JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (83 page)

Yet how did Rose Cheramie happen to be lying at a 90-degree angle across Highway 155 at three in the morning, near suitcases that seemed to be positioned to direct an oncoming car over her body?

Cheramie may in fact have been shot in the head before Jerry Don Moore found her on the highway. Records at Gladewater Hospital describe a “deep punctate stellate” (starlike) wound to her right forehead. Dr. Charles A. Crenshaw commented in his book,
JFK: Conspiracy of Silence
: “The wound to Cheramie’s forehead as described, according to medical textbooks, occurs in contact gunshot wounds—that is, when a gun barrel is placed against a victim’s body and discharged. It is especially applicable to a gunshot wound of the skull . . .”
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Cheramie’s autopsy “cannot be found” according to the responsible authorities.
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Because of the unanswered questions about Cheramie’s death, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison wanted to exhume her body. The local Texas authorities refused to cooperate with Garrison’s request.
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Following Rose Cheramie’s death, her life continued to be a source of information on John Kennedy’s death. In 1967 the Louisiana State Police assigned Lieutenant Francis Fruge to work with Jim Garrison in his investigation of JFK’s murder. Fruge then interviewed the owner of the Silver Slipper Lounge, where Cheramie had been thrown out and hit by a car November 20, 1963, before she predicted Kennedy’s murder that night. Mac Manual had continued to be the owner of the Silver Slipper, a known house of prostitution.

Manual remembered well the night at the Silver Slipper when the two men and Rose Cheramie got into a fight. Manual said they had several drinks when they arrived. Cheramie “appeared to be intoxicated when she got there. She started raising a ruckus. One of the men kind of slapped her around and threw her outside.”
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Manual told Fruge he recognized the two men with Cheramie as soon as they walked into the Silver Slipper. He should have. He worked with them. They were, he said, “pimps who had been to my place before, hauling prostitutes from Florida and hauling them back.”
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Lieutenant Fruge had brought with him a stack of photographs from the New Orleans District Attorney’s office. From the photographs, Mac Manual picked out his two business associates in prostitution. They were more than that. The two men he identified as having accompanied Rose Cheramie to the Silver Slipper were Sergio Arcacha Smith and Emilio Santana, two anti-Castro Cuban exiles with CIA credentials.
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Emilio Santana admitted in an interview with Jim Garrison’s office that the CIA hired him on August 27, 1962, the evening of the day he arrived in Miami as an exile from his native Cuba.
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Santana was immediately employed by the Agency as a crewmember on a boat sailing back to Cuba, carrying weapons and electronic equipment for CIA-sponsored guerrilla actions. He was a CIA employee, he said, during 1962 and 1963.
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As a Cuban fisherman, he had intimate knowledge of the Cuban coastline, which made him a valuable asset in piloting boats that smuggled CIA operatives in and out of Cuba.
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He acknowledged piloting a boat with a CIA team that was off the coast of Cuba for twenty days at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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Santana’s boat would have been carrying one of the unauthorized commando teams that CIA Special Operations organizer William Harvey dispatched to Cuba at the height of the Missile Crisis, igniting the fury of Robert Kennedy for the CIA’s covert provocation of nuclear war.
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President Kennedy’s refusal then, as at the Bay of Pigs, to attack Cuba, and his crisis-resolving pledge to Khrushchev never to do so, provoked a counter-anger in the CIA extending down into the exile community that included Emilio Santana.

The CIA’s version of its employment of Santana is more modest. When Jim Garrison investigated Emilio Santana, a CIA document acknowledged that the Agency had in fact recruited him—in October 1962, it said, corresponding to the time of the Missile Crisis. The document claimed that the Agency had terminated Santana’s contract after he took part in an infiltration operation in May 1963.
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The man Mac Manual identified as Rose Cheramie’s other companion, Sergio Arcacha Smith, had a more commanding role in the CIA’s anti-Castro network.

Sergio Arcacha Smith had been a prominent Cuban diplomat for the Batista regime before it was overthrown by the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro. As Arcacha stated on his personal resume, he was Cuba’s diplomatic consul in Madrid, Rome, Mexico City, and Bombay (at the latter station under Batista).
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After he left the diplomatic service, Arcacha had by 1959 prospered enough as a business executive in Latin America to have his own factory in Caracas, Venezuela.
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He became active there in an anti-Castro group, which may have initiated his involvement with the CIA. On June 29, 1960, he was arrested by the government of Venezuela and charged with plotting to assassinate Venezuelan President Ernesto Betancourt.
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He was released on July 14, 1960.
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The American Embassy came to his immediate assistance, issuing nonimmigrant visitor visas to him and his family so they could depart from Venezuela.
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After arriving in the U.S., Arcacha Smith became the New Orleans delegate of the FRD (Frente Revolucionario Democratico), which a CIA document on Arcacha states “was organized and supported by the Agency.”
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The FRD “was used,” the CIA noted, “as a front for recruitment of Brigade 2506 for the [Bay of Pigs] invasion.”
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Arcacha admitted in a 1967 polygraph test that he and David Ferrie, while working for the CIA, “helped train the Bay of Pigs invasion force with M-1 rifles.”
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When the FRD was phased out, Arcacha established a New Orleans chapter of the Cuban Revolutionary Council,
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the Cuban “government in exile” organized by the CIA.
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Guy Banister, the detective/intelligence agent who would guide Oswald in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, also worked closely with Arcacha Smith in 1961-62. Banister helped set up an organization to raise funds for Arcacha Smith’s branch of the Cuban Revolutionary Council.
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Banister and Smith both had their offices in the Balter Building in New Orleans.
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They moved together in early 1962 to the Newman Building at 544 Camp Street,
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the same address that Oswald used for one of his Fair Play for Cuba leaflets when he was arrested in New Orleans on August 9, 1963, for disturbing the peace.
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According to Arcacha’s New Orleans public relations man, Richard Rolfe, Arcacha said frankly to him that he was under the thumb of the CIA, which in public he always referred to as the “State Department.”
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Sergio Arcacha Smith was also seen with Lee Harvey Oswald. David Lewis, a former employee of Guy Banister, stated to the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office that he witnessed a meeting in the late summer of 1963 at Mancuso’s Restaurant in New Orleans between Sergio Arcacha Smith, Lee Harvey Oswald, and a man named Carlos whose last name Lewis didn’t know (who may have been Arcacha’s and Oswald’s mutual friend, Carlos Quiroga).
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Lewis said Arcacha, Oswald, and Carlos “were involved in some business which dealt with Cuba,” and that Arcacha “appeared to be the boss.”
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As we have seen, “Arcacha” was the name given by CIA double agent Richard Case Nagell to identify one of the participants besides Nagell and Oswald in a late August 1963 planning meeting for killing Kennedy.
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There is just one man with the name, Arcacha, who keeps reappearing in the assassination plot: Sergio Arcacha Smith.
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Sergio Arcacha Smith’s identification by Mac Manual as one of Rose Cheramie’s companions, who she said told her they were going to Dallas to kill Kennedy, is further evidence that the CIA played an operational role in the assassination. Sergio Arcacha Smith in particular had an extensive CIA background, including working relationships with Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Claiming she had been an employee of Jack Ruby, Rose Cheramie also testified to Ruby and a man she identified as Lee Oswald knowing each other well. Rose Cheramie lived and died as a witness to the Unspeakable.

At the risk of his political future (and his life), John Kennedy continued to pursue a secret dialogue toward a rapprochement with Fidel Castro.

On November 5, 1963, at the White House, U.S. diplomat William Attwood briefed National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy on Premier Castro’s warm response to the process developing behind the scenes at the United Nations between Attwood, a deputy to U.S. ambassador Adlai Stevenson, and Cuban ambassador Carlos Lechuga. Castro’s righthand man, Rene Vallejo, said in a phone call to intermediary Lisa Howard that the Cuban leader was ready to negotiate with Kennedy’s representative “anytime and appreciated the importance of discretion to all concerned.”
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Castro enthusiastically offered to expedite the process by sending a plane to pick up Attwood in Mexico. Attwood would be flown to a private airport in Cuba where he would talk confidentially with Castro and then be flown back immediately.
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“In this way,” Castro hoped, “there would be no risk of [Attwood’s] identification at the Havana airport.”
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After meeting with Attwood, Bundy updated Kennedy on Castro’s concrete proposal. Fortunately for history, Kennedy pushed a button under his desk to record the private conversation with his National Security Adviser.
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Bundy told the president of Castro’s invitation to Attwood “to go down completely on the QT and talk with Fidel about the chances and conditions on which he would be interested in changing relations with the United States.”

JFK said, “Can Attwood get in and out of there very privately?”

Bundy shared Castro’s logistical planning for the meeting. He acknowledged the danger of Attwood’s close connection with the president. He added—to Kennedy’s approval—that Attwood as his representative would have the advantage of already knowing Castro, having met with him in Cuba in the late 50s.

Kennedy said, “We’d have to have an explanation of why Attwood was there. Can we get Attwood off the [government] payroll . . . before he goes?”

At this point in their conversation, Kennedy’s and Bundy’s attention was diverted by their receiving word of the Russians holding up a British convoy on its way to West Berlin. When they returned to the subject of the Castro meeting, the president repeated, “I think we ought to have [Attwood] off the payroll, because otherwise it’s much more difficult.”

The two men agreed. Given the risk of the Attwood–Castro meeting being discovered by the press, Attwood should sever his formal relation with the government. Thanks to his reputation as a journalist before his diplomatic career, Attwood should carry out his secret mission to Castro “as a newsman.”
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As Kennedy knew, the greatest risk of the politically explosive meeting lay not with the press but with the CIA. However, the CIA already knew—and was letting others know. As Cuban government intelligence would learn, the CIA had not only closely monitored Kennedy’s secret turn toward Castro from the beginning, as could have been expected. The Agency had also divulged the Kennedy–Castro connection to its Cuban exile network in Miami, thereby inflaming the exiles’ anti-Kennedy sentiment that went back to the Bay of Pigs.
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From the CIA’s command center in Langley to its largest hub of activity in Miami, President Kennedy in his developing détente with Fidel Castro was now regarded as a total traitor to the anti-communist cause.

Having taken the momentous step of approving the secret talks with Castro, during the final week of his life President Kennedy sent a hopeful message to the Cuban premier. It came in his November 18 address in Miami to the Inter-American Press Association. William Attwood said he was told by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who co-authored Kennedy’s speech, that “it was intended to help me by signaling to Castro that normalization was possible if Cuba simply stopped doing the Kremlin’s work in Latin America (such as trying to sabotage—vainly as it turned out—the upcoming Venezuelan elections).”
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In his November 18 speech, the president first emphasized that the Alliance for Progress did “not dictate to any nation how to organize its economic life. Every nation is free to shape its own economic institutions in accordance with its own national needs and will.”
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