The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  It would be through Murchison’s deep connections that all members with shared interest of a Lyndon Johnson presidency could coalesce.

  Murchison could have easily arranged the meeting between Meyer and Johnson to secure the addition of the CIA–Mafia death squad into the fold. Harvey’s group of Mafia–CIA hitmen would be indispensable to the assassination because they were professionals. They, having a need for the removal of JFK, would be compliant soldiers and were off the books. Indeed, following the May 14 meeting between the attorney general, Sheffield Edwards, and Lawrence Houston, the small group of assassins had ceased to exist, even to higher-ups in the agency.

  The Director of the CIA himself, John McCone, who had replaced Allen Dulles, was unaware of the group.

  Murchison, who had deep ties to the vice president, the Mafia, the CIA, and the FBI, would host members from all four groups under his roof the night before John Kennedy was assassinated. Murchison could use many avenues to reach out to the CIA, he had many contacts to the agency including CIA Oswald groomer George de Mohrenschildt, and future director George H. W. Bush. Both worked to protect the oil tycoon’s investments in Haiti. A further connection between the CIA, Texas oil, and LBJ, Johnson’s right hand man, Bobby Baker, was also assigned to protect Murchison’s Haitian business interests.35

  Another man named by Hunt was CIA assassin David “El Indio” Morales.

  “Dave Morales did dirty work for the Agency,” said Wayne Smith, who worked with Morales in Havana pre-Castro. “If he were in the Mob, he’d be called a hit man.”36

  Hard drinking and violent, Morales was a good fit for the assassination compact. He was a soldier who did what he was told, from being an active member of the 1954 coup in Guatemala to overthrowing democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and the tracking and killing of Ernesto “Che” Guevara.37 Morales also had a severe dislike for the Kennedys, deeming them traitors because of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

  “If the son of a bitch [John Kennedy] caused the death of all these people [at the Bay of Pigs], he deserved to die,” said Ruben Carbajal, one of Morales’ close friends said of how he and Morales felt about the operation. “You should never go around lying to your people. You go back on your word, you ain’t no good. My dad taught me that. I don’t give a shit who it is. If it was my own father and he lied to me, he deserves to die.”38

  Morales’s lawyer Robert Walton had said multiple times that El Indio confessed his guilt in the JFK assassination. Morales told Walton, “I was in Dallas when we got that mother fucker, and I was in Los Angeles [where Robert Kennedy was murdered] when we got the little bastard.”39

  In May 1978, set to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Morales, like so many other persons of interest died suddenly before testimony could be given regarding the Kennedy assassination. He quickly succumbed to heart trouble at age fifty-two.

  Following his Church Committee testimony in 1975, Bill Harvey would leave behind a cryptic message regarding his knowledge of any CIA wrongdoing in the assassination: “They didn’t ask the right questions.”

  Harvey would be found dead of a heart attack a year later.

  JFK assassination researcher James Lesar has commented on Bill Harvey’s role as “one of the last remaining, unexplored lines of inquiry in the JFK assassination.”40

  When questioned before the HSCA by Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd concerning clandestine CIA operations around the time of the Kennedy assassination, Richard Helms, the deputy director for plans of the CIA at the time of the assassination who had intimate knowledge of Operation 40 and their use of Mafioso, was obstinate:

  Mr. HELMS - The relevance of one plot or another plot and its effect on the course of events I would have a very hard time assessing and I think you would, too. Suppose I had gone down and told them and said, yes, you know we tried to do this. How would it have altered the outcome of the Warren Commission proceeding?

  Mr. DODD - Wasn’t that really for the Warren Commission to determine?

  Mr. HELMS - I think that is absolutely correct, but they did not have that chance apparently.41

  The Washington Post’s George Lardner reported what Richard Helms said to reporters during a recess from his HSCA testimony:

  Helms told reporters during a break that no one would ever know who or what Lee Harvey Oswald … represented. Asked whether the CIA knew of any ties Oswald had with either the KGB or the CIA, Helms paused with a laugh and said, ‘I don’t remember.’ Pressed on the point, he told a reporter, ‘Your questions are almost as dumb as the Committee’s.’

  NOTES

  1. The Washington Post, September 7, 1976.

  2. Bonanno, Bound by Honor, pg. 263.

  3. Rangano, Mob Lawyer, pg. 325.

  4. Tri City Herald, September 26, 1976.

  5. Rangano, Mob Lawyer, pg. 325.

  6. Sarasota Herald Tribune, December 31, 1975.

  7. Giancana, Antoinette, JFK and Sam, pgs. 69–70.

  8. Giancana, Chuck, Double Cross, pg. 457.

  9. Becker, The Johnny Rosselli Story: All American Mafioso, pg. 153.

  10. Church Committee Interim Report-Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. Pg. 75.

  11. www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0001451843/DOC_0001451843.pdf.

  12. Church Committee: Interim Report - Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, pg. 75.

  13. HSCA Report, Volume V, pg 35.

  14. Church Committee: Interim Report - Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leader, pg.80.

  15. Inspector General’s Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, pgs. 21-22.

  16. “Family Jewels,” CIA Report, pg. 46.

  17. Inspector General’s Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, pgs. 29.

  18. Inspector General’s Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, pg. 32.

  19. “Family Jewels,” CIA Report, pgs. 46–47.

  20. Talbot, Brothers, pg. 86.

  21. Stockton, Flawed Patriot, pg. 72.

  22. Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar, pg. 310.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Church Committee testimony of William Harvey.

  26. Stockton, Flawed Patriot, pg. 179.

  27. Testimony of William K. Harvey, pg. 45.

  28. Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, pg. 102.

  29. Talbot, Brothers, pg. 170.

  30. Alex Jones, “Exclusive Interview with E. Howard Hunt” www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbD_u7nUB_c.

  31. Watson, Prison Planet; May 3, 2007, “Son of JFK Conspirator Drops New Bombshell Revelations.”

  32. Janney, Peter, Mary’s Mosaic, pgs. 230–231.

  33. Gilbride, Richard, Matrix for Assassination: The JFK Conspiracy, pg. 204.

  34. Dale Scott, Peter. “Deep Politics and the Death of JFK.” Pg. 205.

  35. Miller, Davis. “The JFK Conspiracy,” pg. 175.

  36. Talbot, Brothers, pg. 398.

  37. Ibid, pg. 399.

  38. Ibid, pg. 400.

  39. Ibid, pg. 399.

  40. Stockton, Flawed Patriot, pg. 193.

  41. HSCA testimony of Richard Helms.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE ROAD TO WATERGATE

  Nixon’s deep involvement in Operation 40 made him fully aware of a CIA assassination team that included E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and David Morales.

  Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell told me that he learned in 1971 that Nixon, as vice president, had approved the CIA outreach to organized crime in their plan to kill Castro. The CIA authorized ex-FBI agent Maheu to contact the Mob through Johnny Rosselli shortly before Nixon’s surprise defeat in November of 1960. The approach by Maheu happened on Nixon’s watch and at a time when most believed that Nixon would be the next president. Nixon had his own long-term relationship with Maheu, who had funneled money to his campaign from Hughes. As the point man for the CIA-led operation, it is unlikely Nixon wouldn’t have kn
own about the Mob recruitment. At the time, Nixon had connections not only to the CIA, but to Hughes and Maheu. They had already come back to haunt him.

  Hughes lent $205,000 to Nixon’s brother, Don, who established a chain of hamburger restaurants across Southern California called “Nixon Burgers.” The vice president’s mother, Hannah Milhouse Nixon, pledged the deed on her home as collateral for the loan. News of the loan hit the press so late in 1960 that the issue had little impact.1

  California Governor Pat Brown and California Democrats successfully resurrected the issue during Nixon’s unsuccessful bid for the California governorship in 1962. At one point, Democrat dirty trickster Dick Tuck hung a giant banner in Chinese at a San Francisco Chinatown Nixon rally, which read “Nixon, What About the Hughes Loan?” Nixon spoke as his large audience laughed at his cluelessness. Indeed, Nixon knew Hughes and Maheu well, and he paid a price for doing business with them.

  While I will explain why I believe Watergate ended up as a CIA-led coup d’état to topple Nixon, I have always believed that the Watergate burglars broke in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters because Maheu had hired Democratic National Chairman Larry O’Brien, an old Kennedy hand, as a secret lobbyist. Someone around Nixon wanted to know if O’Brien had any documentation or knowledge of Nixon’s relationship with Maheu and the reclusive Hughes. I am aware of the theory that White House Counsel John Dean may have targeted the Watergate breakin to obtain the records of a call-girl ring that Democrats were using to supply girls for visiting dignitaries and party bigwigs. Dean’s girlfriend and later wife, Maureen “Big Mo” Binder, worked for this “escort service.” Although I don’t reject this theory, I suspect that Nixon’s obsession with Hughes, based on the way the Hughes relationship had burned him in 1962, drove the breakin.

  Investigative journalist Lamar Waldron makes a compelling case in his book, Watergate: The Hidden History, that the purpose of the breakin was to obtain records detailing Nixon’s authorization as vice president for the CIA recruitment of Mob assassins to assist in the assassination of Fidel Castro. I believe Nixon fully understood that this plan had gone awry and had morphed into the assassination of JFK. The cast of characters involved in both endeavors is more than coincidental. 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt would recall an anecdote revealed to him by Senator Howard Baker. Baker asked Nixon who really killed Kennedy. “You don’t want to know,” Nixon replied tersely.

  From the beginning of his presidency, Nixon sought the CIA records that would prove the connection of the Bay of Pig veterans to the Kennedy assassination. Although White House Chief of Staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman said that Nixon had turned him down when he suggested reopening and gathering the facts surrounding the JFK assassination, Nixon’s White House domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman said that Nixon had requested all of the CIA records on the Kennedy assassination and had been rebuffed by the agency. It is logical that Nixon, a lawyer, would ask Ehrlichman, a fellow lawyer, to obtain the records rather than Haldeman, who was not.

  Nixon’s effort to obtain the JFK assassination records was an attempt to seize leverage over the rogue agency. This was to be Nixon’s “insurance policy” against the CIA. If threatened, Nixon would expose the agency’s involvement in Kennedy’s death, which took place at the time that he, Nixon, was in political exile without formal governmental influence of any kind.

  This is why I believe Watergate was a CIA operation that capitalized on the stupidity and amateurishness of G. Gordon Liddy, CREEP Campaign Director Jeb Magruder, and John Dean, the three Nixon aides who advanced the plans for the Watergate breakin, which leaked to the CIA.

  Even without the never-supplied CIA files on the Kennedy assassination, Nixon tried to blackmail CIA Director Richard Helms by using his knowledge of the CIA ties to the Kennedy assassination and the Bay of Pigs to keep a lid on the rapidly expanding Watergate scandal.

  Nixon ordered White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman to tell CIA Director Richard Helms that a continued investigation of Watergate would open up “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.” It would also induce Helms to tell the FBI to close down the Watergate investigation because it would reveal national security secrets.2

  “Well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon said on June 23, only six days after the breakin. “Of course, this is Hunt, that will uncover a lot of things, and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.”3

  I believe that, in this instance, Nixon was talking about the JFK assassination.

  “The president’s belief is that this is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs and, ah, because, ah, these people are playing for, for keeps, and that they (the CIA) should call the FBI in, and we feel that… . that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period,”4 Nixon coached Haldeman.

  Haldeman would record CIA Director Helms’s violent reaction to Nixon’s threat. Helms clenched the arms of his chair as his face flushed, and he shouted, “The Bay of Pigs has nothing to do with this! I have no concern for the Bay of Pigs!”5 In fact, in 1963, Helms had served as deputy director of planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion. He knew the full cast of characters involved in the Cuban invasion, the JFK hit, and the Watergate breakin.

  By sending Haldeman to see Helms with the Bay of Pigs threat, Nixon wanted to scare Helms into believing that E. Howard Hunt, under pressure, would spill the beans about the JFK assassination and the ties of many in that plot to the Bay of Pigs.

  Indeed, in his own post-Watergate book, Haldeman said, “It seems that in all those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referencing the JFK assassination.”6

  “In fact, I was puzzled when he [Nixon] told me, ‘Tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans [Watergate burglars] is tied to the Bay of Pigs.’ After a pause, I said, ‘The Bay of Pigs? What does that have to do with this [the Watergate burglary]?’ But Nixon merely said, ‘Ehrlichman will know what I mean,’ and dropped the subject.”7

  National Public Radio correspondent Daniel Schorr, who was on Nixon’s enemy list, said that the threat to the CIA was “about some deeply hidden scandal … an assassination or something on that order. It was supposed to involve the CIA and President Kennedy.”8

  In fact, Nixon’s threat to the CIA’s Helms was broader. Nixon was threatening to expose the CIA-Mob connections which had paved the way for the Kennedy assassination.

  Nixon, a member of four national tickets, knew that there was no information of a political value at the Democratic National Committee, and that information regarding his opponent George McGovern’s campaign could only be found at McGovern headquarters. I believe that the Watergate burglars were seeking documents tying Nixon to Maheu and the Howard Hughes loan. Nixon knew that Democratic National Chairman Larry O’Brien lived as a high-paid fixer for Hughes, essentially lobbying without registering for Hughes Aerospace, seeking defense contracts under JFK. He would certainly have been concerned that O’Brien had the proof somewhere.9

  Watergate is no less a coup d’état by the CIA than the assassination of JFK by a rogue faction of the CIA, working in concert with elements of organized crime and at the direction of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Serving as the youngest member of the notorious Committee to Reelect the President in 1972, I knew Watergate burglars James McCord, the security director at CREEP, and G. Gordon Liddy, the general consul to the CREEP finance committee by day and seeker of covert intelligence by night.

  That anyone would use actual CREEP personnel who could be traced directly to the President’s re-election committee in a covert operation shows the amateurish nature of the Watergate breakin. That some burglars carried address books with White House phone numbers in them shows either a stunning ineptness or an effort to take Nixon down. Indeed, the mistakes in Watergate were legion.

  It is interesting to note that, although E. Howard Hunt claims he quit the CI
A in April 1970, he was immediately hired by a public relations firm representing Howard Hughes’s tool company. The firm was, in fact, a CIA front. The Mullen Co. was run by Robert Bennett, the son of Senator Wallace Bennett of Utah, a longtime friend and supporter of Richard Nixon and an elder in the Mormon Church.

  Bennett would later write a memo to his CIA case officer, Martin Lukowski. In the memo, directed to Director Helms, he reported that he had deflected reporters at the Washington Post and Washington Star away from CIA involvement in the Watergate conspiracy. Bennett, who later admitted to being a source for Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, was part of the effort to distract from the CIA’s link to the Watergate caper and shift the blame to Nixon.

  Although Hunt joined the Nixon Administration in June 1971, he remained a “consultant” to the Mullen Company. While working for the White House, Hunt traveled to Miami to meet with two Cuban exiles with whom he had worked during the Bay of Pigs invasion. These men, Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, accompanied Hunt to a meeting with a woman who claimed to have information about Castro’s reaction to the Kennedy assassination. White House counsel Charles Colson told me that Hunt’s trek to Miami was at his direction and in response to a letter the woman had written to the president.

  “I brought the letter to the president’s attention. He sat bolt upright and said ‘Send someone down!’” Colson told me. “Nixon had a voracious appetite for information about the Kennedy assassination.”10

  The woman said that Castro had been morose. Hunt reported this back to both the White House and the CIA. The fact that Castro was not jubilant over the death of his rival would, of course, confirm Nixon’s suspicion that Kennedy was not murdered by a “communist” as J. Edgar Hoover had insisted to him. Nor had it been a plot by the Cubans, as LBJ had told Nixon in the aftermath. Johnson would repeat this fiction to journalist Leo Janos, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Warren Commission member Richard Russell, and TV journalist Mike Wallace.