The significance of the Kennedy assassination to future generations may be more involved with the nature of American society in 1963 than with the nature of a whodunit
Download 0.71 Mb.
|
| When JFK died, Robert Kennedy lost his will to resist; the President's opponents had the field to themselves. If the ambush had failed by a missed shot, what a mess would have been on the
conspirators hands. The Kennedys would probably have uncovered the plot and what civil warfare would have been involved can only be guessed at. The history of the Kennedy assassination is a Shakespearean epic, a cross between Julius Ceasar, Hamlet, and Macbeth. There is a conspiracy of noble Romans, or Knights Templar, that murders a power-hungry politician, but the ghosts of the Kennedys rise up through the years to haunt the conspirators and bring them their just retribution. The flames of Watergate were predestined in that " Bay of Pigs' " thing that President Nixon wanted the CIA to help keep hidden. But " murder will out " and out of the Watergate closets came forth the skeletons of the Castro, Lumumba, and Kennedy murder plots. It is hard to comprehend just how much of our contemporary American history grew out of the existence of a small island, ninety miles from our southernmost shores. The historical backdrop to the Kennedy assassination can only be understood within the mosaic of our problems with Cuba at the time. Three of the most significant events in modern U.S.-Cuban relations ocurred within two critical years of each other. First, of course, is the failed invasion attempt by the exiles in 1961. Second, the nuclear showdown between Kennedy and the Soviets over the missile crisis. Finally, overshadowed by those twin events and overlooked by history, the death of JFK and with it the death of any hope for a rapprochement between the U.S. and Castro's Cuba. As the twisting trail of these plots wound their way through the fabric of our national history culminating in the Watergate affair and its aftermath of revelations it is worth noting that Nixon's constant concern during the period of the cover-up and the reason he asked the C.I.A. to intervene were noted in the President's own words. Revealed on the tapes which sealed his fate were Nixon's instructions to his aide, Robert Haldeman, who was informed by the President to ask for the C.I.A.'s support in the coverup by reminding the agency that these things tracked back to that " Bay of Pigs thing." In the wake of Watergate a string of disclosures culminated in the exposure of " that Bay of Pigs thing ", i.e. the C.I.A.-Mafia plot to kill Castro which was disclosed in 1975 and again in 1976 by both the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee. Certainly in 1973 Nixon wasn't trying to hide the existence of the Bay of Pigs invasion, but the Castro plot was still unknown. In fact, a case can be made that the effort to contain that information was even the reason for the Watergate break-in itself. However, as 1960 drew to a close the victory of John Kennedy foreclosed Nixon's future involvement in the operation and transformed the mob's involvement with the U.S. government into a greater concern for self-preservation than the destruction of Fidel Castro. For as others were enjoying a quiet Christmas vacation, the President's brother and Attorney General designate, Robert F. Kennedy, was just as quietly reviewing Justice Department files which had largely been produced by the work of Senator John McLellan's Senate Labor Rackets Committee of which R.F.K. had been the Chief Counsel and J.F.K. had been a member. The Kennedy brothers were soon to be handed the reins of the full force of the government's power and Bobby, at least, had big plans for Mssrs. Hoffa, Lansky, Giancana, Trafficante, and Marcello--- plans that would come back to haunt him and his family and the American people for years to come. *** The casino business was a dead-deal in late 1960 Havana and Lewis McWillie had no reason to stay in Cuba, he departed for Miami on January 2nd, 1961, after Castro's men had confiscated his assets. McWillie's arrival made the Chicago and Miami newspapers for a revealing incident which occurred as the passengers from McWillie's flight were disembarking in Miami. All during the brief flight from Havana, McWillie had been eavesdropping on the conversation of one Laverne Kautt, a 54 year old schoolteacher from Chicago. Kautt was the leader of a group that had travelled to Cuba under the auspices of a group known as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (F.P.C.C.). Kautt had been praising Castro and the revolution and when the passengers hit the ground at Miami airport McWillie hauled off and hit Kautt. There was a brief investigation of the incident, but the police probably sympathized with McWillie as there were no charges. Ironically, McWillie's old-friend Jack Ruby had something to say about the F.P.C.C. too. After Oswald's arrest, the Dallas authorities held a press conference where an official noted that Oswald was a member of the Free Cuba Committee. Ruby rose from the audience ( he was posing as a representative of the Israeli press! ) to correct the speaker, stating that Oswald was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, not the group that had just been mentioned. Chapter VIII Although the battle raged on in Algeria and Cuba's loss had created great concern in Washington, in 1960, the international action shifted to another independence related civil war; this time in Africa's Belgian Congo, where independence in July of that year had created instant civil war as both U.S. and French intelligence maneuvered to prevent that critical area from entering the Soviet camp. On June 30, 1960 the former Belgian colony was given its independence; the leftist Patrice Lumumba became Prime Minister and Joseph Kasavubu became President of the new nation. The C.I.A. immediately dispatched one of its senior agents in Europe, Lawrence Devlin, Chief of Station in Luxembourg and Brussels, the Belgian capital, where he had served since 1957, to the Congo station, there, using the name Victor Hedgman, this senior, agency-politician, a gruff Irishman, much like his colleague William Harvey, assessed the situation and cabled Washington in August that the Congo could quickly be another Cuba. On July 12th, the day after Katanga province seceded from the rest of the Congo, conditions looked ready for all out civil war and the U.S. State Department, under John Foster Dulles, extended diplomatic status to his brother Allen's C.I.A. station chiefs attached to our embassies. Devlin and C.I.A. priorities were supreme in Leopoldville, the Congo capital. On August 18, 1969 President Eisenhower's National Security Council took on the subject of the Congo and in response to Devlin's assessment, Allen Dulles soon cabled Devlin back with the decision that Lumumba would be " removed." C.I.A.'s Clandestine Services division commenced an assassination plot with William Harvey consulting Washington from his Berlin base. It seemed everyone was in on the plot, except the intended victim, Lumumba. President Kasavubu sought to dismiss Lumumba as Premier in early-September. This was followed by a coup by Army Colonel Joseph Mobutu which put him in control of the Leopoldville capital and left Lumumba as Mobutu's prisoner after being dismissed as Premier. Mobutu kept Kasavubu as President, but civil disturbances followed in the wake of Lumumba's capture and after appealing to the U.N. for protection, Lumumba was now under house arrest. The situation was far too unstable for C.I.A.'s liking however and at end-September, Devlin was seeking permission to use a local operative for the purpose of infiltrating Lumumba's guard and killing him with poison. Afterwards, the agency sent an operative to the Congo station, a European assassin who thought of himself as part of an execution team. The agency provided him with some plastic surgery and a wig so that other French mobsters in Leopoldville would not recognize him. This agent came to be known as WI/Rogue. Lumumba was still under quasi-house arrest now at the Premier's residence in Leopoldville, Devlin's plans to poison him had not yet come off. The French were also in on the action as Paris gangster Andre Labay led a group of six of his Marseilles' criminal friends in another plot to kill Lumumba, engineered by S.D.E.C.E., the French intelligence service. U.S. and French actions were on parallel track in this situation. In mid-October the C.I.A. changed its plans for an inside job and decided to use a sniper. The Clandestine Services division in Washington sent senior officer Michael Mulroney to join Devlin in the Congo. Mulroney had resisted Deputy Director Richard Bissel's request for an outright assassination plot; instead he planned to draw Lumumba away from his guard so that the Congolese forces could kill him. Mulroney arrived in the Congo later that month and he, Devlin, and ROGUE worked together on the plot. The C.I.A. officers both wanted an operative known as QJ/WIN in on this operation. WIN had worked with Devlin in Brussels for a number of years in the area of narcotics control as an informant; WIN was an aggressive and rising young mobster in Brussels during those years; he was also used to spot and recruit other agents for the agency and the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics in Europe. Mulroney, whose real name is Justin O'Donnell, after conferring with Devlin and with Harvey's recommendation, requested agent QJ/WIN to be loaned from Harvey's European operations. Richard Bissel had asked Harvey to head up Executive Action, also known as Project ZR/RIFLE; the Leopoldville station needed a sniper. WIN had worked off and on for Devlin out of Brusells from April, 1959 to October, 1960, he was the contract agent that within the next year would be the sole operational asset of the assassination capability, ZR/RIFLE. Mulroney had been apprised of WIN's value as an assassin by William Harvey, the agency's top operative in Europe who was soon to be asked to create a permanent facility for assassination in the agency to be called Executive Action. WIN arrived in the Congo just before Thanksgiving, 1960. He probably got his feet wet in Leopoldville by stopping off at the Number Ten Club, run by Jo Attia and populated by Labay's French gangsters. There was really no hiding who he was; in fact shortly after in early December, ROGUE also arrived in the Congo and recognized WIN immediately. ROGUE would have headed straight for Attia's bar, he had been recruited in September, trained, and sent to join in the action in the Congo--- he was in on temporary work from Algeria as were Labay's men. ROGUE challenged WIN immediately to join him in assassination work and WIN told Devlin that there was a loud-mouth down at the Number Ten Club, only to find out it was his prospective partner. Together WIN and ROGUE would raise hell for U.S. clandestine operations on three continents. Lumumba soon escaped from his detention in Leopoldville on November 29th. On December 2nd, ROGUE was in place in the Congo. Lumumba was heading for Stanleyville to attend a family members funeral when he was recaptured by Mobutu's troops and imprisoned. The world waited. On January 15th, Mobutu handed Lumumba over to the troops of Moise Tshombe, the Belgian puppet who ruled the mineral rich, break away Katanga province. On January 17th, the world learned that Lumumba had been beaten to death by henchman of Tshombe and Mobutu. What part did the U.S. agents play in Lumumba's death, if any? WIN supposedly returned to Europe in December; Rogue was expelled from the Congo early on by the chief of Congolese Intelligence. He was sent across the Congo River to Brazaaville, French Congo and turned over to French Intelligence. Rogue was playing a dual role, he was also a member of LaBay's team in Leopoldville. Rogue's real identity was Christian Jacques David and WIN, Lucien Sarti. Their careers would intertwine from that point on. Sarti, twenty-three, partially bald, patch over the left eye lost in a car accident when just a youth. Sarti had a criminal record since the age of eight. Sarti was a Brussels-to-Paris mobster and had also been a barbouze in Algeria. Sarti was seen in Leopoldville by David and Michele Nicoli, working for LaBay. Sarti had worked for Devlin in Brussels as a narcotics informant, while he built up the narcotics smuggling business of his own gang there. Sarti was already known for his prowess with a rifle, ready to prove the European mystique that the Corsicans were the best sharpshooters in Europe. QJ/WIN was brought in to be a sniper--- he and Rogue did not kill Lumumba. O'Donnell's plot may have come off after all. The upshot was that from then on Sarti was Devlin's man: proven, ready, able. Sometimes Devlin used the code name ofDuncan and throughout the intelligence underworld the name Duncan meant access to Sarti, a valuable asset. As for David, he had escaped from his French prison in the Fall of 1960 and by February, 1961 he was back in a French prison and later in a mental hospital that summer. Where he was, what he was really doing for Foccart and the C.I.A. have taken years to see the light of day. In late 1961, David escaped again, this time ending up in Algeria, where he joined the barbouzes--- Sarti, Michel Nicoli, Marcel Francisci, Dominique Venturi--- in the all out counter-terror operation directed by Foccart. In 1961, nearly all of France's top gangsters were in Algeria. David distinguished himself in Algeria for reckless bravery and brutal efficiency. After Algerian independence was achieved, in July, 1962 David returned to Marseilles and joined SDECE as a full agent, working for Foccart and Attia, particularly in Morocco. David also ran the Gavroche Bar in Paris when Attia was out of town; he soon became the confidant of Meme Guerini and his sometime bodyguard. While the plot to kill Lumumba by rifle proved unecessary, the other assassination plot, the one to kill Castro was still in full-swing and the agency was getting edgy in 1961 about the mob's seeming inability to get the job done. Assigning it top priority, William Harvey was brought in from Europe and began to transform his ZR/Rifle project into part of Task Force W's anti-castro plan. Harvey was on board in early 1962 and discussed the Castro project and the possibility of using QJ/WIN in it. Win was at the time the sole asset of the Executive Action project; he was being kept under a $ 7,200 per annum annual retainer contract approved by Richard Helms until the end of 1962. Harvey headed up Task Force W, replacing Big Jim O'Connell as the agency's man in the anti-Castro plot. Harvey reported to Ted Shackley, a former colleague of his in Berlin, who at the youthful age of 34 was heading up the C.I.A.'s Miami station, JM/WAVE. That station ran the entire anti-Castro operation and had been run by Shackley and his operations assistant, Thomas Clines, since 1961; this was R.F.K.'s Operation Mongoose, run out of a few buildings in an isolated part of the University of Miami campus. They relied heavily on the connections provided by Santo Trafficante in the Cuban exile community. Shackley and Clines were instrumental in providing weapons to Johnny Roselli for use in the anti-Castro plot. Shackley and Harvey even loaded up a U-Hual trailer with weapons and equipment for Tony de Varona's use in that same plot; they gave the keys to Johnny Roselli after parking in a lot. The plans to use QJ/WIN again went astray; he was on trial in France in 1962 for smuggling and the agency discussed trying to assist him in beating the charges. Apparently the plans for Executive Action petered out and Sarti resumed a life of crime. He may have worked for the agency again, but he did some major work for private contractors and disappeared from agency sight in Europe in 1965, when he reappeared he was in South America where he would once again meet Christian David. *** As for the Castro assassination plot, in early 1961 the C.I.A. had fashioned a lethal pill for delivery to Castro in his food; however, the first attempt to deliver it failed when Roselli's man in Cuba got cold feet. In March, Trafficante's suggestion that Varona be used was accepted and the pills were passed along to him at a meeting at the Fountainbleu Hotel the night of the third heavyweight championship fight between Floyd Patterson and Sweden's Ingmar Johansen, March 12, 1961. The group met at Trafficante's table in the hotel's Boom Boom room; Maheu, Giancana, Roselli, Trafficante, and the Cuban. It was planned that a Varona contact on the island, a man who worked in a restaurant frequented by Fidel, would slip the pills into Castro's food sometime in April, at the time of the planned Bay of Pigs invasion. Roselli took Varona outside and gave him the pills and a $ 10,000 down payment on a promised $ 50,000. After a first unsuccessful attempt, the next attempt failed as well, ironically due to the intervention of the Kennedys. At the commencement of the invasion, Bobby Kennedy had decided to place a number of exile leaders under house arrest for security purposes. Varona was one of the sequestered leaders and his inability to pass on a " go " signal to his contacts on the island may have contributed to the failure of the entire invasion. At the least, RFK's action helped insure Fidel's continued existence. The new Kennedy Administration had been deeply involved with the effects of transition, new appointments, confirmation hearings, briefings; Bobby was building his organized crime strike force and trying to deal with J. Edgar Hoover and the incipient problems caused by the civil rights movement. Meantime, the C.I.A. continued unaffected in implementing the plans in progress to undo Castro and his revolution. So, while R.F.K. began to implement his crackdown on the national crime syndicate, unknown to him the C.I.A. continued to work with the leaders of that syndicate in their mutual attempt to kill Castro. The Castro assassination was intended to be the imminent prelude to the invasion of the island; a leaderless regime would crumble before the invading exile troops. The C.I.A.-Mafia plot had begun to be implemented in the previous year as former F.B.I. agent Robert Maheu, of the Howard Hughes organization (former F.B.I. agent Richard Danner, Nixon's and Rebozo's Florida friend, worked with Maheu in the Hughes organization at the time), brought in Johnny Roselli, of the Chicago syndicate. Roselli sold the idea to his boss, Sam Giancana, the boss in Chicago and together they had reached the intended target to implement the plot, Santo Trafficante, Meyer Lansky's right-hand man. The seed planted by Lansky in 1959 had come full-circle. After a number of meetings between the participants which took place in the Miami area, mostly at Ben Novack's elegant Fountainbleu Hotel, the operational decisions had been made and were ready to be implemented. The original plan called for a gang-style hit, but something more subtle was decided on: poison pills manufactured in the C.I.A.'s Technical Services' lab. Trafficante had the Cuban contacts, both in Miami's exile community and remaining on the island. The plan called for concealing the poison in soup which would be served to Fidel at one of his favorite restaurants in Havana. Trafficante's Cuban contact had a man in the restaurant's kitchen. The Cuban contact that Trafficante had recommended for the go-between role for the operation was an exile leader named Tony de Varona. Varona was a former President of the Cuban Senate and a chief deputy of Carlos Prio. Prio had been President of Cuba between Batista's tenures, he had also had good relations with the mob, and he was a personal favorite of Vice-President Nixon and Nixon's choice to be the new President after the successful invasion took place. Since before Castro's victory, Prio and his deputy, Varona, had resided in Miami; now Varona was a major leader in the exile community, the head of an exile front, one of the various exile groups which came under the C.I.A.'s funding umbrella. In typical compartmentalized fashion, the C.I.A. group which supervised the invasion was unaware Varona was involved in the assassination plan and sequestered him along with other exile leaders when the invasion began. Varona was thus unable to coordinate the assassination plot and both it and the invasion failed as history so records. Now, a month before the planned invasion date, all the players came together at the Fountainbleu to finalize the plot. As cover for their meeting they had the activities connected with the third and decisive showdown between Heavyweight champion, Floyd Patterson, and his nemesis, the Swede, Ingemar Johanson--- the man who had taken away Patterson's title and handed him his first defeat. On the evening of Monday, March 13, 1961, the festivities at the Fountainbleu included an unusual fashion show in the hotel's Boom Boom Room. There were no elegant models on the stage, nor fashionable buyers in the audience. Instead, this was a paramilitary fashion show and the models, displaying the latest in clothing and equipment for the soldier-of-fortune of the day, were none other than the adventurers who had fought with Castro and now ran the mob's training camp hidden on No Name Key. The leader of this show was Gerry Hemming, the soldier-of-fortune who claimed to have seen Jack Ruby at Captain William Morgan's Havana residence in 1959; oddly enough, Hemming also claimed to know Oswald from his Marine days. Hemming and his boys were going through their paces on the stage as a means of raising funds for their anti-Castro efforts and their audience consisted of their mob benefactors and a sprinkling of notable locals. At the head table, the Fountainbleu's owner, Ben Novack, entertained the recently deposed Venezuelan strongman, Marcos Perez Jimenez and a couple of local mob figures. The wealthy, exiled former dictator's daughter was engaged to be married to one of Lansky's former casino managers, a wedding would shortly follow. At a more private table, slightly behind the show on the stage, was a group with a more sinister intent for the evening. Santo Trafficante presided over the introductions as Tony de Varona met Roselli and Maheu. After a brief discussion, the group retired to Maheu's suite upstairs where they were joined by Sam Giancana and Joseph Shimon, former Washington, D.C. policeman and Giancana's friend and guest for the evening. In compensation for his part in the operation Varona was given $ 10,000 and some communications equipment his group desired. The poison pills which had come from the C.I.A.'s Langley labs made their way from Maheu to Trafficante to Roselli and were given to Varona by Roselli as he and Varona conversed outside the suite. Although Varona knew the kind of men he was dealing with, something about the arrangement gave him the impression that the C.I.A. was involved. It was an impression that made him less than pleased as his dealings with the government's operatives did not build his confidence, rather it diminished it. Of course, Varona's instincts were proven to be correct, as were his misgivings; as time went on the exiles would have good reason to lose faith in the agency's ability to help them and a point would be reached where many of the anti-Castro groups would avoid government assistance wherever possible. In this case, Varona passed the pills through his network to his contact on the island in early April; however, since he was under house arrest at the start of the invasion, no signal was given to the contact and Fidel dined unharmed and the rest is history. The plotters were undeterred, however, and Roselli and Santo would continue to pursue Castro's demise through 1961 and 1962 with government support, although when R.F.K. finally became involved, Giancana, at least, was cut out and the C.I.A. took closer control, assigning top operative, William Harvey, to work with Roselli and the Cubans. After numerous failures and the impression that Trafficante may have been double dealing with Castro, the operation was finally suspended in 1962. Whether or not Trafficante had an arrangement with Fidel, later events would indicate that he and his cohorts really did seek the dictator's demise. Trafficante, Roselli, and Giancana would continue to finance private attempts to kill Castro even when the government's support was no longer there and there is no reason to believe that Lansky ever removed the bounty promised for Fidel's scalp. Directory: 2014 2014 -> For want of a nail 2014 -> The Global Warming that Wasn’t 2014 -> Assembly, No. 3901 state of new jersey 216th legislature 2014 -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 2014 -> Ihbb asian Championships 2014 middle school bowl Round 4 First Quarter 2014 -> Unit: Automotive and Auto Body 2014 -> Ihbb european Championships 2014 Bowl Round 4 First Quarter 2014 -> International History Bee and Bowl 2013-14 Asian Division Question Set Bowl Round Six 2014 -> United states patent and trademark office 2014 -> Walnut creek, ca branch executive committee meeting minutes Download 0.71 Mb. Share with your friends:
|