The Last
Investigation
by
GAETON FONZI
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT
Part 1 of 2
[NOTE: this work may contain spelling and
other errors]
The Last Investigation Gaeton J. Fonzi
part 1 of 2
It was
very hot in Dallas. That week, in the summer of 1978, there was a heat
wave and the temperature had climbed to 106 degrees. I could see the
city's fever shimmering from the gray macadam, feel its stifling thickness
against my skin. I waited on the south curb on Elm Street for a break
in the traffic and then moved out into the center lane. The street
is not as wide as it appears in photographs. Right about ...here.
I stopped on the spot. I had studied it in both the films and the still
photos. I knew it. Right here. Above me rose the dark shadows
of the trees and heavy foliage of the grassy knoll. I saw only a stillness
there now, a breezeless serenity. On my right loomed the familiar red
brick building, flat, insistent, hard-edged, its rows of sooted windows now
innocuous and dull. In my mind, I dropped into a well of time and fell
against the micro-instant of history. It suddenly struck me:
Here was where a man was killed. It was such a simple, clarifying thought.
Right here, in an explosively horrible and bloody moment, a man's life ended.
that very realization -- a man was killed here -- had been oddly removed
from the whirlwind of activity in which I had been involved. A man
was killed here, and what had been going on in Washington -- all the officious
meetings and the political posturing, all the time and attention devoted
to administrative procedures and organizational processes and forms and reports
for the record, all the chaotic concern for distorted priorities and, now,
all the scurrying about in a thousand directions in the mad rush of produce
a final report -- all of that seemed so detached from the hard reality of
a single fact: A man was killed here. Wasn't that supposed to
have some relationship to what we were doing?
I had
been working as a staff investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations
for more than a year and a half. In fact, however, the formal investigation
had begun only the previous January -- and then had abruptly ended less than
six months later, in June. I was one of the few investigators who had
not been fired. And now I was standing in Dealey Plaza, on the spot
where President John F. Kennedy was killed on November 22nd, 1963, and wondering
what the hell had gone wrong.
What had
smothered my initial optimism and early enthusiasm, my original hop that,
finally, after all these years, we might find out the truth about the Kennedy
assassination? Why had I become so bitter and cynical, so depressed
and frustrated about what apparently was going to b e the final result of
all our time and effort? I stood in Dealey Plaza that summer of 1978,
on a very hot day in Dallas, and could not help thinking that perhaps --
just perhaps -- the powers that controlled the Assassinations Committee would
not have gone so far astray in their purpose had they remembered that micro-instant
of time when a man's life ended here.
On the
Tuesday morning on July 17th, 1979, the Chairman of the House Selected Committee
on Assassinations, Ohio Democrat Louis Stokes, called a press conference
to formally release the Committee's "final report."
The report
was long overdue. After consuming more than $5.4 million over a two
year period, the Committee had legally ceased to exist the previous December.
At that time, however, the Committee's Chief Counsel and Staff Director,
G. Robert Blakey, wasn't satisfied with the report the staff had complied
and so, in a bit of bureaucratic legerdemain, he had himself and a few selected
aides temporarily attached to the Speaker of the House's Office for administrative
and pay purposes in order to obtain the additional time to reconstruct a
few final report.
That reconstruction
was dictated by startling testimony which emerged in the very last days of
the Committee's life. Acoustics experts, analyzing a tape recording
of the sounds in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was shot, concluded that more
than one rifle had been fired. As the final report put it: "Scientific
acoustical evidence established a high probability that two gunmen fired
at President John F. Kennedy."
The presence
of more than one gunman meant there was a conspiracy, yet the Committee had
uncovered no hard evidence to indicate the character of that conspiracy.
Blakey realized that would be too obvious a shortcoming in what he was determined
to make an ostensibly impressive document. ("This, I can assure you,
will be the absolutely final report on the Kennedy assassination,"
he early told the staff. "This will e the last investigation.
After us, there ain't gonna be no more.") He was also very aware of
the political priorities of the committee members themselves. He wanted
the report to have attention-getting impact or, as he called it, "sex appeal."
So although the report could not, without embarrassment, clearly reflect
the actual limitations of the staff's investigation, it had to convey the
impression that enough hard digging had been done to provide the Committee
with an insight into the nature of the conspiracy it had uncovered.
Thus it became necessary to restructure and weight the report toward a conspiracy
theory. The question than became: Who to blame?
In retrospect,
the answer should have seemed obvious from the beginning. G. Robert
Blakey was a 41-year-old criminal law professor and head of Cornell University's
Organized Crime Institute when he was asked to take the reins of the Assassinations
Committee. (His appointment followed the debacle which brought about
forced resignation of his predecessor, Philadelphia's Richard Sprague.)
Blakey had been with the Justice Department under Robert Kennedy, and his
subsequent career was focused on Organized Crime -- that nebulous entity
which somehow was achieved capitalized status over the years. He was
considered one of the top Organized Crime experts in the country, was regularly
called to testify as an "expert witness" in that area, and was a fixture
at the numerous Organized Crime seminars held periodically by law enforcement
interests. He also had personal contacts in most Federal agencies and
in the Organized Crime sections of almost every major police department in
the nation.
As soon
as he was appointed, Blakey drew upon his contacts in that Organized Crime-
fighting fraternity to select key senior counsels for the Committee.
For instance, the lawyer he picked to head the Kennedy investigation task
force was a bright, snappy little Texan named Gary Cornwell. As chief
of the Federal Strike Force in Kansas City, Cornwell had achieved notable
trial victories against key Midwest Mafia bigwigs.
Another
initial move by Blakey was to hire as a special consultant to the Committee
a man who carried the Mob's organizational chart in his head, a former New
York cop named Ralph Salerno. For years Salerno has earned a good living
lecturing, writing books and appearing on radio and television shows as the
capo de tutti capi of Organized Crime experts. And there were a number
of other lawyers and researchers Blakey specifically chose for their background
in criminal law and Organized Crime. the Assassinations Committee was
well stacked, in other words, to find an Organized Crime conspiracy in the
John F. Kennedy assassination.
There
is substance and there is the illusion of substance. In Washington,
it is often difficult to tell the difference. Chief Counsel Blakey
was an experienced Hill man. He had worked not only at Justice but
also with previous Congressional committees. He knew exactly what the
priorities of his job were by Washington standards, even before he stepped
in. The first priority, he announced in his inaugural address to the
staff, was to produce a report. The second priority was to produce
a report that looked good, one that appeared to be definitive and substantial.
Somewhere along the line there would be an effort at conducting a limited
investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Bob Blakey
is quite a literate fellow, exceptionally articulate and given to structured
rationality in even his most casual conversations. Nevertheless, to
give the report slickness, he brought in a top professional writer, former
Life magazine editor Richard Billings, who happened to be another knowledgeable
veteran of Congressional committee operations. Together, Blakey and
Billings would insure that the report was expertly constructed.
Thus from
the beginning, there was no doubt that, regardless of the realities of the
actual investigation, the Assassinations Committee's historical legacy would
appear to have substance.
And it
does. An impressively hefty tome -- 686 pages thick, with 13 volumes
of appendixes -- the Committee's final report appears to have a lot of substance.
And yet, on close examination, it makes very few definitive statements.
Used in abundance are such hedging terms as "on the basis of evidence available
to it," and, "the committee believes," and, "available evidence does not
preclude the possibility," and such words as "probably," "most likely," "possible,"
and "may have been."
The point
is that the Committee report does not actually state that Organized Crime
was involved in the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. The report
says this:
"The Committee believes, on the basis of evidence available to it, that the
national syndicate
of Organized Crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination
of President
Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility
that individual
members may have been involved."
The cryptic,
latter part of the conclusion specifically referred to two key mob bosses:
Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Santos Trafficante of Florida. (Lee
Harvey Oswald's uncle, the Committee discovered, was a numbers runner for
the Marcello organization; and Jack Ruby may have had some contact with Trafficante
in Cuba)
However,
after making the allegation in its "Summary of Findings and Recommendations,"
the report buries in its body the detailed conclusion that "it is unlikely"
that either Marcello or Trafficante was involved in the assassination of
the President.
That is
an example of numerous inherent contradictions contained in the details of
the report. It's the result of an attempt to leave no base untouched,
no area verbally unexplored, however cursory the Committee's actual investigation.
What the report does in the most quintessential way is -- to use the expression
favored in Washington -- cover its ass.
One of
the most ironic aspects of that is this: In doing so, the report was
forced to expose indications of its own basic conflicts, as well as the shortcomings
of the Committee's pseudo-investigation.
That problem
came to light some time ago, when the first attempt was made to bring the
various aspects of the report together. For instance, before the acoustics
evidence of conspiracy was firmed up very late in December, each Committee
team was frantically writing what it thought would be a portion of the final
report, that part dealing with its aspect of the investigation. (There
were five major teams, each originally consisting of two lawyers, three researchers
and two investigator. There were also special project teams -- ballistics,
autopsy, acoustics, photographic and other areas involving expert consultants
-- and staff investigators stationed in New Orleans and Miami.) By
December, however, the staff had been drastically depleted through firings
and resignations. When it became obvious that all the portions would
not be finished before the Committee's demise at the end of the month, a
young lawyer name Jim Wolf was given the job of gathering from each team
a summary of its findings and putting them together into what would appears
to be a "draft" of a final report. That, at least, would be something
for the Committee to release before it officially folded.
When that
compilation was completed, it totaled more than 500 pages. Wolf strung
together the summaries he got from each team and then, after a conference
with Blakey, drew up the conclusion. That's when it became obvious
that there were some basic problems.
One of
the key conflicts was Blakey's insistence that the Committee had to come
to some conclusion about Oswald's motivation. (Oswald's guilt, ruled
Blakey, had already been resolved through scientific analysis of the
physical evidence.) Unfortunately, one of the areas that most reflected
the inadequacy of the Committee's investigation was the one dealing with
Oswald himself. Like the Warren Commission, the Committee never did
truly define who Oswald really was, what he really believed, the nature of
his relationships with an odd assortment of people, the reasons for the strange
and mysterious things he did, nor why there are no traces of his actions
over certain periods of time. The Committee, because of the structure
of its limited investigation plan, did very little original work in this
area.
In fact,
a glaring example of the quality of the Committee's investigation is the
fact that one of the key individuals in Oswald's life a women named Ruth
Paine, was never called as a witness by the Committee. She just slipped
through the cracks of the investigative plan. Yet it was Ruth Paine
who played an important role in the life of the Oswald family immediately
before and after the assassination. It was in Ruth Paine's garage that
the Warren Commission said Oswald stored and retrieved the rifle used in
the assassination. Ruth Paine was instrumental in Oswald getting his
job at the Texas School Book Depository. Ruth Paine's husband, Michael,
worked for a major Defense Department contractor and had a government security
clearance. A once-classified document recently revealed that it was
on Ruth Paine's telephone that a "confidential informant" overheard, immediately
after the assassination, a male voice say he didn't believe Oswald killed
Kennedy, and then added, "we both know who is responsible.
Ruth Paine
was never even interviewed by the Committee.
Despite
the mass of conflicting evidence and any investigation inadequate to resolve
the issue, Blakey insisted that the Committee conclude that Oswald killed
Kennedy because of left- wing political motivations. Most of the staff
attorneys, including JFK Task Force Chief Gary Cornwell, argued against such
a conclusion, but not successfully.
Before
the compiled "draft" of the final report was to be presented to the committee
members themselves, Blakey, sensing an undercurrent of discontent wafting
through his staff, announced that all staff members would have the opportunity
to read the report and discuss it. "I will be disappointed if there
is not vigorous debate on many portions of the volume of our staff meeting
Thursday night, " he wrote in a memo. There was vigorous debate, but
on the issue of motivation Blakey did not cave in.
On the
morning that staff meeting, copies of the report were distributed to the
staff. I recall Deputy Chief Counsel Ken Klein wandering into my office
shaking his head shortly after hie read it. Klein was a witty little
guy with a mop of red hair and perpetually raised eyebrows. He had
originally been hired by Dick Sprague out of the New York District Attorney's
Office.
"You know,"
Klein said with a wry smile on his face, "when I first got my copy I thought
they were putting me on. I mean it was like somebody wrote the report
and then somebody else came along and, without reading what the first guy
had written, wrote the conclusions. You know, I was gonna go into Gary
and say, 'Hey, O.K,. that's funny. Now com'on, give me the real report!'"
What bothered
Klein was the fact that each team report had built an excellent argument
for that team's main subject of interest -- whether it was Organized Crime,
pro-Castro sympathizers, anti-Castro or right-wing militants or Russian intelligence
forces. All the subjects had the motivation to be considered suspects
in the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Each team had taken pages
detailed relevant evidence. "And then, "Klein pointed out, "after all
these pages of evidence, all the arguments get thrown out in the conclusion
that, naah, Oswald couldn't have been involved with these guys because that
wasn't his motivation! Very funny. All right now, is somebody
gonna tell me where the real report is?"
When the
real report finally was released, that basic conflict remained. Although
the largest number of pages -- and one complete 1, 169 -pages appendix volume
-- was devoted to building a conspiracy case against Organized Crime, Oswald's
motivation was, perversely, ascribed to his "twisted ideological view."
But that,
of course, is substance. And irrelevant. In the end, the final
report id what it was carefully structured to do: Create the impression
that Organized Crime was involved in the conspiracy. That was the one
point that Blakey wanted to etch in the national consciousness and leave
in history's memory. It was his personal bid to finally lay to rest
the question of President Kennedy's assassination.
The front-page
headline in The Washington Post, its theme echoed by the media across the
country, reflected the report's implications as well as the gist of the press
conference attending its release: Mobsters Linked to JFK Death."
Blakey
himself wanted to be absolutely certain that the reporters at the conference
would accurately interpret the report's interlinear message. "I am
now firmly of the opinion that the Mob did it," he told them. "It is
a historical truth." Then backstepping from such a seemingly impetuous
declaration -- covering his ass -- he quickly added: "This Committee
report does not say the Mob id it. I said it. I think the Mob
did it."
Well,
I don't know if the Mob id it, but I doubt it. From my experience as
a committee investigator and, later, as a team leader, I know that the Committee's
investigation was simply not adequate enough to produce any firm conclusions
about the nature of the conspiracy. To give the impression that it
was, is a deception.
Yet there
was a part of the Committee's investigation which, if vigorously pursued,
could have negated the implications of the Committee's final report.
It was in an area that threatened to open more doors than the Committee cared
to open. As it stands even now, the information that was developed
in this area contradicts the thrust of the Committee report and indicates
that Chief Counsel Blakey's efforts were governed by misguided priorities.
The area may contain the only live lead remaining in the mystery of the Kennedy
assassination.
Although
the Committee report touched this lead -- again, just enough to cover its
ass - - the conclusions draw from it were distorted. Necessarily so.
Told in context and with sufficient background detail, the story could have
been used to stir anew public interest in the Kennedy assassination, this
time sufficient enough, perhaps, to transcend the apathy that has been so
carefully bred over the years. That, of course, would have been a very
daring thing for Congress to do.
This,
is only for history's sake, is that story.
I can
still hear the sound of Vincent Salandria's voice. It has an odd quality
to it, A low, velvet intensity. He was leaning back in his chair, his
hands clasped easily behind his head, speaking slowly and casually but with
a building rationality. We were in the paneled basement office of his
home on Delancey Street in Philadelphia, it was late in 1964, and what Vincent
Salandria was telling me that day I will never forget was that the Warren
Commission report was not the truth.
I thought he was crazy. If you do not recall that time, you cannot
comprehend what a discordant thing it was in 1964 to content that an official
government report might be wrong -- especially one which had been issued
by a panel of men of weighty public status. People than believed what
government officials said. If a guy like Salandria came along and suggested
that an official government report wasn't truthful....well, Salandria was
crazy.
Immediately
after the Warren Commission report was released in September, 1964, Salandria
had written a critique of it for The Legal Intelligencer, Philadelphia's
local law daily. Salandria was then 38-year-old Penn Law grad and ACLU
consultant. He critique was a highly detailed analysis of the report's
findings concerning the trajectories and ballistics of the bullets which
killed President Kennedy. The first time I read Salandria's article,
I didn't understand it. It was complex and technical. But I did
grasp the sensational implication of Salandria's contentions: There
was a possibility that the Warren Commission report was wrong.
I decided
to write an article for Philadelphia Magazine about this oddball young attorney
who was saying these crazy things about our government. Physically
a small man, olive-skinned, dark eyes, a crew cut over a high forehead and
thin, serious face, Salandria appeared a relaxed, easy-mannered fellow, but
as we spoke I sense a deep intellectual intensity within him. Eventually,
the things he said no longer sounded so crazy.
Salandria
said his interest in the Warren Commission had begun long before its report
was issued. He did not like the fact that it was holding secret hearings.
He felt that the rise of dictatorships always corresponded to the abdication
of individual interest in governmental function, but free access to information
concerning that function was necessary to maintain that interest. When
leaks about the Warren Commission's conclusion began emerging, Salandria
became more concerned.
"I thought
you had to be objective about it," he said. "If this had happened in
Smolensk or Minsk or Moscow, no American would have believed the story that
was evolving about a single assassin, with all its built-in contradictions.
But because it happened in Dallas, too many Americans were accepting it."
Salandria
began an intense watch of the Warren Commission's activities. He spent
his vacations in Dallas to familiarize himself with the murder scene.
He ordered the Commission's report and its accompanying 26 volumes of evidence
as soon as they were issued and plunged into a page-by-page study.
"My initial
feeling," Salandria said when I spoke with him, "was that if this were a
simple assassination, as the Commission claimed, the facts would come together
very neatly. If there were more than one assassin, the details would
not fit."
Salandria
claimed the details did not fit. There were, he contented, blatant
contradictions between the Commission's conclusions and the details of the
evidence in the 26 volumes. I found that hard to believe. But
Salandria gave me a copy of the report and the 26 volumes and suggested I
take the time to study them carefully. I did, and then I spoke with
another Philadelphia lawyer, Arlen Specter, who worked on the Warren Commission.
In August of 1966, I wrote an article about the Kennedy assassination in
Philadelphia Magazine. "It is difficult to believe the Warren Commission
report is the truth," I wrote.
Salandria
eventually became recognized as one of the pioneers in the burgeoning group
of Warren Commission critics, and one of the few who never commercialized
his research. And, over the years, as he continued analyzing newly
available evidence, he went beyond criticism and began to reach theoretical
conclusions about the nature of the assassination itself.
Salandria,
for instance, was the first to suggest that details of the evidence indicated
not only a conspiracy, but also the pattern of an intelligence operation
-- perhaps, he tentatively suggested, involving the Central Intelligence
Agency. That's when a young columnist named Joe McGinnis wrote about
Salandria in the Philadelphia Inquirer. McGinnis thought Salandria
was crazy.
I had left Philadelphia to live in Florida and, by late 1975, when I first
began working as a government investigator on the Kennedy assassination,
I had not seen or spoken with Vince Salandria for a number of years.
He had, for some reason, faded into the background among Warren Commission
critics.
I returned
to Philadelphia because I wanted to draw upon Salandria's vast knowledge
of the evidence and get his opinion about the most fruitful areas of investigation.
Salandria was most cordial, said he would be glad to help and we spent a
long winter Sunday talking. Yet in his attitude I sense a certain balking,
a feeling of disappointment in what I was about to begin. Eventually,
he explained it and why he was no longer actively involved in pursuing an
investigation of the assassination. It gave me a surprising insight
into how far Salandria's thinking had evolved.
"I'm afraid
we were misled," Salandria said sadly. "All the critics, myself included,
were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time
and effort micro-analyzing the details of the assassination when all the
time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy.
Don't you think that the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in
the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead,
they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the
most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent
and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny.
The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: 'We are in
control and no one -- not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official
-- no one can do anything about it.' It was a message to the people
that their government was powerless. And the people eventually got
the message. Consider what has happened since the Kennedy assassination.
People see government today as unresponsive to their needs, yet the budget
and power of the military and intelligence establishment have increased tremendously.
"The tyranny
of power is here. Current events tell us that those who killed Kennedy
can only perpetuate their power by* promoting social upheaval both at home
and abroad. And that will lead not to revolution but to repression.
I suggest to you, my friend, that the interests of those who killed Kennedy
now transcend national boundaries and national priorities. No doubt
we are dealing now with an international conspiracy. We must
face that fact -- and not waste any more time micro-analyzing the evidence.
That's exactly what they want us to do. They have kept us busy for
so long. And I will bet, buddy, that is what will happen to you.
They'll keep you very, very busy and, eventually, they'll wear you down."
It had
been almost 10 years from the time I first interviewed Salandria to our talk
that long winter Sunday. Yet, flying back home to Miami that evening,
I sat in the dark plane and had an eerie sense of deja vu. As when
I first spoke with him, I didn't quite grasp exactly what he was talking
about, but had the uneasy feeling he was advancing some awesomely frightening
theories. It crossed my mind that, perhaps this time for sure, Salandria
was crazy.
That was
late November, 1975. A few weeks earlier, I had received a call at
my home in Miami from U.S. Senator Richard S. Schweiker. I had never
met Schweiker but, while working for Philadelphia Magazine, I had spoke with
his administrative assistant, Dave Newhall, a few times over the years.
Newhall, a former Philadelphia Bulletin reporter, was familiar with any early
interest in the Kennedy assassination and thought I might help Schweiker
check out some leads on the case related to Miami's Cuban exile community.
At the
time, Schweiker was a member of what was officially named the Select Committee
To Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities,
headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee, as it became
known in the press, had been making deadlines since early in the year by
revealing how the FBI abused its power by harassing dissident political groups
and conducting illegal investigations, how the CIA, Army Intelligence and
the National Security Agency were involved in domestic snooping and how the
intelligence agencies had planned assassination attempts on foreign leaders.
For Schweiker, despite his long stints in both houses of Congress, these
were eye-opening revelations. "I've learned more about the inner workings
of government in the past nine months than in my 15 previous years in Congress,"
he later told a reporter.
Schweiker
had never been moved to take a special interest in the details of the Kennedy
assassination. He had assumed, as did most Americans then, that the
Warren Commission Report reflected a comprehensive, objective investigation.
He had never had the inclination to critically question the Report closely
because that inclination would have had to include the assumption that certain
government officials and agencies could have been involved in at the very
least a cover-up. Schweiker did not want to believe that. However,
when the Church Committee discovered that United States Government officials
-- specifically, CIA agents -- had made alliances with the Mafia and other
members of Organized Crime in planning assassination, Schweiker was traumatically
shaken. "That was so repugnant and shocking to me that I did a backflip
on any number of things," he later recalled.
One of
the backflips included his old assumption about the validity of the Warren
Commission Report. It was particularly upsetting to Schweiker when
he discovered that CIA Director Allen Dulles was aware of CIA assassination
plots against Cuban Premier Fidel Castro and yet withheld that information
from his fellow members on the Warren Commission. The significance
of that for Schweiker was enlarged when he came across an old Associated
Press story which indicated that Castro had told a reporter just several
weeks before Kennedy's assassination that if the United States tried to eliminate
Cuban leader, then the U.S. leaders themselves would be in danger.
"Nobody paid any attention then because nobody knew we were trying to kill
Castro," Schweiker later said. "But that statement had to have meaning,
particularly to Allen Dulles." Schweiker thought Dulles's failure to
tell the Warren Commission of the Castro plots was "a cover-up of sensational
proportions."
While
the Senate and the Church Committee took their summer vacations, Schweiker
spent most of his time sifting through the volumes of evidence and the unclassified
documents in the Natural Archives relating to the murder of John F. Kennedy.
Then, in September, he issued a public statement calling for a re-opening
of the Kennedy assassination investigation by the Church Committee.
"Recent
disclosure have devastated the credibility of the Warren Commission Report."
Schweiker said. He called for a new "vigorous and meticulous" inquiry.
In backing his call, Schweiker cited the failure of former CIA Director Dulles
to inform the Warren Commission of U.S. Attempts on Castro's life.
He also revealed a testimony that the FBI destroyed and suppressed evidence
about its association with Oswald. And he noted with true shock that
a transcript of a previous "Top Secret" warren Commission session revealed
that Allen Dulles bluntly told his fellow members that J. Edgar Hoover would
probably lie if called to testify.
Schweiker
felt the Church Committee could, in keeping within its mandate, initially
focus on the role of U.S. intelligence agencies in investigating the assassination.
"We don't know what happened," Schweiker concluded from his detailed study
of the case, "but we do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere
you look with him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence."
The Church
Committee was one of the larger select committees formed by the Senate.
It employed more than 100 full-time staffers, mostly attorneys. Its
mandate, however, was unrealistically broad. It not only was supposed
to investigate all illegal domestic intelligence and counterintelligence
activities on the part of the CIA, the FBI and all the military intelligence
agencies, it was also directed to delve into "the nature and extent of which
Federal agencies cooperate and exchange intelligence information," the need
for improved oversight, whether existing laws governing intelligence activities
were adequate and "the extent and necessity of overt and covert intelligence
activities," among other things.
The committee
was formed in January, 1975 and its final report was originally scheduled
for release by that September. That meant that the report had to be,
in relation to the Committee's mandate, a predetermined exercise in superficiality.
To Chairman Frank Church, that was not as important ass having the Committee
finish its work quickly. He had already told intimates that he was
going to run for the Presidency the following year and, because he didn't
want to be accused of using the Committee to garner personal publicity, he
said he would not announce his candidacy until the Committee finished its
job. Despite the pressure from Church, however, in September the Committee
staff had already gotten its deadline extended to March 5th when Schweiker
came up with his proposal to throw the Kennedy assassination into the investigative
pot. That upset Church quite a bit. He knew that looking into
the Kennedy assassination, even from the narrow focus of its relationship
to the intelligence agencies, could extend the Committee's work for months
and months, thereby fouling up his personal plans. Church, however,
did not want to take any political risk by publicly opposing the suggestion,
so he came up with a clever compromise. He said he would permit Schweiker
and a Democrat counterpart, Colorado Senator Gary Hart, to set up a two-
man Kennedy assassination Subcommittee provided that it, too, would wrap
up its work when the committee did in March.
Schweiker
wasn't happy with the limitations but decided to take what he got.
He figured that if he could develop enough solid information or stumble upon
a new revelation in the case, the Committee as a whole could then be pressured
into tackling the Kennedy assassination even beyond its deadline. So
Schweiker jumped in with both feet. Since Church said he could initially
spare only two members of the Committee staff for Schweiker's Subcommittee
-- he would get a few more later as the Committee wound up it individual
projects -- Schweiker geared up his own personal staff for a Kennedy inquiry.
He assigned his then-Legislative Counsel David Marston (later to be appointed
U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia) as his point man. Marston took it upon
himself to become an instant expert in the details of the Kennedy assassination,
immersing himself in national Archives files, guiding Schweiker to what appeared
to be the most fruitful areas of investigation and serving as liaison with
the independent researchers and Warren Commission critics who had suddenly
deluged Schweiker with offers to help. A few office staffers were also
assigned to devote the bulk of their energy to the Kennedy case, including
handling all the kooks and spooks who had started wondering into the office.
Schweiker
and his operation going for about a month before he called me. Although
he himself never detailed all of them, I later learned there were several
reasons for his feeling that he needed an outside staff investigator who
would report directly to him and not to the Committee. He was, first
of all initially not getting the kind of concentrated Committee staff support
he felt his Subcommittee needed. Even those staffers immediately assigned
to the Subcommittee couldn't plunge full-time into the case because they
were busy wrapping up other Committee projects. Schweiker also realized
that the sheer bulk of material that had built up over the years on the Kennedy
case was awesome, yet no Committee staffer had any background knowledge of
it. In fact, the former Wall Street lawyer who was assigned to head
Schweiker's Subcommittee staff, did not even read the Warren Commission Report
until two months after the Subcommittee was formed.
In addition,
the Subcommittee staff was approaching the Kennedy assassination in the same
way it had approached the Committee's investigation into the activities of
the intelligence agencies: It was doing a paper investigation of documents
provided by the agencies themselves. No one was leaving Washington,
no one was doing any original probing. Instead, the staffers spent
most of their time working with the CIA and the FBI, the very agencies that
were suspect of violating their operating charter and engaging in illegal
activities. The CIA was especially cooperative with Church. "they
were almost anxious to show us everything they had, just so they could prove
they had nothing," one staffer later reported. (An interesting point:
Although the CIA admitted withholding information from the Warren Commission
the officer assigned to guide the Senate probers through the Agency's files
was the very one who had performed the same chore for the Warren Commission.)
At any rate, Schweiker was bothered by the approach and, despite the mandate,
limited time allowed him felt that he had to dig into the substance of the
case if there was going to be a break.
Another
reason Schweiker decided to hire his own investigator was this: Although
he was struck by the newly discovered evidence that Kennedy's murder might
have been an act of retaliation by Castro for the CIA assassination plots
against him, Schweiker wasn't ready to rule out another possibilities.
The Subcommittee staff was obviously concentrating on the retaliation theory
because, from the pragmatic viewpoint of its paper investigation, it was
the easiest one to neatly structure into a report within the time limitations.
Yet Schweiker was personally struck by what he termed "the fingerprints of
intelligence" an Oswald's activities before the assassination, as well as
Oswald's associations with anti-Castro Cubans. So while his Subcommittee
staff was heading down one road, Schweiker wanted the opposite and also checked
out.
Finally,
there was this factor: Although Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, a vast
amount of information about the case is associate with a city 1300 miles
away. Within hours of the assassination itself, a rush of leads and
tips related to Miami suddenly popped up. Similarly, as word of Schweiker's
interest in the assassination spread, he was flooded with suggestions of
a Miami connection. In fact, he decided that if there were a relationship
between the Kennedy assassination and Castro elements -- either pro-Castro
or anti-Castro -- or one of the intelligence agencies, Miami was the place
to look for the key clues. Then, when he began receiving some specific
tips about such a relationship, Schweiker decided he could use a man on the
street in Miami's Little Havana.
And I
was in the right place at the right time.
Knowing
something about the Miami area may be of special significance in attempting
to understand the mystery of John F. Kennedy's murder. It played a
key role in the history of the times surrounding the assassination.
You may
not know Miami. You may know a bit about Miami Beach, an unrelated
island strip of high-rise condominiums, kitschy elegant hotels, pseudo-Vegas
nightclubs, expensive restaurants and peacock tourists. But Miami --
or what is called Miami -- is something else. The actual City of Miami
is a small, 34-square-mile jigsaw puzzle piece of real estate slotted within
the 2054-square-mile entity of Dade County. Although there are 26 other
municipalities within Dade, the whole county area is generally known simply
as "Miami." To the east there is Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean;
to the south are the sultry Florida Keys, linked to civilization by a single
road and one water pipeline; to the west is the endless sea of sawgrass called
the Everglades, one of the country's largest, most primitive natural preserves.
Although
most urban areas have undergone certain transformations over the last two
decades, Miami's was uniquely different. Like other big cities during
the 50's, Miami also felt the negative effects of urban sprawl as the white
middle-class abandoned the inner city and took off for the suburbs.
And although the area population was booming, Miami itself was relatively
old and few newcomers to South Florida wanted to move back into an urban
environment after leaving a Northern city -- despite the fact that most of
Miami had a small town feeling about it. Never blighted with high-rise
tenements, Miami was, in fact, a city of neighborhoods lined with modest
old homes of white clapboard, cinder block or coral rock, rear "Florida rooms"
and front porches. With the middle-class exodus and the deterioration
of its neighborhoods, the City of Miami -- almost all of which was really
"inner city" in relation to its neighboring Dade County communities -- began
more and more looking like a neglected waif with no hope of capturing a piece
of the prosperity that was coming on the Gold Coast. Its downtown began
going to hell and its poor black sections like Overtown and Liberty City
began oozing their blight through the rest of the city. Despite the
tropical clime, Miami's feature wasn't sunny.
Until
the Cubans came.
The first
small flock came in the early and mid 50s, the anti-Batistianos, those who
opposed the military dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista. A young
lawyer named Fidel Castro was among the. He stayed briefly and gave
fiery speeches at an old movie theater on Flagler Street. Another was
the wealthy former president, Carlos Prio, who ensconced himself in an elegant
home on Miami Beach and dispensed millions in setting up arms and supply
lines to the rebels while maintaining a close association with the American
Racketeers who were running the Havana gambling casinos. Then,
when it appeared that the end was inevitable, came the Batistianos themselves
and the nonpolitical wealthy who saw the writing on the wall and got out
with their nesteggs. That's when Miami first began to feel the early
tone of Cuban culture and social activity as the monied class began moving
into the business and banking world, setting up their private clubs and fancy
restaurants and the accouterments necessary to maintain the style of living
to which they were accustomed on the island.
Then,
beginning on January 1st, 1959, came the deluge. The seizure of power
by Fidel Castro wrought as profound a change in the destiny of Miami as it
did in the future of Cuba. At firs, the flow of exiles into the city
was a slow stream moving through Miami's International Airport, then as it
became more and more apparent that the ranting barbudo was taking his country
toward Communism, the stream became a torrent.
"They
were new types of refugees," wrote reporter Haynes Johnson. "Instead
of a home, they were seeking temporary asylum. They found it along
the sandy beaches and curving coast line of Florida. They arrived by
the thousands, in small fishing boats, in planes, chartered or stolen, and
crowded into Miami. Along the boulevards, under the palms, and in hotel
lobbies, they gathered and plotted their counter-revolution. Miami
began to take on the air of a Cuban city. Even its voice was changing.
Stores and cafes began advertising in Spanish and English. New signs
went up on the toll roads slicing through the city, giving instructions in
both languages. Everyone talked of home only one hundred miles away.
And everyone talked about the great liberation army being formed in the secret
camps somewhere far way."
And with
the exiles and their passion for a counter-revolution came the Central Intelligence
Agency. Well before the U.S. Embassy in Cuba closed down in January,
1960, the CIA had stepped up its activities within the country tremendously.
It had not only increased the number of personnel operating out of the Embassy
itself, but it began to put covert operatives in place as businessmen, ranchers,
engineers and journalists, amount other covers, in order to recruit and establish
liaison with anti-Castro dissidents. As counter- revolutionary groups
began to form within Cuba, and Agency also began supplying arms and
communications equipment and, for those subversives threatened with exposure,
help in escaping. Among the key Castro defectors the Agency helped
get out of Cuba where its two top Air Force officers, Pedro and Marcos Diaz-Lanz.
The CIA's liaison in that operation was a former Cuban police official named
Bernard Barker, later to gain notoriety as a Watergate burglar. Working
with Pedro Diaz-Lanz as Air Force chief of security, and shortly after also
departing Cuba secretly, was a former Philadelphian named Frank Fiorini who,
later as Frank Sturgis, was also in the Watergate burglary team.
Within
a year after Castro took power, the face of Miami had taken on a definite
Cuban character. More than 100,000 exiles had settled in and others
were arriving at a rate of 1700 a week. As the Cuban exile population
of Miami grew, so did the presence of the CIA. Although 18 government
agencies dealt with handling exile reception, the CIA had its contacts into
every one, including the mother agency, the Cuban Refugee Center. It
also used the Immigration and Naturalization Service to set up and
maintain a massive debriefing facility at the Opa-Locka air base in northern
Dade County. More importantly, however, the Agency began assigning
case agents and keeping tabs on the multitude of anti-Castro groups which
and begun spreading through the exile community like mangrove roots.
At one point, the Agency had a list of almost 700 such groups, some of which
had begun active military operations with CIA support. One veteran
recalls that the infiltration and exfiltration boat traffic on Biscayne Bay
got so heavy "you needed a traffic cop." It confused the U.S. Coast Guard,
which didn't always know whether it was chasing a 'sponsored operation" financed
by the CIA or just a bunch of "crazy Cubans."
The invasion
of Cuba's Bahia Cochinos -- Bay of Pigs -- occurred in April, 1961.
It was the brainchild not of the Cuban exiles but of the Central Intelligence
Agency. It was spawned at a meeting of the Agency's top brass in January,
1960. Originally, it was not going to be a massive operation.
No more than 30 Cuban exile were to be trained in Panama to serve as cadre
for bands of guerrillas recruited within or infiltrated into Cuba.
However, by the time the plan moved through the Agency's bureaucracy and,
was adopted and natured by its covert operations chief -- a lanky, stopped-shouldered,
brilliantly manipulative, Groton- Yale aristocrat named Richard Bissell --
it had gotten blown up to a major project. The plan President Dwight
Eisenhower approved in March, 1960, called for a "unified" and a large paramilitary
force. Named White House project officer was the plan's most enthusiastic
supporter, Vice President Richard Nixon.
Years
later, the Senate Intelligence Committee was to discover, from files voluntarily
given to it by the CIA, that a select few of the Agency's top officers --
including Richard Bissell -- had in the spring of 1960 begun setting in motion,
as an adjunct to the Bay of Pigs operation, plans to assassinate Castro.
The CIA told the Committee that it was involved in nine Castro assassination
plots in all, including those with the Mafia. Castro himself later
produced a detailed list of 24 plots against his life involving the CIA.
What's significant is that both the CIA and Castro agree on when the plans
began.
In Miami,
even before plans for a Cuban invasion became common gossip, the Cuban exiles'
hopes for Castro's overthrow were constantly buoyed by public pronouncements
of support for the U.S. Government. In his State of the Union address,
President Kennedy himself spoke of "the Communist base established 90 miles
from the United States," and said that "Communist domination in this
hemisphere can never be negotiated." As soon as Kennedy and been elected,
CIA Director Allen Dulles and his covert plans deputy Richard Bissell had
flown to the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach and sold their new boss on the
efficacy of a Cuban operation. They did not tell him that the plans
had recently been upgraded within the Agency to include an even large paramilitary
force and air strikes. That decision, Bissell would later admit, was
"internal."
In his recent excellent book on the subject, Peter Wyden wrote: "No
notable event in recent United States history remains as unexplained and
puzzling as the Central Intelligence Agency's adventure that became know
as 'the Bay of Pigs.'
"...the
Bay of Pigs is more than a skeleton in the nation's historical closet; more
than the first blemish on the magic of the Kennedy name and reputation; more
than the collapse of the largest secret operation in U.S. history.
It is a watershed.
"In the
CIA, acting out of control and independently, had not escalated its plans
against Fidel Castro from modest guerrilla operation into a full-fledged
invasion, President Kennedy would have suffered no humiliating, almost grotesque
defeat.
"If Kennedy
had not been thoroughly defeated by Castro on the beaches in 1961, Nikita
Khrushchev almost certainly would not have dared to precipitate the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962 -- the crisis which, in the words of former CIA Director
William E. Colby, pushed the world 'as close to Armageddon' as it has ever
come.
"And it
the reasons for the collapse at the Bay of Pigs had not been covered up...the
CIA might perhaps have been curbed, and the country could have been
spared the intelligence scandals of the 1970s, the revelations of a
government agency routinely, daily, committing unconstitutional acts against
its own citizens in its own country."
Wyden
misses one significant observation: What the Bay of Pigs plan provided
was the historic opportunity for the CIA to begin domestic field operations
on an unprecedented scale. Some aspects of those operations were of
questionable legality. For instance, although the main Cuban exile
brigade was trained at a secret base in Guatemala, other special units were
prepared within the United States by both military and CIA personnel.
That, however, was relatively minor compare with the overwhelming dimensions
to which the CIA's presence in Miami grew. The Agency's officers, contract
agents, informants and contacts reached into almost every area of the community.
And as pervasive as that presence was before the Bay of Pigs, it was to be
but a foothold for later, larger operations. Nevertheless, it was the
preparation of the Bay of Pigs invasion which gave birth to a special relationship
between CIA operatives and the Cuban exiles. That relationship would
eventually intensify into a mutuality of interests which, as it later became
apparent, transcended even Presidential directives and official United States
policy.
One of
the factors that led the Central Intelligence Agency to believe it could
topple Castro was the success it had enjoyed in Guatemala in 1954.
Using a force of only 150 exiles and a handful of World War II P-47 fighters
flow by American contract pilots, the CIA brought down the Communist-leaning
Guatemalan government in less than a week, firing hardly a shot, and installed
the Agency's hand-picked leader, Castillo Armas. When covert operations
boss Richard Bissell was selecting Agency personnel to run the Bay of Pigs
scheme, he told them that the plan was based on "the Guatemala scenario."
Because
of the success of that scenario, Bissell picked veterans of it for the key
slots in the Cuban operation. For instance, appointed the Agency's
political liaison chief to the multitude of Cuban exile groups in Miami was
a dapper, pipe-smoking Ivy Leaguer (Brown, '40) and prolific author of spy
thrillers named E. Howard Hunt. Among Agency personnel, Hunt had --
and still does have -- a curious reputation. To some he is the caricature
of the Hollywood spy -- indeed, Hunt did serve a stint as a Hollywood script
writer -- given to overplaying the cloak and dagger role. One of the
more earnest of the Agency professionals liked to say that Hunt was consistent
in his judgment: "always wrong." Yet down through the years and
right up through the Watergate fiasco, Hunt was inevitable chosen to be on
the front lines of dirty trick operations,. Despite the fact there
appeared to be so many ostensible failures among those operations, Hunts
star continually rose. He also remained strangely close to the one
man whose markedly unflamboyant character seemed in such contrast to his,
the one deemed the shrewdest and most coldly professional of all Agency bosses:
Richard Helms.
It didn't
take long for E. Howard Hunt to inject himself into the labyrinthine world
of Cuban exile politics in Miami. With his faithful sidekick, Bernard
Barker, Hunt set up a series of 'safe" houses for Clandestine meetings, moved
through the shadows of Little Havana and doled out packets of money from
dark doorways. (Hunt carried as much as $115,000 in his briefcase.)
Although Hunt attempted to keep 2 separate identity ("Just call me 'Eduardo,'"
he told the Cubans) and the source of the funds a mystery, the exiles soon
began referring to their benefactors as "Uncle Sam."
It was
Hunt's job to form the Frente, the coalition of Cuban exile groups which
would serve as the political umbrella for the military army of the invasion.
It was early apparent, however, that Hunt's own conservative right-wing political
view colored his handling of the exile groups and he and Barker, wheeling
and dealing among the politicians, started as many squabbles as they mediated.
In fact, immediately before the actual invasion, Hunt was removed -- he says
he quit -- as the Agency's political liaison because he wouldn't go along
with including in the exile coalition a group headed by a democratic socialist
named Manolo Ray. Fidelisimo sin Fidel, Hunt said, and called him a
Communist. Ray's name would also later pop up in the Kennedy assassination
investigation.
Hunt's
principal contribution to the Bay of Pigs invasion was his selection of the
military brigade's political leader, a fiery physician-tuned-politician named
Manuel Artime. Flamboyant had effective, Artime helped stop a political
insurrection at the exile training camp. Years later, he would become
wealthy as a business partner of former Nicaragua dictator Luis Somoza.
His relationship with Howard Hunt would grow into a extremely close friendship.
They bought homes across the street from each other in Miami Shores and Hunt
served as the godfather for one of Artime's children. (In 1975, an
informant called the office of Senator Richard Schweiker and said that a
friend of Artime's in Mexico City claimed that Artime had "guilty knowledge"
of the Kennedy assassination. Artime, moving in and out of the country
on business, was unable to be contacted before Schweiker's mandate expired.
Later, the House Assassinations Committee contacted Artime and planned to
take his sworn statement. Suddenly, Artime went into the hospital and
was told he had cancer. Two weeks later, Artime died. He was
45.)
Another
major contribution Hunt made to the Bay of Pigs operation was his help in
selecting an old friend from the Guatemala scenario for an extremely important
Agency role. Pulled from his post as a covert operative in Havana was
a tall, articulate, charmingly diffident counterintelligence expert named
David Atlee Phillips. It was Phillips' enormous and primary task to
create the Big Lie. As head of the Agency's "propaganda shop" for the
invasion, Phillips had to bend the ranting of the exile groups into an effective
symphony, set up broadcast stations that would rally guerrillas with Cuba
to join the invaders, and establish communications links that would provide
secret codes to trigger the actual invasion. Most of all, it was Phillips'
job to create the impression to the world that the invasion was all a spontaneous
action by anti-Castro forces and that neither the United States nor the CIA
had anything to do with it. Phillips obviously had to be ingenious.
Later,
there would be many an autopsy done on the Bay of Pigs operation and many
valid conclusion reached about why it was such a dismal failure. One
of the major reasons, however, had to be the fact that the most ambitious
clandestine project ever concocted and supervised by the world's most technically
proficient experts in deception and secrecy was, in the end, anything but
a secret. Just nine days before the invasion, a New York Times reporter
in Miami wrote: "Men come and go quietly on their secret missions of
sabotage and gun- running into Cuba, while others assemble at staging points
here to be flown at night to military camps in Guatemala and Louisiana.
Since a mobilization order was issued ten days ago...contingents of men have
been leaving here nightly for the camps of the new revolutionary army.
They will be followed next week by professional men and intellectual who
are to be concentrated at an undisclosed spot in the Caribbean area to prepare
to serve as military government officials if the revolutionaries gain a foothold
on Cuban soil." The next day, Castro must have at least glanced at
the story before checking the sports news.
President
Kennedy told the world that he assumed "sole responsibility" for the Bay
of Pigs. Privately, he turned to his special counsel, Theodore Sorensen,
and asked: "How could I have been so stupid to let them to ahead?"
Yet many in the top echelon of CIA officers involved in planning the Bay
of Pigs did, indeed, feel strongly that Kennedy was responsible of its failure.
There would have been no slaughter of the exiles, no 1200 brave man captured,
if Kennedy had not at the last moment rejected the proposal of massive air
support. That was the word that filtered down to the field operatives,
the Cuban exile community and the remnants of the invasion Brigade.
It produced an incredible bitterness on every level. The military leader
of the Brigade, Pepe San Roman, captured and imprisoned by Castro, later
revealed the depth of his reaction: "I hated the United States," he
said, "and I felt that I had been betrayed. Every day it became worse
and then I was getting madder and madder and I wanted to get a rifle and
come and fight against the U.S."
The Agency
operatives who had led the exiles expressed the same deep bitterness.
The ever-eloquent E. Howard Hunt, monitoring the effect at CIA headquarters
until the end, later noted: "I was sick of lying and deception, heartsick
over political compromise and military defect.... That night, laced
through my broken sleep, were the words Sir Winston Churchill had spoken
to a British Minister of Defense: 'I am not sure I should have dared
to start; but I am sure I should not have dared to stop.' ...I saw
in his words a warning for those Americans who had faltered at the Bay of
Pigs."
Hunts
close associate, David Phillips, would also reveal, years later, the incredible
emotional impact of the defeat. Writing in his memoirs, The Night Watch,
he too, detailed the end:
I went
home. I peeled off my socks like dirty layers of skin -- I realized
I hadn't changed them for a week.... I bathed, then fell into bed to sleep
for several hours. On awakening I tried to eat again, but couldn't.
Outside, the day was sheet spring beauty. I carried a portable radio
to the yard at the rear of the house and listened to the gloomy newscasts
about Cuba as I sat on the ground, my back against a tree.
Helen
came out from the house and handed me a martini, a large one. I was
half drunk
when I
finished.. Suddenly my stomach churned. I was sick. My body heaved.
Then I
began to cry....
I wept
for two hours. I was sick again, then drunk again...
Oh shit!
Shit!
The relationship
between the Bay of Pigs failure and the assassination of President Kennedy
is, even speculatively, not a direct one. No doubt the defeat was a
pivotal event in the course of America's destiny, but perhaps more significant
in relation to the assassination itself is the era which followed, the ear
spawned at the Bay of Pigs. In the beginning, it was shaped by Kennedy
himself, the result of his personal reaction to the ignominious defeat at
Bahia de Cochinos. It turned into an ear of increasing aggressiveness
and true clandestinity under the shroud of a publicly unsanctioned national
policy. The country knew little about what was happening at the time
-- and still remains aware of the possibility that what was happening eventually
lied to the death of a President.
It may
help here to put it all into a large perspective, one that is especially
relevant to the intriguing mystery I was later to stumble upon. A prolific
freelancer named Andrew St. George touched upon it in an article in Harper's
a few years ago. I got to know the bearded, swashbuckling St. George,
a rotund, witty, European-bred charmer, during the early course of the Schweiker
investigation. I discovered he was all over Miami in the early '60s,
working mostly for LIFE magazine at the time, slipping around the anti-Castro
groups and soldier-of- fortune crowd, conning his way along on infiltration
operations into Cuba and wheeling and dealing often, it was rumored, more
as an activist than as an objective journalist. ("Andrew was a loveable
scoundrel," says one anti-Castro Cuban leader who claims that St. George
Purloined a b oat from his group to give to another anti-Castro group.)
St. George was one of the first correspondents to Join the rebel Castro in
his mountain stronghold and monitor the deployment of his guerrilla command.
I once asked Andrew if he had ever worked for the CIA. He smiled, puffed
on a Fine cigar and said, "Only when I worked for LIFE." He meant that,
in those days, it was hard to tell where the CIA left off and LIFE began.
At any rate, what makes St. George's observations especially fascinating
is that he is indeed known to have very close contacts, as they say, within
the Agency.
"Had someone
asked me during the early Sixties to explain, in twenty words or fewer, why
I called the Bay of Pigs a failure," St. George wrote in Harper's, "I would
have said something like this: It was a military formula applied to an essentially
political problem. It was an inevitable failure.
"But what
evidence did we have, really, to say that the Cuban invasion was a failure?
The discredited approach of applying military solutions to political problems,
this failed formula we expected President Kennedy to junk with contempt,
was instead polished up and adopted as the favorite method, in the essential
strategy of the Kennedy Administration, which we expected to suffer and starve
for selling this 'failed formula' to the President, turned out to be a big
beneficiary of the wretched Cuban adventure....
"Within
a year of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA curiously and inexplicably began to grow,
to branch out, to gather more and more responsibility for the 'Cuban problem.'
The Company was given authority to help monitor Cuba's wireless traffic;
to observe its weather; to publish some of its best short stories (by Cuban
authors in exile) through its wholly owned CIA printing company; to follow
the Castro government's purchases abroad and its currency transactions, (a
separate economic research branch was set up in South Miami for the purpose);
to move extraordinary numbers of clandestine field operatives in and out
of Cuba; to acquire a support fleet of ships and aircraft in order to facilitate
these secret agent movements; to advise, train, and help reorganize the police
and security establishments of Latin countries which felt threatened by Castro's
guerrilla politics; to take a hand in U-2 over flights and in sea-air ELINT
(Electronic Intelligence) operations aimed at tracing Cuban coastal-defense
communications on special devices; to pump such vast sums into political
operations thought to be helpful in containing Castro that by the time of
the 1965 U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic both the bad
guys and the good guys -- i.e., the 'radical' civilian politicos and the
'conservative' generals -- turned out to have been financed by La Compania.
Owing largely to the Bay of Pigs, the CIA ceased being an invisible government:
it became an empire."
Following
the Bay of Pigs, word leaked out from the White House that Kennedy was disillusioned
with the CIA, that he was upset with his CIA advisors for pushing a scheme
on him which had been devised during the Eisenhower Administration, that
he had been ill-informed and misled and pressured by CIA brass who had an
egocentric interest in pushing the ill-conceived plan. The President called
for the resignation of CIA Director Allen Dulles and covert plans boss Richard
Bissell and, one aide reported, said he was going to "splinter" the Agency
into "a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds."
That was
misleading. Kennedy was, indeed, damn angry at the CIA, not for planning
the Bay of Pigs but for botching it. And he was mad as hell at Castro
who, in daily endless harangues and broadcast reviews of the battle kept
rubbing the young President's nose in the humiliating defeat. Kennedy's initial
reaction was almost reflexive: Don't get mad, get even. Appointing
his brother Robert to oversee the Agency's covert operations, Kennedy did
not splinter the CIA but infused it with new life. That firming up of policy
towards Cuba and the massive infusion of funding to the CIA's anti-Castro
front groups became known to insiders as "the Kennedy vendetta."
Between
the Bay of Pigs debacle in April, 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis in October
of 1962, a massive and, this time, truly secret war was launched against
the Castro regime. The Manifestations of Kennedy's new policy, which made
the preparations for the Bay of Pigs pale by comparison, slowly began altering
the attitudes of the anti-Castro militant and the CIA operatives in the field,
and although a good measure of encrusted bitterness and cynicism lingered,
a revised, more positive image of the President began taking shape.
Kennedy
did his best to reinforce that image. "Cuba must not be abandoned to the
Communists," he declared in a speech shortly after the Bay of Pigs, and spoke
of a "new and deeper struggle." That was a euphemism for a campaign which
eventually employed several thousand CIA operatives and cost over $100 million
a year. Again Miami was the focus of the effort. And this time the CIA moved
in on a truly unprecedented scale. On a large, secluded, heavily-wooded tract
that was part of the University of Miami's South Campus, the Agency set up
a front corporation called Zenith Technological Services. Its code name was
JM/WAVE and it soon became the largest CIA installation anywhere in the world
outside of its Langley, Va., headquarters.
At the
height of its activities, the JM/WAVE station had a staff of more than 300
Americans, mostly case officers in charge of supervising and monitoring Cuban
exile groups. Each case officer employed as many as 10 Cuban principal agents."
Each principal agent, in turn, would be responsible for as many as 30 regular
agents. In addition, the Agency funded scores of front operations throughout
the area --- print shops, real estate firms, travel agencies, coffee shops,
boat repair yards, detective agencies, gun shops, neighborhood newspapers
-- to provide ostensible employment for the thousands of case officers and
agents operating outside of JM/WAVE headquarters. It was said that if any
Cuban exile wanted to open his own business, he had but to ask the CIA for
start-up capital. The CIA became one of the largest employers in South Florida.
The JM/WAVE
station was also a logistical giant within itself. It leased more than 100
staff cars and maintained its own gas depot. It kept warehouses loaded with
everything from machine guns to caskets. It had its own airplanes and what
a former
CIA officer
called "the third largest navy in the Western Hemisphere," including hundreds
of small boats and huge yachts donated by friendly millionaires. There were
also hundreds of pieces of real estates, from dives to palatial waterfront
mansions, used as "safe houses" or assembly points for operations. In addition,
of course, there were paramilitary training throughout the Florida Keys and
deep in the Everglades. (One of the more active sites, used by a variety
of anti-Castro groups, was a small, remote island north of Key West called,
appropriately enough, No Name Key. One of the groups was called the International
Anti-Communist Brigade, a collection of soldiers-of-fortune, mostly Americans,
headed by a giant ex-Marine named Gerry Patrick Hemming. Like another ex-Marine
named Lee Harvey Oswald, Hemming was trained as a radar operator in California.
Hemming would later claim that Oswald once tried to join his IAB group. Co-founder
of the IAB with Hemming was Frank Sturgis.)
Those
were heady times for the anti-Castro groups in Miami. With the CIA providing
lessons in sabotage, explosives, weapons, survival, ambushes, communications
and logistics, the missions to Cuba began escalating in both frequency and
sale. Initially intent on infiltrating small guerrilla bands onto the island,
the Agency was soon supervising major raids aimed at blowing up oil refineries
and sugar mills. Although some of the more militant exile groups considered
themselves its independent of the CIA --- and some raids were made without
its approval because the missions were technically illegal under the Neutrality
Act, no group could function very long without the Agency, making special
arrangements with Customs, Immigration and the Coast Guard. Whether
the exile leaders acknowledged it or not, the Agency was pulling all the
strings.
Those
were, of course, equally heady times for the CIA. It ran the whole show in
more ways than one, eventually achieving over a major section of foreign
policy a level of influence and control
which
Kennedy himself didn't envision. The JM/WAVE station in Miami became the
international coordinating center for the secret war around the globe. Every
CIA station in the world had at least one case officer assigned to Cuban
operations and reporting to the Miami station. The station also controlled
an international economic strategy, pressuring U.S. allies to embargo all
trade with Cuba and supervising a worldwide sabotage program against goods
being shipped to and from Cuba. (It took delight, for instance, in getting
a German manufacturer to produce a shipment of off-center ball bearings for
a Cuban factory.) The operational level of the Agency was also -- without
Kennedy's knowledge, it now appears, and without even the knowledge of his
newly-appointed Director, John McCone -- continuing its program of assassination
attempts against Castro. In giving the CIA a new life, immense funding,
and the incredible power and influence to conduct effective large-scale secret
operations, Kennedy had created a force over which, as he himself would eventually
discover, could not maintain total control. That realization came with the
Cuban missile crisis-in October, 1962.
It is
not known whether Castro requested the installation of offensive ballistic
missiles in Cuba or if he accepted them at the suggestion of the Russians.
There are many Cuban exiles in Miami who know Castro well, who went to school
with him and fought beside him in the mountains during the early days of
the 26th of July Movement. They believe Castro was driven to obtaining the
missiles by the effectiveness of the secret CIA war against him, that the
unrelenting jabbing of the infiltration and sabotage operations created economic
and political pressures which drove him to consider the possibility of doing
something rash. Perhaps that is what the CIA itself was counting on. The
more fervent of the Cuban exiles were, indeed, initially elated by the possibility
that the crisis might provoke a final showdown with Castro. President Kennedy
himself boosted such hopes with hard-line responses to the daily more blatant
build-up of the Soviet presence in Cuba. In September of that year, Kennedy
declared that the United States would use "whatever means may be necessary"
to prevent Cuba from exporting "its aggressive purposes by force or threat
of force." In Miami, the anti-Castro exiles and their CIA control bosses
delighted in such tough talk and looked forward to some real action.
The manner
in which President Kennedy resolved the Cuban missile destroyed the hope
of the exiles and the men conducting the secret war. Cuba and Castro were
relegated to a minor role as Kennedy dealt directly with Russian Premier
Nikita Khrushchev. The crisis ended on November 29th, 1962. Kennedy announced
that all IL-28 bombers were being withdrawn by the Soviets and that progress
was being made on the withdrawal of offensive missiles. In return, Kennedy
said he gave the Soviets and the Cubans a "no invasion" pledge.
The reaction
among the secret war activities to that settlement one of tremendous shock.
To the men who had been risking their very lives in a tough guerrilla war
against the menace of Communism in the Caribbean, it was astounding that
Kennedy should make a deal with Khrushchev. If the President's actions at
the Bay of Pigs had raised doubts in their minds about Kennedy's sincerity
and determination to bring down Castro, his handling of the missile crisis
more than confirmed those doubts. Over café Cubano at the back tables
of luncheonettes in Miami's Little Havana, in the CIA safe houses set in
the lush foliage of Coconut Grove in the training camps in the remote Keys
and the deep Everglades, wherever the exiles and their control agents gathered,
the word "traitor" would eventually be spoken. Feelings ran that strong.
The late Mario Lazo, a prominent exile attorney and close associate of top
CIA officials (even after the Watergate burglary, he considered E. Howard
Hunt "one of the great men of our time."), called it a "soul-shattering blow."
And yet
the depth of anger at Kennedy for making the missile settlement was shallow
compared with the reaction of the exiles and their CIA cohorts when it became
apparent what the implementation of the President's new "no-invasion" policy
actually meant. Suddenly the United States Government began cracking down
on the very training camps and guerrilla bases which had been originally
established by the United States Government. Regular infiltration raids into
Cuba by the exiles, which automatically would get the Government's "green
light," now were promptly disavowed and condemned. The Cuban Revolutionary
Council, the united front of exile groups established by the CIA, had its
subsidy cut off. (Reacting bitterly, the Council's president declared that
Kennedy had become "the victim of a master play by the Russians.")
The crackdown
continued over the next several months, to the increasing confusion and anger
of the exiles. On the one hand, they were being encouraged and supported
by the U.S. Government -- wasn't the CIA the U.S. Government? -- and, on
the other hand, they were being literally handcuffed and arrested. It was
crazy. In March, 1963 for instance, when a group of anti-Castro raiders
were arrested by British police at a training site in the Bahamas, the U.S.
State Department admitted it had tipped off the British about the camp. That
same night another exile raiding boat was seized in Miami harbor. The Coast
Guard announced it was throwing more planes, ships and men into policing
the Florida straits for anti-Castro raiders. The Customs Service raided the
secret camp at No Name Key and arrested the anti-Castro force in training
there. The FBI seized a major cache of explosives at another exile camp outside
of New Orleans. Weeks later, the Coast Guard assisted the British Navy in
capturing another group of Cuban exiles in the Bahamas. Then Federal Aviation
Administration issued "strong warnings" to six American civilian pilots --
including soldier-of-fortune Frank Sturgis and a few who had worked directly
with the CIA -- who had been flying raids over Cuba. Shortly afterwards,
the Secret Service arrested a prominent exile leader for conspiring to counterfeit
Cuban currency destined for rebel forces inside Cuba -- a plan that had all
the earmarks of a CIA operation. Had Kennedy gone crazy -- or was he, indeed,
a "traitor"?
And yet
against this pattern of a crackdown by Federal enforcement agencies on exile
activity, there emerged a counter-grain of incidents which is very relevant
to the Kennedy assassination. These incidents involve a series of major raids
by anti-Castro groups which took place, despite the crackdown, between the
time of the missile crisis and the assassination of the President. In fact,
at the height of the missile crisis -- and the most politically inopportune
moment for Kennedy -- one of the largest and most militant of the Cuban groups,
Alpha 66, launched a quick strike at a major port in Cuba, killing at least
20 defenders, including some Russians. A week later, the same group sunk
a Cuban patrol boat. On October 31st, the day after Kennedy lifted his blockade
of Cuba as a sign of his peaceful intentions, Alpha 66 struck again. Then,
immediately after the crisis ended in November, a spokesman for the group
pledged further raids.
There
were other Cuban exile groups which also defied Kennedy's "no invasion" policy.
In April, a group calling itself the Cuban Freedom Fighters bombed an oil
refinery outside Havana. In May, another band of anti-Castro rebels struck
military camp near the capitol. Shortly afterwards, a group of exile raiders
returned to Miami and announced it had blown up another refinery, sank a
gunboat and killed scores of Castro soldiers. There were at least a
dozen other actions which, despite the President's orders, indicated that
certain Cuban exile groups and their field operatives were continuing the
secret war. Despite the fact that none of the groups had been formed without
the help of the CIA, that they had all long operated successfully with the
supervisory support and funding of the CIA, the Agency denied it had any
association at all with their continuing actions.
There
were indications that Kennedy himself was confused and did not know what
was happening. At a press conference in May, 1963, in response to a question
about whether or not the United States was giving aid to the exiles, the
President stumbled: "We may well be...well, none that I am familiar with....
I don't think as of today that we are." It was recently discovered that the
CIA was supporting at least one exile group under what the Agency termed
an "antonymous operations concept, whatever that meant.
There
were few who had the foresight or knowledge to understand the significance
of what was happening at the time, but one who did was a Democratic Representative
from Florida named Paul Rodgers. Citing some "serious kinks in our intelligence
system," Rodgers called for a Joint Congressional committee to oversee the
CIA. "And what proof have we," asked Rodgers with uncanny prescience, "that
this Agency, which in many respects has the power to pre-empt foreign policy,
is not actually exercising this power through practices which are contradictory
to the established policy objectives of this Government?"
That was
in February, 1963. That month, in Dallas, a Czarist Russian emigre, world
traveler and former French intelligence operative named George DeMohrenschildt
decided to give a dinner party. He invited a young couple named Oswald, who
had just returned from Russia the previous summer. It was at that dinner
party that Lee Harvey Oswald was introduced to Ruth Paine.
There
was a Democratic Representative from Florida named Paul Rodgers. Citing some
"serious kinks in our intelligence system," Rodgers called for a Joint Congressional
committee to oversee the CIA. "And what proof have we," asked Rodgers with
uncanny prescience, "that this Agency, which in many respects has the power
to pre-empt foreign policy, is not actually exercising this power through
practices which are contradictory to the established policy objectives of
this Government?"
Twelve
years later, with the call from Senator Schweiker, I began an odyssey into
the Kennedy assassination that would be far more revealing than I ever anticipated.
It was a journey into a maze that had, over the years, grown incredibly complicated,
with all sorts of elaborate cul-de-sacs. Perhaps more important, however,
is the fact that there emerged certain similar images along so many of the
pathways --- an indication, often only gossamer, of a concealed connecting
thread or associative strands which appeared to emanate from a common spool.
For instance,
one of the first leads which Schweiker asked me to check out came from a
source he had to consider impeccable: Clare Boothe Luce. One of the wealthiest
women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire,
a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a former Ambassador
to Italy, a successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime
civic activist, Clare Boothe Luce was the last person in the world Schweiker
would have suspected of leading him on a wild goose chase.
It began
almost immediately after Schweiker announced the formation of the Kennedy
assassination subcommittee. He was visited by syndicated Washington columnist
Vera Glaser who told him she had just interviewed Clare Boothe Luce and that
Luce had given her some information relating to the assassination. Schweiker
immediately called Luce and she, quite cooperatively and in detail, confirmed
the story she had told Glaser.
Luce said
that some time after the Bay of Pigs she received a call from her "great
friend" William Pawley, who lived in Miami. Pawley was a man of immense wealth,
originally a Texas oil millionaire who once owned the Havana bus system and
vast sugar holdings. He had helped start General Claire Chenault's
famous Flying Tigers in World War II. Pawley had long been actively supporting
anti-Castro Cubans in Miami, Luce said, and he now had the idea of sponsoring
a fleet of speedboat -- sea-going "Flying Tiger" --- which would be
used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on "intelligence gathering"
missions. Pawley asked her to sponsor one of these boats, said Luce, and
she agreed.
As a result
of her sponsorship, Luce said, she got to know the three-man "crew" of the
boat. She called them "my boys" and said they visited her a few times in
her New York townhouse. "I got to know them fairly well," she said. It was
one of these boat crews, she said, that originally brought back the news
of Russian missiles in Cuba. Because Kennedy didn't react to it, she said
she helped feed it to then-Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public. She
said she wrote an article in LIFE magazine which predicted the nuclear showdown.
"Well, then came the nuclear showdown and the President made his deal with
Khrushchev and I never saw my young Cubans again," she said. The boat operations
were stopped, she said, when after Kennedy's "deal," Pawley was notified
that the U.S. was invoking the Neutrality Act and would prevent any further
exile missions into Cuba.
Luce said
she didn't think of her boat crew until the day that President Kennedy was
killed. That evening she received a telephone call from one of the members
of her boat crew. She told Schweiker she believed his name was Julio Fernandez.
He said he was calling from New Orleans. He told her that he and the other
crew members had been forced out of Miami after the Cuban missile crisis
and that they had started a "Free Cuba" cell ln New Orleans. Luce said that
Julio Fernandez told her that Oswald had approached his group and offered
his services as a potential Castro assassin. Fernandez said his group didn't
believe Oswald, suspected he was really a Communist and decided to keep tabs
on him. Fernandez said they found that Oswald was, indeed, a Communist,
and they eventually penetrated his "cell" and tape--recorded his talks, including
his bragging that he could shoot anyone because he was "the greatest shot
in the world with a telescopic lens." Fernandez said that Oswald than
suddenly came into money and went to Mexico City and then Dallas. Fernandez
also told Luce his group had photographs of Oswald and copies of the handbills
Oswald had distributed on the streets of New Orleans. Fernandez asked Luce
what he should do with this information and material.
Luce recalled:
"I said what you do is call the FBI at once. Don't waste a minute. Go right
in and call up the FBI."
Luce said
she did not think about the story again until Jim Garrison's investigation
hit the headlines in 1967. She said she called the New Orleans district attorney
and tell him of the incident but, after talking to him for 10 minutes, she
decided he was a "phony" and not serious. Through Pawley, however, she did
locate and call her "young Cuban" and reminded him of his conversation with
her the evening Kennedy was killed. By then, Luce recalled, Julio Fernandez
no longer wanted to get involved: "He said, 'Mrs. Luce, we did just what
you said. We got it all to the FBI. They came, took our tape recordings,
took our photographs and told us to keep our mouths shut until the FBI sent
for us.' He said, Mrs. Luce, I am married, I have two children, I am a lawyer
with a very successful practice in Miami. I don't want any part of the Kennedy
assassination. You couldn't torture it out of me."' Luce also said that Fernandez
told her that of the other two members of her boat crew, one was deported
and one was stabbed to death in Miami.
Luce told
Schweiker that her impression, based on what she was told by "her Cubans,"
was that Oswald was hired by Castro to assassinate Kennedy in retaliation
for the assassination efforts against him.
Luce also
told Schweiker that she did not remember the names of the other two crew
members, nor did she know now how to get in touch with Julio Fernandez. She
said that Bill Pawley would know all about it.
Schweiker
called Pawley. Pawley said he didn't remember a thing. Schweiker took it
as an indication that Pawley just didn't want to get involved. He still thought
that Luce's story, if confirmed, could lead to a significant break. He asked
me to try to find the Julio Fernandez who had called her.
I discovered
there are a lot of Cubans in Miami named Julio Fernandez. There are more
than a dozen lawyers named Fernandez. Many Cubans, like Americans, are commonly
known by their middle name, not their first, and some Cubans are commonly
known not by their by father's family name by their matrinomy. Nevertheless,
selecting them by their age and word of their anti-Castro activism, I spent
weeks talking with scores of Cubans named Julio Fernandez. Schweiker particularly
interested in the Julio Fernandez whose name did turn up in an FBI report
buried in the Warren Commissions' volume of evidence. I finally tracked
him down in upstate New York. He wasn't the Julio Fernandez who had called
Clair Boothe Luce. It wasn't until more than a year later, with the broadened
access to information I had with the House Assassinations Committee, I discovered
that there was no Julio Fernandez who called Luce. She had simply concocted
the name for Schweiker.
What was
interesting about the Luce story was that it had a couple of the characteristics
common to so many of the other leads which were fed to Schweiker and, later,
the House Assassinations Committee and, when checked out, went no where.
One such characteristic was that the leads usually could not be dismissed
outright because they always contained hard kernels of truth mixed in the
fluff.
For instance,
in the case of the Luce lead, it was known that Oswald did approach an anti-Castro
group in New Orleans and said he was interested in helping their cause. The
fellow he approached, Carlos Bringuier, was the chief Orleans delegate of
the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, known simply as the DRE or Student
Directorate, headquartered in Miami and under the wing of the CIA's JM/WAVE
station. A few days after Oswald walked into Bringuier's small store, Bringuier
saw him passing out pro-Castro leaflets on Canal Street, got in a scuffle
with him and both he and Oswald were arrested. He later debated Oswald
on a radio program recording of which appeared on the commercial market immediately
after the Kennedy assassination.
Independent
researchers have been looking into Oswald's encounter with Bringuier for
years and have discovered some curious things about it. Jim Garrison found
that a newspaper photographer had been alerted to Bringuier's encounter with
Oswald handling out leaflets before Bringuier approached Oswald. Oswald,
despite his attempt to join the anti-Castro group days earlier, seemed bent
on getting publicity as a pro-Castro demonstrator and encouraged Bringuier
to attack him. At one point, Oswald was overheard to say, "Hit me, Carlos."
In addition Oswald had stamped on some of the pro-Castro leaflets strange
address for the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (of
which he was the only member). The address was a building which housed
a hotbed of anti-Castro activity, at one time the New Orleans office of the
CIA-backed Cuban Revolutionary Front. The Assassination Committee discovered
that Oswald was seen in that building with extreme right-wing and anti-Castro
activists.
In checking
further into Luce's story for the Assassinations Committee, we developed
some additional interesting information. We found that Luce's "great friend"
in Miami, William Pawley, was also a longtime friend of the CIA. He was reportedly
involved in the CIA's overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala. A
CIA front called the Pacific Corporation was an offshoot of Pawley's Flying
Tigers. Pawley himself fronted some of the CIA's anti-Castro activities.
(He once told a Miami reporter: "Find me one man, just one man who can go
it alone and get Castro, I'll pay anything, almost anything.") He helped
fund the LIFE magazine, a secret raid into Cuba in order to exfiltrate two
Russian technicians who could testify, to Kennedy's embarrassment, that Russian
missiles were still in Cuba. The raiding party failed to return and
10 exiles were lost.
In 1976,
before we could interview Pawley about the Luce story and other matters concerning
the Kennedy assassination, he committed suicide. He reportedly had been suffering
from a bad case of shingles.
We pursued
the Luce story all the way down the line. Carlos Bringuier, who later became
a lecturer on Billy Jean Hargis' right-wing Christian Crusade circuit, said
he had never spoken to Clair Boothe Luce. In Miami, however, we did discover
that a few leaders of his Directorio group were -- the kernel of truth --
in touch with Luce.
The Directorio
was, along with Alpha 66, the most active, on both the military and propaganda
fronts, of all the Cuban exile groups. In September, 1962 the group
received national publicity with a daring raid into Havana harbor.
Its boats shelled a theater where Castro was scheduled to speak. Castro raged
that it was another attempt on his life by the CIA. The leaders of the Directorio
decided to squeeze as much propaganda and fund-raising benefit as they could
out of the publicity. They were put in touch with a man in New York who,
for certain reasons, will be known here as Jack Justin. Justin had excellent
contacts in the media and got the Directorio leaders on several radio and
television shows. He also introduced them to Clair Boothe Luce.
The key
Directorio liaison was a sharp, articulate young fellow named Jose Antonio
Lanusa. It was Lanusa who handled the regular reports from DRE delegates
in various cities and who, after the Kennedy assassination, recalled Bringuier's
report from New Orleans about Oswald's visit. It was Lanusa who originally
released the story to the press, after contacting his CIA case officer at
the JM/WAVE station. It was also Lanusa who turned over to the FBI
copies of Bringuier's reports and a tape recording of the radio debate with
Oswald. The FBI never told him to keep his mouth shut about it, Lanusa said.
Lanusa said he never spoke to Clare Boothe Luce about the incident, either
at the time or later, and he knew of no DRE member who was deported or murdered.
Lanusa
said he had only a single contact with Luce, arranged by Jack Justin. Lanusa
didn't know how the DRE arrangement with Justin came about, but Justin appeared
to be affluent, lived in a
luxury
apartment on Central Park West and picked up all expenses whenever DRE members
visited New York. "My opinion now," Lanusa told me, "is that he was being
paid by the CIA."
Justin
introduced him and another leader of the Directorio to Luce in her New York
apartment because, Lanusa was told, she wanted to write an article for LIFE
magazine about the group's raid into Cuba. She said she would turn the $600
fee she would get for the article over to the DRE as a _ contribution. Lanusa
said that was the only money Luce ever contributed to the DRE. He said she
could not have sponsored a boat because he was aware of how all the DRE boats
were acquired. When I told him of the story that Luce had told Schweiker,
Lanusa shook his head and said: "I think Clare Boothe Luce shoots from the
hip without having her brain engaged."
Many times
in the course of my experiences investigating the Kennedy assassination,
I found it strangely difficult to accept the obvious. The truth often came
so boldly and blatantly that it was difficult to believe. Analogically, it
was like sitting across the table from an old friend when, in the midst of
a very pleasant conversation, he suddenly reaches over and slaps you
across the face and then, without missing a word, continues the pleasant
conversation. Your initial reaction is one of shock, then disbelief. When
you ask why he did that, he asks, "Did what?" without changing his pleasant
expression. It was quite obvious what happened, but with his denying the
obvious and the continued pleasant conversation, you begin to doubt the reality
of the obvious. Did what just happened -- this time chunk of experience
that was here a moment ago and is now gone -- really happen? Did I
just get slapped in the face? It was a question I asked myself often.
On slowly
uncovering and verifying the facts surrounding the story that Luce told Schweiker,
I began to envision her as an old woman now -- she was well into her 70s
--diverse experiences of her colorful life perhaps blending into jumbled
recollections over-dramatically recalled. That image was shattered
when I met her.
Clare
Boothe Luce had been difficult to pin down. She regularly moves between her
New York apartment, her home in Hawaii and her penthouse at the Watergate
in Washington, still very active and agile. We finally set up an interview
in the last months of the Committee's existence, too late for an executive
session hearing or sworn deposition. I was accompanied by staff researcher
Betsy Palmer, who had done the file checking of the Luce story at the CIA.
Amid a
splendid fortune of museum-quality Chinese artifacts in her elegant Watergate
apartment house on the floor, coincidentally, is occupied by General Claire
Chenault's widow), Luce was most pleasant and cooperative. Yes, she said,
she had originally told the story to columnist Vera Glaser and confirmed
it with Senator Schweiker. She repeated the story, virtually unchanged for
us.
Luce,
however, when question further, also confirmed additional details which Betsy
Palmer had uncovered in her file search. At the time Luce was in touch with
Schweiker, she was also in touch with William Colby, then head of the CIA.
She told Colby she had just made up the name of Julio Fernandez for Schweiker.
She said she was also in touch with Jack Justin, who gave her the names of
three DRE leaders, including Lanusa, but she didn't mention them to Schweiker.
Colby, however, called Justin and urged him to cooperate with Schweiker,
but Justin said he did not want to get involved. From the CIA file
notes of telephone conversation, it appeared that even Colby was confused
about what was going on. When I pointed out to Luce that her story reminded
me of the Carlos Bringuier incident with Oswald, she smiled and said, "Why,
yes, that's the same type of thing that happened to my boys."
When we
walked out of the Watergate late that afternoon, we knew only one thing for
sure: An awful lot of time had been spent checking out Luce's story and,
in the end, it led nowhere at all.
The last
time I saw Clare Boothe Luce was shortly after we interviewed her at the
Watergate. I attended a luncheon meeting, for reasons which will be later
apparent, of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers at a country
club in Arlington. Luce was the guest speaker. Her speech was a vigorous
defense of the intelligence establishment and an historical review of its
successes. I discovered that Boothe Luce, besides being the guest speaker
at that meeting, is actually on the Board of Directors of the Association
of Former Intelligence Officers. The organization was founded in 1975 by
former Bay of Pigs propaganda chief, David Atlee Phillips.
Time and
again, as I probed through the maze of the Kennedy assassination investigation,
that thread of an association of some sort with intelligence agency activity
would appear and reappear often clear and distinct, sometimes thin and tenuous.
What, if anything did it mean? I'm still puzzled, for instance, by
an episode involving a tip that came into Senator Schweiker's office later
in his investigation. Although I was then in the midst of pursuing
an especially significant development, the new information seemed much too
important to put aside and its source, again, valid enough not to dismiss.
A man
from Key West called Schweiker's office in Washington and said he had some
information which might be of some help in the Senator's investigation of
the Kennedy assassination. The man said he had seen Lee Harvey Oswald and
Jack Ruby together at the Key West International Airport in the summer prior
to the Kennedy assassination. He provided the details. Schweiker's office
called me and I called the man. What he told me led me to drive to Key West
and spend more than a week attempting to confirm the details of his story.
I was not totally unsuccessful, and I did find out more than I expected.
In the
FBI files of its Kennedy assassination investigation, there are hundreds
of reports of individuals who claimed they saw Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack
Ruby together before the killing. Almost every report indicates that a brief
investigation proved the claim groundless. There are some, however,
which indicate that a brief investigation left some claims unresolved, including
a few from sources which appeared to be legitimate; that is where not obvious
mental cases or publicity seekers that relevant in my deciding to go
to Key West. So was another FBI report which connected Jack Ruby to
a gun-smuggling operation in the Florida Keys. There is good evidence
which links Ruby to smuggling guns, although not in the Florida Keys.
In addition, the man who called Schweiker's office appeared to be a very
legitimate sources.
George
Faraldo, a thin, swarthy man in his late 50s was the general manager of the
Key West airport until his retirement several years ago. He subsequently
opened a successful marine diesel business on the island. He is well-known
in the community, a generally respected family man whose wife sings in the
church choir.
I initially
spent several hours with George Faraldo at his office getting the details
of his story. On November 22nd, 1963, Faraldo was in the hospital recovering
from a mild heart attack. That's why he was sure the incident occurred prior
to the Kennedy assassination, probably the summer before, he said. He remembered
arriving at the airport that morning and seeing a group of about 30 or 40
persons clustered in the lobby. Despite its "international" status, the Key
West airport is not large, its terminal building a cinder block structure
the size of a small city post office. There are usually not that many
people in the terminal, which has only a few ticket counters and a separate
small waiting lounge. Faraldo said he learned from talking with a few in
the group that they were part of an organization called the Fair Play for
Cuba Committee and that they were going to Cuba to help, cut the sugar cane
crop. They were waiting for an Aerovia Q Airline plane to fly in from Cuba
to pick them up. Aerovia Q was a commercial airline that regularly
flew chartered and scheduled flights between Key West and Cuba, a 90-mile
hop across the Florida Straits. It maintained a ticket counter at the Key
West Airport.
Faraldo
said he recalled the group waiting around the airport almost all day, getting
repeated word that the plane was delayed. Mostly, he said, they were young
boys and girls, "hippie-looking," casually dressed dungarees, a few in olive-drab
fatigues. They were quiet and well-behaved, Faraldo recalled, some sitting
on the floor in small circles, a few playing guitars. The reason that Faraldo
specifically remembered Lee Harvey Oswald, he said, was because Oswald was
the only one who, during the course of day, kept circulating among the group,
chatting with the various clusters briefly, then moving on. He didn't, however,
appear to be the leader of the group, the one who kept making the announcements
about the plane being delayed. That guy had a beard, said Faraldo.
Both Oswald and Jack Ruby were casually dressed, Faraldo recalled, but Ruby
did not mingle much with the group and spent most of the day standing next
to the doorway that led to the plane boarding area. Once, Faraldo said, he
saw Oswald approach Ruby and talk to him briefly. Faraldo recalled
that the Aerovia Q plane that the group had been waiting for finally arrived
late in the evening and that Oswald got on the plane with the group. He said
he didn't see Ruby get on and doesn't know if he did.
It was
an incredible story Faraldo told, yet he seemed to tell lt in a very credible
way. He said he would have had some doubts about recognizing either Oswald
or Ruby after the Kennedy assassination if it had been a case of just one,
but the fact that he recalled both individuals led him to dispel any thought
that it may have been a case of mistaken identity.
Faraldo
said he didn't observe the group all day, but worked in his office and just
made a few trips out to chat, although he didn't speak with either Oswald
or Ruby. What he did do at one point, however, was film the group with a
movie camera. He was a regular "stringer," or freelance correspondent, for
WTVJ-TV, a Miami television station, and he often sent the news director
short takes of newsy events around Key West, brief film clips for which he
would get a few bucks. Faraldo said his regular procedure was to send
the unprocessed film to Miami with a crew member of a National Airlines flight.
The crew member would then give the film to a cab driver at Miami airport
to deliver to the television station. That's what he did with the film
he took of the Fair Play for Cuba group, Faraldo said.
Although
Faraldo was very believable, I was a bit bothered by an inconsistency in
his ability to recollect detail. He was, for instance, absolutely sure that
the number of the plane that finally arrived to pick up the group was CU-T583
-- it just stuck in his mind, he said -- he couldn't, on the other hand,
recall exactly what month the incident occurred and even had some doubts
about the year. Still, I reasoned, undulations in recollected detail would
be normal after 13 years.
In that
initial interview with him, I probed Faraldo for hours. He remained very
credible. More importantly, he appeared honest and consistently normal. He
wasn't a nut or an odd-ball. He was, in fact, a very intelligent man, a college
graduate with a degree in engineering. Together we drove to the airport terminal
and Faraldo showed me around. We walked through the lobby and he
explain the way the roup was scattered about. He then pointed out exactly
where he saw Oswald and exactly where Ruby was standing most of the time.
Faraldo appeared so sure of what he was saying that I could almost see them
there.
I spent
the next few days attempting to check out Faraldo's story. At the very
least, I wanted to find out whether or not a Fair Play for Cuba group did
fly from Key West to Cuba and when. Perhaps then, I thought, I could
locate other who saw Oswald and Ruby together. I spoke to at least
two dozen individuals, employees and former employees of the airlines operating
out of Key West at the time. I spoke to pilots, stewardesses, mechanics,
ticket counter workers and employees of the terminal itself, including a
former janitor. I could not get any hard substantiation of any point,
yet I kept getting a few tantalizingly vague confirmations that drove me
to dig deeper.
I spoke,
for instance, to a woman who worked the ticket counter for National Airlines
at Key West in the early '60s. She said she did remember a group going to
Cuba to cut sugar cane. A retired Immigration Department official said he
remembered reading about such a group in the newspapers. A Federal Aviation
Administration employee also recalled hearing about a sugar cane cutting
group, but thinks he didn't see them because he worked the late shift at
the time. The FAA chief at Key West said he didn't remember that at all and
that all FAA records of flights were kept only 15 days before being destroyed.
No one who worked the control
tower
at the time remembered an Aerovia Q plane flying in late one night to pick
up a group of sugar cane cutters. The retired airport Janitor, a very
old man, did remember a group of 30 or 40 persons going to Cuba, but thought
they were "foreigners." The U.S. Customs Department kept no records that
could help.
I tried
other angles. I spoke to a number of former employees of Aerovia Q Airlines,
but none could remember the incident Faraldo described. I discovered that
Aerovia Q stopped its regular flights to Key West late in 1961, but Faraldo
said it would have been possible for the airline to fly into Key West as
late as 1963 merely by filing a flight plan with the FAA.
I also
did a page-by-page check of the old bound volumes of the Key West citizen,
the local newspaper. Faraldo had said he thought the newspaper's photographer
had covered the incident, but the guy didn't remember it and said all his
negatives from that time were later lost in a hurricane. Faraldo himself
sent me to an historian at the local public library who, he said, "remembers
everything." She didn't recall the incident and could dig up no confirmation
in her own files.
A spark
of hope flared when Faraldo mentioned that he used to keep the manifests,
or passenger lists, of every daily flight out of Key West, including those
from Aerovia Q. He said he would staple them together at the end of
the day, fold them, put them ln a white envelope and put the envelope in
a cardboard box. And Faraldo remembered specifically where he had kept those
boxes in a storage room at the airport. I~e sped back to check.
With the
help of the current airport manager, we rummaged through every possible storage
area without success. The one storage room where Faraldo was sure the boxes
had been was, just two week before, gutted after a rain storm tore off part
of the ceiling and flooded the room. Faraldo pointed out where the boxes
should have been on a shelf suspended between the ceiling and the air conditioning
ducts. The new manager said everything taken from that gutted room was in
a trash heap on the side of the terminal. I spent hours going through a
~ mountain of soggy trash looking for the discarded boxes. I found nothing
that resembled manifests.
I subsequently
contacted the news director of WTVJ-TV, where Faraldo said he had sent his
film. Ralph Renick confirmed that Faraldo had done some freelancing for the
station and said he was. He said familiar with his story about Oswald and
Ruby. He said Faraldo mentioned it to him about the time of Jim Garrison's
investigation in New Orleans. He went back through his film files at the
time but couldn't find anything. "It would have been a damn good story for
us to break, obviously," said Renick. Renick said he would re-check the files.
He did and found nothing. Meanwhile, I kept going back to Faraldo.
I was frustrated. I thought I myself vaguely recalled reading about a group
of pacifists going to Cuba to cut sugar cane, and there were a few I talked
with who remembered such a group in Key West. Faraldo appeared even more
frustrated than I. He was extremely upset that his manifest records, which
he had so carefully kept for years, he said, had not been retained. We tried
to probe deeper into his memory for additional details. We'd sit around his
office or drive to the coffee shop at the airport. We had lunch together
a few times and one night his wife invited me for a delicious home cooked
dinner. We talked of many things besides the Kennedy assassination and were
beginning to get to know each other a little. He was a soft-voiced, intelligent
man and I liked him.
One day
we were sitting around his office chatting. Faraldo mentioned that he is
a veteran of the U.S. Navy, an experienced pilot, has an avid interest in
electronics and considers himself an expert photographic technician. These
bits of information were dropped over the course of a long conversation and
I didn't immediately link them to anything of significance. He then
mentioned he had a photo lab behind his machine shop. I noted my own interest
in photography and asked to see it. I assumed he was an amateur photographer
who freelanced occasionally for a few bucks and had a nice array of perhaps
even professional quality equipment. I was amazed, however, at the collection
of sophisticated electronic and photographic gear stocked in Faraldo's shop.
I guessed there was well over $100,000 worth of equipment. I then noticed
sitting on the floor in a corner what appeared to be the housing of a an
aerial reconnaissance camera.
Hey, what's
going on here?
Softly
I began probing Faraldo about his use of such equipment. Well, he said, he
had made a number of trips into Cuba after Castro took over in order to find
out a few things. ~e told a story about once being suspected of spying by
Castro's police and how he was retained and beaten. He spoke of how he hated
Castro and how he thought Batista, whom he had known personally, was "one
of the best friends the United States ever had." He said he was also very
friendly with Castro's former Air Force Chief, Pedro Diaz Lanz.
When I
asked Faraldo specifically about the reconnaissance camera, he said he had
flown a number of aerial photographic missions and proudly went into a detailed
explanation of how he had designed a special device to permit him to trigger
the camera, installed in the belly of his plane, from the cockpit. He said
he had taken shots of the Russian missiles in Cuba long before Kennedy
announced they existed.
For whom,
I tried to ask casually, was he working? "I was told," he said smiling, "I
was working~ for the United States Information Agency." I asked if he thought
it possible that he was really working for the CIA? "Yes," he said, "I would
think so." I thought that he should more than just think so and decided to
press. I asked him who paid for all the sophisticated photo and electronic
equipment he had. He looked at me as if I were playing a game with him and
didn't answer directly. Finally he gave me a wide grin and said, "No comment."
It's a
beautiful ride from Key West back to Miami over a long, lonesome stretch
of the Overseas Highway, the big sky a clear deep blue, the ocean vista of
white caps on one side, on the other the bay a crystal expanse of glistening
serenity. But I couldn't appreciate the scenery as I drove back because my
mind was a jumble of confusion about what I had experienced over the previous
several days. I wanted to believe Faraldo because he was intelligent
and credible and I like him. And didn't a few others remember that
group at the airport? Besides, why would he be lying? Why would he
tell such a story and go out of his way to bring it to Schweiker's attention?
I remember conflicting questions racing through my mind as I drove back to
Miami. I also remember feeling something I didn't want to believe I felt:
The sensation of a lingering sting along the side of my cheek, as if someone
had just slapped me across the face.
Perhaps,
yes, perhaps coincidentally, the Luce incident and the Faraldo incident both
contain elements of similarity to a burst of reports which sprung up immediately
following the action of President John F. Kennedy. These reports all indicated
that Lee Harvey Oswald had some association with pro-Castro elements or was,
in fact, a Castro agent. Also, most of the reports had some connection
with Mexico City or Miami. And, again, somewhere along the chain of investigative
links there always popped up some association with the intelligence community.
I've come
to believe that a few of those early reports may have some relationship to
what I later uncovered. The reports linked to Mexico City were especially
interesting. Clare Boothe Luce, for instance, maintained she received that
telephone call from one of her young Cubans on the evening of Kennedy's assassination.
She specifically remembered watching television with her husband in her New
York apartment when the call came through. The caller told her, she said,
about Oswald and how he had left New Orleans to go to Mexico City before
returning to Dallas. Yet, on the evening of November 22nd, Oswald's visit
to Mexico City was known by a limited number of, persons other than Oswald
himself, perhaps his wife Marina and a handful of intelligence officials
-- most notably a select few in the CIA's Mexico City station.
Another
attempt to link Oswald to Castro came out of Mexico City immediately after
Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby. A young Nicaraguan named Gilberto Alvarado
Ugarte walked into the American Embassy and insisted he had a story to tell
the American Ambassador, Thomas Mann. Alvarado claimed that he had gone to
the Cuban Embassy in September and while waiting to conduct some business
saw three persons talking in a patio a few feet away. One was Lee Harvey
Oswald, another a tall, thin Negro with reddish hair and the third a Cuban
from the consulate. Alvarado said he saw the Cuban give the Negro a large
sum of money and then heard the Negro tell Oswald, "I want to kill the man."
Oswald replied, "You're not man enough, I can do it." The Negro then gave
Oswald $6500 in large denomination American bills. Their conversation, said
Alvarado, was in both Spanish and English.
The story
caused quite a stir with Ambassador Mann, a hard-boiled anti-Communist who,
even before Alvarado showed up, was pushing the FBI to investigate a Castro
link to the Kennedy's assassination. It would later become one of the first
pieces of "evidence" to plant the seed of a Cuban conspiracy in President
Johnson's mind. This despite the fact that Alvarado's story didn't check
out. Alvarado subsequently retracted his story, saying he had fabricated
lt because he wanted to get to the United States to join the anti-Castro
activists. Then he recanted his retraction and then, failing a polygraph
test given by the Mexican police, again confessed he had lied. Nevertheless,
it was eventually brought to the attention of the Warren Commission by CIA
boss Richard Helms. In its final Report, the Commission devoted two entire
pages to it.
The Warren
Commission, however, never considered the significance of the source of the
story. Alvarado, it was later discovered, was an agent of the Nicaraguan
intelligence service. Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza was a strong
anti-Castro and a cooperative ally of the CIA, having permitted the Agency
to use his country as a training camp and assembly area for the Bay of Pigs
invasion. In fact, at the time of the Kennedy assassination, Manuel Artime,
the CIA's "golden boy" ¿as his fellow anti-Castro leaders dubbed him),
~till had two training bases in Nicaragua and a huge arsenal of equipment.
According to one source, Artime was also then involved ln a Castro assassination
plot with his close friend and Miami neighbor, E. Howard Hunt.
There
are a few theories about the type of incident the Alvarado fabrication represents,
other than it being the meaningless activity of lone nut -- unlikely in view
of Alvarado's background. It strikes a few researchers as having the hallmarks
of a counter-intelligence scenario, a shrewd ploy (loaded with diverse angles,
from the ridiculous to the sublime, but in the end having a single although
not immediately apparent effect. Was it meant to reinforce certain evidence
or suspicions, or was it just another stone thrown in to further muddy already
murky waters.?
There
are a lot of questions. And perhaps that in itself is relevant. Why should
the sources of the information turn out to be of more interest than the information
itself? What motivation did the sources have in promulgating the information?
Why did they inject themselves into the Kennedy assassination investigation?
Did they each have their own individual reasons for doing so? Or were they
orchestrated by those with a more sophisticated knowledge of public opinion
manipulation, psychological and propaganda techniques These questions are
the matrix of the pattern.
One of
the most fascinating aspects of the early reports linking Oswald to pro-Castro
activity was how quickly they surfaced. The first ones came within hours
of Oswald's arrest, almost before Dallas police knew anything about him or
his background or had, in fact, definitely linked him to anything other than
the killing of Patrolman J.D. Tippitt.
A Scripps-Howard
wire service reporter named Seth Kantor was part of the press contingent
which had traveled with President Kennedy to Dallas. Kantor, a veteran reporter
well-respected by his peers, had worked in Dallas before being transferred
to Washington. He knew the city intimately, its politicians, its leading
citizens, its characters. As did almost every other reporter in Dallas,
Kantor knew Jack Ruby, a character who liked to hang around
police
headquarters and newspaper offices. Ruby had
help him
with a couple of stories about Dallas nightlife. Kantor knew Ruby.
Kantor
says he saw and spoke with Jack Ruby at Parkland Hospital immediately after
Kennedy's assassination. A nurse, who didn't know Ruby, later also reported
she saw Ruby at Parkland Hospital. The Warren Commission chose to ignore
Seth Kantor because his testimony would have alluded to a conspiracy.
I spoke
with Seth Kantor a few times and had dinner with him one evening in Washington.
He's a reserved, soft-spoken guy not given to exaggeration. I checked into
his background and spoke with people who know him. I found no reason to suspect
that Seth Kantor would lie. That, I believe is significant in terms of another
bit of information that Kantor provided. Kantor said he learned of Oswald's
pro-Castro association shortly after Oswald was arrested, not more than two
hours later, at the most, perhaps before 3 p.m. Dallas time. Kantor
had called his managing editor in Washington and been told that the Scripps-Howard
correspondent in Miami a fellow named Hal Hendrix, had this Information.
"I specifically recall that I was at the police station and had to call Hendrix
collect," said Kantor. "Hendrix told me of Oswald's pro-Castro association.
I don't think he knew it first-hand, he said he had been told about it. He
didn't tell me by whom."
Kantor
didn't give special significance to his conversation with Hendrix until years
later. Disturbed by the Warren Commission's findings, he decided to write
a book about Jack Ruby. That's when he found that among the documents not
released to the public was the FBI's list of telephone calls from the Dallas
police station. Kantor requested them under the Freedom of Information Act.
When he finally got the list, Kantor discovered that the only call exorcized
from it, the only call which remained classified for "national security"
reasons, was the call he made to Hendrix.
Again,
it turned out that the source of the information about Oswald's pro-Castroism
was more interesting than the information itself. Before he joined Scripps-Howard,
Hal Hendrix worked for the Miami News. During the Bay of Pigs invasion, Hendrix's
stories contained exceptional detail of the invasion's progress, information
obviously obtained form CIA sources, most likely the Agency's propaganda
section. Hendrix would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his stories revealing
the existence of Russian missiles in Cuba. Still later he would join the
International Telephone & Telegraphs Company as its public relations
director in Latin America. In 1976. Hendrix was indicted and pleaded guilty
perjury as a result of his testimony before a Senate Subcommittee investigating
the role of the CIA and ITT in toppling the Allende government in Chile.
Hendrix worked in Chile and had close contacts with CIA in personnel in Chile.
During a hearing in Miami, a Justice Department attorney revealed that Hendrix
had relationship with the CIA "both as a reporter and later as an employee
of ITT."
Hal Hendrix
was another one of the witnesses who fell between the cracks of the House
Assassination Committee's investigation. In March, 1978, I wrote a memorandum
to Chief Counsel Blakey urging that Hendrix be subpoenaed to testify about
his knowledge of CIA activity. No action was taken. Hendrix was outside the
game plan.
Aside
from his specific requests to check out certain leads which had come to him,
Senator Schweiker laid down no investigative ground rules when he hired me
as a staff investigator. "Just follow your instincts," he said. Schweiker
was, of course enough to realize the advantage of having a personal staff
the investigator not bound by the parameters of the Senate Intelligence Committee's
mandate or under the pressures of a report deadline. Because he had
uncovered the facts about the intelligence agencies withholding information
about Castro assassination plots from the Warren Commission, Schweiker early
leaned toward a Castro retaliation theory for the Kennedy murder. His Subcommittee
staff, ridiculously limited in time and resources, had only those same blocks
of facts to play with and so was structuring its report along the same theory.
Yet as I uncovered information in Miami which took me in the opposite direction
Schweiker encouraged me to pursue the evidence wherever it led.
Over the
course of almost a year of working with Schweiker, my attention was drawn
to a diverse collection of individuals, almost all of whom had an association
with the CIA and anti-Castro activity. Most had the means, motivation and
opportunity to be considered suspect for involvement in the Kennedy assassination,
or have knowledge of it. They all denied having any connection with the assassination,
although a few said they would have liked to have killed Jack Kennedy themselves.
That admission, in itself, never allayed my suspicions.
What I
found especially fascinating was how, as soon as word of what I was doing
spread, offers of help and sources of information began pouring down on me.
There were independent
researchers,
journalists, private investigators and individuals whose means of support
I could never figure out calling me regularly. There were whispered meetings
with anonymous informants in the back of dark bars in Little Havana. There
were meetings in parks along Biscayne Bay. The telephone often rang in the
middle of the night and a Spanish- accented voice would tip me about the
strange behavior of a certain individual in November, 1963. My file began
to grow with hundreds of names and my mind spun attempting to keep track
of information involving scores of interlinking Cuban groups. Slowly, too,
I began recognizing that some of the names ~ coming to me, some of the sources
of information contacting me, were the same as those I had been reading in
the volumes of Warren Commission files and stacks of FBI reports, names which
had popped up immediately after the Kennedy assassination. It was as if I
had suddenly entered a mysterious theater where a 13-year old drama had suddenly
been review with the original cast.
There
were several key characters who early drew my interest and, I still believe,
may be relevant to the new evidence I would later stumble upon. One of them
was a cocky bantam of a man named Mitchell Livingston WerBell III, an arms
dealer who runs. on his large "farm" outside of Atlanta, what amounts to
a training camp for professional killers -- including police and military
types, terrorists and anti-terrorists, soldiers-of-fortune and mercenaries.
WerBell may be the last of the true swashbucklers, a braggadocio an delightful
guy.
Bell was
born in Philadelphia, the son of a wealthy, former Czarist calvary officer.
. ("My father dragged me all over the world," he says. "I was raised
in some of the best bar in Europe.") He claims he was graduated from
the University of Pennsylvania in 1938 although there are no record of it
-- and wound up with the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of
the CIA) in World War II. Trained as a paratroop and guerilla warfare expert,
he established himself as a stalwart secret agent and came out of the China-Burma
theater of life operations as dues-paid life member of the
"old-boys' network"of American secret intelligence -- a superspy fraternity
that included Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and E. Howard Hunt, among others.
They don't
come more colorful than Mitchell Livingston WerBell III. Seemingly eccentric,
he was in his day a blasphemous, often boozy always raucous bon vivant with
a sly sense of humor. He wore a handlebar mustache from time to time, screwed
a monocle in his eye and called himself Prince Eric Straf. He boastfully
dubbed himself "Mitch the Fifth' after multiple invocations of that Constitutional
amendment before a Senate investigations subcommittee questioning him about
his business relationship with Robert Vesco.
What drew
my interest to WerBell was not his color nor his wit; it was his business,
his background and his associates. It appeared that Jack Ruby was involved
in arms dealing and smuggling. So was Mitch WerBell. A passionate anti-Communist,
WerBell has run a series of weapons manufacturing and marketing firms --
principally Military Armament Corporation and its Washington-based parent,
Quantum Ordinance Bankers -- which advanced supplied countries and groups
around the world with advanced weaponry, including the Ingram M-ll, a hand-held,
quiet machine gun. WerBell has been call a "creative genius" for his
designs of noise suppressor for automatic weapons and for other "silent-kill"
devices. He has also been termed the "principal supplier of the CIA's most
sophisticated weapons."
Early
in my investigation for Senator Schweiker, I had a long, all-day, liquory
session with Mitch WerBell in his gun-filled den on his farm in Powder Springs,
Georgia. Between sips, he denied an association with the CIA. "I've always
cooperated very closely," he said, "but I've never allowed them to pay me
one goddamned dime. I don't need it."
Nevertheless,
down through the years WerBell has popped up with uncanny consistency in
operations which have had the imprimatur of the CIA, overtly or covertly.
He was all over Miami working with anti-Castro activists at the height of
Kennedy's secret war against Cuba. He was in Guatemala when assassination
teams swept through the country to bolster the reign of the military. He
was in the Dominican Republic when the United States moved in to quash the
Communist threat. In Venezuela, Uruguay, Chile, Greece, Cambodia, Thailand
and Vietnam, WerBell always seemed to be passing through at the most opportune
moments. My prolific journalistic colleague, the aforementioned Andrew St.
George, has taken a special interest in Mitch WerBell down through the years
and has cultivated a strange and unique relationship with the chesty little
guy. St. George has written a number of articles about WerBell, all very
well done, politically insightful and damningly revealing, yet most of them
buried in pulp adventure or girlie magazine with very little credible impact
Damning revelation is the last thing that WerBell should want, yet the close
relationship between subject and journalist remains intact and St. George
is still a frequent houseguest on "the farm." (Once WerBell was extremely
upset at a St. George article in Esquire which revealed WerBell's plans to
foment a coup d'etat on the Bahamas island of Abaco and make it his own tax-free
nation, but what most bothered the feisty arms dealer was a St. George photo
of him attending to a shapely bikini-clad blonde languishing on a chaise.
WerBell claims the photo almost wrecked his marriage.)
St. George's
continuing interest in WerBell relates to, among other things, his concept
of WerBell's role in history. Sometime in the 50s, St. George maintains,
assassination became an instrument of U.S. national policy: "It also became
an important branch of our invisible government, a sizable business, and
a separate technology involving weapons and devices the ordinary taxpayer
paid billions for but was never permitted to see, except perhaps in the technicolor
fantasies of James Bond flicks." Thanks to the technological proficiency
of his "silent-kill" weapons, Mitch WerBell was in the center of the development
of the "special teams" concept. Special teams are assassination teams.
It was
the special team concept that the CIA employed within its own bureaucratic
structure -- selected individuals stitched together into a tight, top-secret
network outside their normal
chain-of-command
-- to plan the Castro assassination attempts. Yet the first utilization of
the concept came in 1954, according to St. George, when a deep-cover CIA
team went off to Hanoi under Lt. Colonel Lucien Conein, described as "one
of Mitch WerBell's closest lifelong friends." The Conein mission, code-named
"Blackhawk," was to harass and decimate the new Communist rulers of North
Vietnam. Its orders included the "elimination of Vietminh cadres where conditions
permit." Subsequently, similar missions multiplied as CIA Clandestine Services
sent out special teams with authority to kill whenever "circumstances warranted."
There were, among others, "White Star Training Mission" in Laos, "Operation
Lodestone" in Northern Thailand "Study Project Minimax" in certain disaffected
ethnic regions of Indonesia. Then, in the early 60s, With the CIA employment
of the hard-bitten hill tribesmen of North Burma, Laos and Southwestern China
as "deep penetration" and "long-range reconnaissance" teams into Red China,
came large-scale, top-secret U.S. intelligence operations involving unlimited
license to kill. Mitch WerBell's "silent-kill" weapons business did very
well in those days, and Thai King Phumiphon personally hand carved a tiny
rosewood Buddha for him.
Besides
his general association with assassination operations, there were other reasons
why WerBell would interest an investigator probing the Kennedy murder.
A key one was his relationship with individuals who popped up in the FBI's
original investigation. Gerry Patrick Hemming, for instance,
was the ex-Marine who claimed he had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald both
in California and Miami. Deeply involved in anti-Castro activity, Hemming
was among those arrested at a training camp in the Florida Keys after Kennedy's
Cuban missile deal with Khrushchev. Hemming worked as a weapon salesman for
Mitch WerBell.
Another
interesting associate of WerBell's is his buddy from his OSS days, Lucien
Conein. "You've got to start with the premise that Lou Conein is crazy,"
said one of his former CIA bosses once. Crazy enough to always survive.
Now a beefy, scarred and gnarled old grizzly, Conein left Kansas City when
he was 17 to join the French Foreign Legion. In 1941, he switched to the
OSS in France and lived and fought with the notorious Corsican Brotherhood,
which was then part of the Resistance. (Later the Brotherhood would turn
into an underworld organization deeply involved in drug trade and considered
much more effective and dangerous than its Sicilian counterpart, the Mafia.)
Moving to the Far East areas, Conein was part of an OSS team parachuted into
Vietnam to fight the Japanese alongside the Vietminh. Later he married
a Vietnamese, helped Ngo Dinh Diem consolidate his power in South Vietnam
and then, turning against him, was the CIA's liaison with the cabal of generals
who murdered Diem.
It was
Conein's involvement with the coup of the generals which led another old
OSS cohort, E. Howard Hunt, to give him a call several years later. Hunt,
by then, was working in the Nixon White House. Besides wanting Conein to
release a group of phony telegrams which would have squarely blamed President
Kennedy for the Diem assassination (Nixon then considered Edward Kennedy
his prime political foe), Hunt recruited Conein for what was ostensibly the
White House war against the international drug trade.
Conein
got involved in a series of sensitive operations with Hunt at the White House,
some of which, according to a later report in the Washington Post, "appear
to have stretched so far over the boundaries of legality that they were undertaken
in _____ secrecy." One of these, part of a program called Gemstone, was Operation
Diamond, a large, secret organization which Bernard Barker was putting
together for Hunt in Miami. Barker reportedly recruited some 200 former CIA
Cuban agents and organized them into specialized units for future operations.
Among them were intelligence and counterintelligence units as what were known
as Action Teams -- the old CIA term for units with paramilitary skills, including
assassination.
Then,
in November, 1973, Conein got moved out of the White House -- though not
out from under White House command --to become chief of Special Operations
for the Drug Enforcement Administration -- the DEA. He was to be part
of Nixon's highly publicized nation-wide police campaign, led by White House
enforcers with special powers, to combat drug abuse. It has been suggested
that Nixon's anti-drug campaign was, in actuality, a bit to establish
his own intelligence network as part of, as the knowledgeable St. George
put it, "a covert drive to set up a national police machinery under the centralized
command of the White House police organization." It has also been suggested
that it was exactly that bid which brought about Nixon's political assassination,
the sucker set-up that was Watergate.
Assassination,
of course, is the buzz word. It struck me, early on in my investigation of
the Kennedy assassination, how a select group of individuals who drew my
attention for other reasons, would turn out to have some association with
assassination operations in their past. More significantly, that association
often involved a relationship with another member of this select ~roup. The
multiplicity of "coincidences" never failed to surprise me. My attention
was drawn to Lucien Conein, for instance, when I discovered his relationship
with E. Howard Hunt, who attracted my interest because of his activities
with Miami's anti-Castro Cubans When I learned of Conein's OSS background,
I wondered if he had crossed paths somewhere along the way with Mitch WerBell.
Their paths, it turned out, more than just crossed, they interlocked.
When Conein
set up his Special Operations branch of the DEA he recruited" at least
a dozen field operatives from the CIA and set them up in a "safe house,"
an office suite in the LaSalle Building on Connecticut Avenue in Washington.
It has been reported that the reason for operating outside of DEA headquarters
was because the branch was developing a very special plan, which included
assassinating the key drug suppliers in Mexico. The question has been raised,
however, by columnist Jack Anderson among others, whether the White House
Plumbers group was developing assassination capability not for foreign utilization
but for domestic political reasons. Anderson claimed that a contract was
put out on him at one point. At any rate, the Connecticut Avenue office was
funded not by the DEA but by the CIA. And Mitch WerBell has admitted he was
in business there with two former CIA men manufacturing ultra-sophisticated
assassination devices.
My meeting
with Mitch WerBell that long Georgia day in his gun-filled den turned out
to be a verbal paso-doble with a drunk -- or a man who acted drunk. Actually,
by the time I got to him, WerBell was coming off a long bout with the booze,
the result of being caught between the pressure of a few Congressional investigating
committees probing~ his intelligence, arms and drug connections and, on the
other side the very tough squeeze being put on him to keep
his mouth shut by agencies for which he worked. Although we spent several
hours talking, WerBell was determined to dance drunkenly around my key areas
of interest. "There's a helluva lot I ain't said yet," he blathered at one
point, "and there's a helluva lot I ain't gonna say yet"' At times he claimed
loss of memory: "I've been in so many places, so many countries, so many
fuckin' revolutions, it's beginning to get all mixed up ln my mind."
Yet the
transcript of the tape I made during that session with WerBell reveals, despite
the staccato verbal ellipses he drunkenly affected, some interesting responses.
He admitted his involvement with some Castro assassination attempts ("I was
sittin' in Miami with a goddamned million dollars in cash for the guy who
was gonna take Fidel out."), but disclaimed any knowledge of the Kennedy
murder. "Now I didn't like Jack Kennedy," he said. "I thought he was a shit
to begin with. But I was certain not to be involved in the assassination
of an American President, for Christsakes!" WerBell also denied any
business dealings with Jack Ruby, but half-admitted a contact. First he said
he had no connection, then added: "And the reason we didn't...I think we
may have had an incoming...but we don't play with people like that. I mean,
it's as simple as that. This guy Ruby, he called, I didn't know who the hell
he was, but that was years ago...." WerBell lapsed into a drunken mumble.
Later, I thought I might have been fruitful if the House Assassinations Committee,
with its subpoena power and power to grant immunity, would have called WerBell
for formal questioning. But Mitchell Livingston WerBell III, despite
his acknowledged relationship with the area of evidence I considered most
crucial in breaking new investigative grounds -- and despite his long
association with assassination operations --was just another one of the characters
who didn't fit into the game plan.
Although
the initial stages of my investigation for Senator Schweiker were basically
unstructured, I kept stumbling across those interlocking areas of activities
and associations. I didn't realize it at the time, but that's what would
make the evidence I would later discover meaningful. All of which is
relevant to one other individual who early captured my attention: Frank Sturgis,
another one of E. Howard Hunt's cohorts in the Watergate burglary.
Of all
the characters I've met in my reporting and investigating career, Sturgis
is one of the most intriguing. That's saying a lot. There are many who feel
that he is an easy guy to know -- he's outspoken, talkative, apparently direct,
usually quite visible and frequently projects himself into the spotlight.
(A few months ago, he was the spokesman for a group of anti-Castro Cubans
who offered to exchange themselves for the hostages being held in Iran.)
But I spent a lot of time with Frank Sturgis and I haven't figured him out
yet.
The names
of both E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis had been prominently in the news
in connection with the Kennedy assassination long before I joined Senator
Schweiker's staff. A small group of assassination researchers had contended
that two of the three men in
certain
photographs taken in Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963, bore "striking
resemblances" to Hunt and Sturgis. The men were reportedly derelicts or "tramps,"
as the press came to call them, who were discovered in a boxcar in the railroad
yard behind the grassy knoll. (Later, the House Committee's acoustic tests
would indicate that a shot was fired from the knoll area.) Taken to
police headquarters, the tramps were escorted across Dealey Plaza, where
new photographers took several photos of them. The tramps were questioned
and released, without record of their identities being kept. (Despite
the notoriety they subsequently received, not one has turned up since.)
Because
of the publicity generated by the researchers, the contention that two of
the tramps were Sturgis and Hunt was examined by the Rockefeller commission
in early 1975. President had appointed the commission that January
to probably possible illegal CIA activities within the United States.
After a six-month investigation, the Commission issued its report. Relying
on comparative photo analysis performed by the same FBI expert who did all
the Warren Commission's analysis the Rockefeller Commission concluded that
the men in the tramps photographs were not Sturgis and Hunt.
About
the time Schweiker began his investigation, a book which raised the contention
again was published. Titled Coup d' £at In America, it was written
by Michael Canfield and Alan J. Weberman and contained a forward by Texas
Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez. The book incorporated a novel device: It came
with film positive photos of Sturgis and Hunt designed to be overlaid on
photographs of the tramp. Superimposed, the images did, indeed, bear striking
similarities.
I would
later discover, however,-that photo comparison and analysis is an exceptionally
non-conclusive technique. The House Assassinations Committee would wind up
spending $83,154 on it and came up with results which, in some instances,
are totally worthless.
Among
the photographs submitted to a panel of experts for analysis and comparison
were not only those of Sturgis and Hunt but also those of other individuals
who had been suggested by various critics as possible being one or the other
of the three tramps. The panel concluded that Sturgis and Hunt were
not the tramps ln the photographs. It did conclude, however, that one of
the tramps -- the one who resembled Hunt --could very well be a fellow named
Fred Lee Chrisman, a right-wing activist implicated in the Garrison investigation
in New Orleans. When those results came in, investigators were frantically
sent out to track down Chrisman's whereabouts on November 22nd, 1963.
(Chrisman had since died.) They came back with official records and eye-witness
affidavits that Chrisman was on the West Coast teaching school the day Kennedy
was assassinated. So much for the conclusiveness of photo analysis.
What was
particularly interesting, however, was the panel's conclusions in its comparison
of photos of Frank Sturgis with those of the tramps. It used two basic comparative
techniques. One it termed "metric traits" and the other "morphological differences."
One was a comparison of the measurements of six facial features and their
metric relationships; the other was simply whether or not various facial
features were shaped the same. The panel concluded that the average deviation
between the tramp's features and Sturgis' features was "low enough to make
it impossible to rule out Sturgis on the basis of metric traits alone." However,
the panel said, it was the morphological differences which indicated that
Sturgis was not the tramp. In other words, Sturgis just didn't look like
the tramp. (The hair and hairline were different, it said, and so were the
nose, the chin and the differences in ear projection.)
House
Committee's staffer in charge of organizing the photo panel's work was a
research attorney named Jane Downey, and an exceptionally competent, good
detail worker. One day she came to me and asked me to help gather some
of the photographs which would be sent to the panel to find out members for
analysis. I recall asking her at the time to find out whether or not the
experts would take into consideration the possibility that the tramps might
be wearing sophisticated disguises. That, in fact, had to be the case if
they were not just real drifters in the wrong place at the wrong time. (As
a member of the White House Plumbers, E. Howard Hunt had obtained disguises
from the CIA's Technical Services Bureau and used them on more than one job.
Downey promised she would ask the photo analysts about the use of disguises.
Several
days later Jane Downey told me she had checked with the photo analysts. "I'm
told that there is no way they can tell if disguises were used," she said.
I was shocked. "In other words," I said, "if the tramps were in disguise
there would be no way the analysts, could tell who they really are?"
"That's
what I'm told," said Downey.
"Then
why do a photo comparison at all?" I asked. Downey just shrugged her shoulders.
"Well," I said, "I hope that point is mentioned in the final report."
"I'm sure
it will be," said Downey.
Nowhere
in the Committee's final report, nor in the appendix volume dealing with
the photographic evidence, is the fact mentioned that comparative analysis
would be meaningless if the tramps were wearing disguises.
In my
own mind, I've never resolved the question of whether or not Frank Sturgis
looked like one of the tramps in Dealey Plaza. There are a couple of photos
which have strong similarities, others with few. The same could be said of
the Hunt comparison. My initial interest in both, however, was not predicated
on whether or not they were the Dealey Plaza tramps. When the Rockefeller
Commission issued its conclusion that Sturgis and Hunt were not in Dallas
on November 22nd, 1963, it raised more questions than it resolved. (At the
time, I didn't realize how suspect I should have been a~out the Commission's
report in general. It was later revealed that then-Vice President Nelson
Rockefeller really didn't want the CIA to air all its dirty linen and, at
one point, quietly called in Director William Colby and urged him not to
tell all. Rockefeller, it turned out, had earlier been a member of the White
House's Operations Coordinating Board which cleared some of the illegal CIA
activity the Commission was investigating.)
Although
the Rockefeller Commission report claimed that Sturgis and Hunt hadn't legitimate
alibis for their whereabouts on November 22nd, 1963, it ultimately concluded:
"It cannot be determined with certainty where Hunt and Sturgis actually were
on the day of the assassination." It is obsolete certainty that Frank
Sturgis knows where he was on the day after the Kennedy assassination.
He says FBI found him at his home in Miami. "I had FBI agents all over my
house," he has said. "They told me I was one person they felt had the capabilities
to do it. They said, 'Frank, if there's anybody capable of killing the President
of the the United States, you're the guy that can do it."
I spent
a lot of time with Frank Sturgis, especially during the period of the Schweiker
investigation. He had not been out of prison from his Watergate sentence
long when we first met~ an all-evening interview session at his home. He
lives in north Miami, not far from me, and we were in contact often. Sometimes
he would call in the evening and we would chat for hours. Frequently, we
met for coffee at a snack shop or hotel coffee shop. He was always very direct,
very outspoken and, I believe, a lot more polished and sophisticated than
the obscenity-prone, rough-hewn and little-educated character he projects.
In talking about people he knows, he of individuals his "close friend," but
no one really gets close to Frank Sturgis.
Now in
his 50s and tending toward obesity -- and a far cry from the muscular figure
he was not long ago -- Sturgis has led a thousand lives, maybe more- He was
born Frank Angelo Fiorini in Norfolk, Virginia , but his parents separated
when he was an infant and he grew up with his mother's family in Philadelphia's
Germantown. (He would later change his name to his stepfather's, Frank Anthony
Sturgis, when his mother remarried. Howard Hunt once named the chief character
in one his. pulp novels "Sturgis.") Frank Sturgis turned 17 two days
after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and he immediately dropped out of Germantown
High to join the Marines.
Sturgis
was shipped out to the Pacific jungles where he volunteered for the toughest
unit in the Marines, the First Raider Battalion, the legendary Edson's Raiders.
He was taught how to kill silently with his bare hands, infiltrated into
enemy encampments, sloshed through amphibious landings, air-dropped on commando
raids. Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, three serious combat wounds, malaria,
jaundice and, in the end, "exhaustion and possible psychoneurosis" and a
stay at the Sun Valley Naval Medical Center before his discharge in 1945.
After the War, Sturgis was a plainclothes cop with the Norfolk Police, a
part-time student at William & Mary College, managed a few bars, trained
as a radio gunner in the Naval Reserves, crewed as a merchant seaman, did
a two-year stint with the U.S. Army in Germany where he served with the Armed
Forces Security Agency, was married, widowed, re-married, divorced and married
again.
Sturgis
claims he got involved in Cuban activities in the early 50s when he
went to Miami to visit an uncle who was married to a Cuban. That's
how he got friendly with exiled former Cuban President Carlos Prio, he says.
Prio, close to the American mob men who ran Havana's gambling casinos, was
a multimillionaire who was funding a mountain rebel Fidel Castro's guerilla
war against General Batista. (Prio would later be convicted of arms
smuggling with a Texan named Robert McKeown. After the Kennedy assassination,
McKeown told the FBI that he was approached by Jack Ruby about a deal to
sell military equipment to Castro. A week before I had scheduled to call
Prio for an interview he went to the side of his Miami Beach home, sat on
a chaise outside the garage and shot himself in the heart. He reportedly
had financial problems.)
It was
through Prio, Sturgis says, that he was infiltrated into Cuba to join Castro
in the mountains. Soon he was a trusted aide, a emissary for Castro on arms
deals all over the United States and Latin America, a daring pilot who flew
loads of weapons into hairy mountain airstrips. He became friendly with another
daredevil pilot, Pedro Diaz-Lanz, and when, after the revolution, Castro
appointed Diaz-Lanz chief of the Rebel Air Force, Sturgis was named the Air
Force's director of security. Nine months after Castro took power, Diaz-Lanz
and Sturgis publicly decried Castro's Communism, and fled Miami. A
Month later, they were dropping propaganda leaflets over Havana. (Some 30
Cubans were their killed when Castro's planes unsuccessfully tried to bomb
their B-25 out of the air.)
Frank
Sturgis says he was never _ an official, paid has confirmed agent of the
Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA has confirmed that proclamation. Yet
Sturgis, while he could not remember the first name of his first wife in
his testimony before the House Assassinations Committee, recalled that it
was a Friday in 1958 in Santiago, Cuba, that he made his first contact with
a CIA agent. Before the Bay of Pigs and afterwards, during the height
of the JM/WAVE's secret war against Castro, Sturgis used equipment, flew
planes and directed assault craft which were supported by the CIA. He has
admitted that the B-25 he flew on his first leaflet-drop was later repaired
with $10,000 which came from E. Howard Hunt.
In terms
of the Kennedy assassination, it was Sturgis' relationship with Hunt that
early drew my attention. Both testified under oath to the Rockefeller Commission
that they first met just prior to the Watergate caper -- Hunt said in 1972,
Sturgis said in late '71 or early '72. That seemed a strange
contention in view of their very active involvement in Miami's anti-Castro
activities in the early '60s. Sturgis claim that although he knew of "Eduardo"
at the time, all his contacts with him and the funds which came from him
were through Hunt' assistant, Bernard Barker.
There
is no hard evidence to disprove their contention, although there are
some circumstantial factors which raise some questions. Sturgis admitted
he worked closely with the CIA's top Cuban leader, Manuel Artime, and I have
spoken with witnesses who saw them often together in Little Havana. Artime
was very close to and in frequent contact with CIA liaison Hunt. In his autobiography,
Hunt himself claims his attention was drawn to the daring leaflet drop of
Pedro Diaz-Lanz and he quickly made arrangement to meet with the counter-revolutionary
hero. Hunt however, writes nothing of the man who flew with Diaz-Lanz
and was his constant companion. (Hunt's book was published in 1973.)
In October,
1972, Andrew St. George interviewed Frank Sturgis in his home in Miami while
Sturgis was awaiting his Watergate photo~ were publicized~ sentence. It was
before the tramp photo were publicized, before the cries for another Kennedy
assassination investigation began to peak, before the Rockefeller Commission
was formed. St. George was an old friend of Sturgis from their days together
with Castro in the mountains. Sturgis was glad to see the gregarious Hungarian
and, stung by his set up at Watergate and the black headlines which made
him appear an inept bungling burglar, Sturgis -- according to St. George
-- blurted out the real story behind Watergate. A few months later, St. George
visited Sturgis in the Washington, D.C. jail. "I will never leave this jail
alive," he says Sturgis told him, "if what we discussed about Watergate does
not remain between us. If you attempt to publish what I've told you, I am
a dead man."
In August,
1974, St. George published his interview with Sturgis in True magazine. In
it, he quotes Sturgis as saying: "The Bay of Pigs -- hey, was one sweet mess.
I met Howard Hunt that year; he was the political officer of the exile brigade.
Bernard Barker was Hunt's right-hand man, his confidential clerk -- his body
servant, really; that's how I met Barker." Sturgis today denies he
ever said that and curses St. George vehemently.
Today,
Sturgis is not hesitant to admit his disgust with Kennedy after the President
made the Cuban missile arrangement with the Russians. Sturgis was one of
six pilots specially warned by the Federal Aviation Administration for making
raids over Cuba at the time Kennedy was negotiating the delicate deal.
Sturgis was also the co-founded with Mitch WerBell's arms salesman Gerry
Patrick Hemming, of the International Anti-Communist Brigade, some of whose
members were arrested at their training site on No Name Key after the missile
crisis.
My first
interview with Frank Sturgis came not long after he was released from his
Watergate sentence. For many months he remained a relatively low-key figure
in Miami, not moving around much, not getting his name in the newspaper,
not yet back in action. That night he talked effusively, chain-smoking ant
drinking Coke. (Sturgis is a heavy smoker, but never touches any kind of
alcoholic beverage.) He spoke of his early days with Castro, his appointment
by Castro at one point to oversee the gambling casinos before Castro threw
the mob out of Cuba, and of his later anti-Castro activities, being a bit
evasive only his about some of his more mysterious associations. (He once
had a boat called the CUSA. That was the acronym for an ultra-right-wing
group, formed in Germany in the '50s, called Conservatism-U.S.A. The group
placed a black-bordered anti-Kennedy advertisement in a Dallas newspaper
the President was shot. Sturgis initially lied to me about the spelling of
the boat's name. Later, under oath, he would claim that was the name on it
when he bought it.)
What particularly
struck me about that initial interview with Sturgis was his Archie Bunker-like
directness. He said he thought the Kennedy assassination was definitely
a conspiracy, that Oswald was a patsy and that the government agencies --
the FBI, the Secret Service and the CIA -- were all involved in a cover-up.
He spoke of the possible motivations of the anti-Castro groups and their
dislike for Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs failure. ("I even hated him, too,"
he said.) He said he once refused to join the CIA even though it gave him
an application because he thought it was infiltrated at its highest ranks
with double-agents -- "possibly the same people who conspired to kill Kennedy."
He s~id his theory was that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy involving
groups of intelligence agents in Russia's KGB service, Cuba's intelligence
service and the CIA. Actually, as Sturgis rambled on and around in
circles, there wasn't a conspiracy theory he didn't espouse. By the end of
the evening, my head was reeling. Several months Frank Sturgis made that
initial interview more interesting. The Schweiker Report had just been released.
The Intelligence Committee staff had built it on the blocks of Castro assassination
plots which the Warren Commission was not told about, thus making the Castro
retaliation theory its strong theme. It thus appeared that Sturgis now knew
which way to push.
The evening
after the report was released, Sturgis telephoned. He said he had just ran
across an old friend, a "guy with the Company," who "revived" his mind about
something he had "completely forgot" to tell me over the months we had been
in touch. He now recalled that he had heard about a meeting in Havana just
about two months before the Kennedy assassination. At the meeting were a
number of high-ranking men, including Castro, his brother Raul, Ramiro Valdez,
the chief of Cuban intelligence, Che Guevara and his secretary, Tanya, another
Cuban officer, an American known as "El Mexicano," and -- oh, yeah -- Jack
Ruby. And the meeting dealt with plotting the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Oh. That's what Sturgis had "completely forgot" to tell me. Just a bit of
incidental information, replete with details of the plotter's name. "Hey,
Frank," I said, "I'm glad someone revived your mind about that. It may be
relevant."
Incredible.
Suddenly Frank Sturgis was pushing phony Castro-did-. stories again. And
as patently ridiculous as it may appear on its surface, lt did have all the
sophisticated edges of so many of the stories which popped up after the Kennedy
assassination. In fact, Sturgis' "new" story was in fact a dressed
version of one that came during the Warren Commission investigation. And,
as always, there is a hint of documentary evidence to it -- which Sturgis
was kind enough to point out to me. The original story was generated by a
Miami-based investigator named Al Tarabochia, a strong right-winger who worked
for the Senate Internal Security subcommittee. Tarabochia wrote a memo which
wound up with the Warren Commission. He told of a Cuban exile source
who said he had received a letter from a relative in Cuba with the information
that "the assassin of President Kennedy's assassin" visited Cuba "last year."
(Later, I would track down the original writer of the letter, now in Miami,
who would say that her information was given to her by someone she didn't
recall.) At any rate, on such sources did Frank Sturgis' new hot tip
to me seem to be based. Immediately after the Kennedy assassination,
Frank Sturgis was involved in other stories which proved to be without foundation.
According to FBI documents, one involved a reporter named James Buchanan
who wrote an article for the Pompano Beach S-un Sentinel which quoted Sturgis
as saying that Oswald visited Miami in November, 1962, to contact Miami-based
supporters of Fidel Castro and that, while in Miami, was in telephone contact
with Castro's intelligence service. About that time, another story began
circulating, the source of which was reportedly Frank Sturgis, which indicated
that Oswald demonstrated in Miami's Bayfront Park with a group from the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee and had gotten in a fracas with Jerry Buchanan, the
brother of the reporter. The FBI traced both stories and eventually
contacted Frank Sturgis, who denied he had anything to do with them. The
FBI reports wound up as Warren Commission documents. One of them indicates
that both James and Jerry Buchanan were officers in the International Anti-Communist
Brigade.
I was
intrigued by the question of why Frank Sturgis would so early inject himself
into the Kennedy assassination investigation. I was also intrigued by the
character of the information he circulated, imbued as it was with just the
right amount of detail and tenuous relation to some sort of documentary evidence.
In my paranoid moments, I began to wonder whether or not there was a counterintelligence
overlay to what was happening.
There
were, however, other moments which made me think I was taking Frank Sturgis
much too seriously. I recall one evening chatting with him on the telephone.
At the time I was checking into a fellow who was called "El Mono" -- The
monkey -- and who had been described to me as _ "one of the CIA's best-trained
Cuban operatives." I asked Sturgis about him. Sturgis talked about
him for a while and then said he had a friend who could tell me a lot more
about El Mono. The friend, who we'll call Paul here, was an American who
had spent seven years in Castro prisons. He was charged with plotting
to blow up a building housing Russian agents Castro used to visit regularly.
Paul had operated a small bar in Havana 25 a front, was married to a Cuban
who worked for the CIA and was deeply involved in Miami's anti-Castro Cuban
activity. Sturgis said he would make arrangements for me to meet Paul, but
he didn't want to tell Paul that he was setting him up. He said he would
be having breakfast with Paul the next Saturday morning at the Westward Ho
restaurant in Little Havana and that I should just "coincidentally" stroll
in. "He don't know you're gonna be there, so when you get there I'll just
put him on a little bit," said Sturgis. We're old friends, I've known
him for years. It'll be funny. We kid with each other a lot. He's a
funny guy."
I spotted
Sturgis and his friend sitting at a back booth as soon as I walked into the
Westward Ho. Sturgis had his back to the door. I strolled up beside him and
slapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, Frank!" I greeted him, trying
to fake sudden recognition. "Howya been? What've you been doing? Haven't
seen you around lately." Sturgis looked up with a surprised yet blank expression.
"Hey, I know you," he said. "Sure you do"' I said, sitting down beside him.
Sturgis' face took on a pained quizzicality. "Where do I know you from?"
he pondered aloud. "Frank, how can you forget?" I said. "Now wait a minute,
don't tell me," said Sturgis. "I'll think of it." He cupped his chin
in his hand and donned an expression of deep reflection. He appeared to be
a very bad actor and I couldn't keep a silly grin from crossing my face.
Paul just stared back and forth at us wondering what the hell was going on
but not quite believing it, I thought.
Sturgis
kept the act up for about five minutes, pounding his forehead and taking
shots at different names. "Oh, I know I know I know," he would say in mock
frustration, "but I'm drawing a blank wall!" I couldn't help
laughing, more at his display of over-dramatics than at Paul's puzzlement.
Finally, I reached across the table and introduced myself by name to Paul.
He shook my hand and then turned to Sturgis. "Well, now do you remember who
he is?" he asked him. Sturgis feigned a mild convulsion of silly laughter.
"Oh, sure, sure," he admitted, "I really know who he is. I was just puttin'
you on'" "Oh," Paul said, with a smile on his face but obviously
not getting the point of the charade.
"Gaeton
here," Sturgis aid, still laughing as he was about to reveal all, "is a friend
of mine who is with the, uh, Whattaya callit, you know, the government committee
that's looking into the assassination of John F. Kennedy."
Paul didn't
miss a beat: "Oh," he said, "you mean the guy you killed!"
Sturgis
face suddenly froze for a split-moment. The smile was gone. Then he shook
his head and smiled again. "Oh, yeah, sure," he said. I looked at Sturgis
and started laughing also. He was right. Paul was a funny guy. One
afternoon early in January, 1976, I received a telephone call from Dave Marston
in Senator Schweiker's office. "You can give up on Silvia Odio," he said.
"The guys over on Committee staff told me they got word she's in Puerto Rico.
They're getting ready to track her down."
The guys
on the Intelligence Committee staff played everything very close to the vest.
They had pretty much decided that the final report on the Kennedy assassination
could be written from the documents they had acquired, mostly from the CIA,
which showed that the Agency had not told the Warren Commission about the
Castro plot. The staffers figured they didn't have the time for much
original investigation and, if they did any, it might open doors to more
than they could handle. But what had become known as the "Odio incident"
bothered them, just as it had bothered the Warren Commission. They were now
thinking about talking to Silvia Odio, just to cover an important base.
The problem
was that Silvia Odio was missing. She had lived in Dallas at the time of
the Kennedy assassination, but word among independent researchers was that
she had years ago moved to Miami, had re-married and dropped out of sight.
She was one of the few key witnesses who had not exploited her role or capitalized
on her early notoriety. She disliked the publicity, refused interviews with
the press or assassination buffs -- despite being offered large sums of money
-- and had gone into hiding. Now, according to word that Marston received,
the Committee staff had tracked her down in Puerto Rico. "I understand
she just moved back there recently," said Marston. "I was talking to
Silvia Odio in Miami this morning," I said. "Sonavagun," David laughed.
"Imagine, those supersleuths are going after the CIA. One of Silvia
Odio's brothers had gotten a ticket for a minor traffic violation once and
wound up in Florida's computer system. Tracking her family down through several
moves eventually led me to Silvia herself. For the first time in 13 years,
Silvia Odio would repeat the story that represented one of the key unanswered
questions in the Warren Commission investigation. She would also later cooperate,
not without misgivings, with the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
She would come to found. If the Warren Commission had found that Silvia
Odio was telling the truth, its final conclusion that Oswald was not
part of a conspiracy would have been seriously undermined. Odio had claimed
that Oswald was one of three men who came to the door of her apartment in
Dallas one evening the last week in September, 1963. The Commission dismissed
Odio's testimony because, it said, it had considerable evidence" that Oswald
was not in Dallas at all that September.
It had
nothing of the sort. In fact, the Commission had to resort to a blatant deception
in its final report in order to discredit Odio's testimony. However, if Oswald
had gone from New Orleans to Dallas, on his way to Mexico City September,
from other evidence the Commission had, he would have had to have private
transportation and, since he did not have a car and could not drive, that
meant that others were involved with him. (The House Assassinations Committee
would later conclude that Oswald did, in fact, leave New Orleans the last
week in September and, from his other known movements, had to have access.
My discovery
of Silvia Odio in Miami was important for two reasons: First, because in
investigating her story I would incidentally open a new area of evidence
with explosive potential; and, secondly, because the manner in which Silvia
Odio and her testimony were later handled would indicate that the House Assassination
Committee was, in its own way as deceptive in its revelations to the American
people as the Warren Commission.
Silvia
Odio's background is relevant. She was the oldest of 10 children who were
spirited out of Cuba when their parents became active in anti-Castro activity.
Her father Amador Odio was among Cuba's most wealthy men, owner of the country's
largest trucking business and was once described by Time as the "transport
tycoon" of Latin America. Yet both he and his wife were idealists and had
fought against dictators from the time of General Machado in the '30s. They
were among Castro's early supporters, but they were also among the first
to turn against him when "Fidel betrayed the Revolution," as Amador Odio
would later say. With liberal leader Manolo Ray, they helped form one of
the first anti-Castro groups within Cuba.
Amador
and Sarah Odio were arrest in by Castro October, 1961, at their country estate
outside Havana. Ironically, the Odio's had once hosted the wedding
of one of Castro's sisters on that very estate. Later, Castro would turn
it into a national women's prison and Sarah Odio would spend eight years
incarcerated there, while her husband was placed in a cell on Isla
de Pinos. When her parents were arrested, Silvia Odio was 24 years
old, living in Puerto Rico with her husband and four young children. She
had attended private school, Eden Hall Convent of the Sacred Heart in Philadelphia
and law school in Cuba for a while. After her parents were arrested, her
husband was sent to Germany by the firm for which he was working and subsequently
deserted her and her children. Destitute and alone, she began having
emotional problems. By that time, Silvia's younger sisters, Annie and Sarita,
were settled in Dallas. Sarita, a student at the University of Dallas, had
become friendly with a Dallas clubwoman named Lucille Connell, who was active
in both the Cuban Refugee Center there and the Mental Health Association.
When Sarita told Connell of Silvia's plight, Connell made arrangements to
have Silvia and her children move to Dallas and for Silvia to receive psychiatric
treatment for her emotional problems. Lucille Connell became Silvia's
closest confidant. Cornell would later tell me that Silvia's emotional
problems --- brought on by the shock of suddenly being left alone with four
young children, her parents' imprisonment and her abrupt fall from a life
of wealth to deep destitution -- resulted in attacks of sudden fainting when,
according to Connell, "reality got to painful to bear." Connell said she
personally witnessed Silvia suffer these attacks in her home when she first
arrived in Dallas, but with psychiatric counseling they eventually ended...until
the Kennedy assassination.
Silvia
Odio had moved to Dallas in March of 1963. She said she wanted only to lead
a quiet life, but her concern and her desire to do something to help get
her parents out of prison led her and her sisters to maintain contact with
Cuban exiles who were ~ politically active and to join the anti-Castro group
called JURE, which was founded by her father's old friend, Manolo Ray. (This
was the same Manolo Ray whom E. Howard Hunt claims he resigned his Bay of
Pigs CIA-liaison position over; Hunt contended that Ray was much too liberal
and leftist to be permitted to join the invasion's political front coalition.)
The sister attended a couple of Cuban exile rallies in Dallas and gave their
spiritual support to anti-Castro efforts, but being young and with little
money there was not much else they could do. By September, 1963, Silvia
Odio was well-established in the Dallas Cuban exile community, had a decent
job, had her emotional problems under control was doing well enough to be
planning to move into a more comfortable apartment than the garden-type rental
unit in which she and her four children had been squeezed. The week before
Monday, October 1st, 1963, the day she was scheduled to make the move, her
sister Annie, who was then 17, had come to the apartment to help her pack
and babysit with her children. When the doorbell rang early one evening
in that last week of September, it was Annie who went to the door to answer
it. Later I would talk with Annie Odio, who is now also living in to
Miami. She is married to an architect and the mother of two children.
She remembered the evening when three men came to the door of Silvia's apartment
in Dallas. One of the men asked to speak to Sarita. He spoke English
but when Annie answered him in Spanish he also spoke Spanish. Annie
told him that Sarita didn't live there. He then said something, I don't recall
exactly what, something about her being married, which made me think that
they really wanted my sister Silvia. I recall puttin~ the chain on the door
after I told them to wait while I went to get Silvia." Annie told me
that two of the men were Latin-looking and that one of them was shorter and
heavy-set, had dark shiny hair combed back and "looked Mexican." She also
said, "The-one-in the middle was American."
I spoke
with Annie Odio a few weeks after my initial interview with Silvia.
They do not live near each other, but their own families and, although they
talk on the telephone occasionally, are not in frequent touch today. Both
sisters told me they had not discussed the incident in Dallas for several
years pr~or to my asking them about it. Annie recalled that Silvia was initially
reluctant to talk with the strange visitor because she was busy getting dressed
to go out, but she remembers Silvia coming out of the bedroom in her bathrobe
to go to the door.
Silvia
Odio had told me that she remembers it was early evening and that she was
getting dressed to go out when the three men came to the door. The men were
standing in the vestibule just inside the small front porch. Both the
porch and the vestibule had bright overhead lights. Silvia said the men told
her they were members of JURE and spoke as if they knew both Manolo Ray and
her father. All her conversation, she said, was with the taller Latin,
the one who identified himself as "Leopoldo," although he admitted he was
giving her an alias or a "war name," which was common among anti-Castro activists
at the time. She said she is less certain of the other Latin's name, it might
have been "Angelo," but she described him as her sister did, "looking more
Mexican than anything else." The third visitor, the American, was introduced
to her as "Leon Oswald." She said "Leon Oswald" acknowledged the introduction
with very brief reply, perhaps in idiomatic Spanish, but she later decided
he could not understand Spanish because of his lack of reaction to her Spanish
conversation with 'Leopoldo."
There
is no doubt in Silvia Odio's mind that her visitor was, in fact, Lee Harvey
Oswald. She said she was talking with the men more than 20 minutes and, although
she did not permit them in her apartment, she was less than three feet from
them as they stood in the well-lit vestibule. (Later, I would go to Dallas
to confirm her description of the scene.) She said Oswald, as well as the
other two, appeared tired, unkempt and unshaven, as if they had just come
from a long trip.
"Leopoldo"
told Silvia Odio that the reason they had come to her was to get her help
in soliciting funds in the name of JURE from local businessmen. "He told
me," she recalled, "that he would like for me to write them in English, very
nice letters, and perhaps we could get some funds."
Silvia
was very suspicious of the strangers and avoided giving them any commitment,
but their conversation ended with "Leopoldo" giving her the impression he
would contact her again. After the men left, Silvia locked her door and went
to the window to watch them pull away in a red car that had been parked in
front of the apartment. She said she could not see who was driving
the car but did see "Angelo" on the passenger side.
The following
day or the day after, a Silvia was never certain about that, she received
a call from "Leopoldo." She is relatively certain about the gist of what
"Leopoldo told her in that telephone conversation and it is consistent with
her testimony to the Warren Commission. She said that "Leopoldo' told her
that "the Gringo" had been a Marine, that he was an expert marksman and that
he was "kind of loco." She recalled: "He said that the Cubans, we did not
have any guts because we should have assassinated Kennedy after the Bay Pigs."
On the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, both Silvia and Annie
immediately remembered the visit of the three men. Before she had seen a
photograph of Oswald or knew the President's that he was involved, the news
of the President death brought back to Silvia's mind what "Leopoldo" had
said about assassinating Kennedy. She had just returned to work from lunch,
was told that everyone was being sent home, suddenly felt terribly, uncontrollably
frightened and, while walking to her car, fainted. She remembers later waking
up in the hospital.
Across
town, Annie Odio was watching television at a friend's house. She and some
friends had gone to see the President's motorcade pass several miles before
it reached Dealey Plaza. "When I first saw Oswald on television," she told
me, "my first thought was, 'My God, I know this ~uv and I don't know from
where' I kept thinking, 'Where have I seen this guy?' Then I remember my
sister Sarita called me and told me that Silvia had fainted at work and that
she was sending her boyfriend to take me to the hospital. The first thing
I remember when I walked into the room was that Silvia started crying and
crying. I think I told her, 'You know this guy on TV who shot President Kennedy?
I think I know him.' And she said, 'You don't remember where you know him
from?' I said, 'No, I cannot recall, but I know I've seen him before.' And
then she told me, Do you remember those three guys who came to the house?"'
That's when, Annie said, she suddenly knew she had seen Lee Harvey Oswald
before.
Based
on background and character alone, Silvia and Annie highly were highly credible.
Nevertheless, the subsequent heavy checking I did of their story absolutely
convinced me they were telling the truth. One of the major factors was that
Silvia Odio had told more than one person of the incident before the Kennedy
assassination. She wrote to her father in prison and told him of the visit
of the three strangers. The Warren Commission obtained a copy of his reply
warning her to he careful because he did not know them. I spoke to Amador
Odio himself. He and his wife were released from Cuban prison a few years
ago and are also living in Miami now. No longer wealthy (he was working at
night in a low manager's job for an airline),but still proud and idealistic,
a handsome old gentleman who exudes a quite dignity, he confirmed receiving
the letter from Silvia and his reply. More specifically, Dr. Burton
Einspruch, the psychiatrist who was counseling Silvia at the time, recalled
that she had him prior to the assassination of the visit of the two Latins
and the American and that he remembered calling her on the day of the assassination.
He said she mentioned "Leon" and in what he called "a sort of histrionic
way," connected he visit of "Leon'- to the Kennedy assassination.
Also of
special relevance, I thought, was the fact that the FBI found out about the
visit only inadvertently. Both Silvia and Annie had immediately decided that
day in the hospital room not to say anything to anyone about what they knew.
"We were so frightened, we were obsoletely terrified," Silvia remembered.
We were both very young and yet we had so much responsibility, with so many
brothers and sisters and our mother and father in prison, we were so afraid
and not knowing what was happening. We made a vow to each other not to tell
anyone." And they did not tell anyone they did not know and trust. But their
sister Sarita told Lucille Connell and Connell told a trusted friend and
soon the FBI was knocking on Silvia Odio's door. She says it was the last
thing in the world she wanted but when they came she felt she had a responsibility
to tell the truth. Even before I met Silvia and Annie Odio and had
the, opportunity to evaluate their credibility, in reviewing all the FBI
documents and the Warren Commission records of the Odio incident, I was especially
intrigued by two aspects of it: One was that it seemed to contain
the potential of something of keystone significant in any attempt to grasp
the truth about Lee Harvey Oswald and the John F. Kennedy assassination.
If the incident did occur as Odio contended, then no theory of the assassination
would stand unassailable if it did not somehow account for it. Secondly,
that was the very point the Warren Commission itself quickly recognized and
was therefore forced, by its own conclusions, to pummel the facts about its
investigation of the incident into conforming lies.
The Warren
Commission was hampered, of course, by the FBI initial bungling in investigating
the incident. Silvia Odio had provided good physical descriptions of her
visitors and details about their car. The FBI simply did not vigorously pursue
those leads, instead spent most of its time questioning people about Silvia's
credibility and her emotional problems. The Bureau's first interview with
Silvia Odio was on December 12th, 1963. On August 23rd, 1964, with the first
drafts of the Warren Commission report being written, Chief Counsel J. Lee
Rankin wrote to J. Edgar Hoover: "It is a matter of some importance to the
Commission that Mrs. Odio's allegations either be proved or disapprove."
A month later, with the report in galley form, the Odio incident was still
a critical concern staffers. In a memo to his boss, Staff Counsel Wesley
Liebeler wrote: "There are problems. Odio may well be right. The Commission
will look bad if it turns out that she is. There is no need to look foolish
by grasping at straws to avoid admitting that there is a problem."
The FBI
did attempt to alleviate that "problem" when lt interviewed a soldier-of-fortune
named Loran Eugene Hall or September 26th, 1964. Hall claimed he had been
in Dallas in September, 1963, trying to Castro funds with two companions,
one of whom might have looked like Oswald. The Warren Commission grasped
at that straw and detailed that interview in its final report, giving the
impression that Hall and his companions were Odio's visitors. concluded:
"...Lee Harvey Oswald was not at Mrs. Odio's apartment in September, 1963."
The Warren Commission did not mention that Loran Eugene Hall the Kennedy
Cuban missile crackdown and was a member of the International Anti-Communist
Brigade, whose members and leaders had promulgated a series of phony stories
to Kennedy assassination investigators. Neither did the Warren Commission
note in its final report -- even though it knew -- that the subsequent FBI
interviews revealed that Hall's two companions denied being in Dallas, that
neither looked at all like Oswald, that Silvia Odio, shown their photographs,
did not recognize them, and that Loran Eugene Hall, when re-questioned, admitted
he had fabricated the story and was just playing games. It is no wonder
that the critics early pounced on the Odio incident as being the most flagrant
of all the Warren Commission distortions. One of the most respected, Sylvia
Meagher, wrote in her book, Accessories After the Fact: "In the Commission
could leave such business unfinished, we are entitled to ask whether its
members were ever determined to uncover the truth."
It ironic
that Meagher's statement would still be relevant 15 years later, after House
Select Committee's "final" report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
That I recall most about first meeting Silvia Odio was the fear. It is still
very much with her after all these years. She was working as a legal assistant
in the law department of a large firm, but she had remained home that morning
so we could talker husband, Mauricio, a handsome chap involved a in Spanish-language
publishing, had also remained home until he saw his wife was comfortable.
Silvia, then her late 30s, still very youthful and attractive, was nervous
but bright and morning fresh when we began detailing talking. After a few
hours of detailing the incident and her experiences with the Warren Commission,
she had visibly aged. I remember being shocked by that, the way her face
sagged and lines appeared under her eyes and how clearly apparent was the
emotional drain of bringing it all up again. Silvia Odio had been reluctant
to talk with me at all. She kept asking me, "Why are they bringing it all
up again? What good will it do? I told them the truth but they did not want
to hear
it. Why do they want to keep playing games with me? ~Why?" Her voice had
a nervous edge but she was articulate and raised rational points. "Why didn't
the FBI investigate immediately? Why did they wait so long after first ~
talking with me before they came back? Do you really think they really want
to know what the answer to the Kennedy assassination is? I have to admit
I've become very cynical."
She also
admitted she had become terribly disillusioned in the U. Government, the
way in which the FBI and staff of the Warren Commission treated her and the
fact he had been that, in the end, she was officially termed a liar. She
had been bred into a family of culture and class, she had been, style and
respect. She was upset when Warren Commission staff attorney Wesley Liebeler,
in Dallas to take deposition in the Federal building, immediately started
joking with her and told her he was been kidded by other staff member in
Washington about being so lucky to interview the prettiest witness in the
case, invited her to dinner on the pretext of having additional questions
to ask and then invited her to his hotel room. She was shocked, and began
wondering how seriously the Warren Commission was taking its investigation.
"Why should
I get myself involved again?" she asked. "What good will it do me?
What good will it do my family?" Her children are older now, she said, but
still fears for their safety. She said she wonder if men who were with
Oswald are still alive. She was also concerned publicity she might
receive in Miami's Cuban Community, still constantly being shaken by internecine
bombings, and what some crazy, anti-Castro fanatic might do. (She and her
husband once tried to publish a local Spanish-language literary magazine,
but because right-wing Cuban exiles control that specialty distribution market,
they could not get it on the newsstands in Little Havana.)
She was
reluctant to cooperate, but she was also very angry and frustrated. "It gets
me so mad that I was just used," she told me. I gave her my assurances that
this time it ff would be different. I told her that I deeply believed that
it was necessary for the American people to learn the truth about the Kennedy
assassination and that it had something to do with the basics of the democratic
system. I told her I believed that Senator Schweiker was an honorable man
and would not be involved in anything but an honest investigation. He spoke
on the telephone several times before Silvia Odio finally agreed to talk
with me and, eventually, trust me. It was a mistake. I did not realize
at the time that I would later become part of an apparatus that would wind
up using her, Just as the Warren Commission did, "handling" her testimony
in a much more subtle but just as deceptive way -- and deliberately making
sure her story was not prominently presented to the American public.
Yet in the end the House Committee on Assassinations forced to conclude that
Silvia Odio was telling the truth --and that is what it did, reluctantly,
in its final report: "The committee was inclined to believe Silvia Odio."
Waffling
as the admission is, that meant that Silvia Odio, the committee decided,
was telling the truth. And that was that. As if once that was acknowledged
and said, it could be put aside -- a curtsy to honesty and truth -- and the
dance could go on. Yet the questions that bow to truth hammer fatal
structural cracks in the foundation of the House Committee's conclusions
that elements of Organized Crime were the probable conspirators in the Kennedy
assassination. The report attempted to cover its ass on that but, in doing
so, was forced to cross the bounds of rationality: "It is possible," it noted,
"despite his alleged remark about killing Kennedy, that Oswald had not yet
contemplated the President's assassination at the time of the Odio incident,
or if he did, that his assassination plan had no relation to his anti-Castro
contacts, and that he was associating with anti-Castro activists for some
other unrelated reason."
The Committee
did not speculate on that "other unrelated reason." That would have opened
a door marked "CIA," and it had already concluded that the Agency had nothing
to do with Oswald. But all that was to come long after my first talk with
Silvia Odio. And although I sensed her story was important to understanding
the truth behind the Kennedy assassination, I didn't realize how significant
the pursuit of it would be in my own investigation. About the time
I found Silvia Odio in Miami, an independent researcher named Paul Hoch sent
Senator Schweiker a pre-publication copy of an article which as going to
appear in a few weeks in The Saturday Evening Post. He had written
it with George O'Tool a former CIA computer specialist and the author of
The Assassination Tapes, a book which revealed that psychological stress
analysis of Oswald's voice indicate telling the truth when he denied killing
President Kennedy. Hoch himself, a physicist at the University of California
at Berkeley, was a respected Warren Commission critic known for his plodding
analytical research of government documents.
The article
was titled, "Dallas: The Cuban Connection," and it dealt with the Odio incident.
"The Saturday Evening Post has learned," said the article, "of a link between
the Odio incident and one of the many attempts on the life of Cuban Premier
Fidel Castro carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency and Cuban emigres
in the early 1960s."
In his
research, Hoch had discovered that Silvia Odio's parents had been arrested
by Castro because they had harbored a fugitive named Reynol Gonzalez who
was wanted for plotting to kill named Castro in October, 1961. The plotters
planned to use a bazooka fired from an apartment near the Presidential Palace
when Castro was making one of his marathon speeches. The apartment had been
rented by the mother-in-law of the principal plotter, Antonio Veciana. The
plot failed, the bazooka never was fired (the triggerman copped out at the
last moment), the potential killers were arrested and Gonzalez was
later picked up on the Odio estate. However, Veciana, the organizer of the
plot, escape to Miami where he founded Alpha 66, which came to be one of
the largest best financial and most aggressive of the militant Cuban
exile group.
The article
pointed out that Alpha 66 had chapters all over the country, that Veciana
made frequent fund-raising trips to these chapters and that one of the chapters
he visited was in Dallas at "3126 Hollandale." In the mounds of Warren Commission
Hoch found a report by a Dallas deputy sheriff saying that an informant told
him that a person resembling Oswald was seen associating with Cubans at "3128
Harlendale." The article concluded: "Like the two Cubans who,
with 'Leon Oswald,' visited Silvia Odio in September, 1963, Antonio Veciana
was: 1) an anti-Castro activist, 2) engaged in raising funds for the commandos,
and 3) acquainted with Silvia Odio's father. While this falls short of proving
it, a real possibility exists that Veciana was one of the two Cubans who
visited Silvia Odio, or that he at least can shed some light on the Odio
incident."
I doubted
that, but I had the advantage of having had spoken to Silvia and Amador Odio.
If Veciana had been one of Silvia's visitors, both she and her father I assumed,
would have discovered that by now, since Veciana had been a very visible
figure in Miami's anti-Castro movement. (I later checked and confirmed
that with them.) I also doubted that Veciana, if he hadn't been involved,
would know anything about the visit, but he might be worthwhile talking with
when I got around to it. I didn't give it any priority because I thought
the article was overly speculative.
I was,
however, intrigued by another possibility which Paul Hoch raised in a separate
memorandum to Schweiker. In a long and impressively detailed analysis
of one of the early released Church committee reports on assassination plots
against foreign leaders, Hoch wondered why the 1961 Veciana attempt against
Castro was not mentioned. He pointed out that although the CIA claimed
its admitted series of plots with the Mafia where allegedly suspended at
that time, Hoch noted that there was still in effect an earlier directive
-- called NSAM 100 -- which ordered a contingency plan drawn up for Castro's
"removal." Wrote Hoch: "The hypothesis that NSAN 100 and subsequent
events were directly related to the Veciana plot deserves careful consideration.
This would be the case even if there were no possible link to the Kennedy
assassination through the people involved in the Odio incident. ...It
is possible that Veciana was under the direct control of the CIA."
The significance of Hoch's shrew speculation was much deeper than it appeared
on the surface. He was contending, in effect, that since the Veciana
plot did not appear in the Church report, it was one the CIA was trying to
hide.
Hoch is
a soft-spoken, conservative analyst, yet his conclusions were usually strong:
"I suggest consideration of the hypothesis that the CIA has managed to draw
the attention of the Church Committee away from assassination plots other
than the Giancana-Roselli one (specifically, away from the Veciana plot)
for some reason; and that the CIA has thus diverted attention from possible
links between CIA activities and the Kennedy assassination." Hoch then cautiously
added: "Clearly, as such hypothesis is speculative."
Coincidentally,
at about that time, there appeared in Esquire an insightful column by its
Washington watcher Timothy Crouse, who suggested that the CIA in revealing
such flashy "seecrets" as its deadly shellfish toxin and toxic dart gun,
was taking the Church Committee through a promose maze. Crouse was
disturbed that the Committee's chief counsel, F.A.O. Schwarz Jr. ("he was
the innocent look of one of the trolls they sell at the toy store his
great- grandfather founder"), was accepting on face value the CIA's own enumeration
of its misdeeds. "Its pretty unusual," Schwarz admitted to Crouse,
"to find that the defendant has developed large parts of the case.
It's very helpful."
That bothered
Crouse: "Its a queer thing to hear the chief Senate investigator talking
as if he and the CIA wer>
Transfer
interrupted!
th....
It does not seem to have occurred to Schwarz that the CIA was, is, and always
will be, in the business of deception." Course's conclusion was not
irrelevant to the speculation that Paul Hoch had advanced in h is memorandum
to Schweiker. "A subtle pattern begins to emerge," he wrote.
"One suspects that the agency may be trying to peddle certain crimes of its
own choice, trying to guide the Church committee toward certain items and
away from...God knows what."
Actually,
there were no limits to the kinds of God-knows-what speculations bouncing
around my mind by the time I decided to try to locate Antonio Veciana.
I'd been procrastinating. I figured that anyone with his long terrorist
reputation would naturally be elusive and that it would take time to find
him. I didn't know if he was still living in Miami or even if he was
still alive. I might have to put the word through my contacts in Little
Havana, start the tedious core of combing through public records, spending
days on the telephone or in the street sniffing for his trail, pull out all
the research sources I could muster. I found Veciana listed in the
Miami telephone directory.
When I
first called I spoke to his wife Sira. She was, I would later learn,
a pleasantly pretty woman in her early 40 whose life was dedicated to the
welfare of her husband and family. There was a nervous edge to
her voice when she told me her husband wasn't home. I told her I was
with Senator Schweiker and asked for the best time to reach him. She
said I should talk to her son. Tony, I would also later learn, was
a college student, the oldest son of Veciana's five children. Tony
told me his father was in Atlanta. I asked when he would return home.
Tony had a muffled conversation with his mother. "well, he's in Atlanta
and he won't be home for a while," he said. I asked if there
were anyway I could reach his father in Atlanta. Another muffled conversation
with his mother. He asked why I wanted to talk with his father.
In order to easier establish an initial rapport, I had made it a point to
not specifically mention the Kennedy assassination when I first approached
any of the Cuban exiles. I said simply that I was a staff investigator
for Senator Schweiker and that Schweiker was a member of the Church Intelligence
Committee. My interest I always said, was in learning something about
the relationships of the Federal agencies with the anti-Castro Cubans during
the early 1960s. That's what I told Veciana's son. There was
another muffled conversation with his mother. "Well, you see," he said
again, "he's in Atlanta." It was the third time the kid told me that
his father was in Atlanta and I was getting a little annoyed that I couldn't
get beyond that. Then it struck me. The Federal penitentiary
was in Atlanta. Was he trying to tell me his mother was in prison?
That,
it turned out, was exactly what he was trying to tell me. He was being
protective of his father but, at the same time, considered the possibility
that I might be able to help him in some way. I would later learn that
I had approached the Veciana family at a time of extreme stress for them.
It was a very closed-knit family, as many Cuban exile families still are,
with the father ruling gently but firmly and providing supportive direction.
For the Veciana family to be without its patriarch, without even the stability
of his inevitable presence at its main mid-day meal, was terrible stressful.
I would come to know the Veciana -- his wife and his mother, who still lived
with them, Tony and his sisters, Ana, then just finishing college and Victoria,
a high school senior, and the two little ones, Carlos, then five, and Bebe,
three. Ana would later write: "Despite my father's involvement
in the maelstrom of Cuba politics, we have led a very normal life -- on CUBAN
terms. We prayed to Our Lady of Charity (the patron saint of Cuba),
we spoke Spanglish at home and fought -- successfully -- to leave the chaperones
at home." Understanding Veciana and his role in his family, the circumstances
of his being in prison and the stress that was causing is, I now believe,
crucial to understanding the information that Veciana provided and whey he
provided it.
Veciana's
son would not tell me why his father was in prison. "I think there
are some people who want him in there," he said, "but I would rather you
get the details from him. I think my father would be in favor of talking
to you." He said he would write to his father about hat and have
him put me on his visitor's list, although I would first have to bring him
some identification, of curse. I said I would do that and also try
to go directly through the Federal prison authorities for permission to visit
Atlanta. His father, said Tony, had been in there for 26 months.
A few
days later I stopped by the Veciana home to give Tony my card and show him
my official identification. It was a small, modest home with a green
stucco facade set on a quite street on the northern edge of Miami's Little
Havana. Around the abbreviated front yard was a low chain-link fence
with a latch gate. On the patch of grass to the right of the walkway
was a small white status of the Madonna and Child and set in front of it
as if part of a shrine, a slab bench. Closer to the walkway was a flower
planter in the form of a small concrete ship. Dripping terms and bromelia
hung from the edges of a white aluminum awning shading its tiled front porch.
Hung on the varnished wood front door was an old--fashioned promotional device
from Schlitz Brewing, the kind you used to see cluttering neighborhood saloons.
It was a wooden plaque with a brass coat hook on top and, below that, a brass
plate with a "Ship's Time" pie chart. The home exuded a comfortable
unpretentiousness, bereft of the fancy iron scrollwork and fancy trim which
adorns the domiciles of many of Miami's wealthier and more socially prominent
Cuban exiles. You would not guess the Veciana home to be that of a
man of historical importance.
It would
be another month before I could talk with Antonio Veciana. Shortly
after he had put me on his visitor's list and I had made arrangements to
go to Atlanta, he was told that he would be getting an early parole.
Learning that, I decided to wait until he came home. I was in no hurry,
I didn't think it of pressing importance and I had plenty to keep my very
busy.
While
I was waiting, I tried to do what little background checking I could into
Veciana and Alpha 66. There was not much in the newspaper files about
Veciana's early years. He was 31 years old when Castro took power in
1959, and accounting graduate of the University of Havana. In his early
20s, he was considered the boy wonder of Cuban banking and rose to become
the right-hand man of Cuban's major banker, Juko Lobo, the millionaire who
was also know as the "Sugar King" of Cuba.
Alpha
66 emerged early in 1962, with Veciana its founder and chief spokesman.
It seems to receive more press attention than other militant exile groups
because it appeared better organized, better equipped and consistently more
successful in its guerilla attacks and sabotage operations. Strangely
enough, the group's military leader, Major Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, was not
considered among the more right-wing exiles, rather a political liberal.
(Menoyo was eventually captured by Castro on a daring raid into Cuba and
still remains in prison there.) Alpha 66 was the Cuban exile group which
particularly seemed to taunt President Kennedy. Not content to limit
its assaults against Cuba and Castro's forces, it also attacked any foreign
ships supplying Castro and conducted assassination raids against Russian
troops in CUBA. Long before the missile crisis, when Kennedy's policy
was to maintain a separate U.S. stance toward Russia and CUBA, Alpha 66 seemed
bent on attempting to provoke a direct conflict between Russia and the United
States.
Later
when Kennedy went to a special conference in Central America to rally support
of those Latin countries behind his Cuban policy, Alpha 66 deliberately created
an international incident by attacking a Soviet freighter in the Cuban port
of Isabela de Sugua. To acerbate the situation, Veciana conducted a
special news conference for the international press in Washington detailing
the attack and calling on Kennedy to take further direct action against Russia.
The New York Times noted: "Hit-and-run attacks by Cuban exiles against
Soviet ships in Cuba are causing dismay and embarrassment in the Administration."
At the
height of the missile crisis, when Kennedy was in the midst of delicate negotiations
with Khrushchev to keep World War III from erupting, Alpha 66 continued its
raids into CUBA and Assaulting on Castro's patrol boats. "We will attack
again and again," announced Veciana. After the crisis, when Kennedy
had issued a directive to Federal law enforcement agencies to halt all anti-Castro
raids and shut down exile training camps, Alpha 66 defied the ban by continuing
operations secretly and even attacked British merchant ships in Cuban waters.
A lead editorial in the Times warned than: "NO matter how much we may
admire the anti-Castroism that motivates its actions, this group is nevertheless
dangerously playing with the laws and the security of the United States."
One serene
morning 13 years later, the relative incongruity of its all struck me as
I approached this cozy green home on a quite street in Little Havana -- with
its peaceful status of the Madonna gazing across its lovely flowered lawn
-- to see the man who was once at the vortex of such international turmoil
and attention. It was a beautiful blue-sky Florida winter morning,
the sun comfortable warm, a nice breeze blowing from the southeast.
I thought I'd like to be sailing.
I had
contacted Veciana as soon as I learned he was released on parole. The
only image I had of the man was from and old newspaper clipping, a much young
Veciana, the dreaded anti-Castro terrorist, his face contorted in anger as
he sneered a declaration of defiance. And he was, indeed, a well-known
exile terrorist who, in an attempt by the U.S. Government to put a check
on the actions of Alpha 66, was once ordered confined to the county limits.
The man
who opened the door to the small green home appeared as little like a menacing
terrorist as one can imagine. He was, in fact, a very soft-looking
man, fairly tall, with a smooth, full face, wavy black hair and warm dark
eyes. He was not at all muscular, but had a certain heft, a pearish
paunch. He was casually but neatly groomed with pressed dark trousers
and a fresh white guyabera -- actually, nondescript attire in Little Havana.
But what struck me most when I first me Veciana -- and perhaps this is something
one would notice more in Miami -- was his pallor. He had been released
for a few days, yet it was still very much a prison pallor -- which is something
that comes from more than just not being in the sun, something that has to
do with the spirit. The prison was still in Veciana's eyes. We
sat in the small front living room, which could very well have been set in
South Philadelphia: Two Spanish Provincial couches, one red and one
green, fitted with clear plastic covers; large individual portrait photographs
of each child adorning one wall, a coffee table between the two couches with
a gild-framed formal family portrait propped in the center, crocheted doilies
on the end tables.
As soon
as I saw Veciana I knew that he could not have been directly involved in
the Odio incident. He simply did not match the description of any of
Silvia's visitors. In addition, Veciana has a large and noticeable
mole or birthmark over the right side of his mouth. Later, when I asked
Veciana about the Odio incident, he said he knew Amador Odio and his daughter
but knew nothing about the incident. That, I thought, knocked out the
theory that Hoch and O'Toole had advance in their Post article.
When I
first sat down with Veciana, I told him exactly what I had told his son:
I wanted to talk with him in general about the relationship of the U.S. intelligence
agencies with the anti-Castro CUBAN groups. I said nothing of my interest
in the Kennedy assassination and, since Schweiker had gotten relatively little
press attention in Miami compared to the headlines than being made by the
Church Committee, there was little reason for Veciana to assume that was
my priority.
Although
Veciana said he would answer any questions I had, there was an initial defensiveness
in his attitude. "I will tell you what you want to know," he said,
"but I am worried about certain things that can be used against me."
He said he did not understand certain things that happened which he believed
are connected with his going to prison. He said he had gone to prison
on a drug conspiracy charge. He said he would talk with me only if
I could assure him that any information he provided would not be used against
him.
That puzzled
me a bit, but I assumed he was concerned about some United States laws he
may have broke n during the course of his anti-Castro activity. I assured
him our talk would be confidential and not be made public. I felt I
could trust Schweiker to back me and keep that promise, and Schweiker did;
b ut I didn't realize then that once something is thrown into the political
hopper that is the Federal bureaucracy, its ultimate use is dictated by political
ends. At any rate, Veciana accepted that assurance. In his own
way, I later came to learn, he himself was anxious to use me. Just
released from prison, uncertain and confused about what had happened to him,
he took my arrival as an opportunity to establish a defense against any other
actions which might be taken against him. That would come clear to
me only much later. I asked Veciana to start with some general background
about himself and how he had gotten involved in anti-Castro activity.
He said that as president of the association of certified public accountants
in Cuba he had always been interested in politics. He was among the
leaders of a group of professional association presidents who had secretly
worked on Castro's behalf during General Batista's reign. As a result,
when Castro took over he was asked to join the government as a top echelon
finance minister. HE turned the offer down, he said, because he had
a good position in CUBA's major bank, but he did know and worked closely
with Castro's highest ranking government officials.
It was
the inside knowledge of what was going on within the government, Veciana
said, which gave him an early indication that Castro was really a Communist.
His disillusionment grew as time when on and soon he was talking with a few
very close friends about working against Castro. The, he said, certain
people came to him and started talking about eliminating Castro.
For some reason, the way Veciana put that made me think of the letter Paul
Hoch had sent to Schweiker raising the possibility that the CIA may have
been involved in that bazooka attempt on Castro's life which Veciana planned.
I asked him if any of the people who spoke with him about elimination Castro
were representatives of the United States Government. Well, said Veciana,
that was something he had never spoken about before, but there was an American
he dealt with who had very strong connections with the U.S. Government.
For the
next hour and a half, I questioned Veciana about this American who became,
it turned out, the secret supervisor and director of all his anti-Castro
activities. It was this American, who told Veciana his name was Maurice
Bishop, who not only directed the assassination attempt of Castro in Cuba
in October, 1961, but also the plan to kill Castro in Chile in 1971.
Bishop, said Veciana, was the one who suggested the founding of Alpha 66
and guided its overall strategy. Bishop was the one who pulled the
strings when connections with the U.S. Government were needed and when financial
support was needed and who involved Veciana not only in anti-Castro activity
but anti-Communist activity in Latin America as well. He worked with
Veciana for 13 years.
I was
fascinated by what Veciana was revealing and knew I had stumbled upon something
important. Bishop obviously was an intelligence agency connection --
a direct connection -- to an anti-Castro group. The CIA had always
denied -- and still does -- a supervisory role in the activities of anti-Castro
groups after the Bay of Pigs. The Agency claimed it only "monitored"
such activity. Here was Veciana, the key leader of the largest and
most militant anti-Castro group, revealing much more then just a monitoring
interest on the Agency's part -- revealing, in fact, an involvement in two
Castro assassination attempts the CIA had not admitted to the Church Committee.
I wonder how the guys at the committee would handle this one, I remember
thinking to myself, if they gave a damn now that they were frantically trying
to wrap up their final report.
It was
all fascinating but not especially relevant to the Kennedy assassination.
I could see no connection with Veciana's activities in Miami and what had
happened in Dallas, although Veciana did say his secret meetings with Bishop
took place, over the years, in cities besides Miami, including Dallas, Las
Vegas and Washington, and in Puerto Rico and Latin America. However,
when Veciana started talking about chapter of Alpha 66 he had set up across
the country, it gave me the opportunity, with out making reference to the
Kennedy assassination, to asked him about he one in Dallas. He told
me he had spoken at some fund- raising meetings at the home of the Alpha
66 delegate there. I asked him I he knew Jorge Salazar. That
was the name mentioned in theat Dallas deputy sheriff's report about the
gathering of Alpha 66 members at "3126 Hollandale." But I did not mention
that to Veciana, nor that Lee Harvey Oswald was reportedly seen there.
"No," said Veciana, "I do not know the Salazar that is mentioned is the magazine
article in Dallas. And I never saw Oswald at the home where we met."
I was taken back that Veciana should mention Oswald at all, but then I realized,
as Veciana himself would point out to me when he went back to his bedroom
and returned with the magazine, that the Hoch and O'Toole article had been
published in The Saturday Evening Post. Veciana said he had just read
the article the day before. "...No," he was saying , "I never saw Oswald
at that place where we held the meetings...." I was jotting that down
in my notebook and was not looking at him, but I heard him continue..."
"...but I remember once meeting Lee Harvey Oswald." I did not look
up. My mind fell off its chair. I restrained myself from reacting
with a ridiculously overly casual, "Oh, recall I simply asked in a forced
monotone: "How did you meet him? Where? When?" Veciana
said he met Oswald with Maurice Bishop in Dallas sometime near the beginning
of September, 1963. There, in that modest green house in Little Havana,
almost 13 years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the reality of
what I was involved in suddenly struck me. The killing of a President
was no longer a series of lingering mental televison images, bold black headlines,
thick stacks of documents, books and files. It was something that had
actually happened, and there were living people with direct strings through
time to the moment. As much as the substance of the information itself,
it was the absolutely coincidental and credible way it came up, the manner
in wich the interview had developed, which so stunned me. First
impressions are inherently circumstantial judgements, but I had no doubt
then -- and have none now -- that Veciana was simple and truthfully
revealing what he knew.
The details
are what make the case. One morning in the late summer of 1960 -- about
a year and ahalf after Castro took power -- Antonio Veciana's secretary at
the Banco Financiero in Havana handed him a business care from a gentleman,
she said, who was waiting to see him. The name on the card was Maurice
Bishop. Veciana does not specifically remember the name of the business
imprinted on the card but now believes it may have been a construction firm
headquartered in Belgium. Veciana's first for his bank. The man
who said he was Maurice Bishop did not lead Veciana to change his thought
about that initially. Although he spoke excellent Spanish, Bishop said
he was an American and wanted to talk with Veciana about the state of the
Cuban economy and where it appears to be going since Castro took over.
They talked for quite a while and then, around noon, Bishop suggested they
continue their conversation over lunch. Bishop took Veciana to a fine
restaurant called the Floridita once one of Hemingway's favorite watering
holes. As their conversation continued, Veciana recalls. Bishop
began to express a concern about the Cuban government's learning toward Communism
and also let it be known that he was aware of Veciana's feelings toward Castro.
That surprised Veciana because he had told only a few close friends about
his disillusionment with Castro's government. (Among those he told,
however, were two who it late became know had direct contact with the Central
Intelligence Agency. One was his boss, Julio Lobo, who later in exile
was designated to set up an "independent" front committee to raise $20 million
for the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners; another was Rufo Lopez-Fresquet,
who, for the first 14 months of the Revolution, was Castro's Minister of
the Treasury and the CIA's liaison contact with the new government.)
As their
lunch continued, it became obvious to Veciana that Bishop knew a good deal
about him personally. It also became obvious that Bishop was not interested
in Veciana's banking services but, rather, in recruiting him as an active
participant in the then just growing movement against the government of Fidel
Castro and Communism. "He tried to impress on me the seriousness of
the situation," Veciana recalls. Veciana was ready. Through his
contacts high in government, he had long ago come to the conclusion that
Castro, by moving toward tighter control than Batista ever had, was a betrayer
of the Revolution. Veciana had come despise Castro. He told
Bishop that he was willing to work with him against Castro. Bishop
offered to pay him for his services. Veciana told him that he did not
need to get paid to fight against Castro put when the job was over, if Bishop
insisted, they could settle accounts then. In the summer of 1960, Veciana
did not think it would take very long to topple Castro.
Because
it appeared so obvious to him at that first meeting, Veciana asked Bishop
if he worked for the U.S. Government. "He told me at the time," Veciana
would later recall, "that he was in a position to let me know for whom he
was working or for which agency he was doing this." There were several
meetings after the initial one as both Veciana and Bishop got to know one
another better. Finally, Bishop told Veciana that he would like him
to take a "training program" in order to better prepare him for the work
ahead. This turned out to be a series of nightly lectures and instruction
which were given in a nondescript office in a building which Veciana recalls
as being on El Vedado, a commercial strip. He remembers seeing the
name of a mining company in the building and, on the ground floor, a branch
of the Berlitz School of Languages. In addition to Bishop, who would
attend on some evenings, Veciana was instructed by a man he remembers only
as "Mr. Melton." Although he was given some technical training on the
use of explosive and sabotage techniques, Veciana's lessons dealt mainly
in propaganda and psychological warfare. "Bishop told me several times,"
Veciana recalls, "that psychological warfare could help more than hundreds
of soldiers, thousands of soldiers." Veciana was also trained in various
techniques of counterintelligence, surveillance and communications.
The thrust of his training, however, was to make him proficient not as a
guerilla operative but as higher-echelon planner and supervisor. As
Veciana put it: "The main purpose was to train me to be an organizer
so I was supposed to initiate a type of action and other people would be
the ones who would really carry it out."
The training
sessions lasted only a few weeks. By that time, Bishop and Veciana
were concocting various schemes to undermine Castro's regime. With
Veciana's contacts in the upper levels of government, several plots were
evolved to discredit key Communists and funnel the government's own money
into the hands of anti-Castro guerillas. In one instance, Veciana successfully
schemed to get Castro's top aide, "Che" Guevara, to sign a $200,000 check
which, unbeknownst to him, went to the underground. Veciana also set
in motion a propaganda program which results in the destabilization of the
Cuba currency and the creation of public distrust in its value.
Meanwhile,
at Bishop's direction, Veciana began taking a more active role in the organized
underground movement. "Bishop always wanted to be kept informed about
what was going on with the various groups," Veciana told me. With his
supervisory training and technical expertise, Veciana soon became chief of
sabotage for one of the largest underground groups, the Moviemento Revolucionario
del Pueble, formed by Manuel Ray and the predecessor of JURE. Like
others in the underground movement, Veciana also had a few "war names."
One he employed frequently was "Carlos."
Although
Maurice Bishop refused to acknowledge to Veciana any connection with the
U.S. Government, he apparently was familiar with certain personnel in the
American Embassy in Havana. Before the Embassy was closed in January,
1961, Bishop suggested that Veciana contact specific individuals there in
order to get direct assistance and supplies for the anti- Castro movement.
Bishop, however, asked Veciana not to mention his name or the fact that he
was sent by an American. Nor did Bishop indicate whether or not the
contacts he suggested were intelligence agents.
One of
the American Embassy personnel Bishop suggested Veciana contact was named
Smith. At the time, the American Ambassador was Earl E. T. Smith, a
wealthy socialite who would later become the multi-term mayor of Palm Beach
and whose wife, it was well known in that town, had a special relationship
with John. F. Kennedy. Veciana said, however, theat Earl Smith was
not the one he contacted; rather it was a Smith who was a young man then
and whose first name might have been "Ewing," as Veciana initially recalled
it.
Another
individual Veciana remembers contacting at the Embassy was a "Colonel Kail."
Kail, who was in the Army, told Veciana the U.S. Government could not directly
support him in any way. Kail said, however, could be of assistance
with the issuance of passports and visas for plotters who wanted to escape.
The American Embassy closed shortly after Veciana last talked with Kail.
According
to Veciana, Bishop left Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961.
He says he had not met with Bishop for some months prior to it. However,
after the Bay of Pigs, Bishop returned to CUBA. Probably, Veciana learned,
with a Belgium passport. Veciana recalls that he and Bishop had long
discussions about what happened at the Bay of Pigs. He says Bishop
told him that Kennedy's failure to provide air support was the crucial factor
in the failure of the operation. Bishop obviously felt a terrible frustration
about that because, according to Veciana, "At the theme Bishop decided that
the only thing left to be done was to have an attempt on Castro's life."
The assassination
of Fidel Castro was something that Veciana and Bishop had discussed before.
Earlier that year, Russia's first spaceman, Yuri Gagarin, had visited Castro
and Veciana had suggested an attempt at that time, but Bishop, who always
seemed critically aware of the propaganda repercussions of any scheme, rejected
the idea. "He said that it would cause too much trouble between the
United States and Russia," recalls Veciana.
It was
decided that an appropriate opportunity to kill Castro would be when he made
a public appearance on the balcony of the Presidential Palace at a scheduled
ceremony in early October, 1961. Veciana had his mother-in-law rent
an apartment on the eighth floor of a building within range of the balcony
and then made arrangements for her escape to the Untied States by boat on
the day before the planned attempt. (He had flown his wife and children
to Spain as a precaution as soon as he had begun plotting.) He then
recruited the action men to do the actual shooting and obtained the weapons.
(Availability of weapons was not a major problem to the anti-Castro underground
as a result of the supply air-dropped by the U.S. prior to the Bay of Pigs.)
The apartment was stocked with automatic rifles, grenade launchers and a
bazooka. A massive firepower attack was planned so that all of the
key Castro aids who appeared on the balcony with Fidel would be killed.
A short
while before the scheduled attempt, Veciana learned he had long been under
suspicion by Castro's intelligence agency, the DGI. His cousin, Guillermo
Ruiz, who was a high-ranking DGI officer, asked him why he had been seen
visiting the American Embassy. Veciana said it was only to see about
obtaining passports for some friends. Ruiz said if that was the case
then he had been using the wrong entrance. Veciana took it as a warning
that he was still being watched. Bishop also told Veciana that he had
information that Castro's intelligence agents suspected him of subversive
activity and that he should consider leaving CUBA.
The bazooka
attack never came off. Fearing the DGI had learned of the plot, the
firing team fled the apartment. And, indeed, the DGI did know that
something was going to happen, but it was only later that it found the apartment
and seized the weapons.) However, the night before the planned attack,
when Veciana was to place his mother-in-law aboard her escape boat, it was
discovered that the landing site was under heavy surveillance and the boat
could not come into the dock. Because his mother-in-law couldn't swim,
according to Veciana, he had to push her into the water and swim out to the
boat with her. At that point, he says, he decided it was too dangerous
to return to shore and that he would go with her to Miami. Veciana
was not in Miami very long before Maurice Bishop was back in touch with him.
(He would not have been difficult to find in the close-knit exile community
even if Bishop did not have access to official Immigration records.)
Soon there were meeting regularly and planning strategy to continue the fight
against Castro. The result was that founding of Alpha 66 which, according
to Veciana, was Bishop's brainchild. (The name was a collaboration:
Alpha was meant to symbolize the beginning of the end of Castro; the 66 represented
the number of fellow accountants Veciana recruited at the start of his anti-Castro
activities.
While
Veciana established himself as Alpha 66's chief executive officer, spokesman
and fund-raiser, he recruited as the organization's military leader former
Rebel Army officer Major Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo. A daring soldier, Menoyo
had the reputation among Cuban exiles of being a socialist. Veciana
says that Bishop expressed some doubts about his loyalty, but Veciana knew
Menoyo and convinced Bishop he could be trusted. Veciana never told
Menoyo about Bishop but believes today that Menoyo may have suspected he
had some guidance from someone.
With strong
management direction, clever use of propaganda techniques, sophisticated
control of the media, organizational skill in fund-raising and special expertise
in locating weapons caches and planning military operations, Alpha 66 soon
rose to the forefront of the numerous anti-Castro exile groups. Veciana
was all over the place, buying guns and boats, recruiting and organizing
training sites, making fiery speeches, issuing public communiques proclaiming
numerous successful raids into Cuba. At one point, Veciana announced
he had a war chest of $100,000 and that ll the major exile organizations
were backing Alpha 66's efforts. And except for one minor slip which
no one paid any attention to at the time, Veciana gave not a hint to his
Alpha 66 associates that there was an American behind the scenes guiding
his strategy. However, at a press conference recorded in The New York
Times on September 14, 1962, Veciana announced a series of forthcoming Alpha
66 attacks and, in passing, added that the planning was being done
by those "I don't even know."
According
to Veciana, the special headaches that Alpha 66 created for President Kennedy
before and during the Cuban missile crisis were deliberately planned by Maurice
Bishop. The timing of the raids on Cuba at the height of the missile
crisis when Kennedy was in delicate negotiating with Khrushchev was Bishop's
idea. SO was a special press conference in Washington after the crisis,
when Veciana announced that Alpha 66 had just successfully attacked a Russian
ship in a Cuban harbor and engaged in a firefight with Russian troops.
The conference was planned at the time Kennedy was in Costa Rica trying to
gain Latin American support for his new Cuban policy. "The purpose
was to publicly embarrass Kennedy and force him to move against Castro,"
Veciana now admits. Although Bishop was not present at the press conference,
Veciana says he arranged for two high-ranking government officials, one in
the Department of Health and one in the Department of Agriculture, to attend
to give it more legitimacy in the eyes of the press. And it did,
indeed, get the publicity that Bishop had planned. The Government,
said The New York times, "was embarrassed by the incident," and noted that
Kennedy's party in Costa Rico telephoned several times for reports on the
situation. ALTHOUGH Maurice Bishop often suggested specific tactical
moves, he was more concerned with the overall strategy of Alpha 66 and Veciana's
anti-Castro activity. As such, he was far from in constant contact
with Veciana. In fact, Veciana never saw him ore than a dozen or so
times in any one year.
The understanding
between them -- arrived at very early in their relationship -- and the arrangement
they had for meetings was right out of a standard operating procedures manual
of a covert operative. Although an unspoken trust developed, there
was no true personal relationship between Bishop and Veciana, no private
matters were discussed that did not bear upon their mutual anti-Castro mission.
(That, I've come to learn, may say less about Bishop than it does about Veciana.
In the four years I've known Veciana, the numerous times I've been at his
home and among his family, the conversation inevitably returns to his passion,
Cuba politics and anti-Castro activity.)
Every
meetings was instigated by Bishop. That was the arrangement, Veciana
said, that was made at the beginning. Bishop would call and set the
time and place of the meeting. Usually it was in a public place, on
a particular corner or in a park where they would walk and talk. Veciana
remembers meetings in Havana, however, which took place at a country club
and, once, in an apartment across the street from the American Embassy.
Later, however, if Veciana was in another city, Bishop would come to his
hotel. The majority of his meetings with Bishop over the years were
in Miami and Puerto Rico, where most of Alpha 66's operational planning took
place. Veciana assumed that Bishop would fly in for these meetings
because often Bishop would meet him in a rented car. Over the years,
meetings with Bishop took place also in Washington, Las Vegas and Dallas
and, during a period when Veciana had a job in South America, in Caracas,
Lima and La Paz.
During
the most active period of Alpha 66's operations, Veciana was constantly on
the move, hectically in turn with the action and, for security reasons, not
very visible. At that time, Veciana told me, he made arrangements whereby
Bishop would be able to find out where he was at any moment. A third
party, someone Veciana trusted implicitly, was designated as the link.
Although Veciana did not tell this third party who Bishop was or of the relationship
with him. He always made sure this party knew his whereabouts and left
instructions on how Bishop could reach him if he called. Veciana told
me this third party was not a member of his family, but did not want to reveal
the name. He said this intermediary did not know Bishop, was only contacted
by telephone and therefore would be of no help in locating or identifying
Bishop. There was no need to get this third party involved now, he
said. I later found out this third party was a woman.
I always
took the fact that Veciana volunteered the existence of an intermediary as
a strong indication of his credibility. I later also learned that his
reasons for wanting to protect her identity were legitimate: She had
not been actively involved in anti-Castro politics and so could provide no
additional information in that area; she had a husband and family now she
was concerned about protecting; and she was now a Government employee who,
if Bishop still had any connections, might be vulnerable to whatever kind
of pressures that could be applied. It took me three years to find
out the identity of this third party. Whether or not she could have
been a factor in identifying Bishop, she was in a position to confirm Veciana's
credibility. What later happened when I finally discovered her identity
revealed a significant insight into the House Assassinations Committee's
investigation and those who controlled it.
In his
biographical revelations of his Cuban operational days, CIA operative E.
Howard Hunt recalled his first meeting with his project chief, a fellow he
gave the phoney "real" name of Drecher: "Drecher then told me," Hunt
writes, "he had adopted the operational alias of Frank Bender in his dealings
with the Cubans whom he told he was the representative of a private American
group made up of wealthy industrialist...." Hunt revealed that he also
used that same cover story. From the spate of published memoirs now
pouring from the typewriters of former CIA officers, it appears to have been
a fairly typical line employed by operatives with their covert contacts in
whatever country they seemed to be working. It was an effective enough
cover, and sufficiently credible to account for the huge amount of funding
the operative usually had available. It was the same cover story that
Maurice Bishop used. "He would tell me," Veciana recalls, "that, you
know, there are some other people, some very wealthy businessmen, who would
like to get rid of Castro also." He would never be any more specific
than that.
Yet down
through the years it was obvious that Maurice Bishop's range of contacts
and ability to get strings pulled went beyond those of a private individual
or independent group. There was one especially revealing meeting that
Veciana had with Bishop shortly after Veciana left Cuba. Bishop called
and asked Veciana to meet him on a downtown Miami street corner. They
walked about for a while talking. Bishop spoke about how the fight
against Castro might be more difficult and longer than they had first envisioned,
how he and Veciana would have to work very close together and how they must
develop a mutual trust and loyalty. Veciana agreed. Would Veciana,
Bishop asked, be willing to sign a contract to that effect. Of course,
said Veciana. Bishop then led Veciana to the Pan American Bank Building,
a five-story office structure in the heart of Miami's business district.
Veciana recalls only that they took an elevator and that Bishop had the key
to an unmarked office door. The office was spartanly furnished with
only a desk and a few chairs, but Veciana does remember an American flag
standing in one corner.
There
was no one in the office when Bishop and Veciana entered. Bishop, however,
went through another door and returned with two men and some papers.
Bishop asked Veciana to read the papers and sign them. Veciana believes
the documents he signed were contracts and loyalty oaths. He was not
given copies. He recalls that in the contract was a space for a salary
figure and that, according to his original agreement with Bishop, was left
blank. Veciana now describes the incident was a "commitment" ceremony.
"It was a pledge of my loyalty, a secret pledge," he says. "I think
they wanted to impress on me my responsibility and my commitment to the cause."
Today he cannot recall the specific description of the two men present nor
if the was introduced to them. He believes they were just witnesses.
(I later checked the directory of the Pan American Bank Building for that
period Veciana talked about, but there were so many CIA business fronts of
all types in Miami at the time it was invalid to consider one more suspect,
although the building had a few import- export firms. It also had,
in nine separate offices on four different floors, branches of four Federal
agencies, including Treasury, State Department and Health, Education &
Welfare offices. Temporary use of any Government office could have
easily been arranged by Bishop. As a Federal investigator, I often
made use of other agency offices when I traveled, arranged by just a telephone
call in advance.) What also struck Veciana was Bishop's knowledge of
other covert activity the CIA was then associated with and of individuals
the Agency was using as contacts or, in the CIA's term, "assets." For
instance, at one point Bishop asked Veciana to monitor an operation that
led the code name of Cellula Fantasma. "Bishop told me it cost the
CIA $3000,000 for that operation," Veciana says. It was basically
a propaganda operation that involved leaflet drops over Cuba.
Veciana attended a couple of meetings of the group planning the action and
reported back to Bishop. One of those involved was Frank Fiorini Sturgis.
"At that time," Veciana recalls, "I remember Bishop saying to me about Fiorini
that he wasn't just another soldier, he was more than that."
At another
time, a friend of Veciana's who had good contacts in the New York social
scene, arranged a meeting for him with an American, a member of the New York
Racquet Club, who, in turn, reportedly had good contacts with both some wealthy
potential anti-Castro contributors and with high government officials.
Veciana met with the American and later told Bishop about it. Bishop
told him not to bother further with the guy because he was a CIA asset and,
besides, he was a drunk. Veciana concluded that Bishop did, indeed,
know the fellow because the guy almost drank himself under the table at their
meeting. (I confirmed Veciana's story about this when I found the American,
now living in Palm Beach. Although he said he never knew a Maurice
Bishop, he admitted his contacts with Veciana and with the CIA, HE
was a regular at Palm Beach's most popular social watering spot, the Ta-boo.)
Veciana had considered the possibility that Bishop worked for an intelligence
agency other than the CIA. Among the most active monitoring anti-Castro
activity was the Army Intelligence section. What Veciana specifically
recalls, however, was being contacted in 1962 in Puerto Rico by an American
who called himself Patrick Harris. From a series of long conversations
with him, Veciana came to the conclusion that he was Army Intelligence.
Harris told Veciana that he might be able to provide some support for his
anti-Castro activities, but first wanted to make an inspection trip of Alpha
66's operational base in the Bahamas. Veciana eventually came to trust
Harris and did provide him and a couple of associates a tour of the base,
over military chief Menoyo's objections. Harris never did come through
with any aid. "I told Bishop about that," Veciana now says, "and he
told me not to bother with them, that they could not help me. He was
right."
In 1968,
Maurice Bishop helped Veciana get a job with the U.S. Agency for International
Development, working in La Paz, Bolivia, as a banking adviser to Bolivia's
Central Bank. It was a very good paying job and his checks came directly
from the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington. "I was very surprised
I was hired because I was a known terrorist," Veciana says today. "The
State Department, which hired me, once ordered me confined to Dade County
because of my anti-Castro activity. Then in La Paz they put my office
in the American Embassy. For sure, Bishop had very good connection."
Veciana
worked for the Agency for International Development for four years, receiving
more than $31,000 a year to provide advice to Bolivia's budding banking industry.
(It had since been reported that the CIA has used the AID as a front in other
instances, once got one of its own proprietary companies a multi-million
dollar AID contract to train Thailand's border police.) Veciana says,
however, he did very little bank advising during the entire four years.
Instead, he spent almost all his time involved in anti-Castro and anti-Communist
activities directed by Bishop.
The fact
that Bishop was interested in more than just knocking off Castro is significant.
It discredits the possibility, for instance, that Bishop's backing came from
a group of disenfranchised capitalists, or even Organized Crime gambling
Czars, singularly intent on getting their Cuban holdings back. In addition,
the typ of anti-Communist scheming which Bishop had Veciana carry out incorporated
sophisticated counter-intelligence and psychological warfare techniques which
would be employed by someone with a strategic overview. Veciana, for
instance traveled around Latin America -- with Bishop providing expenses
-- involving himself in propaganda ploys aimed at the character assassination
of leading Communist politicians or weakening the financial stability of
Left-leaning governments. (once, when I was questioning Veciana about
Bishop's apparent competency based on his failures to assassinate Castro,
Veciana simply smiled slightly and said, "No, we did not kill Castro, but
here were many other plans, many other plots that did work." He did
not want to elaborate.)
Early
in 1971, Bishop told Veciana that Castro would probably be making a state
visit to Chile some time later that year. He suggested that Veciana
begin planning another assassination attempt. "He told me," Veciana
says, "that it was an opportunity to make it appear that the anti-Castro
Cubans killed Castro without American involvement."
Veciana
set up his planning headquarters in Caracas. It was a natural.
There the Venezuelan bureaucracy is deeply infiltrated by both anti-Castro
Cubans and the CIA. There Veciana knew an experienced and effective
group of plotters to join him, including two veteran terrorists willing to
take on the daring mission of actually doing the shooting. The plan
as it evolved was, on the surface, relatively simple. It became known
that toward the end of his visit to chile Castro would have a major press
conference with as many as 400 journalists, including radio and television
reporters. Press credentials for the two designated assassins would
be obtained from a Venezuelan televison station and, although there would
be tight security, their weapons would be smuggled into the conference room
inside a television camera.
Maurice
Bishop had a major role in setting up the operation, according to Veciana.
Bishop provided the weapons and made arrangements with top leaders in the
Chilean military - - which would be providing Castro security at the conference
--- for the assassins to be immediately grabbed and arrested by Chilean soldiers
before Castro-s own body guards could kill them. Bishop told Veciana
that he would also arrange their escape for Chile later. At the time,
of course, the head of the Chilean government was the democratically elected
Leftist President Salvador Allende. Two years later, in September,
1973, Allende would be overthrown in a military coup d'etat. It has
since become known that Allende's disposal was supported and heavily financed
by the CIA and a few American multinational corporations, chiefly International
Telephone and Telegraph. At one point, the CIA set up a super-secret
Chile task force to work against Allende.
The attempt
to assassinate Castro in Chile failed because at the very last moment the
two designated shooters decided that they would never get out of the conference
room alive. They did not believe that Veciana had made arrangements
for their capture. Veciana could not, of course, tell them of Bishop
or how the arrangements had been made. Ironically, other anti-Castro
Cubans who Veciana had recruited in Caracas to help him in setting up the
plot, had also all along not believed that Veciana could arrange an escape
for the shooters. So they decided, without Veciana's knowledge, to
plan a sub-plot based on the assumption that the shooters would be immediately
caught and killed themselves. Why the existence of the sub- plot later
came to light, Veciana say, it produced the crack that eventually led to
the end of his relationship with Maurice Bishop in 1973.
Among
the associates Veciana says he recruited in Caracas were two veterans of
the war against Castro, Lucilo Pena and Luis Posada. Both have backgrounds,
I later learned, as action men. Pena is the general director of a major
chemical firm and has excellent social and business contacts. He had
once been involved in Alpha 66's "Plan Omega," a plot to invade Cuba
from a base in the Dominican Republic.
Luis Posada's
background, I would discover, is even more intriguing. When I interviewed
him in 1978, he was in jail in Caracas, having been arrested with probably
the most well-known exile terrorist, Dr. Orlando Bosch, for lowing up a Cubana
Airlines plane that killed 73 persons, including many Russians. He
was a veteran of the Bay of Pigs, a member of JURE, a former Lieutenant in
the U.S. Army (where he took intelligence staff officer courses), a former
agent for the CIA and, until his arrest, the owner of a very successful private
detective agency in Caracas. In 1971, when Veciana was working with
him, he was chief of security and counterintelligence in the Venezuelan secret
police.
According
to Veciana, it was Pena and Posada who provided all the necessary credentials
and documents which enabled the selected assassins to establish their false
identities and get into place in Chile. What they also did without
telling him at the time, says Veciana, was plant phony documents o that the
trail of the two who were going to assassinate Castro would lead, if they
were caught and killed themselves, to Russian agents in Caracas. It
was an elaborate sub-plot. Lengthy but false surveillance reports were
slipped into the files of the Venezuelan secret police indicating that the
Cubans were seen meeting with the Russian agents, one of whom was a correspondent
of Izvestia and the other a professor at the University of Central Venezuela.
Also in the file were manufactured passports, diaries and notes allegedly
found in one of the assassin's hotel room and indicating his contact with
the Russian agents. In addition -- and the most damaging evidence --
was a photograph showing what appeared to be one of the assassins leaning
into a car window and talking with one of the agents. Actually, the photo
was of another Cuban who closely resembled the assassin. Without being
told the reason for it, this double was instructed to stop the Russian agent's
car as he left his home in the morning, lean in and ask him for a match.
A telephoto shot was taken of his encounter.
As incredible as this aspect of Veciana's story is, those documents and photographs,
I would later confirm, do exist.
Following
the failure of the assassination attempt, Maurice Bishop learned of the existence
of this sub-plot for the first time. According to Veciana, he was furious.
He accused Veciana of taking part in the planning of it or, in the very least,
knowing about it and keeping it a secret from him. Veciana insisted
then, as he does still, that he was unaware of the secondary scheme.
He says Bishop eventually told him, after he investigated further, that he
believed him, but that in any future operations the scare of his early suspicion
would linger. Bishop said that, considering the type of operations
in which they were involved, a relationship that was less than totally trustworthy
would be no good. He suggested that they sever their relationship.
I believe
there was more to it than that. It appears that Veciana may have become
more aggressive and fanatic in his determination to kill Castro than Bishop
cared for him to be. At the time, Veciana was insisting on taking further
terroristic actions -- indeed, may have already instituted some steps himself
-- and scheming more dangerous assassination attempts. Bishop perhaps
feared that Veciana was getting a bit out of hand and had to be cut off.
In fact, Veciana himself believed for a while that Bishop had something to
do with his going to prison, that it was both a warning to keep his mouth
shut and to desist from independent scheming. That was a key factor
in Veciana's decision to tell me about Maurice Bishop.
At any
rate, when Bishop told Veciana he would like to sever their relationship,
he also said he thought that Veciana deserved compensation for working with
him down through the years. Because Veciana had rejected the idea of
getting paid to fight Castro, Bishop had only provided him with expense money
when Veciana traveled or was involved in a special operation. Now Bishop
insisted that Veciana be compensated for the 13 years he had worked with
him.
It was
July 26th, 1973. Veciana recalls commenting to his wife when he got
home that afternoon on the irony of the dat and its association with Castor's
own movement. Bishop had called. He asked Veciana to meet him
in the parking lot of the Flagler Dog Track, which is not far from Veciana's
home. The track was in session and the parking lot was crowded.
Veciana spotted Bishop waiting in a car at the designated spot. Bishop
got out of the car with a briefcase. With him were two clear-cut
young men in dark suits. The men stood by out of earshot while Bishop
and Veciana spoke. Bishop said he regretted that their relationship
had to end but that it would best for both of them in the long run.
He shook Veciana's hand and wished him luck. Then he handed him the
briefcase. In it, he said, was the compensation that was due him.
When Veciana got home he opened the briefcase. It was stuffed with
Cash. Exactly 253,000 says Veciana. That, says Veciana, was the
last time he saw or spoke with Maurice Bishop.
It is
not generally known, and even Kennedy assassination buffs, those independent
researchers, have not delved into it extensively because they hit a blank
wall when they do, but here is a period of Lee Harvey Oswald's stay in New
Orleans which is largely undocumented. On August 9th, 1963, Oswald
was arrested after distributing pro-Castro leaflets and a scuffle with Carlos
Bringuier. On August 16th, he was again seen passing out leaflets in
front of the New Orleans Trade Mart and was, in fact, that evening shown
on televison newscasts doing it. One August 25th, Oswald was on a radio
debate with Bringuier arranged by New Orleans broadcaster William Stuckey,
a self-styled "Latin-American affairs expert." Despite the fact that
Oswald seemingly went out of his way to court such public attention as a
Castro supporter, as soon as he got it he immediately dropped out of sight.
Between August 25th and September 17th, there is no validated indication
of Oswald's whereabouts. Aside from their visit to the home of his
aunt and uncle on Labor day, Marina Oswald said her husband spent this time
reading books and practicing with his rifle. Down through the years,
Marina Oswald's testimony has been inconsistent, contradictory and, admittedly,
false. The House Assassinations Committee found several very credible
witnesses who saw Oswald during this period in Clinton, Louisiana, about
130 miles from New Orleans, during a black voter registration drive.
With him were David Ferrie, who had been involved in anti-Castro activity,
and New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, who had intelligence agency connections.
The committee could not determine what Oswald was really doing in Clinton,
but here was no doubt he was there.
The Warren
Commission found certain records by which it accounted for some of Oswald's
activity during this period of late August and September. None of these
records could be later authenticated and, in some instances, were discovered
to be false. He reportedly visited the unemployment office, cashed
some unemployment checks and withdrew some library books. The FBI could
not, however, authenticate Oswald's signature on the unemployment decrements
and of the 17 firms where he said he had applied for work, 13 denied it and
four did not exist. Strange also, considering Oswald's being previously
meticulous about such things, three library books returned at the end of
this period were overdue. However, even in taking such records into
account, there is one span of time, between September 6th and 9th, when his
whereabouts is absolutely not known. Initially, Antonio Veciana recalled
that it was sometime in late August or early September, 1963, when Bishop
called and asked to meet him in Dallas. Later, as he gave it more thought,
he said it was probably in early September, perhaps towards the end of the
first week of the month.
It was
not the first time that Bishop had asked Veciana to meet him in Dallas.
He had met him there a number of times prior. Partially because of
that, Veciana had come to suspect that Bishop was from Dallas or had some
family there. More, however, he recalled the time that Bishop had sent
him to talk to Colonel Kail at the American Embassy. The last time
Veciana saw Kail was before Christmas, 1060. Kail said he would consider
Veciana's request for some support but he would like to discuss it further
with him when he returned from his Christmas leave. Kail told Veciana
he was going home to Dallas for Christmas. When Veciana reported back
to Bishop, he got the impression that Bishop knew Kail, or at least his background,
and that they had something in common. In my very first interview with
Veciana, he said, "I think that maybe Bishop is from Texas."
The meeting
that Veciana recalls with Bishop in early September, 1963, took place in
the busy lobby of large downtown office building. From Veciana's description
of its distinctive blue tile facade, it probably was the Southland Center,
a 42-story office complex which, I later checked, opened in 1959. As
soon as Veciana walked in, he saw Bishop in a corner of the lobby talking
with a young man whom Veciana remembers as pale, slight and soft-featured.
He does not recall if Bishop introduced him by name, but Bishop continued
his conversation with the young man only very briefly after Veciana arrived.
Together they walked out of the lobby into the busy lunch crowd sidewalk.
Bishop and the young man stopped behind Veciana for a moment, had a few additional
words and then the young man gestured a farewell and walked away. Bishop
immediately turned to Veciana and a discussion of the current activities
of Alpha 66 as they walked to a nearby coffee shop. Bishop never spoke
to Veciana about the young man and Veciana didn't ask.
On the
day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Veciana immediately recognized
the news photographs and television images of Lee Harvey Oswald as that of
the young man he had seen with Maurice Bishop in Dallas. There was
no doubt in his mind. When I asked him if it could have been someone
who closely resemble Oswald, Veciana said: "Well, you know, Bishop
himself taught me how to remember faces, how to remember characteristics.
I am sure it was Oswald. If it wasn't Oswald, it was someone who looked
exactly like him. Exacto, exacto."
To anyone
who is unfamiliar with the relationships among those who work in intelligence
or government security or even, in some cases, certain areas of law enforcement,
it would seem incredible that Veciana did not ask or even mention Oswald
to Bishop after the Kennedy assassination. yet to those who are familiar
with such relationships, it would seem peculiar if he did. One of the
cardinal principles of all security operations is that information is only
passed on or sought after on what is termed a "need to know" basis.
Individuals working in adjoining offices at the CIA headquarters at Langley
who have known each other for years, go to lunch together daily, have become
close personal and family friends, may not know what the other actually does
at his desk every day or what he's working on --- and would never ask.
that's the way it is. Veciana did not ask Bishop about Oswald.
"I was not going to make the mistake of getting myself involved in something
that did not concern me," he says. He recalls, however, feeling very
uneasy at that time. "Tat was a very difficult situation because I
was afraid. We both understood, I could guess that he knew that I was
knowledgeable of that and I learned that the best way is not to know, not
to get to know things that don't concern you, so I respected the rules and
didn't mention that ever."
What increased
Veciana's fear of his possible becoming involved in the Kennedy Assassination
was a visit to his home by a government agent within a few days after the
murder. Cesar Diosdato ostensibly worked for the U.S. Customs Service
in Key West. He was a well-know figure among anti-Castro activists
in Miami because, technically, it was in the Custom Service's jurisdiction
to prevent violations of the Neutrality Act, which occurred every time an
anti-Castro raiding party took off from Miami or the Keys. With a radio-
equipped patrol car, the pistol-packing Diosdato, a beefy, mustachioed Mexican-American,
roamed the Keys like a traffic cop monitoring the launching sites of the
exile raiding groups. He didn't however, stop them all. The word
among anti-Castro raiders active during JM/WAVE's secret war was that no
group could launch an attack from the Florida Keys without permission of
Diosdato. "He gave us the green light," one former group leader told
me. "Without word from him, he couldn't go." s a result, most
of Cubans thought Diosdato was really working for the CIA. Veciana
did. That's why he became particularly apprehensive when Diosdato knocked
on his door and asked him if he knew anything about he Kennedy assassination
or Lee Harvey Oswald. Diosdato approached him casually. They
had known each because Veciana had frequently gone to Key West to get clearance
from Diosdato. It was not an "official" visit, Diosdato told Veciana.
"He said he had been instructed to ask a few of the exiles if they knew anything,
that's all," Veciana recalls.
Veciana
did not ask himself why a U.S. Customers agent would be investigating the
Kennedy assassination among Miami Cubans and be brought up from Key West
to do it. It crossed his mind that perhaps he was being tested.
In any event, he decided immediately that he was not going to tell Diosdato
anything.
Several
weeks later, Bishop called Veciana to arrange a meeting in Miami. At
that meeting, Bishop never mentioned Oswald or their encounter in Dallas.
They did speak mostly about the Kennedy assassination, its impact on the
world and on their anti-Castro activities. Bishop, says Veciana, appeared
saddened by it. Yet he did suggest the possibility of a strange sort
of involvement. The way Veciana recalls it is this: At the time,
there appeared in the newspapers stories about Oswald having met with a Cuban
couple in Mexico City. Veciana recalls that the stories reported that
the wife spoke excellent English. Bishop said he knew Veciana had a
cousin, Guillermo Ruiz, who was in Castro's intelligence service and who
then happened to be stationed in Mexico City. Ruiz's wife, coincidentally,
spoke excellent English. Bishop asked Veciana if he would attempt to
get in touch with Ruiz and offer him a large amount of money if Ruiz would
say that it was him and his wife who me with Oswald. Veciana took it
as a ploy that might work because, as he puts it, "Ruiz was someone who always
liked money." Bishop, he says did not specify how much Ruiz should
be offered, only that it should be "a huge amount." Veciana, however,
was never able to present the offer to his cousin because Ruiz had been transferred
back to Havana and Veciana could not find a safe way to contact him.
When, a couple of months later, he mentioned his difficulties to Bishop,
Veciana says that Bishop told him to forget it. "He told me it was
not longer necessary," Veciana recalls. And that was the last reference
he or Bishop ever made to the Kennedy assassination.
In May,
1964, John A. McCone, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, provided
an affidavit to the Warren Commission in which h e swore that, based on his
personal knowledge and on "detailed inquires he caused to be made" within
the CIA, Lee Harvey Oswald was not an agent, employee or informant of the
CIA. In addition, McCone also swore" "Lee Harvey Oswald
was never associated or connected, directly or indirectly, in any way whatsoever
with the Agency."
On March
12th, 1964, Richard Helms, then Deputy Director of Plans (DDP) of the CIA,
met with Warren Commission General Counsel J. Lee Ranklin. Helms was
in charge of all the Agency's covert operations. The minutes of that
meeting reveal that Helms told Ranking that "the Commission would have to
take his word for the fact that Oswald had not been an agent" of the CIA.
More than
10 years later, in November, 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
issued a report which concluded that CIA Deputy Director Helms had deliberately
kept secret from his own boss, Director McCone, the existence of certain
covert operations. In the light, the implication of what Antonio Veciana
revealed for the first time on March 2nd, 1976, had historic relevance:
That an individual apparently associated with the CIA had contact with Lee
Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Moreover, that this CIA operative was involved in Castro assassination attempts
in which, for some reason the Agency was not admitting participation.
More than
three years after the initial interview, the House Select Committee on Assassinations
totally discounted Veciana's testimony. The Committee's final report
cited as one of the factors for dismissing it the fact that "Veciana waited
more than 10 year after the assassination to reveal his story." Ignoring
the obvious -- that assuming Veciana's story is a fabrication raises questions
more intriguing than it obliterates -- the Committee's conclusion does not
take into account the circumstances surrounding the spawning of the revelations.
It ignores the facts that I did not initially question Veciana and that he
was not aware of my specific interest in it until later in the interview.
Nevertheless, there are very valid factors governing the reason Veciana revealed
his relationship to Maurice Bishop when he did - and why, later, he was less
than candid about identifying Bishop.
Veciana
had just spent 27 months in a federal prison on a charge of conspiracy to
import narcotics. He was convinced in a New York federal court largely
on the testimony of a former partner with whom he had been in the sporting
goods business in Puerto Rico. The former partner, arrested with 10
kilos of cocaine, implicated Veciana. In doing so, he avoided a long
jail term himself. He was the only witness against Veciana, who has
steadfastly maintained his innocence. Veciana says, however, that the
evidence against him appeared very good and that even the federal narcotics
agents believed he was guilty. For that reason, he is still accumulating
documentation to disprove it and, despite having served his sentence, is
appealing his conviction. Given time, he says, he can destroy the evidence
against him. He has already produced some documentation to back his
claim.
There
is absolutely no indication from any source, including the confidential records
of certain law enforcement agencies, that Veciana had any association with
narcotics dealing prior to his arrest. In the bitterly competitive
world of Cuban exile politics, Veciana's reputation is curiously unspotted.
A former associate, now a top executive with national insurance firm, told
me, "Veciana was the straightest, absolutely trustworthy, most honest person
I ever met."
At the
time of the first interview, Veciana still was prison pale. He had
not yet been completely paroled and had to return each evening to a release
center. There was a cautiousness, a defensiveness in his attitude and
an admitted confusion about what had happened to him. He was anxious
to talk in detail about he case against him and seemed, at times, almost
in grudging admiration of the evidence. For instance, he said, just
before his trial an arsonist set fire to his property of his former partner
who was going to testify against him. "I never ordered anyone to do
that," said Veciana, "but it made it look very bad for me." He insisted
that the evidence used against him at the trial was manufactured. "But
it was done well enough to get the authorities to believe it," he said.
"I know because I have done that kind of work myself."
At that
time, there was a strong, clearly expressed feeling on Veciana's part that
what had happened to him was directly connected with his previous relationship
with Maurice Bishop. He suggested the possibility that his final disagreement
with him might have caused Bishop to take steps to put him out of action.
That's why, he said that, he was anxious to find Bishop and confront him
with that possibility. The he would know. Over the months following
that initial interview I watched Veciana change. Soon that early tentativeness,
that cautious wariness, the shade of prison gray in his eyes began to fade
as he got back into living, resumed his patriarchal confidence, began moving
in his old circles and, I believe, got back deeply but very secretively into
anti-Castro activity. As he did, and thought more of his experience,
he began to change his feelings about Bishop's involvement in h is going
to prison. then one day he told me he was sure he had been set up by
Castro agents. He still, however, said he wanted to find Bishop, although
now for a different reason. Maurice Bishop could again be of some help
to him. Nevertheless, Veciana's initial feelings were confirmed in
an interview with a close associated. He told his associate, confidentially,
that he thought the CIA had framed him because he insisted in moving ahead
with another plot to kill Castro.
The discovery
of Antonio Veciana and his information could not have come at a worse time
for Senator Chruch and the staff of his Select Committtee on Intelligence.
Church had told the staff, which had alrady gone beyond its deadline more
than once, it was gettting its obsolutely final extension, another month
to finish up the Schweiker report. CHruch was chomping at the bit anxious
to get into the Presidentaial sweepstakes. The Chruch Committtee had
gyotten the attention he wanted with it multiple reports on assassinatin
plots agains foreign leaders and illegal intelligence agency snooping and
now he had other priorities.
Senator
Schweiker had immediately recogniszed the significance and, as Paul Hoch
had suggested, to whether or not the CIA had been totally honest with the
Committee about all its Castro plots. Schwiker thought the new information
was explosive enought to re-open hearings. On that, he immediately
ran into a stone wall with both Chrurch and the staff leaders. Although
he never let me or his own staff know it, Schweiker was obviously upset.
He wasn't concerned aobut his own report which, he felt, was already storng
enough in impugning the Warren Commission's conclusions -- the first official
government document to do that --- he was interested in getting the information
on record. In a letter to his subcommittee co-chairman Hart but obviously
directed at Church and staff diretor F.O.A. schwartz, Schweiker wrote:
"I feel strongly Veciana should be called to testify under oath, to evaluate
his crdibility, create an official record of his allegations and examine
them .... I recognize that this involves some difficulty at this stage
of our proceeding, but in veiw of Veciana's direct link to intelligence community
activities subject to the Select Committee's jurisdiction, I do not believe
we can responsible refuse to evaluate his allegations." That put the
Committee on the spot. My concern, however, was less with what the
Committee would do than how it would do it. I felt we had stumble upon
what could possible be a totally new area of information in the Kennedy assasination
investigation and that developing it should be done in a structured and comprehensive
way. The committee staff had the power and resources to do that if
it truly wanted to. Or it could mishandle it and possible cause
doors to be locked tight forever. I called Dave Marston in Schweiker's
office to ask him what ws going to happen. "Well, I thnk they'll do
something," he said. "I think what they'll do is screw it up.
I think they'll go the most direct way, that is, make a official inquiry.
So then there will be an official inquiry and if there is anything there
it'll be gone."
In the
long run, that's exactly what the Committtee staff did. I was asked
to bring Veciana to Washington where he was sworn in at a secret executive
session. Schweiker was the only Committtee member who showed up.
Veciana was sworn in and a staff attorney questioned him for less than an
hour. Only the barest details of his story got on record. A transcript
of the hearing would go into restricted security files. Not a word
about it would be mentioned in any of the Intelligence Committee's reports.
The question of whether or not the CIA was involved in Veciana's attempts
to assassinate Castro ws not confronted. Veciana was not asked about
them. Much to my frustration and that of his other personal staffers,
Schweiker was scrupulous about keeping from us the details of the Committee
staff's work. Since we did not h ave security clearnace and had not
signed non-disclosure agreements, we were not meant to have access to any
Committee information. Yet the Committee staff itself wanted to make
use of me. Since it was busy compiling its final report and I was the
only investigator investingating, and so from being told, through Schweiker,
what to check or who to interview, I could deduce what the Committee's unethusiastic
efforts to follow up the Veciana lead were producing.
For instance,
the CIA told the COmmittee it had no employee name Maurice Bishop and no
record of any agent ever using that alias. I also deduced, from a discussion
with an Army Intelligence asset I had been sent to interview in New Orleans,
that the CIA told the Committee that Veciana and Alpha 66 were monitored
not by the Agency but by Army Intelligence. I thought this was a misdirection.
I pointed out that Veciana was aware of his contacts with Army Intelligence,
that they covered only a limited period of anti-Castro activities and that
they were separate and distinct from his relationship with Maurice Bishop.
Nevertheless, after the CIA denied an interest in Veciana, the Committee
staff pursued the Army Intelligence angle up until the end.
Schweiker
could see what was happening. It became apparent that if we left it
to the Committee to pursue the Veciana lead it would die. Dave Newhall,
Schweiker's administrative assistant and a former investigative reporter
himself, called me one day. "We just don't seem to be able to get through
to the Committee staff about the significance of this," he said. "They're
good Wall Street-type lawyers but they don't have street smarts and they
don't have enough background in this case. Besides, most of them are
packing their bags and looking around for other jobs by now. I think
we'd better start moving on our own." It was the first indication I
had that Schweiker was willing to pursue the Kennedy assassination investigation
beyond the life of Select Committee and his own subcommittee. He had
some leeway in that it would be a few months before his report would be officially
published, since it had to be cleared by the CIA, part of the Committee's
original agreement with the Agency. But the Committee itself would
no longer exist the Schweiker would be on his own, with no subpoena power
or legal clout.
To his
credit, and a bit against the grain of "proper" senatorial protocol, Schweiker
pursued the Veciana lead for moths beyond his subcommittee's demise and even
beyond the issuance of its final report. In fact, it was only well
after the Reagan strategists lured him into a sacrificial role as a Vice
Presidential candidate, and convinced him that the political risks of continuing
his private Kennedy assassination investigation would be too great, did he
decide to drop it.
end part
1XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
However,
also to Schweiker's credit in pursuing the Veciana lead was the fact that
it was in direct contradiction to the thesis being pushed in his own subcommittee's
report. The report suggested that it was very possible that Castro
killed Kennedy. The Veciana lead negated the Castro retaliation theory.
In fact, what I considered a factor in judging Veciana's credibility was
his own feelings about he Kennedy assassination. I had spoken to a
number of anti-Castro exile leaders, most still very dedicated and many fanatically
determined to get rid of the Cuban dictator. None, I have come to believe,
more deeply committed than Veciana. Yet almost to a man these exile
leaders touted the same theory about the Kennedy assassination: Castro
did it. They knew little of the evidence or the facts, they only knew
that Castro did it. Except Veciana. Down through the years, I
have discussed various theories about he Kennedy assassination with him and
he has been consistent in his reaction: "I don't think Castro did it,"
he says thoughtfully. "I know Castro. He is crazy. Once,
when he was down to his last 12 men in the mountains, he said, 'Now, there
is no way we can lose!' He is crazy but he did not kill Kennedy. That
would have been much too crazy. I think it was a plan, sure.
"By "a plan, sure," Veciana means a conspiracy. "Bishop would know,"
he adds. "I think Bishop would know."
The Office
of a United States Senator carries, in itself, a certain amount of clout.
But a Senator does not have subpoena power or the right to demand answers
from anyone. Nevertheless, in terms of substantive investigative results,
Schweiker's staff would accomplish in a few months more than the House Assassinations
Committee would in two years in the Veciana area. The bottom-line question
blared from the beginning: Was Veciana telling the truth? There
were parts of his story which would obviously be difficult, if not impossible,
to corroborate. There were many other parts, however, which could be
easily checked. Confirmation would in the very least, be an indication
of his credibility. His background checked out, of course, as did his
professional standing, his position in the Havana bank and his relationship
with its owner, Julio Lobo. An official Cuban government newspaper
detailed his role in the 1961 Castro assassination attempt and confirmed
the details as Veciana had reported. His founding of Alpha 66 and his
anti-Castro activities were part of the historical records from that period.
There
were, however, a few key pieces of special significance. One of the
points that Veciana himself made about the influence of Maurice Bishop and
his obvious connection with the United States government was the fact that
Bishop had gotten him a position with the U.S. Agency for International Development
despite Veciana's documented record as an anti-Castro terrorist. During
this time, the Bishop plan to assassinate Castro was developed in Caracas.
Schweiker asked the U.S. State Department to check its files. The State
Department wired its confirmation from La Paz: Veciana did work as
a "commercial banking expert" for Bolivia's Central Bank, the telegram reported.
His contracts were financed by the AID. They were for the salary and
for the time period Veciana said they were. During this period he claimed
a legal residence in Caracas.
The State
Department telegram also contained, in passing, an unusual revelation.
Veciana's application for Federal employment, it noted, had an unexplainable
omission: It was unsigned. There were numerous other aspects
of Veciana's story which, as I check into them, added to his general credibility.
There were, for instance, a number of CIA-sponsored leaflet drops over Cuba,
but only a limited number of people knew of the Celula Fantasma operation
by name. One of them was Frank Fiorini Sturgis, who admitted his role
in it. In Puerto Rico I found the friend of Veciana's who put him in
touch with the hard-drinking American whom Bishop obviously knew. The
friend confirmed Veciana's story. I then tracked down he American himself,
now living in palm Beach. While enjoying a liquid lunch at the Ta-
Boo, he acknowledged his contacts with the CIA< recalled the meeting with
Veciana but said he never knew anyone named Maurice Bishop.
A confidential
source, a veteran of the U.S. Customs office in Miami, told me that Cesar
Diosdado, the Customs Agent who questioned Veciana was, indeed, working for
the CIA in Key West, as Veciana had suspected. Customs was reportedly
reimbursed for his salary by the Agency. This was confirmed by another
source who was close to the former head of the local Customs office.
(Diosdado is now with the Drug Enforcement Administration in California.)
One of
the most incredible aspects of Veciana's story is his statement that he was
given $253,000 in cash by Bishop at the termination of their relationship.
Perhaps even more incredible, on the surface, was that he could tell me about
it. Aware, however, of the circumstances in which he made that revelation,
I've always felt the fact that the did tell me a key factor in assessing
his credibility. He had, first of all, initially insisted on
the absolute confidentiality of the interview. Before mentioned the
money specifically, he again repeated the condition of confidentiality.
When I asked if he could prove he had the money or what he did with it, he
said he could show how he disburse it through several channels, but Senator
Schweiker would have to first guarantee him immunity from action by the Internal
Revenue Service. Schweiker could not to that. As a result, when
Veciana's sworn testimony was taken before the Senate Select Committee, at
Veciana's request that area of questioning was omitted when Veciana first
told me of receiving the money, his wife, who had been doing chores around
the house and occasionally rushing in to retrieve their two youngest who
kept escaping from the kitchen, happened to be passing through the livingroom
at that moment of the interview. "Remember," he interrupted himself
to ask her in passing, "when I mentioned to you how strange that we should
get that on the 26th of July." Indeed, she said, she did. Also
confirmed, of course, was the fact that the dogs were running at the Flagler
track that day.
Another
point which appeared initially to be readily checked was the existence of
the two individuals at the American Embassy in Havana to who Bishop had sent
Veciana: Kail and Smith. The right Smith, however, would not
be discovered until he happened to pop into the news much later, during the
closing days of the House Assassinations Committee. Kail I stumbled
upon almost immediately.
I happened
to be talking with the late Paul Bethel in Coconut Grove one day. Bethel
was a strong right-winger, once a Congressional candidate, author and head
of the U.S. Information Agency in Havana when Castro took over. He
was married to a Cuban, active in anti-Castro activities and an excellent
source of information about he exile community in Miami. Many suspected
he has an association with the CIA. I asked Bethel if he recalled a
fellow named Kail at the American Embassy. "Sure," said Bethel.
"I knew Sam well. Military attaché. I believe he's retired
now, probably back home in Dallas."
Sam Kail
was listed in the Dallas telephone directory. When I told Veciana I
had found him, Veciana said, "You know, I would like to call him. Perhaps
he remembers Bishop." He suggested I listen to the call. "Do
you remember me?" Veciana asked Kail after he had introduced himself.
Kail seemed very hesitant and very cautions. "Well, I'm not sure,"
he said. "Remember," coaxed Veciana, "the last time I saw you, in December,
1960, you were going home for Christmas." Kail remembered. "Yes,
I did come home that Christmas," he said. "then you remember me?"
No, Kail said, he can't say that he does. "At any rate," Veciana went
on, "I am trying to find a friend, the American who sent me to you.
He was a big help to me in fighting Castro. Now I need to find him.
Do you remember Maurice Bishop?" Kail was silent for a moment.
"Bishop?" he repeated. More silence. "Bishop," he said again,
as if thinking about it. Kail said that off the top of his head he
didn't recall the name, but he would like to give it some thought.
He said he would think about if for a day or two and then call Veciana back.
Kail never called Veciana back. A couple of weeks later I suggested
to Veciana that he call Kail again. Kail said he had given some thought
to the name of the American that Veciana had asked him about but, try as
he did, he just couldn't recall every knowing anyone named Maurice Bishop,
nor anyone named Bishop who fitted the description Veciana had given.
Sorry he couldn't be of any help, said Kail.
During
the remaining months of Schweiker's investigation, I showed Veciana more
than a dozen photographs of individuals who came close to fitting his description
of Maurice Bishop. Some were sent by the staff of the Select Committee
and, I assumed, were mostly Army Intelligence operative. Most of the
ones I dug up were individuals who, at some point or another -- but usually
not more than at one point -- were in the right place at the right time and
had some association with the CIA or Lee Harvey Oswald or the investigations
of the Kennedy assassination. Included were a few Organized Crime figures.
One who
first struck me as possible being Maurice Bishop was Oswald's Dallas friend,
George DeMohrenschildt. The globe-trotting DeMohrenschildt and a group
of anti-Communist White Russian cohorts had befriended the Oswalds as soon
as they had returned to Dallas from the Soviet Union. Down through
the years, most Kennedy assassination researchers had come to conclude that
DeMohrenschildt had intelligence agency ties. George DeMohrenschildt
loosely fitted Veciana's verbal description of Bishop. I became a bit
excited when I discovered that DeMohrenschildt was then teaching at a small
school in Dallas called Bishop College. Checking further, I learned
that Bishop College once had the reputation of being a hot-bed of Leftist
activity and a known center of Communist agitators. However, it later
became known that the college had, in fact, received major financial support
from a foundation which was founded by the CIA. It appeared to be an
Agency decoy.
Shown
a number of photographs of George DeMohrenschildt, Veciana stated flatly
that he was not Maurice Bishop. Checking further into DeMohrenschildt's
background, I discovered another factors which made it pretty clear that
he couldn't have been.
Part of
the problem, initially, was that it was though to get from Veciana's verbal
attempts a good handle on Bishop's physical characteristics. Veciana
had known and been in contact with Bishop over a period of 13 years.
The man had obviously changed and Vecian's mental image was an amalgam of
those changes. Depending on when I spoke with him, Ceciana's guess
at Bishop's age when he first met him in 1960 ranged from "over 35" to "under
45." He was tall, "maybe six foot," or "maybe six-foot-two."
He was "very built," and "no, not very muscular," but "close to 200 pounds"
or "maybe 210 pounds." It had occurred to me in listening to Veciana
describe Bishop as he appeared at the many meetings down through the years
that perhaps Bishop used a disguise, likely very subtle and sophisticated,
which change is true appearance only slightly but effectively enough to raise
some doubts about his identity in the mind of anyone who happened to see
him with Veciana.
Although
Veciana's general description of Bishop may appear to have been a bit wavy,
he did provide certain discriminating details which made Bishop a very specific
character. He said, for instance, that Bishop was always a very meticulous
dresser, neat and well-groomed. In his later years, he wore glasses
more often, but took them off to ruminate with the stem on his lips.
He was usually well-tanned, although under his eyes there was a certain blotchiness,
a spotty darkness, as if from being in the sun too long. He had brown
h air, given to some gray later. Generally, he was a good-looking man.
At our
initial meeting, Veciana seemed sincere enough when he expressed his own
strong desire to find Maurice Bishop. He seemed determined then to
find out if the reason for his being in prison was a result of his previous
relationship with Bishop. Veciana said that as soon he was settled
down and out from under the restrictions of parole and free to travel again,
he was going to have an artist do a sketch of Bishop from a description he
would provide. That, he said, might help him in looking for Bishop.
I didn't think much about that idea until I had shown Veciana a score of
photographs and gotten negative results so clearly and abruptly. Then
I realized that although each of the suspects had at least one characteristic
similar to Veciana's description of Bishop, a comprehensive image would have
eliminated them immediately. Veciana agreed. A professionally-drawn
composite sketch of Maurice Bishop would help narrow the focus.
Security
was one of my main concerns right from the beginning. The crazy world
of Cuban exile politics in Miami has its share of fanatics as well as professional
assassins, as the pattern of bombings and ambushes in Little Havana down
through the years clearly shows. A few months before I first spoke
with Veciana, an exile leader named Rolando Masferrer, known as El Tigre
when he headed Batista's secret police, condoned the rash or bombings in
a local magazine article. "You do not beg for freedom," he wrote, "you
conquer it.... In the meantime, dynamite can speak in a uniquely eloquent
manner...." A week later, half of Masferrer was found in what remained
of his car when he tried to start it that morning. A uniquely eloquent
retort.
Paranoia,
to one degree or other, is one of the factors anyone delving to any depth
into researching the Kennedy assassination must face. Veciana himself,
in insisting on a promise of confidentiality before he made his revelations,
was obviously concerned about he risks involved. For the reason, we
both agreed it would be prudent to have the composite sketch of Maurice Bishop
done in a police department outside the Miami area. Professional composite
artists work only for law enforcement agencies. I didn't, of course,
want to use a Federal Agency.)
Through
a contact in a department in another city, I arranged for Veciana to spend
most of the day with its best police artist. I had given the police
artist a rough description of Bishop by telephone before we arrived so that
he was able to do some general preliminary sketches to use as a base.
Veciana then spent a couple of hours in tediously going through about 300
police mug shots picking out individual features from those that can closest
to resembling Bishop's. "The problem," Veciana sighed as he flipped
through the mug shots, "is all the individuals look like criminals.
Bishop, he was a gentleman. He looked like a gentleman."
Veciana's
session with the police artist was particularly interesting because it caused
him to focus much more intensely on Bishop's specific features. He
described, for instance, a distinctive lower lip, a straight nose but not
sharp, nostrils not too narrow, a face longer than it was round and, again,
perhaps the most noticeable feature, a darkened area appeared a bit suntanned
most of the time, the area under his eyes was almost leathery looking.
It was late in the afternoon when the police artist finished a sketch that
Veciana proclaimed was "pretty good." The artist himself had warned
that composite sketches aren't meant to be exact resemblances of individuals.
They are designed to elicit a chain of recall in witnesses and spark recollection
of images which lead to some suspects eliminate others. Veciana said
that the sketch of Bishop was not really what Bishop looked like, but he
appeared to be satisfied that it was, as he termed it, "close."
Veciana
returned to Miami and the next morning I took the Bishop sketch and copies
of it to Schweiker's office in Washington. Dave Marston had taken the
day off to go to Philadelphia to look for a house. His nomination as
U.S. Attorney for the eastern district of Pennsylvania was before Congress
and he did not lack for confidence. Dace Newhall looked at the sketch
with a new fascination. "You know, it looks exactly like I thought
it would from the description we were working on," he said. "I think
the boss will want to see this right away." (Newhall never referred to Schweiker
as "Dick," which is the way the Senator usually introduced himself.
I was always bemused by Newhall's favorite term -- "the boss" -- because
it was a bit of a disillusion of his own power in the office)
Schweiker
was attending a hearing of the Senate Health Committee, one of his permanent
post, in the Rayburn Building. We got word to him and, during a break
in the hearing, we huddled in a corner of the anteroom of the chamber.
The Health Committee chairman, Senator Edward Kennedy, glanced quizzically
at the three of us hunched over the sketch as he hurried through the anteroom.
(Schweiker, as a courtesy, had written a note to Kennedy prior to his calling
on the Church Committee to establish a special subcommittee to investigate
President Kennedy's murder. Senator Kennedy reaction was not negative,
which Schweiker interpreted as a signal to go ahead.)
Schweiker
looked at the sketch intensely. His first reaction was a mumbled, "That's
pretty good," as if he were commenting on the quality of the art work.
Then, very seriously, he said, "I've seen that face before." Newhall
and I laughed. For an instance we both thought he was just being kiddingly
glib with a dramatic cliche that fit the moment. But Schweiker was,
in fact, being very serious. "That's a very familiar face," he said,
staring now hard at the sketch. "Perhaps..maybe it was someone from
Sate who briefed me on something recently. We've been getting a lot
of those." He paused and thought a bit. "No, maybe not."
He kept staring at the sketch. "He's very familiar," He said again.
"Does it look like Harvey?" asked Newhall. William Harvey had
been cited by the Church Committee as the CIA's coordinator in its Castro
assassination plots with the Mafia.
"No, it's
not Harvey," Schweiker said. Finally he sighed, resigned at his inability
to recollect the image. "I've got to get back to the hearing," he said.
"Why don't you take a copy down to the Committee staff. I'll give it
more thought later."
The Intelligence
Committee staff worked out of a sprawling arrangement of cubicles on the
ground floor of the old Dirkson Office Building. Newhall and I signed
in at the security desk and a staff attorney who had been working with Schweiker
on the Kennedy subcommittee emerged from the inner recesses. We showed
him the sketch. He looked at the photograph and nodded his head as
if he in approval. "Fine," he said. "That's fine." He gave
no indication that the sketch reminded him of anyone in particular.
He took a copy of it and, I assumed, stuck it securely in Committee's classified
files.
That night
I flew back to Miami. It was a Friday early in April, about a month
after my first interview with Veciana. During that interval I had spoken
with him more than a dozen times. I had two additional lengthy interviews
with him at which I tried to extract every possible detail he could recall
about Maurice Bishop. More importantly, we began to establish a certain
relationship. I would drop in at his home and call him on the telephone
frequently just to ask a question or two about a minor detail that may have
come to mind. We also got to know each other better as we traveled
back and to Washington and around Miami to those sites where he recalled
meeting Bishop. From those formal interviews and informal discussions,
I began to accumulate not only a structured image of Maurice Bishop as an
intelligence operative -- but also a sense of the man himself as Veciana
saw him. At that point, this is what I knew about Maurice Bishop:
He was in Havana in the summer of 1960 when Veciana first met him.
He was working undercover, probably using some business association or firm
as a front. There may have been some relationship with some business
in that building in which Veciana was given his training instruction, maybe
with the American mining company or the Berlitz School. Bishop was
obviously familiar with the personnel and their positions at the American
Embassy. He appeared to be a specialist in propaganda, psychological
warfare and counterintelligence, judging from his primary interests and Veciana's
activities.
From the
character of his Spanish he was probably schooled in the language, but even
before Havana he had most likely spent a good deal of time in a Spanish-speaking
country. He was very intelligent, very liberated and very articulated.
He was, as Veciana put it, a gentleman, perhaps from the South, more likely
from Texas.
The Church
Committee had uncovered the fact that there had been secret operations and
certain ultra-sensitive missions conducted outside the CIA's normal chain
of command. Given that, Bishop may have been among a select clique
with the Agency and, as such, trusted enough to be given an "unofficial"
Castro assassination mission. Since Veciana's activities in the late
'60s began to broaden beyond Cuban affairs and encompass other anti-Communist
operations in Latin America, it also appeared likely that Bishop had moved
up the Agency's executive ladder -- another indication of his having been
associated with a key power group within the CIA.
At the
time of the Kennedy assassination, however, Bishop appeared to be particularly
knowledgeable about intelligence operations in Mexico City, since he not
only was aware of Oswald's activities there, he also knew that Veciana's
cousin was a Castro intelligence officer stationed in Cuban Embassy.
By the
early '70s, Bishop had broadened his interests and contacts throughout Latin
America. However, Bishop's role in the 1971 Castro assassination attempt
in Chile, his ability to reach key military personnel there, indicated he
had a special relationship in that country. The week before we had
constructed the composite sketch of Bishop, I wrote a memo to Schweiker indicating
what I initially thought would be primary areas of investigation. The
memo noted: "Veciana strongly believes that Bishop had something to
do with the downfall of Allende in Chile."
Finally,
another indication of Bishop's position in more recent years derived from
the large amount of money paid Veciana at the end of their relationship in
1973. Bishop probably had to be in a position to have access to such
funds and, perhaps, also have the power to cover them -- or be in association
with someone who did. (It was the large amount of the final payment
which reinforced the indications of a CIA association. As indicated
by the cost of its JM/WAVE operations as far back as the early '60s, the
Agency has always been lavish in its disposal of funds).
On Sunday
evening, that weekend I returned from Washington after the composite sketch
was drawn, I received a called from Dave Newhall. He said he had just
gotten a call from Schweiker in Pennsylvania. "The boss was driving
home when he suddenly remembered who the guy in the sketch reminded him of,"
Newhall said. "He stopped the car and just called me from a phone booth."
The sketch
of Maurice Bishop reminded Schweiker of Dave Atlee Phillips, the former CIA
propaganda chief of the Bay of Pigs invasion, now retired. Phillips
had come before the Senate Intelligence Committee on more than one occasion.
The Committee was interested especially in two phases of Phillips' career:
One was as head of the CIA's task force to prevent the election of Allende
in Chile" the other was in his role as chief of the Agency's unit in
Mexico City responsible for sending to the Warren Commission photographs
of a man erroneously identified as Lee Harvey Oswald. Phillips had
announced his retirement, after 25 years of service with the CIA, in the
Spring of 1975. At the time, the nation was being stirred by a barrage
of press revelations about the illegal activities of the intelligence agencies.
Veciana was still in prison and not yet being considered for parole.
Phillips made minor headlines when he called a press conference at his retirement
and announced he would lead an association of retired intelligence officers
in defense of the CIA.
According
to Phillips, one of the major factors that led to his retirement was, as
he put it, "the rash of sensational headlines in the world press that leave
the impression the CIA is an organization of unprincipled people who capriciously
interfere in the lives of U.S. citizens at home an abroad." He said
he wanted to "straighten out the record." Newhall is usually a laconic
guy, but there was an edge in his voice that evening he called to tell me
about Schweiker honing in on David Phillips. "The boss thinks the resemblance
is pretty damn close," he said. He asked if I could dig up an old newspaper
clip of Phillip's press conference and show the photo in it to Veciana.
The next
morning I checked the date of the press conference, picked up a back issue
of the Miami Herald and went directly to Veciana's place. He wasn't
home. His wife said she didn't expect him back until evening and didn't
know how to reach him. I returned home to another call from Newhall.
"We've found a good photo of Phillips in the last June 23rd issued of People
magazine," he said. "It did a feature about his forming that retired
intelligence agents group. Do you think you can pick up a copy/"
I said I would tried because the Herald photo, a wire service reproduction,
was a poor one and the image a bit washed out. However, after trying
several sources, I couldn't locate the particular back issue of People.
The public library had already put it into a bound volume. Since it
appeared that I wouldn't be able to get a reproduction of the article until
the next day, I decided I would later call Veciana and ask him to join me
at the public library the next morning. We could look at the magazine
in the bound volume together.
That evening,
while waiting to talk with Veciana, I glanced at the story that had appeared
in the Herald when Phillips announced his retirement. There were scant
details about his background. It noted that he had early been a professional
actor, had been recruited by the CIA when he edited an English-language newspaper
in Chile in the early 1950s, had been assigned posts in Mexico and Venezuela
and was working undercover in Cuba when Castro took over.
Phillips
retired before the Church Committee was formed and before the CIA had admitted
to some of the activities that would later garner the Committee its headlines.
In defending the Agency at his press conference, Phillips vigorously rebutted
charges about the CIA which were kicking around at the time. The CIA
did not financially support the strikes that led to Allende's overthrow,
he declared. Also, he said, the CIA never plotted the assassination
of Fidel Castro. Phillips made one final point: He said he assumed
that many would claim his retirement was phony and that the association he
was forming is really a CIA operation. "It is not," he declared strongly.
The facts would later indicate he was wrong on at least two out of three
of those contentions.
When I
contacted Veciana that evening he said he did not know the name of David
Phillips or remember seeing photographs of the man. He said, sure,
hew would come to the public library with me the next morning. "I will
call Dr. Abella and ask him to come with us also," he said. "Then we
can do two things." In talking with Veciana over the weeks about he
Kennedy assassination, it appeared that for the first time he was becoming
interested in some of the details. One day he told me he had been talking
with a close friend, Dr. Manuel Abella, about the assassination. He
said Abella mentioned he recalled seeing a photograph of the crowd in Dealey
Plaza just prior to the assassination. He thought the photo was in
Life or Look, he wasn't sure. However, Abella said, he recognized a
face in the crowd of a man he knew from Cuba as a Castro agent. I had
spoken with Abella and checked back issues of the magazines he suggested,
but didn't find the crowd shot he described. Veciana had said that
someday he would take Abella to the library and help him search for the magazine.
Now Veciana saw my request to go to the library as a opportunity to do that
also.
The next
morning, Dr. Abella, a cigar-chomping pudgy little guy, was waiting with
Veciana at his home. We drove downtown to the Dade Public Library in
Bayfront Park, the site of the every-burning Torch of Freedom donated by
Miami's Cuban exile community. That morning there happened to a demonstration
in progress at the Torch. A shouting group of masked Iranian students
was calling for the ouster of the Shah. Veciana looked at them, smile
slightly and shook his head. He was used to more active forms of demonstrative
dissension.
At the
periodical desk I asked for the bound volume of People magazine with the
Phillips article and for the volumes of Life and Look with issues that might
have crowd photos of Dealey Plaza. We took them to the empty table
at one end of the room. Veciana sat down and put on his glasses.
I stood beside him and found the article about Phillips in People.
There was a half- page black-and-white photo of him standing under a highway
sign, obviously taken near Langley. The sign said: "CIA NEXT
RIGHT." Phillips was depicted almost full-figured, casually dressed,
standing with his hands in his pockets and wearing a guyabera. The
resemblance to the Bishop sketch was clear: The square jaw, the distinctive
lower lip, the straight nose, the forehead and yes, the darkened area under
the eyes. Only the hair style was different.
Veciana
looked at the photo. He looked at the photo. I watched his face
for some reaction but there was none. He kept starting at the photo.
"Is it him?" I asked. Veciana didn't answer. His fact was
totally expressionless but his eyes were intensely focused on the photo.
Finally, he turned the page of the magazine. There was two additional
photos of Phillips, both smaller and both showing Phillips' face less directly
and less clearly. Veciana turned back to the large photo. "Is
it him?" I asked again. Almost a half a minute had passed and
the suspense was pressing on me. Without taking his eyes from the photo,
he said, It is close." I wanted to shout at him: It is close?
What the hell do you mean, it is close! Is it him or isn't it him?
I didn't shout. Instead, I leaned closer and asked again softly: "Is
it him?" Veciana did not take his eyes off the photo. "Does he
have a brother?" he asked. The question took me aback.
"I don't know," I said, but is he Bishop?" Veciana finally shook his
head. "It is close, but it is not him." I remember feeling a
sight of relief at the end of the suspense. "Are you sure it's not
him?" I asked. "No, it's not him," Veciana said again.
Well, I thought, that sounds pretty definite, and turned to the other volumes
that Dr. Abella was waiting to look through. Then Veciana, still looking
at the photo, added: "But I would like to talk with him."
"You would like to talk with Phillips?" I asked, not quite getting
his point. "Do you think Phillips is Bishop?" "No, he is not
Bishop," Veciana said, "but he is CIA and maybe he could help."
Maybe
he could, I thought, and turned to help Abella leafing through the other
bound volumes looking for that crowd shot with the Castro agent. Abella
had described the photo precisely, but it was neither in Life nor Look.
Then Abella said maybe it was in Argosy or True, because he remembered articles
about the Kennedy Assassination in those, also. So I went to get the
bound volumes of those publications and we began looking through them.
Again, we had no luck, but it had taken us about 15 minutes in the searching.
Veciana, meanwhile, had remained seated at the table staring at the same
photo of David Phillips.
Before
the Schweiker investigation had come to a close, more than a dozen individuals
had been considered, however fleetingly, as possible having been the man
who called himself Maurice Bishop. Most of them came to attention because
of having been in anti-Castro activity. The staff of the Senate Intelligence
Committee continued to mostly look for Bishop in the area of Army Intelligence,
despite my trying to make clear to them that Veciana knew of his contacts
there and very much doubted that Bishop was with the military. (Besides
being touted into Army Intelligence by the CIA< the Senate Committee staff,
I would later learn, considered Veciana being referred to Colonel Kail at
the American Embassy significant, since Karl was very much involved in intelligence.
The staff didn't considered the possibility that some Army Intelligence personnel
may actually work for the CIA.) I continued to show Veciana photographs
of individuals sent to me by the Committee staff and others I dug up myself.
Some, like DeMohrenschildt, bore a closer resemblance to the sketch than
others, but none came near as close as David Phillips. Occasionally,
Veciana himself would mention that. Sometimes he would add, "Well,
you know, maybe it would help if I could talk with him." Or, "Maybe
if I saw him I could tell better." Slowly I began getting the impression
that his very definite negative answer when he saw the photo of Phillips
wasn't all that definite. In addition, the more we dug into Phillips'
background, the more the pattern of his being in the right place at the right
time began to emerge. Marston and I began discussing the possibility
of bringing Veciana together with Phillips in a direct confrontation.
The Committee staff, however, had decided not to call Phillips back for any
additional questions under oath, so whatever he did he had to do on our own
and unofficially.
We did
not have the opportunity to have Veciana confront Phillips until September,
just before Schweiker decided to close down his investigation. Between
my first interview with Veciana and that time, I felt as if I were on a very
fast-moving train trying to spot a smoking gun in the blur of passing woods.
As the Church Committee was winding down, it became clear that only a sensational
new revelation, simple and obvious enough for the public to instantly grasp
its significance, could force the Committee to reopen a full-scale Kennedy
investigation. The Veciana lead was a crack in the door to a new corridor,
but it would take time and resources to develop it before its ultimate significance
could be determined. Nevertheless, I attempted to pursue it as best
I could. Over the months, I tried to locate and talk with everyone
Veciana had named. We were hindered by very limited resources, since
Schweiker's staff budget didn't include travel and expenses for a Kennedy
assassination investigation and he could not use Committee funds for a personal
staff investigator. We never did get to Julio Lobo in Spain or Lopez-Fresquet
and Diosdado in California, for instance.
Meanwhile,
over those same months, there were other leads pressing to be pursued.
Many of the Organized Crime figures who had been active in pre-Castro Havana,
for instance, are now in the Miami area. The contacts I had developed
began providing tips worth following up. (One Cuban exile claimed that
South Florida Mafia boss Santos Trafficante had predicted Kennedy's assassination.)
Other leads seemed to come from nowhere, such as when a former employee of
Jack Ruby's popped up working in a Miami nightclub and told me that Ruby
was afraid the Warren Commission would discover he had been running guns
to Cuba. From each new lead there seemed to dangle a dozen strings
which required immediate follow-up. I was kept very busy.
At the
end of June, the Senate Select Committee issued what it called its "Final
Report": Book V - The Investigation of the Assassination of President
John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies. The
press called it the Schweiker Report. Marston had air-expressed an
advance copy to me the night before Schweiker was scheduled to release it
at a major press conference. I thought the report was of historical
significance as the first official confirmation of the invalidity of the
Warren Commission Report. I objected, however, to its over-emphasizing
the possibility of a Castro retaliation simply on the basis of the Warren
Commission not having been informed of the CIA's Castro assassination plots.
I was discussing that which Marston on the telephone the next afternoon when
Schweiker returned from his press conference. Marston asked Schweiker
to pick up the line. "We've got one of your standard skeptics here,
Senator," he said. "I thought all our skeptics were at the news conference!"
Schweiker yelled in mock anguish.
I congratulated
him on the report, but told him I thought the Warren Commission critics were
going to have what I thought was a legitimate objection. "How could
the Committee have failed to pursue the possible relationship of Oswald to
the intelligence agencies," I asked, "when the Committee discovered the intelligence
agencies admitted a cover-up with the Warren Commission?" "Because,"
said Schweiker, "they took the position that they had no relationship with
Oswald. And there were no documents in their files, they said, which
reveal that there was. We pressed them on that several times and each
time they said they had nothing. We hit a blind alley. I don't
disagree with you, but considering the type of probe the Committee was conducting
and the limited access to the intelligence agencies' files, there was not
much we could do about it."
Schweiker
was right. Considering that the Committee staff had conducted virtually
no independent investigation and relied almost exclusively on records volunteered
by the CIA, getting out the report that he did was a major step forward.
He, at any rate, was ecstatic oat the press reception of the report.
Months before he had predicted that the Warren Commission Report would
"collapse like a house on cards." Now not one newsman at his
press conference had challenged him on that prediction. "We have moved
the whole Washington press corps from feeling I was a junior edition of Jim
Garrison to now considering me a valid Warren Commission critic," he chimed.
Despite
the direction that the Schweiker Report had taken and the public attention
it had garnered, Schweiker was anxious for me to keep quietly pursuing the
Veciana lead. He said he didn't know how long he could continue such
an unofficial investigation, but he felt there were still many things we
could do, even on our own, before we gave up.
END PART ONE ..... FORWARD TO PART TWO
.....
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