The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (27 page)

In 1963 Harry Williams—and Robert Kennedy—didn’t know that “Barker was connected to [Santo Trafficante],” as he later learned. Williams was not privy to FBI and CIA files (released decades later) tying Barker to the mob; nor did he realize that his associates Tony Varona and Manuel Artime also had ties to Trafficante.

The JFK–Almeida coup plan gave Marcello and Trafficante the opportunity they needed to kill JFK in a way that would prevent even Robert Kennedy—as well as Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover—from pursuing a full or public investigation of the murder. Though the Kennedys had tried to bar the Mafia from any knowledge of or participation in the coup plan, the network of Marcello and Trafficante surrounding the CIA–Mafia Castro plots allowed the mob bosses to use Barker, Varona, and others to infiltrate the coup plan and ultimately link it to JFK’s assassination.

TWELVE YEARS AFTER JFK’s murder, Richard Helms tried to explain to Congressional investigators why he continued the CIA–Mafia plots in 1963 without telling President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, or CIA Director John McCone. In his long-secret testimony to the Senate Church Committee in 1975, Helms hinted at the JFK–Almeida coup plan (which the CIA withheld from the Committee), saying that “President Kennedy . . . mentioned the desire to have the military of some force inside [Cuba] rise up against Castro, some internal revolt.”
Helms went off the record with the Committee Counsel, who then summarized, “In June of 1963, President Kennedy approved [a] program [that] also involved the promoting [of] disaffection among [the] Cuban military hierarchy.”

Helms indicated then—and in later testimony—that he saw no difference between that effort and hiring the Mafia to assassinate Fidel. To Helms, having mobsters shoot Fidel so he could be replaced by a right-wing dictator—perhaps someone like Manuel Artime, best friend of his protégé Hunt—was no different from, and perhaps even preferable to, helping an internal coup that would be followed by a coalition government, free elections, and democracy. Kennedy aides and officials—including Secretary of State Rusk—told me they totally disagree with Helms’s view. Historian Gerald McKnight talked about the CIA’s “culture of arrogance, assumed privileged insights, and special understanding,” in which the Agency believed it “knew the requirements of national security better than the transient elected officials to whom the CIA was nominally accountable.” McKnight was writing about CIA officer William Harvey, but his description also applies to Richard Helms, whom history now shows withheld crucial information from JFK, LBJ (who made Helms CIA Director), and Richard Nixon (who finally fired Helms after he refused for years to show Nixon the CIA files he wanted). That arrogant attitude is apparently why Helms continued the CIA–Mafia plots even after the JFK–Almeida coup plan was far along.

William Harvey was replaced as head of Cuban operations after his unauthorized raids into Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Officially, his replacement early in 1963 was Desmond FitzGerald, a patrician figure from a family even wealthier and more blue-blooded than that of Richard Helms. FitzGerald was brought over from Far
Eastern operations and had no previous experience in Cuban affairs. Perhaps for that reason, William Harvey continued to work with Johnny Rosselli on the CIA–Mafia plots; Harvey had also grown close to Rosselli. But his role with the Mafia don had to end in June 1963, when the FBI learned that Rosselli was visiting Harvey.

However, after the FBI learned of the June meeting between Rosselli and Harvey, the CIA assigned Rosselli to a new contact: David Morales, the Miami Operations Chief. A gruff, powerful, and forceful man of southwestern Native American descent, Morales had headed covert operations for the CIA in Havana before the closing of the US Embassy, where he had supervised David Atlee Phillips. Morales also had a role in the Bay of Pigs operation and was extremely bitter at its tragic outcome, which he blamed exclusively on President Kennedy. The number-two official at the Miami CIA station bluntly described Morales: “If the US government . . . needed someone or something neutralized, Dave would do it, including things that were repugnant to a lot of people.” Former US diplomat Wayne Smith, who worked with Morales at the US Embassy in Havana, said that “if [Morales] were in the mob, he’d be called a hit man.”

Johnny Rosselli, always looking for an advantage to exploit, soon turned the hard-drinking David Morales into a close friend; they even took a trip to Las Vegas together. For Rosselli, Morales was just another CIA agent he could use for his own ends—in this case, the JFK assassination. While Barker was helpful, he was only a CIA agent. But Morales was a high-ranking CIA officer who could control operations, who could order weapons shipped, and who was also working on the JFK–Almeida coup plan.

Like Rosselli, David Morales would eventually confess late in life to having a role in the murder of JFK. Morales made his confession to
his attorney and also to a lifelong friend after going on a tirade about JFK’s sole responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs. Morales said he had “to watch all the men he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy.” Morales then told his friends that “we took care of that son of a bitch” JFK. Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi, who worked for both the Senate Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, uncovered Morales’s JFK confession and found it credible.

In the fall of 1963, Morales and Rosselli were observed working closely together. An Army Ranger assigned to the CIA in the summer and fall of 1963 later wrote an account of his time in South Florida training Cuban exiles. He wrote about a “Col. Rosselli,” who also worked with one of the exile groups, saying that Rosselli’s team included “a sharpshooter” who “did daily marksmanship practice . . . rehearsing for the day when he could center the crosshairs of this telescopic sight on Fidel.” Rosselli’s “sharpshooter” was able to kill “three cormorants at a range of nearly five hundred yards.” Apparently, the CIA was preparing to have shooters available to kill Fidel if Almeida had problems finding someone to eliminate the Cuban leader. The Army Ranger also documented Rosselli’s work with David Morales at the time; given the JFK confessions of Rosselli and Morales, some researchers have wondered if their sharpshooter and advanced sniper weapons were intended only for Fidel Castro.

CARLOS MARCELLO’S ACCESS to the highly secret CIA–Mafia plots and those working on the JFK–Almeida coup plan gave the godfather, and his allies Trafficante and Rosselli, the connections he needed to create grave concerns at the highest levels of the US government—if those plans appeared linked to JFK’s murder. From August to
November, Marcello and his men would move to compromise more key elements of the coup plan—and other covert CIA operations—as part of their plot to kill JFK.

CHAPTER 10

Plans to Assassinate Fidel Castro and President Kennedy

T
HROUGHOUT THE SUMMER and fall of 1963, CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms juggled an array of authorized and unauthorized covert attempts to “eliminate” Fidel Castro; all of them would impact JFK’s assassination.
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The authorized operations included JFK’s coup plan with Cuban Army Commander Juan Almeida and two far less successful efforts to identify Cuban military officers willing to lead a coup against Fidel: a CIA operation named AMTRUNK and a joint CIA–Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Task Force. In addition, several exile leaders in the JFK–Almeida coup plan continued to attempt tiny raids into Cuba or against Cuban ships, minor efforts designed to “keep the pot boiling,” in the words of one official, until the day for Almeida’s coup arrived. Those raids also kept up the morale of Cuban exiles still receiving US funding, since only a handful of their leaders knew about Commander Almeida and the coup.

In addition to all those efforts, in the remaining months of 1963, Richard Helms actually increased his use of unauthorized operations designed to simply assassinate Fidel Castro. All his unauthorized assassination plots involved Mafia associates, so Helms may have viewed them as simply different aspects of one operation, the same CIA–Mafia plots that had been running for three years. Also, based on his later Congressional testimony, Helms apparently saw no real distinction between his CIA–Mafia plots and the Kennedys’ authorized efforts to stage a coup against Fidel. As Helms would testify to Senate investigators in 1975, “I believe it was the policy at the time to get rid of Castro, and if killing him was one of the things that was to be done in this connection, that was within what was expected.” If true, that belief doesn’t explain why Helms kept President Kennedy, CIA Director McCone, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the dark about his unauthorized operations—or why he used mobsters the Attorney General was trying to prosecute.

The most generous view of the actions of Richard Helms—and a handful of his subordinates—in deceiving his superiors would be that Helms viewed the CIA–Mafia plots as a kind of backup plan in case something happened to Commander Almeida before he launched the coup. Helms might have seen the CIA–Mafia plots as a way of salvaging the operation in the event that Commander Almeida lost his position; was injured, imprisoned, or killed; or decided to flee prior to the coup. Helms might have thought that even if Almeida could initiate the coup, it would still be helpful to have Mafia or exile sharpshooters on hand to finish the job, just in case anything went wrong. While the CIA had only a supporting role in the JFK–Almeida coup plan, the CIA–Mafia plots were something that Helms could fully control—or at least he thought he could.

Rolando Cubela, an old element of the CIA–Mafia plots, took on new prominence in the summer of 1963. Cubela, a physician, had headed the Directo Revolucionario (DR), a student group that had helped win the Revolution. However, Cubela quickly grew disaffected with Castro rule, and by December 1960 he was working with the CIA on plots to kill Fidel. In many ways, Cubela was simply another part of the CIA–Mafia plots since he’d met Santo Trafficante in Cuba and knew at least two associates of the godfather who were also involved in the CIA–Mafia plots. Cubela had been briefly in touch with the CIA in 1962. In June 1963 the CIA contacted Cubela again, just as David Morales was taking over the supervision of Johnny Rosselli from William Harvey.

Although Cubela had no real power within the Cuban government, he received a generous travel budget as the former head of the DR, and he frequently flew to Europe and Communist-bloc countries. According to Cuban reports, David Morales actually met with Cubela in Paris in September 1963, and the CIA acknowledges that a series of meetings between Cubela and CIA personnel followed. Cubela says the CIA kept pressuring him to assassinate Fidel, while the CIA claims assassination was Cubela’s idea.

Rolando Cubela wasn’t part of the JFK–Almeida coup plan. As JFK’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk told me—and as CIA files clearly show—he had no following inside Cuba that would have allowed him to stage a coup on his own. For decades it was thought that Cubela’s contacts with the CIA were known only inside the Agency, where he was identified as a potential assassin code-named AMLASH. However, Rusk and another committee member told me that Cubela was discussed by name in some of RFK’s Cuba subcommittees of the National Security Council, though not as a possible
assassin. Richard Helms and Desmond FitzGerald mentioned Cubela to some subcommittee members only as someone who might help them find a higher-ranking, more powerful official who could stage a coup.

To an official like Rusk, who didn’t yet know about Almeida, that sounded reasonable. Twelve years later, when Rusk found out that the CIA was actually using Cubela as a potential assassin, he was livid at Helms’s deceit, with an anger that the usually calm statesman demonstrated in my interview with him. Only a mid-level official at best, Rolando Cubela played an even smaller role in Cuban affairs as fall 1963 progressed. CIA files establish that Cubela lost his ceremonial military title after he “resigned from the Army after difficulties with Raul Castro,” and an October 18, 1963, CIA memo confirms “that Cubela has no official position in the government.” Yet Richard Helms and Desmond FitzGerald increased CIA pressure on Cubela to assassinate Fidel, with FitzGerald even flying to Paris to confer with Cubela that same month. Though FitzGerald claimed to be the personal emissary of Robert Kennedy, Helms later admitted that RFK was never told about the meeting or the assassination aspect of the CIA’s dealings with Cubela.

The CIA admits it tried to persuade Cubela to poison Fidel, but CIA files also show that the Miami CIA station, where David Morales ran operations, was prepared to provide rifles to him. Cubela owned a house next to Fidel’s home at Varadero Beach, the resort to which Fidel drove on many weekends in an open jeep in a sort of re-creation of his triumphant drive across Cuba after the Revolution. AMWORLD files indicate that at one point the CIA planned to use snipers to assassinate Fidel as he drove toward his beach house. Clearly, having Fidel’s neighbor Cubela as part of that plot would be
very advantageous: The CIA could use his house as the sniper’s nest and/or even blame him for Fidel’s murder. Cubela was both a disgruntled official and one who—because of his extensive travels—came in contact with Russians overseas more often than most Cuban officials. Blaming Cubela for Fidel’s murder might also let the CIA implicate Russia in Fidel’s assassination.

Someone in the CIA, most likely David Morales, arranged for Cubela to be in a meeting with his case officer in Paris on November 22, 1963, at the exact time JFK was scheduled to be riding in an open car through Dallas. If Morales arranged that as part of his work with Johnny Rosselli, it was the perfect way to force Helms to hide a great deal of information from internal CIA investigators and other high US officials, which is exactly what happened. Americans would not learn about the Cubela operation until twelve years after JFK’s murder, and it was never revealed to the Warren Commission.

Richard Helms also approved keeping the CIA’s European assassin recruiter, QJWIN, on the payroll throughout 1963, despite his released files showing a complete lack of results. William Harvey originally supervised QJWIN, but after David Morales took over Harvey’s supervision of Johnny Rosselli in June 1963, it’s likely that Morales had some role with QJWIN as well. The mysterious QJWIN was part of the CIA’s ZR/RIFLE assassination program. CIA files indicate that ZR/RIFLE had been applied to the Castro problem and that QJWIN made a 1963 trip to Florida for an operation involving Johnny Rosselli. However, the ZR/RIFLE program then disappears from the CIA files that have been released, and William Harvey later admitted in Senate testimony that some of his “notes” about ZR/RIFLE were “missing [and] had been destroyed.” As a result, the true identity of QJWIN remains unresolved, with various CIA memos and sources
giving different names.
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Files and testimony say that QJWIN’s job was to recruit assassins from the underworld and that he was involved in narcotics trafficking in Europe in the early 1960s.