Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (47 page)

O’Leary and Seymour argued that finding the CIA document implicated the OAS as one of its members, Jean Rene Souetre, was in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated, only to be captured and deported by US authorities some forty-eight hours later.
⁶⁹²
So, a known assassin was apprehended in Dallas and there is nothing to prove he was even questioned. Moreover, the CIA never shared the information with the Warren Commission. When Mary Ferrell, the renowned archivist of assassination material, found the CIA document in early 1977, she described it as one of the poorest documents she had encountered, virtually looking like a copy of a copy of a faint carbon copy.

Investigative reporter Henry Hunt studying the document concluded it was highly unlikely the CIA officer charged with deciding the release of secret papers in 1967 had “even an inkling of the revelations contained in
this document.” Hunt further concluded the document would never have come to light had it not fallen “under the sharp eyes of Mary Ferrell.”
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Hurt also determined that the “Souetre” referred to in CIA document 632–796 was not Michel Roux. Hunt found independent documentation that the FBI knew Roux was visiting acquaintances in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, and left the United States on December 6, 1963, at Laredo, Texas. This Michel Roux had spent three years in the French Army in Algeria before deserting. Because Roux was not deported, Hurt ruled out that Roux was Souetre. Hurt also pointed out that since his earliest days in the Senate, JFK was publicly and passionately in favor of Algerian independence, a fact that made him a natural enemy of the OAS.
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Henry Hurt traced Dr. Alderson mentioned in the CIA document to Dr. Lawrence Alderson, a respected dentist and longtime resident of Houston who insisted the FBI began trailing him immediately after the assassination and followed him for several weeks. Finally, the FBI asked for an interview to discuss his relationship with Jean Souetre. Alderson explained to the FBI that as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army stationed in France, he met Souetre, then a captain in the French Air Force. Alderson remembered Souetre as “a political activist of the neo-Nazi persuasion.”
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They became friends and for the next ten years the two corresponded annually around Christmastime. Alderson told Hurt the FBI said agents “had traced Souetre to Dallas a day before the assassination and then lost him,” adding the FBI was certain either Souetre killed JFK or knew who had done it.
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In 1999, Brad O’Leary located and interviewed Souetre who was then working as public relations director at the Casino de Divonne in Divonne les Bains, France. Souetre explained he and Mertz were both parachute captains in the French Army and that Mertz, some ten years older than Souetre, was in the
maquis
[the Resistance] during World War II. Souetre argued that it was Mertz, using Souetre’s name, who was in the United States at the time of the Kennedy assassination. “What I find strange is the fact that [Mertz] was there in Dallas the day of the crime and under my identity,” Souetre said. “What was he doing there that day? It is obvious that he knew that something was going to happen and that by implicating Captain Souetre he could blame the CNR [
Comit
é Natinale de la Résistance, the later name of the OAS].”
⁶⁹⁷
Souetre claimed that
when U.S. authorities approached him, he proved he was not in Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated and that he had never been to the United States at any time, for any reason.
⁶⁹⁸

So what was Mertz doing in Dallas on that fateful day in 1963?

Souetre claimed the reason Mertz was let go and deported from the United States was because Mertz, when he was apprehended in Dallas, worked at the same time both for the Marseille heroin crime syndicate and for SDECE, French intelligence service. Souetre explained that at that time, the US Mafia, and particularly crime bosses Carlos Marcello, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante, all of whom ran vast heroin distribution networks in the United States, got their product from Antoine Guerini and his Marseille-based heroin enterprise. “We know that Mertz worked directly for that same enterprise,” O’Leary and Seymour wrote. “Kennedy’s attack on U.S. Mob bosses threatened the stability of Guerini’s Marseille heroin market. Almost all of the heroin bought by U.S. addicts came from Marseille after it was processed from the opium base provided by Nhu [brother of South Vietnamese President Diem]. Hence, Guerini and his syndicate had a lot to lose if Kennedy was allowed to maintain his war on the mob.”
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O’Brien and Seymour argued the reason organized crime wanted JFK dead was that JFK threatened the mob’s number-one cash cow, the security of their multi-billion dollar heroin enterprise.
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Nhu’s deal with the Guerini syndicate turned the local South Vietnamese heroin market into an enormous profit machine. The murder of Diem in the coup d’état staged by General Minh with the help and encouragement of the CIA was widely attributed to a decision made by JFK, even though JFK had given explicit orders that Diem was not to be killed. O’Leary and Seymour concluded the JFK assassination was “a premeditated conspiracy between the U.S. Mafia, the Marseille Mafia, and the highest echelons of the South Vietnamese government” in order to protect their heroin trade.
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Support for the O’Leary/Seymour argument can be found in history professor Alfred W. McCoy’s 1972 study,
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
.
⁷⁰²
Noting that Diem, a pious
Catholic, first launched a determined anti-opium campaign when he came into power in May 1955, he documents the policy was reversed three years later by Diem’s brother Nhu, seeking additional revenue to fund an expanded network of anti-Communist secret police. Nhu imported opium into Vietnam from the Laotian poppy fields, with assistance from
Air Laos Commerciale
, a small charter airline managed by Indochina’s Corsican gangster Bonaventure “Rock” Francisci. According to Lucien Conein, a former high-ranking CIA official in Saigon who helped engineer the Diem coup in 1963, the relationship between Nhu and the Corsican gangsters began in 1958 when Francisci made a deal with Nhu to smuggle Laotian opium into South Vietnam.
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Most of the narcotics exported from South Vietnam were shipped from Saigon’s port on oceangoing freighters.
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As the Vietnam War progressed, the Corsican mobsters operating in Saigon designated Marseille as the preferred European port of entry. Conein, by the way, was widely reported to have carried forty-two thousand dollars in cash as a means of encouragement for the South Vietnamese generals planning the Diem overthrow.

In an important observation, McCoy noted there is a natural attraction between intelligence agencies and criminal syndicates. “Both are practitioners of what one retired CIA operative has called the ‘clandestine arts’—the basic skill of operating outside the normal channels of civil society,” McCoy wrote in
The Politics of Heroin
. Among all the institutions of modern society, intelligence agencies and criminal syndicates alone maintain large organizations capable of carrying out covert operations without fear of detection.”
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McCoy scoffed at the interdiction of weaker US drug enforcement agencies, noting that when the US Bureau of Narcotics first opened its office in Bangkok with three agents in the late 1960s, the CIA’s “massive covert apparatus” operated in the opium highlands of Southeast Asia with the very drug lords the US narcotics agents were trying to apprehend.
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While the CIA in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s operated with vast sums of cash, the CIA had no reason to handle heroin, preferring instead to provide its drug-lord allies with transportation for their drugs, arms, and political protection. “In sum,” McCoy wrote, “the CIA’s role in the Southeast Asian heroin trade involved indirect complicity rather than direct culpability.”
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This was a perfect model for a CIA that had been molded around the theme of
“plausible deniability.”

Granted, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the US military industrial complex all had the motive to see JFK forcibly removed from office, even if that meant assassinating him. So, too, organized crime—and especially Carlos Marcello, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante—along with the CIA had their own motives for seeing JFK dead.

This equation had the makings of a good coup d’état, aimed at putting LBJ in office, escalating the Vietnam War, and ramping up the Southeast Asian heroin trade. LBJ and Richard Nixon would permanently put an end to the career of a hated rival who already had bettered both of them. Organized crime stood to make billions not only in operating the French Connection drug trade with impunity, but also on the expectation Robert Kennedy would have to back off the Justice Department’s war on organized crime the moment Jack Kennedy was no longer in the White House. The military industrial complex stood to make billions producing the new generation of weapons required to fight a prolonged ground war in Vietnam, as generals giving out contracts prepared for their industry homes in retirement.

What LBJ, Richard Nixon, and the military industrial complex lacked was the operational capabilities to pull off a covert plan as audacious as a coup d’état effected by assassinating the president of the United States without detection. What LBJ, Richard Nixon, and the military industrial complex lacked in operational capabilities, the CIA and organized crime made up for in spades. Moreover, the CIA and organized crime could look to the politicians and the military industrial complex for funds to pull off the operation. LBJ and Richard Nixon had never pulled off an operation, but when it came to funding a political campaign, both were experts.

What putting LBJ in the White House before he left Dallas required was the field implementation of a complex criminal plot by a top team of experienced CIA and organized crime operatives that had successfully worked together before and could be counted upon to do so again. The prototype had been developed in Guatemala in 1954 and 1957. Granted, that E. Howard Hunt put LBJ at the top of his deathbed organizational
chart for the JFK assassination, but that did not mean LBJ wrote the operational plan for the covert action. To put the organizational plan of the coup d’état together, the CIA mobilized the Cuban exiles who had worked with the CIA since the Bay of Pigs was first being planned under the Eisenhower administration. That a trained assassin such as Michel Mertz was walking the streets of Dallas the day JFK was murdered can hardly be taken as coincidental. Even if Mertz pulled no triggers that day, the coordination of a complicated crossfire required expert management. Mertz qualified for the job, given a
curriculum vitae
that stretched back to his days picking off Nazis for the French Resistance.

LBJ, the military industrial complex, and Richard Nixon were not necessarily relegated to the role of “benchwarmer,” as E. Howard Hunt in his deathbed confession so humbly characterized his own role in the JFK assassination. Nixon was in Dallas when JFK was killed, meeting with his financial ties to industry and his campaign financiers based in Texas. In Dallas, Nixon reconnected with Howard Hughes, the eccentric multimillionaire whose fortune also traced back to the Texas and the Houston Tool Company. In 1957, it was Howard Hughes who lent Donald Nixon, Richard’s brother, some two hundred thousand dollars to bail out his failed hamburger “drive-in” joint in Whittier, California. Bobby Baker had extensive tentacles into Texas, too, having finagled along with LBJ the lucrative award of the F-111 fighter plane to General Dynamics, a company headquartered between Dallas and Fort Worth. Before he left Texas on November 22, 1963, Nixon knew that those who financed his presidential run in 1960 would finance him again, as soon as the time was right. Like LBJ, Nixon too was a winner with JFK assassinated.

Even if LBJ was not the “mastermind” of the JFK assassination, the point of the coup d’état was to put LBJ in office. The campaign by investigative journalists like William Lambert and
Life
magazine to expose the rampant corruption at the core of Bobby Baker and LBJ’s politics eased off as soon as JFK was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital and LBJ took the oath of office from his longstanding friend and judge Sarah T. Hughes aboard Air Force One. At 2:38 p.m. Eastern Time on November 22, 1963, LBJ could stop worrying that JFK might replace him and start worrying about picking his own 1964 vice presidential running mate. Despite Jackie Kennedy standing on LBJ’s left side in her bloodstained
dress as he took the office, the occasion of the JFK assassination was not a sad one for LBJ. Though his head was turned from the camera, LBJ most surely did not miss the wink of the eye captured on film that Congressman Albert Thomas gave LBJ the moment he lowered his right hand from just having taken the oath of office. With a grieving Jackie still at his side, LBJ perfected the
coup d’état
by being sworn in as president before Air Force One lifted off to return to Washington.

The military industrial complex also gained from JFK’s death. From his first Vietnam War planning session as president even before JFK’s body was placed to rest at Arlington Cemetery, LBJ had signaled to the Pentagon there was no need to worry about the withdrawal of one thousand US military advisors. With LBJ likely to win a landslide victory in 1964 as the successor to a martyred president, the military industrial complex felt comfortable waiting until 1965 before LBJ ramped up the Vietnam War to provide the hundreds of thousands of troops the Pentagon truly felt would be needed to beat the North Vietnamese. Organized crime could continue the lucrative heroin trade from Southeast Asia, with the tacit approval and assistance of the CIA. With LBJ in the White House, the military and the CIA had the receptive ear they never had with JFK.