Authors: Lamar Waldron
Varona, Ray, and Menoyo would join Harry. Almeida would proclaim a
state of emergency to prevent civil war, and the Cuban American troops
at Fort Benning would be invited in to help prevent a Soviet takeover.
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
Raul Castro would be killed as well; his death was easy for Almeida to
arrange, since he worked closely with Raul.
Because of worries that Harry might be captured inside Cuba and
tortured by Fidel’s men, he had not been told some parts of the coup
plan. While Harry knew someone else would take the fall for Fidel’s
death, he didn’t know who that would be. Harry indicated that Bobby
and the CIA were handling that aspect of the plan. Likewise, Harry
was not told exactly how Fidel would be killed or who would do it;
that was something he would learn only after he arrived in Cuba. The
information about Fidel’s being shot in an open jeep at Varadero Beach
comes from later declassified AMWORLD documents and David Atlee
Phillips’s autobiographical novel outline.
Harry had been told that he was only one of several US assets going
into Cuba in the coming days, in preparation for the coup. While the
press was full of reports that the US was restraining groups from staging
raids into Cuba, the handful of exile groups selected by Bobby and Harry
had been encouraged to continue their operations. The CIA mounted its
own small missions into Cuba, with future Watergate burglar Eugenio
Martinez as its premier “boatman.” All of those small raids and infiltra-
tion missions into Cuba during September, October, and the first three
weeks of November were necessary so that there wouldn’t be an obvious
increase in activity just before the coup. In addition, exile leaders Artime,
Ray, Varona, and Menoyo would need to find their own way into Cuba
after the coup, from ports outside the United States, to maintain the
plausible deniability of the whole operation.
As Harry Williams finished his lunch on November 22, 1963, he must
have faced his afternoon session with the CIA men with a sense of both
anticipation and dread. Unless one of the CIA men turned up some
unforeseen problem, Harry would be in Guantanamo and ready to slip
into Cuba in just two days. Harry had already visited Guantanamo for
a couple of days, on a trip Bobby had arranged, just to check it out. He
was certain he would be able to make his way into his Cuban homeland
from there to meet with Almeida. Harry had risked his life to free Cuba
several times before, but that didn’t make doing it yet again any easier.
Still, he was willing to take the risk because he knew he had the backing
of Bobby and JFK, and thus the full force of the US government.
At CIA headquarters, Richard Helms prepared to have lunch with Direc-
tor McCone, Kirkpatrick, and three other CIA officials in a small room
next to McCone’s office. Perhaps it weighed on his mind that he was
keeping sensitive information about his unauthorized Cuban operations
from his superiors. On the other hand, Helms might have viewed his
own efforts to assassinate Castro using Rosselli, QJWIN, and Cubela
as just part of an overall effort to eliminate Fidel at any cost, one that
included the JFK-Almeida coup plan. Helms appeared to feel that as
long as Fidel was terminated, the means didn’t matter. Still, Helms knew
about Bobby’s massive effort against the Mafia, and he must have real-
ized the Attorney General would have never approved the CIA’s use of
people like Rosselli and QJWIN.
Helms knew that in Paris, Cubela’s CIA case officer was meeting
with him and trying to give him a poison pen filled with Blackleaf-40,
a deadly toxin. However, Helms may not have known that, two days
earlier, a CIA officer had telephoned Cubela to set up the November
22 meeting. This meant that scheduling the date opposite JFK’s Dal-
las motorcade originated with someone in the CIA, not with Cubela.9
At the Paris meeting, Cubela’s CIA case officer also told Cubela about
JFK’s speech four days earlier in Miami, citing it “as an indication that
the President supported a coup.”10
Cubela said assassination was the CIA’s idea, and that it was con-
stantly pressuring him to kill Fidel, both on November 22 and at other
times. (In later years, Helms and his associates always testified and said
in interviews that Cubela, not the CIA, wanted to assassinate Fidel.)
According to the CIA, at the November 22 meeting Cubela “asked for the
following items to be included in a cache inside Cuba: 20 hand-grenades,
two high-powered rifles with telescopic sights, and approximately 20
pounds of C-4 explosive.”11 In charge of arranging for those items to be
delivered would be the CIA official whom Cubela says he met in Sep-
tember 1963: David Morales.
David Morales’s activities on November 22, 1963, cannot be docu-
mented, since files concerning his whereabouts that day have never been
released by the CIA. Without the files, it’s impossible to know whether
he was in Miami, Mexico City, or even Dallas. However, by looking at
Morales’s documented actions and statements, we can get a good idea
of what he was up to. For example, we know that at least some of the
things Morales was doing that day involved the assassination of JFK,
since he later admitted his involvement in the murder.
Ten years after President Kennedy’s murder, Morales confessed to
both his attorney and his longtime friend that he had some role in JFK’s
assassination, declaring: “Well, we took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
we?”12 As first documented by Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi,
Morales’s admission came at the end of a drunken tirade set off by
the mention of JFK’s name. According to one of the witnesses, Morales
“jumped up screaming, ‘That no good son of a bitch motherfucker!’ He
started yelling about what a wimp Kennedy was and talking about how
he had worked on the Bay of Pigs and how he had to watch all the men
he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy.”13
There is some support for Morales’s claim. His remarks about JFK
bear a remarkable similarity to those Carlos Marcello made regarding
Bobby—apparently when it came to eliminating JFK, they both had
the same goal, though for different reasons. While Oswald was in New
Orleans, several witnesses reported seeing him in the company of a
“Mexican,” though it can’t be determined if this was Morales or some-
one else. Also, more than twenty years after JFK’s murder, Gaeton Fonzi
uncovered a link between Morales and the French Connection drug
smuggler who also helped French Intelligence (SDECE) agents like
Michel Victor Mertz.14
Morales is the only person who confessed to JFK’s assassination that
was in a position to have both manipulated the date of the CIA’s meet-
ing with Cubela in Paris and have suggested that David Atlee Phillips
meet with Lee Oswald in Dallas, in a public place, in September 1963.
Morales had been Phillips’s supervisor in Havana, and they were work-
ing closely together in the fall of 1963. As for Cubela, Cuban authorities
say that Morales met personally with him in September 1963. It’s also
interesting to note that Cubela had originally been recruited for the
CIA by a business associate of Santo Trafficante.15 Morales would have
realized that after JFK’s assassination, the timing of the CIA-Cubela
meeting and Phillips’s meeting with Oswald would force both Helms
and Phillips to cover up or destroy much crucial information to protect
their own careers.
David Morales knew two men—Johnny Rosselli and John Martino—
who later confessed their roles in JFK’s assassination to trusted asso-
ciates:16 Martino even mentioned the normally secretive Morales by
name in his 1963 book
I Was Castro’s Prisoner.
Cuban authorities also
linked Morales to former death-squad leader Rolando Masferrer, the
associate of Martino and Trafficante who was secretly brought into the
JFK-Almeida coup plan after Tony Varona received a $200,000 bribe in
August 1963.17
More information also backs up Morales’s JFK confession. Morales’s
AMOT informants had fed suspicious assassination-related reports
to the CIA even before JFK went to Dallas. These would soon include
claims that the supposed Cuban agent who appeared to shadow JFK in
Chicago and Florida was also in Dallas, before returning to Cuba. Even
Morales’s own government associates felt he was capable of murder.
The number-two official at the huge Miami CIA station, Tom Clines,
told author David Corn that Morales “would do anything, even work
with the Mafia.” According to Corn, Morales once bragged about sabo-
taging the parachutes of “men he suspected of being communists” and
“had the pleasure of waving good-bye to them, as they plummeted to
[their] death.”18
Former US diplomat Wayne Smith, who worked with Morales at the
US embassy in Havana, said that “if [Morales] were in the mob, he’d be
called a hit man.” According to Smith (later America’s highest-ranking
diplomat in Cuba as head of the US Interests Section in Havana from
1979 to 1982), Morales said three years before his death that “Kennedy
got what was coming to him.” Smith has stated, “I am convinced that
[JFK’s] assassination was carried out by . . . men like David Morales,
who I knew well from my days in Cuba.”19
Chapter Eight
Carlos Marcello’s whereabouts on November 22, 1963, at the time of
JFK’s murder are easily documented. The godfather who controlled Lou-
isiana and parts of the surrounding states was sitting in a New Orleans
federal courtroom, watching his trial enter its final stages. Although a
conviction could lead to prison and permanent deportation, Marcello
knew he would be acquitted, since he’d used intermediaries to bribe a
key juror. In a few hours, his friends and family would be throwing a
celebration for him, but Marcello anticipated celebrating more than just
his acquittal.
Marcello knew that his hated enemy, Bobby Kennedy, was sure to
investigate the circumstances of the verdict, and that he and his associ-
ate Hoffa couldn’t go on bribing jurors forever. The Kennedy admin-
istration’s additional prosecutions and investigations of Marcello and
Hoffa, coupled with its relentless pressure on Trafficante and Rosselli,
couldn’t be allowed to continue. But after November 22, Marcello would
no longer have to worry about the Kennedys’ war on organized crime,
because the Attorney General’s brother would no longer be President.
Marcello’s plan that was unfolding on November 22 was consistent
with his criminal behavior for the past two decades, which had been
careful, cautious, and ruthless. In the case of the JFK hit, even his backup
plan (Tampa) had a backup (Dallas). The situation in Dallas looked much
better than it had in either Chicago or Tampa. No active alert had been
issued to law enforcement; no threat had been detected. In addition,
Marcello had already seen in Chicago and Tampa that Bobby and top
federal officials would cover up assassination information in order to
protect national security, and there was no reason to think Dallas would
be any different.
Marcello, along with Trafficante and Rosselli, had thoroughly planned
and considered every aspect of the assassination for the past year, using
all the skills they brought to their multimillion-dollar criminal business
deals. They realized that JFK needed to be assassinated in public in order
to force a quick reaction from Bobby and the government. Since parts
of the slaying had already been linked to the top-secret JFK-Almeida
coup plan, Bobby and top government officials would be forced into
hurried decisions about limiting the investigation to prevent a nuclear
confrontation over Cuba. As with the concealment of the Chicago and
Tampa attempts, once such cover-ups had been put in place, they could
be almost impossible to later admit or undo. These cover-ups would
have to continue as officials and agencies tried to figure out in secret
which parts of the extensive coup plan had been compromised.
Marcello also knew that by killing JFK during his motorcade, he
would guarantee that JFK’s death and its cause couldn’t be hidden for
even a short period of time. This meant that Bobby’s archrival, Lyndon
Johnson, would quickly assume office, before Bobby and his Justice
Department prosecutors had a chance to seize control of the investiga-
tion. Marcello had contributed money to LBJ for years, as he did to many
politicians in the region. The Mafia boss had originally supported John-
son for the 1960 Democratic nomination over JFK, since LBJ had never
gone after the Mafia.1 Because of LBJ’s lack of interest in pursuing the
Mafia, and his enmity with Bobby, an LBJ presidency was far preferable
to having JFK in office.
Marcello was far more politically savvy than most Mafia chiefs—he