The Man Who Killed Kennedy Read online

  The fumbling by Hunt and Sturgis, the incompetence of the Watergate burglary, and the fact that plainclothes units responded almost immediately when a security guard first encountered the burglars pointed to me the strong belief that Nixon was set up by his old Operation 40 colleagues trying to prevent the reopening of their role in LBJ’s and the CIA’s plot to kill Kennedy.

  Hunt, an old CIA hand, would leave a laundry receipt with his name on it in the Howard Johnson motel room lookout post across the street from the Watergate. The experienced operative would also keep an address book with White House phone numbers tying him back to presidential counsel Chuck Colson. The dubious nature of both these mistakes convinces me that Nixon was set up.

  White House plumber G. Gordon Liddy’s grandiose plan to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the search for files, and the planting of listening devices was no doubt reported to the CIA once Liddy recruited James McCord, Security Director for CREEP and longtime CIA asset. I believe that the company saw the opportunity to remove the threat of Nixon’s exposing their role in JFK’s murder. It is not coincidental that it was McCord who wrote a letter to the Watergate burglars’ trial judge John J. Siricia, exposing the coverup and pointing to higher-ups in the White House and CREEP.

  McCord was likely a double agent, who intentionally botched the surreptitious entry into the Watergate. It was McCord who retaped an office door after security guards had already found it taped and removed the adhesive once. The taping of the door was unnecessary because the door opened, unlocked, without a key. But the tape served its purpose as a clear signal to security. Following the breakin, McCord left tape on some of the doors. McCord also burned all of his files in his home fireplace, with a CIA agent present to witness the paper conflagration.11

  Nixon first heard about the breakin when he was huddled on the West Coast with his political advisors and staff, including John Mitchell, CREEP campaign director Jeb Magruder, campaign deputy Robert Mardian, and Mississippi GOP powerhouse and Mitchell confidant Fred LaRue.

  The errors made by the Watergate burglars are so manifest that it is clear that the burglars worked for the old Operation 40 gang and purposely botched the job with one more target in their sights: Tricky Dick. Consider how the conspirators expertly left a trail of mistakes as evidence for law enforcement:

  The team had a meeting the night before the breakin in a Howard Johnson room booked on the stationary of a Miami firm, which employed Watergate burglar and Operation 40 member Bernard Barker. When Barker was later arrested, he had his hotel room key in his pocket. There, investigators found materials that further incriminated the group.

  In lieu of getting the photographs of documents for the breakin developed privately as planned, veteran spy Hunt took them to a commercial camera shop to be developed.

  James McCord booked his room opposite the Watergate hotel, at the Howard Johnson, in the name of his company.

  On the second night of the breakin, G. Gordon Liddy drove his easily recognizable green jeep recklessly and was eventually stopped by police. After getting pulled over, Liddy proceeded on to the Watergate hotel and parked his jeep right outside.

  Neither Hunt or Liddy made any effort through their many contacts to spring McCord from prison before it was revealed that he was linked with the CIA.

  After the burglary, Hunt locked a wealth of incriminating evidence in his White House safe, including electronic gear from the burglary, address books, and notebooks with information tying the men involved directly to the breakin.

  Before the breakin, each of the burglars was given $100 bills equaling between $200 and $800. All the bills had serial numbers that were close in sequence. When Hunt and Liddy found out that the burglars had been caught, they cleared their hotel room of evidence, but left a briefcase holding $4,600, which by serial number, directly linked it to the money given to the burglars.

  Address books taken from Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez linked them directly to E. Howard Hunt.

  Breakin surveillance man Alfred Baldwin subsequently leaked the story of the burglary, with names, to a lawyer named John Cassidento, a supporter of the Democratic Party.

  The double agents involved in the Watergate breakin were not lazy criminals. They were seasoned professionals, skilled in covert operations. The Watergate breakin was simultaneously a botched job and a successful coverup.

  Then there is the question of lawyer Douglas Caddy. For instance, we can only wonder why an experienced spook such as Howard Hunt would have turned to Caddy to represent the burglars at their arraignment. Both Caddy and Hunt were employed by the Robert R. Mullen Company, which the CIA used as a cover—a cover that the agency was desperate to protect. Dragging Caddy into the Watergate affair could only have served to expose that cover (as indeed it did). From a tradecraft point of view, this makes no sense and leads us again to wonder about Hunt’s intentions.

  In June of 1972, I was working for CREEP as a surrogate scheduler, handling the campaign schedules of the Nixon daughters and cabinet members as well as members of Congress campaigning for Nixon’s re-election. The weekend of the breakin, I was housesitting for my boss at CREEP, Herbert L “Bart” Porter. Porter was a plucky, ex-marine who had gone to USC and been recruited by White House chief Haldeman for the Nixon staff. Porter, who was from California, was on the West Coast attending the senior staff meetings. I had just settled in with a takeout pizza and a six-pack of beer when the phone rang.

  “Porter residence,” I said.

  “Is Bart there?” said a gruff voice I recognized as McCord.

  “No, he and Mrs. Porter are out of town,” I said. “I’m just housesitting. This is Roger Stone. I work at the Committee [to Reelect the President].”

  “Ok, tell him Jim McCord called. Tell him I’m in the lockup, and tell him the jig is up.”

  To this day, I am not certain about the import of McCord’s words. But even at nineteen-years old, I knew the formal denials by presidential spokesman Ron Ziegler and CREEP spokesman DeVan “Van” Shumway that the Watergate breakin was not connected to the White House or the campaign were false.

  McCord’s letter to Siricia would bust the Watergate coverup wide open and lead to Nixon’s resignation, the indictment of his attorney general, and the prosecution of a number of his top aides. Although Nixon had carefully nurtured the career of Massachusetts Attorney General Elliot Richardson and had rewarded him with two appointments (including secretary of defense and US attorney general) Richardson would appoint Harvard professor Archibald Cox as the special prosecutor in the Watergate matter.

  Cox had been solicitor general in the Kennedy administration and a longtime Kennedy hand who was among the Nixon haters. When Cox would not desist in his efforts to secure the Watergate tapes, Nixon fired him in the famous “Saturday Night Massacre.” Richardson promptly resigned. So did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckleshaus, who had run unsuccessfully for the Senate in Indiana and been rewarded by Nixon with appointments as assistant attorney general and the first administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. It was ultimately left to Solicitor General Robert Bork to fire Cox.

  Incredibly, the man named to replace Cox was Houston lawyer Leon Jaworski. Jaworski was a board member of MD Anderson Foundation, a CIA front company. Jaworski also worked for the Warren Commission, on which he was assigned to investigate a possible connection between Oswald and the CIA. Needless to say, he found none. When Oswald assassin Jack Ruby begged the Warren Commission to get him out of Dallas and fly him to Washington DC “if they wanted to learn the truth,” only three people were present: Chief Justice Earl Warren, Congressman Gerald Ford, and Warren Commission Lawyer Leon Jaworski.12

  The CIA ensured that secrets of Watergate and the JFK assassination would remain secrets. It was Nixon’s power struggle with the CIA and his efforts to pry loose their Kennedy assassination files that caused his downfall. Nixon was taken down by “double agents” who intentionally botched the
breakin.

  E. Howard Hunt would die in January 2007 at the age of eighty-eight. Hunt named David Atlee Phillips, Cord Meyer, Bill Harvey, David Morales, and Frank Sturgis as being involved in the JFK hit. He also said Lyndon Baines Johnson was the conspiracy’s chief organizer.

  By March 1974, as the CIA dug their claws deeper into Nixon, more information began to leak out regarding who else the president had crossed. Nixon, it turns out, was making the same mistakes as Kennedy when it came to Big Oil. This is well documented in Russ Baker’s book Family of Secrets:

  There were news reports that federal officials and members of Congress were looking into possible antitrust violations by people who sat simultaneously on multiple oil company boards. In a December 1973 letter responding to members of Congress, an assistant attorney general had confirmed that the Nixon Justice Department was looking at these so-called interlocking directorates.

  Thus, Nixon had crossed the same oil barons who had an interest in the assassination of JFK.

  Watergate would clear the way for even more coverup. Before he himself was driven from office Nixon would install Congressman Gerald Ford as Vice President. “Ford was Nixon’s insurance policy,” Nixon’s former 1968 political aide John Sears would tell me. “Nixon thought Ford was so dumb, they’d never impeach him and put Ford in the White House .”

  Sears would go on to manage Reagan’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination against Ford in 1976 and against Bush in 1980. Ford, who played a key role in the Warren Commission coverup in the death of JFK would go on to become president and would appoint a Commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller that would again whitewash the CIA role in Kennedy’s death. Incredibly, the Rockefeller Commission would chose as it’s Director David Belin, a Warren Commission Counsel and close associate of Arlen Specter. Belin was a vocal proponent of the single-bullet theory.13

  NOTES

  1. Summers, The Arrogance of Power, pgs. 154, 158.

  2. Fulsom, Nixon’s Darkest Secrets, pg. 129.

  3. Gilbride, Matrix for Assassination, pg. 198.

  4. Ventura, Jesse. “American Conspiracies: Lies, lies and More Lies That the Government Tells Us. Pg. 87.

  5. Waldron, Watergate: The Hidden History, pg. 722.

  6. Fulsom, Nixon’s Darkest Secrets, pg. 127.

  7. Haldeman, H.R. “The Ends of Power.”

  8. Fulsom, Nixon’s Darkest Secrets, pgs. 127–128.

  9. Waldron, Watergate: The Hidden History, pg. 620.

  10. Interview with Charles Colson.

  11. Ventura, Jesse, with Dick Russell, American Conspiracies, pg. 214

  12. Ventura, Jesse, with Dick Russell, American Conspiracies, pg. 91.

  13. Baker, Family of Secrets, pgs. 243–244.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CARLOS

  Appearing before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), Santo Trafficante was asked to provide details of his relationship with Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans Mob boss. The dodgy Trafficante had concealed his long relationship with Rosselli before the committee, despite having dinner with Rosselli shortly before his testimony. He was equally obscure in his recollection of Marcello.

  “Just friendship,” Trafficante said. “No business, never had no business dealings with him; no way, shape, or form. I see him once in a while when I go to New Orleans. He’s come to Miami, I think, once to appear before a grand jury. I seen him there.”1

  Why would Trafficante have business dealings with Marcello? Throughout his reign as Mob boss of New Orleans, Marcello maintained that he was merely a tomato salesman who earned $1,600 a month.2 In truth, business dealings between the two ranged from a sizable overseas heroin trade through French diplomats3 and the shared maintenance of gambling interests at home and abroad.

  In Bobby Kennedy’s crusade to eradicate organized crime, no Mob boss was pursued more doggedly than Carlos Marcello. Born in 1910 in Tunis, North Africa to parents of Italian origin, Marcello was brought to the United States as an infant. Though an illegal immigrant, he grew to be one of the most-feared Mob bosses in the country, with an iron grip on both New Orleans and Dallas.

  Perhaps the attorney general’s slow burn for the Louisiana mobster began when Marcello refused to fall in line with other organized crime figures and contribute to the Kennedy campaign. During the 1960 primaries, with his brother campaigning against Johnson, it has been alleged that Bobby reached out to Marcello for a donation. Marcello already had loyalty to Johnson, with whom he maintained a relationship through John Halfen, a Marcello bagman. In typical LBJ fashion, Halfen would ply Johnson with cash, and Johnson would return the contribution in the form of favorable legislation, particularly in relation to gambling law.4 An estimated $50,000 a year was delivered to Johnson from profits made through Marcello’s gambling enterprises.5 Marcello knew what he was getting from Johnson: favors for cash. With the Kennedys, he was not sure what benefits his loyalty would reap, and he was prudent.

  Author Richard Mahoney says it best:

  LBJ’s ties to Marcello through Bobby Baker, his chief aide when he was Senate majority leader, went back to the early 1950’s. Marcello’s Texas ‘political fixer’ Jack Halfen reportedly arranged to siphon off a percentage of the mobster’s racing wire and slot machine profits for LBJ’s Senate campaigns. Journalist Michael Dorman alleged that in exchange for such contributions, LBJ stopped anti-racketeering legislation. After becoming president, Johnson ordered all FBI bugging (principally of the Mafia) to cease. Part of the reason may have been that a Senate investigation of Bobby Baker’s corruption was leading directly to Mob connections. Special Agent William F. Roemer, Jr., who had been spearheading the attack on the Mob in Chicago, concluded: ‘If you judge a man by his acts, here was a man [LBJ] who did more to hinder the government agency fighting crime than any other president or leader in our history.

  In other words, Lyndon Johnson was “mobbed up” with some of the very people Robert Kennedy was hellbent on destroying. LBJ’s stopping of the Mafia wiretaps was not out of some philosophical revulsion at illegal spying and intrusions of privacy. He made sure that the 1964 Democratic national convention and the black activist “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” was completely bugged with reports given to him immediately on what was going on at the Atlantic City convention.

  Before John Kennedy edged out Johnson for the Democratic nomination, Bobby again would reportedly turn to Marcello for cash, this time at the Democratic convention. Marcello again rebuffed the young Kennedy. Instead, he donated $500,000 to the Richard Nixon campaign.

  Bobby did not wait long into the Kennedy administration to act against Marcello by having him deported as an illegal immigrant. The action was also solidified by Marcello’s 1938 violation of the Marihuana Tax Act, in which Marcello sold twenty-three pounds of untaxed marijuana and was sentenced to short prison time and a heavy fine. The Justice Department, with Bobby in charge, negotiated with the Italian government to welcome Marcello into their country upon deportation.6 Marcello, who knew his deportation was imminent, also knew that he could not conduct his business from faraway Italy. His man Carl Noll traveled to Guatemala to broker a deal with a local fixer, who had Marcello’s name written into a blank space on the public birth entry ledger in the small town of San Jose Pinula. The ruse worked, and on April 4, 1961, Marcello was deported to Guatemala. Appearing at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New Orleans, he was briskly handcuffed, taken in a multiple patrol car escort to Moisant International Airport, loaded up, and shipped out.

  “You would have thought it was the president going in instead of me going out,”7 Marcello recalled.

  Shortly after his deportation, a local paper in Guatemala, El Imparcial, began to expose Marcello’s citizenship in Guatemala as fraudulent. Guatemalan President Miguel Fuentes booted Marcello out of the country a short time later.

  Burton Hersh, in Bobby and J. Edgar, expanded on Marcello’s perilous trip back to American soil after his expulsi
on from Guatemala:

  Marcello’s family returned to Louisiana, and he and his lifelong friend, the attorney Mike Maroun, started toward San Salvador in a battered station wagon. They soon ran into marauding soldiers, abandoned the station wagon vehicle, and after a six-hour ride on a rickety bus though the ragged, desolate mountain country between El Salvador and Honduras these two pudgy, aging men in silk Shantung suits were reduced to wandering., Starving and increasingly desperate to come upon some vestige of civilization, they stuffed the $3,000 they had left between them into their crumbling alligator shoes. Fearful that two Indian boys they picked up to guide them were about to murder them with their machetes, Maroun and Marcello plunged down a thorn-ridden ravine, where Marcello tumbled through boulders and bayonet grass and broke three ribs.

  “If I don’t make it, Mike,” Marcello said in his Cajun patois to his friend and attorney, Mike Maroun. “tell my brothers when you get back, about what dat kid Bobby done to us. Tell ‘em to do what dey have to do.”8

  Marcello, bruised and battered, made it to Honduras and, with the help of forged documents, reentered the United States on May 28, 1961.9 One bruise would never heal.

  Marcello’s lawyers had been working up a case for wrongful deportation before the wheels of his plane touched the ground in Guatemala. Marcello, upon his return, would fight the Kennedys in the courtroom claiming that it was the administration that had secured forged documents confirming his Guatemalan birth and “that had the true facts been revealed, Guatemala would not have accepted him as a deportee.”10 It was a deft strategy that held up the courts.

  Italy did not want Marcello because he had claimed to be a Guatemalan citizen, a claim he vehemently refuted in the American courts. He had a lawsuit in the civil court of Rome in a previous case that had declared him “not to be a citizen of Italy and to enjoin the Italian Government from issuing a travel document to him.”11 Guatemala also no longer wanted him. Marcello used the system against itself and played dumb in relation to the entire deportation. He claimed “he was never in Guatemala previously, is unfamiliar with its customs and language, and asserts that the statute authorizing his deportation there as construed and applied to him is unconstitutional in that it violates due process and the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.”12