Legacy of Secrecy (22 page)

Varona, Ray, and Menoyo would join Harry. Almeida would proclaim a

state of emergency to prevent civil war, and the Cuban American troops

at Fort Benning would be invited in to help prevent a Soviet takeover.

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Raul Castro would be killed as well; his death was easy for Almeida to

arrange, since he worked closely with Raul.

Because of worries that Harry might be captured inside Cuba and

tortured by Fidel’s men, he had not been told some parts of the coup

plan. While Harry knew someone else would take the fall for Fidel’s

death, he didn’t know who that would be. Harry indicated that Bobby

and the CIA were handling that aspect of the plan. Likewise, Harry

was not told exactly how Fidel would be killed or who would do it;

that was something he would learn only after he arrived in Cuba. The

information about Fidel’s being shot in an open jeep at Varadero Beach

comes from later declassified AMWORLD documents and David Atlee

Phillips’s autobiographical novel outline.

Harry had been told that he was only one of several US assets going

into Cuba in the coming days, in preparation for the coup. While the

press was full of reports that the US was restraining groups from staging

raids into Cuba, the handful of exile groups selected by Bobby and Harry

had been encouraged to continue their operations. The CIA mounted its

own small missions into Cuba, with future Watergate burglar Eugenio

Martinez as its premier “boatman.” All of those small raids and infiltra-

tion missions into Cuba during September, October, and the first three

weeks of November were necessary so that there wouldn’t be an obvious

increase in activity just before the coup. In addition, exile leaders Artime,

Ray, Varona, and Menoyo would need to find their own way into Cuba

after the coup, from ports outside the United States, to maintain the

plausible deniability of the whole operation.

As Harry Williams finished his lunch on November 22, 1963, he must

have faced his afternoon session with the CIA men with a sense of both

anticipation and dread. Unless one of the CIA men turned up some

unforeseen problem, Harry would be in Guantanamo and ready to slip

into Cuba in just two days. Harry had already visited Guantanamo for

a couple of days, on a trip Bobby had arranged, just to check it out. He

was certain he would be able to make his way into his Cuban homeland

from there to meet with Almeida. Harry had risked his life to free Cuba

several times before, but that didn’t make doing it yet again any easier.

Still, he was willing to take the risk because he knew he had the backing

of Bobby and JFK, and thus the full force of the US government.

At CIA headquarters, Richard Helms prepared to have lunch with Direc-

tor McCone, Kirkpatrick, and three other CIA officials in a small room

next to McCone’s office. Perhaps it weighed on his mind that he was

keeping sensitive information about his unauthorized Cuban operations

from his superiors. On the other hand, Helms might have viewed his

own efforts to assassinate Castro using Rosselli, QJWIN, and Cubela

as just part of an overall effort to eliminate Fidel at any cost, one that

included the JFK-Almeida coup plan. Helms appeared to feel that as

long as Fidel was terminated, the means didn’t matter. Still, Helms knew

about Bobby’s massive effort against the Mafia, and he must have real-

ized the Attorney General would have never approved the CIA’s use of

people like Rosselli and QJWIN.

Helms knew that in Paris, Cubela’s CIA case officer was meeting

with him and trying to give him a poison pen filled with Blackleaf-40,

a deadly toxin. However, Helms may not have known that, two days

earlier, a CIA officer had telephoned Cubela to set up the November

22 meeting. This meant that scheduling the date opposite JFK’s Dal-

las motorcade originated with someone in the CIA, not with Cubela.9

At the Paris meeting, Cubela’s CIA case officer also told Cubela about

JFK’s speech four days earlier in Miami, citing it “as an indication that

the President supported a coup.”10

Cubela said assassination was the CIA’s idea, and that it was con-

stantly pressuring him to kill Fidel, both on November 22 and at other

times. (In later years, Helms and his associates always testified and said

in interviews that Cubela, not the CIA, wanted to assassinate Fidel.)

According to the CIA, at the November 22 meeting Cubela “asked for the

following items to be included in a cache inside Cuba: 20 hand-grenades,

two high-powered rifles with telescopic sights, and approximately 20

pounds of C-4 explosive.”11 In charge of arranging for those items to be

delivered would be the CIA official whom Cubela says he met in Sep-

tember 1963: David Morales.

David Morales’s activities on November 22, 1963, cannot be docu-

mented, since files concerning his whereabouts that day have never been

released by the CIA. Without the files, it’s impossible to know whether

he was in Miami, Mexico City, or even Dallas. However, by looking at

Morales’s documented actions and statements, we can get a good idea

of what he was up to. For example, we know that at least some of the

things Morales was doing that day involved the assassination of JFK,

since he later admitted his involvement in the murder.

Ten years after President Kennedy’s murder, Morales confessed to

both his attorney and his longtime friend that he had some role in JFK’s

assassination, declaring: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t

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we?”12 As first documented by Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi,

Morales’s admission came at the end of a drunken tirade set off by

the mention of JFK’s name. According to one of the witnesses, Morales

“jumped up screaming, ‘That no good son of a bitch motherfucker!’ He

started yelling about what a wimp Kennedy was and talking about how

he had worked on the Bay of Pigs and how he had to watch all the men

he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy.”13

There is some support for Morales’s claim. His remarks about JFK

bear a remarkable similarity to those Carlos Marcello made regarding

Bobby—apparently when it came to eliminating JFK, they both had

the same goal, though for different reasons. While Oswald was in New

Orleans, several witnesses reported seeing him in the company of a

“Mexican,” though it can’t be determined if this was Morales or some-

one else. Also, more than twenty years after JFK’s murder, Gaeton Fonzi

uncovered a link between Morales and the French Connection drug

smuggler who also helped French Intelligence (SDECE) agents like

Michel Victor Mertz.14

Morales is the only person who confessed to JFK’s assassination that

was in a position to have both manipulated the date of the CIA’s meet-

ing with Cubela in Paris and have suggested that David Atlee Phillips

meet with Lee Oswald in Dallas, in a public place, in September 1963.

Morales had been Phillips’s supervisor in Havana, and they were work-

ing closely together in the fall of 1963. As for Cubela, Cuban authorities

say that Morales met personally with him in September 1963. It’s also

interesting to note that Cubela had originally been recruited for the

CIA by a business associate of Santo Trafficante.15 Morales would have

realized that after JFK’s assassination, the timing of the CIA-Cubela

meeting and Phillips’s meeting with Oswald would force both Helms

and Phillips to cover up or destroy much crucial information to protect

their own careers.

David Morales knew two men—Johnny Rosselli and John Martino—

who later confessed their roles in JFK’s assassination to trusted asso-

ciates:16 Martino even mentioned the normally secretive Morales by

name in his 1963 book
I Was Castro’s Prisoner.
Cuban authorities also

linked Morales to former death-squad leader Rolando Masferrer, the

associate of Martino and Trafficante who was secretly brought into the

JFK-Almeida coup plan after Tony Varona received a $200,000 bribe in

August 1963.17

More information also backs up Morales’s JFK confession. Morales’s

AMOT informants had fed suspicious assassination-related reports

to the CIA even before JFK went to Dallas. These would soon include

claims that the supposed Cuban agent who appeared to shadow JFK in

Chicago and Florida was also in Dallas, before returning to Cuba. Even

Morales’s own government associates felt he was capable of murder.

The number-two official at the huge Miami CIA station, Tom Clines,

told author David Corn that Morales “would do anything, even work

with the Mafia.” According to Corn, Morales once bragged about sabo-

taging the parachutes of “men he suspected of being communists” and

“had the pleasure of waving good-bye to them, as they plummeted to

[their] death.”18

Former US diplomat Wayne Smith, who worked with Morales at the

US embassy in Havana, said that “if [Morales] were in the mob, he’d be

called a hit man.” According to Smith (later America’s highest-ranking

diplomat in Cuba as head of the US Interests Section in Havana from

1979 to 1982), Morales said three years before his death that “Kennedy

got what was coming to him.” Smith has stated, “I am convinced that

[JFK’s] assassination was carried out by . . . men like David Morales,

who I knew well from my days in Cuba.”19

Chapter Eight

Carlos Marcello’s whereabouts on November 22, 1963, at the time of

JFK’s murder are easily documented. The godfather who controlled Lou-

isiana and parts of the surrounding states was sitting in a New Orleans

federal courtroom, watching his trial enter its final stages. Although a

conviction could lead to prison and permanent deportation, Marcello

knew he would be acquitted, since he’d used intermediaries to bribe a

key juror. In a few hours, his friends and family would be throwing a

celebration for him, but Marcello anticipated celebrating more than just

his acquittal.

Marcello knew that his hated enemy, Bobby Kennedy, was sure to

investigate the circumstances of the verdict, and that he and his associ-

ate Hoffa couldn’t go on bribing jurors forever. The Kennedy admin-

istration’s additional prosecutions and investigations of Marcello and

Hoffa, coupled with its relentless pressure on Trafficante and Rosselli,

couldn’t be allowed to continue. But after November 22, Marcello would

no longer have to worry about the Kennedys’ war on organized crime,

because the Attorney General’s brother would no longer be President.

Marcello’s plan that was unfolding on November 22 was consistent

with his criminal behavior for the past two decades, which had been

careful, cautious, and ruthless. In the case of the JFK hit, even his backup

plan (Tampa) had a backup (Dallas). The situation in Dallas looked much

better than it had in either Chicago or Tampa. No active alert had been

issued to law enforcement; no threat had been detected. In addition,

Marcello had already seen in Chicago and Tampa that Bobby and top

federal officials would cover up assassination information in order to

protect national security, and there was no reason to think Dallas would

be any different.

Marcello, along with Trafficante and Rosselli, had thoroughly planned

and considered every aspect of the assassination for the past year, using

all the skills they brought to their multimillion-dollar criminal business

deals. They realized that JFK needed to be assassinated in public in order

to force a quick reaction from Bobby and the government. Since parts

of the slaying had already been linked to the top-secret JFK-Almeida

coup plan, Bobby and top government officials would be forced into

hurried decisions about limiting the investigation to prevent a nuclear

confrontation over Cuba. As with the concealment of the Chicago and

Tampa attempts, once such cover-ups had been put in place, they could

be almost impossible to later admit or undo. These cover-ups would

have to continue as officials and agencies tried to figure out in secret

which parts of the extensive coup plan had been compromised.

Marcello also knew that by killing JFK during his motorcade, he

would guarantee that JFK’s death and its cause couldn’t be hidden for

even a short period of time. This meant that Bobby’s archrival, Lyndon

Johnson, would quickly assume office, before Bobby and his Justice

Department prosecutors had a chance to seize control of the investiga-

tion. Marcello had contributed money to LBJ for years, as he did to many

politicians in the region. The Mafia boss had originally supported John-

son for the 1960 Democratic nomination over JFK, since LBJ had never

gone after the Mafia.1 Because of LBJ’s lack of interest in pursuing the

Mafia, and his enmity with Bobby, an LBJ presidency was far preferable

to having JFK in office.

Marcello was far more politically savvy than most Mafia chiefs—he