“The Last Investigation”
by Gaeton Fonzi
(Original manuscript of Fonzi’s article that appeared in the
November 1980 “The Washingtonian” magazine article entitled “Who Killed
JFK?”)
It was very hot in Dallas Elm Street
That very realization -- a man was killed here -- had been
oddly removed from the whirlwind of activity in which I had been involved. A
man was killed here, and what had been going on in Washington -- all the
officious meetings and the political posturing, all the time and attention
devoted to administrative procedures and organizational processes and forms and
reports for the record, all the chaotic concern for distorted priorities and,
now, all the scurrying about in a thousand directions in the mad rush of
produce a final report -- all of that seemed so detached from the hard reality
of a single fact: A man was killed here. Wasn't that supposed to have some
relationship to what we were doing?
I had been working as a staff investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations for more than a year and a half. In fact, however, the formal investigation had begun only the previous January -- and then had abruptly ended less than six months later, in June. I was one of the few investigators who had not been fired. And now I was standing inDealey
Plaza November
22nd, 1963 , and wondering what the hell had gone wrong.
What had smothered my initial optimism and early enthusiasm, my original hope that, finally, after all these years, we might find out the truth about the Kennedy assassination?
I had been working as a staff investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations for more than a year and a half. In fact, however, the formal investigation had begun only the previous January -- and then had abruptly ended less than six months later, in June. I was one of the few investigators who had not been fired. And now I was standing in
What had smothered my initial optimism and early enthusiasm, my original hope that, finally, after all these years, we might find out the truth about the Kennedy assassination?
Why had I become so bitter and cynical, so depressed and
frustrated about what apparently was going to b e the final result of all our
time and effort? I stood in Dealey Plaza Dallas
On the Tuesday morning onJuly 17th,
1979 , the Chairman of the House Selected Committee on
Assassinations, Ohio Democrat Louis Stokes, called a press conference to
formally release the Committee's "final report."
The report was long overdue. After consuming more than $5.4 million over a two year period, the Committee had legally ceased to exist the previous December. At that time, however, the Committee's Chief Counsel and Staff Director, G. Robert Blakey, wasn't satisfied with the report the staff had complied and so, in a bit of bureaucratic legerdemain, he had himself and a few selected aides temporarily attached to the Speaker of the House's Office for administrative and pay purposes in order to obtain the additional time to reconstruct a few final report.
That reconstruction was dictated by startling testimony which emerged in the very last days of the Committee's life. Acoustics experts, analyzing a tape recording of the sounds inDealey Plaza
The presence of more than one gunman meant there was a conspiracy, yet the Committee had uncovered no hard evidence to indicate the character of that conspiracy. Blakey realized that would be too obvious a shortcoming in what he was determined to make an ostensibly impressive document. ("This, I can assure you, will be the absolutely final report on the Kennedy assassination," he early told the staff. "This will be the last investigation. After us, there ain't gonna be no more.") He was also very aware of the political priorities of the committee members themselves. He wanted the report to have attention-getting impact or, as he called it, "sex appeal." So although the report could not, without embarrassment, clearly reflect the actual limitations of the staff's investigation, it had to convey the impression that enough hard digging had been done to provide the Committee with an insight into the nature of the conspiracy it had uncovered. Thus it became necessary to restructure and weight the report toward a conspiracy theory. The question than became: Who to blame?
In retrospect, the answer should have seemed obvious from the beginning. G. Robert Blakey was a 41-year-old criminal law professor and head ofCornell
University Philadelphia
As soon as he was appointed, Blakey drew upon his contacts in that Organized Crime- fighting fraternity to select key senior counsels for the Committee. For instance, the lawyer he picked to head the Kennedy investigation task force was a bright, snappy little Texan named Gary Cornwell. As chief of the Federal Strike Force inKansas City
Another initial move by Blakey was to hire as a special consultant to the Committee a man who carried the Mob's organizational chart in his head, a formerNew York Salerno
There is substance and there is the illusion of substance. InWashington Washington
Bob Blakey is quite a literate fellow, exceptionally articulate and given to structured rationality in even his most casual conversations. Nevertheless, to give the report slickness, he brought in a top professional writer, former Life magazine editor Richard Billings, who happened to be another knowledgeable veteran of Congressional committee operations. Together, Blakey andBillings
Thus from the beginning, there was no doubt that, regardless of the realities of the actual investigation, the Assassinations Committee's historical legacy would appear to have substance.
And it does. An impressively hefty tome -- 686 pages thick, with 13 volumes of appendixes -- the Committee's final report appears to have a lot of substance. And yet, on close examination, it makes very few definitive statements. Used in abundance are such hedging terms as "on the basis of evidence available to it," and, "the committee believes," and, "available evidence does not preclude the possibility," and such words as "probably," "most likely," "possible," and "may have been."
The point is that the Committee report does not actually state that Organized Crime was involved in the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. The report says this:
"The Committee believes, on the basis of evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of Organized Crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved."
The cryptic, latter part of the conclusion specifically referred to two key mob bosses: Carlos Marcello ofNew Orleans Cuba
However, after making the allegation in its "Summary of Findings and Recommendations," the report buries in its body the detailed conclusion that "it is unlikely" that either Marcello or Trafficante was involved in the assassination of the President.
That is an example of numerous inherent contradictions contained in the details of the report. It's the result of an attempt to leave no base untouched, no area verbally unexplored, however cursory the Committee's actual investigation. What the report does in the most quintessential way is -- to use the expression favored inWashington
One of the most ironic aspects of that is this: In doing so, the report was forced to expose indications of its own basic conflicts, as well as the shortcomings of the Committee's pseudo-investigation.
That problem came to light some time ago, when the first attempt was made to bring the various aspects of the report together. For instance, before the acoustics evidence of conspiracy was firmed up very late in December, each Committee team was frantically writing what it thought would be a portion of the final report, that part dealing with its aspect of the investigation. (There were five major teams, each originally consisting of two lawyers, three researchers and two investigators. There were also special project teams -- ballistics, autopsy, acoustics, photographic and other areas involving expert consultants -- and staff investigators stationed in New Orleans and Miami.) By December, however, the staff had been drastically depleted through firings and resignations. When it became obvious that all the portions would not be finished before the Committee's demise at the end of the month, a young lawyer name Jim Wolf was given the job of gathering from each team a summary of its findings and putting them together into what would appears to be a "draft" of a final report. That, at least, would be something for the Committee to release before it officially folded.
When that compilation was completed, it totaled more than 500 pages. Wolf strung together the summaries he got from each team and then, after a conference with Blakey, drew up the conclusion. That's when it became obvious that there were some basic problems.
One of the key conflicts was Blakey's insistence that the Committee had to come to some conclusion about Oswald's motivation. (Oswald's guilt, ruled Blakey, had already been resolved through scientific analysis of the physical evidence.) Unfortunately, one of the areas that most reflected the inadequacy of the Committee's investigation was the one dealing with Oswald himself. Like the Warren Commission, the Committee never did truly define who Oswald really was, what he really believed, the nature of his relationships with an odd assortment of people, the reasons for the strange and mysterious things he did, nor why there are no traces of his actions over certain periods of time. The Committee, because of the structure of its limited investigation plan, did very little original work in this area.
In fact, a glaring example of the quality of the Committee's investigation is the fact that one of the key individuals in Oswald's life a women named Ruth Paine, was never called as a witness by the Committee. She just slipped through the cracks of the investigative plan. Yet it was Ruth Paine who played an important role in the life of the Oswald family immediately before and after the assassination. It was in Ruth Paine's garage that the Warren Commission said Oswald stored and retrieved the rifle used in the assassination. Ruth Paine was instrumental in Oswald getting his job at the Texas School Book Depository. Ruth Paine's husband, Michael, worked for a major Defense Department contractor and had a government security clearance. A once-classified document recently revealed that it was on Ruth Paine's telephone that a "confidential informant" overheard, immediately after the assassination, a male voice say he didn't believe Oswald killed Kennedy, and then added, "we both know who is responsible.
Ruth Paine was never even interviewed by the Committee.
Despite the mass of conflicting evidence and any investigation inadequate to resolve the issue, Blakey insisted that the Committee conclude that Oswald killed Kennedy because of left- wing political motivations. Most of the staff attorneys, including JFK Task Force Chief Gary Cornwell, argued against such a conclusion, but not successfully.
Before the compiled "draft" of the final report was to be presented to the committee members themselves, Blakey, sensing an undercurrent of discontent wafting through his staff, announced that all staff members would have the opportunity to read the report and discuss it. "I will be disappointed if there is not vigorous debate on many portions of the volume of our staff meeting Thursday night," he wrote in a memo. There was vigorous debate, but on the issue of motivation Blakey did not cave in.
On the morning that staff meeting, copies of the report were distributed to the staff. I recall Deputy Chief Counsel Ken Klein wandering into my office shaking his head shortly after he read it. Klein was a witty little guy with a mop of red hair and perpetually raised eyebrows. He had originally been hired by Dick Sprague out of the New York District Attorney's Office.
"You know," Klein said with a wry smile on his face, "when I first got my copy I thought they were putting me on. I mean it was like somebody wrote the report and then somebody else came along and, without reading what the first guy had written, wrote the conclusions. You know, I was gonna go intoGary
What bothered Klein was the fact that each team report had built an excellent argument for that team's main subject of interest -- whether it was Organized Crime, pro-Castro sympathizers, anti-Castro or right-wing militants or Russian intelligence forces. All the subjects had the motivation to be considered suspects in the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Each team had taken pages detailed relevant evidence. "And then, "Klein pointed out, "after all these pages of evidence, all the arguments get thrown out in the conclusion that, naah, Oswald couldn't have been involved with these guys because that wasn't his motivation! Very funny. All right now, is somebody gonna tell me where the real report is?"
When the real report finally was released, that basic conflict remained. Although the largest number of pages -- and one complete 1,169 -pages appendix volume -- was devoted to building a conspiracy case against Organized Crime, Oswald's motivation was, perversely, ascribed to his "twisted ideological view."
But that, of course, is substance. And irrelevant. In the end, the final report id what it was carefully structured to do: Create the impression that Organized Crime was involved in the conspiracy. That was the one point that Blakey wanted to etch in the national consciousness and leave in history's memory. It was his personal bid to finally lay to rest the question of President Kennedy's assassination.
The front-page headline in The Washington Post, its theme echoed by the media across the country, reflected the report's implications as well as the gist of the press conference attending its release: Mobsters Linked to JFK Death."
Blakey himself wanted to be absolutely certain that the reporters at the conference would accurately interpret the report's interlinear message. "I am now firmly of the opinion that the Mob did it," he told them. "It is a historical truth." Then back stepping from such a seemingly impetuous declaration -- covering his ass -- he quickly added: "This Committee report does not say the Mob id it. I said it. I think the Mob did it."
Well, I don't know if the Mob id it, but I doubt it. From my experience as a committee investigator and, later, as a team leader, I know that the Committee's investigation was simply not adequate enough to produce any firm conclusions about the nature of the conspiracy. To give the impression that it was, is a deception.
Yet there was a part of the Committee's investigation which, if vigorously pursued, could have negated the implications of the Committee's final report. It was in an area that threatened to open more doors than the Committee cared to open. As it stands even now, the information that was developed in this area contradicts the thrust of the Committee report and indicates that Chief Counsel Blakey's efforts were governed by misguided priorities. The area may contain the only live lead remaining in the mystery of the Kennedy assassination.
Although the Committee report touched this lead -- again, just enough to cover its ass - - the conclusions draw from it were distorted. Necessarily so. Told in context and with sufficient background detail, the story could have been used to stir anew public interest in the Kennedy assassination, this time sufficient enough, perhaps, to transcend the apathy that has been so carefully bred over the years. That, of course, would have been a very daring thing for Congress to do.
This, is only for history's sake, is that story.
I can still hear the sound of Vincent Salandria's voice. It has an odd quality to it, A low, velvet intensity. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands clasped easily behind his head, speaking slowly and casually but with a building rationality. We were in the paneled basement office of his home onDelancey
Street Philadelphia
On the Tuesday morning on
The report was long overdue. After consuming more than $5.4 million over a two year period, the Committee had legally ceased to exist the previous December. At that time, however, the Committee's Chief Counsel and Staff Director, G. Robert Blakey, wasn't satisfied with the report the staff had complied and so, in a bit of bureaucratic legerdemain, he had himself and a few selected aides temporarily attached to the Speaker of the House's Office for administrative and pay purposes in order to obtain the additional time to reconstruct a few final report.
That reconstruction was dictated by startling testimony which emerged in the very last days of the Committee's life. Acoustics experts, analyzing a tape recording of the sounds in
The presence of more than one gunman meant there was a conspiracy, yet the Committee had uncovered no hard evidence to indicate the character of that conspiracy. Blakey realized that would be too obvious a shortcoming in what he was determined to make an ostensibly impressive document. ("This, I can assure you, will be the absolutely final report on the Kennedy assassination," he early told the staff. "This will be the last investigation. After us, there ain't gonna be no more.") He was also very aware of the political priorities of the committee members themselves. He wanted the report to have attention-getting impact or, as he called it, "sex appeal." So although the report could not, without embarrassment, clearly reflect the actual limitations of the staff's investigation, it had to convey the impression that enough hard digging had been done to provide the Committee with an insight into the nature of the conspiracy it had uncovered. Thus it became necessary to restructure and weight the report toward a conspiracy theory. The question than became: Who to blame?
In retrospect, the answer should have seemed obvious from the beginning. G. Robert Blakey was a 41-year-old criminal law professor and head of
As soon as he was appointed, Blakey drew upon his contacts in that Organized Crime- fighting fraternity to select key senior counsels for the Committee. For instance, the lawyer he picked to head the Kennedy investigation task force was a bright, snappy little Texan named Gary Cornwell. As chief of the Federal Strike Force in
Another initial move by Blakey was to hire as a special consultant to the Committee a man who carried the Mob's organizational chart in his head, a former
There is substance and there is the illusion of substance. In
Bob Blakey is quite a literate fellow, exceptionally articulate and given to structured rationality in even his most casual conversations. Nevertheless, to give the report slickness, he brought in a top professional writer, former Life magazine editor Richard Billings, who happened to be another knowledgeable veteran of Congressional committee operations. Together, Blakey and
Thus from the beginning, there was no doubt that, regardless of the realities of the actual investigation, the Assassinations Committee's historical legacy would appear to have substance.
And it does. An impressively hefty tome -- 686 pages thick, with 13 volumes of appendixes -- the Committee's final report appears to have a lot of substance. And yet, on close examination, it makes very few definitive statements. Used in abundance are such hedging terms as "on the basis of evidence available to it," and, "the committee believes," and, "available evidence does not preclude the possibility," and such words as "probably," "most likely," "possible," and "may have been."
The point is that the Committee report does not actually state that Organized Crime was involved in the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. The report says this:
"The Committee believes, on the basis of evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of Organized Crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved."
The cryptic, latter part of the conclusion specifically referred to two key mob bosses: Carlos Marcello of
However, after making the allegation in its "Summary of Findings and Recommendations," the report buries in its body the detailed conclusion that "it is unlikely" that either Marcello or Trafficante was involved in the assassination of the President.
That is an example of numerous inherent contradictions contained in the details of the report. It's the result of an attempt to leave no base untouched, no area verbally unexplored, however cursory the Committee's actual investigation. What the report does in the most quintessential way is -- to use the expression favored in
One of the most ironic aspects of that is this: In doing so, the report was forced to expose indications of its own basic conflicts, as well as the shortcomings of the Committee's pseudo-investigation.
That problem came to light some time ago, when the first attempt was made to bring the various aspects of the report together. For instance, before the acoustics evidence of conspiracy was firmed up very late in December, each Committee team was frantically writing what it thought would be a portion of the final report, that part dealing with its aspect of the investigation. (There were five major teams, each originally consisting of two lawyers, three researchers and two investigators. There were also special project teams -- ballistics, autopsy, acoustics, photographic and other areas involving expert consultants -- and staff investigators stationed in New Orleans and Miami.) By December, however, the staff had been drastically depleted through firings and resignations. When it became obvious that all the portions would not be finished before the Committee's demise at the end of the month, a young lawyer name Jim Wolf was given the job of gathering from each team a summary of its findings and putting them together into what would appears to be a "draft" of a final report. That, at least, would be something for the Committee to release before it officially folded.
When that compilation was completed, it totaled more than 500 pages. Wolf strung together the summaries he got from each team and then, after a conference with Blakey, drew up the conclusion. That's when it became obvious that there were some basic problems.
One of the key conflicts was Blakey's insistence that the Committee had to come to some conclusion about Oswald's motivation. (Oswald's guilt, ruled Blakey, had already been resolved through scientific analysis of the physical evidence.) Unfortunately, one of the areas that most reflected the inadequacy of the Committee's investigation was the one dealing with Oswald himself. Like the Warren Commission, the Committee never did truly define who Oswald really was, what he really believed, the nature of his relationships with an odd assortment of people, the reasons for the strange and mysterious things he did, nor why there are no traces of his actions over certain periods of time. The Committee, because of the structure of its limited investigation plan, did very little original work in this area.
In fact, a glaring example of the quality of the Committee's investigation is the fact that one of the key individuals in Oswald's life a women named Ruth Paine, was never called as a witness by the Committee. She just slipped through the cracks of the investigative plan. Yet it was Ruth Paine who played an important role in the life of the Oswald family immediately before and after the assassination. It was in Ruth Paine's garage that the Warren Commission said Oswald stored and retrieved the rifle used in the assassination. Ruth Paine was instrumental in Oswald getting his job at the Texas School Book Depository. Ruth Paine's husband, Michael, worked for a major Defense Department contractor and had a government security clearance. A once-classified document recently revealed that it was on Ruth Paine's telephone that a "confidential informant" overheard, immediately after the assassination, a male voice say he didn't believe Oswald killed Kennedy, and then added, "we both know who is responsible.
Ruth Paine was never even interviewed by the Committee.
Despite the mass of conflicting evidence and any investigation inadequate to resolve the issue, Blakey insisted that the Committee conclude that Oswald killed Kennedy because of left- wing political motivations. Most of the staff attorneys, including JFK Task Force Chief Gary Cornwell, argued against such a conclusion, but not successfully.
Before the compiled "draft" of the final report was to be presented to the committee members themselves, Blakey, sensing an undercurrent of discontent wafting through his staff, announced that all staff members would have the opportunity to read the report and discuss it. "I will be disappointed if there is not vigorous debate on many portions of the volume of our staff meeting Thursday night," he wrote in a memo. There was vigorous debate, but on the issue of motivation Blakey did not cave in.
On the morning that staff meeting, copies of the report were distributed to the staff. I recall Deputy Chief Counsel Ken Klein wandering into my office shaking his head shortly after he read it. Klein was a witty little guy with a mop of red hair and perpetually raised eyebrows. He had originally been hired by Dick Sprague out of the New York District Attorney's Office.
"You know," Klein said with a wry smile on his face, "when I first got my copy I thought they were putting me on. I mean it was like somebody wrote the report and then somebody else came along and, without reading what the first guy had written, wrote the conclusions. You know, I was gonna go into
What bothered Klein was the fact that each team report had built an excellent argument for that team's main subject of interest -- whether it was Organized Crime, pro-Castro sympathizers, anti-Castro or right-wing militants or Russian intelligence forces. All the subjects had the motivation to be considered suspects in the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Each team had taken pages detailed relevant evidence. "And then, "Klein pointed out, "after all these pages of evidence, all the arguments get thrown out in the conclusion that, naah, Oswald couldn't have been involved with these guys because that wasn't his motivation! Very funny. All right now, is somebody gonna tell me where the real report is?"
When the real report finally was released, that basic conflict remained. Although the largest number of pages -- and one complete 1,169 -pages appendix volume -- was devoted to building a conspiracy case against Organized Crime, Oswald's motivation was, perversely, ascribed to his "twisted ideological view."
But that, of course, is substance. And irrelevant. In the end, the final report id what it was carefully structured to do: Create the impression that Organized Crime was involved in the conspiracy. That was the one point that Blakey wanted to etch in the national consciousness and leave in history's memory. It was his personal bid to finally lay to rest the question of President Kennedy's assassination.
The front-page headline in The Washington Post, its theme echoed by the media across the country, reflected the report's implications as well as the gist of the press conference attending its release: Mobsters Linked to JFK Death."
Blakey himself wanted to be absolutely certain that the reporters at the conference would accurately interpret the report's interlinear message. "I am now firmly of the opinion that the Mob did it," he told them. "It is a historical truth." Then back stepping from such a seemingly impetuous declaration -- covering his ass -- he quickly added: "This Committee report does not say the Mob id it. I said it. I think the Mob did it."
Well, I don't know if the Mob id it, but I doubt it. From my experience as a committee investigator and, later, as a team leader, I know that the Committee's investigation was simply not adequate enough to produce any firm conclusions about the nature of the conspiracy. To give the impression that it was, is a deception.
Yet there was a part of the Committee's investigation which, if vigorously pursued, could have negated the implications of the Committee's final report. It was in an area that threatened to open more doors than the Committee cared to open. As it stands even now, the information that was developed in this area contradicts the thrust of the Committee report and indicates that Chief Counsel Blakey's efforts were governed by misguided priorities. The area may contain the only live lead remaining in the mystery of the Kennedy assassination.
Although the Committee report touched this lead -- again, just enough to cover its ass - - the conclusions draw from it were distorted. Necessarily so. Told in context and with sufficient background detail, the story could have been used to stir anew public interest in the Kennedy assassination, this time sufficient enough, perhaps, to transcend the apathy that has been so carefully bred over the years. That, of course, would have been a very daring thing for Congress to do.
This, is only for history's sake, is that story.
I can still hear the sound of Vincent Salandria's voice. It has an odd quality to it, A low, velvet intensity. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands clasped easily behind his head, speaking slowly and casually but with a building rationality. We were in the paneled basement office of his home on
I thought he was crazy. If you do not recall that time, you cannot comprehend what a discordant thing it was in 1964 to content that an official government report might be wrong -- especially one which had been issued by a panel of men of weighty public status. People than believed what government officials said. If a guy like Salandria came along and suggested that an official government report wasn't truthful....well, Salandria was crazy.
Immediately after the Warren Commission report was released in September, 1964, Salandria had written a critique of it for The Legal Intelligencer,
I decided to write an article for Philadelphia Magazine about this oddball young attorney who was saying these crazy things about our government. Physically a small man, olive-skinned, dark eyes, a crew cut over a high forehead and thin, serious face, Salandria appeared a relaxed, easy-mannered fellow, but as we spoke I sense a deep intellectual intensity within him. Eventually, the things he said no longer sounded so crazy.
Salandria said his interest in the Warren Commission had begun long before its report was issued. He did not like the fact that it was holding secret hearings. He felt that the rise of dictatorships always corresponded to the abdication of individual interest in governmental function, but free access to information concerning that function was necessary to maintain that interest. When leaks about the Warren Commission's conclusion began emerging, Salandria became more concerned.
"I thought you had to be objective about it," he said. "If this had happened in
Salandria began an intense watch of the Warren Commission's activities. He spent his vacations in
"My initial feeling," Salandria said when I spoke with him, "was that if this were a simple assassination, as the Commission claimed, the facts would come together very neatly. If there were more than one assassin, the details would not fit."
Salandria claimed the details did not fit. There were, he contented, blatant contradictions between the Commission's conclusions and the details of the evidence in the 26 volumes.
I found that hard to believe. But Salandria gave me a copy
of the report and the 26 volumes and suggested I take the time to study them
carefully. I did, and then I spoke with another Philadelphia lawyer, Arlen
Specter, who worked on the Warren Commission. In August of 1966, I wrote an
article about the Kennedy assassination in Philadelphia Magazine. "It is
difficult to believe the Warren Commission report is the truth," I wrote.
Salandria eventually became recognized as one of the pioneers in the burgeoning group of Warren Commission critics, and one of the few who never commercialized his research. And, over the years, as he continued analyzing newly available evidence, he went beyond criticism and began to reach theoretical conclusions about the nature of the assassination itself.
Salandria, for instance, was the first to suggest that details of the evidence indicated not only a conspiracy, but also the pattern of an intelligence operation -- perhaps, he tentatively suggested, involving the Central Intelligence Agency. That's when a young columnist named Joe McGinnis wrote about Salandria in the Philadelphia Inquirer. McGinnis thought Salandria was crazy.
Salandria eventually became recognized as one of the pioneers in the burgeoning group of Warren Commission critics, and one of the few who never commercialized his research. And, over the years, as he continued analyzing newly available evidence, he went beyond criticism and began to reach theoretical conclusions about the nature of the assassination itself.
Salandria, for instance, was the first to suggest that details of the evidence indicated not only a conspiracy, but also the pattern of an intelligence operation -- perhaps, he tentatively suggested, involving the Central Intelligence Agency. That's when a young columnist named Joe McGinnis wrote about Salandria in the Philadelphia Inquirer. McGinnis thought Salandria was crazy.
I had left
I returned to
"I'm afraid we were misled," Salandria said sadly. "All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time and effort micro-analyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy. Don't you think that the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was
"The tyranny of power is here. Current events tell us that those who killed Kennedy can only perpetuate their power by* promoting social upheaval both at home and abroad. And that will lead not to revolution but to repression. I suggest to you, my friend, that the interests of those who killed Kennedy now transcend national boundaries and national priorities. No doubt we are dealing now with an international conspiracy. We must face that fact -- and not waste any more time micro-analyzing the evidence. That's exactly what they want us to do. They have kept us busy for so long. And I will bet, buddy, that is what will happen to you. They'll keep you very, very busy and, eventually, they'll wear you down."
It had been almost 10 years from the time I first interviewed Salandria to our talk that long winter Sunday. Yet, flying back home to
That was late November, 1975. A few weeks earlier, I had received a call at my home in
At the time, Schweiker was a member of what was officially named the Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee, as it became known in the press, had been making deadlines since early in the year by revealing how the FBI abused its power by harassing dissident political groups and conducting illegal investigations, how the
Schweiker had never been moved to take a special interest in the details of the Kennedy assassination. He had assumed, as did most Americans then, that the Warren Commission Report reflected a comprehensive, objective investigation. He had never had the inclination to critically question the Report closely because that inclination would have had to include the assumption that certain government officials and agencies could have been involved in at the very least a cover-up. Schweiker did not want to believe that. However, when the Church Committee discovered that
One of the backflips included his old assumption about the validity of the Warren Commission Report. It was particularly upsetting to Schweiker when he discovered that
While the Senate and the Church Committee took their summer vacations, Schweiker spent most of his time sifting through the volumes of evidence and the unclassified documents in the Natural Archives relating to the murder of John F. Kennedy. Then, in September, he issued a public statement calling for a re-opening of the Kennedy assassination investigation by the Church Committee.
"Recent disclosure have devastated the credibility of the Warren Commission Report." Schweiker said. He called for a new "vigorous and meticulous" inquiry. In backing his call, Schweiker cited the failure of former
Schweiker felt the Church Committee could, in keeping within its mandate, initially focus on the role of
The Church Committee was one of the larger select committees formed by the Senate. It employed more than 100 full-time staffers, mostly attorneys. Its mandate, however, was unrealistically broad. It not only was supposed to investigate all illegal domestic intelligence and counterintelligence activities on the part of the
The committee was formed in January, 1975 and its final report was originally scheduled for release by that September. That meant that the report had to be, in relation to the Committee's mandate, a predetermined exercise in superficiality. To Chairman Frank Church, that was not as important ass having the Committee finish its work quickly. He had already told intimates that he was going to run for the Presidency the following year and, because he didn't want to be accused of using the Committee to garner personal publicity, he said he would not announce his candidacy until the Committee finished its job. Despite the pressure from Church, however, in September the Committee staff had already gotten its deadline extended to March 5th when Schweiker came up with his proposal to throw the Kennedy assassination into the investigative pot. That upset Church quite a bit. He knew that looking into the Kennedy assassination, even from the narrow focus of its relationship to the intelligence agencies, could extend the Committee's work for months and months, thereby fouling up his personal plans. Church, however, did not want to take any political risk by publicly opposing the suggestion, so he came up with a clever compromise. He said he would permit Schweiker and a Democrat counterpart, Colorado Senator Gary Hart, to set up a two- man Kennedy assassination Subcommittee provided that it, too, would wrap up its work when the committee did in March.
Schweiker wasn't happy with the limitations but decided to take what he got. He figured that if he could develop enough solid information or stumble upon a new revelation in the case, the Committee as a whole could then be pressured into tackling the Kennedy assassination even beyond its deadline. So Schweiker jumped in with both feet. Since Church said he could initially spare only two members of the Committee staff for Schweiker's Subcommittee -- he would get a few more later as the Committee wound up it individual projects -- Schweiker geared up his own personal staff for a Kennedy inquiry. He assigned his then-Legislative Counsel David Marston (later to be appointed U.S. Attorney in
Schweiker and his operation going for about a month before he called me. Although he himself never detailed all of them, I later learned there were several reasons for his feeling that he needed an outside staff investigator who would report directly to him and not to the Committee. He was, first of all initially not getting the kind of concentrated Committee staff support he felt his Subcommittee needed. Even those staffers immediately assigned to the Subcommittee couldn't plunge full-time into the case because they were busy wrapping up other Committee projects. Schweiker also realized that the sheer bulk of material that had built up over the years on the Kennedy case was awesome, yet no Committee staffer had any background knowledge of it. In fact, the former Wall Street lawyer who was assigned to head Schweiker's Subcommittee staff, did not even read the Warren Commission Report until two months after the Subcommittee was formed.
In addition, the Subcommittee staff was approaching the Kennedy assassination in the same way it had approached the Committee's investigation into the activities of the intelligence agencies: It was doing a paper investigation of documents provided by the agencies themselves. No one was leaving
Another reason Schweiker decided to hire his own investigator was this: Although he was struck by the newly discovered evidence that Kennedy's murder might have been an act of retaliation by Castro for the
Finally, there was this factor: Although Kennedy was murdered in
And I was in the right place at the right time.
Knowing something about the Miami area may be of special significance in attempting to understand the mystery of John F. Kennedy's murder. It played a key role in the history of the times surrounding the assassination.
You may not know Miami. You may know a bit about Miami Beach, an unrelated island strip of high-rise condominiums, kitschy elegant hotels, pseudo-Vegas nightclubs, expensive restaurants and peacock tourists. But Miami -- or what is called Miami -- is something else. The actual City of Miami is a small, 34-square-mile jigsaw puzzle piece of real estate slotted within the 2054-square-mile entity of Dade County. Although there are 26 other municipalities within Dade, the whole county area is generally known simply as "Miami." To the east there is
Although most urban areas have undergone certain transformations over the last two decades, Miami's was uniquely different. Like other big cities during the 50's, Miami also felt the negative effects of urban sprawl as the white middle-class abandoned the inner city and took off for the suburbs. And although the area population was booming, Miami itself was relatively old and few newcomers to South Florida wanted to move back into an urban environment after leaving a Northern city -- despite the fact that most of Miami had a small town feeling about it. Never blighted with high-rise tenements, Miami was, in fact, a city of neighborhoods lined with modest old homes of white clapboard, cinder block or coral rock, rear "Florida rooms" and front porches. With the middle-class exodus and the deterioration of its neighborhoods, the City of Miami -- almost all of which was really "inner city" in relation to its neighboring Dade County communities -- began more and more looking like a neglected waif with no hope of capturing a piece of the prosperity that was coming on the Gold Coast. Its downtown began going to hell and its poor black sections like Overtown and Liberty City began oozing their blight through the rest of the city. Despite the tropical clime, Miami's feature wasn't sunny.
Until the Cubans came.
The first small flock came in the early and mid 50s, the anti-Batistianos, those who opposed the military dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista. A young lawyer named Fidel Castro was among the. He stayed briefly and gave fiery speeches at an old movie theater on Flagler Street. Another was the wealthy former president, Carlos Prio, who ensconced himself in an elegant home on Miami Beach and dispensed millions in setting up arms and supply lines to the rebels while maintaining a close association with the American Racketeers who were running the Havana gambling casinos. Then, when it appeared that the end was inevitable, came the Batistianos themselves and the nonpolitical wealthy who saw the writing on the wall and got out with their nest eggs. That's when Miami first began to feel the early tone of Cuban culture and social activity as the monied class began moving into the business and banking world, setting up their private clubs and fancy restaurants and the accouterments necessary to maintain the style of living to which they were accustomed on the island.
Then, beginning on
"They were new types of refugees," wrote reporter Haynes Johnson. "Instead of a home, they were seeking temporary asylum. They found it along the sandy beaches and curving coast line of Florida. They arrived by the thousands, in small fishing boats, in planes, chartered or stolen, and crowded into Miami. Along the boulevards, under the palms, and in hotel lobbies, they gathered and plotted their counter-revolution. Miami began to take on the air of a Cuban city. Even its voice was changing. Stores and cafes began advertising in Spanish and English. New signs went up on the toll roads slicing through the city, giving instructions in both languages. Everyone talked of home only one hundred miles away. And everyone talked about the great liberation army being formed in the secret camps somewhere far way."
And with the exiles and their passion for a counter-revolution came the Central Intelligence Agency. Well before the U.S. Embassy in Cuba closed down in January, 1960, the
Within a year after Castro took power, the face of Miami had taken on a definite Cuban character. More than 100,000 exiles had settled in and others were arriving at a rate of 1700 a week. As the Cuban exile population of
The invasion of Cuba's Bahia Cochinos -- Bay of Pigs -- occurred in April, 1961. It was the brainchild not of the Cuban exiles but of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was spawned at a meeting of the Agency's top brass in January, 1960. Originally, it was not going to be a massive operation. No more than 30 Cuban exile were to be trained in
Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee was to discover, from files voluntarily given to it by the
In Miami, even before plans for a Cuban invasion became common gossip, the Cuban exiles' hopes for Castro's overthrow were constantly buoyed by public pronouncements of support for the U.S. Government. In his State of the Union address, President Kennedy himself spoke of "the Communist base established 90 miles from the United States," and said that "Communist domination in this hemisphere can never be negotiated." As soon as Kennedy and been elected,
In his recent excellent book on the subject, Peter Wyden wrote: "No notable event in recent
"...the
"In the
"If Kennedy had not been thoroughly defeated by Castro on the beaches in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev almost certainly would not have dared to precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 -- the crisis which, in the words of former
"And it the reasons for the collapse at the Bay of Pigs had not been covered up...the
Wyden misses one significant observation: What the Bay of Pigs plan provided was the historic opportunity for the
One of the factors that led the Central Intelligence Agency to believe it could topple Castro was the success it had enjoyed in
Because of the success of that scenario, Bissell picked veterans of it for the key slots in the Cuban operation. For instance, appointed the Agency's political liaison chief to the multitude of Cuban exile groups in
It didn't take long for E. Howard Hunt to inject himself into the labyrinthine world of Cuban exile politics in
It was Hunt's job to form the Frente, the coalition of Cuban exile groups which would serve as the political umbrella for the military army of the invasion. It was early apparent, however, that Hunt's own conservative right-wing political view colored his handling of the exile groups and he and Barker, wheeling and dealing among the politicians, started as many squabbles as they mediated. In fact, immediately before the actual invasion, Hunt was removed -- he says he quit -- as the Agency's political liaison because he wouldn't go along with including in the exile coalition a group headed by a democratic socialist named Manolo Ray. Fidelisimo sin Fidel, Hunt said, and called him a Communist. Ray's name would also later pop up in the Kennedy assassination investigation.
Hunt's principal contribution to the
Another major contribution Hunt made to the
Later, there would be many an autopsy done on the
President Kennedy told the world that he assumed "sole responsibility" for the
The Agency operatives who had led the exiles expressed the same deep bitterness. The ever-eloquent E. Howard Hunt, monitoring the effect at
Hunts close associate, David Phillips, would also reveal, years later, the incredible emotional impact of the defeat. Writing in his memoirs, The Night Watch, he too, detailed the end:
I went home. I peeled off my socks like dirty layers of skin -- I realized I hadn't changed them for a week.... I bathed, then fell into bed to sleep for several hours. On awakening I tried to eat again, but couldn't. Outside, the day was sheet spring beauty. I carried a portable radio to the yard at the rear of the house and listened to the gloomy newscasts about
Helen came out from the house and handed me a martini, a large one. I was half drunk
when I finished.. Suddenly my stomach churned. I was sick. My body heaved.
Then I began to cry....
I wept for two hours. I was sick again, then drunk again...
Oh shit! Shit!
The relationship between the
It may help here to put it all into a large perspective, one that is especially relevant to the intriguing mystery I was later to stumble upon. A prolific freelancer named Andrew St. George touched upon it in an article in Harper's a few years ago. I got to know the bearded, swashbuckling St. George, a rotund, witty, European-bred charmer, during the early course of the Schweiker investigation. I discovered he was all over Miami in the early '60s, working mostly for
"Had someone asked me during the early Sixties to explain, in twenty words or fewer, why I called the
"But what evidence did we have, really, to say that the Cuban invasion was a failure? The discredited approach of applying military solutions to political problems, this failed formula we expected President Kennedy to junk with contempt, was instead polished up and adopted as the favorite method, in the essential strategy of the Kennedy Administration, which we expected to suffer and starve for selling this 'failed formula' to the President, turned out to be a big beneficiary of the wretched Cuban adventure....
"Within a year of the
Following the Bay of Pigs, word leaked out from the White House that Kennedy was disillusioned with the
That was misleading. Kennedy was, indeed, damn angry at the
Between the
Kennedy did his best to reinforce that image. "
At the height of its activities, the JM/
The JM/
Those were heady times for the anti-Castro groups in
Those were, of course, equally heady times for the
It is not known whether Castro requested the installation of offensive ballistic missiles in
The manner in which President Kennedy resolved the Cuban missile destroyed the hope of the exiles and the men conducting the secret war.
The reaction among the secret war activities to that settlement one of tremendous shock. To the men who had been risking their very lives in a tough guerrilla war against the menace of Communism in the
And yet the depth of anger at Kennedy for making the missile settlement was shallow compared with the reaction of the exiles and their
The crackdown continued over the next several months, to the increasing confusion and anger of the exiles. On the one hand, they were being encouraged and supported by the U.S. Government -- wasn't the
And yet against this pattern of a crackdown by Federal enforcement agencies on exile activity, there emerged a counter-grain of incidents which is very relevant to the Kennedy assassination. These incidents involve a series of major raids by anti-Castro groups which took place, despite the crackdown, between the time of the missile crisis and the assassination of the President. In fact, at the height of the missile crisis -- and the most politically inopportune moment for Kennedy -- one of the largest and most militant of the Cuban groups, Alpha 66, launched a quick strike at a major port in
There were other Cuban exile groups which also defied Kennedy's "no invasion" policy. In April, a group calling itself the Cuban Freedom Fighters bombed an oil refinery outside
There were indications that Kennedy himself was confused and did not know what was happening. At a press conference in May, 1963, in response to a question about whether or not the United States was giving aid to the exiles, the President stumbled: "We may well be...well, none that I am familiar with.... I don't think as of today that we are." It was recently discovered that the
There were few who had the foresight or knowledge to understand the significance of what was happening at the time, but one who did was a Democratic Representative from
That was in February, 1963. That month, in Dallas, a Czarist Russian emigre, world traveler and former French intelligence operative named George DeMohrenschildt decided to give a dinner party. He invited a young couple named Oswald, who had just returned from
There was a Democratic Representative from
Twelve years later, with the call from Senator Schweiker, I began an odyssey into the Kennedy assassination that would be far more revealing than I ever anticipated. It was a journey into a maze that had, over the years, grown incredibly complicated, with all sorts of elaborate cul-de-sacs. Perhaps more important, however, is the fact that there emerged certain similar images along so many of the pathways --- an indication, often only gossamer, of a concealed connecting thread or associative strands which appeared to emanate from a common spool.
For instance, one of the first leads which Schweiker asked me to check out came from a source he had to consider impeccable: Clare Boothe Luce. One of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a former Ambassador to Italy, a successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime civic activist, Clare Boothe Luce was the last person in the world Schweiker would have suspected of leading him on a wild goose chase.
It began almost immediately after Schweiker announced the formation of the Kennedy assassination subcommittee. He was visited by syndicated
Luce said that some time after the
As a result of her sponsorship, Luce said, she got to know the three-man "crew" of the boat. She called them "my boys" and said they visited her a few times in her
Luce said she didn't think of her boat crew until the day that President Kennedy was killed. That evening she received a telephone call from one of the members of her boat crew. She told Schweiker she believed his name was Julio Fernandez. He said he was calling from New Orleans. He told her that he and the other crew members had been forced out of Miami after the Cuban missile crisis and that they had started a "Free Cuba" cell ln New Orleans. Luce said that Julio Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached his group and offered his services as a potential Castro assassin. Fernandez said his group didn't believe Oswald, suspected he was really a Communist and decided to keep tabs on him. Fernandez said they found that Oswald was, indeed, a Communist, and they eventually penetrated his "cell" and tape--recorded his talks, including his bragging that he could shoot anyone because he was "the greatest shot in the world with a telescopic lens." Fernandez said that Oswald than suddenly came into money and went to Mexico City and then Dallas. Fernandez also told Luce his group had photographs of Oswald and copies of the handbills Oswald had distributed on the streets of New Orleans. Fernandez asked Luce what he should do with this information and material.
Luce recalled: "I said what you do is call the FBI at once. Don't waste a minute. Go right in and call up the FBI."
Luce said she did not think about the story again until Jim Garrison's investigation hit the headlines in 1967. She said she called the New Orleans district attorney and tell him of the incident but, after talking to him for 10 minutes, she decided he was a "phony" and not serious. Through Pawley, however, she did locate and call her "young Cuban" and reminded him of his conversation with her the evening Kennedy was killed. By then, Luce recalled, Julio Fernandez no longer wanted to get involved: "He said, 'Mrs. Luce, we did just what you said. We got it all to the FBI. They came, took our tape recordings, took our photographs and told us to keep our mouths shut until the FBI sent for us.' He said, Mrs. Luce, I am married, I have two children, I am a lawyer with a very successful practice in Miami. I don't want any part of the Kennedy assassination. You couldn't torture it out of me."' Luce also said that Fernandez told her that of the other two members of her boat crew, one was deported and one was stabbed to death in Miami.
Luce told Schweiker that her impression, based on what she was told by "her Cubans," was that Oswald was hired by Castro to assassinate Kennedy in retaliation for the assassination efforts against him.
Luce also told Schweiker that she did not remember the names of the other two crew members, nor did she know now how to get in touch with Julio Fernandez. She said that Bill Pawley would know all about it.
Schweiker called Pawley. Pawley said he didn't remember a thing. Schweiker took it as an indication that Pawley just didn't want to get involved. He still thought that Luce's story, if confirmed, could lead to a significant break. He asked me to try to find the Julio Fernandez who had called her.
I discovered there are a lot of Cubans in Miami named Julio Fernandez. There are more than a dozen lawyers named Fernandez. Many Cubans, like Americans, are commonly known by their middle name, not their first, and some Cubans are commonly known not by their by father's family name by their matrinomy. Nevertheless, selecting them by their age and word of their anti-Castro activism, I spent weeks talking with scores of Cubans named Julio Fernandez. Schweiker particularly interested in the Julio Fernandez whose name did turn up in an FBI report buried in the Warren Commissions' volume of evidence. I finally tracked him down in upstate New York. He wasn't the Julio Fernandez who had called Clair Boothe Luce. It wasn't until more than a year later, with the broadened access to information I had with the House Assassinations Committee, I discovered that there was no Julio Fernandez who called Luce. She had simply concocted the name for Schweiker.
What was interesting about the Luce story was that it had a couple of the characteristics common to so many of the other leads which were fed to Schweiker and, later, the House Assassinations Committee and, when checked out, went no where. One such characteristic was that the leads usually could not be dismissed outright because they always contained hard kernels of truth mixed in the fluff.
For instance, in the case of the Luce lead, it was known that Oswald did approach an anti-Castro group in New Orleans and said he was interested in helping their cause. The fellow he approached, Carlos Bringuier, was the chief Orleans delegate of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, known simply as the
Independent researchers have been looking into Oswald's encounter with Bringuier for years and have discovered some curious things about it. Jim Garrison found that a newspaper photographer had been alerted to Bringuier's encounter with Oswald handling out leaflets before Bringuier approached Oswald. Oswald, despite his attempt to join the anti-Castro group days earlier, seemed bent on getting publicity as a pro-Castro demonstrator and encouraged Bringuier to attack him. At one point, Oswald was overheard to say, "Hit me, Carlos." In addition Oswald had stamped on some of the pro-Castro leaflets strange address for the
In checking further into Luce's story for the Assassinations Committee, we developed some additional interesting information. We found that Luce's "great friend" in
In 1976, before we could interview Pawley about the Luce story and other matters concerning the Kennedy assassination, he committed suicide. He reportedly had been suffering from a bad case of shingles.
We pursued the Luce story all the way down the line. Carlos Bringuier, who later became a lecturer on Billy Jean Hargis' right-wing Christian Crusade circuit, said he had never spoken to Clair Boothe Luce. In Miami, however, we did discover that a few leaders of his Directorio group were -- the kernel of truth -- in touch with Luce.
The Directorio was, along with Alpha 66, the most active, on both the military and propaganda fronts, of all the Cuban exile groups. In September, 1962 the group received national publicity with a daring raid into Havana harbor. Its boats shelled a theater where Castro was scheduled to speak. Castro raged that it was another attempt on his life by the
The key Directorio liaison was a sharp, articulate young fellow named Jose Antonio Lanusa. It was Lanusa who handled the regular reports from
Lanusa said he had only a single contact with Luce, arranged by Jack Justin. Lanusa didn't know how the
Justin introduced him and another leader of the Directorio to Luce in her New York apartment because, Lanusa was told, she wanted to write an article for
Many times in the course of my experiences investigating the Kennedy assassination, I found it strangely difficult to accept the obvious. The truth often came so boldly and blatantly that it was difficult to believe. Analogically, it was like sitting across the table from an old friend when, in the midst of a very pleasant conversation, he suddenly reaches over and slaps you across the face and then, without missing a word, continues the pleasant conversation. Your initial reaction is one of shock, then disbelief. When you ask why he did that, he asks, "Did what?" without changing his pleasant expression. It was quite obvious what happened, but with his denying the obvious and the continued pleasant conversation, you begin to doubt the reality of the obvious. Did what just happened -- this time chunk of experience that was here a moment ago and is now gone -- really happen? Did I just get slapped in the face? It was a question I asked myself often.
On slowly uncovering and verifying the facts surrounding the story that Luce told Schweiker, I began to envision her as an old woman now -- she was well into her 70s --diverse experiences of her colorful life perhaps blending into jumbled recollections over-dramatically recalled. That image was shattered when I met her.
Clare Boothe Luce had been difficult to pin down. She regularly moves between her New York apartment, her home in Hawaii and her penthouse at the Watergate in Washington, still very active and agile. We finally set up an interview in the last months of the Committee's existence, too late for an executive session hearing or sworn deposition. I was accompanied by staff researcher Betsy Palmer, who had done the file checking of the Luce story at the
Amid a splendid fortune of museum-quality Chinese artifacts in her elegant Watergate apartment house on the floor, coincidentally, is occupied by General Claire Chenault's widow), Luce was most pleasant and cooperative. Yes, she said, she had originally told the story to columnist Vera Glaser and confirmed it with Senator Schweiker. She repeated the story, virtually unchanged for us.
Luce, however, when question further, also confirmed additional details which Betsy Palmer had uncovered in her file search. At the time Luce was in touch with Schweiker, she was also in touch with William Colby, then head of the
When we walked out of the Watergate late that afternoon, we knew only one thing for sure: An awful lot of time had been spent checking out Luce's story and, in the end, it led nowhere at all.
The last time I saw Clare Boothe Luce was shortly after we interviewed her at the Watergate. I attended a luncheon meeting, for reasons which will be later apparent, of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers at a country club in Arlington. Luce was the guest speaker. Her speech was a vigorous defense of the intelligence establishment and an historical review of its successes. I discovered that Boothe Luce, besides being the guest speaker at that meeting, is actually on the Board of Directors of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. The organization was founded in 1975 by former Bay of Pigs propaganda chief, David Atlee Phillips.
Time and again, as I probed through the maze of the Kennedy assassination investigation, that thread of an association of some sort with intelligence agency activity would appear and reappear often clear and distinct, sometimes thin and tenuous. What, if anything did it mean? I'm still puzzled, for instance, by an episode involving a tip that came into Senator Schweiker's office later in his investigation. Although I was then in the midst of pursuing an especially significant development, the new information seemed much too important to put aside and its source, again, valid enough not to dismiss.
A man from Key West called Schweiker's office in Washington and said he had some information which might be of some help in the Senator's investigation of the Kennedy assassination. The man said he had seen Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby together at the Key West International Airport in the summer prior to the Kennedy assassination. He provided the details. Schweiker's office called me and I called the man. What he told me led me to drive to Key West and spend more than a week attempting to confirm the details of his story. I was not totally unsuccessful, and I did find out more than I expected.
In the FBI files of its Kennedy assassination investigation, there are hundreds of reports of individuals who claimed they saw Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby together before the killing. Almost every report indicates that a brief investigation proved the claim groundless. There are some, however, which indicate that a brief investigation left some claims unresolved, including a few from sources which appeared to be legitimate; that is where not obvious mental cases or publicity seekers that relevant in my deciding to go to Key West. So was another FBI report which connected Jack Ruby to a gun-smuggling operation in the Florida Keys. There is good evidence which links Ruby to smuggling guns, although not in the Florida Keys. In addition, the man who called Schweiker's office appeared to be a very legitimate source.
George Faraldo, a thin, swarthy man in his late 50s was the general manager of the
I initially spent several hours with George Faraldo at his office getting the details of his story. On November 22nd, 1963, Faraldo was in the hospital recovering from a mild heart attack. That's why he was sure the incident occurred prior to the Kennedy assassination, probably the summer before, he said. He remembered arriving at the airport that morning and seeing a group of about 30 or 40 persons clustered in the lobby. Despite its "international" status, the Key West airport is not large, its terminal building a cinder block structure the size of a small city post office. There are usually not that many people in the terminal, which has only a few ticket counters and a separate small waiting lounge. Faraldo said he learned from talking with a few in the group that they were part of an organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and that they were going to Cuba to help, cut the sugar cane crop. They were waiting for an Aerovia Q Airline plane to fly in from Cuba to pick them up. Aerovia Q was a commercial airline that regularly flew chartered and scheduled flights between Key West and Cuba, a 90-mile hop across the Florida Straits. It maintained a ticket counter at the
Faraldo said he recalled the group waiting around the airport almost all day, getting repeated word that the plane was delayed. Mostly, he said, they were young boys and girls, "hippie-looking," casually dressed dungarees, a few in olive-drab fatigues. They were quiet and well-behaved, Faraldo recalled, some sitting on the floor in small circles, a few playing guitars. The reason that Faraldo specifically remembered Lee Harvey Oswald, he said, was because Oswald was the only one who, during the course of day, kept circulating among the group, chatting with the various clusters briefly, then moving on. He didn't, however, appear to be the leader of the group, the one who kept making the announcements about the plane being delayed. That guy had a beard, said Faraldo. Both Oswald and Jack Ruby were casually dressed, Faraldo recalled, but Ruby did not mingle much with the group and spent most of the day standing next to the doorway that led to the plane boarding area. Once, Faraldo said, he saw Oswald approach Ruby and talk to him briefly. Faraldo recalled that the Aerovia Q plane that the group had been waiting for finally arrived late in the evening and that Oswald got on the plane with the group. He said he didn't see Ruby get on and doesn't know if he did.
It was an incredible story Faraldo told, yet he seemed to tell lt in a very credible way. He said he would have had some doubts about recognizing either Oswald or Ruby after the Kennedy assassination if it had been a case of just one, but the fact that he recalled both individuals led him to dispel any thought that it may have been a case of mistaken identity.
Faraldo said he didn't observe the group all day, but worked in his office and just made a few trips out to chat, although he didn't speak with either Oswald or Ruby. What he did do at one point, however, was film the group with a movie camera. He was a regular "stringer," or freelance correspondent, for WTVJ-TV, a
Although Faraldo was very believable, I was a bit bothered by an inconsistency in his ability to recollect detail. He was, for instance, absolutely sure that the number of the plane that finally arrived to pick up the group was CU-T583 -- it just stuck in his mind, he said -- he couldn't, on the other hand, recall exactly what month the incident occurred and even had some doubts about the year. Still, I reasoned, undulations in recollected detail would be normal after 13 years.
In that initial interview with him, I probed Faraldo for hours. He remained very credible. More importantly, he appeared honest and consistently normal. He wasn't a nut or an odd-ball. He was, in fact, a very intelligent man, a college graduate with a degree in engineering. Together we drove to the airport terminal and Faraldo showed me around. We walked through the lobby and he explained the way the group was scattered about. He then pointed out exactly where he saw Oswald and exactly where Ruby was standing most of the time. Faraldo appeared so sure of what he was saying that I could almost see them there.
I spent the next few days attempting to check out Faraldo's story. At the very least, I wanted to find out whether or not a Fair Play for
I spoke, for instance, to a woman who worked the ticket counter for National Airlines at
I tried other angles. I spoke to a number of former employees of Aerovia Q Airlines, but none could remember the incident Faraldo described. I discovered that Aerovia Q stopped its regular flights to
I also did a page-by-page check of the old bound volumes of the
A spark of hope flared when Faraldo mentioned that he used to keep the manifests, or passenger lists, of every daily flight out of
With the help of the current airport manager, we rummaged through every possible storage area without success. The one storage room where Faraldo was sure the boxes had been was, just two week before, gutted after a rain storm tore off part of the ceiling and flooded the room. Faraldo pointed out where the boxes should have been on a shelf suspended between the ceiling and the air conditioning ducts. The new manager said everything taken from that gutted room was in a trash heap on the side of the terminal. I spent hours going through a mountain of soggy trash looking for the discarded boxes. I found nothing that resembled manifests.
I subsequently contacted the news director of WTVJ-TV, where Faraldo said he had sent his film. Ralph Renick confirmed that Faraldo had done some freelancing for the station and said he was. He said familiar with his story about Oswald and Ruby. He said Faraldo mentioned it to him about the time of Jim Garrison's investigation in
One day we were sitting around his office chatting. Faraldo mentioned that he is a veteran of the U.S. Navy, an experienced pilot, has an avid interest in electronics and considers himself an expert photographic technician. These bits of information were dropped over the course of a long conversation and I didn't immediately link them to anything of significance. He then mentioned he had a photo lab behind his machine shop. I noted my own interest in photography and asked to see it. I assumed he was an amateur photographer who freelanced occasionally for a few bucks and had a nice array of perhaps even professional quality equipment. I was amazed, however, at the collection of sophisticated electronic and photographic gear stocked in Faraldo's shop. I guessed there was well over $100,000 worth of equipment. I then noticed sitting on the floor in a corner what appeared to be the housing of an aerial reconnaissance camera.
Hey, what's going on here?
Softly I began probing Faraldo about his use of such equipment. Well, he said, he had made a number of trips into
When I asked Faraldo specifically about the reconnaissance camera, he said he had flown a number of aerial photographic missions and proudly went into a detailed explanation of how he had designed a special device to permit him to trigger the camera, installed in the belly of his plane, from the cockpit. He said he had taken shots of the Russian missiles in Cuba long before Kennedy announced they existed.
For whom, I tried to ask casually, was he working? "I was told," he said smiling, "I was working~ for the United States Information Agency." I asked if he thought it possible that he was really working for the
It's a beautiful ride from Key West back to Miami over a long, lonesome stretch of the Overseas Highway, the big sky a clear deep blue, the ocean vista of white caps on one side, on the other the bay a crystal expanse of glistening serenity. But I couldn't appreciate the scenery as I drove back because my mind was a jumble of confusion about what I had experienced over the previous several days. I wanted to believe Faraldo because he was intelligent and credible and I like him. And didn't a few others remember that group at the airport? Besides, why would he be lying? Why would he tell such a story and go out of his way to bring it to Schweiker's attention? I remember conflicting questions racing through my mind as I drove back to Miami. I also remember feeling something I didn't want to believe I felt: The sensation of a lingering sting along the side of my cheek, as if someone had just slapped me across the face.
Perhaps, yes, perhaps coincidentally, the Luce incident and the Faraldo incident both contain elements of similarity to a burst of reports which sprung up immediately following the action of President John F. Kennedy. These reports all indicated that Lee Harvey Oswald had some association with pro-Castro elements or was, in fact, a Castro agent. Also, most of the reports had some connection with Mexico City or Miami. And, again, somewhere along the chain of investigative links there always popped up some association with the intelligence community.
I've come to believe that a few of those early reports may have some relationship to what I later uncovered. The reports linked to Mexico City were especially interesting. Clare Boothe Luce, for instance, maintained she received that telephone call from one of her young Cubans on the evening of Kennedy's assassination. She specifically remembered watching television with her husband in her New York apartment when the call came through. The caller told her, she said, about Oswald and how he had left
Another attempt to link Oswald to Castro came out of
The story caused quite a stir with Ambassador Mann, a hard-boiled anti-Communist who, even before Alvarado showed up, was pushing the FBI to investigate a Castro link to the Kennedy's assassination. It would later become one of the first pieces of "evidence" to plant the seed of a Cuban conspiracy in President Johnson's mind. This despite the fact that Alvarado's story didn't check out. Alvarado subsequently retracted his story, saying he had fabricated lt because he wanted to get to the
The Warren Commission, however, never considered the significance of the source of the story. Alvarado, it was later discovered, was an agent of the Nicaraguan intelligence service. Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza was a strong anti-Castro and a cooperative ally of the
There are a few theories about the type of incident the Alvarado fabrication represents, other than it being the meaningless activity of lone nut -- unlikely in view of Alvarado's background. It strikes a few researchers as having the hallmarks of a counter-intelligence scenario, a shrewd ploy (loaded with diverse angles, from the ridiculous to the sublime, but in the end having a single although not immediately apparent effect. Was it meant to reinforce certain evidence or suspicions, or was it just another stone thrown in to further muddy already murky waters.?
There are a lot of questions. And perhaps that in itself is relevant. Why should the sources of the information turn out to be of more interest than the information itself? What motivation did the sources have in promulgating the information? Why did they inject themselves into the Kennedy assassination investigation? Did they each have their own individual reasons for doing so? Or were they orchestrated by those with a more sophisticated knowledge of public opinion manipulation, psychological and propaganda techniques These questions are the matrix of the pattern.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the early reports linking Oswald to pro-Castro activity was how quickly they surfaced. The first ones came within hours of Oswald's arrest, almost before Dallas police knew anything about him or his background or had, in fact, definitely linked him to anything other than the killing of Patrolman J.D. Tippitt.
A Scripps-Howard wire service reporter named Seth Kantor was part of the press contingent which had traveled with President Kennedy to Dallas. Kantor, a veteran reporter well-respected by his peers, had worked in Dallas before being transferred to Washington. He knew the city intimately, its politicians, its leading citizens, its characters. As did almost every other reporter in
help him with a couple of stories about
Kantor says he saw and spoke with Jack Ruby at Parkland Hospital immediately after Kennedy's assassination. A nurse, who didn't know Ruby, later also reported she saw Ruby at
I spoke with Seth Kantor a few times and had dinner with him one evening in Washington. He's a reserved, soft-spoken guy not given to exaggeration. I checked into his background and spoke with people who know him. I found no reason to suspect that Seth Kantor would lie. That, I believe is significant in terms of another bit of information that Kantor provided. Kantor said he learned of Oswald's pro-Castro association shortly after Oswald was arrested, not more than two hours later, at the most, perhaps before 3 p.m. Dallas time. Kantor had called his managing editor in Washington and been told that the Scripps-Howard correspondent in Miami a fellow named Hal Hendrix, had this Information. "I specifically recall that I was at the police station and had to call Hendrix collect," said Kantor. "Hendrix told me of Oswald's pro-Castro association. I don't think he knew it first-hand, he said he had been told about it. He didn't tell me by whom."
Kantor didn't give special significance to his conversation with Hendrix until years later. Disturbed by the Warren Commission's findings, he decided to write a book about Jack Ruby. That's when he found that among the documents not released to the public was the FBI's list of telephone calls from the Dallas police station. Kantor requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. When he finally got the list, Kantor discovered that the only call exorcized from it, the only call which remained classified for "national security" reasons, was the call he made to Hendrix.
Again, it turned out that the source of the information about Oswald's pro-Castroism was more interesting than the information itself. Before he joined Scripps-Howard, Hal Hendrix worked for the Miami News. During the Bay of Pigs invasion, Hendrix's stories contained exceptional detail of the invasion's progress, information obviously obtained form
Hal Hendrix was another one of the witnesses who fell between the cracks of the House Assassination Committee's investigation. In March, 1978, I wrote a memorandum to Chief Counsel Blakey urging that Hendrix be subpoenaed to testify about his knowledge of
Aside from his specific requests to check out certain leads which had come to him, Senator Schweiker laid down no investigative ground rules when he hired me as a staff investigator. "Just follow your instincts," he said. Schweiker was, of course enough to realize the advantage of having a personal staff the investigator not bound by the parameters of the Senate Intelligence Committee's mandate or under the pressures of a report deadline. Because he had uncovered the facts about the intelligence agencies withholding information about Castro assassination plots from the Warren Commission, Schweiker early leaned toward a Castro retaliation theory for the Kennedy murder. His Subcommittee staff, ridiculously limited in time and resources, had only those same blocks of facts to play with and so was structuring its report along the same theory. Yet as I uncovered information in
Over the course of almost a year of working with Schweiker, my attention was drawn to a diverse collection of individuals, almost all of whom had an association with the
What I found especially fascinating was how, as soon as word of what I was doing spread, offers of help and sources of information began pouring down on me. There were independent researchers, journalists, private investigators and individuals whose means of support I could never figure out calling me regularly. There were whispered meetings with anonymous informants in the back of dark bars in Little Havana. There were meetings in parks along
There were several key characters who early drew my interest and, I still believe, may be relevant to the new evidence I would later stumble upon. One of them was a cocky bantam of a man named Mitchell Livingston WerBell
WerBell was born in
They don't come more colorful than Mitchell Livingston WerBell
What drew my interest to WerBell was not his color, nor his wit; it was his business, his background and his associates. It appeared that Jack Ruby was involved in arms dealing and smuggling. So was Mitch WerBell. A passionate anti-Communist, WerBell has run a series of weapons manufacturing and marketing firms -- principally Military Armament Corporation and its Washington-based parent, Quantum Ordinance Bankers -- which advanced supplied countries and groups around the world with advanced weaponry, including the Ingram M-ll, a hand-held, quiet machine gun. WerBell has been call a "creative genius" for his designs of noise suppressor for automatic weapons and for other "silent-kill" devices. He has also been termed the "principal supplier of the
Early in my investigation for Senator Schweiker, I had a long, all-day, liquory session with Mitch WerBell in his gun-filled den on his farm in
Nevertheless, down through the years WerBell has popped up with uncanny consistency in operations which have had the imprimatur of the
It was the special team concept that the
Besides his general association with assassination operations, there were other reasons why WerBell would interest an investigator probing the Kennedy murder. A key one was his relationship with individuals who popped up in the FBI's original investigation. Gerry Patrick Hemming, for instance, was the ex-Marine who claimed he had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald both in California and Miami. Deeply involved in anti-Castro activity, Hemming was among those arrested at a training camp in the Florida Keys after Kennedy's Cuban missile deal with Khrushchev. Hemming worked as a weapon salesman for Mitch WerBell.
Another interesting associate of WerBell's is his buddy from his OSS days, Lucien Conein. "You've got to start with the premise that Lou Conein is crazy," said one of his former
It was Conein's involvement with the coup of the generals which led another old
Conein got involved in a series of sensitive operations with Hunt at the White House, some of which, according to a later report in the Washington Post, "appear to have stretched so far over the boundaries of legality that they were undertaken in secrecy." One of these, part of a program called Gemstone, was Operation Diamond, a large, secret organization which Bernard Barker was putting together for Hunt in
Then, in November, 1973, Conein got moved out of the White House -- though not out from under White House command --to become chief of Special Operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration -- the DEA. He was to be part of Nixon's highly publicized nation-wide police campaign, led by White House enforcers with special powers, to combat drug abuse. It has been suggested that Nixon's anti-drug campaign was, in actuality, a bit to establish his own intelligence network as part of, as the knowledgeable St. George put it, "a covert drive to set up a national police machinery under the centralized command of the White House police organization." It has also been suggested that it was exactly that bid which brought about Nixon's political assassination, the sucker set-up that was Watergate.
Assassination, of course, is the buzz word. It struck me, early on in my investigation of the Kennedy assassination, how a select group of individuals who drew my attention for other reasons, would turn out to have some association with assassination operations in their past. More significantly, that association often involved a relationship with another member of this select ~roup. The multiplicity of "coincidences" never failed to surprise me. My attention was drawn to Lucien Conein, for instance, when I discovered his relationship with E. Howard Hunt, who attracted my interest because of his activities with Miami's anti-Castro Cubans When I learned of Conein's OSS background, I wondered if he had crossed paths somewhere along the way with Mitch WerBell. Their paths, it turned out, more than just crossed, they interlocked.
When Conein set up his Special Operations branch of the DEA he recruited" at least a dozen field operatives from the
My meeting with Mitch WerBell that long Georgia day in his gun-filled den turned out to be a verbal paso-doble with a drunk -- or a man who acted drunk. Actually, by the time I got to him, WerBell was coming off a long bout with the booze, the result of being caught between the pressure of a few Congressional investigating committees probing~ his intelligence, arms and drug connections and, on the other side the very tough squeeze being put on him to keep his mouth shut by agencies for which he worked. Although we spent several hours talking, WerBell was determined to dance drunkenly around my key areas of interest. "There's a helluva lot I ain't said yet," he blathered at one point, "and there's a helluva lot I ain't gonna say yet"' At times he claimed loss of memory: "I've been in so many places, so many countries, so many fuckin' revolutions, it's beginning to get all mixed up ln my mind."
Yet the transcript of the tape I made during that session with WerBell reveals, despite the staccato verbal ellipses he drunkenly affected, some interesting responses. He admitted his involvement with some Castro assassination attempts ("I was sittin' in
Although the initial stages of my investigation for Senator Schweiker were basically unstructured, I kept stumbling across those interlocking areas of activities and associations. I didn't realize it at the time, but that's what would make the evidence I would later discover meaningful. All of which is relevant to one other individual who early captured my attention: Frank Sturgis, another one of E. Howard Hunt's cohorts in the Watergate burglary.
Of all the characters I've met in my reporting and investigating career, Sturgis is one of the most intriguing. That's saying a lot. There are many who feel that he is an easy guy to know -- he's outspoken, talkative, apparently direct, usually quite visible and frequently projects himself into the spotlight. (A few months ago, he was the spokesman for a group of anti-Castro Cubans who offered to exchange themselves for the hostages being held in
The names of both E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis had been prominently in the news in connection with the Kennedy assassination long before I joined Senator Schweiker's staff. A small group of assassination researchers had contended that two of the three men in certain photographs taken in
Because of the publicity generated by the researchers, the contention that two of the tramps were Sturgis and Hunt was examined by the Rockefeller commission in early 1975. President had appointed the commission that January to probably possible illegal
About the time Schweiker began his investigation, a book which raised the contention again was published. Titled Coup d' £at In America, it was written by Michael Canfield and Alan J. Weberman and contained a forward by Texas Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez. The book incorporated a novel device: It came with film positive photos of Sturgis and Hunt designed to be overlaid on photographs of the tramp. Superimposed, the images did, indeed, bear striking similarities.
I would later discover, however, - that photo comparison and analysis is an exceptionally non-conclusive technique. The House Assassinations Committee would wind up spending $83,154 on it and came up with results which, in some instances, are totally worthless.
Among the photographs submitted to a panel of experts for analysis and comparison were not only those of Sturgis and Hunt but also those of other individuals who had been suggested by various critics as possible being one or the other of the three tramps. The panel concluded that Sturgis and Hunt were not the tramps ln the photographs. It did conclude, however, that one of the tramps -- the one who resembled Hunt --could very well be a fellow named Fred Lee Chrisman, a right-wing activist implicated in the Garrison investigation in
What was particularly interesting, however, was the panel's conclusions in its comparison of photos of Frank Sturgis with those of the tramps. It used two basic comparative techniques. One it termed "metric traits" and the other "morphological differences." One was a comparison of the measurements of six facial features and their metric relationships; the other was simply whether or not various facial features were shaped the same. The panel concluded that the average deviation between the tramp's features and Sturgis' features was "low enough to make it impossible to rule out Sturgis on the basis of metric traits alone." However, the panel said, it was the morphological differences which indicated that Sturgis was not the tramp. In other words, Sturgis just didn't look like the tramp. (The hair and hairline were different, it said, and so were the nose, the chin and the differences in ear projection.)
House Committee's staffer in charge of organizing the photo panel's work was a research attorney named Jane Downey, and an exceptionally competent, good detail worker. One day she came to me and asked me to help gather some of the photographs which would be sent to the panel to find out members for analysis. I recall asking her at the time to find out whether or not the experts would take into consideration the possibility that the tramps might be wearing sophisticated disguises. That, in fact, had to be the case if they were not just real drifters in the wrong place at the wrong time. (As a member of the White House Plumbers, E. Howard Hunt had obtained disguises from the
Several days later Jane Downey told me she had checked with the photo analysts. "I'm told that there is no way they can tell if disguises were used," she said. I was shocked. "In other words," I said, "if the tramps were in disguise there would be no way the analysts, could tell who they really are?"
"That's what I'm told," said Downey.
"Then why do a photo comparison at all?" I asked.
"I'm sure it will be," said
Nowhere in the Committee's final report, nor in the appendix volume dealing with the photographic evidence, is the fact mentioned that comparative analysis would be meaningless if the tramps were wearing disguises.
In my own mind, I've never resolved the question of whether or not Frank Sturgis looked like one of the tramps in
Although the Rockefeller Commission report claimed that Sturgis and Hunt hadn't legitimate alibis for their whereabouts on
I spent a lot of time with Frank Sturgis, especially during the period of the Schweiker investigation. He had not been out of prison from his Watergate sentence long when we first met~ an all-evening interview session at his home. He lives in
Now in his 50s and tending toward obesity -- and a far cry from the muscular figure he was not long ago -- Sturgis has led a thousand lives, maybe more- He was born Frank Angelo Fiorini in Norfolk, Virginia , but his parents separated when he was an infant and he grew up with his mother's family in Philadelphia's Germantown. (He would later change his name to his stepfather's, Frank Anthony Sturgis, when his mother remarried. Howard Hunt once named the chief character in one his. pulp novels "Sturgis.") Frank Sturgis turned 17 two days after
Sturgis was shipped out to the Pacific jungles where he volunteered for the toughest unit in the Marines, the First Raider Battalion, the legendary Edson's Raiders. He was taught how to kill silently with his bare hands, infiltrated into enemy encampments, sloshed through amphibious landings, air-dropped on commando raids.
Sturgis claims he got involved in Cuban activities in the early 50s when he went to
It was through Prio, Sturgis says, that he was infiltrated into
Frank Sturgis says he was never _ an official, paid has confirmed agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. The
In terms of the Kennedy assassination, it was Sturgis' relationship with Hunt that early drew my attention. Both testified under oath to the Rockefeller Commission that they first met just prior to the Watergate caper -- Hunt said in 1972, Sturgis said in late '71 or early '72. That seemed a strange contention in view of their very active involvement in
There is no hard evidence to disprove their contention, although there are some circumstantial factors which raise some questions. Sturgis admitted he worked closely with the
In October, 1972, Andrew St. George interviewed Frank Sturgis in his home in
In August, 1974, St. George published his interview with Sturgis in True magazine. In it, he quotes Sturgis as saying: "The
Today, Sturgis is not hesitant to admit his disgust with Kennedy after the President made the Cuban missile arrangement with the Russians. Sturgis was one of six pilots specially warned by the Federal Aviation Administration for making raids over Cuba at the time Kennedy was negotiating the delicate deal. Sturgis was also the co-founded with Mitch WerBell's arms salesman Gerry Patrick Hemming, of the International Anti-Communist Brigade, some of whose members were arrested at their training site on No Name Key after the missile crisis.
My first interview with Frank Sturgis came not long after he was released from his Watergate sentence. For many months he remained a relatively low-key figure in Miami, not moving around much, not getting his name in the newspaper, not yet back in action. That night he talked effusively, chain-smoking ant drinking Coke. (Sturgis is a heavy smoker, but never touches any kind of alcoholic beverage.) He spoke of his early days with Castro, his appointment by Castro at one point to oversee the gambling casinos before Castro threw the mob out of Cuba, and of his later anti-Castro activities, being a bit evasive only his about some of his more mysterious associations. (He once had a boat called the CUSA. That was the acronym for an ultra-right-wing group, formed in Germany in the '50s, called Conservatism-U.S.A. The group placed a black-bordered anti-Kennedy advertisement in a Dallas newspaper the President was shot. Sturgis initially lied to me about the spelling of the boat's name. Later, under oath, he would claim that was the name on it when he bought it.)
What particularly struck me about that initial interview with Sturgis was his Archie Bunker-like directness. He said he thought the Kennedy assassination was definitely a conspiracy, that Oswald was a patsy and that the government agencies -- the FBI, the Secret Service and the
The evening after the report was released, Sturgis telephoned. He said he had just ran across an old friend, a "guy with the Company," who "revived" his mind about something he had "completely forgot" to tell me over the months we had been in touch. He now recalled that he had heard about a meeting in
Incredible. Suddenly Frank Sturgis was pushing phony Castro-did-. stories again. And as patently ridiculous as it may appear on its surface, lt did have all the sophisticated edges of so many of the stories which popped up after the Kennedy assassination. In fact, Sturgis' "new" story was in fact a dressed version of one that came during the Warren Commission investigation. And, as always, there is a hint of documentary evidence to it -- which Sturgis was kind enough to point out to me. The original story was generated by a Miami-based investigator named Al Tarabochia, a strong right-winger who worked for the Senate Internal Security subcommittee. Tarabochia wrote a memo which wound up with the Warren Commission. He told of a Cuban exile source who said he had received a letter from a relative in
I was intrigued by the question of why Frank Sturgis would so early inject himself into the Kennedy assassination investigation. I was also intrigued by the character of the information he circulated, imbued as it was with just the right amount of detail and tenuous relation to some sort of documentary evidence. In my paranoid moments, I began to wonder whether or not there was a counterintelligence overlay to what was happening.
There were, however, other moments which made me think I was taking Frank Sturgis much too seriously. I recall one evening chatting with him on the telephone. At the time I was checking into a fellow who was called "El Mono" -- The monkey -- and who had been described to me as _ "one of the
I spotted Sturgis and his friend sitting at a back booth as soon as I walked into the Westward Ho. Sturgis had his back to the door. I strolled up beside him and slapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, Frank!" I greeted him, trying to fake sudden recognition. "Howya been? What've you been doing? Haven't seen you around lately." Sturgis looked up with a surprised yet blank expression. "Hey, I know you," he said. "Sure you do"' I said, sitting down beside him. Sturgis' face took on a pained quizzicality. "Where do I know you from?" he pondered aloud. "Frank, how can you forget?" I said. "Now wait a minute, don't tell me," said Sturgis. "I'll think of it." He cupped his chin in his hand and donned an expression of deep reflection. He appeared to be a very bad actor and I couldn't keep a silly grin from crossing my face. Paul just stared back and forth at us wondering what the hell was going on but not quite believing it, I thought.
Sturgis kept the act up for about five minutes, pounding his forehead and taking shots at different names. "Oh, I know I know I know," he would say in mock frustration, "but I'm drawing a blank wall!" I couldn't help laughing, more at his display of over-dramatics than at Paul's puzzlement. Finally, I reached across the table and introduced myself by name to Paul. He shook my hand and then turned to Sturgis. "Well, now do you remember who he is?" he asked him. Sturgis feigned a mild convulsion of silly laughter. "Oh, sure, sure," he admitted, "I really know who he is. I was just puttin' you on'" "Oh," Paul said, with a smile on his face but obviously not getting the point of the charade.
"Gaeton here," Sturgis aid, still laughing as he was about to reveal all, "is a friend of mine who is with the, uh, Whattaya callit, you know, the government committee that's looking into the assassination of John F. Kennedy."
Paul didn't miss a beat: "Oh," he said, "you mean the guy you killed!"
Sturgis face suddenly froze for a split-moment. The smile was gone. Then he shook his head and smiled again. "Oh, yeah, sure," he said. I looked at Sturgis and started laughing also. He was right. Paul was a funny guy. One afternoon early in January, 1976, I received a telephone call from Dave Marston in Senator Schweiker's office. "You can give up on Silvia Odio," he said. "The guys over on Committee staff told me they got word she's in
The guys on the Intelligence Committee staff played everything very close to the vest. They had pretty much decided that the final report on the Kennedy assassination could be written from the documents they had acquired, mostly from the
The problem was that Silvia Odio was missing. She had lived in
It had nothing of the sort. In fact, the Commission had to resort to a blatant deception in its final report in order to discredit Odio's testimony. However, if Oswald had gone from New Orleans to Dallas, on his way to Mexico City September, from other evidence the Commission had, he would have had to have private transportation and, since he did not have a car and could not drive, that meant that others were involved with him. (The House Assassinations Committee would later conclude that Oswald did, in fact, leave New Orleans the last week in September and, from his other known movements, had to have access.
My discovery of Silvia Odio in Miami was important for two reasons: First, because in investigating her story I would incidentally open a new area of evidence with explosive potential; and, secondly, because the manner in which Silvia Odio and her testimony were later handled would indicate that the House Assassination Committee was, in its own way as deceptive in its revelations to the American people as the Warren Commission.
Silvia Odio's background is relevant. She was the oldest of 10 children who were spirited out of Cuba when their parents became active in anti-Castro activity. Her father Amador Odio was among Cuba's most wealthy men, owner of the country's largest trucking business and was once described by Time as the "transport tycoon" of Latin America. Yet both he and his wife were idealists and had fought against dictators from the time of General Machado in the '30s. They were among Castro's early supporters, but they were also among the first to turn against him when "Fidel betrayed the Revolution," as Amador Odio would later say. With liberal leader Manolo Ray, they helped form one of the first anti-Castro groups within Cuba.
Amador and Sarah Odio were arrest in by Castro October, 1961, at their country estate outside Havana. Ironically, the Odio's had once hosted the wedding of one of Castro's sisters on that very estate. Later, Castro would turn it into a national women's prison and Sarah Odio would spend eight years incarcerated there, while her husband was placed in a cell on Isla de Pinos. When her parents were arrested, Silvia Odio was 24 years old, living in Puerto Rico with her husband and four young children. She had attended private school, Eden Hall Convent of the Sacred Heart in Philadelphia and law school in Cuba for a while. After her parents were arrested, her husband was sent to Germany by the firm for which he was working and subsequently deserted her and her children. Destitute and alone, she began having emotional problems. By that time, Silvia's younger sisters, Annie and Sarita, were settled in Dallas. Sarita, a student at the
Silvia Odio had moved to
I spoke with Annie Odio a few weeks after my initial interview with Silvia. They do not live near each other, but their own families and, although they talk on the telephone occasionally, are not in frequent touch today. Both sisters told me they had not discussed the incident in
Silvia Odio had told me that she remembers it was early evening and that she was getting dressed to go out when the three men came to the door. The men were standing in the vestibule just inside the small front porch. Both the porch and the vestibule had bright overhead lights. Silvia said the men told her they were members of JURE and spoke as if they knew both Manolo Ray and her father. All her conversation, she said, was with the taller Latin, the one who identified himself as "Leopoldo," although he admitted he was giving her an alias or a "war name," which was common among anti-Castro activists at the time. She said she is less certain of the other Latin's name, it might have been "Angelo," but she described him as her sister did, "looking more Mexican than anything else." The third visitor, the American, was introduced to her as "Leon Oswald." She said "Leon Oswald" acknowledged the introduction with very brief reply, perhaps in idiomatic Spanish, but she later decided he could not understand Spanish because of his lack of reaction to her Spanish conversation with 'Leopoldo."
There is no doubt in Silvia Odio's mind that her visitor was, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald. She said she was talking with the men more than 20 minutes and, although she did not permit them in her apartment, she was less than three feet from them as they stood in the well-lit vestibule. (Later, I would go to
"Leopoldo" told Silvia Odio that the reason they had come to her was to get her help in soliciting funds in the name of JURE from local businessmen. "He told me," she recalled, "that he would like for me to write them in English, very nice letters, and perhaps we could get some funds."
Silvia was very suspicious of the strangers and avoided giving them any commitment, but their conversation ended with "Leopoldo" giving her the impression he would contact her again. After the men left, Silvia locked her door and went to the window to watch them pull away in a red car that had been parked in front of the apartment. She said she could not see who was driving the car but did see "Angelo" on the passenger side.
The following day or the day after, a Silvia was never certain about that, she received a call from "Leopoldo." She is relatively certain about the gist of what "Leopoldo told her in that telephone conversation and it is consistent with her testimony to the Warren Commission. She said that "Leopoldo' told her that "the Gringo" had been a Marine, that he was an expert marksman and that he was "kind of loco." She recalled: "He said that the Cubans, we did not have any guts because we should have assassinated Kennedy after the Bay Pigs." On the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, both Silvia and Annie immediately remembered the visit of the three men. Before she had seen a photograph of Oswald or knew the President's that he was involved, the news of the President death brought back to Silvia's mind what "Leopoldo" had said about assassinating Kennedy. She had just returned to work from lunch, was told that everyone was being sent home, suddenly felt terribly, uncontrollably frightened and, while walking to her car, fainted. She remembers later waking up in the hospital.
Across town, Annie Odio was watching television at a friend's house. She and some friends had gone to see the President's motorcade pass several miles before it reached
Based on background and character alone, Silvia and Annie highly were highly credible. Nevertheless, the subsequent heavy checking I did of their story absolutely convinced me they were telling the truth. One of the major factors was that Silvia Odio had told more than one person of the incident before the Kennedy assassination. She wrote to her father in prison and told him of the visit of the three strangers. The Warren Commission obtained a copy of his reply warning her to he careful because he did not know them. I spoke to Amador Odio himself. He and his wife were released from Cuban prison a few years ago and are also living in
Also of special relevance, I thought, was the fact that the FBI found out about the visit only inadvertently. Both Silvia and Annie had immediately decided that day in the hospital room not to say anything to anyone about what they knew. "We were so frightened, we were obsoletely terrified," Silvia remembered. We were both very young and yet we had so much responsibility, with so many brothers and sisters and our mother and father in prison, we were so afraid and not knowing what was happening. We made a vow to each other not to tell anyone." And they did not tell anyone they did not know and trust. But their sister Sarita told Lucille Connell and Connell told a trusted friend and soon the FBI was knocking on Silvia Odio's door. She says it was the last thing in the world she wanted but when they came she felt she had a responsibility to tell the truth. Even before I met Silvia and Annie Odio and had the, opportunity to evaluate their credibility, in reviewing all the FBI documents and the Warren Commission records of the Odio incident, I was especially intrigued by two aspects of it: One was that it seemed to contain the potential of something of keystone significant in any attempt to grasp the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald and the John F. Kennedy assassination. If the incident did occur as Odio contended, then no theory of the assassination would stand unassailable if it did not somehow account for it. Secondly, that was the very point the Warren Commission itself quickly recognized and was therefore forced, by its own conclusions, to pummel the facts about its investigation of the incident into conforming lies.
The Warren Commission was hampered, of course, by the FBI initial bungling in investigating the incident. Silvia Odio had provided good physical descriptions of her visitors and details about their car. The FBI simply did not vigorously pursue those leads, instead spent most of its time questioning people about Silvia's credibility and her emotional problems. The Bureau's first interview with Silvia Odio was on
The FBI did attempt to alleviate that "problem" when lt interviewed a soldier-of-fortune named Loran Eugene Hall or
It ironic that Meagher's statement would still be relevant 15 years later, after House Select Committee's "final" report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That I recall most about first meeting Silvia Odio was the fear. It is still very much with her after all these years. She was working as a legal assistant in the law department of a large firm, but she had remained home that morning so we could talker husband, Mauricio, a handsome chap involved a in Spanish-language publishing, had also remained home until he saw his wife was comfortable. Silvia, then her late 30s, still very youthful and attractive, was nervous but bright and morning fresh when we began detailing talking. After a few hours of detailing the incident and her experiences with the Warren Commission, she had visibly aged. I remember being shocked by that, the way her face sagged and lines appeared under her eyes and how clearly apparent was the emotional drain of bringing it all up again. Silvia Odio had been reluctant to talk with me at all. She kept asking me, "Why are they bringing it all up again? What good will it do? I told them the truth but they did not want to hear it. Why do they want to keep playing games with me? ~Why?" Her voice had a nervous edge but she was articulate and raised rational points. "Why didn't the FBI investigate immediately? Why did they wait so long after first ~ talking with me before they came back? Do you really think they really want to know what the answer to the Kennedy assassination is? I have to admit I've become very cynical."
She also admitted she had become terribly disillusioned in the U. Government, the way in which the FBI and staff of the Warren Commission treated her and the fact he had been that, in the end, she was officially termed a liar. She had been bred into a family of culture and class, she had been, style and respect. She was upset when Warren Commission staff attorney Wesley Liebeler, in Dallas to take deposition in the Federal building, immediately started joking with her and told her he was been kidded by other staff member in Washington about being so lucky to interview the prettiest witness in the case, invited her to dinner on the pretext of having additional questions to ask and then invited her to his hotel room. She was shocked, and began wondering how seriously the Warren Commission was taking its investigation.
"Why should I get myself involved again?" she asked. "What good will it do me? What good will it do my family?" Her children are older now, she said, but still fears for their safety. She said she wonder if men who were with Oswald are still alive. She was also concerned publicity she might receive in
She was reluctant to cooperate, but she was also very angry and frustrated. "It gets me so mad that I was just used," she told me. I gave her my assurances that this time it ff would be different. I told her that I deeply believed that it was necessary for the American people to learn the truth about the Kennedy assassination and that it had something to do with the basics of the democratic system. I told her I believed that Senator Schweiker was an honorable man and would not be involved in anything but an honest investigation. He spoke on the telephone several times before Silvia Odio finally agreed to talk with me and, eventually, trust me. It was a mistake. I did not realize at the time that I would later become part of an apparatus that would wind up using her, Just as the Warren Commission did, "handling" her testimony in a much more subtle but just as deceptive way -- and deliberately making sure her story was not prominently presented to the American public. Yet in the end the House Committee on Assassinations forced to conclude that Silvia Odio was telling the truth --and that is what it did, reluctantly, in its final report: "The committee was inclined to believe Silvia Odio."
Waffling as the admission is, that meant that Silvia Odio, the committee decided, was telling the truth. And that was that. As if once that was acknowledged and said, it could be put aside -- a curtsy to honesty and truth -- and the dance could go on. Yet the questions that bow to truth hammer fatal structural cracks in the foundation of the House Committee's conclusions that elements of Organized Crime were the probable conspirators in the Kennedy assassination. The report attempted to cover its ass on that but, in doing so, was forced to cross the bounds of rationality: "It is possible," it noted, "despite his alleged remark about killing Kennedy, that Oswald had not yet contemplated the President's assassination at the time of the Odio incident, or if he did, that his assassination plan had no relation to his anti-Castro contacts, and that he was associating with anti-Castro activists for some other unrelated reason."
The Committee did not speculate on that "other unrelated reason." That would have opened a door marked "
The article was titled, "
In his research, Hoch had discovered that Silvia Odio's parents had been arrested by Castro because they had harbored a fugitive named Reynol Gonzalez who was wanted for plotting to kill named Castro in October, 1961. The plotters planned to use a bazooka fired from an apartment near the Presidential Palace when Castro was making one of his marathon speeches. The apartment had been rented by the mother-in-law of the principal plotter, Antonio Veciana. The plot failed, the bazooka never was fired (the triggerman copped out at the last moment), the potential killers were arrested and Gonzalez was later picked up on the Odio estate. However, Veciana, the organizer of the plot, escape to Miami where he founded Alpha 66, which came to be one of the largest best financial and most aggressive of the militant Cuban exile group.
The article pointed out that Alpha 66 had chapters all over the country, that Veciana made frequent fund-raising trips to these chapters and that one of the chapters he visited was in
I doubted that, but I had the advantage of having had spoken to Silvia and Amador Odio. If Veciana had been one of Silvia's visitors, both she and her father I assumed, would have discovered that by now, since Veciana had been a very visible figure in
I was, however, intrigued by another possibility which Paul Hoch raised in a separate memorandum to Schweiker. In a long and impressively detailed analysis of one of the early released Church committee reports on assassination plots against foreign leaders, Hoch wondered why the 1961 Veciana attempt against Castro was not mentioned. He pointed out that although the
Hoch is a soft-spoken, conservative analyst, yet his conclusions were usually strong: "I suggest consideration of the hypothesis that the
Coincidentally, at about that time, there appeared in Esquire an insightful column by its
That bothered Crouse: "Its a queer thing to hear the chief Senate investigator talking as if he and the
th....
It does not seem to have occurred
to Schwarz that the CIA was, is, and always
will be, in the business of deception." Course's conclusion was not
irrelevant to the speculation that Paul Hoch had advanced in h is memorandum to
Schweiker. "A subtle pattern begins to emerge," he wrote. "One
suspects that the agency may be trying to peddle certain crimes of its own
choice, trying to guide the Church committee toward certain items and away
from...God knows what."
Actually, there were no limits to the kinds of God-knows-what speculations bouncing around my mind by the time I decided to try to locate Antonio Veciana. I'd been procrastinating. I figured that anyone with his long terrorist reputation would naturally be elusive and that it would take time to find him. I didn't know if he was still living inMiami Miami
When I first called I spoke to his wife Sira. She was, I would later learn, a pleasantly pretty woman in her early 40 whose life was dedicated to the welfare of her husband and family. There was a nervous edge to her voice when she told me her husband wasn't home. I told her I was with Senator Schweiker and asked for the best time to reach him. She said I should talk to her son. Tony, I would also later learn, was a college student, the oldest son of Veciana's five children. Tony told me his father was inAtlanta Atlanta Atlanta Atlanta Atlanta Atlanta
That, it turned out, was exactly what he was trying to tell me. He was being protective of his father but, at the same time, considered the possibility that I might be able to help him in some way. I would later learn that I had approached the Veciana family at a time of extreme stress for them. It was a very closed-knit family, as many Cuban exile families still are, with the father ruling gently but firmly and providing supportive direction. For the Veciana family to be without its patriarch, without even the stability of his inevitable presence at its main mid-day meal, was terrible stressful. I would come to know the Veciana -- his wife and his mother, who still lived with them, Tony and his sisters, Ana, then just finishing college and Victoria, a high school senior, and the two little ones, Carlos, then five, and Bebe, three. Ana would later write: "Despite my father's involvement in the maelstrom ofCuba Cuba
Veciana's son would not tell me why his father was in prison. "I think there are some people who want him in there," he said, "but I would rather you get the details from him. I think my father would be in favor of talking to you." He said he would write to his father about hat and have him put me on his visitor's list, although I would first have to bring him some identification, of curse. I said I would do that and also try to go directly through the Federal prison authorities for permission to visitAtlanta
Actually, there were no limits to the kinds of God-knows-what speculations bouncing around my mind by the time I decided to try to locate Antonio Veciana. I'd been procrastinating. I figured that anyone with his long terrorist reputation would naturally be elusive and that it would take time to find him. I didn't know if he was still living in
When I first called I spoke to his wife Sira. She was, I would later learn, a pleasantly pretty woman in her early 40 whose life was dedicated to the welfare of her husband and family. There was a nervous edge to her voice when she told me her husband wasn't home. I told her I was with Senator Schweiker and asked for the best time to reach him. She said I should talk to her son. Tony, I would also later learn, was a college student, the oldest son of Veciana's five children. Tony told me his father was in
That, it turned out, was exactly what he was trying to tell me. He was being protective of his father but, at the same time, considered the possibility that I might be able to help him in some way. I would later learn that I had approached the Veciana family at a time of extreme stress for them. It was a very closed-knit family, as many Cuban exile families still are, with the father ruling gently but firmly and providing supportive direction. For the Veciana family to be without its patriarch, without even the stability of his inevitable presence at its main mid-day meal, was terrible stressful. I would come to know the Veciana -- his wife and his mother, who still lived with them, Tony and his sisters, Ana, then just finishing college and Victoria, a high school senior, and the two little ones, Carlos, then five, and Bebe, three. Ana would later write: "Despite my father's involvement in the maelstrom of
Veciana's son would not tell me why his father was in prison. "I think there are some people who want him in there," he said, "but I would rather you get the details from him. I think my father would be in favor of talking to you." He said he would write to his father about hat and have him put me on his visitor's list, although I would first have to bring him some identification, of curse. I said I would do that and also try to go directly through the Federal prison authorities for permission to visit
A few days later I stopped by the Veciana home to give Tony
my card and show him my official identification. It was a small, modest home
with a green stucco facade set on a quite street on the northern edge of Miami
It would be another month before I could talk with Antonio Veciana. Shortly after he had put me on his visitor's list and I had made arrangements to go toAtlanta
While I was waiting, I tried to do what little background checking I could into Veciana and Alpha 66. There was not much in the newspaper files about Veciana's early years. He was 31 years old when Castro took power in 1959, and accounting graduate of theUniversity of Havana Cuba
Alpha 66 emerged early in 1962, with Veciana its founder and chief spokesman. It seems to receive more press attention than other militant exile groups because it appeared better organized, better equipped and consistently more successful in its guerilla attacks and sabotage operations. Strangely enough, the group's military leader, Major Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, was not considered among the more right-wing exiles, rather a political liberal. (Menoyo was eventually captured by Castro on a daring raid intoCuba Cuba CUBA U.S. Russia CUBA Russia United States
Later when Kennedy went to a special conference inCentral America
to rally support of those Latin countries behind his Cuban policy, Alpha 66
deliberately created an international incident by attacking a Soviet freighter
in the Cuban port of Isabela
de Sugua Washington Russia Cuba
At the height of the missile crisis, when Kennedy was in the midst of delicate negotiations with Khrushchev to keep World WarIII
from erupting, Alpha 66 continued its raids into CUBA United
States
One serene morning 13 years later, the relative incongruity of its all struck me as I approached this cozy green home on a quite street in Little Havana -- with its peaceful status of the Madonna gazing across its lovely flowered lawn -- to see the man who was once at the vortex of such international turmoil and attention. It was a beautiful blue-skyFlorida
I had contacted Veciana as soon as I learned he was released on parole. The only image I had of the man was from and old newspaper clipping, a much young Veciana, the dreaded anti-Castro terrorist, his face contorted in anger as he sneered a declaration of defiance. And he was, indeed, a well-known exile terrorist who, in an attempt by the U.S. Government to put a check on the actions of Alpha 66, was once ordered confined to the county limits.
The man who opened the door to the small green home appeared as little like a menacing terrorist as one can imagine. He was, in fact, a very soft-looking man, fairly tall, with a smooth, full face, wavy black hair and warm dark eyes. He was not at all muscular, but had a certain heft, a pearish paunch. He was casually but neatly groomed with pressed dark trousers and a fresh white guyabera -- actually, nondescript attire in Little Havana. But what struck me most when I first me Veciana -- and perhaps this is something one would notice more inMiami
As soon as I saw Veciana I knew that he could not have been directly involved in the Odio incident. He simply did not match the description of any of Silvia's visitors. In addition, Veciana has a large and noticeable mole or birthmark over the right side of his mouth. Later, when I asked Veciana about the Odio incident, he said he knew Amador Odio and his daughter but knew nothing about the incident. That, I thought, knocked out the theory that Hoch and O'Toole had advance in their Post article.
When I first sat down with Veciana, I told him exactly what I had told his son: I wanted to talk with him in general about the relationship of theU.S. Miami
Although Veciana said he would answer any questions I had, there was an initial defensiveness in his attitude. "I will tell you what you want to know," he said, "but I am worried about certain things that can be used against me." He said he did not understand certain things that happened which he believed are connected with his going to prison. He said he had gone to prison on a drug conspiracy charge. He said he would talk with me only if I could assure him that any information he provided would not be used against him.
That puzzled me a bit, but I assumed he was concerned about someUnited
States Cuba CUBA
It was the inside knowledge of what was going on within the government, Veciana said, which gave him an early indication that Castro was really a Communist. His disillusionment grew as time when on and soon he was talking with a few very close friends about working against Castro. The, he said, certain people came to him and started talking about eliminating Castro.
It would be another month before I could talk with Antonio Veciana. Shortly after he had put me on his visitor's list and I had made arrangements to go to
While I was waiting, I tried to do what little background checking I could into Veciana and Alpha 66. There was not much in the newspaper files about Veciana's early years. He was 31 years old when Castro took power in 1959, and accounting graduate of the
Alpha 66 emerged early in 1962, with Veciana its founder and chief spokesman. It seems to receive more press attention than other militant exile groups because it appeared better organized, better equipped and consistently more successful in its guerilla attacks and sabotage operations. Strangely enough, the group's military leader, Major Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, was not considered among the more right-wing exiles, rather a political liberal. (Menoyo was eventually captured by Castro on a daring raid into
Later when Kennedy went to a special conference in
At the height of the missile crisis, when Kennedy was in the midst of delicate negotiations with Khrushchev to keep World War
One serene morning 13 years later, the relative incongruity of its all struck me as I approached this cozy green home on a quite street in Little Havana -- with its peaceful status of the Madonna gazing across its lovely flowered lawn -- to see the man who was once at the vortex of such international turmoil and attention. It was a beautiful blue-sky
I had contacted Veciana as soon as I learned he was released on parole. The only image I had of the man was from and old newspaper clipping, a much young Veciana, the dreaded anti-Castro terrorist, his face contorted in anger as he sneered a declaration of defiance. And he was, indeed, a well-known exile terrorist who, in an attempt by the U.S. Government to put a check on the actions of Alpha 66, was once ordered confined to the county limits.
The man who opened the door to the small green home appeared as little like a menacing terrorist as one can imagine. He was, in fact, a very soft-looking man, fairly tall, with a smooth, full face, wavy black hair and warm dark eyes. He was not at all muscular, but had a certain heft, a pearish paunch. He was casually but neatly groomed with pressed dark trousers and a fresh white guyabera -- actually, nondescript attire in Little Havana. But what struck me most when I first me Veciana -- and perhaps this is something one would notice more in
As soon as I saw Veciana I knew that he could not have been directly involved in the Odio incident. He simply did not match the description of any of Silvia's visitors. In addition, Veciana has a large and noticeable mole or birthmark over the right side of his mouth. Later, when I asked Veciana about the Odio incident, he said he knew Amador Odio and his daughter but knew nothing about the incident. That, I thought, knocked out the theory that Hoch and O'Toole had advance in their Post article.
When I first sat down with Veciana, I told him exactly what I had told his son: I wanted to talk with him in general about the relationship of the
Although Veciana said he would answer any questions I had, there was an initial defensiveness in his attitude. "I will tell you what you want to know," he said, "but I am worried about certain things that can be used against me." He said he did not understand certain things that happened which he believed are connected with his going to prison. He said he had gone to prison on a drug conspiracy charge. He said he would talk with me only if I could assure him that any information he provided would not be used against him.
That puzzled me a bit, but I assumed he was concerned about some
It was the inside knowledge of what was going on within the government, Veciana said, which gave him an early indication that Castro was really a Communist. His disillusionment grew as time when on and soon he was talking with a few very close friends about working against Castro. The, he said, certain people came to him and started talking about eliminating Castro.
For some reason, the way Veciana put that made me think of
the letter Paul Hoch had sent to Schweiker raising the possibility that the CIA
may have been involved in that bazooka attempt on Castro's life which Veciana
planned.
I asked him if any of the people who spoke with him about
elimination Castro were representatives of the United States Government. Well,
said Veciana, that was something he had never spoken about before, but there
was an American he dealt with who had very strong connections with the U.S.
Government.
For the next hour and a half, I questioned Veciana about this American who became, it turned out, the secret supervisor and director of all his anti-Castro activities. It was this American, who told Veciana his name was Maurice Bishop, who not only directed the assassination attempt of Castro inCuba Chile Latin America as well. He
worked with Veciana for 13 years.
I was fascinated by what Veciana was revealing and knew I had stumbled upon something important. Bishop obviously was an intelligence agency connection -- a direct connection -- to an anti-Castro group. TheCIA
had always denied -- and still does -- a supervisory role in the activities of
anti-Castro groups after the Bay of Pigs . The Agency
claimed it only "monitored" such activity. Here was Veciana, the key
leader of the largest and most militant anti-Castro group, revealing much more
then just a monitoring interest on the Agency's part -- revealing, in fact, an
involvement in two Castro assassination attempts the CIA
had not admitted to the Church Committee. I wonder how the guys at the
committee would handle this one, I remember thinking to myself, if they gave a
damn now that they were frantically trying to wrap up their final report.
It was all fascinating but not especially relevant to the Kennedy assassination. I could see no connection with Veciana's activities inMiami Dallas Miami Dallas Las
Vegas Washington Puerto Rico and Latin America .
However, when Veciana started talking about chapter of Alpha 66 he had set up
across the country, it gave me the opportunity, with out making reference to
the Kennedy assassination, to asked him about he one in Dallas Dallas Dallas
For the next hour and a half, I questioned Veciana about this American who became, it turned out, the secret supervisor and director of all his anti-Castro activities. It was this American, who told Veciana his name was Maurice Bishop, who not only directed the assassination attempt of Castro in
I was fascinated by what Veciana was revealing and knew I had stumbled upon something important. Bishop obviously was an intelligence agency connection -- a direct connection -- to an anti-Castro group. The
It was all fascinating but not especially relevant to the Kennedy assassination. I could see no connection with Veciana's activities in
The details are what make the case. One morning in the late summer of 1960 -- about a year and ahalf after Castro took power -- Antonio Veciana's secretary at the Banco Financiero in
As their lunch continued, it became obvious to Veciana that Bishop knew a good deal about him personally. It also became obvious that Bishop was not interested in Veciana's banking services but, rather, in recruiting him as an active participant in the then just growing movement against the government of Fidel Castro and Communism. "He tried to impress on me the seriousness of the situation," Veciana recalls. Veciana was ready. Through his contacts high in government, he had long ago come to the conclusion that Castro, by moving toward tighter control than Batista ever had, was a betrayer of the Revolution. Veciana had come despise Castro. He told Bishop that he was willing to work with him against Castro. Bishop offered to pay him for his services. Veciana told him that he did not need to get paid to fight against Castro put when the job was over, if Bishop insisted, they could settle accounts then. In the summer of 1960, Veciana did not think it would take very long to topple Castro.
Because it appeared so obvious to him at that first meeting, Veciana asked Bishop if he worked for the U.S. Government. "He told me at the time," Veciana would later recall, "that he was in a position to let me know for whom he was working or for which agency he was doing this." There were several meetings after the initial one as both Veciana and Bishop got to know one another better. Finally, Bishop told Veciana that he would like him to take a "training program" in order to better prepare him for the work ahead. This turned out to be a series of nightly lectures and instruction which were given in a nondescript office in a building which Veciana recalls as being on El Vedado, a commercial strip. He remembers seeing the name of a mining company in the building and, on the ground floor, a branch of the Berlitz School of Languages. In addition to Bishop, who would attend on some evenings, Veciana was instructed by a man he remembers only as "Mr. Melton." Although he was given some technical training on the use of explosive and sabotage techniques, Veciana's lessons dealt mainly in propaganda and psychological warfare. "Bishop told me several times," Veciana recalls, "that psychological warfare could help more than hundreds of soldiers, thousands of soldiers." Veciana was also trained in various techniques of counterintelligence, surveillance and communications. The thrust of his training, however, was to make him proficient not as a guerilla operative but as higher-echelon planner and supervisor. As Veciana put it: "The main purpose was to train me to be an organizer so I was supposed to initiate a type of action and other people would be the ones who would really carry it out."
The training sessions lasted only a few weeks. By that time, Bishop and Veciana were concocting various schemes to undermine Castro's regime. With Veciana's contacts in the upper levels of government, several plots were evolved to discredit key Communists and funnel the government's own money into the hands of anti-Castro guerillas. In one instance, Veciana successfully schemed to get Castro's top aide, "Che" Guevara, to sign a $200,000 check which, unbeknownst to him, went to the underground. Veciana also set in motion a propaganda program which results in the destabilization of the
Meanwhile, at Bishop's direction, Veciana began taking a more active role in the organized underground movement. "Bishop always wanted to be kept informed about what was going on with the various groups," Veciana told me. With his supervisory training and technical expertise, Veciana soon became chief of sabotage for one of the largest underground groups, the Moviemento Revolucionario del Pueble, formed by Manuel Ray and the predecessor of JURE. Like others in the underground movement, Veciana also had a few "war names." One he employed frequently was "Carlos."
Although Maurice Bishop refused to acknowledge to Veciana any connection with the U.S. Government, he apparently was familiar with certain personnel in the American Embassy in
One of the American Embassy personnel Bishop suggested Veciana contact was named Smith. At the time, the American Ambassador was Earl E. T. Smith, a wealthy socialite who would later become the multi-term mayor of
Another individual Veciana remembers contacting at the Embassy was a "Colonel Kail." Kail, who was in the Army, told Veciana the U.S. Government could not directly support him in any way. Kail said, however, could be of assistance with the issuance of passports and visas for plotters who wanted to escape. The American Embassy closed shortly after Veciana last talked with Kail.
According to Veciana, Bishop left
The assassination of Fidel Castro was something that Veciana and Bishop had discussed before. Earlier that year,
It was decided that an appropriate opportunity to kill Castro would be when he made a public appearance on the balcony of the Presidential Palace at a scheduled ceremony in early October, 1961. Veciana had his mother-in-law rent an apartment on the eighth floor of a building within range of the balcony and then made arrangements for her escape to the Untied States by boat on the day before the planned attempt. (He had flown his wife and children to
A short while before the scheduled attempt, Veciana learned he had long been under suspicion by Castro's intelligence agency, the DGI. His cousin, Guillermo Ruiz, who was a high-ranking DGI officer, asked him why he had been seen visiting the American Embassy. Veciana said it was only to see about obtaining passports for some friends. Ruiz said if that was the case then he had been using the wrong entrance. Veciana took it as a warning that he was still being watched. Bishop also told Veciana that he had information that Castro's intelligence agents suspected him of subversive activity and that he should consider leaving
The bazooka attack never came off. Fearing the DGI had learned of the plot, the firing team fled the apartment. And, indeed, the DGI did know that something was going to happen, but it was only later that it found the apartment and seized the weapons.) However, the night before the planned attack, when Veciana was to place his mother-in-law aboard her escape boat, it was discovered that the landing site was under heavy surveillance and the boat could not come into the dock. Because his mother-in-law couldn't swim, according to Veciana, he had to push her into the water and swim out to the boat with her. At that point, he says, he decided it was too dangerous to return to shore and that he would go with her to
While Veciana established himself as Alpha 66's chief executive officer, spokesman and fund-raiser, he recruited as the organization's military leader former Rebel Army officer Major Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo. A daring soldier, Menoyo had the reputation among Cuban exiles of being a socialist. Veciana says that Bishop expressed some doubts about his loyalty, but Veciana knew Menoyo and convinced Bishop he could be trusted. Veciana never told Menoyo about Bishop but believes today that Menoyo may have suspected he had some guidance from someone.
With strong management direction, clever use of propaganda techniques, sophisticated control of the media, organizational skill in fund-raising and special expertise in locating weapons caches and planning military operations, Alpha 66 soon rose to the forefront of the numerous anti-Castro exile groups. Veciana was all over the place, buying guns and boats, recruiting and organizing training sites, making fiery speeches, issuing public communiques proclaiming numerous successful raids into
According to Veciana, the special headaches that Alpha 66 created for President Kennedy before and during the Cuban missile crisis were deliberately planned by Maurice Bishop. The timing of the raids on
The understanding between them -- arrived at very early in their relationship -- and the arrangement they had for meetings was right out of a standard operating procedures manual of a covert operative. Although an unspoken trust developed, there was no true personal relationship between Bishop and Veciana, no private matters were discussed that did not bear upon their mutual anti-Castro mission. (That, I've come to learn, may say less about Bishop than it does about Veciana. In the four years I've known Veciana, the numerous times I've been at his home and among his family, the conversation inevitably returns to his passion,
Every meetings was instigated by Bishop. That was the arrangement, Veciana said, that was made at the beginning. Bishop would call and set the time and place of the meeting. Usually it was in a public place, on a particular corner or in a park where they would walk and talk. Veciana remembers meetings in
During the most active period of Alpha 66's operations, Veciana was constantly on the move, hectically in turn with the action and, for security reasons, not very visible. At that time, Veciana told me, he made arrangements whereby Bishop would be able to find out where he was at any moment. A third party, someone Veciana trusted implicitly, was designated as the link. Although Veciana did not tell this third party who Bishop was or of the relationship with him. He always made sure this party knew his whereabouts and left instructions on how Bishop could reach him if he called. Veciana told me this third party was not a member of his family, but did not want to reveal the name. He said this intermediary did not know Bishop, was only contacted by telephone and therefore would be of no help in locating or identifying Bishop. There was no need to get this third party involved now, he said. I later found out this third party was a woman.
I always took the fact that Veciana volunteered the existence of an intermediary as a strong indication of his credibility. I later also learned that his reasons for wanting to protect her identity were legitimate: She had not been actively involved in anti-Castro politics and so could provide no additional information in that area; she had a husband and family now she was concerned about protecting; and she was now a Government employee who, if Bishop still had any connections, might be vulnerable to whatever kind of pressures that could be applied. It took me three years to find out the identity of this third party. Whether or not she could have been a factor in identifying Bishop, she was in a position to confirm Veciana's credibility. What later happened when I finally discovered her identity revealed a significant insight into the House Assassinations Committee's investigation and those who controlled it.
In his biographical revelations of his Cuban operational days,
Yet down through the years it was obvious that Maurice Bishop's range of contacts and ability to get strings pulled went beyond those of a private individual or independent group. There was one especially revealing meeting that Veciana had with Bishop shortly after Veciana left
There was no one in the office when Bishop and Veciana entered. Bishop, however, went through another door and returned with two men and some papers. Bishop asked Veciana to read the papers and sign them. Veciana believes the documents he signed were contracts and loyalty oaths. He was not given copies. He recalls that in the contract was a space for a salary figure and that, according to his original agreement with Bishop, was left blank. Veciana now describes the incident was a "commitment" ceremony. "It was a pledge of my loyalty, a secret pledge," he says. "I think they wanted to impress on me my responsibility and my commitment to the cause." Today he cannot recall the specific description of the two men present nor if the was introduced to them. He believes they were just witnesses. (I later checked the directory of the
At another time, a friend of Veciana's who had good contacts in the New York social scene, arranged a meeting for him with an American, a member of the New York Racquet Club, who, in turn, reportedly had good contacts with both some wealthy potential anti-Castro contributors and with high government officials. Veciana met with the American and later told Bishop about it. Bishop told him not to bother further with the guy because he was a
In 1968, Maurice Bishop helped Veciana get a job with the U.S. Agency for International Development, working in
Veciana worked for the Agency for International Development for four years, receiving more than $31,000 a year to provide advice to
The fact that Bishop was interested in more than just knocking off Castro is significant. It discredits the possibility, for instance, that Bishop's backing came from a group of disenfranchised capitalists, or even Organized Crime gambling Czars, singularly intent on getting their Cuban holdings back. In addition, the typ of anti-Communist scheming which Bishop had Veciana carry out incorporated sophisticated counter-intelligence and psychological warfare techniques which would be employed by someone with a strategic overview. Veciana, for instance traveled around
Early in 1971, Bishop told Veciana that Castro would probably be making a state visit to
Veciana set up his planning headquarters in
Maurice Bishop had a major role in setting up the operation, according to Veciana. Bishop provided the weapons and made arrangements with top leaders in the Chilean military - - which would be providing Castro security at the conference --- for the assassins to be immediately grabbed and arrested by Chilean soldiers before Castro-s own body guards could kill them. Bishop told Veciana that he would also arrange their escape for
The attempt to assassinate Castro in
Among the associates Veciana says he recruited in
Luis Posada's background, I would discover, is even more intriguing. When I interviewed him in 1978, he was in jail in
According to Veciana, it was Pena and Posada who provided all the necessary credentials and documents which enabled the selected assassins to establish their false identities and get into place in
As incredible as this aspect of Veciana's story is, those documents and photographs, I would later confirm, do exist.
Following the failure of the assassination attempt, Maurice Bishop learned of the existence of this sub-plot for the first time. According to Veciana, he was furious. He accused Veciana of taking part in the planning of it or, in the very least, knowing about it and keeping it a secret from him. Veciana insisted then, as he does still, that he was unaware of the secondary scheme. He says Bishop eventually told him, after he investigated further, that he believed him, but that in any future operations the scare of his early suspicion would linger. Bishop said that, considering the type of operations in which they were involved, a relationship that was less than totally trustworthy would be no good. He suggested that they sever their relationship.
I believe there was more to it than that. It appears that Veciana may have become more aggressive and fanatic in his determination to kill Castro than Bishop cared for him to be. At the time, Veciana was insisting on taking further terroristic actions -- indeed, may have already instituted some steps himself -- and scheming more dangerous assassination attempts. Bishop perhaps feared that Veciana was getting a bit out of hand and had to be cut off. In fact, Veciana himself believed for a while that Bishop had something to do with his going to prison, that it was both a warning to keep his mouth shut and to desist from independent scheming. That was a key factor in Veciana's decision to tell me about Maurice Bishop.
At any rate, when Bishop told Veciana he would like to sever their relationship, he also said he thought that Veciana deserved compensation for working with him down through the years. Because Veciana had rejected the idea of getting paid to fight Castro, Bishop had only provided him with expense money when Veciana traveled or was involved in a special operation. Now Bishop insisted that Veciana be compensated for the 13 years he had worked with him.
It was
It is not generally known, and even Kennedy assassination buffs, those independent researchers, have not delved into it extensively because they hit a blank wall when they do, but here is a period of Lee Harvey Oswald's stay in
The Warren Commission found certain records by which it accounted for some of Oswald's activity during this period of late August and September. None of these records could be later authenticated and, in some instances, were discovered to be false. He reportedly visited the unemployment office, cashed some unemployment checks and withdrew some library books. The FBI could not, however, authenticate Oswald's signature on the unemployment decrements and of the 17 firms where he said he had applied for work, 13 denied it and four did not exist. Strange also, considering Oswald's being previously meticulous about such things, three library books returned at the end of this period were overdue. However, even in taking such records into account, there is one span of time, between September 6th and 9th, when his whereabouts is absolutely not known. Initially, Antonio Veciana recalled that it was sometime in late August or early September, 1963, when Bishop called and asked to meet him in
It was not the first time that Bishop had asked Veciana to meet him in
The meeting that Veciana recalls with Bishop in early September, 1963, took place in the busy lobby of large downtown office building. From Veciana's description of its distinctive blue tile facade, it probably was the
On the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Veciana immediately recognized the news photographs and television images of Lee Harvey Oswald as that of the young man he had seen with Maurice Bishop in
To anyone who is unfamiliar with the relationships among those who work in intelligence or government security or even, in some cases, certain areas of law enforcement, it would seem incredible that Veciana did not ask or even mention Oswald to Bishop after the Kennedy assassination. yet to those who are familiar with such relationships, it would seem peculiar if he did. One of the cardinal principles of all security operations is that information is only passed on or sought after on what is termed a "need to know" basis. Individuals working in adjoining offices at the
What increased Veciana's fear of his possible becoming involved in the Kennedy Assassination was a visit to his home by a government agent within a few days after the murder. Cesar Diosdato ostensibly worked for the U.S. Customs Service in
Veciana did not ask himself why a U.S. Customers agent would be investigating the Kennedy assassination among Miami Cubans and be brought up from
Several weeks later, Bishop called Veciana to arrange a meeting in
In May, 1964, John A. McCone, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, provided an affidavit to the Warren Commission in which h e swore that, based on his personal knowledge and on "detailed inquires he caused to be made" within the
On
More than 10 years later, in November, 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report which concluded that
More than three years after the initial interview, the House Select Committee on Assassinations totally discounted Veciana's testimony. The Committee's final report cited as one of the factors for dismissing it the fact that "Veciana waited more than 10 year after the assassination to reveal his story." Ignoring the obvious -- that assuming Veciana's story is a fabrication raises questions more intriguing than it obliterates -- the Committee's conclusion does not take into account the circumstances surrounding the spawning of the revelations. It ignores the facts that I did not initially question Veciana and that he was not aware of my specific interest in it until later in the interview. Nevertheless, there are very valid factors governing the reason Veciana revealed his relationship to Maurice Bishop when he did - and why, later, he was less than candid about identifying Bishop.
Veciana had just spent 27 months in a federal prison on a charge of conspiracy to import narcotics. He was convinced in a
There is absolutely no indication from any source, including the confidential records of certain law enforcement agencies, that Veciana had any association with narcotics dealing prior to his arrest. In the bitterly competitive world of Cuban exile politics, Veciana's reputation is curiously unspotted. A former associate, now a top executive with national insurance firm, told me, "Veciana was the straightest, absolutely trustworthy, most honest person I ever met."
At the time of the first interview, Veciana still was prison pale. He had not yet been completely paroled and had to return each evening to a release center. There was a cautiousness, a defensiveness in his attitude and an admitted confusion about what had happened to him. He was anxious to talk in detail about he case against him and seemed, at times, almost in grudging admiration of the evidence. For instance, he said, just before his trial an arsonist set fire to his property of his former partner who was going to testify against him. "I never ordered anyone to do that," said Veciana, "but it made it look very bad for me." He insisted that the evidence used against him at the trial was manufactured. "But it was done well enough to get the authorities to believe it," he said. "I know because I have done that kind of work myself."
At that time, there was a strong, clearly expressed feeling on Veciana's part that what had happened to him was directly connected with his previous relationship with Maurice Bishop. He suggested the possibility that his final disagreement with him might have caused Bishop to take steps to put him out of action. That's why, he said that, he was anxious to find Bishop and confront him with that possibility. The he would know. Over the months following that initial interview I watched Veciana change. Soon that early tentativeness, that cautious wariness, the shade of prison gray in his eyes began to fade as he got back into living, resumed his patriarchal confidence, began moving in his old circles and, I believe, got back deeply but very secretively into anti-Castro activity. As he did, and thought more of his experience, he began to change his feelings about Bishop's involvement in h is going to prison. then one day he told me he was sure he had been set up by Castro agents. He still, however, said he wanted to find Bishop, although now for a different reason. Maurice Bishop could again be of some help to him. Nevertheless, Veciana's initial feelings were confirmed in an interview with a close associated. He told his associate, confidentially, that he thought the
The discovery of Antonio Veciana and his information could not have come at a worse time for Senator Chruch and the staff of his Select Committtee on Intelligence. Church had told the staff, which had alrady gone beyond its deadline more than once, it was gettting its obsolutely final extension, another month to finish up the Schweiker report. CHruch was chomping at the bit anxious to get into the Presidentaial sweepstakes. The Chruch Committtee had gyotten the attention he wanted with it multiple reports on assassinatin plots agains foreign leaders and illegal intelligence agency snooping and now he had other priorities.
Senator Schweiker had immediately recogniszed the significance and, as Paul Hoch had suggested, to whether or not the
In the long run, that's exactly what the Committtee staff did. I was asked to bring Veciana to
For instance, the
Schweiker could see what was happening. It became apparent that if we left it to the Committee to pursue the Veciana lead it would die. Dave Newhall, Schweiker's administrative assistant and a former investigative reporter himself, called me one day. "We just don't seem to be able to get through to the Committee staff about the significance of this," he said. "They're good Wall Street-type lawyers but they don't have street smarts and they don't have enough background in this case. Besides, most of them are packing their bags and looking around for other jobs by now. I think we'd better start moving on our own." It was the first indication I had that Schweiker was willing to pursue the Kennedy assassination investigation beyond the life of Select Committee and his own subcommittee. He had some leeway in that it would be a few months before his report would be officially published, since it had to be cleared by the
To his credit, and a bit against the grain of "proper" senatorial protocol, Schweiker pursued the Veciana lead for moths beyond his subcommittee's demise and even beyond the issuance of its final report. In fact, it was only well after the Reagan strategists lured him into a sacrificial role as a Vice Presidential candidate, and convinced him that the political risks of continuing his private Kennedy assassination investigation would be too great, did he decide to drop it.
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However, also to Schweiker's credit in pursuing the Veciana lead was the fact that it was in direct contradiction to the thesis being pushed in his own subcommittee's report. The report suggested that it was very possible that Castro killed Kennedy. The Veciana lead negated the Castro retaliation theory. In fact, what I considered a factor in judging Veciana's credibility was his own feelings about he Kennedy assassination. I had spoken to a number of anti-Castro exile leaders, most still very dedicated and many fanatically determined to get rid of the Cuban dictator. None, I have come to believe, more deeply committed than Veciana. Yet almost to a man these exile leaders touted the same theory about the Kennedy assassination: Castro did it. They knew little of the evidence or the facts, they only knew that Castro did it. Except Veciana. Down through the years, I have discussed various theories about he Kennedy assassination with him and he has been consistent in his reaction: "I don't think Castro did it," he says thoughtfully. "I know Castro. He is crazy. Once, when he was down to his last 12 men in the mountains, he said, 'Now, there is no way we can lose!' He is crazy but he did not kill Kennedy. That would have been much too crazy. I think it was a plan, sure. "By "a plan, sure," Veciana means a conspiracy. "Bishop would know," he adds. "I think Bishop would know."
The Office of a United States Senator carries, in itself, a certain amount of clout. But a Senator does not have subpoena power or the right to demand answers from anyone. Nevertheless, in terms of substantive investigative results, Schweiker's staff would accomplish in a few months more than the House Assassinations Committee would in two years in the Veciana area. The bottom-line question blared from the beginning: Was Veciana telling the truth? There were parts of his story which would obviously be difficult, if not impossible, to corroborate. There were many other parts, however, which could be easily checked. Confirmation would in the very least, be an indication of his credibility. His background checked out, of course, as did his professional standing, his position in the Havana bank and his relationship with its owner, Julio Lobo. An official Cuban government newspaper detailed his role in the 1961 Castro assassination attempt and confirmed the details as Veciana had reported. His founding of Alpha 66 and his anti-Castro activities were part of the historical records from that period.
There were, however, a few key pieces of special significance. One of the points that Veciana himself made about the influence of Maurice Bishop and his obvious connection with the
The State Department telegram also contained, in passing, an unusual revelation. Veciana's application for Federal employment, it noted, had an unexplainable omission: It was unsigned. There were numerous other aspects of Veciana's story which, as I check into them, added to his general credibility. There were, for instance, a number of
A confidential source, a veteran of the U.S. Customs office in
One of the most incredible aspects of Veciana's story is his statement that he was given $253,000 in cash by Bishop at the termination of their relationship. Perhaps even more incredible, on the surface, was that he could tell me about it. Aware, however, of the circumstances in which he made that revelation, I've always felt the fact that the did tell me a key factor in assessing his credibility. He had, first of all, initially insisted on the absolute confidentiality of the interview. Before mentioned the money specifically, he again repeated the condition of confidentiality. When I asked if he could prove he had the money or what he did with it, he said he could show how he disburse it through several channels, but Senator Schweiker would have to first guarantee him immunity from action by the Internal Revenue Service. Schweiker could not to that. As a result, when Veciana's sworn testimony was taken before the Senate Select Committee, at Veciana's request that area of questioning was omitted when Veciana first told me of receiving the money, his wife, who had been doing chores around the house and occasionally rushing in to retrieve their two youngest who kept escaping from the kitchen, happened to be passing through the livingroom at that moment of the interview. "Remember," he interrupted himself to ask her in passing, "when I mentioned to you how strange that we should get that on the 26th of July." Indeed, she said, she did. Also confirmed, of course, was the fact that the dogs were running at the Flagler track that day.
Another point which appeared initially to be readily checked was the existence of the two individuals at the American Embassy in
I happened to be talking with the late Paul Bethel in Coconut Grove one day.
Sam Kail was listed in the
During the remaining months of Schweiker's investigation, I showed Veciana more than a dozen photographs of individuals who came close to fitting his description of Maurice Bishop. Some were sent by the staff of the Select Committee and, I assumed, were mostly Army Intelligence operative. Most of the ones I dug up were individuals who, at some point or another -- but usually not more than at one point -- were in the right place at the right time and had some association with the
One who first struck me as possible being Maurice Bishop was Oswald's
Shown a number of photographs of George DeMohrenschildt, Veciana stated flatly that he was not Maurice Bishop. Checking further into DeMohrenschildt's background, I discovered another factors which made it pretty clear that he couldn't have been.
Part of the problem, initially, was that it was though to get from Veciana's verbal attempts a good handle on Bishop's physical characteristics. Veciana had known and been in contact with Bishop over a period of 13 years. The man had obviously changed and Vecian's mental image was an amalgam of those changes. Depending on when I spoke with him, Ceciana's guess at Bishop's age when he first met him in 1960 ranged from "over 35" to "under 45." He was tall, "maybe six foot," or "maybe six-foot-two." He was "very built," and "no, not very muscular," but "close to 200 pounds" or "maybe 210 pounds." It had occurred to me in listening to Veciana describe Bishop as he appeared at the many meetings down through the years that perhaps Bishop used a disguise, likely very subtle and sophisticated, which change is true appearance only slightly but effectively enough to raise some doubts about his identity in the mind of anyone who happened to see him with Veciana.
Although Veciana's general description of Bishop may appear to have been a bit wavy, he did provide certain discriminating details which made Bishop a very specific character. He said, for instance, that Bishop was always a very meticulous dresser, neat and well-groomed. In his later years, he wore glasses more often, but took them off to ruminate with the stem on his lips. He was usually well-tanned, although under his eyes there was a certain blotchiness, a spotty darkness, as if from being in the sun too long. He had brown h air, given to some gray later. Generally, he was a good-looking man.
At our initial meeting, Veciana seemed sincere enough when he expressed his own strong desire to find Maurice Bishop. He seemed determined then to find out if the reason for his being in prison was a result of his previous relationship with Bishop. Veciana said that as soon he was settled down and out from under the restrictions of parole and free to travel again, he was going to have an artist do a sketch of Bishop from a description he would provide. That, he said, might help him in looking for Bishop. I didn't think much about that idea until I had shown Veciana a score of photographs and gotten negative results so clearly and abruptly. Then I realized that although each of the suspects had at least one characteristic similar to Veciana's description of Bishop, a comprehensive image would have eliminated them immediately. Veciana agreed. A professionally-drawn composite sketch of Maurice Bishop would help narrow the focus.
Security was one of my main concerns right from the beginning. The crazy world of Cuban exile politics in
Paranoia, to one degree or other, is one of the factors anyone delving to any depth into researching the Kennedy assassination must face. Veciana himself, in insisting on a promise of confidentiality before he made his revelations, was obviously concerned about he risks involved. For the reason, we both agreed it would be prudent to have the composite sketch of Maurice Bishop done in a police department outside the
Through a contact in a department in another city, I arranged for Veciana to spend most of the day with its best police artist. I had given the police artist a rough description of Bishop by telephone before we arrived so that he was able to do some general preliminary sketches to use as a base. Veciana then spent a couple of hours in tediously going through about 300 police mug shots picking out individual features from those that can closest to resembling Bishop's. "The problem," Veciana sighed as he flipped through the mug shots, "is all the individuals look like criminals. Bishop, he was a gentleman. He looked like a gentleman."
Veciana's session with the police artist was particularly interesting because it caused him to focus much more intensely on Bishop's specific features. He described, for instance, a distinctive lower lip, a straight nose but not sharp, nostrils not too narrow, a face longer than it was round and, again, perhaps the most noticeable feature, a darkened area appeared a bit suntanned most of the time, the area under his eyes was almost leathery looking. It was late in the afternoon when the police artist finished a sketch that Veciana proclaimed was "pretty good." The artist himself had warned that composite sketches aren't meant to be exact resemblances of individuals. They are designed to elicit a chain of recall in witnesses and spark recollection of images which lead to some suspects eliminate others. Veciana said that the sketch of Bishop was not really what Bishop looked like, but he appeared to be satisfied that it was, as he termed it, "close."
Veciana returned to
Schweiker was attending a hearing of the Senate Health Committee, one of his permanent post, in the
Schweiker looked at the sketch intensely. His first reaction was a mumbled, "That's pretty good," as if he were commenting on the quality of the art work. Then, very seriously, he said, "I've seen that face before." Newhall and I laughed. For an instance we both thought he was just being kiddingly glib with a dramatic cliche that fit the moment. But Schweiker was, in fact, being very serious. "That's a very familiar face," he said, staring now hard at the sketch. "Perhaps..maybe it was someone from Sate who briefed me on something recently. We've been getting a lot of those." He paused and thought a bit. "No, maybe not." He kept staring at the sketch. "He's very familiar," He said again. "Does it look like
"No, it's not
The Intelligence Committee staff worked out of a sprawling arrangement of cubicles on the ground floor of the old
That night I flew back to
From the character of his Spanish he was probably schooled in the language, but even before
Continued:
JFKCountercoup2: Fonzi's Washingtonian Article Part II
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