Oswald, Mexico, and Deep Politics

by Peter Dale Scott

  And yet Bobby Kennedy was undeniably (and dangerously) committed to the goal of reducing the power of organized crime in America. Both in his years with the McClellan Rackets Committee and then in his book The Enemy Within, published in February 1960, Kennedy specifically targeted both Santos Traffic ante and Sam Giancana along with Jimmy Hoffa (almost certainly another CIA asset, and possibly involved in the murder plot, although unnamed in the IG Report).12 And when as Attorney General Bobby drew up a list of the hoods he wanted to go after, "heading the list was none other than Sam Giancana."13 In fact the Parade article and photographs which allegedly revealed to O’Connell he was dealing with Giancana and Trafficante (IG Report, 19) were later recalled by O’Connell as describing "Bobby Kennedy’s ten most wanted individuals" (5 AH 249).14

  The truth is that in 1960 Trafficante and Giancana were relatively little known, apart from Robert Kennedy’s pursuit of them. It can hardly be a coincidence that in August 1960, shortly after John Kennedy secured the Democratic nomination, Bissell and Edwards took steps to create (via Roselli, Giancana’s subordinate) a CIA connection to these two men, effectively conferring on them a CIA immunity, or "get-out-of-jail free" card, that Giancana, in particular, would use dramatically on two occasions when his nemesis was Attorney General (IG Report, 57-60, 67-70).

  Both Trafficante and Maheu, along with Maheu’s mentor Edward Bennett Williams (through whom Maheu had met Roselli), were allied to Bobby Kennedy’s arch-enemy, Jimmy Hoffa.15 Using Maheu as his investigator, Williams had performed a number of favors for the CIA in the past, as well as Hoffa. So. according to his biographers, had John Roselli.16 It is thus understandable, and hardly treasonable, that the CIA should have taken these steps to protect their underworld assets, before the Kennedys came to power.

  By contrast, the revival of the plan with Varona, probably in March 1961 (IG Report, 29; Assassination Plots Report, 82), set the CIA in clear and witting alliance with the underworld, in opposition to the policy priorities of the new Attorney General, backed by the President of the United States

  What was really being protected by the CIA here was not so much the underworld per se, but the political life of Washington in which the underworld, with its lobbyists and call girls and cash, was an integrated part.17 Perhaps the most revealing clue to this is the Report’s startling digression (IG Report, 30) on the Cellini brothers (who were top Lansky lieutenants) and the Washington p.r. man Edward K. Moss, a man so powerful (especially among Democrats) that all reference to him has been deleted in the Church Committee’s extended (and Democratic) Assassination Plots Report.

  Whether or not Moss actively represented the Cellinis, he did for years represent a number of far more famous people who were simultaneously CIA assets. One of these in the 1970s was Adnan Khashoggi, then known as "the richest man in the world." (Khashoggi’s kickbacks on lucrative defense contracts with Saudi Arabia generated a slush fund for such intelligence-driven operations as the Iran-Contra affair.) We learn from Khashoggi’s biography that in 1954 Moss, a Yale man and former assistant to the president of the American Management Association, "started Moss International Inc., which has advised nineteen countries, helped the Democratic National Committee organize conventions, and represented the National Coffee Association and the Bank of America."18

  It is striking that one of Moss’s acts for Khashoggi was to secure for him the legal services of Edward P. Morgan, the attorney whom Maheu had previously hired for Howard Hughes (another source of funds for CIA operations) and who turns up in the IG Report (p. 36) as attorney for John Roselli. As Ron Kessler remarks in his Khashoggi biography, Morgan was the kind of man who "knew that clients and issues come and go. but the powers in Washington remain largely unchanged."19

  The chief result of the so-called assassination plot of 1960-61 was not to threaten Castro. It was to preserve the dubious underpinnings of the world that made men like Maheu and Moss and Morgan (and their friends in the CIA) enduringly powerful.

  One can indeed surmise that this was not only the result, but for some, and above all Maheu himself, the conscious aim of the operation. For the CLA gained no protection whatsoever by introducing such sinister cut-outs as Roselli, Giancana and Trafficante. Far from suppressing the involvement of the CIA, these men advertised it whenever it suited them, as even the IG Report is aware.20 Even riskier, from the point of view of the CIA’s security, was the fact that by 1961 Trafficante was widely suspected of being a double agent, reporting to Castro’s DGI as well as the CIA.21

  The plot makes much more sense, however, if one imagines that the initiative for it came from below; and that the purpose was to protect, not the CIA, but the mob and its allies. This is quite possible, for Edwards, O’Connell, Maheu, and Roselli were more clannish than the IG Report lets on. The sentence "Edwards consulted Robert A. Maheu. . . to see if Maheu had any underworld contacts" (IG Report, 15) is particularly misleading. Edwards, O’Connell, Maheu, and Roselli had already dined together in Maheu’s home the previous spring.22 Maheu claims that Edwards and O’Connell originally met and talked with Roselli at a party Maheu threw for an ex-FBI agent, Scott McLeod, when he left the State Department’s Office of Security in 1957.23

  Nor did Maheu open his office with a CIA subsidy in 1956, as the IG Report claims (15); he opened it in 1954.24 In the next six years he had done a number of jobs for the CIA, and O’Connell in particular. In this time period the Maheu office, which Jim Hougan characterizes as one of the CIA’s "deniable proprietaries,’’ had been involved in the 1956 kidnap-murder of a leading intellectual from the Dominican Republic, Jesus de Galindez, in collaboration with the mob figure Bayonne Joe Zicarelli.25

  Could the four men who dined together at Maheu’s house have dreamed up this escapade to reinforce their alliance against Bobby’s house-cleaning? It is striking that (according to the IG Report, 16-18) Edwards took this risky step on his own initiative, merely informing his superiors of a fait accompli. What increases the possibility of that Edwards was using the CIA to help the mob (rather than vice versa) is the fact that so many of those involved (O’Connell, Maheu, Morgan, and others) were, as the IG Report notes (15) former FBI men. For the mob had been receiving the same privileged treatment from some high officials in the FBI, and from J. Edgar Hoover in particular, for many years.26

  Another possibility, not inconsistent, is that the plot was intended to fail, and that Trafficante, the suspected double agent, was in fact supposed under CIA direction to leak some of the details to the Cuban DGI. This would have the effect of increasing Trafficante’s credibility and utility to the Castro intelligence forces, and thus help open a window for the CIA inside Cuba. One of the IG Report’s authors, Scott Breckenridge, later maintained to a Senate staff member "that Trafficante had been providing Castro with details of the plot all along".27

  The AMLASH 1963 Project as a CIA Revolt Against Presidential Policy

  Much has been written (albeit inconclusively) about Robert Kennedy’s angry reaction on learning that the CIA had used Giancana in an operation, how he ordered CLA in May 1962 to clear such operations in future with the Justice Department, and how the CIA failed to do so.28 The Democratically-controlled Church Committee assembled much evidence on the question of Bobby Kennedy’s knowledge, but was inconclusive. We shall soon see that the issue is an important one. From my own reading of the evidence I would conclude:

  1) Robert Kennedy (and probably his brother John) had known of these plots from as early as May 22, 1961, if not earlier.29

  2) It is possible, if not certain, that both Kennedys, although not officially informed of these assassination plots, continued by their non-intervention to tolerate them, up to March 1963.30

  3) After March 1963, and particularly after a new Cuban policy memorandum of April 21, 1963, the Kennedys neither knew of nor sanctioned by silence such plots. On the contrary, Bobby’s Justice Department warned on March 30 it would crack down hard on Cuban exile activities launched from U.S. territory.
And a new set of Presidential policy options explored in April and May led to the reasonable finding, by a committee of the National Security Council that U.S. interests were not likely to be served by Castro’s death.31

  This does not seem to have deterred the CIA. On the contrary, the CIA’s conduct of the Cubela (AMLASH) operation in late 1963, unambiguously, has the earmarks of a hostile revolt against Presidential authority and policy.

  Not mentioned in the IG Report, but crucial to understanding the AMLASH operation, are the secret contacts in 1963 between representatives of the Kennedys and of Castro. The CIA, now deeply distrusted by the White House, was pointedly excluded from these secret negotiations; but almost certainly it had knowledge of them. The CIA’s assassination initiatives in 1963 seem completely bizarre, and irrational, unless we consider that they were designed to prevent these secret contacts from succeeding.

  Normal to any CIA illegal operation, and indeed dictated by the CIA’s charter, is the condition that it must be plausibly deniable. In 1963 the CIA flagrantly violated this elementary rule, as if deliberately. Whereas in 1960 it had brought in the mob as a means of concealing government responsibility, in 1963 it repeatedly sought to establish a convincing trail of responsibility leading into the Kennedy White House.

  In 1962, for example, New York attorney James Donovan, accompanied by John Nolan of Robert Kennedy’s staff, had negotiated with Castro the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. In April 1963 the two men returned to Cuba for more negotiations which, even if not conclusive, were fruitful in opening a doorway for further talks towards possible normalization.32 The CIA was informed of this mission but did not take part in it.

  Desmond FitzGerald of the CIA’s SAS staff does not appear to have looked favorably towards this step on the accommodation track. In early 1963 the staff arranged for the CIA’s Technical Services Division to purchase a wet suit, and contaminate it with tuberculosis bacilli and the spores for a disabling skin disease. The plan was for Donovan (who was not informed of the plot) to give the suit to Castro, his companion in scuba diving.33

  It is not hard to see that this wild proposal violated "the most elementary considerations—for example that it [i.e. the suit] was in effect a gift from the United States, while the idea was to keep it secret; or, then again, Donovan’s feelings about being the gift-giver in this plot. If he wasn’t let in on the plot, after all, he might try on the suit himself."34

  We can see the same CIA antipathy to the accommodation track in October 1963. By this time (thanks in pan to the Donovan-Nolan mission) there had been presidentially authorized meetings at the UN between William Attwood, a Special Advisor to the U.S. Delegation, and the Cuban UN Ambassador, Carlos Lechuga. The President’s authorization specified that Attwood would report directly to McGeorge Bundy in the White House; the CLA and the State Department were to be excluded. The talks began in September and soon involved others, including the French journalist Jean Daniel. On November 18 Attwood finally reported to Bundy that Castro would be sending Lechuga instructions for the agenda of a meeting with Attwood in Havana. Bundy replied that the President would see Attwood after a brief trip to Dallas. With the President’s death, the project for normalization lapsed.35

  The time frame of the short-lived Attwood initiative fits closely with the 1963 Cubela assassination plot. The go-between who arranged for Attwood to meet Lechuga (the American journalist Lisa Howard) told Attwood of her intentions on September 5. Two days later, on September 7, the CIA resumed contact with Rolando Cubela, a member of Castro’s entourage whom the CIA had first contacted in 1961, and then dropped in 1962, after proof of his notorious inability to keep a secret.36 Attwood himself comments that the CIA must have had an inkling of what he was up to, from their phone taps and surveillance of Lechuga.37

  This first coincidence of dates may have been fortuitous. Less excusable is the unauthorized decision of Richard Helms and Desmond FitzGerald to have FitzGerald present himself to Cubela on October 29 as a personal representative of Robert Kennedy, especially since FitzGerald proceeded to discuss an assassination plot against Castro which the Kennedys almost certainly knew nothing about. October 29 was just five days after the President had met personally with Jean Daniel, and given him a personal message to transmit to Fidel Castro. Robert Kennedy had just authorized the Attwood accommodation initiative from which the CLA was being excluded. Crudely put. Helms and FitzGerald chose unilaterally to represent Robert Kennedy, precisely at a time when they could not know what he wanted, or was up to: a time when there was a distinction and potential divergence between CIA and Kennedy interests.

  That the CIA was well aware of this distinction was unconsciously revealed in 1976 by FitzGerald’s assistant Samuel Halpern. Halpern was deposed by the Schweiker-Hart Subcommittee, who had learned that two senior CIA officers had counseled FitzGerald against the security risk of a personal meeting with Cubela. Halpern discounted the danger that the Fitzgerald-Cubela meeting "exposed the CIA to possible embarrassment, because Fitzgerald had not used his real name and, therefore, AMLASH would have been unable to identify Fitzgerald as a CIA officer."38

  Only Roben Kennedy would be embarrassed, in other words. This indeed would seem to be the most rational intention of such an unprofessional and disloyal meeting. Both Kennedys were lending support to explorations which promised (or alternatively, threatened) to lead to an accommodation with Castro. Those initiatives could only be harmed by FitzGerald’s discussion of assassinating Castro with a suspected leaker or double-agent, while claiming to be a representative of Robert Kennedy.

  The same Samuel Halpern has argued that the CIA, far from being disloyal to Robert Kennedy in this operation, had in fact gained his explicit approval informally. In the words of John Davis,

  Since Kennedy and FitzGerald often met socially and at work, there was no need for formal authorization. The attorney general’s approval could just as easily have been conveyed informally and be far less risky for all concerned. This opinion was confirmed by former CIA official, Samuel Halpern, who in 1963 had been executive assistant to the, Task Force on Cuba and one of the four men directly involved in the AM/LASH operation. In an interview on November 18, 1983, Mr. Halpern told me that he was absolutely certain that "Des" FitzGerald "had full authorization from Attorney General Kennedy and President Kennedy to proceed with the AM/LASH plot against Castro," adding that he always felt that since they often met socially, Bobby Kennedy and "Des" FitzGerald conducted most of their business together at Washington cocktail parties and receptions, rather than in their respective offices.39

  There is a germ of truth underlying this false allegation. Robert Kennedy had indeed authorized the AMTRUNK political operation which the IG Report relates to the AMLASH (Cubela) initiative. AMTRUNK was an ambitious attempt to promote a military coup within Cuba, using assets such as Major Ramon Guin whom Cubela contacted (IG Report, 86). As Helms rightly testified to the Church Committee in 1975, he "had pre-existing authority to deal with AM/LASH regarding ‘a change of government’ (as opposed to assassination)."40

  But Halpern and Davis seem to have missed the point: namely, that FitzGerald and Helms never presented the Cubela initiative to their superiors as an assassination operation. It is indeed likely, almost certain, that the CIA had authorization to proceed with the political initiative. But that it had authorization to involve Robert Kennedy’s name and authority in an assassination plot with a notorious leaker, at a time when the Kennedys were attempting to open discussions with Castro, is virtually unimaginable. Both FitzGerald and Helms later denied that the AMLASH operation contemplated assassination.41 It seems clear that Kennedy’s authorization for AMLASH would have been limited to what they described it as, an attempt to find a group to replace Castro.

  From this point on the AMLASH initiative had the looks of an anti-Kennedy provocation. This was Attwood’s retrospective evaluation of the FitzGerald/AML ASH meetings: "One thing was clear: Stevenson was right when he told me back in Sep
tember that ‘the CIA is in charge of Cuba’; or anyway, acted as if it thought it was, and to hell with the president it was pledged to serve."42 Indeed the conduct of the AMLASH episode, as much as of the Attwood initiative, is symptomatic of the mistrust and hostility which divided the CIA from the Kennedys over Cuba in late 1963.

  The Evasiveness of the IG Report With Respect to the Murder of JFK

  In light of this hostility, it is striking how unresponsive the IG Report is to the central charge in the Pearson-Anderson column which it was supposed to investigate. As the IG Report itself admits (p. 6), "Drew Pearson’s column of 7 March 1967 refers to a reported CIA plan in 1963 to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro." Yet in the Report’s 133 pages, only ten and a half (pp. 86-95) refer to a 1963 plot at all, and that one (the Cubela plot) is (we shall see) not the one Anderson was writing about.

  But the principal evasiveness of the IG Report is much more striking. In the entire report, less than a dozen lines (pp. 118, 127) are devoted to what Anderson himself called the "political H-bomb" in the second and more important clause of the quoted sentence, under the heading, "Castro Counterplot:"

  The publicity over New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation of a ‘Kennedy assassination plot’ has focussed attention in Washington on a reported CIA plan in 1963 to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro, which according to some sources may have resulted in a counterplot by Castro to assassinate President Kennedy43