Legacy of Secrecy (29 page)

ent, only Helms knew about a host of unauthorized Castro assassination

operations he was running, including at least one going on at that very

time, in Paris. In that room, Helms alone knew that, in the words of a

later CIA Inspector General’s report, “at the very moment President

Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent in

Paris and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro.”5

As the news from Dallas continued to arrive, Helms decided to withhold

information about the Paris meeting—and his other plots—from CIA

Director McCone and the others in the room.

McCone’s lunch meeting had included a discussion of Cuba, review-

ing the morning briefing that he, Kirkpatrick, and Helms had given

the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) at the

White House. Those PFIAB notes have finally been declassified, and

they include McCone’s saying, “The CIA has had a very active opera-

tion against Cuba,” and that the “CIA has vastly improved its agent

net[work]s and internal agent sources among legal travelers.” However,

an entire paragraph apparently relating to Cuba is still censored. Though

it’s unlikely McCone would have revealed a closely held secret like the

JFK-Almeida coup plan to an advisory board, the presence of Helms and

Kirkpatrick at the meeting means it’s possible they might have at least

laid the groundwork for what could happen with Cuba in ten days.6

It’s not known if McCone’s CIA lunch meeting included discussion

of the JFK-Almeida coup plan, though the secure setting and the high-

level CIA attendees make that much more likely. Kirkpatrick had met

that morning with Harry Williams and the other CIA personnel, such

as E. Howard Hunt, for the final review of the plans before Harry went

into Cuba. This was the last, most critical meeting, with the plan only a

few days away from its fail-safe point. Kirkpatrick had raised no major

objections in the meeting with Harry, and would no doubt want to give

his assessment to McCone and Helms, who had overseen the CIA’s role

in the coup plan up to that point. After their discussion and McCone’s

final approval, Kirkpatrick was set to return to the meeting with Harry

in Washington to give him the go-ahead to proceed.

However, events in Dallas disrupted those plans. McCone first

checked with the Agency Crisis Watch Committee, whose files about

that day have never been made public or shown to Congressional inves-

tigators.7 McCone then called Bobby Kennedy, who asked that McCone

come to his Hickory Hill estate, so McCone left the meeting and headed

there. Kirkpatrick apparently returned to resume the meeting with

Harry, Hunt, and the other CIA officials. Helms’s actions the rest of the

day remain sparsely documented, though in recent years enough infor-

mation he first withheld from the public and Congress has emerged to

make it possible to reconstruct the most important decisions he made,

and the actions he did and didn’t take.

Helms allowed McCone to leave without telling him about any of the

unauthorized Cuba operations Helms was still running in 1963. When

Helms made this decision, the die was cast regarding what he could

reveal, or allow the CIA to reveal, not just for the coming weeks but for

decades. Helms must have felt tremendous pressure—because of the

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events in Dallas and all that he was withholding—as he realized that his

career would be finished if his unauthorized schemes came to light.

Many of Richard Helms’s actions after JFK’s murder make sense in

light of Helms’s position and psychological makeup, as outlined by his

biographer, Thomas Powers, and other journalists. Helms was usually

cool under pressure, able to manage a crisis, and not prone to be emo-

tional under stress, as his subordinate Desmond FitzGerald was. On the

other hand, Helms was also detached (some might say cold-blooded),

at times sarcastic, and quick to divert blame or responsibility. Above all,

Helms was able to keep secrets.8

Though Helms was from an affluent family, he was not indepen-

dently wealthy to the degree that FitzGerald or his former boss Allen

Dulles was. Helms had recently turned fifty; his whole career, personal

life, and future depended on the CIA—and on avoiding any type of

controversy like the Bay of Pigs disaster that had cost Dulles and other

associates their careers.

It’s helpful to think of all the unauthorized Cuban operations Helms

was running not as separate programs, but as parts of one overall unau-

thorized operation, since they often crossed over and usually involved

the same agents and supervisors. Helms and his immediate subordinate

for Cuba, Desmond FitzGerald, apparently relied on a small, trusted

clique of CIA men to deal with the unauthorized portions of the opera-

tion. They included David Morales, David Atlee Phillips, E. Howard

Hunt, and at least one other CIA employee.

The unauthorized operations Helms was running on November 22,

1963, unknown to McCone or Bobby, included the ongoing CIA-Mafia

plots to assassinate Fidel with Johnny Rosselli and David Morales, as

well as the assassination part of the Rolando Cubela (AMLASH) opera-

tion. (McCone and Bobby knew of Cubela only as someone who could

provide intelligence on more powerful Cuban officials.) Helms had also

authorized continuing payments to European assassin recruiter QJWIN

(CIA files show his regular monthly salary was paid on November 22,

1963), and there are indications that French assets were also part of the

CIA’s own assassination plot against Fidel.9 In addition, Helms knew

that David Atlee Phillips was using CIA officer George Joannides to

support a small Cuban exile group called the DRE, which had interacted

with Oswald during his flurry of publicity in New Orleans in August.

The DRE wasn’t part of the JFK-Almeida coup plan, and one CIA memo

says it was “mob controlled.”10 Evidence shows that Phillips was also

helping to support Alpha 66, the violent anti-Castro group the Kennedys

had excluded from the JFK-Almeida coup plan. Finally, newly released

CIA files show that after Trafficante enforcer Herminio Diaz expressed

an interest in assassinating Fidel in September 1963, Helms’s CIA chief

in Miami, Ted Shackley, expressed an interest in Diaz. In the same memo,

Shackley also showed an interest in Rolando Masferrer, Trafficante and

Martino’s notorious associate.

While all those details may seem complicated, they start to make

sense when viewed simply as parts of one large, unauthorized Castro

assassination plan. If Helms wanted his own plan as a backup—in case

something happened to Almeida, or to supplement the President’s plan,

or if JFK got cold feet—he would need someone to assassinate Castro.

Helms would also need someone to take the blame, a fall guy whom

the American public and much of the world would logically accept.

Rosselli’s marksmen could handle the shooting. They could easily be

assisted or supplemented by those who could freely travel in and out of

Cuba, like Diaz, QJWIN, or any French assets helping the CIA. Cubela’s

beach house near Fidel’s at Varadero Beach gave the assassins a place

to operate when Fidel made his regular weekend visit in an open jeep.

As for who could take the blame, some of the US assets going into Cuba

had Russian connections that could be used to make it seem as if they

had killed Fidel on behalf of the Soviets. Among those assets were Lee

Oswald and Gilberto Policarpo Lopez.

Helms also knew information about Oswald that was being withheld,

at least in part, from McCone and Bobby. Dr. John Newman, a noted

historian and major with twenty years’ experience in Army Intelligence,

documented that when Oswald made his odd trip to Mexico City in late

September 1963, two tracks of information about him had been sent to

CIA headquarters. The most secret track clearly showed Oswald to be

of operational interest to Desmond FitzGerald’s anti-Castro activities.

In the days, months, and years to come, Helms would maintain to the

public and Congress that the CIA “had no real knowledge of [Oswald’s]

presence” in Mexico City until after JFK’s assassination. Even today, this

is still the CIA’s official stance. However, Dr. Newman uncovered CIA

files and statements proving that assertion false. The CIA’s Mexico City

chief at the time, Win Scott, later wrote that “Oswald ‘was a person of

great interest’ to the CIA during his visit to Mexico City between Sept.

27 and Oct. 2, 1963.” Clearly, Oswald was part of an extremely sensitive

anti-Castro operation that FitzGerald and his supervisor, Helms, were

running. In charge of surveillance of the Cuban and Soviet embassies

that Oswald visited in Mexico City was David Atlee Phillips, who, in

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addition to his duties in Mexico, worked directly for FitzGerald and on

AMWORLD with David Morales and Manuel Artime.11

The AMWORLD connections show why Helms thought he could

get away with running his own plot to assassinate Fidel without tell-

ing McCone or Bobby. The watchword for AMWORLD and the other

aspects of the JFK-Almeida coup plan was “deniability,” a theme that

would come up repeatedly in the Congressional investigations of the

1970s. Just as JFK and Bobby wanted their coup with Almeida to look

like an internal “palace coup,” with no apparent ties to the US govern-

ment, Helms had worked to establish a cover for many aspects of his

own, unauthorized Castro assassination plotting.

For example, Helms could always claim that Cubela decided on

his own to assassinate Fidel, instead of just providing intelligence on

other Cuban officials, as McCone and Bobby thought he was doing. It’s

ironic, but years later we learned that Helms had not needed to keep

the assassination part of the Cubela operation secret from Bobby: As a

close Kennedy aide told us, Bobby would not have minded Helms’s

assassination operation with Cubela as long as it had not interfered

with the JFK-Almeida coup plan.12 Still, Helms did withhold it, not only

from Bobby, but also from JFK and McCone. On November 22, even as

Helms pondered his options in the wake of JFK’s shooting, Cubela was

still meeting with his CIA case officer in Paris. In addition to trying to

get Cubela to take the CIA’s special poison pen, the case officer was

also offering to place a cache of weapons and explosives in Cuba for

Cubela’s use. The Paris meeting only ended when they received word

that JFK had been shot.13

In the hours after JFK’s murder, Helms no doubt reviewed the ratio-

nalizations and justifications for his unauthorized programs, in case

they surfaced or he needed to convince other CIA officials to keep them

hidden from McCone. As for the CIA-Mafia plots, Helms knew that if the

Mafia ever appeared to have murdered Castro, few tears would be shed

in Washington. Then, too, Rosselli was operating within the structure of

secret CIA exile training camps in Florida that JFK had approved, and

Bobby had visited (without realizing Rosselli’s involvement).14

Helms knew that even if Alpha 66 seemed to be involved in Castro’s

death, the group’s role would be hard to link to Helms, since the CIA’s

contact with the group had been through very deep cover for more than

a year. As a 1963 memo from CIA Miami Chief Ted Shackley to FitzGer-

ald stated, regarding an Alpha 66 offshoot, “current efforts to support

them are being made through other channels.” By “other channels,”

Shackley could mean CIA support funneled through what appeared to

be a private citizen, or via military-intelligence channels. As the memo

said, for the CIA to keep supporting the group while maintaining “the

desired degree of plausibility in our denial of support,” it was important

that even the exile group itself “be unable to track . . . [its] support to

[the CIA].”15 If even the group didn’t know about or couldn’t prove CIA

backing, Helms could be fairly confident he could keep his unauthor-

ized support of Alpha 66 from being exposed. Even if it were, Helms

could rationalize that JFK and Bobby had pressed the CIA to include

Eloy Menoyo, of the SNFE, in the JFK-Almeida coup plan, and it wasn’t

Helms’s fault that Menoyo was partners with Alpha 66’s Antonio Veci-

ana. In the same way, if someone like former Russian defector Oswald

were blamed for assassinating Fidel, Oswald had been a Marine, and

was (as Helms would later testify to Congress) the responsibility of

Defense Department agencies like Naval Intelligence and the DIA.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why Helms had thought he could get

away with running his own unauthorized Castro assassination opera-

tion without telling JFK, McCone, or Bobby. With the impending date for

the coup rapidly approaching, everything would come to a head in less