Authors: Lamar Waldron
constant struggle with the CIA for documents and access to personnel.
Blakey tried to strike a middle ground, though he learned only in the
1990s about a 1978 incident with the CIA that made him realize how the
Agency had deceived the HSCA.
Fonzi and his fellow investigators were interested in the DRE, a CIA-
backed exile group Oswald contacted in August of 1963. While E. How-
ard Hunt had testified that David Atlee Phillips ran the DRE for the
CIA, another agent handled their day-to-day supervision. The HSCA
wanted to talk to that agent, but the CIA claimed they couldn’t locate
him. Around the same time, to help smooth out problems between the
CIA and HSCA, the CIA called out of retirement Agent George Joan-
nides, assigning him to be the CIA’s liaison to the HSCA staff.42
What the CIA didn’t tell the HSCA—and no one learned until Jef-
ferson Morley discovered it in the 1990s—was that George Joannides
had been the CIA official in charge of the DRE in 1963. Joannides started
working for the HSCA in June 1978, but he never told the HSCA about his
work with the DRE—or that he was the man they’d wanted to interview.
In 1981 the CIA gave Joannides a medal, but according to David Talbot,
“today Blakey says that if he had known Joannides’ background, he
would have immediately relieved him of his duties and made him ‘a
witness under oath.’”43
What possible justification could Joannides and his superiors have
used, to get authorization for such deceit from anyone in the CIA’s chain
of command? There is no reason to think the approval went as high as
Director Stansfield Turner, since many longtime CIA officials regarded
him as an outsider. On the other hand, the ambitious Ted Shackley had
both the capability and the personal incentive to stifle the HSCA investi-
gation. Shackley was the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations in 1978—
comparable to Helms’s 1963 position of Deputy Director for Plans—and
Joannides had worked with the DRE while based at Shackley’s JMWAVE
CIA station in Miami in 1963.
Shackley might have had the same thin reed of a national security jus-
tification (or rationalization) Helms had used at times for his cover-ups,
because of an unusual meeting at the UN just weeks before Joannides
was recalled from retirement. America’s UN Ambassador at the time,
Andrew Young, reported to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. On April 22,
1978, Young met at the UN with Commander Juan Almeida. Given the
international publicity of the HSCA investigation, which often included
coverage of the CIA’s attempts to eliminate Fidel Castro, it’s likely that
Almeida wanted some assurance from Vance that his name would not
be exposed by the investigation.
If some US official had asked the CIA to try to protect Almeida, it’s not
hard to image Ted Shackley taking that opportunity to also protect him-
self and his associates by having Joannides assigned as the CIA’s liaison
to the HSCA. Around the time of the Almeida UN meeting, three veter-
ans of the JFK-Almeida coup plan—Varona, Phillips, and Morales—had
been interviewed or were slated for an interview, and the HSCA was
making constant requests for the files of Artime and others associated
with AMWORLD. Joannides would have been the ideal candidate to
make sure the HSCA didn’t get too close to Almeida, while also protect-
ing the secrets Shackley shared with Helms.
Other battles with the CIA drained the HSCA staff’s time and energy,
from their Mexico City investigation to Helms’s testimony. Many critics
charged that Helms had gotten off too easily for lying to Congress, and if
he were caught lying under oath again, the Carter administration would
have to punish him more harshly. A close reading of Helms’s August
9, 1978, HSCA testimony shows that he was fairly candid about some
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
things, saying that in 1963 “the US Government had a policy for many
months of trying to mount a coup against Fidel Castro [and] these opera-
tions were known to the Attorney General of the United States [and to]
the President of the United States [and] all kinds of people high up in
the government.” Helms added that “if you go through the records of
those years, you will find the whole US government was behind this
one.” Helms knew that while the CIA was withholding much from the
Committee, Cyrus Vance and the US military were also not being forth-
coming about the 1963 plans. However, Helms also comes across in his
testimony as incredibly arrogant, not willing to admit well-documented
facts such as the assassination aspects of his Cubela operation.44
In addition to the CIA and US military, other agencies like the Secret
Service and the FBI were keeping crucial facts from the HSCA, including
everything about the Tampa attempt against JFK and most information
about the Chicago attempt. The CIA stonewalled HSCA attempts to
learn more about Gilberto Lopez, and the Defense Department did like-
wise regarding the Marine Intelligence investigation of Oswald, until
the Committee’s time had run out.45
Regarding Martin Luther King, the HSCA “concluded that there was a
likelihood of conspiracy in the assassination of Dr. King” and that “the
expectation of financial gain was Ray’s primary motivation.” The HSCA
reached that conclusion despite investigating Joseph Milteer only for
JFK’s murder, not Dr. King’s, and paying little attention to Marcello for
King’s assassination. That’s because the FBI had apparently withheld
the information given to the Justice Department about Carlos Marcello
and the Mafia’s brokering of the contract to assassinate Dr. King for a
small clique of white racists.
As the House Select Committee on Assassinations rushed to finish its
work on the JFK assassination, acoustic tests indicated there had been
at least one shot from the grassy knoll. But those findings have been
the source of much debate ever since, and we have not factored them
into any of our findings. When the HSCA submitted its Final Report on
March 29, 1979, its ultimate conclusion about JFK’s murder was that
it was likely a conspiracy, involving at least one shot from the grassy
knoll. In addition:
The Committee found that Trafficante, like Marcello, had the motive,
means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy.46
For both Marcello and Trafficante, the committee “was unable to estab-
lish direct evidence of Marcello’s complicity.” It could just as well have
added “because of all the material the CIA, FBI, and other agencies
withheld.” The HSCA also recommended that the Justice Department
pursue the matter further.47 Within six years, the FBI would obtain a clear
confession by Marcello to JFK’s assassination—only to suppress it, until
its full publication for the first time in
Legacy of Secrecy
.
Chapter Sixty-five
By 1980, as if exhausted by the five investigating committees that began
with Watergate and ended with the House Select Committee on Assas-
sinations, the government and the press had lost interest in the assassi-
nations of JFK, Bobby, and Dr. King. This dormant phase would last for
most of the decade. The Justice Department wasn’t acting on the HSCA’s
request to follow-up on its leads, but the FBI’s undercover BRILAB oper-
ation targeting Carlos Marcello still simmered just below the surface.
Before BRILAB erupted in the press, several former government
investigators tried to sustain interest in the assassinations, in effect con-
tinuing the quest Bobby Kennedy had begun soon after his brother’s
murder. Former HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey wrote an account
of his inquiry,
The Plot to Kill the President
, that implicated Marcello and
Trafficante more strongly than the HSCA’s carefully worded conclusions
had. His former investigator Gaeton Fonzi had been frustrated by CIA
stonewalling and the lack of attention that Phillips, Veciana, and Odio
received in the HSCA’s Final Report—so he wrote a detailed article
about it for the
Washingtonian
magazine, which he would later expand
into a book,
The Last Investigation
. FBI veteran William Turner had seen
publicity for his 1978 book
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
appar-
ently stymied by its publisher, but in 1981 he finally used portions of his
1973 interview with Harry Williams in his next book,
The Fish Is Red
.
Turner’s
The Fish Is Red
included new information about JFK’s assas-
sination but was devoted primarily to offering the first book-length
account of the US’s secret war with Fidel Castro—a battle that was
entering a new phase. After Ronald Reagan was elected president in
November 1980, the undercover war between the US and Cuba began
heating up again, with a new focus on Central America as the surrogate
battleground. As the
San Francisco Chronicle
reported, Reagan’s new Sec-
retary of State, Alexander Haig, “regarded [the Sandinistas in Nicaragua
and the rebels in El Salvador] as mere tentacles. He sought to go after the
body of the octopus—Castro’s Cuba. Proposals for forcing confrontation
with Castro were repeatedly advanced by Haig.”1 As a result, half a
dozen veterans of 1963 operations like AMWORLD—including Rafael
“Chi Chi” Quintero and Luis Posada—became involved in US covert
operations in Central America that would result in the Iran-Contra scan-
dal. Commander Juan Almeida remained unexposed and high-ranking
in the Cuban government—and potentially useful to the US at some
point, if Castro should die, become ill, or be deposed. Almeida’s family
outside Cuba continued to receive covert support from the CIA.
On June 4, 1981, four black prisoners attacked and knifed James Earl
Ray almost two dozen times, but the incident was little-noted in the
press and created no new interest in Dr. King’s assassination. Ray recov-
ered and continued serving his life sentence. Sirhan Sirhan was also
doing life, his death sentence having been thrown out with all the others
in California because of an earlier Supreme Court decision.
By 1981, Carlos Marcello was feeling the full force of the FBI’s BRILAB
sting, which had grown out of the Watergate-era prosecution of Nix-
on’s former attorney general Richard Kleindienst. Facing the biggest
legal battle of his life, Marcello was under indictment in Louisiana for
trying to bribe state officials in a multimillion-dollar insurance scam.
In Los Angeles, he’d been indicted for trying to bribe a federal judge.
Even worse, much of the evidence was in the godfather’s own words,
recorded by a bug and phone taps the FBI had finally placed in Mar-
cello’s office at the Town and Country Motel. They were augmented by
secret recordings made by convicted insurance swindler Joe Hauser,
who wore a wire for the FBI in hopes of securing an early release. He
was aided by two undercover FBI agents, who pretended to be crooked
businessmen in an elaborate operation that included a posh office for a
phony company.2
In Miami, Santo Trafficante was under indictment for a $1 million
fraud scheme involving a labor union. Both Trafficante and Marcello
were also hit with RICO racketeering charges, using the statute that
G. Robert Blakey had helped create. Trafficante would avoid conviction,
but Marcello’s luck had finally run out.
Marcello’s BRILAB battles played out prominently in the national
press, but the articles rarely mentioned his name in conjunction with
JFK’s assassination. The 1,200 hours of BRILAB recordings, along with
unrecorded information from Hauser, contained only tantalizing hints
about Marcello and JFK. They weren’t mentioned in the press and were
barred from the trial, at Marcello’s lawyers’ request, so they wouldn’t
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
prejudice the jury. Still, the jury was able to hear hours of Marcello dis-
cussing the blatant corruption and crimes he had been committing for
years. Marcello was convicted in Louisiana on August 4, 1981, and in Los
Angeles on December 11, 1981. The following year, he was sentenced to
seven years for the Louisiana counts and ten years for the Los Angeles
counts. His powerful attorneys did everything they could, but on April
15, 1983, Marcello’s BRILAB appeal was denied and he was ordered to
begin serving his sentence immediately.3
At age seventy-three, Marcello faced seventeen years in prison. He
was initially sent to familiar territory: the US Medical Center for Fed-
eral Prisoners, in Springfield, Missouri, where Marcello had spent six
months a decade earlier. The prison and its parklike grounds were des-
ignated as level one, meaning it was one of the least secure and most
comfortable federal prisons. But after a year, Marcello was transferred to
the maximum-security federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, an imposing