On the Trail of a
President’s Killers
Iona Andronov
NEW TIMES 1977, No. 1, pages 27–30
The U. S. Congress has set up a new body with the rather
intriguing designation House Select Committee on Assassinations. But if you
think it proposes to go into the recently revealed sensational CIA conspiracies,
you are mistaken. Those scandalous revelations have been quietly pigeonholed.
What the new committee plans to do I learned first-hand from Democratic
Congressman Thomas Downing, the sponsor of the resolution setting it up and its
head, whom I interviewed at his home.
“For several years now I have been firmly convinced that
President John Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy,” he said. “This
prompted me to put before Congress a resolution calling for a new investigation
of his assassination.”
Besides investigating the circumstances of President
Kennedy’s death, the committee is to go into the mysterious background of the
death of Martin Luther King. The reopening of the inquiry into the murder of Dr.
King has been demanded by Black leaders.
“I must admit,” the Congressman said, “that at first
I myself, like most Americans, believed the Warren commission’s conclusion
that Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald acting as a lone killer without
accomplices. But later I had an opportunity to examine and carefully study
sequences of a film made by a chance witness of the murder. The picture was
taken by a tourist by the name of Zapruder who has since died. That terrible
film clearly shows how Kennedy, sitting in the open car, was first thrown
sharply forward by the bullet that hit him in the back and then almost at once,
thrown backwards by the second bullet in his head. It is a horrible sight. But
at the same time it is incontrovertible evidence that besides Oswald, who fired
at the President from behind, there was at least one more sniper and a second
ambush opposite the spot from which the first shot was fired.”
Downing laid out in front of me blow-ups of sequences from
Zapruder’s film.
“There is weighty evidence,” he continued, “that
Kennedy’s killers fired three bullets at him. It is practically impossible to
fire three shots from one rifle in such rapid succession. This is the opinion of
authoritative firearms experts. It is also my own opinion based on personal
experience.”
Downing indeed is experienced in handling firearms. Apart
from being a well-known legislator who has been in Congress for eighteen years,
he is a graduate of a military school, a World War II veteran, a major in the
U.S. Army reserve, and has six combat decorations. In general, he is a
courageous man, for it takes courage to be the first on Capitol Hill to risk
issuing an open challenge to those all-powerful quarters who have resisted
public pressure for a thorough investigation of the Dallas tragedy for more than
ten years now.
“My initiative at last found support mainly thanks to the
change in the political climate in this country,” Downing said. “After the
collapse of the Vietnam gamble, the Watergate scandal, and the disclosures of
violations of the law by government services, a great many Americans lost their
previous blind faith in the authorities. They no longer believe everything they
are told. Even before, the unsubstantiated conclusions of the Warren commission
evoked serious doubts. And now further evidence has come to light of the
existence of a conspiracy.”
The recent Congressional investigation of the secret
criminal operations of the CIA and FBI yielded further evidence. There is
documentary proof that shortly before the assassination, Oswald met with FBI
agents and handed them three confidential letters. The CIA was in possession of
taped statements by Oswald. He had secret connections with CIA hirelings who
were plotting to assassinate Cuban leaders. The gangster Jack Ruby, who killed
Oswald, was revealed to have been an FBI informer and at the same time a stooge
for two American mafia bosses, both of whom were killed some months before.
Their killers have not been found, as a matter of fact, nobody really looked for
them. The tangle of crimes which the Warren commission failed to unravel has
continued to become more and more involved, and to untangle it will obviously be
no easy matter.
Yet, as recent opinion polls have shown, the overwhelming
majority of Americans want this done. On the eve of the November election,
Congressmen had to take into account the mood of the voters, and as a result
more than half the members of the House of Representatives voted to set up the
Downing Committee. He, on his part, insisted that FBI and CIA personnel be
barred from having a hand in the investigation, as he is certain that it is they
who deliberately deceived and misled the Warren commission.
The new Committee is selecting its own private
investigators and lawyers with untarnished reputations. And inasmuch as many of
those who could help bring out the truth have died in accidents or in suspicious
circumstances since the Dallas tragedy, the Committee has set up its own
security team to protect volunteer aides against possible assaults.
Downing thinks that the investigation will take at least
two years. For it is estimated that it will be necessary to go into 380
unresolved questions in the case of President Kennedy’s assassination. To
obtain at least a cursory idea of some of the key questions involved, I had to
go to Chicago and New Orleans besides Washington.
How It’s Done in Chicago
In the western suburbs of Chicago there is a green area known as Oak
Park, consisting of one-storey cottages with neatly-kept lawns, occupied by
people with decent incomes and a taste for suburban quiet and fresh air. The
attractive little houses are all alike, the only exception being a big gloomy
two-storey mansion known in the neighbourhood as the “citadel.” Its brick
walls are as thick as those of a fortress, and the front door is covered with
two sheets of bullet-proof steel. Closely curtained windows. A burglar alarm
system. Courtyard surrounded by a tall solid fence. As I climbed on to the front
porch, my eyes fell on a door mat with the words “Go away” in black letters.
The inhospitable householder who acquired that mat has been
dead for more than a year now. His name was Sam Giancana. He was 66. He had
never worked a single day in all his life. When as a young man he was called up
for military service and asked to put down his occupation in a questionnaire, he
was frank for the first and last time in his life and wrote: “I steal.” But
even that was a half-truth. By the time he came of age, Giancana had three
murders on his record, but not a single conviction. For he was a member of mafia
king Al Capone’s gang, which was beyond the reach of Chicago justice.
Twenty years ago Giancana inherited Al Capone’s crime
syndicate, took his place at the head of an underground army of Chicago
racketeers and made millions by trafficking in drugs and running gambling dens
and brothels. Eventually he decided to retire and to hand over the business to
younger successors, thereby satisfying their thirst for power and money. Yet
even after retirement, he lived in his “citadel” in constant fear of
retribution. But not retribution at the hands of the mafia.
The point is that in December 1973 his personal bodyguard
Richard Cain let it slip in a bar in the hearing of outsiders that he and his
chief had had something to do with an international conspiracy and a political
murder on an assignment from the CIA. Exactly 24 hours later two masked men
walked into the same bar, ordered everyone at gunpoint to line up face against
the wall, singled out Cain, shoved a gun barrel in his mouth and silenced him
for good.
A year and a half later, at the height of the U.S. Senate
investigation of CIA conspiracies to assassinate foreign political leaders, the
occupant of the “citadel” was summoned to Washington to give evidence
concerning his connections with Intelligence. In deadly terror, Giancana begged
the Chicago police to provide him with round-the-clock protection. In the summer
of 1975 a police patrol car was on duty day and night outside his door. On June
19 they did not see or hear anything out of the ordinary although that very
evening Giancana was killed in his own home exactly in the same way as his too
talkative bodyguard had been killed—by gunshot in the mouth. Then the rest of
the magazine was emptied into the back of his head. The police outside
Giancana’s windows evidently went deaf during the firing and blind when the
killers made their getaway.
“I would advise you to steer clear of this mysterious
business,” Jim Williams, the editor of the progressive Labour Today told me in
Chicago. “It’s not safe to dig into the doings of the mafia, and here
Intelligence too is involved.”
By the time I arrived in Chicago, Giancana’s corpse had
already been sent off to the morgue. A detail of detectives was going through
the “citadel” with a fine comb. I was told that a diary had been found in
the dead man’s safe containing the names of important police officials, notes
on transactions involving big sums of money, addresses of secret rendezvous and
aliases of his former accomplices. Tapes of business conversations had also been
found. Later it became known that he had written a confession which he
threatened to make public if he were to be harassed for his old sins.
“Giancana had something to say,” police Lieutenant
Daniel Corkle commented after the search.
That was all the police would say. They obviously were
under orders from above to keep their mouths shut. All the evidence found during
the search was taken away from them. The lid was put on the matter.
“Hours before he was shot to death, Mr. Giancana had been
contacted by some of our staff,” Senator John Tower, a member of the committee
investigating CIA operations, said in Washington.
In Chicago a police expert on the underworld, investigator
Charles Siragusa, had this to say: “About the CIA approaching the mob, and
Giancana in particular, it makes sense. I’ve heard rumours for years in
Washington from various law enforcement agencies about the CIA considering an
assassination squad. Maybe they were afraid Giancana would talk.”
And yet a year later Giancana made himself heard through
his close associate in the top crust of the underworld, John Rosselli. In
exchange for assurances from the Senate of immunity from prosecution, Rosselli
said that in the early sixties he and Giancana had received an assignment from
the CIA to assassinate the Cuban revolutionary leaders Fidel Castro, Raul Castro
and Ernesto Che Guevara for a consideration of $150,000. And that is not all:
two weeks ago the new Congressional committee investigating the death of John
Kennedy began digging into the complicity of Giancana and Rosselli in the
assassination of the President.
Fading Legend
Few visitors to Washington, be they foreigners or from some
other part of America, fail to visit the Arlington National Cemetery. Many
outstanding statesmen and military leaders are buried here. But the biggest
attraction to visitors is the flat granite gravestone at the foot of a green
slope. On the granite slab fresh flowers are to be seen the year round, and
through an oval opening an eternal flame flickers. On the stone the name: John
Kennedy.
A few paces a way is a modest grave with a white stone
cross and a plaque with the name of the President’s brother: Robert Kennedy.
Here too there are a great many flowers. Here too people stand long in silent
meditation. Some brush away an involuntary tear.
In the years since the lives of the two Kennedy brothers
were cut short, their names and life stories have become surrounded with legends
and countless verbal and printed reminiscences in which the truth has become
intertwined with fiction and embellished with myths. All this is understandable:
striking, talented personalities are as often as not remembered for their
virtues, and forgiven their sins. True enough, John and Robert Kennedy were
endowed with rare qualities of which not all occupants of high places have been
the possessors. But for all that, for some time now Americans have been engaged
in a painful but nevertheless justified reappraisal of the historical legacy of
the Kennedys in the light of the latest disclosures of behind-the-scenes
governmental actions in the early sixties.
Memoirs dealing with the Kennedy epoch as a rule no longer
fail honestly to mention that the late President himself did not deny his
responsibility for the dangerous mistake of invading Cuba in the spring of 1961.
Another thing on his conscience was the fanning of the bloody civil war in Laos.
He was responsible for the dispatch to South Vietnam of the first three
contingents of American troops. And he personally, as former U.S. Ambassador to
Chile Edward Korry now says, issued orders as far back as 1962 for the launching
of subversive activity through the agency of the CIA to prevent the democratic
coalition headed by Salvador Allende from coming to power in Santiago. The
Caribbean crisis, which placed the world on the brink of a serious conflict, is
also associated with the name of John Kennedy.
At a recent Senate Intelligence committee hearing, Robert
McNamara, then Secretary of Defence, said:
“We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay
of Pigs and thereafter, and there was pressure from President Kennedy and the
Attorney-General [Robert Kennedy] to do something about Castro. We did
contemplate overthrow.”
This admission by McNamara is to be found in the Senate
report on CIA assassination plots involving foreign leaders. A talk John Kennedy
had with Senator George Smathers in the White House before the CIA hirelings’
landing in Cuba is also to be found in that report. Senator Smathers recalls:
“President Kennedy asked me what reaction I thought there
would be throughout South America were Fidel Castro to be assassinated. We had
further conversation of assassination of Fidel Castro. The President was certain
it could be accomplished—I remember that—it would be no problem.”
In November 1961, we learn from the same Senate report, the
President invited to the White House the journalist Tad Szulc, with whom he was
on friendly terms, upon the latter’s return from Cuba. Again Kennedy talked
about assassinating the head of the Cuban government. Present during the
conversation was Richard Goodwin, a State Department expert on Latin American
affairs. Szulc describes it as follows:
“The President asked: ‘What would you think if I
ordered Castro to be assassinated?’ I replied that an assassination would not
necessarily cause a change in the Cuban system. John Kennedy said he raised the
question because he was under terrific pressure from advisers, I think he said
Intelligence people, to okay a Castro murder.”
The Senate report shows that by the time Kennedy entered
the presidency, the plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, Raul Castro and Ernesto
Che Guevara had already been worked out in detail by the CIA. The advocates of
the murder were told that their boss “didn’t want to have an agency person
or a government person get caught. Because of this CIA agents contacted Giancana
and Rosselli in the autumn of 1960 and promised them $150,000 for killing the
Cuban leaders. When the gangsters agreed, the CIA provided them with lethal
poison.
“Execution Action”
Summoned before the Senate Intelligence committee last
summer, John Rosselli made no secret of the fact that he and Giancana had
willingly undertaken the CIA assignment since the victory of the revolution in
Cuba had meant for both the loss of the gaming houses and illicit drug traffic
centres they had owned there. Overthrow of the people’s government held out
the prospect of once again going into business in Havana. Besides, fraternizing
with the CIA was for the gang bosses a guarantee that they could carry on their
criminal operation in the United States with impunity. Moreover, Giancana and
Rosselli saw in this a rare opportunity to establish direct contact with the
White House, and gangland moll Judith Exner, an attractive young adventuress
with a criminal past, was put on the job. As the Senate report on the CIA
reveals, she had, with the knowledge of FBI director Hoover, “frequent contact
with the President from the end of 1960 through mid-1962.” The gang bosses
made the arrangement in league with the CIA and the FBI so as to be able to
blackmail the President into doing their bidding if the need arose.
At the beginning of 1962 CIA officer Bill Harvey, then in
charge of the “execution action,” planned against the Cuban leaders, was
received in secret by the President in the White House. Harvey reported to him
that the thug sent to Cuba by Giancana and Rosselli had been unable to work out
the poisoning of the victims chosen by the CIA, and that the second phase of the
operation—the dispatch to Havana of gunmen—had been uncovered and foiled by
the Cubans. Harvey asked for further instructions, but had to leave without
having received any.
In May 1962 a high CIA official, Lawrence Houston, informed
Robert Kennedy personally of the continued smuggling into Cuba of killers
recruited by the CIA. According to Houston, the President’s brother
“didn’t say anything.” In the spring of 1963 the CIA was instructed by the
President to drop all plans to assassinate the Havana leaders. Instead, John
Kennedy, at last sobered up by the bitter experience of his international
blunders, ordered the ground to be sounded out for diplomatic talks and a
peaceable settlement with Cuba.
“Kennedy was serious about that negotiation,” Goodwin
has now said. “He said that to me. President Kennedy’s whole attitude
changed after 1962.”
Common sense gained the upper hand in the White House not
only as regards Cuba. The President issued orders for the arrest of the mafia
bosses, who had got out of hand. In foreign affairs he began to tend toward a
change in Washington’s Indo-China policy and spoke in favour of the recall of
U.S. combat forces from there. This caused the Pentagon to sound the alarm. The
military and the reactionary ruling elite raised an outcry against the
rapprochement with Moscow Kennedy had embarked upon. The entire United States
military-industrial complex—the generals, the hawkish politicians, the
monopolies with billion-dollar war orders from the army, navy, and the air
force—came down on the President. Panic broke in CIA headquarters is
Washington when it was learned that the President had said to Clark Clifford,
his adviser on Intelligence affairs:” “I made some bad decisions on the Bay
of Pigs. I made these bad decisions because I had bad information. My
information was bad, because our Intelligence was poor. Something is gravely
wrong inside the CIA, and I intend to find out what it is. I want to splinter
the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
But it was already too late to do that. The President had
made too many enemies and by the autumn of 1963 they had joined forces. The CIA
and its partners no longer took their orders from the President, as may be seen
from the Senate report on Intelligence: “On November 22, 1963—the very day
that Kennedy was shot in Dallas—a CIA official offered a poison pen to an
agent for use against Castro while at the same time an emissary from President
Kennedy was meeting with Castro to explore the possibility of improved
relations.”
On the eve of the assassination in Dallas an anonymous
counter-intelligence agent brought together in a basement room in the Carousel
night club the conspirators who soon were to play the role of kamikaze puppets.
Among the doomed men were Giancana, Rosselli and Lee Harvey Oswald. All three
are now dead, Rosselli being the last to go. But one participant in the Dallas
conspiracy has by some miracle survived. With his confession, made six weeks
ago, I shall continue my story about the deadly boomerang that cut down the
President of the United States.
(To be
continued)
Ahead to
Part II
Back to New Times
Back to WC Period