James H. Johnston
MURDER, Inc.: The CIA Under John F. Kennedy
Potomac Books. 343 pp. $32.95
Johnston responds to Colhoun’s review here.
Colhoun’s rebuttal to Johnston here.
By Jack Colhoun
“Did his [President John Kennedy’s] pursuit of freedom for Cuba lead to his paying the ultimate price?” former Church Committee lawyer James Johnston asks provocatively in his book MURDER, Inc.: The CIA Under Kennedy.
Johnston tries to make the case that when Cuban leader Fidel Castro learned the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was plotting to kill him, he retaliated by assassinating President Kennedy. One of the sources Johnston relies on most heavily in constructing this narrative is Edward P. Morgan, a well-connected Washington attorney and former chief inspector in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Morgan learned about the Castro retaliation narrative from his client Johnny Rosselli, the principal liaison with the Agency during the peak years, 1960-1963, of the alleged CIA-Mafia plots. Rosselli’s primary job at the time was representing the interests of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana in Las Vegas, making Rosselli friends with such top Vegas entertainers as Frank Sinatra, Joe E. Lewis, and Louis Prima.[1]
In late 1966, Rosselli hired Morgan to represent his interests in Washington. Morgan planted the seeds of the Castro retaliation scenario in an information operation that involved key officials and lasted several months. Morgan began the effort on 13 January 1967 by briefing journalist Drew Pearson. Together with Jack Anderson, Pearson wrote the “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” a column syndicated in The Washington Post and 600 other newspapers. Pearson, eager to pursue Morgan’s stunning information, conveyed the gist of Morgan’s account to President Lyndon Johnson within a matter of days.[2]
Three days after telling the president, Pearson contacted his good friend Chief Justice Earl Warren, former head of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Pearson advised Warren that what Morgan had told him challenged the Warren Commission’s conclusion that there was no evidence linking Lee Harvey Oswald to a foreign conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. As Warren listened he paced about in “distress.” The chief justice subsequently passed Morgan’s information to James Rowley, chief of the Secret Service, who, in turn, informed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.[3]
The Castro retaliation information blitz instigated by Morgan soon culminated in the first public disclosure of the top-secret CIA-Mafia assassination plots. In early March 1967, Pearson and Anderson not only broke the story of the conspiracy to assassinate Castro in two successive columns, but also suggested that former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, now a Democratic senator from New York, had been deeply involved. According to Pearson and Anderson, one of the plots approved by the attorney general “possibly backfired” against his brother the president.[4]
Morgan discussed Rosselli’s Castro turnaround allegations with the FBI in an interview in March 1967. “The [CIA-Mafia assassination] project almost reached fruition when Castro became aware of it and arrested a number of suspects,” Morgan told the FBI. “By pressuring captured suspects he was able to learn the full details of the plot against him and decided `if that is the way President Kennedy wanted it, he too could engage in the same tactics.’ Castro thereafter employed teams of individuals who were dispatched to the United States for the purpose of assassinating President Kennedy,” Morgan asserted.[5]
While provocative and superficially logical, Johnston’s Castro retaliation thesis, adopted from Morgan, rests on a shaky foundation. The first problem is that the original source was Mafioso Johnny Rosselli. Considerable evidence in the declassified records of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFKARC) at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, calls into question Rosselli’s Castro retaliation allegations—beginning with the Mafioso’s own stunning about-face on the issue he promoted for a decade.
