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Rogue Elephant</A>
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"The people will recognize that the CIA was behaving during those years like
a rogue elephant rampaging out of control . . ."
-Sen. Frank Church, Chairman of Select Committee on Intelligence, July 1975
Rogue Elephant
The Drug Trade, the Kennedy Assassination, and the War in Vietnam
Kent Heiner
For almost forty years, the circumstances surrounding the death of President
John F. Kennedy have been the subject of controversy. From time to time
scholars, witnesses, and commentators have come forth offering some sort of
sweeping explanation, as if to settle the controversy once and for all.
Rather than offering a final analysis of the assassination, I will endeavor
only to show how a particular perspective on the event may be the best
starting point in understanding it.
Though a few authors have written about the assassination from a broader
perspective, many "pet theories" have been offered which blame the
assassination singly on the Mafia, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
Cuban exiles, the Dallas police, or Texas oil interests. There is certainly
evidence to support each of these hypotheses but, by the argumentative nature
of the proponents, I am reminded of the story of the "learned men" who,
though blind, were asked to examine an elephant. One, feeling the elephant’s
leg, said that an elephant is best likened to a tree. Another, examining the
tail, argued that an elephant is not at all like a tree, but rather like a
rope. The sage holding the elephant’s trunk exclaimed that an elephant is
very much akin to a snake, as if to settle the matter.
When trying to describe the true nature of the conspiracy against President
Kennedy, the question that we, also being somewhat blind in the matter, might
most profitably ask ourselves is this: what kind of elephant is part Mafia,
part CIA, part Cuban exile, part Dallas police, and part Texas oil? This
metaphorical elephant represents the slain president’s political rivals, with
whom the Kennedy administration was in a life-and-death power struggle. This
essay will examine the elephant’s sources of power, its conflicts of interest
with the Kennedy administration, and the administration’s specific efforts to
destroy it.
Not included herein will be a chronology of events, a discussion of the
untimely deaths of many witnesses in the case, a complete study of the facts
discrediting the "lone assassin" theory, or a thorough explanation of how the
true nature of the assassination was covered up. For such, other works
suffice. The significance of the illegal drug trade to the assassination will
be shown in the following respects:
1. One of the more significant common interests of the key players in the
assassination conspiracy was drug smuggling;
2. The President and Attorney General were not only standing in the way of
the expansion of this smuggling enterprise into new territory, but were also
prosecuting many of the ring leaders;
3. The assassination conspiracy had as one of its major objectives the
protection and growth of this enterprise.
This is not to say that drug smuggling was the full extent of the conspiracy,
but it may very well have been the essence of it; recognizing this aspect of
the conspiracy is perhaps the best place to begin. The connection to this
activity of all the parties known to have had a hand in the president’s death
provides a motive for the murder, as well as a common ground and motive for
cooperation among these parties; to this end, any one of the many illegal
activities engaged in by all these groups might suffice as a good starting
point for analysis. For instance, arms smuggling also is a commonality among
many of the conspirators, but the author chooses drug smuggling in particular
because of its greater prevalence among the key figures in the conspiracy as
well as its relevance to the present day and its effect on administrations
since Kennedy’s.
All of the above-mentioned interest groups, namely the Mafia, CIA, Cuban
exiles, Dallas law enforcement, and Texas oil interests, conspired to
assassinate John F. Kennedy. More specifically, the conspirators included the
following parties:
* From the mob: bosses Sam Giancana, Carlos Marcello, and Santos
Trafficante of Chicago, New Orleans, and Miami respectively; Teamsters
President Jimmy Hoffa; lesser figures Richard Cain and Charles Harrelson.
* Military, CIA and ex-CIA officers: Most notably, CIA officers E. Howard
Hunt, David Atlee Phillips, Charles Cabell, and William Harvey. Quite
probably General Edward G. Lansdale and Desmond Fitzgerald.
* CIA "assets" and contract employees: Jack Ruby, Dave Ferrie, Clay Shaw,
Frank Sturgis, Jim Hicks, Gordon Novel, and others.
* Cuban exiles: Felix Rodriguez, Eladio del Valle and Bernard Barker, among
others. Possibly Orlando Bosch and the brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo
Sampol.
* Local law enforcement: Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker and Assistant
District Attorney Bill Alexander as well as several members of the Dallas
police force.
* From the Texas oil industry: Texas oil baron Clint Murchison, contractor
George Brown (of Brown and Root), and others unknown. Possibly future
president George H. W. Bush.
Others who knew of the true nature of the assassination either before or
immediately after the fact and who, either by their silence or by conscious
efforts, conspired to cover it up include:
* President Lyndon Johnson
* President Richard Nixon
* President Gerald Ford
* FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
* Senator Arlen Specter
THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
The origins of the outlaw group which eliminated the Kennedys could be traced
to the wartime alliance of U.S. intelligence with organized crime. In 1942,
in an effort to protect New York harbors from acts of sabotage by Axis
agents, naval intelligence enlisted the help of Joseph Lanza, mafia boss of
the East Side docks, to mobilize dock workers. Later in 1943, seeking to
expand the operation to the West Side, they contacted the boss of bosses,
Charles "Lucky" Luciano, then in prison. The West Side docks were controlled
at the time by the heavily Italian longshoremen's union; through "Operation
Underworld," partly arranged by Luciano's associate Meyer Lansky, the Mob's
union contacts were mobilized in this wartime effort (Scott 1993:145; McCoy
1991:31-32). The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) also contacted Luciano,
through Lansky and Luciano's deputy August del Gracio. The OSS, which was the
precursor of the CIA, wanted Luciano to use his contacts in the "old country"
to pave the way for the U.S. invasion of Sicily (Marks 1979:7-8). American
military officials could presumably have pursued similar cooperation with the
Italian anti-Fascist underground, but fears of potential Communist advances
in postwar Italy led them to favor the mafia, cutting back support to the
leftist underground. The Mafia arranged enthusiastic welcomes for the allied
liberators and provided guides for General Patton's troops. After the
invasion, Mafia heads in western Sicily were installed in mayoral posts by
the American occupation force (McCoy 1991:35). The OSS also plotted with the
Mafia against the Italian Communist party. It was as a direct result of his
cooperation with the intelligence services that Luciano was paroled from a
U.S. prison in 1946 and deported to Sicily (Marks 1979:7).
The arrangement with the Sicilians was by no means unique; the pattern was
repeated with French organized crime. The CIA used Corsican gangsters to
break up labor strikes in Marseilles on at least two occasions, once in 1947
and again in 1950. That murders resulted in the first instance did not seem
to deter the CIA from calling on the Mob for a second time (Scheim 1983:191).
Marseilles at the time housed the world’s most productive heroin
laboratories. While the OSS and the other wartime intelligence services were
being replaced in 1947 by the CIA, Luciano had become a central figure in the
trade of opium (and hence heroin) from Indochina via Marseilles and the
French Corsicans in Saigon. A renewed flow of heroin through Marseilles
accompanied the CIA's anti-Communist efforts there in 1950-51 (Scott
1993:176). The Indochina-CIA-heroin connection would continue at least into
the next two decades as the U.S. took over the anti-Communist war in Vietnam
from the French.
As in Operation Underworld, the Mob's union connections were again used for
purposes of "national security" in 1947. Fear of Socialism as a path to
Communism outweighed any concerns regarding criminal control of the unions,
and the United States government again allied itself with organized crime to
defend the country from foreign threats, re-establishing Meyer Lansky's
syndicate in the postwar battle for control of the American unions between
the Mob and the socialists. With the protection of the CIA, some mobsters
gained a competitive advantage trafficking in drugs. In the far east, Charles
Willoughby, MacArthur's chief of intelligence from 1941 to 1951, hired
Japanese mobsters to take action against groups such as the Japanese
Communist Party. Army Intelligence in Japan "used Japan's dope-dealing yakuza
gangs to break up left-wing strikes and demonstrations." (Russell 1992:
126,169,178)
As America gained hegemony over the world economy, the State Department and
CIA worked to protect and expand this dominance. Under the pretext of
safeguarding democracy abroad, the agencies supported business-friendly
right-wing dictatorships and brought down governments who threatened American
business interests. By the mid-1950s the Syndicate (as the American crime
network was sometimes called) had begun to play a key role in such efforts,
in close partnership with the covert action staff of the CIA. Indeed, the
partnership could almost be described as a "merger," with both parties
cooperating in the smuggling of guns and drugs, the laundering of money, the
overthrow of governments, and the rigging of elections in Latin America, East
Asia, and the Near East. Oil and banking tycoon David Rockefeller served as
Eisenhower’s liaison with the CIA. Richard Nixon is known to have had
extensive contacts in organized crime and was said by some on Capitol Hill to
have "run the CIA" as Vice President, probably meaning that he was heavily
involved in the covert operations of the agency (Groden and Livingstone
1989:252). By early 1954, Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana was boasting that his
"Outfit" and the CIA were "two sides of the same coin." The following
Giancana quotation, an excerpt from the biography written by his brother, is
revealing of the mob boss’s perspective on his relationship with the CIA if
not reflective of the true nature of the relationship:
Sometimes our government can't do s--- on the up and up. Sometimes they need
a little trouble somewhere or they need some bastard taken care of. . . .
they can't get caught doin' s--- like that. What if people found out? But we
can. Guns, a hit, muscle . . . whatever dirty work needs to be done. Right
now, we're workin' on Asia, Iran, and Latin America. . . . we got this deal
all sewn up. Ike [President Eisenhower], all he does is play golf . . . it's
[Vice President] Nixon that's got the power. He's the one with the backing of
the big money, like [Howard] Hughes and the [mafia] guys in California and
the oilmen in Texas. . . . Hump [Mob ambassador Murray Humphreys] says
Nixon's gonna call us if he needs a little hardball behind the scenes
(Giancana 1992:215).
The CIA became increasingly involved in its mafia partners’ drug smuggling
operations. Indeed, by 1960, it had become impossible to make a clear
distinction between the two organizations. Many CIA operatives were also
foot-soldiers for organized crime. A significant faction in the CIA had taken
upon itself the responsibility of reorganizing the international drug traffic
to its own advantage. Henceforth, the term "CIA" should be understood to have
two possible meanings: either this faction within the CIA, or the agency as a
whole. Due to the size and influence of this faction, a clear distinction
between the two meanings is hard to make, but analysts in the agency’s
Directorate of Intelligence would rightly be offended to be "lumped in" with
their more seditious colleagues. No matter how much honest work is done at
the CIA, however, the fact remains that for more than fifty years it has
served as a front for what is now the most powerful drug-trafficking
organization in the western hemisphere. During the time period currently
under discussion, the faction referred to resided mostly in the Agency’s
Directorate of Operations and consisted of unofficial "agents" and "assets"
as well as career officers.
During the mid-1950s, the CIA and mafia fought a heroin turf war against the
French in far-away Saigon; this fight is key to understanding the origins of
U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and will be discussed shortly. Under the
CIA program code-named ZRRIFLE, foreign heads of state who stood in the way
of American control of the drug traffic were targeted for assassination; this
program is essential to understanding the origins of the plot against
President Kennedy.
The intention of this corrupt faction in the U.S. government of the 1950s was
to commandeer the strategic positions in the international heroin trade then
held by French interests. Part of this plan necessitated a large U.S.
military presence in Southeast Asia. The French heroin labs in the
CIA-Luciano network got some of their raw material from the poppy fields of
Indochina. The Corsicans' connections to the Indochinese heroin trade (via
the French colonial presence in Southeast Asia) and their connections to
American and French intelligence gave them a competitive edge over the
Sicilians, who had also trafficked in heroin before the war and resumed doing
so afterward. The Corsicans used their intelligence connections as a cover
for their heroin trafficking, and the French used the trade as a way to fund
their war in Southeast Asia, then known as French Indochina:
The French military's Operation X . . . involved collecting opium from
Indochinese mountain tribes, transporting it to Saigon, and transmitting it
to the Corsican underworld. Clandestine laboratories in Saigon processed the
base into morphine, and the Corsicans arranged for its shipment to Marseilles
for further refinement into heroin (Blumenthal 1988:94-95).
Schemers in Washington may have felt that the French were reaping drug
profits that were rightfully theirs, because the United States had been
carrying the majority of the financial burden of the French Indochina war in
the early 1950s and had also supplied hundreds of advisers. One such advisor
was the CIA’s Colonel Edward G. Lansdale. Lansdale had been the American most
responsible for the victory of Ramon Magsaysay over President Quirino in the
Philippines; the CIA man had bolstered his client's popularity with the use
of "psychological warfare" and counterinsurgency campaigns. Lansdale and
Magsaysay had staged mock attacks and liberations on Philippine villages. The
destruction was real, but the deception lay in the fact that the attacks were
not initiated by the Communist guerillas but by the same faction who
heroically came to the villagers’ "rescue." (Prouty 1992:35) Lansdale was
named by Sam Giancana as one of the many political connections of Harry
Stonehill, a Chicago-affiliated businessman in the Philippines, where
Lansdale was proconsul. Stonehill later made moves to set up trade in opium
(Giancana 1992:135,176-77). This is important to note because so much of
Lansdale’s later career was spent in the periphery of the drug trade. On an
investigative tour of Indochina in the summer of 1953, Lansdale flew to the
Plain of Jars in Laos, where he learned some of the details of the French
opium operations, including the fact that General Salan, the Commander in
Chief of the French Expeditionary Corps, had ordered his officers to buy up
the 1953 opium harvest. The opium was subsequently shipped to Saigon for sale
overseas (McCoy 1991:140)
In the winter of 1953-54, the French faced defeat at the hands of the Viet
Minh at Dienbienphu. As the French fought off the attack, they informed
President Eisenhower that unless U.S. forces came to their aid, the war would
be lost. Admiral Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended
sending U.S. troops; Vice-President Nixon concurred. But Eisenhower declined
to involve U.S. forces directly, much to the rage of many French military
men. Eisenhower thought that Indochina was a lost cause and that there was
not enough domestic support for a second Asian war so soon after Korea. As
the president had said in a January 8th National Security Council meeting,
The key to winning this war is to get the Vietnamese to fight. There is just
no sense in even talking about the United States forces replacing the French
in Indochina. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer
their hatred of the French to us. I cannot tell you how bitterly opposed I am
to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by
divisions! (Prouty 1992:51)
Unable to get the president’s approval for direct military involvement,
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proposed that the U.S. should carry on
guerilla operations against the Viet Minh in the event of French defeat. The
Council decided that Allen Dulles was to develop this contingency plan. On
the 29th of January, the President's Special Committee on Indochina met (in
the absence of the president himself) to discuss possible aid to the
desperate French. "At the end of the meeting," writes Colonel L. Fletcher
Prouty, "Allen Dulles, then the director of central intelligence, suggested
that an unconventional-warfare officer, Col. Edward G. Lansdale, be added to
the group of American liaison officers that General Henri Navarre, the French
commander, had agreed to accept in Indochina." (Prouty 1992:38-39,349) The
absence of the President for this critical decision was not atypical of the
administration’s Southeast Asia policy (Scott 1972).
The battle at Dienbienphu was lost by May 1954. Because the U.S. would not
become directly involved, the conflict was taken to the conference table, and
a peace settlement was reached that year in Geneva, creating separate
administrations in northern and southern Vietnam. The north was to be
Communist, led by Ho Chi Minh, and the south non-Communist, until an
all-Vietnam election in 1956 could unify the country. The elections never
took place; Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam sponsored by the
U.S. and managed by Lansdale, declared that the terms of the Geneva Accords
were unacceptable and that there would be no elections as therein specified.
Colonel Lansdale went to Vietnam and established the Saigon Military Mission
(SMM), chiefly a CIA covert warfare office, and immediately set about
destabilizing the country as a pretext for increased U.S. involvement. The
SMM's damage to the meager existing order in Vietnam was incalculable.
Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, the Pentagon's chief of special operations in the
early 1960s, writes,
By midsummer more men had joined the SMM, and its mission was broadened. Its
members were teaching "paramilitary" tactics - today called "terrorism" - and
doing all they could to promote the movement of hundreds of thousands of
"Catholic" Vietnamese from the north with promises of safety, food, land, and
freedom in the south and with threats that they would be massacred by the
Communists of North Vietnam and China if they stayed in the north.
This movement of Catholics - or natives whom the SMM called "Catholics" -
from the northern provinces of Vietnam to the south, under the provisions of
the Geneva agreement, became the most important activity of the Saigon
Military Mission and one of the root causes of the Vietnam War. The terrible
burden these 1,100,000 destitute strangers imposed upon equally poor native
residents of the south created a pressure on the country and on the Diem
administration that was overwhelming. . . . It is easy to understand that
within a short time these strangers became bandits, of necessity, in an
attempt to obtain the basics of life. The local uprisings that sprung up
wherever these poor people were dumped on the south were given the name
"Communist insurgencies" and much of the worst and most pernicious part of
the twenty years of warfare that followed was the direct result of this
terrible activity that had been incited and carried out by CIA's terroristic
Saigon Military Mission (Prouty 1992:66-67).
By mid-year, Lansdale was raising the specter of "Communist insurgency" just
as he did in the Philippines. This destabilization became one of the root
causes of the Vietnam War and "had more to do with the scope, severity, and
duration of the American-made war in Vietnam than anything else." (Prouty
1992:71) On the advice of the U.S., Diem exacerbated the situation by the
ejection of the French law enforcement authorities who had helped to keep
what little peace there was, and of the Chinese merchants who were crucial to
South Vietnamese trade. This resulted in a temporary absence of police power
and in the collapse of the system by which rice farmers obtained goods in
exchange for their crops. When economic and social chaos resulted in hunger
and civil strife, U.S. intelligence was quick to cry "Communist insurgency."
The geography of the "insurgency" should have made it plain that there was
more to the problem than ideology or politics. It was the southern districts,
where the refugees were, that were the most volatile, not the northern areas
bordering on enemy territory. This is evidenced in the 1963 McNamara-Taylor
report to the president, which became the administration's plan for gradual
withdrawal from Vietnam. The report projected a completion of the campaign in
the northern and central areas by 1964, and in the southern delta by the end
of 1965 (Prouty 1992:260-64).
Why would the United States deliberately create chaos in Southeast Asia? As a
pretext for greater involvement. Why become involved? The military-industrial
complex's interest in Vietnam cannot be discounted. Billions of dollars in
armaments were used in the Vietnam War and related military campaigns.
Hundreds of bombing sorties went out every day. Bell's helicopters were used
to excess and to the point of wasting both equipment and lives. Based in Texa
s, Bell Helicopter was likely to have had influence over Lyndon Johnson. Dow
Chemical produced a defoliant called Agent Orange for the war and was
associated with the powerful Rockefeller family. President Lyndon Johnson’s
sponsoring company, Brown and Root, was awarded large contracts in Vietnam.
In addition to military interests, the cooperation of the CIA with organized
crime in the Southeast Asian drug trade and the profits that this operation
eventually reaped also deserve consideration as a motivation for increased
U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Indeed, during the 1950s and 1960s one major
aspect of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia was to take over the drug
trade from the faltering French.
By the early 1950s, the CIA had solidified its contacts in Marseilles, where
heroin was made from Indochinese morphine. In the mid-1950s, the CIA
established a presence in Saigon, where the opium from the region’s poppy
fields was refined into morphine and shipped overseas under the supervision
of French intelligence. By 1960, the CIA was supporting the indigenous
peoples in Laos who had supplied the opium crop to the French.
Lansdale began his investigation of France’s "Operation X" soon after he came
to Saigon in June 1954, hoping to assess his opponent's strength. He quickly
aroused the antipathy of the 2eme Bureau, France’s military intelligence
agency; his investigation ended when a local Chinese banker who was helping
him was murdered. Lansdale openly allied himself and Premier Ngo Dinh Diem
with an army of 2,500 whose leader had murdered a French general in 1951 and
was responsible for a 1953 bombing in downtown Saigon. In February 1955, when
the French handed over the Vietnamese army to the Americans, Lansdale also
used Saigon Military Mission funds to buy out the religious sects under
French control and placed the sectarian armies under the command of Diem. The
Binh Xuyen, a Vietnamese organized crime syndicate, controlled Saigon. By the
time fighting broke out between Diem's forces and the organized-
crime-supported United Front in March 1955, the U.S. and France had already
chosen opposing sides. In fact, the two sides were "pawns in a power struggle
between the French 2eme Bureau and the American CIA." Diem's forces prevailed
after a month of skirmishes and six days of heavy and destructive fighting;
the Binh Xuyen were pushed back into the swamp areas from which they had
come. In retaliation, some of the French started a terrorist bombing campaign
against Americans in Saigon. This ended when Lansdale determined "who the
ringleaders were (many of them were intelligence officers) [and] grenades
started going off in front of their houses in the evenings." (McCoy
1972:119-25)
Working their way further up the supply chain, U.S. forces moved into Laos.
Opium was the main cash crop of The Hmong (or "Meo") tribesmen in northern
Laos. The Hmong had long been fighting the Communist forces in that area, the
Pathet Lao, and had sold their opium crops with the aid of the French. In
1960, the Hmong gained the support of the CIA, which facilitated the sale of
their opium by cultivating a relationship with the local heroin traffickers
and their associates in local government. The Agency called upon one Vang Pao
to lead the CIA-trained Hmong as their General. The Agency built landing
strips in outlying areas for the delivery of supplies by its airline Air
America, and allowed the Corsican traffickers to use the strips for the
pickup of the Hmong opium (McCoy 1972:277).
In 1959, the CIA’s campaign to claim a major strategic position in the
world’s drug traffic was progressing in Southeast Asia, despite Eisenhower’s
refusal to send in combat troops. But that year, American interests lost
control of Cuba, an island nation only 90 miles from Florida which was also
an important transit point for narcotics. It is well-established that
beginning some time around 1959, the CIA contracted with organized crime to
assassinate particular foreign heads of state. What is not generally
recognized is that, not at all coincidentally, those foreign heads of state
were often in countries key to the CIA-Mafia drug traffic. Prime targets were
Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who survived numerous attempts on his life, and the
Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, killed in 1961.
In the late 1950s, the Havana underworld was controlled by Florida mob boss
Santos Trafficante. Among the many vices run by Trafficante was the cocaine
trade, which used Cuba as a transit point for Peruvian cocaine destined for th
e U.S. (U.S. Treasury 1961). Sam Giancana was in on the action too. According
to Giancana, the CIA (or at least a faction therein) took ten percent of the
proceeds from the Havana drug pipeline in return for ignoring the traffic
(Giancana 1992:259). Before Castro's 1959 overthrow of the Batista regime,
Havana had been the single greatest source of revenue for organized crime in
the western hemisphere. The Havana casinos, drug dealers, and abortion
clinics brought the mob hundreds of millions of dollars every year. But when
Castro came to power, he closed the casinos and imprisoned Trafficante. The
common account of the origin of the CIA-mafia assassination plots against
Castro is that CIA representative (and Howard Hughes aide) Robert Maheu
contacted John Roselli, the Las Vegas representative of the Chicago Mob.
Roselli introduced Maheu to Chicago boss Sam Giancana, and then on Giancana's
behalf Roselli contacted Trafficante. Trafficante and Carlos Marcello of the
New Orleans mob both had extensive Cuban connections and became involved in
the CIA assassination plot, part of a larger program known as ZRRIFLE.
Trafficante and Marcello supplied the CIA with Cuban hit men to take Castro
out in a military-style ambush. When it became apparent that subtler methods
were needed, poison pills and other, more bizarre schemes were attempted;
they never succeeded.
After Castro took over Cuba and closed the island to mafia activity, the
Dominican Republic became a staging point for a CIA-sponsored invasion of
Cuba, as well as a new transit point for Trafficante’s narcotics traffic.
Henrik Krüger writes: "Furthermore, the CIA, according to agents of the BNDD
[Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs], helped organize the drug route by
providing IDs and speed boats to former Batista officers in the Dominican
Republic in charge of narcotics shipments to Florida." (Krüger 1980:145)
President Rafael Trujillo may have done something to get in the way of the
drug traffic, for the CIA-mafia alliance marked him for death and he was as
sassinated in May 1961, just after the CIA's failed invasion of Cuba at the
Bay of Pigs.
Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa and Santos Trafficante cooperated in
smuggling drugs into the United States, with Teamsters Local 320 in Miami
being one of the fronts for the business (Krüger 1980:143). Chicago mobster
David Yaras, who answered to Sam Giancana, had assisted Hoffa in organizing
Local 320, where Trafficante kept an office (Scott 1993:175). Jack Ruby of
Dallas reported to Yaras and was another of Giancana’s men, involved in drug
trafficking as well as gambling, arms smuggling, and operating a strip club.
The CIA was aware of Ruby’s drug smuggling activities, according to former
anti-Castro operative Robert Morrow, who worked under the CIA’s Tracy Barnes.
Barnes was one of the Bay of Pigs planners, perhaps the most high-ranking one
to have survived the Kennedy post-invasion firings. He told Morrow that one
of Ruby’s arms smuggling partners was also one of the Agency’s ZRRIFLE
assassins and that Ruby was taking advantage of that fact, counting on the
CIA to remain silent on the smuggling for fear of exposing the assassination
program (Morrow 1992). As one of the CIA-connected men who had supplied
Castro with arms before he came to power and subsequently fell from favor
with the U.S., Ruby is thought to have negotiated Trafficante’s release from
Castro’s prison (Giancana 1992:279; Marrs 1989:394-98).
Though, after the assassination, the government would later try to portray
Jack Ruby as a small-time hustler, Ruby was an influential man in Dallas,
almost an unofficial mayor. Ruby came from Chicago to Dallas in 1947 at about
the same time the Chicago mob was establishing itself in Dallas (Scott
1993:160) Though Jack Ruby’s associate Joseph Civello was eventually
identified by the House of Representatives as the "boss" of the Dallas mob
from 1956 onward (Scott 1993:129), Ruby himself was reputed to be in control
of many of the local vices. He knew everyone in a position of influence, and
was particularly careful to cultivate good relationships with the police
force, sheriff’s department, and district attorney’s office. Ruby is
estimated to have been on speaking terms with 700 of the 1200 officers on the
Dallas police force. Hundreds of officers came to Ruby’s night club; some
came for conversation, some to get the free food and drinks he offered all
officers. Ruby alone could give consent to a new gambling operation in the
city. As a police narcotics informant, he was also "in a position to say
which [drug] deals will go through and not be arrested. Those deals he
doesn't approve of, he tells the police, and there's an arrest. Three or four
Dallas policemen have told us Ruby was their informant on narcotics matters."
(Tarby 1996) Ruby supplied prostitutes to Dallas businessmen and visiting
VIPs as well as to some police officers (Scott 1993:233,342).
Thanks to Ruby and many others like him, the Dallas authorities were so
compromised by the vices that many of them were not in a position to refuse
to cooperate when called upon to frame the innocent, intimidate witnesses,
falsify reports, and destroy evidence in the Kennedy murder. Sheriff Bill
Decker was described by peers as "an old-time bootlegger" and a "payoff man"
for the local rackets (Scott 1993:161). Decker ordered many of his
subordinates to take "no part whatsoever" in the security of the presidential
motorcade, and eventually fired one deputy for showing too much interest in
the case (Craig). In 1937 Decker had testified as a character witness for
Joseph Civello, who was seeking a pardon on a narcotics conviction (Scheim
1983:184).
But there were honest men among the Dallas authorities; the chief homicide
detective, Will Fritz, had received numerous phone calls after the arrest of
Lee Harvey Oswald urging him to terminate his investigation into the murder
of President Kennedy because, "You have your man." Despite these promptings,
Fritz continued until late the next day, when he got a personal telephone
call from new president Lyndon Johnson, who "ordered the investigation
stopped," to the officer’s dismay (Groden and Livingstone 1989:245). Dr.
Charles Crenshaw, who was treating the dying Oswald, also received a personal
telephone call from Johnson, who pressed the doctor for a deathbed confession
from Oswald. Furthermore, it was Johnson who derailed the Texas
investigations into the President's murder by forming a presidential
commission to handle the matter.
Ruby had been the subject of investigation by federal narcotics agents as
early as 1947, for suspected involvement in a scheme to fly opium over the
border from Mexico (Scheim 1983:117). It may have been as a result of this
investigation that Ruby first became a federal informant. In 1947, an FBI
staff assistant in Congressman Richard Nixon’s office wrote a memo asking
Ruby to be excused from testifying before congress on the grounds that Ruby
was "performing information functions" for the Congressman’s staff (Marrs
1989:269). By 1956, another FBI informant reported that Ruby was "Mister Big"
in "a large narcotics setup operating between Mexico, Texas, and the East"
(Scheim 1983:117-118). One infers from the informant’s report that Ruby had
some sort of recruiting film for the operation which demonstrated the
operation’s efficiency and immunity from border guards and narcotics agents.
This immunity is likely to have derived from Ruby’s status as an FBI
informant himself. This status is sometimes accorded to criminals of great
influence in order to protect them; when thus conferred, it often amounts to
a federally-issued "never-go-to-jail-unless-you-murder-someone-on-camera"
card. From such a position, Ruby was able to give his FBI handlers valuable
tips while eliminating his own criminal competition.
Among the wealthy Texans that Sam Giancana counted as business associates
were oil magnates Syd Richardson, Clint Murchison, and H.L. Hunt, some of
whom had been introduced to Giancana by oil-company geologist and Dallas-area
resident George DeMohrenschildt, one of Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA handlers
(Giancana 1992:322). The Murchison family fortune was based partly on loans
from the corrupt Teamsters Pension Fund (Scott 1993:218). Murchison's other
political and business connections included mob boss Carlos Marcello and
Bobby Baker, whose dealings with organized crime on Lyndon Johnson's behalf
nearly ruined LBJ's political career when they came to light in 1963.
Murchison was a common friend of both FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and New
Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello (North 1991:56). In the early 1960s, Sam
Giancana confided in his younger brother that a cocaine smuggling ring which
he ran with Marcello and Trafficante also had the CIA and wealthy Texas
oilmen as partners; the group used offshore oil rigs to bypass U.S. Customs
inspection (Giancana 1992:350). This operation apparently survived until the
later 1970s, even after Giancana’s death. In New Orleans in the summer of
1977, CIA and military personnel were discovered using offshore oil rigs to
smuggle drugs into the U.S. in cooperation with the Marcello crime family
(Ruppert 2000). Some of the rigs were owned by George H. W. Bush’s own Zapata
Offshore company (Bush was CIA director until 1977) and were serviced by
Brown and Root, the Houston-based contracting company which sponsored Lyndon
Johnson’s political career. Brown and Root is currently owned by Halliburton,
for which current Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO. Bush was involved in
CIA Cuban operations in the early 1960s, according to an FBI memo of the time
and was also acquainted with DeMohrenschildt. At the time of
DeMohrenschildt’s 1977 death, his address book contained George Bush’s name
with the words "Zapata Petroleum Midland" (which places the entry at a
pre-1959 date), and George’s college nickname, "Poppy" (Tarpley and Chaitkin
1992).
In 1948, at around the same time that Jack Ruby was settling in and
cultivating the Dallas rackets for the Chicago and New Orleans crime
organizations, George Bush graduated from Yale University, where he had
enjoyed membership in the secret "Skull and Bones" society, an organization
founded in 1833 by a member of the Russell family, which owned the largest
opium-trading company in the United States (Tarpley and Chaitkin 1992).
Following Russell & Company and Skull and Bones throughout their long
histories, one finds several family names of great significance, among them
Delano (as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Luce (owners of the Time-Life
publishing empire), and Dulles (the brothers who led the Eisenhower
administration’s foreign policy). The number of influential families and
figures to emerge from the "old China trade" is a fascinating subject in
itself and too large a subject to be treated here. It was from this social
environment that George H. W. Bush came to Odessa, Texas. At this time, the
so-called Eastern Establishment would have been seeking to incorporate the
growing southwest oil industry into their plans before the new Texas rich
became a serious threat. With family money behind him, "Poppy" went into the
oil business and built partnerships with Texan powerhouses like Brown and
Root, possibly introducing them to the CIA-mafia network and initiating them
in the mysteries of government-protected drug trafficking. He was
tremendously successful, building a Texas power base which took him from the
vice presidency of Zapata Petroleum to the presidency of Zapata Offshore
(1959), the U.S. House of Representatives (1967), the chairmanship of the
Republican National Committee (1972), the directorship of the CIA (1976), the
Vice Presidency (1981), and finally the Presidency (1989).
According to Joseph McBride of The Nation, "a source with close connections
to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the
[Central Intelligence A]gency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a
cover for clandestine activities." The earliest operations of Zapata Offshore
coincided in time with the victory of Fidel Castro and coincided in geography
with the three centers of power in the assassination conspiracy: Texas,
Louisiana, and Florida:
1959 was the year that Bush started operating out of his Zapata Offshore
headquarters in Houston; it was also the year that Fidel Castro seized power
in Cuba. Officially, as we have seen, George was now a businessman whose work
took him at times to Louisiana, where Zapata had offshore drilling
operations. George must have been a frequent visitor to New Orleans. . . .
And then, there were Zapata Offshore drilling operations in the Florida
Strait (Tarpley and Chaitkin 1992).
Bush is thought to have had a role in the Bay of Pigs invasion, as he was
involved with the CIA and Cuban exile politics even in this early time and
many of the names associated with the invasion represent the things dearest
to Bush. Zapata, the code name for the invasion, was the name of the Cuban
peninsula where the invasion was originally planned and coincidentally the
name of Bush’s oil company. One of the ships used in the invasion was named
"Houston," which was Bush’s new home, and another was the "Barbara J."
Barbara was, of course, his wife but one would have to explain the "J" to
suppose that she was the ship’s namesake. More interesting than Bush’s
possible involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion are his activities around
the time of the assassination. A 1963 FBI memo informs us that "George Bush
of the Central Intelligence Agency" was briefed by the FBI on the reaction of
Cuban exiles to the assassination of President Kennedy..
-----
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Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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