The Arrogance of Power (31 page)

The operation went wrong, as would all the Castro murder plots, in a manner straight out of movie melodrama. Afraid she would be searched at the airport, Lorenz hid the capsules in a jar of cold cream. Reunited with Castro in his suite at the Havana Libre, the old Hilton Hotel, she felt “torn by feelings of love and obligation.” Behind the closed bathroom door she dug the capsules out of the cold cream only to find them glutinous and greasy, in no state to slip unnoticed into Castro's coffee. The frightened young woman flushed them down the drain and returned to the room to watch her lover sleeping. She returned to Miami the next morning, to face the rage and scorn of her American mentors.

Sturgis, who had told Lorenz that her mission was a CIA-backed operation, confirmed years later she had indeed been sent to Cuba with the poison. In an October 1960 memo, moreover, FBI Director Hoover warned the CIA that word had leaked of an impending operation to kill Castro, an operation that called for “a girl, not further described, to drop a ‘pill' in some drink or food of Castro's.”
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The Lorenz fiasco, too, turns out to have a Nixon connection. CIA records released in 1994 include material on June Cobb, an American woman who had worked in Cuba alongside Lorenz and had known of the young woman's abortion. In the spring of 1960 a CIA agent induced Cobb to return to the United States, where she was questioned and then surveilled as she met and talked with people immersed in the Cuba intrigues. They included Marita Lorenz and Rorke, not long before Lorenz left on the murder mission to Havana. Related documents appear in the CIA file on William Pawley. The routing on another, dated a week after the CIA brought Cobb out of Cuba, shows that it originated in Nixon's office, on the desk of General Cushman.

When she worked in Castro's office, Cobb had worked as assistant to its director, Juan Orta. Orta was to be the man at the heart of the next and best-documented of all the Castro murder intrigues, the CIA-Mafia plots.

In August 1960, as the Senate Intelligence Committee's probe established, the CIA began conspiring with U.S. Mafia bosses to murder Castro—with the knowledge and authorization of Director Dulles, according to two of the senior officials involved. The key contacts on the Mafia side, Sam Giancana of Chicago and Santo Trafficante of Florida, both had interests in Havana's gambling and crime rackets. The casinos in Cuba were still operating at that point, although under severe restrictions, and Trafficante regularly traveled to the island from Florida. After meeting with a senior CIA officer—Giancana introduced himself as Sam Gold and Trafficante as Joe, the courier—the mobsters agreed to try to locate someone in Castro's entourage to carry out the killing.

CIA technicians worked to perfect the poison of choice—botulin again, this time in a form that would dissolve in a drink and produce a “firmly predictable end result.” The gangsters settled on Orta as the best candidate for the role of assassin. As head of Castro's office he had the necessary access, or so they believed, and he was known to be corruptible, having taken kickbacks
from casino bosses in the past. It was not until February 1961, early in the Kennedy presidency, that the pills would finally reach Orta, by which point he would have been fired.
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Next, poison pills were supplied to Antonio de Varona, a former prime minister and now a key figure in the exile leadership, whose financial backers included Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante. Varona claimed to have a contact in a Havana restaurant that Castro frequented but—in another absurd setback for the plotters—the Cuban leader stopped eating there. As his long-term survival was to prove, Castro had a charmed life, and very good security. The CIA-Mafia plots would be revived the following year, but this was the last assassination conspiracy initiated while Nixon was vice president.
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Varona consulted regularly with Howard Hunt, and both he and the CIA officer involved in the Mafia operations were in touch with William Pawley. Hunt and Pawley of course were regularly in contact with Nixon or his staff. Other clues, some tentative and some specific, also suggest a Nixon connection to the CIA-Mafia conspiracies.

It is likely that the earliest murder proposals had come to the CIA from the mob.
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Varona said he met in summer 1960 with Lansky, the real brain behind the Cuban rackets and the mobster said to have suggested Castro's assassination immediately after Batista's fall. Other initial contacts with the CIA were reportedly made by the man who had operated the Sans Souci casino, Norman Rothman. As described in a previous chapter,
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Rothman had earlier played a central role in the gambling scandal involving Nixon and one of his friends and claimed he had covered up for Nixon. In his view, Nixon owed him a favor.

Scattered among Nixon's vice presidential papers are fragments of semicoded exchanges, apparently about Cuba. They include, for example, a note from Pawley referring to the “problem we are having south of Miami,” and one file contains a letter to Nixon from Marshall Diggs, the vice president's go-between with the exile leader Mario Kohly. Dated July 29, 1960, it speaks of keeping “in close contact with the General regarding the Caribbean situation. . . . Senator Brewster and his associates are thoroughly familiar with everything that has been done. They are prepared if the possible out can be found.” Nixon's reply said Diggs's suggestions had been “passed to the responsible officials for their consideration.”

On August 1 Diggs's secretary wrote to General Cushman introducing “Mr. C. H. (Jim) Pulley,” who “enjoys a highly confidential relationship with both former Senator Brewster and Mr. Diggs on the matters they have discussed with you and Vice President Nixon.”

A search of Brewster's papers turned up empty envelopes bearing the name Pulley—the former senator is said to have sanitized his papers before his death—but research has failed to discover just who Pulley was. According to a former CIA operative, however, he served as a “Washington mob liaison man
for Lansky and Trafficante.” If that is true, the date of Pulley's introduction to Nixon's aide on Cuban matters takes on significance. It was written days or at most weeks before the CIA began the process that led to contacts with Mafia boss Trafficante about killing Castro.
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Over and above these suggestive clues, however, there exists a far more direct connection. Nixon had long known one of the key men involved in the CIA-Mafia plotting and had even directed him in an earlier secret operation. This was Robert Maheu, former FBI agent turned private investigator, in the employ of both Howard Hughes and—when called upon—the CIA.

Maheu, once described as having the demeanor of W. C. Fields playing a con man, was used as the agency's go-between with the mafiosi. It was he who made the initial mob contact in the Castro plots, organized and attended meetings over a protracted period, and handed over bundles of cash and poison pills. Maheu had more overall knowledge of the plots than anyone else involved. He also shared information about these activities with Howard Hughes, who thought the CIA-Mafia scheme “a pretty good idea.”

Maheu had multiple connections to Nixon. The full name of his firm, which covered public relations and management consultancy as well as investigations, was Maheu and King Associates Inc. The King in the partnership referred to Bob King, another former FBI man who had been on intimate terms with both Richard and Pat Nixon since World War II. King was a specialist in counterintelligence, had lobbied for Nixon to play a major role on the National Security Council, served as his senior assistant during the vice presidency—for “protection,” as he put it—and had been a key aide in the 1956 campaign. Nixon on occasion described him as his “alter ego,” a place of pride usually reserved for Bebe Rebozo, to whom King was also close.

Even when he formally left Nixon's office to join Maheu, King had continued working for Nixon. He was back on the campaign trail with him in 1960 and was therefore both allied with Maheu—and close to Nixon—at the time of the anti-Castro plots.

Maheu's other link to Nixon had been his undercover work four years earlier, on Hughes's orders but on Nixon's behalf, in torpedoing opposition to Nixon's reselection as Eisenhower's running mate.
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Earlier still, and significantly in terms of the Castro plots, he had undertaken secret work at Nixon's direction, a successful operation against Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

In July 1954 National Security Council minutes had noted that President Eisenhower had asked “whether it was not possible, with all the power of the United States, to ‘break' Onassis.” His concern arose from a pending Onassis agreement with the king of Saudi Arabia, one that would have put him in control of almost all Saudi oil shipments. The NSC decided on “all appropriate measures” to wreck the deal.

Maheu and a colleague, John Gerrity, found themselves summoned to the vice president's office. “Nixon came in,” Gerrity recalled, and “gave us the whole
Mission: Impossible
bit. ‘I know you'll be careful,' he said, ‘but you have to understand that while this is a national security matter of terrific importance, we can't acknowledge you in any way if anything should go wrong.' . . . I could tell that Nixon enjoyed saying it. He loved these kinds of operations.”
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There followed a series of dirty tricks. Working out of a suite in the National Republican Club, a team of Maheu operatives placed phone taps on Onassis's New York headquarters.
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The shipowner was harried with lawsuits and branded a liar, cheat, and traitor in stories planted in the world's press. After a trip by Maheu to Jidda to persuade the king that one of his high officials had been bribed in the deal, the Saudis tore up the Onassis contract.
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In 1992 Maheu added a chilling postscript to the episode. After briefing him, he recalled, Nixon had made a final remark about Onassis. “If it turns out we have to kill the bastard,” he said in hushed tones, “just don't do it on American soil.” In retrospect, Maheu suggested that Nixon may have said this merely as “something to say, something that sounded tough. . . .”

As for the Castro plots, Maheu asserted that he “had no reason to believe” Nixon knew about them; his partner, Bob King, “drew a blank” altogether when interviewed for this book. Both men, however, spoke in the knowledge that two of the mobsters involved in the scheme died violently while it was being investigated. The body of one of them was found dismembered, floating in an oil drum.
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“I'm one of the last people left who knows what really went on during the operation to assassinate Fidel Castro,” Maheu has explained. “I'm not sure how I want to go, but I am certain I want my body to be in one piece when I do.”

In the magazine interview in which he declared himself “amazed” to learn about the assassination plots, Nixon also declared himself astonished by “all this stuff about the poison shtick.”
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Yet to believe Nixon's claim to have known nothing about assassination plans in 1960 requires our accepting too long a string of improbabilities—that he was not informed of any of the Castro plots by any of those involved with whom he or his aide General Cushman had some form of contact: Allen Dulles, William Pawley, Howard Hunt, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Mario Kohly and his accomplices, the handlers of Marita Lorenz and June Cobb, and, above all, Bob King and Robert Maheu.
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Those still unpersuaded that Nixon was privy to the murder plots may reconsider in light of a new piece of information. If what the author was told in 1997 by President Kennedy's former press secretary Pierre Salinger has validity, Nixon not only was aware of the CIA-Mafia plots but authorized them.

In 1968, said Salinger, he had lengthy conversations with Maheu while soliciting his boss, Howard Hughes, for a contribution to Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. “I knew Maheu well,” Salinger said. “He told me then about his meetings with the Mafia. He said he had been in contact with the
CIA, that the CIA had been in touch with Nixon, who had asked them to go forward with this project. . . . It was Nixon who had him [Maheu] do a deal with the Mafia in Florida to kill Castro.”

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Nixon's frantic insistence, as president, on obtaining the CIA's Bay of Pigs material, now begins to make sense—especially in light of events never before laid out in sequence for the public. It includes discoveries originally made by Terry Lenzner and Mark Lackritz, senior counsel on the Senate Watergate Committee, but not further pursued.

On January 18, 1971, halfway through Nixon's first term, papers across the country carried a sensational story. The columnist Jack Anderson, Drew Pearson's successor, offered remarkably accurate revelations about the Castro plots. He named Maheu directly and reported that the murder plans had begun under Eisenhower and Nixon and continued until shortly before the assassination of President Kennedy. Then Anderson raised a chilling possibility: Some of those privy to the plotting, he wrote, suspected that the plans to murder Castro had provoked the Cuban leader into retaliating in kind, by having Kennedy killed.
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On the same day, at the White House, Bob Haldeman wrote an internal memo requesting information on Howard Hughes, Maheu, and Maheu's contact with Democratic National Committee Chairman Lawrence O'Brien, who had been working as a Hughes consultant.
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The following afternoon, after publication of a second Anderson article on the plots, the attorney general, John Mitchell, placed a call to Maheu.