The Telephone Logs

          

The “rogue elephant” question is a central theme of the book.  Did John Kennedy know of and approve the CIA’s plots against Fidel Castro?  This was Senator Frank Church’s question, and the Church Committee found no evidence of presidential approval.  But of course, this might be because of the way the CIA did business.  It didn’t commit to writing anything on such nasty subjects as assassination.  The book discusses the CIA’s aversion to putting things down on paper and its habit of faking the written record at times.

            But as Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s telephone logs revealed, the CIA couldn’t control everything.  From the National Archives, I obtained a copy of a cable from Paris to CIA headquarters saying that Rolando Cubela wanted to meet with Robert Kennedy personally for assurance that the Kennedys knew of and approved the CIA’s plan to have Cubela lead a coup in Cuba.  That cable was “slotted” at 2:50 in the afternoon of October 11, 1963, Washington DC time.  The slotted time, said a CIA administrative memorandum written in that period, was when cables were put into distribution at headquarters, but the cables were usually delivered to the action officer about an hour and a half earlier. Desmond Fitzgerald was the action officer on this cable, so it would have been delivered to his office around 1:30. 

            Upon reading the cable, Fitzgerald likely wondered if Robert Kennedy would agree to such a meeting.  Therefore, I asked Dan Moorin, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, to review the Attorney General’s telephone logs for the fall of 1963 at the Kennedy Library.  I gave Dan a list of names to look for, and he took this photograph of the record of a call from FitzGerald to Robert Kennedy within an hour of FitzGerald’s receipt of the cable on October 11.  It is some of the most direct and powerful evidence that the Kennedys were fully aware of what the CIA was doing and approved of it.  As any trial lawyer will tell you, there is a big difference between telling the jury about a document and letting them see it for themselves.

Back Story #3, Moses Aleman

Moses Aleman

Moses Aleman took the photograph on the book’s cover, a fact that obviously pleases him.  In 1963, Moe was an FBI agent in Tampa, Florida.  My first contact with him was a phone call to ask if he remembered his 1964 investigation of Gilberto Lopez, a Cuban-American who had lived in Tampa. Moe's investigation determined that on November 17, Lopez had been at a Fair Play for Cuba meeting, expecting a phone call from Cuba to give him the go-ahead to travel there.  He left Tampa on November 20.  He was next seen on the night of Kennedy’s assassination, November 22, crossing the border from Texas into Mexico at Laredo.  He then traveled to Mexico City and flew to Havana on the night of November 27 as the only passenger on a Cubana Airlines flight.  Mexican authorities told the CIA that they thought Lopez had been involved in the assassination.  At the request of FBI headquarters, Moe filed several reports which contain about all that is known about Lopez.

            In calling Moe, I had hoped that he  could tell me more than was in his FBI reports.  Alas, he said this was just one of hundreds of investigations he had done.  Indeed, he didn’t remember anything until I sent him copies of his declassified reports from the National Archives.  But his memory was certain about one thing: He was never told that the interest in Lopez stemmed from allegations he was involved in Kennedy’s assassination.

            Once we finished discussing Lopez, Moe wanted to talk about President Kennedy’s visit to Tampa on Monday November 18.  The Secret Service had tasked the FBI office in Tampa with helping with security.  Kennedy was going to give a talk at the baseball stadium there, and the Secret Service wanted FBI agents posted around the stadium.  Moe was near first base where Kennedy’s car would exit.  It was the same car and same driver, Moe says, that were in Dallas four days later.

            The FBI expected both anti-Castro and Ku Klux Klan demonstrators at the event.  Since it didn’t have photographs of supporters of these groups, the Tampa FBI office instructed its agents to bring their own cameras to photograph the demonstrators.  None showed up, so Moe took pictures of the president, including the one on the book’s cover with Kennedy standing up in the car as he exited the stadium.  The agents’ various photographs of the event were posted on a bulletin board at the Tampa FBI office afterwards, and everyone was asked to vote on the best.  Moe’s photograph won.  Naturally, he is quite proud of it, and it hangs in his house.  He gave me permission to use it gratis.  The image isn’t perfectly focused, and the color has faded with age.  But the graphics department at the University of Nebraska Press turned those into strengths for a dramatic, ghostly book cover using the never-before-published photograph of John Kennedy four days before the Dallas tragedy.

            After Kennedy’s assassination, FBI Director Hoover sent Moe and other Tampa agents certificates of appreciation for their work in guarding the president on November 18.  Their work was one of the few bright spots in the FBI’s presidential security efforts at the time.  Hoover secretly censured several agents for their failures in investigating Oswald before the assassination.

            Moses Aleman has so many interesting stories that I had to resist the temptation to tell more of his back story in the book.  He grew up in a bilingual household in Texas, comfortable with both English and Spanish.  After graduating from the University of Texas, Moe went into the Air Force where he was in intelligence and had occasion to work with FBI agents.  One day, he overheard two agents speak to each other in rather halting Spanish.  They were surprised when he joined in with far more fluency than they had learned at language school in Monterey, California.  The agents said that the FBI needed Spanish-speaking agents because of the Kennedy administration’s interest in Cuba and urged Moe to join when he got out of the Air Force.  Moe likes to tell of taking the FBI’s language test.  He was given two newspaper articles, one in English and one in Spanish, and told he had an hour to translate each article into the other language without use of a dictionary.  “I was completely fluent in both languages,” he says, adding that he finished the test in five minutes.

Photo Back Story #2, Oswald's radio

I was well into my research for the book when I read in Brian Latell’s Castro’s Secrets that Lee Harvey Oswald owned a Russian radio.  The photograph of his Turist PMP-56 pictured above was provided by the National Archives.  Spy agencies around the world give agents one-way-listen (“OWL”). Since the radios don’t transmit, they can’t be picked up by security forces in a country.  Oswald’s ownership of a Russian radio was, therefore, suspicious in the least.

            The Turist was the first portable radios with rechargeable batteries made behind the Iron Curtain in Latvia.  It picked up the two broadcast radio bands in Europe, the long-wave and the medium-wave.  The former is not used for broadcasting in the Western Hemisphere, but the medium-wave band is the same as the AM radio band in the United States.  The radio was named Turist because it was portable and because it had an external antenna attachment that the owner could use to pick up distant stations when he was traveling.

            After Oswald’s arrest on the afternoon of the assassination, Dallas police went to his rooming house with orders to collect his possessions as evidence.  They cooled their heels there waiting for a justice of the peace to show up with a search warrant.  They then boxed up everything in Oswald’s room, took it to the police station, and photographed his possessions.  In addition to the radio itself, they had the external transformer that served as a base for the radio and recharged the batteries.  There is no mention or photograph of an external antenna or wire.  In this police photograph, the radio is tuned to about 1330 KHz on the AM band.  Presumably, this was the last station Oswald listened to.

            Dallas News reporter Lee Aynesworth went to Oswald’s rooming house after the search and interviewed Arthur and Gladys Johnson, who owned the rooming house.  When asked what Oswald did in the evening, they told Aynesworth that Oswald would retire to his room early and listen to the small radio.  The Warren Commission did not mention the radio in its report, choosing instead to say that Oswald watched television in the evenings. 

            The Warren Commission did ask NSA to look at the radio.  NSA reported that it found nothing “of cryptological significance.”  This tends to suggest the NSA only looked at the radio to see if had decoding electronics. In response to my Freedom of Information Act request, NSA wrote me that it could not locate the report of the individual who had actually inspected the radio.  Thus, there is no way to know what the inspector looked for, but according to a later FBI report, the radio didn’t work when it got it from Dallas police, and this was before the FBI sent it to NSA.  The NSA’s internal documents, not furnished the Warren Commission, mentioned NSA had a report from British intelligence about the Turist.  This suggests that British intelligence was interested in the Turist as something the Soviets and their clients might give spies as OWL radios.  But NSA claims that today it has nothing on this subject.

            A radio engineer told me that an AM signal from Cuba could easily be heard on the coast of Texas at night but that Dallas was too far inland to pick a signal up without an external antenna.  A shortwave broadcast from Cuba would reach Dallas though.  A ham operator in Dallas said a signal on the upper part of the AM band, such as 1330 KHz, might be heard in Dallas because he had once picked up a Cuban broadcast on a slightly higher frequency in the shortwave band. 

            The radio is now in the possession of the National Archives, so I asked to be allowed to inspect it.  I planned to take along someone who knew about radios.  Although the National Archives allowed me to inspect some of Oswald’s books, it refused to let me see the radio, giving the odd reason that the radio was evidence in a criminal case.  The Archives did agree to take photographs of the radio, inside and out, and send them to me. Comparing the photograph (below) with those of the standard Turist that I found online, I could see the internal ferrite antenna was broken off at one end and the copper coil moved.  Did this allow it to pick up shortwave?  Experts say the only way to know is to test it, something no one has ever done. 

            AM signals travel farther at night because the sun’s heating of the atmosphere during the day interferes with signals.  Because of this, the Federal Communications Commission in the 1960s required most AM stations to reduce power at night but allowed a few “clear channel” stations around the country to boost power.  The clear channel stations could be picked up hundreds of miles away. One in Texas had listeners all over the Plains States.  The FCC obviously could not control Cuban stations, and, oddly given the Kennedy administration’s hostility toward Cuba, did not even keep data on Cuban stations.  However, a world radio publication of the time said that in 1961, the Cuban station on frequency 1330 was operating at 1,000 watts of power.  This was high power since non-clear channel stations in the U.S. had to reduce power to less than 10 watts, and Cuba may have increased power by 1963.

Photo Back Story #1, the White House meeting

While photographs are normally added to a book to help the reader visualize the story, the process of obtaining several of the photographs in my book actually contributed to the research.  This Back story #1 is about the two photographs of the December 19, 1963, meeting at the White House with President Johnson. 

            I discovered them after writing the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Texas and asking for permission to use a photograph it had online of the CIA’s Richard Helms.  The library’s photo staff gave me permission and, with words authors love to hear, said there was no charge.  I had not been able to find any photograph of Desmond FitzGerald and asked if the library might by chance have a photograph of him as well.  The staff said that his name was not in its database but that if I knew a date when he was at the White House, they might have a photograph.  “December 19, 1963,” I wrote back in an email.  That worked.  The library sent me six photographs of the meeting, two of which are in the book.

            Suddenly, I could see the faces of all the men – and they were all male – that I had been reading about in declassified Top Secret memoranda for the record.  There was FitzGerald, Helms, General Carter, Cyrus Vance, and the others.  I eventually was able to put names to all the faces.  I compared these names with other records of who attended.  There are differences as I note in the book.

            You see FitzGerald standing at the table in a room that isn’t full yet.  He apparently has just walked in.  This would fit with what he wrote in his memorandum about the president starting the meeting before everyone had arrived and while the White House photographer was still taking pictures.  Spies hate to have their picture taken, and FitzGerald’s memorandum suggests displeasure. 

            FitzGerald’s memorandum records that LBJ said someday they, including Johnson, would have to answer to the “grand jury of public opinion” for what had been going on.  He presumably meant the CIA’s plots to assassinate Castro.  And in the one photograph, the president appears less than happy.  Maybe the photographer captured the very moment FitzGerald was writing about of Lyndon Johnson venting his feelings about the CIA’s Murder, Inc.  (Click to enlarge images).

The Dog That Didn't Bark

The Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Dog that Didn’t Bark” is a good metaphor for introducing readers to Murder, Inc., The CIA under John F. Kennedy.  In the story, the great detective is called to solve a crime that has stumped police.   All they have is a missing racehorse and its dead trainer.  Holmes draws attention “to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." A puzzled policeman retorts: “The dog did nothing."  Ah, Holmes responds, that was the curious incident.  The watchdog should have barked when someone took the horse out of the stable.  Since it didn’t, it must have known the thief.  Holmes continues.  The trainer bet against the horse in an upcoming race and intended to lame it, but the horse kicked and killed him when he tried.  Mystery solved because of what didn’t happen.

            The fifty-six-year-old mystery surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination may be thought of in the same way if one substitutes the CIA and other intelligence agencies for the dog.  They didn’t bark.  They didn’t know the culprit though; rather they didn’t want to know.  Just three days before his death, the assassinated president apparently authorized the CIA to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and President Lyndon Johnson allowed this to be covered up.  The cover up has lasted all this time despite attempts by a presidential commission, a vice presidential commission, and committees of the Senate and House of Representatives to get at the truth.  It raises the question, still relevant today, of how democracy can co-exist with a culture of what seems like out-of-control secrecy by our secret agencies.

            Of course, conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination abound.  A common theme for years was that the government knew Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the assassin and hid this in “secret files.”  But when these files were opened to the public in 1998, nothing of the sort was found.

            Murder, Inc. takes a different approach.  It looks into the secret files to learn what didn’t happen.  It details Kennedy’s and Johnson’s radically different Cuban policies, the CIA’s attempts to kill Castro, and how the investigation of Kennedy’s murder was steered away from foreign involvement.

            I first became interested in the subject when I was a lawyer for the Senate intelligence committee in 1976.  The committee looked into CIA plots to assassinate Castro and their relationship to Kennedy’s assassination.  I remember my surprise when a witness from an intelligence agency explained that foreign intelligence agencies don’t have trained assassins like the fictional James Bond.  Instead, they manipulate malcontents and misfits like Oswald for what more stable men would consider suicide missions.  Borrowing from Sherlock Holmes, I found it curious that Richard Helms, deputy director of the CIA in 1963, testified that the thought Castro might have retaliated never occurred to him.  His denial was ludicrous: The CIA was meeting in Paris with a Cuban agent and promising him sniper rifles to assassinate Castro at the exact moment Kennedy was gunned down by a sniper in Dallas on November 22, 1963. 

            A penchant for avoiding the subject of retaliation pervaded the federal government’s investigation of Kennedy’s assassination.  A few examples make the point.  The CIA, in the words of its own historian, ran a “passive, reactive, and selective investigation.”  It never let its Cuban experts, who were plotting the assassination of Castro, talk to the Warren Commission lest the public learn this unsavory fact.  At the FBI, twenty-four hours after the assassination, orders went out to agents in the field not to develop new leads.  A U.S. ambassador hinted to the Soviet Union’s ambassador that the U.S. government would avoid an aggressive investigation.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had already advised the White House to be careful about finding foreign involvement, and so had Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department.  When Warren Commission lawyers visited the CIA station in Mexico City in April 1964 to look into Oswald’s trip there two months before the assassination, they were assured by CIA men there that the CIA had absolutely no evidence of a conspiracy. In fact, a few weeks before the Warren Commission visit, Mexican authorities told the CIA they had evidence others were involved.

            An explanation for this cover up may be found in a CIA-created doctrine called “plausible denial.”  If the CIA is caught with its hand in the cookie jar, engaging in something it doesn’t want the public to know about, it concocts a plausible cover story to deny the truth.  In the event the unpleasant deed is something the president ordered, such as an assassination, the CIA may be forced to fall on its sword and accept responsibility, but it will deny the president knew.

            How else to explain another curious incident?  On November 19, 1963, after months of delay, the CIA finally made the decision to provide its Cuban agent the assassination weapons he wanted.  However, it kept this secret from the Warren Commission.  Twelve years later, it confessed the assassination plot to a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and to the Senate intelligence committee.  But, it told neither of these investigations nor a 1978 investigation by a House committee an equally damning fact:  Deputy Director Helms met alone first with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and then with President John Kennedy on that same November 19.  Helms saved this incriminating detail for a memoir published posthumously in 2004 when he could no longer be asked if Kennedy authorized Castro’s assassination at the meeting.

            The CIA-created doctrine of plausible denial has been used to deceive four major investigations by the executive branch and Congress.  When Richard Helms was called to account by a vice presidential commission and a Senate committee twelve years after Kennedy’s death, he obviously did not tell the whole truth.  Did President Gerald Ford authorize this?  Helms likewise deceived the House assassination committee in 1978.  Did President Jimmy Carter personally authorize the deception? 

             This is only one example of a culture of government secrecy that was born in times of hot war long ago, extended into the Cold War, and continues today.  If our elected representatives can be deceived on repeated occasions on an issue of such public importance as the possibility that a foreign government used assassination to pick the president, who can call the intelligence agencies to account?