Legacy of Secrecy (47 page)

already knew about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City. Keeping in mind

that since McCone still had to bring LBJ up to speed on the top-secret

JFK-Almeida coup plan, as well as other highly sensitive CIA anti-Castro

activities, McCone’s initial briefing to LBJ about Cuba would not have

been well documented in the official records.

Also, given the length of time Bobby and McCone had spent talking

the previous day, and the seriousness with which McCone viewed the

Mexico City situation, it seems almost certain that McCone would have

talked with Bobby about the situation sometime Saturday morning. How

much McCone should tell LBJ about Bobby’s control of the JFK-Almeida

coup plan, and about the CIA-Mafia plots that both McCone and Bobby

thought had ended a year and a half earlier, would also have been some-

thing they needed to discuss. Bobby certainly wouldn’t want McCone to

tell his adversary LBJ things that could be used as political ammunition

against Bobby in the future. (Historian Michael Kurtz writes that just

hours after JFK’s death, Bobby called JFK’s national security advisor at

the White House and ordered him to “change the combinations on the

slain President’s files, to ensure that Johnson’s people could not gain

access to them.”)1 There was still the chance that Bobby could be elected

president himself in less than a year, a possibility many oddsmakers

would have given more credence to on November 23, 1963, than the

actual landslide election of LBJ. McCone would have to manage a fine

balancing act between informing and accommodating Bobby, while also

telling LBJ what he needed to know. Since Bobby already had suspicions

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that some aspect of the anti-Castro operation had backfired against JFK,

McCone likewise wouldn’t be anxious to reveal information to LBJ that

might cause LBJ to doubt McCone’s abilities to keep running the CIA.

One thing that gave McCone some flexibility was the sheer volume

of intelligence information about Cuba that LBJ had to be brought up to

speed on—not just the JFK-Almeida coup plan and its many aspects (like

AMWORLD), but also AMTRUNK, the CIA-DIA Task Force on Cuba,

and the still-huge overall CIA effort against Cuba. Additionally, McCone

had to update LBJ on the many other Cold War hot spots around the

world, from Vietnam to Russia, China, and many more. In that context,

McCone could tell LBJ as much as he thought he needed to know in

the coming days and weeks, depending on how the Cuban and JFK

assassination situations developed. At the same time, McCone would

have to be sure to tell LBJ things that the new president could learn

from other officials. When we interviewed Harry Williams, we were

left with the distinct impression that after JFK’s death, LBJ was not told

everything about the coup plan with Almeida; that would only happen

if LBJ decided to go forward with the operation.

McCone’s November 23 memo for the record and his interview with

historian William Manchester both say that in McCone’s first official

meeting with LBJ, the new president asked McCone to brief him each

morning for the next few days, and McCone wrote that he did just that

for quite some time.2 This probably also helped McCone to see educating

LBJ about the Cuba situation as a gradual process, not something that

had to be done all at once. Still, the welter of detail about all the Cuba

plans McCone knew about must have been a massive amount of data

for the new president to absorb. Even seasoned historians have had

trouble distinguishing AMWORLD from AMTRUNK from AMLASH,

and figuring out where programs like the CIA-Mafia plots fit in. Imagine

trying to learn all that as a new president, while also dealing with JFK’s

funeral, a parade of foreign dignitaries, and assuming all the regular

presidential duties and responsibilities—from dealing with the press to

handling Congress to developing (and promoting) a legislative agenda.

It’s clear that as the days and weeks passed, LBJ dealt with the Cuban

issue by lumping much of it together in his mind as a product of Bobby

Kennedy, and he would cautiously continue only some of the CIA’s

Cuban operations. Clearly, in those early days, starting on November

23, LBJ felt he had more pressing issues to deal with concerning Cuba:

Oswald and Mexico City.

LBJ’s 10:01 AM recorded phone conversation with J. Edgar Hoover on

November 23 raises almost as many questions as it answers. While it’s

clear that LBJ had been briefed earlier about Oswald’s trip to Mexico

City, it also appears that LBJ had already discussed it with Hoover,

and that this was a follow-up call. If so, the first LBJ-Hoover call about

Oswald and Mexico City was never documented. Also, while we have

transcripts of the 10:01 AM LBJ-Hoover call, the actual tape of their dis-

cussion has been erased. The tape isn’t missing; officials at the National

Archives confirm that the tape exists, and that it contains other LBJ calls.

However, only the fourteen-minute 10:01 AM LBJ-Hoover call about

Oswald, Mexico City, and JFK’s assassination has been erased, making

it impossible to know if more was said that isn’t reflected in the written

transcript.3

Odder still, during this conversation Hoover tells LBJ about a tape of

the alleged Oswald Mexico City calls recorded by the CIA, and that “the

tape [does] not correspond to this man’s [Oswald’s] voice.” This is one

of the Mexico City tapes that Helms and the CIA have officially main-

tained were erased many weeks prior to November 23, yet someone had

listened to it before talking to Hoover. Yet the Mexico tape’s existence

couldn’t account for why fourteen minutes of the LBJ-Hoover tape was

erased, since mention of it remains in the transcript. So, why would this

LBJ-Hoover call, and apparently only this call, be erased even after a

transcript was prepared?

One possibility: If LBJ had already been briefed, even generally, about

the JFK-Almeida coup plan (perhaps when he was also first told about

the Oswald–Mexico City situation), and it was mentioned even in pass-

ing in the 10:01 AM conversation, that might have been grounds for

LBJ or the CIA to have had that portion of the tape erased at a later

date. Even into the 1970s, 1980s, and later, the Almeida portion of the

coup plan was still considered extremely sensitive, since he was still in

power, his work for JFK had never been exposed, and his family was still

under CIA surveillance. On national-security grounds, in the interest of

protecting an ongoing operation, it’s much easier to doctor words in a

transcript than it is to doctor a tape. Another LBJ-Hoover conversation,

on November 29, included a very brief mention of “the Cuban opera-

tion,” and a query about whether Oswald was connected to it “with

money.” Some historians believe “the Cuban operation” refers to an

anti-Castro operation—and if that’s true, an earlier and more extensive

discussion between LBJ and Hoover about “the Cuban operation” on

November 23 could explain why that call was erased. It’s also possible

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that this particular portion of the tape was erased because it contained

a reference (missing from the current transcript) to another top-secret

aspect of JFK’s assassination, such as the Tampa and Chicago assassina-

tion attempts, or the fact that Oswald was indeed a US intelligence asset.

(Hoover mentioned Chicago three times in the first few minutes of the

conversation, but only as the source of Oswald’s rifle.)

Based on the transcript of the erased LBJ-Hoover call, LBJ seemed

most interested in whether Hoover had “established any more about

[Oswald’s] visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico in September.” That’s

when Hoover explained that the situation was “very confusing” because

“the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy,

using Oswald’s name . . . do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to

his appearance,” indicating “there is a second person who was at the

Soviet Embassy down there.” In other words, Hoover was describing

an imposter—or a co-conspirator.

In the course of their conversation, Hoover mentioned that the United

States had a “secret operation” in which “no mail is delivered to the

[Soviet] Embassy without being examined and opened by us,” but

doesn’t yet mention the CIA-DFS bugging operations. Hoover twice

told LBJ in the call that the case against Oswald wasn’t very strong, and

that Oswald had denied everything. LBJ asked for a written “synopsis”

by the end of the day, which Hoover agreed to provide.

Based on this conversation and John McCone’s notes, it’s unclear

whether LBJ and Hoover knew yet about the Kostikov/KGB assassina-

tion allegation and the Duran allegations and arrest, but if they didn’t,

LBJ soon would. Just over two hours after LBJ finished his call with

Hoover, the President got together with McCone again for a longer meet-

ing. McCone’s official memo for the record says that at 12:30 PM (East-

ern) he “went to the President’s office . . . to tell him of the information

from Mexico City.” Based on later notes by McCone, this information

included what was known at that time about the allegations involving

Kostikov and Duran.4

If LBJ, or Hoover or McCone, had any qualms about the informa-

tion they had withheld from the press the previous day, or about the

pressure applied to Texas officials to avoid implicating Russia or Cuba,

those qualms vanished when the Mexico City information surfaced. This

meant that allegations or press reports from a foreign country could, if

not handled properly, generate a clamor for retaliation against Cuba or

Russia—a frightening prospect just a year after the Cuban Missile Cri-

sis and barely twenty-four hours after the new president had assumed

office.

These concerns help to explain some of Hoover’s actions on Novem-

ber 23 and in the coming days and weeks. Congressional investigators

found that on that day, Hoover had FBI headquarters cable all field

offices to rescind the FBI’s order of the previous day “to use all infor-

mants” to obtain information about JFK’s murder.5 Any real investi-

gation of JFK’s assassination essentially ended then. Apparently, for

Hoover, the chance that informants or leads might turn up something

implicating Cuba or Russia was simply too great. The decision had been

made to simply put all the blame on Oswald. Agents in the field soon

got the message. Therefore, when a witness like Arnold Rowland tried

to tell the FBI that he and his wife had seen two men on the sixth floor

of the Book Depository, one with a rifle, fifteen minutes before JFK was

shot, the FBI “didn’t seem interested at all.” Summers writes that Roland

said, “They told me it didn’t have any bearing . . . on the case right then.

In fact, they just the same as told me to forget it.”6 Numerous other

witnesses reported having similar experiences, or worse—some were

pressured or threatened with prosecution if they persisted in relating

accounts that didn’t support the “lone nut” theory.

Hoover was also learning officially about the JFK-Almeida coup plan

for the first time that weekend. LBJ was no doubt sharing with his friend

Hoover whatever he was being told about it by McCone. While the

FBI had files on exiles like Harry (who sometimes talked to Miami FBI

agents) that have never been released, and Artime (about whom very

little has been released), Hoover was probably learning the full scope

of the coup plan for the first time. For Hoover and LBJ, the coup plan

gave Cuba and Russia the motivation to have taken action against JFK,

a motivation that could never be revealed.

Concerns about Oswald and Mexico City, the Soviet Union, Cuba,

and the JFK-Almeida coup plan also explain why Hoover barred the

FBI’s Latin American experts from participating in the JFK investiga-

tion. They should have had a leading role, since the average FBI agent

didn’t speak Spanish or have the experience and knowledge to quickly

and effectively deal with the hundreds of Cuban exiles and exile

groups who should have been interviewed. The exiles and their groups

involved constantly shifting loyalties, alliances, offshoots, and command

structures—confusing even to experienced historians and journal-

ists—that could be unraveled only with the expertise of the FBI’s Latin

American experts. Those FBI experts would have known where and

how to focus the Bureau’s energy and resources, but were essentially

barred from participating.

In excluding them, Hoover wanted to avoid having his Latin American

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experts uncover potentially explosive or embarrassing information.

Without them, the released FBI files sometimes show confusion about

Hispanic names and exile groups, which created a filing and cross-

referencing nightmare that hindered the investigation. Also, at the time,