“He was very patriotic. He believed in his job to protect the United States and he was going to go after anyone who was against it,” he added the next day, sitting on a leather couch in his home’s fully stocked bar room whose walls were covered with Hollywood celebrity stills, cheesecake shots, and posters of Aztec warriors with swooning maidens. “He didn’t give a damn. If his own brother would have talked against the United States, he would have blown his ass apart.”
Was his friend involved in the Kennedy assassinations? Carbajal wouldn’t answer directly, only saying that Morales was “maybe” in Dallas and Los Angeles on those days. There were “eight million people in Los Angeles…when Bobby Kennedy got hit, so there may not be any significance to that,” he observed, adding that Morales might simply have been visiting family members there at the time. In any case, said Carbajal, neither he nor Morales mourned RFK’s death. “We didn’t give a shit. Good riddance. Whoever did it, I want to thank them—thank you very much.”
Carbajal does know who killed JFK—it was the CIA, he said, without naming any individuals. Morales and his close CIA colleague Tony Sforza both told him the agency was behind the Dallas plot. The Kennedys got what was coming to them, Carbajal insisted. “[President] Kennedy screwed up, caused all those deaths at the Bay of Pigs, he pulls off the planes, the men get caught on the ground. You want me to respect a president like that? Or an asshole like his brother?” The Kennedys, he added, had also given “the damn nation to the blacks.”
Didi and he both felt that JFK had violated their code, said Carbajal. “If the son of a bitch caused the deaths of all these people [at the Bay of Pigs], he deserved to die. You should never go around lying to your people. You go back on your word, you ain’t no good. My dad taught me that. I don’t give a shit who it is. If it was my own father and he lied to me, he deserves to die. ’Cause you’re no good. I was brought up that way. And Didi was that way too, see?”
Despite all the dangerous dirty work that Morales performed for the CIA, in the end, Carbajal believes, the agency turned on his friend. He suspects that Morales’s sudden illness and death in May 1978 at age fifty-two was induced by his intelligence associates, who feared that he would talk openly about JFK’s murder to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was planning to question him. “I think that’s why they knocked him off, ’cause they didn’t want him to say nothing,” Carbajal said. Was the agency right to fear Morales’s honesty? “You’re goddamn right,” said Carbajal. “You ask him a question, like you ask me a question, and he got right to the point, boom, no horse-shitting around…. You want the truth, here it is.”
The overweight Morales, who chain-smoked unfiltered Pall Malls and often finished off a bottle of Johnny Walker at night, began experiencing heart trouble after flying home to Arizona from Washington, where, he told Carbajal, he had been drinking Scotch with agency colleagues before boarding the plane. He died that weekend in a Tucson hospital. According to a family member, there was no mystery to his death. “He had a heart attack. At home. Maybe [the congressional investigation] was running through his mind and it stressed him out, but the heart attack was there, ready to happen.” As soon as Morales died, his family was visited by CIA officials at their Willcox home in remote Apache country. “They were there making sure he was dead,” said the relative, who was at the Morales home at the time. “Was he dead or was he not dead?”
Our reporting led Morley and me into the catacombs of the old CIA war on Cuba—the underworld that Robert Kennedy suspected had spawned his brother’s assassination. We spoke with another ghost from those long-lost days, fabled anti-Castro militant Antonio Veciana, still vibrant at seventy-eight. Sitting in the backroom office of his boat supply store in Miami, Veciana—leader of Alpha 66, a CIA-sponsored exile group that launched terrorist attacks and raids on Cuba—told us point blank that he thought the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, “but I don’t know [exactly] who.” He repeated what he told House Assassination Committee investigators three decades ago, saying he once saw his CIA handler—a man he knew as Maurice Bishop, but whom congressional investigators identified as David Phillips—talking with a man he would later recognize as Lee Harvey Oswald in the lobby of a Dallas building where Veciana had gone to meet the CIA officer. “Goddamn it, what a fucking mess I’m in!” Veciana later exclaimed when he saw Oswald’s photo in the press. He speculates that the agency wanted to pin JFK’s assassination on Castro, as a pretext for invasion. But Veciana makes it clear that he never believed his hated adversary was behind the Dallas plot.
The man who once swore a fight to the death with Castro seems to have accommodated himself to history, predicting that as the Cuban leader finally fades into the sunset, there will be a diplomatic reconciliation between Washington and Havana. “I don’t agree with it, but it’s a reality,” shrugged the graying, bespectacled warrior, who still looks like the Havana banker he was before he fled the revolution. Back in 1979, as he was leaving his store one evening, Veciana was shot in the head by assassins, on orders, he believes from Fidel. But that all happened so long ago, in another century. It’s hard to believe these days that so much blood and treachery flowed around the island, enough passion, perhaps, to have claimed the life of a president.
One of the more intriguing pieces of evidence we came across during our reporting was an eleventh-hour confession by a legendary veteran of the war on Castro. Ever since Kennedy assassination researchers began airing their theories, they have been confronted with the skeptical response, “If there was a conspiracy, someone would have talked.” But the fact is, over the years, a number of important figures—beginning with Lee Harvey Oswald himself, and including several people long tied to Dallas, such as Johnny Rosselli, David Phillips, and David Morales—did begin to talk before their deaths. And in February 2007, Morley and I discovered the final testament of E. Howard Hunt, another CIA veteran around whom JFK assassination rumors had long swirled.
Hunt’s confessions began with American Spy, the memoir he completed shortly before his death in January 2007. Like the aborted O. J. Simpson confession, Hunt took an oddly speculative tack on the crime of the century, writing that if the CIA did carry out the assassination of President Kennedy, this is how it probably happened
Hunt suggested that several prominent CIA officials might have been involved in the plot, including Cord Meyer—whom the book’s original ghost writer, Eric Hamburg, conjectured was a WASP-elite stand-in for Richard Helms, the top agency man Hunt still could not bring himself to name. (Helms “was very careful to keep his skirts clean—very, very careful,” Hunt intriguingly told Hamburg.) The other CIA suspects Hunt named in his book were William Harvey and Morales, a “cold-blooded killer,” Hunt observed, who like his boss Harvey, was “possibly completely amoral.” While vigorously proclaiming his own innocence, Hunt speculated that Harvey—“a strange character hiding a mass of hidden aggression”—might have played the lead role in organizing the assassination, hiring Mafia sharpshooters “to administer the magic bullet” in Dallas. Hunt even went so far as to raise the possibility that Harvey was acting on orders from Lyndon Johnson.
These speculations by Hunt—a colorful and controversial spy whose intelligence career ended after he was arrested for his role in the Watergate break-in—were, of course, just that—speculations. More significant was what Hunt left out of the book—an eye-opening account that was brought to our attention shortly after Hunt’s death.
The aging spy had begun the confessional process in 2004, at the prodding of his oldest son, St. John, who felt that his father owed history—and his own family—the truth. St. John was a colorful character in his own right, who as a seventeen-year-old had helped his father destroy evidence as Watergate investigators bore down on Hunt—tossing the burglars’ surveillance equipment into a Potomac canal late one night with his father. On another occasion, at his father’s request, St. John got rid of a typewriter by throwing it into a neighbor’s
backyard pond; he later learned that his father had used the typewriter to forge cables showing that JFK had ordered Diem’s assassination.
“I didn’t resent him asking me to help him get out of trouble,” St. John insisted. “I was glad to do it. I knew that I hadn’t lived up to his dreams as a son. I was not a great student, I didn’t go to Choate or Exeter. I wasn’t the son that he had hoped for. So doing all these things for him gave me an emotional strength. My dad needed me.”
In later years, St. John Hunt led the rambling life of a post-sixties rock musician, consuming and dealing more than his share of drugs, until after two felony convictions for peddling speed and finding himself and his children on the streets, he abruptly shifted gears, kicked drugs, and began living a law-abiding life in the appropriately named north coast town of Eureka, California. He recently earned a degree in hotel management from a local college, but keeps in practice as a guitarist, playing with a blues-rock band called Saints and Sinners on weekends.
“I convinced my dad to tell his story after writing him a letter, imploring him to tell the truth before it was too late. His health was starting to decline, he was suffering from cancer, recurring pneumonia, he had just had a leg amputated, just one thing after the other,” St. John recalled, sitting in the dining room of the Red Lion Hotel in Eureka. A compact, handsome man in his early fifties, he was dressed in the style of a cool, aging musician—black suit and shirt—and sported a brief, trim goatee.
Urged on by his son, Hunt began to open up about his murky past, writing provocative notes on the JFK assassination, adding more in an audiotape he mailed to St. John, and finally sitting down to talk for an hour about Dallas on video camera, prodded by questions from St. John and Hamburg, who is well versed in Kennedy literature.
Hunt’s last will and testament—for that is how it sounds, as the gray-bearded figure struggles to speak in the video and on the tape recorder, gasping for air between snatches of his story—is a remarkable American tale. “He felt that he had to come clean—not just for his conscience and history, but also to leave behind something for his family, in case the book made some money. He always deeply regretted that his family had been destroyed by Watergate.” St. John said that his two sisters never forgave their father for his part in the scandal that tore apart their family and led to the death of his mother, Dorothy, in a mysterious 1972 plane crash.
St. John believes that his father was willing to open up to him, in particular, because of the risks his son had taken for him during Watergate. “We had relationship built on trust, based on all of that…So years later, when I implored Papa to tell me everything he knew about JFK’s killing, he was open to it.”
But this confessional process was abruptly cut off when Hunt’s second wife, Laura, and their two grown children intervened—worried about the possible fallout from his unexpurgated account. “Papa was under huge pressure from his second family,” St. John said. “They were telling him, ‘Howard, what are you doing—you’re opening up all these doors from the past.’ It became a huge family issue. I told them, ‘This happened to my family, before you.’ I felt very entitled to hear him tell that story—I resented his second family telling me what I could talk to my father about. But Papa was so torn. He was old and worn out by then. He told me, ‘Saint, this is my family now. You are my family too. But these are the people I have to live with. I’m too old to be put in the middle of a war between my two families.’” Unwilling to accept family-imposed constraints on the project, St. John and Hamburg ended their involvement in it, and another ghostwriter was hired to finish Hunt’s memoir.
Laura Hunt, an elementary schoolteacher in Miami, confirmed that she was opposed to reopening the Kennedy assassination in her husband’s memoir. “Things were a little strained” within the family, she acknowledged. But she does not repudiate the book, and she emphasizes that Hunt, though ailing, was of sound mind when he was working on it. She also denies that Hunt’s speculations about a CIA role in the JFK assassination were prompted by any bitter feelings he might have harbored about the agency for not coming to his aid during Watergate. “He never felt bitter with the agency,” she said. He was not trying to “get some body back. Howard Hunt wasn’t made that way.”
Hunt’s most explosive revelation about the CIA and the Kennedy assassination is not contained in his book. Before he stopped telling his oldest son about his buried past, however, the old spy unburdened himself of a stunning secret. And this revelation was not speculative, but an eyewitness account. In 1963, Hunt recalled, he was invited by Frank Sturgis—the mob-friendly anti-Castro operative who later joined Hunt’s Watergate burglary team—to a clandestine meeting in a CIA safe house in Miami. At the meeting, a group of men—including David Morales—discussed what was referred to as “the big event,” which, it soon became clear, was a plot to kill President Kennedy. After Morales left, Sturgis asked Hunt, “Are you with us?” Hunt said he was “incredulous.”
“You guys have everything you need—why do you need me?” Hunt asked Sturgis.
“You could help with the cover-up,” Sturgis suggested.
Hunt was no Kennedy lover. He once told St. John he wanted to have a bumpersticker made reading: “Let’s finish the job—let’s hit Ted.” But Hunt insisted he did not join the plot, because he learned that Bill Harvey was involved, a man he regarded as “an alcoholic psycho.”
After Kennedy was shot down in Dallas, Hunt recounted, he was “haunted” by the assassination “like the rest of the country.” He felt “lucky” that he had not played “a direct role” in the conspiracy. But Hunt left his exact role in the plot hazy. In the audiotape he sent St. John in January 2004, he said, “I was a benchwarmer in [the plot],” adding cryptically, “I had a reputation for honesty and information was brought to me.”
Sitting in the Red Lion as the winter sun sank into the Pacific and the shadows fell over the coastal redwoods, St. John Hunt tried to make sense of his father’s truncated confession. Was his father a co-conspirator in the killing of President Kennedy? “At the end of the day, I just don’t know. But I do know that he at least had foreknowledge of it. He certainly knew a lot more than he said about it. I was just starting to get a lot out of him when they shut him up.”
Whatever Hunt did in his life, his son has found a way to forgive him. The eulogy that St. John delivered for his father at his funeral in Miami was an outpouring of love for the swashbuckling spy he called “the classic CIA man; an American James Bond.” If he was guilty of base deeds, it was out of a misguided sense of mission. “My personal feeling,” St. John told the assembled mourners, who included Hunt’s fellow Watergate convict Bernard Barker and aging anti-Castro militants like Felix Rodriguez, “is that my father’s deep sense of loyalty and patriotism for this was country was exploited by men of petty concerns and vastly inferior moral fiber.”
He has no qualms about making public his father’s JFK confession, St. John said later. Why? “Because it’s the truth. And I don’t see it as that terrible. Assassination is part of the American political culture. It was going on long before Kennedy and it will be going on long after us.”
IN RECENT YEARS, THE Kennedy legacy has been clouded by a spate of books, documentaries, and articles that have attempted to demythologize Camelot by presenting JFK as a drug-addled, sex-deranged, mobbed-up risk taker. While Kennedy’s private life would certainly not pass today’s public scrutiny, this pathological interpretation misses the essential story of his presidency. There was a heroic grandeur to John F. Kennedy’s administration that had nothing to do with the mists of Camelot. It was a presidency that clashed with its own times, and in the end found some measure of greatness. Coming to office at the height of the Cold War and held hostage by their party’s powerful Southern racist wing, the Kennedy brothers steadily grew in vision and courage—prodded by the social movements of the sixties—until they were in such sharp conflict with the national security bureaucracy and Southern Democrats that they risked split
ting their own administration and party. This is the fundamental historical truth about the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
And yet, caught up in the fashionable anti-Kennedy backlash of the times, prominent journalists like Christopher Hitchens dismiss JFK as “a vulgar hoodlum.” One result of this relentless Kennedy bashing has been to diminish the public outrage over JFK’s unsolved murder. After all, if President Kennedy really was such a sleazy character, where is the tragedy in his violent demise?
It has also become fashionable in all the media babble about Dallas that fills the air each year around November 22 for commentators to opine that “we will probably never know the truth about John F. Kennedy’s assassination”—a self-fulfilling prophecy that relieves them of any responsibility to search for the truth. Ironically, some of the more politically backward countries where Bobby Kennedy took his rapturous mission in the 1960s—including South Africa, Argentina, and Chile—have made strenuous, if painful, efforts to confront the deepest traumas of their past, including assassinations, kidnappings, and torture. In South Africa, this post-apartheid process of political and moral self-examination became known as “truth and reconciliation.” But in the United States, the darkest political mysteries of recent decades—including the assassination of President Kennedy—have yet to be fully explored. From Dallas to Vietnam to Iraq, the truth has consistently been avoided, the perpetrators have never fully answered for their actions. When the nation has mustered the courage to impanel commissions, these investigations soon come up against locked doors that remain firmly shut to this day. The stage for this reign of secrecy was set on November 22, 1963. The lesson of Dallas was clear. If a president can be shot down with impunity at high noon in the sunny streets of an American city, then any kind of deceit is possible.
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