Authors: Lamar Waldron
ciates were linked to the Odio incident.
Warren had probably been told only about the CIA-Mafia plots that
ran from 1960 to 1962, since the FBI was also aware of those, but it’s
doubtful that Warren was told that the plots had continued into 1963.
Helms had no incentive to tell Warren something that remained hidden
even from his own CIA Director, especially since problems with the
plots kept coming up in early 1964. In April 1964, FitzGerald and Helms
“terminated” (as in fired) QJWIN after news reports surfaced briefly in
Europe, linking Jean Souetre and Michael Mertz to JFK’s assassination.
These news reports led to the inquiry that generated the only memo the
CIA has ever released about Mertz, the one page (from a much longer,
still withheld document) concerning his deportation that was quoted
in an earlier chapter.
The European articles also caused the FBI to look for anyone with the
name of, or a name similar to, Mertz who flew out of Dallas after JFK’s
assassination. However, no news about this was reported in America
at the time, and it’s not clear what, if anything, the Warren Commis-
sion was told about Mertz or Souetre. While the Commission received
a few documents about the FBI’s search in early 1964 for November 22,
1963, Dallas airline passengers named Mertz, those were just a hand-
ful of more than a hundred thousand pages of FBI files showered on
the Warren Commission. Lacking more information from the FBI or
CIA, Commission staffers probably didn’t realize the significance of
the documents.27
On March 2, 1964, Helms received reports of yet another Mafia plot
to assassinate Castro, though he didn’t tell McCone and Bobby about
it until three months later. According to Congressional investigators,
Helms wrote that CIA “officials have learned of several plots by exiles to
assassinate Castro. Some of them are connected to the Mafia.” However,
Helms “does not mention [to McCone] the [earlier] CIA sponsored plots”
with the Mafia. Helms said the March 1964 plots “involved ‘people
apparently associated with the Mafia’ who had been offered $150,000 by
Cuban exiles to accomplish the deed. Helms’s memorandum stated that
the sources of the reports were parties to the plots who had presumably
given this information to CIA officials with the expectation that they
would receive legal immunity if the plots succeeded.”28
Three months later, in June 1964, Helms told McCone that, naturally,
“the CIA representatives had told the Cuban informants that such action
would never be condoned.” Helms’s delay in relaying this information
begs the question of whether he was giving the plots three months to
work, before finally informing his Director. Helms still had at least one
possible pathway of information from the Mafia: Though Johnny Ros-
selli no longer went to the Miami CIA station, David Morales visited the
Mafia don in Las Vegas in early 1964.29
Helms continued to withhold much important information from the
Warren Commission, including the CIA’s ongoing contacts with Rolando
Cubela. More than a decade later, the Senate Church Committee would
write that “it is difficult to understand why those aware of the opera-
tion did not think it relevant, and did not inform those investigating
President Kennedy’s assassination of possible connections between that
operation and the assassination.”30 In hindsight, the motive for Helms’s
omission is clear: At the very least, revealing those connections would
have cost Helms his job and probably would have made CIA officials
like David Morales, and possibly even Helms himself, suspects.
Some Warren Commission staff members were already becoming
frustrated with—and perhaps even suspicious of—the CIA. Congres-
sional investigators later found that on March 12, 1964, there had been
a “very important meeting between 6 Warren Commission staffers and
3 CIA men.” During the meeting, Helms told the staffers that “two
case officers would know for sure whether Oswald was an agent.”
The investigators, writing fifteen years later, found Helms’s comment
“very interesting,” and wondered why Helms limited it to “just two
officers. . . . Who were they, were they the only ones who had contact
with Oswald?” In the meeting, Helms stated that “Oswald was not an
agent,” but said that the Warren Commission “would just have to take
his word for it.”31
Ever since a false report about Oswald’s being an FBI informant
had surfaced in January 1964, the Commission had been worried that
Oswald had been an undercover operative for some US agency. They
were not reassured when Hale Boggs asked fellow Commissioner and
former CIA Director Allen Dulles if the CIA had “agents about whom
you had no record whatsoever.” Dulles answered that “the record might
not be on paper,” and that even if it was, it might be “hieroglyphics
that only two people knew what they meant, and nobody outside the
Agency would know.”32
On April 30, 1964, the Warren Commission decided to have top
302
LEGACY OF SECRECY
officials from the CIA and FBI testify about the matter.33 On May 14,
Helms, McCone, and J. Edgar Hoover all testified to the Commission that
Oswald wasn’t an agent or informant for their agencies. In an extremely
technical way, they were correct: As Helms would testify under oath in
1978, Oswald was the responsibility of the defense establishment, not
the CIA. General Joseph Carroll, of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
should have been subject to the same scrutiny, though it’s unclear how
much even he knew about Oswald’s 1963 activities. Indications exist that
the heads of Naval and Marine Intelligence knew more than General
Carroll, but they never testified either. Essentially, each of the agencies
was passing the buck to the other, leaving the Commission, and the
public, in the dark.
Congressional investigators later noted that Helms blatantly lied to
the Commission on several points.34 The same day as Helms’s testimony,
one of Helms’s CIA officials was also lying to the FBI about a report the
bureau had received concerning Artime’s AMWORLD camps in Guate-
mala. The FBI had learned that the “military forces in [Guatemala] were
under the direct control of the US, that there are three military camps
training mercenary forces which were originally organized for an inva-
sion of Cuba.” But on May 14, 1964, the FBI was told “it was the very
strong opinion of CIA that the information [about the camps] is false.
CIA officials speculated . . . the information may have been [planted]
for deception or provocation.”35
CIA files released in 1992 show that in 1964, affidavits had been pre-
pared for Helms and three other CIA officials, in case the Warren Com-
mission pressed them for more disclaimers about Oswald. The affidavits
stated that Oswald “was not an agent, employee, or informant”; that the
CIA “never contacted him, interviewed him, talked with him, or received
or solicited any reports or information from him, or communicated with
him, directly or indirectly, in any other way”; and that “Oswald was
never associated or connected, directly or indirectly, in any way whatso-
ever with the Agency.” There are blanks for the CIA officials to sign and
for each affidavit to be sworn and notarized. However, only McCone
signed an affidavit for the Warren Commission. Helms didn’t sign his,
and a note in the CIA file reads: “never sent to Commission.”36
Although Helms lied and obfuscated about Oswald, the coup plan,
and his unauthorized operations, he did tell the Warren Commission
about troubling information that kept them concerned about a poten-
tially devastating confrontation with the Soviets. A KGB officer named
Yuri Nosenko, who had recently defected to America, claimed that he
had read the KGB file on Oswald, and that it showed the Russians had
no interest in Oswald. One of the CIA officers who helped Nosenko get
from Europe to America was James McCord, the future Watergate bur-
glar who also allegedly assisted Harry Williams with the JFK-Almeida
coup plan.37 Once Nosenko was in the US, a CIA memo confirms that
Harry Williams’s other CIA contact, “Howard Hunt, [was] told about
the doubts regarding AEFOXTROT [Nosenko’s] bona fides” on April
9, 1964.38
Richard Helms made sure Earl Warren knew that Helms and others
in the CIA weren’t certain that Nosenko was telling the truth about the
KGB’s lack of interest in Oswald. Helms pointed out that Nosenko might
have been sent to the US as a false defector, a double agent. While the
Warren Commission decided that Nosenko’s testimony was too sensi-
tive to mention in its report, Helms ordered the defector’s interrogation
to be stepped up.39
The way the CIA handled Nosenko in 1964, and for the next several
years, evokes twenty-first-century concerns about the treatment of US
prisoners at Guantanamo and in Iraq. Even Helms admits that Nosenko
was held “in strict solitary confinement [and] subjected to various psy-
chological pressures.” This scenario went on for years, well after Helms
became CIA Director. Yet in his autobiography, Helms tries to put the
responsibility onto unnamed others for these actions, though he spe-
cifically exonerates James Angleton. In contrast, CIA Miami Chief Ted
Shackley said in his autobiography that it was the paranoid Angleton
who pressed for Nosenko’s “abusive confinement”; Shackley also main-
tains that Nosenko was legitimate.40
From our perspective, Helms had much to gain from keeping Nosenko
in solitary, with his status undetermined, for more than four years. As
long as the Warren Commission and high officials like President Johnson
thought the Soviets might be behind JFK’s assassination, their fear of
possible Soviet reprisals would keep them from pursuing investiga-
tions that could expose Helms’s unauthorized operations, like the 1963
CIA-Mafia plots.41
Chapter Twenty-two
The lies and omissions of Helms, Hoover, and several agencies rendered
any real investigation by the Warren Commission staff almost impos-
sible. Because the Commission was still receiving reports implicating
Fidel in JFK’s murder, national-security concerns remained high. How-
ever, the Commission didn’t realize that most of the reports were linked
to associates of Manuel Artime and Santo Trafficante.1 Because the Com-
mission staff didn’t know about Artime’s work on AMWORLD and the
CIA-Mafia plots with Trafficante, they didn’t realize the “Castro did it”
reports were disinformation designed to distract and divert them. That
same lack of information caused Commission staff to dismiss reports
about John Martino’s accurate statements about JFK’s planned coup and
invasion, which may have been seen as the ravings of a far-right fanatic
who was bitter about his time in Castro’s prisons.
In
Vanity Fair
, Anthony Summers wrote that in an attempt to resolve
the “Castro did it” stories, Earl Warren “dispatched staff counsel Wil-
liam Coleman on a secret mission. Coleman, who has spoken of the trip
privately, [said], ‘It was top-secret.’ Asked to confirm or deny that he
had met Castro, he said only, ‘No comment.’ What Coleman will say is
that his mission helped convince him that Castro had nothing to do with
the president’s death.”2 No files about Coleman’s “secret mission” have
ever been released; they are just some of the sensitive Warren Commis-
sion files still being withheld, while others have been released only in
recent years.
Quoted here are newly declassified files about the Warren Commis-
sion’s largely unknown electronic surveillance of Marina Oswald. This
surveillance included a break-in to bug her bedroom, delve into her
sexual habits, and tap her phone. These files offer a rare glimpse of an
all-too-common FBI practice at the time (and in later years), of invasive
surveillance in the name of national security. It also shows how many
files about JFK’s death have been, and are still being, withheld from Con-
gress and the public. Only a few memos have been declassified about
this bugging operation, as well as one in Tampa, though more subjects
were the targets of such surveillance.3
The phone taps on Marina resulted from a conversation between
J. Edgar Hoover and Warren Commission General Counsel J. Lee Rankin,
the investigation’s executive director.4 Rankin called Hoover on Febru-
ary 24, saying he would “hate to have [Marina] just run out on us,” and
that he wanted “a stake-out on her which would watch her and see
who is visiting her.” Hoover added helpfully that the FBI should “also
consider getting a telephone tap in there.” As he had done with Martin
Luther King, the FBI Director went beyond Rankin’s official request and
apparently decided on his own to also install bugs (listening devices) in
Marina’s new residence. Hoover got approval for the phone taps from