Legacy of Secrecy (41 page)

rifle that was found was the same one that Oswald apparently ordered.5

However, even Warren Commission and military testimony confirm the

rifle found on the sixth floor had a scope that “was installed as if for a

left-handed man.” All evidence shows that Oswald was right-handed,

despite later questioning of Marina Oswald and grilling of Lee’s brother

in a vain attempt to show otherwise. Also, the scope was so badly mis-

aligned that shots later fired by military experts all landed “high and

to the right of the target.” This was no accident caused by a fleeing

assassin’s dropping the rifle and knocking the scope out of alignment.

Military experts at the Aberdeen Proving Ground would later tell the

Warren Commission that “three shims [had been] placed in the scope,”

as it was found on the sixth floor.6

None of those problems would be publicized as they became known.

But stories about the mail-order rifle soon filled the airwaves and news-

papers, as if they were the final link in the chain of Oswald’s guilt. On

the other hand, news about evidence that raised the possibility of other

assassins was summarily dismissed—and in some cases, even the physi-

cal evidence disappeared. One example is the skull fragment mentioned

earlier, which was found on the median across from the grassy knoll,

ten feet behind the position of JFK’s limo—a location that could have

indicated a fatal head shot from the front. The skull piece itself was from

the back of JFK’s head, which also tended to indicate that a shot from

the front had blown the piece out of the back of his skull. The piece was

found by a college student, then examined and photographed by three

doctors, including the chief pathologist at the Methodist Hospital in

Dallas. They forwarded it to Dr. Burkley in Washington, who gave it to

the FBI, who also notified the Secret Service. The 2.75-by-2.2-inch piece

from the back of JFK’s skull then vanished, though its existence is con-

firmed by photographs and Congressional investigators. Apparently,

the main autopsy physician was not told about the bone fragment.7 On

Saturday, November 23, he was still working on his first autopsy report

when he first learned from a Parkland doctor that JFK’s body had a

throat bullet wound, under the tracheotomy incision.

The skull fragment is just one example of how the official story of

Oswald as a “lone assassin,” which dominated the Saturday newspapers

and constant TV news coverage, was far different from what officials

would say in private, or reveal much later. Newspapers that weekend

cited Dallas Police Chief Curry as saying the case against Oswald was

solid, but just a few years later Curry would admit: “We don’t have

any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Nobody’s yet been

able to put him in that building with a gun in his hand.”8 According to

Vanity Fair,
Curry himself “believed two gunmen were involved” in the

assassination, though not a hint of that belief appeared in the press that

weekend or in the months to come.9

Even J. Edgar Hoover admitted to Lyndon Johnson, in a recorded

phone call at 10:01 AM on November 23, that “the case, as it stands now,

isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction.”10 Yet the Saturday

morning newspapers were conveying just the opposite impression by

establishing the basic “lone assassin” scenario that some people still

believe today. In hindsight, it seems absurd to think that all the rel-

evant information about the shooting, and an unusual former defector

like Oswald, could be uncovered less than twenty-four hours after the

shooting—and that clearly wasn’t the case. However, investigations that

touched on covert matters would have to be conducted in secret, so as

not to alarm the public or back LBJ into a corner regarding possible

retaliation against Cuba or the Soviet Union.

In using their positions and media contacts to control the official

release of information, key officials—including LBJ, Hoover, Bobby, the

Secret Service, the Dallas Police, and the US military—were acting both

in the national interest and in their own self-interest. The more attention

focused on Oswald as a “lone nut” who hadn’t acted on anyone else’s

behalf or with any confederates, the less chance the press or local law

enforcement had of exposing leads or information that could cause prob-

lems with Cuba or Russia. For Dallas officials, limiting matters to the

seemingly Marxist Oswald made the conservative city look better, and

prevented any chance of exposing locals who might have used Oswald

for their own purposes. The police had their man, and it was simply

best not to look into evidence to the contrary because of the potentially

troubling questions it could raise.

In some cases, as in squelching the story of the Tampa assassination

attempt, top officials and agencies probably had to rely on press contacts

to keep certain stories from being pursued. Fourteen years after Dallas,

in generally more liberal times after Watergate and Vietnam, reporter

Carl Bernstein would write in
Rolling Stone
that hundreds of journalists

were involved in the “long-standing cooperation between the CIA and

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

many media organizations, involving resource sharing, secrecy agree-

ments, and covert operations. Among the media involved, he said, were

the three major television networks;
Time
and
Newsweek
magazines; the

New York Times
; and the Associated Press and United Press Interna-

tional.”11 The vast majority of the CIA’s press contacts have never been

exposed, though a few memos have been declassified, listing various

journalists as “unwitting collaborators” if they were fed information

that they didn’t realize originated with the CIA, and as “witting col-

laborators” if they did. Some Miami journalists covering anti-Castro

operations even received their own CIA code names (AMCARBON-1,

AMCARBON-2, etc.).12

Journalists withholding information from the public didn’t have to

be made aware of the JFK-Almeida coup plan, or the Cuba Contingency

Plans to protect it. They could simply be told that certain information

was too sensitive, could compromise US operations, or might force a

confrontation with the Soviets—and just a year after the Cuban Mis-

sile Crisis, this last explanation might be all that was required, since

Oswald’s Soviet and Cuba connections had been so widely reported.

We know that when information linking Oswald to David Ferrie started

to surface during the weekend after JFK’s murder, an NBC cameraman

related that “an FBI agent said that I should never discuss what we

discovered for the good of the country.”13 That same phrase, “for the

good of the country,” would be used to stop Dave Powers and Kenneth

O’Donnell from revealing they had seen shots from the grassy knoll,

and it was probably used to silence others as well. Longtime television

journalist Peter Noyes was told by several “members of NBC News

who covered the events in Dallas [that] they were convinced their supe-

riors wanted certain evidence suppressed at the request of someone in

Washington.”14

Some US officials dealing with media assets might have been aware

only that Oswald had been under US surveillance before the assas-

sination, something that not only would have been embarrassing for

the FBI, CIA, and Naval Intelligence if it were revealed, but also could

expose the rather large domestic surveillance program those agencies

ran, which was technically illegal. (Each time Congressional hearings

threatened to fully expose those operations in the 1970s, the hearings

were overshadowed by other events—first Watergate, and then the first

revelations of the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots to the public.)

Any official who actually had access to some of the surveillance might

have believed Oswald acted alone, because the record showed it was

unlikely he had any associates or contacts that US intelligence didn’t

know about. In fact, many of his associates were themselves of interest

to US intelligence (which is why some of them helped with the surveil-

lance). Some officials might have known that Oswald was some type of

US intelligence asset, and simply thought he had turned “bad.” All of

these are reasons for officials to pressure certain journalists to withhold

information, without requiring either the official or the journalist to be

told about the JFK-Almeida coup plan.

The officially sanctioned story of “lone nut” Oswald that quickly

emerged was limited to the evidence that had already become widely

known. Anything else was quickly suppressed, like the newspaper

article about the Tampa assassination attempt that appeared on Satur-

day, November 23. The article appeared only in the
Tampa Tribune;
it was

based on information from Tampa Police Chief Mullins and also cited a

White House Secret Service memo. The November 8 memo quoted in the

article said a “subject made statement of a plan to assassinate the Presi-

dent . . . stated he will use a gun. . . . Subject is described as: white, male,

20, slender build.” That description matches Lee Oswald’s much better

than the initial one issued in Dallas, which described the suspect as

being much older and heavier. The sheriff of a county adjacent to Tampa

confirmed in the article that officers had been “warned about ‘a young

man’ who had threatened to kill the President during that trip.”15

In the article, Chief Mullins mentioned another man at large, identi-

fied as a threat, and wondered “if the . . . two may have followed the

Presidential caravan to Dallas.” Mullins didn’t know about the two men

who had left Florida for Texas, with Rose Cheramie, shortly after the

Tampa attempt. Also unknown to Mullins at that time, Gilberto Poli-

carpo Lopez—the young Cuban exile linked to the Fair Play for Cuba

Committee, who had so many recent parallels to Oswald—had indeed

headed to Texas. Once Lopez was in Texas, Congressional investigators

found that he “crossed the border into Mexico,” then went to Mexico

City and into Cuba, just as Oswald had tried to do in late September.

Lopez used the same border crossing as Oswald, and apparently like

Oswald on the return leg of his Mexico trip, “crossed [the border] in

a privately owned automobile owned by another person.”16 Someone

had to be helping each man, since neither owned a car or had a driver’s

license.

The description cited in the Tampa article is also close to Lopez’s.

Clearly, if JFK had been killed in Tampa, authorities would have

already been primed to look for a suspect like Lopez or Oswald (whose

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

whereabouts the day before the Tampa attempt have never been deter-

mined; one unconfirmed report places him in Tampa, meeting with asso-

ciates of Lopez). We noted previously an unconfirmed newspaper report

placing Lopez in Dallas on the day of the assassination. If films and

eyewitnesses had pointed so overwhelmingly to an additional shooter in

Dallas that they couldn’t be ignored, Lopez probably would have been

fingered by one of the CIA assets working for Marcello, Trafficante, or

Rosselli. If the public found out that an accused shooter was a Cuban, or

that he had fled to Cuba, it’s not hard to imagine the outcry that would

have resulted from Congress and the public for an invasion of Cuba.

We feel that’s exactly what the mob bosses and their allies, like David

Morales and John Martino, had wanted to happen. They didn’t care

if JFK’s murder was blamed on one assassin or two—only that those

blamed were linked to Cuba.

Neither this
Tampa Tribune
article nor anything about the Tampa

attempt was ever brought to the attention of the Warren Commis-

sion or any of the later investigating committees, like the House Select

Committee on Assassinations. We discovered it only after reviewing

thousands of pages of newspaper microfilm in Tampa and Miami, pain-

stakingly reading through each edition (there were often several editions

in one day, especially during events like the Cuban Missile Crisis or

JFK’s assassination).

When we contacted Mullins in 1996, he confirmed everything in the

article and provided additional information, as well as referring us to

more law enforcement sources who had been involved in dealing with

the Tampa attempt. (One high Florida law enforcement official provided

additional information about Trafficante’s involvement in the attempt

and told us that Gilberto Lopez appeared to be an informant for some

government agency.) Chief Mullins, by then long retired, said he was

surprised he had never been contacted by reporters or government

researchers in the thirty-three years since the article appeared, and that

news about the Tampa threat had never been mentioned in any of the