Legacy of Secrecy (2 page)

multi-faceted cover-up that followed JFK’s murder, which lasted decades

longer than anyone could have envisioned in 1963. The cover-up wasn’t

intended to shield JFK’s killers, but to protect Commander Almeida and

prevent a nuclear confrontation. However, high officials ranging from

J. Edgar Hoover to the CIA’s Richard Helms also used the opportunity

to cover up their own misjudgments and misdeeds. Helms needed to

hide his unauthorized Castro assassination plots with the Mafia, which

he had withheld from both his own CIA Director and from Attorney

General Robert Kennedy (tasked by JFK with overseeing covert anti-

Castro operations).

Robert Kennedy had additional reasons for covering up as well,

from protecting his brother’s reputation to preserving his own political

future. Shortly before JFK’s murder, Robert Kennedy testified to Con-

gress that it was almost impossible to prosecute top Mafia godfathers

for any crimes, let alone ordering a hit.5 Robert asked trusted associates

to secretly investigate JFK’s slaying, and he eventually concluded that

Marcello was responsible. Prior to his own assassination, Robert con-

fided to associates that only by becoming President could he conduct

the truly thorough investigation needed to bring his brother’s killers

to justice.6

Robert’s own murder ended any chance of that, and
Legacy
focuses

on long-overlooked information about the criminal ties of compulsive

racetrack gambler Sirhan Sirhan and some of his family. It analyzes

the confessions of two associates of Johnny Rosselli regarding Robert

Kennedy’s murder, raising new questions about the official account.

It’s important to point out that
Legacy
does not say that the same

conspiracy that killed JFK also killed Martin Luther King and Robert

Kennedy. Out of the dozen people knowingly involved in President

Kennedy’s assassination,
Legacy
documents that three of those who con-

fessed or were caught on tape talking about JFK’s murder were later

involved to varying degrees in Dr. King’s slaying. Because so much was

covered up about JFK’s murder, those three men—all career criminals—

were able to get away with killing Dr. King. A like number may have

been involved in Robert’s assassination.

All three assassinations triggered cover-ups by US officials who had

nothing to do with the assassinations themselves. Those efforts in turn

caused still later cover-ups to protect the reputations of agencies and

former superiors. Officials like Richard Helms, who initially covered up

information about JFK’s assassination to protect national security and

his own career, essentially wound up protecting the criminal behavior of

others in order to avoid exposing his earlier cover-ups and unauthorized

operations. The career criminals behind the murders of JFK and Dr. King

spent decades literally getting away with murder, and they knew from

experience how to box in authorities by compromising law enforcement

and intelligence operations.

Legacy of Secrecy
was written because we discovered a tremendous

amount of new and significant information in the National Archives,

and from our sources, after the publication of
Ultimate Sacrifice
. While

Ultimate
covers the period from Oswald’s death on November 24, 1963,

to 2006 in only one chapter, the majority of
Legacy
focuses on the after-

math of JFK’s murder. The deaths of several individuals involved in

those events since the publication of
Ultimate Sacrifice
also allowed us

to disclose more in
Legacy of Secrecy
. The most extensive example is E.

Howard Hunt, whose work on the JFK-Almeida coup plan—while he

was the CIA’s liaison with US publishers and the press—is fully detailed

here for the first time. In a posthumously released autobiography and

tape recordings made for one of his sons, Hunt made seemingly con-

tradictory claims about JFK’s murder, sometimes saying they were only

speculation. However, Hunt’s self-serving accounts left out the most

important information—not just his work on the JFK-Almeida coup

plan, but also the ties of Hunt’s associates, including his best friend

Manuel Artime, to Santo Trafficante and the Mafia. As
Legacy
docu-

ments, seven associates of Hunt were among those who sold out the

JFK-Almeida coup plan to the Mafia. The book also shows how Hunt’s

role in the JFK-Almeida coup plan led to his infamous work for Nixon

during Watergate.7

Legacy of Secrecy
tells the full story in five parts, plus a photo-document

section that shows some of the most important files and people involved.

The following are just some of the highlights from each part:

Part I (Chapters 1-10) reveals critical new information about the JFK-

Almeida coup plan, an operation so secret that only a dozen US officials

knew about it. Even JFK’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, told us he

wasn’t informed about it until after JFK’s murder. This part also iden-

tifies the twelve associates of Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli who

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

learned about the coup plan, showing how that knowledge was used

in the attempts to kill JFK in Chicago, Tampa, and Dallas. It describes

Marcello’s confession to ordering JFK’s murder, his being introduced

to Oswald by his pilot David Ferrie, and Marcello’s meetings with Jack

Ruby. Part I gives a new perspective on Oswald, pointing out his simi-

larities to the ex-Marine patsy for the Chicago attempt and to the Tampa

suspect linked to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Using witnesses

overlooked or ignored by the Warren Report, Part I depicts the murder

of JFK, followed by the killing of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippet.

Part II (Chapters 11-20) details the cover-ups that began within hours

of JFK’s murder. These include Robert Kennedy’s initial suspicions that

someone involved in the coup plan was tied to JFK’s murder, and how

two JFK aides’ eyewitness accounts of shots from the “grassy knoll”

impacted Robert’s control of JFK’s autopsy. It documents President

Lyndon B. Johnson’s efforts to avoid a nuclear showdown with the

Soviet Union, while associates of Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli were

spreading phony stories tying Oswald to Fidel Castro—even hinting to

the press about JFK’s top secret coup plan. Part II further shows how the

CIA’s Richard Helms and the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover withheld key infor-

mation from investigators, President Johnson, and each other, as they

sought to hide their own intelligence failures. Finally, Part II explains

why Marcello had Ruby kill Oswald, how associates of Robert Kennedy

spawned the Warren Commission, and why Robert tried to get LBJ to

continue the coup plan with the still-unexposed Almeida.

Part III (Chapters 21-37, covering 1964 through mid-1967) shows why

Richard Helms shut down his unauthorized Castro assassination opera-

tions after he was promoted to CIA Director, and how Johnny Rosselli’s

threats to reveal those operations stalled legal action against the Mafia

don. It also shows how Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli compromised

the JFK investigation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison,

resulting in one suicide and one murder. Part III also describes Bobby’s

secret investigations of JFK’s murder and briefly lays the groundwork

for several of the men involved in the murder of Dr. King.

Part IV (Chapters 38-60, covering mid-1967 to mid-1969) extensively

details explosive new information about the assassination of Martin

Luther King, focusing on the previously unknown roles of Joseph

Milteer, Hugh R. Spake, Carlos Marcello, and Johnny Rosselli in dealing

with James Earl Ray. It reveals how Milteer and three Atlanta partners

raised money for Dr. King’s assassination, and—after several failed

attempts—paid Carlos Marcello a huge sum to broker the contract on

Dr. King. We show why Marcello agreed, and how James Earl Ray went

from being a new member of Marcello’s drug network to stalking Dr.

King. Part IV also shows why J. Edgar Hoover and high FBI officials had

to limit parts of their King inquiry, both to avoid compromising ongoing

prosecutions of Marcello and Rosselli and because of their earlier failings

in investigating the two mob bosses (and Milteer) for JFK’s murder.

In addition, Part IV raises new questions about Robert Kennedy’s

assassination, including Johnny Rosselli’s ties to Sirhan’s main attor-

ney and CIA officer David Morales. For the first time we expose David

Morales’s tie to an earlier plan to assassinate Fidel Castro by using a

pistol-wielding assassin in a pantry. Part IV also reveals the little-known

criminal ties of some of Sirhan’s associates and family, including the

attempted murder of Sirhan’s brother shortly after Robert Kennedy’s

assassination.

Part V (Chapters 61-65, covering 1970 to the present) focuses signifi-

cantly on Watergate, showing why a dozen participants in that scandal

had ties to operations like the JFK-Almeida coup plan (and the Mafia’s

infiltration of it), and how three of those helped to expose Watergate.

It quotes the document that the Watergate burglars were really after

and explains why Johnny Rosselli and JFK’s assassination became part

of the Watergate investigation, which triggered five more government

committees and commissions.

In Part V, we also document the murders of five witnesses slated for

Congressional inquiries into JFK’s assassination—including Rosselli,

Sam Giancana, and Jimmy Hoffa—and four additional sudden deaths

of witnesses. We show how the JFK-Almeida coup was withheld from

all of those committees, including the HSCA, and the role played by

a 1978 meeting between a US official and Commander Almeida. We

also explain how Watergate spawned the BRILAB FBI sting that finally

brought Marcello a long sentence in federal prison. There, the godfather

became the target of the FBI’s undercover CAMTEX sting, resulting in

Marcello’s JFK confession and his threat to kill the FBI informant who

heard it.

Part V concludes with an Epilogue showing Commander Almeida’s

increasingly high profile in Cuba after the revelation (outside of Cuba) of

his secret work for JFK. With Fidel having stepped aside, Almeida could

be a key player in ending the forty-seven-year-old impasse and trade

embargo between Cuba and the US. Ironically, several of JFK’s Cuban

exile allies from 1963 could still play important roles as well.

Legacy
depicts the sometimes painful transformation of Robert Kennedy

from aggressive Attorney General to a revered champion of civil rights

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

and advocate for the poor, as he struggled to deal with his brother’s

murder. However, this book is not a biography of Robert Kennedy, JFK,

or Martin Luther King, or a chronicle of the civil rights movement, even

for the years we cover in depth (late 1963 to 1969). Unlike
Ultimate Sacri-

fice, Legacy
does not extensively
document the development of the JFK-

Almeida coup plan and the backgrounds of its participants. The same

is true for the long Mafia careers of Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli

prior to JFK’s murder—including their work for the CIA in the Castro

assassination plots that started in 1959— all of which are the subject of

hundreds of pages in
Ultimate Sacrifice
.

For both the FBI and the CIA, where appropriate, we try to draw

distinctions between the actions of top leaders like J. Edgar Hoover and

Richard Helms and those of rank-and-file personnel, who were often at

the mercy of superiors with agendas (and information) they didn’t share

with most in their organizations. The HSCA investigated and cleared the

FBI of involvement in Martin Luther King’s assassination, but because

of the FBI’s well-documented shameful track record in dealing with Dr.

King, we tried to rely on government reports that were appropriately

critical of the FBI.

Legacy
is the result of twenty years of research—with help from some

of the best investigators of today and from the past—that led to the

continuing discovery of files at the National Archives that confirm (and

add detail to) what Kennedy aides and associates told us years earlier. In

1990, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk first confirmed “active” plans

for a “second invasion” of Cuba at the time of JFK’s death and explained

why JFK wasn’t bound by any pledge not to invade Cuba. JFK aide

Dave Powers told us in 1991 that he and another aide saw shots from

the grassy knoll, but were pressured to change their story for the Warren

Commission “for the good of the country.” In 1992, Robert Kennedy’s

top Cuban exile aide Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams first revealed

Almeida’s name and many details of the coup plan, while other for-

mer Kennedy aides pointed to Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli as