Authors: Lamar Waldron
reports about the JFK assassination. He felt frustrated by the fact that
many of his department’s files about Trafficante had been destroyed
several years after he left office.17
We should point out that we don’t think Gilberto Lopez was know-
ingly involved in JFK’s death or the Tampa attempt. Moreover, based
on the descriptions, he was not one of the two men traveling with Rose
Cheramie. Given the many parallels between Lopez and Oswald that
we listed previously, both men were probably being influenced or
manipulated by the same type of individual, someone they trusted as
an intelligence or law enforcement figure, who was actually working
for one of the three Mafia chiefs. The same would be true for ex-Marine
Vallee in Chicago. In the same way the Mafia bosses’ plan to kill JFK in
Chicago included not just one backup city, but two (Tampa and Dallas),
they were prepared in case an accident or illness prevented one of their
fall guys from being in the right place at the right time.
The
Tampa Tribune
article was small and on an inside page; it wasn’t
front-page news; just filler about an odd aspect of JFK’s recent Tampa
trip. But since all word of the Tampa threat had been kept out of the
press, it quickly got the attention of the
Miami Herald
and the Associ-
ated Press. It’s not hard to imagine the reactions of Bobby, Hoover, LBJ,
the Secret Service, and McCone when they heard the Tampa threat had
started to leak. Tampa had a large Cuban exile population, and a sizable
minority of them supported Fidel; the Tampa chapter of the Fair Play
for Cuba Committee was an actual organization, not a phony one-man
front like Oswald had in New Orleans. While Lopez had apparently
not yet surfaced as a suspect, he soon would, and the national-security
implications were enormous. If the public found out that JFK had been
targeted during his Tampa motorcade just four days earlier, the press
and the public might not be so willing to swallow the official account of
a lone, unaided assassin in Dallas. If word of the Tampa plans emerged,
then the Chicago threat, which had contributed to JFK’s decision to
cancel his motorcade there, might also come out. It would look as if JFK
had been constantly stalked by Cubans or by the “international com-
munist conspiracy,” the very thing LBJ had his aide order Texas officials
to avoid mentioning.
Chief Mullins explained that he was never told why he had been
ordered to cut off all mention of the Tampa threat to the press, which is
one reason he was willing to talk to us about it in 1996. But in those days,
as today, the Tampa police cooperated with the local FBI and Secret Ser-
vice offices, and with other federal agencies like the CIA. Mullins there-
fore did what he was told. When the Associated Press and the
Miami
Herald
attempted to follow up on the revelations in the
Tampa Tribune
article, they were confronted by a wall of secrecy. The
Herald
reported
the next day that “the FBI, Secret Service, and local officers declined to
discuss the matter.” The Secret Service offered “no comment.” As for
the Secret Service memo quoted in the original
Tampa Tribune
article,
it appears to have vanished from the official record. While it might be
buried among the four million–plus pages of JFK files at the National
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
Archives, it could also have been one of the files covering the period of
the Tampa attempt that the Secret Service would admit to destroying in
January 1995. That was approximately six weeks after the authors had
first informed the JFK Assassination Records Review Board about the
newspaper article describing the Tampa attempt.
It took thirty-three years for any researcher or investigator to locate
the first small article about the Tampa attempt, so other such articles
might still be out there, perhaps appearing in only one edition of a news-
paper. It took several days for all newspapers to completely adopt the
official story, and in the meantime, other stories briefly emerged, only
to quickly be shut down. On Monday, November 25, the
New York Post
reported that when Oswald went to Mexico, his “movements were
watched at the request of a ‘Federal agency in Washington’ [according
to] William M. Kline, assistant United States Customs Agent-in-Charge
of the Bureau’s Investigative Service.” The following day, the
New York
Times
reported from Mexico that Oswald’s “movements were followed
in Mexico by an unidentified United States Agency.” The same day, the
New York Herald-Tribune
added a report from US Customs official Oran
Pugh that the way Oswald was monitored at the border was “not the
usual procedure.”18 These stories, which hinted at the tight surveillance
of Oswald, were quickly squelched. The following year, the Warren
Commission would obtain carefully worded denials from the Customs
officials mentioned in the stories, though the subject would not be men-
tioned in the Commission’s Final Report.
Another example of a story’s slipping through the cracks in the early
days was an Associated Press article saying “someone telegraphed small
amounts of money to Lee Oswald for several months before the assas-
sination.”19 Though private pressure usually worked to control stories in
the media, just to make sure the message was abundantly clear, Hoover
later issued a statement, carried by the
New York Times,
saying that
Oswald had not been under surveillance by the FBI and was “neither a
spy nor a saboteur.”20
It’s ironic that on Saturday, November 23, some newspapers were
reporting information that was, in some ways, more accurate than
many of Hoover’s public statements. As we mentioned earlier, many
editorials written the previous day—before much about Oswald was
known—blamed JFK’s murder on right-wing extremists. They were
more correct than they realized, given the racist views of Marcello, his
white-supremacist associates like Guy Banister and Milteer, and the
far-right ties of others involved, such as Martino, Ferrie, and Masferrer,
and those on the plot’s periphery, like Artime and Rivero. Ironically,
the statements of communist dictatorships in Cuba and Russia were in
some ways closer to the truth than Hoover was. Far beyond the reach
of Hoover’s FBI, the official Soviet news agency, TASS, blamed “racists,
the Ku Klux Klan, and Birchers.” While not Klan members, both Banister
and Milteer had close associates who were, and Martino was one of the
most prominent speakers offered by the John Birch Society. Of course,
the Russians had their own self-interest at stake in pointing the finger
away from a seemingly lone communist assassin, as did Castro.
Fidel Castro was meeting with JFK’s personal emissary, French jour-
nalist Jean Daniel, at Varadero Beach when they received word of JFK’s
death. In both his private and public statements, Castro indicated JFK’s
death was a very bad thing. Castro didn’t mention the secret negotia-
tions when he issued a public statement on Saturday, but he did blame
JFK’s murder on “‘a macabre plan’ prepared by United States right-wing
extremists.”21
In Washington, Richard Helms was trying to orchestrate critical cover-
ups on two fronts, even as he tried to figure out what had really hap-
pened in Dallas. First, Helms had to be sure that no one—especially the
CIA Director, President Lyndon Johnson, or Bobby Kennedy—learned
of his unauthorized Castro assassination operations. Second, he also
had to protect the CIA’s authorized anti-Castro plots, ranging from
the JFK-Almeida coup plan and AMWORLD to the far less developed
AMTRUNK. Because there was some overlap between some of the
operations (AMWORLD’s Artime was part of both the JFK-Almeida
plan and the unauthorized CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro), he could use
actions to protect the authorized plans to simultaneously hide—and
even continue—his own unauthorized plotting.
First, Helms had to get control of all the CIA’s material on Oswald.
Historian Michael Kurtz has written that Hunter Leake, whom memos
confirm was Deputy Chief of the New Orleans CIA office in 1963, told
him “that on the day after the assassination, he was ordered to collect all
of the CIA’s files on Oswald from the New Orleans office and transport
them to the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.” Kurtz writes
that:
. . . [along with] other employees of the New Orleans office, Leake
gathered all of the Oswald files. They proved so voluminous that
Leake had to rent a trailer to transport them to Langley. Stopping
only to eat, use the restroom, and fill up with gas, Leake drove the
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
truck pulling the rental trailer filled with the New Orleans office’s
files on Oswald to CIA headquarters. Leake later learned that many
of these files were . . . ‘deep sixed.’ Leake explained that . . . the CIA
dreaded the release of any information that would connect Oswald
with it. Leake speculated that his friend Richard Helms, the Agency’s
Deputy Director for Plans, was probably the person who ordered
the destruction of the files because Helms had a paranoid obsession
with protecting the ‘company.’22
Leake’s remark about the “voluminous” files on Oswald makes sense,
given the information from our independent source about the “tight
surveillance” of Oswald, which was not known to Kurtz at the time of
his interview with Leake. Buttressing Leake’s credibility is the fact that
no routine reports from the CIA’s New Orleans office have ever surfaced
about former defector Oswald’s well-publicized pro-Castro activities
in New Orleans during August 1963, despite the CIA’s interest in both
former defectors and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Also, Leake’s
statement to Kurtz that “Oswald indeed performed chores for the CIA
during his five months in New Orleans during the spring and summer of
1963” fits with other information about Oswald’s work for Banister: the
remarkable amount of media coverage Oswald was able to generate in
such a short time, followed by Oswald’s meeting with CIA media expert
David Atlee Phillips, who was also working on AMWORLD.23 The last
part is important, because it suggests that Oswald had some role in an
authorized CIA operation like AMWORLD; otherwise, Helms couldn’t
have hoped to keep the efforts of Leake and “other employees of the
New Orleans office” secret from McCone.
It’s important to keep in mind that while Helms engaged in his cover-
ups, several of the authorized and unauthorized operations were still
active and viable. That meant that Helms had to find a way to conceal
information while still preserving those operations and his options. He
had to decide what to hide, and from whom, and what to reveal. Some
of the decisions Helms made that day would become CIA dogma for
decades, even as evidence emerged that the line Helms took couldn’t
possibly be true. As Dr. John Newman documented, this included the
CIA’s “decision soon after the assassination to deny that anyone within
the CIA—including the Mexico station—knew of Oswald’s visits to the
Cuban consulate until after JFK’s murder.” CIA files declassified later
show this claim was clearly false.24
Deceiving his own CIA Director, Helms apparently authorized Des-
mond FitzGerald, his head of Cuban operations, to tell McCone’s execu-
tive assistant only that a CIA case officer had been meeting with Cubela
in Paris when JFK was shot, and that FitzGerald himself had met with
Cubela the previous month. FitzGerald didn’t tell him anything about
the assassination aspects of the Cubela operation, since McCone hadn’t
been told about that part of the plan. That meant McCone’s assistant
wasn’t told about the poison pen the case officer tried to give Cubela, or
about his promise to deliver high-powered rifles with scopes for Cubela
to use in assassinating Castro, so McCone and his assistant probably saw
little to be concerned about.25
However, McCone’s assistant was struck by how emotional Fitz-
Gerald was when he told him about Cubela. He told
Newsweek
editor
Evan Thomas that “Des was normally imperturbable, but he was very
disturbed . . . shaking his head and wringing his hands.” He couldn’t
understand why FitzGerald appeared to be “distraught and overreact-
ing,” but he didn’t realize how much crucial information FitzGerald was
withholding from him and McCone. It’s also revealing that Helms had
FitzGerald tell McCone’s assistant about the Cubela meeting, instead
of Helms’s telling McCone directly.
McCone was at least generally aware of Cubela, as were a few others
outside of the CIA—but to them, Cubela was only someone who could
look for others to help stage a coup, and who could provide intelligence