The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (32 page)

AP IMAGES

The JFK-Almeida coup plan was completely withheld from the warren Commission and the House select Committee on Assassinations. Above is one of hundreds of pages of files about the JFK-Almeida coup plan declassified in the 1990s. Fidel’s death would likely be blamed on a Russian or Russian sympathizer.

JFK’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, first revealed the existence of the coup plan to the author. He later confirmed to Vanity Fair that JFK was pursuing the coup plan at the same time he was trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Fidel Castro.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Richard Helms was the Deputy Director for Plans in 1963, essentially the top operational official in the CIA. He decided to continue the CIA-Mafia plots with Rosselli and the others, without telling President Kennedy, CIA Director John McCone, or Robert Kennedy.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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Helms was the mentor of CIA official e. Howard Hunt (left). Hunt had originally been involved in the CIA-Mafia plots, but in 1963 he was a key liaison between Ruiz-Williams and the CIA. Hunt’s assistant, CIA agent Bernard Barker (right), was also working for Santo Trafficante at the time, and sold out the JFK-Almeida coup plan to the godfather. Barker was one of a dozen associates of Trafficante, Marcello, or Rosselli who knew about—or actually worked on—the top secret coup plan.

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CIA officer David Atlee Phillips, a close friend of Hunt’s, was a publicity specialist who had targeted both Fidel Castro and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In the summer of 1963, after Oswald’s amazing run of publicity, Phillips reportedly met with Oswald to discuss an operation targeting Castro.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

David Morales was Operations Chief for the huge Miami CIA Station, JMWAVE. Like Phillips, Morales also worked on the top secret JFK-Almeida coup plan in 1963. But Morales hated JFK because of the Bay of Pigs, and in the fall of 1963, he worked closely with Johnny Rosselli, supposedly on the CIA-Mafia plots. Morales later confessed being part of JFK’s assassination to two close associates.

This chart graphically depicts Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s war against Marcello, Trafficante, and other mob leaders. He hired ten times the number of Mafia prosecutors as the Eisenhower-Nixon administration, and they spent 13 times more days presenting Mafia cases to grand juries.

Jack Ruby was a low-level mobster in the Dallas arm of Carlos Marcello’s organization. Marcello told the CAMTEX FBI informant that his group secretly owned Ruby’s Carousel strip club—along with many other clubs in Dallas—and when Ruby was caught stealing from the till, Marcello summoned him for a confrontation.

Ruby’s long-distance phone calls went up markedly when word was first published about a possible JFK trip to Texas, and they skyrocketed once the trip was officially announced. Ruby, Marcello’s “payoff man” for the Dallas Police, had to either find a police officer to silence the person accused of killing JFK, or do the job himself.

This CIA document, and other information from French authorities, shows that assassin Michel Victor Mertz, a French Connection heroin trafficker who worked with Trafficante, was deported from Dallas shortly after JFK’s assassination, an important fact kept from the warren Commission. In addition, Marcello told the FBI’s CAMTEX informant that he imported two shooters from Europe for the JFK hit.