was his job.”

“He was very patriotic. He believed in his job to protect the United States and he was going to go after anyone who was against it,” he added the next day, sitting on a leather couch in his home’s fully stocked bar room whose walls were covered with Hollywood celebrity stills, cheesecake shots, and posters of Aztec warriors with swooning maidens. “He didn’t give a damn. If his own brother would have talked against the United States, he would have blown his ass apart.”

Was his friend involved in the Kennedy assassinations? Carbajal wouldn’t answer directly, only saying that Morales was “maybe” in Dallas and Los Angeles on those days. There were “eight million people in Los Angeles…when Bobby Kennedy got hit, so there may not be any significance to that,” he observed, adding that Morales might simply have been visiting family members there at the time. In any case, said Carbajal, neither he nor Morales mourned RFK’s death. “We didn’t give a shit. Good riddance. Whoever did it, I want to thank them—thank you very much.”

Carbajal does know who killed JFK—it was the CIA, he said, without naming any individuals. Morales and his close CIA colleague Tony Sforza both told him the agency was behind the Dallas plot. The Kennedys got what was coming to them, Carbajal insisted. “[President] Kennedy screwed up, caused all those deaths at the Bay of Pigs, he pulls off the planes, the men get caught on the ground. You want me to respect a president like that? Or an asshole like his brother?” The Kennedys, he added, had also given “the damn nation to the blacks.”

Didi and he both felt that JFK had violated their code, said Carbajal. “If the son of a bitch caused the deaths of all these people [at the Bay of Pigs], he deserved to die. You should never go around lying to your people. You go back on your word, you ain’t no good. My dad taught me that. I don’t give a shit who it is. If it was my own father and he lied to me, he deserves to die. ’Cause you’re no good. I was brought up that way. And Didi was that way too, see?”

Despite all the dangerous dirty work that Morales performed for the CIA, in the end, Carbajal believes, the agency turned on his friend. He suspects that Morales’s sudden illness and death in May 1978 at age fifty-two was induced by his intelligence associates, who feared that he would talk openly about JFK’s murder to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was planning to question him. “I think that’s why they knocked him off, ’cause they didn’t want him to say nothing,” Carbajal said. Was the agency right to fear Morales’s honesty? “You’re goddamn right,” said Carbajal. “You ask him a question, like you ask me a question, and he got right to the point, boom, no horse-shitting around…. You want the truth, here it is.”

The overweight Morales, who chain-smoked unfiltered Pall Malls and often finished off a bottle of Johnny Walker at night, began experiencing heart trouble after flying home to Arizona from Washington, where, he told Carbajal, he had been drinking Scotch with agency colleagues before boarding the plane. He died that weekend in a Tucson hospital. According to a family member, there was no mystery to his death. “He had a heart attack. At home. Maybe [the congressional investigation] was running through his mind and it stressed him out, but the heart attack was there, ready to happen.” As soon as Morales died, his family was visited by CIA officials at their Willcox home in remote Apache country. “They were there making sure he was dead,” said the relative, who was at the Morales home at the time. “Was he dead or was he not dead?”

Our reporting led Morley and me into the catacombs of the old CIA war on Cuba—the underworld that Robert Kennedy suspected had spawned his brother’s assassination. We spoke with another ghost from those long-lost days, fabled anti-Castro militant Antonio Veciana, still vibrant at seventy-eight. Sitting in the backroom office of his boat supply store in Miami, Veciana—leader of Alpha 66, a CIA-sponsored exile group that launched terrorist attacks and raids on Cuba—told us point blank that he thought the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, “but I don’t know [exactly] who.” He repeated what he told House Assassination Committee investigators three decades ago, saying he once saw his CIA handler—a man he knew as Maurice Bishop, but whom congressional investigators identified as David Phillips—talking with a man he would later recognize as Lee Harvey Oswald in the lobby of a Dallas building where Veciana had gone to meet the CIA officer. “Goddamn it, what a fucking mess I’m in!” Veciana later exclaimed when he saw Oswald’s photo in the press. He speculates that the agency wanted to pin JFK’s assassination on Castro, as a pretext for invasion. But Veciana makes it clear that he never believed his hated adversary was behind the Dallas plot.

The man who once swore a fight to the death with Castro seems to have accommodated himself to history, predicting that as the Cuban leader finally fades into the sunset, there will be a diplomatic reconciliation between Washington and Havana. “I don’t agree with it, but it’s a reality,” shrugged the graying, bespectacled warrior, who still looks like the Havana banker he was before he fled the revolution. Back in 1979, as he was leaving his store one evening, Veciana was shot in the head by assassins, on orders, he believes from Fidel. But that all happened so long ago, in another century. It’s hard to believe these days that so much blood and treachery flowed around the island, enough passion, perhaps, to have claimed the life of a president.

One of the more intriguing pieces of evidence we came across during our reporting was an eleventh-hour confession by a legendary veteran of the war on Castro. Ever since Kennedy assassination researchers began airing their theories, they have been confronted with the skeptical response, “If there was a conspiracy, someone would have talked.” But the fact is, over the years, a number of important figures—beginning with Lee Harvey Oswald himself, and including several people long tied to Dallas, such as Johnny Rosselli, David Phillips, and David Morales—did begin to talk before their deaths. And in February 2007, Morley and I discovered the final testament of E. Howard Hunt, another CIA veteran around whom JFK assassination rumors had long swirled.

Hunt’s confessions began with
American Spy,
the memoir he completed shortly before his death in January 2007. Like the aborted O. J. Simpson confession, Hunt took an oddly speculative tack on the crime of the century, writing that if the CIA
did
carry out the assassination of President Kennedy, this is how it probably happened

Hunt suggested that several prominent CIA officials might have been involved in the plot, including Cord Meyer—whom the book’s original ghost writer, Eric Hamburg, conjectured was a WASP-elite stand-in for Richard Helms, the top agency man Hunt still could not bring himself to name. (Helms “was very careful to keep his skirts clean—very, very careful,” Hunt intriguingly told Hamburg.) The other CIA suspects Hunt named in his book were William Harvey and Morales, a “cold-blooded killer,” Hunt observed, who like his boss Harvey, was “possibly completely amoral.” While vigorously proclaiming his own innocence, Hunt speculated that Harvey—“a strange character hiding a mass of hidden aggression”—might have played the lead role in organizing the assassination, hiring Mafia sharpshooters “to administer the magic bullet” in Dallas. Hunt even went so far as to raise the possibility that Harvey was acting on orders from Lyndon Johnson.

These speculations by Hunt—a colorful and controversial spy whose intelligence career ended after he was arrested for his role in the Watergate break-in—were, of course, just that—speculations. More significant was what Hunt left out of the book—an eye-opening account that was brought to our attention shortly after Hunt’s death.

The aging spy had begun the confessional process in 2004, at the prodding of his oldest son, St. John, who felt that his father owed history—and his own family—the truth. St. John was a colorful character in his own right, who as a seventeen-year-old had helped his father destroy evidence as Watergate investigators bore down on Hunt—tossing the burglars’ surveillance equipment into a Potomac canal late one night with his father. On another occasion, at his father’s request, St. John got rid of a typewriter by throwing it into a neighbor’s backyard pond; he later learned that his father had used the typewriter to forge cables showing that JFK had ordered Diem’s assassination.

“I didn’t resent him asking me to help him get out of trouble,” St. John insisted. “I was glad to do it. I knew that I hadn’t lived up to his dreams as a son. I was not a great student, I didn’t go to Choate or Exeter. I wasn’t the son that he had hoped for. So doing all these things for him gave me an emotional strength. My dad needed me.”

In later years, St. John Hunt led the rambling life of a post-sixties rock musician, consuming and dealing more than his share of drugs, until after two felony convictions for peddling speed and finding himself and his children on the streets, he abruptly shifted gears, kicked drugs, and began living a law-abiding life in the appropriately named north coast town of Eureka, California. He recently earned a degree in hotel management from a local college, but keeps in practice as a guitarist, playing with a blues-rock band called Saints and Sinners on weekends.

“I convinced my dad to tell his story after writing him a letter, imploring him to tell the truth before it was too late. His health was starting to decline, he was suffering from cancer, recurring pneumonia, he had just had a leg amputated, just one thing after the other,” St. John recalled, sitting in the dining room of the Red Lion Hotel in Eureka. A compact, handsome man in his early fifties, he was dressed in the style of a cool, aging musician—black suit and shirt—and sported a brief, trim goatee.

Urged on by his son, Hunt began to open up about his murky past, writing provocative notes on the JFK assassination, adding more in an audiotape he mailed to St. John, and finally sitting down to talk for an hour about Dallas on video camera, prodded by questions from St. John and Hamburg, who is well versed in Kennedy literature.

Hunt’s last will and testament—for that is how it sounds, as the gray-bearded figure struggles to speak in the video and on the tape recorder, gasping for air between snatches of his story—is a remarkable American tale. “He felt that he had to come clean—not just for his conscience and history, but also to leave behind something for his family, in case the book made some money. He always deeply regretted that his family had been destroyed by Watergate.” St. John said that his two sisters never forgave their father for his part in the scandal that tore apart their family and led to the death of his mother, Dorothy, in a mysterious 1972 plane crash.

St. John believes that his father was willing to open up to him, in particular, because of the risks his son had taken for him during Watergate. “We had relationship built on trust, based on all of that…So years later, when I implored Papa to tell me everything he knew about JFK’s killing, he was open to it.”

But this confessional process was abruptly cut off when Hunt’s second wife, Laura, and their two grown children intervened—worried about the possible fallout from his unexpurgated account. “Papa was under huge pressure from his second family,” St. John said. “They were telling him, ‘Howard, what are you doing—you’re opening up all these doors from the past.’ It became a huge family issue. I told them, ‘This happened to
my
family, before
you.’
I felt very entitled to hear him tell that story—I resented his second family telling me what I could talk to my father about. But Papa was so torn. He was old and worn out by then. He told me, ‘Saint, this is my family now. You are my family too. But these are the people I have to live with. I’m too old to be put in the middle of a war between my two families.’” Unwilling to accept family-imposed constraints on the project, St. John and Hamburg ended their involvement in it, and another ghostwriter was hired to finish Hunt’s memoir.