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.
&nbs
