Robert Kennedy agreed with my view of history. ‘One of your guys did it,” Bobby said matter-of-factly, calling from Hickory Hill later on Nov. 22. He was speaking to Enrique “Harry” Williams, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs operation and the Cuban exile whom Bobby trusted most. Journalist Haynes Johnson happened to be with Williams in Washington’s Ebbitt Hotel at the time, and he later wrote about how stunned he was when Williams hung up the phone and relayed the attorney general’s comments. In the time that Bobby had been overseeing his brother’s so-called Special Group team on Cuba, he had come to appreciate just how ungovernable the Cuban exile community could be. It hadn’t taken long on Nov. 22 for speculation to focus on the possible involvement of Fidel Castro, given the Kennedy administration’s repeated attempts to oust or assassinate the Communist leader. That speculation only intensified after the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, whose record of pro-Castro agitation quickly came to light. Yet it’s intriguing that Bobby’s suspicion of possible Cuban involvement seemed to focus squarely on the anti-Castro crowd. While he trusted Williams and wasn’t accusing him personally, Bobby knew how furious many members of the exile community had become with the Kennedys, based on the administration’s failure to go all out in the effort to topple Castro. The Kennedy brothers had refused to launch a full-scale military invasion of the island nation, and by 1963 had even begun authorizing some back-channel efforts toward compromise with both Castro and his Soviet benefactors. This, Bobby knew, would be viewed as intolerable by the most hard-line Cuban exiles. Just one day before his brother’s murder, Bobby had received a classified CIA report assessing the exile community’s reaction to a recent speech on Cuba policy that JFK had delivered in Miami. “The conservative and moderate elements were disappointed, having hoped for a more militant stand against the Castro revolution and regime,” stated the Nov. 21 report. Written by Richard Helms, the wily CIA deputy director who many believed was really running the agency, the report was contained in the confidential RFK Justice Department files released earlier this year. As Bobby’s post-assassination suspicions appeared to bounce from Cuba to the Mafia to the CIA, he surely had to confront the reality that the lines separating all three had become increasingly blurry. In those same newly released RFK files was a personal note that Helms had written to Bobby, flagging an article that had appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962. Headlined “CIA Sought Giancana Help for Cuba Spying,” the article described a “fantastic tale of attempted Cuba espionage” involving the Chicago mob boss and covert operatives for the government. This, of course, was the same Giancana whom Bobby had been doggedly trying to put away for years. The idea that the CIA would have turned to the mobster for a little help with Cuba would have seemed too outlandish for many Americans to believe. By now, however, Bobby knew the article had barely scratched the surface. The truth was a lot worse. In the spring of 1962, two CIA officials had showed up at the attorney general’s office to inform him that the Justice Department needed to drop its prosecution of a Giancana associate. When Bobby asked why the CIA was so intent on keeping Giancana happy, according to the 2007 Talbot book “Brothers,” one of the intelligence officers told him that “the CIA had enlisted the gangster in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.” There was actually a long secret alliance between the country’s covert intelligence agency and the underworld. In fact, it was older than the CIA itself. During World War II, as Talbot points out, the OSS — forerunner to the CIA — forged a deal enlisting several mob bosses “to help guard against enemy sabotage in the New York Harbor and to supply intelligence from their contacts in Italy.” Federal officials returned the favor by looking the other way as the mobsters consolidated their power in post-war America, pretending that organized crime did not exist on these shores.
Posted on: Thu, 28 Nov 2013 16:35:05 +0000
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