Legacy of Secrecy (89 page)

reports,” but didn’t indicate how the CIA knew what information the

journalists possessed, or why they hadn’t published it.16

It’s possible that LBJ, after telling Pearson that Anderson’s story had

a factual basis, had asked or pressured Pearson not to pursue the story.

In keeping with Richard Helms’s strategy of trying to minimize stories

unfavorable to the CIA or which questioned the Warren Report, Helms

or other CIA officials may also have intervened with Pearson. Perhaps

Morgan or Rosselli, or the associates they shared with Anderson, had

conveyed the message that no more stories were needed at that point.

Jack Anderson would not resume writing about the leaks from Johnny

Rosselli for almost four years, when his articles were again connected

with the legal problems of Rosselli and Hoffa, and would help lead to

the Watergate scandal.17

Bobby Kennedy must have been relieved when it became apparent

that Anderson’s revelations had stopped and no other media outlets

were pursuing the story. In April 1967, Bobby’s political stock was at its

lowest point, and any future office beyond the Senate seemed unlikely.

At the same time, Bobby was beginning another step in his sometimes

painful transformation that would see him become a symbol of hope

and inspiration for millions the following year.

While dealing with the McCone/Anderson matter, Bobby was still

struggling with the profound effects of his recent trip to Mississippi.

After listening to shocking testimony about hunger and poverty at his

hearings in Jackson, Bobby had insisted on seeing the conditions for

himself. The following afternoon, cameras were rolling as Bobby made

an impromptu visit to dilapidated Delta shacks that housed poverty-

stricken families. The cameras recorded Bobby’s barely contained

surprise and concern when the New York Senator asked a young boy

what he’d eaten for lunch—and the boy said he hadn’t had anything

to eat.18

The cameras couldn’t film clearly what happened inside one of the

shacks, but it was a pivotal moment that gave Bobby the cause that

would consume him until his death. Reporter Nick Kotz described the

dwelling as “a dark windowless shack [smelling of] mildew, sickness,

and urine. . . . There was no ceiling hardly [and] the floor had holes in

it.” Bobby noticed a little boy with “his tummy sticking out.” Bobby

picked up the boy and said, “My God, I didn’t know this kind of thing

existed. How can a country like this allow it?” When Bobby was unable

to get a response from the starving child, an associate says that Bobby

soon had “tears . . . running down [his] his cheek and he just sat there

and held the little child . . . then he said, ‘I’m going back to Washington

to do something about this.’”19

At his Hickory Hill mansion that night, Bobby appeared “ashen

faced,” according to his daughter Kathleen. Bobby told nine of his ten

children that “in Mississippi a whole family lives in a shack the size of

this room. The children are covered with sores and their tummies stick

out because they have no food. Do you know how lucky you are? [You

should] do something for your country.” Bobby was really talking to

himself as much as he was to his children. What he had seen continued

to torment him, and the following night, Bobby could no longer contain

himself. He exploded in self-recrimination, telling the wife of an aide,

“You don’t know what I saw! I have done nothing in my life! Everything

I have done was a waste! Everything I have done was worthless!”20

Bobby Kennedy channeled the shock of what he saw in Mississippi,

and the lingering pain of losing his brother, into a new cause that re-

energized him. Poverty, and all the ills that flowed from it, became his

cause, his crusade. He pressured Congress and LBJ to increase funding

for food programs, a demand that LBJ saw as just another of Bobby’s

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

attacks. Bobby made a high-profile appearance on NBC’s
Meet the Press
,

proclaiming, “If we can spend $24 billion for the freedom and liberty

of the people in Vietnam, certainly we can spend a small percentage of

that for the liberty and the freedom and the future of our own people in

the United States.” Bobby reached out to Martin Luther King, saying in

a letter to him that when it came to the issues of poverty and hunger, “I

cannot agree with you more that something must be done. If you have

any suggestions, I would appreciate hearing from you.”21

As Bobby moved closer to Martin Luther King’s position on poverty

and civil rights, Dr. King was moving toward Bobby’s openly antiwar

stance. On April 4, 1967, just a month after Bobby’s first major antiwar

speech, Dr. King delivered his own ringing denunciation of the war in

his famous sermon at Riverside Church. Most historians and journal-

ists say the trigger for Dr. King’s change was his seeing a copy of
Ram-

parts
magazine on January 14, 1967. As described by Nick Kotz, the

magazine’s “story and pictures showing Vietnamese children who had

been horribly maimed or killed by . . . napalm, dropped by US planes,

[stunned] King, [who] resolved to speak out against the war.”22

However, Dr. King was moving steadily in an antiwar direction

even before he saw the magazine. The previous year, King had met and

befriended Vietnamese Buddhist religious leader and peace advocate

Thich Nhat Hahn, when he was in the US on a speaking tour arranged by

the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a peace group that been helping King

for years. Hated by both the US-backed Vietnamese dictator and the

communist insurgents, King nominated Hahn for the Nobel Peace Prize

on January 25, 1967. However, King proceeded cautiously in making

public pronouncements against the war until the spiraling cost in lives—

disproportionately minorities, due to college deferments more readily

available to Caucasians—and money (needed to fight poverty) became

too great.

Dr. King’s April 1967 antiwar speech was eloquent and well grounded

in fact, and it would have far-reaching implications. King condemned

sending young black men “eight thousand miles away to guarantee

liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southeast Geor-

gia and East Harlem.” Ironically, South Georgia racist Joseph Milteer

would use King’s new antiwar stance to drive his collection of even

more contributions to kill the civil rights leader.

After Dr. King’s speech, he was criticized by some black leaders who

were trying to keep the struggle for equal rights separate from the anti-

war movement. The US news media were generally hostile to King’s

new position, as was President Johnson. After all the work President

Johnson had done for civil rights, LBJ saw King’s remarks as a betrayal,

further fraying a relationship that had already become strained. LBJ

would increasingly shift his focus away from his war on poverty, as he

struggled to manage both the Vietnam war and the growing discontent

in America’s inner cities. J. Edgar Hoover seized upon King’s new anti-

war stance as a reason to increase his already extensive surveillance of

the civil rights leader and his associates. Now that Dr. King was part of

the antiwar movement, he became subject to even more illegal domestic

surveillance from other federal agencies, due to the burgeoning efforts

of US military intelligence and the CIA to monitor peace groups and

demonstrators.

CIA Director Richard Helms was consumed increasingly by Vietnam

in 1967—both the war there and covert efforts in neighboring countries

like Laos—as well as by monitoring the growing antiwar movement.

Helms and the CIA also had a dozen other hot spots and fronts in the

Cold War, including ongoing covert actions against Cuba. However,

in the short run, Helms’s most pressing issue remained the IG Report

about the Rosselli/Anderson situation, since its revelations could end

his career.

By April 24, 1967, the Inspector General was starting to deliver its

report to Helms in installments, while Helms continued to track the

related matters of Cuban operations and the Jim Garrison investiga-

tion. A short time later, District Attorney Garrison subpoenaed Helms

to appear before the grand jury in New Orleans. Helms felt obliged only

to tell Georgia senator (and former Warren Commissioner) Richard Rus-

sell about Garrison’s subpoena—which Helms then ignored. Though

Russell’s relationship with his former protégé, LBJ, had been strained

over civil rights, they were still friends—and Helms knew that as long

as the powerful Senator Russell approved of Helms’s actions, Garrison

could do nothing to compel Helms’s testimony.

News reports monitored by the CIA and FBI indicated that Com-

mander Almeida remained prominent in Cuba, helping to fill the vac-

uum created by Che Guevara’s mysterious absence. UPI reported that on

May 1, 1967, “Havana radio announced that Cuba’s acting Armed Forces

Minister, Major Juan Almeida, will preside over May Day ceremonies

today, instead of Premier Fidel Castro. . . . Almeida recently was desig-

nated acting Armed Forces Minister in place of Major Raul Castro, the

Premier’s brother. The reason for that move never was explained.”23

At the huge ceremony, Almeida revealed only that Che Guevara had

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

been “serving the revolution somewhere in Latin America.” He didn’t

say that Che was in one of the most rugged parts of Bolivia, trying to

spark a small insurgency that even Bolivia’s Communist Party didn’t

support. It was another doomed mission, even more poorly supplied

and supported than Che’s first exile to Africa.24

Richard Helms would have been pleased that Almeida was trusted

with heading Cuba’s big May Day celebration in Fidel’s absence, since

it indicated Almeida still had enough power in Cuba to be valuable to

the US in the future. This knowledge undoubtedly allowed Helms to

rationalize withholding from the Inspector General information about

Almeida’s secret work for JFK, and the CIA’s ongoing covert support

for Almeida’s wife and children outside Cuba. That in turn gave Helms

an excuse to also withhold the Mafia’s infiltration of the Almeida coup

plan from both the IG Report and President Johnson.25

The list of additional material Helms withheld from the Inspector

General, or that Helms convinced the IG and his staff to not include, is

immense: CIA assassination attempts against Castro in 1963; CIA contact

with Rosselli in the summer and fall of 1963; the CIA’s extensive 1963

support for and work with Artime, Varona, Ray, Menoyo, and Harry

Williams; Artime’s and Carlos Marcello’s work on the CIA-Mafia plots;

the Mafia’s $200,000 payoff to Varona, and Varona’s bringing Masferrer

into the plot; CIA contact with Antonio Veciana; the 1963 activities of

E. Howard Hunt, David Atlee Phillips, and David Morales; Oswald’s

contacts with CIA-backed exile groups; and much more detailed in the

earlier chapters of this book and in
Ultimate Sacrifice
.

In a few cases (such as those of the 1959 CIA-Mafia plots and

AMWORLD), a few vague words alluded to the missing operations; in

other cases, information was simply ignored—or history rewritten—to

accommodate the facts deemed safe to include. For example, the IG

Report makes it sound as if the CIA needed to start using Johnny Rosselli

and Santo Trafficante, in the summer of 1960, to find Cubans and exiles

to assassinate Fidel. However, the two the CIA wound up with—Tony

Varona and Juan Orta—had already been working for the CIA.

The story that emerged from the IG Report succeeded in separat-

ing the CIA-Mafia plots from JFK’s assassination by claiming the plots

had ended by early 1963. Only brief passages in the Report mentioned

Helms’s unauthorized operations, but nothing tied them to JFK’s

assassination.

The overall thrust of the IG Report was damage control, with a goal

of discovering who was leaking information and how to stop the leaks.

Ironically, the same concern would result from the next round of Rosselli

revelations to Jack Anderson, and would set in motion the actions of E.

Howard Hunt and the Watergate “plumbers,” so named because their

purpose was to find and stop leaks. Hunt’s men would even consider

killing Jack Anderson, and while the 1967 IG Report does have a section

entitled “Should we try to silence those who are talking or might later

talk?,” the options considered in the IG Report weren’t lethal.26

Some material was added after the Inspector General had completed

the report, such as the March 7, 1966, memo in which Helms lied to

Secretary of State Dean Rusk about the Cubela/AMLASH assassination

plot. That plot was discussed extensively in the IG Report, and since

Helms apparently realized Rusk might have told LBJ about the memo,