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.
The jaws of senators on the Church Committee dropped in disbelief as they listened to Rosselli testify behind closed doors in April 1976. Rosselli, asked about the Castro turnabout narrative, shot back, “That is not true.” He added “no source” in Cuba had ever told him that “a person attempting to assassinate Castro had been captured and . . . confessed . . . [and] that Castro was getting even by sending teams of assassins to this country.” There were “no facts” to back up the Castro retaliation narrative, Rosselli testified when under oath.[6]
Previously, when William K. Harvey, Rosselli’s CIA case officer, testified before the Church Committee, he had admitted to “doubts” about the CIA-Mafia assassination operation in Cuba.
Harvey took over leadership of the assassination plotting in April 1962, and said he soon became skeptical because of the “hazy character” of the reports he received from the Mafia’s supposed assets in Cuba. By the summer, Harvey said he questioned whether “there was . . . real substance” to the alleged plotting, including “statements . . . from Cubans that they [assassin teams] had gone into Cuba.” Eventually Harvey shut down the CIA-Mafia assassination operation on the island in February 1963.[7]
The three-man hit team—once alleged by Rosselli and Morgan to have been dispatched to Cuba by Attorney General Kennedy in early 1963 to kill Castro, as reported in the “Washington Merry-Go-Round”—also turned out to be a chimera. In an internal CIA report complied at the express order of President Johnson in the wake of the Pearson-Anderson revelations, CIA Inspector General J. S. Earman found no evidence that a three-man team had been arrested in Cuba in February or March 1963, as alleged. Earman concluded, “None of the announced [Cuban] captures and executions during the period fits this team.”[8]
Earman’s investigation also did not turn up evidence to corroborate Rosselli’s Castro retaliation narrative. “Castro learned enough at least to believe the CIA was trying to kill him. He is reported to have cooked up a counterplot against President Kennedy,” Earman wrote. “We do not have independent confirmation of any sort.” He added, “We do not know that Castro tried to retaliate.” Scott Breckinridge, Earman’s chief investigator, was more blunt. He asserted Rosselli “fabricated” the Castro retaliation scenario for self-serving reasons.[9]
Even Jack Anderson was forced to concede ultimately that he never developed “hard proof” of the Castro retaliation scenario first alleged in the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” in 1967. In Anderson’s 1999 memoir War, Peace, and Politics, he explained, “To the day . . . no hard proof exists to back up his [Rosselli’s] full account. Yet I believe [emphasis added] it to be true.”[10]
What there is “hard proof” of, however, is that the Castro turn-around scenario was the centerpiece of an information war operation Rosselli mounted to try to blackmail the CIA. In March 1968, Harvey met with Howard Osborn, head of the CIA Office of Security, on behalf of Rosselli. After fierce clashes with Robert Kennedy over Cuba especially during the Cuban missile crisis, Harvey had been relieved of command, transferred to Italy in 1963, and eventually forced to retire in January 1968. In the meantime he had formed an improbable friendship with his former asset in assassination, an egregious violation of tradecraft.
Harvey told Osborn that Rosselli wanted the CIA to intervene with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to prevent his deportation to Italy, or else he would reveal more insider information about the CIA-Mafia assassination plots. In a March 1968 memorandum for the record, Osborn noted that “Harvey says that he has a very strong feeling that if either of the two trials that now threaten Johnny Rosselli result in deportation, he will blow the whistle on the Agency.”[11]
Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms initially decided to stiff-arm Rosselli. The Agency would not intervene on Rosselli’s behalf to prevent his deportation. Osborn wrote, “The DCI decided to ignore his threats and take a calculated risk as to the consequences that may occur with the disclosure of his story.” The 1967 revelations had essentially fallen on deaf ears in public. Despite being the most read muckraking column in the nation, the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” was also regarded as sensational and often unreliable. In The Washington Post, the column was featured in the comics section, not the editorial section.[12]
As Rosselli’s legal cases moved inexorably toward guilty verdicts, the Mafioso ramped up pressure on the CIA. In a 9 December 1970 memorandum, Osborn reported to Helms that Thomas Wadden, another of Rosselli’s Washington attorneys, reported “all avenues of appeal had been exhausted.” Rosselli “now faces deportation.” Osborn cautioned, “[I]f someone did not intercede on his behalf, he [Rosselli] would make a complete expose of his activities with the Agency.” Still Helms refused. Rosselli then proceeded to leak more details to an eager Jack Anderson, who had taken over the syndicated column following Pearson’s death in 1969. In January and February 1971, Anderson would write three more columns on Rosselli’s Castro retaliation narrative.[13]
In a sudden about-face—the reason for which has been shrouded in secrecy for decades—the CIA now interceded with the INS on Rosselli’s behalf. On 23 February 1971—the same day the last Anderson column appeared—CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston and James O’Connell, Rosselli’s first case officer, met with INS Commissioner Raymond Farrell to review Rosselli’s immigration case. Farrell said he had read Anderson’s columns, while the CIA officers expressed concern that Rosselli might subpoena Harvey to prove he had worked for the Agency “us[ing] us as a plea for clemency.” In a 1 March 1971 memorandum about the meeting, O’Connell wrote, “It was the Commissioner’s opinion that a good lawyer could keep proceedings in an administrative stage for many years; and in view of Rosselli’s age, 66, it is highly likely that he would ever be deported.”[14]
Rosselli would not be deported, but he would not die of natural causes. On 7 August 1976, slightly more than three months after he had testified for the third time before the Church Committee, a 55-gallon oil drum floated to the surface of Dumfounding Bay near Miami. Rosselli’s decomposing body, with severed limbs, was found stuffed inside. Both Jack Anderson, and New York Times crime reporter Nicholas Gage, concluded that Rosselli was murdered by the Mafia for his testimony. Rosselli violated gangster protocol when he did not consult his “people,” Gage reported. “When you are called before a committee like, that you have to go to your people and ask them what to do,” an unnamed Mafia source explained. “Rosselli did not come to us, he went before the committee and shot his mouth off all over the place.”[15]
With his grisly demise, Rosselli earned a unique place in CIA history. The gangster had teamed up with his case officer, William Harvey, at one time a rising star in the CIA’s clandestine service, and blackmailed the Agency. The Castro retaliation narrative was thus integral to Rosselli’s successful blackmail plan—but never critical missing evidence in the Kennedy assassination.
Author James Johnston also finds evidence for the Castro retaliation thesis in a plot much more proximate to JFK’s assassination that is wholly unrelated to the conspiracy with the Mafia. The CIA had been meeting covertly with Rolando Cubela, a disaffected Cuban government official, since 1961. Assigned the CIA cryptonym AMLASH/1, Cubela vacillated between a desire to defect and lead a counterrevolution by disgruntled Cuban army officers. The latter plan envisioned assassinating Castro to precipitate a counterrevolutionary coup. Cubela’s CIA case officer Nestor Sanchez told Church Committee investigators that Cubela committed himself to kill Castro in October 1963. To that end, Cubela sought a meeting with Robert Kennedy to assess the Kennedy Administration’s “sincerity” and “resolve” to support his plan to assassinate Castro. Cubela was an experienced assassin. Cubela had been part of a team of assassins who gunned down Colonel Antonio Blanco, head of General Fulgencio Batista’s military intelligence, as he came out of a Havana night club in October 1956.[16]
Clandestine service chief Richard Helms authorized Desmond FitzGerald, then head of the Special Affairs Staff (SAS), the successor to Harvey’s Task Force W as the operational arm for CIA covert operations against Cuba, to pose as a representative of the attorney general in a meeting with Cubela in Paris on 29 October 1963. Helms instructed FitzGerald to offer Cubela “assurances of full [US] support.” FitzGerald recalled Helms decided it was not necessary “to seek approval from Robert Kennedy to speak in his name,” given almost daily pressure from the attorney general to get rid of Castro.[17]
According to Earman, the Kennedy brothers’ intense determination to overturn the Cuban revolution set the stage for the CIA’s “fruitless” and “often unrealistic” plotting to kill Castro. “We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy Administration’s severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime,” Earman wrote. “The fruitless and, in retrospect, often unrealistic [assassination plotting] should be viewed in this context.”[18]
Meanwhile, when FitzGerald and Cubela met in Paris on October 29, FitzGerald assured the anti-Castro Cuban that he had “full” US support if his assassination plot were successful. Sanchez, who translated for FitzGerald on October 29, met with Cubela on November 22, 1963 to further underscore US “good faith.” Sanchez gave Cubela an assassination weapon, a Paper Mate pen, redesigned by the CIA as a syringe with which to inject poison into Castro. “AMLASH/1 was promised full US support if he is successful in a real coup,” Sanchez wrote in his cable recounting the meeting. Just after it broke up, Cubela and Sanchez learned the breaking news: President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. Earman noted, “[A]t the very moment President Kennedy was shot a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent in Paris and giving him an assassination weapon for use against Castro.”[19]
The intelligence tradecraft of the CIA’s assassination plotting, corrupted as it was by unrelenting pressure from the attorney general, along with Cubela’s undisciplined behavior, had, indeed, left the covert operation vulnerable to penetration by Cuban intelligence. In an earlier, 7 September 1963 cable to CIA headquarters, Sanchez wrote, “AMLASH/1 cocky, totally spoiled brat who will always be a control problem.” Helms, moreover, by authorizing FitzGerald to identify himself as RFK’s personal representative, linked the president’s brother, and by extension the president, to Operation AMLASH. “It broke the rules of tradecraft,” as author Evan Thomas put it, violating the doctrine of “plausible denial,” the artifice baked into Cold War intelligence operations to conceal the US role and ultimately insulate the president from responsibility.[20]
James Johnston’s conviction that Operation AMLASH was compromised by Cuban intelligence in the critical months before President Kennedy’s assassination stems, naturally, from his service as a counsel for the Church Committee. And, in point of fact, the CIA’s plotting with Cubela was penetrated by Cuban intelligence. The CIA shut down Operation AMLASH in June 1965, because, as Earman noted, “the entire operation” was “insecure.” Cubela had loose lips.[21]
But the critical question here has always been “when.” Did Cuban intelligence learn that Cubela was conspiring with the CIA to eliminate Castro before or after JFK’s assassination on 22 November 1963? The Castro turnabout scenario is plausible only if Castro learned about Cubela’s assassination plotting well enough in advance to plan and execute his own retaliatory attack in Dallas. Johnston and two other Church Committee staff wrote in a 27 January 1976 memorandum to then Senator Gary Hart, “AMLASH’s [CIA] file contains nothing to indicate any detailed analysis of . . . possible penetration of the CIA’s AMLASH operation . . .”[22]
Johnston argues that Sanchez’s 5-8 September 1963 meetings with Cubela in Porto Alegre, Brazil, marked the moment when Operation AMLASH became an assassination plot. From Porto Alegre, Sanchez cabled the CIA on 7 September that Cubela said there were two ways to overthrow the Cuban revolution: by an “inside job” or a US invasion. Johnston writes, “FitzGerald must have been ecstatic to learn the results of Sanchez’s meeting with Cubela. FitzGerald and Cubela were thinking alike. . . . [H]e [Cubela] was waiting for the CIA to tell him what to do.”[23]
But Johnston does not cite any hard evidence that Sanchez and Cubela discussed Castro’s assassination at Porto Alegre, or agreed on a plan to kill Castro then. Rather, Johnston offers up a questionable interpretation of an interview Castro gave an Associated Press reporter during a reception at the Brazilian embassy in Havana on 7 September 1963. “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind,” Castro declared, referring to CIA-backed sabotage raids in Cuba. “United States leaders would be in danger if they helped in any attempt to do away with Cuban leaders.” Castro added, “If they are aiding terrorist plots to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”[24]
Johnston considers Castro’s angry defiance a clear “threat” to assassinate Kennedy. Johnston writes, “The message seems unmistakable, Castro knew about Cubela, and his threat was against John Kennedy.” Johnston then faults the CIA for failing to “react to Castro’s threat.”
But when Nestor Sanchez was asked by the Church Committee about Castro’s comments to the AP, Sanchez pushed back against this facile interpretation. Why in the world, Sanchez wanted to know, would Castro—if he indeed was planning to kill President Kennedy—proclaim his intent to the world? “[A]re you proposing that he [Castro] would . . . publicly in the Brazilian embassy state that this [the Kennedy assassination] was going to take place?” Sanchez asked. “In other words, was he telegraphing this plan that he had?”[25]
In 1978, members and staffers from the House Select Committee on Assassinations visited Havana and queried Castro about his Associated Press interview. “For three years [1961-1963], we had known there were [assassination] ploys against us,” Castro explained. “I did not mean by that we were going to take measures—similar measures.” Castro said his only intention was to issue “a warning that we know” and a protest against “a very bad precedent,” one that could “boomerang against the authors of those actions.”[26]
There is no historical record of a conversation between Sanchez and Cubela that included talk of Castro’s assassination during their 5-8 September 1963 meetings in Porto Alegre. Brian Latell, former director of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence and a Cuban specialist during his years as an Agency analyst, writes that Sanchez testified to the Rockefeller Commission in 1975 that there was “no discussion of assassination” at Porto Alegre. According to Latell, the conversation “concentrated on Des FitzGerald’s priority: the need to identify senior Cuban [military] officers who might rally to a coup.” The CIA had not yet decided to conspire with Cubela to assassinate Castro. Only when Sanchez met again with Cubela in Paris in early October 1963, was Castro’s assassination firmly on the agenda. Latell writes, “Cubela had reached a crossroads. He had been prattling for over a year about wanting to fulfill a historic mission by killing Castro. Now he was pressed to commit to a specific plan.”[27]
Back when Johnston was serving as a counsel to the Church Committee, he and two other staff members wrote a 27 January 1976 memorandum to then Senator Gary Hart (D-Colorado) about the retaliation theory. “AMLASH’s [CIA] file contains nothing to indicate any detailed analysis of . . . possible penetration of the CIA’s AMLASH operation . . .” concluded the staffers. But documents, some only recently declassified in full, from the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection disclose that senior CIA officials paid much more attention to the possible connection of Cuba or the Soviet Union to the Kennedy assassination than Johnston ever gives the Agency credit for.[28]
In a June 1976 report for the Church Committee, CIA Inspector General John Waller analyzed Operation AMLASH through the lens of the Castro retaliation theory. Waller concluded that the “chronology” of the AMLASH operation “does not fit” the timeline required by the retaliation scenario.
Waller stated that Operation AMLASH did not become an assassination operation until FitzGerald offered Cubela “full US support” on 29 October 1963, after which case officer Nestor Sanchez followed up with a “good faith” meeting with Cubela on November 22. Waller asserted, “The development [of Operation AMLASH into an assassination plot] was too late to provide a basis for any retaliatory action by Castro against Kennedy if he learned of it.”[29]
When Cubela was arrested by Cuban State Security in March 1966, 10 months after the CIA had ceased contact, the charges against him dated from 1964-1965, outside the timeline of the Castro turnabout narrative. Earman, in his March 1967 report, pointed out that Cubela was charged specifically with conspiring with Manuel Artime, a prominent Cuban exile, not the CIA directly, although it is true that the Agency had long groomed Artime as a possible successor to Castro. Cubela was subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
“The trial evidence was confined to Cubela’s counterrevolutionary activities growing out of those meetings [in Europe] with Artime in December 1964 and February 1965,” Earman wrote. “None of his [Cubela’s] many direct contacts with CIA officers . . . were mentioned,” meaning his unprecedented meeting with Des FitzGerald or meetings with case officer Nestor Sanchez. The chief prosecution witness in the Cubela trial was Juan Felaifel, an undercover Cuban counterintelligence agent in Miami. Felaifel learned from Artime’s chief of intelligence that an Artime lieutenant had tested and obtained an assassination weapon, but no connection was made with Sanchez. Earman explained that the CIA had covertly “contrived to put Artime and Cubela together” in a plan to topple the Cuban revolution. According to the plan, Artime’s CIA-supported, exile-based Movimiento de Recuperacion Revolucionario (Movement for the Recovery of the Revolution or MRR) would invade Cuba in the chaos following the assassination of Fidel Castro and drive the remnants of the revolutionary regime from power.[30]
It is also the case that then DCI John McCone—about as staunch an anti-communist as one could hope to find in the upper reaches of the national security state—concluded that neither Cuba nor the Soviet Union were involved in the Kennedy assassination. McCone kept a close eye on US signals intelligence during the dark days following November 22, and as CIA historian David Robarge has written, “McCone was convinced that neither the Cubans nor the Soviets had sought revenge against John Kennedy, largely because of SIGINT [signals intelligence] had disclosed the stunned reactions of Cuban and Soviet leaders to Kennedy’s death. (`They were frightened and we knew that,’ a [Warren] Commission staffer remarked afterward.)” Meanwhile, as Evan Thomas has observed, “[M]ost reputable students of the Kennedy assassination have concluded that [Nikita] Khrushchev and Castro did not kill Kennedy, only if because neither man wanted to start World War III.”[31]
From Johnny Rosselli to Rolando Cubela, Johnston makes a superficially logical and provocative argument for the Castro retaliation allegations. But Johnston’s case collapses like a house of cards when it is scrutinized in the context of relevant declassified CIA documents in the National Archives. The Castro turnabout narrative is a theory of investigation without hard evidence to back it up.
Jack Colhoun is a historian of the Cold War and investigative reporter. He is the author of Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba, and the Mafia: 1933 to 1966 (New York: OR Books, 2013), and is currently writing a second book entitled Reaping the Whirlwind: CIA Assassination Plotting in Cuba. This review is his first for Washington Decoded.
[1] James H. Johnston, MURDER, Inc.: The CIA Under John F. Kennedy (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2019), xii, 51, 228, 230-232, 233-234; Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1993), 374. Morgan also gleaned information about the CIA-Mafia assassination plotting from Robert Maheu, his client in another case. Maheu acted as a cut-out between the CIA and the Mafia during the earliest stages of the assassination efforts, from 1960 to 1961. Johnston, MURDER, Inc., 4-5; Jack Colhoun, Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba, and the Mafia, 1933 to 1966 (New York: OR Books, 2013), 86, 154; Lee Server, Handsome Johnny: The Criminal Life of Johnny Rosselli (London: Virgin Books, 2018), 302-304, 324; Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker, All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 137-138, 161-165, 168.
[2] Max Holland, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes: The White House Conversations of Lyndon B. Johnson Regarding the Assassination, the Warren Commission, and the Aftermath (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 392.
[3] Johnston, MURDER, Inc., 228-29; Jack Anderson with Daryl Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (New York: Doherty, 1999), 119; Holland, Assassination Tapes, 416; Edward Morgan Interview, 22 June 1975, Box 175, Folder 009530, HSCA Numbered Files, John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFKARC), National Archives (NARA); Edward Morgan Testimony, 19 March 1976, Box 26, Folder Rosselli/Morgan Testimony, Church Committee, JFKARC, NARA; House Select Committee on Assassinations Staff Notes, Box 29, Folders 24-25, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, JFKARC, NARA.
[4] Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, “Was JFK Killed in CIA Backfire?” New Orleans States-Item, 3 March 1967, Pearson and Anderson, “Castro Counterplot,” Washington Post, 7 March 1967.
[5] FBI Memorandum, “Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” 21 March 1967, Box 7, Folder JFK-M07, CIA Miscellaneous Files, JFKARC, NARA.
[6] Johnny Rosselli Testimony, 23 April 1976, 3-4, Box 46, Folder John Rosselli 4/23/76, Church Committee, JFKARC, NARA.
[7] William Harvey Testimony, 25 June 1975, 63-68, 84-85, 91, 103-04, 125, Box 35, Folder 3, Church Committee, JFKARC; Rockefeller Commission Memorandum to File from David Belin, “Interview with William K. Harvey,” 19 April 1975, JFKARC, Church Committee, Box 37, Folder 3, FJKARC, NARA; J. S. Earman, “Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” 23 May 1967, 52-53, Box 4, Folder 23JFK-1, HSCA, Segregated CIA Collection, JFKARC, NARA.
[8] Earman, “Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” 118-119; Jack Anderson, “Six Attempts to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” Washington Post, 18 January 1971.
[9] CIA Memorandum by S. D. Breckinridge to Jack Sullivan, “Draft HSCA Report,” 14 March 1979, Record Number 104-10067-10224, JFKARC, NARA.
[10] Anderson, War, Peace, and Politics, 113.
[11] CIA Memorandum for the Record by Howard Osborn, “Johnny Rosselli,” 21 March 1968, Box 121 Folder HSCA Review at HQ, Rosselli, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, JFKARC, NARA, FBI Memorandum from D. J. Brennan, Jr., “Johnny Rosselli,” 20 March 1968, Box 8, HSCA Subject: William Harvey, JFKARC, NARA.
[12] CIA Memorandum for the Record by Howard Osborn, “William Harvey,” 9 January 1967, Box 121, Folder HSCA Review at HQ, Rosselli JFKARC, NARA; Holland, Assassination Tapes, 392.
[13] CIA Memorandum from Howard Osborn for DCI, “Rosselli, Johnny,” 9 December 1970, Box 10, Folder 66483, (1 of 2), HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, JFKARC, NARA; Jack Anderson, “Six Attempts to Kill Castro,” “Castro Plot Raises Ugly Questions,” and “Castro Stalker Worked for CIA,” Washington Post, 18 January 1971, 19 January 1971, and 23 February 1971.
[14] Memorandum for the Record by James O’Connell, “Johnny Rosselli,” 1 March 1971, Box 121, Folder HSCA Review at HQ, Rosselli, HSCA Segregated CIA Collection, JFKARC; Memorandum for the Record by Stanton Ense, DD/OS/PS, “Agency Contact with Immigration and Naturalization Service on Behalf of Johnny Rosselli, 25 March 1974, Box 110, Folder 66483 (1 of 2), HSCA Segregated CIA Collection; Declassified version of the Ense memorandum, Record Number 104-10133-10308, JFKARC, NARA.
[15] Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, “Smudge Only Clue in Rosselli Case,” Washington Post, 27 August 1976; Nicholas Gage, “Mafia Said to Have Slain Rosselli Because of His Senate Testimony,” New York Times, 25 February 1977.
[16] Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012), 180, 182-184; Johnston, MURDER, Inc., 117; Earman, “Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” 86; Robert Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: Norton, 1993), 116.
[17] Earman, “Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” 89.
[18] Earman, “Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” 163.
[19] Earman, “Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” 88-89, 91-94; CIA Cable, “AMLASH/1 Was Met in Paris on November 22, 1963,” 3 December 1963, Record Number 104-10077-10225, JFKARC, NARA.
[20] CIA Cable from Nestor Sanchez from Porto Alegre to Director, 7 September 1963, Record Number 104-10009-10006, JFKARC, NARA quoted in Latell, Castro’s Secrets, 167; Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 299. For “plausible denial” see NSC 10/2,3, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1945-1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), for NSC 5412/2, see, FRUS, 1950-1955, The Intelligence Community (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2007), 547-549.
[21] Earman, “Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” 106.
[22] Church Committee Staff Memorandum to Senator Gary Hart by Johnston/Dwyer/Greissing, “Connection Between AMLASH and Investigation of JFK Assassination,” 27 January 1976, 6, Record Number 157-10004-10292.
[23] Earman, “Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” 106; Johnston, MURDER, Inc., 106.
[24] Johnston, MURDER, Inc., 106-107.
[25] Johnston, MURDER, Inc., 107, 240-241.
[26] US House of Representatives, Select Committee on Assassinations, Final Report: Findings and Recommendations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1978), 127. In July 1975, Senator George McGovern made public a report prepared by Fidel Castro of 24 “CIA-inspired assassination efforts against Cuban leaders” from 1960 to 1971. www.cia.gov, “Statement by Senator George McGovern–CIA,” 30 July 1975.
[27] Latell, Castro’s Secrets, 86, 160, 167-168, 171, 180, 183-84; Johnston, MURDER, Inc., 106.
[28] Church Committee Staff Memorandum to Senator Gary Hart by Johnston/Dwyer/Greissing, “Connection Between AMLASH and Investigation of JFK Assassination,” 27 January 1976, 6, Record Number 157-10004-10292, JFKARC, NARA.
[29] CIA Inspector General [John Waller], “SSC Subcommittee Draft Report on Intelligence Agencies’ Support for the Warren Commission Inquiry,” 7 June 1976, Record Number 104-10103-10096, JFKARC, NARA; Colhoun, Gangsterismo, 207-208, 218, 232, 239-240.
[30] Earman, “Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” 100-101, 104-106, 111, JFKARC, NARA. See also Colhoun, Gangsterismo, 239-240; Latell, Castro’s Secrets, 160, 180; Thomas, Very Best Men, 303.
[31] David Robarge, “DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” Studies in Intelligence, September 2013, 6, 8; Thomas, Very Best Men, 308.
©2019 by Jack Colhoun
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