Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (40 page)

In the end, E. Howard Hunt argued Mary’s death was a contract job. “I think [Mary Pinchot Meyer’s murder] was a professional hit by someone trying to protect the Kennedy legacy,” Hunt wrote in
American Spy
. “I don’t think that Cord Meyer killed his ex-wife, and I don’t think it was Angleton either, although [Angleton] did apparently know that Mary and Kennedy had carried on the affair.”
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When he was in a nursing home at the end of his life, Cord Meyer is supposed to have speculated that Mary Pinchot’s death was tied somehow to the JFK assassination. The story is that author C. David Heymann, author of
The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club
, asked Meyer some six weeks before his death if he thought he knew who killed Mary.
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“The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy,” the mortally-ill CIA man is said to have alleged.
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Author David Talbot doubted the veracity of this story, yet Talbot had no doubt about the CIA’s interest in Mary Pinchot Meyer. “What is clear is that Mary Meyer’s personal life was of immense interest to the CIA, before and after her death,” Talbot wrote. “Angleton was fully aware of the ecstatic sway she had over the president. And he believed that she actually influenced administration policy, nudging it in a more dovish direction.”
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That may have been a concern Mary had. But from the beginning of her marriage to Cord Meyer, Mary knew her husband and Angleton were close, as both men in their earlier years shared literary ambitions. What Angleton suspected Mary might have connected together was the degree to which Cord Meyer and Angleton’s close relationship continued, right up until the day both men participated in the plot to kill JFK. Angleton, as we shall see in the next section, also had reason to know Lee Harvey Oswald, for nearly a year before Oswald’s name surfaced as the likely suspect in the JFK murder case.

James Angleton, a well-educated and highly literate individual, directed counterintelligence for the CIA from 1954–1975. Most intelligence professionals who knew Angleton respected his intelligence—before joining the CIA he edited a literary journal that published the works of e. e. cummings and Ezra Pound—and his fierce loyalty to the agency. Angleton appears to have become involved in the JFK assassination primarily to cover-up the agency’s involvement. Angleton is typically not named as a coconspirator in planning the JFK assassination but clearly appears in the narrative when he was assigned after JFK’s death to be the CIA liaison to the Warren Commission. According to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Angleton, in his role of directing counter-intelligence at the CIA, opened a 201 personality file on Oswald as far back as December 9, 1960, after Oswald’s defection to the USSR.
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But the clincher is that among Angleton’s responsibilities for counter intelligence at the CIA, Angleton ran the false defector program.
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False defectors were double agents that “defected” to the Soviet Union with the intention of acting as undercover assets or spies. In the CIA, an important part of Angleton’s job involved recruiting soldiers among the US military who were intelligent enough to learn Russian and clever enough to convince the Russians they were disgruntled idealists disillusioned with the United States and eager to adopt a political system that embraced real social justice, such as Soviet Communism. Even if Angleton had not recruited Oswald to defect, Angleton most likely managed Oswald through the process of defection and engineered Oswald’s return to the United States the moment his return met the needs of the Agency.

As early as October 1960, the Department of State undertook a project to identify and research all Americans who had defected to the Soviet Union, to Soviet bloc nations, or to Communist China. At the Department of State’s Office of Intelligence/Resources and Coordination, Robert B. Elwood wrote to Richard Bissell, the CIA’s then-deputy director of plans—the position from which Bissell began planning the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba under the Eisenhower administration. Elwood wanted to identify all CIA assets that as former US military had participated in the “false defector” program. The assignment to follow through at the
State Department fell to Otto F. Otepka, deputy director of the State Department Office of Security. Bissell shipped the “false defector” file to James Angleton at CIA Counter Intelligence and to Robert L. Bannerman, Deputy Chief of Security at the CIA.
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According to former military intelligence officer John Newman in his 1995 book,
Oswald and the CIA
, Bannerman told him that the opening of Oswald’s 201 file regarding his defection to the Soviet Union “would have all gone through Angleton.” The 201 opening was something on which “we worked very closely with Angleton and his staff,” Bannerman recalled.
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Given the documents on the JFK assassination released by the federal government in the past few years, we know Oswald’s CIA file was numbered #39-61981, with the “39” denoting an intelligence file. From sometime shortly after he joined the Marines in 1957, Oswald was likely targeted and recruited by the CIA to be a top player in the CIA “false defector” program.

At the State Department, Otepka continued to add to Oswald’s 201 file, noting key “red flags,” for instance when Oswald applied for and received a US passport on one day’s notice to return to the United States, as well as Oswald receiving an extra visa a month and a half before he actually left Russia, evidently so his Russian wife could accompany him home. Otepka also added to Oswald’s file when he learned Oswald had received a State Department loan that made his return to the United States financially possible. There are indications in the file that the attorney general Bobby Kennedy was aware of Oswald and his 201 file a year and a half before the JFK assassination.

When the supposed assassination attempt was made on Gen. Walker, the Justice Department evidently also got involved in the Oswald file. The Justice Department evidently intervened, asking the Dallas Police not to pursue, investigate, or arrest Lee Harvey Oswald in the matter of Oswald supposedly having fired a shot at Gen. Edwin Walker in Dallas. Walker urged the House Select Committee on Investigations to look into this extraordinary intervention that he believed had to trace back to Robert Kennedy.
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From the pieces of the CIA records on the JFK assassination we have available, we can assume that when his brother was assassinated in Dallas it was not the first time Robert Kennedy heard the name “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Conceivably, as we saw in
chapter 4
, a trained Soviet bloc intelligence officer like Pacepa had good reason for perceiving everything
Oswald did resulted from Oswald being a KGB asset, and the CIA may have assumed Oswald was a KGB asset. When we ask the question, “Who did Oswald work for?” the answer may end up being that Oswald worked for both the CIA and the KGB. The likelihood is that prior to the JFK assassination, the FBI’s file on Oswald was fairly extensive. As remarkable as it seems, the evidence suggests Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination was on the payroll of the FBI. J. Lee Rankin, the general counsel of the Warren Commission, wrote a memo to the file in January 1964 documenting that a reliable source informed him of journalists in Texas who commonly knew Oswald was receiving a monthly check of $200 from the FBI.
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Knowing this it is remarkable to think the Warren Commission insisted Lee Harvey Oswald was operating alone. The alternative reality may have been that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patriotic US citizen who earned his employment as a well-trained intelligence operative with his primary allegiance to the CIA. This could be a key part of the deep secret the CIA could not afford the US public to know in the aftermath of the JFK assassination when the Warren Report was issued in 1964.

In his deathbed confession, E. Howard Hunt identified a small group of people from within the CIA that Cord Meyer recruited into the assassination plot. In an organizational chart designed to describe the plot, Hunt placed David Morales below Cord Meyer but with a direct line to the contract killers on the grassy knoll. On the same level as Morales, but off to the side, Hunt placed CIA agent William Harvey.

David Morales had a dark Latin, possibly even Mexican or Indian appearance. He first showed up as El Indio (“The Indian”) in the CIA training of guerillas for the staged “invasion” of Guatemala engineered by E. Howard Hunt in 1954. House Select Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi describes Morales simply: “David Sanchez Morales was a hit man for the CIA.” Fonzi notes Morales bragged of killing people for the CIA in Vietnam, in Venezuela, and in Uruguay, among other places. “These were not murders in the heat of military combat—although they were done in what he considered the performance of his duty for his country,” Fonzi wrote. “(T)hese were assassinations of individuals or groups selected
for annihilation.”
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In the 1960s, Morales was chief of operations at the CIA’s large JMWAVE facility in Miami, an operation that began providing covert training for the Bay of Pigs invasion and evolved into an operations center for Operation Mongoose, a CIA effort to assassinate or otherwise overthrow Fidel Castro. JMWAVE operated under the guise of Zenith Technical Enterprises, Inc, a front company created as a cover for the covert operations JMWAVE staged against Cuba. Fonzi described an all-night drinking session during which Morales flew off the handle at the mention of JFK’s name. Morales started yelling about what a wimp JFK was and talking about how JFK was responsible for the men who died in the Bay of Pigs operation. Finally, Morales stopped, sat down on the bed and remained silent for a moment. “Then, as if saying it only to himself, he added, ‘Well, we sure took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we,’” Fonzi related in his book
The Last Investigation
.
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As noted above, while working for the CIA, William Harvey came to direct a policy that became known as Executive Action, a determination to remove a foreign head of state from power by any means required, including staging a coup d’état and/or assassination. Harvey, like Morales, was involved in the CIA staged coup d’état in 1954 that overthrew the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Harvey, head of ZR/RIFLE—the operation assigned to eliminate foreign political leaders—also directed Task Force W, a group appointed to oversee JMWAVE operations. As documented by Claudia Furiati in her 1994 book,
ZR Rifle: The Plot to Kill Kennedy and Castro
, Harvey drew up policies and oriented the execution of the Cuba project for all CIA foreign stations, as well as for CIA operatives who worked in embassies in countries where Cuba had strong diplomatic representation.
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Ultimately, Harvey fell out of favor with JFK as evidenced by the fact that Harvey continued to send clandestine operations into Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, ignoring Robert Kennedy’s instructions to then-CIA director John McCone to halt all covert operations against Cuba. On October 30, 1962, Harvey was removed as commander of ZR/RIFLE.
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E. Howard Hunt wrote at length in
American Spy
that he doubted Lee Harvey Oswald had the accuracy of marksmanship required to hit JFK with a mail-order 1938 Italian-manufactured Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. “There has been suggestion in some circles that CIA agent Bill Harvey had something
to do with the murder [of JFK] and had recruited several Corsicans, especially a crack shot named Lucien Sarti, to back up Oswald and make sure the hit was successful,” Hunt wrote. “Supposedly, Sarti was dressed in a Dallas police uniform and fired the fatal bullet from the grassy knoll behind the picket fence.”
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Hunt considered another possibility. “Is it possible that Bill Harvey might have recruited a Mafia criminal to administer the magic bullet?” he speculated. “I think it’s possible. I can’t go beyond that. Harvey could definitely be a person of interest, as he was a strange character hiding a mass of hidden aggression. Allegations have been made that he transported weapons to Dallas. Certainly it is an area that could use further investigation.” Hunt noted the association between Harvey and the Corsican assassins involved in the Marseilles drug connection known as the “French Connection,” stemmed from a memo Harvey authored when running the Executive Action program, advocating a desire to hire Corsicans because of their expertise and proficiency as contract hit men.
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Hunt had little regard for Harvey, a man he described as “the perfect concentration camp guard”—a “brain-addled pistol-toting drunk … very much under the control of his wife.” Hunt felt certain Harvey, out of resentment over losing his job as head of ZR/RIFLE, could easily have teamed with LBJ to form “some kind of a thieves’ pact” to assassinate JFK.
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In his deathbed confession, Hunt claims he personally bowed out of the JFK assassination plot when he learned Cord Meyer had recruited William Harvey, a man Hunt described as an “alcoholic psycho.”
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At the next level of the conspiracy, Hunt claimed Cord Meyer recruited David Phillips, the CIA operative who had played a major role in the propaganda campaign overthrowing the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954. Hunt slyly commented that Phillips, “a consummate CIA officer” was not above “a bit of disinformation.”
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Phillips, widely regarded as a propaganda specialist, ultimately rose to be chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Phillips, assuming the identity of the mysterious Maurice Bishop, worked with Antonio Veciana, the Cuban exile leader who established Alpha 66 to oppose Castro after the Communists assumed power in Cuba
in 1959. Veciana claimed that it was Maurice Bishop who suggested to him that in 1963 Alpha 66 should attack Soviet ships docked in Cuba as a means to prevent an improvement in the relationship between the United States and the U.S.S.R. after the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis. When Alpha 66 attacked a Soviet ship on March 23, 1963, a furious JFK ordered that Veciana and other leaders of Alpha 66 should be arrested and placed in confinement in Florida.
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