A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (77 page)

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Days later, Garrison made headlines around the world with the announcement that he had uncovered a conspiracy in Kennedy’s assassination. On March 1, 1967, Garrison formally charged that a respected local businessman and philanthropist, Clay Shaw, was at the heart of the plot.

In Washington, the headlines from New Orleans worried Jack Anderson, Pearson’s junior reporting partner on the Washington Merry-Go-Round column. Even more than Pearson, it seemed, the forty-four-year-old Anderson treasured a scoop, and he feared that he and Pearson were about to be scooped by Garrison about the CIA-Mafia plots.
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Anderson could not discuss any of this with Pearson, at least not easily, since Pearson was thousands of miles away, touring South America with his friend the chief justice; Warren was on an official visit to Andean nations. The two men had just arrived in Lima, Peru, when word reached them of what Anderson had published in the Merry-Go-Round on March 3. It was written in the column’s always-breathless style:

WASHINGTON—President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb—an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy, (D-N.Y.), may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother.

Top officials, queried by this column, agreed that a plot to assassinate Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro was “considered” at the highest levels of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time Bobby was riding herd on the agency. The officials disagreed, however, over whether the plan was approved and implemented.

One version claims that underworld figures actually were recruited to carry out the plot. Another rumor has it that three hired assassins were caught in Havana where a lone survivor is still supposed to be languishing in prison. These stories have been investigated and discounted by the FBI.

Yet the rumor persists, whispered by people in a position to know, that Castro did become aware of an American plot upon his life and decided to retaliate against President Kennedy.

This report may have started New Orleans’s flamboyant District Attorney Jim Garrison on his investigation of the Kennedy assassination.

Pearson was unhappy that Anderson had published the column. “It was a poor story in the first place, and violated a confidence in the second,” Pearson wrote in his diary on March 20, after returning home. “Finally it reflected on Bobby Kennedy without actually pinning the goods on him.” But the article had set events in motion that would quickly prove to Pearson—and to Warren and Johnson—that many of the essential elements of the story were true. The CIA had plotted for years to kill Castro, even recruiting the Mafia to help. Robert Kennedy was clearly aware of the plots, and he may have been responsible for some of them. And the Warren Commission had apparently been told none of it.

Someone else had known about the Castro plots—J. Edgar Hoover. On March 6, three days after the column appeared, the FBI presented the White House with a classified report that bore an eye-popping title: “Central Intelligence Agency’s Intentions to Send Hoodlums to Cuba to Assassinate Castro.” The report summarized what the FBI had known—for years—about the CIA’s plots. It noted that Hoover had personally alerted Robert Kennedy in 1961 to the Mafia’s involvement.

In April, President Johnson called in Pearson to congratulate him on the scoop. “We think there’s something to” the CIA-Mafia plots, Johnson said. “There were some attempts to assassinate Castro through the Cosa Nostra, and they point to your friends in the Justice Department.”

Pearson understood what Johnson was getting at. “You mean
one
friend in the Justice Department,” Pearson said. The president was referring to Robert Kennedy. Johnson would later be quoted as saying that he was appalled to discover that during the Kennedy administration, “we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”

The impact of Pearson’s scoop was limited at first, given the inability of other Washington reporters to confirm such highly classified information and because Pearson’s reporting was so often flawed that other news organizations found it easy to ignore him. And if Warren was angry that the commission that bore his name had been told nothing about the Castro plots, he said nothing about it publicly. There is no suggestion in his correspondence or datebooks from the court to show that he contacted Dulles to ask what the former spymaster knew of the plots and why Dulles might have withheld the information from his fellow commissioners. Dulles died in 1969.

Warren’s apparent calm was not shared by many of the commission’s former staff members, who began to allege publicly that they had been lied to and that the commission had been denied information that could have pointed to a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death. Lee Rankin, normally so slow to anger, told congressional investigators years later that he had been outraged to discover what had been hidden—both by the CIA, which organized the Castro plots, and the FBI, which knew about them. He regretted he had been “naive enough” while on the commission to “think that when the president of the United States told everybody to cooperate with us, they would understand that was an order and a mandate.” The commission “made a mistake by believing that the FBI would not conceal. It made a mistake by believing that the CIA would not withhold information.”

John Whitten, the veteran CIA officer who had been the agency’s first liaison to the Warren Commission, said he was furious to learn about the Castro plots—because he, too, had been told nothing about them in 1964, when he was supposedly providing the commission with every bit of intelligence out of the CIA’s files that might be related to the president’s murder. “Had I known, my investigation would have been entirely different,” Whitten complained years later. “It might indeed turn out that the Cubans had undertaken this assassination as retaliation for our operations to assassinate Castro.”

Whitten was angry, in particular, with Richard Helms, who had been promoted to director of Central Intelligence in 1966 by President Johnson. It would eventually be determined by Congress that Helms had personally approved the Castro plots, including the schemes involving the Mafia. Whitten said later that he believed Helms withheld the information from the Warren Commission because “he realized it would reflect very poorly on the agency, and very poorly on him.” Helms’s decision, he said, “was a morally reprehensible act, which he cannot possibly justify under his oath of office.”

Helms saw things very differently when called before Congress in the 1970s to justify the Castro plots and explain why he had not told the commission about them. In his career as a spy, Helms had been responsible, above all, for keeping secrets. He said he determined, in his own mind, that the CIA’s Castro plots had nothing to do with Kennedy’s assassination, and therefore there was no reason to tell the commission—or his deputy Whitten, for that matter—about them. “It never occurred to me,” he explained. “We never talked to anybody outside the agency about covert operations of any kind.” Besides, Helms asked later, why had it been his responsibility to tell the commission about the Castro plots since he was certain that one of the commissioners—Dulles—knew all about them, as had Robert Kennedy? “All kinds of people knew about these operations high up in the government,” Helms said angrily. “Why am I singled out as the fellow who should have gone up and identified a government operation to get rid of Castro?”

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Hugh Aynesworth, the former
Dallas Morning News
reporter, would never really get off the “assassination beat,” as it came to be known among journalists in Dallas. Year after year, he would keep getting pulled back to the story. By January 1967, he had moved on to a new job as a national correspondent at
Newsweek
, expected to take on every sort of assignment from his new base in Houston. But he had barely settled in at the magazine when the phone rang, with an urgent call from New Orleans. It was district attorney Jim Garrison. He invited Aynesworth to come to New Orleans to talk about the new information he had gathered on the Kennedy assassination.

“I keep running into your name, and I think you have information that could help me,” Garrison said. “I want to share some stuff with you. You need to come down here.” Naturally intrigued, Aynesworth went to New Orleans to meet Garrison at his home, and it was “one of the strangest days of my life.” With his booming voice, the six-foot-four-inch Garrison could have moments of impressive lucidity, but they were fleeting. Garrison was “unhinged,” Aynesworth quickly concluded. The conversation was “both nutty and disturbing for the fact that a high-level elected official could believe the nonsense that Garrison professed to believe.”
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Over the years, Garrison was never able to settle on exactly who was responsible for the assassination. His list of suspects included—at one time or another and in no particular order—gay, sadomasochistic “thrill killers,” narcotics traffickers, anti-Castro and pro-Castro Cuban exiles, the Defense Department, the Justice Department, Texas oilmen who had backed President Johnson’s political career, as well as the president himself. Garrison accused Chief Justice Warren and other members of the assassination commission of orchestrating the cover-up. The CIA figured as a coconspirator in many of Garrison’s theories, as did “queers”; he claimed that at least six men involved in the plot were gay. Oswald, he said, was “a switch-hitter who couldn’t satisfy his wife … that’s all in the Warren report.” The assassination, he said, was carried out by a “precision guerrilla team” of at least seven gunmen positioned around Dealey Plaza.

At their first meeting, Garrison offered to introduce Aynesworth to a key prosecution witness. “You’re lucky you’re in town,” he said. “We’ve just verified this guy and believe me, it’s dynamite.” An assistant district attorney arrived at Garrison’s home with the witness—“a slight little guy from Houston, a piano player who proceeded to relate how he knew that Ruby and Oswald were longtime gay lovers.” The piano player recalled how Oswald and the man who would later kill him had been thrown out of a Houston club because they had been “groping each other all evening long.” Aynesworth did not tell Garrison, but he had seen this man before—back in Dallas in the days just after Kennedy’s murder. “He had come forward within three days of the assassination, telling exactly the same story to the Dallas police.” It was clear to Aynesworth back then, just as it was clear to him now, that the piano player was another of the desperate, delusional attention-seekers determined to pretend that they had some personal role in the great drama. “The last I’d seen of the piano man, he was crying and scrambling out the police station door in Dallas.”

Garrison’s other prosecution witnesses would include a man who called himself Julius Caesar, a former resident of a psychiatric hospital who dressed, appropriately, in a red toga and sandals. Caesar claimed to have seen Oswald and Ruby in the company of the man would become the focus of the district attorney’s investigation: Clay Shaw, who had come into Garrison’s sights largely because he was known to be gay. The district attorney’s targets included another gay Louisianan, David Ferrie, the former Eastern Airlines pilot who may—or may not—have known Oswald in the 1950s. Hounded by the district attorney’s office, Ferrie would be found dead in his New Orleans apartment on February 22, 1967; the coroner ruled out foul play or suicide, although Ferrie had left behind notes that suggested he was under so much pressure that he was contemplating whether to kill himself.

In its issue dated May 15, 1967,
Newsweek
published a devastating article under Aynesworth’s byline, the first major exposé of the possibly illegal tactics of the New Orleans district attorney. The article cited evidence that Garrison had offered a bribe to a witness for perjured testimony that would tie Ferrie to Shaw. The article, which appeared under the headline “The JFK ‘Conspiracy,’” began:

Jim Garrison is right. There has been a conspiracy in New Orleans—but it is a plot of Garrison’s own making. It is a scheme to concoct a fantastic “solution” to the death of John F. Kennedy and to make it stick; in this case, the district attorney and his staff have been indirect parties to the death of one man and have humiliated, harassed and financially gutted several others.

Aynesworth said a furious Garrison called after the article appeared, accusing the reporter of trying to undermine the “search for truth” and warning that he risked arrest if he dared to return to New Orleans. “I hope
Newsweek
has good lawyers and you may have a surprise when you come back to town.”

On March 1, 1969, two years after Clay Shaw’s arrest on charges of conspiring in the Kennedy assassination, a New Orleans jury took less than an hour to acquit him.

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JUNE 1967 THROUGH 1971

In June 1967, Win Scott was eager—desperate even—to downplay the significance of a new informant’s report about Silvia Duran. A second source had come forward to report that Oswald had a sexual relationship with Duran during his visit to Mexico City.

It had been nearly three years since the CIA had first heard the story from the “nut” Elena Garro. This time, it would be much harder for Scott to attack the credibility of the source, since this new information was coming from one of the CIA’s own trusted informants, identified in the agency’s files by the code name LIRING/3 (all of the agency’s informants in Mexico City had code names that began “LI”). In June 1967, LIRING/3 reported that he had heard about Oswald’s brief affair with Duran from the best possible source—Duran herself.
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The informant, a Mexican painter whose circle of friends included Cuban diplomats and who had been friendly with Duran in the past, told his CIA handler that he had recently spoken to Duran by phone and then visited her home. During those conversations, he said, she revealed her affair with Oswald in 1963, adding that she had admitted the relationship to the Mexican police during the brutal interrogations in the days after Kennedy’s assassination.