A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  In response to Robert Kennedy’s outspoken critiques against political and monetary oppressors, students and progressives clamored for him. He was as popular as the Beatles. At times people clawed and ripped at his hands during public appearances to the point where it drew blood.

  Robert Kennedy’s popularity was deeply concerning to the CIA. In 1968, as the Washington Post later reported, “The Central Intelligence Agency considered its spying on American political and civil rights leaders such as Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as having the same high priority as its intelligence-gathering on the Soviet Union and Communist China, according to CIA files.”807 Through their illegal domestic spying program run under the codename MHCHAOS, the CIA spied on peace activists, opened their mail, and even infiltrated progressive publications like Ramparts magazine and publishers like Grove Press, the outfit that published the paperback version of Robert Blair Kaiser’s book R.F.K. Must Die!. Grove Press later sued the CIA for $10 million for having “adversely influenced its managerial, editorial and employment policies.”808

  The Castro plots

  SOME PEOPLE POINT TO THE CASTRO ASSASSINATION PLOTS AS A reason the CIA would not have killed either Kennedy. Weren’t the Kennedys on the same side as the CIA in that regard? No, and this is a point on which so much disinformation has been written I feel compelled to set the record straight.

  Yes, Fidel Castro was a thorn in the CIA’s side. Not only had Castro taken over the Florida faction’s nearest tropical playground, he was flaunting Communist ideas just miles from our shores. Yes, the Kennedys were intent on replacing Castro politically. But no, neither Kennedy ever approved an assassination plot, and the CIA has admitted as much in their internal records and in the testimony of senior officers familiar with the plots. And had the CIA thought either would have approved of the plot, there would have been no reason to hide the plots from them, as they provably did.

  CIA Director Helms gave his head of anti-Castro operations, Desmond Fitzgerald, permission to lie to his operatives, to claim that he had Robert Kennedy’s authority, when they both knew this was not true. Fitzgerald then repeated this lie, and the belief grew within the CIA that Robert Kennedy had authorized the plots. Some CIA people, like Sam Halpern, a high-level aide to Des Fitzgerald, made sure that this version of the story reached the media. In fact, nearly every author that has claimed Robert Kennedy was in on the Castro assassination plots sources Halpern. Halpern claimed that Richard Bissell told him Robert Kennedy ordered the CIA to kill Castro. Halpern shot his own credibility in the foot, however, when he lamented to author Jefferson Morley that he and others in the CIA were frustrated because Robert Kennedy urged what he and others felt amounted only to “pinpricks” against Castro. An assassination plot could never be described as a “pinprick.”

  Bissell, too, would put the lie to Halpern’s assertion when he testified to the Church Committee. Bissell admitted no one at the White House had asked him to assassinate Castro. Perhaps Bissell’s candor reflected his knowledge that the CIA had conducted its own internal investigation through its Inspector General (IG), J.S. Earman, when news of the CIA’s plots to kill Castro first leaked out in Drew Pearson’s column in 1967. The IG report concluded Kennedy was out of the loop.

  While some have suggested this document was meant to protect Kennedy’s role in the plots, that assertion makes no logical sense. If that were the case, the CIA would have leaked it to their media assets and made certain its contents were reported. If the goal was to protect the oval office, why did the CIA go out of its way to suppress this report, which was not released to the public until the 1990s? You don’t tell the truth publicly and hide a lie—there would be no point in having told the lie in the first place. But telling a lie publicly while hiding the truth privately is an all-too-common practice, especially for the CIA.

  The IG report was clearly a damage control assessment. How many people knew of the plots? What might they say? In the report, the CIA was entirely concerned with protecting its own reputation, not the president’s or Robert Kennedy’s. That’s why the findings of this report were considered so sensitive that the report is prefaced with this information:

  This report was prepared at the request of the Director of Central Intelligence. He assigned the task to the Inspector General on 23 March 1967. The report was delivered to the Director, personally, in installments, beginning on 24 April 1967. The Director returned this copy to the Inspector General on 22 May 1967 with instructions that the Inspector General:

  Retain it in personal, EYES ONLY safekeeping

  Destroy the one burn copy retained temporarily by the Inspector General

  Destroy all notes and other source materials originated by those participating in the writing of this report

  The one stayback burn copy, all notes, and all other derived source materials were destroyed on 23 May 1967.

  This ribbon copy is the only text of the report now in existence, either in whole or in part. Its text has been read only by:

  Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence

  J.S. Earman, Inspector General

  K.E. Greer, Inspector (one of the authors)

  S. [Scott] D. Breckinridge, Inspector (one of the authors)809

  What was in this report that was so sensitive there was only one “EYES ONLY” “ribbon” copy kept? The Castro plots had been made public already in the very article that spurred this review, so that was hardly the information the CIA wanted to keep hidden. A reading of the report shows clearly that the sensitive information was this: the CIA had attempted to kill Castro behind President Kennedy’s back, without his approval. In fact, the first plot was to take place concurrently with the Bay of Pigs operation, but neither Kennedy had been advised of that, according to Scott Breckinridge’s Church Committee testimony.810

  Mid-report, there is a chart of allegations from Pearson’s article. Statements from Pearson’s article appear on one side with the CIA’s response opposite it. Next to the allegation that “Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot,” the report’s authors wrote “Not true. He was briefed on Gambling Syndicate-Phase One after it was over. He was not briefed on Phase Two.”

  The CIA reiterated this at the end of the report, where the CIA asked itself, “Can CIA state or imply that it was merely an instrument of policy?” and answered, “Not in this case.” In other words, the CIA admitted quietly, in a document never intended to be made public, that it had no authority from the Kennedy administration for the plots:

  While it is true that Phase Two was carried out in an atmosphere of intense Kennedy administration pressure to do something about Castro, such is not true of the earlier phase. Phase One was initiated in August 1960 under the Eisenhower administration. Phase Two is associated in Harvey’s mind with the Executive Action Capability, which reportedly was developed in response to White House urgings. Again, Phase One had been started and abandoned months before the Executive Action Capability appeared on the scene.

  When Robert Kennedy was briefed on Phase One in May 1962, he strongly admonished Houston and Edwards to check with the Attorney General in advance of any future intended use of U.S. criminal elements. This was not done with respect to Phase Two, which was already well under way at the time Kennedy was briefed.811

  In other words, Robert Kennedy had not known about or approved the Phase One Mafia-oriented plots (including the assassination plot planned in conjunction with the Bay of Pigs operation) and was only told about such plots after they had ended. The CIA deliberately did not tell Robert Kennedy about the Phase Two plots. “Executive Action” is a euphemism for assassination. In the context of the statement in the IG report, it meant an in-house CIA operation, as opposed to the Phase One plots, which had been outsourced to the Mafia.

  The CIA might never have told Robert Kennedy about any of their plots to kill Castro had not Sam Giancana been arrested for the wiretapping of his girlfriend, who was sleeping with someone else. Gi
ancana had participated in plots to kill Castro. As a favor, then, Robert Maheu, the man the CIA chose to run the Castro plots in Phase One, hired wiretappers to help Giancana out. Robert Kennedy discussed the incident with J. Edgar Hoover as soon as he learned of it. As Hoover wrote:

  The Attorney General told me he wanted to advise me of a situation in the Giancana case which had considerably disturbed him. He stated a few days ago he had been advised by CIA that in connection with Giancana, CIA had hired Robert A. Maheu, a private detective in Washington, D.C., to approach Giancana with a proposition of paying $150,000 to hire some gunmen to go into Cuba to kill Castro. I expressed astonishment at this in view of the bad reputation of Maheu and the horrible judgement in using a man of Giancana’s background for such a project. The Attorney General shared the same views. The Attorney General stated that in connection with the “bugging” which had been developed by us in Las Vegas of Phyllis McGuire’s residence where Giancana and she were living, CIA admitted that they had assisted Maheu in making this installation and for these reasons CIA was in a position where it could not afford to have any action taken against Giancana or Maheu. The Attorney General informed me he had asked CIA whether they ever cleared their actions in hiring Maheu and Giancana with the Department of Justice before they did so and he was advised by CIA they had not cleared these matters with the Department of Justice. He stated he then issued orders to CIA to never again in the future take such steps without first checking with the Department of Justice.

  … The Attorney General stated he felt notwithstanding the obstacle now in the path of prosecution of Giancana, we should still keep after him. He stated of course it would be very difficult to initiate any prosecution against him because Giancana could immediately bring out the fact that the United States Government had approached him to arrange for the assassination of Castro.812

  Why would the CIA need to inform Robert Kennedy of the plots if he had ordered them? Clearly, he hadn’t. And clearly, Robert Kennedy didn’t want that to impede the prosecution of Giancana, either.

  When Robert Kennedy found out about an assassination plot against Castro, according to two of his top aides, Adam Walinsky and Peter Edelman, he stopped it. When angry students in Lima, Peru, accused Robert Kennedy of being behind the plots, Kennedy responded, “I’m the one who saved him.”813 No doubt he thought he had, because according to Sy Hersh of the New York Times:

  Mr. [Adam] Walinsky, now a lawyer in private practice in New York, said that Mr. [Robert] Kennedy disclosed that he had received “assurances in writing” from the CIA that the attempted assassination had been aborted. Those assurances came after Mr. Kennedy discussed the issue with high officials of the agency, Mr. Walinsky recalled the then-Senator saying.

  “He told us that he had discovered that the CIA had made a contract with the Mafia to hit Castro,” Mr. Walinsky said. …

  “I remember him saying, blame myself?” Mr. Edelman recalled. “I didn’t start it [the Castro assassination attempt]; I stopped it.”814

  Hersh dropped a little bombshell at the end of this article:

  Asked why Senator Kennedy did not try to make that information public, Mr. Walinsky said he could only speculate, but he believed the Senator, who was assassinated while seeking the Democratic Presidential nomination, in 1968, planned to take some corrective action toward the CIA if elected to the White House.815

  The last time a president tried to take “corrective action” against the CIA was in 1963, and that didn’t go so well for President Kennedy.

  Bill Harvey and Roselli

  THE PLOT ROBERT TURNED OFF MAY HAVE BEEN LAUNCHED DURING the Cuban Missile Crisis. Robert found out Bill Harvey was sending CIA teams into Cuba at the height of the crisis. Outraged, Kennedy demanded an explanation. Harvey tried to blame the military, but Robert had already talked to the military and knew this to be a lie. Kennedy was so outraged that the CIA transferred Harvey to Rome, where Harvey may well have plotted his revenge. David Talbot and others have written about Harvey’s contacts with various mafia leaders in Italy and Corsica, and how Harvey may have plotted President John Kennedy’s assassination there. At the time of this writing, the CIA has refused to release Bill Harvey’s travel vouchers for November 1963, more than half a decade later. What is the CIA still trying to hide? That Bill Harvey had been in Dallas the day President Kennedy was murdered, as a Harvey associate from Rome asserted?816

  Whatever Harvey knew about the JFK assassination may have come into play when Johnny Roselli, one of the people involved in the Castro assassination plots, was arrested for a sophisticated system for cheating at cards in the Friars Club case.

  In September 1967, Roselli contacted Bill Harvey. He made reference to the Grand Jury session and seemed to believe he would be exonerated in the Friars Club case. Roselli also made sure Harvey knew, in the words of FBI man Sam Papich, who served as a liaison between the FBI and CIA, that Roselli “would never reveal his past relationship with the CIA.”817 But Roselli also mentioned that “someone” might leak something in that regard. In other words, it appeared that Roselli was subtly trying to blackmail the CIA so they would help him by threatening to reveal the Castro assassination plots. Harvey reported this to Howard Osborn of the CIA’s Office of Security and then asked a strange question. “Harvey asked if CIA had any ties with Robert Maheu.” Maheu had brought Roselli to the CIA, after which Harvey took a liking to him and became his primary contact. Osborn told Harvey he didn’t know, which likely wasn’t true, and he told Papich the CIA “is not in any way connected with Maheu,” which provably wasn’t true, as Maheu’s contracts with the CIA and renewals thereof are now a matter of public record. It was Maheu’s friends in the CIA’s Office of Security that involved Maheu in the Castro assassination plots. Maheu then brought in Roselli, whom he knew from Las Vegas. Roselli in turn brought in Sam Giancana.

  At the end of his October 1967 memo detailing the conversation between Harvey and Osborn that referenced Roselli, Papich wrote:

  It should be noted that Harvey told Osborn and Papich that the conversation with Roselli lasted approximately one hour. The information volunteered by Harvey certainly does not suggest a conversation of that length. The observation is therefore made that Harvey may not be divulging all that is taking place between him and Roselli. This is strictly speculation.818

  Roselli wasn’t just in trouble over the card cheating. The FBI had determined that Roselli was an illegal alien, whose real name was Filippo Sacco, and was moving to deport him. Two days after the earlier memo, the FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) in Los Angeles sent an Airtel to J. Edgar Hoover about the CIA’s objections to having Col. Sheffield Edwards testify in the Roselli deportation hearing. “It is again noted that the appearance of Colonel Edwards as a witness would strengthen the case against Roselli,” the SAC noted. At a meeting in May 1966, Roselli showed Colonel Edwards a picture of himself as a boy that FBI agents had left in his possession. The FBI felt Colonel Edwards should testify against Roselli and that he could do so without exposing his or Roselli’s connection to the CIA. But someone in the CIA was nervous about putting Colonel Edwards on the stand:

  Edwards is age 65, possesses a severe speech impediment and is in poor health.

  In view of the foregoing, Los Angeles is not authorized to advise the United States Attorney’s Office of Roselli’s conversation with Edwards.819

  In other words, CIA was telling FBI to back down on Roselli. Why? The timing is curious. Someone had already apparently leaked information about the Castro plots to columnist Drew Pearson, possibly superlawyer Edward Morgan. Harvey “made the observation that Morgan obviously was very well informed concerning CIA’s past relationship with Roselli. Harvey assumes that Morgan acquired this information from Robert Maheu….”820 The FBI reiterated Roselli’s connection to the CIA’s Castro assassination plots in a November 1, 1967 memo.

  Was CIA concerned about Roselli’s knowledge of their Castro plots? Or might Roselli have known somethin
g about another assassination plot? Whatever Roselli and Harvey knew or were planning made CIA Director Richard Helms very nervous and the FBI very interested. D.J. Brennan reported in an FBI memo to Bill Sullivan on November 1, 1967, that two days earlier, Harvey had met with Helms to discuss help for Roselli:

  Helms advised SA [Special Agent] Papich 10/31/67 that he mistrusts Harvey; that he is not going to permit himself or CIA to be blackmailed by anybody; and he has no fear of any threats which may emanate from subject.821

  Scribbled at the bottom of this memo is a handwritten note saying, “We must be very careful in any meetings with Harvey,” to which Hoover wrote, “Right & vigorously press case against Roselli.”822

  In an adjacent, undated FBI communication to Sullivan, apparently from Papich, along with reiterating Helms’ desire not to allow the CIA “to be blackmailed by anybody,” the author added, “Helms commented that as far as he is concerned the Bureau can treat Harvey as it sees fit.”823

  By March 1968, after a phone call with Harvey, Helms told Papich “that Roselli’s case on the West Coast was developing to a point which necessitated some serious thinking on the part of CIA. Harvey…claimed he had a responsibility of protecting CIA interests at the same time was of the strong opinion that the Agency should try to help Roselli.”824 At this point, Helms still didn’t see it that way:

  Helms advised that he accepted Harvey’s statements as a form of pressure, and he then made it very clear to Harvey that CIA was not making any kind of deal with the subject or anybody else.…

  Helms confided…that he was not going to be squeezed into any position by Harvey, Roselli, or any other individuals.”