Authors: Lamar Waldron
on them. Other officials outside the CIA knew about Cubela in the same
way, as one of “three persons who are in the [Cuban] military or who
have highly placed contacts in such circles,” as FitzGerald said in a
meeting chaired by JFK just ten days before Dallas.26 However, some of
them, like Secretary of State Rusk and another source we spoke with,
didn’t yet know about the JFK-Almeida coup plan. Cubela wasn’t part
of Almeida’s coup plan and hadn’t been told about it, as is clear from
newly declassified files and from our sources who worked on the plan.
But Helms wanted to preserve Cubela as his own, unauthorized adjunct
to the JFK-Almeida coup plan, so two days later he ordered FitzGerald
to have Cubela’s case officer remove a reference to the poison pen from
a memo about the meeting.
As written, the Cubela memo seen by McCone obscures the subject
of the scoped rifles by saying only that Cubela needed to be sent a sev-
enty-five-pound cache of explosives that also included “weapons and
ammo.” It sounds like material for one of the small sabotage operations
the CIA was still occasionally running, and there is no mention of assas-
sination. This longer, more narrative memo—clearly designed to be read
by someone like McCone—doesn’t specifically mention the rifles with
scopes, as does the much shorter, bare-bones operational memo.27
One reason Helms and FitzGerald probably felt they needed to hide
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the unauthorized portion of their actions involving Cubela and others
was that the CIA’s overall operations against Cuba were still very sub-
stantial. While not as extensive as it had been a year earlier, the effort
was still a massive undertaking, run mostly from the huge Miami CIA
station, but with especially sensitive portions run from Washington (by
FitzGerald) and Mexico City (by Phillips). The whole program involved
hundreds of agents and assets, some of whom were often infiltrated into
Cuba or exfiltrated from it.
Declassified files from November 1963 are filled with the “AM”
code names (which signify Cuban operations) of operatives and
operations, many of which have never themselves been declassified.
In addition to names we’ve explored—like AMWORLD, AMLASH
(Cubela), and AMTRUNK—there were less important ones, like AMCO-
BRA, AMCLEOPATRA, AMHALF, AMFOX, AMCROW, AMCRUX,
AMJUDGE, AMGLOSSY, and many dozens—perhaps hundreds—more,
all active at the time of JFK’s death. Secret drops of supplies, communica-
tions equipment, and arms were constantly being arranged and deliv-
ered. And all this was in addition to the support for the exile leaders that
Bobby and Harry had selected for the JFK-Almeida coup plan (Artime,
Ray, Menoyo, and Varona), who based their sometimes considerable
operations outside the United States. Plus, there was CIA coordination
with the Army’s exile programs (like the Cuban exiles based at Fort
Benning) and those of the DIA (which included Naval Intelligence). In
that broad context, it’s easier to see why Helms and FitzGerald felt they
could hide a few small unauthorized operations.
Another important reason Helms felt he didn’t have to reveal every-
thing to Director McCone was that Helms was able to control the CIA’s
own internal investigations of JFK’s assassination. Former
Washing-
ton Post
editor Jefferson Morley wrote that on November 23, “Helms
called a meeting in his office, ordered his senior staff not to discuss
the assassination, and announced that [John] Whitten would review
all internal files on Oswald.” Morley also said that “the following
morning . . . Helms [delivered] Whitten’s preliminary finding—that
Oswald had acted alone—to President Lyndon Johnson.” According
to Morley, “Whitten’s investigation continued—for the next couple of
weeks, he and a staff of [thirty] worked almost around the clock, dog-
gedly plowing through CIA cables from all over the world, scouring
for new information. He forwarded the most interesting material to the
White House, under Helms’s name. He drafted a report on what the CIA
knew about Oswald and began circulating drafts to the various offices
in the operations directorate that had tracked Oswald at one point or
another.”28
However, beginning on November 23, Helms had started to withhold
crucial information from Whitten, his own CIA investigator. Signifi-
cantly, Helms was withholding more than just the information about his
unauthorized assassination operations, like Cubela and the CIA-Mafia
plots; Helms also didn’t give Whitten the CIA’s files about Oswald’s
written contact with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), some-
thing the FBI knew well (thanks to its illegal mail-opening and black-bag
burglary operations), or about Oswald’s well-publicized seemingly pro-
Castro activities in New Orleans. While it’s understandable that Helms
would not tell his investigator about the unauthorized operations, it’s
less clear why he wouldn’t tell him about Oswald’s FPCC and New
Orleans activities, which had been covered extensively in the national
press in the wake of JFK’s murder. One possibility is that the CIA files
about those Oswald activities also involved Helms’s unauthorized oper-
ations, the closely guarded JFK-Almeida coup plan, or the tight surveil-
lance of Oswald. There are no indications Whitten was allowed to see all
the Oswald files from the New Orleans office that Hunter Leake took to
Washington, or the files about the CIA-backed Cuban exile group, the
DRE, that Oswald interacted with in New Orleans.29
When Whitten finally complained to Helms and to Counter-
Intelligence Chief Angleton, Whitten was sacked from the investigation
and returned to his regular duties. (Morley notes that after this change
of assignment, “Whitten’s career stalled,” and just over a year later, “he
was kicked sideways into an unimportant job reviewing operations.
He would not get a senior position” in the CIA, and would retire in
1970 to become a singer in Europe.)30 Whitten’s replacement was James
Angleton, hardly a good choice from an objectivity standpoint, since one
of his department’s responsibilities had been to keep track of defectors
like Oswald.31 Instead of looking at Oswald’s links to Cuban operations,
Angleton focused on trying to tie Oswald to Russia, which kept Helms’s
secrets safe.
Whitten did get a chance to set the record straight almost fifteen years
later, when he testified to Congressional investigators after the CIA-
Mafia plots had been partially exposed. Though his testimony was kept
classified until recent years, it sheds light on several CIA figures at the
time of JFK’s assassination. Whitten told investigators that if he had
been told about Helms’s CIA-Mafia plots, he would have focused on the
Miami CIA station, run by Ted Shackley (who, by the time of Whitten’s
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testimony, had become a very high-level CIA official). As for Helms’s
also withholding his unauthorized plots from the Warren Commission,
Whitten said it was “highly reprehensible,” and that Helms must have
“realized it would have cost him his job and precipitated a crisis for the
Agency” if it ever became known. Whitten also had extremely negative
things to say about William Harvey, who was in charge of the CIA-
Mafia plots for Helms until at least mid-1963. Whitten said that “Helms
entrusting Harvey to hire a criminal to have the capacity to kill some-
body violates every operation precept, every bit of operation experience,
every ethical consideration.” Whitten called Harvey a “ruthless guy . . .
very dangerous.” When Congressional investigators asked him if Har-
vey could have been part of a plot to kill JFK, CIA veteran Whitten
didn’t answer directly, but stated that Harvey “was too young to have
assassinated McKinley and Lincoln.”32
In addition to the Congressional investigators, many researchers have
speculated that Harvey might have had a role in JFK’s murder, though
no evidence or confession has ever surfaced in that regard. Harvey had
become a hero in the CIA for his work on the Berlin Tunnel in the 1950s,
only to see his career come crashing down after Bobby Kennedy found
out that Harvey had sent unauthorized commandos into Cuba at the
height of the Cuban Missile Crisis (some accounts say that Harvey’s team
was an assassination squad, and that they did make an attempt to kill
Fidel). Harvey had been running both the CIA-Mafia plots with Rosselli
(with whom Harvey was very close) and European assassin recruiter
QJWIN, as well as the CIA’s ZRRIFLE “executive action” assassination
program. But Bobby Kennedy thought Harvey was a “disaster,” and so
Helms had Harvey reassigned and replaced by Desmond FitzGerald
in early 1963.33 Harvey was eventually reassigned to Italy, though his
activities in the United States during the rest of 1963 remain vague. He
met with his drinking buddy Rosselli near Washington in June 1963, and
the CIA admits they met (on a personal level) in 1964 and beyond.
Could Harvey have been involved in JFK’s death, as Whitten seemed
to imply? CIA veteran and former
Newsweek
Bureau Chief Bayard Stock-
ton published a full-length biography of Harvey in 2006. Stockton had
worked with Harvey in Europe and concluded that Harvey was probably
not involved, though he seriously considered the possibility. Apparently,
Stockton still had some doubts and information he couldn’t resolve,
because after he had turned in his book for publication, he contacted us
by email about perhaps working together to investigate what he had
found out about “Harvey’s close association with Johnny Rosselli . . .
to see where it may lead us.”34 Before we could pursue it further with
Stockton, he passed away of natural causes.
Harvey’s actions in November 1963, and around the time of JFK’s
assassination, are not well documented, at least in CIA files that were
shown to Congressional investigators. In some ways, Harvey would
have had much less to lose than many by helping Rosselli with JFK’s
assassination, because Harvey had no official role in AMWORLD or the
JFK-Almeida coup plan. At the same time, he would have been much
less able to influence events and help with the assassination and cover-
up than a confessed conspirator like David Morales. Also, because of
Harvey’s well-known feud with Bobby Kennedy, Harvey would have
been a focus of Bobby’s suspicion if strong evidence surfaced that
pointed toward the CIA. Harvey had a much worse drinking problem
than Morales—another factor that could have affected how much Ros-
selli and Trafficante would have utilized him in their plot. Rosselli could
have simply taken advantage of Harvey—milking him for information
during drinking bouts and manipulated him—without having Harvey
knowingly involved in the plot. In the absence of evidence or a con-
fession by Harvey, it’s hard to be more definitive, though his actions
detailed in later chapters indicate that he probably became aware at
some point that Rosselli was involved in JFK’s murder.
In looking at the CIA’s actions during the weekend following JFK’s
murder, we should also consider the possibility that one or more of Har-
vey’s CIA associates thought (then or later) that Harvey was involved,
or worried that Harvey had been involved, with mobsters tied to JFK’s
assassination. In November 1963, the CIA’s Miami Station Chief was
Ted Shackley, who wrote in his autobiography how much he admired
William Harvey, his “old boss,” whom he “always regarded . . . as a men-
tor and friend.” Harvey had actually convinced Helms to put Shackley
in charge of the Miami station, launching Shackley into a higher-level
CIA career that would last until 1979.35 Shackley had even accompanied
Harvey on one trip to take a trailerload of arms to Johnny Rosselli, in
the spring of 1962.
Just after JFK’s assassination, Shackley assigned an unusual agent to
coordinate the Miami station’s inquiries into JFK’s murder. A recently
declassified CIA memo says that “Anthony Sforza, AMOT case officer
. . . received specific instructions from Shackley about how the AMOT
service was to go about aiding in the investigation” of JFK’s assassina-
tion.36 Sforza had started working with David Morales in Cuba in the
late 1950s. David Corn of the
Nation
says Sforza “operated in Havana
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under the cover of a professional gambler and cultivated contacts with
the Mafia.”37 By 1963, Sforza was working at the Miami station under
David Morales, whom he regarded as a brother.38 Apparently, Sforza
was one of the few Miami CIA agents who could actually travel safely
into Cuba, and on the day of JFK’s murder, he was going from Cuba to
Mexico City as part of an operation with David Atlee Phillips to exfil-
trate a very high-profile Cuban. Apparently, Fidel’s sister Juanita was