by Joan Mellen
“Never will,” Helms later told the Church Committee defiantly, as he would take his secrets to the grave.
Four months into his presidency, John Kennedy, whom onetime CIA asset Gerald Patrick Hemming calls “the last President to believe he could take power,” refused to submit to CIA blackmail and commit land troops to Brigade 2506 about to land at the Bay of Pigs. He cut short the expected air cover.
What the U-2 incident was to Eisenhower’s presidency, the Bay of Pigs was to Kennedy’s. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy were wary of military buildup, wary of a bankrupting deficit that a burgeoning defense budget and military forays engendered. Both were opposed by a CIA pursuing a policy of fierce militarism. “Any person who doesn’t clearly understand that national security and national solvency are mutually dependent and that permanent maintenance of a crushing weight of military power would eventually produce dictatorship should not be entrusted with any kind of responsibility in our country,” Eisenhower had said passionately. Kennedy would have agreed.
The old soldier in Eisenhower could not disavow the CIA, let alone fire its leader, even though Eisenhower’s son John thought his father did John Kennedy “a disservice by not firing Dulles.” Kennedy felt no such constraint. After Brigade 2506’s inevitable defeat and Kennedy’s refusal to be blackmailed into invading Cuba, he fired Allen Dulles, which also meant the departure of his subordinate, General Charles Cabell, whose brother, Jim Garrison would often note, was mayor of Dallas at the moment Kennedy was murdered. Soon Bissell was banished from the clandestine services. Helms confessed years later that after Kennedy had defied the Agency, Helms had vowed he would “fall in front of the onrushing train instead of letting that happen again.”
Kennedy replaced Dulles with John McCone, whom William Harvey, in charge of CIA assassinations, chose not to debrief, as the CIA’s attempts to murder Fidel Castro proceeded. Harvey, as his CIA colleague John Whitten described him, was “a really hard-boiled, unsubtle, ruthless guy . . . a very dangerous man.” Harvey had already obtained the approval of Richard Helms not to brief the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) on Johnny Rosselli’s involvement in the attempt to murder Fidel Castro, and didn’t do so. Nor did Helms, when he took over the clandestine services, involve McCone, granting him “plausible deniability.” It was “not necessary or advisable,” Helms decided. McCone, a devout Catholic, might have been disturbed, Helms said. Lawrence Houston agreed.
John F. Kennedy set himself on a course of eviscerating the power of the CIA. He began to cut away at its operational jurisdiction. He reevaluated the CIA budget and the Agency’s financial autonomy. As Norman Polmar points out in Spyplane, “under a law passed on June 20, 1949, the Director of Central Intelligence was designated the only U.S. government employee who could obligate federal funds without the use of vouchers.”
Kennedy dared to challenge this prerogative.
In May of 1961, only a month after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy formed his own “Special Group,” meeting as the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Its express purpose was to bring the CIA under the control of the president. “Covert action programs of the CIA may not have been worth the risk nor worth the great expenditure of manpower and money,” Kennedy told the group on May 15th. CIA should continue its “intelligence gathering.” He, however, was undertaking a “total reassessment of U.S. covert action policies and programs,” with the help of General Maxwell Taylor, whom he appointed special assistant for intelligence “on top of covert operations.” Kennedy told the press he was resisting the pressure of the “intelligence community” to assassinate Castro, although in fact both he and his brother were to be directly involved in plots to murder the Cuban leader.
Soon overflights bound for Cuba would be in the hands of the Strategic Air Command, not the CIA. The Navy would participate. Kennedy created a Defense Intelligence Agency, responsible to him. He commissioned a list of directives defining precisely what the CIA could and could not do. By the close of 1961, the “Special Group” had seventeen recommendations for the “reorganization and redirection of CIA.” Kennedy also signed a National Security Action Memorandum limiting CIA operations that required “greater firepower than that generated by handguns.” It effectively prevented CIA covert operations except for small skirmishes.
The CIA retaliated by withholding intelligence from the president. By June 7, 1961, Kennedy was complaining that he was “receiving inadequate information concerning developments in a number of countries.” As his ally General James H. Doolittle had put it, the “covert operations dog is wagging the intelligence tail.” In one of his final acts, General Cabell delayed the distribution of the Inspector General’s Report on the Bay of Pigs to Kennedy’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
“I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards,” Kennedy said. It was the persistent refrain of his presidency. By the turn of the New Year 1962, he demanded not only a reorganization of the Agency, but a redefinition of the role of the Director of Central Intelligence.
It was the independence and power of the CIA that John Kennedy fought, its undermining of his authority, and its secret alliance with the military. With one particular virulent policy, the assassination of Fidel Castro, he did not disagree, as the record amply reveals. Robert Kennedy, representing his brother before the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, began openly to encourage the assassination of Fidel Castro, with, Helms would testify, “no limitations” on how that was to be accomplished.
William Harvey would testify under oath before the Church Committee that on at least two occasions there was White House approval and “initiative” of the “specific Rosselli operation” to murder Castro. Sabotage against Cuba was a given, accepted by both sides. In June 1963, President Kennedy approved “a broad economic sabotage program directed against refineries, shipping facilities and other areas of the Cuban economy.” Robert Kennedy sent a message from the president that “more priority should be given to mount sabotage operations.”
Bobby instructed his “hero,” General Edward Lansdale, to send a memo to CIA’s William Harvey to come up with “assassination contingency plans” and to plan “concrete action against Cuba.” When Ramsey Clark became attorney general, among items remaining from Bobby’s tenure, left there during the Katzenbach period, he discovered copies of Lansdale’s memos to Bobby outlining how Castro could be murdered. Calling Castro “primary target,” Bobby urged Lansdale to be ever “new and imaginative” in getting rid of the Castro regime.
Unknowingly Bobby was enlisting the CIA’s murder apparatus (“executive action” capability), the very apparatus soon to be turned against his brother. So Bobby Kennedy fell into a CIA trap that would render him silent about the murder of his brother for the rest of his life. Facilitating that macabre double-cross, not yet aware that it had already been accomplished, the White House itself had requested that the CIA “create an Executive Action (assassination) capability.”
For a time, CIA denied Lansdale direct access to Task Force W, “the CIA contribution to the Inter-Agency Mongoose effort” run by the Special Group Augmented. Bobby was its chair, reporting to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Even as their policies coincided, even as they agreed on the murder of Castro, the CIA was angry. It was the first time an Attorney General “was actively engaged in giving instruction and directions to the CIA.” The problem was not Lansdale, but Bobby Kennedy.
The CIA now concealed its own ongoing efforts to assassinate Castro, although it was required to disclose them. “The question was never asked,” Bissell told Frank Church. Bobby’s group had hoped to “keep its hand tightly” on the CIA. It was not to be. Bobby requested that the CIA at least inform him if they were to continue to use Mafia elements in the assassination attempts on Castro. The CIA ignored him and went ahead anyway. Feeling no loyalty toward Bobby, Lansdale informed the FBI and the National Security Agency that both John and Robert Kennedy were deeply involved in the schemes to kill Castro.
> The CIA Miami station, JMWAVE, enjoyed an “operational relationship” with several editors and reporters on the Miami Herald. These were designated by the cryptonym AMCARBON, the “carbon” connoting that they were media assets. Among them, as AMCARBON-1, was Al Burt, the Herald’s Latin American editor, easily identified on a ten-page CIA report dated four months after the assassination that contains Burt’s journalistic biography, beginning with his work at City Desk. The Miami Herald is spelled out, unredacted, as “Iden[tity] 3.”
Burt, JMWAVE acknowledges, was “by no means an expert on Latin America.” What he provided for the agency was domestic intelligence. Like other AMCARBONs, Burt was willing, CIA notes in this document, “to bring potentially significant operational leads to JMWAVE’s attention” and to “carry out certain operational support tasks.” This, of course, was exactly what its New Orleans asset Clay Shaw also accomplished for the agency.
Among Burt’s “contacts and sources,” from whose efforts he had provided CIA with information, was Edmund Leahy of the Washington News Bureau. Leahy was “particularly interesting,” Burt told JMWAVE; his daughter was “a secretary in the office of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.” What this explosive CIA document, issuing from its Miami station, offers is concrete evidence that Bobby was being spied on “from within,” to use the phrase he used in his book on the Mafia.
Bobby had the wrong enemy, however. Someone on his staff, whom, like Edward Lansdale, he believed he could trust, was betraying him to the enemy from whom he and his brother had the most to fear, and which, in their youthful inexperience, they underestimated. This was the Central Intelligence Agency, which had been charting the Kennedy brothers’ every move.
John Kennedy continued to attempt to curtail CIA operations. “We become prisoners of our agents,” his aide Richard Goodwin would reflect. Kennedy sent Goodwin down to No Name Key to meet with that free lance soldier of fortune Gerald Patrick Hemming and his fellow mercenaries. Would they be interested in taking over the CIA radio station on Swan Island where the CIA monitored its illegal flights into Cuba?
Hemming preferred to remain on good terms with the CIA. Shrewdly, he perceived that its power exceeded that of John F. Kennedy. His loyalty was to James Angleton anyway, on whose behalf he had infiltrated Castro’s 26th of July movement, even participating in Castro’s “execution squads” until the Cuban leader threw him out. He would not be co-opted by a mere president. “We want to be involved in combat operations. We don’t want to be office pinkies,” Hemming said, sending Goodwin home. The Swan Island operation remained under the control of CIA’s David Atlee Phillips, who was before long to be spotted with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas and Louisiana.
As the CIA continued to keep John F. Kennedy in the dark, Kennedy instructed his friend Bill Baggs, editor of the Miami News, to report to him on the actions of JMWAVE. He told Baggs he doubted the CIA was giving him a true picture of “Cuban matters.” Bewildered, Kennedy blamed John McCone.
On July 1, 1962, Baggs convened a group of characters, including a Kennedy backer named Theodore Racoosin. Racoosin invited his friend, soldier of fortune Howard K. Davis, who invited Hemming along. Present as well were the CIA-sponsored Cubans, Eduardo “Bayo” Perez (“Eddie Bayo”), who had served in the 26th of July movement under Raoul Castro, and Tony Cuesta. Lawrence Laborde, who would become a Jim Garrison suspect, was also on hand. The meeting, a measure of Kennedy’s helplessness, degenerated into a farce as the Cubans complained about CIA failures to keep promises regarding money and materiel for their anti-Castro operations.
Kennedy wanted to know about opposition to Castro within Cuba. Richard Helms, in charge of such information, would tell him nothing. Defiant, the CIA now sponsored an “OPERATION FORTY” in Miami, training Cubans in methods of torture and letting its own low-level operatives run free, to Kennedy’s chagrin.
When it came to manipulating the press, David Atlee Phillips was second to none. In October of 1962, as Kennedy was negotiating with Khrushchev over the missiles the Soviet Union had placed in Cuba, Phillips timed raids into Cuba by the terrorist group Alpha 66. At a Washington press conference, Phillips’ asset Antonio Veciana announced that Alpha 66 had just attacked a Russian ship in a Cuban harbor, and had engaged in a firefight with Russian troops. It was Eisenhower and the U-2 all over again. Kennedy fought back, and the CIA failed once more in its ongoing effort to provoke a ground war in Cuba.
Throughout the missile crisis, the CIA withheld information from President Kennedy. Instead, it briefed Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, whose wife, Mary, had been “Dickie” Bissell’s secretary. Keating rose to the floor of the Senate on October 9, 1962, announcing “at least a half-dozen launching sites for intermediate range tactical missiles in Cuba,” facts not yet in Kennedy’s possession. Keating attacked Kennedy for “a tremendous error and serious concession to the Soviets.” He had been supplied with films of Cuba by CIA asset, and future Garrison suspect, Loran Hall and by French intelligence liaison to CIA, Philippe de Vosjoli.
“Who’s giving Keating this stuff?” Kennedy demanded, even now not quite fully aware of the intensity of the CIA opposition to him. When he finally figured it out, he became apoplectic. “Those CIA bastards. I’m going to get those bastards if it’s the last thing I ever do,” he vowed again. It was Bobby who got even by running against Keating for his New York Senate seat, and beating him.
The warfare between Kennedy and the CIA had grown so intense that McCone threatened to resign. During the summer of 1963, Kennedy shut down those CIA-sponsored anti-Castro training camps in Florida and Louisiana. In the autumn, he authorized a rapprochement with Castro through his old schoolmate William Attwood as “a gesture to try to establish communication.” Meanwhile Bobby, Lansdale and McCone were still working on a “Guideline for a Post-Castro Program.” Even McCone was amazed at how openly President Kennedy “suggested the possibility of pursuing both courses at the same time.”
In the intra-government warfare that exploded in the murder of John F. Kennedy, the president represented not a white knight for peace and brotherhood, but a different economic perspective. In Vietnam, he wanted not the ground war that would lead to a catastrophic death toll and an insupportable deficit, but the use of Special Forces, aided by an indigenous military. Castro he wanted dead not by the military invasion the CIA pressed for throughout his presidency, but by “clandestine means.” A Georgetown dinner party found Kennedy inquiring of former British intelligence agent Ian Fleming what his fictional creation James Bond would have done to get rid of Fidel Castro.
At a meeting of the Special Group Augmented, Robert Kennedy did not object when someone said—and Richard Goodwin remembers that it might well have been Bobby himself—that “the only real solution would be to assassinate Castro.” Asked whether Kennedy was involved in those assassination plots, Goodwin would reply only with an analogy: It was like Henry II’s asking, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” referring to the king’s veiled order for the assassination of his adversary, Thomas à Becket.
At times, the Kennedy brothers’ efforts to murder Castro were quite open. At their request, New Orleans’ own Guy Johnson, a former naval commander and ONI operative, brought to the White House Lieutenant Commander Richard Gordon. In the presence of both John and Robert Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Gordon was enlisted to train a marksman to kill Castro. The sniper set forth, only for Castro, forewarned, to meet him at the airport. Gordon was punished with residence at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, where, as a favor to Guy Johnson, F. Lee Bailey represented him against the Navy and won his release.
That pragmatism governed the Kennedy family has been well documented. Kennedy intimate Charles Bartlett would conclude that Kennedy confounded the national interest with his own reelection. From Louisiana comes one painful example. According to former congressman John R. Rarick, who had seen the Angola records, now gone, Kennedy’s sister Rosemary Kennedy, who was declared retarded, her leve
l of psychological disarray unclear, and later subjected to a lobotomy, who became an icon to “mental health awareness,” was actually a thief. She had been incarcerated at Angola for writing bad checks.
A “doctor’s appointment” was arranged in Baton Rouge, and Rosemary was seen no more in the state of Louisiana. It was her criminal activity that apparently prompted the family decision to label this woman as hopelessly damaged, Rarick suggests.
“They’re going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point,” Kennedy had feared, referring to Vietnam, as he signed National Security Memorandum (263) mandating the withdrawal of one thousand soldiers from Vietnam. But long before he decided against a ground war in Vietnam, Kennedy’s fate had been sealed.
At the November 22, 1963, meeting of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board,” McCone demanded that President Kennedy “try to correct the CIA’s public image.” McCone wanted the president himself to refute Arthur Krock’s charge that the CIA functioned as a “third government in South Vietnam.” The clandestine services, however, which had managed the murder of President Diem and plotted against Lumumba, had its own idea of how to deal with John F. Kennedy.
After the death of his brother, Robert Kennedy, viewing the CIA as his chief suspect, immediately confronted John McCone. “Did the CIA kill my brother?” he demanded. Then he called Enrique (“Harry”) Williams, among the favorite Cubans in his “special project.”
“One of your guys did it!” Bobby declared. He asked his aide, Frank Mankiewicz, whether “any of our people were involved,” and Mankiewicz thought, did you think there might be? On the chance that the Mafia might have planned the assassination, Bobby sent Justice Department lawyer and his personal operative, Walter Sheridan, to Dallas to inquire whether the Mafia had anything to do with the murder of his brother. The answer came back in the negative.