by Joan Mellen
The CIA had vetted Tommy. That he was later utilized in the planning of the assassination belies the view that rogue operatives, or low level ex-agents, had on their own plotted the assassination of the president. Tommy passed the test. The CIA concluded that he was the kind of person who “has no personal feelings as to killing and or death . . . understands orders and has top leadership ability.” Jim Garrison believed that Oswald had “acquired in the Marines the military habit of responding to orders without any questions.” Tommy was an Oswald double.
Beckham was not needed, and so he was consigned to other duties, like the delivery of the maps and diagrams to Lawrence Howard, waiting for him in Dallas. The meetings Tommy attended in Algiers mirror the gathering described by Perry Russo at which David Ferrie and Clay Shaw revealed accurately what their alibis for November 22nd would be. Garrison’s first suspect, David Ferrie, had indeed been deeply involved in the implementation of the assassination. Garrison’s development of Ferrie’s role in itself consigned to oblivion the Warren Report, whose conclusion was that Oswald acted alone.
Angelo Kennedy, once Angelo Murgado, was born in Havana, then moved to New York when he was nine years old. Now sixty-six and grizzled, if still slim and lithe, a dark-skinned, gray-haired man, he warns with a smile against the distraction of his considerable affability. “I was an assassin,” he says pointedly, his target then the same Fidel Castro whom the great Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, residing in gloomy exile in London, compared to Adolf Hitler.
Angelo resides in what was once his parents’ home, an elegant one-story house in the “Sweetwater” section west of Miami. His mother’s collection of Lladro porcelain figurines and Limoges china adorns the spacious rooms tiled in rosy squares. The crystal chandelier sparkles. The table is perpetually set.
The father of six children, Angelo now lives alone. “I choose to be isolated completely,” he says. His vices are Marlboros, smoked out on the porch, and Budweiser beer, “the people’s drink.” Material possessions hold no appeal, and service, neither to the CIA nor to Robert F. Kennedy, brought him no riches. One of his passions is cooking. He improvises a superb supper of pork chops, red beans and rice, salad and bread sprinkled in its basket with plantain chips, followed by a thickly rich thimble-sized jolt of Cuban coffee. He will move soon, he says, perhaps to within sight of the sea where he can indulge another passion, fishing. He is not anxious to reminisce about his years in close association with Bobby Kennedy, a man he still admires and loves. He remembers Bobby’s perpetual boyish gesture, always running his hand through his hair. “We will always have Camelot,” his thirteen-year-old daughter wrote on her 2005 Father’s Day card.
Near the close of the evening, Angelo disappears only to emerge with a large, elaborately framed color photograph of three brothers, taken in 1960. The largest figure, the one closest to the camera, is on the left. It is John F. Kennedy, as we knew him. At the center of the composition is Bobby, smiling shyly, he who did so much of the work of the presidency, anxious always to smooth the way for his brother. A very young Teddy is at the right, engulfed in laughter. The world is all before them.
By 1963, Bobby Kennedy had gathered around him that brain trust of loyal Cubans. Among those closest to him were Manuel Artime, Manolo Reboso, who has moved to Nicaragua and married into the very rich Somoza family, and Angelo Murgado. After Bobby’s death, Angelo became a U.S. citizen, and changed his surname to “Kennedy.”
The responsibilities of this group were twofold: to help devise for Bobby a plan and a method of assassinating Fidel Castro and to protect his brother from the murderous impulses of some hot-headed Cuban incensed over Kennedy’s failure to ensure the military success of the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Like other figures in this story, Bernardo de Torres (“Benny” to Angelo) and Alberto Fowler, Angelo, too, was a veteran of the Bay of Pigs disaster.
At their meetings, Bobby would read to them from an intelligence report supplied to him by the CIA, and by other sources. Then he would tear it up. There would be no paper trail. They were “invisible men,” Angelo says, both supervising Bobby’s assassination plots and attempting to protect the president. In this capacity, they made contact with many of those embedded in the Cuban exile community, from Sylvia Odio, who was visited in Dallas in late September by two men she was never to identify and Lee Harvey Oswald, to Sergio Arcacha Smith. Bobby’s group grew close, as well, to Oswald himself, keeping Oswald under constant surveillance.
They focused on the Cubans residing in New Orleans, moving among Castro’s agents, double agents and Cubans working for the CIA as they sought to neutralize a future assassin. By the summer of 1963, Angelo reports, Oswald had swum into their ken. They knew of his antics in New Orleans, his pretending to be a Castro sympathizer with his Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. They knew of his visit to Miami that summer of 1963, where he was observed as well by Edward I. Arthur, another soldier of fortune training in Florida under the umbrella of the Agency as part of Commandos L. Arthur remembers seeing Oswald in Miami that summer. He was warned by his CIA controller: “This guy, Oswald. If you come across him, stay away!” Another CIA colleague remarked to Ed Arthur that summer, “Kennedy’s not long for this world.” In some circles, if not in Bobby’s, the impending assassination was a very open secret.
According to Angelo, he and the others monitored Oswald’s movements so closely that they believed there was no one with whom Oswald was closely associated of whom they were not aware. Told of Oswald’s being sighted with “Juan Valdes,” Angelo laughs. He is amused by the obviously fake name, then suggests that the source, Victoria Hawes, could only have been a plant, a purveyor of disinformation, since had Oswald been seen with customs broker Valdes they would certainly have known about it. Bobby’s men knew that despite Oswald’s dispensing of pro-Castro leaflets, he was part of the anti-Castro community, as Dr. Frank Silva discovered. They knew about Oswald’s relationship with Clay Shaw and that Shaw was “longtime CIA.” They had only contempt for the corrupt Sergio Arcacha Smith.
During one briefing, Bobby was even shown a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald. He was someone they kept bumping into, Angelo says. Who was he? There were so many coincidences. They grew even closer to Oswald, although, to Angelo’s knowledge, Bobby Kennedy was never to meet Oswald “personally.”
Others trying to help John F. Kennedy thwart the CIA’s efforts against him, like Howard K. Davis, loyal to the president, worked with wealthy Kennedy backer, Theodore Racoosin, as they sought to penetrate what the Agency was up to.
Bobby learned that Oswald worked for the FBI. “If the FBI is controlling him,” Bobby concluded, “he’s no problem.” Having studied Oswald, having focused on preventing the death of the president, his people underestimated Oswald’s position and ceased to make him a major “target” of their interest.
Trained to watch for “indicators,” these CIA-trained Cubans, devoted to Bobby now, did discover that “something was cooking in New Orleans.” Bobby urged caution. “We were lost,” Angelo says. “We knew something was cooking, but we didn’t know how to proceed. We knew it was out of New Orleans.” That Oswald was being set up was known to people closest to this group, like Bernardo de Torres, but not to them. “Smelling blood,” as Angelo puts it, Bobby’s team tried to find out what was going on. They visited with Sergio Arcacha Smith because he knew Oswald and was connected to the FBI. Thus they made that error of perceiving Oswald solely as a creature of Hoover, ignoring that he might be used by other agencies and subscribing to the myth that the FBI was in conflict with other national security interests. To spite Hoover, they even considered eliminating Oswald. But then, he seemed so insignificant, so like a “peon,” with an IQ not much greater than his age, Angelo says, that they left him alone. But the elimination of Bobby’s brother would have proceeded even had Oswald been “sanitized.” There were those other Oswalds waiting in the wings, Oswalds who had been prepared and were ready to go, as Gordon Novel suggests.
Odio was to testify to the Warren Commission that the three drove to Dallas together, that all three of her visitors drove up in a car from New Orleans. Angelo claims that this was not the case, that Oswald was already there when he arrived. After the assassination, Odio would identify the figure who had been called “Leon” as Lee Harvey Oswald, the man seen on television. Although she knew their identities, Mrs. Odio has never brought herself to identify Leon’s companions. It may seem odd that she would identify Oswald for the Commission, yet lie about having known him prior to the visit, as opposed to not identifying Oswald at all.
It may seem that Mr. Murgado is distancing himself from Oswald, whom he acknowledges, however, that he had under surveillance. But whether Oswald traveled to Dallas with Bernardo de Torres and Angelo Murgado or was already there in Odio’s apartment when they arrived, the meaning of the incident remains the same.
It was out of Angelo’s hearing that the next day Leopoldo telephoned Odio and remarked that “Leon” had talked about how after what happened at the Bay of Pigs, some Cuban should kill John F. Kennedy. So later, it could be claimed that it was Oswald who had killed the president, Oswald who had acted against the president with premeditation. By dangling Oswald so close to Bobby Kennedy that he appeared to be traveling with one of Bobby’s men, by placing him in the company of Angelo Murgado, those who set Oswald up sought to ensure Robert Kennedy’s silence. For Angelo at the time, it seemed as if it were a coincidence, his calling on Odio and suddenly there was Oswald with “Benny.” The CIA had placed Oswald with Angelo, one of those closest to Bobby, rendering Angelo a seeming if not real participant in the setting up of the man to be accused of the assassination. The CIA was setting up, no less, a man of whom the president’s brother was already aware, information that came to the Agency from Benny. So Bobby’s seeming complicity would even inspire someone in anti-Castro circles to remark, “goddamn Bobby’s got his brother killed!” When Oswald was arrested as the assassin of President Kennedy, Angelo’s reaction was visceral. He said he vomitted.
CIA tradecraft not only engineered the framing of Oswald through the Odio incident, but simultaneously silenced the one person in a position and with the motivation to expose the plot. The Odio incident explains why Bobby would later, on more than one occasion, claim that he would expose what had happened to his brother—only after he became president. Today Angelo says, “I hate everything I have done.” Checkmated, “neutralized,” by the Agency, waiting for the presidency that would never come, Bobby lost the opportunity to reveal what he knew.
During Jim Garrison’s investigation, Bobby Kennedy fought hard to maintain the secret of his having known about Lee Harvey Oswald in advance of the death of his brother. To ensure the possibility of his becoming president, he had, no less, to keep secret his own involvement in plots to murder Fidel Castro. Focusing on the Cubans, aided by well-connected Alberto Fowler and knowing, as Bobby did, that Oswald did not kill John Kennedy, Garrison was a threat to Bobby’s planned agenda.
One of the Cubans whom Garrison had targeted, and was attempting to extradite from Dallas, Sergio Arcacha Smith, knew that Bobby’s people were aware of Oswald. So Bobby unleashed Walter Sheridan to ensure that his two secrets be kept: that he was attempting, independently of the CIA, the avowed enemy of his brother, to assassinate Fidel Castro and that Oswald had come to his attention. Governor Connolly then did his part and Arcacha was not extradited to Louisiana.
Destroying Garrison’s investigation became Bobby’s obsession. He kept a dossier on Garrison. After Alberto Fowler, in his innocence, brought Bernardo de Torres to work in the Garrison office, “Benny” reported not only to the CIA, but, separately, to Bobby’s group. Now working as a private investigator, de Torres moved even among the friends of Garrison’s lover, Phyllis Weinert. To Bobby’s people, de Torres revealed the shape of Garrison’s genitalia, one very large testicle hanging much lower than the other. Macho to a man, the Cubans chuckled.
Today Angelo remarks that they thought they knew enough about Oswald to be certain that Oswald was involved only in assassination plots to murder Fidel Castro, that to Oswald’s knowledge he had nothing to do with the murder of the president. As for Garrison’s investigation, Angelo Kennedy says, “we tried to control it, sanitize it.”
Garrison’s oft-voiced admiration of John F. Kennedy was not enough to earn him Bobby’s endorsement: too much else was at stake. So public was Garrison’s affection for the fallen president, affection he expressed on national television, on “Issues and Answers,” “Mike Wallace At-Large,” and “The Tonight Show,” that only the secret of Bobby’s awareness of Lee Harvey Oswald and how closely his group drew to Oswald, explains his vehemence regarding Garrison.
By the summer of 1963 Bobby suspected that a plot against the life of his brother was emanating out of New Orleans, as Jim Garrison concluded two years later. Today Angelo offers his own, which was also Bobby Kennedy’s real assessment of Garrison’s work. “On a scale of 0 to 100,” Angelo says, “Garrison got to 92. He almost got the whole nine yards.”
“Jim Garrison was closer to the truth about the conspiracy than anybody has ever been,” agrees Donold P. Norton, the “Donald” P. Norton of Garrison’s investigation and another witness Garrison did not utilize. Dr. Robert McClelland, who also was not brought to New Orleans, observed that the back of Kennedy’s skull had been blown out and that he could only have been shot from the front; he concludes that the assassination was “a high level plot to kill the president by the CIA and FBI, at the upper and middle levels. A lot of people in the CIA and FBI thought their fortunes were not attached to the Kennedys.” These included those corporations for whom a burgeoning national deficit was a small price to pay for the revenues that would roll in once oil, helicopters, airplanes and other war materiel went streaming toward Vietnam. Even David Ferrie’s friend Alvin Beaubouef now says, “I think the hit on Kennedy was government done.”
Asked to speculate on the peculiar absence of CIA documents mentioning his DRE handler, George Joannides, DRE military strategist Isidro Borja concludes, “The CIA had to be involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.” The DRE had met with Richard Helms and sensed that the assassination issued from a faction inside the government, where it was decided that “we can’t let that man remain in power.” The lax security at Dallas police headquarters alone told you that. As for the DRE, it was not in their interest that John F. Kennedy should die.
Borja’s colleague, José Antonio Lanuza, concurs. “After a while, I thought it could be the CIA,” he says. “Who can cover their rear ends so well? Castro could not. The Mafia could not. Who has a reason to kill him? Who is trying to cover up? I would say very high up in government.” Oswald, Lanuza speculates, was a plant in the Soviet Union, “then deactivated, like many CIA agents and assets who keep their contacts later.” Lanuza points to Watergate.
That CIA was in the murder business there is no doubt. Watergate conspirator James McCord was with the CIA’s Office of Security in 1963. “When you have violated every federal statute up to and including murder,” he told Martin F. Dardis, “what’s breaking into a doctor’s office?” a reference to the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.
Warren Commission historian Mary Ferrell reflected near the end of her life: “I had such contempt for Garrison, and now, as the years pass, he was so close and they did everything in the world to him.”
The CIA’s efforts in the cover-up continue. At the millennium a committee of archi
vists and librarians was convened by the National Archives. Its purpose was to examine some sealed records relating to the Kennedy assassination and to recommend whether they should be opened to the public. Before the group could make any determinations, they were visited by a man identifying himself as a representative of the CIA. He warned them that under no circumstances must they ever reveal to anyone what they had viewed in those documents. His visit was perceived as a threat by them all. No one talked.
In the final year of his life, bedridden, Jim Garrison continued to write. A “Scenario for Possible Docu-Drama” opens at Morrison’s cafeteria. Tommy appears, along with Sergio Arcacha Smith, Arcacha’s public relations contact [Ronnie Caire], and Rozzy. The scene shifts to the Habana Bar, where Oswald, Shaw, Arcacha, and Beckham chat companionably.
“How did things go in Mexico?” someone asks Oswald, referring to that summertime trip exposed by both Beckham and Richard Case Nagell.
A third scene takes place in Algiers. Shaw and Charlie Marullo are present, along with Anna Burglass, representing her friend Guy Banister. An unidentified Cuban listens in. “Lucious” Rabel arrives with his shadow, Arcacha—and Tommy. On this night they discuss the assassination.
Other scenes are at the Mission on North Rampart to which Shaw has a key, but not Oswald, which is accurate. Cubans in fatigues hold containers filled with money, the containers supplied by Continental Can. The industrial complex is everywhere in this story, from General Motors providing Pershing Gervais with a fake job in Canada to Continental Can in New Orleans assisting in anti-Castro efforts. Yet another scene takes place at the Town and Country Motel where Carlos Marcello discusses the assassination with Clay Shaw, Ferrie, Arcacha, Jack Martin and G. Wray Gill.