Patsy! : The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald

by Douglas Brode

  Maheu cleared his throat as the two FBI agents stared on, dumbfounded. He continued ...

  “If this entailed doing things that ... how to put it ... might not be considered ‘strictly kosher,’ then my view had to be, so be it. All of this relates, if in a serpentine manner, to the issue of national security. You have our permission, my own self and that of Shef Edwards, to relate all this to J. Edgar, as well as suggest Mr. Hoover discuss everything I have said with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, he also aware of what we’ve been doing. That, gentlemen, is all I have to say.”

  The agents stood stock still for a while, unable to offer any coherent response. This was beyond their comprehension. They asked Maheu to take a seat, which he did, while they scurried off into a far corner to discuss the can of worms they’d opened.

  One possibility was to contact someone higher up in the Bureau, perhaps Hoover. That did not strike either as viable. After all, they had, like everyone in government service, heard the rumor, around for so long it had been generally accepted as fact, that the Mob held in reserve a picture ... That didn’t mean they should not now report their findings of a CIA-Mob connection, only that the old bulldog was not that person.

  “If not J. Edgar, who, then?”

  “Give me a moment to think ...”

  Another element had to be taken into account: the recently strained relations between the FBI and the CIA. From the start of the latter organization’s inception, Hoover clearly felt threatened that his Bureau might soon play second-fiddle to the Agency. Since the election, JFK clearly preferred the jet-age cowboys to those now stodgy agents best remembered for gunning down the Dillinger gang, back during the Depression.

  Then the first tangible blow-up between FBI and CIA had occurred. A ranking KGB officer defected from the Soviets. He presented himself directly to the CIA, as if unaware the FBI still even existed. Worse, CIA members who had taken the man into custody, immediately informing both Kennedy brothers of this potentially explosive event, only approached the FBI as an afterthought. Hearing this, Hoover hit the ceiling.

  For Hoover, here was a sign that he and the Bureau now rated as minor-league citizens. And would continue as such so as long the Kennedy clan ran things. An angry complaint was lodged. As a result, JFK did tell Allen Dulles that from now on, the CIA really ought to inform J. Edgar about such matters. Jack did so in such a contemptuous manner that Hoover became hysterical, though Dulles and Helms agreed to keep him in the loop.

  The two agents now in Maheu’s apartment recalled all of this. They agreed that if anyone higher up in the Bureau were to be informed, Hoover would catch wind of it in a matter of time. When that happened, holy hell would break loose. Both men were, like Maheu, the most dedicated of patriots, more concerned about what was best for the U.S. than themselves or the particular venue in the intelligence community they happened have joined.

  “We’re agreed, then?”

  “I believe we are.”

  The agents re-approached Maheu. They explained that, for the time being, they would not mention this to anyone. While they would not agree to Maheu’s request to destroy the tape, the agents promised to keep it locked away to avoid precipitating a commotion that would reflect negatively on both their agencies.

  “Well, I appreciate that. Very much.”

  Maheu breathed a sigh of relief. For the moment, at least, things would likely remain under control.

  *

  Meanwhile, Sam Giancana prepared himself for the likely possibility that Phyllis might hear about his attempt to have Dan Rowan whacked. Terrified at the thought of now losing her forever, whether she had cheated or not, his fears and anxiety proving to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, Sam determined to let the matter of infidelity, real or imagined, drop.

  Also, Old Sam knew that he would have to provide a gift so spectacular that Phyllis could not bring herself to refuse it. And, as a result, would take him back. Diamonds the size of the Ritz wouldn’t work this time, nor would the most expensive mink coat for sale on Fifth Avenue. He had to outdo himself and, once that cunning mind went to work, Sam managed precisely that.

  Already, he had made a top recording, radio, TV, and stage star of her. More of the same was not enough, not now. Phyllis wanted more. She had always wanted more. If she craved something, Sam would get it for her. And, as soon as he did, whatever this may have been struck her as meaningless. Always she wanted more.

  In show business, ‘more’ could only mean one thing: Phyllis wanted to stop being a celebrity and become a movie star.

  So Sam phoned his unofficial godson, Frank Sinatra, in L.A. Now nicknamed The Chairman of the Board, as such not only a superstar but a paragon of the entertainment business, Frankie could do pretty much anything he chose as to upcoming projects.

  “Not a problem, Sam. You know me. As with Charley, any favor asked is a favor honored. It’ll be taken care of.”

  Shortly thereafter, it was announced that recording star Phyllis McGuire would co-star with Sinatra in his upcoming big picture, Come Blow Your Horn, which would start shooting soon.

  *

  Even as Bob Maheu had breathlessly related his impromptu but convincing speech to the pair of disbelieving FBI agents, Johnny Handsome in Vegas hurriedly packed a few essentials into a suitcase. Shortly he headed for the airport where he caught a plane bound for Miami. Sam had suggested Rosselli disappear for a while. He should assume one of his many aliases—you haven’t used ‘James Stewart’ in a while, have you?—while in Florida.

  There, Johnny would help CIA agent ‘George’ and the Mob’s own Santo Traffacante, Jr. to pick and choose among men then being recruited to fly missions over Cuba. Such operatives had, for some time, pretended to defect, then operated as ‘moles’ and on occasion agents provocateur to try and bring down Castro.

  The previous operatives sent on such perilous missions included George’s favorite, young Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Yet even as Maheu and Jim O’Connell had been preparing for their all-important meeting in Miami with Sam Giancana, Shef Edwards, who had initiated the project at least so far as Dick Tracy was concerned, began harboring second thoughts. He did consider the Mob connection a necessarily evil. Still, those words of warning Bob offered, kept out of Shef’s conscious mind during his waking hours, now haunted his dreams. Also there was his own moral conscience which, like that of Bob, resoundingly warned him of that Biblical commandment: Though shalt not kill.

  Such nightmares only increased after Edwards gave Dick Tracy the go-ahead to call Johnny Rosselli and start planning a final solution to ‘the Fidel problem.’ Realizing that time still remained to complete this business without an execution, Shef called an emergency meeting of the CIA’s top agents.

  One man came up with a bizarre scheme that held everyone’s attention. The CIA would send an operative down to Havana, have that person convince Castro’s minions he had defected and wished to serve The Great Leader. The volunteer would claim to be an expert at broadcasting and offer to work for Radio Havana.

  Sounds like a perfect chore for Lee, George mused.

  As an American, the Cubans would naturally be wary, always searching the agent for hidden weapons before allowing him anywhere near their leader. Of course, he would carry none.

  The plan: destroy Fidel Castro’s credibility with the Cuban people. Before some upcoming public address, the agent/defector would offer to thoroughly clean the studio where Cuba’s great man would shortly speak. No one would ever suspect anything as he darted about the area, spraying air freshener.

  Only this would be no ordinary can. Inside, CIA experts at such secretive matters would have inserted some substance that could cause Castro to grow disoriented. Cuba’s leader would make a fool of himself, live on-air. This would set into motion the beginning of his end. Meanwhile, the perpetrator would have hurried away to some waiting escape vehicle and be long gone.

  “Seems reasonable. What chemical did you have in mind?”

  “Lyse
rgic acid is the official name. The government agency that’s been testing this synthetic concoction calls it LSD.”

  “We’ll have to check, make sure it’s dependable. If we do go with this, how do you suggest we get the stuff down there?”

  “It’ll be tough. Castro has appointed a truly brilliant guy, Fabian Escalante, as his new head of security.”

  “How about this?” someone suggested. “Suppose we stage an air-jacking. The pilot must appear to be an average guy. With him would be a recruit, not officially CIA, so no record with us Escalante might come across. Some obscure man who’d like to do his government a big favor, wants the money, and hungers for some adventure in his life. You know, fame and fortune?”

  “Great. Only, where do we find such a man?”

  “I know precisely the right guy,” Frank Sturgis piped in.

  *

  Knowing time was of the essence, Edwards reached a decision that day. LSD had to be abandoned owing to its unpredictable impact: Castro might experience a heightened clarity rather than disorganization. The notion of an air-jack remained very much alive, that device in use already as a means of delivering CIA operatives down to Cuba. Shef liked the concept of transforming Castro into a clown in the eyes of his people and had discussed this with Jake Esterline, head of the Cuba task force.

  The whole business came down to finding two individuals who were willing to try just about anything and able to pull off the near-impossible. Sturgis had already suggested Lee Oswald as the likeliest candidate for that element of the job. What they needed now was someone willing to fly the plane down.

  Needed too was a top gun, someone with prowess at shooting his way out of any impossible situations if it came down to that. Owing to the reconfigured relationships between the CIA and the Mafia, this meant bringing one of their boys on board.

  “I think I’ve got it,” Edwards announced. “Since Bob Maheu has already begun the process of establishing a Mob connection, in my mind the third man ought to be one of theirs. A mobster known for his derring-do. Preferably one who already has a Cuban-connection, knows the lay of the land, so to speak.”

  “Alright,” Esterline countered, “so who comes to mind?”

  “Maheu says that one of their top boys in Vegas, Johnny Handsome, fits the bill. The man Giancana dispatched to kill Castro unless he re-opened the casinos back in January ’59.”

  Esterline considered the possibilities. “Won’t that make him immediately recognizable if captured?”

  “Castro only saw him for a few seconds. With a thick beard, a change of hair-color, and contact lenses to alter his eyes? I think Johnny can get away with it.”

  Maheu was at once contacted as to whether this approach might serve as an intermediary attempt to come up with a solution to the Castro problem. Meanwhile, the conversation pertaining to the Mob whacking the Cuban dictator via some pretty girl continued. For the better part of a month, Frank Sturgis had begun processing just the person to take on the role of Castro’s assassin. Occasionally, the girl was called ‘Lolita’ referring to her child-like appearance. On others, The Kraut, referencing her ethnicity.

  Maheu called Rosselli, Rosselli called Giancana, and Old Sam said sure, why don’t they try that approach during the brief time remaining before the all-important Miami meeting in which a more permanent solution would be discussed. Rosselli got back to Maheu, Maheu called Edwards, and he contacted Allen Dulles.

  They agreed to try this route, doing so without informing Kennedy. They were fearful that JFK was out for blood and might say ‘no: I want you to whack the Beard and that’s that.’

  When Lee first heard the plans from George, he all but did a dance of joy. Johnny Rosseli had mightily impressed him during the twinning process. The idea of heading off on such a top secret mission with the greatest CIA operative and the deadliest of the Made Men thrilled Lee to the bone. It was like ... being the star of a spy movie.

  A CIA private jet flew Lee and George to Tampa. There, Santos Trafficante Jr. had several soldati pick the boys up at the airport in a sleek limo. At Crisco’s, a Mob owned and operated restaurant in downtown, the two CIA operatives met in a quiet corner with Johnny, his code name now ‘Jimmy Stewart,’ after the all-American movie star, an irony Rosselli enjoyed.

  *

  “My beard,” Fidel Castro had swaggeringly stated in a TV interview, “means many things to my people.”

  Though he did not choose to offer specifics, most listeners in Cuba grasped what he meant. Shaggy, unkempt and possibly dirty, perhaps with a horde of microscopic bugs nestled deep within the twisted strands, Castro’s facial hair represented, at least in the late 1950s, an open rebellion against all those white-bread values America held most dear during the Eisenhower era.

  Here was a rebel, maverick, non-conformist. The Third World equivalent of one of those Beatniks in Greenwich Village, who inhabited cellars instead of apartments. Or in some cases lofts; anything that did not fit into the mainstream style of living. These were self-consciously squalid drop-outs from society who had, like Castro down south, grown disenchanted with the U.S. postwar policy toward Third World nations. Every upstanding suburbanite considered these characters a threat to everything they held dear. As most of the males wore beards, that caused them to be suspect as Communists, perhaps pro-Castro.

  What better, then, to turn Castro into a figure of ridicule by eliminating this signature item? A beardless Fidel would look naked in a manner of speaking. And, as such, humorous. No one can take seriously a giant who, like Samson, existed without hair in Gaza or Havana. People could not respect or fear what they found funny. Here was a curious means of dethroning the target.

  So began a brief-lived crusade to de-beard the Beard. The trio of Lee, Maheu and Johnny was not the first to depart. Even as they were readying to board their aircraft, another ascended to begin the hour-and-a-half journey south. Hidden aboard, to be passed to an operative there who would then turn the cargo over to the musketeers, was a box of cigars laced with thallium salts. These, the CIA’s scientists insisted, would do the job.

  The perpetrator would land his supposedly high-jacked plane, send the pretend-kidnap-victim-pilot flying back home, then surrender himself to authorities as a defector. This would put him in the position to pass the cigars on to another CIA agent already planted in Castro’s organization. This man would sneak the box to Lee Oswald after his arrival.

  Always, the Company worked in a serpentine method. The CIA doctrine held that the more complex any such operation became, the less likely any specific member of their task force would be apprehended. If they were confused, the enemy must be, too.

  Initially, the plan appeared to be working. No one however had taken Castro’s considerable sophistication as to tobacco into account. Oswald, employed in the radio station, offered his new leader a cigar. The moment Fidel locked his teeth onto the strange smelling tube, he sensed something wrong. Castro spit out the initial whiff of smoke to enter his throat, shouting for guards to drag the CIA plant off to El Principe. Lee, Maheu and Johnny spent several miserable nights there before release.

  The plot didn’t end there. The operative who had flown in previous to Lee had accepted a lowly job at the Havana Hilton. Despite Castro’s supposed nonchalant attitude toward fashion, it was well known that Fidel always left his shoes outside of his suite door every night to be shined, this (and the fine silk underwear he secretively slipped into every morn before pulling his ragged fatigues on over them) one of his few decadences. The agent requested the honor of doing the shining. In the process, he would scatter thallium salts in the shoes.

  The plan held that such toxic chemicals would be absorbed through Castro’s socks, into his skin. The salts weren’t strong enough to kill, but the specialists insisted that his beard would shortly fall out, and that would be the end of that.

  This was not to be the case. The following morning, Fidel took one look at his shoes, saw white powder spread all across their insides, and ye
lped for the employee responsible to be arrested. El Principle now held another lodger. From then on, supposed defectors from the U.S. were no longer greeted with a hero’s welcome. Instead, all would be closely scrutinized.

  Here ended the last great hope of ridding the world of Fidel Castro without killing him outright. From then on, it was do or die, the hope being that Castro would do the dying.

  Several days later, Santo Trafficante, aka Joe the Courier, passed the botulin pills to Frank Angelo Fiorini, aka Frank Anthony Sturgis, aka George, the CIA operative. He in turn handed them over to Lorita Morenz, aka The Kraut, aka Lolita.

  She failed so totally in her attempt to kill Castro that Sam Giancante, aka Sam Gold, sent word through Rosselli, aka Johnny Roselli, aka Handsome, aka John F. Stewart, to Maheu, aka Dick Tracy. He passed Sam’s message to Edwards, who passed it on to Jake Esterline. He then turned it over to Dick Bissell, who whispered with Allen Dulles, who huddled with John Foster Dulles.

  He in turn reported to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. La Casa Nostra, working with CIA operative George, had to take some time if they were to plan a more effective assassination for Castro. The word went back through the grapevine that George had another solution to the problem in mind. No longer would he rely on giddy girls who thought they’d mastered the skills of a female agent in a James Bond book. This must be accomplished by some man, a nondescript face in the crowd. Already, George had picked out the precise person he wanted for the job.

  *

  JFK, unable to grasp why the task couldn’t be completed as fast and clean as it would have been in one of those Ian Fleming novels he daily devoured, howled that heads would roll if this was not accomplished. Shortly, Chief of TSD Cornelius Roosevelt okayed yet another box of cigars, this one containing fifty Havanas laced with the deadly botulin toxin. These were passed on, once the lab had completed their latest offering, to Dr. Edward Gunn, Chief of the CIA’s Operations Division.