The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (16 page)

Kennedy’s biggest challenge in his assault on the mob was the FBI. Hoover had instructed his agents to avoid all collaboration with other federal law enforcement agencies.
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The attorney general’s initial soundings about FBI preparedness were not promising. When he asked J. F. Malone, the special agent in charge of the New York office, to bring him up to date on organized crime, Malone replied, “To tell you the truth, Mr. Attorney General, I’m sorry but I can’t, because we’ve been having a newspaper strike here.”
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In New York, where Hoover periodically communed with mobster Frank Costello, special agents tagged along with the mobsters the way reporters do celebrities. In Los Angeles, Rosselli kidded around with his retinue and held doors open for them on occasion, saying with a smile, “I know. I know. You’re just doing your job.”
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As far as Hoover was concerned, it was a case of the blackmailer being blackmailed. Both Costello and Rosselli were fully apprised of Hoover’s homosexuality as well as the fact that Meyer Lansky had a photograph of the director with another man in
flagrante fellatio
.
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But in cities such as Chicago, the FBI was on the attack. A highly aggressive FBI mob detail led by William Roemer, Marshall Rutland, and Ralph Hill had already succeeded in planting a microphone in the Outfit’s downtown headquarters on Michigan Avenue. With Kennedy’s urging the skirmish moved to siege. He increased the FBI’s Mafia detail in that city from five to seventy and flew there every few months to urge the agents on.

One such trip occurred in May 1961. Kennedy and press aide Guthman met with special agent in charge Marlin Johnson, Roemer, Hill, and the others assigned to follow the Outfit. When Johnson began reading a prepared statement to the attorney general, Kennedy interrupted him. “Mr. Johnson,” he said, “I didn’t come here to hear a canned speech about how magnificent you are. I didn’t come here to hear from
you
at all. . . . You can sit over there in the corner and we’ll listen to the agents who are out on the street, the men who are doing the work you think is so great.” With that, he turned the briefing over to the foot soldiers. “He impressed all of us,” Roemer remembered. “His questions showed that he had been reading our daily summary airtels. He was most knowledgeable about the Chicago mob. . . . I was surprised he knew so much about one guy in particular: Sam Giancana.”
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Kennedy continued the exchange over lunch between mouthfuls of turkey salad sandwiches and potato salad, pulling more and more information out of the agents as he peppered them with questions. Emboldened by Kennedy’s encouragement, Roemer told him about a tape he got from a secret microphone placed in the headquarters of the Regular Democratic Organization of the First Ward in Chicago. The tape contained a series of conversations involving Pat Marcy, a Democratic organizer Kennedy had met during a campaign trip there in 1960, and various others. Roemer explained to Kennedy that Marcy (whose real name was Pasqualino Marchone) was a mob capo, then turned the tape recorder on, letting it run as Marcy spoke to two Chicago police officers about a third police officer on the vice squad they couldn’t control because he wouldn’t go on the take. After expressing frustration with this third officer, Marcy and his police confederates decide to kill him. “When the tape ran down,” according to Roemer, “Bobby looked at Guthman and then looked at the floor for ten seconds or so. He then asked that the latter part of the tape be replayed — the crucial part where the decision to kill was made.” As it played, Kennedy, saying nothing, looked from face to face in the room. “We got the message,” Roemer later recalled.
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Roemer, Hill, and the other FBI agents took Kennedy’s silent reaction to the tape as a wordless call to arms. In all probability, it was that. But it may have also been Kennedy’s mute recognition of the blood price of political power.

Toward the end of May, the attorney general was shocked to learn that Carlos Marcello had secretly reentered the country. He was flown in either via jet, compliments of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, or by a private plane piloted by David Ferrie, who would later figure centrally in President Kennedy’s assassination.
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The attorney general immediately dispatched twenty United States marshals to south Louisiana to hunt for Marcello, who surrendered voluntarily to INS officials a few days later. Kennedy moved to have him deported again, using a federal grand jury indictment. Marcello, through his attorney Jack Wasserman, had already sued the attorney general for his kidnap-style deportation the previous April, and was seeking to set aside the $835,396 tax lien the IRS had placed on Marcello and his wife.

The war was on. Marcello had two new collaborators in his counter-attack against the government: Guy Banister, a former FBI SAC in Chicago who was then stockpiling weapons in his New Orleans office for the anti-Castro Democratic Revolutionary Front, and Ferrie, who, according to an FBI report in April 1961, was distributing Marcello money to anti-Castro exiles.

April 17, 1961

Bay of Pigs, Cuba, and Washington, D.C.

J
ohn F. Kennedy came into office publicly committed to ridding Cuba of Castro, having blistered the Eisenhower administration for allowing him to survive. In the interregnum, the president-elect was briefed on a plan to infiltrate bands of thirty to fifty exile commandos on the island to foment rebellion. By the time Kennedy took office, the plan had mushroomed. The new proposal was to land an amphibious force of several hundred exiles. The CIA’s Richard Bissell told Kennedy that unless Castro was quickly forced from power, the Soviet Union would arm and garrison a client state in the Americas. The question was, would the new president approve of the invasion plan?
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At the first National Security Council meeting on Cuba, the president was “wary and reserved” about the plan. The Joint Chiefs expressed concern about the prospect of military intervention, but were assured there would be none. Some, like Senator J. William Fulbright and Special Assistant Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., argued that intervention was foolhardy and would “fix a malevolent image on the new administration.” These objections hardly registered in the barrage of “intelligence analysis” about logistics, weaponry, and the claim that Castro would have Russian MIGs in a matter of weeks. CIA director Dulles pointed out that if the exiled Cubans did not attempt the invasion, there would be a “disposal problem.” Kennedy agreed that the “simplest thing might be to let the Cubans go where they yearned to go, Cuba, with a minimum of risk to the U.S.”
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Such was the case with Jorge Recarey, who on February 13 made his seventh nighttime trip across the Windward Straits. At Arcos de Canisi on Cuba’s north coast in the early morning hours, his craft was met by farmers in rowboats. They brought him aboard and took him through the rough surf. He was then taken to the house of a local landowner, Jorge Fundora, and smuggled into Havana for his meeting with the head of the anti-Castro underground in Cuba, Rogelio Gonzalez Corso, code-named Francisco. On his person, Recarey carried a sealed envelope containing his instructions to be given to Francisco. Shortly after Recarey left Fundora’s home, Cuban security police arrived. Fundora was arrested and shot.
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In Havana, at a house deemed secure, Recarey, now operating under his code name Julio Cesar Blanco, met with Francisco. The instructions were to organize and lead the underground in Matanzas, a city of some 25,000 situated in flat, scrubby terrain east of Havana. In Matanzas, Recarey encountered widespread opposition to Castro. Some two hundred active opponents operated scores of safe houses through which they were smuggling weapons, explosives, agents, propaganda, and counterfeit money. Recarey moved from safe house to safe house, changing location every night, organizing the underground in hard-to-penetrate five-man cells. (A single individual in each group knew a single person in another group; if one cell was captured or penetrated, the single individual in the other cell would be exfiltrated.)

In the weeks that followed, Recarey became increasingly aware of the CIA’s incompetence. Shipments dropped at Punto Fundora (named after the executed landowner) contained weapons that didn’t work, counterfeit bills that bled when wet, and motor oil that had been blended (unbeknownst to Recarey) with an explosive substance. When Recarey’s driver added oil to their 1959 Olds 88, the front of the car blew up as they were riding down a highway. They walked away unscathed, but others, following the Agency enjoinder to prepare the resistance for the coming invasion, were not so lucky. Underground leader Francisco attended a large anti-Castro meeting in Havana that contained informants, and soon after was arrested and executed. Recarey’s radioman, Jorge Rojas, met the same fate. Disposal indeed.

With no CIA guidance and little coordination with other units, much less with the invasion force itself, Recarey and other anti-Castro sappers did what they could. They attacked targets with C-4
plastique
and incendiary compounds, blowing up communications linkages and the country’s largest department store, El Encanto, which burned to the ground on the night of March 16.

Back in Washington, indecision reigned. On March 15, President Kennedy rejected the concept of direct American military intervention — air strikes — as well as the recommended landing locus at Trinidad. He informed his advisors that they should continue to plan the invasion with the contingency that it could be called off within twenty-four hours before it was due to begin. To “maintain options,” in the favored phrase of the day, made sense in the shifting sluice of events, but in war-making it is often a recipe for disaster. Armed with the president’s ambivalence, the CIA “ops” leadership (which had excluded the CIA’s intelligence wing from any role in, much less knowledge of, the operation) prevaricated. They led the White House and the Joint Chiefs to think of the landing as a large-scale infiltration that would coincide with a mass uprising against Castro on the island. Down on the ground, CIA trainers told the brigade leaders that the United States would provide air cover and follow up with its own forces once the beachhead was established at the new location — the Bahia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs.

Marine colonel Jack Hawkins, who was exercising overall command of the paramilitary aspects of the landing, informed Bissell that the Bay of Pigs was a bad location. It was hemmed in by a huge swamp.
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But Bissell, banking on Rosselli’s assurance that the Mafia was within striking distance of killing Castro, was unmoved. “Assassination was intended to reinforce the plan,” Bissell later observed. “There was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing. Very few, however, knew of this aspect of the plan.”
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Did President Kennedy know about the murder plot? Seymour Hersh in
The Dark Side of Camelot
asserts that Kennedy did: “Jack Kennedy had every reason to believe in April 1961 that Sam Giancana and his men in Miami and Havana would do the deed. Giancana had delivered, as promised, on the 1960 election. And, as Kennedy surely knew, no one was more adept at murder.”
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Hersh cites Judith Campbell (later Exner), a woman who was consorting sexually with both Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana, as the confessed conduit of manila envelopes containing documents that dealt with the elimination of Castro. After her sexual encounters with Kennedy, she later claimed, he instructed her to pass these documents to Giancana. Campbell’s story has changed over the years, but in the version given Hersh she alleges she knew about the contents of those secret missives. The reflection of Exner’s former husband William Campbell suggests the unlikelihood of such a role: “I couldn’t imagine her being privy to any sort of secret information. She wouldn’t understand it anyway. I mean they weren’t dealing with some sort of Phi Beta Kappa.”
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The notion that Kennedy was communicating directly with Giancana regarding the assassination of Castro strains credulity in any case. Later, in an article written by Liz Smith for
Vanity Fair,
Exner repudiated
My Story
, her earlier book about the affair, and claimed that she became pregnant by President Kennedy in 1963.
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To support his conclusion that the president gave the order to kill Castro, Hersh offers Bissell’s disclosure in January to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy that the CIA was developing an executive action capability. But both Bissell and Bundy denied that Castro’s name was ever specifically named, or that President Kennedy was ever informed about either ZR/RIFLE or the plot against Castro. Bissell, of course, may well have told Bill Harvey and other CIA operatives, such as Jacob B. Esterline and Samuel Halpern, that he had such authorization, but the established etiquette was neither to ask presidents for such an order nor to tell them about executive operations. Richard Helms, who was then Deputy Director of Plans, later observed: “Nobody wants to embarrass a president . . . by discussing the assassination of foreign leaders in his presence.”
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Hersh’s conclusion rests on the testimony of officials down the chain of command. It is essentially a circumstantial projection of what he believes must have happened.

Senator Fulbright, who was privy to the planning of the operation, wrote the president on March 30 that no matter the denials and the disguise, the world would see it as an American invasion, and that if things went wrong the United States would be sorely pressed to intervene directly. He registered his complete opposition, likening Castro to a “thorn in the flesh, not a dagger in the heart.” But the opposition of Fulbright, UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, and special assistant Schlesinger was no match for the authority of Cold War titans like CIA director Dulles and Bissell. At the decisive meeting of April 4, Dulles played his trump card: Castro was about to receive MIGs from the Russians. It was now or never. Even if the beachhead failed, the exiles could repair to the “nearby Escambray mountains.” In fact, these mountains were more than 100 miles from the coast and separated by a huge, impassable swamp. Kennedy, still troubled, gave the go-ahead: April 17, 1961.