Authors: Lamar Waldron
reports,” but didn’t indicate how the CIA knew what information the
journalists possessed, or why they hadn’t published it.16
It’s possible that LBJ, after telling Pearson that Anderson’s story had
a factual basis, had asked or pressured Pearson not to pursue the story.
In keeping with Richard Helms’s strategy of trying to minimize stories
unfavorable to the CIA or which questioned the Warren Report, Helms
or other CIA officials may also have intervened with Pearson. Perhaps
Morgan or Rosselli, or the associates they shared with Anderson, had
conveyed the message that no more stories were needed at that point.
Jack Anderson would not resume writing about the leaks from Johnny
Rosselli for almost four years, when his articles were again connected
with the legal problems of Rosselli and Hoffa, and would help lead to
the Watergate scandal.17
Bobby Kennedy must have been relieved when it became apparent
that Anderson’s revelations had stopped and no other media outlets
were pursuing the story. In April 1967, Bobby’s political stock was at its
lowest point, and any future office beyond the Senate seemed unlikely.
At the same time, Bobby was beginning another step in his sometimes
painful transformation that would see him become a symbol of hope
and inspiration for millions the following year.
While dealing with the McCone/Anderson matter, Bobby was still
struggling with the profound effects of his recent trip to Mississippi.
After listening to shocking testimony about hunger and poverty at his
hearings in Jackson, Bobby had insisted on seeing the conditions for
himself. The following afternoon, cameras were rolling as Bobby made
an impromptu visit to dilapidated Delta shacks that housed poverty-
stricken families. The cameras recorded Bobby’s barely contained
surprise and concern when the New York Senator asked a young boy
what he’d eaten for lunch—and the boy said he hadn’t had anything
to eat.18
The cameras couldn’t film clearly what happened inside one of the
shacks, but it was a pivotal moment that gave Bobby the cause that
would consume him until his death. Reporter Nick Kotz described the
dwelling as “a dark windowless shack [smelling of] mildew, sickness,
and urine. . . . There was no ceiling hardly [and] the floor had holes in
it.” Bobby noticed a little boy with “his tummy sticking out.” Bobby
picked up the boy and said, “My God, I didn’t know this kind of thing
existed. How can a country like this allow it?” When Bobby was unable
to get a response from the starving child, an associate says that Bobby
soon had “tears . . . running down [his] his cheek and he just sat there
and held the little child . . . then he said, ‘I’m going back to Washington
to do something about this.’”19
At his Hickory Hill mansion that night, Bobby appeared “ashen
faced,” according to his daughter Kathleen. Bobby told nine of his ten
children that “in Mississippi a whole family lives in a shack the size of
this room. The children are covered with sores and their tummies stick
out because they have no food. Do you know how lucky you are? [You
should] do something for your country.” Bobby was really talking to
himself as much as he was to his children. What he had seen continued
to torment him, and the following night, Bobby could no longer contain
himself. He exploded in self-recrimination, telling the wife of an aide,
“You don’t know what I saw! I have done nothing in my life! Everything
I have done was a waste! Everything I have done was worthless!”20
Bobby Kennedy channeled the shock of what he saw in Mississippi,
and the lingering pain of losing his brother, into a new cause that re-
energized him. Poverty, and all the ills that flowed from it, became his
cause, his crusade. He pressured Congress and LBJ to increase funding
for food programs, a demand that LBJ saw as just another of Bobby’s
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
attacks. Bobby made a high-profile appearance on NBC’s
Meet the Press
,
proclaiming, “If we can spend $24 billion for the freedom and liberty
of the people in Vietnam, certainly we can spend a small percentage of
that for the liberty and the freedom and the future of our own people in
the United States.” Bobby reached out to Martin Luther King, saying in
a letter to him that when it came to the issues of poverty and hunger, “I
cannot agree with you more that something must be done. If you have
any suggestions, I would appreciate hearing from you.”21
As Bobby moved closer to Martin Luther King’s position on poverty
and civil rights, Dr. King was moving toward Bobby’s openly antiwar
stance. On April 4, 1967, just a month after Bobby’s first major antiwar
speech, Dr. King delivered his own ringing denunciation of the war in
his famous sermon at Riverside Church. Most historians and journal-
ists say the trigger for Dr. King’s change was his seeing a copy of
Ram-
parts
magazine on January 14, 1967. As described by Nick Kotz, the
magazine’s “story and pictures showing Vietnamese children who had
been horribly maimed or killed by . . . napalm, dropped by US planes,
[stunned] King, [who] resolved to speak out against the war.”22
However, Dr. King was moving steadily in an antiwar direction
even before he saw the magazine. The previous year, King had met and
befriended Vietnamese Buddhist religious leader and peace advocate
Thich Nhat Hahn, when he was in the US on a speaking tour arranged by
the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a peace group that been helping King
for years. Hated by both the US-backed Vietnamese dictator and the
communist insurgents, King nominated Hahn for the Nobel Peace Prize
on January 25, 1967. However, King proceeded cautiously in making
public pronouncements against the war until the spiraling cost in lives—
disproportionately minorities, due to college deferments more readily
available to Caucasians—and money (needed to fight poverty) became
too great.
Dr. King’s April 1967 antiwar speech was eloquent and well grounded
in fact, and it would have far-reaching implications. King condemned
sending young black men “eight thousand miles away to guarantee
liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southeast Geor-
gia and East Harlem.” Ironically, South Georgia racist Joseph Milteer
would use King’s new antiwar stance to drive his collection of even
more contributions to kill the civil rights leader.
After Dr. King’s speech, he was criticized by some black leaders who
were trying to keep the struggle for equal rights separate from the anti-
war movement. The US news media were generally hostile to King’s
new position, as was President Johnson. After all the work President
Johnson had done for civil rights, LBJ saw King’s remarks as a betrayal,
further fraying a relationship that had already become strained. LBJ
would increasingly shift his focus away from his war on poverty, as he
struggled to manage both the Vietnam war and the growing discontent
in America’s inner cities. J. Edgar Hoover seized upon King’s new anti-
war stance as a reason to increase his already extensive surveillance of
the civil rights leader and his associates. Now that Dr. King was part of
the antiwar movement, he became subject to even more illegal domestic
surveillance from other federal agencies, due to the burgeoning efforts
of US military intelligence and the CIA to monitor peace groups and
demonstrators.
CIA Director Richard Helms was consumed increasingly by Vietnam
in 1967—both the war there and covert efforts in neighboring countries
like Laos—as well as by monitoring the growing antiwar movement.
Helms and the CIA also had a dozen other hot spots and fronts in the
Cold War, including ongoing covert actions against Cuba. However,
in the short run, Helms’s most pressing issue remained the IG Report
about the Rosselli/Anderson situation, since its revelations could end
his career.
By April 24, 1967, the Inspector General was starting to deliver its
report to Helms in installments, while Helms continued to track the
related matters of Cuban operations and the Jim Garrison investiga-
tion. A short time later, District Attorney Garrison subpoenaed Helms
to appear before the grand jury in New Orleans. Helms felt obliged only
to tell Georgia senator (and former Warren Commissioner) Richard Rus-
sell about Garrison’s subpoena—which Helms then ignored. Though
Russell’s relationship with his former protégé, LBJ, had been strained
over civil rights, they were still friends—and Helms knew that as long
as the powerful Senator Russell approved of Helms’s actions, Garrison
could do nothing to compel Helms’s testimony.
News reports monitored by the CIA and FBI indicated that Com-
mander Almeida remained prominent in Cuba, helping to fill the vac-
uum created by Che Guevara’s mysterious absence. UPI reported that on
May 1, 1967, “Havana radio announced that Cuba’s acting Armed Forces
Minister, Major Juan Almeida, will preside over May Day ceremonies
today, instead of Premier Fidel Castro. . . . Almeida recently was desig-
nated acting Armed Forces Minister in place of Major Raul Castro, the
Premier’s brother. The reason for that move never was explained.”23
At the huge ceremony, Almeida revealed only that Che Guevara had
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LEGACY OF SECRECY
been “serving the revolution somewhere in Latin America.” He didn’t
say that Che was in one of the most rugged parts of Bolivia, trying to
spark a small insurgency that even Bolivia’s Communist Party didn’t
support. It was another doomed mission, even more poorly supplied
and supported than Che’s first exile to Africa.24
Richard Helms would have been pleased that Almeida was trusted
with heading Cuba’s big May Day celebration in Fidel’s absence, since
it indicated Almeida still had enough power in Cuba to be valuable to
the US in the future. This knowledge undoubtedly allowed Helms to
rationalize withholding from the Inspector General information about
Almeida’s secret work for JFK, and the CIA’s ongoing covert support
for Almeida’s wife and children outside Cuba. That in turn gave Helms
an excuse to also withhold the Mafia’s infiltration of the Almeida coup
plan from both the IG Report and President Johnson.25
The list of additional material Helms withheld from the Inspector
General, or that Helms convinced the IG and his staff to not include, is
immense: CIA assassination attempts against Castro in 1963; CIA contact
with Rosselli in the summer and fall of 1963; the CIA’s extensive 1963
support for and work with Artime, Varona, Ray, Menoyo, and Harry
Williams; Artime’s and Carlos Marcello’s work on the CIA-Mafia plots;
the Mafia’s $200,000 payoff to Varona, and Varona’s bringing Masferrer
into the plot; CIA contact with Antonio Veciana; the 1963 activities of
E. Howard Hunt, David Atlee Phillips, and David Morales; Oswald’s
contacts with CIA-backed exile groups; and much more detailed in the
earlier chapters of this book and in
Ultimate Sacrifice
.
In a few cases (such as those of the 1959 CIA-Mafia plots and
AMWORLD), a few vague words alluded to the missing operations; in
other cases, information was simply ignored—or history rewritten—to
accommodate the facts deemed safe to include. For example, the IG
Report makes it sound as if the CIA needed to start using Johnny Rosselli
and Santo Trafficante, in the summer of 1960, to find Cubans and exiles
to assassinate Fidel. However, the two the CIA wound up with—Tony
Varona and Juan Orta—had already been working for the CIA.
The story that emerged from the IG Report succeeded in separat-
ing the CIA-Mafia plots from JFK’s assassination by claiming the plots
had ended by early 1963. Only brief passages in the Report mentioned
Helms’s unauthorized operations, but nothing tied them to JFK’s
assassination.
The overall thrust of the IG Report was damage control, with a goal
of discovering who was leaking information and how to stop the leaks.
Ironically, the same concern would result from the next round of Rosselli
revelations to Jack Anderson, and would set in motion the actions of E.
Howard Hunt and the Watergate “plumbers,” so named because their
purpose was to find and stop leaks. Hunt’s men would even consider
killing Jack Anderson, and while the 1967 IG Report does have a section
entitled “Should we try to silence those who are talking or might later
talk?,” the options considered in the IG Report weren’t lethal.26
Some material was added after the Inspector General had completed
the report, such as the March 7, 1966, memo in which Helms lied to
Secretary of State Dean Rusk about the Cubela/AMLASH assassination
plot. That plot was discussed extensively in the IG Report, and since
Helms apparently realized Rusk might have told LBJ about the memo,