Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  That bad odor also tends to tinge the plot with an anti-Castro spin. As Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez sorted through the information, they began to see that there was even more of an attempt to connect Oswald with Cuba after the assassination. For instance, the Monday after Kennedy died, a man named Alvarado walked into the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. He said that, in September, he had had been at the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. He said that there, he watched as Oswald was given some money to allegedly kill Kennedy.98 This story was soon detonated by the FBI. They found that Oswald was in New Orleans on the days Alvarado said he witnessed the incident. Another example is the false information that Oswald had defected to Cuba in 1959 and was a card carrying member of the Communist Party. This information was sent by cable on November 22 to the U.S. Strike Command at Fort MacDill in Florida. This base was in the forward phalanx of any retaliatory attack on Cuba.99 When Lopez and Hardway digested all these false stories, they discovered that most of them came from assets of David Phillips. In fact, they assembled a color coded chart in which each story was summarized, the asset was named and his connection to Phillips was outlined.100 So it would seem that the actual managers of the plot tried to stage an invasion of Cuba in order to head off Kennedy’s attempt at détente with Castro. With his fear of World War II, Johnson put the brakes to this. In fact, through his aide Cliff Carter, it appears he got the local authorities not to charge Oswald as being part of a communist conspiracy because it could cause World War III.101

  It took fifteen years for Lopez and Hardway to begin to scrape away the bad odor. It took another fifteen years for the public to see that report. By that time, Angleton had passed away. But during the so-called “season of inquiry,” that is the investigations of the Church Committee and the HSCA, his name finally became popular with the press in a way it never had been before. As mentioned previously, Angleton always wished to portray the Kennedy murder as the product of the KGB. And this is what he—with the help of David Phillips—had arranged for with the soufflé they had cooked up in Mexico City. But when, after the anesthesia of the Warren Commission finally began to wear off, and questions about the Kennedy assassination began to be asked, Angleton’s extensive but submerged role in all this began to be exposed. The surprising thing is that, even after his role in the case was finally revealed, he still insisted that the Russians had killed Kennedy. But during his all too brief inquisition—at the time of the Church Committee and HSCA—two famous incidents of resonance took place. In 1974 Director William Colby dismissed Angleton because of his zealous insistence that Russian defector Yuri Nosenko was not genuine. Nosenko gravely wounded Angleton’s KGB case since he said the Russians never seriously thought of employing Oswald. The dispute over Nosenko partially paralyzed the CIA. Colby fired not just Angleton, but his trusted assistants Ray Rocca and Scotty Miler. In the midst of the formation of the Church Committee, which would soon question him, and the possibility of a reopening of the Kennedy case, Angleton uttered his now famous and provocative phrase: “A mansion has many rooms … I’m not privy to who struck John.”102 Angleton had dabbled in writing poetry for many years, and was a friend of T. S. Eliot. Therefore he knew how to be precise with words. What many thought he was suggesting was the following: Since he was now cut loose from any formal protection by the Agency, if they had any ideas about pinning the assassination on him, he was not going down by himself.

  This suspicion was furthered over the brouhaha over the so-called Hunt memorandum. In 1978, former CIA officer Victor Marchetti wrote an article saying that the Agency had decided on a limited hang out on the JFK murder. They would surrender Howard Hunt to the HSCA. The basis for this was the alleged surfacing of a 1966 internal CIA memo from Angleton to Richard Helms saying that no cover story had been constructed for Howard Hunt’s presence in Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed. No one had seen the memo prior to Marchetti writing his story in 1978. But Angleton did show it to author Joe Trento in that year. As he did, he told Trento, “Did you know that Howard Hunt was in Dallas on the day of the assassination?”103 Although the HSCA never did get this memo, a subsequent trial over Marchetti’s article did show that Hunt indeed had no alibi for where he was on the day Kennedy was killed.104 As Lisa Pease maintains in her two part essay on Angleton, this whole memo issue seems part of Angelton’s attempt to repeat his “Who struck John” warning.105 For Howard Hunt was not a part of Angleton’s unit of over 200 employees. As we have seen, Hunt was associated with Allen Dulles, Tracy Barnes, and later Richard Helms. The memo to Helms—whether real or concocted later—would insinuate Hunt’s covert action group in the assassination. Again, if Angleton was going to take the fall, he was going to bring others with him.

  Angleton died in 1987. A year later, David Phillips also passed away. Phillips spent a large part of the last decade of his life defending himself against accusations of his involvement in the Kennedy assassination. In fact he founded a group called CHALLENGE to help finance lawsuits against publications and authors like Donald Freed and Anthony Summers who advanced the work of official investigators like Fonzi, Lopez, and Hardway. The litigation took place not just in America but in foreign countries like England. Phillips took the work of these investigators both seriously and personally. After the HSCA report came out, which described Veciana’s sighting of Phillips with Oswald, and after various authors began to write about his role in the classified Mexico City report, Phillips spent a lot of time in litigation. He also did research on people like Ed Lopez and A. J. Weberman. When Tony Summers called Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee to see if Bradlee could further investigate Veciana’s story about Phillips as Bishop, Bradlee put a young English intern on the assignment. Bradlee told him to see if he could discredit the story. David Leigh came back and told Bradlee that he couldn’t discredit it. From what he could dig up, the story looked genuine.106 What Summers and Leigh didn’t know was that Phillips had also called Bradlee to investigate the Veciana story. And that is why Bradlee wanted that particular spin from Leigh.107 In fact, in the last two years of his life, Phillips was hard at work courting famous prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi to take up the cause of writing a book on the JFK case to counter the work of the likes of Fonzi and Weberman. While Phillips was in England involved in litigation against Summers, he was planning on meeting with Bugliosi while the attorney was filming a British television program called “The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald.” Phillips was clearly hoping Bugliosi would write a book based on this experience. In fact, in preparation for that effort, he was recommending Bugliosi read the works of Warren Commission advocates like Priscilla Johnson and Jean Davison.108

  Before he died on July 7, 1988, he called his estranged brother James Phillips. James knew how much his brother disliked Kennedy. And he always suspected he had played a role in his assassination. Phillips/Bishop knew he was dying. So the brothers understood this was probably the last time they would ever speak. At the end of the call, James asked David if he had been in Dallas the day Kennedy was killed. The longtime Cold Warrior started to weep. He then said that, yes, he had been. This confirmed what James had long suspected. James then hung up.109

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Washington and Saigon

  “The American cold warriors’ view … I learned, was that under no circumstances could the U.S. lose control of Vietnam and its valuable natural resources.”

  —Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins

  Whether or not one agrees that Lyndon Johnson was a part of the conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, there can be little doubt that, by any objective analysis, once he became president, American foreign policy now reverted back to where it had been before Kennedy’s inauguration. This happened on multiple fronts and with great alacrity. As many writers have shown, unlike President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson was a dyed in the wool Cold Warrior. He believed in the Domino Theory, and he had very little insight or interest into the struggles of the Third World to be free of European colonialism. Nowhere was this sp
lit between the two men better illustrated than in Vietnam.

  As noted in Chapter 2, in November of 1961, there was a decision made by Kennedy after a two week long debate in the White House. The decision was that the president would send in 15,000 more advisers to help Ngo Dinh Diem win his war against the Viet Cong in South Vietnam. In his three years in office, this was as far as Kennedy would go in committing direct American forces into that theater. During that November debate, Kennedy was virtually the only one in the room opposed to sending in combat troops.1 It was a line he would not cross at any time during his presidency. Learning his lesson well from Edmund Gullion ten years previous, he understood that if he committed American combat troops to Vietnam, he would be repeating the mistake France had made in the first Vietnam War.

  But, at almost the same time that Kennedy was signing NSAM-111, the order to affirm 15,000 advisers to help South Vietnam fight the war, he was also arranging for Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith to make a trip to Saigon. Whereas Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor had returned from a trip to Vietnam with a recommendation of inserting combat troops, Kennedy knew Galbraith disagreed with that position. So he sent Galbraith to Vietnam for a second opinion.2 This particular trip, and the report made from it, was kept more low key than the much publicized Taylor-Rostow Report requesting the insertion of combat troops. Upon his return, Galbraith was sent to talk to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.3 McNamara now understood that Kennedy was not going any further than sending in advisers. Today, there are two sources from McNamara’s side who verify that Kennedy had told the Secretary to begin to wind the war down: Roswell Gilpatric and John McNaughton.4 For all intents and purposes this marks the beginning of Kennedy’s plan to withdraw from Vietnam. And we should note an important fact about it here. During the November debate in the White House, Kennedy apparently realized just how hawkish the rest of his cabinet was. And this is what appears to have caused him to make an end run around them with the Galbraith-McNamara back channel. McNamara then spent the next year coaxing the Joint Chiefs into presenting a plan for withdrawal of all American forces.

  This plan was finally presented to McNamara at the May 6, 1963 SecDef meeting in Hawaii. This was an annual meeting in which McNamara called in all military and agency chiefs and their deputies representing all American forces in South Vietnam. This document was declassified by the ARRB on December 22, 1997. The record of this meeting leaves it all but certain that Kennedy’s plan worked from Galbraith to McNamara. Because all the agency heads from the armed forces are presenting plans for withdrawal from the theater. On page after page of these documents, at every upper level of the Pentagon, everyone seems aware that Kennedy’s withdrawal program will begin in December of 1963 with a pullout of 1,000 men, and that this would be the beginning of an eventual complete withdrawal by 1965. As young Kennedy learned in his visit to French Indochina, the possibility of any American “victory” was virtually non-existent anyway. In 1963 Kennedy pegged the chances of winning the war at 100 to 1.5 When McNamara was presented with these plans his reaction was that they were not fast enough. He wanted the turnover to the South Vietnamese accelerated “to insure that all essential functions … now performed by U.S. military units and personnel, can be assumed properly by the Vietnamese by the end of calendar year 1965.” In fact, on one document General Adams wrote that he would draw up training plans for the South Vietnamese army “that will permit us to start an earlier withdrawal of U.S. personnel than proposed under the plan presented.”6

  Once this plan was in place, Kennedy decided to activate it in the fall of 1963. In September, he sent McNamara and Taylor to Saigon in order to make a report about the progress of the war. Their observations that all was going well was a mask for the fact that it was not going well. This false rosy scenario would be used by Kennedy as a pretext for his withdrawal plan: If the war was going well, then the USA was not really needed. Kennedy was so intent on using this report as support for his plan that he would not even allow Taylor or McNamara to actually write it. It was actually written in Washington while the two men were in Vietnam. And the final arbiter of what went into it was Kennedy. Instead of Taylor and McNamara presenting their findings to the president, the president presented his report to his two envoys.7 Once the report was presented in turn to his Washington advisers objections were heard about announcing the thousand man withdrawal, and completing it by 1965. Kennedy overrode them. He then sent McNamara out to announce the withdrawal plan to the awaiting press. As McNamara proceeded outside to address the media, Kennedy opened his door and yelled at him, “And tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots too!”8 Consequently, the report secretly edited by Kennedy became his basis for National Security Action Memorandum 263, Kennedy’s order for the withdrawal plan to begin. NSAM 263 was signed and entered into the record on October 11, 1963.

  LBJ vs. JFK in Vietnam

  The withdrawal never happened. Kennedy’s assassination made sure it would not occur. In fact, Lyndon Johnson looked askance at it as Kennedy was putting it together. In the summer of 1961, Kennedy sent Vice-President Johnson to visit South Vietnam. Even at this early date, Johnson was working closely with the Pentagon on escalating the war. He was privy to a secret message from General Lionel McGarr in Saigon in advance of his meeting with President Ngo Dinh Diem. The message was to encourage Diem to request American combat troops for the war.9 And during Johnson’s second meeting with Diem, with McGarr in the room, Johnson did suggest that Diem needed American troops to defeat the Viet Cong insurgency.10 As noted above, this is in direct opposition to what Kennedy wanted. But this episode shows that LBJ was much more in tune with what the Pentagon wanted than the president was. Secondly, it shows how comfortable Johnson was with the United States committing combat troops halfway across the globe in very difficult terrain to fight a guerrilla war. This presaged what would happen once Kennedy was murdered.

  In November of 1963, Kennedy had recalled American ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge back from Saigon for the purpose of firing him.11 After this, a long review was going to take place on how the USA ever got involved in Vietnam, what the original intent was, and what the purpose was in staying there.12 Clearly, now that the withdrawal was imminent, Kennedy was going to try and get the rest of his administration on board to his way of thinking. Not only did this not happen once Kennedy was dead, but the first meeting on Vietnam afterwards was a strong indication that things were now going to be cast in a sharply different tone. This meeting took place at 3:00 p.m. on November 24. The hawkish Lodge told Johnson, “If Vietnam is to be saved, hard decisions will have to be made. Unfortunately, Mr. President, you will have to make them.” This was clearly meant as a push for a wider war, with more American involvement. And Johnson accepted the invitation. He replied with: “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” He then added, “Tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word.”13 This is remarkable, since Kennedy’s last word to the generals—through McNamara at the May SecDef meeting—was that they were withdrawing from the country. Johnson then said that he was unhappy with our emphasis on social reforms, he had little tolerance for the United States trying to be “do-gooders.” He then added that he had “never been happy with our operations in Vietnam.”14 Johnson’s intent was clear to McNamara. He was breaking with the previous policy. The goal now was to win the war.15 LBJ then issued a strong warning: He wanted no more dissension or division over policy. Any person who did not conform would be removed. (This would later be demonstrated by his banning of Hubert Humphrey from Vietnam meetings when Humphrey advised Johnson to rethink his policy of military commitment to Vietnam.16 ) When this meeting was over, Johnson’s assistant Bill Moyers remained in the room with his boss. LBJ said, “So they’ll think with Kennedy dead we’ve lost heart … they’ll think we’re yellow …” Moyers asked whom he was referring to. John
son replied the Chinese and the Russians. Moyers asked the new president what he was going to do now. Johnson said he was going to give the generals what they wanted, more money. And he now repeated that he was not going to let Vietnam slip away like China did. He was going to tell those generals in Saigon “to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip the hell out of some Communists.”17 The reader should recall, this meeting took place just forty-eight hours after Kennedy was killed.

  It is important to note that Johnson never wavered from his comparison of losing Vietnam with losing China. Towards the end of his life, when he was preparing to write his memoirs, he actually compared withdrawing from Vietnam with what Neville Chamberlain did with Hitler at Munich. He then added, “And I knew that if we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam, there would follow in this country an endless national debate … that would shatter my presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy.”18 The reader will search in vain trying to find anytime during his presidency where Kennedy talked like this about Vietnam. To say the least, it was a huge miscalculation on Johnson’s part.

  But the drastic change in style and tone signaled to the hawks and closet hawks that, unlike with JFK, they would now have Johnson’s ear. And further, this is what LBJ wanted to hear. Dean Rusk wrote that “The President has expressed his deep concern that our effort in Vietnam be stepped up to he highest pitch and that each day we ask ourselves what more we can do to further the struggle.”19 Johnson then told McNamara that America was not doing all it could in Vietnam. He sent McNamara to Saigon in order to give him a ground level report. Right before Christmas of 1963, McNamara returned with a bad depiction of what was happening.20 The South Vietnamese had been lying about their progress in the war. A month after that, the Joint Chiefs sent a proposal to the White House recommending bombing of the North and the insertion of American combat troops. As authors like John Newman explained, Kennedy knew the intelligence reports painting a benign picture of battlefield progress were false. But he used them as a pretext for his withdrawal plan. That is, since the South was doing so well, they did not need the Americans. And McNamara understood this. But realizing what Johnson wanted, McNamara now began to give him the real battlefield conditions, which showed that South Vietnam was losing the war against the Viet Cong.21 Therefore, on March 2, 1964, the Joint Chiefs passed a new war proposal to the White House. This was even more ambitious than the January version. It included bombing, the mining of North Vietnamese harbors, a naval blockade, and possible use of tactical atomic weapons in case China intervened.22 Johnson was now drawing up a full scale battle plan for Vietnam. In other words, what Kennedy did not do in three years, LBJ had done in three months.