“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.
That week, in the summer of 1978, there was a heat wave and the temperature had
climbed to 106 degrees. I could see the city's fever shimmering from the gray
macadam, feel its stifling thickness against my skin. I waited on the south
curb on Elm Street for a
break in the traffic and then moved out into the center lane. The street is not
as wide as it appears in photographs. Right about ...here. I stopped on the
spot. I had studied it in both the films and the still photos. I knew it. Right
here. Above me rose the dark shadows of the trees and heavy foliage of the
grassy knoll. I saw only a stillness there now, a breezeless serenity. On my
right loomed the familiar red brick building, flat, insistent, hard-edged, its
rows of sooted windows now innocuous and dull. In my mind, I dropped into a
well of time and fell against the micro-instant of history. It suddenly struck
me: Here was where a man was killed. It was such a simple, clarifying thought.
Right here, in an explosively horrible and bloody moment, a man's life ended.
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 in Dealey
Plaza, on the spot where President
John F. Kennedy was killed on 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?
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
that summer of 1978, on a very hot day in Dallas,
and could not help thinking that perhaps -- just perhaps -- the powers that
controlled the Assassinations Committee would not have gone so far astray in
their purpose had they remembered that micro-instant of time when a man's life
ended here.
On the Tuesday morning on July 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 in Dealey Plaza
when Kennedy was shot, concluded that more than one rifle had been fired. As
the final report put it: "Scientific acoustical evidence established a
high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy."
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 Cornell
University's Organized Crime
Institute when he was asked to take the reins of the Assassinations Committee.
(His appointment followed the debacle which brought about forced resignation of
his predecessor, Philadelphia's
Richard Sprague.) Blakey had been with the Justice Department under Robert
Kennedy, and his subsequent career was focused on Organized Crime -- that
nebulous entity which somehow was achieved capitalized status over the years.
He was considered one of the top Organized Crime experts in the country, was
regularly called to testify as an "expert witness" in that area, and
was a fixture at the numerous Organized Crime seminars held periodically by law
enforcement interests. He also had personal contacts in most Federal agencies
and in the Organized Crime sections of almost every major police department in
the nation.
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 Kansas City,
Cornwell had achieved notable trial victories against key Midwest Mafia
bigwigs.
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 New York cop named Ralph
Salerno. For years Salerno has
earned a good living lecturing, writing books and appearing on radio and
television shows as the capo de tutti capi of Organized Crime experts. And
there were a number of other lawyers and researchers Blakey specifically chose
for their background in criminal law and Organized Crime. The Assassinations
Committee was well stacked, in other words, to find an Organized Crime
conspiracy in the John F. Kennedy assassination.
There is substance and there is the illusion of substance. In Washington,
it is often difficult to tell the difference. Chief Counsel Blakey was an
experienced Hill man. He had worked not only at Justice but also with previous
Congressional committees. He knew exactly what the priorities of his job were
by Washington standards, even
before he stepped in. The first priority, he announced in his inaugural address
to the staff, was to produce a report. The second priority was to produce a
report that looked good, one that appeared to be definitive and substantial.
Somewhere along the line there would be an effort at conducting a limited
investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
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 Billings
would insure that the report was expertly constructed.
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 New Orleans
and Santos Trafficante of Florida. (Lee Harvey Oswald's uncle, the Committee
discovered, was a numbers runner for the Marcello organization; and Jack Ruby
may have had some contact with Trafficante in 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 in Washington -- cover
its ass.
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 Gary and say, 'Hey,
O.K, that's funny. Now com'on, give me the real report!'"
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 Delancey
Street in Philadelphia,
it was late in 1964, and what Vincent Salandria was telling me that day I will
never forget was that the Warren Commission report was not the truth.
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, Philadelphia's
local law daily. Salandria was then 38-year-old Penn Law grad and ACLU consultant.
He critique was a highly detailed analysis of the report's findings concerning
the trajectories and ballistics of the bullets which killed President Kennedy.
The first time I read Salandria's article, I didn't understand it. It was
complex and technical. But I did grasp the sensational implication of
Salandria's contentions: There was a possibility that the Warren Commission
report was wrong.
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 Smolensk or Minsk
or Moscow, no American would have
believed the story that was evolving about a single assassin, with all its
built-in contradictions. But because it happened in Dallas,
too many Americans were accepting it."
Salandria began an intense watch of the Warren Commission's activities. He
spent his vacations in Dallas to
familiarize himself with the murder scene. He ordered the Commission's report
and it’s accompanying 26 volumes of evidence as soon as they were issued and
plunged into a page-by-page study.
"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.
I had left Philadelphia to live in Florida
and, by late 1975, when I first began working as a government investigator on
the Kennedy assassination, I had not seen or spoken with Vince Salandria for a
number of years. He had, for some reason, faded into the background among
Warren Commission critics.
I returned to Philadelphia because
I wanted to draw upon Salandria's vast knowledge of the evidence and get his
opinion about the most fruitful areas of investigation. Salandria was most
cordial, said he would be glad to help and we spent a long winter Sunday talking.
Yet in his attitude I sense a certain balking, a feeling of disappointment in
what I was about to begin. Eventually, he explained it and why he was no longer
actively involved in pursuing an investigation of the assassination. It gave me
a surprising insight into how far Salandria's thinking had evolved.
"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 Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and
openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to
hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy
wanted the message clear: 'We are in control and no one -- not the President,
nor Congress, nor any elected official -- no one can do anything about it.' It
was a message to the people that their government was powerless. And the people
eventually got the message. Consider what has happened since the Kennedy
assassination. People see government today as unresponsive to their needs, yet
the budget and power of the military and intelligence establishment have
increased tremendously.
"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 Miami
that evening, I sat in the dark plane and had an eerie sense of deja vu. As
when I first spoke with him, I didn't quite grasp exactly what he was talking
about, but had the uneasy feeling he was advancing some awesomely frightening
theories. It crossed my mind that, perhaps this time for sure, Salandria was
crazy.
That was late November, 1975. A few weeks earlier, I had received a call at my
home in Miami from U.S. Senator
Richard S. Schweiker. I had never met Schweiker but, while working for
Philadelphia Magazine, I had spoke with his administrative assistant, Dave
Newhall, a few times over the years. Newhall, a former Philadelphia Bulletin
reporter, was familiar with any early interest in the Kennedy assassination and
thought I might help Schweiker check out some leads on the case related to Miami's
Cuban exile community.
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 CIA,
Army Intelligence and the National Security Agency were involved in domestic
snooping and how the intelligence agencies had planned assassination attempts
on foreign leaders. For Schweiker, despite his long stints in both houses of
Congress, these were eye-opening revelations. "I've learned more about the
inner workings of government in the past nine months than in my 15 previous
years in Congress," he later told a reporter.
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 United States
Government officials -- specifically, CIA
agents -- had made alliances with the Mafia and other members of Organized
Crime in planning assassination, Schweiker was traumatically shaken. "That
was so repugnant and shocking to me that I did a backflip on any number of
things," he later recalled.
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 CIA Director Allen Dulles was aware of CIA assassination plots against Cuban Premier
Fidel Castro and yet withheld that information from his fellow members on the Warren Commission. The significance of that for
Schweiker was enlarged when he came across an old Associated Press story which
indicated that Castro had told a reporter just several weeks before Kennedy's
assassination that if the United States tried to eliminate Cuban leader, then
the U.S. leaders themselves would be in danger. "Nobody paid any attention
then because nobody knew we were trying to kill Castro," Schweiker later
said. "But that statement had to have meaning, particularly to Allen
Dulles." Schweiker thought Dulles's failure to tell the Warren Commission of the Castro plots was "a
cover-up of sensational proportions."
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 CIA Director Dulles to inform the
Warren Commission of U.S. Attempts on Castro's life. He also revealed a
testimony that the FBI destroyed and suppressed evidence about its association
with Oswald. And he noted with true shock that a transcript of a previous
"Top Secret" warren Commission session revealed that Allen Dulles
bluntly told his fellow members that J. Edgar Hoover would probably lie if
called to testify.
Schweiker felt the Church Committee could, in keeping within its mandate,
initially focus on the role of U.S.
intelligence agencies in investigating the assassination. "We don't know
what happened," Schweiker concluded from his detailed study of the case,
"but we do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look
with him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence."
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 CIA, the FBI
and all the military intelligence agencies, it was also directed to delve into
"the nature and extent of which Federal agencies cooperate and exchange
intelligence information," the need for improved oversight, whether
existing laws governing intelligence activities were adequate and "the
extent and necessity of overt and covert intelligence activities," among
other things.
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 Philadelphia)
as his point man. Marston took it upon himself to become an instant expert in
the details of the Kennedy assassination, immersing himself in national
Archives files, guiding Schweiker to what appeared to be the most fruitful
areas of investigation and serving as liaison with the independent researchers
and Warren Commission critics who had suddenly deluged Schweiker with offers to
help. A few office staffers were also assigned to devote the bulk of their
energy to the Kennedy case, including handling all the kooks and spooks who had
started wandering into the office.
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 Washington,
no one was doing any original probing. Instead, the staffers spent most of
their time working with the CIA and the FBI,
the very agencies that were suspect of violating their operating charter and
engaging in illegal activities. The CIA was
especially cooperative with Church. "they were almost anxious to show us
everything they had, just so they could prove they had nothing," one
staffer later reported. (An interesting point: Although the CIA
admitted withholding information from the Warren Commission the officer assigned
to guide the Senate probers through the Agency's files was the very one who had
performed the same chore for the Warren Commission.) At any rate, Schweiker was
bothered by the approach and, despite the mandate, limited time allowed him
felt that he had to dig into the substance of the case if there was going to be
a break.
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 CIA
assassination plots against him, Schweiker wasn't ready to rule out another
possibilities. The Subcommittee staff was obviously concentrating on the
retaliation theory because, from the pragmatic viewpoint of its paper investigation,
it was the easiest one to neatly structure into a report within the time
limitations. Yet Schweiker was personally struck by what he termed "the
fingerprints of intelligence" an Oswald's activities before the
assassination, as well as Oswald's associations with anti-Castro Cubans. So
while his Subcommittee staff was heading down one road, Schweiker wanted the
opposite and also checked out.
Finally, there was this factor: Although Kennedy was murdered in Dallas,
a vast amount of information about the case is associate with a city 1300 miles
away. Within hours of the assassination itself, a rush of leads and tips
related to Miami suddenly popped up. Similarly, as word of Schweiker's interest
in the assassination spread, he was flooded with suggestions of a Miami
connection. In fact, he decided that if there were a relationship between the
Kennedy assassination and Castro elements -- either pro-Castro or anti-Castro
-- or one of the intelligence agencies, Miami was the place to look for the key
clues. Then, when he began receiving some specific tips about such a
relationship, Schweiker decided he could use a man on the street in Miami's
Little Havana.
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 Biscayne Bay and
the Atlantic Ocean; to the south are the sultry Florida
Keys, linked to civilization by a single road and one water
pipeline; to the west is the endless sea of sawgrass called the Everglades,
one of the country's largest, most primitive natural preserves.
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 January 1st, 1959,
came the deluge. The seizure of power by Fidel Castro wrought as profound a
change in the destiny of Miami as it did in the future of Cuba. At firs, the
flow of exiles into the city was a slow stream moving through Miami's
International Airport, then as it became more and more apparent that the
ranting barbudo was taking his country toward Communism, the stream became a
torrent.
"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 CIA had stepped up its
activities within the country tremendously. It had not only increased the
number of personnel operating out of the Embassy itself, but it began to put
covert operatives in place as businessmen, ranchers, engineers and journalists,
amount other covers, in order to recruit and establish liaison with anti-Castro
dissidents. As counter- revolutionary groups began to form within Cuba, and
Agency also began supplying arms and communications equipment and, for those
subversives threatened with exposure, help in escaping. Among the key Castro
defectors the Agency helped get out of Cuba
where its two top Air Force officers, Pedro and Marcos Diaz-Lanz. The CIA's
liaison in that operation was a former Cuban police official named Bernard
Barker, later to gain notoriety as a Watergate burglar. Working with Pedro
Diaz-Lanz as Air Force chief of security, and shortly after also departing Cuba
secretly, was a former Philadelphian named Frank Fiorini who, later as Frank
Sturgis, was also in the Watergate burglary team.
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 Miami
grew, so did the presence of the CIA.
Although 18 government agencies dealt with handling exile reception, the CIA
had its contacts into every one, including the mother agency, the Cuban
Refugee Center.
It also used the Immigration and Naturalization Service to set up and maintain
a massive debriefing facility at the Opa-Locka air base in northern Dade
County. More importantly, however,
the Agency began assigning case agents and keeping tabs on the multitude of
anti-Castro groups which and begun spreading through the exile community like
mangrove roots. At one point, the Agency had a list of almost 700 such groups,
some of which had begun active military operations with CIA
support. One veteran recalls that the infiltration and exfiltration boat
traffic on Biscayne Bay got so heavy "you needed a traffic cop." It
confused the U.S. Coast Guard, which didn't always know whether it was chasing
a 'sponsored operation" financed by the CIA
or just a bunch of "crazy Cubans."
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 Panama
to serve as cadre for bands of guerrillas recruited within or infiltrated into Cuba.
However, by the time the plan moved through the Agency's bureaucracy and, was
adopted and natured by its covert operations chief -- a lanky,
stopped-shouldered, brilliantly manipulative, Groton- Yale aristocrat named
Richard Bissell -- it had gotten blown up to a major project. The plan
President Dwight Eisenhower approved in March, 1960, called for a
"unified" and a large paramilitary force. Named White House project
officer was the plan's most enthusiastic supporter, Vice President Richard
Nixon.
Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee was to discover, from files
voluntarily given to it by the CIA, that a
select few of the Agency's top officers -- including Richard Bissell -- had in
the spring of 1960 begun setting in motion, as an adjunct to the Bay of Pigs
operation, plans to assassinate Castro. The CIA
told the Committee that it was involved in nine Castro assassination plots in
all, including those with the Mafia. Castro himself later produced a detailed
list of 24 plots against his life involving the CIA.
What's significant is that both the CIA and
Castro agree on when the plans began.
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, CIA
Director Allen Dulles and his covert plans deputy Richard Bissell had flown to
the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach and sold their new boss on the efficacy of a
Cuban operation. They did not tell him that the plans had recently been
upgraded within the Agency to include an even large paramilitary force and air
strikes. That decision, Bissell would later admit, was "internal."
In his recent excellent book on the subject, Peter Wyden wrote: "No
notable event in recent United States
history remains as unexplained and puzzling as the Central Intelligence
Agency's adventure that became know as 'the Bay of Pigs.'
"...the Bay of Pigs is more than a skeleton in the
nation's historical closet; more than the first blemish on the magic of the
Kennedy name and reputation; more than the collapse of the largest secret
operation in U.S.
history. It is a watershed.
"In the CIA, acting out of control and
independently, had not escalated its plans against Fidel Castro from modest
guerrilla operation into a full-fledged invasion, President Kennedy would have
suffered no humiliating, almost grotesque defeat.
"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 CIA
Director William E. Colby, pushed the world 'as close to Armageddon' as it has
ever come.
"And it the reasons for the collapse at the Bay of Pigs had not been
covered up...the CIA might perhaps have been
curbed, and the country could have been spared the intelligence scandals of the
1970s, the revelations of a government agency routinely, daily, committing
unconstitutional acts against its own citizens in its own country."
Wyden misses one significant observation: What the Bay of Pigs plan provided
was the historic opportunity for the CIA to
begin domestic field operations on an unprecedented scale. Some aspects of
those operations were of questionable legality. For instance, although the main
Cuban exile brigade was trained at a secret base in Guatemala,
other special units were prepared within the United
States by both military and CIA
personnel. That, however, was relatively minor compare with the overwhelming
dimensions to which the CIA's presence in Miami
grew. The Agency's officers, contract agents, informants and contacts reached
into almost every area of the community. And as pervasive as that presence was
before the Bay of Pigs, it was to be but a foothold for
later, larger operations. Nevertheless, it was the preparation of the Bay
of Pigs invasion which gave birth to a special relationship
between CIA operatives and the Cuban exiles.
That relationship would eventually intensify into a mutuality of interests
which, as it later became apparent, transcended even Presidential directives
and official United States
policy.
One of the factors that led the Central Intelligence Agency to believe it could
topple Castro was the success it had enjoyed in Guatemala
in 1954. Using a force of only 150 exiles and a handful of World War II P-47
fighters flow by American contract pilots, the CIA
brought down the Communist-leaning Guatemalan government in less than a week,
firing hardly a shot, and installed the Agency's hand-picked leader, Castillo
Armas. When covert operations boss Richard Bissell was selecting Agency
personnel to run the Bay of Pigs scheme, he told them
that the plan was based on "the Guatemala
scenario."
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 Miami
was a dapper, pipe-smoking Ivy Leaguer (Brown, '40) and prolific author of spy
thrillers named E. Howard Hunt. Among Agency personnel, Hunt had -- and still
does have -- a curious reputation. To some he is the caricature of the Hollywood
spy -- indeed, Hunt did serve a stint as a Hollywood
script writer -- given to overplaying the cloak and dagger role. One of the
more earnest of the Agency professionals liked to say that Hunt was consistent
in his judgment: "always wrong." Yet down through the years and right
up through the Watergate fiasco, Hunt was inevitable chosen to be on the front
lines of dirty trick operations,. Despite the fact there appeared to be so many
ostensible failures among those operations, Hunts star continually rose. He
also remained strangely close to the one man whose markedly unflamboyant
character seemed in such contrast to his, the one deemed the shrewdest and most
coldly professional of all Agency bosses: Richard Helms.
It didn't take long for E. Howard Hunt to inject himself into the labyrinthine
world of Cuban exile politics in Miami.
With his faithful sidekick, Bernard Barker, Hunt set up a series of 'safe"
houses for Clandestine meetings, moved through the shadows of Little Havana and
doled out packets of money from dark doorways. (Hunt carried as much as
$115,000 in his briefcase.) Although Hunt attempted to keep 2 separate identity
("Just call me 'Eduardo,'" he told the Cubans) and the source of the
funds a mystery, the exiles soon began referring to their benefactors as "Uncle
Sam."
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 Bay of Pigs
invasion was his selection of the military brigade's political leader, a fiery
physician-tuned-politician named Manuel Artime. Flamboyant had effective,
Artime helped stop a political insurrection at the exile training camp. Years
later, he would become wealthy as a business partner of former Nicaragua
dictator Luis Somoza. His relationship with Howard Hunt would grow into a
extremely close friendship. They bought homes across the street from each other
in Miami Shores
and Hunt served as the godfather for one of Artime's children. (In 1975, an
informant called the office of Senator Richard Schweiker and said that a friend
of Artime's in Mexico City claimed
that Artime had "guilty knowledge" of the Kennedy assassination.
Artime, moving in and out of the country on business, was unable to be
contacted before Schweiker's mandate expired. Later, the House Assassinations
Committee contacted Artime and planned to take his sworn statement. Suddenly,
Artime went into the hospital and was told he had cancer. Two weeks later,
Artime died. He was 45.)
Another major contribution Hunt made to the Bay of Pigs
operation was his help in selecting an old friend from the Guatemala
scenario for an extremely important Agency role. Pulled from his post as a
covert operative in Havana was a
tall, articulate, charmingly diffident counterintelligence expert named David
Atlee Phillips. It was Phillips' enormous and primary task to create the Big
Lie. As head of the Agency's "propaganda shop" for the invasion,
Phillips had to bend the ranting of the exile groups into an effective
symphony, set up broadcast stations that would rally guerrillas with Cuba
to join the invaders, and establish communications links that would provide
secret codes to trigger the actual invasion. Most of all, it was Phillips' job
to create the impression to the world that the invasion was all a spontaneous
action by anti-Castro forces and that neither the United
States nor the CIA
had anything to do with it. Phillips obviously had to be ingenious.
Later, there would be many an autopsy done on the Bay of Pigs
operation and many valid conclusion reached about why it was such a dismal
failure. One of the major reasons, however, had to be the fact that the most
ambitious clandestine project ever concocted and supervised by the world's most
technically proficient experts in deception and secrecy was, in the end,
anything but a secret. Just nine days before the invasion, a New York Times
reporter in Miami wrote: "Men come and go quietly on their secret missions
of sabotage and gun- running into Cuba, while others assemble at staging points
here to be flown at night to military camps in Guatemala and Louisiana. Since a
mobilization order was issued ten days ago...contingents of men have been
leaving here nightly for the camps of the new revolutionary army. They will be
followed next week by professional men and intellectual who are to be
concentrated at an undisclosed spot in the Caribbean
area to prepare to serve as military government officials if the
revolutionaries gain a foothold on Cuban soil." The next day, Castro must
have at least glanced at the story before checking the sports news.
President Kennedy told the world that he assumed "sole
responsibility" for the Bay of Pigs. Privately, he
turned to his special counsel, Theodore Sorensen, and asked: "How could I
have been so stupid to let them to ahead?" Yet many in the top echelon of CIA
officers involved in planning the Bay of Pigs did,
indeed, feel strongly that Kennedy was responsible of its failure. There would
have been no slaughter of the exiles, no 1200 brave man captured, if Kennedy
had not at the last moment rejected the proposal of massive air support. That
was the word that filtered down to the field operatives, the Cuban exile
community and the remnants of the invasion Brigade. It produced an incredible
bitterness on every level. The military leader of the Brigade, Pepe San Roman,
captured and imprisoned by Castro, later revealed the depth of his reaction:
"I hated the United States,"
he said, "and I felt that I had been betrayed. Every day it became worse
and then I was getting madder and madder and I wanted to get a rifle and come
and fight against the U.S."
The Agency operatives who had led the exiles expressed the same deep
bitterness. The ever-eloquent E. Howard Hunt, monitoring the effect at CIA
headquarters until the end, later noted: "I was sick of lying and
deception, heartsick over political compromise and military defect.... That
night, laced through my broken sleep, were the words Sir Winston Churchill had
spoken to a British Minister of Defense: 'I am not sure I should have dared to
start; but I am sure I should not have dared to stop.' ...I saw in his words a
warning for those Americans who had faltered at the Bay of Pigs."
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 Cuba
as I sat on the ground, my back against a tree.
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 Bay of Pigs failure and the
assassination of President Kennedy is, even speculatively, not a direct one. No
doubt the defeat was a pivotal event in the course of America's
destiny, but perhaps more significant in relation to the assassination itself
is the era which followed, the ear spawned at the Bay of Pigs.
In the beginning, it was shaped by Kennedy himself, the result of his personal
reaction to the ignominious defeat at Bahia de Cochinos.
It turned into an ear of increasing aggressiveness and true clandestinity under
the shroud of a publicly unsanctioned national policy. The country knew little
about what was happening at the time -- and still remains aware of the
possibility that what was happening eventually lied to the death of a
President.
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 LIFE magazine at the time,
slipping around the anti-Castro groups and soldier-of- fortune crowd, conning
his way along on infiltration operations into Cuba and wheeling and dealing
often, it was rumored, more as an activist than as an objective journalist.
("Andrew was a loveable scoundrel," says one anti-Castro Cuban leader
who claims that St. George Purloined a boat from his
group to give to another anti-Castro group.) St. George was one of the first
correspondents to Join the rebel Castro in his mountain stronghold and monitor
the deployment of his guerrilla command. I once asked Andrew if he had ever
worked for the CIA. He smiled, puffed on a
Fine cigar and said, "Only when I worked for LIFE."
He meant that, in those days, it was hard to tell where the CIA
left off and LIFE began. At any rate, what
makes St. George's observations
especially fascinating is that he is indeed known to have very close contacts,
as they say, within the Agency.
"Had someone asked me during the early Sixties to explain, in twenty words
or fewer, why I called the Bay of Pigs a failure,"
St. George wrote in Harper's, "I would have said something like this: It
was a military formula applied to an essentially political problem. It was an
inevitable failure.
"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 Bay of Pigs, the CIA
curiously and inexplicably began to grow, to branch out, to gather more and
more responsibility for the 'Cuban problem.' The Company was given authority to
help monitor Cuba's wireless traffic; to observe its weather; to publish some
of its best short stories (by Cuban authors in exile) through its wholly owned CIA
printing company; to follow the Castro government's purchases abroad and its
currency transactions, (a separate economic research branch was set up in South
Miami for the purpose); to move extraordinary numbers of clandestine field
operatives in and out of Cuba; to acquire a support fleet of ships and aircraft
in order to facilitate these secret agent movements; to advise, train, and help
reorganize the police and security establishments of Latin countries which felt
threatened by Castro's guerrilla politics; to take a hand in U-2 over flights
and in sea-air ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) operations aimed at tracing
Cuban coastal-defense communications on special devices; to pump such vast sums
into political operations thought to be helpful in containing Castro that by
the time of the 1965 U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic both
the bad guys and the good guys -- i.e., the 'radical' civilian politicos and
the 'conservative' generals -- turned out to have been financed by La Compania.
Owing largely to the Bay of Pigs, the CIA
ceased being an invisible government: it became an empire."
Following the Bay of Pigs, word leaked out from the White House that Kennedy
was disillusioned with the CIA, that he was
upset with his CIA advisors for pushing a
scheme on him which had been devised during the Eisenhower Administration, that
he had been ill-informed and misled and pressured by CIA
brass who had an egocentric interest in pushing the ill-conceived plan. The
President called for the resignation of CIA
Director Allen Dulles and covert plans boss Richard Bissell and, one aide
reported, said he was going to "splinter" the Agency into "a
thousand pieces and scatter to the winds."
That was misleading. Kennedy was, indeed, damn angry at the CIA,
not for planning the Bay of Pigs but for botching it.
And he was mad as hell at Castro who, in daily endless harangues and broadcast
reviews of the battle kept rubbing the young President's nose in the
humiliating defeat. Kennedy's initial reaction was almost reflexive: Don't get
mad, get even. Appointing his brother Robert to oversee the Agency's covert
operations, Kennedy did not splinter the CIA
but infused it with new life. That firming up of policy towards Cuba
and the massive infusion of funding to the CIA's
anti-Castro front groups became known to insiders as "the Kennedy
vendetta."
Between the Bay of Pigs debacle in April, 1961, and the
Cuban missile crisis in October of 1962, a massive and, this time, truly secret
war was launched against the Castro regime. The Manifestations of Kennedy's new
policy, which made the preparations for the Bay of Pigs pale by comparison,
slowly began altering the attitudes of the anti-Castro militant and the CIA
operatives in the field, and although a good measure of encrusted bitterness
and cynicism lingered, a revised, more positive image of the President began
taking shape.
Kennedy did his best to reinforce that image. "Cuba
must not be abandoned to the Communists," he declared in a speech shortly
after the Bay of Pigs, and spoke of a "new and
deeper struggle." That was a euphemism for a campaign which eventually
employed several thousand CIA operatives and
cost over $100 million a year. Again Miami
was the focus of the effort. And this time the CIA
moved in on a truly unprecedented scale. On a large, secluded, heavily-wooded
tract that was part of the University
of Miami's South Campus, the Agency
set up a front corporation called Zenith Technological Services. Its code name
was JM/WAVE and it soon became the largest CIA
installation anywhere in the world outside of its Langley,
Va., headquarters.
At the height of its activities, the JM/WAVE
station had a staff of more than 300 Americans, mostly case officers in charge
of supervising and monitoring Cuban exile groups. Each case officer employed as
many as 10 Cuban principal agents." Each principal agent, in turn, would
be responsible for as many as 30 regular agents. In addition, the Agency funded
scores of front operations throughout the area --- print shops, real estate
firms, travel agencies, coffee shops, boat repair yards, detective agencies,
gun shops, neighborhood newspapers -- to provide ostensible employment for the
thousands of case officers and agents operating outside of JM/WAVE
headquarters. It was said that if any Cuban exile wanted to open his own
business, he had but to ask the CIA for
start-up capital. The CIA became one of the
largest employers in South Florida.
The JM/WAVE station was also a logistical
giant within itself. It leased more than 100 staff cars and maintained its own
gas depot. It kept warehouses loaded with everything from machine guns to
caskets. It had its own airplanes and what a former
CIA officer called "the third largest
navy in the Western Hemisphere," including hundreds
of small boats and huge yachts donated by friendly millionaires. There were
also hundreds of pieces of real estates, from dives to palatial waterfront
mansions, used as "safe houses" or assembly points for operations. In
addition, of course, there were paramilitary training throughout the Florida
Keys and deep in the Everglades. (One of
the more active sites, used by a variety of anti-Castro groups, was a small,
remote island north of Key West
called, appropriately enough, No Name Key. One of the groups was called the
International Anti-Communist Brigade, a collection of soldiers-of-fortune,
mostly Americans, headed by a giant ex-Marine named Gerry Patrick Hemming. Like
another ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, Hemming was trained as a radar
operator in California. Hemming
would later claim that Oswald once tried to join his IAB group. Co-founder of
the IAB with Hemming was Frank Sturgis.)
Those were heady times for the anti-Castro groups in Miami.
With the CIA providing lessons in sabotage,
explosives, weapons, survival, ambushes, communications and logistics, the missions
to Cuba began
escalating in both frequency and sale. Initially intent on infiltrating small
guerrilla bands onto the island, the Agency was soon supervising major raids
aimed at blowing up oil refineries and sugar mills. Although some of the more militant
exile groups considered themselves its independent of the CIA
--- and some raids were made without its approval because the missions were
technically illegal under the Neutrality Act, no group could function very long
without the Agency, making special arrangements with Customs, Immigration and
the Coast Guard. Whether the exile leaders acknowledged it or not, the Agency
was pulling all the strings.
Those were, of course, equally heady times for the CIA.
It ran the whole show in more ways than one, eventually achieving over a major
section of foreign policy a level of influence and control which Kennedy
himself didn't envision. The JM/WAVE station
in Miami became the international
coordinating center for the secret war around the globe. Every CIA
station in the world had at least one case officer assigned to Cuban operations
and reporting to the Miami station.
The station also controlled an international economic strategy, pressuring U.S.
allies to embargo all trade with Cuba
and supervising a worldwide sabotage program against goods being shipped to and
from Cuba. (It
took delight, for instance, in getting a German manufacturer to produce a
shipment of off-center ball bearings for a Cuban factory.) The operational
level of the Agency was also -- without Kennedy's knowledge, it now appears,
and without even the knowledge of his newly-appointed Director, John McCone --
continuing its program of assassination attempts against Castro. In giving the CIA
a new life, immense funding, and the incredible power and influence to conduct
effective large-scale secret operations, Kennedy had created a force over
which, as he himself would eventually discover, could not maintain total
control. That realization came with the Cuban missile crisis-in October, 1962.
It is not known whether Castro requested the installation of offensive
ballistic missiles in Cuba
or if he accepted them at the suggestion of the Russians. There are many Cuban
exiles in Miami who know Castro
well, who went to school with him and fought beside him in the mountains during
the early days of the 26th of July Movement. They believe Castro was driven to
obtaining the missiles by the effectiveness of the secret CIA
war against him, that the unrelenting jabbing of the infiltration and sabotage
operations created economic and political pressures which drove him to consider
the possibility of doing something rash. Perhaps that is what the CIA
itself was counting on. The more fervent of the Cuban exiles were, indeed,
initially elated by the possibility that the crisis might provoke a final
showdown with Castro. President Kennedy himself boosted such hopes with
hard-line responses to the daily more blatant build-up of the Soviet presence
in Cuba. In
September of that year, Kennedy declared that the United
States would use "whatever means may be
necessary" to prevent Cuba
from exporting "its aggressive purposes by force or threat of force."
In Miami, the anti-Castro exiles
and their CIA control bosses delighted in
such tough talk and looked forward to some real action.
The manner in which President Kennedy resolved the Cuban missile destroyed the
hope of the exiles and the men conducting the secret war. Cuba
and Castro were relegated to a minor role as Kennedy dealt directly with
Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The crisis ended on November 29th, 1962. Kennedy announced that all
IL-28 bombers were being withdrawn by the Soviets and that progress was being
made on the withdrawal of offensive missiles. In return, Kennedy said he gave
the Soviets and the Cubans a "no invasion" pledge.
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 Caribbean,
it was astounding that Kennedy should make a deal with Khrushchev. If the
President's actions at the Bay of Pigs had raised doubts
in their minds about Kennedy's sincerity and determination to bring down
Castro, his handling of the missile crisis more than confirmed those doubts.
Over café Cubano at the back tables of luncheonettes in Miami's
Little Havana, in the CIA safe houses set in
the lush foliage of Coconut Grove in the training camps in the remote Keys and
the deep Everglades, wherever the exiles and their
control agents gathered, the word "traitor" would eventually be
spoken. Feelings ran that strong. The late Mario Lazo, a prominent exile
attorney and close associate of top CIA
officials (even after the Watergate burglary, he considered E. Howard Hunt
"one of the great men of our time."), called it a
"soul-shattering blow."
And yet the depth of anger at Kennedy for making the missile settlement was
shallow compared with the reaction of the exiles and their CIA
cohorts when it became apparent what the implementation of the President's new
"no-invasion" policy actually meant. Suddenly the United States
Government began cracking down on the very training camps and guerrilla bases
which had been originally established by the United States Government. Regular
infiltration raids into Cuba
by the exiles, which automatically would get the Government's "green
light," now were promptly disavowed and condemned. The Cuban Revolutionary
Council, the united front of exile groups established by the CIA,
had its subsidy cut off. (Reacting bitterly, the Council's president declared
that Kennedy had become "the victim of a master play by the
Russians.")
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 CIA
the U.S. Government? -- and, on the other hand, they were being literally
handcuffed and arrested. It was crazy. In March, 1963 for instance, when a
group of anti-Castro raiders were arrested by British police at a training site
in the Bahamas,
the U.S. State Department admitted it had tipped off the British about the
camp. That same night another exile raiding boat was seized in Miami
harbor. The Coast Guard announced it was throwing more planes, ships and men
into policing the Florida straits
for anti-Castro raiders. The Customs Service raided the secret camp at No Name
Key and arrested the anti-Castro force in training there. The FBI seized a
major cache of explosives at another exile camp outside of New
Orleans. Weeks later, the Coast Guard assisted the
British Navy in capturing another group of Cuban exiles in the Bahamas.
Then Federal Aviation Administration issued "strong warnings" to six
American civilian pilots -- including soldier-of-fortune Frank Sturgis and a
few who had worked directly with the CIA --
who had been flying raids over Cuba.
Shortly afterwards, the Secret Service arrested a prominent exile leader for
conspiring to counterfeit Cuban currency destined for rebel forces inside Cuba
-- a plan that had all the earmarks of a CIA
operation. Had Kennedy gone crazy -- or was he, indeed, a "traitor"?
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 Cuba,
killing at least 20 defenders, including some Russians. A week later, the same
group sunk a Cuban patrol boat. On October 31st, the day after Kennedy lifted
his blockade of Cuba
as a sign of his peaceful intentions, Alpha 66 struck again. Then, immediately
after the crisis ended in November, a spokesman for the group pledged further
raids.
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 Havana.
In May, another band of anti-Castro rebels struck military camp near the
capitol. Shortly afterwards, a group of exile raiders returned to Miami and
announced it had blown up another refinery, sank a gunboat and killed scores of
Castro soldiers. There were at least a dozen other actions which, despite the
President's orders, indicated that certain Cuban exile groups and their field
operatives were continuing the secret war. Despite the fact that none of the
groups had been formed without the help of the CIA,
that they had all long operated successfully with the supervisory support and
funding of the CIA, the Agency denied it had
any association at all with their continuing actions.
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 CIA was supporting at
least one exile group under what the Agency termed an "antonymous
operations concept, whatever that meant.
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 Florida
named Paul Rodgers. Citing some "serious kinks in our intelligence
system," Rodgers called for a Joint Congressional committee to oversee the
CIA. "And what proof have we,"
asked Rodgers with uncanny prescience, "that this Agency, which in many
respects has the power to pre-empt foreign policy, is not actually exercising
this power through practices which are contradictory to the established policy
objectives of this Government?"
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 Russia
the previous summer. It was at that dinner party that Lee Harvey Oswald was
introduced to Ruth Paine.
There was a Democratic Representative from Florida
named Paul Rodgers. Citing some "serious kinks in our intelligence
system," Rodgers called for a Joint Congressional committee to oversee the
CIA. "And what proof have we,"
asked Rodgers with uncanny prescience, "that this Agency, which in many
respects has the power to pre-empt foreign policy, is not actually exercising
this power through practices which are contradictory to the established policy
objectives of this Government?"
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 Washington
columnist Vera Glaser who told him she had just interviewed Clare Boothe Luce
and that Luce had given her some information relating to the assassination.
Schweiker immediately called Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail,
confirmed the story she had told Glaser.
Luce said that some time after the Bay of Pigs she
received a call from her "great friend" William Pawley, who lived in Miami.
Pawley was a man of immense wealth, originally a Texas
oil millionaire who once owned the Havana
bus system and vast sugar holdings. He had helped start General Claire
Chenault's famous Flying Tigers in World War II. Pawley had long been actively
supporting anti-Castro Cubans in Miami, Luce said, and he now had the idea of
sponsoring a fleet of speedboat -- sea-going "Flying Tiger" --- which
would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on "intelligence
gathering" missions. Pawley asked her to sponsor one of these boats, said
Luce, and she agreed.
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 New York
townhouse. "I got to know them fairly well," she said. It was one of
these boat crews, she said, that originally brought back the news of Russian
missiles in Cuba. Because Kennedy didn't react to it, she said she helped feed
it to then-Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public. She said she wrote an
article in LIFE magazine which predicted the
nuclear showdown. "Well, then came the nuclear showdown and the President
made his deal with Khrushchev and I never saw my young Cubans again," she
said. The boat operations were stopped, she said, when after Kennedy's
"deal," Pawley was notified that the U.S. was invoking the Neutrality
Act and would prevent any further exile missions into Cuba.
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 DRE or Student Directorate,
headquartered in Miami and under the wing of the CIA's
JM/WAVE station. A few days after Oswald
walked into Bringuier's small store, Bringuier saw him passing out pro-Castro
leaflets on Canal Street, got in a scuffle with him and both he and Oswald were
arrested. He later debated Oswald on a radio program recording of which
appeared on the commercial market immediately after the Kennedy assassination.
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 New Orleans chapter
of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (of which he was the only member). The
address was a building which housed a hotbed of anti-Castro activity, at one time
the New Orleans office of the CIA-backed
Cuban Revolutionary Front. The Assassination Committee discovered that Oswald
was seen in that building with extreme right-wing and anti-Castro activists.
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 Miami,
William Pawley, was also a longtime friend of the CIA.
He was reportedly involved in the CIA's
overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala.
A CIA front called the Pacific Corporation
was an offshoot of Pawley's Flying Tigers. Pawley himself fronted some of the CIA's
anti-Castro activities. (He once told a Miami
reporter: "Find me one man, just one man who can go it alone and get
Castro, I'll pay anything, almost anything.") He helped fund the LIFE
magazine, a secret raid into Cuba
in order to exfiltrate two Russian technicians who could testify, to Kennedy's
embarrassment, that Russian missiles were still in Cuba.
The raiding party failed to return and 10 exiles were lost.
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 CIA.
The leaders of the Directorio decided to squeeze as much propaganda and
fund-raising benefit as they could out of the publicity. They were put in touch
with a man in New York who, for certain reasons, will be known here as Jack
Justin. Justin had excellent contacts in the media and got the Directorio
leaders on several radio and television shows. He also introduced them to Clair
Boothe Luce.
The key Directorio liaison was a sharp, articulate young fellow named Jose
Antonio Lanusa. It was Lanusa who handled the regular reports from DRE
delegates in various cities and who, after the Kennedy assassination, recalled
Bringuier's report from New Orleans about Oswald's visit. It was Lanusa who
originally released the story to the press, after contacting his CIA
case officer at the JM/WAVE station. It was
also Lanusa who turned over to the FBI copies of Bringuier's reports and a tape
recording of the radio debate with Oswald. The FBI never told him to keep his
mouth shut about it, Lanusa said. Lanusa said he never spoke to Clare Boothe
Luce about the incident, either at the time or later, and he knew of no DRE
member who was deported or murdered.
Lanusa said he had only a single contact with Luce, arranged by Jack Justin.
Lanusa didn't know how the DRE arrangement
with Justin came about, but Justin appeared to be affluent, lived in a luxury
apartment on Central Park West and picked up all expenses whenever DRE
members visited New York.
"My opinion now," Lanusa told me, "is that he was being paid by
the CIA."
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 LIFE
magazine about the group's raid into Cuba. She said she would turn the $600 fee
she would get for the article over to the DRE
as a _ contribution. Lanusa said that was the only money Luce ever contributed
to the DRE. He said she could not have
sponsored a boat because he was aware of how all the DRE
boats were acquired. When I told him of the story that Luce had told Schweiker,
Lanusa shook his head and said: "I think Clare Boothe Luce shoots from the
hip without having her brain engaged."
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 CIA.
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 CIA.
She told Colby she had just made up the name of Julio Fernandez for Schweiker.
She said she was also in touch with Jack Justin, who gave her the names of
three DRE leaders, including Lanusa, but she
didn't mention them to Schweiker. Colby, however, called Justin and urged him
to cooperate with Schweiker, but Justin said he did not want to get involved.
From the CIA file notes of telephone
conversation, it appeared that even Colby was confused about what was going on.
When I pointed out to Luce that her story reminded me of the Carlos Bringuier
incident with Oswald, she smiled and said, "Why, yes, that's the same type
of thing that happened to my boys."
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 Key West airport until his
retirement several years ago. He subsequently opened a successful marine diesel
business on the island. He is well-known in the community, a generally
respected family man whose wife sings in the church choir.
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 Key West Airport.
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 Miami television
station, and he often sent the news director short takes of newsy events around
Key West, brief film clips for
which he would get a few bucks. Faraldo said his regular procedure was to send
the unprocessed film to Miami with
a crew member of a National Airlines flight. The crew member would then give
the film to a cab driver at Miami
airport to deliver to the television station. That's what he did with the film
he took of the Fair Play for Cuba
group, Faraldo said.
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 Cuba
group did fly from Key West to Cuba
and when. Perhaps then, I thought, I could locate other who saw Oswald and Ruby
together. I spoke to at least two dozen individuals, employees and former
employees of the airlines operating out of Key West
at the time. I spoke to pilots, stewardesses, mechanics, ticket counter workers
and employees of the terminal itself, including a former janitor. I could not
get any hard substantiation of any point, yet I kept getting a few
tantalizingly vague confirmations that drove me to dig deeper.
I spoke, for instance, to a woman who worked the ticket counter for National
Airlines at Key West in the early
'60s. She said she did remember a group going to Cuba
to cut sugar cane. A retired Immigration Department official said he remembered
reading about such a group in the newspapers. A Federal Aviation Administration
employee also recalled hearing about a sugar cane cutting group, but thinks he
didn't see them because he worked the late shift at the time. The FAA chief at Key
West said he didn't remember that at all and that all
FAA records of flights were kept only 15 days before being destroyed. No one
who worked the control tower at the time remembered an Aerovia Q plane flying
in late one night to pick up a group of sugar cane cutters. The retired airport
Janitor, a very old man, did remember a group of 30 or 40 persons going to Cuba,
but thought they were "foreigners." The U.S. Customs Department kept
no records that could help.
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 Key West
late in 1961, but Faraldo said it would have been possible for the airline to
fly into Key West as late as 1963
merely by filing a flight plan with the FAA.
I also did a page-by-page check of the old bound volumes of the Key
West citizen, the local newspaper. Faraldo had said he
thought the newspaper's photographer had covered the incident, but the guy
didn't remember it and said all his negatives from that time were later lost in
a hurricane. Faraldo himself sent me to an historian at the local public
library who, he said, "remembers everything." She didn't recall the
incident and could dig up no confirmation in her own files.
A spark of hope flared when Faraldo mentioned that he used to keep the
manifests, or passenger lists, of every daily flight out of Key
West, including those from Aerovia Q. He said he would
staple them together at the end of the day, fold them, put them ln a white
envelope and put the envelope in a cardboard box. And Faraldo remembered
specifically where he had kept those boxes in a storage room at the airport. He
sped back to check.
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 New Orleans.
He went back through his film files at the time but couldn't find anything.
"It would have been a damn good story for us to break, obviously,"
said Renick. Renick said he would re-check the files. He did and found nothing.
Meanwhile, I kept going back to Faraldo. I was frustrated. I thought I myself
vaguely recalled reading about a group of pacifists going to Cuba to cut sugar
cane, and there were a few I talked with who remembered such a group in Key
West. Faraldo appeared even more frustrated than I. He was extremely upset that
his manifest records, which he had so carefully kept for years, he said, had
not been retained. We tried to probe deeper into his memory for additional
details. We'd sit around his office or drive to the coffee shop at the airport.
We had lunch together a few times and one night his wife invited me for a
delicious home cooked dinner. We talked of many things besides the Kennedy
assassination and were beginning to get to know each other a little. He was a
soft-voiced, intelligent man and I liked him.
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 Cuba
after Castro took over in order to find out a few things. He told a story about
once being suspected of spying by Castro's police and how he was retained and
beaten. He spoke of how he hated Castro and how he thought Batista, whom he had
known personally, was "one of the best friends the United States ever
had." He said he was also very friendly with Castro's former Air Force
Chief, Pedro Diaz Lanz.
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 CIA? "Yes," he said, "I
would think so." I thought that he should more than just think so and
decided to press. I asked him who paid for all the sophisticated photo and
electronic equipment he had. He looked at me as if I were playing a game with
him and didn't answer directly. Finally he gave me a wide grin and said, "No
comment."
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 New Orleans
to go to Mexico City before
returning to Dallas. Yet, on the
evening of November 22nd, Oswald's visit to Mexico City
was known by a limited number of, persons other than Oswald himself, perhaps
his wife Marina and a handful of intelligence officials -- most notably a
select few in the CIA's Mexico
City station.
Another attempt to link Oswald to Castro came out of Mexico
City immediately after Oswald was murdered by Jack
Ruby. A young Nicaraguan named Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte walked into the
American Embassy and insisted he had a story to tell the American Ambassador,
Thomas Mann. Alvarado claimed that he had gone to the Cuban Embassy in
September and while waiting to conduct some business saw three persons talking
in a patio a few feet away. One was Lee Harvey Oswald, another a tall, thin Negro
with reddish hair and the third a Cuban from the consulate. Alvarado said he
saw the Cuban give the Negro a large sum of money and then heard the Negro tell
Oswald, "I want to kill the man." Oswald replied, "You're not
man enough, I can do it." The Negro then gave Oswald $6500 in large
denomination American bills. Their conversation, said Alvarado, was in both
Spanish and English.
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 United
States to join the anti-Castro activists.
Then he recanted his retraction and then, failing a polygraph test given by the
Mexican police, again confessed he had lied. Nevertheless, it was eventually
brought to the attention of the Warren Commission by CIA
boss Richard Helms. In its final Report, the Commission devoted two entire
pages to it.
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 CIA,
having permitted the Agency to use his country as a training camp and assembly
area for the Bay of Pigs invasion. In fact, at the time
of the Kennedy assassination, Manuel Artime, the CIA's
"golden boy" ¿as his fellow anti-Castro leaders dubbed him), ~till
had two training bases in Nicaragua
and a huge arsenal of equipment. According to one source, Artime was also then
involved ln a Castro assassination plot with his close friend and Miami
neighbor, E. Howard Hunt.
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 Dallas,
Kantor knew Jack Ruby, a character who liked to hang around police headquarters
and newspaper offices. Ruby had
help him with a couple of stories about Dallas
nightlife. Kantor knew Ruby.
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 Parkland Hospital.
The Warren Commission chose to ignore Seth Kantor because his testimony would
have alluded to a conspiracy.
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 CIA
sources, most likely the Agency's propaganda section. Hendrix would later win a
Pulitzer Prize for his stories revealing the existence of Russian missiles in Cuba.
Still later he would join the International Telephone & Telegraphs Company
as its public relations director in Latin America. In
1976 Hendrix was indicted and pleaded guilty perjury as a result of his
testimony before a Senate Subcommittee investigating the role of the CIA
and ITT in toppling the Allende government
in Chile.
Hendrix worked in Chile
and had close contacts with CIA in personnel
in Chile.
During a hearing in Miami, a
Justice Department attorney revealed that Hendrix had relationship with the CIA
"both as a reporter and later as an employee of ITT."
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 CIA activity. No
action was taken. Hendrix was outside the game plan.
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 Miami
which took me in the opposite direction Schweiker encouraged me to pursue the
evidence wherever it led.
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 CIA and anti-Castro
activity. Most had the means, motivation and opportunity to be considered
suspect for involvement in the Kennedy assassination, or have knowledge of it.
They all denied having any connection with the assassination, although a few
said they would have liked to have killed Jack Kennedy themselves. That
admission, in itself, never allayed my suspicions.
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 Biscayne
Bay. The telephone often rang in the middle of the night and a
Spanish- accented voice would tip me about the strange behavior of a certain
individual in November, 1963. My file began to grow with hundreds of names and
my mind spun attempting to keep track of information involving scores of
interlinking Cuban groups. Slowly, too, I began recognizing that some of the
names ~ coming to me, some of the sources of information contacting me, were
the same as those I had been reading in the volumes of Warren Commission files
and stacks of FBI reports, names which had popped up immediately after the
Kennedy assassination. It was as if I had suddenly entered a mysterious theater
where a 13-year old drama had suddenly been review with the original cast.
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 III,
an arms dealer who runs. on his large "farm" outside of Atlanta,
what amounts to a training camp for professional killers -- including police
and military types, terrorists and anti-terrorists, soldiers-of-fortune and
mercenaries. WerBell may be the last of the true swashbucklers, a braggadocio
an delightful guy.
WerBell was born in Philadelphia,
the son of a wealthy, former Czarist calvary officer. . ("My father
dragged me all over the world," he says. "I was raised in some of the
best bar in Europe.") He claims he was graduated
from the University of Pennsylvania
in 1938 although there are no records of it -- and wound up with the Office of
Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA)
in World War II. Trained as a paratroop and guerilla warfare expert, he
established himself as a stalwart secret agent and came out of the China-Burma
theater of life operations as dues-paid life member of the "old-boys'
network"of American secret intelligence -- a superspy fraternity that
included Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and E. Howard Hunt, among others.
They don't come more colorful than Mitchell Livingston WerBell III.
Seemingly eccentric, he was in his day a blasphemous, often boozy always
raucous bon vivant with a sly sense of humor. He wore a handlebar mustache from
time to time, screwed a monocle in his eye and called himself Prince Eric
Straf. He boastfully dubbed himself "Mitch the Fifth' after multiple
invocations of that Constitutional amendment before a Senate investigations
subcommittee questioning him about his business relationship with Robert Vesco.
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 CIA's most
sophisticated weapons."
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 Powder
Springs, Georgia.
Between sips, he denied an association with the CIA.
"I've always cooperated very closely," he said, "but I've never
allowed them to pay me one goddamned dime. I don't need it."
Nevertheless, down through the years WerBell has popped up with uncanny
consistency in operations which have had the imprimatur of the CIA,
overtly or covertly. He was all over Miami
working with anti-Castro activists at the height of Kennedy's secret war
against Cuba.
He was in Guatemala
when assassination teams swept through the country to bolster the reign of the
military. He was in the Dominican Republic
when the United States
moved in to quash the Communist threat. In Venezuela,
Uruguay, Chile,
Greece, Cambodia,
Thailand and Vietnam,
WerBell always seemed to be passing through at the most opportune moments. My
prolific journalistic colleague, the aforementioned Andrew St. George, has
taken a special interest in Mitch WerBell down through the years and has
cultivated a strange and unique relationship with the chesty little guy. St.
George has written a number of articles about WerBell, all very well done,
politically insightful and damningly revealing, yet most of them buried in pulp
adventure or girlie magazine with very little credible impact Damning
revelation is the last thing that WerBell should want, yet the close
relationship between subject and journalist remains intact and St. George is
still a frequent houseguest on "the farm." (Once WerBell was
extremely upset at a St. George article in Esquire which revealed WerBell's
plans to foment a coup d'etat on the Bahamas island of Abaco and make it his
own tax-free nation, but what most bothered the feisty arms dealer was a St.
George photo of him attending to a shapely bikini-clad blonde languishing on a
chaise. WerBell claims the photo almost wrecked his marriage.)
St. George's continuing interest in
WerBell relates to, among other things, his concept of WerBell's role in
history. Sometime in the 50s, St. George maintains, assassination became an
instrument of U.S.
national policy: "It also became an important branch of our invisible
government, a sizable business, and a separate technology involving weapons and
devices the ordinary taxpayer paid billions for but was never permitted to see,
except perhaps in the technicolor fantasies of James Bond flicks." Thanks
to the technological proficiency of his "silent-kill" weapons, Mitch
WerBell was in the center of the development of the "special teams"
concept. Special teams are assassination teams.
It was the special team concept that the CIA
employed within its own bureaucratic structure -- selected individuals stitched
together into a tight, top-secret network outside their normal chain-of-command
-- to plan the Castro assassination attempts. Yet the first utilization of the
concept came in 1954, according to St. George, when a deep-cover CIA
team went off to Hanoi under Lt. Colonel Lucien Conein, described as "one
of Mitch WerBell's closest lifelong friends." The Conein mission,
code-named "Blackhawk," was to harass and decimate the new Communist
rulers of North Vietnam.
Its orders included the "elimination of Vietminh cadres where conditions
permit." Subsequently, similar missions multiplied as CIA
Clandestine Services sent out special teams with authority to kill whenever
"circumstances warranted." There were, among others, "White Star
Training Mission" in Laos,
"Operation Lodestone" in Northern Thailand
"Study Project Minimax" in certain disaffected ethnic regions of Indonesia.
Then, in the early 60s, With the CIA
employment of the hard-bitten hill tribesmen of North Burma,
Laos and Southwestern
China as "deep penetration" and "long-range
reconnaissance" teams into Red China, came large-scale, top-secret U.S.
intelligence operations involving unlimited license to kill. Mitch WerBell's
"silent-kill" weapons business did very well in those days, and Thai
King Phumiphon personally hand carved a tiny rosewood Buddha for him.
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 CIA
bosses once. Crazy enough to always survive. Now a beefy, scarred and gnarled
old grizzly, Conein left Kansas City
when he was 17 to join the French Foreign Legion. In 1941, he switched to the OSS
in France and
lived and fought with the notorious Corsican Brotherhood, which was then part
of the Resistance. (Later the Brotherhood would turn into an underworld
organization deeply involved in drug trade and considered much more effective
and dangerous than its Sicilian counterpart, the Mafia.) Moving to the Far
East areas, Conein was part of an OSS
team parachuted into Vietnam
to fight the Japanese alongside the Vietminh. Later he married a Vietnamese,
helped Ngo Dinh Diem consolidate his power in South
Vietnam and then, turning against him, was
the CIA's liaison with the cabal of generals
who murdered Diem.
It was Conein's involvement with the coup of the generals which led another old
OSS cohort, E. Howard Hunt, to give
him a call several years later. Hunt, by then, was working in the Nixon White
House. Besides wanting Conein to release a group of phony telegrams which would
have squarely blamed President Kennedy for the Diem assassination (Nixon then
considered Edward Kennedy his prime political foe), Hunt recruited Conein for
what was ostensibly the White House war against the international drug trade.
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 Miami.
Barker reportedly recruited some 200 former CIA
Cuban agents and organized them into specialized units for future operations.
Among them were intelligence and counterintelligence units as what were known
as Action Teams -- the old CIA term for
units with paramilitary skills, including assassination.
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 CIA
and set them up in a "safe house," an office suite in the LaSalle
Building on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. It has been reported that the
reason for operating outside of DEA headquarters was because the branch was
developing a very special plan, which included assassinating the key drug
suppliers in Mexico. The question has been raised, however, by columnist Jack
Anderson among others, whether the White House Plumbers group was developing
assassination capability not for foreign utilization but for domestic political
reasons. Anderson claimed that a contract was put out on him at one point. At
any rate, the Connecticut Avenue office was funded not by the DEA but by the CIA.
And Mitch WerBell has admitted he was in business there with two former CIA
men manufacturing ultra-sophisticated assassination devices.
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 Miami with
a goddamned million dollars in cash for the guy who was gonna take Fidel
out."), but disclaimed any knowledge of the Kennedy murder. "Now I
didn't like Jack Kennedy," he said. "I thought he was a shit to begin
with. But I was certain not to be involved in the assassination of an American
President, for Christsakes!" WerBell also denied any business dealings
with Jack Ruby, but half-admitted a contact. First he said he had no
connection, then added: "And the reason we didn't...I think we may have
had an incoming...but we don't play with people like that. I mean, it's as
simple as that. This guy Ruby, he called, I didn't know who the hell he was,
but that was years ago...." WerBell lapsed into a drunken mumble. Later, I
thought I might have been fruitful if the House Assassinations Committee, with
its subpoena power and power to grant immunity, would have called WerBell for
formal questioning. But Mitchell Livingston WerBell III,
despite his acknowledged relationship with the area of evidence I considered
most crucial in breaking new investigative grounds -- and despite his long
association with assassination operations --was just another one of the
characters who didn't fit into the game plan.
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 Iran.)
But I spent a lot of time with Frank Sturgis and I haven't figured him out yet.
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 Dealey
Plaza on November 22nd, 1963, bore "striking
resemblances" to Hunt and Sturgis. The men were reportedly derelicts or
"tramps," as the press came to call them, who were discovered in a
boxcar in the railroad yard behind the grassy knoll. (Later, the House
Committee's acoustic tests would indicate that a shot was fired from the knoll
area.) Taken to police headquarters, the tramps were escorted across Dealey
Plaza, where new photographers took several photos of them. The tramps were
questioned and released, without record of their identities being kept.
(Despite the notoriety they subsequently received, not one has turned up
since.)
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 CIA activities within the United
States. After a six-month investigation, the
Commission issued its report. Relying on comparative photo analysis performed
by the same FBI expert who did all the Warren Commission's analysis the
Rockefeller Commission concluded that the men in the tramps photographs were
not Sturgis and Hunt.
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
New Orleans. When those results
came in, investigators were frantically sent out to track down Chrisman's
whereabouts on November 22nd, 1963.
(Chrisman had since died.) They came back with official records and eye-witness
affidavits that Chrisman was on the West Coast teaching school the day Kennedy
was assassinated. So much for the conclusiveness of photo analysis.
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 CIA's
Technical Services Bureau and used them on more than one job. Downey promised
she would ask the photo analysts about the use of disguises.
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. Downey
just shrugged her shoulders. "Well," I said, "I hope that point
is mentioned in the final report."
"I'm sure it will be," said Downey.
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 Dealey
Plaza. There are a couple of photos
which have strong similarities, others with few. The same could be said of the
Hunt comparison. My initial interest in both, however, was not predicated on
whether or not they were the Dealey Plaza
tramps. When the Rockefeller Commission issued its conclusion that Sturgis and
Hunt were not in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, it raised more
questions than it resolved. (At the time, I didn't realize how suspect I should
have been a~out the Commission's report in general. It was later revealed that
then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller really didn't want the CIA
to air all its dirty linen and, at one point, quietly called in Director
William Colby and urged him not to tell all. Rockefeller, it turned out, had
earlier been a member of the White House's Operations Coordinating Board which
cleared some of the illegal CIA activity the
Commission was investigating.)
Although the Rockefeller Commission report claimed that Sturgis and Hunt hadn't
legitimate alibis for their whereabouts on November 22nd, 1963, it ultimately concluded: "It
cannot be determined with certainty where Hunt and Sturgis actually were on the
day of the assassination." It is obsolete certainty that Frank Sturgis
knows where he was on the day after the Kennedy assassination. He says FBI
found him at his home in Miami.
"I had FBI agents all over my house," he has said. "They told me
I was one person they felt had the capabilities to do it. They said, 'Frank, if
there's anybody capable of killing the President of the the United States,
you're the guy that can do it."
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 north Miami, not far
from me, and we were in contact often. Sometimes he would call in the evening
and we would chat for hours. Frequently, we met for coffee at a snack shop or
hotel coffee shop. He was always very direct, very outspoken and, I believe, a
lot more polished and sophisticated than the obscenity-prone, rough-hewn and
little-educated character he projects. In talking about people he knows, he of
individuals his "close friend," but no one really gets close to Frank
Sturgis.
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 Japan
bombed Pearl Harbor and he immediately dropped out of
Germantown High to join the Marines.
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. Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima,
Okinawa, three serious combat wounds, malaria, jaundice
and, in the end, "exhaustion and possible psychoneurosis" and a stay
at the Sun Valley Naval
Medical Center
before his discharge in 1945. After the War, Sturgis was a plainclothes cop
with the Norfolk Police, a part-time student at William & Mary College,
managed a few bars, trained as a radio gunner in the Naval Reserves, crewed as
a merchant seaman, did a two-year stint with the U.S. Army in Germany where he
served with the Armed Forces Security Agency, was married, widowed, re-married,
divorced and married again.
Sturgis claims he got involved in Cuban activities in the early 50s when he
went to Miami to visit an uncle who
was married to a Cuban. That's how he got friendly with exiled former Cuban
President Carlos Prio, he says. Prio, close to the American mob men who ran Havana's
gambling casinos, was a multimillionaire who was funding a mountain rebel Fidel
Castro's guerilla war against General Batista. (Prio would later be convicted
of arms smuggling with a Texan named Robert McKeown. After the Kennedy
assassination, McKeown told the FBI that he was approached by Jack Ruby about a
deal to sell military equipment to Castro. A week before I had scheduled to
call Prio for an interview he went to the side of his Miami
Beach home, sat on a chaise outside the garage and
shot himself in the heart. He reportedly had financial problems.)
It was through Prio, Sturgis says, that he was infiltrated into Cuba
to join Castro in the mountains. Soon he was a trusted aide, a emissary for
Castro on arms deals all over the United States
and Latin America, a daring pilot who flew loads of
weapons into hairy mountain airstrips. He became friendly with another
daredevil pilot, Pedro Diaz-Lanz, and when, after the revolution, Castro
appointed Diaz-Lanz chief of the Rebel Air Force, Sturgis was named the Air
Force's director of security. Nine months after Castro took power, Diaz-Lanz
and Sturgis publicly decried Castro's Communism, and fled Miami.
A Month later, they were dropping propaganda leaflets over Havana.
(Some 30 Cubans were their killed when Castro's planes unsuccessfully tried to
bomb their B-25 out of the air.)
Frank Sturgis says he was never _ an official, paid has confirmed agent of the
Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA has
confirmed that proclamation. Yet Sturgis, while he could not remember the first
name of his first wife in his testimony before the House Assassinations
Committee, recalled that it was a Friday in 1958 in Santiago,
Cuba, that he made his
first contact with a CIA agent. Before the Bay
of Pigs and afterwards, during the height of the JM/WAVE's
secret war against Castro, Sturgis used equipment, flew planes and directed
assault craft which were supported by the CIA.
He has admitted that the B-25 he flew on his first leaflet-drop was later
repaired with $10,000 which came from E. Howard Hunt.
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 Miami's
anti-Castro activities in the early '60s. Sturgis claim that although he knew
of "Eduardo" at the time, all his contacts with him and the funds
which came from him were through Hunt' assistant, Bernard Barker.
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 CIA's top Cuban leader,
Manuel Artime, and I have spoken with witnesses who saw them often together in
Little Havana. Artime was very close to and in frequent contact with CIA
liaison Hunt. In his autobiography, Hunt himself claims his attention was drawn
to the daring leaflet drop of Pedro Diaz-Lanz and he quickly made arrangement
to meet with the counter-revolutionary hero. Hunt however, writes nothing of
the man who flew with Diaz-Lanz and was his constant companion. (Hunt's book
was published in 1973.)
In October, 1972, Andrew St. George interviewed Frank Sturgis in his home in Miami
while Sturgis was awaiting his Watergate photo~ were publicized~ sentence. It
was before the tramp photo were publicized, before the cries for another
Kennedy assassination investigation began to peak, before the Rockefeller
Commission was formed. St. George was an old friend of Sturgis from their days
together with Castro in the mountains. Sturgis was glad to see the gregarious
Hungarian and, stung by his set up at Watergate and the black headlines which
made him appear an inept bungling burglar, Sturgis -- according to St. George
-- blurted out the real story behind Watergate. A few months later, St. George
visited Sturgis in the Washington, D.C.
jail. "I will never leave this jail alive," he says Sturgis told him,
"if what we discussed about Watergate does not remain between us. If you
attempt to publish what I've told you, I am a dead man."
In August, 1974, St. George published his interview with Sturgis in True
magazine. In it, he quotes Sturgis as saying: "The Bay of Pigs
-- hey, was one sweet mess. I met Howard Hunt that year; he was the political
officer of the exile brigade. Bernard Barker was Hunt's right-hand man, his
confidential clerk -- his body servant, really; that's how I met Barker."
Sturgis today denies he ever said that and curses St. George vehemently.
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 CIA
-- were all involved in a cover-up. He spoke of the possible motivations of the
anti-Castro groups and their dislike for Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs failure.
("I even hated him, too," he said.) He said he once refused to join
the CIA even though it gave him an
application because he thought it was infiltrated at its highest ranks with
double-agents -- "possibly the same people who conspired to kill
Kennedy." He s~id his theory was that the Kennedy assassination was a
conspiracy involving groups of intelligence agents in Russia's KGB service,
Cuba's intelligence service and the CIA.
Actually, as Sturgis rambled on and around in circles, there wasn't a
conspiracy theory he didn't espouse. By the end of the evening, my head was
reeling. Several months Frank Sturgis made that initial interview more
interesting. The Schweiker Report had just been released. The Intelligence
Committee staff had built it on the blocks of Castro assassination plots which
the Warren Commission was not told about, thus making the Castro retaliation
theory its strong theme. It thus appeared that Sturgis now knew which way to
push.
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 Havana
just about two months before the Kennedy assassination. At the meeting were a
number of high-ranking men, including Castro, his brother Raul, Ramiro Valdez,
the chief of Cuban intelligence, Che Guevara and his secretary, Tanya, another
Cuban officer, an American known as "El Mexicano," and -- oh, yeah --
Jack Ruby. And the meeting dealt with plotting the assassination of John F.
Kennedy. Oh. That's what Sturgis had "completely forgot" to tell me.
Just a bit of incidental information, replete with details of the plotter's
name. "Hey, Frank," I said, "I'm glad someone revived your mind
about that. It may be relevant."
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 Cuba
with the information that "the assassin of President Kennedy's
assassin" visited Cuba
"last year." (Later, I would track down the original writer of the
letter, now in Miami, who would say
that her information was given to her by someone she didn't recall.) At any
rate, on such sources did Frank Sturgis' new hot tip to me seem to be based.
Immediately after the Kennedy assassination, Frank Sturgis was involved in
other stories which proved to be without foundation. According to FBI
documents, one involved a reporter named James Buchanan who wrote an article
for the Pompano Beach S-un Sentinel
which quoted Sturgis as saying that Oswald visited Miami
in November, 1962, to contact Miami-based supporters of Fidel Castro and that,
while in Miami, was in telephone
contact with Castro's intelligence service. About that time, another story
began circulating, the source of which was reportedly Frank Sturgis, which
indicated that Oswald demonstrated in Miami's
Bayfront Park
with a group from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and had gotten in a fracas
with Jerry Buchanan, the brother of the reporter. The FBI traced both stories
and eventually contacted Frank Sturgis, who denied he had anything to do with
them. The FBI reports wound up as Warren Commission documents. One of them indicates
that both James and Jerry Buchanan were officers in the International
Anti-Communist Brigade.
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 CIA's best-trained Cuban
operatives." I asked Sturgis about him. Sturgis talked about him for a
while and then said he had a friend who could tell me a lot more about El Mono.
The friend, who we'll call Paul here, was an American who had spent seven years
in Castro prisons. He was charged with plotting to blow up a building housing
Russian agents Castro used to visit regularly. Paul had operated a small bar in
Havana 25 a front, was married to a
Cuban who worked for the CIA and was deeply
involved in Miami's anti-Castro
Cuban activity. Sturgis said he would make arrangements for me to meet Paul,
but he didn't want to tell Paul that he was setting him up. He said he would be
having breakfast with Paul the next Saturday morning at the Westward Ho
restaurant in Little Havana and that I should just "coincidentally"
stroll in. "He don't know you're gonna be there, so when you get there
I'll just put him on a little bit," said Sturgis. We're old friends, I've
known him for years. It'll be funny. We kid with each other a lot. He's a funny
guy."
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 Puerto
Rico. They're getting ready to track her down."
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 CIA, which showed that the Agency
had not told the Warren Commission about the Castro plot. The staffers figured
they didn't have the time for much original investigation and, if they did any,
it might open doors to more than they could handle. But what had become known
as the "Odio incident" bothered them, just as it had bothered the
Warren Commission. They were now thinking about talking to Silvia Odio, just to
cover an important base.
The problem was that Silvia Odio was missing. She had lived in Dallas
at the time of the Kennedy assassination, but word among independent
researchers was that she had years ago moved to Miami,
had re-married and dropped out of sight. She was one of the few key witnesses
who had not exploited her role or capitalized on her early notoriety. She
disliked the publicity, refused interviews with the press or assassination
buffs -- despite being offered large sums of money -- and had gone into hiding.
Now, according to word that Marston received, the Committee staff had tracked
her down in Puerto Rico. "I understand she just moved
back there recently," said Marston. "I was talking to Silvia Odio in Miami
this morning," I said. "Sonavagun," David laughed.
"Imagine, those supersleuths are going after the CIA.
One of Silvia Odio's brothers had gotten a ticket for a minor traffic violation
once and wound up in Florida's
computer system. Tracking her family down through several moves eventually led
me to Silvia herself. For the first time in 13 years, Silvia Odio would repeat
the story that represented one of the key unanswered questions in the Warren
Commission investigation. She would also later cooperate, not without
misgivings, with the House Select Committee on Assassinations. She would come
to found. If the Warren Commission had found that Silvia Odio was telling the
truth, its final conclusion that Oswald was not part of a conspiracy would have
been seriously undermined. Odio had claimed that Oswald was one of three men
who came to the door of her apartment in Dallas
one evening the last week in September, 1963. The Commission dismissed Odio's
testimony because, it said, it had considerable evidence" that Oswald was
not in Dallas at all that September.
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 University of Dallas,
had become friendly with a Dallas
clubwoman named Lucille Connell, who was active in both the Cuban
Refugee Center
there and the Mental Health Association. When Sarita told Connell of Silvia's
plight, Connell made arrangements to have Silvia and her children move to Dallas
and for Silvia to receive psychiatric treatment for her emotional problems.
Lucille Connell became Silvia's closest confidant. Cornell would later tell me
that Silvia's emotional problems --- brought on by the shock of suddenly being
left alone with four young children, her parents' imprisonment and her abrupt
fall from a life of wealth to deep destitution -- resulted in attacks of sudden
fainting when, according to Connell, "reality got to painful to
bear." Connell said she personally witnessed Silvia suffer these attacks
in her home when she first arrived in Dallas,
but with psychiatric counseling they eventually ended...until the Kennedy
assassination.
Silvia Odio had moved to Dallas in
March of 1963. She said she wanted only to lead a quiet life, but her concern
and her desire to do something to help get her parents out of prison led her
and her sisters to maintain contact with Cuban exiles who were politically
active and to join the anti-Castro group called JURE, which was founded by her
father's old friend, Manolo Ray. (This was the same Manolo Ray whom E. Howard
Hunt claims he resigned his Bay of Pigs CIA-liaison
position over; Hunt contended that Ray was much too liberal and leftist to be
permitted to join the invasion's political front coalition.) The sister
attended a couple of Cuban exile rallies in Dallas
and gave their spiritual support to anti-Castro efforts, but being young and
with little money there was not much else they could do. By September, 1963,
Silvia Odio was well-established in the Dallas Cuban exile community, had a
decent job, had her emotional problems under control was doing well enough to
be planning to move into a more comfortable apartment than the garden-type
rental unit in which she and her four children had been squeezed. The week
before Monday, October 1st, 1963,
the day she was scheduled to make the move, her sister Annie, who was then 17,
had come to the apartment to help her pack and babysit with her children. When
the doorbell rang early one evening in that last week of September, it was
Annie who went to the door to answer it. Later I would talk with Annie Odio,
who is now also living in to Miami.
She is married to an architect and the mother of two children. She remembered
the evening when three men came to the door of Silvia's apartment in Dallas.
One of the men asked to speak to Sarita. He spoke English but when Annie
answered him in Spanish he also spoke Spanish. Annie told him that Sarita
didn't live there. He then said something, I don't recall exactly what,
something about her being married, which made me think that they really wanted
my sister Silvia. I recall puttin~ the chain on the door after I told them to
wait while I went to get Silvia." Annie told me that two of the men were
Latin-looking and that one of them was shorter and heavy-set, had dark shiny
hair combed back and "looked Mexican." She also said,
"The-one-in the middle was American."
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 Dallas
for several years pr~or to my asking them about it. Annie recalled that Silvia
was initially reluctant to talk with the strange visitor because she was busy
getting dressed to go out, but she remembers Silvia coming out of the bedroom
in her bathrobe to go to the door.
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 Dallas
to confirm her description of the scene.) She said Oswald, as well as the other
two, appeared tired, unkempt and unshaven, as if they had just come from a long
trip.
"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 Dealey Plaza.
"When I first saw Oswald on television," she told me, "my first
thought was, 'My God, I know this ~uv and I don't know from where' I kept
thinking, 'Where have I seen this guy?' Then I remember my sister Sarita called
me and told me that Silvia had fainted at work and that she was sending her
boyfriend to take me to the hospital. The first thing I remember when I walked
into the room was that Silvia started crying and crying. I think I told her,
'You know this guy on TV who shot President Kennedy? I think I know him.' And
she said, 'You don't remember where you know him from?' I said, 'No, I cannot
recall, but I know I've seen him before.' And then she told me, Do you remember
those three guys who came to the house?"' That's when, Annie said, she
suddenly knew she had seen Lee Harvey Oswald before.
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 Miami now.
No longer wealthy (he was working at night in a low manager's job for an
airline),but still proud and idealistic, a handsome old gentleman who exudes a
quite dignity, he confirmed receiving the letter from Silvia and his reply.
More specifically, Dr. Burton Einspruch, the psychiatrist who was counseling
Silvia at the time, recalled that she had him prior to the assassination of the
visit of the two Latins and the American and that he remembered calling her on
the day of the assassination. He said she mentioned "Leon"
and in what he called "a sort of histrionic way," connected he visit
of "Leon'-
to the Kennedy assassination.
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 December
12th, 1963. On August 23rd, 1964, with the first drafts of the
Warren Commission report being written, Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin wrote to J.
Edgar Hoover: "It is a matter of some importance to the Commission that
Mrs. Odio's allegations either be proved or disapprove." A month later,
with the report in galley form, the Odio incident was still a critical concern
staffers. In a memo to his boss, Staff Counsel Wesley Liebeler wrote:
"There are problems. Odio may well be right. The Commission will look bad
if it turns out that she is. There is no need to look foolish by grasping at
straws to avoid admitting that there is a problem."
The FBI did attempt to alleviate that "problem" when lt interviewed a
soldier-of-fortune named Loran Eugene Hall or September 26th, 1964. Hall claimed he had been in Dallas
in September, 1963, trying to Castro funds with two companions, one of whom
might have looked like Oswald. The Warren Commission grasped at that straw and
detailed that interview in its final report, giving the impression that Hall
and his companions were Odio's visitors. concluded: "...Lee Harvey Oswald
was not at Mrs. Odio's apartment in September, 1963." The Warren
Commission did not mention that Loran Eugene Hall the Kennedy Cuban missile
crackdown and was a member of the International Anti-Communist Brigade, whose
members and leaders had promulgated a series of phony stories to Kennedy
assassination investigators. Neither did the Warren Commission note in its
final report -- even though it knew -- that the subsequent FBI interviews
revealed that Hall's two companions denied being in Dallas, that neither looked
at all like Oswald, that Silvia Odio, shown their photographs, did not
recognize them, and that Loran Eugene Hall, when re-questioned, admitted he had
fabricated the story and was just playing games. It is no wonder that the
critics early pounced on the Odio incident as being the most flagrant of all
the Warren Commission distortions. One of the most respected, Sylvia Meagher,
wrote in her book, Accessories After the Fact: "In the Commission could
leave such business unfinished, we are entitled to ask whether its members were
ever determined to uncover the truth."
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 Miami's Cuban Community,
still constantly being shaken by internecine bombings, and what some crazy,
anti-Castro fanatic might do. (She and her husband once tried to publish a
local Spanish-language literary magazine, but because right-wing Cuban exiles
control that specialty distribution market, they could not get it on the
newsstands in Little Havana.)
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 "CIA,"
and it had already concluded that the Agency had nothing to do with Oswald. But
all that was to come long after my first talk with Silvia Odio. And although I
sensed her story was important to understanding the truth behind the Kennedy
assassination, I didn't realize how significant the pursuit of it would be in
my own investigation. About the time I found Silvia Odio in Miami, an
independent researcher named Paul Hoch sent Senator Schweiker a pre-publication
copy of an article which as going to appear in a few weeks in The Saturday
Evening Post. He had written it with George O'Tool a former CIA
computer specialist and the author of The Assassination Tapes, a book which
revealed that psychological stress analysis of Oswald's voice indicate telling
the truth when he denied killing President Kennedy. Hoch himself, a physicist
at the University of California
at Berkeley, was a respected Warren
Commission critic known for his plodding analytical research of government
documents.
The article was titled, "Dallas:
The Cuban Connection," and it dealt with the Odio incident. "The
Saturday Evening Post has learned," said the article, "of a link
between the Odio incident and one of the many attempts on the life of Cuban
Premier Fidel Castro carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency and Cuban
emigres in the early 1960s."
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 Dallas
at "3126 Hollandale." In the mounds of Warren Commission Hoch found a
report by a Dallas deputy sheriff
saying that an informant told him that a person resembling Oswald was seen
associating with Cubans at "3128 Harlendale." The article concluded:
"Like the two Cubans who, with 'Leon Oswald,' visited Silvia Odio in
September, 1963, Antonio Veciana was: 1) an anti-Castro activist, 2) engaged in
raising funds for the commandos, and 3) acquainted with Silvia Odio's father.
While this falls short of proving it, a real possibility exists that Veciana was
one of the two Cubans who visited Silvia Odio, or that he at least can shed
some light on the Odio incident."
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 Miami's
anti-Castro movement. (I later checked and confirmed that with them.) I also
doubted that Veciana, if he hadn't been involved, would know anything about the
visit, but he might be worthwhile talking with when I got around to it. I
didn't give it any priority because I thought the article was overly
speculative.
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 CIA
claimed its admitted series of plots with the Mafia where allegedly suspended
at that time, Hoch noted that there was still in effect an earlier directive --
called NSAM 100 -- which ordered a contingency plan drawn up for Castro's
"removal." Wrote Hoch: "The hypothesis that NSAN 100 and
subsequent events were directly related to the Veciana plot deserves careful
consideration. This would be the case even if there were no possible link to
the Kennedy assassination through the people involved in the Odio incident.
...It is possible that Veciana was under the direct control of the CIA."
The significance of Hoch's shrew speculation was much deeper than it appeared
on the surface. He was contending, in effect, that since the Veciana plot did
not appear in the Church report, it was one the CIA
was trying to hide.
Hoch is a soft-spoken, conservative analyst, yet his conclusions were usually
strong: "I suggest consideration of the hypothesis that the CIA
has managed to draw the attention of the Church Committee away from
assassination plots other than the Giancana-Roselli one (specifically, away
from the Veciana plot) for some reason; and that the CIA
has thus diverted attention from possible links between CIA
activities and the Kennedy assassination." Hoch then cautiously added:
"Clearly, as such hypothesis is speculative."
Coincidentally, at about that time, there appeared in Esquire an insightful
column by its Washington watcher
Timothy Crouse, who suggested that the CIA
in revealing such flashy "seecrets" as its deadly shellfish toxin and
toxic dart gun, was taking the Church Committee through a promose maze. Crouse
was disturbed that the Committee's chief counsel, F.A.O. Schwarz Jr. ("he
was the innocent look of one of the trolls they sell at the toy store his
great- grandfather founder"), was accepting on face value the CIA's
own enumeration of its misdeeds. "It’s pretty unusual," Schwarz
admitted to Crouse, "to find that the defendant has developed large parts
of the case. It's very helpful."
That bothered Crouse: "Its a queer thing to hear the chief Senate
investigator talking as if he and the CIA
wer Transfer interrupted!
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 in Miami
or even if he was still alive. I might have to put the word through my contacts
in Little Havana, start the tedious core of combing through public records,
spending days on the telephone or in the street sniffing for his trail, pull
out all the research sources I could muster. I found Veciana listed in the Miami
telephone directory.
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 Atlanta.
I asked when he would return home. Tony had a muffled conversation with his
mother. "well, he's in Atlanta
and he won't be home for a while," he said. I asked if there were anyway I
could reach his father in Atlanta.
Another muffled conversation with his mother. He asked why I wanted to talk
with his father. In order to easier establish an initial rapport, I had made it
a point to not specifically mention the Kennedy assassination when I first
approached any of the Cuban exiles. I said simply that I was a staff
investigator for Senator Schweiker and that Schweiker was a member of the
Church Intelligence Committee. My interest I always said, was in learning
something about the relationships of the Federal agencies with the anti-Castro
Cubans during the early 1960s. That's what I told Veciana's son. There was
another muffled conversation with his mother. "Well, you see," he
said again, "he's in Atlanta."
It was the third time the kid told me that his father was in Atlanta
and I was getting a little annoyed that I couldn't get beyond that. Then it
struck me. The Federal penitentiary was in Atlanta.
Was he trying to tell me his mother was in prison?
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 Cuba
politics, we have led a very normal life -- on CUBAN terms. We prayed to Our
Lady of Charity (the patron saint of Cuba),
we spoke Spanglish at home and fought -- successfully -- to leave the
chaperones at home." Understanding Veciana and his role in his family, the
circumstances of his being in prison and the stress that was causing is, I now
believe, crucial to understanding the information that Veciana provided and
whey he provided it.
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 Atlanta.
His father, said Tony, had been in there for 26 months.
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's
Little Havana. Around the abbreviated front yard was a low chain-link fence
with a latch gate. On the patch of grass to the right of the walkway was a
small white status of the Madonna and Child and set in front of it as if part
of a shrine, a slab bench. Closer to the walkway was a flower planter in the
form of a small concrete ship. Dripping terms and bromelia hung from the edges
of a white aluminum awning shading its tiled front porch. Hung on the varnished
wood front door was an old--fashioned promotional device from Schlitz Brewing,
the kind you used to see cluttering neighborhood saloons. It was a wooden
plaque with a brass coat hook on top and, below that, a brass plate with a
"Ship's Time" pie chart. The home exuded a comfortable
unpretentiousness, bereft of the fancy iron scrollwork and fancy trim which
adorns the domiciles of many of Miami's wealthier and more socially prominent
Cuban exiles. You would not guess the Veciana home to be that of a man of historical
importance.
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 Atlanta,
he was told that he would be getting an early parole. Learning that, I decided
to wait until he came home. I was in no hurry, I didn't think it of pressing
importance and I had plenty to keep my very busy.
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 University of Havana.
In his early 20s, he was considered the boy wonder of Cuban banking and rose to
become the right-hand man of Cuban's major banker, Juko Lobo, the millionaire
who was also know as the "Sugar King" of 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 into Cuba
and still remains in prison there.) Alpha 66 was the Cuban exile group which
particularly seemed to taunt President Kennedy. Not content to limit its assaults
against Cuba
and Castro's forces, it also attacked any foreign ships supplying Castro and
conducted assassination raids against Russian troops in CUBA.
Long before the missile crisis, when Kennedy's policy was to maintain a
separate U.S.
stance toward Russia
and CUBA, Alpha
66 seemed bent on attempting to provoke a direct conflict between Russia
and the United States.
Later when Kennedy went to a special conference in Central 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. To acerbate the situation, Veciana
conducted a special news conference for the international press in Washington
detailing the attack and calling on Kennedy to take further direct action
against Russia.
The New York Times noted: "Hit-and-run attacks by Cuban exiles against
Soviet ships in Cuba
are causing dismay and embarrassment in the Administration."
At the height of the missile crisis, when Kennedy was in the midst of delicate
negotiations with Khrushchev to keep World War III
from erupting, Alpha 66 continued its raids into CUBA
and Assaulting on Castro's patrol boats. "We will attack again and
again," announced Veciana. After the crisis, when Kennedy had issued a
directive to Federal law enforcement agencies to halt all anti-Castro raids and
shut down exile training camps, Alpha 66 defied the ban by continuing
operations secretly and even attacked British merchant ships in Cuban waters. A
lead editorial in the Times warned than: "NO matter how much we may admire
the anti-Castroism that motivates its actions, this group is nevertheless
dangerously playing with the laws and the security of the 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-sky Florida
winter morning, the sun comfortable warm, a nice breeze blowing from the
southeast. I thought I'd like to be sailing.
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 Miami -- was his pallor. He
had been released for a few days, yet it was still very much a prison pallor --
which is something that comes from more than just not being in the sun,
something that has to do with the spirit. The prison was still in Veciana's
eyes. We sat in the small front living room, which could very well have been
set in South Philadelphia: Two Spanish Provincial couches, one red and one
green, fitted with clear plastic covers; large individual portrait photographs
of each child adorning one wall, a coffee table between the two couches with a
gild-framed formal family portrait propped in the center, crocheted doilies on
the end tables.
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 U.S.
intelligence agencies with the anti-Castro CUBAN groups. I said nothing of my
interest in the Kennedy assassination and, since Schweiker had gotten
relatively little press attention in Miami
compared to the headlines than being made by the Church Committee, there was
little reason for Veciana to assume that was my priority.
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 United
States laws he may have broke n during the
course of his anti-Castro activity. I assured him our talk would be
confidential and not be made public. I felt I could trust Schweiker to back me
and keep that promise, and Schweiker did; b ut I didn't realize then that once
something is thrown into the political hopper that is the Federal bureaucracy,
its ultimate use is dictated by political ends. At any rate, Veciana accepted
that assurance. In his own way, I later came to learn, he himself was anxious
to use me. Just released from prison, uncertain and confused about what had
happened to him, he took my arrival as an opportunity to establish a defense
against any other actions which might be taken against him. That would come
clear to me only much later. I asked Veciana to start with some general
background about himself and how he had gotten involved in anti-Castro
activity. He said that as president of the association of certified public
accountants in Cuba
he had always been interested in politics. He was among the leaders of a group
of professional association presidents who had secretly worked on Castro's
behalf during General Batista's reign. As a result, when Castro took over he
was asked to join the government as a top echelon finance minister. HE turned
the offer down, he said, because he had a good position in CUBA's
major bank, but he did know and worked closely with Castro's highest ranking
government officials.
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 in Cuba
in October, 1961, but also the plan to kill Castro in Chile
in 1971. Bishop, said Veciana, was the one who suggested the founding of Alpha
66 and guided its overall strategy. Bishop was the one who pulled the strings
when connections with the U.S. Government were needed and when financial
support was needed and who involved Veciana not only in anti-Castro activity
but anti-Communist activity in 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. The CIA
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 in Miami
and what had happened in Dallas,
although Veciana did say his secret meetings with Bishop took place, over the
years, in cities besides Miami,
including Dallas, Las
Vegas and Washington,
and in 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.
He told me he had spoken at some fund- raising meetings at the home of the
Alpha 66 delegate there. I asked him I he knew Jorge Salazar. That was the name
mentioned in theat Dallas deputy
sheriff's report about the gathering of Alpha 66 members at "3126
Hollandale." But I did not mention that to Veciana, nor that Lee Harvey
Oswald was reportedly seen there. "No," said Veciana, "I do not
know the Salazar that is mentioned is the magazine article in Dallas.
And I never saw Oswald at the home where we met." I was taken back that
Veciana should mention Oswald at all, but then I realized, as Veciana himself
would point out to me when he went back to his bedroom and returned with the
magazine, that the Hoch and O'Toole article had been published in The Saturday
Evening Post. Veciana said he had just read the article the day before.
"...No," he was saying , "I never saw Oswald at that place where
we held the meetings...." I was jotting that down in my notebook and was
not looking at him, but I heard him continue..." "...but I remember
once meeting Lee Harvey Oswald."
I did not look up. My mind fell off its chair. I
restrained myself from reacting with a ridiculously overly casual, "Oh,
recall I simply asked in a forced monotone: "How did you meet him? Where?
When?" Veciana said he met Oswald with Maurice Bishop in Dallas sometime near the beginning of September, 1963.
There, in that modest green house in Little Havana, almost 13 years after the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, the reality of what I was involved in
suddenly struck me. The killing of a President was no longer a series of
lingering mental televison images, bold black headlines, thick stacks of
documents, books and files. It was something that had actually happened, and
there were living people with direct strings through time to the moment. As
much as the substance of the information itself, it was the absolutely
coincidental and credible way it came up, the manner in wich the interview had
developed, which so stunned me. First impressions are inherently circumstantial
judgements, but I had no doubt then -- and have none now -- that Veciana was
simple and truthfully revealing what he knew.
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 Havana handed him a business care from a gentleman, she
said, who was waiting to see him. The name on the card was Maurice Bishop.
Veciana does not specifically remember the name of the business imprinted on
the card but now believes it may have been a construction firm headquartered in
Belgium. Veciana's first for his bank. The man who said he
was Maurice Bishop did not lead Veciana to change his thought about that
initially. Although he spoke excellent Spanish, Bishop said he was an American
and wanted to talk with Veciana about the state of the Cuban economy and where
it appears to be going since Castro took over. They talked for quite a while
and then, around noon, Bishop suggested they continue their conversation
over lunch. Bishop took Veciana to a fine restaurant called the Floridita once
one of Hemingway's favorite watering holes. As their conversation continued,
Veciana recalls. Bishop began to express a concern about the Cuban government's
learning toward Communism and also let it be known that he was aware of
Veciana's feelings toward Castro. That surprised Veciana because he had told
only a few close friends about his disillusionment with Castro's government.
(Among those he told, however, were two who it late became known had direct
contact with the Central Intelligence Agency. One was his boss, Julio Lobo, who
later in exile was designated to set up an "independent" front
committee to raise $20 million for the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners;
another was Rufo Lopez-Fresquet, who, for the first 14 months of the
Revolution, was Castro's Minister of the Treasury and the CIA's
liaison contact with the new government.)
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 Cuba currency and the creation of public distrust in its
value.
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 Havana. Before the Embassy was closed in January, 1961,
Bishop suggested that Veciana contact specific individuals there in order to
get direct assistance and supplies for the anti- Castro movement. Bishop,
however, asked Veciana not to mention his name or the fact that he was sent by
an American. Nor did Bishop indicate whether or not the contacts he suggested
were intelligence agents.
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 Palm Beach and whose wife, it was well known in that town, had a
special relationship with John. F. Kennedy. Veciana said, however, theat Earl
Smith was not the one he contacted; rather it was a Smith who was a young man
then and whose first name might have been "Ewing,"
as Veciana initially recalled it.
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 Cuba before the Bay
of Pigs invasion in April, 1961. He says he had not met
with Bishop for some months prior to it. However, after the Bay of Pigs,
Bishop returned to CUBA. Probably, Veciana learned, with a Belgium passport. Veciana recalls that he and Bishop had long
discussions about what happened at the Bay of Pigs.
He says Bishop told him that Kennedy's failure to provide air support was the
crucial factor in the failure of the operation. Bishop obviously felt a
terrible frustration about that because, according to Veciana, "At the
theme Bishop decided that the only thing left to be done was to have an attempt
on Castro's life."
The assassination of Fidel Castro was something that Veciana and Bishop had
discussed before. Earlier that year, Russia's first spaceman, Yuri Gagarin, had visited Castro
and Veciana had suggested an attempt at that time, but Bishop, who always
seemed critically aware of the propaganda repercussions of any scheme, rejected
the idea. "He said that it would cause too much trouble between the United States and Russia," recalls Veciana.
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 Spain as a precaution as soon as he had begun plotting.) He
then recruited the action men to do the actual shooting and obtained the
weapons. (Availability of weapons was not a major problem to the anti-Castro
underground as a result of the supply air-dropped by the U.S. prior to the Bay of Pigs.)
The apartment was stocked with automatic rifles, grenade launchers and a
bazooka. A massive firepower attack was planned so that all of the key Castro
aids who appeared on the balcony with Fidel would be killed.
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 CUBA.
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 Miami. Veciana was not in Miami very long before Maurice Bishop was back in touch
with him. (He would not have been difficult to find in the close-knit exile
community even if Bishop did not have access to official Immigration records.)
Soon there were meeting regularly and planning strategy to continue the fight
against Castro. The result was that founding of Alpha 66 which, according to
Veciana, was Bishop's brainchild. (The name was a collaboration: Alpha was
meant to symbolize the beginning of the end of Castro; the 66 represented the
number of fellow accountants Veciana recruited at the start of his anti-Castro
activities.
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 Cuba. At one point, Veciana announced he had a war chest
of $100,000 and that ll the major exile organizations were backing Alpha 66's
efforts. And except for one minor slip which no one paid any attention to at
the time, Veciana gave not a hint to his Alpha 66 associates that there was an
American behind the scenes guiding his strategy. However, at a press conference
recorded in The New York Times on September 14, 1962, Veciana announced a series of forthcoming Alpha 66
attacks and, in passing, added that the planning was being done by those
"I don't even know."
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 Cuba at the height of the missile crisis when Kennedy was
in delicate negotiating with Khrushchev was Bishop's idea. SO was a special
press conference in Washington after the crisis, when Veciana announced that Alpha
66 had just successfully attacked a Russian ship in a Cuban harbor and engaged
in a firefight with Russian troops. The conference was planned at the time
Kennedy was in Costa
Rica
trying to gain Latin American support for his new Cuban policy. "The
purpose was to publicly embarrass Kennedy and force him to move against
Castro," Veciana now admits. Although Bishop was not present at the press
conference, Veciana says he arranged for two high-ranking government officials,
one in the Department of Health and one in the Department of Agriculture, to
attend to give it more legitimacy in the eyes of the press. And it did, indeed,
get the publicity that Bishop had planned. The Government, said The New York
times, "was embarrassed by the incident," and noted that Kennedy's
party in Costa Rico telephoned several times for reports on the situation.
ALTHOUGH Maurice Bishop often suggested specific tactical moves, he was more
concerned with the overall strategy of Alpha 66 and Veciana's anti-Castro
activity. As such, he was far from in constant contact with Veciana. In fact,
Veciana never saw him ore than a dozen or so times in any one year.
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, Cuba politics and anti-Castro activity.)
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 Havana, however, which took place at a country club and,
once, in an apartment across the street from the American Embassy. Later,
however, if Veciana was in another city, Bishop would come to his hotel. The
majority of his meetings with Bishop over the years were in Miami and Puerto
Rico, where most of Alpha 66's operational planning
took place. Veciana assumed that Bishop would fly in for these meetings because
often Bishop would meet him in a rented car. Over the years, meetings with
Bishop took place also in Washington, Las
Vegas and Dallas and, during a period when Veciana had a job in South America, in Caracas, Lima and La Paz.
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, CIA
operative E. Howard Hunt recalled his first meeting with his project chief, a
fellow he gave the phoney "real" name of Drecher: "Drecher then
told me," Hunt writes, "he had adopted the operational alias of Frank
Bender in his dealings with the Cubans whom he told he was the representative
of a private American group made up of wealthy industrialist...." Hunt
revealed that he also used that same cover story. From the spate of published
memoirs now pouring from the typewriters of former CIA
officers, it appears to have been a fairly typical line employed by operatives
with their covert contacts in whatever country they seemed to be working. It
was an effective enough cover, and sufficiently credible to account for the
huge amount of funding the operative usually had available. It was the same
cover story that Maurice Bishop used. "He would tell me," Veciana
recalls, "that, you know, there are some other people, some very wealthy
businessmen, who would like to get rid of Castro also." He would never be
any more specific than that.
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 Cuba. Bishop called and asked Veciana to meet him on a
downtown Miami
street
corner. They walked about for a while talking. Bishop spoke about how the fight
against Castro might be more difficult and longer than they had first
envisioned, how he and Veciana would have to work very close together and how
they must develop a mutual trust and loyalty. Veciana agreed. Would Veciana,
Bishop asked, be willing to sign a contract to that effect. Of course, said
Veciana. Bishop then led Veciana to the Pan American Bank Building, a five-story office structure in the heart of Miami's business district. Veciana recalls only that they took
an elevator and that Bishop had the key to an unmarked office door. The office
was spartanly furnished with only a desk and a few chairs, but Veciana does
remember an American flag standing in one corner.
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 Pan American Bank Building for that period Veciana talked about, but there were
so many CIA business fronts of all types in Miami at the time it was invalid to consider one more
suspect, although the building had a few import- export firms. It also had, in
nine separate offices on four different floors, branches of four Federal
agencies, including Treasury, State Department and Health, Education &
Welfare offices. Temporary use of any Government office could have easily been
arranged by Bishop. As a Federal investigator, I often made use of other agency
offices when I traveled, arranged by just a telephone call in advance.) What
also struck Veciana was Bishop's knowledge of other covert activity the CIA
was then associated with and of individuals the Agency was using as contacts
or, in the CIA's term, "assets." For instance, at one
point Bishop asked Veciana to monitor an operation that led the code name of
Cellula Fantasma. "Bishop told me it cost the CIA
$3000,000 for that operation," Veciana says. It was basically a propaganda
operation that involved leaflet drops over Cuba. Veciana attended a couple of meetings of the group
planning the action and reported back to Bishop. One of those involved was
Frank Fiorini Sturgis. "At that time," Veciana recalls, "I
remember Bishop saying to me about Fiorini that he wasn't just another soldier,
he was more than that."
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 CIA
asset and, besides, he was a drunk. Veciana concluded that Bishop did, indeed,
know the fellow because the guy almost drank himself under the table at their
meeting. (I confirmed Veciana's story about this when I found the American, now
living in Palm Beach. Although he said he never knew a Maurice Bishop, he
admitted his contacts with Veciana and with the CIA,
HE was a regular at Palm
Beach's most popular
social watering spot, the Ta-boo.) Veciana had considered the possibility that
Bishop worked for an intelligence agency other than the CIA.
Among the most active monitoring anti-Castro activity was the Army Intelligence
section. What Veciana specifically recalls, however, was being contacted in
1962 in Puerto Rico by an American who called himself Patrick Harris.
From a series of long conversations with him, Veciana came to the conclusion
that he was Army Intelligence. Harris told Veciana that he might be able to
provide some support for his anti-Castro activities, but first wanted to make
an inspection trip of Alpha 66's operational base in the Bahamas. Veciana eventually came to trust Harris and did
provide him and a couple of associates a tour of the base, over military chief
Menoyo's objections. Harris never did come through with any aid. "I told
Bishop about that," Veciana now says, "and he told me not to bother
with them, that they could not help me. He was right."
In 1968, Maurice Bishop helped Veciana get a job with the U.S. Agency for International
Development, working in La
Paz, Bolivia, as a banking adviser to Bolivia's Central Bank. It was a very good paying job and his
checks came directly from the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington. "I was very surprised I was hired because I was
a known terrorist," Veciana says today. "The State Department, which
hired me, once ordered me confined to Dade County because of my anti-Castro activity. Then in La Paz they put my office in the American Embassy. For sure,
Bishop had very good connection."
Veciana worked for the Agency for International Development for four years,
receiving more than $31,000 a year to provide advice to Bolivia's budding banking industry. (It had since been
reported that the CIA has used the AID as a front in other instances, once
got one of its own proprietary companies a multi-million dollar AID contract to
train Thailand's border police.) Veciana says, however, he did very
little bank advising during the entire four years. Instead, he spent almost all
his time involved in anti-Castro and anti-Communist activities directed by
Bishop.
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 Latin
America -- with Bishop providing expenses -- involving
himself in propaganda ploys aimed at the character assassination of leading
Communist politicians or weakening the financial stability of Left-leaning
governments. (once, when I was questioning Veciana about Bishop's apparent
competency based on his failures to assassinate Castro, Veciana simply smiled
slightly and said, "No, we did not kill Castro, but here were many other
plans, many other plots that did work." He did not want to elaborate.)
Early in 1971, Bishop told Veciana that Castro would probably be making a state
visit to Chile some time later that year. He suggested that Veciana
begin planning another assassination attempt. "He told me," Veciana
says, "that it was an opportunity to make it appear that the anti-Castro
Cubans killed Castro without American involvement."
Veciana set up his planning headquarters in Caracas. It was a natural. There the Venezuelan bureaucracy
is deeply infiltrated by both anti-Castro Cubans and the CIA.
There Veciana knew an experienced and effective group of plotters to join him,
including two veteran terrorists willing to take on the daring mission of
actually doing the shooting. The plan as it evolved was, on the surface,
relatively simple. It became known that toward the end of his visit to chile
Castro would have a major press conference with as many as 400 journalists,
including radio and television reporters. Press credentials for the two
designated assassins would be obtained from a Venezuelan televison station and,
although there would be tight security, their weapons would be smuggled into
the conference room inside a television camera.
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 Chile later. At the time, of course, the head of the
Chilean government was the democratically elected Leftist President Salvador
Allende. Two years later, in September, 1973, Allende would be overthrown in a
military coup d'etat. It has since become known that Allende's disposal was
supported and heavily financed by the CIA and
a few American multinational corporations, chiefly International Telephone and
Telegraph. At one point, the CIA set up a super-secret Chile task force to work against Allende.
The attempt to assassinate Castro in Chile failed because at the very last moment the two
designated shooters decided that they would never get out of the conference
room alive. They did not believe that Veciana had made arrangements for their
capture. Veciana could not, of course, tell them of Bishop or how the
arrangements had been made. Ironically, other anti-Castro Cubans who Veciana
had recruited in Caracas to help him in setting up the plot, had also all
along not believed that Veciana could arrange an escape for the shooters. So
they decided, without Veciana's knowledge, to plan a sub-plot based on the
assumption that the shooters would be immediately caught and killed themselves.
Why the existence of the sub- plot later came to light, Veciana say, it
produced the crack that eventually led to the end of his relationship with Maurice
Bishop in 1973.
Among the associates Veciana says he recruited in Caracas were two veterans of the war against Castro, Lucilo
Pena and Luis Posada. Both have backgrounds, I later learned, as action men.
Pena is the general director of a major chemical firm and has excellent social
and business contacts. He had once been involved in Alpha 66's "Plan
Omega," a plot to invade Cuba from a base in the Dominican Republic.
Luis Posada's background, I would discover, is even more intriguing. When I
interviewed him in 1978, he was in jail in Caracas, having been arrested with probably the most
well-known exile terrorist, Dr. Orlando Bosch, for lowing up a Cubana Airlines
plane that killed 73 persons, including many Russians. He was a veteran of the Bay of Pigs, a
member of JURE, a former Lieutenant in the U.S. Army (where he took
intelligence staff officer courses), a former agent for the CIA
and, until his arrest, the owner of a very successful private detective agency
in Caracas. In 1971, when Veciana was working with him, he was
chief of security and counterintelligence in the Venezuelan secret police.
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 Chile. What they also did without telling him at the time,
says Veciana, was plant phony documents o that the trail of the two who were
going to assassinate Castro would lead, if they were caught and killed themselves,
to Russian agents in Caracas. It was an elaborate sub-plot. Lengthy but false
surveillance reports were slipped into the files of the Venezuelan secret
police indicating that the Cubans were seen meeting with the Russian agents,
one of whom was a correspondent of Izvestia and the other a professor at the
University of Central Venezuela. Also in the file were manufactured passports,
diaries and notes allegedly found in one of the assassin's hotel room and
indicating his contact with the Russian agents. In addition -- and the most
damaging evidence -- was a photograph showing what appeared to be one of the
assassins leaning into a car window and talking with one of the agents.
Actually, the photo was of another Cuban who closely resembled the assassin. Without
being told the reason for it, this double was instructed to stop the Russian
agent's car as he left his home in the morning, lean in and ask him for a
match. A telephoto shot was taken of his encounter.
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 July
26th, 1973. Veciana recalls commenting to his wife when he
got home that afternoon on the irony of the dat and its association with
Castor's own movement. Bishop had called. He asked Veciana to meet him in the
parking lot of the Flagler Dog Track, which is not far from Veciana's home. The
track was in session and the parking lot was crowded. Veciana spotted Bishop
waiting in a car at the designated spot. Bishop got out of the car with a
briefcase. With him were two clear-cut young men in dark suits. The men stood
by out of earshot while Bishop and Veciana spoke. Bishop said he regretted that
their relationship had to end but that it would best for both of them in the
long run. He shook Veciana's hand and wished him luck. Then he handed him the
briefcase. In it, he said, was the compensation that was due him. When Veciana
got home he opened the briefcase. It was stuffed with Cash. Exactly 253,000
says Veciana. That, says Veciana, was the last time he saw or spoke with
Maurice Bishop.
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 New Orleans which is largely undocumented. On August 9th, 1963, Oswald was arrested after distributing pro-Castro
leaflets and a scuffle with Carlos Bringuier. On August 16th, he was again seen
passing out leaflets in front of the New Orleans Trade Mart and was, in fact,
that evening shown on televison newscasts doing it. One August 25th, Oswald was
on a radio debate with Bringuier arranged by New Orleans broadcaster William Stuckey, a self-styled
"Latin-American affairs expert." Despite the fact that Oswald
seemingly went out of his way to court such public attention as a Castro supporter,
as soon as he got it he immediately dropped out of sight. Between August 25th
and September 17th, there is no validated indication of Oswald's whereabouts.
Aside from their visit to the home of his aunt and uncle on Labor day, Marina
Oswald said her husband spent this time reading books and practicing with his
rifle. Down through the years, Marina Oswald's testimony has been inconsistent,
contradictory and, admittedly, false. The House Assassinations Committee found
several very credible witnesses who saw Oswald during this period in Clinton, Louisiana, about 130 miles from New Orleans, during a black voter registration drive. With him
were David Ferrie, who had been involved in anti-Castro activity, and New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, who had intelligence agency
connections. The committee could not determine what Oswald was really doing in Clinton, but here was no doubt he was there.
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 Dallas. Later, as he gave it more thought, he said it was
probably in early September, perhaps towards the end of the first week of the
month.
It was not the first time that Bishop had asked Veciana to meet him in Dallas. He had met him there a number of times prior.
Partially because of that, Veciana had come to suspect that Bishop was from Dallas or had some family there. More, however, he recalled
the time that Bishop had sent him to talk to Colonel Kail at the American
Embassy. The last time Veciana saw Kail was before Christmas, 1060. Kail said
he would consider Veciana's request for some support but he would like to
discuss it further with him when he returned from his Christmas leave. Kail
told Veciana he was going home to Dallas for Christmas. When Veciana reported back to Bishop,
he got the impression that Bishop knew Kail, or at least his background, and
that they had something in common. In my very first interview with Veciana, he
said, "I think that maybe Bishop is from Texas."
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 Southland Center, a 42-story office complex which, I later checked,
opened in 1959. As soon as Veciana walked in, he saw Bishop in a corner of the
lobby talking with a young man whom Veciana remembers as pale, slight and
soft-featured. He does not recall if Bishop introduced him by name, but Bishop
continued his conversation with the young man only very briefly after Veciana
arrived. Together they walked out of the lobby into the busy lunch crowd sidewalk.
Bishop and the young man stopped behind Veciana for a moment, had a few
additional words and then the young man gestured a farewell and walked away.
Bishop immediately turned to Veciana and a discussion of the current activities
of Alpha 66 as they walked to a nearby coffee shop. Bishop never spoke to
Veciana about the young man and Veciana didn't ask.
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 Dallas. There was no doubt in his mind. When I asked him if
it could have been someone who closely resemble Oswald, Veciana said:
"Well, you know, Bishop himself taught me how to remember faces, how to
remember characteristics. I am sure it was Oswald. If it wasn't Oswald, it was
someone who looked exactly like him. Exacto, exacto."
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 CIA
headquarters at Langley who have known each other for years, go to lunch
together daily, have become close personal and family friends, may not know
what the other actually does at his desk every day or what he's working on ---
and would never ask. that's the way it is. Veciana did not ask Bishop about Oswald.
"I was not going to make the mistake of getting myself involved in
something that did not concern me," he says. He recalls, however, feeling
very uneasy at that time. "Tat was a very difficult situation because I
was afraid. We both understood, I could guess that he knew that I was
knowledgeable of that and I learned that the best way is not to know, not to
get to know things that don't concern you, so I respected the rules and didn't
mention that ever."
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 Key West. He was a well-know figure among anti-Castro activists
in Miami because, technically, it was in the Custom Service's
jurisdiction to prevent violations of the Neutrality Act, which occurred every
time an anti-Castro raiding party took off from Miami or the Keys. With a radio- equipped patrol car, the
pistol-packing Diosdato, a beefy, mustachioed Mexican-American, roamed the Keys
like a traffic cop monitoring the launching sites of the exile raiding groups.
He didn't however, stop them all. The word among anti-Castro raiders active
during JM/WAVE's secret war was that no group could launch an attack
from the Florida Keys without permission of Diosdato. "He gave us the
green light," one former group leader told me. "Without word from
him, he couldn't go." s a result, most of Cubans thought Diosdato was
really working for the CIA. Veciana did. That's why he became particularly
apprehensive when Diosdato knocked on his door and asked him if he knew
anything about he Kennedy assassination or Lee Harvey Oswald. Diosdato
approached him casually. They had known each because Veciana had frequently
gone to Key West to get clearance from Diosdato. It was not an
"official" visit, Diosdato told Veciana. "He said he had been
instructed to ask a few of the exiles if they knew anything, that's all,"
Veciana recalls.
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 Key West to do it. It crossed his mind that perhaps he was
being tested. In any event, he decided immediately that he was not going to
tell Diosdato anything.
Several weeks later, Bishop called Veciana to arrange a meeting in Miami. At that meeting, Bishop never mentioned Oswald or
their encounter in Dallas. They did speak mostly about the Kennedy
assassination, its impact on the world and on their anti-Castro activities.
Bishop, says Veciana, appeared saddened by it. Yet he did suggest the
possibility of a strange sort of involvement. The way Veciana recalls it is
this: At the time, there appeared in the newspapers stories about Oswald having
met with a Cuban couple in Mexico
City. Veciana recalls
that the stories reported that the wife spoke excellent English. Bishop said he
knew Veciana had a cousin, Guillermo Ruiz, who was in Castro's intelligence
service and who then happened to be stationed in Mexico City. Ruiz's wife, coincidentally, spoke excellent
English. Bishop asked Veciana if he would attempt to get in touch with Ruiz and
offer him a large amount of money if Ruiz would say that it was him and his
wife who me with Oswald. Veciana took it as a ploy that might work because, as
he puts it, "Ruiz was someone who always liked money." Bishop, he
says did not specify how much Ruiz should be offered, only that it should be
"a huge amount." Veciana, however, was never able to present the
offer to his cousin because Ruiz had been transferred back to Havana and Veciana could not find a safe way to contact him.
When, a couple of months later, he mentioned his difficulties to Bishop,
Veciana says that Bishop told him to forget it. "He told me it was not
longer necessary," Veciana recalls. And that was the last reference he or
Bishop ever made to the Kennedy assassination.
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 CIA, Lee Harvey Oswald was not an agent, employee or
informant of the CIA. In addition, McCone also swore" "Lee
Harvey Oswald was never associated or connected, directly or indirectly, in any
way whatsoever with the Agency."
On March
12th, 1964, Richard Helms, then Deputy Director of Plans
(DDP) of the CIA, met with Warren Commission General Counsel J. Lee
Ranklin. Helms was in charge of all the Agency's covert operations. The minutes
of that meeting reveal that Helms told Ranking that "the Commission would
have to take his word for the fact that Oswald had not been an agent" of
the CIA.
More than 10 years later, in November, 1975, the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence issued a report which concluded that CIA
Deputy Director Helms had deliberately kept secret from his own boss, Director
McCone, the existence of certain covert operations. In the light, the
implication of what Antonio Veciana revealed for the first time on March 2nd, 1976, had historic relevance: That an individual
apparently associated with the CIA had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Moreover, that this CIA
operative was involved in Castro assassination attempts in which, for some
reason the Agency was not admitting participation.
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 New York federal court largely on the testimony of a former
partner with whom he had been in the sporting goods business in Puerto Rico.
The former partner, arrested with 10 kilos of cocaine, implicated Veciana. In
doing so, he avoided a long jail term himself. He was the only witness against
Veciana, who has steadfastly maintained his innocence. Veciana says, however,
that the evidence against him appeared very good and that even the federal
narcotics agents believed he was guilty. For that reason, he is still
accumulating documentation to disprove it and, despite having served his
sentence, is appealing his conviction. Given time, he says, he can destroy the
evidence against him. He has already produced some documentation to back his
claim.
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 CIA
had framed him because he insisted in moving ahead with another plot to kill
Castro.
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 CIA
had been totally honest with the Committee about all its Castro plots. Schwiker
thought the new information was explosive enought to re-open hearings. On that,
he immediately ran into a stone wall with both Chrurch and the staff leaders.
Although he never let me or his own staff know it, Schweiker was obviously
upset. He wasn't concerned aobut his own report which, he felt, was already
storng enough in impugning the Warren Commission's conclusions -- the first
official government document to do that --- he was interested in getting the
information on record. In a letter to his subcommittee co-chairman Hart but
obviously directed at Church and staff diretor F.O.A. schwartz, Schweiker
wrote: "I feel strongly Veciana should be called to testify under oath, to
evaluate his crdibility, create an official record of his allegations and
examine them .... I recognize that this involves some difficulty at this stage
of our proceeding, but in veiw of Veciana's direct link to intelligence
community activities subject to the Select Committee's jurisdiction, I do not
believe we can responsible refuse to evaluate his allegations." That put
the Committee on the spot. My concern, however, was less with what the
Committee would do than how it would do it. I felt we had stumble upon what
could possible be a totally new area of information in the Kennedy assasination
investigation and that developing it should be done in a structured and
comprehensive way. The committee staff had the power and resources to do that
if it truly wanted to. Or it could mishandle it and possible cause doors to be
locked tight forever. I called Dave Marston in Schweiker's office to ask him
what ws going to happen. "Well, I thnk they'll do something," he
said. "I think what they'll do is screw it up. I think they'll go the most
direct way, that is, make a official inquiry. So then there will be an official
inquiry and if there is anything there it'll be gone."
In the long run, that's exactly what the Committtee staff did. I was asked to
bring Veciana to Washington where he was sworn in at a secret executive session.
Schweiker was the only Committtee member who showed up. Veciana was sworn in
and a staff attorney questioned him for less than an hour. Only the barest
details of his story got on record. A transcript of the hearing would go into
restricted security files. Not a word about it would be mentioned in any of the
Intelligence Committee's reports. The question of whether or not the CIA
was involved in Veciana's attempts to assassinate Castro ws not confronted.
Veciana was not asked about them. Much to my frustration and that of his other
personal staffers, Schweiker was scrupulous about keeping from us the details
of the Committee staff's work. Since we did not h ave security clearnace and
had not signed non-disclosure agreements, we were not meant to have access to
any Committee information. Yet the Committee staff itself wanted to make use of
me. Since it was busy compiling its final report and I was the only
investigator investingating, and so from being told, through Schweiker, what to
check or who to interview, I could deduce what the Committee's unethusiastic
efforts to follow up the Veciana lead were producing.
For instance, the CIA told the COmmittee it had no employee name Maurice
Bishop and no record of any agent ever using that alias. I also deduced, from a
discussion with an Army Intelligence asset I had been sent to interview in New Orleans, that the CIA
told the Committee that Veciana and Alpha 66 were monitored not by the Agency
but by Army Intelligence. I thought this was a misdirection. I pointed out that
Veciana was aware of his contacts with Army Intelligence, that they covered
only a limited period of anti-Castro activities and that they were separate and
distinct from his relationship with Maurice Bishop. Nevertheless, after the CIA
denied an interest in Veciana, the Committee staff pursued the Army
Intelligence angle up until the end.
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 CIA, part of the Committee's original agreement with the
Agency. But the Committee itself would no longer exist the Schweiker would be
on his own, with no subpoena power or legal clout.
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.
end part 1XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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 United States government was the fact that Bishop had gotten him a
position with the U.S. Agency for International Development despite Veciana's
documented record as an anti-Castro terrorist. During this time, the Bishop
plan to assassinate Castro was developed in Caracas. Schweiker asked the U.S. State Department to check
its files. The State Department wired its confirmation from La Paz: Veciana did work as a "commercial banking
expert" for Bolivia's Central Bank, the telegram reported. His contracts
were financed by the AID. They were for the salary and for the time period
Veciana said they were. During this period he claimed a legal residence in Caracas.
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 CIA-sponsored
leaflet drops over Cuba, but only a limited number of people knew of the
Celula Fantasma operation by name. One of them was Frank Fiorini Sturgis, who
admitted his role in it. In Puerto
Rico I found the friend of Veciana's who put him in
touch with the hard-drinking American whom Bishop obviously knew. The friend
confirmed Veciana's story. I then tracked down he American himself, now living
in palm Beach. While enjoying a liquid lunch at the Ta- Boo, he
acknowledged his contacts with the CIA<
recalled the meeting with Veciana but said he never knew anyone named Maurice
Bishop.
A confidential source, a veteran of the U.S. Customs office in Miami, told me that Cesar Diosdado, the Customs Agent who
questioned Veciana was, indeed, working for the CIA in
Key West, as Veciana had suspected. Customs was reportedly
reimbursed for his salary by the Agency. This was confirmed by another source
who was close to the former head of the local Customs office. (Diosdado is now
with the Drug Enforcement Administration in California.)
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 Havana to who Bishop had sent Veciana: Kail and Smith. The
right Smith, however, would not be discovered until he happened to pop into the
news much later, during the closing days of the House Assassinations Committee.
Kail I stumbled upon almost immediately.
I happened to be talking with the late Paul Bethel in Coconut Grove one day. Bethel was a strong right-winger, once a Congressional
candidate, author and head of the U.S. Information Agency in Havana when Castro took over. He was married to a Cuban,
active in anti-Castro activities and an excellent source of information about
he exile community in Miami. Many suspected he has an association with the CIA. I
asked Bethel if he recalled a fellow named Kail at the American
Embassy. "Sure," said Bethel. "I knew Sam well. Military attaché. I believe
he's retired now, probably back home in Dallas."
Sam Kail was listed in the Dallas telephone directory. When I told Veciana I had found
him, Veciana said, "You know, I would like to call him. Perhaps he
remembers Bishop." He suggested I listen to the call. "Do you
remember me?" Veciana asked Kail after he had introduced himself. Kail
seemed very hesitant and very cautions. "Well, I'm not sure," he
said. "Remember," coaxed Veciana, "the last time I saw you, in
December, 1960, you were going home for Christmas." Kail remembered.
"Yes, I did come home that Christmas," he said. "then you
remember me?" No, Kail said, he can't say that he does. "At any
rate," Veciana went on, "I am trying to find a friend, the American
who sent me to you. He was a big help to me in fighting Castro. Now I need to
find him. Do you remember Maurice Bishop?" Kail was silent for a moment.
"Bishop?" he repeated. More silence. "Bishop," he said again,
as if thinking about it. Kail said that off the top of his head he didn't
recall the name, but he would like to give it some thought. He said he would
think about if for a day or two and then call Veciana back. Kail never called
Veciana back. A couple of weeks later I suggested to Veciana that he call Kail
again. Kail said he had given some thought to the name of the American that
Veciana had asked him about but, try as he did, he just couldn't recall every
knowing anyone named Maurice Bishop, nor anyone named Bishop who fitted the
description Veciana had given. Sorry he couldn't be of any help, said Kail.
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 CIA or Lee Harvey Oswald or the investigations of the
Kennedy assassination. Included were a few Organized Crime figures.
One who first struck me as possible being Maurice Bishop was Oswald's Dallas friend, George DeMohrenschildt. The globe-trotting
DeMohrenschildt and a group of anti-Communist White Russian cohorts had
befriended the Oswalds as soon as they had returned to Dallas from the Soviet
Union. Down through the years, most Kennedy
assassination researchers had come to conclude that DeMohrenschildt had
intelligence agency ties. George DeMohrenschildt loosely fitted Veciana's
verbal description of Bishop. I became a bit excited when I discovered that
DeMohrenschildt was then teaching at a small school in Dallas called Bishop College. Checking further, I learned that Bishop College once had the reputation of being a hot-bed of Leftist
activity and a known center of Communist agitators. However, it later became
known that the college had, in fact, received major financial support from a
foundation which was founded by the CIA.
It appeared to be an Agency decoy.
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 Miami has its share of fanatics as well as professional
assassins, as the pattern of bombings and ambushes in Little Havana down
through the years clearly shows. A few months before I first spoke with
Veciana, an exile leader named Rolando Masferrer, known as El Tigre when he
headed Batista's secret police, condoned the rash or bombings in a local
magazine article. "You do not beg for freedom," he wrote, "you
conquer it.... In the meantime, dynamite can speak in a uniquely eloquent
manner...." A week later, half of Masferrer was found in what remained of
his car when he tried to start it that morning. A uniquely eloquent retort.
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 Miami area. Professional composite artists work only for
law enforcement agencies. I didn't, of course, want to use a Federal Agency.)
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 Miami and the next morning I took the Bishop sketch and
copies of it to Schweiker's office in Washington. Dave Marston had taken the day off to go to Philadelphia to look for a house. His nomination as U.S. Attorney
for the eastern district of Pennsylvania was before Congress and he did not
lack for confidence. Dace Newhall looked at the sketch with a new fascination.
"You know, it looks exactly like I thought it would from the description
we were working on," he said. "I think the boss will want to see this
right away." (Newhall never referred to Schweiker as "Dick,"
which is the way the Senator usually introduced himself. I was always bemused
by Newhall's favorite term -- "the boss" -- because it was a bit of a
disillusion of his own power in the office)
Schweiker was attending a hearing of the Senate Health Committee, one of his
permanent post, in the Rayburn Building. We got word to him and, during a break in the
hearing, we huddled in a corner of the anteroom of the chamber. The Health
Committee chairman, Senator Edward Kennedy, glanced quizzically at the three of
us hunched over the sketch as he hurried through the anteroom. (Schweiker, as a
courtesy, had written a note to Kennedy prior to his calling on the Church
Committee to establish a special subcommittee to investigate President
Kennedy's murder. Senator Kennedy reaction was not negative, which Schweiker
interpreted as a signal to go ahead.)
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 Harvey?" asked Newhall. William Harvey had been cited
by the Church Committee as the CIA's coordinator in its Castro assassination plots with
the Mafia.
"No, it's not Harvey," Schweiker said. Finally he sighed, resigned at
his inability to recollect the image. "I've got to get back to the
hearing," he said. "Why don't you take a copy down to the Committee
staff. I'll give it more thought later."
The Intelligence Committee staff worked out of a sprawling arrangement of
cubicles on the ground floor of the old Dirkson Office Building. Newhall and I signed in at the security desk and a
staff attorney who had been working with Schweiker on the Kennedy subcommittee
emerged from the inner recesses. We showed him the sketch. He looked at the
photograph and nodded his head as if he in approval. "Fine," he said.
"That's fine." He gave no indication that the sketch reminded him of
anyone in particular. He took a copy of it and, I assumed, stuck it securely in
Committee's classified files.
That night I flew back to Miami. It was a Friday early in April, about a month after
my first interview with Veciana. During that interval I had spoken with him
more than a dozen times. I had two additional lengthy interviews with him at
which I tried to extract every possible detail he could recall about Maurice
Bishop. More importantly, we began to establish a certain relationship. I would
drop in at his home and call him on the telephone frequently just to ask a
question or two about a minor detail that may have come to mind. We also got to
know each other better as we traveled back and to Washington and around Miami to those sites where he recalled meeting Bishop. From
those formal interviews and informal discussions, I began to accumulate not
only a structured image of Maurice Bishop as an intelligence operative -- but
also a sense of the man himself as Veciana saw him. At that point, this is what
I knew about Maurice Bishop: He was in Havana in the summer of 1960 when Veciana first met him. He
was working undercover, probably using some business association or firm as a
front. There may have been some relationship with some business in that
building in which Veciana was given his training instruction, maybe with the
American mining company or the Berlitz School. Bishop was obviously familiar with the personnel and
their positions at the American Embassy. He appeared to be a specialist in
propaganda, psychological warfare and counterintelligence, judging from his
primary interests and Veciana's activities.
From the character of his Spanish he was probably schooled in the language, but
even before Havana he had most likely spent a good deal of time in a
Spanish-speaking country. He was very intelligent, very liberated and very
articulated. He was, as Veciana put it, a gentleman, perhaps from the South,
more likely from Texas.
Continued:
JFKCountercoup2: Fonzi's Washingtonian Article Part II
