Authors: Lamar Waldron
he made sure it was included. Helms was probably confident that he
could rationalize his lie to Rusk if need be, since Helms had withheld
the most damaging information about the Cubela/AMLASH plots from
the IG Report. The suppressed information ranged from Manolo Ray’s
contacts with Cubela to Manuel Artime’s work with the Mafia when
Artime was meeting with Cubela.
Helms had dealt with several presidents by that time, and he under-
stood how they operated: LBJ was not going to read the 134-plus-page
memo himself, and likely not even a several-page summary. The matter
was so explosive that LBJ would probably not even have a trusted staff
member read it for him. Helms therefore prepared a few pages of notes
so that he could give LBJ a verbal summary. Congressional investiga-
tors later found that Helms hadn’t bothered to prepare any notes about
the CIA-Mafia plots or the Cubela plots that continued past mid-1963.
Helms was at a loss to explain why when he testified to Congress, but
he clearly never intended to detail for LBJ the CIA activities that were
most relevant to Anderson’s columns and JFK’s assassination.
Helms went to the White House to brief LBJ orally about the IG Report
on May 10, 1967, taking only his notes and not even a copy of the Report.
While LBJ could have demanded to see it, Helms apparently hoped that
by verbally emphasizing the sensitive nature of the CIA-Mafia plots he
had inherited, LBJ would be content to trust Helms to keep the whole
situation under wraps—and that was exactly what happened.27
Helms did not tell LBJ about details in the report like the poison
pen the CIA tried to give to Rolando Cubela on the day JFK was killed.
When Senator Frank Church asked Helms about that years later, Helms
testified, “I just can’t recall having done so.” Helms tried to claim to
Church and the other senators that the Cubela operation hadn’t been
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an assassination plot, but the senators had seen the IG Report by then
and knew Helms was lying. At the time of this testimony, Helms and the
CIA (including then-director George H. W. Bush) were withholding even
more damaging information from the senators, including the Almeida
coup plan and its infiltration by Mafiosi linked to JFK’s assassination.
When Helms briefed President Johnson on May 10, 1967, the only
other person at the meeting was LBJ’s press secretary, probably in case
the material ever surfaced in the news.28 By the end of the briefing, LBJ
was apparently content to let the matter rest with Helms, as long as it
stayed out of the press. By feeding LBJ’s suspicions of Castro, Helms’s
presentation also appears to have succeeded in removing the CIA from
LBJ’s list of suspects in JFK’s assassination. In later years, LBJ would
admit privately to a journalist that “we were running a damn Murder
Incorporated in the Caribbean” and “Kennedy was trying to get Castro,
but Castro got to him first.”29 Leaving LBJ with that impression would
also help Helms justify his ongoing anti-Castro operations, which were
proving more and more problematic.
After his meeting with LBJ, Helms held on to the IG Report for twelve
days before returning it to the CIA’s inspector general. Helms probably
kept the report for as long as he did because his Cuban exile opera-
tions were in a sensitive phase, and because he wanted to make sure
nothing new about the CIA-Mafia plots surfaced from Jack Anderson’s
or Garrison’s investigation. On the following day, May 23, 1967, Sen-
ate investigators later found that “all notes and other derived source
material of the IG Report are destroyed.” Thomas Power writes that the
destruction included “every scrap” of the inspector general’s investiga-
tion: “every transcript of an interview, every memo, every note made by
the investigators. The draft which Helms had read went into a safe, his
briefing notes neatly attached to the front, and it stayed there, untouched
and unread, until . . . 1973,” after Richard Nixon had sacked Helms in
the wake of Watergate. President Nixon had wanted access to material
contained in the IG Report, but Helms had refused to give it to him.30
By mid-May 1967, Helms had succeeded in fending off LBJ’s interest
in the 1963 CIA plots involving the Mafia, plots that Helms must have
suspected could have backfired against JFK. In addition, someone had
persuaded Jack Anderson to stop writing articles about the matter, even
though he still had important unused material. But what about the origi-
nal catalyst for the affair, Johnny Rosselli?
Rosselli had finally gotten what he—along with Marcello and Traff-
icante—had wanted for almost a year. Page 132 of the IG Report relates a
May 3, 1967, discussion between the CIA and the FBI’s liaison to the CIA.
The FBI liaison said that Rosselli had the “CIA ‘over a barrel’ because
of ‘that operation.’ [The FBI liaison] said that he doubted that the FBI
would be able to do anything about either Rosselli or Giancana because
of ‘their previous activities with [the CIA].’”31
In other words, because Rosselli had leaked his role in the CIA-Mafia
plots to Jack Anderson, the FBI would have to hold off on pursuing the
immigration charges that had surfaced one year earlier. Rosselli, Mar-
cello, and Trafficante had achieved a major goal of the strategy they had
begun developing the previous year.
Chapter Thirty-six
Richard Helms had extricated himself from the mess caused by mingling
the CIA with the Mafia, which had contributed to JFK’s assassination.
Now, the same pattern was about to repeat itself in the coming months.
Helms’s increasingly unsettled Cuban operations would help to trig-
ger a series of events leading to yet another high-profile assassination
involving Carlos Marcello.
As JFK’s murder had, this one would involve Cuban-exile gunrun-
ning and drug trafficking. However, there would be major differences
between the two assassinations, from the nature of Marcello’s participa-
tion to the CIA’s shifting role with Cuban exiles. By 1967, the CIA’s anti-
Castro effort had dwindled from what it had been just a few years earlier.
With the massive escalation of intelligence operations in Southeast Asia
and the high level of covert activity in other Cold War hot spots, Cuba
was no longer the major focus it had been earlier in President Johnson’s
term. Even inside the US, Helms’s increasing focus on domestic surveil-
lance of antiwar critics was supplanting anti-Castro operations as the
CIA’s primary domestic operation.
However, Castro was still entrenched just ninety miles from the US,
and looking for opportunities to export his revolution and influence.
According to the FBI, almost a thousand Cuban exiles arrived each
week in Miami, and there were “136,244 Cuban refugees . . . in South
Florida.”1 The CIA still had to gather intelligence about Cuba and take
what action it could against Fidel. Something could always happen to
Fidel and Raul, creating an opening for Almeida. Given the usual shelf
life of Latin American dictators, Fidel had already achieved a relatively
long run—and in 1967, it would have been inconceivable to Helms that
Fidel would remain in power for another four decades. Helms needed
the CIA to maintain a network of exile operatives, in case an opportu-
nity arose, while the Agency kept at least a small amount of pressure
on Castro’s regime.
As
Ramparts
had shown, cracks were starting to appear in the CIA’s
ability to manage the US news media, so it was more important than
ever to hide the CIA’s role in Cuban exile operations. Gone were the days
when the Miami CIA station employed six hundred people who man-
aged three thousand exile CIA assets and fifty corporate fronts.2 While
the CIA’s covert Cuban operations were much better concealed by 1967,
its assets—and former assets—were much harder to control.
While the 1967 Cuban operations of CIA Director Helms and Deputy
Director for Plans Desmond FitzGerald were more deniable, the agency’s
looser control led to problems that sometimes made the news. Like
Helms, FitzGerald had much more on his plate than just Cuba. In May
and June 1967, FitzGerald and the CIA were able to accurately predict
both the Six-Day War in the Middle East and Israel’s quick victory, but
those efforts took time and attention away from supervising officials
overseeing Cuban operations.
Desmond FitzGerald’s health was deteriorating, but he tried to put
up a good front and continue his work. A CIA associate described Fitz-
Gerald to Evan Thomas as looking “physically ill; his face was ‘flushed
and puffy’ [because] FitzGerald was . . . suffering from a circulatory
problem.” FitzGerald had only a short time to live, and his health likely
affected the lack of direction and supervision that plagued Cuban oper-
ations.3 These management problems would lead to terrorist acts by
Cuban exiles in the US and other countries, and some writers viewed
those exiles as being out of control, as going beyond what their CIA case
officers wanted. On the other hand, that may have been the impression
Helms and FitzGerald wanted to create: that the exiles were acting on
their own and were not under Agency control.
Even Cuban exiles the CIA admits were under its direct control at the
time, like Luis Posada, were sometimes involved with the Mafia—with
the CIA’s knowledge, if not approval. For example, CIA files document
that in the summer of 1967, Posada was dealing explosives with one
Mafia figure who was later linked to a Marcello casino deal, and with
another mobster who had worked for Trafficante and run guns with
Jack Ruby.4
The CIA’s less hands-on approach relegated many Cuban exiles to a
gray area. Some CIA-backed exiles worked with non-CIA exiles, while
former CIA assets seeking to continue the struggle against Castro began
receiving support from sources whose backing (or US approval) was
unclear. Still other exiles who had once been CIA assets had to simply
find a new way to earn a living.
Given the Miami nexus of exile operations and Trafficante’s continued
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presence there, it shouldn’t be surprising that in 1967, drugs became an
increasing problem among formerly—and perhaps some currently—
CIA-supported exiles. According to noted intelligence journalist Joseph
Trento, the problem became so widespread that by the following year,
the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) would find “itself arresting scores
of former CIA employees. These Cuban ‘freedom fighters’ were using
their CIA training for a life of crime [and justifying] their actions by
claiming that they were using the ill-gotten funds to continue the effort
against Castro, an effort that the CIA had abandoned. Many of these
men were working directly for Santo Trafficante.”5
Tom Tripodi was a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent assigned to the
Miami CIA station’s security office. He wrote that the CIA originally
looked the other way when some exiles began smuggling car parts and
other black-market goods to Cuba: “The CIA was happy, because the
smuggling gave a sense of purpose and a means of funding to a group it
had trained for a counter-revolution that every day seemed less likely to
occur.” However, now that the CIA had “instructed them in the fine art of
smuggling, some of them applied their newly learned expertise to drug
trafficking.” Tripodi found that some exile drug “suspects employed
many of the intelligence and security techniques they had learned from
the CIA, making” the job of US drug agents more difficult. Yet for some
exiles, the downsizing of anti-Castro CIA operations left “the drug trade
as their only viable means of support.”6
Former FBI agent Bill Turner has pointed out that the CIA’s Miami
operations had created a tradition of lawlessness. In addition to the
fact that the CIA’s charter forbade it from conducting operations on
America soil, “every time a [CIA] boat left for Cuba or a plane dumped
firebombs, the Neutrality Act was broken. . . . The transportation of
explosives on the highways transgressed Florida law. The possession of
illegal explosives and war
matériel
contravened the Munitions Act, and
the procurement of automatic weapons defied the Firearms Act.” The
CIA even set up false corporations and filed false tax returns, all while
quietly arranging “for nonenforcement. An elaborate recognition system
was devised, and police, sheriffs, Customs, Immigration, Treasury, and
the FBI all looked the other way.”7 Some exile assets knew the CIA had
given massive support to Manuel Artime while he was smuggling drugs
and working with the Mafia. In some ways, the Cuban exiles getting into
drug trafficking and arms smuggling in 1967 were simply continuing
an already established tradition.
Trafficante and his organization were no doubt happy to add such