The
Last
Investigation
by
GAETON FONZI
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT
Part 1 of 2
[NOTE: this work may contain spelling
and
other errors]
The Last Investigation Gaeton J.
Fonzi
part 1 of 2
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 hop
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 e 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 investigator. 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 hie 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 backstepping 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 its 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 wondering 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 nesteggs. 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 b oat 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 sources.
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
explain the way the roup 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. I~e 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 a
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. ~e 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.
Bell
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 record 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. "Its 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 know 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.
The
Church
Committee had uncovered the fact that there had been secret operations
and
certain ultra-sensitive missions conducted outside the CIA's normal
chain
of command. Given that, Bishop may have been among a select
clique
with the Agency and, as such, trusted enough to be given an
"unofficial"
Castro assassination mission. Since Veciana's activities in the
late
'60s began to broaden beyond Cuban affairs and encompass other
anti-Communist
operations in Latin America, it also appeared likely that Bishop had
moved
up the Agency's executive ladder -- another indication of his having
been
associated with a key power group within the CIA.
At
the
time of the Kennedy assassination, however, Bishop appeared to be
particularly
knowledgeable about intelligence operations in Mexico City, since he
not
only was aware of Oswald's activities there, he also knew that
Veciana's
cousin was a Castro intelligence officer stationed in Cuban Embassy.
By
the
early '70s, Bishop had broadened his interests and contacts throughout
Latin
America. However, Bishop's role in the 1971 Castro assassination
attempt
in Chile, his ability to reach key military personnel there, indicated
he
had a special relationship in that country. The week before we
had
constructed the composite sketch of Bishop, I wrote a memo to Schweiker
indicating
what I initially thought would be primary areas of investigation.
The
memo noted: "Veciana strongly believes that Bishop had something
to
do with the downfall of Allende in Chile."
Finally,
another indication of Bishop's position in more recent years derived
from
the large amount of money paid Veciana at the end of their relationship
in
1973. Bishop probably had to be in a position to have access to
such
funds and, perhaps, also have the power to cover them -- or be in
association
with someone who did. (It was the large amount of the final
payment
which reinforced the indications of a CIA association. As
indicated
by the cost of its JM/WAVE operations as far back as the early '60s,
the
Agency has always been lavish in its disposal of funds).
On
Sunday
evening, that weekend I returned from Washington after the composite
sketch
was drawn, I received a called from Dave Newhall. He said he had
just
gotten a call from Schweiker in Pennsylvania. "The boss was
driving
home when he suddenly remembered who the guy in the sketch reminded him
of,"
Newhall said. "He stopped the car and just called me from a phone
booth."
The
sketch
of Maurice Bishop reminded Schweiker of Dave Atlee Phillips, the former
CIA
propaganda chief of the Bay of Pigs invasion, now retired.
Phillips
had come before the Senate Intelligence Committee on more than one
occasion.
The Committee was interested especially in two phases of Phillips'
career:
One was as head of the CIA's task force to prevent the election of
Allende
in Chile" the other was in his role as chief of the Agency's unit
in
Mexico City responsible for sending to the Warren Commission
photographs
of a man erroneously identified as Lee Harvey Oswald. Phillips
had
announced his retirement, after 25 years of service with the CIA, in
the
Spring of 1975. At the time, the nation was being stirred by a
barrage
of press revelations about the illegal activities of the intelligence
agencies.
Veciana was still in prison and not yet being considered for
parole.
Phillips made minor headlines when he called a press conference at his
retirement
and announced he would lead an association of retired intelligence
officers
in defense of the CIA.
According
to Phillips, one of the major factors that led to his retirement was,
as
he put it, "the rash of sensational headlines in the world press that
leave
the impression the CIA is an organization of unprincipled people who
capriciously
interfere in the lives of U.S. citizens at home an abroad." He
said
he wanted to "straighten out the record." Newhall is usually a
laconic
guy, but there was an edge in his voice that evening he called to tell
me
about Schweiker honing in on David Phillips. "The boss thinks the
resemblance
is pretty damn close," he said. He asked if I could dig up an old
newspaper
clip of Phillip's press conference and show the photo in it to Veciana.
The
next
morning I checked the date of the press conference, picked up a back
issue
of the Miami Herald and went directly to Veciana's place. He
wasn't
home. His wife said she didn't expect him back until evening and
didn't
know how to reach him. I returned home to another call from
Newhall.
"We've found a good photo of Phillips in the last June 23rd issued of
People
magazine," he said. "It did a feature about his forming that
retired
intelligence agents group. Do you think you can pick up a
copy/"
I said I would tried because the Herald photo, a wire service
reproduction,
was a poor one and the image a bit washed out. However, after
trying
several sources, I couldn't locate the particular back issue of
People.
The public library had already put it into a bound volume. Since
it
appeared that I wouldn't be able to get a reproduction of the article
until
the next day, I decided I would later call Veciana and ask him to join
me
at the public library the next morning. We could look at the
magazine
in the bound volume together.
That
evening,
while waiting to talk with Veciana, I glanced at the story that had
appeared
in the Herald when Phillips announced his retirement. There were
scant
details about his background. It noted that he had early been a
professional
actor, had been recruited by the CIA when he edited an English-language
newspaper
in Chile in the early 1950s, had been assigned posts in Mexico and
Venezuela
and was working undercover in Cuba when Castro took over.
Phillips
retired before the Church Committee was formed and before the CIA had
admitted
to some of the activities that would later garner the Committee its
headlines.
In defending the Agency at his press conference, Phillips vigorously
rebutted
charges about the CIA which were kicking around at the time. The
CIA
did not financially support the strikes that led to Allende's
overthrow,
he declared. Also, he said, the CIA never plotted the
assassination
of Fidel Castro. Phillips made one final point: He said he
assumed
that many would claim his retirement was phony and that the association
he
was forming is really a CIA operation. "It is not," he declared
strongly.
The facts would later indicate he was wrong on at least two out of
three
of those contentions.
When
I
contacted Veciana that evening he said he did not know the name of
David
Phillips or remember seeing photographs of the man. He said,
sure,
hew would come to the public library with me the next morning. "I
will
call Dr. Abella and ask him to come with us also," he said. "Then
we
can do two things." In talking with Veciana over the weeks about
he
Kennedy assassination, it appeared that for the first time he was
becoming
interested in some of the details. One day he told me he had been
talking
with a close friend, Dr. Manuel Abella, about the assassination.
He
said Abella mentioned he recalled seeing a photograph of the crowd in
Dealey
Plaza just prior to the assassination. He thought the photo was
in
Life or Look, he wasn't sure. However, Abella said, he recognized
a
face in the crowd of a man he knew from Cuba as a Castro agent. I
had
spoken with Abella and checked back issues of the magazines he
suggested,
but didn't find the crowd shot he described. Veciana had said
that
someday he would take Abella to the library and help him search for the
magazine.
Now Veciana saw my request to go to the library as a opportunity to do
that
also.
The
next
morning, Dr. Abella, a cigar-chomping pudgy little guy, was waiting
with
Veciana at his home. We drove downtown to the Dade Public Library
in
Bayfront Park, the site of the every-burning Torch of Freedom donated
by
Miami's Cuban exile community. That morning there happened to a
demonstration
in progress at the Torch. A shouting group of masked Iranian
students
was calling for the ouster of the Shah. Veciana looked at them,
smile
slightly and shook his head. He was used to more active forms of
demonstrative
dissension.
At
the
periodical desk I asked for the bound volume of People magazine with
the
Phillips article and for the volumes of Life and Look with issues that
might
have crowd photos of Dealey Plaza. We took them to the empty
table
at one end of the room. Veciana sat down and put on his
glasses.
I stood beside him and found the article about Phillips in
People.
There was a half- page black-and-white photo of him standing under a
highway
sign, obviously taken near Langley. The sign said: "CIA
NEXT
RIGHT." Phillips was depicted almost full-figured, casually
dressed,
standing with his hands in his pockets and wearing a guyabera.
The
resemblance to the Bishop sketch was clear: The square jaw, the
distinctive
lower lip, the straight nose, the forehead and yes, the darkened area
under
the eyes. Only the hair style was different.
Veciana
looked at the photo. He looked at the photo. I watched his
face
for some reaction but there was none. He kept starting at the
photo.
"Is it him?" I asked. Veciana didn't answer. His fact
was
totally expressionless but his eyes were intensely focused on the
photo.
Finally, he turned the page of the magazine. There was two
additional
photos of Phillips, both smaller and both showing Phillips' face less
directly
and less clearly. Veciana turned back to the large photo.
"Is
it him?" I asked again. Almost a half a minute had passed
and
the suspense was pressing on me. Without taking his eyes from the
photo,
he said, It is close." I wanted to shout at him: It is
close?
What the hell do you mean, it is close! Is it him or isn't it
him?
I didn't shout. Instead, I leaned closer and asked again softly:
"Is
it him?" Veciana did not take his eyes off the photo. "Does
he
have a brother?" he asked. The question took me
aback.
"I don't know," I said, but is he Bishop?" Veciana finally shook
his
head. "It is close, but it is not him." I remember feeling
a
sight of relief at the end of the suspense. "Are you sure it's
not
him?" I asked. "No, it's not him," Veciana said
again.
Well, I thought, that sounds pretty definite, and turned to the other
volumes
that Dr. Abella was waiting to look through. Then Veciana, still
looking
at the photo, added: "But I would like to talk with him."
"You
would like to talk with Phillips?" I asked, not quite getting
his point. "Do you think Phillips is Bishop?" "No, he is
not
Bishop," Veciana said, "but he is CIA and maybe he could help."
Maybe
he could, I thought, and turned to help Abella leafing through the
other
bound volumes looking for that crowd shot with the Castro agent.
Abella
had described the photo precisely, but it was neither in Life nor
Look.
Then Abella said maybe it was in Argosy or True, because he remembered
articles
about the Kennedy Assassination in those, also. So I went to get
the
bound volumes of those publications and we began looking through
them.
Again, we had no luck, but it had taken us about 15 minutes in the
searching.
Veciana, meanwhile, had remained seated at the table staring at the
same
photo of David Phillips.
Before
the Schweiker investigation had come to a close, more than a dozen
individuals
had been considered, however fleetingly, as possible having been the
man
who called himself Maurice Bishop. Most of them came to attention
because
of having been in anti-Castro activity. The staff of the Senate
Intelligence
Committee continued to mostly look for Bishop in the area of Army
Intelligence,
despite my trying to make clear to them that Veciana knew of his
contacts
there and very much doubted that Bishop was with the military.
(Besides
being touted into Army Intelligence by the CIA< the Senate Committee
staff,
I would later learn, considered Veciana being referred to Colonel Kail
at
the American Embassy significant, since Karl was very much involved in
intelligence.
The staff didn't considered the possibility that some Army Intelligence
personnel
may actually work for the CIA.) I continued to show Veciana
photographs
of individuals sent to me by the Committee staff and others I dug up
myself.
Some, like DeMohrenschildt, bore a closer resemblance to the sketch
than
others, but none came near as close as David Phillips.
Occasionally,
Veciana himself would mention that. Sometimes he would add,
"Well,
you know, maybe it would help if I could talk with him." Or,
"Maybe
if I saw him I could tell better." Slowly I began getting the
impression
that his very definite negative answer when he saw the photo of
Phillips
wasn't all that definite. In addition, the more we dug into
Phillips'
background, the more the pattern of his being in the right place at the
right
time began to emerge. Marston and I began discussing the
possibility
of bringing Veciana together with Phillips in a direct
confrontation.
The Committee staff, however, had decided not to call Phillips back for
any
additional questions under oath, so whatever he did he had to do on our
own
and unofficially.
We
did
not have the opportunity to have Veciana confront Phillips until
September,
just before Schweiker decided to close down his investigation.
Between
my first interview with Veciana and that time, I felt as if I were on a
very
fast-moving train trying to spot a smoking gun in the blur of passing
woods.
As the Church Committee was winding down, it became clear that only a
sensational
new revelation, simple and obvious enough for the public to instantly
grasp
its significance, could force the Committee to reopen a full-scale
Kennedy
investigation. The Veciana lead was a crack in the door to a new
corridor,
but it would take time and resources to develop it before its ultimate
significance
could be determined. Nevertheless, I attempted to pursue it as
best
I could. Over the months, I tried to locate and talk with
everyone
Veciana had named. We were hindered by very limited resources,
since
Schweiker's staff budget didn't include travel and expenses for a
Kennedy
assassination investigation and he could not use Committee funds for a
personal
staff investigator. We never did get to Julio Lobo in Spain or
Lopez-Fresquet
and Diosdado in California, for instance.
Meanwhile,
over those same months, there were other leads pressing to be
pursued.
Many of the Organized Crime figures who had been active in pre-Castro
Havana,
for instance, are now in the Miami area. The contacts I had
developed
began providing tips worth following up. (One Cuban exile claimed
that
South Florida Mafia boss Santos Trafficante had predicted Kennedy's
assassination.)
Other leads seemed to come from nowhere, such as when a former employee
of
Jack Ruby's popped up working in a Miami nightclub and told me that
Ruby
was afraid the Warren Commission would discover he had been running
guns
to Cuba. From each new lead there seemed to dangle a dozen
strings
which required immediate follow-up. I was kept very busy.
At
the
end of June, the Senate Select Committee issued what it called its
"Final
Report": Book V - The Investigation of the Assassination of
President
John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies.
The
press called it the Schweiker Report. Marston had air-expressed
an
advance copy to me the night before Schweiker was scheduled to release
it
at a major press conference. I thought the report was of
historical
significance as the first official confirmation of the invalidity of
the
Warren Commission Report. I objected, however, to its
over-emphasizing
the possibility of a Castro retaliation simply on the basis of the
Warren
Commission not having been informed of the CIA's Castro assassination
plots.
I was discussing that which Marston on the telephone the next afternoon
when
Schweiker returned from his press conference. Marston asked
Schweiker
to pick up the line. "We've got one of your standard skeptics
here,
Senator," he said. "I thought all our skeptics were at the news
conference!"
Schweiker yelled in mock anguish.
I
congratulated
him on the report, but told him I thought the Warren Commission critics
were
going to have what I thought was a legitimate objection. "How
could
the Committee have failed to pursue the possible relationship of Oswald
to
the intelligence agencies," I asked, "when the Committee discovered the
intelligence
agencies admitted a cover-up with the Warren Commission?"
"Because,"
said Schweiker, "they took the position that they had no relationship
with
Oswald. And there were no documents in their files, they said,
which
reveal that there was. We pressed them on that several times and
each
time they said they had nothing. We hit a blind alley. I
don't
disagree with you, but considering the type of probe the Committee was
conducting
and the limited access to the intelligence agencies' files, there was
not
much we could do about it."
Schweiker
was right. Considering that the Committee staff had conducted
virtually
no independent investigation and relied almost exclusively on records
volunteered
by the CIA, getting out the report that he did was a major step
forward.
He, at any rate, was ecstatic oat the press reception of the
report.
Months before he had predicted that the Warren Commission Report
would
"collapse like a house on cards." Now not one newsman at
his
press conference had challenged him on that prediction. "We have
moved
the whole Washington press corps from feeling I was a junior edition of
Jim
Garrison to now considering me a valid Warren Commission critic," he
chimed.
Despite
the direction that the Schweiker Report had taken and the public
attention
it had garnered, Schweiker was anxious for me to keep quietly pursuing
the
Veciana lead. He said he didn't know how long he could continue
such
an unofficial investigation, but he felt there were still many things
we
could do, even on our own, before we gave up.
END PART ONE ..... FORWARD TO
PART TWO
.....
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