Legacy of Secrecy (61 page)

Though Allen Dorfman was acquitted, Hoffa was convicted and the

Teamster president was sentenced on March 12, 1964. That same day,

Puerto Rican Teamster official (and Hoffa enforcer) Frank Chavez sent

Bobby a taunting letter, saying Chavez was taking up a collection from

local Teamsters to “maintain, clean, beautify, and supply with flowers

the grave of Lee Harvey Oswald.”13 Chavez had met with Jack Ruby in

1962, and in a few months Chavez would make his first attempt to kill

Bobby Kennedy.

Chavez’s letter may have been the final straw for Bobby, who decided

to respond against Hoffa. Two days after Hoffa was sentenced, Jack Ruby

received his death sentence in Dallas on March 14, 1964. Ruby imme-

diately fired his lawyer, Melvin Belli, and hired high-profile Houston

defense attorney Percy Foreman. But Foreman quit after just four days

and wasn’t replaced by anyone of national stature, so Ruby’s appeals

were not likely to be extensively covered by the media. Any informa-

tion Bobby leaked to the press now could no longer affect Hoffa’s or

Ruby’s conviction. So, a short time after Bobby learned about Chavez’s

letter, Bobby’s associates began leaking stories to high-profile news

outlets about Hoffa’s summer 1962 plans to assassinate the Attorney

General.14

The first story about Hoffa’s plot to kill Bobby appeared on the front

page of the
New York Times
, which proclaimed that Hoffa had been “plot-

ting the assassination of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.” Follow-

up cover stories appeared several weeks later in America’s leading news

picture magazines,
Life
and
Look
. Bobby’s well-coordinated PR offensive

seemed designed to catch the attention of the American public—and

surely of the Warren Commission and its staff.15

However, an article sympathetic to Hoffa was also in the works, and

though it was in a much smaller magazine (the
Nation
), it included

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Hoffa’s lawyers’ questions to Partin about running guns to high Cuban

military officials. The article mentioned “a letter from one of Castro’s

generals to Partin, thanking him for help in training Castro’s militia,”

and stressed how vehemently Bobby’s prosecutors “shouted [their]

objections.”16 Was Hoffa trying to send a subtle message to Bobby, threat-

ening to expose Almeida or his associates? In this proxy war, via the

press, Bobby knew that Almeida’s life was at stake, so the Attorney

General needed a truce.

In March 1964, an unusual and very informal summit meeting—

which has never been explained—took place between Bobby and Hoffa

at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. The last time the two men had

met, Frank Ragano said, Hoffa had tried to strangle Bobby. This time,

the two men talked as Hoffa’s bodyguards looked on, while two Secret

Service agents waited nearby for Bobby. The Attorney General did have

one bargaining chip: keeping Hoffa’s own gunrunning to Castro out

of his next trial. At the time, the American public was so anti-Castro

that such a revelation would have ruined Hoffa’s “everyman” image.

What kind of deal Bobby and Hoffa struck is not clear, but each side

soon backed off from using the press to tie the other side to Castro or

assassinations after the flurry of initial articles appeared.17

As for Cuba, Bobby kept in touch with Harry, though both men had

given up any thoughts of a coup. Desmond FitzGerald noticed this

change in Bobby when FitzGerald visited him on February 28, 1964. It

was a courtesy call, suggested by John McCone, to make the Attorney

General aware of current plans for Cuba. According to files reviewed

by David Talbot, Bobby asked FitzGerald “whether or not the US could

live with Castro.” Bobby was persistent, but FitzGerald told Bobby that

“it was not a good idea to explore the peace option with Havana.”18

Working through FitzGerald and Helms, Bobby made sure the CIA pro-

vided for Almeida’s family members, who were still on their extended

stay away from Cuba, their pretext still holding.19 Bobby was probably

unaware that E. Howard Hunt had helped to provide their initial sup-

port, a role Hunt was likely continuing.

Following Bobby’s meeting with LBJ and Lieutenant Erneido Oliva

about Cuba, Cyrus Vance had his men began the process of shutting

down the special training for the Cuban exile troops. Assisting Joseph

Califano and Alexander Haig was a young Alexander Butterfield. Eight

years later, those three men would be among a dozen veterans of the JFK-

Almeida coup plan involved in various aspects of Watergate: Butterfield

as the Nixon aide who revealed the taping system, Haig as Nixon’s final

Chief of Staff, and Haig’s mentor Califano as attorney for the
Washing-

ton Post
and partner in the law firm representing the Democratic Party,

whose Watergate offices were burglarized.

Lt. Oliva worked with Califano and Haig to phase out the special

status of the Cuban American soldiers at Fort Benning and Fort Jackson.

Oliva wrote that he “had to relate the devastating news to all Cuban

exile personnel wearing an American military uniform.” He said that

“every Cuban officer and soldier was given the option, as individuals,

to resign after the completion of his training or remain in active duty.

Those who elected to stay were reassigned to regular units within the

Army, Air Force, and Navy.” Oliva resigned his commission (though

he would eventually return to the military) and joined an exile group

known by its initials as the RECE, which apparently was not funded by

the CIA. While the RECE attracted some exemplary exiles, like Oliva, it

was also joined by the dangerous Felipe Rivero.20

By January of 1964, Richard Helms was moving to consolidate the rem-

nants of the JFK-Almeida coup plan into an operation, under his control,

that included Manuel Artime’s AMWORLD program, Manolo Ray’s

JURE exile group, and Eloy Menoyo’s SNFE group. After Bobby and

Harry’s difficulty in getting those exile leaders to work together, it’s

ironic that FBI and CIA reports highlighted the cooperation of Artime,

Ray, and Menoyo in the early part of 1964, as they briefly put aside their

differences and coalesced under Helms’s Cuban coordinator, Desmond

FitzGerald. Personnel from AMTRUNK joined the operation, and Helms

would soon add Rolando Cubela (AMLASH) to the mix.

Having such complete control allowed Helms to hide his unauthor-

ized plots, like the assassination side of Cubela/AMLASH, by merging

them with the authorized groups. For the time being, QJWIN remained

on the payroll, though Johnny Rosselli’s activities at the Miami CIA

station appear to have ceased by 1964. Following the previously men-

tioned December 6, 1963, Herminio Diaz assassination attempt against

Castro and the January 1964 termination of Tony Varona’s support,

Helms seems to have ended the CIA-Mafia plots. CIA files show that

by early 1964, two veterans of the CIA-Mafia plots were still working

together: David Morales was training Manuel Artime, who was lavish

in his praise of Morales.21

Helms had more suspicions about the possible involvement of CIA

personnel in JFK’s death than he ever acknowledged officially to the

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Warren Commission or any of the Congressional investigations. In a

rarely noted television interview in 1992, Helms admitted that “we

checked [to] be sure that nobody [with the CIA] had been in Dallas on

that particular day [of JFK’s assassination].” Helms said they not only

checked “at the time” but also later, “when the Warren Commission

was sitting.”22 None of those memos or investigations have ever been

made public.

While Helms’s initial suspicions may have centered on Varona and

his associates, other CIA personnel would be quietly terminated or

sent far overseas in the coming months. Such actions by Helms were

technically legal at the time—even if he suspected CIA assets or agents

were involved in murder, he was under no obligation to turn them over

for prosecution. As former CIA agent Tom Tripodi observed about an

unrelated 1963 murder case, CIA officials’ attitude was “Look the other

way. Don’t get involved. Security rules supreme. It just didn’t matter if

murderers went free.”23

As Helms tried to figure out whom he could still trust, his current

Cuban operations were missing the three most important components

that had been active under JFK: Bobby, Almeida, and Harry. Harry was

no longer telling CIA officials like E. Howard Hunt what to do; instead,

an almost poignant January 21, 1964, CIA memo describes Harry’s final

meeting with the same CIA case officer who had been working with

Manolo Ray.

As for Ray, his JURE group was joined by Luis Posada Carrilles, who

had just left the special Cuban American troop program at Fort Ben-

ning. Posada was far to the right of the more liberal Ray, and caused

problems in JURE that would contribute to its eventual dissolution.

Posada’s later career for the CIA raises the possibility that he was an

informant or provocateur in Ray’s group, which the CIA had supported

only because of the Kennedys. During 1964 and the years that followed,

Posada remained close to a fellow ex-soldier from Fort Benning named

Jorge Mas Canosa. Mas Canosa eventually became the top Cuban exile

leader in the US, while Posada went on to a career of terrorist bombings

that would include blowing up a Cubana airliner in 1976, a crime for

which he was still being sought in 2008.24

At least officially, the CIA appeared to leave other Cuban exile groups

out in the cold. LBJ had allowed support for Artime’s and Ray’s groups

to continue, but on April 7, 1964, he ordered “all sabotage operations

against Cuba [discontinued].” LBJ wanted the CIA to fund only a few

groups, to give him options in dealing with Cuba, but he didn’t want

them taking actions that could force his hand. Other exile groups were

not so lucky. A few weeks after JFK’s death, someone at the Miami CIA

station suggested to CIA headquarters that the small DRE exile group

be added to AMWORLD, but this recommendation wasn’t approved.

Since Miami Chief Ted Shackley thought so little of the DRE, the sugges-

tion probably came from David Atlee Phillips, who ran the DRE, or his

associate David Morales. On the other hand, Congressional investigator

Gaeton Fonzi says that Phillips continued his support for Alpha 66’s

Antonio Veciana, albeit under very deep cover.25 At the time, Veciana was

still working closely with Eloy Menoyo, who appears to have continued

receiving some CIA support.

As Helms and FitzGerald worked to coordinate the Cuban operations

they now controlled exclusively, attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro

continued. In fact, Castro would later tell journalist Tad Szulc that there

were more attempts to assassinate him under LBJ than there had been

under JFK.26 It’s possible some of those unauthorized attempts were

backed by the CIA under very deep cover, the same way Phillips sup-

ported Veciana, to give Helms and FitzGerald deniability with LBJ if

problems arose.

Only in recent years have historians and researchers discovered that

so many anti-Castro operations were going on while Helms was with-

holding crucial information from the Warren Commission. Helms had

to be careful, since the earlier CIA-Mafia plots had been leaked to at

least two members of the Commission, Warren and Ford. Perhaps sig-

nificant is that Warren and Ford were the only Commission members

to go to Dallas to interview Jack Ruby, whose pleas to go to Washington

to testify were refused. Years later, Ford’s inadvertent revelation of the

CIA-Mafia plots, shortly after he assumed the presidency, would set off

a chain of events that would expose some of the plots to the public for

the first time.

It’s possible that at least Earl Warren was also generally informed

about ongoing CIA anti-Castro operations that LBJ had approved. A

whisper about those activities to Warren, by Dulles or Angleton, could

explain why the Commission never interviewed any of the important

Cuban exile leaders, like Artime, Ray, and Menoyo, even though their

names cropped up in important information the FBI provided to the

Commission. This omission was especially glaring in the case of Ray

and JURE, since Warren Commission staff would struggle for months

with their investigation of Oswald’s visit to JURE member Silvia Odio.

The same is also true for John Martino, who was never interviewed by

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Warren Commission staff about his remarks concerning a JFK-approved

coup and invasion plan for Cuba, even though memos show that the

staff knew about some of Martino’s provocative remarks. It also appears

that the Commission and staff never realized that Martino and his asso-