The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (29 page)

One by one, Marcello, Trafficante, and their men attempted to compromise or link to JFK’s upcoming murder the handful of Cuban exile leaders and groups involved in the JFK–Almeida coup plan. What they did to link exile leader Eloy Menoyo’s group to Oswald is described later in this book.

As for Trafficante and Marcello, their motivation to kill JFK only increased during the summer and early fall of 1963. New developments in their cases help explain their extensive and careful plans to assassinate the President. Trafficante was fighting the IRS—the same organization that had sent Al Capone to prison—and three of his brothers were also named in the IRS complaint. Marcello faced an upcoming federal trial in New Orleans. The Justice Department attorney presenting the case against him would be one of RFK’s own Mafia prosecutors, meaning this was one trial that Marcello couldn’t buy his way out of with bribes to local or state authorities. Any conviction could result in another deportation, and Marcello was still scarred with the memory of that traumatic experience.

Marcello was not alone among mob bosses in his hatred of John and Robert Kennedy. Though the FBI had not wiretapped Marcello’s phones and had placed only one minor wiretap on Trafficante, RFK’s pressure had resulted in the FBI’s wiretapping other mob leaders, who vented their rage at the Kennedys. Bureau agents heard one Philadelphia mobster complain, “With Kennedy, a guy should take a knife . . . and stab and kill that fucker, I mean it.” The mob chief of Buffalo went even further, saying of the Kennedys, “They should kill the whole family.” Marcello differed from them in two ways: He had more to lose, more quickly, from the Kennedys’ assault. And because Marcello headed America’s oldest Mafia family, he didn’t need approval from the other bosses on the national Mafia “commission” before pursuing major hits, like killing JFK.

Jimmy Hoffa appears to have been aware of Marcello and Trafficante’s plan to kill JFK, but he couldn’t take an active role because of the intense scrutiny he was under from Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. Hoffa was being investigated (and eventually charged)
on three fronts, basically—in the words of historian David Kaiser—“involving his use of union funds—particularly pension funds—to enrich himself and others.” Recipients of Teamster pension fund loans included Marcello and Trafficante, and the latter shared an attorney—Frank Ragano—with Hoffa. Kaiser points out that Ragano later said that on July 23, “he met Hoffa in Washington” before leaving to see Marcello and Trafficante. Hoffa gave him a message to take to the godfathers. Hoffa wanted Ragano to tell them, “Something has to be done. The time has come for your friend [Trafficante] and Carlos to get rid of him, kill that son-of-a-bitch John Kennedy. This has got to be done. Be sure to tell them what I said . . . we’re running out of time—something has to be done.”

According to Ragano, he delivered the message, and “the two men looked at one another in icy silence and did not respond.” Of course, by that time Marcello and Trafficante had already been carefully planning JFK’s murder for at least nine months. Ragano later wrote that he didn’t take Hoffa’s demand seriously. But Ragano’s behavior in the fall of 1963—including publicly toasting JFK’s murder with Trafficante on the night of the assassination and, as reported in an FBI file, handling a huge sum of cash for the assassination—indicates that Ragano played a larger role in JFK’s murder than the attorney ever admitted.

Johnny Rosselli was also feeling pressure from Robert Kennedy in the summer of 1963 since RFK had targeted his boss Sam Giancana; the Attorney General “pushed to get Giancana at any cost,” according to Mafia prosecutor William Hundley (who would later learn of Rosselli’s confession to JFK’s murder). In the summer of 1963, Hundley represented the Justice Department at the Chicago hearing on Sam Giancana’s lawsuit to end the devastating “lockstep” surveillance the FBI had him under.

To stall the government’s questioning of him, Giancana apparently helped leak a story to a reporter with the
Chicago Sun-Times
, which ran an article stating that “Sam Giancana had done work for the CIA,” helping the Agency with intelligence related to Cuba in 1960. The newspaper item didn’t mention assassination, but it did reveal the October 1960 bugging incident with Giancana and singer Phyllis McGuire that had involved the CIA. The article produced two major results: First, Hundley had to back off from questioning Giancana during the court hearing for fear he might reveal the CIA–Mafia plots, which RFK had been told had ended the previous year. Giancana won the suit; the ruling forced the FBI to stay farther away from him. Even so, RFK didn’t let up the pressure and soon began working on a plan to drive the Mafia out of Las Vegas, threatening to eliminate a major source of revenue for Giancana, the Chicago Mafia, and especially Johnny Rosselli.

The second major result of the
Chicago Sun-Times
article was that it caught the attention of CIA Director John McCone, leading to another fateful decision for Richard Helms. Instead of giving McCone the full story of the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Fidel, Helms instead told McCone that the plots had lasted only from 1960 to May 1962 and had ended. Helms didn’t inform the CIA Director that he was continuing the plots into 1963 without authorization. He couldn’t do so without losing his position.

The CIA–Mafia plots were a deep secret even within the CIA, with only a handful of trusted officials like Desmond FitzGerald, Helms’s protégé E. Howard Hunt, David Morales, and William Harvey still working on them. Helms must have felt confident that his dark secret would never leak, even within the Agency.

*
According to the Kennedy aides and officials I interviewed, “eliminate” was the term used by John and Robert Kennedy with the dozen aides and officials who knew about the JFK–Almeida coup plan, as well as when discussing AMTRUNK or the CIA–DIA Task Force. Even then, they usually spoke of “eliminating Castro’s regime” as opposed to eliminating an individual.

*
Released files about QJWIN are still censored, though William Harvey’s notes identify him as José Marie Mankel. But Harvey’s notes also say that his ZR/RIFLE files should be “forged and backdated.” Other notes indicate that Mankel was only QJWIN-1 and that assassins he recruited were also called QJWIN. Other people identified by historians as QJWIN include Moses Maschkivitzan, Jean Voignier, and Michel Mancuso.

*
The FBI’s hands-off approach to Marcello might be explained by Johnny Rosselli’s boasts to Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno that Hoover was once arrested for homosexual acts in New Orleans.

*
Also known as Herminio Diaz Garcia.

*
His full name is Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo.

CHAPTER 11

Oswald in New Orleans, Dallas, and Mexico City

K
ENNEDY AIDES EXPLAINED to me—and declassified files confirm—that ultimate control for the JFK–Almeida coup plan rested with Robert Kennedy, acting on behalf of President Kennedy. They delegated the leading role in the coup plan to Army Secretary Cyrus Vance, named as the “Executive Agent of the Department of Defense for Policy toward Cuba”; Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor; and General Joseph Carroll, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told me why he and Defense Secretary McNamara couldn’t have had a knowing role in the JFK–Almeida coup plan while it was being developed: They had far too many aides and staff and met too frequently with the press—so it would have been impossible to maintain the coup plan’s tight secrecy. Rusk said he understood that and wasn’t angry when he found out soon after JFK’s death that the extensive plans that he, McNamara, and other officials had been making over the summer and fall were not “just in case” contingency plans but were for a real coup that was just days away when JFK died.

Harry Williams told me that E. Howard Hunt resented the fact that the CIA had only a supporting role in the JFK–Almeida coup plan. That was probably also true for Hunt’s mentor Richard Helms
and may have been one reason Helms kept pursuing the unauthorized CIA–Mafia plots.

One of the most important of the CIA’s “supporting operations” for the upcoming coup to topple Castro was “the introduction by CIA as soon as practicable of assets into Cuba for the development of intelligence . . . and the development of a suitable cover plan,” according to long-secret declassified files from 1963—never shown to the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee—that I was the first to quote in 2005. This important CIA attempt to move “assets into Cuba” would accelerate through the summer and into the fall and would include several men linked to JFK’s assassination, including Lee Oswald.

The CIA allies of Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli working on the JFK–Almeida coup plan—including David Morales, Bernard Barker, and David Ferrie—would use the Agency’s efforts to put “assets into Cuba” as part of their plot to kill JFK. In that regard, Rosselli’s friend David Morales was in a position to influence the actions of CIA officer David Atlee Phillips, while Trafficante’s man Barker could impact the actions of E. Howard Hunt—all without Phillips or Hunt being aware that Morales and Barker were really acting on behalf of the mob bosses.

Marcello’s men David Ferrie and Guy Banister had the important task of using the CIA’s plan for getting “assets into Cuba” to make Lee Oswald look guilty after JFK was murdered. Oswald’s covert activities appear to have been largely controlled by Banister and Ferrie during at least the first nine months of 1963. On one hand, Ferrie and Banister were acting for US intelligence, as later described by New Orleans Deputy CIA Chief Hunter Leake and Victor Marchetti, former Special Assistant to Richard Helms, both quoted in earlier
chapters. (Since their main CIA files remain unreleased, it’s not clear whom in the CIA Ferrie and Banister were reporting to, though David Atlee Phillips was involved by the summer of 1963.) However, at the same time, Banister and Ferrie were also acting on behalf of their employer, Carlos Marcello, making sure many of Oswald’s activities would later make him look guilty of JFK’s murder. Banister and Ferrie both hated Fidel, and aside from whatever Marcello was paying them, they no doubt hoped that blaming JFK’s death on a seemingly pro-Castro Communist would trigger the US invasion of Cuba that both men knew was being planned.

Lee Oswald’s public activities in New Orleans in August 1963 are incredibly well documented because of extensive media coverage of them at the time, which resurfaced quickly on television and radio after he was accused of shooting JFK. Oswald first tried to join the local chapter of the DRE, an American anti-Castro group that grew out of Cubela’s old DR group in Cuba. While meeting with the head of the tiny New Orleans DRE chapter, Oswald claimed that he wanted to overthrow Fidel. Shortly after that, Oswald presented a completely opposite impression by very publicly passing out pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets on the street in New Orleans, an act that provoked an attack by the same DRE official and two of his associates. Oswald’s arrest led to newspaper coverage as well as radio and TV appearances, in which he handled himself remarkably well. How could Oswald—or any lone left-winger in the conservative South—generate so much publicity? Court records indicate that a “Mr. Phillips [with US intelligence] from Washington” met with Banister at his office in New Orleans and that they discussed an anti-Castro TV appeal. Dr. Gerald McKnight later confirmed that it was indeed CIA propaganda specialist David Atlee Phillips who’d met
with Banister the previous year. Recall that earlier Phillips had run an operation against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and according to E. Howard Hunt’s sworn testimony to Congressional investigators, David Phillips also ran the DRE for the CIA. Thus in 1963 Oswald was dealing with two organizations involving Phillips, the DRE, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

CIA files confirm that at the same time Oswald was generating remarkable publicity, David Atlee Phillips was working on Manuel Artime’s AMWORLD portion of the JFK–Almeida coup plan. The actions of Phillips and Oswald reveal that Oswald’s unusual pro-Castro publicity blitz was part of the CIA’s efforts to place US intelligence assets in Cuba. That would include a face-to-face meeting with Oswald within weeks of Oswald’s publicity blitz, followed by Oswald’s trip to Mexico City as he attempted to leverage that publicity into permission to fly to Cuba.

Before looking more closely into those activities, it’s important to focus on aspects of Oswald’s New Orleans street fight incident that the Warren Commission didn’t know about—or chose to ignore. Gerald McKnight observed that during Oswald’s “five months in New Orleans all his known activities were consistent with what is called in the intelligence game ‘building a cover.’” On May 26, 1963, Oswald had “founded” a New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee entirely by mail, and it had exactly one member—Lee Oswald. Moreover, he never made a serious effort to recruit anyone else; he continued to avoid real American Communists and Socialists who might have been sympathetic to Cuba.

Dr. McKnight points out that instead, before the leaflet incident that led to Oswald’s arrest, he took the unlikely recruiting step of first passing out pro-Castro “‘Hands off Cuba’ flyers to Navy personnel
attached to the aircraft carrier USS Wasp, at New Orleans’ Dumaine Street Wharf on June 15, 1963.” Only nine months after the tense naval action during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it would be hard to find a group less likely to favorably respond to pro-Castro flyers than US Navy personnel. Clearly, Oswald hoped to provoke a reaction from them, preferably in the form of a punch or other physical altercation that he could leverage into an arrest record and publicity. However, the
Wasp
’s crew only complained, and “Oswald was peacefully sent on his way,” notes McKnight.

Oswald’s first leafleting incident, on June 15, occurred when he was working for the Reilly Coffee Company, run by William Reilly, a staunch anti-Communist who hated Castro. David Kaiser writes that Reilly “was deeply involved in” INCA, “a private propaganda organization attempting to combat Communist influence in Latin America and the United States.” Oswald was officially “fired” from his job there on July 19, but four weeks later he debated the director of INCA on live radio in New Orleans.