Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (37 page)

JFK blamed the CIA. Presidential historian Robert Dallek summarized the problem with the invasion as follows: “the willingness of the Cubans, the CIA, and the US military to proceed partly rested on their assumption that once the invasion began, Kennedy would have to use American forces if the attack seemed about to fail.” That was the crux of why JFK ultimately felt the CIA had betrayed him. The CIA, knowing JFK would never go along with direct US military involvement, calculated the only plan with any chance of success was to promote an invasion plan the CIA knew would fail, in order to force JFK’s hand to approve the B-26 air attacks and approve US jets from the aircraft carrier USS
Essex
thirty miles offshore to provide support. Bissell and Dulles had calculated incorrectly. On Sunday night, April 16, 1961, the last thing JFK did before he went to bed was to call Dean Rusk and tell him to order the cancellation of a dawn aerial attack by the entire exile force of sixteen B-26s, leaving Castro with airplanes to use in strafing the invading exiles on the ground,
in what was called Brigade 2506, that were planning to hit the beach in the Bay of Pigs at dawn. On Monday morning, April 17, 1961, JFK refused to allow the US jets from USS
Essex
to provide air cover.
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That decision marked the moment the invasion was certain to fail. On April 19, destroyers USS
Eaton
and USS
Murray
moved into the Bay of Pigs, in the face of fire from Cuban tanks on shore, to evacuate from the beaches the retreating soldiers of what had been the invading Brigade 2506 of paramilitary Cuban exiles.

The Bay of Pigs scarred JFK badly. Within days of becoming president, he realized how little power he truly had. The CIA had played him, disregarding his expressed concern that the United States not be involved militarily and only
support
an invasion by Cuban exile patriots trying to take back their country for democracy. JFK fired Bissell and Dulles in a threat to break the CIA up into a thousand pieces. Unfortunately, that impulse—to destroy the CIA—was one JFK never followed to completion, a mistake that contributed to him losing not only his presidency, but also his life.

Three members of Nixon’s Watergate burglary team—E. Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker, and Frank Sturgis—were also involved in the planning of the invasion of Cuba. Why were so many men who were involved with the Bay of Pigs fiasco part of the Watergate break-in? Because dating back to the Eisenhower administration, Nixon became closely involved with the CIA and Mafia when he helped plan the Guatemala coup. He continued those relationships when he called on the CIA and Mafia to kill Castro. JFK assassination researcher Lamar Waldron has documented that Nixon received a $1 million Mafia bribe from Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante just prior to the start of the 1972 presidential campaign as part of a deal to release Jimmy Hoffa from prison, which occurred less than four months before the first Watergate break-in.
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These men were veterans of the Eisenhower administration plots and had worked Nixon in the past.

G. Gordon Liddy has long maintained that the Watergate burglary was motivated by the desire to wiretap a telephone in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters that top Democratic officials
and their political friends were using as part of a call girl ring.
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But that does not explain the thousands of pages of documents the Watergate burglars copied or the many different locations that were burglarized over a period of several months, continuing by other secret White House operatives even after the Watergate burglars were apprehended.

The “smoking-gun” discussion in the White House during Watergate involved a meeting between then-White House chief-of-staff H. R. Haldeman and President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office on June 23, 1972, from 10:04 a.m. to 11:39 a.m. Haldeman was concerned about the FBI’s investigation into Watergate. He was looking for a way to justify telling then-FBI acting director Patrick Gray to back off. Nixon was concerned the FBI was going to look into the background of E. Howard Hunt:

Nixon
: Of course, this is a—[E. Howard] Hunt will—that will uncover a lot [unclear] when you open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and then we just feel it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further, that this involves these Cubans, and Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.

Nixon recommended having the CIA instruct the FBI to stop investigating Watergate on national security concerns. Specifically, Nixon instructed Haldeman to have Gen. Vernon A. Walters, deputy director of the CIA, call L. Patrick Gray. Nixon’s chief-of-staff H. R. Haldeman, in his 1978 book,
The Ends of Power
, argued that Nixon’s references in the Watergate tapes to “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” suggested the Watergate burglars were also involved with the JFK assassination. “It seems that in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, [Nixon] was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination,” Haldeman wrote.
⁵³⁵

Nixon
: When you get in these people when you … get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that” ah, without going into the details … don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, “the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, ah because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case,” period!
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In a separate conversation with Haldeman in the Oval Office on June 23, 1972, from 1:04 p.m. to 1:13 p.m., Nixon returned to the Howard Hunt theme.

Nixon
: And I would just tell them that it’d be very bad to have this fellow [E. Howard] Hunt, you know, it’s—“he knows too damn much, and he was involved, we happen to know that. And if it gets out that the whole…” this is all involved in the Cuban thing, that it’s a fiasco, it’s going to make the FBI—the CIA—look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and it’s likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate for [the] CIA and for the country at this time, and for American foreign policy. And he’s just got to tell [L. Patrick Gray and the FBI] to lay off. Is that what you—

Haldeman
: Yeah, that’s the basis we’re going to do it on and just leave it at that.
⁵³⁷

In the later years of Haldeman’s life, he repudiated the “Bay of Pigs meaning the JFK assassination” statement, attributing it to the invention of his ghostwriter, Joseph DiMona.
⁵³⁸
From the time Nixon fired Haldeman in 1973 until 1978, when he was released from prison, Haldeman and Nixon were not on speaking terms. By 1990 Haldeman was repudiating much of what he wrote in
The Ends of Power
, the book he published as he was preparing to be released from prison on parole.
⁵³⁹

Nixon’s seemingly out-of-context comment forced Watergate inquiries to circle back to the invasion plans against Cuba that began under Richard Bissell at the CIA when Nixon was vice president under Eisenhower. Hunt was beginning to demand as much as one million dollars in hush money and Nixon was concerned at how many dark secrets would be exposed if Hunt began to talk. The FBI had begun to suspect the Nixon White House had begun to solicit one million dollars from the Teamsters to keep the imprisoned Watergate burglars quiet.
⁵⁴⁰
In early 1973, in the final stages of the Watergate cover-up, White House counsel John Dean seemed to confirm this when he told Richard Nixon face-to-face that one million dollars might be needed to keep the Watergate burglars quiet. “We could get that—you could get a million dollars,” was Nixon’s response. “You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.”

Nixon’s extreme tactics suggest there was a deeper secret behind
the Watergate break-in, that the Bay of Pigs plotters, including Howard Hunt, were also Watergate burglars and very possibly participants in the JFK assassination. Many have speculated that the Watergate burglary was about making sure Larry O’Brien and the Democratic Party did not have highly sensitive information that would have shown Nixon knew the truth about the JFK assassination and did nothing about it, or possibly even incriminating evidence that might have tied Nixon to the JFK assassination. “Could [Haldeman and Nixon] have been circuitously referring to the interlocking connections between CIA agents, anti-Castro Cubans, and mobsters that likely resulted in the Kennedy assassination?” conspiracy researcher Jim Marrs asked. “Did they themselves have some sort of insider knowledge of this event?”
⁵⁴¹

“What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Sen. Howard Baker, the vice-chairman of the Senate Watergate hearings, famously asked about Watergate. Perhaps this question should have been asked of Richard Nixon about not only the Watergate break-in, but also about the JFK assassination. What did Richard Nixon know about the JFK assassination, and when did he know about it?

Nixon knew that E. Howard Hunt not only was a culprit in Watergate, but was also involved in the coup d’état in Guatemala in 1954 and the staged political assassination that followed in 1957. Then, too, Nixon may have been keenly aware of the evidence that suggested E. Howard Hunt was involved not only in the Bay of Pigs and the various plots to assassinate Castro, but very possibly in the JFK assassination as well.

On Friday, December 8, 1972, Dorothy Hunt, E. Howard Hunt’s wife, was killed when United Flight 553 from Washington National Airport to Midway Airport in Chicago crashed under suspicious circumstances at approximately 2:29 p.m. local time. Captain Wendell L. Whitehouse, a seasoned veteran with eighteen thousand flying hours, piloted the airplane, a Boeing 737 with sixty-one passengers and six crewmembers on board. E. Howard Hunt had just been indicted some months before for his role in the Watergate affair and he was prohibited from traveling. Assassination researcher Harrison Edward Livingstone, believes Dorothy Hunt was
carrying White House hush money to pay off the Cuban exiles whose involvement with Hunt stretched from the Bay of Pigs through the JFK assassination to Watergate.
⁵⁴²
At the crash site, Dorothy Hunt was found to be carrying ten thousand dollars in cash in her purse. She was traveling with Michelle Clark, a CBS reporter, who had learned from her sources that the Hunts were getting ready to “blow the White House out of the water,” such that before Howard Hunt was hung out to dry, he would “bring down every tree in the forest.”
⁵⁴³
Forty-five people died in the crash, including Dorothy Hunt and Michelle Clark.

Witnesses to the crash charged that immediately after the crash, some two hundred FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency officials came in and took over the crash scene. The FBI admitted fifty FBI agents were on the crash scene. Finally, William Ruckelshaus, the acting director of the FBI, explained to the
Washington Post
on June 14, 1973, that the FBI had primary jurisdiction in possible cases of sabotage, including airline crashes.
⁵⁴⁴
The day after the crash, Egil Krogh Jr., the former head of Nixon’s “plumber’s unit” that employed E. Howard Hunt, was named undersecretary of the Department of Transportation. This appointment put Krogh in a position to supervise the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Agency in their investigation of the United Flight 553 crash. Krogh ultimately went to prison for his role in burglarizing the offices of the psychiatrist for Daniel Ellsberg who had achieved fame for the release of the
Pentagon Papers
. On December 19, 1972, Nixon moved former CIA agent Alexander Butterfield to serve as the head of the Federal Aviation Agency. Butterfield had been secretary to the Cabinet and he achieved fame for revealing to the Senate Watergate Committee that he had been responsible for maintaining for Nixon a secret audiotaping system in the White House. Finally, in January 1973, Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary and dirty tricks supervisor was made an executive in the Chicago headquarters office of United Airlines.
⁵⁴⁵

The death of Dorothy Hunt was the first evidence available publicly indicating the Nixon administration was in the business of paying hush money to the Watergate burglars. To go to such lengths as to bring down a jet liner and cover it up with high-level appointments suggest the deep politics behind the Watergate burglary involved more than an effort to embarrass the Democrats with information about a prostitution ring
being run out of the DNC. Nixon’s obsession with the JFK assassination appears out of place in his discussions over Watergate, suggesting Nixon was trying to hide a secret about JFK’s assassination that had to remain secret at all costs—a secret that suggests Nixon may have had reason to have a guilty conscience stemming from his personal involvement in “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.”

A self-proclaimed mistress and long-time lover of Fidel Castro, Marita Lorenz set off a firestorm of speculation with a story that involved soldier-of-fortune Frank Fiorini, also known as Frank Sturgis, as well as E. Howard Hunt and the various CIA-mob plans to assassinate Castro. On May 31, 1978, in sworn testimony before a closed session of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Lorenz testified to having been involved with E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis in the CIA training provided to Cuban exiles in the Everglades in Florida after the Bay of Pigs attack.
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She also claimed to have met Lee Harvey Oswald in early 1961, at a CIA safe house in Miami. It was a meeting of several key players—Frank Sturgis, Pedro Diaz Lanz, Alexander Rorke (a rabid anti-Communist and former-FBI agent who was the wealthy son-in-law of Sherman Billingsley), Orlando Bosch, Guillermo and Ignacio Novo (brothers and Cuban exile leaders), and Jerry Patrick Hemming—in the CIA assassination unit known at the time as Operation 40.
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