“My Miami connections brought me to the attention of Edward Lansdale, who was running Operation Mongoose in the early 60’s; a man handpicked for the chore by JFK himself. Since I was not on the payroll of the CIA or part of the military, my name does not appear on any of the thousands of documents in the Mongoose file. This meant I was able to perform certain…what the Bureau called Black Bag Jobs, mainly having to do with the breaking and entering of the domiciles of members of the Free Cuba Committee who were suspected of having false loyalties and spying for Fidel. I was uncovered of a dozen double agents in 1961 alone. I also hired by several anti-Castro groups in New Orleans, mainly to facilitate the purchase of guns to be smuggled into Cuba. Through this work, I met and won the confidence of a number of persons involved in the underground effort to oust Castro. Some were motivated by patriotism, some by less noble sentiments, both equally useful when it came to getting the job done.
“I’d impressed the Kennedy brothers while we worked together on the Rackets Committee in ’57 and they hired me in ’60 to discover if the Nixon people had any knowledge of certain indiscretions, which if revealed, would prove mighty embarrassing to Jack; I put their fears to rest after successfully infiltrating the Nixon inner circle. This cemented my working relationship with the White House after the election; they always had some small chore for me to take care of for them. It was during a November 1962 meeting with the Attorney General that the opportunity of a lifetime fell into my lap. I was giving Bobby evidence I’d uncovered proving there was an informant for the Chicago Outfit in the Federal Prosecutor’s office in Springfield and somehow our conversation turned to the just concluded Missile Crisis. I had congratulated Bobby on successfully making the Reds back down, but quickly learned neither he nor his brother saw it that way; both of them were furious at how Castro had wriggled off the hook yet again and to make matters worse, had been forced to swallow the poison pill of agreeing not to invade Cuba in the future as part of the settlement with the Russians. They’d thrown everything at him, and somehow Castro was still down there in Havana, thumbing his nose; Jack and Bobby really took it personally, they did not like to lose and their hate for that bearded bastard knew no bounds. But they were now stuck with a bad deal to keep their hands off lest it destroy any chance to improve relations with the Soviets and ease Cold War tensions.
“The words were out of my mouth almost before the thought was formed in my head: what if, I asked Bobby Kennedy, Castro would be foolhardy enough to try and assassinate the President - an act of war on American soil? It would be the 20th Century equivalent of the sinking of the Maine, a complete and utter provocation which renders null and void all previous agreements to leave that Commie son of a bitch alone. Think about it, I told Bobby, the end of Castro and the restoration of democracy in Cuba before November of 1964. That was the proposal I put on the table before him, all I would need was a hundred thousand dollars plus expenses, a free hand and no questions asked.
“Bobby didn’t bat an eye, he took my proposal straight to his brother, and he got back to me a few hours later. They would go for it, Bobby told me, but on one condition of their own: he reserved the right to pull the plug on this ‘act of war’ at any time, including right up the last moment. I readily agreed, and the deal was sealed, the Kennedys loved doing things outside the box, and this was just about a far out of the box as you could get.
“To pull it off would really require the threading of a needle, but I never doubted it could be done. I hit the ground running the next day, putting together an intricate conspiracy from scratch with only myself being able to view all the moving parts in their entirety. I started with the Mafia, who were getting a lot of grief from the Kennedy Justice Department and had a lot to gain or lose, depending. I sat down with Marcello and Trafficante convinced them to go along because I was on a first name basis with the Attorney General who was trying to put them in Federal prison. I hand it to old Carlos, he was a tougher sell than Bobby, but in the end, the old son of a bitch had too much to lose by not pitching in, and too much to gain by not going along. Through Marcello, I was able to recruit, Bannister, Ferrie, Sergio Aracha Smith, among others, all men I already knew and who could be counted on to do what they were told and keep quiet. They were real patriots and men who hated Castro with a passion; some, like Bannister, were no fans of the John Kennedy, but still thought what we were doing was for the good of the country.
“My plan was to con the Directorate of Cuban Intelligence into paying for a hit in the President, no easy task since they had thoroughly infiltrated the anti-Castro forces in the United States and Central America and knew all about Operation Mongoose and the plots to kill Castro. We did it through third parties in Mexico City, where I had Sergio Smith pose as a double agent and meet with a trusted associate of Manuel Piniero, the head of the Directorate, and got the Cubans to agree to put out a contract on JFK, with the killing blamed on disgruntled anti-Castro Cuban exiles. The killer would receive sanctuary in Cuba once the deed was done. None of this would have come about if Castro himself had not signed off on it. I made it easy for him by making it appear as if there was enough space between his government and the shooter without guilt falling on Havana, especially if the assassin ended up on the bottom of the Gulf long before he reached the sunny beaches of the island. Anyway, a solid Cuban connection had been achieved.
“I found my trigger man through George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian immigrant who’d done well in the Texas oil industry, who, because of his connections to the Russian community, was a secret asset to both the Bureau and the CIA. I brought him aboard because he was an ardent anti-Communist and detested Castro and he gave me Lee Harvey Oswald, a Goddamn nut with the heart of a true Marine. De Mohrenschildt’s wife had befriended Marina, the woman he’d married in the Soviet Union during his supposed defection, and that was how he became friendly with Lee, whom he grew to suspect at having taken a shot at General Edwin Walker in April of ’63. When I found out this guy had Communist sympathies and had no problems shooting a man from ambush, I knew he was a keeper.
“Oswald was convinced he was capable of great things and when the opportunity to strike down a great and powerful leader was presented to him, he could not refuse. We persuaded the son of a bitch we were working with Cuban Intelligence; determined to take out Kennedy in an act of self-defense against an American leader hell bent on overthrowing Castro and invading the island. Oswald was the willing participant in a con, completely unaware he was the mark. The biggest risk came when Oswald journeyed to Mexico City to meet with Piniero himself before the Cubans would sign off on the contract to kill Kennedy. It says something that they enthusiastically approved of the plan after meeting with Oswald and promised that transport to Cuba would be ready and waiting on the day Kennedy bit the dust.
“When Kennedy, Johnson, and Governor Connally decided in early June on a Presidential visit to Texas in the fall, I knew before anyone else; same for the itinerary, which included the when and the where of the President’s visit. This gave me plenty of time to get Oswald in place with a job at the Texas School Book Depository in Dealy Plaza, right along the route of the Presidential motorcade.
“Although he did not want to know any of the details in advance, I talked to the Attorney General on a regular basis; he was always emphatic that it needed to be something dramatic, something which would grab the headlines and the public’s attention. Both Jack and Bobby were of one mind on this point, they understood, and there was no disagreement. They knew it would happen when the President went to Texas, but nothing more.
“But there was one side deal I made that the Kennedy brothers knew nothing about, it was with Marcello and Trafficante. They were willing to cooperate with me with the full expectation that their present and future problems with the Justice Department would go away, but just in case the Kennedy’s pulled the plug on this scheme at the last moment and left them empty handed, Carlos and Santos wanted the trigger pulled anyway, only this would not be
an attempt on the President’s life - Marcello made it clear the round would go right through Jack Kennedy’s head. As he put it, ‘If the snake don’t want to work with me, then I’ll damn well cut its head off and make that Bobby just another lawyer. One way or another, the stone is removed from my shoe.” I didn’t think twice before agreeing to go along, but with one stipulation: if it came down to an actual assassination, I wanted the hundred thousand Bobby would have paid me, plus another fifty grand for the extra trouble. Marcello and Trafficante hemmed and hawed, but in the end, agreed to my terms.
“Oswald was the perfect patsy, happily doing whatever was asked of him, including mail ordering a Manlicher-Cararno Italian Army rifle from Kline’s in Chicago, one of the few methods available in 1963 which would guarantee a paper trail for investigators to link the gun right to him. I usually dealt with Oswald in the same manner as I had with informants in the FBI and on the Rackets Committee: we would meet late at night, usually in a car parked around the corner to make sure there were no accidental witnesses to our meetings. The man thoroughly knew his mission: to kill the President from ambush, make his escape from Dallas with the help of his fellow conspirators and travel south to Mexico, where active agents of Cuban Intelligence would get him to the island, where he would be treated like a true hero and live comfortably for the rest of his life. His wife and child would join him shortly thereafter; that was the one thing he was adamant about: Marina would know nothing of this business ahead of the assassination and that she and the kids would be with him when all was said and done and he had gotten away to his new life. I guess I should feel bad about that, but the man was a cold blooded killer, willing to make Mrs. Kennedy a widow and leave his children to grow up without a father. So in the end, screw him.
“And in the end, it all went like clockwork; it still amazes me considering everything that could have gone wrong. Air Force One touched down at Love Field at 11:30 a.m. local time on the morning of November 22nd, 1963, the exact time I placed a call to Bobby Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia, so he could give me a yea or nay on the whole thing. After giving him a brief and succinct account of what was about to happen in Dallas, the Attorney General asked if I could give him a one hundred percent guarantee that his brother, the First Lady or no other innocent person would get hurt. I told him I could lie and give him the guarantee he was asking for, or tell him the truth, that there is always a risk, and how in the end, it comes down to just how badly you want the reward. After a moment of silence on Bobby’s end, he told me, ‘Just do it, but Goddamn it, Jack and Jackie had better be okay, they’d better be okay.’ I don’t think he truly got what was about to happen until right then.
“By the time I got off the phone to the Attorney General, the Presidential motorcade was underway in Dallas, traveling up Main Street at a slow enough speed that it would take 45 minutes to reach its destination, the Trade Mart. Dealy Plaza was at the far end of the route, only 5 minutes from the Trade Mart, giving us plenty of time to pull it off. It was simple enough, as soon as I hung up from my call to Bobby, I placed another call to David Ferrie, who was monitoring the progress of the motorcade and gave him the go ahead. When the President’s limo was approximately 12 minutes from Dealy Plaza, Ferrie made a call to an office in an empty warehouse in New Orleans, which was answered by Guy Bannister. He was the one who made the calls to the police, the Texas Rangers, the FBI, and the Dallas Morning News alerting them all to the presence of a sniper on the 6th floor of Texas School Book Depository, who at the same moment was planning to shoot President Kennedy with a high-powered rifle as he passed by. I figured it would take the police and the Bureau guys 5 minutes to scramble and get the word to the Secret Service. They did it with seconds to spare; Oswald shot out the tail light of the limo instead of blowing off the back of Jack Kennedy’s head off.”
At this point I stopped Harlow and asked what to me were a few obvious questions, such as what would have happened if something, say along the line of an overly enthusiastic supporter of the President’s rushing into the street just before it made the turn into Dealy Plaza, throwing the motorcade off schedule and allowing the police and secret service to get to Oswald before he could get off a shot.
Harlow shook his head with amusement at my question. “The mere fact we had a shooter on the scene, a shooter with connections to Cuban Intelligence would be an “act of war” in and of itself. Jack and Bobby could have made do with just that, but a bullet fired at the President and a smoking gun were the icing on the cake. But I knew my man Oswald would get the shot no matter what, just as I knew that if he were to be cornered in the School Book Depository with gun in hand, he’d never be taken alive. Of course, I had a contingency plan, there was a Mafia hitman with a high-powered rifle of his own across the street, hidden by a railroad yard fence and could have been signaled to take out Oswald just as he was sighting on the President. It would have been messy and would have required the concocting of a whole new story to cover up the truth, but it could have been done. But even if Oswald had been captured, there was a plan in place to silence him in police custody.
“In the end, it all went off flawlessly, the President’s life was saved by a matter of seconds, and Oswald was riddled with bullets at the scene, and the investigations were off and running, following a carefully laid trail back to Havana. That is where you came in Colonel, carefully connecting the dots to Castro way ahead of anyone else on the NSC and putting a big feather in your own hat. The three suspected Cuban operatives - Vargas, Hernandez, and Lopez - really were that, hired by Piniero to pick up Oswald at the bus station, but their mere presence in Dallas was enough to point the finger in the right direction. The “smoking gun” evidence was planted at the bus terminal by Ferrie and Smith and discovered at the right time to close the case in the court of public opinion, allowing the White House to take the ball and run with it all the way to the first bomb falling on Havana.
“Of course my job was not finished by a long shot; I had a good thing going, and cash was still to be made. Plus somebody had to take care of all the loose threads and make sure none of them got pulled. This meant paying Ferrie, Bannister, Smith, and De Mohrenschildt, among others, for a job well done; there was Jack Ruby, the owner of the strip club where a lot of the planning was done with Oswald in attendance. All of them well compensated. The only one I had trouble with was Clay Shaw, who helped tie Oswald to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee; Clay thought he should have been paid better for his small contribution. A word in the right ear took care of Mr. Shaw - no one likes a malcontent.
“Then there was Marcello and Trafficante, with an invasion of Cuba now certain, they were more than willing to be helpful for a price - something I don’t have to explain to you, Colonel. You better believe I made some good coin setting up that deal. I also had a vested interest in making sure John F. Kennedy got his second term he wanted so badly; it wouldn’t do to have Barry Goldwater’s Attorney General drag us all in front of a grand jury in order to discredit the previous Democratic Administration. It was most fortuitous when Wade Harbinson called me with his scheme to dig up dirt on JFK, if I hadn’t handled it, he might have been the first President to resign before he was impeached. I made good money off of Harbinson to lure the skeletons out of the closet, and even better money to waltz them right into Kennedy’s hands at the Hotel Adolphus.
“Everyone walked away a winner, that was the genius of John F. Kennedy; Harbinson had millions in government contracts steered his way; H.L. Hunt made hundreds of millions off of dubious mergers which somehow got SEC approval; Jimmy Hoffa never again had to worry about going to jail while a Kennedy was in the White House. He got to go on being President of the Teamsters until 1980; that bomb wired to the ignition of his Cadillac blew pieces of Hoffa all over a Detroit street, so maybe things didn’t work out all that great for him. But they certainly did for LBJ and Nixon, who both went on to be President and Dr. Max Jocobsen’s problems with the New York State Board of Regents all went away
before they could revoke his medical license. Murray Chotiner was elected to the House from a district in California two years later after an incumbent Democrat unexpectedly decided not to run for re-election. Your name, Colonel, got added to the promotions list at the President’s insistence, so I really should be calling you, General.
“You know, John Kennedy had a reputation for being for pushy and aggressive, for going for victory at all costs, but not in 1964; he was smart enough to know that being magnanimous would get him more. LBJ blackmailed his way into staying on the Democratic ticket because a recording of Ellen Rometsch fell into his hands thanks to Bentley Braden’s addle-brained attempt to derail the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Bentley got to spend the next 20 years penning a thrice-weekly column denouncing liberals who were determined to punish the deserving rich by confiscating their money and giving it to lazy people with dark skin, while extolling the virtues of the Confederacy. He wouldn’t have had such success if calls hadn’t been made to some of Jack’s friends in the newspaper business. That was John Kennedy’s doing all the way, making sure everyone got something for their trouble and had something to lose if they talked.
“Not everyone was happy, though, not Bobby Kennedy, and because Bobby wasn’t happy, ultimately Carlos Marcello got real pissed off. The President’s brother didn’t like what went down at the Adolphus because he didn’t like being in debt to people he felt were morally beneath him and his brother. That sounds strange considering some of the shit he and Jack got away with, but it’s how he saw things, and there was no arguing with him. During the invasion and the fighting afterward, Marcello and Trafficante’s valuable hotels and casinos sustained considerable damage when they were suspected of harboring Castro’s high command. That particular intelligence came right from Bobby, all it took was a call to Joe Califano at the Pentagon, and he took it from there. It was pure spite on Bobby’s part, Marcello and the others got their property back as part of the deal to help with the invasion, only not in the same shape as when Castro stole them; fortunes of war, anyone would say, just bad luck for the Mafia. But dignity and respect meant a lot to an old son of a bitch like Carlos, not to mention honoring a deal, and violators were not forgotten - ever.”
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 43