Authors: Lamar Waldron
just that reason, shows that Almeida’s work for JFK hadn’t leaked, at
least to officials on Cubela’s level. So it’s not hard to see why Helms felt
he could get away with pushing Cubela to assassinate Fidel himself,
since it was, in some ways, only a half step more than Cubela was offi-
cially doing anyway.
Desmond FitzGerald had suggested earlier schemes to kill Castro,
which were never authorized by the Kennedys. In fact, the Kennedys
were not told about them at all, because they involved having JFK’s
personal emissary, James Donovan, give Fidel a poisoned diving suit
during their negotiations about a small prisoner release in the spring
of 1963. Fidel and Donovan shared an interest in scuba diving, so Fitz-
Gerald even suggested rigging an exploding seashell to kill Fidel.
Helms and FitzGerald were the highest CIA officials who knew about
the unauthorized attempts to kill Fidel. From Helms’s perspective, the
CIA-Mafia plots, QJWIN, and Cubela-as-assassin might have been
viewed simply as backup plans in case some problem developed with
Almeida. Others might see them as an attempt by Helms to have Fidel
eliminated by a CIA-originated plan, instead of one in which the CIA
was only a supporting player. It’s also possible that Cubela was being
groomed as a patsy to take the fall when Fidel was killed by other means.
Also, if at the last minute Almeida proved unwilling or unable to place
assassins to kill Fidel at Varadero, it’s possible that Helms wanted to
make sure people were available to do the job.
On November 19, 1963, Helms had shown JFK an arms cache, sup-
posedly from Cuba, that had been found in Venezuela, indicating that
Fidel was exporting his Revolution to the rest of Latin America.37 JFK and
Bobby seemed impressed, and it may have been Helms’s way to ensure
that, just in case their secret peace feelers appeared to be meeting with
success, they didn’t get cold feet about the coup plan. (In subcommittee
meetings, Helms had been opposed to any attempt at negotiation with
Fidel.)
Of the CIA officers that declassified files linked to the AMWORLD por-
tion of the JFK-Almeida coup plan, three were of particular importance
in 1963 and the decades that followed: David Atlee Phillips, David
Morales, and Henry Heckscher. They continued working together
into the 1970s, even using aspects of AMWORLD for coup attempts in
Chile.
David Atlee Phillips was officially the Chief of Cuban Operations at
the CIA’s Mexico City station, but he had a separate role for AMWORLD,
in which he reported directly to Desmond FitzGerald in Washington.
He used different cover identities (among them Lawrence F. Barker
and Michael C. Choaden) for various operations, and dozens of aliases
(including Maurice Bishop, according to Congressional investigator
Gaeton Fonzi).38
Phillips was a writer and propaganda specialist; according to E. How-
ard Hunt, Phillips also “ran” the DRE, a small Cuban exile group that
was not part of the coup plan. This raises suspicion about the unusual
amount of TV, radio, and newspaper publicity Lee Oswald generated in
August 1963, when he had a brief street altercation with the only mem-
ber of the New Orleans DRE branch. At the time, Oswald was the only
member of a phony Fair Play for Cuba (FPCC) chapter in New Orleans,
though he avoided associating with real leftists or pro-Castro people in
the city.39 Shortly after Oswald’s radio and TV appearances, Phillips sup-
posedly met with Oswald and Menoyo’s exile partner in Dallas. A short
time after that, Oswald took his unusual trip to Mexico City, Phillips’s
main base. There, Oswald was one of three individuals linked to Artime
associates who visited the Cuban embassy within days of each other
(sometimes on the same day) in an attempt to get into Cuba.
Phillips’s former boss in Cuba during the time of the Revolution was
David Morales, a gruff Hispanic Indian from New Mexico. Though Phil-
lips would eventually surpass Morales in CIA rank, in 1963 Morales
was still the more senior of the two. Morales was seen within the CIA
as someone willing to deal with the Mafia and assassinations, and he
was close to Mafia don Johnny Rosselli in the fall of 1963. At that time,
Morales was the Chief of Operations at the huge Miami CIA station,
code-named JMWAVE. It was the largest CIA station in the world, even
though it was based in the United States, where the CIA is not sup-
posed to conduct covert operations. The CIA memo from June 1963 that
created AMWORLD established a special communication center for it
38
LEGACY OF SECRECY
at JMWAVE that allowed Morales, FitzGerald, and Helms to bypass
the normal bureaucratic structure and most employees at the Miami
station. It’s unclear how much the Miami Station Chief, Ted Shackley,
knew about AMWORLD and Almeida at that time.
Morales’s position in the AMWORLD part of the JFK-Almeida coup
plan also gave him a way to use it for his own ends, or those of his close
friend Johnny Rosselli. Morales had several code names and cover iden-
tities we know of so far, like “Stanley R. Zamka” and “Dr. Gonzales.”40
But if his close associate David Atlee Phillips is any indication, Morales
had many more, and even one of those could have allowed him to fun-
nel his time to aid Rosselli in a way that wouldn’t be obvious to his
superiors. Morales frequently traveled from his home base of Miami to
Mexico City and to Washington, meaning that no one superior had a
full view of his activities.
A fellow CIA agent said that Morales “was a roughneck. He was a
bully, a hard drinker, and big enough to get away with a lot of stuff other
people couldn’t get away with.” Yet Morales had polish when he needed
it. By his own admission in a CIA file, he worked with “senior offi-
cials [in] Latin American countries,” and ten years after JFK’s murder,
Morales would become “counterinsurgency advisor for Latin American
matters to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington.”41 Just prior to that,
Morales had been one of four regional directors for the CIA in Vietnam
for the Operation Phoenix assassination program, which resulted in the
deaths of 20,857 people, according to the testimony of later CIA Director
William Colby.42
Morales was capable of more than being a manager, and didn’t mind
killing people himself. His best friend says, “Morales claimed credit for
having killed dozens of Tupamaro guerrillas in Uruguay in a door-to-
door search of the apartment building where many of them lived.”43
According to the number-two man at the Miami CIA station in 1963, “if
the U.S. government as a matter of policy needed someone or something
neutralized, Dave would do it, including things that were repugnant to
a lot of people.”44
David Morales also reportedly met with Rolando Cubela, in Septem-
ber 1963, as one of the CIA men pressuring Cubela to assassinate Fidel.45
As Chief of Operations in Miami, Morales would also have been respon-
sible for providing rifles with scopes to Rolando Cubela in Cuba. It’s
important to point out that Cubela himself was not the one who asked
for the meeting in Paris on November 22, 1963; the time was set by some-
one in the CIA, though it’s unclear by whom. Also, Morales’s Cuban
exile informants (in the group code-named AMOT) were responsible
for the hazy reports of a Cuban agent near Chicago, and in Florida, that
helped to trigger national security secrecy after the Chicago and Tampa
attempts.
Henry Heckscher’s role in AMWORLD is documented by recently
released CIA files, showing that he was Manuel Artime’s CIA case officer
in the summer and fall of 1963. However, Heckscher didn’t work with
any of our four sources who worked with the Kennedys on the coup
plan, so it’s not clear how much he knew about Almeida. Heckscher was
a higher-level CIA official than either Morales or Phillips, and had first
worked with them in 1954, on the successful CIA coup that overthrew
the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Joining Heckscher,
Phillips, and Morales in the 1954 coup operation was E. Howard Hunt,
which makes it logical that Helms would have them working together
again in 1963 on another coup.46
E. Howard Hunt, later infamous as a Watergate figure, was one of the
CIA officers working most actively on the Almeida side of the coup
plan. In his later years, Hunt was litigious, so we avoided mentioning
certain things about him in our earlier book. But we can now reveal that
Harry Williams confirmed in taped interviews that Hunt was part of the
CIA effort that helped with the most sensitive parts of the JFK-Almeida
coup plan. (A top Kennedy aide indicated that Harry’s statements about
Hunt were correct.) The activities involving Hunt included paying the
first installment of $50,000 (out of $200,000) to Almeida in a transaction
that Bobby Kennedy authorized and the CIA arranged. Hunt was also
part of the secret operation in which Almeida’s wife and children left
Cuba under a pretext prior to November 22, 1963. The plan was for them
to wait out the coup in another country, while under secret CIA sur-
veillance. This may have been designed to ensure that Almeida didn’t
double-cross the CIA and the Kennedys. Bobby had also authorized
Harry and the CIA to assure Almeida that his family would be taken
care of financially if anything happened to Almeida and they couldn’t
return to Cuba.47
Harry told us that Hunt was one of two CIA officials assigned to assist
him. According to former FBI agent William Turner, the other was Hunt’s
future Watergate partner, James McCord. However, McCord declined
to speak with us about this, and
Vanity Fair
had a similar lack of success
when it tried to contact McCord about the matter in 1994.48 According to
Harry, Hunt seemed to resent having to help him, since Hunt was used
to giving orders to Cuban exiles, instead of taking them.
Prior to working on the JFK-Almeida coup plan, Hunt’s career in
40
LEGACY OF SECRECY
the CIA had been erratic, but his friendship with Richard Helms had
allowed him some measure of success. Before getting to know Helms,
Hunt had worked with David Atlee Phillips, David Morales, and Henry
Heckscher on the CIA’s successful 1954 coup in Guatemala. According
to Helms’s biographer, Thomas Powers, Hunt first met Helms in 1956.
Powers says that “Hunt conceived of Helms as a friend, admired him
openly, and more than once called on him for help.” David Atlee Phillips
wrote that Hunt “idolized” Helms—perhaps because Helms helped him
after Hunt’s botched stint as the CIA chief in Uruguay.
It’s often overlooked that while Hunt was in Uruguay in early 1960,
“he was secretly organizing a plot to overthrow the Uruguayan gov-
ernment,” according to noted journalist Tad Szulc. According to Szulc,
it’s not clear who ordered Hunt “to start organizing a coup,” since
“neither the White House nor the State Department ever entertained
such ideas” about Uruguay. In any event, Hunt was transferred from
Uruguay to work on the CIA’s attempt to overthrow another govern-
ment—that of Fidel Castro in the operation that eventually grew into
the Bay of Pigs.49
E. Howard Hunt played an important role in the Bay of Pigs opera-
tion, until he dropped out at the last minute in April 1961, to protest
including the liberal Manolo Ray in the post-Fidel government. If it had
been up to Hunt, after Fidel’s elimination Cuba would have been ruled
by his good friend, the ultra-conservative Manuel Artime. But the Ken-
nedys insisted on Ray’s inclusion, so Hunt left the operation. Shortly
after he did, the CIA-Mafia plots failed, as did the rest of the Bay of Pigs.
More than a year earlier, Hunt had written a memo suggesting the assas-
sination of Fidel in conjunction with a small invasion, so it’s intriguing
to speculate that Hunt may have had some role in, or knowledge of,
the CIA-mafia plots. Buttressing that is that when Dominican dictator
Rafael Trujillo was assassinated with CIA assistance just a month after
the Bay of Pigs, Trujillo’s Security Chief claimed that Hunt and Johnny
Rosselli had been involved.50
In 1961, Richard Helms helped Hunt find new opportunities in the
CIA. Hunt had been given permission to write spy novels under a pseud-
onym, and Thomas Powers notes that Helms “liked Hunt’s books . . . he
kept copies of them in his office which he sometimes gave to visitors.”51
Apparently, Helms’s personal relationship with Hunt was enough for
him to assign Hunt to work with Harry on the JFK-Almeida coup plan,
despite Hunt’s antipathy for some of its leaders, like Ray. From Helms’s
perspective, Hunt’s experience in planning coups in Guatemala, Uruguay,
Cuba, and possibly the Dominican Republic must have made Hunt seem
like a logical choice. Still, Hunt’s friendship with Artime and dislike of