Legacy of Secrecy (30 page)

than two weeks anyway, and if the Kennedys’ coup plan failed, Helms

could even be rewarded for already having a backup plan in place.

However, after JFK’s shooting, the backup plan for which Helms might

have once been praised now suddenly looked incredibly suspicious. The

unauthorized plans would have to remain hidden from McCone and

Bobby if Helms were to have any future in the CIA.

After McCone had left for Bobby’s estate, Helms received the news

that JFK was dead. Along with learning that JFK had been shot in an

open car, by one or more snipers, Helms’s anxiety must have increased to

new heights. The way in which JFK was shot mirrors later AMWORLD

memos, and a passage in David Atlee Phillips’s autobiographical novel

outline about the CIA’s plan to shoot Fidel at Varadero beach.16 Phillips

later wrote that JFK was shot using “precisely the plan we had devised

against Castro [which involved using] a sniper’s rifle from an upper

floor window of a building on the route where Castro often drove in an

open jeep.”17

Now, just ten days before Almeida’s coup, Helms had to wonder if

some aspect of his plans had been turned on JFK. Clearly, a massive

intelligence failure had occurred somewhere along the line, and Helms,

as essentially the head of CIA operations, was responsible. But had

Castro somehow retaliated against JFK, because of the coup plan or

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one of Helms’s unauthorized operations? Or had someone involved in

Helms’s own plots turned their sights on JFK instead of Fidel?

When Oswald surfaced as the prime suspect in JFK’s slaying, Helms

must have been crushed. What had been a horrible situation just got

even worse since JFK’s murder was now tied to someone with CIA

connections. The words of one of Helms’s top subordinates can help us

gauge Helms’s reaction to hearing that Oswald was the prime suspect in

JFK’s murder. John Whitten was Helms’s covert operations chief for all

of Mexico and Central America. In a detailed report that he wrote soon

after JFK’s death and that was kept classified for thirty years, Whitten

said that after “word of the shooting of President Kennedy reached the

[CIA] offices . . . when the name of Lee Oswald was heard, the effect

was electric.” 18

And that was just the effect for those who knew only that the CIA had

been monitoring Oswald’s activities, especially in Mexico City. There is

no evidence that Whitten and the others had been fully informed about

the JFK-Almeida coup plan, and (based on Whitten’s later testimony)

they knew nothing about Helms’s unauthorized operations, which had

crossed paths with Oswald in recent months. For Helms, who knew

that Oswald was also linked to his unauthorized Castro assassination

operations, the effect was surely more than just “electric”; it was prob-

ably devastating.

To Helms, it would have appeared that someone linked to, or even

part of, his unauthorized operations had murdered the President. That

meant those operations would have to remain unexposed to the public,

the press, Congress, McCone, and even the new president, or else the

CIA itself would come under suspicion. On a more personal level, the

ambitious Helms, who would later become CIA Director under two

presidents, not only would be washed up professionally, but could

even become a target of suspicion himself. The same would apply to

the people Helms had working on his unauthorized operations, like

FitzGerald, Morales, Phillips, and Hunt—they would have to keep quiet

as well if they wanted to continue their careers and avoid suspicion, or

even prosecution.

However, there was one small potential silver lining for Helms, one

that meant he would not have to bear all the responsibility for an Oswald

cover-up. Oswald was a “former” Marine, and thus the responsibil-

ity of Marine and Naval Intelligence, and General Carroll’s DIA. It

wasn’t unusual at that time for military men to be assigned to the CIA,

or vice versa, and the evidence shows that Oswald’s intelligence ties

encompassed both groups. Naval Intelligence (along with Marine

Intelligence, G-2) had been responsible for the “tight surveillance” on

Oswald since his return from Russia, while Oswald’s operational activi-

ties appear to have involved the CIA. That meant officials at Naval

Intelligence would have to cover up as well, as we’ll soon show. In

addition, the FBI had aided with the “tight surveillance” in places where

Naval Intelligence had few resources, meaning that top FBI officials like

J. Edgar Hoover would also have to conceal information about Oswald.

John McCone returned from his long meeting with Bobby Kennedy

at around 5:00 PM and met with Helms, Kirkpatrick, and two other CIA

officials. But Helms still didn’t tell McCone about the unauthorized

operations, then or later. It’s interesting to speculate how history might

have been different if Helms had come clean to McCone about the Mafia,

Cubela, Alpha 66, QJWIN, the DRE, and everything. The course of the

investigation of JFK’s assassination might have taken a dramatic turn

toward dozens of other leads. On the other hand, relations between the

CIA and the FBI were always strained, and it’s possible that McCone

and even LBJ were so overwhelmed by the scope of the possible leads

and what they might expose—and so worried about the reaction of the

press, the public, and the world—that they might still have withheld

information from law enforcement.

Declassified files show two reasons in particular why Helms didn’t

tell McCone about the unauthorized operations. Just three months

earlier, Helms had sparred with the CIA’s new Inspector General (IG),

John Earman, over telling McCone about the CIA’s longtime behavior-

control program known as MKULTRA, which was later exposed during

Senate hearings in the 1970s. Like the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate

Castro, QJWIN, and Cubela, Richard Helms had inherited the MKULTRA

program, but he had continued it. (In 1963 it focused on using LSD, then

legal, to influence behavior, though it also tested more tried-and-true

methods, like prostitutes.) After an IG staffer had stumbled across

the program earlier in 1963, Helms had tried to avoid telling McCone

about it. But IG Earman persisted, and he presented a detailed report

to McCone that concluded the program was “unethical,” likely illegal,

and dangerous. IG Earman also said the program was shrouded in such

secrecy that it was hard to make a complete report.19 That also would

have been true of Helms’s unauthorized Castro assassination opera-

tions in 1963.

That Helms would have continued the dangerous MKULTRA pro-

gram without telling McCone says a lot about Helms’s arrogance and

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tendency to take dangerous risks (or rather, to have others do so) as if

he were accountable to no one. If Helms had chosen to tell McCone on

November 22 about his unauthorized Castro assassination operations,

it would have looked like a pattern of deceit on Helms’s part, something

a hard-nosed businessman like McCone would not tolerate.

Even worse for Helms, he hadn’t just withheld information about his

unauthorized operations from McCone (as well as JFK and Bobby)—he

had actually lied, three months earlier, to his Director about one of those

operations. In August 1963, an article had appeared in the
Chicago Sun-

Times
about Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, then under “lockstep”

surveillance by the FBI. (Unlike the tight surveillance on Oswald, which

was entirely covert, the lockstep surveillance was designed to be very

visible to both the subject and the general public in order to intimidate

Giancana’s criminal associates in restaurants, on golf courses, etc.) The

article had mentioned Giancana’s work for the CIA regarding Cuba.

Though the article didn’t mention the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination

plots, and limited its focus to Giancana’s help in getting intelligence on

Cuba, the article got McCone’s attention. After McCone demanded an

explanation from Helms, Helms told him that the plots had stopped in

May 1962, even though Helms had secretly continued them.20 For Helms

to tell McCone now that he’d been lying about that, and withholding

even more, was simply not an option if Helms wanted to keep his job.

However, while Helms was withholding crucial information about

the unauthorized operations from McCone on November 22, others

were probably withholding important information from Helms about

those same operations. After all, Cuba was not Helms’s only focus; he

essentially headed covert operations for the whole CIA. It was the height

of the Cold War, which meant he had to focus not only on Russia but

also on its communist bloc in Eastern Europe, including the often-tense

divided city of Berlin. Helms also had to contend with China, Central

and South America, and the Middle East (where a CIA-backed 1963 coup

in Iraq had brought to power the party Saddam Hussein would later

control). Moreover, Helms had the growing problem of Vietnam to deal

with. Helms’s point man for Cuban operations, Desmond FitzGerald,

had been in charge of Cuba for less than a year, having formerly been

responsible for Far East operations. Between Helms’s divided attentions

and FitzGerald’s newness on the job (he didn’t even speak Spanish, and

had no previous experience in Cuban affairs), many details could have

slipped by Helms.

To use business terminology, if we consider McCone a chairman of

the board, then Helms would essentially be the CEO for covert opera-

tions, with FitzGerald and Miami station chief Ted Shackley as corporate

vice presidents, and people like Morales, Phillips, and Hunt in middle

management. Below them was yet another layer of more hands-on man-

agers, like Joannides (whom Phillips used to run the DRE) and Morales

operative Tony Sforza. And below those managers were the people

doing the real dirty work, from shooters being trained to kill Castro to

agents slipping in and out of Cuba (or going in overtly, if they had the

right cover) to assets like Banister and Ferrie helping with CIA-backed

Cuban exiles. Just as in many large corporations, those lower down the

ladder can often get away with things the CEO doesn’t know.

For example, the CIA had been targeting the Fair Play for Cuba Com-

mittee for years, and Phillips took part in those activities. It’s probable

that Phillips and even Helms were aware of the operation under which

Oswald joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in early 1963. But they

might not have known that Oswald had ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano

rifle around the same time, using an alias—something he may have done

on the orders of someone like Banister or Ferrie.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the three mob bosses involved in

the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots—Rosselli, Trafficante, and (by

his own admission) Marcello—were the same three Mafia bosses who

later confessed their roles in JFK’s assassination. Their involvement, and

that of the men who worked for them, gave them a way to appear to be

working to kill Castro, while they actually planned to kill JFK. Manuel

Artime is a good example: AMWORLD memos show that one way “to

cover CIA support [for Artime]” was to use the “Mafia.” Another CIA

memo says that at the very same time, “Artime was also [being] used

by the Mafia in the Castro operation.” Hence, Morales’s help to Artime

for AMWORLD and the CIA-Mafia plots to eliminate Castro provided

cover for Morales’s work with Rosselli to assassinate JFK.21

Still another example was in Mexico City, where someone imperson-

ating Oswald made phone calls to the Russian and Cuban embassies,

calls that would come back to haunt Helms and the CIA just after JFK’s

death. Rosselli’s associate Richard Cain was in the perfect position to

have set up the phone calls, and he would have known the CIA would

secretly record them. Cain had previously bugged a communist embassy

in Mexico City for the CIA, and he had ties to the corrupt Mexican police

force (the DFS) that helped monitor the calls for the CIA.

The bottom line is that the three Mafia bosses were in a perfect posi-

tion to compromise not just the JFK-Almeida coup plan, but also Helms’s

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unauthorized operations—and to use parts of them to murder JFK in a

way that would force Helms and other officials to cover up important

information.

The question of whether Richard Helms was knowingly involved in

some aspect of JFK’s assassination has dogged him since the time of

Watergate and the subsequent public revelation of the CIA-Mafia plots

to kill Fidel. After all, Helms was the highest-ranking CIA authority at

the crossroads of the authorized and unauthorized Castro assassination

operations, including those with mobsters like Santo Trafficante, who