The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  11

  CAMPAIGN SECRET

  Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon campaigned in the fall of 1960 as security-conscious Cold Warriors, with few substantive disagreements on foreign policy. The crucial difference, as had been foreseen and carefully orchestrated by Jack's father, was Kennedy's celebrity status, and his confidence and ease before television cameras.

  Kennedy's good looks also gave him an enormous advantage over the jowly and sweaty Richard Nixon in the unprecedented series of national televised debates that were the most dramatic events of the campaign. Public opinion polls later revealed that it was Kennedy's appearance, and not what he said, that carried the day in the first, and most heavily watched, of the four debates. Those who heard the first debate on radio were more inclined to vote for the deep-voiced Nixon.

  Nixon's main asset was the fact of his service under Eisenhower, the avuncular leader whose presidency brought the nation to new heights of prosperity. Kennedy sought to undercut that advantage by proclaiming that America was suffering from a "missile gap," having fallen behind the Soviet Union in the production of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The charge was preposterous, as Kennedy had been privately told by many officials in the Eisenhower administration; America's secret U-2 spy planes had been recording the laggard pace of Soviet missile production since 1956. But the "gap" provided Kennedy with a strong political issue. As the election neared, public opinion polls showed that Americans were more concerned about short-range missiles from Cuba than about nuclear blockbusters from Russia. Fidel Castro's actions were making his anti-American policies a campaign issue: on October 14 he announced the nationalization of 382 U.S.-owned businesses in Cuba, including all banks and industries.

  On the surface, Jack Kennedy and Fidel Castro had much in common. They were young, dynamic leaders who were physically attractive, articulate, and athletic; both lived on the edge and had enormous appetites for women. Both had come from families of means and attended elite schools, but Castro did what Kennedy could not conceive of doing---he turned on his father, a landowner in Oriente Province, and accused him of abusing his workers. In the mid-1950s, the increasingly radical Castro had organized the 26th of July Movement, a tiny guerrilla army in the Sierra Maestra, to campaign for land reform, free elections, public housing, and profit sharing---and an end to the corrupt presidency of Fulgencio Batista. Castro's movement gathered popular support from poorly paid factory workers and farmers, and eventually forced Batista to flee for his safety on New Year's Day, 1959.

  Senator Kennedy, however, saw Cuba through his father's eyes; an island that had been safe for American investment before Castro---and where gambling and prostitution were legal. Under Batista, American corporations owned 40 percent of Cuba's sugar industry, 80 percent of its utilities, and 90 percent of mining. Havana's flourishing gambling casinos, nightclubs, and brothels, all of which Jack Kennedy had enjoyed during private visits in 1957 and 1958,* were under the direct control of the leading organized crime families, who had spent untold millions in payoffs to the Batista regime.

  Kennedy and Nixon campaigned relentlessly throughout the fall as vigorous foes of Fidel Castro. But Kennedy went much further than did Nixon, speaking emotionally of the need for the United States to help unleash those exile "freedom fighters" whose dream was to overthrow the Castro government. Kennedy's attacks on the communist "menace" off the shores of Florida struck a last-minute chord with the voters, who had no way of knowing that the handsome young senator was relying on briefings he had been given about the Eisenhower administration's top-secret invasion planning---and on his awareness that Nixon could say nothing in public that would reveal or disrupt those plans.

  Jack Kennedy's successful election strategy had its beginnings not in 1960 but in 1952, when Richard Nixon's famous "Checkers" speech, named after a reference he made to the family dog, soured the men running the CIA on the young candidate for vice president. Nixon, a hard-line anticommunist who had been elected to the U.S. Senate from California, had emerged at the Republican National Convention as a surprise choice for the vice presidency on a ticket headed by General Dwight Eisenhower. The campaign was disrupted when newspapers began reporting on a private slush fund, said to total $18,000, that had been raised for the young senator by a group of seventy-six conservative California businessmen. The "fund" soon mushroomed into a major scandal that threatened both the Republican ticket and Nixon's future. On September 23, 1952, Nixon defended himself in a half-hour television speech, denying that any money had been spent for his personal use. He told the audience that his wife, Patricia, did not have a mink coat but "a respectable Republican cloth coat," and confessed that his family had received a gift: "a little cocker spaniel---and our little girl---Tricia, the six-year-old---named it Checkers." He added that "the kids love the dog and ... we're gonna keep it." The Checkers speech was a national sensation and solidified, forever, the nation into two groups: those who worshipped Nixon and those who hated him. The outpouring of support for Nixon overwhelmed Eisenhower's strong inclination to dump his running mate, and the two men went on to overwhelm Democrats Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman in the November election.*

  Nixon was far more vulnerable, in 1952 and in 1960, than anyone knew, except for a few officials of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the time of the Checkers speech, the top men at the CIA had unassailable evidence of a Nixon bribe: a copy of a check for $100,000, made out to Nixon, that he had deposited in his checking account at the Bank of California. The CIA's information was all the more dramatic, and politically damaging, because the bribe had been given to Nixon by Nicolae Malaxa, a controversial Romanian industrialist and metallurgist who had, during World War II, been a business partner of Albert Göring, brother of Field Marshal Hermann Göring. Malaxa had been a financial supporter of the pro-Nazi Romanian Iron Guard in early 1941, when the Guard's storm troopers were responsible for a vicious pogrom involving the murder of an estimated seven thousand Jews in Bucharest. After the war, Malaxa served the Communist leadership in Romania and was rewarded with the return of some $2.4 million in personal funds that had been seized by the party. Malaxa, suddenly wealthy, came to the United States on a trade mission in 1946 and stayed, despite repeated efforts by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport him. At the time of his death, in 1972, he was living on Fifth Avenue in New York City, still without citizenship.

  Malaxa survived in America because of his money. In 1951, at the height of the Korean War, Malaxa organized a solely owned company known as the Western Tube Corporation, whose stated purpose was to manufacture tubing for oil drilling. The company announced plans to build a factory in Whittier, California---Nixon's hometown. Nixon, as senator from California, signed a letter in September 1951 urging the federal government to give the firm a "certificate of necessity" and Malaxa a "first preference quota" for permanent residence in the United States, on the grounds that he was essential to the construction of the plant. At the time, Western Tube had the same address and telephone number in Whittier as Nixon's former law firm, Bewley, Knoop & Nixon. Western Tube never got beyond the paper stage and was later determined to be nothing more than a dummy corporation set up to help Malaxa's citizenship efforts. In 1952 Nixon proposed a bill in the Senate granting Malaxa the right to remain in the United States, but the legislation was quashed by Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who later explained that he saw "something rather suspicious" about it.

  Nixon denied any wrongdoing in his efforts on behalf of Malaxa, and the issue attracted little press attention in the 1952 campaign; the focus was on the Nixon fund. But Malaxa was a source of enduring interest to the Romanian émigré community in the United States. Its leaders, Constantin Visoianu and Alexandre Cretzianu, were doing all they could to get Malaxa out of the country, fearing that his ties to the fascist Iron Guard would taint every Romanian exile. The dispute appeared to be just another tedious postwar argument am
ong exiles jostling for position in America, but Visoianu and Cretzianu had far more influence than it seemed: they were secretly on the payroll of the CIA, as were the leaders of many anticommunist exile groups in America. Both were especially close to an officer named Gordon B. Mason, who had served undercover in the CIA station in Bucharest from 1947 to 1951 and had then returned to run the CIA's Romanian operations desk in Washington.

  After Nixon's nomination as vice president, Visoianu, a former Romanian foreign minister, and Cretzianu, a former Romanian ambassador to Turkey, approached Mason and told him that Malaxa had bribed Nixon as part of his effort to remain in the United States. Their evidence was explicit, Mason reluctantly acknowledged in an interview for this book in 1996: they had a photographic copy of Malaxa's check for $100,000 deposited by Nixon in his bank in Whittier. The money was apparently Malaxa's payoff to Nixon for his support in the Congress. One of the tellers in the bank was a Romanian exile, Mason told me, and had been paid by Visoianu and Cretzianu after turning over the copy of the check.

  Mason wrote a report on the transaction, which quickly moved up the CIA's chain of command from Frank Wisner, who was director of clandestine and covert operations, to Allen Dulles, the deputy director, and finally to Walter Bedell "Beedle" Smith, who had been the CIA's director since October 1950. Smith, a retired army lieutenant general, had served loyally as Eisenhower's chief of staff during World War II---in Eisenhower's phrase, he had been "general manager of the war." Everyone knew that Smith would not be pleased by the information, which might well devastate the Eisenhower campaign. Mason was especially nervous. "I was the junior member of the clan," he recalled. "I handed the file to Beedle Smith. 'You son of a bitch,' he yells. 'What are you trying to do? Destroy Eisenhower?'" The CIA director was "purple-faced" with anger. "Where'd you get information like this? I'm not going to have it ... scuttling Eisenhower." He ordered Mason and a colleague to bring to his office "every goddamned scrap" of paper on the affair. Mason did so, and Smith told him: "Just leave everything here. I'll take care of everything ... everything."

  After a week of silence, Smith summoned Mason and his superiors to another meeting and announced that he had "just had a call" from President Harry S. Truman "asking about the report. Which one of you sons of bitches leaked it?" Mason said nothing, but he was reasonably sure that the Romanian exile leaders, having heard no more from him, had taken their spectacular information to the White House. Smith told his subordinates at the meeting that he had told the president, in essence, "If you want this report, you'll have it with my resignation." The CIA director further said that he had told President Truman, misleadingly, that the report was a "two-edged sword"; Malaxa had been involved with Democrats as well as with Nixon. In fact, Malaxa had done nothing more than hire a number of Democrats as his attorneys.

  Beedle Smith, Mason quickly realized, had no intention of permitting his agency---or the truth about Richard Nixon---to get in the way of Eisenhower's election. Ever loyal to his former commanding general, Smith undoubtedly relayed what he knew about Nixon to Eisenhower. That information, nowhere on the record to this day, may have played a role in Eisenhower's initial decision to drop Nixon from the ticket, which was reversed by the outpouring of public support after the Checkers speech. Whether or not Eisenhower ever discussed the Malaxa payment with Nixon, he remained ambivalent about his vice president throughout his two terms in the presidency. And Nixon came away from the Malaxa incident with a lifelong distrust of the CIA.

  Smith may have stopped his associates from acting, but the men in the upper echelon of the CIA knew that the vice presidential candidate was lying when he denied taking any bribes while in the Senate. Richard Nixon was not, in the CIA's phrase, "an honorable man." This attitude, George Mason told me, explains why eight years later some top leaders of the CIA, no longer ruled by Beedle Smith's iron fist, strongly favored the election of Kennedy.

  The election was going to be very close, and Nixon's chance of becoming president could hinge on the Eisenhower administration's Cuba policy---which could succeed only if the CIA and the mob murdered Fidel Castro before November.

  The Eisenhower administration watched with increasing anxiety as Castro, while talking about human rights and democracy, seized control of the press, rigged elections, nationalized industry, shut down the gambling casinos, and moved increasingly close to the Soviet Union. Five years earlier, another left-leaning Latin American leader, President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala, had been successfully overthrown by the CIA in a bloodless coup d'etat; inevitably, there was talk in Washington of another coup. But Castro was far more menacing to American interests than Arbenz, and this time blood would be shed. In the late summer of 1959, Kenneth M. Crosby, a stockbroker who was one of the leaders of the American business community in Havana, was invited to Washington to give Allen Dulles (the CIA's director since 1953) and two of his aides a secret briefing on Castro. Crosby was no amateur in the intelligence business: he had spent five years with the FBI during World War II and was working closely with James Noel, the CIA's current station chief in Havana. Crosby did not mince words, he recalled in a 1996 interview for this book; he told the CIA director that he and many of his business associates in Havana were convinced that "the only way to get rid of [Castro] was to kill him. He was such a powerful, powerful presence, and an evil influence." Crosby remembered describing Castro as "another Hitler. We already knew he was a communist." He told Dulles about Castro's "tremendous influence over the people" and compared his power to that of Rasputin.

  The plotting against Castro intensified in early 1960, when Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet deputy premier, negotiated a Soviet-Cuban trade pact during a visit to Havana. Within a few weeks, according to the 1975 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (known as the Church Report, after the committee's chairman, Idaho Democrat Frank Church), there was agreement at the top of the Eisenhower administration that the Castro regime could only "be overthrown by the use of force." Further, "unless Fidel and Raul Castro and Che Guevara could be eliminated in one package," any covert action against the Cuban government "would be a long, drawn-out affair." The Soviet shootdown of the American U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers on May 1, 1960, and Eisenhower's subsequent lying about it, destroyed a planned summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev and ended any chance of easing Cold War tensions. Castro did not help matters by pronouncing in July that the Monroe Doctrine was dead. "The only thing you can do with anything dead," he said, "is to bury it so that it will not poison the air."

  According to the Church Report, the CIA made its first overt move to bring the Mafia into the assassination plotting against Castro in late August of 1960. Richard M. Bissell, Jr.---the CIA's deputy director of plans---was the man in charge of dirty tricks. Bissell, a former economics professor at Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a golden boy inside the agency, famed for his intellect and his suffer-no-fools attitude. There was no question about Bissell's ability to get things done: working in intense secrecy, he had masterminded the development of the U-2, whose dramatic high-flying missions over the Soviet Union opened up what had been a closed society. Without hint of publicity, the U-2 went from the drawing board in 1954 to successful flight two years later. It was delivered ahead of schedule and under budget. Now Bissell had been given the task of getting rid of the Castro regime, and he turned to Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA's office of security, for fresh ideas. Bissell authorized a cash payment of $150,000 for the operation. What happened next has been the subject of congressional reports, books, and television documentaries over the past two decades.

  The CIA was convinced that the Mafia had access to reliable gunmen in Cuba, but someone was needed to serve as a middleman---to broker the deal. Edwards and his deputy, James O'Connell, agreed that the man for the job was a former FBI agent named Robert A. Maheu, a private investigator who was known for his extensive contacts in Los Angeles and in Las Vegas, where he liv
ed. Maheu, in a 1994 interview for this book, recalled that O'Connell asked him to get in touch with Johnny Rosselli, who had been involved with gambling, extortion, and other syndicate operations since the 1930s. "They asked if I'd help 'dispose' of Castro," Maheu recalled. He was reluctant. "It was not an easy decision for me. I'd be the cutout between the Mafia and the CIA---now I've got a big army on each side of me." Maheu decided that killing Castro fell within the parameters of a "just war," and arranged a lunch in Los Angeles with Rosselli to tell him what the mission was and that the CIA was behind it. Rosselli told Maheu "he'd have to check it with someone in Chicago."

  By 1960 the handsome and well-spoken Rosselli had become the representative of the Chicago mob on the West Coast. His gangster credentials gave him a special cachet and status; he moved easily among the social set in Los Angeles, and in the late 1940s even dabbled briefly as a film producer. It was through those connections that he had met Maheu; through Maheu he had been introduced to the CIA's James O'Connell at a cocktail party. The CIA saw Rosselli in a less sinister light than the FBI did: the FBI knew him as a mobster believed to be personally involved in no fewer than thirteen Mafia murders---a top man, directly responsible to Sam Giancana.

  In September 1960 events in Cuba heightened the Eisenhower administration's feeling of urgency. On the evening of September 14, Cuban counterintelligence agents seized three CIA operatives as they were attempting to bug the New China News Agency, in downtown Havana. The men, who claimed that they were tourists (travel to Cuba was not yet illegal), were arrested while drilling into a ceiling, with electronic gear scattered around them. They were tried a few months later in Havana, found guilty of espionage, and slammed into a Cuban prison, where they remained until April 21, 1963, when the Kennedy administration negotiated their release.